英伟达财报炸裂，Arm 上市如履薄冰，并购市场回暖，维韦克主导共和党辩论

Jason Calacanis (00:00:00): Sultan of Science. What's what's going on? Are you still riding high after your big NASA Zoom interview? Your Space Station Zoom interview? David Friedberg (00:00:06): That was really fun. Shout out to Woody Friedberg from the International Space Station, Astronaut, Calacanis. Woody listens to the pod. On the ISS while he works out the astronauts work out. He said 2 hours 15 minutes every day to, you know, obviously, your body can atrophy gotta work out a lot. He's like, when he's working out, he was installed episodes of the all in pod. A buddy of his put him onto it. He's become a big fan. Right David Friedberg (00:00:30): on. Shout out to David Friedberg (00:00:31): Woody. Yeah. I got a DM from NASA astronauts. I thought it was, like, some sort of scam or something. I clicked on it because I follow NASA astronauts. They DM me. And I'm like, what? This this astronaut wants to Chamath? That's so crazy. I looked the guy up, seems legit. He's following me on Twitter. So we did a Zoom call. Yesterday, and I put it on Twitter. The call I did with him is really fun. Honestly, like a thrill for me an amazing individual. This guy got his PhD at Cal in computer science, did a piece of on convex optimization and applied to Aerospace Engineering became a professor at MIT for 3 years and applied to the astronaut program and got in. Fast forward 2023 in March, he is the pilot of the crew 6 mission, the SpaceX crew 6 mission, to the ISS. And he's been on the ISS since March. He's coming back in a couple of days, an incredible individual, amazing story. It was super fun to chat with him. Jason Calacanis (00:01:26): I don't think I've ever seen you smile or be more cited about anything, you look absolutely ecstatic. David Friedberg (00:01:34): Oh, it was amazing. Jason Calacanis (00:01:35): Did he have any comments on Uranus? Any thoughts on your anus or no? David Friedberg (00:01:40): We didn't get there. Jason Calacanis (00:01:41): You didn't get to your anus? Speaker 4 (00:01:42): Take David Sacks (00:01:42): out. You blew that. Let's try that again. Jason Calacanis (00:01:44): You wanna try that. You take a swing at that. David Sacks (00:01:46): Let me take a shot at this. Freework. So did he talk about going to the moon? David Friedberg (00:01:49): Yeah. He's actually on the Artemis mission. David Sacks (00:01:51): And what about your rainness? David Friedberg (00:01:54): Ah, well done. Well done. David Friedberg (00:01:55): We didn't get that far. We didn't get that far. It was a first date. It was only 20 minutes, guys. Speaker 4 (00:02:00): It Jason Calacanis (00:02:01): was a first date in 20 minutes. Did he go for Uranus? Hey. Hey. David Friedberg (00:02:05): I hear that we're trying to actually land on the south side of the moon, David Friedberg (00:02:10): the dark David Friedberg (00:02:10): side of the moon. David Friedberg (00:02:11): Yeah. So he actually, are you would David Friedberg (00:02:13): he have an opinion on the dark side of the moon, or I don't know the dark side of Uranus? Jason Calacanis (00:02:23): 3 for 3 David Friedberg (00:02:24): for 3 for Jason Calacanis (00:02:29): to let your winter ride. Rainman, Speaker 4 (00:02:33): David Sachs. And I said We open sits of fans and they've discovered Jason Calacanis (00:02:45): I just wanna explain. Somebody was like, why are you bullying Jake out? Why are you bullying Friedberg? Tremont's bullying this person? He loves the attention. Our love language is breaking chops. That's it. We'd like to laugh and take the piss out because everybody takes themselves too seriously. And then what's going on with the tequila? Are you guys serious about this? Because now I'm David Friedberg (00:03:02): getting Don't talk about right now. Jason Calacanis (00:03:03): I'm getting 50 emails a day with people. Yeah. We'll talk about that later. Alright. David Friedberg (00:03:07): We'll talk about it later. David Sacks (00:03:09): I did run a poll asking people if they trying all in tequila, and the poll had narrowly won. David Friedberg (00:03:14): Okay. And then I ran a poll asking what the most they'd ever spent on a bottle was. Speaker 4 (00:03:18): Mhmm. David Friedberg (00:03:19): If you price it around 2 200 bucks. You can, Nigga, you can really maximize demand. I think the demand maximizing function is probably around 180, $190 at all. David Friedberg (00:03:28): Right. You do not need a majority of people who wanna buy your tequila. You just need enough that are willing to pay the right price. David Sacks (00:03:34): No. I agree. I was just trying to see how much interest it'd be out there. And in this poll, I think it was 41% said they would try it 40% said they wouldn't. And then the remainder was just kind of, you know, show me the answer. Jason Calacanis (00:03:46): I think if we don't have advertising ever, but we have a nice sipping tequila, because, you know, I don't drink a lot, but I do like when Saks gives me David Friedberg (00:03:55): a nice focus. Guys, 32,000 votes. So if you look at 18.8%, so it's 79% is 200 or less. That's the the sum of both of those 2 cohorts. So, like, if you priced it at, call it 189, you probably can get 15% And so, you know, you could probably sell several 100,000 bottles a year. I mean, that's like a pretty real business. Jason Calacanis (00:04:19): K. But I need something smooth, and I I like it a little sweet Is that a problem? David Friedberg (00:04:24): Can I just give you my opinion? I think this the thing that people get wrong just as a as a consumer, and I think, like, I'm a pretty discerning consumer. The thing that I don't like is that people focus on all of this window dressing, and they don't focus on the core. And the core is that, for example, in wine, there's 7 or 8 rating systems. And over time, if you buy enough wine and taste enough wine, you can really figure out who's good at what. And there's just nothing that replaces a highly rated wind. It's exceptional. And that kind of discernment is now moving itself into tequila. And so I would just encourage us if we're gonna make a bottle, just make it an exceptionally good tasting bottle. And one of the things that I saw in the comments was that people said, Oh, you can't differentiate. But then I see some other articles like Comos, which is the one that I taste it at the 1 and only Mandarin. That was the first hundred point tequila that had ever been given out. And so there are people that are starting to rate it and create these rankings. And if we were going to put out a product, I would air on extreme product quality. Versus price point. David Friedberg (00:05:38): I invested in a tequila company. I showed this with you guys called 21 seats. It was started by my friends, Nicole, Kat and Sarika, and they spent a lot of time in Mexico finding the right producer, and they put fruit. It's it's a it's a female, niche tequila. So the goal is to create a tequila that will appeal to the female demographic, and they spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out how to actually get the flavor of fresh fruit without using artificial flavoring into the tequila. And so there was this big investment in trying to get the single work. This thing worked, it took off, and, Diageo bought the company, but it was because they spent so much time on the quality of the product that I think they were successful. And that's Everyone else puts their name and label on a on a bottle of tequila and says, hey, this is my tequila. But if you don't get the quality rights, Choomoff is totally right. People don't buy time. You gotta get it right. David Friedberg (00:06:27): If you look at what the rock did, the rock went in a different direction, which is I think he has a very accessible and affordable tequila, which I think makes sense as well it's just a different strategy, and that also works for the rock because he has almost 400,000,000 followers. And so he can really play a volume game, but I don't think that that's what we should ever do. David Sacks (00:06:47): We should stand for exceptional quality. David Friedberg (00:06:48): Exceptional quality. And this speaks to something else, which is one of the biggest points of feedback that I get. So for example, I took 3 days Matt and I took 3 days. We took a little bit of a our own little honeymoon away from all the kids, and we went to Villa Destette just to kind of hang out in Lake Como because I was flying out of Milan and ran into a few people there. And the consistent feedback that I get from those folks is like they love hearing about these different places, whether it's different brands, different kinds of wine, all of these things because all these folks are a little bit left out in the cold now, they don't have, like, how to live life well. And if you work really hard and you're lucky enough to then also have some amount of success, why should you feel ashamed about it? Why shouldn't you be allowed to enjoy that and actually like pamper yourself and celebrate yourself? And I say go for it. So If we can find high quality products, like this is the thing, for example, like, I think there's different ways of expressing success When I was poor, I was poor in wallet, and I was also poor in mine. And then somewhere along the way, I actually became rich in wallet, but I was still poor in mind. And so I would wear these clothes that were gotti and had huge labels. Macelles, Dior, and Balenciaga, all Jason Calacanis (00:08:10): those crads. David Friedberg (00:08:11): Dail it up. Jason Calacanis (00:08:11): And the haircut looked like Friedberg. It was it Speaker 4 (00:08:14): was gross. Jason Calacanis (00:08:15): And then David Friedberg (00:08:15): I learned how to be rich in wallet and rich in mind, which is then you go totally brand off and you can actually find things that are just like really well tailored, well made. They can be almost generational pieces of clothing or whatever. And I think that it's great that you can find these things and tell other people because you find that there's a latent so many number of people that want that. So at Villa Deste as an example, That is probably the Harvard of Hospitality. I've never been to a hotel that is more on point anywhere in the world than that one place. Incredible incredible ways in which all waiters one Jason Calacanis (00:08:50): more time? David Friedberg (00:08:51): Villa Destiny. Villa D, apostrophe, e s t e on Lake Cove. Jason Calacanis (00:08:55): I'll give David Friedberg (00:08:55): you one simple example. Matt and I were, like, talking about this one kind of olive oil. And the waiter at the other table heard He went to the kitchen, brought back, and he said, here, I heard, I just overheard. I apologize, but and I thought, this is incredible. You feel so pampered and loved and taken care of. The level of service and quality there was incredible. And I think that there are so many examples of this where if you can have elements of that in your life. You should do it. By the way, there's a very high chance that this is where I beautiful of you guys for the all in summit in 2025. Jason Calacanis (00:09:29): Okay. David Friedberg (00:09:30): I'm still figuring out all the details. Jason Calacanis (00:09:31): I'm picking 2024. My point David Friedberg (00:09:33): is whether it's Laura Piana, which is, in my opinion, the top of the top in terms of Brand off really high quality of those. Jason Calacanis (00:09:41): Look at that place. David Friedberg (00:09:42): The point is, like, there's all these brands that exist that take enormous amounts of time to exemplify craftsmanship and care. And I think that it's appropriate for people who can participate in those experiences to be able to have them and not feel ashamed and actually like enjoy it and celebrate themselves and do it so let's to go, high quality stuff, not shitty, big label tacky crap. Jason Calacanis (00:10:04): Okay. Nvidia has smashed their earnings massive interest coming into this earnings report, obviously, because we've been talking about Nvidia. They've had a massive run up. Everybody is trying to buy capacity to run language models, etcetera, self driving, yadayada. And it's not just the Googles and Amazon's of the world. You have startups trying to buy H100s, a100s, and buy the simple truck. You also have Sovereign Wealth Funds And Countries buying these in the Middle East and Europe, and you have traditional cooperations buying them. This is the blowout of world blowouts in terms of performance, q 2 revenue, 13,500,000,000, up 101% year over year. That's extraordinary on that large of a number. But up 88% quarter over quarter. High growth in stocks is 20, 30% year over year. So this is, you know, just very uncommon, obviously. Q 2 net income. $6,000,000,000, up 843 percent year over year. NVIDIA is now worth 1,200,000,000,000. It's closing in on Amazon, 1,400,000,000,000 and Google at $1,700,000,000,000 in terms of market cap. And here's the kicker, and they're printing up so much money and so much profits, rather, that the NVIDIA board is approving a $25,000,000,000 share buyback. That's a very large number in terms of share buybacks. That's six times higher than what they were currently allotted. Yeah. I guess, Chamath, when you see this kind of extraordinary run up, What is the ramification gonna be in terms of for the industry, competition, and then just trading this name? Is this peak NVIDIA, or is the peak yet to David Friedberg (00:11:37): come? Well, I think it's peak in one way, but this is less about a commentary on NVIDIA because they're clearly firing on all cylinders. But you know, it's a pretty well established rule in capitalism, which is when the market observes that there's a company just printing enormous revenues and profits, they want to compete with them naturally to get their share of those revenues and profits. And that typically happens in all markets then the result of that are just decaying margins. In the, in the absence of a monopoly, this is what you should expect. And so because in this market, there's nothing really monopolistic about what they do. What they do is and good, but there are other ways and other systems and other companies that are developing chipsets and capabilities here to compete with Nvidia. So it probably just motivates them even more and accelerates the path where you see competition. I tweeted this out yesterday, but one of the most interesting things that could happen is somebody like Tesla decides to either open source their chip or actually starts to sell their platform because if FSD gets to a reasonable level of scale, that entire platform system is a learning and inference system for the physical world. And I think that has tremendous applications. You have something called risk fee, which is an open architecture spec to essentially compete and create different versions of different chips. That has implications more, I think, to arm. You have companies like Google that, you know, frankly spun their own silicon a long time ago, TPU. You have Amazon now talking about doing the same thing. Microsoft has invested a lot of money in FPGA Technology. So it's just yet another accelerant in this trend to create many forms of AI enabled silicon. And so I think that that sort of it it pulls that reality forward. And I just think we're gonna have to figure out when the market prices that in because I think that that probably decays the NVIDIA margin and upside over time. Again, that is not a commentary on them. That's just a market reality. Jason Calacanis (00:13:28): Yeah. Margins get competed away. For folks who don't know, Tesla is making something called dojo. It's their own supercomputer. Here's a pick of it, and they showed that at Tesla AI Day last year. And you have Arm's open source competitor is the risk 5 chip you're talking about. It's an open source architecture for doing large jobs. And so I guess my question to you, Friedberg, is if you look at all this capacity coming online, do you think we're going to be in a situation where the amount of capacity compute being put online is going to outstrip the need for that compute because software is getting so much better. And then maybe, you know, people are running hugging face jobs and and various LMs on the new silicon