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January 22, 2022 / 01:37:14

This episode discusses human rights, the Uyghur situation in China, and the implications of cancel culture. Chamath Palihapitiya, David Friedberg, and David Sacks address their previous comments and the backlash they received.

Chamath reflects on his comments from last week, emphasizing his commitment to human rights and acknowledging the lack of empathy in his previous statements regarding the Uyghurs. He clarifies that his focus is on issues where he believes he can make a real impact, such as climate change and technology.

David Sacks criticizes the cancel culture surrounding Chamath's remarks, arguing that many who condemned him are guilty of hypocrisy. He highlights the importance of genuine action over mere virtue signaling in addressing human rights issues.

The group discusses the complexities of addressing human rights violations while balancing national interests, particularly in relation to China. They emphasize the need for open dialogue and understanding rather than shutting down conversations.

Finally, they touch on the broader implications of their discussion, including the importance of raising awareness about human rights and the potential consequences of ignoring these issues.

TL;DR

Chamath clarifies his human rights comments, addressing backlash and discussing the complexities of cancel culture and genuine action on human rights.

Episode

1:37:14

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is chamath in a room with his pr crew right now like rehearsing and practicing and

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this pod is ruined [Music]

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rain man david

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[Music]

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hey everybody so i just wanted to make sure based on last week's pod it was absolutely clear i care about human

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rights many of you know my origin story but for those of you that don't i was born in a country that's no

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stranger to civil war and religious and political persecution growing up my family and i felt those

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effects it affected our safety it's in part what led my family to file for refugee status and stay in canada so

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this is a real part of my lived experience that said you know i realize that what i said last

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week lacked empathy particularly towards others who are dealing with persecution in this

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case uh the weakers and based on what i read this week i think what's happening to them in western china is

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a terrible situation i also want to talk about this idea about nobody caring look if we take a

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step back and replace uyghur with other really important issues like the conflict in yemen the potential war in

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the ukraine gun control school shootings health care equity we're faced with horrible events every

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day however the unfortunate state of the world today is that we've also normalized this routine of being

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confronted with something tragic or horrible or unjust and being allowed to react with thoughts and prayers

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and this was the real intent of what i was trying to get across so when i talk about my line it's not

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about whether something matters or not it's about which issues of all the important issues we face every day

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where i have the expertise and i believe i have the ability to have a real impact even if just by a little

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for me those areas happen to be climate change life sciences and deep tech but just because this is where i spend

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my time it's not to take away from any of the real work any of you are doing in other areas

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and then lastly i just wanted to explain to people who may be new to the pod because of last week

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that this is a place where four of us four friends talk about a whole wide range of things we explore

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our curiosities we try to learn from each other we challenge each other but we've always done it in a really

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supportive space and i hope you keep that in mind as you listen and watch going forward

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and hopefully can you can bring some of that to your own conversations that's all i have to say

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well said uh sex i mean i i know you have something to say but i'll say um i got a lot of messages this past week after the

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show where um which which i felt a little bit hurt by and mischaracterized and maybe it was

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simply i said the wrong thing at the wrong time um

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and so i i want to just be very clear about a couple of points if i can take a minute that's all right with you guys

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yeah so i said um i just wanted to i was gonna actually send this out on twitter and i decided it was better just to address it on the pod so to be clear i

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strongly believe in and support absolute freedom of all

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people and this means de facto i strongly disagree with the suppression of free

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speech denial of religious freedom imprisonment harm capital punishment slavery and genocide

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i thought this was obvious when we were having our conversation i did not be clear you're not in favor of genocide

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i'm not in favor of genocide i'm not in favor of slavery or capital punishment or suppression of religious freedom

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i thought this was obvious the conversation i tried to have was the wrong conversation at the wrong time which was

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to trying to talk about the broader china v u.s narrative that is swelling and will continue to

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swell this decade i think that the primary function of civilized society or any

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advanced social system is to take care of and protect those that cannot take care of or protect themselves and this

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is usually done by government but when government fails and government is in fact the oppressor i think it is the

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responsibility of other governments and other peoples to step in and have a voice and to take action

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and so that is um that is kind of my moral framework i think it's important i don't deny any of the harm being done to

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the uyghur population in china i don't agree with it on a principled basis and i don't think that what the chinese

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government is doing is right um and the point that i was trying to make during our conversation was a very

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different one that i think got completely lost in the moment which was really just about what's going on with the china u.s narrative right

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now i'm not pro-china i'm also not anti-china i am particularly interested

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in understanding the broader china u.s dynamic and what it means for the world over the coming decade and decades i

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think it's really important for us when we evaluate these things and to understand them to not just take

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sides but to understand the context in the broadest way possible and that's why i'm trying to get both sides and

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understand the mindset of the people that are involved in running these governments and the way that this of

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this world is going to evolve as this economic tension continues to mount um and so that that's where i was trying

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to go um and i was just trying to highlight where i think everything is headed over the next decade or two independent of what are obvious human

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rights issues going on so let me just stop there and say thanks for letting me say that but that was important for me

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to just be really clear on because clearly i wasn't clear last week so well and i i'll i'll just add to what you

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said that i also thought it was implied that you care about these things and that you're not in favor of them i

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didn't think that need to be spoken yeah so i think it's it's nice that you're clarifying it but i think any reasonable

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person would understand that if you care deeply as a vegan about factory farming that you also care about humans and

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you know genocide and torture or whatever issues so i i think it's like a

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your statement is so obvious that i i wonder if you even had to have made it but i'm glad you did sax

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okay so uh i guess first i i should say that um

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you know what's happening to the uyghurs in china is indefensible you've got reports of upwards of a million you know

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of these people being held in detention camps there's reports of mass sterilization and rape it's like

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ethnic cleansing over there so that's absolutely wrong and it's one of a growing list of issues that we have

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serious problems with china on which include theft over intellectual property cyber espionage the bullying of

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their neighbors uh their crackdown on dissidents the list goes on and on i mean i think we

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have to be clear-eyed about the challenge and the threat that china represents and we've discussed that

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on this pod many times that being said you know what i think we saw this week

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was really about cancel culture right you had in response to last week's pod

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you have this online mob form and uh they want to take what jamaa said

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and interpret in the worst possible light so they can turn the outrage meter up to 11 and everyone gets to basically

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go on twitter and virtue signal and say what great people they are and because chamath is a bad person

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and i just want to speak to that issue i mean there's a huge amount of hypocrisy

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going on in that because how many of the people who are tweeting their outrage and their denunciation of chamath

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are doing it from a device made by forced labor in china wearing their nikes made by forced labor in china on

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their way to target to buy cheap goods made in china how many of those people have actually lifted a finger in the

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real world to help the uyghurs how many of them have sacrificed an economic benefit

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uh in any way and so when shema said nobody cares i thought it was a really startling

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statement by him but if you define caring as doing something more than just

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virtue signaling and expressing your feelings as actually making a sacrifice or taking a risk in the real world i

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thought he was frankly telling us a very uncomfortable truth we haven't really most of us done anything

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and in that sense i think the reason why his comments hit such a nerve i don't

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think you get the kind of pylon that we got unless he's saying something that's hitting a nerve and i think the nerve the thing

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that he exposed is that we're not really doing more than virtue signaling on this issue

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and then came all the you know all the hypocrites you've got the nba denouncing him

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issuing a statement when what have they done i mean when daryl mori spoke up

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uh on behalf of the protesters in hong kong the nba shut down and sanctioned him and uh you know lebron james said he

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was uneducated actually i think jeremiah was pretty educated about what's going on so you've got those hypocrites you

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got the white house issuing a statement disavowing chamoth but hunter biden went over to

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china to manage billions of dollars for them and profited by his business dealings over there so they're a bunch of hypocrites and the list goes on and

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on and so you know i think that if in order for the mob to summon the

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outrage that it summons it requires them to i would say first put the worst

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possible light on which moth is saying and to ignore i'd say the fundamental truth of it and

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second to engage in this massive hypocrisy and that is the way that cancer culture operates and i don't think we should buy into it um so i

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appreciate what what chama said i think he's clarifying his remarks he's showing that he does care and he does have

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empathy as we all should but i think there was a fundamental truth in what shema said

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last week and that is what people are so uncomfortable with okay well said um i have feelings um

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and most of all i'm thankful we had the discussion the goal of this pod i think what makes

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it special and why y'all who are listening come here every week it's because you know we're going to be honest with you and we're going to

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tackle these hard discussions and i think friedberg's uh comments and sexist comments

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uh really uh explain that and what our intent here is and is human rights is one of the

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hardest issues to discuss that's why you don't hear it being discussed and there are not easy answers and i think

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you know i was challenged uh by my besties on the episode and their

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questions and their challenges were absolutely critical yeah yes how can we

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care about one group of people when the people in our backyard we're not caring about are we going to invade countries

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these are very nuanced difficult questions but we must have this discussion and if we try to cancel

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people with a 20-second clip that looks completely different if you look at the 2-minute clip or you take the time to

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have a 40-minute listen of the whole segment you get a totally different picture and i i think it's very

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important to raise awareness about human rights and it is an issue that i have been passionate about my whole life

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and i'm not trying to virtue signal or score any points here but i know firsthand that raising awareness and

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having the discussions reduces the violations because dictators despots and people doing this kind of stuff do not

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want the heat of what happened this past week and what happened this past week is that more awareness was raised about

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the uyghurs and the situation that they're going through i think then you know as somebody who's

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modded the situation then i've seen in the last couple of years perhaps this was a tipping point and that is

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something good that can come out of that discussion now on a personal basis i have uh had some feelings of guilt um

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because i was very hard for me to watch what happened to chamoth this week and to watch people dunking on him

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um and then let's face it i brought the topic up and i dug in with my feelings

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and it got a little heated and and i'm suddenly being portrayed as you know a hero in this discussion

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that's not the intent and there's there's no hero or villain in this there is a hard discussion in this

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and i am extremely proud of my friendship with each of you especially you chamoth i'm

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extremely proud of your candidness and tackling these issues and making people think about that

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and you know i'm just so proud to be friends with each of you and i'm so proud of the

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work we hear we do here every week and i think it's important work um and i feel like i get smarter every

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week and and i hope the audience does too and i hope we can keep having these discussions um

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can we make fun of each other yeah now let's yeah make fun of each other i mean i don't know if we're allowed to laugh

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this is like so serious and heavy but so what you're saying is thank you chamath

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now that's gonna be good for 20

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i mean look we've talked about cancel culture a lot on this show you know we've always been i think generally able

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to be third-party observers so what's happened and it was really interesting to go through the cycle this week

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where um you know there was just kind of a an echoing narrative

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uh on one thing that was said with one direction there were a few pieces though chamath right i mean wasn't there a

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piece from the atlantic and some other pieces that kind of highlighted that things that you said were things that a

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lot of people won't say and that's what was really so shocking for so many people what's the peter thiel

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comment on this whole on all of this stuff yeah he said if if no one's saying it it's probably true or

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if you're not allowed to say it it's probably true yeah if you're not allowed to say it yeah

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but um yeah it was uh well you really think based on the the mob that formed

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and you know it's already kind of blown over and that's the way this kind of cancer culture starts but for that sort of uh that wide hot really intense day

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or two you would think that like chamath had practiced genocide himself you know

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you know because everybody comes out and the way that they make themselves feel better is by virtue

