SPEAKER_00: what's going on sax lp meeting is it an lp meeting or are you going are you going to SPEAKER_01: lunch peter teo a little layer what's going on it's 9am you must be there must be a call going SPEAKER_03: on here every week but chamath is in italy another button gets undone this is definitely SPEAKER_15: hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another episode of the all-in podcast episode 36 back SPEAKER_19: with us today on the program the queen of quinoa science uh spectacular friedberg is with us again with leading off last episode friedberg with a great uh friedberg science monologue the the crowd went crazy for it how does it feel coming off that epic performance in episode 35 tell us what were you thinking going into the game and uh yeah well i was thinking i would talk about the SPEAKER_21: alzheimer's drug approval at biogen and i felt like i did it when we were done great god it's just it's SPEAKER_24: like literally interviewing kawaii leonard after like a 50-point game okay and with us rain man david sax with layers for players he's been styled and groomed uh and he's in some random hotel room how are SPEAKER_28: you doing rain man good good i'm not i'm not in a hotel room i'm oh your home just happens to look SPEAKER_31: like a five-star resort god i forgot that um and give us an idea coming into today's game uh with SPEAKER_33: the layers uh you obviously are here to dominate and get your monologues up gotta be hard for you to look at the stat line and see yourself trailing in monologues behind the dictator i'm of course SPEAKER_36: referring to all in statistics yeah where some maniac is breaking down how many minutes we each talk SPEAKER_37: per episode jason i'm really happy with my performance uh for me it's about quality not SPEAKER_38: quantity i like to uh stick and stick and jab okay got it got it what are we talking about right now SPEAKER_31: what what what what what the hell are you talking about right there is a twitter account done you know how the the all-in stands have a ton of skills like there is an audience for this podcast that has more SPEAKER_45: skills than you know it's like the the five percent of the most skilled people in the world listen to this podcast so in addition to doing the merge in addition to doing who's the guy henry who does all those incredible videos with animations in addition to those bellcaster yeah bellcaster SPEAKER_19: henry bellcaster crushing those things are great those are amazing and then uh of course you have young spielberg who led the charge dropping incredible incredible tracks and now we have this new crew that is SPEAKER_45: analyzing somebody put uh you know we'll put in the show notes a link to it but they do um some type of ai analysis of the audio files and they tell us who had the most monologues and then the running time and then historic running time so they're actually looking at it trying to figure out you SPEAKER_33: know who who is uh speaking the most and they thought freeberg was going to run away with the episode but it kind of disappeared in the second half of the game uh and chamath uh obviously came around the corner and took his 27 but they only have a pie chart of how much we each talk i have a i always SPEAKER_24: have a very strong first and third quarter yes absolutely yeah and then uh he gets frustrated when he passes the ball and somebody misses a shot it's kind of like lebron in the early days so kicking SPEAKER_19: off today uh lena khan has been confirmed to the ftc with bipartisan support interesting and this is obviously going to be a challenge for big tech on tuesday the senate voted 69 to 28 to confirm lena khan who is a very well established critic of big tech um and this is obviously really unique because she's 32 years old and she's leaving ftc which is unbelievable i did a little research on her and SPEAKER_33: watched some videos um she's basically written two amazing papers um and the first paper came out in 2017 amazon's antitrust paper the second one uh came out in june um and was about the separation of platforms and commerce and when you hear her speak she is incredibly uh credible and knowledgeable SPEAKER_45: it is as if one of the four of us were discussing this she could come into this podcast and speak SPEAKER_33: credibly about amazon's businesses as opposed to the charades we saw at different hearings where the senators and and congress people just absolutely had no idea what they're talking about some of the the items i picked up from a talk she gave in aspen um is that she she formed a lot of these opinions by talking to venture capitalists who were concerned about amazon's dominance and other companies and the competitive space and she is looking at consumer welfare one of the lenses of antitrust which will i'm sure david sacks will have some thoughts on as our resident attorney here and the framing of those in terms of harm of the consumer she believes there's other harm that happens and she thinks one remedy is to kill amazon basics because the marketplace shouldn't own the goods as well she's concerned about cloud computing consolidation because that creates uh fragility and that is another type of consumer harm while she freely admits that prices have gone down services are free and this is a consumer benefit so she wants to rethink the entire concept and she is savvy she SPEAKER_19: brought up facebook buying a novo um the reportedly spyware vpn to give them a little advantage as to what was being used on phones and maybe give them a little product roadmap information she also um SPEAKER_33: brought up amazon studying the sales of other products to inform amazon basics a claim that amazon says they don't do but everybody knows they do do because all that information is publicly available she talked about amazon's vc arm using data to invest in buying companies why wouldn't they that makes total sense uh that's great signal for them uh she seems to want amazon web services spun out which i think would just double the value of it or maybe at 50 of the value of it and she gave very pragmatic examples like maybe separating google maps from android and when you turn on your android phone you you would have to install maps or maybe you would pick from the different maps that are out there different programs and that there would be integration in them and people could swap out you know mapquest or apple maps in their google searches so a lot of actually very interesting pragmatic approaches and she doesn't think these need to be decade-long lawsuits she thinks this is going to be a negotiation and that people will kind of work together on it but this is all with the backdrop of partisan politics and you know one group of people looking at this through the lens of wealth SPEAKER_58: and inequality and another group looking at it through censorship sax uh since you are our counsel here what are your thoughts on this appointment yeah i mean the interesting thing David Sacks: is that uh you know lena khan is the the bernie approved candidate she is liked by the progressive SPEAKER_61: left but at the same time she got 21 republicans to support her and so this um nomination you know sailed through confirmation i think what she's saying what she's saying i think there's um there's a very uh good good argument to it um that and i've said similar things in the past which is you know what she's basically saying especially in the case of amazon is look you've got this SPEAKER_38: company amazon that controls essential infrastructure aws the whole distribution supply chain going all the way from the port to warehouses to uh to logistics and distribution that is going to be owned by a scaled monopoly player you have a con massive economies of scale it's pretty clear they're going to dominate that and what they're doing is systematically going category by category and SPEAKER_62: using the monopoly monopoly profits they make by owning the sort of core infrastructure and subsidizing their entry into each of these new categories that amazon basics and others and she calls that you know it's predatory pricing and she's afraid that amazon's is going to end up dominating every category every category that you could build on top of this core infrastructure i think it's actually a pretty valid concern i think you see something analogous happening with apple and google and the app stores we had a congressional hearing pretty recently in which you had spotify on other apps complaining about what apple was doing to them saying they are making our service non-viable with the 30 percent rate that they're charging you remember bill gurley had a great post about this saying just because you can charge a 30 rate doesn't mean you should right now we're seeing this blowback from this massive 30 rate and you had spotify saying look apple is doing this to basically make us uh infeasible relative to apple music so i think there is a legit point here which is that if you own the monopoly platform the sort of essential infrastructure you cannot use it to basically take over over every application on top that can be built on top of that platform that i think is a very appropriate use of of antitrust law and i think so i think that's the good here now i think that there there are some some concerns um or some potential downsides and you know and the downside that i see is that we used to think we used to judge antitrust law in terms of consumer welfare and so we so there was a limiting principle to the actions of government which is you would just look at prices and the effect on prices here you know the the sort of movement that lean economy represents the so-called hipster antitrust movement they're concerned about power and they want to restructure markets to avoid sort of concentrations of power i don't see the limiting principle there and so i think what the the would market share be a limiting principle well it would be a limiting principle in terms of who you could take action on but it wouldn't be a limiting principle in terms of how you would restructure the market and i think what we're in for over the next few years is potentially a hyper politic politicization of big tech markets i think these 21 republicans might soon feel like the dog who caught the bumper in the sense that yes they're finally going to have the regulation of big tech they've been calling for but they might not like all of the results because we because what could happen is a very intrusive meddling by government in the markets of technology and it could go well SPEAKER_38: beyond sort of this um this this gatekeeper principle uh that we've been talking about that i think uh SPEAKER_67: would be a valid reason to regulate i think she has to be careful uh in focusing on amazon so if you break down antitrust law there are really three big buckets where the attack vectors are and i'm i'm not going to claim to be an expert but i think um they're relatively easy to understand so you have the first principle body which is called the sherman act that's the thing that everybody's looked at and that's you know sort of where um most current um antitrust enforcement action has failed on tech SPEAKER_68: companies because it largely looks at the predatory nature of pricing power that certain companies have and you have to remember this thing was written in the 1800s and so you know what did people do when they control things they just