Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we discuss the antitrust move that the US government's made against Apple and why this could signal that the US may be getting its groove back as far as promoting business and competitive markets. And in part two, we'll get into why it's a good thing that some of the findings from the new James Webb telescope are calling into question many of the things we think we know about how the universe works.
Hello. Welcome to the call. Like, I see a podcast. I'm James Keys, and riding shotgun with me today is a man who, even as he's gotten older, has definitely kept a carefree demeanor. Tunde. Ogunlana Tunde. Is this the part when you start calling out, money ain't a thing?
[00:00:55] Speaker B: No, it just tells me you don't live in my house, because my children probably wouldn't agree that I'm carefree.
But I guess that's because I'm their dad. But I appreciate it. You make everyone else think I'm a fun guy.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: There you go. All right, we're recording this.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: My dog thinks I'm cool.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: There you go. That's all that matters.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Wonder about the kids, though.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Recording this on March 26, 2024, and Tunde day last week, the US Department of Justice, along with several states, filed a huge antitrust lawsuit against Apple based on the belief that a lot of Apple's business practices are monopolistic and anti competitive. Now, the action doesn't directly seek to break up Apple, at least at this point, but it is going after a lot of the practices, such as the way Apple does its messaging app or runs its App Store or locks accessories in or out of its environment, that the government thinks are stifling competition and really that Apple's using to try to drop the hammer on anybody who would want to compete with them. So what's your initial reaction to the antitrust move and also just what Apple's being accused of here?
[00:02:07] Speaker B: I find it interesting because we haven't seen this type of move by the Justice Department, at least publicly, in this way, to such a large corporation in a very long time.
Just the fact that Apple, along with companies that are referred to as the magnificent seven, used to be Fang, F a N G, which used to stand for Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and Google. And now, if you add Tesla, Navidea, these companies have been really dominant over the last decade and combined now have a value of more than most countries. And so it's interesting as relates to the new technology and the speed at which the world has changed around these technologies. So if we think about 20 years ago was 2004. A lot of these companies, some existed, some didn't, but the ones that existed were much different than they are. I mean, think about Amazon back in 2004, was selling kindles and was like an online bookstore, primarily. Apple was making maybe the iPod hadn't made the phone yet, still was making MacBooks and more of a computer company as it used to be. And Facebook, I think, was just being founded that year, just barely getting off the ground. So I think it speaks to the speed at which this technology and the information ecosystem took off and kind of the lagging behind of the regulatory environment to catch up and say, hey, you guys gobbled up a lot in the last 20 years, and we got to peel this back and make sure that you're not behaving in a way that stifles everyone else coming up after you.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: And we'll get into it later. But the US government had been, starting in the 80s, had taken a much more hands off approach towards antitrust. I mean, many said that they just stopped enforcing antitrust for the most part. And so that's a part of it as well. Just in terms of whether or not this, again, may be a signal that, hey, maybe we're going to start looking more seriously at antitrust because there's been a lot of consolidation and we're in a world with a few dominant players in many, if not most industries, which is not necessarily the way that you create a robust, competitive market that is good for business. All types of businesses, businesses of all sizes. But my reaction really is just more so that Apple's like a serial violator of this. Like, Apple's whole get down seems to be kind of run afoul of the antitrust. I remember back, they had issues with and states and the government had issues with the way Apple did the ipod, even. I'll go back then when it was like, okay, yeah, they only wanted you to be able to get songs from their environment or whatever, or even the issue that they had when they were locked in with at and t, at and t mobility.
We may or may not, as consumers, remember all of these things, but I think the idea of how Apple was locked into at T for a while and then what ended up coming out of that, when the government and other people pushed back on that, was that know we can freely unlock our phones and take them around. But that wasn't always the case with cell phones. And I'm not going to point that all at Apple in terms of saying the whole industry seemed to like to make it so that our phones were locked to our provider. But nonetheless, Apple's get down does seem to be one. They seem to want to create a closed ecosystem and lock people into their ecosystem. That seems to be their goal. So that behavior is the kind of behavior that the government now, and we've seen when we'll talk about the EU are saying, you can't do that. That is monopolistic inherently. And that's the type of stuff that people use to stifle competition. It shouldn't be like, if you make a good product, then that's fine. But that doesn't mean that once somebody gets one thing of your product that in order to leverage that, they have to stay in your ecosystem the whole way. So I think that's the big picture issue. I think, and I hope it comes to a head sooner rather than later because Apple does, in my opinion, make good products and so forth. But the fundamental piece of what they're trying to do and saying, okay, well, you only can buy things through our App Store if you're going to have an accessory.
Your Apple Watch will only work if you have an Apple phone.
That type of mentality, most of what we consider industry doesn't work like that. If I buy a Ford, I don't have to buy Ford tires or I don't have to go put Ford gasoline in the car or whatever, Ford oil in the car.
They have a device that works with whatever is standard industry standards for that thing. So that's kind of the big fight. I think what we see now is kind of the surface skirmish on that. But that, I think is ultimately what's going to be the big fight here. So that's my reaction. I think that that's going to be an interesting thing to unfold in this technological space where it's very easy for all of these players to try to lock us in, but it's also very easy for them not to like, this isn't the same. They don't have to go retrofit a bunch of things in order to open up the environment. In the same way, they didn't have to retrofit a bunch of things in order to make the phones able to be unlocked and used on different networks, but they don't want to. It's easy for them to lock them all in, too. So that was kind of my initial reaction. It's kind of the big fight that's coming as far as technology. Are they going to be allowed or are companies going to be allowed to lock you into environments?
