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SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups. It's your boy, J. Cal, here. And we have a fan favorite with us back again on the podcast. Keith Raboi is with us.

SPEAKER_04: He is an investor at Founders Fund and considered one of the great operating officers here in

SPEAKER_05: Silicon Valley, along with people like Sheryl Sandberg and our friend David Sachs. You can follow him on the Twitter, Raboi, R-A-B-O-I-S. And Keith, welcome back to the program. We were on in May. We had a really great discussion about COVID-19 and what we thought was going to happen with the pandemic. Well, here we are. It's August.

SPEAKER_04: And it seems like we have not learned much and we don't wear masks in this country. We're having massive amounts of outbreaks. What's your take on America's reaction to the pandemic?

SPEAKER_08: Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_09: And it's a pleasure to be back with you. I don't think that much has changed since May, which is probably a sign of the times. It feels like all time is sort of collapsing and, you know, May, June, July, April, August all kind of roll together. Right now, you know, it's pretty obvious that we're going to be going through sort of the version of rolling blackouts or rolling COVID or rolling lockdowns for months, if not, you know, a sustained period of years.

SPEAKER_11: There's clearly no light at the end of the tunnel. No one has visibility into the timeframe. And I think that's causing a lot of psychological issues for people, for companies, for founders,

SPEAKER_09: for real people, because with no visibility, it's very difficult to sort of hold your breath, not knowing how long you have to hold your breath for. And people don't know whether they should be making permanent changes in their lives, i.e., you know, moving locations, changing roommates, planning to work remotely or not, because the timeframe is very uncertain.

SPEAKER_13: Well, when you look at other countries that have beaten it, and America seems to be learning

SPEAKER_05: its lessons by region, New York, like, learned its lesson the hard way.

SPEAKER_04: Northern California, we did spectacular. I think everybody here kind of is pretty obedient and believes in science. Southern California seems to have gone buck wild. Florida and Texas seem to not believe in masks at all. But do you think what the psychological or maybe even the behavioral analysis of this is,

SPEAKER_05: you have to experience it firsthand to understand the nature of it. You just can't trust any kind of reality because a pandemic, number one, we've never experienced in our lifetime. And number two, we have this polarization and the media and the experts and the politicians

SPEAKER_15: all polarizing around their team and their team position as opposed to just learning and science.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah. Well, I think it's very true that people are sort of using politics and political issues as

SPEAKER_09: the new sports or the new tribal religion. And partially that's a vacuum created by the lack of sports and other religions. But secondarily, you know, we're seeing a resurrection of the virus in places like Northern California and in international markets like, think, Australia and probably soon in Europe, where people, Israel, where people felt that the virus was under control and that adherence to a set of

SPEAKER_11: principles around quarantining, mask wearing, contact tracing, testing was effective.

SPEAKER_09: But it doesn't appear that anything short of a reasonable fraction of a population getting exposed to the virus is really going to stop it in its tracks, except in smaller countries, like let's say, call it a population of below 10 million, where it does appear to be the case that you can kind of insulate the entire population from the virus, but in all countries above 10 million, it looks like there's going to be another wave, a third wave, a fourth wave of the virus until we have either therapeutics or vaccines that are much more effective.

SPEAKER_05: So that's an interesting observation. It goes against everything the United States stands for to restrict people's access to travel inside the nation. But it turns out in a pandemic, breaking the country up into regions and saying, hey, we need people to stay in their zone until this passes might actually be the most effective thing to do.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, it might have been the most effective, especially initially.

SPEAKER_11: I mean, it's certainly shutting down international travel corridors from China and then Europe would have been more effective if it had been done faster and sort of more thoughtfully, meaning with less sort of escape routes. But by the time it was really implemented, it might have been too late.

SPEAKER_09: And then possibly we could have cordoned off some of the virus to the places where people coming from China and to some extent Europe were moving towards. But past March, I don't think the travel stuff would have been super effective. You could have created zones maybe within the US. So there's some severe legal constraints on that. But it's not obvious to me that creating internal US travel restrictions is actually constitutional. I think there's a very serious debate about whether that can actually be done.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I don't think it could be done legally would have to be something we would hopped into as Americans or we would lightly regulate because we don't even seem to be able to mandate

SPEAKER_05: people wear masks. That seems to be up for grabs.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, I mean, the wisdom of masks, I don't think it's up for grabs. I do think there's a very serious also legal debate about whether the federal government has authority to mandate masks.

SPEAKER_09: I think the better side of the legal argument is probably not. But the practical argument about efficacy is very strong. I think possibly you could have reduced air travel.

SPEAKER_11: Perhaps federal government has a lot of authority over air travel in the United States. And that would have allowed people to only travel by car. But it seems like people were self-selecting against air travel anyway. I mean, TSA was reporting data of something between like one and five percent of typical traffic on a per day basis.

SPEAKER_23: So to some extent, shutting down air travel would have only been a small fraction of the migration problem.

SPEAKER_32: Would you consider flying commercial in 2020?

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, I've read a lot of the research about the sort of safety of that. And there's like many things these days, there's experts, true experts on both sides of that debate. There's some who are pretty convinced that among many possible activities, it's fairly low risk. And then there's a few experts who actually think the risk is more moderate. So it's somewhere between low and moderate risk, probably closer akin to having a backyard barbecue outside with maybe 10 or 12 neighbors.

SPEAKER_02: Which seems like a very low risk activity. I've expanded my quarantine circle and done a number of backyard type barbecue situations

SPEAKER_04: with, you know, families who are in relative quarantine. It seems like a low risk behavior.

SPEAKER_37: Where are you on your personal risk taking during a pandemic, if I may ask?

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, my general approach has been not no risk.

SPEAKER_11: I think it's very difficult to live your life in complete fear and approach like problems with zero risk. If you did, you would never drive a car, for example. One, certainly below the age of 50, 60, 70, one of the most dangerous things you can do is get in a car and drive.

SPEAKER_23: So I don't think you want to live your life with completely zero risk. I think that's not a very productive way to live your life.

SPEAKER_11: So I think below roughly six to 10 people in small groups is moderate to low risk. Obviously, outdoors is significantly safer from all the evidence than indoor activities. In the weather, fortunately, at least in the summer in California, it's pretty amenable to primarily outdoor activities that will change, you know, in various parts of the country. It becomes insufferably hot. Think Arizona or Florida over the summer. And then, you know, fairly soon in the winter, you know, between rain and cold weather, cold conditions, it's not going to be possible to be, you know, living primarily outdoors. But insofar as one can do that, I've tried to do as many outdoor activities as possible. But I definitely will, in small doses, in small groups, spend time, you know, in real life with people.

SPEAKER_05: I went and I ate my ramen at Tai Shoken in San Mateo, my favorite ramen joint, and outside this past week was like, I think the first time, second time I ate at a restaurant, I took my daughter for sushi one time outside. And man, it was delightful to be amongst people. I forgot how nice it was to just be out and be social.

SPEAKER_43: There's something about our species where we are not meant to be isolated like this.

SPEAKER_11: Oh, no, of course. I mean, if you like to read, you know, you can read Sapiens or any research. Humans are basically herd animals. And, you know, you see this on Twitter, you see this in investing. There's definitely a pop psychology to humans that Darwinistically evolved. And so isolating humans into solo behavior or very small group, extremely small groups does cause real friction or potentially damage. I don't think anybody knows.

SPEAKER_09: We're running a massive social experiment in terms of what is the long term impact. And isolating people in, you know, extremely small doses of people for sustained, what's going to be a sustained period of time.

SPEAKER_11: So I think there's a lot of counter instincts. Now it did switch. You know, there's a reason why we've always had families and tribes across almost all known cultures is people want a safe group of people around them. And generally speaking through most of history until very modern times, if you'd see a human, another person that was not somebody you recognize, you would generally think of them as much more of a threat than a friend.

SPEAKER_23: Right. And then in the last two to maybe four or 500 years, which is, again, a very small fraction

SPEAKER_11: of human history, that has inverted. So that generally speaking, without other signals, we don't treat strangers as threatening. However, with things like COVID and potentially, you know, more lethal or more transmittable viruses to come in the future, I think humans may revert back to their normal Darwinistic sort

SPEAKER_23: of the evolved state, which is to think of someone they don't recognize and don't know as a potential threat.

SPEAKER_04: Oh, so dystopian given how we've grown to love to go to an arena with 20,000 people and

SPEAKER_05: watch a basketball game or go to a music festival, a Burning Man, or even just a movie. When we get back from this break, I want to know what you'd think of the TikTok and China rift when we get back on This Week in Startups.

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SPEAKER_05: I'm telling you, you're going to love it. Get started today. I use it. I love it. It makes everything easy breezy for us. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, investor, operator, and super opinionated and intelligent Keith for Boys is back on the program, a regular, if you want to hear some of his previous episodes, the double feature, episode 904 and 905 from back in February of 2019. And of course, in the COVID, episode 1057 back in May of 2020. We just got through thinking about the sort of ramifications of the COVID. But before we get even deeper into the pandemic and what life will be like, we've had a pretty

SPEAKER_04: crazy relationship with China in the last couple of months from the start of the COVID-19 slash Wuhan slash China virus emerging. And now somehow people are starting to realize that maybe there needs to be some reciprocity.

SPEAKER_05: If we're going to allow TikTok to be on everybody's phone, maybe American companies should get to be on phones in China. And maybe it's not in the best interest of Americans to have spyware on their phones with access to their microphones and cameras and locations for a communist country. What is your take first on the reciprocity issue? And then let's go on to the reality of a communist country's access to data of a company in a communist country like China.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, I think there are several dimensions to the TikTok debate and what to do about China.

SPEAKER_09: One is a simple trade, trade policy, just like we believe we're a capitalist country, we believe in free trade. And if there's going to be countries in the world that don't allow for free trade, then the question is, what do we do about that?

SPEAKER_23: And what's the U.S. reaction? And some degree of reciprocity or reciprocality is probably required.

SPEAKER_09: And so, you know, China has notoriously banned most, well, basically virtually all content-based U.S. companies from operating within China and restricted access or put fetters or required concessions by other products and services from American country, companies that want to operate or sell goods and services in China. And for many, many years, I think the American executive branch ignored this and partially for several reasons, the executive branch was pretty much in denial and didn't really want to confront China. And, you know, Trump has been very attuned to this issue personally before he was president, before he even ran for president, if you watch interviews with him conducted over the last 20, 30 years, he's always been sensitive to China's sort of unfairness in treating American companies. And he used to talk about this all the time. And then he campaigned in 2016 about the issues and threats posed by China.

