E162: Live from Davos! Milei goes viral, Adam Neumann's headwinds, streaming's broken model & more

00:00:00.000 | All right, everybody, welcome to the 54th Annual World Economic Forum here in Davos.

00:00:06.000 | You guys didn't know this, but as elites ourselves, we were invited to kick off the festivities.

00:00:12.480 | Surplus elites.

00:00:13.120 | Yeah. You know, the all-in podcast, very popular. And so they wanted us to come and represent the

00:00:18.080 | pod and our audience there. And it's been amazing. If you haven't seen some of the great musical

00:00:24.480 | performances this year, I mean, they're so notable. Let's just start off here. I mean,

00:00:29.200 | guys, we were here for this live.

00:00:30.640 | Soak it in. I mean, on the replay.

00:00:35.840 | There's the air flute.

00:00:38.320 | Wait, wait, there's a great moment where she really starts vibing. Wait for the head shake.

00:00:46.960 | The eyebrows are great, but the head shake comes in at about there.

00:00:53.360 | There it is.

00:00:53.760 | I like your muumuu. I like your muumuu.

00:00:56.320 | Have you ever played the air flute or just the skin flute?

00:00:59.200 | Just the skin flute.

00:01:00.320 | But guys, guys, this isn't it. There were other, there was a witch doctor or something. I'm not

00:01:08.320 | sure exactly what's going on here. I'm going to just apologize in advance for mocking this.

00:01:13.120 | Or for Sax mocking it, I should say.

00:01:16.800 | This was incredible. I don't know exactly what's going on here with the blowing of the hair.

00:01:25.120 | But it's kind of like you are fluffing.

00:01:26.880 | We've come a long way from COVID, that's for sure.

00:01:27.520 | So they're blowing the COVID on each person's forehead here to spread the COVID.

00:01:32.400 | They've all taken the mRNA vaccine. But you know, we each have a speaking gig. Each of us is

00:01:38.880 | speaking. And so I thought to kick us off here, gentlemen, instead of us just telling everybody

00:01:46.240 | our schedule, I would sing our schedule. And so let me just grab a, let me see if I got my guitar

00:01:52.400 | here. Hold on. Let me just grab it here. Oh, here it is. Okay. Hold on. It's happened to have the

00:01:58.000 | guitar. Is that an air guitar or a real guitar? Oh, no, it's a real guitar. It's actually a real

00:02:01.600 | guitar here. So, but I thought, you know, everybody is really excited about each of our speaking gigs.

00:02:06.720 | So I thought we would just kick it off here. Let me just see if it's in tune.

00:02:10.080 | You guys hear that? Oh, okay. All right. What was that? I think we got it.

00:02:17.680 | Kumbaya, my lord, Kumbaya.

00:02:21.360 | Sax is interviewing Putin, my lord, Kumbaya. In the dictator lounge at noon, Kumbaya.

00:02:33.280 | Conquering Europe, Kumbaya. And now I'm gonna, there's a little audience participation in here,

00:02:42.960 | besties. I need you each to sing with me. Okay. It's, we're gonna start here. It's gonna be just

00:02:48.640 | listen one time and then you're gonna repeat. Okay, here we go.

00:02:50.960 | Oh, Davos, Kumbaya. So just Oh, Davos, Kumbaya. Ready? Three, two.

00:03:08.320 | Okay, very good. Very good. Okay. Now go to the next verse here.

00:03:11.440 | Hosting Steve Bannon at 1pm, Kumbaya. Friedbergs at 2pm, Kumbaya.

00:03:29.360 | Billionaire bunker panel, Kumbaya. Teal just bought one, Kumbaya.

00:03:39.200 | Hunter Biden after party at 1am. Eight balls and escorts for everyone brought to you by Barisima.

00:03:53.760 | And now you all sing. Oh, Davos, Kumbaya.

00:04:01.200 | Wow. Fabulous. You really are the world's greatest moderator.

00:04:08.880 | Let your winners ride.

00:04:11.680 | Rain Man David Saks.

00:04:14.560 | And it said, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy.

00:04:21.280 | Love you.

00:04:21.760 | All right, everybody. Yes, the World Economic Forum is wrapping up in Davos. If you don't know

00:04:32.640 | what the WF is, I'll just give you the brief overview. 3000 people, five days, tons of parties

00:04:37.760 | happens in Davos, Switzerland. It's run by a foundation. They call these non government

00:04:43.280 | organizations NGOs. I can think of it kind of like the TED conference topic this year was rebuilding

00:04:49.120 | trust. It's politicians, business leaders, economists, journalists, all the elites,

00:04:53.600 | the mission statement of the WF improving the state of the world by engaging business,

00:04:57.680 | political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global regional and industry agendas.

00:05:03.680 | It's money printing machine. I'll give you a funny backstory later if you care to know,

00:05:07.760 | but basically, they try to shake it down for about 40 grand a year to go to this thing.

00:05:11.200 | Tons of notable moments that we can get to on the docket here. Free break any highlights for you

00:05:18.400 | watching this, you know, get mocked on social media this year. It's been a slow unraveling

00:05:24.080 | from this being something that people used to flex about going to Davos. Now people are literally

00:05:31.120 | apologizing on social media, Twitter, etc. explaining why they're going because they're

00:05:37.680 | kind of feeling shame and going to this event. So, what are your thoughts on the sort of whole

00:05:43.360 | flipping of this from being a flex to requiring an apology in advance?

00:05:49.280 | You guys know, Andrew Ross Sorkin, the journalist for CNBC, I think he posted on Twitter, you know,

00:05:55.280 | I know, I know, forgive me, I got to go to Davos. It's almost like, embarrassing now

00:06:00.640 | that you are associating yourself with the elite cabal in the Swiss Alps, during a time of rising

00:06:07.920 | global populism and all the criticism that's been rained down on Davos in the last couple of years.

00:06:12.800 | And then Davos is trying to adapt by trying to be more cool and appeal to the populist notions

00:06:20.960 | that have criticized them. Thus, the flute playing, thus the shamanism, you know, and thus,

00:06:28.080 | I think a lot of what Javier Millet has called general economic support for what he defines as

00:06:34.720 | collectivism, which I'd love to talk about, but why don't we just say that? So, I think, yeah,

00:06:38.320 | there's generally been like a response from the community that attends Davos. But there's a lot

00:06:43.600 | of conflict here with the fact that folks are flying in on private jets and telling everyone

00:06:46.960 | to stop producing carbon. The fact that they're all dining and spending lots of money and telling

00:06:52.160 | everyone that we should move to more towards socialist conditions and higher taxation. It's

00:06:55.920 | all a lot of irony wound up in this whole thing. It's almost like a, like a, like a Simpsons show.

00:07:01.360 | It's what it's become.

00:07:02.400 | Well, and the theme rebuilding trust is kind of

00:07:04.880 | insulting at its face, at least to me, like, we don't trust you. You don't need to rebuild trust

00:07:12.560 | with us. We're not going to trust you. There's no way for you to do that, especially after what

00:07:15.760 | happened with COVID. Sax, did you have any sort of reaction to this year's Davos and just how

00:07:22.720 | people are reacting to it? You heard Freyberg sort of thoughts on it.

00:07:28.000 | Well, Davos has become a parody of itself. And that's why you saw these clips go viral of these

00:07:33.520 | ridiculous antics of the priestess doing, I don't know what she was doing. But the only two sets of

00:07:40.720 | remarks that actually were taken seriously on their own terms was the speech by Millet from

00:07:46.720 | Argentina, and then also comments by Jamie Dimon. And the reason why they went viral is because

00:07:54.240 | they were actually saying sensible things that contradicted the sort of established wisdom or

00:08:00.480 | consensus at Davos. I mean, they were effectively subtweeting the other elites at Davos. I mean,

00:08:07.200 | Millet gets up there, and I think he was introduced by Klaus Schwab, and he immediately starts

00:08:12.640 | denouncing collectivist experiments and says that the West is in danger because its elites have been

00:08:20.240 | co-opted by a vision of the world, which leads inexorably to socialism and thereby to poverty.

00:08:26.000 | So Millet basically says this right in front of Klaus Schwab. I mean, he's describing

00:08:29.920 | the people at Davos. That's why that took off and went viral.

00:08:34.480 | It was incredible. I mean, yeah.

00:08:35.920 | In a similar way...

00:08:38.240 | And he flew their commercial.

00:08:39.360 | I didn't know that. Yeah, kudos to him. Jamie Dimon gave this interview, I think it was on CNBC,

00:08:49.040 | where he basically went full Chamath. He basically admitted that Trump had been right

00:08:53.440 | and that a lot of the criticism of Trump and all the derogatory comments for years

00:08:59.520 | were basically just lazy. And he said that Trump was largely right on NATO, on immigration,

00:09:07.840 | on tax reform. He grew the economy well.

00:09:10.240 | Immigration.

00:09:11.360 | Immigration. He was mostly right on China, he said.

00:09:14.880 | Dimon said he didn't always like how Trump said things or talked about people, but he said his

00:09:20.080 | policies were largely sound and only look better in time since we've abandoned them. And he's

00:09:26.880 | basically saying that, "Look at where we are right now." And he questioned the kind of everything is

00:09:31.600 | hunky-dory narrative that the Biden campaign is pushing out. So he really went off script there.

00:09:36.720 | And like I said, I think Chamath said it first here on this pod three months ago,

00:09:40.880 | and now Jamie Dimon is accepting that. So that was a huge subtweet, you could say, of all the

00:09:47.840 | elites at Davos and the accepted wisdom and the narrative that they're all pushing out.

00:09:54.000 | So that was the other big interview that went viral. And I think that's really saying something,

00:10:01.920 | that the elites now have parodied themselves to the point where Davos has become a joke,

00:10:09.680 | and the only talks or remarks out of Davos that people pay attention to are the ones talking sense

00:10:17.600 | to the people at Davos because they're not listening.

00:10:20.400 | Chamath, your thoughts?

00:10:22.560 | Look, everything has a season. And I think that when

00:10:27.040 | there was a much more singular hierarchy of status, Davos played a very important role

00:10:36.000 | to signal to other people that you had made it. But these things come and go. And I think that

00:10:42.880 | this is sort of in the back half of its usefulness and half-life. What is it probably more than

00:10:50.240 | anything else now? A glorified enterprise software sales conference, where the reason to go to these

00:10:56.400 | conferences for a lot of these companies, I suspect, is that it allows you to close very big

00:11:02.320 | deals, multi-million dollar licenses of this, that, and the other thing, where you can get the

00:11:07.520 | leaders of that counterparty across the table from you and hammer out a deal. And I think you pay

00:11:12.640 | 40 grand a ticket for the right to get everybody together to do that. So I think they want to

00:11:18.160 | pretend that it's a lot more than what it is. And I think what it is, is that. And I think whenever

00:11:22.960 | you have the ability to convene people to close business, that's valuable. Beyond that, I think

00:11:29.600 | it's sort of in the eye of the beholder. And it used to be that the beholder thought that this

00:11:34.320 | was important. And now I think we realize it's much of nothing. It's shame in and air flutes and

00:11:41.120 | all kinds of stupidity, which is why people have the courage to go and mock it. And I think that

00:11:45.600 | Malay's comments and Jamie Dimon's comments exemplify that. The only other thing I would

00:11:52.000 | say is that I had heard although I haven't seen it, so I don't know, is that Alex Karp apparently

00:11:56.880 | did a very thoughtful speech about anti semitism. And it is also, which is also very countercultural

00:12:03.840 | to the established logic that the the surplus elites at Davos want to believe, which is the

00:12:09.760 | anti Israel pro Palestine line. I haven't heard of those. I don't know. Yeah, how impactful that

00:12:15.360 | was. But those are the three things that I that I've just seen on Twitter, just kind of speech,

00:12:20.400 | I think is the one that everybody is keying on. And, and correctly. So, you know, obviously,

00:12:25.600 | he's the he's the new president of Argentina. And this speech was amazing. People might not,

00:12:32.240 | people might not also know that he was an economics teacher. And so this talk about

00:12:39.040 | collectivism leading to suffering and regulatory capture and bloat, which we'll talk a little bit

00:12:43.920 | about when we talk about Boeing today, was incredibly powerful. It's super basic, you know,

00:12:49.920 | listen, free markets work, there are people opting into either side of it, he went over essentially

00:12:54.400 | without saying it, the rule of 72. And like 200 years of GDP growth, and how GDP growth under

00:13:00.240 | capitalism rises everybody up, and then collectivism, aka socialism is a bit of a disaster.

00:13:07.120 | But it's well worth watching it, there was a really cool thing that a company called Hagen

00:13:13.280 | did he y g n, with their AI tool, they just immediately took his speech, put it in his own

00:13:19.280 | words, and published it and translated it as if he was speaking English, because he was he was

00:13:25.840 | speaking in his native tongue. So really worth checking it out. And yeah, it was super notable.

