E6: Big Tech antitrust aftermath, potential effects of an M&A clampdown on Silicon Valley & more

all right everybody welcome back it's another episode of Allin podcast the podcast that is racing up the charts despite the fact that we recorded every three or four weeks there's no marketing there's no ads in this podcast it's just four friends who play poker together who've decided to talk about the most important issues in the world welcome back to the podcast David fredberg the queen of quinoa uh himself uh obviously climate.com Itza and uh an undisclosed beverage startup that I'm not supposed to talk about sorry about that I know a lot of people were tweeting about this beverage startup you're still not ready to talk about the beverage startup thank you j y welcome back to the show I always appreciate your promotions uh but when when will the

beverage start by the way do you guys want to talk about do you guys want to talk about Jason's home address because I have that I think please no I want to ask uh is is that a picture in the background I love space by the way as you know but is that a picture of Uranus or what is that picture I think that's Saturn it's Saturn it's Saturn it's Saturn it's no it's Saturn uh freeberg obviously taking the first Virgin Galactic flight uh chamath poopaa of course with us here the um Prince of spax calling in from an undisclosed location that is not burning down like the United States how you doing on your vacay uh doing really well thanks than I'm giving you the three button salute as I told you yeah thank God the microphone is perfectly positioned so we do not have to look at your chest hair

all six of your chest hairs oh my God it's like a $1,000 suit that's missing all of its buttons or shirt rather I mean they couldn't afford to put buttons all the way up on your like probably $2,000 shirt aity meas when I get back to the United States as Jason said my habit Dasher will meet me at PL side and slow the three buttons yeah when he when he leaves for Europe they remove the three buttons he comes back the Habit Dasher puts them back on each shirt uh he does that for the entire work wardrobe and of course chiming in is Rainman himself David Sachs blo professional blogger and the fund manager of craft ventures of course uh before that working at PayPal with uh Peter teal Elon Musk and a bunch of other famous people um uh two of which have gone on to have demonstrably more success than saaks but uh saaks having

of course more than success Dem monal success than the other 72 rocket scientists from PayPal in between he did a little company called Yammer which Microsoft bought for a billion dollars speaking of um big companies in big Tech we had a big Tech hearing this week and Jeff Bezos Sundar and uh Zuck himself as well as Tim Cook two Founders and two Hired Guns uh people who are hired for their positions defending themselves from what I thought was some pretty good questioning um my my expectations were very low that anybody on that panel would know what they were talking about for me I thought Jeff Bezos did the best job he had a great opening statement and he was the most candid um and I think least likely to

get broken up going around the horn here chamath who did the best job in the hearings I don't know if you saw all of them are just Clips but who do you think shined I uh I only saw to be honest with you your recap which I thought was frankly really really good um when we should we should link to that in the show notes so people can listen to it um I saw a couple of answers um the the thing that jumped off the page to me was I I read a little bit of bezos's statement I thought it was pretty fire I thought he did the best job um kind of positioning himself but the reality is you know it's kind of what I said a few days earlier on CNBC but I just thought going in this whole thing was set up to be kind of performative theater and it

basically was that you know the the just like the level of questions are just so poor the level of understanding is so bad and then you know people just use it as a way to grandstand and uh everybody did um so you know I wasn't uh completely blown away by any of it to be quite honest uh what do you think freedberg who had the best showing um in those hearings uh I think Zuck was uh the most kind of eloquent in the uh on point responses he was uh super super well prepped for this thing um I think Bezos and and others um were obviously uh um you know they had they had great kind of prep work done for their statement but in terms of like warning off the attacks I think Zuck did did a great job um you know it was weird it didn't feel like uh

like Tim Cook should have been there it was like kind of a random thing that he was there because everyone had an axe to grind and the axe that everyone had to grind was a little bit different it wasn't like this was a a true objective discussion about you know antitrust and so the the acts that people had to grind were kind of pointed at Google and Facebook and Amazon and different ways uh Tim Cook was kind of you know hey yeah this is cool you guys go ahead and give your responses I'm gonna go back to I think that's because apple does not have a monopoly position on a on a numbers basis in any one era and or and Andor because their products are so loved and universally you know used I I

think it's actually a function of what these companies do so if you look at the the Jim Jordan rant I don't know if you guys watch this but Jim Jordan did this big rant at the open and he went on and on and the first thing he said he's like big Tech is out to get conservatives and then he went on and gave all these examples about how Twitter has been pulling down Donald Trump's tweets and flagging them and Facebook's been been you know canceling certain people on the platform and his whole act to grind was really about censorship on social media platforms which has [ __ ] nothing to do with antitrust and has nothing to do with Apple's business um and so yeah I guess my point is like and then other people have issues with with the with

Google's dominance and ads and Amazon's impact on local business and so there there wasn't much of an ax to grind frankly with Apple at the end of the day as I said I just don't think that it was a function of you know a true kind of objective Anti-Trust approach and it was just more about like hey we've all got different things we want to address and we finally got these guys here let's beat them up and you know saaks what do you think with freedberg that it performance art or do you think that or performative rather do or do you think that there are actually substantive issues that came up during the hearings that we should discuss here well you know it was both um you know certainly there was a tremendous amount of grand standing and political theater and um the the politicians on both sides wanted

to take shots at at the companies for various reasons I mean I think they have a slightly different hierarchy of hate I think the um the the left sort of hates Facebook the most because they blame it for um Trump's election which I think is kind of a a ridiculous scapegoating uh which we should talk more about but um and then I think the right is is most suspicious towards uh Google um but I think there are you know legitimate issues here as um that were brought up and I I think the Congressional hearing did score some hit points um and I think your your previous po did a good job showing some of those um the the these hearings were teed up apparently over the past year by um a series of subpoenas of records that the the

committee this is the uh this is the um house uh subcommittee on antitrust had teed up and so there were some moments where I thought that um you know the the representative scored some hits on you know Facebook and Google um what do you think the big who took the biggest hit in all of this who who who do you think has the most putting aside all this performance obviously and the politization of everything in our country and Jim Jordan who to me is like the he's like the dad at the baseball game who like the little league like game who runs on the court and pushes the Empire and gets banned for the season like he just yells over everybody um for no reason but what is the actual

what was the punch that landed that is the most valid as we go around the horn one more time here now that we got our initial thoughts about it what punch landed the squarest in one of these companies faces well I I I let me me set this up I I think there were three big areas of concern where just about all the companies with maybe the exception of Amazon took hits although even you know Bezos took hits I think one is um with respect to anti-competitive actions that these platforms are taking particularly with respect to the applications or small businesses that operate and are dependent on those platforms I think all of the companies were interrogated about that um you know Bezos took a hit when he had to admit or concede that the company may not have always followed its policy with respect to using its uh you

know third party sellers data to to figure out how to compete with them uh you know Google was interrogated about Snippets um there was news today actually just out of Australia that the government's going to order Google to pay small businesses for the use of its its content uh for Snippets which you know so so the you the regulations are kind of heating up on this but the the sort of the first uh area was sort of anti-competitive and I think Facebook took some some hits with respect to the Instagram acquisition um which uh you know uh Congressman Nadler really went after him and then I think um uh jaia pow is as well uh and that that's a tremendously threatening issue for Facebook because if it is forced to divest Instagram it would just be crippling for for the company we talk

more about that yeah let's take just just Jason just set the table two other issues that I think came up I'll just very briefly the uh number two is sort of cozying up to China I think Google is the one that's most vulnerable here and then the third issue is sort of this issue of censorship and bias uh with respect to content and politics in the election nothing to do with which has nothing to do with antitrust the censorship issue so let's table that one I think you're hitting the nail on the head this was not about antitrust going in I think people were you know kind of confused even Jim Jordan just I don't think he has any clue what he's talking about he doesn't know the difference between regulation and antitrust he doesn't know the difference between the Sherman Act and like you know section

