E36
E36: New FTC Chair, breaking up big tech, government silent spying, Jon Stewart, wildfires & more
2021-06-18 spoken.md · speaker-labeled ▶ watch ← E35 all episodes E37 →
3
ideas born
5
ideas moved
13
captures · 4 voices
4
dissenting
+89.0
conviction added
-66.5
decay · 58 silent
Every number here is replayed from score_events — the same ledger the pool ranks on. Decay is what the 58 ideas nobody mentioned gave up this week; it applies only when an episode is processed.
Tier crossings
conviction thresholds crossed by this episode — 65 / 45 / 15 · ideas born here show where they landed. why 65 isn't always green
▲ +8.1
🏛️ The four big-tech monopolies get broken up by the end of the decade
watch
→
green threshold
57.3 → 65.4
still ember — green gate not met
Who moved the board
each voice's force on conviction this episode — supports and opposes, weighted exactly as the replay applied them · share = % of this episode's movement
What got argued (5 ideas)
ordered by how hard each idea moved · quotes are verbatim from the transcript, timestamps deep-link into the episode
Zero snowpack, extreme drought and unmanaged federal forest land set up a severe 2021 western US fire season with Texas-style brownouts spreading across western states — reviving wildfire liability and preemptive-shutoff risk at the California utilities.
plays
PCG ·primary
ALL
EIX
MCY
SRE
evals 2021-12-18
Well, we are at risk more than ever, right? So we're entering June. So as of June 1st, the California snowpack is down to 0% of normal. That's never happened before. So it's the lowest it's ever been. There is absolutely like no snowpack in the entire Sierra and the entire state. 40% of the state is in a state of extreme drought right now.
We are going to have a terrible fire season. There's going to be brownouts probably throughout a lot of the western states. What played out in Texas that affected folks a few months ago, I think will some version of that will happen in many places in the US.
NEW
▼ META
🏛️ Big tech gets regulated as common carriers via a left-right deal
closed 30
CONTESTED
▲ +33.8
0.0 → 33.8
Rather than breakups, the political settlement lands on common-carrier status for platforms that control core infrastructure — the left gets access/competition rules, the right gets a ban on summary deplatforming, and moderation discretion is constrained.
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META ·primary
GOOGL
evals 2022-06-18
But I think the legit, I think the words you're going to hear a lot, okay, are common carrier. ... And so I think there is I think the left and the right here can cut a deal where they regulate these guys, these big tech companies as common carriers. I think that is what we're headed towards.
And so this brings up this big question, which is like we've now got the kind of psychic shadow of Covid that's going to cast a very long shadow. ... You know, it's going to bring up this whole series of challenges and questions I foresee for the next couple of months, at least, and maybe for several years about what's fair and what's right.
Which is that we wouldn't let, you know, all the special rules and restrictions lift until there were zero cases of Covid. And we all know that's never going to happen. Covid will always be around in the background. And just to add a layer to what's happening here in California is, yeah, on June 15th, we lifted the restrictions, but Governor Newsom has not given up his emergency powers. And he says he will keep them until Covid has been extinguished. So he's now embraced zeroism on behalf of this sort of authoritarianism.
NEW
▼ META
🤖 Apple's privacy push blows up the Google/Facebook ad model
closed 54
▲ +18.1
0.0 → 18.1
Apple used WWDC 2021 to weaponize privacy against ad-funded platforms; as tracking is cut off and consumers become willing to pay for privacy, the targeted-advertising business models of Facebook and Google degrade.
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META ·primary
GOOGL
SNAP
evals 2022-06-18
You can see it in the enormous amount of investment Apple, for example, is making in both advertising, the push to privacy, as well as implementing the push to privacy. You know, this last WWDC, you know, they really threw the gauntlet down, you know, they were really trying to blow up the advertising business models of Google and Facebook.
