All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E6: Big Tech antitrust aftermath, potential effects of an M&A clampdown on Silicon Valley & more

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All right, everybody, welcome back. It’s another episode of All In Podcast, the podcast that is

racing up the charts despite the fact that we record it every three or four weeks. There’s no

marketing. There’s no ads in this podcast. It’s just four friends who play poker together who’ve

decided to talk about the most important issues in the world. Welcome back to the podcast,

David Friedberg, the queen of quinoa himself. Obviously, climate.com eats and an undisclosed

beverage startup that I’m not supposed to talk about. Sorry about that. I know a lot of people

were tweeting about this beverage startup. You’re still not ready to talk about the

beverage startup. Thank you, Jay Pal. Yep. Welcome back. I always appreciate your promotions.

But when will the beverage startup? By the way, do you guys want to talk about Jason’s

home address? Because I have that, I think. Please, no. I want to ask, is that a picture

in the background? I love space, by the way, as you know, but is that a picture of Uranus

or what is that picture? I think that’s Saturn. It’s Saturn. It’s not Saturn.

Friedberg, obviously taking the first Virgin Galactic flight. Chamath Palihapitiya, of course,

with us here. The prince of SPACs calling in from an undisclosed location that is not burning down

like the United States. How are you doing on your vacay? Doing really well. Thanks. I’m giving you

the three-button salute, as I told you. Yeah, thank God the microphone is perfectly positioned

so we do not have to look at your chest hair, all six of your chest hairs. Oh my God.

It’s like a thousand-dollar suit that’s missing all of its buttons, or shirt, rather. I mean,

they couldn’t afford to put buttons all the way up on your, like, probably $2,000 shirt.

Austerity measures. When I get back to the United States, as Jason said,

my haberdasher will meet me at plain sight and show the three buttons.

Yeah, when he leaves for Europe, they remove the three buttons, he comes back,

the haberdasher puts them back on each shirt. He does that for the entire wardrobe. And, of course,

chiming in is Rain Man himself, David Sachs, professional blogger and the fund manager of

Kraft Ventures, of course, before that working at PayPal with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and a

bunch of other famous people, two of which have gone on to have demonstrably more success

than Sachs, but Sachs having, of course, more than success, demonstrable success,

than the other 72 rocket scientists from PayPal. In between, he did a little company called Yammer,

which Microsoft bought for a billion dollars. Speaking of big companies and big tech,

we had a big tech hearing this week, and Jeff Bezos, Sundar, and Zuck himself,

as well as Tim Cook, two founders and two hired guns, people who were hired for their positions,

defending themselves from what I thought was some pretty good questioning. My expectations

were very low that anybody on that panel would know what they were talking about.

For me, I thought Jeff Bezos did the best job. He had a great opening statement,

and he was the most candid, and I think least likely to get broken up.

Going around the horn here, Chamath, who did the best job in the hearings? I don’t know if

you saw all of them or just clips, but who do you think shined?

I only saw, to be honest with you, your recap, which I thought was, frankly, really, really good,

and we should probably link to that in the show notes so people can listen to it.

I saw a couple of answers. The thing that jumped off the page to me was I read a little bit of

Bezos’ statement. I thought it was pretty fire. I thought he did the best job positioning himself,

but the reality is it’s what I said a few days earlier on CNBC, but I just thought going in,

this whole thing was set up to be performative theater, and it basically was that. The level of

questions are just so poor. The level of understanding is so bad, and then people

just use it as a way to grandstand, and everybody did. I wasn’t completely blown away by any of it,

to be quite honest. What do you think, Friedberg? Who had the best showing in those hearings?

I think Zuck was the most eloquent in the on-point responses. He was super, super well-prepped for

this thing. I think Bezos and others, they had great prep work done for their statement,

but in terms of warding off the attacks, I think Zuck did a great job. It was weird. It didn’t

feel like Tim Cook should have been there. It was a random thing that he was there because

everyone had an ax to grind, and the ax that everyone had to grind was a little bit different.

It wasn’t like this was a true objective discussion about antitrust, and so the ax

that people had to grind were pointed at Google and Facebook and Amazon in different ways.

Tim Cook was, hey, yeah, this is cool. You guys go ahead and give your responses. I’m going to go

back to work. Do you think that’s because Apple does not have a monopoly position on a numbers

basis in any one era, and or because their products are so loved and universally used?

I think it’s actually a function of what these companies do. If you look at the Jim Jordan rant,

I don’t know if you guys watched this, but Jim Jordan did this big rant at the opening.

He was the worst.

And he went on and on. The first thing he said, he’s like, big tech is out to get conservatives,

and then he went on and gave all these examples about how Twitter has been pulling down Donald

Trump’s tweets and flagging them, and Facebook’s been cancelling certain people on the platform.

His whole ax to grind was really about censorship on social media platforms,

which has fucking nothing to do with antitrust and has nothing to do with Apple’s business.

I guess my point is, and then other people have issues with Google’s dominance in ads and Amazon’s

impact on local business. There wasn’t much of an ax to grind, frankly, with Apple.

At the end of the day, as I said, I just don’t think that it was a function of,

you know, a true kind of objective antitrust approach. And it was just more about like,

hey, we’ve all got different things we want to address. And we finally got these guys here,

let’s beat them up. And, you know,

Saks, what do you think you with Friedberg that it was performance art? Or do you think that

or performative rather, do you or do you think that there are actually substantive

issues that came up during the hearings that we should discuss here?

Well, you know, it was both, you know, certainly there was a tremendous amount of grandstanding

and political theater and the politicians on both sides wanted to take shots at the

companies for various reasons. I mean, I think they have a slightly different hierarchy of hate.

I think the left sort of hates Facebook the most because they blame it for Trump’s election,

which I think is kind of a ridiculous scapegoating, which we should talk more about.

But and then I think the right is most suspicious towards Google. But I think there are, you know,

legitimate issues here as that were brought up. And I think the congressional hearing

did score some hit points. Your previous pod did a good job showing some of those.

These hearings were teed up, apparently, over the past year by

a series of subpoenas of records that the committee, this is the House

subcommittee on antitrust had teed up. And so there were some moments where I thought that,

you know, the representative scored some hits on, you know, Facebook and Google.

Who took the biggest hit in all of this? Who do you think has the most, putting aside all this

performance, obviously, and the politicization of everything in our country, and Jim Jordan,

who to me is like the, he’s like the dad at the baseball game who like, the Little League game

who runs on the court and pushes the umpire and gets banned for the season. Like he just

yells over everybody for no reason. But what is the actual, what was the punch that landed

that is the most valid, as we go around the horn one more time here, now that we’ve got our initial

thoughts about it, what punch landed the squarest in one of these companies’ faces?

Well, let me set this up. I think there were three big areas of concern where just about all

the companies, with maybe the exception of Amazon, took hits, although even, you know, Bezos took

hits. I think one is with respect to anti-competitive actions that these platforms are

taking, particularly with respect to the applications or small businesses that operate

and are dependent on those platforms. I think all of the companies were interrogated about that.

You know, Bezos took a hit when he had to admit or concede that the company may not have always

followed its policy with respect to using its, you know, third-party sellers’ data to figure

out how to compete with them. You know, Google was interrogated about snippets. This is a big

snippet. There was news today, actually, just out of Australia, that the government’s going

to order Google to pay small businesses for the use of its content for snippets, which,

you know, so the regulations are kind of heating up on this. But sort of the first area was sort

of anti-competitive, and I think Facebook took some hits with respect to the Instagram acquisition,

which, you know, Congressman Nadler really went after him, and then I think

Jayapal as well. And that’s a tremendously threatening issue for Facebook, because if

it is forced to divest Instagram, it would just be crippling for the company.

All right, so let’s, yeah, let’s take, let’s go.

Just to, Jason, just set the table. Two other issues that I think came up, I’ll just very

briefly. Number two is sort of cozying up to China. I think Google is the one that’s most

vulnerable here. And then the third issue is sort of this issue of censorship and bias

with respect to content and politics in the election.

Which has nothing to do with, which has nothing to do with antitrust, the censorship issue. So

let’s table that one. That one.

I think you’re hitting the nail on the head. This was not about antitrust going in. I think people

were, you know, kind of confused. Even Jim Jordan, just, I don’t think he has any clue

what he’s talking about. He doesn’t know the difference between regulation and antitrust.

He doesn’t know the difference between the Sherman Act and like, you know, Section 230.

I think they’re all kind of making it up as they go along. So in many ways, I think personally

that the companies that were the most at risk going in were the same companies at risk coming

out. And so, you know, if you had to stack rank to risk, I think Facebook is number one at the

top of the list. Then I think it’s Google. Then I think it’s Apple. And then I think far, far,

far down is Amazon. In many ways, Amazon is the most inoculated simply because

the end market that they operate in is so massive. And the market that Facebook operates in

is so new, yet so constrained with very few competitors. So in many ways, I think that’s

how the risk cuts. I really think that the antitrust legislative framework that exists

today isn’t enough to touch any of these guys. Instead, I think what really happens is more

regulatory. And if you really think about what these guys are very concerned about,

it’s more that Facebook largely, and then Google to a smaller degree, essentially can be kingmakers

with respect to popular opinion and sentiment. And I think that they want to have regulations.

And I think that there’s a good historical precedent for a bunch of industries

that have had to come under regulation when they effectively get to 100% distribution,

whether it’s meat or airplanes or radio or television, agriculture writ large,

automobiles and transportation. Whenever a market basically serves 100% of the total

addressable universe, governments step in. And they don’t necessarily legislate and trust bust.

They fundamentally regulate and tax. And I think in many ways, that’s just as bad. And frankly,

in some ways, it’s worse. Because if you do that to a tech company, you’re basically crippling

the one thing that they’re supposed to be very good at, which is to innovate. And that’s the

only thing that they can use to basically keep their stock price high, which is then the only

thing that they can use to get people to continue to work for them. So that’s the sort of circular

loop that breaks if you regulate them. And I think that the risk coming in was the same as coming up.

