All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E34: Wuhan lab leak theory, India's "traceability" law, Coinbase's fact check, Big Tech's Hollywood takeover

Episode Date: May 31, 2021

Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Referenced in the show: WSJ - The Wuhan Lab Leak Question: A Disused Chinese Mine Takes Center Stage https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-lab-leak-question-chinese-mine-covid-pandemic-11621871125 Forbes - Friends Don't Let Friends Become Chinese Billionaires https://www.forbes.com/sites/raykwong/2011/07/25/friends-dont-let-friends-become-chinese-billionaires/?sh=44597352ddae Brookings - Fentanyl and geopolitics: Controlling opioid supply from China https://www.brookings.edu/research/fentanyl-and-geopolitics-controlling-opioid-supply-from-china/ NPR - 'We Are Shipping To The U.S.': Inside China's Online Synthetic Drug Networks https://www.npr.org/2020/11/17/916890880/we-are-shipping-to-the-u-s-china-s-fentanyl-sellers-find-new-routes-to-drug-user Coinbase - Announcing Coinbase Fact Check: Decentralizing truth in the age of misinformation https://blog.coinbase.com/announcing-coinbase-fact-check-decentralizing-truth-in-the-age-of-misinformation-757d2392d61a Show Notes: 0:00 Friedberg recaps Sacks' birthday party 6:47 "Wuhan Lab Leak" theory, did COVID come from a lab? Plusn China's fentanyl production 26:09 India's new "traceability" law 33:11 Coinbase & Brian Armstrong debut fact checking blog 41:17 Friedberg's science corner: groundbreaking gene therapies 45:06 Amazon's MGM acquisition, media consolidation 1:04:45 Biden's $6T infrastructure, Democrat's feeling the inflation pressure & responding

Okay, so Jason you're gonna send to zoom link great. I'm gonna make love canata. I'll take 70 minutes And then I'm gonna stretch and shower how long? I'll be ready at 115 Okay, awesome. Thanks. I just puke to my coffee a little bit, but okay It's just that he does he gets seconds and minutes mixed up, you know, it's a lot of gotta have sex in heaven and god. Yeah, I can stop it. Ah, ah, ah, ah. Thank you for tuning into the All in Podcast. We got our cold open.

Somebody's free for it. Yeah, I like that's the, that's the cold open. That should be the cold open. That should be the cold open. Seconds in paradise. Oh my god. By the way, that's all right. These seconds includes Tremoth brushing his teeth. Hey everybody, it is another edition episode 34 of the All In podcast with us today.

David Friedberg, the queen of Kenwa, the science sorcerer of the pod, Rainman, David Sacks, hot off his 60th birthday bash in Los Angeles. Sorry, sorry, that was just going by me, his looks. And the dictator, Chimam Polly Hoppatea, fresh off of writing editorials about himself in Bloomberg. Congratulations everybody. Chimam, give yourself a pat on the back for that exceptional. Freeberg is not my favorite bestie

because he actually showed up my birthday party and like you guys. Oh, I'm sorry David David How do you expect people to react in 24 hours to fly to a different city? Yeah, it was a surprise it was a surprise birthday Surprise to the gas. It was a surprise all the invitees as well. Let me tell you guys what you missed out on okay All right, wait, let's give background. Sacks is now 40 and 50 years old. 74. 74. And his wife is to throw a last minute birthday party after I bought tickets to the next

and the nets and invited family members. Go ahead. And now we're the bad guys. We fly down for the birthday. They show you on the cars from the plane to the house. We get to the house. We get to the house, long driveway. There's like dudes making like watermelon tequila beverages while you hang out and wait. There's some dude from America's Got Talent playing the guitar or playing the violin in the driveway.

The bathrooms are nicer than the bathrooms I have at home. You know, these be porta-potties they rent in the driveway. And, you know, we're all waiting, of course, Saxx is late two and a half hours. There was no party. We're all hanging out and starving. But then we go into the party, sit down for dinner, and then who shows up as our dinner experience? It's the guy that won America's I,

America and I, all two nights before. So no one knows who this guy is except 17-year-old girls and myself. So I like hop out of my seat. I'm like, oh my god, is that guy from American Idol? I had to rush into the backstage to get a photo with him. You know, it's Sachs' garage. And then they have like, Kulio shows up.

So we're like sitting down in dinner for course two. All of a sudden, Pop comes out of the woodwork Kulio. I lose my shit. I run up on the Kul floor I grew up coolio like is like high school jams man I mean that's like in the car cruising and at this point I'm like seven to kilo watermelon to kill his ass I'm like oh my god not so good no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no Oh, the dance floor, you know, jammed up the coolio. I think Julio thought I was sacks, you know, because he's like, yeah, he's like, oh, two South African Jews, you guys all look the same.

Julio comes up, starts hyping me and hugging me, and I'm like, what's up, Julio, my god, this is like a dream come true. He's like hugging me, his face is right next to my face. I didn't know what to say. And I like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I've had a little bit of tequila. And I, and I whisper in Julio's ear. I'm like, I appreciate you. little bit of tequila and I whisper in cool. Yo's here. I'm like oh no, I appreciate I appreciate you

My god, I think I saw freeberg throw his panties on stage to Was what a nerd. I didn't even say what to say. I mean, what do you say when cool? Clearly, clearly, you don't know what to say. Can I go back to the part where you said that you were dancing and instantly the image I had was Julie Slyd-Dryfus inside.

Yeah. Yeah. We have to find that security footage of me, her dancing. Mark McGrath from Sugar Ray performing and he had that dude from cool in the gang performing I'm the game showed up to the good sax and birthday wish wouldn't the game the rapper the game the game game Yeah, the game I was just to do a movie together like 15 years ago and you know I never panned out, but he still remember rainy came by to say hi on my birthday. It was pretty incredible

Very nice. That's really incredible. Sorry, nice. Have you guys ever met sex as parents? Yeah, of course. I just 40th. Yeah, they're so nice. They're so nice. We spent so much time with them. We loved hanging out with them.

It was a really, really cool party. I mean, everybody, sorry, we missed it. 72 hours is generally a shorter window than most out of city parties. But I have a better excuse. I had a corporate offsite for my team. So I apologize. I said, okay, we missed you guys. It was really fun.

I can't wait. Yeah. When Jogelinsons on the invite for a party, you definitely want to want to make it. They're a party. So they're a party. She knows how to throw a party. She knows how to make it. So how does it feel being this old and just looking so exhausted, David Toss?

I mean, you do look exhausted. Jacob, aren't you turning 50 this summer? I was already 50 in November, I did, yeah. I was in quarantine, so we're going to have to have like a post. How heavy is that? 50? About 194. I don't know.

Give her a take. It wasn't actually super heavy for me. I mean, I think just you do think about, hey, we're counting down. It's the back nine. You want to make good use of the time you have left. And so, yeah, of course, it's something where you're going to consider, you know, your life, of course. Yeah. And just make sure you make good use of the time that you have here. Yeah, I think 40 was just a yeah, and just make sure you make good use of the time that you have here. Yeah, I think 40 was just a party, but 50 feels a little bit heavy. It'll still be a great party, but it does feel a little bit metaphysical, I guess. Yeah, I'm looking at metaphysical right now.

