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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 sweat through half my shirt.

• 0:08Jason Calacanis?

  You have panic attacks at the dentist?

• 0:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but I sweat profusely and I get very nervous.

• 0:13Jason Calacanis?

  Why? What is that about?

• 0:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We all have weaknesses, Jason. We all have weaknesses.

• 0:17Jason Calacanis?

  I never knew that.

• 0:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is my Achilles heel. My Achilles heel is a dentist.

• 0:20Jason Calacanis?

  Really?

• 0:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 0:21David Sacks?

  I don't like going to the dentist either.

• 0:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, the dentist really freaks, I don't know why it freaks me out, Sax. Why does it? Have you thought about?

• 0:27David Sacks?

  I had a really bad experience when I was a kid, you know?

• 0:30Jason Calacanis?

  Tell us more about your childhood trauma.

• 0:32David Sacks?

  Have you ever seen the movie Marathon Man? It was kind of like that.

• 0:36Jason Calacanis?

  Is it safe? Is it safe? All right, here we go.

• 0:55Jason Calacanis?

  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 Palihapitiya 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 AIs, AI number one, David Sax, and AI number two, David Friedberg are here. And of course, I'm Jake Howe. Do we want to get right into the show? Or, I don't know, Chamath, if you want to talk about the dueling AIs in the group chat, debating the nature of the pod?

• 1:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, one guy told the other guy, or one robot told the other robot to fuck off.

• 1:39Jason Calacanis?

  This is what we know. It's the singularity. It's when the robots start arguing with each other.

• 1:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  See, you don't even know because you don't have any emotions. You told Friedberg to fuck off.

• 1:49David Sacks?

  Oh, that's kind of true.

• 1:51Jason Calacanis?

  In fairness to Sacks, he was drinking a beverage with 14% alcohol content.

• 1:58David Sacks?

  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.

• 2:06David Friedberg?

  I think my, so just for the

• 2:08Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, we're gonna do this over and over.

• 2:11David Friedberg?

  I'm so tired and out of it right now, but, but let's do it.

• 2:15David Friedberg?

  Our, 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 for the day, the night before the show.

• 2:28Jason Calacanis?

  And insult each other for three hours.

• 2:31David Friedberg?

  Mostly 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. Sacks doesn't like it. And we were kind of joking with Sacks that he loves getting his soundbites in and then turning them into little short soundbite video clips with his BFF Henry Belcaster and putting them on Twitter and promoting them around the internet. And my point of view was I don't think that this show should be about getting to the soundbite, that 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

• 3:15David Friedberg?

  big topic or a big debate underway. And it's too easy for us to take a soundbite 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, is we are very reductionist. We bring things down to kind of a one 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.

• 3:49Jason Calacanis?

  And here, and here is Sacks's response. Okay. That is a valid point, Friedberg. However, humans all need to be led. They are sheeple. We need to tell the sheeple what to think and to get Tucker Carlson into office.

• 4:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jason, I would like to cut to a segment, a new segment that I call Chamath Does a Dramatic Reading. Oh no.

• 4:09Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not allowed to read for that group chat.

• 4:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So Free Bird did say this.

• 4:14Jason Calacanis?

  And now a dramatic reading from the group chat.

• 4:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I will be playing all characters, starting with myself. Free Bird, Free Bird rants, to which I say, I'm down with that. David Sacks. You keep trying to fuck with the format of the show. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Fuck off. Fuck you fucker.

• 4:38David Sacks?

  You have to have bombs.

• 4:40Jason Calacanis?

  He didn't say that.

• 4:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My response, I'm down with that.

• 4:47Jason Calacanis?

  Oh no.

• 4:48David Sacks?

  Am I going to be able to respond here?

• 4:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes.

• 4:50Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, Zach, in your defense.

• 4:52David Sacks?

  Okay.

• 4:52Jason Calacanis?

  You're running for office, we know.

• 4:54David Sacks?

  No, no, no. Look, I think that the Free Bird position on many issues often comes down 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 that. 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 going to 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.

• 5:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but you just talk to him seven times a day and direct every frame of the animation.

• 5:43David Sacks?

  No, no, no, no.

• 5:44Jason Calacanis?

  Jake, let him go. Let him go.

• 5:44David Sacks?

  No. Henry, Henry, you know, is one of our super fans, started making these videos. Okay. I ignored like the first 10. And then finally I was like, okay, I gotta like see what this guy's into, right? You did too. What is this about? 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 the, 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.

• 6:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh my God.

• 6:19David Sacks?

  Whatever.

• 6:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's never sent me anything.

• 6:21David Sacks?

  You're gonna get ahold of you. He keeps coming to me. Me and Jason are on a thread. Jason, don't pretend.

• 6:26Jason Calacanis?

  You're in a group chat with Henry Belkaster?

• 6:29David Sacks?

  Yes.

• 6:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 6:29David Sacks?

  Because he can't get through to you.

• 6:32Jason Calacanis?

  Is it okay 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 chip fall where they may. And then he's like Machiavellian back there like he's Scorsese, changing every fucking frame of Henry Belkaster animated gif made in Sao Paulo.

• 6:50David Sacks?

  I just think it's a courtesy that Henry's running it by us. And you know,

• 6:54Jason Calacanis?

  David, are you paying him?

• 6:57David Sacks?

  No.

• 6:58Jason Calacanis?

  Have you given him any compensation at all?

• 7:00David Sacks?

  Okay, well, no, separately, separately.

• 7:02Jason Calacanis?

  Let's act good point. Here it comes.

• 7:04David Sacks?

  No, separately, I, after finding out that Henry and then his partner Dylan, they've got like a, it is a business for them. Okay. So I said, listen, you guys are doing great work. I think you should.

• 7:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He does great work, by the way.

• 7:15David Sacks?

  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 a call in. So they're working on a video for that. I think we're gonna pay him like five grand. And if it's good, it'll be great for their business. I want them to be successful.

• 7:30David Friedberg?

