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Saxipoo how much heat and momentum is Nikki Haley God in this week. Oh my God stop trying to make Nikki Haley happen Fetch is not happening stop trying to make fetch happen stop trying to make fetch happening. It's happening This is like my long Google short Facebook spread trade of last year It's happening. That's just not happening. Okay, stop trying to make fetch happen. What your winners ride. Just as a programming note We did a Twitter survey and you selected sax as the person you wanted to moderate the pod most next so welcome to Fox News Sunday and your host gave it's actually you're really chafed about this aren't you Jacob? No, I'm excited for it I'm so excited just to save a keyboard warrior the time I Will never ever ever moderate this thing So I'm here to talk all right three two Welcome to the all in pod. I am your host the rainman david sacks the famous doomsday clock that atomic scientists You should measure the threat of nuclear annihilation has never been closer to midnight not even during the cold war But since the best these think it's more important to discuss their stock portfolios We're gonna save you crane for later in the show priorities, right gentlemen? And why not who says you can't take it with you the dictator shamaat polyhopatia is planning to be in tuned with his money Like an Egyptian pharaoh and with his sweaters too even though it certainly won't be cold where he's going And of course he'll throw in the world's greatest moderator Jason Calcanis in the tune to be his servant in the afterlife It's the world jacuzon preparing for all his life by sucking up to every tech founder if you see him in a room with I give better odds the sultana scientist even freeberg. He's just paranoid enough to survive with me and the bunker Even though he still won't be questioning the Davos elites that got us here How much did that intro cost Does he call the money back refund You guys are laughing i'm laughing i don't know i'm laughing without a wiff you are at you Yeah, it's good the funniest part was when you almost read aloud like it's like you were like and then david freeberg insert pause here It's an intro it's an intro. I'm so glad we do an unscripted show. Okay, go ahead Freeber i remember when you did the intro come on did i read actually didn't we cut it? Yeah, you read and then you cut it you hated it and then we made you put it back in or something like that All i have to say to him about this job security is here. Okay, okay issue one issue one Google breakup Adjust department and eight states are now seeking to break up google's business Brokering digital advertising across the internet This is one of the most important legal challenges the companies ever faced Foddle lawsuit on Tuesday the just department did alleging that google abuses its role as one of the largest broker suppliers in online auctioneers Of ads placed on websites and mobile applications the filing promises a protracted court battle with huge implications for the digital advertising Industry of course google responded to the law student of blog post saying that The DOJ's request for to unwind to previous acquisitions from a decade ago is an attempt to rewrite history They said the DOJ mischaracterizes how its advertising products work They say that people choose to use google because they're effective And the company highlights other Companies making moves the advertising industry as well such as mark soft amazon apple and tiktok So i guess i'll kick it to you tumoth Do you think the DOJ has a case here? Do you believe that google has a monopoly in online advertising? And is unfairly using it to gain market share and is this the right remedy breaking up the company Yeah, i think that this is a totally ill-founded lawsuit and i think it just shows more of The personal enmity and anger that some people in the u.s. government has towards entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship than anything else now Why is that? Let's just think about what a monopoly is a man a monopoly or a monopolist effectively creates a completely stagnant non vibrant market in which they have pricing power and complete control Now the argument that i think that refutes that just on its face Is if you actually look number one at their share and number two How the rest of the share has changed over time so Nick can you just please throw that up from Bloomberg This is just in a Bloomberg article that i just shared with you guys, but Google controls 26.5% of a market 43.4% of that market is with a diverse group of others meta has 18.4% and amazon has 11.7 This is not the type of pie chart you would see if you had a monopolist So for example if you went back to the big big big monopolist case in the 1980s, which is when we broke up mobell Well, what that circle would have shown is that they basically had effectively a hundred percent share And what this shows is that there's a huge diversity of people in this market The second thing is that if you had done this chart many years ago amazon would not have really even been there And over the last five years they represent almost 12% of the entire market And it means that if you forecast it forward they could be at 15 to 20% in a few years as well So while the pie is growing and definitely google takes a lot of the profit dollars The distribution is so much more than what anything looks like in a monopoly And so I just think it means that the DOJ is more focused on trying to punish these great American companies than it is in trying to be logical And reasoned and so I don't think this is going to work The last thing I'll say about this is that If you think about what you should have done if I were the US government I would have actually focused on search Because search is a monopoly for Google And while Google would try to argue that there are other ways of acquiring information That is really not true And if you could prove that that monopoly then led to pricing power in ads I think that's a much more nuanced but logical argument that could work But by focusing on this I think it's going to get deconstructed It's going to fail the Texas version of this exact lawsuit And already was thrown out of federal court So I think that Judges and the legal system don't have a lot of patience for this thing It's just meant more to kind of scare American companies and try to play boogie man And decision maker and I don't think it's going to work Freeway, let me go to you I think you know, Tramoth raises a really great point That if you define the market as digital advertising You know, Google's market share is only about a quarter that doesn't seem like a monopoly However, what the government says is that you shouldn't look at digital advertising as a whole But rather this sort of broker advertising That you know, Google does for third party websites and applications Let me show a chart from their lawsuit You can see here that the way they define it Again, they see it as this brokering of Cell site inventory which are website publishers And then buy site demand which are advertisers To find this way it looks like Google has 90% or more market share on the cell side Because the double click acquisition They've got some of between 40 and 80% market share on the demand side with advertisers And then in the middle they have over 50% market share of the ad exchange Is this the right way to look at Google's business Or should we be just thinking about in terms of the overall Digital advertising market I've been involved in ad networks since about 2002 So it's been obviously I'm not directly involved in the business anymore But I was pretty close to this and I was pretty close to double click And the acquisition and I was a business product manager for a period of time on ad words So the way that that that chart kind of Shows the connection between advertisers and publishers is correct that An ad network generally speaking brings buyers of ad inventory to the sellers of ad inventory And the sellers of ad inventory have the option to sell their inventory On an ad network And if the money that they're making on those ad slots that they have whether it's a slot on the side of a page To the top of a page or an interstitial video ad whatever it is They're going to keep selling Their inventory through that network if they're getting paid the most And the real reason Google has won is two part one is because they ran their ad network as an auction Meaning advertisers were competing with each other to pay the most for an ad spot That was the highest quality there's also an ad quality index Calculation a click-through index a bounce back index So there's all this data that feeds into Google's ad network Auction so that the ad that's shown on the publisher site is not just the best ad for the publisher But the best ad for the consumer and then when the consumer clicks on the ad the publisher gets paid And the second thing that Google did and so the the auction dynamic is a really powerful dynamic It creates the best price for the publisher and it creates the highest quality ad for the user Which translates typically into higher click-throughs and And better revenue What they also did that was really powerful is they did the highest revenue share in the market So historically ad networks have like I think initially like a 60 40 red share where they only paid publishers 40% Of the revenue the advertiser paid then the network started to move to a 55 45 model than a 50 50 model Then a 45 55 model I believe on average Google currently is paying somewhere between 70 and 80% to their publishers I got to check my math on that or whatever the latest I heard high 60s yeah yeah Yeah, so but call it 70 And so it is a very competitive share Now the the point being because it's an auction system and because it's opt-in by the publisher If they're not paying the highest price the publisher can go and get ads from somewhere else And historically publishers built their own sales force to sell ads and to source advertisers and to make money off of their Adimentary and it turns out it was a lot more effective to use an ad network to do that The other ad network simply haven't been as good at building an auction model and building competitiveness But I will tell you that when you get to a certain volume and it's not a big volume You don't need a million advertisers bidding against each other You only need a few dozen advertisers and once you have a few dozen advertisers bidding against each other You start to get very competitive in inventory So Google's real lock-in with publishers and the real reason they win in this marketplace Is because they they're pay the publishers the most and if you try and break this up And if you actually do try and you know get into the the weeds of this whole system and change it The publishers ultimately will make less money and this will be a Real problem on the publisher side that they're making the most money They're getting the highest share of advertisers spend and consumers are getting the best quality experience That's what makes Google's model so hard to tackle from an antitrust perspective Because it's giving so basically are it is what you're saying that because fundamentally this is an auction model It prevents Google from extracting monopoly rents correct and and they already pay the highest share on their ad network back to the publishers And so you could go in and say hey high 60s or 70% they should be paying 90% What's the real right number if they're already paying more than anyone else to the publishers They're already making a lower margin than anyone and I'll say let me just let me just add two more things Sorry, which I think are just okay. Go to Jake out first as we get Jake out in here Even though he wouldn't do the same for me Yeah, Jake out do you agree with freeberg that uh that the reason for Google success is that they're hyper efficient And this auction mechanism prevents monopoly behavior No, I there is monopoly behavior going on at Google obviously with search and putting their own content and services up top and tissue mods point Like that's probably the easier target Here, this just feels like they are Maybe 10 years behind they should have just blocked the double click you know acquisition in 2008 and this consolidation of power the What publishers would say to freedberg's point is When you're selling your own advertising you get a much higher cpm when you go