SPEAKER_01: Okay, so Jason you're gonna send a zoom link Great, I'm gonna make love to not that I'll take 70 minutes and then I'm gonna stretch and shower How long I'll be ready at 115? Okay. Awesome. Thanks. I just puked in my coffee a little bit, but okay
SPEAKER_03: It's just that he does he gets seconds and minutes mixed up, you know, it's a cold open
SPEAKER_01: That should be the cold open 70 seconds in paradise. Oh my god, by the way, that's why these seconds includes your mouth brushing his teeth
SPEAKER_03: Hey everybody, hey everybody it is another edition episode 34 of the all-in podcast with us today
SPEAKER_03: David Friedberg the queen of quinoa the science sorcerer of the pod Rain Man David Sacks hot off his 60th birthday bash in Los Angeles Sorry, sorry that was just going by me his looks and the dictator Chumash Palihapitiya fresh off of writing editorials about himself in Bloomberg Congratulations, everybody. Give yourself a pat on the back for that exceptional Freeburg is now my favorite bestie because he actually showed up my birthday party and like you guys
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'm sorry, David David. How do you expect people to react in 24 hours to fly to a different city?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was a surprise. It was a surprise birthday surprise to the gas
SPEAKER_00: It was a surprise to all the invitees as well. Let me tell you guys what you missed out on. Okay
SPEAKER_02: All right. Wait, let's give background Sacks is now
SPEAKER_03: 6050 years old 44 a last minute birthday party after I bought tickets to the Knicks in and the nets and invited family members Go ahead. And now we're the bad guys we fly down for the birthday. They you know, they shut on you on the cars from the plane to the to the house. We get to the house long driveway. There's like dudes making like watermelon tequila beverages while you hang out with your friends
SPEAKER_02: There's some dude from America's Got Talent playing the guitar or playing the violin in the driveway. The bathrooms are nicer than the bathrooms I have at home. You know, these these porta potties they rented in the driveway. And you know, we're all waiting of course, Sacks is late two and a half hours to his own party. We're all hanging out starving. But then we go into the party, sit down for dinner. And then who shows up as our dinner experience? It's the guy that won American Idol two nights before. So no one knows who this guy is, except 17 year old girls and myself. So I popped out of my seat. Oh my god, it's that guy from American Idol. I had to rush into the backstage to get a photo with him. Sacks's garage. And then they have like, Coolio shows up. So we're like sitting down to dinner for course two. All of a sudden pop comes out of the woodwork Coolio I lose my shit. I run up on the The Dance Floor. I grew up Coolio like it's like high school jams man. I mean, that's like in the car cruising. And at this point, I'm like seven tequila watermelon tequila is in so I'm like, oh my god. On the dance floor, you know, jamming up to Coolio. I think Coolio thought I was Sacks. He's like, oh two South African Jews, you guys all look the same. Coolio comes up, starts high-fiving me and hugging me. And I'm like, what's up Coolio? Oh my god, this is like a dream come true. He's like hugging me. His face is right next to my face. I didn't know what to say. And I like, I've had a little bit of tequila. And I'm like, I'm gonna have to get a little bit of watermelon. I'm gonna have to drink some watermelon. I'm like, I appreciate you. I didn't know what to say. I think I saw Freeberg throw his panties on stage 201. You are such a nerd. I didn't know what to say. I mean, what do you say? Can I go back to the part where you said that you were dancing and instantly the image I had was Julie's Louis Dreyfus.
SPEAKER_03:
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we have to find that security footage of Freeberg dancing.
SPEAKER_03: And then Sacks had Mark McGrath from Sugar Raid performing and he had that dude from Cool and the Gang performing and the game showed up to give Sacks a birthday wish. What an incredible...
SPEAKER_02: The game, the rapper, the game? The game came. Yeah. The game I was supposed to do a movie together like 15 years ago and you know, never panned out but he still remembered me and he came by to say hi on my birthday. It was pretty incredible.
SPEAKER_00: Very nice. Have you guys ever met Sacks' parents?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, of course. At his 40th. Yeah, they're so nice. They're so nice. We spent so much time with them. We loved hanging out with them. It was a really, really cool party. Happy birthday. Sorry we missed it. 72 hours is generally a shorter window than most out of city parties.
SPEAKER_03: I have a better excuse. I had a corporate offsite for my team. So I apologize, Sacks.
SPEAKER_01: It's okay. We missed you guys. It was really fun.
SPEAKER_00: I can't wait for 50 minutes. When Jacqueline sends out an invite for a party, you definitely want to make it. She knows how to throw a party. She knows how to throw a party. She does. She knows how to throw a party.
SPEAKER_03: So how does it feel being this old and just looking so exhausted, David? Tell us. I mean, you do look exhausted.
SPEAKER_00: Jacob, aren't you turning 50 this summer? I was already turning 50 in November. I did. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: I was in quarantine, so we're going to have to have like a post. How heavy is that? The 50th? About 194. Give or take. It wasn't actually super heavy for me. I mean, I think just you do think about, hey, we're counting down. It's the back nine. You want to make good use of the time you have left. And so, yeah, of course, it's something where you're going to consider, you know, your life, of course. Yeah. And just make sure you make good use of the time that you have here. Yeah, I think 40 was just a party, but 50 feels a little bit heavy.
SPEAKER_00: It'll still be a great party, but it does feel a little bit metaphysical, I guess. Yeah, I'm looking at metaphysical right now.
SPEAKER_03: So I'll let you know after I figure out what that word means. Well, okay, listen, we didn't get together on Friday, but here we are recording on a Saturday and lots of stuff going on. The thing I think I'm most interested in hearing from Friedberg about is the lab leak theory. And I think that this touches on a little bit of the politicization of science, I guess. There's a lab in Wuhan. I think it's more Trump derangement syndrome didn't allow us to see the forest from the trees and the same words just said by a different president all of a sudden invokes an investigation.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I mean, there is a COVID laboratory in Wuhan. It is the only one in China.
SPEAKER_03: And that's where the virology labs where they study viruses.
SPEAKER_02: Yes, but specifically, they've studied COVID viruses.
SPEAKER_02: They have. Yeah, that's I mean, that's a big class of virus. So it's the only one in China, and it's funded by America and China and the who?
SPEAKER_02: The Institute of Virology. I mean, this is this is, I mean, this is a Wuhan Institute of Virology was posting job wrecks two years ago for specifically for researchers of bat viruses.
