E16: Reflecting on the riots at the US Capitol, plus: Georgia runoffs, vaccine distribution & more

We'll let your winners ride. Rain man David Sacks and they've just gone crazy with it. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release. Your feet, we need to get murky.

All right, and we're back. And thank you to young Spielberg with the all-in 1.5 extended edition remix. We're going all in. That was thank you to the super fans; that was really incredible, actually.

We're back. We're back. Yeah. Shout out young Spielberg with us. The dictator Chamoth, Paulie Hoppetea, the rain man himself, David Sacks, is definitely an excellent driver, and his dad lets him drive in the driveway. And the Queen of Quinoa, spectacular David Freeburg, is with us. We did an emergency pod. We just had all agreed we're taking a nice break. Nothing's gonna happen over the new year. This is the down period, and 2021 is going to be delightful and simple, and then all hell breaks loose. We could start with the vaccine; we could start with the capital; we could start with Georgia. Now we have to start; we have to start; we have to start with the capital; we have to start with the capitals.

All right, so let me just run through the series of events that occur here. There's a certification process, correct, Sacks, that goes on where the electoral college gets counted. And somewhere at 10 a.m., Trump had a rally of thousands of supporters. You were not there, David, correct? You weren't at this round. He was in quote-unquote Miami, right? I think he's in the Miami Hilton on Pennsylvania Avenue right now, and he put up that fake Miami background. But the truth is, let's be honest here, um, Trump came out at 10 a.m. and had a rally. Jason, can we just take a step back for a second? Doesn't David Sacks look like Elliott Gould in Ocean's 11 right now? He is a silver fox. And are you—I mean, you were very public about being in Miami over the new year. You took your talents to Miami, and we see this background.

Um, so we can assume that dictators in his uh pool house poker room. We know that Freeburg's in a Ritz-Carlton somewhere based on the furniture. He's in his Ritz-Carlton uh office, and Sacks, based on your background, are you in Miami right now? Yeah. Are you still there? Yeah. I still—I'm still—I'm still here. Okay. But David, did you meet me or not? I—I haven't—I actually met him. I did meet him. I went to like a tech uh event the other night, and he was there.

So were you wearing masks at the tech event? Were you wearing a mask? They—it was—they were like—No, no. I'll tell you, there were masks indoors, and then there was like COVID testing inside, and then you could graduate to the outdoor patio part where people generally weren't wearing masks. So were you in conversations with people with no masks on? Is that what you're saying at this? Yeah. But you know, everyone's been like COVID tested like a zillion times, and it was outdoors, and you know, I'm willing to meet with people outdoors. You know, I generally don't do it indoors, but I'm—yeah, I'm—that—I—I've said that's my policy starting several months ago.

Did we—can we rewind to April with that photo of Sacks? Do we have it where he was in the ski mask and the goggles and the helmet and like the biohazard suit and like how things have changed? He's like, I'll go to Miami and have a chat with someone. Yeah. You could—you could—you—you could definitely do uh "how it started" and "how it's going" uh split photo for it. But—but look, you're like sharing a banana split with someone like, you know, like—well, because on eBay and Alibaba buying ventilators for his home triage center. Well, I mean, we had people from the WHO saying in March that the—you know, that the case—the infection fatality rate was like 7. You know, and the two big things we learned after that were number one that there was a huge distribution by age, right? And so somebody under 50 without comorbidities had a much, much, much lower risk. And then also the thing we learned is that the—there's—there's maybe a 10x difference between the infection fatality rate and the case fatality rate. I mean, you guys know all this. Yeah. And so—so once we learned those things, um, I mean, I—you—you know, I think a rational person takes things like that into account. I changed my policy with respect to COVID, you know, and—and now especially that we have uh, you know, easy access to tests, which weren't available. You can get tested before going into an event. So I—I have a question to add on to that. Do you own a fur Chewbacca outfit, and were—were you in Washington, D.C., yesterday with more paint on your nipples? Do you have a podium? Do you have a neck-to-waste tattoo? Are you standing behind a podium? Let me hide the—the Viking horns that I've got stashed away here.

All right, listen, there was a great—there was a title. Can we title yesterday's event "National Lampoon Siege of the Capital"? I mean, it was like Animal House, like, you know. Yeah. There was a great—there was a great tweet by somebody saying this was uh this was like the storming of the Bastille as perpetrated by the cast of Animal House. And there was another—there's another great tweet saying uh the capital now appears to be under the control of a man in a Viking mask. The best one was: I have lost all respect for Nicholas Cage's ability to steal the U.S. Constitution apparently. Yeah. Whatever copies left. All right, so let's just go through the chain of events here, and it was—it was absolutely surreal because Trump literally went out to a mob of people and said, "I want you to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and show the GOP what it takes to have courage," et cetera. Mike Pence apparently told Trump that he was not going to go to bat for him in the ceremonial process of counting the votes. And lo and behold, you're watching this, you know, the objections going on to the electoral account, and you see the Secret Service come rushing in, and it becomes a, you know, very serious situation. And when you watch some of the videos, it is truly terrorizing that thousands of people overwhelmed the police. And I guess I want to start with people's opinion on Trump's culpability in inciting what was very dangerous behavior. Four people are dead. Um, so you know, while we're joking about the cosplay outfits, a woman who was a—an art and Trump supporter who is a vet who did four tours uh from what I've read, and I shared the video with you before, literally, you know, as they broke into the building, was trying to breach another area of the building and she's climbing through a window and gets shot apparently by the Secret Service or the police and dies. And so it's all fun and games until four people are dead, and now somebody's lost their wife, daughter, sister. Jason, I mean, there could have been 400 dead. There could have been—Fourth House.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, this could have become a shootout at the O.K. Corral. I can't understand why the police showed the restraint they did. I mean, when you see them getting surrounded—I don't know if you saw the one—they didn't—they didn't show restraint. Jason, there was no police. When you look at the amount of um security that's typically there and has been there for other situations, and then you compare it to the amount of security, knowing for a month and a half that this was coming, it's um, it just doesn't make any sense to me. So I'm a little—I'm a little dumbfounded that, you know, you couldn't have seen this Facebook group called, you know, #StormTheCapital, which had tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of members in there plotting and scheming, selling merchandise called "Storm the Capital." You know, these guys were wearing printed sweatshirts that they had time to make, and nobody knew about it, and nobody thought to reinforce um the security and barricade it and make sure that you couldn't go from the protest site to the—I mean, I—it just seems like there's some level of complicity that needs to get found out here. But there was a—there was an interview I saw with an XDC police guy who said that I think folks were told to tamper down—uh, the police forces were told to tamper down on managing crowds and protests and riots following the controversy associated with BLM a few months ago, and spraying folks with pepper spray and water and all the physical techniques that were used were so um outraging that that there was just more of a systemic concern about being too aggressive with protesters. And as a result, they went too far the other way.

Uh, it's—it's not about—it just happens to be Freeberg that when Black people protested and brown people, they got the tear gas and beaten with batons, and then when the white people uh stormed the—what—the—the capital in the same area, they got uh walked down the steps and escorted out with a stern warning to not do it again. I mean, this is hypocritical and insane. I—I—I don't know why you have to go there particularly. Um, it—it looked to me like what happened is that the Capitol Hill police simply got completely overwhelmed. Uh, you look at these, you know, giant—this is a rally on the Mall that turned into a mob. Well, first it kind of turned into a tailgater, then it turned into a mob, and then it turned into an insurrection. It kind of stumbled forward into progressive uh phases of uh of stupidity and disaster. But it looked to me like the Capitol Hill police simply got overwhelmed. They—they obviously were unprepared; they were surprised I think by this. And I saw video of tons of tear gas being used. I saw people getting tear gas like crazy, and I think there was reports uh this morning on Twitter that the whole area in front of the Capitol there was covered in that light film that remains after tear gassing. So I don't think they were really pulling punches too much. And I also think that uh that there will be prosecutions. I think that uh the—these people were captured on video. There's a lot of talk on Twitter, and everybody is in favor of finding out who they are, applying facial recognition, and uh bringing charges. So I think there will be a lot of charges. Unlike, let's say, the—the BLM protest this summer, I don't remember anybody getting charged based on video of people writing or looting. And then I think, you know, the—the—the final difference actually with the BLM protest is that if you've watched Fox News at all in the last 24 hours, the condemnation of what—of the storming of the capital, of what happened, has been across the board, both right and left. Everybody across the political spectrum has condemned it. Nobody is apologizing for it. Nobody on the right is looking for root causes to explain the reasons why it happened. Everybody is just condemning it and saying that it should never have happened, and the people who did it should be prosecuted. And so I don't see any kid gloves here being used, um, you know, either physically or—glove sex is when you see officers being chased up the steps and uh or taking selfies, you know, which is one instance—I don't want to just say that's the only indicative thing, but when people are breaking through windows and just kind of being let go—I mean, they were obviously overwhelmed, but I'm surprised more people didn't get shot.

