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this is an incredible fashion disaster
we have today david sachs is dressed like
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where's waldo okay uh freeburg
freeburg is dressed like
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driving a [ __ ] uh subaru outback oh god
unbelievable i mean this is ridiculous
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hey everybody everybody it's another episode
of the all in podcast episode 31 with us today
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from well i was just rolled out
of bed the queen of quinoa himself
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david friedberg is here let me just hopefully
get that hair it's not going to help have you
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been studying the homeless problem by
by yourself going out on the streets
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minutes up we have to keep the freedberg release
the ratio up i had somebody stop me in miami and say keep the friedberg ratio high also with us
chiming in is where's waldo himself the skipper
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the david is here don't change my nickname don't
change my nickname i'm comfortable with rain man
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don't throw me off yeah definitely i'm definitely
okay with rain man of course not the skipper not
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the skipper n the dictator himself got a full
night's sleep i hope this time i did i really
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really really really really and of course i'm j
cal the baby seal here in miami look at the view
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how beautiful it's been an incredible incredible
week the tiger has been unleashed i went to austin
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now i'm in miami jake kelly you're more like
you're more you're more like a pudgy hyena
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i don't know you're not really a the quarantine 15 big announcement 10 pounds are gone five to go i'm
lifting weights outside in miami it's been amazing
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field report i get to austin i kid you not
i got my mask on 10 people first of all 10
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people say i love the all in podcast every
like 15 feet walking in austin and in miami but somebody looks at me with my mask and
says are you okay son and i was like what
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i kid you not and i he said are you vaccinated and
i said yeah he's like why are you earning a mask
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and i realized it's time for independent critical
thinking saks i gotta give it to you another great
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great tweet for me to copy and adapt to steal
your deal but i love this tweet that you had
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where you said early in the pandemic explain
the tweet or maybe read the tweet this is which one i've been about one group of people
who wouldn't wear masks oh yeah yeah well at
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the beginning that's right i mean the the the
dysfunction of our politics is that half the country wouldn't wear a mask at the beginning of
the pandemic and and and now the other half of the
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country won't take them off at its end this is
the problem is that the mask has become um it's
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the equivalent of the red maga hat for team blue
this has become some sort of uh virtue signaling
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even when it's not necessary but it's actually
destructive because it's performatively sending
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the signal to people that the vaccines don't work
and we have a third of the country today is still
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vaccine hesitant and this is not helping what we
need to be sending the message to them is look get vaccinated so life can get back to normal
so you don't have to wear a mask and you know we
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still have the cdc putting out this ridiculously
conservative and timid guidance saying that well
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if you get vaccinated you can take off your mass
outdoors as long as you're not with too many
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people well like what no i mean look once you
get vaccinated you should need to wear a mask
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outdoors or indoors and you know we had
the state this uh sort of mini state of the union this past week with biden and it was this
really like image no it was like an empty room
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because of social distancing and they were all
wearing masks even though you know every single one of them is vaccinated and so i think bi didn't
really miss an opportunity in that speech yes he
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said that everyone should get vaccinated
but show not tell i mean you know he walks
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up to the microphone in a mass saying that we
should all get vaccinated well what is the mass for why don't you tell people that if you get
vaccinated you don't need a mask anymore and so
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you know that we have this sort of um contrast
it's actually really it's it's really incredible because your point he was trying to make some
very important points in that speech david
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and when the camera would actually pan from
behind him so instead of looking at him and kamala
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and nancy pelosi it would look there was nine
people and you thought another sold that crowd
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no no no because typically when when you give
these sort of state of the union or you know these kind of like 100-day addresses it is packed
because you have everybody in congress you have
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everybody in the senate you know you have you have
typically like a bunch of other officials you have the supreme court like in a state of the union
address and there was nobody and it felt really
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striking to watch that if trump's mistake was not
wearing a mask in april of 2020 i think bind's
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mistake is not taking it off in april of 2021. why
can't we get a political leader who is willing to
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put on mass at the right time and take him off at
the right time we need a political leader who's
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reasonably scientific and will actually say here's
the intersection of science and common sense
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that everybody can map to and and copy me because
it is to your point david you know the leader of
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the free world is given that title for a reason
it's not it's not completely completely ignore
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what i say i've been put in this position
because i am you know on some dimension
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expected to be the most thoughtful person in the
room and set the example for everybody else let's just talk like the important consequence of this
and i agree with sex the important consequence
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of this however is the economic effect it has so
for example in san francisco restaurants are only
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allowed to be at a quarter capacity so there
are restaurant owners that want to get back to business that want to generate income again that
want to get off of the ppp loan program and all
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of the government support and they should be able
to because most people in san francisco at this
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point the vast majority in fact are vaccinated
and the restaurants for no scientific reason are
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shut down or limited to a quarter capacity and
this is the case across a lot of cities and a
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lot of states in the country right now where
the conservatism with respect to coming out
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of the um you know the major part of this kind
of pandemic is what's now keeping the economy
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or not just keeping the economy because we're
fueling the economy with stimulus but is keeping business owners and keeping um people that want to
participate actively uh in in building and running
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their businesses from getting back to work because
we're so conservative about this and you know what saks is totally right yeah like take the masks off
let people go into restaurants and let people go
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have dinner in san francisco let these places get
back to work by the way we have a we have an a b test that's actually nobody is talking about which
is that the more conservative version of america's
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posture right america is sort of like half we
don't care and half we care too much but in europe you could see a more you know homogeneous approach
to the problem and we printed a negative 0.6 gdp
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growth in europe so to your point with all the
vaccines that are out there with all of the logic and all of the science not being able to just take
the mask off and get back to life as normal was
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negative 0.6 gdp growth in a quarter where they
also printed hundreds of billions of dollars
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and now you come into the united states last year
i don't know if you guys remember this but every forecast i saw had gd from the smartest folks
saying q1 gdp would be on a run rate to be around
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10 it would be one of the best in history it was
only 1.6 so we're on a 6.4 gdp growth run rate
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guys that's not 10 now it's still a lot but the
point is we got to get back to life as normal
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we have to show that these vaccines work
we have to tell people that you can have a normal life you should be going out spending
money going back to the office live normally
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yeah and and we should we should we should just
cover the data i mean we should i mean it'd be great to put up the latest cdc data on the screen
yeah if you use the cdc as a source for the data
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as opposed to listening to their interpretations
of it their policy interpretation it's actually
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pretty illuminating so out of 87 million
people who've been vaccinated there have only
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been 408 serious cases which would be you count as
hospitalization or death related to covet so those
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are odds of one in 213 000. the odds of being hit
by lightning are one in 180 000 so your odds of
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being struck by lightning are greater than your
risk of getting seriously sick it's a royal flush
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i need this in poker terms i think that sounds
like hitting a royal flesh twice yeah exactly
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it's crazy how many royal flushes have we each had
i'll put it i'll put this article up and you guys can share it in the um show notes the technology
review one yeah yeah and i think it it does a good
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job of speaking to sax's statistic now uh yeah
so i think uh sax i think this represents the cdc
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data in the first paragraph uh in this article but
it goes on to kind of speak about the statistics likelihood of these events so you know basically
uh you know it opens up by saying you know as of
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april 20th 87 million people in the united states
have been vaccinated and only 7157 or 0.008
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went on to become infected with sars cov2 um 330
of whom were hospitalized and 77 of whom died from