00:13:32.240 | It's pretty basic. But I think it's everybody wants to hear this right now, which is,

00:13:37.040 | if you're picking collectivism and socialism and redistribution of wealth,

00:13:40.560 | Argentina has like a really good history of watching this fail. And now they're in the

00:13:47.360 | process of dismantling say something else before free bird says something here, which I think is

00:13:53.280 | going to be very thoughtful. Jason, the other reason why Argentina is a really good example to

00:13:57.600 | use is that what does Davos represent at a different level? Well, what it is, is old Europe

00:14:07.920 | getting together in a way that allows them to continue to coalesce power. And what's interesting

00:14:13.360 | is if you had presented the case of any other country, trying collectivism and failing,

00:14:18.240 | it wouldn't get nearly the same attention as Argentina. And the reason is that Argentina

00:14:23.840 | has so many ethnic Europeans. And I think that's another reason which is like, when you present

00:14:29.120 | people that are telling you it didn't work that, frankly, look like you speak the same language as

00:14:33.520 | you. I think it actually goes further in making the point than if you found somebody in South

00:14:39.040 | Asia or Africa that said the same thing to these folks, which they have, which they've not listened

00:14:43.840 | to. And so this is why I think Malay is so interesting and important, because he looks

00:14:48.960 | the part of a Western leader. And I think that that, unfortunately, is what it's going to take

00:14:54.480 | for some of these folks to listen. Yeah, and everyone's acutely aware. I mean, I'll say three

00:14:58.240 | things on this one is just talking to your point, you're not about the history of Argentina and how

00:15:01.600 | it relates to this position that Malay holds and being able to speak credibly to this. Second is

00:15:07.360 | what he said, which I think is really important. And third is how it relates to the United States.

00:15:10.960 | But this was clearly to my, from my view, one of the most important media events of the year.

00:15:15.200 | I do think that anyone that's listening to us right now should go watch it and go listen to

00:15:18.960 | the entirety of the speech. It is so important. I hope everyone really takes in what he said.

00:15:24.560 | Just briefly on Argentina in the mid 19th century, Argentina was a colonial

00:15:28.800 | nation, very agricultural, but a lot of free market, pioneerism going on,

00:15:36.240 | businesses were built, and an economy flourished in Argentina. This photo I put up here is from

00:15:42.640 | 1913. Buenos Aires, which at the time was called Paris of the West. I was about to say it looks

00:15:49.280 | like Paris, right? The architecture, everything's beautiful. And stunning. But here's here's some

00:15:52.960 | statistics. A lot of people don't know, Argentina at this time was wealthier than France or Germany,

00:15:58.400 | twice as wealthy as Spain, and had one of the top 10 highest GDP per capita of any nation on earth

00:16:05.280 | in 1913. And so it was this flourishing, vibrant economy with a lot of innovation, a lot of arts,

00:16:13.280 | a lot of building, a lot of employment, a lot of immigration. And then as the series of military

00:16:20.560 | coups began, I don't know if you guys are aware, but there was a military coup in 1930 1943 1955

00:16:27.280 | 1962 1966 1976. And in every one of these cases, the essence of the coup was one of relativism,

00:16:35.360 | which is some people have benefited more than others. As a result, we need to change the way

00:16:39.520 | that the government and the social structure is functioning. And it has to be taken by force.

00:16:44.080 | And I think this is the big story of Argentina that says so much more than any other nation

00:16:50.160 | of the past century, century and a half, which is that these cycles happen based on not

00:16:56.480 | absolutism, but on relativism. And I'll just give you what I mean by that. Millie made this point,

00:17:02.000 | which is so important. From the year 1800 to the year 2020. In the year 1800, we saw 95% of the

00:17:08.960 | world's population in extreme poverty by 2020. It was less than 5%. And this was driven by free

00:17:17.200 | market capitalism democracies that allowed people individuals to pursue their own self interest and

00:17:23.360 | as a result, deliver products into a marketplace that people wanted and were willing to pay for.

00:17:28.800 | And that incentive that market based system allowed the entire world to move forward.

00:17:34.160 | The relativism problem is that some people move forward faster than others. And that causes this

00:17:39.040 | great cycle of what some people might call envy or jealousy. And Malay said it best,

00:17:43.040 | the West is in jeopardy, which is the key statement he was trying to make in his point

00:17:48.240 | that countries are no longer defending free markets. This is a quote, private property

00:17:52.560 | and other institutions of libertarian libertarianism due to errors in their theoretical

00:17:57.360 | framework and ambition for power, opening doors to socialism and condemning us to poverty, misery

00:18:03.600 | and stagnation. Socialism has failed in all countries where it was attempted. And then he

00:18:08.800 | started to harp on about neoclassical economic theory and the issues with that. But I want to

00:18:12.640 | show you one last image, which speaks so clearly to the point that he's making, which is as these

00:18:17.360 | governments that are well intentioned, and the people that elect the governments and put them

00:18:21.360 | in power are well intentioned, then try to redistribute wealth by getting the governments

00:18:26.240 | to step in and play a market role. The market role that they play causes inflation causes

00:18:32.720 | degradation and economic opportunity, economic mobility and prosperity for most people. And you

00:18:38.560 | can see this in this chart, which we've looked at many times. But everything on the top of this

00:18:43.040 | chart, this is a chart that shows the 20 years of price changes of various goods and services in

00:18:47.360 | the United States. Everything that's gone up in price is something that the US government has a

00:18:53.520 | role in buying or paying for. Yeah, controlling. Yeah. And everything that's gone down in price

00:18:59.680 | is where there is a free market that has allowed people to access goods and services at a lower

00:19:04.720 | price over time as opposed to a higher price over time. And while the intention is that the

00:19:08.960 | government is doing good for people by making education, healthcare, and other goods and

00:19:15.440 | services available to them, the government stepping in and intervening in the free market

00:19:20.160 | causes the price to go up. And ultimately, you end up in a really negative cycle that resolves in

00:19:25.200 | this collectivism approach that he's talking about. And that's why I just wanted to tie back

00:19:29.040 | what he said to what's going on in the US today. And the and I've harped on this a lot, but the

00:19:33.120 | growing role that the federal government is playing, and the intention is good, but the impact

00:19:38.400 | is bad over time. And that's really, I think why it was such an important speech. He was so clear,

00:19:43.040 | it was so important for me to hear it. I'm sorry, I harped on but I just really know.

00:19:46.560 | It's the highlight the key of his speeches, hey, good intentions can lead to a bad outcome here.

00:19:52.080 | Yeah, you want everybody to have healthcare, you want everybody to have education,

00:19:54.880 | the government is providing it. And there's no customer and there's no market, there's no

00:19:59.040 | competition. And the products and services that you are referring to, they include medicine,

00:20:04.000 | they include college, they include tutoring, they they don't just include and include air

00:20:07.920 | conditioning, they include refrigerators and televisions, smartphones, all of that. And

00:20:12.640 | picking which system and which set of problems you want to have, I guess,

00:20:16.480 | is what societies need to do. And free markets.

00:20:20.480 | It's a weird reflexive loop, though, for governments, because these people,

00:20:23.360 | what he also said was, these aren't just well intentioned people. They're also a small class

00:20:27.280 | of elites that wanted to feel like they were better than everybody else by implementing

00:20:32.320 | things at work. And so there is a dark part of this as well, which is their desire for power.

00:20:36.800 | And I think it's important to not gloss that over. So this wasn't just a bunch of

00:20:40.800 | bumbling do gooders that screwed things up. This was also a bunch of folks that,

00:20:44.880 | that irrespective of the data, had an opportunity to gain influence and power. And I think that

00:20:51.360 | that's that's an important thing to acknowledge, because it created a very negative reflexive loop

00:20:57.520 | that governments used. Meaning, if you look at freebergs charts, why did that happen? Well,

00:21:04.400 | part of what happened was, the administrative state became more and more powerful, they were

00:21:10.320 | able to pass laws, they were there to decide who the winners and losers were. That is a drug. And

00:21:16.080 | that drug is very addictive. And so what happened as this happened, was the laws went and reinforced

00:21:22.320 | those dynamics of those people being able to decide winners and losers. The thing that it has

00:21:28.080 | that has not happened yet, though, and we're maybe we're beginning to see it in some of these markets

00:21:32.960 | that the government is too involved in, is that it is bred a level of incompetence and incapability

00:21:38.400 | that we now have to unwind because the average everyday citizens lives are either at risk,

00:21:46.560 | or the services are just so expensive that it's just untenable. And I think that's where we are

00:21:52.320 | now. It's a great segue, I think, into this Boeing issue that we've seen, because here's an issue of

00:21:57.520 | regulation and safety, where you want the government and you want safe planes, and you want

00:22:02.160 | some level of regulation, but then you get regulatory capture. So maybe the government,

00:22:05.360 | the government has not been the supporter of the safety agenda that citizens think.

00:22:10.720 | Yes.

00:22:11.040 | Meaning when you look at what has happened in the US airline industry, there are a handful of end

00:22:18.720 | user providers, but those are all using OEM equipment from one of two vendors, Boeing or

00:22:25.760 | Airbus. So it's a duopoly, but in many ways, it's a monopoly, the way that these folks fight with

00:22:31.840 | respect to tariffs and imports and incentives. So the United States airline industry is a monopoly

00:22:38.400 | of one company. Now, if you look at what's happened, what they would say is, well, planes

00:22:42.880 | have become safer and safer and safer. Yes, but they've become safer, in some ways, in the most

00:22:50.000 | simple and obvious ways, but they've become unsafe in that you have these fleets of planes that are

00:22:55.600 | now behaving very unpredictably. And if you look under the hood, what happens is Boeing as an

00:23:02.800 | example, in like the last four years, how much money do you think they've spent on lobbyists and

00:23:07.840 | PACs? I'll tell you $65 million. How much have they spent just in the last year? Almost $11

00:23:14.000 | million. They're like the 15th most active spender in in politics in Washington. Now,

00:23:20.720 | what did they use that money for? Well, that's also documented. See, the crazy thing is this

00:23:24.560 | stuff happens in plain in plain sight. So they were able to water down the safety regulations.

00:23:29.840 | What does that allow you to do? It allows you to have a situation like this unfold.

00:23:34.000 | And then on the other side, the pilots unions can lobby those same politicians who are taking

00:23:40.080 | money from Boeing and prevent systems that would actually make these planes safer.

00:23:46.880 | You can have more improvements in the guide by wire technology, you can have more improvements

00:23:53.120 | in GPS, you can have more improvements in a computer's ability to help improve and augment

00:23:59.200 | the capability of the pilot. Unfortunately, that will result either in fewer pilots or less pay.

00:24:05.040 | And so that doesn't happen nearly as fast and obviously as it should. It's the same for air

00:24:09.680 | traffic control. And all of these issues build up because we've allowed monopolies to build up. So

00:24:14.640 | as much as we think we are a capitalist society, we have veered into this collectivism in certain

00:24:21.840 | markets and where it's measurable and obvious. We need to point at it and say, let's go fix.

00:24:26.720 | Yeah. And this would be let me just tee up a little bit of what you're referring to in case

00:24:30.800 | people don't know, but everybody probably saw the news that on January 5, the door blew off of

00:24:35.760 | one of these Boeing 737 Max jets. If you've heard that name before, it's because this isn't the

00:24:41.360 | first time that the Max jets have had problems. This plane safely landed, thank God, and there

00:24:46.720 | was nobody sitting in the row where the door blew off. And this has to do with some bolts on the

00:24:52.720 | doors. But this is just the start of problems with the 737 Max. There's an incredible documentary,

00:24:57.920 | if you haven't seen it, we'll put it in the show notes, Boeing's fatal flaw. And the version before

00:25:03.440 | this, the 737 Max 9 is the one that had the bolts come off, Jamal. The Max 8, if you remember,

00:25:09.040 | there were two really harrowing instances where tragically 346 people died in these two instances

00:25:15.200 | because the plane, literally the software on the plane, which is called Max maneuvering

00:25:20.720 | characteristics augmentation system, which was designed, because they were trying to get more

00:25:25.360 | fuel efficiency, and they had positioned the engines in a weird way on the wings.

00:25:32.080 | So they had to kind of help pilots level this stuff. And to your point about regulatory capture,

00:25:37.040 | there was all this behind the scenes manipulation of the market to try to get these planes built to

00:25:43.920 | try to get them out the door because there was so much money at stake. Well, on these two terrible

00:25:48.240 | accidents, the plane the nose literally dove and the pilots were fighting it in both cases,

00:25:53.600 | right, they just crashed and everybody on board died. And for 20 months, the 737 Max models were

00:26:00.960 | grounded. And that cost the company over $21 billion. So there is no competition to your point.

00:26:08.240 | And then in a free market, if there were 10 providers, would this be much different to mouth?

00:26:11.520 | And absolutely, yeah. So I mean, that's what you have to realize here is that these duopolies,

00:26:16.000 | you think there's competition in a duopoly, there isn't competition.

