E143: Nvidia smashes earnings, Arm walks the plank, M&A market, Vivek dominates GOP debate & more

00:00:00.000 | something of science. What's what's going on? Are you still

00:00:01.900 | riding high after your big NASA zoom interview? Your space

00:00:05.240 | station zoom interview?

00:00:06.300 | That was really fun. Shout out to Woody Hoberg from the

00:00:09.560 | International Space Station astronaut Cal alumni. Woody

00:00:13.880 | listens to the pod on the ISS while he works out the

00:00:18.200 | astronauts workout. He said two hours and 15 minutes every day

00:00:21.880 | to you know, obviously your body can atrophy got to work out a

00:00:24.240 | lot. He's like when he's working out he listens to old episodes

00:00:26.280 | of the all in pod. A buddy of his put him onto it. He's become

00:00:29.120 | a big fan. Right on. Shout out to Woody. Yeah, I got a DM from

00:00:32.840 | NASA astronauts. I thought it was like some sort of scam or

00:00:35.280 | something. I clicked on it because I follow NASA astronauts

00:00:38.640 | they DM me and I'm like obviously this astronaut wants

00:00:41.360 | to chat. That's so crazy. I looked the guy up seems legit.

00:00:45.000 | He's following me on Twitter. So we did a zoom call yesterday and

00:00:49.680 | I put it on Twitter. The call I did with him is really fun.

00:00:52.720 | Honestly, like a thrill for me. An amazing individual. This guy

00:00:57.680 | got his PhD at Cal in computer science, did a thesis on convex

00:01:03.240 | optimization applied to aerospace engineering became a

00:01:05.600 | professor at MIT for three years, and applied to the

00:01:08.560 | astronaut program and got in. Fast forward. 2023. In March, he

00:01:14.400 | is the pilot of the crew six mission, the SpaceX crew six

00:01:17.080 | mission to the ISS. And he's been on the ISS since March. And

00:01:21.240 | he's coming back in a couple of days, an incredible individual

00:01:23.760 | amazing story. It was super fun to chat with them.

00:01:26.840 | I don't think I've ever seen you smile or be more excited about

00:01:30.680 | anything. You look absolutely ecstatic. Oh, it was amazing. Did

00:01:35.440 | he have any comments on Uranus? Any thoughts on Uranus?

00:01:39.760 | We didn't get there.

00:01:41.800 | You didn't get to your age.

00:01:42.760 | How you blew that? Let's try that again. Let me take a shot

00:01:46.800 | this freeberg. So did he talk about going to the moon?

00:01:49.680 | Yeah, he's actually on the Artemis mission.

00:01:51.360 | And what about Uranus?

00:01:55.600 | We didn't get that far. We didn't get that far. It was the

00:01:58.840 | first day. It was only 20 minutes.

00:02:00.120 | It was the first day in 20 minutes. Did he go for Uranus?

00:02:03.160 | Hey, hey.

00:02:04.400 | I hear that we're trying to actually land on the south side

00:02:10.000 | of the moon.

00:02:10.440 | Yeah, so he's actually on that.

00:02:13.080 | Would he have an opinion on the dark side of the moon? Or I

00:02:16.480 | don't know the dark side of Uranus.

00:02:23.360 | Three for three. Three for three.

00:02:25.840 | I just want to explain somebody was like, why are you bullying

00:02:47.800 | Jake out? Why are you bullying freeberg? Chamath's bullying

00:02:50.120 | this person.

00:02:50.720 | He loves the attention. Our love language is breaking chops.

00:02:54.000 | That's it. We like to laugh and take the piss out because

00:02:57.320 | everybody takes themselves too seriously. And then what's going

00:02:59.680 | on with the tequila? Are you guys serious about this? Because

00:03:02.080 | now I'm getting

00:03:02.480 | don't talk about that right now. I'm getting 50 emails a day with

00:03:05.240 | people. Yeah, we'll talk about it. All right. We'll talk about

00:03:08.680 | it. I did run a poll asking people if they're trying all in

00:03:11.600 | tequila and the poll had narrowly won.

00:03:13.840 | Okay. And then I ran a poll asking what the most they'd ever

00:03:17.240 | spent on a bottle was. If you price it around to 200 bucks,

00:03:20.960 | you can, you can really maximize the man I think the demand

00:03:23.880 | maximizing function is probably around 180 $190. Right? You do

00:03:28.600 | not need a majority of people to want to buy your tequila, you

00:03:31.520 | just need enough that are willing to pay the right price.

00:03:33.480 | For Oh, I agree. I was just trying to see how much interest

00:03:36.760 | there'd be out there. And in this poll, I think it was 41%

00:03:41.480 | said they would try it 40% said they wouldn't. And then the

00:03:44.600 | remainder was just kind of, you know, show me the answer.

00:03:46.840 | I think if we don't have advertising ever, but we have a

00:03:50.480 | nice sipping tequila, because you know, I don't drink a lot.

00:03:53.040 | But I do like when sacks.

00:03:54.800 | Guys, 32,000 votes. So if you look at 18.8%, so it's 79% is

00:04:02.920 | 200 or less. That's the sum of both of those two cohorts. So

00:04:06.320 | like if you price today, call it 189, you probably can get 15%.

00:04:13.840 | And so you know, you could probably sell several 100,000

00:04:16.800 | bottles a year. I mean, that's like a pretty real business.

00:04:19.360 | Okay, but I need something smooth. And I like it a little

00:04:22.800 | sweet. Is that a problem? Can I just give you my opinion? I

00:04:26.400 | think that the thing that people get wrong, just as a consumer,

00:04:31.720 | and I think like I'm a pretty discerning consumer. The thing

00:04:35.800 | that I don't like is that people focus on all of this window

00:04:38.720 | dressing. And they don't focus on the core. And the core is

00:04:43.840 | that, for example, in wine, there's seven or eight rating

00:04:50.120 | systems. And over time, if you buy enough wine and taste

00:04:54.320 | enough wine, you can really figure out who's good at what.

00:04:56.760 | And there's just nothing that replaces a highly rated wine,

00:05:00.440 | it's exceptional. And that kind of discernment is now moving

00:05:05.120 | itself into tequila. And so I would just encourage us if

00:05:08.400 | we're going to make a bottle, just make it an exceptionally

00:05:11.760 | good tasting bottle. And one of the things that I saw in the

00:05:14.640 | comments was that people said, Oh, you can't differentiate. But

00:05:17.880 | then I see some other articles like combos, which is the one

00:05:21.160 | that I tasted at the one and only mandarina. That was the

00:05:24.640 | first 100 point tequila that had ever been given out. And so

00:05:28.480 | there are people that are starting to rate it and create

00:05:31.360 | these rankings. And if we were going to put out a product, I

00:05:33.800 | would err on extreme product quality, versus price point.

00:05:38.200 | I invested in a tequila company, I showed this to you guys

00:05:40.640 | called 21 seeds. And it started by my friends, Nicole, cat and

00:05:45.920 | sarica. And they spent a lot of time in Mexico, finding the

00:05:51.600 | right producer and they put fresh fruit, it's a it's a

00:05:54.280 | female niche tequila. So the goal is to create a tequila

00:05:57.640 | that will appeal to the female demographic. And they spent

00:06:00.840 | quite a lot of time trying to figure out how to actually get

00:06:03.720 | the flavor of fresh fruit without using artificial

00:06:05.800 | flavoring into the tequila. And so there was this big

00:06:08.400 | investment in trying to get this thing to work. This thing

00:06:10.560 | worked, it took off and Diageo bought the company, but it was

00:06:13.960 | because they spent so much time on the quality of the product

00:06:16.520 | that I think they were successful. And that's everyone

00:06:18.560 | else puts their name and label on a on a bottle of tequila and

00:06:21.920 | says, Hey, this is my tequila. But if you don't get the quality

00:06:24.640 | right, Chamath is totally right. People don't buy a second time,

00:06:26.880 | you got to get it right.

00:06:27.520 | If you look at what the rock did, the rock went in a

00:06:30.200 | different direction, which is I think he has a very accessible

00:06:32.840 | and affordable tequila, which I think makes sense, as well.

00:06:36.440 | It's just a different strategy. And that also works for the

00:06:38.920 | rock, because he has almost 400 million followers. And so he can

00:06:43.080 | really play a volume game. But I don't think that that's what we

00:06:46.240 | should ever do.

00:06:47.040 | No, we should stand for exceptional quality,

00:06:48.800 | exceptional quality. And this speaks to something else, which

00:06:51.200 | is one of the biggest points of feedback that I get. So for

00:06:53.760 | example, I took three days, not an item, three days, we took a

00:06:56.640 | little bit of a, our own little honeymoon away from all the kids

00:06:59.640 | and we went to Villa d'Este, just to kind of hang out in Lake

00:07:02.080 | Como, because I was flying out of Milan, and ran into a few

00:07:06.880 | people there. And the consistent feedback that I get from those

00:07:11.120 | folks is like, they love hearing about these different places,

00:07:15.240 | whether it's different brands, different kinds of wine, all of

00:07:20.480 | these things, because all these folks are a little bit left out

00:07:24.120 | in the cold. Now, they don't have like, how to live life

00:07:27.520 | well. And if you work really hard, and you're lucky enough to

00:07:31.320 | then also have some amount of success, why should you feel

00:07:34.440 | ashamed about it? Why shouldn't you be allowed to enjoy that and

00:07:37.280 | actually like, pamper yourself and celebrate yourself and I say

00:07:41.280 | go for it. So if we can find high quality products, like this

00:07:45.520 | is the thing, for example, like I think there's different ways

00:07:48.280 | of expressing success. When I was poor, I was poor in wallet.

00:07:53.840 | And I was also poor in mind. And then somewhere along the way, I

00:07:59.280 | actually became rich in wallet, but I was still poor in mind.

00:08:02.560 | And so I would wear these clothes that were gaudy and had

00:08:05.080 | Oh, God, huge labels are not meables. Dior and Balenciaga.

00:08:09.920 | All those crowds don't pull it up, man. The haircut looked like

00:08:13.120 | Friedberg's. It was disgusting. It was gross. And then I learned

00:08:15.800 | how to be rich in wallet and rich in mind, which is then you

00:08:19.000 | go totally brand off and you can actually find things that are

00:08:22.200 | just like, really well tailored, well made, they can be almost

00:08:25.720 | generational pieces of clothing or whatever. And I think that

00:08:29.960 | it's great that you can find these things and tell other

00:08:32.640 | people because you find that there's a latent so many number

00:08:35.720 | of people that want that. So at Villa d'Este as an example, that

00:08:38.800 | is probably the Harvard of hospitality. I've never been to

00:08:41.520 | a hotel that is more on point anywhere in the world than that

00:08:45.920 | one place. Incredible, incredible ways in which the

00:08:49.440 | name of the winners one more time, Villa d'Este Villa d

00:08:52.960 | apostrophe, e s t e on Lake Cole. I'll give you one simple

00:08:56.320 | example. Matt and I were like, talking about this one kind of

00:09:00.120 | olive oil, and the waiter at the other table heard, he went to

00:09:04.720 | the kitchen brought back and he said here, I heard I just

00:09:07.480 | overheard I apologize, but and I thought this is incredible. You

00:09:10.400 | feel so pampered and loved and taken care of the level of

00:09:14.080 | service and quality there was incredible. And I think that

00:09:17.280 | there's so many examples of this, where if you can have

00:09:20.960 | elements of that in your life, you should do it. By the way,

00:09:24.160 | there's a very high chance that this is where I use all of you

00:09:26.880 | guys for the all in summit 2025. Okay, I'm still figuring out all

00:09:31.040 | the details. I'm picking 2024. My point is whether it's Laura

00:09:34.320 | Piana, which is, in my opinion, the top of the top in terms of

00:09:37.920 | brand off really high quality clothes. Look at that place. The

00:09:42.360 | point is like there's all these brands that exist that take

00:09:45.280 | enormous amounts of time to exemplify craftsmanship and care.

00:09:50.080 | And I think that it's appropriate for people who can

00:09:53.000 | participate in those experiences to be able to have them and not

00:09:56.000 | feel ashamed and actually like enjoy it and celebrate

00:09:58.520 | themselves and do it. So let's go high quality stuff. Not

00:10:02.240 | shitty, big label tacky crap. Okay, Nvidia has smashed their

00:10:05.480 | earnings massive interest coming into this earnings report,

00:10:08.280 | obviously, because we've been talking about Nvidia, they've

00:10:10.440 | had a massive run up. Everybody is trying to buy capacity to run

00:10:15.160 | language models, etc. self driving, yada, yada. And it's

00:10:18.880 | not just the Googles and Amazons of the world, you have startups

00:10:23.120 | trying to buy h 100s a 100s and buy this infrastructure, you

00:10:26.920 | also have sovereign wealth funds and countries buying these in

00:10:30.520 | the Middle East and Europe, and you have traditional corporations

00:10:33.040 | buying them. This is the blowout of world blowouts. In terms of

00:10:36.680 | performance q2 revenue 13.5 billion, 101% year over year,

00:10:41.600 | that's extraordinary on that large of a number, but up 88%

00:10:45.240 | quarter over quarter high growth in stocks is 2030% year over

00:10:48.960 | year. So this is just very uncommon, obviously, q2 net

00:10:52.720 | income $6 billion up 843% year over year, Nvidia is now with

00:10:58.480 | 1.2 trillion, it's closing in on Amazon 1.4 trillion, and Google

00:11:02.560 | at $1.7 trillion in terms of market cap. And here's the

00:11:05.840 | kicker, they're printing up so much money, and so much profits

00:11:09.360 | rather that the Nvidia board is approving a $25 billion share

00:11:14.320 | buyback. That's a very large number. In terms of share

00:11:17.720 | buybacks, that's six times higher than what they were

00:11:19.360 | currently allotted. Yeah, I guess Chamath a when you see

00:11:24.000 | this kind of extraordinary run up, what is the ramification

00:11:27.840 | going to be in terms of for the industry competition, and then

00:11:32.600 | just trading this name? Is this peak Nvidia? Or is the peak yet

00:11:37.120 | to come?

00:11:37.440 | Well, I think it's peak in one way, but this is less about a

00:11:39.920 | commentary on Nvidia because they're clearly firing on all

00:11:42.960 | cylinders. But, you know, it's a pretty well established rule in

00:11:46.160 | capitalism, which is when the market observes that there's a

00:11:49.520 | company just printing enormous revenues and profits, they want

00:11:53.680 | to compete with them naturally to get their share of those

00:11:56.080 | revenues and profits. And that typically happens in all

00:11:58.960 | markets. And the result of that are just decaying margins in the

00:12:02.360 | in the absence of a monopoly, this is what you should expect.

00:12:05.120 | And so, because in this market, there's nothing really

00:12:07.520 | monopolistic about what they do, what they do is exceptional and

00:12:10.240 | good. But there are other ways and other systems and other

00:12:14.240 | companies that are developing chipsets and capabilities here

00:12:17.000 | to compete with Nvidia. So it probably just motivates them

00:12:21.160 | even more and accelerates the path where you see competition.

00:12:24.440 | I tweeted this out yesterday. But one of the most interesting

00:12:27.280 | things that could happen is somebody like Tesla decides to

00:12:29.680 | either open source their chip or actually starts to sell their

00:12:32.000 | platform because if FSD gets to a reasonable level of scale, that

00:12:35.560 | entire platform system is a learning and inference system

00:12:39.080 | for the physical world. And I think that has tremendous

00:12:41.840 | applications, you have something called risky, which is an open

00:12:44.760 | architecture spec to essentially compete and create different

00:12:48.600 | versions of different chips that has implications more I think to

00:12:51.360 | arm you have companies like Google that you know, frankly,

00:12:53.920 | spun their own silicon a long time ago, TPU, you have Amazon

00:12:57.360 | now talking about doing the same thing. Microsoft has invested a

00:13:00.280 | lot of money in FPGA technology. So it's just yet another

00:13:05.000 | accelerant in this trend to create many forms of AI enabled

00:13:11.040 | silicon. And so I think that that sort of it, it pulls that

00:13:15.120 | reality forward. And I think we're gonna have to figure out

00:13:17.520 | when the market prices that in, because I think that that

00:13:21.160 | probably decays the Nvidia margin and upside over time.

00:13:25.320 | Again, that is not a commentary on them. That's just a market

00:13:27.800 | reality.

00:13:28.440 | Yeah, margins get competed away. For folks who don't know, Tesla

00:13:32.000 | is making something called dojo. It's their own supercomputer.

00:13:34.840 | Here's a picture of it. They showed that at Tesla AI day last

00:13:37.840 | year. And you have arms, open source competitor is the risk

00:13:42.800 | five chip you're talking about. It's an open source architecture

00:13:45.880 | for doing large jobs. And so I guess my question to you,

00:13:49.480 | Friedberg is, if you look at all this capacity coming online, do

00:13:53.320 | you think we're going to be in a situation where the amount of

00:13:56.480 | capacity compute being put online is going to outstrip the

00:14:00.480 | need for that compute, because software is getting so much

00:14:03.360 | better. And then maybe, you know, people are running hugging

00:14:06.920 | face jobs and various LM's on the new silicon from Apple, and

00:14:11.520 | they're running it on their M two's. And so do we need this

00:14:14.640 | much capacity? Are there enough interesting jobs in the world

00:14:17.560 | to for all this capacity? And then might that also be a

00:14:20.400 | headwind against Nvidia when people say, you know what, I got

00:14:23.680 | enough, I got enough capacity here.