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the disease and i would guess that that of those
people there is likely some immune dysfunction which is a you know a likely reason why it doesn't
mean that every individual has that risk it means
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that there are certain people out there that are
going to have immune dysfunction and won't react well to to to won't develop the appropriate kind
of protection from the vaccine um and that's you
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know that small small small small small percent of
people are where we're kind of seeing you know um
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actual risk like that's where i get the 408 number
is it's the number of hospitalizations plus deaths
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minus the ones that they say in the footnote we're
not related to covid right so there's some other like cause so 408 out of 87 million and by the
way i think it's worth just highlighting you
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know just think about the rationale for why there
is conservatism here still right so um if there
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are still pockets where people have not been
vaccinated in the country and there are still areas where people are hesitant to get vaccinated
and there's a large unvaccinated population
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the official guidance the official kind of
reasoning i believe is that we need to be conservative to get all of those people to behave
in a conservative enough way to keep a you know a
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surge from occurring regionally around the country
and the loss the downside is very negligible
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uh where people still have to wear masks what i
don't think that that calculus accounts for is
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that the loss is actually not negligible the loss
of telling people broadly to keep wearing masks is
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a hesitancy to go back to work a hesitancy and a
conservancy to engage in normal economic activity
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and so you know i think that we're kind of missing
that point in the kind of officiating of this uh of this exit strategy here um and it's uh
it's certainly uh i i'm aligned with sax on
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this i certainly think it's uh it's biting us
more than it's helping us to give you an idea just like experience wise when i was in austin
every restaurant is at 110 capacity the locals
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they were like i can't get a reservation for
a week or two the town is packed everybody in the country is going to austin and miami because
they've just learned that austin and miami have
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officially declared if you have the vaccine you
can go have your life but there is still a little
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bit of theater on the margins when you go into a
restaurant i went in to to get a meal and i didn't have my mask on i kid you not 110 capacity 100
people sitting at the bar 200 people at tables
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she hands me a mask and i said i have one i put
it on i say can i ask you a question and she the hostess says uh why should you wear a mask
when there's 300 people in here without a mask
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and the doors are closed i was like that's the
exact question she goes it makes no sense the governor wants no mess the mayor wants masks and
so they're having their own little version of the
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national conversation in austin which is locally
scared or at least the politicians are and then
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reasonable otherwise um so you literally put your
little mask on you walk 10 feet to your table
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and then take it off for the rest of the time in
miami it's a true story i go to miami i walk into
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i i ha you know it was i i haven't been out in
14 months so i decided i would check out a club
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and i went to a nightlife club um and people were
dancing and having a great time people were also
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popping bottles and i was like oh my god it's over
like a nightlife club it was a nightlife club no
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it was not a yes anyway it was a legitimate
club you know here in south beach um and so
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i took a little insta and i share i fed the insta
and immediately i got three comments from friends
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who are like what are you doing in that club
and i wrote back to all three i'm vaccinated
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and they were like okay i was like it's not
but i guess but i think this was the point i
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made a few months ago which is i do think that
the the subconscious training the fear factor that's been kind of you know built into us over
the last year year and a half um is gonna take
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a while to kind of train our way out of you know
people aren't going to be that rational and that
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conscious about oh i've been vaccinated people
are basically the default is fear the what-ifs the butts but oh my god people are still getting
coveted even though they're vaccinated but there's
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there's variance but and everyone looks for a
conscious or you know a kind of conscious reason
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why they're rationalizing their subconscious fear
and everyone's got this fear to go and do things
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in this fear to go back in the world because we've
literally been trained and beaten into a corner for the last year now the conscious reality is you
don't need to be fearful but i'm fearful therefore
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i'm looking for reasons to maintain my fear and i
think this this this is like what again i say that i said it like four times before but this is what
happened after 9 11 and it lasted for years and
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you know we still have ridiculous tsa processes
we need our leaders to take their masks off get tell everybody they're vaccinated take their
masks off go back to normal life so that everybody
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else will feel that it's okay too because even if
you're even if you're if you're not fearful david
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the other thing that you are is just guilty and
right right totally and you gotta you gotta get
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rid of that as well and the only way you'll do it
is if highly visible people are now actually going back to life as normal yeah like the peer pressure
element of it it's like i feel bad i feel bad
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going into a store when everyone else is wearing
a mask and like i'm just crazy this crazy msnbc uh
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moment one of the hosts of one of their shows said
i've been fully vaccinated but i went running in
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central park so i double masked and i'm like the
virtue signaling was so insane and i'm like wait
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a second you're outdoors insane this is the this
is the joyride thing yeah i don't want to see the
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person's name because then if you mention who it
is then you might be attacking a person of color
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or a woman host so i just said now you're avoiding
it which makes you think that you are so who is it how am i supposed to say it without being
does anybody what i mean nobody watches msnbc
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trump derangement syndrome therapy was msnbc the
ratings i wanna i have a question for the three of
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you knowing what we've seen here between the logic
of both sides and the media and the insanity what
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do you take away from the year of the pandemic as
it comes to a close in how you personally look at
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the world sacks you want to start like yeah i'll
tell you i feel like the american people are
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constantly being propagandized and there's almost
like an information war being perpetrated on the
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american people where we cannot get the data
the facts and the truth i think it's true now
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in terms of people not taking off their mass even
though we have the cdc data that basically shows
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the lightning strike probability of getting covet
but we saw at the very beginning of the pandemic remember i have all these people on twitter
telling me every time i tweet about this why don't
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you just listen to the experts right they want me
to shut off my brain and just do whatever the cdc says and i'm like well do you realize the cdc was
against mass at the beginning of the pandemic back
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in march of 2000 last year when i was saying we
need to wear masks because looking at the success
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of the asian countries and some of the data coming
out of that the cdc was very very slow in adopting
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mass they were against it they were telling us we
didn't need to do it and that was the historical cdc like right they've been around for a long time
and then also trump was anti-mask and so you had
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trump was slow to dot mass 2 and yeah and
absolutely and so yes i mean i've said that there's like a venn diagram of american politics
where that you know one circle is favored mass
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wearing one year ago and then once to get rid of
mass mandates today the venn diagram of overlap
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between those two groups is very small i'm in
that overlap i feel like i'm in like a very lonely part of the the political graph um
yeah chamath how has your thinking you know
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now that we've had to process this event in our
lifetime that is probably the most consequential
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uh you know moment yeah i have i have i i've
thought about this a lot jason you ask a really
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important question and i think everybody should
probably try to take five minutes and actually
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write this down um because i think i'll tell you
what i learned i learned i learned three things um
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the first thing i learned is intellectual and it's
exactly the same thing that david sacks said it is
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completely shocking to me how much disinformation
there is and also how we are so prone to turning
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off our brains and not thinking for ourselves so
it's really shocking and i think 2020 was the year
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that that was laid bare that the institutions that
feed you information can't really be trusted that
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you can't really trust the interpretation of
actual simple data that nobody wants to think
00:18:55
in first principle so that's the first one we
have stopped thinking for ourselves and that's a recipe for disaster and so that's an intellectual
thing that i've realized and i don't want to do it
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and so i'll think for myself and i'll take the
consequences the second was economic which is
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wow we have really over rotated um to this crazy
form of globalism that is going to get undone
00:19:18
over the next 30 years and that's going to have
a lot of implications and it can be done in a way
00:19:24
that can rejuvenate the united states which i
think can fix a lot of the stuff that was created and we should talk about that later uh today and
