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as you guys know i get panic attacks at the dentist but she was able to navigate
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me through where i didn't i only sweat through half my shirt you have panic attacks at the dentist no
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but i sweat profusely and i get very nervous why what is that about we all have weaknesses jason
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we all have weaknesses this is my achilles heel my achilles heel is a dentist really yeah i don't like going to the
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dentist either no the dentist really freaks i don't know why it freaks me out sex
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have you thought about i had a really bad experience when i was a kid you know tell us more about your childhood drama
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have you ever seen the movie marathon man it was kind of like that [Music] is it safe is it safe all right here we
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[Music] go [Music] [Music] hey everybody hey everybody welcome again to another episode of the all
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in podcast episode 37 with us today on his noble crusade conquering europe chamath
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pali hapatia calls us from uh a castle somewhere i don't know i can tell by the light switches you're in
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europe and joining us again the two ais ai number one david sachs and ai number two david
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friedberg are here uh and of course i'm j cal do we wanna get right into the show
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or i don't know jeremiah if you want to talk about the the dueling ai's in the
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group chat debating the nature of the pod i mean one guy told the other guy or one robot
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told the other robot to [ __ ] this is what we know it's the singularity but it's when the robots
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are arguing with each other see you don't even know because you don't have
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any emotions you told free bird to [ __ ] off oh that's kind of true alcohol content no no no i just think
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that um we i think the format of the pod is working and i don't think we need to
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turn it on its head that's all i think my so just gonna do this i'm so tired and out of it right now but
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but let's do it um our just for the listeners um benefit on our little group text where we
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do our incredibly well prepped rehearsal for this show by texting each other maybe for four minutes a week but the
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day the night before she told each other for three hours mostly other stuff is covered over the
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group chat but we were um kind of debating maybe throwing in a spin and you know doing a little group q
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and a kind of format sax doesn't like it and we were kind of joking with sax that he
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loves getting his sound bites in and then turning them into little short sound bite video clips with his
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bff henry belcaster and putting him on twitter and promoting him around the internet
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and my point of view was i don't think that this show should be about getting to the sound
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bite that this show should be about something very different which is elevating a conversation
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and creating the context for people to make decisions on their own and that is to give people multiple
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points of view and all of the data and consideration when there's a big topic
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or a big debate underway and it's too easy for us to take a sound bite and then use
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that as the narrative to try and influence people to do things or to have a point of view and i think that is
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largely the problem we've broadly had in the twitter social media era is we are very reductionist we bring things
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down to kind of a one sentence or 140 character statement and then we use that as an emotional
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pivot point for people to get them to go on one side or the other side as opposed to recognizing
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that many of the topics we we address are called that is the way things are done i get it
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and here and here is saks's response that is a valid point freedom however humans all need to be
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led they are sheeple we need to tell the sheeple what to think and to get into office jason i would
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like to cut to uh a segment the new segment that i call chamoth does a dramatic reading
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[Music] so freebird did say this now a dramatic reading from the group chat i will be playing
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all characters starting with myself freeburg free burke rants up to which i say i'm down with that
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david sacks you keep trying to [ __ ] with the format of the show if it ain't broke don't fix it [ __ ] off
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[ __ ] you [ __ ] yourself my response i'm down with that oh no am i going to be able to respond
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here yes okay exactly your defense okay you're running for office we know no no look i think that um the
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the friberg position on many issues often comes down to the idea that this this issue is so complicated it's
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so nuanced we can't have a definitive take and i just reject that i think it's true
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for some issues i think it's great to have the conversation but i think there are many issues where
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it is possible to have a definitive take to come down strongly on one side of it
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and i think the audience wants us to do that i think it's a little bit of a cop-out
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to say oh we're just going to table all the issues so the audience can say no the audience
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wants to hear us give our point of view and i didn't like seek harry uh henry belcaster out he found
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no he's you just talk to him seven times a day and direct every frame of the animation let him go
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let him go no henry henry you know is one of our super fans started making these videos okay i
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ignored like the first ten and then finally i was like okay i gotta like see what this guy's into right
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you did too you slid what is this about like i hope it's to promote his business
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or something because he's just spending way too much time on this anyway so now henry does run his like
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videos by us as a courtesy but he comes up with them he chooses what takes he wants to run
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with and he puts it all together sometimes i'll have a note for him i'll
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say you know oh my god whatever he's never sent me anything you're gonna
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get a hold of you he's coming to me me and jason are on a throne jason don't pretend you're not
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you're not on the channel yes yes the three yeah because he says is it okay for me to do this and we're
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just like go ahead but then david's like well actually if we could change this and cut this
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word and david's like oh you don't need any editing just let the chips fall where they may
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and then he's like machiavellian back there like he scorsese changing every [ __ ] frame of henry
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belicaster animated gift mate i i just think it's a courtesy that henry's running it by us
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and you know david are you paying him no have you given him any compensation okay well no
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separately i after finding out that henry and then his partner dylan they've
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got like a it is a business for them okay so i said listen you guys are doing great work
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i think she does great work by the way yeah i said listen um why don't you guys start doing like
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product videos or videos for startups you can do the first one for uh call in so they're working on a video for that i
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think we're going to pay them like five grand and if it's good it'll be great for
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their business i want them to be successful no but let's get to the point let's get
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to the point about you know reducing the the conversation to sound bites and i want to respond to your point about
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not taking a position on things but okay so i feel like um first of all within this group there
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are hard ticks within this group of four people so there are heart takes already in the
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show and um i think that it's important in many debates and many of the topics we cover
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there is more than one side to the story and we can have our formed opinion but i think understanding what the other
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counterpoints and encounter arguments might be is critical to get people to actually get
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to that opinion themselves as opposed to just telling them this is the single point that you should believe
00:08:15
nothing else matters and so i i really think also many of these conversations are generally two two sides of the same
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coin and many more often than not if you zoom out there are shared values and many of the things that we all argue
00:08:30
about broadly a society and i'm not trying to get too kind of philosophical here
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um but if you kind of distill things down to different points of view with the same set of values or
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recognize that there are actually different values you can come to a point that allows people to think more
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progressively and you know achieve a point of view on their own and i think that's critically
00:08:50
missing today broadly in society that so much is all about like the good and the evil
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good and bad them and us and we don't recognize that in moments where there are shared values we're just sitting on
00:09:00
you know both sides of the same coin or recognizing that sometimes having different values doesn't necessarily
