中国科技监管收紧、CRISPR 突破、气候变化务实方案

Jason Calacanis (00:00:02): Pick up your phone, dipshit. David Sacks (00:00:05): Hello? Saks. Yeah. I'll I'll be ready in, like, 2 minutes. Okay? I'm sorry. Jason Calacanis (00:00:10): Let's go. Splash some water on your face. Take a couple of whatever you need, some And let's go. We're waiting. David Sacks (00:00:17): Okay. I'll be there in 2 minutes. Okay? Jason Calacanis (00:00:18): Okay. Hurry up. Is your chance to get Max Airtime? David Sacks (00:00:23): Are we really gonna record that free brew? Jason Calacanis (00:00:24): You listen. FreeBird's out. That means you're gonna get, by default, 33.3 percent of airtime. It's gonna be your biggest week ever. David Sacks (00:00:30): I'm I'm coming. Jason Calacanis (00:00:33): The weather winner's wide. Rainman, David Sachs. Speaker 3 (00:00:41): We open source it to the fans and make discoveries. Jason Calacanis (00:00:44): Love you. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All in podcast with us today, The Dictator Himself, Chamalpalehoppati. And The rainman, David Sachs. I'm Jay Kal, and the queen of Kinois quit the show. Where is that here? He quit the show. I think I think he quit. So we're looking for a science person. If you know anybody, email science guy at the all in podcast.com if you wanna apply for the science position here. No. He couldn't make it. He was -- Sandler is moving. He's moving. He's moving. I guess we can say that without invading his privacy, but he's he's not gonna be able although we do a show anyway because there's so much going on. And I think we should start with this Do we wanna start with the COVID stuff again for the 3rd episode in a row, or do you wanna start with China and then back into COVID? Fuck COVID. David Sacks (00:01:40): know we should just do COVID quickly because I think, you know, as much as the audience complained about it, we got a lot of comments saying, why are you talking about COVID so much? We were ahead of the curve I'm predicting this whole new delta wave. You know, we told people what was coming. I think it was a useful service. So people might not wanna hear it, but it was, I think, I would say we're probably 2 weeks ahead of the national media. I think Jason Calacanis (00:02:02): that we've gotten a couple things actually right the a couple weeks ahead of other people. Yeah. So Yeah. I mean it was pretty obvious that this was going to race through the places that had low vaccination. and having the breakthrough cases is I don't think anybody anticipated that. And the thing we didn't David Sacks (00:02:25): Yeah. Over the last week on Twitter, I'm seeing this big debate on whether vaccinated people can spread the Delta variant. And I'm like, guys, didn't you see the show 2 weeks ago? We covered this. Yeah. I got it. I was vaccinated. I got it from someone who is vaccinated. This is known. You know? Jason Calacanis (00:02:40): Yeah. David Sacks (00:02:40): Delta variant, has slipped the vaccine, it still prevents the most serious cases, generally speaking. We need to see it as a spectrum of protection. rather than completely binary. But, yeah, absolutely. You can get it and pass it on if you're vaccinated. Like, we know that, and we set we told the audience that 3 weeks ago. Jason Calacanis (00:02:58): The other thing we predicted was, you know, that this is gonna be incredibly disruptive and it's gonna create another debate of lock and potential lockdowns and mask mandates. And most of all, we discussed And we, you know, we had a, I think, a pretty vibrant debate between all of us about under what circumstances does your decision to now get vaccinated, impact everybody else. Visovy, the petri dish of the next variant that's coming. Hopefully, that'll be less deadly, less contagious. which is tends to be how these things go. But we also predicted some people are just gonna start requiring vaccines, vaccine cards, and we we mentioned what's happening in France. And I don't know what examples you've seen this week. Yeah. David Sacks (00:03:43): I thought last week when you made vaccine passports the main issue, I thought it I I well, let's put it this way. that was actually turned out to be great moderation because what has been the big issue all over the world since the last episode of vaccine passports. You saw it with Naftali Bennett in Israel, they are not taking any of this vaccine hesitancy. There's 9 million people in that country, 8,000,000 are vaccinated. They're telling last million, you gotta go get vaccinated. He has laid down the law saying enough is enough. A billion people have gotten vaccinated. it works. And for the last million of you who haven't gotten vaccinated, if you want to attend any function, more than a hundred people. If you wanna go to synagogue, if you wanna go to a sports game, if you wanna go to the mall, you have to be vaccinated or you're gonna get did that day at your own expense. Everywhere you go, it's gonna be so they're gonna make it a real pain in the ass until you get acxated. You then separately had Roger Goodell basically doing the same thing in the NFL saying to players, you well, first of all, all the coaches have to get stated, there was an anti vaxx coach who got fired. And then they don't have as much power with the players because the players have a union. But Giddell said to them, listen. If you don't get vaccinated, you're gonna get tested every day that you go to work. And if the team If there's an outbreak on the team and you guys miss a game, you're gonna lose all of your salary. We're not gonna put up with apparently, there's a game last year during that during COVID where I think it was a ravens Steelers game. And half of the one of those 2, I think, was the Ravens, half of the first string was out with COVID or they were in isolation protocol because they're around players. You know? Obviously, if you're in a locker room, one player gets everyone's gonna be exposed. David Sacks (00:05:28): Right? So it turned out to be like one of the the worst games that the NFL put on last year and get all saying we're not gonna put out product like that anymore. If you are the reason why the team misses a game. Guess what? You and all of your teammates are gonna lose your salary. And since there's only 17 games in a NFL season, talking about real real money. So you had good doing that. And now you have Facebook and Google basically coming out saying, in order to go back to the office, you have to be vaccinated. Now it's a little bit of the soft it's it's sort of more of the the iron fist beneath the velvet glove because they are offering testing. So if you don't get vaccinated, you can get a test every time you go to the office but unlike Israel, which is making you pay for it, you know you know, Facebook and Google are so rich they're gonna pay for it. So basically, what you're seeing here is that government is not in the US. It's not requiring. Jason Calacanis (00:06:17): -- gonna mandate federal workers. Otherwise, you have to get tested weekly. This is beyond now debatable. I think the funny thing is the republicans, I think, somewhere along the way, realize oh my god. We're gonna lose the midterm elections. They have found a way to find a single modality and behavior to steal defeat from the jaws of victory. You know, I think that the Republicans were probably trending to basically win back the house. And now I don't think that's the case. And you have a bunch of these red state governors who are literally flipping their shit right now trying to figure out how to get their folks vaccinated. Many of these people may not even be able to vote come midterms because they're either gonna be dead or still sick. I mean, It's it's we've learned a lot. And at this point, you're being left with folks. There again, There are people who do it for religious reasons. I get it. There are people that, you know, are gonna sort of, like, live off the grid and live by themselves. I get them too. But the folks that wanna be attacks on the system or use public resources, I don't understand, and they're basically gonna get singled out and discriminated against. And the carrot and the stick method here, I think, is gonna work because we saw a bunch of people sign up to get vaccinated in France once they said, listen. You can't go to a cafe or a bar. And I think that the a lot of the people who are not vaccinated are probably enjoying going out and having a life, Danny Meyer, the restaurateur in New York from Union Square Cafe in Gramercy one of the most famous restaurant tours of all time announced on CNBC this morning that he'll be requiring vaccines for all staff and customers What do we think of that? Restaurants saying, you've gotta show a back screen on the way and -- If I love it listen to me. If I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna spend $2000 on wine. And then a couple of thousand bucks on a tip, I don't want some asshole who's gonna get me sick there. It's bad enough that I still may get sick. And and by the way, Danny Rogers Restaurants are not, like, you know, fucking, you know, Red Robin. Jason Calacanis (00:08:22): These are next extremely high in places. Yeah. It's not TGI Fridays. Yeah. The idea that you can get a communicable respiratory disease and spend $5000 is now. both tenable, untenable. Nons starter. Sacks I mean, listen. You you've you it's very interesting last episode I felt like you were really trying to balance your belief in freedom and people being able to make decisions themselves with You know, the reality that we can't be close forever. How has the last week changed your thinking? And what do you think of it, Danny Meyer? David Sacks (00:08:57): I I I like what Danny Meyer did in this sense. He wants to create a certain experience for his clientele. And he knows that his clientele are more likely to go dine in his restaurants if there's a vaccine policy at his restaurants. He's not saying the policy for the country. He's sending it for his establishment. He has every right to be able to do that. And he believes that will help his bottom line, and he's probably right about that. Similarly, Roger Goodell, same thing. I mean, he took a tough line because he knows that if he he wants the to put out a great product every week. They can't be cancelling games because of COVID outbreaks. They can't have the 1st string players out COVID. So he made a smart business decision. I think people should have the freedom the right to do that. Now I still have let's call it a reservation about government requiring it. Not because I don't see the benefit. I definitely see the health benefit. But just