from Apple and they're running it on their M2s. And so do we need this much capacity? Are there enough interesting jobs in the world to for all this capacity? And then might that also be a headwind against in video when people say, you know what? I got enough. I got enough capacity here. David Friedberg (00:14:25): I think the rational way to think about this is to try and calculate the efficient front here on compute use. So the more compute you use, the more it costs you. The question then is if you double the amount of compute you're using for a particular application, do you get twice the return on the investment. If you triple it, does your ROI on a percentage basis, you know, go up or go down? So at some point, you reach an efficient frontier, which is you start to see a declining or negative rate of return on the investment in the compute that you're using for a particular application. And this is certainly going to be application and market specific. It's going to be largely driven by the data that is available in that market to do training, to do tuning, the market's appetite to spend money for that particular set of applications that emerges from that compute that's being used And so we don't know today where the efficient frontier is across each of these different markets and sets of applications. And the market is finding that out. In the process of finding that out, everyone is spending a shit ton of money on compute. And they are trying to get as many server racks as they can. They are trying to get as many chipsets they as they can. They're trying to get as much server time as they can, and everyone's got this idea that the more compute I can throw at a problem, the return is gonna scale linearly and it turns out that, like, with most most things, the answer is likely not. So we're at this point right now, and I would argue a bit of a cycle that the there looks to be a bubble. And what I mean by that is that there's a lot of inefficient spending going on. Has the efficient frontiers are discovered across all these different application sets. And so my intuition without a lot of actual data to back this up is that based just anecdotally on what I'm hearing people doing in the market, what companies are doing, what startups are doing, etcetera, everyone is throwing everything they can at compute, And they're gonna realize that they're gonna need to rationalize those expenses at some time, at some point. So I would I would envision Nvidia is probably writing a writing a little bit of a discovery of the efficient frontier wave right now, and that this probably is not necessarily steady state. Sachs, we, Jason Calacanis (00:16:43): experienced this before, as you remember from the dotcom era, there was a massive investment very similar to this in fiber and the overspending of building the fiber infrastructure. So everybody could get broadband and they could stream movies, etcetera, happened in that 97 to 2002 time period A lot of those companies went out of business. A lot of that fiber never got used. People were working on compression algorithms while they were building on massive Friedberg, and a lot of that fiber sold. I think Google bought up a lot of it. Other people bought it up. And it was just a massive overspend. So is this like the dark fiber of, this era where we're just gonna built so much capacity that there's just gonna be not enough jobs to run on it in your mind? Speaker 4 (00:17:25): Well, I David Sacks (00:17:25): think it's a little different than fiber in the sense that every year, there's gonna be a new generation of chips. And so these cloud providers who are providing GPU compute, they're gonna wanna keep upgrading the chips to be able to address the next generation of applications. So I don't think it's quite as static as fiber where you kind of build it once. And you're right that there was kind of a glut of capacity was created. Eventually, though the internet usage grew into that capacity, But I think this is a little different because, again, you're gonna need to upgrade the chips every year or 2. I think Friedberg is right that this is clearly a spike in demand that may not be sustainable. I mean, recall what happened here is that CHPT launched on November 30th last year and really called everyone by surprise. It kinda took the world by storm. And over the next few months, you had hundreds of millions of users discover AI. I think it surprised even the OpenAI team I think when they launched Chat GPT, they thought it'd be more of a proof of concept, but it ended up being a lot more than that. And so everyone has scrambled all of a sudden in the last 9 months or so to develop their own AI strategy. And so, again, it was this giant platform shift that happened overnight. So there is a tremendous GPU shortage right now, and that's also what's leading to these almost software like profit margins by NVIDIA, because when everyone's clamoring to get a limited supply of these chips and there just aren't enough, NVIDIA can almost charge whatever they want. And so I think even more than the demand, the profit margins might not be sustainable. But I think the reality is we just don't know what the steady state of demand in this market's gonna be. I think we can say that it can't continue at these growth rates, but probably there will be some steady state of demand that's, you know, it probably is at least where we are today. Jason Calacanis (00:19:19): Yeah. I don't think it's perfectly analogous, Shamoff, but just to to to bring up some historical context, check out this article I was reading the other day. The dimensions of the collapse of the telecommunications industry, this is August 22,002. And it says, the, dimension of the the telecommunications industry during the past 2 years has have been staggering. Half a million people have lost their jobs in that time, the Dow Jones Communication Technology Index has dropped 86% the wireless communication index, 8 to 9%. These are declines in value worthy of comparison to the great crash of 1929 out of the 7,000,000,000,000 declined in the stock market since its peak, about 2,000,000,000,000 have disappeared in the capitalization of telecom companies. 23 telecom companies have gone bankrupt and waived capped off by the July 21st collapse of World Congress on the single largest bankruptcy in American history. So just a little history there of this. It it's not perfectly analogous. Obviously, when Nvidia is not going bankrupt or anything like that, but the this overcapacity issue is definitely gonna be something. And but you had mentioned that in in one of your tweet storms in the past couple of weeks or these long form that you're doing on X, previously known as Twitter, You mentioned that what are the jobs that could be pushed to this compute? And and what if one of them works? I think you were doing a speaking that somebody tweeted out a little clip of, So let's unpack that. What do you think are some jobs that people might push here that we don't anticipate that could solve something miraculous in the world? David Friedberg (00:20:40): Well, yeah, the framing is really like if you if you go back to like the the gold rush of the 1800s in San Francisco, the people that made the money were the platform enabler Right? They were the ones that sold the picks, the shovels, the pans, and the jeans. Right. And that's where that's where Levi Strauss was born. The the equivalent analogy the equivalence in that analogy today is NVIDIA because they are the the dominant pick and shovel provider. So the question is, well, what are we going to use these picks and shovels to create? Are we going to find gold? And I think the question is unclear. And where will that gold be found? Will it be found inside of a big tech company, or will it be found inside of a startup? If you look inside of where these resources are being used inside of big tech, It is to completely scorch the earth on the economic value of large models. And I think that that's very, very good for all of the startups that come after it. So what do I mean by this? You know, we were also wrapped around the axle around Chamath GPT and then GPT in general. And now, you know, if you look at the quality of llama, llama 2, Basically, these big companies have decided, no, we're just gonna make all these models extremely good, extremely useful, and very, very free. And so a lot of the resources are going there to subsidize, economically subsidized, and by implication, economically destroy the value of that category. That's going to be good for startups. And so the question is, what will you then build on top of these quasi free, almost free tools. And so one area that I have been looking at for a while is in computational biology. I think clip that you're talking about was just me talking with Orange Eve just around the ability to compute large complex spaces with very sparse information. David Friedberg (00:22:32): It's not it's a it's a very difficult task today, but tomorrow in a AI model that you can train, you can literally characterize every single molecular permutation. You could imagine you combine it with something like alpha fold and you can understand protein folding and all of a sudden you can sequentially to put tools together that could theoretically give you much higher probability guessing for specific compounds that could actually cure disease. A different version of that is a company that myself and a few other people started. I tweeted that out, which is more in the material science space. And We've had some pretty important breakthroughs there, which is really about trying to invent next generation battery materials. And we have one candidate that could be Pretty revolutionary. If it turns out to work, we don't know yet. Some positive signs. Jason Calacanis (00:23:21): So there are there are some David Friedberg (00:23:22): of these green shoots. So my perspective is that a lot of the money that NVIDIA makes today is going to be money well spent because it'll be going to the big guys, big tech plus Tesla, they are then going to create some really foundational platform technologies with it, whether it's dojo, whether it's FSD, whether it's the full platform inside of Tesla, that is the cameras plus the inference plus the training for all forms of physical world interaction, whether it's llama 2, and all of that stuff will be given away essentially, I think open source quasi free to the ecosystem. Over the next few years, and I think that'll be a really important moment which will create 100 of new companies doing really clevered cool thing. So we haven't yet seen the big breakout company yet. And so I think that right now, most of this CapEx is going to the big guys. But the dividends of all the work that these big guys are doing will be seen over the next few years in the startups that get started in the next 4, 5 years. Jason Calacanis (00:24:25): I love the California analogy. Ultimately, what all that prospecting for gold did was create the state of Calacanis. Putting aside the Levi's and the jeans. And, if you know anything about California's GDP, it would be, yeah, I think These statistics are always talked about 5th, 10th, 8th largest, has a bigger GDP, California than some of the largest, countries in the world. So This is a 2015 chart. It's hard to find the updated, information on this, but, ultimately, that was the product of the Gold Rush is this incredible state. Any other thoughts on NVIDIA before we move on to Arm. David Sacks (00:24:59): I think OpenAI had a potentially significant product announcement that's related to this. So they just launched fine tuning for chatgbt, actually version 3.5 Turbo. Says here fine tuning lets you train the model and your company's data and run that scale early tests have shown that fine tune GPT 3.5 can match Cgbt4 on narrow tasks. So you can do things like fine tune the formatting of the output. You can fine tune the tone. Fine tuning also allows business to make the model follow instructions better. So I think the point of this is that we're still at such an early stage of this, and there are so many applications that are gonna be developed and they're making the models more and more useful. So, Jason, to your analogy about fiber, what happened with fiber is there was a big build out of overcapacity, but then the number of applications kept growing until that capacity got used. And I think we're probably gonna see something like that here where there is a big build out going on of capacity and capabilities, and that's gonna lead to the next generation of applications. And and I just think we don't know yet what the steady state of either demand or supply for these chips is gonna be. Obviously, the market got taken by surprise over the last year. So you've seen, again, this huge spike in demand, the supply cannot react fast enough that's led to gigantic profits for Nvidia. But it's hard to know exactly again, what is the steady state gonna be? Is it gonna be like this, or is this a one time spike? And we also don't know what the supply will be once the manufacturers all adjust because now they know that the demand is there. David Friedberg (00:26:38): And to your point, like, the the big use cases are pushing us well past chips to, to really be more like entire systems and these racks. And so if you look like at Gracehopper, which is their next gen design, It's like a bunch of chiplets plus memory on on a huge board. It's not a chip. You're talking about system level manufacturing at this point, and that will also create different kinds of use cases. Because for example, today, right now, when you look at simple things like probabilistic tasks, I think Chamath GPT and all these GPTs are are pretty marvelous and pretty inspirational, but deterministic tasks, they're shit. Like, you know, they hallucinate on simple things like multiplication. Why? Because you infer multiplication and you try to calculate it probabilistically, and you get these simple math functions wrong. And so these are all these things where the the has become more and more sophisticated and actually be able to path and tunnel code into different ways of getting it executed and then bringing it back and stitching it together. All of these things don't exist. Those are very rudimentary things that were solved in V1 of compute. So I think that, to your point, David, like, we don't know where this goes. We're probably gonna go to a place that it's not just about chips, but it's about systems. But that's gonna create this weird Balkanization almost, and I think that's where a lot of the profit margins will get eroded away because that will make it a much more competitive industry, and there just isn't a lot of margin to capture when you actually stitch all these things together. Jason Calacanis (00:28:09): Yeah. And if you think about what were the massive wins for all that extra fiber, it was really 2 companies. The first was YouTube, which stopped charging people for transport on their videos before that. If you had a video go viral, your your server got shut down because you you hit your $5000 a month limit or whatever you had set with your ISP. And then Netflix, of course. Right? Netflix couldn't exist and all that dark fiber built. That's see with all this extra GPU, what could happen, and to your point about the the the breakthroughs there, you can now go into your chat GPT, and you could put in custom instructions. And so it asks you, what would you like chat GPT to know about you and provide better responses. And, you know, for example, I told that I'm a venture capitalist. I live in the Bay Area. I'm looking for concise business information, And then it says, well, how do you like? How would you like chat CPT to respond? And I said, I like to see data in a table. I like to see data in those tables hyperlinks. I like citations when possible. David Sacks (00:29:09): Yeah. Just to be clear, what what you're describing with custom instructions, that was a feature I think they launched like a month or 2 ago. Jason Calacanis (00:29:14): And what David Sacks (00:29:15): that is doing is prompt engineering, basically. It's pre saving, like, all that preamble that you would have to put in every single one of your prompts. Yep. Whereas this fine tuning, as I understand