SPEAKER_03: Saxifu, how much heat and momentum has Nikki Haley gotten this week? Oh my god, stop trying to make Nikki Haley happen.
SPEAKER_05: Fetch is not happening. Stop trying to make Fetch happen.
SPEAKER_01: Stop trying to make Fetch happen. It's happening. Is it happening because it's a bomb?
SPEAKER_03: This is like my long Google short Facebook spread trade of last year. It's happening.
SPEAKER_05: Fetch is not happening, okay? Stop trying to make Fetch happen.
SPEAKER_01: Just as a programming note, we did a Twitter survey and you selected Sax as the person you wanted to moderate the pod most next. So welcome to Fox News Sunday and here's your host, David Sax.
SPEAKER_05: You're really chafed about this, aren't you, J. Cal?
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm excited for it. I'm so excited.
SPEAKER_03: Just to save a keyboard warrior the time, I will never, ever, ever moderate this thing. So I'm here to talk. All right, three, two.
SPEAKER_05: Welcome to the All-In Pod. I am your host, the rain man, David Sax. The famous doomsday clock that atomic scientists use to measure the threat of nuclear annihilation has never been closer to midnight, not even during the Cold War. But since the besties think it's more important to discuss their stock portfolios, we're going to save Ukraine for later in the show. Priorities, right, gentlemen? And why not? Who says you can't take it with you? The dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya, is claiming to be entombed with his money like an Egyptian pharaoh and with his sweaters too, even though it certainly won't be cold where he's going. And of course, he'll throw in the world's greatest moderator, Jason Calcanis, in the tomb to be his servant in the afterlife. It's the role JCal's been preparing for all his life by sucking up to every tech founder in VC he can get in a room with. I give Venerac the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg. He's just paranoid enough to survive with me in the bunker, even though he still won't be questioning the Davos elites that got us here.
SPEAKER_01: How much did that intro cost? Does he call it the money back refund? You guys are laughing.
SPEAKER_02: I'm laughing. I don't know. I'm laughing. Is that with you or at you?
SPEAKER_03: It's good. The funniest part was when you almost read aloud. It's like you were like, and then David Friedberg, insert pause here. Reading the notes.
SPEAKER_05: It's an intro. It's an intro.
SPEAKER_02: I'm so glad we do an unscripted show. Okay, go ahead.
SPEAKER_05: Friedberg, I remember when you did the intro. Come on. Did I read? Actually, didn't we cut it? You cut it, you said, and then you cut it. You hated it, and then we made you put it back in or something like that.
SPEAKER_01: All I have to say, Chamalat, is job security is here. All right. Well done.
SPEAKER_05: Okay. Issue one. Issue one. Google breakup. Issue one. The Justice Department and eight states are now seeking to break up Google's business, brokering digital advertising across the internet. This is one of the most important legal challenges the company's ever faced. Fought a lawsuit on Tuesday. The Justice Department did alleging that Google abuses its role as one of the largest broker suppliers and online auctioneers of ads placed on websites and mobile applications. The filing promises a protracted court battle with huge implications for the digital advertising industry. Of course, Google responded to the lawsuit in a blog post saying that the DOJ's request for it to unwind two previous acquisitions from a decade ago is an attempt to rewrite history. They said the DOJ mischaracterizes how its advertising products work. They say that people choose to use Google because they're effective and the company highlights other companies making moves in the advertising industry as well, such as Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and TikTok. So I guess I'll kick it to you, Chamalat. Do you think the DOJ has a case here? Do you believe that Google has a monopoly in online advertising and is unfairly using it to gain market share? And is this the right remedy, breaking up the company?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I think that this is a totally ill-founded lawsuit and I think it just shows more of the personal enmity and anger that some people in the US government has towards entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship than anything else. Now why is that? Let's just think about what a monopoly is. A monopoly or a monopolist effectively creates a completely stagnant, non-vibrant market in which they have pricing power and complete control. Now the argument that I think that refutes that just on its face is if you actually look, number one, at their share and number two, how the rest of the share has changed over time. So Nick, can you just please throw that up from Bloomberg? This is just in a Bloomberg article that I just shared with you guys, but Google controls 26.5% of a market. Forty-three point four percent of that market is with a diverse group of others. Canada has 18.4% and Amazon has 11.7. This is not the type of pie chart you would see if you had a monopolist. So for example, if you went back to the big, big, big monopolist case in the 1980s, which is when we broke up Ma Bell, well, what that circle would have shown is that they basically had effectively 100% share. And what this shows is that there's a huge diversity of people in this market. The second thing is that if you had done this chart many years ago, Amazon would not have really even been there. And over the last five years, they represent almost 12% of the entire market. And it means that if you forecast it forward, they could be at 15 to 20% in a few years as well. So while the pie is growing, and definitely Google takes a lot of the profit dollars, the distribution is so much more than what anything looks like in a monopoly. And so I just think it means that the DOJ is more focused on trying to punish these great American companies than it is in trying to be logical and reasoned. And so I don't think this is going to work. The last thing I'll say about this is that if you think about what you should have done if I were the US government, I would have actually focused on search, because search is a monopoly for Google. And while Google would try to argue that there are other ways of acquiring information, that is really not true. And if you could prove that that monopoly then led to pricing power in ads, I think that's a much more nuanced but logical argument that could work. But by focusing on this, I think it's going to get deconstructed, it's going to fail. The Texas version of this exact lawsuit already was thrown out of federal court. So I think that judges and the legal system don't have a lot of patience for this thing. It just meant more to kind of scare American companies and try to play boogeyman and decision maker and I don't think it's going to work.
SPEAKER_05: Freewehr, let me go to you. I think, you know, Tramath raises a really great point that if you define the market as digital advertising, that you know, Google's market share is only about a quarter, that doesn't seem like a monopoly. However, what the government says is that you shouldn't look at digital advertising as a whole, but rather the sort of brokered advertising that, you know, Google does for third party websites and applications. Let me show a chart from their lawsuit. You can see here that the way they define it, again, they see it as this brokering of sell side inventory, which are website publishers, and then buy side demand, which are advertisers. And this way, it looks like Google has 90% or more market share on the sell side because of the double click acquisition. They've got somewhere between 40 and 80% market share on the demand side with the advertisers. And then in the middle, they have over 50% market share of the ad exchange. Is this the right way to look at Google's business or should we be just thinking about in terms of the overall digital advertising market? I've been involved in ad networks since about 2002.
SPEAKER_02: So it's been obviously I'm not directly involved in the business anymore. But I was pretty close to this and I was pretty close to double click and the acquisition and I was a business product manager for a period of time on AdWords. So the way that that that chart kind of shows the connection between advertisers and publishers is correct that an ad network, generally speaking, brings buyers of ad inventory to the sellers of ad inventory. And the sellers of ad inventory have the option to sell their inventory on an ad network. And if the money that they're making on those ad slots that they have, whether it's a slot on the side of a page or the top of a page or an interstitial video ad, whatever it is, they're going to keep selling their inventory through that network if they're getting paid the most. And the real reason Google has one is two part. One is because they ran their ad network as an auction, meaning advertisers were competing with each other to pay the most for an ad spot that was the highest quality. There's also an ad quality index calculation, a click through index, a bounce back index. So there's all this data that feeds into Google's ad network auction, so that the ad that's shown on the publisher site is not just the best ad for the publisher, but the best ad for the consumer. And then when the consumer clicks on the ad, the publisher gets paid. And the second thing that Google did, and so the auction dynamic is a really powerful dynamic. It creates the best price for the publisher. And it creates the highest quality ad for the user, which translates typically into higher click throughs and better revenue. What they also did that was really powerful is they did the highest revenue share in the market. So historically ad networks have like, I think initially like a 6040 rev share where they only paid publishers 40% of the revenue the advertiser paid. Then the network started to move to a 5545 model, then a 5050 model, then a 4555 model. I believe on average, Google currently is paying somewhere between 70 and 80% of their publishers. I got to check my math on that or whatever the latest. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So call it 70. And so it is a very competitive share. Now the point being, because it's an auction system, and because it's opt in by the publisher, if they're not paying the highest price, the publisher can go and get ads from somewhere else. And historically, publishers built their own sales force to sell ads, and to source advertisers and to make money off of their ad inventory. And it turns out it was a lot more effective to use an ad network to do that. The other ad networks simply haven't been as good at building an auction model and building competitiveness. But I will tell you that when you get to a certain volume, and it's not a big volume, you don't need a million advertisers bidding against each other. You only need a few dozen advertisers. And once you have a few dozen advertisers bidding against each other, you start to get very competitive in inventory. So Google's real lock in with publishers and the real reason they win in this marketplace is because they pay the publishers the most. And if you try and break this up, and if you actually do try and get into the weeds of this whole system and change it, the publishers ultimately will make less money. And this will be a real problem on the publisher side that they're making the most money, they're getting the highest share of advertiser spend, and consumers are getting the best quality experience. That's what makes Google's model so hard to tackle from an antitrust perspective. Because it's giving...
SPEAKER_05: So basically, is what you're saying that because fundamentally this is an auction model, it prevents Google from extracting monopoly rents?
SPEAKER_02: Correct. And they already pay the highest share on their ad network back to the publishers. And so you could go in and say, hey, high 60s or 70%, they should be paying 90%. What's the real right number if they're already paying more than anyone else to the publishers? They're already making a lower margin than anyone. And I'll say, let me just add two more things, sorry, which I think are just... Can I go to J. Cal first?
SPEAKER_05: I just want to get J. Cal in here, even though he wouldn't do the same for me. J. Cal, do you agree with Freeberg that the reason for Google's success is that they're hyper efficient and this auction mechanism prevents monopoly behavior?