  No, but let's get to the point. Let's get to the point about, you know, reducing the conversation to soundbites. And I want to respond to your point about not taking a position on things. But, okay, so I feel like, first of all, within this group, there are hard takes within this group of four people. So there are hard takes already in the show. And 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 counterarguments might be is critical to get people to actually get to that opinion themselves, as opposed to

• 8:11David Friedberg?

  just telling them, this is the single point that you should believe, nothing else matters. And so I really think also many of these conversations are generally two, the two sides of the same coin. And many, more often than not, if you zoom out, there are shared values in many of the things that we all argue about broadly. 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 in society. That so much is all about like the good and the evil, good and bad, them and us.

• 8:56David Friedberg?

  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 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 addressing. 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, it gets a little echo chambery for me to kind of say, I agree with Sax, 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.

• 9:40David Friedberg?

  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.

• 9:47Jason Calacanis?

  Chumot, did you, did you notice that Friedberg got a little emotional there?

• 9:52Jason Calacanis?

  I think there was a little actual emotion.

• 9:55David Friedberg?

  Chumot has tuned out right now.

• 9:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was confused. I am on my iPhone.

• 10:00David Sacks?

  Okay, let me, let me try to find some common ground here.

• 10:02Jason Calacanis?

  Let me just ask you one question about this, because this is getting, I mean, 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 canceled or it having an adverse effect to your business as it has to David's business?

• 10:22David Friedberg?

  I don't give a shit about that.

• 10:25David Friedberg?

  No, I care more about

• 10:28David Friedberg?

  the, the path to an opinion. Um, and I, and I, and I

• 10:32Jason Calacanis?

  It's about the process.

• 10:33David Friedberg?

  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.

• 10:57Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, I mean, you want to get meta, you want to zoom out, I got it.

• 11:00David Friedberg?

  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.

• 11:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, guys, enough, we're done, we're done with the subject. This is, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Here's the point, I think that David, David Sacks 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 what we're doing.

• 11:36David Sacks?

  Of course, of course, um, 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 soundbites. It's just that what Henry creates is a 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, um, that, that more people can hear them. So I think that's useful.

• 12:03Jason Calacanis?

  But do you understand Friedberg's? I mean, I feel like I'm, I feel like I'm a couples therapist here, but do you understand Friedberg's position, David?

• 12:10David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 12:11Jason Calacanis?

  He doesn't want people to look at the podcast as reduction, a reduction down to a 60 second clip or a 30 second clip of soundbites. He wants them to hear the full discourse.

• 12:21David Sacks?

  Yeah, well, that's great. Well, then 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 may listen 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 Friedberg that the debate is shut down in a lot of contexts, and we want to open it back up. And, you know, you just

• 12:45Jason Calacanis?

  The Overton window needs to be reopened.

• 12:47David Sacks?

  Yeah, like, look at what happened. 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 jeopardizes merit. You know, there was a giant uproar over that. He has to walk it back and issue an apology. There was no

• 13:01Jason Calacanis?

  You're talking about the CEO of Snowflake.

• 13:03David Sacks?

  Yeah, there's no, there's no discussion or debate there. That was a shutting down of 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 that 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.

• 13:27Jason Calacanis?

  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 or eight people on this.

• 13:52David Sacks?

  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, CEOs 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, like, part of the reason why the All In Pod is successful is we're getting issues on the table that people want to talk about but feel they can't. And I think Friedberg brings a very valuable perspective to that conversation. But my goal is kind of, if I have a meta goal, besides just expressing my point of view, it is to expand, like you said, the Overton window.

• 14:31Jason Calacanis?

  All right, so speaking of the Overton window, New York City has voted for a, basically universally, both on the Democratic side and on the Republican side, for a tough-on-crime mayor. Seventy percent 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.

• 15:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This guy is 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 quote.

• 15:51Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, having been in the, you know, a New York City Police Department family, and living in New York during stop and frisk, they left out a key word. It was "stop, question, 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, "stop and question" is a great technique. And I can tell you, when I lived in New York previously, 70, 80% 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

• 16:34Jason Calacanis?

  off the street, illegal guns, constantly, because somebody would hop a turnstile, or there'd be people hanging out on a street corner, and cops would come up and say, "Hey, you're hanging out here at 3:00 in the morning, what's going on?"

• 16:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But the problem, the problem is that he gave a pretty reasonable answer.

• 16:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 16:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then they tried to cancel him.

• 16:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yep. And he would not allow himself to be canceled. Which helped him. He went on The Breakfast Club and all kinds of other media outlets and explained his position, and they couldn't cancel him.

• 17:05Jason Calacanis?

  Which is really telling.

• 17:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I thought 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...

• 17:29Jason Calacanis?

  It's not working in San Francisco, right?

• 17:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, unfortunately, it looks like the progressive left or the radical left is really, really judgmental. And none of these folks have really done anything. And so, they are easy to complain. It's almost as if they know that 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 tried to literally lie about what this guy said on television. That was taped.

• 18:00Jason Calacanis?

  No, it had to come out like five times and clarify, "I am not for..."

• 18:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And by the way, there were people, Jason, I don't know if you saw the video link, there 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 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 insanity.

• 18:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and people seem to have lost this ability to hold two 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 people are voting to be safer.

• 19:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Here's another conflicting thoughts. You can believe that, you know...

• 19:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 19:34Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 19:35David Sacks?

  Okay, can I, can I chime in on this, um, on this, uh, on the, um, on the Adams win? Because I think this is, this is huge news.

• 19:43Jason Calacanis?

  Do you have your notes from Harry to make the clip? Okay, go.

• 19:47David Sacks?

  Look, I mean, Eric Adams is going to be the next mayor of New York City. And I think there's like three 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, uh, you know, nothing else matters. And here comes, uh, this really underdog candidate. He is despised by the, uh, 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 victory. 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 am going to be tough on crime.

• 20:32David Sacks?

