All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

Industry veterans, degenerate gamblers & besties Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks & David Friedberg cover all things economic, tech, political, social & poker.

E37: NYC rejects far-left mayoral candidates, new developments in lab leak theory, Apple's App Store breakup potential & more

E37: NYC rejects far-left mayoral candidates, new developments in lab leak theory, Apple's App Store breakup potential & more

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 03:07

Follow the besties:

https://twitter.com/chamath

https://linktr.ee/calacanis

https://twitter.com/DavidSacks

https://twitter.com/friedberg

Follow the pod:

https://twitter.com/theallinpod

https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast

Intro Music Credit:

https://rb.gy/tppkzl

https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg

Referenced in the show:

NYT - N.Y.C. Mayoral Race Highlights: Adams Leads in Early Results Over Wiley and Garcia

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/22/nyregion/nyc-primary-election

Vanity Fair - Eric Adams interview

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/eric-adams-nyc-mayor-interview

NY Daily News - ‘We don’t want fancy candidates’: Eric Adams declares himself ‘face of the new Democratic Party’

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/nyc-elections-2021/ny-eric-adams-democratic-party-nyc-mayoral-race-20210624-oemlj42abzc7jnime4tjfddfhm-story.html

Jesse Bloom COVID origin research paper

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.18.449051v1

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? by Graham Allison

https://rb.gy/7vj8ks

Apple says third-party app stores would leave iPhone users vulnerable to scammers

https://fortune.com/2021/06/23/apple-iphone-third-party-app-store-users

The Pull Request - Bad Apple* by Antonio Garcia Martinez

https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/bad-apple

Show Notes:

0:00 Besties hash out a new format & the purpose of the podcast

14:31 NYC rejects far-left candidates in mayoral primary; importance of crime, homelessness & drug abuse in elections

29:29 New developments in the Wuhan lab leak theory, ramifications for our relationship with China

54:07 Congress turns the heat on up big tech, Apple's App Store monopoly in trouble

