SPEAKER_02: Is Chamath in a room with his PR crew right now, like rehearsing and practicing?

SPEAKER_01: This pod is ruined.

SPEAKER_14: Hey, everybody. So I just wanted to make sure, based on last week's pod, it was absolutely clear. I care about human rights. Many of you know my origin story, but for those of you that don't, I was born in a country

SPEAKER_15: that's no stranger to civil war and religious and political persecution.

SPEAKER_14: Growing up, my family and I felt those effects. It affected our safety. It's in part what led my family to file for refugee status and stay in Canada. So this is a real part of my lived experience. That said, I realized that what I said last week lacked empathy, particularly towards others who are dealing with persecution, in this case, the Uyghurs. And based on what I read this week, I think what's happening to them in Western China is a terrible situation. I also want to talk about this idea about nobody caring. Look, if we take a step back and replace Uyghur with other really important issues, like the conflict in Yemen, the potential war in the Ukraine, gun control, school shootings, healthcare equity, we're faced with horrible events every day. However, the unfortunate state of the world today is that we've also normalized this routine of being confronted with something tragic or horrible or unjust, and being allowed to react with thoughts and prayers. And this was the real intent of what I was trying to get across. So when I talk about my line, it's not about whether something matters or not.

SPEAKER_19: It's about which issues, of all the important issues we face every day, where I have the

SPEAKER_21: expertise and I believe I have the ability to have a real impact, even if just by a little.

Chamath Palihapitiya: For me, those areas happen to be climate change, life sciences, and deep tech. But just because this is where I spend my time, it's not to take away from any of the real work any of you are doing in other areas.

SPEAKER_14: And then lastly, I just wanted to explain to people who may be new to the pod, because of last week, that this is a place where four of us, four friends, talk about a whole wide range of things. We explore our curiosities. We try to learn from each other. We challenge each other. But we've always done it in a really supportive space. And I hope you keep that in mind as you listen and watch going forward. And hopefully, you can bring some of that to your own conversations. That's all I have to say.

SPEAKER_25: Well said.

SPEAKER_27: Sax, I mean, I know you have something to say, but I'll say I got a lot of messages this past week after the show, which I felt a little bit hurt by and mischaracterized. And maybe it was simply I said the wrong thing at the wrong time.

SPEAKER_29: And so I want to just be very clear about a couple of points, if I can take a minute. That's all right with you guys.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah. So I said, I just wanted to, I was going to actually send this out on Twitter, and I decided it was better just to address it on the pod. So to be clear, I strongly believe in and support absolute freedom of all people. And this means de facto, I strongly disagree with the suppression of free speech, denial of religious freedom, imprisonment, harm, capital punishment, slavery, and genocide. I thought this was obvious when we were having our conversation. I did not know I needed to be-

SPEAKER_34: So to be clear, you're not in favor of genocide.

SPEAKER_27: I'm not in favor of genocide. I'm not in favor of slavery or capital punishment or suppression of religious freedom. I thought this was obvious. The conversation I tried to have was the wrong conversation at the wrong time, which was to try to talk about the broader China v. U.S. narrative that is swelling and will continue to swell this decade. I think that the primary function of civilized society or any advanced social system is to take care of and protect those that cannot take care of or protect themselves. And this is usually done by government. But when government fails and government is, in fact, the oppressor, I think it is the responsibility of other governments and other peoples to step in and have a voice and to take action. That is kind of my moral framework. I think it's important. I don't deny any of the harm being done to the Uyghur population in China. I don't agree with it on a principled basis. And I don't think that what the Chinese government is doing is right. And the point that I was trying to make during our conversation was a very different one that I think got completely lost in the moment, which was really just about what's going on with the China-U.S. narrative right now. I'm not pro-China. I'm also not anti-China. I am particularly interested in understanding the broader China-U.S. dynamic and what it means for the world over the coming decade and decades. I think it's really important for us when we evaluate these things and to understand them to not just take sides, but to understand the context in the broadest way possible. And that's why I am trying to get both sides and understand the mindset of the peoples that are involved in running these governments and the way that this world is going to evolve as this economic tension continues to mount. And so that's where I was trying to go. And I was just trying to highlight where I think everything is headed over the next decade or two, independent of what are obvious human rights issues going on. So let me just stop there and say thanks for letting me say that.

SPEAKER_29: But that was important for me to just be really clear on because clearly I wasn't clear

SPEAKER_38: last week, so well, and I'll just add to what you said that I also thought it was implied that you care about these things and that you're not in favor of them. I didn't think that need to be spoken. Yeah. So I think it's nice that you're clarifying it, but I think any reasonable person would understand that if you care deeply as a vegan about factory farming, that you also care about humans and, you know, genocide and torture or whatever issue. So I think it's like your statement is so obvious that I wonder if you even had to have made it, but I'm glad you did. Sachs?

SPEAKER_42: Okay. So I guess first I should say that, you know, what's happening to the Uyghurs in China is indefensible. You've got reports of upwards of a million, you know, of these people being held in detention camps, there's reports of mass sterilization and rape. It's like ethnic cleansing over there. So that's absolutely wrong. And it's one of a growing list of issues that we have serious problems with China on, which include theft of intellectual property, cyber espionage, the bullying of their neighbors, their crackdown on dissidents, the list goes on and on. I mean, I think we have to be clear eyed about the challenge and the threat that China represents. And we've discussed that on this pod many times. That being said, you know, what I think we saw this week was really about cancel culture, right? You had in response to last week's pod, you have this online mob form and they want to

SPEAKER_45: take what Chamath said and interpret it in the worst possible light so they can turn the outrage meter up to 11. And everyone gets to basically go on Twitter and virtue signal and say what great people they are because Chamath is a bad person. And I just want to speak to that issue. I mean, there's a huge amount of hypocrisy going on in that because how many of the people who are tweeting their outrage and their denunciation of Chamath are doing it from a device made by forced labor in China, wearing their Nikes made by forced labor in China on their way to Target to buy cheap goods made in China. How many of those people have actually lifted a finger in the real world to help the Uyghurs? How many of them have sacrificed an economic benefit in any way? And so when Chamath said nobody cares, I thought it was a really startling statement by him. But if you define caring as doing something more than just virtue signaling and expressing your feelings, as actually making a sacrifice or taking a risk in the real world, I thought he was frankly telling us a very uncomfortable truth. We haven't really, most of us, done anything. And in that sense, I think the reason why his comments hit such a nerve, I don't think you get the kind of pylon that we got unless he's saying something that's hitting a nerve. And I think the nerve, the thing that he exposed is that we're not really doing more than virtue signaling on this issue. And then came all the, you know, all the hypocrites. You've got the NBA denouncing him, issuing a statement. When, what have they done? I mean, when Daryl Morey spoke up on behalf of the protesters in Hong Kong, the NBA shut down and sanctioned him. And, you know, LeBron James said he was uneducated. Actually, I think Daryl Morey was pretty educated about what was going on. So you've got those hypocrites. You've got the White House issuing a statement disavowing Chamath. But Hunter Biden went over to China to manage billions of dollars for them and profited by his business dealings over there. So there are a bunch of hypocrites. And the list goes on and on. And so, you know, I think that if, in order for the mob to summon the outrage that it summons, it requires them to, I would say, first, put the worst possible light on what Chamath is saying and to ignore, I'd say, the fundamental truth of it, and second, to engage in this massive hypocrisy. And that is the way that cancel culture operates. And I don't think we should buy into it. So I appreciate what Chamath said. I think he's clarifying his remarks. He's showing that he does care and he does have empathy, as we all should. But I think there was a fundamental truth in what Chamath said last week.

David Sacks: And that is what people are so uncomfortable with.

SPEAKER_49: Okay, well said.

SPEAKER_38: I have feelings. And most of all, I'm thankful we had the discussion. The goal of this pod, I think what makes it special and why y'all who are listening come here every week is because you know we're going to be honest with you and we're going to tackle

SPEAKER_51: these hard discussions and I think Friedberg's comments and Sachs' comments really explain that and what our intent here is. And human rights is one of the hardest issues to discuss. That's why you don't hear it being discussed.

SPEAKER_38: And there are not easy answers. And I think, you know, I was challenged by my besties on the episode and their questions and their challenges were absolutely critical. Yes, how can we care about one group of people when the people in our backyard we're not caring about? Are we going to invade countries? These are very nuanced, difficult questions. But we must have this discussion. And if we try to cancel people with a 20-second clip that looks completely different, if you look at the two-minute clip or you take the time to have a 40-minute listen of the whole segment, you get a totally different picture. And I think it's very important to raise awareness about human rights. And it is an issue that I have been passionate about my whole life. And I'm not trying to virtue signal or score any points here. But I know firsthand that raising awareness and having the discussions reduces the violations because dictators, despots, and people doing this kind of stuff do not want the heat of what happened this past week. And what happened this past week is that more awareness was raised about the Uyghurs and the situation that they're going through, I think then, you know, as somebody who's monitored the situation that I've seen in the last couple of years, perhaps this was a tipping point. And that is something good that can come out of that discussion. Now, on a personal basis, I have had some feelings of guilt because it was very hard for me to watch what happened to Chamath this week and to watch people dunking on him. And then let's face it, I brought the topic up and I dug in with my feelings and it got a little heated and I'm suddenly being portrayed as, you know, a hero in this discussion. That's not the intent. And there's no hero or villain in this. There is a hard discussion in this. And I am extremely proud of my friendship with each of you, especially you, Chamath. I am extremely proud of your candidness and tackling these issues and making people think about that. And, you know, I'm just so proud to be friends with each of you. And I'm so proud of the work we do here every week. And I think it's important work. Um, and I feel like I get smarter every week and I hope the audience does too. And I hope we can keep having these discussions. Um, and we don't make fun of each other. Yeah. Now let's make fun of each other. I mean, I don't know if we're allowed to laugh.

SPEAKER_54: This is like so serious and heavy, but. So what you're saying is thank you, Chamath.

SPEAKER_55: Now that's going to be clipped for 20 seconds. I'm going to get canceled.

SPEAKER_59: Jason Avark. Jason Callaghan is thank you. Jason Avark.

SPEAKER_60: But Sax's point about, I mean, look, we've talked about cancel culture a lot on this show.

SPEAKER_27: And, you know, we've always been, I think, generally able to be third-party observers to what's happened. And it was really interesting to go through the cycle this week where, um, you know, there was just kind of a, an, an echoing narrative, uh, on one thing that was said with one direction. There were a few pieces though, Chamath, right? I mean, it wasn't there a piece from the Atlantic and some other pieces that kind of highlighted that things that you said were things that a lot of people won't say. And that's what was really so shocking for so many people.

SPEAKER_23: What's the, what's the Peter Thiel comment on this whole, on all of this stuff? Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: He said, if no one's saying it, it's probably true.

SPEAKER_64: Or if you're not allowed to say it, it's probably true.

SPEAKER_66: Yeah. If you're not allowed to say it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_67: But, um, yeah, it was, uh, it was really.