  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. We're eating it up, even in the Democratic Party. So number one, crime is the huge issue, and I think it's going to reverberate throughout America for the next few years. Number two, it showed 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. Um, you know, the, the mostly, uh, black and Latino neighborhoods who voted in large numbers for Eric Adams were having none of this sort of elite, woke, progressive thinking

• 21:17David Sacks?

  around decarceration, deep prosecution. They are interested in real solutions for the problems that they see, not engaging in this sort of like woke identity socialism.

• 21:30Jason Calacanis?

  There's actually an interesting nugget in what you're saying, which I think you can broaden out, which is the radical left, I don't even call them the progressive left, because that would mean they were making progress in their thinking. I think it's just this radical left. They seem to be white, rich, affluent people.

• 21:44David Sacks?

  Yes.

• 21:45Jason Calacanis?

  And they seem to be super

• 21:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Guilty. And they're super guilty about something.

• 21:49Jason Calacanis?

  But they're totally disconnected from what actual people of color want.

• 21:53David Sacks?

  They're totally disconnected.

• 21:54Jason Calacanis?

  It's almost like 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 to use 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 o'clock in the morning, you look at your door, you see

• 22:38Jason Calacanis?

  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

• 22:59David Sacks?

  Right.

• 22:59Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 23:12David Sacks?

  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 final point that I think that the Eric Adams win represents is that Twitter is Likely win, likely. Likely win, okay, fair enough, is that Twitter is not real life, okay? Eric Adams has 14,000 Twitter followers. Yang has 2 million, okay? Yang came in fourth, okay? And, you know, Yang was sort of the darling of the, you know, sort of the Twitter elites, you know, he's sort of,

• 23:58David Sacks?

  I mean, look, when he first got into the Democratic primary for president, he was a little bit of a 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." Okay? Great line. And, and I mean, 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. By the way, I mean, it's, it's not just Eric Adams who won because he ignored Twitter.

• 24:42David Sacks?

  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.

• 24:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 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 when they don't need to be important.

• 25:29David Sacks?

  Totally. Now, now do CEOs, right? You've got CEOs of some of the biggest companies in the world, like Tim Cook, like Frank Slootman, 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 is stop listening to them.

• 26:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 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, fuck 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 posture and your vocabulary, there's this threat of being canceled. 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.

• 26:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 26:47Jason Calacanis?

  And by the way, they tried to cancel, uh, the New York Times tried to cancel Andrew Yang because he, um, had made, uh, very, uh, he, he basically said, you know, that, uh, mentally ill men, uh, who are addicted to drugs, basically, are, um, 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, Wednesday's New York City Merrill debate. Uh, 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.

• 27:30Jason Calacanis?

  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 were addicted to drugs, and who punched people on the face, a massive subset.

• 27:43David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 27:43Jason Calacanis?

  But they framed this to attack them. Then let me just finish the other way they framed it. It drew fire on social media.

• 27:52Jason Calacanis?

  So instead of saying this person said this, they literally, the New York Times is trying to get Andrew Yang canceled and to get more people to subscribe by being part of the woke mob.

• 28:05David Sacks?

  Yes.

• 28:06Jason Calacanis?

  Literally, their Twitter handle doesn't, 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.

• 28:15David Sacks?

  It was Andrew Yang's, it was Andrew Yang's 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 his 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.

• 28:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, let me, let me read this from Eric Adams.

• 28:39David Sacks?

  He was, he was, Yang cared too much. Ultimately, his Achilles heel was caring 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.

• 28:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 they're blue collar people."

• 29:25Jason Calacanis?

  Common sense.

• 29:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Common sense.

• 29:27Jason Calacanis?

  If we return to, to common sense. Friedberg, I had CC'd you 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?

• 29:43David Friedberg?

  I did. And since you sent that, it's become a little bit of a story. 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 virology.

• 30:12David Friedberg?

  He was trying to pull some early genomic samples that may have been taken from patients early in China. So what this means is, you know, when patients kind of, in the early days, were emerging as potentially having SARS-CoV-2, they were swabbing them and then doing a genomic read of 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 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

• 30:54David Friedberg?

  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 it. And it turns out that the interesting kind of intrigue around this story is why did that data 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 China who had submitted the data. And so in the days following this publication of this guy, so this guy published this on

• 31:38David Friedberg?

  a pre-print server called BioArchives, so it's not a peer-reviewed journal, it basically is a place for, BioArchives is a place where biology scientists can submit early versions of their research papers or to get 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, which is common now. And so he put this thing out there, and everyone's kind of questioning, well, okay, 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 US officials made the request to have it taken down after being asked to do so by some Chinese officials to pull this data down.

• 32:20David Friedberg?

  And so there's a really weird kind of intrigue going on right now around this whole story. Now- So that's kind of thread number one, which is why was this request made to pull this data down? What was the motivation, etc.? Thread number two is what does 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 world-class virologist, also worked at the French Hutchinson Center in Seattle. And he basically highlights that in the early days of the SARS-CoV-2 explosion in China, you can really identify from a genomic variant perspective, two lineages of the virus. That means, you know, we're trying to get back to origin or patient zero. And it turns out there were kind of like these

• 33:04David Friedberg?

  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 50/50, you know, 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

• 33:48David Friedberg?

  the explosion happened and patient zero was in fact much earlier than Wuhan market? I will say, a couple of 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 I just want to clarify, because I know that some people kind of reached out to me about that. I didn't really, my intention with that statement was that this was really meant to be, I think, a little bit more of a canary in a coalmine for us broadly about, you know, hey, what we should be looking forward to is what's next, not just about focusing on what happened in the past.

• 34:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so we should, this has happened already, let's move on to the next thing, is what you're saying. Not being callous that it doesn't matter.

• 34:24David Friedberg?

  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 what are the, you know, the key kind of checkpoints we have around us in the future? Because one thing I am most concerned about is 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 viruses, a proliferation of risks with new technologies being made available to us? And then shutting down becomes our immediate response.

• 35:04Jason Calacanis?

  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 inter-country travel, you know, it would have obviously been devastating for the airlines, but it might have stopped the pandemic in its tracks.