I'll let you know after I figure out what that word means. Well, okay, listen, we didn't get together on Friday, but here we are recording on a Saturday, and lots of stuff going on. The thing I think I'm most interested in hearing from Freeberg about is the lab leak theory. And I think that this touches on a little bit of the politicization of science, I guess. There's a lab in Wuhan. I think it's more Trump derangement syndrome. It didn't allow us to see the forest from the trees. And the same words just said by a different president, all of a sudden invokes an investigation.

Yeah, so I mean, there is a COVID laboratory in Wuhan. It is the only one in China. And that's where the... It's a virology left where they study viruses and... Yes, but specifically, they've studied COVID viruses. They have, yeah, that's, I mean, that's a big class of virus. So, yeah. And it's the only one in China,

and it's funded by America and China and the who? The who get an Institute of Virology. I mean, this is, I mean, this is like... The one institute of virology was posting job wrecks two years ago for, specifically for researchers of bat viruses. We know they were studying bat viruses at this place. And Wuhan just happens to be the place where a novel coronavirus that seems to arrive from a bat virus, you know, like emerges.

I mean, what are the odds, right? I mean, this was such an obvious theory, the idea that COVID might have leaked from this particular lab. And yet we were forbidden from talking about it, I guess, till Donald Trump was out of office. I mean, I think there's really two stories here. One is Chinese culpability, in the spread of the virus.

The other one is the media story. Why were we not allowed to have this discussion? Why did the media brand anybody who discussed this leak theory as being some sort of conspiracy theorist or a racist? Why were big tech companies censoring or removing any user generated content from their sites that were putting forward this theory. Why was the media in big tech doing this? I mean, is it somehow? I can tell. But somehow they were telling us it was more racist to talk about a lab accident. Then to... David, because the person who could have explained it in a deescalated factual way, chose to escalate it and be emotional and superficial.

And that was Donald Trump. And so I don't I don't think that you could point to us and say we could have changed how the narrative is exploited. All of us are just normal average people on the ground. But there probably is sort of, you know, a hierarchy of like information. And there probably isn't a single individual individual beyond the president that who has access to more information. And so if he was if he was just more moderate and normal and basically said, Hey, guys,

there is a legitimate risk that we need to investigate because fast forward, basically a 18 months later and this president who is moderate, you can like him or not like him, but he's kind of moderate and unoffensive, says basically that. And now we have this news cycle about investigating something. We should have been investigating 18 months ago, just at least to get to the bottom of it. What was going on? But Trump had to make it such a big deal and about himself.

And I think that's the takeaway. But just because Trump says something doesn't mean it's not true. I mean, he is occasionally going to say things that are true. And that's not what my point is. Well, you're right. As a president of the United States, you just have to have more discipline. Well, but I think you're right in the sense that the reason this became a forbidden topic is because the media had to act like anything Trump said is untrue or crazy or racist.

It's a failure on both sides then, David. I mean, the media is failing to be independent critical thinkers, and Trump is failing to be a good leader and be clear. And that means you have to be an independent critical thinker. The media's first obligation here is to the truth. They're not supposed to distort the truth or push forward a false narrative because of the political consequences.

And they didn't want to be seen as helping Trump in any way, and that's really what their motivation was. But I find it equally disturbing that big tech was censoring the truth on this issue. The whole point of having a free marketplace of ideas is so that we can arrive at the truth. And how is that going to be possible when big tech is censoring? I'm sorry. I really disagree with you. I think that the big tech's decision to censure this information was a derivative of the

first two things. I don't think that decision would have happened had Trump been normal. And then media would have just listened and said, okay, maybe there's a chance this guy's right? He's saying and acting in a normal way. Let's go investigate. And then big tech would have basically said, we don't know the truth one way or the other but it seems legitimate saying people are on both sides. Don't publish mean tweets it was okay for big tech or rather the media to basically portray the correct theory as a lion conspiracy and it was okay for big tech to engage in censorship on that basis. What I'm saying is the following. The president of the United States,

independent on whoever it is, has a very specific responsibility to be measured, to be unemotional, and to be about the bigger picture. That's what the president of the United States is responsibility is no matter who holds the office. And then the media's job is to fact check that and hold that person accountable and cult that person in a transparent manner.

Freeberg, yes or no. Is it a viable theory? And then let's get to odds and percentages. I mean, as a scientist, do you think that this has come from a wet market or some accidental exposure, somebody eating bad or some cross contamination of bad and a pig and then somebody eats a pig or do you think somebody from the lab accidentally brought at home with them. Don't know, it doesn't matter. I feel like we need to kind of

recognize that bio warfare and bioterrorism is a real risk and I think more importantly that this moment, whether or not it's proven, and it will never be proven or disproven one way or the other. So it really doesn't matter. What will ultimately happen is we are going to kind of become much more cognizant of these sorts of threats to the human population. Let me be very specific. A kid in high school could write up some RNA code today on their computer, order that RNA to be delivered to them by what's called an oligoprinting facility, get this RNA, booted up, turned it into a virus, and they could release that thing into the wild. There are several very cheap over-the-counter internet-based ways that one could do this. So, the fact that there is some sophisticated government run lab doing this, I don't think matters as much.

What's really compelling in this whole story line is by holy shit, this is possible. It's possible that there's either an engineer or discovered virus, and it shows just how if these things leak out and they are infectious and they are transmissible can become a real risk to the global population. And it's not just viruses. There are other mechanisms of bio warfare that can be printed and created using similar techniques of genomics. There are proteins called preons and preons cause other proteins to fold in a mismatched way.

This is actually what Mad Cal disease is. It's a preion. It's a protein that you find in the brain. If you eat this particular protein and end up in your brain, it causes the other proteins in your brain that match that protein to misfold and it basically replicates and creates this cascading effect. So basically like allians. Like allians, I didn't find it.

Yeah, but I guess my point is like whether it's pre-ons or viruses, there are techniques and there are capabilities and instruments now that all humans have access to here that theoretically could allow for the booting or the creation and the discrimination of truly terrifying tools, biological tools. Now this comes hand in hand with the incredible optimism and opportunity that these tools present, much like chemical engineering presented in the incredible optimism and opportunity that these tools present, much like chemical engineering presented in the early 20th century to humanity. We could create things like DDT and kill ourselves, or we could create things like artificial fertilizer and feed ourselves.

And so there's this tremendous as there is with any new technology, this tremendous kind of optimism and fear, and it's going to create, I think, a very powerful debate narrative over the coming decade. On what do we do with these tools? Is it even possible to regulate them? Where is this gonna go? And what are the risks? And it's not necessarily just government agencies that we need to kind of be considering here. It's the fact that there's a democratization of this tool, which is enabling all of this great innovation. Does it, sex, does it matter if it was leaked or not? It's free-breg, is it? Yes, of course.

