This Week in Startups - E1093: Keith Rabois on China’s grand plan, TikTok, Taiwan, Big Tech & more

Episode Date: August 7, 2020

Follow Keith: https://twitter.com/rabois Follow Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis Thanks to our partners... Gusto - 3 months free at https://gusto.com/twist Dell for Entrepreneurs - Save up to 48% at https://dell.com/twist LinkedIn Jobs - Get $50 off your first job post at https://www.linkedin.com/twist

This week in startups is brought to you by Gusto. Running a startup is hard work, but thankfully, Gusto makes payroll easy. They also offer flexible benefits, onboarding, and so much more. Twist listeners get three months free at gusto.com slash twist. Dell for entrepreneurs. Level up your hardware today and save up to 43%. And Twist listeners can save an extra. 5% by going to Dell.com slash twist and LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people.

And every hire matters. Get $50 off your first job post at LinkedIn.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to this week in startups. It's your boy, JCal here. And we have a fan favorite with us back again on the podcast. Keith Rboy is with us. He is an investor at Founders. fund and considered one of the great operating officers here in Silicon Valley along with people like Cheryl Sandberg and our friend David Sacks. You can follow him on the Twitter, Roboy, R-A-B-O-I-S. And Keith, welcome back to the program. We were on in May, we had a really great discussion about COVID-19 and what we thought was going to happen with the pandemic. Well, here we are. It's August. And it seems like we have.

not learned much and we don't wear masks in this country and we're having massive amounts of outbreaks. What's your take on America's reaction to the pandemic? Yeah, that's right. It's a pleasure to be back with you. I don't think that's much has changed this May, which is probably a sign of the times. It feels like all time is sort of collapsing and, you know, May, June, July, April, August, all kind of all kind of all together. Right now, you know, it's pretty obvious that we're going to be going through sort of the version of rolling blockouts or rolling COVID or rolling lockdowns for months, if not, you know, a sustained period of years. There's clearly no light at the end of the tunnel.

No one has visibility into the timeframe. And I think that's causing a lot of psychological issues for people, for companies, for founders, for real people, because with no visibility, it's very difficult to sort of hold your breath, not knowing how long you have to hold your breath for. and people don't know whether they should be making permanent changes in their lives, i.e., you know, moving locations, changing roommates, planning to work remotely, or not, because the time frame is very uncertain. Well, when you look at other countries that have beaten it,

and America seems to be learning its lessons by region, New York, like, learned is less in the hard way. Northern California, we did spectacular. I think everybody here kind of is pretty obedient and believes in science. California seems to go on Buckwild, Florida, and Texas seem to not believe in masks at all. But do you think what the psychological or maybe even the behavioral analysis of this is, you have to experience it firsthand to understand the nature of it? You just can't trust any kind of reality because a pandemic, number one, we've never experienced in our lifetime.

And number two, we have this polarization and the media. and the experts and the politicians all polarizing around their team and their team position as opposed to just learning and science. Yeah, well, I think it's very true that people are sort of using politics and political issues as the new sports or the new tribal religion. And partially that's a vacuum created by the lack of sports and other religions. But secondarily, you know, we're seeing a resurrection of the virus in places like North Northern California and in international markets like think Australia and probably soon in Europe

where people Israel where people felt that the virus was under control and that adherence to a set of principles around quarantining, mask wearing, contact tracing, testing was effective. But it doesn't appear that anything short of a reasonable fraction of a population, getting exposed to the virus is really going to stop it in its tracks. except in smaller countries, like let's say call it a population of below 10 million, where it does appear to be the case that you can kind of insulate the entire population from the virus, but in all countries above 10 million, it looks like there's going to be another wave, a third wave, a fourth wave of the virus until we have either therapeutics or

vaccines that are much more effective. So that's an interesting observation. It goes against everything the United States stands for to restrict people's access. to travel inside the nation. But it turns out in a pandemic, breaking the country up into regions and saying, hey, we need people to stay in their zone until this passes might actually be the most effective thing to do.

Yeah, it might have been the most effective, especially initially. I mean, it's certainly shutting down international travel corridors from China and then Europe would have been more effective than if it had been done faster and sort of more, thoughtfully, meaning with less sort of escape valves. But by the time it was really implemented, it might have been too late, and then possibly we could have cordoned off some of the virus to the places where, you know, people coming

from China into some extent Europe were moving towards. But past March, I don't think the travel stuff would have been super effective. You could have created zones, maybe within the U.S. So there's some severe legal constraints on that. it's not obvious to me that creating internal U.S. travel restrictions is actually constitutional. I think there's a very serious debate about whether that can actually be done. Yeah, I don't think it could be done legally. It would have to be something we would hop into as Americans or we would lightly regulate

because we don't even seem to be able to mandate people wear masks. That seems to be up for grabs. Yeah, I mean, the wisdom of masks, I don't think is up for grabs. I do think there's a very serious also legal debate about whether the federal government has authority to mandate masks. I think the better side of the legal argument is probably not, but the practical argument about efficacy is very strong. I think possibly you could have reduced air travel. Perhaps federal government has a lot of authority over air travel in the United States, and that would have allowed people to only travel by car. but it seems like people were self-selecting against air travel anyway.

I mean, TSA was reporting data of something between like 1 and 5% of typical traffic on a per day basis. So some extent shutting down air travel would have only been, you know, a small fraction of the migration problem. Would you consider flying commercial in 2020? Yeah, I've read a lot of the research about the sort of safety of that. And there's, like many things these days, there's experts, true experts on both sides of that debate. There's some who are pretty convinced that among many possible activities, it's fairly low risk. And then there's a few experts who actually think the risk is more moderate. So it's somewhere between low and moderate risk, probably closer akin to having a backyard barbecue outside with maybe 10 or 12 neighbors.

which seems like a very low-risk activity. I've expanded my quarantine circle and done a number of backyard-type barbecue situations with, you know, families who are in relative quarantine. It seems like a low-risk behavior. Where are you on your personal risk-taking during a pandemic, if I may ask? Yeah, my general approach has been not no risk. I think it's very difficult to live your life in complete fear and approach problems with zero risk.

If you did, you would never drive a car, for example. Certainly below the age of 50, 60, 70, one of the most dangerous things you can do is get a car and drive. So I don't think you want to live your life with completely zero risk. I think that's not a very productive way to leave your life. So I think below roughly six to 10 people in small groups is moderate to low risk. Obviously, outdoors is significantly safer from all the evidence than indoor activities. In the weather, fortunately, at least in the summer in California, it's pretty amenable to primarily outdoor activities.

That will change, you know, in various parts of the country, it becomes insufferably hot. I think Arizona or Florida over the summer. And then, you know, pretty fairly soon in the winter, you know, between rain and cold weather, cold conditions, it's not going to be possible to be, you know, living primarily outdoors. But insofar as one can do that, I've tried to do as many outdoor activities as possible. But I definitely will in small doses, in small groups, spend time, you know, in real life with people. I went and I ate my ramen at Tai Shokin in San Mateo, my favorite ramen joint. Outside this past week was like, I think the first time, second time I ate at a restaurant.

I took my daughter for sushi one time outside. And man, it was delightful to be amongst people. I forgot how nice it was to just be out and be social. There's something about our species where we are not meant to be isolated like this. Oh, no, of course. I mean, if you like to read, you know, you can read sapiens or any research. Humans are basically heard animals. And, you know, you see this on Twitter.

You see this in investing. There's definitely a pop psychology to humans that Darwinistically evolved. And so isolating humans into solo behavior or very small group, extremely small groups does cause real friction or potentially damage. I don't think anybody knows we're running a massive social experiment in terms of what is the long-term impact and isolating people in extremely small doses of people for sustained, what's going to be a sustained period of time. So I think there's a lot of counter instincts.

Now, it did switch. You know, there's a reason why we've always had families and tribes across. almost all known cultures, is people want a safe group of people around them. And generally speaking, through most of history, until very modern times, if you'd see a human, another person that was not somebody you recognized, you would generally think of them as much more a threat than a friend. Right. And then in the last two to maybe four or five hundred years, which is, again, a small

fraction of human history, that has inverted so that, generally speaking, without other signals, we don't treat strangers as threatening. However, with things like COVID and potentially, you know, more lethal or more transmittable viruses to come in the future, I think humans may revert back to their normal Darwinistic, sort of the evolved state, which is to think of someone they don't recognize and don't know as a potential threat. Oh, so dystopian given how we've grown to love to go to an arena with 20,000 people and watch a basketball game or go to a music festival, a Burning Man, or even just a movie. When we get back from this break, I want to know what you'd think of the TikTok and China Rift when we get back on this weekend startups. Hey, look, 2020 has been the year of many things.

But if you own a startup, this could also be the year. you switch to a better payroll provider and Gusto is that provider. They weren't built just for small business. Nope. They were built for the people behind them. Their online payroll system is so easy to use. We use it ourselves. And Gusto can automatically calculate paychecks and file all your payroll taxes. So you get that right. Three out of four customers say they run payroll in 10 minutes or less, which means you'll have more time to run your business, focus on your customers, and build an absolutely delightful product or service, just like Gusto is for us. Plus, they offer unlimited payrolls for one monthly price.

There are no hidden fees. Gusto does way more than just payroll. Nope, they're going to help you with time tracking, health insurance, 401Ks, onboarding your new team members, of course, commuter benefits with some people love, offer letters, which are super important and make you look professional, and you get access to HR experts when you need them. And if you're moving from another provider, they can transfer all your data, and they'll do all that for you, make it easy, breezy, and it's no surprise that 94% of customers are likely to recommend Gusto to another founder. Because you're a listener of this

weekend startups, you get three months totally free. All you have to do is go to gusto.com slash twist, g-U-S-T-O-com slash twist. Again, gusto.com slash twist. I'm telling you, you're going to love it. Get started today. I use it. I love it. It makes everything easy, breezy for us. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, investor operator and super opinionated and intelligent Keith Roweboys is back on the program, a regular. If you want to hear some of his previous

episodes, the double feature episode 904 and 904. from back in February of 2019. And of course, in the COVID, episode 1057 back in May of 2020, we just got through thinking about the sort of ramifications of the COVID. But before we get even deeper into the pandemic and what life will be like, we've had a pretty crazy relationship with China in the last couple of months from the start of the COVID-19. slash Wuhan slash China virus emerging.