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singling on this issue and again i would just say that i think we should be thinking about

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what do we do um you know how do we actually make a difference because i don't think just

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virtually on the issue is going to do it um and you know

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at the same time that this mob was forming against jamaath we had a two hour biden press conference in which

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biden never mentioned the uyghurs once the press corps never mentioned the uyghurs ones so

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does that mean the uyghurs are below their line um you know why wasn't it mentioned you

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know shouldn't we be ganging up on biden why is you know why is the press ganging up on tremoth when they're not getting

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up on biden for that so there is a fair amount of hypocrisy here i actually think jason i think you make an excellent point that by discussing these

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issues and raising these issues it creates a little bit of a check on the people perpetrating these atrocities

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because they don't like to be exposed that way and you know maybe we should be boycotting the beijing olympics i mean

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maybe that should be on the table maybe we should be boycotting the nba i mean let's have that conversation yeah or maybe everybody who

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goes there i wouldn't want to see the athletes miss the olympics but maybe they could each just raise their hand and do a you uh or some sort of a signal

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to show they support the situation or they're aware of it uh with the uyghurs there could be some you know modest

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protest or statement they could make without ruining you know their lives work i always hate when the olympics get

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cancelled for some political reason because i think those people work so hard for it um but racing awareness you know

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is a noble goal in all of this and then also doing things is a noble goal um

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and um yeah i mean i i i it was very weird to watch the

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the mob form and then dissipate and just who was you know taking the

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time to actually listen to the full episodes it was clear from that atlantic article and some of the nuance takes that they listened to the full

00:15:50

discussion because there are bullet points here like like there was somebody asked me a very challenging question i

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think it might have been you freeburg like are we going to start invading countries over human rights and then there's more suffering and death and

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pain from the wars and and when do you decide as the the democracies of the world to

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invade the dictatorships of the world to promote human rights like this is a very

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difficult issue uh that the world has had to deal with sadly before and there is no easy answer there you know right

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well you're right this is a point that i also tried to make on the last episode like freeberg did which is um i i think

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it's i think it's actually great to have these ideals and we should have moral clarity about what's happening and i

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think it what's happening is wrong it's outrageous it's an atrocity

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um but but the question is what we do about it and um and the the reality is even

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though it's important to speak out about human rights these types of fulminations about human rights when

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they become this sort of you know when people when we get into this like frenzy it's been the prelude

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and pretext for every misguided foreign intervention that we've had over the last 20 years

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and the example the iraq war i mean saddam hussein was

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suddenly hitler um you know the goals of nation building afghanistan for 20 years our invasion

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of uh libya we got rid of gaddafi and we replaced it with chaos for years we were

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talking about how evil the taliban and their social system was and then we just handed afghanistan back to them a few weeks ago

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exactly so you know and so these types of um you know when

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you kind of you whip people up over human rights i mean i agree with the sentiment and i agree

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with the moral clarity but i also can't help but recognize that neocons and the

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military-industrial complex and the washington blob have used this type of rhetoric for decades to corral us and

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stampede us into wars and foreign interventions that don't make any sense and we all

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recognize after the whole project has gone wrong like afghanistan we become suddenly more realistic about the whole

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thing and suddenly you know we're not talking about you know the the the sort of the moral atrocities

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of the taliban anymore but the discipline is still there they're still there the discipline though is to be

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able to check ourselves before we get into these interventions and i don't think we do a good job of

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that we're whipping ourselves up into these mobs and we're in a frenzy and the the raising awareness is something that

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has been lacking you know certain organizations and i think it's very important that we don't take organizations that have engaged with a

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country let's say china or saudi arabia they may have engaged in good faith with

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the goal of you know engagement is a positive for humanity in the world okay

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if we engage with china and we are co-dependent on each other um that will

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lead to a better arc for human rights and for humanity and less wars because our economies are entangled and we do

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business together okay this is a fine premise what the dictators and despots want you to do is to fight each other and not

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look at the human rights atrocities so it's easier for us to say oh the nba oh apple oh

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you know pick the uh the the company or corporate interest or organization that has engaged

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um but by raising awareness um consistently

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it gives other people the ability to talk about this some organizations weren't willing to even talk about this

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or say the name uyghurs and if we keep talking about the uyghurs the chances that that situation improves i think

00:19:29

there is a chance it does improve but i do think this like notion that the four of us can get together on a podcast and not get cancelled

00:19:35

because you know we don't collect money from advertisers and we started having these conversations amongst friends and

00:19:41

we just put it on the internet um first of all it's a great kind of reflection of what you can do in the united states with the freedom of speech

00:19:47

that we have and we can just put this on the internet anyone can watch it around the world uh i don't know how many people are watching it but mostly

00:19:52

freedom of speech mostly freedom of speech um but i do think that it's it's pretty

00:19:58

valuable and i do think that that's you know an important point for us is you know as much as chamoth got

00:20:03

completely destroyed this week um you know the i gotta i gotta say

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other than covet i'm uh i'm feeling pretty good you feel better you're pretty bummed for a day or two

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i mean i think the the covet thing was scary because four of my five kids got it um so i was just like oh my god

00:20:22

how's everyone doing by the way i'll be very honest with you so

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uh between both houses um you know mine and my ex-wife's

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four of the five kids got it our nanny got it nat did not and the youngest baby did not

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uh there's a real difference between in my house how the boys

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experienced covid and how the girls experience covet quite honestly it like we ex you know we've expressed

00:20:52

certain symptoms specifically a really bad sore throat and a cough that the girls in her house did not the

00:20:57

girls had more intestinal issues the boys roughly did not so it all manifested kind of in odd ways

00:21:02

uh but oh my god i mean a lot of pain in the ass well to be going through that and then also like monitoring twitter

00:21:09

and inbound your phone must have been blowing up i wasn't doing any of that okay jason start the pod let's go all right well okay everybody welcome to the

00:21:16

online podcast with us uh the sultan of science who's got a new startup he launched we'll hear about

00:21:21

that later in the show the rain man himself and dare i say

00:21:27

the dictatorship i was like it's not like we it's not

00:21:33

like we didn't warn you we had a 63 episodes we called them the dictator this was about to happen let's start the

00:21:39

show everybody you guys were like after 20 years of friendship it's like i don't know the list is like 9 000 items long i

00:21:45

was like yeah if you're gonna cancel them we got a log list all right uh so first up i think we

00:21:51

should start with um a a duo of stories that relate to each other microsoft announced it's buying activision

00:21:57

blizzard for 68 billion dollars of cash microsoft's got a lot of cash

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um and i think we all understand like why this is a great idea for microsoft with

00:22:09

xbox and obviously activision owns call of duty which has a hundred and twenty million

00:22:14

or so monthly active users they also own a bunch of nerd stuff uh from blizzard like diablo world of warcraft my

00:22:21

favorite starcraft and those have upwards of 40 million they also had black king if you remember that they

00:22:26

make candy crush and those kind of casual games which have a quarter billion users uh but even with all these

00:22:31

uh it's a highly fragmented market but in related news alina khan the i believe 32 year old

00:22:39

head of the ftc uh who has written a bunch of pieces we talked about this on all in episode 36

00:22:46

sat down with kara swisher and andrew ross sorkin for an interview and

00:22:52

basically we're moving or she intends to move the goal posts on antitrust i want to play three clips and have you each

00:22:58

react to them here's the first one and this is her take on changing the antitrust from consumer harm to

00:23:05

uh now shift to does this deal and we'll take the activision deal here as but one example

00:23:11

but you could take the instagram and the youtube deals as well do these deals substantially reduce

00:23:17

competition in the future let's watch the first clip in certain cases maybe too much success

00:23:22

and so the question is when is the regulator supposed to say this could work and if it works it's

00:23:28

actually worked too well it's an interesting question and i think

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you know for enforcers the the real question is is this the deal that could lessen competition

00:23:39

and in high intensity all deals to some degree to some degree

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substantially less in competition or tend to create a monopoly and there's also indication that

00:23:50

congress wanted enforcers not just to act when you know the third and fourth companies are merging are the first and

00:23:55

second but actually in the incipiency when you said see trends towards concentration that those can also be

00:24:01

important moments for enforcers to jump in so uh what do we think uh freeberg

00:24:07

about this sort of new rubric not consumer harm because obviously if

00:24:12

microsoft buys activision and makes those part of game pass then you get call of duty for free with your game

00:24:18

pass and the candy crush games and blizzard games that's good for consumers they get a whole bunch of more games it

00:24:23

would be like disney buying star wars you get all the star wars stuff in disney plus for the same low price yeah look sex is our legal eagle here

00:24:31

but i'll just say um before uh you know he probably speaks better informed than me

00:24:36

um if it's not about consumer harm and it's about decreasing competition in this broadly i would argue subjective

00:24:43

sense then um what's scary is that there are going to be decisions made

00:24:48

by interpreters of what is and isn't competitive and ultimately if they're not trying to keep in mind the best

00:24:54

interest of the consumer then it is in fact going to cause consumer harm at some point not necessarily in all deals

00:25:00

that they block but there will be deals that they may block that may have benefited consumers meaning prices go

00:25:05

down imagine having all of your products integrated in one streaming service instead of having to pay for three streaming services so instead of paying

00:25:12

70 across hbo max and disney plus and netflix you get everything in one but

00:25:17

today the regulators would not let those businesses merge because that would be anti-competitive under this context

00:25:23

and so this is going to be a touchy debate and it's going to be difficult i think ultimately to rationalize this if

00:25:28

there is going to be a point in the future where we can actually show that consumer harm would be caused by

00:25:33

decreasing competition in the marketplace and so i would be nervous about that subjectivity and the slippery

00:25:39

slope it enables i think it's a great point think about it if you had to pay instead of for disney plus you paid for pixar plus disney plus marvel plus and

00:25:46

star wars plus would be chaos in your household to manage all those accounts it's a much better offering better consumer experience yeah much better

00:25:52

consumer experience and and cheaper and this actually by the way i said sorry i'll say this is why i said in the past it's we use the term monopoly as if it's

00:25:59

de facto evil and bad but not all monopolies or businesses that have very big moats is another way to kind of

00:26:05

describe them are necessarily bad for the customer you get cheaper products you get better

00:26:10

products you get more of an advantage they may ultimately be yielded to be anti-competitive harmful ones let me not

00:26:16

necessarily always but let me explain to you where she's coming from like there's a fundamental pillar of capitalism that

00:26:21

says that excess returns must get competed away so if a capitalist system is to be efficient

00:26:27

if a company has profit margins of 99 competitors emerge pushing those profit

00:26:33

margins down to something reasonable where you get to some sort of equilibrium and the whole principle of

00:26:39

what she's saying is in in the absence of competition we don't really know what the equilibrium

00:26:46

return really looks like and she's not saying that but that is the implicitness of what she's saying

00:26:51

and so in the if you allow all of this stuff to aggregate

00:26:57

maybe google shouldn't have 45 ebitda margins maybe in a really competitive

00:27:02

society they would only have 18 and that's actually better net net for the system the problem is that counter

00:27:09

factual to your point free break is impossible to measure how do you know and how much value do you need to take away of the panoply of things that

00:27:15

google does to figure that out and that's i think we're the problem with it but you know let's be clear

00:27:21

i in 2019 i wrote in my annual letter there's a section called the the tightening of the regulatory noose and

00:27:28

meaning it was a framework for how to basically dismantle big tech and element number one of that was a

