E173: Google buying HubSpot? FTX depositors not made whole, AI job fears, Ukraine joining NATO

00:00:00.000 | All right, everybody. Welcome back to the all in podcast, the

00:00:02.580 | number one podcast in the world. Episode 173. It's objectively

00:00:08.360 | freeberg the number one podcast I checked, I looked online. And

00:00:11.760 | things are cooking over here. So much so that you may have heard

00:00:15.960 | we hired a new CEO. Welcome to the team. Our new fifth bestie

00:00:21.720 | john. Yeah. Clap. Yes. All right, john. Welcome to the

00:00:29.280 | program. Your first day was April 1. It wasn't a joke

00:00:32.480 | literally was your first day. How has week one as CEO for all

00:00:38.880 | in been?

00:00:39.560 | It has been wonderful, super dynamic, really happy to be a

00:00:43.840 | part of the team.

00:00:44.560 | All right, there you have it. Sax you were a huge driver of

00:00:50.200 | this. You spent so much time interviewing everybody going

00:00:53.520 | through the resumes checking the references. You know, and you

00:00:57.440 | really spearheaded this. Oh, wait, you did nothing. I

00:00:59.400 | forgot. It's it's spelled j o n, john.

00:01:02.840 | Who is this?

00:01:04.040 | Second, john. Okay, guys, have a good day. Nice to meet you.

00:01:10.960 | Likewise.

00:01:11.880 | Let your winners ride.

00:01:15.920 | Rain Man David Saxon.

00:01:18.840 | We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy.

00:01:25.600 | Love you. So john worked at the Russian embassy. This is just a

00:01:32.400 | coincidence. Russia references, but he worked as an intern for

00:01:36.520 | Putin. Somehow he wound up getting a gig. Freeberg. You

00:01:39.960 | actually led the the incredible search here. We had hundreds of

00:01:45.960 | people apply. Why do you think we wound up with Mr. Hell here?

00:01:50.280 | Yeah, we had a lot of folks. And we met with a lot of folks. But

00:01:52.760 | john really stood out with, I think his experience and his

00:01:57.080 | thoughtfulness about what we can do. So, so much of our work off

00:02:01.880 | the show obviously has gone into putting on the all in summit and

00:02:05.200 | we want to do more live events. And john has a very strong

00:02:09.800 | background in building incredible live experiences and

00:02:13.480 | events, which we think is going to be a really important

00:02:15.440 | extension. I think we've we realized over the last two

00:02:18.560 | summits, how much community matters for all in and how much

00:02:21.200 | getting people together matters and how much the live content

00:02:24.560 | mattered. And so we want to do more of that. And hopefully john

00:02:27.360 | can take us to the promised land. Fantastic, john. Thanks

00:02:30.920 | for thanks for saying yes. It's awesome to have. Yeah. All

00:02:33.640 | right. And as john's first first duty, he is going to next week

00:02:39.000 | announce the details of the all in summit 2024. Our third

00:02:43.880 | edition. Chairman Dictator Chamath Palihapitiya. You've

00:02:47.480 | been running all in with an iron fist in the group chat, your

00:02:52.000 | thoughts on john in working with him and why we selected the

00:02:57.240 | iron fist, please go.

00:02:58.280 | I think that there's a really important trend that we have

00:03:06.760 | stumbled into, which is that content creators are the modern

00:03:13.440 | form of demand generation, for whatever else it is that you're

00:03:18.040 | going to consume. And I think it replaces advertising, and I

00:03:21.200 | think it displaces traditional content. And so I was really

00:03:26.240 | interested in finding somebody that understood how to connect

00:03:29.520 | those dots and all of the different ways in which we can

00:03:32.680 | explore what our brand is capable of. And I thought he was

00:03:37.240 | the best example of having done one thing extremely well at

00:03:40.240 | scale. And curious enough to figure out the other parts. So,

00:03:44.720 | you know, I'm really excited to work with john.

00:03:46.400 | Yeah. And I'll just add to that, you know, been doing events my

00:03:49.920 | whole life. And when I saw john's actual event history in

00:03:53.760 | the event, you've thrown john really spectacular in the

00:03:57.400 | detail. And I think you're gonna the same way freeberg level up

00:04:00.800 | year two of the conference. I'm really excited to see how you

00:04:03.840 | put your stamp on it and level up year three. A couple of

00:04:06.560 | housekeeping things here. You know, we

00:04:08.640 | by the way, sorry, can I say one thing? Absolutely. Like you

00:04:10.680 | said, Yeah, there is so much room to build real communities.

00:04:15.800 | And I think people are just so tired and bored with everything

00:04:22.400 | online. So I think offline experiences will be a huge value

00:04:28.760 | ad in people's lives.

00:04:29.880 | Yeah, there's definitely a bridge from online to offline.

00:04:33.200 | And the all in meetups that Ray's been hosting the best the

00:04:37.960 | best example. No, the best example of at scale of online to

00:04:42.720 | offline are dating apps. And all I can see is that's a pretty

00:04:46.960 | dissatisfying experience for a lot of people. And so outside of

00:04:50.600 | dating apps, there aren't many really great examples where

00:04:53.400 | like minded people can hang out and have fun and you know, talk

00:04:59.400 | learn party.

00:05:00.920 | It's really interesting. You bring this up. I just finished

00:05:03.880 | John hates new book, The Anxious Generation. And if you've

00:05:08.160 | listened to it, but there's a pair of books out right now, bad

00:05:10.720 | therapy. And this one about kids. And the premise of this

00:05:14.760 | book shamoff is screen time, as you referred to, you know,

00:05:18.960 | people being online. Not only is it bad for kids and adults, it's

00:05:24.000 | also blocking to your point real world connection. And so we all

00:05:28.880 | want a little more real world connection. And so john, welcome

00:05:31.480 | to the team. Additionally, I'll just two more housekeeping items

00:05:35.680 | here and we'll get to the show. We're gonna have a 1 million

00:05:38.200 | subscriber party. If you want to be part of that 1 million

00:05:40.960 | subscriber party, you can increase your chances without

00:05:43.120 | announcing how we're going to give the tickets away. But you

00:05:45.600 | can increase your chances by going to YouTube right now pause

00:05:48.360 | the show, subscribe to the all in podcast channel, hit the bell.

00:05:51.760 | So you get the alert for the best chance of getting one of

00:05:54.560 | the golden tickets to the 1 million subscriber party. And we

00:05:57.400 | are at 486,000. When we add 14,000 more, we're going to do a

00:06:02.000 | live q&a with all the besties. So get in on that as well. john,

00:06:06.600 | any any parting thoughts here or comments? Which bestie has been

00:06:11.280 | the most difficult to work with in the first month? Which one

00:06:14.560 | has been the most delightful go?

00:06:15.840 | It's been a pleasure across the board. I think you know, part of

00:06:20.120 | the beauty of the show is that there are so many different

00:06:22.360 | personalities and viewpoints. And really happy to be part of

00:06:25.400 | the team excited for what we're going to continue building.

00:06:27.520 | How diplomatic who's been the worst to deal with? Who's been

00:06:29.960 | the terror? Be honest. Tell me. We'll talk about it in your one

00:06:34.000 | year review. All right, john. Great job.

00:06:36.800 | Like, who's been the most erotic? Likely freeberg? Who's

00:06:41.560 | read the most value add? Likely me. And who's been the most

00:06:45.320 | am I the most unresponsive?

00:06:51.480 | That's why I get to vote proxy. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's it's

00:06:56.040 | just wild. What's going on here? It really is Game of Thrones.

00:06:59.480 | And you have been put in the center of a john. Congratulations.

00:07:02.760 | Welcome to the Iron Throne. Watch your back. All right,

00:07:07.200 | dismissed, john. Let us know. Thanks, john. We can be helpful.

00:07:11.280 | Salute to you, john. We got to get going here. We got a big

00:07:15.280 | show for you, everybody. Welcome to the show. Officially David

00:07:19.520 | Sachs, your rain man, Chamath Bhaiya Bhatia, chairman

00:07:23.600 | dictator, Sultan of science, David freeberg. I'm the world's

00:07:27.320 | greatest moderator. Welcome to the program. A quick correction

00:07:31.200 | up top that many of you in the crypto space, let us know about

00:07:35.920 | immediately after the episode dropped. We talked about SPF

00:07:39.800 | getting 25 years. And that broke right as we started the show.

00:07:43.640 | And we discussed that the customers of FTX we're going to

00:07:47.000 | get made whole, there's been a lot of speculation about them

00:07:49.400 | being made whole. However, there was an important note, FTX

00:07:55.800 | deposits are getting paid back in US dollars, not the crypto

00:07:58.920 | that dollar amount we've learned is based on the price of their

00:08:02.480 | tokens at the bankruptcy date. The bankruptcy date was November

00:08:04.960 | 11, in 2022. super important. Because the report that started

00:08:11.640 | the run on FTX was published November 2, a couple of days in

00:08:14.800 | between those two dates, and a bunch of crypto plummeted Solana

00:08:19.160 | dropped 50% between November 5 and November 11. That's just one

00:08:22.520 | example. But since then, Solana has been up 11 x and bitcoins up

00:08:27.320 | 4x, Ethereum doubled. So if you want to these depositors, you

00:08:31.480 | miss that run up. And so FTX customers were rightfully

00:08:35.240 | furious. I'll pause there before I get into more details. Any any

00:08:39.440 | thoughts on this sex?

00:08:40.840 | Yeah, I mean, just to hit the nail on the head here, if you

00:08:45.320 | had left your Solana at FTX, you're going to get $16 per

00:08:50.320 | token back. And that apparently was the price at the time that

00:08:54.920 | they went under. So according to the the judicial proceedings,

00:08:59.960 | you've been quote unquote made whole. But the truth is that

00:09:02.680 | Solana at this moment is trading at $188. So you have not been

00:09:06.720 | made whole. And this is why the crypto community is furious. And

00:09:10.480 | so that that basically is the correction. Now, I thought it

00:09:13.360 | was interesting that the judge played into this notion. And we

00:09:17.240 | talked about that quote from the judge last week, where he said,

00:09:20.680 | that if you go to Vegas, abscond with your customers money, gamble

00:09:24.960 | it and then pay them off with the winnings, then you've still

00:09:28.400 | committed a crime. He seemed to be conceding this idea that the

00:09:32.040 | investors or the depositors at FTX have been made whole. Clearly

00:09:36.000 | they have not been, but his quote kind of lent credence to

00:09:39.240 | that. And the reason the judge was talking about is because

00:09:42.320 | SPF lawyers were clearly making this argument that his sentence

00:09:46.880 | should be commuted or reduced, because it pausers have been

00:09:51.480 | made whole. And I think what you saw in the media coverage is

00:09:54.720 | that the reporters were buying into this idea of depositors

00:09:59.160 | being made whole. I mean, you guys got this from somewhere,

00:10:01.920 | right? I mean, this is what the media coverage. So the media was

00:10:05.840 | doing what has been doing throughout the FTX case, which

00:10:09.120 | is carrying water for SPF. And I believe that this narrative that

00:10:13.960 | they're trying to concoct, which we now know is completely false,

00:10:17.080 | is designed to serve a purpose. And I think that purpose is to

00:10:20.680 | get SPF, either pardoned or have his sentence commuted. Because

00:10:26.200 | Mr. Bankman and Miss Freed are huge Democratic Party bundlers.

00:10:30.420 | And I think the goal here is to create the idea in the public's

00:10:34.880 | mind that people weren't really hurt by this. This was just sort

00:10:38.920 | of youthful indiscretion or hijinks. And, you know, it's a

00:10:43.600 | bunch of hijinks, right? shenanigans, but shenanigans

00:10:47.720 | where no one was really hurt. And if they can create that

00:10:50.040 | impression in the public's mind, pardon my can now set up getting

00:10:54.160 | one of their Democratic Party connections. Yeah, to help push

00:10:58.080 | for a commutation of the sentence. I think there's a

00:11:00.320 | narrative going on. I think there's an agenda behind the

00:11:03.040 | narrative. And it's interesting what I'm saying here.

00:11:06.040 | Yeah, this pardon power is really powerful. Chamath, any

00:11:08.680 | thoughts here on the bankruptcy judge, making that call to sell

00:11:13.120 | the chairs, because obviously, if crypto had tanked since that

00:11:16.840 | time, it would look like he saved the money by selling them,

00:11:19.120 | clearing the positions and giving them cash. But what is

00:11:21.560 | the right thing for the bankruptcy judge to do here,

00:11:24.640 | keep the equities, the tokens, or to sell it and freeze it in

00:11:28.880 | time? It seems like a very difficult one.

00:11:31.400 | We got to correct that for just in a certain way. So the trustee

00:11:35.280 | has been selling the tokens post run up. The point is that he's

00:11:40.200 | selling tokens at current prices, call it 188. And then

00:11:44.520 | using that to pay off depositors at $16. So the only reason the

00:11:49.600 | depositors have been quote unquote made whole, is because

00:11:52.800 | they're getting the benefit of this run up, but they're not

00:11:54.680 | paying them back. At the price of their salon today, they're

00:11:58.640 | paying them at this price that got fixed at the time of the

00:12:01.480 | bankruptcy. The truth is, this is no one's getting made whole.

00:12:05.680 | Yeah, this is the, you know, the really hard thing to track here,

00:12:09.200 | because we couldn't find when they were selling it or how much

00:12:12.160 | they've been selling this seems to be being done in the shadows

00:12:15.560 | or in the background. And so if anybody out there as we

00:12:17.640 | crowdsource what's going on here, wants to keep us up to

00:12:21.720 | date, let us know. But yeah, these tokens, some number of

00:12:25.160 | them got sold at a low price, some of them are getting sold, I

00:12:27.480 | guess, as time goes on, Chamath, your just thoughts on how to do

00:12:32.480 | this properly? What's the proper hygiene here? I mean, it's,

00:12:35.240 | we're not a great experts.

