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Sultan of science what's going on are you still riding high after you're a big NASA Zoom interview your space station
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Zoom interview that was really fun shout out to Woody hoberg from the International Space Station astronaut
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Cal alumni Woody listens to the pod on the ISS while he works at the astronauts workout he said two hours and
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15 minutes every day to you know obviously your body can actually got to work out a lot he's like when he's
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working out he listens to old episodes of the all-in Pod a buddy of his put him onto it he's become a big fan right on
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shout out to Woody yeah I got a DM from NASA astronauts I thought it was like some sort of scam or something I clicked
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on it because I follow NASA astronauts they DM me and I'm like obviously this astronaut wants to chat that's so crazy
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I looked the guy up seems legit he's following me on Twitter so we did a zoom call
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yesterday and I put it on Twitter the call I did with him is really fun honestly like a thrill for me
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an amazing individual this guy got his PhD at Cal in computer science did a thesis on convex optimization and
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applied to aerospace engineering became a professor at MIT for three years and applied to the astronaut program and got
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in fast forward 2023 in March he is the pilot of the crew 6 Mission the SpaceX crew 6 mission
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to the ISS and he's been on the ISS since March and he's coming back in a couple of days an incredible individual
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Amazing Story it was super fun to chat with him I don't think I've ever seen you smile or be more excited about
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anything you look absolutely ecstatic oh it was amazing did he have any comments
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on Uranus any thoughts on Uranus or no we didn't get there you didn't get to Uranus Cal you blew that let's try that
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again let me take a shot at this Freeburg so did he talk about going to the Moon yeah
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he's actually on the Artemis Mission and what about Uranus in 20 minutes did he go for Uranus hey
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hell I hear that we're trying to actually land on the South Side of the Moon the
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Dark Side of the Moon Yeah so he's actually honestly would he have an opinion on the dark side of the moon or
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I don't know the Dark Side of Uranus yeah three for three four three four three we'll let your winner slide
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[Music] we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music] I just want to explain somebody was like
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why are you bullying Jake out why are you bullying Freeburg tomorrow's bullying this person he loves the
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attention our love language is breaking chops that's it we'd like to laugh and take the piss out because everybody
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takes themselves too seriously and then what's going on with the tequila are you
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guys serious about this because now I'm getting don't talk about that right now I'm getting 50 emails a day with people
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all right we'll talk about it I did run a poll asking people if they were trying
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all in tequila and the poll it nearly won okay and then I ran a poll asking what the most they'd ever spent on a
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bottle was if you price it around 200 bucks you can you can really maximize demand I think the demand maximizing
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function is probably around uh 180 190 dollars you do not need a majority of people to want to buy your tequila you
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just need enough that are willing to pay the right price no I agree I was just trying to see how
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much interest there'd be out there and in this poll I think it was 41 said they would try it 40 said they wouldn't and
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then the remainder was just kind of you know show me the answer I think if we don't have advertising ever but we have
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a nice sipping tequila because you know I don't drink a lot but I do like when sacs
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guys 32 000 votes so if you look at 18.8 so it's 79 is 200 or less that's the the
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sum of both of those two cohorts so like if you priced it at call it 189. you probably can get 15 percent
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and so you know you could probably sell several hundred thousand bottles a year I mean that's like a pretty real
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business okay but I need something smooth and I like it a little sweet is that a problem can I just give you my
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opinion I think this the thing that people get wrong just as a as a consumer and I
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think like I'm a pretty Discerning consumer the thing that I don't like is that people focus on all of this window
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dressing and they don't focus on the core and the core is that for example in wine
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there's seven or eight rating systems and over time if you buy enough wine and taste enough wine you can really figure
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out who's good at what and there's just nothing that replaces a highly rated wine it's exceptional and that kind of
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discernment is now moving itself into tequila and so I would just encourage us if we're going to make a bottle just
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make it an exceptionally good tasting bottle and one of the things that I saw in the comments was that people said oh
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you can't differentiate but then I see some other articles like comos which is the one that I tasted at
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the one and only mandarina that was the first hundred Point tequila that had ever been given out and so
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there are people that are starting to raid it and create these rankings and if we were going to put out a product I
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would air on Extreme product quality versus price point I invested in a tequila company I shared this with you
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guys called 21 seeds it was started by my friends Nicole cat and Sarika and they spent a lot of
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time in Mexico finding the right producer and they put fresh fruit it's a it's a female Niche tequila so the goal
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is to create a tequila that will appeal to the female demographic and they spent quite a lot
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of time trying to figure out how to actually get the flavor of fresh fruit without using artificial flavoring into
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the tequila and so there was this big investment in trying to get this thing to work this thing worked it took off
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and uh diagio bought the company but it was because they spent so much time on the quality of the product that I think
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they were successful and that's everyone else puts their name and label on a on a
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bottle of tequila and says hey this is my tequila but if you don't get the quality rights chamoth is totally right
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people don't buy a second time you got to get it right if you look at what the Rock did The Rock went in a different
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direction which is I think he has a very accessible and affordable tequila which
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I think makes sense as well it's just a different strategy and that also works for the rock because he has almost 400
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million followers and so he can really play a volume game but I don't think that that's what we should ever do that
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we should stand for exceptional quality exceptional quality and this speaks to something else which is one of the
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biggest points of feedback that I get so for example I took three days that night
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or three days we took a little bit of a our own little honeymoon away from all the kids and we went to Villa Destin
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just to kind of hang on to Lake Como because I was flying out of Milan and ran into a few people there
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and the consistent feedback that I get from those folks is like they love hearing about these different places
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whether it's different brands different kinds of wine all of these things because all these folks are a little bit
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left out in the cold now they don't have like how to live life well and if you work really hard and you're lucky enough
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to then also have some amount of success why should you feel ashamed about it why
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shouldn't you be allowed to enjoy that and actually like pamper yourself and celebrate yourself and I say go for it
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so if we can find high quality products like this is the thing for example like I think there's different ways of
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expressing success when I was poor I was poor in wallet and I was also poor in mine
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and then somewhere along the way I actually became rich in wallet but I was still poor in mind and so I would wear
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these clothes that were gaudy and had huge labels Maples Dior and Valencia yeah man the haircut looked like friedberg's
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it was disgust it was gross and then I learned how to be rich in wallet and rich in mind which is then you go
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totally brand off and you can actually find things that are just like really well tailored well made they can be
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almost generational pieces of clothing or whatever and I think that it's great that you can find these things and tell
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other people because you find that there's a latent so many number of people that want that so Ed Villa deste
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as an example that is probably the Harvard of hospitality I've never been to a hotel that is more on point
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anywhere in the world than that one place incredible incredible ways in which one
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more time Villa Destin Villa D apostrophe e-s-t-e on Lake I'll give you one simple example Matt and I were like
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talking about this one kind of olive oil and the waiter at the other table heard
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he went to the kitchen brought back and he said here I heard I just overheard I apologize but and I thought this is
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incredible you feel so pampered and loved and taken care of the level of service and quality there was incredible
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and I think that there's so many examples of this where if you can have elements of that in your life
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you should do it by the way there's a very high chance that this is where I use all of you guys for the all in
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Summit in 2025. okay I'm still figuring out all the details I'm picking 20 25. my point is whether it's Laura Piana
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which is in my opinion the top of the top in terms of brand off really high quality clothes look at that place the
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point is like there's all these brands that exist that take enormous amounts of time to exemplify craftsmanship and care
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and I think that it's appropriate for people who can participate in those experiences to be able to have them and
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not feel ashamed and actually like enjoy it and celebrate themselves and do it so
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let's go high quality stuff not shitty big label tacky crap okay Nvidia has smashed their earnings massive interest
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coming into this earnings report obviously because we've been talking about Nvidia they've had a massive
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run-up everybody is trying to buy capacity to run language models Etc self-driving yada yada and it's not just
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the Googles and Amazons of the world you have startups trying to buy h100s a100s
