Jason Calacanis: My perception of you, David, is that you got a taste of fame and celebrity, and it's gone to your fucking head. and you're out of your ego is out of control. You now have stopped doing your job every day. And you are obsessed with your statistics and how you're perceived on the pod. As seen by your obsession, and your bromance with Henry or Harvey bell caster, whatever. You're sitting there obsessing over what percentage each of us talk. None of the other besties are reading all in stats or getting obsessed with Henry Belcaster and how they're perceived on the pod. You have taken a championship show, which I pulled together with my decades of experience and team as the point God, I am the Chris Paul of moderating. The reason this show is number one, is because I created a super team. There are four people on this podcast who bring a lot to the table and you have asked for decades for air cow. I will not pull out a list, but the time that you were going to get canceled because of beep and the other time that your company was in the beep because the beep was investigating it, you called air cow. You called an air cow. You can't deny it. And nobody has benefited more from my skills in media than you.
Jason Calacanis: the rain man himself. Yeah, definitely. David Sachs, gentlemen, you're doing the world's greatest genuflector. The world's greatest moderator is here. Oh, this you guys. I got to tell you something. The grift is on a lot of corporate gigs for me to moderate. I don't even have to prepare. I just show up and moderate. So great. What is an example of such a such a gig? there's a lot of corporations and conferences that pay a pretty penny to have the world's greatest moderator come and interview people. This is like the used car parts Association of America. I did one with like 1000 litigators at an attorney conference for like the SAS software they all use. And it was a wonderful fireside. You know, it's just great. This is like the grift. Do you have to fly commercial? Where they fly private? It's commercial at this point. Yeah. What is your what is your writer say? What kind of do you want? Do you ask for spice, salted macadamia nuts? I do not have them feel my nuts. No. What I do is I blend the travel costs into the speaking fee. And then nobody knows when I'm in or out what hotel I'm staying at or whatever. But
Jason Calacanis: Kanye came back, he just went insane. his account got revoked? What have you learned, I guess, now that you own it, because you must be getting a lot of inbound from people asking you, hey, how are decisions going to be made, etc. You've been clear, transparency is super important in this. But what are your thoughts on free speech and speech on a platform like this?
(someone): Well, I mean, the general principle, I think, is that we should hew close to the law in any given country. So the law is varied quite a lot by by country. And so I think we should be doing free speech, that's, that's close, close to the law. And that's, that's, that's the general principle. The I think there are other things where it's like, okay, we like, for example, like, if you're an advertiser, you don't want to necessarily you don't you don't want your ad, like, let's say it's a family movie, next to some you know, NSFW content, even if that content is text, you know, it's like, they'll be like, that's probably that's we don't, you know, so so that's, that's, So there's more of an allowance for what some might call hate speech on the system, but it's just it's not going to be promoted. We're not going to be recommending hate speech. It's at risk of stating the obvious.
Jason Calacanis: When he leaves for Europe, they remove the three buttons, he comes back, the haberdasher puts them back on each shirt. He does that for the entire wardrobe. And, of course, chiming in is Rain Man himself, David Sachs, professional blogger and the fund manager of Craft Ventures. Of course, before that, working at PayPal with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and a bunch of other famous people, two of which have gone on to have demonstrably more success than Sachs, but Sachs having, of course, more than success, demonstrable success than the other 72 rocket scientists from PayPal. In between, he did a little company called Yammer, which Microsoft bought for a billion dollars. Speaking of big companies and big tech, We had a big tech hearing this week, and Jeff Bezos, Sundar, and Zuck himself, as well as Tim Cook, two founders and two hired guns, people who were hired for their positions, defending themselves from what I thought was some pretty good questioning. My expectations were very low that anybody on that panel would know what they were talking about. For me, I thought Jeff Bezos did the best job. He had a great opening statement, and he was the most candid, and I think least likely to get broken up. Going around the horn here, Chamath, who did the best job in the hearings? I don't know if you saw all of them or just clips, but who do you think shined?
Davic Sacks: It's been the best thing they ever did. They gave a generous severance package to anyone who didn't go along with it. It was only 5% took it. They then went on to have a very successful IPO. It's now a $65 billion public company. And a year later, they are more mission-focused. They've attracted more employees. Their diversity numbers have not gone down. And the reason I'm picking him is not just because of the business success, but I think there's a lot of CEOs In fact, I'd say most CEOs, including some of the bigger names that we're all kind of talking about, are secretly would love to do what Brian did. They would love to basically ban politics in the workplace, but for whatever reason, they just don't have the cojones to do it. I applaud Brian for taking the hit of the New York Times hit piece that then came after him and to stick to his guns. He did this policy and I think Coinbase had a great year.