they drove prices up tech does the exact opposite right they constantly drive prices down and what's counterintuitive is it turns out that in the olden days driving prices up drove out competition today driving prices down drives out competition yes right so you know you make gmail infinite storage nobody else can compete with why switch why switch you make you know uh photos completely subsidized you make certain music products effectively free and you subsidize that you know you create enormous amounts of content blah blah blah so you have the sherman act then somewhere along the way we realized okay we need to add something we created this thing called the clayton act that was around m a right we added to that um a lot of folks that are listening probably have heard of hart scott rodino hsr we've all gone through it right on m a events we have to file these hsr clearances SPEAKER_67: when you make big investments for example you know i just made a um a climate change thing we had to file hsr um and then there's this ftca which is the federal trade commission act that is where she can Chamath Palihapitiya: get you know if to use a poker term um you know a little frisky why because the ftca has these two SPEAKER_68: specific things which says you can have an unfair method of competition or an unfair or deceptive act or practice now it falls on her and her team to basically build the strongest case around those two SPEAKER_67: dimensions and my only advice to her i wrote this in 2019 in my investor letter as well just thinking about the breakdown of big tech if you're going to go after these guys that's the body of law that probably is the most um defensible um but you probably have to start you know whether you like it or not with facebook or google um and the reason is there are more examples how you can use that SPEAKER_68: language under the ftca to give those folks a hard time i think it's much harder the example would be SPEAKER_74: chamath that uh we are giving away this product losing money on it to keep you in our store and moat you SPEAKER_31: into our uh advertising network etc that's an example yeah that's yeah or or you know we then we then Chamath Palihapitiya: because then when you have control then you can show that then the first part the sherman act part SPEAKER_68: kicks in why so you've seen 15 or 20 years of google facebook less apple by the way um using their edge to decrease price and for the first time in the last quarter both of these two companies and they were the only two of big tech that announced an increase in pricing right they saw a diminishing of cpm Chamath Palihapitiya: inventory and so they had to figure out ways to grow inventory as users started to stagnate SPEAKER_68: and what they really said is we're ramping up cpms and cpms i think we're up 28 30 percent in a quarter SPEAKER_80: yeah and there's a lot of competition right now for ads if you put these two ideas together which is SPEAKER_68: step one is you surreptitiously basically take all the costs out of the system and then step two raise price over time there's probably something there uh friedberg when we look at her age and her SPEAKER_33: obvious uh deep deep knowledge do you see that as uh an overall plus i mean obviously if you know david framed her as the bernie approved candidate but then conceded that 20 republicans are are backing her what do you what do you think about the massive credibility she has freeberg in terms of she's SPEAKER_83: actually understands this deeply clearly i mean i'm sure she's not dumb uh if that if that's what SPEAKER_45: you're asking i i'm not sure well i mean it's a 32 year old i mean have we seen an appointment like that before i mean i don't think so yeah that's that's good for her um yeah so i just feel like SPEAKER_84: there's um a bit of a a cycle underway where we have this kind of anti-wealth anti-wealth accumulation SPEAKER_87: sentiment as an undercurrent right now you know obviously bernie and elizabeth warren and others are our key vocal um uh proponents of change that's needed to keep this kind of wealth disparity from continuing to grow and one of the solutions is to reduce the monopolistic capacity of certain business models specifically in technology um the the downside that i don't think is realized and and that inevitably comes with this action under this new kind of business model of the the SPEAKER_88: technology age or the digital age is the uh damage to consumers um and so you know as as chamath and SPEAKER_87: david pointed out like historically antitrust has been about protecting the consumer and the irony is the more monopoly or the more monopolistic or the more market share amazon gains the cheaper things get SPEAKER_88: for consumers and um and it's unfair to small businesses and to business owners and to competitors SPEAKER_87: but consumers do fundamentally benefit and so the the logical argument she made in her paper that was widely distributed a few years ago um was around this notion that in this new world it's not about consumer harm um and we need to look past the impact of consumers and look more at kind of the SPEAKER_88: you know the fact that this company maybe prevents innovation and prevents competition but ultimately if the consumer is harmed uh in the resolution of that concern we're not going to wake up to it for a while and then consumers one day are going to wake up and they're going to be like wait a second why am i paying five bucks for gmail and you know why am i paying an extra ten dollars for shipping to get my amazon products brought to me every day and you know all the things that i think we've taken um for granted in the digital age uh with the advent of these you know call it monopolistic kind of business models where they accumulate market share and they can squeeze pricing and keep people out and the bigger they get the cheaper they get and therefore it's harder to compete consumers have benefited tremendously i i i think all of us would be hard-pressed to say i would love to pay 10 bucks a month for gmail i'd love to pay for facebook and at the end of the day these models i'd love to pay more for shipping with amazon um and so you know it becomes a value question right what do you value more do you value the opportunity for competition and innovation in the business world or do you value as a consumer better pricing and i don't think that we're really having that debate and i think that that debate will inevitably kind of arise over the next couple of years if and freeberg SPEAKER_33: kind of played out and i think to be clear freeberg what you're saying is this is driven by the SPEAKER_88: extraordinary wealth of jeff bezos zuckerberg etc it's easy to pinpoint that problem and then not involve the repercussions to consumers if you try and change how business operates in a free market system and these businesses are successful because they have customers that like what they're offering and they're and they drive in a competitive way of pricing down and they prevent people from coming in and competing not by entering into contract and anti-trust enforcement all this sort of stuff they're doing it because they're scaling and offering lower prices i mean this like peter teal and mark andreessen have separately argued for this in really intelligent ways probably in a far more articulated way than i can but and they did this early on which is you know we want to find businesses that can become monopolies because if you can reduce your pricing and improve your pricing power with scale it's going to be harder and harder for someone to compete and therefore the capital theory is rush a bunch of capital into these businesses help them scale very quickly i mean this is obviously the basis of uber and others and then get really big really fast create the moat SPEAKER_87: create the moat drop the pricing and then no one can compete with you on pricing consumers benefit and you've created the big business and you've locked everyone okay so let me go around the horn here SPEAKER_33: and frame this for everybody let's assume that uh big tech does get breaking up this broken up this SPEAKER_31: is uh an exercise we assume it gets broken up and youtube and android are spun out instagram whatsapp are spun out aws is spun out and you know app stores are allowed on um apple's platform uh ios for the first SPEAKER_45: time i want to know if this is good bad or neutral for the following two people so these breakups occur SPEAKER_19: is it good bad or neutral for consumers and then two is it good bad or neutral for startups sacks David Sacks: i generally would lean towards saying yes i mean a lot depends on better neutral for each party SPEAKER_61: startups and for consumers i i think it could ultimately be good for for both but it really depends on how it's done and i think there is a big risk here that this just degenerates into sort of hyper politicization you get intensive amounts of lobbying by big tech in washington SPEAKER_38: that what happens is you know you have a good cop bad cop where lena con just becomes the bad cop she's there to kind of keep big tech in line threatens to break them up and then the good cop is you know biden and the administration and then they they become the protection under the extortion racket they raise on you know ungodly amounts of money and really it'll be a bonanza for for all elected officials because now big techs have to increase its donations even more super cynical wow that's the that's the cynical take so we could end up with something much worse than what we have now but but i think the legit i SPEAKER_62: think the words you're going to hear a lot okay are common carrier because what she seems to be saying is look if you're a tech monopoly that controls core infrastructure we need to regulate you like a common carrier you cannot summarily deny service to your competitors who are downstream applications built on top of your platform conservatives can get behind that because that is the argument they've been making about facebook cutting off free speech is you are a speech utility you should be regulated as a common carrier you cannot cut off people summarily you cannot discriminate against people who should be allowed to have free speech on your platform and so i think there is i think the left and the right here SPEAKER_103: can cut a deal where they regulate these guys these big tech companies as common carriers i think that SPEAKER_97: is what we're headed towards so a bakery can deny service as we talked about previous issue to a gay SPEAKER_33: couple who wants a cake because it's a tiny little company and there's other choices but when we're talking about facebook and twitter there are not other choices and once you're removed like trump has been from the public square there is no recourse you are essentially zeroed out chamath is it good for startups bad for startups neutral same thing for consumers if you know one chunk of every company SPEAKER_106: got cleavered off uh it's unanimously good for startups in any scenario in which they get involved SPEAKER_67: and i think in most cases in which the government gets involved it's it's good for consumers as well and why in both cases so for startups it's just because i think right now we have a massive human capital sucking sound um that big tech creates in the ecosystem which is that there is an entire generation of people that are basically