And now somehow people are starting to realize that maybe there needs to be some reciprocity if we're going to allow TikTok to be on everybody's phone, maybe American company should get to be on phones in China. And maybe it's not in the best interest of Americans to have spyware on their phones with access to their phones with access to their microphones and cameras and locations for a communist country. What is your take first on the reciprocity issue?

And then let's go on to the reality of a communist country's access to data of a company in a communist country like China. Yeah, I think there are several dimensions to the TikTok debate and what to do about China. one is a simple trade, trade policy, just like we believe we're a capitalist country, we believe in free trade. And if there's going to be countries in the world that don't allow for free trade, then the question is, what do we do about that? And what's the U.S. reaction? And some degree of reciprocity or reciprocity is probably required. And so, you know, China has notoriously banned most, well, basically virtually all content-based U.S. companies from operating within China. and restricted access or put fetters or required concessions by other products and services from American country,

companies that want to operate or sell goods and services in China. And for many, many years, I think the American executive branch ignored this. And partially, for lots, for several reasons, the executive branch was pretty much in denial and didn't really want to confront China. And, you know, Trump has been very attuned to this issue personally before he was president, before he even ran for president. If you watch interviews with him conducted over the last 20, 30 years, he's always been sensitive to China's sort of unfairness in treating American companies. And he used to talk about this all the time. And then he campaigned in 2016 about the issues and threats posed by

China and there's some funny YouTube clips where you see like people exerting various parts of speeches and stitching it together. It's like China, China, China, China, China, China, all in the Trump voice. So I think this is sort of an un, it's kind of a neglected area of American politics and foreign policy for about 30 years. And Trump correctly put a lot of attention on it. So one just simple principle is if any country is not going to allow a set of American industries to operate there, there is a question of whether. we should allow, you know, a comparable set of companies to operate here. And that has almost nothing to do with the national security complexity.

So you can imagine a country, let's say Germany, that becomes very protectionist and doesn't allow American cloud operating companies or American search engines to operate in Germany. What would be the proper reaction where we don't really think Germany poses a national security threat to the out it's just purely an economic free trade sort of situation. So that's one dimension. Second, of course, on top of that is what's become very obvious in the last two years to a huge swap of the American people and derivatively a reasonable fraction of the American elected political class is that China poses a serious threat to the United States from a geopolitical national security perspective. And this should have been obvious 10, 15, 20 years ago. But,

it's become starkly obvious in the last two years. I think China's influence and behavior associated with Hong Kong and their ability to intimidate the NBA a year ago started to wake people up. China's increasingly hostile slash genocidal treatment of minorities within China has become indefensible or transparent and indefensible. three, China's willingness to export and to export its influence across borders has become more obvious. I think India most recently, but certainly there's other examples.

Their investment in AI and other technologies which could pose other existential threats to the U.S. again, have become more stark and more clear. And so you put all of this together and then you actually read or listen to the U.S. the explicit strategy of the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, it's very clear that they have an agenda over the next 30 years to be the dominant influence in the world. And that dominant influence includes explicitly suppressing what they would call liberalism. I think democratic liberalism in rough translation.

And so if you put together both the tactics and the explicit announced strategy, there's no way of denying. that China is posing a significant threat to the American way of life. And for 30 years, we sort of avoided or intentionally suppressed this information, averted our eyes, adhering to a 40-year-old strategy of engaging with China that was designed to liberalize China that has proven. You had that work out for us. It's proven to be an unmitigated disaster.

The original logic was that if you expose to, China to more and more information, to more and more economic freedom, that by definition, the country would have to liberalize and the ties, the dramatic constraints imposed by the Communist Party would be, you know, sort of eliminated or significantly reduced. If anything, the opposites happened. In addition, the original, even impetus for associating with China, which, you know, dates back to Richard Nixon and going to China. was to align explicitly as a counterbalance against the Soviet Union. And basically, you could argue the biggest part of intellectual bankruptcy in our China policy

has been, once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, nobody really reassessed, like, what was the purpose of aligning with China in the first place? Yeah, and the globalists got a really great free pass of like, hey, here's some borderline slave labor, the cheapest labor in the world, which in a way, humanity should want labor to go to the cheapest place. That is the most efficient for humanity. So it's great that hundreds of millions of Chinese went from being, you know, really poor to being middle class.

But that was an opportunistic move. Now we feel this crazy dependence on them. So when it comes to the TikTok issue, and I think you set the stage beautifully, what are you in favor of doing with TikTok at this very moment? And then what do you think our ongoing strategy should be with China? So my personal opinion is that the President of the United States should announce a very clear set of principles that require adherence to both the reciprocity and address our national security concerns. and that the Chinese government in consultation with TikTok's owners should choose and elect what path they prefer. So the principles should basically be that to some extent, reasonable American versions of the same products and services must be allowed to operate in China.

And then on the security side, no engineers, no data, no servers about American citizens should be allowed to be. stored in China. And whether that turns into an independent public company, which would be my preference, because the TikTok has done so well and generates fairly significant revenue, it can easily justify being an independent public company, or whether it leads to an acquisition by a U.S. company or a shutdown, a ban, because it can't adhere to those principles, is totally up to the Chinese government. They can decide. I don't think the president should be negotiating a deal. like trying to. Yeah, that's kind of silly. I mean, that's just, that plays to his instinct of I want to get credit for being a dealmaker, blah, blah, blah. It's a bad precedent. I don't think that's the right

way to purchase. I think you should announce clear, straightforward principles and sort of let the chips fall where they are. And if the chips are, the product is banned, that's fine. If Snap or Microsoft or some consortium of independent investors wants to purchase and turn it into an independent company, I think there should also be a timeframe explicitly by X, the following criteria must be satisfied to operate within the U.S. And I think that's the better way to go. But net net, it's probably relatively similar in this specific example to what's going on. I think the key of having neutral principles is you can apply it to a lot of other examples

in the future rather than this complex morass that doesn't basically set a precedent that everybody understands with a problem. rules the road are. I'm a big fan of predictability. The rule of law is about predictability. I think it's critical that we have predictability in our policy. I don't like... It's easier to invest, right, when there's predictability and when there's the rules don't change, people can invest and feel safe, which is one of the things, one of the reasons I've never invested in Chinese companies that get offered all the time. You probably do as well is, I'm not on the ground there. I don't, I don't have any, you know, buddy there to look after me. And it

feels like that system is completely rigged and people have their their thumbs on the scales. When we get back from this quick break, I want to know if you think we're the suckers at the poker table when it comes to China vis-a-vis, hey, we own the iPhone. We get all the profits here and they get this very low-profit building iPhones over there. Or if we should move to the Elon Musk model and say, you know what? Yolo, we're going to build factories here and we're going to skip and leapfrog and get ourselves disconnected from China so that we don't have a dependency when China does to Taiwan what they did to Hong Kong, which is basically roll over them when we get back on this week at startups. Hey, everybody, are you ready to upgrade your workstation? It's time,

and I can get you up to 48% off right now if you go to Dell.com slash twist. Yes, Dell for entrepreneurs is an actual program run by my friends over at Dell. You know I love my Dell laptop. I got the Chrome OS on this one. I got these giant Dell monitors all over the office, and I've been a fan of Dell forever. And I love the laptops having all the ports on the side, USBC, the old USB ports, HDMI cables, Ethernet ports, all built in. No dangle life for me.

I got the whole that shebang right here on this laptop. And what they do with Delfer entrepreneurs is they're trying to support founders by providing resources and financing and tools to help your startup grow with their technology. So if you're scaling your company, that doesn't mean just hiring. You know, you're going to have to get high-quality laptops, monitors, storage, all that important stuff, networking, printers. And they will give you also free IT consulting with experts. And they will help you do things like analyze your cloud spending and save you money. You're probably spending too much.

Of course, Dell has Dell financial services. What this means is qualified founders can finance their entire hardware project and pay for it. in low monthly installments. What an amazing thing to do. Don't blow all your capital on buying a bunch of new machines. Pay for it monthly over time. Great idea. And these Dell machines are up to 48% off right now, this summer, right now, get there.

Dell.com slash twists. Twist listeners can get up to 43% off and take that extra 5% off right now at Dell.com slash twist. Thanks to Dell for making awesome products that I personally love and I've been using for decades as well as running a great company and providing this great support to the founder community. That's part of this week at startups. It really means a lot to me. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, I'm here with Keith Rubey.

We're talking pandemics, politics, China. Before we went to break, I was wondering who you think NetNet won the most in this past 20 years of the iPhone being created in China, pharmaceuticals being created in China. this seemed to send a massive amount of profits to the United States. It also made them a ton of money. We own that intellectual property. They have no qualms in stealing it. And so was this a mutual sort of taking advantage of each other? And then can it possibly be decoupled?

