Censorship always starts by censoring some outrage that everybody agrees should be censored. No one even notices that what's happening is you're handing power to a group of people that they can now use against you in the future. Censorship always starts with something you like, and it ends as something you don't like when it finally gets turned against you.

It [COVID-19 vaccine distribution] is a wartime scenario. When war is happening, you don't go home at 5 PM, and wake up at 9 AM, and clock out for an hour for lunch ... We've created incredible disincentives in the system. In fact, [Andrew] Cuomo put out a million-dollar fine if you get your vaccine out of line. 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.

There's a series of court challenges we can talk about. I think that they're unlikely to prevail—very, very unlikely. I think Joe Biden will be the next president. We can kind of compare this to Bush v. Gore from 2000, and if you want to compare Trump's case to Gore's case, it's weaker in every respect.

This guy [Moncef] Slaoui, who's the head of the Trump administration's effort to produce the vaccine, he actually slowed down the Moderna human trials by about three weeks because they weren't including enough minorities in the trial, and that cost them three weeks. If it weren't for those three weeks, Moderna's vaccine would have happened before Pfizer's, and it would have come out about a week before the election.

We used to pride ourselves on a culture that enabled freedom of speech—that was cherished and heralded; what's cherished and heralded now is a culture that protects people from hearing offensive and scary things that they don't want to hear.

21 million+ [COVID-19 vaccine] doses have been distributed in the United States; 5.9 [million] have made their way into people's arms ... Over 75% 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 ... We're at 25% of where we should be. It is absolutely unbelievable that this is happening.

I don't think you go to school to learn as much as you go to school to socialize; you learn as a byproduct. Everybody socializes; not everybody learns. It's an enormously important & formative experience for a child to be around 15 or 20 other kids and to deal with all the adversity that comes with normal life of a child.

There are a lot of very, very reasonable Republicans and a lot of very reasonable Democrats. The fringes of both parties are functionally mentally retarded.

I don't think we can say we [America] are the superpower anymore and that China is an up-and-coming superpower. It's pretty clear they're an equal superpower ... If we have an edge, it's a very minor one at this point.

I think COVID-19 is going to be a distant memory by next summer. I think we'll have one to two quarters of transition, but I think that once the vaccine's widely available, plus the treatment and testing for the people who slip through the cracks... I tend to think things are going to snap back very fast and COVID-19 will just be this bad memory.

The reason why innovation has happened so fast on the Internet is because of one word: permissionless. Permissionless innovation. Nobody who has an idea for a startup needs to get permission from someone in the government repeatedly. That's really what makes a difference.

Chamath thinks it'll take two years until things get back to normal after COVID-19.

I'm very bullish about the state of entrepreneurship in the US. Just the number of interesting companies doing interesting things and the infrastructure that makes it so easy for founders to get started and create new companies... It's so much easier now to create a company than it was 10 years or 20 years ago. And, of course, it's easy to point to all the ones that don't work... but there are so many more experiments that are happening... I'm very bullish about that part of the American economy.

I think the first thing America has to do is decide whether it still thinks that national greatness is important and whether it wants to compete to be the leading power in the world. Right now, it seems like we're hopelessly divided, and our guns are literally drawn on each other.

There is very much a reasonable narrative, up until the Capitol storming, where the glass was definitely half full, and it could have legitimately been viewed half full, and it was just a matter of opinion because he [Donald Trump] was just such a crazy person and his style was so shitty ... After storming the Capitol, it is very clear, 100% categorically, this guy is just a complete piece of shit.

It does not make sense in the United States of America... that you can buy alcohol and drink yourself into the ground, buy cigarettes and smoke yourself to death, gamble away your money where you're negative EV, or openly do illicit drugs, but you can't participate in a thoughtful trial backed by scientific research.

Sometimes, the founder needs to have the courage to look in the mirror and say 'What I'm doing is not working. I had a plan. I missed the plan by 70%. I'm lighting capital on fire. This is a charity, not a business.' It's best to say it didn't work, shut it down, and move on, and do something else.

You have the leaders of many countries across the world using Twitter as a channel. Do you think they are now going to want to rely on that given that Twitter can censor them at any time? They're going to hand that lever of national power to Jack Dorsey? No way.

One of the things I've urged the company to do over the course of the last several years is parental controls. My kids use TikTok ... What I want to be able to do is set effective time limits ... TikTok has incredible video content in math and science and history. I want to be able to set a slider and say 20% of the videos that get shown over this 1-hour period have to include some of these math and science videos for my 12-year-old.

Should [TikTok] be banned? No, because I believe in a free market. Will it be banned? Yes, because it's the most obvious cultural way to pick a fight with China without actually picking a fight with China ... My advice to my friends who are shareholders... is sell. Sell it; move on.