SPEAKER_42: Based on the, the mob that formed and, you know, it's already kind of blown over and that's the way this kind of cancel culture starts. But for that sort of, uh, that white hot, really intense day or two, you would think

SPEAKER_45: that like Chamath had practiced genocide himself, you know, it, you know, because everybody comes out and the way that they make themselves feel better is by virtue

SPEAKER_42: signaling on this issue. And again, I would just say that, well, I think we should be thinking about what do we do, um, you know, how, how do we actually make a difference? Because I don't think just virtue signaling on the issue is, is going to do it. Um, and, you know, at the same time that this mob was forming against Chamath, we had a two hour Biden press conference in which Biden never mentioned the Uyghurs once, the press core never mentioned the Uyghurs once. So does that mean the Uyghurs are below their line?

SPEAKER_45: Um, you know, why wasn't it mentioned, you know, shouldn't we be ganging up on Biden? Well, why is it, you know, why is the press ganging up on Chamath when they're not ganging up on Biden for that? So there is a fair amount of hypocrisy here. I actually think, Jason, I think you make an excellent point that by discussing these

SPEAKER_42: issues and raising these issues, it creates a little bit of a check on the people perpetrating these atrocities because they don't like to be exposed that way. And, you know, maybe we should be boycotting the Beijing Olympics.

SPEAKER_45: I mean, maybe that should be on the table. Maybe we should be boycotting the NBA. I mean, let's have that conversation.

SPEAKER_70: Yeah.

SPEAKER_51: Or maybe everybody who goes, I wouldn't want to see the athletes miss the Olympics, but maybe they could each just raise their hand and do a U or some sort of a signal to show they support the situation or they're aware of it with the Uyghurs. There could be some, you know, modest protest or statement they could make without ruining, you know, their lives work. I always hate when the Olympics get canceled for some political reason, because I think those people work so hard for it.

SPEAKER_38: Um, but raising awareness, you know, is a noble goal in all of this. And then also doing things is a noble goal. Um, and, um, yeah, I mean, I, I, it was very weird to watch the, the mob form and then dissipate and just who was, you know, taking the time to actually listen to the full episodes. It was clear from that Atlantic article and some of the nuance takes that they listened to the full discussion because there are bullet points here. Like, like there was somebody asked me a very challenging question. I think it might've been you free Berg, like, are we going to start invading countries over human rights? And then there's more suffering and death and pain from the wars. And, and, and when do you decide as the, the democracies of the world to invade the dictatorships of the world to promote human rights? Like this is a very difficult issue, uh, that the world has had to deal with sadly before. And there is no easy answer there, you know, and I, I, I, I, I, I think that.

SPEAKER_42: This is, this is a point that I also tried to make on the last episode, like free Berg did, which is, um, I, I think it's, I think it's actually great to have these ideals and we should have moral clarity about what's happening. And I think it, what's happening is wrong. It's outrageous. It's an atrocity. Um, but, but the question is what we do about it. Um, and, um, and, and the, the, the reality is, even though it's important to speak out about human rights, these types of fulminations about human rights, when they become the sort of, you know, when, when people, when we get into this, like frenzy, it's been the prelude and pretext for every misguided foreign intervention that we've had over the last 20 years.

SPEAKER_45: And the example, the Iraq war, I mean, Saddam Hussein was suddenly Hitler, um, you know, the, the goals of nation building Afghanistan for 20 years, our invasion of, uh, Libya, we got rid of Gaddafi and we replaced it with chaos.

SPEAKER_60: Um, for years, we were talking about how evil the Taliban and their social system was, and then we just handed Afghanistan back to them a few weeks ago.

SPEAKER_45: Exactly. So, you know, and so these types of, um, you know, when, when you kind of, you whip people up over human rights, I mean, I agree with the sentiment and I agree with the moral clarity, but I also can't help but recognize that neocons and the military industrial complex and the Washington blob have used this type of rhetoric for decades to corral us and stampede us into wars and foreign interventions that don't make any sense. And we all recognize after the whole project has gone wrong, like Afghanistan, we become suddenly more realistic about the whole thing. And suddenly, you know, we're not talking about, you know, the, the, the, the sort of the moral atrocities of the Taliban anymore, but the discipline is still there. They're still there. The discipline though, is to be able to check ourselves before we get into these interventions. And I don't think we do a good job of that. We're whipping ourselves up into these mobs and we're in a frenzy.

SPEAKER_84: And the, the raising awareness is something that has been lacking the, you know, certain organizations.

SPEAKER_86: And I think it's very important that we don't take organizations that have engaged with a country, let's say China or Saudi Arabia, they may have engaged in good faith with the goal of, you know, engagement is a positive for humanity in the world.

SPEAKER_38: Okay, if we engage with China, and we are codependent on each other, that will lead to a better arc for human rights and for humanity and less wars because our, our economies are entangled and we do business together. Okay, this is a fine premise. What the dictators and despots want you to do is to fight each other and not look at the human rights atrocities.

SPEAKER_88: So it's easier for us to say, oh, the NBA, oh, Apple, oh, you know, pick the, the, the company or corporate interest or organization that has engaged. Um, but by raising awareness, um, consistently, it gives other people the ability to talk about this, some organizations weren't willing to even talk about this or say the name Uyghurs.

SPEAKER_38: And if we keep talking about the Uyghurs, the chances that that situation improves, I think there is a chance it does improve.

SPEAKER_27: But I do think this like notion that the four of us can get together on a podcast and not get canceled because, you know, we, we don't collect money from advertisers and we started having these conversations amongst friends and we just put it on the internet. Um, first of all, it's a great kind of reflection of what you can do in the United States with the freedom of speech that we have, and we can just put this on the internet and anyone can watch it around the world. Uh, I don't know how many people are watching it, but mostly freedom of speech, mostly freedom of speech, most, um, but I do think that it's, it's pretty valuable.

SPEAKER_29: And I do think that that's, you know, an important point for us is, you know, as much as Chamath got completely destroyed this week.

SPEAKER_13: Um, you know, the, I gotta, I gotta say other than COVID, I'm, uh, I'm feeling pretty good. You feel better.

SPEAKER_29: You're pretty bummed for a day or two.

SPEAKER_26: I mean, I think the, the COVID thing was scary because four of my five kids got it. Um, so I was just like, Oh my God. How's everyone doing by the way?

SPEAKER_94: I'll be, I'll be very honest with you.

SPEAKER_26: So, uh, between both houses, um, you know, mine and my ex-wife's, four of the five kids got it. Our nanny got it. Nat did not. And the youngest baby did not. Uh, there's a real difference between in my house, how the boys experienced COVID and how the girls experienced COVID, quite honestly.

SPEAKER_14: It like we ex, you know, we've expressed certain symptoms, specifically a really bad sore throat and a cough that the girls in our house did not. The girls had more intestinal issues. The boys roughly did not.

SPEAKER_26: So it all manifested kind of in odd ways. Uh, but God, my God, I mean, what a pain in the ass.

SPEAKER_97: Well, to be going through that and then also like monitoring Twitter and inbound, your phone must have been blowing up. I wasn't doing any of that.

David Friedberg: Okay, Jason, start the pod. Let's go. All right. Well, okay, everybody.

SPEAKER_86: Welcome to the all in podcast with us. Uh, the sultan of science. Who's got a new startup. He launched. We'll hear about that later in the show. The rain man himself. And dare I say the dictator.

SPEAKER_105: I was like, guys.

SPEAKER_108: It's not like we, it's not like we didn't warn you.

SPEAKER_110: We got a 63 episodes. We called them the dictator. This was bound to happen. Let's start the show everybody.

SPEAKER_113: I mean, you guys were like after 20 years of friendship. It's like, I don't know. The list is like 9,000 items long.

SPEAKER_117: I was like, yeah, I'm gonna cancel them. We got a long list. All right.

SPEAKER_118: So first up, I think we should start with a duo of stories that relate to each other.

SPEAKER_88: Microsoft announced it's buying Activision Blizzard for $68 billion of cash. Microsoft's got a lot of cash. Um, and I think we all understand like why this is a great idea for Microsoft with Xbox.

SPEAKER_86: And obviously, Activision owns Call of Duty, which has 120 million or so monthly active users. They also own a bunch of nerd stuff from Blizzard like Diablo, World of Warcraft, my favorite Starcraft. And those have upwards of 40 million. They also had bought King. If you remember that they make Candy Crush and those kind of casual games have a quarter billion users. Uh, but even with all of these, uh, it's a highly fragmented market. But in related news, Alina Khan, the, I believe 32 year old head of the FTC, uh, who has written a bunch of pieces. We talked about this on all in episode 36, sat down with Kara Swisher and Andrew Ross Sorkin for an interview. And, uh, basically we're moving, or she intends to move the goalposts on antitrust.

SPEAKER_38: I want to play three clips and have you each react to them. Here's the first one. Uh, and this is her take on changing the antitrust from consumer harm to, uh, now shift to does this deal.

SPEAKER_88: And we'll take the Activision deal here as, uh, but one example, but you could take the Instagram and the YouTube deals as well. Uh, do these deals substantially reduce competition in the future? Let's watch the first clip.

SPEAKER_123: In certain cases, maybe too much success. And so the question is, when is the regulator supposed to say, mm, this could work. And if it works, it's actually worked too well.

SPEAKER_126: It's an interesting question.

SPEAKER_127: And I think, you know, for enforcers, the real question is, is this a deal that could lessen competition?

SPEAKER_128: And in hindsight, all deals to some, all deals to some degree have been lessen competition.

SPEAKER_127: Substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly.

SPEAKER_130: Um, and there's also indication that Congress wanted enforcers, not just to act when, you know, the third and fourth companies are merging or the first and second, but actually in the incipiency. When you said, see trends towards concentration, that those can also be important moments for enforcers to jump in.

SPEAKER_88: So, uh, what do we think, uh, Freeburg about this sort of new rubric? Not consumer harm. Because obviously if Microsoft buys Activision and makes those part of Game Pass and you get Call of Duty for free with your Game Pass and the Candy Crush games and Blizzard games, that's good for consumers. They get a whole bunch of more games. It would be like Disney buying Star Wars. You get all the Star Wars stuff in Disney Plus for the same low price. Yeah.

SPEAKER_60: Look, Saks is our legal eagle here.

SPEAKER_27: But I'll, but I'll just say, um, before, uh, you know, he probably speaks better informed than me. Um, if it's not about consumer harm and it's about decreasing competition in this broadly, I would argue, subjective sense, then, um, what's scary is that there are going to be decisions made by interpreters of what is and isn't competitive.

SPEAKER_136: And ultimately, if they're not trying to keep in mind the best interest of the consumer, then it is in fact going to cause consumer harm at some point.

SPEAKER_27: Not necessarily in all deals that they block, but there will be deals that they may block that may have benefited consumers. Meaning prices go down. Imagine having all of your products integrated in one streaming service instead of having to pay for three streaming services. So instead of paying $70 across HBO Max and Disney Plus and Netflix, you get everything in one, but today the regulators would not let those businesses merge because that would be anti-competitive under this context. And so this is going to be a touchy debate and it's going to be difficult. I think ultimately to rationalize this if there is going to be a point in the future where we can actually show that consumer harm would be caused by decreasing competition in the marketplace. And so I would be nervous about that subjectivity and the slippery slope it enables.

