E24: Markets trend down, political manipulation via COVID "Zeroism," stimulus breakdown, biological Patriot Act

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:00)
I got to count the other another billion dollars I lost. I've lost two billion dollars in the last two days.

**David Friedberg** (0:05)
Are you guys recording? Please record this.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:07)
Looks like we need a poker game tomorrow.

**David Sacks** (0:10)
Can you imagine how tilted Chamath is going to go into the poker game? Yeah, he's going to be in the markets. He's going to buy in for two million just to try and get even.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:38)
Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All-In Podcast. We took a week off and boy, that was sad.
I missed you guys. I missed my besties.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:49)
We should tell people we had a small medical procedure for one of the besties, but everything's good. And it was planned, so nothing out of the ordinary. But we just needed to take a week off. That's why we missed a week and that's why we're back. Yes.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:02)
And one of the besties.
God, I got so many jokes. I'm not going to tell. All the jokes that came into my mind right now would get me canceled.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:09)
Will get you canceled?

**Jason Calacanis** (1:10)
I literally had seven jokes. I can't tell any of them.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:13)
Based on the amount of money that I've lost in the last two days, I'm ready to get canceled. So it's fine. Put them in the chat and I'm just going to fucking let them rip.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:22)
All right, everybody. David Sacks, the Rain Man is here calling in from an undisclosed compound.
Friedberg, the queen of quinoa, back in action. And the dictator himself, licking his wounds.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:36)
$2 billion for a billion a day.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:40)
Checking the Apple stock app, hitting refresh and going, thank God these companies have fundamentals, because I haven't seen this much blood since Game of Thrones.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:49)
Jason, honestly, at this run rate, I can lose a trillion dollars.

**David Friedberg** (2:01)
How does today feel compared to last March, when the same thing was happening? Every day, the market was down 10%.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:07)
Well, this is what's important to remember.

**David Friedberg** (2:08)
We made a joke. It was like, it could only go down 10% so many days in a row.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:12)
March 31st, you guys have to remember that March 31st of 2020, the headlines all over the press, and you can go to the way back machine and look at these things, but the Dow was down 20 some odd percent. The S&P was down 20% and it looked like the world was going to end. Then we had our first big stimulus bill and things started to look up. China started to reopen slowly and things started to look better. What's interesting is you have this rotational de-leveraging that's happening right now. People are repricing in inflation. People are moving into these overlooked stories, getting out of growth a little bit, and it's a bloodbath.
But I would just encourage us all to remember that we were in some pretty dark days in March of last year as well.
When you looked at it by the end of the year, it looked amazing.

**David Sacks** (3:04)
I would just add to that the markets are looking pretty grim for tech stocks right now. But this all started because of a really great jobs report showing that the economy is roaring back. So we added 379,000 jobs in February, which beat expectations by 200,000. They also revised the January gains up 166,000.
So now the unemployment rate is down to 6.2%. Remember, it was at like 15% last summer during the lockdowns for COVID.
So, I mean, all of this is fundamentally due to, I think, really great news in the economy because COVID is ending, which kind of begs the question of why we need another $1.9 trillion stimulus bill. But I think that ultimately, there's a lot of good news in the real economy. And what investors are doing is figuring out how to now price or reprice all these different stocks in light of the economy roaring back.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (4:00)
So just a little math lesson to build on what you're saying.
Everybody has a risk-free rate, and all stocks are priced according to that risk-free rate. And for the last year, particularly when risk-free rates were essentially zero to negative, meaning that's the riskless money that you get from the government, it was hard to do anything except belong growth stocks in a big, big way.
But David, to your point, if we get two or three more quarters of these kinds of jobs numbers, you're going to have a low single-digit unemployment number. And what that means is wages will have to go up for businesses to compete. And that's the kind of traditional form of inflation that actually reprices things, because then you lever up rates to kind of control inflation. When you lever up rates, and all of a sudden, they're not zero, but they're two, three, four, five, six percent. This is sort of what brought the tech bubble to a halt in 2000, which is that you had six percent real rates. And so you can't own businesses that are projecting revenues, let alone profits in 2026