Well, look, it's been beneficial to both parties in many ways, at least in a short-term perspective. That's the whole point of comparative advantage in economics. When you learn macroeconomics, comparative advantage basically means that every should specialize with whatever they can do at the lowest possible cost and that net net is a creative byproduct of consumer surplus for everybody. So we have lower cost phones in our pocket, lower cost plasma TVs, lower cost, you know, electronics of various types because of this relationship. However, that's a very narrow perspective. The only thing that the only variable that

matters your ingredient in the world is not just the cost of a product. So for example, In the 1970s, we built up what's called the National Strategic Petroleum Reserve because the U.S. was very dependent upon OPEC as a source of oil. And it led to fear that we could be blackmailed by the reservations in a foreign policy context. And that was just unacceptable right now because we've outsourced according to, you know, the comparative principle, many strategic productions, including electronics, but also antibiotics. So from medical, pharmaceutical to electronics and the future of computing, we outsourced a lot of production and manufacturing. We no longer have the ability to just drive American foreign policy according to the best

interest for the American people because we can be blackmailed and threatened. And that's not a very sustainable place. So I think the mistake was to allow our manufacturing capability to disappear. And we should have had sort of a minimum viable reserve capability of production so that in the worst case, we could always sustain ourselves and produce in any of these dimensions. There's a second level where it's helped the Chinese people arguably more. Certainly the rate of growth in their economy over the last 20 years has been astounding. the improvement in the sort of lives of the Chinese people of all 1.2 billion has been very oppressive.

So it has absolutely approved the welfare of 1.2 billion on the planet by this relationship and symbiotic relationship with the United States. So that's a very strong positive. But the Chinese CCP has used very aggressive industrial espionage techniques to learn sort of the secrets, the IP behind a lot of American technology and progress. And that has the capability of being used very unfairly to compete in the future. And, you know, that is probably something that everybody, well, it's something everybody did know. It's been widely chronicled. It's probably worse than what's been chronicled. But again, we made little, you know, fosters of concern

were expressed by the government of the United States. But we never. really treated it super seriously. But again, it's the combination of these things, the decline in American manufacturing ability, the dominance of the Chinese supply chain across industrial, military grade, dual-use technologies, across pharmaceuticals and medical equipment like PPP. All of this stuff has combined to put the United States in a very precarious position, which requires offsetting. the marginal economic benefits of a comparative advantage.

Yeah, but easily, I believe, it should not be that hard to reverse if we have all the capital. We have a number of people out of work in this country right now. And we have rare earth materials here. We just decided it was cheaper for them to rip them out of the ground than for us to do it. We could very easily, as we're printing these trillions of dollars, earmarked some of it, to build factories here again. I mean, if Elon can make rockets and cars here, I don't know that we can get silicon chips up and running as fast, but certainly pharma and PPE.

These things are not going to be difficult to make here. We just have to have the will to do it. We need to have a plan. And this seems to be the one issue in our bizarre, left and right Republican and Democratic fight that we all agree on. Is that a green shoot for you? Yeah, I think there should be a comprehensive plan. I think a lot of these, several of these things are easier to fix than others. Consumers are just going to absolutely have to pay a higher price, though, for some products.

There's definitely going to be an implicit tax on the Americans' welfare, especially in the short term. I mean, part of it relates to just the price of wages. One of the reasons why manufacturing in China is cheaper and hence, quote, quote, more effective is the price of labor is substantially less. And with, you know, a lot of activists in the United States wanting to raise the price of labor artificially, that's going to be more challenging. Now, if we can layer in some automation and make, you know, incremental advances in robotics and other automated technologies, maybe the, you know, blended cost of labor and manufacturing won't be that devastating to having a competitive cost structure. But I think we're just going to have a surcharge.

going to be a strategic surcharge that either consumers are going to have to pay or the government's going to have to fund or both so that we have strategic independence from the threat posed by China. So I think that there is a bipartisan consensus emerging. Mostly actually, ironically, from the far ends of the political spectrum, which sometimes get dismissed and or unfairly criticized. It's the most conservative members of Congress and in some ways the most liberal members of Congress, that are most deeply concerned about the threat posed by China. The middle of the bell curve, the political establishment that's been in power for most of the last 30, 40 years, are the people most responsible for the China mass?

And they're the ones who've most defended China from scrutiny and from criticism throughout all these years. And they also cash the checks, let's be honest. They were the ones getting their donations that put them into power. And that's another flaw in our system is the lobbyists who are sending them donations. they're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They wanted to have this globalistic sort of approach and have that be considered, you know, the ultimate for humanity is to just anybody can do anything,

except when you're up against a communist country, that's not actually how they think. Is there a chance, though, that if the world, because Japan is also realizing this dependence, India is, you know, banned TikTok, and they seem to be pretty aware of their, this threat. If Japan, India, and the United States all say on mass, hey, we're going to start producing products outside of China, and we would like to see you change these behaviors,

and we did that as a group. What do you think the reaction from China will be? Will they come to the table and say, you know what? Okay, we'll talk about what's happening with the Uyghurs. Am I perhaps in that correct? Weiger? I think I'm pronouncing it correct. and we'll talk about human rights and we'll talk about Hong Kong and, or do you think they'll just say, you know what, we've been here a lot longer than you guys and we got a billion people. We don't care. Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of codependency here. So if China was completely insulated from the U.S. or India's economy,

it would pose actually more problems for China than for the U.S. As a fraction of GDP and things like that. So that said, it would be a very painful experience for all. evolved. So it's not something to look forward to at all. I do think that China miscalculated, however, on some of their most recent adventures and didn't expect this level of scrutiny the level of pushback they're seeing from India and now the US, partially because for the last 30, 40 years, they hadn't received any. So they've been very adventurousome all across the globe in developing

South China Sea. Yeah, developing strategic relationships throughout Africa, building ports. There's a lot of their strategy has gone, you know, quite well for the last 20, 30 years. Yeah, why not try? I mean, listen, it's like being at a poker table. If you bet and everybody folds, you'd keep betting. Yeah. But then if somebody stands up to you and if somebody else is the sheriff, well, then maybe you're going to curtail your behavior. So China does have a lot to lose here if they don't get in line. Absolutely, a ton of these. But if you just look at even last year,

they were able to basically blockmail the NBA into support. Which was ridiculous. It was absurd. They're basically convincing American athletes and the NBA executives that they needed to stop criticizing China about its human rights violations in Hong Kong or the NBA just wouldn't make as much money in China. And basically 99.9% of the NBA went along with this.

Despite their ability to protest everything else and every other civil rights violation, they somehow were completely willing to be censored and suppress other people's speech as it relates to China. That ship has sailed. Even Steve Kerr, who's one of the worst offenders, actually had to apologize last week for at least some of his behavior last year. Yeah, that was interesting. You know, Darry came out and just said, hey, I mean, all he did was tweet like a GIF or something that was like, we support Hong Kong. we support freedom. And like the NBA came down on him like a ton of bricks. And it was everybody from LeBron to Steve Kerr. And it was like, hey, guys, you're protesting, you know, for very valid issues of racism here in the United States and freedom.

You can't have it both ways. You can't for the incremental 20, what are they making, 20% of their revenue from China? Probably. Who cares? Let the 20 cents go. It's not worth it. I mean, anybody who makes a lot of money to sell your soul for the extra couple of million bucks, it's just not worth it.

And if they don't respect the way we do things in America, because they started blocking all the Rockets games because Darryorne-Mory did it. What 100% of the NBA should have done was they should have just said, hey, we support freedom and we support human rights, period. And so we're not going to point to any specific country, but we're going to point to all countries, including our own. 100% human rights needs to be addressed in the United States. And then look what happened. Cyan Bannister, a friend of ours, mutual friend of ours. She started buying thousands of Hong Kong t-shirts and having people giving them out at Warriors games.

You can't squeeze people like this and not expect them to respond. Do you think what happened in Hong Kong and the ease at which China rolled in there and basically just gangster style took it over, they're going to be able to do to Taiwan? Answer that question when we get back after this quick break. Come on, you all know LinkedIn jobs is the way to find great talent, but I wanted to read for you today an amazing customer testimonial from somebody who's a member of the This Week in Startup's audience. His name is Aaron, and he is the founder and CEO of MAAI. And this is a startup that uses artificial intelligence to optimize travel time on your work schedule. Sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

Well, Aaron recently hired a machine learning engineer, and they started in July, and they have hit the ground running. and they are making things happen at his company. He received 110 relevant applications in four days, and he got great value. That is why LinkedIn Jobs is the number one way to hire. I tell all my startups, start with LinkedIn jobs, and then you're not going to need to do anything else. Because LinkedIn has hundreds of millions of members,

690 million people worldwide. Your company is only going to go as far. as the talent you are able to recruit. And the greatest recruiting tool on the planet right now is LinkedIn jobs. And you can put your job in front of qualified members every day. So it's seen by people who are looking for jobs like the one you have. So here is your call to action. Let me give you $50 right now.

I'm going to give you the 50 by visiting LinkedIn.com slash twist. That's right, a fitty for you, 5.0. again, LinkedIn.com slash twist to get the fitty. Take the 50 right now. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, Keith, Hong Kong, just heartbreaking to see what happened there, to see those students out there fighting, being arrested, being beaten, being shot, being dragged to prisons in mainland China, just to try to maintain their way of life, heartbreaking for anybody who has a conscience. And now Taiwan, an independent country. country according to the West, but a territory of China, according to the CCP, hangs in the balance.

What do you think, given where we're at today, with TikTok, India, and Japan spending money, government money to get people in Japan to stop building stuff in China, we're starting to see this little contingent saying, hey, we're going to have to, you know, pump the brakes here with China's ambitions. Do you think China rolls into Taiwan or do you think that after what's happened with Hong Kong, they're emboldened or with India and the United States, maybe they'll pump the brakes on that one? Because Taiwan produces an awful lot of silicon chips, don't they? Yeah, I mean, Taiwan at the high end of the silicon, it has a monopoly sort of at the high end of silicon chips at the moment. If you want to read some amazing coverage of this, Ben Thompson's

techery is like the go-to-source. So I think that- He's based there too, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So he's an expert in every possible way on the topic. And he's been writing about this thoughtfully for years. So highly recommend, you know, reading the original. I think typically the Chinese strategy has been pretty incremental.