SPEAKER_00: We know they were studying bat viruses at this place. And we want just happens to be the place where a novel coronavirus that seems derived from a bat virus, you know, like emerges. I mean, what are the odds? Right. I mean, this was such an obvious theory. The idea that, you know, COVID might have leaked from from this particular lab. And yet we were forbidden from talking about it, I guess, till Donald Trump was out of office. I mean, I think there's really two stories here. One is Chinese culpability. You know, in the spread of the virus, the other one is the media story. Why were we not allowed to have this discussion? Why did the media brand anybody who discussed this leak theory as being some sort of conspiracy theorist or a racist? Why were big tech companies censoring or removing any user generated content from their sites that were putting forward this theory? You know, why was the media and big tech doing this? I mean, is it somehow I can I can tell you why. But somehow they were telling us it was more racist to talk about a lab accident than to…
SPEAKER_01: David, because the person who could have explained it in a deescalated factual way chose to escalate it and be emotional and superficial. And that was Donald Trump. And so I don't I don't think that you could point to us and say we could have changed how the narrative is exploited. All of us are just normal average people on the ground. But there probably is sort of, you know, a hierarchy of like information. And there probably isn't a single individual beyond the president who has access to more information. And so if he was just more moderate and normal and basically said, hey, guys, there is a legitimate risk that we need to investigate. Because fast forward basically 18 months later, and this president who is moderate, you can like him or not like him, but he's kind of moderate and unoffensive, says basically that. And now we have this news cycle about investigating something we should have been investigating 18 months ago, just at least to get to the bottom of it, what was going on. But Trump had to make it such a big deal and about himself. And I think that's a takeaway. But just because Trump says something doesn't mean it's not true. I mean, he is occasionally going to say things that are true.
SPEAKER_00: And that's not what my point is. My point is, as the President of the United States, you just have to have more discipline.
SPEAKER_01: Well, but but I think you're right in the sense that the reason this became a forbidden topic is because the media had to act like anything Trump said is is untrue or crazy or racist.
SPEAKER_00: It's a failure on both sides then, David, I mean, the media is failing to be independent critical thinkers. And Trump is failing to be a good leader and be clear.
SPEAKER_03: And that means you have to be an independent critical thinker. The media's first obligation here is to the truth. They're not supposed to distort the truth or push forward a false narrative because of the political consequences and that they didn't want to be seen as helping Trump in any way.
SPEAKER_00: And that's really what their motivation was. But I find it equally disturbing that big tech was censoring the truth on this issue. The whole point of having a free marketplace of ideas is so that we can arrive at the truth. And how is that going to be possible when big tech is censoring? I really disagree with you. I think that the big tech's decision to censure this information was a derivative of the first two things.
SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't think that decision would have happened had Trump been normal. And then, you know, media would have just listened and said, Okay, maybe there's a chance this guy's right. He's saying and acting in a normal way. Let's go investigate. And then big tech would have basically said, we don't know the truth one way or the other, but it seems legitimate, sane people are on both sides. So because Donald Trump published mean tweets, it was okay for big tech, or rather the media to basically portray the correct theory as a lie and a conspiracy and it was okay for big tech to engage in censorship on that basis?
SPEAKER_01: What I'm saying is the following. The President of the United States, independent and whoever it is, has a very specific responsibility to be measured, to be unemotional, and to be about the bigger picture. That's what the President of the United States' responsibility is, no matter who holds the office. And then the media's job is to fact check that and hold that person accountable and call that person in a transparent manner. Freeburg, yes or no? Is it a viable theory? And then let's get to odds and percentages. I mean, as a scientist, do you think that this is because came from a wet market or some accidental exposure, somebody eating bat or some cross contamination, a bat and a pig and then somebody eats the pig? Or do you think somebody from the from the lab accidentally brought it home with them?
SPEAKER_03: Don't know, doesn't matter. I feel like we need to kind of recognize that bio warfare and bioterrorism is a real risk. And I think more importantly, that this moment, whether or not it's proven, it will never be proven or disproven one way or the other. So it really doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_02: What will ultimately happen is we are going to kind of become much more cognizant of these sorts of threats to the human population. Let me be very specific. A kid in high school could write up some RNA code today on their computer, order that RNA to be delivered to them by what's called an oligo printing facility, get this RNA, boot it up, turn it into a virus, and they could release that thing into the wild. There are several very cheap, over the counter internet based ways that one could do this. So the fact that there's some sophisticated government run lab doing this, I don't think matters as much. What's really compelling in this whole storyline is like, holy shit, this is possible. It's possible that there's either an engineered or discovered virus. And it shows just how if these things leak out and they are infectious and they are transmissible can become a real risk to the global population. And it's not just viruses. There are other mechanisms of bio warfare that can be printed and created using similar techniques of genomics. There are proteins called prions and prions cause other proteins to fold in a mismatched way. This is actually what mad cow disease is. It's a prion. It's a protein that you find in the brain. And if you eat this particular protein ends up in your brain, it causes the other proteins in your brain that match that protein to misfold. And it basically replicates and creates this cascading effect. So basically like aliens, like aliens. Yeah, but I guess my point is like whether it's prions or viruses, there are techniques and there are capabilities and instruments now that all humans have access to that theoretically could allow for the booting or the creation and the distribution of truly terrifying tools, biological tools. Now this comes hand in hand with the incredible optimism and opportunity that these tools present, much like chemical engineering presented in the early 20th century to humanity. We could create things like DDT and kill ourselves, or we could create things like artificial fertilizer and feed ourselves. And so there's this this tremendous as there is with any new technology, this tremendous kind of optimism and fear. And it's going to create I think, a very powerful debate narrative over the coming decade on what do we do with these tools? Is it even possible to regulate them? Where is this going to go? And what are the risks? And it's not necessarily just government agencies that we need to kind of be considering here. It's the fact that there's a democratization of this tooling, which is enabling all right. Does it matter if it was leaked or not? It's free. Berg is saying it doesn't matter. Big picture. Of course, of course, it matters. And the only reason we don't know conclusively that it came from a lab is because the Chinese government wouldn't let they thought of the investigation, they wouldn't let the investigators come in. And so the smoke is pouring out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and they will not allow the firefighters in because those firefighters come from the West, we could establish the truth.
SPEAKER_00: of what happened if they would let us talk to the scientists who work at that lab, if they could go, what would you do about it? Let's say that you find out that it did like, yeah, well, at a minute, well, first of all, we're talking about a virus has killed millions of peoples, millions of people across the world. It's caused enormous damage to the economy to our economy to economies all over the world. You know, we have to think through carefully what the consequences would be. But it matters a lot how the Chinese government handled this at a minimum, at a minimum, we need to decouple our own data.
SPEAKER_00: We need to decouple ourselves from China with regard to anything that's a vital American interest, we cannot be dependent on them for the manufacturing of our PPE for antibiotics for our pharmaceuticals. It is insane. So there's nothing we're gonna do. We're not there's nothing we're gonna do to China in terms of sanctions, if we find out they covered up a leak, if there's an accidental leak, and they covered it up. We're not
SPEAKER_03: there. It acts more as a warning sign for us to do better and be more independent. It's a principle of escalation. They are still the critical supplier to most of American manufacturing and industry. Every product that American companies make most products have some sort of Chinese produced input. And
SPEAKER_02: well, I would start I would start with I think the measured response that's also in our national interest is to reassure any critical components that we need for our pharmaceutical industry. So drug manufacturing and the manufacturing,
SPEAKER_00: it's about sanctioning China. It's about getting our act together. Chamath, you agree with this? And what do you think if we did find out that it was in fact, a covered up leak, which I think is the most reasonable assumption here? What should we do as America as a country global reaction to China?
