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hey everybody Merry Christmas happy holidays it is the end of 2022 and once again we're doing our
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bestie Awards yes at the end of the year we do our bestie Awards this is where we
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give Awards to the biggest winners losers and many other categories that you love with me again
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of course the Sultan of Science deep in his Kurosawa uh Vibes how are you doing Sultan it was great to see you guys for
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dinner last night sax we missed you that was a lot of fun we all got together twice this week for dinner uh while we
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were on vacation and uh during our dinner we took a vote and sax you are now the director of the all in Summit
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congratulations yes congratulations yes the Griff design My First Act is to veto
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it okay there you go sorry to the fans also with us of course is the dictator himself chamath polyhapatia deep in his
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turtleneck phase and his Vibes tell us about uh your winter Vibes bestie I mean I can't believe that we all took
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over Lake Tahoe for a week together it's cool it's been a lot of fun I gotta say socks you'll be surprised jaycal has
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the life hack of life hacks here he's figured out how to basically get everything pre-wired
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all the restaurants all the reservations it's been great I've loved it we've had
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a wonderful time it's an eight person table for every night and he does it what months in advance
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every two weeks out I get a table of eight uh for five six nights in a row and then I invite my besties out and
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oddly it turned out there was only one person from Jake outside just himself yes there was always a room for the rest
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of us to show up we had a wonderful time uh I picked up the check for the nachos
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and tremath brought six thousand dollars worth of wine I brought my own also to the restaurant yesterday so we could
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open the wine properly it was wonderful we've had a wonderful time and of course
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with us looks like he had to work over the Christmas break uh sax how are you doing brother you working today I'm good
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I'm just hanging out somewhere well come on you could be honest you're at the Twitter HQ I recognize that incredible
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architecture and design they spent so much money on that office space beautiful that's definitely beautiful
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often it's got their own bespoke coffee shop here called The Perch we're the people that work there
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too soon too soon the people are working too hard to be hanging out in the coffee
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shop [Music] [Music] okay so let's get started with our bestie Awards this is uh very
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controversial we start with a political award and uh last year you know this is our
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just so we're clear this is not the prediction show that next week will be the prediction show this week is our
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winners cue the music yes cue the music right there okay here we go 2022 predictions this is what we predicted
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for the bestie award for biggest political winner I said Ron DeSantis and so did David sax
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we predicted in 2022 after me you said it after me and the way you introduced it you said what did Tucker Carlson's
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Writers come up with I said to santis and then you said to santis are you starting already literally
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okay take it easy you're gonna get your flowers so Ron DeSantis obviously a big winner
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uh so those were those were great predictions Freeburg with a wild card there he
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predicted Putin would be a winner in 2022 that one fell a little flat did it not our friend Freeburg not a winner no
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I think he you know I mean my projection was really built on what I thought would
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be a big kind of influence that he would gain this year you know whether he's viewed negatively or positively he's
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certainly at the center of the stage right now now chamoth you're 22 prediction this is your prediction last
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year for this year was that the biggest political winner would be Xi Jinping okay
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now we go to our actual biggest winner this is where we tell you who we thought was the
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biggest winner of 2022. let's start with you sax who is your biggest winner for 2022 political base winner this was the
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prediction that I nailed as as you mentioned it so the Red Wave fizzled everywhere else
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but it crashed over Florida hard so DeSantis is my pick he won re-election by about 20 points and his coattails
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carried four new GOP House Seats which happens to be the exact size of the GOP majority uh several polls have now shown
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him beating Donald Trump by significant margins for the 2024 GOP nomination he is shattering fundraising records
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Florida is now the fastest growing state so he is my pick for the biggest winner
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uh political winner of 2022. great who is your biggest political winner I mean it's obvious it's uh Xi Jinping
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you know there is no single person in the world that is now as powerful as this one man he
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um has complete authoritarian control over 1.2 odd billion people and 20 of the world's GDP and a large amount of
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the world's debt including a lot of U.S dollar debt and so you know it's pretty there's
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there's it's hard to find anybody that won nearly as much as he did okay now to you Friedberg who is your biggest
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political winner of 2022. I mean I think you're the santis and Xi Jinping calls were really like good I think the
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biggest surprising winner for me is like you know unexpected and that would be zelinski um from the Ukraine I don't
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think going into this year people paid as much attention to him he was certainly not a sung hero but coming
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through this conflict and I think leading the storyline about our common enemy of the West
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um and common enemy of democracy being Vladimir Putin uh really kind of made him a superstar and a hero on a global
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stage and I think that's evidenced by the fact that he was in the white house and he gave an address to the U.S
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Congress yesterday so I would make him kind of the biggest winner of the year it's hard to go against desanta so
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um you know he he clearly uh has as sax correctly pointed out gone into the lead
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we'll see if he can beat Trump in the primaries I have my doubts but he does seem to be pulling in some of those
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moderates right I don't understand why you guys say he's a political winner what did he win he hasn't won the
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nomination yet he got re-elected to a state that he had before 2022 so what did he win exactly
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well I think a couple of things one is when he won election to the governorship four years ago it was by less than one
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percent it was a tiny margin of Victory this was margin of almost 20 percent he had coattails and he is now the front
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runner for the GOP nomination in 24. I think you can argue you can make the case that maybe he's peaking too soon
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well I'm glad you brought that up because if you look at the data you know I think in the last
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seven or eight nomination Cycles the person that's been leading the popularity contest going into the Iowa
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caucuses has not won the nomination he's peaking too soon almost that's a possibility uh because when you're the
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front runner everyone takes shots at you on the other hand he if he stays this dominant he will drive out
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other contenders out of the primary and he may be able to solidify it and if if it can just be distances versus Trump in
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the primary he has stands much better shot than if it's Trump versus a bunch of other Challengers and I think that if
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he continues to pull this well within the Republican party I think Trump might not run again because Trump definitely
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does not want to risk being a loser in the Republican primary so yeah there's always front-runner risk but it's hard
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to say that coming out of this year that he wasn't a huge political winner okay if we're going to challenge other
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people's picks I would maybe challenge the zielinski there's no question that he's been a global media hero but
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two-thirds of Kiev is currently without power eighty percent of Keith doesn't have water 30 percent of the Ukrainian
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power stations have been destroyed nearly half of the countries without power uh there's something like 8
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million displaced ukrainians in the country and over a hundred thousand ukrainians have been
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killed in this war so yes he's been a very strong charismatic War leader for them but Friedberg your response I'm not
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advocating for his performance as a leader I'm advocating for his accumulation of political Goodwill and
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that's it okay uh and he is winning the war uh so is that winning well in in war they say there nobody
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wins uh but it's certainly better than having your country taken over by Putin so some would argue that's winning let's
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go to biggest losers biggest losers uh in 2022 we predicted again this is our predictions from last year and then
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we'll go on to our actuals for this year uh last year we predicted uh chamat said
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the progressive left sack said Nancy Pelosi Friedberg you said U.S influence globally interesting and I said the
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extremes both Biden and Trump let's go with our predictions I'm sorry with our actuals for this year chamoth why don't
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you go first this time who is your biggest political loser for 2022 I mean I don't think it's as written about as
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much but the progressive left did see as much failure as the Maga right so they were a huge loser I mean to the
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extent that anybody thought that leftist you know quasi-socialist policies and politics was a winning strategy I think
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that was pretty soundly refuted even in places that were pretty staunchy Democrat it was really
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difficult for the progressive left to do much of anything but lose so I think that was a really powerful and important
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repudiation and I think it it's marginalizes them to a bunch of you know Kooks almost
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and I think that that's really healthy for politics going forward so your prediction and your actual are going to
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be the same then yeah I think they were the biggest political loser in the United States at least okay yeah
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Elizabeth we don't hear people talking about Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders much this year yeah and I think that the
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biggest political loser outside of the United States was probably the European Union okay you want to expand on that a
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little bit if you just think about the coroner that they painted themselves into
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how much they had to basically literally go 180 degrees away from what their policies were you know there was a huge
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raft of whether it was green ESG kind of woke liberal politics that manifested itself in all kinds of National Security
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decisions and energy decisions that in this last year they literally had to undo in order to stay alive and
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um that makes that whole political construct I think very fragile so they were they were a pretty big political
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loser outside of the United States okay sax it's gonna be hard here to guess this
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one but sax who is your biggest political loser in 2022 I have no idea who you're going to pick here by the way
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I got Pelosi right last year that she did lose the gavel so you've got to say that the war in Ukraine was the biggest
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event of the year and obviously you can spread the blame around to a lot of people starting with Putin because he's
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the one who ordered the invasion but I would say this is a slightly different take on the category which is biggest
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political blunder occurred on January 27th of this year when blinken said that NATO's door is open and must remain open
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and that is our commitment he basically shut the door he kept NATO's door open but shut the door on any means of a
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diplomatic off-ramp to end this conflict by promising Russia that Ukraine would not become part of NATO that was the
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single biggest diplomatic blunder of this year or maybe the last couple of decades because there's a good chance we
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could have avoided this disastrous War if we had just been willing to close NATO's door wonderful great crisp answer
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thank you for that nice and tight Friedberg who's your biggest political loser for 2022. it was a tie for me
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between Jerome Powell and Liz truss Liv trust just has to get recognition here for only being in office for 45 days as
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prime minister of the United Kingdom I mean I think that is uh cannot be overlooked uh the uh uh some of the the
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policy and folks that she put in in office uh caused you know massive chaos it was just a clear dysfunction over a
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very short period of time uh Jerome Powell I think this was a big surprise this year to see how the Fed chair
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became um so politicized and his role became so politicized both kind of the the left
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and the right finding reasons to question uh his leadership um in his decision making the failure to
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raise rates soon enough led to massive inflation is what you'll hear from one contingent of politicians and the public
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at large and then the rate at which he's raising rates now to catch up to the and
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to calm inflation is causing people to complain on the other side so there is really no one that seems to be happy
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with Jerome Powell and I think that uh that that was a a shooting star that seems to have completely lost its luster
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okay so the FED yes good pull there okay mine is pretty clear and objectively it
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is of course the GOP the Red Wave failed it turned into a trickle uh Trump is back and I believe there's a good chance
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he will win the primary Roe v Wade a complete unmitigated disaster four Republicans they caught the car and plus
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marriage equality and having to deal with that women and the LGBT community vote and they have long Memories the GOP
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the biggest political losers for me okay I'm sure Saks has no rebuttal there so we will move on to the next category
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uh which is oh by the way if you say it that way then you know the biggest political loser in 2022 were women look
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at like fundamental human rights were Stripped Away from 50 of the population so that's not
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cool and they could have left it alone and they could have left it alone well if if
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what you mean is that the issue was sent to the states and each state then gets to decide then you're right but but if
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you look at the battles that have happened at the states even red States like Kentucky and Kansas have rejected
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the the subsequent political push to Outlaw abortion so it has not turned out to be just by the fact
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that all of these red States basically re-confirmed and enshrined a woman's right to choose may actually go more to
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show that the Supreme Court is totally out of touch and that they didn't need to touch Roe v Wade and the fact that
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they did opened up you know a huge can of worms in 50 states that now go and need to go and adjudicate this thing
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where it looked like actually that decision even back in the day even though the way
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that it was done you know there was a lot of room for improvement clearly everybody agrees with that but was
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actually after you know 50 plus years reasonable law and so now that you took that law away now folks even in the red
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States you're like no it was fine which means that this whole thing was a huge political Gambit more than it was actual
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societal intention okay so we are going to move on now I just I'll add my final two cents to that
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uh as I said I do think women and the LGBT community have very long memories and the people who are in the moderate
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are not going to forget how they were treated by the GOP in this specific issue so biggest political surprise we
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didn't do predictions last year but I'll just run down what everybody said was their political surprise
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I said the fact that Kamala Harris was sidelined was pretty surprising to me and uh that's continued
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you said Joe manchin was your biggest political surprise Glenn Younkin uh winning saxat was your biggest surprise
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and Friedberg the January 6th crowd making it into the capital during the Insurrection was your
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biggest political surprise so here we go our 2022 biggest political surprise sax
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let's start with you you have a lot to say about politics go well the biggest political surprise to me was no Red Wave
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so I admit I got this prediction wrong you know I got all my previous ones right Jay kalis I'm gonna admit I got
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this one wrong uh you know I believe that the electorate would focus on the fundamentals three quarters of the
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country thought were on the wrong track three quarters think we're in a recession nevertheless the Republicans
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did not do nearly as well as predicted they only gained nine seats in the house they actually lost a seat in the Senate
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and I think that that had something to do with candidate quality and of course the whole election denial narrative uh
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basically was a disaster for them I hope that the Republicans move on and stop talking about the past what voters
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want to hear about is the future Freeburg did you have a biggest political surprise for 2022 free book
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yeah it's also the failure of the Red Wave I mean that was my my pick I think the consensus going into the election
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was with uh you know Rising inflation and the disdain that everyone had for the way politicians kind of managed us
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through covet and then managed us through the economic recovery it's uh it was inevitable to see a flip and it
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didn't happen I think obviously we talked about why that is but that was a big surprise for everyone chemath
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your biggest political surprise of 2022 the absolute toothlessness of Maga and Donald Trump I mean he was just a
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Scarlet Letter if you were anywhere near this guy you were going to lose and that's surprising considering
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how traditional Republicans were pandering to him up until frankly just a few months ago
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so I think that we exposed the Emperor of as having no clothes and that he marginalizes and Sidelines candidates
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into a fringe following that cannot go mainstream that was uh it was really surprising to see how Stark that was
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this year fantastic I'm gonna build on your chamoth uh I had two here number two was
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Roe v Wade but we've beaten that uh I think and we just discussed it as much as we possibly could my number one
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building on your shmath is that despite what's happened with Trump the documents
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the the uh his cases in the United States and New York uh and about taxes despite all of this the January 6th
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Insurrection despite all this Trump is still viable I can't believe he's still viable and that he is going to be out
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there in the primaries and he's going to have to debate to santis and I don't know that DeSantis can beat him in a
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debate I think he might uh win so this is completely scary for both me and sax I think it's terrifying Sax's Nightmare
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and mine well I think he's mainly viable in the minds of the Maga dead Enders and
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the mainstream media who want to keep him alive and the blind Administration wants to keep him alive and they'll do
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anything to keep him alive and in the news and you love keeping him in the news so it's a yes it's a co-dependent
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relationship between the mainstream media which you sometimes front for and Trump oh be careful telling me what I