because I don't like giving government the power to, you know, stick a stick a needle in your arm. If you're a government employee, I do think the government has added power. We talked about this last week. They can make it a job requirement. And, you know, what's interesting in California California said if you're a state employee, you gotta get vaccinated. But the one group they singled out were the teachers because, you know, Gavin Newsom has no guts to stand up the teacher's union whatsoever. And I find it so ironic that early in the pandemic, we had this big debate about whether the teachers would go back to school in the fall. And the teacher said, we won't go back unless we're 1st in line for the vaccine. Well, guess what? They got that. they're saying they're not gonna go back if you make us get back to I mean, you can't win with the Jason Calacanis (00:10:38): -- They're moving the goalpost. I mean, people want they wanna work from home. They it's kinda ridiculous. It's one group that needs to do it most, and it they should be the 1 it's kinda like the army and teachers and health care workers. They should be given a mandate. If you want this job, you must be vaccinated. You cannot be in the army in the military and not be vaccinated because we need you in close quarters on a helicopter to go whack Osama Bin Laden. We can't have a COVID outbreak in the Navy SEALs when we gotta go David Sacks (00:11:09): I'm okay with that. I think I think every employer has the right to require it if they believe it's gonna impact job performance. Now I wanna go back to the point that Chamath made about the midterm questions. I I because I there's a part I agree with and a part I disagree with. So the part I agree with is that the Republicans were cruising to, you know, a a midterm slacking. And now the the whole vaccine hesitancy issue, I think there was a prospect of that causing damage to the Republicans. Not because most Republicans are vaccine hesitant, but rather because Republican politicians were not out front enough on getting vaccines. But look, there's a difference between reality and perception. Here here's the reality. Every single republican governor, every single one has been vaccinated and has supported the vaccine. Mitch McConnell, is vaccine sports vaccine. Kevin McCarthy put out a statement. You even have the House of Nori Wip Skolese. get vaccinated on on live TV. Why had he not been vaccinated because he already had COVID? And he didn't necessarily think he needed, but he got the vaccine anyway to basically double down you had Sarah Huckabee Sanders come out and say that she was getting the Trump she called it the Trump vaccine. Jason Calacanis (00:12:19): Yes, please. If the put the Trump logo on it, David Sacks (00:12:22): Right. I mean, she understands. Right? Like, this is probably, you know, operation light speed or warp speed or whatever. was probably the biggest Jason Calacanis (00:12:31): Operation. Operation fuck up the midterms. That's what the Republican should call this. David Sacks (00:12:34): Yeah. Well, so so so look. I mean, the Republican politicians in the Maine support vaccines. The problem is that they were being a little bit too quiet about it. And as a result of that, you had the fringe people, the Marjorie Taylor Greens and so forth. they were occupying too much airspace around this issue. And, you know, frankly, you know -- Right now, I Jason Calacanis (00:12:54): think the I think the Democrats are gonna keep those. David Sacks (00:12:58): I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily go that far. But because I I think that I think the Republican problem was not that they're vaccine hesitant, but rather that They were just being a little too quiet about it. Yeah. But now I think that's changed. I mean, there's not a single major Republican politician who isn't in favor of vaccine. Jason Calacanis (00:13:15): If the Republicans can get their actual act together and actually get these well, you know, Jason does joke about it, but I do think he's right in a certain way, basically like this this group of Republicans largely who refused to get vaccinated. then they may be able to pull something out. But I think that it's gonna have to require a little bit of backtracking and showing up, as you said, by the mainstream Republican political groups, and they just have not done a good job. I it is a really simple offering for them. New information, new strain, new approach. Listen. We didn't anticipate Delta would happen. This is ten times more. It allows people to save face, basically, is what you're saying. -- save face. You got a perfect law firm. Listen. There's new information here. This thing is David Sacks (00:13:57): even the CDC hasn't officially changed their policy yet. I mean, it's coming. Right? We know it's coming. They've always been behind the curve. We predicted the policy change on the show anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months before they actually do it. But, look, on the vaccine, I don't discern a difference in position. on the vaccine itself between Republican governors and democratic governors. They both are advocating it. They're both allowing private organizations require. But none of them, to my knowledge, have either had the the guts or the temerity, however you wanna see it actually require it. Jason Calacanis (00:14:31): Oh, I love that word. temerity. temerity. Not not not really used. Not used enough. And just putting a capitalist before we move on to what's going on in China, We talked about implementing this and how do you implement it. Well, we don't need to have a national registry. People have vaccine cards. You bring your vaccine card. You show it. And then, of course, people go to, well, what happens if you create a fact can anybody create a fake vaccine card? Yes. Of course, you can. But the FBI has put out a statement now because of Lollapalooza, the Music Festival, they are saying do not buy a fake vaccine card because if you wanna have no mask at Lollapalooza, you have to show your vaccine card and they set a the FBI is tweeting about this. It's illegal. It endages yourself and those around you. And it's a federal crime that could lead to hefty fines or prison time. Oh my god. Yeah. So show us your papers. Just get the vaccine and do -- Just get the vaccine folks. Why are we really dealing with this? Oh, you know, I went to Whitley becoming a Darwin Award. This is quickly moving into Darwin Award territory. We are I talked to my doctor, and I was like, I wanna get the Moderna or J and J. Which one should I get? And they're like, got the Pfizer ready. I'm like, yeah. I wanna take a second. I'm like, I don't think that's gonna make a difference. I was like, I think it's totally gonna make a difference. This is, like, when we got off the pod last And they're like, yeah. I was like, well, just give me the 3rd shot of Pfizer then. And they're like, well, that's not necessary either. I'm like, I I don't care if it's not necessary. I want it. Give me the 3rd shot of Pfizer. And then I opened up dredge report yesterday that is, like, 3rd shot of vaccine of Pfizer in Israel or whatever. They're just gonna start giving people a third shot I I just wanna get ahead of David Sacks (00:16:07): the curve. You're exactly right. But by the way, there's one other piece of news that came out that I think is very positive on on COVID, which is the availability of these oral antivirals, the pills? Jason Calacanis (00:16:18): That you can take when you get an early case of it. David Sacks (00:16:21): Right. So it's like what they have for Tamiflu with the flu. Like, no one should ever die of the flu because Tamiflu is, like, completely effective at stopping it provided you take Tamiflu early in the case. So I think that, you know, with the reduced effectiveness of vaccine, what we're gonna have to do is supplement the scenes and the boosters with home testing and then, you know, these oral antiviral so that you get you you take a test, you discover you got COVID, and you immediately prescribed, you know, one of these these pills in the pharma companies are coming out. There's, like, 3 different pharma companies coming out with these oral and antiviral And if Friedberg were here, he could tell us all about it. Jason Calacanis (00:16:59): Yeah. Friedberg, explain the science behind it. You know what? The science can go itself. Hey, Danny Meyer. Chill a great bottle of white burgundy because I'm coming, baby. I'm vaccinated. Let's go, baby. Vaxed and ready to go. Oh my lord. Alright. I the the China situation has been perplexing to me. You know, my position was always be be careful working in China or investing in China or investing in Chinese companies because they could change the rules at any time and change the rules they have in the past A year, we talked about obviously Ann Financial and Jack Ma going MIA. ByteDance is CEO and founder. stepping down as CEO amid Chinese regulations and all this scrutiny. And then we have Didi last week being pulled from the App Store in an unprecedented penalty where you're not allowed to download Didi and the existing users can use it. And then on top of that, all the educational companies this week were told that they cannot operate as for profit companies, and these companies have gone public in Hong Kong and in the West. And this has caused such an acute effect, SoftBank is clearing a bunch of its Uber position to cover their losses in Didi. And then there is the store of Larry Chan, who is a Chinese education entrepreneur. He was worth 15,000,000,000 in January. Now he's lost 99% of his net worth. According to Bloomberg, he founded Gaut Teichido or Tech Chido, which is a Chinese online tutoring firm as we know education is huge. in China. That company, Gao2, peaked at a 140 calls a share in January, and has fallen to 3 dollars a share. Big sorted story there. 