SPEAKER_01: Sultan of Science, what's what's going on? Are you still riding high after your big NASA zoom interview? Your space station zoom interview?
SPEAKER_00: That was really fun. Shout out to Woody Hoberg from the International Space Station astronaut Cal alumni. Woody listens to the pod on the ISS while he works out the astronauts work out he said two hours and 15 minutes every day to you know, obviously your body can atrophy got to work out a lot. He's like when he's working out he listens to old episodes of the all in pod. A buddy of his put him on to it. He's become a big fan. Right on. Shout out to Woody. Yeah, I got a DM from NASA astronauts. I thought it was like some sort of scam or something. I clicked on it because I follow NASA astronauts. They DM me and I'm like, obviously, this astronaut wants to chat. That's so crazy. I looked the guy up seems legit. He's following me on Twitter. So we did a zoom call yesterday and I put it on Twitter. The call I did with him is really fun. Honestly, like a thrill for me. An amazing individual. This guy got his PhD at Cal in computer science. Did a thesis on convex optimization applied to aerospace engineering became a professor at MIT for three years and applied to the astronaut program and got in. Fast forward 2023 in March, he is the pilot of the crew six mission, the SpaceX crew six mission to the ISS. And he's been on the ISS since March. And he's coming back in a couple of days. An incredible individual amazing story. It was super fun to chat with him. I don't think I've
SPEAKER_01: ever seen you smile or be more excited about anything. You look absolutely ecstatic. Oh, it was amazing. Did he have any comments on Uranus? Any thoughts on Uranus or not? We didn't get
SPEAKER_00: there. You didn't get to your end. Oh, you blew that. Let's try that. Okay. You take a shot this
SPEAKER_03: freeburg. So did he talk about going to the moon? Yeah, he's
SPEAKER_00: actually on the Artemis mission. And what about Uranus?
SPEAKER_03: We didn't get that far. We didn't get that far. It was the
SPEAKER_00: first date. It was only 20 minutes.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, it was the first day in 20 minutes. Did he go for Uranus? Hey, hey.
SPEAKER_02: I hear that we're trying to actually land on the south side of the moon. The dark side of the moon. Yeah. So he's actually
SPEAKER_00: on that. Would he have an opinion on the dark side of the
SPEAKER_02: moon? Or I don't know the dark side of Uranus.
SPEAKER_01: Three for three. Three for three.
SPEAKER_01: I just want to explain somebody was like, why are you bullying Jake out? Why are you bullying freeburg? Chumat's bullying this person? He loves the attention. Our love language is breaking chops. That's it. We like to laugh and take the piss out because everybody takes themselves too seriously. And then what's going on with the tequila? Are you guys serious about this? Because now I'm getting 50 emails a day with people. We'll talk about tequila. All right. We'll talk about it. Yeah, I did run a poll asking people if they're trying
SPEAKER_03: all in tequila and the poll at nearly one. Okay. And then I
SPEAKER_02: ran a poll asking what the most they'd ever spent on a bottle was. If you price it around to 200 bucks, you can you can really maximize demand. I think the demand maximizing function is probably around 180 $190. Right? You do not need a
SPEAKER_00: majority of people to want to buy your tequila. You just need enough that are willing to pay the right price.
SPEAKER_03: For real. I agree. I was just trying to see how much interest there'd be out there. And in this poll, I think it was 41% said they would try it 40% said they wouldn't. And then the remainder was just kind of, you know, show me the answer. I think if we don't have advertising ever, but we have a
SPEAKER_01: nice sipping tequila, because you know, I don't drink a lot. But I do like when sacks
SPEAKER_02: guys 32,000 votes. So if you look at 18.8%, so it's 79% is 200 or less. That's the sum of both of those two cohorts. So like if you price it at call it 189, you probably can get 15%. And so you know, you could probably sell several hundred 1000 bottles a year. I mean, that's like a pretty real business. Okay, but I need something smooth. And I like it
SPEAKER_01: a little sweet. Is that a problem? Can I just give you my
SPEAKER_02: opinion? I think that's the thing that people get wrong, just as a consumer. And I think like, I'm a pretty discerning consumer. The thing that I don't like is that people focus on all of this window dressing. And they don't focus on the core. And the core is that, for example, in wine, there's seven or eight rating systems. And over time, if you buy enough wine and taste enough wine, you can really figure out who's good at what. And there's just nothing that replaces a highly rated wine, it's exceptional. And that kind of discernment is now moving itself into tequila. And so I would just encourage us if we're going to make a bottle, just make it an exceptionally good tasting bottle. And one of the things that I saw in the comments was that people said, Oh, you can't differentiate. But then I see some other articles like comos, which is the one that I tasted at the one and only mandarina. That was the first hundred point tequila that had ever been given out. And so there are people that are starting to rate it and create these rankings. And if we were going to put out a product, I would err on extreme product quality versus price point.
SPEAKER_00: I invested in a tequila company, I showed this with you guys called 21 seeds. It was started by my friends, Nicole, Kat and Sarica. And they spent a lot of time in Mexico, finding the right producer, and they put fresh fruit, it's a it's a female niche tequila. So the goal is to create a tequila that will appeal to the female demographic. And they spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out how to actually get the flavor of fresh fruit without using artificial flavoring into the tequila. And so there was this big investment in trying to get this thing to work. This thing worked it took off and Diageo bought the company, but it was because they spent so much time on the quality of the product that I think they were successful. And that's everyone else puts their name and label on a on a bottle of tequila and says, Hey, this is my tequila. But if you don't get the quality right, chamath is totally right. People don't buy a second time you got to get it right. If you look at what Rob the rock did the rock went in
SPEAKER_02: a different direction, which is I think he has a very accessible and affordable tequila, which I think makes sense as well. It's just a different strategy. And that also works for the rock because he has almost 400 million followers. And so he can really play a volume game. But I don't think that that's what we should ever do. We should stand for exceptional quality,
SPEAKER_03: exceptional quality. And this speaks to something else, which
SPEAKER_02: is one of the biggest points of feedback that I get. So for example, I took three days, not nine to three days, we took a little bit of a our own little honeymoon away from all the kids and we went to Villa desti just to kind of hang out in Lake Como because I was flying out of Milan and ran into a few people there. And the consistent feedback that I get from those folks is like, they love hearing about these different places. Whether it's different brands, different kinds of wine, all of these things, because all these folks are a little bit left out in the cold now. They don't have like, how to live life well. And if you work really hard, and you're lucky enough to then also have some amount of success, why should you feel ashamed about it? Why shouldn't you be allowed to enjoy that and actually like, pamper yourself and celebrate yourself and I say go for it. So if we can find high quality products, like this is the thing, for example, like I think there's different ways of expressing success. When I was poor, I was poor in wallet. And I was also poor in mine. And then somewhere along the way, I actually became rich in wallet, but I was still poor in mind. And so I would wear these clothes that were gaudy and had Oh, God, huge labels, terrible, mason's Dior and Balenciaga all this God's don't pull it up in the haircut look like
SPEAKER_01: Friedberg's it was disgusting. It was gross. And then I learned
SPEAKER_02: how to be rich in wallet and rich in mind, which is then you go totally brand off and you can actually find things that are just like really well tailored, well made, they can be almost generational pieces of clothing or whatever. And I think that it's great that you can find these things and tell other people because you find that there's a latent so many number of people that want that. So at Villa d'Este as an example, that is probably the Harvard of hospitality. I've never been to a hotel that is more on point anywhere in the world than that one place. Incredible, incredible ways in which they didn't have a winner. One more time. Villa d'Este Villa D apostrophe E S T on Lake. I'll give you one simple example. Matt and I were like, talking about this one kind of olive oil. And the waiter at the other table heard, he went to the kitchen brought back and he said, here, I heard I just overheard I apologize. But and I thought this is incredible. You feel so pampered and loved and taken care of the level of service and quality there was incredible. And I think that there are so many examples of this, where if you can have elements of life, you should do it. By the way, there's a very high chance that this is where I get all of you guys for the All In Summit 2025. Okay, I'm still figuring out all the details. I'm thinking 2020. But my point is, whether it's L'Oreal Piana, which is, in my opinion, the top of the top in terms of brand off, really high quality clothes. Look at that place. The point is, like, there's all these brands that exist that take enormous amounts of time to exemplify craftsmanship and care. And I think that it's appropriate for people who can participate in those experiences to be able to have them and not feel ashamed and actually like enjoy it and celebrate themselves and do it. So let's go high quality stuff, not shitty, big label tacky crap. Okay, Nvidia has smashed
SPEAKER_01: their earnings massive interest coming into this earnings report, obviously, because we've been talking about Nvidia, they've had a massive run up. Everybody is trying to buy capacity to run language models, etc. self driving, yada yada. And it's not just the googles and Amazons of the world, you have startups trying to buy H 100s, a 100s. And by this infrastructure, you also have sovereign wealth funds and countries buying these in the Middle East in Europe, and you have traditional corporations buying them. This is the blowout of all blowouts in terms of performance, q2 revenue 13.5 billion, up 101% year over year, that's extraordinary on that large of a number, but up 88% quarter over quarter high growth in stocks is 20 30% year over year. So this is just very uncommon, obviously, q2 net income, $6 billion up 843% year over year Nvidia is now with 1.2 trillion, it's closing in on Amazon 1.4 trillion, and Google at $1.7 trillion in terms of market cap. And here's the kicker, they're printing up so much money, and so much profits, that the Nvidia board is approving a $25 billion share buyback. That's a very large number in terms of share buybacks. That's six times higher than what they were currently allotted. Yeah, I guess Chamath, when you see this kind of extraordinary run up, what is the ramification going to be in terms of for the industry competition, and then just trading this name? Is this peak Nvidia? Or is the peak yet to come? Well, I think it's peak in one way. But this is
SPEAKER_02: less about a commentary on Nvidia, because they're clearly firing on all cylinders. But you know, it's a pretty well established rule in capitalism, which is when the market observes that there's a company just printing enormous revenues and profits, they want to compete with them naturally to get their share of those revenues and profits. And that typically happens in all markets, and the result of that are just decaying margins in the in the absence of a monopoly. This is what you should expect. And so because in this market, there's nothing really monopolistic about what they do, what they do is exceptional and good. But there are other ways and other systems and other companies that are developing chipsets and capabilities here to compete with Nvidia. So it probably just motivates them even more and accelerates the path where you see competition. I tweeted this out yesterday. But one of the most interesting things that could happen is somebody like Tesla decides to either open source their chip or actually starts to sell their platform because if FSD gets to a reasonable level of scale, that entire platform system is a learning and inference system for the physical world. And I think that has tremendous applications, you have something called risk fee, which is an open architecture spec to essentially compete and create different versions of different chips that has implications more I think to arm you have companies like Google that you know, frankly, spun their own silicon a long time ago, TPU, you have Amazon now talking about doing the same thing. Microsoft has invested a lot of money in FPGA technology. So it's just yet another accelerant in this trend to create many forms of AI enabled silicon. And so I think that that sort of it pulls that reality forward. And I think we're gonna have to figure out when the market prices that in because I think that that probably decays the Nvidia margin and upside over time. Again, that is not a commentary on them. That's just a market reality. Yeah, margins get competed away. For folks who don't know, Tesla