Let's just tackle this head-on in terms of the race issue. Well, I have a—I have a question for David before I make my statement. David, do you think that if this were Black and brown people storming the capital, would there have been more or less than four deaths? Honestly, I think would have been the same. I just uh disagree. Yeah. I disagree. I really disagree, and I'll tell you why. Um, I think you have the best of intentions wanting to think that way, but here's the way I see it. I see a president that basically instigated a group of people who are fundamentally disenfranchised. Let's face it, like there are—there are a lot of very, very reasonable Republicans and a lot of very reasonable Democrats. The fringes of both parties are functionally mentally [ __ ]—we know this. Okay. And so what you see are extremes on both sides who are just completely lost and looking for any excuse. And so you have a president in the tail end of his presidency, an anonymous presidency—basically call them out. Nobody who actually had a job or anything to do could show up, right? So you had all these people show up. It's a Wednesday. Yeah, it's a Wednesday during the day. I mean, and what do you think happens? They're there; they're all frothed up, you know. Um, Eric Trump frothing them up, Donald Trump Jr. frothing them up, Trump frothing them up, Giuliani frothing them up, and all of a sudden, as you said, stumbling into degrees of—of craziness and stupidity to storm the capital. And I just think to myself, how could a president instigate this kind of action? Number one. The second thing I think about is when Black athletes peacefully protested uh something that they had the fundamental constitutional right to protest in the president's eyes, they were sons of [ __ ]—White people that stormed the [ __ ] capital—the people's house—yep, were called patriots by the president's daughter, and she—and then we're told that they were loved by the president himself. To me, it's just an enormously stark contrast of a double standard. I think that beyond the persecutions of the people, I actually feel very bad for the people that stormed the capital. I feel like these are folks that are on the fringes who just need a vessel, and Trump is a vessel, and then he instigates them and runs away. You know what I mean? He's a character; he's lost. These are less—that these guys commit the crime, and now they're going to go to jail. I feel like the—the culpability has to go all the way back to Trump, to Hawley, to Cruz. These guys—are—those are the real scumbags in all of this.

Freebird, what are your thoughts on this, and then I'll go back to Sacks and let him respond. Yeah, I don't—I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that if this was a Black Lives Matter and—and it was Black people involved or brown people involved in um in the same sorts of activities you saw yesterday that you would not see more shootings. I don't think that's an unreasonable uh position to take. Obviously, um, I think there's this other circumstance which is that event preceding this one, as I mentioned, I saw an interview with the D.C. police—former police director of the police or some—I forgot what his title was—where he highlighted that, you know, folks were kind of instructed to stand down following the BLM controversies. And so I think that's also kind of a reasonable point of view. And uh, what about the president's culpability? I mean, I think that's one issue that's gonna have to be addressed post, and I think we have to figure out what life post-Trump is going to be like because this is a level of chaos that nobody—to Sacks's point—all people condemned. It's um—yeah, there's a—there's a—there's a theory which actually takes its origin from—from Hitler where uh Hitler used this term "the big lie," and uh, you know, the theory is that you can create political propaganda by saying something that's so outrageous, it is so improbable that people say there's no way this thing keeps getting said over and over unless it's actually real. Um, and this is sort of like the QAnon pedophile ring in the pizzeria or the fact that the election was stolen from you. It is such an outrageous statement um that—that it seems to people uh that it only has to be true um because it is—it is such an insane thing. And if it is—it's so insane and I am so incited by this thing—so this is kind of a, you know, acknowledged as being uh, you know, a political propaganda technique that goes back a long time. By the way, Hitler used it as a way to—to use it as almost like a double bluff uh to blame the Jews um uh in—in Germany, which was um uh, you know, an unfortunate kind of origin of the term. But um uh but the term is used a lot now and saying like these sorts of events are ridiculous. Now, what's gonna happen going forward? I don't think big lies go away. You can try and mute them on Twitter and meet them on Facebook or mute them on Reddit, but whether it's QAnon or whatever is next, this is becoming kind of a standard form now because of the way media is distributed. Anyone can say a big lie, and it gets a lot of listeners. And Trump is totally culpable for that. He made some [ __ ] up; he made a bunch of claims. I mean, if you guys haven't seen Lindsey Graham's speech yesterday, it is absolutely worth watching that he gave late last night. I saw it; I saw it. And he's—he's like—he's like, "I asked for the—for the—show me the eight—the ten—give me ten people that claim that they voted and they were under eighteen." He's like, "They gave you one. Give me anyone that—that uh was in prison or died," and he gave me zero. And he's like, goes on and on for a couple of minutes about how none of what was said about what happened in the election was true, and it was all false, and he's like, "This is all just not true." Um, and so I think Trump is culpable for creating a falsehood and uh and uh, you know, having a megaphone. And you know, there were certainly—of violence that is—I think where the rubber is going to meet the road. Trump's going to be out of office in two weeks or less, one way or the other. Do you uh—and let me just take it to Sacks. Um, Sacks, I want to give you the time to respond to the—the issue of uh the double standard uh in terms of race and BLM, and then also do you, Sacks, if you're on Biden's team coming in, do you advise that you prosecute Trump or investigate Trump for this insurrection? Yes or no.

Okay, so just to tie off on the—the BLM issue, I—I just, you know, I just normally don't think that race is the issue here. Um, Chamoth, look, I—I don't know, at the end of the day, what the fatalities would have been if it had been a BLM protest that—that went awry, but I will stick to what I said before, which is I predict that you will see more prosecutions come out of this—of the people who are involved. I'm talking about the people who stormed the Capitol, then we saw from all the—the BLM protests over the summer. I mean, I don't remember any prosecutions coming out of videotape of people being caught recorded looting and rioting, and I predict you will see more here. And again, I think another difference—again, the extent there's a double standard—uh, I—you know, I remember a lot of left-wing news networks um calling the writing and looting the summer peaceful protests, which they clearly were not. You even had a book called *In Defense of Looting*, and I don't hear anybody defending the storming of the capital. Nobody on the right. So look, to the extent there's a double standard, I don't know that it accrues to the—the BLM side of this, but look, I think that's kind of beside the point and not—not the real issue here. I mean, Jason, to your question of is Trump responsible? Yes. I mean, clearly 100—100 yes because he—he is the one who—who put forth this theory that the election was stolen and was constantly repeating it for the last two months. Two months ago, right after the election, there was an article published in *The Spectator* called "Deplorables Don't Riot." It was actually a pretty good op-ed. It was written by a conservative, and the conservative's point was that, you know, all these windows and shops have been boarded up in anticipation of potential riding and looting with the election, and all these conservatives are saying, "Well, who's—do you know—who are they afraid of? You know, not—not us—not the MAGA folks." Well, then the theory was deplorables don't—don't riot, and—and the right was—was proud of that two months ago. And now we are seeing that, well, no, the deplorables are rioting. Why is that? What—what changed over the last two months? And what changed is the constant feeding to this group of people this idea, starting with Trump, but then perpetuated by, you know, different right-wing media organizations and other politicians.

Who sort of were you, know, trying to curry favor with Trump? Uh, they were constantly pushing for this idea that the election was stolen. So that these people on the Mall, who then riot and storm the Capitol, believed that the election was being stolen from them. So, you know, ultimately that responsibility goes to Trump's.

To be clear, and reflecting back to you, you're saying Trump incited sedation? Is that the right word? Well, sedition. Sedition doesn't seem like the wrong—it doesn't seem like the exact right word to me. I mean, riot—it was, it was certainly a riot. Now, now did—now look, I mean, you're talking about prosecuting a legal case. Uh, you know, if you want to look at the legal standard for incitement, it has to be, you know, provoking people to take an imminent lawless act. Uh, I think I think he—if you want to see this mob as a gun, I think he loaded the gun; he pointed it in a certain direction, but did he tell them to storm the Capitol? No, not specifically. I think, therefore, it'd be a very hard case to prosecute, but I think, you know, prosecuting him in a court of law is, is sort of unnecessary and redundant. I mean, I think that in the eyes of the public, politically, he has—I think most people see that he's culpable. And I even think of his political career, I think he's, I think he's disqualified himself from being uh, a candidate, you know, at a national level again.

