E113: DOJ tries to break up Google, vaccine questions, Ukraine escalation & more

Jason Calacanis 0:00 Sacksy-poo, how much heat and momentum has Nikki Haley gotten this week?

David Sacks 0:03 Oh my God. Stop trying to make Nikki Haley happen. Fetch is not happening. Stop trying to make fetch happen.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:09 Stop trying to make fetch happen! (laughs)

David Friedberg 0:10 It's happening.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:11 Is it happening because it's tomorrow? (laughs) What?

David Friedberg 0:14 This is like my long Google short Facebook spread trade of last year.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:17 That's so great!

David Friedberg 0:18 It's happening.

David Sacks 0:19 Fetch is not happening, okay? Stop trying to make fetch happen.

Jason Calacanis 0:22 Don't let your winner slide. Rain Man David Sacks. I'm going all in. And I said- We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, ... queen of kinwah. I'm going all in.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:39 Just as a, um, programming note, we did a Twitter survey and you selected Sacks as the person you wanted to moderate the pod most next. So welcome to Fox News Sunday.

David Sacks 0:51 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:52 And here's your host, David Sacks.

David Sacks 0:54 You're really chafed about this, aren't you, J-Cal?

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:56 No, I am excited for it! (laughs) I am so excited.

David Friedberg 1:00 Just to save a keyboard warrior the time, I will never, ever, ever moderate this thing.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:05 (laughs)

David Friedberg 1:07 So I'm here to talk.

David Sacks 1:08 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 besties think it's more important to discuss their stock portfolios-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:26 (laughs)

David Sacks 1:26 ... we're gonna save Ukraine for later in the show. Priorities, right gentlemen?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:30 (laughs)

David Sacks 1:31 And why not? Who says you can't take it with you? The dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya is planning to be entombed with his money like an Egyptian pharaoh.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:38 (laughs)

David Sacks 1:38 And with his sweaters too, even though it certainly won't be cold where he's going.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:42 (laughs)

David Sacks 1:43 And of course, he'll throw in the world's greatest moderator, Jason Calacanis, in the tomb to be his servant in the afterlife. It's the role J-Cal has been preparing for all his life by sucking up to every tech founder and VC he can get in a room with.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:55 (laughs)

David Sacks 1:56 I give better odds to the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg. He's just paranoid enough to survive with me in the bunker, even though he still won't be questioning the Davos elites that got us here.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:05 (laughs) How much did that intro cost?

David Sacks 2:08 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:09 (laughs)

David Sacks 2:10 Does it come with a money back refund? (laughs) You guys are laughing. You guys are laughing.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:16 I'm laughing. I don't know, I'm laughing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Are they with you or at you? (laughs)

David Sacks 2:20 (laughs) That's good.

David Friedberg 2:21 The funniest part was when you almost read aloud, like, it's like you were like, "And then David Friedberg..." Insert pause here. (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:29 (laughs) Just, just reading the notes.

David Sacks 2:31 It's an intro, it's an intro.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:33 I'm so glad we do an unscripted show. Okay, go ahead.

David Sacks 2:35 Oof. Friedberg, I remember when you did the intro-

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:38 Come on! Did I read-

David Sacks 2:39 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.

David Friedberg 2:45 All I have to say, Chamath, is job security is here. All right, well done.

David Sacks 2:48 (laughs)

David Sacks 2:49 Okay, issue one.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:50 Issue one.

David Sacks 2:51 Google breakup.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:52 Issue one. (laughs)

David Sacks 2:53 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 has 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 two previous acquisitions from a decade ago is an attempt to rewrite history. They said the DOJ mischaracterizes how its advertising products work. They say that people choose to use Google because they're effective. And the company highlights other companies making moves in the advertising industry as well, such as Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and TikTok. So, I guess I'll kick it to you, Chamath. Wh- 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?

David Friedberg 4:03 Yeah, I think that this is a totally ill-founded lawsuit. And I think it just shows more of the personal enmity and anger that some people in the US government has towards entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship than anything else. Now, why is that? Let's just think about what a monopoly is. A mon- a monopoly or a monopolist effectively creates a completely stagnant, non-vibrant market in which they have pricing power and complete control. Now, the argument that I think that refutes that just on its face is if you actually look, number one, at their share, and number two, how the rest of the share has changed over time. So Nick, can you just please throw that up from Bloomberg? This is just in a Bloomberg article that I just shared with you guys. But Google controls 26.5% of a market. 43.4% of that market is with a diverse group of others. Meta has 18.4% and Amazon has 11.7. This is not the type of pie chart you would see if you had a monopolist. So for example, if you went back to the big, big, big monopolist case in the 1980s, which is when we broke up Ma Bell, well, what that circle would have shown is that they basically had effectively 100% share. And what this shows is that there's a huge diversity of people in this market. The second thing is that if you had done this chart many years ago, Amazon would not have really even been there. And over the last five years, they represent almost 12% of the entire market. And it means that if you forecasted forward, they could be at 15 to 20% in a few years as well. So while the pie is growing, and definitely Google takes a lot of the profit dollars, the distribution is so much more than what anything looks like in a monopoly. And so I just think it means that the DOJ is more focused on trying to punish these great American companies than it is in trying to be logical and reasoned. And so I, I don't think this is gonna 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 in 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.

David Sacks 6:56 Friedberg, let me go to you. I think, you know, Chamath raises a really great point that if you define the market as digital advertising, then, you know, Google's market share is only about a quarter. That doesn't seem like a monopoly. However, what the government says is that you shouldn't look at digital advertising as a whole but rather the sort of brokered advertising that, you know, Google does for third party websites and applications. Let me show a chart from their lawsuit. You can see here that the way they define it, again, they see it as this brokering of, um, sell-side inventory with our website publishers, and then buy-side demand with your advertisers. Defined this way, it looks like Google has 90% or more market share on the sell side because of 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?

David Friedberg 8:03 I've been involved in ad networks since about 2002, so it's been, uh... Obviously, I'm not directly involved in the business anymore, but, um, I was pretty close to this and I was pretty close to DoubleClick and the acquisition. I was a business product manager for a period of time on AdWords. So the way that, uh, 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 gonna 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's 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, 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 have like a, I think, initially, like a 60/40 rev 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% to their publishers. I gotta check my math on that or, or whatever the latest

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:12 I heard high 60s, yeah. Yeah, high 60s.