[00:07:29] Speaker B: And I think you make a good point about the fact we can't see it because I think if you think of traditional industry, quote, unquote, like industrial companies, like steel companies and railroad companies and the old idea of kind of monopolies, like the game, the guy with the top hat and the monocle, we're used to kind of big industry where you can see stuff. Right, like you're saying about Ford. Well, if they forced us to buy gas from Ford gas stations and they had Ford owned companies pulling oil out of the ground, and Ford ships shipping the oil to us, it would be easy to see for us, just as laypeople and consumers like, oh, wow, this company, Ford, really is dominating everything. We can see it all over the.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: Place, by the way, just real quick. Companies would do that if they could.
That's what they would love to be able to do. That's kind of the standard oil story, which, like I said, we'll get into that. But they want to vertical integration, all that stuff. If they can, they'll continue to grow and try to do that.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: But go ahead. Yeah, well, I mean, that's the whole point of this discussion.
But I wanted to read real quick from one of the articles citing exactly what we're talking about here as to why. So it says, the Justice Department said in a release that to keep consumers buying iPhones, Apple moved to block cross platform messaging apps, limited third party wallet and smartwatch capabilities, and disrupted non App Store programs and cloud streaming services. So that goes back to the point, like you had talked to me in a private conversation about the streaming services that if Apple didn't approve or want you using certain vendors, they themselves would manipulate the device so that the streaming output.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: Quality.
We know that with messenger, for example, when people send through messenger, send multimedia files, then they'll lower the quality if it's not coming from within the Apple ecosystem or going out and so forth.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: And the other thing is that the Justice Department accuses Apple of blocking vendors and vendors who created apps to go around Apple's ability to mess with the consumer. They also blocked them. So that's what we're saying here really on the conversation is Apple appears to have behaved in a way that's monopolistic and that stifles competition unfairly due to their own size now in the marketplace.
[00:10:05] Speaker A: Let me give a little meat on the bones of what you just said real quick, just an example of that. And I know that with the Fortnite thing, there's a big dispute with Apple and all of this ongoing right now. And we're not going to go into that. But just the idea, like where Apple, for example, when you pay for things through the App Store, they take a piece of that. And so Apple has taken steps historically to make it so that you have to do everything through the App Store.
If vendors try to go around that and say, okay, now you just come to our website, you can pay us and directly, you don't have to pay us through the App Store. Apple's trying to shut that down because they want to take a piece of every hit that somebody's going to get if somebody's doing something on their iPhone and so forth. So it is using their market power and their dominance because there's so many people have iPhones that people want to be in the App Store. And so it's like, oh, well, you're just going to have to give Apple X percent of all of your sales because if you went into that market. So that's just an example. What you mean as far as how they will punish you if you try to get around what they've set up in place to take a piece of everything that you're doing.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's where also it's much more difficult for us to see into that ecosystem because it's not big ships, it's not people pulling oil out of the ground and all that. It's all in our smartphone that comes, everything's at lightning quick speeds. And I don't really know what's going on behind the scenes. And like you're saying about apps and vendors and who's paying who.
Well, let me just finish. This is an example because I thought about, like, it's interesting that the justice really, this is the system, right? Apple is getting sued. Now, a court of law is going to go through due process and we'll see if the Justice Department's claims are founded or unfounded once we have discovery and all that. So again, this speaks to the strength of the american system, that the government doesn't just throw a hammer at a large corporation because it doesn't like it.
This is a process. And as we've explained, the Justice Department has brought some evidence that appears worth looking into, that Apple is behaving a certain way.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: That's a key point, man, because I like Apple.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: I'm a consumer of it. I've got an iPhone, iPad. I've got my whole family, ten years worth of pictures or more on icloud than I pay for. Yes.
[00:12:21] Speaker A: You better watch those pictures, man. You out here doing a show talking about how Apple might need to get the hand slatter wrist slap. But no, I mean, I think that's an excellent point, though, in the sense that this isn't about liking or not liking Apple. This is the law of the land. And these laws are in place because it's been determined previously. People learn lessons in the past. We're wise to kind of take heed to those lessons, that one company or a small group of companies dominating markets is not good for innovation. It's not good for consumers. You get less quality, you get higher prices and so forth. So that's the exercise that's going on here. This is pro business in the sense of, hey, we need to be able to make sure that businesses can, new businesses can even come up. And then we also have to make sure that consumers are getting a fair deal. Well, how do you do that without the government constantly holding everybody's hand? You create a competitive marketplace. That's the way it does. And then the competitive marketplace, does that work? So the other thing, though, that I wanted to get into and just briefly mention is Apple. And then I've seen it referred to as like a walled garden approach. And so Apple's saying, their point is that, hey, we're increasing ease of use for consumers. We're helping consumers in that way. We're increasing security because we vet everything so closely that comes through the App Store, and things have to be approved, and we're making sure that it's safe and everything like that.
That's their argument.
They do have counterarguments to this, and they have other ones, but they have these counterarguments. And so the question ultimately will, and to your point, the government isn't just unilaterally saying, okay, here's what we're going to do. This has to go through the court system, which is going to take a lot of time. We know how that goes. It's going to take a lot of time. And in many cases in the past, companies and the government have come to settlements. They agree, okay, here's what we'll do. This is what will resolve this issue. And that may be something that happens here, it may not. Apple may take, take this all the way to trial and appeals and all that, and try to just say that the government's wrong in terms of, this isn't a violation of the law, but ultimately, this is, I think, to your point, a strength of our system is that, okay, we have these rules in place to promote this greater good. And now the government, they've gotten off their hand. This is kind of like with Apple right now. It's almost like Apple is the guy. Everybody's going, all these big businesses are going 85 and a 65, and the government pulled over Apple. They're probably like, yo, everybody's doing this. Everybody's trying to lock people into these closed ecosystems and all that. But hey, you are too. So, yeah, everybody else was zooming by. The cop pulled you over. So this is what you're going to have to deal with it and then we'll see what comes of it.