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think my attendance CJ Cal well I wish the Republican Party would finally take ownership of This Disaster
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that is Trump and tell him that he has no business but you guys keep him in the game and the fact that he's viable again
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your personal Nightmare and mine okay biggest business winner everybody excited to get off politics right now
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and get to our Kill Zone which is business so last year we had predictions in this category I had said Disney
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that's an up and down prediction I'll get into that in a moment Tremont you said small and medium-sized businesses
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the Old smbs Sac said rise of the rest the flyover states and Freeburg you said stripe uh Tremont
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let's start with you smbs what did you get right what did you get wrong here uh I mean I whiffed it just completely
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missed the global macro shift that we embarked on in full force starting in q1 of this year it was it is the most
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important business Story of the Year it's just like we have an absolute complete regime change and by the way
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that regime change is so complete and so you know um thorough that it even touched Japan just
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a few weeks ago or sorry just a few days ago where Japan who fight you know finally yielded on this idea of you're
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gonna we're gonna have negative interest rates in yield curve control even they finally broken it and raised rates so it
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is an absolute worldwide sea change in how we need to think about risk and I think that's worth talking about a
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little bit later in the show but that was the single biggest business Story of the Year said I missed this too even
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though on another prediction when you ask what the biggest business loser would be I think I said that it would be
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asset classes that have been pumped up by the fed's money printing because you start to feel now so I got that part
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right but what I didn't connect it to were all the asset classes actually got pummeled so I kind of conceptually
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understood that rates were Rising but I totally underestimated the magnitude of the shift the way that growth stocks
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would get hammered the way that crypto would get destroyed the fact that like tiger basically got blown out of the
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industry I mean I had the right General intuition but I didn't translate it into
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the specific asset types and the magnitude of the shift and also the like what jamas said a real regime change now
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and how markets are viewing stock performance it's really incredible uh Freeburg let's
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get in on this this is somewhere where you can contribute deeply what do you think about your take last
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year and you still believe in stripe yeah I mean look it's a it's a business that obviously benefited greatly from
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the pandemic and the adoption of um you know the payment processing infrastructure that they've built across
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their across various kind of e-commerce platforms it's I've been I'm not an investor so I don't
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have any numbers but there are public reports that have highlighted that the revenue increased 66 percent this year
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they've indicated that they're probably going to experience significant Revenue slow down with the recession ahead
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but it still seems like a super high quality business and you know valuation wise who knows what things are going to
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be worth when they ultimately come to Market there's certainly no one going to uh going public right now so at some
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point we'll see you know whether valuations play out but it seems like it continues to be a very strong one of the
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strongest private businesses that's being built in Silicon Valley we will get to 2022 biggest business winners in
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one second I will just say for Disney yeah man what a swing Bob chapek uh in and
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then out and now Bob Iger back so I feel like I got this one wrong and right at the same time I still believe in the
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company deeply I think they're gonna have a big win let's get to our actual biggest winner of 2022 sax why don't you
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lead us off with your biggest winner of 2022 for business I said Lockheed Martin
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along with other defense stocks uh Lockheed Martin which makes javelins and high Mars is up 40 in the past year when
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most the Market's been weighed down Northrop grumman's also up almost 40 percent and even some of the Lesser
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performers like Raytheon and General Dynamics are up about almost 20 percent in a terrible Market environment
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the fact the matter is war is terrible but it appears to be good business we've sent so many weapons to Ukraine that
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there's recent press reports that are the U.S stockpiles of missiles javelins and Stingers are now depleted so these
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companies are going to keep doing well for the next year at least now there's a new appropriation sailing through
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something like 44 billion of new funding for the war it's now over a hundred billion dollars McConnell says this is a
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Republican's number one priority this is now a bipartisan concern and if you think the war is expensive just wait for
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reconstruction that's estimated to cost at roughly a trillion dollars to build uh Ukraine back sax can I ask you a
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question about that it are these when we uh fund these wars I've heard uh different versions of this can't get a
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clear answer when we provide weapons uh and systems like this are they not on account and we
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ask for money back at some point do you know the answer to that question you think we're gonna get money back are you
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kidding it seems to be sometimes that we do so that's why I was asking I think it's something there hasn't been Clarity
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on look I think the the war has been phenomenal business for the military industrial complex so that's what we're
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seeing here uh not so great for the rest of the economy free bird what do you got
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yeah I mean I think you guys will remember last November I predicted energy and defense to be the best
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performing stocks for this year sax is right I think defense is up 40 so I I kind of
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went with the bigger oil and gas companies um are up uh you know across the board
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about 47 in terms of equity value in the public markets a year to date uh compared to the s p being down about 20
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percent uh so over the short term I would argue oil and gas companies but I think that um over the long term there
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were a couple of big breakthrough moments uh that I would give kind of you know the winner in business that will
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benefit over the long term to open Ai and to Fusion startups and we'll talk more about why uh for those two
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obviously later when we get to the biggest winner in Tech and science um but yeah short-term oil and gas they
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benefited from the supply constraints and the conflict in the Ukraine and the longer term I think open AI infusion
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startups well and by the way I mean just just to give Freebirds some credit here
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you actually predicted the war or you predicted a war I don't know if you predicted this war but you predicted
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yeah I predicted the war and Putin kind of rising to the center stage and the defense that was a huge prediction
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because I don't think most people even most analysts well they were surprised even when The Invasion happened I think
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people were still very surprised both that Putin would order it but also if you study the situation I think you got
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to be surprised that we didn't negotiate harder to try and prevent it I traded it
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too I bought an energy ETF so it worked out for me okay chemath your biggest business winner of 2022. uh Nick can
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throw it up but it's basically any single person that understands the following formula so if you this is the
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that's so good this is the this is the capital asset pricing model so what is this this is like before you make any
00:27:03
investment what it actually tells you is here's the rate of return that you need to generate
00:27:08
above the risk-free rate in order for you to justify making that investment and if you really understood the capital
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asset pricing model going into 2022 it would have been difficult for you to not make money
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because all of a sudden as the 10-year flexed up and as you know the volatility particularly of things like tech stocks
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went crazy you could have figured out where you to park your money and all these people that have built
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businesses around this Capital asset pricing model so you have companies obviously so you know you have sectors
00:27:44
of the economy like defense or energy stocks consumer goods and Staples they all had
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moments where they all did well but if you take it one step above the organizations that actually ran big
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macro books or really understood how to algorithmically implement this Capital asset pricing model just
00:28:05
ran roughshod over the markets and you know said in a different way it's sort of my background which is you
00:28:13
know if you understood the capital asset pricing model you would have been a massive bear and the bear got fed this
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year to a degree that none of us could have anticipated okay so am I correct saying the capital asset pricing model
00:28:25
is the biggest winner or no people that understood it people that understood it got it okay and for my biggest winner I
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went with chat GPT open Ai and their partner Microsoft why did I pick that as the biggest winner well uh on my other
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podcast this week in startups we played a game chat GPT versus the first result of Google's and Molly and I could not
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tell the difference and in fact we picked chat gpt's answers often above Googles Google one of the
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greatest businesses and franchises ever created has no answer at currently for chat GPT because
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Google's business model is to get you to click on an ad between links if you give
00:29:11
the actual answer then the person doesn't stops clicking if they stop clicking Google stops making money there
00:29:19
is no business model in search if the person gets their answer because they're done
00:29:24
this is an existential threat like we have not seen and our friend Sam Altman has a line chat GPT open AI with
00:29:31
Microsoft Microsoft I think is going to release a and there's a prediction as well a search engine
00:29:39
with openai that has a significant impact on Google's franchise we didn't think this
00:29:46
would ever happen and it's here okay the biggest losers in business we made predictions last year I said in 2020 I
00:29:55
predicted in 2021 The Biggest Loser in 2022 would be crypto by the way Friedberg you agreed with me and we
00:30:02
nailed it you agreed with me well yes that's right that's correct we were in agreement how about that
00:30:09
independent you said uh and chamath Visa slash MasterCard we'll get into that and
00:30:15
sax you said asset classes benefiting from government pumps very interesting the FED stopping QE interesting anybody
00:30:23
have comments on their predictions or each other's predictions from last year on a percentage basis
00:30:29
David absolutely nailed it sax absolutely nailed it on a dollar basis the biggest business loser of this year
00:30:36
was big Tech and I think that you saw three things happen which I think are important for
00:30:42
the future the first was it was the most crowded trade both by professional money managers as well as
00:30:51
retail and that fever finally broke in the last half of uh in the second half of this year and now going into into
00:30:59
these last few weeks you're seeing a lot of panicked selling to cover losses and other things
00:31:07
so I think that um number one that happened number two Regulators basically said we're going to
00:31:13
go after these guys every single which way we can and then number three I think it started
00:31:20
to change the Innovation cycle where people now actually believe that they can't outspend because folks won't
00:31:26
tolerate it and the things that they're spending their money on seem kind of foolish and so I think the you know big
00:31:32
Tech is probably not discussed enough but it was a huge loser for this year in terms of what happened
00:31:39
2022's actual biggest business loser chamat says big Tech Freeburg who is your biggest business loser for 2022. I
00:31:48
mean this one's just a simple FTX I mean that was such a incredible uh revelation
00:31:54
of the scale of the scam and the fraud and the craziness that went on and I think what was interesting about FTX is
00:32:01
it had implications not just for crypto and not just for kind of offshore or regulatory not just for fraud but also
00:32:08
for the investors we had a whole debate about whether the press and journalists failed to kind of you know appropriately
00:32:16
investigate this guy rather than give him accolades because he said the right things which he said he did over I am
00:32:21
and investors failed to do relevant amounts of due diligence or form aboard and have proper governance over him
00:32:26
because they wanted to be part of the hot new thing and everyone had Capital to deploy and I think what was
00:32:31
interesting about the FTX failure is it didn't just it wasn't just a failure due
00:32:35
to fraud but it revealed so many parts of kind of you know I call it uh um you know systemic
00:32:43
laziness and and systemic kind of Blind Eye and systemic bias uh that allowed and enabled this to happen it was really
00:32:51
a revealing kind of failure and that's why I kind of gave it the the award Mr David sacks who is your biggest business
00:32:57
loser of 2022 well you kind of mentioned this uh I picked Bob J Peck who's the former Disney CEO he was iger's
00:33:06
hand-picked successor three years ago then the pandemic hit which shut down the theme parks but then I think the big
00:33:12
mistake was allowing himself to be Mao Mao by woke employees into picking a fight with DeSantis over the so-called
00:33:18
don't say gay Bill uh that caused DeSantis to retaliate by threatening the special privileges that Disney enjoys in
00:33:25
the state and then he had Iger undermining him behind the scenes this was revealed I think it was a Wall
00:33:30
Street Journal story that he was grousing to insiders that jpeg was not soliciting his advice and
00:33:36
he was undermining confidence in with the board and uh recently chapek was forced out Naga was put back in Detroit
00:33:42
fantastic choice for The Biggest Loser how brutal does Iger look in that Wall Street Journal piece I mean
00:33:48
would anybody work for him yes he is incredible he looks terrible I agree I read that piece twice actually
00:33:54
the CFO calling him up she was the one who stabbed him uh you know in knifed chapek It's a Great Wall Street I don't
00:34:03
think I don't think that that happens without the support of the person waiting in the wings
00:34:08
Hey listen there's a couple of jobs you never quit you never quit a hit TV show you never quit a hit band like Roger
00:34:15
Waters with Pink Floyd why didn't they just extend it don't quit the Disney job it's the best job in the world but Jason
00:34:20
why go through this never quit why go through the theatrics of like grooming somebody putting them in your job and
00:34:26
then undermining them like I I all I'm saying is if you're I think he made a mistake I think he made a mistake he
00:34:31
quit and he wanted to come and also if like if you're a good up and coming exec I mean what do you do if like all of a
00:34:38
sudden like you know you have the opportunity to get groomed for that job it just seems really
00:34:42
risky yeah I mean I I think Bob Iger realized when he in that piece they say he went on his yacht his wife
00:34:50
didn't come with him The Wall Street Journal piece is incredible and he's got bored and he's
00:34:54
70 something years old he's almost like an early 70s why would you give up the greatest job in the world so he went
00:34:59
back and he took it back didn't Disney have a mandatory retirement age but this is my point is he was so he was so
00:35:04
prolific he could have extended it why not just extend it and be done with it yeah did you guys read the book he wrote
00:35:11
uh that right of our lifetime what is it yeah and I think that what was interesting about that book was the
00:35:18
entire thing was built around a series of deals that he did it was like I did this acquisition and I did this
00:35:23
acquisition then I did this acquisition and everything for him was building this
00:35:27
this this Empire by doing deals and someone whose storyline and narrative that they tell of themselves that's
00:35:33
built as a series of deals is a deal junkie and you're not going to be a deal junkie where that's your excitement
00:35:40
that's the thrill that's the adventure that you get out of life and then you go and sit on a yacht you're not doing any
00:35:45
deal sitting on a yacht and you're going to want to get back to that and I think
00:35:47
it's less about kind of management and product and it was much more about being in the midst of doing deals and that's
00:35:53
probably why that's why he came back if this was part of iger's diabolical strategy to get back let me just say
00:35:58
like one of the ways he did it I mean jpeg had the right instincts which is when this whole Florida debate happened
00:36:03
over don't say gay highly contentious no comment no comment his Instinct was just
00:36:08
stay out of it but then Iger made some statements about how companies have to live with their values and that gun
00:36:14
stuff and then the employee started you know again you know Mao Maui him to get involved and he took the bait and he got
00:36:21
involved and what he didn't expect is that DeSantis wasn't going to just roll over to Santa's hit him back really hard
00:36:27
and it cost them economically and then yeah and in the first interview that Iger
00:36:33
gave when asked about this question he was like no comment yeah we're not going to give all the politics
00:36:42
anymore it was hilarious that was in hilarious nuts JPEG to basically get involved in politics and then obviously
00:36:48
became cannon fodder for DeSantis exactly we're out of this now I mean how diabolical is that well it's absolutely
00:36:58
so dirty the other two things were jpeg said we're going to take away your P L's
00:37:05
to each of the leaders that is like just neutering them that he basically said everybody's under the CFO everybody's
00:37:10
going to be on one p l that infuriated all the creatives and then he went to war with Scarlett Johansson over a 10
00:37:18
million dollar settlement for her black widow he couldn't handle Talent he couldn't handle the politics and he
00:37:23
wanted to control everybody's piano just unforced error after unforced era congratulations to my guy bobager I own
00:37:30
the stock do you think he was diabolical at all oh in the best possible way in the best possible way which means that
00:37:35
Disney stock is going to go up yes I'm buying more Disney stock this year is is all like the woke Progressive politics
00:37:41
that he projects is that all just a game to mask what a Viper's Nest their Executive Suite really is are you
00:37:47
telling me that Disney is a political Corporation after Eisner and Bob Iger and all of this Michael Ovitz I mean
00:37:54
it's the history of Disney it's the greatest job in the world it is Game of Thrones to get that job and Bob Iger got
00:38:00
it back he's my guy I'm sticking with him okay they have the best IP in the business I don't care how he gets that
00:38:05
job back he's awesome I gotta say the IP at Warner media is a real strong Contender I mean we were talking about
00:38:12
this yesterday how good White Lotus season two was all right let's open an incredible discussion it is incredible
00:38:17
how HBO produces extraordinary hit after extraordinary hit the quality and the consistency of that quality coming out
00:38:25
of HBO is like nothing else you'll go I mean look Avatar 2 I did not like Avatar
00:38:30
one I thought it was junk Avatar 2 is getting panned for being junk as well not everything that comes out of Disney
00:38:35
is a hit they certainly have the best franchises but man Warner media has a lot to contend with and uh you know they
00:38:42
could end up being a real Challenger to Disney in the years ahead sax did you watch the White Lotus season two yes or
00:38:48
no okay no problem it is absolutely fantastic we have to do a little fan service here
00:38:53
what did you love chamoth about white letter season two give the fans a little service here but wait it's on season two
00:38:58
I didn't even see season one I don't even know what you guys are talking about okay how to show in television
00:39:04
well I'll tell you what's incredible is there's a diversity of characters and they weave the super like you know
00:39:10
interesting story together but each of the characters are so distinct and the characters are played so well I mean we
00:39:17
were talking about um you know we were kind of at dinner last night talking about who our
00:39:21
favorite character was on the show and everyone has a different answer and everyone has a different reason and then
00:39:26
there are characters that you hate but the fact that you hate them and the fact that you despise them draws you in
00:39:32
you're drawn into these characters I think that the the way that they kind of portrayed and the way that the
00:39:37
characters were acted by the um by the actors uh and then the way that they all kind of weave together to tell this
00:39:42
extraordinary story uh it was really um it was really compelling and it was like
00:39:47
just super impressive uh directing acting writing everything a handful of scenes in season one and season two
00:39:54
which I would say are unbelievably psychologically violent hmm and there's just no other
00:40:03
way to describe like how they just Expo and and by the way they do it with simple shots very simple dialogue it's
00:40:13
almost nonchalant in the way that they present these truth bombs and you have to sit there and process it and you're
00:40:20
just like oh my God it's just it's wave after wave it's an incredible incredibly well written show the
00:40:27
character development is extraordinary amazing production and set design by the way also I mean when you when you watch
00:40:33
don't you want it you want it to go to those locations do you guys remember in season Once
00:40:39
sax will remember this because sacks watched it season one the family is sitting at the table where they're
00:40:44
watching the Hawaiian dance and Paula the guest of the family gets up and leaves she can't take it anymore
00:40:50
and then the next day they're in a discussion about it and the father says something about I think hierarchy or
00:40:57
imperialism or something and it goes around the table and she just dead pan she says well maybe it's just time for
00:41:02
others to eat talking about you know like fixing these wrongs and I had to listen to it two or three times
00:41:10
I'm like oh my God that is that is a line that just sticks in your brain there's a few of those in in that show
00:41:17
that I think I would say and I was saying like they they really draw you in the set design the production design is
00:41:23
so compelling you want to be there you want to be in that experience with those characters
00:41:30
the pineapple sweet I mean and then in this season that whole hotel I looked up the hotel by the way online they hadn't
00:41:36
you know their own set design people come in and redo the hotel but it is an actual hotel and they just made it so
00:41:42
magical yeah it was such an incredible oh we should make that the host off the wall in Summit 2023.