230 I think they're all kind of making it up as they go along so in many ways I think personally that the companies that were the most at risk going in were the same companies at risk coming out and so you know if you had to stack rank the risk I think Facebook is number one at the top of the list then I think it's Google then I think it's Apple and then I think far far far down is Amazon in many ways Amazon is the most inoculated simply because the End Market that they operate in is so massive um and the the market that Facebook operates in is so new yet so constrained with very few competitors so in many ways I think that's how the risk Cuts I really think that the Anti-Trust legislative framework that exists today isn't enough to touch any of these guys instead I think what really happens is more regul at um and if you really think about what these guys are very concerned about it's

more that Facebook largely and then Google to a smaller degree essentially can be king makers with respect to popular opinion and sentiment and I think that they want to have regulations and I think that there's a good historical precedent for a bunch of Industries um that have had to come under regulation when they effectively get to 100% distribution you know whether it's meat or airplanes or radio or television you know agriculture RIT large um uh Automobiles and transportation whenever a market basically serves 100% of the total of addressable Universe governments step in and they don't necessarily legislate and Trust bust they fundamentally regulate and tax and I think in many ways that's just as bad and frankly in some ways it's worse because if you do that to a tech company you're basically crippling the one thing that they're supposed to be very good at which is to and that's the only thing that they can use to

basically keep their stock price High which is then the only thing that they can use to get people to continue to work for them so that's the sort of circular Loop that breaks if you regulate them and I think that the risk coming in was the same as coming up so Facebook let's let's take them let's take them one at a time Facebook I thought had the worst performance because it was pretty clear that Nadler was setting them up not only to not be able to buy a company in the future but In that clip he was sort of teeing them up that maybe the Instagram uh acquisition should be unwind and they should be forced to spin that off uh because they were saying over and over and over again that Zuckerberg put in emails uh with his management team that

they were going to buy these companies or kill them or copy their feature sets and even though that may not be explicitly illegal the fact that they've hit as chth is talking about such incredible market share with billions of users and because of the track record of Zuckerberg you know which may not be at all related to this but it sets the table no but Jus Jason In fairness Dem Mark that decision wasn't made when Facebook had market dominance um that decision was made when Facebook was still fundamentally at risk and there was a large period of time where a lot of other people had they been left to their own devices or properly capitalized could have actually become a relatively you know important competitor to Facebook Instagram could have been at

that point but then Snapchat was the opposite Snapchat they were at scale and then they were going to buy it and threaten them either you sell to us or we're going to copy the features I think I think I think what a more logical and defensible reaction like I I just think it's not defensible to say oh you know what Facebook I didn't like the acquisition you did 10 years ago basically because it worked and so I'm going to punish you 10 years later that's crazy that's stupid yeah in the review mirror no no good yeah a more reasonable place to be is to say okay this thing meaning Communications large has become a critical piece of societal infrastructure and we are trying to figure out now what the rules should be

and rules shouldn't be brittle rules should be evolutionary they should map you know to the moral decisions and ideas and Frameworks of the time and so you know uh we have to figure out for example number one interoperability so how can you message across all these multiple networks you know another simple example uh you know we legislated the ability for emergency services to be able to send a message on your mobile phone line and your landline you should probably be able to have a back door into all the messaging Network simply for that reason so the point is that you know there are all kinds of things you can do today to make this infrastructure layer of society operate in a more predictable way on behalf of what was your best you have you thought about a regulation then

let's stick to Facebook and then we'll go to Amazon chath have you thought about a regulation that would make sense to Facebook whether it's divesting an asset or maybe a certain percentage of usage or allowing Facebook Messenger to work with iMessenger to work with you know Twitter DMS I'll answer it in a different way so look I mean for 20 years I've run these kind of businesses like from from Winamp to aim and icq to then you know at Facebook and so um you know I remember at aim and icq we you know uh did all this hand ringing and all these meetings between us and Microsoft and Yahoo to to make our messaging networks interoperate and you know eventually we were basically just cut off at the knees because other people just moved around us and

eventually it all just morphed anyways away from uh these sort of brittle messaging networks my my kind of view is that I don't I I think what's best for Facebook is a status quo and so you know uh if if if if they can basically and by the way I think the strategy is and and Mark wrote this in his Manifesto but a couple of years ago you know this is sort of what led to Chris Cox resigning if I'm playing you know sort of like conspiracy theorist if you read zuck's Manifesto what he was basically saying is listen we're going to take all these product and we're going to take all that code and we're going to mesh them all together in such a complicated convoluted mess that if and when somebody ever tells us to rip it apart it'll take another 5 or 10 years to do

it and that's effectively the technical read on that Manifesto It's just like you're going to make it technically impossible to uh unthread these things as inde and your thesis is that's a strategy against an Anti-Trust breakup I I I I find that no I just think it's a really smart strategy I mean he wrote it and he published it online so it's not like he's hiding anything he made it I mean this is the beautiful part about it he made it completely in the clear now uh so that's that's the strategy is to basically make it one monolithic code base so that if and when I think I don't I'm not sure if this is the intention but frankly if and when somebody knocked on the door and said hey you need to strip apart what and messenger and

Instagram you can say well look it's it's one monolithic code base of you know 50 million lines of code it'll take me 10 years but sure I'll figure it out somehow so yeah you know I think what's good for Facebook is a status quo now that's different from what's good for politicians and then what's different for um consumers I think what's good for consumers is fundamental interoperability now this is then what touches you know Android and uh apple as well like the IDE idea today that you can not have a group text message that can only include iPhones you know on the off chance one of your friends is an Android phone you're basically [ __ ] is kind of which happens every six months on our group that freeberg what do you

think uh in terms of Facebook and any potential action that could be taken or any possible solution to them having such a dominant position because they are the only one of the four that has a dominant position I would think about the um you know how these businesses are kind of built right there in all these businesses there's an infrastructure layer the infrastructure layer in the case of Google and Facebook is is is reasonably similar it's a bunch of data centers and and hardware and software infrastructure to run all of their services on top and then on top there are uh consumer products and then there are advertising products and the and the customer base for the consumer product is obviously users and the you know customer base for the advertising products is these advertisers that pay to access these consumers and give them ads and get clicks from them and sell them stuff um and so if you think about what do you pull out um it it sounds

like on the Google side there's um there's there's concern both on the advertising and on the consumer products that are being offered and the scale and The Leverage that Google has and how they make those products kind of come to Market um and with Facebook it's really about this absolute kind of Monopoly on um you know on social products and services whereas Google's got this great Monopoly on on search products for consumers so um you could kind of take a Layman's view and say hey like rip out WhatsApp and rip out um uh Instagram and you know then Facebook is good but the problem is in that infrastructure layer they've created this social graph and this connection between you know all the people that you know and they've got all the stuff sitting on the same servers and chth points out all the same codebase and there's a lot of

commonality there so the reality of like ripping something out from there is a lot more nuanced and a lot more challenging than just saying hey you got to get rid of WhatsApp or you've got to get rid of Instagram um and it's more likely some sort of Chinese wall situation where you end up with a uh a negotiated exit continued ownership and control but you know almost like what happened with the banks in the 80s you kind of got to separate um one side of the business from the other that could be one way that this goes because you know it's really hard to kind of break apart given the way that these businesses are built what do you think about a solution uh David in which uh they conceded hey we're not going to buy any more of these uh competing social networks which I think it would be kind of hard for them to buy one right now I think that's done I mean like you can even see that Google Fitbit I mean

Fitbit is you know what is it a 1.2 or3 billion do acquisition it's going to take almost two years to close and Google's already making concessions antitrust concessions to the EU for you know this is A1 trillion doll company trying to by a$1 billion company so I think large acquisition in m&a uh by the big four uh it's impossible is that good for society chath or bad for society is it good for our business of investing in startups or is it bad for us investing in startups well I I think it's good in one very important way which is that it forces the capital markets to support uh these companies and what I mean by that is you know I I I've told you guys a couple times but in the year 2000 there was 8,000 public companies in the year 2020 July 2020 as we sit there August 2020 there's about 4,000 so we've seen a

shrinking of 50% of the number of public companies so the idea that there isn't an m&a onramp anymore means that more capital and the capital markets will become more fluid and we will support emerging growth companies in the public markets is my suspicion if only there was yeah if only there was an easy way for these companies to get public go ahead David respond well I I was I mean I I think that um I I think you're raising the right issue which is um the chilling effect on m& that these hearings are going to have um even if Facebook is never broken up or or that deal is sort of retroactively challenged um the the the big four tech companies have to be looking at these hearings and now they're going to be second guessing every acquisition they want to make and

it's going to have a chilling effect and I I think that's a disaster for Silicon Valley um because we know that most of the startups don't work um and you know uh and there's really only you know most of them go out of business and there's only two good exits one is an IPO the other is m&a and if you take the m&a exit off the table because it's no longer sort of feasible from a regulatory standpoint um not all those companies are going to IPO yeah but David what what you're saying doesn't make logical sense because if those companies are [ __ ] anyway they should be going out of business and who cares about an aqua hire or some Mini modest

hire that gets you two times your money there's a lot of of uh Acquisitions um where the acquirer is picking them up because they provide an important component or technology or product but that that that startup would not have been a great Standalone public company would y would Yammer be worth more today and would you be worth more money would your investors be worth more money if Yammer had spaed yes or no David um I is absolutely yes okay so David your your argument makes no sense I think you're to lose it's not that it doesn't make sense I think D David does bring up something that's important in the following way which is there's a lot of companies Jason that get to a certain amount of scale and then they basically start running out of oxygen whether it's because they've overbuilt or they've over hired or they've overspent orever