00:27:34

changing regulatory landscape and it's really incredible to see it in front of our eyes we got a bill that just left judiciary

00:27:40

right that was effectively voted across the aisle that's now going to go to the floor of the senate which is going to rewrite

00:27:46

some of these anti-communities it's like 75-25 and it was a 50-50 committee of democrats and republicans so clearly

00:27:51

across the aisle clearly across the aisle uh and i mean the funny thing about that was feinstein and padilla the

00:27:57

two democratic senators from california where most of these companies are in in the wall street journal article

00:28:02

that i read railed against it but still voted for it to go to the floor so it's i think some version of that is going to

00:28:09

pass she's going to go and scrutinize these companies i still think this microsoft activision deal on balance

00:28:14

gets done because if you take the absolute values away from it the reality is that it's an

00:28:19

adjacent part of microsoft's core business and there's nothing fundamentally monopolistic about what would happen if

00:28:25

you let microsoft and activision come together could it reduce competition in the future i think would be her new lens and

00:28:32

if xbox has call of duty and sony playstation doesn't or the next console

00:28:37

doesn't maybe it does uh you could make the argument saks what are your takes on this

00:28:42

very hard to apply standard of reducing future competition because as aaron

00:28:48

sorkin said very clearly all of these reduced competitions now we got to get into what does the word

00:28:54

substantially mean in this context yeah so my take on on leita khan is that she's got some worthwhile observations

00:29:01

on the problems posed by these big tech monopolies but i don't think she's got the right remedies so on the

00:29:08

observations i think she's correct broadly speaking that these big tech companies the fangs they have way too

00:29:14

much power in the marketplace there are now gatekeepers over the internet that control all these powerful platforms and

00:29:20

broadly speaking it is time i think to uh to basically have some limits on those

00:29:27

powers make sure they don't abuse it i think she's also right that the traditional standard of consumer harm

00:29:33

doesn't really capture that sort of concept of market power for these free ad based services right

00:29:39

because there is no pricing um and furthermore i think she's got a point when she says that you know when you say

00:29:45

no pricing you mean facebook and google the consumer doesn't pay so how can there be consumer harm right so clearly

00:29:51

that there's that standard of consumer harm doesn't really capture the market power dynamic and then i think the last

00:29:56

observation she makes which i think is pretty pretty valid is this idea that you know when facebook bought instagram at that

00:30:04

time it didn't seem to be a problem but it definitely allowed them to extend their monopoly from the

00:30:10

desktop into mobile and it probably should be scrutinized harder my problem is with her remedies i mean what she's

00:30:15

basically saying is first of all like you said any deal that could decrease competition in the

00:30:22

future is a problem well the whole goal of business and making business moves like an acquisition

00:30:28

is to build your moat is to win create a more competitive offering so there's no

00:30:33

limiting factor there's no bright line test there at least with consumer harm

00:30:38

there's a bright line test which is about pricing right it's mathematically measurable you could create a model

00:30:43

around it here there's absolutely nothing and so what it's going to do is completely politicize the process of

00:30:50

getting a an m a deal approved and you can see this when she's talking about the impact on labor i mean this is a

00:30:57

total s uh this is a total sop to the labor constituency in the democratic party

00:31:04

because look facebook and google no matter how powerful monopolies they may be they don't have a dominant position

00:31:09

in the labor market this is not true they're competing for the same engineers that every tech company is competing for

00:31:15

so she's bringing a purely political consideration in now and so again there's no bright line rule

00:31:20

it's gonna be heavily political companies trying to get a merger approval never know whether they're good or not and even after they get approved

00:31:27

they'll never know they're good and i have a big problem with her saying that any deal

00:31:33

that they approve can be reopened and reevaluated right a decade into the future and reverse

00:31:39

the actions they're taking companies need certainty that's the that's the real issue it's the the rules of

00:31:45

capitalism have been that a smarter slash more strategic s you

00:31:52

know entity if they can run their plays more efficiently has the right to win

00:31:57

um this is almost trying to say actually not really and that is very problematic yeah so you never know you're good

00:32:04

you're never known you never know you're good and then the problem that it'll create in the equity market specifically

00:32:09

is how do you actually drive shareholder returns and then what do all these shareholders then do

00:32:16

if these companies are rendered to basically stay where they are and you take a snapshot i mean you take

00:32:21

a snapshot of the economy and you say this was what it will be from now on but staks's point is really interesting it's

00:32:27

going to require m a to become kind of a political maneuvering process similar you know create sort of these

00:32:33

uh you know um obfuscated gates where you don't really know what it's going to take to get through there and then

00:32:39

you've got to go do what you do when you try and convince foreign governments to work with you or allow you to do a transaction in a foreign government in a

00:32:44

foreign country where you got to go in and you got to go figure out the politicians who they want who they are what they want and then put together a

00:32:50

political consortium that's going to approve the deal given that there's now going to be subjective uh you know validation

00:32:56

whereas before i think the the criteria were much more objective let me play this other clip this is the

00:33:02

clip that the sax was referencing alina khan also talks about how labor uh

00:33:07

unions are trying to get in on the action slash griff see on the other side some of this research has showed that

00:33:14

labor markets are significantly concentrated um and it's led to you know additional thinking

00:33:20

at the policy level of how this should be affecting what anti-trust enforcers are doing so the justice department

00:33:27

including in the last administration started looking at no poacher agreements more closely instances in which

00:33:33

employers may be colluding to suppress wages both agencies have been looking at the

00:33:38

ways in which mergers in particular may lessen competition for labor um and have

00:33:44

downstream effects on workers in ways that are harmful and that also needs to be on our radar so i think this is an

00:33:50

ongoing conversation but increasingly the question is you know how we implement some of these priorities and

00:33:56

not you know whether they're important but this is the first time you've included labor this is something labor's wanted for a long time the idea of

00:34:02

looking at antitrust through the lens of unemployment essentially yeah there's an interesting history here

00:34:08

i mean um you know there were cases in which uh you know unions were supportive of transactions because they thought

00:34:13

they would lead to more downstream benefits but i think we started to see

00:34:18

uh through retrospective studies instances in which you know mergers actually ended up having a harmful

00:34:23

effect and so i think that is what's significantly contributing to this this is this is also part of what i said in 2019 the third element of that plan was

00:34:30

you have to change the rules on stock-based compensation so instead of her talking about it as labor i think

00:34:36

the the more accurate way to say it is like there's very valuable human capital in technology business a few people have

00:34:43

you know discontinuous impact on these businesses and it has been a stated strategy of all

00:34:49

of big tech to use their balance sheets to buy small companies in their incipiency to use her words not

00:34:55

because it helps advantage their monopoly but it prevents the leakage of human capital into other ideas and it

00:35:01

prevents those other ideas from literally flourishing that's really what's been happening for years in

00:35:07

silicon valley and we all know that you know all the aqua hiring we see is about hoarding talent

00:35:13

and you'd rather pay these people millions of dollars a year if you're a big tech to basically work on next to nothing

00:35:20

then take the risk of them going across the street to a competitor and then having them build something that disrupts you yeah and this was such a

00:35:26

this is such a no the only way but feel sorry just to finish the old one of the ways that you can change it is you have to change the way that stock-based

00:35:33

compensation works how it's accounted for how you know how you can actually deal with it on a gap basis how uh

00:35:40

capitalists then treat that in terms of their earnings if you don't do that none of the models change

00:35:46

people look past it people look through it they don't think it's a real cost which it is

00:35:52

and then you're allowed to continue to do it that's really the underlying issue so much so chamath that the human the

00:35:58

hoarding of human capital was a reoccurring theme on the silicon valley hbo show where people in huli were

00:36:03

getting paid millions of dollars and hanging out on the roof uh freeberg when you look at this uh human capital labor

00:36:10

being brought into it isn't the point of a lot of m a to

00:36:15

um eliminate jobs and eliminate redundancy so if you brought in youtube at google i'm not sure if you were there

00:36:21

at that time period the distinct concept was hey we already have an advanced ad network we already have accounting and

00:36:27

we already have servers around the world and storage you don't need to hire those people we can get rid of them or whatever

00:36:34

and we get rid of that redundancy large-scale consolidation that's certainly true most m a in technology is

00:36:41

the opposite where an acquisition takes place and the acquisition gets fueled by further investment after

00:36:47

the acquisition is made when youtube was acquired there was a few dozen employees there and then very quickly google scaled that

00:36:54

team the engineering team the infrastructure team they even had their own independent ad sales team um to thousands of employees

00:37:02

and without that it would have been very difficult for youtube to achieve that scale both from a product success perspective an infrastructure

00:37:08

perspective but also an employee-based perspective with the amount of capital it would have taken to go and raise that from venture capitalists maybe nowadays

00:37:14

where there's billions of dollars floating around it would be different but back then it would have been very hard and so what's the same for whatsapp

00:37:21

and instagram yes exactly whatsapp was 19 people when it was acquired and now it's thousands i'm certain and

00:37:26

instagram's the same and so what we've seen traditionally or not traditionally but over the last 10 15 years with

00:37:32

internet-based acquisitions is not about consolidation and reduction in costs but about taking and enabling technology and

00:37:38

accelerating it on an existing platform now number one it makes that new technology a product far more successful

00:37:44

far more far-reaching and more consumers benefit from it number two is it now makes that platform

00:37:50

harder to compete with so as a platform it's going to be a lot harder to catch up with the cash flows being generated

00:37:56

at google and facebook given how quickly they reinvest that capital in new technology to further their advancement

00:38:02

to your what's been so significant over the past

00:38:08

15 years that people are lifting their head up is that it has been both beneficial to consumers and

00:38:13

anti-competitive so that was exactly what i was going to get to here your youtube example is the perfect one

00:38:18

because if you look at youtube think about all the joy education communication it has created on a global

00:38:24

basis and it's free and that has helped humanity so much in this new lens but no

00:38:30

one else can make a video ad site like this exactly we're now looking at all the benefit

00:38:36

that youtube has created for humanity versus the fact that it's going to be impossible to depl displace youtube now

00:38:43

to your point sax how do you get past the bright line do you have a suggestion for a way and would you now look at

00:38:49

something like youtube and say we shouldn't have allowed that to happen youtube was on debt store because of the lawsuits and

00:38:55

the server bills we all know that right well this is the uncertainty that's going to be created and i think

00:39:01

this administration is creating tremendous business uncertainty i think the reaction of a lot of big tech companies is going to be to stop doing m

00:39:08

a until the situation gets clarified because they just don't know um you know targets are target companies

00:39:14

are going to want to have huge breakup fees and it's just going to have a chilling effect on the market for m a i mean business needs certainty and

00:39:21

they're not giving it in this business environment um before we get to you just let me kind of make one point about that last clip on

00:39:28

on the labor point listen this feels to me just like when the administration

00:39:35

uh talked about cleantech and clean energy and electric vehicles but then they only gave the subsidy to the uh car

00:39:42

companies that were uh that were basically union shops and so give tesla

00:39:47

the same that's right they excluded tesla they excluded tesla from the eevee somewhere they tried to pretend that ford and gm were the ones driving the

00:39:53

eevee revolution in the us it was laughable what they were trying to do there is they were shoehorning a union

00:39:59

agenda into clean tech and i think that's what lena horne was doing in that clip she was shoehorning a union agenda