SPEAKER_01: is making something called dojo. It's their own supercomputer. Here's a picture of it. They showed that at Tesla AI day last year. And you have arms. Open Source competitor is the risk five chip you're talking about. It's an open source architecture for doing large jobs. And so I guess my question to you freeburg is if you look at all this capacity coming online, do you think we're going to be in a situation where the amount of capacity compute being put online is going to outstrip the need for that compute, because software is getting so much better. And then maybe, you know, people are running hugging face jobs and various LM's on the new silicon from Apple, and they're running it on their m twos. And so do we need this much capacity? Are there enough interesting jobs in the world to for all this capacity? And then might that also be a headwind against video when people say, you know what, I got enough. I got enough capacity here. I think the rational way to think
SPEAKER_00: about this is to try and calculate the efficient frontier on compute use. So the more compute you use, the more it costs you. The question then is, if you double the amount of compute you're using for a particular application, do you get twice the return on the investment? If you triple it, does your ROI on a percentage basis, you know, go up or go down. So at some point, you reach an efficient frontier, which is you start to see a declining or negative rate of return on the investment in the compute that you're using for a particular application. And this is certainly going to be application and market specific, it's going to be largely driven by the data that is available in that market to do training to do tuning the markets appetite to spend money for that particular set of applications that emerges from that compute that's being used. And so we don't know today where the efficient frontier is across each of these different markets and sets of applications. And the market is finding that out. In the process of finding that out, everyone is spending a shit ton of money on compute. And they are trying to get as many server racks as they can. They're trying to get as many chipsets as they can, they're trying to get as much server time as they can. And everyone's got this idea that the more compute I can throw at a problem, the return is going to scale linearly. And it turns out that like with most things, the answer is likely not. So we're at this point right now. And I would argue a bit of a cycle that the there looks to be a bubble. And what I mean by that is that there's a lot of inefficient spending going on, as the efficient frontiers are discovered across all these different application sets. And so my intuition without a lot of actual data to back this up, is that based just anecdotally on what I'm hearing people doing in the market, what companies are doing, what startups are doing, etc. Everyone is throwing everything they can compute. And they're going to realize that they're going to need to rationalize those expenses at some time at some point. So I would I would envision in videos probably writing a writing a little bit of a discovery of the efficient frontier wave right now. And that this probably is not necessarily steady state. Sax we experienced this before, as you remember from the dotcom
SPEAKER_01: era, there was a massive investment very similar to this in fiber, and the overspending of building the fiber infrastructure, so everybody could get broadband, and they could stream movies, etc. happened in that 97 to 2002 time period, a lot of those companies went out of business, a lot of that fiber never got used. People were working on compression algorithms while they were building on massive fiber. And a lot of that fiber got sold, I think Google bought up a lot of it, other people bought it up. And it was just a massive overspend. So is this like the dark fiber of this era where we're just going to build so much capacity, that there's just going to be not enough jobs to run on it in your mind? Well, I think it's a little different than fiber in the
SPEAKER_03: sense that every year, there's gonna be a new generation of chips. And so these cloud providers who are providing GPU compute, they're going to want to keep upgrading the chips to be able to address the next generation of applications. So I don't think it's quite as static as fiber where you kind of build it once. And you're right that there was kind of a glut of capacity was created. Eventually, though, the internet usage grew into that capacity. But I think this is a little different because again, you're going to need to upgrade the chips every year or two. I think freeburg is right that this is clearly a spike in demand that may not be sustainable. I mean, recall, what happened here is that chat GPT launched on November 30, last year, and really caught everyone by surprise, it kind of took the world by storm. And over the next few months, you had hundreds of millions of users discover AI, I think it's surprised even the open AI team. I think when they launched chat GPT, they thought it'd be more of a proof of concept. But it ended up being a lot more than that. And so everyone has scrambled all of a sudden, in the last nine months or so to develop their own AI strategy. And so, again, it was this giant platform shift that happened overnight. So there is a tremendous GPU shortage right now. And that's also what's leading to these almost software like profit margins by Nvidia, because when everyone's clamoring to get a limited supply of these chips, and there just aren't enough, Nvidia can almost charge whatever they want. And so I think even more than the demand, the profit margins might not be sustainable. But I think the reality is, we just don't know what the steady state of demand in this market is going to be. I think we can say that it can't continue at these growth rates. But probably there will be some steady state of demand. That's, you know, it probably is at least where we are today.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't think it's perfectly analogous, Chamath. But just to, to bring up some historical context, check out this article I was reading the other day, the dimensions of the collapse of the telecommunications industry. This is August 20 2002. And it says, the dimension of the collapse in the telecommunications industry during the past two years have been staggering. Half a million people have lost their jobs. And that time, the Dow Jones communication technology index has dropped 86%, the wireless communication index 89%. These are declines in value worthy of comparison to the great crash of 1929. Out of the 7 trillion decline in the stock market since its peak about 2 trillion have disappeared in the capitalization of telecom companies. 23 telecom companies have gone bankrupt in a wave capped off by the July 21 collapse of worldcon, the single who launches bankruptcy in American history. So just a little history there of this, it's not perfectly analogous. Obviously, when video is not going bankrupt or anything like that, but this overcapacity issue is definitely going to be something but you had mentioned that in one of your tweet storms in the past couple of weeks, or these long form that you're doing on x, previously known as Twitter, you mentioned that what are the jobs that could be pushed to this compute? And what if one of them works? I think you were doing a speaking that somebody tweeted out a little clip of. So let's unpack that. What do you think are some jobs that people might push here that we don't anticipate that could solve something miraculous in the world? Well, the other framing is really like if you
SPEAKER_02: if you go back to like the the gold rush of the 1800s in San Francisco, the people that made the money were the platform enablers, right? They were the ones that sold the pics, the shovels, the pans and the jeans. Right. And that's where that's really by Strauss was born the the equivalent analogy. The equivalence in that analogy today is Nvidia, because they are the dominant pick and shovel provider. So the question is, what are we going to use these picks and shovels to create? Are we going to find gold? And I think the question is unclear. And where will that gold be found? Will it be found inside of a big tech company? Or will it be found inside of a startup? If you look inside of where these resources are being used inside of big tech, it is to completely scorch the earth on the economic value of large models. And I think that that's very, very good for all of the startups that come after it. So what do I mean by this? You know, we were also wrapped around the axle around chat GPT and then GPT in general. And now, you know, if you look at the quality of llama llama to basically these big companies have decided, no, we're just going to make all these models extremely good, extremely useful and very, very free. And so a lot of the resources are going there to subsidize economically subsidized and by implication, economically destroy the value of that category. That's going to be good for startups. And so the question is, what will you then build on top of these quasi free, almost free tools. And so one area that I have been looking at for a while is in computational biology, I think that that clip that you're talking about was just me talking with Oren Zeev, just around the ability to compute large complex spaces with very sparse information. It's not it's a it's a very difficult task today. But tomorrow in the AI model that you can train, you can literally characterize every single molecular permutation, you can imagine, you combine it with something like alpha fold, and you can understand protein folding, and all of a sudden, you can sequentially start to put tools together that could theoretically give you much higher probability guessing for specific compounds that could actually cure disease. A different version of that is a company that myself and a few other people started, I tweeted that out, which is more in the material science space. And we've had some pretty important breakthroughs there, which is really about trying to invent next generation battery materials. And we have one candidate that could be pretty revolutionary. If it turns out to work, we don't know yet, some positive signs. So there are there are some of these green shoots. So my perspective is that a lot of the money that Nvidia makes today is going to be money well spent, because it'll be going to the big guys, big tech plus Tesla, they are then going to create some really foundational platform technologies with it, whether it's dojo, whether it's FSD, whether it's the full platform inside of Tesla, that is the cameras plus the inference plus the training for all forms of physical world interaction, whether it's llama two, and all of that stuff will be given away, essentially, I think, open source quasi free to the ecosystem over the next few years. And I think that will be a really important moment, which will create hundreds of new companies doing really clever, cool things. So we haven't yet seen the big breakout company yet. And so I think that right now, most of this capex is going to the big guys. But the dividends of all the work that these big guys are doing will be seen over the next few years in the startups that get started in the next four or five years. I love the California analogy, ultimately, what all that
SPEAKER_01: prospecting for gold did was create the state of California, putting aside the Levi's and the jeans. And if you know anything about California's GDP, it would be Yeah, I think these statistics are always talked about fifth, 10th, eighth largest, has a bigger GDP, California than some of the largest countries in the world. So this is a 2015 chart, it's hard to find the updated information on this. But ultimately, that was the product of the coal rush is this incredible state. Any other thoughts on Nvidia before we move on to arm, I think open AI had a potentially significant
SPEAKER_03: product announcement that's related to this. So they just launched fine tuning for chat GPT, actually version 3.5. Turbo says here fine tuning lets you train the model on your company's data and run that scale early tests have shown that fine tune GPT 3.5 can match or exceed GPT for on narrow tasks. So you can do things like fine tune the formatting of the output, you can fine tune the tone. Fine tuning also allows business to make the model follow instructions better. So I think the point of this is that we're still at such an early stage of this. And there are so many applications that are going to be developed, and they're making the models more and more useful. So Jason, to your analogy about fiber, what happened with fiber is there was a big build out of over capacity, but then the number of applications kept growing until that capacity got used. And I think we're probably gonna see something like that here where there is a big build out going on of capacity, but and capabilities and that's going to lead to the next generation of applications. And I just think we don't know yet what the steady state of either demand or supply for these chips is going to be. Obviously, the market got taken by surprise over the last year. So you've seen, again, this huge spike in demand, the supply cannot react fast enough that's led to gigantic profits for Nvidia. But it's hard to know exactly again, what is the steady state going to be? Is it going to be like this? Or is this a one time spike? And we also don't know what the supply will be once the manufacturers all adjust, because now they know that the demand is there.