it, is more about fine tuning the model to to improve the model for a certain kind of data or certain kind of output. Jason Calacanis (00:29:32): Right. So the example there would be if you had your email box or you had your Google docs or you had a repository of all your Slack messages or something, your company had your corp company handbooks or you know, all of, Shamak's letters he writes every year, you could have that uploaded to chat GPT. David Sacks (00:29:47): It's potentially very powerful, I think, for enterprises. I think the big enterprise use case, the most obvious one, is that every enterprise wants its own internal chatbot. It wants its own internal Chad GPT, where the employees can ask questions. And the AI has access to all of the company's information, and it understands permissions and privacy. It only reveals information to people who have the right to see it. That's kind of a tall order, but I think that's what the market wants. Yeah. They want the chat GPT for the company intranet. Jason Calacanis (00:30:17): Yes. And so you asked him. David Sacks (00:30:19): Racing to provide that. And there was a interesting tweet by Nathan Banaitch. Anyway, he just said bye bye a bunch of startups. I guess a lot of stars were working on this fine tuning problem. That may be too glib a reality. Because I think there's just a lot of enterprises who do not want to share all their corporate information with OpenAI? Jason Calacanis (00:30:36): Of course. What if it's HR information? Then you have people asking, like, who are the o most overpaid people in this company? You know, what if it's like the badge information and how many hours people are working? Or David Sacks (00:30:45): That's more permissions, Jason, but even if OpenAI can nail the permissions problem, I think there's just a lot of enterprises who will not wanna trust their data to Openai. Jason Calacanis (00:30:53): They're David Sacks (00:30:53): gonna be afraid about where it goes. This is why I think open source is taking off in a big way is that I think big enterprises would much rather roll their own models and control it and do the fine tuning, and that's why they're using tools like mosaic and hugging faces. They wanna have control over it themselves. David Friedberg (00:31:09): That's a in point. And that has implications as well into the hardware, which is also probably a good jumping off point for ARM because this, that what you said is exactly must happen for the integrity of an organization to to wanna use these things. And if that happens, then It just further further accelerates, I think, how the hardware will get extracted and, frankly, quasi open source as well. Jason Calacanis (00:31:31): Alright. Let's talk. Facebook did a David Friedberg (00:31:32): great job of this because, like, Facebook was building data centers, they had to invent tremendous capabilities that didn't exist before, and the market was really fragmented. It was very expensive. And what they did was they basically created these reference designs for servers and blades in the whole nine yards and open source the whole thing. And it just, you know, in, in essence, destroyed a market, but it created a hyper efficient market that then everybody could use. And I think the question is that if it's happening at the software layer already now, just like it did in web 2 software, And then we see certain elements of what to hardware have been open sourced. I think it makes pretty logical sense that you can expect the same things to happen in the AI world. The AI models and the AI platforms and the a all of that stuff will first get open source because it's a data integrity security issue. And then the hardware will get a open source as well because you just want simple reference designs you can use and plug and play. Jason Calacanis (00:32:30): Yeah. If you wanna look at that, it's called the open compute project, open compute dot org, just a way to use open source to grind down the prices, take out the margin, I guess, is what you're saying, Chamath, to make all these data centers, scale. Right? Well, and so David Sacks (00:32:46): Yeah. So one related story here is this just happened in the last few weeks, there's a company called CoreWeave, which provides cloud infrastructure for in the form of a loan. What what we was trying to do, it's kind of like a AWS, but for GPUs. So essentially, instead of having to buy your own GPUs, in order to, you know, set up your own infrastructure, you just basically rent compute from these guys. David Friedberg (00:33:16): But this is, this is exactly why, like, none of these, none of these companies will really be allowed to exist in this exactly 4 or 5 years from now, because ultimately, What people want is massive throughput, right, tokens per second, give me as many tokens per second as possible. And they don't particularly care, again, If you understand the model, do they really care what the underlying substrate hardware should be? It doesn't seem like they should. They should care what is the throughput, What do I pay for it? And by the way, that is exactly what happened when AWS really start to scale. Because if you guys remember, when we started to first subtract code into AWS, what do we care about? How much did an EC 2 instance cost? How much did an S3 bucket cost? And that's all we cared about because that abstraction allowed us to not care about the underlying hardware, who was the vendor, what was the con configuration. It didn't matter. And so in an interesting way, we're gonna go through that same evolution here because it's just economically rational that that kind of market exists. You should only care tokens per second, I think. Jason Calacanis (00:34:13): Alright. In other news, oh, and by the way, there's, something called common crawl, which is another interesting open source project that'll is getting a lot more attention today because they have crawl the web and you can use this common crawl. They release it in and, that's what a lot of people are training their data on. Now they don't have permission from all those people to do training data, but they do have the ability for you download an open crawl essentially what Google has, and you have a an open source version of it. David Friedberg (00:34:41): So Carmen Crowll was started and funded by Gil Elbas. Yeah. He's a he's a friend. Gil sold his company, applied semantics to Google. Back in 0203. And a big part of his effort with, common crawl is to That's accurate. David Friedberg (00:35:00): Is it AdSense? Jason Calacanis (00:35:01): AdSense words. Yeah. David Friedberg (00:35:03): AdSense. So, basically, applied semantics could read a web page and then create the keywords associated with the content on that webpage. And then those keywords would trigger AdWords ads on the on the webpage. So they called it AdSense. So AdSense started and the whole publisher network at Google was born from the Applied Symantics acquisition. And Gil was obviously a pretty significant shareholder of Google He's even in the s 1 as one of the major shareholders. He's a a really great human being. And his intention with this common crawl project was, you know, to make the crawling of the web, the index, and the caching available, for all these different projects that might exist. And he didn't at the time anticipate the, the OpenAI application becoming, you know, the big breakthrough. But when GPT 3 was published, I think they said that 80 plus percent of the waiting came from the content out of common crawl. And so it's really been this, this amazing project, completely nonprofit, all funded mostly funded by Gil, and, has really unlocked this opportunity for a lot of the open source alternatives to now try and provide solutions that can exist and coexist with OpenAI and others in the in the commercial options in the world. Jason Calacanis (00:36:16): A small piece of trivia. We were one of the first AdSense publishers. And so here's a story from October of 2005 web logs, Inc. We should engage it in the the blogging company I started hit $3000 a day in AdSense. Thanks to Gail and the team over there, and we wind up selling it to David Friedberg (00:36:33): That's awesome. Jason Calacanis (00:36:34): And this is the story about it. And and we were including David Friedberg (00:36:36): That's awesome. Jason Calacanis (00:36:37): In the s 1, they had 2 examples of publishers. 1 was New York Times, and then one was Weblog Zinc. They wanted to show, like, an upstart and this one. And David Friedberg (00:36:45): so lot Jason Calacanis (00:36:46): of history here, and it's fun to go back, down to it. And we were we were in the s one for David Friedberg (00:36:50): By the way, Gail was gonna be at the summit. So, Speaker 4 (00:36:52): Oh, you David Friedberg (00:36:52): could go to the summit? Speaker 4 (00:36:53): Oh, I'm David Friedberg (00:36:53): gonna give him Jason Calacanis (00:36:54): a hug and take a picture. David Friedberg (00:36:55): Charles Barkley had this great story, which is like he it's like over the moon about being a grandfather. I saw this on 60 And he said, it's because I want my grandchild grandson to Google me and notice that I did some things, and then we can talk about it. Speaker 4 (00:37:12): Yeah. David Friedberg (00:37:12): And Jay Jacob, that I had this thought for you. Like, that's like, that's a cool piece of internet history that you're a part of. Yeah. You know, hopefully your your your grandkids will Google that, and you can tell them as far as pretty cool. Jason Calacanis (00:37:23): Or, you know, 1800 episodes of this weekend start ups. I just tweeted, an episode with Gary Tan from 2009 that I recorded at Sequoia's office, and I just put it on the, this weekend startup support account. It's pretty funny to have baby face Gary Tan for posterous on there. Alright. Arm officially filed its F One. It's kinda like an s one for a foreign company, and they plan to go public Next month, ARMs revenue last quarter, 675,000,000, down 2% year over year, up 7% quarter over quarter. Fiscal full year 2023, 2.7000000000ish, down 1% year over year. Farmers Manager business, just so you know, is a smart 99% of smartphones, are built with Arm's chip architecture. David Friedberg (00:38:06): Embedded systems. They, they have a massive systems. Yeah. We'll get into it. The problem is the market totally move. When SoftBank bought Arm, it was probably like the last year where, you know, there was so much focus on the hardware and platform technologies inside of mobile and tablets and all that stuff. But in these last few years, think of what's happened. We've had a massive shift to AI. Right? And so that's pushing a lot more pressure on GPUs and whatever comes after that. We have had a reemergence of the popularity of risk fee which is an open source competitor to Arm. We have had Apple in source a whole bunch of their own architectural decisions in Silicon Design because Jason Calacanis (00:38:45): they don't want the dependency a tiny profit. Yeah. Well, also, they also care about different things. Like, they care about battery life. So that's why, you know, that's the focus of their chip architecture. David Friedberg (00:38:54): And so all of this just means that That market embedded systems becomes more and more constrained and commoditized over time, which again, as we said, in capitalism means that future profits will be less than historical profits. And so I think this is a very tough valuation to get right and trying to stretch to a 60 or $70,000,000,000 print, I think, is really tough. This is a Honestly, a 15 to $20,000,000,000 company. Jason Calacanis (00:39:24): Ouch. So, a question for you, Chamath, and I'll open it up to to the Davis. Why would SoftBank I know the answer, but I'm asking you so you can explain it to the audience. Why would SoftBank take a company public with these headwinds, with no growth being flat, why are they taking the public now? David Friedberg (00:39:43): Well, SoftBank has the de lever, right? They have a they have a very big problem which is that they have this forget SoftBank Vision Fund for a second, but SoftBank itself is a telco operator that has ginormous piles of debt that they've used to finance the building of their business. And so when you have contraction in your core business, You become more and more at risk of breaching the covenants of all that debt and, or you just, like, run out of free cash flow. Like, all of these things, really hurt your future ability to invest. And so SoftBank is under a lot of pressure to just clean up the balance sheet and de lever. And so when you have an asset like this sitting there, if you can sell, you know, $20 or $30,000,000,000 of that, call it to somebody and then replenish your balance sheet that provides tremendous liquidity and relief And they did that as well a few months ago with Alibaba. They've started to I think now they may have sold out the overwhelming majority of the position in Alibaba. Again, because they have massive liquidity needs because they have so much bring the balance sheet. Jason Calacanis (00:40:54): So they're forced to get it out is, I guess, what you're saying. And then we've talked Saks a little bit about other companies that are gonna be forced they're on the what do they call when you're on a pirate ship? They make you walk the plank. I'd say this is like the walking of the plank to to an IPO. You got other companies that have issues where they just have to get public at some point. So maybe the public markets are gonna open up. And, in some cases, it's gonna be because people are walking the plank. Other cases, it's gonna be opportunistic. So maybe you could talk a little bit about your thoughts on that. David Sacks (00:41:24): I think it's hard to walk clients into the public markets. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that because the public markets have to wanna buy your issuance. Speaker 4 (00:41:31): So if David Sacks (00:41:31): it's not a good company, then, you know, in this environment, they're not gonna be able IPO. Jason Calacanis (00:41:35): Well, they're gonna be able to RPO. I think the question is the price. They have no choice but to David Friedberg (00:41:39): get this out. David Sacks (00:41:39): So, yeah, there may be a lot of down rounds. Into an IPO from the last private round, which was 2 or 3 times what the IPO price is gonna be. And maybe what you mean by walk the print plan is that Will you tell me? But there are a lot of companies which have built up huge press stacks because they raised too much money at the peak at valuations that are too high. And going public does allow you to reset your whole press stack because all the preferred with all the rights and preferences converts to common. So post IPO, you just have common. Yeah. And so it is a way to, like, clear out all the structure and all the mess that has built in a company, and you can get to a real valuation that reflects basically the truth of what the company is worth. Jason Calacanis (00:42:22): Another analogy might be. The house is on you gotta you're on the balcony. You gotta jump, or you gotta stay in the burning building. David Sacks (00:42:27): Yeah. But, you know, listen, if your company's on fire, I don't think you're gonna be able to IPO. I mean, it's it's gonna be a tough scrutinizing public market for new offerings. I think that the scenario in which you can IPO is if the company is fundamentally good, it will be able to IPO at some valuation, and that valuation may be a significant down round from their last private rounds, those will be able to get out. Jason Calacanis (00:42:52): Yeah. And that's Stripe, I guess. Now are you seeing David Sacks (00:42:54): Stripe. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:42:56): Are you seeing, David, the M and A activity starting to bubble up in your portfolio or in, you know, the back channels? Because I'm starting to see that a bit. Founders are packing it in in some instances and saying, you know what? We wanna try for M and a or, you know, some companies are getting a little bit frisky and saying, hey, what what's available in the market on the small side? So are you are you seeing an any any M and A action? David Sacks (00:43:17): Not a ton yet, but there's definitely a growing number of startups who are realizing that what they're doing is not working, and they're not gonna be able to raise another round. And so, therefore, figuring out a graceful exit whether it's an aqua hire or some other type of landing. Speaker 6 (00:43:33): Got it. Those are those might Jason Calacanis (00:43:34): be the accurate walking the planks. David Sacks (00:43:35): Yes. Those are the walking the planks. You're gonna start seeing a lot more for sure. Jason Calacanis (00:43:39): Friedberg, your thoughts on the in the on the public markets here in in relation to privates and people walking the plank. David Friedberg (00:43:46): I don't think there is a public market right now. There's no IPO window. This arm thing is, you know, pretty forced it seems it's not like there's a ton of pent up public demand to buy these armchairs. At least that's what it seems. So know, they're they're gonna go shop it. They're gonna find out what the market tells them it's worth. And and then we'll see. Nvidia is gonna help buoy it. I'm sure. There'll be an argument that, you know, all boats will rise and arm will be a beneficiary, but I don't know if that necessarily leads into the IPO window being open again. I think we've all heard the commentary from Morgan Stanley that they don't think the window's opening until q2, q3 of next year, maybe. I I I can't remember the exact commentary. But as as we all know, a lot of LPs inventure funds and private equity funds are waiting for the IPO window to reopen before they're gonna start reallocating capital back into the private venture funds because they need to get liquid in order to be able to recycle capital back into the next class of of funds. So this glut right now, this inability to kinda get companies public is certainly weighing on folks. You know, you effectively have 3 options when you're running a private company, you gotta keep raising money, which means either raise private capital or go public. And we've talked about the challenges of late raising late stage private capital if you've had a high private valuation in your prior round. Going public is very difficult right now because a lot of folks are still digesting and having indigestion from the last couple of years, or you gotta sell the company or you gotta get profitable. Now on the the sell the company side, many of the acquisitions that we're seeing with a few exceptions are generally more bolt on and less like, hey, I'm gonna pay some big strategic premium for some big strategic game changing company right now because all the buyers are dealing with their own shareholder issues and their own public shock issues right now. And the, you know, can you get profitable? It's really, as you guys know, where a lot of folks are going, which is totally restructure your ambition, restructure your plans, and build a business where customers are willing to pay you money and where you can then take that profit and only reinvest that profit and not invest more than that profit. David Friedberg (00:45:58): And if you can get to that steady state, you know, you can live to see another another day, another year, another decade, And those businesses, by the way, that we saw on the dot com boom and the global financial crisis, that that we're able to do that during the the Doldrum Death Valley March that everyone's going through right now, they emerged victorious. They learned how to be frugal. They learned how to be nimble. They learned how to really focus on customer experience because they had to increase retention, and they had to increase the prices they were charging. They learned how to be efficient with allocating resources. And so profitability became a a core part of their DNA and their ability to succeed. So I think this is really a a a trial era. And, you know, on the other side of this trial era, a number of very high quality companies will emerge, but in the interim, I don't think that there's a an IPO path that a lot of folks can just check the box and say, hey. Let's go ahead and go public even if the valuation's not great. Remember, an IPO process, you gotta over sell your book or the bankers won't underwrite it. So at if they're you know, you can't just say, hey. The price is now five bucks and expect bankers are there. If a company's burning money, the big concern with going public right now is that there is no pipe market. There is no ability to do secondary to do follow on offerings. So the company can't raise capital after it's public. So unless you're actually profitable, your option of going public right now really isn't there because shareholders don't wanna buy shares in a company that may run out of money. Jason Calacanis (00:47:24): Yeah. And that would end up yeah. Yeah. And to your point, if you this third option and you you you become really resilient and you have profits jam off, that seems to me to be the setup for the next boom that we could experience in the coming years, hopefully, which is we don't have companies that are burning, you know, mountains of cash people are getting to profitable. These businesses look great. And then if the big companies are now, you know, having their stock and they've laid off 20,000 employees, and they got people returning to the office, and they're fit, and they're strong. Hey, that's a setup for strong companies buying strong companies or those strong companies That are private. The M David Friedberg (00:48:00): and A market is dead as a doorknob. It's more dead than the IPO market. So 2 days ago, the European Commission and the CMA in the UK said that they're probing Adobe Figma because they have some concerns that it's gonna limit competition in the market. It looks like Microsoft will have to Give a 15 year license to video game streaming to ubisoft in order to get the UK folks to agree to Activision to their Activision acquisition. So you're talking about, in the first case, a $20,000,000,000 merger that may not happen because the CMA they found their footing. They clearly had a win in the Microsoft Activision thing and now they're probably going to find issue with the Adobe Figma thing. And the Europeans don't want to be left out in the action, so they're jumping in. So I think the M and A market is effectively dead. What it leaves is an IPO market, but that is very tenuous because you don't have a leading candidate that can really catalyze something. And I made this prediction earlier, but I think the only company that can really catalyze things would be if people were ready to do Starlink. I mean, it's it's the most obvious natural logical thing that would just get everybody excited and off the sidelines and into the arena. But that may take another year. May not, but it may. In the meantime, I don't think there's any company like Instacart. I don't think people are going to be jumping off the sidelines. Arm. It'll be tough. Even Stripe now is like a very complicated valuation trade. And I think that that's a really technical thing to be involved in in an IPO like that. A tenders evaluation. And so companies have no choice except to get profitable and get to default to live to use the famous Paul Graham quote. Deers, that's the only path. Jason Calacanis (00:49:49): That's it. Yeah. I mean, that's the only path. David Sacks (00:49:51): Either have to be defaultalive, which means profitable or default investable, which means that you're capable of producing metrics that a VC will fund. But really that starts with 100% year over year growth. There's a lot of companies that aren't growing very fast. They're growing 20, 30, 40, 50, 60% growth. That's not VC Fundable. Jason Calacanis (00:50:11): Yeah. Or David Sacks (00:50:11): they're flat, even worse. Some are shrinking. So those cases, they gotta think more like a PE model than a venture model. Yeah. And PE companies are cash flow positive. They don't burn cash. Speaker 4 (00:50:23): I'll come to the new world. David Sacks (00:50:25): I put out this video a few months ago, called VC or PE. What's the right framework for thinking about your startup? This was a, Oh, Craft Ventures. Jason Calacanis (00:50:33): You too. David Sacks (00:50:34): This was a talk that I gave to our portfolio companies. We recorded it and then published it. Really, it should have gotten more attention, but this was basically recommending to all those slower growing companies in our portfolios, stop thinking that VC funding is always gonna be available and start thinking more like a PE funded Private Equity company, which is to say you need to cut your burn to get cash or positive. You will then be able to control your own destiny. So, yeah, the slide here, if you're not VC eligible, act realistically. So we provided some guidance on what makes a company eligible for VC funding. And you can see there's a good column. There's a great column. Good starts at 2 x growth, greatest three x, gross margins, good starts at 50%, great is 80%. Net dollar retention, good starts at a 100%, great's 120%. CAC payback, Good is 12 to 18 months. Great is 6 to 12 months. Burn multiple. Good is one and a half, great as 1 or less. And then there's some danger zones as well. This was to provide them with some realistic guidance in terms of whether they'll be able to raise another VC round or not. And I can tell you like most startups in start world right now are in the danger zone. It's a really tough environment. And so, you know, listen, if you're a startup with sub 1,000,000 of ARR and you're in the danger zone, you're probably gonna have to pack it in or maybe you package yourself up for an aqua hire. But if you're a startup that has 50,000,000 of ARR, but you're in the danger zone. Just cut your burn. You could basically make yourselves cash flow positive and you could engineer an outcome for yourself, a pretty good outcome. David Friedberg (00:52:12): My anecdotal experience is, one of our larger investments We brought in a private equity firm where they came in. And my god, it's been an incredible experience. Because the combination of how like a VC looks at a business and how a PE firm looks at a business in a moment like this is hyper additive because it's super clarifying. It's very straightforward, and it gives a CEO an extremely clear mandate from which to operate, and then they become very measurable and I found it to be a really, really healthy thing. Now PE guys can only get in folds and companies of a certain size. So it limits Jason Calacanis (00:52:52): 50,000,000 and above in revenue, 100,000,000? Yeah. David Friedberg (00:52:54): In our case, it was a 400,000,00380, 300, more than 300,000,000 in revenue. So it's a big it's a big company, but My point is just just more that we were moving along a trajectory to getting to default alive, but by adding that PE discipline to Jason Calacanis (00:53:10): our board. David Friedberg (00:53:11): Boom. I think we were able to focus on it probably a year to 18 months faster and with specific precision because they have a very different toolkit and a reaction to misexecution. And that's extremely healthy. Jason Calacanis (00:53:26): Yeah. We had this happen, you know, meeting with, just from the front lines, we, we meet with we have 20,000 people apply for funding from our firm. In large part, I would say we doubled the number of applications after all in started. So shout out to my besties here. It's really helped our deal flow. And we find companies, and we found a company that was obsessed with all in, and the 2 founders were quants, and they made this company called StoneAlgo. We meet this company. They they've got very little money. It's a bootstrap company, and they got to a half $1,000,000 in revenue you know, just on sweat equity. And we find this company, it's not part of the Silicon Valley, you know, accelerator system, It's basically kayak for diamonds, shout out to the team over there. And we were able to place a nice bet on this company that was breakeven. And, you know, put in, you know, a couple of $100,000 to to start start them down this, road to growing faster. But what a delightful thing to find a profitable company in the world. And so if you have a profitable company, like and it's just 50000 a month or 25000 a month, please email me nackelegones.com. I want to invest in your company. When you have that company, small amount of revenue profitable, you're not burning a ton. You are attractive to investors right now. It's the it's the highest attractiveness in the world. And I just wanna point out, David, as this market has you know, completely gone from absolute chaos. The hair has gotten tighter and tighter. You were in crazy abandon, and now you are tight tight is right. Sachs is focused. He's deploying that LP capital. He's deploying that advice to SAS Companies, and it's no joke now, folks. General sacks is here. He is not crazy. History uncle. He is Speaker 4 (00:55:10): SAS sacks. Jason Calacanis (00:55:10): His SAS sacks is back. David Sacks (00:55:15): This is like when, Marcus Zuckerberg started wearing a tie to work to start showing that it was serious? Jason Calacanis (00:55:21): Yes. Yes. Sass is SAS Sachs and Sirius Sachs back with that slick back hair. Alright. Listen, we gotta get going here. We got a lot more on the docket. I I I think we just Maybe I'm gonna jump the fence here and we just go right to the Republican primary. David Friedberg (00:55:37): The funniest thing last night was at poker. We watched it. Jason Calacanis (00:55:41): You watched it during poker. David Friedberg (00:55:42): Were you able to focus? You have to hear Kevin Hart react when all these guys are doing it. It's one of the funniest things I've ever heard. And the worst part of the poker was Jason Calacanis (00:55:57): the magician. Here we go. David Friedberg (00:56:00): It says, Joanne. How can you both be playing poker here, but also off the debate statement? David Friedberg (00:56:08): Which I thought David Friedberg (00:56:08): which I thought was a really funny joke. But it was funny, but it was funny. It was very funny. Jason Calacanis (00:56:17): Alright. Listen. I know everybody's I just wanna go around the horn here. Friedberg Did you watch the debate? Who won the debate? Who had the largest gain? Net gain in terms of their profile in your mind after watching debate number 1 of the GI David Friedberg. Biggest game. David Friedberg (00:56:37): I watched the debate. I kinda think about these guys on three dimensions, which is the content how dynamic they are and and their personality. Jason Calacanis (00:56:46): I think David Friedberg (00:56:46): those are the three dimensions that people are gonna be kind of assessing them on. I think Nikki Haley did a tremendous job gaining interest with respect to her personality, and her content. Bergam, Hutchinson, I don't think had a chance to move the needle on any of them. I think Vivek was by far the winner on dynamic. He had the the hardest hitting biggest comeback with a very close second being Chris Christie, but I do think that Vivek got taken apart when it comes to content. And I have real concerns about his personality. There's a lot of people that are just turned off by him, that he seems a little too eager, that he seems a little too smart for his own good. The commentary about him being so junior and doesn't have experience, I think, standing next to those guys on stage, really showed, to be honest. Mickey Haley tearing him apart on his, point of view on Russia and Saks, you know, we can debate the point or not, but I think she did a masterful I David Sacks (00:57:52): don't think she tore him apart. I think the biggest dunk line of the evening was when he congratulated her on her future appointments to the boards of Raytheon and Lockheed. David Friedberg (00:58:02): Yeah. That was I thought David Sacks (00:58:03): that was brilliant. David Friedberg (00:58:04): Just need his most dynamic character. And I think people, people do in a democracy vote on that. They vote on how dynamic someone is. They vote on their personality and whether they can trust the person. I think Nikki Haley shines there. She seems extremely trustworthy and personable. Chris Christie came across as very personable. So you're big winners. Yeah. Mike Pence, I would say under, underwhelmed and Ron DeSantis, man, it's like he didn't show up. So yeah. I would