SPEAKER_11: And there's some funny YouTube clips where you see people exerting various parts of speeches and stitching it together. It's like China, China, China, China, China, all in the Trump voice.

SPEAKER_09: So I think this is sort of an un, it's kind of a neglected area of American politics and foreign policy for about 30 years. And Trump correctly put a lot of attention on it. So one just simple principle is if any country is not going to allow a set of American industries to operate there, there is a question of whether we should allow, you know, a comparable set of companies to operate here. And that has almost nothing to do with the national security complexity. So you can imagine a country, let's say Germany, that becomes very protectionist and doesn't allow American cloud operating companies or American search engines to operate in Germany. What would be the proper reaction where we don't really think Germany poses a national security threat to the US? It's just purely an economic free trade sort of situation. So that's one dimension. Second, of course, on top of that is what's become very obvious in the last two years to a huge swath of the American people and derivatively a reasonable fraction of the American elected political class is that China poses a serious threat to the United States from a geopolitical national security perspective. And this should have been obvious 10, 15, 20 years ago, but it's become starkly obvious in the last two years. I think China's influence and behavior associated with Hong Kong and their ability to intimidate the NBA a year ago started to wake people up. China's increasingly hostile slash genocidal treatment of minorities within China has become, you know, indefensible or transparent and indefensible. Three, China's willingness to export into export its influence across borders has become more obvious. Think India most recently, but certainly there's other examples. Their investment in AI and other technologies, which could pose other existential threats to the U.S., again, have become more stark and more clear. And so you put all of this together and then you actually read or listen to the explicit strategy of the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party. It's very clear that they have an agenda over the next 30 years to be the dominant influence in the world, and that dominant influence includes explicitly suppressing what they would call liberalism. I think democratic liberalism in rough translation. And so if you put together both the tactics and the explicit announced strategy, there's no way of denying that China is posing a significant threat to the American way of life. And for 30 years, we sort of avoided or intentionally suppressed this information, averted our eyes, adhering to a 40-year-old strategy of engaging with China that was designed to liberalize China that has proven... You had that work out for us. ...has proven to be an unmitigated disaster. The original logic was that if you expose China to more and more information, to more

SPEAKER_11: and more economic freedom, that by definition, the country would have to liberalize and the ties, the dramatic constraints imposed by the Communist Party would be, you know, sort

SPEAKER_09: of eliminated or significantly reduced. If anything, the opposites happened. And in addition, the original, even impetus for associating with China, which dates back to Richard Nixon and going to China, was to align explicitly as a counterbalance against

SPEAKER_11: the Soviet Union. And basically, you could argue the biggest part of intellectual bankruptcy in our China policy

SPEAKER_09: has been, once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, nobody really reassessed, like, what was the purpose of aligning with China in the first place?

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and the globalists got a really great free pass of, like, hey, here's some borderline

SPEAKER_05: slave labor, the cheapest labor in the world, which, in a way, humanity should want labor to go to the cheapest place. That is the most efficient for humanity. So, it's great that hundreds of millions of Chinese went from being, you know, really poor to being middle class. But that was an opportunistic move. Now, we feel this crazy dependence on them. So, when it comes to the TikTok issue, and I think you set the stage beautifully, what are you in favor of doing with TikTok at this very moment? And then, what do you think our ongoing strategy should be with China?

SPEAKER_11: So, my personal opinion is that the president of the United States should announce a very

SPEAKER_09: clear set of principles that require adherence to both the reciprocity and address our national security concerns, and that the Chinese government, in consultation with TikTok's owners, should choose and elect what path they prefer. So, the principle should basically be that, to some extent, reasonable American versions of the same products and services must be allowed to operate in China.

SPEAKER_11: And then, on the security side, no engineers, no data, no servers about American citizens should be allowed to be stored in China. And whether that turns into an independent public company, which would be my preference, because

SPEAKER_09: the TikTok has done so well and generates fairly significant revenue, it could easily justify being an independent public company. Or whether it leads to an acquisition by a US company, or a shutdown, a ban, because it can't adhere to those principles, it's totally up to the Chinese government, making it aside. I don't think the president should be negotiating a deal, like, trying to...

SPEAKER_74: Yeah, that's kind of silly. I mean, that's just... That plays to his instinct of, I want to get credit for being a dealmaker, blah, blah, blah. It's the kind of...

SPEAKER_08: Yeah, it's a bad precedent. I don't think that's the right way to approach this. I think you should announce clear, straightforward principles, and sort of let the chips fall

SPEAKER_09: where they are. And if the chips are, the product is banned, that's fine. If Snap or Microsoft or some consortium of independent investors wants to purchase and turn it into an independent company, I think there should also be a timeframe explicitly by X, the following

SPEAKER_11: criteria must be satisfied to operate within the US. And I think that's the better way to go.

SPEAKER_09: But net-net, it's probably relatively similar in this specific example to what's going on. I think the key of having neutral principles is you can apply it to a lot of other examples in the future, rather than this complex morass that doesn't basically set a precedent that everybody understands what the rules of the road are. I'm a big fan of predictability. The rule of law is about predictability.

SPEAKER_79: I think it's critical that we have predictability in our policy. I don't like...

SPEAKER_13: It's easier to invest, right, when there's predictability.

SPEAKER_05: And when the rules don't change, people can invest and feel safe, which is one of the things... One of the reasons I've never invested in Chinese companies that get offered all the time, you probably do as well, is I'm not on the ground there. I don't have anybody there to look after me. And it feels like that system is completely rigged and people have their thumbs on the scales. When we get back from this quick break, I want to know if you think we're the suckers at the poker table when it comes to China vis-a-vis, hey, we own the iPhone, we get all the profits here, and they get this very low-profit building iPhones over there. Or if we should move to the Elon Musk model and say, you know what? YOLO, we're going to build factories here, and we're going to skip and leapfrog and get ourselves disconnected from China so that we don't have a dependency.

SPEAKER_53: When China does to Taiwan what they did to Hong Kong, which is basically roll over them when we get back on This Week at Startups.

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SPEAKER_05: All right, I'm here with Keith. We're talking pandemics, politics, China. Before we went to break, I was wondering who you think NetNet won the most in this past 20 years of the iPhone being created in China, pharmaceuticals being created in China. This seemed to send a massive amount of profits to the United States. It also made them a ton of money. We own that intellectual property. They have no qualms in stealing it. And so, was this a mutual sort of taking advantage of each other?

SPEAKER_87: And then, can it possibly be decoupled?

SPEAKER_09: Well, look, it's been beneficial to both parties in many ways, at least in a short-term perspective. That's the whole point of comparative advantage in economics. When you learn macroeconomics, comparative advantage basically means that every nation should specialize with whatever they can do at the lowest possible cost. And that NetNet creates a byproduct of consumer surplus for everybody. So, we have lower cost phones in our pocket, lower cost plasma TVs, lower cost electronics of various types because of this relationship. However, that's a very narrow perspective.

SPEAKER_11: The only variable that matters in your ingredient in the world is not just the cost of a product. So, for example, in the 1970s, we built up what's called the National Strategic Petroleum Reserve

SPEAKER_09: because the U.S. was very dependent upon OPEC as a source of oil.

SPEAKER_11: And it led to fear that we could be blackmailed by the renovations in a foreign policy context.

SPEAKER_09: And that was just unacceptable. Right now, because we've outsourced, according to the comparative principle, many strategic productions, including electronics, but also antibiotics. So, from medical, pharmaceutical to electronics and the future of computing, we've outsourced a lot of production and manufacturing. We no longer have the ability to just drive American foreign policy according to the best

SPEAKER_11: interest for the American people because we can be blackmailed and threatened. And that's not a very sustainable place. So, I think the mistake was to allow our manufacturing capability to disappear. And we should have had sort of a minimum viable reserve capability of production so that in the worst case, we can always sustain ourselves and produce in any of these dimensions. There's a second level where it's helped the Chinese people arguably more.

SPEAKER_09: Certainly, the rate of growth in their economy over the last 20 years has been astounding.

SPEAKER_11: The improvement in the sort of lives of the Chinese people of all 1.2 billion has been very oppressive.

SPEAKER_09: So, it has absolutely improved the welfare of 1.2 billion on the planet by this relationship and symbiotic relationship with the United States.

SPEAKER_11: So, that's a very strong positive. But the Chinese CCP has used very aggressive industrial espionage techniques to learn sort of the secrets, the IP behind a lot of American technology and progress. And that has the capability of being used very unfairly to compete in the future. And, you know, that is probably something that everybody, well, it's something everybody did know. It's been widely chronicled. It's probably worse than what's been chronicled. But again, we made little, you know, flashes of concern were expressed by the government of the United States. But we never really treated it super seriously. But again, it's the combination of these things, the decline in American manufacturing ability, the dominance of the Chinese supply chain across industrial grade, military grade dual use technologies, across pharmaceuticals and medical equipment like PPE, all of this stuff

SPEAKER_09: has combined to put the United States in a very precarious position, which requires offsetting the marginal economic benefits of a comparative advantage.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, but easily, I believe it should not be that hard to reverse if we have all the capital, we have a number of people out of work in this country right now, and we have rare earth materials here, we just decided it was cheaper for them to rip them out of the ground than for us to do it. We could very easily, as we're printing these trillions of dollars, earmark some of it to build factories here again. I mean, if Elon can make rockets and cars here, I don't know that we can get silicon chips up and running as fast, but certainly pharma and PPE, these things are not going to be difficult to make here, we just have to have the will to do it, we need to have a plan. And this seems to be the one issue in our bizarre left and right, Republican and Democratic

SPEAKER_24: fight that we all agree on is, is that a green shoot for you?

SPEAKER_94: Yeah, I think there should be a comprehensive plan. I think a lot of these, several of these things are easier to fix than others.

SPEAKER_09: Consumers are just going to absolutely have to pay a higher price, though, for some products. There's going to be, there's definitely going to be an implicit tax on the American's welfare, especially in the short term. I mean, part of it relates to just the price of wages. One of the reasons why manufacturing in China is cheaper, and hence, quote, unquote, more

SPEAKER_23: effective is the price of labor is substantially less. And with, you know, a lot of activists in the United States wanting to raise the price

SPEAKER_09: of labor artificially, that's going to be more challenging. Now, if we can layer in some automation and make, you know, incremental advances in robotics and other automated technologies, maybe the, you know, blended cost of labor and manufacturing won't be that devastating to having a competitive cost structure. But I think we're just going to have a surcharge. It's just going to be a strategic surcharge that either consumers are going to have to pay or the government's going to have to fund or both, so that we have strategic independence from the threat posed by China. So I think that there is a bipartisan consensus emerging, mostly actually, ironically, from the far ends of the political spectrum, which sometimes get dismissed and or unfairly criticized. It's the most conservative members of Congress, and in some ways, the most liberal members of Congress that are most deeply concerned about the threat posed by China, the middle of the bell curve of the political establishment that's been in power for most of the last 30, 40 years is that are the people most responsible for the China mess, and they're the ones who most defended China from scrutiny and from criticism throughout all these years.