It's a matter of big picture. Of course, you disagree with it. Of, does it matter if it was leaked or not? It's freebergassing. It does a matter of big picture. Of course it matters. You disagree with freebergs. Of course it matters. And the only reason we don't know conclusively that it came from a lab is because the Chinese government wouldn't let, they thwarted the investigation, they wouldn't let the investigators come in. And so the smoke is pouring out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and they will not

allow the firefighters in because those firefighters Come from the West we could establish the truth of what happened if they would let us talk to the scientists who work at that lab if they could go What would you do about it? Let's say that you find out that it did like yeah Well at a minute well first of all we're talking about a virus has killed millions of people's millions of people across the world It's calls a normance damage to to the economy to our economy to economies people across the world. It's caused enormous damage to the economy, to our economy, to economies all over the world. We have to think through carefully what the consequences would be, but it matters a lot how the Chinese government handled this.

At a minimum, we need to decouple ourselves from China with regard to anything that's a vital American interest. We cannot be dependent on them for the manufacturing of our PPE, for our antibiotics, for our pharmaceuticals. It is insane. So there's nothing we're going to do to China in terms of sanctions if we find out they covered up a leak. If there's an accidental leak and they covered it up, we're not still at the level of a plan. It acts more as a warning sign for us to do better and be more independent It's a principle of escalation. They are still the critical supplier to most of American manufacturing in industry every product that American

Companies make most products have some sort of Chinese produced input and so I would start I would start with I think the measured response That's also in our national interest is to resure any critical components that we need for our pharmaceutical industry. So drug manufacturing and the manufacturing. So it's not about sanctioning China. It's about getting our act together. Chimathi, you agree with this? And what do you think? If we did find out that it was in fact a covered up leak, which I think is the most reasonable assumption here. What should we do as America, as a country, global reaction to China? I agree with Friedberg and David Sacks in parts. There's nothing to do, I think we have to move on.

I think it's important to get to the bottom of it. It'll maybe help eliminate some of the politicizing of science that we've seen as a result of this thing, but ultimately, what's done is done. Instead, what I think we have to learn from it is you can't elect hotheads and people who are unpredictable and unreliable to basically be our truth tellers and fact tellers. And if anybody but Donald Trump was the president of the United States in that moment, we probably could have had a chance of getting to the bottom of it when it counted. And whether you support him or not, it doesn't matter. The style made it impossible for anybody to really listen.

That to me is the most important takeaway of that moment, which is he does have a responsibility above everybody else's. The second thing is, I think this is the most important macro investing theme that I've seen in my lifetime, which is that globalization as we know it is over. And what Saxipu just said is what I really believe, which is that you have to ensure and you have to move to a place where you value resiliency over just in time. And if you look at the businesses that need to get built in order to enable resiliency, you will see trillions of dollars of opportunity. And I really, I really, really believe in that. That's that's very exciting to me

So instead of great. Yeah, instead of being anti-China, which I don't think is productive I think it's better to be pro-America and say hey, let's just figure out how to build this stuff ourselves Now here's the problem though when the rubber meets the road The biggest impediment to ensuring jobs into the United States are the same people on the left who actually claim that there is no upward mobility. And here's why. When you go and you want to basically vulcanize supply chains, you are introducing inefficiency. You're also introducing some puts and takes in areas that today have been like third-real issues, for example. The people on the left believe in

climate change more than anybody else. But when you explain to them that in order to eliminate hydrocarbons, you actually have to mine critical minerals and metals out of the ground. They're the same people that say no way. Well, you can't have one without the other. And you actually have to have a rational conversation and realize like, listen, we're going to have to do this. And so for example, like Biden this past week, somewhat capitulated for environmental interest and said, you know what? Yes, climate change is critical, but we're going to try to get them from everywhere else but America. It's not going to work. So that's kind of where, like, I'm a little frustrated. But those are my two takeaways. Number one is, let's

just get past China and let's just focus on the United States. And number two is globalization, as we know it is done, and we need to focus on resiliency. Did you guys read the Wall Street Journal piece on the miners who in 2012 were the ones who you know, we're clearing essentially Bat Dung. Bat up. Yeah, and so this this is a really fascinating Turn of events that we're starting to know what this lab was doing if you didn't see the Wall Street Journal story We'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, we'll put in the show notes But in April 2012 six miners fell sick with a mysterious illness after entering the mine to clear bat Guano, I guess is what

after entering the mind to clear a bat. Guano, I guess, is what. Poup, that poop. That poop. Which is supposed to be an incriminate source of fertilizer worldwide. Yeah, so three of them died. Chinese scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Ourology were called into investigate

after taking samples from bats in the mind identified several new coronaviruses. Now, on answer questions about the minor illness, the viruses found at the site and the research done with them have found at the site and the research done with them have elevated into the mainstream, an idea once dismissed as a conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 might have lead from the lab in Wuhan. I mean, this is just becoming more and more obvious. My gut tells me that our government already

knows this, has known it for some time, the 90-day sort of window that they've given the Chinese to kind of give us an answer as to what happened here is window dressing and then we're going to start the process of becoming more independent from China. Because there's, I mean, there's nothing you could do. I mean, how could we retaliate for an accident? We're not going to get in a war over this. No one's suggesting that. But I think we have to open our eyes to the regime that we're dealing with over in China. And just to add a layer to this analysis, novel coronaviruses are not the only thing coming out of Chinese labs. China is also the number one producer of fentanyl.

Obviously. Yeah. And that's another truth that we can finally talk about now that Trump is out of office people haven't wanted to talk about it or they thought that you were hysterical or promoting a conspiracy theory if you talked about it but I just posted two articles in the chat one from Brookings and one from NPR about how China is the main source of fentanyl that's pouring into our streets. The first it makes a stop over in Mexico and then somehow it gets muggled into the US. This is a huge problem in our cities.

And I think this is not accidental. You know, this is deliberate. So the Chinese government is deliberately sending a super opioid drug into the United States for profit or to destabilize the country and different cities and create more division between the left and the right because homelessness and wealth inequality is getting mixed up with a super drug as opposed to a homeless problem.

This is getting a little long. I know it's getting crazy, it's crazy. Well, that's what I'm reflecting back to, Sacks, but how's it a conspiracy theory? We know that China is mass producing the fentanyl that's coming into the US. We know that that fentanyl is creating a gigantic crisis of drug addiction of homelessness on the streets. We know they could stop it if they wanted to. They have total control over that country. What is a conspiracy theory? Yeah, I don't know. If that's the equivalent of saying America produces all the world's cars, it's not America.

There are organizations within the United States that under the purview of the US government. The CCP is hand picking, who gets to run bite dance and ant and they're retiring CEO. They get to decide what is producing that country and who produces it. you're telling me that Tax what do you think is going on in the federal government when they say to their their counterparts At the Chinese Communist Party. Hey, we need you guys to stop producing Fentil. Do you think that conversation's happening?

Yeah, it was this was an agenda item during the Trump administration and talks between Do you have any sense of what What the feedback was from China. I mean, what's the counterpoint? I don't know enough, but what is the counterpoint that China would then say? Like, why they can't stop there? Why this is still happening? I mean, my understanding is there are thousands of kind of, you know, call them under-regulated factories and facilities in China, any number of which this could be a question.