unfortunately frittering away their most productive years getting paid what seems to them like a lot of money uh but is what is effectively just you know um payola to not go to a competitor or go to a startup at by big tech so to explain that clearly for example like if you're a machine learning person right uh those machine learning people um you know can get paid 750 to a million dollars a year to stay at google and instead they won't go to a startup because they take sort of the bird in the hand right you multiply that by 100 or 150 000 very talented you know technical people and that's actually what you're seeing every day now those numbers are actually much higher you know if you're if you're a specific ai person you can get paid five ten million dollars a year my point is they could have started a startup and they could have and frankly they just million they look let's be honest they go to google facebook and whatever and i don't think anybody sees the real value of what they're SPEAKER_68: doing in those places except getting paid now they're making a rational economic decision for SPEAKER_67: themselves and so nobody should blame them for that um but if startups had more access to those people um or if you know those engineers finally said you know what enough's enough i'm actually going to go and try something new that's net additive to the ecosystem it's net additive to startups Chamath Palihapitiya: right that's that's that's for them and then for consumers i think the reason why it's positive is SPEAKER_68: that it'll start to show you in which cases you had been giving away something that you didn't realize was either valuable or you didn't realize you were giving away in return for all of these product subsidies that you were getting and i think that's the next big thing that's happening you can see it in the in the enormous amount of investment apple for example is making in both advertising the push to privacy as well as implementing the push to privacy you know this last wwdc you know they really threw the gauntlet down you know they they were really trying to blow up um the advertising business models of google and facebook um and as consumers become more aware of that they're probably willing to pay more so a simple example is you know there are a lot of people now who will pay higher prices for food if they know it to be organic right there are people who will pay higher prices for electricity or for an electric car because of its impact or the lack thereof in the climate so it's not to say that SPEAKER_120: people always want cheaper faster better right i mean sometimes people will buy an iphone because it's SPEAKER_33: uh obviously protecting their privacy and they know it's not an ad based model and in fact apple is now making that part of their process so uh freeberg i asked the other gentleman uh if they thought some large unit being chopped off of every company youtube aws uh instagram you pick it um would be a net positive SPEAKER_82: for startups or negative or neutral and the same thing for consumers what do you think which gentleman SPEAKER_84: did you ask you mean i was specifically referring to the ones who are wearing layers hello sir yes SPEAKER_88: i'm using the term lightly so if you guys go back a few years ago you'll uh remember there were these i SPEAKER_87: think there were congressional hearings and jeremy stopelman from yelp was pretty vocal about how google um was redirecting um search engine traffic to their own kind of reviews and they were pulling SPEAKER_88: yelp content off the site but then they said to yelp if you don't want us to pull your content you can turn the web crawler toggle off and we won't crawl your site but your site is publicly available we can crawl it and we show snippets on our home page but then their argument was well you're using our content to drive your own reviews and they made this whole kind of case that google's kind of monopoly in search was harming their ability to do business um you know the counter argument was well if you guys have a great service consumers will go to your app directly or your website directly to get reviews they won't go to google and so it created a little bit of this kind of noise for a while i think there was some follow-up and this is all very much related because ultimately if he was able to get google to stop providing a review service his business would do better because google would effectively redirect search traffic to his site as opposed to their own internal site so it is inevitably the case that in-house apps or in-house services that compete with third-party services when you're a platform business um are uh you know if they're removed it's certainly going to benefit the competitive landscape which is typically startups uh you know imagine if apple didn't have apple maps pre-installed on the iphone everyone would download and use google maps right i mean they're are yeah map quest whatever or map quest or whatever and so um you know or whatever startup came along in like ways and said hey we've got a better map but because they have this ability to kind of put that apple maps in front of you as a consumer and it's a default on your phone you're more likely to just click on it and start using it and you're done it certainly opens up this window but i think the question is what's ultimately best for the consumer if you believe that consumers will choose what's best for themselves you're starting to kind of manipulate with the market a bit and sacks i don't know i think you've got a different point of view on this but yeah yeah well i'm a SPEAKER_61: i'm a free markets type of guy but um my experience at paypal really changed my thinking on this because paypal it was a startup that launched effectively as an involuntary app on top of the ebay market at that time ebay had a monopoly on the auction market and that was the key sort of beachhead market for online payments so we launched on top of ebay they were constantly trying to dislodge us and remove us from their platform and really the only thing keeping them from just switching us off was a was SPEAKER_38: an antitrust thread we actually spun up you could call it a lobbying operation where we would send information to the ftc and the doj and say listen you've got this auction monopoly here that's taking anti-competitive actions against us this little startup and you know it and so we were able to rattle the saber and and sort of uh brush them back from the plate from taking a you know a much more dramatic action against us and frankly we did something kind of similar with visa mastercard because paypal was essentially an application on top of visa mastercard as well we offered merchants the ability to accept visa mastercard but also paypal payments which were gradually eating into and supplanting the the credit card payments and so you know visa mastercard had a very dim view of paypal and they were constantly you know they were constantly making noise about switching us off and i i do think that without the threat of antitrust hanging over these big monopolies or duopolies it would have been very hard for us as a startup to get the access to these networks that we needed and so it really kind of changed my thinking about it because you know if you let these giant monopolies run wild run run amok they will absolutely stifle innovation 100 they will become gatekeepers and so you have to have the threat of antitrust action hanging over their heads or you will stifle SPEAKER_33: innovation absolutely i mean if you just look at the interesting google flights over time i'm looking at a chart right now we'll put it into the notes google flights you know i know some of us don't fly commercial anymore but you know for somebody who's uh looking for flights on a regular basis SPEAKER_45: watching google intercept flight information put up google flights and it's an awesome product SPEAKER_88: and just expedia and bookings.com so jason that was that was a company called ita software based out of boston and ita was acquired by google ita was the search engine behind flight search for most companies it was like 70 phds they were all statistics guys and they basically built this logistical model that identified you know flights and pricing and all this sort of stuff oh wow so and so they should never been well they created a white label uh search capability that they then provided and they were making plenty of money providing this as a white label search capability to expedia and kayak and all the online uh travel agencies and google wanted to be in that business because travel search was obviously such a big vertical um and rather than just buy a travel search site they bought the engine that powers travel search for most of the other sites gangster and then they also revealed the results in their own search result homepage uh which effectively cut off the otas and the otas are big spenders on google ads SPEAKER_45: so so basically google this is how nefarious it is if i'm hearing what you're saying friedberg SPEAKER_33: correctly they watched all this money being made by those otas they watched where they got their data SPEAKER_35: from then they bought their data source and then they decided you know what we won't take your cost per click money we'll just take your entire business well i don't know so so let me just put let me just SPEAKER_21: say it another way what's best for consumers so does a consumer because what happens a lot in SPEAKER_88: online dictatorships i guess that you don't want to make money in online advertising there are a lot of these ad arbitrage businesses is one way to think about it where um you know a service provider will pay for ads on google to get traffic the ads will come to their site and then they will either make money on ads or you know kind of sell that consumer services right and so that's effectively what the otas were is they were they became intermediaries online search engine intermediaries that were arbitraging google's ad costs versus what they could get paid for the consumer and so google look at this and they're like wait a second we're only capturing half the pie and consumers don't want to have to click through three websites to buy a flight or buy a hotel and by the way if they did they would keep doing it so why don't we just give them the end result right up front and then consumers will be happier the less time they have to spend clicking through sites and looking at other shitty ads SPEAKER_93: the happier they'll be and the product just works incredibly well consumers so make consumers lives SPEAKER_24: less arduous while building a power base that then could make their lives miserable what i think lena David Sacks: khan is saying though is you can't just look at the short-term interests of consumers you got to look SPEAKER_38: at their long-term interests what's in the long-term interest consumers is to have competition in the short term these giant monopolies can engage in predatory pricing to lower the cost for consumers and SPEAKER_61: so just looking at the price on a short-term basis isn't enough and they can trick people to giving SPEAKER_68: them something else that they don't know to be valuable so in the case of these you know a lot of these companies what are they doing they're tricking them to get enormous amounts of user information yep personal information user generated content and they get