David Friedberg 10:14 Yeah, so c- 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, to source advertisers and to make money off of their ad inventory. And it turns out it was a lot more effective to use an ad network to do that. The other ad networks simply haven't been as good at building an auction model and building competitiveness. But I will tell you that when you get to a certain volume, and it's not a big volume, you don't need a million advertisers bidding against each other. You only need a few dozen advertisers. And once you have a few dozen advertisers bidding against each other, you start to get very competitive in inventory. So Google's real lock-in with publishers and the real reason they win in this marketplace is because they, they pay the publishers the most. And if you try and break this up and if you actually do try and, you know, uh, 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 advertiser spend, and consumers are getting the best quality experience. That's what makes Google's model so hard to tackle from an antitrust perspective because it's giving consumers-

David Sacks 11:30 So basically, are... Is what you're saying that because fundamentally this is an auction model, it prevents Google from extracting monopoly rents?

David Friedberg 11:39 Correct. And, and they already pay the highest share on their ad network back to the publishers, and so you could go in and say, "Hey, high 60s or 70%, they should be paying 90%." What's the real right number if they're already paying-

David Sacks 11:50 Right.

David Friedberg 11:50 ... more than anyone else to the publishers? They're already making a lower margin than anyone. And I'll say, let, let me just, let me just add two more things, sorry, which I think are just-

David Sacks 11:58 Well, can I go to J-Cal first? I just wanna get-

David Friedberg 11:59 Yeah.

David Sacks 11:59 ... J-Cal in here.

David Friedberg 12:00 Yeah, yeah.

David Sacks 12:00 Even though he wouldn't do the same for me.

David Friedberg 12:02 Yeah (laughs) .

David Sacks 12:02 Uh, J-Cal, do you agree with Friedberg that, uh, that the reason for Google's success is that they're hyper efficient?And this auction mechanism prevents monopoly behavior?

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:12 No, I, there is monopoly behavior going on at Google, obviously, with search and putting their own content and services up top. And to Chamath'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 DoubleClick, 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%, which is exactly to the percentage that, uh, Google was 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 ChatGPT. So...

David Sacks 13:16 Right. So do you think-

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:17 Much like what happened with Microsoft, you know, they're, they're just late. 10 years too late, maybe.

David Sacks 13:21 Right, right. So to use one of your favorite words, is the DOJ acting as a rug puller here for Google?

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:27 (laughs) .

David Sacks 13:27 In the sense that they're trying to unwind 10 year old acquisitions. Does that, does that make sense?

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:32 Yeah, it doesn't make much sense to me.

David Sacks 13:33 Shouldn't the government be able to unwind acquisitions that happened a decade ago? Does that make any sense?

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:38 No.

David Friedberg 13:38 No, of course not.

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:38 No. No, they have, that they should, they should learn from it and not do it again.

David Sacks 13:43 Yeah.

David Friedberg 13:43 Tex, what do you think?

David Sacks 13:45 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.

David Friedberg 13:52 Yeah.

David Sacks 13:53 Like, when you get approval from the government, you wanna know you're good.

David Friedberg 13:56 Yeah.

David Sacks 13:56 And we have an approval process, so it seems to me, I agree with J-Cal, like if the government is gonna have a problem with an acquisition, state it upfront, but then once they approve it, you're approved, you're done.

David Friedberg 14:07 Yeah.

David Sacks 14:07 Otherwise, you know, companies will be much less likely to engage in acquisitions, and that's gonna have a chilling effect on M&A behavior in the ecosystem, which is as bad for the ecosystem as a whole.

David Friedberg 14:18 We do need these- We do really need these exits.

Chamath Palihapitiya 14:20 What is really does is it puts, it puts US competitiveness against every other country and any other regulatory regime that'll be more permissive to this stuff.

David Friedberg 14:26 Totally agree.

Chamath Palihapitiya 14:27 And that doesn't, 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.

David Friedberg 15:16 Right. I'll also add, I, I totally agree with Chamath. 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 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, gonna become, uh, kind of an opening for some, you know, international competitor to come in and try and provide, uh, 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, as Chamath pointed out earlier. But so much more of consumer behavior is shifting, where people are going direct to e-commerce sites, and then the ads that are getting the highest click-through and where advertisers are spending more and more money, uh, is on e-commerce sites. I know this from experience on a couple boards I'm at, where companies stopped spending on Facebook and Google and just started spending exclusively on Amazon. And that's where you get consumers that are much more likely to purchase, the purchasing proclivity is higher, the click-through rate is higher, so the return on ad spend is much higher. And then I think that there's a big shift happening right now, as you guys know, with third party cookies. Google has declared that they're removing third party cookies in 2024. This means that in 2024, it is gonna be very hard to track a user from one website to the next. If you go to a website and look at furniture and then you go to another website, third party cookies allow an advertiser to find you on that other website, knowing that you were just looking at furniture and send you a furniture ad and say, "Hey, come on over," and you're more likely to click on that ad. It's been very effective for advertising, and particularly in the segment of advertising called retargeting, but it is becoming much harder to do this with third party cookies and with the Apple identifier being yanked. And Google just made an attempt to try and get this change with the W3C that was rejected, and that change is now gonna make this hit very, very hard beginning in 2024. So the ad networks themselves are already being massively hurt by Apple's ID changes, the third party cookies being removed. It's becoming harder to target consumers, harder to make money as a, um, for publishers. So meanwhile, the market's being challenged, Amazon's coming in-

Chamath Palihapitiya 17:36 Well, this-

David Friedberg 17:36 No, it's kinda this, yeah, yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 17:36 This is the inverse definition of a monopoly. When you have a market-

David Friedberg 17:39 Totally.

Chamath Palihapitiya 17:40 ... 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.

David Friedberg 17:51 Totally.

Chamath Palihapitiya 17:52 Five years ago, this would've 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...

David Friedberg 18:17 If they called 30 of us into a room one by one and said, "Can you please explain how this works?" You would have come to a different conclusion because we could have articulated these things and it would have been clear. And so, why do they not do that? Or if they do do it, who's actually in there? Either way, whatever's getting to the conclusion of, "Let's go file this lawsuit in 2023," is late at a minimum and misguided at best. You know?

Jason Calacanis 18:43 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 to paint." I think this is like our government saying-

David Friedberg 18:54 It's totally different.

Jason Calacanis 18:54 ... Google ... It is totally different, but-

David Friedberg 18:56 (laughs) Totally different. Other than that, it's the same. Totally different. (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 18:59 But, but, we're s- I think that this lawsuit makes no sense, therefore-

David Friedberg 19:02 You always have to bring it back to China. Does everything in your brain-

Jason Calacanis 19:04 No, I did not. No.

David Friedberg 19:04 ... have to virtue signal?

Jason Calacanis 19:06 No. No.

19:06 (laughs)

David Friedberg 19:06 Like, it's like, you have like a virtue signal?

