E52: Trump's SPAC, peak venture liquidity, tech as an economic ladder, Dems overplaying their hand

Jason Calacanis 0:00 Only Sax can lose 20 pounds and look worse. (laughs)

David Sacks 0:03 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:04 Sax, you know, with, with all, with all these gains and all your funds, I would really love for you to cash some out and buy a belt.

David Sacks 0:10 (laughs)

David Friedberg 0:10 Ask your wife or your house manager to help you find slim fit shirts at the, uh, the local Macy's.

Jason Calacanis 0:15 You'd literally look like you're wearing a parachute.

David Sacks 0:17 I've never, I've never worn slim fit anything.

Jason Calacanis 0:20 Stand up for a second. Stand up.

David Sacks 0:21 I can't. I'm not, I'm not wearing pants.

Jason Calacanis 0:23 (laughs)

David Sacks 0:26 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:26 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 0:26 Oh, my lord.

David Sacks 0:26 Do you want to see?

Jason Calacanis 0:27 Can somebody call HR? Are you really not wearing pants?

David Sacks 0:30 I got... No, I got, I got shorts on.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:31 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 0:31 No, that's not true. Are you really wearing shorts?

David Sacks 0:34 Yeah, I am.

Jason Calacanis 0:35 No, he's not... He's lying.

David Sacks 0:37 No, I'm not.

Jason Calacanis 0:38 Put your leg up. Show us that pasty leg. No fucking way. Oh, my God.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:43 Oh, my God. How big are those shorts?

Jason Calacanis 0:45 It's, it's-

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:45 That's incredible. (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 0:46 He's like Dom DeLuise and he lost 100 pounds-

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:49 No, this is, this is-

Jason Calacanis 0:49 ... and he didn't change his wardrobe.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:50 Oh, my God.

Jason Calacanis 0:50 You're rich, dude. Change your wardrobe.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:52 Oh, my God. Those are like two toothpicks sticking out of a tent.

David Sacks 0:56 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:57 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 0:57 It's like somebody set up a circus tent and didn't tie down the ends.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:01 (laughs)

David Sacks 1:02 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:02 (laughs) He's wearing a parachute and a circus tent.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:05 Oh, my God.

Narrator 1:06 What's going on? Let your winners ride. Rain Man, David Sax. What's going on? And I said, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Jason Calacanis 1:18 Love you, besties.

Narrator 1:19 Queen of Quinoa. What's going on?

Jason Calacanis 1:23 Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody welcome to another episode of the All-In Podcast. With us today again-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:30 Podcast.

Jason Calacanis 1:30 ... the podcast. Uh, with us again today, the dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya, and the Queen of Quinoa, David Friedberg, in front of some bad art, and from the mausoleum, a svelte, fighting weight, minus 20 pounds, the Rain Man himself, David Sax.

David Sacks 1:49 You guys gave me the motivation. I mean, this podcast-

Jason Calacanis 1:52 We fat shamed you.

David Sacks 1:53 ... kee- nee- you fat shamed me, you needled me for months, and then I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna lose the weight," so I've lost it.

Jason Calacanis 2:00 What was your peak weight in the last 12 months?

David Sacks 2:04 I think I was at, in the high 190s, and I'm down to about 172 now, so it's about 25 pounds.

Jason Calacanis 2:11 Wow.

David Sacks 2:12 Since, since about April or May.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:13 That's really great, bro.

Jason Calacanis 2:14 That's fantastic.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:16 I mean, honestly, your family thanks you.

David Sacks 2:18 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:18 I thank you as a friend, too. No, but seriously.

Jason Calacanis 2:20 Keep you around longer.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:21 That's really fucking great. I'm really, I'm really proud of you.

David Friedberg 2:24 Are you exercising, too?

David Sacks 2:25 Thank you.

David Friedberg 2:25 Or did you just cut your diet?

David Sacks 2:26 It's, it's, uh, I- I- I'm doing the same ex- exercise regimen I was doing before, which is just running occasionally, but, um, it's, it's all diet.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:34 It's all diet.

David Sacks 2:35 It's, it's frankly severe calorie restriction. And your, your Munique product has been very helpful.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:41 But is it really severe calorie restriction?

David Friedberg 2:43 Oh, Munique plug. First plug. Thanks for the plug.

David Sacks 2:44 I think so. I think so.

Jason Calacanis 2:44 Yeah, we were talking about Munique for the syndicate on the call-in app the other day.

David Friedberg 2:49 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:50 (laughs)

David Sacks 2:50 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 2:51 Plugs are dropping from the sky. (laughs)

David Sacks 2:53 Well, hold on, I'm allowed to plug, I'm allowed to plug another bestie's product.

Jason Calacanis 2:55 Uh-

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:55 You just did the Munique plug, so you could put a call-in plug. You have-

David Sacks 2:59 No, no, no. I'm not-

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:59 You're violating a rules of the road that we wrote down.

David Sacks 3:01 No, I'm not. It's not a violation of the rules because I'm not a shareholder in Munique. I don't own any interest in that.

Jason Calacanis 3:06 Yes, yes, you... Yeah, but are you negotiating a deal?

David Sacks 3:07 No, but now I might.

Jason Calacanis 3:08 Have you talked about funding Munique?

David Sacks 3:10 No, I haven't, but Friedberg, can I invest?

Narrator 3:12 (laughing)

David Sacks 3:13 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:15 That's a good one. We should, we should actually throw that one in the syndicate if you guys want.

Jason Calacanis 3:19 Uh, yeah, Munique's great. I- I did it. I lost some weight on it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:22 Saxypoo, what's your, uh, what's your, uh, basal calorie burn? Did you calculate that?

David Sacks 3:27 I'm not... What does that mean? Just by cal-

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:28 Like, your steady state calorie burn on a normal day, like if you're not exercising or whatever, like-

David Sacks 3:32 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:33 ... based on your height, your BMI, your weight, all that stuff.

David Sacks 3:35 Yeah, I did, I did look it up, and I think it's around 2,000 calories a day.

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:39 2,000 calories.

David Sacks 3:39 But, but the thing that's super interesting... Yeah, there's a calculator online where you can enter your, your, uh, height, weight, and age, and it'll tell you how many calories that you burn every day. So, if you wanna lose weight, you need to consume fewer calories than that. It's that simple. Everything else that people do around weight loss that is not that is basically some sort of game. You just have to consume fewer calories than you're burning. But the thing that's really interesting about that calculator is that the m- number of calories you can burn every year actually changes as you get older. It goes down. So, the reason why people gain weight as they get older is because you're in a habit of consuming a certain number of calories every day, but, you know, as you get older, like, every year, you can consume, say, 50 fewer calories a day, something like that, and that basically becomes fat if you cons- if you consume at the same level. So, you have to cut your consumption down as you get older, or you will gain weight.

David Friedberg 4:28 And in addition to your metabolic fitness, meaning, like, you know, having your exercise level stay up to increase your metabolism overall, you can also add muscle mass. A lot of people lose muscle mass over time.

Jason Calacanis 4:38 Yep.

David Friedberg 4:39 Muscle burns more calories per day, just to kind of keep functioning. So, the more muscle mass you have, the higher your basal...

Jason Calacanis 4:47 Uh, you lose like-

David Friedberg 4:48 ... muscles are.

Jason Calacanis 4:48 ... half a pound to a pound a year after 40? Is that correct? Directionally, uh, Friedberg?

David Friedberg 4:52 Uh, I- I don't know, but that sounds about right, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 4:55 Yeah, that's what I read.

David Sacks 4:55 That is about right bec- and I think it's because of this dynamic where people are just consuming the same amount, but they don't realize that they can't burn it, and so it becomes fat. You know, so, so in my case, first of all, you gotta get your caloric intake down to 2,000 just to get to steady state, and that can be a challenge. But if you really want to lose weight, you need to burn... You need to basically consume a few hundred calories less than that. And if you can consume 500 calories less than that per day, that's considered rapid weight loss. And then you can actually see the results, which is very motivating.

Jason Calacanis 5:28 Yeah.

David Sacks 5:28 So, I like the idea of just going for the, like, significant, the 500 calorie...

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:32 Where are you? You're at 1,500 calories a day?

David Sacks 5:35 Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, I haven't, like, precisely measured it out, but I've been trying to go for-

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:39 And is that... Do you skip a meal? Is that how you get to the minus 500 calories?

David Sacks 5:43 Uh, yeah, I will either skip breakfast, or I'll do a very light breakfast. Um, and then for lunch, I'll do, like, something entirely plant-based, like, like soup, like a vegetable soup of some kind. And then, when it comes to dinner, it'll be a more normal dinner, but no carbs, no dessert-

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:58 Two dinners, one bottle of wine.

David Sacks 5:59 (laughs)

David Friedberg 6:00 Yeah. (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 6:00 Well, no, no, you have a good system. The Sax system works for me.

David Friedberg 6:03 Has wine and pizza gone up now under-

David Sacks 6:03 I agree. Yeah, yeah. And one, one, one other thing-

Jason Calacanis 6:04 The Sax system is vegetables first.

David Sacks 6:06 Yes.... then fish, then-

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:08 Then fish.

David Sacks 6:08 ... poultry-

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:08 Chicken.

David Sacks 6:08 ... then red meat.

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:09 Then red meat.

David Sacks 6:10 So, so it's, it's not, you're not like entirely all one thing or another. You're not like all vegan, which would be hard. You're n- y- it's not like you're all, uh, y- there's no red meat or something like that. You can do a little of everything but you have to have a weighting. And the weighting is based on what foods ha- are the most calorie dense. So, the, the mistake that I think people make, and I think it's one of these trick diets, is like with these protein, like the South Beach type diet or the paleo diet, right? Where they're trying to trick their body in- into ketosis and all they do is eat a lot of red meat. But those steaks have a lot of calories in them.

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:43 Yeah.

David Sacks 6:43 So, it only works if you do it perfectly where you totally trick your body. And keeping your body in ketosis forever is just not sustainable, in my view. It's hard. So, I think you're a lot better off just eating less calorie dense food, and steak is very calorie dense, so, you know, again, you try and eat-

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:59 Speaking of steak-

David Sacks 7:00 ... plants first, then, then fish.

Jason Calacanis 7:01 Oh. Oh.