SPEAKER_74: I think it's a great point. Think about it.

SPEAKER_51: If you had to pay, instead of for Disney Plus, you paid for Pixar Plus, Disney Plus, Marvel Plus and Star Wars Plus, it'd be chaos in your household to manage all those accounts.

SPEAKER_86: It's a much better offering. Better consumer experience.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah.

SPEAKER_86: Much better consumer experience and cheaper.

SPEAKER_27: And this is why, by the way, I said, sorry, I'll say, this is why I said in the past, it's, we use the term monopoly as if it's de facto evil and bad. But not all monopolies or businesses that have very big moats is another way to kind of describe them are necessarily bad for the customer. You get cheaper products, you get better products, you get more of an advantage.

SPEAKER_136: They may ultimately be yielded to be anti-competitive in a harmful way, but not necessarily always.

SPEAKER_14: But let me explain to you where she's coming from. Like there's a fundamental pillar of capitalism that says that excess returns must get competed away.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So if a capitalist system is to be efficient, if a company has profit margins of 99%, competitors emerge pushing those profit margins down to something reasonable where you get to some sort of equilibrium. And the whole principle of what she's saying is in the absence of competition, we don't really know what the equilibrium return really looks like. And she's not saying that, but that is the implicitness of what she's saying. And so in the, if you allow all of this stuff to aggregate, maybe Google shouldn't have 45% EBITDA margins. Maybe in a really competitive society, they would only have 18% and that's actually better net net for the system. The problem is that counterfactual to your point, Freeburg is impossible to measure. How do you know and how much value do you need to take away of the panoply of things that Google does to figure that out? And that's, I think, where the problem with it, but let's be clear. In 2019, I wrote in my annual letter, there's a section called the tightening of the regulatory noose and meaning it was a framework for how to basically dismantle big tech. And element number one of that was a changing regulatory landscape. And it's really incredible to see it in front of our eyes. We got a bill that just left judiciary, right, that was effectively voted across the aisle. That's now going to go to the floor of the Senate, which is going to rewrite some of these anti-competitive bills.

SPEAKER_74: It was like 75-25 and it was a 50-50 committee of Democrats and Republicans. So clearly across the aisle.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Clearly across the aisle. And I mean, the funny thing about that was Feinstein and Padilla, the two Democratic senators from California, where most of these companies are. In the Wall Street Journal article that I read, railed against it, but still voted for it to go to the floor. So it's, I think some version of that is going to pass. She's going to go and scrutinize these companies. I still think this Microsoft Activision deal on balance gets done, because if you take the absolute values away from it, the reality is that it's an adjacent part of Microsoft's core business.

SPEAKER_14: And there's nothing fundamentally monopolistic about what would happen if you let Microsoft and Activision come together.

SPEAKER_51: Could it reduce competition in the future? I think would be her new lens.

SPEAKER_88: And if Xbox has Call of Duty and Sony PlayStation doesn't, or the next console doesn't, maybe it does. You could make the argument. Sax, what are your takes on this? Very hard to apply standard of reducing future competition, because as Aaron Ross Sarkin said very clearly,

SPEAKER_148: all of these reduced competition is now we got to get into what is the word substantially mean in this context. Yeah.

SPEAKER_42: So my take on, on Lita Khan is that she's got some worthwhile observations on the problems posed by these big tech monopolies, but I don't think she's got the right remedies. So on the observations, I think she's correct, broadly speaking, that these big tech companies, the fangs, they have way too much power in the marketplace. There are now gatekeepers over the internet that control all these powerful platforms. And broadly speaking, it is time, I think, to basically have some limits on those powers, make sure they don't abuse it. I think she's also right that the traditional standard of consumer harm doesn't really capture that sort of concept of market power for these free ad based services, right? Because there is no pricing. And furthermore, I think she's got a point when she says that, you know, a deal.

SPEAKER_43: When you say no pricing, you mean Facebook and Google don't charge.

SPEAKER_42: The consumer doesn't pay. So how can there be consumer harm, right? Right. So clearly that there's that standard of consumer harm doesn't really capture the market power dynamic.

SPEAKER_45: And then I think the last observation she makes, which I think is pretty, pretty valid, is this idea that, you know, when Facebook bought Instagram at that time, it didn't seem to be a problem. But it definitely allowed them to extend their monopoly from the desktop into mobile. And it probably should be scrutinized harder. My problem is with her remedies. I mean, what she's basically saying is, first of all, like you said, any deal that could decrease competition in the future is a problem. Well, the whole goal of business and making business moves like an acquisition is to build your moat, is to win, create a more competitive offering. So there's no limiting factor. There's no bright line test there. At least with consumer harm, there's a bright line test, which is about pricing, right? It's mathematically measurable. You could create a model around it. Here, there's absolutely nothing. And so what it's going to do is completely politicize the process of getting an M&A deal approved. And you can see this when she's talking about the impact on labor. I mean, this is a total stop to the labor constituency in the Democratic Party, because, look, Facebook and Google, no matter how powerful monopolies they may be, they don't have a dominant position in the labor. It's just not true. They're competing for the same engineers that every tech company is competing for. So she's bringing a purely political consideration in now. And so, again, there's no bright line rule. It's going to be heavily political. Companies trying to get a merger approval never know whether they're good or not. And even after they get approved, they'll never know they're good. And I have a big problem with her saying that any deal that they approve can be reopened and reevaluated a decade into the future and reversed.

SPEAKER_152: Companies need certainty. That's the real issue.

Chamath Palihapitiya: The rules of capitalism have been that the smarter slash more strategic, you know, entity, if they can run their plays more efficiently, has the right to win. This is almost trying to say, actually, not really. And that is very problematic. You never know you're good. You never know you're good. You never know you're good. And then the problem that it'll create in the equity market specifically is, how do you actually drive shareholder returns? And then what do all these shareholders then do if these companies are rendered to basically stay where they are? And you take a snapshot of the economy and you say, this is what it will be from now on.

SPEAKER_27: But it's, Sachs' point is really interesting. It's going to require M&A to become kind of a political maneuvering process. Similar, you know, create sort of these, you know, obfuscated gates where you don't really know what it's going to take to get through there. And then you've got to go do what you do when you try and convince foreign governments to work with you or allow you to do a transaction in a foreign government in a foreign country. Well, you got to go in and you got to go figure out the politicians who they want, who they are, what they want, and then put together a political consortium that's going to approve the deal, given that there's now going to be subjective, you know, validation.

SPEAKER_158: Whereas before, I think the criteria were much more objective.

SPEAKER_86: Let me play this other clip. This is the clip that Sachs was referencing. Lena Khan also talks about how labor unions are trying to get in on the action slash griff. See you on the other side.

SPEAKER_130: Some of this research has showed that labor markets are significantly concentrated and it's led to, you know, additional thinking at the policy level of how they should be affecting what anti-trust enforcers are doing. So the Justice Department, including in the last administration, started looking at no poach agreements more closely, instances in which employers may be colluding to suppress wages. Both agencies have been looking at the ways in which mergers in particular may lessen competition for labor and have downstream effects on workers in ways that are harmful and that also needs to be on our radar. So I think this is an ongoing conversation, but increasingly the question is, you know, how we implement some of these priorities and not, you know, whether they're important.

SPEAKER_161: But this is the first time you've included labor. This is something labor's wanted for a long time. The idea of looking at antitrust through the lens of unemployment, essentially.

SPEAKER_127: Yeah, there's an interesting history here. I mean, you know, there were cases in which, you know, unions were supportive of transactions because they thought they would lead to more downstream benefits.

SPEAKER_130: But I think we started to see through retrospective studies, instances in which, you know, mergers actually ended up having a harmful effect. And so I think that is what's significantly contributing to this.

SPEAKER_14: Look, this is also part of what I said in 2019. The third element of that plan was you have to change the rules on stock-based compensation.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So instead of her talking about it as labor, I think the more accurate way to say it is like, there's very valuable human capital in technology business. A few people have, you know, discontinuous impact on these businesses. And it has been a stated strategy of all of big tech to use their balance sheets to buy small companies in their incipiency, to use her words, not because it helps advantage their monopoly, but it prevents the leakage of human capital into other ideas. And it prevents those other ideas from really flourishing.

SPEAKER_21: That's really what's been happening for years in Silicon Valley. And we all know that, you know, all the aqua hiring we see is about hoarding talent. And you'd rather pay these people millions of dollars a year, if you're big tech, to basically work on next to nothing,

SPEAKER_165: than take the risk of them going across the street to a competitor and then having them build something that disrupts you.

SPEAKER_166: It disrupts you. Yeah. And this was such a, this is such a known thing.

Chamath Palihapitiya: But the only way, sorry, just to finish, one of the ways that you can change it is you have to change the way that stock-based compensation works, how it's accounted for, you know, how you can actually deal with it on a gap basis, how capitalists then treat that in terms of their earnings. If you don't do that, none of the models change. Yeah. People look past it. People look through it. They don't think it's a real cost, which it is.

SPEAKER_168: And then you're allowed to continue to do it. That's really the underlying issue.

SPEAKER_86: And so much so, Chamath, that the human, the hoarding of human capital was a reoccurring theme on the Silicon Valley HBO show, where people in Hooli were getting paid millions of dollars and hanging out on the roof.

SPEAKER_88: Freeburg, when you look at this human capital labor bring brought into it, isn't the point of a lot of M&A to eliminate jobs and eliminate redundancy. So if you brought in YouTube at Google, I'm not sure if you were there at that time period, the distinct concept was, Hey, we already have an advanced ad network. We already have accounting and we already have servers around the world and storage.

SPEAKER_171: You don't need to hire those people. We can get rid of them or whatever. And we get rid of that redundancy.

SPEAKER_173: Large scale consolidation. That's certainly true.

SPEAKER_27: Most M&A and technology is the opposite where an acquisition takes place and the acquisition gets fueled by further investment after the acquisition is made. When YouTube was acquired, there was a few dozen employees there. And then very quickly, Google scaled that team, the engineering team, the infrastructure team. They even had their own independent ad sales team to thousands of employees. And without that, it would have been very difficult for YouTube to achieve that scale, both from a product success perspective, an infrastructure perspective, but also an employee based perspective with the amount of capital it would have taken to go and raise that from venture capitalists. Maybe nowadays, where there's billions of dollars floating around, it would be different. But back then, it would have been very hard.

SPEAKER_99: I think that's the same for WhatsApp and Instagram at Facebook.