direct to Samsung or IBM or Disney and so you want to create those direct relationships How much do those direct relationships cost? It's probably 20 or 30% which is exactly to the percentage that Uh, Google is taking off the top so Google is pretty aware of that But it's just paradoxical that they're doing this at this time David because Amazon has developed a huge ad business Netflix and Disney have now have ad tears for their services to go up against YouTube So and then for the first time we've been talking about Google search supremacy being challenged by chat GPT So You know, they're they're just late 10 years too late maybe right right So to use one of your favorite words is the DOJ acting as a rug puller here For Google in the sense they're trying to unwind 10-year-old acquisitions. Is that does that make sense? Yeah, it doesn't make much sense to the government be able to unwind acquisitions that happen a decade ago. Does that make any sense? No, no, they have they should They should learn from it and not do it again Yeah, that's what do you think? I think it's a pretty bad way to approach things because they create so much uncertainty in the marketplace And has a chilling effect on future acquisitions. Yeah, like when you get approval from the government you want to know you're good Yeah, and we have an approval process So it seems to me I agree with Jake how like if the government is gonna have a problem with that acquisition State it up front, but then once they approve it you're approved. You're done Otherwise, you know companies will be much less likely to engage in acquisitions And that's kind of a chilling effect on M&A behavior in the ecosystem Which is bad for the ecosystem as a whole? Well, we need to really do these sets it puts us competitiveness against every other country and any other regulatory regime That'll be more permissive to this stuff. Oh, that doesn't that doesn't make any sense And I think this is what's lost on this. I just feel these lawsuits right now are bordering on the mean spirited because these things have been tried They've generally failed and so the real solution it always goes back to this and it's Ugly and messy is you need to rewrite the actual laws To reflect how business conditions exist today And so it's not the responsibility of the DOJ to try to fit around peg into a square hole It doesn't work like that and that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to manipulate and Contort the law to try to go after somebody that shouldn't frankly be gone after because these deals to your point We're done a decade ago and they were done legally and they were done rightly So if you have an issue with how the market is evolved change the law Right, I'll also add I totally agree with Shamath. I think that this action You know as one of our friends put it on our on our text screen. It's like killing the golden goods I mean this is one of the the big job creators innovators and taxpayers and employers and drivers of economic growth And why would we allow that to go and kind of burgeon off shore? As a as a government this is absolutely I'm gonna become a kind of an opening for some you know international competitor to come in and try and provide Alternative services with similar economics. I'll also say I just sent you guys a link. I'll send you one more The market itself is becoming so much more challenging to operate in as an ad network You know e-commerce so Amazon's ad business is booming right as Jamath pointed out earlier But so much more of consumer behavior is shifting where people are going direct to e-commerce sites and then the ads that are Getting the highest click through and where advertisers are spending more more money is on e-commerce sites I know this from experience on a couple boards. I'm at where companies stop spending on Facebook and Google and just started spending exclusively on Amazon And that's where you get consumers that are much more likely to purchase the purchasing per cleavit is higher the click-through rate is higher So the return on ad spend is much higher and then I think that there's a big shift happening right now as you guys know With third-party cookies Google has declared that they're removing third-party cookies in 2024 This means that in 2024 it is going to be very hard to track a user From one website to the next if you go to a website and look at furniture and then you go to another website Third-party cookies allow an advertiser to find you on that other website Knowing that you were just looking at furniture and send you a furniture ad and say hey come on over And you're more likely to click on that ad. It's been very effective for advertising and particularly in the segment of advertising called retargeting But it is becoming much harder to do this with third-party cookies and with the apple identifier being gained and Google just made an attempt to try and get this change with the w3c That was rejected and that change is now going to make this hit very very hard beginning in 2024 So the ad networks themselves are already being massively hurt by apples I D changes the third-party cookies being removed. It's becoming harder to target consumers harder to make money as a For publishers. So meanwhile the market's being challenged and was on coming in Yeah, the inverse definition of a monopoly when you have a market or there is dynamism where companies are changing the rules and that is reallocating Share gains to different players. That's the definition of a dynamic market that's self-regulating Totally five years ago. This would have made more sense. Yeah much more sense So I think just this goes back down to one basic thing which is do our elected and appointed officials Really understand what's going on in the economy and I think this is An example that highlights not as much as they should and before a lawsuit like this gets filed They should call us up If they called 30 of us into a room one by one and said can you please explain how this works You would have come to a different conclusion because we could have articulated these things and it would have been clear And so why do they not do that or if they do do it? Who's actually in there either way whatever's getting to the conclusion of let's go file this lawsuit in 2023 Is late at a minimum and misguided at best, you know You have to ask the question like how is this different than jisging paying saying you know what jack mollus too powerful Therefore he's gonna learn to paint. I think this is like Our goal is a Google it is totally different I think You always bring it back to China does everything you have to virtue signal like it's like No, I'm trying to be a gentleman intellectually interesting conversation Jason Jason. Jason. We're still manning an intellectually honest position Exactly let me finish to moth let me finish Before you jump the fence very simply You asked like why are they filing something that makes no sense my I think they want to have an outcome and their outcome is they want to stick it to big tech because it's too powerful And then you just send yourself square peg round hole They're trying to find something to get Google on this is not it. How does it relate to China? Well actually, I never agree with jkow here actually I'll defend it for a second. Well, I just take second world second raised moderators Yeah, third greatest take China out of it for a second because that could mean that could mean a lot of different things And so I don't want to get hung up on that But it does feel to me like the government is lashing out Against companies like Google because they're perceived as being too powerful. That's my that's just going on And in fact, I mean that's Lena con's theory is that we have to stop big tech companies from getting bigger because power But in this case it doesn't make any sense because the auction market for advertising is very competitive and the remedy of unwinding ten-year-old deals doesn't make any sense So yeah, they're just kind of barking up the wrong tree is sort of the idea There's there's two other things that they really should be looking at as these ad networks Are losing their market share in the overall digital ads meant there are two other players business, you know, and Deflix doing these Digital ads on their platforms and having ad tiers and then you may have noticed ubers doing an ad business now They did three hundred fifty million dollars in the first year of that business a million a day And they're protected to do a billion next year and those have location information in it because you have your destination Yeah, and so those And so opportunities are emerging. It's a dynamic space. I just want to say like You guys are making like I think a really important macro point, which is like in a marketplace It's always easy to hate the winners and claim that their success is unfair If you're not part of it and I think that just because something successful in a marketplace doesn't mean it's a monopoly You know this whole thing of envy, you know, we've We've heard from like the Berkshire shareholders meeting. I think there was a good conversation around this But envy really is ultimately the doom of innovation and democracy It's like you see the success you want to take down the successful Nothing can be too successful or else it has to be destroyed And then you know as we talked about it's gonna go somewhere else Well, I mean just play devil's advocate with it on that free bird It sounds like we all agree that the government has kind of the wrong theory and is barking up the wrong tree here However, isn't it the case that Apple and Google are too powerful Maybe not in this auction advertising auction marketplace, but when it comes to the app store I mean they have an operating system monopoly with iOS and Android or do optically But I think you're you're bringing up the key point which is these nuances are the ones that matter there is A body of law today David that you can apply pretty intelligently and thoughtfully to that exact problem And also to Google search and so it's a bit of a head scratcher why the DOJ hasn't spent the time to figure out To even understand that that's actually where they should be focused because that is where there is truly In the app for a case we have it. It's a doobly. So it's very clear the share shift has already been set There is no share shift happening to a third player There is no side loading that's really happening and so domestically in the United States and Western Europe There's a de facto doobly complete control completely inflexible inelastic pricing that is a monopoly and then separately for surge in the United States It is also an effective monopoly and those are the things where if you really wanted to go after them because you think there's some damage being done to people I would have focused there, but the app business has nothing to do with any of this and just means that right They don't understand how the market works right okay, so shifting gears Microsoft has just been sued on antitrust Or rather there's a pro by the EU And this was based on a complaint actually from Slack slack file to complaint back in 2020 That Microsoft was basically engaging in in bundling or tying of products The allegation is that Microsoft don't fairly ties Microsoft teams and other software to its widely used office suite. Do you guys think that's a better claim? Okay, so I mean, I'll just say like you know, there was an episode that we did I think back in September where I basically Railed against Microsoft for exactly this kind of bundling. It seems like the EU has picked up that theory And once to go after bundling we did slack series a I was on the board Took it public blah blah blah. I'll tell you the thing that we talked about a lot That was the thing that I was always like the most afraid of which is How can we compete with a better product in the face of superior distribution? I think what Microsoft did was Anti-competitive, but I don't think it was monopolistic And I think that the EU in that time Has a much better framework of laws that they had demonstrated up until now They were willing to enforce around anti-competitive pricing And so Heart of what slack was trying to do was create some aerospace For that to get into the ether to the discussion that it's like we could build the best product in the world But if Microsoft gives it away with this other product that is quasi essential They'll always beat us and there's