Jason Calacanis: amazing choice. Wow. Three great choices. Satya, Jack Armstrong, I think Ilan clearly is but I'm going to pick somebody else. So it's not all Ilan all the time.
Davic Sacks: Yeah. No one questions his competence and his expertise. But again, I see no groundswell for him in either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, or even as an independent because again, it doesn't fit the populist mood of the country right now.
Jason Calacanis: Agreed. So that's your pragmatic, like path to victory. But let me ask you about competence, then because maybe I can frame the question get a better answer out of you.
Chamath Palihapitiya: That's what I thought I was answering when you said who's more competent.
Jason Calacanis: I mean, you guys interpret my questions. Have you like you interpreted in terms of competence? sacks interpreted the question pragmatically to getting into office. But let's ask sacks the question. And I'll ask you pragmatically unless sacks the question of competence. in terms of competence, I gave you like four people, right? Is he the most competent person to run the country right now? No, I you think to Santa's is more competent than him.
Davic Sacks: I think that of all the major candidates who actually have a realistic shot to Santa's is the most supremely competent as an executive. He's run the state of Florida. He did it during COVID, which was
Jason Calacanis: so well said Friedberg, because when you're Michael, and I just think you're very courageous for doing it, because it's very easy for somebody to say, Oh, well, you are being callous. The truth is incentives matter. And we saw it, we've seen this over and over again, if you pay for something, you get more of it. And really, San Francisco is bearing the burden. I think this is what your book and you know, in a lot of the videos you've made, at least the message I got was, San Francisco has the lowest price of drugs, the lowest enforcement, and the most incentives. Therefore, they suffer, because every person who is, you know, addicted comes here, because they speak to each other. And 90% of the people who are in San Francisco are here because we have created an incentive structure. Is that directionally correct as we wrap here?
(someone): Yeah, 100% correct, including just the non enforcement of laws against sleeping on the sidewalk, doing drugs in public, not requiring ultimately three times more people die, living outside as an unsheltered homeless person rather than live than being in a shelter. And for me, that's all you need to know to know that you cannot allow our brothers and sisters to sleep on the street, no matter how desperate they sound about wanting to avoid going inside, it's three times deadlier to be on the street than inside.
Jason Calacanis: So the compassionate thing is to force people into housing.
(someone): Yes.
Jason Calacanis: People to say, but you know, because you're, we have this perception that people have freedom, and they should have the right to do this.
Davic Sacks: So DeSantis is my pick. He won reelection by about 20 points and his coattails carried four new GOP house seats, which happens to be the exact size of the GOP majority. Several polls have now shown him beating Donald Trump by significant margins for the 2024 GOP nomination. He is shattering fundraising records. Florida is now the fastest growing state. So he is my pick for the biggest winner, political winner of 2022.
Jason Calacanis: Great. Who is your biggest political winner?
Chamath Palihapitiya: Chema? I mean, it's obvious. It's Xi Jinping. You know, there is no single person in the world that is now as powerful as this one man, he has complete authoritarian control. over 1.2 odd billion people and 20% of the world's GDP and a large amount of the world's debt, including a lot of us dollar debt. And so, you know, it's pretty, there's, there's, it's hard to find anybody that won nearly as much as he did.
Jason Calacanis: Okay, now to you, Friedberg, who is your biggest political winner of 2022?
David Friedberg: I mean, I think your DeSantis and Xi Jinping calls were really like, good. I think the biggest surprising winner for me is like, you know, unexpected.
Chamath Palihapitiya: And, you know, we think it's in this, you know, sort of three to 5 million range of people. But if you just had a numerical canonical number that was irrefutable, you just run over everybody.
Jason Calacanis: This turns it into a meritocracy is gonna be terrifying to some blue check marks when they see that the people who they report on get 10 times as many views as they do, of course, is why when when journalists look at Sean Hannity, go to Sean Hannity his profile and for the number of followers he has, how pathetically engaged his audiences, it's all bots.
Chamath Palihapitiya: It's all trolls. It's all nobodies.