10¢ lost a 100,000,000,000 in market cap in 3 days early this week as China cracked down on what they call the monopoly and music rights. So while we debate what happens with the monopolies here in the United States, China just literally told them And here's the quote from the BBC article. The company and its affiliated businesses have been told that they can no longer engage in exclusive deals over music rights. and must dissolve any existing agreements within 30 days. I mean, this would be like Biden just saying the app store is now open. Jason Calacanis (00:19:17): You have to let other app stores in Apple or you know, just coming down and saying to Amazon, you can't sell Amazon Basics anymore in 30 days, no more Amazon Basics at the site. What are we what do you think the end game is here? Is this a because China seems like they are very it and they plan in centuries, what is happening here? There's the short term and the long term. I think what's happening in the short term is that the same thing that we are talking about in the United States that Saks is, you know, very eloquently, basically, I think led most everybody in just really framing for a lot of people is this idea that, you know, we have privatized free speech and we have put the distribution of information into the hands of 3 or 4 founder CEO oligarchs. That's also true in China. And when you look under the hood of the major Internet companies, there's 405 guys that are in charge. And so I think that in the United States, politicians feel increasingly uneasy with those folks having power because it's applied indiscriminately. Trump gets banned, Trump may not get banned, this person gets distribution. This article is considered misinformation. That article is considered disinformation. This article is suppressed. It's a dangerous place to be. And in China, they were just, like, enough's enough. So I think the short term as it relates to the Internet company, was basically a realization that we are not going to allow any more devolution of power from the Chinese Communist Party to and into the hands of these internet entrepreneurs. So that was that was sort of like the So it's a move out of fear. There's they're gonna lose their power base. Not scared. I think they're just smart, and they were like, we're not gonna allow this to happen. So they don't have to deal with section 230 or any. Jason Calacanis (00:21:03): law like that. I think it was just a realization that we want them to understand who is boss. Right? And so there was a wave of resignations. There was now all of this market cap upheaval, and this is now where we get to sort of like the appetizer. And I think in the appetizer, what they're basically saying is we will control how money is made and who makes money. And I think that that sets up the really difficult thing that I think happens, which is about the long term. So in this in this thing, what's happening right now is China very firmly telling everybody we are firmly in control. There is no private market, and there is no capital market without our approval. And that's a really big statement. And in fact, it was such a big statement that I think the Chinese security authorities and have like a conference call on Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, all these folks were invited And, you know, the vice chairman basically, his quote was something to the effect of we promised that any more changes will at least let you know. Not, a, there's nothing nothing to see here or there's nothing more to come. It's just more that as we decide new rules, we'll make sure that we give you guys enough warning. So it's very much firmly saying we know exactly how money is made. We will decide who makes money in what way, and we're going to make sure that you know, all of this wealth creation happens under terms that we define. And I think that the setup for the long term The long term in China is complicated. It is an enormous demographic time bomb. We've talked about this before. By the end of 21100, China's population will shrink from 1,100,000,000,000 people down to about 700,000,000 people. Right? So they had very progressive, quote unquote, under their framework, laws of one child policy to basically make it economically viable in the sixties seventies. There was such a number of people. Those people were able to get great jobs in the, you know, eighties nineties in two thousands. And now they've realized, oh, wow. We made a huge miscalculation because now there is just not enough people. Jason Calacanis (00:23:09): And so China is gonna shrink. And I think that, honestly, I think Xi Jinping probably thinks the simplest way to solve this is to basically nationalize a lot of the economy over And so I if I was a betting man, which I am general, but I'm not in China because I just don't understand the market, it's super complicated. It's a stupid place to bet. I'm not gonna say that. I just think that I don't know the market. Well, I mean, they changed the rules of the game. Hold on. Let me just finish what I was saying. I think that what we're what we're starting to see is the beginning of nationalizations. And I think it's gonna start in technology universe because those are the critical assets that the Chinese need to own for the future. So that's, in my opinion, what's happening. I think it's really important. what's going on there. And yeah. I don't know. Sachs, when you look at this, we've been talking about, you know, these these 2 great competitors, America and China and who's gonna win, how does China win if this would seem not having a vibrant entrepreneurial, you know, socialist, communist, hybrid. Is this the end of that experiment? And now it's just gonna go all national and then doesn't that make it easier for the west to win if China is just gonna say we're gonna we're gonna operate everything and they don't have a competition of ideas? David Sacks (00:24:27): if they go that far. I think it's really interesting actually to compare what's happening in China with what's happening on the US in the US. because on the surface, Both countries are having this debate about whether big tech needs to be reined in, broken up, controlled. We're having that debate in the US and and not they're having some version of it in in China. But it's a little bit like the the civil rights debate, right, where, you know, we have our civil rights issue in the US. and, you know, they have Shenzhen. You know? They have the Uighurs. You know? It's like a whole order of magnitude different in terms of the way they react. And I think There's I I would say there's 3 main differences here between the Chinese approach and the US approach. Number 1, data privacy. We have a concept of separation between private companies and the data they control and the data that the US government can get its hands And the US government typically has to get a warrant and go through a court proceeding to get that data. What China is doing, they've now passed a law, basically saying all these companies, your data belongs us. If we want it, we get it. They're taking operational control over the data, and you know they're gonna use it. Okay? That's a big difference. Number 2, I think that China seems to be really worried about these big tech companies, not just in terms of whether they might engage in anti competitive practices or consumer harms or those conventional antitrust concepts in the United States. But they're certain about these big tech mobiles becoming power centers in China. And you saw this with Jack Ma. Right? I mean, clearly, the CCP had a problem with the way that Jack Ma had become a figure that people rallied around him. They looked to him. They cared about what he had to say. David Sacks (00:26:11): And all of a sudden, yes, the aunt IPO was put on hold, but it was more than that. Right? You know, this was not just like, you know, what the SCC would have done. All of a sudden, Jack Ma disappears. He goes into some house arrest. He comes out 3 months later looking kind of emaciated. You know, they are putting the the fear of god in, you know, these big tech mobiles in a way that we would never do in the US. I mean, look, I don't want Tim Cook to engage into competitive practices, but I don't want anything bad happening to Tim I don't think the guy should be under house arrest. If he wants to donate his money to political causes and speak out as a private citizen, he has every right to do that, and I'll defend his right to do that no matter you know, how much I want, you know, Apple to be reined in? That they don't have that's that, again, that separate concept in China. And I think the last thing that's going on here that's different is you saw China put the Kibosh on. There are 34 IPOs of major China Chinese tech companies that were scheduled to and U. S. markets. And they have sort of shut that pipeline down. And what it appears to be to they appear to be saying is that we've talked about reshoring strategic industries back to the U. S. like pharmaceutical manufacturing. They seem to be saying, we are going to reshore the IPO business. We do not want you big Chinese tech companies, IPO ing on American markets, on American exchanges. We are bringing that business back to China. And that is why I think you're seeing, you know, giant ripple effects now. Because, I mean, to to Chip's point, about we now it looks like are going to be decoupling our financial markets and that's why you're seeing you know, gigantic hits of evaluations. Jason Calacanis (00:27:50): That's a would you would you agree with me that the decoupling of these financial markets might be in the best interest of humanity and, ultimately, the decoupling of these 2 economies, if we don't see eye to eye about human rights and how to treat people, maybe it's good that we have a little more distance between the two markets. I mean, it's hard to know if engagement is the better process, but it doesn't seem like The Chinese Communist Party wants to have anything to do with democracy, anything to do with free markets. They want to control all the markets. David Sacks (00:28:20): Yeah. I mean, you could see but in a in a way, the product that the US was exporting to China was was our financial markets. And -- Mhmm. -- and I think a good way. Right? So that I think the bad version of this is when China is able to buy up ownership in critical strategic centers in the US, and that affects people's speech rights over here. But this is not China buying up ownership in the US. This was China acting Speaker 4 (00:28:47): as a David Sacks (00:28:47): consumer of US Financial Markets. And And I think I think it's different. Right? When we're selling products over there, that helps correct our trade balance. Right? This is why I don't have a problem with Elon selling cars over in China. He's helping our trade balance. Okay? But so but they're kinda canceling that. They're kinda saying we're gonna reassure this industry. We wanna have a domestic you know, stock market. Jason Calacanis (00:29:12): This is creating a mono economy. Right? It's like it's gonna blur the lines between public and private ownership. and it's going to basically make it one huge pot from which the Chinese government can can take and put it back into as it deems fit for the broader success of China as a whole. Right? So if you're a CEO and they