SPEAKER_02: And to your point, like the big use cases are pushing us well past chips to really be more like entire systems, and these racks. And so if you look like at Grace Hopper, which is their next gen design, it's like a bunch of chiplets plus memory on a huge board. It's not a chip, you're talking about system level manufacturing at this point. And that will also create different kinds of use cases. Because for example, today, right now, when you look at simple things like probabilistic tasks, I think chat GPT and all these GPTs are, are pretty marvelous and pretty inspirational. But deterministic tasks, they're shit like, you know, they hallucinate on simple things like multiplication. Why? Because you infer multiplication and you try to calculate it probabilistically, and you get these simple math functions wrong. And so these are all these things where the software has to become more and more sophisticated, and actually be able to path and tunnel code into different ways of getting it executed and then bringing it back and stitching it together. All of these things don't exist. Those are very rudimentary things that were solved in v one of compute. So I think that to your point, David, like, we don't know where this goes. We're probably going to go to a place that it's not just about chips, but it's about systems. But that's going to create this weird balkanization almost. And I think that's where a lot of the profit margins will get eroded away, because that will make it a much more competitive industry. And there just isn't a lot of margin to capture when you actually stitch all these things together. Yeah. And if you think about what were the massive wins for
SPEAKER_01: all that extra fiber, it was really two companies. The first was YouTube, which stopped charging people for transport on their videos before that if you had a video go viral, your server got shut down because you hit your $5,000 a month limit or whatever you had set with your ISP. And then Netflix, of course, right, Netflix couldn't exist and all that dark fiber built that so we'll see with all this extra GPU, what could happen into your point about the breakthroughs there, you can now go into your chat GPT and you can put in custom instructions. And so it asks you, what would you like chat GPT to know about you and provide better responses. And you know, for example, I told it I'm a venture capitalist, I live in the Bay Area. I'm looking for concise business information. And then it says, Well, how do you like how would you like chat GPT to respond? And I said, I like to see data into a table. I like to see data in those tables with hyperlinks. I like citations when possible.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, just to be clear what you're describing with custom instructions. That was a feature I think they launched like a month or two ago. And what that is doing is prompt engineering, basically, it's pre saving, like all that preamble that you would have to put in every single one of your prompts. Yeah. Whereas this fine tuning, as I understand it is more about fine tuning the model to your to improve the model for a certain kind of data or certain kind of output, right. So the example there would be if you had your email
SPEAKER_01: box, or you had your Google Docs, or you had a repository of all your slack messages or something in your company, how do you crop company handbooks or, you know, all of chamat letters he writes every year, you could have that uploaded to chat GPT is potentially very powerful, I think, for
SPEAKER_03: enterprises. I think the big enterprise use case, the most obvious one is that every enterprise wants its own internal chat bot, it wants its own internal chat GPT, where the employees can ask questions and the AI has access to all the company's information, and it understands permissions and privacy. So it only reveals information to people who have the right to see it. That's kind of a tall order. But I think that's what the market wants. Yeah, they want the chat GPT for the company intranet. Yes. And so I think there's a lot of people racing to provide that. And there was a interesting tweet by Nathan Bhanesh. Anyway, he just said bye bye a bunch of startups. So I guess a lot of stars were working on this fine tuning problem that may be too glib. Because I think there's a lot of enterprises who do not want to share all their corporate information with open AI. Of course, what if it's HR
SPEAKER_01: information, then you have people asking like, who are the most overpaid people in this company? You know, what if it's like the badge information and how many hours people are working or that's more about permissions, Jason, but even if
SPEAKER_03: open AI can nail the permissions problem, I think there's a lot of enterprises who will not want to trust their data to open AI. They're gonna be afraid about where it goes. This is why I think open source is taking off in a big way is that I think big enterprises would much rather roll their own models and control it and do the fine tuning. And that's why they're using tools like mosaic and hugging faces, they want to have control over it themselves. That's an excellent point. And that has implications as well
SPEAKER_02: into the hardware, which is also probably a good jumping off point for arm because this that what you said is exactly must happen for the integrity of an organization to want to use these things. And if that happens, then it just further further accelerates, I think, how the hardware will get abstracted and, frankly, quasi open sourced as well. All right, let's talk Facebook did a great job of this, because like, when Facebook was building data centers, they had to invent tremendous capabilities that didn't exist before. And the market was really fragmented, it was very expensive. And what they did was they basically created these reference designs for servers and blades and the whole nine yards and open source the whole thing. And it just, you know, in essence, destroyed a market, but it created a hyper efficient market that then everybody could use. And I think the question is that if it's happening at the software layer already now, just like it did in web two software, and then we see certain elements of web two hardware been open sourced, I think it makes pretty logical sense that you can expect the same things to happen in the AI world. The AI models and the AI platforms and they all have that stuff will first get open source because it's a data integrity security issue. And then the hardware will get open source as well, because you just want simple reference designs you can use and plug and play.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, if you want to look at that, it's called the open compute project, open compute.org. Just a way to use open source to grind down the prices take out the margin, I guess is what you're saying, to make all these data centers scale, right? Well, so yeah, so one related story here is this just happened in the
SPEAKER_03: last few weeks, there's a company called core weave, which provides cloud infrastructure for AI training, it secured a $2.3 billion investment in the form of a loan, what core weave is trying to do, it's kind of like AWS, but for GPUs. So essentially, instead of having to buy your own GPUs, in order to, you know, set up your own infrastructure, you just basically rent compute from these guys. But this is this is
SPEAKER_02: exactly why like, none of these, none of these companies will really be allowed to exist in this exactly four or five years from now, because ultimately, what people want is massive throughput, right tokens per second, give me as many tokens per second as possible. And they don't particularly care. Again, if you understand the model, do they really care what the underlying substrate hardware should be? It doesn't seem like they should, they should care what is the throughput? What do I pay for it? And by the way, that is exactly what happened when AWS really start to scale. Because if you guys remember, when we started for subtract code into AWS, what do we care about? How much did an EC two instance cost? How much did an S three bucket cost? And that's all we cared about. Because that abstraction allowed us to not care about the underlying hardware, who was the vendor? What was the configuration? It didn't matter. And so in an interesting way, we're going to go through that same evolution here, because it's just economically rational that that kind of market exists. You should only care tokens per second, I think. All right, in
SPEAKER_01: other news, oh, by the way, there's something called common crawl, which is another interesting open source project is getting a lot more attention today. Because they have crawled the web and you can use this common crawl, they release it monthly. And that's what a lot of people are training their data on. Now they don't have permission from all those people to do training data. But they do have the ability for you download an open crawl essentially what Google has and you have a an open source version of it. So
SPEAKER_00: common crawl was started and funded by Gil Elbaz. Yeah, he's he's a friend. Gil sold his company applied semantics to Google back in 02, 03. And a big part of his effort with common crawl is to effectively is it AdSense? AdSense. So basically
SPEAKER_00: applied semantics could read a web page, and then create the keywords associated with the content on that web page. And then those keywords would trigger AdWords ads on the on the web page. So he called it AdSense. So AdSense started and the whole publisher network at Google was born from the applied semantics acquisition. And Gil was obviously a pretty significant shareholder of Google. He's even in the S1 as one of the major shareholders. He's a really great human being. And his intention with this common crawl project was, you know, to make the crawling of the web the index and the caching available for all these different projects that might exist. And he didn't at the time, anticipate the, the open AI application becoming, you know, the big breakthrough. But when GPT three was published, I think they said that 80 plus percent of the waiting came from the content out of common crawl. And so it's really been this a this amazing project, completely nonprofit, all funded, mostly funded by Gil, and has really unlocked this opportunity for a lot of the open source alternatives to now try and provide solutions that can exist and coexist with open AI and others in the commercial options in the world. Small piece of trivia. We were one of the first AdSense
SPEAKER_01: publishers. And so here's a story from October of 2005. Weblogzinc, which didn't gadget the blogging company I started hit $3,000 a day in AdSense, thanks to Gil and the team over there. And we wound up selling it to us. And this is the story about it. And we were in the S one, they had two examples of publishers, one was New York Times. And then one was weblogzinc. They want to show like an upstart and this one. That's a lot of history here. And it's fun to go back down to and we were we were in the S one for by the way, Gil is going to be at the summit. So summit. Oh, give me
SPEAKER_01: a hug and take a picture.
SPEAKER_02: Charles Barkley had this great story, which is like he is like over the moon about being a grandfather. I saw this on 60 minutes. And he said, it's because I want my grandchild grandson to Google me and notice that I did some things and then we can talk about it. Yeah. And Jay, Jay Calve that I had this thought for you like that's like that's a cool piece of internet history that you're a part of. Yeah, hopefully your your your grandkids will Google that and you can tell us what it's pretty cool.
SPEAKER_01: Or you know, 1800 episodes of startups. I just tweeted a an episode with Gary tan from 2009 that I recorded at Sequoia's office. And I just put it on the this weekend startups Twitter account is pretty funny to have babyface Gary tan from poster us on there. All right arm officially filed its f1 it's kind of like an s1 for a foreign company and they plan to go public next month arms revenue last quarter 675 million down 2% year over year up 7% quarter over quarter fiscal full year 2023 2.7 billion ish down 1% year over year. Farmers major business just so you know is smartphones 99% of smartphones are built with arms chip architecture embedded systems they have a massive system systems. Yeah, we'll get into
SPEAKER_02: it. The problem is the market is totally moving when when soft bank bought arm. It was probably like the last year where, you know, there was so much focus on the hardware and platform technologies inside of mobile and tablets and all that stuff. But in these last few years, think of what's happened. We've had a massive shift to AI. Right. And so that's pushing a lot more pressure on GPUs and whatever comes after that. We have had a reemergence of the popularity of risk fee, which is an open source competitor to arm. We have had Apple in source a whole bunch of their own architectural decisions in silicon design because they don't want the dependency. They
SPEAKER_01: have a time the couple philosophy. Yeah, well, also, they also care about different things like they care about battery life. So that's why that's the focus of their chip architecture. And so all of this just means that that market
SPEAKER_02: embedded systems becomes more and more constrained and commoditized over time, which again, as we said in capitalism means that future profits will be less than historical profits. And so I think this is a very tough valuation to get right. And trying to stretch to a 60 or $70 billion print, I think is really tough. This is a honestly a 15 to $20 billion company.
SPEAKER_01: Ouch. So question for you, I'm often opening up to to the David's. Why would SoftBank I know the answer, but I'm asking you so you can explain it to the audience. Why would SoftBank take a company public with these headwinds with no growth being flat? Why are they taking the public now?
SPEAKER_02: Well, SoftBank has the D lever, right? They have a they have a very big problem, which is that they have this forget SoftBank Vision Fund for a second. But SoftBank itself is a telco operator that has ginormous piles of debt that they've used to finance the building of their business. And so when you have contraction, your core business, you become more and more at risk of breaching the covenants of all that debt and or you just like run out of free cash flow, like all of these things really hurt your future ability to invest. And so SoftBank is under a lot of pressure to just clean up the balance sheet and D lever. And so when you have an asset like this sitting there, if you can sell, you know, 20 or $30 billion of that, call it to somebody, and then replenish your balance sheet, that provides tremendous liquidity and relief. And they did that as well a few months ago with Alibaba, they've started to, I think now they may have sold out of the overwhelming majority of the position in Alibaba, again, because they have massive liquidity needs, because they have so much debt. So this is just part and parcel of them D levering the balance sheet. So
SPEAKER_01: they're forced to get it out is I guess what you're saying. And then we've talked sacks a little bit about other companies that are going to be forced. They're on the, what do they call it, when you're on a pirate ship, they make you walk the plank. I'd say this is like the walking of the plank to an IPO, you got other companies that have issues where they just have to get public at some point. So maybe the public markets are going to open up. And in some cases, it's going to be because people are walking the plank other cases, it's going to be opportunistic. So maybe you could talk a little bit about your thoughts on that. I think it's hard to walk the plank into the public markets.
SPEAKER_03: I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that, because the public markets have to want to buy your issuance. So if it's not a good company, then you know, in this environment, they're not gonna be able to IPO.
SPEAKER_01: Well, they're gonna be able to I think the question is the price, they have no choice but to get this out. So yeah, there may be a lot of down rounds into an IPO from the
SPEAKER_03: last private round, which was two or three times what the IPO price is going to be. Maybe what you mean by walk the plank is that, well, you tell me but there are a lot of companies which have built up huge press stacks because they raise too much money at the peak at valuations are too high. And going public does allow you to reset your whole press stack because all the preferred with all the rights and preferences converts to common. So post IPO, you just have common. And so it is a way to like clear out all the structure and all the mess that has built up in a company and you can get to a real valuation that reflects basically the truth of what the company is worth. Another analogy might be the house is on fire, you got it,
SPEAKER_01: you're on the balcony, you got to jump, or you got to stay in the burning building. Yeah, but you know, listen, if your company is on fire, I don't
SPEAKER_03: think you're gonna be able to IPO I mean, it's it's gonna be a tough scrutinizing public market for new offerings. I think that the scenario in which you can IPO is if the company is fundamentally good, it will be able to IPO at some valuation and that valuation may be a significant down round from their last private round. Those will be able to get out.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that's stripe, I guess. Now, are you seeing stripe? Yeah. Are you seeing David, the M&A activity starting to bubble up in your portfolio or in you know, the back channels? Because I'm starting to see that a bit. founders are packing it in, in some instances and saying, you know what, we want to try for M&A. Or, you know, some companies are getting a little bit frisky and saying, Hey, what's available in the market on the small side? So you're seeing an enemy, any M&A action, not a ton yet. But there's definitely a growing number of
SPEAKER_03: startups who are realizing that what they're doing is not working, and they're not gonna raise another round. And so therefore figuring out a graceful exit, whether it's an aqua hire or some other type of landing.
