sexy blue how much heat and momentum has Nikki Haley gotten this week oh my God stop trying to make Nikki Haley happen fetch is not happening stop trying to make fetch happen stop trying to make Snapchat it's happening this is like my long Google short Facebook spread trade of last year it's happening that's just that's happening okay stop [Music] stop Rain Man David attack [Music]
just as a um 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 post David sucks you're really chafed about this aren't you Jacob no I'm excited for it I'm so excited 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
welcome to the all in pod I am your host the Rain Man David sacks 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 best you 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 is planning 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 calcamus and the tune to be his servant in the afterlife it's a little Jake house been
preparing for all his life by sucking up to every Tech founder of BC you can get in a room with I give better odds to the Sultan of science David freberg 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 how much did that intro cost does he come with the money back refund you guys are laughing I'm laughing I
don't know I'm laughing I thought with you or at you that's good the funniest part was when you almost read aloud like it's like you were like and then David Friedberg insert pause here it's an intro it's an intro I'm so glad we do an unscripted show okay go ahead Freebird I remember when you did the intro come on did I read actually didn't we cut it yeah you read and then you cut
it you hated it and then we made you put it back in or something like that all I have to say Tremont is job security is here all right well done okay issue one issue one Google breakup 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 filed a lawsuit on Tuesday the justice department did alleging that Google abuses its role as one of the largest broker suppliers in 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 to 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 Tick Tock so
I guess I'll kick it to you chamoth 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 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 U.S government has
towards entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship than anything else now why is that let's just think about what a monopoly is I mean 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 percent of a market 43.4 percent of that market is with a diverse group of others meta has 18.4 percent 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 Belle well what that Circle would have shown is that they basically had effectively a hundred percent 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 percent of the entire market and it means that if you forecast It Forward they could be at 15 to 20 percent 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 freeway let me go to you I think you know tremath 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 this 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 our website Publishers and then buy side demand which are advertisers defines this way it looks like Google has 90 or more market share on the sell side because the doubleclick acquisition they've got somewhere between 40 and 80 market share on the demand side with 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 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 in the acquisition I was a
business product manager for a period of time on AdWords so the way that that chart kind of shows the connection between advertisers and Publishers is correct that an ad network uh 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 at 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 won 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 uh 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 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 had like a I think initially like a 60 40 red share where they only paid Publishers 40 of the revenue The Advertiser paid then the network started to move to a 55-45 model then a 50 50 model then a 45-55 model I believe on average Google currently is paying somewhere between 70 and 80 percent to their publishers I gotta check my math on that or
whatever the latest yeah yeah so but call it 70. and so it is a very competitive share now the 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 Network 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've their pay the Publishers the most and if you try and break this up and if you actually do try and you know get into the 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 advertisers spend and consumers are getting the best quality experience that's what makes Google's model so hard to tackle from an Anti-Trust perspective because it's giving so basically is what you're saying that because fundamentally
this is an auction model it prevents Google from extracting Monopoly rents correct and and already paid 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 let me just add two more things sorry which I think are just well can I go to jaycal first I just want to get Jake Owen here even though he wouldn't do the same for me yeah Jake how do you agree with Freeburg that uh that the reason for Google success is that they're hyper efficient and this auction mechanism prevents Monopoly Behavior no I there is
Monopoly Behavior going on at Google obviously with search and putting their own content and services up top and to shimon's point like 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 you know acquisition in 2008 and this consolidation of power the the what Publishers would say to friedberg'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 percent which is exactly to the percentage that uh Google is taking off the top so Google's 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 have now have ad tiers for their services to go up against YouTube so and then for the first time we're even talking about Google search Supremacy being challenged by chat GPT so right with Microsoft you know they're they're just late 10 years too late maybe 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 yeah it doesn't make much sense should the government be able to unwind Acquisitions that happened a decade ago does that make any sense no of course no that they should they should learn from it and not do it again yeah sex what do
you think I think it's a pretty bad way to approach things because it creates 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 Jayco like if the government is going to have a problem with an