Jason Calacanis: I looked at Mitt Romney just put out a video whatever in the first like half hour, he had 100,000 views, like, every politician who starts seeing this is gonna go wait a second in the world, I'm getting more views here than I am on MSNBC, or Fox, the world I need to do this rational place if Mitt Romney actually has more influence than Sean Hannity. Let's hope Okay, let's move on. We got to get through this quickly. It's our longest episode ever. Here we go. We are going to do next up. It's very, this is a very important category. Best CEO of 2022. In 2021.
David Friedberg: The some of the policy and folks that she put in, in office, caused, you know, massive chaos, it was just a clear dysfunction over a very short period of time. Jerome Powell, I think this was a big surprise this year to see how the Fed chair became so politicized, and his role became so politicized, both kind of the left and the right, finding reasons to question his leadership. and his decision making, the failure to raise rates soon enough, led to massive inflation is what you'll hear from one contingent of politicians and the public at large. And then the rate at which he's raising rates now to catch up to the and to calm inflation is causing people to complain on the other side. So there is really no one that seems to be happy with Jerome Powell. And I think that that was a shooting star that seems to have completely lost its luster.
Jason Calacanis: Okay, so the Fed, yes, good pull there. Okay, mine is pretty clear and objectively it is, of course, the GOP. The red wave failed, it turned into a trickle. Trump is back and I believe there's a good chance he will win the primary. Roe v. Wade a complete unmitigated disaster for Republicans, they caught the car and plus marriage equality and having to deal with that women and the LGBT community vote and they have long memories. The GOP, the biggest political losers for me. Okay, I'm sure sacks has no rebuttal there. So we will move on to the next category.
Chamath Palihapitiya: So I thought he was excellent on race. I thought he was incredible. In the moment that he basically stood up to Trump about his son Hunter, and he looks in the camera and he basically says, look, I love my son. My son's had troubles and I support, I mean, amazing and so like in those moments it's so hard to not see that guy as presidential and i don't meaning like it's easy for democrats or people that are voting for him like me but i think if you were a republican you got to look at that guy and say man that is a decent dude Yeah, I thought he did. He did in certain key moments. He did fabulously well. And in other moments where there were traps, he actually got built up because Trump kept interrupting and Joe was smart enough to stop talking so that it amplified the sense that Trump was interrupting him.
Jason Calacanis: Trump, to me, seemed pathetic and scared. That was my like he's scared of losing. He felt like a bully who had been like laughed at by the whole class, like nobody takes him seriously. Like the moderator. What's his name?
Chamath Palihapitiya: But I do agree with David, I think the CEO that bit the bullet, so maybe publicly, what I would say is, you know, the CEO of Karna deserves a huge know, medal for having the courage to do it before anybody else did the CEO of checkout.com just took a huge write down. These CEOs are making sure their companies survive.
Jason Calacanis: Friedberg best CEO 2022.
David Friedberg: My vote for best CEO is Warren Buffett. And I think it is just simple arithmetic. he has for years and now for decades proven himself to be just not just an exceptional investor, stock picker, whatever the kind of typical quip is about what he does for a living. But I think what's so extraordinary about Buffett is that regardless of the market conditions, he can kind of remain steadfast in his intent and in his mission. And he doesn't kind of waiver. And, you know, he doesn't take an active role in ranting and complaining about markets and politics. And I think that that's what makes him such an extraordinary leader, he stays within his zone of competence, he doesn't do things that he doesn't know about. He doesn't let the macro drive him and cause him to be kind of you know, affected by it. And he says, This is what I know how to do, this is what I can do. And that is all that he does do.
Davic Sacks: On the other hand, he if he stays this dominant, he will drive out other contenders out of the primary, and he may be able to solidify it. And if it can just be DeSantis versus Trump in the primary, he has a much better shot than if it's Trump versus a bunch of other challengers. And I think that if he continues to pull this well within the Republican Party, I think Trump might not run again, because Trump definitely does not want to risk being a loser in the Republican primary. So, yeah, there's always front-runner risk, but it's hard to say that coming out of this year that he wasn't a huge political winner. Okay. If we're going to challenge other people's picks, I would maybe challenge Zelensky. There's no question that he's been a global media hero, but two-thirds of Kiev is currently without power. 80% of Kiev doesn't have water. 30% of the Ukrainian power stations have been destroyed. Nearly half of the country is without power. There's something like 8 million displaced Ukrainians in the country. And over 100,000 Ukrainians have been killed in this war. So yes, he's been a very strong, charismatic war leader for them.
David Friedberg: But freeburg your response. I'm not advocating for his performance as a leader.