SPEAKER_01: Got it. Those are those might be the accurate walking the planks.
SPEAKER_03: Yes, those are the walking the planks, you're gonna start seeing a lot more of that for sure. freeburg your thoughts on the on the public markets here in
SPEAKER_01: relation to privates, and people walk in the plank.
SPEAKER_00: I don't think there is a public market right now. There's no IPO window. This arm thing is, you know, pretty forced. It seems it's not like there's a ton of pent up public demand to buy these arm shares. At least that's what it seems. So you know, they're gonna go shop it, they're gonna find out what the market tells them it's worth and and then we'll see in video is
SPEAKER_00: going to help buoy it I'm sure there'll be an argument that you know, all boats will rise and arm will be a beneficiary. But I don't know if that necessarily leads into the IPO window being open again. I think we've all heard the commentary from Morgan Stanley that they don't think the windows opening until q2 q3 of next year, maybe I can't remember the exact commentary. But as we all know, a lot of LPS in venture funds and private equity funds are waiting for the IPO window to reopen before they're going to start reallocating capital back into the private venture funds, because they need to get liquid in order to be able to recycle capital back into the next class of funds. So this glut right now, this inability to kind of get companies public is certainly weighing on folks, you know, you effectively have three options when you're running a private company. You got to keep raising money, which means either raise private capital or go public. And we've talked about the challenges of late raising late stage private capital if you've had a high private valuation in your prior round, going public is very difficult right now because a lot of folks are still digesting and having indigestion from the last couple of years or you got to sell the company or you got to get profitable. Now on the sell the company side, many of the acquisitions that we're seeing with a few exceptions are generally more bolt on and less like, hey, I'm going to pay some big strategic premium for some big strategic game changing company right now because all the buyers are dealing with their own shareholder issues and their own public stock issues right now. And the you know, can you get profitable is really as you guys know where a lot of folks are going, which is totally restructure your ambition, restructure your plans, and build a business where customers are willing to pay you money, and where you can then take that profit and only reinvest that profit and not invest more than that profit. And if you can get to that steady state, you know, you can live to see another another day, another year, another decade. And those businesses, by the way, that we saw on the dot com boom and the global financial crisis that that we're able to do that during the doldrum Death Valley March that everyone's going through right now. They emerged victorious, they learned how to be frugal, they learned how to be nimble, they learned how to really focus on customer experience, because they have to increase retention, and they had to increase the prices they were charging, they learned how to be efficient with allocating resources. And so profitability became a core part of their DNA and their ability to succeed. So I think this is really a trial era. And you know, on the other side of this trial era, a number of very high quality companies will emerge. But in the interim, I don't think that there's a an IPO patch that a lot of folks can just check the box and say, let's go ahead and go public, even if the valuation is not great. Remember, an IPO process, you got to oversell your book, or the bankers won't underwrite it. So if they're, you know, you can't just say, hey, the price is now five bucks and expect bankers are there. If a company is burning money, the big concern with going public right now is that there is no pipe market, there is no ability to do secondary to do follow on offerings. So the company can't raise capital after it's public. So unless you're actually profitable, your option of going public right now really isn't there because shareholders don't want to buy shares in a company that may run out of money. Yeah. And that's what it is. Yeah. And to your point, if you take this
SPEAKER_01: third option, and you become really resilient, and you have profits, chimaaf, that seems to me to be the setup for the next boom that we could experience in the coming years, hopefully, which is, we don't have companies that are burning, you know, mountains of cash, people are getting too profitable, these businesses look great. And then if the big companies are now, you know, having their stock prices recover, and they've laid off 20,000 employees, and they got people returning to the office and they're fit, and they're strong. Hey, that's a setup for strong companies buying strong companies or those strong companies that are private, the
SPEAKER_02: M&A market is dead as a doornail. It's more dead than the IPO market. So two days ago, the European Commission and the CMA in the UK said that they're probing Adobe figma because they have some concerns that it's going to limit competition in the market, it looks like Microsoft will have to give a 15 year license to video game streaming to Ubisoft in order to get the UK folks to agree to Activision to their Activision acquisition. So you're talking about the first case of $20 billion merger that may not happen. Because the CMA, they found their footing. They clearly had a win in the Microsoft Activision thing. And now they're probably going to find issue with the Adobe figma thing. And the Europeans don't want to be left out in the action. So they're jumping in. So I think the M&A market is effectively dead. What it leaves is an IPO market. But that is very tenuous, because you don't have a leading candidate that can really catalyze something. And I made this prediction earlier. But I think the only company that can really catalyze things would be if people were ready to do Starlink. I mean, it's the most obvious natural logical thing that would just get everybody excited and off the sidelines and into the arena. But that may take another
SPEAKER_02: year may not, but it may. In the meantime, I don't think there's any company like Instacart, I don't think people are going to be jumping off the sidelines arm, it'll be tough. Even Stripe now is like a very complicated valuation trade. And I think that that's a really technical thing to be involved in an IPO like that a technical valuation. And so companies have no choice, except to get profitable and get to default alive to use the famous Paul Graham quote, there's that's the only path. That's it. Yeah, I mean, that's the only path
SPEAKER_03: you either have to be default alive, which means profitable or default investable, which means that you're capable of producing metrics that a VC will fund. But really, that starts with 100% year over year growth. There's a lot of companies that aren't growing very fast or growing 2030 4050 60% growth. That's not for their fundable. Yeah, or they're flat, even worse, some are shrinking. So those cases, they got to think more like a PE model than a venture model. Yeah. And PE companies are cashflow positive, they don't burn cash. I put out this video a few months ago, called VC or PE. What's the right framework for thinking about your startup? This was a Oh, craft ventures,
SPEAKER_01: YouTube, this was a talk that I gave to our portfolio companies,
SPEAKER_03: we recorded it and then published it. Really, it should have gotten more attention. But this was basically recommending to all those slower growing companies, our portfolio, stop thinking that VC funding is always gonna be available and start thinking more like a PE funded private equity company, which is to say you need to cut your burn to get cash flow positive, you will then be able to control your own destiny. So this slide here, if you're not VC eligible, act realistically. So we provided some guidance on what makes a company eligible for VC funding. And you can see there's a good column is a great column. Good starts at two x growth grade is three x gross margins. Good starts at 50%. Great is 80%. Net dollar attention good starts 100% grades 120%. CAC payback. Good is 12 to 18 months great is six to 12 months burn multiple good is one and a half grade is one or less. And then there's some danger zones as well. This was to provide them with some realistic guidance in terms of whether they'll be able to raise another VC round or not. And I can tell you like most startups in startup world right now are in the danger zone. It's a really tough environment. And so, you know, listen, if you're a startup with sub 1 million of ARR, and you're in the danger zone, you're probably gonna have to pack it in or maybe you package yourself up for an aqua hire. But if you're a startup that has 50 million of ARR, but you're in the danger zone, just cut your burn, you could basically make ourselves cash flow positive. And you could engineer an outcome for yourself a pretty good outcome. My anecdotal experience is one of our larger investments. We
SPEAKER_02: brought in a private equity firm where they came in. And my God, it's been an incredible experience. Because the combination of how like a VC looks at a business and how a PE firm looks at a business in a moment like this is hyper additive, because it's super clarifying. It's very straightforward. And it gives a CEO an extremely clear mandate from which to operate and then they become very measurable. And I found it to be a really, really healthy thing. Now, PE guys can only get involved in companies of a certain size. So limits 50 million and above in revenue 100 million. Yeah, in our case, it was a 400 million 380 300 more than 300 million revenue. So it's a big it's a big company. But my point is just just more that we were moving along a trajectory to
SPEAKER_02: getting to default alive. But by adding that PE discipline to support, boom, I think we were able to focus on it probably a
SPEAKER_02: year to 18 months faster and with specific precision because they have a very different toolkit and a reaction to mis-execution. And that's extremely healthy. Yeah, we had
SPEAKER_01: this happen, you know, meeting with just from the front lines, we, we meet with we have 20,000 people apply for funding from our firm, in large part, I would say we doubled the number of applications after all in started. So shout out to my besties here, really helped our deal flow. And we find companies and we found a company that was obsessed with all in. And the two founders were quants and they made this company called Stone Algo. We meet this company, they've got very little money, it's a bootstrap company, and they got to a half million dollars in revenue, you know, just on sweat equity. And we find this company, it's not part of the Silicon Valley, you know, accelerator system. It's basically kayak for diamonds, shout out to the team over there. And we were able to place a nice bet on this company that was breakeven. And you know, put in a you know, a couple $100,000 to start them down this road to growing faster, but what a delightful thing to find a profitable company in the world. And so if you have a profitable company, like and it's just 50,000 a month or 25,000 a month, please email me, Jason at Calle, ganas.com, I want to invest in your company. When you have that company, small amount of revenue profitable, you're not burning a ton, you are so attractive to investors right now. It's the highest attractiveness in the world. And I just want to point out David, as this market has, you know, completely gone from absolute chaos, the hair has gotten tighter and tighter. You were in crazy bad and now you are tight tight is right. Sax is focused, he's deploying that LP capital, he's deploying that advice to SAS companies. And it's no joke now folks, General Sachs is here. He is not crazy. History uncle, he is SAS, sacks, his SAS sacks is back. This is like when Mark Zuckerberg started
SPEAKER_03: wearing a tie to work to start showing that it was serious. Yes. SAS is SAS sacks and Sirius sacks with that slick back
SPEAKER_01: hair. Alright, listen, we got to get going here. We got a lot more on the docket. I think we just maybe I'm going to jump the fence here. And we just go right to the Republican primary. The
SPEAKER_02: funniest thing last night was at poker. We watched it. You watched it during poker, were you able to focus? You have to hear Kevin Hart react when all these guys are doing it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard. And the worst part of the poker was the magician. Here we go. says, How can you both be
SPEAKER_02: playing poker here but also the debate stage? Which I thought was a really funny joke. All right, listen, I know everybody's I just want to go
SPEAKER_01: around the horn here. Friedberg. Did you watch the debate? Who won the debate who had the largest gain, net gain in terms of their profile in your mind after watching debate number one of the GOP, David Friedberg, biggest game, I watched the
SPEAKER_00: debate, I kind of think about these guys on three dimensions, which is the content, how dynamic they are and their personality. I think those are the three dimensions that people are going to be kind of assessing them on. I think Nikki Haley did a tremendous job gaining interest with respect to her personality and her content. Burgum Hutchinson, I don't think had a chance to move the needle on any of them. I think Vivek was by far the winner on dynamic. He had the hardest hitting biggest comeback with a very close second being Chris Christie. But I do think that Vivek got taken apart when it comes to content. And I have real concerns about his personality. There's a lot of people that are just turned off by him, that he seems a little too eager that he seems a little too smart for his own good. The commentary about him being so junior and doesn't have experience, I think standing next to those guys on stage really showed to be honest, Nikki Haley tearing him apart on his point of view on Russia. And Saks, you know, we can debate the point or not. But I think she did a masterful. I don't think she tore him apart. I
SPEAKER_03: think the biggest dunk line of the evening was when he congratulated her on her future appointments to the boards of Raytheon and Lockheed. Yeah, that was that was brilliant. I
SPEAKER_00: just think he's the most dynamic character. And I think people people do in a democracy vote on that they vote on how dynamic someone is. They vote on their personality and whether they can trust the person that he Nikki Haley shines there. She seems extremely trustworthy and personable. Chris Christie came across as very personable. So you're big winners. Yeah, Mike Pence, I would say, under underwhelmed and Rhonda Santas, man, it's like he didn't show up. So aside from him, yeah, I would say Haley, Chris Christie, Vivek and Kim Scott are probably like, you know, across those dimensions, like, you know, the four runners and everyone else is probably off.