I do want to throw a quick hold on.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: I just want to joke. I'm thinking about it, like taking classified documents home. Like, man, everyone does it.
How come I'm getting hammered?
[00:15:03] Speaker A: It's that guy over there.
[00:15:07] Speaker B: Sorry, I couldn't resist.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: I'm just thinking about it. Everybody's doing away from now, and I'm walking away from now. Go ahead, keep going. I do want to make a brief reference, though, to. Because I said Apple being a serial violator in terms of antitrust. Like, their whole get down definitely does seem to kind of run afoul of antitrust ethos.
The EU has been ahead of the US on this and been more aggressive in terms of this. Like, even recently, I don't know if people have noticed a switch where iPhones now, I think the most recent release from 2023 of the iPhone, maybe 15 it was, has a USBC and it doesn't have lightning anymore. And that's in a direct response to the EU a few years back saying, hey, we don't want all consumers to have to do all these different chargers. So the USB C is comparable to what you use from a technological standpoint, maybe even, you know, you're going to have to switch over to that in the European Union. And Apple's like, well, we got to switch it there. We're going to switch it everywhere. We're not going to be doing both. And so that's something that the EU has done. So just for context, was there anything that, either for context or just to add on to this discussion, anything notable from what you see as far as the EU? And that was one example, but just how the EU has already kind of been going at Apple for this. And I know that they even passed a new law recently, which we'll touch on briefly. But just in terms of trying to scale back the exercise of monopoly power by Apple and other tech giants.
[00:16:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting because they did come out with something that's called the Digital Markets act recently, just a few weeks ago. I mean, we're here, like you said, March 26. This thing, I think, came out at the beginning of March. And Apple was one of the first targets. So I guess it's multiple governments are looking at Apple and they were hit with a $2 billion fine for.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: Their.
[00:17:04] Speaker B: System and platform, kind of stealthily promoting Apple music and not allowing Spotify and other providers of music services and I guess streaming entertainment, certain types to have the same type of access on the platform and the same type of user experience. And so it's interesting, I think we've talked about this in other areas with the European Union, areas like food, that american corporations are just, I think there's 140 something chemicals that if an american corporation like McDonald's or Burger King or others or a Morton steakhouse wants to do business in Europe, they're just not allowed to put certain chemicals and process food a certain way in order to sell that food in Europe. And maybe this is what happens with Apple, right? And maybe the other big, because to be fair to Apple, the EU is heavily targeting Google and Meta as well with this digital market.
[00:18:07] Speaker A: Just to be clear, though, it's not like the TikTok thing where they wrote a law naming these companies specifically. What that is is they're looking at big tech, quote unquote, gatekeeper companies that provide, and this is another, quote, core platform.
And they even say they're trying to break up closed tech ecosystems that lock customers in. That's Apple's get down. But Facebook, Google's, they're all trying to do that stuff, too. That's how you monetize people, monetize people more efficiently.
But obviously, that is something that regulators and the people who have looked closely at this thing is something that stifles competition and ultimately is not good for consumers and for businesses by and large, other than business, obviously.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: And that's where I'm getting at is the fact that the EU forces american food corporations to behave differently when selling products over there in that continent, unfortunately doesn't translate to their behavior at home where they're offering us as Americans better food. And so that's what I'm saying is we might see a similar just evolution in the tech ecosystem and big company space where maybe these big companies start playing ball just to make sure they have access to the european market and behave in the way that the European Union is asking. And they won't behave that way domestically because our government won't ask the same of them. And it's interesting, I think it speaks a lot to the power of american corporations ability to lobby their.
I mean, I can get into the tangent on pharmaceutical drugs and why in Canada they're much less than our own companies sell to Americans. And that's all because of the way.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: That these, the legal and regulatory framework.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: For the consumer, though.
[00:19:59] Speaker A: Yeah, let me add to that. It's an interesting point about how the food, like the EU, has these stricter regulations on food and what can go in and so forth. And so the same burger that's sold by a multinational fast food company, the same burger that's sold in the European Union will have different ingredients than the burger that's sold in the United States because of that.
In the tech space. It's interesting to me because for a hardware concern like the USB C charging port, that's a much more difficult needle to thread for them to have to use one charging port for iPhones here and another one there.
Just the economy, they lose so much on the economies of scale as far as their production and so forth.
But from a software standpoint to your point, it wouldn't be very difficult at all relatively to have to, hey, we're going to take this much data from consumers in the European Union. We're going to store it, it'll be very minimal, but in the US, we're going to take everything from them and we're going to keep it forever. It wouldn't be very difficult to treat customers or treat people differently in the US versus in, or even how the App Store works or how the music systems work. All of those things can be, it wouldn't be that difficult based on your ip address where you're accessing it from, how the app treats you or what the app allows you to do or doesn't allow you to do. So, yeah, we could be in line if our government doesn't pick it up in terms of making sure that the protections are in place for things that are deemed anti competitive or exploitations of the market, then yeah, we may end up where it bifurcates. And Europe has a different experience than us and so forth in terms of how the tech environment treats them and how the markets are receptive to competition versus, or locking people into closed.
