SPEAKER_05: Jake out. Do you have intros today? No, I don't have time for intros. Oh, come on. All right, fine. He started as a nerd with no followers on Twitter. Now he's a nerd that gets recognized when leaving the shitter. He turned water into wine. He just wants to please us. Now he's a mixture of Kermit the frog and a science nerd Jesus. He's the man with the stands the queen of Ken while the Sultan of science, the prince of Prozac, the Lord of Lexapro. He gets stops for selfies all over town. My producer fee gave him a mental breakdown. The Sultan of Zola, Mr. David Reber. It's true. It did give me a breakdown. You're over it now. You just named dropped three SSR eyes and that intro is incredible. Well, I talked to his I talked to his psychiatrist. He said he's working on the cocktail. Yeah, save some for me. Oh, you speaking of you. He's got a very quick wit and impeccable grammar known for building beautiful products that don't work. Oh my god, like Colin and Yammer. He used to invest in SAS quite a lot. Now he's fighting a brigade of Ukraine bots. He's spending so much
SPEAKER_05: time in his bunker. It's starting to get smelly. We see them only three times a week all in Tucker and Megyn Kelly. He'd invest in your startup if you had the knack. But right now he needs that cash for his GOP super pack. The world's biggest asshole the rain man himself Mr. David Sachs. That's all. That's a repeat joke. That's not I know but it kills every time so I'm gonna keep repeating it until you stop laughing. His wardrobe costs so much he can't get into a scuffle. He bought all his friends with his white
SPEAKER_05: truffles. He scaled Facebook to a Billy that wine collection. It's just fucking silly. He's on the world tour meeting with princes and kings. Is he talking luxury sweaters or maybe bigger things? The dictator himself chamath Pali happened to you. That was really nice, actually. Well, I mean, I appreciate you. You were obviously trying to get invited to dinner tonight. I'm trying to get off the alternate list. He's trying to get off the alternate that the email was harsh nine was alternate. You would try me. I know I have a seat. As for me, I'm the
SPEAKER_05: world's greatest moderator who can take a note compared to these guys. I'm just a millionaire who's broke the all in summit almost killed us. But we came back from death's door. I knew we peaked when freeburg took over the dance floor. We love the fans, but we love each other more. Thanks for the first 100 fellows. Here's to 100 more really good. Wow. That's really really good. Look at you touching
SPEAKER_04: surprisingly came prepared today. First time he after 100 episodes, he finally figured out he has to prepare. So that was the note. Just prepare your job. Do your job. Do your job. Do your job. Your un-remutarated job. Do your job. Speaking of un-remutarated, we heard that somebody's grifting off the pod. Oh, yeah. So good point. What we heard sex is that you got a big care package from Montclair. Yeah, that's true.
SPEAKER_06: What?
SPEAKER_03: What I think we're all going to declare today is that we all want to wet our beak. And if Montclair sends each of us a care package, we will all wear Montclair gear at episode 100. My brand Google your own brand. Yeah, we decided to
SPEAKER_06: Jamas got Laura piano. I got Montclair. You go get like, you know, I saw it or something. I saw it. I saw it. Actually, I got eyes on too. You have to do. I have Uniqlo. I got Uniqlo. We got Gap Kids for JCal. In fact, you didn't you didn't declare your Montclair gift package by the way. That was the discovery we made this weekend. So I want to thank I want to thank the folks at there's a company called
SPEAKER_06: and they sent me this gift actually this hoodie this Montclair hoodie, which I never seen before. What is this plug you? They send you a hoodie for $1,200 and they get a
SPEAKER_06: there were several other things that I'll bring you guys each a shirt from Montclair.
SPEAKER_03: These guys are getting hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue. Yeah, how bad is your portfolio that you're grifting? Did you put this Montclair stuff on to like eBay after you got it? I was already wearing and they sent me more. So I'm gonna wear this hoodie is pretty cool. What can I say? I'm not gonna
SPEAKER_06: three cents and all of a sudden you're grifting. I just for everyone listening. I'm looking for a wardrobe. Okay, just send my package to my let me tell you something. There's no upgrade that's gonna help free. I think you're fucked. No, I'm gonna bring you guys Montclair shirts the poker game tonight. Gee, thanks.
SPEAKER_03: Thanks. Appreciate that. How did how did you guys even find out that he got this gift? We're at his fleet week party. And there was an angel some Blue Angels party and there's someone there who started telling me like, did you hear the tax cut this whole thing?
SPEAKER_03: Somebody there's a rat. There was a rat. He's got a mole. We were talking about the podcast. 100% It was way 100%. No, no, it wasn't 100% was it Jeff?
SPEAKER_01: I know what am I one of my friends was in the man cave and he saw this like care package from Montclair and he really admired this like jacket. It was like a puffer jacket but with like wool sleeves or something. So you gave it to him. And I gave it to he liked it.
SPEAKER_06: Even on the pod. He's not even on the pocket. Give it to producer Nick. So he was walking around with it. He was really appreciative. So maybe he said something or, or well, I can't.
SPEAKER_06: I'm not just the griffic is crazy. Let's just say there was a lot of conversations going on about your care package sacks.
SPEAKER_03: Well, and it makes us wonder sacks. Are there other care packages that have come in and like, have you been promoting other stuff on here? So who makes the magazines that you wouldn't want to? How much of your Loro Piana have you actually paid for over the past year? That's
SPEAKER_03: 100% I would never I would never accept it for free. Oh, it's important. Wait, no, all joking aside. It's hard if you're running a clothing business, especially if you're like a small niche provider stuff. So yeah, you have a responsibility to pay for this stuff, not to grift and get it for free.
SPEAKER_01: No, I know. When I was at the Loro Piana store on 57th Street in Manhattan, the 18,000 square foot store. I was thinking the same thing these poor people. How do they survive? Well, Loro Piana is only $270 square foot rent.
SPEAKER_02: Maybe Loro Piana. I would pick a book. purveyors, Friedberg, exploiting poor baby goats. Well, whatever. I mean, the fact is the markets down. There's gonna be a little grifting on the margins. It's understandable.
SPEAKER_05: Rain Man David Saks.
SPEAKER_00: We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy. Freeberg he loves to produce every 17th episode. He does a great job. Oh, no, I like to prepare or at least know what the heck we're going to talk about when we get to the prompts. He got these jobs. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: Alright, so first up on freebergs curiousness. This is free. This is how you're gonna do it. Let's get to the next section. Come on. No, no, no. Okay. So, go, go, go. Why do you think Chamath people love the podcast? Why do you think they listen? Why do you think they love it? What is the the phenomenon? What lightning has been captured in this bottle? First is I think that they appreciate our friendship. It's kind of like odd and quirky.
SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of, you know, it maps to like relationships that they have amongst their own friends. So that's what makes it relatable. But the second is that all of us uniquely have a point of view. About stuff that matters more and more in the world. I think that's just the basics of it. Like it's not like technology is going away. And it's not like its impact in the world is going away. And the more it becomes mainstream, the more it's important for a lot of folks to understand what's happening. And I think we provide a pretty unfiltered view of it. And we do it where, and this is a lot of credit to Sax, more than anyone else on the show, has to take a counterpoint and steal man's money. And what would otherwise be controversial views. And if he didn't have his three friends around him, that would make the pod meaningfully worse, I think.
SPEAKER_05: Can you explain for people who don't know what steel manning is what that means?
SPEAKER_01: Well, just it just means like to have intellectual honesty around a point of view, and actually put your best foot forward and trying to explain it, even when it's not Orthodox, even when it's not what the mainstream would say is right. And so what it actually does is it creates a contrast against every other alternative that you have to learn about things, which you find incrementally is biased. And I think that's what we've gotten right. We are four friends that have a reasonable point of view rooted in some amount of success. And I think that that's important because it gives us credibility. And we take all sides of issues. Yeah. And oftentimes, it is not the obvious, simple, reductive answer. And I think that that's where it really shines. Just so people know about the steel man argument, I want to make sure people are correct. I think most people refer to it as the act of presenting the other argument in the strongest way possible to be intellectually honest, like the opposite.
SPEAKER_05: Exactly. Because the way the way the debate happens on Twitter and so forth is it's almost like the intellectual debate is being attacked using opposition research tactics like a political campaign.
SPEAKER_06: So in other words, they go back through anything you might have said or written, take the the thing that was most wrong or least justifiable or the thing they can even just take out of context. And then they'll try to make it about that as opposed to the argument you're actually making. And we just see this tactic over and over again. And it's not an intellectually rigorous way of having a debate about something. You don't learn anything. And deep down inside, you know that it's contrived. And that is the, in a nutshell, so it does, it almost in many ways has less to do with how good we are, but frankly, how bad all the alternatives are.