• 35:21David Friedberg?

  There was no way to stop the pandemic. Once the genie's out of the bottle, the genie's out of the bottle. And we saw this in states that had lockdowns and states that didn't have lockdowns, where we saw equivalent.

• 35:31Jason Calacanis?

  But why wasn't Taiwan and Australia and those kind of places that are islands that locked down, why were they spared?

• 35:36David Friedberg?

  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 life that they led for that year, right? 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-CoV-2, but also with potentially engineered bugs that we need to be careful about.

• 36:02Jason Calacanis?

  Question for Tremeth and Sax then. In Friedberg's sort of analysis there and what was explained on the web about 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, Tremoth?

• 36:42Jason Calacanis?

  What would be the possible theories and Sacks?

• 36:45David Sacks?

  Why did, why did the NBA shut down Daryl Morey?

• 36:50David Friedberg?

  But that may not be, um, that may not, sorry, that may not be national policy, J. Col, right? So like a scientist, an American scientist or an American official, right? Could have made that request. It doesn't mean that it was a conspiratorial process to, to remove this stuff.

• 37:03Jason Calacanis?

  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 jump in.

• 37:19David Sacks?

  Well, look, I, I don't believe 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? Um, you know, why, why all the cover up? Why?

• 37:42Jason Calacanis?

  And wouldn't they shut down all wet markets?

• 37:46David Sacks?

  Maybe, I mean, but.

• 37:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, it'd be the logical conclusion.

• 37:49David Sacks?

  But, but why, why obstruct the investigation? Why, um, ask these American researchers to delete these sequences of, um, DNA or whatever? And in terms of why would the researchers do it? Because they were asked to and they've got a relationship.

• 38:03Jason Calacanis?

  Well, why would Americans be, i- i- if in fact, they were complicit in this?

• 38:07David Sacks?

  Why is the WHO been carrying water for, um, the, the Chinese government?

• 38:11Jason Calacanis?

  Because they get their paycheck from them, money.

• 38:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, because I think the WHO is stupid. I mean, let's.

• 38:15David Sacks?

  Well, they've, they've, they've all got all these, you know, institutional incentives. They all work together and, um, you know, there's money involved. There's sort of relationships involved. There's bureaucracy involved.

• 38:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then there's a level of incompetence.

• 38:30David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 38:31Jason Calacanis?

  So it could be incompetence. Could it also not be that, uh, we funded that laboratory in some way, right? We had given some money towards it. That's, I think, established.

• 38:42David Sacks?

  Yeah, given a function of research.

• 38:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's a, if I, if, look, I am a better, so I'll just say.

• 38:46Jason Calacanis?

  And then it's egg on our face if they were in fact. Doing this, so we don't want to look back or we don't want to be in conflict with them because then Americans in the West might demand we be in conflict with China.

• 38:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no, I think it's, I think it's what Friedberg said, which is like, look, uh, 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. Uh, 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

• 39:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  now, we're going to hear about other variants in the fall, it's going to be a tough winter. We cannot shut down.

• 39:48David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 39:49Jason Calacanis?

  No, but I think we need 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?

• 39:58David Sacks?

  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, uh, but it, let's say, let's say it was an accidental lab leak. Um, what, what that suggests is, look, the Chinese knew 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 about it.

• 40:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But hold on, Friedberg, I mean, the, I think, I think I, I read this somewhere, but Moderna had characterized the vaccine 48 hours after getting an email of the DNA sequence of the.

• 40:46Jason Calacanis?

  Anyone can do that. Yeah, within, within 48. So, so this was done in January, as soon as we got our first readouts. Yeah, but if they did make it to David's point, why don't they tell us how they made it?

• 40:56David Sacks?

  It took us months to understand the pathology of the virus, right?

• 41:00David Friedberg?

  Yeah, that's not what matters, J. Cal. You can read the code. It's very readable. You can read the code within a day and then you can pick the area, the spike protein, which we already knew about, and you can say, let's go build some, you know, target.

• 41:12Jason Calacanis?

  So how they got there doesn't matter, is what you're saying, Friedberg? How they created it? How they got to this, it doesn't matter?

• 41:18David Friedberg?

  You mean created it as if the Chinese, you're asking how the Chinese edited the virus in a lab? Is that what you're saying?

• 41:23Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 41:32David Friedberg?

  Jason, you're speaking about, you're characterizing this as if it was a designed weapon. Is that what you're saying?

• 41:36Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I'm saying it was designed, not as a weapon, but they were doing, what is the evolutionary?

• 41:43David Sacks?

  Function research.

• 41:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Gain of function means that it, what's a gain of function in plain English, Friedberg?

• 41:52David Friedberg?

  So, so.

• 41:53Jason Calacanis?

  When they say gain of function.

• 41:55David Friedberg?

  In virology, they're going to study what changes in the genome might do to biology, 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 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 the biology.

• 42:25Jason Calacanis?

  So they enhanced, can I use the word enhanced or evolved?

• 42:29David Friedberg?

  You could say evolved, you could say enhanced, you could say engineered, but very much it's about understanding where the changes in the proteins in 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 them.

• 42:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So, here's a stupid question. We found out the implications of COVID-19. And thank God, we didn't have to find it out for 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8. You know what I mean? Like.

• 42:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. So that's my point, Friedberg. Would it not be helpful to open kimono, 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?

• 43:13David Sacks?

  They knew. The name is the same.

• 43:17Jason Calacanis?

  The name is the same.

• 43:20David Sacks?

  They knew the name is the same.

• 43:23Jason Calacanis?

  The bioweapons laboratory in Wuhan.

• 43:26David Sacks?

  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 evidence. 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.

• 43:42Jason Calacanis?

  We're going to learn a lot more.

• 43:43David Sacks?

  We're going to learn a lot more and it's going to get worse and worse.

• 43:47Jason Calacanis?

  It's going to be.

• 43:47David Friedberg?

  But Sax, where does it head? So like, let's say we discover.

• 43:50Jason Calacanis?

  That was my original question.