I mean, if you look—okay, again, just go back two months ago. Look at how much has changed. Two months ago, just in the day or two after the election, Trump had narrowly lost, but there was talk of him starting a new news network to rival Fox. There was talk about he could even be a candidate again in, in 2024. It was not off the table. I think now it's, it's clearly off the table. And you've seen it—it's partly because of the Georgia runoffs, which we should get to. But again, the Republican candidates, at least one of them, had won that election two months ago, and now they lost, and that has a lot to do with Trump's antics in the meantime of, is just feeding this constant, you know, lie about the stolen election, right?

I think there's a really important question about, you know, sorry, but is it worth um, prosecuting Trump, uh, post fact? Um, you know, does that do more harm or good for, for the country as a whole? Certainly, there will be a lot of people that would get great satisfaction of putting Trump in prison; a lot of people are calling for that. But um, we really do need to question the um, you know, the incredible divide in the nation and what's the best way to heal the divide. The objective shouldn't be pursuing justice; uh, it should be about moving forward. I'm not suggesting don't prosecute Trump, but I, I think that it's, it's worthy of noting that, you know, there is another way of framing this whole thing, which is what's the best thing to do going forward.

Though, on the flip side, you could even make the case that one of the best things Joe Biden could do today or tomorrow is to announce a federal election uh, review commission, uh, to actually look into wrongdoings at the state level with a 500 bipartisan—yeah, 100—yeah. I mean, it's a slam dunk case anyway if Biden did that, and he, you know, he basically embraced the notion that a lot of folks are really angry about and said, "I'm listening to you; I'm hearing you; let me show you." And at the same time, they did not prosecute Trump and, you know, let him go, go off into the distance and do his own thing. Maybe you start to kind of, you know, heal the rift a little bit. But right now, everyone's kind of inflamed, and there is this like, "How do we prosecute him? What do we do when he's, you know, do it, you know?" And we're just continuing to kind of escalate the dialogue and increase the rift. I just—yeah.

So I look, I think prosecuting Trump at this point, first of all, legally, that might be a difficult case to prove because of the need to prove that the um, that he was trying to provoke uh, an imminent lawless action. You know, if he had been at the barricades, you know, pushing people forward, yes. But so I think legally it'd be a tough case, and I think it would be—like you said—it'd be unnecessarily uh, divisive and partisan. I don't know why we need to go there. I mean, at the end of the day, any politician's stock and trade is their credibility and popularity, and Trump has fundamentally damaged the perception of him, I think even among the right.

I have a huge issue with this, and I'll tell you why. It's because the folks that are now going to go to jail were instigated by this guy, and the folks that were there, in many ways, were brought—they were cajoled—they were instigated to travel—groomed to travel there—to take the time out of their lives to basically then get fed this rhetoric and, in a moment of just crazy mob-like mentality, to act out at the behest of the leader of the free world. There has to be a consequence, not just to those people, because they, in many ways, are not the person to prosecute, to the extent that you are going to put some of these people in jail, which we look like—it looks like we're going to—and, by the way, let's be honest, there is no inconceivable way that these people get charged with a misdemeanor; that's not going to stand, right? And the worst perpetrators of this, when they get put in jail, will get put in jail for five to ten years minimum. And so what are we going to do when we look at ourselves in the eye and say, "These poor Americans, at the end of the day, who were instigated by this guy, and he yet again gets off scot-free while hundreds of Americans who were basically in a peak of craziness fed by this guy does something and goes to jail, and you have hundreds of lives and hundreds of families ruined?"

Even if we don't find a way to basically put Trump in jail for this, I can 100 guarantee you—I will bet a million bucks that now the Southern District of New York—gloves off—every single state that can go after this guy—gloves off—and to the extent that Joe Biden had any incentive to basically like let this go away at the federal level—gloves off, in my opinion. I really, I really, really need to say—let's, let's say that folks do go after Trump. What does that do? If he gets put in jail, or he, you know, gets uh, there's some criminal proceeding brought against him, what does that do to the 50 percent of the nation that truly support him and truly care about him? I don't, you know, I don't—like the balance of justice versus unification, you know, I think we're talking actually about 25 percent of the country. I think—I don't even think it sounds right or whatever it is—like there's obviously a big voting block and a big block of the uh, potential blockchain. I think, I think—I think of the 70 million people that voted for Donald Trump, I think there are half of them who would equally vote for a normal centrist candidate—Romney and Nikki Haley—didn't necessarily believe in Donald Trump. Then I think there's the other 35 million, and I do think that there's a spectrum of those 35, and I think that you probably lost 10 or 15 million of them after the events of yesterday where they just threw their hands up in the air and said, "Hey, it would really only inflame."

20 million is what you're saying, correct? And I think I agree with Jamal, right? And those 20 million people are, you know, sad to say, concentrated in about 10 states that don't functionally matter economically or otherwise. Um, and so about the balance of justice versus unification, certainly it sounds like you're saying weighs heavily towards justice, right? Like more, more folks will benefit from seeing him come to justice or would perceive justice, then I think what it will allow—I think it'll allow the Republican party to recenter itself. I think that's better for politics; I think it's better for governance; it's better for America. I think it allows a lot of people to basically wake up out of this haze that they've been in for four years and say, "Wow, wait a minute. Enough, enough. Like I was on a really bad bender; I did a couple things I really regret, and I need to recenter myself."

How do you not find this turning into a tit-for-tat—Berlusconi, Italy, Brazil, Israel kind of phenomenon—where, you know, future leaders are then attacked and challenged and taken—the best—the best tweet I saw on this was this woman tweeted out that uh, the following: she said, "When the Democrats lost in 2016, they knitted pink hats and donated to Planned Parenthood." No, they didn't—no, they didn't. They invented a ridiculous Russian conspiracy theory. They—David—that like 10 people went to Russia—the Russians—no one went to jail. You're like the last person—you're like the last person who still believes in this. Well, listen, I still believe that they tried, and I still believe—I don't know that they succeeded, but I think Mueller spent two years investigating this—tens of millions of dollars—25 FBI—and uh, yeah, those are all GOP talking points. The fact is Manafort went to jail for something completely unrelated. You must be the last person who still believes that Trump won in 2016 because of Russian interference.

I think that they—I think he asked the Ukraine for help, and I think he asked the Russians for help, and I think that he would have gladly accepted the help. Now, is it—was it a, a conspiracy? No, it wasn't a conspiracy. Never—this is the problem with your Russia talking point is that you're trying to just say because he didn't get prosecuted—which he's probably not going to get prosecuted for this either—the guy was a serial offender, okay? And they were trying to get information from Wikileaks, and they were trying to get the, the hacks. And so I don't know why you can so clearly see what he's doing, David, when he incites this violence, and then you don't see that he would—he has no moral backbone or character and that he wouldn't accept foreign aid. It's not that—bastard—here, here's my view, okay? Here's my view is that when you lose an election as a candidate, you have to look in the mirror and ask what you did wrong. Okay, Trump failed to do that two months ago. Instead of just taking the L and, you know, and he, he could have blamed it on the fact that the vaccine was one week late. I mean, there were—there he, you know—instead of just accepting the loss, he invented this conspiracy theory that the election was stolen, and he's basically, like Freiburg said, been pumping it month after month, and you know, his enablers, you know, have, have perpetuated it until we had this, you know, total breakdown and storming of the Capitol. But again, you know, where was the Democratic reassessment of why they lost in 2016? Who on the Democrat side looked in the mirror and said, "You know, we shouldn't have lost that election. You know, what did we do wrong?" They didn't do that. Instead, they blamed it all on Russian interference or Facebook. You know, all of a sudden Facebook went from being a darling to being a scapegoat, and there were uh, Russian ads being bought with rubles and tons of link farms confirmed done by the Russians in order to uh, ferment anti-Hillary sentiment.

