All-In PodcastE37: NYC rejects far-left candidates, new developments in lab leak theory, App Store breakup & more
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,007 words- 0:00 – 14:31
Besties hash out a new format & the purpose of the podcast
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
As you guys know, I get panic attacks at the dentist, but she was able to navigate me through where I didn't-
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... and I only sweat through half my shirt.
- JCJason Calacanis
You have panic attacks at the dentist?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No, but I sweat profusely and I get very nervous.
- JCJason Calacanis
Why? What is that about?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
We all have weaknesses, Jason. We all-
- JCJason Calacanis
Wow.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... have weaknesses.
- JCJason Calacanis
I never knew that.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
This is my Achilles heel. My Achilles heel is the dentist.
- JCJason Calacanis
Really?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
I don't, I don't like going to the dentist either.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No, the dentist really freaks... I don't know why it freaks me out, Sacks.
- JCJason Calacanis
That's weird.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Why does it f- Have you thought about this?
- DSDavid Sacks
I had a really bad experience when I was a kid, you know?
- JCJason Calacanis
Tell us more about your (laughs) childhood trauma.
- DSDavid Sacks
Have you ever seen the movie Marathon Man? It was kinda like that.
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs) Is it safe? Is it safe?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I'm going all in. All right, here we go. Let your winners ride.
- JCJason Calacanis
Rainman, David Sacks.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I'm going all in.
- DSDavid Sacks
And I said- We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.
- JCJason Calacanis
Love you guys.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Queen of Quinoa.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I'm going all in.
- JCJason Calacanis
Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome again to another episode of the All In Podcast, Episode 37. With us today, on his noble crusade conquering Europe, Chamath Palihapitiya, calls us from, uh, a castle somewhere. I don't know. I can tell by the light switches you're in Europe. And joining us again, the two AIs, AI number one-
- DFDavid Friedberg
(laughs)
- 14:31 – 29:29
NYC rejects far-left candidates in mayoral primary; importance of crime, homelessness & drug abuse in elections
- DSDavid Sacks
window.
- JCJason Calacanis
All right, so speaking of the Overton window, New York City, um, has voted, uh, for a basically universally, both on the- on the Democratic side and on the, uh, Republican side for a tough on crime mayor. Seventy percent of San Francisco feels worse about crime in a separate poll. Um, and Eric Adams is the current borough president and a former NYPD, uh, officer and he is looking like he, because of this, uh, stacked voting, uh, which can take a little time to figure out who, uh, will become the mayor of New York. But he has 32% of first place votes among 800,000 Democratic voters.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
This guy is a really decent, centrist, moderate human being. Um, grew up, um, where he was affected and touched by crime, decided to fight through that, wasn't, you know, complaining, became a police officer, did that. You know, eventually, borough president, has done that, runs for mayor. He goes on television, he gives an interview where they say, "What is your perspectives on stop and frisk?" And the answer he gives w- was pretty specific, which is that, you know, "I believe in stopping, um, and investigating potential crimes," or some such, right? Uh, Jason-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... you can probably find the exact quote.
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, I mean, having been in the, uh, uh, you know, New York City Police Department family, um, the, and living in New York during stop and frisk, it, they left out a key word. It was stop, question, and frisk. So in high crime areas where there were a lot of shootings or guns, um, they would do a stop, question, and then possibly frisk. Obviously, uh, all policing techniques can be abused, but his feeling on it was when deployed correctly, stop and question is a great technique. And I can tell you when I lived in New York previously, 70%, 80% of people, including people of color, including people from the toughest neighborhoods, were in favor of this. This was universally seen as a huge success at the time because they were taking guns off the street, illegal guns constantly, because somebody would hop a turnstile, um, or there'd be people hanging out on a street corner and cops would come up and say, "Hey, you're hanging out here at 3:00 in the morning. What's going on?"
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
But the problem, the problem is that he gave a pretty reasonable answer.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yes.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And then they tried to cancel him.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yep.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And he wouldn't allow them-
- DSDavid Sacks
Which helped him.
- JCJason Calacanis
... himself to be canceled.
- DSDavid Sacks
Which helped him.