SPEAKER_01: No, there is monopoly behavior going on at Google, obviously, with search and putting their own content and services up top. And to Shammat's point, that's probably the easier target. Here this just feels like they are maybe 10 years behind. They should have just blocked the double click acquisition in 2008 and this consolidation of power. What publishers would say to Freeberg's point is, when you're selling your own advertising, you get a much higher CPM when you go direct to Samsung or IBM or Disney. And so you want to create those direct relationships. How much do those direct relationships cost? It's probably 20 or 30%, which is exactly to the percentage that Google is taking off the top. So Google is pretty aware of that. But it's just paradoxical that they're doing this at this time, David, because Amazon has developed a huge ad business. Netflix and Disney now have ad tiers for their services to go up against YouTube. And then for the first time, we're even talking about Google search supremacy being challenged by ChatGPT. So, right, with Microsoft, you know, they're just late 10 years too late, maybe.
SPEAKER_05: Right, right. So to use one of your favorite words is the DOJ acting as a rug puller here for Google in the sense that they're trying to unwind 10 year old acquisitions. Is that does that make sense?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it doesn't make much sense to the government to unwind acquisitions that happened a decade
SPEAKER_05: ago. Does that make any sense? No, no, they should.
SPEAKER_01: They should learn from it and not do it again. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: What do you think?
SPEAKER_05: I think it's a pretty bad way to approach things because they create so much uncertainty in the marketplace and has a chilling effect on future acquisitions. Yeah. Like when you get approval from the government, you want to know you're good. Yeah. And we have an approval process. So it seems to me, I agree with JCal, like, if the government is going to have a problem with an acquisition, state it upfront, but then once they approve it, you're approved, you're done. Otherwise, you know, companies will be much less likely to engage in acquisitions. And that's going to have a chilling effect on M&A behavior in the ecosystem, which is bad for the ecosystem as a whole. Well, it really does.
SPEAKER_03: It puts us competitiveness against every other country and any other regulatory regime that'll be more permissive to this stuff. That doesn't make any sense. And I think this is what's lost on this. I just feel these lawsuits right now are bordering on the mean spirited because these things have been tried. They've generally failed. And so the real solution, it always goes back to this and it's ugly and messy, is you need to rewrite the actual laws to reflect how business conditions exist today. And so it's not the responsibility of the DOJ to try to fit a round peg into a square hole. It doesn't work like that. And that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to manipulate and contort the law to try to go after somebody that shouldn't frankly be gone after because these deals, to your point, were done a decade ago and they were done legally and they were done rightly. So if you have an issue with how the market has evolved, change the law.
SPEAKER_02: Right. I'll also add, I totally agree with Chamath. I think that this action, as one of our friends put it on our text stream, it's like killing the golden goose. I mean, this is one of the big job creators, innovators and taxpayers and employers and drivers of economic growth. And why would we allow that to go and kind of burgeon offshore as a government? This is absolutely going to become kind of an opening for some international competitor to come in and try and provide alternative services with similar economics. I'll also say, I just sent you guys a link. I'll send you one more. The market itself is becoming so much more challenging to operate in as an ad network. You know, e-commerce, so Amazon's ad business is booming, right, as Chamath pointed out earlier. But so much more of consumer behavior is shifting where people are going direct to e-commerce sites and then the ads that are getting the highest click through and where advertisers are spending more and more money is on e-commerce sites. I know this from experience on a couple of boards I'm at where companies stopped spending on Facebook and Google and just started spending exclusively on Amazon. And that's where you get consumers that are much more likely to purchase. The purchasing proclivity is higher. The click through rate is higher. So the return on ad spend is much higher. And then I think that there's a big shift happening right now, as you guys know, with third party cookies. Google has declared that they're removing third party cookies in 2024. This means that in 2024, it is going to be very hard to track a user from one website to the next. If you go to a website and look at furniture and then you go to another website, third party cookies allow an advertiser to find you on that other website, knowing that you were just looking at furniture and send you a furniture ad and say, hey, come on over and you're more likely to click on that ad. It's been very effective for advertising and particularly in the segment of advertising called retargeting. But it is becoming much harder to do this with third party cookies and with the Apple identifier being yanked. And Google just made an attempt to try and get this change with the W3C that was rejected. And that change is now going to make this hit very, very hard beginning in 2024. So the ad networks themselves are already being massively hurt by Apple's ID changes, the third party cookies being removed. It's becoming harder to target consumers, harder to make money for publishers. So meanwhile, the market's being challenged. Amazon's coming in. This is the inverse definition of a monopoly.
SPEAKER_03: When you have a market where there is dynamism, where companies are changing the rules and that is reallocating share gains to different players, that's the definition of a dynamic market that's self-regulating. Totally.
SPEAKER_01: Five years ago, this would have made more sense.
SPEAKER_03: Much more sense. I think just this goes back down to one basic thing, which is do our elected and appointed officials really understand what's going on in the economy? And I think this is an example that highlights not as much as they should. And before a lawsuit like this gets filed, they should call us up. If they called 30 of us into a room one by one and said, can you please explain how this works, you would have come to a different conclusion because we could have articulated these things and it would have been clear. And so why do they not do that? Or if they do do it, who's actually in there? Either way, whatever's getting to the conclusion of let's go file this lawsuit in 2023 is late at a minimum and misguided at best. You know, you have to ask the question like, how is this different than Xi Jinping saying,
SPEAKER_01: you know what, Jack Ma is too powerful. Therefore, he's going to learn to pay. I think this is like, our Google, it is totally different. Other than that, it's a well, I think that this lawsuit makes no sense.
SPEAKER_01: You always bring it back to China.
SPEAKER_03: Does everything in your brain have to virtue signal like it's like, no, I'm trying to intellectually
SPEAKER_01: interesting conversation. Jason, Jason, Jason, intellectually honest position.
SPEAKER_05: Exactly. Let me finish.
SPEAKER_01: Mr. Ma, let me finish before you jump the fence. Very simply, you asked, like, why are they filing something that makes no sense? My decision is I think they want to have an outcome. And their outcome is they want to stick it to big tech because it's too powerful. And then you just said yourself, square peg round hole. They're trying to find something to get Google on. This is not it. How does it how does it relate to China? Well, I agree with J Cal here, actually, I'll decide for a second.
SPEAKER_01: Second greatest moderator, yeah, third greatest take China out of it for a second, because
SPEAKER_05: that can mean that can mean a lot of different things. And so I don't want to get hung up on that. But it does feel to me like the government is lashing out against companies like Google, because they're perceived as being too powerful. That's my that's just going on. And in fact, I mean, that's Lena Khan's theory is that we have to stop big tech companies from getting bigger, because power. But in this case, it doesn't make any sense, because the auction market for advertising is very competitive. And the remedy of unwinding 10 year old deals doesn't make any sense. So yeah, they're just kind of barking up the wrong tree is sort of the idea here.
SPEAKER_01: David, there's there's two other things that they really should be looking at as these ad networks are losing their market share in the overall digital ad spend. There are two other players, Disney, you know, and Netflix doing these digital ads on their platforms and having ad tiers and then you may have noticed Uber is doing an ad business now. They're doing $350 million in the first year of that business a million a day, and they're projected to do a billion next year. And those have location information in it because you have your destination. And so those opportunities are emerging.
SPEAKER_02: It's a dynamic space. I just want to say like, you guys are making like, I think a really important macro point, which is like in a marketplace, it's always easy to hate the winners and claim that their success is unfair, if you're not part of it. And I think that just because something successful in a marketplace doesn't mean it's a monopoly. You know, this whole thing of envy, you know, we've heard from like the Berkshire shareholders meeting, I think there was a good conversation around this, but envy really is ultimately the doom of innovation and democracy. It's like you see the success, you want to take down the successful, nothing can be too successful or else it has to be destroyed. And then, you know, as we talked about, it's going to go somewhere else.
SPEAKER_05: Well, I mean, just play devil's advocate with it on that free bird. It sounds like we all agree that the government has kind of the wrong theory and is barking up the wrong tree here. However, isn't it the case that Apple and Google are too powerful, maybe not in this auction, advertising auction marketplace, but when it comes to the app store, I mean, they have an operating system monopoly with iOS and Android or duopoly.
SPEAKER_03: But I think you're bringing up the key point, which is these nuances are the ones that matter. There is a body of law today, David, that you can apply pretty intelligently and thoughtfully to that exact problem and also to Google search. And so it's a bit of a head scratcher why the DOJ hasn't spent the time to figure out to even understand that that's actually where they should be focused, because that is where there is truly in the app store case, it's a duopoly. So it's very clear the share shift has already been set. There is no share shift happening to a third player. There is no sideloading that's really happening. And so domestically in the United States and Western Europe, there's a de facto duopoly,
SPEAKER_03: complete control, completely inflexible inelastic pricing. That is a monopoly. And then separately for search in the United States, it is also an effective monopoly. And those are the things where if you really wanted to go after them, because you think there's some damage being done to people, I would have focused there. But the ad business has nothing to do with any of this and just means that they don't understand how the market works.
SPEAKER_05: Right. Okay. So shifting gears, Microsoft has just been sued on antitrust grounds, or rather there's a probe by the EU. And this was based on a complaint actually from Slack. Slack filed a complaint back in 2020 that Microsoft was basically engaging in bundling or tying of products. The allegation is that Microsoft unfairly ties Microsoft Teams and other software to its widely used Office suite. Do you guys think that's a better claim? Okay. So I mean, I'll just say like, you know, there was an episode that we did, I think back in September, where I basically railed against Microsoft for exactly this kind of bundling. It seems like the EU has picked up that theory and wants to go after bundling.
SPEAKER_03: We did Slack Series A, I was on the board, took it public, blah, blah, blah. I'll tell you the thing that we talked about a lot. That was the thing that I was always like the most afraid of, which is how can we compete with a better product in the face of superior distribution? I think what Microsoft did was anti-competitive, but I don't think it was monopolistic. And I think that the EU in that time has a much better framework of laws that they had demonstrated up until now they were willing to enforce around anti-competitive pricing. And so part of what Slack was trying to do was create some airspace for that to get into the ether, to the discussion that it's like, we could build the best product in the world, but if Microsoft gives it away with this other product that is quasi-essential, they'll always beat us. And there's nothing we can do about it. What do you think? And I think that was basically the question that was posed to the European authorities because we thought that they would pay attention to it. What's interesting about it is that then when the acquisition happened to Salesforce, it sort of waters down that claim because now Salesforce also has a set of really essential products that are useful and needed in the market that Slack can go and attach themselves to. And in many ways, David, it forced the hand of Slack to be acquired by Salesforce. And if not Salesforce, it would have to have been somebody else. But could it have been an independent company had we not had to compete against teams in that way? Meaning if we had to compete against another well-funded startup, would it still be public? I suspect so. I don't think we would have sold to Salesforce.