SPEAKER_27: Yes, exactly. WhatsApp was 19 people when it was acquired. And now it's thousands, I'm certain, and Instagram is the same. And so what we've seen traditionally, or not traditionally, but over the last 10, 15 years with internet based acquisitions, is not about consolidation and reduction in costs, but about taking and enabling technology and accelerating it on an existing platform. Now, number one, it makes that new technology or product far more successful, far more far reaching, and more consumers benefit from it. Number two, is it now makes that platform harder to compete with. So as a platform, it's going to be a lot harder to catch up with the cash flows being generated at Google and at Facebook, given how quickly they reinvest that capital in new technology to further their advancement. To your point. Yeah, but I would say what's been so significant over the past 15 years that people are lifting their head up is that it has been both beneficial to consumers and anti competitive.

SPEAKER_86: So that was exactly what I was going to get to here. Your YouTube example is the perfect one.

SPEAKER_181: Because if you look at YouTube, think about all the joy, education, communication it has created on a global basis as a juggernaut. Better product and it's free.

SPEAKER_183: And it's free.

SPEAKER_33: And that has helped humanity so much in this new lens. But no one else can make a video ad site like this. Exactly.

SPEAKER_88: So we're now looking at all the benefit that YouTube has created for humanity versus the fact that it's going to be impossible to displace YouTube now. To your point, Sachs, how do you get past the bright line? Do you have a suggestion for a way? And would you now look at something like YouTube and say we shouldn't have allowed that to happen?

SPEAKER_187: YouTube was on debt store because of the lawsuits and the server bills. We all know that.

SPEAKER_42: Right. So this is the uncertainty that's going to be created. And I think this administration is creating tremendous business uncertainty. I think the reaction of a lot of big tech companies is going to be to stop doing M&A until the situation gets clarified because they just don't know. You know, target companies are going to want to have huge breakup fees and it's just going to have a chilling effect on the market for M&A. I mean, business needs certainty and they're not giving it in this business environment. Tremont, before we get to you, just want to make one point about that last clip on the labor point.

SPEAKER_45: Listen, this feels to me just like when the administration talked about clean tech and clean energy and electric vehicles, but then they only gave the subsidy to the car companies that were basically union shops. They didn't give Tesla the same. That's right. They excluded Tesla. They excluded Tesla from the EV somewhere. They tried to pretend that Ford and GM were the ones driving the EV revolution in the US. It was laughable. What they were trying to do there is they were shoehorning a union agenda into clean tech. And I think that's what Lena Horne was doing in that clip. She was shoehorning a union agenda into antitrust law. And it's a bit absurd because Facebook and Google, even though they are very powerful companies, when it comes to talent, they are in a war for talent, just like everybody else. They compete against each other. There's not a union issue there. These are not factory employees. These are not mistreated employees. These are very well-paid employees. And moreover, the market is highly competitive and we don't need them trying to insert this union agenda into antitrust law.

Chamath Palihapitiya: You got to think that, for example, going back to Microsoft Activision, obviously the bankers would have called Apple and Facebook and Google as well. I mean, it's absurd that they wouldn't have. Of course, it's processed. The minute that you think you have a bona fide offer, one of the things you have to do is essentially, you know, get an opinion letter. And also to make sure that as a public market shareholder, you can justify that you've evaluated all the other options, right? Sure. But it's really quite telling to David's point. I don't think that if you were Facebook or Google or Apple, you could have credibly made an offer because the calculus in the back of your head was not whether it had business logic, but whether you could actually get it through the FTC.

SPEAKER_88: But Microsoft did because Microsoft is no longer seen as a threat.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And look, we said this in our awards show two or three episodes ago. You know, they have really been the most untouched in the last decade by antitrust scrutiny, whether domestically or internationally.

SPEAKER_202: They've largely skated under the radar after paying the price for an entire decade.

SPEAKER_42: I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Microsoft's effectively pivoted, with the exception of this gaming, into being an enterprise software company. And the politicians just care a lot less about enterprise software. It doesn't capture the public's imagination. It's the big consumer, you know, companies that get all of that attention.

SPEAKER_86: Fascinating point. Like literally the consumer and the bread and circuses of this is what's driving it.

SPEAKER_102: Like people hate big tech and Trump got banned from it, yada, yada.

SPEAKER_42: But I got to say, you know, these increasing restrictions on big tech and these prohibitions and the chilling effect, the uncertainty. It's one thing to do it when the market is just completely ripping and we can sort of afford to run these experiments and tinker with these rules. But I got to say, I'm starting to get pretty worried here that, you know, we had Jeremy Grantham who's sort of a- Old school? Yeah, old school kind of bearish type market commentator.

SPEAKER_45: He had this expression that the, yeah, I mean, it's one of these stop clock right twice a day things.

SPEAKER_202: Jeremy Grantham has never found a market he didn't. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_45: But a stop clock can be right twice a day. And the line he had today is that we're seeing the popping of a super bubble.

David Sacks: And, you know, we've been talking about- Super bubble. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_142: Basically- But that's not true. But I mean, it's good.

SPEAKER_45: It's evocative. Well, the sense in which it might be true is that, I mean, we've talked about this last few months, is that you had the Fed and the federal government pump a 10 trillion of liquidity into the market over the past two years because of COVID. Now they're starting to pull that back. And there was, I think, a general asset inflation across asset classes. Certain types of assets clearly got more inflated than others. We've seen a huge correction in growth stocks. We've seen a huge correction in crypto. Basically, anything long dated as the fear of interest rates increasing has gone up, they've massively corrected. But, so the concern is that, you know, with the losses we're seeing, and I mean, every day it just keeps, I keep seeing more red, that this could turn into a recession. You know, popping of bubbles is usually followed by a recession.

SPEAKER_217: So I think, you know, the fortunes of the economy could turn really quickly here and- That is the marginal risk.

SPEAKER_14: The marginal risk is actually for a recession. We talked about this before.

Chamath Palihapitiya: By the way, just to your point, you're right that we pumped in $10 trillion, but over the last three weeks, and really over the last two and a half months, we have actually eviscerated $10 trillion of value as well. So if you want to measure it, we put $10 trillion of excess capital in, but we've now destroyed $10 trillion of equity.

SPEAKER_219: Destroyed it by lowering the prices or repricing stuff. Yeah, we've repriced everything.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Equity, crypto. I mean, crypto in the last couple of days has just been shellacked. Yeah. Growth stocks have been shellacked. Biotech stocks have been just absolutely smoked. Everything is getting crushed. COVID stocks. But David is saying something really important. The risk, in my opinion, is not of runaway inflation anymore. And the reason was, what happened this weekend was incredibly important. And we have seen this happen just a few years ago. So this weekend, China cut interest rates. Now, as we know, we are dealing in the United States with this issue of whether we should raise rates, and by how much, because we're worried about inflation.

SPEAKER_21: Well, if you're cutting rates, it's because you're worried about the other problem, which is that the economy is basically turned over and you need to become more accommodating. Right? You need to incentivize businesses to spend by lowering-

SPEAKER_51: By turned over, you mean? It's slowed down.

SPEAKER_88: People are not building companies, not doing new projects. So you want to give them an incentive or maybe some catalyst to start some new company or start some new project because all the real estate projects have wound down.

SPEAKER_21: In 2018, here's exactly what happened.

SPEAKER_14: The setup was, everybody was worried about what the Fed was going to do on interest rates. The Fed was looking at China as the canary in the coal mine, the leading indicator of what we should do.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And at the end of 2018, Jerome Powell decided to raise rates and we raised rates and then enter 2019 and the Chinese economy turned over. And we realized that their economy was not nearly as strong as we thought it would be. And so our reaction was disproportionate to what the actual data on the ground said. We entered a recession in 2019.

SPEAKER_14: That's when you guys probably saw Trump going crazy, blaming Powell. I mean, most of us ignored it because, you know, we were all dealing with, you know, Trump derangement syndrome.

Chamath Palihapitiya: But the underlying thing of what he was saying was, hey, hold on a second. You just caused a recession in America by raising too quickly. The Fed is now in this really delicate situation where China cut rates last week. We have an FOMC meeting, the open markets committee that sets rates on Wednesday, I think, of this coming week. What is he supposed to do? You know, Bill Ackman two weeks ago was advocating for a 50 basis point raise in this meeting.

SPEAKER_21: So that's way beyond what people even thought is supposed to happen.

SPEAKER_42: We should just remember that Bill Ackman has bets, macroeconomic bets in the market. If he's calling for a 50 point raise, I guarantee you- You're going to make a lot of money. You'll make a lot of money if there's a 50 point raise.

SPEAKER_165: No conflict, no interest. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah, exactly. My only point is the setup is a very complicated one for the Fed coming into this week. If we overcorrect- Yes. ...and the leading indicators all around the world tell us that their economies are weak, then inflation may have actually been much more transitory than we thought. And right now we have to decide because if we overcorrect, we're going to plunge the United States economy into a recession.

SPEAKER_236: This is why I think, Friedberg, when you look at this, when you have so many different things happening at once

SPEAKER_86: when you're trying to pilot a plane or a car in rain, on ice, going really fast, maybe there's something wrong with the brakes. I mean, you've got to be very delicate with how you steer into this.

SPEAKER_88: What is the right strategy here on a policy basis coming out of Omicron? Should we just take a pause on raising rates? What do you think the right situation here? Obviously putting a bunch of regulation on top of big mergers and acquisitions, and that's going to create headwinds. I don't know how many different variables we want to add to the mix of an economy that feels like we're in a perfect storm. I don't know.

SPEAKER_237: Look, a lot of us kind of talk about the valuation of things in markets as being the economy, but it's not.

SPEAKER_29: The economy is the productivity of businesses that are valued in the market.

SPEAKER_177: And as long as the productivity of the businesses in the market continues to improve, that businesses continue to grow,

SPEAKER_29: that there's stability to pricing that's not run away or declining, neither inflationary or too deflationary.

SPEAKER_27: You know, I think those are the indicators that matter most. Now, the reality is, over the last couple of years, we've had trillions of dollars that have flowed into these markets for free. And those trillions of dollars have created lots of mini asset bubbles. Lots of little new markets have emerged. NFTs, random cryptocurrencies that don't actually do anything. The collectibles market, the art market. There are lots of examples of these speculative early stage businesses that have gone public. And people back them. And they said, Look, when there's this much money around, I'm going to start making more risky bets, I'm going to make more speculative bets. And regardless, the money's coming out of the markets, the money's going to come out one way or another. And as it starts to come out, these little bubbles are the first that are going to pop. And that doesn't necessarily mean that the economy is at risk. It means that there are valuation bubbles that are going to burst, they're going to decline. And no interest rate policy is going to change that because the inevitable growth in the underlying economy, the inevitable end to the pandemic, is what's ultimately going to drive capital out of these markets, and back into ultimately more productive assets and less speculative assets. And so this is a transition that I'm not sure you can really kind of manage.

SPEAKER_30: I think underlying businesses and the growth of the economy and the ability for people to get jobs. There's an incredible number of open jobs are in the US right now 3 million open job listings.

SPEAKER_243: Go apply for a job million, 11 million, whatever it is, go go go sign up for a new job, three point, what is it sex?