acquisition state it up front 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 kind of a chilling effect on m a behavior in the ecosystem which is bad for the ecosystem as a whole well it really does 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 right I'll also add I totally agree with chamoth I think that this action you know as one of our friends put it on our on our text stream it's like killing the Golden Goose I mean this is one of the 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 as a government this is absolutely um going to become uh kind of an opening for some you know 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 Jamal 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 uh is on e-commerce sites I know this from experience on a couple
boards I'm at where companies stop 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 proclivities 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 Inked 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 apples ID changes the third party cookies being removed it's becoming harder to Target consumers harder to make money as a um for Publishers so meanwhile the Market's being challenged Amazon's coming in the inverse definition of a monopoly 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 five years ago this would have made more sense yeah much more sense so 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 clearer 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 you know what Jack ma is too powerful therefore he's going to learn Japan I think this is like
Google it is totally different totally different other than that of course I think that this lawsuit makes no sense you always better bring it back to China does everything in your brain have to Virtue signal like it's like intellectually interesting conversation Jason intellectually honest position exactly let me finish before you jump the fence very simply you asked like why are they filing
something that makes no sense my position 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 because it relate to China agree with Jay Cal here actually I'll defend it for a second world second
greatest moderator yeah third greatest take China out of it for a second because that could mean that could 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 what's 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 they're just kind of barking up the wrong tree 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 uh you know and uh Netflix doing these digital ads on their platforms and having ad tiers and then you may have noticed Uber's doing an ad business now they did 350 million dollars 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 yeah and so those networks and opportunities are emerging 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 I think that just because something's successful in a Marketplace doesn't mean it's a monopoly you know this whole thing of envy you know we've 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 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 in opoly with IOS and Android or duopoly but I think you're 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 afternoon 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 side loading that's
really happening and so domestically in the United States and Western Europe there's a de facto duopoly complete control completely inflexible inelastic pricing that is a monopoly and then separately for surge 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 right they don't understand how the market works right okay so shifting gears Microsoft has just been sued on Anti-Trust accounts or rather there's a pro 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 in bundling or
tying of products the allegation is that Microsoft fairly 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 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 you know 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 well that's exactly was my point when we talked about this last time is that if Microsoft can basically clone the sort of the the Breakthrough Innovative product you know just to say they do one every year and then they put a crappy
version of that in their bundle yeah 10 20 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 right and they've done that with slack they've done that with OCTA they've done that
with zoom you know Jake how can we have a vibrant Tech ecosystem at least in B2B software if Microsoft can just keep doing that indefinitely yeah it's it's a difficult question I don't know though if what the consumer harm is here if you keep adding great features to a bundle so to take the other side of the argument you know 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 wiki style you know 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 said they had a 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 point about that great Nick can you pull up this chart yeah it was like High Teens or something was there was there I mean it looks like from this chart that slack is kind of leveled no no that's the number of users I was talking about Revenue okay if you look
at slacks Revenue quarter over quarter it's basically it wasn't there a report that it's been a little bit of a disappointment to Salesforce or no well I mean you know this number here that we're looking at where it says 75 million Microsoft teams members 12 million stock members by the way if you wanted to if you wanted to play conspiracy theorists maybe that's why there's a falling out
between benioff and Brett I mean Brett was the champion of this deal you know 28 billion dollar acquisition and 28 billion dollars is threading a needle the 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 a activist investor program from Elliott man I mean yeah maybe it's not doing as well as they needed it to 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 I have no idea like I said I was I was pre-qualifying with saying let's play
conspiracies fair enough okay you have a suggestion here's a suggestion for The Regulators that are listening or watching our podcast 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 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'd 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 Zoom a zoom clone for free or you know a slack clone for free but then what happens is once they've you know 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 like 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 exactly 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 charmath these like transfer payments or subsidies to basically you
know take over systematically take over every SAS vertical 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 yeah I disagree with you guys oh let me just let me just play let me just play my devil's advocate which is kind of how I feel uh as well I think these concepts of um