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and buy this infrastructure you also have Sovereign wealth funds and countries buying these in the Middle
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East in Europe and you have traditional cooperations buying them this is the blowout of world blowouts in terms of
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performance Q2 Revenue 13.5 billion up 101 year over year that's extraordinary on that large of a number but up 88
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percent quarter over quarter high growth in stocks is 20 30 year over year so this is yeah just very uncommon
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obviously uh Q2 net income six billion dollars up 843 percent year over year Nvidia is now worth 1.2 trillion it's
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closing in on Amazon 1.4 trillion and Google at 1.7 trillion dollars in terms of market cap and here's the kicker
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they're printing up so much money and so much profits rather that the Nvidia board is approving a 25 billion dollar
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share buyback that's a very large number in terms of share BuyBacks that's six times higher than what they were
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currently allotted yeah I guess chamoth when you see this kind of extraordinary run up what is the ramification going to
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be in terms of for the industry competition and then just trading this name is this peak
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Nvidia or is the peak yet to come well I think it's peak in one way but this is less about a commentary on Nvidia
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because they're clearly firing on all cylinders but you know it's a pretty well established rule in capitalism
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which is when the market observes that there's a company printing enormous revenues and profits
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they want to compete with them naturally to get their share of those revenues and
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profits and that typically happens in all markets then the result of that are just decaying margins in the in the
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absence of a monopoly this is what you should expect and so because in this market there's nothing really
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monopolistic about what they do what they do is exceptional and good but there are other ways and other systems
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and other companies that are developing chipsets and capabilities here to compete with Nvidia so it probably just
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motivates them even more and accelerates the path where you see competition I tweeted this out yesterday but one of
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the most interesting things that could happen is somebody like Tesla decides to either open source their chip or
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actually starts to sell their platform because if FSD gets to a reasonable level of scale that entire platform
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system is a learning and inference system for the physical world and I think that has tremendous applications
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you have something called risk V which is an open architecture spec to essentially compete and create different
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versions of different ships that has implications more I think to arm you have companies like Google that you know
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frankly spun their own silicon a long time ago TPU you have Amazon now talking about doing the same thing Microsoft has
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invested a lot of money in fpga technology so it's just yet another accelerant in this trend to create many
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forms of AI enabled silicon and so I think that that sort of it pulls that reality forward and let's
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think we're gonna have to figure out when the market prices that in because I think that that probably decays the
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Nvidia margin and upside over time again that is not a commentary on that that's
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just a market reality yeah margins get competed away for folks who don't know Tesla is making something called Dojo
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it's their own super computer here's a picture of it they showed that at Tesla AI Day last year and you have arms open
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source competitor is the risk five chip you're talking about it's an open source
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architecture for doing large jobs and so I guess my question to you Friedberg is
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if you look at all this capacity coming online do you think we're going to be in
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a situation where the amount of capacity compute being put online is going to outstrip the need for that compute
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because software is getting so much better and then maybe you know people are running hugging face jobs and
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various LMS on the new silicon from Apple and they're running it on their m2s and so do we need this much capacity
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are there enough interesting jobs in the world to for all this capacity and then
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might that also be a headwind against Nvidia when people say you know what I got enough I got enough capacity here I
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think the rational way to think about this is to try and calculate the efficient Frontier on compute use
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so the more compute you use the more it costs you the question then is if you double the
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amount of compute you're using for a particular application do you get twice the return on the
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investment if you triple it does your Roi on a percentage basis you know go up or go
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down so at some point you reach an efficient Frontier which is you start to see a declining or negative rate of
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return on the investment in the compute that you're using for a particular application and this is certainly going
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to be application and Market specific it's going to be largely driven by the data that is available in that market to
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do training to do tuning the Market's appetite to spend money for that particular set of applications that
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emerges from that compute that's being used and so we don't know today where the efficient Frontier is across each of
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these different markets and sets of applications and the market is finding that out in the process of finding that
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out everyone is spending a [ __ ] ton of money on compute and they are trying to
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get as many server racks as they can they're trying to get as many chipsets as they can they're trying to get
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as much server time as they can and everyone's got this idea that the more compute I can throw at a problem
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the return is going to scale linearly and it turns out that like with most most things the answer is likely not so
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we're at this point right now and I would argue a bit of a cycle that the there looks to be a bubble and what I
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mean by that is that there's a lot of inefficient spending going on as the efficient Frontiers are discovered
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across all these different application sets and so my intuition without a lot of actual data to back this up is that
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just anecdotally on what I'm hearing people doing in the market what companies are doing what startups are
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doing Etc everyone is throwing everything they can at compute and they're going to realize that they're
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going to need to rationalize those expenses at some time at some point so I would I would Envision Nvidia is
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probably writing writing a little bit of a discovery of the efficient Frontier wave right now
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and that this probably is not necessarily steady state sax we experienced this before as you remember
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from the.com era there was a massive investment very similar to this in fiber and the overspending of building the
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fiber infrastructure so everybody could get broadband and they could stream movies Etc happened in that 97 to 2002
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time period a lot of those companies went out of business a lot of that fiber never got used people were working on
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compression algorithms while they were building our massive fiber and a lot of that fiber got sold I think Google
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bought up a lot of it other people bought it up and it was just a massive overspend so
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is this like the dark fiber of this era where we're just going to build so much capacity that there's just going to be
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not enough jobs to run on it in your mind well I think it's a little different than fiber in the sense that
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every year there's gonna be a new generation of chips and so these Cloud providers who are providing
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GPU compute they're going to want to keep upgrading the chips to be able to address the next generation of
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applications so I don't think it's quite as static as fiber where you kind of build it once and you're right that
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there was kind of a lot of capacity it was created eventually though the internet usage grew into that capacity
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but I think this is a little different because again you're going to need to upgrade the chips every year or two I
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think Friedberg is right that this is clearly a spike in demand that may not be sustainable I mean recall what
00:18:04
happened here is that chat GPT launched on November 30th last year and really called everyone by surprise it kind of
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took the World by storm and over the next few months you had hundreds of millions of users discover AI I think it
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surprised even the open AI team I think when they launched chat GPT they thought
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it'd be more of a proof of concept but it ended up being a lot more than that and so everyone has scrambled all of a
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sudden in the last nine months or so to develop their own AI strategy and so again it was this giant platform shift
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that happened overnight so there is a tremendous GPU shortage right now and that's also what's leading to these
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almost software like profit margins by Nvidia because when everyone's clamoring to get
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a limited supply of these chips and there just aren't enough Nvidia can almost charge whatever they want and so
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I think even more than the demand the profit margins might not be sustainable but I think the reality is we just don't
00:19:04
know what the steady state of demand in this market is going to be I think we can say that it can't
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continue at these growth rates but probably there will be some steady state of demand that's you know probably is at
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least where we are today yeah I don't think it's perfectly analogous chamoth but just to to bring
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up some historical context check out this article I was reading the other day the dimensions of the collapse of the
00:19:28
Telecommunications industry this is August 20 2002 and it says um the dimension of the collapse in the
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Telecommunications industry during the past two years has have been staggering half a million people have lost our jobs
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in that time the Dow Jones communication technology index has dropped 86 percent
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the wireless communication index 89 percent these are declines in value-worthy of
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comparison to the great crash of 1929 out of the seven trillion decline in the stock market since its peak about 2
00:19:52
trillion have disappeared in the capitalization of telecom companies 23 telecom companies have gone bankrupt in
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a way of capped off by the July 21st collapse of Worldcom the single largest bankruptcy in American history so just a
00:20:04
little history there of this it's not perfectly analogous obviously with Nvidia is not going
00:20:09
bankrupt or anything like that but this over capacity issue is definitely going to be something but you had mentioned