00:09:06
make someone evil it makes them different and that's why i try and kind of elevate the conversation
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a little bit and why i care so much about this point because i really think it's worth
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everyone getting a broader perspective on everything that they're addressing
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so that they can kind of go into things eyes wide open now sax i will say on nearly everything i actually
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fundamentally agree with you on many of the points on the show and so it's a little bit kind of you know gets
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a little echo chambery for me to kind of agree with sax like that's it i think it's also worth highlighting why
00:09:33
there are other points of view and why there are other arguments to be made out there
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and for me i certainly have strongly held opinions um and uh you know i i just don't think
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that it's worth getting to my opinion without taking the broader context of the conversation
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did you notice that freeburg got a little emotional there i think that was a little actual emotion
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is tuned out right now i was confused i am confused okay let me let me try and find
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someone hold on let me just ask you one question about this because this is getting i mean
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we're kind of in the dugout right now and i don't know if this is fabulously
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boring to people or not um but do you frequently hold back your opinions on the show because you don't want to
00:10:15
influence people or you're afraid of being canceled or having an adverse effect to your business as it
00:10:20
has to david's business i don't give a [ __ ] about that no i care more about um
00:10:27
uh the uh the path to an opinion um no and i care more about like achieving the objective so what i mean
00:10:37
by that is if you just say this is my opinion take it or leave it the other half that has a different
00:10:43
opinion doesn't change their opinion if you if you zoom out for people and you say here's the broad set of facts
00:10:50
and circumstances and why different groups have different opinions it ends up being a lot easier to
00:10:54
actually get people to see what may be the better path forward listen if you want to get meta i have
00:11:00
formed my opinion on many of these matters i don't think stating my opinion changes
00:11:04
anyone's mind i think zooming out and giving people the broader perspective so
00:11:07
they can get there themselves is the way to kind of achieve change okay guys enough we're
00:11:11
onto the subject this is we can walk and chew gum at the same time here's the
00:11:14
point i think that dave david sacks has opinions they are strong opinions but as i've
00:11:21
known him for 20 years they're also weakly held and he changes his mind and i think that's powerful
00:11:26
david friedberg and i've known you for a very long time as well is great at explaining things
00:11:31
all of it is additive so let's all just keep yeah and of course of course um you
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know i support having a nuanced conversation that gets all point of views out on the table
00:11:42
the point of the pod is not to you know engage in sort of sound bites it's just
00:11:46
that what henry creates is the result of a conversation he boils it down from 30 minutes into one minute i think
00:11:54
that performs a service for the audience maybe gets our takes out there in a way that you know
00:12:00
um that that more people can hear them so i think that's just you know but do you understand freeburgs i
00:12:04
mean i feel like i feel like i'm a couple's therapist here but do you understand friedenberg's
00:12:09
position david yeah he doesn't want people to look at the podcast as reductio a reduction down to a 60-second
00:12:16
clip or a 30-second clip of someone else he wants them to hear the full discourse yeah well that's
00:12:21
great well then they can listen and do that but i mean realistically a lot of people
00:12:26
don't have time to listen to the full 60 minutes they made sense to the clip
00:12:29
but look i think if there's a meta purpose to me being on the pod i think it's to expand
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the parameters of what people think they can say because i actually i agree with
00:12:38
freeberg that the debate is shut down in a lot of contexts and we want to open it back
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up and you know your overturn window needs to be reopened yeah like look at what happens the whole frank slootman
00:12:49
thing last week where he puts out a pretty mild statement about supporting diversity but not to the
00:12:55
point where it's it jeopardizes merit you know there was a giant uproar over
00:12:59
that he has to walk it back and issue an apology there was no the ceo of snowflake yeah
00:13:03
there's no there's no discussion or debate there that was a shutting down of the conversation
00:13:07
because one side of the debate is basically engaging in moral indictments against
00:13:13
the other side they're not really interested in having a serious debate about the issues i
00:13:17
think that my metapurpose in speaking out on the pod about all these issues that i think are just
00:13:22
common sense you know is is just to kind of reopen the debate yeah i mean it is that merit versus
00:13:32
diversity and what is the point of a business and should the business be compromised or throttled
00:13:37
i think that's a very hard thing for people to say should we throttle this business
00:13:41
so that we have diversity should we slow down in order to have more diversity we
00:13:45
can't find the right candidate but we have a candidate here who's a white male but yeah we already
00:13:50
have seven people on this right we've talked about that my my point in giving that example
00:13:55
is just to show how shut down the debate is because the day after slootman said ceos are
00:14:01
having this conversation in private they're telling me this and they're afraid to say it publicly
00:14:05
the very next day he walks it back and issues an apology kind of buttressing his original point
00:14:10
that people can't say what they really think so in my view like part of the reason
00:14:14
why the all empot is successful is we're getting issues on the table that people want to talk about but feel
00:14:19
they can't and i think freeberg brings a very valuable perspective to that conversation
00:14:25
but my goal is kind of if i have a medical besides expressing my point of view it is to expand
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like you said the overton window all right so speaking of the overton window new york city
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has voted for a basically universally both on the democratic side and on the republican side for a tough on crime
00:14:43
mayor 70 percent of san francisco feels worse about crime in a separate poll um and eric adams is the current borough
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president a former nypd uh officer and he is looking like he because of this stacked voting
00:15:00
which can take a little time to figure out who will become the mayor of new york but he
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has 32 percent of first place votes among 800 000 democratic voters this guy is a
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a really decent centrist moderate human being um grew up where he was affected and
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touched by crime decided to fight through that wasn't you know complaining became a police officer did that you
00:15:28
know eventually borough president has done that runs for mayor he goes on television he gives an
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interview where they say what is your perspectives on stop and frisk and the answer he gives was pretty
00:15:42
specific which is that you know i believe in stopping um and investigating potential crimes or some
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such right uh jason you can probably find the exact well i mean having been in the uh you know a new york city
00:15:54
police department family um the and living in new york during stop and frisk they left out a key word it was stop
00:16:02
question frisk so in high crime areas where there were a lot of shootings or guns they would do
00:16:09
stop question and then possibly frisk obviously all policing techniques can be abused
00:16:15
but his feeling on it was when deployed correctly stop in question is a great technique and i can tell you when
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i lived in new york previously 70 80 percent of people including people of color including people from the
00:16:28
toughest neighborhoods were in favor of this this was universally seen as a huge success at
00:16:32
the time because they were taking guns off the street illegal guns constantly because somebody would hop a turn style
00:16:39
or there would be people hanging out on a street corner and cops would come up and say hey
00:16:43
you're hanging out here at three in the morning what's going on but the problem the problem is that he
00:16:47
gave a pretty reasonable answer yes and then they tried to cancel them yep and he would not allow himself to be
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cancelled he went on the breakfast club and all kinds of other media outlets and
00:17:01
explained his position and they couldn't cancel him which is how they really thought it was an incredible
00:17:07
testament to what we're going through right now which is right now nobody knows what to do to
00:17:12
solve the things we feel we've tried the radical right version of a candidate
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it didn't work we're now wondering to ourselves while we have a custodian in
00:17:23
the white house whether we go to the radical left that's probably not going to work either
00:17:28
because unfortunately in san francisco i mean unfortunately it looks like the the the progressive left or the radical
00:17:34
left is really really judgmental um and none of these folks have really done anything
00:17:40
and so they they are easy to complain it's almost as if they know that they what they want won't
00:17:46
work so they don't want anything else to work and so they just want everything to
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devolve into chaos that's a shame and so you know people tried to literally lie about what this guy said on
00:17:56
television that was taped no no i did it five times and clarify i am not by the way
00:18:04
they were there were people jason i don't know if you saw that the art the the video length there were people
00:18:10
holding a press conference in front of his office literally screaming about stop and frisk
00:18:16
when he never said stop and frisk he said stop in question is a reasonable strategy
00:18:22
if somebody if we think that there is the potential of a crime and the fact that people could not have
00:18:27
that conversation and had to go to basically this guy needs to either quit or be completely removed
00:18:34
from his ability to run for mayor yes it's insanity yeah and uh you can people seem to have lost this
00:18:42
ability to hold two conflicting ideas in their mind uh which is you could be for criminal
00:18:48
justice reform you could be against police violence um and you could be for strong policing
00:18:57
of violent crimes and law and order and what seems to be happening in both cities new york san francisco
00:19:04
and other places where crime is getting acute is um that they uh people are voting
00:19:10
here's here's two other to be safer here's here's another conflicting
00:19:14
thoughts uh you can believe um that you know uh asians are awesome but you can also believe that the uh
00:19:25
coronavirus may have come from the wuhan lab and believing the latter doesn't mean
00:19:31
that you're supporting asian hate i'm just going to put that out there right okay can i chime in on this um
00:19:38
on this uh on the um on the addams win because i think this is this is huge news do you have your notes from harry
00:19:45
to make the clip okay go look i mean eric adams is going to be the next mayor of new york city