SPEAKER_01: I agree with Friedberg and David Sachs in parts. There's nothing to do, I think we have to move on. I think it's important to get to the bottom of it. It'll maybe help eliminate some of the politicizing of science that we've seen as a result of this thing. But ultimately, what's done is done. Instead, what I think we have to learn from it is you can't elect hotheads, and people who are unpredictable and unreliable, to basically be our truth tellers and fact tellers. And if anybody but Donald Trump was the President of the United States in that moment, we probably could have had a chance of getting to the bottom of it when it counted. And whether you support him or not, it doesn't matter. The style made it impossible for anybody to really listen. That to me is the most important takeaway of that moment, which is he does have a responsibility above everybody else's. The second thing is, I think this is the most important macro investing theme that I've seen in my lifetime, which is that globalization as we know it is over. And what Saxipoo just said is what I really believe, which is that you have to onshore, and you have to move to a place where you value resiliency over just in time. And if you look at the businesses that get that need to get built, in order to enable resiliency, you will see trillions of people who have hundreds of dollars of opportunity. And I really, really believe in that. That's very exciting to me. So instead of being anti China, which I don't think is productive, I think it's better to be pro America and say, hey, let's just figure out how to build this stuff ourselves. Now, here's the problem, though, when the rubber meets the road, the biggest impediment to onshoring jobs into the United States are the same people on the left, who actually claim that there is no upward mobility. And here's why.
SPEAKER_01: When you go and you want to basically balkanize supply chains, you are introducing inefficiency. You're also introducing some puts and takes in areas that today have been like third rail issues. For example, the people on the left believe in climate change more than anybody else. But when you explain to them that in order to eliminate hydrocarbons, you actually have to mine critical minerals and metals out of the ground. They're the same people that say no way. Well, you can't have one without the other. And you actually have to have a rational conversation and realize like, listen, we're gonna have to do this. And so for example, like Biden this past week, somewhat capitulated for environmental interest and said, you know what, yes, climate change is critical, but we're going to try to get them from everywhere else but America, it's not going to work. So that's kind of where like, I'm a little frustrated. But those are my two takeaways. Number one is past, let's just get past China, and let's just focus on the United States. And number two is going to be like, well, let's just get past China. And let's just focus on the United States. And number two is globalization as we know it is done. And we need to focus on resiliency. Did you guys read the Wall Street Journal piece on the miners who in 2012, were the ones who, you know, were clearing, essentially bat dung. Yeah. And so this this is a really fascinating turn of events that we're starting to know what this lab was doing. If you didn't see the Wall Street Journal story, we'll put it in the show notes.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we'll put the show notes but in April 2012, six miners fell sick with a mysterious illness after entering the mind to clear bat. Wano, I guess, is what this poop, which is supposed to be a primary source of fertilizer worldwide. Yeah, so three of them died. Chinese scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were called in to investigate after taking samples from bats in the mine identified several new Coronaviruses. Now unanswered questions about the miners illness, the viruses found at the site and the research done with them has been
SPEAKER_03: elevated into the mainstream an idea once dismissed as a conspiracy theory that SARS COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 might have leaked from the lab in Wuhan. I mean, this is just becoming more and more obvious. My my gut tells me that our government already knows this has known it for some time, the 90 day sort of window that they've given the Chinese to kind of give us an answer as to what happened here is window dressing. And then we're going to start the process of becoming more independent from China, because there's I mean, there's nothing you could do. Why? How could we retaliate for an accident? We're not gonna get in a war over this. No one's suggesting that. But I think we have to open our eyes to the regime that we're dealing with over in China. And just to add a layer to this analysis. Novel Corona Coronaviruses are not the only thing coming out of Chinese labs. China is also the number one producer of fentanyl. Obviously, yes. And that's another truth that we can finally talk about now that Trump is out of office. People
SPEAKER_00: haven't wanted to talk about it, or they thought that you were hysterical or promoting a conspiracy theory if you talked about it. But I just posted two articles in the chat, one from Brookings and one from NPR, about how China is the main source of fentanyl that's pouring into our streets. First, it makes a stopover in Mexico, and then somehow it gets smuggled into the US. This is a huge problem in our cities. And, you know, I think this is not this is not accidental. You know, this is this is deliberate. Yeah, the Chinese your position is the Chinese government is deliberately sending a super opioid drug into the United States for profit or to destabilize the country and different cities and create more division between the left and the right. Because homelessness and wealth inequality is getting mixed up with a super drug, as opposed to a homeless problem. This is
SPEAKER_03: getting a little this is getting a little I know it's getting crazy. Well, that's what I'm reflecting back to sex. But how's it a conspiracy theory? We know that China is mass producing the fentanyl that's coming into the US. We know that that fentanyl is creating a gigantic crisis of drug addiction to homelessness on the streets. We know they could stop it if they wanted to. They have total control over that country. What is the conspiracy theory? Yeah, I don't know. If that's the equivalent of saying I'm going to get a
SPEAKER_02: shot. I'm going to get a shot. Why are you saying America produces all the world's cards? It's not America. There are organizations within the United States that are under the purview of the US government. The CCP is handpicking who gets to run ByteDance and Ant and they're retiring CEOs. They get to decide what is produced in that country and who produces it. You're telling me that fentanyl can be a disaster.
SPEAKER_02: And I mean, in the US government, when they say to their counterparts at the Chinese Communist Party, Hey, we need you guys to stop producing fentanyl. Do you think that conversation is happening? Yeah, it was this was an agenda item during the Trump administration and talks between
SPEAKER_00: what the feedback was from China. I mean, what's the counterpoint? I don't know enough. But what is the counterpoint that China would then say, like, why they can't stop it or why this is still happening? I mean, my understanding is there are 1000s of kind of, you know, call them under regulated factories and facilities in China, any number of which this could be
SPEAKER_02: Let me ask you a question. It just just trying to have a fentanyl addiction problem in their streets. We don't know. I mean, maybe the answer is no. And the answer is they round up every single person who's a Hong Kong dissident who would sell a book or if anybody goes to the
SPEAKER_03: Tiananmen Square protests, you're going to jail for five years, they just announced Hong Kong citizens who go to the Tiananmen Square Memorial this year are getting five years and if you tweet about it, you get one year in jail. So they can, they can control anything in their country.
SPEAKER_01: Just to build on your control point, I tweeted this to you guys in the group chat. We can post this as well in the show notes. But there was an article in Forbes this week that said friends don't let friends become Chinese billionaires. That was the title. And the data point that this is an old story, by the way, it's like eight years old to see. No, no, this was written now. That might have been no, I think read the story. I think at the top it says the story is like eight years old. But anyway, it is true that Chinese billionaire Chinese billionaire dies every 40 days, unnatural deaths have taken the
SPEAKER_01: lives of 72 mainland billionaires over the past eight years. 15 were murdered. It's the Wild West over there, man. 17 committed suicide. Seven died from accidents and 19 from illness and 14 were executed suicide accidents.