So Facebook, let’s let’s take them. Let’s take them one at a time. Facebook, I thought had the

worst performance because it was pretty clear that Nadler was setting them up not only to not be able

to buy a company in the future. But in that clip, he was sort of teeing them up that maybe the

Instagram acquisition should be unwound and they should be forced to spin that off. Because they

were saying over and over and over again, that Zuckerberg put in emails with his management

team that they were going to buy these companies or kill them or copy their feature sets. And even

though that may not be explicitly illegal, the fact that they’ve hit as Chamath is talking about

such incredible market share with billions of users, and because of the track record of Zuckerberg,

you know, which may not be at all related to this, but it sets the table.

No, but Jason, in fairness to Mark, that decision wasn’t made when Facebook had market dominance.

That decision was made when Facebook was still fundamentally at risk. And there was a large

period of time where a lot of other people had they been left to their own devices or properly

capitalized, could have actually become a relatively, you know, important competitor to

Facebook, Instagram could have been at that point. But then Snapchat was the opposite Snapchat,

they were at scale, and then they were going to buy it and threaten them. Either you sell to us,

or we’re going to copy the features. I think I think I think what a more

logical and defensible reaction. Like, I just think it’s not defensible to say,

oh, you know, at Facebook, I didn’t like the acquisition you did 10 years ago,

basically, because it worked. Yeah. And so I’m going to punish you 10 years later. That’s crazy.

That’s stupid. Yeah. In the review mirror. No, no good. Yeah. A more reasonable place to be is to

say, okay, this thing, meaning communications writ large, has become a critical piece of societal

infrastructure. And we are trying to figure out now what the rules should be. And rules shouldn’t

be brittle rules should be evolutionary, they should map, you know, to the moral decisions and

ideas and frameworks of the time. And so, you know, we have to figure out, for example, number

one, interoperability. So how can you message across all these multiple networks? You know,

another simple example, you know, we legislated the ability for emergency services to be able to

send a message on your mobile phone line and your landline, you should probably be able to have a

backdoor into all the messaging networks simply for that reason. So the point is that, you know,

there are all kinds of things you can do today to make this infrastructure layer of society

operate in a more predictable way on behalf of what was your best you have you thought about

a regulation, then let’s stick to Facebook, and then we’ll go to Amazon. Chamath, have you thought

about a regulation that would make sense to Facebook, whether it’s divesting an asset,

or maybe a certain percentage of usage or allowing Facebook Messenger to work with iMessenger to work

with, you know, Twitter DMs? I’ll answer it in different ways. So look, I mean, for 20 years,

I’ve run these kind of businesses, like from, from Winamp to AIM and ICQ to then, you know,

at Facebook. And so, you know, I remember in at AIM and ICQ, we, you know, did all this hand

wringing and all these meetings between us and Microsoft and Yahoo, to make our messaging

networks interoperate. And, you know, eventually, we were basically just cut off at the knees,

because other people just moved around us. And eventually, it all just morphed anyways away from

these sort of brittle messaging networks. My, my kind of view is that I think what’s best for

Facebook is a status quo. And so, you know, if they can basically, and by the way, I think the

strategy is and Mark wrote this in his manifesto, but a couple of years ago, you know, this is sort

of what led to Chris Cox resigning, if I’m playing, you know, sort of like conspiracy theorists,

if you read Zuck’s manifesto, what he was basically saying is, listen, we’re going to

take all these product, and we’re going to take all that code, and we’re going to mesh them all

together in such a complicated, convoluted mess that if and when somebody ever tells us to rip

it apart, it’ll take another five or 10 years to do it. And that’s effectively the technical read

on that manifesto. It’s just like, you’re going to make it technically impossible to unthread

these things as independent. And your thesis is that’s a strategy against an antitrust breakup. I

find that no, I just think it’s a really smart strategy. I mean, he wrote it, and he published

it online. So it’s not like it’s hiding anything. He made it right. I mean, it’s the beautiful part

about it. He made it completely in the clear. Now. So that’s, that’s the strategy is to basically

make it one monolithic code base so that if and when I think I don’t, I’m not sure if this is the

intention, but frankly, if and when somebody knocked on the door and said, hey, you need to

strip apart WhatsApp and Messenger and Instagram, you can say, well, look, it’s one monolithic code

base of, you know, 50 million lines of code, it’ll take me 10 years, but sure, I’ll figure it out

somehow. So yeah, you know, I think what’s good for Facebook is a status quo. Now that’s different

from what’s good for politicians. And then what’s different for consumers, I think what’s good for

consumers is fundamental interoperability. Now, this is then what touches, you know, Android and

Apple as well, like the idea today that you cannot have a group text message that can only include

iPhones, you know, on the off chance one of your friends is an Android phone, you’re basically

fucked is kind of which happens every six months on our group that Freeberg, what do you think,

in terms of Facebook, and any potential action that could be taken? Or any possible solution

to them having such a dominant position, because they are the only one of the four

that has a dominant position? I would think about the, you know, how these businesses

are kind of built right there in all these businesses, there’s an infrastructure layer,

the infrastructure layer, in the case of Google and Facebook is reasonably similar,

it’s a bunch of data centers and hardware and software infrastructure to run all of their

services on top. And then on top, there are consumer products, and then there are advertising

products and the and the customer base for the consumer product is obviously users and the,

you know, customer base for the advertising products is these advertisers that pay to access

these consumers and give them ads and get clicks from them and sell them stuff. And so if you think

about what do you pull out, it sounds like on the Google side, there’s, there’s there’s concern,

both on the advertising and on the consumer products that are being offered, and the scale

and the leverage that Google has, and how they make those products kind of come to market.

And with Facebook, it’s really about this absolute kind of monopoly on, you know,

on social products and services, whereas Google’s got this great monopoly on search products for

consumers. So you could kind of take a layman’s view and say, hey, like rip out WhatsApp and rip

out Instagram, and you know, then Facebook is good. But the problem is, in that infrastructure

layer, they’ve created the social graph and this connection between, you know, all the people that

you know, and they’ve got all this stuff sitting on the same servers, and Chamath points out all

the same code base, and there’s a lot of commonality there. So the reality of like,

ripping something out from there is a lot more nuanced and a lot more challenging than just

saying, hey, you got to get rid of WhatsApp, or you’ve got to get rid of Instagram. And it’s more

likely some sort of Chinese wall situation where you end up with a negotiated exit, continued

ownership and control. But you know, almost like what happened with the banks in the 80s, you kind

of got to separate one side of the business from the other. That could be one way that this goes,

because you know, it’s really hard to kind of break apart given the way that these businesses

are built. What do you think about a solution, David, in which they conceded, hey, we’re not

going to buy any more of these competing social networks, which I think would be kind of hard for

them to buy one right now. I think that’s done. I mean, like, you can even see that Google Fitbit,

I mean, Fitbit is, you know, what is it a 1.2 or $3 billion acquisition, it’s going to take almost

two years to close. And Google’s already making concessions, antitrust concessions to the EU,

right, or, you know, this is a $1 trillion company trying to buy a $1 billion company. So

I think large acquisition in M&A by the big four, it’s impossible.

Is that good for society, Chamath, or bad for society? Is it good for our business of investing

in startups or is it bad for us investing in startups? Well, I think it’s good in one very

important way, which is that it forces the capital markets to support these companies. And what I

mean by that is, you know, I’ve told you guys a couple times, but in the year 2000, there was

8000 public companies. In the year 2020, July 2020, as we sit there August 2020, there’s about

  1. So we’ve seen a shrinking of 50% of the number of public companies. So the idea that

there isn’t an M&A on ramp anymore, means that more capital and the capital markets will become

more fluid. And we will support emerging growth companies in the public markets is my suspicion.

If only there was, yeah, if only there was an easy way for these companies to get public,

David, respond.

Well, I was, I mean, I think that I think you’re raising the right issue, which is

the chilling effect on M&A that these hearings are going to have, even if Facebook is never

broken up, or, or that deal is sort of retroactively challenged. The big four tech

companies have to be looking at these hearings. And now they’re going to be second guessing

every acquisition they want to make, and it’s going to have a chilling effect. And I think

that’s a disaster for Silicon Valley. Because we know that most of the startups don’t work.

And, you know, and there’s really only, you know, most of them go out of business, and

there’s only two good exits. One is an IPO, the other is M&A. And if you take the M&A exit off

the table, because it’s no longer sort of feasible from a regulatory standpoint, not all those

companies are going to IPO.

Yeah, but David, what you’re saying doesn’t make logical sense, because if those companies are

shit, anyway, they should be going out of business. And who cares about an aqua hire,

or some mini modest hire that gets you two times your money?

There’s a lot of acquisitions, where the acquirer is picking them up because they provide an

important component or technology or product, but that that that startup would not have been

a great standalone public company.

Yeah, would Yammer be worth more today? And would you be worth more money? Would your

investors be worth more money if Yammer had SPAC’d? Yes or no, David?

The answer is absolutely yes.

Okay, so David, your argument makes no sense. I think you’re playing to lose.

It’s not that it doesn’t make sense. I think David does bring up something that’s important

in the following way, which is there’s a lot of companies, Jason, that get to a certain

amount of scale. And then they basically start running out of oxygen, whether it’s because

they’ve overbuilt, or they’ve overhired, or they’ve overspent, or whatever.

Or there’s a natural audience for the product.

Yeah, maybe. But I think a lot of it is just sort of more overbuilding and just kind of

distracted capital allocation. But then, you know, you need somebody to come in. And this

is the problem with Silicon Valley. And I think what David speaks to is the following.