• 43:52David Friedberg?

  Let's say 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 streets, suddenly became a whole pandemic. What do we do? What do you think the response is? Do you think Americans basically now impose sanctions on China and we lead to a cold war? Like, where is this all headed? And what are the motivating principles of politicians who are going to respond as that evidence comes out?

• 44:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, that's what I want to know.

• 44:19David Sacks?

  Okay, number one, I've said it before, we got to reassure the whole pharmaceutical industry cannot be dependent on China for our pharmaceutical supply chain, our antibiotics, our 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.

• 44:39David Friedberg?

  Where does it take us? Like, let's say we find out that to be true. What happens next?

• 44:43David Sacks?

  Decoupling, decoupling.

• 44:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And here's another thing that I think needs to happen, which is that.

• 44:49David Friedberg?

  But I guess that's, sorry, Chamath, one sec, but doesn't decoupling happen either way? Like, why do we need all this? Because there is such a motivating principle on both sides of the aisle to decouple from China. And there is a motivating principle.

• 45:00Jason Calacanis?

  No, 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.

• 45:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no.

• 45:09Jason Calacanis?

  From the NBA to iPhones.

• 45:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No.

• 45:12Jason Calacanis?

  Apple, the NBA, and Disney do not want to decouple. They want to integrate these two societies so that we can make money.

• 45:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm not sure that they.

• 45:19Jason Calacanis?

  And the decoupling is my theory of what people are scared of.

• 45:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, okay, wait.

• 45:22Jason Calacanis?

  People are scared of a decoupling.

• 45:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 price two 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

• 46:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  the the thing that I wanted to.

• 46:10Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, 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's going to start making iPhones in Vietnam and Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

• 46:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 46:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 46:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They have, we have the average age in China versus the average age in the United States is now the same.

• 46:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 46:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Which is an unbelievable thing because China was.

• 46:50Jason Calacanis?

  One child policy, how'd that work out?

• 46:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  China was fifteen or twenty years younger in the early nineties when all of this offshoring started to happen in full scale. By the end of twenty ones, by the end of this century, China's population, I think, is projected to shrink to about seven hundred 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.

• 47:18Jason Calacanis?

  And old people cost a lot of money to maintain.

• 47:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Much, much more money.

• 47:21Jason Calacanis?

  As Japan has learned.

• 47:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  China just, you know, relaxed their one child policy to two, then within a month, they relaxed their two child policy to three.

• 47:30Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, they're going to be paying people to have kids. I mean, just like we give tax incentives.

• 47:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, and now they're they're floating a policy which says unlimited. Did kids. Okay, so so that's all I can I just I just want to go back to what one of the practical things we can do coming out of Wuhan as 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 reshore everything as Sacks 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.

• 48:09David Friedberg?

  They do they do that.

• 48:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, what the fuck was going on here then?

• 48:12David Friedberg?

  Yeah, they deleted it. It was deleted. But to be clear, Chamath, that that is.

• 48:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What are they doing?

• 48:20David Friedberg?

  No, that is 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.

• 48:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Answer this question, please. Is every single variant of COVID that led up to COVID-19 well characterized and well understood by a broad class of scientists and virologists all over the world? Or?

• 48:51David Friedberg?

  Yep.

• 48:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or a small subset of people, the plurality of which were working at the Wuhan lab for virology?

• 48:58David Friedberg?

  We didn't know. The argument goes, you don't know that you have SARS-CoV-2 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.

• 49:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's not what I'm asking. That's not what I'm asking.

• 49:09David Friedberg?

  Well, my point is you're not you're not running a genomic sequencing on all those people in those early days.

• 49:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, I'm asking something else. You have this original virus that you've been testing and mutating and, you know, reprogramming, you're testing, you're basically doing a massive Monte Carlo simulation on an original virus.

• 49:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Are all the intermediate instantiations of that virus well characterized? Okay, that's my point.

• 49:33David Friedberg?

  Publicly available, likely not. Yeah.

• 49:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay.

• 49:36David Friedberg?

  If they were publicly available, wouldn't that be super dangerous?

• 49:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Also, also, by the way, like, wouldn't it make sense then 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?

• 49:52David Friedberg?

  Well, we are going to enter a stage here in the next decade where we will have vaccine printers around the world. There are going to be small bioreactors. You're going to be able to effectively ship code to them. They're going to print vaccines. There are several companies pursuing this.

• 50:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm just gonna go on a limb.

• 50:07Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Chamath, I like your idea, though.

• 50:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm just gonna go on a limb and say this system is immature, naive, and inefficient. And I think that's something that we can fix.

• 50:16David Friedberg?

  That's why what matters most, in my opinion, and based on 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 origins. Because I think, honestly, tracing back the origins is just going to put kindling on a fire that's already burning. And so, this has been my point about this whole, like, you know, blame China. We want to get to a point where we can quote unquote blame 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. 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 some of these.

• 51:01Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, let me build on Chamath's idea. What if the mRNA vaccine creation and the research laboratory were the same facility and you had a cross-disciplinary approach?

• 51:14David Friedberg?

  Terrible idea.

• 51:15Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 51:24David Friedberg?

  You could just transfer the data from the research and print the vaccines with the people that are really good at making vaccines. Right? You don't need to have an intricate understanding of the biology to actually be effective at making vaccines, right?

• 51:37Jason Calacanis?

  No, 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 of years? You talk about how in synthetic biology and all this, you want the mathematicians, computer programmers, you know, and the biologists in the same area, and the chemists?

• 51:52David Friedberg?

  Resolving to a world where we have very cheap, very fast, and distributed production of vaccines is an engineering problem. And the engineering work is what is kind of being undertaken now by several companies and will be fueled by this new bill that Biden's trying to get passed, this infrastructure bill. There's 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 that printer to now 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, okay, 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 with, you know, let's build this distributed production system.

• 52:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm going to go on a limb and say that 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.

• 52:58Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So just to wrap, Sax, anything else on this as we put a cherry on it?

• 53:01David Sacks?