SPEAKER_08: So I think there's-

SPEAKER_96: And they also cashed the checks, let's be honest. They were the ones getting their donations that put them into power, and that's another flaw

SPEAKER_04: in our system is the lobbyists who are sending them donations. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They wanted to have this globalistic sort of approach and have that be considered, you

SPEAKER_05: know, the ultimate for humanity is to just anybody can do anything, except when you're up against a communist country, that's not actually how they think. Is there a chance, though, that if the world, because Japan is also realizing this dependence, India is, you know, banned TikTok, and they seem to be pretty aware of this threat.

SPEAKER_04: If Japan, India, and the United States all say en masse, hey, we're going to start producing

SPEAKER_05: products outside of China, and we would like to see you change these behaviors, and we did that as a group, what do you think the reaction from China will be? Will they say, come to the table and say, you know what, okay, we'll talk about what's

SPEAKER_04: happening with the Uyghurs, am I pronouncing that correct, Uyghur, I think I'm pronouncing it correct, and we'll talk about human rights, and we'll talk about Hong Kong, and, or do you think they'll just say, you know what, we've been here a lot longer than you guys, and we got a billion people, we don't care?

SPEAKER_94: Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of codependency here, so China's economy, like, if China was

SPEAKER_09: completely insulated from the U.S. or India's economy, it would pose actually more problems for China than for the U.S. as a fraction of GDP and things like that. So, that said, it'd be a very painful experience for all involved, so it's not something to look forward to at all. I do think that China miscalculated, however, on some of their most recent adventures, and didn't expect this level of scrutiny and push, you know, the level of pushback they're seeing from India and now the U.S., partially because for the last 30, 40 years, they haven't received any. So, you know, they've been very adventuresome all across the globe, in developing- South China Sea. Yeah, developing strategic relationships throughout Africa, building ports. There's a lot, a lot of their strategy has gone, you know, quite well for the last 20, 30 years.

SPEAKER_74: Yeah, why not try? I mean, listen, it's like being at a poker table. If you bet and everybody folds, you'd keep betting. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: But then if somebody stands up to you, and if somebody is the sheriff, well, then maybe you're going to curtail your behavior, so China does have a lot to lose here if they don't get in line.

SPEAKER_11: Oh, absolutely. A ton to lose. But if you just look at even last year, they were able to basically blackmail the NBA into support- Which was ridiculous. Yeah. It's absurd. They're basically convincing American athletes and the NBA executives that they needed to stop criticizing China about its human rights violations in Hong Kong, or the NBA just wouldn't make as much money in China. And basically 99.9% of the NBA went along with this, despite their ability to protest everything else and every other civil rights violation, they somehow were completely willing to be censored and suppress other people's speech as it relates to China. That ship has sailed. Even Steve Kerr, who's one of the worst offenders, actually had to apologize last week for at least

SPEAKER_112: some of his behavior last year.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah. That was interesting. You know, Daryl Morey came out and just said, hey, I mean, all he did was tweet like a gif or something that was like, we support Hong Kong, we support freedom. And like the NBA came down on him like a ton of bricks. And it was everybody from LeBron to Steve Kerr. And it was like, hey, guys, you're protesting, you know, for very valid issues of racism here in the United States and freedom. You can't have it both ways. You can't for the incremental 20. What are they making? 20% of their revenue from China? Probably. Who cares? Who cares? Let the 20 cents go. It's not worth it. I mean, anybody who makes a lot of money to sell your soul for the extra couple of million bucks, it's just not worth it. And if they don't respect the way we do things in America, because they started blocking all the Rockets games because Daryl Morey did it, what 100% of the NBA should have done was they should have just said, hey, we support freedom and we support human rights, period. And so we're not going to point to any specific country, but we're going to point to all countries, including our own. 100% human rights needs to be addressed in the United States. And then look what happened. Cyan Bannister, a friend of ours, mutual friend of ours, she started buying thousands of Hong Kong t-shirts and having people giving them out at Warriors games. You can't squeeze people like this and not expect them to respond. Do you think what happened in Hong Kong and the ease at which China rolled in there and basically just gangster style took it over, they're going to be able to do to Taiwan?

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SPEAKER_05: All right, Keith, Hong Kong, just heartbreaking to see what happened there, to see those students out there fighting, being arrested, being beaten, being shot, being dragged to prisons in mainland China, just to try to maintain their way of life. Heartbreaking for anybody who has a conscience. And now Taiwan, an independent country, according to the West, but a territory of China, according

SPEAKER_04: to the CCP, hangs in the balance. What do you think, given where we're at today with TikTok, India, and Japan spending money, government money, to get people in Japan to stop building stuff in China, we're starting to see this little contingent saying, hey, we're going to have to pump the brakes here with China's ambitions. Do you think China rolls into Taiwan? Or do you think that after what's happened with Hong Kong, they're emboldened?

SPEAKER_05: Or with India and the United States, maybe they'll pump the brakes on that one? Because Taiwan produces an awful lot of silicon chips, don't they?

SPEAKER_122: Yeah, I mean, Taiwan at the high end of the silicon has a monopoly sort of at the high end of silicon chips at the moment.

SPEAKER_09: If you want to read some amazing coverage of this, Ben Thompson's Chatechery is like the go-to source. So I think that- He's based there too, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So he's an expert in every possible way on the topic. And he's been writing about this thoughtfully for years. So highly recommend reading the original. I think typically the Chinese strategy has been pretty incremental.

SPEAKER_11: So insofar as they push and probe and hit resistance, they've typically been unwilling to force the issue because they believe traditionally that time is on their side. So, you know, don't artificially have an aggressive timeline that leads to incremental sort of sacrifice and pain. However, Taiwan's a very complicated topic for the US.

SPEAKER_09: I mean, we've sort of sold Taiwan out in 1979. And, you know, one of the most aberrant decisions in American foreign policy history, we basically told China, we're not going to treat Taiwan as an independent, freely elected democratic government, and, you know, sort of said, implied that kind of do what you want because we're not going to defend them.

SPEAKER_11: And that, you know, he's completely, that completely amoral, arguably immoral American foreign policy

SPEAKER_09: decision hasn't been reversed yet. And the establishment, you know, of the left and the right in the middle of the bell curve that we were speaking about before really doesn't want to revisit that and they get very allergic and immediately nuclear reactive. If you suggest this, I, you know, I tweeted about this a year ago that I think absolutely we should be reversing this. We, America, America needs to stand for principles and the principles mean the whole point of a principle is you do things that are uncomfortable and painful. It's easy to have principles where there's no pain and no sacrifice. The whole point of a principle is to prove that you actually mean it. And so that we need to recognize Taiwan as a democratically elected government that's legitimate. However, there is a geopolitical complexity of given the geospatial limits of where Taiwan is and where China has power. And even with the incredible brilliance and technical innovations behind an aircraft carrier group, there's, there is a lot of limits to trying to defend Taiwan from one or two aircraft carrier groups versus, you know, the geo, the geo proximity of China. It could be done, but it'd be a very expensive, painful move to defend Taiwan.

SPEAKER_11: There's some clever Navy theater based technologies that we could either sell or provide Taiwan that might make them more capable of defending, you know, the island, but, um, even that's controversial. Um, you know, uh, but I, there was always the, you know, debate, uh, when an American president really used nuclear weapons to defend Taiwan, which is probably what it would take, like at a, at a military level, either an explicit and very credible threat to news nuclear weapons, or the actual use of a tactical nuclear weapon is what it would probably take for the United States

SPEAKER_09: to prevent China from invading Taiwan and push Cambridge up.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. And I don't think the American people are going to want to get into a nuclear holocaust over an island that they don't even know the history of.

SPEAKER_08: And that was the justification for the 1979 policy. Like in so far as there was justification was, look, at the end of the day,

SPEAKER_09: Jimmy Carter and many people were not going to defend Taiwan with nuclear weapons. And once you admit that you're not going to defend it with nuclear weapons, the ability to defend the island with conventional weapons is highly dubious, not maybe impossible. You can debate it a little bit, but highly unlikely. And so if you know that you can't defend it, you know, are you really going to bluff and, you know, support their independence where, you know, someone could call you on.

SPEAKER_132: You get called on that.

SPEAKER_09: Yeah. At least with respect to Western Europe and NATO's explicit policy, which always called for the use of nuclear weapons, people sometimes forget this, but NATO's explicit policy was if the Soviet Union invades Western Europe, we will use nuclear weapons to defend ourselves.

SPEAKER_11: That was at least partially credible.

SPEAKER_134: Yeah.

SPEAKER_11: I don't, I don't know, you know, if that had ever been a factual case, which president would have, you know, authorized the use of either, either tactical or intermediate range nuclear weapons. Who knows? Maybe some would have, some might not have, but it was at least partially credible.

SPEAKER_09: I think most people find it incredible that we would defend Taiwan with nuclear weapons.

SPEAKER_135: It's one of the, uh, the great features of nuclear weapons is that,

SPEAKER_04: you know, the, the fact that they are so destructive mutually, the mutually assured destruction nature of them makes threats with them almost, um, uh, um, shallow by design, because I don't think anybody on either side wants to get involved in, in that kind of, uh, the interchange,

SPEAKER_15: but building up and investing in Taiwan and having a presence in Taiwan, and then maybe buying some of the companies there or bringing their technology to the United States and other places and having them offshore some factories and take their knowledge to other places. Boy, that would be a power move. Would it not?

SPEAKER_23: Yeah. And we're, and some of that's happening, you know, some of that stuff is moving to Arizona and Japan is funding, uh,

SPEAKER_09: you know, substantial investment in Japan, um, manufacturing capability, other technical, technical improvements. It doesn't really help the Taiwanized people, uh, the people of Taiwan, really at the end of the day, actually taking the strategic, uh, economic value out, uh, makes them more vulnerable, probably not less. Um, so they might not love this strategy, but it's probably good for Americans in the short term as a strategy of convenience, um, and for, you know, national American independence. Uh, so that makes sense. But I think this is a very complicated problem. I suspect that China doesn't want to roll the dice right now, with Taiwan, certainly not with this president, because I think they can, one of the features or bugs with Trump is he's very unpredictable. Uh, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: Having a crazy guy on your team, just having grown up in Brooklyn, like when you got a crazy guy on your squad, like people don't want to fight you. I was that guy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_140: You know, it's like, that guy's crazy. Don't, don't get in a fight with them.