If big tech M&A is off the table, the single biggest thing that’ll change is valuations

by late stage privates. Because if you know that you can’t get a 2x mark to market from

the last post, guess what’ll happen to your post money? It’ll go way down. Right? Because

that was always the understood assumption. You know, all these guys, these late stage

money can come in and say, well, sure, I’ll put, you know, two and a half billion dollar

post a $3 billion post. Because in their mind, what they’ve been taught is that immediately

sets the mark to get acquired as 2x. And in many ways, Facebook started it because Facebook

came to buy Instagram, literally weeks after that growth stage round at 500 million. That’s

why they paid a billion one. They doubled the valuation. But wouldn’t it? Hold on a second.

Wouldn’t it be healthier, though, for the entire ecosystem, if we weren’t building those

late stage companies to be flipped to a major company, maybe merging them with medium sized

companies are slightly stronger, and then taking them public to your point, Chamath.

The point is, if you don’t have a fucked up cap table, you can do all of those things. It’s the

fucked up cap table. So this solves that. Who needs this late stage capital coming in and doing

these fakaka crazy rounds? Why not take the company’s public earlier?

Well, because look, you don’t always know what’s going to happen. I mean, this is the reason why

Instagram sold is the reason Yammer sold is you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. You

don’t know what the outcome is going to be. And in a lot of those cases that you’re saying,

what would become IPOs, if they weren’t acquired, well, a lot of them just, you know,

aren’t going to work. It’s crazy to be taking those exits off the table when both the startup

and, you know, the acquirer or the big tech company, you know, want to do the do the transaction.

And one of the reasons why I think these, you know, there are a lot of these M&A type outcomes

is because big companies have realized they’re not very good at R&D at sort of good at sort of

new product development. And so what they’ve done is they’ve outsourced a lot of their R&D

budgets to M&A. And so they let the startups run the experiments, you know, in any category,

in any new area, you end up having a dozen of these startups get funded, you know, we make

fun of it because they’re all, you know, there’s so many competitors in every little space.

But those startups are the laboratory where all these experiments are taking place. And then,

you know, the big company comes in at the end and sees which experiment did well and they acquire it.

Freeberg, what do you think?

I think it’s, I mean, I think the advantage of being a platform business is you can

plug something in and immediately gain a lot of scale from it. So, I mean, you know,

Instagram and YouTube are perfect examples. They were, you know, reasonably fast growing,

had millions of users. But once they were plugged into the engine of the bigger platform,

they were worth 100 times as much over a few years, because of all the usage and the

infrastructure and the distribution, etc, that was provided. But, you know, it looked insane

at the time to pay a billion dollars and a billion six for those two businesses. Each of

them are easily worth 100 billion plus today, probably some multiple of that. And so, I think

Sax’s point is right. It’s like, I’d rather as a… Look, I worked in M&A at Google for

a couple of years early in my career. I left Google in 2006. And a lot of the infrastructure

that makes Google’s revenue engine was acquired. You know, we bought a company called Applied

Semantics for 100 million bucks, or 100 something million dollars at the time,

which ultimately became AdSense. And Applied Semantics could scan a webpage

and basically determine what keywords that webpage represented and then match ads from

AdWords onto that webpage. That acquisition was $100 million. I mean, I don’t track anymore how

much but 10s of billions of dollars of revenue are generated by that, you know, by that AdSense

system today. You’re bringing up something really important, which is, at the time,

Google was not a trillion dollar company. So, the point is that Google had access to

enough capital market scale, where, you know, nobody’s going to get in the way of a 5, 10,

20 billion dollar company trying to buy $100 million business like that. I just don’t think

you’re going to see, you know, any regulatory body take that seriously. Wait, so didn’t we

just paint the perfect picture? There’ll be a trickle down. Wait, isn’t that the perfect

picture? I think what it means is the 20 billion dollar company now probabilistically

can actually win. So, for example, like look at this Intuit Credit Karma transaction, right?

The question is, you know, could a smaller company have bought Credit Karma? Probably,

but not at the price that, you know, Intuit is willing to pay. Now, if Intuit gets big enough,

where there’s a chilling effect and regulators say, okay, you know, you’re above a magic threshold

and, you know, no bueno on the M&A anymore. Now, Credit Karma has two choices, which is maybe they

sell for $4 billion to a very different company, right? Or maybe they sell, actually, let’s take a

different example, PayPal. PayPal is now a top 20 business in America, right, by market cap.

So, if PayPal isn’t allowed, for example, to buy, you know, a bunch of sort of like,

you know, payment rail, payment companies, maybe what happens is like a, you know, a

medium-tier business is allowed to buy them. And now all of a sudden those medium-tier businesses

can compete with PayPal. That’s what I think, that actually seems like the best solution that

we’ve kind of stumbled on here. Can’t Slack then become, or Dropbox, or Uber, or any Airbnb? Now,

they can become the acquirers of these companies, and then they can compete. So, why don’t we just

say, hey, if you’re over a trillion dollars, or if you’re over $500 billion, you can buy 1% of

your market cap. I’m just throwing a number out here. Jason, let me jump in on this. That’s not

what Nadler was arguing for. You know, it’s not like Nadler was saying that if you’re a big fork

tech company, you can’t do these deals, but everyone else can. The standard that Nadler,

and the precedent that he was essentially setting in that hearing is, you know, 20-20 hindsight bias.

You know, if a company acquires… Yeah, well, putting Nadler aside, I agree with you on that,

but putting that aside, if we were going to come up with a rule, because we know the rules as they

currently exist are inadequate to do any type of regulation for these companies, because none of

them have 95% market share. So, if, in fact, we need a new solution, how about this for a solution?

I’m just putting it out here. You can acquire something that is under 5% of your market cap.

So, if your market cap over the last year is a billion, you can buy something $50 billion or less.

If you’re under $250 billion, you can buy whatever the hell you want.

But J. Kel, let me ask this question. You know, the points we made earlier about YouTube and

Instagram, they were successful because of the scale of the user base of the platforms that

acquired them and the work that had already been done. And so, they could plug in…

They would have both been totally successful without them.

They would have been successful, but would they have been worth $300 billion like they are today?

Maybe more. Maybe more.

But Instagram was 13 people, YouTube was a couple dozen people. It doesn’t matter. The story is a

small group were brought in with an interesting platform that was kind of working at the time,

and then they became these $300 billion platforms. So, that’s one scenario.

And a lot of money could be used. And Google and Facebook used a lot of money to be the best

acquirer, to be able to acquire those businesses. And that’s the argument for this,

hey, they’re at such a scale right now, no one else can compete because only they can pay this

fee. As Chamath points out with Intuit and Credit Karma, only Intuit can buy Credit Karma at that

price. Now, the alternative way to think about this is what if there is vertical expansion?

So, instead of leveraging their existing platform and their existing dominance, what if Google,

in this case, is trying to get into the cloud business? They’re competing viciously with

Amazon and Microsoft and others in this enterprise cloud business marketplace that is

continuously evolving, changing every year. There’s a different kind of lead and a different

company that’s suddenly growing faster than the others. And Google spent $2.6 billion to buy

Looker. Buying Looker for $2.6 billion does not advantage Google’s advertisers. It does not

advantage, I mean, to some degree, it might. It does not advantage Google’s users. And it is not

about platform dominance in their traditional ad business. It’s about vertical expansion into a new

market. Okay. So, here’s how I’ll rewrite the law, David. If you have over 70% market share

in your vertical, you cannot make additional acquisitions in that vertical. If you have…

But they’re buying into a new vertical, right? That’s my point.

That’s what I’m saying. And so, then the caveat is, if you’re buying into a new vertical,

you don’t have to hit that cap.

We already have that. We already have, I mean, that’s basically the way the rules work today

is that you look at market share. I mean, Coke cannot buy Pepsi. Facebook cannot buy Twitter

today. But what we’re talking about is at a much earlier stage, are you going to interfere

with the M&A? Or are you going to retroactively go back and unwind these transactions?

Unwinding transactions makes no sense. Yeah.

I think the point is, this is all water under the bridge. But the incremental M&A for these

big guys is very unlikely. Now, David does bring up a good point. Unless it’s in basically a do

nothing, not that important in the positioning category relative to the core business. And so,

this is why it’s, again, go back to like, why did Looker close faster than Fitbit?

It’s half the price. Looker is twice the price, right? Fitbit is half the price.

Yeah. New market, completely. Yeah.

Yeah. And so, there is a fear that there is going to be a compounding advantage

that regulators have a responsibility to stop. So, I think it goes back to,

once you get to a certain level of scale, the thing that we’re missing with online businesses

is this kind of like, there’s like a great original sin here that we’re not admitting,

which is that the internet is now a pervasive and critical part of human infrastructure.

As such, there needs to be people that regulate and manage the internet, the same way the FAA

manages and regulates planes and wind turbines. Think about the FAA, let’s just take aviation.

It is impossible for you to go and just go into your garage, build some random thing to carry

people from point A to point B in the absence of some certification, okay? Take agriculture.

It is impossible for you to basically go and like build up a farm and build up, you know,

livestock or whatever, and all of a sudden just supply it into fucking Sobeys and Safeway without

any sort of like checks and balances. Similarly, and the reason is because it’s simple human

infrastructure that everybody relies on. And I just think that we have to admit that now,

the internet company- Also, those are life and death.

This can be too. I mean, like, what about the guy that read the post about like the pedophiles and

the pizza joint came up with an AK-47? Yeah, I mean, it’s quite an edge case compared to flying

on a plane. This stuff is life and death at some level, but even more than life and death,

it’s the anointing of power that then determines life and death.

And that’s, I think, the key is that it’s power. Yeah.