SPEAKER_03: But they execute the 14 for Can you imagine 14 billionaires just get executed?
SPEAKER_00: Is that story real? What is that story from tomorrow?
SPEAKER_02: I mean, well, this this maybe is a good segue into Coinbase fact check. But this is an article in Forbes.
SPEAKER_03: All right, India versus WhatsApp.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'll give you the rundown on the India thing. So basically, you know, there there is a right to, you know, free speech effectively in the Indian Constitution. But then India passed the law. Effectively, I'll just I'll just summarize it as traceability, which basically means that if you have an online network, and you post something in the network, if an Indian sensor or an Indian regulator or authority basically says, Hey, hold on, this is an issue, they have the right to basically have the network. Or whoever owns that network, trace it down to its originating source. Now, that's a really important distinction, because there are certain products. So for example, take WhatsApp, where a feature of the product is end to end encryption, right? So it's hopping around in ways that are very difficult and near to impossible for anybody to really figure out. And now all of a sudden that that that element which used to be a feature is now a bug because if the Indian government says, Hey, hold on that statement, I have an issue with I need you to figure out who said that they'll essentially have to undo all their end to end encryption to figure out. So then WhatsApp filed a court case in New Delhi, this week, essentially, I think asking for an injunction. And so I think this is going to go to a head, but you have this now state of affairs, which I think is really interesting, which is so you know, we talk about how we have an issue with Chinese sensors. Well, now, here's a different, more complicated example, because this is the largest democracy in the world. And what they're effectively saying is, we need to have an equivalent red button, or a red button, or a red button, or a red button. And a set of levers, so that we can figure out what's going on when we choose. And there's going to be a lot of implications, because inside of India, what's different than America as a democracy is, it has lower average incomes, it has lower health, it has lower literacy rates, it has more religious sort of tension. And it's got, you know, many, many more young people who are more prone, theoretically, to get, you know, bamboozled by misinformation and disinformation. And so, you know, India sees those facts on the ground, and probably wrote this law with those intentions in mind, right. And it's had a bunch of these issues, by the way, particularly between Muslims and Hindus. And so what do you do? You know, what is Facebook and WhatsApp supposed to do? What is Google supposed to do? What does it mean for internet rights? I think it's a super, super complicated problem. And do you prioritize misinformation and disinformation above the right for people's privacy? And you're going to see it unfold in the largest democracy in the world over the next couple months. I don't really know how I feel about it, to be honest, except I do think that Indian government has a right to set the rules of their own country. Well, and set the rules they are I mean, remember, they also banned TikTok in an instance and hundreds of other apps. I think 60 apps from China have been banned permanently in India. So India obviously has a different approach to China, which is we're going to put our foot down. Of course, they're involved in some skirmishes on their border. But yeah, it does seem Saks, what do you what's your thought? You have personal right to privacy, end to end encryption, and then you have, you know, the ability to do that.
SPEAKER_03: And then you have, you know, the ability to run backdoor a backdoor to it. Yeah, this is another major sledgehammer to globalization. You know, in the in the mid to late 90s, we had this beautiful dream that we're going to create a single internet for the whole world, it would create a single common market, a single place for people to interact and go and that all these barriers, these geographic barriers, tribal barriers would come down over time. And now what we see is the trade barriers have come up.
SPEAKER_00: Instead of having one internet for the whole world, it's fragmenting into a bunch of different internets governed by local laws. You know, it started with the great firewall of China creating sort of a separate Chinese internet. Now you're starting to see country by country regulations. And I just think it's it's sort of an inevitable reaction that the power of governments and sovereignty comes before the power of corporations and they're reimposing their will. And I think the question for all these companies is going to be where they decide they're willing to play. And, you know, I think now I do think it's a very different choice whether you want to play in India, whether you want to play in China, because in China, when the government tells you to hand over information on dissidents, you really are aiding and abetting what could be political oppression. Whereas India being a democracy, I don't think the choice is quite the same at all. And so, you know, I do think these tech companies are gonna have to decide which countries they want to sort of play ball with. And ultimately, I think they probably gonna have to make a determination based on working with the democratic ones, and they're probably gonna have to exit the ones that engage in political repression.
SPEAKER_01: In my, first of all, I think that's really well said what you said, in my in my annual letter last year, I kind of wrote like, here's the white paper on how to dismantle big tech. And there were two frames, one was around taxation, which we're also seeing, but the second was on this regulator regulatory point, David, that you're bringing up. That's the simplest way to sort of break these companies down, which is if you have to engineer now, instead of one monolithic code base, multiple instantiations, where you can't even get the leverage of like, you know, cross border data centers. I mean, by the way, there's a really interesting thing that the Biden tax bill also proposes on this dimension, right, it's going to prevent you from sending IP, you know, into places like, like Ireland and keeping it there, right. So you can't have all of a sudden, you know, code that's running in Ireland that executes something that makes money so that you can pay Irish tax versus something code that runs in America, that's largely, you know, user oriented, that's not going to happen. That's not going to be allowed anymore. Right. So all of these things are happening at the same time, essentially, to rein big tech in making it almost a whack a mole problem inside these companies where you're fighting a tax thing, for example, Google's fighting antitrust in France, then you're fighting antitrust at the EU level, then you're fighting, you know, traceability and encryption in India, then you're fighting, you know, inversion of an IP in America. Wow, like, it's like, all of a sudden, the lawyers inside of these companies will outnumber the engineers. And I think a lot of this is the downstream consequences of what happened back in January when Twitter and all the other big tech companies deplatformed Trump. Remember, at the time, it wasn't just, you know, conservatives are in the US, who raised alarm bells, it was Angela Merkel in, in Germany, it was the finance minister in France, I think India talked about it, I think Modi had a statement about it. They all woke up and said, Whoa, a head of state can be deplatformed by Jack Dorsey, he's more
SPEAKER_00: powerful than the President of the United States. And countries all around the world started looking at the power of big tech, and realize that they're subordinate to all these tech billionaires and oligarchs.
SPEAKER_01: Tell me about Coinbase and fact check. I think this thing is incredible. I mean, I have to say, by the way, the first thing I'll say about and this is this is the exact opposite of what I said the last time Brian Armstrong wrote a memo. This memo is excellent. And if you haven't had a chance to read it, we'll put it in the show notes. But Brian's essay is super, I think there have been a couple of CEO memos in the last two months that I think, honestly should be in the Hall of Fame in the Smithsonian. One is the Toby Lutke memo that the internal email he wrote. And the second one is this one that Brian wrote, because I think this, this thing is probably one of the most important things, in my opinion, that has been written by a CEO, which has the potential to lead to huge systemic changes. Well, he echoed, he echoed a lot of the things we've been saying on this pod about going direct, don't let the press tell your story, go direct, get you get the truth out. They're basically what the what the blog said is they're going to start using the Coinbase blog as a forum basically as a media publication for crypto related things. And the fact check part is that when the popular press gets crypto wrong, which they do frequently in Coinbase's view, Coinbase is going to call them out and correct them.