Yeah. Keeping moving, though. Like I said, I just wanted a brief comment on the Europe piece because Europe being so far ahead of us in terms of how aggressively they are trying to push these companies is interesting at the minimum. And I think you probably got to the root of it with the lobbying piece. But the lobbying piece defines a lot of this I wanted to discuss just briefly with you, the historical context, because a lot of us, not all of us, but a lot of us, when we learn about monopolies and american history and so forth, you hear about standard Oil, or then even at t, like these big breakups of companies now, breakup isn't the only remedy, and a lot of times that's the most extreme remedy. But how do you look at this in terms of the context? Or is there, do you see any context that's helpful in terms of what happened, like with Standard Oil or at T or any know, major antitrust enforcement action from the past in the US?
[00:22:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's a good question because your allusion to Ford in that example earlier was a good example because that's kind of what Standard Oil really did at the time. And for the audience, just to do a quick reflection, Standard Oil was the company founded by John D. Rockefeller in the late 18 hundreds, which became quickly the largest company in the world.
[00:23:06] Speaker A: Well, initially a key piece on this. Initially they were really good. They had a competitive advantage by being really good at what they were doing, and then they leveraged that to. Go ahead.
[00:23:16] Speaker B: Yeah, it's an interesting comparison, I think, to Apple. And I think Apple can be representative of maybe this basket of, like you say, gateway companies that have come up on the tech side as comparison to standard oil. Because think about it, Standard Oil in 1870s, 1880s, were basically just starting the industrial age within the prior decades. And we're coming from being the world, being totally agrarian to this new thing called oil, which can power engines and change the world. Literally.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Yeah, it's literally the transition from coal and steam power to this new to oil, and the ability to use that to start powering, to start as an energy source for all these things that we're doing.
[00:24:02] Speaker B: I think even the oil part gets lost on the bigger idea of petroleum creating literally new products. I mean, think about it. Plastic, rubber, those things never existed on the earth before.
[00:24:14] Speaker A: But synthetic rubbers, okay.
[00:24:16] Speaker B: I'm not talking about molasses that falls out of a tree.
[00:24:19] Speaker A: You mean latex.
[00:24:23] Speaker B: You got to challenge me on some nerd stuff. Then I'm going to make you go, let's not go down that road, because we will.
[00:24:33] Speaker A: That'll be a ten minute diversion into nowhere.
[00:24:35] Speaker B: Exactly.
But the idea is just that, just like, that's why I say the analogy to me is comparable. Because if we say all that, right, from the late 18 hundreds, we could say, hey, by the late ninety s, the early 2000s, this new thing called the Internet created this whole new realities, right? I mean, who ever heard of email and the at sign and all this kind of stuff prior to 25, 30 years ago?
We now have a whole new thing. And so I think that if you look at. Just to read a little bit of what Standard Oil was accused of, a quote from an article, Standard Oil allegedly used its size and clout to undercut competitors in a number of ways that were considered anti competitive, including underpricing and threats to suppliers and distributors who did business with standards competitors. So that's what I mean by they were more like a gangster, kind of like the way Apple is behaving. I would say more so than the comparison of AT and T, which is people our age and older are pretty familiar with that because that one was broken up in 1982, which was basically just the breakup of what were called the Bell operating companies, which to me wasn't as much of a sinister, malicious thing like a monopolistic takeover as I think. It was just organic that you had at and T and Bell companies from the 1920s and 30s that were the only ones doing this stuff.
50 years later, they were still the only ones doing this. And the Justice Department said, you know what? We're just going to break you guys up just to get.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Well, actually, at and t, they were going to lose the lawsuit, the antitrust lawsuit, and at and t proposed that because just for a little clarity, at and t, as you pointed out, I think, and that's the organic development. In the 20s, it didn't make sense to have 50 different companies laying these wires and so forth. There was a, hey, let's get a network set up. So it made sense to have maybe one group or a collection of companies doing that, and maybe all under one ownership. But at and T, at that time was providing all the local coverage, all the long distance, all the local service, all the long distance service, and they were their own equipment supplier. So it's like, okay, guys, that, again, is where you get out of beyond just the core business. You start being also all of the ancillary businesses that come along with this or having your hand in that pot. And then they suggested this consent judgment, basically say, hey, we'll cleave off the local stuff. We still get to do long distance, and then the local people won't have to buy from our equipment company.
I think that was different, because what Standard Oil did was they got good in one thing and then started going upstream and downstream and then started saying, hey, all right, we're going to dominate the next level up from us, the next business up from us the next business down from us and keep going. And that is, I think, similar to what we see at Apple. But I think what we know now, though, is that the breakup is, in the last 40, 50 years has been seen as more extreme.
We've heard in the passing calls to break up Facebook or calls to even now, like, oh, is Apple going to, are they going to try to break up Apple? And so forth. The government doesn't seem to like that anymore as much anymore. And really there is a line of demarcation you can point to in the late seventy s and eighty s where Robert Port was very influential in this and Ronald Reagan took a lot of his advice in terms of this stuff, where the government kind of became, they did kind of look and say, okay, we don't need to be as aggressive with protecting competitors, making sure that we protect the marketplace. Like a big company might be able to just serve everybody just fine. And it represented a departure in terms of how aggressively our government enforced this stuff. And it's not a coincidence now that you go from city to city, town to town, and these shopping centers may all look the same because you got the same big companies doing everything.