00:12:36.680 | That's a great question. I don't know the differences between

00:12:40.760 | chapter seven and chapter 11 bankruptcy law, but I don't know

00:12:45.120 | what was filed here was a chapter seven or chapter 11. I

00:12:48.280 | don't, I don't know. But it seems that this was the only

00:12:53.280 | thing that they could do, which was to liquidate into a common,

00:12:57.160 | you know, unit of measure. Because at the end of the day,

00:13:00.760 | their auditors had to measure in a standard unit, and that was

00:13:05.400 | probably the US dollar. And so then they were trying to work

00:13:08.080 | backwards from that shareholder equity number to get them back

00:13:12.280 | to that number. So it was kind of logical that that this is the

00:13:17.240 | only thing they could do. And I guess they benefited from the

00:13:20.720 | fact that there was a run up, but it's really unfortunate for

00:13:23.040 | folks. So I don't know, maybe in other countries, had this been a

00:13:26.800 | differently constituted company organized in a different place.

00:13:29.600 | Bankruptcy law could have allowed the liquidator to

00:13:32.040 | actually just distribute the assets on a pro rata basis.

00:13:34.840 | This was a chapter. I got the update here. This is a chapter

00:13:40.520 | 11. And in September, the judge allowed FT x to start

00:13:43.920 | liquidating up to 100 million a week in Delaware, right? This is

00:13:47.560 | a chapter 11 Delaware filing. Yeah, chapter 11 in Delaware,

00:13:51.120 | correct. And this could increase to 200 million a week. So it

00:13:53.920 | seems like they did, they did start the liquidation later. So

00:13:57.040 | they might have caught some of the run ups. So they did catch

00:13:59.040 | the run up, then you could be doubly upset.

00:14:01.000 | Right. My point, my point is, in different in different

00:14:03.760 | situations, one could imagine where the shareholders could

00:14:07.600 | have been allowed to vote. Do you want money? Or do you want

00:14:11.240 | in kind? And if in kind, maybe you get a pro rata distribution

00:14:15.320 | of all the assets, which have included a whole bunch of these

00:14:18.400 | coins, but then it probably would have included a bunch of

00:14:22.440 | other assets, not just Solana and Bitcoin, then eat that

00:14:25.480 | ripped. So

00:14:26.600 | I think the point is that if they had distributed in kind,

00:14:29.520 | meaning tokens, that people would have seen, oh, wait, I

00:14:32.720 | only got back one 10th, the number of tokens that I put in.

00:14:35.520 | That's the point, right? Yeah, you put in 100 Solana tokens,

00:14:39.480 | you only get back, call it roughly 10. Because the price

00:14:42.720 | of those tokens was fixed at 16. And they can now sell at

00:14:46.280 | somewhere between 100 and 200. They're able to, quote, make you

00:14:50.160 | hold the $16 price, but that's not being made whole, that was

00:14:53.240 | the what are they doing with the extra money sacks? Because are

00:14:55.760 | they using that to make other people in this whole crater hole

00:14:59.800 | as well? So maybe they're thinking holistically, they're

00:15:01.600 | taking the profits of those Solana holders, let's say, or

00:15:04.360 | Bitcoin holders went for x. And is that going to trickle down to

00:15:07.520 | the equity holders? Who knows? Freeberg, you have thoughts?

00:15:09.960 | Yeah, I think the plan is that that excess capital beyond what

00:15:14.200 | is quote, owed to the account holders goes to the equity

00:15:17.160 | holders, because it's considered excess of the liabilities.

00:15:20.600 | Therefore, it goes to the shareholders. I'll also say, in

00:15:24.800 | a traditional like brokerage, you create an account. And when

00:15:28.920 | you set up an account, your account has a currency

00:15:31.520 | denomination. It's a dollar based account or euro based

00:15:35.720 | account. And then you your account holds a bunch of assets.

00:15:39.400 | And so at any given time, the value of your account is

00:15:42.640 | represented to you in that local currency. The challenge with

00:15:46.680 | crypto exchanges is that there's often this representation of a

00:15:49.600 | wallet, which is meant to hold assets that don't necessarily

00:15:53.000 | have the intention of being translated into a locally

00:15:55.920 | denominated currency. And so I think that's what makes the

00:15:58.880 | system different in the case of a US exchange bankruptcy. And

00:16:01.840 | this happens in commodity trading accounts or commodity

00:16:04.400 | exchanges. Often, there's a freezing of the assets and then

00:16:07.440 | a liquidation of the assets, where the freezing of the assets

00:16:10.640 | sets the price or the value at the moment of what you're

00:16:13.920 | supposed to hold in that account in your currency of your

00:16:17.120 | account. And so the bankruptcy judge and the trustee are

00:16:21.440 | treating this like a liquidation process using a local currency

00:16:26.160 | that was set at the time, whereas many folks don't

00:16:29.600 | consider that the intention of the account that the account was

00:16:32.360 | meant to hold assets, that it's really a portfolio of assets

00:16:35.800 | that shouldn't be liquidated to try and generate local currency

00:16:39.040 | because that's kind of the whole point of many of these crypto

00:16:41.800 | currencies themselves. It was a custodial account, basically,

00:16:45.760 | right, a custodial account of assets versus a trading account

00:16:50.080 | of which is meant to ultimately be converted back into a local

00:16:53.920 | currency, which is typical. And I think that's what makes this

00:16:57.600 | such a challenging process. Yeah, just liquidate everything.

00:17:01.640 | Pool of money arrives, distribute the money. But the

00:17:06.760 | way bankruptcy works is that there's a pecking order that

00:17:09.760 | essentially you you have all the assets of the company, the

00:17:12.600 | job of the trustee is to liquidate them, they have a

00:17:15.040 | fiduciary duty to get the highest price they can for those

00:17:17.600 | assets, we have no reason to believe that they haven't, they

00:17:20.360 | seem to have waited a decent enough amount of time to get to

00:17:23.560 | benefit from this crypto recovery. And then what happens

00:17:26.560 | is, again, there's like a pecking order for the

00:17:28.360 | distribution of the proceeds. And you're going to have debt

00:17:31.760 | holders, they're going to be senior to the equity holders,

00:17:34.440 | the depositors are going to be high up there as well.

00:17:38.480 | Government agencies that are owed fines are going to be high

00:17:40.800 | up there, there's gonna be a very specific pecking order in

00:17:43.360 | which the equity holders are last,

00:17:44.800 | if we want to go into conspiracy corner and put our tinfoil hats

00:17:47.160 | on, you mentioned the IRS, the CFTC, right, these government

00:17:51.440 | agencies are owned like over $20 billion. If all this crypto

00:17:55.680 | profits, if they're higher in the stack, they would be going

00:17:59.240 | directly to the government and the government is handling the

00:18:01.120 | process here. So it doesn't look right.

00:18:02.960 | But I don't I don't think I don't think it's that's driving

00:18:05.440 | it. I think that I think bankruptcy rules are very

00:18:08.360 | specific, and they're completely designed around, again,

00:18:13.040 | assessing what the value of each claimant is, at the time of

00:18:19.440 | bankruptcy, and then creating a pecking order for distribution.

00:18:21.680 | So I don't think there's any foul play here. I think that

00:18:25.760 | this is just the way that the cookie crumbles. But I think

00:18:29.120 | that it's simply wrong, or misleading, to say that the

00:18:33.960 | depositors were made whole. And I think the reason we thought

00:18:37.680 | that is because of these statements that were promulgated

00:18:41.840 | through the media, including the judge to give people that

00:18:44.840 | impression. And I think it really just underscores that the

00:18:48.280 | media always has an agenda. And you got to be so careful about

00:18:52.200 | imbibing their narratives. Because without knowing exactly

00:18:56.560 | what their agenda is, you can imbibe their bias.

00:18:59.960 | Yeah, my understanding of bankruptcy is like the they can

00:19:03.400 | get a little bit creative, and the bankruptcy judges can be a

00:19:06.840 | little creative and trying to holistically think about what's

00:19:09.640 | the best thing for the business and all the stakeholder

00:19:11.720 | shareholders. But anyway, we'll keep monitoring it. And like

00:19:15.240 | we've said before, anytime we make a mistake, we're going to

00:19:17.760 | talk about it right up front. Anytime there's an omission or

00:19:20.760 | breaking news happens, we're going to fill you in. And that

00:19:24.280 | leads us to our second topic, some more news broke about truth

00:19:27.200 | social, we had a nice spicy discussion about it last week.

00:19:30.440 | Since that time, shares of TMTG, or dollar sign D, DJ T have

00:19:36.400 | dropped 30%. And the numbers for their revenue also confirmed it

00:19:41.760 | came out pretty ugly 4 million in revenue, 15 million losses,

00:19:44.920 | floats only 30 million shares. But there are some follow up

00:19:48.680 | stories here we'll get into Trump is suing the two co

00:19:51.160 | founders to reduce their combined 8.6 state to zero his

00:19:54.560 | arguments co founders set the company up improperly and

00:19:56.840 | mishandled the launch of true social so they should forfeit

00:19:59.320 | their stock. These are both co founders previously on The

00:20:02.080 | Apprentice, Trump owned 60%. And he stands for receiving earn out

00:20:06.600 | of 36 million additional shares in the coming week, worth almost

00:20:10.320 | 2 billion. So huge windfall for President Trump coming. In

00:20:14.200 | addition to that, Sacha, you're gonna love this Russia, Russia,

00:20:16.920 | Russia, the Guardian is reporting TMTG raised $8

00:20:20.800 | million in emergency funding that might have possibly come

00:20:24.320 | from a Russian linked entity. The SPAC while it was on hold,

00:20:28.920 | was running out of cash, Russia linked entity. You read this all

00:20:32.360 | about this in the Guardian, they tried to raise some money, they

00:20:34.840 | wound up raising 8 million across two convertible notes

00:20:37.480 | from a bank called Paxium located in the Caribbean, owned

00:20:41.080 | by a Russian who is reportedly the nephew of Alexander

00:20:45.920 | Smirnoff, who used to work in Putin's executive office until

00:20:49.080 | 2017. Is this a joke? No, I mean, I wish it was a joke,

00:20:53.320 | because I know I'm gonna get barbecued for, like by the by

00:20:56.560 | the Trump supporters in the comments. But it is crazy that

00:20:59.840 | the Russians are

00:21:01.040 | his name, Alexander Smirnoff. Isn't that the name of a vodka?

00:21:05.360 | Kind of is s m i r n o v smirnoff. Maybe from doesn't

00:21:10.560 | even drink. I mean, maybe Yeah, I don't know if Putin drinks or

00:21:13.640 | not. Anyway, Trump doesn't drink. That's true. Yeah. If

00:21:20.600 | it does. Oh, really? Is that true? Yeah. So anyway, important

00:21:26.440 | caveats to all this stuff. Interesting story, though.

00:21:29.160 | There's no indication that Trump or Trump media had any idea

00:21:31.960 | about the nature of these loans, because they were opaque. And

00:21:36.000 | Trump media says it's propaganda and false narrative. Your

00:21:40.840 | thoughts on the Trump's back sacks and in Russia, and it's

00:21:43.680 | your favorite topic?

00:21:44.400 | Well, we're, it's gonna be a really long seven months, if

00:21:48.720 | we're going to bring up every one of these evidence free

00:21:51.000 | stories of some sort of Russia connection to Trump. I mean,

00:21:54.360 | this article doesn't even make sense. Like you said, here's the

00:21:56.920 | giveaway in the middle of the article, they say the Guardian

00:21:59.720 | does, quote, there is no indication that Trump or Trump

00:22:03.440 | media had any idea about the nature of the loans beyond that

00:22:05.800 | they were opaque, nor has the company or its executives been

00:22:09.160 | accused of wrongdoing. So then what are we talking about here?

00:22:12.320 | It just there's some guy with a Russian sounding last name. I

00:22:15.240 | mean, literally, that's the story. It doesn't even make

00:22:17.400 | sense. I don't understand how you can get a loan and not know

00:22:20.240 | who your counterparty is. So this whole thing just seems like

00:22:24.240 | it's part of the milieu of let's create any connections we can

00:22:28.680 | between Trump and Russia. And the giveaway on this was

00:22:33.040 | actually a New York Times story that just came out in the past

00:22:36.760 | week. It was called Russia amps up online campaign against

00:22:39.600 | Ukraine before us elections. Now. The interesting thing about

00:22:43.880 | this story is that it was reporting allegations by Clint

00:22:49.720 | Watts, who has apparently been hired by Microsoft to run

00:22:55.720 | something called the Threat Analysis Center. And his job

00:22:58.840 | basically is to find Russian interference in the election.

00:23:02.160 | Now, here's what I found interesting about this is that

00:23:05.600 | Clint Watts that that name rang a bell for me. And it's because

00:23:10.200 | Clint Watts was involved in the Twitter files. So back in

00:23:15.640 | January of last year, Matt IEB broke this story in the Twitter

00:23:22.080 | files that Clint Watts was running the Hamilton 68

00:23:27.360 | dashboard. He was basically behind that project. He's a

00:23:29.960 | former FBI agent. What was Hamilton 68 Hamilton 68 claim

00:23:34.480 | that it was tracking 500 Russian accounts on social media, who

00:23:39.160 | were engaged in manipulation of online discourse? Well, as it

00:23:44.840 | turns out, executives inside of Twitter knew these accounts were

00:23:48.440 | and they were just American accounts, some Canadian

00:23:50.840 | accounts. And in the words of Twitter executives, the whole

00:23:53.720 | Hamilton 68 dashboard was bullshit. That was their word.