I mean, no, it actually happened; it's true. It's true. I don't know—affect the election—nobody could know that, but it didn't—yes, we can, because yeah, it did—it did some effort. So now you're admitting there was Russian interference, so you were before saying there wasn't, and now you're saying there was. I'm talking about—I'm talking about why somebody—no, no, it's not because—here, here's the—here's where you're being misleading is yes—is it true that there was some FSB operative somewhere buying ads on Facebook? Yes—hundreds of them—hundreds of them—out of billions of impressions. Okay, it was a microscopic number of total impressions of the election, and the people who actually looked at those ads thought they were absurd. Imagine some operative—hold on, let me finish my point. Imagine some operative in Moscow trying to influence the American election by buying ads on Facebook. Did they try? Yes. Look, foreign intelligence services are trying all the time, okay? But was that—they didn't try—they did try—yes—okay? And did Trump and his family ask them? No. There was no help; there's no proof of collusion; there was no proof of collusion. Okay, okay, that's what we need to take the meeting. Okay, no, that's what Mueller—he spent two years investigating it and found no collusion. Look, so my point is—again, we're getting off on a rabbit hole here—but my point was when, when you as a candidate lose an election, you have to take responsibility for that. That was not done in 2016; it was not done certainly in 2020 by Trump. It is the problem with both our political parties that they would rather invent conspiracy theories and lies than acknowledge why people are rejecting them. Yeah, I agree with this. I, I would say this, but that is not the point, David. You are right. Okay, somewhere along the way, we got stuck worrying about the pronouns that we use and which bathrooms should be or should not be transgendered while the American middle class was completely gutted from pillar to post. That is what's created the boundary conditions for this. Every single time there's been an insurrection or an uprising or a revolution in America, it has never been about ideology; it has always been about economics—always—and economics is the tip of the spear in this country, whether we like it or not. It started with the Boston Tea Party; you know, it continued through the Civil War; it has always been about that topic. So we all let it happen; we all have a responsibility to fix it. That, though, is a topic I think for another day, because that's the grand arc of what we need to do in our generation and fix this inequality gap. Meanwhile, we do have this tactical issue, which is you have the leader of the free world, in my opinion, and I think in a lot of reasonable-minded people's opinion, instigating essentially at a minimum a riot, and at the maximum some form of like treason—idiotic form of—I don't—I mean, the problem is it's just—it is just—it's just—it's incomprehensible what it is.

I've fallen on the side that we need to prosecute him. Now, I was, I was 50-50 on this, but I'll tell you what's tipped me over is, you know, if we don't prosecute him, there's this sort of like unfairness to it. I think that's a very good point you made, Chamoth, but I also think that he is—go—we need to wake people up from this fog they've been in—to Freiburg—and I don't—I think we have to free the, the Republican party to get back to some more version that is reasonable. Like you are—Sacks—I would rather see the party—the Republican party—has—is—is already rejecting Trump. So just look at what's happened in the last 24 to 48 hours, even after this storming of the Capitol. Okay, you had Republicans who, who were just hours before objecting to the electors—they basically were saying, "No, I've changed my mind"—who is that—Lindsey Graham—but not Ted Cruz—not that other Kelly—there are a few other ones who switched sides. Uh, you had ex—you had excellent speeches by Lindsey Graham and then Romney. I agree with that; they spoke very, very eloquently. And just today, Elaine Chao resigned as Secretary of Transportation. I think that's mostly significant. She's—David—she's a missionary party. Yeah, look, I think, I think after Georgia, the Republican party was already blamed Trump for that, and now after the storming of the Capitol, they're ready to be done with him. This idea that you need to prosecute Trump to somehow end his, end his relation with the Republican party, I think it will just backfire. Um, I don't think that's what the point is. I think the point is that nobody is above the law, and when you, when you lead—you know what—look, the thing with the people that attended this rally is, in any other situation—and Jason, you said it earlier—these are our veterans; these are the people that are like working good jobs; they're trying to just keep America going; they've always believed in American exceptionalism. There was nothing wrong with that; it was just perverted by this [ __ ] scumbag. Yep, he is a complete piece of [ __ ] [ __ ] scumbag; he's garbage. And I think that's why you have to prosecute him; I think you have to make an example of him. I know that they—with Nixon—they took a different approach, but I just think he's too dangerous to leave unprosecuted because every time he has some bad behavior—whether it was the Ukraine—whether it's, you know, Russian—we can debate what level they wanted to engage with the Russians—or, you know, in the case of this uh, riotous behavior, you know, I think he's not gonna stop. That's the thing that I fear is I don't think he's gonna—I would rather—I would rather take every single person arrested and give them zero days in jail and add it all up and give it to Trump. Well, I, I wouldn't—I mean, I, I agree with you to, to some degree that they were victims of this two-month propaganda campaign to convince uh, the right that this election was stolen. I think a lot of those people who are storming the Capitol—they were there not to steal an election because they were—thought they were there to prevent the stealing election. And so yes, they, they have been duped by a lot of people, including, you know, leading with, with Trump, but including a lot of other people who should have known better. Uh, but, but that being said, they did make the decision to hop the barricades, smash the windows, go into the Capitol. There's some personal responsibility—absolutely.

Yeah, we can't—that's the tragedy of this woman—like—but let's talk about this woman for a second, and I think it's important to look at this specific case. This is a person who's a veteran, and she was inside the halls already and was trying to breach another area, and she was just shot dead by Secret Service. They might have been protecting the VP; they might have been protecting Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell; who knows. Um, but they shot her dead. Yeah, I saw it on video; I mean, it's on video; it's unbelievable. And it—I mean, coming from a law enforcement family, I can tell you that's a clean shooting. If she was breaching and they told her, "Do not come in here; we're going to shoot you," and they were protected—the Secret Service is protecting an asset; they're allowed to shoot you—like you can't jump that—and she's a military vet; she's from the Air Force. I mean, what is in her mind? How wound up was she by Trump and by this propaganda that when they told her, "Do not breach the second door"—inside, by the way—you just said the key word—you cannot be spun up in all of this by Giuliani; he's a [ __ ] [ __ ]—you know, he can barely like not wet his pants—yeah, you know, you're not going to get spun up by Sidney Powell. The only person that can really catalyze this is the person that has the respect that comes with sitting in the seat that's called the presidency of the United States, and he's the only one—he's the only one—we all know this because if Giuliani was running this rally and said, "Let's go storm the Capitol," nobody would have done it. We all know this—look—yeah.

What do you think about this woman, David? Like, think about the psychology of this person for a second—the humanity of it. You know, I'll say something—I think um, man, politics is um, isn't the problem; it's kind of a manifestation of the problem. If you think about how crazy it is that I posted a tweet about this the other day because I've been thinking about it a lot—I think it's so crazy that you can show people a TV ad or a Facebook ad and get them to change their mind on what to vote—like—um, people are kind of shown stuff, and the bigger problem is this kind of reductionism that's um, that's kind of enveloped all of this. You know, if you go back a hundred years, I guarantee you people were having deeper, more civil conversations about differences of opinion and ways to govern and um, and, and laws uh, to govern us. And I think like, you know, it's so—

It's easy to put a 30-second, kind of reductionist ad in front of someone, uh, incite their kind of amygdala to respond and change their mind about something, or push them in some direction. And I think that's the bigger issue with, like, what's been going on is people are kind of being pushed all the way to one side or pushed all the way to the other side, um, through this, you know, this very kind of simple process. There is no dialogue to decide what candidate to vote for, or dialogue to decide, um, what path to take. It's it's all insidious, like "lock his ass up," you know, "kill them"—like everything has become extremely binary, um, and the gray scale is really the reality. And unfortunately, we've kind of really hurt ourselves in this tribalism over objectivism kind of approach to how we, uh, talk as a society and how we debate. As a result, people are pushed over the edge, and I think this is a manifestation of that broader problem, which I think is probably linked to the internet and short attention spans. Well, this is going also why, uh, I think the GOP has just been completely, you know—but it's not just the GOP—dominated now, that what I'm saying, they're all—they—which I think is a good segue into Georgia—but you can share the same about AOC. And you could say that AOC is doing the same to the Democratic Party, and they're they're, you know, equally frustrated with this extremist point of view, or Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, and they're, you know, none of them got the nomination, though, right? None of—but they could have, and they were close. And it was like, "Hey, look, give everyone a million dollars," okay, great, like, and "tax the rich 90," great, like it's easy to say. And and my point is, by the way, I think the root of a lot of this is, um, is people are programmed to be unhappy, right? That's how you instigate people to take action. The the bottom 10 percent of Americans make more money and have a better position in life than the top 10 percent of Kenyans, and it's an incredible statistic if you think about it. Go to dollarstreak.org or dollarspeak.com, and you can actually play around and see what different people live like around the world. Yet, in the US, we are told at every strata, whether you're wealthy or or not wealthy relative to others in the United States, that you should be better off. And it is, um, you know, happiness is the difference between expectation and outcome, and everyone's been set an expectation beyond what they currently have. And as a result, through programmatic work that is done on people in the United States, we are being told, "You should be unhappy," oh, and by the way, here's the short-term solution to resolve it, and it's driving an incredible amount of, um, of behavioral shift, and it really threatens democracy, as we saw this week. And you guys will remember my my big loser for the political loser for 2020 was the American, uh, democratic institution, and I think we saw that, uh, this week on the on the heels of that. Can I ask you guys what you think of this? Basically, Pelosi has told Pence you have to invoke the 25th Amendment or they're going to take up impeachment. What do you guys think about that?