SPEAKER_09: I don't, I don't think you really want to invade Taiwan with Trump as president, because anybody who tells you that he wouldn't immediately react in a, in a,

SPEAKER_23: in a quite vigorous way,

SPEAKER_11: um, is probably wrong and certainly cannot be predicted accurately.

SPEAKER_09: So I think the deterrent effect is actually quite high with Trump vis-a-vis Taiwan, which is really what you want right now, but that could change over time. So I don't think that issue gets forced, but I think the genocide continues in China that, you know,

SPEAKER_11: many of the other unfortunate developments in China are going to continue unless an American

SPEAKER_09: president and a sustained bipartisan consensus aggressively, uh, pushes back, uh, with, with both bigger inconsistency, you know, a one week news story about TikTok is not going to change this dynamics. It has to be a sustained strategy measured in months, quarters, years.

SPEAKER_05: I think it's a good segue to how ridiculous the New York times has become. Um, I don't know if like you had this experience where you're watching videos of Uyghurs being,

SPEAKER_02: uh, bound, blindfolded and having their head shaved and be for boarding trains, which, you know, just obviously evokes, uh, a Holocaust, God forbid, like, um, trigger in,

SPEAKER_05: in any reasonable person who has even the most basic knowledge of history. When you see people getting on trains to be reeducated, it doesn't take a genius to realize

SPEAKER_02: that, that this is a precursor or perhaps, uh, an actual piece of evidence of genocide occurring.

SPEAKER_05: Uh, these, uh, individuals are forced to eat pork and, uh, are beaten. And the, the sadism and sadistic nature of what's happening is insane. And the, the, the videos, just like the faxes coming out of Tiananmen Square,

SPEAKER_04: that kind of public, um, uh, awareness of it does make a difference.

SPEAKER_24: And at the same time, we have New York times journalists lamenting the losing of follower counts of kombucha girl and other tick tockers.

SPEAKER_05: Uh, any thoughts on the sort of media's failure to take this seriously?

SPEAKER_54: Yeah.

SPEAKER_122: I mean, the New York times has had an incredible distortion of technology, you know, measured

SPEAKER_09: at least for the last five years, probably longer, but the last five years have been so stark and basically non-controversial. So, you know, several years ago, um, they wrote this, what's going to look like, uh, one of the more embarrassing pieces in journalism history, uh, called this front page in their times, Chinese, uh, citizens, uh, happy, despite or happy with their restricted internet access. Um, you know, it's like a whole feature on how you can be, I mean, this is really going to be in the annals of history, like the New York times praising Hitler, um, which they did do. Um, this is going to read that way. I think it's ex-mose of like maybe an authoritative regime controlling the internet is superior. We interviewed, you know, 20 Chinese citizens and they say they're happy. QED. Right. That's literally how this article reads. I'm not exaggerating. It's one of the most embarrassing things written in the English language. Um, and you know, now three years later, um, everybody knows how biased that was and how insane actually it was to write that. Um, that's, I think that was the high watermark for me of how bad the New York times technology coverage is that they're basically defending an authoritarian communist genocidal regime. Um, and you know, making a fax to support it, um, which is like absurd. So anyway, they've continued notwithstanding, um, and in supporting China, it's a little inconsistent. It's interesting. The worst offenders are in attack, uh, journalism in quotes section. Uh, whereas, um, on this particular topic, there was, um, one of the journalists, she's actually, she appears to be quite good at her job, um, cover cyber security. Yeah. And she wrote, um, a critique of, uh, one of her colleagues, you know, dismissing the concerns associated with the CCP, um, espionage, CCP cyber attacks and TikTok, um, at least on Twitter. Um, so that at least somebody over at the New York times is doing something. Yeah.

SPEAKER_57: I mean, the, the, the naivete, they were like, well, I think they're using Amazon web services to store the data.

SPEAKER_05: So how could they, you know, ever have access to that? And it's like, uh, they could download it.

SPEAKER_122: Yeah. Well, let me also make another point, make another point.

SPEAKER_09: That's kind of, um, been neglected in the public conversations about TikTok.

SPEAKER_11: Personally, I think the data that TikTok has as just a silo is not incredibly sensitive.

SPEAKER_09: However, if you stitch that together with all of the other sources of data China has, and some of the hacks that have been confirmed that the Chinese government has intentionally performed on American targets. If you put all that data together, I think you could create a very threatening situation for us and for us citizens, us politicians.

SPEAKER_04: And to make it explicitly clear, I don't know if people remember in like one of the,

SPEAKER_05: the dark night trilogy of Batman films, there was a moment where Wayne enterprises had been able to turn on every single cell phone and basically listening on everybody. Like, hey geniuses, like every politician with kids who have TikTok on their phones and then they get their parents to install it and it's got microphone access. What makes you think that they can't get a microphone turned on and then do espionage in this fashion or root your phone or do any, uh, number of, uh, hacks when you,

SPEAKER_04: I don't know if you saw Bari Weiss's, um, resignation letter or Andrew Sullivan's, or the recent one from Ariana Pacari from MSNBC.

SPEAKER_05: But I wonder if you'd think there's any self-reflection on the part of late stage journalism and late stage journalists or the editors of these publications when they see

SPEAKER_04: extremely liberal individuals leaving and on the way out burning their bridge and saying, I'm leaving because I feel bullied at the New York times by liberals.

SPEAKER_05: I feel like people have closed the Overton window to an extent that I can't even in Andrew Sullivan's cases as a gay man have a reasonable opinion about something controversial. Do you think there's any self-reflection or do you think it's,

SPEAKER_156: they've just all got Trump derangement syndrome or they're all pandering for page views or some combination?

SPEAKER_08: Well, two, two combinations. I think that Batman, Batman syndrome is actually very possible,

SPEAKER_09: especially on Android devices. Um, there's a, a relatively witty line that Peter Navarro, who, you know, is very controversial, but relative, a relatively witty line he used in an interview yesterday about, you know, the CCP knows where your kids, your children are,

SPEAKER_11: which is kind of a play on the old, uh, you know, TV commercial public service announcements. It's like 10 PM. Do you know where your kids are?

SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Um, so I think that's, um, one of the main concerns, but I think it's the combination of data sources put stitched together, that's most threatening. And so looking at any of these in isolation may not seem as scary, but the hacks, the cybersecurity hacks and the data from the app and the root access, et cetera, et cetera, combined could be extremely threatening. And so that, uh, that'd be a little bit more concerned about than any specific app. Um, but on your more macro point, obviously, you know, I have read, uh, those resignation letters and I think, you know, journalism has severe bias in the United States at the moment. And for people who don't share the overarching popular sort of intellectual theories of journalism, you know, they're going to be, uh, suppressed at the moment, it's kind of a, uh, binary outcome in a sense of you're either a believer or not believer in, in, in those circles. Uh, and so I think we're going to see more of this, which is going to lead to a Renaissance in traditional journalism where people actually try to get to the bottom of the facts and put together a story and let readers judge what the meaning of the story is. And that, you know, it's going to be led by whether it's sub stock or other, you know, innovations, but it's not the ideological journalism will appeal to 20% of the American people, um, that share that specific ideology. But at some point, the middle of the bell curve of the American people are going to reject it. Um, I think you're already sort of seeing that. I mean, in some ways the Trump election was a revolt against traditional journalism, uh, being, um, conscripted as well. I, I think a lot of people who are Trump voters absolutely just didn't believe

SPEAKER_11: things they were reading in the New York times because they understood the New York times had such an animosity towards a certain set of years that they, they couldn't believe, um, some of the the probably correct indictments of Trump that were embedded in some of this coverage. Um, 10,

SPEAKER_09: 20, 30 years ago, I think if, if a mainstream journal, uh, journalist like the Washington Post, New York times had run exposés on the presidential candidate, like someone like Trump, it would have

SPEAKER_11: been more devastating to that candidate, even within the conservative party. Uh, but because

SPEAKER_09: these organs of ideology are so distrusted and disliked and despised in some ways by people who have, you know, religious views, who are pro-life, who are conservative, pro-Israel, et cetera, that they just don't care what the New York team's rights. And so it doesn't have the impact that it

SPEAKER_138: would have had. And it should have because some of it is incredibly valid. True. Some of it's, some of it's definitely true. Some of it's very obvious. I mean, you grew up in New York too. I

SPEAKER_09: mean, both of us grew up with Donald Trump on the radio all day long. And so, you know, there's nothing surprising about Trump to me. Yeah. I mean, anybody who was in New York City can be

SPEAKER_04: absolutely certain that Trump was involved in financial shenanigans. And I think we all knew who ran the concrete business in New York, especially as somebody who grew up in Brooklyn, and, and, and, you know, watch the Fulton fish market accidentally burned down. Yeah.

SPEAKER_23: Anybody who grew up in New York in the 1980s, absolutely knew what Trump as president would be.

SPEAKER_09: I mean, that's why, you know, I tweeted in May of last year, May of 2016, sorry, you know, Trump was a sociopath. It was, you know, none of this is a surprise, but I think that the transmission of this information to the American people and voters was discounted massively because of all the bias over all these years that led to this, um, you know, basically rejection, uh, you know, occasionally the New York times may get something right, but if you don't believe them because they've got eight things wrong over the last two years, it doesn't do any good for anybody.

SPEAKER_04: Uh, you saw the tech hearings for, uh, major companies up there. Uh, you got, uh, your Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon of those four, which one deserves, uh, which one had the worst performance and or deserves to be under the most scrutiny, which one, which executive did best and which one maybe deserves the least amount of scrutiny and is great for society.