00:23:58.320 | And nevertheless, this Hamilton 68 project that Clint Watts ran,

00:24:02.880 | put out story after story for years about how the Russians

00:24:07.040 | were meddling in American political debates. And these

00:24:11.040 | stories, the Hamilton 68 claims became the basis for 1000s

00:24:15.080 | literally 1000s of mainstream media stories, claiming that

00:24:19.640 | Russia was interfering in American politics. It all turned

00:24:23.400 | out to be a total hoax, a total fraud. Now, the amazing thing to

00:24:27.300 | me is you would think after an expose like this, that it would

00:24:31.520 | at least be mentioned in the New York Times, that the person

00:24:34.480 | they're quoting, as saying that the Russians are meddling in our

00:24:38.520 | elections, has a previous history of setting up Russia

00:24:43.560 | hoaxes. And they don't even mention that, despite the type

00:24:47.400 | of story. Moreover, it's amazing to me that this Watts guy, not

00:24:52.520 | only landed on his feet, he got a cushy job at Microsoft running

00:24:56.480 | their threats analysis center, so that he could put out more of

00:24:59.280 | this threat analysis on how the Russians were meddling. I can't

00:25:02.640 | imagine a less qualified person to be describing Russia threats

00:25:06.920 | than somebody who was caught red handed, manufacturing bogus

00:25:11.040 | threats for years,

00:25:12.160 | for burgers on any event, Jason, I would just say that, you know,

00:25:15.280 | going back to the SVF, the story, the takeaway there is, be

00:25:18.960 | careful what you're imbibing from the mainstream media,

00:25:22.260 | because there's always an agenda. And until this story

00:25:26.080 | about true social from the Guardian has a little bit more

00:25:29.220 | detail to it, that makes sense to me, I'm just going to put it

00:25:32.160 | in the category of more of the same.

00:25:34.280 | Yeah. And you know, as I've said on this program before, Russia's

00:25:37.560 | explicit strategies, just put their fingerprints on everything

00:25:40.200 | and cause chaos like they did with the Internet Research

00:25:43.320 | Agency and all the trolling they were doing the last couple of

00:25:45.840 | elections, free burger thoughts on this, you're concerned about

00:25:48.600 | the interference in the election.

00:25:49.920 | I'm not gonna know my thoughts on this. Yeah, this is this is

00:25:54.440 | nothing I feel like I should be thoughtful about.

00:25:56.640 | Okay, sounds good. All right. And then wrapping up, I had

00:25:59.600 | mentioned last episode, about the insider trading charges in

00:26:03.520 | the company that was the SPAC before they purchased true

00:26:09.120 | social, and the three, two of the three men have been charged

00:26:13.600 | with insider trading just pleaded guilty. So Michael and

00:26:16.840 | Gerald Schwartzman made 23 million in illicit profits

00:26:21.200 | trading shares of DWAC before the merger was announced. They

00:26:23.840 | each pled guilty to one count of securities fraud, face three to

00:26:28.040 | five years, neither was involved with truth. This is the SPAC that

00:26:32.960 | came before truth. And there it is, folks. So there's your

00:26:36.520 | update, what's the relevance of this to being a top issue on the

00:26:38.880 | online pod? I just think this is gonna be a really long seven. I

00:26:41.560 | think it's gonna be a really long seven months for us till

00:26:43.480 | the election if we're going to bring up every mainstream media

00:26:46.960 | story that seeks to create a connection between this is an

00:26:50.320 | SEC filing. Yeah, it's done. This one has nothing to do with

00:26:53.320 | Russia. This is the insider trading one.

00:26:54.640 | But you just said it has no connection to true social. So

00:26:57.840 | why are we even talking?

00:26:58.520 | No, no, it's the these are the people who traded the stock

00:27:02.160 | before truth social merged with it. This is the SPAC that was

00:27:05.720 | social, and they traded when they found out that Trump was

00:27:09.120 | going to be the SPAC that was merged with. So I'm just

00:27:11.480 | following up closing the loop on that breaking news. Google is

00:27:13.800 | reportedly considering making an offer to hire, acquire HubSpot

00:27:17.000 | trading a $34 billion market cap that just came out, reported by

00:27:20.600 | Reuters, who cited anonymous sources shares up 7% on the

00:27:23.880 | news. If you don't know HubSpot, awesome tool, we use it, CRM

00:27:27.840 | that blends marketing, sales, customer service, all that kind

00:27:29.760 | of good stuff. And so here's their quarterly revenue since

00:27:34.200 | IPO. They've been public for 10 years, as you pointed out in the

00:27:37.600 | group chat, Friedberg, and this has been slow and steady

00:27:40.560 | revenue, power of SAS, I guess, and a great product. I'm not a

00:27:44.480 | shareholder. Here's the quarterly revenue growth on a

00:27:46.800 | year over year basis, stock chart, yada, yada. Chamath, I

00:27:51.240 | guess this is something we've been talking about here, which

00:27:53.640 | is M&A and M&A being pushed into the cold plunge, and being

00:27:59.000 | frozen. And now we see something like this. What is what do you

00:28:01.560 | take from this, if it's in fact a true report?

00:28:03.480 | I mean, I think it's a bit of an odd acquisition. And the reason

00:28:06.160 | is that it's become pretty clear for all of big tech that any

00:28:10.800 | acquisition that they do is going to be highly scrutinized.

00:28:13.640 | And so just from an EV expected value perspective, if you're

00:28:19.920 | going to try to acquire something and spend the next

00:28:22.200 | year beating your head against regulators, why not do it for

00:28:26.240 | something that's really valuable. And I would not

00:28:28.800 | characterize HubSpot as strategically valuable for

00:28:32.120 | Google, I think it's an important ecosystem player. And

00:28:35.360 | it's probably better off as an independent company. So if I

00:28:37.960 | were Google, I'd be trying to buy something much more useful

00:28:40.200 | like perplexity or something.

00:28:42.280 | Friedberg, your thoughts on this?

00:28:45.280 | First of all, it's super impressive HubSpot's been

00:28:47.920 | public, they went public at about a billion dollar market

00:28:49.960 | cap 10 years ago, and today they're trading at 34 billion.

00:28:52.680 | So organically develop this business, and they provide

00:28:56.880 | marketing automation software. So basically things like CRM

00:28:59.880 | tools, email marketing tools. So when you use advertising tools,

00:29:04.200 | and you generate leads, those leads come in, what do you do

00:29:06.760 | with them? So let's say you're running a website that sells

00:29:09.240 | bicycles, people want information on bicycles, what do

00:29:13.160 | you do with those people after they get information on your

00:29:15.560 | website? And how do you track them down? And how do you sell

00:29:17.720 | them a bicycle? If you're a big enterprise software company, and

00:29:21.640 | you start to get companies reaching out to you through your

00:29:23.760 | website, how do you then convert them? So you use CRM tools,

00:29:26.960 | customer relationship management tools, Salesforce is obviously a

00:29:31.440 | behemoth in the space. But HubSpot has this integrated

00:29:34.840 | marketing automation and CRM platform for taking leads, and

00:29:40.400 | then converting those leads and selling products to them. So the

00:29:43.800 | sales team and the marketing team uses HubSpot software to

00:29:47.440 | operate and do their work and do it better. When I worked at

00:29:51.400 | Google in 2005, the main thing I worked on is how do we do a

00:29:56.680 | better job taking our advertisers and giving them more

00:30:01.000 | tools that they can then convert the leads that they're getting

00:30:04.720 | into customers. And so one of the first things I worked on in

00:30:09.760 | 2004, and then we closed the deal in 2005, was acquiring

00:30:12.800 | urchin, which became Google Analytics, so that companies

00:30:15.920 | could better track how folks were converting on their website

00:30:19.440 | after they spend marketing dollars on Google, how do you

00:30:22.000 | see where those people go on your website and what they're

00:30:24.000 | actually doing on the website, and ultimately make your website

00:30:26.720 | better so you can sell more products and more software. And

00:30:29.240 | one of the things I worked on was CRM. So I had this

00:30:32.200 | conversation with the executive team with Larry and Sergey and

00:30:35.000 | others at that time. And we talked about what should we buy

00:30:38.320 | a CRM company. And we actually had a conversation they did with

00:30:42.000 | Mark Benioff at the time. And we talked about, is there a way to

00:30:44.840 | buy Salesforce and Salesforce went public shortly before

00:30:48.360 | Google, and it was more

00:30:50.160 | richly valued than I think the appetite was at the time to make

00:30:55.200 | this leap to buying a CRM company, we actually spent quite

00:30:58.640 | a bit of time meeting with and I personally spent time meeting

00:31:00.840 | with NetSuite, which ultimately got rolled in, I think it was a

00:31:04.400 | Larry Ellison was the primary owner of NetSuite, we looked at

00:31:07.240 | a few other CRM companies. And this was always meant to be the

00:31:10.800 | next solution that you plug into the advertising platform at

00:31:13.960 | Google, you get all these leads from advertising, and how do you

00:31:17.600 | convert those leads and make them customers. And many of the

00:31:20.800 | other things we looked at were things like checkout software,

00:31:23.640 | and software that would let you run a website to sell your

00:31:26.880 | products to customers on the website. And so which became

00:31:29.120 | Shopify, in a way, which became Shopify. And we had looked very

00:31:32.640 | deeply at doing this at Google is actually building a product

00:31:36.120 | called Google checkout. It wasn't very successful, but it

00:31:39.040 | was to do exactly this, which is to build a basically a Shopify

00:31:42.640 | type competitor. And so this has always been the natural fit for

00:31:46.440 | Google's business, Google made a quarter trillion dollars last

00:31:49.640 | year in advertising revenue. And then they didn't make much

00:31:52.680 | revenue after the advertising generated leads, because Google

00:31:56.760 | doesn't have a great commerce business, and they don't have

00:31:58.840 | any of these other enterprise tools. So this is a very

00:32:01.240 | natural fit into Google's advertising business, and taking

00:32:05.920 | all of the leads from advertising and better

00:32:07.920 | converting them and giving your sales team the tools they need

00:32:11.360 | to convert those leads into customers. So it makes great

00:32:14.160 | strategic sense. It's been a concept that's been around for

00:32:16.480 | 20 years at Google, certainly, they're going to face

00:32:18.840 | regulatory scrutiny, but it doesn't have the same sort of

00:32:20.880 | overlap with the ad network businesses, because they're not

00:32:26.120 | very heavily in the ad network business at HubSpot. But it's a

00:32:28.960 | really good kind of enterprise software plug, plug in some

00:32:31.080 | would say acquisitions are one of three types, they are

00:32:33.920 | defensive, they are offensive, or they are about reinforcing

00:32:38.480 | the status quo. If you had to bucket HubSpot into one of those

00:32:41.280 | three things, is this an offensive M&A? Is it a

00:32:44.720 | defensive M&A? Or is this status quo?

00:32:48.840 | I think it gives advertisers more tools that can integrate

00:32:54.760 | with AdWords, which is how advertisers spend ad dollars is

00:32:57.680 | through AdWords platform. And so as a result, it locks the

00:33:01.640 | advertisers on to Google's ad platform, keeps them more

00:33:05.480 | engaged. And so I think that the benefit to Chamath's point is

00:33:09.960 | that they're going to both protect ad revenue at Google by

00:33:13.120 | locking in people on the on the CRM side, and the marginal impact

00:33:18.320 | they'll get from selling CRM services, not that impactful to

00:33:21.640 | the business. I mean, if you could spend, let's say with the

00:33:24.560 | premium $50 billion on HubSpot, or $5 billion on perplexity

00:33:30.080 | today, which one would you buy?

00:33:33.200 | I think you got to buy HubSpot, you're protecting your point,

00:33:36.000 | you're protecting a quarter trillion dollar ad business.

00:33:38.680 | HubSpot makes $2 billion in revenue. So it's 1% of the size

00:33:43.000 | of Google's ad business. And it helps you lock in some

00:33:46.400 | percentage of that $250 billion. So that's an important

00:33:49.640 | strategic acquisition, I think for Google.

00:33:51.640 | So you'd rather buy something in marketing automation versus AI?

00:33:55.400 | I think they should spend the money in AI. But I think you

00:33:58.200 | have to buy something to...

00:33:59.640 | It's a good question.

00:34:01.320 | To further the revenue. Yeah.

00:34:02.840 | What does Google accomplish here that they couldn't do with an

00:34:04.920 | integration?

00:34:05.600 | A partnership, you mean?

00:34:09.320 | Well, I mean, they could just build on HubSpot's platform,

00:34:12.280 | just create a connector between Google Ads and HubSpot.

00:34:15.440 | I think that exists already, actually.

00:34:16.600 | Exactly. So what's the point?

00:34:17.960 | What do you really understand?

00:34:19.360 | I think what Friedberg is saying in nicer languages, they're

00:34:22.520 | going to make it a roach motel.

00:34:23.680 | Lock in.

00:34:24.360 | You get in and you can't get out.

00:34:26.440 | I mean, it gives you the full life cycle of the advertiser

00:34:29.000 | sack. So I mean, you understand the funnel, right? You get the

00:34:31.960 | actual profile of the customer.

00:34:33.880 | Yeah. The problem with the roach motel M&A strategy is that

00:34:36.680 | people sniff that out pretty quickly. And then they start to

00:34:40.120 | carve out these very discrete parts of the product that they

00:34:42.880 | want you to divest in order to get the whole thing done. That's

00:34:45.640 | the thing that surprisingly, I think the regulators have gotten

00:34:49.680 | smart about. And I suspect it's not that the regulators

00:34:52.080 | themselves know these discrete ideas, but that the answers are

00:34:55.400 | fed to them by competitors who want to just slow these

00:34:58.600 | processes down and make these things convoluted and

00:35:01.760 | complicated.