I think it's the right thing to do. How do you—I think they have to be—there has to be a backstop against you—what do you mean? You could do something crazy—you could still—well, here's the thing, I I I tweeted at Free Bahar about this: if you are impeached, uh, successfully, you can't run again, um, so I think that this is a, um, a way to put the nail in the coffin of Trump even having the ability to run in 2024, which I think is why the Democrats are on the right side of history on this one. That's my personality, maybe. They sign a non-prosecution agreement with him if he resigns, and that that's kind of the final, you know, I mean, that's what I would like to see. But Jason, why can't you trust voters to make the right decision in 2024? I I um, do I trust voters? I it's not about trusting the voters; it's more about do I think there should be ramifications for somebody's behavior? That's that's my fear is that if he keeps getting away with stuff, he could do something even more violent or dangerous, as Chamod said earlier. It's a miracle that a hundred people weren't shot dead and this wasn't a firefight. I mean, if somebody takes out a gun at any moment during that and people start shooting, we could have hundreds of people, Americans, dead, not just the four who died. And I think Trump is absolutely capable of doing something in the last 14 days. If he did this 15 days out, why wouldn't he do something else seven days out or three days out? He's a maniac. I mean, this is insane, deranged, criminal, lunatic behavior. It's completely possible that he could do something more dangerous in the last 14 days. I know that that sounds crazy, but look at what we saw yesterday. I think I I think there is like a white-knuckle element to the next two weeks. I think we're all kind of white-knuckling it to, you know, to see what's gonna happen. Uh, we have 300 hours to go till Biden has sworn in, and I've got to admit, like, I I'm counting down the hours, you know. It's too insane. Nobody wants—everything—everybody's feeling—everybody's feeling that, um, that being said, I I just think that I'm more on on Fr Freeberg's point of view on this: that we have this insane level of partisan warfare in the US, it's gone to like a whole another level, and I just—and and and Trump has definitely made it worse, and the storming of the Capitol is the, you know, is the zenith of it, it's the apex. But look, the other side's been doing it too. And the question is just how we de-escalate this insane—person in the de-escalation—Chamath isn't Biden like being elected? I think it is. Yeah, I think it is. It's like we picked the most boring candidate who has the most milk-toast, middle-of-the-road approach, who who Lindsey Graham likes and who travels the world with—I mean, Lady G loves him. Well, to the extent that Biden has a mandate, this is it. I mean, and he talked about it in his victory speech that night, which was which was was quite good. It's about bringing people together, um. Now, look, I mean, the the the issue—one of the issues—is you can't ignore the fact that Democrats for the last four years have waged this insane partisan war against Trump. I mean, let's not even go into the merits, but you had this two-year Mueller witch-hunt, you then had this, uh, impeachment, uh, you know, crusade, which, look, if there was a lot of validity to the impeachment, why wasn't it used as a campaign issue last year? I just think everybody knows—let me ask you a question—everybody knows that was hyper-partisan, and and my point is that yeah, look, I mean, I think it's a good thing if Biden can de-escalate things, that that is that is, I think, why he won the election is that he was seen as more of a sane alternative. Let me ask you a question, Saks: do you think it would have been—do you think if Trump had been impeached for the Ukraine, uh, interference and Pence had taken over, we would not have seen what we were seeing yesterday, and the country would have been further along to healing? Uh, so you know—no, I mean, Pence would not have invited or asked all of his supporters to come to the Capitol to oppose the accounting—the the counting of the electors. I look, that was a unique Trump thing, for you know, he could not accept the loss and had to keep pushing and pushing and pushing on this idea that he that the election was stolen. Okay, so it would have been a good idea? No, no, it wouldn't. No, it wouldn't. Because if you had—if you had impeached Trump—no, well, first of all, he was impeached, okay? But if you had voted for—victim—if you had removed him from office, the Senate had voted to convict over a phone call, okay? And look, I'm not defending the phone call; I'm not saying the phone call was perfect, okay? I know Trump says it was perfect; it was not a perfect phone call, but you can't remove a sitting president for that, okay? Look, it was unseemly or whatever—I think we all know what he was trying to do in that phone call, but you can't remove a sitting president over that. That was hyper-partisan, and so no, the country would be much further apart today if you had done that. And and so the question now is, well, how do you bring it back together? And I think I understand where where where Tamatha's coming from. I think that Trump deserves morally—culpably—uh, I think he he has a repudiation—some repudiation—but but I don't believe in locking him up or or prosecuting him. That's only going to make things much more—crime for this crime—we we don't even know what else is out there. I mean, I think yeah, there's other issues out there. Let's talk about Georgia. Let's let's—I think we've nailed the Trump—I mean, unless anybody really feels like continuing to talk—Stacy Abrams is a genius. I mean, my gosh, she should be in charge of everything. Yeah, can we get her on the vaccine rollout? Well, Trump—that's incredible. It's incredible. Stacy Abbas did an incredible job on the Democratic side mobilizing turnout, um, but the reason why the Republicans lost Georgia is frankly Trump. I mean, Trump cost them Georgia two months ago. Purdue beat Ossoff in that election—he won—he won—he won—and and he's beaten him before. I think he is, uh, I mean, he's not the most wonderful candidate, but I think he is a better candidate, and he lost because of these antics over the last two months, culminating in that insane phone call that Trump had with the Georgia securities—we talked about—rather—right? I mean, should he get you to fight for that? Saks, can't you just find me 11,000 votes? Look, I I just think, you know, which one is more prosecutable: sending people to the Capitol or asking them and begging them to find him 11,000 votes? Which one is more prosecutable to you, Saks, since you're gonna be framing us? Let's wait—Jason, hold on—let's let's move on—let's move away from the whole Trump goes to jail for a second. I just wanna—I think it's important to talk about Georgia because I think David you're going to make a point. Yeah, exactly. I mean, look, I think we're getting hung up too much on the legalities, and let's just talk about what's right and wrong, you know, which we is what we can agree on and let you know lawyers and prosecutors figure out the legalities. Um, Ramesh Panuru from National View had a great quote about Georgia: he said that Purdue and Loeffler could have survived any two of these three being unimpressive candidates: Georgia shifting purple and Trump being a maniac. And unfortunately, you had three out of three, and that's why they lost. If—uh—it was a great—is a great quote, uh, you know, you had the Raffensperger call—"Can't you just find the 11,000 votes?" The day before the election or two days for the election. I mean, that had to push swing voters and undecideds to the Democrats. And the other thing is that Purdue and Loeffler weren't able to make the best argument that they had, which is: if you vote for us, you end up with split—you you prevent the Democrats from having all the power in Washington. So unless you want to give all the power in Washington to a single party, you need to vote for us. That was the best argument for voting for them because there's a lot of people in this country who believe in splitting their ticket because they don't trust either party, which is kind of where I'm at, um, but they were unable to make that argument effectively because Trump was still hanging on to the idea that he was going to be president. No, I think David, I honestly I think this comes down to the intelligence of the candidates. Kelly Loeffler is a [ __ ], she's an idiot. David Purdue's a good old boy—he's an idiot. They're just stupid. This actually speaks to a bigger problem, which is the Republicans could do so much better if they could actually find younger, more vibrant, intelligent people, and instead they find these [ __ ] morons. I don't know where they find them, but you know, they pulled Kelly Loeffler out of some like backstage Dallas beauty pageant and just kind of like fluffed her up and tried to get her to run. She's a [ __ ], Loeffler. Loeffler was a mistake—Loeffler wasn't a mistake—[ __ ] idiot. Did you read the story about her with the WNBA? But I mean, George—I mean, it's unbelievable. Georgia Georgia is full of so many incredible politicians, and they found that idiot. That that was a huge mistake. If they just voted—or—yeah, I mean, the governor made a huge mistake—they they appointed her to the last two months. Uh, I so I agree that she's a particularly weak candidate, but the Republicans only needed one of these two elections, and Purdue had beaten Ossoff before. I agree with you—he's not necessarily the greatest candidate of all time, but he has proved better than Ossoff in the past, including November. And the reason why he lost two months later is because what's transpired in the last two months: Biden has acted presidential, and Trump has done what he's done, and that that made all the difference. And and that, by the way, is why you're seeing the Republicans breaking from Trump. They were already on their way to breaking with him, and then you had this—David—story of the Capitol. What are the implications for Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz? I I think I think this was a blow to them because I think that what they were doing in terms of, uh, opposing the the the electors, uh, everybody knew it was sort of cynical and theater—it was theater—it was performative theater designed to curry favor with Trump so that he might endorse them in 2024 for the nomination, and it was it was it was opportunistic, and the problem is it backfired horribly, and you know, people now see it for what it was. And so yeah, I think it's gonna ultimately—they tried to do something opportunistic that they thought would help them politically, and I think it's gonna hurt them. But wait, I have to ask you guys: do you guys know the backstory of Loeffler and the Atlanta Dream, the WNBA team? It's tears, honestly, Jason. I'm going to get so angry because she is just a complete piece of [ __ ]. Please don't—I I'm—you can bring it up—I I don't think Saks and Friberg are aware of this, but I think she's a complete piece of [ __ ]. She basically tells the story—it's basically she was anti-BLM, and she was writing letters to the NBA—WNBA—to not allow the players to to be vocal about Black Lives Matter with the, you know, after the killing of—the murder of George Floyd. And uh, so what the team did—if you look at that story—is they backed Warnock, uh, they got on the call with him, they refused to say her name, and uh, they rallied the support of Warnock, uh, who ultimately, uh, beat her, and they refused to say her name I just ever again. If you—the players are saying—if you want to see courage, the women that play in the WNBA are some of the most incredible people. Yes, these these are women that have basically stopped their athletic career, stopped fame, you know, stopped all of the attention, in some cases stopped fortunes, to work on behalf of criminal justice reform, to basically overturn, you know, uh, unjust convictions. These women are incredible, and then to be suppressed—to be able to say what was on their mind—Kelly Loeffler is a piece of [ __ ], and they basically wore these "Vote Warnock" t-shirts every day at every game. I mean, imagine. And then now they're I think going to be forced to go to those women. Yeah, I give them—Sue Bird, I think is the uh, was the leader of the whole movement. Yeah, bravo to her. All right, moving on from politics, I think we have to talk, Freeberg, about the deployment of the vaccine, um, I I did a quick poll on Twitter and Twitter and the American people have asked that Friedberg—the Queen of Quinoa—be responsible for the vaccine distribution going forward. Really? I'm in. Let's do it. Uh, I would—what did you—I would get that vaccine into everyone's arms in 75 days. I mean, it was—you would be such a stone-cold—yeah, that would be amazing. Yeah, I don't know—Free Freebird, what would you do differently? And maybe you could describe—you know, we were supposed to be at a million a day; we're at 350, trending towards 400. We did 1.5 million in 72 hours, according to Fauci at one point, uh, right after the new year. So we're kind of like halfway where we need to be. What would you do differently? Because the rollout seems—we have more than 50 percent are on the shelves still—in arms—it is a wartime scenario. When war is happening, you don't go home at 5:00 p.m. and wake up at 9:00 a.m. and clock out for an hour for lunch, and you know, you don't uh, "Oh well, don't run too fast, you know, you might trip." You don't do any of that. We've created incredible disincentives in the system by—in fact, Cuomo put out a million-dollar fine if uh, if you get your vaccine out of line. I mean, think about the disincentive that creates. Now people are more scared about giving the vaccine to the wrong person than they are incentivized to give the vaccine to the right person. And the reality is this is a group game; this isn't an individual game. It's not about who gets vaccinated first and you'll live and you'll die. We all need to get vaccinated as a group so that we all have immunity so that this virus stops spreading. It doesn't matter if you're individually vaccinated; it matters if we're all vaccinated because that's the only way we're all going to get out of the economic slump that is truly damaging this country right now. And so the first step is create a military-style operation: figure out how many feet on the ground—you know, it's all a rate-based system, right?—how many are you running per day, and then how do you achieve that objective? And over time, you have your target rate per day, you would scale it up over 75 days or whatever your rollout time frame needs to be, and you would say, "This is how we're going to get there. We need this number of people giving shots, this many minutes apart," and then you go figure out where you're going to give the shots and who's going to give them—get the vaccines to where they need to get to—take over all the gymnasiums and all the stadiums and all the open sports facilities around the country. People can drive up, stand in line, get a freaking shot. And 65-year-olds get priority for the first 30 days, and then after 30 days your 65-and-over crowd loses their priority, and it's open season for who wants to get a shot. You stand in line, you get a shot. Walk in, you got 3.8 million nurses in the United States; you go contract 500,000 of them, you give them a huge friggin one-time bonus to come and run this program. You run 24-hour shifts in the gymnasiums around the country; people come in, they get shots, they get out. Takes three minutes. If you're feeling weird, if you have risk of allergies, you go sit in the other room, you wait for two hours, and there's a bunch of roaming nurses keep an eye on you, and you get this thing done. That's it. This is not that complicated, and we can leverage the National Guard to create the infrastructure to support these lines and get these things done. We can go recruit—there are plenty of nurses associations—you can go—people can work overnight shifts and get paid triple overtime, get extra bonuses for doing this—is a great way to kind of create an economic stimulus around this. We can get this entire country vaccinated in 90 days, and the way that uh, Israel is doing it is a great model, you know, when they run out—describe that. Yeah, so at the end of the day, if uh, you know, when you open—when you take these things out of deep freeze, you're at risk of them spoiling at that point because the mRNA is very um, you know, can break, and so it needs to be really cold, and then you gotta—

