E37: NYC rejects far-left candidates, new developments in lab leak theory, App Store breakup & more

Friedberg said his restraint on the show is deliberate, not fear of cancellation: he cares more about the path to an opinion than broadcasting the opinion itself. Sacks wants firmer takes, while Friedberg believes presenting competing facts and values gives listeners a better chance of changing their own minds.

The podcast’s viral clip operation was informal: Henry Belcaster chose and produced clips largely on his own, while Sacks sometimes sent edits. Sacks said he was not paying for those clips, but commissioned Belcaster and Dylan for a roughly $5,000 Callin product video after learning they were building a business.

The hosts used Eric Adams’s 2021 Democratic primary showing to argue that Twitter attention was a poor proxy for votes. They contrasted Adams’s small online following with Andrew Yang’s roughly two million followers and weaker result, while centering crime and public safety as the issue they believed mattered most. (NYC Government)

Jesse Bloom recovered deleted early SARS-CoV-2 sequencing data because raw reads remained on Google Cloud after disappearing from the public database. Friedberg stressed that the recovered sequences did not settle the origin question: they could fit either a Wuhan-market origin or an earlier lineage in which the market was only an amplification point.

The COVID debate ultimately shifted from assigning origin blame toward building systems that could handle the next outbreak without shutdowns. Friedberg favored open genomic repositories and distributed vaccine “printers,” while Sacks argued that determining what happened still mattered because lessons from an accidental leak could shape future safeguards.

The most revealing moment in the Apple debate was the hosts openly acknowledging that a lower App Store take would benefit their own portfolios. Jason argued that cutting Apple’s 30% fee to 15% could defuse much of the conflict with Epic, Spotify and Netflix, turning an antitrust argument into an explicit investor incentive.

Sacks argued Apple was unusually hard to break up because its hardware, operating system and App Store lack clean corporate fault lines, making sideloading a more practical remedy. Chamath favored opening distribution, while Friedberg argued government intervention could replace a private monopoly with regulatory barriers that also hurt startups.