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what's going on saks lp meeting is it an lp meeting or are you going are you going to lunch peter thiel
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what's a little later what's going on it's 9 00 am you must be there must be a call going on here
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every week but chamoth is in italy another button gets undone this is definitely
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[Music] hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another episode of the all-in podcast episode 36 back with us today on the program the
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queen of quinoa science uh spectacular friedberg is with us again with leading off last episode freeberg with a great uh freeberg science monologue the crowd
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went crazy for it how does it feel coming off that epic performance in episode 35 tell us what were you thinking going into the
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game and uh yeah well i was thinking i would talk about the alzheimer's drug approval
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at biogen and i felt like i did it when we were done great good it's just it's like literally
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interviewing kawhi leonard after like a 50-point game okay and with us rain man david sacks
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with layers for players he's been styled and groomed uh and he's in some random hotel room
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how are you doing rain man good good but i'm not i'm not in a hotel room i'm oh your home just happens to look like a
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five-star resort got it forgot that and give us an idea coming into today's game uh with the layers uh you obviously are here to dominate and get your monologues up
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gotta be hard for you to look at the stat line and see yourself trailing in monologues behind the dictator i'm of course
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referring to all in statistics yeah where some maniac is breaking down how many minutes we each talk
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per episode jason i'm really happy with my performance uh for me it's about quality not quantity i like to
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stick and stick and jab what the hell are you talking about right now my twitter account done you know how this the all-in stands
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have a ton of skills like there is an audience for this podcast that has more skills than you know it's like the the five percent of the most skilled
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people in the world listen to this podcast so in addition to doing the merge in addition to doing who's the guy henry
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who does all those incredible videos with animations in addition to those capture
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casters are crushing those things are great those are amazing and incredible uh of course you
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have young spielberg who led the charge dropping incredible incredible tracks and now we have this new crew
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that is analyzing somebody put uh you know we'll put in the show notes a link to it but they do um some type of
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ai analysis of the audio files and they tell us who had the most monologues and then the running time and then historic running time so they're actually looking at it trying to figure out you know who is
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speaking the most and they thought freeburg was going to run away with the episode but it kind of disappeared in the second half of the game uh and shmoth
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obviously came around the corner and took his 27 but they only have a pie chart of how much we each talk i have a
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i always have a very strong first and third quarter yes absolutely yeah and then he gets
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frustrated when he passes the ball and somebody misses a shot it's kind of like lebron in the early days so kicking off today uh lena khan has
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been confirmed to the ftc with bipartisan support interesting and this is obviously going to be a
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challenge for big tech on tuesday the senate voted 69 to 28 to confirm lina khan who is a very well established
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critic of big tech um and this is obviously really unique because she's 32 years old
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and she's leaving the ftc which is unbelievable i did a little research on her and watched some videos
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um she's basically written two amazing papers um and the first paper came out in 2017
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amazon's anti-trust paper the second one came out in june um and was about the separation of platforms and commerce
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and when you hear her speak she is incredibly uh credible and knowledgeable it is as
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if one of the four of us were discussing this she could come into this podcast and speak credibly about amazon's
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businesses as opposed to the charades we saw at different hearings where the senators and congress people
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just absolutely had no idea what they're talking about some of the items i picked up from a talk she gave
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in aspen um is that she be she formed a lot of these opinions by talking to venture capitalists who were concerned about amazon's dominance and other companies
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and the competitive space and she is looking at consumer welfare one of the lenses of antitrust which will i'm sure
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david sacks will have some thoughts on as our resident attorney here and the framing of those in terms of
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harm of the consumer she believes there's other harm that happens um and she thinks one remedy is to kill
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amazon basics because the marketplace shouldn't own the goods as well she's concerned about cloud computing consolidation because
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that creates uh fragility and that is another type of consumer harm while she freely admits that prices
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have gone down services are free and this is a consumer benefit so she wants to rethink the entire
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concept and she is savvy she brought up facebook buying a novo the reportedly spywarevpn to give them a little advantage as to what was being used on phones
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and maybe give them a little product roadmap information she also um brought up amazon studying the sales
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of other products to inform amazon basics a claim that amazon says they don't do but everybody knows they do do because
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all that information is publicly available she talked about amazon's vc arm using data to invest in buying companies
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why wouldn't they that makes total sense uh that's great signal for them uh she seems to want amazon web services
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spun out which i think would just double the value of it or maybe at 50 percent of the value of it
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and she gave very pragmatic examples like maybe separating google maps from android and when you turn on your android phone
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you you would have to install maps or maybe you would pick from the different maps that are out there different
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programs and that there would be integration in them and people could swap out you know mapquest or apple maps in their
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google searches so a lot of actually very interesting pragmatic approaches and she doesn't think these need to be decade-long lawsuits she thinks this is
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going to be a negotiation and that people will kind of work together on it but this is all with the
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backdrop of partisan politics and you know one group of people looking at this through the lens of wealth
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and inequality and another group looking at it through censorship sacks uh since you are our council here what
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are your thoughts on this appointment yeah i mean the interesting thing is that uh you know lina khan
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is the the bernie approved candidate she is liked by the progressive left but at the
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same time she got 21 republicans to support her and so this um nomination you know sailed through confirmation i think what she's saying what she's
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saying i think there's um there's a very uh good good argument to it um that and i've said similar things in
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the past which is you know what she's basically saying especially in the case of amazon is look you've got this company amazon that
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controls essential infrastructure aws the whole distribution supply chain going all the way from the port to warehouses to to logistics and distribution
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that is going to be owned by a scaled monopoly player you have a con massive economies of scale it's pretty
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clear they're going to dominate that and what they're doing is systematically going category by category
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and using the monopoly monopoly profits they make by owning the sort of core infrastructure and
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subsidizing their entry into each of these new categories that amazon basics and others
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and she calls that you know it's predatory pricing and she's afraid that amazon's just gonna end up dominating
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every category every category that you could build on top of this core infrastructure i think it's actually a pretty valid
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concern i think you see something analogous happening with apple and google and the app stores we had a congressional hearing
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pretty recently in which you had spotify on other apps complaining about what apple was doing to them saying
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they are making our service non-viable with the 30 rake that they're charging you remember
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bill gurley had a great post about this saying just because you can charge a 30 rate doesn't mean you should
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right now we're seeing this blow back from this massive 30 rake and you had spotify saying look
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apple is doing this to basically make us infeasible relative to apple music so i think there is a legit point here which is that if you own the monopoly platform the sort of
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essential infrastructure you cannot use it to basically take over every application