SPEAKER_01: Now let me get your mom and then Saks, you get to comment on both of their so I want to go to you last because you have the most passion here. Chima, who are your big winners coming out of it? In other words, who gained the most last night?
SPEAKER_02: What can Brown do for you? What can Brown do for you? I think that okay, ups settlement. Great. I thought that I thought that Nikki Haley did an incredible job. And I do think that the vet did a very good job. And I think what's interesting is that I'm fascinated to see what the republican reaction over the next few weeks will be to Vivek and specifically what I'm interested in seeing is, do the Trump loyalists start to were they incepted with an idea yesterday, which is that this guy can give us a lot of the talking points we want without some of the heartburn and Ajita that we don't want. And if he is able to thread that needle, which is what I think his effective strategy has been, he could really build momentum going into the fall. So that was my that was my real takeaway is that he is refining a playbook. Look, the guy is a clearly a really brilliant person. Well studied, well prepared, and dynamic, as David said, so he can, you know, clap back at people, which I think is important. But the most important thing that he's done is he has defined a very precise strategy to thread this needle of being close enough to Trump to, frankly, eventually go after him. But do it in a way where he's slowly building credibility among Trump loyalists. And I think if you look at where other people made huge gaffes, unnecessary gas was they took their beliefs, and they confuse them with the strategy of winning. And that doesn't work in the Republican Party. So when the candidates were asked about Trump, and the ones that drew a hard line and said that this guy's going to go to jail, what happened, they got booed. And it just ended their ability to be credible. For what they said afterwards, I'm not saying that that's right or wrong. It's just an observation. So I think the vet is doing the smartest job of understanding the rules on the field. And he's in the arena to okay, so that gives them a lot that can now hold on. Now we go to sacks sacks. You heard Nikki
SPEAKER_01: Vivek, Christy from freeburg. Here's a vet and Tim Scott. So Vivek clearly the buzz and the search terms and everything. It seems to be favoring Vivek as the big lift here. Do you think Vivek is the Trump change agent without the indictments without the baggage without the Trump derangement syndrome insanity is Chumath correct here that he's a more palatable version of the change agent that is Trump.
SPEAKER_03: I think he's positioning himself as the backup plan to Trump. So he's not criticizing Trump. He is cultivating support within Trump's base. Again, not to supersede him, but I think to perhaps be a backup plan. I think it is a smart strategy. But let me back up a little bit here. Who won for you? Well,
SPEAKER_01: we had the best game before you make your points. We have the biggest everybody else played the game. biggest game. The
SPEAKER_03: biggest game was Vivek. That's okay. reflected in the polling. There's a poll on Drudge Report in which 33% which was the highest number said that he won the debate. 22% for Haley 18% for DeSantis Christie got 16% the rest were just non factors. So not scientific, but pretty scientific, but this is
SPEAKER_03: corroborated by Nate Silver had a sub stack this morning, saying that based on the buzz on social media and the sentiment, and Google Trends, Google Trends, he predicted that Vivek would we keep saying Vivek Vivek it's it is he's gonna
SPEAKER_03: have the biggest bounce out of the debate. Partly that's a function of the fact that he was the least well known candidate. Okay, so this gave him a lot of exposure and he has a good orator. I mean, just the way the energy, the timber of his voice, he projects well, and he had a clear point of view in this debate. You may not agree with everything he said, but he had a very clear point of view. And I expect that both the number of people who like him and the number of people who dislike him will go up as a result of this. But I think the net effect of that will be positive. Now let me back up just give you a couple more thoughts on the debate. First of all, in terms of winners, I think the Republican Party in a way, demonstrated that it is the party of ideas where there actually are debates happening. Because you saw here, I think, real differences between the candidates, and I could break them up into really three categories, if you like, there's this neocon wing of sort of hardline, foreign policy hawks. And you saw Nikki Haley's part of that and Chris Christie and Pence, and Tim Scott, then you had this religious right, faction, where you've got Pence and Scott. And then you've kind of got the MAGA wing, which Vavake really took up the mantle of opposing Ukraine and defending Trump. So you have three very different groups within the party who are battling, I think, for mindshare within the party and to be the future of the party. So it's not just about candidates and personal style, but it really is about ideas. You compare that to the Democratic Party, they're not even having a debate, they're protecting Biden from a debate, there could be a real debate because RFK Jr. has really different ideas. And he would like to take the party in a very different direction, the direction of his father and uncle, Bobby Kennedy and John F Kennedy, he's saying that we have moved away from where we should be as a party. But the people who control the Democratic Party do not want to have that debate. They have shut it down completely. There is no debate, they're just protecting Biden. So that's number one is I think we should give the Republican Party some credit for being willing to discuss and debate. I agree with you on that. I love the fact that you had a vibrant
SPEAKER_01: debate, you had differences of opinions. Now it was a little like a UFC fight and you know, zingers and back and forth. And I did like the fact that you had people who in moderation was actually surprisingly good when they forced them to say like, would you give Trump a pardon? Or, you know, what would you do in terms of support for Ukraine? This was like really well done. And they had that 32nd thing where they stopped people they say, Hey, this is a 32nd one. And they had to rein in Pence because he kept, you know, interrupting and they were kind of respectful. So I just want to shout out to Fox for good moderation. There were some crazy zingers. And I think they had some zingers in there as well. And it seems like we live in zinger culture. I think the the best zinger goes to the moderator who said, let's talk about the elephant that's not in the room. And then they brought up Trump. Well, frankly, that one, but that was pretty hardcore. Well, so let's talk
SPEAKER_03: about winner number two, which was Trump because Trump did not participate and he didn't pay any price whatsoever for that. He barely got mentioned or attacked on that stage. And then he did this interview with Tucker, which started five debate, which was kind of brilliant, because once again, Trump was able to suck up a lot of the oxygen, maybe not all of it, but a lot of oxygen without even participating in the debate. It was a perfect bookend. I watched both. It was
SPEAKER_01: a perfect bookend. You got Trump over here saying, chamath I'm interested in your position. But he said, Listen, I don't need to be in there with these guys mudsling and they have 01% and I think he got the sense that he's excited to debate them when there's two people left or something like that. What did you think of? Did you watch Trump's thing? freeburg or chamath? No, watch it.
SPEAKER_02: I watched the debate on me. I watched both the debate and then
SPEAKER_03: I watched I do think Trump effectively won the debate night.
SPEAKER_00: Because you had all these guys going at each other. And then you had Trump playing the Trump card. I'm not even going to show up. Because I don't have to. He literally made himself better than everyone else in the room. By saying I'm not even it's not even worth my time to show up to talk to you guys go ahead and fight with each other. I'll also just restate this point about Vivek. I think it became abundantly clear that his strategy, his strategy is to pander to the Trump audience, that his commentary about you know, God is real climate change is there's two genders. He knows through polling, through his understanding, and his intelligence, that this is what this audience that is the bulk of the voting members of the Republican Party want to hear, and he is telling them what they want to hear. And then
SPEAKER_03: is that a politician? Yeah, I mean, isn't that better than pandering to the military industrial complex like Nikki Haley did? There was a comment last night that I thought was really
SPEAKER_00: important, which is that leadership is not about consensus. And what he's doing is he is reflecting back the consensus view of the majority of people in that party in order to get himself elected, rather than leading with a different message that casts a different opportunity, the different light on the opportunity for this nation. And I think that's really where he and others on that stage, or he particularly fall short, is that he speaks too much to what people already believe and say, because he knows that that's what they're voting for Trump about. And then the bet is that there's some chance, not 100%, but some chance that Trump doesn't make it all the way guns up in jail, or people start to turn on him. And then he's the front runner, because he's basically captivated that audience. Yeah, hold on, but but freeburg, and I will let you address it
SPEAKER_01: here. Shemagh just said, the brilliance of the vague and his positioning here is that he understands how to win. And he is playing this game. And you call it pandering. Sax is I think, saying it's understanding the needs of that audience. The job of a politician, Sax is to win and to stay in office. So I don't believe the Vicks positions on a lot of the stuff. I think he is pandering. I think he wouldn't do what Trump did. I think, you know, he's doing the part in promise because he knows to get some votes. So how do you reconcile this? Your job is to win, right? And you would rather see DeSantis maybe pick up on some of this action? No. As your preferred candidate, then that's a good question. freeburg. Do you think that a
SPEAKER_02: politician's job when you're running for President of the United States? Is it to understand the conditions on the field and win or not?
SPEAKER_00: I think the politicians job or I don't want to say the job. I think the opportunity to get elected in a democracy is to provide leadership, to cast a light on where you think the country or whatever constituency you're supposed to lead, can go to provide a sense of opportunity to provide a sense of optimism, to provide a sense of what's not happening today that should be different, rather than reflecting back to those people exactly what they want. Now, the flip side of that is exactly what you're saying, Chamath, which is that I think what happens in a democracy is that people elect people that represent what they believe. And I think that's what's going to happen a lot. And he's raising his hand and he's saying, I believe these things. And he's going to get elected or he's going to put himself in a position to get elected if Trump drops out. I just think there's a lot of people who are very
SPEAKER_02: smart, who if they are too idealistic, will achieve nothing in their lives. And I don't think Vivek is one of those people. idealism has a place in the world. It's not on the debate stage when you're running for president. Okay,
SPEAKER_01: sacks, you want to get in here? Okay, let's take the issue of
SPEAKER_03: Ukraine, because that was one of the main issues that Vivek differed from the rest of the people on that stage. There is polling by CNN that a majority of Americans have now turned against the idea of giving more aid to Ukraine. I'm sure that number is much higher in the Republican Party. If you remember, there was an event, Charlie Kirk, who is a conservative influencer, has an event called Turning Point USA. And they did polling of their conference attendees, the number one issue that everyone agreed on was Ukraine 95% of the attendees opposed giving more aid to Ukraine, Donald Trump only got 85% popularity. So the base of the party is even more united against Joe Biden's policy in Ukraine than they are unloving Trump. Okay, that tells you something. And yet, Vivek is the only candidate on that stage that was willing to raise his hand, like aggressively, like full throatedly not kind of a half hearted to saying that he did not agree with Biden's policy on Ukraine. What is wrong with all these other people on the stage that they cannot understand what is wrong with Biden's Ukraine policy, which by the way, is the signature policy of his presidency. What is the point of Republicans nominating a candidate who's just going to agree with Joe Biden on providing aid to Ukraine as much as it takes for as long as it takes? Is this your position here? freeburg? Is that, you
SPEAKER_01: know, when at all costs, let's call it the vague when at all costs play the game on the field, as Shammat is saying, and just win the game versus being principled because you did have a
SPEAKER_02: no, no, I think that that framing is such a setup. Can I can I just frame it how you want? You said playing the game
SPEAKER_01: on the field. And freeburg said, having a principal here and having like an actual vision for the country. So I'm taking both of yours.