SPEAKER_86: They're very very million 3.7% are not a lot of people.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, they're not a lot of people in the US that don't have an option to go out right now and go improve their working condition. There are a lot of open jobs in the US. And salaries have gone up. That's what I mean, you're working condition, you can go make more money. And, and so you know, the economy underlying, there are lots of great businesses that are growing and doing well. And there's stability that's emerging. And then there's a bunch that aren't. And there are a bunch that were always speculative and that they were hyped and overvalued. And, you know, as those assets get devalued, a lot of us that have most of our worth and income coming from capital are, are going to feel the burn.

SPEAKER_73: I have two questions that we, I want to go around the horn on first, Chamath.

SPEAKER_86: If we could do, if each of you could do one thing to one or two things to manage this economic policy in the next year, what would it be? Like, what two things do you think we should do, David?

SPEAKER_247: One or two things, be the top of the list that regulators should do in terms of managing this seemingly chaotic situation.

SPEAKER_42: It just feels to me like we're pinballing from one overreaction to another. So we overreacted in terms of flooding the zone with liquidity because of COVID. I mean, remember like Druckenmiller was like the, one of the only voices about a year ago when they did that, that last $2 trillion stimulus bill, the COVID relief bill. Yep. And he said, look, retail is already 15% above trend.

SPEAKER_45: Meaning, if you looked at demand, the demand side of the economy, it had fully recovered and was actually above trend. People were spending more money. And then we flood the zone with another $2 trillion. And then lo and behold, six months later, we have this inflation. And then in response to that inflation, we're now jacking up rates so quickly that I think we're risking, to Chamath's point, a recession. So we're pinballing from one overreaction to another. And I just, the big meta thought I had this week, which is how many of our problems are just self-inflicted right now? I mean, even on COVID, right? We could live with this variant of COVID, Omicron. You know, Chamath and all of our friends, everyone I know in the last few weeks basically has had it. And it's been very mild. It's basically been a cold. But in large swaths of the country, we're not choosing to live with it. We're at each other's throats about these vaccine mandates, these other restrictions and school closures. Okay. So your number one is stop over yet. And similarly, and the same thing, just to make it even more local, we've got a crime wave in America going on right now. Why? Because we emptied the jails last year and stopped prosecuting. Totally self-inflicted.

David Sacks: Okay.

SPEAKER_252: So what things do we need to do?

SPEAKER_88: Just if you had one or two things that you think we should do. One, you said we're ping-ponging. So do you think more consistent policy, communicating better?

SPEAKER_14: I think that you want some neat little answer that's tweetable and there is none. No.

SPEAKER_124: I wanted your- Let me explain. If you actually thought that was a good idea.

SPEAKER_14: There's no one or two things anybody can do. I think there's a collective set of things that we have to do in an organized way. Let's hear it. So look, just to set up, right?

Chamath Palihapitiya: We have had more activity and hedging than in any other period in recent memory except the great financial crisis.

SPEAKER_21: Just to set the tone of where we are in terms of volatility in the capital markets.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Mutual funds who don't short stocks, right? The multi-trillion dollar mutual fund complex whose only job is to buy has been a net seller. Hasn't even started buying a single thing yet. We have an FOMC meeting that's going to happen next week where Jerome Powell and the, you know, the Fed has to decide what to do in the face of incomplete data. It's not as if we've even stopped all of the purchasing of assets that we've been doing. We're still putting money into the system. I just want to be clear.

SPEAKER_21: We were debating when we stopped the spigot. We're not even debating when we shrink our balance sheet as a country.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So we are in a really complicated moment. And I think the risk is that there is an overreaction to incomplete data. And we plunge the US economy into a recession. And I just think that that has to be really thoughtfully measured. And we, guys, we've seen this in 2019, 2018, 19.

SPEAKER_237: A free break. Any thoughts? No, I'm not an economist and I'm not a central banker. And so I have no clue. Okay.

SPEAKER_42: Um, the, the next thing, but, but, but to my point, I mean, we are dealing with balancing the risks of inflation against the risk of recession. I think that is fundamental. And right now, all the statements have been so hawkish that, you know, the markets have been just flowing red now for months. And it's starting, I think, I think the, the balance of risks is starting to make recession possible in a way that didn't seem possible two, three months ago.

SPEAKER_51: Doesn't the repricing of assets though, like we look at Peloton, you know, it's down whatever 80%, you look at Zoom is down 70, 80%. When you see those things that were obviously mispriced, uh, Rivian, uh, which we talked about.

SPEAKER_263: I wouldn't use the term mispriced. They were.

SPEAKER_264: Repriced. I would say they're repriced.

SPEAKER_179: They were mispriced. They're not repriced. No, they were, they were, they, someone paid something for them and someone, someone sold them for something.

SPEAKER_30: They were, they were priced against gravity.

SPEAKER_265: Yeah, but Freeburg, if, if yesterday they paid 25% more and then today they're paying 25% less.

SPEAKER_02: What difference does it make whether it's yesterday, an hour ago, or a year ago? It was mispriced. Everyday pricing changes.

SPEAKER_187: Well, no, here's the thing about the pricing. The pricing was based on people with a lot of money, placing a lot of bets.

SPEAKER_37: Uh, maybe who were. Okay, fine. What's the point Jason? The market condition changed.

SPEAKER_86: Uh, well, I think maybe we had enthusiastic people betting things up without looking at fundamentals is my point. I think Saks agrees with me here on this. So I think. I think you're right about that. Yeah. Now you have market participants who were gambling on like momentum. Now we're repricing stuff. Do we think, where are we at in this repricing or correct pricing of assets?

Chamath Palihapitiya: We're in the eighth, in my opinion, I think we're in the eighth inning of, of the tech drawdown. So. Got it. If you're a high growth tech company, you've been smashed for three months in a row. As you said, Jason, we're off. Yes. Some stocks are off 80, you know, 50 to 80% of their highs.

SPEAKER_272: That's like.com era corrections. It really is. That's crash.

Chamath Palihapitiya: That's.com era crash. Yes. Yes. If you're, if you're, uh, if you're in other areas like value, you've had a pretty good rally. If you're in crypto, you're just starting to get smoked now.

SPEAKER_227: If you're in, um. Why is it crypto? This is, I want your thoughts on this. Why isn't crypto getting smoked like Peloton and zoom?

SPEAKER_168: Is it because those people are hodlers or something? Well, crypto, I think has slightly different dynamics than, than individual stocks like a Peloton.

SPEAKER_26: But I think that you're gonna see. There's no earnings release for one. Right. There's you're gonna. Cause I can't understand.

SPEAKER_32: All the, all that the market is, is who's bidding and who's coming into the market.

SPEAKER_27: I mean, there's still thousands of millions of people from around the world stepping into the crypto markets each day that are putting more money into these markets. And that balances out the withdrawals. And that's all the crypto is. And in fairness. There's no underlying business that you're valuing.

SPEAKER_98: And in fairness. The Peloton release was really bad. Okay.

SPEAKER_179: I mean, really. It was very strange.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Well, I think they over- I don't think it was strange. It was just like, uh, we're just gonna basically stop producing anything because all of our inventory will meet our demand for the foreseeable future.

Chamath Palihapitiya: That's a, that's not a good statement if you're supposed to be a high growth. Okay.

SPEAKER_86: So if we're seeing 50 to 80% sacks.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Gavin Baker had a tweet. That's capital allocator. Yeah. Yeah. The bottom of the market. He, and it was a phrase, something like when we shoot the generals and his comment was the generals are big tech. When those things trade down 25%, the bottom is in. And I think that collectively, most people think that, uh, we're a little bit oversold in all areas, except big tech. I think big tech is down 10, 11, 12%. When you see this thing really get cracked is when those folks, you know, trade down another 10 or 15%.

SPEAKER_21: And then I think we're kind of through most of the pain.

SPEAKER_88: So Peloton and Zoom were kind of mid tech. I don't know what we call those, but I would call them like mid tech. They're obviously not big tech, but they're not small either. Mid tech gets their asses kicked 50 to 80%. Big tech 15%. But if big tech goes down 30%, then we start really seeing a bottom and we consider Netflix part of that.

SPEAKER_165: I don't think you'll ever see that because I think big tech you have to remember is basically the index.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And in the last 10 or 20 years, you've never seen drawdowns more than 15 to 25%. You've never seen it. And when you've ever had a 15 to 25% drawdown, meaning the market goes off 15 or 25%, you have to remember the thing that we have also done over the last 20 years is created so much money on the sidelines, always looking for a cheap buying opportunity. And so the minute that these things, so even, you know, March of 2020, remember when we started to do this pod and it literally looked like the world was ending?

SPEAKER_287: Yeah. The bottom existed for a week. Yup.

SPEAKER_21: And then within a week, the entire 25% loss in the stock market was wiped out and we were back to normal. That's when I sold. Me too.

SPEAKER_118: Don't take our advice, folks. Okay. Well, let's talk specifically about Neff. I think it was good that we talked about Peloton. I paddicked at the lows.

SPEAKER_294: Oh my God.

SPEAKER_116: I did too. I remember selling Slack going, this is the dumbest thing, but I have no choice because I was literally ready to puke.

SPEAKER_184: How about when Uber goes to 15 from 45? I was ready to puke. I basically curled up in a ball and said, I'm not selling, but I'm not feeling good right by the way.

SPEAKER_02: This is what I was saying, Jason, like any comment you made earlier, I think you made a comment about, you know, what do you do right now to drive or make change in these markets?

SPEAKER_27: And I'm not sure that at the end of the day, the drive or the change is being made as much as the change that's being made is being driven by the market itself. There is just so many dynamics at play that it's very difficult to kind of ascertain where things are headed next, what's going on. And we're all going to sit here and we're all going to speculate. We're going to flip a coin. It's going to come up heads. It's going to come up tails. We're going to be right. We're going to be wrong. It's really difficult to kind of put our foot down and for any of us to put our foot down and say, this is what I think needs to happen.

SPEAKER_177: And this is what I think should happen or could happen or will happen. Half of us will be right. Half of us will be wrong. But man, let's take another stock.

SPEAKER_51: I think it's interesting to talk about this. Netflix was at $700. Good Lord. A month ago. It's at 390 today.

SPEAKER_298: You can talk about the business. That's a good one to talk about the business.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, that's like a real business that you can assess what's going on in the business itself.

SPEAKER_298: Well, they think they're not going to grow 20, 30% a year. They think they're going to grow 8, 9, 10% a year. But a fabulous business, right? Great business. Incredible.

SPEAKER_300: Is that now the time? So is this becoming a buying time?

SPEAKER_27: I mean, Netflix is so saturated. It has achieved such incredible market share by growing so quickly every year for years and years and end. At some point, the growth was going to slow down. They hit their natural audience.

SPEAKER_164: I think Netflix is going to be the best example of consumer surplus at scale.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And what I mean by that is they have given so much value away for an incredibly small amount of money. Like if you think about the value you get from Netflix as compared to what you would get from Comcast.

SPEAKER_15: And you spend $10 or $15 for Netflix versus $100 for Comcast.