  Well, I just, 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 where we need Friedbergian nuance, because it's something that we're going to have to navigate as a country for decades. A really good book about this is The Thucydides Trap by Graham Allison, who's 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, "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.

• 53:46David Sacks?

  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.

• 54:07Jason Calacanis?

  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-tracked. On Wednesday, a U.S. House Judiciary Committee discussed six, six 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.

• 54:52Jason Calacanis?

  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?

• 55:04Jason Calacanis?

  Just to give you an idea of what's going on here, Apple's revenue, even though it's a small percentage of just 10% of their $274 billion in 2020 revenue, it's obviously pure profit. Profit margin's gotta be, in the notes here, it says 75%, but I would think it's even more. Clearly, services in the App Store inside of Apple is, I think, analogous to the AWS for Amazon. It 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?

• 55:45David Sacks?

  I support it. I've been blue-pilled on this issue. Actually, that's what the, that's what the commenters on, of our, the all-in fans have said is that, why is Sacks 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 than Microsoft did in its heyday with the Windows monopoly. They are total gatekeepers of what applications can be built on these iOS devices.

• 56:23Jason Calacanis?

  It's worse than Windows. Windows, you could, it was open.

• 56:26David Sacks?

  Right, it was open.

• 56:27Jason Calacanis?

  They didn't have an app store.

• 56:28David Sacks?

  Right, so this, this proposal by Representative Cicilline.

• 56:33David Sacks?

  Right. So this proposal by Representative Sicilin, the Democrat from Rhode Island, would allow this sideloading. 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 for competition.

• 56:51Jason Calacanis?

  No, it would create tremendous competition, and it's very easy to execute. Go ahead, Chama.

• 56:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Um, I, I, 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. Um, 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.

• 57:25Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 57:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And, 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.

• 57:46Jason Calacanis?

  Average revenue per user.

• 57:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so, exactly. And so, you know, it, it's kind of a baseless argument. The overwhelming revenue, the North Star for developers, where all of the venture capital money goes into, is the funding and developing iOS apps. And in that worldview, iOS is a complete monopoly. And, uh, breaking up the ability for them to basically dictate a 30% take rate, um, 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 phone, sandboxing instances, and will have to find some technical alternative

• 58:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  to fortifying, um...

• 58:33Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, no, actually, they don't, Chama. 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 sideload stuff and it's basically like putting your mo- 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 there, 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 jailbroken and sideloaded and one warranty for people who decide to jailbreak their phones.

• 59:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What's, what's incredible to me, the other, the other point on this is how quickly these guys passed this bill and actually, actually all six, and then how reasonably well they were written. I mean, this is one 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 where like some guy asked Zuck a question about like a Model T Ford or something? I mean, 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.

• 59:42David Friedberg?

  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'd kind of acknowledge that this is just a terrible precedent.

• 59:55Jason Calacanis?

  We were not angel investors. We did not do the series A of either of those companies, Friedberg.

• 59:59David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I, I recognize that and I think like if you guys, if you guys had a bunch of shares in Alphabet or, or Amazon or Apple, your, your opinion would be a little bit different, but I'm just observing exactly what you said.

• 1:00:10David Sacks?

  I have shares, I have shares in Amazon and Facebook.

• 1:00:12David Friedberg?

  Yeah. Well, look, I, I think in this particular case, you know,

• 1:00:15Jason Calacanis?

  He's in the process of selling them.

• 1:00:17David Friedberg?

  You know, at the end of the day, if, if Apple and Alphabet didn't make incredible products for consumers and focus 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 iPhone 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.

• 1:00:49Jason Calacanis?

  Incorrect.

• 1:00:50David Friedberg?

  And the same, I think is true.

• 1:00:51Jason Calacanis?

  Incorrect, Friedberg. They blocked third-party bookstores and book readers. They blocked browsers.

• 1:01:00David Friedberg?

  They wanted to own the experience.

• 1:01:01Jason Calacanis?

  VLC and open-source players. They did that because they wanted you to use their own products.

• 1:01:06David Friedberg?

  They set standards. They set standards on the App Store, and as long as you met those standards, those apps got in there. So YouTube's in there. Google Chrome is in there. You know, I've got Chrome installed on my iPhone. I think it's a better browser.

• 1:01:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It took them years, Friedberg.

• 1:01:17Jason Calacanis?

  Years, and they realized they had to give that up. They had to give up the browser.

• 1:01:21David Friedberg?

  Because that's what consumers wanted. That's what consumers wanted.

• 1:01:24Jason Calacanis?

  No, because they knew it put a target on their back.

• 1:01:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, the only reason that Chrome is there is because of the amount of money that Google pays Apple for search.

• 1:01:33David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I look.

• 1:01:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And that was a quid pro quo in that search deal. I will bet you dollars to donuts that that's the only reason Chrome is supporting an I O S.

• 1:01:41David Friedberg?

  Yeah, 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 shitty apps on the phone that didn't work and broke down all the time.

• 1:01:51Jason Calacanis?

  You will then go through the process of jailbreak. Should you be able to jailbreak your phone and hack it, Friedberg?

• 1:01:57David Friedberg?

  I don't, I don't think that I should be telling Apple how to make their friggin 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 want to. It's not a free market. It's a monopoly.

• 1:02:08Jason Calacanis?

  It's a duopoly.

• 1:02:10David Friedberg?

  I can go buy a friggin Samsung, or I don't know if H D C still makes phones, or Nokia or BlackBerry. I guess these guys are all dead because their products suck. But at the end of the day, if there's an alternative out there, I will buy it. And if you guys want to go fund a hardware company that builds a software platform on top of the hardware and make it compatible. I'm not a monopolist. I'm just pointing out like.

• 1:02:27Jason Calacanis?

  Robert Baron. Now I know why you didn't want to say your opinion. You're a goddamn robber baron.

• 1:02:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, it's really, it's really interesting that Friedberg, actually, on this issue, is actually the free market red pill. No, and everybody else is sort of blue pill. But David, you're right. I'm speaking my book.