1:09:25 Antonio Garcia Martinez's first Substack article on Apple

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Read Episode Transcript

As you guys know, I get panic attacks at the dentist, but she was able to navigate me through where I didn't. I only swept through half my shirt. Like attacks with the dentist? No, but I sweat profusely and I get very nervous. Why? What is that about? We all have weaknesses, Jason. We all have weaknesses. And this is my Achilles heel. My Achilles heel is a dentist. Really? Yeah. I don't like going to the dentist either. No, the dentist really freaks. I don't know why it freaks me out. Sex. Why does it? Have you thought about a really bad experience when I was a kid? You know? Tell us more about your childhood trauma. Have you ever seen the movie marathon, man? It was kind of like that. Is it safe? Is it safe? Alright, here we go. Let your winners ride. Man David. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy. We. Hey everybody, hey everybody welcome again to another episode of the All in podcast episode 37. With us today on his noble crusade, conquering Europe chamath Polly Hypatia calls us from. A castle somewhere? I don't know. I can tell by the light switches you're in Europe and joining us again the two AI AI #1 David Sachs and AI #2 David Friedberg are here. And of course I'm Jake. How do we want to get right into the show or I don't know truth? If you want to talk about the the dueling AI and the group chat debating the nature of the pod. I mean one guy told the other guy or one robot told the other robot to **** ***. This is what we know. It's the singularity, but it's when the robots arguing with each other. See, you don't even know because you don't have any emotions. You told Freebird to **** ***. That's kind of true. Fairness discussion, he was drinking a beverage with 14% alcohol content. No, no, no. I just think that we, I think the format of the pod is working and I don't think we need to turn it on its head. That's all I think my so we're going to do this. I'm so tired and out of it right now, but but let's do it. Are just for the listeners benefit on our little group text where we do our incredibly well prepped rehearsal for this show by texting each other maybe for four minutes a week, but the date the night before she saw each other for three hours. The other stuff is covered over the group chat, but we were kind of debating, maybe throwing in a spin and, you know, doing a little group Q and a kind of format. Sax doesn't like it. And we were kind of joking with sax that he loves getting his sound bites in and then turning them into little short sound bite video clips with his BFF Henry Belcaster and putting him on Twitter and promoting him around the Internet. And my point of view was I don't think that this show should be about getting to the sound bite. This show should be about something very different, which is elevating a conversation and creating the context for people to make decisions on their own. And that is to give people multiple points of view and all of the data and consideration when there's a big topic or big debate underway and it's too easy. For us to take a sound bite and then use that as the narrative to try and influence people to do things or to have a point of view and I think that is largely the problem we've broadly had in the Twitter social media era as we are very reductionist, we bring things down to kind of A1 sentence or 140 character statement and then we use that as an emotional pivot point for people to get them to go on one side or the other side as opposed to recognizing that many of the topics we we address are that is the way things are done. I get it. But here and here is sax's response. That is a valid point freeburn. However, humans all need to be LED. They are sheeple. We need to tell the sheeple what to think and to get to her Tolson into office. Jason, I would like to cut to a segment. The new segment that I called Chamath does a dramatic reading. We're allowed to reach. So, so, so Freeberg did say this. Now a dramatic reading from the group chat. I will be playing all characters, starting with myself. Freeburg Freeburg grants up to which I say I'm down with that, David Sacks. You keep trying to **** with the format of the show. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. **** ***. **** you ******. You have problems. My my response, I'm down with that. Oh no. Am I going to be able to respond here? Actually, your defense, OK, you're running for office. We know, you know. No. Look, I think that the the Freeberg position on many issues often comes down to to the idea that this, this issue is so complicated, it's so nuanced, we can't have a definitive take and I just reject. I think it's true for some issues. I think it's great to have the conversation, but I think there are many issues where it is possible to have a definitive take to come down strongly on one side of it and I think the audience. Wants us to do that. I think it's a little bit of a cop out to say, oh, we're just gonna table all the issues so the audience can say no. The audience wants to hear us give our point of view and I didn't like seek Harry Henry Belcaster out. He found us. He's all. You just talked to him seven times a day and direct every frame of the animation. He let him go. Let him go. Henry. Henry you know is one of our super fans started making these videos. OK? Ignored like the 1st 10. And then finally, I was like, OK, I gotta, like, see what this guy's too, right? You did too you to listen to what is this about is like, I hope it's to promote his business or something because he's just spending way too much time on this anyway. So now Henry does run that his like videos by us as a courtesy, but he comes up with them, he chooses what takes he wants to run with and he puts it all together. Sometimes I'll have a note for him. I'll say, you know, Oh my God, whatever. He's never sent me anything you're going to get. How old are you? He keeps coming to me. Me and Jason are on a threat. If Jason don't pretend you're not. You're not on the jam with every bell cast. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Because he did 30 days. Is it OK for me to do this? And we're just like, go ahead. But then David's like, well, actually, if we could change this and cut this word and David's like, oh, you don't need any editing. Just let the chips fall where they may. And then he's like, Machiavellian back there. Like, he Scorsese changing every ******* frame of Bellechester animated GIF made it. So I I just think it's a courtesy. That Henry's running at buy us and you know, that's it. Are you paying him? No. Have you given him any compensation? OK, well, no separately. Here it comes separately. I after finding out that Henry and then his partner Dylan, they've got like a it is a business for them. OK. So I said, listen, you guys are doing great work. I think he does great work by the way. Yeah, I said, listen, why don't you guys start doing like product videos or videos for startups. You can do the first one for call in. So they're working on a video for that. I think we're going to pay them like 5 grand and if it if it's good, it'll be great for their business. I want them to be successful. But let's get to the point. Let's get to the point about. You know, reducing the the conversation to sound bites and I want to respond to your point about not taking a position on things. But so OK, so I feel like first of all within this group there are hard ticks within this group of four people. So there are hard ticks already in the show. And I I think that it's important in many debates and many of the topics we cover, there is more than one side to the story and we can have our formed opinion, but I think understanding what the other counterpoints. And and counter arguments might be is critical to get people to actually get to that opinion themselves as opposed to just telling them. This is the single point that you should believe nothing else matters. And so I I really think also many of these conversations are generally. To this two sides of the same coin, and many more often than not, if you zoom out, there are shared values and many of the things that we all argue about broadly as society. And I'm not trying to get too kind of philosophical here, but if you kind of distill things down to different points of view with the same set of values or recognize that there are actually different values, you can come to a point that allows people to think more progressively and, you know, achieve a point of view on their own. And I think that's critically missing today broadly. Society that's so much is all about like the good and the evil, good and bad, them and us. And we don't recognize that in moments where there are shared values, we're just sitting on, you know, both sides of the same coin or recognizing that sometimes having different values doesn't necessarily make someone evil. It makes them different. And and that's why I try and kind of elevate the conversation a little bit and why I care so much about this point because I really think it's worth everyone getting a broader perspective on everything that they're dressing so that they can kind of go into things. Eyes wide open. Now, sax, I will say. On nearly everything, I actually fundamentally agree with you on many of the points on the show. And so it's a little bit kind of, you know, gets a little echo chambery for me to kind of say I agree with sex. Like, that's it. I think it's also worth highlighting why there are other points of view and why there are other arguments to be made out there. And for me, I certainly have strongly held opinions. And, you know, I I just don't think that it's worth getting to my opinion without taking the broader context of the conversation. Did you, did you notice that Freeberg got a little emotional there? I think there was a little lecture emotion. Just tuned out right now. I was confused. I am on my iPhone. OK, let me, let me try and find some. Hold on. Let me just ask you one question about, because this is getting me. We're kind of in the dugout right now and I don't know if this is fabulously boring to people or not. But do you frequently hold back your opinions on the show because you don't want to influence people or you're afraid of being cancelled or at having an adverse effect to your business as it has to David's business? I don't give a **** about that. No, I care more about. The the path to an opinion. And the process, no. And I care more about like achieving the objective. So what I mean by that is if you just say this is my opinion, take it or leave it, the other half that has a different opinion doesn't change their opinion. If you if you zoom out for people and you say here's the broad set of facts and circumstances and why different groups have different opinions, it ends up being a lot easier to actually get people to see what may be the better path forward. Listen, if you want to get mad and you want to zoom out, I got, I have. I have formed my opinion on many of these matters. I don't think stating my opinion changes anyone's mind. I think zooming out and giving people the broader perspective so they can get there themselves is the way to kind of achieve change. OK guys, enough. We're done. We're on this topic. This is we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Here's the point. I think that David David Sachs has opinions. They are strong opinions, but as I've known him for 20 years, they're also weakly held and he changes his mind and I think that's powerful. David Friedberg, and I've known you for a very long time as well, is