00:14:25.200 | I think the rational way to think about this is to try and

00:14:29.600 | calculate the efficient frontier on compute use. So the more

00:14:35.320 | compute you use, the more it costs you. The question then is,

00:14:41.040 | if you double the amount of compute you're using for a

00:14:43.400 | particular application, do you get twice the return on the

00:14:47.360 | investment? If you triple it, does your ROI on a percentage

00:14:52.360 | basis, you know, go up or go down. So at some point, you

00:14:56.320 | reach an efficient frontier, which is you start to see a

00:14:59.400 | declining or negative rate of return on the investment in the

00:15:02.960 | compute that you're using for a particular application. And this

00:15:06.040 | is certainly going to be application and market specific,

00:15:08.360 | it's going to be largely driven by the data that is available in

00:15:11.280 | that market to do training to do tuning the market's appetite to

00:15:15.160 | spend money for that particular set of applications that emerges

00:15:18.840 | from that compute that's being used. And so we don't know today

00:15:23.760 | where the efficient frontier is across each of these different

00:15:27.640 | markets and sets of applications. And the market is

00:15:30.360 | finding that out. In the process of finding that out, everyone is

00:15:34.160 | spending a shit ton of money on compute. And they are trying to

00:15:37.520 | get as many server racks as they can. They're trying to get as

00:15:40.800 | many chipsets as they can, they're trying to get as much

00:15:44.200 | server time as they can. And everyone's got this idea that

00:15:47.200 | the more compute I can throw at a problem, the return is going

00:15:51.760 | to scale linearly. And it turns out that like with most most

00:15:54.200 | things, the answer is likely not. So we're at this point

00:15:58.400 | right now. And I would argue a bit of a cycle, that the there

00:16:03.680 | looks to be a bubble. And what I mean by that is that there's a

00:16:06.640 | lot of inefficient spending going on, as the efficient

00:16:10.000 | frontiers are discovered across all these different application

00:16:12.800 | sets. And so my intuition without a lot of actual data to

00:16:17.440 | back this up, is that based just anecdotally on what I'm hearing

00:16:20.840 | people doing in the market, what companies are doing, what

00:16:23.240 | startups are doing, etc. Everyone is throwing everything

00:16:26.320 | they can compute. And they're going to realize that they're

00:16:28.680 | going to need to rationalize those expenses at some time at

00:16:31.000 | some point. So I would, I would envision Nvidia is probably

00:16:34.280 | writing, writing a little bit of a discovery of the efficient

00:16:37.360 | frontier wave right now. And that this probably is not

00:16:40.480 | necessarily steady state.

00:16:41.800 | Saks, we experienced this before. As you remember, from

00:16:46.080 | the dotcom era, there was a massive investment very similar

00:16:49.800 | to this in fiber, and the overspending of building the

00:16:53.240 | fiber infrastructure, so everybody could get broadband,

00:16:56.040 | and they could stream movies, etc. happened in that 97 to 2002

00:17:01.560 | time period. A lot of those companies went out of business,

00:17:04.120 | a lot of that fiber never got used. People were working on

00:17:06.960 | compression algorithms while they were building a massive

00:17:09.280 | fiber, and a lot of that fiber got sold. I think Google bought

00:17:11.720 | up a lot of it, other people bought it up. And it was just a

00:17:14.640 | massive overspend. So is this like the dark fiber of this era

00:17:18.960 | where we're just going to build so much capacity, that there's

00:17:22.360 | just going to be not enough jobs to run on it in your mind?

00:17:25.320 | Well, I think it's a little different than fiber in the

00:17:27.120 | sense that every year, there's gonna be a new generation of

00:17:29.480 | chips. And so these cloud providers who are providing GPU

00:17:35.920 | compute, they're going to want to keep upgrading the chips to

00:17:38.760 | be able to address the next generation of applications. So I

00:17:41.760 | don't think it's quite as static as fiber where you kind of build

00:17:44.600 | it once. And you're right that there was kind of a glut of

00:17:47.720 | capacity was created. Eventually, though, the internet

00:17:50.560 | usage grew into that capacity. But I think this is a little

00:17:53.640 | different, because again, you're going to need to upgrade the

00:17:55.600 | chips every year or two. I think Freeberg is right that this is

00:17:58.840 | clearly a spike in demand that may not be sustainable. I mean,

00:18:03.520 | recall what happened here is that chat GPT launched on

00:18:06.880 | November 30, last year, and really caught everyone by

00:18:10.280 | surprise, it kind of took the world by storm. And over the

00:18:13.120 | next few months, you had hundreds of millions of users

00:18:15.440 | discover AI, I think it's surprised even the open AI team,

00:18:19.120 | I think when they launched chat GPT, they thought it'd be more

00:18:21.840 | of a proof of concept. But it ended up being a lot more than

00:18:25.480 | that. And so everyone has scrambled all of a sudden, in

00:18:28.920 | the last nine months or so, to develop their own AI strategy.

00:18:32.840 | And so, again, it was this giant platform shift that happened

00:18:36.840 | overnight. So there is a tremendous GPU shortage right

00:18:41.080 | now. And that's also what's leading to these almost software

00:18:46.000 | like profit margins by Nvidia. Because when everyone's

00:18:49.360 | clamoring to get a limited supply of these chips, and

00:18:53.080 | there just aren't enough Nvidia can almost charge whatever they

00:18:55.760 | want. And so I think even more than the demand, the profit

00:18:59.280 | margins might not be sustainable. But I think the

00:19:02.960 | reality is we just don't know what the steady state of demand

00:19:06.120 | in this market is going to be. I think we can say that it can't

00:19:10.560 | continue at these growth rates. But probably there will be some

00:19:14.440 | steady state of demand. That's, you know, it probably is at

00:19:17.520 | least where we are today.

00:19:18.560 | Yeah, I don't think it's perfectly analogous Chamath. But

00:19:21.680 | just to bring up some historical context, check out this article

00:19:25.760 | I was reading the other day, the dimensions of the collapse of

00:19:28.080 | the telecommunications industry. This is August 20 2002. And it

00:19:32.000 | says, the dimension of the collapse in the telecommunications

00:19:35.320 | industry during the past two years has been staggering half a

00:19:37.840 | million people have lost their jobs in that time, the Dow Jones

00:19:40.120 | communication technology index has dropped 86% the wireless

00:19:42.920 | communication index 89%. These are declines in value worthy of

00:19:46.920 | comparison to the Great Crash of 1929. Out of the 7 trillion

00:19:49.960 | decline in the stock market since its peak about 2 trillion

00:19:53.160 | have disappeared in the capitalization of telecom

00:19:55.680 | companies. 23 telecom companies have gone bankrupt in a wave

00:19:58.440 | capped off by the July 21 collapse of worldcom the single

00:20:01.880 | largest bankruptcy in American history. So just a little

00:20:04.480 | history there of this, it's not perfectly analogous. Obviously,

00:20:08.560 | we don't have Nvidia is not going bankrupt or anything like

00:20:10.480 | that. But this overcapacity issue is definitely going to be

00:20:13.040 | something but you had mentioned that in one of your tweet storms

00:20:17.040 | in the past couple of weeks, or these long form that you're

00:20:19.040 | doing on x, previously known as Twitter. You mentioned that what

00:20:23.480 | are the jobs that could be pushed to this compute? And what

00:20:27.880 | if one of the works, I think you were doing a speaking gig that

00:20:29.880 | somebody tweeted out a little clip of. So let's unpack that.

00:20:33.840 | What do you think are some jobs that people might push here that

00:20:36.320 | we don't anticipate that could solve something miraculous in

00:20:39.360 | the world?

00:20:39.760 | Well, the the framing is really like if you if you go back to

00:20:43.800 | like the the gold rush of the 1800s in San Francisco, the

00:20:47.680 | people that made the money were the platform enablers, right?

00:20:50.160 | They were the ones that sold the picks the shovels, the pans and

00:20:52.720 | the jeans. Right. And that's where that's where Levi Strauss

00:20:55.820 | was born. The the equivalent analogy, the equivalence in that

00:20:59.480 | analogy today is Nvidia, because they are the dominant pick and

00:21:04.720 | shovel provider. So the question is, well, what are we going to

00:21:08.520 | use these picks and shovels to create? Are we going to find

00:21:10.920 | gold? And I think the question is unclear. And where will that

00:21:14.200 | gold be found? Will it be found inside of a big tech company? Or

00:21:17.200 | will it be found inside of a startup? If you look inside of

00:21:20.200 | where these resources are being used inside of big tech, it is

00:21:23.880 | to completely scorch the earth on the economic value of large

00:21:28.840 | models. And I think that that's very, very good for all of the

00:21:32.960 | startups that come after it. So what do I mean by this? You

00:21:35.920 | know, we were also wrapped around the axle around chat GPT

00:21:40.800 | and then GPT in general. And now, you know, if you look at

00:21:44.720 | the quality of llama, llama to basically these big companies

00:21:49.160 | have decided, no, we're just going to make all these models

00:21:52.520 | extremely good, extremely useful and very, very free. And so a

00:21:57.520 | lot of the resources are going there to subsidize economically

00:22:00.960 | subsidize and by implication, economically destroy the value

00:22:05.120 | of that category, that's going to be good for startups. And so

00:22:09.960 | the question is, what will you then build on top of these

00:22:14.120 | quasi free, almost free tools. And so one area that I have been

00:22:19.080 | looking at for a while is in computational biology, I think

00:22:21.520 | that that clip that you're talking about was just me

00:22:23.360 | talking with Orin Z. Just around the ability to compute large

00:22:29.360 | complex spaces with very sparse information. It's not it's a

00:22:33.960 | very difficult task today. But tomorrow in an AI model that you

00:22:36.920 | can train, you can literally characterize every single

00:22:39.880 | molecular permutation you could imagine. You combine it with

00:22:43.280 | something like alpha fold, and you can understand protein

00:22:45.280 | folding. And all of a sudden, you can sequentially start to

00:22:47.440 | put tools together that could theoretically give you much

00:22:50.760 | higher probability, guessing for specific compounds that could

00:22:56.760 | actually cure disease. A different version of that as a

00:22:59.320 | company that myself and a few other people started, I tweeted

00:23:02.840 | that out, which is more in the material science space. And

00:23:05.440 | we've had some pretty important breakthroughs there, which is

00:23:08.120 | really about trying to invent next generation battery

00:23:10.800 | materials. And we have one candidate that could be pretty

00:23:16.040 | revolutionary, if it turns out to work, we don't know yet some

00:23:19.320 | positive science. So there are there are some of these green

00:23:22.440 | shoots. So my perspective is that a lot of the money that

00:23:25.160 | NVIDIA makes today is going to be money well spent, because it

00:23:28.440 | will be going to the big guys, big tech plus Tesla, they are

00:23:33.360 | then going to create some really foundational platform

00:23:37.640 | technologies with it, whether it's dojo, whether it's FSD,

00:23:42.000 | whether it's the full platform inside of Tesla, that is the

00:23:44.680 | cameras plus the inference plus the training for all forms of

00:23:48.080 | physical world interaction, whether it's llama to, and all

00:23:51.640 | of that stuff will be given away, essentially, I think, open

00:23:54.640 | source quasi free to the ecosystem over the next few

00:23:58.760 | years. And I think that will be a really important moment, which

00:24:02.480 | will create hundreds of new companies doing really clever,

00:24:06.520 | cool things. So we haven't yet seen the big breakout company

00:24:10.480 | yet. And so I think that right now, most of this capex is going

00:24:13.680 | to the big guys. But the dividends of all the work that

00:24:18.600 | these big guys are doing will be seen over the next few years in

00:24:22.720 | the startups that get started in the next four or five years.

00:24:25.480 | I love the California analogy. Ultimately, what all that

00:24:28.160 | prospecting for gold did was create the state of California,

00:24:31.640 | putting aside the Levi's and the jeans. And if you know anything

00:24:35.320 | about California's GDP, it would be Yeah, I think these

00:24:40.840 | statistics are always talked about fifth, 10th, eighth

00:24:43.400 | largest, has a bigger GDP, California than some of the

00:24:46.960 | largest countries in the world. So this is a 2015 chart, it's

00:24:51.200 | hard to find the updated information on this. But

00:24:53.400 | ultimately, that was the product of the gold rush is this

00:24:55.560 | incredible state. Any other thoughts on Nvidia before we

00:24:57.920 | move on to arm,

00:24:59.440 | I think OpenAI had a potentially significant product

00:25:02.880 | announcement that's related to this. So they just launched

00:25:07.080 | fine tuning for chat dbt, actually version 3.5. Turbo says

00:25:13.000 | here fine tuning lets you train the model and your company's

00:25:15.160 | data run at scale early tests have shown that fine tune dbt

00:25:19.360 | 3.5 can metric CGT for on narrow tasks. So you can do things

00:25:24.120 | like fine tune the formatting of the output, you can fine tune

00:25:30.200 | the tone fine tuning also allows businesses to make the model

00:25:33.360 | follow instructions better. So I think the point of this is that

00:25:38.200 | we're still at such an early stage of this. And there are so

00:25:41.800 | many applications that are going to be developed, and they're

00:25:44.360 | making the models more and more useful. So Jason, to your

00:25:48.120 | analogy about fiber, what happened with fiber is there was

00:25:51.400 | a big build out of overcapacity, but then the number of

00:25:55.200 | applications kept growing until that capacity got used. And I

00:25:58.840 | think we're probably going to see something like that here

00:26:01.040 | where there is a big build out going on of capacity, but and

00:26:04.600 | capabilities, and that's going to lead to the next generation

00:26:07.040 | of applications. And I just think we don't know yet what the

00:26:11.120 | steady state of either demand or supply for these chips is going

00:26:14.480 | to be. Obviously, the market got taken by surprise over the last

00:26:18.600 | year. So you've seen, again, this huge spike in demand, the

00:26:22.280 | supply cannot react fast enough. That's led to gigantic profits

00:26:25.560 | for Nvidia. But it's hard to know exactly again, what is the

00:26:29.120 | steady state going to be? Is it going to be like this? Or is

00:26:31.000 | this a one time spike? And we also don't know what the supply

00:26:34.560 | will be once the manufacturers all adjust, because now they

00:26:37.720 | know that the demand is there.

00:26:38.840 | And to your point, like the the big use cases are pushing us

00:26:43.280 | well past chips to really be more like entire systems, and

00:26:48.040 | these racks. And so if you look like at grace opera, which is

00:26:50.640 | their next gen design, it's like a bunch of chiplets plus memory

00:26:54.800 | on a huge board. It's not a chip, you're talking about

00:26:58.560 | system level manufacturing at this point. And that will also

00:27:01.880 | create different kinds of use cases. Because for example,

00:27:05.000 | today, right now, when you look at simple things like

00:27:06.960 | probabilistic tasks, I think chat GPT, and all these GPTs

00:27:10.040 | are, are pretty marvelous and pretty inspirational. But

00:27:13.680 | deterministic tasks, they're shit, like, you know, they

00:27:16.280 | hallucinate on simple things like multiplication, why,

00:27:18.880 | because you infer multiplication, and you try to

00:27:20.840 | calculate it probabilistically, and you get these simple math

00:27:23.760 | functions wrong. And so these are all these things where the

00:27:27.360 | software has to become more and more sophisticated, and actually

00:27:30.280 | be able to path and tunnel code into different ways of getting

00:27:33.560 | an executed and then bringing it back and stitching it together.

00:27:35.880 | All of these things don't exist. Those are very rudimentary

00:27:39.440 | things that were solved in v1 of compute. So I think that to

00:27:43.400 | your point, David, like we don't know where this goes, we're

00:27:47.080 | probably going to go to a place that it's not just about chips,

00:27:49.800 | but it's about systems. But that's going to create this

00:27:53.160 | weird balkanization almost. And I think that's where a lot of

00:27:58.440 | the profit margins will get eroded away, because that will

00:28:01.200 | make it a much more competitive industry. And there just isn't

00:28:06.560 | a lot of margin to capture when you actually stitch all these

00:28:08.840 | things together.