Jason Calacanis 19:07 No, I'm trying to be intellectually- I'm trying to have an intellectually interesting conversation here.

David Friedberg 19:10 Jason, Jason, we could be talking-

David Sacks 19:11 He's, he's steel manning an intellectually honest position.

Jason Calacanis 19:14 Exactly. Let me finish.

David Friedberg 19:15 We could be talking.

Jason Calacanis 19:15 Let me finish, Chamath. Let me finish before you jump the fence. Very simply, you asked, like, why are they filing something that makes no sense? My position is-

David Friedberg 19:25 Yes, tell me about China.

Jason Calacanis 19:25 ... 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, because it-

David Friedberg 19:37 How does it, how does it relate to China?

Jason Calacanis 19:39 How does it relate to Xi Jinping?

David Sacks 19:40 Well, actually you, I kind of agree with J-Cal here actually.

Jason Calacanis 19:42 Go ahead.

David Sacks 19:42 I'll defend him for a second. Okay. Take-

Jason Calacanis 19:43 Right. World's second, world's second greatest moderator.

David Friedberg 19:46 Yeah, third greatest.

David Sacks 19:46 Take China out of it for a second-

Jason Calacanis 19:48 Yeah.

David Sacks 19:48 ... because that, that can mean, that can mean a lot of different things. And so I don't want to get hung up on that, but-

Jason Calacanis 19:53 Yeah.

David Sacks 19:53 ... it does feel to me like the government is lashing out against-

Jason Calacanis 19:57 Yes.

David Sacks 19:57 ... companies like Google-

Jason Calacanis 19:59 I agree with that.

David Sacks 19:59 ... because they're perceived as being too powerful.

Jason Calacanis 20:00 That's my preference.

David Sacks 20:01 That's what's going on.

Jason Calacanis 20:02 Yes.

David Sacks 20:02 And in fact, I mean, that's Lina 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-

Jason Calacanis 20:19 Yeah.

David Sacks 20:19 ... they're, they're just kind of barking up the wrong tree is sort of the idea here.

Jason Calacanis 20:22 One final thing, David. There's, there's two other things that they, 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 is doing an ad business now. They did $350 million in the first year of that business, a million a day, and they're projected to do a billion next year. And those have location information in it because you have your destination.

David Friedberg 20:52 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 20:52 And so those new networks and new opportunities are emerging.

David Friedberg 20:56 That's the question. It's, it's, it's, 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 (laughs) and claim that their success is unfair if you're not part of it. And I, I think that just because something is successful in a marketplace doesn't mean it's a monopoly. You know, this whole thing of envy, you know, we've, 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 in a 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, it's going to go somewhere else.

David Sacks 21:40 Well, I mean, just to play devil's advocate with it, on that, Freeburg. It sounds like we all agree that the government has kind of the wrong theory and is barking up the wrong tree here. However, isn't it the case that Apple and Google are too powerful, maybe not in this auction, advertising auction marketplace, but when it comes to the App Store, I mean, they have an operating system monopoly with iOS and Android, or duopoly. They-

David Friedberg 22:03 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 App Store case, we have a-

David Sacks 22:29 True monopoly power.

David Friedberg 22:29 ... it's a duopoly.

David Sacks 22:31 Yeah.

David Friedberg 22:31 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 search in the United States, it is also an effective monopoly. And those are the things where if you really wanted to go after them because you think there's some damage being done to people, I would have focused there but-

David Sacks 23:02 Right.

David Friedberg 23:02 ... the ad business has nothing to do with any of this. It just means that-

David Sacks 23:06 Right.

David Friedberg 23:06 ... they don't understand how the market works.

David Sacks 23:09 Right. Okay, so shifting gears. Microsoft has just been sued on antitrust grounds, or rather, there's a probe by the EU, and this was based on a complaint actually from Slack. Slack filed a complaint back in 2020 that Microsoft was basically engaging in, in bundling or tying of products. The allegation is that Microsoft unfairly ties Microsoft Teams and other software to its widely used Office Suite. Do you guys think that's a better claim?

David Friedberg 23:39 Okay, so-

David Sacks 23:40 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.

David Friedberg 23:54 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 air space 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.

David Sacks 25:20 Right.

David Friedberg 25:20 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.

David Sacks 25:37 Well, that, that's exactly was my point when we talked about this last time, is that if Microsoft can basically clone the sort of, the breakthrough innovative product, you know, let's say they do one every year and then they put a crappy version of that-

David Friedberg 25:53 10% worse.

David Sacks 25:53 ... in their bundle.

David Friedberg 25:55 Yeah.

David Sacks 25:55 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, 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 Okta, they've done that with Zoom. You know, can't J-Cal, can we have a vibrant tech ecosystem, at least in B2B software, if Microsoft can just keep doing that indefinitely?

Jason Calacanis 26:22 Yeah, it's, it's a difficult question. I, 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 gonna 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 from 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 pace.

David Sacks 27:26 I don't know about that. Wait, Nick, can you pull up this chart?

Jason Calacanis 27:29 Yeah, it was, like, high teens or something. Was there, was there, I mean, was there growth?

David Sacks 27:31 I mean, it looks, it looks like from this chart that Slack has kind of leveled off.

Jason Calacanis 27:34 No, no, no, that's the number of users. I was talking about revenue.

David Sacks 27:36 Okay.

Jason Calacanis 27:37 If you look at Slack's revenue quarter over quarter, it's basically been the same.

David Sacks 27:40 But wasn't there a report that it's been a little bit of a disappointment to Salesforce or no?

Jason Calacanis 27:45 Well, I mean, you know, this number here that we're looking at where it says 75 million Microsoft Teams members, 12 million Slack members.

David Friedberg 27:53 Uh, by the way, if you wanted to, if you wanted to play conspiracy theorist, maybe that's why there was a falling out between Benioff and Brett. I mean, Brett was the champion of this deal, you know, $28 billion acquisition. And $20 billion, it's 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.

David Sacks 28:28 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.

David Friedberg 28:41 I have no idea. Like I said, I was p- I was pre-qualifying with saying, "Let's play conspiracy theorist for a second." (laughs)

David Sacks 28:45 (laughs) Yeah, fair enough, fair enough. Okay, so J-Cal, let, let me-

David Friedberg 28:47 By the way, can I have a suggestion? Wait, yeah, I have a suggestion. Here's a s- 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 and 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 anti-trust legislation after the fact.

David Sacks 29:41 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, uh, 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. J-Cal, your point about how what Microsoft is doing doesn't seem to be harming anybody, it seems to benefiting consumers, I think that's a, a valid point, but I would bring up a, 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 'cause 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 wanna have a healthy long-term ecosystem, I think this type of like bundling behavior is, is bad.