nothing we can do about it What do you think and I think that was basically the question that was posed to the European authorities because we thought that they would pay attention to it What's interesting about it is that then you know when the acquisition happened To sales force It sort of waters down that claim because now sales force also has a set of really essential products that are useful and needed in the market That slack can go and attach themselves to and in many ways David It forced the hand of slack to be acquired by sales force and if not sales force It would have to have been somebody else But could it have been an independent company had we not had to compete against teams in that way Meaning if we had to compete against another well-funded startup would it still be public? I suspect so I don't think we would have sold the sales force When that that's exactly was my point when we talked about this last time is that if Microsoft Can basically clone the sort of the the breakthrough innovative product You know, just say they do one every year and then they put a crappy version of that in their bundle Yeah 10% 20 or 50% worse But they give it away effectively for free as part of the bundle And then they basically pull the legs out from under that other company So it can't be a vibrant competitor And then the next year they'll just raise the price of the bundle right and they've done that with slack They've done that with aqta they've done that was zoom You know, Jake Al can we have a vibrant tech ecosystem at least in B2B software If Microsoft can just keep doing that indefinitely Yeah, it's it's a difficult question I don't know though if what the consumer harm is here if you keep adding great features to a bundle So to take the other side of the argument You know zoom has now added channels like slack slack has added huddles which are essentially zoom calls and Now they're both going to try to add the code and notion Wiki wiki style, you know documents to both zoom and slack So everybody's copying everybody's features everybody's incorporating everybody's features it takes a little bit of time This is actually a lot better behavior from Microsoft than the old days when they would do something called vaporware They used to announce products to chill people from buying them so they would announce a slack Two years before slack came out just to get people to not install slack They did that with Lotus notes They said that a Lotus notes competitor coming for two years and it never materialized so I think the marketplace will compete and if you look at Slack itself, it's still growing the same percentage growth it did Inside of Salesforce that it did as an independent company. So it's growing at a similar I don't know about that great Nick. Can you pull up this chart? Yeah, it was like high teens or something was there was there It looks like from this chart that slack is kind of level off That's the number of users I was talking about revenue. Okay. If you look at slacks revenue quarter over quarter It's basically the report that it's been a little bit of a disappointment to Salesforce or no well I mean, you know this number here that we're looking at where it says 75 million Microsoft teams members 12 million slack members I just if you wanted to if you wanted to play conspiracy theorist maybe that's why There's a falling out between Benny off and Brett. I mean Brett was the champion of this deal You know 28 billion dollar acquisition and 28 billion dollars. It's threading a needle The only one of that scale that's really worked out definitively has been linked in So if slack hiccuped in a moment when we also had a regime change in rates and valuations Now look at Benny off is looking down the barrel of a activist investor Programmed from Elliott man. I mean, yeah, maybe it's not doing as well as they needed it to I got the sense that Benny off was Generally sorry that Brett decided to leave in that it was voluntary voluntary on breath's part and regretted basically as opposed to You know a non-regretted termination I have no idea like I said I was pretty qualifying with saying let's play conspiracy Fair enough fair enough. Okay, so can I just wait? Yeah, I have a suggestion Here's a suggestion for the regulators that are listening or watching our podcast I really valuable thing for the industry that you could do Would be to introduce transparency on ELA's what are those enterprise licensing agreements These are these things that these big companies use to throw everything in the kitchen sink into a deal when they sell to a company But if there was transparency And there was a sense of how those things were priced so think of it like the FDA saying here's you have to publish your ingredients Right and what percentage of it is this and that It would be really beneficial because it would slow down The tendency of these big companies to try to kill the small companies with these poorer products And something around ELA's and more transparency around pricing to the market could be a good governor Without having to go down the path of all this antitrust legislation after the fact I think there is some good advice for regulators there I think they should focus on anti competitive tactics and like clarifying what those are as opposed to some of these crazy lawsuits to break up companies Uh that don't seem to have well grounded theories it be I think better to focus on the specific tactics that create the harm and identifying what those are Jake out of your point about how what Microsoft is doing doesn't seem to be harming anybody It seems to be benefiting consumers I think that's a valid point But I would bring up a different example which is if you look at the anti competitive behavior of dumping Where a company will basically dump its product on the market for free Destroy all the other competitors and once they're out they can raise prices because the barriers to entry are high There's a huge cost of like Basically entering the industry I think that this bundling behavior is a form of dumping where in the short run It looks like consumers are benefiting because they're getting zoom a zoom clone for free Or you know a slack loan for free But then what happens is once they've you know hobbled those companies they raise the price of the bundle So I think if we want to have a healthy long-term ecosystem. I think this type of like bundling behavior is great bad I think it's anti competitive. It's a great point But I think there's a very specific solution for it. You don't need to break up Microsoft What you need to do is require That when they create a bundle every product in that bundle needs to basically have an individual price exactly And the price of every product in that bundle should add up to the cost of the bundle exactly So they can't do like you said tumult these like transfer payments or subsidies to basically You know take over Systemically take over every sense vertical. I think that would be amazing By the way, there are many other markets David where that exactly exists where if you have the ability to Preferentially put your product into your distribution channel You have to transfer price it transparently at the market And it's what everybody else would be able to get it at and that then allows the best product to win in the market And it gives the government the ability to say I understand that these rails are roughly monopolistic But I'm going to leave them alone as long as you treat everything that sits on top of those rails equally And that nuance is missing in software So I think the combination of transparency in these enterprise licensing agreements And more transparency and accounting treatment for what you just said Would solve a lot of this problem and you would have a more vibrant ecosystem where the big guys Can't just snuff out the small guys whenever they want Yeah, I just agree with you guys. Let me just let me just play let me just play my devil's advocate Which is kind of how I feel as well I think these these concepts of monopolistic bundling made a lot of sense I make a lot of sense in the sense If if what you're bundling and the service or the product or whatever is a commodity product And these statements that you're making Assume that one messaging service is the same as a must another messaging service that one video app is the same as another video app And that by giving a discount They're going to win the market the real that may have made sense back in the day when there were things like trains and trains Had a monopoly on where things could go or electricity or oil production at all of the kind of origins of kind of monopolistic Anti-trust laws and an action started to kind of emerge here in our free market in the US But when it comes to software if your product is the same as the other guys product Maybe they deserve to win by bundling and maybe it's okay for them to offer a discount and beat you on pricing Because if your product is actually better and it provides better ROI for the customer It has a better feature set. It's faster. It has a bunch of stuff that the other product doesn't have The market will pick it. It's not that the market's gonna say hey, we're just a bunch of idiots These products are so differentiated But because these guys are giving me a discount. I'm gonna go over to the discount That's not how it works and you guys know this I'm not saying that Microsoft can't copy slack and then undercut them and charge a different price and a lower price and discount What I'm saying is they can't cross subsidize They're slack competitors. It's the fact that they can copy slack that makes slack That means that slack should lose the fact that that's slack Yeah, it's great almost all of us whereas look software new software is really hard to create but really easy to copy I mean the first version of a new product is hard to create but you can reverse engineer almost any software product Show me where someone's made a better competitor to Google search Show me where like consumers don't choose to go to another search engine because Google's built a better search engine No, it's because there's a data network effect there that the more searches they provide the more data they get It's the reinforcement learning. I'll say I'll say it differently. It's easier to copy There's an asymptote to that quality point though. I don't think that's necessarily true I think I think there's a nuance here that and by the way all the social networks that people thought were had massive lock-in effect turns out They don't right David. No, that's not true. Look there's more lock-in deeper in the stack that you exist There's very little lock-in at the application layer so workflow apps Which effectively is what most of these enterprise software things are? Are very copyable because there's nothing that really locks it in But if you're a social network or if you're some deep machine-learn thing that basically generates great search results That's much harder to copy because more and more of the product And it generates the product quality is underneath the waterline. Yeah, but I think in enterprise software It's all thin UI layers on top of very simple Then don't compete then don't compete because the bigger guy that offers a discount is always going to beat you What he's saying which I agree with is you just if you could add transparency so that you understand what is happening I don't think anybody's against transparency. Nobody should be against it And if Microsoft wants to charge a penny a seat for teams Then they should be allowed to do that. I don't think we're saying that they shouldn't a lot of startups have used the opposite tactic Where they've entered with free offerings or free services and then they try and upsell later and we don't complain about that There's a lot of ways to compete in a market place But that's my point. There's a lot of ways to compete in the marketplace if the product you're offering is of parat commodity Something that's different enough that people are willing to pay for it Well then you know, they're willing to pay more than they'll pay the big guy that's giving them a bundling discount Just build a better product then the whole b2b SaaS space should basically pack up shop and go home. We should just stop funding VCs just to stop funding new SaaS companies because And all the productivity gains will just go up the window Yeah, why would you fund any Competitive then yeah, how's that bad