SPEAKER_11: Well, I mean, Apple, not Microsoft. Sorry. I mean, sorry. All four companies I think are incredible, you know, have done amazing things for Americans and society period. And, um, I think, you know,

SPEAKER_09: Bezos is statement before our testimony, I think describes this distills it perfectly. Everybody should read the statement in its entirety. It is a vigorous defense of technology and Amazon specifically of what it's done to improve welfare for everybody. Um, I think that's true for Apple. I think it's true

SPEAKER_11: for Facebook. I think it's true for Google. I think, uh, Mark, uh, had the best, I agree with basically the strategic recovery coverage, which won't surprise anybody, um, that Google is the most

SPEAKER_09: vulnerable, uh, because basically it has no friends. The left doesn't like, you know, has decided for whatever set of reasons that large, large, successful businesses are threats and bad, which is somewhat antithetical to the last, the last century of American history. And the people who know better and should know better and should be articulating a vigorous defense against that, you know, erosion are Republicans. But Google has burned so many bridges with conservatives that the Republicans are exasperated and just saying, well, I'm not going to waste my social capital defending you. Like you, you, you guys, you know, refuse to help our defense department, you fire conservatives, you have a monoculture, you censor conservative content on YouTube, et cetera, et cetera. And so, you know, as Ben Thompson summed up his piece today,

SPEAKER_79: it's like Google has absolutely no allies. The left doesn't like them and the right doesn't like them. So. And it's the most obvious, I mean, and, and by the way, they have a, you know, a market share that looks like a monopolist. Whereas Facebook does not have a market share that looks like monopolist in any relevant market. Apple has a minority of a market in every market they serve. And, you know, Amazon correctly

SPEAKER_09: understood probably has single digit market share. So none of the other companies really should have

SPEAKER_11: even been there. But I think Mark's statement to the committee was also quite elegant about how technology companies, including the ones through acquisition, allow them to compete successfully with large entrenched businesses that have not been serving their customers very well for a long time.

SPEAKER_69: And I, I highly recommend people read the excerpt of the testimony about that.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I, when looking at it, I don't think

SPEAKER_05: that because of Zuckerberg's track record and the fines he's gotten on privacy twice and all those settlements, he has the credibility and because he has both the Democrats and the Republicans feel like the thumbs on the scale for the other party, he felt like he was at risk as well for me. When you look at Google, well, they've straight up lied and obscurified and been opaque about how they put their rankings. I mean, Matt Cutts for just a decade lied to me and everybody and said,

SPEAKER_04: we didn't change organic search when all they did was put 400 pixels worth of ads above organic search. And everybody knows 90% of the clicks occur in the first, whatever, 100 pixels.

SPEAKER_05: They seem to be super at risk. I thought Amazon was incredible. I thought Bezos, his opening statement was like the opening scene in his movie when they do the 10 part Amazon series or whatever treatment

SPEAKER_04: they do where Tom Hanks plays Bezos or whoever winds up. I don't know who's the best person maybe to play. I got to think of somebody young. Ball Tom Cruise. You're saying a ball Tom Cruise.

SPEAKER_182: No, I like the Tom Hanks idea.

SPEAKER_57: Tom Hanks is just so all American, you just have to get buff. You got to get rid of the dad bot. I don't know if he's capable of it. But the thing that I thought Bezos should have just said to them,

SPEAKER_04: because when they were going at him with the third party, you know, acquisition, accusations that they were copying other people's products. It's like, that's called capitalism. We, we all try to make

SPEAKER_05: better products. And what would you have us do not allow third parties to sell on our platform? Because we can press a button and turn off the third party. And the millions of businesses that

SPEAKER_04: have been built off of that could go away. So what do you suggest? You know, to to all these politicians? What do you suggest we do? Should we turn it off? Because we can turn it off right now.

SPEAKER_156: I could just make a phone call. We'll turn off their party. And all those people will lose their

SPEAKER_23: jobs and they won't compete. I know. Well, it does a good way of reframing it. In addition,

SPEAKER_11: I found a tweet that I retweeted the other day that showed the percentage of third party goods sold on Amazon versus Walmart versus traditional retail. And you know, Amazon, it's like one or 3% or something like that. And all these other like 30%. So, you know, people are politicians are distorting

SPEAKER_23: the facts, or, you know, be willfully ignorant of them in complaining about practices that have

SPEAKER_51: been extremely common and dominant business practices actually for 50 plus years, like house

SPEAKER_186: brands. So when they talk about Amazon basics, it's like, well, Whole Foods has 365 Kroger's target,

SPEAKER_87: everybody has a house brand. And the house brands at those supermarkets and department stores was typically 20 or 30% of sales. I was just told by a CEO who works in Amazon that the house brands on Amazon, Amazon basics is less than 1%. That's correct. Yeah. Anybody who's used Amazon product, Amazon basics products know they're a great deal, but they're not the best products.

SPEAKER_44: They're kind of janky. No, it's a silly concern. You know who I got? I got JK Simmons.

SPEAKER_04: J.K. Simmons as an older Bezos and as a younger Bezos. That's what we need to cast like a Gordon. Who's that Gordon Leavitt? What's that kid's name, Nick? Joseph Gordon Leavitt as a young Bezos.

SPEAKER_191: Then you get J.K. Simmons on some, you know, some steroids. What do they call those things?

SPEAKER_04: The athlete's stake? HGH. Yeah, get him on a little HGH and then you got him playing an older Bezos.

SPEAKER_05: For Apple, they said they don't have market share, but they do have the lion's share of app revenue and the profits in phones. So part of this is also how do you define market share, right?

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, I mean, arguably the app revenue is a little tricky to create a market out of, but you can reframe it probably around profits. Typically it's not done. Typically market share is calculated by revenue or sales, but it's not that crazy on a kind of adjusted contribution margin kind of basis. So, but typically they don't have the dominant market share, which, you know, most antitrust analysis doesn't even begin unless you have like 40% market share. The lowest end market reported

SPEAKER_09: antitrust case is like around 30% and the 30 and 40% cases require you to take concerted action with other people. Like basically like a concerted boycott or something like that. Unilateral action,

SPEAKER_11: you definitely need market share more than 50% in the United States, at least for 60 plus years. So, you know, I think making an antitrust case against Apple in the United States

SPEAKER_23: is pretty unlikely. You can find these niche markets, like for example, there was one that at least stated a claim, which is just the first level bar in the book publishing space. But I think what would happen is if Apple really had legal risk in some of these niche markets, they would just, might as well just shut down the business rather than, you know, live with a government investigation.

SPEAKER_19: All right. So it's obvious that this is going to continue the scrutiny of big tech.

SPEAKER_05: I've been thinking about how big each big tech company can preemptively offer something that would make things feel because a lot of this is about feelings. It feels unfair, but nobody can really pin these companies. If they did, they would already have done antitrust cases. So a lot of this is about feelings. I think that this is unfair. I want you to think about each of these four major companies and what you think they could make as a concession that might feel good. I'll give you mine first. When I look at a company like Facebook, if they woke up one day and said, if you want to pay $10 a month or whatever Netflix or Spotify costs, eight bucks, 12 bucks, you can use an ad-free privacy guaranteed. We store none of your data on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. It's like a collection. Uh, and therefore there are no issues around consumer privacy. Do you think that would make people feel good with that? You think that would, um, call off the hounds?

SPEAKER_11: Maybe some, I mean, there's still like the left wing still wants to cry and try to find excuses for Hillary losing. Um, and, and so they tend to blame Facebook and they don't like the fact that people tend to share articles on Facebook that are not approved by the New York times. Um, so that's kind of,

SPEAKER_23: there's two groups. There's the privacy, you know, sort of concerns, which your suggestion would absolutely help reframe that narrative. But, um, a lot of it's around content and whether,

SPEAKER_11: whether you had a solution for that one. No, because I don't think they should cave. I think at the end of the day, the media hates Facebook because Hillary lost and the media is no longer a gatekeeper to content. So whether it's Facebook or Twitter, um, there's nobody who can stop you from generating attention with,

SPEAKER_23: you don't need to ask permission to generate attention for ideas and for, uh, your own publications anymore. And the media hates that because they've always had a monopoly. They're speaking, it's kind of ironic. They even had the biggest monopoly in the United States who are basically people in the media. Um, some of it government conferred if you think about like TV station, radio stations, yet have a, uh, a license and often quite monopolistic license.

SPEAKER_170: Um, so not true of print, but true of other forms of media.

SPEAKER_04: So would a, another opportunity for them to be, cause it was a pretty harsh, um, uh, removal of, you know, Alex Jones, who's a conspiracy. There isn't a whack job doing performance art. I think to his own admission that it's performance art, whether, no matter how you feel about it. Um, you know, the Sandy Hook parents was, uh, a false flag, like insanity. They had like Milo Yiannopoulos, who was like a performance. I knew him back before he was a performance artist. It was like performative art, like super trolling. And then there were a couple of other people,

SPEAKER_05: uh, on the right who got bounced off of YouTube. Um, would it have been a power move for YouTube to say, Hey, YouTube has this one level for everybody. And then there's a sub level where if you're a paid person, or even you just go into your settings and say, I want questionable content, or I want content that has been flagged and just, Hey, there's a way you can turn it on if you really

SPEAKER_04: want to see it. And it's going to live over here. Would that not have been a better move for him? Or do you think they did the right thing taking Milo and, uh, you know, uh, Alex Jones off the

SPEAKER_11: platform? Well, I think that's an interesting idea because, you know, play, uh, defaults using,

SPEAKER_23: leveraging defaults is something I mean, technology companies have already done to compete with either political perception or large insurance incumbents. We've, we used very clever default setting back in my PayPal days to, uh, prevent these a mastercard from eliminating us. So it's a very, very classic,

SPEAKER_11: uh, move to do something like what you suggest. Um, I, I think it depends on specific cases. Like I wouldn't necessarily love all the people that banned Facebook together. Uh, I think fundamentally,

SPEAKER_23: I have a very simple principle, which I've explained at length and, uh, among other places an interview with Kara Swisher on recode, if the content can be published in a book in the United

SPEAKER_11: States, it should be allowed on Facebook. And if it wouldn't be allowed to be published in a book because it's obscene, libelous, et cetera, then it shouldn't be allowed on Facebook. And we've lived with that, you know, sort of construct for three, 400 years, very successfully. Do you include the UK?

SPEAKER_09: You know, you can go back further. Um, and it works. We, we understand what content is publishable. And if it can be published in a book, there's no reason Facebook or Twitter should treat the content

SPEAKER_56: any differently. Well, did Kara, I wonder if Kara was, uh, quick enough, cause she's pretty smart,

SPEAKER_04: uh, to respond that books typically have editors and publishers who would then

SPEAKER_05: act as an intermediary would have massive liability.