00:20:15
that in one of your Tweet storms in the past couple of weeks or these long form that you're doing on X previously known
00:20:21
as Twitter you mentioned that what are the jobs that could be pushed to this compute and
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and what if one of them works I think you were doing a speaking that somebody tweeted out a little clip of so let's
00:20:33
unpack that what do you think are some jobs that people might push here that we don't anticipate that could solve
00:20:38
something miraculous in the world well yeah the framing is really like if you if you go back to like the the Gold Rush
00:20:45
of the 1800s in San Francisco the people that made the money were the platform enablers right they were the ones that
00:20:50
sold the picks the shovels the pans and the jeans right and that's where that's where Levi
00:20:55
Strauss was born the the equivalent analogy the equivalence in that analogy today is NVIDIA because they are the the
00:21:03
dominant pick and shovel provider so the question is well what are we going to use these picks and shovels to create
00:21:10
are we going to find gold and I think the question is unclear and where will that gold be found will it be found
00:21:15
inside of a big tech company or will it be found inside of a startup if you look
00:21:19
inside of where these resources are being used inside of big Tech it is to completely Scorch the Earth on the
00:21:27
economic value of large models and I think that that's very very good for all of the startups that come after it so
00:21:34
what do I mean by this you know we were all so wrapped around the axle around chat GPT and then GPT in general and now
00:21:43
you know if you look at the quality of llama llama 2 basically these big companies have
00:21:49
decided no we're just going to make all these models extremely good extremely useful and very very free and so a lot
00:21:57
of the resources are going there to subsidize economically subsidized and by implication economically destroy the
00:22:04
value of that category that's going to be good for startups and so the question is what will you
00:22:11
then build on top of these quasi-free almost free tools and so one area that I have been looking
00:22:19
at for a while is in computational biology I think that that clip that you're talking about was just me talking
00:22:23
with Lauren's Eve just around the ability to compute large complex spaces with very sparse information it's not
00:22:33
it's a very difficult task today but tomorrow in an AI model that you can train you can literally characterize
00:22:39
every single molecular permutation you could imagine you combine it with something like Alpha
00:22:44
fold and you can understand protein folding and all of a sudden you can sequentially start to put tools together
00:22:48
that could theoretically give you much higher probability guessing for specific compounds that could
00:22:56
actually cure disease a different version of that is a company that myself and a few other people started I tweeted
00:23:03
that out which is more in the material science space and we've had some pretty important breakthroughs there which is
00:23:08
really about trying to invent Next Generation battery materials and we have one candidate that could be
00:23:15
pretty revolutionary if it turns out to work we don't know yet some positive signs so there are there
00:23:21
are some of these green shoots so my perspective is that a lot of the money that Nvidia makes today is going to be
00:23:27
money well spent because it'll be going to the big guys big Tech Plus Tesla they are then going
00:23:33
to create some really foundational platform Technologies with it whether it's Dojo whether it's FSD whether it's
00:23:42
the full platform inside of Tesla that is the cameras plus the inference plus the training for all forms of physical
00:23:48
world interaction whether it's llama two and all of that stuff will be given away
00:23:52
essentially I think open source quasi-free to the ecosystem over the next few years and I think
00:23:59
that'll be a really important moment which will create hundreds of new companies doing really clever cool
00:24:07
things so we haven't yet seen the big breakout company yet and so I think that right now most of this capex is going to
00:24:13
the big guys but the dividends of all the work that these big guys are doing will be
00:24:21
seen over the next few years in the startups that get started in the next four or five years I love the California
00:24:26
analogy ultimately what all that prospecting for gold did was create the state of California putting aside the
00:24:32
Levi's and the genes and uh if you know anything about California's GDP it would be yeah I think these
00:24:41
statistics are always talked about fifth tenth eighth largest uh it has a bigger
00:24:45
GDP California than some of the largest countries in the world so this is a 2015
00:24:50
chart it's hard to find the updated information on this but ultimately that was the product of the Gold Rush is this
00:24:55
incredible State any other thoughts on Nvidia before we move on to arm I think open AI had a potentially significant
00:25:02
product announcement that's related to this so they just launched fine tuning for
00:25:09
chat GPT actually version 3.5 turbo it says here fine tuning lets you train the model on your company's data and run
00:25:15
that scale early tests have shown that fine-tuned GPT 3.5 can matric cgbt4 on narrow tasks so you can do things like
00:25:25
fine-tune the formatting of the output you can fine tune the tone fine tuning also allows business to make the model
00:25:33
follow instructions better so I think the point of this is that we're still at such an early stage of
00:25:40
this and there are so many applications that are going to be developed and they're making the models more and more
00:25:45
useful so Jason to your analogy about fiber what happened with fiber is there was a
00:25:52
big build out of over capacity but then the number of applications kept growing until that capacity got used and I think
00:25:59
we're probably going to see something like that here where there is a big build out going on of capacity and
00:26:04
capabilities and that's going to lead to the next generation of applications and
00:26:08
and I just think we don't know yet what the steady state of either demand or supply for these chips is going to be
00:26:14
obviously the market got taken by surprise over the last year so you've seen again this huge spike in demand the
00:26:22
supply cannot react fast enough that's led to gigantic profits for NVIDIA but it's hard to know exactly again what is
00:26:29
the steady state going to be is it going to be like this or is this a one-time Spike and we also don't know what the
00:26:34
supply will be once the manufacturers all adjust because now they know that the demand is there and to your point
00:26:39
like the the big use cases are pushing us well past chips to to really be more like entire systems and these racks and
00:26:48
so if you look like at Grace Hopper which is their next-gen design it's like a bunch of chiplets plus memory be on a
00:26:55
huge board it's not a chip you're talking about system level manufacturing at this point
00:27:00
and that will also create different kinds of use cases because for example today right now when you look at simple
00:27:06
things like probabilistic tasks I think chat GPT and all these gpts are are pretty marvelous and pretty
00:27:12
inspirational but deterministic tasks they're [ __ ] like you know they hallucinate on simple things like
00:27:17
multiplication why because you infer multiplication and you try to calculate it probabilistically and you get these
00:27:23
simple math functions wrong and so these are all these things where you the software has to become more and more
00:27:28
sophisticated and actually be able to path and tunnel code into different ways of getting it executed and then bringing
00:27:34
it back and stitching it together all of these things don't exist those are very
00:27:39
rudimentary things that were solved in V1 of compute so I think that to your point David like we don't know where
00:27:45
this goes we're probably going to go to a place that it's not just about chips but it's
00:27:50
about systems but that's going to create this weird balkanization almost and I think that's
00:27:57
where a lot of the profit margins will get eroded away because that will make it
00:28:02
a much more competitive industry and there just isn't a lot of margin to capture when you actually Stitch all
00:28:08
these things together yeah and if you think about what were the massive wins for all that extra fiber it was really
00:28:15
two companies the first was YouTube which stopped charging people for transport on their
00:28:21
videos before that if you had a video go viral your your server got shut down because you you hit your five thousand
00:28:27
dollar a month limit or whatever you had set with your ISP and then Netflix of course right Netflix couldn't exist and
00:28:32
all that dark fiber built that so we'll see with all this extra GPU what could happen and to your point about the the
00:28:38
breakthroughs there you can now go into your chat GPT and you could put in custom
00:28:45
instructions and so it asks you what would you like chat CPT to know about you and provide better responses and you
00:28:52
know for example I told it I'm a venture capitalist I live in the Bay Area I'm looking for concise business information
00:28:59
and then it says well how do you like how would you like chat GPT to respond and I said I'd like to see data in a
00:29:05
table I like to see data in those tables with hyperlinks I like citations when possible yeah just to be clear what
00:29:10
you're describing with custom instructions that was a feature I think they launched like a month or two ago a
00:29:14
couple weeks ago what that is doing is uh prompt engineering basically it's pre-saving like all that Preamble that
00:29:21
you would have to put in every single one of your prompts whereas this fine tuning as I understand it is more about
00:29:27
fine-tuning the model to your team to improve the model for a certain kind of need or certain kind of output right so
00:29:32
the example there would be if you had your email box or you had your Google Docs or you had a repository of all your
00:29:38
slack messages or something your company had your company handbooks or you know all of uh chamat's letters he writes
00:29:44
every year you could have that uploaded to chat GPS it's potentially very powerful I think for Enterprises I think
00:29:51
the big Enterprise use case the most obvious one is that every Enterprise wants its own internal chatbot it wants
00:29:57
its own internal chat GPT 8 where the employees can ask questions and the AI has access to all the company's
00:30:05
information and it understands permissions and privacy so it only reveals information to people who have
00:30:10
the right to see it that's kind of a tall order but I think that's what the market wants yeah they want the chat GPT
00:30:16
for the company intranet yes and so I think racing to provide that and there was a interesting tweet by Nathan Ben H
00:30:24
anyway he just said bye bye a bunch of startups because I guess a lot of stars were working on this fine-tuning problem
00:30:28
that may be too glib because I think there's just a lot of Enterprises who do not want to share all
00:30:34
their corporate information with open AI of course what if it's HR information then you have people asking like who are
00:30:40
the most overpaid people in this company you know what if it's like the badge information and how many hours people
00:30:44
are working or that's more about permissions Jason but even if open AI can nail the permissions problem I think
00:30:49
this is a lot of Enterprises who will not want to trust their data to open an AI yeah they're gonna be afraid about
00:30:54
where it goes this is why I think open source is taking off in a big way is that I think big Enterprises would much
00:31:00
rather roll their own models and control it and do the fine tuning and that's why
00:31:04
they're using tools like Mosaic and hugging faces they want to have control over it themselves that's an excellent
00:31:10
point and that has implications as well into the hardware which is also probably
00:31:13
a good jumping off point for arm because this that what you said is exactly must
00:31:17
happen for the Integrity of an organization to want to use these things and if that happens then it just further
00:31:25
further accelerates I think how the hardware will get abstracted and frankly quasi-open sourced as well all
00:31:31
right let's talk Facebook did a great job of this because like when Facebook was building data centers
00:31:36
they had to invent tremendous capabilities that didn't exist before and the market was really fragmented it
00:31:43
was very expensive and what they did was they basically created these reference designs for servers and blades in the
00:31:48
whole nine yards and open source the whole thing and it just you know in in essence destroyed a market but it
00:31:55
created a hyper efficient market that then everybody could use and I think the question is that if it's happening at
00:32:02
the software layer already now just like it did in web 2 software and then we see certain elements of web
00:32:09
2 Hardware been open sourced I think it makes pretty logical sense that you can expect the same things to
00:32:15
happen in the AI world the AI models and the AI platforms and the all of that stuff will first get
00:32:20
open source because it's a data Integrity security issue and then the hardware will get open
00:32:26
source as well because you just want simple reference designs you can use and plug and play
00:32:30
yeah if you want to look at that it's called the open compute project opencompute.org
00:32:35
just a way to use open source to grind down the prices take out the margin I guess is what you're saying
00:32:42
to make all these data centers uh scale right well so yeah so one related story here is this this happened in the last
00:32:50
few weeks there's a company called core weave which provides Cloud infrastructure for
00:32:55
AI training it's secured a 2.3 billion dollar investment in the form of a loan what court weave is trying to do it's
00:33:01
kind of like uh AWS but for gpus so essentially instead of having to buy your own gpus
00:33:09
in order to you know set up your own infrastructure you just basically rent compute from these guys but this is this
00:33:17
is exactly why like none of these none of these companies will really be allowed to exist in this exact way four
00:33:22
or five years from now because ultimately what people want is massive throughput right tokens per second give
00:33:27