00:26:18.960 | No, I mean, like, for example, like, if you look at the car market, how many instances I think the

00:26:23.360 | last big incidents that I remember was, I think, Ford had an issue with the fuel tanks of some

00:26:28.640 | cars that were exploding, right? Yeah. But the reality is, when that happens,

00:26:32.640 | there are alternatives. One is that there's a legal requirement for Ford to just fix these

00:26:38.560 | things quickly. There are lawsuits that happened, there was class actions, there was settlements,

00:26:44.400 | but there's also the ability for folks that can afford it is just to switch vendor and of which

00:26:48.560 | there are 50 other vendors to choose from. That is a healthy dynamic. So today, when you look

00:26:53.680 | at the auto market, what do you see a plethora of choice. And when you see fatalities or safety

00:26:59.440 | issues, they are overwhelmingly driver error. Yes, we assume that and we get insurance to deal with

00:27:05.760 | that. When you look at airplanes, you have these three sections of risk that each are compounding

00:27:12.560 | because there is no competition. Number one is that the monopoly vendor has zero pressure to

00:27:18.960 | actually test these things adequately. Because on the other side of building something well,

00:27:24.560 | is shareholder pressure to deliver something sooner and faster so that they can reap more profits.

00:27:30.960 | Then second is you have a regulatory infrastructure that puts rules on top of rules, but then will bend

00:27:36.320 | the rules if you donate to them. Right? And that's measured and known. And then the third are the

00:27:41.680 | folks that actually operate the planes, who have this actual incentive to not see technical

00:27:46.960 | improvements because it defends their job for longer. And in all of these cases, there isn't

00:27:52.400 | enough competition to shine a light on this to say, how does society actually want this market

00:27:57.680 | to operate? This is collectivism. It's not working.

00:28:01.440 | Doug Birkey

00:28:01.920 | Freeberg, you have thoughts on this Boeing regulatory capture and the issue of only

00:28:05.520 | having two vendors there. And the complexity of these machines now in relation to that,

00:28:12.880 | Freeberg Nick, you can pull this up. This is an audit

00:28:15.440 | of the business model for a company called TransTime Group. TransTime Group is a

00:28:22.320 | aircraft aerospace parts manufacturer. They sell certified, regulated aircraft parts

00:28:30.640 | to aviation companies as well as to airlines, private pilots and also the government.

00:28:36.720 | And they do about 7 billion in revenue, three and a half billion in EBITDA.

00:28:42.640 | So to your point a couple weeks ago about what's the appropriate competitive EBITDA

00:28:48.960 | margin that a company can ultimately achieve their EBITDA margins 53% this company better

00:28:54.560 | than Facebook insane on 7 billion of revenue and growing. Nick, if you want to pull up their stock

00:28:59.360 | chart, and you guys can see how the business has performed over the years and their business model

00:29:03.760 | has been relatively simple. They've acquired aerospace companies got that have certified parts,

00:29:10.000 | they drop the cost and raise the price. And they do that over and over again. And here's

00:29:13.680 | the business over the last 10 years. This thing is, you know, roughly 10 bagger,

00:29:19.200 | eight to 10 bagger in the last 10 years. The market cap is 60 billion today, no end in sight.

00:29:26.480 | And so there was a government audit done of the business by using uncertified cost data,

00:29:32.400 | which is one of the most reliable sources of information to perform cost analysis, we found

00:29:35.920 | that trans time earned excess profit profit of at least $21 million on 105 spare parts

00:29:42.240 | on 150 contracts. So they're selling spare parts into the government. The government auditor came

00:29:47.760 | in, audited them and identified because there's no real audit, there's no real accountability

00:29:53.440 | in government as purchasers. But there is regulatory authority on deciding who are the

00:29:57.760 | winners and who are the losers in the market. Trans time has been elected a winner because

00:30:02.240 | they have regulatory approval to make and sell these parts. The cost to get approval to make and

00:30:07.200 | sell these parts is so high, that it makes it prohibitive for startups to come in and compete

00:30:12.400 | in this marketplace. And now that they're a preferred supplier, and they get the single

00:30:16.720 | contracts, where there's no competition to be a supplier, they can raise the price every year.

00:30:22.080 | Multiple audit reports over the last 23 years have highlighted the problem of the Department

00:30:26.320 | of Defense paying excess profits on sole source contracts, where cost analysis was not used to

00:30:31.200 | determine fair and reasonable prices. And this problem continues to occur. Now, I'm not necessarily

00:30:36.560 | saying that this is a negative on trans time. It's a fantastic business. It's well run. It's one of

00:30:40.880 | the best run public companies with a multi $10 billion market cap in the world. But the condition

00:30:46.080 | is that the US government comes in and picks and chooses through its regulatory authority,

00:30:50.000 | which companies can make products, the cost to enter and compete becomes prohibitively high.

00:30:55.440 | And then the company has complete pricing power, and there's very little accountability in the

00:30:58.640 | overall system. And I think that this plays out not just with this company, but obviously also

00:31:03.360 | with Boeing and the fact that we've narrowed down the competitive market space to just a few sole

00:31:08.160 | source providers that have very little accountability. And eventually, these sorts of

00:31:12.000 | conditions arise, either prices get too high quality degrades all the other things that natural

00:31:16.560 | market forces would keep a check on. Yeah. And in terms of competition,

00:31:20.480 | Chamath, the I guess the only thing you could say is consumers could potentially maybe try to avoid

00:31:28.080 | the 737. Max, I know I did when all these accidents happen. I just told you know, my person who books

00:31:34.320 | the flights, hey, do not put me on a 737. Max period full stop. And you know what, you're

00:31:39.360 | going to wind up paying a lot more, you're going to have a hard time getting certain routes, you're

00:31:42.560 | going to reduce it because, you know, most airlines, I think, have these 737. Max is in

00:31:48.320 | there. So you when you have such a few number of providers to your point about it's not like cars,

00:31:52.640 | it's not fragmented like that you can't avoid a certain car type, a plane type the way you can

00:31:57.360 | avoid a car type. So just wrapping up your Chamath, what changes should we see in terms of

00:32:03.680 | late stage capitalism, something the example like air travel and manufacturers, is there any way to

00:32:09.920 | unwind this reasonably? Or is it too late? Because we're at this? Well, I go back to some of the

00:32:18.960 | examples that we've made fun of before, you have to rely on the government to actually be competent

00:32:26.320 | in key moments in time. I think this is one of them, the organization that could do something

00:32:31.600 | about it, for example, take the FTC, or even take the DOJ. We are investigating Amazon's

00:32:40.480 | purchase of the portable vacuum cleaner Roomba, right? critically important issue.

00:32:47.600 | And that is apparently for the American people, higher than the sclerosis that the government has

00:32:56.000 | enabled, enabled in the airline industry, which affects everybody. So could the right government

00:33:03.600 | agencies choose to actually focus on something important here and actually figure out why is

00:33:10.000 | this happening? Because I think the door plugs issue is endemic of a much bigger problem. This

00:33:16.560 | is a company that's rotting because there is no accountability. And the reason there's no

00:33:21.040 | accountability is there's no real functional competition. And I have not seen any good answer

00:33:26.480 | to accountability other than competition. Yeah, I mean, the the good news is the FAA

00:33:33.440 | really took quick action to ground these 171 Boeing 737 nine max airplanes, but they don't

00:33:41.680 | they do not understand the scope of the problem if they let them back in the fleet. And this is

00:33:46.000 | happening. The bigger picture problem of lack of competition. Yeah, they're no, no, no, my

00:33:50.800 | my safety of these. Yeah, my point is like, you had to adjudicate the interaction of very

00:33:56.800 | complicated hardware and software. In that first go around. Here is just a pure, systemic hardware

00:34:04.720 | failure. So the point is that whether it's them or their suppliers, there's just some complacency

00:34:13.600 | that sets in when you know you will always have the business to Friedberg's point, it is a very

00:34:19.280 | corrosive thing in running a business, trying to have motivated employees, when they know on the

00:34:28.800 | back end of it that they could make anything in the world. And they'll just be able to sell it

00:34:33.920 | to somebody and they'll have to take it. That's that example that Friedberg just cited 20 odd

00:34:39.200 | million dollars for just random stuff for what is it 15 pieces. That's crazy. That's just straight

00:34:46.240 | up theft. And so when you have that, how do you expect the employees of that organization to give

00:34:51.680 | a I don't see how I don't see how you could expect that. And so my point is the FAA has a much bigger

00:34:58.240 | problem. So for example, like the D o E has a loan program to try to create a diverse energy

00:35:04.080 | infrastructure in the United States. Maybe we need to look at some of these sectors and instead of

00:35:08.240 | building the administrative state, take some of that money instead and just create programs to

00:35:13.360 | get more competition. All right. In other news, Adam Neumann, you remember from WeWork infamy

00:35:19.360 | slash fame, it has a new startup, you may have heard of it flow, they've raised a ton of money,

00:35:24.640 | he started buying a bunch of apartment buildings, the idea, people can rent nice apartments in cool

00:35:29.680 | cities, that focus more on social interaction, and hanging out in common spaces, all that great

00:35:35.920 | stuff. And there's also allegedly or reportedly some sort of rent to own, where renters can

00:35:41.360 | receive equity in the company over time. And I don't think this has ever been released. But the

00:35:47.600 | idea would be maybe you own shares in flow, flow manages around 3000 units, most of which were

00:35:53.040 | purchased by Newman after he left, we work and you know, he took down a windfall as an exit package.

00:35:58.400 | And so according to the real deal, this real estate publication, Newman had a 60 million

00:36:02.880 | variable rate mortgage on one of these properties in June, sex, maybe you could explain to us what's

00:36:07.840 | going on here, since you have a lot of experience in real estate. Well, it's pretty simple,

00:36:12.640 | he can't make his interest payments. Okay, so the reason is, is because he had floating rate debt.

00:36:18.240 | So if he had locked in his dad over, say 10 years back in when he bought this building in 2021,

00:36:25.440 | or whenever it was, when interest rates were extremely low, you know, that was during the

00:36:30.400 | desert period, probably could have locked in long term debt at maybe even 3%, three or 4%.

00:36:36.960 | And instead, he got floating rate debt. And if you look at where commercial debt is now,

00:36:42.080 | I mean, it's seven, eight, 9%, if you can get it, which is pretty hard.

00:36:46.240 | So he maxed out on debt when he bought these buildings, he bought them top of market.

00:36:50.800 | It sounds like in 2021, because real estate, like a lot of things moves inversely to interest rates.

00:36:58.240 | So when interest rates spiked over the last year or so, then real estate valuations went down. So

00:37:04.800 | he bought a bunch of buildings, top of market using a lot of debt that was floating rate,

00:37:09.680 | interest rates spike, perfect storm, now he can't make his interest payments.

00:37:13.920 | The crazy part about this, when I was watching it happen, we talked about it, I think on the

00:37:18.480 | program at the time was Andreessen Horowitz put in like, over 300 million at a billion dollar

00:37:24.160 | valuation. But they didn't do that in peak Zurb. They did that in 2022. And the writing was on the

00:37:29.040 | wall. What are your thoughts on why they would make a bet like that? And yeah, just tech VCs

00:37:36.480 | betting on real estate for a second time? How does that occur?

00:37:39.680 | Well, I don't think it occurs because they cared about real estate. I think it allows them to

00:37:45.360 | take $300 million of committed capital and put it out there so that they're $300 million less

00:37:54.160 | available, which means that they're $300 million closer to raising a new fund,

00:37:58.160 | which means that they can raise they can charge 2% on more money. That's why they did it.

00:38:02.720 | Got it. Yeah. So just keep the money train deploying capital. It's a place where you

00:38:08.000 | can put a big huge check. And you can raise your next fund. And yeah, why not? Okay, well,

00:38:13.520 | they have. Let me let me offer. I mean, I don't disagree. I think that candidly, what you've said

00:38:19.120 | is exactly how mega funds are thinking about it. We have to deploy capital to raise our next fund.

00:38:23.440 | And if we still have capital in our last fund, then we can't deploy freeberg.

00:38:27.520 | Well, if you're gonna have to deploy large amounts of capital,

00:38:30.640 | wouldn't you feel better deploying that capital with an entrepreneur who's actually run a big

00:38:37.120 | business before even though the business failed? No, no, no, if you're if you're if you if you

00:38:41.120 | were not optimized for fees, you would do a Peter Thiel did and just have the fund and return the

00:38:44.800 | money. Right? And for further because he's already won, but everybody else that's trying to win the

00:38:52.080 | only way to win in a world where your your exits are not that great is to actually generate money

00:38:58.880 | via fees, even though that fees are taxed at current income. That's the way to win in venture

00:39:03.280 | is not carry. It's by fees. And so it's and I don't blame Andreessen. I think like that's that's

00:39:10.640 | smart for them to do. And if they have folks that are willing to enable that by giving them money,

00:39:15.360 | they should do it. But are they going to generate huge rates of return? Probably not because that's

00:39:21.200 | not what real estate is known for real estate is known for long steady tax arms that slowly compound

00:39:27.520 | for the for the owner of the company over 20 or the owner of the business over 25 to 35 years.