for the customer? They're paying less and they're getting a better Fewer new products created. Yeah freeberg at the limit what you're basically saying is because Comcast is a monopolistic provider of my internet connection I should have to take their video offering and will never use Netflix No, it's like they have they offer a commodity That's my point if you're offering a commodity these things should apply makes a ton of sense But what you're saying but what you're saying effectively and what you just said is that b2b software is effectively commodity And he wants to copy it and he won't get a comment said to you I'm turning this off you only have one choice in its mind because these is my rails and I built it You would turn to the government to help you because you would say but Netflix is a better product And what David is saying is the exact same argument So my point is unless you also believe logically that you're allowed to turn off Netflix if you're Comcast and take their crappy VOD service then you're you're at least intellectually consistent Well, steel is a commodity too steel is a commodity too and you can't engage in dumping I mean, this is the argument is that for example You know with respect to China the argument was that they were dumping cheap steel in the US market to drive all the US producers out of business And then once they were out of business did raise the price the point is there's all these examples where we have had the Intelligence and the ability to be nuanced about this to see that these things are possible and they shouldn't exist We don't let Comcast turn off Netflix Okay, we have a law around that I understand so my so I think what we're saying is Embrace and extend this law for these new markets that didn't exist 50 and a hundred years ago when these laws were written So that the same benefits that we have in the steel market and in the cable market We have in the software market. It'll just create a healthier ecosystem Jake how you want to get it on this? Yeah, I just take a little bit of a say I wonder when you install teams Does it automatically when you install the Microsoft Office suite? Does it automatically install teams? Because it does seem the default there matters do people have to actively turn it on or is it actively built in and so The bundling of it I think matters and then interoperability matters So there are other vectors here To force an interoperability so if you open your windows machine Do you have a choice of it depends which browser let's just Let's just say that you use Exchange for certain things, but in other things for example to manage your namespace you may use octa But then they say actually no we need you to use our Version of octa. Yeah, it all becomes complicated. I think it's too complicated for a government to understand So I think the general thing is can we extend the definition of these basic rules that we've agreed to in other markets To include technology and would we be better served? And I think for the most part I do think it would be it would better serve startups It would better serve the folks that want to build product practicality though you would I think I have all said it's a Here's no I think what they've turned it on for a dollar person or something here's introductory price I think the combination of what David said and I said would do the trick Which is if you force these highly complicated license agreements to be transparent It would not allow them to dump and then the second thing is that all of that transfer pricing That goes into that license cost needs to sum up to the cost itself now. Why is that important? You can learn about how they prevent this in health care So let's take Pfizer good example. Here's a company with 30 billion dollars on the balance sheet right and Pfizer has a need still To subsidize all of the R&D of their drugs and you would say well, yeah, they have 30 billion dollars So they should just take the money off the balance sheet and do it. Why don't they do it? It's because the accounting laws and all of the complicated and anti-competitive laws say well if you want to take this cash pile and use it over here it goes from An asset liability item 30 billion of cash and all of a sudden. I'm going to net it against your EPS All right, I think there's an actual cost for these companies to do this stuff to bundle to cross to all of this stuff And so what do they do? They go into the market They ask startups to build stuff and then they buy it. That's the kind of market. I think is better for us Yeah, let's have that be the last word on this topic is we've been going for a while But I'm glad you brought up Pfizer because this brings us to issue two. Oh, which is and I think we can show this correct me for David Yeah, so Albert burlose the CEO of Pfizer went to Davos last week and he probably expect to Davos, you know the The conference this surplus elites and he expected probably nothing but softballs and falling treatment from the establishment media And instead he probably had the most uncomfortable walk of his life when two reporters from rebel news Approached him that's what it's started asking him some tough questions. Let's roll tape. What's rebel news? Well, like can I ask you? When did you know that the vaccine students stopped transmission? How long did you know that without saying it publicly? Thank you very much I'm sorry question. I mean we now know that the vaccine students stopped transmission, but why did you keep it secret? Good question. You said it was a hundred percent effective then 90 percent then 80 percent then 70 percent But we now know that the vaccines do not trans stop transmission. Why did you keep that secret? To have a nice day. I won't have a nice day until I know the answer Why did you keep it a secret that your vaccine? Did not stop transmission? We should we should cut this okay, we can stop from there, but that wow welcome to info wars All the info wars Like Not a bunch of your times of voters covering for powerful people but asking them tough questions Okay, that's not a legitimate question. Is that a legitimate question? Free, what do you think of the questions? Is it legit or not? You got you guys are about to get us Downranked on YouTube if you modify what's the word about to get warning labels? For this sort of thing I look at you by the way you're right that YouTube Band that video we had to watch it on Twitter because Elon Musk Twitter is still free Okay, listen, so actually protecting why hold on why is YouTube abridging freedom of the press in order to protect the powerful CEO For answering more questions that are legitimate. Yeah, just their basic questions It's is it a legitimate question of Did they cover up the The fact that the vaccines didn't transmit. I think it's like a legitimate question that I would actually want to be answer to I don't know why he didn't just answer that no, we didn't cover it up Freeberg what are you asking me if I know what whether Pfizer did a cover up? Is that what you're like? Well, no, it's a legitimate question is what I'm getting at why are you unwilling to question the Pfizer CEO? No, I'm not I'm not unwilling to question at all, but I'm not I don't think that this is a fight look first of all Pfizer is uh Commercial enterprise so they have the incentive to make money 100% right so their objective is to sell a vaccine I think they're making 10 to 15 billion dollars on this vaccine this year You're absolutely right that the economic incentive is there for Pfizer to continue to push and rationalize the sales of this vaccine The efficacy of the vaccine weighing very quickly as this virus evolved and mutated it became pretty evident pretty fast that the the rate of transmission in vaccinated people continue to go up and You know this may be a function of the quality of the vaccine or the efficacy of the vaccine more likely a function of the fact that The virus has predicted evolved and therefore the antibodies that that are produced and the T cell response that that's induced by the original vaccine Becomes less efficacious over time so the real question is a policy question a behavioral question and but look Pfizer didn't have another product to sell So it certainly makes sense for them to continue to sell their product and there is still good data that represents that there is some immune Response and some benefit in certain populations to continuing to get a a booster and all the stuff with the original Yeah, let me ask you about the data the fact that that Pfizer only has this product to sell is not exactly a ringing endorsement of their behavior But let's let's stay on the data for a second. There was a study in nature, which is you know one of the most preeminent Scientific journals about the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, which is basically inflammation of the heart tissue which can basically lead to heart attacks saying that the risk among young people especially young men in 18 to 24 years was elevated if they got the vaccine. This was a study out of France So It's pretty clear that the Yeah, it's efficacious we thought but is it less safe than we thought as well? I generally I don't know the answer to this I would like to know It's an important question and there's a lot of work being done to uncover it and here's a link to a paper that was published in the journal circulation Is the name of the journal not too long ago By a team led by researcher at mass general and um what this and so just to address the myocarditis question And and just so everyone that's listening knows I take a very objective view on all this stuff. I don't have a strong bias one way or the other So the mass general team identified 16 people that had myocarditis that that were vaccinated and 45 people that didn't work part of their control group And they tried to understand what the difference was between these two groups There have historically been three kind of theories about why there is incidents of myocarditis In certain populations that get the the COVID vaccine And by the way the incidence rate is still typically less than a two out of every hundred thousand people that get the vaccine But as you saw on the paper you just shared and others have validated it It can be as high as 30 times more likely to happen in young people That take the the Moderna vaccine which is still a low incidence But but 30 times higher is is significant at worth worth understanding So the three kind of reasons or the three ideas that I study times higher that sounds like a lot Yeah, so the the reason and it's off a small base, but yes, and so The three ideas or the three theories around why this is happening number one is what's called protein mimicry where certain people the protein on their Their heart tissue for example or certain proteins found in the cells in their heart tissue Maybe you look like the some element of the spike protein that's created by the vaccine Therefore when you make antibodies to bind to and clear your body of spike protein It's also binding to your own cells and causing an autoimmune response and those are called Kind of auto antibodies The second is just general immune system activation that maybe genetically some people are predisposed to having a very active immune system in response to the vaccine And therefore with a very active immune system make it inflammation and damage And then the third is this idea that there's just massive proliferation of your B cells Some of which have auto antibodies and some of which therefore destroy your heart tissue and cause this inflammation So what this team did is they looked at the blood difference between people that had myocarditis and people that didn't They found no auto antibodies They found no big changes in the T or B cell populations meaning that there isn't a big immune system activation difference The big difference that they found was that the people that had Myocarditis actually had a lot of the spike protein Floting around in their blood whereas the people that didn't did not have the spike protein floating around in their blood So this answers one question, but it but opens up many more doors Which is what's really going on? So if you have spike protein in your blood and your body's not clearing it right Well, how long after getting vaccinated were the spike protein still floating around because I remember when the MR They first came out they said it with the spike proteins would go away after a