me as many tokens per second as possible and they don't particularly care again if you understand the model do they
00:33:34
really care what the underlying substrate Hardware should be it doesn't seem like they should they should care
00:33:39
what is the throughput what do I pay for it and by the way that is exactly what happened when AWS really start to scale
00:33:45
because if you guys remember when we started to First abstract code into AWS why do we care about how much did an ec2
00:33:51
instance cost how much did an S3 bucket cost and that's all we cared about because that abstraction allowed us to
00:33:57
not care about the underlying Hardware who was the vendor what was the con configuration it didn't matter and so in
00:34:04
an interesting way we're going to go through that same Evolution here because it's just economically rational that
00:34:08
that kind of Market exists you should only care tokens per second I think all right in other news oh by the way
00:34:15
there's uh something called common crawl which is another interesting open source
00:34:19
project that is getting a lot more attention today because they have crawled the web and you can use this
00:34:24
common crawl they release it monthly and that's what a lot of people are training
00:34:28
their data on now they don't have permission from all those people to do training data but they do have the
00:34:35
ability for you to download an open crawl essentially what Google has and you have a an open source version of it
00:34:41
so Carmen crawl was started and funded by Gil elbaz yeah he's a he's a friend Gill sold his company applied semantics
00:34:50
to Google back in 0203 and a big part of his effort with common crawl is to that's happening
00:35:00
is it AdSense [Music] AdSense so basically applied semantics could read a web page and then create
00:35:09
the keywords associated with the content on that web page and then those keywords
00:35:13
would trigger AdWords ads on the on the web page so they called it AdSense so AdSense started and the whole publisher
00:35:18
Network at Google was born from the applied semantics acquisition and Gill was obviously a pretty significant
00:35:24
shareholder of Google he's even in the S1 as one of the major shareholders he's a really great human
00:35:30
being and his intention with this common crawl project was you know to make the crawling of the web the index
00:35:37
and the caching available for all these different projects that might exist and he didn't at the time anticipate the uh
00:35:44
the open AI application becoming you know the big breakthrough but when gpt3 was published
00:35:50
I think they said that 80 plus percent of the waiting came from the content out of common
00:35:57
crawl and so it's really been this uh this Amazing Project completely non-profit
00:36:01
all funded mostly funded by Gill and um has really unlocked this opportunity for a lot of the open source
00:36:08
alternatives to now try and provide solutions that can exist in coexist with open Ai and
00:36:14
others in the commercial options in the world a small piece of trivia we were one of the first AdSense
00:36:20
Publishers and so here's a story from October of 2005 weblogs Inc with student Gadget the the
00:36:26
blogging company I started hit three thousand dollars a day in AdSense thanks to Gail and the team over there and we
00:36:32
wound up selling it that's awesome and this is the story about it and and we were awesome in the S1 they had two
00:36:38
examples of Publishers one was New York Times and then one was weblogs Inc they wanted
00:36:43
to show like an upstart and this one and so a lot of history here and it's fun to
00:36:47
go back uh down to and we were we were in the S1 for by the way Gil is going to be at the summit so uh oh go give me a
00:36:54
hug you take a picture Charles Barkley had this great story which is like he is like over the moon about being a
00:37:01
grandfather I saw this on 60 Minutes and he said it's because I want my grandchild grandson to Google me and
00:37:09
notice that I did some things and then we can talk about it yeah and Jacob I had this thought for you like that's
00:37:15
like that's a cool piece of Internet history that you're a part of yeah hopefully you're you're your grandkids
00:37:21
will Google that and you can tell them that's right that's pretty cool or you know 1800 episodes of this weekend
00:37:26
startups I just tweeted a an episode with Gary tan from 2009 that I recorded at sequoia's office and I just put it on
00:37:35
the uh this week in startups Twitter account it's pretty funny to have baby face Gary tan from posterous on there
00:37:39
all right arm officially filed it's F1 it's kind of like an S1 for a foreign company and they plan to go public next
00:37:46
month arms Revenue last quarter 675 million down two percent year over year up seven percent quarter of a quarter
00:37:52
fiscal full year 2023 2.7 billion ish down one percent year over year Farms major business uh just so you know is uh
00:38:01
smartphones 99 of smartphones are built with arms chip architecture embedded systems they they have a medication
00:38:08
systems yeah we'll get into it the problem is the market is totally moved when SoftBank platform it was probably
00:38:13
like the last year where you know there was so much focus on the hardware and platform Technologies inside of mobile
00:38:21
and tablets and all that stuff but in these last few years think of what's happened we've had a massive shift to AI
00:38:27
right and so that's pushing a lot more pressure on gpus and whatever comes after that we have had a re-emergence of
00:38:35
the popularity of risk V which is an open source competitor to arm we have had Apple in Source a whole bunch of
00:38:42
their own architectural decisions in Silicon design because they don't want the dependency
00:38:46
philosophy yeah well also they also care about different things like they care about battery life so that's why you
00:38:52
know that's the focus of their chip architecture and so all of this just means that that market embedded systems
00:38:59
becomes more and more constrained and commoditized over time which again as we said in capitalism means that future
00:39:06
profits will be less than historical profits and so I think this is a very tough valuation to get right
00:39:14
and trying to stretch to a 60 or 70 billion dollar print I think is really tough this is a
00:39:21
honesty at 15 to 20 billion dollar company ouch so a question for Youth and I'll open it up to to The Davids
00:39:29
why would SoftBank I know the answer but I'm asking you so you can explain it to
00:39:34
the audience why would SoftBank take a company public with these headwinds with no growth being flat why are they taking
00:39:42
it public now well SoftBank has the d-lever right they have a they have a very big problem which is that they have
00:39:49
this forget SoftBank Vision fund for a second but SoftBank itself is a Telco operator that has ginormous piles of
00:39:58
debt that they've used to finance the building of their business and so when you have contraction in your core
00:40:03
business you become more and more at risk of breaching the covenants of all that debt
00:40:09
and or you just like run out of free cash flow like all of these things really hurt your future ability to
00:40:15
invest and so SoftBank is under a lot of pressure to just clean up the balance sheet and delever and so when you have
00:40:21
an asset like this sitting there if you can sell you know 20 or 30 billion dollars of that call it to somebody and
00:40:31
then replenish your balance sheet that provides tremendous liquidity and relief and they did that as well a few
00:40:38
months ago with Alibaba they've started to I think now they may have sold out of
00:40:42
the overwhelming majority of the position in Alibaba again because they have massive liquidity needs because
00:40:48
they have so much debt so this is just part and parcel of them delevering the balance sheet so they're forced to get
00:40:55
it out is I guess what you're saying and then we've talked sacks a little bit about other companies that are going to
00:41:01
be forced they're on the what do they call it when you're on a pirate ship they make you walk the plank I'd say
00:41:06
this is like the walking of the plank to an IPO you've got other companies that have issues where they just have to get
00:41:12
public at some point so maybe the public markets are going to open up and uh in some cases it's going to be
00:41:19
because people are walking the plank other cases it's going to be opportunistic so maybe you could talk a
00:41:23
little bit about your thoughts on that I think it's hard to walk the plank into the public markets I'm not sure exactly
00:41:27
what you mean by that because the public markets have to want to buy your issuance
00:41:31
so if it's not a good company then you know in this environment they're not gonna be able to IPO well they're going
00:41:36
to be able to iPad I think the question is the price they have no choice so yeah
00:41:40
there may be a lot of down rounds into an IPO from the last private round which was two or three times what the IPO
00:41:46
price is going to be maybe what you mean by walk the plank is that well you tell
00:41:51
me but there are a lot of companies which have built up huge pref Stacks because they
00:41:55
raise too much money at the Peak at valuations are too high and going public does allow you to reset your whole prep
00:42:02
stack because all the preferred with all the rights and preferences converts to Common so post IPO you just have common
00:42:09
yeah and so it is a way to like clear out all the structure and all the mess that
00:42:15
has built up in a company and you can get to a real valuation that reflects basically the truth of what the company
00:42:22
is worth another analogy might be the house is on fire you got it you're on the balcony you gotta jump or you got to
00:42:27
stay in the burning building yeah but you know listen if your company's on fire I don't think you're going to be on
00:42:30
IPO I mean it's it's going to be a tough scrutinizing public market for new offerings I think that the scenario in
00:42:39
which you can IPO is if the company is fundamentally good it will be able to IPO at some valuation and that valuation
00:42:47
may be a significant down round from their last private round those will be able to get out yeah and that's strike I
00:42:53
guess now are you it could be striped yeah are you seeing David the m a activity starting to Bubble Up in your
00:43:00
portfolio or in you know the back channels because I'm starting to see that a bit
00:43:04
Founders are packing it in in some instances and saying you know what we want to try for m a
00:43:09
or you know some companies are getting a little bit frisky and saying hey what's
00:43:14
available in the market on the small side so you're seeing any any m a action not a ton yet but there's definitely a
00:43:20
growing number of startups who are realizing that what they're doing is not working and they're not going to raise
00:43:25
another round and so therefore figuring out a graceful exit whether it's an aqua
00:43:30
hire or some other type of Landing ah got it those are those might be the accurate walking the planks yes those
00:43:36
are the walking the planks you're going to start seeing a lot more of that for sure Freeburg your thoughts on the on
00:43:40
the public markets here in relation to privates and people walk in the plank I don't think there is a public market
00:43:48
right now there's no IPO window this arm thing is you know pretty forced it seems It's not like there's a ton of
00:43:57
pent-up public demand to buy these arm shares at least that's what it seems so you know they're gonna go shop it
00:44:03
they're gonna find out what the market tells them it's worth and and then we'll see Nvidia is going to
00:44:07
help buoy it I'm sure there'll be an argument that you know all boats will rise and arm will be a
00:44:14
beneficiary but I don't know if that necessarily leads into the IPO window being open again I think we've all heard
00:44:20
the commentary from Morgan Stanley that they don't think the window's opening until
00:44:24
Q2 Q3 of next year maybe I can't remember the exact commentary but as as we all know
00:44:32
a lot of LPS in Venture funds and private Equity Funds are waiting for the IPO window to reopen before they're
00:44:40
going to start reallocating Capital back into the private Venture funds because they need to get liquid in order
00:44:46
to be able to recycle Capital back into the next class of funds so this glut right now this inability to
00:44:53
kind of get companies public is certainly Weighing on folks you know you effectively have three options when
00:44:59
you're running a private company you gotta keep raising money which means either raise private capital
00:45:07
or go public and we've talked about the challenges of raising late stage private
00:45:10
Capital if you've had a high private valuation in your prior round going public is very difficult right now
00:45:16
because a lot of folks are still digesting and having indigestion from the last couple of years or you got to
00:45:22
sell the company or you got to get profitable now on the sell the company side many of the Acquisitions that we're
00:45:27
seeing with a few exceptions are generally more bolt-on and less like hey I'm going to pay some big strategic
00:45:31
premium for some big strategic game changing company right now because all the buyers are dealing with their own
00:45:37
shareholder issues and their own public stock issues right now then the you know
00:45:41
can you get profitable it's really as you guys know where a lot of folks are going which is totally restructure your
00:45:46
ambition restructure your plans and build a business where customers are willing to pay you money
00:45:52
and where you can then take that profit and only reinvest that profit and not invest more than that profit and if you
00:45:58
can get to that steady state you know you can live to see another another day another year another decade
00:46:05
and those businesses by the way that we saw in the.com boom and the global financial crisis that that were able to
00:46:11
do that during the the doldrum Death Valley March that everyone's going through right now they emerged
00:46:17
Victorious they learned how to be frugal they learned how to be nimble they learned how to really focus on customer
00:46:23
experience because they had to increase retention and they had to increase the prices they were charging they learned
00:46:28
how to be efficient with allocating resources and so profitability became a core part of their DNA and
00:46:35
their ability to succeed so I think this is really a a trial era and you know on the other side of this
00:46:43
trial era a number of very high quality companies will emerge but in the interim
