Check out what, what time is it over there?

Well, we started at 8am. So now it’s 828. It’s 828. I’m going to

be on the slopes at 11. Yeah. So I’ll be out there skiing. I’m

in Niseko, in Japan, and take a quick flight to Sapporo, Sapporo

and then you drive two hours into the mountains. Yesterday I

cat skied. There’s an abandoned ski mountain.

By the way, in honor of you, I grabbed a Sapporo from the

fridge today.

Oh, very nice. This week’s episode brought to you by.

So they drive the cat ski up, and then you ski down and it’s

all fresh track. So it’s literally an abandoned ski

resort. You know, during the financial crisis here.

I just asked you what time it was. That’s all I asked you.

It’s called small talk. It’s called banter. I thought you

might be interested in your besties life, but apparently

not.

Let’s get to the show. Everybody wants to hear the show. A lot of

news going on. And, you know, in our industry, there’s been a big

discussion about RSUs and stock options, both the cost of these

things. And then there’s another issue of people staying private

for too long. If you remember, for folks listening, Airbnb,

Uber famously took over 10 years to go public. People like Bill

Gurley wrote about this, hey, you should get public. When the

window is open, obviously, the window is closed right now or

largely closed stripe. Now people are speculating they

missed their window, they have a $4 billion tax bill due to cover

expiring employee RSUs. Those are restricted stock units. And

at the same time, Foursquare, a company from the web 2.0 era,

this is, you know, 1015 years ago, when they were very popular

check in software mobile location app, they are going to

let their previous employees stock option grants expire

according to the information. They issued these options in

2016, seven year window before expiration, more than 100 form

employees will be impacted. And some of them are the very early

team members. And this employee stock option problem is becoming

acute because, hey, you people waited to go public.

Basically, what happens is you grant an RSU, which is

effectively W two income when it’s realized with an expiration

date. But that expiration date forces you to be public so that

that RSU can be exchanged for value. And that’s like a 10 year

window. So then these guys have to go in and modify that date,

and push it out by another four or five, six years or whatever.

That is a deemed event by the IRS that then creates withholding

tax issues, right? So you then have to, you then have to

withhold tax on behalf of the employees. And so that

collective number is the 4 billion that stripe is trying to

raise, according to a leaked pitch deck, stripe implied they

needed 2.3 billion in capital by the end of q1 2023. They’re

working with Goldman Sachs to raise a few billion at a $55

billion valuation that’s down 42% from the peak of 95 billion in

2021. One wonders if they had gone public, what their

valuation would be right now, can we just say real quick why

this matters, Jacob? Like, yes. So anyway, why does it matter

to me? Yeah, why does this? Why does this all matter? Like, why

do we care? Thank you. That’s where we’re getting to.

I posted a link. This is a 2013 interview that Zuck did with

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. And if you go all the way back,

the apprehension to go public was one thing that we really

anchor to a lot at Facebook in the early days. And at the time,

I don’t know if you guys remember, but there was these

arcane laws around the number of shareholders that you could have.

And I think the issue specifically was that after 500

shareholders, you have to publicly release your financials.

And so we did all kinds of things to make sure we never hit

the 500 cap. And we tried to push the IPO date as far out as

possible, because we thought that it would keep people more

focused. And then in 2010, or 11, I told this story a couple

times, one of the things that I was advocating for pretty

aggressively was trying to launch a mobile operating system

to compete with iOS and Android. And we had put together all this

work and brought in Intel and AT&T and all these people. And

it came down to the fact that we needed a couple billion dollars

to float this thing. And we didn’t have that money. So the

only solution to that would have been to go public, but it

wasn’t the right moment in time. And Zach was uncomfortable

with it. A year after going public. One of the things that

he said publicly in this tech crunch thing was, wow, I should

have just gone public sooner. It wasn’t nearly the bad thing that

I thought it was going to be. And when you look subsequently

at how much money they’ve spent in AR and VR, spending half a

quarters of that cash could have given them the chance to

disrupt Android and iOS in 2010 and 11, which in hindsight is

obviously a no brainer bet, right? So even though I think we

at Facebook were the ones to really put this in the water

table about not going public, I think a lot of startups should

have gone back to first principles to really question

whether waiting as long as possible actually makes sense.

So I was curious about the stripe situation. So I asked my

team to do a little bit of work on how would you value this

thing if it were going public. And the interesting thing about

stripe is that it operates in a really transparent middleman

business. So what’s interesting about stripe is that so many of

the people in the ecosystem are public. And so what that means

is you can build a pretty accurate mosaic of how well or

not well that business is doing by interpolating all the other

data from all of these other companies that are public and

are forced to report. And so there’s like a couple of really

interesting things that jump off this page. And so the first

thing that we did was we looked at what is the future

profitability look like x of growth. And what’s interesting

is that you look at companies like visa and MasterCard that

are doing quite well and have done really well for a long

time. But you look at this outlier and IDN and IDN is

probably the most obvious competitor to stripe. And the

thing that is demonstrated here is how incredibly profitable

this business is. And how much operating leverage they have,

which means that their opex is relatively constrained. Because

it turns out in the x&y axis here, just so people who are

listening can understand the chart. Sure. So if you take the

market cap on the x axis and divide it by their sales

estimate, you get a multiple of the enterprise value to their

sales. Got it. And if you look at the 2024 estimated EBITDA

margin that they’re forecasting x of their long term sales

Kager, what you start to get a sense of is the operating

leverage that this business has. And so all of this basically

nets out to three interesting takeaways. When stripe got

underwritten at $96 billion. It’s this data point right here

where you know, you see your stripe previous round,

five x enterprise value to divided by 2024 divided over

their long term, their long term EBITDA exactly by their sales

estimate. And then if you look at the $55 billion valuation,

it’s down. So what it looks like it’s happening is

appropriately so people are doing the right thing, which is

they’re rerating the stock right by approximately 5060%. But

what’s interesting is not where they are in terms of where they

used to be. But the interesting thing is where they are relative

to their most obvious competitor agent. So Nick, please bring up

the next one. So this is where things get really interesting

because we looked at what was odd yen. And what was stripes

GMV per employee a couple of years ago before all hell broke

loose in the private funding markets. And what you see is

they were pretty equivalent businesses. And they had roughly

the same amount of employees. But this crazy thing happened,

which is that if you look at the gray bar, this is the number of

employees that stripe has, it went crazy from a little over

2000 to almost 8000. So a four x of employees in

x in 24 months, they had it’s 6000 people just pause for a

second on that 6000 people in 24 months and 700 days or so.

Right? Three people a day. And if you do the same calculation

for our gen, it shows that they a little bit less than grew by

about 75%. And then if you look at the growth of GMV, and you

impute, how productive is each employee? Basically, this is the

story of what’s happened to stripe and Audien, which is that

Audien has found operating leverage, right? So they’ve

found and maintained incredible profitability. And stripe has

added an enormous number of employees. Now, the question is

why? Right? So it turns out that these guys at the top line are

growing roughly the same except Audien actually takes

meaningfully less on a per transaction basis than stripe

does. And the reason is that Audien services these large head

customers, think big, bulky folks that have huge amounts of

transactions. And so as a result, have pricing power. And

stripe has some of those customers as well. In fact, they

just announced that they’re going to process a large portion

of Amazon’s payment volume. But what’s happened at the same time

is that those kinds of deals aren’t necessarily that

profitable. And so you have to hire a lot more people to build

a lot more features so that you can generate revenue from the

long tail of customers, all of these SMBs. And this is the tail

of these two companies, which is that stripe has some head

customers, but many, many, many tail customers. Audien has

mostly head customers, fewer tail customers. And so the

leverage in the business is that Audien has most of these

employees in Europe, where the cost of these folks is much,

much cheaper, and they have less than half the number. And so as

both of these companies continue to grow, you have one that has

maintained, and frankly, grazed their long term profit

projections, because they see it in the business, even at lower

transaction costs, and stripe, which is having a little bit

more trouble. So I thought it was a really interesting

expose. The takeaway for me is that if you were sitting inside

the company, and obviously hindsight is 2020. The most

profitable thing they could have done from an enterprise value

perspective would probably have been to go public in 2018 2019.

Because they could have raised max value at max valuation,

cleaned out all these options issues and have a huge balance

sheet of cash with which to do stuff, whether it’s acquisitions

or other things. Because the thing that I struggle with is,

is there going to be long term profitability in all of these

tail products? Because if you look in the SAS ecosystem, and

sacks, I’ll hand the ball to you. There’s companies building

all this other stuff. And these point products are probably

pretty good to sack.

What do you think about edge end going after the fat part of the

long tail and then stripe going after the long tail having many

more customers?

Well, I think they’re both viable strategies. And I mean,

I’ve actually written about this. I wrote a blog some time

ago called enterprises versus SMBs, who’s the better customer

for B2B SAS companies. And I think the sort of old school

traditional view is that enterprises were always the best

customers because they have the biggest budgets that translates

into the biggest annual contract values, or ACVs. This provides

the highest ROI on sales efforts. So now you can make a

sales driven distribution strategy pencil in the first

place, the prospects are easy to identify, you know, after all,

if you’re going after the fortune 500, you can just make a

list of the 500 companies. So I think the traditional gold

standard was sort of the head, like you’re saying, Jason, the

enterprises, however, I think in recent years, it’s become more

popular to pursue the stripe strategy of the sort of more SMB.

Why is that more popular?

Well, because first of all, stripes are the SMBs are more

early adopters. So when you’re a startup, it’s way easier to

satisfy their standards to satisfy their needs, their needs

are less complicated, you don’t have to have sock to compliance

and everything else. If you’re more risk taking, right? Yeah,

if you solve an immediate pain point for them, they’ll just buy

it. Okay. Whereas I think enterprises are more late

adopters, they tend to be more skeptical of new software

categories. Yeah, I think in addition to that, the SMB sales

cycle is really quick. I mean, I’d say typically one to two

months, you can close a deal, the sale itself is simpler. Like I

said, that’s the product requirements are simpler, and

the low end of the market tends to be the most underserved part.