00:35:02.480 | Oh, they snitch? They send the snitch in?

00:35:04.960 | I think it's very smart for a competitor to actually call a

00:35:07.600 | regulator and give them a roadmap of how to make the deal

00:35:12.080 | happen, but in a very convoluted, complicated way. You

00:35:16.200 | remember, I suspect that's what happened in Microsoft

00:35:18.400 | Activision. Microsoft brilliantly fought it off, right?

00:35:21.640 | And so they were able to get the whole thing done completely on

00:35:23.760 | their terms. But in many other cases, you get these discrete

00:35:26.560 | things where it's like, okay, divest this, sell that, keep

00:35:29.160 | this. And it's like, why are we doing this? But I just think the

00:35:33.600 | roach motel strategy is harder to get done these days, because

00:35:36.880 | folks will know how to make it super convoluted.

00:35:39.840 | I will tell you what, when a big company like this makes a big

00:35:43.320 | acquisition offer like this, as much as I know, Google's

00:35:46.600 | business, I think it's a generalization that can be drawn

00:35:49.480 | here. It's usually a negative signal about organic growth.

00:35:54.280 | Meaning if I'm a Google shareholder, I should look at

00:35:58.640 | this. And I should say, why do you need to make this

00:36:01.680 | acquisition? Why is there an indication in this bid, that

00:36:06.000 | there is some advertising revenue leakage going on? And

00:36:09.520 | then I should go spend time trying to understand that. I

00:36:12.880 | think there's a really important question there. Yeah.

00:36:14.760 | But this is why I'm asking you, like, obviously, they're not

00:36:17.400 | going to do this, because things are going perfectly in that

00:36:19.520 | space. And so if you're losing share, you're not going to be

00:36:22.640 | losing it to Bing, you're losing it to some form of AI, which is

00:36:25.360 | why, again, it's a bit of a head scratcher, spend a lot less

00:36:28.600 | money and just buy everything in the space or spend 50 billion

00:36:31.400 | and buy everything possible in the space.

00:36:33.000 | To give you just a little context here, this is going to

00:36:36.040 | be by far their largest acquisition, if it's true, if it

00:36:38.640 | gets closed, this is all speculation right now. Looking

00:36:41.400 | back, Motorola Mobility was bought for 12.5 billion, there

00:36:44.840 | were patents, there was the hardware business, which they

00:36:46.520 | spun out, you can look up the deal details there. But there's

00:36:50.000 | a long tail of companies they've bought Nest Labs, Fitbit, and

00:36:54.720 | YouTube, 3 billion, 2 billion, 1.6 billion, if you remember,

00:36:58.520 | they bought a Mandiant, I've never even heard of the

00:37:01.480 | cybersecurity company, 5.4 billion, they bought Nest for

00:37:04.080 | 3 billion, double click 3 billion, that was a long time

00:37:06.160 | ago, it's probably triple that value in today's dollars.

00:37:08.320 | By the way, remember, Fitbit, Fitbit took 18 or 24 months to

00:37:12.880 | close. It took a while. Yeah. Deep, deeply scrutinized. If you

00:37:16.960 | think a wearable on your wrist is going to get scrutinized when

00:37:19.400 | bought by Google, imagine what happens when a $50 billion

00:37:21.760 | marketing automation company gets bought by Google.

00:37:24.640 | Yeah, it's really interesting.

00:37:26.240 | Look, I don't think this acquisition makes any sense. I'm

00:37:28.920 | kind of in Jamas camp. This is this would be a very odd

00:37:31.600 | acquisition. I'm not even sure the story is true. There's been

00:37:33.680 | no confirmation of an actual bid made. This was basically an

00:37:36.960 | anonymous source, saying that Google had hired investment

00:37:39.880 | bankers to, you know, maybe kick the tires.

00:37:42.840 | Well, typically, these bankers float these problems like this,

00:37:46.040 | because they want to pump the deal.

00:37:48.360 | But yeah, imagine what the fees would be on $50 billion

00:37:51.120 | acquisition.

00:37:52.440 | But they want to shake some other buyers loose. Yeah, when

00:37:55.120 | you have these auctions.

00:37:57.040 | Well, look, it's gonna be very hard for any big tech company to

00:37:59.920 | do a $50 billion acquisition of anything just that given that

00:38:03.040 | lean economy FTC are opposed to bigness in and of itself. But I

00:38:07.160 | think from a strategic point of view, I agree this, this deal

00:38:10.360 | would be odd. I don't really see the connection to the Google

00:38:13.000 | ads business. HubSpot is used by companies to manage their

00:38:17.400 | pipelines. It's a competitive Salesforce. I see it all the

00:38:20.600 | time. I see startups using it all the time as the alternative

00:38:24.360 | to Salesforce because it's sort of easier to use more user

00:38:27.360 | friendly. And the main thing it does is you have your pipeline

00:38:31.040 | in there, you bring in the leads at the top of the funnel, and

00:38:34.120 | then you work them down to close deals.

00:38:36.080 | Where do those leads come from sex?

00:38:37.680 | I understand that they can come from Google AdWords, but most of

00:38:41.640 | them come from from ad spend. That's the connection. And it's

00:38:45.120 | always been this idea that those two should be integrated.

00:38:47.320 | Okay, but but the point is that if you think about your top of

00:38:52.160 | funnel, if you're one of the customers of HubSpot, using

00:38:55.720 | this, Google AdWords is just one of a number of channels. That's

00:38:59.640 | right. So you could be getting your leads through inbound, you

00:39:03.560 | could be getting your leads through events, you could be

00:39:06.400 | getting your leads through I mean, there's so many different

00:39:09.560 | sources. So it doesn't make sense to me that somehow, Google

00:39:16.280 | would need to acquire a company to manage not their advertisers,

00:39:20.760 | but the people their advertisers are trying to reach as one of a

00:39:24.160 | dozen different potential marketing channels. It just

00:39:26.680 | doesn't really make sense. I mean, the acquisitions where

00:39:29.160 | Google's been really successful have been broad horizontal

00:39:32.680 | platform plays like Android. This is as vertical as it gets.

00:39:36.680 | This is CRM software. This is basically Google getting into a

00:39:41.160 | vertical app for sales and marketing teams. Yeah. If you

00:39:46.760 | think about the business that this is most like it would be G

00:39:50.680 | suite. And because it's an enterprise play. And that's the

00:39:54.440 | most neglected part of Google's business.

00:39:56.560 | I think you're both missing a key piece to this. I think this

00:39:58.720 | is about the data. You look at these, these are the leads and

00:40:02.400 | the great contacts in the database of the customer which

00:40:05.520 | Google doesn't have access to and they can close the loop and

00:40:08.240 | they can make targeting of ads and get people deeper and they

00:40:12.080 | can fight for a larger percentage. So to your point,

00:40:14.560 | sacks, yes, you've got 20 different inbound feeds coming

00:40:18.560 | in for leads. If Google knows the leads that are already in

00:40:21.800 | there, they can then retarget them across their entire ad

00:40:24.440 | network, which is the largest in the world. That's the value. If

00:40:27.400 | I know your 10,000 best customers, and then I know when

00:40:30.600 | they're on Google searching, and I know that when they're in a

00:40:32.840 | Chrome browser, I know when they're on an Android phone, if

00:40:34.960 | they happen to use that, man, I can just start getting more of

00:40:38.320 | your ad dollars into it. That's what's actually happening here.

00:40:40.640 | It's they don't want to SAS business. They want the data

00:40:43.520 | they want to retarget folks, and then they want to make close

00:40:47.000 | more sales and be more efficient than Tick Tock, and Facebook

00:40:50.000 | meta. It's about

00:40:50.920 | you think they'd be allowed to use their customers data to

00:40:54.440 | somehow target their ad product?

00:40:55.800 | Absolutely. 100%. If you if I'm opting into it, and I say, Hey,

00:40:59.520 | you have 10,000 people in your database, you want to go find

00:41:01.760 | them we have you have 8000 of them connected that came in

00:41:04.160 | through Google search. What about the other 12,000? You want

00:41:06.480 | to try to find them in the Google ad network, we can put

00:41:08.600 | that together for you. That's actually if somebody is going to

00:41:11.360 | snitch on this deal, it's about the data.

00:41:13.160 | I'll tell you back in just improving conversion rates,

00:41:17.400 | drives more ad revenue. Bingo. And the key measurement we had

00:41:22.640 | the year after we bought urchin and launch Google Analytics was

00:41:26.000 | we looked at how much an advertiser spent on Google's ad

00:41:29.280 | words network before and after they installed Google Analytics.

00:41:33.360 | And that year, it was a ton of money. At the time, we saw an

00:41:37.240 | incremental roughly $500 million in revenue in ad spend with

00:41:42.440 | folks who installed Google Analytics from before versus

00:41:46.320 | after, because they then started to change their websites and

00:41:49.040 | tweak their sales flow or their marketing flow on their website

00:41:52.400 | to better convert customers so they could spend more on the

00:41:55.040 | network because higher conversion rates means you can

00:41:57.480 | spend a higher CPM on advertising. So the deeper you

00:42:01.640 | go from an integration perspective in closing sales,

00:42:05.040 | the better you actually can get and the more money you can spend

00:42:08.040 | on marketing on the front end. And so that benefits the growth

00:42:10.600 | in the network.

00:42:11.120 | And to build on your point, Friedberg, this is why Amazon

00:42:14.480 | and Uber and Instacart have become such mayor major players

00:42:18.480 | in advertising. They have the data on sales information, they

00:42:22.240 | still cover drop off and they sell conversions at the point

00:42:25.960 | sacks of the shopping cart about to be clicked on. And Amazon's

00:42:30.560 | been taking some of that in Instacart but intercepting some

00:42:34.040 | of those ads. Yeah, I'll speculate on this for a second.

00:42:36.520 | I think that if I'm sitting inside of Google, I see the

00:42:39.840 | capability of our AI tools, our generative AI tools, in being

00:42:43.720 | able to improve marketing and sales processes. And I'm saying

00:42:48.600 | how do we leverage that? Well, guess what, we don't actually

00:42:51.000 | have access to our advertiser sales and marketing automation

00:42:53.880 | workflow, because we don't have a CRM tool. So then the natural

00:42:58.640 | strategic thing is how do we get a CRM tool? Okay, well, we can't

00:43:02.120 | buy Salesforce. Well, we could buy HubSpot. That makes sense.

00:43:05.200 | Number two, but then we could we could apply our generative AI

00:43:08.200 | capabilities to improve conversion efficiency and HubSpot

00:43:11.200 | and probably grow revenue there as well. So it could be a fairly

00:43:13.880 | quickly accretive deal. And there's the benefit to the ad

00:43:16.560 | network. I think the Roach Motel idea is probably the best

00:43:19.520 | strategy here. Yeah, you're right. I just think I would if I

00:43:22.480 | were them with $50 billion, they're like, 30 billion, by the

00:43:26.200 | way, 35. They got to pay 50% more 25% more, it's already

00:43:30.640 | floated up. So you got to imagine it's probably a $40

00:43:32.320 | billion deal. Yeah. Okay, 40. Okay, so they save 10 billion. I

00:43:36.760 | think the synergies here are negligible. If it took Google

00:43:39.880 | almost two years to get a an accelerometer on a wrist approved

00:43:43.920 | from antitrust. This is going to take three years. Sax. Yeah. So

00:43:47.320 | why bother? So like do something much more disruptive. I have an

00:43:50.000 | answer to that. But I want to hear saxes first.

00:43:51.360 | Well, I just looked up how many customers HubSpot has HubSpot

00:43:55.400 | has 205,000 customers as of the end of 2023. Now you look up

00:43:59.520 | Google AdWords. It has 1.2 million businesses. Okay. And

00:44:04.120 | I'm sure that's not 100% overlapping. Every one of them

00:44:07.400 | should be using HubSpot. That's hugely creative. I agree. Yeah.

00:44:10.720 | I don't think that Google has the leverage to drive all of its

00:44:15.200 | AdWords customers into using all of them. If it gets 5% of them,

00:44:19.200 | it makes this deal make sense.

00:44:20.440 | Interesting. That part is kind of interesting if they can

00:44:23.840 | actually drive their ad customers what they did with

00:44:26.800 | with double click, double click was actually advertising. No,

00:44:29.360 | but they had other other places that they could take their AdWords

00:44:31.880 | advertisers to spend that the double click network had access

00:44:34.800 | to. Anyway, I hear you. Yeah. And there was another set of

00:44:37.920 | advertising audit management tools that double click had

00:44:40.320 | that that's an enterprise software tool that they were

00:44:42.440 | able to sell into their advertisers that they didn't

00:44:44.200 | have themselves.

00:44:44.960 | Chumak, let me ask you a markets question here. If we wind up

00:44:49.400 | with a Republican conservative GOP presidency administration for

00:44:55.000 | the next four years, which seems like a possibility here, a

00:44:58.160 | strong possibility, what does that do for M&A markets? Do you

00:45:01.040 | think they might be opening up here? And the reason Google's

00:45:04.480 | even considering this is because they anticipate this deal might

00:45:07.880 | fall into a new administration that is going to fire Alina Khan

00:45:11.840 | possibly, probably.