SPEAKER_11: Um, they did for many parts of history, but actually the beginning, they didn't. And then again, they, and now they don't really in many ways. Um, but yes, there was gatekeepers in the publishing industry, but you could self-publish pamphlets were self-published. The American revolution

SPEAKER_23: was predicated on pamphlets, actually anonymous or synonymous pamphlets. Um, you know, where the key, you know, common sense and things like that, or federalist papers, et cetera, were indispensable to

SPEAKER_11: American history. And, you know, I don't think there was like a traditional publisher behind those. Uh, so I don't think that's totally true, but, but, uh, there were absolutely gatekeepers, but I think the legal standards have been well-established, significantly framed. I mean, when the printing press came out, it did cause revolutions. Like at the end of the day, it was the first time that a normal person could proselytize that scale. And, you know, there was worse fought because of the printing press in many ways. Um, but I, so I think there's consequences to allowing people to publish new and provocative ideas,

SPEAKER_09: but we've had as a society had well-established standards and there's no reason to change them

SPEAKER_02: for Facebook or Twitter. I mean, if we did not have the ability to publish the murder of George Floyd and that eight and a half minute video of him being murdered, we would not have the ability

SPEAKER_05: to do the change we want to see in policing. So, you know, public, this ability, this freedom

SPEAKER_11: of publishing cuts both ways. Uh, yeah, publishing, I mean, broadening exposure to access to information, broadening to people who can be, uh, writers or publishers is a very good thing. And I think

SPEAKER_23: we've already adopted significantly successful standards on, you know, can't have child porn, you can't have obscenity, you certainly can't defame people.

SPEAKER_04: You can't threaten to hurt bodily harm somebody. I mean, I've had people threaten to punch me on the face on Twitter. I'm like, by the way, you know, it's probably not a good idea to do that.

SPEAKER_05: I think you can have a knock on your door if you do something like that.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah. I mean, certainly any imminent threat, uh, uh, violence is unacceptable. You couldn't publish a book calling for it either if it was imminent. So I think we have like the principles that,

SPEAKER_11: and so when someone doesn't want to use traditionally successful principles, it means to me that what they really want to do is suppress ideas that they're actually trying to censor ideas because they, they know for a fact that the standards we normally employ would absolutely enable like this content to be published. Now, I do think there are lines, um, that absolutely can be drawn.

SPEAKER_23: And, but the lines are, is this clearly defined? Is this devalatory or libelous? Is this obscene, et cetera? Uh, and if not, if a user wants to share some content with his or her friends,

SPEAKER_11: they should be able to do that. And you don't have to be friends with someone on Facebook. There's

SPEAKER_09: no requirement that I be friends with you on Facebook, or I don't have to follow someone on Twitter. If I don't like their content, you know, I absolutely shouldn't have to follow them.

SPEAKER_43: All right. Here's my best idea for Google to get themselves out of hot water. Let me run this one

SPEAKER_04: up the flagpole and see what you think. Google, when you type in internal temperature, smoking brisket, when I do it on my barbecue, it pulls the actual answer, the paragraph, they call it a snippet or a one box and they put it right there on my mobile phone.

SPEAKER_05: Internal temperature should be 195 degrees. Let that meat sit for an hour and you're good to go. Not only do they do that, they take the next four or five questions that I would have asked. They put a little carrot next to it. You click the dropdown and it gives you another snippet for, it says, what is it to do? Well done brisket or medium rare brisket or whatever it is. In other words, they make it absolutely unnecessary for me to go visit those websites. And the whole defense they had was, Hey, we send information. Now they're actually profiting from it. I think if they want to use snippets, they should pay some amount of money. Let's call it $1 for every

SPEAKER_87: thousand times it's seen 25 cents from what every time it's seen, or just share the revenue. Cause they already share revenue. When you put ads on Google ads on your site, they give you 60, 70% of it. Maybe when they use the content on their site, they should just pay you a little big. What do you think about them being generous and doing something like this to share the wealth?

SPEAKER_11: I think it would certainly appease some of their critics. It wouldn't appease all because a lot

SPEAKER_09: of people are trying to build destination websites and watch traffic. It's not just a marginal economic calculation, but for many publishers it is. But there is just like my point about Facebook,

SPEAKER_11: there are some well-established principles here and maybe they need to be litigated to see the application. But there's a concept of fair use, you know, that's been well-established for centuries. And arguably maybe Google is not complying with fair use and how they're doing snippets, the one box, because to some extent, if you're taking a primary, fair use is not measured

SPEAKER_80: just by the percentage of the content. It's a four part test. Is there confusion on the part of the user? The percentage you're using? Is there an educational purpose? And are you impeding the other person's ability to do commerce? And you're sticking to that fourth one. I'm no lawyer. I know you are, but

SPEAKER_04: I have enough background on this from getting legal letters to Engadget and other publications.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, no, the fourth principle is if they're taking and depriving people of economic value

SPEAKER_23: by showcasing the primary import of the content on their site, that actually would not be a fair use.

SPEAKER_11: And so I think there are test cases that particular publishers might want to try litigating against Google. And, you know, look, Google's got deep pockets, so it's a pretty good litigation. You know, I might invest in some of that. Let's do it. I'm going to write a blog post

SPEAKER_87: and then you and I could fund this because it actually, I see two Achilles heels for Google. The first one is also, if you were to ask people to search and, you know, you own the company Traeger

SPEAKER_05: Grills, the smoker I use, and I'm not saying it's the best one, it's what people tell me is the best one, but there's some other ones that are particularly good as well. And if I search for Traeger

SPEAKER_87: Grills and they sell that keyword to another person, people don't actually know because the chiclet for an ad is like this tiny now. It's like, it literally looks like a tic-tac. And they may even call it that a chiclet or a tic-tac where it says AD. I would say 50, 60, 70% of people, if you were to survey them after them, is what you clicked on an ad or not, would not know. Or they would misattribute it. This is a clear violation of advertising law. So they have two huge Achilles heels. And if somebody had the chutzpah to go after them with two lawsuits,

SPEAKER_233: Google would lose. I guarantee it.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah. So I think there's some promising litigation. Like, so you don't need to apply like this complicated antitrust analysis. You know, as I said, there's a lot of very straightforward, well-established for centuries principles. You just named two of them that could be used to, you know, improve the situation. I do think though, that Google does have, you know, 70, 80,

SPEAKER_23: 90% market share in search. And it's almost surely the case that search is a relevant market,

SPEAKER_11: divorced from just general advertising. So I think that's an easy monopoly case to bring.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. So we got three swings at back there. Amazon, what would you think is

SPEAKER_04: a reasonable solution? I have one, but I don't know if it's as good as the other two I put forth, of how they could avoid some issues with their basics product. But do you have any ideas for them

SPEAKER_11: to make it feel more fair and to take the heat off? Well, you know, I think they're doing a really good job. As you pointed out, this is an opening statement, probably reframed a lot of people's opinion very quickly about today, really want to mess with Amazon, specifically around, you know,

SPEAKER_240: by the way, we're more popular than you guys are. That was the greatest ever. He's like,

SPEAKER_04: the only people who people love more than us, are the people who go and defend the country at war,

SPEAKER_240: military people. And the press is like number 20 on the list. Yeah, especially among Democrats. So,

SPEAKER_11: you know, politicians are pretty good at understanding, you know, who's vulnerable and who they should attack and who's more popular than they are, and it's going to backfire. Yeah. So I think that was part of their strategy was like, we're pretty damn popular. Americans depend on us a lot right now. They really like us. You want to have a battle? Let's have a battle. Let's see who wins this one versus caving. And I think sometimes tech people have the wrong instinct,

SPEAKER_23: which is to cave. You have to know, like, is history on your side? Or the correlation of horses to use an old Russian concept on your side? If Amazon wants to battle, you know, a bunch of Democrats, I think Amazon wins that in most people's minds. So, you know, Bezos in some ways, like, you want to you want to have a fight? Let's have a fight right now. Here's the bit. Here's

SPEAKER_87: the one I have with the basics product line, and the house brands. And this is like a double, like, trolling dunk. We will make no profit on our Amazon basics products. We'll just make them, we'll provide them at cost, just so that more people and consumers have more choice for the basic things in their life, because that's good for society. We're not going to underprice them, which is illegal. Right, of course. But we're going to sell them at cost, just like Costco does. Costco is supposedly, you pay the membership, you get a cost. So as part of an Amazon Prime, if you're Amazon Prime, you get Amazon basics at the verified cost

SPEAKER_05: that Amazon spends on that USB-C cable. I think that's a pretty good idea. You know,

SPEAKER_212: some people criticize like, does cost effectively mean below cost? Because a lot of people have these

SPEAKER_23: only, but anyway, I think that's a good framing. You know, especially since it's 1% of their products, it's not going to matter that much in the grand scheme of Amazon. But I think that's a reasonable approach. Certainly would magnify the consumer welfare and the popularity to the consumer of Amazon, which is part of the strategy. And I think you could see this also in Apple strategy. Apple's obviously a very well-approved, well-liked brand. Tim was, you know, pretty much playing a no hits, no runs, no errors kind of strategy. Yeah, very, very milk toast, very milk toast. I'd be right down the middle. I know the American people like my company, they like me, I'm not going to say anything that changes that. I don't want attention here. Like,

SPEAKER_11: why am I here? You know, kind of thing. And so I think, and their political strategy usually reflects that even though Tim's been somewhat outspoken on some issues that he cares a lot about, obviously. Typically, they found a way to have a bipartisan, you know, lobbying and a political

SPEAKER_253: donation strategy across the board, so that they don't generate the animosity that Google does among Republicans and Twitter to some extent, and YouTube, particularly at Google.

SPEAKER_05: And Facebook and Zuckerberg. Yeah. I mean, it is amazing when you think about it. Tim Apple is like sitting next to the president at every economic conference. Then he's going out and speaking about, you know, important issues, gay rights and social justice. And he doesn't get barbecued for sitting next to Trump because he doesn't say anything. He just sort of sits next to him and says, like, yep, we want to support Americans. And, you know, we're here to help. I had the masterful, I think, one-liner for him, which was, we have a closed ecosystem because we want to protect children from porn and things they shouldn't see. Android has an open ecosystem. Google's an open ecosystem. If you are a parent, you can pick the open ecosystem. If you want a curated experience, like Walt Disney World, where there's no smoking or there's no pornographic material, or there's no adult content, there's no R-rated features at Disneyland and Disney World or on Disney Plus, that's what we're providing. And it's just something different. But so we need to have those controls, but you can buy an Android phone and you can load whatever you want. So there's that. And then my second point as Tim Cook would have been, and by the way, we have a developer mode for iPhones. Now you click on developer mode and you can loan any app store, but you don't get any support from us. So when you click, I'm in developer mode and you pay $29 a year. He gives you a warning that you're now your privacy is up. You can

SPEAKER_190: do whatever you want with your device, but we're not going to support it. Wouldn't that have been just

SPEAKER_23: an easy dunk for him? Yeah, I like the first one much better than the second. The second one is

SPEAKER_11: a similar principle though. It's like playing with default. It's very few people are going to choose that, but you get the optics of reframing it to be completely optional, even though very few people

SPEAKER_256: would elect for the inferior choice. So yeah, those kinds of moves typically are very effective.