couple of days three weeks Three weeks after x have they done a study like you know six months after or you're after not yet But that's that's being done right now So what they're identifying is what's going on with the immune system of these this population Where their body is not able to clear the spike protein and when their body doesn't clear the spike protein a bunch of cytokins and other Inflammatory things start to get released and it causes inflammation on the heart tissue Because you know, there's a particular So wait Jake Allen, I ask you I remember I remember when you know the vaccine first came out I remember Rogan Almost got canceled for saying that if he was a young person a young man he's like 50 So he got vaccinated But he said that if I was a young person in my 20s, I would not get vaccinated Because I don't think the risk return makes sense And he almost got canceled for that was Rogan right about that So you know I have been thinking a lot about This decision to get vaccinated or not and how we came to that decision and then I think what freeberg said earlier is super interesting The because the virus mutated the efficacy of these vaccines obviously changed and wasn't necessary and so I think it was a moving target to understand if you should take it or not it was a very personal decision clearly for people who were over 65 years old The chances of dying were pre significant For people under that a certain age it was lower. So everybody had to make a very personal decision here But wait a moment, hold on a second, was it a personal decision when you had vaccine mandates And then on top of that on top of that You had the media were dunking on anti-vaxxers throughout 2021 remember that I mean they were saying about anti-vaxxers that if you didn't get the vaccine and you got sick There wouldn't be a hospital bed for you There was a lot of like dancing on the graves of these people Yeah, where you know, there were like all these articles it You know, there'd be like some preacher who you know said don't get vaccinated And then they would die of COVID and there's a lot of like more bid sort of foolish like articles Dancing on their graves. I mean it was not this objective personal decision. There was tremendous Social and legal pressure to get vaccinated. You're right. Yeah, I mean you're right. There was and I think Part of the reason I myself got vaccinated was because I wanted to be able to travel again I wanted to be able to go to Madison Square Garden and watch the nicks and I also thought well I don't want to be if I'm overweight like one of the people who dies from this So you know, we all sat here. We all got vaccinated. Do we regret our decision to get vaccinated now that we see this you know Studies like maybe it wasn't necessary And also it was apparently oversold so when the Pfizer CEO won't say when they knew it wasn't at a stock transmission I think it's a valid question to investigate what Pfizer knew and when And just keep everybody accountable for this for future things that happened because right now We're in a position where if Pfizer's not being honest with us If the origin story of COVID isn't being honest with us these conspiracy theories are now starting to Start to look like reality. Let me go to your tumulth I mean, so we were all felt this tremendous pressure in 2021 to get the vaccine right we all care about our health you care a lot about Your health we all thought we could trust the experts that the vaccine was both efficacious and safe We know it was not efficacious in the sense that They're telling us that we have to get re-vaccinated every two months for to work on safety I don't want to get over my skis because we only have some data But clearly like this myocarditis data is not good So were we basically Stampeded into making a decision Right that was not actually good for us and would you make that same decision today Let's just lay the foundation for understanding how we got here so There are these pathways inside the FDA to get drugs approved And if you take a normal pathway for a normal drug you're going to spend nine or ten years Maybe more 12 13 in some cases and more than a billion dollars to get a drug approved And the way that it works is in phase one You do a study on toxicology Effectively like is this safe or not safe And you have to have enough people take it and you need to observe them for enough time where That phase one outcome essentially says this won't hurt people. It's benign We don't know the mechanism of action. We don't know whether it's going to solve the problem But we know that it's safe And then in phase two You then try to really understand the mechanism of action And if that works you go into phase three where you actually scale it out You create a double arm study you may do a control group you may do an open label companion You may overpower it with thousands of people And the FDA is incredibly rigorous Okay, even down to like it's incredible by the way like how you're allowed to open the results and they have all of these services that Make sure that you can't influence the results or Manipulate them. It's incredible. The FDA has an incredible process The thing is that they also have a way to jump around that fence And that is what we use for the COVID-19 vaccines. So in a molecule 13 years If it's for a really important drug you can shorten it to six or seven with this thing called breakthrough designation for a biologic 12 or 13 years But if you get this thing called armat six or seven years So you're still talking years and thousands of people David But then there's this one special asterix that exists inside the FDA called emergency use authorization And in moments of deemed emergency You can shorten even six years down to in some cases six seven nine months a year two years Right, are you you're describing operation warp speed So that emergency use authorization Fast-track these vaccines to market now the thing to keep in mind is there are still two classes of vaccines They are the messenger RNA vaccines. That's the biantech and Pfizer ones and then there are the more regular ones That in many cases the West was dumping on AstraZeneca and Johnson Johnson As example we used we used to ship those to developing countries and say we'll just keep the MR mRNA once you guys Dave Chappelle had this funny joke. He's like I took the J&J vaccine, right But it turns out that now when we're looking back The long tail of issues may actually apply to these things that were fast-track these MR RNA vaccines that were fast-tracked under emergency use Why because of what Frebrook said this protein mimicry thing is something we don't understand now. Why don't we understand it? It's because our tools are not precise enough to exactly know when we engineer these solutions That it only binds to this specific protein And what we're learning is that there these proteins are some they're so similar That there can be a little collateral damage that this other thing that looks 99 percent will also all of a sudden attract this This This antigen so this is a very complicated Body of problem and because we didn't give it enough time to bake in the wild We're learning about this thing in real time If you if we had gone to what you had suggested Which is a massive masking mandate while this stuff played out Could the outcome be different? Well, we don't know because we didn't make those decisions But I think that's what people will be debating the last thing I'll say on this is specifically to myocarditis I have an interventional cardiologist in LA. I've seen him every three years ever since Goldie passed away Out of respect for Goldie and Cheryl who initially asked me to go But it's been a great thing that I've done I've learned a lot from him. He introduced me to PCSK9 inhibitors and a bunch of things He called me two years ago and such a month. I want to do a study that or a year ago I want to do a study that looks at Actually myocarditis and the the effects of this vaccine and Nick I don't know if you can just throw it up, but we published something and basically, you know what we see David is that for folks with myocarditis you're releasing troponin and this is a sim this is a A protein that you would otherwise use to figure out whether you're having a heart attack or severe, you know some sort of heart abnormality And so it just goes to show you that there is some collateral damage in some cases in this example This is one case that we published which is a 63 year old white woman I'm saying that implicitly so that people understand that these things really matter on age, gender and race All of the data that comes out of France really was focused on I think it was 18 to 34 year old males Of all racial persuasions and we've thought that it This issue is prevalent only in males, but We've had a few cases that we've talked about now that that touch women as well So it's a complicated set of things because our tools are not fine grain enough To engineer the drug for incredible Specificity and I think that's the thing that we're dealing with now it and by the way last thing Because of all this it probably is reasonable to take a step back and have a commission that just Uncovers all of this stuff look we've had commissions for I totally agree we need a investigation usage in baseball like if still we need investigation I was a bad luck and it goes back Discuss back to rebel news asking burla a very simple question Which is what did you know and when did you know with respect to the efficacy and safety of these vaccines If they did not tell the public that these vaccines did not work the way they were supposed to because they want to keep Mending money that is a legitimate scandal. We have a right to know But freeberg let me ask you a question here. I think you know, Tremas talked about this Sort of sped up process to cut through red tape and get a vaccine to market more quickly I personally actually think that that kind of process is fine for patients who want to assume the risk You know as sort of a libertarian I support that But I go back to the fact that people in many places were not given a choice They had to get vaccinated Or they could lose their job or their freedom participate in society And now we're finding out that they may have been forced to do something that in their particular case May not really have been a great cost benefit decision for them What do you think that the sort of impacts going to be Of this just like socially. I mean you've talked about I think that there's a decay decline in trust Of institutional authority in the US and that's a huge problem. I mean isn't this going to contribute to that Yeah, look, I mean, I think that there's been institutional authority overreach Uh, that's been building for quite some time and you know, look, I mean you guys can go back to our first episode And our earliest episodes and I wasn't and haven't been and I think the first time I tweeted I tweeted about the adverse impact that lockdowns could have and we should be weighing the cost of the lockdowns against the benefit And ultimately the benefit was zero because we ended up accumulating call it $10 trillion of Of you know, or $4 trillion of net costs that we have to pay off at some point and not to mention the economic uh consequences of the lockdowns And uh, you know, the benefit was negligible because the the virus continued to spread and evolve and there was no way to really stop the virus and it's cracks hindsight is 2020 fog of war lawmakers made decisions Was it the right decision would you have made the same decision? It's really hard to say you feel like you're saving the world When the world is ending It's easy to kind of act with some degree of what is now viewed as overreach I do think that the Mass vaccination requirement may have also been deemed overreach given the limited data that was available and the rapid evolution That was pretty apparent in the virus at the time as well But vaccines are required for a number of other illnesses in a number of school systems Uh around the country You know, you start to question I think we will start to see people question whether those are appropriate But again, those are longer-stried better understood The the the cost benefit analysis is is much there. Yeah, actually. I think I think you're right that one of the costs of this policy Is going to be that people will stop trusting vaccination in general even though I think that these COVID