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:01 I, I rarely eat beef, uh, but I get to eat it, uh, today and I'm having steak night. Dre's coming over for dinner and in the season he, whenever I text him and I say, "Hey, what do you want for dinner?" Draymond's always like, "Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish." And I said, "Bro, I, I get to eat steak so fucking rarely." Uh, and today we're having steak. I can't wait. My mouth is watering-

David Sacks 7:22 When you say get to-

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:23 ... 'cause you guys look great.

David Sacks 7:23 ... when you get to, it's because you're on some diet basically?

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:25 No, no, I do, I, I just observe that I don't eat meat any more than once a week maximum. And right now I'm probably averaging once every two weeks, maybe even once every three weeks. And to your point, it's much better. I, I do these, uh, scans, you know, you can do these kind of body scans to know what your, um, your total water weight, your total muscle weight, your total weight, your total body fat, all of that stuff, and your basic metabolic rate. And I just kind of track it, like, once a quarter just to see where it is. Um, and I d- I, I agree with you, like, I've really found that, uh, I can't eat red meat anymore. Like, it's like, it just really fucks me up.

Jason Calacanis 8:01 But it's so good.

David Sacks 8:01 Right.

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:02 It's so good.

David Sacks 8:02 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:03 Oh my God, it's so good.

David Sacks 8:04 The other, one other trick is that you should never consume calories, like, in liquid form, right? You should only be drinking-

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:11 Yes.

David Sacks 8:11 ... water, tea, coffee, things like that, that don't have any calories. People go to Starbucks in the morning and they, they drink, like s-

Jason Calacanis 8:18 800 calories.

David Sacks 8:18 ... four, yeah, 400 plus calories. Then they have a, you know, cinnamon roll or whatever, or, or banana n- bread.

Jason Calacanis 8:24 Yeah, they're at 1200 at the start of the day.

David Sacks 8:26 That's, yeah, I mean, that's it. You, there's, I mean, you're gonna be gaining weight on, just from going to Starbucks in the morning. There's no w- now, if you do an Americano with a splash of almond milk or something that's like five, 10 calories, that's fine. But, um, you, you have to stop drinking calories. And then the one exception is, like last night we did poker, we were drinking wine, so that's fine, you know?

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:46 I didn't-

Jason Calacanis 8:46 Now hold-

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:46 ... 'cause I thought the wine was shit.

Jason Calacanis 8:48 Yeah, let's talk about poker.

David Sacks 8:50 You thought the wine was shit? Are you serious?

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:50 I thought the whole, I thought the whole game was horrible. Let me just tell you all the things that were wrong.

Jason Calacanis 8:53 Uh-oh. Here we go. Oh, here we go.

David Sacks 8:54 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:54 Okay? Number one, I fucking came all the way up to San Francisco-

Jason Calacanis 8:57 Wait, Sax hosted last night, Chamath normally hosts. Sax went-

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:00 Horrible.

Jason Calacanis 9:00 ... over the top-

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:01 So, number one-

Jason Calacanis 9:02 ... and Chamath is to-

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:02 ... "is over the top" in air quotes. Number one-

Jason Calacanis 9:04 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:05 ... nobody arrived on time-

Jason Calacanis 9:06 Terrible.

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:06 ... because nobody respects you enough to show up on time.

Jason Calacanis 9:09 Also, wow.

David Sacks 9:09 Jak- Jakow and I played heads up for an hour-

Jason Calacanis 9:11 Hour.

David Sacks 9:11 ... before anyone else showed up. We, we were there from 7:00 to 8:00 just playing heads up.

Jason Calacanis 9:15 It was fun. It was fun. I took all of Friedberg's money.

David Sacks 9:18 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 9:18 I own 3% of Munique.

David Sacks 9:20 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:20 You as the host didn't show up till 9:30 and you spent all of the time on the phone-

Jason Calacanis 9:26 Trading Japanese bonds.

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:26 ... outside in the room trading Japanese bonds or doing whatever you were doing.

Jason Calacanis 9:30 Talking to Peter Tien.

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:30 Nats showed up at 10:30. You know, the game was basically randomly in the mock half the night. Nobody was observing any good decorum. Run it once, run it twice, there was just nothing going on.

Jason Calacanis 9:41 There was no dictatorship.

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:43 You had stale fish, you had stale fish-

Jason Calacanis 9:44 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:44 ... okay, just sitting there rotting, stinking up the whole fucking room.

Jason Calacanis 9:48 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:48 You know, you had 2013 called in, which is not even a good year, just FYI.

Jason Calacanis 9:52 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:52 Okay? 2012, okay, 2015, two thou- I mean... So anyways, I thought it was a disaster. I stormed and, up and I left.

Jason Calacanis 10:00 He did rage quit and it was quite a moment-

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:03 I did rage quit.

Jason Calacanis 10:03 ... because we're playing PLO.

David Sacks 10:04 Okay.

Jason Calacanis 10:05 Finally Sax loses all his money.

David Sacks 10:07 May I respond? May I respond?

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:08 (laughs) But I did have three bowls of ice cream, which I regretted this morning.

Jason Calacanis 10:12 (laughs)

David Sacks 10:13 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 10:13 All right, Sax-

David Sacks 10:14 Okay.

Jason Calacanis 10:14 ... in your defense, why were you, why did you leave your guests for three hours while you talked on the glass box?

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:21 At your own home, bro.

Jason Calacanis 10:23 What was so important?

David Sacks 10:23 I wasn't, it wasn't three hours.

Jason Calacanis 10:25 It was.

David Sacks 10:25 You guys were being well attended to.

Jason Calacanis 10:26 Two hours at least.

David Sacks 10:26 I made sure that you were well attended to and then I had to duck out for-

Jason Calacanis 10:29 Well attended to? What are we, preschool?

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:31 What did th- what are you talking about?

David Sacks 10:32 ... to execute a couple of, a couple of-

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:34 What was he to the King of France? (laughs)

David Sacks 10:34 ... execute a couple of trades. So-

Jason Calacanis 10:37 Uh-huh. Wow.

David Sacks 10:37 What were the calls? Well, you know crypto's like a 24/7 market these days.

Jason Calacanis 10:44 (laughs) Oh, my God. Crypto never sleeps. So David Sax-

David Sacks 10:47 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 10:47 ... has to excuse himself. Oh, my God.

David Sacks 10:49 Yeah, I got wired 800K, uh, Hong Kong gold. Had to, uh-

Jason Calacanis 10:52 (laughs)

David Sacks 10:53 ... had to trade it up.

Jason Calacanis 10:54 To float your bond, yeah.

David Sacks 10:55 Yeah. So, okay, so first of all, the food was amazing. We had like this incredible-

Jason Calacanis 11:00 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:00 You did eat it.

David Sacks 11:01 We had this incredible... Oh, I take it-

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:02 You didn't eat it.

David Sacks 11:03 No, I did. I did.

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:03 You had brussel sprouts. You had the brussel sprouts. You ate none of it.

David Sacks 11:06 Well, I, I'm on a diet. I did eat the sushi.

Jason Calacanis 11:08 (laughs)

David Sacks 11:08 There was like this incredible sushi spread. We had so much sushi, most of it didn't get eaten. Then we had, uh, pizzas got, the best late night pizzas from two different pizza places got delivered. There was more than one pizza per person in terms of selection.

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:20 It was Tony's Nepali Thai and that has pretty great pizza.

Jason Calacanis 11:22 You had, you had homemade caramel sauce poured over Chamath's ice cream for him.

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:26 Oh, that was good.

David Sacks 11:26 Mm-hmm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:26 No, dulce de leche, that was great.

Jason Calacanis 11:27 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:27 Props to the chef who made that.

Jason Calacanis 11:28 Your chef put dulce de leche on the vanilla ice cream.

David Sacks 11:30 Yeah, and the Colga in 2013 Estate Nine is a fantastic bottle of wine that I, I had another bottle of it earlier this week, so I know-

Jason Calacanis 11:36 All right, we just lost 42% of the audience.

David Sacks 11:39 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 11:39 They are now on the YouTube comments saying-

David Sacks 11:41 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 11:41 ... "Why are these people..." (laughs) "Why do we listen to this pod every week?"

David Sacks 11:45 And here, here's the, here's the reality, Chamath, is you were very quiet and sort of sullen the whole night-

Jason Calacanis 11:52 Ah.

David Sacks 11:52 ... from really the time you got there.

Jason Calacanis 11:53 It's kinda true.

David Sacks 11:53 You didn't really participate in the conversation. And Sky hypothesized that the reason why you were so withdrawn is because you were upset that the game had moved from your place to my place, and you thought somehow I was trying to hijack your game, which is not true. We do a game at my place maybe-

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:09 No, no, no, I told Sky-

David Sacks 12:10 ... once every six months.

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:10 No, no, no. I told, I told Sky a text already, I said, "Hey guys, we normally run the game Thursdays at my house. I'm happy to come up but it's harder for me 'cause Nat's..."... almost two.

David Sacks 12:19 Right. So you were upset from the get-go that you weren't hosting-

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:21 No, no, no, I wasn't. I told, I told him that pretty candidly, like, uh, two weeks ago.

Jason Calacanis 12:23 Well, I mean, there's another underlying issue here. Friedberg and Sacks have not come to the last three games at Chamath's house. Is there something going on here or is it just the commute?

David Sacks 12:31 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:32 I think the commute is hard. I mean, in fairness to you guys-

Jason Calacanis 12:34 The commute's hard.

12:34 I only missed the last game. I went, I went, uh-

12:36 Okay. Well, Sacks hasn't been coming and I know he's in, he's in town. Is there something going on, Sacks, where you can't-

David Sacks 12:41 No, it's, it's-

Jason Calacanis 12:41 ... drive anymore? You haven't, I mean...

David Sacks 12:43 It's, it's either the commute or sometimes I'm out of town, you know, so.

Jason Calacanis 12:46 You were in town the last couple of times, I don't know. I think it's kinda, you and Chamath maybe need to go for a walk downtime.

David Sacks 12:50 Okay, I'll come. I'll come to the next... When's the next game?

Jason Calacanis 12:52 Whenever. The next game is, you should come. But y- I mean, you're s- what are you doing? Staying home playing chess with Peter Thiel on your iPad? I mean, come on.

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:58 Both me and Friedberg are about to have kids. We cannot.

David Sacks 13:01 Oh, the game is over?

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:02 No, no, no, for another couple of weeks, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 13:04 We're gonna revert back to that terrible COVID app, iPad app, playing poker where, like, everyone gets pissed at each other-

13:10 No. Oh, my God. Oh, the Chinese app-

13:11 Oh, my God.