great at explaining things. All of it is additive. So. Let's all just keep doing that, of course. Of course. You know, I support having a nuanced conversation that gets all point of views out on the table. The the point of the pod is not to, you know, engage in sort of sound bites. It's just that what Henry creates is the result of a conversation. He boils it down from 30 minutes into one minute. I think that performs a service for the audience, maybe gets our takes out there in a way that, you know, that, that more people can hear them. So I think that's useful. Did you understand Freebirds? I mean, I feel like I'm, I feel like I'm a couples therapist here, but do you understand Freeberg's position, David, that, yeah, he doesn't want people to look at the podcast as reduction, reduction down to a 62nd clip or a 32nd clip of 2nd place. He wants them to hear the full discourse. Yeah, well, that's great when they can listen and do that. But I mean, realistically, a lot of people don't have time to listen to the full 60 minutes. They made sense to the clip. But look, I think if there's a meta purpose to me being on the pod, I think it's to expand. The parameters of what people think they can say. Because I actually, I agree with freeberg that the debate is shut down in a lot of context and we want to open it back up and you know, you just Overton Window needs to be reopened. Like look at what's the whole Frank Slootman thing last week where he puts out a pretty mild statement about supporting diversity, but not to the point where it's it jeopardizes merit. You know, there was a giant uproar over that he has to walk it back and issue an apology. There was no discussion. CEO of snowflakes. Yeah. There's no there's no discussion or. Faith there. That was a shutting down in the conversation because one side of the debate is basically engaging in moral indictments against the other side. They're not really interested in having a serious debate about the issues. I think the my meta purpose in speaking out on the pod about all these issues that I think are just common sense, you know, is is just to kind of reopen the debate. Yeah, I mean it is that merit versus diversity and what is the point of a business and should the business be compromised or throttled? I think that's a very hard thing for people to say. Should we throttle this business so that we have diversity? Should we slow down in order to have more diversity? We can't find the right candidate, but we have a candidate here who's a white male. But gosh, you know, we already have seven of these people on this, right? We've talked about that. My, my, my point in giving that example is just to show how shut down the debate is because. The day after, Slootman said CEO's are having this conversation in private, they're telling me this and they're afraid to say it publicly. The very next day, he walks it back and issues an apology, kind of buttressing his original point that people can't say what they really think. So in my view, that, like, part of the reason why the all input is successful is we're getting issues on the table that people want to talk about but feel they can't. And I think Freeberg brings a very valuable perspective to that conversation. But my goal is kind of if I have a medical besides this, expressing my point of view. Is to expand, like you said, the Overton window. All right, so Speaking of the Overton Window, New York City has voted for a basically universally, both on the on the democratic side and on the Republican side for a tough on crime. Mayor, 70% of San Francisco feels worse about crime in a separate poll. And Eric Adams is the current borough president and a former NYPD officer, and he is looking like he because of this stacked. Voting it's gonna take a little time to figure out who. Will become the mayor of New York, but he has 32% of first place votes among 800,000 Democratic voters. This guy is a a really decent centrist, moderate human being. Grew up where he was affected and touched by crime. Decided to fight through that. Wasn't, you know, complaining, became a police officer, did that, you know, eventually borough President has done that, runs for mayor. He goes on television, he gives an interview where they say what is your perspectives on stop and frisk? And the answer he gives was pretty specific, which is that, you know, I believe in stopping and investigating potential crimes or some such, right. Jason, you can probably find the exact, I mean having been in the, you know, in New York City. Police Department family the and living in New York. During stop and frisk they left out a keyword. It was stop, question and frisk. So in high crime areas where there were a lot of shootings or guns they would do stop, question and then possibly frisk. Obviously all policing techniques can be abused but his feeling on it was when deployed correctly, stopping question is a great technique and I can tell you when I lived in New York previously, 7080% of people. Including people of color, including people from the toughest neighborhoods, were in favor of this. This was universally seen as a huge success at the time because they were taking guns off the street, illegal guns constantly, because somebody would hop a turnstile or there would be people hanging out on a street corner and cops would come up and say, hey, you're hanging out here at three in the morning, what's going on? But the problem, the problem is that he gave a pretty reasonable answer, yes. And then they tried to cancel him. They would not allow himself to be cancelled, which he went on The Breakfast Club and all kinds of other media outlets and explained his position and they couldn't cancel him. Which is really telling. It was an incredible testament to what we're going through right now, which is right now, nobody knows what to do to solve the things we feel. We've tried the radical right version of a candidate. It didn't work. We're now wondering to ourselves, while we have a custodian in the White House, whether we go to the radical left, that's probably not going to work either, because unfortunately, San Francisco, I mean, unfortunately it looks like the the the progressive Left or the radical left. Is really, really judgmental. And none of these folks have really done anything. And so they they are easy to complain. It's almost as if they know that they what they want won't work, so they don't want anything else to work, and so they just want everything to devolve into chaos. That's a shame. And so, you know, people try to literally lie about what this guy said on television that was taped. No, it did it five times and clarify I am. And by the way they were there were people, Jason, I don't know if you saw that the art, the the video link that they were people holding a press conference in front of his office literally screaming about stop and frisk. When he never said stop and frisk. He said stop and question is a reasonable strategy if somebody if we think that there is the potential of a crime and the fact that people could not have that conversation and had to go to. Basically, this guy needs to either quit or be completely removed from his ability to run for mayor. It's it's insanity. Yeah, and you can. People seem to have lost this ability to hold 2 conflicting ideas in their mind, which is you could be for criminal justice reform, you could be against police violence, and you could be for. Strong policing of violent crimes and law and order. And what seems to be happening in both cities, New York, San Francisco and other places where crime is getting acute is that they people are voting. Here's here's two other two be safer. Here's here's another conflicting thoughts you can believe. That you know. Asians are awesome, but you can also believe that the coronavirus may have come from the Wuhan lab. And believing the latter doesn't mean that you're supporting Asian hate. I'm just going to put that out there, right. OK. Can I, can I chime in on this, on this, on the on the Adams win? Because I think this is, this is huge news. Do you have your notes from Harry to make OK, go. Look, I mean, Eric Adams is going to be the next mayor of New York City. And I think there's like 3 big takeaways from from from this. Number one, crime is the issue that I've been saying on this pod that it is for at least six months. It is the number one issue when people do not feel safe in their homes and in their neighborhoods, you know, nothing else matters. And here comes this really underdog candidate. He is despised by the sort of the progressive left and sort of the elites of the Democratic Party. And he wins. I mean he, this is a huge underdog. Country he's he's only a former cop. He still carries a gun. I mean, he is packing, and that sent a message to the electorate, I'm going to be tough on crime. I'm not standing for defunding the police and deep prosecution and decarceration, which are the hobby horses right now, the progressive left. I'm going to protect you and the city and the voters were eating it up, even in the Democratic Party. So number one, crime is the huge issue, and I think this is going to reverberate throughout America for the next few years. #2 it's. Code how out of touch the sort of progressives these, and I'd say predominantly white progressives are, how out of touch they are with the constituencies they claim to represent. You know the the mostly black and Latino neighborhoods who voted in large numbers for Eric Adams were having none of this sort of elite woke progressive thinking around decarceration deep prosecution. They are interested in real solutions. 24 the problems that they see not engaging in this sort of like actually identify socialism there. There's a there's actually an interesting nugget in what you're saying, which I think you can broaden out, which is the the radical left. I I don't even call them the progressive left because that would mean they were making progress and they're thinking, I think it's just this radical left. They seem to be white, rich, affluent people. Yes. And they seem to be super. They're super guilty about something totally disconnected from what actual people of color want. They're totally discussed. That they're speaking for a group of people who maybe are like, that's not actually my position. I want my kids to be safe on the way to school. I want guns off the street. If somebody, you know, and I think that I want to read the quote that he had because this is really important, is to go to the source material, not the headlines from, let's face it, the radical left is running these news publications and they're determining how they frame him. And here's the question from Vanity Fair. So you think there is a way? Do you stop and frisk? That isn't abusive. It's a reasonable question. And his answer, well, there's a word that's missing in there. It's called stop, question and frisk. So 2:00, o'clock in the morning, you look out your door. You see a person standing in front of your house. He places a gun in his waistband. You go to call the police. I hope that police officer responds. He needs to be able to question that person. What are you doing with that gun? If we're telling police officers you can't question people? We are jeopardizing the safety. Of the city. I mean, this is the most common sense, logical, right, framing of the discussion. It's not like they're saying just pick a random person on the subway and say, empty your pockets and get up against the wall like the Gestapo. You know, somebody called something and you question people in the area. We've seen this in San Francisco, that you've got these, you know, social justice