vaccines I'm not even sure you can really call them vaccines. I mean every other vaccine that I've ever heard of Completely prevents that disease the polio vaccine ended polio the mmr vaccine ended muslim umson rebela the COVID vaccine just didn't work I don't think it was a vaccine But I think now what's going to happen is people are going to have a lot more distrust And there's a there's a there's a tremendous amount of post activity rationalization going on where once you Kind of made a statement that the vaccine will stop transmission of the virus or stop hospitalizations And suddenly it doesn't and you've made that statement with such surety and brevity And funded it with so much money and cost such cost in doing so at that point You're too far removed to go back and say you know what it doesn't and as we're seeing now the consequences of not being willing to say that you were wrong maybe far greater Then the consequences of Kind of continuing or or kind of you know making this change so it's uh actually a question point All right final question to jcow then on that point. Yeah, so I mean jcow look you were dunking or at least concern trolling on anti-vaxxers during this time period do you reconsider that all I mean other words Everybody was saying that the anti-vaxxers were these stupid Unsophisticated people wow yeah, I I think but maybe but maybe it was the elites who were the one suffering from group think I mean look And I put myself in this bucket We were all heard it into this idea. We all took the vaccine an early adopter of a product and now we're finding out Yeah, in fairness we Yeah, we infernice we said we knew this was experimental We knew this was the first time mr. And I But we also knew like a billion people had gotten them or we when we got ours we knew hundreds of millions Yeah, but no And then they hold on let me just you ask the questions. Let me finish And so I think people made a risk assessment knowing this was an experimental vaccine Knowing that the covid was mutating at the time And yeah, it could have been oversold of course that that seems to be the case I Nick pull up this tweet, but you know, we need to I I think we have to look at because we had this conversation you and I of you were very Much in favor of Everybody getting the mandate and everybody being forced to get the The no, no, I never supported the mandate you did we had a conversation about that like if should people be able to work Should people go on on trains and your position No, I did not support a mandate. I thought it should always keep you as choice. I did believe Yeah, I made the mistake of believing the experts in the mainstream media I think if the last couple years have taught us anything it's that they can't be trusted the level of distrust We should have is even greater than we thought I never supported a mandate I thought it should be people's choice Yeah, and I certainly wasn't I don't think I was dunking on the anti-vaxxers. Let's pull up this tweet Nick Yeah My lord trump his corny's a fox user killing their own constituents with this anti-vaxx nonsense. Yeah Uh, do you retract that? Do I retract it? Um, I'm trying to look at the date. By the way, this is this is a tweet that Jason put out what was the date Fett of the answer for 2022 that sex pulled up just so people yeah, that was only a year ago Yeah, I know at this point people were saying that uh, no, I get it. I get it. Look, this is not this is not a rare This was not a rare sentiment, but I'm saying hold on hold on just to give this content stand by this well hold on a second. I'm just reading This was showing the deaths of uh, from covid were happening at a magnitude more by people who didn't take the vaccine and we know the vaccine was Had reduced deaths. So we still know that correct freeberg the the vaccine reduced reduces the cases of deaths correct Yeah, the this new by valent booster um Eric tophal put out a tweet. I put I gave you guys the link here where he covered a paper That was done recently and the paper shows a reduction in hospitalization rate and death rate Yeah for folks that are getting this new by valent booster. So but again, that is a benefit That is the benefit. Yeah in one's own kind of personal safety and there's a risk profile associated with that as sex is pointing out But this notion that the vaccines stop the virus and are a true vaccine in the sense of how we talk about polio and chicken pot or smallpox and this other stuff Not equivalent We're freeberg wait that data how long after vaccination was that data because I thought that with respect to the vaccine One of the big problems is that the the benefits only last for two months unless you're willing to get re-vaccinated every two months No, that's it's not really realistic generally speaking. This is not like a vaccine in the sense of a Smallpox or right. It's just a shot It's a treat. It's a it's a it's a modest muting of the effects and it's one that people need to take kind of a risk-based Decision on for one's personal thing but having mandates on whether or not you can go to school and whether or not you can You know Be in places and whether or not it's appropriate for for workplace setting There's still high degrees of infectiousness with this ever evolving virus the virus that we have today is not the virus that we had in February of 2020. It's a very different virus and It is evolved to such an extent now and it's continuing to evolve That it's very difficult to say there's a vaccine for this virus. It's It's a why won't you just say this that this the so-called vaccine has been a failure We don't know hold on. I mean, I mean it's failure We don't we don't know the full safety implications Like I said, I don't want to get too far out of my skis on that however. Yeah, we know the efficaciousness of it has been a failure For that it doesn't last long enough unless you're going to get Let's start going to get jab six times a year Which I don't think anybody here would do that And I think it's not necessary because it's we hold on There was a time period where it was effective correct freedberg and it did reduce that's massively So I think that's the issue that we're talking about here is that now the COVID strains are so weak That maybe it's not as necessary But there was a time period where people were not taking the vaccine and Republicans specifically weren't taking the vaccine And they were dying at a much higher percentage So it didn't if you're defying the vaccine is not getting Not transferring the disease sure it was a failure It didn't block like we thought it was reducing death but we're reducing death it did work for a period of time If it only lasted for two months and COVID is still around and it's basically endemic It's everywhere. How do the vaccine make any difference whatsoever? I think now it's two months but fact that it wasn't but you know freedberg is that true What's the question? I'm losing track of this How long does the the lowering the percentage of deaths the benefits of it only yes of a lot of reducing What we've learned is the only last two months is that true? Yeah, it depends on the population and yes There is a decline in the benefit over time as well as the fact that the viruses evolving those are both two Yeah, kind of independent things and as a result over time, you know like Yeah, we got to keep getting boosted or shots and Pfizer's making a great business out of it You're right. There's a massive economic incentive here for them in Rabirna to keep this gravy train rolling And there's a massive incentive for government officials politicians to continue to stand by what they said before because otherwise They're going to be called wrong and they're going to get beat off And I feel like you're making an effort you're making an effort to stand by what you previously said The market is just come out. I think we should just come out and say that look regardless of where the safety data ultimately comes out Just based on efficaciousness We can say that this thing didn't work and therefore mandating it Was even worse thing because hold on we put ever we put the drug through this rapid process And we didn't let people make an individual cost benefit decision We basically heard of them into this And at best it didn't do very much. I don't think that that decision if you come if you make that conclusion I'm not sure that it gives us a toolkit To do better the next time and I think we've all said this in freeberg was the one that first really taught us about this There will be a next time unfortunately So I think that we have to focus our energy here in acknowledging that the tools that we have To create these messenger RNA vaccines and other types of solutions We are pushing the boundaries of science and the body is still very poorly understood And so the sensitivity and specificity of these drugs may not be what we think up front And as a result of that Maybe we need to find a different way of using emergency use authorization in the future And I don't know David to your point. I'm beyond my ski tips on scientific Knowledge to know how If I would say as a minimum that if we're going to do emergency use it shouldn't be mandated Let patients and doctors sign on the phone. Okay, let's move on. So we have a moment of agreement One question for freeberg. Would you Advise or in your life would you can would you continue to get a booster or are you going to consider getting a booster every year? If they keep them with them and now would you advise parents or you know Adults over 65 or 70 to get one because those seem to be the high risk group, right? So if your parents said should I get it or not I would advise advise them to talk to their doctor and their doctor would advise him to do it What do you think most doctors would tell somebody above 65 or 70 at this point? Which depends what state they're in at this point but We basically would split on Unless this virus turns into Ebola, I'm never getting boosted again. I'll tell you that right now I do agree is what about you guys? I'm not getting boosted again. No I'm not getting boosted. I think that speaks volumes that's got volumes right there That's right. That's it. That's it Like we could have just done your parents seconds What about you guys? We are literally not this show will be banned on every last moron. Let's move on Freeberg but the fact that all of us can arrive at that and then we're worried about getting banned To show you how screwed up You're right. I already is like you're right What we can't like have an honest conversation about this by the way The other thing this is going to do it's going to inflate in a large number of people just hearing a say this and it because people have these deep what's happened It's this has now become a sense of identity a sense of tribalism and a sense of it's a belief system It's no longer about an objective decision. No, well we saw this with the mass the mass became the blue became the blue That's right. And so so now the vaccine is basically You know, it's become tribal but that's second but but people need to move beyond that because this is a scientific question Of of constant benefits related to this Medical treatment. Okay, let's just move on. There's too much of a talk about. There's not for venture capitalists about your Vaccine Yeah, yeah, yeah, please don't listen to us. All right Let's move on you are by the way by the way, speak your doctor and just remember Of vaccine manufacturers have a business to run and politicians have to get reelected all right Let's move on because we've got stuck on this. Okay, look there's been some important developments in Ukraine I think we should just cover quickly this week. There are a bunch of things the Biden administration said they're gonna send Abrams tanks as well as Bradley's and leopard twos The Abrams tank in particular is our best most expensive tank at the beginning of the war They said they would not send them so they were a vursor decision on that now the Ukrainians are saying they want jets as well That's sort of the next issues can come up the Biden administration also in a New York Times article that came out earlier this week said that they were warming To the idea of of supporting an invasion of karmia Some Europeans like Peter Hitchens are getting very nervous about this level of escalation. He had a pretty amazing peace talking about the risk of this creating nuclear war and even if the Ukrainians prevail in this