So insofar as they push and probe and hit resistance, they've typically been unwilling to force the issue because they believe traditionally that time is on their side, so, you know, don't artificially have an aggressive timeline that leads to incremental sort of sacrifice and pain. However, Taiwan's a very complicated topic for the U.S. I mean, we've sort of sold Taiwan out in 1979. And, you know, one of the most aberrant decision in the American foreign policy history, we basically told China, we're not going to treat Taiwan as an independent, freely elected, democratic government, and, you know, sort of said, implied that kind of do what you want because we're not going to defend them.

And that, you know, he's completely, that completely amoral, arguably immoral American foreign policy decision hasn't been reversed yet. And the establishment, you know, up the left and the right in the middle of the bell curve that we were speaking about before really doesn't want to revisit that. And they get very allergic and immediately nuclear reactive, if you suggest, this, I tweeted about this a year ago that I think absolutely we should be reversing this. America needs to stand for principles and the principles mean the whole point of a principle is you do things that are uncomfortable and painful.

It's easy to have principles where there's no pain and no sacrifice. The whole point of a principle is to prove that you actually mean it. And so that we need to recognize Taiwan as a democratically elected government that's legitimate. However, there is a geopolitical complexity of given the geospatial limit. of where Taiwan is and where China has power and even with the incredible brilliance and technical, technical innovations behind an aircraft carrier group, there's a lot of limits to try to defend Taiwan from one or two aircraft carrier groups versus, you know, the geo-proximity of China.

It could be done, but it would be a very expensive, painful move to defend Taiwan. There's some clever maybe theater-based technologies that we could either sell or provide Taiwan that might make them more capable of defending, you know, the island. But even that's controversial. But there is always the, you know, debate when an American president really used nuclear weapons to defend Taiwan, which is probably what it would take. Like at a military level, either an explicit and very credible threat to news nuclear weapons or the actual use of a tactical nuclear weapon is what it would probably take for the United

States to prevent China from invading Taiwan and push camera shove. Yeah. And I don't think the American people are going to want to get into a nuclear Holocaust over an island that they don't even know the history of. And that was the justification for the 1979 policy, like insofar as there was a justification, was, look, at the end of the day, Jimmy Carter and many people were not going to defend Taiwan with nuclear weapons. And once you admit that you're not going to defend it with nuclear weapons, the ability to defend the island with conventional weapons is highly dubious,

not maybe impossible. You can debate it a little bit, but highly unlikely. And so if you know that you can't defend it, you know, are you really going to bluff and, you know, support their independence where you know someone could call you on you get called on that yeah at least with respect to western europe and nato's explicit policy which always called for the use of nuclear weapons because they'll sometimes forget this but nato's explicit policy was if the r if the senate union and aids western europe we will use nuclear weapons to defend ourselves uh that was at least partially credible yeah i don't i don't know you know if that had ever been a factual case which president would have, you know, authorized the use of either tactical or intermediate range

nuclear weapons. Who knows? Maybe some would have, some might not have, but it was at least partially credible. I think most people find it incredible that we would defend Taiwan with nuclear weapons. It's one of the great features of nuclear weapons is that, you know, the fact that they are so destructive mutually, the mutually assured destruction nature of them makes threats with them almost, um, shallow by design because I don't think anybody on either side wants to get involved in that kind of the interchange. But building up and investing in Taiwan and having a presence in Taiwan and then maybe buying some of the companies there or bringing their technology to the United States and other places and having them offshore some factories and take their knowledge to other places,

boy, that would be a power move, would it not? Yeah. And some of that's happening. Some of that stuff is moving to Arizona and Japan. is funding a substantial investment in Japan, manufacturing capability, other technical improvements. It doesn't really help the Taiwanized people, the people of Taiwan, really, at the end of the day, actually taking the strategic economic value out makes them more vulnerable, probably, not less. So they might not love this strategy, but it's probably good for Americans in the short term as a strategy of convenience and for, you know, national American independence. So that makes sense.

But I think this is a very complicated problem. I suspect that China doesn't want to roll the dice right now with Taiwan. Certainly not with this president because I think they can. One of the features, your bugs with Trump is he's very unpredictable. Yeah, having a crazy guy on your team, just having grown up in Brooklyn, like when you got a crazy guy on your squad, like people don't want to fight you. I was that guy. Yeah. You know, that guy's crazy.

Don't get in a fight with them. I don't think you really want to invade Taiwan with Trump as president because anybody who tells you that he wouldn't immediately react in a quite vigorous way is probably wrong and certainly cannot be predicted accurately. So I think the deterrent effect is actually quite high with Trump vis-a-vis Taiwan, which is really what you want right now. But that could change over time. So I don't think that issue gets forced.

But I think the genocide continues in China, you know, many of the other. other unfortunate developments in China are going to continue unless an American president and a sustained bipartisan consensus aggressively pushes back with both bigger and consistency. You know, a one-week news story about TikTok is not going to change this dynamics. It has to be a sustained strategy measured in months, quarters, years. I think it's a good segue to how ridiculous the New York Times has become. I don't know if like you had this experience. where you're watching videos of Uyghurs being bound, blindfolded, and having their head shaved

and be for boarding trains, which, you know, just obviously evokes a Holocaust, God forbid, like trigger in any reasonable person who has even the most basic knowledge of history. When you see people getting on trains to be reeducated, doesn't take a genius to realize that this is a precursor or perhaps an actual piece of evidence of genocide occurring. These individuals are forced to eat pork and are beaten, and the sadism and sadistic nature of what's happening is insane. And the videos, just like the faxes coming out of Tiananmen Square, that kind of public awareness of it does make a difference.

and at the same time, we have New York Times journalists lamenting the losing of follower counts of kombucha girl and other TikTokers. Any thoughts on the sort of media's failure to take this seriously? Yeah, I mean, the New York Times has had an incredible distortion of technology. You know, measured at least for the last five years, probably longer, but the last five years have been so stark and basically a non-controversion. So, you know, several years ago, they wrote this what's going to look like one of the more embarrassing pieces in journalism history called this front page in their Times.

Chinese citizens happy despite or happy with their restricted internet access. It's like a whole feature on how you can be how. I mean, this is really going to be in the adults of history like the New York Times praising Hitler, which they did do. this is going to read that way. They get this expose of like maybe an authoritative regime controlling the internet is superior. We interviewed, you know, 20 or Chinese citizens and they say they're happy. QED. Right.

That's literally how this article reads. I'm not exaggerating. It's one of the most embarrassing things written in the English language. And, you know, now three years later, everybody knows how biased that was and how insane actually it was to write that. I think that was the high watermark for me of how bad the New York Times technology coverage is, that they're basically defending an authoritarian communist genocidal regime and making up facts to support it, which is like absurd. So anyway, they've continued notwithstanding in supporting China.

It's a little inconsistent. It's interesting. The worst offenders are in attack journalism, in quotes. section. Whereas on this particular topic, there was one of the journalists, she's actually, she appears to be quite good at her job, cover cyber security. And she wrote a critique of one of her colleagues, you know, dismissing the concerns associated with the CCP, espionage, CCP cyber attacks and TikTok, at least on Twitter. So that at least some, you know, at least someone over at the York Times is doing some. Yeah, I mean, the naivete, they were like, well,

I think they're using Amazon Web Services to store the data. So how could they, you know, ever have access to that? And it's like, uh, they could download it. Yeah, well, let me also make another point, make another point that's kind of, um, been neglected in the public conversations about TikTok. Personally, I think the data that TikTok has, as just a silo is not incredibly sensitive. However, if you stitch that together with all of the other sources of data China has and some of the hacks that have been confirmed that the Chinese government has intentionally performed on American targets, if you put all that data together, I think you could create a very threatening situation for the U.S. and for U.S. system,

U.S. politicians. And to make it explicitly clear, I don't know. enough people remember in like one of the the dark night trilogy of Batman films there was a moment where Wayne Enterprises had been able to turn on every single cell phone and basically listening on everybody hey geniuses like every politician with kids who have TikTok on their phones and get their parents to install it and it's got microphone access what makes you think that they can't get a microphone turned on and then do espionage in this fashion or root your phone or do any number of hacks when you, I don't know if you saw Barri Weiss's resignation letter

or Andrew Sullivan's or the recent one from Ariana Picari from MSNBC. But I wonder if you'd think there's any self-reflection on the part of late-stage journalism and late-stage journalists or the editors of these publications when they see extremely liberal individuals leaving and on the way out burning their bridge and saying, I'm leaving because I feel bullied at the New York Times by liberals. I feel like people have closed the Overton window to an extent that I can't even, in Andrew Sullivan's cases, as a gay man, have a reasonable opinion about something controversial. Do you think there's any self-reflection or do you think it's, they've just all got Trump derangement syndrome or they're all pandering for

page use or some combination there are there two combinations i think the batman batman syndrome is actually very possible especially on android devices um there is a relatively witty line that peter navarro who you know is very controversial but a relatively witty line you used in interview yesterday about you know the ccp knows where your kids your children are which is kind of a play on the old uh you know tv commercial public service announcements it's like 10 p.m do you know where your kids are yeah um so i think that's um one of the main concern But I think it's the combination of data sources put stitched together that's most threatening. And so looking at any of these in isolation may not seem as scary, but the hacks, the cybersecurity hacks and the data from the app and the root access, etc., etc., combined could be extremely threatening.