Let me ask you a question. Does China have a fentanyl addiction problem in their streets? We don't know. No, no. No, no, no. And the answer is they round out every single person who's a Hong Kong dissident into would sell a book or if anybody goes to the... That's fair.

...tianimans square protests. You're going to jail for five years. They just announced. Hong Kong citizens who go to the Tiananmen Square Memorial this year are getting five years And if you tweet about it, you get one year in jail. So they can They can control anything in their country just to build on your control point I tweeted this to you guys in the group chat we can post this as well in the show notes But there was an article in Forbes this week that said friends don't let friends become Chinese billionaires

That was the title. And the data point that this whole story, by the way, it's like eight years old, just you know. No, no, this was written now. That might have been... No, I think read the story. I think at the top, it says the story is like eight years old. But anyway, it is true that Chinese billionaires...

The Chinese billionaires... ...dise every 40 days. Unnatural deaths have taken the lives of 72 mainland billionaires over the past eight years. 15 were murdered It's the wild west over there man 17 committed suicide seven died from accidents in 19 Millness and 14 were executed Suicide accidents, but was they execute the 14 for can you imagine 14 billionaires just get executed?

Is that story real? What is that story from Timoff? I mean well this this maybe is a good segue into Coinbase Fact Check, but this is an article in first. All right, India versus WhatsApp. Well, I'll give you the rundown on the India thing. So basically, there is a right to free speech effectively in the Indian Constitution. But then India passed the law effectively. I'll just summarize it as traceability, which basically means that if you have an online network and you post something in the network, if an Indian sensor or an Indian regulator or

authority basically says, hey hold on, this is an issue. They have the right to basically have the network or whoever owns that network, trace it down to its originating source. Now that's a really important distinction because there are certain products. So for example, take WhatsApp where a feature of the product is end-to-end encryption. So it's hopping around in ways that are very difficult and near to impossible for anybody to really figure out. And now all of a sudden that element which used to be a feature is now a bug because if the Indian government says, hey, hold on, that statement, I have an issue with, I need you to figure out who said that. They'll essentially

have to undo all their intended encryption to figure out. So then what's that filed a court case in New Delhi this week, essentially I think asking for an injunction. And so I think this is going to go to a head. But you have this now state of affairs, which I think is really interesting, which is so, you know, we talk about how we have an issue with Chinese censors. Well, now here's a different, more complicated example, because this is the largest democracy in the world. And what they were effectively saying is we need to have an equivalent red button and a set of levers so that we can figure

out what's going on when we choose. And there's going to be a lot of implications because inside of India, what's different than America as a democracy is it has lower average incomes, it has lower health, it has lower literacy rates, it has more religious sort of tension, and it's got many, many more young people who are more prone theoretically to get, you know, bamboozled by misinformation and disinformation. And so, you know, India sees those facts on the ground and probably wrote this law with those intentions in mind. And it's had a bunch of these issues, by the way, particularly between Muslims and Hindus.

And so what do you do? What is Facebook and what's app supposed to do? What is Google supposed to do? What does it mean for internet rights? I think it's a super, super complicated problem. And do you prioritize misinformation and disinformation above the right for people's privacy? And you're going to see it unfold in the largest democracy in the world over the next couple of months. I don't really know how I feel about it, to be honest, except I do think that Indian government

has a right to set the rules of their own country. And set the rules they are. I mean, remember, they also ban TikTok in an instance and hundreds of other apps. I think 60 apps from China have been banned permanently in India. So India obviously has a different approach to China, which is we're going to put our foot down. Of course, they're involved in some skirmishes on their border. But yeah, it does seem sacks. What do you, what's your thought? You have personal right to privacy and to end encryption, and then you have the ability to run back door to it. Yeah.

This is another major sledgehammer to globalization. In the mid to late 90s, we had this beautiful dream that we're going to create a single internet for the whole world. It would create a single common market, a single place for people to interact and go, and that all of these barriers, these geographic barriers, tribal barriers

would come down over time. And now what we see is the trade barriers have come up. And now instead of having one internet for the whole world, it's fragmenting into a bunch of different internet governed by local laws. It started with the great firewall of China creating sort of a separate Chinese internet.

Now you're starting to see country by country regulations. And I just think it's sort of an inevitable reaction that the power of governments and sovereignty comes before the power of corporations and they're reimposing their will. And I think the question for all these companies is going to be where they decide they're willing to play. Now, I do think it's a very different choice whether you want to play in India or whether you want to play in China because in China, when the government tells you to hand over information on dissidents, you really are aiding and abetting what could be political oppression.

Whereas India being a democracy, I don't think the choice is quite the same at all. And so, you know, I do think these tech companies are going to have to decide which countries they want to sort of play ball with. And ultimately, I think they probably are going to have to make a determination based on working with the democratic ones. And they're probably going to have to exit the ones that engage in political repression. In my, first of all, I think that's really well said what you said. In my annual letter last year, I kind of wrote like, here's the white paper on how to dismantle Big Tech.

And there were two frames. One was around taxation, which we're also seeing, but the second was on this regulatory point, David, that you're bringing up. That's the simplest way to sort of break these companies down, which is if you have to engineer now, instead of one monolithic codebase, multiple instantiations, where you can't even get the leverage of like cross-border data centers. I mean, by the way, there's a really interesting thing that the Biden tax bill also proposes on this dimension, right? It's going to prevent you from sending IP into places like Ireland and keeping it there.

So you can't have all of a sudden code that's running in Ireland that executes something that makes money so that you can pay Irish tax versus something code that runs in America that's largely user-oriented. That's not going to happen. That's not going to be allowed anymore. All of these things are happening at the same time, essentially to reign big tech in, baking it almost a whack-a-mole problem inside these companies, where you're fighting a tax thing,

for example, Google's fighting antitrust in France, then you're fighting antitrust at the EU level, then you're fighting traceability and encryption in India, then you're fighting inversion of an IP in America. Wow. It's like all of a sudden, the lawyers inside of these companies will outnumber the engineers. I think a lot of this is the downstream consequences of what happened back in January when Twitter and all the other big tech companies de-platformed Trump. Remember at the time,

it wasn't just conservatives or in the US who raised alarm bells. It was Angela Merkel in Germany. It was the finance minister in France, I think India talked about it. I think Modi had a statement about it. They all woke up and said, whoa, a head of state can be de-platformed by Jack Dorsey. He's more powerful than the president of the United States and countries all around the world started looking at the power of big tech and realize that they're subordinate to all of these tech billionaires and oligarchs.

Tell me about Coinbase in fact, Jack. I think this thing is incredible. I mean, I have to say, by the way, the first thing I'll say about, and this is the exact opposite of what I said the last time Brian Armstrong wrote a memo, this memo is excellent. And if you haven't had a chance to read it, we'll put it in the show notes. But Brian's essay is super. I think there have been a couple of CEO memos in the last two months that I think honestly should be in the Hall of Fame in the Smithsonian.