00:39:33.120 | That's not what a venture fund is supposed to be doing for a 10 year 12 year return cycle. So

00:39:38.000 | obviously, they're doing it for fees. That's okay. I think that's capitalism.

00:39:40.960 | What are the LPS then think sacks if we look at this, you know, you're an LP in a technology

00:39:46.400 | firm. I'll take Andreessen out of it for a second. But let's just say some giant LP gives

00:39:50.400 | giant amounts of money to a venture capital firm, and then they're deployed in real estate.

00:39:56.320 | What happens, you know, in their minds? And is there any kind of tension that would occur?

00:40:01.040 | Well, handy having the situation, you can never judge a VC based on one investment.

00:40:06.960 | If we were to do that, every VC would have a lot of egg on their face, because we're supposed to

00:40:11.360 | take big swings and swing for the fences and try and hit home runs and grand slams. And a lot of

00:40:16.160 | them are going to make you look foolish, you have to look at an investment portfolio and track

00:40:21.440 | returns over time. So I wouldn't judge any particular investor based on one investment.

00:40:27.120 | So I don't think that's fair. Now, in the case of this investment, if you want me to explain what I

00:40:32.560 | think went wrong. I think Adam Newman had a compelling vision. His vision was to create a

00:40:39.520 | new experience in in, I guess you'd call it apartment living, and that people will be willing

00:40:45.120 | to pay more for that, because he would create this national brand in apartments. And right now,

00:40:50.800 | apartments are super local, and there is no brand in, you know, apartment living. So I think as a

00:40:57.200 | entrepreneur, as an operator, he had a great vision. And I think he actually achieved his

00:41:02.640 | vision. If you read these articles carefully, what they say is that his occupancy was high,

00:41:07.840 | and people were willing to pay at least a little bit more for the experience of being in a flow

00:41:13.200 | apartment. The problem for Adam Newman is that at the end of the day, his plan to raise rents by

00:41:20.800 | creating experience, even though it worked, it just didn't raise rents that much. And what ended

00:41:26.240 | up being much more important were the moves in interest rates and how he capitalized these

00:41:32.720 | acquisitions and the price he paid on the acquisitions. So there's an old saying in real

00:41:37.520 | estate that you make money based on the buy, not on the sell, meaning that, you know, when you go

00:41:43.360 | and sell your apartment building, office building, or whatever, you're monetizing an acquisition that

00:41:49.200 | you did correctly. And if you don't buy at the right price, you're never going to be able to

00:41:53.040 | make money on the sale. And I think this is a really good example of this, where he bought

00:41:57.680 | at top of market, his capital stack was over reliant on debt, and he had floating rate debt.

00:42:05.120 | I mean, those are just financial mistakes and timing mistakes that you can't make up for,

00:42:10.400 | no matter how good an operator you are in real estate. And in a way, I mean, this is the same

00:42:15.520 | thing that happened with WeWork, which is he delivered an excellent product. I mean, people

00:42:20.320 | love WeWork offices. Absolutely. Yeah, they pick them over other offices because of the vibes,

00:42:27.040 | because of the culture, because of the community. So he has some mastery of that. But to your point,

00:42:32.880 | entry price matters, and the economics matter. If you look at WeWork, it didn't fail because

00:42:37.920 | the product wasn't good. It was because he didn't pay enough attention to the financial

00:42:42.000 | aspects of the business. With WeWork, he leased a bunch of offices at the absolute top of the market,

00:42:47.600 | and then over invested in TI's, tenant improvements. With Flow, he bought a bunch

00:42:52.000 | of real estate at the top of the market and sort of did it with the wrong capital stack.

00:42:56.320 | So this is the problem is that when you get into a real estate business, it doesn't really matter

00:43:02.080 | how great you are as an entrepreneur operator if you're not good at sort of the legacy,

00:43:09.040 | old school real estate part of it. And the old school real estate guys were saying during WeWork,

00:43:16.160 | "This is not going to work. This is Regis, but with a bad capital structure." And the old school

00:43:22.160 | real estate guys were saying something similar about this. And it just goes to show that if you

00:43:28.080 | are going to try and disrupt a legacy industry, you do have to kind of understand the ins and

00:43:32.880 | outs of that legacy industry. And the great paradox of this, Sax, was when he did Green

00:43:38.000 | Desk, which was the precursor to WeWork, when he did the first WeWorks in San Francisco and other

00:43:42.400 | places, his playbook was find a building that's empty that cannot be leased. So he got 25 Taylor

00:43:48.880 | Street, like 6th and Market, the worst area by the Tenderloin, and we had an office there for

00:43:53.600 | a little bit. And I had my podcasting studio there for a little bit. This was a terrible off, this was

00:43:57.760 | a terrible area, but he made it hip and cool. And it was really cheap. And man, it sold out and it

00:44:03.280 | was packed and the vibes were great. But then as you're saying, then he moved all of a sudden to

00:44:08.160 | Soma, and he started opening up these glass filled ones. And, you know, the he was renting them for

00:44:13.760 | less with all their giveaways and six months free and all this stuff than they could ever afford.

00:44:18.080 | So he kind of had mission drift, right? The playbook, they just they changed the playbook.

00:44:23.600 | And it economically was not viable.

00:44:25.200 | Well, the timing, the timing got really bad. And again, they didn't pay attention to the

00:44:29.840 | financial aspects as much as they should. In this case, I think that if he was trying to execute

00:44:36.000 | this play today, and doing his acquisitions today, he could actually make it where he would,

00:44:41.200 | he would need a lot more equity because he wouldn't be able to get as much debt financing.

00:44:44.640 | But if he had the equity and could do more of an acquisition based on equity, the prices he'd pay

00:44:49.120 | right now would be much lower. And then as interest rates come down, he could ride that

00:44:54.080 | wave, he could refi, pull his equity out, and put debt on it that is cheaper as the price goes down.

00:45:00.800 | So there was a way to maybe make this work. But you know, with real estate,

00:45:05.520 | the timing is just so important. Again, your cost basis of when you get in the investment

00:45:10.800 | is probably the most important thing in terms of whether you make money or not.

00:45:15.520 | Did you see this by chance, the real estate piece in 60 minutes, the package they did

00:45:19.520 | last week, Saks? It was basically what we were talking about here a year ago.

00:45:23.520 | Super compelling, if you haven't seen it. It's basically the all in podcast from 12 or 18 months

00:45:27.680 | ago. Has anything changed on the field in terms of commercial real estate? Or is it just continuing

00:45:33.600 | to collapse? No, I mean, nothing's changed. I think that all the commercial real estate

00:45:37.360 | guys, the sponsors and the dealmakers and so forth, they're all kind of hanging on by their

00:45:43.120 | fingernails waiting for interest rates to come down. And all the leases are still coming off,

00:45:48.720 | right? Like people are still who had six, seven, eight year leases that were signed pre-COVID.

00:45:52.720 | It depends on the market. I mean, some of the markets are coming back. But again, what this

00:45:59.200 | flow news showed, this Adam Neumann news shows is that you could be fully occupied and you could

00:46:07.040 | still default. And the reason is because of your capital structure, the interest rates have spiked

00:46:11.440 | up. You're now paying all of your operating income is being eaten up by your debt service.

00:46:19.360 | The only way to make it through that is you go to your bank, it's one of these regional

00:46:23.520 | banks, and you work out a deal to extend. They call it pretend and extend. And they let you

00:46:30.480 | hang on there. You'll extend the term of your- Kick the can down the road, yeah.

00:46:35.440 | Yeah. They'll lower your debt payments in exchange for more term. And you just try to

00:46:38.960 | get to the other side of these high interest rates. And then once you get to the other side,

00:46:44.160 | again, you're hanging on, you're not defaulting. That's what everyone's doing. So, if rates don't

00:46:49.280 | come down as expected this year, I think the market's expecting 150 basis points of rate cuts.

00:46:55.360 | If that doesn't actually happen, there's a lot of real estate sponsors who are in trouble.

00:47:00.080 | And in turn, there's a lot of regional banks who are in trouble because they're the ones

00:47:04.640 | who made all these loans to these sponsors. So, everyone's trying to, like you said,

00:47:08.640 | kick the can down the road. Yeah. And the 60 Minutes piece also

00:47:13.440 | talked about how there's some emergency rezoning going on in New York specifically where

00:47:17.920 | they take the floor plate in the middle, which I think you talked about, Sach, you have to have

00:47:21.920 | windows if you want to convert to residential. And they just make an empty space, the void,

00:47:27.040 | they call it, in the middle of the building that they'll deal with in the future. But they just

00:47:31.840 | have this empty space in the middle of the building that's not going to get used. And

00:47:35.600 | then the rest that has windows gets used to be converted into lofts, etc, in New York. So,

00:47:40.400 | people are starting to think creatively. If people don't come back to office. Okay,

00:47:44.560 | let me ask you a question just based on that comp, the set of comments, given Adam Newman's

00:47:49.440 | experience as an investor in this space, and this general opportunity, wouldn't you rather back a

00:47:54.720 | known someone who knows and has been through the market and has experience versus some founder

00:47:59.760 | who shows up and has never run a business in this space? I mean, this guy has more experience.

00:48:03.440 | It's such a great point. Well, here's the thing, Freeberg, the great point about that is,

00:48:08.400 | you don't see a lot of founders who explicitly come out and say, I want to build $100 billion

00:48:13.120 | business, I want to build a giant business. They're so rare, that VCs who have a lot of chips,

00:48:19.040 | they would like to back those, you know, swing for the fences, folks. And so, I do understand

00:48:24.320 | why people would back him again. And they've run out of before they've done it. To some degree.

00:48:27.840 | So, maybe they learned from mistakes, and this time around, he learned from those mistakes.

00:48:31.840 | Yeah, but this is the exact same mistake.

00:48:33.200 | So, therefore, they made the bad bet.

00:48:35.840 | I'm not advocating, by the way. I'm just asking.

00:48:38.080 | No, I understand. But to your point, Freeberg, I can understand. People want to bet on somebody

00:48:41.920 | who is crazy and swings for the fences. This entrepreneur clearly does not learn from their

00:48:46.960 | mistakes. I think both of those things could be true. Right, Shama?

00:48:50.000 | What I would say is that I think that where I've made the biggest mistakes in my investing career

00:48:55.760 | is when I confused what I was investing in for one thing when it was the other. And so,

00:49:02.000 | when I look back, and I had a small dallyance in biotech, because I thought, oh, this is going to

00:49:08.480 | be more computational biology, and I understand computation. So, this gives me an edge. Turned

00:49:14.080 | out I was wrong. There was another time where I've invested in certain sectors of the economy,

00:49:19.280 | because I thought they were technology businesses, and at best, they were tech-enabled

00:49:23.040 | versions of an existing industry. And when I look at those investments, the thing that I got wrong

00:49:28.960 | was not listening to the very experienced investors in those sectors and why they passed.

00:49:37.200 | And that has caused me no shortage of headache and grief. And so, if I had to learn anything

00:49:45.040 | from all of this, it would be that if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a

00:49:50.160 | duck. It's not a tech company. And so, if that duck means it's a real estate business, I would

00:49:56.240 | talk to a real estate investor and wonder to myself why they wouldn't have done this deal.

00:50:00.400 | Similarly, you know, when it's a biotech business, I have to ask myself,

00:50:05.200 | why wouldn't they have done it? They know more than I ever will in this space. And so, similarly,

00:50:10.240 | I kind of look at this as an example of that, which is, could be a very talented person in an

00:50:16.160 | industry. I think just like it's important for us to be very clear and lucid and intellectually

00:50:22.080 | honest about what industry that is. I think it's a great point. I mean, look, I think whenever

00:50:25.760 | you're dealing with a tech-enabled business, which I would define as a more traditional

00:50:31.600 | business model with some sort of software layer, you know, on top of it, you have to kind of assess

00:50:40.160 | like how much of a difference does that software really make at the end of the day. In this case,

00:50:46.080 | this is a real estate business with a very thin kind of software slash operating technology.

00:50:53.360 | Yeah, the experience layer is a very small part of the overall, let's call it P&L of this business.