It's been a conscious decision is my only point. And we may see now there may be some reversal against this because this does every time, this leads to greater concentration of wealth. And what happens a lot of times, and this will transition us into this next part a lot of times. What happens with this is once you have too many or parties become so entrenched they resist change instead of driving innovation. If something's happening, it's like, oh, we want to keep things the same. We're going to box out anybody who's trying to change anything or who's trying to innovate, because the way things are now are very profitable for us, so it doesn't drive innovation. And then obviously they're able to charge higher prices. Even right now, the government's looking at the grocery industry. There's been questions on whether or not their profits and their margins are up as high as the pandemic still. And it's like, well, hold on, the pandemic's over. What's going on? So just on that last, like antitrust generally in the United States as it stands, like in context of the past or not, what are you noticing in terms of? Well, one, just your thought on antitrust and if it's something the government should be focusing on, and then two, what are you noticing as far as recent trends based on what you think about the first question, do you think this is a good trend or a bad trend?
[00:29:41] Speaker B: I'm not sure on trends yet. Probably have to look a little bit deeper to see probably a longer time frame. Yeah, like a longer view, let's say the last five, six years. Is there more antitrust activity than there were in the prior 20 years? I mean, it seems like probably.
[00:29:56] Speaker A: No.
[00:29:56] Speaker B: I think this apple and this kind of big tech stuff is not unique, but it's something everyone's been kind of talking about. It's been on their minds. And I think we're not surprised after mean even conversations we've done on the show about the negative effects of social media on young people and all this. We know that we live in Florida, and I think the governor just passed legislation this week about social media. And kids like that, they're going to try and ban, I guess, people under a certain age from even getting on social media apps. So the idea that the government would scrutinize this specific big tech stuff is not a surprise to me. I think what's interesting, to your point about the grocery store stuff I'm preparing for today, I just saw interesting articles that the grocery stores is one, another one which I found interesting, and just for honorable mention, is there's an antitrust suit against Hermes, the Birkin bag maker, those hundred thousand dollars bags, because, again, they're apparently stifling the market and competition in certain ways. So it just was interesting to me to see that kind of variety of antitrust kind of activity going on right now. And it was a reminder to me that, again, going back to the way we discussed this in the opening part of this discussion, not that the government's targeting companies like the way it appears, know the government, and I mean the government here, not the deep state, what people think, but I'm talking like people in the open, like the senators and congresspeople that appear to be targeting TikTok, that appears to be a target. This is what appears to be the government, in my opinion, doing what it's supposed to do to protect the consumer in making sure that there is a level playing field in the marketplace. And I think it's no coincidence to me, going back to the Standard Oil conversation, that we had the outsized gains of wealth of people, a concentrated group of people like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, JP Morgan, Henry Flagler, who also were business partners.
And then you had the antitrust era coming over the ensuing decades, which also helped to lead to things like the new deal, the biggest middle class, and all that, because you had a more level playing field and the ability for entrepreneurs and small business people to have a chance and grow in the. Then to your point, starting about 40 years ago, 45 years ago, we had new silent attacks on the regulatory system coming from the industrialist crowd that does the lobbying. And I think today, it's not a surprise that the new technology, like we've discussed with a weak regulatory environment like we had in the middle to late 18 hundreds after the civil war, that we then have this outsized group of people that, like we talked about in a private conversation recently, Elon Musk is worth now, like, 208,000,000,000. And it was like, five years ago, he was worth 100 billion.
You know what I mean? And I'm not hating on a guy for being wealthy. I'm just saying that this group at the top has become even more exponentially wealthy in just recent, like, the last half decade. People like, it used to be there was nobody worth $100,000,000,000.10 years ago, and now we have multiple, like, a dozen people worth that much. So it's not a surprise that this has all got us back into a similar place, that history has rhymed, maybe not repeated, but it's rhyming.
[00:33:24] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's an excellent point. And also in the sense that it seems to be bringing the issue to a head again, to the pockets. Like, okay, now that we have this concentration of wealth and power that is becoming so extreme that it's impossible to ignore, then it's going to bring the issue back to a head. And so that's probably the natural ebb and flow to me. I think it's too early to say whether this is a trend. This could be something, though. If this signals a more sustained, more aggressive. This is a big swing, I think is the biggest way or the best way to look at this. This isn't something on the margins here. This is one of the biggest companies in the world, and you're going at one of their core ways of the way they do business and that they're open about how they do business.
When we were preparing for the show, you were talking about how Tim Cook cracks a joke when somebody's complaining to him about, oh, well, this doesn't work well. When somebody's in an Android environment or whatever, he's like, oh, tell the person to buy an iPhone. And it's like, yo, man, hold up.
You shouldn't be making that. The government cites that in their antitrust.
It's getting to the point where it's going to force the public's hand to deal with this stuff with the laws that are already in the books. And that's a key piece here, is that with the TikTok thing, while we are skeptical of TikTok and bite dance and all that, we were more skeptical of the government singling them out legislatively. Like, all right, we're going to make a law about this person. Hold on, what's the problem? Let's make a law and apply that to everybody. Whatever the problem is, let's address that problem in a law that applies to everybody, not making a law about one person. And in this case, that's what we want to see is the laws are already on the books. It's just a matter of there's been lax enforcement or the government's take small swings. So this is a big swing. I mean, government's taken swings in the patent. 20 years ago, they took a swing at Microsoft and that didn't play out the way necessarily that the government wanted. But nonetheless, the government's taken some swings.
But this is a big one. So we'll see how if this signals a return to a more robust kind of business environment where some say people look at these numbers, they're talking about how there were more publicly traded companies back in the so forth than there are now.
[00:35:34] Speaker B: Definitely.