then the third is physiological which is if you
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didn't know before i'm gonna tell you now and
it's this three-letter word that we make into
00:19:38
a four-letter word in america which is the letters
f-a-t we have a fat epidemic in the united states
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almost 80 percent of every single person that was
hospitalized because of covid was clinically obese
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and you can't say it and you're not allowed to
say it if you say that somebody is fat or if
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you say that somebody is obese it's all of a
sudden like you know you're gonna get virtue signal cancelled and instead what we're doing
is we're leaving an entire generation of people
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completely abandoning them because we're not
confronting the problem that by a combination
00:20:15
of food and a lack of movement we are setting them
up to either die acutely of something like covid
00:20:22
or chronically by heart disease and diabetes
and that it was like it is now so obvious and
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by the way that's the other thing where these
healthy fit people were running around double vaxing and or double masking in central park
and they don't even know the basic data like
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even if you thought you were going to go to the
hospital the 80 percent of all of those millions and millions of hospitalizations were from
people that were obese they had physiologically
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completely taken their body to a place that it
wasn't able to fight right so those are my three
00:20:57
takeaways intellectual economic and physiologists
insert one thing on that is because i agree with
00:21:02
with everything chamath just said is this
this idea of laying bear that laying bare the
00:21:07
the sort of corruption of these like institutions
that are supposed to be coming with good policies
00:21:13
and educating us and it turns out they you know
keep giving us this foolish guidance but there's also another institution i think that was
laid bare which are these education unions
00:21:21
right we had school closures for a year the the
learning loss and the isolation that kids are
00:21:27
have experienced we don't even know what the
results of this are going to be this could be a generational consequence and what do we see
from the education unions they didn't want to
00:21:36
go back to school they fought it you know
we had the whole oakley school board resign
00:21:42
because they just said well they want us to go
back to work to be babysitters for their kids so we could smoke pot these are people who don't
care about the kids and after this year i don't
00:21:51
know how anyone can be against school choice or
charter schools or giving parents more involvement
00:21:57
in their kids educations 100 freeberg coming out
of the pandemic and looking at your own psychology
00:22:06
and your own life what um have you learned and
what do you take forward in terms of lessons and
00:22:12
how you're going to approach post-pandemic
life i'll kind of flip it a little bit
00:22:18
one of the first experiences i had with how
broadly people could be influenced in a way
00:22:25
that doesn't have grounding or rooting in facts
and reality is when i sold my company to monsanto
00:22:31
in 2013. and j-cal i think you came with me on
one of these trips that i took uh yeah i visited monsanto with you yeah and um you know there was
an incredible bias by my team and by me personally
00:22:43
prior to even engaging in conversations with
monsanto against that company because they were deemed to be evil and as i as i spent a lot of
time personally kind of digging into the the facts
00:22:52
and the history of the business and kind of how we
got here it was surprising to me like how much of the bias against monsanto was not rooted in fact
and was in fact um you know a series of claims
00:23:03
that then became truth and reality because of
the perception and it just became it things got
00:23:09
stuck that way gmos are bad gmos are evil that
the science of how they work what they do why they're useful was never contemplated never became
part of the dialogue it was just this assumed fact
00:23:19
that this is an evil company that this stuff
is bad and um you know this is a long long
00:23:24
topic we could talk about this i'm sure for an
entire hour and a half about the science and technology behind gmos and how we make food and
all that sort of stuff and i'll be happy to do
00:23:32
that another time but like for me i was just
so surprised when i engaged with thoughtful friends of mine who were scientists even and they
had this bias and then when you engage them in a
00:23:41
dialogue about like why where does that come
from what's the rooting it just wasn't there and i got and i mentioned this to you
guys when i was an executive at the
00:23:48
management team in monsanto we had a who ruling
where a guy got himself elected to the iarc
00:23:55
the um this is the cancer research
group within wh he was this liberal guy
00:24:02
who was very anti-technology who got himself
elected to the iarc board and um got a ruling made
00:24:07
that uh roundup is a possible carcinogen and that
ruling led to a 10 billion dollar lawsuit that
00:24:14
monsanto or now bayer is settling um which wasn't
rooted in the science or the fact that the other
00:24:19
scientists on the committee had kind of previously
kind of proved uh previewed and gone through and said this isn't cancerous and it's incredible the
implications it's had and so i've always you know
00:24:29
for several years now i've had this kind of belief
that like people can be led to believe things that
00:24:34
aren't necessarily rooted in objective truth uh
or in fact or have empirical evidence to behind them and this is this this goes back to the
origins of religion and monarchies and like
00:24:42
you know these myths and these these these these
tales we tell ourselves uh where we all end up
00:24:48
believing something and there's some influencing
factor that that drives that i think this has just been an incredible manifestation of that um the
the the misinformation on both sides from the
00:24:57
beginning to the end of the pandemic and it's
just been extraordinary to watch i don't think you change it i think social networks amplify it
um you know i think that the the rate at which
00:25:07
information or misinformation flows back and forth
is making it easier and quicker to kind of adopt this you know systemic inaccurate
belief system that people might adopt
00:25:15
and so um you know it's a it's a big question
mark for me i i don't know you know how we as a people kind of move forward with like objective
fact-based decision-making and belief systems
00:25:26
um and i don't know if we ever will uh but um well
yeah it's just how humans are wired maybe you know
00:25:31
i haven't given it a lot of thought and i really
like all of your answers because mine is very similar number one i i feel like i was always an
independent critical thinker in my life and that
00:25:41
i think i kind of started to pick sides because
of trump that like i just found him so offensive
00:25:47
and i realized i have to go back to being just
an independent critical thinker i fill out with no party i assume all news stories are fake
news i assume all date is being manipulated
00:25:56
i assume everybody's got an agenda i believe
everybody's virtue signaling now and i'm making the decisions for myself and i in the one of the
things dove tells exactly what you said chimoff
00:26:06
which is this was a disease of a of you know old
people and fat people obese people of which i
00:26:13
have been one for far too long and this is my
commitment is just i i got to take my health 100 seriously now that i'm 50 years
old i got a trainer i got a masseuse
00:26:23
i'm working out i'm doing weights i'm doing
everything i change my diet i'm taking supplements the the stuff we talked about here i went right
to my doctor after that episode we did chem off
00:26:32
i'm getting that body scan for four [ __ ] grand
or whatever it costs and i'm just doing it all are you saying masseuse is going to help you lose
weight no but i've had a i've had shoulders maybe
00:26:47
no i just realized i don't stretch i don't stretch
and my shoulders were getting very tight and being on the computer and everything so i'm just what
a man of the people what a man of the people
00:26:56
oh look at you which one are you wearing i got a
masseuse sucked every week i got a figure i got a
00:27:03
person i gotta afford that the third thing
and this is heartfelt and sincere is that
00:27:11
friendship and our loved ones are really
with along with health is so important
00:27:19
and i am cherishing every moment every experience
with every friend knowing that the world can
00:27:25
shut down and whatever and we have to take
advantage of every moment and that for me is that the takeaways the can just to build on something
i'm really proud of what you're trying to do um
00:27:36
jason for your health when i i remember i
you know you know how you all have these high
00:27:43
grade school pictures yep right like you
go to like picture day or whatever yeah and there was this crazy contrast that i had
in my grade school pictures there was like
00:27:52
two of them when i was in sri lanka so i was like
you know five and six and then great you know then
00:27:58
i was seven or eight and then all of a sudden
this crazy hey hey what's up antonio is here
00:28:08
mucho calientes does antonio
realize he's on an international
00:28:18
nobody even knows who he is don't worry he's like
one of the most powerful guys in our industry what
00:28:24
i was gonna say is like uh by like i think when
i was like nine or ten i had gotten really fat um
00:28:32
because because when we moved to canada it was a
very different food supply and then economically
00:28:39
we were in a different place we ate what we
could afford and i put on a lot of weight and that weight carried with me until uh college
and then after college and that's when i said i
00:28:49
got to get in shape exactly for the same reason
jason because like my dad was getting dialyzed he was constantly you know dealing with these
health issues and i said i don't deal with this
00:28:57
um but that's a rare thing that happens if you
think about the number of people that are put in this predicament of like not even forget you
you're able to get a trainer or whatever but
00:29:06
there are a ton of people that can only eat what
they can afford yeah right and the reality is it
00:29:11
is just meaningfully cheaper to eat at mcdonald's
than it is to go to whole foods and be able to buy
00:29:17
organic food and so it's just not even on the
agenda for people so this is what i mean by you we have to be able to say that it's not
that people are fat because they choose to
00:29:26
be that there are these systemic imbalances that
make people sick you know what i mean education
00:29:32
and health these are the education that we need
to work on in america like saks you said at the
00:29:37
uh i was at last week's actually said you know
the i think this is a great bargain that could happen in america with all this polarization if
even a republican conservative like sax can say
00:29:48
everybody should get a great education and
everybody should be healthy right like and sax
00:29:54
isn't a socialist but this this is important
and it's so easy to just get a happy meal
00:30:00
then to to eat a salad you know or whatever i was
in washington dc this week and um i met with this
00:30:07
organization which um uh anybody who is interested
in this should check out called third way
00:30:13
and what third way is is a centrist organization
right so they they largely work with dems to try
00:30:20
to pull them here um and i think the republican
version is called the niskansen i guess center but
00:30:27
the idea is i sat with these guys and i was like
just teach me something and they taught me the most incredible thing you guys know who pew is pew
goes out and does all these research they've been
00:30:36
doing it for decades they're the most respected
i think in surveys pew does this incredible thing
00:30:41
where they go to like a whole bunch of countries
in the world and they ask this basically very
00:30:47
simple question i'm going to ask you guys what
you think the answer is on a 0 to 10 scale
00:30:53
where 10 is important what do you think
americans think to the following question
00:31:00
how important is hard work to get ahead in life
meaning right so it's a proxy for how americans
00:31:07
think about hard work how important is hard work
to get ahead in life freedberg what percentage of
00:31:14
americans do you think that say that hard work
is important to get ahead in life and i'll give you a couple of data points i would say 80 yeah
but the setup is indonesia 28 india 38 germany
00:31:30
50 go ahead what do you think the answer
is well it should be a hundred percent but what do i think it is in the u.s
um i i'm hoping it's above 60.