So it’s great to play where the incumbents are not that’s a

traditional strategy as you go after the low end of the market

that’s been kind of overlooked or ignored. And that’s kind of

what stripe has done here, too, is no one was really serving

these these developers. So I tend to think it’s a good

strategy, too. And the truth is, it’s not one or the other, I

think you just have to pick, you know, which of your battles that

you want to fight. And some starts to go after enterprises,

and some will go after SMBs. And it really goes down, I think,

to founder market fit, I think founders who are better at

sales, probably skew more towards an enterprise got a

strategy, whereas if you’re more of a product founder, you go

after SMBs, brilliant summary over time sacks for a company to

thrive over long periods of time. Do you have to serve as

both? Or do you think you can stay in one of those things and

grow indefinitely? Well, what I’ve seen is that if you start

the low end of the market with SMBs over time, you can move up

market because what happens is that as your product gets more

and more sophisticated, and your company and your ability to

execute and deliver gets more sophisticated, you can start

satisfying the needs of bigger and bigger companies. So you

start SMB, then you go mid market, then you eventually get

to enterprises. I think if you start with enterprises, it’s

very hard to go down market because it’s a lot easier to add

requirements to your product than to actually strip

complexity out of a product that’s actually surprisingly

difficult to do. So I think it’s I think either strategy can

work either you start the low end and move up market. That’s

the classic Clay Christensen innovators delimit type thing,

or you, you just start the top and you stay at the top. It

makes sense. It’s just I mean, adding 10 people a day over two

years, that’s a large number of people to add to a company.

Well, in fairness to stripe, they were very honest about

this. And they were like, we overestimated got confident and

we overhired. And they found that all the coordination costs

the SACS point became too high. That’s exactly what the

collison said in their memo. So I think that they’re trying to

course correct and get back to this. I think the point that I’m

making unemotionally, I don’t own stripe nor adjunct, I don’t

have a horse in this race is more that in this market,

specifically in these middlemen, highly transparent middlemen

markets, it’s very difficult to hide the cheese, meaning the

ability to get to an extremely precise valuation model is

pretty easy. You know, this was half a day’s work that we did.

And the point is, all this data is out there. And so it means

that if you’re going to go public as a company like this,

you have to be quite thoughtful about how outside and folks will

value you because the terminal buyer is very, very

sophisticated and pretty smart about how to think about spaces

like this.

Freeberg, when you look at this, it kind of dovetails with the

get fit, Brad Gerstner, you on Twitter doing more with less

employees. Zuckerberg, again, says he is getting rid of

managers, he’s asking managers to saxes discussion about, you

know, the layers of management that got added and added, where

high performers would be would have five people put under them

10 people put under them. Is it going to be? Are you impressed

with how quickly the industry is responding to this new

environment? Or are they not responding fast enough? In terms

of headcount revenue, because now we’re looking at revenue

per employee, this is a never looked at that. It’s been a

decade since we looked at that.

This is a little bit of a different situation where it’s

about the scalability of a business. Like when I look at

like the value that a business has created, you start first

with like, can you make a product? Can you sell the

product? Do people want to buy the product? And then you know,

can you make money selling it? And then there’s this metric

that a lot of people use, which is LTV to CAC, which is the

lifetime value of acquiring a new customer divided by the cost to

acquire that customer. But I think you can generalize that

ratio to talk about business performance more broadly, which

is, you know, capital deployed, which is typically what CAC is

used in terms of growth on the denominator, and then capital

returned over time, which can be the numerator. And so you can

kind of think about that LTV to CAC ratio, being something more

broadly defined as something like ROIC, or what have you, the

question for the scalability of any business is, does that ratio

whether it’s LTV to CAC or ROIC return on invested capital? Does

it get bigger or smaller? Does it increase or decrease? Does

that ratio increase or decrease as you get bigger as you spend

more money as you deploy more money? If it’s getting smaller,

then mathematically, you can resolve pretty quickly to the

asymptotic valuation that that business will achieve or the

asymptotic revenue that that business will achieve. And

that’s a very scary kind of circumstance when a business

that’s tracking that metric starts to see that metric

shrink. If that metric is growing, then you have an, you

know, a hyperbolic kind of moment and you can build

platforms and add products and invest very heavily and take

lots of risk and take lots of bets. When it’s going the wrong

way. You have two options. Number one is you have to make a

change or a pivot in the business to get it to go the

other way. Or number two is you have to take advantage of that

moment before the market finds out about that moment. Because

as soon as the market realizes that that ratio is going the

wrong way, your valuation multiple what you’re worth as a

multiple of revenue or profit shrinks dramatically, because

then the market can also see that asymptote and outcome. So I

think it’s very often the case that one should, you know, as a

board member as an investor, urge entrepreneurs, CEOs,

founders, managers to think really clearly about that

metric, what’s the right way to define the denominator and define

the numerator in our business, and define that ratio over time.

And as soon as it starts tracking the wrong way, you have

a moment, you can either fix it, or you got to go sell the

business or go public and raise capital before the market

catches on and your valuation shrinks. So I think what

Yeah, so when I see what you’re showing in this data, and

talking about this, the shrinking valuation issue for

Stripe, it really, I think highlights this important point,

this broad point, which is did they miss the window? Did they

miss the moment where suddenly, you know, the shrinkage is

causing, you know, an asymptotic outcome for this business that

it makes investors a little bit like, well, I’m not as excited

about that, because it’s not there’s no, there’s no longer as

much upside. And it might be time to kind of devalue the

company. And did they miss the moment to go public, raise a

bunch of capital, you know, to go and try new things and

hopefully pivot into a way. So I don’t know enough about the

business. But that’s my broad kind of assessment of this, this

interesting thing about that space. We talked to one of our

friends at our poker game, who runs a large consumer facing

business. And I don’t know if you were there for that

conversation off revert, but I was, you were there. Yeah. And

one of the interesting things he said is, we are at a level of

scale where we just bid these guys against each other. And

these things tend to now be loss leaders for them. Which is to

say effectively, that cost structure becomes really

important. So your CAC becomes very important, because your

LTVs are capped, right? And the LTVs are capped, because these

companies have enough negotiating leverage to say,

well, if you want my business, here’s the cost of doing this

business, which makes a ton of sense if you’re any large

purveyor of services that require payment processing

infrastructure. So one of the interesting dynamics, I think

we’re learning in this market is how it’s really not a market,

right, there are segments, and there’s embedded profitability

in each segment. So to your point, Friedberg, this is the

sum of at least three or four different LTV to CAC ratios,

right? The tail looks very different, which is why you have

to build a ton of features. And the head just wants pure play.

And it’s all about cost first. Because all of these guys want

want to pick up every nickel and dime that’s on the floor,

because for them, on billions of transactions is meaningful to

them. It’s an it’s an it’s an EPS miss or, or beat, right for

them, which has huge implications to their stock. This

is a market that I think is going to be really fascinating

to uncover and peel back the layers of over the next by the

way, we haven’t even talked about what Stripe does as a

business. I know we have a diverse audience that doesn’t

all come from tech. Yeah. So Stripe is will process your

transactions, but they were the first people to make it as

simple as putting a snippet of code into your app. To process

a payment, they can be with Visa, MasterCard and those other

places, they charge you a percentage of each transaction.

So to Tramont’s point, these larger answer devs, developers,

510 years ago love this because they can instantly get payments,

right. It’s abstracted the whole thing just the same way

cloud computing does write storage at s3, etc. So you can

kind of think about it that way. But a large whale in the system

chamath, which you said, add yen has a lot of whales, not a lot

of long tail stripe, because it’s developer friendly. And a

snippet of code, they have this huge long tail, anybody can do

stripe. In fact, people who are using things like substack or

Patreon, I believe, they can just drop in their stripe

account. So people now, businesses have one have a stripe

account, they just drop it in there. So for me, that seems

like a huge potential in the future, because some of those

could become whales in the system.

And the long tail gives stripe a lot of pricing power, because

there’s there’s no way for any one of those entities to have

enough leverage to tell stripe, hey, I don’t want to pay 2.9%

plus 20 or 30 cents a transaction, right? Whereas if

you go to the head, I think adyen is charging like 1.3 or 4%.

So yeah, it’s a wholly different market. And the pricing as a

result is totally different.

Yeah. It’s interesting to me, sacks that we now are getting

down to, you know, brass tacks here, we’re analyzing these

money printing businesses and saying, what is the ultimate

value of this? 1020 years from now, Chamath and I got a front

row seat to that, because there’s a natural audience to

every single service. For AOL, it was 30 million paid subs a

month. At I think the peak was 30 bucks a month people were

paying Chamath. So at the time for 99. Yeah. So you know, you

start looking at those numbers, you know, a billion dollars a

month almost in just and it was a fixed cost business. But then

boom, he just hit a ceiling and competition emerged emerged in

the in the case of broadband. And then that business just

slowly deprecated over time. So sacks, what does this moment tell

you for founders, a lot of the listeners here and capital

allocators, in terms of assessing businesses for the

last and this will pivot into our next story. The last couple

of years, you know, if you were a first time fund manager, you

were investing in 19 2019 to 2021. high valuations, those,

those funds, are they ever going to be able to grow a profit? And

then people were investing in those based on momentum, logo

chasing. This is now back to, you know, sharpening your

pencils, Bill Gurley style investing. Yeah,

yeah. I mean, we’ve talked about it before. There’s nothing new

here. When you’re in a boom, the only three things that matter

are growth, growth and growth. And when you’re in a downturn,

the three things that matter are growth, burn and margins. It’s

not that growth stops mattering. It’s just that people also care

about burn and margins. And, you know, the companies that fare

the worst are the ones that have inefficient growth, that

basically have burned a lot of money to grow. They have, you

know, lower negative gross margins, they are burning way

too much money, the burn multiple doesn’t make sense,

basically, the ratio of money burnt to net new ARR that

they’re adding, those companies get called out, when all of a

sudden, you have regime change, like we’re seeing now

CAC is one of the early signs of this, Chamath, you and I saw

that member AOL was sending DVDs everywhere, and CAC became two

or $300 for every AOL subscriber. And then they were

playing this funny accounting game. I don’t remember this,

Chamath, where they were saying, Hey, the LTV is like five years

for an AOL, they were looking back at that number, not forward

with broadband coming. And so like, we can totally spend $300

on TV ads to get a dial up customer at 24 a month. And boy

did that whips on them. So listening to everybody talk

here, I’m just like, wow, keep your eye on the CAC folks, the

customer acquisition cost, how much you get, you spend to get a

new AOL, Netflix, or SAS product, or a Stripe customer is

critically important.