00:41:51
I'm sorry I'm working on my Jennifer Coolidge tell your director uh David sacks what would you like completely for
00:41:57
you yeah my Biggest Loser was crypto and I think there'll be a subsequent Domino
00:42:02
to fall which is now that Gary G out of the SEC has FTX and the ftt tokens as the grift he's going to go
00:42:11
down the list of other tokens and he is going to start doing more prosecutions of griffs in crypto Biggest Loser for me
00:42:21
all right biggest business surprise let's see if we can get Zach's back engaged in the conversation now that
00:42:27
we're not talking about art and life sex last year your biggest business surprise it's actually produced a movie
00:42:35
about Dolly I know he is I'm joking with him he's a control artist and he sold it
00:42:39
to Mark Cuban congratulations on the sale uh David I guess me and Cuban are besties now fantastic in 2021 our
00:42:47
selections for business biggest business surprises I was very surprised by dows chamath by moderna
00:42:54
sax by Tech moving to Miami and Friedberg you were surprised by nfts what were we surprised by in 2022
00:43:01
Freeburg we'll start with you Elon musk's acquisition of Twitter I think took Everyone by surprise it kind of
00:43:06
went I mean this is such an obvious one but it went from a Whimsical fantasy and
00:43:10
idea to suddenly you know cold-hearted reality with uh you know a huge kind of negotiating Saga that took place and
00:43:19
Court battles and all the drama that ensued and here's what I think was most surprising about it it wasn't just the
00:43:25
acquisition and the and the fact that the acquisition closed but it was the the incredible
00:43:31
veracity of the head cutting cost cutting the demands that people return to work return to the office and then
00:43:38
what was most surprising that followed that is the impact that that seems to have had on the rest of Silicon Valley
00:43:44
where now nearly every VC I speak with every CEO every board is looking to elon's behavior for right or for wrong
00:43:51
for you know Moral Moral or not and saying that's a model for how you can challenge your team to achieve the
00:43:57
impossible in an impossibly difficult environment which is what we find ourselves in and so I think it was a
00:44:03
series of surprising events he bought Twitter he made these incredible changes and then everyone seems to be looking to
00:44:08
that as a model and it's really resonated it's quite a Rippling effect I'm not saying it's good I'm not saying
00:44:12
it's bad I'm not saying it's moral right or wrong but the whole thing was really
00:44:16
an incredible surprising unexpected Saga this year so I give the Elon acquisition
00:44:21
on Twitter kind of the award chamatha do you have a biggest surprise I would say it's uh Jerome Powell and
00:44:28
the fed and their staunch hawkishness uh on inflation I think everybody wants all of this to be over
00:44:37
and I think we're definitely in the last few Innings of it but I think what was surprising was how consistent
00:44:44
and how hawkish and how bearish Jerome Powell was every chance he got he didn't capitulate or waver from the
00:44:54
key message which he was saying from the beginning which is we have the tools to
00:44:59
fix a broken economy but we don't have the tools to fix runaway inflation and so we will raise
00:45:05
rates higher than anyone expects and keep them there longer than anybody wants because on the
00:45:11
back end of it we can fix a few broken bones but if left unchecked this could really do a lot of damage and I think
00:45:18
that that was an enormous surprise that all the political pressure in the world all of the financial Capital markets
00:45:24
pressure in the world did nothing to change his position sax what was your biggest business surprise of 2022 David
00:45:32
sack's biggest well it was it was a pretty big surprise that adobe bought figma for 20 billion that price tag in
00:45:39
this environment pretty big surprise but I gotta say I think Freeburg nailed it uh gotta say that the business Saga of
00:45:45
the year was Elon buying Twitter first the liberal media was up in arms that he might do it then they insisted that he
00:45:52
must complete the deal in any event he he did ultimately buy the company and now he's affecting his
00:45:59
changes I agree that's the big business story this year certainly it was a big surprise for me that I got deposition
00:46:04
for six hours is it a surprise that you're sitting in Twitter's headquarters today right now yeah it is a surprise
00:46:09
but just by the way the rumors and speculation are getting out of hand I am not a candidate for CEO of Twitter so I
00:46:16
want to put the composure on that because it's starting to get out of hand and the job is yours my friend
00:46:21
congratulations all right again let me know you've worked hard yeah take out the last man standing The
00:46:31
Last Man Standing outwit Outlast now that sax has said he is not taking the job a bunch of Libs have just stopped
00:46:38
taking Xanax the libs biggest fear with sax was gonna get that job we just canceled a bunch of Xanax uh
00:46:45
prescriptions uh congratulations to the lib sax is not going to be your overlord
00:46:48
on Twitter for me it's obvious uh the Twitter acquisition is the biggest surprise by Far and Away Freeburg I
00:46:56
couldn't have summarized it better I will say in six weeks what we have seen there is
00:47:01
nothing short of extraordinary have there been bumps in the road has it been a little chaotic at times perhaps but
00:47:09
the features that are coming Fast and Furious are gonna be the story going forward you've seen uh Twitter for
00:47:16
business sax had his fingerprints all that you may fingerprints all over that you may have seen uh hashtags for stock
00:47:23
tickers I was briefly involved in that they're going to be so many features coming and this is what Elon zone of
00:47:30
Excellence is product he is an engineer he's a product genius the proof is in the pudding whether it's
00:47:37
rocket chips or the cars we're going to see a parade of features I predict in another six
00:47:42
to 18 weeks we will see people talking about all the great features in Twitter not any of the transitional issues and
00:47:50
people will be shocked my runner-up metastock collapsing that was my runner-up for the biggest
00:47:57
business uh shock is that they just absolutely collapsed I was just going to add to what you're saying about new
00:48:03
features launching while we've been sitting here on this pod and I've been checking my Twitter feed there's a new
00:48:08
feature where there's a view count on all of your tweets and all of everybody else's tweets as well so you can see how
00:48:14
many views a tweet is generating so this tweet that I posted yesterday has 1.5 million views it's like incredible so it
00:48:22
really shows the incredible reach of Twitter and anybody who's thinking about going to like some knockoff like Madison
00:48:28
or something is gonna have to contend with the fact that it doesn't have nearly the distribution so I think this
00:48:36
really shows the power of Twitter and then Dave Rubin noticed my I tweeted this just a second ago and Dave Rubin
00:48:44
noted that the New York Times doesn't have anywhere near the views for its tweets because they bought all their
00:48:51
followers which is interesting I didn't know that but I just went over to the New York Times profile and and my tweets
00:48:56
are routinely getting 10 to 20 times more reach more views than theirs so this is a super interesting indicator of
00:49:05
who actually people are paying attention to on Twitter it's fascinating this is fascinating I'm looking at my
00:49:12
own I just did how do you give a 30 billion fraud Bell referring to SPF and that was just less than an hour ago no
00:49:19
it's 30 minutes yeah an hour ago and I have 50 000 views already which is uh 10 of my follower account so this is an
00:49:26
extraordinary you see right next to likes retweets quote tweets the feature train is coming and this will change the
00:49:33
dialogue all these haters who are like Twitter's gonna go down who are rooting against Elon let me tell you something
00:49:38
if a guy can land two rockets at a time and he can literally restart the electric car movement and he becomes the
00:49:46
number one car in any category he releases a car and how on Earth would you bet against him to build software
00:49:53
you have to be idiotic this is way too much I mean you guys like we should sorry
00:49:59
it's like an ad yeah you're selling them whatever for a company that you guys are
00:50:03
working at like I mean come on I'm not working yeah well you guys are advisors right Nick
00:50:09
can you let me show another feature because I think it's cool Nick sure let's go yeah let's go pull up my
00:50:14
profile real quick welcome to this week in Twitter God Twitter now has affiliate badges you
00:50:20
can see I've got a little craft Ventures badge next to my name so if you you should be able to click on it actually
00:50:26
to get to the craft Ventures profile yeah so you're gonna be able to affiliate users with business accounts
00:50:36
and it creates kind of secondary badges after the blue check I think even the corporate journalists are going to love
00:50:42
this because if you're a New York Times writer you'll have a little nyt badge next to your name Wall Street Journal
00:50:47
whatever you'll have the little badge so more and more people are going to get blue checks and then people are going to
00:50:52
have secondary or even tertiary badges that are basically specific to their affiliations okay so I think let's make
00:50:59
sure we get let's get an all-in badge we are going to have all in badges really soon awesome okay let's go for free work
00:51:05
free works that was our biggest business surprises and we just canceled your account Freebird they're locked out we
00:51:13
just took away no one goes through it anyway it's all good don't worry about it okay best science break they're
00:51:17
here's an easy one for us to do 2022 biggest science breakthrough what have you got Sultan of science we core of
00:51:25
course have to start with you 22 biggest science breakthrough Freeburg yeah I'm I'm gonna give it obviously to the um
00:51:30
the demonstration of net energy gain from the national ignition facility in plasma Fusion
00:51:36
uh that we talked about last week I I wouldn't call it a breakthrough by the way I think we we use that as a misnomer
00:51:42
last week but I'm still going to put it in this category it's more of a milestone along a very long path a very
00:51:48
arduous path a very difficult work that's been taking decades so it's a great milestone but I think what was so
00:51:54
important and impactful and Powerful about it is that it's really catalyzed the change a sea change in the investing
00:51:59
in the Outlook that this is becoming more reality as I mentioned last week we've seen an increase of nearly 40
00:52:04
percent in the number of fusion startups and the amount of capital that's flowing
00:52:08
in is now reaching 10 billion a year so this is becoming you know a real investable or an area that's getting
00:52:13
real investment some people might not think it's very investable but that's why I think it's it's been an important
00:52:17
year for fusion and I think um you know it's something I highlighted last year I was excited about and I too
00:52:23
picked Fusion uh also just point of clarity last week some people chamoth before you go to your prediction were
00:52:28
saying hey you're talking your book on solar when you're in your disagreement with
00:52:32
Friedberg that's obvious you've been very upfront that you're investing in solar you placed your bet
00:52:38
yeah 100 percent yeah so just depends everybody knows he made that bet he's talked about it
00:52:43
incessantly plus those idiots that were saying that are stupid but um yes let me
00:52:49
uh let me further clarify what I said last week and why it's important if Nick can you bring up the capital asset
00:52:54
pricing model again the most important thing for me is to make sure that we don't misallocate
00:53:01
human capital into Endeavors that I think are best left for research institutions funded by the government
00:53:08
and I think when you look at a capital asset pricing model and try to build one out
00:53:12
for Fusion as an example the expected rate of return that you need to get from this
00:53:19
is just astronomically High because of the beta of that investment risk and the market risk premium you
00:53:25
have to generate and so you know from my perspective I think that there are probably four or
00:53:30
five labs in the world that are capable of actually getting us to a positive energy equation I think Friedberg I
00:53:37
really thank you for actually saying that it wasn't a breakthrough in more of a milestone I think the real
00:53:42
breakthrough is when we have positive not just joules but we actually convert that into electrical energy right and we
00:53:49
actually talk about power and watts and I think that most people listening probably don't even understand the
00:53:54
difference between joules and Watts or don't even care and they want to jump around here or there so the point is
00:53:59
that there's an enormous path we need to take in physics and I think it's best done in
00:54:04
governments and I don't want to see a bunch of billions of dollars get wasted to get to to get marginal cost of energy
00:54:10
to zero right now I think there is a point in time where private startups can take the the
00:54:16
last 20 or 30 percent but I think about this like the internet which is you need
00:54:20
a DARPA to build V1 and then it could be handed over to Private Industry and I think Fusion when
00:54:26
we look back will look very similar and all the folks that try to build you know
00:54:31
versions of the internet that were private I think found themselves lagging because there's just a level of
00:54:36
investment that's required that's best served in government so anyways that's let's clarify that for all the for all
00:54:43
the folks who got their panties but in any event my science breakthrough of the year is that there was a 13 year old
00:54:48
girl this was you know because of all of this Fusion stuff actually we didn't even get to cover it because it happened
00:54:53
in the same week and I think this is infinitely more impressive and is an actual breakthrough
00:55:00
which is a 13 year old girl in the United Kingdom who had a heretofore uncurable form of leukemia T Cell acute
00:55:09
lymphoblastic leukemia so typically you start in chemotherapy if chemotherapy doesn't work you move to bone marrow
00:55:16
transplants and it was uncurable and a lab in the UK basically using crispr edited these transplant T cells
00:55:28
to go in and wipe out her cancer and now her cancer is literally undetectable now if you bring up that Capital asset
00:55:37
pricing model again Nick what I'll tell you is the rate of return on a human life in my opinion is infinite and so
00:55:44
here is an unbelievable breakthrough that got very little attention because everybody was wrapped around the axial
00:55:51
effusion it happened in the same week so maybe it's understandable I didn't understand it but I think this is the
00:55:57
single most important thing that happened in science not just this year but frankly in the last decade because
00:56:03
if you can actually now do base editing and eradicate at least in this case a blood-based Cancer and eventually we'll
00:56:12
be able to bring that and use that towards solid-state tumor cancers it's a huge breakthrough in in just
00:56:20
human longevity and human quality of life and that happened just a few weeks ago
00:56:26
okay and of course for David sacks his biggest uh science breakthrough is I don't care so moving on
00:56:33
sex go ahead tell us yeah no this category reminds me of when Biden had that moment where he's like America can
00:56:41
be defined in a single word and he's like that's kind of how I feel about this category America is a nation that
00:56:48
can be defined in a single word foreign amazing how you figured out a way to be derogatory about Biden in the science
00:56:59