00:31:42
i agree with you saks 100 is the right answer
and i believe americans don't believe it i'm
00:31:47
going to put americans at 35 because we've
seen so many people get lucky and get rich
00:31:53
or just people think the system's rigged or the
victim culture where people tell everybody don't bother trying because it's rigged and you
just it's i think the argument sorry jamal
00:32:01
i'll let you give us the answer in a second but
i think the argument is that like entrepreneurism fuels these moments of extraordinary success but
the perception creates the opposite effect which
00:32:11
is someone can get rich very quickly and therefore
there's this luck factor or this unfairness factor
00:32:16
that is um you know that is inherent in the
system right and so while it does enable hard
00:32:22
work to drive you know tremendous outcomes the
perception is that holy crap in three years you
00:32:29
know kylie jenner went on instagram and became
a billionaire or whatever right and people get really kind of blown away by that and i think
it's discouraging or one person's success makes
00:32:38
it such that other people can't that it's zero
sum when in fact a company what's your what's
00:32:44
your number for america 80 the number is 73 and
we are the third highest ranking country in the
00:32:52
survey that's great so it's amazing now if you if
you ask then americans who better represents the
00:32:59
interests of hard-working people among republicans
and democrats the overwhelming answer is now
00:33:06
republicans which is really interesting democrats
even in exit polling basically voted uh for biden
00:33:12
because they just really found trump distasteful
and a lot of the people that um you know basically
00:33:18
said you know he's an ass and so they voted
him out but it was not because they believed
00:33:23
that democrats could do the job of actually
reinforcing the values of hard work and this goes back to they don't want handouts people don't
want handouts people people people want a fair
00:33:32
shot they want an even starting line they don't
want an even finishing line yeah they don't they don't no one wants paternalism and uh everyone
wants opportunity um you know but you take
00:33:43
what you're given when it's available to you no
one says no you know i spent a lot of time with farmers in the midwest in the united states
very diehard conservative generally right
00:33:53
and and farmers benefit greatly from significant
government federal government support programs
00:33:59
um primarily a crop insurance program and some
commodity price support programs but but they are
00:34:05
very anti-government and there's this tremendous
irony there right because they don't want to hand out they they want to kind of be left alone they
want to be able to run their business they want
00:34:12
and i'm generalizing right but i'm just speaking
broadly to kind of the theme of things i hear when i when i meet with farmers um but when the crop
insurance program shows up and direct support
00:34:21
payments show up you're like okay i'll take the
check um you know and so it's hard to say no
00:34:27
but i think the motivation for everyone is
universally the same which is right i want to have the opportunity to be successful independently
are we creating policies that reinforce this
00:34:36
and are we creating the condition that
makes people feel less like a victim less looking for handouts and let's reduce i
i have a concern about the stimulus checks i
00:34:45
i do think it was a smart thing to do to get
us out of this but do you guys wonder if this
00:34:51
generation which is not going back to work we have
a shortage of uber drivers we have a shortage of
00:34:56
bartenders waiters nobody was a lot of people
are just choosing not to go to work because they have their stimis america is a place
where you come to because you want to grind
00:35:07
you want to find your own little engine room and
you want to be in there and you want to put in the
00:35:13
hours and the people that it attracts from around
the world speak to that you know the way that you
00:35:18
can explain you know why indonesia and india
are so far to the left on that same question
00:35:24
is because it's an extremely homogeneous
population with zero immigration no immigration yeah i actually think the reason why america's
so far to the right is it itself selects not
00:35:34
by you know some kind of gender age or religion
or color of skin by motivation it's motivation
00:35:40
yeah and it's like if you're motivated to crush
you come to the united states yeah we we've all
00:35:45
we're all what are we like you know one generation
away except jason you're two-generation american my irish side is sixth generation we're all
fighting we're first generation except for jason
00:35:54
right we all moved here uh to the united states
as immigrants as immigrants motivated family yeah
00:36:00
i think that's why i'm the least successful
of the group is that what you're saying yeah you're the you're the lazy complacent
american whereas we're the hungry immigrants
00:36:08
i'm trying i'm trying hey listen
you're the daniel day lewis
00:36:14
you're the daniel day lewis character in
gangs in new york you know you hate the immigrants you sit at the boats you throw
eggs at everyone it's interesting you bring
00:36:20
that up yeah do you know where my irish uh poor
bearers came from and when they immigrated to
00:36:26
the five points we were in the five points it's
exactly accurate yeah of course i was it makes
00:36:33
sense you're not daniel day lewis you're the the
heavier shorter guy though that was kind of nice
00:36:38
yeah i dropped 10 on my
quarantine 15 and i gave it to sax yeah you did you're looking good jacob you look
good you look good in miami miami suits you
00:36:47
in a weird way i gotta give i gotta give jay
cal as much credit for where he came from
00:36:52
as chamath because i don't know those parts
of brooklyn are maybe as tough as sri lanka
00:37:00
kids with guns kids with guns yeah you know
child warriors always row with a posse by the
00:37:06
way you know on immigration i don't know if you
guys saw this you know george um w bush uh is a
00:37:12
paints now and he paints uh immigrants yes so um
i bought his book i bought a signed copy of it i should have brought it to the podcast today but
it's a great book i highly recommend it trigger
00:37:21
no but he actually has some writings in there
that talks about the power of immigration and how immigration is so core to the success
of the united states just to our point so
00:37:29
um this cup this conversation made me think of
the book that i just bought this week uh really cool book by the way george w bush uh amazingly
great artist really captures the personality of
00:37:38
immigrants in his in his work uh i think the thing
the thing is um like everybody wants to come here
00:37:45
to work hard everybody that's here is willing to
work hard right whether you're first generation or not and then the question is can government
create policies that allow us to do that and
00:37:55
actually just create a safety net to catch us
if we fall because that's what we also all want
00:38:00
so there are parts of biden's bill that i think
made a ton of sense like you know making community
00:38:05
college free that's a really disruptive idea
because it'll put a ton of pressure on for-profit colleges right to like get their act together or
not that's a good idea the child tax credit so
00:38:16
that you can actually have subsidized you know
um child care for your kids that's a good idea
00:38:22
but then where you kind of go astray is then when
you start to figure out you know the levels of
00:38:28
taxation again we talked about this last time
but you know i just think that that's where you can kind of demotivate people to not then
put in the hours i think this is a good segue
00:38:37
also into um immigration through our southern
border and this incredibly polarizing issue
00:38:43
and how the media is polarizing it how the parties
are polarizing it just to ask a question to see if
00:38:48
we even understand the data how many people
do you think are illegal immigrants in the united states right now 20 million okay free
berkshires um that's a guess yeah i i guess
00:38:59
i guess 18 million i'll take a slight under to
chamoc but about the right that's about the right magnitude the last number i heard was like 12
million but that was a few years ago and bingo
00:39:08
it's 12. now how many people are apprehended at
the southern border a year since 2010 every year
00:39:15
half a million anybody else want to take a guess
50 000. all right it's uh 350 000. so we literally
00:39:24
are tearing the country and i know that because i
watched the movie sicario and i'm estimating based
00:39:29
on the scene where they round everyone up at the
border and took him away so that that that's my terrifying film yeah and awesome like incredible
film just like xanax because you might have a
00:39:40
panic attack my favorite modern director dennis
villanuev he's unbelievable but uh yes we digress
00:39:46
yes that scene when they're racing the cars into
the border crossing go to checkpoint what it is
00:39:55
so if you guys are into sci-fi that guy directed
the arrival which is one of my favorite films um yeah that's a fabulous beautiful yeah beautiful
um so literally the country's being torn apart
00:40:05
a country of 330 million over three million
would be one percent point one percent coming
00:40:11
into the border and we just said immigration
is just all these amazing people coming here
00:40:17
to who want to strive and who want great things
why are we tearing the country up over this issue
00:40:24
this is a tough topic well i think i think jason
i think your point of view on immigration really depends on where you're sitting in the economy so
i think for all of us who are in silicon valley
00:40:35
we know that something like half of startups have
uh an immigrant co-founder totally so we've seen
00:40:42
you know like paypal i think you know there were
like three or four immigrants on the founding team
00:40:48
you know peter was born in germany elon was
born in south africa max was born in russia
00:40:54
um you know i was born in africa and then you go
down the list um same thing with google you know
00:41:00
sergey bring came from russia and just on and on
it goes so if you're sitting in silicon valley as a tech worker you see that these immigrants
bring tremendous dynamism to the economy however
00:41:10
if you're in a low-wage job maybe low-skill
service uh then the you know a lot of this
00:41:17
immigration is competition and it creates wage
pressure for you so this is why historically the unions have not been in favor of you know uh
of of immigration uh you have you know a lot of
00:41:29
service workers in the minority communities you
know there's a lot of animosity towards immigrants