SPEAKER_03: Look, I think the framing is not as not what is wrong with Vivek but what is wrong with candidates like Christie and Pence and Haley and Scott, where even though 95% of their party is opposed to Ukraine, they are adopting Joe Biden's policy. And their only criticism of Joe Biden is that he's not doing enough fast enough for that. Okay, let's let freeburg get in
SPEAKER_01: here. They're completely out of point with the Republican Party
SPEAKER_03: as it stands today. We got your point. But is it not freeburg?
SPEAKER_01: What you're saying is that there is this profile and courage to invoke that book, where you there's something that's unpopular that you have to do and I think Nikki Haley, Pence, Christie, and the other ones who are pro defending Ukraine from Russia. Their profile and courage. freeburg is that they will go against that 95% polling and say it's the right thing to do. We should defend Taiwan, we should defend Israel, we should defend Ukraine against those are three different issues. I know it's three different issues, but they were all evoked by Vivek himself. So freeburg your chance, I think the West Wing
SPEAKER_00: does a great job of exploring both sides of this, which is when do you have to break the mold and break the expectation of the people to do the right principle thing? And when do you have to do the thing that you don't think is right, but it's what the people want to have happen. And I think that that's a obviously a balance that needs to be struck when you're in this position of being an elected leader in a democracy. And so there's no there's no real answer. I wish that there was like, I wish Mr. Beast had like a presidential process like he you guys saw his Olympics video that he did last week, where he brought people and he created this like, he's like five things. I wish that we had something like that to elect president that it was more than just oration. Because we elect the president today, based on their oratory skills, they go on stage and who has the best quickie comment, the person who would be the most decisive under pressure doesn't necessarily win. The person who can inspire and attract and retain the best leadership, the person who can have the best foreign policy interactions with other leaders doesn't necessarily win. Those are skills that show up in other contexts. And when we put people on a stage, and we say, Okay, speak to the audience, the guy who speaks the best looks the best. It's not necessarily the guy who is best equipped to handle the challenge of the Bay of Pigs, or, you know, the decision on whether or not I think you're being very dis I think you're being very dis
SPEAKER_02: just you have the floor go.
SPEAKER_02: That's kind of like saying, why isn't it that it's the quarterback with the strongest arm that isn't the most successful? Why? Because that person is a fucking loser. And the person that's the winner is the one that can thread together a multifaceted set of skills to win the game. Tom Brady was drafted in the seventh round, not the first round. He wins the game, because he has the requisite skills, which is a basket of things, and a nuance of skills in different moments at different times. And so I think that you're being a little glib by saying the person isn't cool under pressure or this or that. It's not true. The people that win these races have a preternatural ability to be a complete egoist, but not a narcissist. That is an incredibly deft set of skills that a fair, rare people have it gives them this energy to be out there talking to 1000s and 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of people may be saying the same thing 1000s of times. But being able to stay focused, being able to be on point, having a sense of what they need to believe, know the details in a certain part, know the high level at another part, stay punchy, but stay affable. That's the game, there are a set of skills that
SPEAKER_00: it takes to become president, you test the oration skills of a person, when you put them on a debate stage, you don't test the other complex skills that it takes to be president. And getting people to understand the complexity of the role and all the other aspects of someone's personality are lacking in these fucking debates. But there are other these other skills are in
SPEAKER_02: play and many things other than just the debate. Like the campaign is a highly sophisticated orchestration of running a small little government. Mario Cuomo famously
SPEAKER_03: said that you campaign in poetry and and government pros. And there is a difference between campaigning skills and governing skills. There is a gap there, I would update it to say that you govern in pros and campaign and tweets, you know, so the campaign definitely puts a huge emphasis on a candidate's communication skills. But that is not all just gloss or style. It also has to do with their policies and the nuances of their policies, and how they handle pressure, how good they are under pressure and how good they are when they're attacked. So you know, we put these candidates or pressure cooker and kind of learn who they really are. I'm not sure it's a horrible process. So let me ask you a question. Yeah. Pence has been in the
SPEAKER_00: situation room dealing with a foreign adversary. Vivek has no military or defense experience. He has no foreign state experience. How do you assess Vivek in his ability to address those critical issues that he's going to have to lead us through versus someone who's been there and done that? And how do you know, give a great question? Great question. Okay, trust him.
SPEAKER_01: We trust the Wilson
SPEAKER_03: Pence made that argument against a vague apparently not realizing that the guy he was vice president for was in that exact same position in 2016. No previous political experience, right? No experience being in the situation room. The only reason why Pence got to warm his ass on a chair in the situation room is because Donald Trump picked him to be his VP. Oh, but he wasn't responsible for making any important decisions. He was basically clock in time as vice president, give me a break. And that's why he's at what is it one or 1%? No one gives a shit about Pence. That's what they said about Obama as well. Obama had zero
SPEAKER_02: experience. Obama barely could get elected before he became senator and then president in a matter of four years. And for Bush, what happened to Bush? They said that exact argument as well. And what do they do? They packed them with Rumsfeld and Cheney. How did that end?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I just want to also point out here that sometimes things get a little bit heated. And when we get heated, it's typically because we're we're triangulating around something very important. I think what we're trying triangulating around here is that we are moving from an era of incumbents, and insiders to an era of outsiders. If you're your point, sacks, post Trump, we now have the two or three most fascinating candidates are people who do social media who do podcasts who do earned media, like we talked about, I think two or three weeks ago, it's really good insight. And the vague ism has mastered it. And he is exactly like Trump. And he's exactly like Obama, to a certain extent, in that those people were incredibly personable. They knew how to talk on podcasts, they knew how to engage people. And I think that, you know, this spiciness that we're having here on the pod, and the spiciness that you're seeing with some of those candidates, is that we're moving from traditional media defining these candidates to direct to consumer direct through Twitter slash acts direct through podcasts, this podcast included making people like RFK and the vague, you know, very palatable people and Ross Perot, I know I'm gonna get laughed up for bringing this up who got 19% of the vote, which is a serious number. He went direct as well. At that time, after he dropped out. No, he got 90% per row, because he actually went as an independent all the way. And what Ross Perot did was the equivalent of what the vague and RFK are doing on podcast, he bought television time, you don't know that, or some people in the audience might not understand who Ross Perot even is, but look it up. He bought television time, and he went direct to the country with our budget. I thought this is going to be the future of politics. What we're witnessing right now is the transition from traditional media and the establishment, defining who the great candidates are to the public. And the people on podcasts and social media who are the tip of the spear on the vanguard, they're going to pick the winners. And I think this could be the tipping point election. Trump was the first Obama then Trump and now the vague and RFK. So I just like you all to maybe respond to
SPEAKER_01: that, especially you sex and she brought this around to media issue up two weeks ago, I partially agree with freeburg. In this sense, look,
SPEAKER_03: obviously track record is important, obviously, the ability to be an executive executive functioning is important for the chief executive of our country. So I'm not saying that we shouldn't look at that kind of record. And this is why was one of the reasons why I support DeSantis. I think he's been a brilliant governor, he's done a superb job in the state of Florida. He did the best job of all the governors during COVID. I think he did a better job than Trump did during COVID. So listen, I think those things are important. Where I disagree is just because Mike Pence has again, warmed a chair in the situation room. As vice president, to me, that's just not that relevant experience. I mean, the VP is kind of a nothing job unless something terrible happens to the president, they get tapped on the shoulder. So I just disagree with what is relevant experience. Second, I think it's important to recognize that the reason why the vague has a lane here. And the reason why Trump had a lane in 2016 is that the establishment wing of the party is so completely out of touch with what the base wants. Look, the reason why Trump came out of nowhere in 2016 is he basically turned everything on its head. He said no more bushes, no more of these stupid forever wars in the Middle East. We need to build a wall, no more of this open border policy. And we need to reset our trade relationship with China. Those were three mega issues that no one else in the party was talking about. And the mega issue today is Ukraine 95% of the base is against it. And they have left the vague this gigantic lane to exploit. Why? I don't know. I mean, they're trapped in legacy neocon thinking that the US sacks are he kept saying donor class. I think that was a great moment. It's a combination of being trapped in legacy thinking where we have to be the policeman of the world, combined with all the big donors in the party. Okay, many of whom are wrapped up with the military industrial complex want to contribute to that. If you were Can you just say it again? What
SPEAKER_02: you feel like I'm not hearing? No, I think that being president
SPEAKER_00: requires being better more than just an orator. And I think that the debates allow the best orator to show off their skills and capabilities on the debate stage. I was saying I wish that there were other events, I would love to see some set of systems to expose the candidates success or failings and how well equipped they are, rather than the person who can just give the best interview. We all know this, when you interview a candidate, an engineer, the engineer that gives the best interview is not necessarily going to become the best engineer, you can look at their code to see if they're a great great engineer, you can talk to people that report it to them to see if they're a great manager, you can learn more about their success and skills through more than just their oration on the stage. And yes, there's data in fact, that we can pull from these people. I was just speculating in kind of a pseudo silly way about the concept of can we do more than just put people on a debate stage, hire a CEO for your companies. So the board, what I'll
SPEAKER_00: tell you, what Yeah, what I'll tell you we don't do is we don't have the employees elect the CEO through a vote by having that CEO go in front of you and say, I'm the best guy for the job. I hear you, but your vote is part of it. But you can interview, we
SPEAKER_00: do reference calls, right? We we talked to them about their strategy. And you know, through the interview through the reference calls, through looking at the performance of other businesses they've built and run and, you know, and with that can have a fulsome understanding of his candidacy
SPEAKER_02: and his ability to be president. My point is, I think that there
SPEAKER_00: are certain things like with Trump, that had not been tested or tried that are going to come up in this role that they'd never done before in the past. And I'm not saying look, by the way, I'm certainly not a big, you know, political career guys, you guys know, I think, you know, I hate that people build a career out of politics. I think it's the most inane, ridiculous thing. And if we could go back and rewrite the Constitution, that's probably the first thing I'd put in there. The thing with
SPEAKER_02: the this line of thinking, and maybe this is where I reacted. So I apologize if I personalize it, is that it creates the risk of exactly what you just said in this, what you just said right now, which is this blob class of people that use those arguments as the reason why change can't happen. Yeah, why it might not
SPEAKER_00: disagree with that. I don't disagree with that. And I think
SPEAKER_02: that is the huge red flag about this line of argumentation around why out of the box candidates can't be evaluated by reasonably smart people of which there are 300 million of us in America that have the ability to see it. And so I actually don't think it's as hard of a job as we make it out to be. And that when you get 180 190 million different people voting, I do think you actually get a pretty good wisdom of the crowds and take away Trump's UI for a second. What Sachs just said is so profound, because like what Trump nailed was three ginormous lanes that turned out now we can all agree with. None of us wanted these wars. Everybody basically believes that the border needed to be closed. And everybody believes that China has taken advantage in a way that is really hollowed out the middle class in America. Those were three totems that nobody would have touched. And if we had allowed this whole thing of like, oh, Trump doesn't have this, Trump doesn't have that he just gives cute nicknames to his adversaries, we would have missed that he actually had enough executive function to nail the three biggest themes of our current lifetime. Okay, I
SPEAKER_00: think that's fair. I guess my commentary can just be reduced down to the debate stage and saying who won and who should be is different than who should be president. Okay, necessarily. I got it looking at the broader context. Good job. Good job. But the presidential candidacy is much more than just these
SPEAKER_02: debates. Okay, yes. There's a lot of other things going on. If
SPEAKER_03: we're judging people just based on how well they talk and how quick on their feet they are. Chris Christie is a great talker. He's a media trained talker. But guess what he got booed. That was the debate. The dope point of the debate for me
SPEAKER_02: was that he I thought took a kind of like a low key racist jab at Vivek when he read it. He's a person. Yeah, the last
SPEAKER_01: person in one of these debates who stood in the middle of the stage and said, what's a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here was Barack Obama. I'm afraid we're dealing with the same type of amateur standing on the stage tonight. You felt it was a little No, not that it's when I felt the back like
SPEAKER_02: chat cheap. It's already have a guy who sounds like chat
SPEAKER_01: chippy tea standing here's like this Indian tech worker and I
SPEAKER_02: thought, Hey, man, that's what you read into it. That's
SPEAKER_01: interesting. I thought he was just saying he sounded as a South Asian tech worker. That's what I read that he was that he was very like, robotic and formulaic or something. But what did you How did you read it as a as the palace white guy on the panel? There is something almost personal about the way
SPEAKER_03: that both Christie and pants seem to react to a bank. It was almost like, who are you? You young whippersnapper to be on the stage with me, especially pants. I've been the vice president. Who are you? You know, and all this was dismissive. Here's what his quotes were dismissive. And I think there was a resentment that even before this debate, Vivek was rising in the polls, and those guys were going nowhere. Let me explain it. And again, it's not just oratorical
SPEAKER_03: skill. It's the substance. Yes, of the issues, and where he's willing to go, that these other candidates are not here are the
SPEAKER_01: quotes to respond to. Let me explain it to you, Vivek. I'll go slower this time. Now is not the time for on the job training. And we don't need to bring in a rookie all of this dismissive stuff from Pence to the vague, got some applause because you know, conflict, conflict and confrontation gets applause by these lunatics in the audience. And like it was like a when you also get an allocation of seats for your own team. So
SPEAKER_02: yeah, it was the only reason why Pence was VP is because a
SPEAKER_03: rookie got elected president. Yeah, that's a very good it's a
SPEAKER_01: good insight. Yeah, that was very weird. I thought the thing that was very interesting was not to make it all about Trump, but he was the quote unquote elephant that was not in the room was the un dying support for Pence who had everybody say Pence did the right thing on January 6. What would you take away from that sex because there were some there was a mix of booze and cheers for Christie when he kind of said like we need somebody who doesn't behave this way. It's unbecoming of the presidency referring to Trump. So what was your take on? Is the Republican Party in this audience trying to move past Trump given all these indictments? I'm going to leave the Trump Stockholm syndrome and Trump derangement syndrome out of this just objectively. Yeah. Well, I thought I thought
SPEAKER_03: DeSantis had the best response, which is Listen, if we spend our time relitigating January 6, and looking in the rearview mirror, we're going to lose to Joe Biden. This is exactly the conversation and the debate that Democrats want us to be having. I think that's just factually true, that if the Republican Party spends his time debating January 6, that's playing into Biden's hands. So you don't think Trump can necessarily beat
SPEAKER_01: Biden that these other candidates have a better chance of beating Biden? Is that what you know? I didn't say that. I'm asking the question focusing on relitigating. Okay, January
SPEAKER_03: 6 is not only is it a waste of time, it's just a loser for Republicans. And by the way, it's Trump's worst quality to keep harkening back to the last election. Even I think his fans and supporters don't want to hear that.