section a new low even for you sex oh it's a good one sex I like it all right biggest flash in the pan 2021 this
00:57:08
is what we said where the biggest flash in the pan I said uh the woke socialist leadership of cities I.E Chessa boudin
00:57:17
freebrook said the Constitution Dao Sac said the word transitory very well played and Tremont said the metaverse
00:57:24
also very well played everybody yes very good everybody get your flowers uh enjoy all of those seem like pretty
00:57:32
good uh selections but this year is what everybody wants to hear about Freeburg tell us now who is your 2022 biggest
00:57:40
flash in the pan the undisputable who here we go biggest flash in the pan of 2022 was the all in Summit
00:57:50
it went that'll always be a strong and significant memory it was such a hot thing for a minute and then it died
00:57:58
so um to the all-in summit I I uh when I used my glass I pour one out I toast to
00:58:05
you to Miami and uh unless David sacks carries it from here uh it was a flash in the pan
00:58:10
it was a flash in the pan uh sex who's your flash which Democrat is The Flash in the plan for you exactly this is
00:58:16
where I had uh Liz truss as you guys mentioned she only survived 44 days as PM I mean that's only four scaramuccis
00:58:28
she was basically fired by the bond markets after she combined a thatcheress tax cut with massive energy subsidies to
00:58:37
counter the price spikes caused by the war in Ukraine that's just been actually committed to this was deemed untenable
00:58:42
by the UK Central Bank it crashed the pound and I think there is a serious Point here which is that as much as
00:58:49
Thatcher and Reagan were the two towering heroic figures of the 1980s I think zombie thatcherism is not going to
00:58:56
be electorally viable in the UK just like zombie reaganism is not going to be viable the United States I think that
00:59:02
the conservative movement has to stop living in the past we have to develop fresh ideas to meet the economic and
00:59:08
foreign policy challenges of today tremath do you have a flash on the pen I actually think Fusion literally was a
00:59:16
flash in the pen it was it lasted 10 to the negative 10 seconds so that more less of a flash you can't have without
00:59:23
being a flash in the pen ah they have it hey uh I see somebody who's here oh look
00:59:28
who's oh is it the proprietor the proprietor the owner to her customer support at
00:59:35
your service so actually spent the last 15 minutes selling your new features uh yeah on the
00:59:41
podcast pretty exciting well the the like the views are like incredible yeah I mean and I saw Dave Rubin already made
00:59:49
an observation that if you look at New York Times their views are maybe one tenth Like My Views just me as a lone
00:59:56
Tweeter and he said that their followers are inflated by just basically buying a
01:00:00
bunch of follower accounts yeah the views thing is huge that's why I I pushed the views which is like actually
01:00:06
a lot harder feature to implement than you'd think because the sheer number of uh transactions uh per second like uh
01:00:12
it's I think it sort of requires system-wide on the order of of three three million transactions a second to
01:00:21
actually calculate the view to you know calculate and display the view count FYI
01:00:25
for Twitter Twitter Global so it's like three million per second it's a lot for those of you listening uh
01:00:32
Elon Musk has joined the Pod Elon how's uh how's the first six weeks been generally speaking of owning Twitter
01:00:38
well it's been quite a roller coaster which uh obviously you've um but witnessed and been on the roller coaster
01:00:45
as well yes the Dramamine I've taken the Dramamine it's it's quite yeah I mean it's exciting uh but I think it's sort
01:00:52
of has its highs and lows to say the least um but overall that seems to be going in
01:00:58
a good direction and um you know we've got the the expenses reasonably under control so the company's not like
01:01:06
on the in the fast lane of bankruptcy anymore and we're uh releasing features uh
01:01:12
faster than Twitter's history at the same time as having contained the costs and and uh reduced the cost structure by
01:01:20
a factor of three maybe maybe four so you know the the verified uh is obviously that's that's that's huge it's
01:01:30
the revenue stream as well as um uh a means of identifying of like knowing that it's a
01:01:38
real person and not a botter or trial situation the having the affiliation organization
01:01:46
affiliation which I suspect you talked about that was a an idea of David's that was great
01:01:51
um to uh you know have organizational affiliation so you can know that somebody is
01:01:57
um an actual professor at Stanford or uh does that this particular handle is actually Disney not someone simply
01:02:03
putting I work at Disney in my in their bio so I think that's going to be really
01:02:09
helpful it they're just really just having um detailed and uh nuanced verification so of all the various
01:02:19
things that you say you are are these things validated by other people and organizations can you tell us how you do
01:02:26
product iteration Elon because one of the things that I think some people got guilted by over the last couple of weeks
01:02:32
is like a bunch of things got taken away or changed or rules changed or policies
01:02:37
changed and there was very quick action and then people had all this negative feedback about the the quick action
01:02:42
without communication but your extraordinary Talent is to iterate product to success can you just maybe
01:02:48
share with people how you do product iteration in this context to help them understand how some of these decisions
01:02:54
get made and why moving quickly is so important and just you know how you're doing this I'm a big believer in like
01:03:01
you want to look at the net output um so it's sort of like a you know what's the batting average uh if it's
01:03:09
like baseball the point is is not that you're like uh you know hit the ball but it's like well how many
01:03:17
home runs you get and how like what's your actual your slugging percentage Yeah selling percentage Yeah Yeah it's
01:03:23
like you've got to swing for the fences you're gonna you're gonna you know strike out a bit more but we're gonna
01:03:26
swing for the fences here at Twitter um and we're gonna do it quickly so and I think uh generally like my error
01:03:36
rate uh and sort of being the chief twit uh will be less over time um but you know in the beginning we'll
01:03:44
we'll make obviously sort of a lot more mistakes uh and you know because it's I'm new to the I'm like hey
01:03:52
I just got here man um so I mean if you look at like the actual amount of improvement that's happened at
01:03:58
Twitter in terms of like I said like having costs that are not insane uh and getting and actually
01:04:05
shipping product that on balance is good I think that is uh that that's great like I think we're actually
01:04:14
executing well and getting things done I think we'll have fewer um pure gaffs in the future how did you get
01:04:21
to your intuition on what the efficient Frontier of employees needed to be to make the product better well
01:04:30
um yeah I I observed part of this where you basically asked the question who here is
01:04:39
critical and who here is exceptional yes I mean is so I mean it really the what are the criteria is trying to apply
01:04:49
and obviously you're not gonna be perfect um if you're moving fast and and there's
01:04:54
a lot of you know people you're talking about here is that anyone who is exceptional
01:04:59
what they do where the role is critical and they have a positive effect uh on others
01:05:05
um and they are trusted meaning they've put the company's interests before their
01:05:08
own uh should stay pretty straightforward yeah and you know also and it also is up for
01:05:14
working you know working hard like uh that would not that would not this this that starts was not Twitter's prior
01:05:23
culture yeah were you surprised that that the intersection of that Circle and the people that left was basically 25
01:05:31
were you surprised it was that deep or did you think your intuition was like it's probably somewhere in here well I
01:05:37
think you could just stand back and say without knowing how many employees Twitter has at all
01:05:43
and say how many people are really needed to run Twitter like let's say you don't know what the
01:05:50
employee account number is at all how many people needed to keep the site operational like let's say if excluding
01:05:57
product product Evolution you basically have to keep the servers going and uh you have to have customer sort of a
01:06:07
support function to take down a material that is in violation of the law how many people
01:06:16
what's the minimum number of people that's in the hundreds probably it's not uh exactly it's not it's not like a
01:06:22
giant number yeah Twitter saw is like 2 000 people right yeah we still have two thousand people it's not nothing and and
01:06:28
actually if you there's there's actually on the order of uh like almost 5 000 uh contractors
01:06:36
like almost yeah almost all of the what's called trust and safety work which is like
01:06:42
um the the support functions for the site are done by contractors you're doing a lot more to take down
01:06:48
hate speech than the company previously was doing yeah absolutely I hate speech impressions are down by a third and
01:06:55
we'll get even um lower maybe you could speak a little bit to the what we discovered uh I think
01:07:00
in those early weeks which was the incentive the incentive previously was to create
01:07:06
as many accounts as possible and there were a lot of quick fixes to lowering all these you know what people might
01:07:14
call bot accounts in some cases it was people opening many millions of accounts but uh we discovered this very early how
01:07:21
easy was it for you uh with the tech team to maybe lower the bot count and all the fake accounts maybe you could
01:07:26
speak a little bit to that because people have seemed to think that gosh it's a really hard thing to get rid of
01:07:31
bots and it turns out it isn't um but we still have a fair number of bots in the
01:07:35
system but the like I think the the internal structure the way Twitter set up previously was this Relentless focus on
01:07:44
what they called mdao which is monetizable daily active users although I would say the monetizable part is the
01:07:51
dubious but at least things that appeared to be monetized or could be passed off as
01:07:57
monetizable daily active users so this I created an incentive to turn a blind eye
01:08:02
to a fake account so if the incentive structure is like you know maximize the appearance of
01:08:11
monetizable daily active users then you're just it's a strong incentive to pretend that a bot is real and that's
01:08:19
what happened so um we're taking a lot of steps to reduce the Bots and trial situation
01:08:28
um so many um and um I think you're seeing that in in the usage like it's not it's not like
01:08:39
relatively rare to have your replies filled with crypto scams I'm not seeing any anymore
01:08:45
Freebird you had a question yeah I mean just on your earlier question you know Elon when you first started
01:08:51
um making changes at Twitter after you bought the business a lot of people kind of took notice at
01:08:57
how extraordinarily Swift and significant those changes were yeah and um there's a lot of technology companies
01:09:04
that have CEOs and investors and boards and we all talk to a lot of them and they're all now having a conversation
01:09:10
like look at what Elon did at Twitter how can we do something as aggressive as Swift as deep do you think much about
01:09:18
kind of the the model you're playing for other businesses and other Business Leaders particularly in Silicon Valley
01:09:25
and how you're operating Twitter do you ever kind of talk about that because I know you mostly talk about your business
01:09:30
and you talk about the businesses you're running but you're having a big influence I think in how other people
01:09:34
kind of act and behave that are other Business Leaders and run other technology companies I mean to Frank I'm
01:09:39
not I'm not really you know act are thinking about that much because I'm just thinking about
01:09:44
like how do we um I'm just like you know uh just get Twitter to be in a financially healthy
01:09:52
place um and and and fix the engine of engineering so we can have a rapid evolution of of new products
01:10:00
so and you know I I mean I guess I'm gonna sort of in some ways an unfortunate position where I uh don't have to answer
01:10:09
it it's not public and we don't have a board really so uh I mean so I can just go you know and and
01:10:19
I can take actions that are uh drastic and and obviously if if if I make a bunch of mistakes then the then Twitter
01:10:32
won't succeed and that'll be pretty embarrassing and uh sad but as long as like I said as long as
01:10:40
the batting average is is good um um wins uh out you know significantly outweigh
01:10:48
the mistakes then um you know it'll be a great future and I think I'm very optimistic about where
01:10:55
things happen I think a lot of people want to talk about or understand Elon your position on freedom of speech and
01:11:02
your principles I'm curious you've been pretty upfront about it how do you think
01:11:06
about it post acquisition you know what speech should be allowed on the platform Kanye came back he just
01:11:12
went insane his account got revoked what have you learned I guess now that you own it because you must be getting a lot
01:11:19
of inbound from people asking you hey how are decision is going to be made Etc you've been clear transparency is super
01:11:25
important in this but what are your thoughts on free speech and speech on a platform like this well I mean the the
01:11:30
general principle I think is that we should Hue close to the low in any given country so the lowest vary quite a lot
01:11:36
by by country um and um so I think we should be doing free speech that's that's close close to the low
01:11:47
and uh that's that's that's the general principle um the I think there are other things where
01:11:55
it's like okay we um like for example like if you're an Advertiser um you don't want to Nestle you don't you
01:12:04
don't want your ad like let's say it's a family movie next to some you know uh NSFW
01:12:13
content even if that content is text you know you know it's like um but they'll be like uh that's
01:12:22
probably that's we don't you know so so that's okay so that's you know part of what you know like when like so
01:12:30
there's there's more of an allowance for what you write what someone call hates feature on the system but it's just it's
01:12:36
not going to be promoted it's not like it's we're not going to be recommending hate speech it's a risk of stating the
01:12:42
obvious and we're not going to monetize hate speech so or negative speech like that's
01:12:54
nor would advertisers want us to you know any any I think it's going to be a rare product that wants to be uh next to
01:13:00
uh seriously negative stuff I would say you refer to it as hey freedom of speech
01:13:04
but not reach because this is a very nuanced discussion like should this stuff be able to hit the trends you know
01:13:09
in that kind of stuff yeah like it's certainly possible it's some things that will be regardless hate speech will hit
01:13:13
we'll hit it we'll hit Trends but I think it's going to be relatively unusual uh especially as we are doing a
01:13:20
better job of controlling the the bot Central situation and uh and yeah I don't exercise like this difference
01:13:27
between the Boston trolls like Boston like fully automated accounts but like a troll phone would be where you've got
01:13:31
like you know 100 people in a warehouse somewhere each with 100 phones and so they're actually humans and they're
01:13:37
gonna pass a capture test or you know and they can you know reply and reply and they're because they're actually
01:13:42
humans but it's actually ten thousand accounts that are just they're they're obviously not operating as as as real
01:13:52