And so that would be a little bit more concerned about than any specific app. But on your more macro point, obviously, you know, I have read those resignation letters. And I think, you know, journalism has severe bias in the United States at the moment. And for people who don't share the overarching popular sort of intellectual theories of journalism, you know, they're going to be suppressed at the moment. It's kind of a binary outcome in a sense of you're either. believer or not believer in those circles. And so I think we're going to see more of this. It's going to lead to a renaissance in traditional journalism where people actually try to get to the bottom of the facts and put together a story and let readers judge what the meaning of the

story is. And that is going to be led by whether it's substack or other innovations. But it's not ideological journalism will appeal to 20% of American people that share that specific ideology. But at some point, the middle of the bell curve of the American people are going to reject it. I think you're already sort of seeing that. I mean, in some ways, the Trump election was a revolt against traditional journalism being conscripted as well. I think a lot of people who are Trump voters absolutely just didn't believe things they were reading. in The New York Times because they understood that the New York Times had such an animosity towards a sort of set of views that they they couldn't believe some of the probably correct indictments of Trump that were embedded in some of this coverage. 10, 20, 30 years ago, I think if a mainstream journalistial, like the Washington Post New York Times had run exposés on a presidential candidate like someone like Trump,

it would have been more devastating to that candidate, even within the conservative party. But because these organs of ideology are so distrusted and disliked and despised in some ways by people who have religious views who are pro-life, who are conservative, pro-Israel, etc., that they just don't care with the New York team's rights. And so it doesn't have the impact that it would have had. And it should have because some of it is incredibly valid. True. Some of it's definitely true.

Some of it's very obvious. I mean, you grew up in New York too. I mean, both of us grew up with Donald Trump on the radio all day long. Yeah. And so, you know, there's nothing surprising about Trump to me. Yeah, I mean, anybody who was in New York City can be absolutely certain that Trump was involved in financial shenanigans. And I think we all knew who ran the concrete business.

in New York, especially as somebody who grew up in Brooklyn and, you know, watch the Fulton fish market accidentally burned down. Yeah, anybody grew up in, anybody who grew up in New York in the 1980s, absolutely knew what Trump as president would be. I mean, that's why, you know, I tweeted in May have 16, sorry, you know, Trump was a sociopath. It was, you know, none of this is a surprise, but I think the, the transmission of this information to the American people and voters was discounted massively because of all the bias over all these years that led to this, you know, basically rejection. You know, occasionally, the New York Times

may get something right, but if you don't believe them because they've got eight things wrong over the last two years, it doesn't do any good for anybody. You saw the tech hearings for major companies up there. You got your Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. Of those four, which one deserves, which one had the worst performance end or deserves to be under the most scrutiny, which one, which executive did best, and which one maybe deserves the least amount of scrutiny

and is great for society? Well, I mean Apple, not Microsoft, sorry. I mean, sorry. All four companies, I think, are incredible, you know, have done amazing things for Americans and society, period. And I think, you know, Bezos's statement before our testifying, I think, describes this, distills it perfectly. Everybody should read the statement in its entirety. It is a vigorous defense of technology and Amazon specifically of what it's done to improve welfare for everybody.

I think that's true for Apple. I think it's true for Facebook. I think it's true for Google. I think Mark had the best, I agree with basically the strategic recovery. which won't surprise anybody, that Google is the most vulnerable because basically it has no friends. The left doesn't like, you know,

has decided for whatever sort of reasons that large successful businesses are threats and bad, which is somewhat antithetical to the last century of American history. And the people who know better and should know better and should be articulating a vigorous defense against that, you know, erosion are Republicans, but Google has burned so many bridges with conservatives

that the Republicans are exasperated and just say, well, I'm not going to waste my social capital defending you. Like, you guys, you know, refuse to help our defense department. You fire conservatives. You have a monoculture. Your censor conservative content on YouTube, et cetera, et cetera. And so, you know, as Ben Thompson's summed up speech today, is like Google has absolutely no allies.

The left doesn't like them and the right doesn't like them. And it's the most obvious. And by the way, they have a market share that looks like a monopolist, whereas Facebook does not have a market share that looks like a monopolist in any relevant market. Apple has a minority of a market in every market they serve. And Amazon correctly understood probably has single digit market share. So none of the other companies really should have even been there. But I think Mark's statement to the committee was also quite elegant about.

how technology companies, including the ones through acquisition, allowed them to compete successfully with large entrenched businesses. They have not been serving their customers very well for a long time. And I highly recommend people read the extra of testimony about that. Yeah, when looking at it, I don't think that because of Zuckerberg's track record and the fines he's gotten on privacy twice and all those settlements, he has the credibility. And because he has both the Democrats and the Republicans feel like the thumbs on the scale for the other party, he felt like he was at risk as well for me.

When you look at Google, well, they've straight up lied and obscurified and been opaque about how they put their rankings. I mean, Matt Cuts for just a decade lied to me and everybody said, we didn't change organic search. when all they did was put 400 pixels worth of ads above organic search. And everybody knows 90% of the clicks occur in the first whatever 100 pixels. They seem to be super at risk. I thought Amazon was incredible. I thought Bezos, his opening statement was like the opening scene in his movie

when they do the 10-part Amazon series or whatever treatment they do where Tom Hanks plays Bezos or whoever winds up. I don't know who's the best person maybe to play. I got to think of somebody young. Ball Tom Cruise. You're saying a ball, Tom Cruise. No, I like the Tom Hanks idea. Tom Hanks is just so all-American.

You just have to get buff. He got to get rid of the dad bot. I don't know if he's capable of it. But the thing that I thought Bezo should have just said to them because when they were going at him with the third-party, you know, acquisitions that they were copying other people's products, So that's called capitalism. We all try to make better products.

And what would you have us do? Not allow third parties to sell on our platform? Because we can press a button and turn off the third party. And the millions of businesses that have been built off of that could go away. So what do you suggest to all these politicians? What do you suggest we do? Should we turn it off? Because we can turn it off right now.

I can just make a phone call. We'll turn off third party. And all those people will lose their jobs. and they won't compete. I know. Well, it does a good way of reframing. In addition, I found a tweet that I retweeted the other day that showed the percentage of third-party goods sold on Amazon

versus Walmart versus traditional retail. And, you know, Amazon's like 1 or 3% or something like that and all these other people are like 30%. So, you know, people are, politicians are distorting the facts or, you know, be willfully ignorant of them in, complaining about practices that have been extremely common and dominant business practices actually for 50 plus years. Like house brands.

When they talk about Amazon basics, it's like, well, Whole Foods has 365, Kroger's Target. Everybody has a house brand. And the house brands at those supermarkets and department stores was typically 20 or 30% of sales. I was just told by a CEO who works in Amazon that the house brands on Amazon, Amazon, Amazon basics is less than 1%. That's correct. Anybody who's used Amazon Amazon basics products,

no, they're a great deal, but they're not the best products. They're kind of janky. No, it's a silly concern. You know who I got? I got J.K. Simmons. J.K. Simmons, as an older Bezos,

and as a younger Bezos, that's what we need to cast. Like a Gordon, who's that Gordon Levin? What's that kid's name, Nick? Joe, Joseph Gordon. Joseph Gordon Levitt as a young Bezos. Then you get

JK Simmons on some you know, some steroids. What do they call those things? The athlete's stake? Yeah, get him on a little HGH and then you got him playing an older Bezos. For Apple,

they said they don't have market share, but they do have the lion share of app revenue and the profits in phones. So part of this is also, you define market share rent? Yeah, I mean, arguably, the app revenue is a little tricky

to create a market out of, but you can reframe it probably around profits. Typically, it's not done. Typically, market share is calculated by revenue or sales, but it's not that crazy I'll need to do that on a kind of adjusted contribution margin kind of basis. So, but typically they don't have the dominant market share, which, you know,

Most antitrust analysis doesn't even begin unless you have like 40% market share. The lowest end market reported antitrust case is like around 30%. And the 30 and 40% cases require you to take concerted action with other people, like basically like a concerted boycott or something like that. Unilateral action, you definitely need market share more than 50% in the United States, at least for 60 plus years. So, you know, I think making an antitrust case against Apple in the United States is pretty unlikely. You can find these niche markets. Like, for example, there was one that at least stated a claim, which is just the first level bar in the book publishing space. But I think what would happen is if Apple really had legal risk in some of these niche markets,

they would just, might as well just shut down the business rather than, you know, live with the government. an investigation. All right. So it's obvious that this is going to continue the scrutiny of big tech. I've been thinking about how big, each big tech company can preemptively offer something that would make things feel, because a lot of this is about feelings. It feels unfair, but nobody can really pin these companies. If they did, they would already have done antitrust cases.

So a lot of this is about feelings, I think, of that this is unfair. I want you to think about each of these four major companies and what you think they could make as a concession that might feel good. I'll give you mine first. When I look at a company like Facebook, if they woke up one day and said, if you want to pay $10 a month or whatever Netflix or Spotify cost, $8, $12, you can use an ad-free privacy guaranteed. We store none of your data on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. it's like a collection and therefore there are no issues around consumer privacy. Do you think that wouldn't make people feel good?

You think that would call off the hounds? Maybe some. I mean, there's still like the left wing still wants to cry and try to find excuses for Hillary losing. And so they tend to blame Facebook and they don't like the fact that people tend to share articles on Facebook that are not approved by the New York Times. Got it.

So that's kind of, there's two groups. There's the privacy, you know, sort of concerns, which your suggestion would absolutely help reframe that narrative. But a lot of it's around content and whether, whether. You got a solution for that one? No, because I don't think they should cave. I think at the end of the day, the media hates Facebook because Hillary lost and the media is no longer a gatekeeper to content.

So whether it's Facebook or Twitter, there's nobody who can stop you from generating attention. You don't need to ask permission to generate attention for ideas and for your own publications anymore. And the media hates that because they've always had a monopoly. They're speaking. It's kind of ironic. They even had the biggest monopoly in the United States who are basically people in the media. some of the government conferred if you think about the TV station radio stations you have a license and often quite monopolistic license so not true of print but true of other forms of media

so would another opportunity for them to be because it was a pretty harsh um uh removal of you know Alex Jones who's a conspiracy there isn't a whack job doing performance art I think to his own admission that it's performance art, no matter how you feel about it. You know, the Sandy Hook parents was a false flag, like insanity. They had like Milo Yanopoulos, who was like a performance. I knew him back before he was a performance artist. It was like performative art, like super trolling.