monopolistic bundling made a lot of sense I make a lot of sense in the sense in if if what you're bundling in 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 real 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 U.S 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 I'm not saying that Microsoft can't copy slack and then under charge a different price and charge a different price and a lower price and discount it what I'm saying is they can't cross subsidize
they're a slack competitor it's the fact that they can copy slack that makes Slack that means that slack should lose the fact that that slack actually creates almost look software new software is really hard to create but really 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 show me where someone's made a
better competitor to Google search show me where like 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 the more data they get it's the reinforcement learning I'll say I'll say it differently it's easier to copy there's an asymptote to that quality
point though I don't think that that's necessarily no I think there's a Nuance here that and by the way all the social networks that people thought were had massive lock-in effect turns out they don't right David no dude 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 precise generates the product quality is underneath the water line but I think in
Enterprise software it's all thin UI layers on top of very simple then don't compete because the bigger guy that offers a discount is always going to be you what he's saying which I agree with is you just if you could add transparency so that you understand what is happening I don't think anybody's against transparency nobody should be against against it and if 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 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 but that's my point there's a lot of
ways to compete in the marketplace If the product you're offering is of parents no the problem is a commodity build something that's different enough that people are willing to pay for it well then you know 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 then the whole B2B SAS space should basically
pack up shop and go home we should just stop funding VCS just to stop funding new SAS companies because and all those productivity games will just go up the window yeah why would you fund any you know it's a definition of anti-competitive then yeah how's that bad for the customer they're paying less and they're getting a better price there'll be fewer new products created
yeah freebrook 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 will never or use Netflix no it's a they have they offer a commodity that's my point if you're offering a commodity these things should apply it makes a ton of sense effectively and what you just said is that B2B software is effectively
commodity and you want to copy it anyone can reply to you I'm turning this off you only have one choice and it's mine because these 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 and what David is saying is the exact same argument so 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 you're at least intellectually consistent commodity too steel is a commodity too and you can't engage in dumping I mean this is the argument is that for example you know with respect to China the argument was that they were dumping cheap Steel in the U.S 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 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 okay we have a law around that I understand so my 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 Jacob you want to get in on this yeah I wonder when you install teams does it automatically when you install the Microsoft Office Suite does it
automatically install teams because it does seem to 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 that interoperability matters so there are other vectors here to force them interoperability so if you open your Windows machine do you have a choice of it depends which browser let's just let's just say that you use
exchange for certain things but in other things for example to manage your name space you may use OCTA but then they say actually no we need you to use our version of OCTA 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 how would that work in practicality though you would you would I think that David says turned it on for a dollar a person or something here's introductory price I think the combination of what David said
and I said would do the trick which is if 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 dollars 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 dollars 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 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 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 yeah 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 which is and I think we can show this red meat for David yeah so Albert berla who's the CEO of Pfizer went to Davos last week and he probably expect to Davos you know
the 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 Ruiner and I started asking him some tough questions let's roll tape what's Rebel news borla 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 that question I mean we now know that the vaccines didn't stop transmission but why did you keep it secret good question you said it was 100 effective then 90 then 80 then 70 percent but we now know that the vaccines do not trans 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 we should cut this okay we can stop from there but that wow welcome to Infowars first of all you know what real journalism looks like not a bunch of New York Times the reporters covering for powerful people but asking them tough questions
what do you think of the question is it legit or not you got you guys are about to get us down ranked on YouTube and Spotify we're about to get warning labels for this sort of thing yeah look by the way you're right that YouTube banned that video we had to watch it on Twitter because Elon Musk Twitter is still free okay listen she's actually protecting why hold on why is YouTube
abridging freedom of the press in order to protect the powerful CEO of Pfizer foreign did they cover up the fact that the vaccines 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 Freeburg what are you you're asking me if I know what whether Pfizer did a
cover-up is that what you're asking the legitimate question is what I'm getting at why are you unwilling to question the Pfizer CEO oh no I'm not I'm not unwilling to question at all but I'm not I don't think that this is a fight look first of all Pfizer is uh 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 weighing very quickly as this virus evolved and mutated it became pretty evident pretty fast that the uh the rate of Transmission in vaccinated people continue to go up