00:19:52
um and i think there's like three big takeaways from from this number one crime is the issue
00:19:58
that i've been saying on this pod that it is for at least six months it is the number
00:20:02
one issue when people do not feel safe in their homes and in their neighborhoods uh you know nothing else
00:20:08
matters and here comes uh this really underdog candidate he is despised by the uh sort of the progressive left and sort
00:20:18
of the elites of the democratic party and he wins i mean he this is a huge underdog victory
00:20:24
he's only a former cop he still carries a gun i mean he is packing and that sent a message to the
00:20:30
electorate i am going to be tough on crime i'm not standing for defunding the
00:20:34
police and deep prosecution and decarceration which are the hobby horses right now the progressive left
00:20:40
i'm going to protect you and the city and the voters were eating it up even in the democratic
00:20:45
party so number one crime is the huge issue and i think it's going to reverberate
00:20:50
throughout america for the next few years number two it showed how out of touch these sort of
00:20:57
progressives these and i'd say predominantly white progressives are how out of touch they
00:21:02
are with the constituencies they claim to represent um you know the the mostly uh black and latino neighborhoods who
00:21:11
voted in large numbers for eric adams were having none of this sort of elite woke progressive thinking around
00:21:17
decarceration deep prosecution um they are interested in real solutions for the problems that they see not
00:21:26
engaging in this sort of like action identity there's actually an interesting nugget
00:21:32
in what you're saying which i think you can broaden out which is the the radical left i don't even call
00:21:37
them the progressive left because that would mean they were making progress in their thinking i think it's just this
00:21:41
radical left they seem to be white rich affluent people yes and they seem to be super totally
00:21:47
they're super guilty about something but they're all totally disconnected from
00:21:50
what actual people of color want they're totally discussing like they're speaking for a group of people
00:21:56
who maybe are like that's not actually my position i want my kids to be safe on the way to
00:22:00
school i want guns off the street if somebody you know and i think that i want to read
00:22:06
the quote that he had because this is really important is to go to the source material
00:22:10
not the headlines from let's face it the radical left is running these news uh
00:22:17
publications and they're determining how they frame him and here's the question uh from
00:22:23
vanity fair so you think there is a way to use stop and frisk that isn't abusive it's a reasonable
00:22:29
question and his answer well there's a word that's missing in there it's called stop
00:22:34
question and frisk so two o'clock in the morning you look out your door you see a person standing in front of
00:22:39
your house he places a gun in his waistband you go to call the police i hope that
00:22:44
police officer responds he needs to be able to question that person what are you doing with that gun
00:22:50
if we're telling police officers you can't question people we are jeopardizing
00:22:54
the safety of the city i mean this is the most common sense logical right framing of the discussion
00:23:01
it's not like they're saying just pick a random person on the subway and say empty your pockets and get up
00:23:06
against the wall like the gestapo you know somebody called something and you questioned people in the area
00:23:12
we've seen this in san francisco that you've got these you know social justice
00:23:16
crusaders who claim that they're helping minority communities and you see an
00:23:19
increase in the number of victims from those communities and what eric adams said is listen we can't just care
00:23:24
about the cops abusing their power we also have to care about violence against these communities when it's
00:23:30
perpetrated by criminals and people responded to that to that message and i think this the the final
00:23:35
point that i think that the eric adams win represents is that twitter is likely win like likely win okay fair
00:23:41
enough is that twitter is not real life okay eric adams has 14 000 twitter followers
00:23:48
yang has two million okay yank him in fourth okay and you know yang was sort of the
00:23:54
darling of the you know sort of the twitter elites you know he's sort of i mean look
00:23:58
when he first got into the democratic primary for president he was a little bit of a
00:24:02
breath of fresh air but ultimately he kind of adopted the generic progressive positions on things that did not
00:24:08
resonate with the people of new york they wanted someone tough on crime and so i think you know eric adams he
00:24:14
had another great quote i think on election night he said social media does not pick a candidate
00:24:19
people on social security pick a candidate okay great line and and i mean and so
00:24:25
here's the thing is i think we all are distorted in our thinking based on what this like
00:24:31
very loud but ultimately small number of voices on social media says and i think it's
00:24:37
not just politicians by the way i mean it's it's not just eric adams who won because he ignored
00:24:42
twitter i mean biden won because he ignored twitter right i mean biden was not on twitter and he was able to win the
00:24:49
democratic primary for president so you know i think there's a lesson here for politicians which is like
00:24:54
twitter modern moderates can win anything and everything as long as they show up and they do the work but if you
00:25:01
to your point spend all your time trying to curate your twitter image all you're going to do is
00:25:07
validate a bunch of people that really at the end of the day are trying to punch up
00:25:12
right if you think about all the people that are spouting off trying to cancel trying to judge there's
00:25:17
a there's a great there's a great quote in many drake songs which is like
00:25:22
these people have more followers than dollars and what he's trying to say is like you
00:25:26
make them important when they don't need to be important totally now now do ceos right you've got
00:25:33
ceos of some of the biggest companies in the world like tim cook like frank slootman who are making their
00:25:38
company policy based on what this small number of loud voice on twitter are saying it's ridiculous
00:25:44
i mean i think the eric adams win is a watershed because it shows the emperor wears no clothes
00:25:50
these these very loud progressive woke voices ultimately do not have that many supporters and all people
00:25:57
have to do not not listen to them not when it goes into the privacy of the ballot box
00:26:02
you have a lot of people again similar to the to the to the to what we saw in the in the
00:26:08
trump election in 2016 where all these people quietly said oh i cannot support trump
00:26:14
and then one in two people went into that ballot box and said [ __ ] you to everybody and this is the
00:26:21
exact same thing that's playing out except the opposite which is now if you are not completely progressive
00:26:27
at least in your posture and your vocabulary there's this threat of being cancelled and so you adopt this stuff
00:26:33
almost to make your life easy but when push comes to shove and we see it here in new york city and
00:26:38
we'll probably see it all over the country you get into the ballot box you're going
00:26:42
to go for somebody moderate and reasonable that does the simple things that you want to get done
00:26:47
and by the way they tried to cancel the new york times tried to cancel andrew yang
00:26:51
because he um had made uh very i he basically said you know that uh mentally ill men
00:27:01
uh who are addicted to drugs basically are um punching people in the face and you
00:27:07
know we need to address that and the new york times framed it really interestingly and i'll read you the
00:27:13
tweet watch andrew yang's response to a question about how he would handle mental health
00:27:17
during when wednesday's new york city mayoral debate uh drew fire on social media from people
00:27:24
who said it lacked empathy or understanding and when you look at that framing he said how he would handle mental
00:27:30
health he wasn't talking about mental health generally and broadly he was talking
00:27:35
about people suffering from mental health on the streets who were homeless who were
00:27:39
addicted to drugs and who punch people on the face right massive subset yeah but they
00:27:44
framed this to attack him then let me just finish the other way they framed it it drew fire on social media
00:27:52
so instead of saying this person said this they literally the new york times is trying to get
00:27:59
andrew yang canceled and to get more people to subscribe uh by being part of the woke mob yes
00:28:06
literally their twitter handle does that he i could find ten times as many people who said
00:28:11
yeah we can't have people who are mentally ill and violent on the street punching people
00:28:15
it was andrew yang's it was andrew yang's single best moment of the campaign
00:28:19
is he talked honestly about the risk to the public of mentally ill people living on the
00:28:25
streets and attacking people it was his single best moment the reason he did it is because he saw the traction
00:28:30
that eric adams was getting on the safety issue and if yang had done that from the
00:28:35
beginning of the campaign he might be the next mayor yeah let me let me read this from here
00:28:40
yang cared too much ultimately his achilles heel was caring too much about the very
00:28:46
online voices on twitter like the new york times and we've just seen that eric adams has proved is all a
00:28:52
house of cards nobody really cares what they think here's the here's the quote from eric
00:28:58
adams if the democratic party fails to recognize what we did here in new york they're going to have a problem in the
00:29:04
midterm elections and they're going to have a problem in the presidential election the
00:29:08
brooklyn borough president said america is saying we want to have justice and safety
00:29:15
and end inequality and we don't want fancy candidates we want candidates their nails are not
00:29:21
polished they have calluses on their hands and they're blue-collar people common sense common people they've
00:29:27
returned to common sense freeburg i had uh cc jew on um this uh thread where somebody said they
00:29:36
found missing sequencing of the kova genes that were submitted to a database did you have a chance to review that at
00:29:43
all um i did and since you sent that it's become a little bit of a story a lot of people have kind of picked it
00:29:51
up and followed up on it because it did ignite quite a bit of interest so the story is a guy named jessie bloom who's
00:29:58
a researcher at the hutchinson cancer center in seattle and has been studying um
00:30:04
you know covet as a lot of scientists have kind of shifted their attention over the past year but has a background
00:30:09
in virology he was uh trying to pull some early genomic samples that that may have been
00:30:19
taken from patients early in china so what this means is you know when patients kind of
00:30:25
um in the early days were emerging as potentially having stars cov2 they were swabbing them
00:30:31
and then doing a genomic read of the rna they find from the virus in that swab and around the world a lot of scientists
00:30:39
contribute to this openly available genomic database um and they contribute their whole genome
00:30:44
samples when they when they run studies and so on so other scientists can use it in the
00:30:48
future for research and what this guy found was that there were a few dozen of these samples
00:30:53
that had been on this genomics database that were now missing and they had been pulled down and using
00:31:00
a little technical sleuthing he realized they had been pulled down from the directory
00:31:04
but the raw genomic sample read data was still available on the google cloud so he used the google cloud api to pull
00:31:11
that actual data down from the servers and then ran a study on it it turns out the
00:31:16
the interesting kind of intrigue around this story is why did that data get get deleted who
00:31:21
deleted it and it turns out the only way it gets deleted is if the original kind of authors go in
00:31:26
and make a request to have it removed and these were some random scientists in china who had
00:31:32
and so in the days following this publication of this guy so this guy published this
00:31:38