▼ GOOGL
🏛️ The four big-tech monopolies get broken up by the end of the decade
closed 37
CONTESTED
▲ +8.1
57.3 → 65.4
And I think what we're in for over the next few years is potentially a hyper politicization of big tech markets. I think these 21 Republicans might soon feel like the dog who caught the bumper in the sense that, yes, they're finally going to have the regulation of big tech they've been calling for, but they might not like all of the results because what could happen is a very intrusive meddling by government in the markets of technology, and it could go well beyond sort of this gatekeeper principle that we've been talking about that I think would be a valid reason to regulate.
And my only advice to her, I wrote this in 2019 in my investor letter as well, just thinking about the breakdown of big tech. If you're going to go after these guys, that's the body of law that probably is the most defensible. But you probably have to start, you know, whether you like it or not with Facebook or Google.
So I just feel like there's a bit of a cycle underway where we have this kind of anti wealth, anti wealth accumulation sentiment as an undercurrent right now, you know, obviously, Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and others are key vocal proponents of change that's needed to keep this kind of wealth disparity from continuing to grow. And one of the solutions is to reduce the monopolistic capacity of certain business models, specifically in technology.
Episode digest
written during extraction and stored in data/extractions/ep036.json — the auditable source of truth, including everything market-adjacent that did not earn a capture
E36 (2021-06-18) is a regulation episode, and the Lina Khan confirmation (Senate 69-28, three days earlier) is the tradeable core. Jason frames it accurately — her 2017 Amazon paper, the platforms-and-commerce paper, killing Amazon Basics, spinning AWS, unbundling Google Maps from Android — and then drops the one genuinely contrarian market claim of the episode: spinning out AWS 'would just double the value of it'. That is a sum-of-parts BULLISH read on the same news everyone else treats as a risk, so it is captured as the lone oppose on the new bearish idea big-tech-antitrust-breakup-2021 (primary AMZN; GOOGL/FB/AAPL adjacent). Sacks concedes the gatekeeper case is legitimate (his PayPal-on-eBay and PayPal-on-Visa/Mastercard receipts: 'without the threat of antitrust hanging over these big monopolies... it would have been very hard for us as a startup to get the access to these networks') but predicts the outcome is 'hyper politicization of big tech markets' over 'the next few years', with the 21 Republicans as the dog that caught the bumper and a good-cop/bad-cop extortion racket where Khan is the threat and the administration collects the donations — captured as support with horizon_hint 36 while the idea itself stays at the default 12mo per the no-padding rule. Chamath is the most specific and the most useful: he maps the three attack vectors (Sherman Act — useless against tech because tech drives prices DOWN, so 'today, driving prices down drives out competition'; Clayton/HSR for M&A; and the FTCA's unfair-methods-of-competition and unfair-or-deceptive-acts hooks, which is where 'she can get a little frisky'), then says Khan is making a mistake focusing on Amazon and 'you probably have to start... with Facebook or Google.' That is a name-level exposure call, and it is the reason FB and GOOGL sit as adjacent plays. Chamath's second-order argument — that big tech surreptitiously took cost out of the system and is now raising price, citing FB/GOOG CPMs up 28-30% in a quarter as the first big-tech price increases ever — was left as color rather than a mention because it is reported earnings data, not an opinion. Sacks's separate and much more falsifiable prediction gets its own sub-idea: that the settlement is not breakups but COMMON CARRIER status, with the left getting access rules and the right getting a ban on summary deplatforming — 'I think that is what we're headed towards.' Friedberg is the philosophical counterweight throughout (anti-wealth cycle is real and is being routed through anti-monopoly policy; consumers are the unpriced victims — 'why am I paying five bucks for Gmail'; handing regulators a long-term-consumer-welfare standard is 'giving another throttle... to folks that may not necessarily come from business'), and his ITA Software history is the best receipt in the episode for how Google bought the engine under the OTAs. The other genuinely new tradeable thesis is Chamath's: Apple used WWDC 2021 to 'blow up the advertising business models of Google and Facebook' and consumers will pay for privacy — new idea