Chamath, do you think that there should be an internet regulatory body that decides how

businesses operate and how content is censored and managed on the internet? Is that what you’re

kind of suggesting? Yeah, so let me be very specific. So I think that there are very specific

kinds of businesses and business models that should be overseen. Specifically, I think the

first and most important thing is a body that oversees the collection of user data and how

it drives targeting and identification. So privacy concerns around that, that’s a no-brainer.

That’s the first one. And then I think the second one is something that essentially tears the fig

leaf off of internet companies and says, you know what, you are the equivalent of a publisher on a

platform, some weird hybrid that we didn’t think could exist when we wrote these rules. And so

we’re now going to adapt these rules. Because, you know, if you think about it, nobody is happy

with the internet publishers today. You know, the left thinks that it skews right, the right

thinks it skews left. Everybody’s confused. Nobody gets what they want. And so I think somebody has

to step in and kind of sort it all out. Well, I think this is a good segue to

Sax’s point. And then I guess we have a fork here now in the discussion. Do we want to go

and talk about censorship and that specific issue across Facebook? Or do we want to get

into Amazon for a second? Which way do we want to go, Sax? Go to censorship. Well,

I mean, yeah, we can talk censorship. Let’s jump the fence here. Should there be, to Chamath’s

point, Sax, a regulatory body that decides what people can and cannot say on social networks,

yes or no? No, I mean, let’s think about that. What we’re saying is we need the politicians to

set up a regulatory body to control how the people talk about the politicians. I mean,

that seems like a recipe for disaster. What about specific lies and intentionality to

frame debates incorrectly? Saxie Poole, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying like,

you go to a movie, and there’s a little blurb here that says who can go to the movie and who

cannot. You buy an album, and it tells you whether there’s explicit lyrics or not. Like, before you

turn on the TV, there’s like some rating agency that tells you whether your kids should be

watching it with you. My point is, what is the equivalent version? We all need to think about

what it is. But to say that there should be nothing, I think is crazy. Sax?

Well, I think, I mean, those ratings are mostly about, you know, standards related to kids,

you know. And the big internet companies already have a lot of child safety features. I don’t know

that you need to create laws around that. And I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about anyway.

I mean, I think the big debate about Facebook or Twitter is whether they’re engaging in censorship

or bias, right? And that goes way beyond this topic of child safety.

So, okay, let’s unpack.

I don’t think that they’re censoring. All I’m saying is, I think you need to label,

and you need to more clearly designate what this content is so that people can choose. Like,

for example, on Twitter, you know, I follow a bunch of people on the right,

I follow a bunch of people on the left, I follow one or two QAnon accounts,

only because like, I just want to see it all. And then I want to judge and I feel like if I can see

everything, I can sort of like lay it all on a table and figure out where the rough center is

and kind of move to that, you know? So you feel you’re intelligent and mature enough to do that,

Chamath, but the rest of the world isn’t? No, not really. But I try to do it because I think

it’s important for me. Would you rather the platforms or some regulators come up with what

you could see on those platforms, Chamath? Again, not what I can see. But there has to be

a simple way, for example, you know, you could have something and again, all this does is it

breaks business models, which then breaks monetization and it breaks the market cap

of these companies. But for example, let’s just say you had a new kind of job, which was,

you know, you hired 500,000 people. And these were a combination of lawyers, journalists,

academics, all kinds of random people, artists, everybody, okay? Normal folks,

blue collar folks, and you paid them full time to basically read stuff and kind of like, you know,

wisdom of the crowd style, tell us where this sat in a spectrum. Okay, this is on the left,

this is on the right, this is kind of centered, this seems laughable, this seems unbelievable,

this seems relatively credible. And I think that you would get, you know, very quickly,

and I don’t think the latency would be that high, but probably minutes, where, you know,

40 or 50,000 signals would tell you whether something is, you know, where something is in

the spectrum of, you know, how to understand it. And then that that system, that system will get

paid, get get played, though, it’ll get gamed, right? Like someone will figure out a way to

turn all of Chamath’s tweet labels into super evil tweets. And you know, now everyone will

mute you because you’re super evil. Yeah, I think we just defined George Orwell’s 1984.

Like, or cancel culture, right? If you’re paying 500,000 or a million people, if Facebook and

Google and these guys come together on Twitter, and they pay a body of people to do this work.

And so you don’t know who posts it, you just see the content, you read it, you label it,

it’s a classifier. So Chamath, what do you think you would get classified as?

And then what if you disagreed with what you were classified as?

No, but David, like, what I’m saying is, you wouldn’t know it’s me. Like, if I wrote an

article on medium, right, and I wanted to publish it in Twitter, that article first hits a queue,

50,000 people read it, they human classify it. And then it gets published.

And now what if you don’t like the way it’s classified? And you don’t want those tags

attached to it. And you want a place to publish freely without classification without tagging,

then there will be a company that supports that too. And you’ll see how much people care about

that.

Yeah, I mean, I think the free market could handle what you’re saying, Chamath, because

I think David’s concerns would be the same as mine, which is who’s doing this classification?

What kind of transparency is there? And we already have the wisdom of the crowds, which is

things that are outrageous automatically get pushed up on Twitter, which allows anonymous.

And then Facebook seems to be all the top trends seem to be on the right.

Let’s swing over to Saks. Saks, what do you think of the 1984 proposal from Chamath,

the 500,000 censors telling you what to think of a post before you read it?

Yeah, I mean, it’s…

I don’t want to bias the question, but it’s an insane idea, Chamath.

It’s a little bit like Twitter fact checking the politicians they don’t like.

It’s the digital Politburo.

It’s a form of like soft censorship. And, you know, I actually think that,

you know, Zuckerberg gets attacked the most, but I think his position

on speech actually makes the most sense. I mean, it seems like what he said is

we want to be a neutral free speech platform. And, you know, whereas I think, you know, Twitter and

Snapchat, for that matter, are much more likely to engage in either,

you know, censorship or fact checking.

Which is paradoxical, because Twitter’s initial position, David, was it was the free speech

platform.

I totally agree. I think Zuck’s position is the most defensible, but it also is the

most untenable because it’s the least technologically and socially palatable.

But it is the most defensible and philosophically, in my opinion, the only position you can have.

But it’s not going to be what wins.

Right. Well, the reason why Zuckerberg is hated is because if you’re going to defend the principle

of free speech, you always end up defending speech that society hates,

you know, like the ACLU and Skokie.

Exactly. Exactly.

And so, you know, Zuckerberg, I think, has done the best job sticking to his guns. I mean,

the reason why Twitter is sort of, you know, loved on the left is precisely because they

gave in to the mob and they’ve, you know, they’ve started taking down accounts that

the mob doesn’t like or, you know, fact checking them.

Whereas I think, you know, and Zuckerberg’s refusal to do that, and by the way, I don’t

think he’s been like perfect in this regard, but he’s been much better about standing up

for the principle of free speech. That’s what’s made him, you know, anathema to the left.

I think that and the fact that Facebook still gets blamed for, you know, Hillary’s loss.

Freeberg, I have two specific follow-ups to what David just said for you, which is, one,

how much of this has to do with anonymity being allowed on Twitter versus not being

allowed on Facebook. And second, how much of it has to do with the fact that we have

algorithms that trend topics. If we didn’t have those algorithms trending them, perhaps

this wouldn’t be an issue because if you wrote something that was inflammatory, it wouldn’t,

and false, let’s say in that situation, both characteristics, it wouldn’t go to the top

of the list, which is what everybody’s kind of upset about is that something that’s false

goes to the top of your feed. Comment on those two issues.

Well, I think your second point’s an important one, which is like social media helps to enhance

the stimulation of the amygdala in the human brain. You know, you see something that makes

you angry or something that makes you elated, you are more likely to engage with it. If you

see something that is kind of a rational discussion about something that doesn’t

incite emotion in you, you’re less likely to engage in it. And so, whatever the engagement

model is, it ends up, you know, creating a lot more virality and chatter, and it kind of gets

brought to the surface. And there’s a lot that’s been written and said about this that I don’t

think we’re kind of uniquely in a position to say anything more on. And that’s obviously what a lot

of people are kind of concerned about is the inflammatory and polarizing nature of the content

that is getting highlighted on these platforms and is getting greater distribution on these

platforms. And then I think your prior point, I’m not sure it’s about anonymity as much as it is

about any form of censorship that ultimately can be viewed as bias. So, Jim Jordan’s points were

actually, you know, as much as the guy rants and goes on and sounds like a guy running on the

soccer field to punch the coach, it’s really interesting to hear the point of view that as

a conservative, I believe that a lot of what Donald Trump is saying or what some conservative

voices are saying is reasonable, and that voice should be heard. And to hear over and over about

Twitter pulling these things down, and then seeing a whole bunch of stuff like anarchists

taking over Seattle and taking over Portland, and they don’t get their stuff taken down,

you know, them claiming that they can hold down the streets of Portland and Seattle, because that’s,

you know, the way that it should be, doesn’t, you know, incite any sort of censorship,

but Donald Trump saying he’s going to end it incites censorship. And so I think it’s not as

much about anonymity as much as it is about, you know, having censorship tied to a voice and

censorship tied to a labeled or tagged point of view or labeled or tagged individual or voice

on the platform. So without anonymity, I think the problem goes away for Twitter,

I think Twitter is working on a project. And I’ve been saying this for a decade,

that they should let everybody pay $50 a year, $5 a month, or 30 bucks a year, $10 a month,

whatever it is to go through a verification process to make sure it’s their name on the

account, which by the way, next door is doing at scale, not only do they know it’s you,

they know it’s your you’re the person who lives at that address, because you got a postcard there,

I think, and in Korea, South Korea, you’re required to put your social security number

in to open a social account, that would solve the entire problem. Now that may seem and then

it would drive other users who want anonymity to anonymous platforms. And that’s where Twitter

is trying to have its cake and eating it too. And they’re falling on their face,

they have one level, which is troll accounts, because you can do whatever the hell they want,

playing on a same playing field with people who can, and this is just a disaster for them,

that Jim Jordan may be an idiot, and just a loudmouth. But I think I agree with you,

if the situation was reversed, and we were talking about Obama being censored for some reason,

and the right and right wing people or left wing people being silenced or deprecated on the

platform, you know, soft band, people will be up in arms, but that was a different form,

he should be doing that in a censorship, and they should have a censorship committee talking

about that. What do you think Chamath about these two issues, anonymity on these platforms,

and the velocity in which things that outrage people, because you yourself Chamath, went from,

hold on, but I want to cue this up for you Chamath, you yourself went from being a perennial

guest on a lot of these programs, and then now since you’ve been a little bit more vocal about

how you feel about social issues, when you said break everything up, who cares on CNBC,

and then when you said, who cares, let them fail, they don’t get their summer hampers house,

you gained 150,000 followers, and now you’ve learned that if you’re more, I don’t want to

say the word outrageous, but if you’re more vocal about social issues, you’re going to gain a lot of

attention. Do you think you should have been labeled as somebody who is hysterical about

your 500,000 people or being outrageous? Both and all platforms are littered with fake accounts.