SPEAKER_01: Who has a better chance of winning some pairing of these candidates acts or Trump and one of these candidates versus Biden heads up? You know, does something like DeSantis Vivek or Halle and Vivek, you know, pick your combination here have a better chance versus Biden, then Trump plus one of these? And I think it's tough to say, but I do think that Trump has
SPEAKER_03: really high negatives. And in order for him to win the presidency, he's got to flip something like two or three out of five states, like swing states that voted against him last time. And I do think that this is one of the stronger arguments that DeSantis makes is that, you know, I could deliver those states whereas Trump may not. So I think there is an electability argument for DeSantis.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, and so, Friedberg hearing all by the way, I'm not saying
SPEAKER_03: that that's what's gonna happen. But I do think we know that Trump does have very high negatives. And yeah, he's gonna have to flip some states that he's before he's gonna have a
SPEAKER_01: lot of Democrats and women come out to vote against him. He supercharges the base in the way Hillary charged the other way because they one of the thing about our status, his
SPEAKER_03: performance in that debate. So I know that he doesn't stand out
SPEAKER_03: in the way that, you know, the vague or some of these other candidates do because he didn't deliver any zingers. And also, he wasn't the brunt of attack. I think we all thought that maybe there'd be a lot more incoming for him and the incoming really went for the vague. But I think that he had a strategy in that
SPEAKER_03: debate. This is my interpretation. It's not based on any insider knowledge or anything like that, which was the way he answered questions was, I think, to be broadly acceptable to all the different factions in the GOP. So like I mentioned, there's kind of the mega faction, there's the neocon faction, and there's the religious right faction. And his answers may not have been the ones that were most loved by any of those factions. But I also think that none of his answers disqualified himself with any of those factions, which is kind of hard to do given how much they're at each other's throat. So sacks if this was a poker tournament, and this was the
SPEAKER_01: final table, would you say the strategy for the Santas was, Hey, listen, I'm gonna let these other guys shoot it out. I'm just gonna sit on my big chip stack here. I'm in second place. You got let me let, let's let the field eliminate themselves. I'm going to just protect my stack. I'm not going to play a lot of hands here. He's just sort of sitting and waiting for it to get down to three or four people, and then I'll mix it up some more. Is that the strategy?
SPEAKER_03: I think he came across as the grown up. Mm hmm. Nobody really took swipes at him or shots at him and he didn't really take shots anybody else he did, again, try to focus the Republican Party on what it's going to take to win. He was one of the only people on that stage who had criticism of Biden. I think it was a mistake not to criticize Biden's record. Yeah, they got shocked at that. That was such a weird thing that they
SPEAKER_01: were all going after Trump and nothing about Biden. The only
SPEAKER_03: attacks on Biden that I even remember from that night were from Trump's interview with Tucker where he criticized God he destroyed criticized Biden's lack of physical and mental acuity. But look, I think that if if the convention were ultimately to be a brokered convention, which all the different factions of the GOP had to agree on a candidate, then I think this answers me that candidate because he may not be the candidate who is most loved by any of those factions. But I think he's made himself the most broadly acceptable to all of them. The problem is, I don't think that's the way that candidates are chosen. You know, I think that what happens in practice is that the factions are trying to feed each other. And that one faction is going to win. And I think it's probably gonna be the maga faction. So that's the problem, I think with the strategy, but luck he came across the grown up and he came across as the most broadly acceptable.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so if this is a final table of a poker tournament, and Trump is going to sit down and debate three of these people chum off, who's going to be left to debate Trump and be the final three or four seats here? Which three? I think it'll be DeSantis. Vivek and it'll be either Tim Scott
SPEAKER_02: or Nikki Haley.
SPEAKER_01: Interesting. freeburg. Who are the final three who are going to debate Trump, you know, in debate number four or five?
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if he's going to show up. I don't know why he would if he's up. I mean, it would be it would just be such a Trump move to just not show up to any of these debates and just like get elected play the game. How incredible debate would that be if it was Trump DeSantis
SPEAKER_03: and Vivek? Fire? My fourth would be Nikki Haley. I think she had
SPEAKER_03: her moments in that debate. I think she had good advice for the Republican Party on the abortion issue. Yeah, she did a really great job. And she pointed out how, you know, much money. I thought that
SPEAKER_01: was a tea party moment for her. That's when I warmed up to Nikki Haley a bunch. And she's like, Listen, we also approved, you know, six, $8 trillion. We got to look at ourselves. And it was like, okay, is it the tea party 2010 here? That was a great moment. Who do you? Who do you have left? freeburg? Everybody else played the game play along. Who will be the final three here to debate Trump if Trump shows up? Play along for the game? I
SPEAKER_00: mean, I'll get mine. Vivek seems to be in a good place. Okay. DeSantis has a lot of money. Yeah, he's probably gonna stick around.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. So Vivek and DeSantis are we all have consensus. Nikki Haley. I don't think he's gonna show up. We got your we got your point. Yeah,
SPEAKER_03: you're critical of the fact that the vague is having a boom or surge based on his oratorical skills, which I think you regard as being a shot. Question, but you're showing no enthusiasm for DeSantis, who actually has the track record of being the most capable executive Oh, no, no, I'm not by the way, I didn't I'm not we're not
SPEAKER_00: talking about who I would vote for President. We even even had that comment. Like we didn't even ask that question once. Okay, so we're asking now, putting aside Trump, who do you
SPEAKER_00: pick? What was really interesting is hearing the governors speak about their skills. I think Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Burgum, DeSantis all had moments where they shine from from punches it from my perspective from a content perspective, which is where I was talking about at the beginning, which people largely ignore, which is that they actually had quite a lot to draw from. And, you know, point to some policy that seemed pretty strong.
SPEAKER_01: Here we go. Final question. Final question. I want you to give me your one and two not Trump. Sachs, we know DeSantis is number one for you. So then who's who's your number two to pair with him? Who would you pair with?
SPEAKER_03: We want to be the candidate to be that the ticket Republican
SPEAKER_01: ticket, you're going to go to DeSantis one, and then who do you put with them as a number two?
SPEAKER_03: Well, for me, to Santa San, I think that the only candidates
SPEAKER_03: who have acceptable answers on what I regard as the number one issue of our time, which is Ukraine, because that could lead to or three, the only candidates have acceptable answers are Trump, the vacant DeSantis, meaning they've all been pretty clear they would de escalate. I think all the other candidates have basically indicated in one way or another, they would actually be vague is your those three candidates are the only ones that are acceptable to me. Okay, so we take Trump off if
SPEAKER_01: Trump doesn't run, which that's my personal belief. But just of the people who are on stage last night, you're going to DeSantis the vague is your ticket. Chamath, who's your ticket? After one debate, not counting Trump, if the Republican ticket who do you think is Republican? Look, I like to buy these deep
SPEAKER_02: out of the money options. I will go out on the limb. I think that the vague has a really good chance of winning this Republican nomination. That's what I saw. I saw like outright
SPEAKER_00: against Trump. Yeah, I
SPEAKER_01: off the table. So just pick, for example, for example, no, no,
SPEAKER_02: no, I really do think he's he can win this thing. And for example, I thought it was very clever when he said that he had a line he said, Donald Trump was the best. Let me be categorically clear Donald Trump was the best president of the 21st century. And I was like, what? And then I thought about it is and I thought, why is he saying it? Does he say it because he believes it? Or does he saying because it's like a tactic? And there's probably bits of both. Yep. Because I do think that there are elements where he fundamentally does believe that Trump has at least shined the path forward. And so I think he does believe it to some degree. But then I thought it's even smarter to have said it. And again, this is where I go back to, I'm not sure that that's oratory skills versus like, understanding, you know, game theory, strategy, and and strategy and being a strategic thinker and trying to win. I thought that that was a very smart thing to have said. And all along that evening, I thought that he did the best job of preserving optionality for the Trump base to say, you know what, Vivek is all of the positive features of Trump without some of the negatives. So let's just clean up the ticket and let's go and I think again, there's a long way. Yeah, of course. I like the call. I like the call. But I would buy
SPEAKER_02: that deep out of the money option. And who's your number
SPEAKER_01: two, then? We're going one to here one to either as to pair with Vivek or your number two choice in terms of know that I if he doesn't figure out a way to slipstream pass Trump, the
SPEAKER_02: Trump will win the nomination. Okay, taking Trump out of the
SPEAKER_01: rest. Who's your number two? Okay, great. Fascinating to see
SPEAKER_03: this happening. I agree with what a lot of what Jamal said. I think the vague is positioning himself to be the backup candidate for the maga wing. Yeah, absolutely. And he's doing it by never attacking Trump and by combating him. By the way, saying that Trump was the best president of the 21st century, there's only been three. It was George W. Bush, Obama, and then Trump. Sorry, Biden. Sorry, Biden's has been for George W. Bush was one of the worst presidents in American history. Yeah. So it's worse. Obama, obviously, a Republican candidate is not going to think highly of Obama or Biden. So it kind of narrows it down, doesn't it? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: The intelligence of actually saying the words. Yes. strategically.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, I agree.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks. What do you think about the vague's unpopular statement? And it may I'd like to hear whether it's unpopular with the base, but it was certainly unpopular in the room last night that the climate change agenda is a hoax, which drew a lot of booze. That was is that like, is that a lightning bolt kind of thing to say? Why would he say that? And what's the strategy? It's like Trump saying he loves coal. He loves coal miners. It's
SPEAKER_01: just to me a little bit like he was trying to see the agenda is
SPEAKER_00: a hoax, meaning like all the ESG stuff is nonsense. But it comes across as him saying, climate change isn't real, and he's got to now deal with the repercussions of climate change
SPEAKER_01: is strategic.