00:51:02.000 | Such a great point. Saks, I mean, a perfect analogy would be like if you have, if you're

00:51:06.560 | taking a flight on United, the United app is delightful now. It's a really good app. I don't

00:51:10.800 | use this as a commercial airline. It's called United Airlines, Saks. You pay for one ticket

00:51:14.480 | instead of the whole plane. But have you been to a McDonald's recently? I actually went to

00:51:17.680 | McDonald's. Yeah. You order through an app now and there's a big screen. The point is you walk

00:51:21.360 | in there and it's probably not the McDonald's you knew 15 or 20 years ago. It's not about waiting in

00:51:26.480 | line and ordering and that's not how it works anymore. There. So the point is, is that a tech

00:51:32.000 | enabled business or is that still a restaurant? Well, if you spend a lot of your time intellectually

00:51:37.040 | contorting yourself to try to justify why the next version of McDonald's is a tech enabled

00:51:42.080 | business, you're just going to lose a lot of money. It's a restaurant. Now all restaurants

00:51:46.880 | need technology. And what you see by McDonald's is even the oldest and most established are running

00:51:52.240 | forward very quickly to implement technology because they know that it creates efficiency,

00:51:57.840 | which then flows to the bottom line for them. Yeah. So the reality is that we have lived in

00:52:02.720 | this wonderland where we've looked at these software businesses that have 80 and 90% gross

00:52:07.680 | margins and impose that expectation on other markets and then made investment decisions by

00:52:12.480 | trying to justify how that it's a tech enabled real estate business, a tech enabled healthcare

00:52:18.000 | business, a tech enabled energy business without being honest with ourselves that those businesses

00:52:23.120 | have over decades because of lots of competition found a consistent and reliable

00:52:31.360 | resting place in terms of gross margins far below 80 and 90%. And so instead of willing

00:52:38.320 | tech enabled businesses to be at 80 and 90 and tricking oneself, I think it's more realistic

00:52:43.120 | to ask yourself why aren't 80 and 90% gross margin businesses decaying to 30 and 40% gross

00:52:48.800 | margins like every other part of the economy, when everything will be technology enabled? I think that

00:52:53.600 | that's a very reasonable question. And I think the answer is, there is no safe place. I don't think

00:52:58.320 | that you can justify 80 90% gross margins in software, when you can use a model and whip up

00:53:03.520 | a competitor. I just think that we are all going to a place where everything is a tech enabled

00:53:08.960 | version of some marketplaces would be a notable exception there with network effects. So DoorDash

00:53:14.320 | versus the tech enabled restaurant, asset light marketplaces, you and I and sacks have been

00:53:18.640 | involved in a bunch of different marketplaces together. Sometimes they're asset heavy,

00:53:22.560 | sometimes they're asset light when they're asset heavy, man, it's really hard to make those

00:53:26.240 | businesses work on sacks. Yeah, I mean, I think we should differentiate between gross margin and then

00:53:33.200 | the net operating margin or profit, right. And so, you know, gross margin is what is the cost

00:53:40.560 | on the margin of providing one incremental unit. And the thing about pure software businesses

00:53:47.120 | is that on the margin, you can provision another instance of the product almost for free. I mean,

00:53:51.760 | there's a little bit of hosting costs at AWS or whatever. So on the margins, it's, you know,

00:53:57.120 | it's like the perfect gross margin business, as opposed to a hamburger, as opposed to a,

00:54:01.440 | yeah, a restaurant is going to have very large costs of goods sold or cogs. The simple heuristic

00:54:09.360 | that I use is just does this company have large cogs, costs of goods sold? And are they physical

00:54:16.800 | world cogs? If they are, it's not a software business, it's at best a tech enabled business.

00:54:23.920 | So just look for that. You know, does this business have large physical world cogs? Now,

00:54:30.960 | what I would say is if the cogs are virtual, like, you know, it could be hosting costs,

00:54:36.240 | or it could be paying Twilio for telephony or something like that, then at least it's still

00:54:43.120 | not like as good a business because the margins aren't as good, but it's very scalable, right?

00:54:48.800 | Because you're not you don't have that like huge friction of needing to scale up physical world

00:54:53.120 | infrastructure, physical world, supply chains, that kind of stuff. So I like virtual cogs a

00:54:58.480 | lot better. There are digital cogs a lot better than physical cogs.

00:55:02.800 | I love it when marketplaces though, I mean, we could speak to that, too. You know,

00:55:05.920 | when I had Dara on the pod the other week, and when he launches an adjacency,

00:55:10.480 | hey, we're going to sell alcohol, hey, we're going to sell groceries, hey, we're gonna

00:55:13.680 | add this thing that's right next to the already, you know, portfolio of Uber offerings,

00:55:18.800 | doesn't cost them much, right? They just have to get the supply side up and running,

00:55:21.840 | but they already have the demand side. And I think that's where like, these super apps are

00:55:24.720 | doing really well, or Airbnb adding, you know, some inventory in a new city that they unlock,

00:55:30.240 | right? Well, true, true marketplaces are perfect gross margin businesses as well,

00:55:34.720 | because they don't have physical inventory that they themselves own. What you'll see is with a

00:55:38.960 | lot of marketplaces, they'll cheat by buying the inventory themselves, at least to jumpstart the

00:55:46.400 | market and then selling it. And so when you see that line item on the P&L, you know, that they

00:55:52.240 | have real cost of goods sold, you know, oh, wait a second, this isn't a true marketplace, they're

00:55:57.840 | providing the service. And so again, it's just a way to like catch whether the business is truly

00:56:04.480 | one of these great, high gross margin businesses, or whether it's more of a tech enabled business

00:56:10.240 | that's pretending to be a pure software business. Yeah, direct to consumer got people in a lot of

00:56:15.040 | trouble during the last cycle in venture capital. If you look at a lot of these companies,

00:56:21.920 | even the best SaaS businesses have seen their gross margins erode by about 15 to 20%. It used

00:56:31.120 | to be that best in class software business can generate 90 91% 88 high 80s to low 90s gross

00:56:38.400 | margins. Now that's not true. You see a lot of these best in class companies that are in the

00:56:41.760 | high 60s, low 70s. So it already just shows you that that pressure has has come upon the market.

00:56:47.200 | And so is it that the software enabled business goes towards 85? Or is that the 85% gross margin

00:56:52.960 | business goes towards 30? It looks like it's the latter. That's just what the data says.

00:56:56.880 | Well, ma'am, just categorizing certain costs differently than you are. But I don't know why

00:57:01.200 | software business would go all the way to 30. Right? Because again, sales and marketing don't

00:57:04.560 | count in the gross margin. GNA doesn't count even R&D doesn't count in the gross margin has to be,

00:57:10.640 | you know, a unit cost that you can attribute on the margin to that incremental instance of the

00:57:17.520 | product. So things like, again, paying Twilio for meter telephony or paying open AI for like

00:57:24.800 | metered API access, all of that is definitely in cogs. And I think some customer support costs

00:57:31.120 | that can be attributed on kind of a per instance basis that goes in there. But if if sales and

00:57:37.280 | marketing and R&D and GNA aren't going in there, I mean, I don't know why I go all the way to 30.

00:57:43.120 | I guess I'm just saying that I still think software businesses and marketplaces for that

00:57:47.520 | matter are still the best kinds of businesses on a margin profile basis. The problem is that

00:57:53.520 | there's a lot of fake software businesses or fake marketplaces out there that are pretending

00:57:59.120 | to be pure tech businesses when actually, they're they're more like old school businesses that have

00:58:05.280 | the veneer of technology. And I think, to your point there, like the trick of saying I'm an 80%

00:58:11.920 | gross margin business, but having no profitability is then who cares? So when you look at the profit,

00:58:18.640 | when you look at the profitability of these businesses, again, you'll be in the 20 to 30%.

00:58:23.200 | That's why when you see companies that are in the high 30s to low 50s, they're a very unique.

00:58:30.240 | And be, you should expect that there is something fundamentally monopolistic about them.

00:58:37.680 | And that is the simplest way to filter out these companies, because in a highly competitive market,

00:58:43.600 | you cannot extract those kinds of profit dollars. Capitalism says you can't do that. So you can only

00:58:48.720 | do it when when you have an N of one or N of two kind of competitive dynamic where there's essentially

00:58:54.880 | a mutual to talk with your biggest competitor. Yeah, it is it is a good point that just because

00:59:00.160 | you have good unit economics or good gross margins doesn't mean that the business is profitable at

00:59:05.680 | the end of the day. Yeah, it could be totally 80% gross margins and still be losing a ton of money

00:59:10.320 | because you've got too much overhead. You've got too much sales and marketing. You're too much R&D.

00:59:14.960 | Yes. So you're selling to customers who don't really need it. And then they eventually cancel,

00:59:18.800 | right? Like we see that a lot. Look at the streamers. Look at the streamers. That's just

00:59:23.280 | a big recycling exercise. It's just like people come to the top of the funnel, they use the product,

00:59:27.360 | and then they leave and then you have to reacquire them over and over again. And it and it could be

00:59:31.760 | the case that SAS actually looks a little bit like that too, at the bottom level,

00:59:35.200 | but when you hit your natural audience, it does get challenging.

00:59:38.240 | Well, this is why in SAS, there's a heuristic called the rule of 40,

00:59:42.800 | which is for public market SAS companies, you want to see that their operating margin

00:59:48.480 | plus their growth rate equals 40 or is greater than 40, ideally. So in other words, you could

00:59:54.560 | have a SAS business with a 20% operating margin and a 20% growth rate, and that would hit rule

01:00:01.200 | of 40 and that would be a very attractive business. Or you could have, I don't know,

01:00:06.080 | it could be growing 50% year over year, and its operating margin could be negative 10%.

01:00:11.200 | And that'd be okay too, because they're losing money, but at least the investment is leading to

01:00:17.040 | well above average growth. Or you could be growing, you could be growing slower, you could

01:00:23.360 | have a 10% growth rate and have a 30% operating margin, and that would also be hitting the rule

01:00:28.160 | of 40. So it's just a simple way of tracking whether this is a good business at scale.

01:00:34.640 | I don't think startups have to worry about this until they get to the later growth stage.

01:00:38.880 | Yeah. When you're in your BC round, you're making 50, 100 million. Yeah, you got to be

01:00:42.880 | really thoughtful about this. In the beginning, you're trying to get product market fit and

01:00:45.520 | triangulate on something. So Chamath just mentioned streaming, NBCUniversal, if you

01:00:50.240 | didn't know it, paid the NFL $100 million for the exclusive streaming rights to one,

01:00:56.880 | that's right, one first round playoff game for the NFL. That happened last weekend between the

01:01:01.680 | Chiefs and the Dolphins. That was on their service Peacock, NBC's app, basically their

01:01:07.280 | version of Netflix or Disney Plus. It garnered 23 million viewers, which makes it the most streamed

01:01:12.880 | live event in US history. Even so, that's almost half of what the Packers and Cowboys had about 40

01:01:22.080 | million. Lions versus Rams, same weekend, 36 million. And so this has brought into question

01:01:28.800 | what's going on with streaming? Have these businesses gotten ahead of their skis? Just

01:01:32.320 | to give you a couple of charts. Disney Plus took off like a massive rocket peaked in q4 of 2022 at

01:01:38.640 | 164 million subscribers are now at 150 million. Here's a chart. I mean, just amazing how quickly

01:01:45.760 | they got to Netflix ish numbers. Here's Netflix's chart. Again, this is quarterly, they're up to

01:01:52.640 | now an all time high 247 million subscribers, and the annual growth rate all the way back to 2001

01:01:59.680 | still pretty spectacular. And their revenue also very respectable for Netflix. However, they

01:02:06.640 | overspent massively during the peak streaming era 2019 to 2022. And that's when subscriber growth

01:02:13.200 | started to slow. Obviously, they were spending way too much and other entrants came in like Apple

01:02:19.200 | Plus and Amazon Prime where they really didn't even think that they had to make a profit. They

01:02:23.920 | were using streaming maybe to sell more iPhones or to get more Amazon Prime subscribers. So here is

01:02:31.040 | the major problem. Here's the churn chart. Basically churn means people cancel, right. And

01:02:36.080 | so as these services have cut what they're offering the number of Marvel shows or Disney,

01:02:42.240 | you know, having Star Wars shows, the churn goes way up. People are also having subscription

01:02:48.640 | overload. I don't know how many of these I subscribe to, but I think it's all of them.

01:02:53.120 | Or maybe out of these 123456789 on the chart, I think I have seven of these. So there is definitely

01:03:00.400 | some unbelievable subscription burnout. And the streamers in order to get these businesses above

01:03:08.000 | water have raised their prices. We all know that you've probably seen your streaming bills,

01:03:11.440 | you know, have three, four or five bucks added to them every month. And at the same time,

01:03:15.200 | they're cutting how much they're spending. So you're paying more for less. Chamath,

01:03:18.320 | your thoughts on this dynamic? If you bring the chart back up, here's the

01:03:22.480 | most important thing that's worth noting. Let's take stars as an example, it turns 12% of their

01:03:28.640 | users every month, which means that over a year, they've turned 144% of their user base.

01:03:33.680 | That means that they have to basically turn their entire membership base one and a half times in

01:03:41.280 | order just to tread water. Right. So if you start with 100, it's a lot of money that you have to

01:03:47.920 | spend to make sure you end the year at 100. Forget about growing. If you look at peacock,

01:03:53.520 | they're going to lose 100% of their subscribers in a year. If you look at

01:03:57.760 | discovery, they're going to lose 75%. If you look at max, they're going to lose 50 odd percent

01:04:06.800 | Apple TV, same Hulu and Disney plus will lose 60%. Netflix will lose almost 40%.