13:11 ... that was, uh-

13:12 Yeah.

13:12 ... fixed with a bunch of people colluding.

13:13 Everyone is so angry.

13:15 Uh, I had to set off that app.

13:16 Yeah.

13:16 Well, we'll get it back in the next group.

13:17 All right. Let's, let's, let's start our show.

13:18 Let's start.

13:18 Let's start-

13:18 Let's start.

13:18 Let's

Jason Calacanis 13:19 start the show. Uh, first up in, uh, SPAC land, uh, Donald Trump has done a SPAC and it's for his Trump Media and Technology Group. Uh, and he's launching an app called Truth Social, which you can preload, I guess, in the App Store, you're allowed to preorder stuff now. I thought that was kind of an interesting feature. Um, the company will merge with the SPAC called Digital World Acquisition Corporation, ticker symbol currently DWAC. It's led by somebody named Patrick Orlando, uh, who is a Florida-based investment manager. I'm not making that up. Uh, I don't know if Orlando is actually his name. Um, he founded a sugar trading business and built two energy distribution businesses, allegedly, uh, or supposedly. Um, Friedberg said maybe he's a real estate guy. Who knows? The stock peaked at $157 a share, uh, this morning, Friday morning. So the SPAC started at 10 bucks?

14:09 It started at 10, so that's 16X before dropping back down to 100. It's become a bit of a meme stock on Wall Street Bets. Trading was halted. Uh, it puts this at something in the range of a, you know, well over a $10 billion market cap. And, um, there is literally no technology, no team. And a bunch of technologists looked at the source code just by doing view source, I think, on the, on the web pages and, uh, there's an open source project I think called Mastered Don or Mastered Ton. I don't know, I think it's Mastered On, um, that they seem to have just copied the code from. It's a, it's like a distributed version of Twitter.

14:43 (laughs)

14:43 And it seems they just cut and pasted the code and didn't even change the license, you know, like the GPL license where you're supposed to give credit to who wrote the code (laughs) . So no business, no team, no IP, no users, no money, no office, no nothing. It's basically, uh-

14:56 It's an NFT. This is an NFT.

14:58 It's an NFT. (laughs)

14:59 And basically, what "A"-

Chamath Palihapitiya 15:00 It's an exchange traded NFT.

Jason Calacanis 15:02 It's an exchange traded NFT.

Chamath Palihapitiya 15:03 It's a, it's an NFT of Donald Trump. Go ahead, Friedberg.

Jason Calacanis 15:05 The value of this thing, the value of this thing is, like, closer to... Donald Trump is closer to 20 billion 'cause there's a $1.7 billion value if they hit certain stock prices, according to the press release they put out, but there's not a good SEC filing on it. So at 1.7, that means he got 170 million shares, which are now worth, let's say, at $157 a share. Donald Trump has effectively 20 plus billion dollars.

15:27 Oh, so he's finally a billionaire?

15:29 And he's finally a billionaire of equity value in his stake in this thing.

15:31 (laughs) He's actually a billionaire.

15:32 And I think this... And this is the absolute, like, penultimate NFT. It is traded against a caricature that is a one of a kind, completely rare. This is gonna... All of his, quote unquote, "media IP" is gonna be licensed into this SPAC. And so if you wanna own a piece of it, this is the way to own it. And people are trading it like an index on the Donald Trump, um, uh, character.

Chamath Palihapitiya 15:57 It's an, it's an index on that. I think it's a, it's an index on the right. I think it's an index on an alternative to Fox News.

Jason Calacanis 16:05 To traditional media?

Chamath Palihapitiya 16:07 The traditional media. It's a huge fuck you to actually the mainstream media. I think this is gonna-

Jason Calacanis 16:11 To Twitter?

Chamath Palihapitiya 16:12 Oh, my God, it's gonna tilt the hell out of, like, the folks that write at the, at the New York Times. My gosh.

Jason Calacanis 16:18 Did you see Jack Dorsey's tweet, by the way?

Chamath Palihapitiya 16:21 No. (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 16:21 I gotta... I'll, I'll, I'll put it in the chat, but he kind of, um, he made a comment on it after. There was a screenshot and then just-

16:27 I mean, let's be honest, it's a grift. I mean, this is a... This is, th- this is the ultimate peak grift in the peak bubble of our lifetime. Period.

16:35 I think it's a vote. Uh, I mean, like Peter Thiel said yesterday, you know, like, Bitcoin is a vote against the establishment. This is a vote against the establishment.

16:41 All right. What are the chances that an actual app launches f- Sacks? Like, and when would that actually happen? When can this, uh, crew of dipshits actually write a line of code and actually release a product? You know how hard it is to release a product.

David Sacks 16:54 Yeah. That's a good question. I mean, what they're saying is that they're gonna launch a new social network, I guess, Twitter style, called Truth Social and the primary interface will consist of a feed of short posts from users you follow. Sounds familiar. However, these posts will be called Truths instead of Tweets and reshares will be known as Retruths. (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 17:15 Wow, so original.

David Sacks 17:17 So that's... (laughs) So that's what's coming. And, um, the, the, the slide deck that's available on the company's website lists Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, Disney+, CNN, iHeartMedia, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services as some of TMTG's current and future competitors. So basically, you know, Trump is proposing an alternative to all the traditional media and social networks that have basically banned him. But I do think that the trading here does represent... There is, I think, a groundswell for, for social media platforms that are not controlled by big tech and, you know, there's... Trump has 70 million tech voters, sorry, 70 million voters. Of those, probably 30 to 40 million you would say are, would be fans of his on social media. He's been banned from Twitter and Facebook and this is his response, he's gonna create his own platform. I don't know whether it'll ultimately be successful, but I think what you're seeing here is the demand for alternatives to, you know, censorious platforms that are controlled by big tech.

Jason Calacanis 18:17 So if he has 30 million real fans, Chamath, what number of them would download the app and participate in the first year?

David Friedberg 18:24 He had 90 million-

Jason Calacanis 18:25 Set a, set a line.

David Friedberg 18:26 He had, he had 90 million followers on Twitter, J-CAL, which is-

Jason Calacanis 18:28 That, that doesn't count. That doesn't count.

David Friedberg 18:29 But that's half of the Twitter registered accounts.

Jason Calacanis 18:31 I know, we had 70 million people vote for him, so what are the real fans? Not just Republicans who don't want Hillary.

Chamath Palihapitiya 18:36 I don't think that's the way to think about this. I would-

Jason Calacanis 18:38 Okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 18:38 ... I would view this as differently than this. What's in- what's insane is you have s- s- this entity here, which is essentially a cash shell that's now basically, you know, 300 odd million dollars of cash, plus what looks like 18 or 19 billion dollars of brand value, like of intangible goodwill, and the sum total of that is, is what the total market cap of this thing is. So if there, if it is 18 billion, then that's what it is. What this allows them to do, and this is where it kind of gets interesting, is these guys, what it shows me is they could come back and actually raise an enormous amount of money. They could issue, you know, a secondary stock sale. They could do a convert. They could raise billions of dollars because the demand is there. And then with those billions of dollars, they could actually do something really meaningful. They could go and acquire an existing app, Jason.

Jason Calacanis 19:29 Call In. Call In.

Chamath Palihapitiya 19:29 They could acquire engineers and a product that already exists. They could acquire-

Jason Calacanis 19:32 Maybe do an acqui-hire, yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 19:33 They could acquire a traditional broadcast outlet and give Trump, uh, you know, a way to short circuit his launch of a Fox competitor. So I actually think this is a huge vote. I think David's right. It's a vote against censorship. It's a vote for Trump. It's a vote for the right. It's a vote for alternative, uh, voices. And as a result, I think a lot of folks in the mainstream who have Trump derangement syndrome are now gonna be, you know, reawoken and in complete full tilt for a while.

Jason Calacanis 20:07 Yeah, it's pretty tilty. Uh, TMTG+ will be, uh, you know, it's terrible branding, but the TMTG+ is going to be there.

Chamath Palihapitiya 20:15 Look at this, you're already tilted. (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 20:17 I'm super, no, I'm not tilted. I mean, I, it's, it's a, I think the whole thing's just a super grift. I don't think they'll ever get a product out the door, and if they do, I think they get to maybe five, 10 million users-

David Friedberg 20:25 They're, they're gonna raise-

Jason Calacanis 20:26 ... which isn't enough.

David Friedberg 20:26 J-Cal, they've got, they've got a $20 billion market cap. They could do whatever the hell they want.

Jason Calacanis 20:30 I think it's all people just manipulating the stock like GameStop.

David Friedberg 20:32 But they could s- like Chamath said, they could turn that into s- into cash. They could sell-

Jason Calacanis 20:35 We'll see. I mean, they could turn it into-

David Friedberg 20:36 ... 5, 4% of the company.

Jason Calacanis 20:36 ... a billion of it. I don't think they can get to 20 billion.

Chamath Palihapitiya 20:39 Trump today, in one day, is worth more than two times the New York Times. Can you imagine what's going on in the New York Times right now?

David Friedberg 20:47 Just as brand. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 20:48 And that's just brand.

Jason Calacanis 20:49 Well, let's see. I mean, not all these SPACs stay at $150 a share, you know?

David Sacks 20:53 So, so J-Cal, I, I think you're right that people outside the tech industry really underestimate how hard it is to build technology products that are any good, you know, that have a good UI, they're delightful to users. It does require real talent and if you're not sort of from the industry, you don't even know what kind of talent you need to hire. However, I think Chamath has a really good point that with this kinda market cap, they could acquire their way to a portfolio of assets, like for example, okay, Rumble right now has become the alternative to YouTube among-

Jason Calacanis 21:24 Yeah.

David Sacks 21:24 ... uh, not just conservatives but anyone who's, who's been deplatformed. There's a lot of leftists now who've been-

Jason Calacanis 21:28 There's locals.com that you invested in.

David Sacks 21:30 ... locally, yes, exactly. I invested in Locals, which is Dave Rubin's thing. So but, but just to take Rumble for a second 'cause it's kind of a YouTube competitor, you know, they've got something like 30 million, uh, users plus. It's a very, it's a, it's a pretty big and growing audience, um, but there is Locals, there are other assets, and you could ... And I think the last valuation of Rumble, I think it was announced when Peter Thiel actually invested, I think it was around a $500 million valuation. Even if you paid a gigantic premium to that, I mean, if your market cap's 20 billion, you could spend 2 billion on that. You could spend 5 billion-

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:02 Five billion, yeah.