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on that can be built on top of that platform that i think is a very appropriate use of of antitrust law and i think so i think that's the good here now i think that there there are some
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some concerns um or some potential downsides and you know and the downside that i see is
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that we used to think we used to judge antitrust law in terms of consumer welfare
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and so so there was a limiting principle to the actions of government which is you would just look at prices and the
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effect on prices here you know the the sort of movement that lena khan represents the
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so-called hipster antitrust movement they're concerned about power and they want to restructure
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markets to avoid sort of concentrations of power i don't see the limiting principle there
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and so i think what the the would market share be a limiting principle well it would be a limiting principle in
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terms of who you could take action on but it wouldn't be a limiting principle in terms of how you would restructure the market
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and i think what we're in for over the next few years is potentially a hyper politic politicization of big
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tech markets i think these 21 republicans might soon feel like the dog who caught the bumper
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in the sense that yes they're finally going to have the regulation a big tech they've been calling for but they might
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not like all of the results because we because what could happen is a very intrusive meddling
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by government in the markets of technology and it could go well beyond sort of this um this this gatekeeper principle uh that we've been talking about that i
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think would be a valid reason to regulate jamaat i think she has to be careful uh
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in focusing on amazon so if you break down anti-cross law there are really three big buckets where
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the attack vectors are and i'm i'm not going to claim to be an expert but i think
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they're relatively easy to understand so you have the first principal body which is called the sherman act that's the thing that
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everybody's looked at and that's you know sort of where most current antitrust enforcement action has failed on tech
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companies because it largely looks at the predatory nature of pricing power that certain companies have and you have
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to remember this thing was written in the 1800s and so you know what did people do when they control things they just they drove
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prices up tech does the exact opposite right they constantly drive prices down and what's counterintuitive is it turns out that in the olden days driving prices up
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drove out competition today driving prices down drives out competition yes right so you know you make gmail infinite storage nobody else can compete with why switch
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why switch you make you know uh photos completely subsidized you make certain music products
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effectively free and you subsidize that you know you create enormous amounts of content
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blah blah so you have the sherman act then somewhere along the way we realized okay we need to add something we created this thing
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called the clayton act that was around m a right we added to that um a lot of folks that are listening probably have
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heard of heart scott rodino hsr we've all gone through it right on mna events we have to file
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these hsr clearances when you make big investments for example you know i just made a um a climate
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change thing we had to file hsr um and then there's this fdca which is the federal trade commission act that is
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where she can get you know if to use a poker term um you know a little frisky why because the ftca
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has these two specific things which says you can have an unfair method of competition
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or an unfair or deceptive act or practice now it falls on her and her team to basically build the strongest case around those two dimensions and my only advice to her i wrote this
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into 2019 in my investor letter as well just thinking about the breakdown of big tech
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if you're going to go after these guys that's the body of law that probably is the most
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defensible but you probably have to start you know whether you like it or not with
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facebook or google and the reason is there are more examples how you can use that language
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under the ftca to give those folks a hard time i think it's much harder the example would be
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chamoth that uh we are giving away this product losing money on it to keep you in our store and moat you into our uh advertising network et cetera that's an
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example yeah that's yeah or or you know we then we then because then when you have
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control then you can show that then the first part the sherman act part kicks in why so you've seen
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15 or 20 years of google facebook less apple by the way um using their edge to decrease
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price and for the first time in the last quarter both of these two companies and they
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were the only two of big tech that announced an increase in pricing right they saw
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a diminishing of cpm inventory and so they had to figure out ways to grow inventory as users started to stagnate
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and what they really said is we're ramping up cpms and cpm's i think we're up 28 30 percent in a quarter yeah and there's
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a lot of competition right now for edge if you put these two ideas together which is step one is you surreptitiously
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basically take all the costs out of the system and then step two raise price over time there's probably something there
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uh friedberg when we look at her age and her obvious deep deep knowledge do you see that as an overall plus i mean obviously if you know david
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framed her as the bernie approved candidate but then conceded that 20 republicans are are backing her
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what do you what do you think about the massive credibility she has freeberg in terms of she's actually understands this deeply
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clearly i mean i'm sure she's not dumb uh if that if that's what you're asking i'm not sure i mean it's a 32 year old i mean have we seen an appointment like that before i mean i
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don't think so yeah that's that's good for her um yeah so i just feel like there's um
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a bit of a cycle underway where we have this kind of anti-wealth anti-wealth accumulation sentiment as an undercurrent right now you know
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obviously bernie and elizabeth warren and others are key vocal um proponents of change that's needed
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to keep this kind of wealth disparity from continuing to grow and one of the solutions is to reduce the monopolistic
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capacity of certain business models specifically in technology um the downside that i don't think is realized and and that inevitably comes with this
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action under this new kind of business model of the the technology age or the digital age
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is the uh damage to consumers um and so you know as as chamath and david pointed out like historically antitrust has been about protecting the consumer and the irony is the more monopoly or
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the more monopolistic or the more market share amazon gains the cheaper things get for
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consumers and um and it's unfair to small businesses and to business owners and to
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competitors but consumers do fundamentally benefit and so the the logical argument she made in her paper
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that was widely distributed a few years ago what was around this notion that in this
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new world it's not about consumer harm and we need to look past the impact to consumers and look more at kind of the
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you know the fact that this company maybe prevents innovation and prevents competition but ultimately if the consumer is harmed
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uh in the resolution of that concern we're not going to wake up to it for a while
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and then consumers one day are gonna wake up and they're gonna be like wait a second why am i paying five bucks for gmail
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and you know why am i paying an extra ten dollars for shipping to get my amazon products brought to me every day
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and you know all the things that i think we've taken for granted in the digital age
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with the advent of these you know call it monopolistic kind of business models where they accumulate market share and they can squeeze pricing and keep people
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out and the bigger they get the cheaper they get and therefore it's harder to compete consumers have benefited tremendously i
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i think all of us would be hard-pressed to say i would love to pay 10 bucks a month for gmail i'd love to pay for facebook
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and at the end of the day these models i'd love to pay more for shipping with amazon and so you know it becomes a value
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question right what do you value more do you value the opportunity for competition and innovation in the business world or do you value
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as a consumer better pricing and i don't think that we're really having that debate and i think that that debate will
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inevitably kind of arise over the next couple of years if and how much of this kind of played out and
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i think to be clear freeberg what you're saying is this is driven by the extraordinary wealth of jeff bezos zuckerberg et cetera