SPEAKER_01: So even if you wanted to learn about tech and you go up and you sign up for these newsletters, or if you look at some of these tech sites, they're really terrible. And they have done an increasingly terrible job over the last five years in telling the most important things, the truth and everything in between. And so if you can find a source for an hour a week that is trying to tell you how basically the world is going to come together in a really integrated multifaceted way, it's not like we're right. And it's not like we know better than other people. In fact, many times a lot of the criticism I get is, how dare you talk about X or how dare you talk about Y? Because it makes people who are experts in that field, you know, feel like, how dare you come into my realm and even have an opinion on, you know, what Russian politics was like in the 1980s. And those things really annoy these folks because they feel that those opinions and that knowledge should be cordoned off and held tightly as this secret that only they are allowed to talk about into the world. And this is the point where with the internet, all this knowledge is accessible. So the value of that knowledge, in my opinion, is the least it's ever been. It's the interpretation that's valuable. And it's the ability to actually like think narratively around how all these things connect. And this is where I give a lot of credit. I think you guys do an incredible job. I think the way Freedbrook thinks is super unique. I think the way that Saxis thinks is unique. I think, J. Cal, your courage to basically fight back is very special. All of it together is a really unique recipe. It works. And what I will tell you consistently is the number of people that listen to this of import and influence. I am constantly shocked. And if you are not sure of it, you need to get out of this stupid little echo chamber of Silicon Valley, go to New York, go around the world. And if you're in the right meetings, it's incredible how folks are getting educated using this pod. And I think that's really amazing. Yeah, I think there's like been a tendency in what we call media today, historically, kind of communication amongst humans.
SPEAKER_03: It was very slow for a communication cycle to go from beginning to end to close because we had print and books and then telegraphs and then telephones and then television and radio. And the Internet, I think, has really changed the cycle, the loop cycle to the point that a story iterates and proliferates very quickly. A lot of people talk about the news cycle being very short nowadays. And what that means is that there is a group think approach to resolving to a point of view on what the news is. So the news comes out, everyone iterates on it, they form their point of view, and all of a sudden everyone's on the same point of view. And so there is no room for dissent or debate or discussion because the cycle closes so quickly and everyone coalesces around the same point of view. And nowadays, I think we see not just that unipolar behavior, but we see this bipolar behavior where everyone coalesces on their point of view and how their point of view is the opposite of the other side. And everyone has their own heuristic for what the other side is. There's this populism versus elitism siding, there's this red versus blue siding, there's this us versus them siding, US versus China siding. Everything is now bipolar. And so you very quickly coalesce around what your poll says and what your poll is instructing you to believe. And that is what is fundamentally wrong with how the system is working today. And I think what people find refreshing about a discourse that doesn't succumb to that bipolarity as a standard is that it provides people the ability to have a real rational, out-of-sync point of view that maybe changes one's point of view and changes one's mind in a meaningful way. And I think that's what's really missing today. And I think maybe sometimes we do a good job and we touch on that. And so that's what I would strive to do is to always try and avoid that bipolarity on everything. You know, the Zen Buddhists call it dualistic thinking. The human brain and generally the universe seems to evolve into this kind of dualism on everything. And it's not really always the case that there are shades of gray, that there is nuance, that there is a complex dimensionality to things that I think people really, if they take the time to understand, recognize that maybe it's not left and right, maybe it's not elite in populism, maybe it's not all black and white. And that's an important, hopefully, framing that maybe we can bring to light through our diagnosis of what's going on in things right now.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I like to add to that. I think there's there's a ton of great journalism going out there, we see it. There's a ton of great sub stacks out there, people go deep, there's other great podcasts out there. And right now, it's a tumultuous time for media journalism and getting information and do what trust what sources do we actually trust, who actually is thinking in a crisp way, and informing people. And, you know, having been a former journalist, when we were journalists, we knew that we would get 10 2030 40% of a story, we would publish it, and we would try our best. But journalism has changed dramatically in the last 20 years. And I can tell you journalism is dead. Sorry, okay. Some great journalism occurring. It's on the margins. It's irrelevant. And I'll tell you why. Because the facts are known instantaneously on Twitter and through the internet. We don't need people to relay facts, we need people to wrap facts in context, and allow us to come to our own conclusions.
SPEAKER_01: That's why I think journalism isn't what it used to be. That's why people who are historically journalists struggle, because now they actually have to create context and narrative and have an opinion. But when you publish that into the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, it becomes very confusing. They don't know that that's what they were supposed to do. That's not what they used to do. That's not how Pulitzer Prizes were were historically given out. And that's why everybody then you know, rants and rails about things kind of going is, you know, if you if you look at it, as journalists, people don't know this, but journalists are being compensated.
SPEAKER_05: Their little salaries, in many cases are based on their follower counts. They're based on what audience they're bringing to the table. And you see this in substack. substack just said we're going to hire the top journalists on who have the most followers on Twitter. But you have to change the word so that you change how people think about it. These people are not journalists. These people are opinion makers. Okay, in some cases, they're doing journalism. In some cases, they're, no, no, there are some cases where they're actually doing real journalism.
SPEAKER_05: There are people doing investigative reporting. Still, it's not the majority of what you see, but it still exists. It's just a very much smaller percentage. But putting that aside, if you think about but how you wrap a virtuous blanket around every 1000 people because of the acts of one.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not and I'm not I said, there's a range here. It's a small percentage, but this is what do you think?
SPEAKER_05: What do you think that percentage of content creation? I put it at 5%. So that's, you know, one out of 20. Yeah, sure. I think it's less than 1%. But let me just finish this one thought here. You know, if you are going to be hired, and compensated, and we talk about systems here a lot. So just thinking from first principles, if you're a journalist, if you're a writer, opinion writer, whatever you produce content for Wall Street Journal for podcasts, etc. Today, let this sink in. Your follower count is what your book advantage is.
SPEAKER_05: It's what your compensation is. It's who hires you. Now, if that's the truth, and it's not all the time, but I think point at that your job is not to relay facts, we can get facts. Exactly. Let me finish my thought here. And so then what happens is how is follower count on Twitter actually derived? How do you get that follower count by being tribal? And so what's happened is journalists have became tribal, they get big followings, they give spicy takes, they pick a side, and then their compensation follows it. And that's why you don't have to be a journalist.
SPEAKER_05: And that's why New York Times said, Can we all stop on Twitter, and they literally put an edict out. Then you look at this podcast. I think people look at us as you know, in their mixture podcasting long form taking the time week after week to spend 90 minutes chopping these things up. I think that's what to the original question freeburg you had is what people find so great. I when people ask me, I say it's really about the fact that there's a there's a friendships here. And it's funny. But it's also informative. And it's insightful. And at times, as you pointed out, Shemagh, you know, random acts of bravery and taking positions that are not popular. And to think that you and freeburg almost blew this up over a few 100k. I didn't know the two of you equally should share. I wouldn't classify it that way. By the way. Now the bad feelings already getting spicy. So I have more of an ethical framework. But yeah, that's fine. Go ahead. Even worse. Look at Shambaugh stirring the pot. Just to chime in on this point. I mean, I think I'm in
SPEAKER_06: violent agreement with you guys. But I'd frame it a little differently. I think the reason why people seek out our podcasts and other podcasts and sub stacks is and sort of this kind of independent journalism and are willing to pay for it is because the mainstream media has become totally devoid of substance. It's as partisan and etiol in etiol guys as it's ever been. Reporters are extremely ideological. You look at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the major television networks, it's all kind of the same thing. And yeah, there is like, you know, a little bit of an echo chamber problem in terms of the partisan politics. But the mainstream media is the most etiol guys it's ever been. I mean, just to give you one small example that we talked about in the pod. The you know, we had two quarters of negative GDP growth, which the media is always considered to be the definition of recession. And then all of a sudden, they said, No, we can't know what a recession is anymore. Because they know that'd be a horrible headline for Biden right before the midterm elections. That's more of a partisan version, I think on the, you know, a more ideological version would be just around this Ukraine war. I mean, it's just incredible how biased the coverage is. They don't even present the other side of the story, like this called the Mearsheimer take about how we got to this point that we're in. So the American people just aren't being informed at all. I you know, we we love to talk about how the people of all these other countries are being propagandized by their governments. We never talk about how propagandized the American people are. The media does not present the other side of the story at all on how we got into the Ukraine war and how we're now at the brink of what Biden calls Armageddon. Yeah. So we see it out of it. How are we gonna get out of it? Any topic, by the way, I think
SPEAKER_03: that was my punch. So many topics that we see, you know, effectively short form and short form, meaning it can be presented in a soundbite or on a tik tok clip, or in a couple of paragraphs, where someone's attention span before someone has attention span lapses out, always misses the dimensionality that got us to that point. And so there's one perspective, one point of view on one dimension, and the dimension like Sax is talking about, about the time and the history of the dynamics.
SPEAKER_03: Of all the countries and all the people and all the interactions that have happened for the past couple of decades that led up to this moment. But then this moment is taken in its context alone and reclassified as being something that is good versus evil. It completely misses the entire storyline of what happened. It's like going to be end of a fairy tale and saying, here's this moment of what happened. And all the build up and all the things that occurred are often missing and all the different sides of the story are missing. And I think that that's really what makes it so difficult today to feel like you can trust authority and that you can trust the media that's presented to you as a consumer, not just in the U.S. or in the West, but around the world, because there's so much that's left out and manipulated and kept away. And what people are waking up to is the fact, as Chamath points out, that so much of that information, the direct information is available now. And so this investigation, this ability to uncover the data and the storylines and the perspectives that are typically missing from one form of media is making people realize that there's so much that's being left out the lie of 100 percent, 100 percent. And I think in this podcast, it's really shocking to people nowadays. And I think that's what makes maybe to some degree, hold on conversation a little more appealing. I'll drop to you in a second there, sex. But I did see this happen in three specific topics that we discussed here.