00:41:35
because of that fundamentally it creates job
competition and wage competition and i do think
00:41:41
well so so look it's easy for us to sit here in
silicon valley where we sit in the economy and
00:41:46
say oh well let's just have unlimited immigration
it doesn't matter well yeah it doesn't matter to us but if you're in the low-skilled part of the
economy it does matter a lot to let in a flood
00:41:56
of immigrants who are in that low school category
and by the way we're worried about these jobs getting automated away as well so you know i think
you have to have a sensible policy i mean yes to
00:42:07
immigration but i think you have to think about
how much sort of low-skill immigration can we
00:42:12
assimilate and absorb right but are a lot of those
people who are coming in also then taking lower wages because they're off the books and they're
illegal whereas if we had a more reasonable policy
00:42:21
of letting whatever percentage in like we could
just pick a number and if that actually worked
00:42:28
and they were getting paid on the books then it
would remove some of that downside pressure so you're not paying somebody under the books to be
a delivery person or a dishwasher or whatever the
00:42:38
entry level job is they have to get paid that
means jason i think this speaks to the broader
00:42:43
kind of set of political topics which
relates to the enablement of competition and it speaks to some of the trade
policy points that i think the last
00:42:51
administration made which is to limit trade and
to limit access to global markets uh to provide
00:42:59
services and products to the united states and to
tax them because the lower cost labor ultimately
00:43:04
out competes with higher cost labor in the united
states and so you know you get lower cost goods but the balance is is it worth having lower
cost goods and services where you could actually
00:43:14
see too much of a decline in the employability or
the wages of people that are currently producing
00:43:20
those goods and services in the united states
and that's the tricky balance right there's no blue or red right way to do this we want to
enable competition we want to enable progress
00:43:29
we want to enable lower cost of production lower
cost goods and services but we also don't want to have the economic impact and the social impact
of people being underemployed and unemployed
00:43:39
um and balancing those two one of the tricky
pieces of that balancing puzzle is immigration
00:43:45
another one is trade another one is regulation etc
etc right so a lot of these things kind of drive
00:43:50
that that tricky balance i really bounce around on
this i of all of the four of us i was the only one
00:43:56
that immigrated myself so i didn't you know it's
not my parents did it oh you did something yeah yeah okay i did it myself i drove to the border i
got a tn visa stamp you know i crossed the border
00:44:07
into buffalo i stood in line i got my own social
security number um and i started a life in america
00:44:14
in in the year 2000. how old were you 22 i guess
or 23. you had a job lined up already i had a job
00:44:23
i had a job offer i had my offer letter i did the
whole thing then i transferred on to an h1b visa i had to go through all of that then i had to you
know wait in line i got delayed i had to refile
00:44:33
so as a person that went through the immigration
system and finally got their green card in 2007 or eight and then my my citizenship in 2011 or 2012
i bounce around on how i feel because i remember
00:44:45
the insecurity i felt in not wanting to lose my
visa and have to leave and go back to canada and
00:44:52
so if somebody was in that situation i could
see why you know they would get very agitated if they saw a lot of immigration being lumped
in into one broad brush right and because if
00:45:03
you if you look at it actually there's a there's a
really interesting conundrum because it's not like immigration is a thing where all immigrants
are pro-immigration right that's right it's
00:45:11
actually not that at all it tends to be sort of
cultural elites are pro-immigration because it's a
00:45:17
it's a synthetic way of showing openness
and open-mindedness um but then you know in
00:45:22
inside no right i mean it's true it's because
they don't know they don't get affected by it
00:45:27
exactly if anything it makes it easier for them
to maybe find people to hire well as someone that
00:45:33
lived through it what i would say is it it you
know if i was still waiting for my green card and waiting in line and having the idea that
there was some amnesty program would have made me
00:45:41
feel very insecure i'm not sure how i would have
reacted to it but in that moment i would have felt insecure so the the broad solution to immigration
is you have to separate the two problems and say
00:45:52
this part of the problem can be solved almost
like a professional sports team which is to say we have the ability to draft every year the
smartest and most interesting capable people
00:46:02
that want to come here and work hard that
will probably you know it be a rising tide
00:46:08
then there are these two other buckets bucket
in the middle is just compassionate openness you know family members and other people refugees
you know because i was emigrated into canada not
00:46:19
in the first bucket because we didn't have
much to contribute economically but in the second bucket which is for social justice and
refugees and then there is a third bucket which
00:46:28
is there are people that are not going to be in
a position to wait in line they are going to come to the border and we have to have a mechanism
of saying okay you shouldn't have done it but
00:46:38
you did and now here's a pathway where you can
earn the right to prove that you should be here
00:46:43
and i think that there there there's a but we
can't have that nuance because nobody wants to hear it you want to lump it into one you know this
is where for example like last year when trump
00:46:52
you know decapitated the h-1b program i
thought this is just so dumb yeah no nuance
00:46:59
it's it's basically telling you know like uh it's
forcing a star athlete you know to go and play a
00:47:06
different sport why would you do that you know and
it's so artificial it doesn't make any sense but
00:47:11
it's such a reasonable there's such a reasonable
discussion to have here to be had here because other countries have solved this exact thing
with the point based system australia canada
00:47:21
new zealand and others have all worked on a system
like this which is you get points for each of the
00:47:26
qualities that you bring and then you put some
numbers on it but there is no yeah but jake out those countries are much much harder to get into
than the united states getting into new zealand
00:47:35
you better buy a property or something like
that it might be that the point-based system is
00:47:41
letting in the people that make the society
stronger no canada has a really progressive view on this i mean they have a point-based system but
they do a lot they're really compassionate about
00:47:50
you know the they'll take in a lot more
refugees than than most other countries and i think that that they've never lost that
spirit and i think that the point is i think i
00:47:57
agree with jason it's possible it's logical the
problem is it's too logical and you know let's
00:48:03
summarize it it's like i think freeburg made an
interesting connection to the issue of free trade
00:48:09
so you know look you know i majored in economics
in college you know i i was like a believer in free trade like sort of completely ardent free
trade because why it creates economic efficiency
00:48:20
and so you know it's logical it's logical
and if people lose their jobs their factory
00:48:25
closes because yeah we're not as good then
yes you let the chips fall where they may i think what we've learned over the last
20 or 30 years is that we have to consider
00:48:35
the distributional consequences of a
policy like free trade because it's about well who benefits and who loses and yes american
consumers have benefited from the flow of cheap
00:48:45
goods from china and other places but we've seen
our manufacturing american producers have lost
00:48:52
yeah and so throughout the the midwest and the
rust belt you've got these empty factories they just line up like like tombstones up in you know
places like detroit and and you've got the you've
00:49:01
got these towns that used to be factory towns
that are now just kind of empty and the people
00:49:06
are like hooked on fentanyl and it's a social
disaster and so i think you know what i've kind
00:49:11
of learned about this is you have to take into
account the consequences of these policies and i can't just do it you've evolved your position i
have it can't just be about a darwinian economic
00:49:22
efficiency anymore you have to think about who who
wins and who loses and by the way everybody's got
00:49:32
a lot of the current globalization policy that the
united states embraced over the last two or three decades um i think sacks correct me if i'm wrong
but a lot of this originated during the clinton
00:49:41
era which was uh you know a democratic president
and then ironically the free trade republicans are
00:49:47
the ones who have flipped over the last couple
of years to realize the economic consequence on the production side of the united states is so
severe that we need to now limit free trade and
00:49:55
if you remember paul ryan you know who was
the house speaker a few years ago had this six-point plan for the republicans going into
the primaries and one of the key points was to
00:50:04
you know enable the trans-pacific partnership
they were trying to continue to push free trade and i think that the policy shift is ironic
because it's always been kind of a red issue
00:50:13
then it became a blue issue that became
a red issue um and i think you know like everything we are evolving our points of view as
we experience and learn more things and get more
00:50:23
data and perhaps pro the rate of progress isn't
the thing to optimize for but the rate of progress
00:50:28
balanced against the equality of progress seems
to be where the united states is at right now to respond to what what free book said about uh
about how this happened so there's an old saying
00:50:37
in washington that the best sorry that the worst
ideas are bipartisan and the idea of bringing
00:50:44
um china into the world trade organization and
giving them sort of mfn trading status that
00:50:49
happened under clinton but it was absolutely a
bipartisan decision and part of the reason why our our politics are so royal it was proposed
it was proposed clinton it was past then bush
00:50:59
right okay but they both supported it it was
a bipartisan sort of disaster and i think one of the reasons why our politics are so royal