SPEAKER_00: So basically, here's what he says the increased awareness has been great. Unfortunately, we also see misinformation published frequently as well, rather than traditional media, social media or by public figures. This doesn't always come from negative intentions. Our business and crypto can be difficult to understand. And often people are rushed to post first impressions online, making mistakes in the process that other times misinformation comes from people publishing their own agenda, or from people who have a conflict of interest. This is not unique to our business or industry, of course. So how should companies respond? One turn the other cheek to fight and
SPEAKER_03: three publish the truth. I believe there is a reasonable middle ground between these first two options, turning the other cheek and fighting, which is to simply publish the truth in a thoughtful and respectful way. The way you fight back is you publish the truth. So that to me, that's not a choice. Those are the same thing is you can either remain silent, take the high road, which always results in people believing whatever you know lies are being said, or you fight back by telling the truth.
SPEAKER_00: fact check approach is not about antagonizing or embarrassing others, as Brian Armstrong, but simply sharing what happened through our own channels. It also means sharing the good, along with the bad with radical transparency.
SPEAKER_03: I just want to say that I wish him all the success in the world. Because I think if, if, if an as this works, which I think it will, because people in the crypto universe are more prone to actually get their own information and do their own diligence. I think the spillover effects to other companies can be really positive. All of this is going to the same place, which is the intermediate layer of traditional media is basically getting whittled down. Right? There was a there was a different thing that happened in those last few weeks, which was
SPEAKER_01: the Tribune company, I think it was basically got taken private by some hedge fund. And in it, they talked about what has happened in the industry. And the most incredible thing was the amount of revenue that has disappeared from newspapers. And literally from the 10s of billions of dollars to basically single digit billions today over the last 20 years, which effectively means traditional media's revenue sources going away. And if then all of a sudden, if you take that media, model away, and there are no more economic incentives, then it stands to reason that the overarching incentives that remain are around reputation, which is then about facts. And so the fact that Coinbase will have a place that says here are the facts, and we're going to put it on chain permanently on the record. That's, I think, a really powerful idea. And recent Horowitz, by the way, same situation, they're doing it in venture capital, you know, one of the largest and most prolific and important sources of funding the future. They're on the record on chain in their own way, right with their own media. And, and they're now helping to tell the stories of other folks through it. David Sachs, you know, Sachs has put so much content in terms of teaching people about the business that he knows really well. But at the same time, he's also been able to write about what he thinks about certain things. And then eventually, on behalf of his companies, he'll be able to say things and do things as well. So all of a sudden, not all of a sudden, I guess we've seen it. But if we had to put a label on this, this is the dismantling of traditional media, it is happening in real time. And it's accelerating. It turns out, you know, as a subject being interpreted as you're being through The New Yorker right now in your story, Jamal, and I am through my Business Insider profile, you know, all these profiles that they do, they're interpreting your life when people could just tune into the podcast and hear us talk about it, right. And it's like you can go direct to the source, listen to 34 episodes of all in, or you could read some interpretation of the story.
SPEAKER_03: And then you can get a little bit of a description from somebody trying to get pages. Well, here's my here's my observation. The thing is that people who create artifacts on a real time basis, so in many ways, we have all collectively now started to create a weekly artifact of who we are as people. It leaves very little leftover for interpretation. And so then unfortunately, what happens is journalists trying to write content, have to introduce some form of flourish to stand out. Yeah. Because if you're just repeating something that was said on the podcast, or something that we said,
SPEAKER_01: it's a good point. Tweet, there's nothing left to talk about. It's kind of already been said. And so that's what creates boundary conditions for lying. And it's what creates boundary conditions for mistruths. And we've seen a handful of reporters back in the day fall, you know, fall into that trap. We, you know, there was a couple writers in the New York Times that got pinched for lying. It's going to be harder and harder to lie. So in many, in some ways, I'm actually pretty optimistic that that reputation management and truth will be easier to do in the future when this intermediary layer doesn't exist. But it'll take many other companies to do what Coinbase is doing and recent us in this podcast, us with our tweets and our memos and our posts. I think it's it's all in the good positive direction. Yeah. And Armstrong in his in this blog talks about the gel man amnesia effect, which we've talked about on this pod before, which is
SPEAKER_00: I saw that. Yeah, which is great. I love that. Because you know, the gel man amnesia is you read the newspaper about a topic, you know something about you see that 50% of it is just wrong. Then you turn the page to some other part of the newspaper, say, you know, world affairs, you don't know as much about and you just assume it's true. And we all know that the media is maybe 50% right about everything. And so yeah, I mean, so this is why we have to hear from experts directly. I think it's why it's the decentralization of media. It's why I think this like heavy handed, centralized censorship by big tech is so offensive and anachronistic is to try and control what everyone can say, especially when it later turns out that you know, big media gets so many things wrong, like the lab leak theory. So it's it's this is definitely the way things are headed. I would like to invest some money to basically have freeberg a platform to explain science.
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's right here. freeberg. Tell us about the science of NBA games and large gatherings in the age of vaccination.
SPEAKER_03: I'm pretty sure you got COVID this week, J. Cal.
SPEAKER_02: I'm pretty sure I definitely lost my voice at the Knicks games. But I have to say this was pretty stunning. To go to a Knicks game have everybody in the arena show their VAX card to get in. I suppose somebody could photocopy one or steal one, you know, it sounds like a lot of work. And I don't know what the if there's a
SPEAKER_03: penalty for doing something like that. But what when you see a full arena Madison Square Garden, everybody vaccinated freeberg do does it give you any pause as a scientist that this is not a good idea or this is too soon? Or do you think heck yes, this is what we should be doing proper risk assessment finally.
SPEAKER_02: No, we should do what we want to do. They have it, folks. Do what you want to do. There's a great science moment way to keep the freeberg ratio high.
SPEAKER_03: That was supposed to be the science segue.
SPEAKER_02: We're ready for a monologue. Let's go freeberg. Come on. Let's go freeberg. We're poking the tiger here.
SPEAKER_00: freeberg, why don't you tell this is something I thought was incredible. Amgen this week at the end of this week got approval for this really incredible drug that basically targets k razz mutations in lung cancer, which has been this body of cancer that has basically been somewhat intractable for a really long time. And these guys have cracked the code, it looks like and now the drug is 18,000 a month, I think. But, you know, that's that's for insurance to take care of, but pretty incredible breakthrough that people are really excited about.
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you if you were tracking it. No, but I think that there were several other gene therapies, there are several drugs that got approval in the last like month. One of which is this or actually about two months ago, this drug that uses targeted CAR T therapy. Basically, you know, we all have T cells. And we can edit our own T cells and we can edit our own T cells.