SPEAKER_05: Well, that's exactly was my point when we talked about this last time is that if Microsoft can basically clone the breakthrough innovative product, just to say they do one every year, and then they put a crappy version of that in their bundle. 10% worse. Yeah, 10% or 50% worse, but they give it away effectively for free as part of the bundle. And then they basically pull the legs out from under that other company so it can't be a vibrant competitor. And then the next year they'll just raise the price of the bundle. And they've done that with Slack. They've done that with Okta. They've done that with Zoom. You know, JCal, can we have a vibrant tech ecosystem, at least in B2B software, if Microsoft can just keep doing that indefinitely? Yeah, it's a difficult question.
SPEAKER_01: I don't know though, what the consumer harm is here if you keep adding great features to a bundle. So to take the other side of the argument, Zoom has now added channels like Slack. Slack has added huddles, which are essentially Zoom calls. And now they're both going to try to add the Coda and Notion wiki style documents to both Zoom and Slack. So everybody's copying everybody's features. Everybody's incorporating everybody's features. It takes a little bit of time. This is actually a lot better behavior for Microsoft than the old days when they would do something called vaporware. They used to announce products to chill people from buying them. So they would announce a Slack two years before Slack came out just to get people to not install Slack. They did that with Lotus Notes. They did that with Lotus Notes competitor coming for two years, and it never materialized. So I think the marketplace will compete. And if you look at Slack itself, it's still growing the same percentage growth it did inside of Salesforce that it did as an independent company. So it's growing at a similar pace. Well, I don't know about that.
SPEAKER_05: Wait, Nick, can you pull up this chart? Yeah, it was like high teens or something.
SPEAKER_01: Was there growth? I mean, it looks like from this chart that Slack has kind of leveled off.
SPEAKER_05: No, no, no.
SPEAKER_01: That's the number of users. I was talking about revenue. It's basically been the same. But wasn't there a report that it's been a little bit of a disappointment to Salesforce?
SPEAKER_05: Or no?
SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, you know, this number here that we're looking at where it says 75 million Microsoft Teams members, 12 million Slack members.
SPEAKER_03: By the way, if you wanted to play conspiracy theorist, maybe that's why there was a falling out between Benioff and Brett. I mean, Brett was the champion of this deal, you know, $28 billion acquisition. And $28 billion, it's threading a needle. The only one of that scale that's really worked out definitively has been LinkedIn. So if Slack hiccuped in a moment when we also had a regime change in rates and valuations, now look at Benioff as looking down the barrel of an activist investor program from Elliott. Man, I mean, yeah, maybe it's not doing as well as they needed it to.
SPEAKER_05: I got the sense that Benioff was genuinely sorry that Brett decided to leave and that it was voluntary. Voluntary on Brett's part. And regretted basically as opposed to, you know, a non-regretted termination.
SPEAKER_03: I have no idea. Like I said, I was pre-qualifying with saying let's play conspiracy theorist for a second. Fair enough. Okay. So check out- I have a suggestion. Here's a suggestion for the regulators that are listening or watching our podcast.
SPEAKER_03: A really valuable thing for the industry that you could do would be to introduce transparency on ELAs. What are those? Enterprise Licensing Agreements. These are these things that these big companies use to throw everything in the kitchen sink into a deal when they sell to a company. But if there was transparency and there was a sense of how those things were priced, so think of it like the FDA saying here's you have to publish your ingredients, right? And what percentage of it is this and that? It would be really beneficial because it would slow down the tendency of these big companies to try to kill the small companies with these poorer products. And something around ELAs and more transparency around pricing to the market could be a good governor without having to go down the path of all this antitrust legislation after the fact.
SPEAKER_05: I think there is some good advice for regulators there. I think they should focus on anti-competitive tactics and like clarifying what those are as opposed to some of these crazy lawsuits to break up companies that don't seem to have well-grounded theories. It would be, I think, better to focus on the specific tactics that create the harm and identifying what those are. Jake, out of your point about how what Microsoft is doing doesn't seem to be harming anybody, it seems to be benefiting consumers, I think that's a valid point. But I would bring up a different example, which is if you look at the anti-competitive behavior of dumping, where a company will basically dump its product on the market for free, destroy all the other competitors, and once they're out, they can raise prices because the barriers to entry are high. There's a huge cost of like basically entering the industry. I think that this bundling behavior is a form of dumping, where in the short run, it looks like consumers are benefiting because they're getting a Zoom clone for free or a Slack clone for free. But then what happens is once they've hobbled those companies, they raise the price of the bundle. So I think if we want to have a healthy long-term ecosystem, I think this type of bundling behavior is bad. I think it's anti-competitive. It's a great point. But I think there's a very specific solution for it. You don't need to break up Microsoft. What you need to do is require that when they create a bundle, every product in that bundle needs to basically have an individual price. And the price of every product in that bundle should add up to the cost of the bundle. So they can't do, like you said, Chamath, these transfer payments or subsidies to basically systematically take over every SaaS vertical.
SPEAKER_03: I think that would be amazing. By the way, there are many other markets, David, where that exactly exists, where if you have the ability to preferentially put your product into your distribution channel, you have to transfer price it transparently at the market. And it's what everybody else would be able to get it at. And that then allows the best product to win in the market. And it gives the government the ability to say, I understand that these rails are roughly monopolistic, but I'm going to leave them alone as long as you treat everything that sits on top of those rails equally. And that nuance is missing in software. So I think the combination of transparency in these enterprise licensing agreements and more transparency and accounting treatment for what you just said would solve a lot of this problem. And you would have a more vibrant ecosystem where the big guys can't just snuff out the small guys whenever they want.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I disagree with you guys. Let me just play my devil's advocate, which is kind of how I feel as well. I think these concepts of monopolistic bundling made a lot of sense. I make a lot of sense in the sense if what you're bundling and the service or the product or whatever is a commodity product. And these statements that you're making assume that one messaging service is the same as a another messaging service, that one video app is the same as another video app. And that by giving a discount, they're going to win the market. The reality that may have made sense back in the day when there were things like trains and trains had a monopoly on where things could go or electricity or oil production and all of the kind of origins of kind of monopolistic antitrust laws and actions started to kind of emerge here in our free market in the US. But when it comes to software, if your product is the same as the other guy's product, maybe they deserve to win by bundling. And maybe it's okay for them to offer a discount and beat you on pricing. Because if your product is actually better, and it provides better ROI for the customer, it has a better feature set, it's faster, it has a bunch of stuff that the other product doesn't have, the market will pick it. It's not that the market's going to say, hey, we're just a bunch of idiots. These products are so differentiated, but because these guys are giving me a discount, I'm going to go over to the discount. That's not how it works. And you guys know this.
SPEAKER_05: I'm not saying that Microsoft can't copy Slack and then charge a different price and a lower price and discount it. What I'm saying is they can't cross subsidize their Slack competitor. It's the fact that they can copy Slack that makes Slack, that means that Slack should
SPEAKER_02: lose. The fact that Slack can't actually create something that's differentiated enough. Almost all software is, look, software, new software is really hard to create, but really
SPEAKER_05: easy to copy. I mean, the first version of a new product is hard to create, but you can reverse engineer almost any software product.
SPEAKER_02: Show me where someone's made a better competitor to Google search. Show me where consumers don't choose to go to another search engine because Google's built a better search engine. No, it's because there's a data network effect there that the more searches they provide,
SPEAKER_05: the more data they get. It's the reinforcement learning.
SPEAKER_03: I'll say it differently. It's easier to copy.
SPEAKER_02: There's an asymptote to that quality point, though. I don't think that that's necessarily true. No, I think there's a nuance here that- And by the way, all the social networks that
SPEAKER_02: people thought had massive lock-in effect turns out they don't. Right.
SPEAKER_03: David, no, that's not true. Look, there's more lock-in deeper in the stack that you exist. There's very little lock-in at the application layer. So workflow apps, which effectively is what most of these enterprise software things are, are very copyable because there's nothing that really locks it in. But if you're a social network or if you're some deep machine-learned thing that basically generates great search results, that's much harder to copy because more and more of the product- Precisely. What generates the product quality is underneath the waterline. Yep. But I think in enterprise software, it's all thin UI layers on top of very simple workflows. Then don't compete.
SPEAKER_02: Don't compete because the bigger guy that offers a discount is always going to beat you.
SPEAKER_03: What he's saying, which I agree with, is if you could add transparency so that you understand what is happening, I don't think anybody's against transparency. Nobody should be against it. And if Microsoft wants to charge a penny a seat for Teams, then they should be allowed to do that. I don't think we're saying that they shouldn't.
SPEAKER_02: A lot of startups have used the opposite tactic where they've entered with free offerings or free services and then they try and upsell later. And we don't complain about that. There's a lot of ways to compete in the marketplace. That's because there's no bundling. There's no bundling. There's no dumping. But that's my point. There's a lot of ways to compete in the marketplace if the product you're offering is of parity or is a commodity. Build something that's different enough that people are willing to pay for it and that they're willing to pay more than they'll pay the big guy that's giving them a bundling discount. Just build a better product.
SPEAKER_05: Then the whole B2B SaaS space should basically pack up shop and go home. We should just stop funding. VC should just stop funding new SaaS companies because- And all those productivity gains will just go up the window.
SPEAKER_05: Why would you fund any innovative new product? Yeah, it's a definition of anti-compatitiveness.
SPEAKER_02: How's that bad for the customer? They're paying less and they're getting a better product. There'll be fewer new products created.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Freeberg at the limit. What you're basically saying is because Comcast is a monopolistic provider of my internet connection, I should have to take their video offering and we'll never use Netflix.