where there's a natural audience for the product yeah maybe but I think I think a lot of it is just sort of more overbuilding and just kind of distracted Capital allocation but then you know you need somebody to come in and this is the problem with Silicon Valley and I think what David speaks to is the following if big Tech m&a is off the table the single biggest thing that'll change is valuations by late stage private by late stage privates because if you know that you can't get a 2X Mark to Market from the last post guess what'll happen to your post money it'll go way down right because that was always the understood assumption you know All These Guys these late stage money can come in and say well sure I'll put you know $2.5 billion

post a$3 billion most because in their mind what they've been taught is that immediately sets the mark to get acquired as 2X and in many ways Facebook started it because Facebook came to buy Instagram literally weeks after that growth stage round at 500 million that's why they paid a billion one they doubl the valuation but wouldn't it hold on a second wouldn't it be healthier though for the entire ecosystem if we weren't building those late stage companies uh to be flipped to a major company maybe merging them with mediumsized compan are slightly stronger and then taking them public to your point Jam my point is if you don't have a [ __ ] up cap table you can do all of those things it's the [ __ ] up capap T this soles that who needs this late stage Capital coming in and doing these fkaka crazy rounds why not take the company's public earlier

well because look uh you don't always know what's going to happen I mean this is the reason why Instagram sold it's the reason Yammer sold is you don't know exactly what's going to happen you don't know what the outcome's going to be and in a lot of those cases that you're saying would would become IPOs uh if they weren't acquired well a lot of them just you know aren't going to work it's it's crazy to be taking those exits off the table when both the startup and you know the acquire or the big tech company you know want to do the do the transaction um and and and and and one of the reasons why I think these you know there are a lot of these m&a type outcomes is because big companies have realized they not very good at R&D at sort of good at sort of new product development and so what they've done is

they've outsourced a lot of their R&D budgets to m&a and so they let the startups run the experiments you know in any category uh in any new area you end up having a dozen of these startups get funded you know we we make fun of it because they're all you know there's so many competitors in every little space but those startups are the laboratory where all these experiments are taking place and then you know the big company comes in at the end and sees which experiment well acquire it free what do you think I think it's I mean I think the advantage of being a platform business is you can plug something in and immediately gain a lot of scale from it so I mean you know Instagram and YouTube are perfect examples they were um you know reasonably fast growing had millions of users um but once they were

plugged in to the engine of the bigger platform they were worth a hundred times as much uh over a few years uh because of all the usage and the infrastructure and the and the distribution Etc that was provided um but you know it looked insane at the time time to pay a billion dollars and a billion six for those two businesses each of them are easily worth 100 billion plus today probably some multiple of that um and so I think it's uh Sax's point is right is like I'd rather as a look I worked in m&a at Google uh for a couple of years early in my career I left Google in um in 2006 and a lot of the um infrastructure that makes Google's um you know Revenue engine was acquired you know we bought a company called applied semantics for1

million bucks or hundred something million dollars at the time um which ultimately became AdSense and applied semantics could scan a web page um and basically determine what keywords that web page represented and then match ads from AdWords onto that that web page that acquisition was $100 million I mean I don't track anymore how much but tens of billions of dollars of Revenue are generated by that uh uh you know by that AdSense system today you're bringing up something really important which is at the time Google was not a trillion company so the point is that Google had access to enough Capital Market scale where you know nobody's going to get in the way of a 5 10 20 billion do company

trying to buy a hundred million business like that I just don't think you're going to see you know any regulatory body take that seriously wait so didn't we just paint the perfect picture there be a trickle down wait wait isn't that the perfect picture in fact I think what it means is the $2 billion company now probabilistically can actually you win so for example like look at this uh intu it credit Karma transaction right the question is you know could a smaller company have bought Credit Karma probably but not at the price that you know Inuit is willing to pay now if in gets big enough where there's a chilling effect and Regulators say okay you know you're above a magic threshold and you

know no bueno on the m&a anymore now Credit Karma has two choices which is maybe they sell for 4 billion to a very different company right um or maybe they sell actually let's take a different example PayPal PayPal is now a top 20 business in America right by market cap so if PayPal isn't allowed for example to buy uh you know a bunch of sort of like you know payment rail payment companies um maybe what happens is like a you know a medium tier business is allowed to buy them and now all of a sudden those medum TI businesses can compete with PayPal that's what I think that that actually seems like the best solution that we' we've kind of stumbled on here can't slack then become or Dropbox or Uber or any Airbnb now they can become the acquires these companies and then they can compete so why don't we just say hey if you're over a trillion dollars or if you're over 500

billion you can buy 1% of your market cap I'm just throwing a number out here Jason let me jump in on this the the that's not what uh Nadler was arguing for you know it's not like Nadler was saying that if you're a big fork tech company you can't do these deals but everyone else can the the the the standard that that Nadler and the precedent that he was essentially setting in that hearing is you know 2020 hindsight bias you know if if a company acquires um yeah putting I agree with you on that but putting that aside if we were going to come up with a rule because we know the rules that as they currently exist are inadequate to do any type of regulation for these companies because none of them have 95% market share so if in fact uh we we need a new

solution how about this for a solution I'm just putting it out here you can acquire something that is under 5% of your market cap so if your market cap over the last year is a billion you can buy something 50 billion or less if you're uh under 5 if you're under 250 billion you could buy whatever the hell you want but J let me let me let me ask this question you know the points we made earlier about YouTube and Instagram they were successful because of the scale of the user base of the platforms that acquired them and the work that had already been done and so they could plug in both been totally successful without they would have been success but would they have been worth $300 billion like they are today unar but Instagram was 13

people YouTube was a couple dozen people it doesn't matter the story is a small group were brought in with with an interesting platform that was kind of working at the time and then they became these $300 billion platforms so that's one scenario and a lot of money could be used uh and Google and um and Facebook used a lot of money to be the best acquirer to be able to acquire those businesses and that's the argument for this hey they're at such a scale right now no one else can compete because only they can pay this this fee as jamath points out with into it in Credit Karma only into it can buy Credit Karma at that price now the alternative way to think about this is what if there is vertical expansion so instead of

leveraging their existing platform and their existing dominance what if Google in this case is trying to get into the cloud business right and they're competing viciously with Amazon and Microsoft and others in this Enterprise Cloud business Marketplace that is continuously evolving changing every year there's a different kind of lead and in a different uh company that's suddenly growing faster than the others and Google spent $2.6 billion to buy looker buying looker for $2.6 billion does not Advantage Google's advertisers it does not advant I mean to some degree might it does not Advantage Google's users and it is not about platform dominance in their traditional ad business it's about vertical expansion into a new market okay so here's how I'll rewrite the law David if you have over 70% market share in your vertical

you cannot make acquis additional Acquisitions in that vertical if you have they're buying into a new vertical and so then the caveat is if you're buying into a new vertical you don't have to hit that c we already have that we already have I mean that that's that's basically the the way the the rules work today is that you look at market share I mean Coke cannot buy Pepsi Facebook cannot buy Twitter today um but what we're talking about is at a much earlier stage are you going to interfere with the m&a or are you going to retroactively go back and unwind these transactions unwinding transactions makes no sense yeah I think the point is this is all water under the bridge and but the incremental m&a for these big guys is uh very unlikely now

David does bring up a good point unless it's in basically a you know do nothing not that important you know in in the positioning uh category relative to the Core Business and so this is why you know it's again go back to like why did looker close faster than Fitbit it's half the price looker is twice the price right fifth bit is half the price yeah new New Market completely yeah yeah and so so there is a fear that there is going to be a compounding advantage that Regulators have a responsibility to stop so I think it goes back to um once you get to a certain level of scale the thing that we're missing with online businesses is this kind of like you know there's like a there's like a great original sin here that we're not admitting which is that the internet is

now a pervasive and critical part of human infrastructure as such there needs to be people that regulate and manage the internet the same way the FAA manages and regulates planes and wind turbines like think about the fa let's just take Aviation it is impossible for you to go and just go into your garage build some random thing to carry people from point A to point B in the absence of some certification okay take agriculture it is impossible for you to basically go and like build up a farm and build up you know uh livestock or whatever and all of a sudden just Supply it into [ __ ] soes and Safeway without any sort of like checks and balances similarly and the reason is because it's simple human infrastructure that everybody relies on and and I just think that we have to admit that now the

interet comp also those are life and death this can be too I mean like what about the guy that read the post about like the pedopiles in the pizza joint came up with an AK-47 yeah I mean it's quite an edge case compared to flying on a plane this stuff is life and death at some level but even more than life and death it's the anointing of power that then determines life and death that and that's I think the key is that it's power yeah jamat do you think that there should be an internet regulatory body that decides how businesses operate and how content is censored and managed on the Internet is that what you're kind of suggesting yeah so let me be very specific so I think that there are very specific kinds of businesses um and business models that should be overseen specifically I think the first and most important thing is a body that

oversees the collection of user data and how it drives targeting and identification so privacy concerns around that that's a that's a no uh brander um that's the first one and then I think the second one is something that essentially tears the Fig Leaf off of internet companies and says you know what you are the equivalent of a publisher and a platform some weird hybrid that we didn't think could exist when we wrote these rules and so we're now going to adapt these rules because you know if you think about it nobody is happy with the internet Publishers today you know the the left thinks that it skews right the right thinks it's skews left everybody's confused nobody gets what they want um and so I think somebody has to step in and kind of sort