SPEAKER_02: Now, using this CAR T therapy, this is a series of techniques where you basically reprogram your T cells genetically to go after a specific target in your body. And so there are now a whole series of CAR T therapies that are coming to market that are actually in market, you can go down and go get treatment today for several of these CAR T therapies that you know, not too long ago were really difficult to kind of understand, you know, being real. They take your T cells out of your blood, you know, as you go and you get your blood drawn. A couple of weeks later, you come back to the doctor, they've taken the T cells out of your blood, they reengineer them. The way they reengineer is really interesting. They basically use this technique where they zap them with electricity and it gets this gene editing in there and then they get edited. And then they put those T cells back into your body. It takes about an hour to get them re injected back into your body and then they do their job. And they in many cases are being used to target cancer cells, very specific receptors. So now the T cell has been programmed to go find that cancer cell receptor, they hit the cancer cell receptor bind to it and then eliminate that cancer cell.
SPEAKER_03: So essentially, in plain English, you're putting this super T cell back in the body, it goes through the blood, and then it finds something far in that shouldn't be there, like a virus or cancer, anything you want bacteria, whatever you want it to find, and it snipes it. But yeah, what it does, remember, it's looking for a specific protein. And that protein, for example, can be expressed only on the surface of specific cancer cells. So if you found certain cancer cells that you have a cancer, and we know that there's a specific protein that shows up on the surface of that cancer, which is common in many cancers, because they all follow very similar kind of mutations, you can end up targeting that cancer cell and only that cancer cell and your T cells go to work and they go and wipe it out.
SPEAKER_02: I think the breakthrough this week was in multiple myeloma and thyroid cancer.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there was a multiple myeloma one, which was a Bluebird bio product. And then I think it got picked up by Bristol, or someone else picked it up. So they basically paid the fee and they run their own good manufacturing practice facility where your blood is shipped to them. They do all the gene editing with your own T cells in this facility, and they ship it back to your doctor and it gets re injected back into you.
SPEAKER_02: There are 600 car T cell. Is that what it's called car space T cell?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so cars stands for chimeric antigen receptor. And that is the little call it think about it as like a seeker that's on the outside of your T cell, it goes in, it finds a specific thing it's trying to bind to. And so you're reprogramming your T cell to have a specific receptor. And then as soon as it finds that that as soon as that receptor binds to the correct protein that it's looking for, boom, that cell that it binds to gets wiped out.
SPEAKER_02: Are we going to talk about the crazy media mergers and spin outs that are happening because it seems like just in the last 90 days, the entire industry is rewiring itself. And it's kind of a pretty significant set of transactions that are underway. Amazon is buying MGM, which owns most importantly, James Bond, James Bond has done $20 billion in adjusted revenue for their movies. And you can obviously see many different backstories and television shows around the James Bond. So this is kind of in my mind, of that eight or 9 billion, they spent six billions on the franchise for James Bond so that Bezos can play James Bond, obviously, while he retired.
SPEAKER_03: If you take a zoom out, several years ago, you guys may remember, early 2000s into the mid-aughts, all the telcos started freaking out. Because they were sorry, all the media companies were freaking out. Because their controlled points of distribution, which were network television, and then their cable television stations, and the movie theaters were getting disintermediated by the internet.
SPEAKER_02: So all these internet companies showed up like YouTube and Netflix, and we're going direct to consumer where consumers were not getting access to content directly without the control channels that the media companies controlled. At the same time, the telcos were freaking out. Because it turns out people didn't need cell phones anymore or need phone lines anymore. What they needed was internet access and internet access was quickly commoditizing. So the telcos were like, holy crap, being in the business of providing internet service, not a great business. And so they needed to be making more value per user per year, then we're going to be able to make charging them for internet access. So the telcos started buying up media companies. This is what Verizon and others did. And the media companies, remember Verizon bought AOL and Yahoo, AT&T bought Time Warner, and then the media companies, the old school media companies that were kind of like still decided not to sell and to stay on their own, they decided, well, we got to go internet. So we got to figure out how to be on the internet and compete in this world where companies like Netflix and Amazon are going direct to consumers. And, you know, they all started building their own internet services. HBO Max, Hulu. And meanwhile, the tech companies that went direct to consumers, they're realizing, you know what, if these media companies aren't going to play ball, we better get our own media, we got to get our own content. And so then they started licensing, buying, funding, and building their own media companies. And so there's a total reorientation that's underway. Now, what's interesting in the last couple of weeks is Verizon decided, you know what, we can't be in the media business, we're not very good at it. And they spun it out, and they're selling AOL, Yahoo. And then meanwhile, this really interesting deal is AT&T gave up on owning Time Warner. And so it turns out that the telcos who thought that they could own the media and monetize it, you know what, it's just a pain in the butt. It's another business, we can't really figure out how to add value to our subscriber base with these products. They're going to have to exist on their own. We don't know how to run them because we're not media guys. And they're spitting out. So now the telcos, the interesting question to ask is, what are they going to do next? What's the next move for them because they got to keep growing. Meanwhile, the tech companies and the media companies are just like this. And there's 50 subscription services, each with their own silo and balkanization of content. And we're all going to have to choose as consumers, do I want HBO Max or Paramount Plus or you know, the bundle I get from Comcast, and it's going to be a nasty battle for the next 10 years. Where you want content, you're going to have to go pick and choose who do you want to buy content from. And so, yeah, I have a theory. I think consolidation happens when markets don't matter anymore and are getting commoditized.
SPEAKER_03:
SPEAKER_01: And what I would say about all of this, what it shows me is that we're now transferring to the phase of the market where it's all about cost of capital. And right now, the only person that actually understood that was Netflix. And Netflix issued billions of dollars of debt, and they've started to finance every piece of content under the sun. And being small, and trying to compete against Netflix was not possible. And now we're in that part of the market where content is actually not that important, because there is an enormous diversity of it. So no one single person can really corner that market. And so then it becomes how much can you make and how cheaply can you make it? And there, scale matters. So I think like what this shows me back to sort of what we talked about before on the other part about like facts and truth is, this is part of a much broader, you know, media puzzle that's becoming more obvious, which is traditional outlets that push top down content is kind of yesterday's news. And what it's being replaced by is more and better forms of user generated content, and highly commoditized professional content. And in all of that, the economics are going away. So if you if you if you are not sure, go and look inside of TikTok. The content that individual people create inside of TikTok is unbelievably good. And they are training an entire generation of kids to consume content 15 seconds 30 seconds at a time, which has huge implications, by the way for how they consume music. So for example, if you guys like look inside of TikTok, and then go to YouTube and look at the most popular videos, it's absolutely the same. And same thing with Spotify. It's 15 second clips now. No, you know, these kids want to listen to the hook of a song, and then they won't listen to it. I see how my kids use it. And it's crazy because like they get addicted to a hook on TikTok, they try to go to YouTube to learn the lyrics, they only want to learn the lyrics for the part that's in the TikTok.