SPEAKER_05: Okay. We're both investors in companies and we have our companies compete against these big companies, which can obviously sometimes buy them for a large amount of money, which is great for investors and for those teams. But they can also compete against them and destroy them very quickly if they choose to. We see that once in a while, maybe it's a little more overblown. Do you think for our industry, venture capital, technology, entrepreneurship, it's good to have these giant players out there who can write 10, $20 billion checks to do M&A or would it be better if we had some new rule that said, if you are over $500 billion, you can only buy companies up to this amount, $20 billion in market cap, or maybe it was a percentage. If your company's worth a trillion dollars, you can buy anything that's 10% of the value of your company or 20% of the value of your company or some sort of throttling that were to occur for the big giants who are running the table

SPEAKER_04: and getting so big that people have this concern that they're basically mitigating too much of American life.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, but I think the history is just like proves that it's actually not true. I mean, what's the biggest thing Apple's ever purchased? It's actually this ridiculous purchase. Beats. Beats, yeah. So dumb. It's like wasting money and a very small amount of money, a very small fraction on market cap. And, you know, so literally the most important tech company in many ways doesn't buy anybody. Amazon, you know, did buy Whole Foods.

SPEAKER_74: 13 billion and they went up 20 billion that day.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, so they bought Whole Foods, but before Whole Foods,

SPEAKER_240: like the most they'd spend on acquisition was like about a billion dollars. So you're talking like a rounding error.

SPEAKER_267: Facebook's the only one, right? WhatsApp, that was bold.

SPEAKER_240: Yeah, I'm not sure WhatsApp was worth doing. 19?

SPEAKER_23: I'm not sure it was worth doing, but you could debate that. Instagram was brilliant. You know, clearly, although now people are applying hindsight. I remember tweeting and I have to find it because Twitter search is so broken. The day of the acquisition of Instagram, I remember tweeting how brilliant it was. And so many people, including some very smart people I know, thought I was crazy.

SPEAKER_57: The ultimate brilliant hedge, it was 1% of their market cap at the time, right?

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, it was 30 million users, which isn't that much. And it was 13 employees with basically no revenue.

SPEAKER_11: So for a billion dollars, to me, it was very extremely profound. And I tweeted some of this. But it was extremely controversial at the time.

SPEAKER_23: So applying hindsight isn't really like a productive exercise that everybody's doing now. I think that's like, you know, kind of ridiculous.

SPEAKER_74: But if you take the two, 19 billion for WhatsApp.

SPEAKER_27: 20 billion total, roughly.

SPEAKER_74: Yeah, when they were at 100 and change, I think, in market cap. If you just averaged out the two for 10% each, it was a smart move.

SPEAKER_11: And then they wasted money, probably on Oculus. So to some extent, it's not like they've been, other than Instagram, which would have been a potentially competitive threat if it could scale users, scale employees. It would have. Well, it would have scaled users.

SPEAKER_23: Scaling employees, as you know, is really hard. Going from 13 people to 300 people is very painful. Going from 300 people to 3,000 people.

SPEAKER_96: I think Roloff had just put $50 million in the week before they got bought.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, but you still need people. You need to manage people. Things tend to go wrong. Yeah. There were risks. There were risks. And they had no revenue. They had no credit. Google's been fairly effective in buying some things.

SPEAKER_23: YouTube was a very smart acquisition. 1.6. Yeah. I think DoubleClick probably was a very smart and borderline anti-competitive acquisition. For sure.

SPEAKER_275: Yeah.

SPEAKER_11: I think those two. Android. Yeah. But Android was more like an R&D product at the time they purchased it. True. And they spent roughly $400 million total on it. Maybe even a little less. The most important thing they bought in some ways was the pioneering engineering talent into

SPEAKER_23: some extent IP and probably... DeepMind or AdSense? No, no, no. No, no, no. Way back. Oh, the AdSense competitor in Santa Monica.

SPEAKER_240: What was it called? It became AdSense Applied Semantics. Yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_212: That was probably the most important thing they purchased.

SPEAKER_283: That was like $100 million or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So no one... It was free.

SPEAKER_23: And Google had like no material revenue at the time either. So it was like, you know, in some ways it wouldn't have qualified under any antitrust

SPEAKER_11: doctrine for anything. Yeah. But it was by far the most influential. Again, Android was an R&D product, extremely influential, extremely powerful, but wouldn't

SPEAKER_23: have been disqualified by any neutral principle.

SPEAKER_15: What's your advice to founders?

SPEAKER_05: Now that we've got these SPACs everywhere and the IPL windows open, retail investors have shown up thanks to Robinhood, shouldn't companies just start going public and using that public equity to then go make more acquisitions and be more independent and drive value? Isn't that better for us in the investment community and society at large to have,

SPEAKER_65: you know, five times as many public companies to choose from?

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, of course. I mean, I've for 10 years been arguing that most founders should take the company public as rapidly as possible. Basically, Bill Gurley and I have been on this crusade for a decade. And, you know, most founders have rejected that advice. I explained my views at length in a full chapter on this topic in Eli Gill's High Growth Handbook, which I highly recommend reading. Great book. I also have a couple of answers that are probably about a decade old on Quora that try to distill this. So you can see it's not revisionist history. I actually published these answers in 2010. Yeah. But so in any event, maybe now some founders are realizing

SPEAKER_212: the wisdom of, you know, the girly Keith Buse of the world.

SPEAKER_04: But yeah, I mean, look at Shopify. Look at Nikolo. I just had the Nikolo founder on his company's worth 10, 15 billion dollars. They don't even have a product in market yet.

SPEAKER_137: I mean, that's scary.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, that's a little scary. But you can look at things like Shopify or like Carvana or Square. Slack. Yeah, Square went public at three and a half bill. It's now 55 or 60 bill. You know, Shopify. It's crazy. Shopify is at 120 billion or so, you know, when public probably about three.

SPEAKER_289: Stay independent and go public. It's such an obviously the best move.

SPEAKER_05: If people want to buy your company, it's because they see you as a massive opportunity or a threat or both.

SPEAKER_234: Yep. Yep. They're linked together.

SPEAKER_23: Like the ability to have a successful acquisition is related to your viability and prospects as an independent enemy as well.

SPEAKER_17: Why hasn't Microsoft bought Slack?

SPEAKER_294: Is it too expensive?

SPEAKER_240: No. Well, obviously not from a market cap perspective, but I suspect it's one. Or Google.

SPEAKER_11: Well, now I think it would be hard from an antitrust perspective. Now they have teams to get away with Slack. I think it'd be too high visibility. Google could probably buy Slack. Although Google probably anything they try to do at any price point, you know, that's meaningful gets scrutinized. But Salesforce, maybe it's a classic, like, you know, we could build this kind of decision. Salesforce probably you're probably does make actually some sense there.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, because it's becoming the dashboard. I can't believe that somebody hasn't taken in this pandemic Slack off the table because

SPEAKER_57: I don't know about when you are working now remote work is Slack. Like, that's your office now.

SPEAKER_299: Like, what is that worth?

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, no, I think like Slack is a desirable target. Is Zoom? Well, Zoom's got lots of tricky issues. You know, they have engineering centers and engineers in China.

SPEAKER_23: There's some, there's been some concerns about how they've suppressed certain kinds of content and protests.

SPEAKER_302: Yeah, no, they've been reversing those decisions real quick. I mean, they see the liability.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, there's, there's, I think that one is probably better stay as independent company. Yeah. Um, you know, I, I think unless you want to really take on the burden of

SPEAKER_23: the optics and the substance of improving those things. Um, you know, they, I think it's highly risky right now. Um, we, we, we, we use Zoom for most of our pitches, but presumably the CCP doesn't care. Like what I'm investing in.

SPEAKER_306: You, uh, have you invested during the pandemic?

SPEAKER_196: Yeah, you know, um, I'd say in a moderately uncomfortable way, um, certainly founders fund as a

SPEAKER_23: whole, as a collection of partners is mostly a founder driven, a team driven investor, um, group. So the most important criteria for us is the quality and caliber of the founders. And, you know, remote investing is extremely challenging to us. Why is it hard for you?

SPEAKER_309: Yeah.

SPEAKER_23: Because I think, uh, a video conference, this is not a substitute for gauging someone's abilities versus in the real world meeting. Yeah. Um, and so I think those of us that compete mostly on our ability to assess people feel

SPEAKER_11: like we're at a comparative comparative disadvantage during COVID. Yeah. Um, which, which is somewhat frustrating. I mean, obviously not that much we can do about it, but, um, fundamentally I, I feel like, um, you know, competing with like one hand, you know, sort of broken, like a broken hand playing like a sport or something. Um, and it's been difficult. Uh, I have led to important investments, uh, in the last, I guess, four, five months of COVID,

SPEAKER_23: which for me is a very slow pace. Um, typically, uh, probably something closer to one a month on average,

SPEAKER_04: but you knew both those founders and met in the real world before that, or have any of them in pure zoom?

SPEAKER_11: These there's two specifically that I've never met in person. Wow. In one case, uh, fortunately, Matt, uh, a chief of staff had worked with her before. Um, and you know, she and her co-founder both worked at Facebook. And so we're like a concentric circle removed, um, from people I know very well. Uh, second recent one that's not announced yet, um, is in a domain and market that I understand very well. Um, I've had significant success in that kind of market before.

SPEAKER_23: So although it's somewhat annoying to have to make an investment decision via zoom. Um, I, I also similarly have several people in common. Um, there are several angel investors in the company that I know very well, uh, as well as, you know, other people associated with this person's background. Um, but still not ideal at all.

SPEAKER_55: All right. So we're not going to have, as we wrap up here, um, less than a hundred days until the election,

SPEAKER_05: we're not going to have a crazy socialist, you know, uh, ban the billionaires, Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren in the white house. Maybe the slim chance Elizabeth Warren would be the VP, but I doubt it. Um, chances Trump wins and how would he thread the needle chances? Biden wins and what would be the best strategy for him to win?