SPEAKER_05: If you remember, we talked about abortion. And we were on that topic very early. And no one wanted to talk. I remember when we started talking about the number of weeks, maybe how Europe looks at this. That wasn't part of the popular conversation. It was always just are you against choice? Are you for killing babies? It was like a very two dimensional look at it. Immigration, same thing. Nobody would talk about the numbers. Nobody talked about recruitment. Nobody talked about the point systems used in other countries. It was almost like those basic things were not allowed to be discussed. Why can't the media discuss those nuances and freedom of speech is I think the biggest one and the search for truth. You know, nobody wants to talk about the fact that the ACLU used to actually protect unpopular speech and unpopular speeches, you know, the hardest thing in the world to protect. But how did that become something we can't even talk about now? Right. And just the snap silencing of any opinion, whether it's Chappelle, or, you know, pick a topic and freedom of speech, Trump, etc. You know, who gets protection for freedom of speech? And we'll talk about it later on the news with Alex Jones, obviously a very controversial topic as well. Go ahead, sex, you want to add something to Well, I think just to take this Ukraine situation as an example, I think the media's biggest power is the power to define when time begins on an issue. So well, like right with Ukraine, we're part of an escalatory spiral that's been going on for well more than eight or nine months. This issue has been going on since 2008.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, he's been over a decade. So in other words, if you come in, in like the seventh inning, okay, so to free works point, you come in at the end of the story, and it's been an escalatory spiral. But the media just pretends like time begins on February 24. Of course, you're gonna have a certain kind of view on the subject. Whereas if you know the history of the situation, if you know that back in the 1990s, you had people like George Kennan, who was the architect of our Cold War containment policy, you had William J. Perry was Bill Clinton's defense secretary, you had Henry Kissinger, you had john Mirscher, all worn that bring NATO right up to Russia's front porch was extremely provocative to them that they would see that as a provocation, it would eventually lead to a moment of crisis. When that moment of crisis finally came. You know, we're not told that this was predicted. We're told that anyone who says that this war has anything to do with NATO expansion is basically a Putin apologist and is spelling Putin talking points. All right, let's not let's not let's save some of that for the Ukraine talk. We're going to talk about
SPEAKER_05: could agree or disagree with that take. But the point is, the media doesn't even portray it.
SPEAKER_05: They really just pick a side. And they I think I like your analogy of like, just coming in for the last 15 minutes of the game. And just describing that, you know, we you need to have a deeper discussion of how did we get here? How did we get here on immigration? Why don't we have a point system? Why do we look at people suddenly coming from south of the border differently than we did just 20 years ago? How did that become a politicized issue? What's the right solution here? Especially if we can't hire people for basic jobs in the United States? Everybody wants to know this question? What's your fate? You have a favorite moment? Or a least favorite moment? A great moment in the show history. And then I guess we'll move on maybe to some audience questions here. But let's let's get this one because an embarrassing moment, your favorite moment, your least favorite moment of a moment now you look back on and you're particularly proud of Jamal. I love the cold opens. I think that they are unbelievably human and funny and normalizing. They are by far the best part of the pod in life. And yeah, that's my that's my absolute favorite part by by like miles and miles.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_05: Actually got a favorite moment other than Ukraine. Other than Ukraine. I know you got Ukraine on the brain. Probably when you started talking like Joe Pesci. The Joe Pesci voice. I can't do it on command. I'm not your monkey sacks. Don't you talk to me like that. I'll get a fucking bad idea. No, seriously, you have any other favorite moments? Or things you're particularly proud of things that people tell you about?
SPEAKER_05: What do you you know, hey, I love what do you love this part of the show. I'm also proud that we we were able to air our dirty laundry a little bit in public and still get over ourselves and our own egos. And we're still here. I think that takes a lot of courage and a little bit of a little bit of maturity. That's that's not in public visibility all the time. In the media.
SPEAKER_05: I like that sentiment a lot. I think there's a lot of yeah, they were uncomfortable about it. You know, I, I think there's a lot of personal growth that's going on here. For all of everybody involved. Yeah. A free break. You got a favorite moment other you know,
SPEAKER_05: I like it when you and sex fight. That's just that's your least favorite moment.
SPEAKER_03: I literally turn I turn my headphones off and I like do some emailing. It's it really is just it really is just this political thing. But yeah, it does come up. You know, I don't like the fact the moments I've been interrupted by you that like that just happened five seconds ago. Like, you know, those are usually pretty tough.
SPEAKER_03: Good. What I what I did enjoy, I did enjoy meeting people at the summit, who shared that this has been like a really important thing for them to listen to. I think I was at a pizza coffee in the city. And some guy came up to me. This was one early after early when we were doing the podcast. And he was like, listening to you guys has really helped me get through COVID. And he was like locked in his apartment and even though he's not here.
SPEAKER_03: He didn't have a lot of friends and he didn't have a lot of people to talk with. And just being able to hear through, you know, kind of a good conversation around when's this going to end? How's COVID gonna you know, what's going to change in the city and hearing our friendship really made a big difference for him. And it was actually really interesting that was off the show. But it made me realize that the show actually is impactful and helpful and gave me kind of the energy to keep going even though I've had frustrations in the past. I don't know. I like I like those moments a lot to be honest. That there's real value here for people. I also I thought the summit was a lot of fun. I mean, I had a good time.
SPEAKER_05: But you know, it's a I think we're steering towards I think we're steering towards summit 2023. That was me starting the pot a little bit.
SPEAKER_04: I think 2020 done one. I as far as I'm concerned, you do it, you produce it or you hire a producer, I'll show up.
SPEAKER_05: I'm a I don't need to make a producer fee. You can do it. You can take the producer fee, whatever it is. All right, guys, I got a couple of questions here from the audience.
SPEAKER_03: Do you guys see this list? Yeah, we got it. Well, you pick you pick. So here's a question. We got it over email from Nathan. And Nathan said, we know the reasons. The reason you guys started the pod. What is the motivation of each bestie to continue doing it every week? I asked myself that every week.
SPEAKER_04: therapy.
SPEAKER_02: No, I'm thinking about taking a break. Not because I don't like doing it. But it is time consuming. And I do want time to get back to doing some business writing. I was on a pretty good track to publish a book about sass. Before we started doing the pot. I had written a lot of business blogs. And this is kind of
SPEAKER_06: taking a break. What? How many weeks? Because we 10 weeks? What are you thinking? Maybe like a month or something? Yeah. Oh, four weeks. You can take that's no big deal. Maybe I don't know. Four to 10. All right. There's there's a I've got like a right now Brad Gerson is like doing jumping jacks in his back yard and put me in the game. Well, we could do that. I mean, I've got like five half written business blogs in my hopper that I really want to finish. And so I don't know. The show does take a lot of cognitive energy is what you're saying. It takes a lot of energy.
SPEAKER_05: Your time each week sex. I mean, as you guys know, the taping is only a couple hours, but then it's just keeping track of all the issues. And then, you know, if I'm preparing takes for this pod, I also turn some of those takes into articles. This is like for the week or the American
SPEAKER_06: conservative or whatever. So I'm responding and responding and then I have tweeting takes as I'm coming up with them, which is I think the, the load for sacks because he is the most heterodox is the heaviest and this is like poorly understood. It's easy to just basically be on the side of the current conventional wisdom or to not have an opinion and to talk about things that are orthogonal, but David is consistently the one that wades into the middle of the ocean and he's a
SPEAKER_01: I can, I can understand why you know, because he, he knows he has to be more prepared than the rest of us because he is more open to the attacks from all of these nitwits. It's just this. I mean, he just, no, I day on Twitter, I'm being told I'm never change or blah, blah, blah. These are like uninformed nitwits. You know, they're the, they're the, they're the ones that are the most important.
SPEAKER_00: The cancer of people who comment on Twitter is the following. They suffer from the worst kind of cancer, which is a lack of belief in themselves. And so what they do is they point to other people and try to convince yet more people to not believe in them. But that has nothing to do with anything. It's just misdirection from their core problem, which is they don't believe in themselves. And so, you know, David has to fight all of that stuff off, but he has to fight it off with more people.
SPEAKER_01: Which must be exhausting. You know, my approach has just been to turn off comments and to not start. This is the single biggest problem I think with social media is it's at this heightened point where it's this virulent strain of a lack of belief in oneself that manifests in this hatred that you direct to anybody else that believes in themselves. Interesting, interesting theory. Yeah. And I would just, just to add to that. You know, it's not like I haven't heard any of the arguments that they're making. I guarantee you they have not heard the arguments I'm making, but I've heard all the arguments are 100%. I'm totally familiar with 1938 Munich, Neville Chamberlain, all this kind of stuff. I just don't think that is the correct understanding of what's happening right now. I think the correct historical analogy is either 1914 with war one, and the blank chapter of the war, and the
SPEAKER_06: The people on the other side generally don't understand that they are just kind of part of this like Twitter mob, who's buying into the current thing and whatever they're told by the media. So it is it is a little bit exhausting. I think that that's what people don't realize is you know, you when this thing got very popular, the two or three days after an episode comes out becomes your texts, your email, your DMS and your replies become filled, especially again, I would I would encourage you to keep doing this thing and just to turn off comments and don't go back.