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it's easy to pinpoint that problem and then not involve the repercussions to consumers
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if you try and change how business operates in a free market system and these businesses
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are successful because they have customers that like competition and they drive in
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a competitive way pricing down and they prevent people from coming in and competing not by entering into contracts and
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anti-trust enforcement all this sort of stuff they're doing it because they're scaling and offering lower prices i mean this go
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like peter thiel and mark andreessen have separately argued for this in really intelligent ways probably in a far more articulated way than i can
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but and they did this early on which is you know we want to find businesses that can become monopolies because if you can reduce your pricing
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and improve your pricing power with scale it's going to be harder and harder for someone to compete and therefore the
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capital theory is rush a bunch of capital into these businesses help them scale very quickly i mean this is obviously the basis of uber and others
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and then get really big really fast create the mode create the mode drop the pricing and then no one can compete with your pricing consumers benefit and
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you've created the big business and you blocked everyone okay so let me go around the horn here and frame this for everybody let's
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assume that uh big tech does get breaking up this broken up this is uh an exercise we assume it gets broken up
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and youtube and android are spun out instagram whatsapp or spun out aws has spun out and you know app stores are allowed on um apple's platform uh ios for the first time i want to know
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if this is good bad or neutral for the following two people so these breakups occur is it good bad
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or neutral for consumers and then two is it good bad or neutral for startups sex i generally would lean towards
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saying yes i mean a lot depends on neutral for each party startups and for consumers
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i i think it could ultimately be good for for both but it really depends on how it's done
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and i think there is a big risk here that this just degenerates into sort of hyper politicization you get intensive amounts of lobbying by big tech in washington that what
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happens is you know you have a good cop bad cop where lena khan just becomes the bad cop she's
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there to kind of keep big tech in line threatens to break them up and then the good cop is you know biden
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and the administration and then they they become the protection and the extortion racket they raise on
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you know ungodly amounts of money and really it'll be a bonanza for for all elected officials because now
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big tech's gonna have to increase its donations even more super cynical wow that's that's the cynical take so we could end up with
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something much worse than what we have now but but i think the legit i think the words you're gonna hear a lot
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okay are common carrier because what she seems to be saying is look if you're a tech monopoly that controls core infrastructure we need to regulate you like a common carrier you cannot
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summarily deny service to your competitors who are downstream applications built on top of your platform
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conservatives can get behind that because that is the argument they've been making about facebook cutting off free speech
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is you are a speech utility you should be regularly as a common carer you cannot
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cut off people summarily you cannot discriminate against people who should be allowed to have free
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speech on your platform and so i think there is i think the left and the right here can cut a deal where they regulate these
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guys these big tech companies as common carriers i think that is what we're headed towards so bakery can deny service as we
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talked about previous issue to a gay couple who wants a cake because it's a tiny little company and there's other choices
00:21:45
but when we're talking about facebook and twitter there are not other choices and once you're removed like trump has been from the public square
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there is no recourse you are essentially zeroed out chmath is it good for startups bad for startups neutral
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same thing for consumers if you know one chunk of every company got cleavered off uh it's
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unanimously good for startups in any scenario in which they get involved and i think in most cases in which the government gets involved it's it's good for consumers as well and why
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in both cases so for startups it's just because i think right now we have a massive
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human capital sucking sound that big tech creates in the ecosystem which is that there is an entire generation of people that are basically
00:22:35
unfortunately frittering away their most productive years getting paid what seems to them like a
00:22:42
lot of money uh what is what is effectively just you know um payola to not go to a competitor or go to a startup at buy big tech so
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those machine learning people um you know can get paid 750 to a million dollars a year to stay
00:23:05
at google and instead they won't go to a startup because they take sort of the bird in the hand right you multiply that by a hundred or
00:23:13
150 000 very talented you know technical people and that's actually what you're seeing
00:23:19
every day now those numbers are actually much higher you know if you're if you're a specific ai person you can get paid
00:23:24
five ten million dollars a year my point is uh they could have started a startup and maybe they could have
00:23:30
and frankly they just million they look let's be honest they go to google facebook and whatever and i don't think anybody sees the real
00:23:36
value of what they're doing in those places except getting paid now they're making a rational and economic decision for themselves and so nobody
00:23:42
should blame them for that um but if startups had more access to those people um or if you know those engineers finally said you know what enough's enough i'm actually going to go and try something new
00:23:55
that's net additive to the ecosystem it's net additive to startups right that's that's for them and then
00:24:00
for consumers i think the reason why it's positive is that it'll start to show you in which cases
00:24:07
you had been giving away something that you didn't realize was either valuable or you didn't realize you were giving
00:24:13
away in return for all of these product subsidies that you were getting and i think that's the next big thing that's happening you can see it in the the enormous amount of investment apple
00:24:25
for example is making in both advertising the push to privacy as well as implementing the push to
00:24:31
privacy you know this last wwdc you know they really threw the gauntlet down you know they they were really
00:24:38
trying to blow up um the advertising business models of google and facebook um and as consumers become more aware of
00:24:45
that they're probably willing to pay more so a simple example is you know there are a lot of people now
00:24:51
who will pay higher prices for food if they know it to be organic right there are people who will pay
00:24:56
higher prices for electricity or for an electric car because of its impact or the lack thereof in the climate so it's not to
00:25:02
say that people always want cheaper faster better right i mean sometimes people will buy an iphone because it's uh
00:25:08
obviously protecting their privacy and they know it's not an ad based model and in fact apple is now making that part of their
00:25:14
process so uh freeburg i asked the other gentleman uh if they thought some large unit being
00:25:21
chopped off of every company youtube aws uh instagram you pick it um would be a net positive for startups or negative or neutral and the same thing for consumers what do you think
00:25:32
which gentleman did you ask me i i was specifically referring to the ones who are wearing players
00:25:38
hello yes uh i'm using the term lightly so if you guys go back a few years ago you'll remember there were these i think there were congressional hearings and jeremy stapleman from yelp
00:25:50
was pretty vocal about how google um was redirecting search engine traffic to their own kind of reviews and they were pulling yelp
00:26:01
content off the site but then they said to yelp if you don't want us to pull your content you can turn the web crawler
00:26:07
toggle off and we won't crawl your site but your site is publicly available we can crawl it and we show snippets on our
00:26:13
homepage but then their argument was well you're using our content to drive your own reviews and they made this whole kind of case
00:26:18
that google's kind of monopoly and search was harming their ability to do business
00:26:24
um you know the counter argument was well if you guys have a great service consumers will go to your app directly
00:26:29
or your website directly to get reviews they won't go to google and so it created a little bit of this kind of noise for a while
00:26:36
i think there was some follow-up and this is all very much related because ultimately if he was able to get google
00:26:42
to stop providing a review service his business would do better because right google would effectively redirect search traffic to his site as opposed to their own internal site
00:26:53
so it is inevitably the case that in-house apps or in-house services that compete
00:26:59
with third-party services when you're a platform business are you know if they're removed it's
00:27:05
certainly going to benefit the competitive landscape which is typically startups uh you know imagine if apple didn't have
00:27:11
apple maps pre-installed on the iphone everyone would download and use google maps right i mean there
00:27:16
are yeah mapquest whatever or map quest or whatever and so um you know or whatever startup came along
00:27:21
in like ways and said hey we've got a better map but because they have this ability to kind of put that apple maps in front of
00:27:27
you as a consumer and it's a default on your phone you're more likely to just click on it and start using it and you're done it certainly opens up this window but i
00:27:34
think the question is what's ultimately best for the consumer if you believe that consumers will choose
00:27:40
what's best for themselves you're starting to kind of manipulate with the market a bit
00:27:45
and saks i don't know i think you've got a different point of view on this but yeah yeah well i'm i'm a free markets type of guy
00:27:51
but my experience at paypal really changed my thinking on this because paypal was a startup that launched effectively as an involuntary app on top of the ebay
00:28:03
market at that time ebay had a monopoly on the auction market and that was the key sort of beachhead
00:28:09