And then there were a couple of other people on the right who got bounced off of YouTube. Would it have been a power move for YouTube to say, hey, YouTube has this one level for everybody. And then there's a sub-level where if you're a paid person or even you just go into your settings and say, I want questionable content or I want content that has been flagged and just, hey, there's a way you can turn it on if you really want to see it and it's going to live over here.

Would that not have been a better move for him? Would you think they did the right thing taking Milo and, you know, Alex Jones off the platform? Well, I think that's an interesting idea because, you know, defaults using, leveraging defaults is something being technology companies that we've done to compete with either political perception or large and trans incumbents. We've, we used very clever default setting back on my PayPal days to prevent these a master card from eliminating us. So it's a very, very classic move to do something like what you suggest. I think it depends on specific cases. Like I wouldn't necessarily lump all the people that banned Facebook together.

I think fundamentally I have a very simple principle, which I've explained at length, among other places, an interview with Kara Swisher on Recode. If the content can be published in a book in the United States, it should be allowed on Facebook. And if it wouldn't be allowed to be published in a book because it's obscene, libelists, etc.,

then it shouldn't be allowed on Facebook. And we've lived with that, you know, sort of construct for three, 400 years very successfully. Do you include the UK? You know, you can go back further. And it works. We understand what content is publishable. And if it can be published in a book, there's no reason Facebook or Twitter should treat the content any differently. Well, did Cara, I wonder if Kara was quick enough because she's pretty smart to respond that books typically have editors and publishers who would then act as an intermediary who would have massive liability?

They did for many parts of history, but actually the beginning they didn't, and then at the end they did, and now they don't really in many ways. But yes, there was gatekeepers in the publishing industry, but you could self-publish, pamphlets were self-published. The American Revolution was predicated on pamphlets, actually anonymous or synonymous pamphlets, you know, where the key, you know, common sense and things like that or federalist papers, etc. were indispensable to American history.

And, you know, I don't think there was like a traditional publisher behind. those. So I don't think that's totally true, but, but there were absolutely gatekeepers. But I think the legal standards have been well established, significantly framed. I mean, when the printing press came out, it did cause revolutions. Like at the end of the day, it was the first time that a normal person could proselytize that scale. And, you know, there was worse fought because of the printing press in many ways. But so I think there's consequences to allowing people to publish new and provocative ideas. But, you know, we've had as a society had well-established standards and there's no reason to change them for

Facebook or Twitter. I mean, if we did not have the ability to publish the murder of George Floyd in that eight and a half minute video of him being murdered, we would not have the ability to do the change we want to see in policing. So, you know, public, this ability, this freedom of publishing cuts both ways. Yeah, publishing. I mean, broadening exposure to access to information, bought into people who can be writers or publishers is a very good thing. And I think we've already adopted significantly successful standards on, you know, can't have child porn, you can't have obscenity. You certainly can't defame people.

We've even... Can't threaten to hurt bodily harm somebody. I mean, I've had people threaten to punch me on the face on Twitter. I'm like, by the way, you know, it's probably not a good idea to do that. I think you can have a knock on your door if you do something. something like that. Yeah, I mean, certainly any imminent threat of violence is unacceptable. You couldn't publish a book calling for it either if it was imminent. So I think we have like the principles. And so when someone doesn't want to use traditionally successful principles, it means to me that what

they really want to do is suppress ideas, that they're actually trying to censor ideas because they, they know for a fact that the standards we normally employ would absolutely enable like this content to be published. Now, I do think there are lines. that absolutely can be drawn. But the lines are, is this defamatory or libelous? Is this obscene, et cetera? And if not, if a user wants to share

some contact with his or her friends, they should be able to do that. And you don't have to be friends with someone on Facebook. There's no requirement that I'd be friends with you on Facebook, or I don't have to follow someone on Twitter. If I don't like their content, I absolutely shouldn't have to follow them. All right.

Here's my best idea for Google to get themselves at hot water. Let me run this one up the flagpole and see what you think. Google, when you type in internal temperature smoking brisket when I do it on my barbecue, it pulls the actual answer, the paragraph. They call it a snippet or a one box, and they put it right there on my mobile phone. Internal temperature should be 195 degrees. Let that meat sit for an hour and you're good to go. Not only do they do that, they take the next four or five questions that I would have asked,

they put a little carrot next to it. You click the drop down, and it gives you another snippet for it says, what is it to do well-done brisket or medium-rere brisket or whatever it is. In other words, they make it absolutely unnecessary for me to go visit those websites. And the whole defense they had was, hey, we send information. Now they're actually profiting from it. I think if they want to use snippets, they should pay some amount. of money. Let's call it $1 for every thousand times it's seen.

25 cents for every time it's seen or just share the revenue because they already share revenue. When you put ads on Google ads on your site, they give you 60, 70% of it. Maybe when they use the content on their site, they should just pay you a little big. What do you think about them being generous in doing something like this to share the wealth? I think it would certainly appease some of their critics. It wouldn't appease the because a lot of people are trying to build destination websites and watch their traffic. It's not just a marginal economic calculation, but for many publishers it is. But there is, just like my point about Facebook, there are some well-established principles here,

and maybe they need to be litigated to see the application. But there's a concept of fair use, you know, that's been well-established for centuries. And arguably, maybe Google is not complying with fair use and how they're doing snippets, the one box, because to some extent, if you're taking a primary effort, fair use is not measured just by the percentage of the content. It's a four-part test. Is there confusion on the part? of the user, the percentage you're using, is there an educational purpose, and are you impeding the other person's ability to do commerce? And you're sticking to that fourth one.

I'm no lawyer. I know you are, but I have enough background on this from getting legal letters and gadget and other publications. Yeah, no, the fourth principle is if they're taking and depriving people of economic value by showcasing the primary import of the content on their site, that actually would not be a fair use. And so I think there are test cases. that particular publishers might want to try litigating against Google. And, you know, look, Google's got deep pockets. So it's a pretty good litigation. You know, I might invest in some of that.

Let's do it. I'm going to write a blog post. And then you and I could fund this because it actually, I see two Achilles heels for Google. The first one is also, if you were to ask people to search and, you know, you own the company, Trayor Grills, the smoker I use, that I'm not. saying it's the best one. It's what people told me is the best one, but there's some other ones that are particularly good as well. And if I search for Trigger Girls and they sell that keyword to another person, people don't actually know because the chicklet for an ad is like this tiny now. It's like it literally looks like a tic-tac. And they may even call it that, a chicklet or a

ticket where it says AD. I would say 50, 60, 70 percent of people, if you were to survey them after them is what you clicked on an ad or not would not. Would not. not know. Or they would misattributed. This is a clear violation of advertising law. So they have two huge Achilles heels. And if somebody had the hootspah to go after them with two lawsuits, Google would lose. I guarantee it. Yeah. So I think there's some promising litigation. So you don't need to apply like this complicated antitrust analysis. As I said, there's a lot of very straightforward, well-established for centuries principles. You just named two of them. that could be used to, you know, improve the situation.

I do think, though, that Google does have, you know, 70, 80, 90 percent market share in search. And it's almost surely the case that search is a relevant market, divorced from just general advertising. So I think that's an easy monopoly case to bring. Yeah, so we got three swings up out there. Amazon. what would you think is a reasonable solution? I have one, but I don't know if it's as good as the other two I put forth of how they could avoid some issues with their basics product. But do you have any ideas for them to make it feel more fair and to take the heat off?

Well, you know, I think they're doing a really good job, as you pointed out, this is an opening statement, probably reframed a lot of people's opinion very quickly about it. They really want to mess with Amazon. on specifically around, you know, by the way, we're more popular than you guys are. That was the greatest dunk ever. He's like, the only people who people love more than us are the people who go and defend the country at war, military people. And the press is like number 20 on the list.

Yeah, especially among Democrats. So, you know, I think there's a lot. Politicians are pretty good at understanding, you know, who's vulnerable and who they should attack and who's more popular than they are and it's going to backfire. Yeah. So I think that was part of their strategy was like, we're pretty damn popular. Americans depend on us a lot right now. They really like, they really like us.

You want to have a battle? Let's have a battle. Let's see who wins this one versus caving. And I think sometimes tech people have the wrong instinct, which is to cave. You have to know, like, is history on your side or the correlation of horses to use an old Russian concept on your side? If Amazon wants to battle, you know, a bunch of Democrats, I think Amazon wins that in most people's minds. So, you know,

it bases us in some way, it's like, you want to have a fight? That's have a fight right now. Here's the one I have. With the basics product line and the house brands, and this is like a double like trolling dunk, we will make

no profit on our Amazon basics products. We'll just make them, we'll provide them at cost just so that more people and consumers have more choice for the basic things in their life because that's good for society. We're not going to underpriced them, which is illegal. Right, of course.

But we're going to sell them at cost, just like Costco does. Costco is supposedly you pay the membership, you get a cost. So as part of an Amazon Prime, if you're Amazon Prime, you get Amazon basics at the verified cost that Amazon spends on that USBC cable. I think that's a pretty good idea. Some people will criticize, like, this cost effectively mean below cost because what people have these are. But anyway, I think that's a good idea. good framing, you know, especially since it's 1% of their products, it's not going to matter that much in the grand scheme of it for Amazon. But I think that's a reasonable approach.

Certainly would magnify the consumer welfare and the popularity to the consumer of Amazon, which is part of the strategy. And I think you could see this also in Apple strategy. Apple is obviously a very well-approved, well-like brand. Tim was, you know, pretty much playing a no hits, no runs, no errors kind of strategy. Yeah, very, very milk toast. Very milk toast. I'd be right down the middle. I know the American people like my company that they like me.