00:28:09.480 | Yeah. And if you think about what were the massive wins for

00:28:14.160 | all that extra fiber, it was really two companies. The first

00:28:17.600 | was YouTube, which stopped charging people for transport on

00:28:20.880 | their videos before that, if you had a video go viral, your your

00:28:24.040 | server got shut down, because you hit your $5,000 a month

00:28:28.080 | limit, or whatever you had set with your ISP. And then Netflix,

00:28:31.120 | of course, right, Netflix couldn't exist, and all that

00:28:33.200 | dark fiber built that. So we'll see with all this extra GPU,

00:28:35.760 | what could happen. And to your point about the the breakthrough

00:28:39.160 | is there, you can now go into your chat GPT, and you can put

00:28:45.000 | in custom instructions. And so it asks you, what would you like

00:28:47.680 | chat GPT to know about you and provide better responses. And

00:28:52.360 | you know, for example, I told it, I'm a venture capitalist, I

00:28:54.720 | live in the Bay Area, I'm looking for concise business

00:28:57.880 | information. And then it says, Well, how do you like, how would

00:29:01.760 | you like chat GPT to respond? And I said, I like to see data

00:29:04.360 | in a table. I like to see data in those tables with hyperlinks.

00:29:07.880 | I like citations when possible. Yeah, just to be clear what

00:29:10.480 | you're describing with custom instructions. That was a feature

00:29:12.720 | I think they launched like a month or two ago. And what that

00:29:15.480 | is doing is prompt engineering, basically, it's pre saving, like

00:29:20.000 | all that preamble that you would have to put in every single one

00:29:22.840 | of your prompts. Yeah. Whereas this fine tuning, as I

00:29:25.880 | understand it is more about fine tuning the model to your to

00:29:29.320 | improve the model for a certain kind of data or certain kind of

00:29:31.640 | output. Right. So the example there would be if you had your

00:29:34.880 | email box, or you had your Google Docs, or you had a

00:29:37.400 | repository of all your slack messages or something in your

00:29:40.120 | company, you had your company handbooks, or, you know, all of

00:29:43.120 | Chamath's letters he writes every year, you could have that

00:29:45.640 | uploaded to chat GPT is potentially very powerful, I

00:29:48.480 | think for enterprises. I think the big enterprise use case, the

00:29:52.720 | most obvious one is that every enterprise wants its own

00:29:56.040 | internal chatbot, it wants its own internal chat GPT, where the

00:30:00.280 | employees can ask questions, and the AI has access to all the

00:30:04.920 | company's information, and it understands permissions and

00:30:07.400 | privacy. So it only reveals information to people who have

00:30:10.240 | the right to see it. That's kind of a tall order. But I think

00:30:13.000 | that's what the market wants. Yeah, they want the chat GPT for

00:30:16.320 | the company intranet. Yes. And so there's a lot of people

00:30:19.360 | racing to provide that. And there was a interesting tweet by

00:30:23.080 | Nathan, the nature anyway, he just said, bye bye a bunch of

00:30:25.800 | startups. So I guess a lot of stars were working on this fine

00:30:28.240 | tuning problem that may be to glib. Because I think there's

00:30:32.160 | just a lot of enterprises who do not want to share all their

00:30:35.000 | corporate information with open AI.

00:30:36.640 | Of course, what if it's HR information, then you have

00:30:38.960 | people asking, like, Who are the most overpaid people in this

00:30:41.200 | company? You know, what if it's like the badge information and

00:30:43.760 | how many hours people are working? Or

00:30:45.200 | that's more about permissions, Jason. But even if open AI can

00:30:47.960 | nail the permissions problem, I think there's a lot of

00:30:50.120 | enterprises who will not want to trust their data to AI. Yeah,

00:30:53.800 | they're gonna be afraid about where it goes. This is why I

00:30:55.800 | think open source is taking off in a big way is that I think big

00:30:59.560 | enterprises would much rather roll their own models, and

00:31:02.400 | control it and do the fine tuning. And that's why they're

00:31:04.360 | using tools like mosaic and hugging faces, they want to have

00:31:07.760 | control over it themselves.

00:31:08.920 | That's an excellent point. And that has implications as well

00:31:11.800 | into the hardware, which is also probably a good jumping off

00:31:14.320 | point for arm because this that what you said is exactly must

00:31:17.600 | happen for the integrity of an organization to want to use

00:31:21.280 | these things. And if that happens, then it just further

00:31:25.120 | further accelerates, I think, how the hardware will get

00:31:28.000 | abstracted, and frankly, quasi open sourced as well. All right,

00:31:31.640 | let's talk Facebook did a great job of this, because like, when

00:31:34.120 | Facebook was building data centers, they had to invent

00:31:37.960 | tremendous capabilities that didn't exist before. And the

00:31:41.640 | market was really fragmented, it was very expensive. And what

00:31:44.120 | they did was they basically created these reference designs

00:31:47.000 | for servers and blades and the whole nine yards and open

00:31:49.640 | source the whole thing. And it just, you know, in essence,

00:31:53.520 | destroyed a market, but it created a hyper efficient market

00:31:56.920 | that then everybody could use. And I think the question is that

00:32:00.240 | if it's happening at the software layer already now, just

00:32:03.880 | like it did in web to software, and then we see certain elements

00:32:08.800 | of web to hardware been open sourced, I think it makes pretty

00:32:12.720 | logical sense that you can expect the same things to

00:32:14.840 | happen in the AI world. The AI models and the AI platforms and

00:32:18.880 | they all of that stuff will first get open source because

00:32:21.440 | it's a data integrity, security issue. And then the hardware

00:32:25.280 | will get open source as well, because you just want simple

00:32:27.800 | reference designs you can use and plug and play.

00:32:30.000 | Yeah, if you want to look at that, it's called the open

00:32:33.120 | compute project, open compute.org. Just a way to use

00:32:37.280 | open source to grind down the prices take out the margin, I

00:32:39.960 | guess is what you're saying, Chama to make all these data

00:32:43.640 | centers scale, right? Well, so

00:32:46.520 | you know, so one related story here is this just happened in

00:32:50.120 | the last few weeks, there's a company called core weave, which

00:32:54.040 | provides cloud infrastructure for AI training, it secured a

00:32:56.960 | $2.3 billion investment in the form of a loan, what core weave

00:33:01.000 | is trying to do, it's kind of like AWS, but for GPUs. So

00:33:06.200 | essentially, instead of having to buy your own GPUs, in order

00:33:10.400 | to, you know, set up your own infrastructure, you just

00:33:13.040 | basically rent compute from these guys.

00:33:16.480 | But this is this is exactly why like none of these, none of

00:33:18.960 | these companies will really be allowed to exist in this exact

00:33:21.600 | way four or five years from now, because ultimately, what people

00:33:24.400 | want is massive throughput, right tokens per second, give me

00:33:27.080 | as many tokens per second as possible. And they don't

00:33:30.520 | particularly care. Again, if you understand the model, do they

00:33:34.080 | really care what the underlying substrate hardware should be? It

00:33:37.000 | doesn't seem like they should, they should care what is the

00:33:39.680 | throughput? What do I pay for it? And by the way, that is

00:33:42.640 | exactly what happened when AWS really start to scale. Because

00:33:45.520 | if you guys remember, when we started to first extract code

00:33:48.160 | into AWS, what do we care about? How much did an EC two instance

00:33:51.200 | cost? How much did an s3 bucket cost? And that's all we cared

00:33:53.920 | about. Because that abstraction allowed us to not care about the

00:33:57.800 | underlying hardware, who was the vendor? What was the con

00:34:01.000 | configuration, it didn't matter. And so in an interesting way,

00:34:04.520 | we're going to go through that same evolution here, because

00:34:06.640 | it's just economically rational that that kind of market exists,

00:34:10.400 | you should only care tokens per second, I think.

00:34:13.520 | All right, in other news, oh, by the way, there's something

00:34:16.320 | called common crawl, which is another interesting open source

00:34:19.280 | project that is getting a lot more attention today. Because

00:34:22.800 | they have crawled the web, and you can use this common crawl,

00:34:25.160 | they release it monthly. And that's what a lot of people are

00:34:28.120 | training their data on. Now, they don't have permission from

00:34:31.440 | all those people to do training data. But they do have the

00:34:35.040 | ability for you to download an open crawl, essentially what

00:34:37.680 | Google has, and you have a an open source version of it. So

00:34:42.000 | common crawl was started and funded by Gil Alba's. Yeah, he's

00:34:46.560 | a he's a friend. Gil sold his company applied semantics to

00:34:50.520 | Google back in Oh, two or three. And a big part of his effort

00:34:56.120 | with common crawl is to that's not effectively is it AdSense

00:35:01.600 | for words in AdSense. So basically, applied semantics

00:35:06.480 | could read a web page, and then create the keywords associated

00:35:10.960 | with the content on that web page. And then those keywords

00:35:13.160 | would trigger AdWords ads on the on the web page. So he called it

00:35:15.520 | AdSense. So AdSense started, and the whole publisher network at

00:35:18.400 | Google was born from the applied semantics acquisition. And Gil

00:35:22.880 | was obviously a pretty significant shareholder of

00:35:25.240 | Google. He's even in the s1 as one of the major shareholders,

00:35:29.000 | he's a really great human being. And his intention with this

00:35:32.600 | common crawl project was, you know, to make the crawling of

00:35:35.840 | the web, the index, and the caching available for all these

00:35:39.920 | different projects that might exist. And he didn't at the time

00:35:42.560 | anticipate the, the open AI application becoming, you know,

00:35:47.920 | the big breakthrough. But when GPT three was published, I think

00:35:51.200 | they said that 80 plus percent of the waiting came from the

00:35:56.120 | content out of common crawl. And so it's really been this a this

00:35:59.240 | amazing project, completely nonprofit, all funded, mostly

00:36:03.160 | funded by Gil, and has really unlocked this opportunity for a

00:36:07.320 | lot of the open source alternatives to now try and

00:36:10.240 | provide solutions that can exist and coexist with open AI and

00:36:14.360 | others in the commercial options in the world.

00:36:16.680 | A small piece of trivia. We were one of the first AdSense

00:36:20.360 | publishers. And so here's a story from October of 2005.

00:36:24.840 | Weblogs, Inc, which didn't gadget, the blogging company I

00:36:27.280 | started hit $3,000 a day in AdSense, thanks to Gil and the

00:36:30.920 | team over there. And we wound up selling it to awesome. And this

00:36:34.480 | is the story about it. And we were in the s one, they had two

00:36:38.720 | examples of publishers, one was New York Times. And then one was

00:36:42.480 | weblogs, Inc, they want to show like an upstart and this one is

00:36:45.520 | a lot of history here. And it's fun to go back down to and we

00:36:49.080 | were we were in the s one for by the way, Google,

00:36:50.840 | Gil was gonna be at the summit. So

00:36:52.480 | I'm gonna give him a hug and take a picture.

00:36:55.160 | Charles Barkley had this great story, which is like he is like

00:37:00.320 | over the moon about being a grandfather. I saw this on 60

00:37:03.000 | minutes. And he said, it's because I want my grandchild

00:37:06.920 | grandson to Google me and notice that I did some things. And then

00:37:10.720 | we can talk about it. Yeah. And Jay, Jay, I had this thought for

00:37:15.160 | you. Like that's like, that's a cool piece of internet history

00:37:18.320 | that you're a part of. Yeah, hopefully your your, your

00:37:21.040 | grandkids will Google that. And you can tell us where it's

00:37:23.040 | pretty cool.

00:37:23.560 | Or, you know, 1800 episodes of this week in startups. I just

00:37:27.840 | tweeted a, an episode with Gary tan from 2009 that I recorded

00:37:32.680 | at Sequoia his office. And I just put it on the this week in

00:37:35.720 | startups Twitter account. It's pretty funny to have babyface

00:37:38.080 | Gary tan from posterous on there. Alright, arm officially

00:37:40.600 | filed its f1. It's kind of like an s1 for a foreign company. And

00:37:44.160 | they plan to go public next month arms revenue last quarter

00:37:47.520 | 675 million down 2% year over year up 7% quarter of a quarter

00:37:52.440 | fiscal full year 2023 2.7 billion ish down 1% year over

00:37:57.640 | year. Arms major business just so you know, is smartphones

00:38:01.960 | 99% of smartphones are built with arms chip architecture

00:38:06.000 | embedded systems, they have a system systems, we'll get into

00:38:09.360 | it. The problem is the market is totally moved when when SoftBank

00:38:11.760 | bought arm, it was probably like the last year where, you know,

00:38:15.680 | there was so much focus on the hardware and platform

00:38:19.440 | technologies inside of mobile and tablets and all that stuff.

00:38:22.400 | But in these last few years, think of what's happened. We've

00:38:25.640 | had a massive shift to AI. Right. And so that's pushing a

00:38:29.440 | lot more pressure on GPUs and whatever comes after that. We

00:38:33.360 | have had a reemergence of the popularity of risk fee, which is

00:38:37.120 | an open source competitor to arm. We have had Apple in source a

00:38:41.840 | whole bunch of their own architectural decisions in

00:38:43.800 | silicon design because they don't want the dependency

00:38:46.320 | they have a type of philosophy. Yeah, well, also, they also care

00:38:49.360 | about different things like they care about battery life. So

00:38:51.600 | that's why that's the focus of their chip architecture.

00:38:54.040 | And so all of this just means that that market embedded

00:38:57.760 | systems becomes more and more constrained and commoditized

00:39:02.560 | over time, which again, as we said, in capitalism means that

00:39:06.360 | future profits will be less than historical profits. And so I

00:39:10.160 | think this is a very tough valuation to get right. And

00:39:15.280 | trying to stretch to a 60 or $70 billion print, I think is

00:39:19.080 | really tough. This is a honestly a 15 to $20 billion company.

00:39:24.120 | Ouch. So question for you, I come off and I'll open it up to

00:39:27.440 | to the Davids. Why would SoftBank? I know the answer, but

00:39:32.000 | I'm asking you so you can explain to the audience. Why

00:39:35.600 | would SoftBank take a company public with these headwinds with

00:39:39.240 | no growth being flat? Why are they taking the public now?

00:39:43.120 | Well, soft softbank has the D lever, right? They have a they

00:39:46.400 | have a very big problem, which is that they have this forget

00:39:50.360 | SoftBank Vision Fund for a second, but SoftBank itself is a

00:39:54.200 | telco operator that has ginormous piles of debt that

00:39:58.120 | they've used to finance the building of their business. And

00:40:01.040 | so when you have contraction, your core business, you become

00:40:06.080 | more and more at risk of breaching the covenants of all

00:40:08.480 | that debt and or you just like run out of free cash flow, like

00:40:11.720 | all of these things really hurt your future ability to invest.

00:40:15.200 | And so SoftBank is under a lot of pressure to just clean up the

00:40:18.400 | balance sheet and D lever. And so when you have an asset like

00:40:22.160 | this sitting there, if you can sell, you know, 20 or $30

00:40:26.240 | billion of that, call it to somebody, and then replenish

00:40:31.680 | your balance sheet, that provides tremendous liquidity

00:40:35.280 | and relief. And they did that as well. A few months ago with

00:40:38.880 | Alibaba, they've started to, I think now they may have sold out

00:40:42.280 | of the overwhelming majority of the position in Alibaba again,

00:40:45.360 | because they have massive liquidity needs because they

00:40:48.640 | have so much debt. So this is just part and parcel of them D

00:40:52.840 | levering the balance sheet.

00:40:53.800 | So they're forced to get it out is I guess what you're saying.

00:40:56.080 | And then we've talked sacks a little bit about other companies

00:41:00.320 | that are going to be forced. They're on the what do they call

00:41:03.440 | it when you're on a pirate ship, they make you walk the plank.

00:41:05.560 | I'd say this is like the walking of the plank to an IPO, you got

00:41:09.080 | other companies that have issues where they just have to get

00:41:12.280 | public at some point. So maybe the public markets are going to

00:41:15.880 | open up. And in some cases, it's going to be because people are

00:41:20.040 | walking the plank, other cases, it's going to be opportunistic.

00:41:22.120 | So maybe you could talk a little bit about your thoughts on that.

00:41:23.880 | I think it's hard to walk the plank into the public markets.

00:41:26.160 | I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that, because the public

00:41:28.160 | markets have to want to buy your issuance. So if it's not a good

00:41:31.880 | company, then you know, in this environment, they're not gonna

00:41:34.400 | be able to IPO.

00:41:35.160 | Well, they're gonna be able to I think the question is the price.

00:41:37.800 | They have no choice but to get so yeah, there may be a lot of

00:41:40.680 | down rounds into an IPO from the last private round, which was

00:41:44.560 | two or three times what the IPO price is going to be. Maybe what

00:41:47.400 | you mean by walk the plank is that, well, you tell me, but

00:41:51.600 | there are a lot of companies which have built up huge prep

00:41:54.640 | stacks, because they raise too much money at the peak at

00:41:58.080 | valuations are too high. And going public does allow you to

00:42:01.680 | reset your whole prep stack, because all the preferred with

00:42:04.920 | all the rights and preferences converts to common. So post IPO,

00:42:08.520 | you just have common. And so it is a way to like clear out all

00:42:13.720 | the structure and all the mess that has built up in a company

00:42:16.560 | and you can get to a real valuation that reflects basically

00:42:21.000 | the truth of what the company is worth.

00:42:22.440 | Another analogy might be the house is on fire, you got it,

00:42:24.720 | you're on the balcony, you got to jump, or you got to stay in

00:42:27.000 | the burning building.