SPEAKER_11: So I think the chances are a little bit higher than people right now. A lot of people writing Trump off and, you know, Trump is clearly into K, um, you know,

SPEAKER_23: his performance has been abysmal for the last three to six months, uh, on many of these dimensions.

SPEAKER_11: That said, I think there's a couple pieces of volatility and, you know, wild cards still significantly in play.

SPEAKER_23: A, Biden imminently is going to announce a vice presidential pick. And if he mishandles that and chooses, you know, the wrong candidate and things, you know,

SPEAKER_11: sort of spiral in a negative way that would introduce a lot of uncertainty back in the race. Secondly, the healthcare front, which dictates the economic front.

SPEAKER_09: If by the October jobs report, the economy looks to be back on track. It's not going to be all the way back, but if the first and second directions are positive, I think the election will be very close. If not, I think Trump has a severe problem because basically the number one predictor for presidential reelections is the right track, wrong track percentage. And right now for lots of really good reasons, most Americans think we're on the wrong track. But if you can fix that quickly, um, where people are feeling optimistic again, I think that would help substantially. Third is almost surely there should, there will be at least one presidential debate.

SPEAKER_23: You know, Biden's been in isolation, uh, for a long time.

SPEAKER_201: Seems like a wide strategy.

SPEAKER_11: Which has worked in the short term. But once you get divorced from, uh, stress and difficult questions, it gets harder.

SPEAKER_23: You don't just snap that agility, the mental agility, et cetera, back instantly like a light switch.

SPEAKER_11: So if he underperforms massively in the first debate, I think that could really hurt him.

SPEAKER_23: And if he tries to avoid debating, I think it'll backfire. It'll be the equivalent of Hillary not going to Wisconsin because he's overconfident.

SPEAKER_127: That's the one I wonder about because I do agree with you that you need to use that muscle.

SPEAKER_05: If you look at what happened with Bloomberg, he just got demolished and he just wasn't prepared to fight in those debates. And he was clearly the most qualified person, I believe, on the Democratic side. I mean, I think that's the person Trump feared most if he was just sharper,

SPEAKER_17: but he hadn't tuned that muscle because he jumped into the race at the last minute.

SPEAKER_11: He hadn't been under stress and screened for a very long time and he's aging. A similar thing happened in 2016 with Jeb Bush. Yeah. He had been like an investment banker for X years. In the prime of his career as a politician in Florida, he's actually a pretty good debater, a pretty good speaker, but he totally lost that, you know, that ability. It's like a boxer's like retired or something.

Chamath Palihapitiya: This is why you need to do a podcast twice a week.

SPEAKER_240: You got to keep your, you got to stay sharp. Okay, Matt, schedule me a few podcasts a week. They'll be much better than this one. No.

SPEAKER_11: And then the last piece of volatility will be, you know, insofar as things escalate with China and there's a real confrontation, especially if Biden mishandles his positioning on China. I think Trump wants to run against Beijing Biden. And, you know, Biden's got advisors on both sides of this equation. Some are more realistic about the threat posed by China and some who are traditional establishment foreign policy bureaucrats. And depending on where he ultimately lands, he'll need to be more or less vulnerable to punches from Trump on China. But if China makes some aggressive decisions and does some things that, you know, alienate the American people, and Trump is perceived to be the most anti-China candidate, that could be very important for his reelection.

SPEAKER_289: I wonder if China wants him to win.

SPEAKER_11: I have no idea. I think it's tricky. I think they like the fact that he, they surely are racing the fact that he seeds distrust and a lot of social conflict. And that's been part of China's intentional strategy for at least the last five, 10, maybe 15 years. So Trump as a candidate and Trump as president absolutely causes divisions. That said, you know, he's been pretty aggressive recently on China and, and pretty attuned to a lot of the civil stuff they're trying to get away with. And, you know, I think Biden would be maybe certainly less confrontational, but maybe might even borderline fall into an appeasement camp and they might be willing to roll the dice that they'd rather have an appeasing president of the United States than a unpredictable and hawkish president. But Biden would also allow for less social divisions, more unified, more unified America. And, and, you know, that would be inconsistent with a lot of China strategy.

SPEAKER_86: I have another theory. It's a crazy conspiracy theory, but I think you got to exhaust all of these because we live in a crazy

SPEAKER_05: world. You notice that Trump started wearing a mask two weeks ago and then just totally reversed his position on it. And he was like, I'm going to wear a mask and you should totally wear a mask. And here's my mask and take a picture of my mask. Doesn't it look cool on me? That was, he started doing that 60 days out from the first debate, which I think is September 29th, if my memory serves me correct. It takes like three, four weeks for mask wearing to like work. And it takes two or three weeks for people to die from COVID. I think it's 10, 20 day window. He might have timed this perfectly because you, I don't know if you noticed the caseloads are coming down as testing's going up and we just had a plateau in debts after it went up a little bit. He might time this perfectly so that he gets everybody to start wearing masks. He's just make Trump 2020 masks. Then he could claim victory that he defeated COVID or he ran it down to let's say under 100 deaths a day or under 200 deaths a day from this peak of 1500. And then the stock market would rip. And then maybe that's his window.

SPEAKER_234: Yeah. Well, his biggest mistake, his single biggest mistake from a political perspective and some

SPEAKER_11: of its levels of respect was he should have embraced wearing a mask before anybody else. It's a very conservative approach to a really tricky problem. A mask is individualistic. It's not something, it's very inexpensive. It's not something the government needs to provide you. So it should have been like the big Democrats who want to shut down the economy with a once

SPEAKER_23: with a one size fits all mandate sledgehammer that are interfering with economic progress versus me who's saying, go buy a simple mask, wear it.

SPEAKER_11: And, you know, we don't need to do all these like government interventions in the world. And it would have been a very both substantively successful, probably policy, but very ideologically consistent with his, you know, sort of most likely voters is like, who needs governments? You know, we know how to produce a mask. We know how to build a mask. Adam. Yeah. Get a bandana. Get your Leonard Skinner bandana. Let's go. Or Adams, the shoe company now does high end masks or, you know, Nike produces masks. The American genius. I've got my Adams mask right here. There you go.

David Friedberg: I buy them 10 at a time for my whole team.

SPEAKER_11: Right. They're really good, actually. Right on brand. So I even have a Barry's mask that I wear. Oh, Barry's boot camp.

SPEAKER_242: How are you doing without your Barry's? Dying. I'm dying. Did you Peloton? What are you doing? Remote Barry's?

SPEAKER_11: I'm doing a lot of remote Barry's. The classes are pretty good. They have classes with via Zoom with like weights and the instructors are quite good. It's not this. It's obviously not a substitute for the real world in many ways. But for most people, you know,

SPEAKER_05: We both love basketball. We both love basketball. You watched a couple of these first games. It's a little bit weird, but it's great to have it back. Yeah.

SPEAKER_11: Well, I think all sports. I mean, I've been watching mostly baseball. I'm a phenomenally addicted, fanatically addicted Yankees fan. Yeah. Of course, the Yankees are quite good. I'm really hoping the baseball season doesn't fall apart at the moment, because the Yankees

SPEAKER_23: are absolutely the best team in baseball and it's really exciting to watch them. Why didn't they do a bubble? They should have just bubbled it. Who knows? You know, the machinations. It's like classic, you know, commissioner problems, union problems.

SPEAKER_11: In any event, hopefully, they can hold it together. Basketball, you know, we're both Knicks fans. They're both deprived of watching the Knicks. Oof. You like the Tibbs?

SPEAKER_342: You like the Tibbs acquisition?

SPEAKER_240: I don't know. I like the Jeff Van Gundy response, which is this roster needs a lot of work.

SPEAKER_259: So, yeah, I mean, coaches can only do so much. I like Barrett.

SPEAKER_86: I like Barrett and Mitchell. I think Mitchell getting 30, 40 minutes a game could be really interesting this season if he can handle it.

SPEAKER_11: I think the basic problem with the Knicks has been, I mean, the owner, it starts from the top. For sure. It's like sort of like the Trump administration. Yeah. And but secondarily, I think they've been on strategies that made sense for about six months at a time, and then they throw up their hands and revise the whole strategy. So dumb. So they never make any progress.

SPEAKER_79: So we wind up trading, you know, occasionally we've stumbled into some pretty good players and wind up trading them. Yeah, how do you trade Chris Barrett?

SPEAKER_347: If you get Chris Stapps Porzingis at number three or four on the draft, and everybody says you're an idiot, and then he turns out to be like a once in a lifetime player,

SPEAKER_57: once in a generation player, and then you trade him because he doesn't like you? F that. Yeah, it's crazy. You're staying. You're staying.

SPEAKER_09: It's insane. You have to build, you know, if anything, you watch The Last Dance, you know, with Jordan. Basketball teams, particularly, need to be built around the talent. And we occasionally, by accident, you know, get talent. Stumble into it. And then we throw it away. And so, you know, it's been 20 years and wasted 20 years as a Knicks fan. Oh, brutal. Other than, like, three weeks of Jeremy Lin, like, it's been a really horrible 20 years.

SPEAKER_05: And then, you know, Mello with Steve Novak and that whole crew, J.R. Smith, they actually played, like, what did that, had that 50-plus win season? And...

SPEAKER_196: Yeah, we had one season that was pretty reasonable. Reasonable.

SPEAKER_23: I mean, 50, when I was growing up as a Knicks fan, 50 wins was like the low bar. Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_57: It's like, yeah, Oakley, Mason, Ewing, Harper, Starks. Starks. I mean, you did not want to go up with that team.

SPEAKER_356: Bernard, or even before that, Bernard King. Bernard King. I mean, we were more like 40, 40.

SPEAKER_357: Or even after that, Marcus Camby, Sprewell, Larry Johnson.

SPEAKER_94: Yeah, so we had a pretty good run, other than when Bernard, you know, unfortunately damaged

SPEAKER_09: his knee for a couple years, you know, from the mid-80s on to 2001. The Knicks were, you know, a real franchise, but that's a long time ago.

SPEAKER_05: Well, we have all the assets.

SPEAKER_86: We got all the draft picks. We got some decent young players to build off of. I mean, just be patient. I mean, we're not going anywhere. We're just year 20 of pain. We can deal with two more years of pain. 10% more pain to have a playoff team. Just take your... I think that's, I think that's why they went with Tibbs, is I think they think he's that player developer, and we're just going to stick with the five-year plan and let,

SPEAKER_05: and let's just hire people slowly and develop talent. On that note, Keith Ruboy, let's pray for our Knicks for next year. Let's play for an end of the pandemic, and you're always a great guest, and we'll see you shortly. Thanks again for coming on. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.