00:45:13.240 | I think that I think the Democrats and the Republicans

00:45:16.920 | are really well aligned here. They don't like deals. And I

00:45:20.880 | don't think you're going to see a big sea change. They hate big

00:45:23.880 | tech for different reasons, but they equally want to slow them

00:45:27.200 | down. If you look at the non big tech M&A deals, they're going to

00:45:32.440 | get slowed down for different reasons. So for example, like

00:45:35.200 | the big US deal merger with Nippon Steel that was announced,

00:45:38.240 | Biden has one set of issues, but I suspect, you know, if Donald

00:45:41.520 | Trump were to get elected, his issues will be more about

00:45:43.800 | further hollowing out middle America. And so that deal will

00:45:48.440 | probably get stopped for different reasons. But so I

00:45:52.520 | think that they're both actually, roughly aligned and

00:45:56.440 | not allowing a lot of this big M&A to happen. But for different

00:46:00.080 | reasons, for different reasons, but the outcome is the same. So

00:46:03.000 | this is why I would just kind of think like, if you're going to

00:46:05.120 | do a deal, you got to do something that's like, small

00:46:09.800 | enough where it'll pass muster, you know, it to be really

00:46:13.120 | valuable. And the regulators will be like, whatever, just let

00:46:16.480 | it happen.

00:46:17.040 | Saks, what do you think you think a Trump administration

00:46:20.120 | would become more frisky allow more M&A they seem to be

00:46:22.720 | actually closing up to tech in a major way?

00:46:25.240 | Well, I agree with Jamal that there's a lot of anger on the

00:46:28.140 | Republican side towards big tech, because of censorship and

00:46:30.520 | bias. And Google is as guilty of that as any of these big tech

00:46:33.880 | companies. So I don't expect a Republican administration to

00:46:38.560 | have Google in its good graces. That being said, I do think

00:46:41.440 | Republicans have a more traditional definition of

00:46:44.520 | antitrust than Lena Khan does. And I think that a Republican

00:46:50.080 | antitrust enforcer would probably be guided by market

00:46:54.960 | share considerations, first and foremost. And so in this case,

00:46:59.520 | since Google does not have a CRM play, then based on a

00:47:03.680 | traditional definition of antitrust, they would be able to

00:47:05.760 | make this acquisition, whereas I think, again, Lena Khan is just

00:47:09.240 | opposed to bigness and doesn't want big tech companies getting

00:47:11.320 | any bigger. So there's no guarantee that Republicans would

00:47:15.040 | allow it, I would say that if you got the right FTC

00:47:18.600 | Commissioner, or right, do J, I'd say, there's a possibility

00:47:22.960 | of it being more likely to go through,

00:47:24.400 | to remind everybody, I mean, the cons interpretation of antitrust

00:47:29.880 | is future competition, trying to protect future competition. The

00:47:33.000 | traditional one is consumer based, hey, are consumers

00:47:35.880 | benefiting or not. And so that's actually the that's one of the

00:47:39.480 | top three guests I want to

00:47:40.560 | market share is really the traditional test.

00:47:43.080 | Yeah, market share, and then the impact that has on consumer

00:47:46.080 | choice and price.

00:47:46.960 | Yeah, let's go back on to the synergy point. I just want to

00:47:49.440 | like, please, I just want to brainstorm about this for a

00:47:51.920 | second. Let's say you're one of Google's 1.2 million businesses

00:47:56.000 | that are using AdWords, there's a high chance you're also using

00:47:58.720 | Facebook, there's a high chance you're also doing other kinds of

00:48:02.320 | advertising, you might be doing physical world advertising, you

00:48:05.960 | might be doing events, there might be a dozen different

00:48:08.480 | channels through which you get leads. Now, all of a sudden,

00:48:11.400 | Google sends you an email saying, hey, we acquired HubSpot,

00:48:14.560 | you know, why don't you click here to use us for CRM? Is that

00:48:19.440 | really going to drive a change in behavior from a small

00:48:22.760 | business? Beyond what they would already do today? It doesn't

00:48:26.200 | seem that synergistic to some percent of them. Not all maybe

00:48:29.720 | 5%. Again, like 5% is 50,000. That's an email campaign. I mean,

00:48:35.720 | I just don't see the leverage basically.

00:48:37.400 | Yeah, I don't know if I agree. But I mean, that's why we're

00:48:40.600 | here.

00:48:40.920 | If Google did a deep product integration where the leads that

00:48:45.880 | you acquired through Google AdWords magically appeared in

00:48:50.400 | HubSpot, and that's where you went to go work them, then yes,

00:48:54.720 | maybe, well, maybe there'd be synergy.

00:48:57.200 | Just looking at this on the numbers, since we like to do

00:48:59.800 | back of the envelope here $250 billion in revenue, 1.2 million

00:49:02.840 | in advertisers, it's almost exactly 200,000 per advertiser.

00:49:06.440 | Obviously, there's some big ones, obviously, there's a long

00:49:08.320 | tail. Man, if you can get some number of those to spend 10, 20,

00:49:12.240 | 30% more, it could be quite accretive. To the bottom line,

00:49:15.320 | it would pay for the acquisition over a short period of time.

00:49:17.520 | And we'll see. It's interesting discussion for sure. All right,

00:49:21.000 | if you missed it, Jon Stewart did a segment on AI on the Daily

00:49:24.480 | Show, he came back, he's doing I think, Mondays every week. And

00:49:27.720 | it went viral. And it was about how AI is going to change our

00:49:32.800 | jobs faster than any previous labor revolution. So it seems

00:49:36.200 | like the public is starting to get an idea about AI wiping out

00:49:41.160 | large swaths of jobs, and it's starting to hit the mainstream.

00:49:44.400 | CEOs like Brian Chesky from Airbnb and Aaron Levy from box.

00:49:48.600 | I had them on this weekend startups in the last year, they

00:49:51.400 | said they anticipate 30 to 50% productivity gains for a lot of

00:49:55.160 | the jobs in their companies, developers, customer support,

00:49:57.400 | all that stuff. And we covered cloners AI customer support

00:50:00.160 | agent, doing the job of 700 full time employees and driving a

00:50:03.600 | $40 million increase in profits this year, yada, yada, yada,

00:50:06.640 | we've we've talked about this over and over again, but it

00:50:09.160 | seems to be tipping over into public consciousness. We Chamath

00:50:13.520 | have talked about whether humans will find more work to do, or if

00:50:16.960 | this is going to truly displace people, I think we all kind of

00:50:19.360 | feel like, at least to the best of my memory, we all feel like

00:50:22.760 | new jobs will be created, but it is entering the public's

00:50:25.720 | consciousness. What impact is that going to have? If the

00:50:28.520 | public starts thinking AI is going to take their job tomorrow?

00:50:31.400 | I mean, I think that social media will make this perception

00:50:35.520 | more widespread than it's been at other moments of revolution

00:50:39.640 | and innovation. But we've gone through this before. I'd like to

00:50:43.000 | summarize my thoughts in three charts. Okay. And I call this

00:50:47.080 | this time, it's not different. So chart number one, for those

00:50:52.440 | watching on YouTube is a look at the components of US GDP. This

00:50:56.560 | is from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Now, this goes from

00:51:00.720 | 1929, up to 2011. So it doesn't go all the way back to the

00:51:04.040 | 1800s. And we're missing the last decade. But the point is,

00:51:07.480 | the following, if you can see the chart, if you can't see it,

00:51:10.280 | I'll describe it to you, which is that GDP, the components of

00:51:14.000 | GDP are surprisingly resilient, and roughly the same over long

00:51:18.480 | stretches of time, which is that even though GDP goes up,

00:51:21.280 | consumer consumption is always around 70%. Net exports are a

00:51:27.440 | few percent plus or minus gross domestic investment is around

00:51:31.400 | the 20% level. And then government consumption is around

00:51:35.040 | the 20% level. And that's what adds up to GDP. So that's an

00:51:40.360 | important thing to note. Why? Because in the absence of

00:51:44.120 | something very acute, like World War Two, these things don't

00:51:47.160 | change over long periods of time. Okay, so if that is true,

00:51:50.160 | what happens when you have any kind of a revolution? So let's

00:51:55.240 | look at the Industrial Revolution. So the shift from

00:51:57.080 | farms to factories. And what you saw was exactly what people

00:52:01.960 | should be worried about with respect to AI, which is in

00:52:04.520 | specific job classes, things just fall to zero. So

00:52:08.760 | unemployment basically went to zero. And the income associated

00:52:12.440 | with those jobs also went to zero. So this is what people are

00:52:15.200 | worried about. But if you remember the last chart, the

00:52:18.360 | point is, somehow we found a way to find growth. And this is

00:52:24.960 | what's demonstrated on this final chart, which is when you

00:52:27.280 | look at US productivity and worker compensation, this is

00:52:29.920 | going from World War Two to today, you find that every time

00:52:33.760 | we find a new way of innovating, compensation tends to track it.

00:52:38.880 | So if you take these three things together, number one,

00:52:42.400 | which is the components of GDP rarely change. Number two is

00:52:45.880 | that yes, there are certain categories of jobs that always

00:52:48.840 | get disrupted away. But the third is the most important,

00:52:52.360 | which is that as productivity goes up, which is what AI should

00:52:55.560 | give us, just as we've seen in the past, compensation also goes

00:52:59.640 | up, which means new job classes will be created. So I think the

00:53:03.920 | macro picture, if you look back hundreds of years, is that this

00:53:07.320 | is like many other moments in time, it feels more personal

00:53:10.680 | right now, because we're all living it. Right. None. Few of

00:53:13.400 | us live the agrarian to industrial revolution. Yeah, we

00:53:16.800 | missed it. And few of us live the technological revolution,

00:53:20.040 | right, we kind of came in at the heels of it. But I suspect that

00:53:23.480 | this time is not different.

00:53:24.640 | freeburger thoughts on this. I think you've said something

00:53:28.120 | similar on past episodes. But it is kind of tipping and into

00:53:33.120 | public consciousness. And it's also affecting white collar jobs

00:53:36.720 | this time, not just people in fields picking berries. And so

00:53:40.800 | those people may be a little more vocal. And we've seen

00:53:43.320 | massive layoffs in tech, massive layoffs in media. And those jobs

00:53:47.480 | don't seem to be coming back, people seem to be get taking the

00:53:50.160 | gains and just having people on the team be 30% more efficient,

00:53:54.240 | as Brian told me on my other pod. So what do you think

00:53:57.920 | freeburg? Is this time different? Or is it the same?

00:54:01.960 | So here's this article from June 2 1983, in the New York Times

00:54:08.320 | all about how computers are eliminating jobs in industries

00:54:13.160 | that were effectively offline knowledge work industries at the

00:54:16.880 | time, creating engineering designs, creating architectural

00:54:19.880 | drawings, I think this article spoke to the fact that these

00:54:22.840 | jobs were going to be eliminated. And as we all know,

00:54:26.120 | those jobs actually got enhanced by computers, productivity went

00:54:29.960 | up, and new sub industries emerged. And in fact, the

00:54:32.920 | overall industries actually grew in some cases when we were

00:54:35.520 | fearful of them being replaced due to the automation enabled by

00:54:39.120 | software. So I think that in this particular sense, we can

00:54:44.240 | talk about the Industrial Revolution enabling through

00:54:46.920 | manufacturing systems and centralized production, a

00:54:51.560 | replacement of manual labor with machines, what we're talking

00:54:56.320 | about now is a replacement of knowledge work that has been

00:54:59.520 | aided by computers with machines. So the machines no

00:55:02.560 | longer even need the human but the reality is that these

00:55:05.280 | systems are actually going to give humans 10 to 100 x

00:55:08.360 | leverage. So when you think about that one person could

00:55:12.080 | spend three weeks making an architectural drawing today,

00:55:14.840 | what if that one person could make an architectural drawing

00:55:17.400 | every six hours? So the question then is, do we stop making

00:55:22.320 | architectural drawings and we fire a bunch of architects? Or

00:55:25.680 | does the cost of making an architectural drawing drop by 90%

00:55:29.320 | and it enables us to do more detailed higher resolution,

00:55:32.960 | architectural drawings across more places more frequently, and

00:55:37.640 | the industry actually booms. And what we've seen historically is

00:55:41.000 | that when productivity goes up, costs go down, the actual volume

00:55:45.240 | balloons and the economy grows. So it's a it's an example where

00:55:49.680 | I think in this particular case, we will see these tools creating

00:55:52.760 | more leverage for knowledge work instead of just simply

00:55:55.760 | replacing knowledge work, and that humans will start to shift

00:55:58.760 | to a higher order of work. And we'll see the economy grow and

00:56:02.160 | productivity go up as a result. So so I think that's my kind of

00:56:07.080 | key read on on the story, but it's very hard to connect the

00:56:10.240 | dots for people without having all of these historical cases.

00:56:13.680 | And I think one of the ways to think about doing this usefully

00:56:16.440 | is you go back to the software revolution, and all the stuff

00:56:19.200 | that we were doing with pencils and papers before computers, we

00:56:23.040 | actually didn't lose all those jobs, the people could now do 100

00:56:26.560 | times or 1000 or million times as much work, and new industries

00:56:29.880 | emerged and productivity went up, and the economy grew. And so

00:56:33.320 | we just have to have this. This realization as the starts to

00:56:37.240 | take hold, that the industries will change. And that the

00:56:42.280 | systems will actually provide leverage, not replacement.

00:56:45.040 | Yeah, it's such a good point. And I think what you teach your

00:56:48.800 | kids is like really important at this moment in time, like having

00:56:51.920 | a job that is replaced by AI, or that could be greatly replaced

00:56:56.560 | by AI might be a mistake. And if you think about being a

00:56:59.280 | conductor, Friedberg, or a maestro, conductor of an

00:57:03.200 | orchestra, I think that's the job of the future is can you

00:57:06.600 | work with these agents forget about co pilots, because that's

00:57:08.920 | phase one of all this, but agents are phase two, where you

00:57:11.960 | have an agent who's writing copy, who's the HubSpot example

00:57:16.000 | you get before, you know, a designer who's in the cloud,

00:57:18.880 | who's an agent, an AI agent making you artwork, and then you

00:57:21.840 | stitch all these things together. I've been loading

00:57:24.400 | chat JPT with my kids constantly asking history questions, and

00:57:28.600 | whatever questions they want. I've been teaching them how to

00:57:30.400 | use chat JPT.