and you know 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 that are produced and the T Cell response that 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 the stuff with the original yeah let me ask you about the data the fact that that Pfizer only has this product to sell is
not exactly a ringing endorsement of their behavior but but let's stay on the data for a second there was a study in nature which is you know one of the most preeminent scientific journals about the risks 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 thought the vaccine this was a study out of France so it's pretty clear that the there are yes efficacious as we thought but is it less safe than we thought as well I I generally I don't know the answer to this I would like to know 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 math General and um what this and so just to address the myocarditis question and 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 uh the covid vaccine and by the way the incidence rate is still
typically less than a two out of every hundred thousand 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 the moderna vaccine which is still a low incidence but but 30 times higher is is significant worth understanding so the three kind of
reasons or the three ideas 30 times higher that sounds like a lot yeah so the reason and off a 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 their heart tissue for example or certain proteins found in the cells in their heart tissue maybe look like
the um 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 predisposed 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 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 is not clearing it right well how how long after getting vaccinated where the spike protein 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 have they done a study like you know six months after or year after not yet but that's that's being done right now so what they're identifying is what's going on with the immune system of these 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 reasons let me ask you I remember I remember when you know 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 right about that 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 Friedberg said earlier is super interesting be because the virus mutated the
efficacy of these vaccines obviously uh 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 uh for people under that a certain age it was lower so everybody had to make a very personal decision here
was it a personal decision when you had vaccine mandates and then on top of that 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 that if you didn't get the vaccine you got sick there wouldn't be a hospital bed for you there was you know a lot of like dancing on the graves of these people
yeah where you know there were like all these articles that you know there'd be like some preacher who you know said don't get vaccinated and then they would die of covet and there's a lot of like morbid sort of ghoulish like articles dancing on their graves I mean it was not this objective personal decision there was tremendous social and legal pressure to get vaccinated you're right
you're right there was and I think part of the reason I myself got vaccinated is 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 like one of the people who dies from this so you know 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 it also it was apparently oversold so when the Pfizer CEO would 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 uh and just keep everybody accountable for this uh for future things that happen because right now we're in a position where if Pfizer is
not being honest with us if the origin story of covet isn't being honest with us these conspiracy theories are now starting to start to look like reality let me go to YouTube moth 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 right that was not actually good for us and would you make
that same decision today 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 ten years maybe more 12 13 in some cases and 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 right are you you're describing operation warp speed 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 they are the messenger RNA vaccines that's the Bion Tech and Pfizer ones and then there are the more regular ones that in many cases the West was dumping
on AstraZeneca and Johnson Johnson we used to ship those to developing countries and say we'll just keep the MRNA wants you guys think Dave Chappelle had this funny joke he's like I took the J J vaccine right 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 there these proteins are some they're so similar
that there can be a little collateral damage that this other thing that looks 99 will also all of a sudden attract this 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 you 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 such mouth I want to do a study that were a year ago I want to do a study that looks at actually myocarditis and the the effects of this vaccine and Nick I don't know if you can just throw it up but we publish something and basically you know what we
see David is that for folks with myocarditis you're releasing troponin and this is a Sim this is a A protein that you would otherwise use to figure out whether you're having a heart attack or severe you know 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 it this issue is prevalent only in males but we've had a few cases that we've talked about now that that touch women as well
so it's a complicated set of things because our tools are not fine-grained 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
usage in baseball like if we need an investigation this goes back this goes back to Rebel news asking berla a very simple question which is what did 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 Freeburg let me ask you a question here I think you know Chamas 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 you know as 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 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 just 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 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 in our earliest episodes and I wasn't
and haven't been and I 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 dollars of of you know four trillion dollars of net costs that we have to pay off at some point and not to mention the