The interesting factoid from yesterday was I think Facebook says they take down 6.3 billion fake

accounts or something. Some crazy, crazy, crazy numbers. So they are paying playing whack-a-mole.

Twitter just basically says we don’t have the team and the infrastructure. So just let the

6 billion accounts be. That’s the only difference between Facebook and Twitter. It’s an

acknowledgment of the problem and transparency on the reporting. So, you know, look, my point of

view on this is that I think that irrespective of what I believe about free speech, I think it’s

becoming harder and harder for me just as a layman reading to figure out what’s true and not true.

I think that the line is getting very gray and I think that sources that used to have

complete integrity that were, you know, just beyond reproach in terms of their integrity,

it’s not clear anymore because the business model of the internet is driven towards clicks.

So I think what’s actually happening is that we are dismantling information and news and

journalism. The first place where I think that goes is places like Substack, which is going to

rebuild it bottoms up, where people will vote with their subscription dollars what to believe and

what not to believe. And then on top of that, people will overlay aggregation tools so that

you can actually have multi-subscriptions and create sort of like next generation

magazines and content subscriptions or whatever. I think that’s where the world is going in terms

of information and content. Jason, my honest belief is that I don’t think I’ve ever said

anything that particularly crazy. I just think that I’m reasonably intelligent and I’m precise

in what I say and it cuts through a lot of the bullshit because most people have nothing to say.

So, you know, when I make a fucking investment, I write a one pager and I post it and I’m willing

to be held accountable. You know, when I don’t understand about climate change, I just post about

it even though I want to invest two billion dollars of my own money in it. And so I think

being authentic and just being straightforward is sort of like what is valuable at some level

on the internet. I think that governments are going to regulate these companies. Let’s just

be clear. Whatever I think about censorship, it just doesn’t matter what I think because

governments are of a belief that these platforms craft and shape public opinion and sentiment,

which drive the aggregation and coalescing of power, which fundamentally disrupts the business

model of the politician. Let’s go swing over to Saks here. Saks, any comments on that censorship

issue or the once very respected sources of news maybe being less respected now? I think

the New York Times came to mind when Chamath was sort of outlining that phenomenon. And then we’ll

move on to Amazon. Yeah, I mean, I think there are things that these platforms can do to elevate

the, you know, the discourse, you know, the quality of the information people are getting.

I think that eliminating the bot accounts, I think it’s a huge problem on Twitter that

they’re out there. They’re not really doing much about it. I think that’s something they

could improve and fix. You know, requiring people to be who they purport to be, you know,

I think this is tied to the bot issue of, you know, not allowing these sort of sock puppet

accounts. But the thing about those steps that they could take is they’re speech neutral, right?

The rules would apply to everybody, you know, to Freeberg’s point. And so, I think they should

look at doing more of those things. But, you know, what I’m concerned about is that, you know,

so much of the debate, so much of the pressure that’s being brought on Facebook is to actually

moderate and control the type of speech that occurs on its platform. And I think the reason

why Zuckerberg is attacked more than say, you know, Jack Dorsey is because he’s been

more resistant to doing that. I think it’s actually because you have a bunch of what

seems like real names. But again, I think that there’s a fake account issue on Facebook that’s

just as bad as Twitter. It’s just the difference is, you know, the fake accounts on Facebook have

proper first and last names, whereas Twitter, you have all kinds of alphanumeric garbage as

an account name. So, here’s a different proposal. Why, you know, maybe what we need is the decision

that we allow complete unfettered free speech. And there’s a layer of both Facebook and Twitter

and YouTube where that’s completely allowed. But the precursor to have that access is you need to

put in your social security number or something that’s uniquely identifiable by your government.

So that if you say something, and there’s a law against you saying something, already a pre

established law, there’s recourse, where can you go and be anonymous tomorrow? Because you know,

on a web page, you can create any web page you want.

No, nobody’s gonna say then I think what it creates is a decision by a user to coalesce

on completely different platforms, if what you want is complete anonymity for a very different

reason. And I think that that’s very reasonable to my point is, the solution to this David is

diversity, not to have one thing and two companies try to create some Swiss Army knife Frankenstein

product that solves this, it’s just not possible. And I think we’re both saying the same thing,

which is like, you have completely different behaviors, trying to go in through the same

channel, it’s not possible.

Actually, I like the idea of these platforms doing more to eliminate bot accounts and anonymity,

because those are neutral rules of the game. And they do improve the quality of the debate that

occurs on those platforms. I think those would be good things. I think it’s just hard to do.

I think that those companies may even want to do that. It seems like Facebook certainly does.

It’s just a hard thing to execute.

It’s actually not that hard. I mean, if you just said, Hey, listen,

this account in order to have a verified account, you have to have a phone number,

an email. So that’s two steps that a spammer trying to create a lot of accounts would not

be able to do because you’d have to get burner phone number after burner phone number,

which is a cost. It’s possible, right? But it’s a cost. And if you want to be verified,

we need your phone number. And we need your email address. And we need you to you put in

your credit card and get charged $1 on your credit card just that over and over and over

overnight Reddit would become the new Twitter overnight Reddit would be cut for Chan would

become the new Facebook. I mean, overnight, like, like, I’m not saying to have an account,

Freeberg, but to have the blue checkmark, so you would still be able to and then over time,

people could say, I don’t want to see replies unless they’ve been verified.

And it could be just a toggle you pick.

By the way, Facebook, Google and Twitter already have this mechanism, because that’s what they do

to graduate advertisers up the spending curve. You know, you can start as an anonymous advertiser,

just spending, you know, onesie twosie dollars, you know, just off of a web page, basically,

just you go through and you do self serve ads. And the more you spend, or the more targeting

capability you want, you graduate, you self identify, you give more information, you get

more capability back, you get more trust in the system. So it does exist for the customers of

these big tech companies. And this is the other big thing. What it shows you is that it’s actually

solved the problem for the customers is just doesn’t solve it for the, you know, feudalist

feedstock, which are the users, because they won’t pay. And so if you said, Hey, listen, there’s

customers there. They could be those Twitter’s coming out with a paid version. So they’re

obviously on the on the halfway there, they’re going to come up with a paid version of Twitter,

Jack said it on his quarterly earnings. I’m going to sell my Twitter stock.

Well, I mean, it’s not it’s not one of the other free bird, though, you don’t have to pick one or

the other, you could still be anonymous, but you have the opportunity because right now they’re

not accepting new verified users. And unless you’re a muckety muck, you don’t get to even go

down that route. So shouldn’t everybody have? I would like I mean, I person would like Twitter

more if it verified identity. I mean, I don’t I don’t think there should be a speech tax. I don’t

know why they have to charge $1 but but but taking a dollar means we have your credit card. It’s just

another hurdle. That’s why you can do it like a $1 off without actually charging anyone’s card. Yes,

you could do that. For example, like if you if you actually force people to verify by putting

in their social security number, like there’s a couple of guys I follow. I’ll just name them

Scott Adams, who wrote the Dilbert comments. There’s a guy who I’m really not sure I understand

his politics, but I follow him because I because you know, he’s a rabble rouser.

Is you know, it’s not just people on the left, but I think it would be people on the left people

in the center people on the right, who would basically pay the quote unquote tax because

they’re already real people. And they would just they would then have more guarantees and assurances

that Twitter won’t be arbitrary. And I think that makes Twitter better. And if it maybe it

makes it smaller, right? And then maybe you’re right, Friedberg, like 4chan or 8chan or Reddit

become good for a different kind of behavior. By the way, I mean, like, that’s what we do today.

We don’t eat the same fucking thing every goddamn day. We don’t wear the same pants every day.

I agree with where he’s going with that. I mean, the the defining feature of Reddit is that it is

basically anonymous. People have usernames, but you never know who it is. pseudonyms. And it

creates a certain kind of conversation. And that’s fine. Twitter is supposed to be real people. I

mean, it’s not I mean, Facebook, even more so. But, you know, when I think about the accounts

that I follow on Twitter, you know, it’s, it’s, you know, all of them are real people. Occasionally,

you’ll get, occasionally, you’ll get a pseudonymous. Yeah, you’ll get like a startup L.

Jackson or something like that. And, you know, and I think that’s okay.

Yeah, but you would choose to then follow them.

The difference with like a startup L. Jackson is they’re not a fake account. They’re just

using a pseudonym. Right. And you know that when you follow them.

And over time, they’ve proven to be to provide some value that makes people follow them.

And so you can be anonymous if you get a certain number of followers.