00:42:27.640 | Yeah, but you know, listen, if your company's on fire, I don't

00:42:29.840 | think you're gonna be able to IPO. I mean, it's, it's going to

00:42:32.080 | be a tough scrutinizing public market for new offerings. I

00:42:37.160 | think that the scenario in which you can IPO is if the company

00:42:41.760 | is fundamentally good, it will be able to IPO at some valuation

00:42:45.880 | and that valuation may be a significant down round from

00:42:48.280 | their last private round, those will be able to get out.

00:42:51.440 | Yeah, and that's right, I guess. Now, are you saying

00:42:54.480 | stripe? Yeah. Are you seeing David, the M&A activity starting

00:42:59.200 | to bubble up in your portfolio or in you know, the back

00:43:01.920 | channels, because I'm starting to see that a bit. founders are

00:43:04.960 | packing it in, in some instances and saying, you know what, we

00:43:07.520 | want to try for M&A. Or, you know, some companies are getting

00:43:11.760 | a little bit frisky and saying, Hey, what what's available in

00:43:13.920 | the market on the small side? So you're seeing an Emmy, any M&A

00:43:16.600 | action,

00:43:16.960 | not a ton yet. But there's definitely a growing number of

00:43:20.680 | startups who are realizing that what they're doing is not

00:43:22.920 | working, and they're not gonna be able to raise another round.

00:43:25.480 | And so therefore figuring out a graceful exit, whether it's an

00:43:29.080 | aqua hire or some other type of landing.

00:43:32.000 | Got it. Those are those might be the accurate walking the

00:43:34.760 | planks.

00:43:35.760 | Yes, those are the walking the planks, you're gonna start

00:43:37.640 | seeing a lot more of that for sure.

00:43:38.960 | Freeberg, your thoughts on the on the public markets here in

00:43:42.200 | relation to privates, and people walk in the plank.

00:43:45.520 | I don't think there is a public market right now. There's no IPO

00:43:49.240 | window. This arm thing is, you know, pretty forced. It seems

00:43:55.240 | it's not like there's a ton of pent up public demand to buy

00:43:58.600 | these arm shares. At least that's what it seems. So you

00:44:01.760 | know, they're gonna go shop it, they're gonna find out what the

00:44:03.840 | market tells them it's worth. And, and then we'll see in

00:44:07.360 | video, it's gonna help buoy it, I'm sure. There'll be an

00:44:09.920 | argument that, you know, all boats will rise, and arm will be

00:44:14.360 | a beneficiary. But I don't know if that necessarily leads into

00:44:17.480 | the IPO window being open again. I think we've all heard the

00:44:20.400 | commentary from Morgan Stanley that they don't think the

00:44:22.680 | windows opening until q2 q3 of next year, maybe I can't

00:44:27.360 | remember the exact commentary. But as we all know, a lot of

00:44:33.080 | LPS in venture funds and private equity funds are waiting for

00:44:37.920 | the IPO window to reopen before they're going to start

00:44:40.680 | reallocating capital back into the private venture funds.

00:44:44.240 | Because they need to get liquid in order to be able to recycle

00:44:47.640 | capital back into the next class of funds. So this glut right

00:44:52.080 | now, this inability to kind of get companies public is

00:44:55.000 | certainly weighing on folks, you know, you effectively have three

00:44:59.000 | options when you're running a private company. You got to keep

00:45:03.400 | raising money, which means either raise private capital or

00:45:07.400 | go public. And we've talked about the challenges of late

00:45:09.680 | raising late stage private capital, if you've had a high

00:45:11.800 | private valuation in your prior round, going public is very

00:45:15.760 | difficult right now, because a lot of folks are still

00:45:18.400 | digesting and having indigestion from the last couple of years,

00:45:21.520 | or you got to sell the company or you got to get profitable.

00:45:23.720 | Now on the sell the company side, many of the acquisitions

00:45:26.720 | that we're seeing with a few exceptions are generally more

00:45:29.240 | bolt on and less like, hey, I'm going to pay some big strategic

00:45:31.760 | premium for some big strategic game changing company right now

00:45:35.080 | because all the buyers are dealing with their own

00:45:37.880 | shareholder issues and their own public stock issues right now,

00:45:40.440 | then the you know, can you get profitable? It's really as you

00:45:42.960 | guys know, where a lot of folks are going, which is totally

00:45:45.600 | restructure your ambition, restructure your plans and build

00:45:49.520 | a business where customers are willing to pay you money. And

00:45:53.040 | where you can then take that profit and only reinvest that

00:45:56.200 | profit and not invest more than that profit. And if you can get

00:45:59.120 | to that steady state, you know, you can live to see another

00:46:02.960 | another day, another year, another decade. And those

00:46:06.240 | businesses, by the way, that we saw in the.com boom in the

00:46:09.520 | global financial crisis that that we're able to do that

00:46:12.240 | during the doldrum Death Valley march that everyone's going

00:46:15.920 | through right now, they emerged victorious, they learned how to

00:46:19.120 | be frugal, they learned how to be nimble, they learned how to

00:46:22.280 | really focus on customer experience, because they had to

00:46:24.800 | increase retention, and they had to increase the prices they were

00:46:27.240 | charging, they learned how to be efficient with allocating

00:46:29.840 | resources. And so profitability became a core part of their DNA

00:46:35.040 | and their ability to succeed. So I think this is really a trial

00:46:40.160 | era. And you know, on the other side of this trial era, a number

00:46:44.040 | of very high quality companies will emerge. But in the interim,

00:46:46.440 | I don't think that there's a an IPO path that a lot of folks can

00:46:49.520 | just check the box and say, let's go ahead and go public,

00:46:51.760 | even if the valuation is not great. Remember, an IPO process,

00:46:54.880 | you got to over sell your book, or the bankers won't underwrite

00:46:57.440 | it. So if they're, you know, you can't just say, hey, the price

00:47:00.320 | is now five bucks and expect bankers are there. If a company

00:47:03.240 | is burning money, the big concern with going public right

00:47:06.200 | now is that there is no pipe market, there is no ability to

00:47:09.320 | do secondary to do follow on offerings. So the company can't

00:47:12.600 | raise capital after it's public. So unless you're actually

00:47:15.880 | profitable, your option of going public right now really isn't

00:47:19.880 | there because shareholders don't want to buy shares in a

00:47:21.720 | company that may run out of money. Yeah. And that's what it

00:47:24.800 | is. Yeah.

00:47:25.480 | And to your point, if you take this third option, and you you

00:47:28.840 | become really resilient, and you have profits, Jamal, that seems

00:47:32.400 | to me to be the setup for the next boom, that we could

00:47:36.080 | experience in the coming years, hopefully, which is, we don't

00:47:39.160 | have companies that are burning, you know, mountains of cash,

00:47:42.240 | people are getting to profitable, these businesses

00:47:44.280 | look great. And then if the big companies are now, you know,

00:47:48.280 | having their stock prices recover, and they've laid off

00:47:50.360 | 20,000 employees, and they got people returning to the office,

00:47:53.040 | and they're fit, and they're strong. Hey, that's a setup for

00:47:56.520 | strong companies buying strong companies or those strong

00:47:58.840 | companies that are private.

00:48:00.440 | The M&A market is dead as a doornail. It's more dead than

00:48:03.280 | the IPO market. So two days ago, the European Commission and the

00:48:07.440 | CMA in the UK said that they're probing Adobe Figma, because

00:48:11.720 | they have some concerns that it's going to limit competition

00:48:14.720 | in the market, it looks like Microsoft will have to give a

00:48:19.280 | 15 year license to video game streaming to Ubisoft in order to

00:48:23.560 | get the UK folks to agree to Activision to their Activision

00:48:27.120 | acquisition. So you're talking about the first case of $20

00:48:30.120 | billion merger that may not happen. Because the CMA, they

00:48:35.000 | found their footing. They clearly had a win in the

00:48:40.960 | Microsoft Activision thing. And now they're probably going to

00:48:44.840 | find issue with the Adobe Figma thing. And the Europeans don't

00:48:48.120 | want to be left out in the action. So they're jumping in.

00:48:50.160 | So I think the M&A market is effectively dead. What it leaves

00:48:54.720 | is an IPO market. But that is very tenuous, because you don't

00:48:59.080 | have a leading candidate that can really catalyze something.

00:49:01.640 | And I made this prediction earlier. But I think the only

00:49:03.960 | company that can really catalyze things would be if people were

00:49:06.560 | ready to do Starlink. I mean, it's the most obvious natural

00:49:09.920 | logical thing that would just get everybody excited and off

00:49:13.720 | the sidelines and into the arena. But that may take

00:49:18.160 | another year may not, but it may. In the meantime, I don't

00:49:22.280 | think there's any company like Instacart, I don't think people

00:49:24.600 | are going to be jumping off the sidelines, arm, it'll be tough.

00:49:28.160 | Even stripe now is like a very complicated valuation trade. And

00:49:33.440 | I think that that's a really technical thing to be involved

00:49:37.000 | in an IPO like that, a technical valuation. And so companies have

00:49:41.800 | no choice, except to get profitable and get to default

00:49:45.400 | alive to use the famous Paul Graham quote, that's the only

00:49:48.600 | path. That's it. Yeah, I mean, so it's the only path,

00:49:51.840 | you either have to be default alive, which means profitable or

00:49:54.960 | default investable, which means that you're capable of producing

00:49:58.920 | metrics that a VC will fund. But really, that starts with 100%

00:50:02.960 | year over year growth. There's a lot of companies that aren't

00:50:05.480 | growing very fast or growing 2030 4050 60% growth, that's not

00:50:09.720 | for their final. Yeah, or they're flat, even worse. Some

00:50:12.720 | are shrinking. So those cases, they got to think more like a PE

00:50:17.080 | model than a venture model. Yeah. And PE companies are cash

00:50:21.400 | deposit if they don't burn cash. I put out this video a few

00:50:26.280 | months ago, called VC or P what's the right framework for

00:50:29.680 | thinking about your startup. This was a

00:50:31.600 | craft ventures YouTube.

00:50:34.200 | This was a talk that I gave to our portfolio companies, we

00:50:37.640 | recorded it and then published it. Really, it should have gotten

00:50:40.480 | more attention. But this was basically recommending to all

00:50:44.680 | those slower growing companies, our portfolio, stop thinking

00:50:49.040 | that VC funding is always gonna be available and start thinking

00:50:52.680 | more like a PE funded private equity company, which is to say

00:50:56.680 | you need to cut your burn to get cash for positive, you will then

00:51:00.120 | be able to control your own destiny. So yeah, this slide

00:51:03.720 | here, if you're not VC eligible, act realistically. So we

00:51:06.680 | provided some guidance on what makes a company eligible for VC

00:51:11.600 | funding. And you can see there's a good column is a great column.

00:51:14.040 | Good starts at 2x growth greatest three x gross margins.

00:51:17.560 | Good starts at 50%. Great is 80% net dollar retention. Good

00:51:22.120 | starts 100%. Great 120% CAC payback. Good is 12 to 18 months

00:51:27.600 | great is six to 12 months burn multiple good is one and a half

00:51:32.120 | great is one or less. And then there's some danger zones as

00:51:35.360 | well. This was to provide them with some realistic guidance in

00:51:38.880 | terms of whether they'll be able to raise another VC round or

00:51:41.480 | not. And I can tell you like most startups in startup world

00:51:45.760 | right now are in the danger zone. It's a really tough

00:51:49.080 | environment. And so, you know, listen, if you're a startup with

00:51:53.360 | sub 1 million of ARR, and you're in the danger zone, you're

00:51:55.760 | probably going to have to pack it in or maybe you package

00:51:57.560 | yourself up for an aqua hire. But if you're a startup that has

00:52:02.120 | 50 million of ARR, but you're in the danger zone, just cut your

00:52:06.120 | burn, you could basically make ourselves cash flow positive.

00:52:09.000 | And you could engineer an outcome for yourself a pretty

00:52:11.640 | good outcome.

00:52:12.280 | My anecdotal experience is one of our larger investments. We

00:52:18.400 | brought in a private equity firm where they came in. And my god,

00:52:22.760 | it's been an incredible experience. Because the

00:52:26.960 | combination of how like a VC looks at a business and how a PE

00:52:30.520 | firm looks at the business in a moment like this is hyper

00:52:33.640 | additive, because it's super clarifying. It's very

00:52:36.320 | straightforward. And it gives a CEO an extremely clear mandate

00:52:39.960 | from which to operate and then they become very measurable. And

00:52:43.840 | I found it to be a really, really healthy thing. Now, PE

00:52:48.000 | guys can only get involved in companies of a certain size. So

00:52:51.240 | it limits

00:52:52.040 | 50 million and above in revenue 100 million.

00:52:54.440 | Yeah, in our case, it was a 400 million 380 300 more than 300

00:52:58.960 | million revenue. So it's a big it's a big company. But my point

00:53:02.000 | is just just more that we were moving along a trajectory to

00:53:05.480 | getting to default alive. But by adding that PE

00:53:08.440 | person to our board, boom, I think we were able to focus on

00:53:14.960 | it probably a year to 18 months faster and with specific

00:53:19.600 | precision, because they have a very different toolkit and a

00:53:22.160 | reaction to miss execution. And that's extremely healthy.

00:53:26.680 | Yeah, we had this happen, you know, meeting with just from the

00:53:29.960 | front lines, we, we meet with, we have 20,000 people apply for

00:53:35.040 | funding from our firm, in large part, I would say we doubled the

00:53:37.960 | number of applications after all in started. So shout out to my

00:53:40.680 | besties here, really helped our deal flow. And we find

00:53:43.840 | companies and we found a company that was obsessed with all in.

00:53:46.840 | And the two founders were quants and they made this company

00:53:49.160 | called stone algo. We meet this company, they've got very little

00:53:52.640 | money. It's a bootstrap company, and they got to a half million

00:53:56.280 | dollars in revenue. You know, just on sweat equity. And we

00:54:00.560 | find this company, it's not part of the Silicon Valley, you know,

00:54:03.920 | accelerator system. It's basically kayak for diamonds,

00:54:07.000 | shout out to the team over there. And we were able to place

00:54:09.320 | a nice bet on this company that was break even. And, you know,

00:54:13.160 | put in, you know, a couple of $100,000 to start start them

00:54:16.520 | down this road to growing faster, but what a delightful

00:54:20.360 | thing to find a profitable company in the world. And so if

00:54:25.040 | you have a profitable company, like and it's just 50,000 a

00:54:28.520 | month or 25,000 a month, please email me Jason at

00:54:30.720 | callaghanis.com. I want to invest in your company. When you

00:54:33.680 | have that company, small amount of revenue profitable, you're

00:54:37.120 | not burning a ton, you are so attractive to investors right

00:54:39.840 | now. It's the highest attractiveness in the world. And

00:54:44.400 | I just want to point out David, as this market has, you know,

00:54:47.760 | completely gone from absolute chaos, the hair has gotten

00:54:51.880 | tighter and tighter. You were in crazy banning. And now you are

00:54:56.640 | tight tight is right. sax is focused. He's deploying that LP

00:55:00.920 | capital. He's deploying that advice to SAS companies. And

00:55:04.120 | it's no joke now, folks. General sacks is here. He is not crazy.

00:55:09.360 | History Uncle is SAS sacks. He's SAS sacks is back.

00:55:14.280 | This is like when Mark Zuckerberg started wearing a tie

00:55:18.440 | to work to start showing that it was serious.

00:55:21.000 | Yes, yes. SAS is SAS sacks and serious sacks is back with that

00:55:25.880 | slick back hair. All right, listen, we got to get going

00:55:28.680 | here. We got a lot more on the docket. I think we just maybe

00:55:33.560 | I'm going to jump the fence here. And we just go right to

00:55:36.600 | the Republican primary.

00:55:37.640 | The funniest thing last night was that poker. We watched it.

00:55:41.200 | You watched it during poker. Were you able to focus?

00:55:44.240 | You have to hear Kevin Hart react. When all these guys are

00:55:48.320 | doing it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard. And the

00:55:51.080 | worst part of the poker was

00:55:53.760 | the magician. Here we go.

00:55:59.000 | That's just how can you both be playing poker here but also the

00:56:03.920 | debate stage.

00:56:04.720 | Which I thought was a really funny joke.

00:56:15.920 | It was very funny. All right, listen, I know everybody's I

00:56:18.760 | just want to go around the horn here. Friedberg. Did you watch

00:56:22.040 | the debate? Who won the debate who had the largest gain? net

00:56:28.560 | gain in terms of their profile in your mind after watching

00:56:33.160 | debate number one of the GOP. David Friedberg biggest gain I

00:56:37.600 | watched the debate. I kind of think about these guys on three

00:56:41.160 | dimensions, which is the content, how dynamic they are and

00:56:44.960 | their personality. I think those are the three dimensions that

00:56:47.680 | people are going to be kind of assessing them on. I think Nikki

00:56:51.640 | Haley did a tremendous job gaining interest with respect to

00:56:56.960 | her personality and her content.

00:57:00.360 | Bergam Hutchinson, I don't think had a chance to move the needle

00:57:07.040 | on any of them. I think Vivek was by far the winner on dynamic.