David Friedberg 30:53 Great point.

David Sacks 30:53 I think it's anti-competitive.

David Friedberg 30:55 It's a great point.

David Sacks 30:56 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-

David Friedberg 31:05 Transfer price.

David Sacks 31:05 ... needs to basically have an individual price.

David Friedberg 31:07 Exactly.

David Sacks 31:07 And the price of every product in that bundle should add up to the cost of the bundle.

David Friedberg 31:11 Exactly right.

David Sacks 31:11 So they can't do, like you said, Chamath, these like transfer payments or subsidies to basically, you know, take over, systematically take over every SaaS vertical.

David Friedberg 31:20 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 gonna 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.

32:14 Yeah, I disagree with you guys. Uh, 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, these concepts of, um, monopolistic bundling made a lot of sense, uh, make a lot of sense in the sense if, if what you're bundling and the service or the product or whatever is a commodity product. And these statements that you're making assume that one messaging service is the same as another messaging service, that one video app is the same as another video app, and that by giving a discount they're going to win the market. The reality, that may have made sense back in the day when there were things like trains, and trains had a monopoly on where things could go, or electricity or oil production. And all of the kind of origins of kind of monopolistic antitrust laws and, and actions started to kind of emerge here in, in our free market in the US. But when it comes to software, if your product is the same as the other guy's product, maybe they deserve to win by bundling. And maybe it's okay for them to offer a discount and beat you on pricing. Because if your product is actually better and it provides better ROI for the customer, it has a better feature set, it's faster, it has a bunch of stuff that the other product doesn't have, the market will pick it. It's not that the market's gonna 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.

David Sacks 33:38 I'm not saying that Microsoft can't copy Slack and then under cut them-

David Friedberg 33:42 Charge a different price, right.

David Sacks 33:43 ... and charge a different price and a lower price and discount it. What I'm saying is, they can't cross subsidize their Slack competitor.

David Friedberg 33:49 It's the fact that they can copy Slack that makes Slack, that means that Slack should lose. The fact that they, that Slack can't actually create something that's differentiated enough.

David Sacks 33:59 No, I disagree. Almost all software is... Look, software, new software is really hard to create but really easy to copy.

David Friedberg 34:05 Yeah.

David Sacks 34:05 I mean, the first version of a new product is hard to create, but you can reverse engineer almost any software product.

David Friedberg 34:11 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, 'cause Google's built a better search engine.

David Sacks 34:19 No, it's 'cause there's a data network effect there, that the more searches they provide, the more data they get. It's the reinforcement learning.

David Friedberg 34:25 I'll say, I'll say it differently. It's easier to copy-

34:27 There's an asymptote to that quality point though. I don't think that that's necessarily true.

34:30 No, I think, I think there's a nuance here that-

34:32 And by the way, all the social networks that people thought were, had massive lock-in effect, turns out they don't, right? You know.

34:36 David, no that's not true. Look, there's more lock-in deeper in the stack that you exist. There's very little lock-in at the application layer. So workflow apps, which effectively is what most of these enterprise software things are, are very copyable because there's nothing that really locks it in. But if you're a social network or if you're some deep machine learned thing that basically generates great search results, that's much harder to copy because more and more of the product, what generates the product quality-

35:06 Precisely.

35:06 ... is underneath the waterline.

35:07 Yeah.

35:07 But I think in enterprise software it's all thin UI layers on top of very simple workflows.

35:13 Then don't compete. Then don't compete 'cause the bigger guy that offers a discount is always gonna beat you.

35:17 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 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.

35:35 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.

David Sacks 35:44 That's 'cause there's no bundling. There's no bundling. There's no dumping.

David Friedberg 35:46 Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot of ways... But that's my point. There's a lot of ways to compete in the marketplace if the product you're offering is of parity-

David Sacks 35:52 No, the problem is-

David Friedberg 35:52 ... or is a commodity.

David Sacks 35:54 ... that, no but the problem-

David Friedberg 35:54 Build s- build something that's different enough that people are willing to pay for it.

David Sacks 35:57 Well then, you know, like-

David Friedberg 35:58 And that, and that, and that they're willing to pay more than they're, they'll pay the big guy that's giving them a bundling discount. Just build a better product.

David Sacks 36:03 Then the whole B2B SaaS space should basically pack up shop and go home. We should just stop funding, VCs should just stop funding new SaaS companies because, and it'll be a-

David Friedberg 36:12 And all the productivity gains will just go out the window.

36:14 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 36:14 Yeah, why would you fund any innovative new product?

David Friedberg 36:16 Yeah, it's the definition of anti-competitive then. Yeah.

36:19 How's that bad for the customer? They're paying less and they're getting a better product.

David Sacks 36:21 There'll be fewer new products created.

David Friedberg 36:23 Yeah, free at the limit, what you're basically saying is because Comcast is a monopolistic provider of my internet connection, I should have to take their video offering and we'll never use Netflix.

36:33 ... 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.

36:40 No, no, no, they, they-

36:40 But again, what you're saying-

36:41 But if you- but if you think-

36:41 But what you're saying effectively, and what you just said is that B2B software is effectively a commodity.

36:45 No, no, my point is-

36:46 Anyone can copy it, anyone can replicate it.

36:47 ... if Comcast said to you, "I'm turning this off. You only have one choice and it's mine because this is my rails and I built it," you would turn to the government to help you because you would say, "But Netflix is a better product." 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. But if you don't believe that- Well, steel is a 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 US market to drive all the US producers-

37:27 Right.

37:27 ... out of business. And then once they were out of business they'd raise the price.

37:30 But the point, 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? Oh, we have, we have, we have a law around that.

37:44 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. J Cal, you wanna get in on this?

38:03 Sure. I take it all the way. Go ahead.

Jason Calacanis 38:04 For a model to say, I wonder when you install Teams, does it automatically i- when you install the Microsoft Office Suite, does it automatically install Teams? Because it does seem the default there matters. Do people have to actively turn it on or is it actively built in? And so the bundling of it I think matters and then interoperability matters. So there are other vectors here to force some impor- in- interoperability. So if you open your Windows machine, do you have a choice of which browser-

David Friedberg 38:29 It depends, for example, like let's just-

Jason Calacanis 38:32 Yeah.

David Friedberg 38:32 Let's just say that you use Exchange for certain things.

Jason Calacanis 38:36 Yeah.

David Friedberg 38:36 But in other things, for example, to manage your namespace you may use Okta. But then they say, "Actually no, we need you to use our version of Okta."

Jason Calacanis 38:45 Yeah.

David Friedberg 38:45 It all becomes complicated. I think it's too complicated for a government to understand. So I think-

Jason Calacanis 38:50 Yeah.