I guess you rise above the noise. Here’s another solution. There are no, there’s no nuance about

truth or how much you believe this is true as a voting mechanism. So if you were verified on

Twitter, and there was a scale that says how true, how truthful do you believe this is,

and you could slide it and pick, you know, from one to five, you could actually have another

signal there. What do you think about some sort of a signal to Chamath’s point about community

values saying, I buy this, I don’t. 97% of people wouldn’t use it. And the 3%

that do would completely bias the result. Okay, Chamath, what do you think would happen?

I agree with Freeberg. I don’t, I don’t think that’s a, it’s just, I don’t think it’s a really

good idea. My only comment was just offering the other thing, by the way, I know it sounds crazy,

it’s just offering it as like the, you know, the way that this negotiated solution will end up.

And it’s kind of sort of what these internet companies are being forced to do, which are these

weird, you know, pseudo action bodies that like review things and like, you know,

so it’s all just a slippery slope to that outcome. But by the way, you were speaking

about StartupBellJackson, you know, there was another guy, SuperMugatu. And, you know,

he turned out to be this, you know, really good, young, up and coming investor, Dan McMurtry.

And he was sued, you know, he used a pseudonym for a long time, build up a huge audience,

and then flipped himself and basically came out and said, here, my name is Dan McMurtry,

and I run a fund. And, you know, it was wonderful. Yeah, I think it’s a very good marketing strategy.

It’s a growth strategy now, be StartupBellJackson, and then you wind up becoming a venture partner.

When are you going to announce that you’re the guy behind VC Brex?

Like, I’m not ready to do that.

I’m not ready. People thought it was me. I was like, I’m getting tortured.

Wait till you hear that I’m the guy behind Zero Hedge. That’ll really freak you out.

Well, Zero Hedge is instructive. Didn’t he get banned? Or did she get banned for

posting about stuff in coronavirus that eventually turned out to be acceptable and true?

Now imagine if he had verified his account, he had a social security number, he had all that

stuff in there, just verified, that’s it, just information that says Zero Hedge is real. It’s

a real person. Yeah. And you know, the rule is when you’re that level of verified,

you can publish whatever you want.

Yeah, you can, you can say false statements as a real person. So Donald Trump is a real person,

he’s a verified account, and he’s saying things that Twitter is then determining are false,

or inflammatory.

I would rather, you know, them not try to do it. And I’d rather have pundits that you can

believe in. So the other problem is like, look, when you have public figures, you have punditry

around public figures. But the problem isn’t what that person says, it’s you can’t believe

the punditry, because half of them are fake. So at some point, you have to break the cycle,

and somebody has to be real.

Well, and this is the problem with the Trump issue in a pandemic is two edge cases put together.

And now we’re figuring out what the actual cost of it is. Trump said masks are bullshit,

you don’t need to wear a mask, blah, blah, blah, I choose not to wear a mask,

I’m not going to give people the satisfaction of seeing me in a mask. Turns out masks are correct.

We, we should have put that, or should we have put in front of Trump’s non-mask comments, hey,

this is against what the guidelines are. Or the fact is the WHO said the World Health Organization

said you shouldn’t wear masks. Then it turns out now we have a bunch of conservatives dying

who didn’t wear masks. No, I don’t think I don’t think you should have put anything there.

And let all the conservatives who believe him die.

It’s not about letting conservatives die. I think that’s a crazy way of positioning it. Like,

he’s allowed to have his opinion. And really, like, if anything, I think social media

has shown that the way that we use to venerate, like veneration is sort of like, it’s kind of,

it’s been disrupted by social media. Like the idea that you venerate somebody because like,

they won an election in a moment is so crazy, because they are basically like you,

and in many cases, maybe dumber than you.

With respect to all these ideas surrounding the idea that we need to

regulate these platforms. I think we should just remember that the way stuff gets into your feed

is that you make the decision to follow it. You know, these feeds are self curated. I mean,

there is this issue about, well, you know, the algorithm does sort of emphasize or sort of

increase the volume. And, you know, we want to make sure those algorithms,

you know, are done in a neutral way. They’re not, they’re not biased somehow. But,

you know, the content that appears in people’s feed is content they’ve chosen to see

with the exception of trending topics on both platforms.

Well, like I said, though, as long as those algorithms are unbiased and work in a speech

neutral way, I think they’re fine. But the, you know, the reason why Facebook has been boycotted

is that they refuse to censor some of Donald Trump’s tweets, you know. But you don’t see those

posts, rather, unless you’ve chosen to follow them.

I think it’s crazy that they want to ban him.

Problem is, it’s a chain of it’s a chain of fake accounts and real accounts, right? Let’s be honest,

it’s a combination of both that exists on both Facebook and Twitter, to amplify content in ways

that none of us really understand. And I would I would be very skeptical that anybody there

really understands every single piece of content, how and why it gets weighted the way it does. And,

you know, like, well, I bet you that there’s probably a way to tell whether an account is fake.

I mean, obviously, they have system integrity tools to figure this out. That’s,

there’s no way you could have eliminated 6 billion accounts if that wasn’t true.

But then, you know, you choose not to suppress the weighting of those, or maybe you do suppress

the weighting of them entirely. It’s just an all you’re talking about. But in terms of

implication, okay, so maybe maybe you can game the trending topics that way, but you can’t get

in my feed, unless either I choose to follow you or you pay to, you know, run an ad, which my eyes

are just trained to skip over. So I, you know, I think if you were to ask the average person,

do you believe that you are sort of influenced by deceptive content on Twitter and Facebook,

or you’re sort of unduly influenced? They would say no, you know, none of us believe that we are

but then if you asked, but if you if you said, do you interact in groups and forums

with a bunch of people that you don’t know? The answer would be 100% Yes,

what I’m saying is that the average person doesn’t believe that they’re unduly influenced. But But if

you ask them, or do you think other people are they would say, David, of course, like, it’s like,

you know, when you’re having a fucking slurpee, it’s like, you know, do you think that this is

unduly gonna hurt you? No. It’s 1200 calories of liquid sugar.

All right, I think we beat this horse to death. There’s no solution, just on the edges. But let’s

let’s go to Amazon, because I thought that this was a particularly interesting one. Amazon,

I thought came out the best of everybody, and is the least likely to be broken up. I think some of

you agree with that. What were your impressions on Amazon’s performance and Amazon in terms of

being broken up? Let’s start with you, Friedberg. And then we’ll go back to Chamath.

I think the intention of antitrust laws, obviously, is to protect consumers and protect markets and

protect market pricing from being manipulated by monopolists or monopolies. And so, you know,

the point that was made about Walmart years ago is the same point that’s being made about Amazon

today, which is that they’re crushing small local businesses. And as a result, there is a lot of

damage being done. And they are quote, unquote, too powerful. But the reality is that the pricing

effect of what they’re doing is what needs to ultimately be scrutinized. And I think is what

will ultimately drive whether or not these guys have either some massive penalty or get forced

to break up. And so you ask yourself the question, look, if I’m going to buy, call it a mattress,

or let’s let’s use something like a pillow. Is it cheaper for me to buy that pillow as a consumer

through Amazon or from the local store? Now, what if the local store is put out of business because

of Amazon, and now Amazon is the only place I can get a pillow? Is the pillow now going to be more

expensive or less expensive than it would have been otherwise? And I think that is the lens by

which we need to kind of assess and the regulators will ultimately assess whether or not Amazon is

causing harm in the marketplace because of its position and its power.

Freebird.

Look, I have several businesses that sell on Amazon. And it is fucking expensive. One of my

companies I’m on the board of, we’ve been the number one food product on Amazon multiple times.

We kind of slide up and down the top 10.

Can you say what that is?

Yeah, Soylent. Soylent. And so we sell a lot of Soylent on Amazon. And it is expensive, man. I

mean, the fulfillment, the shipping, the advertising fees they force you to pay. I will

tell you that as a business owner or board member of a business that sells and I have several others

that sell on Amazon, too. It is a grind. And it is cheaper for us to sell directly through Shopify.

Why don’t you just raise the price on Amazon?

So to some extent, so Amazon, this is actually part of the problem. So Amazon forces certain

best pricing negotiations. If you’re a large seller on Amazon, you have to make sure in order

for them to promote you and make you kind of a sponsored item and show you at the top of the list,

you have to give them the best deal, sort of like what Walmart does, right? You can’t have a cheaper

price anywhere else.

Got it. So that was something that did not come up. They force you to have the best price there,

even if you charge more on your website.

In these negotiated deals. Yeah. And so you have to make sure that you’re providing.

And I’m not sure what the deal is specifically with Soylent. So I don’t want to kind of speak

incorrectly here.

No, I’ve heard the same thing from other folks.

That is kind of part of what happens. And so I will tell you like it is harder for it is

cheaper for me to sell Soylent. I think it’s cheaper for some of these products to be sold.

I can tell you my other company, which we sell quinoa, it’s cheaper for us to sell

through retail stores than it is to sell on Amazon. We actually give up more margin selling

on Amazon.

Then why would you do it?

Because of the volume and because they’ve aggregated all the consumers.

So you’ve made the decision as an entrepreneur to sell you quinoa in all places,

even though you lose some margin, you make it back in aggregate.

Well, this goes to the market.

Sounds like capitalism to me.

Well, this goes to the market problem, because now I have less choice as a business owner,

because the only place I can find consumers is in this online marketplace called Amazon.

I can no longer go sell at 50 local grocery stores because people don’t go to the freaking

local grocery stores anymore. And that’s obviously a little bit of an extreme statement. But let’s

say I’m a pillow guy. I can’t go sell at 50 pillow stores because they’ve all been shut

down because all the consumers go to Amazon.

But could you also sell at Target and Walmart and those other competitors who seem to be doing just,

you know, pretty well, actually?

They’re doing well. Yeah. And a lot of people have said that they’re the kind of,

you know, the exceptions, but there’s a thousand versions of Sears and other

stores that haven’t done as well. Walmart and Target just happen to be extremely well

run businesses. But there’s nothing fundamental about those businesses.