00:46:46
I don't think that there's a an IPO path that a lot of folks can just check the box and say hey let's go ahead and go
00:46:51
public even if the valuation Is Not Great remember an IPO process you got to over sell your book or the bankers won't
00:46:57
underwrite it so if they're you know you can't just say hey the price is now five
00:47:00
bucks and expect anchors are there if a company's burning money the big concern with going public right now is that
00:47:07
there is no pipe Market there is no ability to do secondary to do follow-on offerings so the company can't raise
00:47:12
Capital after it's public so unless you're actually profitable your option of going public right now really isn't
00:47:20
there because shareholders don't want to buy shares in a company that may run out
00:47:23
of money yeah and that's what it ends up yeah yeah and to your point if you take
00:47:27
this third option and you you become really resilient and you have profits chamoth that seems to me to be the setup
00:47:34
for the next boom that we could experience in the coming Years hopefully which is we don't have companies that
00:47:40
are burning you know mountains of cash people are getting to profitable these businesses look great and then if the
00:47:45
big companies are now you know having their stock prices recover and they've laid off 20 000
00:47:51
employees and they got people returning to the office and they're fit and they're strong hey that's a setup for
00:47:56
strong companies buying strong companies or those strong companies that are private the m a market is dead as a
00:48:01
doornail it's more dead than the IPO market so two days ago the European commission and the CMA in the UK said
00:48:08
that they're probing Adobe Sigma because they have some concerns that it's going
00:48:13
to limit competition in the market it looks like Microsoft will have to give a 15-year license to video game
00:48:21
streaming to Ubisoft in order to get the UK folks to agree to Activision to their
00:48:26
Activision acquisition so you're talking about the first case a 20 billion dollar
00:48:30
merger that may not happen because the CMA they found their footing they clearly had a win in the Microsoft
00:48:41
Activision thing and now they're probably going to find issue with the Adobe figma thing and the
00:48:47
Europeans don't want to be left out in the action so they're jumping in so I think the m a market is effectively dead
00:48:53
what it leaves is an IPO Market but that is very tenuous because you don't have a
00:48:59
leading candidate that can really catalyze something and I made this prediction earlier but I think the only
00:49:04
company that can really catalyze things would be if people are ready to do starlink I mean it's the most obvious
00:49:09
natural logical thing that would just get everybody excited and off the sidelines
00:49:15
and into the arena but that may take another year may not but it may in the meantime I don't think there's
00:49:22
any company like instacart I don't think people are going to be jumping off the sidelines arm it'll be tough
00:49:29
even stripe now is like a very complicated valuation trade and I think that that's a really technical
00:49:35
thing to be involved in in an IPO like that a technical evaluation and so companies have no choice except to get
00:49:43
profitable and get to default to life to use the famous Paul Graham quote dear that's the only path that's it yeah I
00:49:50
mean Pat you either have to be default alive which means profitable or default investable which means that you're
00:49:58
capable of producing metrics that a VC will fund but really that starts with 100 year-over-year growth there's a lot
00:50:04
of companies that aren't growing very fast they're growing 20 30 40 50 60 growth
00:50:09
refundable yeah or they're flat even worse some are shrinking so those cases they got to think more like a PE model
00:50:17
than a venture model yeah and PE companies are cash flow positive they don't burn cash
00:50:24
I put out this video a few months ago called VC or PE what's the right framework for thinking about your
00:50:30
startup this was a oh craft Ventures YouTube this is a talk that I gave to our portfolio companies
00:50:37
we recorded it and then published it really it should have gotten more attention but this was basically
00:50:43
recommending to all those slower growing companies in our portfolios stop thinking that VC funding is always going
00:50:51
to be available and start thinking more like a PE funded private Equity company which is to say you need to cut your
00:50:58
burn to get cash flow positive you will then be able to uh control your own destiny so yeah this
00:51:03
slide here if you're not VC eligible act realistically so we provided some guidance on what makes a company
00:51:10
eligible for VC funding and you can see there's a good column there's a great column good starts at 2x growth grade is
00:51:16
3x gross margins good starts at 50 great is 80 net dollar retention good starts at 100 greatest 120 percent CAC payback
00:51:25
good is 12 to 18 months grade is 6 to 12 months burn multiple good as one and a half great is one or less and then
00:51:34
there's some danger zones as well this was to provide them with some realistic guidance in terms of whether they'll be
00:51:40
able to raise another VC round or not and I can tell you like most startups in start world right now are in the danger
00:51:47
zone it's a really tough environment and so you know listen if you're a startup with sub 1 million of ARR and you're in
00:51:55
the danger zone you're probably gonna have to pack it in or maybe you package yourself up for an aqua hire but if
00:52:00
you're a startup that has 50 million of ARR but you're in the danger zone just cut your burn you could basically make
00:52:07
yourself Castrol positive and you could engineer an outcome for yourself a pretty good outcome my anecdotal
00:52:13
experience is one of our larger Investments we brought in a private Equity Firm or
00:52:19
they came in and my God it's been an incredible experience because the combination of how like a VC
00:52:28
looks at a business and how a PE firm looks at a business in A Moment Like This is hyper additive because it's
00:52:34
super clarifying it's very straightforward and it gives a CEO an extremely clear mandate from which to
00:52:40
operate and then they become very measurable and I found it to be a really really healthy thing
00:52:47
now PE guys can only get in involved in companies of a certain size so it limits
00:52:52
50 million and above in Revenue 100 million Yeah in our case it was a 400 million 380 300 more than 300 million
00:52:59
Revenue so it's a big it's a big company but my point is just more that we were moving along a trajectory to
00:53:05
getting to default alive but by adding that PE part discipline tool support boom I
00:53:12
think we were able to focus on it probably a year to 18 months faster and with specific Precision
00:53:20
because they have a very different toolkit and a reaction to mis-execution and that's extremely healthy
00:53:26
yeah we had this happen you know meeting with uh just from the front lines we um
00:53:31
we meet with we have 20 000 people apply for funding from our firm in large part
00:53:36
I would say we doubled the number of applications after all in started so shout out to my besties here it's really
00:53:41
helped our deal flow and we find companies and we found a company that was obsessed with all in and the two
00:53:47
Founders were quants and they made this company called Stone algo we meet this company they've got very
00:53:52
little money it's a bootstrap company and they got to a half million dollars in Revenue
00:53:58
you know just on Sweat Equity and we find this company it's not part of the Silicon Valley you know accelerator
00:54:04
system it's basically kayak for diamonds uh shout out to the team over there and
00:54:08
we were able to place a nice bet on this company that was break even and you know put in uh you know a couple
00:54:14
of hundred thousand dollars to to start start them down this um road to growing faster but what a delightful thing to
00:54:20
find a profitable company in the world and so if you have a profitable company like and it's just 50
00:54:28
000 a month or 25 000 a month please email me Jason calagonist.com I want to invest in your company
00:54:33
when you have that company small amount of Revenue profitable and you're not burning a ton you are so attractive to
00:54:39
investors right now it's the highest attractiveness in the world and I just want to point out David as this Market
00:54:46
has you know completely gone from absolute chaos the hair has gotten Tighter and Tighter you were in Crazy
00:54:55
Banning and now you are tight tight is Right Sachs is focused he's deploying that LP Capital he's deploying that
00:55:02
advice to SAS companies and it's no joke now folks General sax is here he is not
00:55:08
crazy history Uncle he is sassax he's sassax is back this is like when uh Mark Zuckerberg started wearing a tie to work
00:55:19
to start showing that it was serious yes yes with that slick back hair all right
00:55:27
listen we gotta get going here we got a lot more on the docket I I think we just
00:55:32
maybe I'm gonna jump the fence here and we just go right to the Republican primary the funniest thing last night
00:55:39
was at poker we watched it you watched it during poker were you able to focus you have to hear Kevin Hart react
00:55:47
when all these guys are doing it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard and the worst part of the poker was
00:55:57
uh the magician here we go how can you both be playing poker here but also on the debate stage at this
00:56:05
time which I thought was that was a funny joke but it was funny it was very funny all
00:56:17
right listen I know everybody's I just want to go around the horn here Friedberg
00:56:21
did you watch the debate who won the debate who had the largest gain net gain in terms of their profile in
00:56:31
your mind after watching debate number one of the GOP David Friedberg biggest gain I watched the debate I kind of
00:56:39
think about these guys on three dimensions which is the content how dynamic they are and their personality I
00:56:46
think those are the three dimensions that people are going to be kind of assessing them on
00:56:50
I think Nikki Haley did a tremendous job gaining interest with respect to her personality and her content
00:57:02
burgum Hutchinson I don't think had a chance to move the needle on any of them I think Vivek was by far the winner on
00:57:11
Dynamic he had the the hardest hitting biggest comeback with a very close second being Chris
00:57:17
Christie but I do think that Vivek got taken apart when it comes to content and I have real concerns about his
00:57:24
personality there's a lot of people that are just turned off by him that he seems
00:57:28
a little too eager that he seems a little too smart for his own good the commentary about him being so Junior
00:57:36
and doesn't have experience I think standing next to those guys on stage really showed to be honest Mickey Haley
00:57:43
tearing him apart on his uh point of view on Russia and sax you know we can debate the point
00:57:50
or not but I think she did a masterful I don't think she tore him apart I think the biggest dunk line of the evening was
00:57:57
when he congratulated her on her future appointments to the boards of Raytheon and Lockheed yeah that was I think that
00:58:03
was brilliant I just think he's the most dynamic character and I think people people do in a democracy vote on that
00:58:08
they vote on how Dynamic someone is they vote on their personality and whether they can trust the person I think Nikki
00:58:15
Haley shines there she seems extremely trustworthy and personable Chris Christie came across as very personable
00:58:20
so you're big Winners yeah Mike Pence I would say under underwhelmed and Ron DeSantis man it's like he didn't show up
00:58:34
are probably like you know across those Dimensions like you know the four runners and everyone else is probably
00:58:41
off now let me get your mom and then sack you get to comment on both of there so I want to go to you last because you
00:58:47
have the most passion here chamath who are your big Winners coming out of it in other words who gained the most last
00:58:54
night welcome Brown do for you Buck and brown do for you I think that okay UPS settlement great I thought that I
00:59:00
thought that Nikki Haley did an incredible job and I do think that Vivek did a very
00:59:06
good job and I think what's interesting is that I'm fascinated to see what the Republican reaction over the next few
00:59:13
weeks will be to Vivek and specifically what I'm interested in seeing is do the Trump loyalists
00:59:22
start to were they incepted with an idea yesterday which is that this guy can give us a lot
00:59:30
of the talking points we want without some of the heartburn and agita that we don't want and
00:59:38
if he is able to thread that needle which is what I think his effective strategy has been
00:59:46
he could really build momentum going into the fall so that was my that was my real takeaway
00:59:53
is that he is refining A playbook look the guy is a clearly a really brilliant person
00:59:59
well studied well prepared and dynamic as David said so he can you know clap back at people which I think is
01:00:09
important but the most important thing that he's done is he has defined a very precise strategy to thread this needle
01:00:19
of being close enough to Trump to frankly eventually go after him but do it in a way where
01:00:28
he's slowly building credibility among Trump Loyalists and I think if you look at where
01:00:34
other people made huge gaffs unnecessary gaffs was they took their beliefs and they confuse them with the strategy of
01:00:44
winning and that doesn't work in the Republican party so when the candidates were asked about Trump
01:00:50
and the ones that Drew a hard line and said that this guy's going to go to jail what happened they got booed and it just
01:00:55
ended their ability to be credible for what they said afterwards I'm not saying that that's right or wrong it's
01:01:02
just an observation so I think vivec is doing the smartest job of understanding the rules on the field
01:01:09
and he's in the arena okay so that gives them a lot that gives them a lot now we
01:01:14
go to sack sacks you heard Nikki Vivek Christie from Freeburg you heard yeah and Tim Scott so the vet clearly uh the
01:01:23
buzz and the Search terms and everything it seems to be favoring Vivek as the big
01:01:27
lift here do you think vivec is the Trump change agent without the indictments without the baggage without
01:01:35
the Trump derangement syndrome insanity is is chamoth correct here that he's a more palatable version of the change
01:01:42