David Sacks 22:03 ... on that, you know? And so, it's a-

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:04 And by the way, sorry, just to dispel this idea, you don't need good UI if you have the right feature set, and Reddit is the perfect example where they've always been on the side of free speech and they've always been on the side of allowing people to vocalize and pursue their own passions, even if some of those things were really, you know, um, for the mainstream, uh, beyond the pale. Their UI is terrible, but they have thrived because that single feature-

David Friedberg 22:32 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:32 ... dominates any desire for elegant UI. And so, I think what you're gonna find over this next iteration of these apps is how valuable free speech is, and there are enough examples, whether it's Rumble or Reddit or others, that show you that the ability to not be censored dominates.

David Friedberg 22:47 4chan, Discord, they're all very similar.

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:49 It's gonna, it's gonna tweet, it's gonna tweak, oh my god, the, the folks on the left-

Jason Calacanis 22:53 Here's one thing I will say in their defense, they did-

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:55 ... are on super tilty.

Jason Calacanis 22:55 ... figure out how to do, uh, data analysis and marketing during his, you know, 2016 campaign and they did get that guy Pascal or whatever and they figured out Cambridge Analytica. So they did figure out how to get some tech people, right, Sax, to, you know-

Chamath Palihapitiya 23:10 By the way, sorry, can I just say one thing?

Jason Calacanis 23:11 ... do all that marketing stuff?

Chamath Palihapitiya 23:11 The other super tilty thing is people will wanna fade this trade and, you know-

Jason Calacanis 23:16 Short it and then it goes up?

Chamath Palihapitiya 23:17 They're gonna be silent, they're gonna know, they're gonna be silently wishing for this thing to crater. And I think there's going to be a lot of profit-taking on this because I think it's very speculative, but I think we will all be shocked at the actual closing enterprise value when this thing de-SPACs because it will de-SPAC and we're all gonna kinda scratch our heads thinking, "W- how did we not see this?" I mean, I didn't see this. I would've never-

David Friedberg 23:38 There's gonna be, there's g- And there's gonna be at least a billion dollars of cash available when they do their secondary.

Chamath Palihapitiya 23:41 At least. At least.

David Friedberg 23:42 At least. I mean, they can do whatever they want.

Jason Calacanis 23:44 Yeah.

David Friedberg 23:45 They're gonna have more, more cash available to them to invest than the New York Times had.

Chamath Palihapitiya 23:48 He is, he is firmly back in the game.

Jason Calacanis 23:51 Not, not tan.

David Friedberg 23:52 And by the way, one of, one of, one of the comments Scaramucci made to, this morning, it's a very astute one, which is, "I'm rooting for the SPAC because if this actually does de-SPAC at this valuation, Donald Trump is not running for president again 'cause he's now got a $20 billion media business or $20 million of equity value in this new media business and he's gonna keep running." Sax, what do you think?

David Sacks 24:11 Uh, that could be a win-win for, uh, the Republican Party. (laughs) But you know what? That-

Jason Calacanis 24:16 So you're buying the stock to join in the board? (laughs)

David Friedberg 24:18 (laughs)

David Sacks 24:18 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 24:19 Sax is leading the B-

David Sacks 24:21 Yeah, I mean, so-

Jason Calacanis 24:22 ... to the pipe.

David Friedberg 24:22 (laughs)

David Sacks 24:23 ... I, I, I think Chamath raised a good point that sites like Reddit have shown that, you know, like a beautiful UI is not necessarily the feature that, that-... that users want in every case. I do think you still have to have some tech talent involved in order to produce a good product. Just to give you an example, so this product wasn't supposed to have its soft launch until next month, but somehow, some users found a way to access the site and they were setting up accounts within hours of the announcement. So one vandal claimed the @donaldjtrump handle and posted a picture of a pig with extremely large testicles. Um-

Chamath Palihapitiya 24:54 Oh, really? (laughs)

Narrator 24:55 (laughs)

David Sacks 24:55 So-

Narrator 24:56 (laughs)

David Sacks 24:56 ... now, now I would just submit that you at least need to have enough tech talent to prevent something like that from happening.

Chamath Palihapitiya 25:02 Yes.

David Sacks 25:03 I mean, maybe it wasn't a vandal. I mean, maybe Trump posted that photo himself.

Chamath Palihapitiya 25:08 Trolling.

David Sacks 25:08 I don't... It's not, it's not impossible.

Chamath Palihapitiya 25:10 It's on brand.

David Sacks 25:11 Um, but yeah... But, but anyway-

Chamath Palihapitiya 25:13 (laughs)

David Sacks 25:13 ... my, my point is, they still have to assemble the tech talent to build this or I like the idea better of just acquiring the collection of assets that they need. And I think you're right. I think it's multifaceted. I think it's a social network, uh, à la Twitter. I think it's probably some sort of video distribution.

Chamath Palihapitiya 25:29 Do not underestimate the number of people in Wall Street who are, uh, on the right and who will help these guys make very good decisions, even if they do it sort of, you know, quote-unquote "clandestinely," meaning they'll never be on the cover of helping them do a big M&A or whatever. But there are, there are a lot of those folks that will help make sure that this de-SPACs cleanly, that they have access to capital, that they know how to go and raise and tap the markets. And what's beautiful about the public markets, and you can say this is, you know, an issue but it's not in this case, is that, you know, um, you can go and, and basically support this guy in a way that's relatively anonymous, because it's not like you have to disclose that you own the stuff if you're, if you're a private investor. So I think that, uh, he's back in the game in a big way, and I think this is going to really shake up the media landscape if they can execute well. They just need to think about this as an M&A vehicle, not as an engineering and product creation vehicle.

David Sacks 26:28 Yes, 100% agree. 100% agree with that.

David Friedberg 26:30 Sax, Sax, would you sell Colin for a billion dollars in equity value at $100 a share to these guys today?

Chamath Palihapitiya 26:36 Yes.

David Sacks 26:36 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 26:37 I can answer on his behalf, yes.

David Sacks 26:38 (laughs)

David Friedberg 26:39 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 26:39 Yes, I'm in at 50.

David Friedberg 26:40 Was that... Is that what you were doing on the phone last night?

Chamath Palihapitiya 26:41 I'll take the 20X lift.

David Sacks 26:42 (laughs) No, no.

Chamath Palihapitiya 26:44 I'll take 20X in eight months.

David Sacks 26:46 J Cal, you wanna be my agent? (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 26:48 (laughs) I think you have a quicker line to Trump than I do.

David Sacks 26:51 No, no, no, no, no.

Chamath Palihapitiya 26:52 Uh, I think actually this might be like to Peter Thiel's point, like, maybe don't take the product, uh, literally, but take the market cap seriously, uh, because this is a, a lot of... If, if they can keep even a $5 billion market up, I do agree that does make them dangerous in terms of buying assets. And I do think they can get the first five... All of these right-wing services get five to... He gets 5 to 10 million people to sign up for him. Even his, like, Signal, he was at like a million, uh, you know, very quickly. He's got like a Signal or Telegram group, I think, and he got 2 million. He could buy... Maybe he could buy Ben Shapiro's Daily Caller. That's a big media brand on the right that people listen to.

David Sacks 27:29 Well, uh, yeah, and keep Ben-

Chamath Palihapitiya 27:29 The number one podcast.

David Sacks 27:30 ... Shapiro, and keep, keep Ben Shapiro there to run it because Trump needs operators.

Chamath Palihapitiya 27:34 And the more disruptive thing isn't to buy stuff on the right, it's to buy stuff in the center or even stuff on the left. Again, it's, it's very hard if you're a public company. It's impossible actually. If, if Trump Media Group now has a currency and tries to acquire assets, um, the directors have a fiduciary responsibility to actually vote in favor of that deal, because they're not allowed to look at who the buyer is and say, "No, we don't want to do that." So if he puts out a reasonable fair market offer price, you know, of the closing price plus 30, 35%, there is not a single public market director in the world, I don't care how Democratic they are or how much of a donor they are, they'll always vote the deal, because otherwise they will get personally sued. And that's the liability in public markets. So I would be very careful about this thing. This thing is going to get really serious really quickly. I wonder if there's a tentpole, um, media personality that he could acquire in the same way Spotify got Joe Rogan and Netflix got Dave Chappelle. Back to Sax, you know-

David Sacks 28:34 If there's somebody they could offer $100 million to.

Chamath Palihapitiya 28:35 No, because Sa- They shouldn't do that. They should do what Sax just said, which is that, you know that, that list of like the dumpster fire on Facebook every day, which is like Dan Benigno and Ben Shapiro and blah, blah, blah? He should just go and get all those guys. Yeah, that's what I just said. Round them up. But I wonder if there's like a comedian, you know, like, uh, you know, Bill Maher obviously hates him, but then is there somebody in the middle who is like a notable comedian on the right, Sax? I'm not fully vetted on your alt-right-

David Sacks 28:59 I, I don't-

Chamath Palihapitiya 28:59 ... buddies, but who's, who's in that alt-right cohort that-

David Sacks 29:03 Well, I think there's, there's comics who are willing to be politically incorrect and non-woke.

Chamath Palihapitiya 29:08 Yeah.

David Sacks 29:09 Um, so I think, uh, what's his name? Like Bill Burr or something like that? Is... Isn't he like kind of in that-

Chamath Palihapitiya 29:12 Yeah, Bill Burr is net- team Netflix, but yeah-

David Sacks 29:15 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 29:15 ... I wonder if a Bill Burr... He hates Trump though, I think.

David Sacks 29:17 Or, who was-

Chamath Palihapitiya 29:17 But I mean-

David Sacks 29:18 Who was the guy who got canceled for exposing himself?

Chamath Palihapitiya 29:20 Louis C.K.?

David Sacks 29:21 Uh... Yeah, Louis C.K.?

Chamath Palihapitiya 29:22 Louis C.K.

David Sacks 29:23 I mean, I'm not saying he's conservative, right? But, um, you know-

Chamath Palihapitiya 29:27 No, he's not.

David Sacks 29:27 ... I don't know. He's available.

Chamath Palihapitiya 29:28 Both those guys hit it.

David Sacks 29:28 He's highly available. (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 29:30 He's, he's available. So, I mean, a- actually one thing to think about is, you know, Trump got all these people to do like the monthly $25 reoccurring subscription, and he got in a little bit of trouble for that because people didn't know they were signing up for it. But I wonder if he could get a million people or five million people to pay 10 bucks a month for this, Sax?