What if Amazon kicked you off the platform and said, we’re not going to allow third party

sellers? Would you be happier or would you be sadder?

We’d be sadder.

Got it. Chamath, what are your thoughts?

Amazon specific.

Yeah, I think David said it really well up front,

which is that it’s a it’s kind of a when and not an ifs. So it’s, you know, Amazon today,

I don’t think is at risk just because its end market is so big. But I think within five or 10

years, it definitely will be looked at through the same lens as Facebook and Google. And

actually just those two. Look, and I think David said it also really well,

like the antitrust law that you would get, you know, to be successful if applied to Facebook

and Google has nothing to do with users and content. And it has everything to do with

the pricing of the ads to their customers. And if anybody actually were smart enough

to figure out whether there was some way in which their auctions were working,

that was effectively pricing inventory in a market, quote unquote, or in a system manipulated

way, that’s probably the best hook to nab one of these folks in antitrust law. But other than that,

it’s going to be regulation. In terms of Amazon, I think they’re going to get away unscathed.

What’s incredible, by the way, is, you know, two days later, they’re like, hey, by the way,

we just got an FCC license and we’re going to launch a $10 billion satellite constellation.

And, you know, if you if you looked at their RFP to the FCC, the number of people that,

you know, basically complained and cried, it was incredible.

By the way, I think this is a huge, important point that we haven’t made,

which is the benefit of scale for large innovative companies. There is no way any

company would have out of the blue been able to afford a $10 billion distributed satellite

program without having customers and all this other stuff lined up. Amazon can afford to take

that risk, just like Alphabet has taken the risk with self driving cars and did so before anyone

else for many years, which is a net benefit for society, correct? Which is a net benefit for

society. So by having scale by having incredible profits by and then by reinvesting it in R&D,

creating jobs innovating, it’s the only way this kind of stuff is going to get done.

You’re not going to get it done by breaking up these companies and having 100 companies that

only have $10 million of profit each. And then each of them are, you know, no one at all can

afford to do these grand, important projects that move markets forward.

Ultimately, for humanity, Freeberg, you see these trillion dollar plus companies

as because they can make those big swings, a net benefit for humanity.

As a technologist, and as a kind of person that hopes for the future,

I hope that these sorts of companies can continue to persist, and that they’re led by people that

want to take innovative risks with R&D dollars. And by the way, if they don’t, they’re going to

fucking fail eventually, right? It’s these guys that are leading these companies and putting these

crazy bets on crazy new ideas that are allowing these businesses to remain competitive. And if

they didn’t, and you know, some big company manager were to come in and start running these

things and distributing cash and dividends back to shareholders, these wouldn’t be happening.

And you know, capitalism would take care of itself. And then the next big innovative risk

taker that can generate a profit and reinvest that profit in a smart way would end up winning

in the marketplace. So…

Saks, you are a big investor in SpaceX at Kraft Ventures, I understand.

And when you see Bezos copy every single thing Elon does from, you know, launching the rockets

to then putting up the satellites, do you think he’s just a copycat?

Well, you know, I think he’s the scariest monopolist out of the whole bunch. You know,

if you look at kind of Amazon versus, say, Google or Facebook or Apple, I mean,

those other companies are sort of sticking to their original footprint, whereas Amazon keeps

expanding into new areas. You know, it’s that whole mantra he has about your profit is my

opportunity. And so, yeah, with each, you know, with each advancement they make as they get into,

you know, as they get to a new level of scale, they then turn around and seek to take over

kind of the, you know, the areas that their vendors or business partners are operating.

And so, you know, it started with first they did retail, you know, books, and then they expanded

to other areas of retail, and then they take over infrastructure, and now there’s talk about them

getting into freight or trucking. And so, yeah, they keep expanding into these new areas. And it’s

really a statement about our politics. I agree with Jamal that Bezos went pretty much unscathed,

and I think it has a lot to do with, you know, he did win the internet with that opening statement

that he gave. It was a really sort of great, you know, rags to riches, only in America type story.

And so, I think, I agree with Jamal, he’s going to get away pretty unscathed, but I do think that

they are the scariest monopolists of the bunch. Well, comment specifically on him copying every

one of Elon Musk’s ideas. Well, you know, copying is, it is sort of a part of the game, you know,

it is part of the game. And I’ve heard you attack Zuckerberg for doing the same thing.

And, you know, look, I get it, you know, we prize innovation, and we love innovators.

But as soon as you say that you can’t, that other companies can’t copy those innovations,

you do stifle progress. Yeah, but I look at it as more, how consistently do you do that as your

playbook? When you look at Amazon Basics, this is the point I wanted to make when I made in my

earlier podcast, which was, you know, the Amazon Basics and the third party seller system is the

thing that they keyed in on these hearings, they did not key in on the issue of that Freeberg

brought up, which was what is the margin they’re taking from those third party sellers, which I

think would have been a much more deft approach to questioning them. But when it comes to third

party sellers, the fact is, they’re allowing people to compete with them on their own platform,

which drives prices so low. And when they make a better USB-C cable, that doesn’t take a genius

to make a better cable. So do you think Amazon Basics should be allowed and is great for humanity?

Or do you think that that using of the data, because they have the sales data on it,

is in some way abhorrent and a problem given the way antitrust laws are currently framed?

Well, okay, so I think this is an area where, so the area you’re talking about is the way that

these platforms treat the applications or small businesses that operate on their platforms. And

I do think this is a good area for Congress to keep scrutinizing. There’s a saying in chess that

the threat is greater than the execution. So sort of a chess strategy principle. I think that’s true

here where we, I think the execution would be a disaster if we actually impose a lot of these

rules. If we broke up these companies, if we stopped Amazon from innovating, I think that

would be a disaster for those companies and for the economy, because I do think they do a lot of

good things. But in a weird way, I think we have to keep threatening to do those things in order

to get these companies not to do anti-competitive things. I mean, we heard Bezos say that he

couldn’t guarantee that they weren’t using their seller’s data in inappropriate ways, basically

to break Amazon’s own policy. And so I think you do have to apply this kind of scrutiny to

these companies, because I don’t think we want to be retroactively, you know, remediating a

situation. I don’t think we want to be breaking them up or doing something like that, but I do

think we want them second-guessing these anti-competitive decisions before they actually happen.

Because otherwise, you know, they —

So some scrutiny, some rules, but we certainly don’t want to ankle them versus their competitors

in China. As we wrap up here, because we’re getting way past our hour, we’re now at 80

minutes, and we said a max of 90 here was what we all agreed on. I want to talk about the election.

We are now at the 100-day mark. We all thought Biden was a shoo-in. Now I have my own thesis.

I want to float it and see what you guys think. You had Trump start wearing a mask last week,

telling everybody they should wear masks. Now there’s universal discussion of wearing masks.

We’ve got a little bit of vaccine hope, and we’ll get to Friedberg’s position on,

is that vaccine false gold, or is it actual reality? But we know that masks are going to

take three or four weeks, if they’re implemented properly, for us to see the caseload go down,

which then — the caseload starts going down, and three or four weeks after that,

the deaths would start going down. We may have even seen a little plateau in the number of cases.

Cases is ramping up. We hit a record 850,000 or 900,000 just yesterday at the time of taping,

I think on the 29th of July. Now, my thesis is, Trump goes all in on masks.

The vaccine starts to show promise right as the debates start. He gets in there with Biden.

We see caseloads go down. We see deaths plummet. We get down under 250 deaths per day in America.

By September 15th, the market rips, and on the end of September, we have the first presidential

debate. Biden dunks on a senile, or maybe not crisp, Biden. Trump sails in. And we were just

talking two months ago, anything could happen, but Trump was definitely not going to be there.

Let’s go around the horn. Friedberg, vaccine false gold, or really promising? And what happens

in the election? I think there’s tons of promise with vaccine news in the next two months,

three months. I guess the point is, you’re going to hear more upside than you’re going to hear

downside news on vaccines, for sure. You know, whether or not we have a vaccine, and by when,

and yada, yada. Percentage chance we have a vaccine. We’re going to have a vaccine. I think

it’s a function of how many doses, at what point in time. And, you know, there is this 30,000 trial

happening with Moderna right now. There’s a Russian vaccine that just got approved yesterday in Russia

that they’re saying is ready to go, and they’re starting to distribute it. So there are vaccines,

right? This is a known known. So that news will only continue to improve and build, and there’ll

only be more and more indications of success with vaccines between now and November. How that

affects markets, I think, I’m not sure that drives markets as much as some of the other stuff that’s

going on in markets with the Fed and with policy and with stimulus packages. I think those are

frankly important drivers right now. And how much the markets ultimately affect the election,

I don’t know. So yeah, it’s all still pretty uncertain. Who’s going to win?

I think it’s pretty uncertain. Okay, you have to put your entire net worth on one person go.

Yeah, I still think Trump is, I kind of have been vacillating on this. I think Trump is probably

only going to improve from here on out. So your entire net worth is on the line in three,

two, place your bet. I’d go Trump. Wow. Wow. It’s still it’s still it’s still to me. I mean,

Trump is got to be the huge underdog here. I mean, right now it looks like Biden’s gonna win. I mean,

his basement strategy could backfire in the sense that if you know, fundamental conditions improve

with respect to COVID or the economy, the fact that he hasn’t said anything done anything gone

anywhere. You know, it could it could turn out to be a mistake. But right now, it it looks like

it’s working. And, and, you know, Trump seems to be completely knocked off his game. You know,

just earlier in the week, he floated this trial balloon about delaying the election that was

completely shot down by Republicans. And it’s when you saw that, what did you think as a Republican

when you saw him tweet that? What did you think? What was your emotional visceral reaction as our

token? You know, I’m not, I don’t I don’t necessarily identify with with partisan politics.

