Sacks
speaker
82 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard Aug 2024
Sacks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Or maybe he and Greg Abel have already talked about the kind of risk book that they want over these next five to 10 years, and it reflects a discussion about what the incoming CEO wants. So there could be all kinds of reasons why. I don't really know. I just think that Apple, just back to Freeberg's core thesis, I agree with many of his general points.
I'm not sure that they affected the Berkshire strategy, but Apple is sort of a little bit wayward. It is a company with an effective and unregulated monopoly or duopoly that doesn't really know what to do. And I think that that's the biggest problem with that company. And that's independent of Buffett selling now or selling a year from now or having not sold a year before.
By the way, you mentioned the Google thing, but this clearly was not part of his calculus. I think he just got very lucky. But if you're holding Apple today, I think you have to take the $20 billion that Google pays you every year, which comes in at 99% margin, and you should probably sensitize the value of Apple We're not having that 20 billion if this antitrust ruling against Google stands.
That alone could be worth upwards of half a trillion to a trillion dollars, depending on what multiple you want to put on that 20.
I think that this Google thing is the most important thing that's happened in tech since the Microsoft DOJ decision in 2000. Internet Explorer, yeah. Yeah. Because if you go back to that consent decree in 2000, it essentially handcuffed this incredibly foreboding company. more than a decade while all kinds of innovations happened. So they missed out on two huge waves, right?
Microsoft essentially missed out on social and then they missed out on mobile, largely as a result of that consent degree. And then they were able to catch up and embrace SaaS and the cloud. Amazing. Amazing. But there is this small
O outcome here, which is essentially a consent decree where Google gets handcuffed for some number of years and it creates a couple of big waves of innovation of new companies that can succeed that may not have otherwise been able to succeed in the absence of such a consent decree.
And a good example of this would be the AI-powered search experiences that you're starting to see, whether it's from OpenAI or Perplexity or a few of these other folks. The big O outcome though is more if you go back to the Ma Bell kind of thing where the company gets broken up. I think that the odds of that are extremely unlikely. So I think the big O outcome
is probably something that you can pretty safely take off the table. I think it's going to be a little low outcome. But the point is that there's a distribution here between these two things that this judge will be in control of. And I think that, again, I'm just guessing, I think both the Democrats and the Republicans will really support whatever happens here.
And that's not necessarily because, I don't think that's necessarily because they have a bone to pick with Google. I think that they have bones to pick with other companies more than Google. But I think that it starts to set the tone for being able to check big tech in a very meaningful and productive way. And I think that that has important ramifications for Washington.
One of the things that I like to do when I'm in Portofino is when you see these huge yachts in the bay, I like to figure out what they are. Okay. And so I use Google for like a vessel finder. And two of the top three links send me to spyware. And I think to myself every time, every year this happens,
How is it that in 2024, Google hasn't figured out how to click these links in a sandbox, isolate the ones that send you to spyware, and just take them out of the index? And of course, they can do it. They have 100,000 people and $2 trillion in market cap. So I think that there's just a level of... technical navel gazing at some level that I think besets every big company.
And so there are other examples here that you can look at that are a lot less charged than politics. I think Freiburg is right that it's largely algorithmic, but I think David is right in that there is a quality problem. I think the solution here is that for certain extremely important moments,
There needs to be a little bit more intervention and there needs to be a little bit more curation so that it passes the smell test. I mean, the version of this that I also experimented with, and Nick, you can find the tweet that I had, was when I was searching for the assassination of Donald Trump on Google, it just didn't show up. It does show up now.
So I think they got the message and they fixed it. So clearly somebody's listening. And I think clearly then the index changes. So I think that both things are possible, which is the algorithm can improve. And also that certain things before people start to complain loudly about this perceived bias, there should be enough intervention to make sure that the algorithmic results pass a smell test.
And if they're not, to add some amount of reinforcement learning or something else, some human feedback that allows... that allows you to get to a good answer that's unbiased.
Well, the judge, the judge already said yes.
So now if Apple created their own- I think, David, I think you're being too narrow. Hold on one second. You're being too narrow. The initial complaint in the Microsoft Internet Explorer thing that kicked off the whole DOJ thing versus the consent decree were two totally different things. I think that you're underestimating the scope of the remedy.
No, no, no, no. I don't think that's a narrowing. Again, the big O outcome of breaking up the company, like what happened in Ma Bell. I don't think that's going to happen here. A little-o outcome that is a consent decree similar to the one that Microsoft had to sign is very likely.
But what I want you to understand is the way that that started, which was literally around Internet Explorer and bundling versus the consent decree, was meaningful orders of magnitude broader. So what I'm saying is this little-o outcome is going to be much bigger than the scope of this lawsuit. And if they don't, man, they have dodged an enormous bullet.
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