crusaders who claim that they're helping minority communities and you see an increase in the number of victims from those communities. And what Eric Adams said is, listen, we can't just care about the cops. Abusing their power. We also have to care about violence against these communities when it's perpetrated by criminals and people responded to that, to that message. And I think this the, the, the final point that I think that the Eric Adams win represents is that Twitter is not likely win, likely win. OK fair enough. Is that Twitter is not real Life OK Eric Adams has 14,000 Twitter followers. Yang has 2,000,000. OK. Yank him in fourth. OK. And you know, Yang was sort of the darling of the, you know, sort of the Twitter elites, you know, he's. I mean, look, when he first got into the Democratic primary for President, he was a little bit of a fresh breath of fresh air. But ultimately, he kind of adopted the generic progressive positions on things that did not resonate with the people of New York. They wanted someone tough on crime. And so I think, you know, Eric Adams, he had another great quote, I think on election night. He said social media does not pick a candidate. People on Social Security pick a candidate. OK, great line. And and I mean, and so here's The thing is I think we all. Are distorted in our thinking based on what this like very loud but ultimately small number of voices on social media says. And I think it's not just politicians. And by the way, I mean it's it's not just Eric Adams who won because he ignored Twitter. I mean Biden won because he ignored Twitter, right? I mean Biden was not on Twitter and he was able to win the Democratic primary for President. So, you know, I think there's a lesson here for politicians which is ignore Twitter, moderate moderates can win. Anything and everything as long as they show up and they do the work. But if you, to your point, spend all your time trying to curate your Twitter image, all you're going to do is validate a bunch of people that really, at the end of the day, are trying to punch up, right. If you think about all the people that are spouting off, trying to cancel, trying to judge, there's a, there's a great, there's a great quote in in many Drake songs, which is like, these people have more followers than dollars, and what he's trying to say is like, you make them important. But they don't need to be important. Totally. Not now. Now do CEO's, right? You've got CEO's of some of the biggest companies in the world, like Tim Cook, like Frank Slutman, who are making their company policy based on what this small number of loud voice on Twitter are saying. It's ridiculous. I mean, I think the Eric Adams win is a watershed because it shows the emperor wears no clothes. These, these very loud, progressive woke voices ultimately do not have that many supporters and all people have to do. Not when it goes into them, not when it goes into the privacy of the ballot box. You have a lot of people. Again, similar to the to the to the to the to what we saw in the in the Trump election in 2016 where all these people quietly said, oh, I cannot support Trump. And then one in two people went into that ballot box and said **** you to everybody. And this is the exact same thing that's playing out except the opposite, which is now if you are not completely progressive, at least in your. Posturing your vocabulary, there's this threat of being cancelled. And so you adopt this stuff almost to make your life easy. But when push comes to shove, and we see it here in New York City and we'll probably see it all over the country, you get into the ballot box, you're going to go for somebody moderate and reasonable that does the simple things that you want to get done. And by the way, they tried to cancel the New York Times tried to cancel Andrew Yang because he had made a very he basically said, you know that. Mentally ill men who are addicted to drugs basically are punching people in the face. And, you know, we need to address that. And the New York Times framed it really interestingly. And I I'll read you the tweet. Watch Andrew Yang's response to a question about how he would handle mental health. During Wednesday Wednesdays, New York City mayoral debate drew fire on social media from people who said it lacked empathy or understanding. And when you look at that framing, he said how he would handle. Mental health. He wasn't talking about mental health generally and broadly. He was talking about people suffering from mental health on the streets, who were homeless, who are addicted to drugs, and who punch people in the face. Massive subset, yeah, but they framed this to tackle. Then let me just finish the other way they framed it. It drew fire on social media. So instead of saying this person said this, they literally the New York Times is trying to get Andrew Yang cancelled and to get more people to subscribe by being part of the woke mob. Yes, literally their Twitter handle, doesn't he? I could find 10 times as many people who said, yeah, we can't have people who are mentally ill and violent on the street punching people. It was Andrew Yang's, it was Andrew Yang single best moment of the campaign is he talked honestly about. The risk to the public of mentally ill people living on the streets and attacking people. It was a single best moment. The reason he did it is because he saw the traction that Eric Adams was getting on the safety issue, and if Yang had done that from the beginning of the campaign, he might be the next mayor. Yeah, let me let me read this. He was he was. Yang cared too much. Ultimately, his Achilles heel was carrying too much about the very online voices on Twitter like the New York Times, and we've just seen that Eric Adams has proved it's all a House of Cards. Nobody really cares what they think. Here's the here's the quote from Eric Adams if the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York. They're going to have a problem in the midterm elections and they're going to have a problem in the presidential election, the Brooklyn Borough president said. America is saying we want to have justice and safety and end inequality, and we don't want fancy candidates. We want candidates. Their nails are not polished. They have calluses on their hands and their blue collar people. Common sense, common sense to return to, to common sense. Freeberg I had a CCG on. This thread where somebody said they found missing sequencing of the COVID genes that were submitted to a database. Did you have a chance to review that at all? I did. And since you sent that, it's become a little bit of a story and a lot of people have kind of picked it up and followed up on it because it did ignite quite a bit of interest. So the story is a guy named Jesse Bloom, who's a researcher at the Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle and has been studying, you know, COVID as a lot of scientists have kind of shifted their attention over the past year, but but has a background in biology. He was trying to pull some early genomic samples that that may have been taken from patients early in China. So what this means is, you know when when patients kind of in the early days we're emerging as potentially having SARS Kobe two, they were swabbing them and then doing a genomic read of the the RNA they find from the virus in that swab. And around the world a lot of scientists contribute to this openly available genomic database. And they contribute their whole genome samples when they when they run studies and so on, so other scientists can use it in the future for research. And what this guy found was that there were a few dozen of these samples that had been on this genomics database that were now missing, and they had been pulled down. And using a little technical sleuthing, he realized they had been pulled down from the directory. But the raw genomic sample read data was still available on the Google Cloud. So he used the Google Cloud API to pull that actual data down from the servers and then ran a study on. And it turns out that the the interesting kind of intrigue around this story is why did that data? Get get deleted who deleted it? And it turns out the only way it gets deleted is if the original kind of authors go in and make a request to have it removed. And these were some random scientists in in China who had submitted the data. And so in the days following this publication of this guy, this guy published this on a preprint server called Bio Archive. So it's not a peer reviewed journal. It basically is a place for bio archive is a place where biology scientists can submit early versions of their research papers or to get a a new. Finding out really quickly and then the world can kind of study it. And you don't have to wait for the journalistic kind of cycle of getting things approved, the which is which is common now. And so he put this thing out there and everyone's kind of questioning, well, OK, where did these samples go? Turns out that these Chinese scientists had submitted them. And now it has shown or it has come out that apparently some U.S. officials made the request to have it taken down after being asked to do so by some Chinese officials duplicated them. And so there's a really weird. Kind of intrigue going on right now around this whole story now. So, so, so that's kind of thread #1 which is what, why was this request made to pull this data down, what was the motivation, etcetera. Thread #2 is what is the data show us and what the data shows us unfortunately is a little bit inconclusive. So a guy named Trevor Bedford just put out a tweet earlier today analyzing this. He's a, he's a world class virologist, also works at the French Hutchinson Center in Seattle and he basically highlights that in the early days of the SARS Co V2 explosion in China you can really identify. From a genomic variant perspective, 2 lineages of the virus, that means, you know, we're trying to get back to origin or patient zero. And it turns out they were kind of like these two families of the virus that were emerging. And even with that new data, you could kind of reconstruct the family tree in such a way that the Wuhan meat market could have been the origin, meaning the root virus could have come out of that Wuhan market or the Wuhan meat market could have been one of the two branches of the tree that emerged early on. So there may have been an even earlier origin. And Wuhan market was just one place where it started to take off. So, you know, he said, look, he still thinks that it's about a 5050. You know, there there's no clear evidence one way or the other based on these newly uncovered samples. But, you know, there is still this question of does the Wuhan market kind of paint the patient zero story or is it one of the places where the explosion happened and patient zero was in fact much earlier than Wuhan market I I will say a couple episodes ago I kind of made a comment, you know, with respect to the origin of this virus that I don't know. Don't care. And and I just wanna clarify because I know that some people kind of reached out to me about that. I didn't really my, my intention with that statement was that this was really meant to be, I think a little bit more of a Canary in a coal mine for us broadly about, you know, hey, what we should be looking forward to is what's next, not just about so we know what happened in the past has happened already. Let's move on to the next thing is what you're saying not being callous that it doesn't matter? Yeah. I think I think what's more important is that we need to get prepared for how do we prevent these things happening in the future. And and what