people so that that's you know stuff like that can cause things to to Trend negatively
01:14:00
that's why I'm like a big reporters of having just a low-cost um verification capability
01:14:08
and um yeah so but like this is definitely a work in progress so there's um like I said it's gonna be and I did
01:14:18
like one of the first things I said uh after the acquisition closed was like we're gonna make a bunch of mistakes but
01:14:24
then we'll try to recover from them quickly and that's uh that's what we've done and I think we've generally
01:14:29
succeeded in uh recovering it from them quickly and um it's been going pretty well was the Paul
01:14:38
Graham and journalists suspensions mistakes from have you talked about this publicly about how that all kind of got
01:14:44
resolved at the end uh yeah I mean the program uh suspension was definitely a mistake and I actually called the
01:14:48
program to apologize personally for that one yeah great yeah um so uh you know on the journalist
01:14:55
front the I think the journalist essential suspensions were were not not a mistake uh in that
01:15:01
um for some reason uh a bunch of journalists thought they were um better than regular than everyone else
01:15:10
and that if they engage in doxing and and uh you know other and break the rules in various ways that that they're
01:15:17
not subject to suspension even though your average your average citizen is and I think that's just messed up uh the
01:15:23
same rules should apply to people who call themselves journalists as to you know anyone else on the system
01:15:30
they shouldn't be uh sort of above the rules for some reason they thought they they should be that's that's that
01:15:37
doesn't make sense I don't think that's right yeah and the rules being transparent and upfront I think that's
01:15:42
what everybody's looking forward to maybe some just complete Clarity and transparency and you've said from the
01:15:48
beginning when somebody gets suspended or the shadow Banning or this sort of tips into
01:15:53
this really weird stuff that we discovered during or you discovered uh where the journalists discovered during
01:15:58
the Twitter files it's it's kind of a bummer that people are being sanctioned or Shadow banned and they don't know it
01:16:05
if we're going to have a system the rules should be clear to everybody yeah absolutely so the the something I've
01:16:11
committed to and we'll uh well I think probably be able to roll that out in January
01:16:16
um just by the way there is like a bit of a you know we are not going to be rolling out a ton of new features over
01:16:21
you know Christmas and New Year's and stuff so there's like a you know what's been the next sort of
01:16:31
feature set will probably roll out mid to late January um and hopefully in that we'll uh we can
01:16:37
include um information about why an account is suspended or uh has uh what as uh called
01:16:46
within Tesla to Twitter uh visibility filtering uh AKA Shadow Banning so um uh and and some of these things like
01:16:58
are like there's a lot of things that just happen accidentally where there's um you know the rules in the system that
01:17:06
are meant to detect whether someone's a sort of Bot or troll or or like brigading where they're like you know
01:17:13
and and then and an account is sort of innocently caught up uh in that so um like there was some accounts just
01:17:23
suspended uh yesterday because um but temporarily suspended like they got like 12 hour suspensions because
01:17:32
someone in customers it's someone in trust and safety thought that they had posted a
01:17:41
nude photo of Hunter Biden or something oh no but they hadn't they hadn't actually done that um I don't know it
01:17:52
was just basically a mistake there were some accounts that would go to 12 hour suspension yesterday for uh an error
01:18:00
why it happened it was just essentially a mistake uh in the with Twitter customer support that was corrected Elon
01:18:07
let me uh let me ask you just a slightly broader question one of the things we just talked about was
01:18:13
the regime change that's happened where you know we all have to act differently now that the risk-free rate is probably
01:18:20
going to get to five percent and I'm just curious across all your businesses so Twitter yes but really more
01:18:26
importantly Tesla SpaceX are there decisions that you will make differently or not at all or will make
01:18:32
that you wouldn't have made otherwise in this new regime and how often do you think about that kind of stuff
01:18:41
well I think like it's more like like it does seem like we're headed into a recession here
01:18:46
um in 2023 the magnitude that recession is debatable but I think it's at least a
01:18:52
a life to moderate recession potentially it's on the order of uh 2009. um so that's so I think it's it's wise
01:19:02
to kind of like prepare for the worst hope for the best prepare for the worst don't get too adventurous like watch out
01:19:10
for margin of debt like I really advise people to not have uh margin debt uh in a volatile stock
01:19:18
market and uh uh you know from a cash standpoint keep keep powder dry you can get some pretty extreme things
01:19:29
happening in a down Market um like Brett Johnson who was a CFO who is the CPO CFO of SpaceX was at um
01:19:39
broadcom in 2000 and he he said that uh and that's a good company making good products
01:19:47
and he said the the from from Peak to trough I think in less than 12 months uh broadcom went down 97 percent
01:19:55
so like even if you had a small margin loan there you got you got crushed um it subsequently recovered and I think
01:20:02
you know to to much higher levels but you know if there's like mass panic in the stock market uh then you've got to
01:20:10
be really be careful about margin debt so but I mean this is just as we know this
01:20:19
the economy is cyclic so you and it's somewhat overdue for a recession and my best guess is that you know we
01:20:32
have sort of Stormy times for a year to a year and a half and then things start to
01:20:39
Dawn breaks roughly in uh Q2 24 if if I were to get that's like my best guess recessions don't like booms don't last
01:20:52
forever forever but neither do recessions and it's a 14-year boom so a six quarter recession seems like yeah
01:20:58
that may that might actually bounce out the last time it was what four or five quarters so yeah it's it's not easy hey
01:21:05
um the Twitter files how how how much longer are these gonna go on uh it seems like every week
01:21:12
another drop uh and these are pretty controversial um how much longer are the Twitter files
01:21:18
going to go on uh in your mind yeah and maybe why is this important to you to make sure that people understand the
01:21:26
stuff yeah I think it's important to like you know if we're going to be trusted in the future to kind of clear
01:21:32
the decks for stuff that's happened in the past so um I mean to be totally Frank
01:21:39
um almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true
01:21:45
so is there a conspiracy theory about Twitter that didn't turn out to be true so far they've also turned out to be
01:21:54
true and if not more true than people thought is there a part of the files that really shocked you more than the
01:22:01
rest of them like of the things that have been disclosed of all of these things is there something that really
01:22:05
sticks out with you is like holy [ __ ] I had no idea this was happening or is the whole thing just a big
01:22:12
dumpster fire and they were just looking at one huge thing um you know like psyops versus the hunter
01:22:19
Biden Thing versus the yeah the number of FBI people involved that was yeah it was pretty intense yeah the FBI psyop
01:22:27
stuff to me was probably the one that was the most Insidious like the rest of it I could think of like you know a
01:22:32
bunch of overzealous Libs got used yeah got it you know what I mean sure sure but to have like a secure skiff that
01:22:40
essentially sends things that you know government agents want the populace to basically think
01:22:46
it seems like out of like a really bad dystopian novel and then it turns out it existed
01:22:52
and then also the thing is it couldn't have just existed at Twitter so what are we going to do about all the
01:22:57
other places where this shit's happening YouTube Facebook yeah none of it seemed that surprising to me
01:23:03
I mean I don't know maybe I just believed all the conspiracy theories but I've also been inside some of these
01:23:08
companies and seen how they operate so honestly none of it was a surprise to me was it a big shock to you Elon well you
01:23:15
you Freeburg you were I I think you can claim that you weren't surprised that these companies were Shadow Banning
01:23:20
although they denied it but did you really suspect that the FBI was playing a role in flagging content for these
01:23:28
companies to take down it's like that blew me away content that's got nothing to do with like terrorism yeah they're
01:23:34
not investigating crimes like there's no crime right yeah they literally flagged
01:23:38
satire maybe they didn't get the joke I don't know but uh they don't seem to be a humor driven
01:23:48
group but um they don't seem to have the best senses of humor but aren't they supposed
01:23:52
to get warrants isn't that how it's supposed to work in a democracy they want information
01:23:59
that's troubling to me put yourself on either side of the extremes we have Michael schellenberger here who broke
01:24:05
the FBI story in the Twitter file so let's listen to him and to see because I think maybe the audience isn't caught up
01:24:13
on like what was discovered so now I know I have to follow Elon Musk that doesn't seem fair yeah hey guys
01:24:22
see you later hey guys oh hey Michael how are you uh I'm good uh just a quick question for
01:24:31
you Michael Michael first of all first of all who makes that sweater oh I'll send you mine man do you want it
01:24:37
or are you making fun of it I praise from you brother I praise uh just briefly Michael
01:24:45
um isn't the FBI supposed to get warrants uh to yes take actions with folks and then I guess is that at the
01:24:51
Crux of this are they doing this at other companies you think are they just like embedded in YouTube should we
01:24:56
expect they're embedded at meta and that they don't get warrants and they're kind
01:25:00
of tipping the scales and is that a good thing for a society or a bad thing for society it's a bit of a basic question
01:25:04
yeah well I think there's a there's multiple issues relating to FBI that I think have to be unpacked a bit but the
01:25:11
first one is that yeah FBI was constantly pushing the boundaries of what is legally and ethically acceptable
01:25:18
in terms of requesting information now I think what you saw over the last uh three weeks was a shift in I think our
01:25:26
own understanding that we did see more pushback from Twitter Executives against FBI and some alarm Bells being uh wrong
01:25:33
in terms of the requests that were being made from the intelligence Community but
01:25:37
these guys were really persistent they kept asking for more they kept getting more and more cooperation it's very
01:25:43
troubling it does look like Congress is going to look into this uh the two heads
01:25:47
of the Committees that are tasked with this or have said that they're going to look into it next year I think the other
01:25:52
thing that we saw that I think is is more troubling was this persistent uh effort to basically communicate to
01:26:00
Twitter Executives but also to news media National Security correspondence that there was this heavy foreign
01:26:06
infiltration going on this this Russian disinformation and it appeared to me looking at all the evidence both that we
01:26:13
saw from within Twitter and from outside of it that this was pretty organized effort to convince
01:26:19
uh key Executives at Twitter and Facebook but also these key reporters that that they should expect a hack and
01:26:26
leak operation sometime right before the elections having to do with Hunter Biden
01:26:31
I I find that very suspicious can I make an observation I think that maybe what we're finding out is that the mainstream
01:26:40
media tried to go back to its 1980 Cold War Playbook and turn Russian to a boogeyman but as we're seeing in the
01:26:48
Ukraine war you know they're not nearly the formidable foe that we thought they were and so it could probably be the
01:26:55
case that in 2016 they were as inept technically as as they are militarily right now and so we may have just built
01:27:03
up this monster that uh is kind of more like you know a a much smaller thing to be worried about
01:27:11
and we all ran with it because we had no evidence but the Ukraine Russia war is evidence that you know this highly
01:27:17
sophisticated War Machine and propaganda machine is not that good at their job right yeah I mean I think that what's
01:27:25
there's a lot of interest that were being served by hyping the so-called Russian misinformation threat I mean one
01:27:31
of them was just to Simply explain away the Trump phenomenon as a consequence of
01:27:36
foreign interference uh certainly the people that ran Hillary Clinton's campaign had an interest in doing that
01:27:41
but then you saw it become a sort of way I think to condition people for the release of the Biden laptop
01:27:51
and again we can't I can't prove that but it is striking that the Joel Roth this means Twitter executive who I think
01:27:58
was the object of this misinformation campaign um testified under oath that he was
01:28:03
being bombarded with these messages all throughout 2020 that they should expect some sort of a hack and leak operation
01:28:09
so when the New York Post finally did report on that computer uh in 2014 it was briefly censored by Twitter but I
01:28:17
think more importantly it was discredited in the minds of many voters including myself I really didn't think
01:28:24
that that laptop was what they said it was and it turned out that it was so I do think it's there's a real troubling
01:28:30
pattern of behavior by both the FBI agents but also by the former FBI Executives including the Deputy Chief of
01:28:37
Staff and the chief counsel from FBI that that were at Twitter as Executives at the time and In fairness Michael this
01:28:44
has been brought up many times but I just would like your take on it because you're a lifelong Democrat
01:28:49
correct until until last year great so it would you know uh just unless anybody think that you are like some Maga
01:28:55
supporter here just with my sweater yeah exactly this was all in the backdrop of
01:29:00
trump asking for the Russians you know during that debate to hack Hillary for him interfering with solanski and trying
01:29:06
to get him to give dirt on Biden and the fact that Hunter Biden was obviously dirty uh so to expect a hack
01:29:14
there was massive precedent for it so that set the stage for this correct for sure and there is definitely uh that
01:29:22
going on and maybe that's all there was to it it is just striking of course because
01:29:27
and I didn't even mention in my this is by the way this is Twitter thread uh part seven that I did on this issue
01:29:33
um I didn't even get into the fact that you know within a few days the many uh former senior heads of intelligence
01:29:40
organizations and others came out and said that it was the result of a Russian disinformation campaign so yeah sure I
01:29:47
mean I I guess we could find some other explanation uh for it um whether it was innocent or
01:29:53
coordinated but it is it is striking also I think the other thing that we found was the contrast between the the
01:30:00
threat inflation and what what Twitter was Finding themselves I mean there was you know you'll repeatedly Joel Roth
01:30:07
would would respond to FBI that yeah we looked into these accounts that you mentioned and they were all very low
01:30:12
follower accounts with very little activity so they just weren't finding very much foreign influence on the
01:30:19
Twitter platform and so I just think it was grossly inflated either for kind of good reasons or bad reasons I would say
01:30:28
yeah yeah and it's uh there there's no perfect way to police this stuff obviously and uh okay well listen we