SPEAKER_02: No, they offer a commodity. That's my point. If you're offering a commodity, these things should apply. It makes a ton of sense. But what you're saying effectively and what you just said is that B2B software is effectively a commodity. Anyone can copy it. Anyone can replicate it.
SPEAKER_03: If Comcast said to you, I'm turning this off. You only have one choice and it's mine because this is my rails and I built it. You would turn to the government to help you because you would say, but Netflix is a better product. What David is saying is the exact same argument. My point is, unless you also believe logically that you're allowed to turn off Netflix if you're Comcast and take their crappy VOD service, then you're at least intellectually consistent. Steel is a commodity too.
SPEAKER_05: Steel is a commodity too and you can't engage in dumping. This is the argument is that, for example, with respect to China, the argument was that they were dumping cheap steel in the US market to drive all the US producers out of business. And then once they were out of business, they'd raise the price. The point is there's all these examples where we have had the intelligence and the ability
SPEAKER_03: to be nuanced about this, to see that these things are possible and they shouldn't exist. We don't let Comcast turn off Netflix. We have a law around that. I understand. So I think what we're saying is embrace and extend this law for these new markets that didn't exist 50 and 100 years ago when these laws were written so that the same benefits that we have in the steel market and in the cable market we have in the software market, it'll just create a healthier ecosystem. Jake Hill, you want to get in on this? I was just going to say, I wonder when you install Teams, does it automatically, when
SPEAKER_01: you install the Microsoft Office Suite, does it automatically install Teams? Because it does seem the default there matters. Do people have to actively turn it on or is it actively built in? And so the bundling of it, I think matters. And then interoperability matters. So there are other vectors here to force some interoperability. So if you open your Windows machine, do you have a choice of which browser?
SPEAKER_03: Let's just say that you use Exchange for certain things, but in other things, for example, to manage your namespace, you may use Okta, but then they say, actually, no, we need you to use our version of Okta. It all becomes complicated. I think it's too complicated for a government to understand. So I think the general thing is, can we extend the definition of these basic rules that we've agreed to in other markets to include technology and would we be better served? And I think for the most part, I do think it would be, it would better serve startups. It would better serve the folks that want to build products. How would that work in practicality though?
SPEAKER_01: You would have Office, they'd say here's Teams, turned it on for a dollar a person or something? Here's the introductory price? I think the combination of what David said and I said would do the trick, which is if
SPEAKER_03: you force these highly complicated licensing agreements to be transparent, it would not allow them to dump. And then the second thing is that all of that transfer pricing that goes into that license cost needs to sum up to the cost itself. Now why is that important? You can learn about how they prevent this in healthcare. So let's take Pfizer, good example. Here's a company with $30 billion on the balance sheet, right? And Pfizer has a need still to subsidize all of the R&D of their drugs and you would say, well, yeah, they have $30 billion so they should just take the money off the balance sheet and do it. Why don't they do it? It's because the accounting laws and all of the complicated anti-competitive laws say, well, if you want to take this cash pile and use it over here, it goes from an asset liability item, 30 billion of cash, and all of a sudden I'm going to net it against your EPS. All right, Chamath, I think- So my point is there's an actual cost for these companies to do this stuff, to bundle, to cross, to all of this stuff. And so what do they do? They go into the market. They ask startups to build stuff and then they buy it. That's the kind of market I think is better for us.
SPEAKER_05: Let's have that be the last word on this topic because we've been going for a while, but I'm glad you brought up Pfizer because this brings us to issue two. Oh boy. Oh boy. Which is, and I think we can show this clip- Red meat for David.
SPEAKER_03: Red meat for David.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. So Albert Berle, who's the CEO of Pfizer, went to Davos last week and he probably expected to Davos the conference of the surplus elites. And he expected probably nothing but softballs and fawning treatment from the establishment media. And instead he probably had the most uncomfortable walk of his life when two reporters from Rebel News approached him outside the perimeter and started asking him some tough questions. Let's roll tape.
SPEAKER_01: What's Rebel News?
SPEAKER_00: Borlick, can I ask you, when did you know that the vaccines didn't stop transmission? How long did you know that without saying it publicly? Thank you very much. I'm sorry. Good question. I mean, we now know that the vaccines didn't stop transmission, but why did you keep it secret?
SPEAKER_00: Good question. You said it was 100% effective, then 90%, then 80%, then 70%. But we now know that the vaccines do not stop transmission. Why did you keep that secret? Have a nice day. I won't have a nice day until I know the answer. Why did you keep it a secret that your vaccine did not stop transmission? Temple Commander.
SPEAKER_05: We should cut this. Okay, we can stop from there. But that- Wow, welcome to Info Wars.
SPEAKER_01: All Info Wars. That's what real journalism looks like. First of all, you know what it's about to- That's what real journalism looks like.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, you know what it's about to have. Not a bunch of New York Times reporters covering for powerful people, but asking them tough questions. Okay, is that a legitimate question, Freiberg? Is that a legitimate question? That is a totally legitimate question. Freiberg, what do you think of the question?
SPEAKER_01: Is it legit or not?
SPEAKER_02: You guys are about to get us downranked on YouTube and Spotify with the warning. We're about to get warning labels on each episode. Why is everyone covering for this sort of thing?
SPEAKER_05: By the way, you're right that YouTube banned that video. We had to watch it on Twitter because Elon Musk's Twitter is still free. Why is YouTube protecting- hold on. Why is YouTube abridging freedom of the press in order to protect the powerful CEO of Pfizer from answering questions that are legitimate? Just more basic questions. Yeah, just more basic questions. They're basic questions. What are the questions?
SPEAKER_01: Is it a legitimate question of did they cover up the fact that the vaccine didn't transmit? I think it's like a legitimate question that I would actually want to know the answer to. I don't know why you didn't just answer that. No, we didn't cover it up.
SPEAKER_05: Freiberg? You're asking me if I know whether Pfizer did a cover up?
SPEAKER_02: Is that what you're asking? Well, no, it's a legitimate question is what I'm getting at.
SPEAKER_05: Why are you unwilling to question the Pfizer CEO? Oh, no, I'm not unwilling to question at all.
SPEAKER_02: But I don't think that this is a- look, first of all, Pfizer is a commercial enterprise, so they have the incentive to make money. 100%, right? So their objective is to sell a vaccine. I think they're making 10 to 15 billion dollars on this vaccine this year. You're absolutely right that the economic incentive is there for Pfizer to continue to push and rationalize the sales of this vaccine. The efficacy of the vaccine waned very quickly. As this virus evolved and mutated, it became pretty evident pretty fast that the rate of transmission in vaccinated people continued to go up and this may be a function of the quality of the vaccine or the efficacy of the vaccine, more likely a function of the fact that the virus as predicted evolved and therefore the antibodies that are produced and the T cell response that's induced by the original vaccine becomes less efficacious over time. So the real question is a policy question, a behavioral question. But look, Pfizer didn't have another product to sell, so it certainly makes sense for them to continue to sell their product. And there is still good data that represents that there is some immune response and some benefit in certain populations to continuing to get a booster and all this stuff with the original. Yeah, let me ask you about the data.
SPEAKER_05: The fact that Pfizer only has this product to sell is not exactly a ringing endorsement of their behavior. But let's stay on the data for a second. There's a study in Nature, which is one of the most preeminent scientific journals, about the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, which is basically inflammation of the heart tissue, which can basically lead to heart attacks, saying that the risk among young people, especially young men, in 18 to 24 years was elevated if they got the vaccine. This was a study out of France. So it's pretty clear that the vaccine wasn't as efficacious as we thought, but is it less safe than we thought as well? I genuinely don't know the answer to this. I would like to know.
SPEAKER_02: It's an important question, and there's a lot of work being done to uncover it. And here's a link to a paper that was published in the journal Circulation, is the name of the journal, not too long ago, by a team led by a researcher at Mass General. And what this, and so just to address the myocarditis question, and just so everyone that's listening knows, I take a very objective view on all this stuff. I don't have a strong bias one way or the other. So the Mass General team identified 16 people that had myocarditis that were vaccinated and 45 people that didn't were part of their control group. And they tried to understand what the difference was between these two groups. There have historically been three kind of theories about why there is incidence of myocarditis in certain populations that get the COVID vaccine. And by the way, the incidence rate is still typically less than two out of every 100,000 people that get the vaccine, but as you saw in the paper you just shared and others have validated it, it can be as high as 30 times more likely to happen in young people that take the Moderna vaccine, which is still a low incidence, but 30 times higher is significant and worth understanding. So the three kind of reasons or the three ideas- It's 30 times higher?
SPEAKER_05: That sounds like a lot.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. So the reason, and also small base, but yes. And so the three ideas or the three theories around why this is happening, number one is what's called protein mimicry, where certain people, the protein on their heart tissue, for example, or certain proteins found in the cells in their heart tissue, maybe look like some element of the spike protein that's created by the vaccine. Therefore, when you make antibodies to bind to and clear your body of spike protein, it's also binding to your own cells and causing an autoimmune response. And those are called kind of auto antibodies. The second is just general immune system activation that maybe genetically some people are pretty disposed to having a very active immune system in response to the vaccine. And therefore with a very active immune system, they get inflammation and damage. And then the third is this idea that there's just massive proliferation of your B cells, some of which have auto antibodies and some of which therefore destroy your heart tissue and cause this inflammation. So what this team did is they looked at the blood difference between people that had myocarditis and people that didn't. They found no auto antibodies. They found no big changes in the T or B cell populations, meaning that there isn't a big immune system activation difference. The big difference that they found was that the people that had myocarditis actually had a lot of the spike protein floating around in their blood. Whereas the people that didn't did not have the spike protein floating around in their blood. So this answers one question, but opens up many more doors, which is what's really going on. So if you have spike protein in your blood and your body's not clearing it.
SPEAKER_05: Right. Well, how long after getting vaccinated were the spike proteins still floating around? Because I remember when the mRNA vaccine first came out, they said the spike proteins would go away after a couple of days. Three weeks.
SPEAKER_05: Three weeks after the vaccine. Have they done a study like, you know, six months after or a year after?