are the, you know the the key kind of checkpoints we have around this in the future because one thing I am most concerned about is a huge step back, but I'm concerned about our normalization of cancel. You know we kind of have started to cancel people but we've also you know these shutdowns have been normalized and the normalization where shutdown is the response to an emerging variant or emerging virus is really scary because you know, how is society going to function properly when there's going to be a proliferation of these virus? There's a proliferation of of risks. With new technologies being made available to us and then shutting down becomes our immediate response, well how do you feel about shutting down borders? Friedberg, as the first course of action, if everybody in unison had shut down the borders in February and said no intercountry travel, you know, it would have obviously been devastating for the airlines, but it might have stopped the pandemic in its tracks. There was no way to stop the the, the pandemic once the genies out of the bottle, the genies out of the bottle, and we saw this in states that had lockdowns and states that. They didn't have lockdowns where we saw equivalent, but why wasn't Taiwan and Australia and those kind of places that are islands that lock down? Why were they spared? I I don't know if you can really say that they were spared and I don't know if you can really say that people are happy with the the life that they led for that year, right? I I think what we need to solve for is how do we have these vaccines come to market much faster and be much more variable in their efficaciousness. Because we are going to have a lot more of these kind of emerging variants over the next couple of years with SARS, Kobe 2, but also with. Potentially engineered bugs that formed to be careful about. Question for tamatha sacks then in Friedberg's sort of analysis there and what was explained on the web about the these new sequences the US. Was allegedly involved in taking this down with the Chinese if the USA, and I'm just creating a hypothesis here just to do a little game theory if the US. Was allowing China to take this down. What would the game theory be if the US was involved in, DARE I say, a cover up or being opaque like the Chinese have already been proven to be? Why would the US do that chamath? What would be the possible theories and sacks? Why did why did the NBA shut down Daryl Morey? But that may not be that made us. Sorry, that may not be national policy, Jake. All right. So like a scientist, an American scientist or an American official could have made that request. It doesn't mean that it was a conspiratorial process to to remove this stuff. Yeah, no, I want to jump the gun. I want to jump the fence and say if in fact the some US people were involved. So to your point, it could be an individual covering it up or it could be an organization in America or it could be, you know, some set of organizations. But sacks, you wanted to. Well, look, I, I, I don't. Leave the wet market theory precisely because there is a cover up. I mean, the wet market theory was the official CCP WHO party line about where the virus came from. If that was the case, why wouldn't they just throw open the gates to investigators, let them go into Wuhan Institute of Virology? You know what? Why? Why all the cover up? Why wouldn't they shut down all wet markets? Maybe, I mean, but maybe the logical conclusion. But but why? Why obstruct the investigation? Why ask these American researchers to delete these sequences of DNA or whatever? And in terms of why would the researchers do it? Because they were asked to and they've got a relation. Why would Americans be if in fact they were? Why is it? Why is The Who been carrying water for the the Chinese Government? Because it doesn't from them? Because I think The Who stupid. I mean, let's. They've, they've all got all these, you know, institutional incentives, they all work together and, you know, there's money involved, there's sort of relationships involved, there's bureaucracy involved and then there's a level of incompetence. Yeah. So it could be incompetence. Could it also not be that we funded that laboratory in some way, right. We had given some money towards it that's I think established in a function research. I think it's a if if look I am a better. So I'll just say on our face if they were in fact doing this so we don't want to look for or we don't want to be in conflict with them because no, I think Americans in the West might demand we be in conflict with China. No, no I think it's I think it's what Freeberg said which is like look what seemingly. A low level request is made to basically delete an entry in a table. You do it, you know, not thinking anything of it it. I think it's pretty clear that this was. Something that leaked out of that lab, the thing that we will never, ever know is how and why and whether it was purely accidental or something more nefarious than that. And I think This is why, to friedberg's point, we just have to put a pin in all of that and move on and try to figure out a way where we set ourselves up so that the the next time, for example, the like, you know, we we hear about the Delta variant now, we're going to hear about other variants in the fall. It's going to be a tough winter. We cannot shut down. To know what happened here in order to inform our plan for the future. So I think to your point, walking and chewing gum at the same time. Why can't we do both? Yeah, well, I mean, think about it if the so. So I've never, I've never heard anyone seriously argue that the lab leak was intentional. I mean I think because that would have posed, I think, a risk to China itself. But but let's say, let's say it was an accidental lab leak. What? What that suggests is, look, the Chinese. Do everything about this virus for months while we were all here pulling out our hair trying to figure this thing out. What is it? Who does it affect? You know what are the risks. We're all having these debates in the United States and trying to get to the bottom of this thing and they knew everything about it and they were they weren't telling us. But hold on, freeberg, I mean the I think, I think I I read this somewhere but Moderna had characterized the vaccine 48 hours after getting an e-mail of the DNA sequence of the anyone can do that. Yeah, within within 40. So. So this was done in January as soon as we got. Yeah, they did make it to David's point. Why don't they tell us how they made it it, it took months to understand the pathology of the virus, right? Yeah, it's it's that's not what matters, jakal. You can read the code. It's very readable. You can read the code within a day and then you can pick the area that the spike protein, which we already knew about and you can say, let's go build some, you know, target. So how they got there doesn't matter, is what you're saying, freeberg. How they how they created it, how they got to this. It doesn't have the Chinese. You're saying you're asking how the Chinese edited. The virus in a lab, is that what you're saying? Yeah. How they was this like a three-year project? Is this the 17th version they worked on or the second? You know, like there's so many things, Jason, you're speaking about, you're characterizing this as if it was a designed weapon. Is that what you're saying? Well, I'm. I'm saying it was designed not as a weapon, but they were doing what? Remember function research gain of function means that it there where there is a gain of function in plain English, freeburg so. So when they say geology in virology, they're going to study what changes in the genome might do to biology, to to an animal, to a biological system. And that study gives them insights into how a virus may evolve or how certain parts of a virus may affect humans ultimately in different ways. And so understanding viruses and and really important when you're studying viruses is you want to understand where they're headed, not just where they're coming from. And so to understand where they're headed, you may make genomic changes and study how those genomic changes affect biology. They used the word enhanced, or you could say you could say evolve, you could say enhanced, you could say engineered. But but very much it's about understanding where the changes in the proteins and the virus can affect biology in different ways in the future so that we can better understand, you know, what these viruses are capable of and prepare ourselves against. Here's a stupid found out we found out the implications of COVID-19 and thank God we didn't have to find it out for 171615141312111098, you know what I mean? Like. So that's my point, Freeberg would it not be helpful to open kimona look at every single enhancement they made and what the results of those were like. They did something in that lab for the last couple of years. Who's got that information? They knew the name is the same. The name is the same, they move on. Bioweapons. Come on, are you? What? What? What this database thing represents is, look, there was a cover up here and that cover up has fingerprints and the information is leaking out and we are seeing more crime and and more information is going to come out. I actually disagree with you guys that we're not going to learn more about what happened. I think we're going to learn. We're going to learn a lot more and it's going to get worse and worse. It's going to be. But tax, where does it head? So, like, let's say we discover. That was my original equation question. We discover that there's an accidental lab leak out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A scientist got infected, left the lab gave it to her boyfriend. People spread it in the street suddenly became a whole pandemic. What? What do we do? What do you think the response is? Do you think Americans basically now impose sanctions on China and we and we lead to a Cold War? Like, where's this all headed? Well, what are the motivating principles of politicians who are going to respond as that evidence comes out? Yes, that's what I want to know. OK, number one, I've said it before. We got to reassure the whole Pharmaceutical industry. And not be dependent on China for our pharmaceutical supply chain or antibiotics or PPE. That is insane. Second of all, I mean, we got to be more realistic about the nature of the regime that we're dealing with. They knew everything about this virus for months while we were trying to figure it out. Where does it take us? Like let's say we find out that to be true. Where does this? What happens now? Decoupling. Decoupling here. And here's another thing that I think needs to happen, which is that, but I guess that's sorry, but doesn't decoupling happen either way? Like why do we need? All this because there is such a motivating principle on on both sides of the aisle to decouple from China. And there is a motivating principle to know there is there is a reason to not decouple. It's called money. There is a group of elites who do not want the decoupling to happen from the NBA to iPhones. Apple, the NBA and Disney do not want to decouple. They want to integrate these two societies so that we can make money. I'm not sure the decoupling is my theory of what people are scared of. No, OK, people are scared of a decoupling. I just want to say two things. I don't think that there's like a group of elites that want that to happen necessarily because I think that their lives are complicated and what they would love to have I think is actually two end markets. You have to remember if you go from one global market to a duopoly market and you're a seller of