don't like you, you're gonna resign. Right? If you're a company and they're worried about your propensity to be a little too frisky on your own. They'll rein you in. I've allowed to use cybersecurity law or something else, but the point is that I think that we shouldn't take this as free market regulators having their way. This isn't Lena Con implementing, you know, some laws. This is a top down decision to nationalize large parts of the economy starting with technology. And I know that for some people that may seem unfathomable, but if I'm a betting man which I am, That's what I would bet on, that this is the beginning of the beginning of an attempt to pull these companies in. I mean, at the at what David said is true. The Chinese government owns the data of Chinese companies. So at the end of the day, the Chinese government also owns the users and it also owns the revenues. It just hasn't told you yet. Yeah. In a way, it's like the Chinese government and our our government is trying to officiate the game fairly and create a really competitive, vibrant, game. And I think what the Chinese government just said is the game's over. Like, there is no game. David Sacks (00:30:48): Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:30:49): We no. There's a game. It just has It just has -- -- the game? -- because -- They know who's David Sacks (00:30:52): on control. Jason Calacanis (00:30:53): It has an Uber CEO. It made a bunch of CEOs general managers in a large corporation. that report through a reporting chain to one person Xi Jinping. But there's no more game in terms of building companies and investing in China How is the west ever going to trust? How is Goldman Sachs or Sequoia, you know, launching a venture firm there or retail investors or head fund investors, how are they ever gonna wanna participate in that market? Because so look. For example, when you invest in China, right, or if you set up a fund, there are 2 pools of capital. Right? There's a local renminated investment vehicles, and then there's the US dollar denominated investment vehicles. and they do that to segregate where the capital comes from. So it's not too difficult for the Chinese government to basically say, you know what? I'm gonna actually make a constraint on dollar inflows so that you know, the renminbi denominated investment funds that from Chinese investors into Chinese companies needs to be above a certain percentage, call it 2 thirds, right, or call it 80%. They can make all these decisions because These are all just rules that are completely under the control. So I I think that people who don't think this is gonna happen are probably not looking at the setup. The setup seems to be directing itself towards that outcome. And it by the way, it makes sense for what Xi Jinping wants to do Speaker 5 (00:32:08): for -- No. Jason Calacanis (00:32:08): No. That's that's not question. My question is, why would Masayoshi san or another entity ever invest in China? Because you look through the risks and you got completely enamored by the population in the TAM. But what I'm saying now is -- Well, why would they do it again? Or are they not gonna do it? No. But there are there are boundary conditions that would say that even before this, you would have had to reconsider. The population is shrinking. There's a different demand side pull that's happening. Right? Older people need different kinds of services than younger people, There's not enough younger people. There's too many men. There's not enough women. So there's not enough couples. There's not all of these demographic issues ultimately will get reflected in the economic reality, which is that smart investors would put money in China differently over time anyways But I think that this is a bigger thing, as David said, which is if that's coming to pass, you wanna control the pipes because you wanna how that information is presented to people, your citizens so that they don't get pissed off. And then you might as well just own the account own the business anyway. I see this as being amazing for American companies because I I don't see who would ever want to be an entrepreneur. Whoever has a great idea and wants to pursue it in China. Why would you do it? No. I disagree with you. And and and the reason I disagree with you and we don't have access to their markets anyway. What company has access to their market? The difference is young, smart Chinese people for decades have been staying in China, in part because it was more they could more relate culturally to Jack Ma than they could to Jack Dorsey. Mhmm. Okay. That's just I mean, that just makes sense. Sure. And I understand that. Jason Calacanis (00:33:40): And then the second is we like a lot of like, sorry, like, the opposite of some other Western countries at Canada closed our doors. Why would the next Jack Ma start a company if they saw Jack Ma disappear. That's my question. Because you know what? If you're coming from China and you can you can only make a 1,000,000,000 versus 45,000,000,000, I think you still take the shot. Okay. David Sacks (00:34:02): I think, Jay Calacanis is right in in the sense. I don't think it's gonna be like a binary decision where all of a sudden they run to stop doing business in China, but they're gonna be hedging their I mean, if you were a Chinese billionaire looking at this landscape, your your your priority has got to be to get some wealth outside country beyond the control of the CCP. You're gonna be buying Bitcoin. You're gonna be trying to get your money overseas. You have got to be very nervous about what's happening. Jason Calacanis (00:34:25): -- homes in Palo Alto? David Sacks (00:34:28): Absolutely. I mean, look, I think what President Xi is doing is fundamentally redefining the bargain between Chinese entrepreneurs and the government. And here here was the original bargain. Right? The great Chinese leader at economic reformer, deng Xiaoping, basically set the bargain you know, 40 years ago and what and basically, the bargain was this. We're gonna open up the economy and let you, the entrepreneur, get rich We're gonna keep all the political power. So as long as you don't mess with us politically, you can get as rich as you want. That was the original bargain. Now President Xi is saying there's a new bargain There's a a new Boston town, and here is the deal. That economic interests in China will be subordinate to national interests. Those now interest are defined by the CCP, and I run the CCP for Jason Calacanis (00:35:14): -- Exactly. Exactly. David Sacks (00:35:15): And that is what is happening. Speaker 5 (00:35:17): And that is a big change. Jason Calacanis (00:35:18): They just got layered. There is a new CEO that they report to. This actually makes me very hopeful, actually. I think this is going to be like, a spiraling down of their economy. I don't think it's gonna spiral up. I don't I don't think so. I mean, who's gonna who's gonna endanger them? Who's gonna invest in their economy? Everybody. Guess what? Because if you want a shred of fucking lithium, if you want a battery, if you want nickel, if you want anything to happen, you need to work with China. They are incredibly smart and thoughtful. They had been strategic while we've been running around, you know, complaining, crying, talking about the kindergarten soccer game, they were doing the hard work. They were doing it for decades. And until we find solutions that can work around them, we need to work with them. I think they just throttled innovation and think they just shot themselves in both feet. I I think they're gonna regret this decision. David Sacks (00:36:13): would come out in the middle and say they've just attached a discount rate that now every investor has to consider political risk when they invest in China because the future is very uncertain. The bargain is getting changed, and if you're an investor, you now have to take you're taking some huge political risk. Jason Calacanis (00:36:30): I agree with David. I think that's a better way. I would refine what I'm saying by saying it's a distribution of risk where it's closer to Russia now than it is to the United States. Yeah. And then I think there's an there's literally an act called the Maginsky Act, Maginsky Act. What does they act that Bill Broder's lawyer, Maginsky? David Sacks (00:36:49): Oh, yes. Jason Calacanis (00:36:51): Oh, because, basically, in Russia, they were just killing people and taking their businesses. mean, this feels like the equivalent in China to David Sacks (00:36:59): me. Magnific. Magnific. Jason Calacanis (00:37:01): Yeah. I mean, literally, that was Bill Broader's lawyer. who was tortured to death, and I I just don't see anybody wanting to invest there anymore. And it it this does make the Bitcoin In hindsight, it does look like they shut down Bitcoin a couple of months before making these actions. So your point, David, they probably anticipated that people would start shipping their money out using Bitcoin. And so they banned Bitcoin, and now they're banning CEOs from having too much power. That was probably a sequential event David Sacks (00:37:32): that would be very smart on their part. You know? Jason Calacanis (00:37:35): Can't leave. Very smart. What does this do to, like, the Sequoia capital, China, the Masiyoshi San Investing heavily there, 10¢ investing year. All the Chinese LPs. -- still very active in the United States investing in companies. All the Chinese LPs are are fine All the Chinese GPs are fine. All the Chinese companies are fine. I think David's right. It's just a discount factor. I do think it affects global dollar flows, and I think it's hard for a Western capital pool to allocate money to China without doing a little bit more work and applying a higher discount rate. David Sacks (00:38:11): Yeah. I would I I have to believe that the conversations happening in these firms that have made gobs of money in China over the last couple of decades It has to be, are we living on borrowed time? How much more time do we have before China says that Chinese profits. Chinese return on investment are gonna go to Chinese individuals and companies under our control because that's that's the direction it all seems to be headed Jason Calacanis (00:38:36): Yeah. And how quickly can I get get out of these positions? I mean, how do you even get out of these positions? If and this is the other thing I don't understand. If they're going to reverse some IPOs, how does that mechanically happen? Are they going to just say it's a buyout. It's a second second transaction, and they'll just do, like, a A buyout? So if Masayoshi and Hassan