All-In PodcastE52: Trump's SPAC, peak venture liquidity, tech as an economic ladder, Dems overplaying their hand
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,316 words- 0:00 – 13:19
Bestie weight loss strategies, poker recap
- JCJason Calacanis
Only Sax can lose 20 pounds and look worse. (laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
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.
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- DFDavid Friedberg
Ask your wife or your house manager to help you find slim fit shirts at the, uh, the local Macy's.
- JCJason Calacanis
You'd literally look like you're wearing a parachute.
- DSDavid Sacks
I've never, I've never worn slim fit anything.
- JCJason Calacanis
Stand up for a second. Stand up.
- DSDavid Sacks
I can't. I'm not, I'm not wearing pants.
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Oh, my lord.
- DSDavid Sacks
Do you want to see?
- JCJason Calacanis
Can somebody call HR? Are you really not wearing pants?
- DSDavid Sacks
I got... No, I got, I got shorts on.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
No, that's not true. Are you really wearing shorts?
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah, I am.
- JCJason Calacanis
No, he's not... He's lying.
- DSDavid Sacks
No, I'm not.
- JCJason Calacanis
Put your leg up. Show us that pasty leg. No fucking way. Oh, my God.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Oh, my God. How big are those shorts?
- JCJason Calacanis
It's, it's-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
That's incredible. (laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
He's like Dom DeLuise and he lost 100 pounds-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No, this is, this is-
- JCJason Calacanis
... and he didn't change his wardrobe.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Oh, my God.
- JCJason Calacanis
You're rich, dude. Change your wardrobe.
- 13:19 – 33:43
Trump SPAC, how he can leverage the capital intelligently, building vs. acquiring, and more
- JCJason Calacanis
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?
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.
(laughs)
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-
It's an NFT. This is an NFT.
It's an NFT. (laughs)
And basically, what "A"-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's an exchange traded NFT.
- JCJason Calacanis
It's an exchange traded NFT.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's a, it's an NFT of Donald Trump. Go ahead, Friedberg.
- JCJason Calacanis
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.
Oh, so he's finally a billionaire?
And he's finally a billionaire of equity value in his stake in this thing.
(laughs) He's actually a billionaire.
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.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
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.
- JCJason Calacanis
To traditional media?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
The traditional media. It's a huge fuck you to actually the mainstream media. I think this is gonna-
- JCJason Calacanis
To Twitter?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
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.
- JCJason Calacanis
Did you see Jack Dorsey's tweet, by the way?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No. (laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
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-
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.
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.
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.
- DSDavid Sacks
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)
- JCJason Calacanis
Wow, so original.
- DSDavid Sacks
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.
- JCJason Calacanis
So if he has 30 million real fans, Chamath, what number of them would download the app and participate in the first year?
- 33:43 – 44:56
Peak venture returns, tech landscape
- JCJason Calacanis
capital?
- DSDavid Sacks
Venture capital, 'cause clearly Sachs is, is having extraordinary liquidity events, uh, at-
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
... 11:00 at night on a Thursday night that-
Friedberg, money is not made. It's simply transferred from one perception to another.
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
One perception to another.
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
That was a Wall Street, uh, speech.
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Sachs was like in his, uh, glory last night-
- DSDavid Sacks
He was, he was going gecko shirt last night, yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
... doing monologues from Wall Street last night.
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
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-
(laughs)
... 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.
Well, it's... It is bonkers. Wait.
Yeah.
We gotta show that chart. <|agent|><|en|>
Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
We should talk about... Let me just
- NANarrator
We should all see that.
- DSDavid Sacks
You should highlight the s- highlight the statistics, J Cal, 'cause it is truly extraordinary how much liquidity venture firms are having this year.
- JCJason Calacanis
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.
- DSDavid Sacks
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.
- JCJason Calacanis
The last three years, yeah. It's-
- DSDavid Sacks
And that doesn't, and that doesn't even factor in what's happening in crypto.
- 44:56 – 58:58
Tech's global role: are we still in the early days, as opposed to a bubble? Wealth shaming, upward mobility
- DFDavid Friedberg
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.
- JCJason Calacanis
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?
- DSDavid Sacks
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.
- JCJason Calacanis
For humanity.
- DSDavid Sacks
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-
- JCJason Calacanis
(coughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah. Well, I, yeah, I'm one of them.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
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.
- JCJason Calacanis
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.
- DSDavid Sacks
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,-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
... carried interest. And-
- JCJason Calacanis
Explain what it is.
- DSDavid Sacks
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-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
By the way, uh-
- DSDavid Sacks
... and that's interesting.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... 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.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Al Sharpton's rationale aside, um, anyone's gonna get wealthier if they're paying less taxes. So I think-
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- DFDavid Friedberg
... (laughs) you know, you're broadly-
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... you're, you're gonna see a bit of a focus on that point, obviously because you can-
- JCJason Calacanis
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.
- DFDavid Friedberg
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.
- DSDavid Sacks
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.
- JCJason Calacanis
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.
- DSDavid Sacks
Right.
- JCJason Calacanis
I mean, these are giant companies making huge international impacts.
- DSDavid Sacks
I think it's either that or this whole thing is a liquidity-driven bubble, (laughs) so it's one of the two. (laughs)
- 58:58 – 1:17:41
Democrats overplaying their hand, Netflix discourse, and more
- DSDavid Sacks
- JCJason Calacanis
Take me.
- DSDavid Sacks
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.
I, I can speak to that. Okay.
- JCJason Calacanis
Here's your alley-oop. (laughs) Sex with the windup.
- DSDavid Sacks
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.
- JCJason Calacanis
Shout out to Dave Chappelle.
- DSDavid Sacks
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."
- JCJason Calacanis
They overplayed their hands. These guys have, like, Ace Jack off, and they're sh- yeah shot there.
- DSDavid Sacks
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.
- JCJason Calacanis
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.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Agreed.
- JCJason Calacanis
So I am glad I voted for Biden.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Agreed.
- JCJason Calacanis
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?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, Sachs is-
- JCJason Calacanis
Do a smaller thing three times.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... 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-"
- JCJason Calacanis
I've never been to one. (laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
"... 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?
- JCJason Calacanis
Friedberg?
- DFDavid Friedberg
Diversity of thought drives successful outcomes.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
All right, thanks for coming in for the all-in podcast. We're telling you shit you already know. (laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I mean, like, what are we talking about?
- JCJason Calacanis
Think for yourself, people. Listen to a bunch of opinions, uh, and if somebody says something you don't like or challenges you-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Jake, who, who are you talking to right now?
- JCJason Calacanis
... 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.
- DSDavid Sacks
Right, but it, it, the voice-
Episode duration: 1:27:28
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode cGenTdTrYEo
Get more out of YouTube videos.
High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.
Add to Chrome