[00:35:35] Speaker A: And it's like, well, so we have a lot more people, a lot more business, but less companies. What does that say?
We're going in.
[00:35:43] Speaker B: Like you said when I was a kid, I mean, growing up in Washington DC area, we used to have hardware stores like in the early mid eighty s and they slowly got replaced by Home Depots and Lowe's. And I think that's an easy example in Walmart for the public. And the little local grocery stores have been replaced by the regional big players and the Super Walmarts and all that. And the Target grocery stores.
[00:36:09] Speaker A: It's the government's job to if that is something that violates the laws on the books and the laws on the books are in place to protect the consumers and to protect people claim to love free markets and markets, we got to protect markets. Markets don't exist in nature. One person takes it all over and it's just theirs. So it requires big government and big government intervention to protect the market. We learned that lesson already. We learned that 150 years ago. So now that government is doing that action to preserve the market and to ensure a good environment for the or a worthy environment for consumer rumors. And so that's what we're in right now. And so we'll see. And the point isn't to stake an emotional connection like, oh, this is terrible because of this, or this is great because this is just like, all right, well, let's see how it plays out. But it's notable in the sense, like I said, I don't know that you say that the government were taking this big a swing at a core at such a big company, at least consistently more recently. And now they're looking at Walmart, they're looking at Kroger's in the grocery industry and all mean it will see. But it's good to see that the people who are supposed to be looking at this stuff are actually looking at this stuff and they're not afraid to take a swing.
[00:37:14] Speaker B: Yeah. And I want to just allude to one thing before we wrap this section up to something you said about those who get big end up being more interested in protecting their own interests and all that. One thing would be the electric car market. It's well documented that as early as the 1980s, 1990s, there were designs of electric cars that looked very functional.
[00:37:36] Speaker A: It could be viable.
[00:37:37] Speaker B: Yeah. And we're fortunate that we had a guy that already made a billion dollars in something called PayPal that by the.
[00:37:45] Speaker A: Early 2000 back up. But those designs were buried because there was the big auto and big oil. There were few players and they were kind of cozy enough that it's like, hey, we don't necessarily need to, if big auto starts doing electric cars, that's going to mess with big oil. So it's like, hey, we'll kind of keep. Was there weren't enough diversity in players for someone to take that swing?
[00:38:12] Speaker B: And that's where I think we're kind of fortunate as a society that a guy that was able to make a lot of money prior to Elon Musk and also partnered with the federal government in 2009 through a 500 million dollar grant that we had this person that was willing to take this risk and it worked out. Right. And we have now the Tesla, which is the proof of concept, which then.
[00:38:34] Speaker A: Once the concept was proof of concept, then everybody else jumps in. Yeah, now there's a bunch of competition and there's a bunch of innovation each year.
[00:38:43] Speaker B: They're pushing also. That's a good point. The competition is pushing the new technology. So now we have better battery life and use for a lot of things. And we got houses powered on batteries, but also now they're working on the hydrogen engine.
So this innovation pushes new innovation, and it's kind of like without an mp3 player, maybe we don't get to Bluetooth technology. So even though some things may not seem related, they all persist. But I'll just finish here with the idea that this is a very american thing. The Sherman act. When it was enacted, the Supreme Court called it a charter of freedom that was designed to protect free enterprise in America. And this is something very american, as I'll read from Justice Douglas in the United States versus Columbia Steele, at the very end of his whole tirade, he says it is founded on a theory of meaning. The Sherman act is founded on a theory of hostility to the concentration in private hands of power so great that only a government of the people should have it. That's a very american spirited thing to say, as we were founded off a country that didn't want a king anymore. So I just want to say that, that antitrust is really part of the.
[00:39:52] Speaker A: Well, I would say at least traditionalist american, because there are a lot of Americans now that don't seem to have lost connection to that.
[00:40:00] Speaker B: That's another chip.
[00:40:04] Speaker A: But, no, I mean, it's a good point, and I'm glad you did finish with that because that's an excellent kind of context in terms of. Yeah, because, again, this stuff doesn't exist. This stuff went and happened in the 17 hundreds or anything like that. This is the kind of stuff that, when you're trying to have this dynamic society where there are multiple players and not just a select group of winners that get to be forever winners in business, this is the kind of thing that you need to have in order to make that vision come true. So I think we can wrap from there. Thanks for joining us on part one of this discussion. Part two this week will be coming up, so please check for that as well.
All right. Our second topic this week. Want to discuss some things that the James Webb telescope has been seeing and how this may be, at minimum, questioning some of the things that established scientific dogma has been, or the thought process has been recently and just a little context. James Webb telescope is we have the Hubble telescope. These are telescopes that are in space, and they're observing from it so they don't have to deal with the american or the earth's atmosphere or anything like that. No weather or anything like that. They're in space and they get a clear view. So the Hubble was the old one, and then they recently, in the last two years, they launched it in 2021 and went into operation in 2022. The James Webb telescope, which has all the new bells and whistles and all the improved technology since Hubble went up, the Hubble telescope went up. And it's been amazing. Some of the images we see sometimes in newsfeeds or whatever, just these amazing images of space that Webb telescope is delivering. But it's also not without controversy because there have been now with the measurements and the more precise ability for it to see things, some of the beliefs in terms of the expansion of the universe and how that's working and just some basic physics stuff is being called into question. So thoughts tunde on just different observations here and possibly that the James Webb telescope may be proving wrong some of the stuff, or it may end up proving wrong some of the stuff that we think about the way the universe works right now.