war There was a really interesting statement by Larry Fink at Davos last week saying that he estimated the cost of reconstruction At $750 billion and Fitch ratings agency says that Ukraine has had it towards default So major major developments I think in the war this week. I want to get your guys opinion on this We know from a history that wars tend to escalate and to be far more costly than the participants ever thought Is that the track we're on now and in hindsight knowing what we know now Should we regret that we didn't use every diplomatic tool we had to prevent the war most notably taking NATO expansion off the table free burger. Go to you It's such a tough Situation situation escalating to a point where we should be concerned You know, there's a lot of information we don't have and there's a lot of intelligence gathering and Conversations and chatter that we're not privy to So to sit here and kind of be an armed chair mechanic on this too I don't know what diplomatic conversations have gone on or are going on All I know is what we're reading on the internet, right? So I'm not This war is extremely well covered and there are no diplomatic conversations going on yeah, so We are escalating the war. I mean me at Jake Hallertsha-Mathin here I do you guys have any concerns about the direction this is headed at all? Yes, I'm concerned. I also agree with Freberg that I don't think we have all the information But I'm not exactly sure what we can do right now. It's it seems like they have decided That there is a play to exert a lot of pressure Come the spring and that's something that you've mentioned as a very likely thing And so I guess the calculus on the ground is that there's a way to really push Russia into a corner and the only way to do that is with more Military support and then on the heels of that David the link that you sent is Then it's not just the war machine that is now spinning up, but it's the aftermarket Financial services infrastructure that's also spinning up or Larry Larry thing You mean the grift aspect of this war? Well, yeah, we're Larry. Thanks. We'd like hey They're gonna need three quarters of a trillion dollars of reconstruction support We saw that play out in Iraq as well We're at first it was the war machine and then it was the reconstruction machine and together it was trillions of trillions of trillions of But you know what that's called those are called infrastructure funds and those infrastructure funds raise Hundreds of billions of dollars to make investments to build new infrastructure in markets that need it and that are willing to pay for it And it will likely end up being kind of long-term debt assumed by that region To pay to do this work and the beneficiaries will be the investors and owners of those infrastructure funds I think there's two sides to this sacks that are worth kind of noting one is the telegraphing of this decision because it's not being done secretly It's being done out in the open There's certainly a calculus to that Why are they telegraphing this and what do they intend to do with that Messaging being put out there like this and it may be that it's uh to Acerpt or assume a stronger negotiating position certainly to go into some sort of you know mild modest exit or settlement coming out of this thing But you're right the flip side is and the cost here is one of extreme outcome Which is there may be a france ferdinand moment here where One thing goes too far and triggers a cataclysmic outcome and in this case the cataclysmic outcome is Tactical nuclear weapons and tactical nuclear weapons as we've talked about When I think I've I had some conversations and some dinners. I shared with you guys with some folks In the intelligence community and this has been talked about by x intelligence community folks publicly Are a key part of the Russian war playbook that this is um there there is a tactical nuclear weapon response system that is in place and you know these are Very possible paths that we could find ourselves kind of walking down obviously where that to happen It would be a massive escalation and you're right There could be a france ferdinand kind of moment that emerges by shaking the cage and and lighting a fire and there may be A stronger negotiating position to get to a settlement faster by doing this I don't have a strong point of view on the probability of either of those and and why but I think you know Maybe both are certainly in play here. Yeah, it was interesting to me that the Wall Street Journal on the heels of all of this stuff also publish an article About Roman Abramovich and the interesting thing about it was a quote in the article that effectively said something tantamount to well now that he's proven not as useful We need to target him with sanctions So I just think that what all of this is is now sort of they're entering the end game David to use a chess analogy and It looks like they're setting The wheels in motion to kind of put all the Pieces together for a negotiated settlement Do we know I mean well, but is it the end? Is it continual escalation? I mean jacal I actually either war we didn't want to give the Ukrainians Abrams tanks because they were That was considered too provocative now. We're giving them to them I mean, I think what's going on here is and I suspected this you know from the beginning is that We are trying to engage them in a war of attrition and it's working and so I think the West collectively is trying to further that goal of just making Russia economically politically militarily culturally Irrelevant or angled in some way and if you think about what's now happening with Energy you know its primary export. He is going to lose those customers and his customers will be you know bottom feeding India China low cost you know oil and he is going to be a pariah So what I'm looking at is if there's going to be a negotiated settlement this year What is the next five or ten years going to look like for Russia? What is their place in the world going to be the West is never going to trust them again the Germans are never going to buy their oil again Everybody is going to be looking for ways to distance themselves from so how does he have an exit ramp? And we talked about this from the the get go here on this podcast is what's the golden bridge for him to retreat across And we really need to find that golden bridge quickly because I do think This is starting to look desperate for him The West keeps giving better and better munitions He keeps losing economically. He's going to keep losing and politically who would ever want to engage Putin in anything You know any kind of cultural or international trade it's going to be A disaster for him. So this war of attrition Has to resolve itself with some sort of settlement, but we can't go on for two or three years Can it? I mean it has to settle at some point I think that it certainly can go on and I think that history proves that wars tend to escalate and the costs incurred are much greater In many cases the participants ever dreamed of and if they had to go and do it all over again They wouldn't have gone into it in the first place so Yeah, I think this is concerning I think you know the the the the the creative is a war of attrition strategy Yeah, I think I think the idea has developed into a war of attrition and I think you're right that Well, I think you think that was five disabilities. I think there's two possibilities, Jake Hal. I think that the Maybe the more cynical or realistic members of the administration Think there's benefit in wearing Russia down and grinding them down However, I also think there's kind of a true believer camp that sees Pushing Russia out of Ukraine nothing less than that will do And we have to punish their aggression. They maybe they want regime change. I think there's doing factions the administration Remember general milley several months ago said that everything that the Ukrainians could achieve And laterally just about had been done and they should negotiate and even Jake Sullivan had said that they should take Crimea off the table That was just the leaks a few months ago now the administration is leaking that they're gonna support a Crimean invasion So I think there's these both schools within the administration the true believers the more cynical Folks and it feels to me like the true believers are on top right now because we just keep Escalating this war more and more and I think that's dangerous that polarizes the outcomes right So I think Jake Hal if you had your way it sounds like you would grind the Russians down But at a certain point you would say enough is enough and like a poker player like you do it at the poker table You'd say have one my one my Prius for the night I don't need to risk that to win a Tesla. So I'm gonna cash in my chips and get away. It'll walk out walk away, right? Yeah, I wish I could do that. I wish I could do that consistently Yeah, exactly. Getting up from the table is a rare skill That's right, but I'm not sure the administration is getting up from the table I mean, I think we've achieved the American position on this I think has largely been achieved we've prevented Russia from taking over Ukraine We've prevented we've basically shifted Europe onto American natural gas. We've destroyed Nord Stream I think we're close to achieving our major objectives But I'm not sure we're gonna stop there Yeah All right, anyway, all right. Let's move on freeberg of a science corner. I was gonna share the This was last week. I think we talked about talking about it this week So there was a paper that is a pretty compelling paper published by a team led out of Harvard on Identifying what may be the the core driver of aging and demonstration on an ability to kind of reverse aging. So I'll just start really quickly there you know in the human body We have many different types of cells right? We have 200 roughly different kinds of cells and I sell a skin cell a brain cell a heart cell They all have the same DNA the same genetic code the same genome at the nucleus of that cell What makes those cells different and the reason they act and behave differently is they have Different gene expression meaning different genes in that cell are turned on and off and when a gene is turned on The protein that that gene codes for is expressed and made in the cell And the genes that are off those proteins are not made and remember proteins are the biochemical machines in biology So when certain proteins are produced they do stuff and other proteins don't do stuff and the cell acts and behaves very differently So some cells when you turn genes on and off you get a neuron some cells you turn them on and off you get a muscle cell in your bicep some of them You get a heart cell and so all of these cells are differentiated by The genes that are expressed the general term for the expression of genes is the epigenome and an epigenome basically refers to These these systems whereby there's certain parts of the DNA certain segments of genes are Uncoiled a little bit. So if you zoom in on DNA, you know, there's 23 chromosomes They're tightly wrapped in these coils and when you go even closer you see that there's these segments called nucleosomes And a nucleosome means it's like a bead and a bunch of DNA is wrapped around the bead and how closely those beads are together How much the DNA is wrapped allows a segment of the DNA to be opened up and then expressed meaning copies of the DNA are turned into RNA Which floats into this thing called the ribosome and the ribosome is the protein printer So the more these little segments of genome are are exposed the more they're expressed and there's certain chemicals These metals and acetyls that kind of attach to the genome and certain elements that allow parts of the The chromosome to wrap up and get really tightly bound or to unwrap and to express the gene So the epigenome is almost you can think about it like the software and the genome or the DNA is the hardware And so the hardware basically defines what you can make the epigenome defines what is being made what stuff is turned on and what stuff is turned off So this paper and this work that was done historically We've always thought that aging meant that over time the DNA in ourselves was mutating And errors were accumulating in the DNA and as a result of those errors the cells start to dysfunction And what these guys really did a good job of proving with this paper is that it may not be mutations in the