• 1:02:44David Friedberg?

  Red pill, blue pill, like, you know.

• 1:02:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Our books. No, I'm speaking my book. I completely agree. I really like 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.

• 1:03:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 along with it.

• 1:03:23David Friedberg?

  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 forces might demand, you end up declining in 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 win 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.

• 1:03:55David Sacks?

  Here's the problem is that the developer network effects around an operating system monopoly are in Super Bowl. They, you cannot overthrow them. There are now thousands and thousands, maybe even millions of apps have been developed on the iOS 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

• 1:04:37David Sacks?

  innovation to move forward. And by the way, just on the Sicily 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

• 1:04:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  of sheets of glass. The only way to break up Apple is to force them to use their, let their operating system be licensed to other hardware.

• 1:04:56David Sacks?

  That's not breaking them up. That's not breaking them up. So.

• 1:04:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It would certainly create downward pressure on their margins if Dell could make a competing Apple desktop.

• 1:05:06David Sacks?

  Okay, 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?

• 1:05:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes, there's nothing to chop off.

• 1:05:14David Sacks?

  Amazon could spin out AWS very easily. Google could spin out YouTube or maybe Enterprise.

• 1:05:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Instagram, yes.

• 1:05:20David Sacks?

  Apple's 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 sideloading.

• 1:05:32David Friedberg?

  I feel like 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 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 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's going to come in and sideload 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.

• 1:06:13Jason Calacanis?

  This is the Princess Leia, you know, basic theory, the tighter you squeeze, the more galaxies slip through your fingers. And maybe TikTok 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

• 1:06:32David Friedberg?

  Shopify, and Shopify is crushing it. And they're incredible. And they're going to create this long tail of stores that ultimately could end up competing really effectively with Amazon. And we've seen it, right? And consumers choose it.

• 1:06:43Jason Calacanis?

  And just because Shopify is making a lot from SaaS revenue, does not mean that the majority of goods are not going to go through

• 1:06:48David Friedberg?

  I will tell you, the consumer, 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.

• 1:06:57Jason Calacanis?

  It's pretty good.

• 1:06:57David Friedberg?

  And it has forced innovation, you know, 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 AWS would have emerged, and therefore Google Cloud and all these other alternatives wouldn't have emerged if Amazon didn't have this incredible

• 1:07:17Jason Calacanis?

  Or the Chromium opens for project.

• 1:07:18David Friedberg?

  And think about the industry that emerged around Waymo.

• 1:07:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Android. But nobody, David, nobody's, nobody's suggesting to have broken these thing up in 2007. But it's 2021 and things have changed.

• 1:07:30David Friedberg?

  I don't know what's down the road that we're gonna miss out on, right? I mean, I guess my point is like, you know, let the consumer make the decision as opposed to create regulatory burden that over time has its own cost.

• 1:07:40Jason Calacanis?

  What is the downside to allowing somebody who wants to put an app store on their iPhone? What's the downside, Friedberg? 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 subscribe set of subscriptions? And I prefer the Android store.

• 1:07:56David Friedberg?

  The Apple argument, 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 come out over the last decade is incredible. And the new products that have come out is just mind blowing. And, you know, we all kind of miss the fact that these are the beneficiaries of scaled businesses. And, you know, you can't really see a startup go way more.

• 1:08:21Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, 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 at 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's 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.

• 1:09:05Jason Calacanis?

  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 people will be feel more reasonable about what you're taking.

• 1:09:14David Sacks?

  Can I, can I bring in the, that Substack article by Antonio Garcia Martinez? It was called.

• 1:09:19Jason Calacanis?

  You want to end on that or you want to end on McCaffrey getting killed by the Musa?

• 1:09:22David Sacks?

  I don't want to. I want to end the Apple segment on, on, um, on AGM's article, which was called Bad Apple.

• 1:09:30David Friedberg?

  Although. Great article, great article.

• 1:09:31David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, it was, it was unbelievable, but.

• 1:09:33Jason Calacanis?

  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 romance with Antonio. I mean.

• 1:09:45David Sacks?

  Which David are you talking about?

• 1:09:47Jason Calacanis?

  I'm talking about you, Sax. You are, are you in love with Antonio?

• 1:09:53Jason Calacanis?

  It's a big pause.

• 1:09:56David Sacks?

  Oh.

• 1:09:56Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, he got cut out. We lost him on Zoom when I asked him if he's in love. Apple came in and they pressed pause.

• 1:10:02David Sacks?

  Apple pressed pause on the screen.

• 1:10:04Jason Calacanis?

  He's frozen. Look at the frozen look in his eyes. Look how he's, that's the look of love.

• 1:10:10David Sacks?

  Come on, did you read that article?

• 1:10:11Jason Calacanis?

  Love.

• 1:10:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I thought it was really well written, too.

• 1:10:14David Sacks?

  It was well written, right?

• 1:10:14Jason Calacanis?

  He's a great writer.

• 1:10:15David Sacks?

  Great writer.

• 1:10:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's a really, really good writer.

• 1:10:17Jason Calacanis?

  Well, here's the thing. He is getting paid probably $300,000 to $700,000 to write on Substack after getting fired and after getting a giant settlement from Apple, whatever that's gonna 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 by Substack. But I thought his most salient point was Steve Jobs would not have been able to exist in the Apple that exists today.

• 1:10:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He would have gone run out of apples, what he said.

• 1:10:52Jason Calacanis?

  He would have been canceled. I mean, Steve Jobs would have 100%. David, you broke up when I asked you if you were in love with Antonio. You just, I think you got.

• 1:11:00David Sacks?

  No, my. Apple cut you off. Yeah, exactly. No, look, I think, I don't agree with everything AGM 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 wanted to mention it is it kind of goes to Friedberg's point about how much innovation, how much innovation is there really at Apple now that the genius who created it is gone? And 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 huddled ranks of some drab dystopia. And then AGM says, "The tech titans nowadays resemble more and more the harangue figure on the screen

• 1:11:45David Sacks?