I think this is a good segue to Sax's point and then I guess we we have we have a fork here now in the discussion do we want to go and talk about censorship and that specific issue across Facebook or do we want to get into Amazon for a second which way do we want to go SX go to sensorship well I mean we let's let's jump the fence here should there be to chat's point Sachs a regulatory body that decides what people can and cannot say on social networks yes or no no I mean let's think about that what we're saying is we need the the the PO politicians to set up a regulatory body to control how the people talk about the politicians I mean that seems like a recipe for disaster what about specific lies and intentionality to um frame uh debates

incorrectly Saxy poo that's not what I'm saying I'm saying like like you go to a movie and you know there's a little blurb here that says who can go to the movie and who cannot um you know you get a you buy an album and it tells you whether there's explicit lyrics or not like you before you turn on the TV there's like some rating agency that tells you whether your kids should be watching with you my my point is what is the equivalent version we all need to think about what it is but to say that there should be nothing I think is crazy sax well well I think um so I mean those ratings are mostly about um you know uh standards related to to kids you know and um the big internet company companies already have a lot of child

safety features I don't know that you need to create laws around that um and I and I don't think that's what we're talking about anyway I mean I think the big debate about Facebook or Twitter is whether they're engaging in censorship or bias um right and that that goes Way Beyond um this topic of of of child safety so okay let's let's unpack I don't think that they're censoring all I'm saying is I think you need to label and you need to more clear designate what this content is so that people can choose like for example on Twitter you know I follow a bunch of people on the right I follow a bunch of people on the left I follow one or two Q andon accounts only because like I just want to see it all and then I want to judge and I feel like if I can see everything I can sort of like lay it all on a table and figure out where the rough Center is

and kind of move to that you know so you feel you're intelligent and mature enough to do that shth but the rest of the world isn't no not really but I try to do it because I think it's important for me would you rather the platforms or some Regulators come up with what you could see on those platforms tath again not what I can see but there has to be a simple way for example you know you could have something and again this this this all all this does is it breaks business models which then breaks monetization and it breaks the market cap of these companies but for example let's just say you had a new kind of job which was you know all these you had you hired 500,000 people and these were a combination of lawyers journalists you know uh academics all kinds of random people artists everybody okay normal

folks bluecollar folks and you paid them full-time to basically read stuff and kind of like you know uh you know wisdom of the crowd style tell us where this sat in a spectrum okay of this is on the left this is on the right this is kind of centered this seems laughable this seems unbelievable this seems relatively credible and I think that you would get you know very quickly and I don't think the latency would be that high but probably minutes where you know 40 or 50,000 signals would tell you whether something is you know where something is in the spectrum of you know how to understand it and then that that system that system will get PA get get played though it'll get gamed right like someone will figure out a way to turn

all of chim's tweet labels into Super Evil tweets and you know now everyone will mute you because you're super evil yeah I think we just defined George rell's 1984 like or cancel culture right like if you're pay 500,000 or a million people if Facebook and Google and these guys come together and Twitter and they pay a body of people to do this work um and so you don't know who posts it you just see the content you read it you label it it's a classifier so chamat what do you what do you think you would get classified as and then what if you disagreed with what what you were classified as no but David like what I'm saying is you wouldn't know it's me like if I wrote an article on medium right and I wanted to publish it in Twitter that article first hits a queue 50,000

people read it they human classify it and then it gets published and now what if you don't like the way it's classified and you don't want those tags attached to it and you want a place to publish freely without classification without tagging then there will be a company that supports that too and you'll see how much people care about that yeah I mean I think the free market could handle what you're saying chth cuz that I think David's concerns would be the same as mine which is who who's doing this classification what kind of transparency is there and we already have the wisdom of the crowds which is things that are outrageous automatically get pushed up on Twitter which allows Anonymous and then Facebook seems to be all the top trends seem to be on the right um let's swing over to Sach saak what do you think of of the 1984 proposal from uh chamat 500,000 sensors

uh telling you what to think of a post before you read it yeah I mean it's I don't want to bias the question but it's an insane idea it's it's a it's a little bit like uh Twitter factchecking uh the politicians they don't like the digital po bur it's it's a it's a form of like soft censorship um and you know I I I actually think that you know Zuckerberg gets attacked the most but I think his position on speech actually makes makes the most sense I mean seems like what he said is we want to be a neutral Free Speech platform and you know whereas I think you know Twitter and um Snapchat for that matter are much more likely to engage in either uh you know censorship or or factchecking um Zu Twitter's

initial position David was it was the Free Speech platform no I totally agree with I think zuck's position is the most defensible but it also is the most untenable because it's the most it's the it's it's the least uh technologically and socially palatable but it is the most defensible and philosophically in my opinion the only position you can have but it's not it's not going to be what wins right well it's it's it's the the reason why Zuckerberg is hated is because if you're going to Def defend the principal Free Speech you always end up defending speech that Society hates you know like the ACLU Andy exactly and and and so you

know Zuckerberg I think has done the best job sticking to his guns I mean the reason why Twitter is sort of uh you know loved on the left is is precisely because they gave in to the Mob and they've you know they've started uh taking down accounts that the mob doesn't like or or or or you know factchecking them whereas I think you know Zu and that and Zuckerberg's refusal to do that and by the way I don't think he's been like perfect in this regard but he's been much better about standing up for the principal of free speech that's what's made him you know anathema to the left I think that and the fact that Facebook still gets blamed for freeberg I I have two

specific follow-ups to what David just said for you which is one how much of this has to do with anonymity being allowed on Twitter versus not being allowed on Facebook and second how much of it has to do with the fact that we have algorithms that Trend topics if we didn't have those algorithms trending them perhaps this wouldn't be an issue because if you wrote something that was inflammatory it wouldn't and false let's say in that situation both characteristics it wouldn't go to the top of the list which is what everybody's kind of upset about is that something that's false goes to the top of your feed comment on those two issues well I think your second your second point is an important one which is like

social media helps to enhance the stimulation of the amydala in the human brain uh you know you see something that makes you angry or something that makes you elated you are more likely to engage with it if you see something that is kind of a rational discussion about something that doesn't incite emotion in you you're less likely to engage in it and so whatever the engagement model is it ends up you know creating a lot more virality and chatter and and it kind of gets brought to the surface and there's a lot that's been written and said about this that I don't think were kind of uniquely in a position to to say anything more on um and that's obviously what a lot of people are kind of concerned about is the uh inflamatory

and polarizing nature of the content that is getting highlighted on these platforms and is getting greater Distribution on these platforms and then I think to your prior point I'm not sure it's about anonymity as much as it is um uh about any form of censorship that ultimately can be viewed as bias so Jim Jordan's points were actually you know as much as the guy Rants and goes and sounds like a guy running on the soccer field to punch the coach um it's really interesting to hear the point of view that as a conservative I believe that a lot of what Donald Trump is saying or what some conservative voices are saying is reasonable and that voice should be heard and to hear over and over about Twitter pulling these things down and then seeing a whole bunch of stuff like

anarchists taking over Seattle and taking over Portland and they don't get their stuff taken down you know them claiming that they can hold down the streets of Portland and Seattle because that's you know the way that should be doesn't you know uh incite any sort of censorship but Donald Trump saying he's going to end it incite censorship um and so I think it's not as much about anonymity as much as it is about um you know having um censorship tied to a voice and censorship tied to a labeled or tagged point of view or labeled or tagged individual or voice um on the platform so without anonymity I think the problem goes away for Twitter I think Twitter is working on a project and I've been saying this for a decade

that they should that everybody pay $50 a year $5 a month or 30 bucks a year $10 a month whatever it is to go through a verification process to make sure it's their name on the account which by the way next door is doing at scale not only do they know it's you they know it's your you're the person who lives at that address because you got a postcard there I think and in Korea South Korea you're required to put your social security number in to open a social uh account that would solve the entire problem now that may seem and then it would drive other users who want anonymity to Anonymous platforms and that's where Twitter is trying to have its cake and eating it too and they're falling on their face they have one level which is