agent that is Trump I think he's positioning himself as the backup plan to Trump
01:01:47
so he's not criticizing Trump he is cultivating support within Trump's space again not to supersede him but I think
01:01:55
to perhaps be a backup plan I think it is a smart strategy but let me back up a little bit here who won for you
01:02:05
everybody else played the game biggest game clearly the biggest game was Vivek that's okay reflected in the polling
01:02:12
there's a poll on Drudge Report in which 33 which was the highest number said that he won the debate 22 for Haley 18
01:02:19
suffer DeSantis Christie got 16 the rest were just non-factors so not scientific
01:02:25
but pretty scientific but this is corroborated by Nate silver how to yes some stock this morning basically saying
01:02:31
that based on the buzz on social media and the sentiments Google Trends he predicted
01:02:37
that for vague we keep saying Vivek Vivek it's it is quite key he's gonna have the biggest
01:02:47
bounce out of the debate partly that's a function of the fact that he was the least well-known candidate okay so this
01:02:54
gave him a lot of exposure and he has a good orator I mean just the way he caused the energy the timber of his
01:03:00
voice he projects well and he had a clear point of view in this debate you may not agree with everything he said
01:03:07
but he had a very clear point of view and I expect that both the number of people who like him and the number of
01:03:13
people who dislike him will go up as a result of this but I think the net effect of that will be positive now let
01:03:19
me back up just give you a couple more thoughts on the debate first of all in terms of winners I think the Republican
01:03:24
party in a way demonstrated that it is the party of ideas where there actually are debates happening because you saw
01:03:32
here I think real differences between the candidates and I could break them up into really three categories if you like
01:03:38
there's this Neo on wing of sort of Hardline foreign policy Hawks and he saw Dicky Haley's part of that
01:03:46
and Chris Christie and Pence momentum Scott then you had this religious right faction where you've got
01:03:53
Pence and Scott and then you've kind of got the Maga Wing which Vivek really took up the mantle of opposing Ukraine
01:04:01
and defending Trump so you have three very different groups within the party who are battling I think for mind share
01:04:08
within the party and to be the future of the party so it's not just about candidates and personal style but it
01:04:13
really is about ideas you compare that to the Democratic party they're not even having a debate they're protecting Biden
01:04:19
from a debate there could be a real debate because RFK Jr has really different ideas and he would like to
01:04:26
take the party in a very different direction the direction of his father and Uncle Bobby Kennedy and John F
01:04:33
Kennedy he's saying that we have moved away from where we should be as a party but the people who control the
01:04:39
Democratic party do not want to have that debate they have shut it down completely there is no debate they're
01:04:44
just protecting Biden so that's number one is I think we should give the Republican party some credit
01:04:49
for being willing to discuss and debate I love the fact that you had a vibrant debate you had differences of opinions
01:04:57
now it was a little like a UFC fight and you know zingers and back and forth but
01:05:03
I did like the fact that you had people who in moderation was actually surprisingly good when they forced them
01:05:10
to say like would you give Trump a pardon or you know what would you do in terms of support for Ukraine this was
01:05:16
like really well done and they had that 30 second thing where they stopped people they said hey this is the 30
01:05:20
second one and they had to reign in Pence because he kept you know interrupting and they were kind of
01:05:26
respectable so I just want to shout out to Fox for good moderation uh there were
01:05:30
some crazy zingers in there as well and it seems like we live in zinger culture I think the the best Zinger goes to the
01:05:37
moderator who said let's talk about the elephant that's not in the room and then
01:05:41
they brought up Trump well Frank I don't know if you caught that one but that was
01:05:44
pretty hardcore well so let's talk about winner number two which was Trump because Trump did not participate and he
01:05:50
didn't pay any price whatsoever for that he barely got mentioned or attacked on that stage and then he did this
01:05:57
interview with Tucker which started five minutes before in the debate which was kind of brilliant because once again
01:06:02
Trump was able to suck up a lot of the oxygen maybe not all of it but a lot of oxygen without even participating in the
01:06:08
debate it was a perfect bookend I watched both it was a perfect bookend you got Trump over here saying chamath
01:06:13
I'm interested in your position but he said listen I don't need to be in there with these guys mudsling and they have
01:06:17
zero or one percent uh and I I think he got the sense that he's excited to debate them when there's two people left
01:06:23
or something like that what did you think of did you watch Trump's thing uh Freeburg or Tremont
01:06:29
I watched both the debate and then I watched I do think Trump effectively won the debate night
01:06:37
because you had all these guys going at each other and then you had Trump playing the trump
01:06:43
card I'm not even gonna show up because I don't have to he literally made himself better than everyone else in the
01:06:49
room by saying I'm not even it's not even worth my time to show up to talk to you guys go ahead and fight with each
01:06:54
other I'll also just restate this this point about Vivek I think it became abundantly clear that his strategy his
01:07:01
strategy is to Pander to the Trump audience that his commentary about you know God is
01:07:08
real climate change is the numbers there's two genders he knows through polling through his understanding and
01:07:17
his intelligence that this is what this audience that is the bulk of the voting members of the Republican Party want to
01:07:25
hear and he is telling them what they want to hear and then uh isn't that the Java politician yeah I mean isn't that
01:07:32
better than pandering to the military-industrial complex like Nikki Haley did there was a comment last night
01:07:36
that I thought was really important which is that leadership is not about consensus and what he's doing is he is
01:07:42
reflecting back the consensus view of the majority of people in that party in order to get himself elected rather than
01:07:47
leading with a different message that casts a different opportunity the different light on the opportunity for
01:07:52
this nation and I think that's really where he and others on that stage or he particularly falls short is that he
01:07:59
speaks too much to what people already believe and say because he knows that that's what they're voting for Trump
01:08:04
about and then the bet is that there's some chance not a hundred percent but some chance that Trump doesn't make it
01:08:10
all the way he ends up in jail or people start to turn on him and then he's the front runner because he's basically
01:08:16
captivated that audience yeah hold on but Freeburg and I will let you address it here chamoth just said the Brilliance
01:08:23
of Vivek and his positioning here is that he understands how to win and he is playing this game and you call it
01:08:30
pandering sacks as I've been saying it's understanding the needs of that audience
01:08:34
the job of a politician sex is to win and to stay in office so I don't believe the Vex positions on a lot of the stuff
01:08:42
I think he is pandering I think he wouldn't do what Trump did I think you know he's he's doing the part in promise
01:08:48
because he knows he gets some votes so how do you reconcile this your job is to win right and you would rather see
01:08:54
DeSantis maybe pick up on some of this action no as your preferred candidate then that's a good question Freeburg do
01:09:03
you think that a politician's job when you're running for president of the United States is it to understand the
01:09:10
conditions on the field and when or not I think the politician's job or I I don't want to say the job I think the
01:09:18
opportunity to get elected in a democracy is to provide leadership to cast a light on where you think the
01:09:25
country or whatever constituency you're supposed to lead can go to provide a sense of opportunity to provide a sense
01:09:32
of optimism to provide a sense of what's not happening today that should be different rather than reflecting back to
01:09:39
those people exactly what they want now the flip side of that is exactly what you're saying which is that I think what
01:09:44
happens in a democracy is that people elect people that represent what they believe and I think that's what's going
01:09:48
to happen he's raising his hand and he's saying I believe these things and he's going to
01:09:53
get elected or he's going to put himself in a position to get elected if Trump drops out I just think there's a lot of
01:09:59
people who are very smart who if they are too idealistic will achieve nothing in their lives and I don't think Vivek
01:10:05
is one of those people idealism has a place in the world it's not on the debate stage when you're running for
01:10:10
president United States okay sax you wanted to get in here go okay let's take the issue of Ukraine because that was
01:10:15
one of the main issues that Vivek differed from the rest of the people on that stage there is polling by CNN that
01:10:22
a majority of Americans have now turned against the idea of giving more Aid to Ukraine I'm sure that number is much
01:10:28
higher in the Republican party if you remember there was an event Charlie Kirk who is a conservative influencer has an
01:10:37
event called Turning Point USA and they did polling of their conference attendees the number one issue that
01:10:43
everyone agreed on was Ukraine 95 of the attendees opposed giving more Aid to Ukraine Donald Trump only got 85 percent
01:10:52
popularity so the base of the party is even more united against Joe Biden's policy in Ukraine
01:11:00
than they are unloving Trump okay that tells you something and yet for Vegas the only candid on that stage
01:11:06
that was willing to raise his hand like aggressively like full-throatedly not kind of a half-hearted to saying that he
01:11:13
did not agree with Biden's policy on Ukraine what is wrong with all these other people on the stage that they
01:11:17
cannot understand what is wrong with Biden's Ukraine policy which by the way is the signature policy of his
01:11:25
presidency what is the point of Republicans nominating a candidate who's just going to agree with Joe Biden on
01:11:32
providing AIDS Ukraine as much as it takes for as long as it takes is this your position
01:11:37
here at Freeburg is that you know win at all costs let's call it the vague win at
01:11:42
all costs play the game on the field as chamatha sang and just win the game versus being principled because you did
01:11:49
have no no I think that that framing is such a setup can I can I just say something frame it how you are you you
01:11:54
said playing the game on the field and Friedberg said having a principal here and having like an actual vision for the
01:12:00
country so I'm taking both of yours look I think the framing is not as not what is wrong with Vivek but what is wrong
01:12:06
with candidates like Christy and Pence and Haley and Scott where even though 95 of their party is opposed to Ukraine
01:12:16
they are adopting Joe Biden's policy and their only criticism of Joe Biden is that he's not doing enough fast enough
01:12:23
for them okay let's let free bird get in here they're completely out we got your
01:12:26
point what the Republican party as it stands today we got your point but is it not Freebird what you're saying is that
01:12:31
there is this profile and courage to to invoke that book where you there's something that's unpopular that you have
01:12:38
to do and I think Nikki Haley Pence Christy and the other ones who are pro defending Ukraine from Russia
01:12:46
their profile encourage uh Freeburg is that they will go against that 95 polling and say it's the right thing to
01:12:52
do we should defend Taiwan we should defend Israel we should defend Ukraine against those are three different issues
01:12:58
I know it's three different issues but they were all evoked by the Vivek himself so Freiburg your chance I think
01:13:04
The West Wing does a great job of exploring both sides of this which is when do you have to break the mold and
01:13:10
break the expectation of the people to do the right principle thing and when do you have to do the thing that you don't
01:13:17
think is right but it's what the people want to have happen um and I I think that that's a obviously
01:13:23
a balance that needs to be struck when you're in this position of being an elected leader in a democracy and so
01:13:28
there's no there's no real answer I wish that there was like I wish Mr Beast had
01:13:34
like a presidential process like he you guys saw his Olympics video that he did last week
01:13:39
where he brought people and he created this like these like five things I wish that we had something like that to elect
01:13:45
President that it was more than just oration because we elect the president today based on their oratory skills they
01:13:52
go on stage and who has the best quippy comment the person who would be the most
01:13:55
decisive Under Pressure doesn't necessarily win the person who can Inspire and attract and retain the best
01:14:02
leadership the person who can have the best foreign policy interactions with other leaders doesn't necessarily win
01:14:07
those are skills that show up in other contexts and when we put people on a stage and we
01:14:14
say okay speak to the audience the guy who speaks the best looks the best it's not necessarily the guy who is best
01:14:21
equipped to handle the challenge of the Bay of Pigs or you know the decision on whether or not I think you're being very
01:14:27
difficult I think you're being okay you have the floor this is like that's kind of like saying why isn't it that it's
01:14:35
the quarterback with the strongest arm that isn't the most successful why because that person is a [ __ ] loser
01:14:42
and the person that's the winner is the one that can threat together a multi-faceted set of skills to win the
01:14:48
game Tom Brady was drafted in the seventh round not the first round he wins the game because he has the
01:14:55
requisite skills which is a basket of things and a Nuance of skills in different moments at different times and
01:15:01
so I think that you're being a little glib by saying the person isn't cool under pressure or this or that
01:15:07