Chamath Palihapitiya: There was such a huge gap in value. But Netflix had to spend so much money to keep people entertained. The real question is, at what point do they start to sort of like run out of the things that they can do to keep people engaged? And otherwise, they, Jason, do what you did, which is you have a subscription to HBO Max. You have a subscription to Disney Plus. Yeah. I mean, the headwinds are the competition. Everybody gets in the game. The only real winner is the consumer. Yeah. And any individual company, I think, gets into a real tough spot. And I think what you saw was their earnings release basically said just that. Disney is doing a great job competing against us. HBO Max is doing a great job competing against us. So we're not sure with the incremental dollar that we can give you the growth that we've given you before when we had no competition. That's, by the way, Lena Khan's comment, which is the other side of the coin, which is when you have more competition, the consumer does win. It contains prices. It just doesn't contain asset inflation, which does impact the shareholders of these companies. Yeah.

SPEAKER_298: And still, even at this level, $172 billion, they have a 35XP ratio.

SPEAKER_177: One way that to look at this here, I think your point is an interesting one, Chamath, where you talk about how much value they've given away over the years and what they have today.

SPEAKER_29: You can always look at the balance sheet of a business, a public company. And in the balance sheet, there's this line. Goodwill. No, well, not even goodwill, just the accumulated loss, the accumulated deficit. And if you look at that on Netflix, they basically run the business right now, as of their last earning statement, which was December 31st, negative $40 million.

SPEAKER_27: So in terms of the total net cash that they've generated as a business, since their founding as a business, they've lost $40 million. So, you know, and meanwhile, the question is, okay, what's the, you know, so they're not necessarily at a stage where they've been generating cash, but for many, many years, Amazon had a similar strategy where they were reinvesting all their capital. Yep. And that capital was going into building the business and growing the platform and adding the next layer of growth. The question is, has Netflix from a fundamental business perspective, not a valuation perspective? Have they added enough growth platforms into the business? Have they found enough other products, services or ways to build customers to grow the business?

SPEAKER_240: No, they have one product. They have one product.

SPEAKER_84: They have linear video.

SPEAKER_313: They don't have gaming. They don't have anything else. They did start doing sports. They don't have comedy, really.

SPEAKER_84: They are dabbling. They dabbled with doing a couple of podcasts.

SPEAKER_86: They dabbled with doing a couple of games and there's rumors that they might try to get the other 20 or 30% of people who don't pay by creating a lighter version that was ad supported. In other words, you're not going to get the new season of Ozark, but maybe you can get the first two or three. You're a year behind the production schedule, but you can watch it all with ads.

SPEAKER_14: So why isn't Netflix and video games and sports?

SPEAKER_86: It's such an obvious one. And that's why I think they released a series of games based on their IP. So as their IP grows, and I think that's what you'll see with Disney Plus is.

SPEAKER_88: Think about an app store inside of Disney Plus, a merch store inside of Disney Plus. I think there's so many verticals next to them. Why is there no merch store inside of it?

SPEAKER_277: Why don't they own Spotify or have a Spotify competitor?

SPEAKER_319: Well, I think Spotify sees themselves as a-

SPEAKER_323: That's a really good point.

Chamath Palihapitiya: You know, when you look at the Peloton, I was looking at the Peloton earnings when, you know, it was down 25% yesterday or the day before. And I was like, this is an incredible business because they have 2.1 million subscribers that pay them-

SPEAKER_21: Pay 40 bucks a month.

SPEAKER_326: It's incredible.

SPEAKER_168: I mean- It's a money printing machine. Money printing machine. I actually have a subscription. I don't even have a Peloton. Peloton.

SPEAKER_327: I don't have any of them. You just pay $500 a year to use the classes.

SPEAKER_168: I have the app. It's crazy. I don't even use the app. I think that's 20 bucks for just an app. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya: But the point I was trying to make is when you look at it, you know, there's about 30% of that revenue that goes right back to the music labels for the music. So, you know, to your point, like, there's just an enormous value in actually music. You know, so- One of the-

SPEAKER_165: As Netflix built library values and content, they could be- Right. They could point it to music as well. There's all these things they could do to reignite growth.

SPEAKER_177: A lot of people discount the value of having a subscription consumer business.

SPEAKER_27: When you have a consumer's credit card on file, and they're paying every month for something, it's an incredible point because you don't have the friction of getting the sale done. You've already done the sale. Yep. Now the question is, can you upsell them some new service or some new addition that they're not paying for today?

SPEAKER_60: So obvious. Yeah. It's so obvious, right? And so like, by the way, I'll say this, like for years, Google struggled with this question, which is, what is Google's consumer subscription business?

SPEAKER_27: Because Google did not have consumer credit cards across its platform despite a billion daily users. Nope. And so Google for years was strategically trying to figure out what business can or should we be in to have a subscription model with consumers. Because once you have that, then you can charge for all sorts of stuff. You can charge for storing photos, you can charge for accessing audio, you can charge for accessing unlimited video. Imagine if at the-

SPEAKER_42: I'll take the contrarian side of this.

SPEAKER_336: Okay, here we go. Yeah.

SPEAKER_42: Go ahead, Peter. Well, no, look, I invest in B2B subscription businesses. I hate B2C subscription businesses. And the reason is just the churn rates. Yeah. What we see when we look at B2C subscription businesses is 5% monthly churn is not uncommon. It's pretty much the standard. So call that 50%, 60% churn in the subscription base every year.

SPEAKER_45: So effectively, you're rebuilding the company from scratch every two years. I don't see like how you can build a successful business that way.

SPEAKER_340: Yeah, see, but I'll tell you why you're wrong about this.

SPEAKER_45: Hold on, hold on. Let me contrast that to B2B. With B2B subscription businesses, you do lose some customers. But the ones who stick with you keep adding seats for more employees usually. Land and expanse. Land and expanse. Your land and expanse. Your cohorts actually, your cohorts are growing 20% every year instead of shrinking 50%. Now, obviously, there are some of these B2C subscription businesses like Netflix and Peloton. They are obviously valuable. They've defied gravity. Well, Netflix has done it because they spend billions of dollars on content. And Peloton's got it because they plop an expensive machine in your house so you can't forget about it. And that keeps you a little bit more recurring than like a lot of these subscriptions, which are just very easy to cancel. But so look, they've been able to make it work. But I'm mostly.

SPEAKER_86: Here's why I think you're wrong. It turns out these are so low priced, these subscriptions that you get a lot of consumers trialing them. So because it's only five or 10 bucks a month to use something like a Spotify or a Disney, because they're so low pricey, you do get a little bit of sampling. And that's why the rates higher. Whereas in business, there is a massive onboarding of people have to take their time to set up the software, learn how to use it. So if you're going to commit to it, it does reduce it and you do have land and expand. But what we're talking about with product expansion is the equivalent in SAS of land and expand. So imagine if Disney Plus or Spotify, after you listen to an album or it's in your top rotation, they showed you the merch for that band. Or after you completed the season of Mandalorian or Book of Boba Fett, they showed you the merchandise and said, here is a limited edition of Grogu, Baby Yoda. When we tried to get Baby Yoda stuff last Christmas, Disney dropped the ball. They didn't have any.

SPEAKER_187: And they could have had all that made and they would have sold millions of. We were buying stuff on Etsy.

SPEAKER_215: The reason Baby Yoda works is because it's leveraged off a platform, this massive Disney platform of which this B2C subscription service is just one piece.

SPEAKER_42: I mean, look, obviously there are valuable consumer subscription businesses.

SPEAKER_45: So the way I'm approaching it can't be right in all cases. However, I think people really get themselves in trouble when they start to value these B2C subscription businesses the same as the B2B ones. In one case, in the B2C case, churn is the predominant characteristic and it means that you're gonna have to spend more on marketing or COGS or content or what have you to keep rebuilding the user base. Whereas in the B2B context, the user base is compounding on its own. And that just makes for, I think, a more fundamentally attractive business opportunity.

SPEAKER_14: Yes, but it grows slower. Again, just at the end of the day, these are all variables, just the weights just changed. I agree with David that consumer churn businesses or consumer businesses have much higher churn than enterprise. And enterprises have negative churn, which means that they just naturally grow. But the reality is consumers just have an unbounded TAM that enterprises do not.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And the way that the LTVs work just tend to be different. And the cash flow cycle of these companies tend to be very different. And that's why you see Netflix get these enormous valuations that enterprise subscription businesses do not.

SPEAKER_86: What some people are now doing when they look at consumer businesses and they look at churn is they take out the ones that are based on credit card to look at like people who actually unsubscribe because they don't want it, but not because their credit card changes.

SPEAKER_42: So basically, so if you think about like Netflix's business, if it's churning two and a half percent per month, let's call that 30% of the user base is a trading every year. They've got to rebuild their user base from scratch every three or four years. Now, they can do that. I guess at some point, though, they may run out of, you know, greenfield opportunity to grow their customer base. But, you know, it's going to pressurize their margins because they're going to have to constantly spend on content, original content to retain you.

SPEAKER_352: They have to spend on marketing to keep going after the portion.

SPEAKER_86: Yeah, but the archive, you're leaving out the archive. These archives are going to be super valuable.

SPEAKER_51: And I don't think we even know how to value these archives yet, because if you look at the Marvel archive or the Star Wars archive, these things just keep printing money year after year. And then you'll see Netflix and HBO Max will keep being able to go back to them.

SPEAKER_88: HBO Max being the canonical example now, because you didn't think that that business would have, you know, a lot of IP to build on. But suddenly you have the Many Saints of Newark and the Sex and the City reboot. I mean, they're going right down the line. There's going to be an entourage reboot. Yeah, IP has value.

SPEAKER_352: When you own the franchise, it has value. Disney has shown that. You own the best franchise.

SPEAKER_88: HBO Max is now showing it. And then that means Netflix will show it next.

SPEAKER_352: Yeah, but how much of Netflix's content do they even own? Are they licensing it?

SPEAKER_86: No, now it's 100%. Netflix is 100%. They stopped. And that's why Disney started taking it off. Their whole spend, I think they're spending 20 billion or something. It's all on original content. So that's why they made that move is because they knew they were going to have the Disney content and the Marvel content pulled.

SPEAKER_153: Where do we want to go next? Guys, because I have COVID, I want Sax to talk to me about this. What's going on with Fauci?

SPEAKER_215: Oh my gosh. This is quite a story. This really is.

SPEAKER_283: I'm trying to get my head around this story. I'd be totally honest.

SPEAKER_358: Can you slow it down and explain it to us? Because I think we all want to understand what's going on.

SPEAKER_42: Okay. So a series of emails have come out that were requested under the Freedom of Information Act. And what they show is that at the NIH, Fauci and Francis Collins, who was the head of it, they had a series of conversations with scientists around January, sorry, January 31st or February 1st. There are emails on February 1st summarizing those conversations. And basically what they say is that a group of scientists advised Fauci and Collins that COVID likely came from a lab.