troll accounts they can do whatever the hell they want playing on a same playing field with people who uh can and this is just a disaster for them the Jim Jordan may be an idiot um and just a loudmouth but I think I agree with you if the situation was reversed and we were talking about Obama being censored for some reason and the right and right-wing people or leftwing people um being silenced or deprecated the platform you know soft band uh people would be up in arms but it that was a different form he should be doing that in a censorship and they should have a censorship committee talking about that what do you think chamath about these two issues anonymity on these platforms and the Velocity in which things that outrage people because you yourself chth went from hold on but I want to CU this up for you chth you yourself went from being uh a perennial

guest on a lot of these programs and then now since you've been a little bit more vocal about how you feel about social issues when you said break everything up who cares on CNBC and then when you said um who cares let them fail they don't get their summer Hampton's house you gained 150,000 followers and now you've learned that if you're more I don't want to say the word outrageous but if you're more vocal about social issues you're going to gain a lot of attention um do you think you should have been labeled as somebody who is hysterical by your 500,000 people or being outrageous um both and all platforms are littered with fake accounts um the interesting factoid from yesterday was I think Facebook says

they take down 6.3 billion fake accounts or something some crazy crazy crazy number so they are paying playing wacka Twitter just basically says we don't have the team in the infrastructure so we just let the six billion accounts be that's the only difference between Facebook and Twitter it's a it's a it's an acknowledgment uh of the problem and a transparency on the reporting so um you know look my my point of view on this is that I think that uh irrespective of what I believe about free speech I think it's becoming harder and harder for me just as a Layman reading to figure out what's true and not true um I think that the line is getting very gray and I think that sources that used to have complete um Integrity that were you know just um just beyond reproach in terms of

their integrity um it's not clear anymore because the business model of the internet is driven towards clicks so I think what's actually happening is that we are dismantling um information and news and journalism um the first place where I think that goes is places like substack which is going to rebuild it Bottoms Up where people will vote with their subscription dollars what to believe and what not to believe and then on top of that people will overlay aggregation tools so that you can actually have multi subscriptions and create certain of like next Generation magazines and content subscriptions or whatever I think that's where the that's where the world is going in terms of information and content Jason my honest belief is that I don't think I've ever said anything that particularly crazy I just think that I'm reasonably intelligent and I'm precise in what I say and it cuts through a lot

of the [ __ ] because most people have nothing to say so um you know when I make a [ __ ] investment I write a one pager and I post it and I'm willing to be held accountable you know when I don't understand about climate change I just post about it even though I want to invest $2 billion of my own money in it and so I think uh being authentic and just being straightforward is is sort of like what is valuable at some level on the internet uh I think that governments are going to regulate these companies let's just be clear yeah and and you you whatever I think about censorship it just doesn't matter what I think because governments are of a belief that these platforms craft and shape public opinion and sentiment which Drive the

aggregation and coalescing of power which fundamentally disrupts the business model of the politician uh let's go swing over to Sachs here uh saaks any comments on that censorship issue or uh the uh once very respected sources of news maybe being less Ed now I think the New York Times came to mind when uh chth was sort of outlining that phenomenon and then we'll move on to Amazon yeah I mean I I think there are things that these platforms can do to elevate the uh you know the discourse you know the quality of the information people are getting I think that um eliminating the bot accounts I think it's a huge problem on Twitter that that it's you know that they're out there um they're not really

doing much about it um I think that's something they could improve prove and fix um you know requiring people to to be who they purport to be you know I think and this is tied to the bot issue of you know not allowing um these sort of um sock puppet accounts um so but but the thing about those those steps that they could take is they speech neutral right the rules would apply to everybody um you know to freeberg point and so I think they should look at doing more of those things but you know what I'm concerned about is that um you know so so much of the um the debate so much of the pressure that's being brought on Facebook is to actually moderate and control the the type of speech that occurs on its platform and um and I think the reason why Zuckerberg is is attacked more than say You Know Jack

dorsy is because he's been more resistant to to doing that I I think I think it's actually because you have a bunch of what seems like real names but again I think that there's a fake account issue on Facebook that's just as bad as Twitter it's just the difference is you know the the fake accounts on Facebook have proper first and last names whereas Twitter you can have all kinds of alpha numeric garbage as a as an account name so here's a different proposal why you know maybe what maybe what we need is the decision that we allow complete unfettered free speech and there's a layer of both Facebook and Twitter and YouTube where that's completely allowed but the precursor to have that access is you need to put in your social security number or something that's uniquely identifiable by your

government so that if you say something and there's a law against you saying something already a pre-established law there's recourse where can you go and be anonymous to moth because you know on a web page you can create any web page you want no but no what I was going to say then I think what it creates is um a decision by a user to coales on completely different platforms if what you want is complete anonymity for very different reason and I think that that's very reasonable too my point is the the solution to this David is diversity not to have one thing and two companies try to create some Swiss army knife Frankenstein product that solves this it's just not possible and I think we're

both saying the same thing which is like you have completely different behaviors trying to go in through the same channel it's not possible I actually I I like the idea of these platforms doing more to eliminate bot accounts and and uh anonymity um because th those are neutral rules of the game and they do improve the quality of the debate that occurs on those platforms um I think those would be good things I think it's just hard to do I think that those companies may even want to do that it seems like Facebook certainly does it's just a hard thing to execute it's actually not that hard I mean if you just said Hey listen this account in order to have a verified account you have to have a phone number and email so

that's two steps that a spammer trying to create a lot of accounts would not be able to do because you'd have to get burn a phone number after burn a phone number which is a cost it's possible but it's a cost and if you want to be verified we need your phone number and and we need your email address and we need you to you put in your credit card and get charged a dollar on your credit card just that credit card over overnight Reddit would become the new Twitter overnight Reddit would become 4chan would become the new Facebook I mean overnight like like I'm not saying to have an account free brg but to have the blue check mark so you would still be able to and then over time people could say I don't want to see replies

unless they've been verified and it could be just a toggle you pick by the way Facebook Google and Twitter already have this mechanism because that's what they do to graduate advertisers up the spending curve you know you can start as an anonymous Advertiser just spending you know onesie TWY dollars um you know just off of a web page basically just you go through and you do self- serf ads and the more you spend or the more targeting capability you want you graduate you self-identify you give more information you get more capability back you get more trust in the system so it does exist for the customers of these big tech companies and this is the other big thing what it shows you is that it's

actually solved the problem for the customers is just doesn't solve it for the you know feudalist feed stock which are the users because they won't pay and so if you said Hey listen there's an the customers the users Twitter's coming out with a paid version so they're obviously on the on the halfway there they're going to come up with a paid version of Twitter Jack said it on his uh quarterly uh earnings I'm G I'm going to sell my Twitter stock well I mean it's not it's not one of the other freeberg though you don't have to pick one or the other you could still be anonymous but you have the opportunity cuz right now they're not new verified users and unless you're a muy to muuk you don't get to even go down that route so shouldn't everybody have the ability I I I would like I mean

I personally would like Twitter more if it verified identity I mean I don't I don't think there should be a speech tax I don't know why they have to charge a dollar but um but but taking charging a dollar means we have your credit card it's just another hurdle that's why I put it dollar yeah yeah you you you can do like a $1 off without actually charging anyone's card yes you could do that for example like if you if you you actually force people to verify by putting in their social security number like there's a couple guys I follow I'll just name them Scott Adams who wrote the Dilbert comments there's a guy Mike who I'm really not sure I understand his politics but I follow him because I because you know he he post all kinds he a RAB Rouser my point is you know it's

it's not just people on the left but I think it would be people on the left people in the center people on the right who would basically pay the quote unquote tax because they're already real people and they would just they would guarantees and insur that Twitter w't be arbitrary and I think that makes Twitter better and if it maybe it makes it smaller right and then maybe you're right freeberg like 4 Chan or eight Chan or Reddit become good for a different kind of behavior by the way I mean like that's what we do today we don't eat the same [ __ ] thing every goddamn day we don't wear the same pants every day I agree with where he's going with that I mean the the the defining feature of Reddit is that it is basically Anonymous people have usernames but but you never know who it is pseudonyms and it creates

a certain kind of conversation and that's fine Twitter is supposed to be real people I mean it's not I mean Facebook even more so but you know when I think about the accounts that I follow on Twitter um you know it's it's you know all of them are are real people occasionally you'll get occasionally you'll get aags you you'll yeah you'll get like um a startup L Jackson or something like that and um you know and I and I think that's okay yeah but you would choose to then follow them the difference with like a startup L Jackson is they're not a fake account they're just using a pseudonym right know that when you follow them and over time they've proven to be to provide some value that makes people follow them and so you could be