01:30:34
appreciate your reporting thanks for doing it um and uh if you haven't uh read Michael's book uh San Francisco
01:30:43
you did some great reporting there as well and uh continued success in your investigative journalism thank you
01:30:49
Michael thanks guys appreciate it all right Michael sorry oh lost him hey you did an interview uh on that I
01:31:01
think I saw it on YouTube or something where you interviewed someone who was homeless in San Francisco and they were
01:31:05
addicted to drugs and they kind of said some narrative about how they were uh in this condition because San
01:31:12
Francisco basically pays them to be homeless and pays them to do drugs on the street did that ever get published
01:31:17
and did that come out because it was such a compelling couple of minutes that you got on tape there it really for me
01:31:22
sent home a message of how far kind of a progressive policies can take a society
01:31:29
and it's such a beacon for where things might go as other people start to think about adopting similar policies around
01:31:35
the world which is why I thought it was such important reporting whatever happened with that and where can folks
01:31:40
see that because it was such a moving interview for me yeah if you just Google Michael schellenberger YouTube homeless
01:31:46
you'll be able to find all my videos there's a lot of them that we did with people on the street all of them of
01:31:51
course people asking and wanting to do them but yeah I mean what we I also wrote about that in my book which is
01:31:57
basically San Francisco pays a cash welfare payment of somewhere between six to seven hundred dollars plus you can
01:32:02
get 200 in food stamps and a lot of uh people sadly use that to maintain their addiction and this gentleman uh James
01:32:11
with the tattoos on his face was very honest about how he was playing the system in fact he was himself we found
01:32:19
this increasingly kind of horrified by the incentives that San Francisco was creating for people to live on the
01:32:24
streets and and live on the streets in their in their addiction so yeah you can find that on YouTube so many people say
01:32:30
incentives Drive behavior and unfortunately these policies all came from a good place from a kind heart and
01:32:37
the idea that we could help people in need and unfortunately the way that the incentives get structured they can
01:32:42
actually cause more harm than good it's such an important lesson I just wanted to say that because I think you're
01:32:46
reporting on this really hit that home uh so so thanks for doing that I think it's really important because we have we
01:32:52
have to do the right thing for people but we also have to be careful that the policies are done in the right way so I
01:32:56
think it's so well said Friedberg because when you're Michael and I I just think you're very courageous for doing
01:33:03
it because it's very easy for somebody to say oh well you are being callous the truth is incentives matter and we saw we
01:33:10
we've seen this over and over again if you pay for something you get more of it and really San Francisco is burying the
01:33:15
burden I think this is what your book and uh um you know in a lot of the videos you've made at least the message
01:33:19
I got was San Francisco has the lowest price of drugs the lowest enforcement and the most incentives therefore they
01:33:25
suffer because every person who is you know addicted comes here because they speak to each other and 90 of the people
01:33:33
who are in San Francisco are here because we have created an incentive structure is that directionally correct
01:33:38
as we wrap here yeah 100 correct including just the non-enforcement of laws against sleeping on the sidewalk
01:33:45
doing drugs in public not requiring ultimately three times more people die living outside is an unsheltered
01:33:52
homeless person rather than live than being in a shelter and for me that's all you need to know to know that you
01:33:57
usually we cannot allow our brothers and sisters to sleep on the street no matter
01:34:01
how desperate they sound about wanting to avoid going inside it's three times deadlier to be on the street than inside
01:34:06
so the compassionate thing is to force people into housing but you know because you're we have this
01:34:15
perception that people have freedom and they should have the right to do this but a person who's taking fentanyl in
01:34:19
your research is not thinking correctly and if it was any family member of ours we would not want them to make that
01:34:25
decision for themselves we'd want somebody else to make that decision for them correct uh ABS I would want that
01:34:30
from if I was on the street so desperate that I was you know smoking Fentanyl and
01:34:34
breaking multiple laws every day of course I would want to be hospitalized you know and usually you know people
01:34:40
overcome their addiction that's the good news we always leave out of it but it is
01:34:44
possible people do overcome their addiction all the time but they often need some some an intervention from
01:34:49
family and friends and if that's too late for that then you need the intervention from the from the city all
01:34:54
right Michael thank you Michael appreciate it thanks guys so as we get back to the all-in news network we've
01:35:01
now gone 24 hours a day the all-in news network has launched we'll just have a road we should sit at various offices
01:35:07
throughout Silicon Valley letting Executives and CEOs imagine we did like a 12-hour Marathon
01:35:15
show for charity where just people showed up and we did a what do they call those on
01:35:20
TV what is the Charities yeah no no just a yeah telephone jaycal has to still fly commercial and we'll do
01:35:29
a telephone hey sax thank you for setting up those amazing uh drop-ins well done yeah I think sex I think
01:35:36
that's your jacket that's a great jacket is that custom that is this is the Christmas or holiday jacket
01:35:42
who is it by Isaiah it's uh Valentino all right well that's that's that's nice also
01:35:48
um okay no it's nice okay but okay let's keep going here we gotta go to lightning
01:35:52
round all right let's move biggest flash in the pan we were was our last I went with crypto pretty easy to say
01:35:59
that I'm not going to give myself a big high five but what did you guys think of
01:36:02
the Elon conversation real quick well he's very talkative any anything interesting or surprising for you I mean
01:36:07
he said the biggest you know thing that people want to make sure to avoid is margin debt I thought that was I mean
01:36:12
he's working hard and um he's just such a product a focused guy he just gets his
01:36:17
he's like so deeply into it he's like yeah just ultimately product wins right Friedberg I mean if anything's oh my god
01:36:23
of course everything yeah that's it that's it yeah so I mean and you know products are made by teams so what I
01:36:31
think is distinctly different here I'm just giving my personal opinion I don't have Microsoft teams no no
01:36:36
teams make products and so what I just want to say here is you know like the second teams suck no that I'm not no
01:36:42
don't trigger uh the bundle but I just want to say you know like this is a takeover
01:36:47
as opposed to building a company from scratch he's had to assemble a team and then work at this incredible product
01:36:52
pace and I think those two things are starting to click week yeah for sure it's gonna look very different than week
01:36:59
the first six weeks so yeah the products are really looking awesome and it was nice of them to give me that shout out
01:37:03
on the you know the affiliate badges but I'll just give a shout out I didn't hear
01:37:08
it what was it oh well he gave me he gave me some credit for the affiliate badges but I wanted to give credit to
01:37:14
the PMS who approached me about that idea troll I win again oh okay let me get let me give credit to the
01:37:22
actual PM's uh Evan Jones and Patrick trogger who they approached me about this idea they had and then I helped you
01:37:29
know give it some momentum here's the truth when Dave and I spend the first couple weeks there now that it's a
01:37:35
little more public anyone's been on the program what we found over and over again was that there were great features
01:37:40
that were ready to be released that were being held back by management and there
01:37:44
were brilliant people with all the ideas that you'd think should have been released and they just weren't allowed
01:37:49
to release a lot of these products why who knows but now that is an in charge I think you'll see the product cycle is
01:37:56
going to go much quicker the most important thing I saw which is such an important lesson for anyone running a
01:38:00
business in Silicon Valley is that the pace of decision making matters far more than the accuracy of decision making
01:38:06
it's always been like one of my three big mottos um yeah for me like my number one like my
01:38:13
three things are always like grit biased action and then narrative but like buy of tax and the rate at which you can
01:38:19
make decisions is a far greater predictor of success than the accuracy of the decisions you
01:38:24
do make and so you have to be willing to embrace failure you have to be willing to make decisions that could result in
01:38:29
something not being done correctly or making a mistake and even getting embarrassed on the internet you know by
01:38:34
making mistakes and having to call people like Paul Graham and apologize for them and that was a big moment
01:38:40
as a business scales as professional managers are brought in their incentive is to not make mistakes
01:38:47
their incentive is to do things that are predictably going to work and are predictably not going to fail and
01:38:53
therefore they avoid taking the risks and they reduce the rate of action the rate of decision making and that's why
01:38:58
so many businesses ultimately don't scale past some sort of inflection point or when founders that are willing to
01:39:03
push that envelope step out everything starts to fall apart and it's so critically important I think to look at
01:39:08
that as being I think elon's defining traits and characteristics that this regardless of the scale of the
01:39:13
organization and the Enterprise he's still willing to act with that level of bias to action that you typically see in
01:39:18
a small startup okay can put his reputation at risk yeah I um I sat in a meeting yesterday he said
01:39:28
that if we're not rolling back ten percent of the time we haven't pushed hard enough
01:39:33
right wonderful there you go I mean if you're never rolling anything back because you never make a mistake maybe
01:39:39
you're just not right moving fast enough not ambitious enough you're not faster you have enough of a bias towards action
01:39:45
you're too afraid of making a mistake by the way here's what's so interesting about the views feature is that
01:39:50
a bunch of websites I think it started because Instagram did a bunch of apps deprecated you know likes because they
01:39:57
felt that it was too it was part of this negative cycle and so they took all this stuff away and
01:40:06
basically views is going sort of back in that direction and giving more granularity in terms of outside in
01:40:13
social engagement on a post which is I think interesting to see it's happening in a moment where all these
01:40:18
other sites and apps are actually going in the opposite direction [Music] well it's it's like a standard feature
01:40:24
on YouTube and it's very powerful for YouTube's Network effects because it shows you how many views you get so it
01:40:30
discourages people from using other sites because you know you get the most Distribution on YouTube so it's weird
01:40:37
that other social networks don't want to follow suit I mean in one hour they had
01:40:41
it but they deprecated that's what's so interesting but I guess you know my point is we've only had this feature for
01:40:46
an hour and I didn't realize how much distribution my tweets were getting and it definitely undermines my incentive to
01:40:52
want to go use some other platform when I see the distribution I'm getting on Twitter well if you're getting 10 times
01:40:57
more distribution than the New York Times you know what's going to happen is people stop listening and reading them
01:41:01
well I mean it's sort of like this podcast itself like I mean we people ask us to go and my point is we have to rely
01:41:08
on social proof and anecdotes about the actual scale and the breadth and the reach because it's impossible for us to
01:41:16
get one holistic View that shows across all of these different modalities whether it's Spotify or apple
01:41:22
podcast or YouTube how many people listen or watch and you know we add it all up and you know we think it's in
01:41:29
this you know sort of three to five million range of people but if you just had a numerical
01:41:35
canonical number that was irrefutable you just run over everybody this turns it into a meritocracy this could be
01:41:41
terrifying to some blue check marks when they see that the people who they report
01:41:46
on get 10 times as many views as they do of course which is why when when people
01:41:50
journalist look at Sean Hannity go to Sean Hannity's profile and for the number of followers he has
01:41:55
hypothetically engaged his audiences it's all Bots it's all trolls it's all nobodies I looked at Mitt Romney just
01:42:01
put out a video Whatever in the first like half hour he had a hundred thousand views like every politician who starts
01:42:06
seeing this is gonna go wait a second I mean the world I'm getting more views here than I am on MSNBC or Fox the world
01:42:11
I need to do this more rational place if Mitt Romney actually has more influence
01:42:15
than Sean Hannity let's hope okay let's move on we got to get through this quickly it's our
01:42:20
longest episode ever here we go we are gonna do next up it's very this is a very important category best CEO of
01:42:30
2022 in 2021 I went with Frank slootman and Elon Musk uh chamoth went with Satya
01:42:37
Nadella sax went with Brian Armstrong and Freeburg went with Jack Dorsey now we go
01:42:43
on to 2022 sax who everybody wants to know sax is best CEO of 2022 go ahead sex uh every founder took my advice to get
01:42:55
leaner so down their burn create Runway you know whether the storm down you know so you're getting a
01:43:01
generic answer not a person yeah exactly I mean look I think actually a lot of the names a lot of the names well here's
01:43:07
the problem is that you know yeah can I finish Jacob the the names that you mentioned from
01:43:12
last year would be the top candidates for this year I mean I think Sacha Nadella had a good year obviously what
01:43:17
elon's doing we just talked about it's amazing um Brian Armstrong I think stock hasn't done great but he's been a strong
01:43:23
CEO but I don't want to repeat the same names I think that you know every CEO who responded to the regime change by
01:43:29
cutting costs getting leaner extending Runway I think deserves to be on this list and
01:43:35
unfortunately a lot of them are just resisting and they're just not yet taking the medicine or they've been
01:43:41
taking the medicine in little drips and drives instead of just like swallowing it whole and getting a move on yeah just
01:43:46
drink the whole two tablespoons of medicine don't sip it you gotta just take it it's not getting better I mean
01:43:52
the stock market today should be a wake-up call I mean this is one of the worst days in the market the whole year
01:44:00
so things are getting worse before they're getting better chamoth who is your best CEO of the Year well the
01:44:06
numerical answer is Vicki hollab who's the CEO of Occidental Petroleum stocks up like 140 this year it's technically
01:44:12
the best performing stock of the year 63 billion dollar company but that's just a numerical answer who I
01:44:21
uh I actually want to double down on David's answer Sax's answer because I agree with that
01:44:27
I have been guiding uh our portfolio company CEOs to be at cash flow break even now or extend Runway to q1 2025.