it's not true the people that win these races have a greater natural ability to be a complete
01:15:16
egoist but not a narcissist that is an incredibly Deft set of skills at a fair rare people have it gives them this
01:15:24
energy to be out there talking to thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people may be saying
01:15:31
the same thing thousands of times but being able to stay focused being able to be on point having a sense of
01:15:37
what they need to believe know the details in a certain part know the high level in another part stay Punchy but
01:15:42
stay affable stay that's the game there are a set of skills that it takes to become president you test the oration
01:15:49
skills of a person when you put them on a debate stage you don't test the other complex skills that it takes to be
01:15:55
president and getting people to understand the complexity of the role and all the other aspects of someone's
01:16:00
personality are lacking in these [ __ ] debates but there are other these other skills are in play and many things other
01:16:06
than just the debate like the campaign is a highly sophisticated orchestration of running a small little government
01:16:13
Mario Cuomo famously said that you campaign and poetry and and government prose and there is a difference between
01:16:21
campaigning skills and governing skills there is a gap there I would update it to say that you
01:16:27
govern and prose and campaign and tweets you know so the campaign definitely puts
01:16:32
a huge emphasis on a candidate's communication skills but that is not all just um gloss or style it also
01:16:42
has to do with their policies and the nuances in their policies and how they handle
01:16:47
pressure how good they are under pressure and how good they are when they're attacked so you know we put
01:16:53
these candidates through a pressure cooker and kind of learn who they really are I'm not sure it's a horrible process
01:16:57
so sex let me ask you a question yeah Pence has been in the Situation Room dealing with a foreign adversary Vivek
01:17:04
has no military or defense experience he has no foreign State experience how do you assess vivec in his ability to
01:17:11
address those critical issues that he's going to have to lead us through versus someone who's been there and done that
01:17:16
and you know give a great question great question okay trust him you trust me listen Pence made that argument against
01:17:22
a vague apparently not realizing that the guy he was vice president for was in that exact same position in 2016 no
01:17:29
previous political experience right no experience being in the Situation Room the only reason why Pence got to warm
01:17:36
his ass on a chair in the situation room is because Donald Trump picked him to be
01:17:40
his VP oh but he wasn't responsible for making any important decisions he was basically clock in time as vice
01:17:46
president give me a break and that's why he's at what is it one or one percent no
01:17:51
one gives a [ __ ] about Pence that's what they said about Obama as well Obama had
01:17:55
zero experience Obama barely could get elected before he became Senator and then president in a matter of four years
01:18:01
and for Bush what happened to Bush they said that exact argument as well and what did they do they packed him with
01:18:06
Rumsfeld and Cheney how did that end yeah I just want to also point out here that sometimes things get a little bit
01:18:12
heated and when we get heated it's typically because we're we're triangulating around something very
01:18:16
important I think what we're trying triangulating around here is that we are moving uh from an era of incumbents and
01:18:24
insiders to an Era of Outsiders if to your point sacks post-trump we now have the two or three most
01:18:33
fascinating candidates are people uh who do social media who do podcasts who do earned media like we
01:18:39
talked about I think two or three weeks ago it's a really good insight and vivekism has mastered it and he is
01:18:45
exactly like Trump and he's exactly like Obama to a certain extent in that those
01:18:48
people were incredibly personable they knew how to talk on podcasts they knew how to engage people and I think that
01:18:54
you know this spiciness that we're having here on the Pod and the spiciness that you're seeing with some of those
01:18:59
candidates is that we're moving from traditional media defining these candidates to direct to Consumer direct
01:19:08
through Twitter acts direct through podcasts this podcast included making people like RFK and Vivek you know very
01:19:15
palatable people and Ross Perot I know I'm gonna get laughed after bringing this up who got 19 of the vote which is
01:19:23
a serious number he went direct as well no he he got 90 pero because he actually
01:19:33
went as an independent all the way and what Ross Perot did was the equivalent of what Vivek and RFK are doing on
01:19:38
Pockets he bought television time you don't know that or some people in the audience might not understand who Ross
01:19:44
Perot even is but look it up he bought television time and he went direct to the country with our budget I thought
01:19:50
this is going to be the future of politics what we're witnessing right now is the transition from traditional media
01:19:57
and the establishment defining who the great candidates are to the public and the people on podcasts and social media
01:20:04
who are the tip of the spear on the Vanguard they're going to pick the winners and I think this could be the
01:20:09
Tipping Point election Trump was the first Obama than Trump and now Vivek and RFK
01:20:15
so I just like you all to maybe respond to that especially you sex since you've got this orange media issue up two weeks
01:20:21
ago I partially agree with Freeburg in in this sense look obviously track record is important obviously the
01:20:27
ability to be an executive executive functioning is important for the chief executive of of our country so I'm not
01:20:35
saying that we shouldn't look at that kind of record and this is why was one of the reasons
01:20:41
why I support DeSantis I think he's been a brilliant Governor he's done a superb
01:20:44
job in the State of Florida he did the best job of all the governors during covid I think he did a better job than
01:20:50
Trump did during covet so listen I think those things are important where I disagree is just because Mike Pence has
01:20:56
again warmed a chair in The Situation Room as vice president to me that's just not
01:21:02
that relevant experience I mean the VP is kind of a nothing job unless something terrible happens to the
01:21:09
president they get tapped on the shoulder so I just disagree with what is relevant experience second
01:21:16
I think it's important to recognize that the reason why Vivek has a lane here and
01:21:21
the reason why Trump had a lane in 2016 is that the establishment wing of the party is so completely out of touch with
01:21:29
what the base wants look the reason why Trump came out of nowhere in 2016 is he basically turned everything on his head
01:21:36
he said no more bushes no more of these stupid Forever wars in the Middle East we need to build a wall no more of this
01:21:42
open border policy and we need to reset our tribulation with China those were three Mega issues that no one else in
01:21:49
the party was talking about and the the mega issue today is Ukraine 95 of the bases against it and they have left the
01:21:58
fake this gigantic Lane to exploit why I don't know I mean they're trapped in Legacy neocon thinking that the US
01:22:09
that was I think that was a great moment It's a combination of being trapped in Legacy thinking where we have to be the
01:22:15
policeman in the world combined with all the big donors in the party okay many of
01:22:19
whom are wrapped up with the military industrial complex want to contribute to that people can you just say it again
01:22:23
what you feel like I'm not hearing no I think that being president requires being better more than just an orator
01:22:30
and I think that the debates allow the best orator to show off their skills and capabilities on the debate stage I was
01:22:36
saying I wish that there were other events I would love to see some set of systems to expose the candidate's
01:22:43
success or failings and how well equipped they are rather than the person who can just give the best interview we
01:22:49
all know this when you interview a candidate an engineer the engineer that gives the best interview is not
01:22:54
necessarily going to become the best engineer you can look at their code to see if they're a great engineer you can
01:23:00
talk to people that report it to them to see if they're a great manager you can learn more about their success and
01:23:06
skills through more than just their oration on the stage and yes there's data in fact that we can pull from these
01:23:11
people I was just speculating in kind of a pseudo-silly way about the concept of
01:23:16
can we do more than just put people on a debate how do you hire a CEO for your companies
01:23:23
well yeah what I'll tell you we don't do is we don't have the employees elect the
01:23:27
CEO through a vote by having that CEO go in front I don't know but you're saying
01:23:30
no I'm not the best guy for the job interview is part of it but you can interview we do reference calls right we
01:23:36
we talked to them about their strategy and you know through the interview through the reference calls through
01:23:42
looking at the performance of other businesses they've built and run and you know
01:23:46
that can have a wholesome understanding of his candidacy and his ability to be president my point is I think that there
01:23:52
are certain things like with Trump that had not been tested or tried that are going to come up in this role that
01:23:58
they'd never done before in the past and I'm not saying look by the way I'm certainly not a big you know political
01:24:04
career guys you guys know I think you know I I hate that people build a career around politics I think it's the most
01:24:09
inane ridiculous thing and if we could go back and rewrite the Constitution that's probably the first thing I put in
01:24:14
there the thing with the this line of thinking that maybe this is where I reacted so I apologize if I personalized
01:24:19
it is that it creates the risk of exactly what you just said in this what you just said right now which is this
01:24:27
blob class of people that use those arguments as the reason why change can't happen yeah why it might I don't
01:24:35
disagree with that I don't disagree with that and I think that is the huge red flag about this line of argumentation
01:24:40
around why out of the box candidates can't be evaluated by reasonably smart people of which there are 300 million of
01:24:48
us in America that have the ability to see it and so I actually don't think it's as hard of a job as we make it out
01:24:55
to be and that when you get 180 190 million different people voting I do think you actually get a pretty good
01:25:02
wisdom of the crowds and take away Trump's UI for a second what sax just said is so
01:25:10
profound because like what Trump nailed was three ginormous lanes that turned out now we can all agree with none of us
01:25:17
wanted these wars everybody basically believes in that the Border needed to be closed and everybody believes that China
01:25:25
has taken advantage in a way that has really hollowed out the middle class in America those were
01:25:31
three totems that nobody would have touched and if we had allowed this whole thing of like oh Trump doesn't have this
01:25:38
Trump doesn't have that he just gives cute nicknames to his advert series we would have missed that he actually had
01:25:44
enough executive function to nail the three biggest themes of our current lifetime okay I think that's fair I
01:25:51
guess my commentary can just be reduced down to the debate stage and saying who won and who should be is different than
01:25:57
who should be president necessarily looking at the broader context presidential but the presidential
01:26:04
candidacy is much more than just his debates okay yes there's a lot of other things going on if we're judging people
01:26:10
just based on how well they talk and how quick on their feet they are Chris Christie is a great talker okay he's a
01:26:17
media trained talker but guess what he got booed that was yeah it's a debate the dull point of the debate for me was
01:26:23
that he I thought took a kind of like a low-key racist jab at Vivek when he was let me read it first person yeah the
01:26:32
last person in one of these debates who stood in the middle of the stage and said what's a skinny guy with an odd
01:26:36
last name doing up here was Barack Obama I'm afraid we're dealing with the same type of amateur standing on the stage
01:26:42
tonight you felt was a little no not that it's when you thought that was Vivek like chat GPT essentially enough
01:26:47
already of a guy who sounds like Chachi PT standing yeah here's like this Indian
01:26:51
tech worker and I thought hey man that's what you read into it that's interesting
01:26:54
I thought he was just saying he sounded as a Salvation Tech worker that's right that he was um that he was uh very like
01:27:03
robotic and formulaic or something but what did you how did you read it because uh has the palace white guy on the panel
01:27:10
there was something almost personal about the way that both Christy and Pence seem to reactive and make it was
01:27:16
almost like who are you you young whippersnapper to be on the stage with me especially Pence I've been the vice
01:27:22
president who are you you know here's what his quotes were dismissive and I think there was a resentment that
01:27:29
even before this debate but vague was rising in the polls and those guys were going nowhere let me explain it and
01:27:36
again it's not just oratorical skill it's the substance yes of the issues and where he's willing to go that these
01:27:43
other candidates are not here are the quotes to respond to let me explain it to you Vivek
01:27:47
I'll go slower this time now is not the time for on-the-job training and we don't need to bring in a rookie all this
01:27:54
dismissive stuff from Pence to Vivek got some Applause because you know conflict
01:27:59
and confrontation gets applaused by these lunatics in the audience who were like it was like well you also get an
01:28:05
allocation of seats for your own team so yes and why Pence was VP is because a rookie
01:28:12
got elected president yeah that's a very good it's a good side yeah that was very weird I thought the
01:28:17
thing that was very interesting listen not to make it all about Trump but he was the quote-unquote elephant that was
01:28:22
not in the room was the un uh dying support for Pence you had everybody say Pence did the right thing on January 6th
01:28:29
what would you take away from that sacks because there were some there was a mix