[00:42:10] Speaker B: This is really interesting. And it's a good reminder, be careful going down rabbit holes on YouTube on stuff that you're not 100% versed on, because for sure, I'm a smart guy, but one thing that's not part of my resume is being an astrophysicist. So I'm going to just be very.
[00:42:27] Speaker A: Clear, start this discussion.
[00:42:30] Speaker B: No, because it's funny. Just preparing. It was a good exercise because I'm not only going online like Google and all that, but I went to YouTube because, like you're saying these are beautiful images, all that. So I thought, let me watch, see if I can find some good documentaries or videos that explain this stuff. And that's what I mean.
This is easy, ripe for disinformation, this type of lane of looking down. Because you're right, it seems like two things that have definitely come out of this that to me were very intriguing out of the many things that have come out, because there's a lot of very interesting things. But the one that I think that we're talking here is the Hubble constant, which is the rate at which objects move away from what was considered the big bang, the original 13 point something billion years ago, when scientists singularity.
[00:43:25] Speaker A: And the prevailing theory right now is that 13.7 billion years ago, there's a singularity boom. There's inflation where it expands, and then it's just been expanding ever since.
[00:43:35] Speaker B: And the point about inflation, if you picture like a balloon expanding, that was the concept is that this inflation or expansion is happening kind of evenly from this singularity, from that single point. And what the Webb telescope has basically knocked out is that that's accurate. It's found that space is moving at different speeds in all kinds of different directions.
[00:44:02] Speaker A: The expansion is not like this. The expansion that's been taking place here for the last 13 billion years even.
[00:44:09] Speaker B: I saw some stuff where they've observed galaxies as old as 46 billion years. But now they're trying to figure out something to do with the way light is coming, and not that it's that old. So there's a lot of investigation that still needs to play out. And then the other one that I found interesting, which, again, is ripe for speculation, is that the telescope appears to have found evidence because it can detect chemicals and a lot of other things, not just lights.
That there is a chemical that on earth is only found from living matter like plankton, that as part of their excretion, they excrete this chemical out. And along with things like methane and carbon, there's speculation that there may be life on that planet, because our only other evidence of this chemical is here on earth by life forms, even if they're simple life forms. So who knows if that's true or not, right? Like, meaning if there is actually life on there, that chemical is being secreted by something else. And I think that's what this brings us to, is I'm the type of person that can take that information. Not just say, I'm so good, but just say, okay, I hear that, and that's cool, that's interesting.
[00:45:21] Speaker A: Tell me more.
[00:45:21] Speaker B: But I don't need to speculate further and kind of use that as a way to confirm some pre existing bias. Like, okay, that means there's aliens on that planet, or that means know everything that Einstein and all these other scientists said was wrong, because this one telescope is upending the Hubble constant. I look at it more as building on prior knowledge.
[00:45:44] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
This is the time where. Well, I'll put it like this. I look at this, and I agree with you. That's kind of the discipline of scientific. You know, we can talk if you want, about, like, that's difficult for people a lot of times to live through the acquisition of more information and then how you put together a new understanding once you acquire new information, because that's what we're in right now. James Webb telescope equals better measurement. Better measurement equals more information.
Not unlike when Galileo looks up with what he called a spyglass. Now we call a telescope. And the first one documenting what it looks like with a telescope, it's like, okay, the whole idea of the earth being the center of the universe was put to bed then, because there was better observation, more information. And there you go. So we're in a mode like that right now. We have unquestionably better observation and more information. And the thing at that point, we need the theoretical physicists to come along and start with the theoretical. There's physicists that test stuff, and then there's the theoretical physicists like Einstein, that sit around in a room or wherever and then think about stuff and say, okay, well, based on all this information, what could this mean? So that's what we're right now, the theories that were in place based on our old measurements that we could do, what we could measure, it's kind of like, oh, this stuff's called into question now. So now we're going to have to take all this new information and figure out a new way to approach it. And so that's kind of the discipline of science. The other thing about this, to me that's very notable, is that the scales are so far beyond our perception, like when they're talking about billions or billions of light years away and all this other stuff, millions of light, we can't even figure out in our heads how big these structures are, that we can see them that far away. And so it does make it ripe for either jumping to conclusions or falling down rabbit holes where people can give you explanations that make you feel good, because there aren't going to be, at this stage, a lot of explanations that are just bulletproof because we're still in that acquisition mode of information. So the pictures are beautiful, and I think that things are working as they supposed to be working, that this thing should be telling us stuff and calling into question things that we thought before because it's given us so much more information based on what it's able to see and measure relative to what we had before. So that's part of it.
[00:48:12] Speaker B: Yeah, you're right. And it makes me think of things like Isaac Newton, the famous story that apple fell on his head and he figured out gravity. And then you fast forward to. And that was in the 17 hundreds. Right. Fast forward.
[00:48:28] Speaker A: More particularly, though, that gravity here on the earth was the same thing that was operating in space as well. That's kind of the real big connection there is that the phenomenon we experience, the physical phenomena, the physics we experience here, are also the physics that are driving the things that we look up at the sky.
[00:48:48] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's also how novel those ideas were because religion had solved those questions prior to this type of scientific method and scientific discovery. And that was kind of the point I'm making, is, if you fast forward to the 1930s, Albert Einstein's discoveries upended some of the newtonian type of stuff. But why was it, and like you said, better measurement Einstein was dealing with much better technology by the 1920s and 30s. He had electricity. He had.
[00:49:17] Speaker A: Now, Einstein confirmed a lot of Newton stuff, too. He gave more context to it. He was like, okay, yeah, but it was kind of like, yeah, but, yeah.