01:04:15.120 | So the only winner in all of this is Facebook and Google. The only winners are Facebook and Google,

01:04:21.360 | because that's where the ads will appear to try to reacquire these folks, right? So I guess that's

01:04:27.200 | a positive indication. But the reality is that money isn't infinite. And so what happens in a

01:04:32.720 | dynamic where you have a category, where there's just a lot of consumer churn, I think what happens

01:04:38.240 | is it evolves in phases. And in phase one, which is sort of where we are now where there's a bunch

01:04:43.120 | of relatively well established folks, is that they are going to initially overspend on content,

01:04:49.920 | because they are going to try to differentiate the cost of acquisition based on content, right,

01:04:54.960 | which makes sense. I have a tentpole, come and watch it here. You can't watch it anywhere else.

01:04:59.120 | And I think that was the peacock example, where they had this football game and all these people

01:05:04.480 | showed up. And they thought this is exactly why we're paying so much money for these rights,

01:05:10.160 | because people will show up. I think the problem is that when everybody is doing it,

01:05:14.400 | everybody's doing it. And so you don't know how to differentiate even in our group chat.

01:05:20.880 | Look at the number of times when somebody randomly says, Is there something to watch? And everybody's

01:05:24.640 | got 50 recommendations. Guess what I do, I tune it all out, because I'm like 50 across six different

01:05:30.640 | services, I have no way to track it. And then I lose interest. And I'm like, you know, I'll just

01:05:36.160 | stick to YouTube. So I think what happens is in phase one, folks spend a lot of content in phase

01:05:42.320 | two, they realize that actually, what you need to do is spend on a long tail of content in a much

01:05:49.200 | more disciplined way. So there's a company that that I know about, for example, they just signed a

01:05:53.920 | pretty big deal with Amazon. Hundreds of millions of dollars.

01:06:02.640 | And I was trying to figure out is that a lot or a little. And it turns out that Amazon's trying to

01:06:07.920 | get three or four or five versions of these going. Which means that before we probably could have

01:06:13.920 | gotten five or 600 million and instead you get two or 300 million still an incredible thing,

01:06:18.560 | but it just goes to show you that there's a lot of competition. And so instead of having

01:06:22.400 | a single mode, right, if you were to graph something, where there's a few pieces that

01:06:27.840 | just get all the money, now you're smearing this content across all kinds of stuff. And I think

01:06:34.320 | that that makes it very difficult to keep folks so I suspect that you're just going to see a lot

01:06:40.000 | of churn. I don't I don't like this category at all as an investor. Clearly, there's been

01:06:44.560 | an overspend here, but consolidation is coming freeberg. Any thoughts on the streaming space?

01:06:48.400 | I just think this is the opposite of what we were talking about earlier,

01:06:52.880 | where there's a free market competing, and it's benefiting consumers. I mean,

01:06:57.120 | the point that you made is a really good one that there's a lot of great content to watch.

01:07:00.560 | Folks that raise prices, people cancel. So you got to drop prices, you got to offer good content.

01:07:06.160 | And I actually think this is a really good and healthy thing to see happen is competition that

01:07:12.240 | benefits consumers. And there'll be some set of winners here and some set of losers. But I think

01:07:16.160 | ultimately, it's just really good to see this how it all shakes out, who's willing to put up the big

01:07:21.360 | bucks, who's got the smarter algorithm that predicts how fresh your content has to be and

01:07:26.400 | how unique it has to be relative to other platforms to keep the audience attention.

01:07:31.040 | I would argue if you look at those numbers, and you look at the performance over time,

01:07:34.400 | Netflix absolutely rules the roost in the sense they're an incredible operating team.

01:07:38.400 | They have an incredible capability of predicting what content will work, how quickly they have to

01:07:43.040 | refresh content, how much they should be investing in content per quarter per month. And they're

01:07:47.280 | clearly retaining users and making money. And others maybe that are newer to the game haven't

01:07:51.920 | figured that out yet. But it's just very good to see the competition. So I don't know how to predict

01:07:55.760 | what's going to happen here. But it's good to see.

01:07:57.520 | It's clearly going to be massive consolidation. Also, these folks are

01:08:00.560 | launching advertising based version. So you probably saw Netflix has an advertising tier.

01:08:05.120 | And so a lot of these folks didn't have those Disney plus, I think is going to have one as well.

01:08:10.000 | You know what no one's paying attention to is YouTube TV. I don't know,

01:08:13.920 | you guys subscribe to YouTube TV.

01:08:15.360 | I'm a Hulu person.

01:08:17.040 | Yeah, I think it's fantastic. If you look at some third party data on YouTube TV,

01:08:21.040 | the subscriptions are going through the friggin roof. And it's really interesting to see because

01:08:25.280 | with YouTube TV, you're basically re bundling the unbundling that happened in cable, except you're

01:08:30.480 | doing it over the internet, you can access it anywhere. So they've basically converted the pipe

01:08:34.720 | as the value to the service itself as the value which you can access anywhere you want on any TV

01:08:39.520 | in any room without boxes while you're on the road on your phone on your laptop. And it seems to be

01:08:44.960 | kind of highlighting that maybe it wasn't necessarily the bundling that was the problem,

01:08:50.160 | but the way that the service was being offered. So who knows maybe bundling versus all of this

01:08:55.600 | part and parcel, you got to pick five different providers and buy content on the fly. Maybe

01:09:00.240 | that's not what consumers want.

01:09:01.600 | Young people don't care about the live channels old people do. But yeah, Hulu and YouTube TV

01:09:07.280 | are really wonderful products because they work really well on Apple TV. The apps work great,

01:09:12.320 | but they also work great on your iPhone, your iPad. So yeah, you know, they're really spectacular

01:09:17.120 | in that way. Saks.

01:09:19.200 | Well, this is tie this conversation back to what we were talking about with margins and SAS and

01:09:24.400 | tech enabled versus real software businesses. I personally have never seen a B2C subscription

01:09:31.040 | business that works the churn is just too high. I mean, what I've seen is that the monthly churn

01:09:36.880 | rates on a software subscription for consumers is somewhere in the five to 10% range. So on a

01:09:43.360 | full year basis, you're attaining maybe 50% of your customer base, you're effectively rebuilding

01:09:47.600 | your business from scratch every two years. It's a very tough place to be. This is why I basically

01:09:52.160 | skewed towards B2B SAS is because a good B2B SAS business will have net expansion instead of 50%

01:10:00.000 | churn, you'll do 120% expansion. And so you're actually building a subscriber base with long

01:10:05.920 | term value. Now, how did Netflix do it? I mean, Netflix avoided that prohibitive level of churn

01:10:11.920 | by spending literally billions of dollars on content and original programming. And again,

01:10:17.360 | it goes back to the point, this is not a pure software, pure tech business. It includes an

01:10:23.680 | old school studio, which is very capital intensive. And they financed a lot of the

01:10:31.920 | content acquisition with billions and billions of dollars raised during that ZURP period,

01:10:37.360 | from I think, both equity and debt. And you have to wonder if that could be done again in this

01:10:43.760 | post ZURP period, where capital is just a lot scarcer. I think this is going to work really

01:10:48.320 | well, though, for Netflix and Disney, man, these huge archives that they own, these libraries

01:10:52.560 | are going to get them to three, four, 500 million global subs, and has become money printing machines

01:10:58.400 | that I don't think they're going to need a ton of new content. The question is whether you could

01:11:02.480 | recreate an archive of that level today, given how much more expensive capital is. My point is that

01:11:08.320 | ZURP helped Netflix catch up to these studios and create this huge library. But still, I think that

01:11:14.560 | what the streaming services have shown in their churn is that if you don't provide original

01:11:19.440 | content and original programming, then users will churn off that. So, you have to kind of have both.

01:11:26.240 | You kind of have like the library as filler, but if you don't have a hot show come along every

01:11:32.400 | so often, the subscribers will churn off that. Yeah, you need to have some new content, depending

01:11:36.800 | on how deep the library is. It feels like Netflix and Disney+ have done a great job with their

01:11:40.000 | libraries, just to give you an idea. Revenue for Netflix for 2023, 33.5 billion, 247 million subs,

01:11:49.120 | that's ARPU yearly revenue for those folks, 136 bucks a year. Now, the reason you're seeing that

01:11:55.760 | number not make sense if you're paying 15 bucks a month is because internationally,

01:12:00.320 | Netflix is a lot, lot cheaper. But I love those two businesses. I think they're going to be

01:12:05.280 | extraordinary over time. Netflix has to acquire 100 million people a year just to stay even.

01:12:12.640 | What's their churn rate? 4% a month. I think it's fine. Right. So, they're churning half their

01:12:16.880 | customer base every year. That's my point. 100 million people. They're rebuilding their customer

01:12:23.760 | base from scratch every two years. How does that make sense? It's totally fine because what happens

01:12:28.080 | is you have people coming off their parents plan, getting their own, people go through a bad beat,

01:12:33.440 | they don't like it, you know, whatever, they unsubscribe, but they all come back,

01:12:36.240 | back and forth, back and forth. And then it just keeps growing over time. I think you're describing

01:12:42.240 | something that's true. I think David is describing why it's a shit business. I mean, if they make

01:12:48.480 | more money than they spend, and I don't think they need to do a ton of advertising. Eventually,

01:12:52.640 | you churn through so much of the market that actually you can't maintain that growth rate.

01:12:57.440 | I mean, if you reactivate, maybe you can do it. But I think that's what's happening.

01:13:02.000 | From a business perspective, the only logical thing that I would do if I was running one of

01:13:07.120 | these businesses is attach it to another business where you can think about it in terms of LTV. So,

01:13:13.520 | the only obvious example of that, I think, is Amazon Video, because you can stick it beside

01:13:18.880 | Prime and a bunch of other things. And now you have a very different way of justifying

01:13:24.400 | LTV and minimizing churn. And that seems like a I buy that argument, Jason, I don't buy like

01:13:30.080 | a standalone business like this trying to do it. Yucky. I know. Sorry, real quick. Have you guys

01:13:35.360 | dug into Netflix's business? I mean, they're still growing top line, the EBITDA margin continues to

01:13:41.440 | expand. I mean, all those facts might be true. But that churn engine and that recapture engine

01:13:46.160 | seems to be working in a way that they're printing cash and growing. It's pretty impressive. I don't

01:13:51.200 | know if there's a limit there. But I mean, I haven't looked at the analyst. I think that is

01:13:54.720 | the key. Yeah, to the bundling point, Apple Plus, which is the TV component, not the hardware

01:14:01.200 | product, is bundled as part of this Apple One program, which is kind of like Amazon Prime.

01:14:06.640 | And so I think you're seeing a little bundling there. Netflix also added video games to make

01:14:11.040 | it even more sticky. So I think there's like a subscription, super app coming, which the New

01:14:15.760 | York Times is kind of done right with wordle, crosswords, the athletic wire cutter and the New

01:14:20.880 | York Times. So I think you're going to start to see honestly, you just had a jumble of names that

01:14:25.440 | went in one year and out the other. I don't remember a single one. You said this is my

01:14:28.480 | point for most people, Jason, not a media aficionado like New York Times is doing fantastic

01:14:32.800 | doing this bundling. Some people come for the crosswords and wordle. And that's why they

01:14:36.320 | subscribe and they like the news. Other people come for the news, they discover crosswords and

01:14:40.000 | wire cutter and the athletic and they stay for that. So I do think there's going to be an

01:14:44.000 | incredible business here. I'll take the other side of it. Yeah, they spent a lot on content

01:14:48.240 | though during that period where Disney plus came in. I think everybody's now has a little more

01:14:53.200 | discipline and the budgets came way down. If you didn't know the Hulk cost 250 million or something,

01:14:59.200 | the She-Hulk rather, that cost 225 million for nine episodes. What? The first Avengers,

01:15:03.440 | 225 million. Wait, sorry, 250 million for nine episodes? Of the She-Hulk. Oh my lord. And people

01:15:09.920 | criticize it for having bad CGI. So it's, I think there's like new discipline coming to Hollywood.

01:15:14.080 | Was this a Netflix show? A Disney plus show. A Disney plus show.

01:15:17.440 | Yeah. I don't know about you guys. I've been rewatching the Sopranos. I find some of the

01:15:20.800 | content on HBO max to be the best content out there. Oh my God. I've watched it twice.

01:15:24.640 | There's so much rewatchability on it. Disney doesn't have that much rewatchability. I don't

01:15:28.400 | know. The only reason I keep my max subscription is because I'm waiting for a house of the dragon

01:15:32.480 | season two. I mean, if they didn't have that one show, I'd be like, yeah, cut it. You know?

01:15:36.960 | Yeah. I do think this could help Netflix because a lot of these streaming services came along.