on a pre-print server called bioarchive so it's not a peer-reviewed journal uh it basically is a place for
00:31:44
bioarchive is a place where uh biology scientists can submit uh early versions of their research papers or to
00:31:50
get a new finding out really quickly and then the world can kind of study it and you don't have to wait for the
00:31:55
journalistic kind of cycle of getting things approved which is which is common now um and so
00:32:00
he put this thing out there and everyone's kind of questioning well okay where did these samples go it turns
00:32:05
out that these chinese scientists had submitted them and now it has shown uh or it has come out that apparently
00:32:12
some um us officials made the request to have it taken down after being asked to do so
00:32:17
by some chinese officials uh to pull this data down and so there's a really weird kind of intrigue going on
00:32:22
right now around this whole story now so so that's kind of thread number one
00:32:28
which is why was this request made to pull this data down what was the motivation etc
00:32:32
thread number two is what does the data show us and what the data shows us unfortunately is a little bit
00:32:38
inconclusive so a guy named trevor bedford just put out a tweet um earlier today uh analyzing this he's a
00:32:43
he's a world-class virologist also works at the french hutchinson center in seattle um and he basically
00:32:49
highlights that in the early days of the sarsko v2 explosion in china you can really identify from a genomic
00:32:57
variant perspective two lineages of the virus that means you know we're trying to get back to origin
00:33:01
or patient zero and it turns out there were kind of like these two families of the virus that
00:33:05
were emerging and even with that new data you could kind of reconstruct the family tree in such a way that the
00:33:13
wuhan meat market could have been the origin meaning the root virus could have come out of that
00:33:18
wuhan market or the wuhan meat market could have been one of the two branches of the tree that
00:33:24
emerged early on so there may have been an even earlier origin and wuhan market was just one place
00:33:30
where it started to take off so you know he said look he still thinks that it's about a 50 50. you know
00:33:35
there's no clear evidence one way or the other based on these newly uh uncovered samples but
00:33:41
you know there is still this question of does the wuhan market kind of paint the patient zero story or is it
00:33:47
one of the places where the explosion happened and patient zero was in fact much earlier than wuhan market i
00:33:53
i will say a couple episodes ago i kind of made a comment you know with respect to the
00:33:57
origin of this virus that i don't know don't care and and i just want to clarify because i
00:34:01
know that some people kind of reached out to me about that i didn't really uh my my intention with
00:34:06
that statement was that this was really meant to be um i think a little bit more of a canary
00:34:11
in a coal mine for us broadly about you know hey what we should be looking forward to is what's
00:34:16
next not just absolutely what happened in the already let's move on to the next thing is what
00:34:21
you're saying not being callous that it doesn't matter yeah i think i think what's more important is
00:34:25
that we need to get prepared for how do we prevent these things happening in the
00:34:28
future and and what are the um you know the key kind of checkpoints we have around us in the future because
00:34:33
one thing i am most concerned about is a huge step back but i'm concerned about
00:34:37
our normalization of cancel um you know we kind of have started to cancel people but we've also
00:34:43
you know these shutdowns have been normalized and the normalization where shutdown is the
00:34:48
response to an emerging variant or emerging virus is really scary because you know how is society going to
00:34:53
function properly when there's going to be a proliferation of these viruses a
00:34:57
proliferation of of risks uh with new technologies being made available to us and then shutting down becomes our
00:35:03
immediate response well how do you feel about shutting down borders friedberg as the
00:35:07
first course of action if everybody in unison had shut down the borders in february and said
00:35:13
no intercountry travel you know it would have obviously been devastating for the airlines but it
00:35:19
might have stopped the pandemic in its tracks there was no way to stop the the pandemic once the genie's out of the
00:35:24
bottle the genies out of the bottle and we saw this in states that had lockdowns and states that didn't have
00:35:29
lockdown it's where we saw equivalent but why wasn't taiwan and australia and
00:35:33
those kind of places that are islands that lock down why were they spared i i don't know if you can really say
00:35:39
that they were spared um and i don't know if you can really say that people are happy with the the
00:35:43
life that they led for that year right i i think what we need to solve for is how do we have these vaccines
00:35:48
come to market much faster and be much more variable in their efficaciousness because
00:35:53
we are going to have a lot more of these kind of emerging variants over the next
00:35:56
couple of years with stars cov2 but also with potentially engineered bugs that form to
00:36:01
be careful about question for trimatha saks then um in friedberg's sort of analysis there um and what was
00:36:09
explained uh on the web about the these new sequences the us was allegedly involved in taking
00:36:17
this down with the chinese if the usa and i'm just creating a hypothesis here
00:36:22
just to do a little game theory if the u.s was allowing china to take this down what would the game theory be
00:36:30
if the u.s was involved in dare i say a cover-up or being opaque like the chinese have
00:36:36
already been proven to be why would the u.s do that tremoff what would be the possible theories and
00:36:44
sacks why did why did the nba shut down daryl mori but that may not be um that made it
00:36:52
sorry that may not be national policy jake all right so like a scientist an american scientist or an american
00:36:57
official could have made that request it doesn't mean that it was a conspiratorial process to remove this
00:37:02
stuff yeah no i want to jump the gun i want to jump the fence and say if in fact the some u.s people were
00:37:08
involved so to your point it could be an individual covering it up or it could be
00:37:13
an organization in america or it could be you know some set of organizations but saks you
00:37:18
wanted to well look i i don't believe the wet market theory precisely because there is a
00:37:24
cover-up i mean the wet market theory was the official ccp who party line about where the virus
00:37:31
came from if that was the case why wouldn't they just throw open the gates to
00:37:36
investigators let them go into the wuhan institute of virology um you know why why all the cover-up why
00:37:42
and wouldn't they shut down all wet markets maybe i mean but yeah and maybe the
00:37:48
logical competition but why why obstruct the investigation why um ask these american researchers to delete
00:37:55
these sequences of um dna or whatever and in terms of why would the researchers do it because
00:38:01
they were asked to and they've got a relationship why would americans be if in fact they were why is it just why
00:38:08
is the who been carrying water for um the chinese government they get their paycheck from them
00:38:13
no because i think the the who is stupid i mean that's well they've all got all these you know institutional
00:38:18
incentives they all work together and um you know there's money involved there's sort of relationships involved
00:38:24
there's bureaucracy involved um and then there's a level of incompetence
00:38:30
yeah so it could be incompetence could it also not be that uh we funded that laboratory
00:38:38
in some way right we had given some money towards it that's i think established yeah
00:38:42
the functional resources i think it's a if look i i am a better person and then
00:38:47
on our face if they were in fact doing this so i think we don't want a little or we
00:38:51
don't want to be in conflict with them because no i think americans in the west
00:38:54
might demand we be in conflict with china no no i think it's i think it's
00:38:57
what friedrich said which is like look uh what seemingly a low-level request is made
00:39:02
to basically delete an entry in a table you do it you know not thinking anything of it uh
00:39:08
it i think it's pretty clear that this was something that leaked out of that lab
00:39:17
the thing that we will never ever know is how and why and whether it was purely accidental or something more nefarious
00:39:26
than that and i think this is why to friedberg's point we just have to put a pin
00:39:30
in all of that and move on and try to figure out a way where we set ourselves up so that the
00:39:35
the next time for example the like you know we we hear about the delta variant now
00:39:42
we're going to hear about other variants in the fall it's going to be a tough
00:39:45
winter we cannot shut down yeah i think we need to know what happened here in order to inform
00:39:53
our plan for the future so i think to your point walking and chewing gum at the same time why can't
00:39:57
we do both yeah well i mean think about it if the so so i've never i've never heard anyone
00:40:05
seriously argue that the lab leak was intentional i mean i think because that would have posed i think a
00:40:12
risk to china itself but but let's say let's say it was an accidental lab leak
00:40:18
um what what that suggests is look the chinese knew everything about this virus for months while we were all here
00:40:25
pulling out our hair trying to figure this thing out what is it who does it affect you know what are the
00:40:30
risks we're all having these debates in the united states and trying to get to
00:40:33
the bottom of this and they knew everything about it and they were they weren't telling us but
00:40:37
hold on freeburg i mean the i think i think i i read this somewhere but moderna had characterized the vaccine 48
00:40:44
hours after getting an email of the dna sequence of the anyone can do that yeah within within 40
00:40:48
so so this was done in january as soon as we got yeah but if they did make it to david's
00:40:53
point why don't they tell us how they made it it it took months it took months to
00:40:58
understand the pathology of the virus right yeah it's it's that's not what matters
00:41:02
jkl you can read the code it's very readable you can read the code within a day and then you can pick the area of
00:41:08
the spike protein which we already knew about and you can say let's go build some you
00:41:12
know target so how they got there doesn't matter is what you're saying freeberg how they how they created it
00:41:17
how they got i mean the you're saying you're asking how the chinese edited
00:41:22
the virus in a lab is that what you're saying yeah how they was just like a three-year project is this the 17th
00:41:27
version they worked on or the second you know like there's so many things jason you're speaking about you're
00:41:33
characterizing this as if it was a designed weapon is that what you're saying
00:41:37
well i'm i'm saying it was designed not as a weapon but they were doing what it studied
00:41:42
evolutionary function research yeah gain of function means that it there so there is a gain of function in
00:41:50
plain english fredberg so so when they say neurology in virology they're going to study
00:41:57
what changes in the genome might do to biology to an animal to a biological system
00:42:04
and that study gives them insights into how a virus may evolve or how certain parts of a virus may
00:42:10
affect humans ultimately in different ways and so understanding viruses and really
00:42:15
important when you're studying viruses is you want to understand where they're
00:42:17
headed not just where they're coming from and so to understand where they're
00:42:20
headed you may make genomic changes and study how those genomic changes affect so they
00:42:25
enhanced can i use the word enhanced or solved you could say evolve you could say enhanced you could say engineered
00:42:32
but um but very much it's about understanding where the changes in the proteins and
00:42:37
the virus can affect biology in different ways in the future so that we can better understand
00:42:42
you know what these viruses are capable of and prepare ourselves we found out the implications of covet
00:42:49
19. and thank god we didn't have to find it out for 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1098.
