E2: Rebooting the economy, understanding corporate debt, steps to avoid a depression & more with David Sacks

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody, welcome to episode two of the All-In Podcast with Jason and Chamath. Some basic ground rules here. If you're not into speculation, you don't like to debate, you don't like to question authority, and you don't like to get a shit ton of inside information. I'm going to actually turn the podcast off right now and go download the Daily from the New York Times or All Things Consider or some other bullshit. But we're here to do speculating and talking about inside information and the real deal.
With me, as always, my co-host, Chamath Palihapitiya, if you don't know how to pronounce it, Palihapa-tiya.
Chamath, how are you doing? You holding up okay?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:34)
I am doing fabulously well. We are in week four of our lockdown sheltering in place here.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:40)
You're losing your mind?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:42)
I'm not because I'm fortunate to be in the suburbs. I think if I was cooped up in an apartment in the city, I would feel a lot worse than I do right now. But there's a lot of fresh air. The weather's finally turned. It's not raining as much.
So we get to see the sun a little bit. Makes a big difference.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:59)
Yeah. Can you imagine 15, 20 years ago, a hold up in an apartment with three kids who are home from school, like these people who are in a city, they must be going insane.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:08)
I mean, there's so much value to visiting New York. But if you're stuck there in a in a quarantine lockdown, I don't know what I'd do.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:16)
All right. Well, we got a great guest today. Why don't you introduce our guest, Chamath?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:21)
Well, we are really lucky here. This is a person who I've known now for, I don't know, maybe 15, 20 years. What I would call him is one of my best show ponies. I have ridden this motherfucker up and down in everything he's done. He has made me so much money. It's like owning the publishing rights to the YouTube back catalog. This is how prolific this guy is.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:46)
It's like owning the Beatles back catalog, right? You're like Michael Jackson.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:52)
So David Sacks though, no, all kidding aside, David Sacks is one of the most incredible people that we know, one of our closest friends. Big bit of a background on David. He almost became a lawyer, but dropped out of law school after going to Stanford and worked with Peter Thiel at PayPal and was a chief operating officer there. Left PayPal, moved to Los Angeles, unsuccessfully kept his virginity, found a way to not get laid as a movie producer in Hollywood, which seems to be impossible, but David found a way of doing it.
Produced a movie, one of the best-known movies of that generation called Thank You for Smoking.
Then moved back up here, started Genie, pivoted, started Yammer, sold that for more than a billion dollars to Microsoft, and became during that time, frankly, one of the most unsung heroes of company founders and was a prolific investor in some of the most well-known iconic businesses of this last generation, Airbnb, Uber, Slack. The list goes on and on and now is the co-founder of Craft Ventures, which is essentially David's early stage venture business where he helps a lot of really great companies get to the next level, and frankly, the level that he's been playing at for a while. Despite all of that, again, I just see him as a show pony.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:35)
Some money printing machine. If you can get in on that fund, if you can get in on those companies, you're going to do well. Sacks is an operating machine.
Welcome to the program. David Sacks.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:44)
Welcome to the podcast.

**David Sacks** (3:45)
Thanks for having me.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:48)
How are you holding up? Sacks just personally, family, everything, companies, just generally psychologically.
How is this impacting you?

**David Sacks** (3:57)
I think we're all fortunate to be safe.
We started paying attention to the virus, I guess, in February because of Twitter tech. There are a bunch of people on the tech ecosystem who started tweeting very alarming things in February or even going as far back as January 30th. I didn't know for sure if they were right, but some of them were friends of mine. We were to get seriously and we started doing work from home, I think on March 1st. We've all been self-isolated since then. Fortunately, everyone has been safe and holding it pretty well.