market for online payments so we launched on top of ebay right they were constantly trying to dislodge us and remove us from
00:28:16
their platform and really the only thing keeping them from just switching us off was a was an antitrust thread we
00:28:23
actually spun up you could call it a lobbying operation where we would send information to the
00:28:28
ftc and the doj and say listen you've got this auction monopoly here that's taking anti-competitive actions
00:28:35
against us this little startup and you know it it and so we were able to rattle the
00:28:41
saber and sort of brush them back from the plate from taking a you know a much more dramatic action against us
00:28:48
and frankly we did something kind of similar with visa mastercard because paypal was essentially an application on top of
00:28:54
visa mastercard as well we offered merchants the ability to accept visa mastercard but also
00:28:59
paypal payments which were gradually eating into and supplanting the the credit card payments
00:29:04
and so you know visa mastercard had a very dim view of paypal and they were constantly you
00:29:10
know they were constantly making noise about switching us off and i i do think that without the
00:29:16
threat of antitrust hanging over these big monopolies or duopolies it would have been very hard for us as a startup
00:29:23
to get the access to these networks that we needed and so it really kind of changed my
00:29:30
thinking about it because you know if you let these giant monopolies run wild run run amok they will absolutely stifle innovation 100 they will become
00:29:42
gatekeepers and so you have to have the threat of antitrust action hanging over their
00:29:47
heads or you will stifle innovation absolutely i mean if you just look at the interesting google flights over time
00:29:54
i'm looking at a chart right now we'll put it into the notes google flights you know i know some of us don't fly commercial
00:30:00
anymore but you know for somebody who's uh looking for flights on a regular basis watching google intercept flight
00:30:08
information put up google flights and it's an awesome product and just expedia and bookings.com
00:30:15
so jason that was a company called ita software based out of boston and ita was acquired by google ita was
00:30:22
the search engine behind flight search for most companies it was like 70 phds they were all
00:30:27
statistics guys and they basically built this logistical model that identified you know flights
00:30:32
and pricing and all this sort of stuff too wow so and so they should never been allowed well they created a white label
00:30:38
uh search capability that they then provided and they were making plenty of money providing this as a white label
00:30:43
search capability to expedia and kayak and all the online uh travel agencies and google wanted to be in that business because travel search was obviously such a big vertical um and
00:30:54
rather than just buy a travel search site they bought the engine that powers travel search for most of the other
00:31:00
gangster and then they also revealed the results in their own search result home page uh which effectively
00:31:06
cut off the otas and the otas are big spenders on google ads so so basically google this is how
00:31:12
nefarious it is if i'm hearing what you're saying fredberg correctly they watched all this money being made
00:31:18
by those otas they watched where they got their data from then they bought their data source
00:31:23
and then they decided you know what we won't take your cost per click money we'll just take your entire business well i don't know
00:31:29
so let me just let me just say it another way what's best for consumers so does a consumer because what happens
00:31:35
a lot in benevolent dictatorships i guess that you don't want to make money in online advertising there are a lot of
00:31:40
these ad arbitrage businesses is one way to think about it where um you know a service provider
00:31:46
will pay for ads on google to get traffic the ads will come to their site and then they will either make money on ads or
00:31:52
you know kind of sell that consumer service right and so that's effectively what the otas were is they were they became engineers
00:32:00
online search engine intermediaries that were arbitraging google's ad cost versus what they could get paid for the consumer
00:32:05
and so google look at this and they're like wait a second we're only capturing half the pie and consumers don't want to have to
00:32:11
click through three websites to buy a flight or buy a hotel and by the way if they did they would keep doing it
00:32:16
so why don't we just give them the end result right up front and then consumers will be happier the less time they have to spend clicking
00:32:22
through sites and looking at other shitty ads the happier they'll be and the product just works incredibly well considering
00:32:27
to make consumers lives less arduous while building a power base that then could make their lives miserable
00:32:35
what i think lina khan is saying though is you can't just look at the short-term interests of consumers you got to look at their long-term interest what's in
00:32:41
the long-term interest consumers is to have competition in the short term these giant monopolies can engage in
00:32:47
predatory pricing to lower the cost for consumers and so just looking at the price on a short-term basis isn't enough and they can trick people to giving them something else that they don't know to
00:32:59
be valuable so in the case of these you know a lot of these companies what are they doing they're tricking them to
00:33:04
get enormous amounts of user information yep personal information user generated
00:33:10
content and they get nothing for it right and then on the back of that if you're able to build a trillion
00:33:16
look at look at the value that youtube has generated um economic value and then try to figure
00:33:22
out how much of that value is really shared with the creator community inside of youtube i'm guessing it's less than
00:33:28
50 basis points well 50 i just want a percent of revenue yeah but you're saying downstream with all that data google is
00:33:36
making a massive amount of money i just wanted if you if you impute the value of all of the pii that google
00:33:41
basically expects personally identifiable information all the cookies that they drop
00:33:46
all that information and you equate it to an economic enterprise value not necessarily yearly
00:33:52
revenue like a discounted cash flow over 20 years you would be in the trillions and trillions of dollars and then if you
00:33:58
discounted the same 20 years of revenue share that they give to their content producers it will be in the
00:34:04
hundreds of billions of dollars at best and so you're talking about an enormous trade-off where google basically has built
00:34:14
you know a multi-trillion dollar asset and has leaked away less than 10 or 15 percent
00:34:19
of the value but that's an example where they are giving people something that they think is valuable
00:34:25
right but in return they're able to build something much much more valuable i just want to address like sax's point
00:34:32
which is the regulators are now going to start to think about the long-term interest consumer over the short-term interest of
00:34:37
the consumer as um effectively giving the regulatory throttle uh to uh elected officials and this means that you're now giving
00:34:48
another throttle right another control uh joystick um uh to to folks that may not necessarily
00:34:55
come from business um that may not necessarily have the the appropriate background and that may have their own kind of
00:35:01
political incentives and motivations to make decisions about what is right and what is wrong for consumers over the long term
00:35:07
and ultimately those are going to be value judgments right there's no determinism here there's no right or wrong
00:35:12
um they're going to be decisions based on the kind of opinion and nuance of of some elected people and so it is a
00:35:18
very dangerous and kind of slippery slope to end up in this world where the judgment of some regulator
00:35:24
about what's best for consumers long term versus the cold hard facts oh prices went up prices didn't
00:35:29
you know but really saying well this could affect you in the future in this way um starts to become kind of a really you
00:35:35
know scary and slippery slope uh if we kind of embrace this uh this this new regulatory order
00:35:40
all right moving on big news this week uh apple had a gag order it has been revealed
00:35:46
um this is unbelievable it's pretty crazy um and uh we only have partial information
00:35:52
here but the justice department subpoenaed apple in february of 2018 about an account that belonged to donald
00:35:58
mcgann who obviously was the uh trump's white house counsel at the time and obviously was part of the campaign he is very famously uh known for being interviewed by
00:36:09
mueller and at that time this is the time period by the way we're talking about here in february of 2018
00:36:15
when mueller was investigating manafort who of course uh was super corrupt and went to jail and then was suddenly pardoned
00:36:21
because they he was also involved in the campaign in 2016 it's possible that this related to mueller
00:36:27
it's unknown at this time uh many other folks were also caught up in this dragnet rod rosenstein was a second and it's um
00:36:34
unclear if the fbi agents were investigating uh whether mcghan was the leaker or not
00:36:40
trump had previously ordered mcgahn the previous june to have the justice department remove mueller which mcgahn refused and threatened to resign and mcgann later
00:36:51
revealed that he had in fact leaked his resignation threat to the washington post uh according to the times disclosure
00:36:58
that agents had collected data of a sitting white house counsel uh which they kept secret for years is
00:37:03
extraordinary go ahead sacks well i i just think let's get all the facts out here i think you're missing some of the key facts so
00:37:09
the the justice department under trump starts this investigation into leaks of classified information they're on a mole hunt
00:37:16
effectively and they start uh making they subpoena the doj subpoenas records from apple and it goes very broad and they end up subpoenaing the records not just of mcgann who's the white house
00:37:29
counsel which is very bizarre and curious they'd be investigating their own white house counsel but they also uh well it wasn't ships
00:37:37
yes but there are they also subpoena records of adam schiff and swalwell and members of the house
00:37:43
intelligence committee and so you have now um an accusation which is being breathlessly reported on cnn and msnbc that here you had the trump administration
00:37:54
investigating its political enemies and using the subpoena power of the doj with apple's compliance to now spy on their political enemies that that
00:38:05
those are some big jumps those are some big jumps yeah and that is those are some big jumps because
00:38:10
um according to preet bharara and some other folks who are in the industry um who who have done these actual
00:38:16
subpoenas they could have been subpoenaing you know one of manafort's you know corrupt you know uh partners in crime and then
00:38:24
those people he could have been talking to many people in the trump administration and then subsequently family members and
00:38:29
others so he might have not been the target he could have been caught up in the metadata of other people yeah so
00:38:35
this might not be trump saying get me his iphone records it could be there's some dirty person they know
00:38:41
they're dirty and that person had reached out to other people and they might have even done one more hop from
00:38:46
it thoughts i mean okay that's one version yeah and then you know the other the other version which is important is you subpoena your own lawyer by going to
00:38:59
apple getting basically god knows what data associated with this man's account and
00:39:06
then you know institutes a gag order on that company so that they can neither tell the person
00:39:11
until now when the gag order expired nor tell anybody else nor have any recourse to the extent that they think that this
00:39:17
is illegitimate that to me smells really fishy and so you know like there are other mechanisms that that we know of like fizzy requests and other things that these big companies have to deal with all the time
00:39:29
this at least the way that it's written and how it's been reported is something outside of the pale and so