today you've got this populism on the right
00:51:08
and you've got a populism of the left and that
where they both agree is in restraining is having
00:51:14
a more protectionist uh trade policy that's right
so so i think i think a little bit of history here is important i think you got most of it right
but if you go even one step back under clinton
00:51:24
there was nothing that they actually did
but it was something that deng xiaoping did which was that you know for a large time i
think until the mid 90s 94 the remin beg was
00:51:35
firmly pegged to the u.s dollar and you know it
was like you know 5.8 ramimbi to the u.s dollar
00:51:42
and uh all of a sudden they basically said well
look we have this hapless economy uh we have to do
00:51:48
something about it and we have this enormous bulge
of young people and so they did this brilliant
00:51:55
thing and china said you know we're going to
basically devalue our currency and they're going to basically make it essentially float
and instantly you re-rated the currency by 40
00:52:06
and over time it re-rated by almost 60 and what it
did was all of a sudden it unleashed as you said
00:52:14
all of these subsidies into the united states
why because now chinese goods became 30 cheaper
00:52:20
right and then the thai goods became 30
cheaper indonesian goods became 80 cheaper
00:52:26
right vietnamese goods became 50 cheaper that's
that's that entire contagion in eastern asia
00:52:32
that we went through in the late 90s so
it's like china devalues their currency
00:52:37
all of a sudden you have all these young
people in china who can make things for 30 cheaper you're able to flood the american market
with goods we were like wow this is incredible my
00:52:46
genes that cost ten dollars now cost seven dollars
i'm just using it as a representative example
00:52:51
i'm just going to buy more genes and
so you're consuming consuming consuming
00:52:56
all of a sudden bush comes along and says well
you know this seems to be working out well i want to go to war with iraq i need to basically
get china to vote yes and the security council
00:53:07
okay what's it going to take china's like admit
me to the wto because even during all of this they were still not part of the wto and to
david's point and that's when the nuclear
00:53:16
bomb went off in 2004 you know the minute that
they were involved and they could actually have
00:53:21
you know bilateral trade relationships
and normalized trade relationships then all of a sudden the next wave happens
because instead of just buying cheap chinese jeans
00:53:31
every american company was like wait a minute
i can drive up earnings by just exporting this factory to china writ large and the chinese
had all this capital that they had built
00:53:42
up all these us dollars to then support
it and subsidize it well it's a prisoner's dilemma right chemoth because if you don't
do it as an american company and you don't
00:53:50
move your manufacturing there and everybody else
does your shareholders your shareholders will decapitate your stock price you know as a ceo you
get fired and so so then that's that's when david
00:54:00
that what you said happened that's when you hollow
out from 2014 to 2016 you hollow out the middle
00:54:06
class you hollowed out the inside the rust belt
and then basically you de-industrialized the west
00:54:13
you saw the rise of populism you saw the rise
of opioids as essentially a coping mechanism
00:54:19
for people's inability to even work hard right
now that's americans are wired to work hard
00:54:27
right so they need to self-medicate if you can't
let them work hard yeah they turn to fentanyl little opioids to do it and then all of a sudden
donald trump gets elected in 2016. so what if we
00:54:36
a man without hope is the man without fear you
know you give people no job and no purpose in the morning what happens and the democratic
parties turn to socialism i think that's like
00:54:44
part of it as well so this is really interesting
because we're talking about second the sec i think
00:54:49
everybody who was doing this was considering the
second order problems and what we're experiencing now is the third order problem which is things
that people couldn't predict like we now have a
00:54:59
communist country that is not changing its
human rights record and it's not changing
00:55:05
its uh behavior and might even be getting worse
and we've enabled china but but jason china china
00:55:12
will actually self-regulate i i actually think now
the china issue is a little overblown the way we
00:55:19
take it meaning i think china's central planners
are frankly just much much smarter than ours right
00:55:25
they just are well they have central planning
and they have better tools they don't they don't they don't have a domain communism limbic system
that's just reactionary to their current or any
00:55:34
legal system they have no legal system that should
scare us that they're more effective planners than than our our politicians but here's the thing
here's the thing that smart policy can't outrun
00:55:44
though it cannot outrun demographics and the most
important takeaway that i learned over the last
00:55:50
few weeks when i was studying this problem because
i've been thinking a lot just currently like okay inflation what's the 10-year view what's
just gonna happen like what's my macro view of the
00:55:59
world and i saw the most interesting stat which
is the median age in china and the median age in
00:56:06
south asia is greater now than the median age in
america so it's in the mid 40s versus the mid 30s
00:56:14
and that's an enormously important thing because
now you have an aging population in china you've had this one child policy that's really has worked
against them for a very long time so they have
00:56:23
they have an under representation of these young
people and so you're flexing now into managing
00:56:28
a demographic shift where folks are older they're
not going to work in a factory they're not making
00:56:33
goods the same way they used to economic growth
is tapering and so that whole china situation in
00:56:40
fact demographically is going to solve itself but
the implications for america are not good meaning
00:56:46
i think inflation goes up commodity prices go
up prices of everything go up but it allows us
00:56:51
to actually re-establish and rejuvenate the
uh the industrialized rust belt of america
00:56:58
we just have to spend the money and this is
where i think like when you look at biden's plan this is where i wonder like didn't anybody do
this simple macroeconomic you know trace route
00:57:10
to actually come up with this because it's pretty
obvious what to do and then you wonder which is why i mean have have literally a trillion dollars
allocated to reestablishing entire supply chains
00:57:22
across critical industries that we want to own
which i think friedberg you brought up what 15 episodes ago that this is an incredible
opportunity for us to i think manufacturing
00:57:32
here bring the next generation and reinvent
manufacturing i still think biomanufacturing represents this um this complete a great domain
where the united states could build and lead
00:57:42
you know i'll just give you some statistics
globally there's about 25 million liters of fermentation capacity or biomanufacturing
capacity of that about 20 million is used to
00:57:53
make beer and wine and pharmaceutical drugs today
in in an enclosed system five million is available for rent and of that four million is already
rented out so there's only a million liters of
00:58:02
capacity really available for rent there's
a hundred synthetic biology companies that are looking to produce fermentation based
products from materials for clothing to food
00:58:13
to animal protein to new drugs and they can't get
the capacity to make this stuff and every one of them is scrambling around silicon valley looking
to raise hundreds of millions of dollars of
00:58:21
venture funding to go build friggin manufacturing
capacity for biomanufacturing this is where the united states can lead because we can make every
material every drug and every consumable that the
00:58:32
entire world would use using biomanufacturing and
just to be clear by manufacturing that's effing go
00:58:37
so you edit the dna of an organism and it can be
programmed to make a molecule for you and so we
00:58:43
can use large fermenter tanks to make this stuff
i did the math recently and you would need about
00:58:49
10 to 50 billion liters of capacity to make
all the animal protein for the entire world
00:58:54
and using 45 000 liter tanks which are three
meters wide each it would take about 30 to
00:59:00
40 square miles of fermentation tanks to
make all the protein for the whole world
00:59:05
we could build that in the united states for
about three to four for about three to four hundred billion dollars and we could build it in
a couple of years i mean that is like a moonshot
00:59:13
you could also make materials for clothing you
could make detroit you you could make biopsy
00:59:18
put it there and and this is like this and because
today the science exists as i go back to like the
00:59:24
internet era we now have this ability to program
organisms to make stuff for us this did not exist
00:59:29
10 years ago 15 years ago 20 years ago today is
the moment it exists so if we don't capitalize
00:59:34
on this huge budget to build infrastructure to go
after this massive opportunity to make everything that the world consumes we're going to miss out
and free markets will compete us away this is the
00:59:43
one time that big check can be written and that
big check can enable this new industry and instead of making cars and making you know all the stuff
that maybe we don't need to be making you really
00:59:51
think that all this uh trillions of infrastructure
spending is going to what you just described that's my point it's not that's my point no
it's not that's my point and i think that that
01:00:00
but that that's what i mean is we're missing this
opportunity we're rebranding the same old social programs as infrastructure because the politicians
know that's one of the last categories of spending
01:00:09
that's still popular i mean it's not going to go
to the right things it does it does those labels those labels pull well when you say jobs like
for example one of the things i learned which
01:00:18
is insane is that for whatever reason people
think fixing climate change is a net negative
01:00:24
because it it will restrict one's way of life
and destroy jobs whereas in fact it's the exact
01:00:31
opposite right it should actually allow you to do
more live healthier and there should be an entire
01:00:37
renaissance of industries and jobs and so it goes
back to the disinformation just makes a rational
01:00:42
conversation almost impossible speaking of