00:40:06

into anti-trust law and it's a bit absurd because facebook and google even though they are very powerful companies

00:40:13

when it comes to talent they are in a war for talent just like everybody else they compete

00:40:18

these are not facts these are not mistreated employees these are very well paid employees and moreover the market

00:40:24

is highly competitive and we don't need them trying to insert this union agenda into anti-trust law you got to think

00:40:31

that for example going back to microsoft activision obviously the bankers

00:40:36

would have called apple and facebook and google as well i mean it's absurd that

00:40:42

they wouldn't have yeah it has to be at the minute that you think you have a bonafide offer one of the things you have to do is essentially you know get

00:40:49

an opinion letter and also to make sure that as a public market shareholder you can justify that you've evaluated all

00:40:54

the other options right sure um but it's really quite telling to david's point i don't think that if you were

00:41:00

facebook or google or apple you could have credibly made an offer because the calculus in the back of your head was

00:41:06

not whether it had business logic but whether you could actually get it through the ftc but microsoft did

00:41:12

because microsoft is no longer seen as a threat and look we said this we said this in our awards show

00:41:18

two or three episodes ago you know they have really been the most untouched uh in the last decade by antitrust scrutiny

00:41:26

whether it domestically or internationally they've largely skated under the radar after

00:41:32

paying the price for an entire decade i think a lot of that has to do with the fact that microsoft's effectively

00:41:37

pivoted with the exception of this gaming into being an enterprise software company and the politicians just care a lot less

00:41:44

about enterprise software it doesn't capture the public's imagination it's the big consumer you know companies that get all of that

00:41:50

attention that's the fascinating point like literally the consumer and the bread and circuses of this is what's

00:41:56

driving it like people hate big tech and trump got banned from it yadda yadda

00:42:02

but i gotta say you know these um increasing restrictions on big tech and the these prohibitions and the chilling

00:42:09

effect the uncertainty it's one thing to do it when the market is just completely ripping and we can sort of afford to run

00:42:16

these experiments and tinker with these these rules but i gotta say i'm i'm starting to get pretty worried here

00:42:24

that you know we had jeremy grantham as sort of an old school yeah old school kind of bearish type market commentator

00:42:31

he had this expression that the yeah i mean it's more one of these stop clock right twice a day things here jeremy

00:42:36

grantham has never found a market he didn't make it yeah yeah exactly but but but a stop clock can be right twice a

00:42:42

day and um the line he had today is that we're seeing the popping of a super bubble and you know we've been talking about

00:42:48

bubble yeah exactly basically but that's not that's not true but i mean it's good it's evocative well the the sense of

00:42:54

which it might be true is that i mean we've talked about this last few months is that you had the fed and the the the

00:43:02

federal government pump a 10 trillion of liquidity into the market over the past two years because of covet now they're

00:43:09

starting to pull that back and there was i think a general asset inflation across asset classes certain

00:43:16

types of assets clearly got more inflated than others we've seen a huge correction in growth stocks we've seen a

00:43:22

huge correction in uh in crypto basically anything long-dated as the fear of interest rates

00:43:28

increasing has gone up they've massively corrected but so the concern is that

00:43:34

you know with the losses we're seeing and i mean every day it just keeps i keep seeing more read that this could

00:43:40

turn into a recession you know popping of bubbles is usually followed by uh by recessions or so i think you know

00:43:47

the fortunes of the economy could turn really quickly here and that is that is the marginal risk

00:43:53

the marginal risk is actually for a recession we we talked about this before by the way just to your point you're right that we pumped in 10

00:43:59

trillion dollars but over the last three weeks and really over the last two and a half months we have actually eviscerated

00:44:05

10 trillion dollars of value as well so if you want to measure it we put 10 trillion of excess capital in

00:44:12

but we've now destroyed 10 trillion dollars of equity by lowering the prices or pricing stuff

00:44:17

yeah we've been pricing the crypto i mean crypto in the last couple of days has just been

00:44:22

flat uh growth stocks have been shellacked um biotech stocks have been just absolutely

00:44:28

smoked everything is getting crushed uh but david is saying something really important the risk in my opinion is not

00:44:36

of runaway inflation anymore and the reason was what happened this weekend

00:44:42

was incredibly important and we have seen this happen just a few years ago so

00:44:48

this weekend uh china cut interest rates now

00:44:53

as we know we are dealing in the united states with this issue of whether we should raise rates and by how much

00:44:59

because we're worried about inflation well if you're cutting rates it's because you're worried about the other problem which is that the economy is

00:45:04

basically turned over and you need to become more accommodating right you need to incentivize businesses to spend by

00:45:10

like turned over you mean it's slowed down people are not building

00:45:15

companies not doing new projects so you want to inside you want to give them an incentive or maybe some catalyst to

00:45:22

start some new company or start some new project because all the real estate projects have wound down in 2018 here's

00:45:29

exactly what happened the setup was the fed we were everybody was worried about what

00:45:34

the fed was going to do on interest rates the fed was looking at china as the canary in the coal mine the leading

00:45:40

indicator of what we should do and at the end of 2018 jerome powell decided to raise rates

00:45:48

and we raised rates and then entered 2019 and the chinese economy turned over and

00:45:57

we realized that their economy was not nearly as strong as we thought it would be and so our reaction was disproportionate

00:46:04

to what the actual data on the ground said we entered a recession in 2019 that's when you guys probably saw

00:46:10

trump going crazy blaming powell i mean most of us ignored it because you know we were all dealing with you know

00:46:15

trump derangement syndrome but the underlying thing of what he was saying was hey hold on a second uh you just

00:46:21

caused the recession in america by raising too quickly the fed is now in this really delicate situation where china cut rates last

00:46:28

week we have an fomc meeting the open markets committee that sets rates on wednesday i think of this coming week

00:46:34

what is he supposed to do you know bill ackman two weeks ago was advocating for a 50 basis point raise

00:46:41

in this meeting so that's way beyond what people even thought is supposed to we should just

00:46:46

remember that bill ackman has bets macroeconomic bets in the market if he's calling for a 50-point raise i guarantee

00:46:52

you you're gonna make a lot of money you'll make a lot of money no conflict no interest yeah yeah my my only point is the setup is a very

00:46:58

complicated one for the fed coming into this week and the risk is to a recession because if we over correct

00:47:04

yes and the leading indicators all around the world tell us that their economies are weak then inflation may have actually been

00:47:11

much more transitory than we thought and right now we have to decide because if we over correct we're going to plunge

00:47:17

the united states economy into a recession this is why i think friedberg when you look at this

00:47:23

when you have so many different things happening at once and you're trying to pilot a plane or a car you know in rain

00:47:29

on ice going really fast maybe there's something wrong with the brakes and you got to be very delicate with you know how you steer into this

00:47:36

what is the right strategy here on a policy basis coming out of omicron um should we just

00:47:43

take a pause on raising rates what what do you think the right situation here obviously putting a bunch

00:47:49

of regulation on top of big you know mergers and acquisitions and that's going to create headwinds i i

00:47:55

don't know how many different variables we want to add to the mix of an economy that feels like we're in a perfect storm

00:48:01

i don't know like a lot of us kind of talk about the valuation of things in markets as

00:48:06

being the economy but it's not the economy is the productivity of businesses that are valued in the market

00:48:13

and as long as the productivity of the businesses in the market continues to improve that businesses continue to grow

00:48:19

that there's stability to pricing that's not runaway or or declining neither inflationary or too deflationary

00:48:27

um you know i think those are the the indicators that matter most now the reality is over the last couple of years we've had

00:48:34

trillions of dollars that have flowed into these markets for free and those trillions of dollars have

00:48:40

created lots of mini asset bubbles lots of little new markets have emerged

00:48:45

nfts random crypto currencies that don't actually do anything the collectibles

00:48:50

market the art market there are lots of i mean there are and lots of examples of these speculative early stage businesses

00:48:58

that have gone public and uh people backed them and they they said look when there's this much money around i'm going to start making more

00:49:04

risky bets i'm going to make more speculative bets and uh regardless the money's coming out

00:49:09

of the markets the money's going to come out one way or another and as it starts to come out these little bubbles are the

00:49:15

first that are going to pop and that doesn't necessarily mean that the economy is at risk it means that there

00:49:20

are valuation bubbles that are going to burst they're going to decline and no interest rate policy is going to change

00:49:26

that because the inevitable growth in the underlying economy the inevitable end to the pandemic is what's ultimately

00:49:32

going to drive capital out of these markets and back into ultimately more

00:49:37

productive assets and less speculative assets and so this is a transition that i'm not sure you can really kind of

00:49:43

manage i think underlying businesses and the growth of the economy and the ability for people to get jobs there's

00:49:48

an incredible number of open jobs are in the us right now three million open job listings go apply for a job

00:49:53

eleven million whatever it is go go go sign up for a new job three point what is it sacks three they're very very million

00:49:58

three point seven percent unemployment they're not a lot of people yeah they're not a lot of people in the us that don't have an option to go out

00:50:04

right now and go improve their their working condition there are a lot of open jobs in the us and salaries have

00:50:10

gone up that's what i mean your working condition you can go make more money and um and so you know the economy underlying

00:50:17

there are lots of great businesses that are growing and doing well and there's stability that's emerging and then there's a bunch that aren't and there

00:50:23

are a bunch that were always speculative and that they were hyped and overvalued and you know as those assets get

00:50:28

devalued a lot of us that have most of our worth and income coming from capital

00:50:34

are uh are going to feel the burn i have two questions by the way that we

00:50:42

if we could do if each of you could do one thing to one or two things uh to manage this

00:50:48

economic policy in the next year what would it be like what two things do you think we should do david one or two

00:50:53

things be the top of this that regulators should do in terms of managing this

00:50:59

seemingly chaotic situation just not due it just feels to me like we're pinballing from one overreaction

00:51:06

to another so we overreacted in terms of flooding the zone with liquidity because

00:51:11

of covid i mean remember like druckenmiller it was like the one of the only voices

00:51:17

about a year ago when they did that to that last two trillion dollar stimulus bill the covet relief bill yeah and he

00:51:23

said look retail is already 15 above trend meaning if you looked at demand the demand side of the economy it had

00:51:30

fully recovered and was actually above trend people were spending more money and then we flood the zone with another

00:51:36

two trillion and then lo and behold six months later we have this inflation and then in response to that inflation we're

00:51:42

now jacking up rates so quickly that i think we're risking to tomas point a recession so we're

00:51:47

pinballing from one over reaction to another and i just the big meta thought i had this week with just how many of our problems

00:51:54

are just self-inflicted right now i mean even on covid right we could live with this variant of covet

00:52:01

omicron you know chamath and all of our friends we've everyone i know in the last few weeks basically has had it and it's been very

00:52:08

mild it's basically been a cold but in large swaths of the country we're not choosing to live with it we're at each

00:52:14

other's throats about these vaccine mandates these other restrictions and okay so your closures and similarly and

00:52:20

and the same thing just to make even more local we've got a crime wave in america going on right now why because

00:52:26

we emptied the jails last year and stopped prosecuting totally self-inflicted okay so what things do we

00:52:31

need to do just if you had one or two things that you think we should do one you said we're ping-ponging so do you think more

00:52:36

consistent policy community i don't i don't i think that you want some neat little answer that's tweetable and there

00:52:42

is none no i just i wanted you i mean let me explain i thought there's no one or two things anybody can