00:39:34
i think you have to deal with it with this question of like what the hell was going on over there yeah it does
00:39:40
seem like they were going uh i mean you know kindly maybe mole hunting more nefariously witch hunting um but they were trying to pin it on
00:39:51
people and they may have used this blanket sort of deniable plausibility of the russia
00:39:58
you know imbroglio but really what these guys were doing was they were investigating anybody that they thought was a threat
00:40:05
and that is a really scary thing to have in a democracy and then the fact that these big tech
00:40:10
companies basically just turned it over and didn't have any recourse to protect the user or to inform the public
00:40:17
forget trump for a second i think we don't necessarily want that to be the precedent that holds going forward
00:40:23
yeah and the interesting thing here is that saks jeff sessions rosenstein and barr
00:40:30
all say they're unaware of this so what would be the charitable reason they were unaware of it or what
00:40:35
would be the nefarious reason or is that important at all because that's really strange
00:40:40
well they would go after the white house council and adam schiff and those top three people would have no
00:40:46
idea are they lying i mean what's next is the sc you know are we going to basically go to a point where like you know
00:40:52
every single ever no but i mean like every single post that one makes on facebook is basically
00:40:58
surveilled um if you make an anonymous post on twitter will you be tracked down i remember like
00:41:04
as much as everybody thinks there's anonymity on the internet there really isn't and you should just completely assume
00:41:10
that you are trackable are being tracked have been tracked everything is in the wide open it's just a matter of whether it's
00:41:16
disclosed to you or not or whether it's brought back to you or not so yeah so look i mean i i agree with dramath that this stinks
00:41:22
and it's a it's an invasion of people's civil liberties but i would not make it too partisan
00:41:27
because the obama administration was engaging in similar activity back in 2013 and i don't think
00:41:35
people realize this the there's an old saying in washington that the real scandal is what's legal
00:41:41
and the fact of the matter is that what the trump administration did was certainly suspicious and it might have been politically motivated
00:41:47
we don't know but it was legal the doj convened a federal grand jury got these uh got these subpoenas
00:41:54
presented them to apple and got this information and in a similar way back in 2013 the
00:42:00
obama administration did something similar it's quite extraordinary they subpoenaed the records of the ap
00:42:06
they for they for two months they got the records of reporters and five branches of the ap
00:42:13
and all their mobile records and they were on a mole hunt to try and find leakers of classified information so the
00:42:20
trump administration basically did exactly what the obama administration did the only new wrinkle is that they only went after reporters
00:42:27
they actually subpoenaed records of members you're missing one huge you're missing you're missing one huge
00:42:34
difference trump was under investigation uh for espionage and treason at the time so it is
00:42:40
slightly different um obama well i i i don't think it's that different in the sense that trump used powers that
00:42:47
were pioneered by the obama administration they just took them they just took them well one little and in addition to that
00:42:53
sax in addition to that um when obama did it all the top brass at the department of justice were aware
00:42:59
of this and in this case you have three people who were running the department of administration all claiming they don't know no in 2013 there's a new york
00:43:06
times article on this i'm going to post on the in the show notes but it said that when when first of all the
00:43:13
ap was not informed about the subpoenas until a number of months later so it was a
00:43:18
secret seizure of records same thing here with the gag order and so you have people being
00:43:25
investigated they don't even know they're being investigated investigated they can even get a lawyer spun up to oppose
00:43:30
the invasion of their rights i i agree with you but the attorney general knew about that maybe the attorney
00:43:37
general did but the white house claims that it didn't know so in any event i mean look what we i my
00:43:42
view on this is that we shouldn't try to make this two partisan what we have here is an opportunity to hopefully get some
00:43:48
bipartisan legislation to fix the issue and i think the fix should be this that when you investigate somebody when you subpoena records
00:43:58
from a big tech company you have to notify them you should not be able to do that secretly because the fact of the matter is that
00:44:04
apple and these other big tech companies don't have an incentive to oppose the subpoena they're not your lawyer
00:44:10
and actually brad smith the president of microsoft had a great op-ed in the washington post that we should
00:44:16
post that we should put in the show notes where he said these secret gag orders must stop
00:44:21
he said that in the old way of the government subpoenaing records is it that you would have essentially
00:44:27
offline records you'd have a file cabinet and the government would come with a search warrant they present the search warrant to you
00:44:33
and then you could get a lawyer to oppose it well they don't do that anymore because your records aren't in a file cabinet somewhere they're in the
00:44:39
cloud and so now they don't even go to the person who's being investigated right they just go to a big tech company
00:44:45
sees the records and then put a gag order on top of it so you don't even know you're being investigated that's the part of it that's stupid by
00:44:51
the way it's even more pernicious than that sax because to uh combine this with the previous uh
00:44:57
story what incentive does apple have to say to an administration that could break them
00:45:02
up we're not going to cooperate of course zero incentive they are not your agent
00:45:09
in this and here's the thing those are your records they're in the cloud but they're your records and every other privacy context
00:45:15
we say those records belong to you not the big tech so why they're not governments this is why people's moving everything to your phone
00:45:22
at this point why should the government be able to do an end run around you the target of the
00:45:27
investigation go to big tech get your records from because they can't not your records well first of all they're not your records
00:45:33
these companies tricked all of us by giving it to us for free so that we gave them all of our
00:45:38
content they are fair not just the they are not just the custodian they are the trustee
00:45:44
of our content and it's a huge distinction in what they're allowed to do and jason
00:45:49
brings up an incredible point but just which is that of course they're now incentivized to have a back door
00:45:55
and live under a gag order because their their defense in a back room is you guys you know when when in the light somebody says we should break you up in the dark they can say guys come on we
00:46:08
got a back door you just come in gag order us give us we'll give you what you want you want a honeypot
00:46:14
right you don't want this thing all over the internet and can you imagine how credible david that is to your point
00:46:20
because that is a body of concentrating power that i think is very scary in fairness to apple friedberg they have locked down the phone and they've moved all of this information
00:46:31
from the cloud or they're starting this process and saying we're going to keep some amount of data encrypted on your phone and of
00:46:37
course with the san bernardino shooting they refused in a terrorist shooting a known terror
00:46:42
shooting to not give a backdoor um well that's a crazy standard it's like you know what okay there was a san
00:46:47
bernardino shooter and they were like nope sorry that's a bridge too far but you know don mcgahn
00:46:53
and basically like you know political espionage they're like here you go yeah i don't know i don't know how how
00:46:59
do you make these decisions let me ask you guys a question go ahead would you be could you see yourself thriving in a world where all of your
00:47:12
information was completely publicly available but also all of everyone else's information was completely publicly available yes oh everybody has all their nudes on
00:47:23
the web is what you're saying everybody there's a there's a there's a book by stephen baxter
00:47:28
called the light of other days it's one of my favorite sci-fi books i sent it out to all of my investors this last uh we do like a book
00:47:35
thing every year and i reread it recently but the whole point of the book is that there's like a wormhole
00:47:40
technology that they discover and they can figure out how to like look and you can boot up your computer and look in anywhere
00:47:47
and see anything and hear anything you want and so all of a sudden society has to transform
00:47:52
under this kind of new regime of hyper transparency where all information about everything
00:47:58
is completely available but i think the fear and the concern that we innately have with respect to loss of privacy is that
00:48:05
there's a centralized or controlled power that has that information but what if there was a world that that
00:48:11
you evolved to where all of that information is generally available quite broadly and i'm not advocating for this by the
00:48:16
way i'm just pointing out that like the sensitivity we have is about our information being concentrated
00:48:21
in the hands of either a government or a business um and i think you have to kind of accept
00:48:27
the fact that more information is being generated about each of us every day than was being generated by us a few
00:48:34
weeks ago or months ago or years ago basically everybody everybody's the truman and everybody is the truman show
00:48:39
is what you're saying well in a geometrically growing way information which we're calling pii or whatever
00:48:45
is being generated about us and i think the genie's out of the bottle meaning like the the cost of sensors the
00:48:51
access to digital the digital age and what it brings to us from a benefit perspective is creating information about us in a
00:48:57
footprint about us that i don't think we ever kind of contemplated but as that happens the question is where does that
00:49:03
information go can you put that genie back in the bottle and i think there's a big philosophical
00:49:09
point which is like if you try and put the genie back in the bottle you're really just trying to fight information wants to be free information
00:49:14
wants to grow what's the name of the book you were talking about there the light of other days by stephen baxter
00:49:20
and arthur c clark helped write it but the book is most interesting about the philosophical implications of a world
00:49:26
where all information is completely freely available anyone yeah completely transparent and
00:49:31
so like do we see ourselves because i think there's two paths one is you fight this and you fight it and you fight it every which way which is i want my pii
00:49:38
locked up i don't want anyone having access to it yada yada yada you'll either see a diminishment of services or the other one is you do us or you'll see
00:49:44
a selfie on twitter where you take your shirt off or you'll see this concentration of power where we all kind of freak out
00:49:50
where the government or or some business has all of our information the other path is a path that society starts to recognize that
00:49:56
this information's out there there's you know whatever it's not just about pii here this is about
00:50:02
due process this is about our fifth amendment right to due process you have the government
00:50:07
secretly investigating people they could never do this if they had to present you with a search warrant they are doing an
00:50:13
and run around that process by going to big tech just to put some numbers on this big tech is getting something like 400
00:50:20
subpoenas a week for people's records they only oppose four percent of them why they have no incentive to operate how many of those you should be able to see do you know how many are those a secret or not we don't know how many of them
00:50:32