David Friedberg 38:50 ... the general thing is can we extend the definition of these basic rules that we've agreed to in other markets to include technology and would we be better served? And I think for the most part, I do think it would be. It would better serve startups. It would better serve the folks that want to build products-

Jason Calacanis 39:08 How would that work in practicality though? You would, you would-

David Friedberg 39:10 I, I think what David said-

Jason Calacanis 39:12 ... have offices that say, "Here's Teams-"

David Friedberg 39:12 No, I think what Dave-

Jason Calacanis 39:13 "... turn it on for a dollar a person or something. Here's an introductory price."

David Friedberg 39:16 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 on the balance sheet, right? And Pfizer has a need still to subsidize all of the R&D of their drugs. And you would say, "Well yeah, they have $30 billion so they should just take the money off the balance sheet and do it." Why don't they do it? It's because the accounting laws and all of the complicated anti-competitive laws say, "Well, if you want to take this cash pile and use it over here, it goes from an asset liability item, $30 billion of cash, and all of a sudden I'm gonna net it against your EPS." All right, Chamath, let's-

Jason Calacanis 40:13 So, but-

David Friedberg 40:14 I think okay, look, I think- But my point is there's a- ... 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.

Jason Calacanis 40:27 Yeah.

David Friedberg 40:27 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-

Jason Calacanis 40:34 Oh boy. Oh boy. (laughs)

David Friedberg 40:35 (laughs) Which is, and I think we can show this clip. Red meat for David. Red meat for David. Yeah, so Albert Bourla, who is the CEO of Pfizer, went to Davos last week.

Jason Calacanis 40:43 Where?

David Friedberg 40:43 And he probably expect- to Davos, you know, the-

Jason Calacanis 40:45 (laughs)

David Friedberg 40:46 ... the, 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-

Jason Calacanis 41:00 Rebel News?

David Friedberg 41:00 ... the perimeter and a- started asking him some tough questions. Let's roll tape.

Jason Calacanis 41:04 What's Rebel News?

Unknown guest at Davos questioning Pfizer CEO 41:06 More like 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?

Jason Calacanis 41:14 Thank you very much. I'm sorry. (laughs)

Unknown guest at Davos questioning Pfizer CEO 41:16 It's just a question. I mean we, we now know-

Jason Calacanis 41:19 Good question.

Unknown guest at Davos questioning Pfizer CEO 41:19 ... that the vaccines didn't stop transmission, but why did you keep it secret?

Jason Calacanis 41:24 Good question.

Unknown guest at Davos questioning Pfizer CEO 41:25 You said it was 100% effective, then 90%, then 80%, then 70%. But we now know that the vaccines do not trans- stop transmission. Why did you keep that secret?

Jason Calacanis 41:36 Have a nice day.

Unknown guest at Davos questioning Pfizer CEO 41:37 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?

Jason Calacanis 41:45 Incredible command.

David Friedberg 41:46 We should, we should, we should cut this.

41:47 Okay, we can stop from there, but that-

Jason Calacanis 41:49 Wow, welcome to InfoWars, all in InfoWars crossovers. (laughs)

David Friedberg 41:51 That's what real journalism looks like.

Jason Calacanis 41:53 First of all, you know what-

David Friedberg 41:53 That's what real journalism looks like.

Jason Calacanis 41:55 Yeah. You, you know what's bad now?

David Friedberg 41:55 Not a bunch of New York Times reporters covering for powerful people, but asking them tough questions.

Jason Calacanis 42:00 Is that a legitimate question, Friedberg? Is that a legitimate question?

David Friedberg 42:03 That is a totally legitimate question.

Jason Calacanis 42:04 Friedberg, what do you think of the question? Is it legit or not?

David Friedberg 42:06 You got, you guys are about to get us down ranked on YouTube and Spotify with the warn-

42:10 (laughs)

42:10 We're about to get warning labels on each episode.

42:12 Why is someone covering for this sort of thing?

42:14 I, look, I mean you're-

42:15 By the way, you're right that YouTube banned that video.

42:19 Yeah.

42:19 We had to watch it on Twitter because Elon Musk Twitter is still free.

42:22 Okay listen, so-

42:23 Why is YouTube protecting-

42:24 ... actually-

42:25 Hold on. Why is-

42:26 Yeah.

42:26 ... YouTube abridging freedom of the press in order to protect the powerful CEO of Pfizer from answering-

Jason Calacanis 42:32 Well just, just more basic questions-

David Friedberg 42:33 ... basic questions that are legitimate.

Jason Calacanis 42:34 That, yeah, just look at the questions.

David Friedberg 42:35 Just basic questions.

Jason Calacanis 42:37 Is, is it a legitimate question of-... 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 he didn't just answer that, "No, we didn't cover it up."

David Sacks 42:52 Freeburg?

David Friedberg 42:53 What are you a- you're asking me if I know what, whether Pfizer did a cover-up? Is that what you're a- (laughs) like-

Jason Calacanis 42:58 Well, no, it's a legitimate question-

David Sacks 42:59 Okay. (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 42:59 ... is what I'm getting at.

David Sacks 43:00 Why are you unwilling to question the Pfizer CEO or are you-

David Friedberg 43:03 Oh, no, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not unwilling to question it all, but I'm not, I, I don't think that this is a Phi- Look, first of all, Pfizer is a commercial enterprise, so they have the incentive to make money, 100%. Right? So their objective is to sell a vaccine, I think they're making $10 to $15 billion on this vaccine this year. You're absolutely right that the economic incentive is there for Pfizer to continue to push and rationalize the sales of this vaccine. The efficacy of the vaccine waned very quickly. As this virus evolved and mutated, it became pretty evident pretty fast that the, uh, the rate of transmission, uh, in vaccinated people continued 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, uh, 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, and it's, 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, uh, a booster and all this stuff with the original variant.

David Sacks 44:23 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, 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 risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, which is basically inflammation of the heart tissue, which can basically lead to heart attacks, saying that the risk among young people, especially young men, in 18 to 24 years was elevated if they got the vaccine. This was a study out of France. So it's pretty clear that, that the, that the vaccine-

David Friedberg 45:00 There are, there- Yeah, so let me just say-

David Sacks 45:01 ... wasn't as efficacious as we thought, but is it less safe than we thought as well? I, I genuinely, I don't know the answer to this. I'd, I would like to know.