We look really closely at CAC payback, you know, how many

months does it take to, to pay back the cost of acquiring a

customer? We don’t look at that exclusively, though, because,

you know, what expenses go into CAC is highly dependent on your

accounting

unpack that for a second, because there’s the money you

spend on a Facebook ad, or a LinkedIn ad, or any other great

platform for driving, you know, customers to sign up for it.

Yes, you spend money on an ad, or you spend money on a

salesperson, obviously, that goes into CAC. But then what

about sales operation headcount? Does that go in? Is that offset

account? Or is that sales headcount? Is that customer

acquisition or something else? So there’s a lot of like subtle

accounting decisions that can have a big impact on with

numbers that number? Well, this is why this is why I’ve always

recommended just looking at burn multiple. What I really want to

know is, is how much money is this startup burning in relation

to how much revenue is adding? Just like the ratio of those two

things, because there’s no one

burned 100. Yeah. So yeah, this month, we spent $300,000. And we

burned $100,000. And then we added $100,000 in new customers

ARR. So that’s one x, so that you have on your chart here burn

multiple of one to 1.5, or under one is amazing or great. But if

you burn 200,000, and 100,000,

I warn founders going into this year, do not have a burn

multiple greater than two, because there’s just so many

headwinds right now, that what happens is, if you end up

missing your revenue forecast, your burn multiple is going to

look terrible, we can shoot up to 345 and up. So it’s better to

have some cushion by going into the year, being super efficient

on the converse side, Friedberg, if your lifetime value of a

customer is incorrect, which we’re seeing now with people

canceling SAS products, or reducing the number of seats, or

in cloud computing, people are now saying, Hey, maybe I should

take myself out of the cloud and host my own servers or some of

my own servers and reducing their cloud bill. Cloud growth

is slowing at Azure, Azure, across the board. Amazon Web

Services, etc. The it’s still growing, but it’s slowing the

growth. So that LTV, if you get that wrong, that can whipsaw you

as well. Yeah,

yeah, I mean, LTV, which is like, what do you make over time

from a customer or however you want to assess it? A market

deployment? It should be on kind of net cash, meaning like how

much profit do I pull back into my bank accounts at the end of

the day, after paying third parties and internal people, and

where a lot of people, I think in models I’ve seen on, you

know, what’s the lifetime value of a customer, they kind of take

either revenue, or just the simplified gross profit number.

But the reality is, if you’re scaling the number of engineers

you need, because you have many more customers, and you got

customer service calls, and you know, you’ve got to do custom

deployments with your customers, all of that kind of

adds up to additional cost. And some of these businesses, you see

that the SAS companies, for example, that all have gotten

their multiples hammered, it’s because the kind of microscope

has come out at this point, to some degree, set aside general

macroeconomic factors that are driving some of the multiple

compression. But as the microscope has come out, it

turns out that the efficiency of the business is not what everyone

hoped and dreamed a SAS business might be, that the efficiency of

the business maybe looks a little bit more like either a

services business, or there’s a big kind of scaling hardware

component, that the margin that you actually make for every

dollar of revenue generate, fundamentally is smaller than,

you know, what you think it is, you have to add people to

support and ops and new servers and all the stuff you’re

highlighting. And a lot of that’s excluded. And then it

doesn’t take, you don’t realize all that, when you’re small, or

when you’re medium and growing, you realize that when you’re

bigger, when you’re bigger, you’re like, Oh, wow, how do we

get these costs out? Well, if we cut these costs, customer

quality would decline, customers would churn, all this bad stuff

would happen. So yeah, that LTV number is generally not right.

And that’s why I say, it’s much more about kind of a true ROAC

calculation, which is how much capital am I deploying. And it’s

not just being deployed in marketing dollars, it’s being

deployed in other ways. And then how much capital am I making

back net profit over time. And I think that’s the right way to

always analyze a business generally, but like,

particularly in businesses where it’s easy to obfuscate either of

those numbers, and they could seem like it’s an extraordinary

enough business, you can get hurt when you get bigger, or

when you’re scaling. And in a market like this, where you’re

trying to go public, it’s like, Whoa, that really hurt, you

know, so I think that’s a lot of what we’re seeing.

Let’s talk about the other side of the table, Chamath, we’ve

been living through a zero interest rate hallucination.

Basically, people were growth, growth, growth, logo, logo,

logo, whatever. When they’re making these bets, capital

allocators, now we’re back to brass tacks. Okay, what’s the

margin? What’s the lifetime value? And is this actually

real? Is there a real business here? Or is this just a grand

hallucination? That hallucination exists not only on the founder

side, but on the capital allocator side. This week, we

had a interesting semi viral thread on Twitter, somebody

named Tyler tringas. He’s an early stage investor, don’t

know who that is. But he did a thread predicting a 16 z just to

pick out one firm was a zero interest rate phenomenon, and an

incredible machine to accumulate a UM assets under management.

And so what were your thoughts just writ large on the capital

allocator side of this grand hallucination of zero interest

rates?

I mean, I think it’s a little unfair. I think this is written

more just to try to generate views and clicks, because, okay,

you have to see the underlying return data to really have a

sense of knowing is it? I think it’s fair to say a couple of

things that there was probably two and a half or three years of

capital raised in the industry. That’s going to get really put

under pressure. And the reason is that there is not a lot of

time diversity in that money, meaning people got it, and they

put it into the ground right away. And one of the principles

of having a more predictable return set of returns over time

is that you leverage time, right? So if you had $100, and

you wanted to have a diversified stream of returns, you’re much

better off spending $1 a month for 100 months, versus $10 a

month for 10 months. So just that thing will cause a lot of

impact and headwinds for a lot of the capital in 2021 and 2022.

Then the other thing you have to keep in mind is that over many

cycles, where we’ve had high rates and low rates and medium

rates, our industry typically returns $1 60 for every dollar

it raises. And that’s over many cycles. And so if you believe

that we’re going to revert to the mean, out of the trillion

dollars we’ve raised, maybe we’ll return 1.6 trillion. Now

that sounds good, except the problem is that 1.6 trillion is

marked at five and a half trillion. So you’re gonna have

to give back there’s a lot of pain, you’re gonna have to give

back a lot of paper profits in order to get back to that 1.6

and be okay with it. And the question is, what has happened

in decision making in the meantime, meaning how many

people did you hire? How many deals did you do that you

regret? And then how does it change your psychology and how

you treat the next investment that comes over the desk? Can

you separate yourself from these bad losses, and not be on tilt

and make a good decision?

So you had a terrible two day session, like Phil Helmuth did

last week losing $350,000. Can you play the next week, and not

be on tilt and start to build back your stack and make 30,000

a night for 10 nights or 10 of the next 20 set 15 sessions or

whatever it is? It’s actually had a rebuttal or something you

wanted to add to this?

No, not really a rebuttal. I mean, look, I think if you’re

going to be intellectually honest about it, I think that

2021 is going to be is going to likely be not a great vintage

for VC. Why? Because the valuations were just Yeah, the

valuations were just really high. They’ve come down by what

at least 50% on average, maybe more, more, maybe 50% now, but

you still have more medicine to take. I think when you look at

some of these companies are growing into their valuation.

Look, I think for any given set of companies for any portfolio,

the most important thing is what’s in the portfolio. So if

in 2021, you had the founding of the next Google or whatever,

that effect is going to swamp the effect of price levels in

that year because of the power law. Again, the number one most

important thing is just what’s in that portfolio, what’s in

that basket. The second most important thing is the entry

prices. And obviously, if the entry prices are twice as high

in a given year than they are, and every other year and twice

as high as what the exit multiples are going to be in 10

years, when that portfolio becomes liquid, that’s going to

hurt the returns, but we won’t know which of these effects

predominates until five years from now, we see, you know,

I mean, when I saw that tweet thread, I thought, maybe this is

an issue for some venture firms, but we’re not going to see even

the inklings of it for another five or seven years takes a

while. That’s a problem that may manifest itself in year 10. And

between now and then any firm that it has a good track record

of returning capital, or frankly, has a good brand and

good marks will still raise an inordinate amount of money

because this is an asset class that I still think on the

margins is a more of a must have asset allocation than a on the

margins. I just rather ignore it because you know, it is the

future of how GDP will get created. And so everybody kind

of has to pay attention.

Imagine if in 2021, the you know, the next great mega

outcomes in AI were created, right, because those founders

were just slightly ahead of the curve, you know, they were like

a couple years out of the curve. If those create, you know, the

next, whatever trillion dollar companies, Google, Apple, then

the fact that price levels were to x, what they should have

been won’t matter. What will really matter is the

distribution, there’ll be a bunch of bad portfolios, there’ll

be some really incredible ones. And that’s the way it always is

with venture.