own some amount of DD, they say, here's Here's the price per share that we pay you. Here's your cash. Give us a share as Ciao. That's incredible. A forced sale at whatever price they determine. No. I mean, like, I think these things will operate more efficiently than that because you have a distributed show base. So, you know, if China can't force a shareholder of DD to sell the shares because it's listed in an American stock exchange. But they But if Didi does go private the way that, you know, the news reports are saying, somebody's gonna have to backstop that capital. I suspect it'll be a Chinese organization. So they will take Dee Dee private again and then buy out all of the shareholders who bought from around by the way. If that does come to pass, I think that is an obvious signal that we're moving into sort of a more a nationalization of critical resources and China has determined that Internet resources are critical. And I think that that's right. If I was in their shoes, that's exactly what I would do as well. Does this mean that we should be kicking out Chinese companies from operating in the US, i. e. TikTok, etcetera? No. But I do think that TikTok needs to get carved out of ByteDance, and it needs to have a completely American cap table, but that shouldn't be a government edict. That should be something that the ByteDance investors and board are scrambling to do right now because otherwise, That equity value may go to 0. ByteDance should be a half a $1,000,000,000,000 company. It probably is a couple $100,000,000,000 company now, which means that probably lost half of its market value. That's crazy. Jason Calacanis (00:40:27): Crazy. Yeah. David Sacks (00:40:27): I think I think there's a few things for us to worry about there. I mean, I I I like the idea about competing China by having freer and more open capital markets and allowing anyone in the world to invest in our companies. I think the issues with TikTok are more around data. You know, we know now that any data that ByteDance has belongs to the Chinese government. This isn't just a TikTok issue. It's any company -- Right. Jason Calacanis (00:40:53): -- David Sacks (00:40:53): any US company that's doing business in China. Look, it applies to Zoom. Okay. Look, Zoom. We're on Zoom right now. Zoom is not a Chinese company, but it has a giant engineering team in China. What are the data implications for that? Jason Calacanis (00:41:08): Yeah. They stop routing their servers through. Remember they have some servers routing through China, but I do think they're gonna have to shut down and sell off whatever their assets are in China. That's gonna be untenable to have a communication platform. You know? It's it's kinda like Huawei. Right? We don't allow Huawei to operate, and we're gonna have to do that with software. Right? There's been a big CRISPR breakthrough. A sixty five year old man named Patrick Daugherty was suffering with a a a disease in which His protein was misshaped mishapen, building up in his body, destroying important tissues such as nerves and hands and feet. He watched the same disease kill his dad. And here's the quote, had watched others get crippled and die, difficult deaths from this disease. and it's a terrible prognosis. He entered a trial utilizing CRISPR, the gene editing tool, and researchers reported the data indicating that The experiment treatment worked well. The study, Daugherty, volunteered for is the first in which doctors are simply infusing the gene editor directly into patients and letting you find its own way to the right gene in the right cells in this case, the cells in the liver, making the destructive protein, the advance, is being held not just as not just for amyloidosis patients, but also as a proof of concept that CRISPR could be used treat many other much more common diseases. It's a new way of using the innovative technology to map thoughts? I think this is a really important through. And what it allows us to do now is see a world where look. If you if you think about the 2 different paths of the following idea. You're gonna make a solution to a problem. If the problem was an Internet company, or you wanted to make a product, what you would do is you would go to Amazon Web Services. You'd be able to consume a whole set of abstractions And then you would build a light amount of programming, which is essentially like the application logic of your app. Right? I think a lot of people listening understand that idea because that's what they do. Jason Calacanis (00:43:04): Here, what we're getting to a place is now soon, we're gonna be able to view biological problems in the same way. So we're building all these small little building I don't wanna call them small, but building these very important building blocks that is very much akin to the building blocks we needed to put together the 1st set of computers, to put together MS DOS. All of that allowed us to create Windows. Windows allowed us to actually access the Internet. And there was this in Seriatom development of things that happened. And I think that we're on the verge of that, and that's what these kinds of breakthroughs really show us, which is that you can view so for example, in a different company, they they've created these mRNA gate arrays, logic gate arrays. So if you're, you know, a chip designer, you would understand how to basically create electrical function in part using, you know, gate arrays. But if you reduce a biological function to the same idea, now that same person has a translational ability to solve a different problem that they didn't have before. So I think what we're saying is that we're seeing this platformization, this AWS application of a biological tool chain with things like CRISPR and all of the other modalities I'd need to stack on top of it so that the next person can view it as a programming problem. And I think that that's the really exciting path that accelerates a lot of this development. But this is an enormously important breakthrough because it validated a lot of what CRISPR was beyond a lot of theoretical innovation that That up until now was basically what it was known for. And a lot of investment had gone into companies that were trying to do things, but this is the first really important one The the funny thing about Intelie is that it's been public for, like, 7, 8 years, and it's just been toiling, toiling, toiling, toiling, and then you know, the last little while, obviously, it's gone absolutely crazy because of this breakthrough. Yeah. And related to and related to his CRISPR create 1st genetically modified marsupials after years of using the gene editing technique, Christopher to genetically modify everything from vegetables to lab. rodents, researchers have used it to edit 1 of the hardest target jets, marsupials, the MIT technology reports. Jason Calacanis (00:45:08): I guess it turns out they're very hard to edit, and we're now editing more subiols and changing things like their hair color. So brave new world. Friedberg was here. The Friedberg ratio would be off the charts. Right. Wrapping up, we have -- David Sacks (00:45:21): Pretty incredible. -- just just one thing to add to that. I mean, I think what it what it shows is that these COVID vaccines are just the first product, the first breakthrough product of this mRNA technology, there's gonna be a lot more. And what I wonder about is, you know, this this category of seen hesitant people. And they're kind of like, you know, in the in the technology world, you have kind of a spectrum of early adopters, late adopters, luddites. You know, people are actively against technology. Yeah. Well, I mean, luddites are even more Jason Calacanis (00:45:50): -- -- words and then luddites. Yeah. David Sacks (00:45:51): Yeah. Luddites are even more violently opposed. I think the original luddites They I think the original unites were in England. They lost their jobs at some factory, and so they've broken to the factory with flood tamers to destroy all the machines that replace their jobs. So -- Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:46:04): -- David Sacks (00:46:04): it's clearly a spectrum. And what I wonder about is that if you're on sort of the luddite end of the spectrum with respect to bio technology. I mean, are you gonna have a materially worse life because you're not getting the benefits of all these vaccines and all these treatments And, I mean, COVID could just be the first example of this. Jason Calacanis (00:46:22): Well, I mean, if you build on it, it's sort of like we're gonna create a 2 class society. One that is not only dealing with all the maladies and cancers and and living longer. But we haven't even started to think about, well, taking somebody who's already in great health and what can you do for them? So oh, you know what? You can be 2 inches taller. You could add 10 IQ points. You could run faster. You could have higher blood oxygen, whatever. I mean, We could we could genetically modify people to stay underwater for 10 minutes and be, you know, better processors of oxygen like other mammals are. you could have superhumans. I mean, that that's basically where this is going. And that that unlocks a whole another level of ethical and moral considerations, but you're right. There could be a group of people who are like, I don't wanna touch any of this, and they die at sixty, seventy, eighty years old. Then we got another class of people who embrace this, and they have 20 more IQ points, and they live to a 120. No. I mean, it's it sounds funny, but and like science fiction, but that is in the realm of possibility in our lifetimes. David Sacks (00:47:22): There's a lot of great science fiction written about this whole sort of transfumismist idea. A book series I really like is nexus by Rameses Namb, who actually was a developer at Microsoft and, you know, then became a writer, and he write with, I'd say, a high degree of sort of accuracy and specificity about these technologies and how they might evolve. There you'll just be sure to out that book. Jason Calacanis (00:47:48): Jason, be honest. If if you could actually increase anything in your body through this gene editing, what would it be? Just throw throw anything out there. But the first thing is -- Push anything out there? I think I would increase my muscle mass. 100%, increase my muscle mass, by the way, the percentage of fat would go down not in reality in absolute terms, but just in percentages. So this CRISPR thing was a a public company called Inteliotherapeutics. but I wanna throw a shout out to another startup that seemingly, I think, may have had a breakthrough