SPEAKER_45: How'd they know? Because it had, you know, hallmark signatures like the furan sites, the same reasons we now believe the virus came from a lab. Okay. But by February 4th, officials at, so three days later, officials at the NIH, including Fauci had come to the conclusion that the virus must have been passed zoonotically from an animal like a pangolin. It didn't come from the lab. And furthermore, they were starting to use language like conspiracy theory to discredit the lab leak, the lab leak idea. So within a few days, they were all in on this sort of so-called zoonotic theory.

SPEAKER_362: And they really began a campaign, in the words of Collins, a devastating takedown of scientists who were trying to discuss the lab leak theory. That became the official position. Why? Why? Well, okay. So this is where it gets really interesting. Obviously, I can't speculate to motives, but here's what we know. The NIH, Fauci's division, years ago, there was a debate in the scientific community about how we study viruses. Fauci's an epidemiologist. He wants to study them. Makes sense. The debate is over whether you should enhance the viruses as a way to study them, so-called gain-of-functional research. There, Fauci is on the side of engaging in that kind of research. There are other scientists who think it's crazy. They lose. The NIH then makes grants to a group called the EcoHealth Alliance. It's run by a British scientist named Peter Daszak. Okay?

SPEAKER_233: By the way, who doesn't support EcoHealth and an alliance?

SPEAKER_368: Yeah, incredible branding. Yeah, exactly. And we love puppies. Yeah.

SPEAKER_208: We're, yes.

SPEAKER_368: Angel puppy love. Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_371: So, EcoHealth Alliance, which has neither been good for the ecology, for our health, or alliances. Or alliances.

SPEAKER_374: Yeah. Keeping a bad name to alliances everywhere.

SPEAKER_45: Yes. So, they then provide funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study bat viruses where, you know, functional research then occurs. This lab in Wuhan is known to have had leaks in the past. So, just from a security choice, not the best recipient of a grant. But that is what happens. Okay? And then we know the history from there. It's almost certain that this virus-

Chamath Palihapitiya: What's the element of this story that has to deal with the Lancet and the- Yes, I'll tell you. The person that worked for Fauci and then that person got a grant afterwards?

SPEAKER_227: What? And then just one other thing I want to point out here, so we're clear.

SPEAKER_86: This has become a very partisan issue. But the original FOAs were done by BuzzFeed and the Washington Post. FOIA. FOIA. FOIA. FOIA. FOIA. Sorry. The FOIA releases were done by BuzzFeed and Washington Post. And now you have Rand Paul on the other side of it, who seems like really wacky and obviously conspiracy right wing. Wacky. So you have this like really weird partisanship that's now been embedded in it.

SPEAKER_41: Okay. Yes.

SPEAKER_381: So Saks, can you explain the partisan nature and then Chamath has a question as well.

SPEAKER_42: I almost want to take Chamath's question first about who is this Daszak guy and what is this Lancet letter. Let me come back to the partisan thing. I'm just going to try to establish the facts before we get into the partisan mess of this thing. So Peter Daszak is the guy who made these grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Okay.

SPEAKER_45: There is one other interesting fact. When the West wanted to come in and investigate what happened in this lab, China approved one person from the West to come in and conduct the investigation. Guess who that was? Peter Daszak. Okay. He was the only guy the CCP let in to go look at this lab. He then comes out of this, whatever he did and says, it has to be the zoonotic theory. He endorsed the wet market idea. It cannot be lab leak. That is a conspiracy theory. And then he rounds up a group of scientists to write a letter to the Lancet, which is a respected scientific publication, which-

SPEAKER_113: Incredibly respected.

SPEAKER_45: Yes. Which he signs. In which he basically advocates the zoonotic theory, but he goes further and says there is no way that it could be lab leak. And anyone who says that is a conspiracy theorist. And that has an incredibly chilling effect on the scientific community because no scientist wants to be labeled a kook or a conspiracy theorist.

SPEAKER_356: Or heretical to the Lancet.

SPEAKER_45: Exactly. And this is a tight knit ecosystem of- Insiders. Insiders and institutions and grants. No scientist wants to lose their funding. Right? And then furthermore, big tech starts censoring this disinformation, the lab leak theory, because they say, well, these officials, look at all the scientists. We have to follow the science. Right? So the science, according to this letter from the Lancet, is basically on the side of the zoonotic theory. So you then have downstream censorship of this. So that is who Peter Daszak is. And in this letter in the Lancet, he never disclosed his conflict of interest, which is the fact that he funded this Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct the type of research that might have led to the leak of the virus. So this guy is hopelessly conflicted and has a reason to want to suppress and cover up a lab leak and he never disclosed it. And look, so does Fauci. I mean, because Fauci funded Daszak. So imagine when in February of 2020, when the lab leak is coming across the desk of Fauci, does he tell the president, Mr. President, he's at the right hand of the president. Mr. President, we might have funded this thing. We funded Daszak who funded the Wuhan lab. We collectively, the United States government might have some responsibility in this. Do you think that conversation ever took place when he was making his recommendations? He was hopelessly conflicted. And if the truth about this had come out and look, I'm not saying he had any intentional role. I'm not saying he wanted this to happen. I'm not even saying that he knew for sure that Daszak was funding the Wuhan lab. Okay. Let's just give Fauci the benefit of the doubt. But we all know how politics works. If it had come out in February of 2020 that Fauci had funded the guy who funded the Wuhan lab and that's where the virus likely came from, his career would have been finished. Finished. Finished. We know that as a political reality. And so within days of scientists advising Fauci, hey, this thing probably came from the lab. The NIH has consolidated around the idea that this is a conspiracy theory and they work to suppress it and they wage a public campaign. I got to tell you, when I have learned all these facts, I got to tell you what I compare it to. It's almost like we learned all those revelations about Bill Cosby that here's this guy on TV for years pretending to be America's dad. And then we find out he's a monster. Fauci has been on TV for years lecturing us about COVID. He's been like America's dad, America's doctor. And lo and behold, we find out that he has a role in this whole thing.

SPEAKER_46: And look, I'm not saying-

SPEAKER_385: Well, his intent was not to abuse anybody's intent has been always to help people. So it's a little bit of a gnarly metaphor. Of course.

SPEAKER_388: I'm going to give him the benefit of every doubt here. I'm going to give him the benefit of every doubt.

SPEAKER_45: Okay?

SPEAKER_389: He's called him Bill Cosby.

SPEAKER_45: I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt in the sense that he didn't want this to happen. He didn't have any, he didn't cause that. But we know for a fact that he funded Daszak who funded this lab. It's where the virus came from. Come on. We know that. And he covered it up. He engaged in a campaign to suppress the lab leak theory.

SPEAKER_391: That is a conflict of interest.

SPEAKER_236: Let's get Freeberg in on the science. What do you think as a man of science, Friedberg, the sultan of science, in fact,

SPEAKER_86: about these emails and the chances that Fauci essentially was funding gain of research

SPEAKER_236: and then attempting to cover it up, which is the accusation.

SPEAKER_240: I don't know if that's a question of science. Look, I mentioned this in the past. Jamie Metzl.

SPEAKER_177: We're a science community.

SPEAKER_27: Jamie Metzl did a podcast interview with Lex Friedman. It's worth listening to. It's a couple hours long. If you've got some time to kill. But he does a good job contextualizing these matters and what may have gone on that led ultimately to the lab leak and also the lab leak cover up.

SPEAKER_29: I don't know what happened with Fauci emails. I have not read this stuff. So I, you know, I have no reason to believe that Fauci is malintentioned in the sense that he has some reason to harm or hurt. I could see that there is a certain degree of nervousness to accuse the biggest foreign government and potential U.S. adversary of causing a global pandemic and not wanting that sort of conflict to arise at a period of time when you really need to take care of your people.

SPEAKER_40: And we really need to focus internally as a country on how do we get through this pandemic and making that.

SPEAKER_395: I have to respond to that.

SPEAKER_45: I'm not saying that Fauci or anyone involved in that process should have accused China, but that's not what was their decision and that what was not was debate. They decided to stop the debate altogether. They decided to suppress the debate.

SPEAKER_60: What would you have done in that seat, Sachs? You're sitting in that seat and the country is potentially facing a pandemic that could wipe out millions of Americans. I'll tell you. Where do you prioritize? How do you communicate that?

SPEAKER_45: I'll tell you what, if I was sitting at the NIH and I wasn't hopelessly conflicted, I would probably have just said, listen, I don't know what the origin of the virus is. Let that debate continue. I would not have tried to wage a public campaign against the people, against the scientists who were honestly pursuing in good faith where this virus might have come from so we can learn things, maybe how to avoid something like this from happening again. The people at the NIH should not have engaged in that type of politically minded PR campaign. They just shouldn't. That's not their job as scientists. And then to find out that they have a conflict of interest on top of that, that might be motivating that desire. That is not appropriate.

SPEAKER_14: I think it's really important, Freeburg, you can probably agree with this, that at some point some journalists should really simplify this for all of us because it's an incredibly important topic that we need to look at at the end of all of this, assuming that Omicron is the end of this chapter because it's been a horrible chapter for the world. But we do need an accounting of the truth, right? Yes.

SPEAKER_27: I think that that's really important. There was an episode many ago when I said, I don't know and I don't care about whether or not the virus came out of China. And again, I was somewhat kind of misstated as the intention of why I said that. The reason I said that and what I really meant was that what happened, even if it was a lab leak, what happened was really the tip of the iceberg. The ability to bioengineer pathogenic organisms is becoming ubiquitous. The toolkit to do gain of function research as it's being called in the press is a very simple toolkit. The ability to engineer organisms that can cause catastrophic harm to the human species is becoming available on the internet and with tools that any of us can buy and use in our garage. And so what I'm more questioning and what I'm more concerned about and what I care more about is what is our global biodefense strategy? How are we getting ahead of the next wave of this happening? And it's not about the who said, he said, she said. But those things. Those things aren't. It's really important to understand.

SPEAKER_45: How we even know we need biodefense when they're saying it came zoonotically. They're saying it came from an animal when it actually was created in a lab. If you want to have biodefense, we got to first say that it came from a lab. Whether it did or did.

SPEAKER_30: Yeah, you're right. Whether it did. Separate question to me. Whether it did or didn't.

SPEAKER_27: The tooling to do this is absolutely possible. And the ability for these sorts of viruses to leak out and be made and turned into a weapon is significant. It's a real risk.

SPEAKER_404: And so I'm more interested in figuring out how do we solve this problem?

SPEAKER_60: How do we solve this problem?

Chamath Palihapitiya: But both of you guys are saying nuanced versions of David is saying we have to have an honest accounting of what happened. If we could, if we're supposed to actually have an eco health alliance.

SPEAKER_408: Yeah. I'm not. By the way, I'm not. I'm not.

Chamath Palihapitiya: You're saying. Yeah. I'm not dismissing that. Yeah. And you're saying we need to actually formalize gain of function research because everybody has it.

SPEAKER_14: And so it's going to be inappropriate for us to ignore it.

SPEAKER_157: We need to assume game of the function research leads to dangerous pathogenic bio organisms. But one doesn't cancel the other.

SPEAKER_27: And then we need to formulate. It doesn't. And then we need to formulate a bio defense strategy. I'm just saying like we don't.