say Haley, Chris Christie, Vivek, and Kim Scott are probably, like, you know, across those dimensions, like, you know, the 4 runners and everyone else is probably off. Jason Calacanis (00:58:42): Now let me get you up and then, Zach, you get to comment on both of there. So I wanna go to you last because you have the most passion here. Chamath, who are your big winners coming out of it? In other words, who gained the most last night? David Friedberg (00:58:54): What can Brown do for you? What can Brown do for you? Jason Calacanis (00:58:57): I think that Okay. UPS settlement. Great. David Friedberg (00:58:59): I thought that I thought that Nikki Haley did an incredible job. And I do think that Vivek did a very good job. And I think what's interesting is that I'm fascinated to see what the Republican reaction over the next few weeks will be to Vivek. And specifically what I'm interested in seeing is Do the trump loyalists start to were they incepted with an idea yesterday? Which is that this guy can give us a lot of the talking points we want without some of the heartburn and audio that we don't want. And if he is able to thread that needle, which is what I think his effective strategy has been, He could really build momentum going into the fall. So that was my that was my real takeaway. Is that he is refining a playbook. Look, the guy is a clearly a really brilliant person, well studied, well prepared and dynamic, as David said, so he can, you know, clap back at people, which I think is important. But the most important thing that he's done is he has defined a very precise strategy to thread this needle of being close enough to trump to frankly eventually Go after him, but do it in a way where he's slowly building credibility among Trump loyalists. And I think if you look at where Other people made huge gaps, unnecessary gaps, was they took their beliefs and they confuse them with the strategy of winning. And that doesn't work in the David Friedberg (01:00:46): Republican party. So when the candidates were asked about David Friedberg (01:00:46): Trump and the ones that drew hard line and said that this guy's gonna go to jail. What happened? They got booed. And it just ended their ability to be credible for what they said afterwards. I'm not saying that that's right or wrong. It's just an observation. So I think Vivek is doing the smartest job of understanding the rules on the field And he's in the arena to work. Okay. Jason Calacanis (01:01:11): So now that David Friedberg (01:01:12): gives him a lot. That gives him a Jason Calacanis (01:01:13): lot of chance. Now we go to Saks. Sacks, you heard Nicky Vivek Christy from Friedberg, Here Vivek, Nicky, and Tim Scott. So Vivek clearly, the buzz and the search terms and everything, you know, seems to be favoring Vivek as the big lift here do you think Vivek is the trump change agent without the indictments without the baggage without the trump derangement syndrome insanity. Is is Chamath correct here that he's a more palatable version of the change agent that is trump? David Sacks (01:01:43): I think he's positioning himself as the backup plan to trump. So he's not criticizing Trump. He is cultivating support within Trump's space. Again, not to supersede him, but I think to perhaps be a backup plan. I think it is a smart strategy. But let me back up a little bit here. Jason Calacanis (01:02:00): Who won for you? David Sacks (01:02:02): Well We had the bet. Jason Calacanis (01:02:02): We had the best game before you make your points. We had the biggest game. Everybody else played the game. Biggest game. David Sacks (01:02:07): Well, clearly, the biggest game was that's reflected in in the polling. There's a poll on drudge report in which 33%, which is the highest number said that he won the debate 22% for Haley, 18% for DeSantis. Christie got 16%. The rest were just nonfactors. So Nate scientific, but pre It's not scientific, but is corroborated by Nate Silver had a Yes. Some stock this morning, basically saying that based on the buzz on social media and the sentiment Jason Calacanis (01:02:34): that he predict this, David Sacks (01:02:36): Google trends, he predicted that Vivek would we keep saying Vivek Vivek, it's It is David Friedberg (01:02:43): it's great. It's a debate. It's a debate. It's a fake. David Sacks (01:02:46): He's gonna have the biggest bounce out of the debate. Partly, that's a function of the fact that he was the least well known candidate. Jason Calacanis (01:02:53): Okay. David Sacks (01:02:53): So this gave him a lot of exposure, and he has a good orator. I mean, just the way he talks the energy, the timbre of his voice, he projects well, and he had a clear point of view in this debate. You may not agree with everything he said, but he had a very clear point of view. And I expect that both the number of people who like him and the number of people who dislike him will go up as a result of this, but I think the net effect of that will be positive. Now let me back up just to give you a couple more thoughts on the debate. First of all, in terms of winners, I think the Republican Party in a way demonstrated that it is the party of ideas where there actually are debates happening because you saw here, I think, real differences between the candidates. And I could break them up into really 3 categories, if you like. There's this neocon wing of sort of hard line foreign policy Hawks. And you saw a Dickie Haley's part of that in Chris Christie and Pence. Ment him Scott. Then you had this religious right faction where you've got Pence and Scott. And then you've kinda got the Mago wing, which Vivek really took up the mantle of opposing Ukraine and defending Trump. So you have 3 very different groups within the party who are battling I think, for mindshare within the party and to be the future of the party. So it's not just about candidates and personal style, but it really is about ideas. You compare that to the Democratic party. They're not even having a debate. They're protecting Biden from a debate. There could be a real debate because RfK junior has really different ideas, and he would like to take the party in a very different direction, the direction of his father and uncle, Bobby Kennedy, and John F Kennedy. He's saying that we have moved away from where we should be as a party, but the people who control the democratic party do not wanna have that debate. They shut it down completely. David Sacks (01:04:43): There is no debate. They're just protecting Biden. So that's number one is I think we should give the Republican party some credit for being willing to discuss and debate ideas. Jason Calacanis (01:04:52): With you on that. I love the fact that you had a vibrant debate. You had differences of opinions. Now it was a little like a UFC fight and, you know, zingers and back and forth. But I I did like the fact that you had people who in moderation was actually surprisingly good. When they forced them to say, like, would you give Trump a pardon? Or, you know, what would you do in terms of support for Ukraine? This was, like, really well done. And they had that 32nd thing when they stopped people, they say, hey. This is the 32nd one, and they had to rein in pence because he kept, you know, interrupting, and they were kind of respectful about it. So I just want to shout out to Fox for good moderation. There were some crazy zingers in there as well. And it seems like we live in Zinger culture. I think the the best Zinger goes to the moderator. We said, let's talk about the elephant that's not in the room. Speaker 6 (01:05:41): And then they brought up Trump. David Sacks (01:05:42): Well, frankly, Speaker 6 (01:05:43): you caught that one, but that Jason Calacanis (01:05:44): was pretty hardcore. David Sacks (01:05:45): Well, so let's talk about winner number 2, which was trump. Because Trump did not participate, and he didn't pay any price whatsoever for that. He barely got mentioned or attacked on that stage, And then he did this interview with Tucker, which started pricing as before the debate, which was kinda brilliant because once again, Trump was able to suck up a lot of the oxygen, maybe not all of it, but a lot of oxygen without even participating in the debate. Jason Calacanis (01:06:08): It was a perfect bookend. I watched both. It was a perfect bookend. You got Trump over here saying chum off. I'm I'm interested in your position already. He said, listen, I don't need to be in there with these guys mudsling, and they have 0 or 1%. Well and I I I think he got the sense that he's excited to debate them. When there's two people left or something like that. What what did you think of? Did you watch Trump's thing, Friedberg or Chamath? Can I watch it? David Friedberg (01:06:29): I watched the debate. I watched the debate only. David Sacks (01:06:31): I watched both the debate, and then I watched. David Friedberg (01:06:33): I do think Trump effectively won the debate night because you had all these guys going at each other. And then you had trump playing the trump card. I'm not even gonna show up because I don't have to. He literally made himself better than everyone else in the room by saying I'm not even it's not even worth my time. To show up to talk to you guys, go ahead and fight with each other. I'll also just restate this, this point about Vivek. I think it became abundantly clear that his strategy his his strategy is to pander to the trump audience, that his commentary about, you know, god is real, climate change is opposed. There's 2 genders. He knows through polling, through his understanding, and his intelligence. That this is what this audience, that is the bulk of the voting members of the Republican party, want to hear and he is telling them what they want to hear. And then David Sacks (01:07:29): isn't that the Java politician? Speaker 4 (01:07:31): Yeah. David Sacks (01:07:31): I mean, isn't that better than pandering to the military industrial complex? Like Nikki Haley did? David Friedberg (01:07:35): There was a comment last night that I thought was really important, which is that leadership is not about consensus. And what he is doing is he is reflecting back consensus view of the majority of people in that party in order to get himself elected rather than leading with a different message that casts a different opportunity, the different light, on the opportunity for this nation. And I think that's really where he and others on that stage, or he particularly falls short, is that he speaks too much to what people already believe and say because he knows that that's what they're voting for Trump about. And then the bet is that there's some chance, not a 100%, but some chance that Trump doesn't make it all the way, ends up in jail or people start to turn on him. And then he's the front runner because he's basically captivated that audio to the same message. Jason Calacanis (01:08:18): Yeah. Hold on. But but Friedberg, and I will let you address it here. Chamath just said the brilliance of Vivek and his positioning here is that he understands how to win, and he is playing this game. And you call it pandering, Sacs, is, I think, saying it's understanding the needs of that audience. It the job of a politician Sachs is to win and to stay in office. So I don't believe the vapes positions on a lot of the stuff. I think he is pandering. I think he wouldn't do what Trump did. I think you know, he's he's doing the part in Promise because he knows it gets some votes. So how do you reconcile this? Your your job is to win, right? You would rather see DeSantis maybe pick up on some of this action. No? David Friedberg (01:09:01): Ben, that's a good question. Friedberg, do you think that a politician's job, when you're running for president of the United States, is it to understand the conditions on the field and win or not? David Friedberg (01:09:13): I think the politician's job or I I I don't wanna say the job. I think the opportunity to get elected in a democracy is to provide leadership, to cast a light on where you think the country or whatever constituency you're supposed to lead can go to to Jason Calacanis (01:09:29): provide a sense of opportunity, to provide a sense of David Friedberg (01:09:33): optimism, to provide a sense of what's not happening today that should be different rather than reflecting back to those people exactly what they want. Now the flip side of that is exactly what you're saying, Shamoff. Which is that I think what happens in a democracy is that people elect people that represent what they believe. And I think that's what's gonna happen. A lot of and he's he's raising. He's raising his hand, and he's saying, I believe these things. He's gonna get elected, or he's gonna put himself in a position to get elected if Trump drops out. David Friedberg (01:09:57): I just think there's a lot of people who are very smart who, if they are too idealistic, will achieve nothing in their lives, and I don't think Vivek is one of those people. Idealism has a place in the world. It's not the debate stage when you're running for president of the United States. Okay. Jason Calacanis (01:10:11): Sachs, you wanted to get in here. Go. David Sacks (01:10:12): Okay. Let's take the issue of Ukraine because that was one of the main issues that viveque differed from the rest of the people on that stage. There is polling by CNN that a majority of Americans have now turned against the idea of giving more aid to Ukraine. I'm sure that number is much higher in the Republican party. If you remember, there was an event, Charlie Kirk, who is a conservative influencer, has an event called Turning Point USA. And they did polling of their conference attendees. The number one issue that everyone agreed on was Ukraine 95% of the attendees opposed giving more aid to Ukraine. Donald Trump only got 85% popularity. So the base of the party is even more united against Joe Biden's Speaker 4 (01:10:58): policy in Ukraine than they are on loving Trump. David Sacks (01:10:59): K? That tells you something. And yet, Viveca is the only kid on that stage that was willing to raise his hand, like, aggressively, like, full throatedly, not kind of a half hearted. To saying that he did not agree with Biden's policy on Ukraine. What is wrong with all these other people on the stage that they cannot understand what is wrong with Biden's Ukraine policy, which by the way is the signature policy of his presidency. What is the point of Republicans nominating a candidate who's just gonna agree with Joe Biden on providing aid to Ukraine as much it takes for as Speaker 4 (01:11:35): long as it takes. Is this your David Sacks (01:11:35): position here at Freeburg? Is that Jason Calacanis (01:11:39): you know, win at all costs, let's call it the Vivek, win at all costs, play the game on the field as Shamaka saying, and and just win the game. Versus being principled because you did have a No. No. No. David Friedberg (01:11:49): No. I I think that that framing is such a setup. Can can I can I just Speaker 4 (01:11:52): say something? Jason Calacanis (01:11:52): Frame it how you want. You you said playing the game on the field, and Friedberg said having a principal here and having, like, an actual vision for the country. So I'm taking both of yours. David Sacks (01:12:02): I think the framing is not as not what is wrong with the vague, but what is wrong with candidates like Christie and Pence and Haley and Scott, where even though 95% of their party is opposed to Ukraine, they are adopting Joe Biden's policy And their only criticism of Joe Biden is that he's not doing enough fast enough for David Friedberg (01:12:23): them. Okay. Jason Calacanis (01:12:23): Let's let Friedberg get in here. David Sacks (01:12:25): They're completely out of step, which our Republican party as it stands today. Jason Calacanis (01:12:28): We got your point. But is it not Friedberg? What you're saying is that there is this profile and courage to to invoke that book where you there's something that's unpopular that you have to do. And I think Nikki Haley, Pence, Christie, and the other ones who are pro defending Ukraine from Russia, Their profile encourage, Friedberg is that they will go against that 95% polling and say it's the right thing to do. We should defend Taiwan. We should defend Israel. We