I'm not going to say anything that changes that. I don't want attention here. Like, why am I here? You know, kind of thing. And so I think, and their political strategy usually reflects that, even though Tim's been somewhat outspoken on some issues that he cares about, obviously. Typically, they found a way to have a bi-part. partisan, you know, lobbying and a political donation strategy across the board so that they don't

generate the animosity that Google does among Republicans and Twitter to some extent and YouTube, particularly at Google. And Facebook and Zuckerberg. Yeah. I mean, it is amazing when you think about it. Tim Apple is like sitting next to the president at every economic conference. then he's going out and speaking about, you know, important issues, gay rights and social justice. And he doesn't get barbecued for sitting next to Trump because he doesn't say anything.

He just sort of sits next to him and says, like, yep, we want to support Americans and, you know, we're here to help. I had the masterful, I think, one liner for him, which was, we have a closed ecosystem because we want to protect children from porn and things they shouldn't see. Android has an open ecosystem. Google's an open ecosystem. If you are a parent, you can pick the open ecosystem. If you want a curated experience like Walt Disney World, where there's no smoking or there's no pornographic material, or there's no adult content, there's no R-rated features at Disneyland and Disney World or on Disney Plus, that's what we're providing. And it's just something different. So we need to have those controls.

But you can buy an Android phone and you can load whatever you want. So there's that. And then my second point, as Tim Cook would have been, and by the way, we have a developer mode for iPhones now. You click on developer mode and you can loan any app store, but you don't get any support from us. So when you click, I'm in developer mode and you pay $29 a year, he gives you a warning that you're now, your privacy is up. You can do whatever you want with your device, but we're not going to support it. Wouldn't that have been just an easy dunk for him? Yeah, I like the first one much better than the second.

And the second one is a similar principle, though. It's like playing with default. It's very few people are going to choose that. But you get the optics of reframing it to be completely optional, even though very few people would elect for the inferior choice. So, yeah, those kind of moves typically are very effective. Okay, we're both investors in companies. And we have our companies compete against these big companies,

which can, obviously, sometimes buy them for a large amount of money, which is great for investors and for those teams. But they can also compete against them and destroy them very quickly if they choose to. We see that once in a while. Maybe it's a little more overblown. Do you think for our industry, venture capital, technology, entrepreneurship, it's good to have these giant players out there who can write 10, $20 billion checks to do M&A, or would it be better if we had some new rule that said, if you are over $500 billion, you can only buy

companies up to this amount, 20 billion in market cap, or maybe it was a percentage. You know, there's a billion, if your company's worth a trillion dollars, you can buy anything that's 10% of the value of your company, or 20% of the value of your company, or some sort of throttling that were to occur for the big giants who are running the table and getting so big that people have this concern that they're, you know, basically mitigating too much of American life. Yeah, but I think the history is just like, proves a, of, That's actually not true.

I mean, what's the biggest thing Apple's ever purchased? It's actually this ridiculous purchase. Beats. Beats, yeah. So dumb. It's like wasting money and a very small amount of money, a very small fraction of market cap. And, you know, so literally the most important tech company in many ways doesn't buy anybody.

Amazon, you know, I did buy Whole Foods. 13 billion and they went up $20 billion that day. Yeah. So they bought Whole Foods. But before Whole Foods, like the most things. spent on an acquisition was like about a billion dollars. So you're talking like a rounding error. Facebook's the only one, right?

WhatsApp, that was bold. Yeah, I'm not sure WhatsApp was worth you. 19. I'm not sure it was worth doing, but you could debate that. Instagram was brilliant. You know, clearly, although now people are applying hindsight. I remember tweeting and I have to find it because Twitter search is so broken. The day of the acquisition of Instagram, I remember tweeting how brilliant it was.

And so many people, including some very smart people, know, thought I was crazy. Like literally. The ultimate brilliant hedge, it was one percent of their market cap at the time, right? Yeah, there was 30 million users, which isn't that much. I got to see the other things. And it was 13 employees with basically no revenue. So for a billion dollars, to me it was very extremely profound.

And I tweeted some of this. But it was extremely controversial at the time. So applying hindsight isn't really like a productive exercise that everybody's doing now. I think that's like, you know, Yeah, but if you take the two, 19 billion for what's that? 20 billion total, roughly. Yeah, when they were at 100 and change, I think, in market cap. If you just averaged out the two for 10% each, it was a smart book.

And then they wasted money, probably on Oculus. You know, like, so there's some extent, like, it's not like they've been, other than Instagram, which would have been a potentially competitive threat if it could scale users, scale employees. It would have. Well, it would have scaled users. Scaling employees, as you know, is really hard. Going for 13 people to 300 people to 300 people is very painful.

Going for 300 people to 3,000 people. I think Roloff had just put $50 million in like the week before they got bought. Yeah, but you still need people. You need to manage people. Things tend to go wrong. There were risks. And they had no revenue and they had to create it. Google's been fairly effective in buying some things.

YouTube was a very smart acquisition. 1.6. Yeah. I think Double Click probably was a very smart and borderline anti-competitive acquisition. For sure. I think those two. Android. Yeah, Android was more like an R&D product at the time they purchased it.

True. And they spent roughly $400 billion total on it, maybe even a little less. There was a, you know, the most important thing they bought in some ways was the pioneering, engineering talent into Submix and IP and probably. Deep mind or Eds. No, no, no, no, no, way back. Oh, the AdSense competitor in Santa Monica. What was it called? It became AdSense.

Applied semantics, yes. That was probably the most important thing they purchased. And that was like $100 million or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, no one would. And Google had like no material revenue at the time either. So it was like, you know, in some ways, they wouldn't have qualified under any antitrust doctrine for anything.

But it was by far the most influential. Again, Andrew was R.D product, extremely influential and extremely powerful, but wouldn't have been disqualified by any neutral principle. What's your advice to founders? Now that we got these SPACs everywhere and the, IPO windows open, retail investors have shown up thanks to Robin Hood. Shouldn't companies just start going public and using that public equity to then go make more acquisitions and be more independent and drive value?

Isn't that better for us in the investment community and society at large to have, you know, five times as many public companies to choose from? Yeah, of course. I mean, for 10 years, I've been arguing that most founders should take the company public as rapidly as possible. Basically, Bill Gurley and I have been on this crusade for a decade, and most founders have rejected that advice. I explained my views at length in a chapter, a full chapter on this topic in Eli Gilles' high-growth handbook, which I highly recommend reading. I also have a couple of answers that are probably by a decade old on Quora that try to

distill this. So you can see it's not revisionist history. I actually published these answers in 2010. But so in any event, maybe now some founders are realizing the wisdom of the growing key views of the world. Yeah, I mean, look at Shopify. Look at Nikolo. I just had the Nikolo founder on his company's worth $10, $15 billion. They don't even have a product in market yet. I mean, that's scary. That's a little scary.

But you can look at things like Shopify or like Carbana or Square. Slack. Yeah, Square Republic of three and a half bill. it's now 55 or 60 bill. You know, Shopify. It's crazy. Shopify is at $120 billion or so. You know, when public probably about three.

Stay independent and go public. It's such an obviously the best move. If people want to buy your company, it's because they see you as a massive opportunity or a threat or both. Yep. Yep. They're linked together. Like the ability to have a successful opposition is related to your viability and

prospects as an independent enemy as well. Why hasn't Microsoft bought Slack? Seems like, is it too expensive? No, well, obviously not from a marketing cap perspective, but I suspect it's more Google. Well, now I think it would be hard from an antitrust perspective. Now they have teams to get away with Slack, I think it would be too high visibility. Google could probably buy Slack, although Google probably anything they try to do at any

price point, you know, that's meaningful, gets scrutinized. But. Salesforce, maybe. It's a classic, like, you know, we could build this kind of decision. Salesforce probably does make actual some sense there. Yeah, because it's becoming the dashboard. I can't believe that somebody hasn't taken in this pandemic slack off the table because I don't know about when you are working now remote, work is Slack.

Like, that's your office now. Like, what is that worth? Yeah, no, I think like, uh, slock is a desirable target. Um, is Zoom. And well, Zune's got lots of tricky issues, uh, you know, they have engineering centers and engineers in China. There's some, there's been some concerns about how they, uh, suppressed certain kinds of content and protest. Yeah, no, they've been reversing those decisions real quick. I mean, they see the liability. Yeah, there, there, there's, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

that one is probably better saying as an independent company. You know, I think unless you want to really take on the burden of the optics and the substance of improving those things, I think it's highly risky right now. We use Zoom for most of our pitches, but presumably the CCP doesn't care like what I'm investing in. Have you invested during the pandemic? Yeah. You know, I'd see. say in a moderately uncomfortable way, certainly founders fund as a whole, as a collection of partners is mostly a founder-driven, a team-driven investor group. So the most important criteria

for us is the quality and caliber of the founders. And, you know, remote investing is extremely challenging to ask for pain. Why is it hard for you? Because I think a video conference this is not a substitute for gauging someone's abilities versus in the real world meeting. Yeah. And so I think those of us that compete most of our ability to assess people feel like we're at a comparative disadvantage during COVID. Yeah. Which is somewhat frustrating.