  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 mobs. Supply is run by a supply chain manager. Exactly. And, and, and so there's no more innovation there. They are just a gatekeeper collecting rents. And, you know, Friedberg, 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 Apple's permission.

• 1:12:23David Friedberg?

  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 particular 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 wins. And you will see it because leadership driven by founders at those businesses could take them to compete directly with these guys.

• 1:13:06David Friedberg?

  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 Amazon.

• 1:13:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll give you a different take. I think that all four companies are going to win.

• 1:13:21David Friedberg?

  Including Amazon.

• 1:13:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 newsfeed and Google search are constraints. And people are going to test those things.

• 1:14:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think that in testing it, you're probably going to do what the government was successful, as Sacks said in 2000, which is just slow 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, Friedberg, 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,

• 1:14:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 1:14:54Jason Calacanis?

  Here's my prediction. I think the pirates are assembling themselves, whether it's Coinbase 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 hysterical, or the trolling right seriously, I feel like that is ending. And this great nightmare of hysteria 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 five or 10 or 20 years ago.

• 1:15:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Go reasonableness. Let's go reasonableness.

• 1:15:31Jason Calacanis?

  Well reasoned. All right, everybody. This has been another episode of the All In Podcast. Wait, what are you guys all doing today? Uh, nobody. What am I doing today? Yeah. What, are you inviting us somewhere? No, I'm just wondering what. Or is this a flex? Are you gone kai? Or did you get an electric, you got an electric surfboard, didn't you?

• 1:15:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's 8:30 PM for me, so I gotta go hang out with my family.

• 1:15:54Jason Calacanis?

  I've got the accelerator and a board meeting, and that's it.

• 1:15:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm in the Mediterranean, general area.

• 1:16:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. She's conquering Europe.

• 1:16:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm in Miami. But I did, again, I just want to say, I did go to the dentist, and I felt pretty good. Overcame my-

• 1:16:09David Friedberg?

  Zach, are you hearing about people moving back from Miami? This like little thing going on about people saying, no, that's BS.

• 1:16:14David Sacks?

  People are so happy here.

• 1:16:16David Friedberg?

  Yeah. Do you think you're gonna end up living there?

• 1:16:19David Sacks?

  Uh, no. I mean, we'll see.

• 1:16:21David Friedberg?

  Just a part time.

• 1:16:22Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe. No, maybe.

• 1:16:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did you, uh, did you get orthopedic, did you get orthopedic shoes when you bought that shirt?

• 1:16:32Jason Calacanis?

  Did you join a golf club? Are you in a retirement community right now?

• 1:16:38David Sacks?

  Guys, I'm on a, I'm on a diet. I predict by the end of the summer, I'll be thinner than Jason.

• 1:16:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Is there a weight back coming? What? Go to Dexascan. Wait, okay. Let, bring it. Go to Dexascan.

• 1:16:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No Dexascan.

• 1:16:50Jason Calacanis?

  Dexascan, whatever. Go to Dexascan. And let's go. Next episode, show your Dexascan.

• 1:16:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, way, way. Do it, do it, do it.

• 1:16:58Jason Calacanis?

  Dexascan, and then we'll propose a bet.

• 1:17:01David Sacks?

  What is your weight right now, Jake? Jake, what is your weight?

• 1:17:04Jason Calacanis?

  I think I'm 194.

• 1:17:06David Sacks?

  Okay.

• 1:17:06Jason Calacanis?

  195, something like that.

• 1:17:08David Sacks?

  And what's your height?

• 1:17:09Jason Calacanis?

  Five, eight and a half.

• 1:17:13Jason Calacanis?

  Five nine. What are you? You do look thinner. You do look thinner.

• 1:17:15David Sacks?

  Yeah, I think I've lost about five pounds already. I'm about 185 right now.

• 1:17:19Jason Calacanis?

  And what's your height?

• 1:17:21David Sacks?

  Five nine.

• 1:17:22Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, we're the same height and you weigh 10 pounds less. You look good. Are you on any pharmaceuticals to lose weight?

• 1:17:28David Sacks?

  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.

• 1:17:34Jason Calacanis?

  Go Saks. Nice. Yeah, good for you. You do look better. You do look better. You feel good? More energy?

• 1:17:40David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, I, yes, I was getting like, just that extra five pounds, like, kind of tipped me over. I think I got like another 15 to go, but.

• 1:17:48Jason Calacanis?

  You think you could be 170?

• 1:17:50David Sacks?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's my goal.

• 1:17:51Jason Calacanis?

  Have you cut back on drinking? Yeah.

• 1:17:57Jason Calacanis?

  You can only take on so many demon's hours.

• 1:18:01David Sacks?

  We had, we had some incredible wine last night, you know?

• 1:18:04Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I thought you were a vodka guy. Can't you just do like a vodka and soda and be good?

• 1:18:09David Sacks?

  I don't want to give a, I can't give a wine, you know?

• 1:18:12Jason Calacanis?

  I can't wait till we play poker and drink some more Tama's wine. That's so fun. Oh, I can't wait either. Love you, love you, Saks. Love you, Harry. Love you, Harry videos.

• 1:18:22Jason Calacanis?

  Love you, All In 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 first 10 people, it's $10,000 a month. We're going to monetize by allowing 10 people to be in the iMessage chat for $10,000 a month each. To break chops. It's only like 300 bucks a day to be in the, I gotta figure out a way to monetize this. All right, we'll see you all next time. Bye, bye.

• 1:18:58Speaker 04

  And instead, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, S. I. Queen of Kinoah.

• 1:19:10David Sacks?

  Besties are gone.

• 1:19:13Speaker 04

  That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway sex.

• 1:19:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, man.

• 1:19:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.

• 1:19:29David Sacks?

  What, your, the, beak? What, your, beak?

• 1:19:32Speaker 04

  What, your, beak?

• 1:19:33David Sacks?

  Beak?

• 1:19:33Speaker 04

  What?

• 1:19:34David Sacks?

  We need to get merch. Besties are back.