David Sacks 29:46 Yeah, absolutely, if there's something there behind the, the curtain. I mean, if it's nothing but like, I don't know, a newsletter of his, like, extemporaneous tweets, I don't think so. But if there's real content there from people they care about, why wouldn't they?

Chamath Palihapitiya 30:00 Wait a second. What if he just did every Friday night a rally on a video service where he just did one of his two or three-hour standup routines and had different people come up and talk, like his pillow guy and all of his other weirdos in a sort of-

David Sacks 30:12 I think this could be-

Chamath Palihapitiya 30:12 ... backpack.

David Sacks 30:13 ... like the... I think this could be like the Oprah Winfrey Network where she may, like, anchor the tentpole show or something, but there's a lot of other creators on the network. I think that's the opportunity he has.

Chamath Palihapitiya 30:22 Dan Kean.

David Friedberg 30:22 Yeah.

David Sacks 30:22 The question, the question quite frankly though is whether he's operational enough to actually drive to these outcomes. I think it's very easy for us to imagine what you could do with $20 billion and his media brand, and the question is just does this get executed that way?

Jason Calacanis 30:36 Now does-

David Sacks 30:36 'Cause it's not going to be a real estate sugar guy from Florida that's going to manage this thing to an outcome.

Jason Calacanis 30:41 D- Does Twitter then let him back on the platform if he has this competing platform? Does Facebook? How does that dynamic work?

David Sacks 30:46 No. I think, I think at that point, they have the perfect excuse not to let him back on, which is like, "Hey, we're not censoring him because he's, there's an alternative."

Jason Calacanis 30:53 Hmm.

David Sacks 30:54 They don't want to let him back on.

Jason Calacanis 30:56 In a way, I guess you have to ask yourself, if Twitter had let him come back on and gave him his platform back after like a six-month or a year timeout, would he even be doing this?

David Sacks 31:04 No, he says in... He has a press announcement where he says that, I mean, he says here that, "Trump Media and Technology Group's mission is to create a rival to the liberal media consortium and fight back against the big tech companies in Silicon Valley which have used their unilateral power to silence opposing voices in America." This is what has given him the opportunity-

31:24 Yeah.

31:24 ... is their censorship.

31:25 Their censorship just created a 20-billion-dollar war chest.

Jason Calacanis 31:29 (laughs)

David Sacks 31:30 (laughs)

31:30 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 31:30 I mean, the, the most tilting thing of this whole conversation is, it's worth twice as much as The New York Times.

David Sacks 31:34 That is so tilting. (laughs)

31:35 But, but haven't I, haven't I been saying on this show for over a year that censorship backfires in ways you can't expect?

Jason Calacanis 31:40 Yeah.

David Sacks 31:40 Yeah.

31:40 They never think through the second and third-order consequences of their censorship. It's like when Angela Merkel came out and said, "Hey, like wait, did, did Twitter just de-platform a head of state? Why are we depending on them?" I mean, there's all these second and third-order consequences they never think through, and now they're coming back to bite them in the ass.

Jason Calacanis 31:56 Yeah. I mean, forcing people to get vaccines is now leading to whatever percentage of people just retiring or just, you know, or not coming back to work, and that's causing a bit of bedlam in the, uh, economy, as we talked about.

David Sacks 32:08 All these authoritarian tendencies create a backlash of some kind, and if our ruling elites would just have a lighter hand, there'd be a lot less tension in the country.

Jason Calacanis 32:17 We had an interesting discussion last night at, during, uh, but I think it was on the other side of the table, so maybe you two didn't hear it, but we were talking about, i- is Biden gonna run again in 2024, and what would that look like? And I just said, "I, I can't imagine Biden in a debate three years from now." Like, he, he doesn't seem... I don't wanna be derogatory here, but he doesn't seem very crisp the last time, four years later. So what do we think? Uh, chances of Biden running in 2024, chances of Trump running in 2024 with all this information, and what would that look like?

David Sacks 32:47 Zero. Zero and zero.

Jason Calacanis 32:49 You're zero and zero. Friedberg, are you even care?

David Sacks 32:52 Nope.

Jason Calacanis 32:53 Yeah, I didn't think so.

David Sacks 32:53 Right, look, I mean, I, I, I think Trump's gonna run this $20-billion media empire and he's gonna be happy doing that, and I think if it's not Biden, it's gonna be a proxy. So, um, it's not gonna be too far off, uh, in terms of what the-

Jason Calacanis 33:07 You're, you're deep in this, uh, Sachs, you're hosting, uh, as people were talking about on Twitter, uh, and you tilted all of San Francisco, or 90% of it. You're, you're (laughs) hosting DeSantis for a fundraiser.

David Sacks 33:17 It's his, his first fundraiser for his re-election as governor. He hasn't said anything about his plans in 2024. It's way too early for that. Um, do I think Biden or Trump could be on the ballot? I think it's 50/50 for both of them.

33:27 All right.

33:28 But I would like to see... But look, instead of having two 80-year-olds like running against each other, I would like to see, say, two 40-something, or just younger leaders, you know, giving America a real choice.

Jason Calacanis 33:40 All right, where do we wanna jump off to now? Venture

Jason Calacanis 33:43 capital?

David Sacks 33:44 Venture capital, 'cause clearly Sachs is, is having extraordinary liquidity events, uh, at-

Jason Calacanis 33:49 (laughs)

David Sacks 33:49 ... 11:00 at night on a Thursday night that-

33:51 Friedberg, money is not made. It's simply transferred from one perception to another.

33:55 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 33:56 (laughs)

David Sacks 33:56 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 33:56 One perception to another.

David Sacks 33:57 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 33:58 That was a Wall Street, uh, speech.

David Sacks 34:00 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 34:01 Sachs was like in his, uh, glory last night-

David Sacks 34:03 He was, he was going gecko shirt last night, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 34:05 ... doing monologues from Wall Street last night.

David Sacks 34:06 (laughs)

34:06 And he was leaving, he was leaving the poker table to go to, into his soundproof chamber that oversees his estate next to the poker room, and from there he was on his phone screaming, pacing back and forth, doing deals. Gecko style. He had his 300-pound trader next to him. He was placing orders. And, um, something's going on in the market. I mean, it's Sachs, you know, do tell, but-

34:27 (laughs)

34:27 ... clearly the, uh, the venture liquidity s- um, uh, waterfall that's going on right now is playing into a lot of, a lot of this.

34:33 Well, it's... It is bonkers. Wait.

34:35 Yeah.

34:36 We gotta show that chart. <|agent|><|en|>

34:37 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 34:37 We should talk about... Let me just

Narrator 34:38 We should all see that.

David Sacks 34:38 You should highlight the s- highlight the statistics, J Cal, 'cause it is truly extraordinary how much liquidity venture firms are having this year.

Jason Calacanis 34:44 All right. Well, just to look at, um, the value of US venture-backed companies that went public or were acquired, 290 billion, 280 billion in '19 and '20, and then, uh, this year, uh, 2021 so far, we're at 590 billion. It's literally doubled, but if you look back, um, it was about 110 billion in 2018. So we are now five, six X where we were five years ago. Uh, and this is, again, the value of US venture, US venture-backed companies that went public or were acquired. So the liquidity is bonkers, and we're seeing that in real estate, uh, you know, jets being bought, whatever. The VC industry has experienced three years of record-breaking exits. Uh, this is a Twitter user who tweeted it. Uh, 2021 is obviously smashing all those levels.

David Sacks 35:29 Yeah. I mean, uh, we, uh, it, for, for the last... Uh, until the last three years, so the previous 15, 20 years, the exits per year were in this 50 to 100 billion range. Then they've jumped up to 600 billion in the last year, and in the previous two years, it was 300 billion each. So yeah. I mean, it's just... More money has, has been made e- or distributed out in the venture capital industry in the last three years than I think the previous 20 years combined, at least.

Jason Calacanis 35:56 The last three years, yeah. It's-

David Sacks 35:57 And that doesn't, and that doesn't even factor in what's happening in crypto.

36:01 Right.

36:02 And crypto is just like, it's just rocketry.

Jason Calacanis 36:03 Well, I'm sure there's some crypto in here. Coinbase is in here, as an example.

David Sacks 36:05 No, like, like, like, in my portfolio as an example, like, you know, uh, like venture returns, which have, which have been excellent across the board, so forget mine, just everybody's, venture value kind of like slowly ticks up over time, right? Because, like, you know, you're doing this work and then that work gets valued and then somebody else comes in and raises a new round and, you know, you, you hopefully can defend your pro rata, yada, yada. So it, it, it, it does create a lot of compounding value, but it's, you know... And, and it's relatively fast, but compared to crypto, it's unbelievably slow, whereas in crypto, you know, quarter over quarter, you have these swings that I've, I've personally never ever seen. Like, I was telling you this story yesterday. We own something, which I'm not gonna tell you what it is, but, um, it's a crypto thing and, uh-

Chamath Palihapitiya 36:51 ... our nav, I had to mark my book up a billion net asset value on that asset. I had to mark it up because, you know, we have to submit to our auditors and just keep it an accurate sense of what our book value is. A billion dollars in a quarter. I've never seen that in my entire investing career. And here's how, what it does to me and my whole team. I have a budget for next year of how much I want to spend, instantly that number goes up. And what it really means is I'm probably just going to be getting the same ownership, but I'm just going to be paying more for it. And if I'm going through that, I think everybody's going to go through it. What it's going to do is, is like all of this, all of these returns are great, all of these increases are great, but I'm not sure that there's going to be that much more progress. There's not necessarily going to be that many more startups, because it's just harder and harder to find good things in the same, for the same number of GP's in a place. And costs are going bananas. Salaries are off the charts. I don't know if you guys saw, but Stripe for example, there was a tweet about how Stripe's starting to pay like starting engineers 280K. I don't know if that's true or not, but there was a tweet in Twitter. And I thought to myself, "My gosh, like 20 years ago, a starting engineering salary was 50, 60K." In the Bay Area. And so you've seen this incredible price inflation. So it's actually quite good. Again, it's sort of what we talked about yesterday. All of these gains eventually come back around and get recaptured. And so I think like you're starting to see the beginning of this really incredible cycle of wealth transfer essentially. So the funds may make it, but it's going to come back to the founders

Jason Calacanis 38:27 Shobit-

Chamath Palihapitiya 38:27 ... in place.