have a gag order they are required to tell the target what happened but not if there's a gag
00:50:37
order attached to it we don't know how many have a gag order you should have the right to send your own lawyer to oppose the
00:50:44
request not if you want for it if you want to see an amazing movie the lives of others uh which is about
00:50:51
the state security service in east berlin germany uh also known as the stasi and the
00:50:57
impact of literally in your apartment building there are three people spying on the other 10 people and they're the
00:51:03
postmen and you know the housewife and the teacher and they're all tapped and secretly recording to each
00:51:09
other it leads to chaos and bad feelings and obviously when east berlin um when the
00:51:15
wall came down all of this came out and it was really dark and crazy yeah i mean look j let me connect this to the censorship
00:51:22
issue actually because in my view they're both very similar civil liberties issues which is in the case of the censorship issue you
00:51:28
have the government doing an end run around the first amendment by demanding that big tech
00:51:34
companies engage in censorship that the government itself could not do you have something very similar taking place here with these records the
00:51:40
government is demanding secrecy about its seizure of records they're imposing that on big tech
00:51:46
they're making big tech do its dirty work for them they could never do that uh directly if they had to go to the target
00:51:52
of the investigation and ask for their and subpoena the records that way so what you have here is a case where we
00:51:58
not only need to be protected against the power of big tech we need to be protected against the power of government
00:52:04
usurping the powers of big tech to engage in you know behavior they couldn't otherwise engage in and let's be honest and the government are
00:52:15
overlapping and in cahoots or they're inside yeah they're in some really crazy dance the money is flowing freely from uh lobbyists and it's a very very
00:52:28
complicated relationship it's a very complicated very complicated relationship all right seven-day average
00:52:33
for coveted debts is uh now at 332. um finding cases of people who have had kovid um is now becoming like almost shocking
00:52:45
uh i don't know if you guys saw but uh the point guard chris paul uh who was having an incredibly winning season in
00:52:51
the nba he basically got over it they said he was vaccinated so it could be a mild case but he's been
00:52:57
uh pulled out indefinitely and he's about to play in the western conference final so it's pretty crazy and freeburg uh obviously california's
00:53:05
opened up after 15 months and we were the first to shut down the last open up and we were
00:53:10
hit the least i think of any state or amongst the least of any certainly the least of any large state
00:53:16
and you're being asked to still wear a mask at your office i'm also being asked to take off my shoes when i get on an airplane yeah 20 years later and yeah i don't
00:53:28
think al qaeda exists anymore uh yeah maybe some yeah parts of it explain what's happening to you in the presidio which is uh a lovely state park uh here in california under
00:53:41
the golden globe my office in the presidio in california san francisco county and the federal government have all removed
00:53:47
mass mandates but our our landlord has determined in their judgment that everyone should
00:53:53
still wear a mask to go to work and so to go into my rented office and work i have to wear a mask
00:53:59
and i think it's it's an issue for a lot of people who like those people at um i've been probably a couple restaurants this week and you know you go to some restaurants and everyone's just chilling
00:54:10
the employees are not wearing masks there's other restaurants where they're being told they have to keep wearing masks by their manager or their boss um and so
00:54:18
this brings up this big question which is like we've now got the kind of psychic shadow of covid that that's
00:54:25
gonna it's gonna it's gonna cast a very long shadow you predicted it you predicted it and um and so
00:54:30
people that that are in power want to continue to kind of impress upon you know whatever you know
00:54:37
employees or tenants or what have you they might have in whatever they deem their judgment to
00:54:42
be which is obviously in many cases an under-informed uninformed non-scientific and um and non-mandated judgment about
00:54:51
effectively what people should have to wear so if the threat or the risk has been removed and all of the health officials and all
00:54:57
of the government agencies are saying the threat has been removed you no longer need to kind of wear masks but your boss or your manager or your
00:55:04
landlord tells you you have to wear a mask to conduct your business or to go to work
00:55:09
you know it's going to bring up this whole series of challenges and questions i foresee for the next couple of months at least
00:55:15
and maybe for several years about what's fair and what's right and there will always be the safety argument to be made on the other side so it's very hard to
00:55:21
argue against that and oh well the inconvenience is just a mask it's not a big deal but for you know a number of people to
00:55:27
to now kind of be told you know what to do and what to wear it'll take a year to sort all these things out because they'll all get
00:55:33
prosecuted or not prosecuted but litigated and they're going to go to court they will get laminated for sure there will be lawsuits on this
00:55:40
and and what's going to happen is that you're going to basically have again jason back to that example of the the bakery in colorado
00:55:47
private institutions will be allowed some level of independence in establishing um you know certain employee guidelines and so on exactly and you you'll have to conform
00:55:58
to those and it is what it is i mean i i was very strange in austin in terms of these coveted uh dead enders who just will not let it go
00:56:10
i'm in austin where nobody is wearing a mask and then there were like i went into lululemon
00:56:16
and they like two people charged me with masks in hand and they were like you have to wear a mask and i was like do i and they're like yes it's our policy i was like fine i'll put it on i don't care
00:56:28
you know no big deal this thing this thing has really fried a bunch of people's brains i mean it's crazy i mean it's it's
00:56:34
basically like you've taken an entire group of folks and kidnapped them and kidnapped them essentially it's
00:56:40
stockholm syndrome it's incredible everyone's been helping everyone's been held hostage you know in a prison for
00:56:46
the last year and so you've kind of accepted that this is the new reality i gotta wear a mask i
00:56:51
gotta wear gloves um and you know it's the similar sort of shift in reality that i think was needed
00:56:56
going into this where people didn't believe what it was and now it's hard for them to believe what it's become well we we fly that's
00:57:04
just human nature yeah yeah we flagged on this pod a few months ago the threat of zeroism
00:57:10
yeah which is that we wouldn't let you know all the special rules and restrictions lift until there
00:57:17
were zero cases of covet and we all know that's never going to happen code would always be around in the background
00:57:22
and just to add a layer to what's happening here in california is yeah on june 15th we lifted the restrictions but governor newsom has not given up his
00:57:30
emergency powers and he's he says he will keep them until kovitz been extinguished
00:57:35
so he's now embraced zeroism on behalf of uh this sort of authoritarianism yeah and you know so we've got this like golden state caesar and now i i what's interesting is i
00:57:47
don't think this is just because he's a tyrant although he's certainly been heavy-handed i think it's because that the i think
00:57:54
it's more about corruption than ideology because federal funds emergency funds from the
00:58:01
federal government keep flowing to the state as long as we have a state of emergency
00:58:06
and so the longer he keeps this thing going the more money he gets from the federal government that he can then use
00:58:11
in this recall year to pay people off and so we've already seen he's been buying every vote he can
00:58:17
right he gave 600 bucks to everyone making under 75 000 he's forgiving all the traffic fines and
00:58:22
parking tickets he's doing this this lottery ticket uh thing for getting the vaccine
00:58:27
and so he just wants to keep the the um the gravy train from washington to california even though we have a circle
00:58:41
i mean it reminds me of 911 where people were just like hey we can keep this gravy train no i mean like 911 is the perfect kind
00:58:48
of psychic you know scenario uh you know replaying itself with kovid there are behavioral changes that have
00:58:54
lasted forever there are regulatory changes this you know department of homeland security i mean you go through the amount of money that gets spent by
00:59:00
the tsa every year and the qualified risk and the qualified benefit completely unquantified right
00:59:06
like the amount of money that flows into these programs because you can make the the subjective statement there is a
00:59:12
threat there is risk therefore spend infinite amounts of money right like it's because because you never kind of put
00:59:18
pen to paper and say what is the risk what is the probability what is the severity of loss and therefore let's make a value
00:59:24
judgment about how much we should spend to protect against that downside and we're now doing the same thing with covid we're not having a conversation
00:59:31
about how many cases how many what's the risk should we really still be spending bill billions of dollars of state funding to
00:59:37
continue to protect a state where 70 of people are vaccinated and we and we have a massive surplus
00:59:42
and we're still giving people money um who may or may not need it and we're doing it indiscriminately speaking of uh discussions and hard
00:59:49
topics and being able to have them youtube which kicked off a ton of people on the platform for talking
00:59:54
about things that were not approved by the who has taken professor brett weinstein's
01:00:01
podcast down because he had a very reasonable discussion about ivermectin and its efficacy or
01:00:07
lack of efficacy this is a doctor a phd talking to an md and the video was removed apple did not remember it's really scary this episode these people should not be the
01:00:19
gatekeepers of the truth they have no idea what the truth is let's talk about the the jon stewart appearance on stephen well that's what i
01:00:25
was about to do yeah he killed he killed on stephen colbert but the things he was saying
01:00:31
about the lab leak would not have been allowed on youtube if it was three months ago that you would have
01:00:36
been removed for it even as a comedian the performance was amazing he basically says you know the wuhan
01:00:43
uh kovit lab is where the wuhan you know uh no the disease is named after the lab
01:00:51
where do you think it came from it was like a panel in murr you know mated with a bat i mean
01:00:56
this isn't and he goes on this whole diatribe it's incredibly funny yes but then at the end of it
01:01:02
well i i had two takeaways i don't know if you guys felt this at first i was like i had jon stewart's a little unhinged
01:01:07
here like i mean there was a part of it that was funny and then there was a part of it which is like wow jon stewart's been trapped indoors a little for 15
01:01:13
months yeah yeah so i thought that as well to be honest but then the second thing which i saw on twitter was all these
01:01:20
people reminding uh anybody who saw the tweet that this exact content would have not been allowed on big tech platforms were it said three or six months ago and
01:01:32
i was like wow this is this is really nuts meaning it takes a left-leaning smart funny
01:01:40
comedian to say something satire if the if the right if the right would have said it would have just been instantly
01:01:46
banished and that's like that's kind of crazy yeah the great quote was i think we owe
01:01:51
a great debt of gratitude to science science has in many ways helped ease the suffering of this pandemic uh which was more than likely caused by
01:01:57
science yeah well it was a funny line where he said something like if there was an outbreak of chocolatey
01:02:03