SPEAKER_02: Not yet, but that's being done right now. So what they're identifying is what's going on with the immune system of this population where their body's not able to clear the spike protein. And when their body doesn't clear the spike protein, a bunch of cytokines and other inflammatory things start to get released and it causes inflammation on the heart tissue because you know, there's a particular set of reasons. Wait, JK, let me ask you.
SPEAKER_05: I remember when the vaccine first came out, I remember Rogan almost got canceled for saying that if he was a young person, a young man, he's like 50, so he got vaccinated. But he said that if I was a young person in my 20s, I would not get vaccinated because I don't think the risk return makes sense. And he almost got canceled for that. Was Rogan right about that?
SPEAKER_01: So you know, I have been thinking a lot about this decision to get vaccinated or not and how we came to that decision. And then I think what Freeberg said earlier is super interesting. Because the virus mutated, the efficacy of these vaccines obviously changed and wasn't necessary. And so I think it was a moving target to understand if you should take it or not. It was a very personal decision. Clearly for people who were over 65 years old, the chances of dying were pretty significant. For people under that a certain age, it was lower. So everybody had to make a very personal decision here.
SPEAKER_05: Was it a personal decision when you had vaccine mandates? And then on top of that, you had the media were dunking on anti-vaxxers throughout 2021. Remember that? I mean, they were saying about anti-vaxxers that if you didn't get the vaccine, you got sick, there wouldn't be a hospital bed for you. There was a lot of dancing on the graves of these people where there were all these articles. There'd be some preacher who said, don't get vaccinated. And then they would die of COVID. And there's a lot of morbid, ghoulish articles dancing on their graves. It was not this objective personal decision. There was tremendous social and legal pressure to get vaccinated. You're right. You're right.
SPEAKER_01: There was. And I think part of the reason I myself got vaccinated was because I wanted to be able to travel again. I wanted to be able to go to Madison Square Garden and watch the Knicks. And I also thought, well, I don't want to be, if I'm overweight, one of the people who dies from this. So we all sat here. We all got vaccinated. Do we regret our decision to get vaccinated now that we see this, you know, studies like maybe it wasn't necessary. And also it was apparently oversold. So when the Pfizer CEO won't say when they knew it wasn't going to stop transmission, I think it's a valid question to investigate what Pfizer knew and when. And just keep everybody accountable for this for future things that happened. Because right now, we're in a position where if Pfizer is not being honest with us, if the origin story of COVID isn't being honest with us, these conspiracy theories are now starting to start to look like reality. Let me go to you, Chamath.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, so we were all felt this tremendous pressure in 2021 to get the vaccine, right? We all care about our health. You care a lot about your health. We all thought we could trust the experts that the vaccine was both efficacious and safe. We know it was not efficacious in the sense that they're telling us that we have to get revaccinated every two months for it to work. On safety, I don't want to get over my skis because we only have some data. But clearly, like this myocarditis data is not good. So were we basically stampeded into making a decision that was not actually good for us? And would you make that same decision today?
SPEAKER_03: Let's just lay the foundation for understanding how we got here. So there are these pathways inside the FDA to get drugs approved. And if you take a normal pathway for a normal drug, you're going to spend nine or 10 years, maybe more 12, 13 in some cases, more than a billion dollars to get a drug approved. And the way that it works is in phase one, you do a study on toxicology, effectively like is this safe or not safe? And you have to have enough people take it. And you need to observe them for enough time where that phase one outcome essentially says this won't hurt people. It's benign. We don't know the mechanism of action. We don't know whether it's going to solve the problem, but we know that it's safe. And then in phase two, you then try to really understand the mechanism of action. And if that works, you go into phase three, where you actually scale it out, you create a double arm study, you may do a control group, you may do an open label companion, you may overpower it with thousands of people. And the FDA is incredibly rigorous. Okay, even down to like, it's incredible, by the way, like how you're allowed to open the results. And they have all of these services that make sure that you can't influence the results or manipulate them. It's incredible. The FDA has an incredible process. The thing is that they also have a way to jump around that fence. And that is what we use for the COVID-19 vaccines. So in a molecule, 13 years, if it's for a really important drug, you can shorten it to six or seven with this thing called breakthrough designation. For a biologic, 12 or 13 years, but if you get this thing called RMAT, six or seven years. So you're still talking years and thousands of people, David. But then there's this one special asterisk that exists inside the FDA called emergency use authorization. And in moments of deemed emergency, you can shorten even six years down to, in some cases, six, seven, nine months, a year, two years.
SPEAKER_05: Right. You're describing Operation Warp Speed.
SPEAKER_03: So that emergency use authorization fast-tracked these vaccines to market. Now the thing to keep in mind is there are still two classes of vaccines. There are the messenger RNA vaccines, that's the BioNTech and Pfizer ones. And then there are the more regular ones that in many cases the West was dumping on AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson as an example. We used to ship those to developing countries and say, we'll just keep the mRNA once you guys take. Dave Chappelle had this funny joke. He's like, I took the J&J vaccine.
SPEAKER_03: But it turns out that now when we're looking back, the long tail of issues may actually apply to these things that were fast-tracked, these mRNA vaccines that were fast-tracked under emergency use. Why? Because of what Friedberg said. This protein mimicry thing is something we don't understand. Now why don't we understand it? It's because our tools are not precise enough to exactly know when we engineer these solutions that it only binds to this specific protein. And what we're learning is that these proteins are so similar that there can be a little collateral damage. But this other thing that looks 99% will also all of a sudden attract this antigen. So this is a very complicated body of problem. And because we didn't give it enough time to bake in the wild, we're learning about this thing in real time. If we had gone to what you had suggested, which is a massive masking mandate while this stuff played out, could the outcome be different? Well, we don't know because we didn't make those decisions. But I think that's what people will be debating. The last thing I'll say on this is, specifically to myocarditis, I have an interventional cardiologist in LA. I've seen him every three years ever since Goldie passed away, out of respect for Goldie and Cheryl who initially asked me to go. But it's been a great thing that I've done. I've learned a lot from him. He introduced me to PCSK9 inhibitors and a bunch of things. He called me two years ago and said, Shammath, I want to do a study that, or a year ago, I want to do a study that looks at actually myocarditis and the effects of this vaccine. And Nick, I don't know if you can just throw it up, but we published something. And basically, what we see, David, is that for folks with myocarditis, you're releasing troponin. And this is a protein that you would otherwise use to figure out whether you're having a heart attack or severe, some sort of heart abnormality. And so it just goes to show you that there is some collateral damage in some cases. In this example, this is one case that we published, which is a 63-year-old white woman. I'm saying that implicitly so that people understand that these things really matter on age, gender, and race. All of the data that comes out of France really was focused on, I think it was 18 to 34-year-old males of all racial persuasions. And we've thought that this issue is prevalent only in males, but we've had a few cases that we've talked about now that touch women as well. So it's a complicated set of things because our tools are not fine grain enough to engineer the drug for incredible specificity. And I think that's the thing that we're dealing with now. And by the way, last thing, because of all this, it probably is reasonable to take a step back and have a commission that just uncovers all of this stuff. Look, we've had commissions for things as benign as steroid usage in baseball. Like if steroid usage in baseball had 11 conditions... This goes back to Rebel News asking Birla a very simple question, which is, what did
SPEAKER_05: you know and what did you know with respect to the efficacy and safety of these vaccines? If they did not tell the public that these vaccines did not work the way they were supposed to because they want to keep minting money, that is a legitimate scandal. We have a right to know. But, Freeberg, let me ask you a question here. I think Chamath talked about this sort of sped up process to cut through red tape and get a vaccine to market more quickly. I personally actually think that that kind of process is fine for patients who want to assume the risk. As sort of a libertarian, I support that. But I go back to the fact that people in many places were not given a choice. They had to get vaccinated or they could lose their job or their freedom to participate in society. And now we're finding out that they may have been forced to do something that, in their particular case, may not really have been a great cost-benefit decision for them. What do you think that the sort of impact is going to be of this, like socially? I mean, you've talked about, I think, that there's a decline in trust of institutional authority in the U.S. and that's a huge problem. I mean, isn't this going to contribute to that?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, look, I mean, I think that there's been institutional authority overreach that's been building for quite some time. And you know, look, I mean, you guys can go back to our first episode and our earliest episodes and I wasn't and haven't been. I think the first time I tweeted, I tweeted about the adverse impact that lockdowns could have and we should be weighing the cost of the lockdowns against the benefit. And ultimately, the benefit was zero because we ended up accumulating, call it, $10 trillion of, you know, $4 trillion of net costs that we have to pay off at some point, not to mention the economic consequences of the lockdowns. And you know, the benefit was negligible because the virus continued to spread and evolve and there was no way to really stop the virus in its tracks. Hindsight is 20-20, fog of war, lawmakers made decisions. Was it the right decision? Would you have made the same decision? It's really hard to say you feel like you're saving the world. When the world is ending, it's easy to kind of act with some degree of what is now viewed as overreach. I do think that the mass vaccination requirement may have also been deemed overreach given the limited data that was available and the rapid evolution that was pretty apparent in the virus at the time as well. But vaccines are required for a number of other illnesses in a number of school systems around the country. You know, you start to question, I think we will start to see people question whether those are appropriate, but again, those are longer studied, better understood. The cost benefit analysis is much there. Yeah, actually, I think you're right that one of the costs of this policy is going to
SPEAKER_05: be that people will stop trusting vaccination in general, even though I think that these COVID vaccines, I'm not even sure you can really call them vaccines. I mean, every other vaccine that I've ever heard of completely prevents that disease. The polio vaccine ended polio. The MMR vaccine ended measles, mumps, and rubella. The COVID vaccine just didn't work. I don't think it was a vaccine, but I think now what's going to happen is people are going to have a lot more distrust.
SPEAKER_02: There's a tremendous amount of post-activity rationalization going on, where once you kind of made a statement that the vaccine will stop transmission of the virus or stop hospitalizations, and suddenly it doesn't, and you've made that statement with such surety and brevity and funded it with so much money and caused such cost in doing so. At that point, you're too far removed to go back and say, you know what, it doesn't. As we're seeing now, the consequences of not being willing to say that you were wrong may be far greater than the consequences of kind of continuing or kind of making this change. So, it's a- Well, actually, that's a good point.