David Friedberg 45:09 It's an important question, and there's a lot of work being done to uncover it, and here's a link to a paper that was published in the journal, Circulation is the name of the journal, not too long ago, by a team led by a researcher at Mass General. And, um, what this, uh, 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 w- 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 incidents of myocarditis in certain populations that get the, uh, the COVID vaccine. And by the way, the incidence rate is still typically less than, uh, two out of every 100,000 people that get the vaccine, but as you saw in the paper you just shared and others have validated it, it can be as high as 30 times more likely to happen in young people that take the, uh, the Moderna vaccine, which is still a low incidence, but, but 30 times higher is, is significant and worth, worth understanding. So the three kind of reasons or the three ideas about-

David Sacks 46:21 Wait, 30 times higher?

David Friedberg 46:22 Yeah.

David Sacks 46:22 That sounds like a lot.

David Friedberg 46:24 Yeah, so the, the reason, and, uh, also small base, but yes. And so the three ideas or, 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 autoantibodies. 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 autoantibodies, 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 autoantibodies. They found no ch- 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 a- but opens up many more doors, which is, what's really going on? So if you have spike protein in your blood and your body's not clearing it ...

David Sacks 47:53 Right. Well, how, h- how long after getting vaccinated were, were the spike proteins still floating around? Because I remember when the mRNA-

David Friedberg 47:59 This was, uh, this was st-

David Sacks 47:59 ... vaccine first came out, they said it w- the spike proteins would go away after a couple of days.

David Friedberg 48:03 Three weeks.

David Sacks 48:05 Three weeks after vaccine?

David Friedberg 48:05 Three weeks. Yep.

David Sacks 48:06 Have they done a study, like, you know, six months after or a year after?

David Friedberg 48:09 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 is 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, uh, particular-

David Sacks 48:28 Oh, that doesn't sound good.

David Friedberg 48:29 ... thing, set of reasons.

David Sacks 48:30 Wait, J-Cal, let me ask you.

David Friedberg 48:31 Right.

David Sacks 48:31 I remember, I remember th- 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."

Jason Calacanis 48:48 Yeah.

David Sacks 48:49 ... because I don't think the risk-return makes sense.

Jason Calacanis 48:52 Well-

David Sacks 48:52 And he almost got canceled for that. Was Rogan-

Jason Calacanis 48:54 Yeah.

David Sacks 48:54 ... right about that?

Jason Calacanis 48:56 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. The- because the virus mutated, the efficacy of these, uh, 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- were pretty significant. Uh, for people under that certain age, it was lower. So e- everybody had to make a very personal decision here. I- We are now in a-

David Sacks 49:37 Wait, hold on a second.

Jason Calacanis 49:37 We are now in a position-

David Sacks 49:38 Hold on a second. Was it- was it a personal decision when you had vaccine mandates? And then on top-

Jason Calacanis 49:43 Yeah.

David Sacks 49:44 ... of that, on top of that, you had the media-

Jason Calacanis 49:47 Right.

David Sacks 49:47 ... 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 and you got sick, there wouldn't be a- a hospital bed for you. There was, you know, a lot of, like, dancing on the graves with these people.

Jason Calacanis 50:01 Yeah.

David Sacks 50:01 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 COVID, 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.

Jason Calacanis 50:19 You're right.

David Sacks 50:19 Was there not?

Jason Calacanis 50:20 I mean, you're right. There was, and I think part of the reason I myself got vaccinated was because I wanted to be able to travel again. I wanted to be able to go to Madison Square Garden and watch the Knicks. And I also thought, "Well, I don't wanna 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? And also, it was apparently oversold. So when the Pfizer CEO would say when they knew it wasn't gonna stop transmission, I think it's a valid question to investigate what Pfizer knew and when, uh, a- and just keep everybody accountable for this, uh, for future things that happen because right now, we're in a position where if Pfizer's not being honest with us, if the origin story of COVID isn't being honest with us, these conspiracy theories are now starting to start to look like reality.

David Sacks 51:11 Let me go to you, Chamath. 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 re-vaccinated every two months for it to- to work. On safety, I don't wanna 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-

David Friedberg 51:50 Right.

David Sacks 51:50 ... that was not actually good for us? And would you make that same decision today?

David Friedberg 51:56 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 gonna spend nine or 10 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 gonna 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's 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 used 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, ni- nine months, a year, two years.

David Sacks 54:02 Right. Are you, you're describing Operation Warp Speed?

David Friedberg 54:05 So that emergency use authorization fast tracked these vaccines to market. Now, the thing to keep in mind is there are still two classes of vaccines. There are the messenger RNA vaccines, that's the BioNTech and Pfizer ones, and then there are the more regular ones that in many cases the West was dumping on. AstraZeneca and Johnson&Johnson as-

David Sacks 54:24 Yeah. Yeah, I remember.

David Friedberg 54:24 ... example. We used to ship those to developing countries and say, "We'll just keep the m- MRNA ones. You guys take." Dave Chappelle had this funny joke. He's like-

David Sacks 54:32 (laughs)

David Friedberg 54:32 ... "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 said, "Chamath, I wanna do a study that-" or a year ago, "I wanna 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 published something, and basically, you know, what we see, David, is that for folks with myocarditis, you're releasing troponin. And this is a sym- this is a- 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 was a 63-year-old white woman. I'm saying that i- 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 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-grain enough to engineer the drug for incredible specificity, and I think that's the thing that we're dealing with now. E- and by the way, last thing, because of all this, it probably is reasonable to take a step back and have a commission that just uncovers all of this stuff. Look, we've had commissions for things as benign as-

David Sacks 57:37 Right, I totally agree. We need an investigation.

David Friedberg 57:38 ... like steroid usage in baseball. Like, if steroid usage in baseball-

David Sacks 57:41 Totally, we need an investigation.

David Friedberg 57:42 ... 10- 10/11 in commission.

David Sacks 57:43 And it goes- this goes back, this goes back to- to-

David Friedberg 57:45 Yeah.

David Sacks 57:45 ... to Rebel News asking Burleigh a very simple question which is, "What did you know and when did you know it 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 and we have a right to know. But, Friedberg, let me ask you a question here. I think, you know, Chamath talked about this sort of sped up process to cut through red tape and get a vaccine to market more quickly. I personally actually think that that kind of process is fine for patients who want to assume the risk. 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- or they could lose their job or their freedom to participate in society. And now, we're finding out that they may have been forced to do something that, in their particular case, may not really have been a- a great cost-benefit decision for them. What do you think that the sort of impact's gonna be of this just s- like socially? I mean, you've talked about, I think, that there's a de- a decline in trust of institutional authority in the US and that's a huge problem. I mean, isn't this gonna contribute to that?