goodness in hershey pennsylvania pennsylvania it would be it wouldn't be because you know whatever the pangolin kissed about it's because
01:02:09
there's a [ __ ] chocolate factory there like i don't know maybe a steam shovel made it with a cocoa beans a [ __ ] chocolate factory maybe that's it
01:02:25
i mean this was a great example of censorship run amok at these big tech companies but
01:02:30
the other thing i saw that was really interesting was stephen colbert lose control of his audience and you
01:02:37
know stuart killed on that show but you could see stephen colbert was i think visibly nervous
01:02:42
very uncomfortable yeah very very uncomfortable they did not know what was coming and he was trying to and
01:02:47
when when john stewart kept pushing this he was like well uh he stopped trying to qualify well so what you're saying is now that faulcy
01:02:54
has said this might be a possibility you're saying it might be a possibility and john stewart was having none of it he ran right over that said no
01:03:00
the name is the same it's obvious come on and yeah well colbert kept challenging him i don't know if you saw this part where he said hey listen is it possible that they have a lab in wuhan to study
01:03:11
the coronavirus disease because warren there are a lot of novel coronavirus diseases because there's a big bat population and then steward is like no i'm not
01:03:19
standing for that he goes i totally understand it's the local specialty and it's the only place to find bats you won't find bats anywhere else oh wait austin texas
01:03:25
has thousands of them out of a cave every night at dusk and he wouldn't let it go so it's just great watching it was it
01:03:32
was a reminder frankly of how funny both jon stewart and stephen colbert were about 15 years ago
01:03:38
and i frankly i don't think stephen colbert is funny anymore because no because he's got to keep his job
01:03:44
he's carrying no but he's also too woke and yeah yes he's become very polemical and and
01:03:49
what stewart reminded us is that comedy is funny when it's making fun of the people who are pretentious and basically who are telling the truth and
01:04:00
stephen colbert has become so polemical that he's lost sight of the comedy and yeah john stewart brought it back
01:04:07
and i hope you know what this by the way by the way colbert colbert had this element of satire which even stuart
01:04:13
because stewart was in your face funny whereas colbert was like subtle and dry and you had to think about it there was
01:04:19
layered and for sure he's totally lost it totally totally lost well if you know and then and then and then i thought stewart came out swinging hard i do think though sax you have to agree did it seem to you
01:04:30
though like stewart had not like he just needed more human to human interaction absolutely he was a caged tiger man he was the cage
01:04:38
tiger they let him out it was the funniest thing jon stewart's done in many years and and the reason is because he connected with the fact that here is
01:04:50
this obvious thing that we're not allowed to say and that is what comics should be doing
01:04:56
yes put it light on it i mean if comedy is tragedy plus time i think that this is a
01:05:02
great moment for us to reflect on like i think we're gonna go back to normal pretty quick
01:05:08
um if you remember after 9 11 there was this idea that comedy was over forever you were not
01:05:13
going to be able to make fun of things and that this was the end of satire people were this is you know
01:05:19
um a bridge too far etc and um i think we're back we're back and that's it you know we can
01:05:25
joke about the coronavirus we can talk about it we don't need to censor people for
01:05:30
having an opinion we're all adults here um you know the idea that you know we have to take down people's tweets because they have some crazy theory or put a label on them like we went a little crazy during the
01:05:42
pandemic um and tried to stifle discussions for what reason exactly like when we look back on this it's going to look really strange that we demanded that we put labels on people
01:05:56
questioning or having a debate including doctors doctors were not allowed to debate to
01:06:02
the public on youtube or twitter about uh what was the drug that trump kept promoting hydrologic chloroquine chloroquine like remember that whole chloroquine i
01:06:13
think this uh ivermectin or whatever it is it's just triggering people because it feels like that last drug
01:06:19
which is a drug that may or may not work to slow down the progression of covid but anyway this is all over
01:06:24
if you haven't gotten your goddamn vaccine please get it stop denying science stop denying science climate change
01:06:30
climate change is not real and remember oh my god the youtube just canceled their account
01:06:36
jamal what are you doing science we talk about science as if science is a definitive answer to a question it's a process it's a process by which
01:06:47
you come to answers you test them and look hydroxychloroquine may have been completely wrong
01:06:53
but let the debate happen the answers came out anyway i'll tell you a fundamental premise of science is to
01:06:58
challenge assumptions and so when you challenge um an existing hypothesis or kind of an
01:07:05
existing thing that we hold to be true you are engaging in science and the rigorous debate around what works and
01:07:12
what doesn't work was notably absent over the past year because everything became about the political truth
01:07:18
you're either true or you're false based on your political orientation and we reduced everything down to kind of this one identity politics
01:07:24
this one-dimensional framework which we have a tendency politics let me just point this out to you guys i was going to mention this a few weeks ago but like
01:07:30
think about every conversation you have how um common it is now to immediately think
01:07:36
about what the person on the other side that you're talking to just said and then trying to put them on a blue or red spectrum it's
01:07:44
how we've all kind of been reprogrammed over the past decade or so where it used to be about the topic
01:07:49
itself and the objective truth finding or the or the specifics of what we're talking about
01:07:55
and now it's become about you immediately try and resolve them to being conservative or
01:08:00
or not red or blue trump or not purple and so every conversation you kind of try and orient around that simple ridiculous one-dimensional framework and it's a complete loss of the
01:08:12
discovery of objective truth in all matters in life and all matters and that affect all of
01:08:17
us um and it's uh it's really quite uh stark and sad this is why we need a nuclear
01:08:25
i think it's less about that i think it's more about everyone just reorienting themselves when you have a conversation just notice yourself doing
01:08:30
it and then recognize that maybe that's not the way to make a decision about the conversation or about having
01:08:36
an opinion or point of view but have an opinion or a point of view about the topic itself not about the orientation of the topic
01:08:43
on a on a single dimensional spectrum and then layer identity politics into that so not only
01:08:49
your politics but your gender your race your sexual preference the color of your skin and now how is
01:08:55
anybody supposed to have a reasonable argument when i have to process like oh chabot's from you know sri lanka
01:09:01
but he went through canada and he worked for i mean it's so reductive that no one gets it it's so reductive that no one gets to
01:09:08
have an identity anymore right because we we are all complex and all issues are complex and
01:09:13
they are all nuanced and when you reduce everything down to kind of this one-dimensional framework you lose any ability to have depth to
01:09:19
have nuance to have said another way the issues are complex enough we don't have to put identity
01:09:25
politics or political you know leanings on top of it all right so we had the worst
01:09:30
fire season uh in california ever last year obviously as jamaat said glo uh global
01:09:35
warming is uh a conspiracy um by the chinese uh as per your guy trump uh saks and uh there is climate change in switzerland
01:09:46
there is a center called the center for climate change there is a reason that there's climate change in switzerland
01:09:51
it's coming from that lab ah the sector did it look at the sign look at the side it says climate change
01:09:59
they're getting paid to propagate this conspiracy theory yeah uh all right so it's it's going to be the
01:10:05
worst thing well we are at risk more than ever right so we're entering june so as of june 1st the california
01:10:12
snowpack is down to zero percent of normal that's never happened before so it's the lowest it's ever been there
01:10:18
there is absolutely like no snowpack in the entire sierra in the entire state 40 of the state is in a state of extreme
01:10:25
drought right now we've had 16 000 acres burn as of a few weeks ago up from 3 600 during the same
01:10:31
time period the same day of the year last year um and so the the tinder is there now remember
01:10:37
uh last year was the highest um uh california's ever seen we burnt four million acres last year california has about 33 million acres of farmland of forest land
01:10:48
representing about a third of our total land size in the state um you know 60 percent of that land is
01:10:53
federal 40 is private um and so the the big kind of variable drivers this year are going to be um you know uh wind and heat and we're already seeing a few heat waves but it's the wind that
01:11:05
kind of kicks these things off but the tinder is there right so like the state is dry um the uh uh the the
01:11:12
the snowpack is gone we're on severe water restrictions in a lot of counties throughout the state um it's worth i think talking about the
01:11:19
carbon effect you know last year um based on the forests that burnt in california
01:11:25
we released about one and a half times as much carbon into the atmosphere from our forest fires as we did from uh cars burning fossil fuels in the state
01:11:36
and so wow so here's some statistics for you guys which i think are just worth highlighting
01:11:41
there's about 2 billion metric tons of carbon stored in california forest land which is about 60 tons per acre
01:11:48
so there's about 9 million new tons of carbon sequestered per uh fruit in california by our forest land per year when there's a fire we release about 10
01:12:01
tons per acre so about 1 6 of the carbon in that in that forest land the rest of the carbon doesn't burn up so remember when there's a forest fire typically the outside of the tree burns the whole thing doesn't burn to ash
01:12:13
and so a forest fire can actually if you look at the longitudinal kind of effect of it
01:12:19
burning forests can actually preserve the carbon sequestration activity versus you know just removing forests or removing trees and so there is to some extent um you know an effort
01:12:31
that has been shut down several times which is to do these kind of controlled burns through the state but it's met with such resistance uh
01:12:37
given that it's so controversial no one wants to have smoke in their in their neighborhood it shouldn't be it shouldn't be controversial the problem
01:12:43
is you can't present simple data and have people have a logical conversation about it and the cost per acre to clear land and
01:12:49
farm to forest land in california it ranges depending on the complexity of the land it's somewhere between 50 and a
01:12:54
thousand dollars so call it a couple hundred dollars per acre so you can very quickly kind of do the math on a carbon credit basis so it's about
01:13:01
40 bucks per ton uh for for carbon credit today so you're actually you know you can kind of preserve about
01:13:08
four hundred dollars per ten per ton by not putting carbon into the atmosphere and if you can actually manage farmland
01:13:14
uh forest land clearance and forest land preservation uh from fire at a cost of 400 or less
01:13:20
and there was an active carbon credit market you should be able to cover the cost of managing that forest land back
01:13:25
but we're here at incredibly high risk this year it doesn't mean that we're necessarily going to have a fire because weather is the key driver
01:13:31
the weather is highly variable wind we need wind we need wind and we need a heat wave with wind and then there will be fires
01:13:37
but and then what do they do when the wind kicks up right now uh the electric company turns off power