00:52:47

do i think there's a collective set of things that we have to do in an organized way so look just to set up right um we have

00:52:54

had more activity and hedging than in any other period in recent

00:53:00

memory except the great financial crisis just to set the tone of where we are in

00:53:06

terms of volatility in the capital markets mutual funds who don't short stocks

00:53:11

right the multi-trillion dollar mutual fund complex whose only job is to buy has been a net seller

00:53:18

hasn't even started buying a single thing yet we have an fomc meeting

00:53:23

that's going to happen next week where jerome powell and the you know the fed has to decide what to do in the face

00:53:30

of incomplete data it's not as if we've even stopped all of the purchasing uh of assets that we've

00:53:37

been doing we're still putting money in the system i just want to be clear we were debating when we stopped the spigot

00:53:44

we're not even debating when we shrink our balance sheet as a country so we are in a really complicated moment

00:53:50

and i think the risk is that there is an overreaction to incomplete data and

00:53:58

we plunge the u.s economy into a recession and i just think that that that has to

00:54:04

be really thoughtfully measured and we guys we've seen this in 2019 2018-19

00:54:10

africa any thoughts uh no i'm not an economist and i'm not a central banker and so i have no clue

00:54:16

okay um the next thing but tomas point i mean we are dealing

00:54:21

with balancing the risks of inflation against the risk of recession i think that is fundamental and right now

00:54:27

all the statements have been so hawkish that you know the markets have been

00:54:33

just flowing red now for months and it's starting i think i think the the balance of risks is

00:54:39

starting to make recession possible in a way that didn't seem possible two three months

00:54:45

doesn't the repricing of assets though like we look at peloton you know it's down whatever 80 percent you look at

00:54:50

zoom is down 78 when you see those things that were obviously mispriced uh rivian uh which we talked about i

00:54:56

wouldn't use the term miss price they were priced i would say they're re-priced they were mispriced they're not

00:55:05

and someone said represent sold them for something they were priced against three birds yesterday they paid 25 more and then

00:55:11

today they're paying 25 percent less what difference does it make whether it's yesterday an hour ago or a year ago

00:55:18

every day pricing changes well no here's the thing about the pricing the pricing was based on people with a lot of money

00:55:23

placing a lot of bets uh maybe whoever okay fine what's the point the market

00:55:29

condition changed uh well i think maybe we had enthusiastic people betting things up

00:55:34

without looking at fundamentals is my point i think saks agrees with me here on this so i think i think you're right

00:55:40

yeah so now you have market participants who were gambling on like momentum now

00:55:45

we're repricing stuff do we think where are we at in this repricing or correct pricing or in the settings we're in the

00:55:51

eighth in my opinion i think we're in the eighth inning of of the tech drawdown so got it if you're a high

00:55:58

growth tech company you've been smashed for three months in a row as you said jason we're off some stocks are off 80

00:56:04

you know 50 to 80 percent of their highs that's like dot-com era corrections

00:56:09

that's crash that's crash if you're if you're uh

00:56:14

if you're in other areas like value you've had a pretty good rally if you're in crypto you're just starting to get

00:56:19

smoked now if you're in um why is it crypto this is i want your

00:56:25

thoughts on this why isn't crypto getting smoked like peloton and zoom is because those people are huddlers or something well crypto i

00:56:32

think has slightly different dynamics than than individual stocks like a peloton but i think that you're gonna know something's released for one right

00:56:39

you're gonna because like you have to understand what all the all that the market is is who's bidding and who's coming into the market i mean there's

00:56:44

still thousands of millions of people from around the world stepping into the crypto markets each day that are putting

00:56:49

more money into these markets and that balances out the withdrawals and that's all that crypto is there's no

00:56:54

underlying business that you're valuing the peloton release was really bad okay i mean it was very strange yeah

00:56:59

they well i think they overcame it was strange it was just like uh we're just gonna basically stop producing anything

00:57:06

because all of our inventory will meet our demand for the foreseeable future that's a that's not a good statement if you're

00:57:12

supposed to be a high growth okay so if we're seeing 50 to 80 percent sacks baker had a tweet that's a capital

00:57:17

allocator yeah the bottom of the market he and it was a phrase something like when we

00:57:22

shoot the generals and his comment was the generals are big tech when those things trade down 25 the bottom is in

00:57:30

and i think that collectively most people think that uh we're a little bit oversold

00:57:36

in all areas except big tech i think big tech is down 10 11 12

00:57:41

when you see this thing really get cracked is when those folks you know trade down another 10 or 15 percent and

00:57:48

then i think we're kind of through most of the pain so peloton and zoom were kind of mid-tech i don't know what we

00:57:53

call those but i would call them like mid-tech they're obviously not big tech but they're not small either mid-tech gets their asses kicked 50 to 80 percent

00:58:00

big tech 15 but if big tech goes down 30 then we start really seeing a bottom and we consider netflix you'll never see that

00:58:07

because i think big tech you have to remember is basically the index and in the last 10 or 20 years you've never seen

00:58:13

drawdowns more than 15 to 25 you've never seen it and and when you've ever had a 15 to 25

00:58:19

drawdown meaning the market goes off 15 or 25 you have to remember the thing that we have also done over the last 20 years

00:58:25

has created so much money on the sidelines always looking for a cheap buying opportunity and so

00:58:31

the minute that these things so even you know march of 2020 remember when we started to do this pod and it literally

00:58:37

looked like the world was ending yeah the bottom existed for a week yep

00:58:42

and then within a week the entire 25 loss in the stock market was wiped out and we were back to normal so that's

00:58:48

when i sold okay well let's talk specifically about

00:58:54

neff i think it was good that we talked about peloton addict at the lowe's oh my god i did too i remember selling i

00:58:59

remember selling slack going this is the dumbest thing but i have no choice because i was how about

00:59:04

15 how about when uber goes to 15 from 45 i was ready to basically curled up in a ball and said i'm not selling but i'm

00:59:10

not feeling good right by the way this is why i was saying jason like any comment you made earlier i think you made a comment about um you know what do

00:59:17

you do right now to drive or make change in these markets and i'm not sure that at the end of the day the drive or

00:59:24

the change is being made as much as the change that's being made is being driven by the market itself there is just so

00:59:30

many dynamics at play that it's very difficult to kind of ascertain where things are headed next what's going on

00:59:36

and we're all going to sit here and we're all going to speculate we're going to flip a coin it's going to come up heads it's going to come up tails we're

00:59:42

going to be right we're going to be wrong it's really difficult to kind of put put our foot down and for any of us to put our foot down and say this is

00:59:47

what i think needs to happen and this is what i think should happen or it could happen or will happen half of us will be right half of us will be wrong but man

00:59:54

let's take another stock i think it's interesting to talk about this netflix was that seven hundred dollars uh just a

00:59:59

couple of months ago it's at 390 today um

01:00:04

yeah that's like a real business that you can assess what's going on with the business itself well they think they're not going to grow uh 20 30 percent a

01:00:11

year they think they grow eight nine ten percent a year but a a fabulous business right like uh great business incredible

01:00:19

is incredible now the time so is this growing coming so much anytime netflix is so saturated it is it has achieved

01:00:26

such incredible market share by growing so quickly every year for years and years on end at some point the growth

01:00:31

was going to slow down they hit their natural audience i think that's right i think netflix is going to be the best

01:00:36

example of consumer surplus at scale and what i mean by that is they have given so much value

01:00:44

away for an incredibly small amount of money like if you think about the value you get from netflix as compared to what

01:00:50

you would get from comcast and you spend ten bucks a month ten dollars or fifteen dollars for netflix versus a hundred

01:00:56

bucks for comcast there was such a huge gap in value um but netflix had to spend so much

01:01:03

money to keep people entertained the real question is at what point do they start to sort of

01:01:09

like run out of the things that they can do to keep people um engaged and otherwise they jason do what

01:01:15

you did which is you have a subscription to hbo max you have a subscription to disney plus yeah i mean the headwinds are

01:01:20

everybody gets in the game the only real winner is the consumer yeah and any individual company i think gets

01:01:26

gets into a real tough spot and i think what you saw was their earnings release basically said just that disney's doing a great job competing against us

01:01:33

hbo max is doing a great job competing against us so we're not sure what the incremental dollar that we can give you

01:01:38

the growth that we've given you before when we had no competition and that's by the way lena's lena khan's comment which

01:01:44

is the other side of the coin which is when you have more competition the consumer does win it contains prices it

01:01:50

just doesn't contain asset inflation which does impact the shareholders of these companies uh yeah and still even at this level 172

01:01:58

billion dollars they have a 35 xp one way that to look at this here i

01:02:04

think your point is an interesting one chamoth where you talk about how much value they've given away over the years and what they have today

01:02:10

you can always look at the balance sheet of a business a public company and in the balance sheet there's this um

01:02:17

this line goodwill um no well not even goodwill just the um uh the accumulated loss

01:02:24

um uh the accumulated deficit and if you look at that um on netflix they basically run the business right now at

01:02:31

as of their last earnings statement which was december 31st negative 40 million dollars so in terms of the total

01:02:37

net cash that they've generated as a business since their founding as a business they've lost 40 million dollars

01:02:44

so you know and meanwhile the question is okay what's the you know so they're not necessarily

01:02:49

uh at a stage where they've been generating cash but for many many years amazon had a similar strategy where they were reinvesting all their capital and

01:02:56

that capital was going into building the business and growing the platform and adding the next layer of growth the

01:03:01

question is has netflix from a fundamental business perspective not a valuation perspective have they added

01:03:06

enough growth platforms into the business have they grow found enough other products services or ways to build

01:03:12

things throughout the world everyone has linear video they don't have gaming they don't have anything else right they did start doing sports

01:03:18

comedy really they they are dabbling they dabbled with doing a couple of podcasts they dabbled doing a couple of

01:03:24

games and there's rumors that they might try to get the other 20 or 30 percent of people who don't pay by creating a

01:03:29

lighter version that was ad supported in other words you're not going to get the new season of ozark but maybe you can

01:03:35

get the first two or three uh you're a year behind the production schedule but you can watch it all with

01:03:41

ads so why isn't netflix in video games and sports it's such an obvious one and that's why

01:03:46

i think they released a series of games based on their ip so as their ip grows and i think that's what you'll see with

01:03:52

disney plus is think about an app store inside of disney plus a merch store inside of disney plus i think there's so many

01:03:58

verticals next to them why is there no merch stories why don't they own spotify or have a spotify competitor

01:04:04

well i think spotify sees themselves as a that's a really good point you know when you look at the peloton i was

01:04:09

looking at the peloton um earnings when you know this it was down

01:04:14

25 yesterday or the day before and i was like this is an incredible business because they have 2.1 million

01:04:20

subscribers that hey 40 bucks a month it's incredible i mean it's a money printing machine money printing machine

01:04:25

i actually have a subscription i don't even have a peloton peloton i don't have anything you just pay 500 a year to use

01:04:31

the classes i have the app it's crazy i don't even use the app but i think that's 20 bucks for the just that app yeah but the point i was trying to make

01:04:37

is when you look at it you know there's about 30 percent of that revenue that goes right back to the music labels for the music so you know to your point like

01:04:44

uh there's just an enormous value in actually music you know so yeah one of the great flicks built library values

01:04:50

and content they could be they could point it to music as well there's all these things they could do to reignite growth

