E23: Radical DAs, breaking down FB/Google vs. Australia, sustained fear post-vaccine & fan questions!

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
Jake, are you going to do your Trump impression? We're going to do your Trump impression.
Yeah.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:04)
Everybody, I'm getting my Twitter handle back.

**David Sacks** (0:06)
Don't give him derangement syndrome right before we start the pod.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:09)
I want to warm him up.

**David Sacks** (0:10)
This doesn't warm him up, it gets him deranged.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:12)
Get your show notes up, bitches.
Hey everybody. Hey everybody. Welcome to another All-In podcast with me today, of course, the dictator Chamath Palihapitiya, the Queen of Kin, wah, David Friedberg, and of course, yeah, definitely the Rain Man is here. David Sacks, he's an excellent driver in the driveway. Okay, boys. I guess we made it to episode 22

**David Friedberg** (0:59)
Your intro becomes one second longer for every episode we do.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:03)
People love it.

**David Friedberg** (1:04)
And people love it. You know, they don't. They think it's so stupid.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:08)
I am.
You have to understand persuasion. What I'm doing is I do the same intro and it warms people up to the discussion.

**David Friedberg** (1:14)
See, we're still talking about the intro.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:17)
See, everybody's obsessed about it.

**David Friedberg** (1:18)
You proved my point.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:20)
All right, guys. Are we going to dress?

**Jason Calacanis** (1:22)
Elephant in the room.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:24)
The elephant in the room, or do we just move on to topics?

**Jason Calacanis** (1:26)
I will say.

**David Friedberg** (1:27)
Elephant in the room.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:28)
After the last show, I fought very hard with the three of you to not post that episode.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:38)
You wanted to spike the episode.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:39)
I wanted to spike the episode, and I'll tell you why. I thought it was not good content. I don't think Vlad said anything new or remarkable or interesting. I don't think we had good analysis, and I think the whole thing kind of felt flat and felt like a PR stunt. And I felt that truly and honestly, and I made the case to you guys that we should cancel.
Obviously, I lost, and I think going forward, we should have a veto, right? But we can talk about that offline.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:04)
Did you quit the show, or did you threaten to quit the show?

**Jason Calacanis** (2:06)
I threatened to quit the show.
I'm going to, after this, I'm going to propose to you my rules, my ground rules for going forward, one of which I think should be no more PR bullshit from Jason's portfolio. But besides that, I think I might be able to-

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:21)
I think I hear a bestie guestie. Is that com.com at the door?

**Jason Calacanis** (2:27)
And I don't think that we're journalists.
By the way, I don't think that the journalism thing works for us. I think we're like analysts and commentators, and we have opinions, and so to bring someone on and try and interview them with a four-on-one format, it just feels weird. It doesn't seem to work. It doesn't create an opportunity for discourse. And frankly, when you try and do journalism in this context, you either appear like you're softballing or you appear like you're doing gotcha journalism, and I think both are bad. And so I think it works really well when the four of us just kind of chat and analyze and shoot the shit and have opinions and talk and debate.
And so my vote is to kind of avoid doing besties-guesties unless it's something pretty amazing and critical and we can all kind of build a dialogue with that person around a topic. But yeah, so that's kind of where I'm sitting and how I feel about it, but we've had a lot of debates obviously since the last episode about it.

**David Friedberg** (3:20)
Can I build on what you're saying?
This is kind of like that really famous Teddy Roosevelt quote about sort of like the man in the arena with the dust on his face, right? I feel like all four of us are in the grind doing things. And I think what makes the podcast good is it's almost like there's like, you know, in a basketball game of four quarters, there's a timeout and you come off the floor and you can actually just take a second to observe what you're seeing. And then the ref blows the whistle and you go back into the game. And I think for me, what makes this thing so fun is I feel like every Friday for these two hours, you know, it's basically the ref calls a timeout or the coach calls a timeout. And we can just kind of take a breath and just observe, all right, what's happened before we get back in the arena. And so, you know, just to your point, I don't think we're journalists. And I don't think we should try to be because I don't think that's the point of what this is. It should be four friends talking about things that are important. And then to the extent that it's important and interesting for other people, they'll listen or not listen. And I think these last few weeks, we got caught up a little too much in, you know, ratings, where is it ranking? How can we go higher? And it's that the gamification of people's reactions that I think caused us, you know, to do that. Whereas the episode before, I actually kind of liked because Dreymon is legitimately one of our really good friends. You know, we see him many, many times, obviously, less during basketball season, but a ton when he's outside, we play poker together, we all hang out together.