SPEAKER_01: It's hard for the first few weeks and then you realize 99% of people who comment have nothing important or useful or interesting to say, like zero, like negative zero. And you forget that there's like 99.999% of the world that just reads your content and couldn't even care about their comments.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I would just I would focus on what you have to say, assuming is the point nor and ignore all these other Twitter agree that would make it less exhausting, but it would still be time consuming. I there is a bunch of business blogs I want to get done. So
SPEAKER_06: I mean, I said you take two weeks off, you come back and see how you feel. I mean, you can do it week by week to I mean, just take one week off and see it.
SPEAKER_05: I think you'll I think you'll be back. Great, great, great question from Nathan. Thank you for your participation. Nathan. Next question. I actually like this one. I'm going to pull it out. It's an email question from Juan T.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, hey, wanted, wanted. Bill Gurley recently put out a piece explaining how this might be as good a time as in a decade to build a company. How are you guys seeing your own portfolio companies trying to take advantage of the situation? And I guess I'll add Do you guys agree? And how do you think about this as a moment for company building? I could take that one. I am seeing a lot of the companies that were you had done a great job raising around seed round series a never got product market fit now wrap it up, right there, they're shutting down, they're doing the wind down process. And then we're seeing lists of very talented people. And I've talked about this before on the show the consolidation of talent behind the winning ideas, the the experiments that actually worked products that got some traction are now having an easier time hiring talent.
SPEAKER_05: And so to Bill's point, he's got a lot more experience in this than the four of us put together, is absolutely right. When you build in this down market, yeah, it's harder to raise money, of course. But talent is what makes great products, and products that delight customers get the flywheel going. And if you survive through this, and you have that talent, you're not going to face 20 copycats. And there's not 50 new products coming out a day, people have more time to actually engage and try a product, which is a great thing. And then you try a product, which they've been burnt out on and the peanut butter spreading, you know, we have this thin layer of peanut butter talent. Now it's getting consolidated in the winter. So absolutely a great time for five CEOs and founders or you know, 10 founders across five companies to consolidate down to to do those tuck in acquisitions and get focused and build really good teams and cut the weakest people on the team. There's a lot of weak talent that have been overpaid, and aren't actually contributing to these teams and they need to get cut. And then you pull in the All Stars. It's a time he's 100% right. All of the if you look back in history, since 2000, all of the best performing funds of all times were the ones that were formed right in the middle of the downturns, oh, three, oh, eight, oh, nine, these are the vintages that have always been the best. And what that means it's a proxy for investing, which is, it's the hardest time right now. It's when you have the shakiest hand when you're writing the check. But it'll probably be where all of the real money is made, or the real generational wealth, both for the entrepreneurs who have the courage to start, and the investors who are
SPEAKER_01: the courage to invest. There was a story that I heard in New York, I was talking to a really well known hedge fund, or family office. And they were talking about how they were meeting with a CEO of a fintech unicorn, very well known fintech unicorn. And they said they left the meeting, and they said, this person had an unbelievable disrespect for money. And it was the most arrogant interaction that they had ever heard. And they said, under no circumstances, would we invest in this guy in this company at any price. And, you know, lo and behold, a year later, that company is now visibly going through a bunch of hiccups. And it just reminds me that, Jason, we've always had two problems when times are good. Problem number one is that there's never been a check and balance on that kind of behavior, a lack of respect for capital, and almost a disregard for business models, which is just inexcusable. And I think it's partly the fault of a very young entrepreneur, but it's also partly the fault of a board who doesn't know how to direct that person. Enablement is real. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: But then the second, the second thing is, we've always had this, you know, this big tech put on the table where every time you would try to really hone in on running a lean, highly efficient organization, the alternative would be to go work at, you know, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, where the terms are just completely different to what the experience was, you know, at a startup.
SPEAKER_01: And the bigger the gap, the harder it was for you to be able to hire and retain good people without just copying them. And now that that's also coming off the table, that is a key moment. So Gurley is 100% right. There is no longer the big tech put. Those are the generals that are about to get shot over the next eight to 12 months, in my opinion, in the public markets, in terms of market cap and employment and perks. And then second is that these really thoughtful investors who felt pretty deeply disrespected will now be able to call the shots. And these founders will have to come back hat in hand and either apologize or just completely find a different religion. And I think in that you'll have a lot of amazing opportunities to build companies. I think it's well said.
SPEAKER_05: Tax, what are you seeing?
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, look, when times are as frothy as they were, a lot of bad ideas get funded and there's a lot of bad behavior that occurs. I don't think all of it's intentional. Some of it is just the lack of discipline that when capital is just so freely available, people are building their businesses in ways that were optimizing solely for one variable, which was top line growth. They just weren't paying enough attention to gross margins or burn. And when you then have a downturn and capital is not so available, you have to build your business in a much more capital efficient way. And you can't create fake businesses where you're buying growth that's not economically justified, where you've got negative union economics around the growth. So I think that this downturn is going to create a shakeout. It's going to weed out bad ideas, bad practices and a lack of sort of focus. Bad boards. Or bad investors or no boards. Bad alligators. One trick ponies.
SPEAKER_04: You know, there's just a lot of one trick ponies out there who've optimized growth but don't have a real business.
SPEAKER_06: And it's going to require entrepreneurs to play sort of more like multivariable calculus or math, not just single variable. It is extremely difficult to convert TVPI to DPI.
SPEAKER_01: You know, the value of paper values into actual distributions, and that takes a skilled hand. And I think that a lot of young folks were hired into venture that fundamentally did not know what they were doing. They've neither ever built a company or helped build a company or actually learned how to generate returns, but they became very good at buying free call options on companies. You know, I remember like a lot of people, the way that you, these young people, I remember I heard a story that you would sell against Gurley, right? So let's just say you were trying to do a deal and Bill gives you a term sheet from Benchmark and you get somebody else. The young folks were like, oh, Bill's too negative and he doesn't get it. And they would try to convince these entrepreneurs that, you know, these rainy days don't happen. My experience with Gurley is he is the most sophisticated investor of our generation. And what I mean by that is, you know, he was trained as an equity analyst that really understood business models and cost of capital. And so in a moment like this, the way that Gurley would help you on a board is meaningfully more important than how some, you know, middling VP at some random startup who's now a, you know, junior partner at a venture firm, because that person has literally no clue. And so these companies are going to go through a very difficult moment, which again, is the reason why a good steady hand who knows what they're doing will make a ton of money in this next cycle. And for people who don't know TVPI, let me just give you a quick definition. This is the total value divided by the paid in capital.
SPEAKER_05: So total value is distributions like, hey, here's your Robinhood stock, here's your Uber stock, here's cash, plus the net asset value. What's that fancy value? For the value of the shares of the companies that haven't had an exit. And so you divide those two numbers, you get a ratio 1.5 1.2, etc. But to Shmaltz point, net asset value is debatable in some of these right and distributions are what matter. You can't you can't eat the the IRR you got it. You got to eat the stuff that's been distributed. Yeah. All right, let's keep going. I'll do one more. I'm going to skip over. Well, I'll just the question on Twitter that got the most votes was what's the exact net worth of each bestie?
SPEAKER_03: I would make the case that that's probably not the best way to measure oneself. And, you know, I don't think we're going to do it. I also would argue that we're probably all exposed to a lot of fuzzy math with private assets that we own and in terms of companies. Who cares? Like how does that correlate with happiness and the fact that we're all in the same position? It doesn't really. And I don't think it's a big focus in terms of objectives.
SPEAKER_05: I'll say the next one that got a lot of votes, which I really like.
SPEAKER_03: It's a lagging indicator and a byproduct of what we do. There are moments when what we do reflects in value that frankly where we are over earning.
SPEAKER_01: And then there are periods where what we do is under reflected and we are under earning. And so the through line has to be, you know, the through line is the through line. So the through line has to be that you need to survive in both good times and bad times, which means you've got to like what you're doing. And if you get caught up in a numerical number, there's all kinds of math you can do to make it look a lot bigger than it is. But it's all meaningless. Yeah, I would argue as long as you're actively developing yourself, over time the weighing machine will do its job.
SPEAKER_03: Somebody told me in my 20s, when I was at AOL, he said, you know, if you're, because at the time I, you know, I grew up on welfare.
SPEAKER_01: I thought the goal was to make money. I didn't know any better. I've learned later that there's a lot more leading indicators of happiness and things that actually create happiness. White truffles. White truffles. I was going to say friendship, my family, but yeah. Friendship and family.
SPEAKER_05: Laughs. I define it as laughs and friendships, you know. Friendships.
SPEAKER_01: But he said to me, you know, your goal should be to just be in the upper few percent of your age bracket and just enjoy what you're doing. And he said, let time take care of everything else. Because as long as you find something you're, you know, you decently enjoy and are good at, you'll just get better and better at that thing. And then at some point, you know, you will lose track of what the, you know, measurement of that is because you're just too caught up in how much you enjoy doing the thing. And I thought that he had no idea what he was talking about. And now 25 years later, I can tell you he was totally right. Totally right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: By the way, this was a question I was trying to skip over. So. No, but it led to a good fork.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. Okay. What is happiness? Yeah. Yeah. I think after, you know, observing outcomes for 25 years in tech, what I would say is that if you're smart, hardworking, don't have behaviors that sabotage yourself and, you know, take intelligent risks, you will be successful in this business.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, technology is such a wind at your backs. It's such an engine of wealth creation. How can you not do well? But the exact magnitude of how well you do, I think is ultimately, it is substantially affected by timing. And, you know, like if you were employee, whatever number X at Google, you're going to do better than most founders, even of a unicorn company. And when you found your company, and then when you exit, what the market is doing, those things have a huge impact on the act, on the magnitude. So, you know, whether you end up being, you know, a billionaire, a centimillionaire, you know, a decamillionaire, whatever you want, those things are very affected by timing and chance, but not whether you're going to be successful at a substantial level. And so just, you know, be smart, be hardworking, don't sabotage yourself, you know, get into tech and you will do well. Trust the process. Trust the process. The exact amount of how well you do will be dependent on some, you know, stochastic factors, but not the fact that you're going to do well. We are enormous beneficiaries of having been born when we were, because we are a bunch of late 40 and early 50 somethings that in the prime of our career in tech,
SPEAKER_01: the Federal Reserve took rates to zero. And we had no idea a priori how important that would be in all of our outcomes, but they were.