nothing for it and then on the back of that if you're able to build a trillion look at look at the value that youtube has generated um economic value and then try to figure out how much of that value is really shared with the creator community inside of youtube i'm guessing it's less than 50 basis points well 55 55 percent of revenue yeah but SPEAKER_149: you're saying downstream with all that data google is making a massive amount of money i just want to SPEAKER_68: if you if you impute the value of all of the pii that google basically gets personally identifiable information all the cookies that they drop all that information and you equate it to an economic enterprise value not necessarily yearly revenue like a discounted cash flow over 20 years you would be in the trillions and trillions of dollars and then if you discounted the same 20 years of revenue share that they give to their content producers it will be in the hundreds of billions of dollars at best and so you're talking about an enormous trade-off where google basically has um built you know a multi-trillion dollar asset and has leaked away less than 10 or 15 percent of the value but that's an example where they are giving people something that they think is valuable right but in return they're able to build something much much more valuable right i just want to SPEAKER_88: address like sax's point which is the regulators are now going to start to think about the long-term interest consumer over the short-term interest of the consumer as um effectively giving the regulatory throttle uh to uh elected officials and this means that you're now giving another throttle right another control uh joystick um to to folks that may not necessarily come from business um that may not necessarily have the the appropriate background and that may have their own kind of political incentives and motivations to make decisions about what is right and what is wrong for consumers over the long term and ultimately those are going to be value judgments right there's no determinism here there's no right or wrong um they're going to be decisions based on the kind of opinion and nuance of of some elected people and so it is a very dangerous and kind of slippery slope to end up in this world where the judgment of some regulator about what's best for consumers long term versus the cold hard facts oh prices went up prices didn't you know uh but really saying well this could affect you in the future in this way um starts to become kind of a really you know scary and slippery slope SPEAKER_87: uh if we kind of embrace this uh this this new regulatory order all right moving on big news this week SPEAKER_31: uh apple had a gag order it has been revealed um this is unbelievable it's pretty crazy um and we we SPEAKER_33: only have partial information here but the justice department subpoenaed apple in february of 2018 about an account that belonged to donald mcgan who obviously was the uh trump's white house council at the time and obviously was part of the campaign he is very famously uh known for being interviewed by mueller and at that this is the time period by the way we're talking about here in february of 2018 when mueller was investigating manafort who of course uh was super corrupt and went to jail and then was subsequently pardoned because they he was also involved in the campaign in 2016 it's possible that this related to mueller it's unknown at this time uh many other folks were also caught up in this dragnet rod rosenstein was his second and it's um unclear if the fbi agents were investigating uh whether mcgan was the leaker uh or not trump uh had previously ordered mcgan the previous june to have the justice department remove mueller which mcgan refused and threatened to resign and mcgan later revealed that he had in fact leaked his resignation threat to the washington post uh according to the times disclosure that agents had collected data of a sitting white house council uh which they kept secret for years is extraordinary go ahead sax well i i just think let's get all the SPEAKER_61: facts out here i think you're missing some of the key facts so the the justice department under trump starts this investigation into leaks of classified information they're on a mole hunt effectively and they start uh making they subpoena the doj subpoenas records from apple and it goes very broad and they end up subpoenaing the records not just of mcgan who's the white house council which is SPEAKER_38: very bizarre and curious so they'd be investigating their own white house council but they also uh well it was a leadership yes but they're all they also subpoena records of adam schiff and swalwell and members of the house intelligence committee and so you have now um an accusation which is being breathlessly reported on cnn and msnbc that here you had the trump administration investigating its political enemies and using the subpoena power of the doj with apple's compliance to now spy on their political enemies that that those are some big jumps those are some big jumps set up yeah and that those SPEAKER_33: are some big jumps because um according to preet bahara and some other folks who are in the industry um who who have done these actual subpoenas they could have been subpoenaing you know one of manafort's you know corrupt you know uh partners in crime and then those people he could have been SPEAKER_45: talking to many people in the trump administration and then subsequently family members and others so he might have not been the target he could have been caught up in the metadata of other people SPEAKER_33: yeah so this might not be trump saying get me his iphone records it could be there's some dirty person they know they're dirty and that person had reached out to other people and they might have even done one more hop from it smart thoughts i mean okay that's one version yeah and then you Chamath Palihapitiya: know the other the other version which is important is you subpoena your own lawyer by going to apple getting basically god knows what data associated with this man's account and then you know institute SPEAKER_68: the gag order on that company so that they can neither tell the person until now when the gag order expired Chamath Palihapitiya: nor tell anybody else nor have any recourse to the extent that they think that this is illegitimate that to me smells really fishy and so you know like there are other mechanisms that that we know of like physical requests and other things that these big companies have to deal with all the time SPEAKER_68: this at least the way that it's written and how it's been reported is something outside of the pale and so i think you have to deal with it with this question of like what the hell was going on over Chamath Palihapitiya: there yeah it does seem like they were going uh i mean you know kindly maybe mole hunting more nefariously witch hunting um but they were trying to pin it on people and they may have used this blanket sort of deniable plausibility of the russia you know imbroglio but really what these guys were SPEAKER_68: doing was they were investigating anybody that they thought was a threat and that is a really scary thing to have in a democracy and then the fact that these big tech companies basically just turned it over and didn't have any recourse to protect the user or to inform the public forget trump for a second i think we don't necessarily want that to be the precedent that holds going forward yeah and SPEAKER_120: the interesting thing here is that sacks jeff sessions rosenstein and barr all say they're unaware of SPEAKER_33: this so what would be the charitable reason they were unaware of it or what would be the SPEAKER_149: nefarious reason or is that important at all because that's really strange well they would go after the white house council and adam schiff and those top three people would have no idea SPEAKER_68: are they lying i mean what's next is the sc you know are we going to basically go to a point where like you know every single every no but i mean like every single post that one makes on facebook is basically surveilled um if you make an anonymous post on twitter will you be tracked down i remember like as much as everybody thinks there's anonymity on the internet there really isn't and you should just completely assume that you are trackable are being tracked have been tracked everything is in the wide open it's just a matter of whether it's disclosed to you or not or whether it's brought SPEAKER_38: back to you or not so yeah so look i mean i i agree with jama that this stinks and it's it's an invasion of people's civil liberties but i would not make it too partisan because the obama administration was engaging in similar activity back in 2013 and i don't think people realize this the there's an old saying in washington that the real scandal is what's legal and the fact of the matter is that what the trump administration did was certainly suspicious and it might have been politically motivated we don't know but it was legal the doj convened a federal grand jury got these uh got these subpoenas presented them to apple and got this information and in a similar way back in 2013 the obama SPEAKER_62: administration did something similar it's quite extraordinary they subpoenaed the records of the ap they for they for two months they got the records of reporters and five branches of the ap and all their mobile records and they were on a mole hunt to try and find leakers of classified information so the trump administration basically did exactly what the obama administration did the only new wrinkle is that they'd only went after reporters they actually uh subpoenaed records of members you're missing SPEAKER_31: one huge you're missing one huge difference trump was under investigation uh for espionage and treason SPEAKER_172: at the time so it is slightly different um i i i i don't think it's that different in the sense that SPEAKER_62: trump used powers that were pioneered by the obama administration they just took them they just took SPEAKER_100: them well one little and in addition to that sacks in addition to that um when obama did it all the SPEAKER_19: top brass at the department of justice were aware of this and in this case you have three people SPEAKER_187: who were running the department of administration all claiming they don't know no in 2013 there's SPEAKER_38: a new york times article on this i'm going to post on the in the show notes but it said that when first of all the ap was not informed about the subpoenas until a number of months later so it was a secret seizure of records same thing here with the gag order and so you have people being SPEAKER_62: investigated they don't even know they're being investigated investigated they can't even get a lawyer spun up to oppose the invasion of their rights i agree with you but the attorney general SPEAKER_38: knew about that maybe the attorney general did but the white house claims that it didn't know so in any event i mean look yeah what we i my view on this is that we shouldn't try to make this too partisan what we have here is an opportunity to hopefully get some bipartisan legislation to fix the SPEAKER_62: issue and i think the fix should be this that when you investigate somebody when you subpoena records from a big tech company you have to notify them you should not be able to do that secretly because the fact of the matter is that apple and