- JCJason Calacanis
He went on The Breakfast Club and all kinds of other media outlets and explained his position and they couldn't cancel him, which is, I think, really telling.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I thought it was, I thought it was an incredible testament to what we're going through right now, which is right now nobody knows what to do to solve the things we feel. We've tried the radical right version of a candidate. It didn't work. We're now wondering to ourselves while we have a custodian in the White House whether we go to the radical left. That's probably not gonna work either because unfortunately-
- JCJason Calacanis
It's not working in San Francisco, man.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I- I mean, un- unfortunately, it looks like the- the- the progressive left or the radical left is really, really judgmental. Um, and none of these folks have really done anything and so they- they are easy to complain... It's almost as if they know that they, what they want won't work so they don't want anything else to work and so they just want everything to devolve into chaos. That's a shame. And so, you know, people try to literally lie about what this guy said on television that was taped (laughs) .
- JCJason Calacanis
No, he had to come out like five times-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And now, and did it-
- JCJason Calacanis
... and clarify, "I am not for"-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And by the way, they, they were, there were people, Jason, I don't know if you saw that, the ar- the- the video link that... There were people holding a press conference in front of his office literally screaming about stop and frisk when he never said "stop and frisk." He said stop and question is a reasonable strategy if somebody f- if we think that there is the potential of a crime. And the fact that people could not have that conversation and had to go to basically this guy needs to either quit or be completely removed from his ability to run for mayor. Yeah, it's, it's insanity.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah. A- and, uh, you can- people seem to have lost this ability to hold two conflicting ideas in their mind, uh, which is, you could be for criminal justice reform, you could be against police violence, um, and you could be for... strong policing of violent (laughs) crimes and law and order. And what seems to be happening in both cities, New York, San Francisco, and other places where crime is getting acute is, um, that they, uh, people are voting-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Here's, here's, here's two other conflicting thoughts.
- JCJason Calacanis
... to be safer.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Here's, here's another conflicting thoughts. Uh, you can believe, um, that, you know, uh, Asians are awesome, but you can also believe that the, uh, coronavirus may have come from the Wuhan lab. And believing the latter doesn't mean that you're supporting Asian hate. I'm just gonna put that out there. (laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
Well, ca- can I, can I chime in on this, um, on this, uh, o- on the, um, o- on the Adams win? Because I think this is, this is huge news.
- JCJason Calacanis
Do you have your notes from Harry to make the clip?
- 29:29 – 54:07
New developments in the Wuhan lab leak theory, ramifications for our relationship with China
- JCJason Calacanis
Freeburg, I had, uh, CC'd you on, um, this, uh, thread where somebody said they found missing sequencing of the COVID genes that were submitted to a database. Did you have a chance to review that at all?
- DFDavid Friedberg
Um, I did. And since you sent that, it's become a little bit of a story. A lot of people have kind of picked it up and followed up on it because it did ignite quite a bit of interest. So the story is a guy named Jesse Bloom, who's a researcher at the Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle and has been studying, um, you know, COVID as a lot of scientists have kind of shifted their attention over the past year, but, but has a, a background in virology. He was, uh, trying to pull some early, um, genomic samples that, uh, um, that may have been taken from patients early in China. Uh, so what this means is, you know, when, when patients kind of, um, in, in the early days were emerging as potentially having SARS-CoV-2, they were swabbing them and then-
- JCJason Calacanis
Mm-hmm.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... doing a genomic read of the, the RNA they find from the virus in that swab. And, uh, around the world, a lot of scientists contribute to this openly available genomic database, um, and they contribute their whole genome samples, uh, when they, when they run studies and so on, so other scientists can use it in the future for research.And what this guy found was that there were a few dozen of these samples that had been on this genomics database that were now missing. And, um, they had been pulled down. And using a little technical sleuthing, he realized they had been pulled down from the directory, but the raw genomic sample read data was still available on the Google Cloud. So he used the Google Cloud API to pull that actual data down from the servers and then ran a study on it. And it turns out that the- the interesting kind of intrigue around this story is why did that data get- get deleted?