00:42:56
you know what i mean like yes so that's my point freeburg would it not be helpful to open kimono
00:43:01
look at every single enhancement they made and what the results of those were like they did something in that lab for
00:43:10
the last couple of years who's got that information they knew the name is the same
00:43:18
the name is the same thing what this database thing uh represents is look there was a cover up here and
00:43:30
that cover-up has fingerprints and the information is leaking out and we are seeing more crime and and
00:43:37
more information is going to come out i actually disagree with you guys that we're not going to learn more about what
00:43:41
happened we're going to learn how we're going to learn we're going to learn a lot more
00:43:45
and it's going to get worse and worse it's going to be but sex where does it head so like let's say we
00:43:49
discover that was my original question question let's say we discover that there's an
00:43:54
accidental lab leak out of the wuhan institute of virology a scientist got infected
00:43:58
left the lab gave it to her boyfriend people spread it in the street suddenly became a whole pandemic what what do we
00:44:04
do what do you think the response is do you think americans basically now impose sanctions on china and we and we
00:44:10
lead to a cold war like where is this all headed what are the motivating principles of
00:44:14
politicians who are going to respond as that evidence comes out yes that's what i want to know okay
00:44:19
number one i've said it before we've got to reassure the whole pharmaceutical industry we cannot be
00:44:24
dependent on china for our pharmaceutical supply chain our antibiotics our ppe that is insane um second of all i mean
00:44:32
we got to be more realistic about the nature of the regime that we're dealing with they knew
00:44:36
everything about this virus for months while we were trying to figure it out where does it take us like
00:44:40
let's say we find out that to be true where does this what happens next decoupling decoupling
00:44:45
here and here's another thing that i think needs to happen which is that but i guess that's sorry one sec but
00:44:50
doesn't decoupling happen either way like why do we need all this because there is such a motivating principle on
00:44:56
on both sides of the aisle to decouple from china and there is a motivating principle no
00:45:01
there isn't there is a reason to not decouple it's called money there is a group of elites who do
00:45:07
not want the decoupling to happen from the nba to iphones apple the nba and disney do not want to decouple
00:45:15
they want to integrate these two societies so that we can make money i'm not sure the decoupling is my theory
00:45:20
of what people are scared of no okay people are scared of a decoupling i just want to say two things
00:45:25
i don't think that there's like a group of elites that want that to happen necessarily because i
00:45:31
think that their lives are complicated and what they would love to have i think is actually two end
00:45:38
markets you have to remember if you go from one global market to a duopoly market and you're a seller of
00:45:45
services you actually have more pricing power and a duopoly than you do in a monopoly into
00:45:50
a monopoly so you know if you're disney theoretically and you have the ability to
00:45:55
differentially price two different pieces of content you're going to do that so
00:45:59
i i tend to think in general it's better for economic systems to have this bifurcation
00:46:06
so the i just want to go back to the the thing that i wanted to define bifurcation you're saying two
00:46:12
different markets but what if there is hey we're going to sanction we're not
00:46:16
going to send disney movies where they're not going to let disney and nba and like they don't like google
00:46:20
and twitter and or iphones are not going to be made there and apple's going to start making
00:46:23
iphones and vietnam and pakistan and sri lanka i actually think what happens is it
00:46:27
accelerates democracy because again you have an enormously difficult and thorny issue inside of china which
00:46:35
is they have a cataclysmic demographic bombshell going on they have we have the average age in
00:46:42
china versus the average age in the united states is now the same yep which is an unbelievable thing
00:46:49
because china was facing policy china was 15 or 20 years younger in the early 90s when all of this
00:46:55
offshoring started to happen in full scale by the end of 21s by the end of this century
00:47:02
china's population i think is projected to shrink to about 700 million people so they
00:47:08
are in a hugely difficult demographic situation where there's no young people people are
00:47:14
getting older and older and older and so there's just going to be a lot of upheaval you just saw by the way people
00:47:19
cost a lot of money too much much more money japan china just you know relax their
00:47:24
one child policy to two then within a month they relax their two-child policy to three
00:47:30
and they're gonna be paying people to have kids i mean just like we give tax
00:47:33
incentives well and now they're uh they're floating a policy which says unlimited kids okay so
00:47:38
so that's why you can just i just want to go back to what uh one of the practical things we can do coming out of
00:47:44
wuhan as all this new data comes out is instead of vilifying china or trying to enter some cold war which is stupid
00:47:50
we should just go and reshore everything as sac suggested one thing that you can say is wherever
00:47:56
there is this kind of research happening in the world every single variant needs to go to some
00:48:02
basically open source repository that virologists all around the world can basically watch what's happening in
00:48:08
lockstep well right what the [ __ ] was going on here then yeah they deleted it it was deleted but to be clear
00:48:21
that is exactly the principle and that is exactly what goes on within the academic and research communities
00:48:27
worldwide there's very open and cooperative dialogue with academics around the world
00:48:31
about these matters and generally that is absolutely true in the way things are done because scientists don't care about
00:48:36
politics they care about you know human health and progress answer this question please
00:48:41
is every single variant of covid that led up to covet 19 well characterized and well understood
00:48:47
by a broad class of scientists and virologists all over the world or yeah or a small subset of people the
00:48:55
the plurality of which we're working at the wuhan lab for virology we didn't know the argument goes you
00:49:01
don't know that you have sars cov2 in those early days and so you see some people getting sick
00:49:06
and then suddenly you put your head up and you're like wait a second that's
00:49:08
what's going on here that's not what i'm about my point is you're not you're not
00:49:11
running a genomic sequencing on all those people in those early days no no i'm asking
00:49:14
something you have this original virus that you've been testing and mutating
00:49:19
and you know reprogramming you're testing you're basically doing a massive monte
00:49:23
carlo simulation on an original virus are all the intermediate instantiations of that virus
00:49:30
well characterized okay that's my point yeah okay if they were publicly available wouldn't that be super
00:49:38
dangerous also also by the way like wouldn't it make sense then if if you were doing
00:49:42
these iterations of these viruses that that the dna sequences should go to places like pfizer and moderna where you
00:49:49
are mandated to create vaccines just in case well we are going to enter a stage here
00:49:54
in the next decade where we will have vaccine printers around the world they're going to be small bioreactors
00:49:59
they're going to be able to effectively ship code to them they're going to print
00:50:02
vaccines there's several companies pursuing this i'm just i'm just going to go over this
00:50:08
i like your idea though i'm just going to be interesting this system is immature
00:50:13
naive and inefficient and i think what if that's something that we can fix that's why what matters most in my
00:50:18
opinion and based on the comments i made a few episodes ago is that we need to focus on how to get
00:50:24
there versus trying to trace back the origins because i think honestly tracing back
00:50:27
the origins is just going to put kindling on a fire that's already burning and so my my this this this has been my
00:50:34
point about this whole like you know blame china we want to get to a point where we can quote unquote blame
00:50:38
china for this but the decoupling and the onshore there is already enough motivation there
00:50:43
and there is already on both sides of the aisle there is already kind of an obvious trajectory that we're headed
00:50:48
this way i'm not sure this is a catalyst maybe or it's a little bit more kindling
00:50:52
we're already headed there and it doesn't actually answer our forward-looking question which is how do
00:50:56
we secure our future and how we secure our future is really where technology and industry and and
00:51:01
some of these free burgers let me let me build on chamat's idea what if the mrna vaccine creation and the
00:51:08
research laboratory were the same facility and you had a cross-disciplinary approach where they're making stuff and
00:51:17
then they're curing it next door in real time so that they can trade notes why would that be a terrible idea
00:51:22
it seems like a brilliant idea you could just you could just transfer the date from the
00:51:26
research and print the vaccines with the people that are really good at making vaccine
00:51:30
right you don't need to have an intricate understanding of the biology to actually be effective at making
00:51:36
vaccines right no but isn't there something about scientists who are cross-disciplinary sharing space and