01:04:56

a lot of people discount the value of having a subscription consumer business when you have a consumer's credit card

01:05:01

on file and they're paying every month for something it's an incredible point because you don't have the friction of

01:05:06

getting the sale done you've already done the sale yep now the question is can you upsell them some new service or some new addition that they're not

01:05:12

paying for today so obvious yeah it's so obvious right and so like by the way i'll say this like for years google

01:05:17

struggled with this question which is what is google's consumer subscription business because google did not have

01:05:23

consumer credit cards across its platform despite a billion daily users and so google for yours was strategically trying to figure out what

01:05:29

business can or should we be in to have a subscription model with consumers because once you have that then you can

01:05:35

charge for all sorts of stuff you can charge for storing photos you can charge for accessing audio you can charge for

01:05:40

accessing unlimited imagine i'll be the i'll take the contrarian side of this okay here we go yeah go

01:05:45

ahead go ahead peter j well no look i i invest in b2b subscription businesses i

01:05:51

hate b2c subscription businesses and the reason is just the churn rates what we see when we look at bc subscription

01:05:56

businesses is five percent monthly churn is not uncommon it's pretty much the standard so

01:06:02

call that 50 60 percent churn in the subscription base every year so effectively you're rebuilding the

01:06:07

company from scratch every two years i don't see like how you can build a successful business

01:06:12

i'll tell you why you're wrong doing contrast that to b2b with b2b subscription businesses you do lose some

01:06:19

customers but the ones who stick with you keep adding seats for more employees usually and so actually

01:06:26

your landing expands your courts actually your cohorts are growing 20 every year instead of shrinking 50

01:06:31

now obviously there are some of these b2c subscription businesses like netflix and peloton they are obviously valuable

01:06:37

they've defied gravity well netflix has done it because they spend billions of dollars on content and peloton's got

01:06:43

it because they plop a expensive machine in your house so you can't forget about

01:06:49

it and that keeps you a little bit more recurring than like a lot of these subscriptions which are just very easy

01:06:54

to cancel but so look they've been able to make it work but i'm most excited here's why i think you're wrong it turns

01:07:01

out these are so low priced these subscriptions that you get a lot of consumers

01:07:06

trialing them so because it's only five or ten bucks a month to use something like a spotify or a disney um because

01:07:14

they're so low priced you do get a little bit of uh sampling and that's why the rate's higher whereas in business

01:07:20

there is a massive onboarding of people have to take their time to set up the software learn how to use it so if

01:07:25

you're going to commit to it it does reduce it and you do have land and expand but what we're talking about with product expansion is the equivalent in

01:07:31

sas of land and expand so imagine if disney plus or spotify after you listen to an album or it's in

01:07:37

your top rotation they showed you the merch for that band or after you completed the season of mandalorian or

01:07:44

book of boba fett they showed you the merchandise and said here's a limited edition of

01:07:49

um grogu baby yoda when that we tried to get baby yoda stuff last christmas

01:07:54

disney dropped the ball they didn't have any uh and they could have had all that made and they would have sold millions of we

01:07:59

were buying stuff on etsy the reason baby yoda works is because it's leveraged off a platform this

01:08:05

massive disney platform of which this b2c subscription service is just one piece i mean look obviously there are

01:08:11

valuable consumer subscription businesses so the way i'm approaching it can't be right in all cases however i think

01:08:17

people really get themselves in trouble when they start to value these b2c subscription businesses the same as the

01:08:23

b2b ones in one case you in the b2c case churn is the predominant characteristic

01:08:30

and it means that you have to spend more on marketing or cogs or content or what

01:08:35

have you to keep rebuilding the user base whereas in the b2b context the user base is compounding on its own and

01:08:42

that'll that just makes for i think a more finally attractive business option yes but it grows slower again just

01:08:50

at the end of the day these are all variables just the weights just changed i agree with david that consumer churn businesses or consumer businesses

01:08:57

have much higher churn than enterprise and enterprises have negative churn which means that they just naturally

01:09:02

grow but the reality is consumers just have an unbounded tam that enterprises do not

01:09:07

and the way that the way that the ltvs work uh just tend to be different and the cash

01:09:12

flow cycle of these companies tend to be very different and that's why you see netflix get these enormous valuations that enterprise subscription businesses

01:09:19

do not what some people are now doing when they look at consume in consumer businesses and look at churn is they

01:09:24

take out the ones that are based on credit card to look at like people who actually unsubscribe because they don't want it but not because their credit

01:09:30

cards so basically so if you think about like netflix's business if it's turning two and a half percent per month let's

01:09:36

call that 30 percent of the user base is a trading every year they've got to rebuild their user base from scratch

01:09:42

every three or four years now they can do that um i guess at some

01:09:48

point though they may run out of you know greenfield opportunity to grow

01:09:53

their customer base um but you know it's gonna pressurize their margins because they're gonna have

01:09:59

to constantly spend on content original content to retain you that you have to spend on

01:10:04

marketing to keep going after the portion you're you're leaving out the archive these archives are going to be super

01:10:10

valuable and i don't think we even know how to value these archives yet because if you look at the marvel archive or the star wars

01:10:16

archive these things just keep printing money year after year and then you'll see netflix and hbo max will keep being

01:10:21

able to go back to them hbo max being the canonical example now because you didn't think that that business would

01:10:26

have you know a lot of ip to build on but suddenly you have the many saints of newark um and the uh sex and the city

01:10:33

reboot i mean they're going right down the line there's going to be an entourage when you own a franchise it has value disney has shown that you own

01:10:39

the best franchises hbo max is now showing it and then that means netflix will show it next yeah but

01:10:45

how much of a netflix's content do they even own are they licensed no now it's 100 netflix is 100 they stopped and

01:10:51

that's why disney started taking it off their whole spend that i think they're spending 20 billion or something it's

01:10:57

all on original content so that that's why they made that move is because they knew they were going to have the disney content the marvel content pulled where

01:11:03

do we want to go next guys big world play because i have coveted uh i want to i want i want sax to talk

01:11:09

to me about his what's going on with fouchy oh my gosh this is quite a story this

01:11:16

really is um i'm trying to get my head around the story and i'd be totally honest and explain it to us because i think

01:11:21

we'll please my head what's going on okay so um a series of emails have come out that were requested of the freedom

01:11:28

of information act and what they show is that at the nih um fauci and francis

01:11:34

collins who was ahead of it they had a series of conversations with scientists around january sorry january 31st or

01:11:42

february 1st there are emails on february 1st summarizing those conversations and basically what they

01:11:49

say is that a group of scientists advise falchi and

01:11:54

collins that covet likely came from a lab how they know because it had you

01:11:59

know hallmark signatures like the furion sites the same reasons we now believe

01:12:05

uh the the virus came from a lab okay but by february 4th officials at so

01:12:11

three days later officials at the nih including falchi had come to the conclusion

01:12:18

that the virus must have been passed zoonotically from an animal like a

01:12:23

pangolin it didn't come from the lab and furthermore they were starting to use language like conspiracy theory to

01:12:29

discredit the the lab leak the lab leak idea so that within a few days they were all

01:12:36

in on this sort of so-called zoonotic theory and

01:12:42

they really began a campaign in the words of collins a devastating

01:12:47

takedown of scientists who are trying to discuss the lab leak theory that became the official position

01:12:54

why well okay so this is where it gets really interesting um

01:12:59

obviously i can't speculate to modis but here's what we know the nih falchi's division

01:13:05

years ago there was a debate in the scientific community about how we study viruses vouchers an epidemiologist he

01:13:12

wants to study them makes sense the debate is over whether you should enhance the

01:13:17

viruses as a way to study them so-called gain of function research

01:13:22

their faulcy is on the side of engaging in that kind of research there are other scientists

01:13:28

who think it's crazy they lose the nih then makes grants to a group called the eco health alliance it's run

01:13:35

by uh a british scientist named peter dazing okay by the way who doesn't who

01:13:40

doesn't support eco health and an alliance branding

01:13:50

yes exactly so so eco health alliance which is has neither been good for the

01:13:56

ecology for our health or uh online alliances yeah keeping up

01:14:01

bad natural alliances everywhere yes so they then provide funding to the wuhan institute of virology to

01:14:08

study bat viruses where you know function research then occurs this lab in wuhan is known to have had

01:14:15

leaks in the past so just from a security choice not the best recipient

01:14:20

of a grant but that is what happens okay and then we know the history from there it's almost certain that

01:14:26

what's the what's the element of the story that has to deal with the lancet and the yes person that worked for

01:14:31

fouchy and then uh and then that person got a grant afterwards what well and then just one

01:14:37

other thing i want to point out here um so we're clear this has become a very partisan issue but the original foams were done by

01:14:45

buzzfeed and the washington post sorry the foia releases were done by

01:14:50

buzzfeed and washington post and now you have rand paul on the other side of it who seems like really wacky and

01:14:56

obviously conspiracy right-wing so you have this like really weird partisanship that's now been embedded in it okay

01:15:04

yes so can you explain the partisan nature and then question i almost want to take

01:15:10

uh chamas question first about who's this dazed guy what is this lanceletta let me come back to the parts and think i'm just going to try to establish the

01:15:15

facts before we get into the partisan mess of this thing so peter dazek is the guy who made these

01:15:21

grants to the wounds of virology okay there is one other interesting fact when the west wanted to come in and

01:15:27

investigate what happened in this lab china approved one person from the west

01:15:33

to come in and conduct the investigation guess who that was peter dazek okay he was the only guy

01:15:40

the ccp led in to go look at this lab he then comes out of this whatever he did

01:15:45

and says it has to be the zoonotic theory he endorsed the wet market idea it cannot be lab leak

01:15:52

that is a conspiracy theory and then he rounds up a group of scientists to write

01:15:58

a letter to the lancet which is a respected scientific publication which is incredibly respected yes which he

01:16:04

signs in which he basically advocates the zoonotic theory but he goes further and says there is no way

01:16:10

that it could be lab leak and anyone who says as a conspiracy theorist and that has an incredibly chilling effect on the

01:16:18

scientific community because no scientist wants to be labeled a kook or conspiracy theory or heretical to the

01:16:23

lancet exactly and this is a tight-knit ecosystem of um of insiders

01:16:29

insiders and institutions and grants no scientist wants to lose their funding right

01:16:34

and then furthermore big tech starts censoring his disinformation the lab leak theory because they say well these

01:16:41

officials look at all the scientists we have to follow the science right so the science according to this letter from

01:16:47

the lancet is basically on the side of the zoonotic theory so you then have downstream

01:16:52

censorship of this so that is who peter dazuk is and and and in this letter in

01:16:58

the lancet he never disclosed his conflict of interest which is the fact that he funded

01:17:04

this wuhan institute of irology to conduct the type of research that might have led to the leak of the virus so

01:17:11

this guy is hopelessly conflicted and has a reason to want to suppress and cover up a lab leaking never disclosed

01:17:18

it and look so does fouchy i mean because fauci funded dazzac

01:17:24

so imagine when in february of 2020 when the lab leak is coming across the

01:17:30

desk of fauci does he tell the president mr president he's at the right hand of the president

01:17:35

mr president we might have funded this thing we funded dasic who funded the wuhan lab

01:17:41

we collectively the united states government might have some responsibility in this do you think that conversation ever took place

01:17:47

when he was making his recommendations he was hopelessly conflicted and if the truth about this had come out and look