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Who deleted it? And it turns out the only way it gets deleted is if the original kind of authors go in and make a request to have it removed. And these were some random scientists in- in China-
- JCJason Calacanis
Bum, bum, bum.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... who had submitted the data. And so, uh, in the days following this publication, uh, of this guy... So this- so this guy published this on a pre-print server called bioRxiv. So it's not a peer-reviewed journal. Uh, it- it basically is a place for s-... Uh, bioRxiv is a place where, uh, biology scientists can submit, uh, early versions of their research papers or to get a- a new finding out really quickly, and then the world can kind of study it. And it's- and you don't have to wait for the journalistic kind of cycle of getting things approved, uh, um, uh, which is- which is common now. Um, and so he put this thing out there and everyone's kind of questioning, "Well, okay, where did these samples go?" It turns out that these Chinese scientists had submitted them, and now it ch- it has shown, uh, or it has come out that apparently some, um, US officials made the request to have it taken down after being asked to do so by some Chinese officials, uh-
- JCJason Calacanis
What?
- DFDavid Friedberg
... to pull this data down.
- JCJason Calacanis
Mm-hmm.
- DFDavid Friedberg
And so there's a really weird kind of intrigue going on right now around this whole story. Now... So- so- so that's kind of thread number one, which is wha- why was this request made to pull this data down, what was the motivation, et cetera. Thread number two is, what does the data show us? And what the data shows us, unfortunately, is a little bit inconclusive. So a guy named Trevor Bedford just put out a tweet, um, uh, earlier today, uh, analyzing this. He's a- he's a world-class virologist, also works at the Fred Hutchinson Center in Seattle. Um, and he basically highlights that in the early days of the SARS-CoV-2 explosion in China, you can really identify from a genomic variant perspective two lineages of the virus. That means, you know, we're- we're trying to get back to origin or patient zero. And it turns out there were kind of like these two families of the virus that were emerging. And even with that new data, you could kind of reconstruct the family tree in such a way that the Wuhan meat market could have been the origin, meaning the root virus could have come out of that Wuhan market, or the Wuhan meat- meat market could have been one of the two branches of the tree that emerged early on. So there may have been an even earlier origin and Wuhan market was just one place where it started to take off. So, you know, he said... Look, he still thinks that it's about a 50/50. You know, there- there's no clear evidence one way or the other based on these newly, uh, uncovered samples. Um, uh, but, uh, you know, the- the- there is still this question of does the Wuhan market kind of paint the patient zero story or is it one of the places where the explosion happened and patient zero was in fact much earlier than Wuhan market? I- I will say a couple episodes ago, I kind of made a comment, you know, with respect to the origin of this virus that I don't know, don't care. And- and, uh, I just wanna clarify 'cause I know that some people kind of reached out to me about that. I didn't really... Uh, w- my- my- my intention with that statement was that this was really meant to be, um, I think a little bit more of a canary in a coal mine for us broadly about, you know, hey, what we should be looking forward to, it's what's next, not just about focusing-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, so we should-
- DFDavid Friedberg
... on what happened in the past. Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
This has happened already, let's move on to the next thing, is what you're saying. Not being callous that it doesn't matter.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah. And I think- I think what's more important is that we need to get prepared-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yes.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... for ho- how do we prevent these things happening in the future and- and what are the, um, you know, the- the key kind of checkpoints we have, uh, around this in the future. 'Cause one thing I am most concerned about, this is a huge step back (laughs) , but I'm concerned about our normalization of cancel. Um, you know, we kind of have started to cancel people, but we've also, you know... these shutdowns have been normalized. And the normalization where shutdown is the response to an emerging variant or emerging virus is really scary because, you know, how is society gonna function properly when there's gonna be a proliferation of these viruses, a proliferation of- of risks, uh, with new technologies being made available to us, and then shutting down becomes our immediate response?
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, how do you feel about shutting down borders, Friedberg, as the first course of action? If everybody in unison had shut down the borders in February and said, "No inter-country travel," you know, I- it would've obviously been devastating for the airlines, but it might have stopped the pandemic in its tracks.