00:57:12.840 | He had the hardest hitting biggest comeback with a very

00:57:16.480 | close second being Chris Christie. But I do think that

00:57:19.600 | Vivek got taken apart when it comes to content and I have real

00:57:23.800 | concerns about his personality. There's a lot of people that are

00:57:26.280 | just turned off by him, that he seems a little too eager that he

00:57:29.920 | seems a little too smart for his own good. The commentary about

00:57:35.320 | him being so junior and doesn't have experience I think standing

00:57:38.440 | next to those guys on stage really showed to be honest,

00:57:42.440 | Nikki Haley tearing him apart on his point of view on Russia. And

00:57:48.280 | sex, you know, we can debate the point or not. But I think she did

00:57:51.640 | a masterful I don't think she tore him apart. I think the

00:57:54.160 | biggest dunk line of the evening was when he congratulated her on

00:57:58.840 | her future appointments to the boards of Raytheon and Lockheed.

00:58:02.360 | Yeah, that was that was brilliant. I just think he's the

00:58:04.840 | most dynamic character. And I think people people do in a

00:58:07.720 | democracy vote on that they vote on how dynamic someone is. They

00:58:10.800 | vote on their personality and whether they can trust the

00:58:13.720 | person that Nikki Haley shines there. She seems extremely

00:58:16.720 | trustworthy and personable. Chris Christie came across as

00:58:19.480 | very personable. So your big winners? Yeah, Mike Pence, I

00:58:22.920 | would say, under underwhelmed and Rhonda Santas, man, it's

00:58:27.080 | like he didn't show up. So I would say Haley, Chris Christie,

00:58:33.320 | Vivek and Scott are probably like, you know, across those

00:58:37.400 | dimensions, like, you know, the four runners and everyone else

00:58:41.320 | is probably off.

00:58:42.240 | Now, let me get your mouth and then sack you get to comment on

00:58:45.120 | both of their so I want to go to you last because you have the

00:58:47.480 | most passion here. Chamath, who are your big winners coming out

00:58:51.840 | of it? In other words, who gained the most last night?

00:58:54.400 | What can Brown do for you? What can Brown do for you? I think

00:58:57.480 | that okay, ups settlement. Great. I thought that I thought

00:59:00.960 | that Nikki Haley did an incredible job. And I do think

00:59:04.920 | that Vivek did a very good job. And I think what's interesting

00:59:08.840 | is that I'm fascinated to see what the Republican reaction

00:59:12.400 | over the next few weeks will be to Vivek. And specifically, what

00:59:17.920 | I'm interested in seeing is, do the Trump loyalists start to

00:59:23.720 | where they incepted with an idea yesterday, which is that this

00:59:28.520 | guy can give us a lot of the talking points we want without

00:59:33.120 | some of the heartburn and agita that we don't want. And if he is

00:59:38.840 | able to thread that needle, which is what I think his

00:59:42.040 | effective strategy has been, he could really build momentum

00:59:48.920 | going into the fall. So that was my that was my real takeaway is

00:59:53.840 | that he is refining a playbook. Look, the guy is a clearly a

00:59:57.600 | really brilliant person. Well studied, well prepared, and

01:00:04.000 | dynamic, as David said, so he can, you know, clap back at

01:00:07.960 | people, which I think is important. But the most

01:00:10.720 | important thing that he's done is he has defined a very precise

01:00:16.360 | strategy to thread this needle of being close enough to Trump

01:00:22.400 | to, frankly, eventually go after him. But do it in a way where

01:00:28.640 | he's slowly building credibility among Trump loyalists. And I

01:00:32.280 | think if you look at where other people made huge gaffes,

01:00:36.440 | unnecessary gaffes, was they took their beliefs, and they

01:00:42.440 | confuse them with the strategy of winning. And that doesn't

01:00:46.040 | work in the Republican Party. So when the candidates were asked

01:00:49.560 | about Trump and the ones that drew a hard line and said that

01:00:51.720 | this guy's going to go to jail, what happened, they got booed.

01:00:54.160 | And it just ended their ability to be credible. For what they

01:01:00.040 | said afterwards. I'm not saying that that's right or wrong. It's

01:01:02.120 | just an observation. So I think Vivek is doing the smartest job

01:01:05.640 | of understanding the rules on the field. And he's in the arena

01:01:10.920 | to okay, so that gives them a lot that can now we go to sack

01:01:14.640 | sacks. You heard Nikki Vivek, Christie from freeberg. And

01:01:18.960 | then Nikki, yeah. And Tim Scott. So Vivek, clearly, the buzz and

01:01:23.920 | the search terms and everything, it seems to be favoring Vivek as

01:01:26.840 | the big lift here. Do you think Vivek is the Trump change agent

01:01:31.720 | without the indictments without the baggage without the Trump

01:01:36.400 | derangement syndrome insanity is Chamath correct here that he's

01:01:40.280 | a more palatable version of the change agent that is Trump.

01:01:43.000 | I think he's positioning himself as the backup plan to Trump. So

01:01:47.640 | he's not criticizing Trump, he is cultivating support within

01:01:51.560 | Trump space. Again, not to supersede him, but I think to

01:01:55.320 | perhaps be a backup plan. I think it is a smart strategy.

01:01:57.880 | But let me back up a little bit here.

01:02:00.120 | Who won for you? Well,

01:02:02.360 | before you make your points, well, everybody else played the

01:02:06.320 | game. biggest game.

01:02:07.840 | The biggest game was a fact that's reflected in the polling.

01:02:11.960 | There's a poll on Drudge Report in which 33%, which was the

01:02:15.760 | highest number said that he won the debate. 22% for Haley 18%

01:02:19.760 | for DeSantis, Christie got 16%. The rest were just non factors.

01:02:23.440 | So Nate scientific, but pretty scientific, but this is

01:02:27.200 | corroborated by Nate silver. Yes, some stuck this morning,

01:02:30.280 | Chris Lee saying that based on the buzz on social media and the

01:02:34.080 | sentiment and Google Trends, Google Trends, he predicted that

01:02:39.760 | Vivek would, we keep saying Vivek Vivek, it's it is he's

01:02:47.040 | gonna have the biggest bounce out of the debate. Partly,

01:02:49.640 | that's a function of the fact that he was the least well known

01:02:52.360 | candidate. Okay, so this gave him a lot of exposure. And he

01:02:55.920 | has a good orator. I mean, just the way he talks the energy, the

01:03:00.240 | timber of his voice, he projects well. And he had a clear point

01:03:04.680 | of view in this debate. You may not agree with everything he

01:03:07.560 | said, but he had a very clear point of view. And I expect that

01:03:10.200 | both the number of people who like him and the number of

01:03:12.840 | people who dislike him will go up as a result of this, but I

01:03:16.080 | think the net effect of that will be positive. Now, let me

01:03:19.080 | back up just give you a couple more thoughts on the debate.

01:03:21.120 | First of all, in terms of winners, I think the Republican

01:03:24.000 | Party in a way, demonstrated that it is the party of ideas

01:03:28.960 | where there actually are debates happening. Because you saw here,

01:03:32.240 | I think, real differences between the candidates, and I

01:03:35.800 | could break them up into really three categories, if you like,

01:03:38.760 | there's this neocon wing of sort of hardline foreign policy

01:03:44.200 | hawks. And you saw Nikki Haley's part of that and Chris Christie

01:03:47.360 | and Pence, and Tim Scott, then you had this religious right

01:03:51.640 | faction where you've got Pence and Scott, and then you've kind

01:03:55.440 | of got the MAGA wing, which Vivek really took up the mantle

01:03:58.840 | of opposing Ukraine and defending Trump. So you have

01:04:02.880 | three very different groups within the party who are

01:04:05.360 | battling, I think, for mindshare within the party and to be the

01:04:09.120 | future of the party. So it's not just about candidates and

01:04:12.600 | personal style, but it really is about ideas. You compare that to

01:04:15.760 | the Democratic Party, they're not even having a debate,

01:04:17.840 | they're protecting Biden from a debate, there could be a real

01:04:20.920 | debate because RFK Jr. has really different ideas. And he

01:04:25.520 | would like to take the party in a very different direction, the

01:04:28.080 | direction of his father and uncle, Bobby Kennedy and John F.

01:04:33.120 | Kennedy, he's saying that we have moved away from where we

01:04:36.360 | should be as a party, but the people who control the Democratic

01:04:39.920 | Party do not want to have that debate, they have shut it down.

01:04:42.280 | Completely. There is no debate, they're just protecting Biden.

01:04:45.440 | So that's number one is I think we should give the Republican

01:04:48.840 | Party some credit for being willing to discuss and debate.

01:04:51.880 | I agree with you on that. I love the fact that you had a vibrant

01:04:55.840 | debate, you had differences of opinions. Now it was a little

01:04:58.560 | like a UFC fight and you know, zingers and back and forth. But

01:05:03.120 | I did like the fact that you had people who in moderation was

01:05:08.000 | actually surprisingly good when they forced them to say like,

01:05:10.320 | would you give Trump a pardon? Or, you know, what would you do

01:05:13.680 | in terms of support for Ukraine? This was like really well done.

01:05:17.440 | And they had that 32nd thing where they stopped people, they

01:05:19.640 | say, this is a 32nd one, and they had to rein in Pence

01:05:22.160 | because he kept, you know, interrupting, and they were kind

01:05:26.320 | of respectful. So I just want to shout out to Fox for good

01:05:29.000 | moderation. There were some crazy zingers in there as well.

01:05:32.960 | And it seems like we live in zinger culture. I think the the

01:05:36.520 | best zinger goes to the moderator who said, let's talk

01:05:38.920 | about the elephant that's not in the room. And then they brought

01:05:41.960 | up Trump. Well, frankly, you caught that one. But that was

01:05:44.440 | pretty hardcore.

01:05:45.360 | Well, so let's talk about winner number two, which was Trump,

01:05:48.720 | because Trump did not participate. And he didn't pay

01:05:50.960 | any price whatsoever for that. He barely got mentioned or

01:05:54.440 | attacked on that stage. And then he did this interview with

01:05:57.600 | Tucker, which started five minutes before the debate, which

01:06:00.840 | was kind of brilliant, because once again, Trump was able to

01:06:03.320 | suck up a lot of the oxygen, maybe not all of it, but a lot

01:06:06.160 | of oxygen without even participating in the debate.

01:06:08.200 | It was a perfect bookend. I watched both. It was a perfect

01:06:11.160 | bookend. You got Trump over here saying, Chamath, I'm interested

01:06:14.200 | in your position. But he said, Listen, I don't need to be in

01:06:16.240 | there with these guys mudslinging and they have zero

01:06:17.920 | 1%. And I think he got the sense that he's excited to debate them

01:06:21.920 | when there's two people left or something like that. What did

01:06:24.480 | you think of? Did you watch Trump's thing? freeberg or

01:06:26.760 | Chamath? No, watch it.

01:06:28.880 | I watched the debate. I watched both the debate and then I

01:06:32.840 | watched I do think Trump effectively won the debate

01:06:36.080 | night. Because you had all these guys going at each other. And

01:06:40.200 | then you had Trump playing the Trump card. I'm not even going

01:06:44.280 | to show up. Because I don't have to. He literally made himself

01:06:47.800 | better than everyone else in the room by saying I'm not even it's

01:06:51.200 | not even worth my time to show up to talk to you guys go ahead

01:06:54.160 | and fight with each other. I'll also just restate this, this

01:06:57.120 | point about Vivek. I think it became abundantly clear that his

01:07:00.440 | strategy Vivek his his strategy is to pander to the Trump

01:07:04.600 | audience, that his commentary about you know, God is real.

01:07:09.240 | Climate change is two genders. He knows through polling, through

01:07:15.520 | his understanding, and his intelligence, that this is what

01:07:19.640 | this audience that is the bulk of the voting members of the

01:07:23.680 | Republican Party want to hear, and he is telling them what they

01:07:27.400 | want to hear. And then

01:07:29.120 | isn't that the job of a politician? Yeah, I mean, isn't

01:07:32.000 | that better than pandering to the military industrial complex

01:07:34.560 | like Nikki Haley did,

01:07:35.480 | there was a comment last night that I thought was really

01:07:37.480 | important, which is that leadership is not about

01:07:40.120 | consensus. And what he is doing is he is reflecting back the

01:07:43.440 | consensus view of the majority of people in that party in order

01:07:45.960 | to get himself elected, rather than leading with a different

01:07:48.680 | message that casts a different opportunity, the different light

01:07:51.360 | on the opportunity for this nation. And I think that's

01:07:54.160 | really where he and others on that stage, or he particularly

01:07:57.200 | fall short, is that he speaks too much to what people already

01:08:00.880 | believe and say, because he knows that that's what they're

01:08:03.440 | voting for Trump about. And then the bet is that there's some

01:08:06.840 | chance, not 100%, but some chance that Trump doesn't make

01:08:10.600 | it all the way he ends up in jail or people start to turn

01:08:13.320 | on him. And then he's the front runner. Because he's basically

01:08:16.720 | captivated that audience.

01:08:17.840 | Hold on, but but freeberg, and I will let you address it here.

01:08:21.240 | Chamath just said, the brilliance of the vacant his

01:08:24.480 | positioning here is that he understands how to win. And he

01:08:28.200 | is playing this game. And you call it pandering. saxes, I

01:08:32.320 | think saying it's understanding the needs of that audience. The

01:08:35.600 | job of a politician sacks is to win and to stay in office. So I

01:08:39.960 | don't believe the vakes positions on a lot of the stuff.

01:08:42.080 | I think he is pandering. I think he wouldn't do what Trump did. I

01:08:45.800 | think, you know, he's doing the part in promise, because he

01:08:49.200 | knows he gets some votes. So how do you reconcile this? Your job

01:08:53.000 | is to win, right? And you would rather see DeSantis maybe pick

01:08:55.600 | up on some of this action? No. As your preferred candidate,

01:09:00.120 | that's the same.

01:09:00.760 | Actually, that's a good that's a good question. freeberg. Do you

01:09:03.360 | think that a politician's job when you're running for

01:09:07.400 | President of the United States? Is it to understand the

01:09:10.080 | conditions on the field and win or not?

01:09:12.400 | I think the politicians job or I don't want to say the job. I

01:09:17.720 | think the opportunity to get elected in a democracy is to

01:09:21.240 | provide leadership, to cast a light on where you think the

01:09:25.040 | country or whatever constituency you're supposed to lead can go

01:09:29.360 | to provide a sense of opportunity to provide a sense

01:09:32.720 | of optimism, to provide a sense of what's not happening today

01:09:36.120 | that should be different, rather than reflecting back to those

01:09:39.520 | people exactly what they want. Now, the flip side of that is

01:09:41.800 | exactly what you're saying to math, which is that I think what

01:09:44.040 | happens in a democracy is that people elect people that

01:09:46.200 | represent what they believe. And I think that's what's gonna

01:09:48.480 | happen. And he's raising his hand and he's saying, I believe

01:09:51.960 | these things, and he's going to get elected, or he's going to

01:09:54.360 | put himself in a position to get elected if Trump drops out.

01:09:57.120 | I just think there's a lot of people who are very smart, who

01:10:01.600 | if they are too idealistic will achieve nothing in their lives.

01:10:04.640 | And I don't think Vivek is one of those people. idealism has a

01:10:07.600 | place in the world. It's not on the debate stage when you're

01:10:10.000 | running for president. Okay, sacks, you wanted to get in

01:10:12.200 | here. Okay, let's take the issue of Ukraine, because that was one

01:10:15.360 | of the main issues that Vivek differed from the rest of the

01:10:19.360 | people on that stage. There is polling by CNN that a majority

01:10:23.320 | of Americans have now turned against the idea of giving more

01:10:26.280 | aid to Ukraine. I'm sure that number is much higher in the

01:10:29.000 | Republican Party. If you remember, there was an event,

01:10:32.920 | Charlie Kirk, who is a conservative influencer, has an

01:10:37.160 | event called turning point USA. And they did polling of their

01:10:40.480 | conference attendees. The number one issue that everyone agreed

01:10:44.160 | on was Ukraine 95% of the attendees opposed giving more

01:10:49.520 | aid to Ukraine. Donald Trump only got 85% popularity. So the

01:10:54.360 | base of the party is even more united against Joe Biden's

01:10:58.880 | policy in Ukraine than they are on loving Trump. Okay, that

01:11:02.080 | tells you something and yet, Vivek is the only kid on that

01:11:05.660 | stage that was willing to raise his hand, like aggressively like

01:11:09.640 | full throatedly, not kind of a half hearted to saying that he

01:11:12.800 | did not agree with Biden's policy on Ukraine. What is wrong

01:11:16.000 | with all these other people on the stage that they cannot

01:11:18.200 | understand what is wrong with Biden's Ukraine policy, which by

01:11:22.480 | the way, is the signature policy of his presidency? What is the

01:11:27.400 | point of Republicans nominating a candidate who's just going to

01:11:30.520 | agree with Joe Biden on providing aid to Ukraine as much

01:11:35.080 | as it takes for as long as it takes? Is this your position

01:11:37.760 | here? freeberg? Is that, you know, when at all costs, let's

01:11:40.840 | call it the vague when at all costs, play the game on the

01:11:43.160 | field as Chamath is saying, and just win the game. Versus being

01:11:47.780 | principled, because you did have a

01:11:49.440 | no, no, I think that that framing is such a setup. Can I

01:11:52.160 | can I just say something

01:11:52.920 | frame it how you want you said playing the game on the field.