these other big tech companies don't have an incentive to oppose the subpoena they're not your lawyer and actually brad smith the president of microsoft had a great op-ed in the washington post that we should post that we should put in the show notes where he said these secret gag orders must stop he said that in the old way of the government subpoenaing records is that you would have essentially offline records you'd have a file cabinet and the government would come with a search warrant they present the search warrant to you and then you could get a lawyer to oppose it well they don't do that anymore because your records aren't in a file cabinet somewhere they're in the cloud and so now they don't even go to the person who's being investigated right they just go to a big tech company seize the records and then put a gag SPEAKER_191: order on top of it so you don't even know you're being investigated that's the part of it that SPEAKER_33: stinks and by the way it's even more pernicious than that sacks because to combine this with the previous uh story what incentive does apple have to say to an administration that could break them up SPEAKER_195: we're not going to cooperate of course zero zero incentive they are not your agent in this and SPEAKER_182: here's the thing those are your records they're in the cloud but they're your records in every other SPEAKER_62: privacy context we say those records belong to you not to big tech so this is why apple's moving everything to your phone right but just this point why should the government be able to do an SPEAKER_200: end run around you the target of the investigation go to big tech get your records from because SPEAKER_67: they're not your records well first of all they're not your records these companies tricked all of SPEAKER_68: us by giving it to us for free so that we gave them all of our content they are fair point not just that they are not just the custodian they are the trustee of our content and it's a huge distinction in what they're allowed to do and jason brings up an incredible point which is which is Chamath Palihapitiya: that of course they're now incentivized to have a back door and live under a gag order because their their defense in a back room is you guys you know when when in the light somebody says we should break you up in the dark they can say guys come on we got a back door you just come in gag order us give us SPEAKER_68: we'll give you what you want you want a honey pot right you don't want this thing all over the internet and can you imagine how credible david that is to your point because that is a body of concentrating SPEAKER_31: power that i think is very scary in fairness to apple friedberg um they have locked down the phone SPEAKER_19: and they've moved all of this information from the cloud or they're starting this process and saying we're going to keep some amount of this data encrypted on your phone and of course with the SPEAKER_33: san bernardino shooting they refused in a terrorist shooting a known terrorist shooting to not give a SPEAKER_68: back door um well that's a crazy standard it's like you know what okay there was a san bernardino Chamath Palihapitiya: shooter and they were like nope sorry that's a bridge too far but you know don mcgan and basically like SPEAKER_68: you know political espionage they're like here you go yeah i don't know how how do you make these SPEAKER_84: decisions let me ask you guys a question go ahead freeberg would you be could you see yourself SPEAKER_88: thriving in a world where all of your information was completely publicly available but also all of everyone else's information was completely publicly available yes oh everybody has all their nudes on the web is what you're saying everyone there's a there's a there's a book by stephen baxter called the light of other days it's one of my favorite sci-fi books i sent it out to all of my investors this last uh we do like a book thing every year and i reread it recently but the whole point of the book is that there's like a wormhole technology that they discover and they can figure out how to like look in you can boot up your computer and look in anywhere and see anything and hear anything you want and so all of a sudden society has to transform under this kind of new regime of hyper transparency where all information about everything is completely available but i think the fear and the concern that we innately have with respect to loss of privacy is that there's a centralized or controlled power that has that information but what if there was a world that that you evolved to where all of that information is generally available quite broadly and i'm not advocating for this by the way i'm just pointing out that like the sensitivity we have is about our information being concentrated in the hands of either a government or a business um and i think you have to kind of accept the fact that more information is being generated about each of us every SPEAKER_87: day than was being generated by us a few weeks ago or months ago or years ago basically everybody SPEAKER_215: everybody's the truma and everybody's the truman show is what you're saying well in a geometrically SPEAKER_88: growing way information which we're calling pii or whatever is being generated about us and i think the genie's out of the bottle meaning like the the cost of sensors the access to digital the digital age and what it brings to us from a benefit perspective is creating information about us and a footprint about us that i don't think we ever kind of contemplated but as that happens the question is where does that information go can you put that genie back in the bottle and i think there's a big philosophical point which is like if you try and put the genie back in the bottle you're really just trying to fight information wants to be free information wants to grow what's the name of the book you were talking about there the light of other days by stephen baxter and arthur c clark helped write it but the book is most interesting about the philosophical implications of a world where all information is completely freely available anyone yeah completely transparent and so like do we see ourselves because i think there's two paths one is you fight this and you fight it and you fight it every which way which is i want my pii SPEAKER_21: locked up i don't want anyone having access to it yada yada yada you'll either see a diminishment of services or the other one is you do a or you'll see a selfie on twitter where you SPEAKER_88: take a shirt off or you'll see this concentration of power where we all kind of freak out where the government or or some business has all of our information the other path is a path that society starts to recognize that this information is out there there is you know whatever it's not just SPEAKER_38: about pii here this is about due process this is about our fifth amendment right to due process you have the government secretly investigating people they could never do this if they had to present you with a search warrant they are doing an un and run around that process by going to big tech just to put some numbers on this big tech is getting something like 400 subpoenas a week for people's records they only SPEAKER_62: oppose four percent of them why they have no incentive to how many of those do you know how many are those a secret or not we don't know how many of them have a gag order they are required to tell the target what happened but not if there's a gag order attached to it we don't know how many have a gag order you should have the right to send your own lawyer to oppose the request not to depend on big tech for it SPEAKER_120: if you want to see an amazing movie the lives of others uh which is about the state security service SPEAKER_82: in east berlin germany uh also known as the stasi and the impact of literally in your apartment building SPEAKER_33: there are three people spying on the other 10 people and they're the postman and you know the housewife and the teacher and they're all tapped and secretly recording to each other it leads to SPEAKER_82: chaos and bad feelings and obviously when east berlin um when the wall came down all of this came out and SPEAKER_61: it was really dark and crazy yeah i mean look let me connect this to the censorship issue actually because in my view they're both very similar civil liberties issues which is in the case of the SPEAKER_38: censorship issue you have the government doing an end run around the first amendment by demanding that big tech companies engage in censorship that the government itself could not do you have something very similar taking place here with these records the government is demanding secrecy about its seizure SPEAKER_62: of records they're imposing that on big tech they're making big tech do its dirty work for them they could SPEAKER_38: never do that uh directly if they had to go to the target of the investigation and ask for their and subpoena the records that way so what you have here is a case where we not only need to be protected against the power of big tech we need to be protected against the power of government usurping the powers SPEAKER_62: of big tech to engage in you know behavior they couldn't otherwise engage in and let's be honest SPEAKER_33: big tech and the government are uh overlapping and in cahoots or they're inside yeah they're in some really crazy dance the money is flowing freely from uh lobbyists and it's a very very complicated relationship it's a very complicated it's a very complicated relationship all right seven day average for covid deaths is uh now at 332 um finding cases of people who have had covid um is now becoming like almost shocking uh i don't know if you guys saw but uh the point guard chris paul uh who is having an incredibly winning season the nba he basically got covid they said he was vaccinated so it could be a mild case but he's been uh pulled out indefinitely and he's about to play in the western conference final so it's pretty crazy and freeberg uh obviously california's opened up after 15 months and we were the first to shut down the last to open up and we were hit the least i think of any state or amongst the least of any certainly the least of any large state um and you're being asked to still SPEAKER_88: wear a mask at your office i'm also being asked to take off my shoes when i get on an airplane yeah 20 years later and yeah i don't think al-qaeda exists anymore uh yeah maybe some yeah parts of it SPEAKER_31: explain what's happening to you in the presidio which is a lovely state park uh here in california SPEAKER_88: my office in the presidio in california san francisco county and the federal government have all removed mask mandates but our our landlord has determined in their judgment that everyone should still wear a mask to go to work and so to go into my rented office and work i have to wear a mask um and i think it's it's an issue for a lot of people who like those people that um i've been probably at a couple restaurants this week and you know you go to some restaurants and everyone's just chilling the employees are not wearing masks there's other restaurants where they're being told they have to keep wearing masks by their manager or their boss um and so this brings up this big question which is like we've now got the kind of psychic shadow of covid that that's gonna it's gonna it's gonna cast a very long shadow you predicted