this week called Forum Energy. And the reason why these guys are interesting is that they've built this incredibly massive long duration battery out of iron. Now why is that important? We have really simple ways of harvesting iron from the earth, it is literally everywhere. Everywhere you look iron exists. It's not so true for nickel. It's not true cobalt. It's not true for manganese. It's not true for lithium. It's not true for all of these other specialty chemicals that we need in order to build batteries. But these guys have solved a very complicated technical challenge that'll allow you to store energy cheaply, which has huge implications for electricity and grid And so big shout out to these guys at Forum because if if if it looks like what they said they did is true, It's a really important breakthrough that'll have some important ramifications. It's it's amazing, by the way, to see progress. Now you wake up and you read these things and you're just like, god. This is incredible that there are people working away on shit that really matters. It's almost as if there's, like, one group of people. We talked about cynicism in a previous episode recently. There's one group of people whether you're in the bounder circles or capital allocator or a journalist covering the space who understands it, there there is a a technical you know, explosion going on here, an innovation that is going to solve a lot of problems. And then you have another group of people who think that all these problems are intractable, I'm kinda looking at this, you know, what happened with COVID, and I was talking to my wife about global warming. Jason Calacanis (00:50:00): And I was like, feels to me like we can solve global warming. Like, feels like it's very much in our control. And then there's another group of people who feel like it's over and don't have kids because the whole planet gonna go on fire. We're I mean, I think Elon tweeted this out, and I think we've talked about this now with respect to China. But, you know, we have an enormous problem in the world in general, which is that unless our birth rate is positive and accretive, It has huge implications to progress. Right? If you just like if you eliminate or you decrease the denominator of the global population, The odds that there's another Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos that are created are just lower. And so net of anything else A declining population rate, particularly in Western countries, has huge detrimental effects to the world. And so all the folks that think that they're going to solve the the psychology of the world by not having kids, it's a little misguided. The thing to do is to actually have a positive birth rate, find technological solutions to this problem and allow what we've been able to do, which is a rising populace to basically be motivated to work and solve problems. And I think that we have to be very careful about that because if if people don't get this right, they're gonna take the wrong solution. It's not gonna be a solution as at all and it's gonna make the problems even worse. Could you imagine if the population of the Earth shrank in half what it would mean in terms of productivity, services, the health care requirements that are needed, the cost of providing those things, the economic viability of countries will go away, it would be a disaster. Yet, there is a group of people who feel we should do exactly that. And and not not a small group of people. Yeah. David Sacks (00:51:37): Well, they think that I think I think the mistake isn't thinking that human consumption is the problem. And specifically with respect to to to climate change or global warming, no. You you can't see it that way, because, look, humans in order to exist need to consume and we're gonna emit carbon as part of that process. The thing to focus on is energy production. Are you shifting to clean production, not because you're never gonna be able to shrink your consumption enough to to basically eliminate carbon emissions. It has to be done on the production side. And one of the interesting things that's happening now, I think we should about is in Europe, they're creating this new carbon trading plan. I think China is even trying to set up one of these markets. And so they're creating these new, you know, marketplaces to trade carbon permits. And I think the most exciting part about this is that it gives an incentive for for innovators to create new technologies technologies. Because what happens is if you have a technology to take carbon out of the atmosphere, you can now sell a permit on the exchange that gives somebody the right to emit that carbon. And now those technologies, those those nets, the negative emission technologies, it's unclear whether they really exist yet. But no one's gonna create them if there's not a customer for them. And that's what's really cool about these new tradable permit schemes is they create a buyer for for for those nets. And I think that's ultimately how we're gonna solve this problem of climate change. We're not gonna do it through reducing human consumption. Like, we're gonna have to go back to the stone age if you don't wanna emit carbon. It's about moving to clean production of energy and creating negative emission technologies. Jason Calacanis (00:53:32): Yeah. Let me just build on that for a second. There's look. There's a bunch of cap and trade systems. China basically has a a a carbon tax system in place. The big thing that none of these folks have gotten to yet, but I think if you look at the laws in Europe, they're going there, is the idea of carbon tariff. And I think these carbon taxes, if they actually exist properly, will look like a tariff. What does that mean? Let's just say you're Britain, and you want to import a Volkswagen from Germany. If Britain has a carbon tariff that says basically you need to account for all of the emissions that went into making this car, and I'm going to assess an import duty that basically maps to that. I think that that's where the world is going, and that's probably, David, to to your point, it's going to be a really big value unlock because the amount of money that'll get both made but also destroyed in that process will be incredible. And that's where we have a chance to really reimagine consumption in a different way. Like, there are just so many categories. I saw this interesting stat. If you look at CPG Companies, right, companies like Procter And Gamble, Clorox, and you compare them to the places where they sell their goods like Walmart and Target. Every single major big box retailer has basically declared a net 0 emission strategy in the next 5 to 10 years. Not a single company on the CPG side has actually any plans to do anything meaningful anywhere near 2030, 245, 2050. And when you look under the hood, those companies like P And G And Clorox are enormous emitters, enormous So even though you walk into a target in Amazon and you try to make yourself feel good thinking thinking to yourself on buying something that 0 emissions, it's not true. It's basically that Amazon will will bear the cost of getting to net 0, but the products that you actually consume are horrible for the environment. and the amount of, you know, fossil fuels that went into it and the amount of plastic that will then get put into the ocean, it's tremendous. Jason Calacanis (00:55:33): And so Moving slightly more aggressively beyond these cap and trade systems into something that looks more like a tariff, I think could be really important for the world. And we're gonna need to do it. There is and there are multiple ways to do it. I don't know if you guys saw Elon backed this the Xprize, carbon sequestration, sequestrian project, which is a $100,000,000 prize. And you can do this in multiple ways. You can do it at There's a the 1 trillion trees.org. I don't know if you saw that where they're trying to plant 1,000,000,000,000 trees because that's the original way to sequester this carbon. there's gonna be, like, 3 or 4 different ways to do this. And if there's an incentive to do it, yeah, that is gonna help for sure. David Sacks (00:56:15): part of why there's such political disagreement over this is because you look at approaches like the Green New Deal, I mean, I think they understand the the the the problem, but what they're proposing is always on the consumption side is basically politicians picking and choosing how people are gonna consume carbon, whether it's, you know, cracking down on private planes to, you know, factories. I mean, again, taking us back to the stone each. Nobody wants to no no one sane, I think, wants to support that kind of totalitarian prince bowl that the politicians get to tell us how to consume. But this is this is why I think these these these market based solutions where you say, look, carbon emissions are obviously an externality. If you want to omit, you need to basically pay the correct price for carbon emissions, and we use the the money that you pay as as as some sort of whether it's a tax or whether it's buying a permit, we use that money then set into negative carbon emissions. It's a market based system where the government controls the externality, but they don't dictate how people get consume carbon. And I think that's the right balance. And we don't really have that type of balanced conversation in the US yet because you've kinda got one side that says they wanna save the planet, but they wanna control everything. And then you got the other side saying, well, look, I wanna save the economy because your plan, the green deal's gonna destroy it. What we need is is, again, a market based solution to this. Jason Calacanis (00:57:46): And I guess the criticism of a market based solution is you're basically giving people a way to I I the most cynical interpretation would be, you can pay to pollute. You can just you can pollute all you want and just pay a fine essentially. But that's not the right way to look at it. You're actually offsetting somebody else is capturing what you put out there. And depending on the rules of the road, if you had to capture 50% more than you put in, you could create a formula there. Right? I mean, there could be some formula that Over time -- There's been a lot of fraud in this market. Like, you know, people sell these carbon credits from, you know, certain forests, and there's this joke, which is like there's been a tree that's been sold, like, 80,000,000,000 times because it's like, You can't really verify. You can only really estimate the amount of carbon sequestration that, you know, for example, a tree actually does