00:57:31.400 | That's great. Yeah. I mean, I think it's like, like, there's

00:57:33.600 | this whole transition of humans doing manual labor to doing

00:57:37.680 | knowledge work, where you're using software to create

00:57:40.720 | digital output, to now having more folks spend more of their

00:57:44.840 | time being conceptualists or creators where you can kind of

00:57:47.600 | be an architect or a creator of something, and the system just

00:57:52.080 | generates it, you know, you state your intended objective,

00:57:54.840 | and the system solves for it. Yes. As opposed to, hey, I got

00:57:58.160 | to go build the Excel spreadsheet and check the

00:58:00.240 | formula in every cell and do all the manual. What if I just say,

00:58:03.400 | hey, here's what I want the model to do, please generate it

00:58:05.320 | for me, and you get the result. It enables you to do 100 times

00:58:09.040 | more. That's why I use the analogy conductor, or Augusta

00:58:12.520 | leader, sex, what do you think this is your you're on the

00:58:16.120 | populist side, you really have your finger on what Americans

00:58:19.560 | think. And as a compliment, it's a literal compliment. But I do

00:58:25.760 | think you're I think you've become a pop, especially as the

00:58:28.160 | longer I've known you, we know each other for over 20 years,

00:58:30.280 | you become more populous. So what's the word on the street

00:58:33.120 | here amongst, you know, Jen pop? And when I think they're

00:58:36.680 | taking this news, when they see somebody like Jon Stewart, they

00:58:39.360 | respect when you see somebody like Jonathan's Jon Stewart,

00:58:42.160 | you know, doing this, that's like gonna hit a large swath of

00:58:45.600 | these, you know, you know, elites that we've talked about

00:58:49.240 | before on the show who are losing their jobs, or maybe

00:58:51.280 | their salaries are getting capped.

00:58:52.480 | Well, first of all, Jason, to quote Senator raucous from

00:58:56.280 | gladiator, I may not be a man of the people, but I do try to be a

00:59:00.000 | man for the people. Yes, exactly. So Oh, my God, did you

00:59:04.400 | see the AI? Did you see the AI from some Y combinator company,

00:59:08.320 | but where they like made a little video of us? And like,

00:59:11.880 | we're talking about somebody's nuts. And then they were like,

00:59:14.280 | you said, Oh, I'm gonna ask my butler to ask my assistant to

00:59:18.000 | ask my house manager to then ask my chauffeur to pick those up.

00:59:21.400 | It's like, pretty great. Yeah, it looks funny. Look, to be

00:59:27.480 | frank, no one cares what Jon Stewart thinks. He's never been

00:59:31.400 | less relevant and less funny. This is a story that has been

00:59:35.920 | hyping up for months now. COVID is over. So they need something

00:59:39.680 | else to scare us with. And what they really should be talking is

00:59:43.000 | that we've got two wars that risk spiraling out of control.

00:59:46.160 | And they don't want to go there. I don't want to go there or the

00:59:49.960 | national debt. Exactly right. They don't want to go there

00:59:52.040 | either. Those issues reflect well, on the current

00:59:56.360 | administration and power. So they're going to scare us with

00:59:59.120 | this. Now look, in the short to medium term, AI leads to

01:00:02.240 | productivity gains. In the long term, it may lead to job losses.

01:00:06.080 | But as you guys pointed out, hopefully by then we'll have

01:00:08.800 | lots of other jobs created by the productivity boom that we're

01:00:11.920 | going to get. And this has been the case throughout history with

01:00:14.800 | regard to technology improvements. And if we don't

01:00:17.280 | have these productivity improvements, what's going to

01:00:19.600 | drive the growth in GDP? What's going to allow us to pay off

01:00:22.720 | this enormous national debt that seems to be? Yep, you know, so

01:00:26.160 | large that we it's under payable, we need the productivity

01:00:29.280 | gains that AI is going to unlock without them. We're definitely

01:00:32.640 | toast. So look, I don't put place a lot of stock in this

01:00:35.760 | Jon Stewart story. It's just one of many that the media is is

01:00:40.200 | creating to try and scare us about AI.

01:00:41.800 | And that's actually a great guest. Jon Stewart would be a

01:00:44.000 | great guest along with Lena Khan, put those on the list.

01:00:46.360 | Have you seen this clip where young Lacoon basically says, our

01:00:50.680 | best LLM is 50 times smaller than what a four year old has

01:00:54.560 | processed since they've been four year old is awake, has been

01:00:58.200 | awake a total of 16,000 hours. And you say, okay, 16,000 hours

01:01:02.760 | multiply this by 3600 seconds per hour, and then figure out

01:01:07.160 | like, what's the bandwidth of the optical nerve going to the

01:01:11.600 | cortex, it's about 20 megabytes, where you have 1 million nerve

01:01:14.680 | fibers per, per per eye, and it's about 10 bytes per second,

01:01:19.160 | right, give or take. So multiply, that's 10 to the 15

01:01:23.920 | bytes by the time you're four, 50 times more than whatever LLM,

01:01:27.720 | like the biggest LLM in the world have been trained on. Okay.

01:01:30.480 | So what that tells you is that in the space of a few months, a

01:01:35.160 | baby has seen more information than the biggest LLMs that we

01:01:38.560 | have.

01:01:38.920 | The point is that, and this is one of the foremost experts in AI

01:01:42.560 | and really one of the fathers of modern AI. What he's basically

01:01:45.920 | saying is it's still more artificial than intelligent. And

01:01:50.280 | everybody needs to take a deep breath and understand that

01:01:53.240 | there's just going to be a lot more work before you get to this

01:01:55.800 | omnipresent agent that just replaces and destroys everything

01:01:59.280 | and thinks on its own. Yeah, I'm willing to bet on all of us

01:02:02.640 | versus a bunch of four year olds.

01:02:03.960 | And I just want to say kumbaya to Davos as well. The clip from

01:02:07.800 | Davos, thanks for letting me choose that. Yeah, it's

01:02:10.920 | interesting sacks like the number of jobs that will be

01:02:16.480 | replaced or augmented, and then the creation of jobs and then

01:02:20.000 | you start thinking about well, how many jobs exist in the real

01:02:22.360 | world, I saw Waymo is doing Uber Eats deliveries. And you just

01:02:25.880 | think, well, more people are going to be able to afford Uber

01:02:28.200 | Eats, which is kind of expensive to use. So consumption is going

01:02:31.360 | to go up. And then you think about the optimists. And then

01:02:33.640 | what's the other robot company that's making a general human

01:02:36.920 | robot figure figure. And man, those are starting to get really

01:02:41.240 | interesting. And I think that's going to be the unlock. So maybe

01:02:45.160 | you could speak a little bit to sex. What do you think happens

01:02:47.760 | when we start getting humanoid robots in the mix? And do you

01:02:50.480 | have any investments in that space?

01:02:51.920 | I don't, because I don't do that kind of hardware R&D. I mean,

01:02:56.200 | look, I think you're right that AI does lead to robotics,

01:02:59.080 | because one of the hard things about robotics is just having

01:03:04.240 | the the robot, not just move, but understand what's happening

01:03:09.040 | in the world around it, and then make the right decisions about

01:03:12.480 | how to react to that. And so LLM to start creating a path for the

01:03:19.280 | robot to be able to make intelligent decisions without

01:03:22.920 | having to be programmed with a bunch of if then statements,

01:03:26.360 | right. And I mean, self driving kind of does this too. I mean,

01:03:29.560 | self driving is sort of the early. It's kind of like the

01:03:33.280 | early prototype for these kinds of robots. And that's why it's

01:03:37.480 | not a surprise that Tesla is developing optimists is because

01:03:40.520 | you think about what self driving is, it's, it's a device,

01:03:44.160 | a car with a whole bunch of cameras on it, it takes in all

01:03:47.440 | that visual information, and then it makes decisions about

01:03:50.880 | how to move and how to react. And then it's it's trained based

01:03:55.200 | on mirroring human decisions, all those human decisions that

01:03:59.960 | Tesla's been able to gather through the combination of self

01:04:02.120 | driving with humans intervening, allows it to train the self

01:04:06.920 | driving, I guess, brain, you could say,

01:04:08.920 | well, and it's also sacks moving at two or three miles per hour,

01:04:12.240 | so it can take its time. And if you haven't seen this figure,

01:04:15.360 | this combines the language model with what you're discussing

01:04:18.400 | sacks. So the language models, when you show them a picture,

01:04:21.280 | and you say, Hey, and this is from figure. And there's a, this

01:04:25.600 | is their robot. And it says, Hey, give me something to eat.

01:04:27.920 | Have you guys seen this before?

01:04:29.080 | I've heard some of the founders of these robotics companies talk

01:04:31.600 | about why they create robots in a humanoid shape. And it's not

01:04:35.400 | just because they're trying to create a replacement for humans

01:04:39.160 | or something like that. It's also because now they can point

01:04:42.280 | cameras at the way that humans move. Yes. And so they can

01:04:45.360 | actually train these robots on how humans move and react to

01:04:48.840 | things. So you're able to kind of create a large data set kind

01:04:52.800 | of like with self driving, so that the robots are able to

01:04:55.640 | learn how to how to move. And I've seen a different video

01:04:59.080 | where optimists, the Tesla robot is folding shirts. Yeah,

01:05:03.560 | pretty impressive. Yeah.

01:05:04.560 | What's what's really interesting about this freeberg is, when I

01:05:09.160 | spoke to the people who are making these evolution has made

01:05:13.000 | humans to operate in the world most efficiently over whatever

01:05:18.840 | number of years and creatures before us. So in fact, the world

01:05:24.160 | is optimized for the human body type. And so maybe you could

01:05:29.360 | talk a little bit about what you think is going to happen with

01:05:32.000 | these robots freeberg in the in the short and medium term, when

01:05:35.080 | will we have one of these robots in our houses? What will the

01:05:38.720 | price point be in five to 10 years? And what will they be

01:05:40.880 | doing in five to 10 years? I don't know, we should explore,

01:05:44.200 | we should explore that question at the Olin summit 2024. Okay,

01:05:48.000 | shout out to Ilan. Ilan, can you bring optimists to the event,

01:05:52.400 | please?

01:05:52.880 | Jason, I don't think it's a five year timeframe. I think it's

01:05:55.200 | longer than that. That's just my guess. And one of the reasons is

01:05:58.320 | if you look at the use of robots in call it industrial production

01:06:03.520 | today, they don't want humans getting too close to them.

01:06:06.160 | They're actually kind of dangerous, because you have

01:06:07.640 | these arms flying around, they move quickly, they're very

01:06:11.040 | heavy, you get banged on the head by one of them, it's going

01:06:13.840 | to take you out. So the idea of having a robot in your house

01:06:17.800 | that's capable of freely moving, you have to make that so safe,

01:06:22.000 | to a point that they just haven't gotten to yet with

01:06:24.080 | robots. So there's just gonna be like a lot of fine tuning work

01:06:27.160 | that happens before. This is a domestic product, I think in the

01:06:30.400 | near term, it's all about industrial applications, or

01:06:34.640 | maybe even military applications.

01:06:36.280 | But if you've ever been to the, the giga factories, I was doing

01:06:41.880 | a little tour of one of them once, and somebody grabbed me

01:06:44.200 | because I almost wandered into one of those areas, and they

01:06:46.760 | have tape on the floor, then they have a wall, etc. But if

01:06:50.240 | you even get within a certain closeness with this tape on the

01:06:54.720 | floor, it shuts the whole thing down, because they're afraid

01:06:57.400 | somebody's gonna get crushed behind one of these arms.

01:06:59.080 | Chamath, I'll give it to you. When will we have one of these

01:07:03.000 | robots in our homes for the price of a Prius? Now, by the

01:07:07.520 | way, Prius is a car that costs about $50,000 that common folk

01:07:11.960 | drive. So $50,000 robot in our houses.

01:07:15.160 | I think it'll be less than that. I think it's going to be in the

01:07:18.760 | next two or three years, you'll have a domestic help robot that

01:07:22.520 | you can probably pay 1000 bucks a month for, okay, which would

01:07:26.120 | be two to $3,000 car payment, that would be the equivalent of

01:07:29.680 | a car payment on $100,000 car. So okay, you say under

01:07:32.920 | five, you say three, what do you think freeberg same bet $1,000

01:07:36.840 | a month robot $100,000 sticker price, when we have that in our

01:07:40.080 | homes? No, I think it's 1000 a month, 1000 a month, which would

01:07:44.520 | be the equivalent over whatever number of months and what is it

01:07:47.560 | it does its general purpose does different stuff, general

01:07:50.200 | person's robot $1,000 a month, 50 payments, I think it washes

01:07:54.160 | the dishes, I think it will do the laundry, take out the trash,

01:07:58.240 | there'll be like a whole set of house household tasks that it

01:08:01.480 | will do. Walk the dog. No, no, not responsible for a live

01:08:07.280 | creature. What do you say free bird? $1,000 a month at home

01:08:10.320 | robot does your dishes. There's a great bet for us. Give us the

01:08:14.000 | over under how many years for you? I'm not sure. I think the

01:08:17.000 | salt of science Come on, man, give us a year.