00:51:40
having collisions building relationships isn't that part of the science process
00:51:43
that's worked over the last couple years you talk about how in synthetic biology and all this you
00:51:47
want the mathematicians computer programmers you know and the biologists in the same
00:51:51
area and the chemists resolving to a world where we have very cheap very fast and distributed production of
00:51:58
vaccines is an engineering problem and the the engineering work is what is kind of
00:52:03
being undertaken now by several companies and will be fueled by this uh this new um
00:52:08
uh bill that biden's trying to get past this infrastructure build is a ton of
00:52:11
money and therefore and as that happens that engineering process is effectively think about them
00:52:16
like printers and they can take code and that code allows the that printer to not print
00:52:20
whatever you want to print the question of what you want to print is going to be determined by the
00:52:25
research that's being done over here which is okay here's what we're
00:52:27
discovering here's what we should print here's what we should protect against
00:52:30
and why but i think that there's a separate engineering exercise which you know let's let let's build this
00:52:35
distributed production system i'm going to go on a limb and say these labs are immature
00:52:40
naive and unsophisticated in the checks and balances that exist and i think we've seen that
00:52:48
and we need to fix it and you need to do something more than just have a bunch of folks that are focused on
00:52:55
science going ham in whatever way they want all right so just to wrap sax anything else on this
00:53:00
as we put a cherry on it well i just you asked the question what do we do about china i think that is a question
00:53:06
that's a generational question we're going to be asking that for totally for
00:53:09
decades it's this is an area where we need freed bergy and nuance because it's something that we're going
00:53:15
to have to navigate as a country for for decades a really good book about this is the
00:53:21
thucydides trap by graham allison who's a harvard professor and he discusses different strategies we
00:53:28
can take he quotes uh lee kuan yew who is the you know president of singapore who has
00:53:34
a great quote about this he said lee kuan yew said that the size of china's displacement of the world
00:53:39
balance is such that the world must find a new balance it is not possible to pretend
00:53:44
that this is just another big player this is the biggest player in the history of the world
00:53:48
that was that was the lee kuan yew quote um so we were dealing with this issue even before covet but i do think that
00:53:55
kovid has unmasked this regime a little bit and caused people across both sides of the whole
00:54:03
spectrum to look at this regime i think more realistically all right so in somewhat related news uh apple
00:54:12
obviously building all their phones over there and now having servers and data over there
00:54:17
um has led to a lot of scrutiny of big tech but the more pressing issue is the anti-trust bills that seem to be
00:54:25
fast-tracked on wednesday u.s house judiciary committee discussed six six proposed anti-trust bills uh one
00:54:33
bill uh sponsored by a democrat from rhode island uh would call for apple to allow
00:54:40
third-party app stores seems reasonable and provide iphone technologies to third-party
00:54:46
software makers so i think that means maybe opening up imessage which would be delightful i'm not sure
00:54:53
exactly what they mean there and so apple and tim cook is in a panic he apparently called nancy pelosi
00:55:01
and said can you pump the brakes just to give you an idea of what's going on here um
00:55:08
apple's uh revenue even though it's a small percentage of just 10 uh of their 274 billion dollars in uh
00:55:17
2020 revenue it's obviously pure profit profit margins got to be in the notes here it says 75
00:55:24
but i would think it's even more clearly services and the app store inside of apple is i
00:55:30
think analogous to the aws for amazon is a money printing machine that's growing
00:55:34
really fast uh what do we think about apple being forced to put other app stores on their
00:55:42
phones just like you can on your android phone i support it i've been blue pilled on this issue
00:55:47
actually that's what the that's what the commenters on of our the all-in fans have said is that
00:55:52
why sacks taking blue pills on this issue um and and look the reality is because
00:55:57
i'm not in the business of um of helping two trillion dollar uh market cap companies i'm in the
00:56:03
underdog business i'm in the business of helping the entrepreneur get started
00:56:08
with a new company and the fact of the matter is is that apple has the market power the same
00:56:14
market power greater than microsoft did in its heyday with the windows monopoly they are total gatekeepers of what
00:56:21
applications can be built on these ios devices and windows windows you could win
00:56:26
it was open i mean it was open they already have an app store yeah right so this this proposal by uh
00:56:31
representative right so this proposal by representative sicilian the democrat from rhode island
00:56:37
would allow the side loading it would basically loosen the grip that apple has over the apps that can be
00:56:43
loaded onto apple devices it would at least uh you know create some degree some potential no it would create
00:56:50
a tremendous competition and it's very easy to execute great jamaa uh um i i think you said it really well i am
00:56:57
also in the underdog business so i think the the faster they've rammed this thing
00:57:02
through the better off it'll be um the thing that is important to recognize is that apple will make this
00:57:09
argument that well look there's always android and also look there's the open web and
00:57:14
that's structurally not true for a couple of reasons the overwhelming amount of development
00:57:20
at least in silicon valley and broadly speaking in tech starts on the iphone sure um and it's only then as an
00:57:28
afterthought almost i mean you have to remember it took snapchat three or four years of being a public
00:57:34
company before they actually had a reasonable android app right and so android is has always been
00:57:40
sort of the low rpu afterthought even though it has meaningfully more users they're just not
00:57:45
as much revenue per user and so exactly and so you know it's kind of a baseless argument
00:57:51
the overwhelming revenue the north star for developers where all of the venture capital money goes into is the funding
00:57:59
and developing ios apps and in that world view ios is a complete monopoly and uh breaking up the ability
00:58:10
for them to basically dictate a 30 take rate um and also loosening the technical
00:58:16
guard rails i think is a huge step forward there's only one thing that i would say however
00:58:22
apple has done an incredible job with privacy locking down the phone sandboxing instances and we'll have to
00:58:28
find some technical alternative to fortifying um oh no actually they don't chamoth actually i
00:58:35
think what they do is when you go to your settings you say unlock iphone you now are not
00:58:40
protected apple is not responsible you've decided to sideload stuff and it's basically like putting your mo
00:58:47
your phone into jailbreak or dev mode where they are not going to support you that's the way i think apple should
00:58:52
execute it is that would be like they're you know if you want to load anything you want when
00:58:56
you get viruses and your privacy gets hacked it's not on us you just essentially
00:59:01
although we have one warranty for people who are not jailbroken and side loaded and one warranty for people
00:59:06
who decide to jailbreak their phones what's what's incredible to me the other
00:59:10
the other point on this is how quickly these guys pass this bill and actually oh actually all six and then how
00:59:15
reasonably well they were written i mean this is one topic where sometimes you know politicians can really kind of
00:59:21
get it wrong or they can get lobbied in one way or the other and these bills come out they don't make
00:59:25
sense i mean if you have to remember where how far we've come you know wasn't the first antitrust
00:59:30
thing where like some guy asked zuck a question about like a model t ford or something i mean it was just so
00:59:36
stupid they were so dumb and they've gone from there to this it's really incredible how fast they've
00:59:41
caught up i think this is just a terrible precedent and i i think if you guys um weren't going to
00:59:47
make money by weakening apple and alphabet you guys put your free market hats on you'd kind
00:59:53
of acknowledge that this is just we were not angel investors we did not do the series of either of those
00:59:58
companies fredberg yeah i i recognize that and i think like if you guys have if you guys had a bunch of
01:00:03
shares in alphabet or amazon or apple your your opinion would be a little bit different but
01:00:07
um i'm just observing exactly what you think i have shares i have shares on amazon and facebook yeah well look i i
01:00:13
think in this particular case he's in the process of selling them you know at the end of the day if if apple and
01:00:20
alphabet didn't make incredible products for consumers and focus on consumer happiness they
01:00:25
wouldn't be as successful as they are and much of if you remember kind of the
01:00:28
early days of the apple app store ideology it was about curating apps and curating the quality of those apps so
01:00:35
that the quality of the overall iphone experience would be superior to anything else out
01:00:40
there and consumers would love it it wasn't about blocking out competitors and blocking out rivals and blocking out
01:00:45