I mean, obviously not that much we can do about it. But fundamentally, I feel like, you know, competing with like one hand, you know, sort of broken, like a broken hand playing like a sport or something. and it's been difficult. I have led two important investments in the last, I guess, for five months of COVID, which for me is a very slow pace. Typically, probably something closer to one a month on average. But you knew both those founders and met in the real world before that,

or have any of them been pure Zoom? There's two specifically that I have never met in person. Wow. in one case fortunately Matt Achina staff had worked with her before and she and her co-pilot both worked at Facebook and so we're like a concentric circle removed from people I know very well

second recent one that's not announced yet is in a domain and market that I understand very well I've had significant success in that kind of market before so although it's somewhat annoying to have to make an investment decision via Zoom. I also similarly have several people in common. There are several angel investors in the company

that I know very well, as well as other people associated with this person's background, but still not ideal at all. All right. So we're not going to have, as we wrap up here, less than 100 days until the election, we're not going to have a crazy socialist, you know,

ban the billionaires, Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren in the White House. Maybe the slim chance Elizabeth Warren would be the VP, but I doubt it.

Chances Trump wins and how would he thread the needle? Chances Biden wins and what would be the best strategy for him to win? So I think the chances are a little bit higher

than people, right now a lot of people are writing Trump off. And, you know, Trump is clearly into decay. His performance has been abysmal for the last three to six months on many of these dimensions. That said, I think there's a couple pieces of volatility and wild cards still significantly in play.

A, Biden imminently is going to announce a vice presidential pick. And if he mishandles that and chooses, you know, the wrong candidate and things, you know, sort of spiral in a negative way, that would introduce a lot of uncertainty back in race. Secondly, the healthcare front, which dictates the economic front, if by the October jobs report, the economy looks to be back on track, it's not going to be all the way back, but if the first and second the durators are positive, I think the election will be very close. If not, I think Trump, you know, has a severe problem because basically the number one predictor for presidential re-elections is the right track, wrong track percentage. And right now, for lots of really good reasons,

most Americans think we're on the wrong track. But if you can fix that quickly, where people are feeling optimistic again, I think that would have. help substantially. Third is, almost surely there should, there will be at least one presidential debate. You know, Biden's been in isolation for a long time. Seems like a wide strategy. Which has worked in the short term, but once you get divorced from stress and difficult questions, it gets harder. You don't just snap that agility, the mental agility, et cetera, back instantly like a light switch. So if he underbend, performs massively in the first debate. I think that couldn't really hurt him. And if he tries to

avoid debating, I think it'll backfire. It'll be the equivalent of Hillary not going to Wisconsin because he's overconfident. That's the one I wonder about because I do agree with you that you need to use that muscle. If you look at what happened with Bloomberg, he just got demolished and he just wasn't prepared to fight in those debates. And he was clearly the most qualified person, I believe, on the Democratic side. I mean, I think that's the person Trump feared most. he was just sharper, but he hadn't tuned that muscle because he jumped into the race at the last minute. He hadn't had been under stress and screened me for a very long time. And he's aging.

A similar thing happened in 2016 with Jeff Bush. He had been like an investment banker for X years. In the prime of his career as a politician in Florida, he was actually a pretty good debater and pretty good speaker. But he totally lost that, you know, that ability. It's like a boxer's like retired or something. This is why you need to do a podcast twice a week. You got to keep you got to stay sharp. Okay, Matt, schedule me a few podcasts a week.

There'll be much better than this one. No. And then the last two a week. The last piece of volatility will be, you know, insofar as things escalate with China. Yeah. And there's a real confrontation, especially if Biden mishandles his positioning on China. I think Trump wants to run against Beijing Biden. And, you know, Biden's got advisors on both sides of this equation, some are more.

realistic about the threat posed by China and some who are traditional establishment foreign policy bureaucrats. And depending on where he ultimately lands, he'll be more or less vulnerable to punches from Trump on China. But if China makes some aggressive decisions and does some things that, you know, alienate the American people and Trump is perceived to be the most anti-China candidate, that could be very important for his reelection. I wonder if China wants him to win. I have no idea. I think it's tricky. I think they love. They love the fact that he surely erasing the fact that he cedes distrust and a lot of social conflict. And that's been part of China's intentional strategy for at least the last five, 10, maybe 15 years.

So Trump as a candidate and Trump as president absolutely causes divisions. That said, you know, he's been pretty aggressive recently on China and pretty attuned to a lot of civil stuff they're trying to get away with. And, you know, I think Biden would be maybe certainly less confrontational, but maybe might even borderline fall into an appeasement camp, and they might be willing to roll the dice that they'd rather have an appeasing president of the United States than a unpredictable and hawkish president. But Biden would also allow for less social divisions, more unified America, and that would be inconsistent with a lot of China's strategy. I have another theory. It's a crazy conspiracy theory. But I think you've got to exhaust all of these,

because we live in a crazy world. You notice that Trump started wearing a mask two weeks ago and then just totally reversed his position on it? And he was like, I'm going to wear a mask and you should totally wear a mask and here's my mask and take a picture of my mask. Doesn't it look cool on me? That was, he started doing that 60 days out from the first debate,

which I think is September 29th, if my memory serves me correct. It takes like three, four weeks for mask wearing to, like, work. And it takes two or three weeks for people to die from COVID. I think it's 10, 20-day window. He might have timed this perfectly because I don't know if you noticed the caseloads are coming down as testing is going up. And we just had a plateau in debts after it went up a little bit.

He might time this perfectly so that he gets everybody to start wearing masks. He should just make Trump 20-20 masks. Then he could claim victory that he defeated COVID or he ran it down to, let's say, under 100 debts a day or under 200 deaths a day from this peak of 15. 100. And then the stock market would rip and then maybe that's his window. Yeah, well, his biggest mistake, his single biggest mistake from a political perspective and some of the perspective was he should have embraced wearing a mask before anybody else. It's a very conservative approach to a really tricky problem. A mask is individualistic.

It's not something it's very inexpensive. It's not something the government needs to provide you. So it should have been like the big Democrats who want to shut down the economy. with a one size fits all mandate. Sledgehammer. That are interfering with economic progress versus me. He's saying, go buy a simple mask, wear it. And we don't need to do all these like government interventions in the world. And it would have been a very both substantively successful probably policy,

but very ideologically consistent with his sort of most likely voters. It's like who needs governments. You know, we know how to produce a mask. We know how to build a mask. Yeah. Get a bandana. Get your Leonard Skinner bandana. Let's go.

Or Adams, the shoe company now does high-end masks or, you know, Nike produces masks. The American genius. I've got my Adams mask right here. There you go. I buy them 10 at a time for my whole team. Right.

They're really good, actually, right on brand. So I even have a Barry's mask that I wear. Oh, Barry's Book Camp. How are you doing without your Barry's? Dying. I'm dying. Did you Peloton? What are you doing?

Remote parraries? I'm doing a lot of remote barriers. The classes are pretty good. They have classes via Zoom with like weights and the instructors are quite good. It's obviously not a substitute for the real world in many ways, but for most people, you know, we both love basketball. You watched a couple of these first games. It's a little bit weird, but it's great to have it back, yeah? Well, I think all sports.

I mean, I've been watching mostly baseball. I'm phenomenally, you know, phenomenally addictive. fanatically addicted Yankees fan. And fortunately the Yankees are quite good. I'm really hoping the baseball season doesn't fall apart at that moment because the Yankees are absolutely the best team of baseball and it's really excited to watch them. So why didn't they do a bubble?

They should just bubbled it. Who knows? You know, the machinations. It's like classic, you know, commissioner problems, union problems. In any event, hopefully they can hold it together. basketball, you know, we're both Knicks fans and both deprived of watching the Knicks. You like the Tibbs?

You like the Tibbs acquisition? I don't know. I like the Jeff Van Gundy response, which is this roster needs a lot of work. So, yeah, I mean, coaches can only do so much. I like Barrett. I like Barrett and Mitchell. I think Mitchell getting 30, 40 minutes a game

could be really interesting this season if he can handle it. I think the basic problem with the Knicks has been, I mean, the owner, it starts from the top. like the Trump administration. But secondarily, I think they've been on strategies that made sense for about six months at a time, and then they throw up their hands and revise the whole strategy. So they never make any progress. So we wind up trading.

You know, occasionally, we've stumbled in to some pretty good players and wind up trading them. Yeah, how do you trade Chris Par? If you get Chris Stap's Porzingis at number three or four in the draft, and everybody says you're an idiot. and then he turns out to be like a once in a lifetime player, once in a generation player, and then you trade him because he doesn't like you? F that. Yeah, it's crazy. You're staying. You're staying.

It was insane. You have to build, you know, if anything, you watch the last dance, you know, with Jordan. Basketball teams particularly need to be built around the talent. And we occasionally, by accident, you know, get talent. Stumble into it. And then we throw it away. And so, you know, it's been 20 years. to 20 years as a Knicks fan.

Brutal. Other than like three weeks of Jeremy Lynn, like, it's been a really horrible 20 years. And, you know, Mello with Steve Novak and that whole crew, J.R. Smith, they actually played, like, what did that, that had that 50 plus win season. Yeah, we had one season. That was pretty reasonable.

Reasonable. I mean, 50, when I was growing up as a Knicks fan, 50 wins is like the low bar. Yeah, I know. It's like, yeah, Oakley, Mason, Ewing, Harper, Stark. I mean, you did not want to go up with that team. Or even before that, Bernard King, I mean, we were more like 40.

Or even after that, Marcus Camby, Spreewell, Larry Johnson. Yeah, so we had a pretty good run. Other than when Bernard, you know, unfortunately damaged his knee for a couple of years, you know, from the mid-80s on since 2001, the Knicks were, you know, a real franchise. But that's a long time ago. Well, we have all the assets. We got all the draft picks. We got some decent young players to build off of. I mean, just be.

patient. I mean, we're not going anywhere. We're just a year 20 of pain. We can deal with two more years of pain. 10% more pain to have a playoff team. Just take your... I think that's why they went with Tibbs is I think they think he's that player developer and we're just going to stick with a five-year plan and let's

just hire people slowly and develop talent. On that note, Keith Rubei, let's pray for our Knicks for next year. Let's play for an end of the pandemic. And you're always a great guest and we'll see you shortly. Thanks again for coming on. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.