01:08:19.160 | Well, I don't think it necessarily follows this general

01:08:22.440 | purpose model. I think that there are likely going to be

01:08:26.160 | more narrow application ranges. And they're not going to

01:08:33.760 | necessarily be humanoid in form factor. I don't know if you guys

01:08:39.360 | have seen gecko robotics, we got seen this company, are you guys

01:08:42.400 | investors in this? Nope. Pretty impressive, like suite of

01:08:47.440 | autonomous products that do specific things in industrial

01:08:53.440 | settings. So they have like, robots that climb on the outside

01:08:57.520 | of buildings and look for cracks using special scanning

01:09:00.840 | equipment, but they're very autonomous and how they operate

01:09:03.960 | and what they can do. And they've got a whole class of

01:09:05.640 | robots that can then be each one of those robots can do many

01:09:10.080 | different tasks for many different applications. And so

01:09:13.680 | the form factors, they've got kind of a set of form factors,

01:09:17.520 | meaning a set of robots that look differently, and have

01:09:20.280 | different capabilities of them, like little spider legs or arms

01:09:23.480 | or whatever. And then they can be applied to go do something

01:09:27.920 | autonomously. And then they just run and they do it. If you pull

01:09:30.240 | that up, you'll see it climbing walls, riding along pipes. Yeah,

01:09:34.560 | they're built. Well, they're not purpose. That's what's

01:09:37.680 | interesting. They're they're sort of a narrow range of

01:09:41.520 | applications, but they're not specific to do only one thing.

01:09:45.600 | And so they can work in different environments and do

01:09:48.080 | different things. And so you'll kind of pick from their suite of

01:09:51.280 | robots, which ones you want to use to do different, different

01:09:55.320 | tasks, and then they go and do it. It's really interesting.

01:09:57.680 | They're mostly using them for industrial monitoring

01:09:59.520 | applications right now, like looking on bridges for breaks

01:10:02.000 | and cleaning, cleaning windows, cleaning windows, all that kind

01:10:06.440 | of stuff. Oh, cleaning windows. That's a good Yeah. So they've

01:10:09.680 | got like a really cool suite. And I think that's what we're

01:10:11.600 | likely to see in domestic settings as well. Alright, so

01:10:14.640 | you I'm just I'm just not sure over three, by the way, I will

01:10:18.040 | say the success of Gecko indicates that there's far more

01:10:21.040 | money to be made in industrial applications. And there isn't

01:10:25.520 | consumer applications today. I disagree. Yeah, I think every

01:10:30.480 | human is going to have one of these. And I think every

01:10:32.600 | household in America, every middle class household in

01:10:35.560 | America will have one of these $1,000 a month robots in seven

01:10:38.760 | years. I'll give it seven. You say you want to do everything. I

01:10:42.840 | say to do domestic chores, taking out the trash, folding

01:10:47.880 | laundry, domestic tasks. I just think it's hard to justify that

01:10:51.800 | because you're only spending so many hours a week doing that

01:10:54.600 | sort of stuff. Is it really worth 1000 bucks a month?

01:10:57.280 | Whereas in the industrial setting, it makes a lot more

01:10:59.840 | sense about those dangerous tasks, like climbing on a

01:11:02.160 | bridge, looking at the seams and climbing on a building cleaning

01:11:05.720 | the windows. Those tasks take years to do sometimes. Many,

01:11:10.000 | many years of high risk human labor, whereas taking out the

01:11:13.640 | trash and folding laundry might be a little bit more hard to

01:11:16.600 | justify this better. It's more breaking news here during the

01:11:19.560 | program. We'll get our war correspondent, our geopolitical

01:11:24.320 | expert, David Sachs. What are you seeing on the wires?

01:11:27.320 | Well, there's a NATO meeting going on right now. And Blinken

01:11:30.920 | did a press conference where he says that Ukraine will be

01:11:33.440 | joining NATO. That's the big news going viral right now.

01:11:37.800 | Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit

01:11:43.360 | is to help build a bridge to that membership and to create a

01:11:49.120 | clear pathway for for Ukraine moving forward. So of course, we

01:11:54.560 | believe that Ukraine deserves to be a member of NATO and that

01:11:58.160 | this should happen sooner rather sooner sooner rather than later.

01:12:01.840 | Chamath, any thoughts on this flip that just broke during the

01:12:06.760 | program? Well, we just, I think NATO just added Sweden, right?

01:12:12.040 | And it was done in pretty record time from application to

01:12:17.040 | admission. So I would like to know whether is this just

01:12:20.760 | rhetoric to just keep everybody at bay and placate the

01:12:25.000 | Ukrainians? Or is this real? The problem that this creates is

01:12:29.800 | that if it is real, and they're admitted, then NATO has to

01:12:34.800 | defend Ukraine, which means that then America and all the

01:12:40.400 | other NATO allies would have to fight, which means that we're in

01:12:43.000 | a war, America should not be in a war.

01:12:46.280 | Just give you the exact fact you are correct. Sweden, Finland

01:12:49.600 | applied to join in May 2022. Following Russia's invasion of

01:12:54.880 | Ukraine, and they had been neutral, as you know, for many

01:12:57.920 | decades, Finland has a massive land border with Russia. And

01:13:02.760 | they joined in April of 2023, after applying in May of 22. So

01:13:06.800 | just a year later, and Sweden became a member in March of

01:13:09.480 | 2024. Just two years later, efforts membership was held up

01:13:13.920 | by both Turkey and Hungary. Saks, you're our resident expert

01:13:17.480 | on Ukraine and all things geopolitical, your thoughts.

01:13:20.760 | On the one hand, what Lincoln is saying is more of the same here,

01:13:23.720 | because it's been the administration's policy to seek

01:13:26.200 | to bring Ukraine into NATO since they took office. They've

01:13:30.400 | reiterated that over and over again. And it's one of the major

01:13:34.120 | reasons for this war is that the Russians said over and over

01:13:36.960 | again, this was a red line for them. That's why there's a war

01:13:39.360 | in Ukraine. The idea that you're going to be able to bring

01:13:42.520 | Ukraine into NATO, however, when the war is going so badly, is

01:13:47.520 | now entering the territory of being delusional. I mean, this

01:13:51.000 | is like a delusional comment. And if you just want to

01:13:54.160 | understand how badly things are going, look at yesterday's

01:13:57.120 | politico, which was called Ukraine is at great risk of its

01:14:00.440 | front lines collapsing. The source for this article was

01:14:04.440 | high ranking Ukrainian officials close to Zaluzhny, who's the

01:14:08.720 | former commander in chief. Some people have speculated that

01:14:11.480 | Zaluzhny himself might be the source, but at a minimum, it's

01:14:14.880 | high ranking Ukrainian officers who reported to Zaluzhny. And

01:14:19.440 | what they say in this article is that the prognosis in Ukraine is

01:14:23.520 | grim. They say that the sad truth is that even if the

01:14:27.400 | funding bills approved by the US Congress, a massive resupply

01:14:31.200 | may not be enough to prevent a major battlefield upset. They

01:14:33.840 | say that there is a great risk of the front lines collapsing

01:14:36.800 | wherever Russian generals decide to focus their offensive, which

01:14:40.480 | people expect in the next few months. And there's nothing that

01:14:44.360 | can help Ukraine now because there are no serious

01:14:47.120 | technologies able to compensate Ukraine for the large mass of

01:14:50.520 | troops Russia is likely to hurl at us. This is a quote from one

01:14:54.600 | of the Ukrainian officials. We don't have those technologies

01:14:58.120 | and the West doesn't have them as well, insufficient numbers. So

01:15:02.600 | what they're saying is that even if the funding bill goes through

01:15:06.320 | the 61 billion, it's not going to be enough to save Ukraine. And

01:15:10.720 | at the very moment that that is now being finally honestly

01:15:14.520 | reported by Western media, it's something I've been saying now

01:15:17.720 | for months. Finally, the truth is coming out. You have Blinken

01:15:21.840 | doubling and tripling down on these comments that nevertheless

01:15:24.920 | Ukraine will be joining NATO. And Tomas is right under Article

01:15:27.920 | five, an attack on one is an attack on all. Therefore, if

01:15:32.000 | Ukraine becomes part of NATO, an attack on Ukraine by Russia,

01:15:35.880 | which is currently ongoing, will be concerned an attack on the

01:15:38.600 | United States. Then you have to add to the mix the fact that

01:15:41.880 | Macron and other European leaders have actually been

01:15:44.720 | advocating for NATO to sending ground troops. And he said this

01:15:48.240 | over and over again, he's doubled down on this multiple

01:15:51.200 | times. So you have a dynamic now where this isn't just hot

01:15:55.200 | rhetoric by Blinken. This really has the risk of tipping over

01:16:00.040 | into policy, I would say in a Biden second term, where Biden

01:16:05.080 | agrees to do what our European allies are already calling for,

01:16:08.880 | which is sending NATO troops to Ukraine to save Ukraine from

01:16:13.720 | what Politico calls an imminent collapse. I think this is a

01:16:17.280 | very dangerous situation. I mean, we're really talking about

01:16:19.440 | here is World War Three. So if you want to have a serious

01:16:23.720 | chance of war three in the next four years, and I would say go

01:16:26.000 | ahead and vote for Biden in November. I mean, this is very

01:16:28.480 | clear to me. I'm personally not willing to accept that risk. I'm

01:16:31.440 | not willing to accept a 10% or 1% risk of that chance. But I

01:16:35.560 | think Blinken putting it on the table here, I think people

01:16:38.120 | should be deeply concerned about this. And there should be a lot

01:16:41.280 | of follow up questions for Blinken and the administration

01:16:44.160 | about this freeberg.

01:16:45.440 | Should the free country of Ukraine be able to join NATO on

01:16:51.120 | some timeline? Or should they be banned from ever joining?

01:16:54.240 | I think the statements are correct, that Ukraine joining

01:16:58.760 | NATO escalates conflict. And we will find ourselves in a de

01:17:02.360 | facto global conflict World War. Now, the question is, is that

01:17:11.240 | the cycle, the natural cycle? I will once again, Nick, pull it

01:17:15.640 | up, please reference Ray Dalio is typical big cycle behind

01:17:20.520 | empires rise and decline. As he spoke at length with us in

01:17:25.320 | person about at the All in Summit last year, he points out

01:17:29.160 | that the era of prosperity, that over the last 500 years, we've

01:17:33.960 | seen six major empires go through is followed by a debt

01:17:38.200 | bubble, which drives a wealth gap, which ultimately leads to

01:17:44.040 | economic challenges, which means printing more money, which is

01:17:46.720 | the cycle we are going through right now, with a, as you guys

01:17:50.640 | know, two to $3 trillion annual deficit and explosion in federal

01:17:55.720 | debt levels. And that ultimately leads inevitably to external

01:18:00.280 | conflict to war. Now, the particular motivations in every

01:18:04.840 | case in all six times, this has happened in the last 500 years,

01:18:08.720 | look different when you read the history books about what were

01:18:12.400 | the circumstances that drove us to external conflict that drove

01:18:15.560 | that nation to war. But the truth is, every single one of

01:18:19.840 | them was preceded by a debt bubble, income inequality, wealth

01:18:25.160 | gap, and the printing of money. And there's a relationship

01:18:28.960 | between those economic factors and a desire for conflict. And I

01:18:33.120 | think that is what we are seeing play out over the past couple of

01:18:35.920 | years, starting with our motivated interest in supporting

01:18:41.480 | Ukraine, against the Russia conflict, and now escalating it

01:18:45.640 | towards inviting Ukraine to join NATO to escalate the conflict

01:18:48.920 | itself. Now, I think there's a notion that having a war is

01:18:54.960 | stimulating, having a war is unifying, this should be the

01:18:58.080 | wags the door wag the dog theory. I don't think it's a

01:19:01.640 | wag the dog theory as much as it is what do you do when the

01:19:05.200 | economic condition of the nation is such that the federal

01:19:08.800 | government has to print money to support the economy and or to

01:19:12.360 | bridge the wealth gap. And when under those circumstances in

01:19:15.600 | order to unify the country in order to motivate a system of

01:19:20.320 | unification amongst a fracturing society or fracturing economic

01:19:24.480 | strata, you feel like you have to have an external enemy, and

01:19:29.680 | that the notion of war itself is economically stimulating. I

01:19:34.120 | think that those are the motivating factors that we've

01:19:36.320 | seen play out six times in the last 500 years. And we may be

01:19:40.280 | unfortunately seeing play out here again, as we talked to

01:19:43.080 | Graham Allison, Ray Dalio about last year, we said, what can we

01:19:47.160 | do to avoid this that there have been times historically, where

01:19:50.840 | these things have been avoided. But if we're not being cognizant

01:19:54.680 | of what's going on here, and motivating a different tact and

01:19:59.200 | a different path, whether it's through our electoral cycle, or

01:20:03.440 | through being loud and vocal in whatever media channels we each

01:20:07.520 | have access to, to make folks more aware of this, I think, you

01:20:12.040 | know, we will find ourselves walking down this path of

01:20:14.720 | looking for global conflict and finding it.

01:20:16.600 | Jamal, you look like you wanted to chime in there. Yeah.

01:20:19.080 | Of the three presidential candidates, to be very clear,

01:20:22.720 | one is supportive, then, of some kind of confrontation, because

01:20:29.680 | by proxy, they're supportive of admitting Ukraine into NATO,

01:20:33.280 | which would create a war and two are pretty clearly anti war.

01:20:36.280 | And just for people who know the boom bust cycle behind empires

01:20:40.040 | rise and declines. You can see that if you're on the YouTube

01:20:43.640 | video, but the sixth of eight moments is revolutions and wars.