01:11:55.240 | And freeberg said, having a principle here and having like

01:11:59.240 | an actual vision for the country. So I'm taking both of

01:12:01.640 | yours.

01:12:02.120 | Look, I think the framing is not as not what is wrong with

01:12:04.680 | the vague, but what is wrong with candidates like Christie

01:12:09.120 | and Pence, and Haley and Scott, where even though 95% of their

01:12:14.800 | party is opposed to Ukraine, they are adopting Joe Biden's

01:12:18.680 | policy. And their only criticism of Joe Biden is that he's not

01:12:22.280 | doing enough fast enough for that. Okay, let's let freeberg

01:12:24.680 | get in here. They're completely out of point with the Republican

01:12:27.360 | Party as it stands today. We got your point. But is it not

01:12:30.120 | freeberg? What you're saying is that there is this profile and

01:12:32.880 | courage to invoke that book, where you there's something

01:12:36.420 | that's unpopular that you have to do. And I think Nikki Haley,

01:12:39.880 | Pence, Christie, and the other ones who are pro defending

01:12:43.760 | Ukraine from Russia. Their profile and courage freeberg is

01:12:48.520 | that they will go against that 95% polling and say it's the

01:12:51.760 | right thing to do. We should defend Taiwan, we should defend

01:12:54.480 | Israel, we should defend Ukraine against those are three

01:12:57.720 | different issues. I know it's three different issues, but they

01:12:59.720 | were all evoked by Vivek Vivek himself. So freeberg your

01:13:03.000 | chance, I think the West Wing does a great job of exploring

01:13:06.900 | both sides of this, which is, when do you have to break the

01:13:10.280 | mold and break the expectation of the people to do the right

01:13:13.460 | principle thing? And when do you have to do the thing that you

01:13:16.800 | don't think is right, but it's what the people want to have

01:13:19.640 | happened. And I think that that's a, obviously a balance

01:13:23.800 | that needs to be struck when you're in this position of being

01:13:26.400 | an elected leader in a democracy. And so there's no,

01:13:29.240 | there's no real answer. I wish that there was, like, I wish Mr.

01:13:32.960 | beast had like a presidential process like he you guys saw his

01:13:37.760 | Olympics video that he did last week, where he brought people

01:13:40.520 | and he created this like, these like five things. I wish that we

01:13:43.840 | had something like that to elect president, that it was more

01:13:46.760 | than just oration, because we elect the president today, based

01:13:50.840 | on their oratory skills, they go on stage and who has the best

01:13:53.680 | quippy comment, the person who would be the most decisive under

01:13:56.680 | pressure doesn't necessarily win the person who can inspire and

01:14:00.640 | attract and retain the best leadership, the person who can

01:14:03.560 | have the best foreign policy interactions with other leaders

01:14:06.240 | doesn't necessarily win. Those are skills that show up in other

01:14:10.000 | contexts. And when we put people on a stage, and we say, okay,

01:14:14.920 | speak to the audience, the guy who speaks the best looks the

01:14:18.000 | best. It's not necessarily the guy who is best equipped to

01:14:21.640 | handle the challenge of the Bay of Pigs, or, you know, the

01:14:25.400 | decision on whether or not I think you're very, very

01:14:27.800 | distress. I think you're being very dismissive. You have the

01:14:30.480 | floor. Go. Go. This is like, that's kind of like saying, why

01:14:34.280 | isn't it that it's the quarterback with the strongest

01:14:37.360 | arm that isn't the most successful? Why? Because that

01:14:40.480 | person is a fucking loser. And the person that's the winner is

01:14:44.080 | the one that can thread together a multifaceted set of skills to

01:14:47.840 | win the game. Tom Brady was drafted in the seventh round,

01:14:51.400 | not the first round, he wins the game, because he has the

01:14:55.280 | requisite skills, which is a basket of things, and a nuance

01:14:58.880 | of skills in different moments at different times. And so I

01:15:02.000 | think that you're being a little glib by saying the person isn't

01:15:04.960 | cool under pressure or this or that. It's not true. The people

01:15:09.760 | that win these races have a preternatural ability to be a

01:15:15.960 | complete egoist, but not a narcissist. That is an

01:15:19.280 | incredibly deft set of skills that a fair rare people have it

01:15:23.440 | gives them this energy to be out there talking to 1000s and

01:15:28.160 | 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of people may be saying the same

01:15:31.720 | thing 1000s of times. But being able to stay focused being able

01:15:35.760 | to be on point having a sense of what they need to believe. Know

01:15:39.000 | the details in a certain part know the high level in another

01:15:41.480 | part stay punchy but stay affable stay. That's the game.

01:15:45.200 | There are a set of skills that it takes to become president.

01:15:47.920 | You test the oration skills of a person when you put them on a

01:15:51.000 | debate stage. You don't test the other complex skills that it

01:15:54.520 | takes to be president. And getting people to understand the

01:15:57.360 | complexity of the role and all the other aspects of someone's

01:16:00.760 | personality are lacking in these fucking debates. But there are

01:16:04.120 | other these other skills are in play and many things other than

01:16:07.040 | just the debate. Like the campaign is a highly sophisticated

01:16:10.200 | orchestration of running a small little government. Mario Cuomo

01:16:14.520 | famously said that you campaign in poetry and and govern in

01:16:19.320 | prose. And there is a difference between campaigning skills and

01:16:22.760 | governing skills. There is a gap there, I would update it to say

01:16:26.280 | that you govern in prose and campaign and tweets, you know,

01:16:30.560 | so the campaign definitely puts a huge emphasis on a candidate's

01:16:34.160 | communication skills. But that is not all just gloss or style.

01:16:40.260 | It also has to do with their policies and the nuances of

01:16:44.860 | their policies, and how they handle pressure, how good they

01:16:48.980 | are under pressure and how good they are when they're attacked.

01:16:51.900 | So you know, we put these candidates through a pressure

01:16:54.180 | cooker and kind of learn who they really are. I'm not sure

01:16:56.300 | it's a horrible process.

01:16:57.420 | So sex, let me ask you a question. Yeah. Pence has been

01:17:00.220 | in the situation room dealing with a foreign adversary. Vivek

01:17:04.740 | has no military or defense experience. He has no foreign

01:17:07.100 | state experience. How do you assess Vivek in his ability to

01:17:11.420 | address those critical issues that he's going to have to lead

01:17:13.860 | us through versus someone who's been there and done that? And

01:17:16.980 | how do you know, give a great question? Great question. Okay,

01:17:19.300 | trust him. We trust the

01:17:20.380 | vision. Pence made that argument against a vague, apparently not

01:17:24.260 | realizing that the guy he was vice president for was in that

01:17:27.060 | exact same position in 2016. No previous political experience,

01:17:31.020 | right? No experience being in the situation room. The only

01:17:34.140 | reason why Pence got to warm his ass on a chair in the situation

01:17:38.180 | room is because Donald Trump picked him to be his VP. Oh, but

01:17:41.540 | he wasn't responsible for making any important decisions. He was

01:17:44.620 | basically clocking time as vice president, give me a break. And

01:17:47.940 | that's why he's at what is it one or 1%? No one gives a shit

01:17:52.060 | about Pence.

01:17:52.660 | That's what they said about Obama as well. Obama had zero

01:17:55.740 | experience. Obama barely could get elected before he became

01:17:58.780 | senator and then president in a matter of four years. And for

01:18:02.020 | Bush, what happened to Bush? They said that exact argument as

01:18:04.860 | well. And what do they do? They packed them with Rumsfeld and

01:18:06.980 | Cheney. How did that end?

01:18:08.380 | Yeah, I just want to also point out here that sometimes things

01:18:11.820 | get a little bit heated. And when we get heated, it's

01:18:13.820 | typically because we're we're triangulating around something

01:18:16.300 | very important. I think what we're trying triangulating

01:18:18.420 | around here is that we are moving from an era of

01:18:22.260 | incumbents, and insiders to an era of outsiders. If you're your

01:18:26.580 | point, sacks, post Trump, we now have the two or three most

01:18:33.220 | fascinating candidates are people who do social media who

01:18:37.820 | do podcasts who do earned media like we talked about, I think

01:18:40.460 | two or three weeks ago is really good insight. And the vague is

01:18:43.220 | him has mastered it. And he is exactly like Trump. And he's

01:18:46.200 | exactly like Obama to a certain extent in that those people were

01:18:48.700 | incredibly personable. They knew how to talk on podcasts, they

01:18:51.300 | knew how to engage people. And I think that, you know, this

01:18:55.600 | spiciness that we're having here on the pod and the spiciness that

01:18:58.140 | you're seeing with some of those candidates, is that we're moving

01:19:01.860 | from traditional media defining these candidates to direct to

01:19:07.480 | consumer direct through Twitter slash x direct through podcasts,

01:19:11.440 | this podcast included, making people like RFK and Vivek, you

01:19:15.460 | know, very palatable people and Ross Perot, I know I'm gonna get

01:19:18.780 | laughed up for bringing this up who got 19% of the vote, which

01:19:22.860 | is a serious number. He went direct as well. But at that

01:19:27.220 | time, after he dropped out, no, he got 90% pro because he

01:19:32.580 | actually went as an independent all the way. And what Ross Perot

01:19:35.520 | did was the equivalent of what Vivek and RFK are doing on

01:19:38.500 | podcast, he bought television time, you don't know that, or

01:19:41.460 | some people who understand who Ross Perot even is, but look it

01:19:44.900 | up. He bought television time, and he went direct to the

01:19:48.060 | country with our budget. I thought this is going to be the

01:19:52.620 | future of politics. What we're witnessing right now is the

01:19:55.620 | transition from traditional media and the establishment,

01:19:58.700 | defining who the great candidates are to the public.

01:20:02.180 | And the people on podcasts and social media who are the tip of

01:20:05.500 | the spear on the vanguard, they're going to pick the

01:20:08.060 | winners. And I think this could be the tipping point election

01:20:10.380 | Trump was the first Obama than Trump and now the vague and RFK.

01:20:15.020 | So I just like you all to maybe respond to that, especially you

01:20:18.380 | sex and she brought this media issue up two weeks ago,

01:20:21.140 | let me partially agree with freeberg. In this sense, look,

01:20:24.540 | obviously, track record is important. Obviously, the

01:20:27.680 | ability to be an executive executive functioning is

01:20:31.580 | important for the chief executive of our country. So I'm

01:20:34.780 | not saying that we shouldn't look at that kind of record. And

01:20:39.980 | this is why was one of the reasons why I support to

01:20:41.940 | Sanchez. I think he's been a brilliant governor, he's done a

01:20:44.100 | superb job in the state of Florida. He did the best job of

01:20:47.820 | all the governors during COVID. I think he did a better job than

01:20:50.820 | Trump did during COVID. So listen, I think those things are

01:20:53.140 | important, where I disagree is, just because Mike Pence has,

01:20:56.500 | again, warmed a chair in the situation room, as vice

01:21:00.140 | president, to me, that's just not that relevant experience. I

01:21:03.740 | mean, the VP is kind of a nothing job unless something

01:21:08.420 | terrible happens to the president, they get tapped on

01:21:10.460 | the shoulder. So I just disagree with what is relevant

01:21:14.220 | experience. Second, I think it's important to recognize that the

01:21:18.260 | reason why the vague has a lane here. And the reason why Trump

01:21:22.820 | had a lane in 2016 is that the establishment wing of the party

01:21:27.180 | is so completely out of touch with what the base wants. Look,

01:21:31.780 | the reason why Trump came out of nowhere in 2016 is he basically

01:21:35.740 | turned everything on his head. He said no more bushes, no more

01:21:38.380 | of these stupid forever wars in the Middle East, we need to

01:21:40.780 | build a wall, no more of this open border policy. And we need

01:21:44.780 | to reset our trade relation with with China's. Those are three

01:21:48.180 | mega issues that no one else in the party was talking about. And

01:21:51.740 | the the mega issue today is Ukraine 95% of the bases against

01:21:56.660 | it. And they have left the vape this gigantic lane to exploit.

01:22:00.340 | Why? I don't know. I mean, they're trapped in legacy neocon

01:22:04.940 | thinking that the US is

01:22:06.380 | sacks are he kept saying, I think that was a great moment.

01:22:11.580 | It's a combination of being trapped in legacy thinking where

01:22:14.780 | we have to be the policeman of the world, combined with all the

01:22:17.180 | big donors in the party, many of whom are wrapped up with the

01:22:19.700 | military industrial complex want to contribute to that.

01:22:22.140 | People can you just say it again? What you feel like I'm

01:22:25.060 | not hearing? No, I think that being president requires being

01:22:28.100 | better more than just an orator. And I think that the debates

01:22:31.500 | allow the best orator to show off their skills and

01:22:33.980 | capabilities on the debate stage. I was saying I wish that

01:22:37.100 | there were other events, I would love to see some set of systems

01:22:41.380 | to expose the candidates success or failings and how well equipped

01:22:46.300 | they are, rather than the person who can just give the best

01:22:48.980 | interview. We all know this when you interview a candidate, an

01:22:51.820 | engineer, the engineer that gives the best interview is not

01:22:54.780 | necessarily going to become the best engineer, you can look at

01:22:57.620 | their code to see if they're a great, great engineer, you can

01:23:00.780 | talk to people that reported to them to see if they're a great

01:23:02.980 | manager, you can learn more about their success and skills

01:23:06.660 | through more than just their oration on the stage. And yes,

01:23:09.060 | there's data in fact, that we can pull from these people. I

01:23:12.220 | was just speculating in kind of a pseudo silly way about the

01:23:16.140 | concept of can we do more than just put people on a debate

01:23:18.980 | how to hire a CEO for your companies. So the board, what do

01:23:22.900 | you judge? Well, yeah, what I'll tell you we don't do is we don't

01:23:25.740 | have the employees elect the CEO through a vote by having that

01:23:28.620 | CEO going from the best guy for the job. I hear you but you're

01:23:32.700 | doing part of it, but you can interview we do reference calls,

01:23:35.940 | right? We we talked to them about their strategy. And you

01:23:39.780 | know, through the interview through the reference calls,

01:23:41.980 | through looking at the performance of other businesses

01:23:44.260 | that they've built and run and, you know, and that can have a

01:23:48.340 | fulsome understanding of his candidacy and his ability to be

01:23:50.940 | president. My point is, I think that there are certain things

01:23:53.540 | like with Trump, that had not been tested or tried that are

01:23:56.780 | going to come up in this role that they'd never done before in

01:23:59.300 | the past. And I'm not saying look, by the way, I'm certainly

01:24:02.420 | not a big, you know, political career guys, you guys know, I

01:24:05.180 | think, you know, I hate that people build a career out of

01:24:08.300 | politics. I think it's the most inane, ridiculous thing. And if

01:24:10.700 | we could go back and rewrite the Constitution, that's probably

01:24:13.300 | the first thing I put in there. The thing with that this line of

01:24:16.420 | thinking, and maybe this is where I reacted, so I apologize

01:24:19.020 | if I personalize it, is that it creates the risk of exactly what

01:24:23.740 | you just said in this, what you just said right now, which is

01:24:26.660 | this blob class of people that use those arguments as the

01:24:31.820 | reason why change can't happen. Yeah, why it must be disagree

01:24:35.700 | with that. I don't disagree with that. And I think that is the

01:24:37.700 | huge red flag about this line of argumentation around why out of

01:24:41.740 | the box candidates can't be evaluated by reasonably smart

01:24:46.100 | people of which there are 300 million of us in America that

01:24:49.380 | have the ability to see it. And so I actually don't think it's

01:24:53.340 | as hard of a job as we make it out to be and that when you get

01:24:56.780 | 180 190 million different people voting, I do think you actually

01:25:01.940 | get a pretty good wisdom of the crowds and take away Trump's UI

01:25:07.820 | for a second. What Saks just said is so profound, because

01:25:11.180 | what Trump nailed was three ginormous lanes that turned out

01:25:15.260 | now we can all agree with. None of us wanted these wars.

01:25:18.620 | Everybody basically believes that the border needed to be

01:25:22.340 | closed. And everybody believes that China has taken advantage

01:25:26.780 | in a way that is really hollowed out the middle class in America.

01:25:30.100 | Those were three totems that nobody would have touched. And

01:25:34.420 | if we had allowed this whole thing of like, oh, Trump

01:25:37.380 | doesn't have this Trump doesn't have that he just gives cute

01:25:39.660 | nicknames to his advert series, we would have missed that he

01:25:43.300 | actually had enough executive function to nail the three

01:25:46.940 | biggest themes of our current lifetime.