01:17:54

i'm not saying he had any intentional role i'm not saying he wanted this to happen i'm not even saying that he knew

01:18:00

for sure that dasic was funding the wuhan lab okay let's just give fauci the benefit of the doubt but we all know how

01:18:06

politics works if it had come out in february of 2020 that fauci had funded the guy who funded the wuhan lab and

01:18:13

that's where the virus likely came from his career would have been finished okay finished we know that as a political

01:18:19

reality and so within days of scientists advising fauci hey this thing probably

01:18:25

came from the lab the nih is consolidated around the idea that this is a conspiracy

01:18:31

theory and they work to suppress it and they wage a public campaign i got to tell you when i have learned all these

01:18:36

facts i got to tell you what i compare it to it's almost like we learned all those revelations about bill cosby that

01:18:43

here's this guy on tv for years pretending to be america's dad and then we find out he's a monster fauci has

01:18:49

been on tv for years lecturing us about covet he's been like america's dad america's doctor and lo and behold we

01:18:56

find out that he has a role in this whole thing and look i'm not saying his intent was not to uh of

01:19:02

course it wasn't anybody's intent has been used to help people so it's a little bit of a part

01:19:07

i'm going to give him the benefit of every doubt here i'm going to give him the benefit of every doubt okay he's called him bill cosby

01:19:14

i'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt in the sense that he didn't want this to happen he didn't have any he didn't cause that but we know for a fact

01:19:20

that he funded dazak who funded this lab it's where the virus came from come on we know that and he covered it up he

01:19:27

engaged in a campaign okay we suppressed the lab leak theory that is a conflict of interest let's get let's get freebie

01:19:33

in on the science what do you think as some a man of science freedberg the sultan of science in fact about uh these

01:19:40

emails and the chances that fauci essentially was

01:19:46

funding gain of research and then attempting to cover it up which is the accusation that's a question of science

01:19:51

look there um i mentioned this in the past jamie science community you know amy metzel did a um a podcast interview

01:19:58

with lex friedman it's worth listening to uh it's a couple hours long if you've got some time to kill um but he does a

01:20:04

good job contextualizing these matters and what may have gone on that led ultimately to

01:20:11

um the the lab leak and also the lab leak cover-up i don't know what happened with fatching emails i have not read

01:20:16

this stuff um so i i you know i have no reason to believe

01:20:22

that thatchy is malintentioned in the sense that he has some reason to harm or hurt um i could see that

01:20:29

there is a certain degree of nervousness to accuse the biggest foreign government and potential u.s

01:20:35

adversary of causing a global pandemic and not wanting that sort of conflict to arise at a period of time when you

01:20:42

really need to take care of your people and we really need to focus internally as a country on how do we get through this pandemic and making that response

01:20:50

to that no i have to respond to that i'm not saying that fauci or anyone

01:20:56

involved in that process should have accused china but that's not what was their decision that what was not was

01:21:02

made they decided to stop the debate altogether they decided to suppress the

01:21:07

debate what would you have done in that seat sex you're sitting in that seat and the country is potentially facing a pandemic that could wipe out millions of

01:21:13

americans where do you prioritize it i'll tell you what if i was sitting at

01:21:18

the nih and i wasn't hopelessly conflicted i would probably have just said listen i don't know what the origin

01:21:24

of the virus is let that debate continue i would not have tried to wage a public

01:21:29

campaign against the people against the scientists who were honestly pursuing in

01:21:35

good faith where this virus might have come from so we can learn things maybe how to avoid something like this from

01:21:40

happening again the people at the nih should not have engaged in that type of politically minded pr campaign they just

01:21:47

shouldn't that's not their job as scientists and then to find out that they have a conflict of interest on top of that that might be motivating

01:21:54

that desire that is not that's not appropriate i i think it's really important freeburg you

01:21:59

can probably agree with this that at some point some journalist should really simplify this for all of

01:22:05

us because it's it's a it's an incredibly important topic that we need to look at at the end of all of

01:22:11

this assuming that omicron is the end of this chapter because it's been a horrible chapter for the world

01:22:16

um but we do need an accounting of the truth right i think that that's really important

01:22:22

there was an episode many ago when i said i don't know and i don't care about whether or not the virus came out of china and um again i was somewhat kind

01:22:29

of misstated as the intention of why i said that the reason i said that and what i really meant was that what happened even if it was a

01:22:36

lab leak what happened was really the tip of the iceberg the ability to bio engineer pathogenic

01:22:42

organisms is becoming ubiquitous the toolkit to do gain a function research

01:22:48

as it's being called in the press is a very simple toolkit the ability to engineer organisms that can cause

01:22:54

catastrophic harm to the human species is becoming available on the internet

01:22:59

and with tools that any of us can buy and use in our garage and so what i'm more questioning and what i'm more concerned about and what i care more

01:23:05

about is what is our global biodefense strategy how are we getting ahead of the next wave of this happening and it's not

01:23:10

about the who said he said she said those things it's really important to understand

01:23:16

we need biodefense when they're saying it came zoonotically they're saying it came from an animal when it actually was created in the lab if you want to have

01:23:22

biodefense we got to first say that again whether or not yeah you're right whether it did a separate question to me whether it did

01:23:28

or didn't the tooling to do this is absolutely possible and the ability for these sorts

01:23:34

of viruses to leak out and be made and turned into a weapon is significant it's a real risk

01:23:40

and so i'm for you guys i think both of you guys just figuring out how do we solve this problem like how do we get right

01:23:46

but both of you guys are saying nuanced versions of david is saying we have to have

01:23:51

an honest accounting of what happened if we could if we're supposed to actually have an eco-health alliance yeah i'm not

01:23:57

by the way i'm not i'm not you're i'm not you're saying yeah i'm not just making i'm not dismissing that yeah and you're saying

01:24:02

we need to actually formalize gain of function research because everybody has it and so it's going to be inappropriate

01:24:09

for us to ignore it we need to assume game of the function research leads to dangerous pathogenic bio-organisms

01:24:17

and then we need to formula it doesn't and then we need to formulate a biodefense strategy i'm just saying like we don't the implication the reason why

01:24:23

saxis thing is important to me is the implications we have to have an honest accounting of these implications we saw

01:24:28

another implication just this week in flint michigan they shut down

01:24:33

indefinitely the public school system in flint michigan okay this is a society just to give you

01:24:39

a sense of the facts here 90 percent are minority

01:24:47

because of the fear uh of of catching covet and spreading covet uh but and 90 are minority kids 80

01:24:55

are in poverty i don't know how you know 80 of kids who are in poverty are

01:25:00

expected to have a laptop and internet access on a consistent basis this is the same place that screwed up the water

01:25:06

system so uh i don't i so i think like we have to have an honest accounting of um

01:25:12

of all of these things because the implications are real this is the biggest story of our lifetimes kovid i mean it might be the

01:25:19

biggest international incident since world war ii and the fact that the major

01:25:25

let's call it prestige publications have not really fully invested hold on

01:25:30

conundrum to me because this started with um a massive amount of coverage from

01:25:37

buzzfeed washington post new york times in june of last year 2021 they were covering this like crazy vanity fair did

01:25:44

a major investigation and then it seems to have gone silent and then rand paul

01:25:50

has been going after this and it all of a sudden became partisan so the only coverage i'm seeing of it

01:25:55

is that's independent is the intercept but then everything else is the hill and you know really weird far right stuff

01:26:01

that wanna like you know fauci needs to be whatever and how did it become so partisan if it started with left-leaning

01:26:09

publications getting this information sacks like how did this become partisan is because the president changed in the

01:26:14

middle of all this like what uh do you have an honest handicapping of why we can't get

01:26:21

you know like a consensus on what's actually happening here from the press is it rand paul's too polarizing

01:26:27

well i think what happened is if you go back to february of 2020

01:26:32

if you look i just had this conversation with ashley rinsberg on my call-in show and you know he's not unplugged

01:26:41

now available call it can i he he he literally wrote the book on the new york times and i

01:26:47

asked him about their coverage of problem

01:26:56

this is the guy who literally this is the guy who literally wrote the book on uh the new york times and i asked him

01:27:02

about the new york times coverage of of coven and covet origins he says that on february 17th so basically two weeks

01:27:08

after these officials at the nih settle on the conspiracy theory narrative

01:27:14

that that narrative is then published almost word for word verbatim using the same

01:27:19

language not just the new york times in the washington post across all these major publications so what you see there

01:27:26

is a pr campaign it's a concerted effort you don't get the same words and language being used across all the major

01:27:32

publications at the same time unless somebody is pushing that narrative we all know this this is corporations do

01:27:38

this right they run pr campaigns that is what basically happened and so the prestige media got on board this

01:27:46

zoonotic theory and this idea look like they've done so many times they got on board wmd in iraq before realizing it

01:27:54

was a total farce and a hoax okay they so they got themselves on record behind

01:27:59

this conspiracy theory idea and similarly i think the democrats got themselves on

01:28:05

record as being pro falci and everything because of you know tds right anyone

01:28:10

who's standing up to trump must be correct and defend it and so all of this happened in 2020 and so by the time we

01:28:18

now fast forward to let's call it an honest investigation of the origins of the virus which should be bipartisan

01:28:24

this should not be partisan we should all want to know what happened we should all want to take the politics out of it

01:28:30

because without knowing what happened how do we prepare for it in the future everyone's already like hopelessly

01:28:36

committed to positions they took in 2020 and i think this was driving the partisanship

01:28:42

yeah i think you're right yeah i mean that's the thing i'm trying to get to is like when i saw you wanted to put it on the docket i'm like

01:28:49

trying to grok this and i can't find i'm finding all the left-leaning coverage from june of 2021

01:28:56

none since then and then it's all right coverage now and i think it's something we need to get

01:29:02

some independent coverage with so i'll take credit i'll take credit for saying fauci is the biggest political loser at

01:29:08

our all-in uh podcast recap thank you i'll take my bow now well i mean and the the other

01:29:13

thing that's kind of the way half of our refrigerations have come true already i mean right now we're so correct on these things um the thing that's i think just

01:29:20

infuriating right now is that everybody is trying to manipulate the public

01:29:26

and they have not understood that in this media environment the truth comes out

01:29:32

kind of not only eventually but pretty quickly so stop trying to game the public either way that the vaccines

01:29:38

don't work they've delayed the public reckoning on this by what like two years well here's

01:29:44

the thing there's a so i agree with you on that there's also a forward release that happened in the uk where and it's a little too much to get

01:29:50

into right now but this photo release now is looking at all the people who died in the uk of covid uh and it turns

01:29:57

out like maybe more people are dying because they didn't get their cancer or a large number of people died because they didn't go in to get tested for

01:30:03

cancer and all of this is going to come out eventually and not putting out every day the ages

01:30:11

um and the comorbidities of people who died of kovid just led to this feeling that we're getting gamed and turning on

01:30:17

cnn and seeing the case counts in a cumulative chart is like a startup giving me like the cumulative number of

01:30:22

people who registered for their company but for their product we don't care about that we want to know your daily active users what about what about the

01:30:28

catastrophic impact of school closures that we've been talking about on the show repeatedly you know everything's

01:30:34

being manipulated stop manipulating the public look you have to realize that there is huge political motivations here

01:30:40

because huge cya going on because the heads of the teachers union said there is no

01:30:46

learning loss they are the ones who lobby to shut the schools down they sure as hell aren't going to admit their