The thing to keep in mind is in 21 and 22 rates were still

effectively too low. And I think we did this analysis, Nick, you

can throw up that thing, but it’s not correlated with big

outcomes, those vintage years. 2023 is the is the first vintage

year where we’re actually starting to see high enough

rates that have historically generated that kind of return.

And so I do agree with you, David, I just think it’s shifted

out by a couple years 2324 25. Those can be some real power law

years, I think, because we’re going to have just based on what

the Fed is saying, five and a half percent interest rates for

the foreseeable future, which is, it’s a huge, it’s a huge

number of the risk. That’s a huge

I’ll tell you what that is. You know what it is, though, Chamath,

I think to build on your point, and freeberg, I’ll bring you in

on after this, it creates an environment in which discipline

on all sides of the table boards, management teams,

investors, rank and file, everybody has to be focused,

everybody has to have sharpened swords. And that little bit of

headwind is and the the ability to raise capital being harder is

building more reserve and more resilience and grit in this set

of founders. It’s kind of like parenting, in a way like if you

are too permissive, you give too many options. Kids aren’t

disciplined. And now this group of entrepreneurs I’m seeing who

haven’t given up, my Lord, are they becoming animals in terms

of like pure samurai, in terms of how they’re running these

businesses, anything that’s not efficient projects that were the

third or fourth most important project, cut, cut, cut. Now it’s

taking them 18 months, freeberg to maybe get discipline. But

maybe you could speak to the next three years and the

opportunity for investing in this cohort, because man, that

last cohort is going to be really, really challenged. And

they’ll probably do 6% returns, just like your money market

account can do right now five or six or what bonds can do. But

this next group, man, we’re seeing dogged entrepreneurs who

are focused on reality. And there is no hallucination now

that this is going to be easy. There is no grand delusion here.

What are you seeing in the market?

If the market average return in venture in early stage

investing is going to be 6%. Remember, it’s it’s not evenly

distributed. So you know, 80% of funds could end up having net

negative real returns, and 20% make money and then those

there’ll be a very few that will make real money. And you know,

that’s the nature of having, you know, a very kind of low average

return on the industry is there may be a lot of wipeouts on the

investor class. Folks that have only had one or two funds and

then just got blown up in the cycle. I think that there’s two

groups of companies out there. One is companies that obviously

have been funded and are doing stuff and are active businesses.

And they’ve raised money in the past. And that’s where there’s

going to be really ugly times. I’ve mentioned this in the past,

but I do think that there’s a significant number of these

companies that if they were to be truly valued on first

principles in private markets today, they’ll get valued as at

a value that’s less than their preferred equity, which means

that there’s a difficult restructuring needed in the

company. And not everyone’s going to be willing to embrace

that. So that’s what’s going to trigger a lot of the wipeouts in

the market. It’s not like the businesses are valueless. It’s

that the capital structure makes it difficult to refund them to

fund them and continue their operations. Now for all the new

businesses, as you highlight, man, there’s so much

extraordinary leverage out there. You know, left and right. I

think we talked about this maybe a year ago, that there was a big

bubble coming in AI. But I mean, left and right in nearly every

market every segment, you won’t see a pitch deck that doesn’t

have those two letters in it. Right? I mean, I’m sure you guys

find it. It does feel it is. It is hard, not to feel like you’re

a little bit of a lemming if you buy into the AI stuff. But I

will say that the use cases we’re seeing are really

incredible. Totally. I didn’t feel this way with the last

couple of waves, like the whole web three thing never totally

made sense. And crypto always felt a little bit speculative,

like kind of unsure. But the AI thing seems like it’s going to

deliver real value. And I’m seeing like already three major

enterprise use cases. Number one is just auto summaries, like

being able to summarize very quickly 1000 articles or a

meeting, you know, spitting out a like a summary of what just

happened in a meeting. And it could break it down between a

recap and action items. It just does all the work for you.

Second thing is like in app customer service, kind of like a

co pilot, but there’s no reason to contact customer support

anymore. Because you can just ask the AI inside the app. And

like, why would you get it right? And they’ll be faster,

right? That’s something where it’s so narrow sacks. Yeah,

they’ll get it right. It’s like a power user who’s sitting next

to you. It’s your co pilot and is making you much more

effective in the app. And then the third thing we’re already

seeing is auto complete for everything. I mean, it is like

bonkers. How you know how you get like little type of

suggestions in email. Yeah, it’s like two or three words. The AI

is gonna be able to do type ahead for any content type

paragraphs to do lists tables. It’s so it’s bonkers. You see

it in Google, you see it in Google Sheets. Now, like if you

type, you know, equal sum, it’s like, oh, here’s what the seven

most likely things to happen next are, in which case, it’s

kind of like you use the chess.com app. I don’t know if

you’ve used it with like the heads up display, where it’s

showing you the different moves. And this is a book move versus

this is not a book. Let me make a prediction all of the things

that you guys said, I think are incredible consumer surplus

business opportunities, which means that the ultimate winner

is us. And we’re going to become, as you said, for the

visa consumer, another consumer, incredibly, incredibly

productive, and more leveraged in how we spend our time, which

will allow us to do all kinds of other interesting things with

all the time that we save. That I think is almost now a

certainty. The problem with consumer surplus businesses is

oftentimes, there is no money made in the funding of them. And

really, where the money is made is in enabling it. So for

example, so far, what I would say is, there’s very little

money that has been made in AI. There’s been an enormous amount

of money that’s been made by Nvidia. And the reason is

because they are the pick and shovel provider and into the

industry. And so as that’s an example, AMD, I think can also

benefit. So the silicon players seem pretty obvious here. Maybe

some of the cloud players, the problem is the cloud players are

trapped inside of other big companies with many other

business models. But I just want to put out there that I think

David, you’re right that the consumer 100% wins. But

economically, it’s not clear to me that there is a winner that

is venture fundable. Well, hold on a second. Yeah, the Levi

Strauss is of the world right in the gold rush. The people that

made the picks and shovels in the jeans are sure to make

money. Yeah. And the people that pan for gold is much more

speculative and harder to see right now.

Yeah. So well, I think, I think you have a point that so I

mentioned three use cases, I think are killer use cases

already seen demos of today. And when you look at them, you’re

like, okay, this has real applicability. I mean, the AI is

going to be, it’s going to powerfully change our work

lives. I’m just focused on enterprise. So now I don’t know

who benefits economically from that, that functionality that I

mentioned, I think is likely to be pretty commoditized pretty

soon. But it’s going to be incorporated into lots of

different apps in ways that are hard to predict right now. I

think that this AI revolution is going to do for SAS what mobile

did for, you know, a lot of the web 1.0 companies, where, like,

for a lot of these web one companies, they were either

disrupted by mobile, or they’re turbocharged by mobile. So you

think about Facebook, it successfully made the

transition, and mobile made his business so much better, because

people are just using it a lot more on their mobile devices.

There were a lot of other businesses that just kind of

fell by the wayside, because they just couldn’t make the

adaptation from desktop to mobile computing. I think AI is

going to be like that for SAS, where there’s going to be a lot

of SAS products are just 100% right. Yeah, you’re 100%. If you

can incorporate the AI into your SAS product, put in a co pilot,

put in auto complete and all sorts of other forms of value

that we’re just scratching the surface of, you’re going to be

able to deliver so much more business value. But if you’re

not able to do that, and somebody else can, then you’re

gonna get disrupted.

Look at some of these enterprise spaces, like, take something

like APM, right, like application performance

management, that’s an entire ecosystem of enterprise

companies, it’s probably 10 15 $20 billion of collective

market cap. And I’m just gonna say something not to not defend

anybody, but like that can mostly be automated by AI. Those

are simple heuristics that can be embedded in a way that’s

completely novel, where this code library just gets dropped

in, and all of this stuff happens relatively auto

magically now. So there are all kinds of other sectors, to your

point that get crushed, then the question is, who provides that

layer now for free in their existing SAS toolkit, or their

product that now all of a sudden, captures more value as a

result, and they can sell it for pennies, because it’s

incremental to them in terms of their margin in revenue.

I think you’re right, hardware wins. I think cloud wins big.

Because if you keep adding to these, you know, models, and

once 10 20% better, people are going to be willing to pay for

that. But then when you think about consumers, whether they’re

enterprise or actual consumers, I believe tomorrow, this stuff

is going to provide so much value, that people are going to

take their wallets out and be more than willing to spend for

it. It’s more valuable than Netflix. I disagree. Okay, I’m

gonna take that side. But imagine you take your videos of

you learning to ski, and you put it into an AI coach, and it’s

like, here’s how to, and it just draws on it, here’s how to

be a better skier, this is going to blow people’s minds. And

you’ll be more than willing to spend 25 bucks a month. I

disagree with that. And the reason is, because we’ve spent

now two decades, and that’s a lot of muscle memory to unwind

of people that have been consistently given more for

less. And I think that we shouldn’t underestimate the

expectations we’ve all collectively created by

building software tools that have that inherent deflationary

aspect to them. And so I just think that it’s going to, it’s a

very high, high bar, I still think there are subscription

services to be built. I don’t disagree with you there, Jason,

I just think that in general, though, the de facto business

model that we’ve created in tech is more for less. And we’ve used

technology to give us operating leverage to create margin

structures that other companies couldn’t copy. And I still

don’t. And I think that AI accelerates that not changes it.