should defend Ukraine against Those David Sacks (01:12:57): are 3 different issues. Jason Calacanis (01:12:58): I know it's 3 different issues, but they were all evoked by the Vivek himself. So Friedberg, your chance? David Friedberg (01:13:03): I think The West Wing does a great job of exploring both sides of this, which is when do you have to break the mold and break the expectation of the, the people to do the right principle thing. And when do you have to do the thing that you don't think is right? But it's what the people want to have happen. And I I think that that's a, obviously, a balance that needs to be struck when you're in this position of being an elected leader in a democracy. And so there's no there's no real answer. I wish that there was, like, I wish Mr. Beast had, like, a presidential process. Like, he you guys saw his Olympics video that he did last week where he brought people and he created just, like, these, like, 5 things. I wish that we had something like that to elect president. That it was more than just oration because we elect the president today based on their oratory skills. They go on stage and who has the best quippy comment The person who would be the most decisive under pressure doesn't necessarily win. The person who can inspire and attract and retain the best leadership. The person who can have the best foreign policy interactions with other leaders doesn't necessarily win. Those are skills that show up in other contexts. And when we put people on a stage and we say, okay. Speak to the audience. The guy who speaks the best looks the best. It's not necessarily the guy who is best equipped to handle the challenge of the Bay of Pigs or, you know, the decision on whether or not I think you're being very descriptive. I think you're being denied. Just just Jason Calacanis (01:14:30): you have the floor? Go. Come off. Go. David Friedberg (01:14:31): This is the like, it that's kinda like saying, why isn't it that it's the quarterback with the strongest arm that isn't the most successful. Why? Because that person is a fucking loser? And the person that's the winner is the one that can thread together a multifaceted set of skills to win the game. Tom Brady was drafted in the 7th round, not the 1st round. He wins the game. Because he has the requisite skills, which is a basket of things and a nuance of skills in different moments at different times. And so I think that you're being a little glibed by saying the person isn't cool under pressure or this or that. It's not true. The people that win these races have a preternatural ability to be a complete egoist, but not a narcissist. That is an incredibly deaf set of skills that a fair, rare people have. It gives them this energy to be out there talking to 1000 and 1000 and 1000 and 1000 and 1000 of people may be saying the same thing thousands of times. But being able to stay focused, being able to be on point, having a sense of what they need to believe, know the details in a certain part, know the high level at another part, stay punchy, but stay affable. Stay. That's the game. David Friedberg (01:15:45): There are a set of skills that it takes to become president. You test the oration skills of a person when you put them on a debate stage. You don't test the other complex skills that it takes to be president. And getting people to understand the complexity of the role and all the other of someone's personality are lacking in these fucking debates. David Friedberg (01:16:03): But there are other these other skills are in play in many things other than just the debate. Like the campaign is a highly sophisticated orchestration of running a small little government. David Sacks (01:16:13): Mario Cuomo famously said that you campaign and poetry and and government prose. And there is a difference between campaigning skills and governing skills. There is a gap there. I would update it to say that you govern in pros and campaign and tweets, you know, so the campaign definitely puts a huge emphasis on a candidate's communication skills, but that is not all just, gloss or style. It also has to do with their policies and the nuances of their policies and how they handle pressure, how good they are under pressure, and how good they are. When they're attacked. So, you know, we put these canister pressure cooker and kinda learn who they really are. I'm not sure it's a horrible process. David Friedberg (01:16:57): So, Saks, let me ask you a question. Yeah. Pence has been in the situation room dealing with a foreign adversary. Vivek has no military or defense experience. He has no foreign state experience. How do you assess Vivek in his ability to address those critical issues that he's gonna have to lead us through versus someone who's been there and done that? And how do you, you know, give the great question. Great question. David Sacks (01:17:19): Okay. Jason Calacanis (01:17:19): You trust them. You trust the vague. David Sacks (01:17:20): Pence made that argument against the vague, apparently not realizing that guy he was vice president for was in that exact same position in 2016. No previous political experience. Right. No experience being in the situation room. The only reason why Pence got to warm his ass on a chair in the situation room is because Donald Trump picked him to be his VP. Oh, but he wasn't responsible for making any important decisions. He was basically clocking time as vice president. Give me a break. And that's why he's at, what is it, 1 or 1% No one gives a shit about Pence. David Friedberg (01:17:52): That's what they said about Obama as well. Obama had zero experience. Obama barely could get elected before he became Senator and then president in a matter of 4 years. And for Bush, what happened to Bush? They said that exact argument as well, and what do they do? They packed them with rums spelled in Cheney. The, how did that Jason Calacanis (01:18:08): end? Yeah. I I just wanna also point out here that sometimes things get a little bit heated. And when we get heated, it's typically because we're we're triangulating around something very important. I think what we're trying triangulating around here is that we are moving, from an era of incumbents and and insiders to an era of outsiders. If to your point, Sachs, Post Trump, we now have the 2 or 3 most fascinating candidates are people, who do social media, who do podcasts, who do earned media, like we talked about, I think, 2 or 3 weeks ago, is really good in And Vivek is has mastered it. And he is exactly like Trump, and he's exactly like Obama to a certain extent in that those people were incredibly personable. They knew how to talk on podcasts. They knew how to engage people. And I think that, you know, this spiciness that we're having here on the pod and the spiciness that you're seeing with some of those candidates is that we're moving from traditional media defining these candidates to direct to consumer direct through Twitter slash acts, direct through podcasts, this podcast included, making people like RFK and Vivek, you know, very palatable people. And Ross Perot, I I know I'm gonna get laughed at for bringing this up who got 19% of the vote, which is a serious number, He went direct as well. After he dropped it. David Friedberg (01:19:27): After he dropped it. Jason Calacanis (01:19:29): No. He he he got 90%. Perault, because he actually went as an independent all the way. And what Ross Perault did was the equivalent of what Vivek and RFK are doing on podcast. He bought television time. You don't know that, or some people in the audience might not understand who Rossboro even is, but look it up. He bought television time, and he went direct to the country with our budget. I thought this is going to be the future of politics. What we're witnessing right now is the transition from traditional media and the establishment defining who the great candidates are to the public and the people on podcasts and social media who are the tip of the spear on the vanguard they're gonna pick the winners. And I think this could be the tip in point election. Trump was the 1st Obama than Trump and now Vivek and RfK So I just like you all to maybe respond to that, especially you, Saks, since you Speaker 4 (01:20:19): you brought Jason Calacanis (01:20:19): this earned media issue up 2 weeks ago. David Sacks (01:20:21): I ain't partially agree. Friedberg. In in this sense. Look, obviously track record is important. Obviously, the ability to be an executive, executive, functioning is important for the chief executive of of our country. So I'm not saying that we shouldn't look at that kind of record And this is why was one of the reasons why his support to San Francisco. I think he's been a brilliant governor. He's done a superb job in the state of Florida. He did the best job of all the governors during COVID. I think he did a better job than trump did during COVID. So listen, I think those things are important where I disagree is just because Mike Pence has, again, warmed a chair in the situation room as vice president, to me, that's just not that relevant experience. I mean, the VP is kind of a nothing job unless something terrible happens to the president and they get tapped on the shoulder. So I just disagree with what is relevant experience. 2nd, I think it's important to recognize that the reason why Vivek has Elaine here and the reason why Trump had a lane in 2016 is that the establishment wing of the party is so completely out of touch with what the base wants Look, the reason why Trump came out of nowhere in 2016 is he basically turned everything on his head. He said no more bushes, no more of these stupid forever wars in the Middle East, We need to build a wall. No more of this open border policy, and we need to reset our troubleshoot with with China. Those were 3 mega issues that no one else the party was talking about. And the the mega issue today is Ukraine, 95% of the bases against it and they have left Vivek this gigantic lane to exploit. Why? I don't know. I mean, they're trapped in legacy neocomp thinking that the US police Jason Calacanis (01:22:06): Are they bought so sacks? Are he the fact they kept saying they're bought and so that was I think that was a great moment. David Sacks (01:22:11): That's a combination of being trapped in legacy thinking where we have to be the policeman in the world combined with all the big donors in the party. Okay. Many of whom are wrapped up with the military industrial complex wanna contribute to that, David Friedberg (01:22:22): Peter, can you just state again what you feel like I'm not hearing? David Friedberg (01:22:25): No. I think that being president requires being better more than just an orator. And I think that the debates allow the best orator to show off their skills and capabilities on the debate stage. I was saying, I wish that there were other events. I would love to see some set of systems to interview. We all know this. When you interview a candidate, an engineer, the engineer that gives the best interview is not necessarily gonna become the best engineer. You can look at their code to see if they're a great engineer. You can talk to people that report it to them to see if they're a great manager. You can learn more about their success and skills through more than just their oration on the stage. And, yes, there's data in fact that we can pull from these people. I was just speculating in kind of a pseudo silly way about the concept of can we do more than David Friedberg (01:23:17): just put people on a debate? How do you hire a CEO for your companies? David Friedberg (01:23:23): Well, yeah, what I'll tell you, we don't do is we don't have the employees elect the CEO through a vote by having that CEO go in front. No. No. No. But you're saying, I'm the best guy for the job. Hear you, but Jason Calacanis (01:23:32): your view is part of it. David Friedberg (01:23:33): But you can interview. David Friedberg (01:23:34): We do reference calls. Right? We we we talked about their strategy. And, you know, through the interview, through the reference calls, through looking at the performance of other businesses they've built and run, and, you know, And, you know, why can't he David Friedberg (01:23:47): do that with if that can have a fulsome understanding of his candidacy and his ability to be president? David Friedberg (01:23:51): My point is I think that there are certain things like with Trump, that had not been tested or prided that are gonna come up in this role that they'd never done before in the past. And I'm not saying, look, by the way, I'm certainly not a big you know, political career guides. You guys know, I think, you know, I think, I hate that people build a career out of politics. I think it's the most in name, ridiculous thing. And if we could go back and rewrite the constitution. That's probably the first thing I put in there. David Friedberg (01:24:14): The thing with the this line of thinking, and maybe this is where I reacted. So I apologize if I personalize it. Is that it creates the risk of exactly what you just said in this, what you just said right now, which is this blob class of people that use those arguments as the reason why change can't happen. Yeah. Why it must be I David Friedberg (01:24:34): don't disagree with that. I don't disagree with that. Speaker 4 (01:24:36): And I David Friedberg (01:24:36): think that is the huge red flag about this line of argumentation around why out of the box candidates can't be evaluated by reasonably smart people, of which there are 300,000,000 of us in America that have the ability to see it. And so I actually don't think it's as hard of a job as we make it out to be and that when you get a 180, a 190,000,000 different people voting, I Jason Calacanis (01:25:00): do think you actually get David Friedberg (01:25:01): a pretty good wisdom of the crowds and take away trump's UI for a second What Saks just said is so profound because like what Trump nailed was 3 ginormous lanes that turned out now we can all agree with. None of us wanted these wars. Everybody basically believes that the border needed to be closed, and everybody believes that China has taken advantage in a way that has really hollowed out the middle class in America. Those were 3 totems that nobody would have touched. And if we had allowed this whole thing of like, oh, Trump doesn't have this, trump doesn't have that. He just gives cute nicknames to his average series. We would have missed that he actually had enough executive function to nail the 3 biggest themes of our current lifetime. Jason Calacanis (01:25:50): Okay. David Friedberg (01:25:50): I think that's fair. I guess my my commentary can just be reduced down to the debate stage and saying who won and who should be is different than who should be president, necessarily. I think looking at the broader context Good job. Good job. Good job. The presidential, but David Friedberg (01:26:03): the presidential candidacy is much more than just who's the base. Okay. David Friedberg (01:26:07): There's a David Friedberg (01:26:08): lot of other things going on. David Sacks (01:26:09): If we're judging people just based on how well they talk and how quick on their feet they are, Chris Christie is a great talker. Okay. He's a media trained talker. But guess what? He got booed. David Friedberg (01:26:19): That was their David Sacks (01:26:20): low point of Speaker 4 (01:26:21): the debate. The dull point of the David Friedberg (01:26:21): debate for me was that he, I felt took a kind of like a low key racist jab at Vivek David Friedberg (01:26:28): when he was like, let me read it. David Friedberg (01:26:28): He he referred. Yeah. The Jason Calacanis (01:26:31): last person in one of these debates who stood in the middle of the stage and said, what's a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here was Barack Obama. I'm afraid we're dealing with the same type of amateur standing on the age. Janette, you thought David Friedberg (01:26:43): it was a little No. Not that. It's when you Not that was the deck, like, Chamath, CPT. Oh, okay. Essentially Jason Calacanis (01:26:47): saying. Already of a guy who sounds like chat, CPT, standing Speaker 4 (01:26:49): up. Yeah. David Friedberg (01:26:50): Here's, like, this Indian tech work and I thought, Jason Calacanis (01:26:52): hey, man. David Friedberg (01:26:52): That's like Did Jason Calacanis (01:26:53): you read into it? That's interesting. I thought he was just saying he sounded David Friedberg (01:26:56): As a Salvation tech record. David Friedberg (01:26:59): I didn't I didn't understand it when I read Jason Calacanis (01:27:00): it that he was, that he was, very, like, robotic and formulaic or something. But what did you how did you read it as, as the palace white guy on the panel? David Sacks (01:27:10): There was something almost personal about the way that both Christie and Pence seemed to reactivate. It was almost like Who are you, your young wiffer snapper to be on the stage with me, especially, Pence. I've been the vice president. Who are you you know, and all this was a resentment. Jason Calacanis (01:27:26): Here's what his quotes Speaker 4 (01:27:27): were. David Sacks (01:27:27): Dismissive. And I think there was a resentment that even before this debate, Vivek was rising in the polls, and those guys were going nowhere. Jason Calacanis (01:27:34): Let me explain it to you. David Sacks (01:27:35): And then again, it's not just oratorical skill. It's the substance Yes. Of the issues and where he's willing to go that these other candidates are not. Jason Calacanis (01:27:43): Here are the quotes you respond to. Let me explain it to you, Vivek. I'll go slower this time. Now it's not the time for on the job training, and we don't need to bring in a rookie. All of this dismissive stuff from Pence to Vivek got some applause because, you know, conflict conflict and confrontation gets applause by these lunatics in the audience and, well, like, it was like David Friedberg (01:28:04): a But you also get an allocation of sea. For your own team. Jason Calacanis (01:28:07): So Yeah. David Sacks (01:28:07): So it was The only The only Speaker 4 (01:28:08): the only Speaker 6 (01:28:08): I don't remember the reason David Sacks (01:28:10): why Pence was VP is because a rookie got elected president. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:28:13): It's a very good it's a good insight. Yeah. That was very weird. I I thought the thing that was very interesting was him not to make it all about Trump, but he was the quote, unquote elephant that was not in the room. Was the, dying support for pets. You had everybody say Pence did the right thing on January 6. What we should take away from that sax because there was some there there was a mix of booze and cheers for Christy when he kinda said, like, we need somebody who doesn't behave this way. It's unbecoming of the presidency referring to Trump. So what was your take on is the Republican party in this audience trying to Move past Trump given all these indictments. I'm gonna leave the Trump Stockholm syndrome and and trump derangement syndrome out of this just objectively Speaker 4 (01:28:55): Yeah. What what did you think of that? David Sacks (01:28:58): I thought DeSantis had the best response, which is, listen, if we spend our time relitigating January 6th, looking in the rearview mirror, we're gonna lose to Joe Biden. This is exactly the conversation and the debate that Democrats want us to be having. I think that's just factually true. Speaker 4 (01:29:13): That David Sacks (01:29:13): if the Republican party spends his time debating January 6, that's playing into Biden's hands. Jason Calacanis (01:29:18): So you don't think Trump can necessarily beat Biden that these other candidates have a better chance of beating Biden. Is that what you No. David Sacks (01:29:25): I didn't say that. Jason Calacanis (01:29:26): I said that David Sacks (01:29:27): focusing focusing on relitigating Jason Calacanis (01:29:29): Okay. Yes. David Sacks (01:29:30): January 6 is not only is it a waste of time. It's just a loser for Republicans. And by the way, it's Trump's worst quality to keep harkening back to the last election. Even I think his fans and supporters don't wanna hear that. Jason Calacanis (01:29:42): Who has a better chance of winning? Some pairing of these candidate, Saks, or trump, and one of these candidates, versus Biden. Heads up, you know, does, something like DeSantis Vivek or Haley and Vivek, you know, pick pick your combination here, have a better chance versus Biden than Trump plus one of these. David Sacks (01:30:04): I think it's tough to say, but I I do think that Trump has really high negatives. And in order for him to win the presidency, he's gotta flip something like 2 or 3 out of 5 states, like, swing states that voted against him last time. And I do think that this is one of the stronger arguments that DeSantis makes is that you know, I could deliver those states whereas Trump may not. So I think there is an electability argument for DeSantis. Jason Calacanis (01:30:33): Okay. And so, Friedberg hearing all this. David Sacks (01:30:37): By the way, I'm not saying that that's what's gonna happen, but I I do think we know that Trump does have very high negatives. Speaker 4 (01:30:43): And David Sacks (01:30:43): Yeah. He's gonna flip flip some states that David Friedberg (01:30:45): he lost before. Jason Calacanis (01:30:46): He's he's gonna have a lot of Democrats and women come out to vote against him. He super charges the base in the way Hillary charged the other way. Can I David Sacks (01:30:53): say one other thing about, to say it's just performance of that debate So I know that he doesn't stand out in the way that, you know, Vivek or some of these other candidates do because he didn't deliver any zingers and also He wasn't the brunt of attack? I think we all thought that maybe there'd be a lot more incoming for him, and the incoming really went for Vivek. But I think that he had a strategy in that debate. This is my interpretation. It's not based on David Friedberg (01:31:18): Yeah. Go ahead. David Sacks (01:31:18): Any insider knowledge or anything like that. Which was the way he answered questions was, I think, to be broadly acceptable to all the different factions in the GOP So like I mentioned, there's kind of the mega faction. There's the NeoCon faction, and there's the religious right faction. And his answers may not have been the ones that were most loved by any of those factions, but I also think that none of its answers disqualified himself with any of those factions, which is kinda hard to do given how much they're at each other's throats. Jason Calacanis (01:31:50): So, Sachs, if this was a poker tournament and this was the final table, would you say the strategy for DeSantis was, hey, listen. I'm gonna let these other guys shoot it out. I'm just gonna sit on my big chip stack here. I'm in second place. You got let me let let's let the field eliminate themselves. I'm gonna just protect my stack. I'm not gonna play a lot of hands here. He's just sort of sitting and and waiting for it to get down to three or four people and then he'll mix it up some more. Is that the strategy? David Sacks (01:32:15): I think he came across as the grown up. Speaker 4 (01:32:17): Mhmm. David Sacks (01:32:18): Nobody really took swipes at him or shots at him, and he didn't really take shots to anybody else. He did, again, try to focus the Republican party on what it's gonna take to win. Mhmm. He was one of the only people on that stage who had criticism of Biden. I think it was a mistake not to criticize Biden's record now. Jason Calacanis (01:32:33): I was trying to make Speaker 4 (01:32:33): a donation. Jason Calacanis (01:32:34): Shocked at that. That was such a weird thing that they were going after Trump and attacks and nothing about Biden. David Sacks (01:32:40): The only attacks on Biden that I even remember from that night were from Trump's interview with Tucker where he criticized. Jason Calacanis (01:32:46): God, he he destroyed. David Sacks (01:32:48): Biden's lack of physical and mental acuity. But, look, I think that if if the convention were ultimately to be a brokered convention, which all the different factions of the GOP had to agree on a candidate, then I think DeSantis be that candidate because He may not be the candidate who is most loved by any of those factions, but I think he's made himself the most broadly acceptable to all of them. The problem is I don't think that's the way that candidates are chosen. You know, I think that what happens in practice is that the factions are trying to feed each other. And that one faction's gonna win. And I think it's probably gonna be the magnafaction. So that's the problem, I think, with the strategy, but Look. He came across the grown up, and he came across as the most broadly acceptable. Jason Calacanis (01:33:30): Okay. So if, this is a final table, of a poker tournament. And Trump is gonna sit down and debate 3 of these people, Shamoff, who's gonna be left to debate Trump and be the final 3 or 4 seats here. Which 3? David Friedberg (01:33:46): I think it'll be DeSantis. David Friedberg (01:33:49): Vivek, and it'll be either Tim Scott or Nikky. Jason Calacanis (01:33:54): Interesting. Friedberg, who are final 3 who are gonna debate trump, you know, in debate number 4, 5. David Friedberg (01:34:00): I don't know if he's gonna show up. I don't know why he would if he's up 50, 60, 70, 70. I mean, it would be it would just be such a trump move to just not show up to any of these debates and just like, get elected. Jason Calacanis (01:34:13): Play the game. David Sacks (01:34:13): How incredible a debate would that be if it was from DeSantis and Vivek. Speaker 4 (01:34:18): Firewall. David Sacks (01:34:19): My my force would be Nikki Haley. I she did it good. She had her moments in that debate. I think she had good advice for the Republican party on the abortion issue. David Friedberg (01:34:26): Yeah. She did a really great job. Jason Calacanis (01:34:28): And and she pointed out how you know, much money. I thought that was a tea party moment for her. That's when I wormed up to Nikki Haley a bunch. And she's like, listen. We also approved you know, $68,000,000,000,000. We gotta look at ourselves. And it was like, okay, is it the tea party 2010 here? I thought that was a great moment. Who do you who do you have left Friedberg? Everybody else played the game. Play along. Who will be the final 3 here to debate trump if trump shows up? Play along for the game. David Friedberg (01:34:52): I mean, I'll give mine. Vivek seems to be in a good place. Jason Calacanis (01:34:55): And Okay. David Friedberg (01:34:57): I don't know. DeSantis has a lot of money. Yep. So he's probably gonna stick around. Jason Calacanis (01:35:01): Yeah. So Vivek and DeSantis are we all have consensus. I go with Nikki Hall here's what Chris Christie has said there. David Friedberg (01:35:07): I don't think he's gonna show up. Jason Calacanis (01:35:09): We got your we got your point. Yeah. David Sacks (01:35:10): Yeah. You're critical of the fact that the Vake is having a boom or a surge based on his oratorical skills, which I think you regard as being a shy of way to a I would need to come Jason Calacanis (01:35:22): out of the question. David Sacks (01:35:22): But you're showing no enthusiasm for DeSantis who actually has the track record of being the most capable executive. David Friedberg (01:35:28): Oh, no. No. I'm not by the way, I didn't I'm not we we're not talking about who I would vote for president. We didn't even have that comment. Like, we didn't even ask that question once. Jason Calacanis (01:35:34): Okay. So we'll ask it now. In putting aside Trump, Who do you pick? David Friedberg (01:35:39): What was really interesting is hearing the governors speak about their skills. I think Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Bergum, the Santa's all had moments where they shine from from from Hutchison from my perspective, from a content perspective, which is where I was talking about at the beginning, which people largely ignore, which is that they actually had quite a lot to draw from and, you know, point to human policy that seemed pretty strong. Jason Calacanis (01:36:01): Here we go. Final question. Final question. I want you to give me your 1 and 2, not trump. Sachs, we know DeSantis is number 1 for you. So then who's who's your number 2 to pair with him? Who would you pair with? David Sacks (01:36:12): To be what? To be the candidate? Jason Calacanis (01:36:14): To be the the ticket. Republican ticket. You're gonna go to Santaas 1, and then who do you put with them as as the number Speaker 4 (01:36:19): 2? Well, for me DeSantisan? David Friedberg (01:36:22): I think that the only candidates who have acceptable answers David Sacks (01:36:25): on What I regard as the number one issue of our time, which is Ukraine, because that could lead to world war 3, the only candidates who have acceptable answers are Trump Vivek and DeSantis. Meaning they've all been pretty clear. They would deescalate. I think all the other candidates have basically indicated in one way or another. They would escalate Jason Calacanis (01:36:45): that war. Vivek is yours. David Sacks (01:36:46): So those 3 candidates are the only ones that are acceptable to David Friedberg (01:36:48): me. Okay. Jason Calacanis (01:36:49): So we take Trump off. If Trump doesn't run, which that's my personal belief, but just of the people who are on stage last night, you're going to Santa's, Vivek is your ticket. Chamath, who's your ticket? After one debate, not counting Trump. If you if the Republican ticket, who do you think's Republican? David Friedberg (01:37:03): Look, I like to buy these deep out of the money options. I Okay. Jason Calacanis (01:37:05): We'll go out on the limb. David Friedberg (01:37:07): I think that debate has a really good chance of winning this Republican nomination. That's what I saw. I saw, David Friedberg (01:37:11): like, outright against Trump. David Friedberg (01:37:13): Yeah. I and and we're taking Jason Calacanis (01:37:14): Trump off table. So just picking up, David Friedberg (01:37:16): for example, for example Speaker 6 (01:37:17): no. No. David Friedberg (01:37:18): No. No. I'm I but I really do think he's he he can win this thing. And for example, I thought it was very clever when he said that he had a line. He said, Donald Trump was the best. Let me be categorically clear. Donald Trump was the best president of the 21st century. And I was like, what? And then I thought about it. It's and I why is he saying it? Does he say it because he believes it, or does he saying because it's like a a tactic? And there's probably bits of both. Jason Calacanis (01:37:49): Yep. Because I do think David Friedberg (01:37:50): that there are elements where he fundamentally does believe that Trump has at least shined the path forward. And so I think he does believe it to some degree, but then I thought it's even smarter to have said it. And again, this is where I go back to, I'm not sure that that's oratory skills versus, like, understanding you know, game theory, strategy, and and strategy and being a strategic thinker and trying to win, I thought that that was a very smart thing to have said, And all along that evening, I thought that he did the best job of preserving optionality for the trump base to say, you know what? Vivek is all of the positive features of Trump without some of the negatives. So let's just clean up the ticket and let's go. Jason Calacanis (01:38:36): And I David Friedberg (01:38:36): can hear you again. There's a long way. Yeah. For question. Jason Calacanis (01:38:40): I like the call. I like the call. David Friedberg (01:38:41): But, we should buy that deep out of the money option. Jason Calacanis (01:38:43): And who's your number 2 then? We're going 1, 2 here. 1, 2. Either as to pair with Vivek or your number 2 choice in terms of David Friedberg (01:38:49): No. Then I I if the date doesn't figure out a way to slipstream past Trump to trump within the nomination. Jason Calacanis (01:38:56): Okay. Taking trump out of the rest. Who's your number to? We're trying to get it. Okay. Great. Fascinating to see this happening. David Sacks (01:39:01): I agree with what a lot of what Shamas said. I think Vivek is positioning himself to be the backup candidate for the MAGA Wing. Yep. Absolutely. And he's doing it by never attacking Trump and by complimenting him. By the way, saying that Trump was the