services, you actually have more pricing power in a duopoly than you do in a monopoly into a monopoly. So you know if you're Disney theoretically and you have the ability to. Differentially priced, 2 different pieces of content, you're going to do that. So I I tend to think in general it's better for economic systems to have this bifurcation. So the I just want to go back to the thing that I wanted to define bifurcation. You're saying two different markets, but what if there is, hey, we're going to sanction, we're not going to send Disney movies or they're not going to let Disney and NBA and like they don't let Google and Twitter in or iPhones are not going to be made there and Apple is going to start making iPhones in Vietnam and Pakistan and Sri Lanka. I actually think what happens is it accelerates democracy because again, you have an enormously difficult and thorny issue inside of China, which is they have a cataclysmic demographic bombshell going on. They have, we have the average age in China versus the average age in the United States is now the same, which is an unbelievable thing because China was 15 policy that China was 15 or 20 years younger in the early 90s when all of this offshoring. Started to happen in full scale by the end of 21, by the end of this century, China's population, I think, is projected to shrink to about 700 million people. So they are in a hugely difficult demographic situation where there's no young people. People are getting older and older and older, and so there's just going to be a lot of upheaval. You just saw it, by the way, triple cost a lot of money to make much more money. Japan has learned. China just, you know, relaxed their one child policy to two. Then within a month they relaxed their two child policy to three and never be paying people to have kids. I mean they're just like we give tax incentives. Well and now they're they're floating a policy which says unlimited kids. OK so so that's why you can I just, I just want to go back to what one of the practical things we can do coming out of Wuhan is all this new data comes out is instead of vilifying China or trying to enter some Cold War, which is stupid, we should just go and restore everything as SAC suggested. One thing that you can say is wherever there is this kind of research. Happening in the world, every single variant needs to go to some basically open source repository that virologists all around the world can basically watch what's happening in lockstep so that what the **** was going on here? Then when they deleted it, it was deleted. But to be clear, that that isn't what are they doing? No, that isn't that. That is exactly the principle. And that is exactly what goes on within the academic and research communities worldwide. There's very open and cooperative dialogue with academics around the world about these matters. And generally that is absolutely true in the way things are done, because scientists don't care about politics. They care about, you know, human health and progress. Answer this question, please, is every single variant of COVID that led up to COVID-19 well characterized? Well understood by a broad class of scientists and virologists all over the world, or yeah, or a small subset of people, the, the plurality of which we're working at the Wuhan lab for virology. We didn't know that. The argument goes, you don't know that you have SARS, Co, V2 in those early days. And so you see some people getting sick and then suddenly you put your head up and you're like, wait a second, what's going on here? That's not what I'm asking. What my point is, you're not, you're not running a genomic sequencing on all those people in those early days. No. Masking something else. You have this original. Virus that you've been testing and mutating and, you know, reprogramming your testing. You're basically doing a massive Monte Carlo simulation on an original virus. Are all the intermediate instantiations of that virus well characterized? OK, that's my point. That's ******* crazy. Yeah, OK. If they weren't publicly available, would that be super dangerous also? Also by the way, like wouldn't it make sense and if if you were doing these iterations of these viruses that that the DNA sequences should go to places like Pfizer and Moderna where you are mandated to create vaccines just in case? Well, we are going to enter a stage here in the next decade where we will have vaccine printers around the world. They're gonna be small. Bioreactors are going to be able to effectively ship code to them. They're going to print vaccines. There's several companies pursuing this. I'm just going to go. I like your idea, though. I'm just gonna be interesting to see. This system is immature, naive and inefficient. And I think that if that's something that we can fix, that's why what matters most, in my opinion, and based on the the comments I made a few episodes ago, is that we need to focus on how to get there versus trying to trace back the origin. Because I think honestly, tracing back the origins is just going to put kindling on a fire that's already burning. And so my, my, this, this has been my point about this whole like, you know, blame China, we we want to get to a point where we can quote UN quote. Same China for this, but the decoupling and the onshore, there is already enough motivation there and there is already on both sides of the aisle. There is already kind of an obvious trajectory that we're headed this way. I'm not sure that this is a catalyst maybe or it's a little bit more kindling. We're already headed there and it doesn't actually answer our forward-looking question which is how do we secure our future and how we secure our future is really where technology and industry and and some of these free birds. Let me, let me build on Chamotte idea, what if the M RNA vaccine creation and the research. Laboratory where? The same facility and you had a cross disciplinary approach where? Where they're making stuff and then they're curing it next door in real time so that they can trade notes. Why would that be a terrible idea? It seems like a brilliant idea, and you could just, you could just transfer the data from the research and print the vaccines with the people that are really good at making vaccine. Right. You know, you don't need to have an intricate understanding of the biology to actually be effective at making vaccines, right? But isn't there something about scientists who are cross disciplinary sharing space and having collisions, building relationships? Isn't that part of the science process that's worked over the last couple years? You talked about how in synthetic biology and all this, you want the mathematicians, computer programmers, you know, and the biologists in the same area in the chemists resolving to a world where we have very cheap, very fast and distributed production of vaccines is an engineering. And the engineering work is what is kind of being undertaken now by several companies and and will be fueled by this, this new bill that Biden's trying to get passed, this infrastructure bill is a ton of money in there for it. And as that happens, that engineering process is effectively think about them like printers and they can take code and that code allows the that printer to that print whatever you want to print. The question of what you want to print is going to be determined by the research that's being done over here, which is OK, here's what we're discovering, here's what we should print, here's what we should protect against and why. But I think that there's a separate engineering exercise which, you know, let, let, let, let's build this distributed production system. I'm gonna go on the limit and say the these labs are immature, naive and unsophisticated in the checks and balances that exist. And I think we've seen that and we need to fix it and you need to do something more than just have a bunch of folks that are focused on science going ham in whatever way they want. All right. So just to wrap sacks, anything else on this as we put a cherry on it. Well I just you you asked the question what do we do about China. I think that is a question that's a generational question. We're going to be asking that for decades. It's this is an area we would need freed burgie and nuance because it's something that we're going to have to navigate as a country for for decades. You are really good book about this is the Thucydides trap. By Graham Allison is a Harvard professor and he discusses different strategies we can take. He quotes Lee Kuan Yew, who is the, you know, President of Singapore, who has a great quote about this. He said, Lee Kuan Yew said that the size of China's displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a New Balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world. That was that was the Lee Kuan Yew quote. So we were dealing with this issue even before COVID, but I do think that. COVID has unmasked this regime a little bit and caused people across both sides of the spectrum to look at this regime, I think, more realistically, all right, so in somewhat related news, Apple obviously building all their phones over there and now having servers and data over there has led to a lot of scrutiny of big tech. But the more pressing issue is the antitrust bills that seem to be fast. Act on Wednesday, U.S. House Judiciary Committee discussed 66 proposed antitrust bills. One bill, sponsored by a Democrat from Rhode Island, would call for Apple to allow third party app stores. Seems reasonable, and provide iPhone technologies to third party software makers. So I think that means maybe opening up iMessage, which would be delightful. I'm not sure exactly what they mean there, and so Apple. And Tim Cook is in a panic. He apparently called Nancy Pelosi and said, can you pump the brakes? Just to give you an idea of what's going on here, apples revenue, even though it's a small percentage of just 10% of their $274 billion in 2020 revenue, it's obviously pure profit. Profit margins got to be in the notes here. It says 75%, but I would think it's even more clearly services and in the App Store inside of Apple is I think analogous to the AWS for Amazon is a money printing machine that's growing. Really fast. What do we think about Apple being forced to put other app stores on their phones just like you can on your Android phone? I support it. I've been blue pilled on this issue. Actually. That's what the that's what the commenter is on of are the all in fans have said is that why stocks taking blue pills on this issue? And and look, the reality is because I'm not in the business of of helping $2 trillion market cap companies. I'm in the underdog business. I'm in the business of helping the entrepreneur get started with a new company. And the fact of the matter is, is that Apple has the market power the same, market power greater. That Microsoft did in its heyday with the Windows monopoly. They are total gatekeepers of what applications can be built on these iOS devices. Windows. Windows. You could windows. So any it was open. I mean, it was open. They have an App Store. Yeah, right. So this this proposal by representative Sicily, right. So this proposal by Representative Cicilline, the Democrat from Rhode Island, would allow this side loading. It would basically loosen the grip that Apple has over the apps that can be loaded onto Apple devices. It would at least. You know, create some degree, some potential. No. It would create tremendous competition and it's very easy to execute. Good, I think you said it really well. I am also in the underdog business. So I think the the faster they ram this thing through, the