SPEAKER_01: And then they move on to challenge. Yes, whatever it is. And so the the point of all of that is that content costs are going to continue to go down, which means the economics are going to go down, the margins are not that good. And so it's all just a commodity that almost doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I don't know about that. I think for the top tier IP, like you can't displace a Disney, and they are growing portfolio of IP and those things are high margin and you know, having 250, having 250 to 500,000 500 million people paying you monthly has never existed in the history of humanity. And so it's never been an at scale service like this before. The closest was Verizon and AT&T when they hit 100 million members. I'm not disputing that people won't pay 999. What I'm disputing is the denominator of what they're paying for is increasing so fast that no one piece of content matters, Jason.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_03: I agree with that collections matter, right. So the IP of Marvel, Disney, Pixar put together, right, like pick Disney launched this thing with no direct to consumer relationships with when they launched Disney Plus, what do they have now 60 million subscribers or something
SPEAKER_02: 100 million subscribers, which is incredible. You guys have kids, my kids watch this stuff on Disney Plus for the rest of our lives over and over and over they'll put on friggin Moana I cannot tell you how many times I've watched the seashore scene of Moana. They want to watch the beginning, they want to watch the middle part. It's just like infinitely reusable content. And so Disney's content library is so powerful for that particular demographic, basically the demographic of anyone with children, that it's an instant on kind of moment. These other guys like Paramount Plus, and you know, HBO's obviously got some special content, but it shows how much content matters, right? The quality of the content for the demographic is so key for this to work. All these media companies that have kind of a broad, dithered, you know, library of half quality, half good kind of content, they're gonna struggle, man, because they're not gonna feel like they're ringing a little too much out of it with this too much content production. There's like 50 shows about superheroes, then there's like 50 shows that are like, you know, meta commentary on the superhero shows, it's almost becoming exhausting. Like how many Homeland style shows are there going to be how many Soprano style shows are going to be Game of Thrones? I'm getting burnt out.
SPEAKER_03: I think you're making my point, which is that no one piece of content matters anymore. It's all the same. So my big takeaway from Bezos buying MGM and these other, you know, M&A events is it's less about the decline of content, even though there are more and more options that are ever have been and therefore more competition. And it's more about the rising power and wealth and influence of big tech.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you look at throughout history, whoever is buying studios in any given era, they're the people with the money and power and they're seeking influence. It was GBC, it was Gulf and Western by Paramount in the 1970s, an oil and gas company or in the picture. So that's right, Sony Sony Columbia in the 1980s, when you had the era of the rising sun. So whoever has the money and the power and seeking influence are the ones buying studios. That's what Bezos is doing right now. But I think this time it is a little bit different in this sense that we're reaching an end state of digital convergence where the where content and the digital distribution are now reaching their kind of final state. And so I don't expect these studios once they're owned by big tech to ever go anywhere. And I don't think they're going to be trading again every 10 years. I think this is the end state. Amazon wants this library for their streaming service. And I think that big tech is going to gobble up the rest of these libraries and that's where they're going to stay.
SPEAKER_03:
SPEAKER_02: You think all media will end up in tech? Yeah. I mean, I think big tech is going to eat Hollywood. Look, we've been on this path of convergence now since the mid 90s with the internet. And the question was always, we knew that tech and Hollywood were converging and joining more and more. And the question would be on whose terms this final merger would take place.
SPEAKER_00: And I think that big tech now you just look at the market caps. They're so much bigger than the market caps of these studios that eight billion surrounding era. It's a rounding error for Bezos. I mean, it's one day's revenue or whatever less. So obviously big tech is going to win this battle. They are going to own Hollywood.
SPEAKER_02: But except for the few guys that have scale to actually be successful like Disney, Disney, maybe HBO to some extent, we'll see how I mean, look, Zaslav who runs this. He's an incredible media guy and he gets it. But they could be like this Discovery Plus slash HBO Plus, whatever that combined business ends up looking like. That could be a competitor. And there may be like there's two to three libraries that are deep enough and strong enough to compete and stand on their own as a tech kind of platform. But what's also really interesting is that all the telcos are exiting. What are they going to become? Right? It's clear. What's interesting is they're not they're not tech companies. Jump pipes that are fast are important. Right. So here's the thing with the telcos, the telecom stack is we know that tech is taking over Hollywood. But the question is what part of the tech stack?
SPEAKER_00: And what's happened is the part of the tech stack that has the direct relationship with the audience, Apple, Google, Amazon, who aggregate millions and millions of consumers, they're the ones who should actually own the content because they're the ones delivering up the content to the consumer. And everybody else who's lower down in the stack, who are just the pipes, they don't really have a claim on these libraries. The pipes are super valuable. The pipes are the pipes are valuable, but they're a commodity. What Elon is doing with Starlink is going to disrupt them. I'm not saying they're not valuable, but they're not in a highly leveraged position to do anything with the content. They're going to keep increasing speed in order to keep you paying 30 bucks a month. Because like now that they're at they realized, you know what we can't we can't run media businesses and we can't monetize it. Well, what are they going to do?
SPEAKER_02: Focus on faster bandwidth, get us to gigabit. I mean, it doesn't matter. I mean, like you guys are like you guys are so fucking old. Like you're just like talking about yesterday's news. Nobody cares. This is what I mean consolidation in markets like this should tell you it's time to move on and focus on something else. This is a dead industry with no profit. So what happens to at&t and what happens to Verizon over the next 10 years? It doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I agree. I agree with that part that it doesn't matter what happens to these telcos. They should be done pipes. Again, they're not in a leveraged position to create value around content. They never should have owned it. But I do think there is major, major significance in Amazon and Apple and Google and these other big tech companies owning Hollywood because they have, they're going to combine the influence they already have with the influence of Hollywood. And you already have, again, censorship on these tech platforms, are they going to start censoring the type of content, the Hollywood producers, I think these issues are going to get more and more important over time, because so much control over our politics and society and culture are being concentrated in the hands of, frankly, our industry. But this is what I think about the other the other side of that coin is what we talked about before with respect to things like Coinbase. While that's happening, more and more people who have their own distribution are going direct. So let's just separate entertainment, and facts. From a fact
SPEAKER_01: perspective, I think we're seeing everything sort of become highly decentralized. And I think that that's constructive. Now, there'll be services that will be there to help us navigate. But I think that's what's happening. With respect to entertainment. I just think like, it was our generation was the last one that actually even cared about movies that cared about these 10 productions that that cared about water cooler type conversations on a Monday morning books, novels, kids will not understand what the hell we're talking about. They're like, What do you mean, you used to run into work on a Monday? You think it's a couldn't care less? Really? They still love going to the movies. They love video games. Yeah, I mean, by the way, they're obviously like that, you know, the combination of media tech, and they're just the kind of ultimate manifestation of where it's all. And it's not just our kids just look at the monthly active usage numbers at roblox and epic. And yeah, it's it's nuts. And so they are voting every day with their attention. And at the end of the day, the thing
SPEAKER_01: that has never been improved is the nut or increases the number of hours in a day. So to mark your point, your point on the telcos, you know, as an investor, I own a bunch of Verizon and AT&T stock, if you were running that company, what would you do? I would quit. You might run it for capital and then buy assets. Oh, wait, they did that.