SPEAKER_165: The implication. The reason why Sachs' thing is important to me is the implications. We have to have an honest accounting of these implications.

SPEAKER_21: We saw another implication just this week in Flint, Michigan. They shut down indefinitely the public school system in Flint, Michigan. Okay. This is a society just to give you a sense of the facts here.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 90% are minority. 80%. Why did they shut it down? Because of COVID? 80% because of COVID. Yeah. Because of the fear of catching COVID and spreading COVID. 90% are minority kids. 80% are in poverty. I don't know how, you know, 80% of kids who are in poverty are expected to have a laptop and internet access on a consistent basis. This is the same place that screwed up the water system. So I think like we have to have an honest accounting of all of these things because the implications are real.

SPEAKER_42: This is the biggest story of our lifetimes, COVID. I mean, it might be the biggest international incident since World War II. And the fact that the major, let's call it prestige publications have not really fully investigated what happened is unbelievable.

SPEAKER_183: Hold on a second.

SPEAKER_86: This is the conundrum to me because this started with a massive amount of coverage from BuzzFeed, Washington Post, New York Times in June of last year, 2021. They were covering this like crazy vanity fair, did a major investigation. And then it seems to have gone silent. And then Rand Paul has been going after this and it all of a sudden became partisan. So the only coverage I'm seeing of it that's independent is the intercept. But then everything else is the hill and, you know, really weird far right stuff that want to like, you know, Fauci needs to be whatever. And how did it become so partisan if it started with left leaning publications getting this information sacks?

SPEAKER_88: Like, how did this become partisan? Is it because the president changed in the middle of all this? Like, do you have an honest handicapping of why we can't get, you know, like a consensus on what's actually happening here from the press?

SPEAKER_187: Is it Rand Paul's too polarizing?

SPEAKER_42: Well, I think what happened is if you go back to February of 2020, if you look, I just had this conversation with Ashley Rinsberg on my call in show. And, you know, he's a blog.

SPEAKER_420: Now available. Call it. Call it.

SPEAKER_42: Colby Rinsberg, una. He literally wrote the book on The New York Times, and I asked him about their coverage of-

SPEAKER_421: Robert Hood account. You could trade that on Robert Hood. So fine.

SPEAKER_42: Colby Rinsberg, can I, can I finish? Sorry. Colby Rinsberg, this is the guy who literally, this is the guy who literally wrote the book on the New York Times. And I asked him about the New York Times coverage of COVID and COVID origins. He says that on February 17, so basically two weeks after these officials at the NIH settle on the conspiracy theory narrative,

SPEAKER_45: narrative. That narrative is then published almost word for word verbatim using the same language, not just the New York Times, in the Washington Post, across all these major publications. So what you see there is a PR campaign. It's a concerted effort. You don't get the same words and language being used across all the major publications at the same time unless somebody is pushing that narrative. We all know this. Corporations do this, right? They run PR campaigns. That is what basically happened. And so the prestige media got on board this zoonotic theory and this idea, look, like they've done so many times. They got on board WMD in Iraq before realizing it was a total farce and a hoax, okay? So they got themselves on record behind this conspiracy theory idea. And similarly, I think the Democrats got themselves on record as being pro Fauci and everything because of, you know, TDS, right? Anyone who's standing up to Trump must be correct and defend it. And so all of this happened in 2020. And so by the time we now fast forward to, let's call it an honest investigation of the origins of the virus, which should be bipartisan. This should not be partisan. We should all want to know what happened. We should all want to take the politics out of it because without knowing what happened, how do we prepare for it in the future? Everyone's already like hopelessly committed to positions they took in 2020. And I think that's what's driving the partisanship. Yeah, I think you're right.

SPEAKER_86: Yeah. I mean, that's the thing I'm trying to get to is like when I saw you wanted to put it on the docket, I'm like trying to grok this and I can't find, I'm finding all the left-leaning coverage from June of 2021. None since then. And then it's all right coverage now. And I think it's something we need to get some independent coverage with. So I'll take credit. I'll take credit for saying

SPEAKER_177: Fauci is the biggest political loser at our all in podcast recap. Thank you. I'll take my bow now.

SPEAKER_430: Well, I mean, and the other thing that's kind of infuriating.

SPEAKER_431: Well, half our predictions have come true already. I mean,

SPEAKER_86: I know we're so correct on these things. The thing that's, I think, just infuriating right now is that everybody is trying to manipulate the public and they have not understood that in this media environment, the truth comes out kind of not only eventually, but pretty quickly. So stop

SPEAKER_187: trying to game the public either way that the vaccines don't work or they do work. But Jason,

David Sacks: they've delayed the public reckoning on this by what, like two years?

SPEAKER_86: Well, here's the thing. So I agree with you on that. There's also a FOA release that happened in

SPEAKER_88: the UK, where, and it's a little too much to get into right now. But this FOA release now is looking at all the people who died in the UK of COVID. And it turns out like maybe more people are dying because they didn't get their cancer or a large number of people died because they didn't go in to get tested for cancer. And all of this is going to come out eventually and not putting out every day, the ages and the comorbidities of people who died of COVID just led to this feeling that we're getting gamed and turning on CNN and seeing the case counts in a cumulative chart is like a startup giving me like the cumulative number of people who registered for their company, but for their product. We don't care about that. We want to

SPEAKER_79: know your daily active users. What about the catastrophic impact of school closures that we've been talking about in the show repeatedly? And everything's being manipulated. Stop

SPEAKER_45: manipulating the public. Look, you have to realize that there is huge political motivations here because huge CYA going on because the heads of the teachers union said there is no learning loss. They are the ones who lobby to shut the schools down. They sure as hell aren't going to admit their mistake now. They're covering it up. And so any politician who takes their money is basically, they're going to muffle their criticism. There's only one really honest, like left-wing guy I've seen acknowledge the school closure issue, which was Jonathan Chait had a great article in New York Magazine saying that progressives must acknowledge the mistake of school closures

SPEAKER_46: because otherwise we can't learn from it. He has been a voice in the wilderness on that side of

SPEAKER_86: the aisle. We got to wrap up. Now that Sachs has cracked open the plugs, what are we all working on? Because I want to give a plug to Friedberg, who did a great interview on a tech podcast called This Week in Startups where he announced TANA. So it's a dual plug here. Friday's episode of

SPEAKER_73: This Week in Startups. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about the launch of of KANA, your new replicator.

SPEAKER_29: We're just announcing the business, which I talk about a lot on Jason's pod. So definitely worth hearing. But as you guys know, I've talked a lot about this concept of decentralized manufacturing, where we can kind of move old school industrial production systems, which are super inefficient, we use lots of resources, move stuff into factories, process them and then ship the products back out. And, you know, technology now allows us to have more distributed or decentralized manufacturing, potentially. So what, you know, what we've been working on for three years at this point is a company called KANA, which is really about, you know, printing beverages in your home. So you can use a single device to print the iced coffee or iced tea, cocktail, juice, wine, soda, etc. All using a single flavoring system and water from your from your sink.

SPEAKER_27: Like, we talked more about it on the pod. But I think this is a big theme, you know, forget about KANA for a second. But generally, like the systems of old, like, you know, the Industrial Revolution created all these old school systems that are big contributors to carbon emissions, and are super resource inefficient. And I do think that everything from 3D printing to bio manufacturing to the system that we kind of introduced today, with KANA, can completely reinvent our global industries in different ways, and ultimately lead to cheaper products, better products and products that use much less natural resources and put less carbon out. And so it's been a big thing that we've been

SPEAKER_29: working on. I'm excited to kind of open it up a little bit and talk more about what we're doing. So thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_13: Did you hire the Muth as a spokesperson?

SPEAKER_27: He may or may not have his brand on here. We'll see. So right now, the business is signing up lots of

SPEAKER_237: different folks that can create digital beverage brands. And so if any of you guys want to have J. Cal's, you know, hard cider, hard cider, we'll be launching that. But that's a big part of the platform.

SPEAKER_227: Phil Hallmuth actually told me his new soda that he's going to be bringing. It's called Muth Cola. It has five times the sugar of Coca Cola. Other than that, it's just like any other colder, but you get

SPEAKER_449: five times the calories. It's like drips out like maple syrup.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Hey, I'd like to, I'd like to do a plug. Do you got a plug? I'm sorry, project you're working on. No, but I want to, I want to say it again. In Genesee County in Michigan, Flint indefinitely shut down their public schools this week.

SPEAKER_14: What is going on? You have thousands of kids who at best will have to learn via Zoom and internet access that most of these kids may or may not have because again, uh, you know, they're, they're in poverty.

SPEAKER_98: And so I just want to make sure that everybody just understands that.

SPEAKER_84: Yeah, everybody tweet that and talk about it.

SPEAKER_453: Self-inflicted wounds.

SPEAKER_84: Well, here's the thing. These kids, um, this is one of Eric Adams' points now.

SPEAKER_21: 90, 90% minority, 80% in poverty, um, all virtual until further notice. Well, here's what's going to happen too.

Chamath Palihapitiya: It goes right against the CDC guidelines. Okay. And, uh, this is really the accounting of the cost.

SPEAKER_14: And we are, as we've said before, learning loss in our kids is going to be the single biggest

Chamath Palihapitiya: thing we look back at 20 years coming out of this pandemic, uh, and realize was the, the, the biggest price we paid for this. So, uh,

SPEAKER_86: And here's the stupidity of it. The, what the, and Eric Adams and the, and the New York City, uh, you know, sort of, uh, leadership, we're talking about this.

SPEAKER_88: When these kids are in school, okay, there's a chance they're going to get Omicron. Like everybody got Omicron. Like everybody has it now. Like it's crazy how many people in our circle have it. The only person who doesn't have it is Phil Hellmuth. Now, um, what's going to happen when they go home or they're not in school and they're hanging out with their friends or looking for something? They're going to get it anyway.

SPEAKER_53: What Eric Adams said is that school is the safest place for them to be. Yes. Totally.

SPEAKER_468: Totally.

SPEAKER_237: School shutdowns are just so insane to me right now.

SPEAKER_42: Unicef had an article, which I'll dig up where they said that the cost in future earnings by this generation of students who suffered learning loss is going to be 17 trillion worldwide.

David Sacks: Uh, that's going to be the economic impact from this thing. Not to mention the stunted social and emotional development by locking these kids down for

SPEAKER_430: your anxiety, PTSD. I mean, this is going to create depression in kids.

SPEAKER_360: We need to solve this. We got it. We got to get that. We got to get the schools in Flint open.

SPEAKER_88: All right, everybody for the dictator. Chamath, Polly Hoppa Tia. David Friedberg, the sultan of science and the rain man himself. David Sachs. I'm Jake.

SPEAKER_477: How we'll see you next time. Love you, boys. Episode 65. Love you, besties. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_478: David Sachs.

SPEAKER_481: I'm going to source it to the fan. Love you, besties.

SPEAKER_491: I'm the queen of her feet.

SPEAKER_495: What? That's going to be good. We need to get merch. Besties are back. I'm going.