SPEAKER_01: And even more importantly, PCs, internet and mobile happened.
SPEAKER_05: All of that hard work was done beforehand by an entire court of people that had to fight much stronger headwinds than we had to fight.
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, David, I just want to build on that. Like we were extraordinarily lucky. And so don't get caught up in that because there's all these factors you don't, you cannot control. I'll say one more thing that I think is the most important observation I've made in terms of whatever it is, building wealth over time is to make sure you're building equity in yourself.
SPEAKER_03: If you're in a services business and every day and whether that's serving the clients of the company you work for or just serving clients on behalf of yourself and everything you do is a transaction and that transaction doesn't build on itself, doesn't compound value in some way, then you're missing out on an opportunity. Every year that goes by that you're earning income or you're not building equity is a non-compounding year. And it's compounding equity value that I think ultimately pays off for you as an individual. And I can give a lot of examples of this, but if you're in a, let's say a brokerage business and you just do deals and you might make, have a good year, you might have a bad year. The real question you need to ask yourself is what is compounding? Are you growing a client base? Are you growing your skill set? Are you next year able to do more things or have more options than you had this year? And if the number of options you have is declining or static every year, then you're limiting your equity value and that ultimately will translate into limited wealth creation. Can I chime in on that point around equity?
SPEAKER_06: So when I discovered what equity was, this was when I was in law school and actually the guy who explained to me was Antonio Gracias. A light bulb really went off for me because my dad is a doctor and I was on a path to becoming a lawyer. And in both those cases, you're a professional. The way you get paid is you more or less charge an hourly rate. And so the amount of money you can make is capped, right? Just take the number of hours in the day and in the week, multiply it by your rate. And that's the most money you can make in a year. And the difference between that and equity is with equity, you own a piece of a business and that business could be ultimately worth any amount. And so your equity could therefore be worth virtually any amount. And so you're uncapped. And so just, you know, if you want to have outside success, you have to have equity in something. I think that is exactly right. If you're just basically working for wages, you even if you are the best at what you do and you get paid an insane hourly rate, you again, you could be successful, but you're not going to be uncapped. And so that is the beauty.
SPEAKER_06: That's the beauty of Silicon Valley is all these companies offer equity to everybody. And it's not just shares in something you can actually get equity and create leverage in your life in this era more than any human has ever had in any era prior because of software and computing and automation.
SPEAKER_03: You can create a website that prints cash for you every day if you wanted to. You can create a service that you get leverage out of and there's equity value in that. And I think that's really key because then you can go build another one, another one, and you're building value over time. And that's just the most simplistic example of how technology today provides leverage that can really allow anyone to pursue a path of equity. And I think you made a good point about what are you getting leverage off of?
SPEAKER_06: So there's a bunch of different things you can get leverage off of. It used to be labor, right? Right. So the old way was leverage off labor. And I guess if you were to own like a consulting firm or like some sort of factory, then the more people you have working, the more money you'd make. The other way would be like you can get leverage off capital, like a fund manager, or you can get leverage off of technology because software can basically create these super-scaled outcomes. So you need to figure out like what is it you're getting leverage off of?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So I'll do the last one, which I thought was a really good question. And it got a lot of votes from Marcos Ortiz. If you had to start from scratch, no money, no connections, only the knowledge you have right now and 100 bucks, what would you build in 2022?
SPEAKER_01: I would build something in energy transition or in life sciences.
SPEAKER_03: With $100?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: I would build a startup incubator venture fund of some type. A way to fund entrepreneurs and just be a capital allocator much earlier in my career.
SPEAKER_06: I would create a B2B software company that actually I'm already creating it. So I haven't unveiled it yet, but there's something I'm incubating right now. Go David, go. Whoa, where's the bet? Wait, whoa, whoa, wait.
SPEAKER_05: What my way your beak? What is going on here? I haven't gotten my I haven't gotten the subscription.
SPEAKER_01: Have you raised money? I haven't raised money yet. When I raise money, you guys can invest. I have not gotten my subscription documents, sir. If you could think of this idea as Yammer 2.0.
SPEAKER_06: So JCal, you're not in because you criticized the Yammer, but it was a joke. I gave you the, I let you win tech crunch 50.
SPEAKER_05: I put the fix it for you. David, just to put my pitch in, I ran Eamon ICQ,
SPEAKER_01: help Facebook was an investor in Yammer was the series A investor in Slack. So I'm ready for you. Yeah, you were there for us when we needed you back at Yammer days, unlike JCal.
SPEAKER_06: What are you talking about?
SPEAKER_05: Your wife came to my life and they're like, okay, let me in.
SPEAKER_00: I do the round. You guys are in. Let me lead it. Let us do the pre round round.
SPEAKER_02: Pre round. Thank you. We've agreed.
SPEAKER_05: Did you just agree on TV?
SPEAKER_06: Yes. Well, assuming on there's one thing you have to do, which is you've got to rip out Slack and use this instead. Yes.
SPEAKER_05: A hundred percent. I will just say, you know, I'm going to be very honest with you.
SPEAKER_01: The day I left Facebook, I stopped using it. The day we sold, we distributed Slack stopped using it. So don't worry about me. I am right. I am a hundred percent aligned with you.
SPEAKER_05: I'm all in. I'm all in. Absolutely. All right. Let's do the show. Let's do the show. Freeberg. You didn't answer that question. What would you do? Well, actually I would get some water vaporizers and then I would get some molecule. So, and I would make a new super protein that was made out of. Okay. Sorry. No, no, no. Keep going. I like it.
SPEAKER_03: I think it'd be something with the protein slurry.
SPEAKER_05: You'd make some kind of steak that tastes better than steak. Protein slurry.
SPEAKER_05: It's some sort of protein.
SPEAKER_03: I would definitely build a business again. I think the, you know, the challenge is, uh, as you move past that stage in your career
SPEAKER_03: where, you know, you have the willingness and the time to be 120% building one product every day. Uh, it's, uh, it's really hard to go back to that. And I think if I was in a position again where I had no money and had no.
SPEAKER_01: I think that's the key part of the question, not the hundred dollar part.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I think I would go back to building something. I do think the intersection of life sciences with software creates this era of opportunity. It would probably be something in the realm of AI ML meets life sciences, uh, where you can actually work in a leveraged way with software to drive outcomes in these important markets. So, uh, I would actually create.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. Freeburg and I could have been entering.
SPEAKER_03: We can be able to get started something. Yeah. Maybe we can still.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, not too late.
SPEAKER_03: We got the co-founders.
SPEAKER_03: Sacks will let you in the pre round. If you let us in your pre round.
SPEAKER_06: Okay. Sounds good. They were right.
SPEAKER_05: All right. Kelly, you want to take us forward? Should we go forward? Okay. Let's see what's on the docket. We've got Russia's invasion of Ukraine. You had Biden last week saying we're facing the risk of Armageddon.
SPEAKER_06: How is that not the top story?
SPEAKER_01: Go Saksipu, go take it.
SPEAKER_05: All right, here we go. Let me just queue it up for Saks. By last week.
SPEAKER_06: So we're facing risk Armageddon. That's your Tia. Okay, here we go. And then, and then Leon Panetta just let's teed up J Cal. We don't need, everyone knows what's going on. Then you had Leon Panetta just, who was the former secretary of defense and director of central intelligence wrote an op-ed for Politico saying that intelligence analysts have now raised the probability of the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine from one to five percent at the beginning of the war to 20 to 25 percent now is what he says. So, and I don't think he'd be saying that if this wasn't pretty much conventional wisdom in Washington now. I mean, Panetta is sort of a very respectable figure in the beltway. And Biden said it right for the first time. And Biden said that we're facing the most dangerous situation and the highest risk of nuclear wars and secure missile crisis called the risk of Armageddon. The problem is that nobody is willing to say what we should be doing differently to avoid this situation. So, you know, people are always attacking us for having a point of view on foreign policy. First of all, this affects us. I don't know why we're not allowed to have a point of view. But, you know, in, in our business thinking where there's an existential issue, you have the attitude of drop everything and figure this out. If somebody told you that there's a 25 percent chance of your company blowing up, maybe in the next few weeks, you would drop everything and focus on that problem. But it's like, you know, after the Armageddon comments, it's like the media just passed over it. It's like, oh, this is like crazy Biden or whatever. It was minimized. It was contextualized. The White House walked it back. Nobody's really focusing on this and what we should be doing differently. And in fact, what Panetta recommends and Petraeus said the same thing is that if Russia uses attack nuke in Ukraine, then we should respond by attacking Russia directly. Now, if we do that, we are literally in World War Three. And remember, at the beginning of the war, Biden was really clear that we weren't going to get directly involved. He vetoed the idea correctly of the no fly zone, which would have required us to shoot down Russian planes. Biden, remember, he was asked in the press conference at the beginning of the war by Lester Holt. He said Holt said, you know, Mr. President, what if Americans are trapped behind enemy lines and you're not going to get those planes in Ukraine? Would you send in American troops to go get them? Biden said no. I think very properly said no because he said, listen, we do not want to risk World War Three. But now because of mission creep and a slippery slope and we've all gotten more involved in this war, we've gotten more emotionally committed. You now have Panetta and Petraeus calling for us to directly attack Russia and get in World War Three. The Russians almost certainly would respond with nuclear because that's all they've got. The conventional forces to stand up to us. So look at how close we have now gotten to the brink of a nuclear showdown. And has anybody reassessed? Is anyone calling for us to reevaluate? Because that's the conversation we should be having right now.