Jason Calacanis 38:27 ... let me ask you a question about the crypto stuff. Is, is there any worry there that these valuations match reality? Because-

Chamath Palihapitiya 38:34 My-

Jason Calacanis 38:35 ... you might have a very small float on these, a lot of excitement, and they're not actually products being used by customers in the real world.

Chamath Palihapitiya 38:41 Here's the thing. I... Because it's an internal permanent pool of capital, I have no legal requirement to actually mark, okay? Um, but the reason we do it is because we want to track nav, NAV and book value, okay? And, you know, I compensate my team based on how well we compound book value. But you're right, it's a huge, um, problem because I don't know how to get liquid on these things. And so you see this thing sitting on your p- your balance sheet and you're like, "What do we do with this? How do you move it around?" You can't, you cannot. And so I would rather... There's a, there's a great guy, uh, he was an early pioneer of private equity and, um, he had this phrase which he said like, you know, "The best way to mark up a deal is right at the end." So if you put in, you know, $10 million into a series A, if you could be allowed, the best thing to do would be carry that at a $10 million value right until the minute you get liquid because then you don't go through the psychological, um, rollercoaster ride of having to go through these marks. Because then when these marks come back down, Jason, to your point, there'll be, there'll be a quarter where we give back that billion dollars of net. Uh, maybe, you know?

Jason Calacanis 39:51 I mean, what, what do we all do?

Chamath Palihapitiya 39:53 It's a huge mind fuck.

Jason Calacanis 39:54 Let, let me ask a question about valuation, Sacks. When you're doing yours, because this came up when I was doing mine and, and marking my funds, if a secondary transaction occurs and somebody buys com or, you know, Slack or whatever, it's... When it's a private company at $10 a share, but the last time you purchased it or there was a funding two years ago, it was at $2 a share, where do you put the valuation? At what the secondary market is trading it at or what you last paid for it or somewhere in between those, and who makes that decision, Sacks? What is the-

David Sacks 40:22 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 40:23 ... best practice on this? Because secondary market transactions, people are actually making a transaction.

David Sacks 40:28 Right.

Jason Calacanis 40:28 But is that as good as a venture firm-

David Sacks 40:31 Right.

Jason Calacanis 40:31 ... you know, plopping down and joining the board? Obviously not.

David Sacks 40:33 No, it's not. So first of all, you don't want to be making these decisions ad hoc, you want to have a policy. So we have a written policy and there's a process for amending it if it ever needs to be amended. And what our policy does is it just uses the most pref- the most recent preferred round to give us the value of the shares. And then there can be adjustments based on market conditions. Like, we know that... And it's usually on the downward, right? Like, if a company we know has had a huge problem, they're not going to fundraise again, so there's not going to be a new market anytime soon where we can mark that up.

Jason Calacanis 41:05 You're saying it's a zombie company perhaps.

David Sacks 41:07 Yeah, if it's a zombie-

Jason Calacanis 41:07 It's a ghost company.

David Sacks 41:08 ... company, we can, we can mark it down. But basically speaking, we use preferred financing valuations to set marks only. Now, we do sometimes buy secondary shares, and there's a methodology for putting a value on them. Usually, it's basically what we buy them at and, um, if we somehow otherwise own common, we'll use the 409A, so...

Jason Calacanis 41:27 That's what we do too.

David Sacks 41:28 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 41:28 Yeah. It's... I think it's a really, really clean policy.

Jason Calacanis 41:31 You want to be conservative in these because nothing would be worse-

Chamath Palihapitiya 41:34 No, you can't. Yeah, I think you have to be accurate, not conservative.

Jason Calacanis 41:36 Accurate, yeah. Well, I mean, uh, you could be... Yeah, I guess the question is like, the... You could see somebody playing some games where, you know, you buy s- you know, some shares at the... You, you own shares in the company, you buy some shares in secondary-

Chamath Palihapitiya 41:50 I think the embedded-

Jason Calacanis 41:50 ... and now you've got two marks, right?

Chamath Palihapitiya 41:52 The embedded risk in venture capital has always been the following, which is that you have money that goes in into the A, and there is an incentive today, especially because so much money is trying to come in, where you want to drive as much growth as possible because then the B is at such a large step up that the IRRs look amazing, and then the C looks greater than the B, so then everybody's quote unquote making paper money, which allows you to create more incentives to raise more capital. The problem with all of that is that if these valuations ever turn out to not be real or there's a valuation reset or there's inflation or the public markets don't value growth stocks, it takes a long time for it to work its way through the venture ecosystem. And all of this liquidity will probably make it even more quote un- you know, violent when it does happen because it'll eventually will happen. We'll go through a re-rating like the year 2000, who knows when it is and what the catalyst is. But that's the real, uh, downside of not, uh, of all of this, is that it'll eventually have a, a valuation reset that's going to be-

Jason Calacanis 42:51 Well, and, and to make this super real for people, US venture capital funds have raised a combined 69.1 billion in 2020.Uh, 2021 passed to 2018, um, and a couple of these were because of Andre- Andreessen Horowitz doing a pair of mega funds with 4.5 billion in commitments recently. And so, uh, it's been just a tremendous amount of funds being made. And then to give you an example, Clubhouse went from 100 million to a billion to four billion in under 18 months in valuation, led, I think, each time by Andreessen Horowitz. So what you're saying in an example like this, or in your hypothetical example, and I'll just make it a real world one, if they take tho- And, and by the way, these are 2020 ul- one- 2020 stats. I don't know what the 2021 stats are, so those are old stats. There's probably many more. I think actually I have the updated stats. Uh, funds have raised 96 billion, uh, for 2021. That's the most updated.

Chamath Palihapitiya 43:41 In fairness to all of the venture capitalists, I think that they're doing exactly what they should be doing and in fairness to all the crossover funds, right now is the time to be putting maximum money to work as fast as possible. Not necessarily intelligently, not necessarily in a concentrated way, but the real game, if you wanna play it at the institutional level, is to just put all the chips on the table and then go back to the store and get some more chips as quickly as possible. Put them all on the table, come back and get more, so that when it all, you know, is said and done, you have as many dollars working. And the worst case is you will return the average return of the market, and if that happens to be good, you're- you look good. If it happens to be crappy, you'll be no worse, better- worse off than anybody else. But meanwhile, you will have collected enormous fees. And so that's the point in the cycle we're at, and I think that anybody who's doing it makes a ton of sense. I think it's- it's a really logical thing to be doing.

David Friedberg 44:41 The ones that have had big liquidity events are also retiring. I mean, we're seeing across the board, GPs of these ultra successful funds that have returned 5X plus taking their c- yeah, and they got their carried interest and they share their 20, 25% share in that and they walk

David Friedberg 44:56 away. But if- i- i- if you look at the value of all global public equities, it's about, um, it's about $100 trillion. And so if you're seeing... Let's say that we're raising $100 billion a year of venture capital in these funds and then you're making a two and a half X average market return, which is not normal, right? Let's assume that's the normal cycle we're in right now. Um, that's $250 billion of liquidity realized in a year out of $100 trillion of global public equities. That's only a quarter of a percent of the disruption of public equities. And think about it, technology is set up to disrupt all of these old school businesses that are public and mature and scaled, and that's what the $100 trillion represents. So it's actually, you know, kind of looking at it statistically, it's not that unfounded that we're only seeing a quarter percent market cap disruption of public equities each year, because those public companies aren't disrupting each other generally, maybe to some extent they are, they're getting disrupted by new companies that are emerging, um, new startups. And so I don't think that this is like necessarily the, you know, the peak. It may kind of be the beginning of a continuing disruption cycle that we're gonna see kind of persist for the next decade or two, especially as more of the old school industrial businesses which make up a bulk of that market cap start to get disrupted not just by software, but also by automation, by ESG angle investing, by, um, uh, life sciences and all these other kind of technologies that... and- and these interests, these market interests that are gonna disrupt those old industries. I think we could even see an acceleration from here. So, um, you know, I don't- I don't think that this is necessarily peak frenzied bubble, low interest rate fueled outcomes. I think this may be kind of part of a longer term trend that is statistically probably not that big a deal.

Jason Calacanis 46:41 Sax, are you concerned about this peak bubbly market or do you think, you know, like Chamath said, push all your chips in and raise as big a fund as you can and, you know, if the game is gonna be played at these high stakes, you wanna be at the table?

David Sacks 46:55 Well, I- I- I like what Friedberg said, I think it's a super interesting point that this could just be the beginning. Look, we- we live in an age of accelerating technological progress, so why wouldn't the returns from that accelerating technological progress also be accelerating? Y- y- you know, we- we had this thesis 20 years ago when the internet first started that you- the new economy would replace the old economy. It took a few years longer than people thought, but we are fully there. And the number of new companies being created now is just exploding. There i- a lot of this- the- this liquidity that's being generated is being now pumped into the next set of funds which will go to founders, they'll be able to create more companies, they'll be able to keep more of those companies, um, because the- there'll be less dilution. And then a lot of this wealth is trickling do- a lot of the VC money is trickling down into the competition for salaries, so anybody really anywhere in the world who can learn how to, uh, write code can now, you know, make a six figure plus salary because of remote work. So all the salaries all over the world are equilibrating. So I mean, this is an incredible pathway to prosperity for, I mean, certainly the United States, but really the whole world.

Jason Calacanis 48:03 For humanity.

David Sacks 48:04 Um, for humanity. It's really positive assuming it keeps going, assuming it's not just totally liquidity driven and, you know, I don't know exactly, you know, how all those macro forces will play out, but, um, but so I mean, this seems very positive overall. The other th- the other thing it'll lead to just quickly is a change in who has political power because, you know, ultimately, you know, money is the mother's milk of politics and- and the people who are making all these returns will eventually fund politicians. And, uh, and you know, I th-

Jason Calacanis 48:35 (coughs)

David Sacks 48:35 Yeah. Well, I, yeah, I'm one of them.

Jason Calacanis 48:37 Yeah.

David Sacks 48:38 But look, I think there's two kinds of like, I'd say prototypes polit- uh, politically speaking for people in the technology world. You've kind of got the- the sort of standard woke progressives who are funding a lot of this crazy stuff like decarceration cities, whatever, we talked about that before. But I also think there's another prototype that's less loud and they feel that they're m- they kind of keep their views more s- to themselves, which is I call them liberaltarians who are sort of liberal on social values, but libertarian on economic policy. They don't like...... government regulations, Certainly if they're in the crypto world, they don't like government regulations. They could see how they create, uh, you know, friction to progress and they believe in markets and, um, and they- w- I think they're going to want to fund politicians who support tha- those types of things. So, you know, I could be very positive, uh, politically in that respect.