01:25:49.660 | Okay, I think that's fair. I guess my commentary can just be

01:25:52.820 | reduced down to the debate stage and saying who won and who

01:25:56.060 | should be is different than who should be president. Okay,

01:25:58.220 | necessarily. I think looking at the broader context, good job.

01:26:00.900 | Folks have done a good job. But the presidential candidacy is

01:26:04.740 | much more than just debates. Okay. Yes. There's a lot of

01:26:08.660 | other things going on.

01:26:09.660 | If we're judging people just based on how well they talk and

01:26:12.900 | how quick on their feet they are. Chris Christie is a great

01:26:15.300 | talker. Okay, he's a media trained talker. But guess what?

01:26:18.540 | He got booed.

01:26:19.380 | That was the low point of the debate. The dope point of the

01:26:22.380 | debate for me was that he I thought took a kind of like a

01:26:26.300 | low key racist jab at Vivek when he read it. He referred to

01:26:31.060 | person. Yeah, the last person in one of these debates who stood

01:26:33.660 | in the middle of the stage and said, What's a skinny guy with

01:26:35.980 | an odd last name doing up here was Barack Obama. I'm afraid

01:26:39.500 | we're dealing with the same type of amateur standing on the

01:26:41.980 | stage tonight. You felt was a little

01:26:43.580 | no, not that it's when you got out of the back like chat GPT.

01:26:46.620 | Already have a guy who sounds like chat GPT standing here's

01:26:50.220 | like this Indian tech worker. And I thought, Hey, man, that's

01:26:53.020 | like you read into it. That's interesting. I thought he was

01:26:55.020 | just saying he sounded as a South Asian.

01:27:01.980 | That he was very like, robotic and formulaic or something. But

01:27:06.420 | what did you how did you read it as a as the palace white guy on

01:27:09.780 | the panel,

01:27:10.180 | there was something almost personal about the way that both

01:27:13.540 | Christie and Pence seem to react to a vague it was almost like,

01:27:17.060 | Who are you you young whippersnapper to be on the stage

01:27:20.220 | with me, especially Pence. I've been the vice president. Who are

01:27:23.940 | you? You know, and all this was

01:27:26.060 | here's what his quotes were

01:27:27.420 | dismissive. And I think there was a resentment that even

01:27:30.020 | before this debate, Vivek was rising in the polls, and those

01:27:33.260 | guys were going nowhere. Let me explain it. And again, it's not

01:27:36.540 | just oratorical skill. It's the substance. Yes, of the issues,

01:27:40.420 | and where he's willing to go that these other candidates are

01:27:43.620 | not

01:27:43.900 | here are the quotes to respond to let me explain it to you.

01:27:46.340 | Vivek. I'll go slower this time. Now is not the time for on the

01:27:51.100 | job training. And we don't need to bring in a rookie all this

01:27:54.620 | dismissive stuff from Pence to Vivek got some applause because

01:27:58.500 | you know, conflict, conflict and confrontation gets applaused by

01:28:01.220 | these lunatics in the audience who were like it was like a

01:28:04.100 | while you also get an allocation of seats for your own team. So

01:28:07.220 | yeah, it was the only reason why Pence was VP is because a rookie

01:28:12.540 | got elected president. Yeah, that's a very good. It's a good

01:28:14.620 | insight. Yeah, that was very weird. I thought the thing that

01:28:17.460 | was very interesting was not to make it all about Trump, but he

01:28:19.940 | was the quote unquote elephant that was not in the room was the

01:28:24.100 | undying support for Pence you had everybody say Pence did the

01:28:28.140 | right thing on January 6. What was your takeaway from that

01:28:31.180 | sacks? Because there was some there was a mix of booze and

01:28:35.100 | cheers for Christie when he kind of said like we need somebody

01:28:38.020 | who doesn't behave this way. It's unbecoming of the

01:28:40.260 | presidency referring to Trump. So what was your take on is the

01:28:44.300 | Republican Party in this audience trying to move past

01:28:48.900 | Trump given all these indictments? I'm going to leave

01:28:50.980 | the Trump Stockholm syndrome and Trump derangement syndrome out

01:28:54.060 | of this just objectively. Yeah.

01:28:56.420 | Well, I thought I thought DeSantis had the best response,

01:29:00.700 | which is listen, if we spend our time relitigating January 6,

01:29:03.900 | and looking in the rearview mirror, we're gonna lose to Joe

01:29:06.220 | Biden. This is exactly the conversation and the debate that

01:29:10.060 | Democrats want us to be having. I think that's just factually

01:29:12.700 | true. That if the Republican Party spends its time debating

01:29:16.100 | January 6, that's playing into Biden's hands.

01:29:18.820 | So you don't think Trump can necessarily be Biden that these

01:29:22.820 | other candidates have a better chance of beating Biden? Is that

01:29:25.220 | what you

01:29:25.420 | know, I didn't say that. I'm asking a question saying,

01:29:27.820 | focusing on relitigating, okay, January six is not only is it a

01:29:32.500 | waste of time, it's just a loser for Republicans. And by the way,

01:29:35.420 | it's Trump's worst quality to keep harkening back to the last

01:29:38.940 | election. Even I think his fans and supporters don't want to

01:29:41.980 | hear that.

01:29:42.500 | Who has a better chance of winning some pairing of these

01:29:45.900 | candidates, axe, or Trump and one of these candidates versus

01:29:50.140 | Biden heads up, you know, does something like DeSantis, Vivek

01:29:55.180 | or Haley and Vivek, you know, pick pick your combination here,

01:29:58.140 | have a better chance versus Biden, then Trump plus one of

01:30:01.660 | these.

01:30:01.980 | I think it's tough to say, but I do think that Trump has really

01:30:08.860 | high negatives. And in order for him to win the presidency, he's

01:30:12.540 | got to flip something like two or three out of five states,

01:30:16.700 | like swing states that voted against him last time. And I do

01:30:20.980 | think that this is one of the stronger arguments that DeSantis

01:30:23.700 | makes is that, you know, I could deliver those states, whereas

01:30:27.140 | Trump may not. So I think there is an electability argument for

01:30:32.660 | DeSantis.

01:30:33.580 | Okay. And so Friedberg, hearing all this,

01:30:37.460 | by the way, I'm not saying that that's what's gonna happen. But

01:30:39.420 | I do think we know that Trump does have very high negatives.

01:30:43.140 | And yeah, he's gonna flip some states.

01:30:45.220 | He's gonna have a lot of Democrats and women come out to

01:30:49.820 | vote against him. He supercharges the base in the way

01:30:52.220 | Hillary charged the other way.

01:30:53.460 | Can I say one other thing about DeSantis' performance in that

01:30:56.100 | debate? So I know that he doesn't stand out in the way

01:31:00.700 | that, you know, Vivek or some of these other candidates do,

01:31:03.500 | because he didn't deliver any zingers. And also, he wasn't the

01:31:06.940 | brunt of attack. I think we all thought that maybe there'd be a

01:31:09.540 | lot more incoming for him and the incoming really went for

01:31:12.060 | Vivek. But I think that he had a strategy in that debate. This is

01:31:16.540 | my interpretation. It's not based on any insider knowledge

01:31:19.340 | or anything like that. Which was the way he answered questions

01:31:23.580 | was, I think, to be broadly acceptable to all the different

01:31:26.900 | factions in the GOP. So like I mentioned, there's kind of the

01:31:30.020 | MAGA faction, there's the neocon faction, and there's the

01:31:33.380 | religious right faction. And his answers may not have been the

01:31:39.020 | ones that were most loved by any of those factions. But I also

01:31:42.820 | think that none of his answers disqualified himself with any of

01:31:46.460 | those factions, which is kind of hard to do given how much

01:31:49.060 | they're at each other's throats.

01:31:50.180 | So sacks, if this was a poker tournament, and this was the

01:31:52.900 | final table, would you say the strategy for the Santas was,

01:31:57.620 | Hey, listen, I'm gonna let these other guys shoot it out. I'm

01:32:00.020 | just gonna sit on my big chip stack here. I'm in second place.

01:32:02.620 | You got let me let let's let the field eliminate themselves. I'm

01:32:06.220 | going to just protect my stack. I'm not going to play a lot of

01:32:08.340 | hands here. He's just sort of sitting and waiting for it to

01:32:12.020 | get down to three or four people. And then I'll mix it up

01:32:13.540 | some more. Is that the strategy?

01:32:14.860 | I think he came across as the grown up.

01:32:18.300 | Nobody really took swipes at him or shots at him. And he didn't

01:32:21.100 | really take shots anybody else. He did, again, try to focus the

01:32:24.220 | Republican Party on what it's going to take to win. He was one

01:32:27.180 | of the only people on that stage who had criticism of Biden. I

01:32:30.780 | think it was a mistake not to criticize Biden's record.

01:32:32.820 | Yeah, they shocked at that. That was such a weird thing that

01:32:35.980 | they were all going after Trump. And the only attacks on nothing

01:32:38.740 | about Biden.

01:32:39.300 | The only attacks on Biden that I even remember from that night

01:32:42.540 | were from Trump's interview with Tucker where he criticized God,

01:32:46.620 | he destroyed, criticized Biden's lack of physical and mental

01:32:49.780 | acuity. But look, I think that if if the convention were

01:32:52.740 | ultimately to be a broker convention, which all the

01:32:55.420 | different factions of the GOP had to agree on a candidate,

01:32:58.740 | then I think this answers to be that candidate because he may

01:33:02.020 | not be the candidate who is most loved by any of those factions.

01:33:05.260 | But I think he's made himself the most broadly acceptable to

01:33:07.780 | all of them. The problem is, I don't think that's the way that

01:33:10.460 | candidates are chosen. You know, I think that what happens in

01:33:13.380 | practice is that the factions are trying to feed each other.

01:33:17.300 | And that one faction is going to win. And I think it's probably

01:33:20.860 | give me the MAGA faction. So that's the problem, I think,

01:33:23.660 | with this strategy. But look, he came across the grown up and he

01:33:27.140 | came across as the most broadly acceptable.

01:33:28.980 | Okay, so if this is a final table of a poker tournament, and

01:33:35.700 | Trump is going to sit down and debate three of these people

01:33:38.300 | come off, who's going to be left to debate Trump and be the final

01:33:43.500 | three or four seats here? Which three?

01:33:45.380 | I think it'll be the Santas, Vivek, and it'll be either Tim

01:33:53.420 | Scott or Nikki Haley.

01:33:54.220 | Interesting, Freeberg, who are the final three who are going to

01:33:57.180 | debate Trump, you know, in debate number four or five?

01:33:59.700 | I don't know if he's gonna show up. I don't know why he would if

01:34:03.180 | he's up 50 60 70% of the polls. I mean, it would be it would just

01:34:07.900 | be such a Trump move to do not show up to any of these debates

01:34:11.620 | and just like get elected.

01:34:12.900 | Play the game.

01:34:13.460 | How incredible debate would that be if it was from the Santos and

01:34:16.860 | Vivek?

01:34:17.460 | Fire.

01:34:18.940 | My fourth would be Nikki Haley. I think she had a good she had

01:34:21.940 | her moments in that debate. I think she had good advice for

01:34:24.420 | the Republican Party on the abortion issue.

01:34:26.180 | Yeah, she did a great job.

01:34:27.940 | And she pointed out how, you know, much money. I thought that

01:34:32.220 | was a tea party moment for her. That's when I warmed up to Nikki

01:34:34.660 | Halley a bunch. She's like, Listen, we also approved, you

01:34:38.340 | know, six, $8 trillion, we got to look at ourselves. And it was

01:34:41.100 | like, Okay, is it the tea party 2010? Here? I thought that was a

01:34:43.940 | great moment. Who do you who do you have left freeberg? Everybody

01:34:46.220 | else played the game play along, who will be the final three here

01:34:48.980 | to debate Trump if Trump shows up? play along for the game.

01:34:51.860 | I mean, I'll get mine. Vivek seems to be in a good place.

01:34:55.380 | Okay.

01:34:55.940 | I don't know. The Santa says a lot of money. Yeah, he's

01:35:00.180 | probably gonna stick around.

01:35:01.460 | Yeah. So the vacant Santa's are we all have consensus. Nikki

01:35:05.260 | Halley.

01:35:05.740 | I don't think he's gonna show up.

01:35:08.820 | We got your we got your point. Yeah.

01:35:11.140 | You're critical of the fact that the vague is having a boom or

01:35:15.940 | surge based on his oratorical skills, which I think you regard

01:35:19.060 | as being a shot away.

01:35:20.500 | Question.

01:35:22.780 | You're showing no enthusiasm for de Santos, who actually has a

01:35:26.340 | track record of being the most capable exec.

01:35:28.060 | Oh, no, no, I'm not. By the way, I didn't. I'm not we're not

01:35:30.540 | talking about who I would vote for president. We haven't even

01:35:32.380 | had that comment. Like we didn't even ask that question once.

01:35:34.420 | Okay, so we're asking now. Putting aside Trump, who do you

01:35:38.700 | pick?

01:35:39.140 | What was really interesting is hearing the governors speak

01:35:41.740 | about their skills. I think Nikki Haley, Chris Christie,

01:35:44.860 | Bergam, the Santa's all had moments where they shine from

01:35:49.460 | from from Hutchinson, from my perspective, from a content

01:35:52.420 | perspective, which is what I was talking about at the beginning,

01:35:54.420 | which people largely ignore, which is that they actually had

01:35:57.740 | quite a lot to draw from and, you know, some policy that seemed

01:36:00.740 | pretty strong.

01:36:01.380 | Here we go. Final question. Final question. I want you to

01:36:04.140 | give me your one and two not Trump. Saks, we know de Santos

01:36:08.380 | is number one for you. So then who's who's your number two to

01:36:10.580 | pair with him? Who would you pair with?

01:36:11.940 | We're saying be what to be the candidate to be that the ticket,

01:36:15.180 | Republican ticket, you're going to go to Santa's one. And then

01:36:18.060 | who do you put with a measure as a number two?

01:36:19.700 | Well, for me, to Santa's end, I think that the only candidates

01:36:26.860 | who have acceptable answers on what I regard as the number one

01:36:30.820 | issue of our time, which is Ukraine, because that could lead

01:36:33.420 | to war three, the only candidates have acceptable

01:36:35.620 | answers are Trump, the vacant Santa's, meaning they've all

01:36:38.980 | been pretty clear, they would de escalate. I think all the other

01:36:41.780 | candidates have basically indicated in one way or another,

01:36:44.340 | they would ask,

01:36:44.820 | Vivek is those three candidates are the only ones that are

01:36:48.300 | acceptable to me. Okay, so we take Trump off if Trump doesn't

01:36:50.740 | run, which that's my personal belief. But just of the people

01:36:52.940 | who are on stage last night, you're going to Santa's Vivek is

01:36:55.700 | your ticket to math, who's your ticket? After one debate, not

01:37:00.140 | counting Trump? If the Republican ticket, who do you

01:37:02.820 | think is a Republican?

01:37:03.420 | Look, I like to buy these deep out of the money options. I

01:37:05.580 | think we'll go out on a limb. I think that Vivek has a really

01:37:08.220 | good chance of winning this Republican nomination. That's

01:37:10.300 | what I saw. I saw like outright against Trump. Yeah, I

01:37:14.220 | were taking Trump off the table. So just pick, you know, for

01:37:16.580 | example, for example, no, no, no, no, I really do think he's

01:37:20.420 | he can win this thing. And, for example, I thought it was very

01:37:23.740 | clever when he said that he had a line, he said, Donald Trump

01:37:28.420 | was the best. Let me be categorically clear. Donald

01:37:33.100 | Trump was the best president of the 21st century. And I was

01:37:36.420 | like, what? And then I thought about it is and I thought, why

01:37:40.140 | is he saying it? Does he say it because he believes it? Or does

01:37:42.620 | he saying because it's like a tactic? And there's probably

01:37:47.740 | bits of both. Yep. Because I do think that there are elements

01:37:51.220 | where he fundamentally does believe that Trump has at least

01:37:55.460 | shine the path forward. And so I think he does believe it to

01:37:58.980 | some degree. But then I thought it's even smarter to have said

01:38:02.540 | it. And again, this is where I go back to, I'm not sure that

01:38:06.500 | that's oratory skills versus like, understanding, you know,

01:38:10.420 | game theory, strategy, and and strategy and being a strategic

01:38:14.260 | thinker and trying to win. I thought that that was a very

01:38:16.860 | smart thing to have said. And all along that evening, I

01:38:20.500 | thought that he did the best job of preserving optionality for

01:38:25.500 | the Trump base to say, you know what, Vivek is all of the

01:38:30.540 | positive features of Trump without some of the negatives.