Give the vaccine very quickly; otherwise, the mRNA can degrade, and it's not effective. And you have to defrost it in order to give it; yes, you defrost it, then it's sitting there. Now you got to give it within a couple of hours. And if you've got extra, it's complicated. What they're doing in Israel is they're looking outside; they grab the pizza guy that's on the bicycle truck, on the bicycle cruising by. They're like, "Do you want a shot? Come on in." They give them a shot; they grab the next guy. You do not need to track everyone that gets a shot. You do not need everyone to show their ID to get a shot. You do not need to X, Y, and Z—all the disincentives that create friction in the system of rolling out the vaccine need to be completely eliminated. There's no qualifying criteria except maybe being 65 and over for the first 30 days. And we've prioritized politics, um, over health and safety. We have made it the case that the teachers should get the shot first because the teachers' unions created an uproar in California and said they're not going to go to work unless they do. So now the teachers are going to get it, and the essential workers are going to get it, which are people that are working in stores and warehouses and other stuff. And meanwhile, the people that can actually die from this—15% likelihood of death if you're over 85—are not getting it because they're not technically an essential worker. So the prioritization, where we've tried to create these artificial, politically motivated systems for defining who gets the vaccine and who doesn't, is absolutely killing us, and literally killing us. 4,000 people died yesterday in the United States. And so the system has [ __ ] up the incentives. We've—and don't bleep that out because that's exactly what it is—the disincentives we've created are destroying, um, the rollout, um, the uh, the governor's getting involved in creating models of prioritization that are politically motivated are killing us, and and we should centrally plan this thing. Ward Production Act, make a [ __ ] ton of the stuff, grab it all, get a hundred million doses distributed into gymnasiums around the country. Get the nurses in there, get the National Guard. It should have been federal; I mean, that's the key. This should have been a federal effort. Central planning is sometimes needed to get [ __ ] done. We did it with the War Production Board during World War II; we did it with the Manhattan Project. We—there have been countless examples where we've had to centralize planning for a massive short-term event, and this is one of those events. And this needs to be, um, prioritized and organized centrally, and it needs to have the right-minded people on this—not kind of people that are, you know, political operatives, and not people that are working nine-to-five. Um, well, the good news is this is this is a war, and we need to go win the [ __ ] war. I mean, Trump—Trump has time; he said he's at Camp David this weekend, so I think he can put some attention to it. Saks, can I ask a question? Freeburg, so you know, uh, what do you think about just using markets to distribute the vaccine?