I think it’s going to be the opposite. If you look at

Netflix, if you look at Disney, they’ve been raising prices,

providing more value, I think that this is going to provide so

much value, that the incremental 10 bucks a month, five bucks a

month per employee is going to pay off so much that this could

be a slack, or like some presentation software, there are

a lot of people who are making PowerPoint, AI PowerPoints, where

it makes you a new deck, or a figma with AI, these things are

going to be so powerful, people are like, it’s totally worth an

extra 100 bucks a month, because I can get rid of another

employee, this one employee can now do the work of three. Fuck

it, man, I’ll give you $1,000. A really good

a model. If you just added the LTV of that software company is

going to make more money. I’m just saying it’s deflationary.

That’s deflationary. Okay, it’s deflationary on the entire

economy. But that software company that figures out how you

can fire two accountants and keep one and make them as good

as, you know, three. Yeah, you’re able to charge software,

right? You’re selling consumer surplus. Okay, I think we’re in

agreement. Freeberg sold him a silence. You want to chime in on

this? You still with us? Southern silence. Technology

drives prices down.

Well, technology is about doing more with less, right? It’s

about doing more with less. And the AI helps you do so much more

with the same amount of time, or less time.

I think your whole point about Disney and Netflix, etc, is

because they aren’t, you know, innovating on either sides. And

so in order to drive earnings growth, they’re having to raise

prices. But that doesn’t speak to the benefit of technology.

They’re innovating massively, they’re adding massive features

to their products and massive new shows. I mean, I think

there’s pricing power in this AI thing. That’s just my

belief. I could be

thought about leverage. Yeah. I mean, like, I think I think your

point like, so my general rule of thumb, thumb on technology is

the technology creator, the technology company should

generally be capturing about one third of the value that they

deliver to the customer.

unpack that. Why? What do you come up with? And so

I mean, it just kind of where I’m giving example. Yeah. Yeah.

So like, let’s say that you, as a food delivery company, you

have to pay a human 10 bucks to deliver food from you. Now,

let’s say I run a robot, my amortized cost of running that

robot is two bucks. So it’s eight bucks cheaper, or call it

$1. So it’s $9 cheaper, I should charge you four bucks. You know,

because four bucks is super competitive with the existing

market. And it’ll keep me competitive against the other

automation companies that are going to start to emerge. It’s

just kind of how market dynamics end up working out. If you

charge too much, you’re going to invite people to come in and

compete with you. If your commodity technology

commoditizes, remember all technology commoditizes over

time. And if you don’t charge enough, you’re not going to make

enough money to be able to reinvest in scaling your

business and doing more kind of interesting things as a

platform. So you know, generally AI provides more leverage to

sexist point, if I can build an application, I don’t know if you

guys have seen these incredible UI apps that are built in AI

now, where I can say, with a prompt, hey, we talked about it

two weeks ago, yeah, right, make me a dog walking app interface,

and it builds like the three steps of the dog walking app,

and gives you a bunch of options, and you can pick the

one you want, I would typically have to pay a design firm $50,000

to do that work for me. So if it’d be AI is doing it

automatically, you know, I should be paying, let’s say

$15,000 for that product for that capability, the margin on

that is 100%. Try 50 margins, right, whatever it is very low.

And the margin on that’s 100%. Whereas the margin on paying

people to do design work as a design firm is very, you know,

not not a great margin, you’re having to pay

you know why we’re having, we’re working it out in our heads

right now, one group of us is talking about comparing AI

software and AI services to the existing software stack. And on

the other side of the discussion, we’re comparing it

to the humans who are currently doing that work. Imagine the 6%

that two brokers get, you know, doing the sale of a million

dollar home in that 60,000. And AI could negotiate that and find

you a better home and sell your home for the optimal price. For

less than that 60,000, what would you be willing to pay for

that? Right? And the same thing with the designer of the logo?

I don’t think that’s how it’s going to play out exactly jk

out because to completely eliminate a job function, you

have to do you know, 100% of it. And you have to, you know, 100%

of the job function, as but as well as are better than the

human. Whereas, I think as opposed to a model where you

still have the human in the loop, but they’re much more

productive, because they’re working with an AI, they’re

augmented, they’re the Iron Man, like model. So I think that’s

more effective. Yeah. So I think if there’s a job reduction, it

would be more the case where they’ve got a team of five

accountants, and they go to two or three, because now they’re

just much more productive. I don’t think they go to zero.

That’s my sense. Anyway,

I look at outsourcing as a possible corollary to this.

Remember, when you move the accountants to Manila, where

their knowledge workers there and it knocked out half the

price, two thirds of the price, whatever it was, this just feels

like that, on steroids to me,

if you have a business model, like, you know, Infosys, or

Tata, or one of these things that’s levered to utilization

rate, this is the most obvious way to basically add many,

potentially, percentage points, if not 10s of percentage points

of utilization to your business, that’s all money, free

money for you, right? Because now you’ll have fewer people,

they’ll be more utilized, and they’ll have more leverage

because they’ll be using a bot or some AI agent to help them

write code, write unit tests, all that typical stuff that

right now you outsource. And even if you pay a marginal cost,

you add the labor arbitrage to technology arbitrage. Now, all

of a sudden, these businesses look really, really interesting.

Yeah. I think customer support definitely gets

revolutionized, right? Because the initial no brainer, you

know, the first line of defense is going to be the AI using, you

know, text to voice, and it can choose what language it wants to

output to what accent. So you’ll never know that you’re you’ll

think you’re talking to someone locally.

Literally, you’ll be in 50 languages with the right answer.

And you don’t need to build up that entire group. I mean, this

I think we’re underestimating in some ways.

Yeah, but it’s gonna happen here. But my point is, I think

that a lot of that customer support inquiries just go away

because the help the assistant gets built into the tool

directly. So you never get to go. Yeah, like, why do you, you

know, if you can just ask it,

people do that right now on YouTube, if you just type the

question into YouTube, and you find the video that takes five

minutes, but you’re saying this gonna take 15 seconds, X,

because it’s gonna be right there.

I think what Zack said before is hugely important. When you think

about how AI touches non technology businesses, what he

said is the boundary condition, which I think is right, I think

he nailed this, which is the boundary condition for AI to

replace a human is where the threshold error rate of that AI

is the same or less than the human, right? If you look at

very complicated markets, where does regulatory capture rear its

ugly head, it’s in allowing humans to be error prone, and

you can’t do anything about it. Take healthcare. If you go into

a hospital, there’s a certain error rate in every surgery,

right? There’s a certain error rate in the things that happen.

But there’s probably a whole bunch of ways in which that

entire infrastructure can be made much, much better with AI,

right, a robot that does laser guided precision surgery,

characterizing tumors 100 with 100% accuracy. So you always get

100% of the cancer out when you go and get surgeries done. All

these things are possible now. And all of a sudden, you take

these error rates that can be high as as high as 20 or 30%. So

for example, breast cancer surgeries, the dirty secret of

our healthcare industry is that has a 30% error rate, you know,

that can and should go to zero. And now all of a sudden, so

these highly regulated markets, I think, can become much, much

more efficient and, and leveraged and at pass that

consumer surplus on to people. In that case, it’s healthfulness,

which I think is a big deal. I didn’t mind. So interesting. I

do have a scan. Yeah, incredible. I mean, I got all

the videos, I got all the loops. I went to the one down on El

Camino Real. It was like going to a spa in and out, no big

deal. But I got the results. And it’s like, Oh, here, here’s a

tiny of little things that are not worth cutting your body

open to look at. But just so you know, your knee, your shoulder,

your kidney, there’s a little polyp here, there’s a little

polyp here, whatever, there’s a little growth here. But let’s

see in two or three years, just monitor it. And I’m like, Oh my

god, I’m so grateful. This thing gets down to like 500 bucks,

which it obviously will or 1000 bucks, and everybody’s doing it

and that all that data is in there. And then the AI is

looking at it, like you’re saying, I mean, the early

detection, was he able to tell the doctor how full of shit

you’re? No, you know, you’re not supposed to eat for four hours.

So they, they didn’t get an accurate reading on.

There’s your cold oven, everybody.

Yeah, I, here’s a really important clip for founders.

Play the Steve Jobs clip.

This is super important when looking at web three versus AI

to sax’s point, you’ve got to start with the customer

experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start

with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to

try to sell it. And I’ve made this mistake probably more than

anybody else in this room. And I’ve got the scar tissue to

prove it. And I know that it’s the case. And as we have tried

to come up with a strategy, and a vision for Apple, it started

with what incredible benefits can we give to the customer?

Where can we take the customer? Not, not starting with, let’s

sit down with the engineers and, and figure out what awesome

technology we have, and then how are we going to market that? And

I think that’s the right path to take.

Can I ask you guys a question? I sometimes I go down these rabbit

holes, I’ll watch hours and hours of Steve Jobs clips. What

do you think makes him so calm? Doesn’t he just strike you as

incredibly just like calm and like comfortable with himself

and just aware? I know what it is. What is it was so much

better. And aesthetically building product than anybody

else. He when you think of that PC era of no taste, beige boxes,

and everybody having no style, and just no swagger. He was

studying, you know, German design, Buddhism, tripping on

acid, and like just understanding the universe at a

level that Gates and the other contemporaries weren’t, they just

weren’t as transcendent in understanding product design as

he was. So it was like when you were saying you were playing

poker with a bunch of four year olds or something. That’s the

analogy. He’s just on such a different level that he’s

watching people make, you know, as 400. And, you know, IBM, PS,

whatever, like, just garbage computers, garbage operating

systems. And it’s just like,

the thing is, like, if you look at any era, just the way that he

communicates, there’s just a level of calm. I don’t know how

to describe it. So you understand what I’m trying to

say? Like, he, he just seems like he just sees through all

the noise, like he’s seen through the matrix, like he’s

unplugged himself.

Sax is unimpressed. Okay, they have

no, I’m very impressed with Steve Jobs. I think he

understood product development better than anybody else. Yeah.