economic uh consequences of the lockdowns and uh you know the benefit was negligible because the the virus continued to spread and evolve and there was no way to really stop the virus in its tracks hindsight is 2020 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 uh 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 I think we will start to see people question whether those are appropriate but again those are longer studied better understood the the cost benefit analysis is is much there yeah actually I think I think you're right that one of the costs of this policy is going to be that people will stop trusting vaccination in
general even though I think that these coveted 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 measle mumps 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 is it tremendous there's a 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 and as we're seeing now the consequences of not being willing to say that you were wrong may be far greater then the consequences of kind of continuing or kind of you know making this change so it's uh actually that's a good point all right final question to Jay Calvin on that point yeah so I mean
Jake out look you were dunking or at least concerned 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 wow yeah I I think but maybe 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 were all herded into
this idea yeah we all took that being an early adopter of a product and now we're finding out yeah we 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 we when we got ours we knew hundreds of millions hold on let me just you have some questions so let me finish 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 that seems to be the case all right Nick pull up this tweet but you know we need to I I think we have to look at because we had this conversation you and I of you were very much in favor of everybody getting the
Mandate and everybody being forced to get the the no no I never supported the Mandate you did we had a conversation about that like if should people be able to work should people do it on trains and your position was no I I did not support a mandate I thought it should always see people's choice I did but yeah hold on I made the mistake I made the mistake of believing the experts in the mainstream media I
think if the last couple 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 so I thought it should be People's Choice yeah um and I certainly wasn't I don't think I was dunking on the anti-vaxxers let's pull up this tweet Nick yeah my Lord Trump history Fox News are
killing their own constituents with this anti-vaxx nonsense yeah uh do you retract that do I retract it um I'm trying to look at the date by the way this is this is a tweet that um Jason put out what was the date Danforth 2022 that sax pulled up just so yeah yeah that was only a year ago yeah I know at this point people were saying that uh no I get it I get it this is not
so rare this is not a rare sentiment but I'm sorry hold on hold just to give this just stand by this 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 freeberg the the vaccine reduced reduces the cases of deaths correct
yeah the the this new bivalent booster um Eric Topol put out a tweet 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 bivalent booster so but again that is a benefit that is the benefit yeah in one's own kind of personal safety and there's a
risk profile associated with that as taxes 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 chickenpox or uh smallpox and this other stuff not equivalent very good for free Burger wait that data how long after vaccination was that data because I thought that with respect to the vaccine one of the big problems is
that the the benefits only last for two months unless you're willing to get re-vaccinated every two months no that's yeah look it's not really realistic generally speaking this is not like a vaccine in the sense of a uh smallpox or all right it's just a shot it's a treat 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 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 to evolve that it's very difficult to say there's a vaccine for this virus it's uh it's uh why won't you just say this the that this the so-called vaccine has been a failure we don't know hold on I'm gonna it's a failure 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 yeah we know the efficaciousness of it has been a failure unless you're willing to get reducing unless you're willing to get jabbed six times a year which I don't think anybody here would do that and something that's not necessary because it's we hold on there was a time period where it was effective correct Friedberg and it did reduce deaths massively so I think
that's the the issue that we're talking about here is that now the kovich 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 debt but reducing death it did work for a period of time if it only lasted for two months and covet is still around and it's basically endemic it's everywhere how did the vaccine make any difference whatsoever I think now it's too much but back then it wasn't but you know free burglary Freeburg is that true
what's the question I'm I'm losing track at this point how long does the the lowering the percentage of deaths the benefits of it yes of reducing what you've learned is they only last two months is that true 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 yeah kind of
independent things and as a result over time you know like yeah we got to keep getting boosted or shots and Pfizer's making a great business out of it you're right there's a massive economic incentive here for them and moderna to keep this great 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 honestly I feel like I feel like you're making an effort you're making an effort to stand by what you previously said yeah 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 an even worse thing because hold on we put every 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 I don't think that that decision if you come 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 up front 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 right I would say as a minimum that if we're going to do emergency use it shouldn't be mandated let patients
okay let's move on so we have a moment of agreement one question for free birds yeah would you advise or in your life would you can would you continue to get a booster or are you going to consider getting a booster every year no if they keep about 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 I would advise advise them to talk to their doctor and their doctor would advise them to to do it what do you think most doctors would tell somebody above 65 or 70 at this point it depends what state they're in at this point but basically would be split on political ones unless this virus turns into Ebola I'm never getting boosted again I'll