One is the Toby Lutke memo that the internal email he wrote. And the second one is this one that Brian wrote. Because I think this, this thing is probably one of the most important things in my opinion that has been written by a CEO which has the potential to lead to huge systemic changes. Well, he echoed a lot of the things we've been saying on this part about going direct, don't let the press tell your story, go direct, get the truth out.

They're basically what the blog said is they're going to start using the Coinbase blog as a forum, basically as a media publication for crypto-related things. The fact-check part is that when the popular press gets crypto wrong, which they do frequently in Coinbase's view, Coinbase is going to call them out and correct them. They're going to do respectfully. Here's what he says,

the increased awareness has been great. And fortunately, we also see misinformation published frequently as well. Other than traditional media, social media or by public figures, this doesn't always come from negative intentions. Our business and crypto can be difficult to understand and often people are rushed to post first impressions

online, making mistakes in the process. That other times misinformation comes with people publishing their own agenda or from people who have a conflict of interest. This is not unique to our business or industry, of course. So how should companies respond? One, turn the other cheek, two, fight, and three, publish the truth. I believe there is a reasonable middle ground between these first two options, turning the

other cheek and fighting, which is to simply publish the truth in a couple of ways. Two and three of the same. The way you fight back is you publish the truth. So to me, that's not a choice. Those are the same thing, is you can either remain silent, take the high road, which always results in people believing whatever lies are being said, or you fight back by telling the truth. Fact check approach is not about antagonizing or embarrassing others.

It's a Brian Armstrong, but simply sharing what happened through our own channels. It also means sharing the good along with the bad with radical transparency. I just want to say that I wish I'm all the success in the world because I think if if and as this works, which I think it will, because people in the crypto universe are more prone to actually get their own information and do their own diligence. I think the spillover effects to other companies can be really positive.

All of this is going to the same place, which is the intermediary layer of traditional media is basically getting whittled down, right? There was a different thing that happened in those last few weeks, which was the Tribune company, I think it was, basically got taken private by some hedge fund. And in it, they talked about what has happened

in the industry. And the most incredible thing was the amount of revenue that has disappeared from newspapers. And literally from the tens of billions of dollars to basically single digit billions today over the last 20 years, which effectively means traditional media's revenue source is going away. And if then all of a sudden, if you take that media model away and there are no more economic incentives, then it stands to reason that the overarching incentives that remain are

around reputation, which is then about facts. And so the fact that Coinbase will have a place that says, here are the facts, and we're going to put it on chain permanently on the record. That's, I think, a really powerful idea. Andries and Horowitz, by the way, same situation. They're doing it in venture capital. One of the largest and most prolific and important sources

of funding the future. They're on the record on chain in their own way, right, with their own media and they're now helping to tell the stories of other folks through it. David Sachs, you know, Sachs has put so much content in terms of teaching people about the business that he knows really well, but at the same time, he's also been able to write about what he thinks about certain things and then eventually on behalf of his companies, he'll be able to say things and do things as well. So all of a sudden, not all of a sudden, I guess we've seen it, but if we had to put a label on this, this is the dismantling of traditional media. It is happening in real time.

And it's accelerating. It turns out, you know, as a subject being interpreted as you're being through the New Yorker right now in your storage amount, and I am through my business insider profile, you know, all these profiles that they do, they're interpreting your life when people could just tune into the podcast and hear us talk about it, right? And it's like you can go direct to the source, listen to 34 episodes of All-Anne

or you could read some interpretation from somebody trying to get pages. Well, here's my observation. The thing is that people who create artifacts on a real-time basis, so in many ways, we have all collectively now started to create a weekly artifact of who we are as people. It leaves very little leftover for interpretation,

and so then unfortunately, what happens is journalists trying to write content have to introduce some form of flourish to stand out. Yeah. Because if you're just repeating something that was said on the podcast or something that we said in a tweet, there's nothing left to talk about. It's kind of already been said. And so that's what creates boundary conditions for lying. And it's what creates boundary conditions for mischroots. And we've seen a handful of reporters back in the day fall, you know, fall into that trap. We, you know, there was a couple writers in the New York Times that got pinched for lying.

It's going to be harder and harder to lie. So in many, in some ways, I'm actually pretty optimistic that, um, that reputation management and truth will be easier to do in the future when this intermediary layer doesn't exist. But it'll take many other companies to do what Coinbase is doing and recent us in this podcast, us with our tweets and our memos and our posts, I think it's all in the good positive direction. Yeah, and Armstrong in his in this blog talks about the gelman amnesia effect, which we just talked about on this pod before, which is.

Yeah, I saw that. Yeah, which is great. I love that. Yeah. Because, you know, the gelman amnesia is you read the newspaper about a topic, you know something about, you see that 50 about a topic, you know something about, you see that 50% of it is just wrong. Then you turn the page to some other part of the newspaper,

say, world affairs, you don't know as much about, and you just assume it's true. And we all know that the media is maybe 50% right about everything. And so, yeah, I mean, so this is why we have to hear from experts directly. I think it's why it's the decentralization of media. It's why I think this like heavy handed, uh,

centralized censorship by big tech is so offensive and an aquanistic is to try and control what everyone can say, especially when it later turns out that, you know, big media gets so many things wrong like the lab leak theory. Um, so it's, it's, it's definitely the way things are headed. I would like to invest some money to basic with Freeberg platform to explain science. Well, that's right here.

Freeberg, tell us about the science of NBA games and large gatherings in the age of vaccination. I'm pretty sure you got COVID this week, take out. I'm pretty sure. I definitely lost my voice at the Nix Games, but I have to say this was pretty stunning to go to a Nix game, have everybody in the arena show their Vax card to get in.

I suppose somebody could photocopy one or steal one, sounds like a lot of work, and I don't know if there's any penalty for doing something like that. But what, when you see a full arena, Madison Square Garden, everybody vaccinated, freeberg, do, does it give you any pause as a scientist that this is not a good idea or this is too soon? Or do you think that gas, this is what we should be doing proper risk assessment finally? No, we should do what we want to do.

They have folks science. What do you want to do? Science. Do what you want to do. have a post-science. What do you want to do? There's a great science moment way to keep the freeberg ratio high. That was supposed to be the science that way We're ready for a monologue. Let's go freeberg. Come on. Let's go freeberg We're progan the tiger here freeberg. Why don't you tell this is something I thought was incredible amgen This week at the end of this, got approval for this really incredible drug that basically targets K-RAS mutations in lung cancer, which has been this body of cancer that has basically been somewhat intractable for a really long time. And these guys have cracked the code, it looks like.

And now the drug is 18,000 a month, I think. But that's for insurance to take care of. But pretty incredible breakthrough that people are talking a lot about. I don't know if you were tracking it. No, but I think that there were several other gene therapies. There were several drugs that got approval in the last month, one of which is this, or actually it was about two months ago, this drug that uses targeted CAR-T therapy.