Clearly, that’s it.

I mean, my favorite Steve Jobs passage is the one where he

describes the john Scully disease. Do you guys remember

this? Yeah,

no. Oh, here it is. You know, one of the things that really

hurt Apple was after I left john Scully got a very serious

disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great

idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other

people, here’s this great idea, then of course, you can go off

and make it happen. And the problem with that is that

there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a

great idea and a great product. Yeah. So true.

Yeah, I mean, I tell people it’s like a rugby scrum. You go, you

know, you got to get a whole team to get the ball down the

field. It’s not like one person put the ball down the field,

you know, they kind of maybe suggested a play. But once

you’re on the field, everything changes. And everyone’s involved

in getting it down the field.

That quotes where the name for craft ventures come from.

Oh, really? Oh, little known fact. Yeah, I didn’t know that.

Yeah. Section 230. We talked about last week, the Gonzalez

versus Google case, the justices heard oral arguments and

plaintiffs seem to fare poorly, quote from SCOTUS blog justice.

Elena Hagan suggests that even if section 230 is not well

suited to address the current needs of today’s internet, such

as such a task was best left, as we predicted. Last week, I

think sacks you did best left to Congress rather than the Supreme

Court. Quote, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the

internet. Kagan observes actual thoughts.

Yeah, I mean, this is just, I think, really a quick update to

what we talked about last week, the justice heard oral

arguments, they seem to be very skeptical of the plaintiffs

arguments. Even Justice Thomas, who has written the most

skeptically in recent years about the broad immunity that

tech companies enjoy under section 230, seem surprisingly

sympathetic to the theory that the Ninth Circuit Court ruled on,

which is that section 230 protects recommendations, as

long as the providers algorithm treats content on its website

similarly. So even the justice who I think was most likely to

reign in 230 seem to be more comfortable with what the

defendant, which was Google was saying. So it looks to me like

Google and big tech are going to win this one.

Any thoughts to me?

No, not really. I think I want to know what you guys think

about Trump showing up with Big Macs and water in East

Palestine. I mean, he is a genius. He beat Buddha judge to

East Palestine. Yeah, that was

unbelievably pull up my tweet. I think this is the power we

aren’t we because Trump has been out of the public discourse. He’s

a media. He is a media savant. Literally, Biden is in Ukraine,

saber rattling over air sirens that may or may not be true.

They were fake. Who cares? Anyway? Well, no, it doesn’t

matter. No, it doesn’t matter. No, we don’t know. So we do we

do actually. Okay, because I don’t need to be on a second. I

don’t need to be there because Jake Sullivan just being a press

conference, and he was asked by a CBS News reporter, if the US

gave the Russians any kind of heads up that the President was

going to be in Kiev. And what Sullivan said, and I quote is,

we did notify the Russians that President Biden will be traveling

to Kiev. We did so some hours before his departure for

deconfliction purposes. You know what deep confliction is, right?

It’s when the US tries to avoid an accidental conflict. And you

know, Putin’s not crazy enough to try and assassinate Biden. So

the Russians were not attacking Kiev that day. In fact, they

haven’t attacked Kiev as far as I know, for weeks. So these air

raid sirens were basically just pure theater. But the amazing

thing is, if you don’t know if you don’t know that Biden

orchestrated is my point people on your side. Come on, Jason.

That doesn’t mean Biden press the button. So don’t don’t also

take it to the other extreme. It was either who knows who went

who why the siren went off, but put it aside. This was a joint

event between the Biden administration and the Zelensky

team. They organized it. The whole thing was choreographed.

How do you how did that red carpet get there? Jason? Was

that an accident to?

Okay, so let’s put that aside.

accidental. I mean, how

let me give you your GOP. Let me give you your GOP win. Donald

Trump is a savant. And he went to America to the place that we

were reporting on the under reported story. People in East

Palestine are being ignored. And he comes there to help the

people of America. I give you all credit. Your guy sacks did

the most amazing media move in history. He went to Middle

America where people are suffering as opposed to a war

that nobody wants to be in and spend all that money on we won’t

spend money. But we will go spend billions in Ukraine. Go.

All right. I don’t know what this reminded me of. And you may

think this is a weird connection. But it reminded me

of the ending to the movie, boys in the hood. Do you remember

what happens at the end of that movie?

No, I haven’t seen it in years ago.

Okay, it was 30 years old. But ice cube, you know, plays this

character doughboy and his brother gets killed. Yep. And at

the very end of the movie, he gives this speech to Cuba

Gooding Jr. Where he says, you know, I turned on the TV. And

there was all this shit about violence in a foreign land. And

there was nothing on my brother getting killed all this stuff

about what’s happening in foreign countries, nothing about

what’s happening here. And then I think the most memorable line

was, either they don’t know, don’t show, or they don’t care

what’s going on in the hood. Right. So what’s going on here

is the people of East Palestine, Ohio are being engulfed in a

plume of carcinogens and toxins. And Biden is off right pursuing

this crusade in eastern Ukraine. And it’s not just him. I’ll

dish out to Mitch McConnell as well. Mitch McConnell was

neocons of our neocons. Yeah,

McConnell was on TV saying that the number one priority of the

United States right now is defeating Russia in Ukraine.

It’s not helping the people of Ohio. It is not securing the

border. It is not solving crime in our cities. It is not making

our schools better. It’s running off and basically supporting

this war in Ukraine. So both these oxygen areas Biden and

McConnell both they either don’t know, don’t show or they don’t

care what is happening United States of America. He’s a

genius. But it’s not even genius. I mean, it’s so obvious

that you go there. It’s so obvious. Nobody wants to go

there. And Biden didn’t go there. It’s not. It’s not

genius. It’s obvious didn’t go there. Where’s the Sanders? He

should. He hasn’t declared. Don’t make a trip. I think the

most senior democratic person that went over there was Josh

Shapiro, who’s the governor of Pennsylvania. He got there

before Buddha judge.

What is going on? And I mean, and this it’s it’s a never

ending war. And so, you know, this is if nobody wants to fight

a never ending war. This is, this is what got Bush in

trouble, right? Like this was the big critique is like, we’re

spending all this money over in the Middle East on these

conflicts.

Well, you’re talking about Bush Senior. Yeah. So let’s let’s

contrast with Bush Senior. I think actually, it’s a good

analogy. So the with Bush Senior Bush, actually, this is 1991. He

won the Iraq War. That was actually a stunning foreign

policy success. Because he actually didn’t go too far. He

didn’t go all the way on the road to Baghdad, the way that

his son, George W. Bush would creating an epic disaster. So

Bush 41 delivered a victory there, and he still lost

election. Why? Because he seemed out of touch. He wasn’t focused

on domestic problems. The American people want an American

president to focus on American problems. And even if Biden

delivers some sort of victory in Ukraine, if he ignores these

festering problems at home, that he is, I think, vulnerable for

this reelection. But I think the truth of the matter is that

this war is going to turn out much worse than the Iraq War did

in 1991. Because in 91, we showed restraint, and we knew

what our vital interest was. And we kept our objectives limited.

And we kept the timetable very short. What is Biden doing here?

Biden won’t tell us what the objective is just whatever the

Ukrainians want. He won’t tell us what the timetable is. It’s

basically for as long as it takes. And then meanwhile, this

week, you had Kamala Harris go to the Munich summit, declaring

that the Russians are guilty of crimes against humanity, which

that’s something that we could have assessed after the war.

Think about the incentives, you’re now giving the Russian

leadership before we said that we just wanted them to leave.

When you accuse them of war crimes, it implies that we’re

gonna go chasing them all the way to Moscow, they’re not gonna

want to end this war, when they can be put on trial at the Hague.

I mean, this is highly inflammatory. So, you know, this

thing is not going in the right direction.

Yeah, that was the thing I didn’t like about Biden’s speech

over there is just, he’s escalating, escalating,

escalating, hey, that we have to stop Putin. I mean, which you

do, he did invade another country, he didn’t cause three

or 400,000, Russians have died, according to reports, over 100,000

Ukrainians have died, according to votes, neither side is given

the accurate number, because they don’t want to demoralize

their constituents. But the amount of suffering going on

here is extraordinary. And I think it should be the West who

is going, send McCrone, send somebody from Germany, send

some, you know, group of people to then go to Ukraine and work

this out. But you don’t need to go on your saber rattling. It

was too much saber rattling for me. It is not a de escalation.

We need de escalation in these situations, not saber.

I agree with you, Jason. But, but Biden has really painted

himself into a corner here. Because before the war, he

refused to take NATO expansion off the table. He refused to

recognize the Russian interest in Crimea. And we gave no

support to the Minsk Accords, which would have given some

limited autonomy to the Russian speakers in the Donbass area. If

we had just done those three things, there would have been no

war. Biden refused to do that. He refuses to take expansion off

the table even today. So he has nothing to compromise with he is

dug in. And the problem we have now is that it’s a loose, loose

scenario. If the Ukrainians keep doing poorly, because right now

it looks like they’re on the back foot. What is the United

States going to do? We’re going to let them lose this war? Or

are we going to keep giving them more aid and step in? It looks

to me like Biden now has invested his whole presidency in

this, and he can’t just let them lose, which means more escalation

from us. And on the Russian side, if the Russians lose, then

they have an incentive to use nuclear weapons to rescue the

situation. So it seems to me that both scenarios here are

really bad. And we don’t really have a good way out of this.

We’re looking for some sort of magical Goldilocks scenario

where the Russians sort of lose but not enough to use nukes. You

know, the administration has not given us a clear picture of what

victory looks like here. That’s actually reasonably achievable

in a reasonable timeframe at a reasonable cost.