David Friedberg 59:02 Yeah, look, I mean, I think that there's been institutional authority overreach, uh, that's been building for quite some time. And you know, look, I mean, you guys can go back to our first episode and our earliest episodes, and I wasn't and haven't been, 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 a- accumulating, call it, $10 trillion of- of, you know, or $4 trillion 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- the benefit was negligible because the- the virus continued to spread and evolve, and, uh, there was no way to really stop the virus in its tracks. Hindsight is 20/20, fog of war, lawmakers made decisions. Was it the right decision? Would you have made the same decision? It's really hard to say. You feel like you're saving the world. When the world is ending, uh, it's easy to kind of act, uh, 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. V- vaccines are required for a number of other illnesses in a number of school systems, uh, 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- the cost-benefit analysis is- is- is much there.

David Sacks 1:00:39 Yeah, actually, I think- I think you're right that one of the costs of this policy is gonna be that people will stop trusting vaccination in general, even though I think that these COVID vaccines, I'm not even sure you can really call them vaccines. I mean, every other vaccine that I've ever heard of...... completely prevents that disease. The polio vaccine ended polio. The M- MMR vaccine ended measle, mumps, and rubella. The COVID vaccine just didn't work. I don't think it was a vaccine, but I think now what's gonna happen is people are gonna have a lot more distrust and- and-

David Friedberg 1:01:12 There's a tremendous a- 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 than the consequences of, uh, kind of continuing or- or kind of, you know, making this change. So it's a- it's a perfectly-

David Sacks 1:01:52 Well, actually, that's a good point. All right, final question to J-Cal, then, on that point.

David Friedberg 1:01:55 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:01:56 So, I mean, J-Cal, look, you were dunking, or at least concern trolling, on anti-vaxxers during this time period. Do you reconsider that at all? I mean, in other words, everybody was saying that the anti-vaxxers were these stupid, unsophisticated people-

Jason Calacanis 1:02:10 Well-

David Sacks 1:02:11 ... who-

Jason Calacanis 1:02:11 ... yeah, I- I think-

David Sacks 1:02:13 But- 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-

Jason Calacanis 1:02:22 Yeah, we all took the vaccine.

David Sacks 1:02:22 ... of being an early adopter of a product, and now we're finding out that it certainly didn't do what it said.

Jason Calacanis 1:02:28 But, you know, in fairness, we- 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 of people had gotten them-

David Sacks 1:02:39 Yeah, but okay, hold on-

Jason Calacanis 1:02:39 ... and the MRNA, hold on, let me just- you asked a question, 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.

David Sacks 1:02:57 All right, Nick, pull up this tweet.

Jason Calacanis 1:02:59 But, you know, we need to- I- I think we have to look at, uh, 'cause 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 vaccine-

David Sacks 1:03:14 No, no, no, I never supported the mandate.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:16 You did. We had a conversation about that, like if- should people be able to go to work-

David Sacks 1:03:19 No, I-

Jason Calacanis 1:03:19 ... should people go on- on trains, and your- your position was people shouldn't be able to go on trains.

David Sacks 1:03:23 No, no, no, I didn't No, I- I did not support a mandate. I thought it should always be people's choice. I did believe that-

Jason Calacanis 1:03:27 Oh yeah, but you did say, going to group events-

David Sacks 1:03:29 Hold on, I made the mistake, hold on a second-

Jason Calacanis 1:03:30 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:03:31 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, 'cause I thought it should be people's choice.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:45 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:03:45 Um, and I certainly wasn't... I don't think I was dunking on the anti-vaxxers. Let's pull up this tweet, Nick.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:51 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:03:53 My lord. Trump, his cronies at Fox News are killing their own constituents with this anti-vax nonsense.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:58 (laughs) Yeah. Uh-

David Sacks 1:04:00 Do you retract that?

Jason Calacanis 1:04:04 Do I retract it? Um...

David Sacks 1:04:06 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:04:07 I'm trying to look at the date.

David Friedberg 1:04:08 By the way, this is a- this is a tweet that, um, Jason put out. What was the date? Fe- Jan 4th, 2022, that Sax pulled up just so people-

Jason Calacanis 1:04:16 Yeah, I mean at this point-

David Sacks 1:04:16 No, that was only a year ago.

Jason Calacanis 1:04:18 Yeah, no, at this point, people were saying that, um-

David Sacks 1:04:21 No, I get it. I get it.

David Friedberg 1:04:22 ... the deaths is- the- there was a large amount of deaths among-

David Sacks 1:04:24 Look, this was not- this was not a rare- this was not a rare sentiment, but I'm saying-

Jason Calacanis 1:04:27 No, but hold on, hold on, just to give the-

David Friedberg 1:04:28 Do you still stand by this?

Jason Calacanis 1:04:29 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, Friedberg? The- the vaccine reduce- reduces the cases of deaths, correct?

David Friedberg 1:04:51 Yeah, the- the- this new bivalent booster, um, Eric Topol put out a tweet. I p- I gave you guys the link here, where he, uh, covered a paper that was done recently, and the paper shows a reduction in hospitalization rate and death rate-

Jason Calacanis 1:05:04 Yeah.

David Friedberg 1:05:04 ... for folks that are getting this new bivalent booster. So- but again, that is a benefit.

Jason Calacanis 1:05:09 That is the benefit, yeah.

David Friedberg 1:05:10 In one's own kind of personal safety, and there's a risk profile associated with that, as Sax is pointing out, but this notion that the vaccines stop the virus and are a true vaccine in the sense of how we talk about polio and chicken pox or, uh, smallpox and this other stuff, not equivalent. Very different.

David Sacks 1:05:27 No, but- but Friedberg-

David Friedberg 1:05:28 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:05:28 ... 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-

David Friedberg 1:05:40 No, that's, yeah, look-

David Sacks 1:05:41 ... then, yeah, it's not really realistic.

David Friedberg 1:05:43 Generally speaking, this is not like a vaccine in the sense of a, uh, smallpox or, um-

David Sacks 1:05:51 Right, it's just a shot. It's a treatment.

David Friedberg 1:05:53 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, uh, be in places and whether or not it's appropriate for- for a workplace setting, there's still high degrees of infectiousness with this ever-revolving 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, uh, it's a- it's a total-

David Sacks 1:06:29 But J-Cal, why won't you just say there's- the- that this so-called vaccine has been a failure? We don't know. Hold on, I'm gonna- I'm gonna admit-

Jason Calacanis 1:06:35 Hold on, it's a failure at?

David Sacks 1:06:37 We don't- we don't know the full safety implications. Like I said, I don't wanna get too far out on my skis on that. However-

Jason Calacanis 1:06:43 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:06:43 ... we know the efficaciousness of it has been a failure.

Jason Calacanis 1:06:46 For- for what? For blocking transmission or for reducing death?