01:44:37
and they're 25 yes because I I mean I think he's not 24. well Elon and I are kind of roughly in the same place we
01:44:44
have been for a while which is like you know mid 24 is when the recession ends and you need to give yourself two to
01:44:49
three quarters of buffers so that you can go and raise around which takes a quarter to two quarters and once you
01:44:55
start to get kind of get escape velocity out of a recession having money through
01:44:59
end of q1 2025 I think is a is a minimum requirement and you know of the companies that I think were the most
01:45:09
precariously positioned there was five of them that got their acts together and really did
01:45:16
it but these are all CEOs of companies that you know I mean if you said them you
01:45:20
would know some of them but I I do agree with David I think the CEO that bit the
01:45:24
bullet so maybe publicly what I would say is you know the CEO of klarna deserves a
01:45:29
huge you know metal for Having the courage to do it before anybody else did the CEO of
01:45:35
checkout.com just took a huge write down these CEOs are making sure their companies survive Friedberg best C EO
01:45:44
2022. my vote for best CEO is Warren Buffett and I think it is just simple arithmetic
01:45:51
uh he has for years and now for decades proven himself uh to be just not just an exceptional
01:45:59
investor or stock picker whatever the kind of typical quip is about what he does for a living
01:46:05
but I think what's so extraordinary about Buffett is that regardless of the market conditions he can kind of remain
01:46:11
steadfast in his uh intent and in his mission and he doesn't kind of waver and you know he doesn't take an active role
01:46:19
in ranting and complaining about markets and politics and I think that that's what makes him such an extraordinary
01:46:25
leader he stays within his zone of competence he doesn't do things that he doesn't know about he doesn't let the
01:46:30
macro drive him and cause him to be kind of um you know affected by it and he says
01:46:36
this is what I know how to do this is what I can do and that is all that he does do and he does it so exceptionally
01:46:41
well and to Jamal's point he is the largest shareholder of Occidental Petroleum along with many other uh
01:46:46
incredible businesses and I think he's proven in a market like we just had this year why he is kind of the most
01:46:52
extraordinary CEO or one of the most extraordinary CEOs but one of the you know best kind of capital allocators of
01:46:58
all time I'm going to go in a similar fashion as Chama off and sacks and go with the money losing CEOs who have
01:47:07
dedicated themselves to free cash flow and to getting to profitability from the last cycle Airbnb and Uber were the
01:47:14
money losers and now Airbnb is my number one they become a money printer they are
01:47:20
now making bank and they're still growing very uh quickly and then Uber I put in my second
01:47:27
they need to do another riff they need to cut some expenses but they too are hitting the free cash flow and the
01:47:32
network effects so I'm giving it to uh chesky and then Dara one and two okay let's keep moving best
01:47:39
investor uh for me uh I'm going with the investors like a general category who are demanding governance and doing
01:47:48
diligence again uh or who never stopped let me say it that way there's a generation of investors who've raised
01:47:55
their funds in the last five years and didn't do diligence didn't demand board seats didn't demand boards
01:48:01
those uh idiots are now paying the price and they created a lot of this mess of entitlement and a lack of governance I
01:48:08
want to give a shout out to the bill girlies of the world who fought for governance and fought for
01:48:13
diligence in the face of being told okay Boomer you don't get it who do you have
01:48:18
uh best investors I will pick the what are called the pot shops so these are folks that have
01:48:27
strategies where they have hundreds of investing pods underneath an umbrella and they have this very sophisticated
01:48:33
risk infrastructure so this is what Ken Griffin owns in Citadel this is what Izzy Englander owns in millennium
01:48:40
Brevin Howard is another one de Shaw's another one so they have all kinds of strategies
01:48:48
but that are essentially run by computers that allocate risk you know scale you up scale you back turn you on
01:48:54
turn you off fire you overnight and those strategies as a whole ran over the market this year
01:49:01
they were the best performers they are giving back billions of dollars they've generated double-digit positive
01:49:07
returns they're raising their fees in some cases some of these folks are moving their
01:49:13
annual fee up to four percent a year they're carry up to 40 percent a year incredibly incredibly well-run
01:49:21
performant businesses they were by and Away the best investors uh this year okay we're gonna go lightning around
01:49:28
from here uh Sachs do you have a uh best investor yeah I said uh Stan uh drucken
01:49:34
Miller he has to recall last year he predicted that inflation would be lasting this is the spring of 2021 when
01:49:40
transitory was the word of the day this year he predicted the bear Market rally we had in July and August and I remember
01:49:49
back at the coaching Summit in may they were around that time he was interviewed
01:49:53
and he basically was saying that as soon as there was a bear Market rally over the summer that he would then put a
01:50:01
short position on I don't know if he actually did that but he said he's going to do that and then it turns out that
01:50:05
the summer rally that we had was a dead cap bounce so he was right about that and now he is predicting a hard Landing
01:50:12
in 2023 with a deeper recession than many expect so sadly I suspect he may be right yet again
01:50:20
Friedberg best investor for you 2020. damn yeah I had drunken Miller I I indicated that he's been doing
01:50:25
interviews pretty much every quarter for the last two years and he's been pounding the table telling everyone
01:50:29
what's going to happen and it all happened and he even told people the trades in mid-2021 he said he was short
01:50:35
long dated treasuries and he was long Commodities and if you had put those two trades on at that time and held them to
01:50:40
today you would have made a fortune and so I think he's extraordinary in his um ability to kind of see macro in a way
01:50:46
that others don't but also to take extremely brave action with his portfolio he's renowned for how big the
01:50:52
bets are that he makes and how quickly he can change his mind when he's wrong and make another big bet and still get
01:50:58
himself out of the hole he's incredible so definitely give it to Stanley brooken
01:51:02
Miller this year 2021 we did our best turnarounds I pick Disney Jamal Ford Freiburg
01:51:11
what about the worst investor of 2022 can we do that coach moth you want a freestyle tell us your worst investor of
01:51:17
2022. I mean I'll put myself in the category along with anybody else who was long tech hey Steve Nick if you can just
01:51:23
bring please back up this Capital as a pricing model any of us that didn't understand this got run over
01:51:31
this year and just to put some very specific numbers here there was a decent little tweet thread
01:51:38
uh that Elon was a part of where he they actually calculated what the expected rate of return of Tesla was and it
01:51:45
turned out to be almost 14 a year and so you know when you start to compound 14 over three four five years
01:51:52
these numbers get very big very quickly and the reason why is that it has a huge
01:51:58
beta and we're in a world now where the risk-free rate is quite high so all of us benefited from this equation
01:52:05
essentially being upside down for the last 15 years and all of us who were over allocated
01:52:12
into things that benefited from those Dynamics frankly got run over this year so we
01:52:17
were as a class the worst investors of 2022. okay here we go let's do our best turn around I am going to go with uh me
01:52:27
for me it's meta they were losing money hand over Fest they refused to do a rift
01:52:34
and then finally bestie Brad gerstner said uh let's get fit he did a memo and finally finally
01:52:40
Zuckerberg made some Cuts reportedly rumors he's making a 15 10 or 15 cut I heard in the back channels right now
01:52:49
based on performance so he's not calling it a riff or a layoff they're just going
01:52:52
to cut the bottom 10 or 15 again so I think zuck's gonna turn it around anybody have a best turnaround so you're
01:53:00
saying zoc mission accomplished turn around this year I'm going with meta so your answer is
01:53:07
meta was turned around by Zuck this year yes they got down to 85 and now they're
01:53:12
up what 110 115 yes he turned it around at the end of the year it was like a Hail Mary at the end of the year he's
01:53:17
turned it around I think he's going to continue to yes that is my position go with that Jacob okay so if we're
01:53:27
talking about very partial turnarounds here I would say I would say that you can measure the turnaround as of October
01:53:35
24th to now yes exactly so uh San Francisco is still overall a mess but there were a few positive events that
01:53:43
happened over the past year and since we're looking back we should call these out so first of all
01:53:49
back this is towards the beginning of the year we recalled three members of the school board uh most particularly
01:53:54
Allison Collins remember her this was done by something like a 70 30 margin an 80 20 on on Collins
01:54:03
this was the school board that had dragged his feet on school reopenings they destroyed the merit-based Lowell
01:54:09
High School they wasted hours of meetings on a silly plan to remove the names of names like Abraham Lincoln from
01:54:16
this from the schools in any event they were removed then Jake how you referred to this we got chase a boudin recalled
01:54:23
the bias 60 40 margin as San Francisco D.A this was the D.A who whose agenda was decarceration he tried to release as
01:54:31
many repeat offenders as possible the voters San Francisco had enough and then most recently the far less supervisor
01:54:38
Gordon Marr just got rejected by his own Community this November and the new tough D.A Brook Jenkins
01:54:45
um got reelected in her own right after being appointed by London breeds so there's still a long way to go in San
01:54:51
Francisco but there are definitely some green shoes that the electorate here has
01:54:56
had enough and is looking for the let's say called the Centrist Democrats as opposed to the radicals
01:55:03
okay we're in the lightning round here we're in hour three of the all in podcast uh Marathon this uh Telethon
01:55:11
got a best turnaround for 2022. Hard One to give so any green shoots for 2022 as
01:55:17
sax would say no I mean the everything everything's just got a disaster great freeberg anything that you have there
01:55:26
may be no turnaround award until 2025 fine okay yeah we have a little split on this free bird you got anything if
01:55:33
you're you're an incisive [ __ ] Viewpoint and I'll pick Zuck and meta that makes sense 94 it's at 117. it's
01:55:40
one of my best J trades I'm gonna take it didn't you also say Disney was your pick of the year or something I'm buying
01:55:46
more I'm buying more Disney I'm buying more this is I'm telling you Disney Warner which you
01:55:52
talked about before yeah and Facebook are three of my uh bit and uh you know three of my big ones let's say worst
01:55:59
human being here well I think look given that this is supposed to be the year 2022 I mean you got to say that
01:56:05
SPF was the winner of this hands down okay congratulations to SPF you are consensus worst human being for this
01:56:12
year I mean not ever but for this year only for this year right yeah we we all hate you equally okay
01:56:18
who's who's number two why do you hate him why do I hate him because all those people lost their money
01:56:24
and you know there's some pot it's causing chaos I feel terrible for all these people who lost money that's why I
01:56:28
hate him ugh that's disgusting did you see anybody have a second mode the two guys
01:56:35
copped to please Caroline Ellison and uh Gary black pancakes but it turns out that they actually did engineer a back
01:56:44
door into FTX and Alameda has been doing this oh my God oh my God that's game over
01:56:51
we're getting 10 years he's getting my game over okay well should we talk about that interesting defense strategy that
01:56:57
we were um discussing in in the chat oh yeah I think this is actually a fascinating defense strategy I think
01:57:03
this is their only shot one of our besties had this theory that he was prescribed two prescription drugs one
01:57:10
was Adderall what was the other one called this was awesome the patch it's it's a drug I wasn't
01:57:16
familiar with I guess it's a patch but when you combine these two things apparently it basically shuts down or
01:57:22
kills the part of your brain that deals with inhibition inhibition it's cocaine yeah what if his defense strategy was
01:57:31
yeah like only an insane person would do this and I was acting insane because I was prescribed these drugs that had
01:57:38
these drug conflicts and it like killed part of my brain I mean and you think about every Criminal on Wall Street said
01:57:44
cocaine is my defense but this you could say he was maybe he was legally prescribed it if you could
01:57:49
show the prescription oh by the way I'm not saying yes this should get him off I'm just we're basically workshopping
01:57:56
what is the only shot of his defense would be right well and think about it sax he acted manic after
01:58:04
FTX collapsed so that Mania of doing 20 Twitter spaces would be there's something so insane about what he did
01:58:13
right that you that all it's almost like a like a prescribed Insanity defense like
01:58:19
I was preside a drunk combination that made me insane did anybody have a most loathsome company as we wrap the only
01:58:26
way that you could come up with that is like you you'd have to have two parents that were like law professors or
01:58:30
something all right most most loathsome company this is his defense you know yeah my
01:58:36
parents boohoo no no no he'll claim Insanity Jay Cal he'll say of course yeah and they'll
01:58:42
have a I mean do we think that his parents aren't going to help his defense you know at this point this this kid's
01:58:50
got to go away for life that's it wow I think it's got to be life I think it's got to be 30 plus years I mean it's
01:58:56
just gonna be billions of dollars what kind of justice system do we have when people go away for 20 30 40 years per
01:59:02
billion would you sentence a decade per billion at least yeah I mean just you got something
01:59:10
unfortunately Sex You Gotta don't you think the justice system needs to look at other
01:59:15
people who are in jail for selling cocaine for selling marijuana for for robbing a a convenience store they'll
01:59:22
put somebody away for robbing a convenience store for a decade or two where are they gonna put him in jail for
01:59:26
just because somebody came in with a gun and robbed a convenience store they get
01:59:29
20 years this kid's gonna get off screw that look I think what do you guys think
01:59:33
the over under is here you think it's like I'll set it at I'll set it at 35 years
01:59:38
I'll take the over I'll take 30. I said a good line then I think this is made off of no I agree over on 30. yeah
01:59:48
I think I think I said 35. I think it's going to be a multiple hundreds of years
01:59:52
I agree and you'll be gone for Life yeah I think it's gonna be life but I set a good line uh okay most slows some
01:59:58
company is FTX anybody want to go for a second keep moving no I'll add one I'm gonna this year I'm gonna give my last
02:00:04
year I gave it to Tyson Foods one of the largest slaughterer of animals on Earth
02:00:08
this year I'm going to give it to a company called innotiv i-n-o-t-i-v This is the company that had was busted by
02:00:15
the feds for their animal abuse in their dog breeding facility uh where 4 000 beagles were rescued one of which I
02:00:22
adopted and this is a publicly traded company stocks down 90 some odd percent which I'm thrilled to see terrible
02:00:28
business awful awful kind of you know inhumane behavior and so I I want to kind of give them a
02:00:35
special shout out this year look at you and you're getting the virtue signaling points of rescuing the dog to increase
02:00:42
your Q factor amongst besties well done Max Q factor Max Q factor yeah anybody else have a
02:00:50
low sum yes I'd like to pick this company which uh destroyed the environment for a
02:00:57
bunch of endangered species that I would otherwise have used for various fur pelts for my sweaters and such yes and I