Jason Calacanis 49:29 What's interesting, I just want to build on what you built on what Friedberg said, which is, I think the best point you made was l- look on a, on a global basis of the opportunity for an individual, somebody who is, you know, graduating high school, college, they're 18, 19, 20 years old. Because of remote work, anybody can work from anywhere. Technology companies have unlimited resources and they need an un- an, a n- a never-ending supply of developers or even a SaaS salesperson, a marketer, you know, back office, et cetera. And they can work from anywhere on the globe and make a six-figure salary, you know, whatever, 50, 60, 70, 80K for one of these entry level jobs in sales. And all the information on how to get those jobs is available for free from startups that have put OpenCourseWare online or very free courses. Yet we're looking at this massive technological change and the New York Times' position is that technology is destroying humanity and polarization of wealth is destroying humanity. What we're actually uncovering here is, all of this money being invested in these companies is giving an opportunity for people around the world to get high paying jobs.

David Sacks 50:31 Totally. And actually, can I, can I, can I, uh, let me mention a really interesting item in- that was just in Politico today, which was about, um, Al Sharpton was lobbying in Congress against changing the carried interest treatment. So remember, you know, all of us in VC make our compensation in the form of, uh,-

Jason Calacanis 50:50 Yeah.

David Sacks 50:50 ... carried interest. And-

Jason Calacanis 50:51 Explain what it is.

David Sacks 50:53 Well, it's basically, you know, if a fund is in profits that, you know, the VC will get... the, the VC's firm will get, say, 25% of the upside after they pay back all their LPs. That's called the carried interest. Because of the way that these partnerships are set up, that is treated as a capital gains as opposed to ordinary income, assuming it meets the holding periods of the underlying assets. So, there's be- a big debate about whether, you know, VCs and private equity people should be paying ordinary income or, or long-term cap gains on those returns. Al Sharpton was lobbying against changing it because in this political, uh, Politico article, he was saying that it would impede the efforts of Black entrepreneurs to build lasting wealth if you jacked up the tax rates because there's a lot of fund managers and, you know, who, who are Black, who are making a lot of money now, and they don't want to be subject to this change in treatment. So, that was super interesting. You know, this tech boom is not... it's not exclusive. I mean, the, the tech industry gets this rap as if it's this highly exclusionary place. It's not. I mean, three of the people on this pod right now are immigrants. So, you know, the wealth that's being created is not going to traditional centers, traditional... it's not going to the heirs of, you know, Northeastern, you know, uh, families or something who've been sending their kids to Harvard and Princeton for generations. It's going to entirely new people who haven't had this kind of wealth before. And-

Chamath Palihapitiya 52:20 By the way, uh-

David Sacks 52:20 ... and that's interesting.

Chamath Palihapitiya 52:21 ... uh, an- another positive externality of this wealth, all these massive gains that, uh, folks who have invested in venture capital have gotten has caused one really interesting positive change. So Amherst, which is a really exclusive liberal arts college in the, uh, Northeast, made so much money, their endowment is so flush with cash, they basically eliminated, uh, legacy admittances, which means if your parents got in, you were 70% likely to get into Amherst. An equivalent kid whose parents didn't go to Amherst had a less than 6% admit rate, right? So a huge disparity. Basically said if you are a legacy kid, that exists... you know, and we all know this, it exists at Harvard, it exists at, at all these Ivy League schools. But Amherst is now so- has made so much money through VC investments, as an example, they're like, "We've canceled admittances." So there's, there are, there are some really positive things that are happening with all this money that's being made.

David Friedberg 53:19 Al Sharpton's rationale aside, um, anyone's gonna get wealthier if they're paying less taxes. So I think-

David Sacks 53:27 (laughs)

David Friedberg 53:27 ... (laughs) you know, you're broadly-

David Sacks 53:28 Yeah.

David Friedberg 53:28 ... you're, you're gonna see a bit of a focus on that point, obviously because you can-

Jason Calacanis 53:31 Well, which is why Cal- Friedberg, California was massively in the bonus in terms of budget, surplus, and cash because of this issue. And they were spending money like drunken sailors.

David Friedberg 53:41 Yeah, I mean, uh, I just think you're gonna hear a lot of positioning for, you know, the case. And, and by the way, I think that, you know, building individual wealth creates... this is obviously a philosophical point, but, you know, it creates a greater path to prosperity for more people, uh, through the spending that they'll underdo in, in growing the economy than, you know, than not. So I, I don't know. I mean, I feel like the Al Sharpton point is a good one to kind of make, but it's, it's a broader one than that.

David Sacks 54:08 Well, I think th- so to, in my view, the broader point about the, the Sharpton thing is that it shows that we talk about this group, uh, of rich people, the, the wealthy, the millionaires and billionaires as if it's a static class of people, at least this is the progressive attack. It's not. I mean, what Sharpton points to is that this group is constantly changing. There's new people getting rich. So when we talk about the rich, if it's new people getting rich, what we're really talking about is success. And if you really want to ban people getting rich, I mean, you're talking about banning success. Our country can't be successful that way. We're not gonna be able to out-compete China if we're preventing success. And by the way, we can't fund all these progressive, uh, programs if we are, you know, hamstringing success. So, um, you know, I think th- this, what we've created here with this highly entrepreneurial free enterprise system that's funded by venture capital, this is the golden goose of the American economy. And the most important thing is that we don't break it.

Jason Calacanis 55:01 Sax, it might just be we may have underestimated its power is what we're sort of realizing collectively here today, is that we've always thought that this thing is hitting all-time highs. This might be the beginning...... right? Like, it feels like this is getting bigger and, uh, you know, a- and going at a velocity that is different than even when we came into the industry. You, you know, the amount of exits, the ama- the scale of these companies, the Coinbases, the Robinhoods, the Ubers, the Slacks.

David Sacks 55:27 Right.

Jason Calacanis 55:27 I mean, these are giant companies making huge international impacts.

David Sacks 55:31 I think it's either that or this whole thing is a liquidity-driven bubble, (laughs) so it's one of the two. (laughs)

55:36 It's, it's both. It's both. I think it's both.

Jason Calacanis 55:37 Well, and, and I also think the, the Sharpton thing is a very interesting point that we can go back to maybe episode 25 or 20 when we started this podcast, which was Trump got massive support from the Black and Hispanic community because of this entrepreneurial freedom, uh, upward mobility pitch the Republicans were making. That's the perfect pitch for the Republicans, not this divisive, divisive, you know, shut the border down, but more, "Hey, we want everybody to support." And I thought one of the-

David Sacks 56:05 How, how crazy is it-

Jason Calacanis 56:06 ... one of the best takes was Michael Che... I just wanna just end on this and I'll give it to you, Chamath. Michael Che was on The Breakfast Club when our, our friend was hosting SNL and he said, "I don't know, I think white people just don't like their billionaires for some reason."

David Sacks 56:18 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 56:19 Uh, it's weird because we love our billionaires. If Oprah or Tyler Perry was coming, we'd be excited about it. And I met Michael Che there and, and Michael Che was really excited. He, he's a fan of Elon's and, like, it was a really great conversation they had.

David Sacks 56:31 It's so true. It's so true.

Jason Calacanis 56:33 Like, why are we hating people who are changing the world and helping?

David Sacks 56:37 Right, because it's, it's not we, it's, it's... Frankly, it's white woke progressives. They're crazy. They're the crazy ones.

Jason Calacanis 56:43 They're, they're bonkers.

David Sacks 56:44 They're bonkers.

Jason Calacanis 56:44 We have to get purple.

David Sacks 56:46 I think conservatives and what you call woke progressives, um, are the same. I don't think it's about a political affinity. I think it is about people feeling like they don't have the opportunity that others clearly were able to realize. And it is amplified and magnified by the social media that, that basically shines a light on the success that people have had in a way that we've never had in history before and it creates a great deal of feeling like I'm missing out and I'm being left out. And that's what's driving a lot of the discontent on both the left and the right.

Jason Calacanis 57:17 100%.

David Sacks 57:18 And it's not... It's not a political point of view. I think it's a social point of view. And the great progress we've had and the great success we've had as a society over the past couple of decades is now being realized through this media in a way that's kind of driving emotional conditions for people that haven't had the same level of success.

Jason Calacanis 57:33 Maybe if they stopped tweeting and complaining and just learned some skills, like, (laughs) if you're still complaining on Twitter-

David Sacks 57:38 As the only, as the only, as the only colored person on this pod, what I'll tell you is I've, I... It's very rare that I meet a colored person that hates a successful other colored person. Just doesn't exist, guys.

Jason Calacanis 57:48 Tell us more.

David Sacks 57:49 (laughs)

57:50 It's just one of these things-

Jason Calacanis 57:51 Why?

David Sacks 57:51 ... where, you know, we were... we are all grinding, we all know how hard it is to be on the outside looking in. If any one of us makes it, there's a lot of support.

Jason Calacanis 58:00 I mean, we see that in-

David Sacks 58:01 That's just wa-... That's just... I'll just tell you, that's what I felt. I, I- We see that in... South Africa, South African Jews don't feel that way.

Jason Calacanis 58:07 No, I mean, we see that in the in- incoming emails and tweets to you, Chamath. You, you are inspiring people in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. We see it constantly. They come up to you at events and they're like, "Hey, if Chamath can figure this out, I can do it."

David Sacks 58:18 I'm about to do this thing in Africa and I'm going there in December. I can't wait. And, you know, we're thinking of just doing a couple of, like, lectures and talks and stuff.

Jason Calacanis 58:27 All in Africa? Let's do it.

David Sacks 58:27 Lectures and talks and these, this, these places are gonna get rammed with people and it's, like, it's beautiful to see, like, yeah, I just think that, uh, minorities, like, don't hate on other people that are successful. It's just not-

Jason Calacanis 58:38 You're, you're going to Africa in December?

David Sacks 58:40 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 58:41 For what?

David Sacks 58:41 Why don't we do all in Africa? What are we doing? Like-

Jason Calacanis 58:43 Where are you going?

David Sacks 58:44 ... I guess, I guess I'm still cooking. I got some stuff cooking.