- DFDavid Friedberg
There was no way to stop the- the- the pandemic. O- once the genie is out of the bottle, the genie is out of the bottle. And we saw this in states that had lockdowns and states that didn't have lockdowns where we saw equivalent-
- JCJason Calacanis
No, wait, but why wasn't Taiwan and Australia and those kind of places that are islands that locked down, why were they spared?
- DFDavid Friedberg
I- I don't know (laughs) if you can really say that they were spared. Um, and I don't know if you can really say that people are happy with the- the life that they led for that year, right? I- I- I think what we need to solve for is how do we have these vaccines come to market much faster and be much more variable in their efficaciousness, because we are gonna have a lot more of these kind of emerging variants over the next couple of years with SARS-CoV-2 but also with potentially engineered bugs-
- JCJason Calacanis
So question for-
- DFDavid Friedberg
... that we need to be careful about.
- JCJason Calacanis
... question for Chamath and Sax then. Um, in Friedberg's sort of analysis there, um, and what was explained, uh, on the web about the- these new, uh, sequences, the US was allegedly involved in taking this down with the Chinese. If the USA, and I'm just creating a hypothesis here just to do a little game theory, if the US was allowing China to take this down, what would the game theory be if the US was involved in, dare I say, a cover-up or being opaque like the Chinese have already been proven to be, why would the US do that, Chamath? What would be the possible theories? Uh, and- and Sax.
- DSDavid Sacks
Why did- why did the NBA shut down Daryl More?
- DFDavid Friedberg
But that may not be... um, that may not... Sorry. That may not be national policy, J Col, right? So like a scientist, an American scientist or an American official-
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay. Sure.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... could have made that request. It doesn't mean that it was a...... conspiratorial process to, to remove this stuff.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah. No, I wanna jump the gun. I wanna jump the fence and say if in fact the, some US people were involved, so to your point, it could be an individual covering it up, or it could be an organization in America, or it could be, you know, some set of organizations. But Sachs, you wanted to jump in.
- 54:07 – 1:09:25
Congress turns the heat on up big tech, Apple's App Store monopoly in trouble
- DSDavid Sacks
- JCJason Calacanis
Uh, all right. So, uh, in somewhat related news, uh, Apple obviously, uh, building all their phones over there and now having servers and data over there, um, has led to a lot of scrutiny of big tech, um, but the more pressing issue is the antitrust bills that seem to be fast-tracked. On Wednesday, US House, uh, Judiciary Committee discussed six, six proposed antitrust bills. Uh, one bill, uh, sponsored by a Democrat from Rhode Island, uh, s- would call for Apple to allow third-party app stores, seems reasonable, uh, and provide iPhone technologies to third-party software makers. So I think that means maybe opening up iMessage, uh, which would be delightful.
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
I'm not sure exactly what they mean there. Um, and so Apple, uh, and Tim Cook is in a panic. He apparently called Nancy Pelosi-
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
... and said, "Can you pump the brakes?"
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs) Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
Uh, (laughs) just to give you an idea of what's going on here, um, Apple's, uh, revenue, even though it's a small percentage of just 10%, uh, of their $274 billion in, uh, 2020 revenue, it's obviously pure profit. Profit margin's gotta be... Uh, uh, in the notes here, it says 75%, but I would think it's even more. Clearly, services in the App Store inside of Apple is, I think, analogous to the AWS for Amazon. It is a money printing machine that's growing really fast. Uh, what do we think about Apple being forced to put other app stores on their phones, just like you can on your Android phone?
- DSDavid Sacks
I support it. I've been blue pilled on this issue. Actually, that's what the, that's what the commenters on, of our, the all-in fans have said is that, "Why is Sax taking blue pills on this issue?"
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
Um, and, and look, the reality is because I'm not in the business of, um, of helping two trillion dollar, uh, market cap companies. I'm in the underdog business. I'm in the business-
- JCJason Calacanis
Ah. Got it.
- DSDavid Sacks
... of helping the entrepreneur get started with a new company. And the fact of the matter is, is that Apple has the market power, the same market power or greater than Microsoft did in its heyday with the Windows monopoly. They are total gatekeepers of what applications can be built on these iOS devices-
- JCJason Calacanis
It's worse than Windows. Windows you could-
- DSDavid Sacks
Windows was open.