tell you that right now what about you guys I'm not getting boosted again I think that speaks volumes right there that's it like we could have discovered here for 10 seconds guys we are literally not this sure let's move on hold on Freeburg but the fact that all of us can arrive at that and then we're worried about getting banned to tell you how screwed up you're right you're right he 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 of people just hearing us say this and 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 woman of the redness so the vaccine is basically uh you know it's become tribal but but people need to move beyond that because this is a scientific question of of constant benefits related to this medical treatment okay let's just move on there's too much other stuff doctors not for Venture capitalists about your vaccine
yeah please don't listen to us all right by the way by the way speak to your doctor and just remember uh vaccine manufacturers have a business to run and politicians have to get reelected all right let's move on because we've gotten stuck on this 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 by
Administration said they're going to send Abrams Tanks as well as Bradley's and leopard twos 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 by
Administration also in a New York Times article that came out earlier this week said that they were warming to the idea of 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 and 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 dollars and Fitch ratings agency says that Ukraine is headed towards default so major 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 and 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 Friedberg I'll go to you it's such a tough situation is the situation escalating to a point where we should be concerned you know 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 so to sit here and kind of be an armed chairman I I don't know what diplomatic conversations have gone on or are going on uh all I know is what we're reading on the internet right so I I I'm not I don't know this this war is extremely well covered and there are no diplomatic
conversations going on yeah so we're escalating the War I mean here do you guys have any concerns about the direction this is headed at all 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's 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 and so 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 and 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 or Larry Larry Fink you mean the grift aspect of this war well yeah where Larry Fink was like hey they're gonna 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 by the way you know what
that's called they're 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 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 the sacks that are worth kind of 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 and it may be that it's uh to assert or assume a
stronger negotiating position certainly to go into some sort of you know 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 France 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've talked about and I think I've I 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 uh ex-intelligence Community folks publicly are a key part of the Russian war Playbook that this is um there is a tactical nuclear weapon response system that is in place
and you know 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 France Ferdinand kind of moment that emerges by shaking the cage and and lighting a fire and there may be a stronger negotiating position to get to a settlement Faster by doing this I I don't have a strong point of
view on the probability of either of those and and why but I think you know maybe both are certainly in play here yeah it was interesting to me that the Wall Street Journal on the heels of all of this stuff also published an article about Roman abramsic 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 do we know that I mean what but is that yeah or is it continual escalation I
mean Jacob 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 I suspected this you know from the beginning is that 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 uh 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 ten 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 them so how does he have an exit ramp and we talked
about this from the the get-go here on this podcast is what's the golden bridge for him to retreat across and 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 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 a some sort of settlement but we kids can't go on for two or three years can it I mean it has to settle at some point I think that it 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 that they had to go and do it all over again they wouldn't have gone into it in the first place so yeah I think this is concerning I think you know the the crazy thing is the war of attrition strategy I think I think it has developed into a war of attrition and I think you're right that I think there's two possibilities Jay
Cal I think that the 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 want 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 going to support a Korean
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 so I think jaycal if you had your way it sounds like you had grind the Russians
down but at a certain point you would say enough is enough and like a poker player like you do it at the poker table you'd say have on my I won my Prius for the night I don't need to risk that to win a Tesla so I'm going to cash in my chips and get away and Walk Up Walk Away right 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 that's right but I'm not sure the administration is getting up from the table I mean 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 prevented we've basically shifted Europe onto American Natural Gas we've destroyed Nordstrom I think we're close to achieving our major objectives
but I'm not sure we're going to stop there yeah all right anyway all right let's move on Friedberg you have a science corner I was going to share the this was last week I think we talked about uh talking about it this week so um there was a paper that is a pretty um compelling paper published by a team uh LED out of Harvard on identifying what may be the the core driver of Aging and demonstration on an