Jason Calacanis 58:46 Hey.

58:46 Let's go. I'm getting email constantly by people who are starting startups in Africa. I wanna go. I've never been. I really wanna go.

David Sacks 58:53 Y- Y- You can come with me in early December if you want.

Jason Calacanis 58:54 I'm in. I'm 100%... I have nothing to do. I'm bored.

David Sacks 58:56 Can I... Here's the thing that I wanted to talk about before.

Jason Calacanis 58:58 Take me.

David Sacks 58:58 What is crazy, and this is, Jason, to build on your Trump comment, we may be facing a situation, I'd love to get your guys' reaction, where Donald Trump in his first two years of his presidency may actually have gotten more done than Biden will get done in his first two years. And I just want your guys' reaction and thoughts on, uh, how that's possibly could be, because we have a Democratic president, we have a Democratic congress and we may not get anything done.

59:26 I, I can speak to that. Okay.

Jason Calacanis 59:28 Here's your alley-oop. (laughs) Sex with the windup.

David Sacks 59:31 Okay. I, I can't believe that the way the progressives have done this reconciliation bill. It's been crazy. Okay, look, from the beginning they've been saying, Biden, the administration, the Democrats have been saying, "We wanna do the biggest package of tax expense since The Great Society." Okay? But here, here's the thing, if you wanna do LBJ type things, you gotta have LBJ type majorities. They've got a 50/50 Senate and a three-seat margin in the House. LBJ, when he passed The Great Society, he had, like, 69 senators. He had a filibuster super majority, filibuster proof super majority in the Senate. He had something like 150 mar- seat margin in the House. That is the kind of margins you need to pass great site-like programs. So instead of having, I'd say, ambitions that were reasonable, the administration caucuses with the progressives, they come together with this fo- over 4 1/2 billion of spending, 3 1/2 in the social welfare, 1.2 trillion of infrastructure, and they wanted even more, okay? And then they've been trying to jam this thing and they never went to the center of the party, to Sinema, to Manchin, and said, "Hey, what are you guys willing to do?" And so somehow I think they thought they could just jam this thing through over the objections of these votes that they absolutely need. And I think there's really this mentality on the part of the progressive left that I think they're so used to jamming people with speech codes and cancellation and censorship and COVID mandates that are not passed by legislatures but have been imposed by edict. I think they're just used to jamming people and they think they're gonna shame people on Twitter, like these senators, like Manchin, like Sinema, into voting their way. Guess what? It doesn't work that way. Twitter is not the real world. Eric Adams showed that in New York.

Jason Calacanis 1:01:06 Shout out to Dave Chappelle.

David Sacks 1:01:07 He won that election. Exactly. Dave Chappelle is... Dave Chappelle has a 95% approval rating. Okay? The critics hate him. The woke progressives hate him. Guess what? You know how many people were actually at that Dave Chappelle protest? Like three dozen, okay?... the Progressives don't have the votes. What they should have done, and by the way, their, their conduct through the whole thing has been insane. AOC has basically been saying, "If you don't give us everything we want, we're not voting for your one and a half trillion dollar bill."

Jason Calacanis 1:01:30 They overplayed their hands. These guys have, like, Ace Jack off, and they're sh- yeah shot there.

David Sacks 1:01:34 They're putting a gun to their head, saying, "Hey, unless you give us three and a half billion, we're not going to vote for one billion." Really? You're gonna do that? How does that make sense? We know... Call their bluff. We know Progressives will vote for every penny they can. What the, what Biden should have done, if we had a more hands-on president who actually wanted to get things done, he, and he knows this from his time in the Senate, he should have gone to those swing senators as a group and said, "Hey, what can we get done here?" Not to AOC and Pelosi. They can't deliver, they can't deliver the bill.

Jason Calacanis 1:02:00 Well, I mean, the promise of Biden, I'll say, you know, as somebody who voted for Biden, I'm a little disappointed, was he was supposed to be moderate, and he was supposed to bring people to the center. And it doesn't feel like he's actually. To your point, Shammav, you asked us what we think, I have... I- I'm not regretting, because I, Trump had to go. It was too much chaos. There was just too much risk having him in there.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:02:19 Agreed.

Jason Calacanis 1:02:19 So I am glad I voted for Biden.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:02:21 Agreed.

Jason Calacanis 1:02:21 But I am unhappy that he cannot build consensus down the middle and get the far left to just, you know, pump the brakes. I- I- I understand they have passion for certain projects, but just get something done moderately and in a phased approach. Why does this have to be so huge and confusing?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:02:38 Well, Sachs is-

Jason Calacanis 1:02:38 Do a smaller thing three times.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:02:40 ... Sachs, Sachs is exposing what we may not know, which is that Progressives are very loud, but they may not actually represent a plurality of people. So, for example, in the Netflix protest, I saw a video, and there was about two dozen people, you know, and one person actually had tweeted, "Hey, I- I never even showed up to the office yet-"

Jason Calacanis 1:03:00 I've never been to one. (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:03:00 "... but now I'm showing up to walk out of the office." But then what happened was, there were some other people that showed up, and in the middle of the protest, they had a sign that said, you know, "Jokes are funny, I like jokes." And then everybody started chanting that. Then, uh, a Black woman got up and she started to say, "Black lives matter," and then everybody got confused and started to chant, "Black lives matter." And then they were all looking around each other trying to find direction in this protest, and it became somewhat directionless. And I think this is what, you know, we're, we're now realizing, is that... You know, remember when, like, as managers in corporations, we've all heard this term, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." But it may actually be the case that the squeaky wheel shouldn't get the grease, because it's a head fake, and we're gonna get lost in misdirection. Another example of this, there's a guy, Dorian Abbot, and I wanted to talk about this as well. This is a guy who's an acclaimed climate professor. Okay, l- let me just give you the whole story. I'm just going to read to you, because I think it's interesting, the first couple paragraphs of this story from the New York Times. "MIT invites geophysicist Dorian Abbot to give a prestigious public lecture this autumn. He seemed a natural choice. He's a scientific star who studies climate change and whether planets in distant solar systems might harbor atmospheres conducive to life. Then a swell of angry resistance arose. Some faculty members and grad students argued that Dr. Abbot, who's a prof at University of Chicago, had created harm by speaking out against aspects of affirmative action and diversity, because in videos and opinion pieces, he wants people and members of groups rather than as individuals. He basically favors a diverse pool of applicants selected on merit." So, but he said his planned lecture at MIT was about climate science and to help people understand climate change, and would make no mention of his views on affirmative action. But his opponents, uh, argued that he was infuriating, inappropriate, and oppressive, and so they canceled the lecture. Now, here's the question I have. Here, that's another example of all of this stuff. Are we better off with, let's just say there's 100 grad students, 100 brilliant minds at MIT being pushed to think even more specifically about climate change by an expert who can do that? Or are we better off finding some more middle of the road person who maybe not be as intellectually, um, ambitious around climate change, but has a whole bunch of other views not related to climate change that are more palatable? And what does that do for all of us, including probably all these people who probably want a solution to climate change, but who have now held back the ability to teach these kids? What do we do? What do we think about that kind of stuff? And this is where, again, the squeaky wheel in this case did get the grease, but are we actually better off in this example?

Jason Calacanis 1:05:51 Friedberg?

David Friedberg 1:05:51 Diversity of thought drives successful outcomes.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:05:57 (laughs)

David Sacks 1:06:00 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:06:02 All right, thanks for coming in for the all-in podcast. We're telling you shit you already know. (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:06:07 I mean, like, what are we talking about?

Jason Calacanis 1:06:08 Think for yourself, people. Listen to a bunch of opinions, uh, and if somebody says something you don't like or challenges you-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:06:15 Jake, who, who are you talking to right now?

Jason Calacanis 1:06:15 ... maybe that's an opportunity for you to learn or grow, or for you to make a blog post or do your own standup special, give your own talk that challenges their debate, like we do here every week.

David Sacks 1:06:25 Right, but it, it, the voice-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:06:25 You, you guys remember the same thing happened with that, what's that ultra-conservative young guy? Sachs, who went to Berkeley a few years ago, and they blocked him from joining campus?

Jason Calacanis 1:06:33 Ben Shapiro.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:06:33 No, no, no. The, um-

David Sacks 1:06:34 No.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:06:34 He's got like a Greek name, Greek name.

David Sacks 1:06:36 No, Greek guy. Greek name.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:06:36 Yiannopoulos?

Jason Calacanis 1:06:37 Yiannopoulos.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:06:38 Milo Yiannopoulos?

Jason Calacanis 1:06:39 No. He's the right-wing guy, the gay provocateur.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:06:41 No, but we're, here we're talking about an expert in climate change giving a lecture-

Jason Calacanis 1:06:44 Yes.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:06:44 ... about climate change to grad students who would, who could then go and solve climate change for the... all of the world. (laughs) I mean, this is MIT and U, U Chicago, which are probably two of the smartest institutions of people in the world.

David Sacks 1:06:56 Right. He's not saying anything politically offensive, it's just that his unrelated views, uh, they view, they think are anathema and therefore they're gonna protest and block him. And, of course, you know, they're, they always use the language of safetyism, which is, "Oh, well, if you allow this person on campus, it threatens my safety." Really? This person's a physical threat to you? "No, he threatens my self-conception." Really? He said something that, you know, he's gonna talk about something that offends you? "No, it's just that, uh, you know, he said things that, that, that threaten my view of the world, so my safety is jeopardized." I mean, this is, this is literally the language that's being used now. Um, I mean, Friedberg's reaction to it is, "Yeah, this is so obvious that we don't even need to discuss it." But-... it's not so obvious that it's not taking place. It's actually-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:07:39 It's happening.

David Sacks 1:07:39 ... it's happening.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:07:40 It's happening.

Jason Calacanis 1:07:41 You know what I find the most disappointing about the whole Netflix situation is, I thought Dave Chappelle, you know, even though maybe the special wasn't as funny as other ones, I thought it ha- it made you think in such a, just incredible way. And I was actually read the, I looked up the transcript and I read the transcript so I could think more about it and try to form an opinion about this turf issue and trans people and, you know, people punching up, punching down in comedy. I, it made me think. And then the entire discussion about this is just people walking out and no discussion about what he actually said. And that to me is just a little bit of a tell. Like, if you are so upset about what he said, well, where is the transcript of what he said? Break it down sentence by sentence and tell us exactly what he got wrong and why, so that we can continue the discussion. The Netflix