Basically, we all have T cells and we can edit our own T cells now using this CAR-T therapy, this series of techniques where you basically reprogram your T cells genetically to go after a specific target in your body. And so there are now a whole series of car teeth therapies that are coming to market that are actually in market. You can go down and go get treatment today for several of these car teeth therapies that, you know, not too long ago, were really difficult to kind of understand, you know, being real. They take your T cells out of your blood. You know, so you go in, you get your blood drawn. A couple of weeks later, you come

back to the doctor, they've taken the T cells out of your blood, they re-engineer them, the way they re-engineer them is really interesting. They basically use this technique where they zap them with electricity and it gets this gene editing in there and then they get edited. And then they put those T cells back into your body. It takes about an hour to get them re-injected back into your body. And then they do their job. And in many cases, they're being used to target cancer cells. It's a very specific receptor.

So now the T cell has been programmed to go find that cancer cell receptor. They hit the cancer cell receptor, bind to it, and then eliminate that cancer cell. So essentially, in plain English, you're putting this super T cell back on the body. It goes through the blood and then it finds something far in that shouldn't be there like a virus or can't find anything you want to do. You can find anything you want to do.

Back to your area, whatever you want it to find and it snipes it. But yeah, what it does, remember, it's looking for a specific protein. And that protein, for example, can be expressed only on the surface of specific cancer cells. So if you found certain cancer cells that you have a cancer, and we know that there's a specific protein that shows up on the surface of that cancer, which is common in many cancers, because they all follow very similar kind of mutations, you can end up targeting that cancer cell and only that cancer cell, and your T cells go to work and they go and wipe it out. I think the breakthrough this week was in multiple myeloma and thyroid cancer.

Yeah, there was a multiple myeloma one which was a blooper bio product. Yeah. And then I think it got picked up by Bristol or someone else picked it up. So they basically paid the fee and they run their own good manufacturing practice facility, where your blood is shipped to them. They do all the gene editing with your own T cells in this facility, and they ship it back to your doctor, and it gets re-injected back into you.

And so, there are 600 car T cell, is that what it's called car space T cell? Yeah. So car stands for chimeric antigen receptor and that is the little Call it think about it as like a secret that's on the outside of your T cell It goes and it finds a specific thing it's trying to bind to and so you're reprogramming your T cell to have a specific Receptor and then as soon as it finds that that as soon as that receptor binds to the correct protein that's looking for boom That that cell that it binds to,

it gets wiped out. Are we gonna talk about the crazy media mergers and spinouts that are happening? Because it seems like just in the last 90 days, the entire industry is rewiring itself. And it's kind of a pretty significant set of transactions that are underway. Amazon is buying MGM, which owns most importantly,

James Bond. James Bond has done $20 billion in adjusted revenue for their movies, and you can obviously see many different back stories and television shows around the James Bond. So this is kind of in my mind of that eight or nine billion, they spent six billions on the franchise for James Bond, so that Bezos can play James Bond.

Obviously, while he rejected. If you take a zoom out, several years ago, you guys may remember early 2000s into the mid-Auts, all the telcos started freaking out because they were, or sorry, all the media companies were freaking out because their control points of distribution, which were network television and then their cable television stations and the movie theaters, were getting disintermediated by the internet. So all these internet companies showed up,

like YouTube and Netflix, and we're going direct to consumer, where consumers were not getting access to content directly without the control channels that the media companies controlled. At the same time, the telcos were freaking out, because it turns out people didn't need cell phones anymore or need phone lines anymore. What they needed was internet access. Internet access was quickly commoditizing. So the telcos were like holy crap. Being in

the business of providing internet service, not a great business, we need to be making more value per user per year than we're going to be able to make charging them for internet access. So the telcos started buying up media companies. This is what Verizon and others did. And the media companies, so remember Verizon bought AOL and Yahoo, AT&T bought Time Warner, and then the media companies, the old school media companies that were kind of like still decided not to sell and to stay on their own, they decided well we got to go internet. So we got to figure out how to be on the internet and compete in this world where companies like Netflix

and Amazon are going direct to consumers. And they all started building their own internet services. And so the next thing I'm going to have is pls. And you know, who is a big one. And meanwhile, the tech companies that went directly to consumers, they're realizing, you know, what if these media companies aren't going to play ball,

we better get our own media. We get to get a whole team fit. And so then they started licensing, buying're realizing, you know what, if these media companies aren't going to play ball, we better get our own media. We get to get a whole chain of tech. And so then they started licensing, buying, funding, and building their own media companies. And so there's a total reorientation that's underway. Now, what's interesting in the last couple of weeks is Verizon decided, you know what, we can't see in the media business, we're not very good at it. And they spun it out, and they're selling AOL Yahoo. And then meanwhile, this really interesting deal is AT&T

gave up on owning time Warner. And so it turns out that the telcos who thought that they could own the media and monetize it, you know what, it's just a pain in the butt, it's another business, we can't really figure out how to add value to our subscriber base with these products. They're going to have to exist on their own, we don't know how to run them because they're on media guys. And they're spinning out. So now the telcos, the interesting question to ask is, what are they going to do next? What's the next move for them? Because they got to keep growing.

Meanwhile, the tech companies and the media companies are just like this. And there's 50 subscription services, each with their own silo and volcanization of content. And we're all going to have to choose as consumers do I want HBO Max or Paramount Plus or the bundle I get from Contacts, and it's going to be a nasty battle for the next 10 years. Where youcaps, it's going to be a nasty battle for the next 10 years

where you want content, you're going to have to go pick and choose who you want to buy content from. So, yeah. I have a theory. I think consolidation happens when markets don't matter anymore and are getting commoditized. And what I would say about all of this, what it shows me, is that we're now transferring to the phase of the market where it's all about cost of capital. And right now, the only person that actually understood that was Netflix.

And Netflix issued billions of dollars of debt, and they've started to finance every piece of content under the sun. And being small and trying to compete against Netflix was not possible. And now we're in that part of the market where content is actually not that important because there is an enormous diversity of it. So no one single person can really corner that market. And so then it becomes how much can you make

and how cheaply can you make it. And their scale matters. So I can think like what this shows me back to sort of what we talked about before on the other part about like facts and truth is this is part of a much broader media puzzle that's becoming more obvious, which is traditional outlets that push top-down content is kind of yesterday's news. And what it's being replaced by is more and better forms of user generated content and highly commoditized professional content.

And in all of that, the economics are going away. So if you are not sure, go and look inside of TikTok, the content that individual people create inside of TikTok is unbelievably good. And they are training an entire generation of kids to consume content 15 seconds, 30 seconds at a time, which has huge implications, by the way, for how they consume music. So, for example, if you guys

like look inside a TikTok and then go to YouTube and look at the most popular videos. Exactly. Exactly. And same thing with Spotify. It's 15 second clips now. No, you know, these kids want to listen to the hook of a song and then they won't listen to it. I see how my kids use it and it's crazy because like they get addicted to a hook on TikTok. They try to go to YouTube to learn the lyrics.