best president of the 21st century. There's only been 3. It was George W Bush, Obama, and then Trump Right? Oh, sorry. Biden. Sorry. Biden's has been 4. George W Bush was one of the worst presidents in American history. Jason Calacanis (01:39:30): Yeah. So it's either a law or a war. Obama. David Sacks (01:39:33): Obviously, a Republican candidate is not gonna think highly of Obama or Biden. So it kinda narrows it down, doesn't it? Jason Calacanis (01:39:40): Yeah. What what's in her last name? David Friedberg (01:39:41): Just with the intelligence of actually saying the words. Jason Calacanis (01:39:44): Yeah. It's all in that. Strategically brilliant. I Yeah. David Sacks (01:39:46): I know. I agree. David Friedberg (01:39:47): Saks, what do you think about Vivek's unpopular statement, and it may I I'd like to hear whether it's unpopular with the base, but it was certainly unpopular in the room last night that the climate change agenda is a hoax, which drew a lot of booze, That was Is that like is that a lightning bolt kind of thing to say, why would he say that? And what's the strategy there. Jason Calacanis (01:40:08): It's like trump saying he loves coal. He loves coal miners. It's just pandering. To me David Friedberg (01:40:13): a little bit like he was trying to see the agenda is a meaning, like, all the ESG stuff is nonsense. Exactly. But it comes across as him saying Chamath change isn't real, and he's got an out deal with the repercussions of Jason Calacanis (01:40:23): saying that. David Sacks (01:40:26): I think it's, but I don't I don't I don't think you know what he believes, Jake Hall, but David Friedberg (01:40:31): Yeah. His follow-up comment around that was he said that it is an economic yoke on our country because the combination of subsidies and the lack of expansion of carbon is what's holding back the country economically. So that's how I think I remember him tying these two things together. So that's that's probably where the state is. Jason Calacanis (01:40:49): No intelligent person doesn't believe that line, it's not heating up. Come on. And that it's not better to go to renewables. That's just David Sacks (01:40:55): How do you know if you looked at the science, Jacob? Jason Calacanis (01:40:57): Of course, I have. Yes. It's massive consensus. You know, as deep as a person needs to go. Freightberg, we we we're not gonna disagree Speaker 4 (01:41:04): with that. David Sacks (01:41:04): You just treat it. Look, it's just something you're supposed to believe in. No. I'm I'm I'm not saying David Friedberg (01:41:09): that I don't believe that I think. Jason Calacanis (01:41:10): How the planet has gotten warmer. That's it. David Friedberg (01:41:12): I will say Saks is right. That it has become a thing that it's like we're all supposed to take as given. No one is gonna go up and say, here's the science that validates. Here's the data that validates. Here's there's there's some empirical evidence and then people use counter empirical evidence to try and counter it. And that's what makes it a little bit of a a movement now, which is the institutions, the elites, however they're framed, have been wrong so many times on the things that they told us were given. That we're supposed to assume that this is a given to f that. I'm not gonna be told what to believe anymore. And I don't wanna be told what to believe anymore is what people want to that's what they heard from that song. Yeah. Yeah. Last week, and that's what they heard, you know, in Vivek. Let Jason Calacanis (01:41:55): me state my David Friedberg (01:41:55): position, sir. David Sacks (01:41:56): I totally agree. Yeah. Here's the thing, David Friedberg (01:41:58): you know, David Sacks (01:41:58): after COVID. David Friedberg (01:41:59): Without me even making a comment on trying to change a 100%. We were told David Sacks (01:42:03): so much bullshit that was in the name of science during COVID. They told us the vaccines were safe and effective. Jason Calacanis (01:42:09): I just wanna clarify my position before you respond to it. It's undeniable that temperatures have risen I think it's a crazy experiment to run to not try to lower it. It's just a crazy experiment. The planet is precious I don't think we should run it. I, I am not dogmatic about it. It's not a religious thing. I'm not genuinely seeing. David Friedberg (01:42:27): It's not an experiment we're running, Jake. It's called human development and growth. Jason Calacanis (01:42:32): And the temperature goes up. So why wouldn't we use renewable energy when not pollute? Cause not polluting is is good too. David Friedberg (01:42:40): When you have Self proclaimed scientific experts and or sixteen year old girls shaming everybody with pretty flimsy data. There was a while where we where everybody just said, well, they must be right, and COVID exposed the hoax. And so now we're a lot less prone to believe these self proclaimed intellectuals and their jargon and their nonsense. So ask me how much money have I invested in climate change with all that data? 0. Ask me how much money I've invested in technologies that will benefit climate change as a byproduct of national security, 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars. Yes. And the reason I give you that example is that for me, that framing was just such a turn off because I couldn't buy into it. Jason Calacanis (01:43:33): Yeah. There are multiple reasons. David Friedberg (01:43:35): But then Jason Calacanis (01:43:35): the more David Friedberg (01:43:36): pragmatic realistic framing, which allowed us to actually say, maybe you're right, but maybe you're wrong, but let's not even debate the issue. Let's make sure we're not dependent on another country and fighting endless wars, that got me off my ass to do stuff. And I think there's a lot of people in America that are in that 2nd category. They don't want absolutely riddle dogma Speaker 4 (01:43:56): to David Friedberg (01:43:56): drive their life and how they're forced to make decisions. Jason Calacanis (01:43:58): You can come up with 3 or 4 really good reasons to not keep burning fossil fuels. They're dirty, they're pollutants, there are better options that are more sustainable, that are more cost effective. It's more cost effective to put solar in than to burn coal or build a new coal plant. Reasons. And then there's a personal David Sacks (01:44:17): nominee finish. Those points. Yeah. No. I'm I'm what I'm putting through here. Automatically gonna trust. Jason Calacanis (01:44:22): I am not automatically trusting. I'm changing the body of evidence. I'm not blindly trusting anybody. I'm taking the body of evidence and saying that entire body of evidence, geopolitical. David Friedberg (01:44:30): I don't think you've David Sacks (01:44:31): really looked at the evidence. I don't believe Jason Calacanis (01:44:33): you're conscious David Sacks (01:44:33): on this issue. Jason Calacanis (01:44:34): Okay. Anyway. David Sacks (01:44:35): I haven't gone deep on this issue. That's all I'm saying. Speaker 4 (01:44:38): I'm not I'm not in David Friedberg (01:44:39): a position to agree Speaker 4 (01:44:40): or dispute. David Sacks (01:44:40): Yeah. Listen Jason Calacanis (01:44:40): to what I'm saying. If you listen as opposed to telling me what I think and you to what I'm telling you, there are many reasons to pursue sustainable energy, clean energy, and geopolitics is one of them and, you know, polluting the environment as one of them and temperatures rising if that indeed results in damages to the oceans, and, you know, weather patterns, there are 5 or 6 great reasons to stop burning coal and stop burning oil. David Friedberg (01:45:09): Look at these 2 climate white washes we're living in in this moment. People were so convinced they just need to Royal the country around the hurricane hitting California. And by the time it landed, it was a storm. It was rain in Los Angeles. I asked people here when I I said, how it's hurricane? They're like, it wasn't a hurricane. And in fact, the news were so tilted about it. They had to call it, it could have been a hurricane. They can waste the storm. Ratings. 2nd is this thing in Maui, it turns out Michael Schellenberger has done some pretty good work on this, is exposing that A lot of the reason these fires may have started was because of this radical Speaker 4 (01:45:48): climate agenda that caused the David Friedberg (01:45:48): utility to not invest in the protective measures they should have around power lines. That is crazy, Jason. Jason Calacanis (01:45:58): Oh, yeah. I'm I'm not defending what happened in Maui. It's obviously incompetent we should be bearing we we have the same issue in Calacanis, which is weird. David Friedberg (01:46:05): Dogmatic belief, there's a consequence. It shouldn't Speaker 4 (01:46:07): be a Jason Calacanis (01:46:08): dogmatic believer. No. I'm not saying you are. I'm just trying to Yeah. I'm I'm David Friedberg (01:46:11): not saying you are. I'm trying to make this point. When people dogmatically believe bodies of evidence that they themselves don't interrogate fully, they may, it may lead them to conclusions and then actions that you are now seeing have measurable human consequences. If you look at PG And E in California, it's riddled with these issues. Jason Calacanis (01:46:28): Yeah. They shut our power off because they're afraid that wind is gonna blow down power lines and start fires. Yeah. I mean and we just need to bury them. So David Friedberg (01:46:35): So I think that it would be great to, like, not debate the climate issue, put a pin in it, and instead just say, we all want our kids to be able to have clean air around us. Speaker 4 (01:46:44): We want David Friedberg (01:46:44): clean water to drink. And we want to make sure that we have the resources to be productive as human beings without having to send our kids to war or Jason Calacanis (01:46:52): without putting the country in danger? 100%, which is exactly my point. There are so many reasons to take this seriously and and move to renewables and nuclear. Alright. Listen. This has been an insanely great episode. Hey. Let me just get one person's comments. So here's your here's your, red meat for, Sachs here. It sounds like there was a the the the coup, 60 days later, the guy who was running the coup in Russia, had a little accident. So random, maybe your thoughts, sex. David Sacks (01:47:23): You're talking about? Jason Calacanis (01:47:25): Yeah. I don't I mean, he had some mechanical difficulties David Friedberg (01:47:27): on his p j. Jason Calacanis (01:47:28): I don't know what happened. Is he not sending that citation for maintenance? What happened? David Friedberg (01:47:31): They had Jason Calacanis (01:47:32): a bad engine or something. It's so random. Poor guy. David Sacks (01:47:34): The latest reporting from the New York Times this morning is that ProGosian's plane was not shot shot down, but rather they believe there was an explosive device on it. Jason Calacanis (01:47:42): Oh. David Sacks (01:47:42): So we don't know, you know, we don't we don't know exactly who Jason Calacanis (01:47:46): planned it. A bird strike, something random with a bird strike. David Sacks (01:47:48): No. Somebody took him out. Somebody took him off the board. Jason Calacanis (01:47:51): Really? Oh, must have been must have been Ukraine. Right? That that's what you're putting it on. It's Ukraine. David Sacks (01:47:56): No. I mean, I think it's probably pretty obvious who did it, although we won't know for sure. So let me Jason Calacanis (01:48:03): say that name. David Sacks (01:48:05): Listen, I think that allegedly. Yeah. Legedly. That's what you always say whenever a 100 buy of doing something. You're acceptable. Speaker 6 (01:48:15): There was a little cocaine and maybe some bribes. David Sacks (01:48:18): I think this resolves the question of who came out on top during that mutiny. There were a lot of people speculating that somehow, Progression of the upper hand or he was paid off or Speaker 6 (01:48:28): what have you. Jason Calacanis (01:48:29): Right? Remember there was a line of thinking, oh, this wasn't a coup. If it wasn't a coup, then why did Putin whack him? Whack, whack. And it was exactly 60 days later. Is that was the other thing. Is that gonna ask a question? How funny David Friedberg (01:48:42): is it that it's like Putin's like, hey, propose and come come and see me. We're good. Nothing to worry about. Speaker 4 (01:48:47): I'll send him private jet. Jason Calacanis (01:48:49): And then Speaker 6 (01:48:49): I'll send him private jet. David Friedberg (01:48:50): And then it's like, listen, where are you going to a block? Jason Calacanis (01:48:53): Yeah. You can take my p j. David Friedberg (01:48:55): Secret. I'll how does this happen? Like, you can't even write this though. And related now Speaker 6 (01:49:00): to Friedberg, you're sending his p j to take me down to the arts summit. Oh, thanks for the ride Freight, David Sacks (01:49:04): I told you. It's like Michael Corleone. David Friedberg (01:49:06): Tumble who? David Sacks (01:49:07): Apparently, there's a meeting about a month ago. I remember it being reported where Progosian and the other heads of Wagner came to meet with Putin. And the deal that Putin supposedly offered was that Wagner could stay together but had to report to the Russian military. And the Wagner commanders were on board with it, but one person objected, and that was Progoggan. Oh. So it's a little bit like, remember the meeting between Michael Corleone and Mo Green in Vegas. David Friedberg (01:49:32): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. David Sacks (01:49:34): You know, Michael's like, think of a price and Mo Green's like, you don't buy me out. I buy you some, you know, that kind of reaction. Yep. And the guy had some sort of death wish, I guess. Jason Calacanis (01:49:45): You know what they say? Beware the dog that doesn't bark. Putin said nothing for the last 2 months. He was like, yeah. It's all good. Nothing out of the Putin camp. And then boom. Putin is a murderous lunatic who must be stopped and contained. Well, I David Sacks (01:49:59): think that's the opposite of being a lunatic. I think the somebody who is very cold and calculating. Jason Calacanis (01:50:04): Okay. Yeah. Murdrous calculated sociopath. David Sacks (01:50:06): He figured out how to diffuse a mutiny. I don't think it was a full on coup. But a mutiny that would have been very disruptive to his front line if he had basically tried to violently suppress it. So he cuts a deal where Basically, he offers banishment to Belarus. Progression was supposed to go to Belarus. By the way, we don't know exactly why progression returned to Moscow or Saint Petersburg. He was supposed to be staying in Belarus or Africa. So maybe he violated the terms of his probation. We don't know. There were all these people on social media who were pinning their hopes for regime change and liberal reform within Russia on progosian, which was always absurd because he was this warlord whose behavior in conduct was even more erratic and violent than Putin. So he was never gonna be a great vessel for liberal reform in Russia. Nonetheless, there are all these people who pinned their hopes for regime change in Russia on Progozi. We can see now what a stupid idea that was. The Russian regime, whether you like it or not, is stable. It's not unstable. Russia is winning the war. And you may hate Putin, but he is still a master of Russia. And eventually, we're gonna have to deal with him. These fantasies that we're gonna be able to regime change him, I think, are absurd, and they've led us to this horrible point. Jason Calacanis (01:51:24): Okay. For the dictator, for the Sulfan of Science, and focused SaaSacks with the slick Back care. I am new, which great monitor. We'll see you next time. Bye bye. Speaker 4 (01:51:37): We'll let your winners ride. Jason Calacanis (01:51:40): Rainman, David Sachs. Speaker 4 (01:51:44): And I said We open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Besties are golf. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge, George, because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension, but they just need to release that mountain. David Friedberg (01:52:16): You're the beep beep.