01:20:48.800 | As freebirds pointing out, there are two more that come after

01:20:51.400 | that debt and political restructuring, and then the new

01:20:55.480 | world order emerges. And so the question here, I guess becomes,

01:20:59.440 | can diplomacy when the day and then is Blinken's point that

01:21:03.920 | they eventually can become a member or that they're

01:21:06.280 | imminently going to become a member and it's breaking news. So

01:21:08.840 | we don't know if he's speaking about

01:21:12.320 | let's just be really clear on this, the words he used were

01:21:15.680 | very carefully chosen. And that means that there was a media and

01:21:20.120 | press strategy conversation that was had by him and his staff,

01:21:24.000 | which obviously found its way into the White House

01:21:27.720 | administration, and that there was a executive conversation

01:21:30.520 | about this, for sure, this is the positioning we need to now be

01:21:34.080 | clearly stating, which means that this is now policy. He did

01:21:37.600 | not slip up on those words. This was not some off the cuff

01:21:41.000 | comment. This was clearly a media trained statement, which

01:21:45.000 | means that it is it is administration was delivered

01:21:47.760 | during exactly at the next White House press conference, you will

01:21:52.000 | hear the question asked by reporters. Is this the White

01:21:55.040 | House position? And they will say yes, it is. Yeah. And just

01:21:58.760 | to be clear that that video had a couple of edits in it. And we

01:22:01.880 | don't have the full press conference here. The quote from

01:22:04.200 | the hill is Ukraine will become a member of NATO period. Our

01:22:07.760 | purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that

01:22:10.720 | membership, which then seems like this would this if you're

01:22:14.120 | building a bridge that takes time. So maybe they mean over

01:22:17.880 | time, the fullness of time to be able to do this in the next year

01:22:22.760 | would be if it was on the timeline of Finland would be

01:22:25.720 | insane. I cannot

01:22:27.320 | it would be insane, but they're not ruling it out. And I think

01:22:29.800 | you have to look at the context of what's happening. He's making

01:22:32.400 | these remarks, as all the news from the battlefield is

01:22:36.920 | terrible. Ukraine is losing and it's at risk of collapsing. And

01:22:41.520 | European leaders like Macron are therefore calling for direct

01:22:45.720 | NATO intervention in the war. So for Lincoln to be making this

01:22:50.080 | sort of statement is really adding fuel to the fire. And

01:22:53.000 | let's see if he walks it back. Let's see if he clarifies it. I

01:22:55.480 | predict that he won't, because this is a

01:22:57.120 | clarification for sure. Because this does not feel like it'd be

01:23:00.360 | good for voting because the war is credibly unpopular. It'll

01:23:03.880 | make the election pretty simple. Every other issue. All the

01:23:07.080 | social issues that we fight about will fall away. The debt

01:23:10.440 | will fall away. The border will fall away. If this is true, if

01:23:14.280 | it's true, does America want to go to war?

01:23:16.840 | Well, Chamath, I think I think we're already at that point,

01:23:19.640 | even if there is some sort of clarification. And the reason I

01:23:22.160 | say that is because Biden clearly is very committed to

01:23:25.600 | this Ukraine policy. It didn't just start when he became

01:23:28.200 | president, it started when he became vice president, and was

01:23:31.400 | managing the Ukraine portfolio for Obama. This is why Hunter

01:23:35.080 | Biden got that job in Ukraine, because Biden was running the

01:23:38.200 | show there. And they have been very committed to this idea of

01:23:41.280 | bringing Ukraine into NATO for decades. I mean, he supported

01:23:44.640 | when he was a senator. So this is not like Freeberg said, this

01:23:47.760 | is not like to some randomly chosen words out of the blue,

01:23:50.800 | Blinken measures his words carefully, he knows what he's

01:23:53.840 | saying. And this is something that Biden clearly is passionate

01:23:58.480 | about. And what you have to believe is that in a Biden

01:24:01.480 | second term, he's going to manage this whole situation so

01:24:05.160 | perfectly, that this war is not going to escalate any further.

01:24:08.600 | And I just I have no confidence in that. Remember, if you want

01:24:12.080 | to use a historical analogy, go back to Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

01:24:16.480 | He was elected on literally the catchphrase, he kept us out of

01:24:20.200 | war. Less than one year later, we were in World War One. World

01:24:24.800 | War One. Yeah. So this idea of what Biden wouldn't possibly get

01:24:29.200 | us into a war. I mean, history shows otherwise. History shows

01:24:33.360 | that presidents once they win reelection are more likely to

01:24:38.160 | get us into war, rather than less, because they don't have to

01:24:41.200 | fear voters. So then the question is, well, what is in

01:24:45.120 | Joe Biden's heart? What's he passionate about? He is clearly

01:24:48.440 | passionate about this cause about bringing Ukraine into NATO,

01:24:52.600 | and certainly not having Ukraine collapse or lose this war.

01:24:56.200 | Whereas Trump and Bobby Kennedy have both said that they will

01:24:59.920 | end this war, they will seek a peace deal, if elected. I think

01:25:05.280 | that's enough right there.

01:25:06.240 | Yeah, I mean, and obviously, Lincoln and Biden are looking

01:25:09.320 | for peace as well. They just don't want to lose the war.

01:25:11.280 | No, they're not looking for peace. I just think they are

01:25:14.680 | definitely for peace, you can disagree, but they want peace.

01:25:17.320 | And why do they reject the deal at Istanbul at the beginning of

01:25:19.320 | this war?

01:25:19.880 | Yeah, because they, I think, don't want Russia to determine

01:25:23.720 | who gets to be in NATO, and they want free countries to decide.

01:25:26.200 | Is that worth going to war for?

01:25:27.800 | I mean, that is, I guess, the existential question here is, at

01:25:31.920 | what point do we want to let free democracies determine their

01:25:35.360 | future, and protect them from invading countries? That is,

01:25:38.280 | like, actually, the core of this is, do you believe in

01:25:40.920 | democracy? Do you believe free countries should have the

01:25:43.920 | autonomy to pick their future? And is that worth fighting for?

01:25:47.880 | That is the question the world faces right now.

01:25:50.080 | I think that framing, I think that framing is not totally

01:25:53.240 | accurate. I think, of course, those things are good and right

01:25:55.760 | things. I think the thing is, on the balance of issues, there are

01:26:00.080 | seasons when certain priorities need to be shaped by a country.

01:26:03.840 | And right now, we're in a season where there's tremendous

01:26:09.560 | domestic instability in our country. And, and our country,

01:26:14.400 | you're saying in our country, yeah, in our balance sheet is

01:26:16.600 | breaking. So I think the question isn't that is democracy

01:26:19.640 | important? Of course, it's important. It's how relatively

01:26:23.320 | important is it abroad, relative to these domestic issues here?

01:26:28.760 | Yeah, but I know.

01:26:29.880 | Hold on, let me just finish. Is it worth fighting for is the

01:26:34.360 | issue? And is it worth fighting for when you don't have the

01:26:37.080 | resources to do it? Now, if we were sitting here, and a country

01:26:40.600 | next to Ukraine was invaded, say, Finland, or say, France, or

01:26:45.080 | another country in Europe was invaded, we would absolutely go

01:26:49.200 | to bat for them. But for Ukraine, we won't go to bat for

01:26:51.800 | them. They're not part of part of NATO. And you know, this is

01:26:55.480 | when you say

01:26:55.920 | are you saying send American soldiers, because that's what

01:26:59.520 | we're talking about.

01:27:00.080 | If France or Finland was, would you be opposed to France? If

01:27:03.600 | Russia invaded France? Would you defend France? Would you be in

01:27:06.240 | favor of the course, that's, that's our article five guarantee

01:27:09.920 | under NATO. This is why I don't want to extend an article five

01:27:12.200 | guarantee to Ukraine, because it will put us directly in conflict

01:27:15.200 | with Russia. And I'm not interested in being in war three.

01:27:18.360 | Right. And then so Finland and Sweden come up. And I guess the

01:27:21.440 | argument would be would you be in favor of sending troops to

01:27:24.480 | defend Finland and Sweden, the latest members of NATO? And

01:27:26.600 | would you be in favor of it? Now we're committed. And when you

01:27:29.520 | were in favor of them joining NATO, I guess is the next

01:27:31.680 | question should we discuss it on the pod, I explained that it was

01:27:34.200 | creating a liability, not an asset, but what's done is done.

01:27:36.840 | Should free countries be able to join NATO, I guess is at the end

01:27:40.080 | of the question, actually, makes me make two points on that. The

01:27:43.280 | first one is, countries don't have a right to join NATO any

01:27:47.120 | more than I have a right to join Augusta country club. Just because

01:27:50.520 | I'm a golf player doesn't mean I get to join Augusta. Okay, it's

01:27:53.720 | up to the current membership of Augusta or NATO decide whether

01:27:59.080 | they're going to admit a country based on what is in their

01:28:01.640 | interests. It has never been in our interest to make Ukraine

01:28:05.240 | security dependent of the United States. Sorry, this is the

01:28:07.840 | reality. The second thing I want to point out is that what was

01:28:12.120 | Russia demanding, they were demanding Ukrainian neutrality,

01:28:16.000 | they were not basically looking to conquer Ukraine, they wanted

01:28:20.840 | them to be neutral. So Ukraine did not have to give up its

01:28:24.840 | freedom. Okay, they just had to agree to be neutral. That was

01:28:28.880 | the key issue. That's what makes it very different than some

01:28:31.520 | other historical analogies. And that was not acceptable to us at

01:28:35.160 | the very beginning of the war. Blinken said that we would

01:28:38.000 | insist on an open door policy would be a clearly the right

01:28:41.320 | move here would have been to kick the can down the road and

01:28:43.360 | just tell Putin, we'll take it off. We'll take NATO off the

01:28:46.000 | table for 10 years or 20 years. And then we could have outlasted

01:28:49.200 | Putin. You and I agreed on that before the war started. And then

01:28:53.800 | the minute the war started, everyone forgot that that was

01:28:56.120 | the key costumes Bell live this war, just more diplomacy is

01:29:00.880 | better. Can I just say one thing? Saxe, you would be the

01:29:05.160 | perfect member of Augusta. For one small issue.

01:29:09.120 | Rhymes with snus.

01:29:12.480 | Oh, Augusta. Oh, my gosh.

01:29:15.840 | My favorite from who is the lunatic? deranged guy from New

01:29:22.160 | York, we see in Congress and they expelled him after six

01:29:25.920 | months. George said to us, are you Jewish? He's like, I'm Jew.

01:29:30.840 | Ish ish, like a little pause in the middle. Alright, listen,

01:29:35.760 | another amazing episode, episode 173. Congratulations to our CEO

01:29:39.880 | john hell. He's with us now who will make

01:29:42.920 | a nice callback. Please do us a favor. Do us a favor. 486,000

01:29:53.080 | people following the YouTube channel, get in there and be

01:29:56.000 | part of the q&a when we hit 500,000 and your best chance of

01:30:01.240 | being part of the 1 million subscriber party, which I think

01:30:04.320 | Chamath is going to oversee. It'll be at the Wynn in Las

01:30:08.520 | Vegas there. Oh, okay, there it is. We have a location and then

01:30:11.960 | the all in some make an announcement next week. Go to

01:30:15.260 | YouTube type in all in and subscribe for the rain man,

01:30:20.240 | David Sachs. Yeah, Chamath Palihapitiya, the German

01:30:23.480 | dictator and your sultan of science who loved dune to he

01:30:27.640 | loved it. He saw it twice over a decade. I'm going to see it

01:30:32.120 | twice. I'm gonna go see it again. Go see it. And I got

01:30:34.360 | the comment boards got so angry. Furious, furious, overrated. I

01:30:41.160 | mean, this set them off like nothing has ever set them off.

01:30:44.540 | I don't know. Try making a comment about Trump. Join my

01:30:48.520 | world. You can't attack him. Timothy Shalame. God. Man, they

01:30:56.120 | were really with his defense. I mean, he does look like he

01:31:00.280 | drinks a lot of soy. I'll be honest. I think that guys only I

01:31:03.400 | don't think that guys ever had whole milk. Not skinny. skinny

01:31:08.640 | people like that when you're super skinny like that you

01:31:11.080 | travel in packs to protect each other as a group. Oh, like you

01:31:15.080 | can get in a group like hyenas or something and then just

01:31:17.480 | protect each other. Yeah, it's like oh my god, we got to stick

01:31:20.040 | up for each other. Because if we don't, you know, Hey, are you

01:31:23.120 | standing sideways? Or are you like, there's like, they're like

01:31:26.240 | a pod, a pod of soybeans, like the Roman turtle protection

01:31:31.040 | thing that they were so made. Yeah, shields up as one as one

01:31:34.560 | so he is now up to 630 million. The box office pretty, pretty

01:31:39.520 | good run, huh? You know, they're gonna do do in three

01:31:41.960 | now. Don't it's definitely happening. He's just negotiating

01:31:45.160 | a big price tag. Yeah, big deal. All right, everybody. You know

01:31:50.000 | what to do. And we'll see you next time on love you. The

01:31:53.400 | world's greatest podcast, the orange pockets. Tell your

01:31:56.160 | friends

01:31:56.600 | let your winners ride

01:31:59.520 | brain man David

01:32:02.080 | we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with

01:32:09.000 | it. Love you as a queen of

01:32:11.840 | going

01:32:12.280 | besties are gone

01:32:19.560 | that is my dog taking a notice in your driveway

01:32:23.080 | we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy

01:32:31.440 | because they're all just useless. It's like this like

01:32:33.320 | sexual tension, but they just need to release

01:32:36.760 | what you're about to be

01:32:40.440 | waiting to get murkies

01:32:44.160 | going on

01:32:44.800 | late

01:32:45.320 | I'm going on

01:32:52.760 | ♪ Only you ♪

01:32:54.920 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

E173: Google buying HubSpot? FTX depositors not made whole, AI job fears, Ukraine joining NATO

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