- JCJason Calacanis
... install any... It was open. I mean, what-
- DSDavid Sacks
Right. It was open. You're right.
- JCJason Calacanis
They didn't have an app store. Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
Right. So this, this proposal by, uh, Representative Cicilline-
- JCJason Calacanis
Not so all the viruses. (laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
Right. So this proposal by Representative Cicilline, the Democrat from Rhode Island, would allow this sideloading. It would basically loosen the grip that Apple has over the apps that can be loaded onto Apple devices. It would at least, uh, you know, create some degree, some potential for competition.
- JCJason Calacanis
No, it would create tremendous competition. And it's very easy to execute. Go ahead, Chamath.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Uh, um, I, I, I think you said it really well. I am also in the underdog business. So I think the, the faster they ram this thing through, the better off it'll be. Um, the thing that is important to recognize is that Apple will make this argument that, "Well, look, there's always Android. And also, look, there's the open web." And that's structurally not true for a couple of reasons. The overwhelming amount of development, at least in Silicon Valley and broadly speaking in tech, starts on the iPhone.
- JCJason Calacanis
Sure.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Um, and it's only then as an afterthought almost... I mean, you have to remember, it took Snapchat three or four years of being a public company before they actually had a reasonable Android app, right? And so Android is- has always been sort of the low ARPU afterthought, even though it has meaningfully more users. They're just not as valuable.
- JCJason Calacanis
Average revenue per user.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And so... Exactly. And so, you know, it- it's kind of a baseless argument. The overwhelming revenue, the North Star for developers where all of the venture capital money goes into is to funding and developing iOS apps. And in that world view, iOS is a complete monopoly. And, uh, breaking up the ability for them to basically dictate a 30% take rate, um, and also loosening the technical guardrails, I think is a huge step forward. There's only one thing that I would say. However, Apple has done an incredible job with privacy, locking down the phone, sandboxing instances, and we'll have to find some technical alternative to fortifying, um-
- JCJason Calacanis
Oh, uh, no. Actually, they don't, Chamath. Actually, I think what they do is when you go to your settings, you say, "Unlock iPhone. You now are not protected. Apple is not responsible. You've decided to sideload stuff." And it's basically like putting your mo- your phone into jailbreak or dev mode where they are not gonna support you. That's the way I think Apple should execute it, is that would be like their, "You know, if you wanna load anything you want, when you get viruses and your privacy gets hacked, it's not on us. You've just essentially, although we have one warranty for people who are not jailbroken and sideloaded and one warranty for people who decide to jailbreak their phones."
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
What's, what's incredible to me, the other, the other point on this is how quickly these guys passed this bill. And actually, uh, actually, all six, and then how reasonably well they were written. I mean, this is one topic where sometimes, you know, politicians can really kind of get it wrong or they can get lobbied in one way or the other, and these bills come out, they don't make sense. I mean, if you have to remember where- how far we've come, you know, wasn't the first antitrust thing where like some guy asked Zuck a question about like a model T Ford or something?
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- 1:09:25 – 1:10:04
Antonio Garcia Martinez's first Substack article on Apple
- JCJason Calacanis
- DSDavid Sacks
I wanna, I wanna end the Apple segment on, on, um, on AGM's article, which was called Bad Apple, although-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Great article. Great article, by the way.
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah. I mean, it was, it was unbelievable. But basically-
- JCJason Calacanis
David was so ex- I just wanna let people know how excited David was about this. David, I think, is like ready to be in a full-blown romance with Antonio.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
I mean, he is-
- DSDavid Sacks
Which David are you talking about?
- JCJason Calacanis
I'm talking about you, Sacks.
- DSDavid Sacks
Oh, okay.
- JCJason Calacanis
You are s- uh, are you in love with Antonio? It's a big pause.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Oh. WiFi broke up. (laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Oh, he got cut out. (laughs) We lost him on Zoom when I asked him if he's in love. (laughs)
- DFDavid Friedberg
Apple came in and they pressed pause. (laughs) Apple pressed pause on the stream.
Episode duration: 1:19:49
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