anonymous if you get a certain number of followers I guess you rise above the noise here's another solution there there are no um there's no Nuance about truth or how much you believe this is true as a voting mechanism so if you were verified on Twitter and there was a scale that says how true how truthful do you believe this is and you could slide it uh and pick I you know from one to five you could actually have another signal there what do you think about some sort of a signal to chat's point about uh Community value saying I buy this I don't 97% of people wouldn't use it and the 3% that do would completely bias the result okay trth what do you think would happen I agree with freeberg I I don't I don't think that's a it's just I don't think it's a really good idea um my my my only comment was just offering the the other thing by the way I know it sounds crazy was just offering

it as like the you know the way that this um negotiated solution will end up and it's kind of sort of what these internet companies are being forced to do which are these weird you know pseudo action bodies that like review things and like you know so it's all just a slippery slope to that outcome um but by the way uh you you were speaking about startup all Jackson you know there was another guy super mugatu um and you know he turned out to be this you know really good young upand cominging investor Dan McMurtry and he was Su you know he used a pseudonym for a long time build up a huge audience and then flipped himself and basically came out and said here my name is Dan McBerry and I run a fund and you know uh it was wonderful yeah I think it's a very good marketing

strategy it's a growth strategy now be startup Al Jackson up becom a venture partner when are you going to announce that you're the guy behind VC brags like I'm not ready to do I'm not ready either I'm not people thought it was me I was like I'm getting tortured wait till you hear that I'm the guy behind Zero Hedge that'll really freak you well zero zeroe head just instructive didn't he get banned or she get banned for posting about stuff in Corona virus that eventually turned out to be acceptable and true now imagine if he had verified his account he had his Social Security number he had all that stuff in there just verify that's it just information that says Zero Hedge is real it's a real person yeah and you know the rule is when you're that level of verified you can publish whatever you want so you can you can say false

statements as a real person so Donald Trump is a real person he's a verified account and he's saying things that Twitter is then determinating are false or inflammatory I would rather you know um them not try to do it um and I'd rather have pundits that you can believe in so like the other problem is like look when you have public figures you have pentry around public figures but the problem isn't what that person say says it's you can't believe the punditry because half of them are fake so at some point you have to break the cycle and somebody has to be real well and this is the problem with the the Trump issue in a pandemic is two edge cases put together and now we're figuring out what the actual cost of it is Trump said masks are [ __ ] you don't need to wear a mask blah blah blah I choose not to wear a mask I'm not going to give people a satisfaction see me a mask turns out masks are correct we we should

have put that or or should we have put in front of Trump's non-mas comments hey this is against what the guidelines are um or the fact is the who said the World Health Organization said you shouldn't wear masks then it turns out now we have a bunch of conservatives dying who didn't wear masks no I don't think I don't think you should have put anything there um and let all the conservatives who believe him die it's it's not about letting conservatives die I think that's a crazy way of positioning it like he's allowed to have his opin and soci has shown that the way we used toate like veneration is sort of like uh

it's kind of it's been disrupted by social media like the idea that you venerate somebody because like they won an election in a moment is so crazy because they are basically like you and in many cases maybe dumber than you with respect to you all these ideas surrounding the idea that we need to regulate these platforms um I think we should just just remember that the way stuff gets into your feed is that you make the decision to follow it you know these feeds are self-curated I mean there is this issue about well you know the algorithm does sort of um emphasize or or sort of increase the volume um and you know we want to make sure those algorithms um you know are done in a a neutral way they're not they're not biased somehow but you know the the the content that appears in people's feed is

content they've they've chosen to see with the exception of trending topics on both platforms well like I said though as long as those algorithms are unbiased and work in a speech neutral way I think they're they're fine um but the you know the the the reason why Facebook has been boycotted um is is that they're they refuse to censor some of Donald Trump's tweets you know and but but you don't see those uh you don't see those posts rather unless uh you've chosen to follow them I I think it's crazy that they want to ban him problem is it's a chain of it's a chain of fake accounts and real accounts right let's be honest It's a combination of both that exists on both Facebook and Twitter to amplify content in ways that none of us really understand and I would I would be very

skeptical that anybody there really understands every single piece of content how and why it gets weighted the way it does and you know like I bet you that there's probably a way to tell whether an account is fake I mean obviously they have system Integrity tools to figure this out that's there's no way you could have beli eliminated 6 billion accounts if that wasn't true um but then you know you choose not to suppress the waiting of those or maybe you do suppress the waiting of them entirely it's just an alter you're talking about but but in terms of implication okay so maybe maybe you can game the trending topics that way but you can't get in my feed unless uh either I choose to follow you or you you pay to you know run an ad which my eyes are just trained to skip over um so I

you know I I I think if you were to ask the average person do you believe that you are um sort of um influenced by uh deceptive content on Twitter and Facebook uh or you're sort of uh unduly influenced uh they would say no you know none of us believe that we are but then if you ask but if if you said uh do you interact in groups and forums uh with a bunch of people that you don't know the answer would be% yes but what I'm saying is that the average person doesn't believe that they're unduly influence but but if you ask them or do you think other people are they would say David of course like it's like you know when you're having a [ __ ] Slurpee it's like you know do you think that this is unduly going to hurt you

no it's 1,200 calories of liquid sugar all right I think we beat this horse to death there's no solution uh just on the edges but let's let's go to Amazon because I thought that this was a particularly interesting one Amazon um I thought came out the best of everybody and is the least likely to be broken up I think some of you agree with that uh what were your impressions on Amazon's performance and Amazon in terms of being broken up let's start with you freedberg and then we'll go back to shath I think um the intention of antitrust law is obviously to protect consumers and protect markets and protect um market pricing from being manipulated by monopolists or monopolies and so um you know the the the the point that was made about Walmart years ago is the same point that's being made about

Amazon today which is that they're crushing small local businesses um and as a result uh there is a lot of damage being done and they are quote unquote too powerful but the reality is that the the pricing um effect of what they're doing is what needs to ultimately be scrutinized and I think is what will ultimately Drive whether or not these guys have either some massive penalty or get forced to break up and so you ask yourself the question look if I'm going to buy call it um a mattress or let's let's use something like a pillow uh is it cheaper for me to buy that pillow as a consumer through Amazon or from the local store now what if the local store is put out

of business because of Amazon and now Amazon is the only place I can get a a pillow is the pillow now going to be more expensive or less expensive than it would have been otherwise um and I think that is the lens by which we need to kind of assess and The Regulators will ultimately assess whether or not Amazon is causing harm in the marketplace because of its position and its power fre um look I have several businesses that sell on Amazon um and it is [ __ ] expensive one of my companies I'm on the board of we we've been the number one food product on Amazon multiple times uh and we we kind of slide up and down the top 10 can you say what that is yeah soilent soilent and so we sell a lot of soilent on Amazon um and um it is

expensive man I mean the Fulfillment the shipping the advertising fees they force you to pay um I will tell you that as a business owner or board member of a business that sells and I have several others that sell on Amazon too um it is a it is a grind um and it is cheaper for us to sell directly through Shopify just raise the price on Amazon um so to some extent so Amazon this is actually part of the problem so Amazon forces certain um best pricing negotiations if you're a large seller on Amazon you have to make sure in order for them to promote you and make you kind of a sponsored item and show you at the top of the list you have to give

them the best deal sort of like what Walmart does right you can't have a cheaper price anywhere else got it so that was something that did not come up they forc you to have the best price there even if you charge more on your website in these negotiated deals yeah and so you have to make sure that you're providing um uh and I'm not sure what the deal is specifically with soyland so I don't want to kind of speak in correctly here uh heard the same thing from other folks what if that is kind of part of what happens and so um I will tell you like it it is harder for it is cheaper for me to sell soilent I think it's cheaper uh for some of these products to be sold I can tell you my other company which we sell quinoa it's

cheaper for us to sell through retail stores than it is to sell on Amazon we actually give up more margin selling on Amazon would you do it because of the volume and because they've aggregated all the so you've made the decision as an entrepreneur to sell your quinoa in all places even though you lose some margin you make it back in aggre well this this goes to the market maret well this goes to the market problem because now I as a I have less Choice as a business owner because the only place I can find consumers is in this Online Marketplace called Amazon can no longer go sell at 50 local grocery stores because people don't go to the freaking local grocery stores anymore and that's

obviously a little bit of an extreme statement but let's say I'm a pillow guy I can't go sell at 50 pillow stores because they've all been shut down because all the consumers go to Amazon but could you also sell at Target and Walmart and those other competitors who seem to be doing just you know pretty well actually they're doing well yeah and and a lot of people have said that they're the kind of you know the exceptions but there's a thousand versions of Sears and other stores that haven't done as well Walmart and Target just happen to be extremely well-run businesses but there's nothing fundamental about Amazon kicked you off the platform and said we're not going to allow third party sellers would you be happier or would you be sadder it would