02:01:03
would like to go with blah blah blah which was torturing puppies uh 18 of which I rescued and I am now have them
02:01:11
in the J Cal puppy rescue I am the most sensitive and caring person uh also I would like to add Sea World I am in the
02:01:20
process of raising money to build bigger uh pools to eventually release all the orcas in captivity that is my new Focus
02:01:26
for next year okay moving on oh God do we want to do best meme do we want to do best new tech I'll do
02:01:34
best new tech I don't have a best meme I've been going with Fusion for best new tech I'm going with uh I'm gonna go with
02:01:39
chat GPT I think what was so impressive about chat GPT um and and the experience that
02:01:45
everyone's had using it is that it really for the first time I think elucidated where uh these kind of machine learning
02:01:52
tools can take us and what the kind of new product experience can be what generative AI can yield uh things Beyond
02:01:59
I think the scope of what a lot of people were imagining before so it was really so revealing and as you guys know
02:02:04
there's an absolute friggin tidal wave of people trying to start companies that are leveraging tools and generative AI
02:02:11
uh to kind of reinvent everything from what workplace tools Enterprise software all the way through to Media games and
02:02:17
entertainment so that's why I think chat GPT was the most impressive new technology
02:02:22
and then sax lightning round please best new tech Alpha full three which basically has almost near perfect
02:02:28
accuracy and protein folding sax best new tech I can't improve on the chat GPT so yeah let's keep rolling best Trend
02:02:36
best trend in business and in the world mine is startups getting back and investors getting back to reality and
02:02:42
the what I call the age of austerity the age of focus after the Age of Excess that's the best trend in our world the
02:02:48
age of austerity what's your best trend for 2022 marginal cost of energy generation and storage is now in the low
02:02:55
single digit pennies per kilowatt hour which basically means that uh not only will energy be free and abundant but it
02:03:02
will I think over the next decade or two create a massive peace dividend it will
02:03:07
rewrite our foreign policy it will rewrite National Security that is the reason why people should care about
02:03:13
energy transition not necessarily climate change although that's important it's a distant second
02:03:19
to keeping men and women out of War and keeping our borders safe well said anybody else have a best friend
02:03:28
last year I'm I said the Creator economy uh which I think referred to all these kind of creators creating new products
02:03:35
and and businesses beyond their content this year I I think that the trend that was again enabled and demonstrated
02:03:41
through chat gbt is the narrator economy I think this is going to be a really important Trend going forward we'll talk
02:03:46
about it in the prediction episode but I think the idea that people are and they're starting to experience this in
02:03:51
using chat gbt and Dolly and other kind of generative AI tools is how much you can kind of narrate the
02:03:58
product you want to see created and have it created for you on the Fly and I think that that's a really kind of
02:04:03
powerful mind shift for people and friendship for people um and I think it really starts to
02:04:07
change a lot of the way that people behave entertain themselves businesses operate and so on so I'd call it the
02:04:12
narrator economy and I think it's really kind of starting to emerge okay do you have a trend sex yeah I would say best
02:04:19
friend is the growing realization that the corporate media is failing does not tell the truth it has an agenda more and
02:04:27
more people are opting out of it and going with Independent Media I think you know what Elon mentioned where we're
02:04:32
going to start holding these corporate journalists the same standard on Twitter as regular citizens they're outraged by
02:04:37
that but that's a huge step in the right direction the fact of the matter is is that the press or the media is the prism
02:04:45
through which reality is refracted and if it's not giving us an accurate representation of the world we can't
02:04:50
begin to solve our problems since we don't have accurate information and I think more and more people are waking up
02:04:55
from the Matrix and realizing that we're living in this media controlled simulation and
02:05:01
um again I don't think we're able to make progress until the um this power that the media seems to have overall
02:05:07
reality gets uh gets broken okay let's go for worst Trend my worst trend is the Fed trying to play catch-up the FED
02:05:14
trying to play ketchup sorry buddy the FED trying to play catch-up is the worst trend for me over steering into
02:05:21
the crash what do you got chamoth for the worst trend of 20. the first Trend was the continued profligate spending by
02:05:29
the federal government we have record deficits record debt and this year we're ending the Year by
02:05:36
adding another 1.65 trillion dollars of spending that nobody can seemingly account for it is truly the Christmas
02:05:42
tree of Christmas trees uh in terms of bills so we describe not gotten religion yet around being measured and how we
02:05:50
spend money good one worst Trend sax last year my worst Trend was authoritarianism growing all over the
02:05:56
world and I think that's pretty decent prediction this year's uh worst trend is the government colluding with big Tech
02:06:04
to engage in censorship this is how they're going to do the authoritarianism we talked about it with schellenberger
02:06:09
and Elon this whole series of Revelations known as the Twitter files we can see this collusion this cozy
02:06:15
relationship between the sensors at Twitter and big Tech and the bureaucrats at the FBI and DHS and Pentagon this is
02:06:23
a really disturbing dystopian relationship as we talked about it earlier and you know I feel like we
02:06:29
spent all this time talking about the authoritarianism in Russia and China we seem to be obsessed with combating that
02:06:36
and going to war with that but we don't spend enough time talking about this growing authoritarianism at home the
02:06:42
media doesn't seem to want to report all the Twitter files at all let's focus on
02:06:46
stopping authoritarianism here well said Friedberg what's your worst trend for 2022 is what I would call interest rate
02:06:54
Mania and I think that this is the Mania that we've been caught up in on this show that other people on our thread
02:07:01
people in the business community and the investing Community where everyone's obsession with did the FED act soon
02:07:06
enough or late enough and that interest rates ultimately Drive success or failure with building businesses and
02:07:11
making good Investments and the truth is when interest rates go the wrong way good Investments
02:07:17
uh you know can kind of strengthen their way can can make their way through those
02:07:21
environments bad Investments cannot good businesses can make their way through and bad Investments cannot and so I
02:07:27
think our our Mania around the fact that interest rates and the FED ultimately drove bad outcomes in businesses and
02:07:33
Investments is a flawed kind of assertion and we all want to kind of get back to the drunken days
02:07:38
where you know a low interest rate environment enables us all to be successful and wealthy and I think that
02:07:43
that's kind of changed so I think it's time for us to get away from the interest rate media and focus more on
02:07:48
solid investing and solid business building okay here we go lightning round we got two to go favorite media of 2022.
02:07:54
for me it was Top Gun House of the Dragon White Lotus 2 but I'm gonna pick my favorite here or something you may
02:07:59
not have heard of the film tar I highly recommend it but I did like those other three tremendously what do you got sacks
02:08:07
for your favorite media of 2022 how's the dragon I guess I enjoyed quite a bit like you did um I'll give a shout out to
02:08:13
my movie Dolly land which will be coming out next summer if we're going to include podcast episodes I would give a
02:08:19
shout out to the unheard episode where Freddy Sayers interviews John mershimer the professor of international relations
02:08:25
he explains the origins of the Ukraine war and has some really pessimistic predictions about what might happen next
02:08:33
I suggest everyone watch it if they want to understand this conflict and where it
02:08:37
may be going next year tomorrow if you have any favorite media for 2022 you want to share I thought
02:08:42
Yellowstone kicked ass absolutely incredible there's uh I think it's on Hulu um but
02:08:49
there's a show with Steve Carell a little short series called the patient a serial killer that kidnaps his
02:08:56
psychologist and locks him in his basement to try to help him prevent him killing more people
02:09:03
and I thought it was really really well done never have I ever the latest season
02:09:09
another just brilliant offering from Mindy Kaling she's unbelievable those are those are probably the top
02:09:15
ones what do you got Freeburg any media yeah I read a book this year that I really liked
02:09:21
um it's called the vital question by a guy named Nick Lane someone recommended it to me
02:09:26
it's uh he's a biochemist and he kind of talks a little bit about the origin of life on Earth it really ties into this
02:09:31
idea that there are certain call it principles of physics and statistics that make life predictive
02:09:37
and predictable but I think the way that he kind of walks through how a lot of things emerge
02:09:43
in life and and how life ultimately kind of developed on this planet are are really
02:09:49
well shown so yeah I give his book a shout out it was a it was a really good so that book the vital question is
02:09:55
incredible the other one that he wrote which is called life ascending those two books you must read if you don't want to
02:10:00
be a letter in my opinion all right uh I will also for those people who don't understand the difference between power
02:10:07
and energy you will learn what that is very good I have two book recommendations putting the rabbit in
02:10:12
the Hat is uh Brian Cox you may know him from secession he um has a great book and he reads the audiobook very
02:10:19
enjoyable I'm halfway through Quentin Tarantino's Cinema speculation and enjoying it very much Zach you will
02:10:24
enjoy it tremendously okay and now we do the Rudy Giuliani award for self-emulation this is for the
02:10:31
person who poured lighter fluid and gasoline over themselves and lit themselves on fire for no apparent
02:10:36
reason I go with Kevin O'Leary who secured a 15 million dollar bag from FTX and then decided to try to defend it uh
02:10:44
18 Ways to Sunday burning whatever reputation he had who do you have in your Rudy Giuliani award this will be
02:10:51
controversial for you guys I'm gonna go with Elon Musk I don't think that Elon put himself in the position that he did
02:10:58
uh with bad intentions or without paying attention I think he's taken on a role uh in buying and running Twitter
02:11:06
that is you know principled and uh you know in his mind and many other people's minds a really important role that
02:11:13
someone needs to play uh unfortunately I think his reputation has gotten really hurt
02:11:18
because of you know that role he's not making a lot of friends and uh he's not he's causing
02:11:25
a lot of reputational damage he obviously had a lot of good and important things he was working on prior
02:11:30
to taking on the additional burden of Twitter and while many people appreciate his doing it I think that it's causing
02:11:35
him a lot of reputational damage and so yeah I I don't mean to kind of be offensive in saying that but
02:11:42
I think he's gotten it's certainly been a hard thing to do it's certainly been a
02:11:46
hard thing to do sex but you're saying self-immolation Freeburg because he took it on himself he could have just he took
02:11:51
it on himself yeah I'm not saying stupid interpretation yeah it's not it's not like the Rudy Giuliani idiocy I think
02:11:57
he's taking on the burden of doing this and I think it's causing him a lot of reputation
02:12:01
okay it's an interpretation of the award what do you got your mom a sacks in Jamal well I mean if if I were to
02:12:06
interpret the award I think the way it was originally intended I think I got to give it to Herschel Walker this year
02:12:11
unfortunately and I I wish Republicans would stop winning this award at least Herschel never gave any speeches next to
02:12:18
a dildo shop but uh nonetheless I am so sorry that I'm so delighted sax that you've been so self-aware about the
02:12:28
Follies of the dying Maga the last throws of the magination I want to find some Democrats to give this to I
02:12:36
want to give it to that brain dead Senator uh from Pennsylvania what's his name uh fetterman thank you I wanted to
02:12:43
give it to fetterman but he won so I don't know what I'm supposed to do you know it's like no listen when when a
02:12:51
republican self-immolates like Rudy or Herschel or something like that they get laughed out of town and when the
02:12:57
Democrat does it like ephederman they just get elected so I I don't know what to say all right you got any final words
02:13:03
here good I mean you gotta end this episode it's gonna be the longest episode ever
02:13:07
poof I think it's poor poor producer Nick whoever signed the papers for the whole
02:13:13
search and seizure at Mar-A-Lago looks kind of like an idiot so that that was not politically astute okay I think you
02:13:19
would say the FBI then okay poorly handled perhaps that's actually great that's a great one actually if
02:13:24
we're gonna get serious for a second the combination of Revelations if we're going to look over this whole year
02:13:30
remember Jason when I I basically spoke up at the time they raided a Mar-A-Lago and said that it was heavy-handed and
02:13:37
unnecessary for years Donald Trump is an idiot savant minus the Savant why all of you
02:13:45
guys just project all of this like insane genius evil level stuff he's not capable of that this is a simpleton who
02:13:56
likes attention he stole a bunch of souvenirs that he didn't read when he was in my opposition
02:14:01
hasn't read now kept in a box downstairs just to say he had them that's exactly right I was the one who championed the
02:14:07
souvenir I know he's a souvenir guy you said he was selling secrets to the South
02:14:11
no I did not say that I said veneers no suggested it yes Kushner an elaborate conspiracy theory
02:14:21
I'm saying I know it's not a conspiracy theory when you do it and and guys and this is the same person that basically
02:14:28
in the in the beginning of his presidential campaign in 2016 in front of Hillary Clinton said absolutely I
02:14:36
bend the laws that you created the tax laws to my favor because I'm not stupid when she called him a tax Dodger and it
02:14:44
turns out after all these years he was telling the truth he basically once again the show ends
02:14:51
with Trump he's been a great 2022. no no but honestly like like did we learn anything except that these tax laws are
02:14:58
egregiously stupid and the only people that are consistently guaranteed to make money in these tax laws are Real Estate
02:15:04
Investors if you put these two things together a real estate investor who happened to be very poor at his job
02:15:11
which Trump turned out to be packed billions of dollars of nols that he was able to use to wash his taxes for years
02:15:18
and years and by the way and he was clearly proud of it he was just goading the Democrats and not releasing them
02:15:24
they went through all this rigmarole and what did we find out he had huge nols he
02:15:28
had huge deductions and he paid no taxes is that shocking to any of us it's like
02:15:32
it's like Chappelle said he came out of the house told everyone everything you think is going on inside that house is
02:15:38
going on and went back and then he walked back inside the house yeah it was pretty great she fell got it all
02:15:44
right listen for David sacks the Rain Man Four the queen of quinoa Sultan of science David Friedberg and
02:15:54
the dictator himself it has been an honor and a privilege to do this podcast with you gentlemen this is the longest
02:16:03
show in the history of the Pod enjoy everybody uh R.I.P producer Nicks uh next 48 hours and we'll see everybody
02:16:10
next year love you bye-bye happy holidays love you bestest back at you will let your winners
02:16:18
Rock Rain Man [Music] we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music]
02:16:32
besties [Music] we need to get Mercies [Music]