What do we think? freeberg of Xi Jinping making overtures and

hey, maybe we should work towards peace. If you follow the

money, he wants cheap oil. He wants this thing to end and he

wants the West to be buying goods from China. The West wants

to sell a bunch of armaments. The military industrial complex

is absolutely in delight of replenishing all of these

weapons, perhaps a little cynical to follow the money

concept. But what was your take on the chessboard of Xi Jinping

is going to visit Putin before Biden does, and he wants to

build bridges and we want to saber rattle. What are your

thoughts? If anything,

he getting like, I mean, China buys energy from Russia today,

they buy oil on sale at a very cheap price. So if I’m China, I

want this to last longer, don’t I? Like, why would I want to end

this and then have Russia’s markets open up? Because if

their markets open up the markets normalize to market

prices, right now they’re getting a discount. So I think

yeah, they certainly don’t want things to escalate. The question

is how quickly do they want them to de escalate? So I’m China,

I’m kind of probably playing a little bit of a, you know,

middle line here. I just, I obviously don’t want to see a

big hot war. China’s got its own domestic problems right now that

seem pretty significant, and existential and having access to

cheap energy seems like a benefit. Obviously, if there was

significant conflict and escalation of conflict, that

would be very bad from an economic perspective for China.

So they’re probably somewhere in the middle, like a slow

resolution, let’s say, I don’t know. I mean, this is pure

speculation. This is just me,

Sachs, which mouth Europe isn’t going to buy Putin’s oil anytime

soon, right? They’re now going to

know that he’s able to sell it to China, he’s able to sell to

India and the rest of the world. There was actually an article in

today’s New York Times about how the West may be unified about

Ukraine, but the rest of the world is not the article was

saying something that critics were said for a while, which is

we actually don’t have the whole world with us at all. The BRICS

countries are not with us the emerging world, the whole

southern hemisphere, basically is not with us. They would like

the US to play a more constructive role in finding a

peace deal, not like you said, Jason saber rattling or

escalating. So the rest of the world is not happy with us. And

this is why the Russian sanctions have not been

effective. I think the Russian economies had like a three to 4%

hit, it is not the collapse that was predicted, because there are

enough other countries willing to do business with them.

Would this have happened to Martha Trump was president? And

how would Trump have handled it? Do you think just game theory

here? I’m just curious. Because Trump almost won, right? I mean,

if Trump had won, what would this look like? Would Putin have

gone in there if Trump was president? And how would Trump

have handled it? Because Trump seems to think I would have just

told him don’t do this, and they wouldn’t have done it.

I mean, this is the most obvious compliment I can give him. I

think that he is exceptionally pragmatic on being anti war. And

I think that that is one of the most positive characteristics

that he showed he was really the only president, I think, in

modern history, right, sexy poo that hasn’t gotten us embroiled

in a new new wars. Yeah, it is the best part of him. Yeah, he’s

been incredibly, incredibly consistent. So I suspect that

there would have been some kind of a deal. I know that sounds so

ridiculous to say, but there would have been a deal.

I actually agree. He’s a dealmaker. He’s a Jason, he

came to North Korea, he went to North Korea and met with he’ll

shake hands with anybody. Exactly. He would have fired all

of the deep state blob that started to position anything

towards a conflict. So I think he would have shut the door so

ferociously on Ukraine and NATO, and anybody that crossed that

line, he would have tarred and feathered publicly. And I think

the end result would have been that Putin could have found an

off ramp well before he invaded. Probably.

Totally. Yes, I agree.

And Trump blamed Germany for all this, right? He called it.

Well, Trump very early, asked the question, why are we

spending all this money to defend Germany when Germany has

this big pipeline deal with Russia, it doesn’t seem like

they need our protection, they should just pay for it

themselves. But I think there’s a separate point that you must

just made that is a really good point, which is Trump’s

instinctual resistance to what the deep state wants. And he

actually said it this week, he gave a two minute televised

statement that was all over Twitter, where he basically made

the argument that listen, the reason why we’re in this war is

because the military industrial complex and the foreign policy

establishment, they basically courted this conflict, and they

are working at odds with the interest of the American people.

It’s actually a fairly radical critique, I don’t think a major

presidential candidate has run against the military industrial

complex, the way that he is now positioning himself. And let me

tell you this, you know, I’ve said it before, he’s not my

preferred candidate. But if this war spirals out of control,

either, you know, it turns into a even bigger conflict that

draws us in, or it turns into a big recession, because I don’t

think we’ve seen the last of the supply shocks from this war. If

we get a recession that Trump can, I think, lay at the feet of

this war, he’s positioning himself to take advantage, this

could be a silver bullet for him. I don’t think he has any

other way of winning. But, you know, if this turns into a big

mess, Trump is

positioning hat sacks, you have your tinfoil hat there. Put it

on for a second. I want to talk to tinfoil sacks, tinfoil hat

sacks. Let’s put them the tinfoil hats on here. Do you

think Putin is escalating this as a way to position Trump to

where Putin says he could say this during the election, like,

listen, you know, I would love to talk to Trump. And what if

Trump goes and talks to Putin, or does a phone call with him?

Because I know that’s against the rules, right?

So let me understand your theory. So wait, so your theory

is that Putin is going to

sacks theory.

Okay, so so your theory is that Putin’s escalating this into

potentially a nuclear war to get Trump reelected. That’s your

theory. And I’m the

Trump is favorable to him. I’m just tinfoil hatting it. The

reason that this has occurred. No, no, now that this has

occurred, not that he did. He did.

You’re the one in tinfoil hat territory,

tinfoil hat corner at the end. Putin, the reason why he started

the war for it that he would end the war to give Trump a win.

How’s he going to end the war for Trump? What are you talking

about? During the election? He’s he does a call with Trump. And

he says, you know, I talked to Trump about this. And I’d love

to do some negotiations with Trump. I’ve always had

appreciation for his ability to help negotiate things I would

love I would feel better about negotiating with Trump, who

hasn’t saber rattled and told everybody in the world that I

have to be that there isn’t regime change. So

I think it’s really interesting how you come up with these

conspiracy theories, and then attribute them to me and called

me the tinfoil hat guy. But

I know, you just said this is a silver bullet.

No, it’s a silver bullet.

rails. Yeah, if this war is off the rails, and the economy goes

off the rails, because of this war, he Trump right now is

positioning himself to take advantage of that fact. And

DeSantis is to play right into his hands as a pacifist,

critical things about the war skeptical, I would say things

about the war this week. So it’s not just Trump. But look, the

thing you have to understand about this war is existential

for Putin is existential at this. Yes, he cannot back off

extra. And it’s extracurricular for us. Yeah, yeah. And that’s

why Obama said back in 2014, that the Russians have

escalatory dominance, they will always climb the escalatory

ladder all the way up to nukes if they have to. And the sooner

we recognize that fact that better off we’re going to be, I

think the good news is that we are speech that he did, where he

kind of see the speech. Was it good? We just talked about it.

It was two minutes. It was fabulous. Sachs just mentioned

it. The crazy thing is, it sounded a lot like we’ll be

talking on this podcast, which is he talked about all these

generals that retire Victoria Nuland. He mentioned Victoria

Nuland by name by name by name. He, he really did explain to the

audience this because I didn’t see this because I’m on a

different time zone. And it was it must have broken when I was

asleep or sleep. Well, it’s a two minute video in which he

like I said, he attacked the military industrial complex and

foreign policy establishment for creating this war. And he

mentioned Victoria Nuland by name, let me tell you something

Newland is going to be it’s going to be a very popular

message. But yes, it’s very popular. Newland is the Fauci of

this situation. Okay. The same way that Fauci was supposed to

be protecting us go on viruses, and then find a function

research. Victoria. Now we got a label. Let me tell you,

misinformation. Victoria Nuland was supposed to be our chief

diplomat with respect to Russia and Eastern Europe. And what did

she do? Instead, she ginned up this conflict. How he ended up

we backed in insurrection in Ukraine in 2014. Jason, if you

didn’t like the insurrection of January six, let me tell you,

you aren’t going to like the insurrection that she staged in

Ukraine. Because they brought in these Ukrainian far right

nationalists as the muscle. And that is what we also bring

problems.

Bring Big Macs. Did he bring Big Macs with him? Did you say he

brought Big Macs to East Palestine? He brought fast food

to them? Yeah, I don’t even know what you’re showing up with

bigger ignoring what SAC said. But no, no, I got it. I am not

disagreeing with him. I think if you want to

never been conflict. Nobody wants to be in a forever war.

Yeah. But let me explain why he mentioned Victoria Newland. He

mentioned her because she was the State Department official

who was responsible for backing this insurrection of a

democratically elected leader in Ukraine in 2014, named

Yanukovych. Okay, Yanukovych was trying to was doing a balancing

act between Ukrainian nationalists and Russia. And it

was a very delicate balancing act. And we basically toppled

him. And ever since then, the relations with the Russians over

Ukraine have been headed south. If you’re wondering why Putin

sees Crimea, it was in direct retaliation for the coup that we

backed in Ukraine in 2014. This is the origin of the conflict.

And, you know, if you want to understand where this comes from,

you have to go back to this. And the fact that Trump’s willing to

talk about is pretty incredible.

I think that the good news for us is I think that heading into

June and the debt fiasco that’s looming, I think we’re going to

and I think this will help a lot get distracted with domestic

issues in the sense that it’ll take some heat off of

escalating

all of this foreign adventurism. You know, this is such a scene

like this is such a scene from wag the dog. Every time there’s

something inside the United States that we should really

focus on. We have this wag the dog moment where we get

distracted by some adventurism abroad, and we forget and we

lose sight. So we have this East Palestine thing right now. In

June, we’re gonna have to come back to terms with this death

ceiling issue, which is a huge one, how we’re going to resolve

it. It’s not clear. Just this week, the Federal Reserve

basically said, Hey, folks, we’re taking rates to five and

a half plus, and they’re going to stay there. That seems like

no news. People just seem to digest it and move on. It’s

really incredible how we just find we’re like, what is it

Jason, the dog that chased the bumper and caught the car or

whatever.