be sadder got it chamath what are your thoughts Amazon specific yeah I think David said it really well up front um which is that it's a it's kind of a when and not an if so it's you know Amazon today I don't think is at risk just because its End Market is so big but I think within 5 or 10 years um it definitely will be looked at through the same lens as Facebook and Google and um actually just those two um look and I and I think David said it also really well like the antitrust law that you would get um you know to be successful if applied to Facebook and Google has nothing to do with users and content and it has everything to do with the pricing of the ads to their customers and if anybody actually were smart enough to figure out whether there was some some way in which their auctions were working um that was effectively pricing inventory in a market quote unquote or in a system manipulated way that's probably the best

hook to to NAB one of these folks in anti trust law but other than that it's going to be regulation in terms of Amazon I think they're going to get away unscathed what's incredible by the way is you know two days later they're like hey by the way we just got an FCC license and bring a launch of 10 billion dollar satellite constellation and you know if you if you looked at their uh RFP to to the F uh to the FCC the number of people that you know basically complained and cried it was incredible by the way I think this is a huge important point that we haven't made which is the benefit of scale for large Innovative companies there is no way any company would have out of the blue been able to afford a 10 billion distributed satellite program without having

customers and all this other stuff lined up Amazon can afford to take that risk just like alphabet has taken the risk with self-driving cars and did so before anyone else from many years which is a net benefit for society correct Dave which is a net benefit for society so by having scale by having incredible profits by and then by reinvesting it in R&D creating jobs innovating it's the only way this kind of stuff is going to get done you're not going to get it done by breaking up these companies and having a 100 companies that only have $10 million of profit each and then each of them are you know no one at all can afford to do these Grand important projects that uh that move markets forward ultimately for Humanity freeberg you see these trillion dollar plus

companies as because they can make those big swings a net benefit for Humanity as a technologist and as a kind of person that hopes for the future I hope uh I hope that they uh that that these sorts of companies can continue to persist and uh that they're led by people that want to take Innovative risk with R&D dollars and by the way if they don't they're going to [ __ ] fail eventually right it's these guys that are leading these companies uh and and putting these crazy bets on crazy new ideas that are allowing these businesses to remain competitive um and if they didn't and you know some big company manager were to come in and start running these things and distributing cash and dividends back to shareholders these wouldn't be happening and and you know capitalism would take

care of itself and then the next big Innovative risk taker that can generate a profit and reinvest that profit in a smart way would end up winning in the marketplace so uh s you are a big investor in SpaceX at craft Ventures I understand uh and when you see Bezos copy every single thing Elon does from you know launching the Rockets to then putting up the satellites do you think he's just a copycat well I you know I I think he's the scariest monopolist out of the the whole bunch um you know if you look at kind of Amazon versus say Google or Facebook or apple I mean th those other companies are sort of sticking to their original footprint whereas Amazon keeps expanding into new areas um you know it's that that whole mantre has about your profit is my opportunity and so yeah with each uh you know with with

each advancement they make as they get into you know as they get to a new level of scale they then turn around and uh and seek to take over kind of um the the you know the areas that um that their vendors or business partners are operating and so you know it started with first they did retail you know books and then they expanded to other areas of retail and then they take over um infrastructure and now there's talk about them getting into to Freight or Trucking um and so yeah they keep expanding into these new areas and it's it's really a statement about our politics I agree with jamat that that Bezos went pretty much unscathed and I think it has a lot to do with you know he he did win the internet with that opening statement that he gave it was a really um sort of great you know Rags to

Riches only in America type story and um and so I think I agree with jat is going to get away pretty unscathed but I I do think that they are the scariest monopolis of the bunch well comment specifically on him copying every one of Elon musk's ideas well you know uh copying is it it is it is sort of a part of the game you know I it is part of the game and I've I've heard you attack Zuckerberg for doing the same thing and you know look I I get it you know we we we prize uh Innovation and we we we love innovators um but as soon as you say that you can't that other companies can't copy those Innovations you do stifle progress I I look at it as more how consistently do you do that your playbook when you look at uh Amazon Basics this is the point I wanted to

make when and I made in my my earlier podcast which was you know the Amazon Basics and the third party seller system is the thing that uh they keyed in on on these hearings they did not key in on uh the issue of that freeberg brought up which was what is the margin they're taking from those third party sell which I think would have been a much more DEA uh approach to questioning them them but when it comes to third party sellers the fact is they're allowing people to compete with them on their own platform which drives prices so low and when they make a better USBC cable that doesn't take a genius to make a better cable so do you think Amazon Basics should be allowed and is great for Humanity or do

you think that that uh using of the data because they have the sales data on it is in some way abhorent and a given the way antitrust laws are currently framed uh Sachs well okay so I I think this is an area where so the area you're talking about is the way that these platforms treat the applications or small businesses that operate on their platforms and I do think this is a good area for for Congress to keep scrutinizing um you there there there's a saying in in in chess that that the threat is greater than the execution so sort of a chess stat strategy principle I think that's true here where um we I I

I think the execution would be a disaster if we actually imposed a lot of these rules if we broke up these companies if we stopped Amazon from innovating I think that would be a disaster for uh for for those companies and for the economy because I do think they they do a lot of good things but in a weird way I think we have to keep threatening to to do those things in order to get these companies not to do anti-competitive things I mean we heard Bezos say that he couldn't guarantee that they weren't using their uh their their sellers data to to to to in inappropriate ways basically Amazon to to break Amazon's own policy and so I think you do have to apply this kind of scrutiny to these companies because I I don't think we want to be retroactively uh you know remediating a situation I don't think we want to be breaking them up or doing something like that but I do think we want them second guessing these anti-competitive

decisions before they actually happen um because otherwise you know so some scrutiny some rules but we certainly don't want to ankle them versus their competitors in China as we wrap up here uh because we're getting way past our hour we're now at uh 80 minutes and uh we set a Max a 90 here was what we all agreed on um I want to talk about the election we are now at the 100 day Mark we all thought Biden was a shoe in now I have my own thesis I want to float it and see what you guys think um you had Trump start wearing a mask last week telling everybody they should wear masks now there's Universal discussion of wearing masks we've got a little bit of vaccine hope and then we'll get to friberg's position on is That vaccine false gold or is it actual reality but we know that masks are going

to take 3 or four weeks uh if they're implemented properly for us to see the case load go down which then the case load starts going down and 3 or 4 weeks after that the debts would start going down we may have even seen a little plateau in the number of cases cases is ramping up we hit a record 850 or 900,000 just yesterday at the time of taping I think on the 29th of July now my thesis is Trump goes all in on masks the vaccine starts to show promise right as the debates start he gets in there with Biden we see case loads go down we see debts plummet we get down under 250 debts per day in America by September 15th the market rips and on SE end of September we have the first presidential debate Biden dunks on a scile or maybe not crisp Biden Trump sales in and we were just talking two months ago Anything could happen but Trump was definitely not

going to be there let's go around the horn freedberg vaccine false gold or really promising and what happens in the election I I think there's tons of promise with vaccine news in the next two months uh 3 months uh I guess the point is you're going to hear more upside than you're going to hear downside news on vaccines uh for sure you know whether or not we have a vaccine and by when and y y percent chance we have a vaccine we're gonna have a vaccine I think it's a function of how many doses um at what point in time um and you know there there's this 30,000 trial happening with madna right now there's a a Russian vaccine that just got approved yesterday in Russia that they're saying is ready to go and they're starting to distribute it so there is a vac there are vaccines right this is a a no known uh so so that news will only continue to improve and build and there'll only be more and more indications of success with vaccines

between now and in November how that affects markets I think I'm not sure that drives markets as much as some of the other stuff that's going on in markets with uh with the fed and um and with policy and with stimulus packages I think those are are are frankly um important drivers right now and how much the markets ultimately affect the election I don't know um so uh yeah it's still it's it's all still pretty uncertain um who's G to win and uh I think it's pretty uncertain i' you have to put your entire net worth on one person go um yeah I I I I still think Trump is um I I I I kind of have been uh vacillating on this I I think Trump is probably uh only going to improve from here on out so your entire net worth is on the line in three two place your bet