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_03: You can't. Right. These businesses have had horrendous capital allocation for decades. And the reason that they were allowed was that they were they were part of a culture of insiders, or other ins where other insiders said that they were important. But as it turned out to individual users who are making usage decisions every day, they were not important at all. And this is what we're learning that the Emperor has no clothes. So while everybody was, you know, looking around themselves saying
SPEAKER_01: AT&T is important, and hey, you know, let's go and like, you know, buy all of these crazy old school media assets. Young people were like, I use Snapchat and Tiktok and YouTube, and I'm done. Thanks. Goodbye. Right. And who owns those platforms? I mean, you're right that professional content is being crowded out to some degree by amateur content. But now, the the big tech companies own the professional content or the studios for creating them. And they own the user generated platforms that lets the amateurs create the content. So big tech now owns everything.
SPEAKER_00: No, but you're seeing the next shooter drop because the thing that I think content creators haven't yet realized, and social media personalities and influencers haven't yet realized is how can I own my own distribution and monetize my relationship, that feature of the web will get figured out in our lifetime. And that's what
SPEAKER_01: starting to a Patreon and then Apple is now no no no
SPEAKER_03: that Spotify is doing paid content. These people are doing stripe accounts direct with their fans.
SPEAKER_01: Those people are too old, they're not going to figure it out. What I'm saying is, there are going to be people who are teenagers today, right? Or kids who will be teenagers in a decade, 20 somethings, who will figure this out for whom the idea that if you're a Charlie D'Amelio, right? Your Tiktok's top biggest star with 120 odd million followers, that to go through an intermediary to talk to your people will not in the future make any sense. And I think David, that's that's where the next thing will change. I just think it's unreliable to expect laser beam Mr. B's Charlie D'Amelio all these people to go through the know because they have they have such nice, I think
SPEAKER_00: they could go direct to some of those guys could go direct now that they're huge, but it's it's no different than building a name on the New York Times and then starting your own substack. It's gonna happen.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but you can't go viral and you can't get discovered unless you participate.
SPEAKER_00: Not an or you can use the platform and you can have a new way you will build scale, you will build scale on a platform, and then you'll go on your own because you'll want to control and monetize your own relationship. It's it is what these folks have done. Meaning like how Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian had built incredible scale and wealth is effectively through that they build scale through Instagram and Twitter and wherever TV show. Now, the only
SPEAKER_01: thing that they haven't done is they've monetized it through offline goods. But if somebody figures out how to monetize it through an online relationship, then what you're really doing is you're learning how to build scale in an established platform. And then you on ramp to something else that's also online and you go from there. To think that it won't get figured out, I think is being made. It's being figured out. It's being figured out right now the street is figuring out there's something called ghost, which is like an open source version of sub stack. It is an open source version of sub stack and people are building direct relationships
SPEAKER_03: and doing their own Patreon. And if you leave sub stack, you get to take your stripe account with you. You use your stripe account. So now it's you can go on sub stack for a year, leave and keep all your subscribers. I think this solution will get figured out through the crypto community. And the reason is because that is by definition, to your point, Jason, fundamentally distributed and tied to a payment and a store of value. Because that's what effectively this is, it's like, where is the value of somebody's reputation. And right now, we don't have a way of measuring
SPEAKER_01: it. And you can you can put that on chain in some way. I don't claim to know how. But I mean, people have talked about this as all these different, I hope I hope that happens. I hope that crypto figures out a way to create decentralized social networks and all the rest of it. But it doesn't exist yet. And the only way that Mr. Beast or Charlie D'Amelio or any of these people became stars is they went viral on YouTube or tick tock or Insta, they on a on a big tech platform. And so right now strategy is going to be doing both.
SPEAKER_03: You use the platform. The power, they have all the power right now. Because if they deny you access to one of these platforms, you're
SPEAKER_00: cares about Trump. You're talking about Trump. You're so completely lost your mind. Trump in their life, but you Okay, you're the one who mentioned his name. You're the one with Trump on the on the brain. What are you talking about? We love that he's bad. You love he's bad. Or do you want to
SPEAKER_00: say no, I'm not missing it at all. But you want to work or not? We're trying to do takeaways on these moves by big tech to buy Hollywood Studios. And I'm telling you, it's about who has the power, money and influence. And it's all good. I'll go out on a limb and say, we're, we're, we're in the sort of the, the August of their supremacy. So and again, I would just say, David, if on the one hand, it's a whack a mole problem with governments on taxation and regulation. And on the other hand, you have a way where you can have distributed social currency and value. Wow, I mean, these big tech companies are getting bombarded on every single side. And I think that's just a hard place to be.
SPEAKER_01: One last thing for you guys on a market check my 10 year break evens remember, we're now down to 242. It's been 18 days. What is he talking about? My little inflation check my little inflation check. And seems like things are trending in the right direction.
SPEAKER_01: Hmm. The market's back the markets back a little. There may not be inflation. Well, I think what happened to moth is you put it well, I think a couple of pods ago, the market sent a signal to Biden that look, this is too much taxing too much spending. It's too inflationary. And I don't know if Biden heard the message, but several Democratic senators breaks, and they pumped put on the brakes, they reduce the size of the package. They're now talking about maybe the capital gains rate going to 25. The infrastructure bill is, you know, been chopped to 25.
SPEAKER_00: So I think there's less inflationary pressure coming out of Washington, hopefully. Yeah, what I what I heard last week, I spoke to some folks in Washington, what they said was exactly what you said, David, they're not going to, at best, they're going to get the cap gains. Sorry, no movement on cap gains. They don't think it can happen at all. So that's not going to move.
SPEAKER_01: Okay. Number one, number two is that corporate will go to 25, but not to 28. And then number three, they're going to really tighten the IP loophole, which will prevent American companies from shipping IP to places like Ireland to not pay tax. They're going to make it impossible to do things like inversions, all this kind of stuff, and then scope that down. That's actually, to your point, a very, very good outcome for the markets. So this was actually productive if this happened.
SPEAKER_03: If the infrastructure bill gets I think the Republicans now they first McConnell said 600 to 800 billion. Now I think they're they're at 900 billion. I think the democrats started at 2.3 billion. Now I think they're at 1.7. So hopefully it's being brought down to a more reasonable number. That's not going to bust the budget
SPEAKER_00: point to 1.3. And everybody will have something. But here's the crazy thing. I mean, the US government debt is now at 100% of GDP. We owe our entire economy. It's pretty crazy. And there's still other countries that are 1.5 right and double like Japan and others. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: But Biden Biden $6 trillion budget would increase our budget debt or debt from 100% of GDP to 117%. If he gets his way too much. It's a World War Two level of spending. But what is the benefit equivalent to World War Two that we're getting out of this thing?
SPEAKER_00: Well, also, we're having a surplus in so many states that we're doing lotteries. Thank you, Queen of Kenwa, Rain Man and the dictator. I'm JC Calacanis. We'll see you next time on the All In podcast. Bye bye.
SPEAKER_00: We're going all in. Besties are gone. That's my dog taking a nice near driveway. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge door because they're all just like this like sexual tension that they just need to release. You're a bee. We need to get merges.