01:30:51

mistake now they're covering it up and so any politician who takes their money is basically they're going to muffle

01:30:57

their criticism there's only one really honest like left-wing guy i've seen acknowledge the school closure issue

01:31:03

which was jonathan chait had a great article in new york magazine saying that progressives must acknowledge the

01:31:10

mistake of school closures because otherwise we can't learn from it he has been a voice in the wilderness on that

01:31:15

side of the aisle we got to wrap up now that uh sax has cracked open the plugs uh what are we all working on because i

01:31:22

want to give a plug to friedberg who uh did a great interview uh on a tech

01:31:27

podcast called this week in startups where he announced tana so it's a dual plug here uh friday's

01:31:33

episode of this week's startups uh maybe you could tell us a little bit about the launch of of canada your new uh yeah

01:31:39

we're applicator we're just announcing the business um which i talk about a lot on jason's pod so definitely worth

01:31:46

hearing but as you guys know i've talked a lot about this concept of decentralized manufacturing where we can kind of move

01:31:51

old-school industrial production systems which are super inefficient we use lots of resources move stuff into factories

01:31:58

process them and then ship the products back out and um you know technology now allows us to have more distributed or

01:32:04

decentralized manufacturing um potentially so what you know what we've been working on for three years at

01:32:10

this point is a company called canna which is really about you know printing beverages in your home so you

01:32:16

can use a single device to print uh iced coffee or iced tea cocktail juice wine soda

01:32:24

etc um all using a single flavoring system and water from your from your sink we talked more about it on the pod

01:32:30

but i think this is a big theme you know forget about canada for a second but generally like the systems of old like

01:32:36

you know the industrial revolution created all these old school systems that are big contributors to carbon

01:32:42

emissions and are super resource inefficient and i do think that everything from 3d printing to biomanufacturing to the

01:32:48

system that we kind of introduced today with canna can completely reinvent our global

01:32:54

industries in different ways um and ultimately lead to cheaper products better products and products that use

01:32:59

much less natural resources and put less carbon out um and so it's been a big thing that we've been working on i'm

01:33:05

excited to kind of open it up a little bit and talk more about what we're doing so um thanks for having me on

01:33:11

did you hire the mute uh as a spokesperson he may or may not have his brand on here we'll see there so right

01:33:16

now the business is um uh is signing up lots of different folks that can create digital beverage brands

01:33:23

and so if any of you guys want to have jake house you know our cider hard cider um here we

01:33:28

go we'll uh we'll be launching that but yeah and actually told me his his new um his new

01:33:35

soda that he's going to be bringing it's called muth cola it has five times the sugar of

01:33:40

coca-cola other than that it's just like any other colder but you get five times the calories it rips out like maple

01:33:45

syrup uh hey i'd like to i'd like to do uh you gotta

01:33:51

um in genesee county in michigan flint indefinitely shut down their public

01:33:57

schools this week what is going on you have thousands of kids um who at best will have to learn via

01:34:04

zoom and internet access that most of these kids may or may not have because again

01:34:09

uh you know they're they're in poverty and and so i just want to make sure that everybody just understands that

01:34:15

everybody tweet that and self-inflicted wounds well here's the thing these kids um this is one of eric adams

01:34:23

90 90 minority 80 in poverty um all virtual until further notice well

01:34:29

here's what's going to happen it goes right against the cdc guidelines okay and uh

01:34:35

this is really the accounting of the cost and we are as we said before learning

01:34:40

loss in our kids is going to be the single biggest thing we look back in 20 years coming out of this pandemic and realize was the the the biggest

01:34:48

price we paid for this so and here's the stupidity of it the what the eric adams and the new york

01:34:54

city uh you know sort of uh leadership we're talking about this when these kids are in school okay there's a chance

01:35:01

they're gonna get omicron like everybody got omicron like everybody has it now like it's crazy how many people in our circle have it the only person doesn't

01:35:07

have is phil hellmuth now um what's gonna happen when they go home

01:35:12

or they're not in school and they're hanging out with their friends or looking for something they're going to get it anyway

01:35:19

what eric adams said is that school is the safest place for them to be yes totally

01:35:24

and school shutdowns are just so insane to me right now unicef had an article which i'll dig up

01:35:32

where they said that the cost in future earnings by this generation of students

01:35:38

who suffered learning loss is going to be 17 trillion worldwide uh that's going to be the

01:35:43

economic impact from this thing not to mention the stunt individual and emotional development yeah by locking

01:35:49

these kids down for years anxiety ptsd i mean this is going to create depression in kids

01:35:55

we need to solve this we got it we got to get the we got to get the schools and flint open all right everybody for the

01:36:01

dictator chemo polly hoppetea david friedberg the sultan of science

01:36:07

and the rain man himself david sacks i'm jay cal we'll see you next time

01:36:12

love you [Music]

01:36:23

we open source besties to the fans and they've just gone crazy

01:36:28

[Music]

01:36:45

we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just it's like this like sexual tension but

01:36:51

they just need to release [Music]

01:36:56

your feet

01:37:03

[Music] i'm going home

01:37:10

[Music]

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This episode stands out for the following:

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Episode Highlights

Chamath's Clarification on Human Rights
Chamath emphasizes his commitment to human rights and clarifies previous comments.
“I strongly believe in and support absolute freedom of all people.”
@ 03m 04s
January 22, 2022
Virtue Signaling vs. Real Action
Sax critiques the hypocrisy of online outrage, emphasizing the need for real action.
“We're not really doing more than virtue signaling on this issue.”
@ 07m 46s
January 22, 2022
Microsoft's Big Move
Microsoft announced its acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $68 billion, shaking up the gaming industry.
“Microsoft's got a lot of cash.”
@ 21m 57s
January 22, 2022
The Debate on Monopolies
The conversation explores whether monopolies can be beneficial for consumers.
“Not all monopolies are necessarily bad for the customer.”
@ 25m 59s
January 22, 2022
Regulatory Uncertainty
The changing regulatory landscape creates uncertainty for businesses and mergers.
“Business needs certainty.”
@ 39m 21s
January 22, 2022
Economic Risks
Experts discuss the delicate balance between inflation and recession risks in the current economy.
“The risk is actually for a recession.”
@ 43m 53s
January 22, 2022
Overreaction in Policy
The panel reflects on how economic policies are swinging between extremes, risking stability.
“We're pinballing from one overreaction to another.”
@ 51m 47s
January 22, 2022
Consumer Wins Amidst Competition
Increased competition among streaming services benefits consumers, but poses challenges for individual companies.
“The only real winner is the consumer.”
@ 01h 01m 26s
January 22, 2022
Peloton's Subscription Model
Peloton's 2.1 million subscribers make it a 'money printing machine'.
“It's incredible, I mean it's a money printing machine!”
@ 01h 04m 25s
January 22, 2022
Fauci's Controversial Role
Emails reveal Fauci's involvement in the lab leak theory suppression.
“Fauci has been on TV for years lecturing us about COVID...”
@ 01h 18m 49s
January 22, 2022
Biodefense Strategy Needed
Experts discuss the urgent need for a global biodefense strategy against engineered pathogens. 'The ability for these sorts of viruses to leak out and be made and turned into a weapon is significant.'
“The ability for these sorts of viruses to leak out and be made and turned into a weapon is significant.”
@ 01h 23m 34s
January 22, 2022
The Cost of School Closures
Flint, Michigan's public schools shut down indefinitely, impacting 90% minority students in poverty. 'Learning loss in our kids is going to be the single biggest thing we look back on.'
“Learning loss in our kids is going to be the single biggest thing we look back on.”
@ 01h 34m 40s
January 22, 2022

Episode Quotes

We're not really doing more than virtue signaling on this issue.
E64: Antitrust standards & enforcement, tech repricing, lab leak obfuscation, E63 reactions & more
Imagine having all of your products integrated in one streaming service.
E64: Antitrust standards & enforcement, tech repricing, lab leak obfuscation, E63 reactions & more
Business needs certainty.
E64: Antitrust standards & enforcement, tech repricing, lab leak obfuscation, E63 reactions & more
The only real winner is the consumer.
E64: Antitrust standards & enforcement, tech repricing, lab leak obfuscation, E63 reactions & more
It's a little bit of a part.
E64: Antitrust standards & enforcement, tech repricing, lab leak obfuscation, E63 reactions & more
Stop trying to game the public.
E64: Antitrust standards & enforcement, tech repricing, lab leak obfuscation, E63 reactions & more

Key Moments

Human Rights Clarification03:04
Virtue Signaling07:46
Raising Awareness15:27
Microsoft Acquisition21:57
Regulatory Changes27:28
Business Certainty39:21
Recession Risk43:53
School Shutdowns1:34:23

Words per Minute Over Time

Vibes Breakdown

E63: Insurrection indictments, human rights in the US and abroad, groundbreaking MS study and more

January 15, 2022

01:25:09

E63: Insurrection indictments, human rights in the US and abroad, groundbreaking MS study and more

E36: New FTC Chair, breaking up big tech, government silent spying, Jon Stewart, wildfires & more

June 18, 2021

01:27:34

E36: New FTC Chair, breaking up big tech, government silent spying, Jon Stewart, wildfires & more

E13: SPACsgiving Special! Vaccine news, innovation vs regulation, fixing higher ed, challenge trials

November 25, 2020

01:21:34

E13: SPACsgiving Special! Vaccine news, innovation vs regulation, fixing higher ed, challenge trials

E37: NYC rejects far-left candidates, new developments in lab leak theory, App Store breakup & more

June 25, 2021

01:19:50

E37: NYC rejects far-left candidates, new developments in lab leak theory, App Store breakup & more

E102: Elon closes Twitter deal, $META uncertainty, Zuck's historic bet, big tech decline & more

October 29, 2022

01:36:01

E102: Elon closes Twitter deal, $META uncertainty, Zuck's historic bet, big tech decline & more

Trump vs Harvard, Nvidia export controls, how DEI killed Hollywood with Tim Dillon

April 19, 2025

01:38:35

Trump vs Harvard, Nvidia export controls, how DEI killed Hollywood with Tim Dillon

E35: Biogen's controversial Alzheimer's drug approval, the billionaire space race, Bitcoin & more

June 13, 2021

01:35:37

E35: Biogen's controversial Alzheimer's drug approval, the billionaire space race, Bitcoin & more

E4: Politicizing the pandemic, Police reform, Twitter vs Facebook with David Sacks & David Friedberg

June 20, 2020

01:18:50

E4: Politicizing the pandemic, Police reform, Twitter vs Facebook with David Sacks & David Friedberg

E92: Adam Neumann's second act, a16z's $350M bet, housing policy, Inflation Reduction Act & more

August 20, 2022

01:39:03

E92: Adam Neumann's second act, a16z's $350M bet, housing policy, Inflation Reduction Act & more

Sheryl Sandberg, plus open-source AI gene editing explained

May 03, 2024

01:15:23

Sheryl Sandberg, plus open-source AI gene editing explained

E83: Market slide continues, and how to address Uvalde

May 27, 2022

01:49:26

E83: Market slide continues, and how to address Uvalde

E156: Ivy League antisemitism, macro, SaaS recovery, Gemini, Figma deal delay + big Friedberg update

December 08, 2023

01:32:29

E156: Ivy League antisemitism, macro, SaaS recovery, Gemini, Figma deal delay + big Friedberg update