01:15:41.760 | We had way too many, right? We got saturated with streaming services and most of them,

01:15:46.880 | you subscribe to, you may not even remember subscribing. You may just subscribe to a free

01:15:51.200 | trial to get an NFL game and then you get billed because you forgot to cancel it.

01:15:55.280 | By the way. Yeah. Have you guys ever gone into Apple iCloud settings and looked at your

01:16:02.080 | subscriptions? Oh boy. Yeah. Get in there and guys just go, if you have like an extra five

01:16:09.280 | minutes, you will save so much money by going into subscriptions in your settings and just

01:16:14.880 | turning them all off. I was shocked. I was shocked. I mean, this is part of your austerity

01:16:19.440 | measure. Absolutely. You know how many subscriptions to Disney plus I had?

01:16:22.800 | How many? This is what's so gross is why they even let me do this. I had three.

01:16:27.280 | What? Three. How's it even possible?

01:16:33.040 | For the plane one, but I had, I had three, I had three, I had two HBOs. I had

01:16:41.440 | two Netflix. Oh no. Netflix keeps sending you a message saying, Hey, you need to update your

01:16:45.440 | payment information. But then I'm watching Netflix on my Apple TV. So I'm like,

01:16:50.080 | I'm clearly playing for paying for it somehow. It's so confusing and I have the perfect solution

01:16:57.120 | for you. There are credit cards now where you can set a spending limit. And so what I do is every

01:17:02.000 | year I just turn off the limit on that credit card. I just take it from unlimited or on cap

01:17:07.920 | down to zero. And I do this for business as well. And then all the subscriptions timeout,

01:17:11.760 | you know what I call that? What Jeff, Jeff does that from Jeff.

01:17:15.680 | But I mean, having somebody go in there and then you have a Jeff average,

01:17:20.880 | just know, but it's very simple. You only use one card for subscriptions and then you turn it off

01:17:24.240 | every year. Which ones you want to keep going. It works really well. And then you move the other

01:17:27.840 | ones to a new car. I don't even want to say how many thousands of dollars I was wasting on like

01:17:31.840 | duolingo. I was like, I'm paying for duolingo. And then I was paying for Italian. It's still

01:17:36.480 | terrible. Yeah, terrible. And then I had, I had like a case against them. No, then I had duolingo

01:17:41.760 | and I had Babel and I had Rosetta stone. So I'm like, my Italian is not improving because of any

01:17:47.120 | of these three apps, but I was paying them collectively like $400. I had a whoop subscription.

01:17:51.840 | I don't even have a loop. When Rick Thompson started manscaped, I was, I signed up for

01:17:57.840 | manscaped. I get all this ball deodorant. I've never used it once. We know, we know we sit

01:18:02.720 | next to you in poker. We know it's not working, bro. Just a message to manscaped. I have tried

01:18:08.720 | to cancel. I have called, I have emailed, I took it upon myself to try. It's impossible to cancel.

01:18:15.040 | They won't even let you reset your account so that you can get a link to cancel. It's so hard.

01:18:20.080 | And still your balls are terrible. Yeah, my balls are phenomenal. I've sat next to you in

01:18:26.640 | poker, man. Not real. Okay. Let's get into plastics and get off Chamath balls. I mean,

01:18:32.480 | how did we get here? Subscription services, subscription services. Yes. Streaming is at a

01:18:38.640 | crosswords, a crossroads apparently. So they're really trying to make that ball deodorant happen,

01:18:44.400 | aren't they? They're trying to make it happen. Well, they're trying to make fetch happen. Ball

01:18:47.760 | deodorant's not happening. I'm sorry. I mean, what are you supposed to do? Squat and swipe?

01:18:51.680 | How does that work? Is it a spray? Are you lifting and spraying?

01:18:56.480 | I mean, you gotta give him points for creativity, trying to create like a new thing, but yeah.

01:19:00.640 | I was trying to support my friend in signing up for a subscription service,

01:19:04.400 | and now I can't cancel. That's my problem. That's my predicament.

01:19:08.080 | Could you also take a shower and use soap? I don't know. Just putting it out there.

01:19:12.240 | What's going on down there, Chamath?

01:19:15.200 | Does it have to do with the product? I signed up because Rick was the venture investor that

01:19:19.600 | seeded it and started. I supported my friend. Yes.

01:19:22.640 | And now I want out and I cannot get out. You can't get out.

01:19:25.840 | Every time I try to get out, they pull me back in. I'm just going to say when it comes to Manscaped,

01:19:30.880 | no, no testimonials, please. No testimonials. The worst part is like, you know, it comes to the house

01:19:36.240 | and... Oh, somebody opens your ball deodorant and puts it on your desk.

01:19:40.640 | They do. No, they put it right on the kitchen. Now the entire staff knows you have stinky balls.

01:19:44.080 | Well, that's what's so funny. They put it right on the kitchen counter. So as I walk through the

01:19:47.680 | bathroom, I grab it and I'm like, who's seen this bottle? Oh, there it is.

01:19:53.520 | What is it? There it is.

01:19:54.320 | Cold bottles.

01:19:55.040 | Oh my God. Oh man.

01:20:04.640 | So how do you apply it? Is it just a little dab will do you?

01:20:08.000 | No, I mean, you know, I just...

01:20:09.040 | It's not a spray. It's apparently an ointment, Sax. It's an ointment.

01:20:12.480 | This is far too much information.

01:20:14.960 | Nah, I'll try it.

01:20:16.400 | Don't you?

01:20:17.760 | I'll try it.

01:20:19.760 | It's coming to me on Christmas.

01:20:20.960 | You know what? I'm going to give you my subscription.

01:20:23.680 | It's got a drop-off ball deodorant.

01:20:27.360 | Why not?

01:20:30.800 | Use the promo code Chamath for 10% off your...

01:20:34.640 | Use the promo code Dictator. You get 10%.

01:20:36.640 | You can never cancel, but you can get...

01:20:41.120 | It's D-I-C-K-tator.

01:20:44.640 | Dictator. Yeah, use the promo code Dictator. You get 10% off your ball deodorant at Manscaped.

01:20:50.960 | All right, Freeberg, it's your turn to shine. No, not ball deodorant.

01:20:54.640 | We wanted to talk about microplastics. A study came out. It's terrifying. We've known plastics

01:21:00.000 | have been terrible for years. Obviously, it's been turned into some sort of political discourse

01:21:04.080 | with straws and everything, but plastics are horrible. We shouldn't be using them,

01:21:07.920 | but this study confirms a bunch about drinking microplastics. Educate us on this study

01:21:13.200 | that everybody's talking about right now. Dr. Freedberg.

01:21:17.040 | I wouldn't start with the statement that plastics are awful.

01:21:20.320 | Plastics are polymers, which are long chains of what are called monomers. This is hydrogen,

01:21:27.200 | carbon, and oxygen that comes together to form these specific molecules.

01:21:31.440 | And then we can kind of bake them into crystal-like structures. And the reason the plastic

01:21:37.120 | industry took off is because it ended up being very cheap to create materials that we could

01:21:41.120 | turn into chairs, that we could turn into bottles to move stuff around. A lot of applications,

01:21:45.760 | everything from solar photovoltaics to our computers, to our laptops, to our phones,

01:21:51.280 | everything has some form of these polymers in it. The polymers that are commonly used for

01:21:57.040 | making bottles that we consume beverages out of are PET plastics. These PET plastics are made from

01:22:04.800 | a combination of natural gas and crude oil. So we kind of have a production process where we

01:22:10.800 | get the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen that's naturally found in natural gas and crude oil,

01:22:16.000 | convert it into these molecules that we turn into long chains, and we turn them into bottles,

01:22:20.560 | and fill those bottles and they end up being a lower carbon footprint than using glass about

01:22:27.040 | 5x the carbon footprint to use glass instead of plastic and in making a bottle to store stuff and

01:22:34.800 | move liquids around 40% cheaper. And a lot of other kind of reasons why the industry and the

01:22:41.360 | world adopted plastics not just for bottle beverages, but for other applications. So in

01:22:46.480 | bottle beverages, because these are polymers, there are these long chains of little molecules

01:22:50.800 | that are stuck together, some of those chains break. And then some of those little chunks of

01:22:55.760 | those molecules end up floating around in the liquid that we're consuming. And what this study

01:23:01.520 | did that kind of highlighted a set of data that hadn't really been studied well before is they

01:23:06.960 | used a form of spectroscopy. So kind of a multi spectral light system shining light at different

01:23:12.640 | wavelengths on the liquid in a bottle in plastic bottle to figure out how many of these little

01:23:17.920 | plastic particles there were in the liquid. And in doing that, they found that there was on the order

01:23:22.720 | of 10,000 little plastic particles per liter of water or per liter of soda or drink or Gatorade

01:23:30.640 | or whatever beverages that you're drinking. The real question then is, well, how risky is that?

01:23:34.960 | So if you look at a lot of the health agency studies, the kind of well adopted and well

01:23:42.160 | researched efforts on is there toxicity associated with PT plastics on its own,

01:23:47.600 | they find that there's very little genotoxicity or no genotoxicity, meaning it doesn't doesn't

01:23:51.520 | change your DNA. There's no carcinogen missing. It doesn't cause cancer. But there are other

01:23:57.200 | studies recently, that have shown different mechanisms by which these little tiny micro

01:24:02.240 | plastics might end up in yourself, because they absorb into your body, and they're small enough

01:24:06.720 | that they can cross into barriers, they can get into your brain, they can get into your cells,

01:24:10.880 | when they're in your cells. There are other mechanistic studies that are done in a petri

01:24:14.640 | dish, as opposed to being studied in the body, where they've demonstrated that they could

01:24:18.720 | actually disrupt the function of organelles like mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum,

01:24:23.040 | so all these little things that operate in your cell, they can cause irritation,

01:24:26.320 | they can trigger chemicals to be produced that might cause allergies, that might cause inflammation,

01:24:31.760 | and so on and so forth. So while the general molecule of PT itself isn't known or shown in

01:24:37.840 | any way to cause cancer or to cause changes in your DNA, there are other mechanisms by which

01:24:42.880 | these little tiny plastics might be disrupting cellular function might be causing other health

01:24:47.120 | issues. And that's now going to open up a big area of research that that's going to be predicated,

01:24:52.880 | I think, on the fact that this study now shows that there are 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of little

01:24:58.080 | pieces of tiny plastic in these plastic bottles that we're drinking water, and soda and juice

01:25:02.560 | from that are getting into our body and into ourselves. 240,000 little pieces in the average

01:25:08.880 | one liter plastic bottle. It's a pretty scary statistic. When you hear that number enough to

01:25:14.240 | cross the blood brain barrier, right? And in rats and mice, they've shown that these little

01:25:20.480 | micro plastics can actually accumulate in the brain if they consume enough of them. Now, the

01:25:24.960 | reason this hasn't been well understood or studied in the past is we kind of look at the aggregate

01:25:29.200 | amount of plastic that's in a liquid. And it's like, oh, the amount is so small, it doesn't

01:25:32.880 | matter. But when you start to look at how small these little pieces of plastic are, and add them

01:25:38.480 | up the cumulative effect over time, that they can actually cross into cells cross the blood brain

01:25:43.520 | barrier, maybe you're not getting removed from the body. That's opening up a whole lot of research,

01:25:47.760 | because there's no easy way to just scan a body and say, is there plastic in it? How much plastic

01:25:51.920 | is there? Because there isn't a good chemical signature for it. And what these guys did is

01:25:55.920 | they use light to look in the liquid to find the plastics, which we can't easily do in the body

01:26:00.880 | today. So free burger, you're going to drink plastic bottle water anymore. I'm not. Okay,

01:26:05.520 | Jamal, I've already stopped this started for me about four months ago. My wife basically said

01:26:11.120 | we're getting rid of all plastic. And at first I really pushed back and I'm like, this is crazy.

01:26:15.760 | And she just kept talking to me about it and showing me all this data. And yeah, about a

01:26:20.800 | month ago, I would say I switched. So now use glass and a craft like this. Yeah, much better.

01:26:27.440 | We got rid of all of the plastic in our in our house in the gym, no more bottles.

01:26:31.920 | It's wasteful anyway. Like why not? You have beautiful filtered water at home, put it in a

01:26:35.760 | craft. Sure. But the scary thing, I mean, it's a little bit more inconvenient, I'll be honest with

01:26:41.200 | you. But it is very scary. And I think that it does alter the phenotype of the human body over

01:26:48.400 | time. And I think you'd have to be insane to bet against that. And I suspect when you look at the

01:26:54.880 | rates of depression and autism and Alzheimer's and dementia and autoimmune diseases, Crohn's

01:27:00.080 | rheumatoid arthritis, to think that all of these environmental factors have no impact, I think is,

01:27:07.040 | is taking a very scary bet. Here's what I do. I buy these glass bottles on Amazon.

01:27:12.160 | You know, two or three cases of them, I have the best water filter system at home.

01:27:16.800 | We fill them, we put them in the refrigerator, and we haven't bought plastic in years.