politics we just shifted caitlyn jenner real quick before we rap because we're almost out of time
caitlyn jenner is officially running for governor
01:00:52
and i guess people are making light of it but saks
you you actually wrote a considered post on it so
01:00:58
unpack it for us yeah i was defending
caitlyn jenner i mean look i mean the the what caitlyn jenner came out and said is
that gavin newsom's da's chase abudeen and
01:01:10
george gasco in l.a are presiding i'm putting
words in her mouth presiding over a crime wave
01:01:16
and she was calling him out on that and what
you then immediately saw was all of gavin's people come out and criticize her for being
stupid because supposedly she didn't know that
01:01:25
da's were locally elected well i think a couple
of points there first of all why hasn't gavin
01:01:31
newsom come out and distance himself from chase
abu dean and george gasco and what they're doing in those cities he hasn't done that because he's
been cozying up to their side that this sort of
01:01:41
progressive extreme radical decarcerations wing of
the party and the reason we know that is because
01:01:48
he he recently had a job to fill the attorney
general spot in california he could have chosen
01:01:55
anybody for that job and he chose um an east bay
assemblyman named robonta for it who is an ally of
01:02:03
chase abu dean and gascone and this progressive
d.a alliance and so yeah it's true that newsom
01:02:10
didn't appoint these da's but he's appointing
their allies to posts that are even more important
01:02:16
that you know the attorney general of all
of california and so i think it was a very legitimate issue for caitlyn jenner to come
out and call out gavin newsom on and i think
01:02:26
she's on to something here which is there's
a lot of issues in california there's a lot of things that are wrong from homelessness to
unemployment and these crazy coveted restrictions
01:02:35
but the number one issue i think has to be crime
we are seeing an explosion of crime in our seat
01:02:41
in our streets we all know there are large parts
of la and san francisco that we do not feel
01:02:47
comfortable walking around anymore oh my god you'd
be crazy to walk down the street with a child the livable area where you can where you feel
safe living or opening a business or walking
01:02:57
around has drastically shrunk in the last few
years and if you do not feel safe in your city
01:03:03
nothing else politically matters the government's
first responsibility is to protect its people and
01:03:09
i think if caitlyn jenner can keep speaking out
on issues like this i think maybe she has a shot
01:03:15
yeah i think that she's got a credible shot if she
has a reasonable economic policy behind it and you
01:03:20
know this uh the school voucher thing on education
those are the things that will carry uh california
01:03:26
voters because i do think and by the way
here's where i think we should take some credit
01:03:32
the best thing about this podcast other than
the fact that we used ourselves to keep us sane
01:03:37
it's it's made it it's made it fashionable
fashionable to think independently again
01:03:45
and eventually what becomes fashionable becomes
the rigor and what that means is i think that
01:03:50
there will be more and more people that will think
for themselves and if she has reasonable policies
01:03:56
and a platform that's understandable she can win
and that's an incredible testament i think to
01:04:05
people making their own decisions and being able
to have a reasonable conversation with people with
01:04:10
different opinions i think is the other takeaway
from the podcast that people always give me that feedback when they uh see me on the street or
whatever and talk to me about it and as a point
01:04:20
uh going to austin they are now
dealing with tent city problems like la and the same problems that they're dealing with
we're dealing with in san francisco so i went for
01:04:28
a walk around the lake a couple of times it was
great and you know there were a lot of tents and
01:04:35
they're literally taking the most beautiful lake
in the entire beautiful part of the city and it's
01:04:40
becoming camp central they're basically ruining it
for the the actual citizens who are not homeless
01:04:47
austin lifted the tent ban they had
uh in texas now texas is voting now
01:04:53
the entire conversation when i was in austin
all conversations did not go to nfc's crypto
01:04:59
the border or anything it went to tent city
and people in austin who are very liberal were saying i'm voting to ban tent
city i'm voting i'm voting against
01:05:09
you know this insanity because it's we don't
want to become san francisco we don't want to become l.a so the and these are liberal people
and the i the concept that a city would allow
01:05:22
people to camp in the center of the city
and ruin it for everybody else is insane portland's version of amsterdam is still up and
running it's been a year i mean if people want to
01:05:31
camp we have campgrounds for that send the campers
to the campgrounds can i tell you the secret
01:05:36
origin story of miami and why miami is now a tech
hub it's because of this issue it's because a tech
01:05:42
entrepreneur got punched in the face by a homeless
person in san francisco i don't know if he'd want
01:05:48
me to tell the story i'll find out afterwards
and you can beep out his name but basically who is a prolific tech founder he's got i don't
know if you'd want me to tell the story but he was
01:05:59
out just you did two beeps fine we'll do two beeps
anyway he was out walking around san francisco
01:06:04
and a crazy homeless person just walk up
and punch him in the face for no reason
01:06:09
and this is something this homeless person's
done many times the cops were there just kind of shrugged didn't want to prosecute it didn't want
to write up a ticket he's like no i really want to
01:06:19
press charges so the cops like okay fine so then
you know he presses charges nothing happens the
01:06:24
da office basically keeps you know giving him the
run around until he basically says fine forget it
01:06:29
he drops charges he just moves he just votes
with his feet so he moves to miami he was the
01:06:35
first one from that sort of like the sort
of the core like silicon valley plugged in
01:06:41
ecosystem to move out to miami he says he did the
seed round then he talked to keith rabboy and he's
01:06:48
the one who convinced keith rabboy to move to
miami so keith rabboy then he did the series a
01:06:55
so was the seed investor of miami and he got rabbi
do the series a and then rabboy you know he's very
01:07:00
you know prominent and loud on social media he's
been evangelizing the whole thing and then he got delian and founders fund and their whole noise
machine to move you know their circus to miami
01:07:17
they've got a mayor of miami francis suarez who
actually said we want tech here right you know
01:07:22
and they don't they don't have a homeless problem
the city has a lot of cops it's well managed so
01:07:28
look he's got the right environment and and
most of all the city of miami is welcoming
01:07:33
to the tech ecosystem where san francisco the
politicians seem to can't wait to get rid of it
01:07:38
but it's all comes back to this homeless issue
i think if if and gotten punched in the face by
01:07:44
the homeless person i think this all would have
played out very differently it's very very true let's wrap on a quick fang um i don't you must
have seen every single major tech company had a
01:07:55
massive blowout quarter and when i say massive
i mean unbelievable and the five the five tech
01:08:02
companies now collectively this year um will make
more than 1.2 trillion dollars trillion with a t
01:08:10
of revenue if those five companies were a country
it would be the 14th largest country in the world
01:08:17
wow we're not talking market cap here folks
we're talking cash in the bank account just revenue no no just revenue really right now which
is which which i think is a good proxy for gdp
01:08:27
and so the point is you know if these companies
were countries collectively fang it would be um
01:08:33
a top 15 country and and if you and so i
guess really what we've learned is what
01:08:38
we've known which is okay these are monopolies
they have pricing power you know unfortunately
01:08:45
facebook had to actually even disclose that
you know inventory only grew by 12 but prices
01:08:50
grew by 35 percent um you know google basically
showed the same thing and if you go back to
01:08:57
sort of like the pillar of andy truss law which is
that 1970 odd supreme court case it defined what's
01:09:02
called the consumer welfare test right so so you
know the ftc and doj they're relatively toothless
01:09:10
in the face of companies cutting prices but
they can really act when companies raise prices
01:09:15
and here's where their definition of a monopoly
which is brittle it doesn't account for 20 you
01:09:20
know 2021 tech companies does come into play
because now you can see that they're that they're
01:09:26
winding up their pricing power if they can raise
prices number one the second thing that i'll say
01:09:31
is the apple facebook thing is a very important
canary in the coal mine as well because it's not
01:09:38
as if the five of them can actually work together
there's infighting right and so yeah it's game of
01:09:44
thrones well with this new update to ios you know
what those dialogues will essentially do in my
01:09:51
opinion if i had to guess is limit inventory right
so facebook and google will have fewer ads that
01:09:58
they can actually run in a targeted way and so the
only way that they can keep them growing revenue
01:10:04
with fewer impressions is by raising prices even
more and then the last thing i'll say is uh you
01:10:09
know this complicated dynamic between apple
facebook and google is that google still pays apple almost 70 or 80 billion dollars for search
whereas facebook pays them nothing so if you put
01:10:19
all these things in a box i think you're going
to see the beginning of the end this is where now you can see the end game come into focus which
is wedding well you don't need necessarily new
01:10:30
laws in section 230 although we'll have that you
now see fangm moving into the line of sight of the
01:10:37
traditional antitrust framework because now they
can use very traditional you know anti-competitive
01:10:42
pricing law to go after these guys i am going
to i am going to strongly disagree with chamoth okay and i've not disagreed with chemotherapy
strongly since we've done the podcast the the
01:10:51
reason i strongly disagree is because this is
not inventory that is being sold at a fixed price
01:10:56
where the price is set by the company facebook and
google in particular run an auction model they are
01:11:04
a marketplace business they have advertisers who
show up and they bid on ads which is the inventory
01:11:11