SPEAKER_05: And free break. This brings up two points that I think you can comment on. Naval actually, the founder of Angel List, Angel Investor and just public thinker, I would say public intellectual. He came on to call in with the two of you. And he, you know, outlined like, who does get to have an opinion on Ukraine and other issues, which has dovetail with this, like, who gets to be an expert in the world today? And of course, at the same time, not only Saks has been commenting on, hey, what's the off ramp here? Elon has been talking about, hey, you know, how do we get out of this? Do we have some votes, you know, by these regions that have been annexed or that are in dispute? AOC now is getting criticized on officer people shouting her down at a public event today or yesterday, that she's a warmonger and she won't speak out against war. How do you frame the public dialogue about this freeburg? And then do you see a potential off ramp here other than Putin leaves Russia, which is I think the public stance by a lot of folks, you know, Putin can end this, he just has to leave Ukraine in order for this to end. So two questions there for you, freebird. It's very hard to have good dialogue about any situation where an argument could be made
SPEAKER_03: on the grounds of morality in an absolute sense, making it really difficult to have a discourse around what the right thing to do is because you don't agree fundamentally on the objective you're shooting for. One side says the objective is to preserve the integrity of democracy and the freedom of people. And the other side says the objective should be to secure the interests of the West and the United States and preserve the world from nuclear holocaust. I think that's what makes this a challenging conversation. The objective can be reframed and then from that objective, each side can make their own case without being forced to take in the point of view of the other side. And it's why we're at a bit of a standstill. And it's also why it's so easy to get swept up in a mass point of view, a coalesced point of view of the masses that makes one feel good about what may end up being a very bad situation. It feels good to say I'm doing this for freedom of the people. I'm doing this to save lives. And at the end of the day, it may cause a nuclear war. And it's okay because I feel good going into this debate that this is the right thing. It's the morally superior thing to do. What's very hard is that we can't actually say as a group, our objective should be to preserve the integrity of democracies around the world to an extent. And that's a nuanced point of view. To an extent means I'm willing to preserve the democracies through certain actions, but I'm not willing to cross a certain line. And absolutism doesn't need to come into play. That's what I think is making this such a very difficult conversation. And it's why it's so hard to actually have a conversation around it. And it's really, I would argue, the most poignant and the most dramatic moment in what we talked about earlier, which is this deep-seated kind of, you know, bipolarity. And once you're sitting on your pole, you don't want to come off. And you don't realize that so much of the dialogue is in this middle. And we have to come to some point of view that maybe this isn't about an absolute outcome. It's not absolutely going to be a nuclear war. And it's not absolutely going to be the end of democracy. There's some conversation in the middle that's very difficult to have. And people that work somewhere in the world, hopefully, ambassadors, foreign policy people, State Department people, hopefully are having the more nuanced, critical conversation about how do we resolve to the maximal outcome that doesn't necessarily take us to an absolute end. Chamath, to that point, it's going to be an imperfect outcome here.
SPEAKER_05: I think this is much, much simpler than all of this.
SPEAKER_01: Leon Panetta is a senior counselor to this defense contracting agency called Beacon Global Strategies, who works on behalf of Raytheon. I found that out while Friedberg was talking in a two-second Google search. I suspect that if you looked for Petraeus's conflicts of interest, you would find that through some Byzantine set of, you know, strategic consulting organizations and whatnot, he also works on behalf of the defense industry. So you have these people who will generate more revenue and more profit if there is a massive war. And those people have been trying to push us into a land war in Europe since this whole thing started. And so this is just yet another attempt. It's just the most final way of doing it. So I would just encourage people, whenever you see all these folks clamoring for war, clamoring for war, is just to keep in mind that they are riddled with conflict and that you can find it out. Again, this information is sitting in plain sight on the internet and you can figure out whether this person is really advocating a truth that makes sense or they're getting paid to shill a revenue generating mechanism for some part of the military industrial complex. Sax, how much of this is people talking, their book being the military industrial complex
SPEAKER_05: in your mind?
SPEAKER_06: I think that's a big part of it. I think all of these Washington think tanks are funded by defense contractors. I think it's short-sighted, obviously, because if it leads to a nuclear war, there's not going to be a defense industry. There won't be anything left. But look, I think that Washington is wired for war in part because there's a huge lobby for it, for all these defense contractors. And what's the lobby for peace? I mean, there's no one really arguing for peace. Speaking of this, Elon tweeted...
SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you what's lobbying for peace, and I'm going to connect what may seem two disparate
SPEAKER_01: ideas together. But the single biggest thing I think that will prevent nuclear war is the inflation that we're feeling. And the reason is because it allows the Fed, in my opinion, for the first time really in the last 15 years, to act properly. And if they hold the line and they take interest rates to 4-5%, I think one non-obvious outcome of all of that is that it becomes extremely expensive next to impossible to finance military adventurism abroad. And that's a practical economic outcrop of really meaningfully high rates greater than zero. And so I actually think the reality is that for a lot of these governments, the more that inflation sticks around, the stickier it is, the higher rates are in general, the bigger the problems at home are, and the less prone they're going to be likely. I actually think that explains the escalation of this rhetoric, because people want to try to make this issue and put it on the table. But you understand that these folks don't say it's a 90% likelihood. They go from 1% to 25%, which, if you understand probabilities, is effectively a left-tail risk that's effectively the same. And the reason they're trying to do it is they're trying to get it back, David, as you say, to timestamp it, to get it in front of people's perspectives to make it important in a moment where everybody increasingly, not just in the United States, but in the UK, in Europe, are looking internally and trying to figure out how to keep their economies in a reasonably functioning way and how to make sure that their financial and other infrastructure keeps working. So you're saying? And that is not necessarily a priority when rates are zero. But when rates are 4%, I mean, just by the way, if you guys saw what happened today, it was the competing of two narratives this week. There was the financial narrative of the UK having to bail out their pension system, right, of all of a sudden the pensions being forced sellers, of those forced sellers now, you know, spilling into the United States debt markets around CLOs and collateralized loan obligations and junk debt, which then could theoretically spill as a contagion to other parts of the market. That was narrative one. And all of that, by the way, is a result of hiding inflation and the Fed moving up rates
SPEAKER_01: and other countries being forced to attack inflation with higher rates and creating all these dislocations, narrative one versus narrative two, which is, hey, all of a sudden, we have to put the nuclear risk on the table. And if you actually saw the print that was spilled, the disproportionate amount of the rhetoric actually focused on the former narrative and not the latter. And so I think that that's why these folks are escalating the rhetoric in order to kind of create an equality so that they get enough print of that version of the outcome. What you're saying is you have the world saying, we can't afford to have this conflict.
SPEAKER_05: We are broke. We've got too many chaotic issues. I think the world is saying we are increasingly under enormous domestic pressure.
SPEAKER_01: And as a result, we cannot spend on things abroad. We can't afford this. And then the other side saying, well, we need you to afford this.
SPEAKER_05: So nuclear is going to happen. There's going to be a nuclear annihilation. Then there's a small strain of folks who would economically benefit and who are now ratcheting
SPEAKER_01: up their rhetoric so that that second path becomes more and more on the table. What do you think of this Freeburg, this analysis that Chamath has, these two polar, these two
SPEAKER_05: groups vying for the attention and or budget of the world? The military industrial complex versus yeah, citizens saying our country can't afford this.
SPEAKER_05: We need to focus inward, not citizens, the central banks. Okay, but I think the central banks influenced by citizens, right?
SPEAKER_05: Like this is a whole system here we're talking about. People are, you know, watching their pensions go away. They're watching jobs get cut. If I was a betting man, I spent the, I would guess that the next half a trillion to a trillion
SPEAKER_01: dollars that is spent in Western world economies will be to subsidize something that's broken internally inside of one of our countries, whether it's the UK pension system or whether it's the high yield credit markets. And it will not be to finance military adventurism in Russia. Just to underscore that point. So there's an article today in the Washington Post about how the US has been
SPEAKER_06: talking about how the US government's debt service is going to be around 570 billion this year, which is a 45% increase. Biden's budget for 2023 is only 1.6 trillion. So you're talking about something like over a third now of the official budget is already going to debt service because it's not a variable, right?
SPEAKER_05: It's a variable, right? Exactly.