01:27:21.920 | So in years, in years, only because I care about the environment, because I'm a good person.

01:27:27.760 | Jason, I'll also say like that, that application is a pretty small, like, I think on the order,

01:27:35.120 | if I'm right, 80% of bottle beverages are drunk outside the home. So people are buying stuff at

01:27:41.440 | convenience stores at gas stations at markets, taking them with them to work. And that's how a

01:27:46.720 | lot of plastic bottles are can carry a container. Remember, I have us is such a small percentage of

01:27:51.600 | the global population, you go to Africa, you go to Brazil, you go to China, there isn't a great

01:27:56.240 | like people don't have these amenities that we have in our upper and middle class America,

01:28:01.200 | that plastic bottles have provided access to products that consumers around the world

01:28:05.600 | otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. So there's a reason they exist. But by the way, I also want

01:28:09.760 | to just be really clear, there isn't conclusive evidence or science that shows these plastic

01:28:14.880 | micro particles or nanoparticles are causing these health effects. There's certainly a lot

01:28:19.600 | of questions that it brings on. Well, what is the cumulative effect of these little things getting

01:28:23.280 | into cells? Do they get into cells? Why do they do when they're in there? Why would anybody bet

01:28:27.040 | that it's zero? Right? So that is the upside, right? Well, the upside is that people get to

01:28:31.840 | access cheap beverages on the street that otherwise, people that are living on $13,000 a year

01:28:36.400 | that can buy a, you know, a plastic soda for 25 cents. You can also buy a candle. Yeah, so that's

01:28:43.680 | that's definitely an alternative. They're a little more expensive. Generally plastic just became the

01:28:47.200 | cheapest container. Saks your thoughts. Sorry, guys, I stepped out to get a drink here. Don't

01:28:54.080 | miss anything. It would be better if you had put a straw in your water bottle.

01:28:59.200 | Now I understand your level of depression.

01:29:05.200 | Saks you just telling those arrow water bottles. Yeah, I missed something.

01:29:10.960 | Also, I use these beautiful contigo. So I think some people use yetis or other kind of things.

01:29:19.840 | And I actually carry them with me only because I try to like think about the environment,

01:29:24.960 | just the amount of plaques is being created. I don't know if you've seen this, but like you

01:29:28.960 | go to Whole Foods now or you go to any supermarket and you see this wall of salads.

01:29:34.080 | Freiburg like this is unconscionable. Like the we're literally giving people salad in a giant

01:29:41.760 | plastic box. Yeah, let me just say a couple things about this because there's this conception that

01:29:47.360 | this is just awful, awful, awful, but plastics there, there is a degradation of these PTS when

01:29:53.120 | they're exposed to sunlight. There is a recycling system that many of much of this material ends up

01:29:58.400 | in much of it. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's actually correct. Not a lot. But what would the

01:30:03.280 | alternative be? Right? So the alternative is you put in a glass thing and you charge people $15

01:30:07.920 | for a couple pieces of lettuce. The reason the reason plastic the plastic industry emerged is

01:30:12.560 | because it provided a low cost way to transport materials. And that we're all very wealthy. So we

01:30:17.680 | have to just step outside of our bubble for a second and recognize that most people, you know,

01:30:22.080 | the dollar difference is a huge difference for most consumers, they're not going to make that

01:30:26.080 | dollar leap. So you know, the fact that plastics emerged is to support a consumer market that's

01:30:31.360 | grown up all over the world. Yeah, but how does this make sense? Look at these bananas, just as

01:30:35.120 | an example, to give people an idea bananas already come with a case called crazy. And they're

01:30:41.440 | literally wrapping bananas in plastic now. And you know, I think this is where regulation makes

01:30:47.600 | sense. No, there must be a gas in here or something because they're trying to keep the

01:30:51.280 | bananas from going bad. That's why I want to shout out like this is where I think regulations

01:30:55.680 | actually do work France, Spain, a lot of countries now are just saying you know what for fruits,

01:31:01.040 | vegetables like yeah, don't put them in plastic, please. We're not going to allow you to do that.

01:31:06.000 | And I think I'm not pro plastic, by the way, I'm not drinking plastic from plastic bottles.

01:31:10.480 | But we have to be cognizant of where this industry emerged from what the science says about it. Like

01:31:14.880 | I don't want to just be flipping about it. What is doing to all plastics? What is doing in the

01:31:18.960 | oceans? freeberg is unconscionable. Like this, this is not a do gooder thing. It's just awful.

01:31:24.640 | There's no reason that we need to tell you. I'll give you some good optimism around this.

01:31:32.080 | There's a lot of efforts right now to develop microbes that can actually biodegrade these

01:31:36.480 | pt plastics. So there's, so we're engineering these microbes that will produce enzymes,

01:31:42.800 | these little bacteria that will produce enzymes, those enzymes can then be made in the plastic

01:31:48.480 | itself. So then the plastic will biodegrade within a year after you use it. So there's a lot of this

01:31:53.680 | kind of effort on how do you make naturally biodegrading plastics using bio sources and

01:31:57.920 | biological molecules as part of the production process. And a lot of big plastic packaging

01:32:02.800 | companies and industrial biotech companies are investing in this area. This is where

01:32:06.960 | collectivism can do good. You know, like, if we actually, as a society say we want to do sustainable

01:32:13.200 | packaging, like because of the tragedy of the commons, like you're saying freeberg because

01:32:16.880 | it's cheaper capitalism, like there's no floor here, you know, to stop people from doing this

01:32:22.880 | and stop from using plastics unnecessarily like wrapping bananas, etc. All right, listen,

01:32:27.360 | it's been an amazing episode of the all in podcast for the dictator. Wish me luck today,

01:32:34.080 | boys. Wish me luck. Use the promo code Dick will be following the live stream on the chat following

01:32:38.880 | the live stream. Use promo code deck to get 20% off your ball deodorant. What do you guys think

01:32:43.760 | about actually like running some poker tournaments through the year called all in 100% That would be

01:32:50.240 | super fun, though. 100% I think we could replace the WSOP pretty quick. I mean, it'd be pretty

01:32:57.040 | cool. So I'm not kidding. We have still help me with on our school. I think Jason's right.

01:33:02.240 | I'm not just tell me if I think you can get all the pros because I think the problem is like those

01:33:06.080 | championships have been so watered down, right? There's 52 of them, just in Vegas in June and

01:33:12.560 | July. And then now you have like the circuit rings so that there's bracelets and rings. And

01:33:18.080 | then there's the European one. And there's this one, there's the Bahamas. You can't have I think

01:33:24.720 | in order to be a world champion. Can you really have like 150 winners a year?

01:33:30.240 | Sacks, are you bored with Holden? Well, I'll play with you guys. But yeah,

01:33:34.000 | I'm kind of bored with it. Yeah, I played a tournament yesterday. Big Oh,

01:33:38.080 | 37 players. I came in first. I don't know if you play where did you play? I had a speaking

01:33:43.120 | gig yesterday in LA after the speaking gig. I was going to the airport. I had a little time.

01:33:47.200 | And I just stopped by Hollywood Park where I wanted to see the new one.

01:33:53.920 | You're the best. And I don't know, there's nothing more boring.

01:33:57.200 | Big Oh is a lot of fun.

01:33:58.320 | Playing in a tournament with people you don't know.

01:34:00.160 | Oh, it was great. It was great. There was like a fight.

01:34:02.320 | The tournament's gone forever. I mean, I did the WSOP a couple of times. And you know,

01:34:05.920 | I think I lasted like three days. It's a long time to be playing poker at tables with people.

01:34:10.800 | This was one day, Chamath, I got to the final table. And they wanted to chop and I was the

01:34:15.120 | short stack. I was like, well, you know, my flights in a couple hours, I'd rather not chop.

01:34:19.120 | And this woman, I got in a fight at the casino almost, this woman was wearing a mask. And she

01:34:24.400 | goes, this mother ever won't chop. And I said, Ma'am, it's my option to not shop.

01:34:34.400 | Madam, Madam.

01:34:35.520 | I said, Madam, Madam, whatever, say them. And she went crazy. And the floor came over,

01:34:40.800 | said, Ma'am, you have to sit down. She called me a mother effort twice to my face.

01:34:46.720 | You went on to win?

01:34:47.280 | I was the short stack and I went on to win the tournament. I kid you not.

01:34:50.640 | How much did you win?

01:34:51.360 | 1400 bucks.

01:34:52.320 | What was the hourly rate on that? You make like $14 an hour.

01:34:57.440 | It was a hundred dollar buy in. So yeah, it was 200 bucks an hour, but here's what happened.

01:35:01.520 | So I had this guy massively-

01:35:02.720 | You played for seven hours?

01:35:04.400 | Six hours, maybe. It was awesome. It was great. I had the time of my life. It was the first time

01:35:09.200 | I played in a tournament for like, since we played the one drop that time. I haven't played

01:35:13.440 | in a tournament since then. It was so much fun.

01:35:17.040 | Jason goes from playing the hundred K buy into the hundred dollar buy.

01:35:21.440 | I had a time of my life because I've never played big O before. It's where you have five cards and

01:35:25.840 | it was high low. It was so dynamic and fun.

01:35:28.080 | Oh yeah, yeah. Big O, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:35:29.280 | Big O is so fun. You have five pull cards and it's high low. So I was like, I'll learn big O.

01:35:34.320 | I've never, I've literally not played one orbit of big O. I won the tournament. It was awesome.

01:35:39.440 | And so then it's me and this one guy and I've got him like three to one or whatever.

01:35:45.760 | And he's like, "Listen, I got to go. Please. I got my kids." I was like, "No problem. I'll

01:35:49.760 | chop it with you if we take 400 off the top for the dealers." The dealer cried. She was like,

01:35:54.480 | "What?" And I was like, "Yeah, I'll chop it with you evenly." And so I won and I just

01:35:59.760 | chopped it up and gave a big tip.

01:36:00.960 | What did you, did you get like a certificate or like-

01:36:04.000 | I think they put you on the website or something like that.

01:36:06.000 | Let's look it up.

01:36:07.200 | Yeah. It's on the Poker Classic website that I, or I don't know if it's called the Poker

01:36:10.880 | Classic, whatever it is. But my point is we would have a great tournament. We do each of the games.

01:36:15.120 | Each of us gets a free roll into the game and then everybody else buys in. I like it.

01:36:19.280 | Sax, you like PLO or you just like Chess now?

01:36:21.360 | No, I like Hold'em, but I'm just saying I wouldn't play with a bunch of strangers.

01:36:26.480 | I like playing with friends, but-

01:36:29.360 | To goof off and have fun.

01:36:30.480 | Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like sitting, the problem with tournaments-

01:36:33.840 | You'll RSVP to my game to show up at six and show up at 830.

01:36:38.000 | And then listen to yourself on the pod and then leave.

01:36:41.200 | Yeah. He's editing the pod at the table.

01:36:43.840 | There's a lot of things you can do while at a poker game.

01:36:45.840 | You can watch your podcast. You can edit your podcast.

01:36:49.520 | For the Sultan of Science, the King of Beep, David Freeburg, and yeah, definitely the Rain

01:36:56.080 | Man himself. We're live from Davos. We'll see you next year. Bye-bye.

01:36:59.600 | Wait, did you give me the shout out? Am I-

01:37:01.440 | I did for the dictator himself. Use the promo code Dick.

01:37:04.400 | Oh, Dictator Chairman. No, Chairman Dictator.

01:37:06.240 | Chairman Dictator. Use the promo code Chair, Man, or Dick to get 10, 20, or 30% off.

01:37:12.800 | Can somebody from Manscape please let me cancel? Please, please.

01:37:17.280 | It's like 10 bucks a month. It's just 10 bucks a month. I'll give you the money.

01:37:23.360 | I just don't want to get- I want to be able to cancel.

01:37:25.600 | I'll pay you 10 bucks a month to not send all the deodorant.

01:37:28.240 | I'm going all in. We'll let your winners ride.

01:37:32.000 | Rain Man, David Sasson. I'm going all in.

01:37:37.920 | And it said- We open sourced it to the fans,

01:37:40.160 | and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, Weston.

01:37:42.720 | The Queen of Kinwam. I'm going all in.

01:37:45.120 | Let your winners ride. Let your winners ride.

01:37:48.240 | Besties are gone.

01:37:51.840 | That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

01:37:56.480 | Wait, no, no. Oh, man.

01:37:59.280 | My avatar will meet me at the place. We should all just get a room and just have

01:38:02.880 | one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this sexual tension that

01:38:06.720 | they just need to release somehow. What the beep?

01:38:11.120 | What the beep? What the beep?

01:38:12.160 | What the beep? We need to get merch.

01:38:15.360 | Besties are gone. I'm going all in.

01:38:24.000 | I'm going all in

01:38:26.000 | You

E162: Live from Davos! Milei goes viral, Adam Neumann's headwinds, streaming's broken model & more

Chapters