They only want to learn the lyrics for the part that's in the TikTok. Busset. And then they move on. Busset challenge, yes. Whatever it is. And so the point of all of that is that content costs

are going to continue to go down, which means economics are going to go down. The margins are not that good. And so it's all just a commodity that almost doesn't matter. I don't know about that. I think for the top tier IP, like you can't display a Disney, and they are growing portfolio of IP and those things are high margin. And, you know, having 250 to 500, 500, 500 million people paying you monthly has never existed in the history of humanity. There's never been a at-scale service like this before. The closest was Verizon and AT&T when they hit 100 million numbers. I'm not disputing that people won't pay $9.99. What I'm disputing is the denominator of what

they're paying for is increasing so fast that no one piece of content matters, Jason. No, we agree with that. Collections matter, right? So the IP of Marvel, Disney picks our... Disney's not so hard to study, right? Like, Disney launched this thing with no direct-to-consumer relationships when they launched Disney Plus. What do they have now?

60 million subscribers. There's something to 100 now. 100 million subscribers, which is incredible. You guys have kids. My kids watch this stuff on the floor. You will have it for the rest of our lives. And over and over. They'll put on friggin' Moana.

I cannot tell you how many times I've watched the C-Short scene, I'm on it. They want to watch the beginning. They want to watch the middle part. It's just like infinitely reusable content. And so Disney's content library is so powerful for that particular demographic, basically the demographic of any one of the children that it's an instant on kind of moment.

These other guys like Paramount Plus and HBO's obviously got some special content, but it shows how much content matters, right? The quality of the content for the demographic is so key for this to work. All these media companies that have kind of a broad, dithered library of half quality, half good kind of content, they're gonna struggle, man, because they're not gonna be able to survive. I also feel like they're ringing

a little too much out of it. There's too much content production. There's like 50 shows about superheroes. Then there's like 50 shows that are like, you know, meta commentary on the superhero show. It's almost becoming exhausting. Like how many homeland style shows are there going to be? How many soprano style shows are there going to be? Game of

throne. I'm getting burnt out. I think you're making my point, which is that no one piece of content matters anymore. It's all. So my big takeaway from Bezos buying MGM and these other, you know, M&A events is it it's less about the decline of content, even though there are more, more options that have been in there for more competition. And it's more about the rising power and wealth and influence of big tech. I mean, if you look at, throughout history,

whoever is buying studios in any given era, they're the people with the money and power and they're seeking influence. It was G.E. buying NBC. It was Gulf and Western by paramount in the 1970s an oil and gas company or So that's right Sony Boring Columbia in the 1980s when you had the era of the rising sun So whoever has the money and the power and seeking influence are the ones buying studios That's what business is doing right now

But I think this time it is a little bit different in this sense that we're reaching an end state of digital convergence where the where where content and the digital distribution are now reaching their kind of final state. And so I don't expect these studios once they're owned by big tech to ever go anywhere. And I don't think they're going to be trading again every 10 years. I think this is the end state. Amazon wants this library for their streaming service. I think that Big Tech is going to gobble up the rest of these libraries and that's where they're going to stay. You think all media will end up in tech?

Yeah. I think Big Tech is going to eat Hollywood. Look, we've been on this path of convergence now since the mid-90s with the internet. The question was always, we knew that tech and Hollywood were converging and joining more and more. The question would be on whose terms this final merger would take place. I think that big tech now, you just look at the market caps, there's so much bigger than the market caps of these studios that... Eight billion surrounding era in Paris. It's surrounding air for Bezos.

I mean, it's one day, it's one day, we revenue or whatever, or less. So obviously, Big Tech is going to win this battle. They are going to own Hollywood. But except for the few guys that have scale to actually be successful in Disney, right? Disney, maybe HBO to some extent. We'll see how, I mean, look, Zasselov who runs the Scorsese and he's an incredible, media guy and he gets it, but they could be,

like, Discovery Plus, Slash HBO Plus, whatever that combined business ends up looking like, that could be a competitor, and there may be, there's two to three libraries, they're deep enough and strong enough to compete and stand on their own as a tech platform. But what's also really interesting is that all the telcos are exiting and what are they going to become?

Right? It's clear what's interesting is they're not tech companies. Tom, point that out of the past. Right. So, here's the thing with the telcos, the telecom stack. We know that tech is taking over Hollywood, but the question is what part of the tech stack? And what's happened is the part of the tech stack? And what's happened is the part of the tech stack that has the direct relationship with the audience,

Apple, Google, Amazon, who aggregate millions and millions of consumers, they're the ones who should actually own the content because they are the ones delivering up the content to the consumer. And everybody else who's lower down in the stack who are just the pipes, they don't really have a claim on these libraries in this content. The pipes are there for pipes.

The pipes are valuable, but they're a commodity. What Elon is doing with Starlink is going to disrupt them. I'm not saying they're not valuable, but they're not in a highly leveraged position to do anything with the content. They're going to keep increasing speed in order to keep you paying 30 bucks. Yeah, what's easy? Because like now that they're out, they realize, you know what, we can't run media businesses and we can't monetize it well.

What are they gonna do? Because they can't just open it. Yeah, focus on faster bandwidth. Get us to gig a bit. I mean, it doesn't matter. I mean, like you guys are like, you guys are so fucking old. Like you're just like talking about yesterday's news.

Nobody cares. This is what I mean. Consolidation in markets like this should tell you it's time to move yesterday's news, nobody cares. This is what I mean, consolidation in markets like this should tell you it's time to move on and focus on something else. This is a dead industry with no profit. So, Jamal, what happens to AT&T and what happens to Verizon over the next 10 years?

It doesn't matter. Well, I agree with that part. That it doesn't matter what happens to these telcos, they should be dumb pipes. Again, they're not in an leverage position to create value around content. They never should have owned it. But I do think there is major, major significance in Amazon and Apple and Google and these other big

tech companies owning Hollywood because they have, they're going to combine the influence they already have with the influence of Hollywood. And you already have, again, censorship on these tech platforms. Are they going to start censoring the type of content that Hollywood produces? I think these issues are going to get more and more important over time because so much control over our politics and society and culture are being concentrated in the hands of, frankly, our industry. But this is what I think about the other side of that coin is what we talked about before with respect to things like coinbase.

While that's happening, more and more people who have their own distribution are going direct. So let's just separate entertainment and facts. From a fact perspective, I think we're seeing everything sort of become highly decentralized. And I think that that's constructive. Now, there'll be services that will be there to help us navigate, but I think that's what's happening with respect to entertainment I just think like it was our generation was the last one that actually even cared about movies that cared about these tent productions that cared about water cooler type conversations on a Monday morning books novels kids will not understand what the hell we're talking about. They're like, what do you mean you used to run into work on a Monday?

You're kids don't want to go to the movies anymore. You think it's over? They couldn't care less. Really? They play games that go into the movies. They love video games. Yeah, I mean, by the way, they're obviously like that, you know, the combination of media attack and they're just the kind of ultimate manifestation of where it's all.

And it's not just that I want to. It's just look at the monthly active usage numbers at Roblox and Epic. And for there, yeah. Yeah. It's nuts. And so they are voting every day with their attention. And at the end of the day, the thing that has never been improved

is the not or increased as the number of hours in a day. So, Jimov, you're point of the telcos. You know, as an investor, I own a number of hours in a day. So, Tom, you're point of the tail codes. As an investor, I own a bunch of rides in an AT&T stock. If you were running that company, what would you do? I would quit. You might run it for capital and then buy assets. Oh, wait, they did that. You can.