in the first place. And so there there's been just a lot of, unfortunately, you know, fly by night unreliable, non trustworthy ways that this market has evolved. People have been waiting for decades for this carbon trading market to really step into high gear, which is why some folks think the more aggressive plan will just be introduced tariffs and let the market David, to your point sort it up. David Sacks (00:58:57): Chamath, what do you what do you think the prospects are for these negative emission technology? I I can't believe that a solution as low tech is planting trees is gonna solve the problem Jason Calacanis (00:59:07): with all the carbon. Yeah. Yeah. David Sacks (00:59:08): So the question is, what do what do you what do you think the assuming we create the market, the demand for negative emission technologies, the permits to emit what do you think the prospects are technologically that innovators are gonna come up with these solutions? Jason Calacanis (00:59:24): I do think that we are a couple of breakthroughs away from these things being non issues. So I'll give you a couple of examples. If you look at like, I'll just use batteries as an example because where I'm spending a lot of time. When you look back and, like, you ask yourself, like, how did we decide to make the batteries the way we make them? You know, was it some, like, you know, broad survey of every single chemical composition and all these different structures, and we realized that, you know, a composition of nickel and manganese and cobalt was the right thing to do. or lithium and iron and phosphate was it turned out that it was mostly like a handful of people decided, and we all just been iterating around the edges ever since. So one of the solutions to a lot of these problems is to actually go back to 1st principles. The problem is that as these industries get built up and you know this, you have so much PP and E, like so much equipment, so much investment in physical CapEx that's happened The idea of switching platforms is almost impossible because it's not economically viable. So we are in this situation today where A bunch of solutions have been proposed, David, to solve that problem. Right? The problem with carbon capture and other other things and negative emission is that they're extremely expensive. They're very inefficient. They require an enormous amount of energy themselves, and it's not clear that they work. So what's happening? One is that there's been some pretty novel innovations in moving people past some of these basic problems by looking at the periodic table to try to find different ways of solving things like energy storage, which has huge implications to climate. But the second is that we are pushing the boundaries of physics in different ways as well, and that's where there's going to be the potential for an enormous breakthrough. specifically around superconductors. So what is a superconductor? It's something that allows an enormous amount of energy to basically trans through it. Now, we have this issue which is that you can actually create superconductors in highly controlled environments that are extremely, extremely cold, but they have incredible performance characteristics that would revolutionize power and energy transmission and storage. Jason Calacanis (01:01:32): People have been innovating in bringing that up to room temperature. In that breakthrough, which I think you will see in the next 20 to 30 years, It's just a complete sea change of how we think about this whole problem. So I think the short term we're innovating in the periodic table in the long term, we're figuring out how to bend the laws of physics. And I think that those are those are probably the 2 most practical solutions to a lot of these things that remove the constraints that we've created. And, again, the constraints have been completely human defined, which is the sad thing. They were not necessary from the start. We could have made very different decisions had we known these problems were gonna be as big as they were? You know, the way that we make plastic didn't have to be this way. Right? The amount of petroleum that we use, it it did have to be in this specific way, but this is where we are. And there are direct air capture technologies DAC, which is basically an energy issue. You can literally suck the carbon dioxide out of the air. And -- Again, another another issue of material science because the the the sub rates that you use tend to be relatively inefficient and sort of really activate them, you're pumping a tremendous amount of energy through there. That's the issue is can you get the energy? And I think when we talked about the small actors, the small module or nuclear reactors. If energy is free or it's solar based, you could you could kinda get a virtuous cycle going here. That's essentially what superconductors allows you to see as a world where you basically have limitless free energy. David Sacks (01:02:59): It sounds like the thing that we all agree is that this problem is ultimately gonna be solved by innovation. And this is the problem I have with so many of the political proposals is you know, our ability to innovate is a function of the size and scope of our economy and the incentives and rewards for innovation and the freedom for entrepreneurs to do their thing. And if you crush that Jason Calacanis (01:03:18): -- Yeah. -- David Sacks (01:03:19): you know, with government mandates, you won't get the innovation we need to get out of this problem. Jason Calacanis (01:03:23): we can easily innovate our way out of it and it requires some individual to say I wanna dedicate my life to it. And then what is the motivation to do that? And who are the capital allocators who are gonna give them the $1,000,000,000 to create this company? I spent a bunch of time. So on the capital allocator that'll give billions, in fact, I did a survey of the superconductor space as an example. And here's what I found. Of the of the four folks that I found who are all each individually doing things in superconductors that I think are incredible. They're all immigrants, every single one. We're not born in the United States. You could you they are so fucking happy to be here. They feel so lucky and they don't understand why everybody complains all the fucking time. Yeah. Complaining is there is a disease of constantly complaining about stuff. And if you count the number of times you complain every day, and it's more than two or three times a day, you need to get your head examined. You're you're probably just talking yourself into anxiety problems. Stop complaining, start building. I mean, these problems are solvable. There is an immigrant in in the United States right now that will figure out to conduct electricity without resistance, it will transform the world. And we are so fucking lucky that that guy came here to this country, and we have the chance to give the guy $1,000,000,000 David Sacks (01:04:49): One of my favorite movies is wag the dog with -- Yeah. -- Chris Moffler and Rob Lanier. Right. Jason Calacanis (01:04:55): Yeah. And David Sacks (01:04:56): it doesn't have him place this producer character. Yeah. And every time there's a setback, he's like, oh, this is nothing. Speaker 5 (01:05:03): I remember we made this movie in 3 out of David Sacks (01:05:05): the 4 lead dollars died, and we recast the movie. It's like, this is nothing. Speaker 5 (01:05:09): Yeah. And, you know, and he that's sort of his catchphrase is he's got this can do attitude where no matter what set that happen. See, this makes it's like, oh, this is nothing. Jason Calacanis (01:05:17): We got it. And -- Yeah. -- David Sacks (01:05:18): you know, and and that's Speaker 5 (01:05:19): kind of the attitude you need if you wanna be an entrepreneur is There's gonna be so many setbacks. You gotta be like, oh, this is nothing. Jason Calacanis (01:05:25): And you Speaker 5 (01:05:26): figure out a way around it. Jason Calacanis (01:05:27): Yeah. This one of the guys that are working on superconductor showed me his data for the last 10 years. And what's interesting, David, to your point is he had a 4 year period where he took a huge step back where basically, like, you know, he had this superconductor. He's like, it works at you know, I'm just gonna use simple numbers here, but, like, you know, minus 300 Celsius. He got it all the way up to minus, you know, a 100, and then it went back to minus 200. For 4 years, Could you imagine the mental devastation? And I said, how did you deal with it? He goes, you know, basically, he's like, ah, it's nothing. Yeah. And thank god for that guy. It's interesting. I just listened to Quentin Tarantino's on a podcasting tour because he's got a new book. He he wrote a novel out of the once upon a time in Hollywood characters, and I just started listening to it. It's fantastic. Listen on Audible. And Brian Koppelman from the moment interviewed Quintin, and I listened to it yesterday on my bike ride, And he was just talking about how he just never gave up, and he had written true romance. And then he wrote what was the other one he wrote? at that time. Natural born killers. David Sacks (01:06:36): Natural killers. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:06:38): And he was just talking about how the first movie nobody would do, then he wrote the 2 screenplays. and nobody would do. And then he got to a reservoir dogs and, you know, they tried to scrape together $800,000. And he kept asking, like, why didn't you quit? Why didn't you quit? He's like, well, you know, I just I figured it out. Like, I figured it out. I had a voice, and then nobody would buy my scripts because I was trying to do something innovative, and they were reading the scripts, and they didn't understand what I was doing in terms of innovating on how a movie would be with, you know, how he does with pulp fiction. He changes the time and does the storytelling in a nonlinear fashion. They say nobody understood it. But every time I read it, I realized I had a voice. It was my voice. It was getting better and better. And then people you know, I sold those movies and then he kept building them. And it was very inspiring to think about that take of, like, he just didn't give up, and he just -- Totally. looked at the work, and he found his he found his own value in his own work improving even without the external You know? David Sacks (01:07:38): It's a it's a fantastic story. It's like one of those classic, you know, Hollywood Ron from North Stories. He's working at a video store for years, and, you know, he would start he was making his own movie and he would film on the weekends. And then, you know, he he made a few $100 every week, basically. And then he would rent the equipment on a Friday because then they would only charge him for one day because it was the weekend. So he could basically record the entire weekend. And so he'd go off and record and and then he'd have to go back to work. And he started making this movie, you know, 1 weekend at a time for, like, 2 or 3 years. And then he finally put the didn't even have the money to get the film developed. So finally after 3 years, he gets the film developed, and he's unfortunately, it sucked. It wasn't what he was expecting. But during that time, he wrote term answers then got bought. He sold that screenplay. That gave him a little bit of money. Then he wrote reservoir dogs, and then he met Laurence Bender. And, you know, Bender went out, read the script. It was like, holy shit. This is amazing. They raised the, you know, million or so bucks to make the movie, and then that kinda launched everything. And, yeah, it's it's one of these, you know, amazing rags to to riches stories. You know, they're kinda rare and or they're more rare in Hollywood. They occur all the time in the tech industry. We see Jason Calacanis (01:08:50): them all the time. That's such an interesting point. He said, they're like, you would never let you make that movie now. And, you know, in another conversation. I think I listened to 3 podcasts with him. Joe Rogan, Breddy Synallis, and then Brian Kopelman's, and all three of them are tremendous. But I think in the Breddy Chanel in in the Joe Rogan 1, he's like, oh, they would never let you make that movie. He was like, bullshit. You could just make it. I just made it. I did you not see the last 2 films and how politically incorrect they were? And, you know, I don't care what Bruce Lee's, you know, fans think of how I Trey Bruce Lee. He was a he was a bad actor. He was a terrible, you know, human being to these folks. And he his basic thing was everybody keeps waiting to ask for permission. And he's like, I'm just gonna make my movies and let the chips fall where they may. I'm not gonna be censored. I'm not gonna sense for myself, and I'll make my 10 movies, and that's it. Game over. I'm gonna tell a writer to Rich's story. I wanna tell this coker story Speaker 5 (01:09:44): I get one last one on Tarantino's David Sacks (01:09:46): and then Speaker 5 (01:09:46): you tell your story. David Sacks (01:09:47): Tarantino's success with reservoir dogs, I think it came out in 1991. really inspired me to wanna make movies because I saw that somebody could make a movie outside the system for so little money. And that's why I made think for smoking. And we have another we have another independent movie coming out next year about Salvador Dolly, which, you know, finally got made after about 15 years So yeah. I mean, he's inspired a lot of people, and he shows what can be done. Jason Calacanis (01:10:15): This is a rags, which is a story that involves Jay Account. So I get invited I get invited to the Harvard Business School to give a speech. First and last time I was invited because I was disinvited, Jason. after that, what happened. But well, the the back 2 rows walked out in the first five minutes. Wow. It was incredible. It was incredible. Like, we I get invited to do this thing. Obviously, it's in Boston. It's in wintertime. Right, Jacob? Yeah. It was it was winter, and it was Boston. It's, like, not a great trip. So, Saks, you know, I was like, okay. Jacob, what are we gonna do to spice this trip up? And we invite Big Al. Oh. Okay? And we get on the plane and Big Al says, oh, you wanna play a little poker? I said, absolutely. And I turned to Jake Allen and said, Jason, Do you wanna play? He's like, I said, you know, you guys can play against each other. And I said, Jason, why don't you deal? He's like, I'm not interested in dealing. And I said, Jake, I'll give you 10% of whatever I win. I was like, shuffle up. Shuffle up. He deals the game. for fucking 6 hours from LA -- Chinese poker. Chinese poker to Boston. I smash Big Al. I smash Big Al smash I smashed them. And then we go into the thing we have, like, a a nice dinner, blah blah blah. We go out. We have the thing at at at the at Harvard where I said something like, you know, I think an NBA is basically worthless. It's just not a good use of your time. I think you should be out building things. The black two rows walked out. They were completely offended. and I did the speech. It doesn't matter. I kept back on the plane and were flying back. And at some point, I realized, I said, Jason, what's the tally? And Jason says, I'm up 40,000. And I said, excuse You're up for and it turned out that I was fucking smashing him. Smashing. Smashing. Anyways, the long story short of it was that we circled for a few times, and then we finally landed and Jay Cal won $55,000. Jason Calacanis (01:12:14): But that's funny. David Sacks (01:12:15): Here's -- -- circling so you could win more. Jason Calacanis (01:12:17): I can't get you here's what you're going out through the pack of cards at Jason. It's in I never wanna see you ever get a number one Have you fucking played poker? I went to the pilots, and I told them, I'll give you $5 if you can make this flight last another hour. And they were like, yeah. We got a circle. They got and we just kept circling I was like, yeah, for an hour. I was like, I gotta get another hour in. You lost $550,000 on a fucking stupid trip. He never even wanted to come. He just came and did wanna go. -- go to the best Michelin Star restaurant in Boston. Oh my god. In Boston. It's so fucking stuffy by the way. So stuffy. And so they're taking so seriously. And they're trying to, you know, bring, you know, 18 courses to us. And you know, big al's a big guy. He's called big al for a reason. I mean, he's a linebacker. And they say the big he's like, I'll take this. I want a steak. What do you got? He's like, oh, there's there's a steak included in the prefix. You should do the tasting menu, which Mont's like, oh, yeah. Tasting menu. Fuck it. Let's go. Yeah. I'll put more truffles on it. Like, it's not truffle season. okay. Well, make it truffle season. Anyway, he starts bringing the food. And he he wants to eat a steak, and they bring him I can't remember. -- funny season in movie where, like, they pulled the the tin, and it's, like, a, like, a small piece of meat that's, like, giant Schafer comes flying off. A piece of a piece of parsley, and that's it. The steak was the size of a pack of Riggley's gum. I am not kidding. They took, like, a beautiful steak, and they just made a little rectangle out of it. He takes his fork He puts it on, and he holds it up to the woman. He goes, where's my steak? And he puts the whole steak in his mouth. I was like, what diet? She was sure. Jason Calacanis (01:14:00): That was your steak. He's like, I want a steak. I'm hungry. I want a steak. Want a steak. The whole restaurant, Sarah, He's like, I ordered a steak. This is not -- If you ask him if you ask him about the strip, he's like, I lost so much money. Yeah. He's like, I didn't eat. It was cold in Boston. It was cold. It's the worst trip ever. Speaker 5 (01:14:19): It was a horrible trip ever. Jason Calacanis (01:14:20): And he is like the woman's like, well, how can we make you happy? He's like, bring me a steak because, like, well, sorry. We we gave you a steak point. The steak can't How many steaks? How many steaks are you gonna afford now that Robin Hood just so public? Congrats for Jake. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's right now, it's my 3rd biggest win, Uber comm and then this one. And, you know, time and market. I I think Robin had going out at 30,000,000,000. There's a chance this could go 10, 20, 30 x from here. I think it could be a $1,000,000,000,000 company someday. 22,000,000 members even through all the craziness that we talked about on this podcast. You know, they're learning, they're fixing things, and 22,000,000 people using the product, and they're gonna launch so many other products as part of it. And all these young people are getting financially literate. I know it's a double edged sword, but I kinda feel like this generation -- -- balance. It's it's it's better. Balance is important. I mean, can you imagine if we were in our 20 trading derivatives and options and and just trading stocks all day. I wanted to do that, but it was too hard. You had to get a broker. It was $35 a trade when I started trading, and you had to call Charles Schwab and put it in order. Of all the things of all the things I could have done online in my twenties and thirties trading stocks didn't end up being high on the list, but -- You didn't play a lot of cards. I mean -- -- play a lot Speaker 4 (01:15:38): of cards. Jason Calacanis (01:15:39): Right. But that that's what these kids are doing. Like, for them, this is you know, in the same zone, a lot of them as sports betting, wagering, playing poker for money, they're they're learning. I don't know how you feel about David Sacks (01:15:50): it, David. Investment strategy. Jason Calacanis (01:15:52): Well, I mean, if you make a lot of mistakes early in your career when you're making a $100 bets or buying a tenth of a stock, you know, it's small stakes, and you're gonna learn a hell of a lot. So I I think the education part is you can only learn by doing. Right, Zach? I mean, David Sacks (01:16:06): you Jason Calacanis (01:16:06): can't learn in a And and they okay. Listen. There's been an amazing episode even without Friedberg. We miss you, Freeberg. Come back next week. Let the conspiracy theories a bound, but Friedberg just was busy. He couldn't make it, and we all wanted to we missed each other, so we wanted to see our besties. We love you Friedberg, and we love you Freiberg. We love you Freiberg. I got your David Sacks (01:16:25): free merch. Jason Calacanis (01:16:26): I got your free merch. I'll see you all next time in the all in podcast. Bye bye. My wife winners ride. Rainman, David Sachs. I'm doing all. And it Speaker 3 (01:16:39): said, open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with Jason Calacanis (01:16:42): it. Love you. what airliners ride. Besty's our car. Go to 13th. That is why they are dogs that you and I was driveway steps. Oh, man. My the Azure will meet the uplist. Speaker 4 (01:17:02): We should all just get a room and have one big huge order because they're all just business. It's like this, like, sexual tension, but we just need to release them out. Jason Calacanis (01:17:10): What? You're the -- BP. We need to get mercies are back.