SPEAKER_05: All right, final question to J. Cal then on that point. Yeah. So, I mean, J. Cal, look, you were dunking or at least concern trolling on anti-vaxxers during this time period. Do you reconsider that at all? I mean, in other words, everybody was saying that the anti-vaxxers were these stupid unsophisticated people who- Well, yeah, I think- But maybe it was the elites who were the ones suffering from group think. I mean, look, and I put myself in this bucket, we all herded into this idea- Yeah, we all took the vaccine. Of being an early adopter of a product, and now we're finding out that it certainly didn't do what it said.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, in fairness, we said we knew this was experimental. We knew this was the first time mRNA, but we also knew like a billion people had gotten them or when we got ours, we knew hundreds of millions of people had gotten them. Yeah, but okay, well hold on. And the mRNA, hold on, let me just, you ask the question, so let me finish.
SPEAKER_01: And so, I think people made a risk assessment knowing this was an experimental vaccine, knowing that the COVID was mutating at the time. And yeah, it could have been oversold. Of course, that seems to be the case.
SPEAKER_05: All right, Nick, pull up this tweet.
SPEAKER_01: But you know, we need to, I think we have to look at, because we had this conversation, you and I, you were very much in favor of everybody getting the mandate and everybody being forced to get the vaccine. No, no, no, I never supported the mandate.
SPEAKER_01: You did, we had a conversation about that. Like if should people be able to work, should people go on trains and your position was people shouldn't be able to go on trains.
SPEAKER_05: No, I did not support a mandate. I thought it should always be people's choice. I did believe them. I made the mistake of believing the experts in the mainstream media. I think if the last couple of years have taught us anything, it's that they can't be trusted. The level of distrust we should have is even greater than we thought. I never supported a mandate because I thought it should be people's choice. And I certainly wasn't, I don't think I was dunking on the anti-vaxxers. Let's pull up this tweet, Nick.
SPEAKER_05: My Lord, Trump, his cronies and Fox News are killing their own constituents with this anti-vax nonsense. Yeah. Uh, do you retract that?
SPEAKER_01: Do I retract it? Um, I'm trying to look at the date.
SPEAKER_02: By the way, this is a, this is a tweet that, um, Jason put out. What was the date? January 4th, 2022. That's sax pulled up just so people, that was only a year ago.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, at this point, people were saying that, uh, no, I get it.
SPEAKER_01: I get it. This was not a rare sentiment, but I'm saying, just to give this to stand by this.
SPEAKER_01: Well, hold on a second. I'm just reading it. This was showing the deaths of, uh, from COVID were happening at a magnitude more by people who didn't take the vaccine. And we know the vaccine was had reduced deaths. So we still know that correct. Freeburg the vaccine reduce reduces the cases of deaths.
SPEAKER_02: Correct? Yeah. So this new by valent booster, um, Eric Topol put out a tweet. I, I gave you guys the link here where he covered a paper that was done recently. And the paper shows a reduction in hospitalization rate and death rate for folks that are getting this new by valent booster. So, but again, that is a benefit.
SPEAKER_01: That is the benefit.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. In one's own kind of personal safety. And there's a risk profile associated with that as sax is pointing out. But this notion that the vaccines stop the virus and are a true vaccine in the sense of how we talk about polio and chicken part where a smallpox and this other stuff, not equivalent. Very, very free. Wait, that data, how long after vaccination was that data?
SPEAKER_05: Because I thought that with respect to the vaccine, one of the big problems is that the benefits only last for two months, unless you're willing to get revaccinated every two months.
SPEAKER_02: No, that's not really realistic. Generally speaking, this is not like a vaccine in the sense of a, uh, smallpox or, or, or
SPEAKER_02: is this a shot? It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a modest muting of the effects and it's one that people need to take kind of a risk based decision on for one's personal thing, but having mandates on whether or not you can go to school and whether or not you can, you know, uh, be in places and whether or not it's appropriate for, for workplace setting, there's still high degrees of infectiousness with this ever evolving virus. The virus that we have today is not the virus that we had in February of 2020. It's a very different virus and it has evolved to such an extent now and it's continuing
SPEAKER_02: to evolve that it's very difficult to say there's a vaccine for this virus. It's a, uh, it's a, why won't you just say that this, the so-called vaccine has been
SPEAKER_05: a failure. We don't know. Hold on. I'm going to, we don't, we don't know the full safety implications. Like I said, I don't want to get too far out of my skis on that. However, we know the efficaciousness of it has been a failure. For what? For blocking transmission or for reducing death. Unless you're willing to get jabbed six times a year, which I don't think anybody here would do that. So the thing doesn't work. And probably not necessary because it's, we, well, hold on.
SPEAKER_01: There was a time period where it was effective, correct, Friedberg? And it did reduce that's massively. So I think that's the issue that we're talking about here is that now the COVID strains are so weak that maybe it's not as necessary, but there was a time period where people were not taking the vaccine and Republicans specifically weren't taking the vaccine and they were dying at a much higher percentage. So it didn't, if you're defining the vaccine as not getting, not transferring the disease, sure. It was a failure. It didn't block like we thought it would. In terms of reducing death, reducing death, it did work for a period of time.
SPEAKER_05: If it only lasted for two months and COVID is still around and it's basically endemic, it's everywhere. How did the vaccine make any difference whatsoever?
SPEAKER_01: I think now it's two months, but back then it wasn't. But you know, Friedberg is that true?
SPEAKER_02: What's the question? I'm losing track at this point.
SPEAKER_01: How long does the lowering the percentage of deaths, the benefits of it only reducing
SPEAKER_05: what we've learned is the only last two months. Is that true?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it depends on the population. And yes, there is a decline in the benefit over time, as well as the fact that the virus is evolving. Those are both two kind of independent things. And as a result over time, you know, like, yeah, we got to keep getting boosted or shots and fighters making a great business out of it. You're right. There's a massive economic incentive here for them and Moderna to keep this gravy train rolling. And there's a massive incentive for government officials, politicians to continue to stand by what they said before, because otherwise they're going to be called wrong and they're going to get beat up. I feel like you're making an effort to stand by what you previously said.
SPEAKER_05: I think we should just come out and say that, look, regardless of where the safety data ultimately comes out, just based on efficaciousness, we can say that this thing didn't work and therefore mandating it was even worse thing because hold on, we put ever we put the drug through this rapid process and we didn't let people make an individual cost benefit decision. We basically herded them into this and at best it didn't do very much.
SPEAKER_03: I don't think that that decision, if you can, if you make that conclusion, I'm not sure that it gives us a toolkit to do better the next time. And I think we've all said this and Friedberg was the one that first really taught us about this, there will be a next time, unfortunately. So I think that we have to focus our energy here in acknowledging that the tools that we have to create these messenger RNA vaccines and other types of solutions, we are pushing the boundaries of science and the body is still very poorly understood. And so the sensitivity and specificity of these drugs may not be what we think upfront. And as a result of that, maybe we need to find a different way of using emergency use authorization in the future. And I don't know, David, to your point, I'm beyond my ski tips on scientific knowledge to know how. I would say as a minimum that if we're going to do emergency use, it shouldn't be mandated.
SPEAKER_05: That patients, okay, let's move on. So we have a moment of agreement question for free.
SPEAKER_01: Would you advise or in your life? Would you would you continue to get a booster? Or are you going to consider getting a booster every year if they can come with them? And now would you advise parents or you know, adults over 65 or 70 to get one because those seem to be the high risk group, right? So if your parents said, Should I get it or not?
SPEAKER_02: I would advise advise them to talk to their doctor and their doctor would advise them to do it.
SPEAKER_01: What do you think most doctors would tell somebody above 65 or 70? At this point,
SPEAKER_02: what depends what state they're in at this point, but basically would be split on lines.
SPEAKER_05: Unless this virus turns into Ebola. I'm never getting boosted again. I'll tell you that right now. I do agree with that. What about you guys?
SPEAKER_01: I'm not getting boosted again. No, I'm not getting I think that speaks volumes.
SPEAKER_05: That's right there. That's it. Like we can
SPEAKER_04: move on free bird, but the fact that all of us can arrive at that and then we're worried
SPEAKER_05: about getting banned to you how screwed up you're right. It is like you're right what we can't like have an honest conversation about this. By the way, the other thing this is going to do, it's going to inflame a large number
SPEAKER_02: of people just hearing us say this and it because people have these deep what's happened is this has now become a sense of identity, a sense of tribalism and a sense of it's a belief system. It's no longer about an objective decision. Well, we saw this with the mass, the mass became the blue became the blue of the red
SPEAKER_05: and the vaccine is basically, you know, it's become tribal but that's not gonna but but people need to move beyond that because this is a scientific question of cost and benefits related to this medical treatment. Okay, let's just move on. There's too much other stuff to talk about. You're not for venture capitalists about your vaccine plan.
SPEAKER_01: Speak to your doctor. Yeah, speak to your doctor.
SPEAKER_05: Please don't listen to us. All right. Let's move on. We're as confused as you are. By the way, by the way, speak to your doctor and just remember, vaccine manufacturers have
SPEAKER_02: a business to run and politicians have to get reelected. All right, let's move on because we've got stuck on this.
SPEAKER_05: Okay, look, there's been some important developments in Ukraine, I think we should just cover quickly this week. There are a bunch of things the Biden administration said they're going to send Abrams tanks as well as Bradley's and Leopard 2's. The Abrams tank in particular is our best most expensive tank. At the beginning of the war, they said they would not send them so they reversed their decision on that. Now the Ukrainians are saying they want jets as well. That's sort of the next issue that's going to come up. The Biden administration also in a New York Times article that came out earlier this week said that they were warming to the idea of supporting an invasion of Crimea. Some Europeans like Peter Hitchens are getting very nervous about this level of escalation. He had a pretty amazing piece talking about the risk of this creating nuclear war. Even if the Ukrainians prevail in this war, there was a really interesting statement by Larry Fink at Davos last week saying that he estimated the cost of reconstruction at $750 billion and Fitch ratings agency says that Ukraine is headed towards default. Major developments I think in the war this week, I want to get your guys' opinion on this. We know from history that wars tend to escalate and to be far more costly than the participants ever thought. Is that the track we're on now? In hindsight, knowing what we know now, should we regret that we didn't use every diplomatic tool we had to prevent the war, most notably taking NATO expansion off the table? Freeburg, I'll go to you.