it you predicted it and um and so people that that are in power want to continue to kind of impress upon you know whatever you know employees or tenants or what have you they might have um in whatever they deem their judgment to be which is obviously in many cases an under-informed uninformed non-scientific and um and non-mandated judgment about effectively what people should have to wear so if the threat or the risk has been removed and all of the health officials and all of the government agencies are saying the threat has been removed you no longer need to kind of wear masks but your boss or your manager or your landlord tells you you have to wear a mask to conduct your business or to go to work um you know it's gonna bring up this whole series of challenges and questions i foresee for the next couple of months at least and maybe for several years about what's fair and what's right and there will always be the safety argument to be made on the other side so it's very hard to argue against that and oh well the inconvenience is just a mask it's not a big deal but for you know a number of people to to now kind of be told you know what to do SPEAKER_67: and what to wear it'll take a year to sort all these things out because they'll all get prosecuted not prosecuted but litigated and they're going to go to court they will get litigated for sure Chamath Palihapitiya: there will there will be lawsuits on this and and what's going to happen is that you're going to basically have again jason back to that example of the the bakery in colorado um private institutions SPEAKER_67: will be allowed some level of independence in establishing um you know certain employee guidelines and so on exactly and you you'll have to conform to those and um it is what it is i mean SPEAKER_33: i i was very strange in austin in terms of these covid uh dead enders who just will not let it go SPEAKER_45: i'm in austin where nobody is wearing a mask and then there were like i went into lululemon and they SPEAKER_33: like two people charged me with masks in hand and they were like you have to wear a mask and i was like do i and they're like yes it's our policy i was like fine i'll put it on i don't care you know no big SPEAKER_150: deal this thing this thing has really fried a bunch of people's brains i mean it's crazy i mean SPEAKER_251: it's it's basically like you've taken an entire group of folks and kidnapped them and kidnapped SPEAKER_253: them essentially it's stockholm syndrome it's incredible no everyone's everyone's been held SPEAKER_88: hostage you know in a prison for the last year and so you've kind of accepted that this is the new reality i gotta wear a mask i gotta wear gloves um and you know it's the similar sort of shift in reality that i think was needed going into this where people didn't believe what it was and now it's hard for them to believe what it's become we we flagged human nature yeah yeah we we flagged on SPEAKER_61: this pod a few months ago the threat of zeroism yeah which is that we wouldn't let you know all the SPEAKER_38: special rules and restrictions lift until there were zero cases of covet and we all know that's never SPEAKER_61: going to happen covet will always be around in the background and just to add a layer to what's happening here in california is yeah on june 15th we lifted the restrictions but governor newsom has SPEAKER_62: not given up his emergency powers and he's he says he will keep them until covet has been extinguished so he's now embraced zeroism on behalf of uh this sort of authoritarianism yeah and you know so we've SPEAKER_38: got this like golden state caesar and now i i what's interesting is i don't think this is just because he's a tyrant although he's certainly been heavy-handed i think it's because that the i think it's more about corruption than ideology because federal funds emergency funds from the SPEAKER_62: federal government keep flowing to the state as long as we have a state of emergency and so the longer he keeps this thing going the more money he gets from the federal government that he can then use in this recall year to pay people off and so we've already seen he's been buying every vote he can right he gave 600 bucks to everyone making under 75 000. he's forgiving all the traffic fines and parking tickets he's doing this this lottery ticket uh thing for getting the vaccine and so he just wants to keep the the um the gravy train from washington's for going to california even though SPEAKER_260: it's what government governor timoth would have done SPEAKER_24: i mean it reminds me of 9 11 where people were just like hey we can keep this gravy train no i mean like SPEAKER_88: 9 11 is the perfect kind of psychic you know scenario uh you know replaying itself with covid there are behavioral changes that have lasted forever there are regulatory changes this you know department of homeland security i mean you go through the amount of money that gets spent by the tsa every year and the qualified risk and the qualified benefit completely unquantified right like the amount of money that flows into these programs because you can make the the subjective statement there is a threat there is risk therefore spend infinite amounts of money right like it's because because you never kind of put pen to paper and say what is the risk what is the probability what is the severity of loss and therefore let's make a value judgment about how much we should spend to protect against that downside and we're now doing the same thing with covet we're not having a conversation about how many cases how many what's the risk should we really still be spending bill billions of dollars of state funding to continue to protect a state where 70 of people are vaccinated SPEAKER_24: and we and we have a massive surplus and we're still giving people money uh who may or may not need SPEAKER_33: it and we're doing it indiscriminately speaking of uh discussions and hard topics and being able to have them youtube which kicked off a ton of people on the platform for talking about things that were not approved by the who has taken professor brett weinstein's podcast down because he had a very reasonable discussion about ivermectin and its efficacy or lack of efficacy this is a doctor a phd talking to an md um and the video was removed apple did not remove really it's really scary SPEAKER_61: this episode these people should not be the gatekeepers of the truth they have no idea what the truth is let's talk about the the john stewart appearance on steven colbert well that's what i was SPEAKER_62: about to do tell this which is yeah he killed he killed on stephen colbert but the things he was saying about the lab leak would not have been allowed on youtube if it was three months ago that SPEAKER_31: you would have been removed for it even as a comedian the performance was amazing he basically David Friedberg: says you know the wuhan uh covet lab is where the wuhan you know uh no the disease is named after the SPEAKER_152: lab so where do you think it came from was like a panel in mer you know mated with a bat i mean this Chamath Palihapitiya: isn't and he goes on this whole diatribe it's incredibly funny yes but then at the end of it well i i had two takeaways i don't know if you guys felt this at first i was like SPEAKER_152: ah john stewart's a little unhinged here like i mean there was a part of it that was funny and then there was a part of it which is like wow john stewart's been trapped indoors a little too long months yeah yeah so i thought that as well to be honest but then the second thing which i saw on Chamath Palihapitiya: twitter was all these people reminding uh anybody who saw the tweet that this exact content would have not been allowed on big tech platforms were it said three or six months ago and i was like wow this is this is really nuts meaning it takes a left-leaning smart funny comedian to say something that satire if the if the right if the right would have said it would have just been instantly banished and that's like that's kind of crazy yeah the great quote was i think we owe a great debt of gratitude to SPEAKER_33: science science has in many ways helped ease the suffering of this pandemic uh which was more than SPEAKER_38: likely caused by science yeah it was a funny line where he said something like uh if there was an outbreak of chocolatey goodness in hershey pennsylvania pennsylvania it wouldn't be it wouldn't be because you SPEAKER_282: know whatever the pangolin kissed a bat it's because there's a chocolate factory there like i don't SPEAKER_284: know maybe a steam shovel made it with a cocoa bean chocolate factory maybe that's it SPEAKER_182: oh he was so funny so he's so funny so i i agree with jama's takeaways i mean this was great example of censorship run amok at these big tech companies but the other thing i saw that was SPEAKER_38: really interesting was stephen colbert lose control of his audience and you know stewart killed on that SPEAKER_62: show but you could see stephen colbert was i think visibly nervous very uncomfortable yeah very very SPEAKER_292: uncomfortable he did not know what was coming and he was trying to and when when john stuart kept SPEAKER_62: pushing this he was like well uh he's not trying to qualify well so what you're saying is now that fauci has said this might be a possibility you're saying it might be a possibility and john stuart was having none of it he ran right over that said no the name is the same it's obvious come on and yeah SPEAKER_149: colbert kept challenging him i don't know if you saw this part where he said hey listen is it possible that they have a lab in wuhan to study the coronavirus disease because we're on there a lot of novel coronavirus diseases because there's a big bat population and then stewart is like no i'm not standing for that he goes i totally understand it's the local specialty and it's the only place to find bats you won't find bats anywhere else oh wait austin texas has thousands of them SPEAKER_37: fly out of a cave every night at dusk and he wouldn't let it go so it's just great watching SPEAKER_62: it was it was a reminder frankly of how funny both john stuart and stephen colbert were about 15 years ago and i frankly i don't think stephen colbert is funny anymore because no because he's got to keep his job he's carrying no but he's also too woke and and yeah yes he's become very polemical and and what stuart reminded us is that comedy is funny when it's making fun of the people who are pretentious and basically who aren't telling the truth and stephen colbert has become so polemical that he's SPEAKER_305: lost sight of the comedy and john stewart brought it back and i hope you know what they said colbert Chamath Palihapitiya: colbert had this element of satire which even stuart because stuart was in your face funny whereas colbert was like subtle and dry and you had to think about it there was layered and for sure he's totally lost it totally totally lost well if you know and then and then and then and then i thought stuart came out swinging hard i do think though it sucks you have to agree did it seem to you though SPEAKER_309: like stuart had not like he just needed more human to human interaction absolutely he was a cage tiger SPEAKER_313: man he was a cage tiger they let him out he was like jake l going to austin absolutely it was the SPEAKER_266: funniest thing john stewart's done in many years and the