DNA that's causing aging But actually changes in the epigenome and that the DNA remains pretty stable and pretty consistent Over time and the way they did this is they broke the DNA and just so you guys know every second of your life About a million breaks in DNA in cells throughout your body or happening Your DNA is being broken up and then there's all this machinery in your cell that fixes the DNA when it breaks Now what happens when it fixes it it turns out It's actually really good at fixing it and the DNA doesn't change and we historically thought that the DNA changed a lot And mutations accumulate over time But in reality what may be happening is as your DNA gets fixed The epigenome the acetyl and methyl groups on the gene on the the chromosome Don't get put in the right place and over time what happens is the epigenome degrades And this is considered and a lot of people refer to this now as the information theory of aging You can kind of think about making a lot of copies of software a lot of copies of a photo and a photo printer Over time and every time you make a copy of this a little error a little error and those errors accumulate And the errors that accumulate caused the epigenome to change and as a result certain genes are turned on They're supposed to be off and certain genes are turned off that are supposed to be turned on and then those cells Start to get dysfunctional because the wrong proteins are being made and the cell can no longer do what it's supposed to do So what these guys could it be the could it be the ribosome as well that gets screwed up over time the printer the ribosome is a pretty You know Static protein. It just does its thing and there's hundreds of ribosomes in a cell So you know if one of them this functional it just doesn't do anything And then the other ones kind of step in and do it so the ribosomes are constantly running What these guys did is they basically took two mice two populations of mice And they gave the one population of mice a certain thing that caused its DNA to break at three times the rate of the other population And then as the DNA broke They could they could see that this mouse population got older and older faster And by a bunch of measures on how do you measure age? But what they did is they then measured they then sequenced the DNA of the two populations of mice And what they showed is that the older mice the ones that had their DNA Changing a lot by the way these were genetically identical mice The ones that had their DNA broken a lot more they had the correct genome their genome was the exact same as the other mice That that stayed young And so what that tells us is that it's the epigenome and not the the DNA itself that's changing So then here's what they did remember last year we talked about young monocle factors Which are these four proteins these four molecules that can be applied to To DNA to to a cell and they cause all of the gene expression to reset back to looking like a stem cell And remember all of those differentiated cells come from a stem cell And when they did that the older population of mice suddenly started to act younger and all of the measures of age reversed And they did this across different tissue types They measured this in a lot of different ways cognitive function Health cellular health etc And so it is not just a fantastic new proof point of how young monocle factors can actually reverse age But it demonstrates that the epigenome itself is what is the core driver of aging And you guys remember all toast labs raised three billion dollars in a seed round last year and remember at the end of 21 I said like the hominocle factors and aging research is going to be kind of the next hot thing I think this paper is going to be one of the seminal papers that really kind of Illustrates and proves the point that this epigenome is the driver of aging and as we now are investing a lot of money in figuring out how young monocle factors and other Transcription factors like the young monocle factors can be applied in specific ways to actually reverse aging and cause the cells to start functioning correctly again And then people will start to act and resolve in a healthy way Once again, there's a lot of work to go between here and there But now we have a much more kind of definitive proof point that this information theory of aging may be real That it's tied to the epigenome and that there are solutions that can work And we have to figure out how to put them together and how to engineer a fantastic outcome. So really great paper By a team led out of Harvard. I think really validates a lot of the work and the money that's going into the space both in the public and the private sector And obviously a lot of new startups kind of chasing this opportunity To figure out how we can use these transcription factors to reverse aging and that this may end up leading us to you know a much kind of healthy life and by the way when they applied those young monocle factors to the mice The mice lived 107% longer Then they were supposed to but more importantly the health span as it's defined improved So the mice not only lived longer, but they actually lived healthier. They're all the measures of healthiness in the body improved So it's a really kind of free burger. It's going to help us in the next 10 years It may yeah, it very well made there there are now Some there Science corner I feel like science corners should only discuss things that can happen in the next few years Let's put that way or I'll tell you one thing for sure you can make you can make money as an investor over the next 10 years In finding the right teams that are going to have the highest likelihood of progressing clinical trials in the space I will say that there may be clinical trials that can come to market really fast Particularly with kind of these x-vivo therapeutics where you take cells out of your body Apply the hominocca factors and then put them back in your body for certain tissue types like i cells for example or t cells in your blood There's a lot of ways that this may come to market faster and it's not just about reversing your age overall But reversing the age of certain cell types in your body that can then have profound health impacts in the near term So that's the kind of stuff that's going to start to come through clinical Stage sooner than later and then maybe you know some number of yours down the road We figure out a way to reverse the age and all the cells in our body and the whole body becomes more youthful But for now it's going to be targeted cells in a very specific way to reverse aging and improve health Very powerful very interesting lots of investment opportunity and You know certainly some some some very smart folks What is the realistic time frame is for like you know reversing aging Because we need that 30 years shit 80 does that mean we're going to be able to like live to a hundred because we'll be able to like reverse age well I think if it's a question is can you live well to a hundred I think that's a question we don't know But if you could reverse aging Yeah, but we don't know what that means because there's all kinds of things that you inherit over time That this may not for example like if you have long-term heart disease I could see how the cells could get healthier, but it can't eliminate the plaque in your arteries Right, you know, that's hard calcium So that's yeah, that's shit that shit's there So you have to say well same with Alzheimer's like Alzheimer's has plat there's a plaque element But the the the cause of that and the cellular dysfunction may be reversible It could definitely be that like injury rates of older people hips knees Shoulders arms all the sort of like soft musculoskeletal stuff You can you can really do a good job of because at the same time as you get older like People intake less protein. They process it less well You lose a lot of muscle mass as you get older those are things that I think are like short-term solutions But no to be honest with you sacks the stuff that really can screw you which is heart disease and brain function This probably won't do much for a long time So check out screwed. Yeah, I'm in the best shape. I've been in the 20 years. I feel great I'm can you reverse whatever is wrong with jcl or is that in the pot category? Can I do a quality of life shut up? Can I not follow it or what? I guess please yeah, I got an email. We all got it from a guy who I won't say just a vibe not to violate his Privacy privacy But he's in Saskatchewan. He listens to the pod where his father is and made him get a pre-newvo scan Flu the father to Vancouver. They found a five centimeter cancerous tumor on his kidney and Three days ago had it removed and looks like guys totally healthy and Wow eliminated. Here's thing. So another live saved By the pod but I but I wanted to show you guys a picture So yesterday I went to Los Angeles to see my interventional cardiologist and what they do is they do the what's called a contrast CT scan So they put you into an IV and they put this contrast inside of you Nick do you want to put through the picture please? And then they use all the software to actually create an extremely accurate 3d model of your heart and What they can do is go inside of your arteries and actually measure the calcium buildup I've mentioned this before this this is a service called heart flow H-E-A-R-T-F-L-O-W In any event my calcium score is still zero. Thank God touch wood keep grinding But I just wanted to put this out there for anybody who Has a history of heart disease in their family for them or for their parents or what have you If you go and ask your doctor, this is a third-party service that they can do it. You go get a contrast CT And you can get a very Accurate sense of your heart health. This is amazing. They they found it's incredible. They found that you have a heart They did find that I have a heart. This is a powerful technology Because of us we tried to find if you had a heart for all this 112 episodes Dr. Kroll's burger shot Breaking news they found the heart It looked huge. It looked like secretariat looks like he's got a big heart. Yeah Yeah I do have a big heart boys as you guys know No, I mean if this is shocking for the audience. It's an actual size. That can't be actual size It's bigger than this brain. It's gonna be hard Well glad you're healthy bestie. That's fantastic So go get go get a heart flow if anybody has heart disease go talk to your doctor. All right. Well for David sacks Was was the moderation okay? Yeah, I mean Funny as if you're doing a jake hell. All right, Farron. I'll come back to moderate next week. I'll model I'll be honest with you. I would give both the david's A robotic b-c plus I think they're better off opining than moderating okay And I think that Jason really doesn't have anything interesting to say so he's You want to slide my comments last week and then we can minimize the number of times He finds any random way to take it back to virtue signaling and genuinely reflecting about China I was gonna ask Jason What he thought and but the cowboys 49ers game where kittles was an Ineligible downfield receiver and they didn't call a penalty very important catch for that game that again the cowboys now losing every single time they get to the playoffs But I didn't want to ask you because I was I thought that you'd veer it toward gg mping in some china comment No No Any genuiflecting would you like to do before you go back to your I will admit that the moderation thing is harder than it looks Hmm Then it looks to be entertaining. I think that's that's that's the thing Thank you plus A plus moderator get back to your job jake hell I will I will come back next week and moderate I have been under the weather Yeah pass the ball and let and let us put the ball on the basket I will put the ball exactly where you each like it perfectly look for some great assist coming next week Which I was back at 100% strength thanks such to the davids for Going in from it from the last two weeks and we'll see you all next time on the all in poppy boys Like your winners ride Bring man David I'm doing And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just got crazy with Lumbia west I squee Besties are We should all just get a room and just have one big huge or two because they're all It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release them out What your What your Your feet What We need to get Besties are in the air I'm doing