SPEAKER_06: Because so much of it is that it's not locked in in long term rates. So because interest rates have gone up so much, the debt service gone up and interest rates are still going up. And so Druckenmiller had those points around how the debt services within a decade is going to eat up practically the whole federal budget. So Tromoff is right that we've never really had to choose between guns and butter before in the past. It was just let's just do both and we'll rack up more national debt. I do think there will be more and more pressure to question this type of spending and why we've already given Ukraine $80 billion in handouts when we can't afford to basically pay for major entitlements at home. So I think there'll be more pressure. Now, I don't know if that pressure is going to come in time, though, to de-escalate this Ukraine war. It's not. And that's what concerns me. And just to cut to the chase on this, I think where the rubber meets the road on Ukraine is Crimea. And why? Because the Russians have a major naval base there at Sevastopol. It's the home of the Black Sea Fleet. And they will never give that up. They are willing to use nukes, I believe, to basically protect that asset. It's a vital interest of theirs. Hold on. 80% of the population of Crimea, they're Russian. And three-quarters of them, according to polling that was done by Gallup and by a German polling firm, so not Russian polls, indicated that they see themselves as Russian and want to be part of Russia. So if we support a self-determination, we'd be fine with Crimea being part of Russia. But here's the rub. Ukrainian nationalism demands that every square inch of Crimea goes back to Ukraine. And it is State Department policy right now that we will never recognize Crimea as being Russian. We'll never recognize the annexation, which happened back in 2014. So something's got to give here. Something's got to give. Either we have to sit down Zelensky and say to him, listen, you're not getting back Crimea. We're going to make that part of a peace deal. Or we are going to back the Ukrainians in their military effort to retake Crimea with the result that I think is quite likely that the Russians will be willing to use a tactical nuke to prevent their total defeat. So at some point, we're going to have to choose here which of these outcomes do you want. Do you want to basically go for a negotiated settlement, which means telling the Ukrainians they cannot have everything they want? Or do you really want to risk a nuclear war to take back Crimea, which is Russian, and the people there see themselves as Russian? So we need to make a choice here. Yeah, so Elon put out a tweet for and got savaged for it.
SPEAKER_05: And he outlined sort of what you're saying here. So do you think his plan he said redo elections of annex regions under UN supervision Russia leaves if that is the will of the people. And then he says Crimea formerly part of Russia as it's been since 1783 water supply to Crimea a short as you're saying Ukraine remains neutral. Should the West force Ukraine to accept these type of terms essentially, elections and I don't know why Crimea wouldn't be part of that election process. Do you think UN supervised elections in those regions should occur and we should force the landscape to do that.
SPEAKER_06: So he who pays the piper calls the tune Of course, we need to have a point of view on how this war should be resolved. Listen, it's not about force, they can fight on and do whatever they want as long as they want hold on with our support weapons. That's American weapons. If you want you should do that. We should pull the American weapons if he doesn't.
SPEAKER_06: If Zelensky wants our weapons and support, which appear to be infinite, we should not give him a blank check guarantee. The blank check is what started World War One, the German Kaiser gave Austria a blank check guarantee and it led to World War One. That is how great powers get pulled into the wars of minor powers. And we absolutely have to have a point of view on how we do not get pulled into this. And I think our one of our lines should be that we are not going to fund the Ukrainians in retaking Crimea.
SPEAKER_05: Got it. So just to put a to clear this so we can move on to the next topic. You're in support of removing are not giving further weapons support to the Ukraine. It's not going to come to that we need to have a point of view on how you are in support
SPEAKER_06: of all stopping our support if they don't sit down and negotiate a settlement here.
SPEAKER_05: That's what you would do.
SPEAKER_06: America needs to have a point of view of what is in its own interests. What is in our interest is for this to get resolved diplomatically at some point through negotiated settlement, not for it to escalate into a nuclear war that we could get pulled into. The only way that's going to happen, okay, is if Crimea goes back to Russia. I'm telling you, they will be willing to pull out all the stops. And by the way, they could even use tech nukes before Crimea. But you answer the question, though, that I asked three times, would you remove American
SPEAKER_05: support and weapons if they don't accept that? If Ukraine doesn't accept that, would you be comfortable taking away our support in one? I don't think it's gonna come to that.
SPEAKER_06: But yes, we should be willing to threaten that. Okay, that's it.
SPEAKER_05: I'm just trying to get you to answer that one question. Let's hold on a second.
SPEAKER_06: They are a client state of the US. They do not call the shots were America we call the shots. We're the big dog here. All right. That's the bottom line. And you really want to get pulled into a nuclear war because I do not I just wanted you to answer that one question. We should pull out. Let's get real. Okay, this is about our future. You know, we are American nationalists, at least I am. I'm not a Ukrainian nationalist. I support self rule. I think we accomplished something by preventing Kyiv from getting toppled. But I want to support self rule for the people of Korea.
SPEAKER_05: It's time for a settlement in Saxon. I think the most important thing that we can all be thankful for, which I think will prevent
SPEAKER_01: a lot of wars in the next 10 or 20 years is inflation and non-zero interest rates. It's just going to be really tough. Like, you know, the UK cannot do anything right now other than make sure that they have foreign currency reserves to back up the pound, which they don't really have that much. They're going to need money to bail out their pension system. Whoever thought it was a good idea to allow pensions to run levered risk was it's obviously insane. Could you imagine if it turned out that the teachers pensions and the firefighters pensions in America were running levered long? I mean, they're not all this together. Now, I mean, it's just a breaking point.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's clear. You know what a pension is?
SPEAKER_04: I know. I'm not trying to fancy. Yeah, it's just a dead instrument. No, no, no. I'm saying, I'm saying, I'm saying don't use some fancy intellectual argument.
SPEAKER_01: I'm saying practically speaking, the treasurer is not allowed to call Goldman Sachs and say, I'm going to run two turns of leverage on this money. That is not allowed to happen in the United States. Okay. I get in some fancy way. It could be thought of as levered long with, you know, all kinds of indirection, but that is not how the world works today. Practically speaking, it is how the UK works. A treasurer in a UK pension system is allowed to call an investment bank and actually run levered. That is insane. Okay. So my point is when rates are non-zero, all of that jig is up. Governments are forced to batten down the hatches and, you know, husband cash for God knows what will break in the system. And I think that that is, and as disruptive as that is, it may actually be the bulwark against war. The jig is up, folks.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I think that's what we should take away from this is we can't afford this and the United States is funding it. We have to force a settlement here and it will be a profile courage. Maybe the silver lining of inflation.
SPEAKER_01: Okay. Andy Jassy's had an all hands meeting.
SPEAKER_05: Amazon is freezing hiring for corporate roles in its retail business. Almost 90 VPs or higher level execs have left Amazon since 2021. Early this week, there was an all hands presentation and the slides were leaked to Business Insider. Some of them constraints, breed, resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and innovation. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense. The slides instructed employees to accomplish more with less. Sounds familiar. Sounds like something the US needs to do and foreign policy needs to do. Amazon leadership team urged employees to double down on frugality. Jassy also spoke in the meeting, just a couple of quotes, and then I'll get your thoughts. Chamath. It's on a lot of people's minds. And of course, none of us know for sure what's going to happen, but there are a lot of signs that point to this being a difficult and rough economy ahead of us. And I don't know how long that will last. But I think it's one of the things that we are thinking about and we decided that we're going to be more streamlined in how we expand in 2023. Good companies that last a long period of time who are thinking about the long term always have this push and pull. Chamath, what do you read into this?
SPEAKER_01: I'll say three quick things. One is that today, Thursday, October 13th, we had an inflation print which was worse than expected and the markets are materially higher. Strange. Why? Well, we talked about this a few weeks ago, but my thought then, and it's the same that I think now, is that we've effectively seen the near-term bottom and we're now consolidating. And so every opportunity people have to justify that most of the news is behind them, they take and they use that as a reason to buy. Okay, so that's number one, which is that we are sort of near the end. The second, however, is that if we do see another leg down, there is really only one cohort of company that hasn't been really whacked. And I'll summarize it very quickly by saying it's Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Google. That's it. Even Facebook has now been sort of put into the bucket of everybody else where we've been crushed 60, 70, 80% in those companies. So what does that mean? Well, those four companies are now being identified for what they may be, which in capitalism is called over-earning. Okay? They are making more money than we think is appropriate. This letter from Andy Jassy is his way of effectively telling his major shareholders that he is now moving the business to become more of a cash cow business. Tim Cook made this incredible decision in 2016, 17, 18 that effectively did the same thing. That's when Buffett came in. That's when he established a huge ownership in the stock. That's when the stock absolutely ripped because it moved into a different bucket in people's minds. It became growth at a pretty reasonable price. And I think Andy is making the case that Amazon is going to become one of these GARP stocks, growth at a reasonable price. He's going to generate a ton of cash flow. He's going to keep expenses nominal. He's going to return a ton of cash to shareholders with buybacks. That's the reading in between the lines of that letter. I think it's a really profound statement and a very smart move because you haven't seen that letter or a version of that letter yet from Microsoft. And you started to see hints of that letter from Sundar where he said, you know, it's and he's not- He's saber rattling. He's not there yet. He's in the appetizer part. You know, he's in Amooshboosh where he's like, oh, you know, guys, you got to work harder. Hey, guys, let's create some fancy acronyms. But Sundar's got courage. No, no, no, but he's got courage. He is going to rip the bandaid off too. And so I think what it means is these three and maybe these four companies are going to draw a hard line in the sand and say, we are not over-earning. Do not abandon this stock. That again will help put in a bottom in the stock market.