SPEAKER_02: It's such a tough situation. Is the situation escalating to a point where we should be concerned?
SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of information we don't have and there's a lot of intelligence gathering and conversations and chatter that we're not privy to. To sit here and be an armchair mechanic on this stuff, I don't know what diplomatic conversations
SPEAKER_02: have gone on or are going on. All I know is what we're reading on the internet.
SPEAKER_05: This war is extremely well covered and there are no diplomatic conversations going on.
SPEAKER_02: We are escalating the war. Let me get Jay Kalar-Chimath in here.
SPEAKER_05: Do you guys have any concerns about the direction this is headed at all?
SPEAKER_03: Yes, I'm concerned. I also agree with Freeburg that I don't think we have all the information, but I'm not exactly sure what we can do right now. It seems like they have decided that there is a play to exert a lot of pressure come the spring and that's something that you've mentioned as a very likely thing. I guess the calculus on the ground is that there's a way to really push Russia into a corner and the only way to do that is with more military support. Then on the heels of that, David, the link that you sent is then it's not just the war machine that is now spinning up, but it's the aftermarket financial services infrastructure that's also spinning up. You mean the grift aspect of this war?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, where Larry Fink was like, hey, they're going to need three quarters of a trillion dollars of reconstruction support. We saw that play out in Iraq as well, where at first it was the war machine and then it was the reconstruction machine and together it was trillions and trillions of dollars. By the way, you know what that's called?
SPEAKER_02: Those are called infrastructure funds and those infrastructure funds raise hundreds of billions of dollars to make investments to build new infrastructure in markets that need it and that are willing to pay for it and it will likely end up being kind of long-term debt assumed by that region to pay to do this work and the beneficiaries will be the investors and owners of those infrastructure funds. I think there's two sides to this, Sax, that are worth noting. One is the telegraphing of this decision because it's not being done secretly. It's being done out in the open. There's certainly a calculus to that. Why are they telegraphing this and what do they intend to do with that messaging being put out there like this? It may be that it's to assert or assume a stronger negotiating position, certainly to go into some sort of mild modest exit or settlement coming out of this thing. But you're right. The flip side is, and the cost here is one of extreme outcome, which is there may be a Franz Ferdinand moment here where one thing goes too far and triggers a cataclysmic outcome. And in this case, the cataclysmic outcome is tactical nuclear weapons. And tactical nuclear weapons, as we talked about, and I think I had some conversations and some dinners I shared with you guys with some folks in the intelligence community, and this has been talked about by ex-intelligence community folks publicly, are a key part of the Russian war playbook. There is a tactical nuclear weapon response system that is in place, and these are very possible paths that we could find ourselves kind of walking down. Obviously, were that to happen, it would be a massive escalation. And you're right, there could be a Franz Ferdinand kind of moment that emerges by shaking the cage and lighting a fire. And there may be a stronger negotiating position to get to a settlement faster by doing this. I don't have a strong point of view on the probability of either of those and why, but I think maybe both are certainly in play here. It was interesting to me that the Wall Street Journal on the heels of all of this stuff
SPEAKER_03: also published an article about Roman Abramovich. And the interesting thing about it was a quote in the article that effectively said something tantamount to, well, now that he's proven not as useful, we need to target him with sanctions. So I just think that what all of this is, is now sort of they're entering the end game, David, to use a chess analogy. And it looks like they're setting the wheels in motion to kind of put all the pieces together for a negotiated settlement.
SPEAKER_05: Do we know? Is it? Is it continual escalation? I mean, Jake, I actually, at the beginning of the war, we didn't want to give the Ukrainians Abrams tanks because they were that was considered too provocative. Now we're giving them to them. I think what's going on here is and I suspected this, you know, from the beginning is that
SPEAKER_01: we are trying to engage them in a war of attrition, and it's working. And so I think the West collectively is trying to further that goal of just making Russia economically, politically, militarily, culturally irrelevant or angled in some way. And if you think about what's now happening with energy, you know, his primary export, he is going to lose those customers and his customers will be, you know, bottom feeding India, China, low cost, you know, oil, and he is going to be a pariah. So what I'm looking at is if there's going to be a negotiated settlement this year, what is the next five or 10 years going to look like for Russia? What is their place in the world going to be? The West is never going to trust them again, the Germans are never going to buy their oil again, everybody is going to be looking for ways to distance themselves from so how does he have an exit ramp and we talked about this from the get go here on this podcast is what's the golden bridge for him to retreat across. And we really need to find that golden bridge quickly because I do think this is starting to look desperate for him. The West keeps giving better and better munitions. He keeps losing economically, he's going to keep losing and politically, who would ever want to engage Putin in anything with, you know, any kind of cultural or international trade, it's going to be a disaster for him. So this war of attrition has to resolve itself with some sort of settlement, but we can't go on for two or three years, can it? I mean, it has to settle at some point.
SPEAKER_05: I think that it can certainly can go on. And I think that history proves that wars tend to escalate and the costs incurred are much greater in many cases than participants ever dreamed of. And if they had to go and do it all over again, they wouldn't have gotten into it in the first place. So yeah, I think this is concerning. I think, you know, the crazy thing is... Do you think it is a war of attrition strategy?
SPEAKER_01: Do you think that's the... Yeah, I think it has developed into a war of attrition.
SPEAKER_05: And I think you're right that... Well I think there's two possibilities, J. Cal. I think that maybe the more cynical or realistic members of the administration think there's benefit in wearing Russia down and grinding them down. However, I also think there's kind of a true believer camp that sees pushing Russia out of Ukraine, nothing less than that will do. And we have to punish their aggression, maybe they won't regime change. I think there's dueling factions in the administration. Remember General Milley, several months ago, said that everything that the Ukrainians could achieve militarily just about had been done and they should negotiate. And even Jake Sullivan had said that they should take Crimea off the table. That was just the leaks a few months ago. Now the administration is leaking that they're gonna support a Crimean invasion. So I think there's these both schools within the administration, the true believers, the more cynical folks, and it feels to me like the true believers are on top right now because we just keep escalating this war more and more. And I think that's dangerous. That polarizes the outcomes, right?
SPEAKER_05: So I think, J. Cal, if you had your way, it sounds like you would grind the Russians down, but at a certain point you would say enough is enough. And like a poker player, like you do at the poker table, you'd say have one of my Prius for the night. I don't need to risk that to win a Tesla. So I'm gonna cash in my chips and get away, walk up, walk away, right?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I wish I could do that. I wish I could do that consistently. Yeah, exactly. Getting up from the table is a rare skill.
SPEAKER_05: That's right, but I'm not sure the administration is getting up from the table. I think we've achieved, the American position on this, I think has largely been achieved. We've prevented Russia from taking over Ukraine. We've basically shifted Europe onto American natural gas. We've destroyed Nord Stream. I think we're close to achieving our major objectives, but I'm not sure we're gonna stop there.
SPEAKER_04: All right, anyway, all right, let's move on.
SPEAKER_05: Freeberg, you have a Science Corner?
SPEAKER_02: I was gonna share the, this was last week, I think we talked about it this week. So there was a paper that is a pretty compelling paper published by a team led out of Harvard on identifying what may be the core driver of aging and demonstration on an ability to kind of reverse aging. So I'll just start really quickly that, in the human body, we have many different types of cells, right? We have 200 roughly different kinds of cells, an eye cell, a skin cell, a brain cell, a heart cell. They all have the same DNA, the same genetic code, the same genome at the nucleus of that cell. What makes those cells different and the reason they act and behave differently is they have different gene expression, meaning different genes in that cell are turned on and off. And when a gene is turned on, the protein that that gene codes for is expressed and made in the cell. And the genes that are off, those proteins are not made. And remember, proteins are the biochemical machines in biology. So when certain proteins are produced, they do stuff and other proteins don't do stuff and the cell acts and behaves very differently. So some cells, when you turn genes on and off, you get a neuron. Some cells, you turn them on and off, you get a muscle cell in your bicep. Some of them, you get a heart cell. And so all of these cells are differentiated by the genes that are expressed. The general term for the expression of genes is the epigenome. And an epigenome basically refers to these systems whereby certain parts of the DNA, certain segments of genes are uncoiled a little bit. So if you zoom in on DNA, you know, there's 23 chromosomes. They're tightly wrapped in these coils. And when you go even closer, you see that there's these segments called nucleosomes. And a nucleosome means it's like a bead and a bunch of DNA is wrapped around the bead. And how closely those beads are together, how much the DNA is wrapped, allows a segment of the DNA to be opened up and then expressed, meaning copies of the DNA are turned into RNA, which floats into this thing called the ribosome. And the ribosome is the protein printer. So the more these little segments of genome are exposed, the more they're expressed. And there's certain chemicals, these methyls and acetyls that kind of attach to the genome and certain elements that allow parts of the chromosome to wrap up and get really tightly bound or to unwrap and to express the gene. So the epigenome is almost, you can think about it like the software. And the genome or the DNA is the hardware. And so the hardware basically defines what you can make. The epigenome defines what is being made, what stuff is turned on and what stuff is turned off. So this paper and this work that was done, historically, we've always thought that aging meant that over time the DNA in our cells was mutating and errors were accumulating in the DNA. And as a result of those errors, the cells start to dysfunction. And what these guys really did a good job of proving with this paper is that it may not be mutations in the DNA that's causing aging, but actually changes in the epigenome and that the DNA remains pretty stable and pretty consistent over time. And the way they did this is they broke the DNA. And just so you guys know, every second of your life, about a million breaks in DNA in cells throughout your body are happening. Your DNA is being broken up and then there's all this machinery in your cell that fixes the DNA when it breaks. Now what happens when it fixes it, it turns out it's actually really good at fixing it and the DNA doesn't change. And we historically thought that the DNA changed a lot and mutations accumulate over time. But in reality, what may be happening is as your DNA gets fixed, the epigenome, the acetyl and methyl groups on the chromosome don't get put in the right place. And over time, what happens is the epigenome degrades. And this is considered, and a lot of people refer to this now as the information theory of aging. You can kind of think about making a lot of copies of software, a lot of copies of a photo and a photo printer over time. And every time you make a copy, there's a little error, a little error, and those errors accumulate. And the errors that accumulate cause the epigenome to change. And as a result, certain genes are turned on that are supposed to be off and certain genes are turned off that are supposed to be turned on. And then those cells start to get dysfunctional because the wrong proteins are being made and the cell can no longer do what it's supposed to do. So what these guys...