01:38:33.820 | So let's just clean up the ticket and let's go and I think

01:38:36.620 | that there's still again, there's a long way. Yeah, I

01:38:40.060 | like the call. I like the call. But I would buy that deep out of

01:38:43.020 | the money option. And who's your number two, then? We're going

01:38:45.420 | one, two here, one, two, either as to pair with Vivek or your

01:38:48.020 | number two choice in terms of know that I if the deck doesn't

01:38:51.900 | figure out a way to slipstream past Trump, the Trump will win

01:38:55.220 | the nomination. Okay, taking Trump out of the rest. Who's

01:38:58.060 | your number two? Okay, great. Fascinating to see this

01:39:01.420 | happening. I agree with what a lot of what Jamal said. I think

01:39:04.860 | Vivek is positioning himself to be the backup candidate for the

01:39:10.980 | MAGA wing. Yeah. And he's doing it by never attacking Trump and

01:39:15.140 | by complimenting him. By the way, saying that Trump was the

01:39:18.140 | best president of the 21st century. There's only been

01:39:20.060 | three. It was George W. Bush, Obama, and then Trump. Sorry,

01:39:25.100 | Biden. Sorry, Biden's has been for George W. Bush was one of

01:39:28.860 | the worst presidents in American history. Yeah, so it's a

01:39:31.580 | forever wars. Obama, obviously, a Republican candidate is not

01:39:34.900 | going to think highly of Obama or Biden. So it kind of narrows

01:39:38.940 | it down, doesn't it?

01:39:39.740 | Yeah, what was the intelligence of actually saying the words?

01:39:44.100 | Yeah, strategically brilliant. I know, I agree.

01:39:46.740 | facts. What do you think about the VIX unpopular statement? And

01:39:50.380 | it may I'd like to hear whether it's unpopular with the base,

01:39:52.980 | but it was certainly unpopular in the room last night, that the

01:39:55.420 | climate change agenda is a hoax, which drew a lot of booze. That

01:39:59.460 | was is that like, is that a lightning bolt kind of thing to

01:40:04.340 | say? Why would he say that? And what's the strategy?

01:40:08.700 | Like Trump saying he loves coal? He loves coal miners. It's just

01:40:12.940 | it felt to me a little bit like he was trying to say agenda is a

01:40:15.980 | hoax, meaning like all the ESG stuff is nonsense. But it comes

01:40:19.300 | across as him saying climate change isn't real. And he's got

01:40:22.140 | to now deal with the repercussions. And climate change

01:40:24.300 | is strategic.

01:40:25.060 | I think it's I don't I don't think you know what he believes

01:40:30.180 | J. Cal, but

01:40:30.860 | yeah, his follow up comment around that was he said that it

01:40:33.700 | is an economic yoke on our country. Because the combination

01:40:38.420 | of subsidies and the lack of expansion of carbon is what's

01:40:42.660 | holding back the country economically. So that's I think

01:40:45.580 | I remember him tying these two things together. So that's

01:40:48.500 | probably where the state no intelligent person doesn't

01:40:50.700 | believe that the planet's not heating up. Come on. And that

01:40:53.860 | it's not better to go to renewables. That's just

01:40:55.580 | how do you know if you looked at the science, J. Cal?

01:40:57.460 | Of course I have. Yes, it's massive.

01:40:59.460 | You've gone deep on the science.

01:41:00.700 | You know, as deep as a person needs to go free bird.

01:41:03.420 | You just treat it. Look, it's just something you're supposed

01:41:06.900 | to believe in. No, I'm not saying that.

01:41:09.420 | How the planet has gotten warmer. That's it.

01:41:12.940 | I will say sacks is right. That it has become a thing that it's

01:41:17.380 | like we're all supposed to take as given. No one is going to go

01:41:20.900 | up and say, here's the science that validates here's the data

01:41:24.140 | that validates here's there's some empirical evidence and

01:41:26.420 | then people use counter empirical evidence to try and

01:41:28.660 | counter it. And that's what makes it a little bit of a

01:41:30.940 | movement now, which is the institutions, the elites,

01:41:36.460 | however, they're framed have been wrong so many times on the

01:41:39.300 | things that they told us were given, that we're supposed to

01:41:41.740 | assume that this is a given to F that I'm not going to decide

01:41:45.420 | what to believe anymore. And I don't want to be told what to

01:41:48.020 | believe anymore is exactly what people let me let me state my

01:41:50.780 | what they heard from that song last week. And that's what they

01:41:54.300 | heard. You know, and let me state my position. I totally

01:41:56.660 | agree. Yeah, here's the thing. After COVID without me even

01:42:00.460 | making a comment on climate change 100% we were told so

01:42:03.340 | much bullshit in the name of science during COVID. They told

01:42:07.580 | us that vaccines are safe and effective. I just want to

01:42:10.020 | clarify my position before you respond to it.

01:42:12.540 | It's undeniable that temperatures have risen. I

01:42:15.420 | think it's a crazy experiment to run to not try to lower it.

01:42:19.580 | It's just a crazy experiment. The planet is precious. I don't

01:42:23.020 | think we should run it. I am not dogmatic about it. It's not a

01:42:25.940 | religious thing. I'm not genuinely

01:42:27.420 | experiment we're running Jake. It's called human development

01:42:30.060 | and growth. Yes.

01:42:30.860 | And the temperature goes up. So why wouldn't we use renewable

01:42:35.820 | energy nuclear when not pollute because not polluting is is good

01:42:40.140 | to when you have

01:42:41.420 | self proclaimed scientific experts and or 16 year old

01:42:48.380 | girls shaming everybody with pretty flimsy data. There was a

01:42:56.580 | while where we were everybody just said, Ma, they must be

01:42:59.060 | right. And COVID exposed the hoax. And so now we're a lot

01:43:03.620 | less prone to believe these self proclaimed intellectuals and

01:43:08.060 | their jargon and their nonsense. So ask me how much money have I

01:43:14.020 | invested in climate change with all that data? Zero. Ask me how

01:43:18.580 | much money I've invested in technologies that will benefit

01:43:21.700 | climate change as a byproduct of national security. hundreds of

01:43:24.620 | millions of dollars. Yes. And the reason I give you that

01:43:27.260 | example is that, for me, that framing was just such a turnoff

01:43:31.940 | because I couldn't buy into it. Yeah, there are multiple reasons

01:43:35.500 | the more pragmatic, realistic framing, which allowed us to

01:43:39.540 | actually say maybe you're right, but maybe you're wrong. But

01:43:42.420 | let's not even debate the issue. Let's just go and make sure

01:43:44.660 | we're not dependent on another country and fighting endless

01:43:46.620 | wars. That got me off my ass to do stuff. And I think there's a

01:43:49.660 | lot of people in America that are in that second category.

01:43:52.660 | They don't want absolutely emotionally riddled dogma to

01:43:56.220 | drive their life and how they're forced to make decisions. You

01:43:58.820 | can come up with three or four really good reasons to not keep

01:44:03.260 | burning fossil fuels. They're dirty. They're pollutants. There

01:44:07.260 | are better options that are more sustainable that are more cost

01:44:10.380 | effective, it's more cost effective to put solar in than

01:44:13.140 | to burn coal or build a new coal plant. So there's economic

01:44:16.300 | reasons. And then of course, those points, you know, we're

01:44:19.820 | saying is we're not automatically going to trust. I

01:44:22.620 | am not automatically trusting I'm taking the body of evidence

01:44:25.340 | search. I'm not blindly trusting anybody. I'm taking the body of

01:44:28.100 | evidence and saying that entire body of evidence.

01:44:30.700 | Geopolitical really looked at the evidence. I don't believe

01:44:32.900 | I know on this issue. Okay, anyway, I haven't gone deep on

01:44:36.420 | this issue. That's all I'm saying.

01:44:38.060 | To what I'm saying, if you listen, as opposed to telling me

01:44:43.220 | what I think, and listen to what I'm telling you, there are many

01:44:46.420 | reasons to pursue sustainable energy, clean energy, and

01:44:51.380 | geopolitics is one of them. And, you know, polluting the

01:44:55.220 | environment is one of them and temperatures rising if that

01:44:57.700 | indeed results in damages to the oceans and you know, weather

01:45:03.180 | patterns, there are five or six great reasons to stop burning

01:45:07.580 | coal and stop burning oil.

01:45:09.260 | Look at these two climate whitewashers were living in in

01:45:12.580 | this moment. People were so convinced they just needed to

01:45:16.620 | roil the country around the hurricane hitting California.

01:45:20.180 | Then by the time it landed, it was a storm. There was rain in

01:45:24.340 | Los Angeles. I asked people here when I got here, I said, How is

01:45:27.180 | hurricane? They're like, it wasn't a hurricane. And in fact,

01:45:30.140 | the news were so tilted about it, they had to call it it could

01:45:33.740 | have been a hurricane. Yeah, there was a storm ratings.

01:45:36.660 | Second is this thing in Maui, it turns out Michael Schellenberger

01:45:40.900 | has done some pretty good work on this is exposing that a lot

01:45:44.420 | of the reason these fires may have started was because of this

01:45:48.260 | radical climate agenda that caused the utility to not invest

01:45:53.020 | in the protective measures they should have around power lines.

01:45:56.100 | That is crazy, Jason.

01:45:57.820 | Oh, yeah, I'm not defending what happened in Maui. It's obviously

01:46:01.380 | incompetence. We should be bearing we have the same issue

01:46:03.940 | in California, which is dogmatic belief. There's a consequence.

01:46:07.660 | It's not a dogmatic believer. No, I'm not saying you are. I'm

01:46:10.460 | just trying to make I'm not saying you are. I'm trying to

01:46:12.740 | make this point. When people dogmatically believe bodies of

01:46:16.060 | evidence that they themselves don't interrogate fully, they

01:46:19.020 | may, it may lead them to conclusions and then actions

01:46:22.020 | that you are now seeing have measurable human consequences.

01:46:24.900 | If you look at PG&E in California, it's riddled with

01:46:27.700 | these issues.

01:46:28.340 | Yeah, they shut our power off because they're afraid that wind

01:46:31.140 | is going to blow down power lines and start fires. Yeah, I

01:46:33.340 | mean, and we just need to bury them. So.

01:46:35.100 | So I think that it would be great to like not debate the

01:46:37.860 | climate issue, put a pin in it. And instead, just say, we all

01:46:41.340 | want our kids to be able to have clean air around us. Yes, clean

01:46:44.980 | water to drink. And we want to make sure that we have the

01:46:47.860 | resources to be productive as human beings without having to

01:46:50.900 | send our kids to war, or without putting the country in danger.

01:46:53.980 | 100% which is exactly my point. There's so many reasons to take

01:46:57.900 | this seriously and move to renewables and nuclear. All

01:47:00.300 | right, listen, this has been an insanely great episode. Hey,

01:47:03.300 | let me just get one person's comments. So here's your here's

01:47:07.940 | your red meat for sacks here. It sounds like there was the the

01:47:13.500 | coup. 60 days later, the guy who was running the coup in Russia

01:47:17.300 | had a little accident so random. Maybe your thoughts. Sacks.

01:47:23.460 | You're talking about for Goshen? Yeah, I mean, he had some

01:47:26.580 | mechanical difficulties on his PJ. I don't know what happened.

01:47:29.300 | Is he sending that citation in for maintenance? What happened?

01:47:31.820 | They had a bad engine or something. It's so random. Poor

01:47:34.340 | guy. The latest reporting from the New York Times this morning

01:47:36.460 | is that for Goshen's plane was not shot shot down, but rather

01:47:39.660 | they believe there was an explosive device on it. Oh, so

01:47:42.860 | we don't know. You know, we don't we don't know exactly. It

01:47:46.580 | was a bird strike something random like a bird strike. No,

01:47:48.980 | not somebody took him out. Somebody took him off the board.

01:47:51.700 | Really? Oh, must have been. It must have been Ukraine, right?

01:47:54.500 | That's who you're putting it on. It's Ukraine. No, I mean, I

01:47:57.540 | think it's probably pretty obvious who did it. Although we

01:48:00.740 | won't know for sure. So I think, listen, I think that

01:48:06.700 | allegedly, allegedly, that's what you always say whenever 100

01:48:12.660 | binds accused of doing something you always have to insert

01:48:14.700 | allegedly, there was a little cocaine and maybe some bribes. I

01:48:18.700 | think this resolves the question of who came out on top during

01:48:21.940 | that mutiny. There were a lot of people speculating that somehow

01:48:25.980 | pergoes and had the upper hand or he was paid off or that

01:48:28.780 | happened. Right? Remember, there was a line of thinking, Oh,

01:48:30.700 | this wasn't a coup. If it wasn't a coup, then why did Putin whack

01:48:34.620 | him?

01:48:34.820 | Back, back.

01:48:36.780 | And it was exactly 60 days later. Is that correct? That was

01:48:40.260 | the other thing is that can ask a question. How funny is it

01:48:42.700 | that it's like, Putin's like, hey, pergoes and come, come and

01:48:45.380 | see me. We're good. Nothing to worry about. I'll send a

01:48:48.340 | private jet. And then it's like, Listen, where are you going to

01:48:52.780 | the black? So you can take my PJ and he's like, I can't see

01:48:55.660 | later. How does this happen? Like, you can't even write this

01:48:59.620 | stuff related.

01:49:00.180 | freeberg is sending his PJ to take me down to the

01:49:02.820 | thanks for the ride freeberg. I told you it's like Michael

01:49:06.100 | Corleone. Apparently, there's a meeting about a month ago. I

01:49:09.780 | remember it being reported where progression and the other heads

01:49:12.380 | of Wagner came to meet with Putin. And the deal that Putin

01:49:16.220 | supposedly offered was that Wagner could stay together, but

01:49:20.140 | they had to report to the Russian military. And the Wagner

01:49:23.140 | commanders were on board with it. But one person objected and

01:49:26.460 | that was progression. Oh, so it's a little bit like remember

01:49:29.140 | that the meeting between Michael Corleone and Mo green and

01:49:32.220 | Vegas? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, Michael's like, think of a

01:49:35.860 | price and Mo greens like, you don't buy me out. I buy you

01:49:39.500 | out. That kind of reaction. Yeah. And the guy had some sort

01:49:44.100 | of death wish, I guess.

01:49:45.380 | You know what they say, beware the dog that doesn't bark. Putin

01:49:48.980 | said nothing for the last two months. He was like, Yeah, it's

01:49:51.220 | all good. Nothing out of the Putin camp. And then boom. Putin

01:49:55.860 | is a murderous lunatic, who must be stopped and contained.

01:49:59.420 | I think the opposite of being a lunatic. I think this is

01:50:02.140 | somebody who is very cold and calculating. Okay, yeah,

01:50:04.740 | murderous, calculated sociopath.

01:50:06.580 | He figured out how to diffuse a mutiny. I don't think it was a

01:50:10.180 | full on coup, but a mutiny that would have been very disruptive

01:50:13.820 | to his front line if he had basically tried to violently

01:50:15.900 | suppress it. So he cuts a deal where basically he offers

01:50:20.980 | banishment to Belarus. progression was supposed to go

01:50:24.220 | to Belarus. By the way, we don't know exactly why progression

01:50:28.260 | returned to Moscow or St. Petersburg. He was supposed to

01:50:31.300 | be staying in Belarus or Africa. So maybe he violated the terms

01:50:34.820 | of his probation. We don't know. There are all these people on

01:50:37.300 | social media who are pinning their hopes for regime change

01:50:40.300 | and liberal reform within Russia on progression, which was always

01:50:44.900 | absurd, because he was this warlord, whose behavior and

01:50:48.340 | conduct was even more erratic and violent than Putin. So he

01:50:53.140 | was never going to be a great vessel for liberal reform in

01:50:56.340 | Russia. Nonetheless, there are all these people who pin their

01:50:59.940 | hopes for regime change in Russia on progression. We can

01:51:02.460 | see now what a stupid idea that was. The Russian regime, whether

01:51:07.140 | you like it or not, is stable is not unstable. Russia is winning

01:51:10.820 | the war. And you may hate Putin, but he is still master of

01:51:14.860 | Russia. And eventually, we're gonna have to deal with him.

01:51:17.260 | These fantasies that we're gonna be able to regime change him, I

01:51:22.220 | think are absurd. And they've led us to this horrible point.

01:51:24.740 | Okay, for the dictator for the Sultan of science and focused

01:51:29.900 | SAS sacks with a slick back hair. I am the most great

01:51:34.540 | moderator. See you next time. Bye bye.

01:51:35.740 | Oh, let your winners ride.

01:51:38.540 | Rain Man David

01:51:41.060 | We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

01:51:48.140 | Love you.

01:51:48.820 | West Coast Queen of Kinhwa

01:51:50.620 | besties are

01:51:58.060 | dog taking a notice in your driveway.

01:52:03.020 | Oh, man.

01:52:05.820 | We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy

01:52:10.460 | because they're all just useless. It's like this like

01:52:12.300 | sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

01:52:14.540 | What? You're a B.

01:52:17.020 | B.

01:52:17.380 | What? You're a B.

01:52:18.540 | You're a B.

01:52:19.340 | B.

01:52:19.780 | What?

01:52:20.260 | We need to get merch.

01:52:22.100 | Besties are back.

01:52:22.940 | I'm going all in.

01:52:30.460 | I'm going all in

01:52:32.460 | You

E143: Nvidia smashes earnings, Arm walks the plank, M&A market, Vivek dominates GOP debate & more

Chapters