Yeah, you caught the bumper. We got plenty of big problems here

in the United States plenty of big problems. And I don’t know

that wag the dog works anymore. Because I think the American

people want, like I said, they want an American president to

focus first and foremost on American problems. And even

remember, Bush senior in 91 won that war and still lost

reelection still lost. So I don’t think wagging the dog

works anymore. It works for some short period of time, especially

while the media are portraying this point, the air raid

theater, that eventually the people smarten up.

You’re so right. So that issue, think about Bush, Bush came off

of the Persian Gulf War with like a 91 or 2% approval

rating. I mean, we’ve never seen anything like it. But he

violated a simple tenet of his domestic policy, which is read

my lips, no new taxes, boom, lost. And it was not even close

in the end. So I think you’re right. I think people really

care about the economy. Go Nikki Haley

and do how much do how much debt do we want to go into over

foreign wars? The only thing I ever liked about Trump was his

policy of not starting wars and not getting into them. And

Americans want to focus on our balance. I’m a balance sheet

voter right now I’m voting based on who is going to be fiscally

responsible. I mean, free burger, the same boat here, I

think we’ve got to be real careful in how we handle China

because you had Blinken on all the Sunday shows basically

denouncing them expressing outrage that they might support

the Russians acting shock shock that they could do that. We

don’t even have the ability anymore to understand that other

countries do things in their own interest. And we can’t

accept that. And instead, we act as if foreign policy should be

conducted according to this morality play that we’ve

created. And if you don’t do what we think is right, then

we’re going to express all this outrage and condemnation at you.

And somehow that’s going to get you to violate your own

interests. That’s not the way the world works. And what we’re

doing right now, we’re doing right now is pushing China and

Russia together into a new axis block. This is very foolish,

very foolish, even during the Cold War. Okay, we work to keep

Russia and China apart. And whatever you think of those

regimes today, they were much worse back then. Remember, the

Soviets, you had a Stalinist regime, the Chinese had Mao,

those were the two of the three biggest mass murderers of the

20th century. And Nixon and Kissinger still went to China

and shook Mao’s hand and toasted him because it’s important to

keep China and the Soviet Union divided. And what are we doing

today, we are basically pushing them together. With all this

condemnation and outrage. It is not a smart strategy.

Can’t disagree. We need to be building bridges with India.

That’s a key key relationship. And China. I don’t know why

we’re not figuring out what we’re talking about.

Yeah, this is poisoning our relationship with India. India

is the biggest democracy in the world. And our relations with

them have gone south since this war, because they have a

friendship with Russia that goes

I mean, I would rather see Biden go to India and start building

some bridges there. Yeah, I agree.

I can’t disagree.

Jacob, how’s your fundraising going for launch on four?

Thanks for asking. It’s a great question. You know, we’re doing

that public 506 C public fundraising thing. And so I did

a bunch of webinars. And without doing a single in person

meeting $51 million in requests came in, just, you know, to a

type form, basically a form online. And now we’re going to

be starting in the next month after I get back from Japan,

actually meeting with the, you know, big LPs in the world, and

I want to make a trip to the Middle East and just go all

around the world and meet all the big funds. So thanks for

asking. Yeah, I think it’s gonna change everything. Yeah, good

for you.

That’s awesome. You imagine $52 million in commitments before

actually doing the actual tour. That’s awesome. Just out of the

gate. And my last one was 44. And so I think this 506 C, like

I can be public about the fact that we’re raising a fund. And

so it’s just absolutely amazing.

Well, congrats. And I have one question for you.

Yes, go ahead.

Can you be replaced with an AI?

The world’s greatest moderator? I mean, that’s not gonna make

great jokes. Not for not for now. And oh, you know what, I

had an interesting point about management fees in these funds.

Just to circle back. Did you know, this is what I heard that

benchmark during that worst vintage, you know, after I think

the great financial crisis, or maybe it was the dot com was

either of those. They took their management fees, because that

fund was so you know, challenged. They deployed the

management fees into primary investing, or I’m sorry, to

follow on investing on their winners to regain the results.

Can you imagine in this market, a VC who deployed capital in

2020 2021, saying, you know what, we’ve got these management

fees millions of dollars in the future, to pay for managing

these instead of taking that money. I’m going to put that

into your into the companies for my launch fund three month, I

had a couple of opportunities. And I was like, you know what,

I’m going to take some of the management fees and invest in

some of those existing companies to try to goose the returns for

my LPS. And so we’re at 104% or 103% invested in the capital,

just by just taking a couple 100 grand off of the management

fees. And I’m like, well, this is a really interesting

strategy. Like, why am I playing for the management fees? Or am

I playing for the mic? I’m paying for the mic, right? I

mean, you should be.

Jason, by the way, it’s not true that the AI can’t tell jokes.

Our friend, Billy tweeted how the AI told a joke in this the

style of Jerry Seinfeld, then he asked it to tell a joke in the

style of Dave Chappelle and it refused. So the AI can tell a

joke if it wants to. It’s racist, but no only clean

jokes.

Oh, I see. It doesn’t work blue.

I guess I don’t think every I don’t think Dave Chappelle has

to be blue. But it would not tell a joke about Dave

Chappelle blue. Wow. I mean, we got to get Sam. He’s an

iconoclastic. Like he would be Sam would be in the are all in

52.

Well, by the way, actually, he’s got a shot there. After our last

episode, in which we were raising concerns about the AI

bias, they published a blog post, saying that yes, the day

after, if bias has occurred, it is a bug, not a feature. And

they are trying to be even handed. So I’m glad they have

that smart now it’s that and that’s their standard. And we’re

going to hold them to that standard. But I’m glad

well, they have to be public. Like this. Yeah, I mean, I read

the blog post. It seemed reasonable. It’s great. They’re

addressing it. And I also think they’re now doing embedded

citation. So somebody tweeted at me after we had the whole

discussion about credit. And when they were doing facts,

they’re now saying, and they haven’t made an announcement

about this yet. But they were saying, according to this

source, the following according to this source, so they’re

starting to source in the copy that’s being written. So that’s

a big step. And then I was talking to Adam D’Angelo, about

Poe, which is an amazing app, you should try it. I think it’s

the best one out there right now of all the chats. Poe is an app

based on the core data set. And I asked him questions about the

trip to Japan and the seco and this and that. And it was

extraordinary how well done the answer was with bullets. And

then I asked him online, Hey, what about citations back to the

original core questions? And he said, Yes, we’re going to be

adding that. So then I was thinking, wow, if you add to the

core corpus, and then they link back to your answer. That’s

awesome. For me as a person who’s answered hundreds of

questions on core to build my reputation. So I think Cora is,

for me, I think Cora is the could be the Google, I think

Cora’s got a better data set. And if they play that right, I

think they could be better than chat GPT. And they said, you

have to get permission based on the Cora data set data set,

poet, it will answer questions like the best answers on core

is that you’re saying? Yeah. That’s kind of interesting is

using Cora as the primary data set. I’m sure it’s using the

rest of the web, too, and Wikipedia and everything. I

think I don’t know why they’re calling it po I think they should

just do Cora chat bot or whatever. Yeah, but just try it.

It’s called Po download it. You can use it today. You want to

know why I’m excited about that? Because you got a little tasty

poo. You got a little slice, a little slice of Cora. Oh, good

for you. Well, I mean, Cora was always like, are they ever going

to make money? Or are they just going to build this incredible

data set and do nothing with it? Yeah. What did I say? I said, I

said AI is going to be to the to basically sass what mobile

was to have one. Oh, you’ll either get disrupted or get

turbocharged by it. It’s gonna be I think Cora is the number

one player in AI going forward. I know that sounds crazy. But the

fact that and I think Reddit also has this insane potential

if Reddit had a chatbot because think about how many times

people do a search, and YouTube is the other one where they say,

what’s the best sci fi movie of the year or which directors make

the best screenplays or whatever, and then they put the

word Reddit at the end, or they put the word core at the end,

where they put the word YouTube at the end, to just narrow down

the corpus of where to find the answer. Go ahead. I’ve worked

with you. I’ve known D’Angelo for 17 years now. Smart cat. He

was the CTO of Facebook when I worked there. The single

smartest and best single smartest person I worked with.

And then separately, one of the most absolute genuinely best

human beings in the world. Can we get him out? He does. He

doesn’t. Is he not a good public speaker or something? Because I

never hear him talk. I’d like to get him at all in summit.

Maybe Angela is just so superb on every dimension.

We should get him on actually, just because I didn’t know he

was working in AI. He has a lot of interesting thoughts about,

you know, social networking platforms.

And he’s on the board of opening. Okay. Oh, get him on

the pod. Or maybe you own summit. 2023. All right,

everybody.

He’ll definitely make the anti establishment list.

Definitely anti establishment. Yeah. Okay. So for the Sultan of

sneaking out, he left and the dictator. And what do you want

to be referred to now? pacifist, the peace pacifist,

peacemaker. You are the saxophist. I’m the world’s

undisputed greatest moderator on the number one podcast in the

world for now until the AI replaces you. Yeah, I trained the

AI to replace your sacks. Ukraine, UK, UK, and Biden,

Biden, Biden. No, Nikki Haley. No, stop making Nikki Haley

happen. The end. The data set has been done. All right,

everybody. See you next time.

Let your winners ride.

Rain Man, David.

We open source it to the fans and they’ve just gone crazy with

it.

Love you. Queen of

besties are gone.

Dog taking a notice in your driveway.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy

because they’re all just like this like sexual tension that

they just need to release.

We need to get