other platforms it was about making something that consumers would absolutely love
01:00:50
and the same ideas freedberg they blocked third party uh book stores and uh book readers they blocked browsers
01:01:00
they wanted to block experience vlc and open source players they did that because they
01:01:04
wanted you to use their own products basically they set standards on the app store and as long as you met those
01:01:09
standards those apps got in there so youtube's in there uh google chrome is in there you know
01:01:14
i've got chrome installed on my iphone i think it's a better browser it took them years years and they
01:01:18
realized they had to give that up they had to give up the browser because that's what
01:01:22
wanted no the only reason that chrome is there is because of the amount of money that
01:01:31
google pays apple for search yeah look and that was a quid pro co in that search deal i will
01:01:37
bet you dollars to donuts if that's the only reason yeah i don't think apple i don't think
01:01:42
apple is that dumb i'm pretty sure that these guys recognize that if consumers
01:01:46
want something they better give it to them and if consumers wanted a bunch of shitty apps on the phone that didn't
01:01:50
work and broke down all the time you will then go through the process of jailbreaking should you be able to
01:01:55
jailbreak your phone and hack it freedberg i don't i don't think that i should be
01:01:59
telling apple how to make their friggin hardware they should make their hardware and i as
01:02:02
a consumer in the free market should decide if i want to buy it or not and if i would
01:02:06
oh it's not a free market it's a monopoly i can go buy a freaking samsung or i
01:02:11
don't know if htc still makes phones or you know nokia or blackberry i guess
01:02:14
these guys are all dead because their products suck but okay at the end of the day if there's an
01:02:18
alternative out there i will buy it and if you guys want to go fund a hardware company that builds a software platform
01:02:23
on top of the hardware and maybe i'm not a monopolist now i know why you didn't want to say
01:02:30
your opinion you're a goddamn robber no it's really it's really interesting
01:02:34
that free book actually on this issue is actually the the free market um monster
01:02:39
red pill no and ever and everybody else is sort of blue pill but but david you're right
01:02:43
i'll point out that red pill blue pill like you know the books i think it's better for startups i don't
01:02:53
particularly have a lot of trust or faith that these big companies when they get this big are particularly
01:03:00
well run or have the best interest of the broad market in their minds and so yeah i'll be honest with you i hope
01:03:09
these companies get broken up i think it's great for what we do i think it's great for entrepreneurship
01:03:14
i think it's super uh phenomenal for the innovation cycle we could be a part of um and i would hope to
01:03:21
participate in that and make a bunch of money i think the best the best way to destroy
01:03:25
a monopoly is to build better technology that disrupts them and that has always been the case
01:03:30
throughout history and anytime government gets involved and tries to break up a monopoly
01:03:34
in a way that is not natural to the way the market forces might demand you end up declining an
01:03:40
innovation standard we have to disrupt apple we have to disrupt amazon we have to disrupt alphabet using technology if
01:03:45
we want to have an advantage to go in the market and by having government come in and
01:03:48
intervene i feel like it ends up being like like like you know this cronyism which which
01:03:53
ultimately affects markets in an adverse way here's the problem is that the developer
01:03:57
network effects around an operating system monopoly are insuperable they you you cannot overthrow them there
01:04:03
are now thousands and thousands maybe even millions of apps have been developed on
01:04:07
the ios system and uh no competitor can ever get that kind of traction it is the windows monopoly all over
01:04:15
again and by the way microsoft and windows might have dominated the internet if it weren't for
01:04:20
the government coming down with the whole netscape litigation netscape didn't survive but it kind of
01:04:26
it kind of froze microsoft in its tracks and prevented them from dominating the nascent internet and so you know i
01:04:33
think that turned out to be a good government intervention uh in terms of allowing innovation to
01:04:38
move forward and by the way just on the sicily proposals i think part of the reason why they make
01:04:42
so much sense is because we can't break up apple how would you break up apple right i
01:04:46
mean apple sells one product which is ios on different sizes the only way to break
01:04:51
up apple is to force them to use their opera let their operating system be licensed
01:04:55
to other hardware that's not breaking them up so uh it would certainly create downward pressure
01:05:01
on their margins if dell could make a competing apple desktop okay fair enough what i'm saying
01:05:07
what i'm saying is there's no natural fault lines within apple like there are at amazon
01:05:12
or google right yes amazon could spin out aws very easily google could spin out youtube or maybe
01:05:19
enterprise instagram apple's yes of course so so what that means is because you can't split up the company
01:05:27
if you want to address their power the only way to do it is with proposals like side loading i feel like you're you're
01:05:34
either looking at a capitalist monopoly or you're looking at a government monopoly
01:05:39
so if you think about what's happened in financial services in the united states
01:05:42
the the regulatory burden on being a service provider in the financial services industry
01:05:46
is so high that it is very difficult for startups to come in and compete and look at what emerged bitcoin right i
01:05:53
feel like there is always going to be a consumer innovation model that will supplant the
01:05:58
monopoly and you can't just say hey the government's going to come in and
01:06:01
sideload or or break up these big businesses what ultimately happens when you do that is you create a regulatory
01:06:06
burden that makes it equally difficult for competition to arise over time or to reduce innovation that's going to
01:06:12
benefit consumers this is the princess leia uh you know basically theory the the tighter you squeeze
01:06:19
the more galaxies slip through your fingers and maybe tick tock uh and snapchat are examples of that
01:06:25
with facebook but there aren't many and i don't know who's coming up to fight against amazon
01:06:30
at this point um so shopify and shopify is crushing it and they're incredible and they're going
01:06:35
to create this long tail of stores that ultimately could end up competing really
01:06:38
effectively with amazon and we've seen it right and and and consumers choose it
01:06:43
and this because just because shopify is making a lot from sas revenue does not mean that the majority of goods
01:06:48
are not going to go through i will tell you the consumer the the consumer experience on shopify stores is
01:06:52
fantastic i mean we all don't realize it but we're buying a ton of stuff from shopify
01:06:56
stores it's pretty good it's pretty good and it has forced innovation you know and and i will also highlight
01:07:01
that one of the benefits of these scaled businesses is that they end up having the
01:07:05
resourcing to fund new and emerging businesses that otherwise wouldn't be fundable
01:07:09
i don't think that aws would have emerged and therefore google cloud and all these other
01:07:13
alternatives wouldn't have emerged if amazon went yeah it didn't have this
01:07:16
incredible chromium open source project and think about the industry that emerged around
01:07:21
android but nobody david nobody's nobody's suggesting to have broken these
01:07:25
thing up in 2007 but it's 2021 and things have changed i don't know what's down the road that
01:07:31
we're going to miss out on right i mean i i guess my point is like you know let the consumer make the
01:07:36
decision as opposed to create regulatory burden that over time has its own what is the downside to allowing
01:07:42
somebody who wants to put an app store on their iphone what's the downside freeberg what's the downside to letting
01:07:47
me have amazon's app store or android app store and me to pick that i want to just have one subscript
01:07:54
set of subscriptions and i prefer the android store yeah why is that bad i'm not making it
01:07:59
personally the apple argument is absolutely quality of the the quality of i think
01:08:04
you i just think it's a little bit short-sighted for us to all jump to say let's break up big tech like
01:08:08
the quality of what no no no no overlapping i think it's incredible and and the new products that have come
01:08:12
out is just mind-blowing and you know we all kind of miss the fact that these are the beneficiaries of
01:08:17
scaled businesses and you know you can't really see a startup we are not saying break up big
01:08:23
tech we're saying get rid of the 30 app store fee because that negatively impacts our portfolios
01:08:29
let's be clear here this is screwing with the margins and a lot of the companies we invested
01:08:35
we want that take rate lowered i mean this is if apple just made the take rate 15
01:08:41
this entire thing goes away epic games feels great spotify's feel great that's what they should have done when
01:08:46
you over play your hand and then all of a sudden you create a group of enemies from netflix to spotify
01:08:52
to epic games that was apple's big mistake they should have given those people a lower rate and just
01:08:59
slowly lowered the rate which is what everybody's doing now with creator percentages
01:09:05
and i think that's what youtube should do now the 45 percent they're taking
01:09:08