David Sacks 1:06:49 That it doesn't last long enough, unless you're willing to get- hold on, unless you're willing to get jabbed six times a year, which I don't think anybody here would do that. So the thing doesn't work.

Jason Calacanis 1:06:56 And probably not necessary because it's- we- well, 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 COVID strains are so weak that maybe it's not as necessary, but there was a time period where people were not taking the vaccine, and Republicans specifically weren't taking the vaccine, and they were dying at a much higher percentage. So it didn't, if you're defining the vaccine as not getting, not transferring the disease, sure, it was a failure. It didn't block like we thought it would-

David Sacks 1:07:28 If it only worked for two months, then-

Jason Calacanis 1:07:29 ... but in terms of reducing death, but reducing death, it did work for a period of time.

David Sacks 1:07:33 If it only lasted for two months and COVID is still around and it's basically endemic, it's everywhere, how did the vaccine make any difference whatsoever?

Jason Calacanis 1:07:41 I think now it's two months, but back then it wasn't. But you know, Friedberg, you-

David Sacks 1:07:44 Wait, Friedberg, is that true?

David Friedberg 1:07:47 What's the question? I'm, I'm losing track at this point.

Jason Calacanis 1:07:49 How long does the, the lowering the percentage of deaths-

David Sacks 1:07:53 The benefits of it only-

Jason Calacanis 1:07:55 Yes. Of lo- reducing the chance of death.

David Sacks 1:07:56 ... and what we've learned is they only last two months, is that true?

David Friedberg 1:07:59 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-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:09 Yeah.

David Friedberg 1:08:09 ... kind of independent things, and as a result, over time, you know, like, yeah, we gotta 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-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:20 Yeah.

David Friedberg 1:08:20 ... gra- 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 gonna be called wrong, and they're gonna get beat up for it.

David Sacks 1:08:31 Totally.

David Friedberg 1:08:31 And they're not gonna get reelected.

David Sacks 1:08:32 And now, honestly, I feel like, I feel like you're making an effort, you're making an effort to stand by what you previously said.

David Friedberg 1:08:37 So, so, so yeah.

David Sacks 1:08:37 The marketing should come out. 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-"

Jason Calacanis 1:08:49 Well, yeah. I, I-

David Sacks 1:08:49 "... was 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.

David Friedberg 1:09:03 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 upfront. And as a result of that, maybe we need to find a different way of using emergency use authorization in the future. And I don't know, David, to your point, I'm beyond my ski tips on scientific knowledge to know how, but that could be a really useful conclusion.

David Sacks 1:09:58 Well, I'd say as a minimum, if we're... I would say as a minimum that if we're gonna do emergency use, it shouldn't be mandated. Let patients and doctors decide on their own.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:06 Yeah, I would agree with that. I would agree with that.

David Sacks 1:10:06 Okay, let's move on. So we have a moment of agreement.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:08 One, one question for Friedberg.

David Sacks 1:10:09 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:09 Would you advise or in your life, would you con- would you continue to get a booster or are you going to consider getting a booster every year?

David Friedberg 1:10:18 No. No.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:18 If they keep coming at 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?"

David Friedberg 1:10:30 I would advise, advise them to talk to their doctor and their doctor would advise them to, to do it.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:34 What do you think most doctors would tell somebody above 65 or 70 at this point?

David Friedberg 1:10:38 It depends what state they're in at this point, but (laughs) like in Texas-

Jason Calacanis 1:10:41 So it basically would be split on political lines.

David Sacks 1:10:44 Unless this virus turns into Ebola, I'm never getting boosted again.

David Friedberg 1:10:48 Totally.

David Sacks 1:10:48 I'll tell you that right now. And Friedberg agrees.

David Friedberg 1:10:50 I do agree with that.

David Sacks 1:10:50 What about you guys?

Jason Calacanis 1:10:52 I'm not getting boosted again, no.

David Sacks 1:10:53 Okay.

David Friedberg 1:10:53 I'm not getting boosted.

David Sacks 1:10:54 And I think that speaks volumes. That speaks volumes right there.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:56 And that's why I asked it. World first, murder.

David Sacks 1:10:58 That's it. That's it. Like, we could have just done this in 10 seconds.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:59 But what about your parents, David? What about-

David Friedberg 1:11:01 You guys, we are literally not, this show will be banned on every platform.

David Sacks 1:11:04 I don't know. All right, let's move on. Let's, let's move on. Hold on, Friedberg, but the fact that all of us can-

David Friedberg 1:11:08 You're right.

David Sacks 1:11:09 ... arrive at that and then we're worried about getting banned tells you-

David Friedberg 1:11:12 You're right.

David Sacks 1:11:12 ... how screwed up our society is.

Jason Calacanis 1:11:16 Yeah. You're right.

David Friedberg 1:11:16 Right.

David Sacks 1:11:16 Like-

David Friedberg 1:11:16 You're right.

David Sacks 1:11:16 ... what? We can't, like, have an honest conversation about this?

David Friedberg 1:11:19 By the way, the other thing this is gonna do, it's gonna inflame a large number of people just hearing us say this. And it... because people have these deep... What's happened is this has now become a, 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.

David Sacks 1:11:32 Yeah, well, we saw this with the mask. The mask became, the blue became the-

David Friedberg 1:11:36 Yeah. That's right. And so, so now-

David Sacks 1:11:36 ... the blue equivalent of the red MAGA hat. And the vaccine is basically, uh, you know, it's become tribal.

David Friedberg 1:11:42 Yeah, but-

David Sacks 1:11:43 But, but people need to move beyond that because this is a scientific question of, of cost and benefits related to this medical treatment. Okay, let's just move on. There's too much other stuff to talk about.

Jason Calacanis 1:11:52 Speak to your doctors, not for venture capitalists about your vaccine plan.

David Sacks 1:11:57 Thank you, Jacob.

David Friedberg 1:11:58 Totally agree. Speak to your, speak to your doctor. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 1:11:59 Yeah. Speak to your doctor. Please don't listen to us.

David Sacks 1:12:01 All right. Let's, let's move on.

Jason Calacanis 1:12:03 Whereas confused as you are.

David Friedberg 1:12:04 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.

David Sacks 1:12:12 All right, let's move on because we've gotten stuck

David Sacks 1:12:14 on this.

Jason Calacanis 1:12:14 Woof.

David Sacks 1:12:14 Okay, look, there's been some important developments in Ukraine that I think we should just cover quickly this week. There were a bunch of things. The Biden administration said they're gonna send Abrams tanks as well as Bradleys and Leopard 2s. The, uh, 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 gonna come up. The Biden administration also in a New York Times article that came out earlier this week said, that they were warming to the idea of, 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