[00:49:25] Speaker B: That'S what I'm saying. But that's, to me, what the Webb telescope is doing. Einstein's theories, it's confirming a lot of mean. There's hundreds of discoveries. Obviously, the two that I mentioned specifically get a lot of attention, but most of what it's doing is confirming things that only, like you're saying, theoretical physicists were able to even contemplate, because these were all things that were just done mathematically. And now we have the tools, the ability to measure in such a precise way that it's been able to confirm a lot of those calculations and also bring in this surprise, like, okay, the Hubble constant needs to be looked at again. And I think that.
[00:50:07] Speaker A: And you got more theoretical physicists now. We got a theoretical physicist out here putting out that actually, the universe is 27 billion years old. There's no such thing as dark energy. So now we got more theoretical physicists coming out with ideas that will try to harmonize what we're seeing now with what we already know. And some of them will be right, some of them will be wrong. And that's kind of the evolution of the scientific process, is that it's always evolving, because as you get more information, you can't hold on to whatever you thought before. If that new information conflicts with what you thought before. And the discipline of science is supposed to be that you can do that because humans have a hard time with that a lot of times.
[00:50:44] Speaker B: Well, and I think that is the real dilemma. And kind of really, it's a mindset, which is science is counter kind of intuitive to the way we're wired science.
Science requires humility in the sense that you're always, in a sense, trying to be proven wrong if you're the scientist, if you're humble, right? Because you're saying, hey, I just discovered this. Maybe everybody, all my peers are agreeing and the calculations say this, and the way we measure it says that. But again, fast forward, right? If technology improves and all this stuff, and now measurements are able to be done in a more precise way, if it ends my initial theory, if I'm true to the word of being a scientist, I can't be upset about that. I should commend and thank the people that broke the mold in the new discovery, which is very contrary to the way that humans have been organized for most of our history, which is either dealing with a king or some sort of monarch or a warlord or a religious type of environment, which both don't welcome being questioned. They don't welcome questioning that authority. So I think it's different mindset, whether.
[00:52:01] Speaker A: It be kings or religion or whatever. Those with power oftentimes resist or oftentimes with murderous kind of consequences.
People trying to tell them they're wrong. Even with the church, when Galileo starts coming out and saying, yeah, the earth isn't a sinner, I've been looking at through my spyglass, then the church puts them on house arrest because the church had staked their reputation on being right about all this stuff. And we see this. I mean, this is how power tends to want to behave, is if I say something, then it's right no matter what. This is why you'll have presidents drawing, like, little circles on hurricane maps, saying, oh, yeah, see, I told you it was supposed to be there because. And they're just making up stuff because it's like, oh, they just don't. They can't be.
[00:52:44] Speaker B: It was supposed to go there, remember?
[00:52:50] Speaker A: So power oftentimes does the exact opposite of what the discipline of science is supposed to be, because the discipline of science, remember, the act of trying to prove wrong, whatever the established thought process is. If I come up with a theory, I want other people to try to prove me wrong, because my theory is only as strong as it's able to withstand people trying to prove me wrong. And if somebody does it, obviously, then there's supposed to be a certain level of graciousness to it. Then you're supposed to try to refine it and say, okay, that's more information. Let me try to refine that. So that's how we've gotten from a world where people couldn't cross the ocean to where people, a world where people could is by this level of this ability to come up with an idea experiment. That's called a hypothesis experiment. Then if it withstands that, it becomes a theory. And then you start putting stuff into practice until you figure out a better way. And then your theory may get modified or upended. Like, that's how you go from people that can go on the land or go on the water to up, they can start flying in the sky, or we can communicate with people who aren't in the same room with us through these wired devices or to these wireless devices. So all of the progress that we live with is because of the ability for science to constantly question itself and to try to continue to move forward and people not holding on to whatever it is that they want to think is true and then using resources or using power to stifle anyone ever questioning them, because it's the questioning that causes science to move forward. So again, this is part of the plan. So to like that all these different people now are coming up with all these different theories based on what James Webb is saying. And so I look at it as encouraging.
[00:54:27] Speaker B: Yeah, well, if you pair this with our part one of antitrust, allowing for innovation and all this kind of stuff, then, yeah, it's a good regulatory environment for businesses to be able to implement these ideas that come from science, plus the ability of the scientific method and the mindsets that keep trying to prove things wrong. I mean, I think that makes the type of society that we've been enjoying living in.
[00:54:57] Speaker A: Because think about it, the same thing I just said about how power oftentimes resists any efforts to question it. It's the same thing with monopolies. Monopolies they will resist, they will stifle efforts to innovate in ways that undermine or that they think undermine them in the short term. Because if you're on top, if you're on the top perch, people have found it better to just knock other people off who may be coming up there than embracing change. Because when change comes, you may or may not be still on top of the perch. I'm sure Kodak, when they started taking phones or pictures with phones or with digital cameras, Kodak didn't think they were about to be gone.
[00:55:38] Speaker B: But let's speed it up for the younger members of the audience. Let's say BlackBerry, when they would, when people look like they might want to try a touchscreen and BlackBerry is like, nah, we'll keep with the keyboard.
[00:55:49] Speaker A: We think people prefer a, that's, yeah. And if BlackBerry was big enough, they would have stifled all the touchscreens and we'd still be using.
[00:55:57] Speaker B: Yeah, you're right.
[00:55:57] Speaker A: So that's kind of the way it so, but I think we can wrap them there. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call. Like I see it, subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think, send it to a friend. Until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:56:08] Speaker B: I'm Tunde Ogunlana.
[00:56:10] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk to you next time.