ability to kind of reverse aging so I'll just start really quickly that you know in the human body we have many different types of cells right we have 200 roughly different kinds of cells and I sell 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 these systems whereby the 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 of 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 are certain chemicals these methyls and acetyls that kind of attach to the genome and certain elements that allow parts of the 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 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 that 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 Gene uh on on the um 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 should be the could it be the ribosome as well that gets screwed up over time the printer the ribosome is um a pretty you know uh static protein it just does its thing and there's hundreds of ribosomes in a Cell so you know if one of them's 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 Maui 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 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 um 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 that stayed Young and so what that tells us is that it's the epigenome and not the 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 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 cognitive function uh 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 three billion dollars in a sea ground last year and remember at the end of 21 I said like yamanaka Factor as an aging research is going to be kind of the next thought 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 we have to figure out how to put them together and how to engineer a fantastic outcomes 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 uh you know a much kind of healthier life and by the
way when they applied those yamanaka factors to the mice the mice lived 107 percent 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 they're all the measures of healthiness in the body improved so it's a really kind of is this going to help us in the next 10 years
it may yeah it very well made there are now some therapists in this corner I feel like science corners should only discuss things that can happen in the next few years let's put it that way to look at it I'll tell you I'll tell you one way one thing for sure you can make 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 eye 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 you know some number of years down the road we figure out a way to reverse the
age and 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 and you know certainly some some very smart folks yeah the realistic time frame is for like you know reversing aging because I mean we need that 30 years
yeah but I think I think it'll be 80. does that mean we're gonna be able to like live to 100 because we'll be able to like reverse age is can you live well to a hundred I think that's the question we don't know but if you could reverse aging 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 like 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 right you know that's totally different calcium that shit's there so right you you have to leave the same with Alzheimer's like Alzheimer's has pla there's a plaque element but the the the cause of that and the cellular dysfunction may be reversible it could
definitely be that like injury rates of older people hips knees shoulders arms all the sort of like soft musculoskeletal stuff you can you can really do a good job of because at the same time as you get older like people to 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 socks the stuff that really can screw you which is heart disease and brain function this probably won't do much for a long time so check it out screwed yeah yeah I'm in the best shape I've been in 20 years I feel great I'm getting irreverse whatever is wrong with Jayco or is that in the plot category can I do a quality of life shout out can I do a quality
I got an email we all got it from a guy who I won't say just about not to violate his privacy privacy but he's in Saskatchewan he listens to the Pod where his father is and made him get a pre-nuval scan oh flew the father to Vancouver they found a five centimeter cancerous tumor on his kidney and uh three days ago had it removed and looks like guys totally healthy and well eliminated he was saying so another live
saved but I 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 the contrast CT scan so they put you into an IV and they put this contrast inside of your neck you want to put 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 this is a service called heart flow h-e-a-r-t-f-l-o-w [Music] 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 this is amazing they they found it's incredible they found that you have a heart they did find that I have a heart this is this is a practical technology
because all of us we would try to find if you had a heart for all this 112 episodes Dr Carlsberg was shot they found a heart it looked huge it looked like secretariately yeah I do have a big heart boys as you guys know no I mean this is shocking for the audience it's a natural size that can't be actual size it's bigger than its brain it's got a big part well glad you're healthy bestie that's fantastic
so go get go get a hard flow if anybody has heart disease go talk to your doctor all right well for David sacks was was the moderation okay uh yeah I mean listen it was interesting funny as if you were doing a j Calvin all right fairness I'll come back to moderate next week I'll moderate this I'll be honest with you I would give both The Davids a robotic b-minus C plus
I think they're better off opining than moderating okay and I think that Jason really doesn't have anything interesting to say so he's better off moderating audience liked 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 gonna 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 was I thought that you'd Veer it towards Xi Jinping in some China comments no why no any genuflecting would you like to do before you go back to your 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 that's that's the thing entertaining thank you plus a plus moderator get back to your job Jacob yeah I will I will come back next week and moderate I I have been under the weather if passed the ball and let and let us put the ball in the basket I will put the ball exactly where you each like
it perfectly look for some great assist coming next week when Jake I was back at 100 strength thanks uh to The Davids for filling information the last two weeks and we'll see you all next time on the island boys we'll let your winners ride Rain Man [Music] we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music] besties [Music] where did you get Mercies [Music]