Right. You're surprised what you would want to do, right? These businesses have had horrendous capital allocation for decades. And the reason that they were allowed was that they were they were part of a culture of insiders. There were other ins, where other insiders said that they were important. But as it turned out to individual users who were making usage decisions every day, they were not important at all. And this is what we're

learning that the emperor has no clothes. So while everybody was looking around themselves saying, AT&T is important and, hey, let's go and buy all of these crazy old school media assets. Young people were like, I use Snapchat and TikTok and YouTube and I'm done. Thanks, goodbye. Talk to you. Right. And who owns those platforms? I mean, you're right that professional content is being crowded out to some degree by amateur content. But now the big tech companies own the professional content or the studios for creating them and they own the user-generated platforms that let's the amateur is create the content. So big tech now owns everything. No, but you're seeing the next shooter drop because the thing that I think content creators

haven't yet realized and social media personalities and influencers haven't yet realized. And social media personalities and influencers haven't yet realized is how can I own my own distribution and monetize my relationship? That feature of the web will get figured out in our lifetime. And that's what this is. That's starting to a Patreon and then Apple is now. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Spotify is doing pay content. No, no, no, no, no. People are doing stripe accounts direct with their fans. Those people are too old. They're not going to figure it out. What I'm saying is there are going to be people who are teenagers today, right? Or kids who will be teenagers in a decade, 20-somethings, who will figure this out,

for whom the idea that if you're a Charlie Demilio, right? Your TikTok's top biggest star with 120 odd million followers, that to go through an intermediary to talk to your people will not in the future make any sense. And I think David, that's where the next thing will change. I just think it's unreliable to expect laser beam, Mr. Beast, Charlie Demilio, all these people to continue to go through the, no, because they have such, I think they could go direct,

some of those guys could go direct now that they're huge, but it's no different than building a name on the New York Times and then starting your own sub-stack. It's gonna happen. Yeah, but you can't go viral, and you can't get discovered unless you participate. That is not one of these platforms. These are not an or. You can use the platform, but you can't go viral and you can't get discovered unless you participate. These are not on the news or not an or you can use the platform and you can have a relationship. You will build scale. You will build scale on a platform and then you'll go on your own because you'll want to control and monetize your own relationship.

It is what these folks have done, meaning like how Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian had built incredible scale and wealth, is effectively through that. They build scale through Instagram and Twitter and wherever. TV show. Now, the only thing that they haven't done is they've monetized it through offline goods, but if somebody figures out how to monetize it

through an online relationship, then what you're really doing is you're learning how to build scale in an established platform, and then you on-ramp to something else that's also online and you go from there to think that it won't get figured out I think is being made. It's being figured out. It's being figured out right now. The street is figuring out there's something called ghost which is like an open source version

of Substack. It is an open source version of Substack and people are building direct relationships and doing their own Patreon. If you leave Substack, you get to take your stripe account with you you use your stripe account So now it's too hot you can go on Substack for a year leave and keep all your subscribers I think this solution will get figured out through the crypto community and the reason is because that is by definition to your point Jason Fundamentally distributed and tied to a payment and a store of value because that's what effectively this is It's like where is the value of somebody's reputation and right now and tied to a payment and a store of value, because that's what effectively this is.

It's like, where is the value of somebody's reputation? And right now, we don't have a way of measuring it, and you can put that on chain in some way. I don't claim to know how. But I mean, people have talked about this, this is all these different forms. I hope that happens. I hope that crypto figures out a way

to create decentralized social networks and all the rest of it, but it doesn't exist yet. And the only way that Mr. Beast or Charlie Demelio or any of these people became stars is they went viral on YouTube or TikTok or Insta. They on up on a big tech platform. And so right now the strategy is going to be doing both you use the platform.

And all the power. They have all the power right now because if they did not you access to one of these platforms. Oh, you're too much. Who cares about Trump? I'm not talking about Trump. I'm talking about Trump. You're so incompletely lost. You're nobody lost.

Trump in their life, but you. Okay. You're the one who mentioned his name. You're the one who's on the brain. What are you talking about? We love that he's bad. You love he's bad. What do you want to do?

No, I'm not missing it at all, but my point, we're trying to do takeaways on these moves by Big Tech to buy Hollywood studios, and I'm telling you, it's about who has the power, money, and influence, and it's all big tech. I'll go out on a limb and say, we're in the sort of the August of their supremacy. So, and again, I would just say, David, if on the one hand, it's a whack-a-mull problem

with governments on taxation and regulation. And on the other hand, you have a way where you can have distributed social currency and value. Wow, I mean, these big tech companies are getting bombarded on every single side. And I think that's just a hard place to be. One last thing for you guys on a market check, my 10-year break events, remember, we're now down to 242. It's been 18 days. What is he talking about? My little inflation check, my little inflation check, and seems like things are trending in the right direction. The markets are back.

The markets back a little. There may not be inflation. Well, I think what happened, Jamoth, is you put it well, I think a couple of pods ago, the market sent a signal to Biden that, look, this is too much taxing, too much spending, it's too inflationary. And I don't know if Biden heard the message, but several Democratic senators did. Pump the brakes. And they pumped the put on the brakes, they reduced the size of the package. They're now talking about maybe the Capitol gains

going to 25, the infrastructure bill has been chopped in half. So I think there's less inflationary pressure coming out of Washington, hopefully. Yeah, what I heard last week, I spoke to some folks in Washington what they said was exactly what you said, David, they're not going to, at best they're going to get the cap gains, sorry, no movement on

cap gains. They don't think it can happen at all. So that's not going to move. Okay. Number one, number two is that corporate will go to 25 and not to 28. And then number three, they're going to really tighten the IP loophole, which will prevent American companies from shipping IP to places like Ireland to not pay tax. They're going to make it impossible to do things like inversions, all this kind of stuff. And then scope that down. That's actually to your point a very, very good outcome for the markets. So this was actually productive if this happened.

If the infrastructure bill gets, I think the Republicans now, the first McConnell said 600 to 80 billion. Now I think they Republicans now they the first Maconald said 600 to 80 billion now I think they're they're at 900 billion. I think the Democrats started at 2.3 billion now I think they're at 1.7 so hopefully it's being brought down to a more reasonable number. That's not going to bust the the budget. 0.2 1.3 and everybody will have something that appears to be the crazy thing. I mean the US government debt is now at 100% of GDP. We owe our entire economy. It's pretty crazy. And the countries that are 1.5, right, in double, like Japan and other

say, but Biden, Biden's $6 trillion budget would increase our budget debt from 100% of GDP to 117%. If it gets away too much, it's a World War II level of spending. But what is the benefit equivalent to World War II that we're getting out of this thing? Well, also, we have a surplus in so many states that we're doing lotteries. Thank you, Queen of Kenwa, Rainman, and the dictator. I'm Jason Calcannis. We'll see you next time on the Holland podcast. Bye bye! What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What need to release that album What? You're that beat? What? You're a beer of beat? Beer of beat? Beer of beat? What?

We need to get merch I'm going to leave I'm going to leave you