It's a great idea. I think, you know, you have to get the incentive such that kind-based systems are the incentive right, because the objective here is to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible. So take that being your objective, and then figure out, look, you guys are going to get a thousand dollars per person vaccinated in the first 15 days, and then you're going to get 500, and then, you know, whatever the transition is, and then anyone can sign up to buy doses at a at a cost, so they they have skin in the game, right? That's an alternative. So let Walgreens and CVS buy 50 million doses, and then they're incentivized to get them rolled out as quickly as possible. Let them do the work. Sure, um, and frankly, if a few people have anaphylactic reactions across the country, that's just the reality in war; you have some casualties. This can't be perfect; it has to be good enough to win the war. Um, well, by the way, when somebody goes into anaphylactic shock, just to clarify that—yeah, you get an Epi shot; it's not fatal if you have an epipen. That's right. And so, um, so you know, when you get a uh, when you get a um, uh, you know, a vaccine, if you get one of these vaccines, 40 to 60 percent of people are gonna have some sort of reaction. You can have a fever because these are—these produce a ton of proteins in your body relative to what you would normally, you know, kind of experience with it with a dead vaccine. There's a lot of vaccines in your body; there's a lot of protein in your body. Your body reacts to get rid of that protein; you produce all these antibodies very quickly, so you end up having a fever; you end up having some some allergic response or headaches or flushing or whatever. So everyone's going to—a lot of people are going to have some sort of thing. So one of the concerns is they want to have nurses available, and they want to have this feel like a controlled medical environment. But again, the reality is we have to sack it up; we have to accept the fact that people are going to be uncomfortable. It is not going to be an easy, simple vaccine like you get the flu vaccine at Walgreens; it's going to be a little bit uncomfortable. You may not have five or six nurses surrounding you and getting all the TLC that Americans have become used to getting every time we, you know, brush our freaking teeth. And uh, and we're gonna have some people going into anaphylactic shock, and they're gonna get epipen shots, and and you know, um, and we shouldn't be charging 1500 for epipen shots; that's another, you know, important point. But I think the market-based model could work as well. So hasn't Israel done this right? I mean, Israel—they moved the old people to the front of the line, but anybody can get in line if they've got extra doses that day; they just keep sticking people; they keep jabbing people until they run out all day long till they run out. That's right. And so they're probably at 20% of the population by now. Yeah, so I I'm sure we all agree with everything you're saying; it speaks to an enormous amount of political incompetence. I mean, it's really, really just unbelievable why we just don't have smarter people in charge of these things. But Zach, I just want to ask you because, you know, there is the conservative argument on this, which is, um, you know, states—the federal government shouldn't be doing everything, and states need to kind of manage their populace and manage, you know, what what goes on locally. You know, what is the conservative—I'm not asking you this, and I'm not attacking you; I'm just asking like, what is the conservative argument for not doing central planning and central, um, organization around vaccine distribution and delegating it to states, and you know, are are there, you know, do you think that there's a case against, um, you know, for that that's pretty strong within the Republican party and within kind of conservative rights? I I I think if there's a conservative point of view on this, it would just be that let markets distribute the vaccine; they'll do a much better job. I don't, you know, I think whether it's federal or state, the question is who's more incompetent, and I'm not really sure, um, I mean, I I think the problem right now is that when you make vaccine distribution fundamentally political, then the debate becomes about exactly who's—what is your position going to be exactly in line as opposed to just running the most number of people through the process as quickly as possible. We're getting ourselves so twisted up in knots over making sure that the exact right person is in line that we're having, you know, vaccine go to waste. Yeah, just to put that in context: 21 million-plus doses have been distributed in the United States; 5.9 have made their way into people's arms. In other words, there are 15 million—over 75 percent of doses have not gone in people's arms. And in California, we have distributed 5.85% of the population's vaccines, but we've only put 1.3 in people's arms. So we are literally uh, 4x where we should be; we're at 25% of where we should be. It is absolutely unbelievable that this is happening. And if the government—if the government's—if the government stopped trying to do anything except, you know, look, it did Operation Warp Speed; that actually did help get vaccines done faster. But if you just—that was just money to your point, Saks. All they did was create a market where they basically pre-bought all the vaccines whether or not they were going to work and then funded the market to go and produce them early; that's all that it was. So to your point, that Operation Warp Speed—for everyone thinking it's a massive centrally controlled effort—it was a market-based incentive; they put—it wasn't the Manhattan Project, is what you're saying. They put up a couple of millions—yeah, they put up a couple billion dollars and said to all these pharma companies, "Go produce the vaccine, and if it works, we'll buy them; if it doesn't work, throw them away, but let's get production going," and that was it. Can I can I use this as a segue? Like, I mean, what we're seeing is sort of—we have a bunch of elected officials; we give them, you know, an enormous amount of responsibility; they also get this implied power, and then you just—you see sometimes in these acute moments they're totally derelict. Then I just want to move off of vaccines for a second. Then you get an elected official who is not acutely incompetent, but it seems broadly, grossly, and consistently incompetent, and I want to talk about Chesa Boudin. And I I want to use Saks's article, which, to be very honest, David, was probably one of the most incredibly well-written things—well done—you have ever created. I don't know, Jason, do we have show notes? Can we put it in? We'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, we'll put a link in the show notes. Um, it is so [ __ ] good what you wrote. If everybody—folks who are listening—have a chance to read David's killer D.A., the killer D.A., um, but it basically, you know, starts with a profile of this young woman—seemed like an incredible woman—that was killed by this uh, drunk driver, uh, but anyways, David, do you want to talk about it?