reason is because he connected with the fact SPEAKER_38: that here is this obvious thing that we're not allowed to say and that is what comics should be SPEAKER_149: doing yes put a light on it i mean if comedy is tragedy plus time i think that this is a great moment SPEAKER_33: for us to reflect on like i think we're going to go back to normal pretty quick um if you remember after 9 11 there was this idea that comedy was over forever you were not going to be able to make fun of things and that this was the end of satire people were this is you know um a bridge too far etc and um i think we're back we're back and that's it you know we can joke about the coronavirus we can talk about it we don't need to censor people for having an opinion we're all adults here um you know the idea that you know we have to take down people's tweets because they have some crazy SPEAKER_31: theory or put a label on them like we went a little crazy during the pandemic um and tried to stifle discussions for what reason exactly like when we look back on this it's going to look really strange SPEAKER_19: that we demanded that we put labels on people questioning or having a debate including doctors doctors were not allowed to debate to the public on youtube or twitter about uh what was the drug that trump kept promoting hydroxychloroquine chloroquine like remember that whole chloroquine i think this uh ivermectin or whatever it is it's just triggering people because it feels like that last drug which is a drug that may or may not work to slow down the progression of covid but anyway this is all over David Friedberg: if you haven't gotten your goddamn vaccine please get it stop denying science stop denying science SPEAKER_326: and climate change climate change is not real and remember oh my god the youtube just canceled our SPEAKER_182: account jamal what are you doing you can't say that science we talk about science as if science is a definitive answer to a question it's a process it's a process by which you come to answers you SPEAKER_62: test them and look hydroxychloroquine may have been completely wrong but let the debate happen SPEAKER_88: the answers came out anyway i'll tell you a fundamental premise of science is to challenge assumptions and so when you challenge um uh an existing hypothesis or uh kind of an existing thing that we hold to be true you are engaging in science and the rigorous debate around what works and what doesn't work was notably absent over the past year because everything became about the political truth you're either true or you're false based on your political orientation and we SPEAKER_332: reduced everything down to kind of this one identity politics this one-dimensional framework which we have a tendency politics let me just point this out to you guys i was gonna mention this a SPEAKER_88: few weeks ago but like think about every conversation you have how um common it is now to immediately think about what the person on the other side that you're talking to just said and then trying to put them on a blue or red spectrum it's it's it's how we've all kind of been reprogrammed over the past decade or so where it used to be about the topic itself and the objective truth finding or the or the specifics of what we're talking about and now it's become about you immediately try and resolve them to being conservative or or not red or blue trump or not purple and so every conversation you kind of try and orient around that simple ridiculous one-dimensional framework and it's a complete loss of the discovery of objective truth in all matters in life and all matters and that affect all of us um and it's uh it's really quite uh stark and and sad this is why we need a new we need a new political party the reason party i think it's less about that i think it's more about everyone just reorienting themselves when you have a conversation just notice yourself doing it and then recognize that maybe that's not the way to make a decision about the conversation or about having an opinion or a point of view but have an opinion or a point of view about the topic itself not about the orientation of the SPEAKER_33: topic on a on a single dimensional spectrum and then layer identity politics into that so not only SPEAKER_149: your politics but your gender your race your sexual preference the color of your skin and now how is anybody supposed to have a reasonable argument when i have to process like oh chamath from you know SPEAKER_341: sri lanka but he went through canada and he worked for i mean it's well it's so reductive that no one SPEAKER_88: gets so it's so reductive that no one gets to have an identity anymore right because we we are all complex and all issues are complex and they are all nuanced and when you reduce everything down to kind of this one-dimensional framework you lose any ability to have depth to have nuance to have said SPEAKER_33: another way the issues are complex enough we don't have to put identity politics or political you know SPEAKER_19: leanings on top of it all right so we had the worst fire season uh in california ever last year SPEAKER_33: obviously as chamath said glow uh global warming is uh a conspiracy um by the chinese uh as per your SPEAKER_21: guy trump uh sacks and uh there is climate change in switzerland there is a center called the center for climate change there is a reason that there's climate change in switzerland it's coming from SPEAKER_300: that lab ah the center did it look at the side look at the side it says climate change on the building they're getting paid to propagate this conspiracy theory yeah uh all right so it's it's going to be SPEAKER_84: the worst so we are we well we are at risk more than ever right so we're entering june so as of june SPEAKER_88: 1st the california snowpack is down to zero percent of normal that's never happened before so it's the lowest it's ever been there there is absolutely like no snowpack in the entire sierra in the entire state 40 of the state is in a state of extreme drought right now we've had 16 000 acres burn as of a few weeks ago up from 3600 during the same time period the same day of the year last year um and so the the tinder is there now remember uh last year was the highest um uh california's ever seen we we burnt 4 million acres uh last year california has about 33 million acres of farmland of forest land representing about a third of our total land size in the state um you know 60 of that land is federal 40 is private um and so the the big kind of variable drivers this year are going to be um you know a wind and heat and we're already seeing a few heat waves but it's the wind that kind of kicks these things off but the tinder is there right so like the state is dry um the uh uh the the the snowpack is gone we're on severe water restrictions in a lot of counties throughout the state um it's worth i think talking about the carbon effect you know last year um based on the forests that burnt in california we released about one and a half times as much carbon into the atmosphere from our forest fires as we did from uh cars burning fossil fuels in the state um and so wow so here's some statistics for you guys which i think are just worth highlighting um there's about 2 billion metric tons of carbon stored in california forest land which is about 60 tons per acre um so there's about 9 million new tons of carbon sequestered per uh in california by our forest land per year when there's a fire we release about 10 tons per acre so about one sixth of the carbon in that in that forest land the rest of the carbon doesn't burn up so remember when there's a forest fire typically the outside of the tree burns the whole thing doesn't burn to ash and so a forest fire can actually if you look at the longitudinal kind of effect of it burning forests can actually preserve the carbon sequestration activity versus you know just removing forests or removing trees trees um and so there is to some extent um you know an effort that has been shut down several times which is to do these kind of controlled burns through the state but it's met with such resistance uh given that it's so controversial no one wants to have smoke in their in their neighborhood SPEAKER_106: it shouldn't it shouldn't be it shouldn't be controversial the problem is you can't present simple data and have people have a logical conversation about it and the cost per acre to clear SPEAKER_88: land and farm to forest land in california is it ranges depending on the complexity of the land but somewhere between 50 and a thousand dollars so call it a couple hundred dollars per acre so you can very quickly kind of do the math on a carbon credit basis so it's about 40 bucks per ton for carbon credit today so you're actually you know you can kind of preserve about 400 per ton by not putting carbon into the atmosphere and if you can actually manage farmland forest land clearance and forest land preservation from fire at a cost of 400 or less and there was an active carbon credit market you should be able to cover the cost of managing that forest land back but we're here's an incredibly high risk this year it doesn't mean that we're necessarily going to have a fire because weather is the key driver the weather is highly variable wind we need wind we need wind and we need a heat wave with wind and then there will be fires but and then what do they do when the wind SPEAKER_24: kicks up right now uh the electric company turns off power in california because they don't want to be SPEAKER_45: blamed when a power line goes down and starts a fire so we have these regular moments this is SPEAKER_93: not where we just lose power yeah this is not just a california problem i know everyone wants to beat SPEAKER_88: up on california but like the whole western u.s go look at google maps you'll see how much green stuff there is on google maps it's green up and down the western half of the us friedberg was trump SPEAKER_33: right that um raking up the forests uh to put it in uh layman's terms or simple terms is an actual SPEAKER_88: thing that helps 60 of forest land in california is uh federal land and uh it was the federal government's responsibility to manage that that cost down to manage that risk down what is the incentive what is the motivation you know what are the key drivers those are obviously it does work to clear it though it theoretically when you reduce the amount of tinder you will reduce the risk of a burn right and so the cost but the cost of doing so as we mentioned it's probably a couple hundred dollars per acre and so who's gonna let's say you want to do that on five million acres you know SPEAKER_33: wouldn't this create a bunch of jobs oh wait we're paying people to stay home yeah like it would create a ton of jobs i mean i hate to be like that guy but SPEAKER_61: like could we create a bunch of 35 an hour jobs for people i've heard scuttlebutt that newsom is so worried about fire season that they're going to try and accelerate the recall election so it happens before there was you know the conventional wisdom the conventional wisdom would do that too he's so SPEAKER_380: smart well no if tamat did it it would be strategic well the conventional wisdom the conventional SPEAKER_176: wisdom was that you'd want to wait as long as possible to do the recall because the longer you SPEAKER_38: wait the longer you get the rebound of the economy from covet right but now they're talking about accelerating