SPEAKER_03: Could it be the ribosome as well that gets screwed up over time, the printer?
SPEAKER_02: The ribosome is a pretty static protein. It just does its thing and there's hundreds of ribosomes in a cell. So if one of them is dysfunctional, it just doesn't do anything. And then the other ones kind of step in and do it. So the ribosomes are constantly running. What these guys did is they basically took two mice, two populations of mice, and they gave the one population of mice a certain thing that caused its DNA to break at three times the rate of the other population. And then as the DNA broke, they could see that this mouse population got older and older faster. And by a bunch of measures on how do you measure age. But what they did is they then measured... They then sequenced the DNA of the two populations of mice. And what they showed is that the older mice, the ones that had their DNA changing a lot... By the way, these were genetically identical mice. The ones that had their DNA broken a lot more, they had the correct genome. Their genome was the exact same as the other mice that stayed young. And so what that tells us is that it's the epigenome and not the DNA itself that's changing. So then here's what they did. Remember last year we talked about Yamanaka factors, which are these four proteins, these four molecules that can be applied to DNA to a cell. And they cause all of the gene expression to reset back to looking like a stem cell. Remember all of those differentiated cells come from a stem cell. And when they did that, the older population of mice suddenly started to act younger. And all of the measures of age reversed. And they did this across different tissue types. They measured this in a lot of different ways. Genome function, health, cellular health, etc. And so it is not just a fantastic new proof point of how Yamanaka factors can actually reverse age, but it demonstrates that the epigenome itself is what is the core driver of aging. And you guys remember Altos Labs raised $3 billion in a seed round last year. And remember at the end of 21, I said Yamanaka factors in aging research is going to be kind of the next hot thing. I think this paper is going to be one of the seminal papers that really kind of illustrates and proves the point that this epigenome is the driver of aging. And as we now are investing a lot of money in figuring out how Yamanaka factors and other transcription factors like the Yamanaka factors can be applied in specific ways to actually reverse aging and cause the cells to start functioning correctly again. And then people will start to act and resolve in a healthy way once again. There's a lot of work to go between here and there. But now we have a much more kind of definitive proof point that this information theory of aging may be real, that it's tied to the epigenome, and that there are solutions that can work. And we have to figure out how to put them together and how to engineer a fantastic outcome. So really great paper by a team led out of Harvard, I think really validates a lot of the work and the money that's going into the space, both in the public and the private sector. And obviously, a lot of new startups kind of chasing this opportunity to figure out how we can use these transcription factors to reverse aging, and that this may end up leading us to a much kind of healthier life. And by the way, when they applied those Yamanaka factors to the mice, the mice lived 107% longer than they were supposed to. But more importantly, the health span as it's defined, improved. So the mice not only lived longer, but they actually lived healthier. All the measures of healthiness in the body improved. So it's a really powerful indicator. But, Friedberger, is this going to help us in the next 10 years?
SPEAKER_02: It may. Yeah, it very well may. There are now some therapeutic efforts. Is that how long they gave you sex?
SPEAKER_01: I feel like science corners should only discuss things that can happen in the next few years.
SPEAKER_05: Let's put it that way. Or is that the wrong way to look at it?
SPEAKER_02: I'll tell you one thing for sure. You can make money as an investor over the next 10 years in finding the right teams that are going to have the highest likelihood of progressing clinical trials in this space. I will say that there may be clinical trials that can come to market really fast, particularly with kind of these ex vivo therapeutics where you take cells out of your body, apply the Yamanaka factors, and then put them back in your body for certain tissue types like I cells, for example, or T cells in your blood. There's a lot of ways that this may come to market faster. And it's not just about reversing your age overall, but reversing the age of certain cell types in your body that can then have profound health impacts in the near term. So that's the kind of stuff that's going to start to come through clinical stage sooner than later. And then maybe some number of years down the road, we figure out a way to reverse the age in all the cells in our body, and the whole body becomes more youthful. But for now, it's going to be targeted cells in a very specific way to reverse aging and improve health. Very powerful, very interesting, lots of investment opportunity. Certainly some very smart folks. What do you think the realistic timeframe is for reversing aging?
SPEAKER_05: Because we need that. 30 years? Shit.
SPEAKER_04: It's like, wait, I'll be 80. That's when you'll need it the most. That can be close.
SPEAKER_04: Wait, so if we live to 80, does that mean we're going to be able to live to 100 because
SPEAKER_05: we'll be able to reverse age? Well, it depends. I think the question is, can you live well to 100?
SPEAKER_03: I think that's the question. We don't know.
SPEAKER_05: But if you could reverse aging.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but we don't know what that means because there's all kinds of things that you inherit over time that this may not, for example, if you have long-term heart disease, I could see how the cells could get healthier, but it can't eliminate the plaque in your arteries. That's hardened calcium. That shit's there. You have to live well. Same with Alzheimer's.
SPEAKER_02: Alzheimer's has plaque. There's a plaque element, but the cause of that and the cellular dysfunction may be reversible.
SPEAKER_03: It could definitely be that injury rates of older people, hips, knees, shoulders, arms, all the sort of like soft musculoskeletal stuff you can really do a good job of because at the same time as you get older, people intake less protein, they process it less well, you lose a lot of muscle mass as you get older. Those are things that I think are like short-term solutions. But no, to be honest with you, Sax, the stuff that really can screw you, which is heart disease and brain function, this probably won't do much for a long time.
SPEAKER_05: So check it out. Screw it.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. I've been doing it for 20 years. I feel great.
SPEAKER_05: Can you reverse whatever is wrong with JCal or is that in the plaque category? Can I do a quality of life shout out?
SPEAKER_03: I got an email. We all got it from a guy who I won't say just to not to violate his privacy, but he's in
SPEAKER_03: Saskatchewan. He listens to the pod or his father is and made him get a prenouveau scan, flew the father to Vancouver. They found a five centimeter cancerous tumor on his kidney and three days ago had it removed and looks like guy's totally healthy and eliminated. So another live saved. But I wanted to show you guys a picture. So yesterday I went to Los Angeles to see my interventional cardiologist and what they do is they do what's called a contrast CT scan. So they put you into an IV and they put this contrast inside of you. Nick, do you want to throw the picture up please? And then they use all the software to actually create an extremely accurate 3D model of your heart and what they can do is go inside of your arteries and actually measure the calcium buildup. I've mentioned this before. This is a service called HeartFlow, H-E-A-R-T-F-L-O-W. In any event, my calcium score is still zero. Thank God, touch wood. Keep grinding. But I just wanted to put this out there for anybody who has a history of heart disease in their family for them or for their parents or what have you. If you go and ask your doctor, this is a third party service that they can do it. You go get a contrast CT and you can get a very accurate sense of your heart health.
SPEAKER_01: This is amazing. They found it's incredible. They found that you have a heart. They did find that I have a heart. This is incredible technology. Because all of us, we would try to find if you had a heart for all these 112 episodes. Dr. Carlsberg was shocked. Breaking news. They found a heart.
SPEAKER_05: It looked huge. It looked like secretary. It looks like he's got a big heart.
SPEAKER_03: I do have a big heart, boys, as you guys know.
SPEAKER_01: This is shocking for the audience. Is that actual size? That can't be actual size.
SPEAKER_05: His heart's bigger than his brain.
SPEAKER_01: He's got a big heart. Glad you're healthy, bestie. That's fantastic.
SPEAKER_03: So go get a heart flow if anybody has heart disease. Go talk to your doctor. All right.
SPEAKER_01: Well, for David Sacks.
SPEAKER_05: Was the moderation okay? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, listen, it was interesting. The answer wasn't as funny as if you were doing it, J. Cal.
SPEAKER_05: I'll admit.
SPEAKER_01: All right. Fair enough. I'll come back to moderate next week.
SPEAKER_03: I'll moderate next week. I'll be honest with you. I would give both the Davids a robotic B-C+. I think they're better off opining than moderating. And I think that Jason really doesn't have anything interesting to say, so he's better off moderating. I don't know. Do any of you like my comments last week? And then we can minimize the number of times he finds any random way to take it back to virtue signaling and genuflecting about China. I was going to ask Jason what he thought about the Cowboys 49ers game where Kittle was an ineligible downfield receiver and they didn't call a penalty. Very important catch for that game that, again, the Cowboys now losing every single time they get to the playoffs. But I didn't want to ask you because I thought that you'd veer it towards Xi Jinping and some China Comet. No. Any genuflecting would you like to do before you go back to your...
SPEAKER_05: I will admit that the moderation thing is harder than it looks. Well, it's harder than it looks to be entertaining. I think that's the thing. I think Jason does such a good job. I think J. Cal and A to A+.
SPEAKER_03: Thank you. A+. Get back to your job, J. Cal.
SPEAKER_01: I will come back next week and moderate. I have been under the weather.
SPEAKER_03: Pass the ball and let us put the ball in the basket. I will put the ball exactly where you each like it perfectly.
SPEAKER_01: Look for some great assists coming next week when J. Cal is back at 100% strength. Thanks to the Davids for filling in for me for the last two weeks and we'll see you all next time on the All In Poly. Love you, boys. Bye guys.
SPEAKER_05: Love you, guys. Bye, guys. Love you, guys.