01:13:43
in california because they don't want to be blamed when a power line goes down and starts a fire
01:13:48
so we have these regular moments this is where we just lose power yeah this is not just a california
01:13:53
problem i know everyone wants to beat up on california but like the whole western us go look at google maps you'll see how much green stuff there is on google maps
01:14:00
it's green up and down the western half of the us friedberg was trump right that um raking up the
01:14:06
forests uh to put it in uh layman's terms or simple terms is an actual thing that helps sixty
01:14:12
percent of forest land in california is uh federal land and uh it was the federal government's
01:14:18
responsibility to manage that that cost down to manage that risk down what is the incentive what is the motivation
01:14:24
you know what are the key drivers those are obviously it does work to clear it though theoretically when you reduce
01:14:30
the amount of tinder you will reduce the risk of a burn right and so the cost but the cost of doing so as we mentioned is probably a
01:14:36
couple hundred dollars per acre and so who's gonna let's say you wanna do that on five million acres you know
01:14:41
wouldn't this create a bunch of jobs oh wait we're paying people to stay home yeah like it would create a ton of jobs
01:14:47
i mean i hate to be like that guy but like could we because an hour jobs for people i've heard scuttlebutt that newsom is so worried about fire season that they're going to
01:14:58
try and accelerate the recall election so it happens before there is you know the conventional system the
01:15:03
conventional wisdom would do that too he's so smart no if it would be strategic the conventional wisdom was that you'd want to wait as long as possible do the recall because the longer you wait the longer you get the rebound
01:15:17
of the economy from kovid right sure but now they're talking about accelerating it to beat fire season because it's
01:15:22
looking really bad and freebird's right that we needed much more aggressive forest
01:15:27
management it's not just climate change it's also forest management we don't do it in california anymore
01:15:33
and so i think we're we are in for a really hellish fire season nothing we're going to have a terrible
01:15:38
we're going to have a terrible fire season um there's going to be brownouts probably throughout a lot of the western states what played out in texas that affected folks
01:15:50
a few months ago i think will some version of that will happen um in many places in the us
01:15:57
this is a and it's all roughly avoidable and the critical principle act here is the progressive left they need to marry
01:16:10
their disdain for climate change and their disdain for the things that need to happen to prevent it because right now these two things for them are just like it's
01:16:24
cataclysmically not possible um for us to agree on for example as friedrich says a control burn program has a mechanism of sort of like fighting climate change
01:16:35
or you know investing more in the the greenification of the economy so that we can actually eliminate the use of a lot of these non-sustainable energy sources all these things basically just come down to
01:16:48
a group of individuals deciding that they can both have an opinion on something as important as climate change but then are also willing to then go and act right now they won't until they do it's
01:17:00
just going to spill over everywhere it's going to be a very bad fire season and the only reason i know that it is is that every year before it has been
01:17:07
every single year has gotten warmer yeah it's not you don't need to be getting this here better yes by the way let me just correct a
01:17:14
statistic i said because the statistic i gave was a few weeks ago but as of today we're actually at the average
01:17:20
uh the historical average in terms of number of acres that are burnt in california as we have seen historically i will also
01:17:25
say that you know close to one-sixth of um california's uh uh forest land burnt last year so there is a tremendous amount of tinder that has been removed from the risk equation
01:17:38
and we typically burn about a million acres a year i think we burnt like four million last little over four million last year
01:17:43
so you know as you look at the the cumulative kind of reduction of burnable acres we're we're
01:17:49
actually the good thing that's going on is we're actually at a lower risk scenario going into this year in terms of total amount
01:17:55
of tinder the risk of the tinder catching is higher because it's drier nasa but when you have to add this all
01:18:02
up there's certainly a high probability of a bad fire season but there could there be a scenario here
01:18:07
where we end up with less there's zero zero scenario that's going to happen nasa publishes temperature studies
01:18:13
they do measured measurements of how much warming there is in the earth last year we set yet another record it was the seventh year in a row where it was warmer than all the previous successive
01:18:27
years it's just going in the same place i mean and so if we're all of a sudden supposed to
01:18:32
bet that a trend that has effectively been reliable for the last decade is going to turn
01:18:38
i'm not sure that that's a bet you'd want to make or that the wind is not going to do a good bet it's just stupid
01:18:44
there's no reason to make that bet i mean this is like betting on a one-outer we need to we need we need the left
01:18:50
to take control of this issue and solve it get ready for martian skies over california
01:18:58
literally i've been thinking about an escape plan from california i mean and i'm putting a generator in
01:19:03
this month i bought six new air filters you know like beautiful that's not that's not good enough well i
01:19:10
have my house is totally sealed and i have the air purifiers in i have a built-in air purifier of the house and i have six
01:19:16
portable ones in each everything are you coming back in august uh in sept at the end of august but by
01:19:23
the way let me let me tell you where it really the rubber meets the road uh just again i'm speaking to the progressive left
01:19:30
they care apparently so much about minorities i just want to make sure you guys understand that you know air quality disproportionately affects minorities
01:19:40
why because we are not not me anymore but you know minorities are the ones that typically
01:19:46
live near industrial output near transportation through ways and thoroughfares it is con it is statistically proven that blacks brown other minority people are
01:19:58
the worst people to suffer from respiratory diseases and airborne illnesses and these are
01:20:04
things that are that are happening today so again i want to go back to the same group of individuals
01:20:09
who apparently believe in climate change but don't believe in nuclear they don't believe in controlled burns they believe in inequality but they
01:20:16
don't want to do what's necessary to regulate a mission what are we doing guys just get something do the job
01:20:22
do the job do your [ __ ] job what you're saying is correct your mouth but i think it's a sad statement about
01:20:27
the progressive left that the only way to reach them through an argument is to argue for that there's a disparate impact
01:20:33
on a minority the reality is affects all americans yes exactly exactly it's it's give me those red
01:20:39
pills come on come on sachs you're holding out no but but your mother understands that
01:20:45
audience he is making the argument they're going to respond to but the argument that they and everyone should be responding to
01:20:51
is inequality is bad for everybody the planet all humans exactly what are you guys going to do for fire season do you actually i'm thinking about renting a house like i rented a house in chicago in lake
01:21:02
michigan last year and i went there and it was a great escape for a month to get away from fire season but i don't i don't i'm very scared to be in
01:21:07
california during all of this to be completely honest with you i don't just want to be there um yeah i'm out i'm
01:21:15
august and hopefully everything is calmed down by that although it won't because it gets very very hot at the end of august september
01:21:20
september september was the heart of it it's typically the heart of it jkl do you think you're gonna go to
01:21:25
miami or austin or something you know i i i went back to austin for a wedding and uh i met the governor um and uh you went sweating and you met
01:21:38
greg you gotta beep that up you went to sweating about the governor yes um and going to austin in 2021 is like when i would come to san
01:21:51
francisco and go to the battery in 2003 and zach 2013 and saks would say why don't you live here there's so much going on in san francisco come to san francisco and i did uh and i i got the last five years of
01:22:03
the peak but uh austin very appealing to me and then i've been looking at beach houses in um
01:22:09
miami and i'm uh i'm 50 of the way there folks oh my god i mean the fact that you can now buy a beach house i mean god bless america
01:22:33
and i forgot that i convinced you to move to san francisco yet another way in which i have contributed to the money you're
01:22:40
your career absolutely absolutely okay i'm gonna use call-in every day call-in syndicates underway everything's good you wouldn't even be a vc if it wasn't for me you'd still be a member
01:22:54
really pushed me towards it and then special thank you to you and chamoth uh bill lee uh for anchoring uh and dave
01:23:00
goldberg we love you jacob no you know what i mean i i tweeted the other day at the end of the day
01:23:06
you know our lives are a collection when we look back on them of memories with our friends and you know i include family and
01:23:12
friends and this podcast not to get all gushy and and whatever is uh been a delight over the you know
01:23:19
really hard pandemic that's now ending and it's i just i'm really happy that we get to spend this time every week
01:23:24
together every week i get uh you know a little bit of excitement uh like i used to get when we
01:23:30
go your host poker uh saks or chamop you know those days when we'd have a poker game
01:23:35
uh sky dayton would tell me and you know uh i get a little tingly feeling uh like
01:23:40
oh my god i'm gonna see my friends tonight and play poker and laugh and you know we got that amazing note from the woman
01:23:46
who said she was really having a hard time during the pandemic and that the podcast all the podcasts really helped her and
01:23:51
you know shout out to sam thanks for that yeah sam that really made our week so shout out to sam
01:23:56
um long way of saying i love you sex well i love you are the stephen colbert to my john stewart i think it's the opposite i think it's the uh i have to call i have to come on
01:24:10
your show and red pill you and make sure that you're you're saying the truth and not getting too wrapped up
01:24:16
in your trump derangement syndrome or whatever at the end of the day you know we we are
01:24:22
i think all of us working through complex issues to freeburg i really loved your
01:24:27
contribution today about how complex these issues are and layering more complexity onto them
01:24:33
of our identities our wealth you know our histories immigrants not whatever politics
01:24:39
these issues are so hard and in some ways also so easy with technology and world-class
01:24:45
execution that the world needs to have more reasonable conversations and i think that what we've demonstrated
01:24:51
here is that four friends can have reasonable discussions and laugh about life and enjoy life
01:24:57
and that should be for everybody listening that's what sam said in her note to us which was very heartwarming so thank you yeah that was
01:25:02
great yeah i mean love you guys love you saks back back jesus querying dictionary a feeling of a faction for another entity or human
01:25:34
[Music] subroutine overheating must play chess with peter thiel and stop saying i love you too jacob thank you
01:25:49
stop saying it i never [Music] how do i look with four callers four you say no it's more two but also two chins so two two cups make up for my double chin two shots are
01:26:16
better than one two shirts are better than one all right twice this good saks is adding shirts tomatoes i'll see you all next time
01:26:31
bye-bye love you guys [Music] and they've just gone crazy with it [Music] your we need to get mercies