it to beat fire season because it's looking really bad and freeberg's right that we needed much more aggressive forest management it's not just climate change it's also SPEAKER_62: forest management we don't do it in california anymore and so i think we are in for a really SPEAKER_67: hellish fire season we are going to have a terrible we're going to have a terrible fire season um there's going to be brownouts probably throughout a lot of the western states what played out in texas that affected folks a few months ago i think will some version of that will happen um in many places in the u.s this is uh and it's all roughly avoidable and the critical principle act to share is the progressive Chamath Palihapitiya: left they need to marry their disdain for climate change and their disdain for uh the things that need to happen to prevent it because right now these two things for them are just like it's cataclysmically not possible um for us to agree on for example as friedberg says a control burn program has a SPEAKER_165: mechanism of sort of like fighting climate change or you know investing more in the Chamath Palihapitiya: the greenification of the economy so that we can actually eliminate the use of a lot of these non-sustainable energy sources all these things basically just come down to a group of individuals deciding that they can both have an opinion on something as important as climate change but then are also willing to then go and act right now they won't until they do um it's just going to spill over SPEAKER_67: everywhere it's going to be a very bad fire season and the only reason i know that it is is that every year before it has been every single year has gotten warmer yeah it's not only to be a genius here SPEAKER_88: better yes by the way i let me just correct a statistic i said because the statistic i gave was a few weeks ago um but as of today we were actually at the average uh the historical average in terms of number of acres that are burnt in california as we have seen historically i will also say that you know close to one sixth of um california's uh uh forest land burnt last year so there is a tremendous amount of tinder that has been removed from the risk equation and we typically burn about a million acres a year i think we burnt like four million last year a little over four million last year so you know as you look at the the cumulative kind of um reduction of burnable acres we're we're actually the good thing that's going on is we're actually at a lower risk scenario going into this year in terms of total amount of tinder the risk of the tinder catching is higher because it's drier nasa but but when you add this all up there's certainly a high probability of a bad fire SPEAKER_93: season but there could there could be a scenario here where we end up with less than zero zero SPEAKER_67: scenario that's going to happen nasa publishes temperature studies they do measured measurements Chamath Palihapitiya: of how uh much warming there is in the earth last year we set yet another record it was the seventh year in a row where it was warmer than all the previous successive years it's just going in the same place i mean and so if we're all of a sudden supposed to bet that a trend that has effectively been reliable for the last decade is going to turn i'm not sure that that's a bet you'd want to make SPEAKER_189: or that the winds is not stupid there's no reason to make that bet i mean this is like betting on a David Friedberg: one outer we we need we need we need the left to take control of this issue and solve it get ready SPEAKER_61: for martian skies over california i mean literally i'm thinking about an escape plan from california SPEAKER_33: and i'm putting a generator in this month i bought six new air filters you know like beautiful that's not that's not good enough well i have my house is totally sealed and i have the air purifiers in i have a built-in air purifier of the house and i have six portable ones in each every bedroom are you SPEAKER_67: coming back in august uh in at the end of august but by the way let me let me tell you where it really the rubber meets the road uh just again i'm speaking to the progressive left they care apparently so Chamath Palihapitiya: much about minorities i just want to make sure you guys understand that you know air quality disproportionately affects minorities why because we are not not me anymore but you know minorities are the ones that typically live near industrial output near transportation throughways and thoroughfares it is it is statistically proven that blacks brown other minority people are the worst people to suffer from respiratory diseases and airborne illnesses and these are things that are that are happening today SPEAKER_68: so again i want to go back to the same group of individuals who apparently believe in climate change but don't believe in nuclear they don't believe in control burns they believe in inequality but they don't want to do what's necessary to regulate emission what are we doing guys just at some point SPEAKER_61: do the job do the job i think do your job i what you're saying is correct your mouth but i think it's a sad statement about the progressive left that the only way to reach them through an argument is to argue for that there's a disparate impact on a minority the reality affects all americans yes exactly exactly exactly it's it's bad red pill me give me those red pills come on come on sacks you're SPEAKER_62: holding out on me no but but but tamath understands that audience he is making the argument they're going to respond to but the argument that they and everyone should be responding to is SPEAKER_351: quality is bad for everybody the planet all humans exactly what are you guys going to do for SPEAKER_88: fire season do you actually i'm thinking about renting a house like i rented a house in chicago and lake michigan last year and i went there and it was a great escape for a month to get away from fire Chamath Palihapitiya: season i i don't i don't i'm very scared to be in california during all of this to be completely honest with you i just don't want to be there um yeah i'm out come back i'm going to try to figure out some come back in uh late of august and hopefully everything is calmed down by then although it won't because it gets very very hot at the end of august september september was the heart of it SPEAKER_88: it's typically the heart of it it's been hard of it jacal do you think you're going to go to miami or SPEAKER_22: austin or something you know i i i went back to austin for a wedding and uh i met the governor um and SPEAKER_412: don't you went sweating and you met greg abbott you gotta beep that out you went to sweating about SPEAKER_31: the governor yes um and going to austin in 2021 is like when i would come to san francisco and go to SPEAKER_263: the battery in 2003 and sax 2013 and sax would say why don't you live here there's so much going on in san francisco come to san francisco and i did uh and i i got the last five years of the peak but uh austin very appealing to me and then i've been looking at beach houses in um miami and SPEAKER_416: i'm uh i'm 50 of the way there folks oh my god i mean the fact that you can now buy a beach house i SPEAKER_420: mean god bless america god bless america oh my god i had a 71 three-year average i had a 71 three-year SPEAKER_422: average in high school i had 11.50 on my sats and i'm gonna buy a beat house and i forgot that i SPEAKER_182: convinced you to move up to san francisco yet another way in which i have contributed to the monster your SPEAKER_425: career towards absolutely absolutely okay i'm gonna use call-in every day call-in syndicates SPEAKER_426: underway everything you wouldn't even be a vc if it wasn't for me you'd still be a media figure that's SPEAKER_19: right we do a conference producing you're you're you and naval really pushed me towards it and then special thank you to you and chamath uh bill lee uh for anchoring uh and david we love you jakel no you know what i mean i i tweeted the other day at the end of the day you know our lives are a collection when we look back on them of memories with our friends and you know i include family and friends SPEAKER_33: and this podcast not to get all gushy and and whatever is uh been a delight over the you know SPEAKER_31: really hard pandemic that's now ending and it's i just i'm really happy that we get to spend this time every week together every week i get uh you know a little bit of excitement uh like i used to get when we go you'd host poker uh sax or chamap you know those days when we'd have a poker game uh sky date and would tell me and you know uh i get a little tingly feeling uh like oh my god i'm gonna see my friends tonight and play poker and laugh and you know we got that amazing note from the woman SPEAKER_33: who said she was really having a hard time during the pandemic and that the podcast all in podcast SPEAKER_436: really helped her and you know shout out to sam thanks for that note yeah sam that really made our SPEAKER_33: week so shout out to sam um that's a long way of saying i love you sax well jake jake how you are SPEAKER_37: the stephen colbert to my john stewart i think it's the opposite i think it's the opposite i have to SPEAKER_182: call i have to come on your show and red pill you and make sure that you're you're saying the truth SPEAKER_38: and not getting too wrapped up in your trump derangement syndrome or whatever at the end of the day SPEAKER_19: you know we we are i think all of us working through complex issues to friedberg i really loved your contribution today about how complex these issues are and layering more complexity onto them of our identities our wealth you know our histories immigrants not whatever politics these issues are so hard and in some ways also so easy with technology and world-class execution that the world needs to have more reasonable conversations and i think that what we've demonstrated here is that four friends can have reasonable discussions and laugh about life and enjoy life and and that SPEAKER_444: should be for everybody listening that's what sam said in her note to us which was very heartwarming SPEAKER_446: so thank you yeah that was great yeah i mean love you guys love you sax SPEAKER_152: i must download new directions to escape forest fires love love program active love l-o-v-e querying SPEAKER_451: dictionary a feeling of affection for another entity or human like i like playing video games till 2 a.m SPEAKER_396: and my dog can i say it to a very similar to coding or problem solving using my computer and my 17b SPEAKER_454: subroutine overheating must play chess with peter teal and stop saying i love you to jacob SPEAKER_458: jacob thank you stop saying it stop saying it i never said it he's overloading my shirt was so SPEAKER_396: expensive but yet so i put on yet another shirt i had to pump it up for the pod i'm looking because SPEAKER_469: i've gained 15 pounds i need to make up for it with a 1200 how do i look with four collars four you say SPEAKER_396: no it's more two but also two chins so do these two collars make up for my double chin two shirts are SPEAKER_478: better than one two shirts are better than one all right everybody twice is good SPEAKER_420: sax is adding shirts tomas is removing it i'll see you all next time bye bye love you guys SPEAKER_13: rain man david sacks open source it to the fans