SPEAKER_03: I think it's I don't think you know what he believes JKL but yeah, his follow up comment around that was he said that it
SPEAKER_02: is an economic yoke on our country. Because the combination of subsidies and the lack of expansion of carbon is what's holding back the country economically. So that's I think I remember him time these two things together. So that's probably where the state no intelligent person doesn't
SPEAKER_01: believe that the planet's not heating up. Come on. And that it's not better to go to renewables. That's just how do
SPEAKER_03: you know if you looked at the science JKL? Of course I have.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, it's massive. You're going deep on the science. You know, as deep as a person needs to go freebird. You just read it. You
SPEAKER_03: just read it. Look, it's just something you're supposed to believe in. No, I'm not saying that. I'm just going to say statistics of how the planet has gotten warmer. That's it. I will
SPEAKER_00: say sacks is right. That it has become a thing that it's like we're all supposed to take as given. No one is going to go up and say, here's the science that validates. Here's the data that validates. Here's there's some empirical evidence and then people use counter empirical evidence to try and counter it. And that's what makes it a little bit of a movement now, which is the institutions, the elites, however they're framed
SPEAKER_00: have been wrong so many times on the things that they told us were given that we're supposed to assume that this is a given to F that I'm not going to be told what to believe anymore. And I don't want to be told what to believe anymore is exactly what people let me let me state my position from that song last week. And that's what they heard. You know, in the next. Let me say my position. I totally agree. Yeah. Here's the
SPEAKER_03: thing. After COVID without me even making a comment. 100% we
SPEAKER_00: were told so much bullshit in the name of science during COVID.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they told us the vaccines are safe and effective. I just
SPEAKER_01: want to clarify my position before you respond to it. It's undeniable that temperatures have risen. I think it's a crazy experiment to run to not try to lower it. It's just a crazy experiment. The planet is precious. I don't think we should run it. I am not dogmatic about it. It's not a religious thing. I'm not just an experiment we're running. Jake
SPEAKER_02: all it's called human development and growth. Yes.
SPEAKER_01: And the temperature goes up. So why wouldn't we use renewable nuclear when not pollute because not polluting is is good too. When you have self proclaimed scientific experts, and or 16
SPEAKER_02: year old girls shaming everybody with pretty flimsy data. There was a while where we were everybody just said, they must be right. And COVID exposed the hoax. And so now we're a lot less prone to believe these self proclaimed intellectuals and their jargon, and their nonsense. So ask me how much money have I invested in climate change with all that data? Zero. Ask me how much money I've invested in technologies that will benefit climate change as a byproduct of national security, hundreds of millions of dollars. Yes. And the reason I give you that example is that for me, that framing was just such a turn off because I couldn't buy into it. Yeah, there are
SPEAKER_01: multiple reasons, the more pragmatic, realistic framing,
SPEAKER_02: which allowed us to actually say maybe you're right, but maybe you're wrong. But let's not even debate the issue. Let's just go and make sure we're not dependent on another country and fighting endless wars. That got me off my ass to do stuff. And I think there's a lot of people in America that are in that second category. They don't want absolutely emotionally riddled dogma to drive their life and how they're forced to make decisions. You can come up with three or four really good
SPEAKER_01: reasons to not keep burning fossil fuels. They're dirty. They're pollutants. There are better options that are more sustainable that are more cost effective. It's more cost effective to put solar in than to burn coal or build a new coal plant plants. Those points. No, we're saying is we're automatically gonna
SPEAKER_03: trust. I am not. I'm taking the body of research. I'm not
SPEAKER_01: blindly trusting anybody. I'm taking the body of evidence and saying that entire body of evidence, geopolitical really looked at the evidence. I don't believe on this issue. Okay,
SPEAKER_03: anyway, I haven't gone deep on this issue. That's all I'm saying. If you listen to what I'm saying, if you listen, as
SPEAKER_01: opposed to telling me what I think and listen to what I'm telling you, there are many reasons to pursue sustainable energy, clean energy, and geopolitics is one of them. And you know, polluting the environment is one of them and temperatures rising if that indeed results in damages to the oceans and you know, weather patterns. There are five or six great reasons to stop burning coal and stop burning oil. Look
SPEAKER_02: at these two climate whitewashes we're living in in this moment. People were so convinced they just needed to Royal the country around the hurricane hitting California. Then by the time it landed, it was a storm. It was rain in Los Angeles. I asked people here when I got here, I said, how was hurricane? They're like, it wasn't a hurricane. And in fact, the news were so tilted about it, they had to call it it could have been a hurricane. Yeah, they can wait in store ratings. Second is this thing in Maui, it turns out Michael Schallenberger has done some pretty good work on this is exposing that a lot of the reason these fires may have started was because of this radical climate agenda that caused the utility to not invest in the protective measures they should have around power lines. That is crazy, Jason. Oh, yeah, I'm not defending what happened
SPEAKER_01: in Maui. It's obviously incompetence. We should be bearing we have the same issue in California, which is wind
SPEAKER_02: dogmatic belief. There's a consequence. I'm not a dogmatic believer. No, I'm not saying you are. I'm just trying to make I'm not saying you are I'm trying to make this point. When people dogmatically believe bodies of evidence that they themselves don't interrogate fully, they may it may lead them to conclusions and then actions that you are now seeing have measurable human consequences. If you look at PG&E in California, it's riddled with these issues. Yeah, they shut
SPEAKER_01: our power off because they're afraid that wind is going to blow down power lines and start fires. Yeah, I mean, and we just need to bury them. So. So I think that it would be great to
SPEAKER_02: like not debate the climate issue, put a pin in it, and instead just say, we all want our kids to be able to have clean air around us. You want clean water to drink. And we want to make sure that we have the resources to be productive as human beings without having to send our kids to war, or without putting the country in danger. 100% which is exactly my
SPEAKER_01: point. There are so many reasons to take this seriously and move to renewables and nuclear. All right, listen, this has been an insanely great episode. Hey, let me just get one person's comments. So here's your here's your red meat for sacks here. It
SPEAKER_01: sounds like there was the coup. 60 days later, the guy who was running the coup in Russia had a little accident. So random. Maybe your thoughts. Sachs. You're talking about
SPEAKER_03: bergosian. Yeah, I mean, he had some mechanical difficulties on
SPEAKER_01: his PJ. I don't know what happened. He's sending that citation in for maintenance. What happened? They had a bad engine or something. So random. Poor guy. The latest reporting
SPEAKER_03: from the New York Times this morning is that for gozins playing was not shot shot down, but rather they believe there was an explosive device on it. Oh, so we don't know. You know, we don't know exactly. It was a bird strike something random
SPEAKER_01: like a bird strike. No. Not somebody took him out. Somebody
SPEAKER_03: took him off the board. Really? Oh, must have been. It must have
SPEAKER_01: been Ukraine, right? That's who you're putting it on. It's Ukraine. No, I mean, I think it's probably pretty obvious who
SPEAKER_03: did it, although we won't know for sure. Say the name. I think say that name. Listen, I think that allegedly, allegedly,
SPEAKER_03: that's what you always say. Whenever 100 Biden's accused of doing something allegedly, allegedly, there was a little cocaine and maybe some bribes. I think this resolves the question
SPEAKER_03: of who came out on top during that mutiny. There were a lot of people speculating that somehow for gozine at the upper hand, or he was paid off or that to remember there was a line of
SPEAKER_01: thinking, Oh, this wasn't a coup. If it wasn't a coup, then why did Putin whack him? What? And it was exactly 60 days later? Is that correct? That was the other thing is that can ask a question? How funny is it that
SPEAKER_02: it's like, Putin's like, Hey, per goes and come come and see me. We're good. Nothing to worry about. I'll send a private jet. And then it's like, Listen, where are you going to a box? You can take my PJ and he's like, See, how does this happen? Like, you can't even write this. Freeberg is sending his PJ to take me down to the on. Oh,
SPEAKER_01: thanks for the ride. Freeberg. I told you it's like Michael
SPEAKER_03: Corleone. Apparently, there's a meeting about a month ago. I remember it being reported where progression and the other heads of Wagner came to meet with Putin. And the deal that Putin supposedly offered was that Wagner could stay together, but they had to report to the Russian military. And the Wagner commanders were on board with it, but one person objected and that was precaution. Oh, so it's a little bit like remember that the meeting between Michael Corleone and Mo Green and Vegas? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, Michael's like, think of a price and mowgreens like, you don't buy me out. I buy you. That kind of reaction. Yeah. And the guy had some sort of death wish, I guess. You know what they say? Beware the dog that
SPEAKER_01: doesn't bark. Putin said nothing for the last two months. He was like, Yeah, it's all good. Nothing out of the Putin camp. And then boom. Putin is a murderous lunatic, who must be stopped and contained. Well, I think the opposite of being a
SPEAKER_03: lunatic. I think this is somebody who is very cold and calculating. Okay, yeah, murderous calculated sociopath.
SPEAKER_03: He figured out how to diffuse a mutiny. I don't think it was a full on coup, but a mutiny that would have been very disruptive to his frontline if he had basically tried to violently suppress it. So he cuts a deal where basically he offers banishment to Belarus. Progosion was supposed to go to Belarus. By the way, we don't know exactly why Progosion returned to Moscow or St. Petersburg, he was supposed to be staying in Belarus or Africa. So maybe he violated the terms of his probation. We don't know. There are all these people on social media who are pinning their hopes for regime change and liberal reform within Russia on Progosion, which was always absurd because he was this warlord, whose behavior and conduct was even more erratic and violent than Putin. So he was never going to be a great vessel for liberal reform in Russia. Nonetheless, there are all these people who pin their hopes for regime change in Russia on Progosion. We can see now what a stupid idea that was. The Russian regime, whether you like it or not, is stable is not unstable. Russia is winning the war. And you may hate Putin, but he is still master of Russia. And eventually we're gonna have to deal with him. These fantasies that we're gonna be able to regime change him, I think are absurd. And they've led us to this horrible point. Okay, for the dictator for the Sultan of Science and focused
SPEAKER_01: sass sex with a slick back there. I am Neil Eichberg, come on over, see you next time. Bye bye.
SPEAKER_03: That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge door because they're all just like this like sexual tension that they just need to release. What? You're a bee. We need to get merch.