apple-privacy-hits-ad-models-2021 (FB primary, GOOGL/SNAP adjacent). Nobody disagreed with him, so it is a single-mention idea for now. WILDFIRES became directional and got captured: Friedberg's data (June 1 snowpack at 0% of normal, never happened before; 40% of the state in extreme drought; 4M acres burned in 2020) sets the tinder case, Sacks says 'we are in for a really hellish fire season' plus 'get ready for Martian skies', and Chamath table-pounds it with the tradeable extension — 'there's going to be brownouts probably throughout a lot of the western states' and Texas/Uri repeating elsewhere in the US — hence the new bearish idea western-us-fire-season-grid-crisis-2021 mapped to PCG/EIX/SRE (Jason himself raises the PSPS shutoffs: 'the electric company turns off power in California because they don't want to be blamed'). Important honesty note: at 1:17:12 Friedberg WALKS BACK his own stat, saying California is actually at the historical average for acres burned to date and that because one-sixth of the state's forest land burned last year the cumulative tinder is lower, so 'there could be a scenario here where we end up with less than a million acres a year' — Chamath shot it down flat ('There's zero scenario that's going to happen') on the seven-consecutive-warmest-years trend. Friedberg is still recorded as support because his final words were 'there's certainly a high probability of a bad fire season', but a reviewer should know his sub-million-acre scenario is in there. Disclosed positioning is domestic rather than financial: Jason is installing a generator and six air purifiers and is '50% of the way' to a Miami beach house, Chamath says 'I'm very scared to be in California during all of this', Friedberg is renting an escape house for fire season, Chamath mentions filing HSR on a climate investment. On COVID, covid-normalcy-summer-2021 (E008, eval_by 2021-06-19) receives four mentions one day before its kill date, and the split is real: Jason says 'we're going to go back to normal pretty quick' and 'this is all over' (support), while Sacks argues zeroism won — restrictions lifted June 15 but Newsom keeps emergency powers 'until Covid has been extinguished' and is buying votes with federal emergency money in a recall year — and Friedberg's own Presidio landlord still mandates masks, giving him the 'psychic shadow' line, and Chamath predicts a year of litigation over private mask policies (all three oppose). CONSIDERED AND NOT CAPTURED: the Apple/McGahn gag-order segment (strong civil-liberties content, 400 subpoenas a week with only 4% opposed, but no direction and no instrument — Jason's sharp link that Apple has zero incentive to resist an administration that can break it up is the closest it gets to an edge); Friedberg's carbon-credit math on forest management ($40/ton credits vs $50-$1,000/acre clearance) because it is explicitly conditional on an active carbon market existing and states no price direction; Jason's 'Expedia and bookings.com have collapsed' because it is past-tense observation; Chamath's Google-PII-is-worth-trillions DCF because it is an antitrust argument, not a forward valuation call; Chamath's jab that the left 'don't believe in nuclear' because it is a political complaint with no adoption claim; Jon Stewart/Colbert, YouTube censorship of Bret Weinstein, and the identity-politics riff (not tradeable). A bearish-Facebook claim exists here but it does NOT belong on facebook-boycott-short-2020 (still open until 2021-07-11): that idea's thesis is the advertiser boycott plus the political-ad ban, whereas everything bearish about FB in this episode runs through antitrust/FTCA exposure and Apple's privacy changes — different mechanisms, so new ideas were created rather than retro-attaching. LABEL ANOMALY (important): the transcript labels David Friedberg as 'Friedrich Hayek' for all 53 of his turns — a name-matching failure in diarization, not a merge. Confirmed by content: the 'Friedrich Hayek' label answers Jason's question about the previous episode's science monologue with 'I was thinking, I would talk about the Alzheimer's drug approval at Biogen' (Friedberg's E35 monologue), is addressed as 'Friedberg' repeatedly by Jason, and delivers the Presidio-office, Ohalo-investor-book-club and science-corner material. All four besties have substantial correctly-attributed turn counts (Jason 109, Friedberg 53, Sacks 53, Chamath 47) so there is no missing-speaker merge. Two minor within-turn merges were spotted and worked around: the turn labelled Chamath at 10:46 opens with Jason's handoff word 'Chamath,' and the turn labelled Jason at 19:59 ends with Sacks's answer 'I generally would lean towards saying yes' — no captured quote crosses either boundary.