better off it'll be. The thing that is important to recognize is that Apple will make this argument that, well, look, there's always Android and also look, there's the open web. And that's structurally not true. For a couple of reasons. The overwhelming amount of development, at least in Silicon Valley and broadly speaking, in tech, starts on the iPhone. Sure. And it's only then as an afterthought almost. I mean, you have to remember it took Snapchat three or four years of being a public company before they actually had a reasonable Android app, right. And so Android is has always been sort of the low ARPU afterthought, even though it has meaningfully more users. They're just not as valuable revenue per user and so exactly. And so, you know, it's kind of a baseless argument, the overwhelming revenue the North Star for developers. There are all of the venture capital money goes into is the funding and developing iOS as and in that worldview, iOS is a complete monopoly, and breaking up the ability for them to basically dictate a 30% take rate and also loosening the technical guardrails, I think is a huge step forward. There's only one thing that I would say, however, Apple has done an incredible job with privacy locking down the. Known sandboxing instances, and we'll have to find some technical alternative to fortifying. No actually they don't Trump. Actually I think what they do is when you go to your settings you say unlock iPhone, you now are not protected, Apple is not responsible. You've decided to side load stuff and it's basically like putting your your phone into jailbreak or Dev mode where they are not going to support you. That's the way I think Apple should execute it is that would be like they're you know if you want to load anything you want when you get viruses and your privacy gets hacked, it's not on us. You've just essentially all the we have one warranty for people who are not jail broken and side. Put it in one warranty for people who decide to jailbreak their phones, what's what's incredible to me. The other, the other point on this is how quickly these guys pass this bill and actually I'll actually all six and then how reasonably well they were written. I mean this is 1 topic where sometimes, you know politicians can really kind of get it wrong or they can get lobbied in one way or the other and these bills come out, they don't make sense. I mean if you have to remember where how far we've come, you know wasn't the first antitrust thing. We're like some guy as Zuck a question about like a Model T Ford or something. It was just so stupid. They were so dumb. And they've gone from there to this. It's really incredible how fast they've caught up. I think this is just a terrible precedent. And I I think if you guys weren't going to make money by weakening Apple and Alphabet, you guys put your free market hats on, you kind of acknowledge that this is just a test. We're not Angel investors. We did not do the series of either of those companies. Freeberg. Yeah, I I I recognize that. And I think, like if you guys, if you guys had a bunch of shares in Alphabet or Amazon or Apple. Your your opinion would be a little bit different, but I'm just observing exactly what you say. I've shares, I've shares in Amazon and Facebook. Yeah. Well, look, I, I think in this particular case he's in the process of selling them. You know, at the end of the day, if if Apple and Alphabet didn't make incredible products for consumers and focused on consumer happiness, they wouldn't be as successful as they are. And much of if you remember kind of the early days of the Apple App Store ideology, it was about curating apps and curating the quality of those apps so that the quality of the overall. The phone experience would be superior to anything else out there, and consumers would love it. It wasn't about blocking out competitors and blocking out rivals and blocking out other platforms. It was about making something that consumers would absolutely love. And the same, I think it's correct Friedberg, they blocked third party book stores and book readers, they blocked browsers, they blocked the DLC and open source players. They did that because they wanted you to use their own products, they said. Yes, they set standards on the App Store and as long as you meet those standards, those apps got in. There's a youtubes in there, Google Chrome is in there. You know, I've got Chrome installed on my iPhone. I think it's a better browser. Took years for years and they realized they had to give that up. They had to give up the browser that they had to give us wanted. No, no. The only reason you promise they're on their back. No, the only reason that Chrome is there is because of the amount of money that Google pays Apple for search look, and that was a quid pro quo in that search deal. I will bet you dollars to doughnuts if that's the only reason for support. I don't think Apple is that dumb. I'm pretty sure that these guys recognize that if consumers want something they better give it to them. And if consumers wanted a bunch of ****** apps on the phone that didn't work and broke down all the time, you will then go through the process of jailbreaker should you be able to jailbreak your phone and hack it. Friedberg, I don't. I don't think that I should be telling Apple how to make their freaking hardware. They should make their hardware. And I as a consumer in the free market should decide if I want to buy it or not. And if I was, it's a free market, it's a monopoly. If I want to duopoly I can go buy a freaking Samsung. Or I don't know. C still makes phones. Or, you know, Nokia or BlackBerry. I guess these guys are all dead because their product suck. But at the end of the day, if there's an alternative out there, I will buy it. And if you guys wanna go fund a hardware company that builds a software platform on top of the hardware and make it the people with us over here, not a monopolist. OK, robber Baron. Now I know why you didn't want to say your opinion. You're a *** **** robber. No, it's really, it's really interesting that Freeburg actually on this issue is actually the the free market. Red pill, no. And every and everybody else is sort of blue pill. But but David you're right, I'm speaking about red pill. Blue pill like you know the books. No, I'm speaking my book I completely I I really creative destruction. I think it's better for startups. I don't particularly have a lot of trust or faith that these big companies when they get this big are particularly well run or have the best interests of the broad market. In their minds. And so, yeah, I'll be honest with you, I hope these companies get broken up. I think it's great for what we do. I think it's great for entrepreneurship. I think it's super phenomenal for the innovation cycle we could be a part of. And I would hope to participate in that and make a bunch of money. I think the best way to destroy a monopoly is to build better technology that disrupts them. And that has always been the case throughout history. And anytime government gets involved and tries to break up a monopoly in a way that is not natural to the way the market. Sources might demand you end up declining an innovation standard. We have to disrupt Apple. We have to disrupt Amazon. We have to disrupt Alphabet using technology if we want to have an advantage to go in the market. And by having government come in and intervene, I feel like it ends up being like like like you know this cronyism which which ultimately affects markets in an adverse way. Here's the problem is that the developer network effects around an operating system monopoly are in Super Bowl. They you you cannot overthrow them. There are now thousands and thousands, maybe even millions of apps have been developed on the. I OS system and no competitor can ever get that kind of traction. It is the windows monopoly all over again. And by the way, Microsoft and Windows might have dominated the Internet if it weren't for the government coming down with the whole Netscape litigation. Netscape didn't survive, but it kind of, it kind of froze Microsoft in its tracks and prevented them from dominating the nascent Internet. And so, you know, I think that turned out to be a good government intervention in terms of allowing innovation. To move forward and and by the way, just on the Sicilian proposals, I think part of the reason why they make so much sense is because we can't break up Apple. How would you break up Apple, right. I mean Apple sells one product, which is iOS on different sizes of sheets of breakup. Apple is to force them to use their operate, let their operating system be licensed to other hardware that's operating model. That's not breaking them up. So then there it would it would certainly create downward pressure on their margins if Dell could make a competing Apple desktop. OK, fair enough. What I'm saying, what I'm saying is there's no. Natural fault lines within Apple like there are at Amazon or Google, right? Yeah, there's nothing to chop off. Amazon could spin out a WS very easily. Google could spin out YouTube or maybe Enterprise Instagram. Apple. Apple is not going to separate iPad and iOS. Yes, of course. So. So what that means is because you can't split up the company if you want to address their power. The only way to do it is with proposals like side loading. I feel like you're you're either looking at a capitalist monopoly or you're looking at a government monopoly. So if you think about what's happened in financial services in the United States, the the regulatory burden on being a service provider in the financial services industry is so high that it is very difficult for startups to come in and compete and look at what emerged. Bitcoin, right? I I feel like there is always going to be a consumer innovation model that will supplant the monopoly. And you can't just say, hey, the government is going to come in and side load or or break up these big businesses. What ultimately happens when you do that is you create a regulatory burden that makes it equally difficult for competition. To arise over time or to reduce innovation that's going to benefit consumers. This is the Princess Leia, you know, basic theory, the the tighter you squeeze, the more Galaxy slip through your fingers. And maybe Tik T.O.K and Snapchat are examples of that with Facebook, but there aren't many, and I don't know who's coming up to fight against. Amazon at this point. So Shopify and Shopify is crushing it and they're incredible and they're gonna create this long tail of stores that ultimately could end up competing really effectively with Amazon and we've seen it right and and and consumers choose it. And just because just because Shopify is making a lot from SAS revenue does not mean that the majority of goods are not going to go through. Will tell you the consumer, the the consumer experience on Shopify stores is fantastic. I mean we all don't realize it, but we're buying a ton of stuff from Shopify stores pretty good and it has forced innovation, you know and and and I will also. Highlight that one of the benefits of these scaled businesses is that they end up having the resourcing to fund new and emerging businesses that otherwise wouldn't be fundable. I don't think that a WS would have emerged and therefore Google Cloud and all these other alternatives wouldn't have emerged if Amazon didn't have this thing. Yeah, didn't have this incredible chromium open source project. And think about the industry that emerged. Memo Android. But nobody, David, nobody, nobody suggesting to have broken these things up in 2007. But it's 2021 and things have changed. I don't know what's down