Yeah, I mean, so for the last—with, let's say, for the last couple of months, I've been following the San Francisco uh, a couple of San Francisco Police Department accounts on Twitter, and I was noticing these extraordinary tweets, which are getting retweeted a lot about how they kept uh, arresting and then having to let go of all these criminals who are committing burglaries and other crimes. And you could see the frustration of the police department boiling off these tweets. And you know, basically, they are sub-tweeting this new district attorney that we've had, Chesa Boudin, who was elected—he's been in office about a year; he's elected the end of 2019. And so I started doing a little bit of research, and then we had this horrible New Year's Eve killing of this, you know, uh, wonderful young woman, uh, Hannah Abe, who came to America from Japan for college and stayed here for work. She was just 27 years old; she gets killed by uh, by by a a criminal—someone who was released—who was paroled by Chesa Boudin uh, back in April. He had been in jail for armed robbery; Chase—uh, released him as part of a plea bargain, and then he was arrested five more times for stealing cars and other crimes, most recently two weeks ago, and the D.A. refused to press charges, and that that's the reason he was out on New Year's Eve. He stole a car, and then there was this hit-and-run where he killed Hannah and another woman. And so, you know, I had already been noticing this issue, and so I started doing some some research, and I have a research assistant helping me with this; it's the only way I could put something like this together. And we went pretty deep, and we realized that the death of of Hannah wasn't just an accident or an act of negligence by this D.A.; it was part of an overall philosophy of decarceration that he has, but he—his his background is very interesting. He was a child of parents who were in the Weather Underground, who when he was just a baby committed armed robbery and were part of the murder—which is—David—yeah, David, say the words: they were domestic terrorists. Yeah, they were—they were—that's right; they were domestic terrorists. Uh, they participated in an armed robbery against the Brink's truck, which is—these were domestic terrorists that were competent when compared to what we saw yesterday in the capital. Like, these are highly capable domestic terrorists. To be clear—I don't know—I don't know how capable they were. Their their robbery results in the death of two police officers and a Brink's guard, and they were put in prison. His mother spent 20 years in prison; she's now released. Her—his father is still in prison uh, for almost 40—40 years, and he's described in interviews how his earliest memories are visiting his parents in prison and how this shaped his entire political outlook. And he became a public defender, which I think was a pretty good place for him. I think if I were an indigent, you know, criminal defendant, I would want someone like Chesa Boudin on my side. And but the problem is he ran for district attorney, and he simply doesn't believe in prosecuting huge numbers of crimes, uh, you know, certainly property crimes, burglary, shoplifting, vandalism, and those crimes have absolutely spiked in the city. You know, a 45% increase in burglaries in one year, 35% increase in stolen cars, 30% increase in homicides. Crimes are through the roof because he simply doesn't believe in putting people in jail. Well, you know, can I just say this? Can I tell you—sorry—let me just uh, point out there's a there's a little bit of a history to um, to this notion that D.A.'s should change the criminal justice system. There's a TED Talk uh, by a guy named Adam Foss. I don't know if you've seen it or if any of you guys have watched it. I I I was at the TED Conference the year that he spoke, but this guy, um, basically thought, you know, he made the case that it is the role and the opportunity for the district attorney, for the prosecutor, to change the criminal justice system from the prosecutorial side—that you can um, you know, kind of demotivate jail and and and other kind of um, you know, mechanisms of punishment uh, and and push for uh, for a rehabilitation program as an alternative, and that the district attorneys can take this this roll on of changing the criminal justice system. And it created a little bit of a mini movement, and there was a lot of attention and follow-up after he gave his TED Talk. And I think San Francisco, in large part, picked up on the uh, the momentum coming out of this and other similar sort of stories about the D.A. can really change the criminal justice system, and Chesa Boudin really kind of capitalized on it. In principle, a lot of people are motivated from a good place when they elected him, which is—it is unfortunate—a lot of people get trapped in a life of crime, and the fact that they're in and out of prison is a result of the fact that they're put into the criminal justice system in the first place, and parole is really harsh on people, and all these other reasons why people's lives are ruined for simple mistakes. And if they get an opportunity in life, they can fix themselves, and they can come out um, in a better place. So there is a bit of an origin story; it's not just like San Francisco said, "Let's get an anarchist to be D.A. and destroy the world and kill us all." Like, I think it came from a good and true place where this all kind of originated, but obviously the experiment has gone severely awry in San Francisco, and his particular methods uh, and his particular actions have certainly caused far more harm than anyone has seen any good. As that's what we pointed out—they've started a recall effort for him, too. Well, I think that I think the danger is not that you have um, an enlightened political philosophy; I think that's actually quite great—then that we can experiment. I think the danger is both on the left and on the right where people cathartically deal with childhood trauma through their job, and you know, I don't know what Chesa Boudin has gone through, and I feel very bad that he had an incredibly hard life, um, or complicated—or maybe not; I don't even know, but I wouldn't want to know that he's trying to deal with his own experiences through his job because that's not his job. Meaning, you know, you don't want an activist D.A.; I think you want a D.A. that's enforcing the laws, and what you do want is you want to elect politicians who change the laws to reflect our values. Yeah, that would be a better through line, I think, and and really, I mean, if you look at what's happening in San Francisco, I think we've conflated income inequality—which people in San Francisco are very tuned into—with essentially junkies—people who are addicted to incredibly hardcore drugs that are very hard to get off of—and we've had more deaths from overdoses of fentanyl than we've had from COVID by a magnitude of four or five. I mean, it is bedlam on the streets of San Francisco. And if you don't enforce a basic rule of law, what happens is the price of drugs gets cheaper, more available, more people try them, more people get addicted, and then more people come from other places because they know you have the lowest price on drugs, and the price of drugs is inversely correlated with prosecution of drug crimes—so prosecution of crime. So this is why San Francisco is spiraling, and most drugs are purchased from criminal funds, so, you know, criminal activity goes up to fund the drug purchasing, so that that's the vicious cycle that's driving San Francisco. And there's a recall going on, and then in related news, Gavin Newsom is now up to a million signatures in his recall, which I think is two-thirds of the way there. Yeah, they have until mid- or late February; they're going to get the votes. And I think I think the question—you know, Friedrich and I talked about this just on a phone call; he and I caught up a couple days ago—I think it is time, guys, for us to find an incredibly centrist, thoughtful candidate and put them into the recall race um, against uh, Newsom. Burke had the best idea, which was Kim Kardashian, which I think is incredible because she is very smart, she's very likable, she's got enormous distribution, she's like uh, she's about to become a lawyer—you know, that'll be the amazing—the best platform for Kardashian to run for president. Look, it's pretty clear, you know, recognition, influence, fame is what gets people elected, you know, not the best policy and not the greatest experience. From Jesse Ventura to Arnold Schwarzenegger to Donald Trump, Robert—Ronald Reagan—I mean, these are celebrities who—I would argue in the case of Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or maybe even Donald Trump as well—their celebrity was kind of, you know, it had hit its its its media-driven apex, and and this was a second act. And you know, perhaps someone like that is a great fit here. Uh, Kim Kardashian really fits the bill, but um, uh, you know, I—that's just a shot in the dark, but I do think someone like that needs to go up because if you put a politician up again, it's another one of these rolling events, and for uh, you know, for the populist to kind of really find appeal, it has to be a recognized person—you know, broadly recognized and liked person. Um, GovernorJason.com—I'm not ready to run for political office; I'm 50, and when I'm 60, I would consider it actually, but not right now. I wonder what I've got to hop to. I think we all got to hop, but I was going to say one thing, which is the beginning of today's podcast was probably the punchiest it's ever been, and I think it just speaks to the fact that there was so—the bar was so high for Trump to have done something that would have actually gotten us to actually argue and interrupt each other, you know, because we've been so incredibly like loving and protective of each other for four years on this topic, but it literally took an armed insurrection for us to finalize the—these—well, I mean, I think it's good for people to see Saks maybe and I or Chamath and Saks or whoever disagree on some of these cases or Friberg, you…

Know doesn't believe in prosecuting Trump. I think we actually had a split ticket there, where Saxon Freeberg felt like we shouldn't prosecute Trump, and Chamath and I were in the prosecute Trump one. But I think we're all struggling with these issues; all Americans are struggling with these issues of how do you deal with a black swan event. I think that's what's so unique about Trump, is—and I think David, you could speak to this—is I don't think the system was designed for his level of crazy. Right? Like our system is based on norms and traditions and trust, just like venture investing is. And we see this in venture investing; some founder goes off the jumps the fence, and all of a sudden, you know, yeah, I mean, we still—I would say our system performed pretty well in terms of being stress-tested. And well, look, we still got two more weeks. You know, I think we're all kind of—we're all kind of white-knuckling it right now.

Yeah.

Yeah. Hopefully nothing else happens. But, but look, if—if Trump's goal was a coup, you know, I think it's a strong word, but if it—like, it totally failed. I mean, he didn't come close to—no, uh—to succeeding in a coup. Um, the opposite, in fact, the opposite. He—again, we talked about how I think his—he destroyed his popularity over the last two months. He—he impacted his earnings by negative two billion dollars.

Yeah. So, uh, but—but—but you know, but to this point about us agreeing or disagreeing, you know, I saw a whole bunch of uh, fans of the pod, like, at mentioning me, saying, "I wonder what Saks is gonna say about this." I don't know what—like, yeah, and I'm kind of like—like, what do they think I'm gonna say? Like they think I'm gonna be supportive of this. I mean, you know, like, I—I—I think somehow, you, Jason, you've programmed the viewers that I—like, I'm somehow like the—the Trump—the Trump guy, uh, you know, because you're always trolling me as the Trump supporter. I mean, I—I would believe that Russia was a hoax, and that would have been treated the same. Climbing up those steps, we all know that's not true. Some of these are self-inflicted wounds—of your own—gonna take some ownership there, boys.

Boys, I gotta hop. Okay, I love you very much. Happy New Year.

Happy New Year. Our best. I will say one thing before we meet next time: I guarantee you some highly unexpected and highly impactful thing will occur. Please know—can we get back to talking about Spax or the Bachelor? We didn't even—even talk about uh, my SPAC today.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, okay. Give it a plug. Go ahead.

And snap. No, I mean, just explain to people. He doesn't need to plug it double today; it's insane. All right, we'll explain why IPOE is merging with Sofi. Um, it's an incredible company led by an incredible CEO, Anthony Noto. Um, you can read a little one-pager on my website, but um, anyways, guys, more importantly, to all the listeners out there, Happy New Year to all of you guys. Let's make 2021 kick ass.

Yep. Um, I love you guys. You—I miss you. I'll see you guys soon. Play poker soon. Oh, look, there's somebody. Yeah, I got it interrupted. I gotta go. All right, we'll see you all. I got introduced next time. Check us out. Young Spielberg, take us out. Young Spielberg to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like—it's like sexual tension that they just—we need to get back. I'm going on.