I'd go Trump wow Trump wow it's still it's it's still it's still to me I mean Trump has has got to be the huge Underdog here I mean right now it looks like Bay's going to win I mean his basement strategy could backfire in the sense that if you know fundamental conditions improve with respect to covid or the economy the fact that he hasn't said anything done anything gone anywhere um you know it it it it could it could turn out to be a mistake but right now it it looks like it's working and um and you know Trump seems to be completely knocked off his game um you know just earlier in the week he floated this trial balloon about delaying the the election that was completely shot down

by um Republicans and it you saw that what did you think as a republican when you saw him tweet that what did you think what was your emotional visal reaction as our token you know I'm not uh yeah I I I don't I don't necessarily identify with with partisan politics so let me just I have to state that what was your reaction as an American to him saying delay the election of course everybody everybody shot it down for your reaction everybody shot it down for good reason everybody your reaction of course of course we're not going to delay the election we've you know um you know we we we haven't delayed the we didn't delay the election to to fight being pinned as a republican he's it's not going to [ __ ] with your deal flow saxs you can be a Republican

okay your entire net worth we have to wrap your entire net worth sacks you could right now three two yeah right now it looks like Biden's going to win that Trump's Trump's been knocked off his game and and me to say like I I think the the problem that Trump has right now is he's a Salesman without a sales pitch um you know you go back to the state of the union preo he had it all worked out he was going to run on the greatest economy ever keep America great that issue's been taken away from him and it seems like he's still trying to regain his footing he's trying to figure out what to run on and the fact that he can't do these rallies which were really you know the fact that he was able to go in 2016 to these swing states he would be you know flying around on his plane

and and and he would three he did three rallies a day in these swing states with tens of thousands of people wanted it he wanted to win it was it was it was that and it gave him a way to go over the heads of the media and speak directly to the people and then those people talk to other people there's a lot of Word of Mouth um and so he the inability for him to hold those rallies I think has just been um devastating for the type of campaigning that he likes to do and so in a weird way we have less than 100 days to the election but it feels like the campaign hasn't really started yet because Trump can't do rallies and Biden hasn't left his basement okay um chth entire net worth on the line all spacks spack b spack c spack d whatever you got

spack up all your spacks on the line everything the Warriors position three two two we don't need to guess but I'll tell you why um you know uh we had a 33% drop in GDP we have double digigit unemployment and I think Trump's real path to winning the White House which we talked about before was getting an enormous stimulus bill passed and he didn't force the Republican Senate to the table to make sure that these unemployment benefits didn't roll off off now there's a very practical problem with these unemployment benefits which is that it is not administered at the federal level it's administered by literally 50 state agencies that run relatively decrepit software now just so you guys don't why did we pick $600 it was an estimated numerical average because what the Republicans really wanted to do was just top it up you know whatever you used to get to get to 100

and it was technically not feasible to implement across 50 different insurance in Boise Idaho is different than somebody in New York so they they were like ah 600 bucks so my point is uh it's going to take 4 to eight weeks to reimplement unemployment insurance once we decide what we're going to do so that basically if you start it today puts you somewhere between September 1 and October 1 and the you know so you have then 30 days to basically catch a positive Tailwind or 60 days so call it midpoint 45 days you know you have now Federal eviction laws that are rolling off so I think that it's setting itself up for a diff very difficult path um he just stopped spending I believe in Michigan Trump did um which is you know not a good sign um he actually has overs spent in Georgia um so if you look at

the facts on the ground your entire net worth goes on no Biden it's a it's a languishing campaign as of today David is right he's a Salesman without a pitch and unfortunately he's a the path isn't clear the path should have been paved with money it's such a no-brainer here let me let me give you one last he printed all that money too and why would you stop printing the money if you gave everybody $1,200 and six weeks of unemployment why not just do it for another six weeks and give everybody another 1,200 I don't understand why that's such a difficult decision for Trump freeberg go let me give you a scary poll that just came out by yugov it said says um 55% of supporters of Donald Trump say that they will not accept the election victory of Joe Biden

if mailin votes are are are allowed wow so you know the the framing of this is actually a little bit more serious than just who's going to win there is a further polarization constitutional crisis question rioting you know whatever disregard for the election entirely kind of moment coming up here because Trump and others have kind of framed this as such a non-election election because it's all fake and it's all fake news and you know this is all part of the conspiracy so there is something scary Brewing I think and that that's what I'm kind of most interested in tracking is really where does this all go percentage chance that we get to a constitutional crisis and Trump says I'm not leaving the White House on a percentage basis freeberg I don't think

he'll say I'm not leaving the White House I think he's going to be [ __ ] happy to go back to wherever he's going to go um yeah but I think I think there's going to be other ramifications that are worth us figuring out and thinking about because that's the scary stuff that's coming next okay a 25% chance of a constitutional crisis I think if the elections close we could easily have like a Gore V Bush type situation um it could be very damaging for for the Republic I do not think there will be a hanging chat issue in this election this is going to be one way or the other incredibly decisive on an electoral college level okay final it's not set up for it to be that that close Okay well I I I don't think eltion it right now it's not trending to be close at all it's trending to be a blowout and so I think we'll avoid the the crisis because it's not close and it

looks like Biden's going to run away with it but if it does get super close um you know I could imagine there being a crisis based on people not accepting the if the margin of error is within the margin of these mailin ballots and you have you know 30 40% of the population saying they're not going to accept it um I'm not saying we'll have like a legal crisis but I think you could have a legitimacy crisis it could be very bad for the Republic repu uh not as bad as Trump's presidency clearly uh so uh final question final final question if Trump believes he's not going to win and he's essentially given up right now which it feels like he's kind of given up what would do you think who would win if Trump says Nikki haly and Pence can run I've done such an amazing job I've been the best president in the history of the Union but I want to get back to my life and I think Pence Nikki heli should go for it what happens and who wins sacks too late for that too late

for that you can't you can't put Pence and Nikki Haley on the ballot why not of course you can if he says I'm feeling under it if he bows out the Republicans would have to pick a successor it's not a new third party that the Republicans would be allowed to pick a successor if he said I'm not doing it for uh you know health reasons whatever reason he comes up with who wins no too silly this is silly I think he might drop out I think there I'm putting out there I think it's a 5% chance he doesn't want to be demolished and he says you know what I'll take the deal you agree to not prosecute me getting out of here uh I'll take it and and I Chang I changed my bet to Joe Biden I've changed my bet after this after you RIS your whole net worth you Chang to Joe Biden well he's he's

clearly the favorite right now and the question is whether there's still time for there to be a change I mean honestly I think we should stop bending on what the outcome is I think it's stupid I think what we should really be worried about is what what are we doing like letting tens of millions of Americans roll off of unemployment insurance with zero like the Republican Senate went on vacation it's ridiculous I mean they should all be fired it's it's the craziest thing we have the biggest crisis in our lifetime if you roll up the last three crises 911 do com bust and the Great Recession those three pale in comparison to the magnitude of this one and these [ __ ] are going on vacation I agree with you it's outrageous I I don't think partisan politics are that interesting but um I I think they will eventually pass a bill I

think um the the the issue on the unemployment is not that the Republicans don't support an extension of unemployment but the the magnitude of the unemployment now um exceeds what workers would get if they went back to work and so I think they're concerned about creating a disincentive for for work split the difference why not make it $300 honestly it is such fake [ __ ] news like it's like it has been shown that people then end up spending that money like I don't know if you guys saw but like there are industries that are posting it's not just Facebook Amazon and Google posting meet and beats like you wouldn't believe in boating in housing people are spending this money it drives GDP so whether you put 600 or 200 or 1,200 into people's pockets they have a proclivity to spend it they should have gotten something done TR

Trump trump as well as all the Republicans are up for re-election I think would just cave on this issue and and I I I think it will get done the the Republicans who are opposing it are the ones who aren't up for reelection and are concerned about debt you know that's the that's the uh that's the concern that all Deb matter if we go into a depression David why not the incremental six weeks of unemployment put it at $300 but get something done David why are you not getting something done David why is your team [ __ ] this up David yeah I don't I don't wear a Jersey not on a team uh but I I think they will get something done I mean I'm not back for vacation do you think they should have gone a vacation they're got their own vacation David they can't they got

to come back to work these guys went duck hunting instead of the taking care of the 15 million your team went duck hunting in Washington DC because there obviously there's a lot of there's enough Republicans who want to get something done I mean why not blame the Democrats for being too intransigent sorry what I'm saying is it's not Republicans I'm saying the entire breaking your chop sacks the the entire group should not have gone on vacation the entire half half half of the Congress is gone they're they not to be found where are they what what are they doing that's more important maybe they're hanging out in their basement like like Biden I love you guys all right everybody stay safe uh on behalf of the dictator himself bestie C the the uh spack Meister himself stay safe chamal on behalf of the queen of quino the

freed Berger himself uh stay safe David freeberg uh in whichever one of your three houses you're in right now and and to Rainman he's definitely burn don't burn baby he's definitely a great driver in the driveway yeah definitely still yeah he's definitely watch wner wner and of course you have and of course he's still investing from Craft certainly craft funds still investing we'll see you all next time on the sixth most popular podcast out of the gate we'll see maybe if you tell your friends about this podcast we'll go to number one on the technology list uh love you boys stay safe can't wait to play poker bye great job everybody