the road that we're gonna miss out on, right. I mean, I I guess my point is like, you know, let the consumer make the decision as opposed to create regulatory burden that that over time has its own. What is the downside to allowing somebody who wants to put an App Store on their iPhone? What's the downside, freeberg? What's the downside to letting me have Amazon's App Store or Android App Store and me to pick that I want to just have one subscription set of subscriptions at. I prefer the Android store. Not a bad thing. I'm I'm not making it personally. The apple argument is that the quality of the the quality of. I think I just think it's a little bit short sighted for us to all jump to say let's break up big tech like the quality of what's going on over there I think is incredible and and then you products that have come out, it's just mind-blowing and you know we all kind of missed the fact that these are the beneficiaries of scale businesses and you know you can't really see a startup. We are not saying break up big tech. We're saying get rid of the 30% App Store fee because that negatively impacts. Our portfolios. Let's be clear here. This is screwing with the margins and a lot of the companies we invested, we want that take rate lowered. I mean, this is if Apple just made the take rate 15%, this entire thing goes away. Epic Games feels great. Spotify feel great. That's what they should have done when you overplay your hand and then all of a sudden you create a group of enemies from Netflix to Spotify to epic games. That was Apple's big mistake. They should have given those people a lower rate and just slowly lowered the rate, which is what everybody's doing. Now with creator percentages and I think that's what YouTube should do now the 45% they're taking just lower that to 30. Just give up a little bit of the take rate and and people will be feel more reasonable about what you're taking. Can I can I bring in the that sub stack article by Antonio Garcia Martinez it was called to end on that you know just be getting killed by the. I wanna see CP. I wanna end the Apple segment on on on a GM's article which was called Bad Apple. Although great article, great article. I mean it was, it was unbelievable but but David was. So I just want to let people know how excited David was about this. David I think is like ready to be in a full blown bromance with Antonio. I mean which day are you talking about? I'm talking about you, sax. You are. Are you in love with Antonio? It's a big pause. We lost them on zoom. When I asked him if he's in love. Apple came in and they pressed pause, press pause on the street. We look at the frozen look at his eyes. Look how he's he. That's the look of love. Did you read that article of love? I thought it was really well written too. Really, he's a really, really good writer. But here's the thing. He is getting paid probably 300,000 to $700,000 to write on stop stack after getting fired and after getting a giant settlement from Apple, whatever that's going to be. So he is making out like a bandit. But I thought the funniest part was, like, I'm not being silenced here because I'm now being paid to talk about Apple for the next year. My sub stack. But he thought his most salient point. Was Steve Jobs would not have been able to exist in the apple that exists today, he would have run out of apples. What? He would have been cancelled. What? I mean, Steve Jobs would have 100%. David, you broke out when I asked you if you were in love with Antonio. You just you. I think you got cut you off. Yeah, exactly. No, look, I think I don't agree with everything GM writes, but I do think he is a fantastic writer with a lot of interesting perspective. And that ending of that article, the reason I want to mention it is it kind of goes to freeburg's point about how much innovation. How much innovation is there really at Apple now that the that the genius who created it is gone? And he he ends his article by saying when Apple launched the Mac computer in 1984, you know, they famously ran that Super Bowl ad that featured a solitary figure flinging a sledgehammer into a Big Brother like face spewing propaganda at the huddle ranks of some drab dystopia. And then a GM says the tech Titans nowadays resemble more and more the harangue figure on the screen rather than the colorful rebel. Going against the established order, whether it be hiring policy or free speech, Silicon Valley has to decide whether it becomes what it once vowed to destroy. The reality is, the great genius who founded Apple is long gone. It is run by HR people and woke mob. It's run by a supply chain manager. Exactly. And and and so there is no more innovation there. They are just a gatekeeper collecting rents and, you know, freeberg you're right to raise the issue of what's going to create the most innovation. But the thing that's going to create the most innovation is letting entrepreneurs create new companies without needing apples permission. I will tell you something. I think that over the next decade, because of exactly what you guys said, that Apple is run by managers who don't want to see loss but aren't driven to gain, you're going to end up seeing Amazon, Acular, and Apple likely as well. Lose to the likes of Shopify and Square and Stripe. Shopify, Square and Stripe are all formidable threats to Amazon over time and now that Bezos is actually going to step out. And it is going to be run by a bunch of managers and you have these founders of these three companies still running all three of those businesses. And all three of those businesses are going to be incredible competitive threats from different angles on Amazon. That is where innovation win and you will see it because leadership driven by founders at those businesses could take them to compete directly with this guys. And you don't need the government to come and intervene. All three of them are building and are going to continue to build better experiences for consumers and for merchants that could end up disrupting the interview. I'll give you a different take. I think that all four companies are going to win. Including Amazon, yeah. They're going to continue to win. And I think what it shows is that Shopify and Stripe and square had to have very precise entry points in markets. And in many ways, the things that they are allowed to do is still quite constrained because Amazon exists. I think that that's fine. That should be allowed. But I don't think that's what's going to get, you know, legislated and then litigated over the next 10 or 15 years. It's a handful of very specific practices. That constrain what folks can do. I think the App Store is a constraint. The algorithmic nature of Facebook's news feed and Google search are constraints and people are going to test those things. And I think that in testing it, you're probably going to do what the government was successful as sack said in 2000, which is just slowed these guys down. You have to remember at some point there were probably more DOJ lawyers inside of Microsoft than product managers. And everything, if I remember correctly from a feature perspective had to go to the DOJ. For approval for some time. That's probably the best thing that can happen to these companies, which is you completely gum up the product infrastructure. Then you know, freedberg you're right, the human capital equation changes, people leave. It's not that fun to be there. They go to startups. But again, you needed the government to step in, and they're not going to necessarily solve it, but they can really slow down the overreach of these companies for the next 20 years. And I think that that's net additive for the world. Here's, here's my prediction. I think the pirates. Are assembling themselves, whether it's coin base saying we're not going to have politics at work or Antonio and the end of cancel culture, the end of taking the hysterical left or the historic or the trolling right. Seriously, I feel like that is ending and this great like nightmare of hysteria and is going to end and the Overton window is going to blossom and open up and people are going to be more innovative and accepting of new ideas and be reasonable and not cancel people. Who wrote something 5 or 10 or 20 years ago? Reasonableness. Let's go. Reasonableness. Well reasoned. Alright, everybody, this has been another episode of the All. Wait, what podcast brought to you by today? Nobody. What am I doing today? Yeah, well, you. Are you inviting us somewhere? No, I'm just wondering, is this a flex? Are you are you gone? Did you get an electric? You got an electric surfboard? Didn't you say 30 PM for me? So I got to go hang out with my family. I've got the accelerator and a board meeting and that's it. I'm in the Mediterranean general area. Yes, I'm actually conquering Europe. Did again I just want to say I did go to the dentist and my film pretty good overcame. Are you hearing about people moving back from Miami this like little thing going on about people saying no, that's people are so happy here. Yeah. Do you think you're going to end up living there? No. I mean, we'll see. Maybe. Maybe. I see, my orthopedic. Did you get orthopedic shoes when you bought that shirt? My God, would you join a Golf Club? Are you in a retirement community right now? Guys, I'm. I'm on a I'm on a diet. I predict by the end of the summer I'll be thinner than Jason. Is there a way to go to dexatrim? Wait. OK, let bring it. Go to dexatrim. No dexa scan. Whatever. Dexa scan and let's go. Next episode, show your DEXA scan. I'll show mine anyway. And do it. Do it, do it. Dude, what are you wearing? Please, I think I'm 194 OK 195 something like that. And what's your height? 5 foot 3? What are you? You do look thinner. You do look. Yeah. If they have lost about £5 already. I'm about 185 right now. And what's your height? 590. We're the same height and you weigh £10 less. You look good. Are you on any pharmaceuticals to lose weight? No, I'm doing. I'm doing intermittent fasting. I'm doing no carbs and I'm trying to be as plant based as possible. So go sex. Nice. Yeah. Good for you. You do look better. You do look better. You feel good? More energy? Yeah. I mean, I yes, I was getting like. Does that extra £5 like kind of tip me over? I think I got like another 15 to go, but you think you could be 170? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's my goal. Have you cut back on drinking? Really take on so many demons out. It's a we had some incredible wine last night. You know what? I thought you were a vodka guy. Can't you just do like a vodka and soda and be good? I don't like lemons. I can't give a wine, you know? Umm, I can't wait till we play poker and drink some more tamas wine. That's so fun. Ohh, I can't wait either. Love you. Love you, sax. Love you Harry. Love you Harry. Videos. Stats back at you. All right. This has been the all in podcast brought to you by nobody. And if you'd like to join the all in chat, you can join our iMessage group, the 1st 10 people. It's $10,000 a month. We're going to monetize by allowing 10 people to be in the chat for 10,000 a month each to break chops like 300 bucks a day to be in. I got to figure out a way to monetize this. All right, we'll see you all next time. Bye bye. Let your winners ride Rain Man. David said that. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Thank you. Like what? Besties are. My dog taking out your driveway? We should all just get a room and just have one big huge order because they're always useless. It's like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release stuff out there. You're a Big Bear. See what we need to get merchants? I'm going.