that they're able to get based on the data that
they're able to match to that particular ad slot
01:11:16
if the advertisers can get more value by bidding
a higher price because of the data that they're
01:11:22
getting that shows that this customer is more
likely to click on the ad and ultimately buy something they will bid more for the ads what has
been such an incredible juggernaut of a business
01:11:31
for both google and then facebook which was
effectively a mimic of google system was this auction model and the innovation has been in
getting more data as you uh as you track consumers
01:11:42
around the internet and secondly is in the smart
ad targeting which is where the algorithm figures
01:11:48
out which ad to show the consumer based on whether
that consumer is likely to click on the ad or not
01:11:53
and the more consumers click on the ads the more
advertisers are willing to pay for an impression
01:11:59
because that ad is now going to con that ad is
now going to convert to more revenue for them that is why this is not a monopolistic approach
it is an auction approach and i think and it's
01:12:09
why they've won in the past over this argument but
yeah go ahead i could go ahead at facebook my team was the one that built it um so i oversaw those
guys back in 2008 and nine when we did the first
01:12:19
version of it obviously it's gotten much more
sophisticated and you're right it's a vic reaction and literally my mandate to the team
was i don't want your innovations
01:12:27
copy google and give me a version of what google
looks like and we're going to implement it there's a problem it's not exclusively that ads
are not sold entirely based on that system ads
01:12:38
are sold direct via a team so for example when
budweiser writes a hundred million dollar check or
01:12:43
procter gamble they're not necessarily
stepping in the auction the same way as a small and medium-sized business and if you look
at how facebook and google have oriented their
01:12:52
policy they've only highlighted those people
because david to those people you're absolutely
01:12:58
right there's a very legitimate market clearing
price argument for them but there are an entire
01:13:03
class of advertisers that come in over the top i'm
saying brand advertisers yeah that gets structured deals that get structured apis they get structured
access and facebook is and google is setting price
01:13:13
and microsoft is setting price and so this is
where that's the entry point because at the end
01:13:18
of the day an impression to david friedberg
whether it's seen by the local taco shop
01:13:24
or procter gamble some of it will be a victory
auction some of it will be structured inventory
01:13:30
it's a convoluted mess of the two you can't tease
it out you're right at the end at the end it's about getting cpm higher right it's about cost
per thousand impressions but it's a lot i think
01:13:39
this is a good conversation this is episode 31 i
would love to talk about some of my early days at
01:13:45
google and how how we made some of those decisions
because i think it's it's instrument instrumental to how this is designed to be ultimately a system
of commerce efficiency that's really important
01:13:55
not just a system of selling ads but let's talk
let's talk about it later yeah okay as we wrap most impressive um observation from these uh
quarterly reports that just came out for me
01:14:08
amazon's ad business 24 billion
growing at 77 year-over-year on top of
01:14:15
their amazon web services business it'll be bigger
than aws in three years at this rate yeah what's everyone else's uh what's everyone else's that
to me was like whoa what was the most impressive
01:14:25
thing for the rest of you guys on on there's a lot
of impressive things here i have a second but go ahead yeah it was unbelievably impressive but we
have we have four enormous monopolies on our hands
01:14:36
and if i was a betting man end of decade
these four monopolies will not exist
01:14:42
i'm not that bad oh broken up yeah by the end
by the end of this decade so 20 30. yeah okay
01:14:49
log back that i'm willing to bet you dollars to
donuts that what they they face breakup i'll bet
01:14:55
a couple donuts you bet a couple dollars okay and
we'll uh give the donuts to saks i'm off donuts
01:15:02
zach what was your sacks what was your
takeaway well i mean i would up level it slightly in in antitrust there's historically
two schools there's the bourke school and the
01:15:10
brandeis school bork was narrowly focused
just on consumer harm and would be closer to like the freeberg position the brandeis
school is more about concentrations of power
01:15:19
right and would be more concerned about you
know not letting people get too powerful in this
01:15:24
american democracy and i think the interesting
thing is now that there's folks on the right who definitely are buying into the brandeis school
because of the restrictions on free speech and
01:15:34
access to the marketplace of ideas that companies
like amazon actually all of them at amazon google
01:15:40
apple um facebook have all uh imposed
they're limiting people's access to the marketplace of ideas so i think now it's really
interesting you're seeing a combination of both
01:15:51
the right and the left get together saying these
companies are too big they're too powerful i think
01:15:56
the republicans are saying we'll let you keep
the money we're not going to take your wealth the democrats are saying we're going to take your your
power and your wealth the republicans are saying
01:16:05
we want to level your power a little bit but i
think you know these forces are going to come together and i agree with chamoth i think i don't
know exactly when but i think these companies are
01:16:15
going to get broken up and knocked down because
they are too powerful oh it's a good it's a good it's a good counter argument sex i mean the other
that that more important point of view of power uh
01:16:24
versus uh you know economic harm to consumers is
an important one clearly there's no accounting for
01:16:29
that quantitatively um and politics will drive
it my i think like it's just incredible i mean
01:16:35
if you guys think about it as a consumer i mean
how incredible are the products that alphabet amazon and apple have made and free and all
free they'll still exist if they get broken
01:16:44
i mean even even the iphone like ordering stuff
on android every day i'm amazed and i marvel at
01:16:50
the world we live in at the [ __ ] that we
can do with the click of a button i mean it is such an incredible world we live in because of
these businesses so as much as we can hound them
01:16:58
for all the wealth here's the problem here's the
problem is that apple and google in particular have a monopoly on the applications that can
exist on these these incredible phones yes
01:17:09
and if you can't get access to the app store you
you can't exist as an app and frankly you can't
01:17:16
in the modern world if these guys cut you off and
so we already saw a congressional hearing very recently in which um spotify and some other apps
were testifying against google and apple because
01:17:28
the apple tax because yes because these platforms
were discriminating against those applications
01:17:34
in order to benefit themselves and i think that
in particular has to be looked at and i think
01:17:40
eventually stop two things two things apple just
got sued by the eu today so they got slapped with
01:17:45
antitrust for their app store so that's gonna
sort itself out as well so you have all this as jason said game of thrones i wanted to read to
you guys something justin just put it in the chat
01:17:56
this is something i said to brad gerstner in 2019
when we were he was interviewing me for something
01:18:01
and i think it's it's even more true today than
it was in 2019. i said the following i said
01:18:08
my perspective on facebook is the reason why
the market gives it a small multiple because
01:18:13
by the way you hear this all the time like my gosh
these companies are so cheap why are they so cheap i said the reason why the market gives
it such a small multiple is because
01:18:22
they don't believe the market the market doesn't
believe that their earnings potential is durable
01:18:29
because the market is sure that in the next 10
or so years governments will start to act because
01:18:35
they care about their own self-preservation so if
you get very reductionist at the end of the day
01:18:41
that's what governments care about and so they're
going to legislate to protect their monopoly which
01:18:46
is the ability to have power all right there it is
folks a shout out from chamath to chamath in 2019
01:18:54
shout out i'd like to give a shout out to myself
hold on jason no jason i would like to do this
01:19:02
don't hurt your arm patting yourself on the
back you got to stretch that out with your functional stretching on sundays i get my
functional stretch on love you besties can
01:19:11
best when are you guys coming back please can we
play poker now that we're all vaccinated i might have to i might have to go to new york next week
to just round out my three can we book the uh can
01:19:20
we book the miami trip to moth let's let's go out
there we're no we're doing a live show oh big news is coming everybody we are going to be putting
up a voting mechanism you're going to be able to
01:19:29
vote with your dollar with a tiny donation to see
all in life whichever city gets the most donations
01:19:38
all right i'm just going to miami but where are
we where are we going to donate the money to have we decided that or i mean i think it should be
something relationally poker and the winner or you
01:19:47
know do a single hand plow and the winner gets to
decide the charity of their choice oh i like that
01:19:52
i like that that could be fun i mean i think
something that we've already decided can we just decide to sell tickets in miami and new york and
be done with the show miami i know i think miami
01:20:02
and new york we could just do a one-two i mean
it's a hot quick jump jamal you decide the date well the rest of us will make it work these guys
are going to be there end of may we're going to
01:20:10
pick a date we're going to go to miami we're going
to do the first taped live all-in and we're going to sell we're going to sell tickets for like
5 or 10 bucks all the proceeds go to charity
01:20:19
it's got to be more like 50 or 25 because of the
venue because we have to the venue's got to get there vig but anyway love you besties love you
guys love you freeburg love you mom most of all
01:20:36
we'll see you all next time
on the all in podcast bye bye let your winners ride rain man david
01:20:50
and they've just gone crazy
01:21:11
we should all just get a room and just have one
big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension
that they just need to release
01:21:22
your feet