So let me just I have to state that. But what was your reaction as an American to him saying delay

the election? Of course, everybody, everybody shot down for your reaction. Everybody shot it

down for good reason. Everybody your reaction, of course, of course, we’re not going to delay

the election. We’ve, you know, you know, we haven’t delayed the we didn’t delay the election

to fight. He’s so scared of being pinned as a Republican. He’s it’s not gonna fuck with your

deal flow sacks. You could be a Republican. Okay, your entire net worth, we have to wrap

your entire net worth sacks. You could right now 3-2 net right now looks like Biden’s gonna win.

Trump’s been knocked off his game. And let me just say, like, I think the problem that Trump

has right now is he’s a salesman without a sales pitch. You know, you go back to the state of the

union pre COVID. He had it all worked out. He was gonna run on the greatest economy ever keep

America great. That issue has been taken away from him. And it seems like he’s still trying

to regain his footing. He’s trying to figure out what to run on. And the fact that he can’t do

these rallies, which were really, you know, the fact that he was able to go in 2016 to the swing

states, he would be, you know, flying around on his plane. And you’d three he did three rallies

a day in these swing states with 10s of 1000s of people wanted it he wanted to win. It was it was

that and it gave him a way to go over the heads of the media and speak directly to the people.

And then those people talk to other people, there’s a lot of word of mouth. And so he hit the

inability for him to hold those rallies, I think has just been devastating for the type of campaigning

that he likes to do. And so in a weird way, we have less than 100 days to the election,

but it feels like the campaign hasn’t really started yet, because Trump can’t do rallies,

and Biden hasn’t left his basement. Okay,

I’m sure math, entire net worth on the line, all SPACs, SPAC, B, SPAC, C, SPAC, D, whatever you

got spacked up, all your SPACs on the line, everything the Warriors position, three to

two, but we don’t need to guess, but I’ll tell you why. You know, we had a 33% drop in GDP,

we have double digit unemployment. And I think Trump’s real path to winning the White House,

which we talked about before, was getting an enormous stimulus bill passed, and he didn’t

force the Republican Senate to the table to make sure that these unemployment benefits didn’t roll

off. Now, there’s a very practical problem with these unemployment benefits, which is that it is

not administered at the federal level. It’s administered by literally 50 state agencies that

run relatively decrepit software. Now, just so you guys know, why did we pick $600? It was

an estimated numerical average, because what the Republicans really wanted to do was just top it

up. You know, whatever you used to get to get 200. And it was technically not feasible to implement

across 50 different insurance. Somebody in Boise, Idaho is different than somebody in New York.

So they were like, ah, $600. So my point is, it’s going to take four to eight weeks

to re-implement unemployment insurance once we decide what we’re going to do. So that basically,

if you started today, puts you somewhere between September 1 and October 1. And so you have then

30 days to basically catch a positive tailwind or 60 days, so call it midpoint 45 days. You know,

you have now federal eviction laws that are rolling off. So I think that it’s setting itself

up for a very difficult path. He just stopped spending, I believe in Michigan, Trump did,

which is, you know, not a good sign. He actually has overspent in Georgia.

So if you look at the facts on the ground, your entire net worth goes on.

Now, Biden, it’s a it’s a languishing campaign. As of today, David is right. He’s a salesman

without a pitch. And unfortunately, he’s a the path isn’t clear. The path should have been

paved with money. It’s such a no brainer. Here, let me let me give you one last call that money

to and why would you stop printing the money? If you gave everybody $1,200 and six weeks of

unemployment, why not just do it for another six weeks and give everybody another 1200?

I don’t understand why that’s such a difficult decision for Trump,

free bird. No, let me give you a scary poll that just came out by you. It says

55% of supporters of Donald Trump say that they will not accept the election victory of Joe Biden

if mail in votes are allowed. Wow. So the framing of this is actually a little bit more serious than

just who’s going to win. There is a further polarization constitutional crisis question

rioting, you know, whatever disregard for the election entirely kind of moment coming up here

because Trump and others have kind of framed this as such a non election election because it’s all

fake and it’s all fake news. And, you know, this is all part of the conspiracy. So there is

something scary brewing, I think. And that’s what I’m kind of most interested in tracking

is really where does this all go? Percentage chance that we get to a constitutional crisis.

And Trump says, I’m not leaving the White House on a percentage basis, free bird.

I don’t think he’ll say I’m not leaving the White House. I think he’s going to be

fucking happy to go back to wherever he’s gonna go. Yeah, but I think it’s I think there’s going

to be other ramifications that are worth us figuring out and thinking about because that’s

the scary stuff that’s coming next. Okay, that’s a 25% chance of a constitutional crisis. I think

if the election is close, we could easily have like a Gore v. Bush type situation. It could be

very damaging for the Republic. I do not think there will be a hanging

chat issue in this election. This is going to be one way or the other incredibly decisive on

an electoral college. Okay, final, I don’t not set up for it to be that that close.

Okay, well, I don’t think the election right now is not trying to be close at all. It’s trying to

be a blowout. And so I think we’ll avoid the crisis because it’s not close. And it looks like

Biden’s gonna run away with it. But if it does get super close, you know, I could imagine there being

a crisis based on people not accepting that if the margin of error is within the margin of these

mail-in ballots, and you have, you know, 30-40% of the population saying they’re not going to accept

it. I’m not saying we’ll have like a legal crisis, but I think you could have a legitimacy crisis,

it can be very bad for the Republic. Not as bad as Trump’s presidency, clearly.

So, final question, final, final question. If Trump believes he’s not going to win,

and he’s essentially given up right now, which it feels like he’s kind of given up.

What would do you think who would win if Trump says Nikki Haley and Pence can run? I’ve done

such an amazing job. I’ve been the best president in the history of the union. But I want to get

back to my life. And I think Pence, Nikki Haley should go for it. What happens and who wins?

Saxe. Too late for that? Too late for that. You can’t you can’t put Pence and Nikki Haley

on the ballot. Why not? Of course you can, if he says I’m feeling under it.

If he bows out, the Republicans would have to pick a successor. It’s not a new third party,

the Republicans would be allowed to pick a successor. If he said I’m not doing it for,

you know, health reasons, whatever the reason he comes up with,

who wins? Nikki Haley? No? Too silly? This is silly. I think he might drop out. I think

I’m putting it out there. I think it’s a 5% chance he doesn’t want to be demolished.

And he says, you know what, I’ll take the deal. You agreed to not prosecute me getting out of

here. I’ll take it and I changed I changed my bet to Joe Biden. I’ve changed my bet.

After this, after you read your whole network, you change to Joe Biden.

Well, he’s clearly the favor right now. And the question is whether there’s still time for

there to be a change. I mean, honestly, I think we should stop betting on what the outcome is. I

think it’s stupid. I think what we should really be worried about is what are we doing? Like

letting tens of millions of Americans roll off of unemployment insurance with zero like the

Republican Senate went on vacation. It’s ridiculous. I mean, they should all be fired.

It’s the craziest thing. We have the biggest crisis in our lifetime. If you roll up the

last three crises, 9-11 dotcom bust and the Great Recession, those three pal in comparison

to the magnitude of this one. And these motherfuckers are going on vacation. I agree

with you. It’s outrageous. I don’t think partisan politics are that interesting. But

I think they will eventually pass a bill. I think the the issue on the unemployment is not that the

Republicans don’t support an extension of unemployment. But the the magnitude of the

unemployment now exceeds what workers would get if they went back to work. And so I think

they’re concerned about creating a disincentive for the difference. Why not make it $300?

It’s honestly it is such fake fucking news. Like it’s like it has been shown that people

then end up spending that money. Like I don’t know if you guys saw but like there are industries

that are posting it’s not just Facebook, Amazon and Google posting meat and beets like you wouldn’t

believe in boating in housing people are spending this money it drives GDP. So whether you put 600

or 200 or 1200 into people’s pockets, they have a proclivity to spend it they should have gotten

something done. Trump Trump as well as all the Republicans are up for reelection, I think we

just cave on this issue. And I think it will get done. The Republicans are opposing it are the

ones who aren’t up for reelection and are concerned about debt. You know, that’s the that’s the

that’s the concern that all the debt matter if we go into a depression, David, why not?

The incremental six weeks of unemployment, put it at $300. But get something done, David.

Why are you not getting something done, David? Why is your team fucking this up,

David? Yeah, I don’t I don’t wear a jersey. I’m not on a team.

But I think they will get something done. I mean, I’m not when they’re back for vacation. Do you

think they should have gone on vacation? They’re got their own vacation, David. They can’t.

They got to come back to work. These guys went duck hunting instead of

taking care of the 15 million your team went hunting Washington DC.

Because obviously, there’s a lot of there’s enough Republicans who want to get something

done. I mean, why not blame the Democrats for being too intransigent?

Sorry, what I’m saying is it’s not Republican. I’m saying the entire

we’re breaking your chops, sex, the entire group should not have gone on vacation.

The entire half half half of the Congress is gone.

Where are they? What? What are they doing? That’s more important.

Maybe they’re hanging out in their basement like like Biden.

I love you guys. All right. Everybody stay safe. On behalf of the dictator himself,

best DC, the the SPAC Meister himself. Stay safe, Chamath. On behalf of the queen of quinoa,

the Friedberger himself. Stay safe, David Friedberg,

in whichever one of your three houses you’re in right now. And.

And to rain, man, he’s definitely burnt. Don’t burn, baby. He’s definitely a great

driver in the driveway. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s definitely a lot of

Wapner Wapner. And of course, fish sticks. And of course, he’s still investing from craft,

certainly craft funds still investing. We’ll see you all next time on the six most popular

podcast out of the gate. Let’s see. Maybe if you tell your friends about this podcast,

we’ll go to number one on the technology list.

Love you, boys. Stay safe. Can’t wait to play poker. Bye. Great job, everybody.