Episode 32. The freezing point of water is 32 degrees Fahrenheit. When I was 32, I started my first and last firm that would ever go public on the NASDAQ.

The number of completed numbered pianos and audits by Ludwig von Beethoven. Let's Ludwig von bitch this podcast. Go, go, go!

Welcome to the 32nd episode of the Prob G show. In today's episode we speak with Roger McNamy, an American businessman investor, venture capitalist, and founding partner of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners. He's also the author of ZOXT waking up to the Facebook catastrophe. We discussed the big news around the DOJ suing Google for violating any trust laws.

How the social platforms destroy democracy and what remedies can be put in place moving forward. We also get into the sharing economy and why Roger is hopeful for the next generation of innovators. Instead of reviewing the news, I think Roger cuts a lot of it down or distills a lot of it down in its relevance. So let's bust right to Roger. Roger, where does this pod find you?

I'm in California where it is still fire season, but we are enjoying a lovely early autumn day today.

Nice. Good to hear it. So the big news today, today we have the DOJ suing Google for violating any trust laws. So give us a sense of the action today and provide us with some context.

So the Department of Justice has been pursuing Google in several ways for several years. And today the announcement is that they're going to sue Google with respect to search and to the monetization of search and the documents for the case reveal relatively little that is new, but describe parents of behavior that have been

around us for so long that few people question the legitimacy of Google's business practices and the country is undergoing a reappraisal of economic policy specifically with respect to the concentration of economic power and whether we should revive any trust law to try to restore competition in the hope that it will also be something that helps us.

It's not in and among itself illegal to be a monopoly. It's illegal to abuse your monopoly power. Tell us how Google abuses their monopoly power.

So if we think about economic policy broadly defined, there was a time when monopoly itself was considered to be un-American. In fact, that really goes back to the founding of the country that one of the things that the early Americans associated with monarchy was monopoly.

And the choice to focus on capitalism as defined by Adam Smith in 1776 was that it was inherently pro-democracy that lots and lots of small businesses competing with each other, highly distributed economic power, would be something that would help to further the American dream.

Today, we are 40 years into a period of time when a different philosophy is prevailed. When essentially the notion was put forward by Robert Bork and others in the 70s that concentration of economic power was not a problem so long as consumers didn't suffer higher prices.

That led to the extraordinary economic growth that occurred from 1980 to 2000 and to the extraordinary concentration of wealth that has taken place since 2000.

And we're at a point now where prosperity is so unevenly experienced within the economy that the vast majority of the population doesn't benefit from long economic periods of economic growth.

So if you're Google, this has been a perfect situation. The company gets started in the days immediately before 9-11. It enjoys after 9-11 the support of the government to build this civilian surveillance system.

It builds what Shashana Zubov describes as surveillance capitalism, this notion that you gather all the known data about the people you should product.

You use that initially to predict their behavior, you then sell those predictions to advertisers, you build an extraordinary business around that, you then create parallel and ancillary products that leverage the data that address different parts of the human experience, and you gradually increase the efficiency of the economy, capturing most of the economic gains for yourself by using algorithms to standardize human beings.

If you think about it, it's the sort of thing that only works if you have something that approaches monopoly scale. And in Google's case, you can see that in the case of this DOJ case, relative to search, but the same thing is true in browsers, the same thing is true in maps, same thing is true in video, and especially in the infrastructure that supports the online advertising economy.

And so I think as the users of internet products, we've all become accustomed to the notion that Google dominates and search, they dominate in browsers, they dominate in video, they dominate in maps.

There are alternatives, but in many ways it's hard to get at them, it requires an ordinary personality, which by the way, I bring to this particular party because I have for the last three years, made avoiding Google into a life work, and I treat it like a video game where you can remember Frager where you had to get across the river by hopping it from log to log.

And I treat this whole experience like Frager, and I'm trying to the other logs, the logs going by are the products you use instead of Google, Google's the river and you're trying to avoid falling into the river. It turns out to be incredibly difficult.

And it took a year before I had weaned myself from everything but YouTube. And as somebody who is a musician as well as what I do in the daytime, I can't avoid YouTube because that's where all the music is.

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