SPEAKER_05: What do you think, Freeburg? You worked at this company and you know, the principles across the board, the saber rattling will turn into saber swinging in Q4, Q1, you think? Google, Apple?
SPEAKER_03: Cuts coming? Well, Amazon is affected in a different way because they operate this physical supply chain business. They're delivering goods to people's homes that people are buying. So they really have to change their trajectory very quickly. It was incredible. You guys remember when COVID hit, you tried to place an order on Amazon. It was like three weeks to deliver because the infrastructure wasn't there to do it. So they actually were seeing more orders than their system had predicted. And they did massive build out. They hired what, a million people or something in their network to meet demand. And then over the next year, earnings went through the roof. Their infrastructure and employee headcount went through the roof. And now we're obviously coming back down the other side of a mountain and they're having to shift strategy and shift their operating model yet again. There's a broader set and that's because they're in the direct commerce business. Microsoft, Google, and other kind of software companies, some of which benefit from advertising, which is almost like a first derivative on the consumer market or a first derivative on the spending of companies that sell to consumers, have a little bit of a different calculus. They're a much higher margin business, 30% EBITDA kind of business with EBITDA margin business with a very distinct kind of set of challenges on how advertising revenue is going to be affected over the next couple of quarters and balancing that against their cloud platform, which is sold to enterprises and their media consumption platform, which is generally like YouTube at Google's case, which is less effective. So it's not as much of a direct calculus. I will say what's happened over the past decade, which we're now seeing change, is these companies have had extraordinary growth, hiring people to no end. There's always been kind of this extended expense on capital on human capital. And that expense on human capital has driven the average cost per employee through the roof. And it's not just the salaries. It's the cost of the RSU. It's the cost of the facilities and the free ice cream and the gyms and all the other stuff that's gone on to compete. That's now changing. And so it really is creating a different model for operating that hasn't existed for the last decade where everything has been, you know, how many more things can we throw in the kitchen, you know, throw like the kitchen sink at this problem to get all the human capital here. And I think that's really, you know, what's going to kind of structurally change in the valley. It's not as acute as what Amazon is dealing with. It does feel like those are the last cities to fall, Chamath.
SPEAKER_05: They are the ones that take the index to 3,200.
SPEAKER_01: If we're going to try to do it, there's only one place to look. You've whacked everybody else. Everything is down, you know, 50 to 90 percent in some cases. So. Well, and then finally, you know. And by the way, sorry, just at the end of last year, a quarter of every S&P dollar was crowded in those names. A quarter. So you got to go there.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. I mean, and also they're automatically bought, right? They're automatically bought by these index funds. And so who is at the wheel saying we're not we're going to take the money out of them, right? Who who in their right mind is taking money out of Apple, Amazon and Microsoft? Where do you put it? I guess is everybody's question, right? Chamath, like if you take it out of there, where do you put it?
SPEAKER_01: Well, no, I think I think it's just that when when you have patterns of selling, typically, as I've seen it, my experience is that initially it's the algorithms that really start to push a market in a direction. Then you have, you know, the more traditional fund complexes, that's the hedge funds and the long onlys. They follow suit. And then the last group tends to be retail. And it works in reverse the other way as well. And so, you know, obviously there's exceptions to all of these, but as a general rule.
SPEAKER_05: So if retail starts bailing on Amazon. Well, they are right now.
SPEAKER_01: And Apple. Yeah, they are sellers now. But again, time to buy it. Right. But again, this is this is where sort of organized capital now is finding a bottom again, like when you start to shake, just think about the psychology of like being delivered bad news after bad news. You go through the cycles, right? There's denial, there's anger, there's depression, there's bargaining. But then at some point there's acceptance. And in that acceptance phase, you're like, yeah, you're right, things are bad. But when you see a market rally into a print like this, it's a it's really, really interesting
SPEAKER_01: psychological turning point. As a proof point to what you're saying, Sacks, Chamath and Sacks, I want to get your comment
SPEAKER_05: on this venture capital firms, like Sequoia, Excel and others that have now changed their status as you know, just private companies, but also dabbling in public are buying public equities, which basically means they see more opportunity in public underpriced and underpriced tech stocks, growth stocks, etc. Then they do in late stage, private companies, correct? And you saw the Wall Street Journal story, I'm assuming sex.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I saw that.
SPEAKER_05: What is what do you read? What's your read into that? And they is it overblown? Or is it indicative of something? I think it's probably overblown because Sequoia created that fund that is a hedge fund and
SPEAKER_06: Andreessen Horowitz became a registered investment advisor so they could buy public security. So look, I don't think most venture funds are all of a sudden investing in public markets. We aren't even allowed to do that as far as I know, nor would we ever try to. So I think probably it's exactly Give up Sacks, your VC exception exemption, but you could do it.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, we wouldn't want to, but it's kind of the point. But look, I can't explain why the market did what it did today. It could have liked you, my said it could have been some sort of algorithmic, you know, buying or selling. But I just think that the overall news today was the economic news was just another really bad report. I mean, just look at these headlines from the New York Times today. Okay, I'm going to read you the headlines on a single sort of scrolling page here. Number one, inflation came in much faster than expected. Bad news to the Fed. Takeaways from another painful inflation report. Three, disappointing inflation data keeps Democrats on defense at a midterm elections. Four, food prices climb again, weighing on household budgets. Five, rent inflation remain tepid, a troubling sign. Six, used car prices aren't declining as much as economists of the host. Slow down, slow down. Seven. Give Freiburg a chance to take his annex.
SPEAKER_05: Take his annex, Freiburg. Gas prices fall slightly, but overall energy costs are soon expected to rise.
SPEAKER_06: And eight, retirees are getting an 8.7% social security cost living rates the biggest in decades. I guess that one is sort of positive, but it's like literally negative headline after the New York Times. Can I reinterpret that for you?
SPEAKER_01: I think the way to think about it is this gives the Fed the resolve it needs. It's going to go by 75. It's probably going to go another 75. We're going to have rates by four to 450 to 5%, probably within Q1, which means if you're trying to figure out where the bottom is, it's roughly nowish. And so that's why you see smart money, David, shaking this thing off and starting to enter the market. And so again, and the other version interpretation is when rates are four or five percent, the cost of servicing United States debt is so meaningful as a percentage of their budget. The incremental spend that they would need to make to enter a new war is too much, I think. I love this point. I love this point.
SPEAKER_05: We're weaving all these things together. Do we want to look at you? So right.
SPEAKER_06: So on the economics page of the New York Times, it's just disasters headline after disasters headline. Then you turn to the foreign policy page. You got Tom Friedman writing a column here saying we are suddenly taking on China and Russia the same way. We are taking on China and Russia at the same time. And Tom Friedman historically has been a huge hawk. And he is even saying he's saying pump the brakes. Yeah, pump on the brakes. Never fight Russia and China at the same time. Yeah. So he says we are in uncharted waters. I just hope these are not our new forever wars. It's like, whoa. So basically, look, our economic base, our economy is crumbling at home at the same time that we are doing unprecedented saber rattling abroad. This does not compute. We need to take a time out here. I agree with you.
SPEAKER_01: But my prediction is that we will not enter a new war with rates flexing up as aggressively as they are.
SPEAKER_05: I love it. I love weaving these two stories together. I think it makes a lot of sense. We didn't have time for Alex Jones, but we'll save that for another episode. Gentlemen, I think it's our best episode ever. It's an honor and a privilege to spend this hour or so with you every week. I love you like brothers. And it's been a great hundred episodes. I look forward to 100 more sacks. If you need a mental health break. Dr. Friedberg's got him doped up.
SPEAKER_01: David will be back next Friday. I just want to say for applies, David, don't read your replies.
SPEAKER_05: Get off of that. I just want to say how much I love you guys.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm really proud of what we've created. And I'm really excited to get to the next hundred. And I'll see you guys tonight. I'll break up the white truck.
SPEAKER_03: So you want to keep going? That's the news today. I'm in for a handy. I'm in for a handy. I love you, Sax.
SPEAKER_05: I will say that Jake House moderation has been a lot better since he got brigaded.
SPEAKER_01: That is his way of saying he'll be. He'll see you next Friday. I love you.
SPEAKER_05: I love you. I love you. Freeburg. Let's see if we can get Sax to do it. It's been a hundred episodes. He hasn't said it yet, but I love the sax. David, are you coming tonight?
SPEAKER_01: Sax. Are you coming? Yeah, I'll come.
SPEAKER_06: I'll come. Oh, wait, wait, wait. Let me check. I'll get back to you offline.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus Christ. God, Jesus. All right, but hold on a second. Hold on a second.
SPEAKER_05: The Sax. I love you. So let's see if we can just say, I love you back at you.
SPEAKER_00: That's two.
SPEAKER_05: Go around the horn. Back at you. Freeburg, can you say I love you too? Can you say I love you? I see you. I see you. I see you.
SPEAKER_04: What did you tell Coolio? Freeburg, I love you. Appreciate you. Oh, you appreciate. Okay. We got to back at you and I appreciate you. You guys. That's a hundred, baby. That's a hundred. We'll see you for episode two.
SPEAKER_05: I love you too, Chamath. I'll see you tonight. Bye. Bye.
SPEAKER_00: Oh man! My haptasher will meet me at the... We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. Wet! You're a bee! Wet! You're a bee!
SPEAKER_06: Wet! You're a bee! Bee! Wet? We need to get merch!