just lower that to 30. just give up a little bit of the take rate and and people will be feel more
01:09:12
reasonable about what you're taking can i can i bring in the that sub stack article by antonio
01:09:18
garcia martinez i want to end the apple segment on on um on agm's article which was called bad apple
01:09:30
although a great article great art yeah i mean it was it was unbelievable but david
01:09:34
was so i just want to let people know how excited david was about this david i think is like ready
01:09:41
to be in a full-blown bromance with antonio i mean which david are you talking about
01:09:47
i'm talking about you sacks you are are you in love with antonio it's a big pause oh oh
01:09:58
we lost upon zoom when i asked him if he's in love apple came in and they press
01:10:02
pause pause on the stream he's frozen look at this look at the frozen look at his eyes look
01:10:07
how he's he that's the look of love did you read that article of love i thought it was really well written too
01:10:14
it was well written he's a really really good writer but here's the thing he is getting paid
01:10:21
probably three hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand dollars to write on stubstack after getting
01:10:26
fired and after getting a giant settlement from apple whatever that's gonna be
01:10:30
so he is making out like a bandit but i thought the funniest part was like i'm
01:10:35
not being um silenced here because i'm now being paid to talk about apple for the next
01:10:41
year my sub sack um but he i thought his most salient point was steve jobs would not have been able to
01:10:48
exist in the apple that exists today he would have run out of apples what do you say he would have been cancelled
01:10:53
what i mean steve jobs would have a hundred percent david you broke up us if you were in love with antonio you
01:10:59
just you i think you got no money off yeah exactly no look i think um i don't agree with everything
01:11:05
agm writes but i do think he is a fantastic writer with a lot of interesting perspective and
01:11:10
that ending of that article the reason i want to mention it is it kind of goes to
01:11:14
freeberg's point about how much innovation how much innovation is there really at
01:11:18
apple now that the that the genius who created it is gone and he he ends his article by saying
01:11:25
when apple launched the mac computer in 1984 you know they famously ran that super bowl
01:11:30
ad that featured a solitary figure flinging a sledgehammer into a big brother-like
01:11:35
face spewing propaganda at the huddled ranks of some drab dystopia and then agm says
01:11:40
the tech titans nowadays resemble more and more the harangue figure on the screen
01:11:45
rather than the colorful rebel going against the established order whether it be hiring policy or free
01:11:51
speech silicon valley has to decide whether it becomes what it once vowed to destroy the reality is the
01:11:57
great genius who founded apple is long gone it is run by hr people and woke mobs
01:12:05
it's run by a supply chain manager exactly and and and so there is no more innovation there
01:12:10
they are just a gatekeeper collecting rents and you know freeberg you're right to raise the issue of
01:12:15
what's going to create the most innovation but the thing that's going to create the
01:12:18
most innovation is letting entrepreneurs create new companies without needing apple's permission i will tell you
01:12:23
something i think that over the next decade because of exactly what you guys said
01:12:27
that apple is run by managers who don't want to see loss but aren't driven to gain you're
01:12:33
going to end up seeing amazon particular and apple likely as well lose to the likes of shopify and square
01:12:41
and stripe shopify square and stripe are all formidable threats to amazon over time
01:12:46
and now that bezos is actually going to step out and it is going to be run by a bunch of
01:12:50
managers and you have these founders of these three companies still running all three of those businesses
01:12:55
and all three of those businesses are going to be incredible competitive threats from different angles on amazon
01:12:59
that is where innovation wins and you will see it because leadership driven by founders at those businesses
01:13:05
could take them to compete directly with these guys and you don't need the government to come and
01:13:08
intervene all three of them are building and are going to continue to build better experiences for consumers
01:13:13
and for merchants that could end up disrupting the answer i'll give you a different take i think
01:13:17
that all four companies are going to win including amazon yeah they're going to
01:13:23
continue to win and i think what it shows is that shopify and stripe and square had to have very
01:13:30
precise entry points in markets and in many ways the things that they are allowed to do is still quite
01:13:35
constrained because amazon exists i think that that's fine that should be allowed but i don't think that's what's
01:13:43
going to get you know legislated and then litigated over the next 10 or 15 years it's a
01:13:48
handful of very specific practices that constrain what folks can do i think the app store is a constraint
01:13:56
the algorithmic nature of facebook's newsfeed and google search are constraints
01:14:01
and people are going to test those things and i think that in testing it you're
01:14:07
probably going to do what the government was successful as sac said in 2000 which is just slow
01:14:13
these guys down you have to remember at some point there were probably more doj lawyers inside of microsoft than product
01:14:18
managers and everything if i remember correctly from a feature perspective had to go to
01:14:23
the doj for approval for some time that's probably the best thing that can happen
01:14:28
to these companies which is you completely gum up the product infrastructure then you know
01:14:33
friedrich you're right the human capital equation changes people leave it's not that fun to be there they go to
01:14:39
startups but again you needed the government to step in and they're not going to necessarily solve
01:14:45
it but they can really slow down the overreach of these companies for the next 20 years and i think that that's
01:14:52
net additive for the world here's here's my prediction i think the pirates are
01:14:57
assembling themselves whether it's coinbase saying we're not going to have
01:15:00
politics at work or antonio and the end of cancel culture the end of taking the hysterical left or the
01:15:08
historic or the trolling right seriously i feel like that is ending and this great like nightmare of hysteria
01:15:15
uh and is going to end and the overton window is going to blossom and open up and people are going to
01:15:22
be more innovative and accepting of new ideas and be reasonable and not cancel people
01:15:27
who wrote something five or ten or two go go reasonableness let's go reasonable well-reasoned all
01:15:32
right everybody uh this has been another episode of the all waiting podcast uh nobody uh what am i doing today
01:15:40
yeah what you are you inviting us somewhere no i'm just wondering oh is this a flex are you using are you
01:15:46
gone or did you get an electric electricity it's 8 30 pm for me so i got to go hang out with my family
01:15:54
um i've got the accelerator and a board meeting and that's it i'm in the mediterranean
01:15:59
general area yes i'm actually conquering europe but i did again i just want to say i did
01:16:05
go to the dentist and um i filmed pretty good overcame sex are you hearing about people moving back
01:16:11
from miami this like little thing going on about people saying no people are so happy here
01:16:16
yeah do you think you're gonna end up living there uh no i mean we'll see maybe
01:16:23
no maybe did you did you get orthopedic did you get orthopedic shoes when you bought that
01:16:30
shirt oh my god did you join a golf club are you in a retirement community right now
01:16:38
guys i'm i'm on a i'm on a diet i predict by the end of the summer i'll be
01:16:42
thinner than jason yeah is there a weight check coming uh and let's go next episode show your
01:16:55
decks again i'll show mine and wait do it do it do it dexter please i think i'm 194. okay 195
01:17:07
something like that and what's your height five foot three five nine what are you you do look
01:17:15
thinner yeah i think i've lost about five pounds already i'm about 185 right
01:17:19
now and what's your height for five nine oh we're the same height and you weigh 10
01:17:24
pounds less you look good are you on any pharmaceuticals to lose weight no i'm doing i'm doing intermittent
01:17:29
fasting i'm doing no carbs and i'm trying to be as plant-based as possible so go
01:17:35
sex nice yeah good for you you do look better you do look better you feel good more energy yeah i mean i
01:17:42
yes i was getting like just that extra five pounds like kind of tipped me over i think i got like another
01:17:47
15 to go but you think you could be 170 oh yeah yeah yeah that's my goal have you cut back on drinking yeah
01:18:02
we had some incredible wine last night you know what i thought you were a vodka guy can't you just do like a vodka and
01:18:08
soda and be good i don't want to give it i can't give a wine you know i can't wait till we play poker
01:18:13
and drink some more tomos wine and it's so fun oh i can't wait either love you love you
01:18:18
saks love you harry love you harry videos back all right this has been the all-in
01:18:27
podcast brought to you by nobody and uh if you'd like to join the all-in chat you can join our imessage group uh
01:18:33
the first ten people it's ten thousand dollars a month we're gonna monetize by
01:18:36
allowing ten people to be in the it's only like 300 bucks a day to begin i got to figure out a way to monetize
01:18:47
this all right we'll see you all next time bye-bye [Music] and they've just gone crazy with it
01:19:10
[Music] where need to get mercy's