01:28:33
of booze and cheers for Christy when he kind of said like we need somebody who doesn't behave this way it's Unbecoming
01:28:40
of the presidency referring to Trump so what was your take on is the Republican party in this audience
01:28:46
trying to move past Trump given all these indictments I'm going to leave the Trump Stockholm syndrome and Trump
01:28:53
derangement syndrome out of this just objectively yeah I thought DeSantis had the best response
01:29:00
which is listen if we spend our time relitigating January 6 and looking in the rear view mirror we're going to lose
01:29:06
to Joe Biden this is exactly the conversation and the debate that Democrats want us to be having I think
01:29:11
that's factually true that if the Republican Party spends his time debating January 6 that's playing into
01:29:18
Biden's hands so you don't think Trump can necessarily be Biden that these other
01:29:23
candidates have a better chance of beating Biden is that what you mean it's a question focusing focusing on
01:29:28
relitigating okay January 6 is not only is it a waste of time it's just a loser for republicans and by the way it's
01:29:35
Trump's worst quality to keep hearkening back to the last election even I think his fans and supporters don't want to
01:29:42
hear that who has a better chance of winning some pairing of these candidates sacks
01:29:47
or Trump and one of these candidates versus Biden heads up you know does uh something like DeSantis
01:29:54
Vivek or Haley and Vivek you know pick your combination here have a better chance versus Biden than Trump plus one
01:30:01
of these I think it's tough to say but I I do think that Trump has really high negatives and in
01:30:10
order for him to win the presidency he's got to flip something like two or three
01:30:15
out of five states like swing states that voted against him last time and I do think that this is one of the
01:30:22
stronger arguments that DeSantis makes is that you know I could deliver those States whereas Trump may not
01:30:30
so I think there is an electability argument for DeSantis okay and so Friedberg hearing all this by the way I'm not
01:30:38
saying that that's what's going to happen but I I do think we know that Trump does have very high negatives and
01:30:43
yeah he's gonna have to flip some States before he's going to have a lot of Democrats and women come out to vote
01:30:50
against him he supercharges the base in the way Hillary charged the other way because I say one other thing about of
01:30:54
course to say it's just performance in that debate so I know that he doesn't stand out in the
01:31:00
way that you know vivekers and these other candidates do because he didn't deliver any zingers and also he wasn't
01:31:06
the brunt of attack I think we all thought that maybe there'd be a lot more incoming for him and the incoming really
01:31:11
went for Vivek but I think that he had a strategy in that debate this is my interpretation
01:31:17
it's not based on yeah go ahead any Insider knowledge or anything like that which was the way he answered questions
01:31:23
was I think to be broadly acceptable to all the different factions in the GOP so
01:31:28
like I mentioned there's kind of the mega faction there's the neocon faction and there's the religious right faction
01:31:34
and his answers may not have been the ones that were most loved by any of those factions but I also think that
01:31:43
none of his answers disqualified himself with any of those factions which is kind
01:31:48
of hard to do given how much they're at each other's throats so sax if this was a poker tournament and this was the
01:31:53
final table would you say the strategy for DeSantis was Hey listen I'm going to let
01:31:58
these other guys shoot it out I'm just gonna sit on my big chip stack here I'm in second place you got let me let let's
01:32:04
let the field eliminate themselves I'm gonna just protect my stack I'm not gonna play a lot of hands here he's just
01:32:09
sort of sitting and waiting for it to get down to three or four people and then he'll mix it up some more is that
01:32:14
the strategy I think he came across as the grown-up nobody really took swipes at him or
01:32:20
shots at him and he didn't really take shots anybody else he did again try to focus the Republican party on what it's
01:32:25
going to take to win he was one of the only people on that stage who had criticism
01:32:30
of Biden I think it was a mistake not to criticize Biden's record that was such a weird thing that they
01:32:36
were all going after Trump nothing about Biden the only attacks on Biden that I even
01:32:41
remember from that and I were from Trump's interview with Tucker where he criticized oh God he he destroyed
01:32:47
criticized Biden's lack of physical and mental acuity but look I think that if if the convention were ultimately to be
01:32:53
a broker convention which all the different factions of the GOP had to agree on a candidate then I think this
01:32:59
answers would be that candidate because he may not be the candidate who is most loved by any of those factions but I
01:33:05
think he's made himself the most broadly acceptable to all of them the problem is
01:33:09
I don't think that's the way that candidates are chosen you know I think that what happens in practice is that
01:33:14
the factions are trying to feed each other and that one faction is going to win and
01:33:20
I think it's probably going to be the mega faction so that's the problem I think with the strategy but look he came
01:33:26
across the grown-up and he came across as the most broadly acceptable okay so if uh this is a final table of a
01:33:33
poker tournament and Trump is going to sit down and debate three of these people who's going
01:33:39
to be left to debate Trump and be the final three or four seats here which three
01:33:46
I think it'll be DeSantis Vivek and it'll be either Tim scottron to give interesting
01:33:55
Friedberg who are the final three who are going to debate Trump you know in debate number four or five
01:34:00
I don't know if he's gonna show up I don't know why he would if he's up 50. I mean it would be it would just be such
01:34:08
a trump move to not show up to any of these debates and just like get elected play the game how incredible a debate
01:34:14
would that be if it was from DeSantis and Vivek fireworks my fourth would be Nikki Haley
01:34:20
I think she did a good she had her moments in that debate I think she had good advice for the Republican party on
01:34:25
the abortion issue yeah she did a really great job she pointed out how you know much money I thought that was a tea
01:34:32
party moment for her that's when I warmed up to Nikki Haley a bunch and she's like listen we also approved you
01:34:38
know six eight trillion dollars we gotta look at ourselves and it was like okay is it the Tea Party 2010 here I thought
01:34:43
that was a great moment who do you who do you have left Freeburg everybody else played the game play along who will be
01:34:48
the final three here to debate Trump if Trump shows up play along for the game I
01:34:52
mean I'll give mine Vivek seems to be in a good place okay I don't know does Santa sends a lot of
01:34:59
money yeah he's probably gonna stick around yeah so Vivek and DeSantis are we all have consensus Nikki Haley here's
01:35:06
the crazy Christian look I don't think he's gonna show up we got your we got your point yeah yeah you're critical of
01:35:12
the fact that the vague is having a boom or a surge based on his oratorical skills which I think you regard as being
01:35:19
a shot away but you're showing no enthusiasm for DeSantis who actually has a track record
01:35:26
of being the most capable executive oh no no I'm not by the way I didn't I'm not we're not talking about who I would
01:35:31
vote for president we haven't even had that comment like we didn't even ask that question once okay so ask it now
01:35:36
putting aside Trump who do you pick what was really interesting is hearing the governors speak about their skills I
01:35:43
think Nikki Haley Chris Christie bergum DeSantis all had moments where they Shine from from Hutchinson from my
01:35:51
perspective from a Content perspective which is where I was talking about at the beginning which people largely
01:35:55
ignore which is that they actually had quite a lot to draw from and you know certain policy that seemed pretty strong
01:36:01
here we go final question final question I want you to give me your one and two not Trump
01:36:07
Saks we know DeSantis is number one for you so then who's who's your number two to pair with him who would you pair with
01:36:12
me what to be the candidate to be that the ticket Republican ticket you're gonna go to santus one and then who do
01:36:18
you put with them as a number two well for me to Santa send I think that the only candidates who have acceptable
01:36:28
answers on What I regard as the number one issue of our time which is Ukraine because that could lead to World War III
01:36:34
the only candidates of acceptable answers are Trump of vacant DeSantis meaning they've all been pretty clear
01:36:39
they would de-escalate I think all the other candidates have basically indicated in one way or another
01:36:45
so those three candidates are the only ones that are acceptable to me okay so we take Trump off if Trump doesn't run
01:36:51
which that's my personal belief but just of the people who are on stage last night you're going to santis Vivek is
01:36:55
your ticket who's your ticket after one debate not counting Trump if if the Republican ticket who do you think is
01:37:03
Republicans I like to buy these deep out of the money options I think we'll go out on the limb I think that Vivek has a
01:37:08
really good chance of winning this Republican nomination that's what I saw I saw like outright against Trump yeah
01:37:13
and we're taking a trump off the table so just picking up for example for example no no no no I really do think
01:37:20
he's he can in this thing and for example I thought it was very clever when he said that he had a line he said
01:37:27
Donald Trump was the best let me be categorically clear Donald Trump was the best
01:37:33
president of the 21st Century and I was like what and then I thought about it and I thought why is he saying
01:37:40
it does he say it because he believes it or is he saying because it's like a a tactic
01:37:46
and there's probably bits of both yep because I do think that there are elements where he fundamentally does
01:37:52
believe that Trump has at least shined the path forward and so I think he does believe
01:37:58
it to some degree but then I thought it's even smarter to have said it and again this is where I go back to I'm not
01:38:06
sure that that's oratory skills versus like understanding you know Game Theory strategy and and strategy and being a
01:38:14
strategic thinker and trying to win I thought that that was a very smart thing to have said and all along that evening
01:38:20
I thought that he did the best job of preserving optionality for the Trump base to say you know what Vivek is all
01:38:30
of the positive features of Trump without some of the negatives so let's just clean up the ticket and let's go
01:38:36
again there's a long way yeah I like the call I like the call but who's number to
01:38:42
buy that deep out of the money option and who's your number two then we're going one two here one two here either
01:38:46
as to pair with a vague or your number two choice in terms of no then I if defect doesn't figure out a way to
01:38:53
slipstream past Trump the Trump will win the nomination okay taking Trump out of
01:38:57
the rest who's your number two okay great fascinating to see this happening I agree with what a lot of what jamas
01:39:04
said yeah I think Vivek is positioning himself to be the backup candidate for the Maga
01:39:11
Wing yep and he's doing it by never attacking Trump and by commenting him by the way saying that Trump was the best
01:39:18
president of the 21st century there's only been three it was George W bush Obama and then Trump right oh sorry
01:39:25
Biden sorry Biden's has been four George W Bush was one of the worst Presidents in American history yeah so
01:39:31
it's easier Obama obviously a republican candidate is not going to think highly of Obama or Biden so it kind of narrows
01:39:39
it down doesn't it yeah the intelligence of actually saying the words yeah I know I agree sax what do you think
01:39:47
about vivek's unpopular statement and it may I'd like to hear whether it's unpopular with the bass but it was
01:39:53
certainly unpopular in the room last night that the climate change agenda is a hoax which drew a lot of booze
01:39:59
that was is that like is that a lightning bolt kind of thing to say why would he
01:40:06
say that and what's the strategy it's like Trump saying he loves coal and he loves coal miners it's just painful to
01:40:13
me a little bit like he was trying to see which agenda is a hoax meaning like all the ESG stuff is nonsense exactly
01:40:19
but it comes across as him saying climate change isn't real and he's got to now deal with it climate change is
01:40:24
strategic I think it's um but I don't I don't think you know what he believes Jake
01:40:30
help but yeah his follow-up comment around that was he said that it is an economic yoke on our country
01:40:37
because the combination of subsidies and the lack of expansion of carbon is what's holding back the country
01:40:43
economically so that's I think I remember him tying these two things together so that's that's probably where
01:40:49
the state is no intelligent person doesn't believe that the planet's not heating up come on and that it's not
01:40:54
better to go to Renewables that's just how do you know if you looked at the science Jacob of course I have yes it's
01:40:58
a massive consensus on the science you know as deep as a person needs to go free bird
01:41:04
you just treat it look it's just something you're supposed to believe in no I'm I'm not saying that I just don't
01:41:10
have the statistics of how the plan that's it I will say sax is right that it has become a thing that it's like
01:41:17
we're all supposed to take as given no one is going to go up and say Here's the science that validates here's the data
01:41:24
that validates here's there's there's some empirical evidence and then people use counter empirical evidence to try
01:41:28
and counter it and that's what makes it a little bit of a a movement now which is
01:41:34
the institutions the elites however they're framed have been wrong so many times on the things that they told us
01:41:40
were given that we're supposed to assume that this is a given to F that I'm not going to be told what to believe anymore
01:41:46
and I don't want to be told what to believe anymore is exactly what people let me let me State my position that's
01:41:51
what they heard from that song last week and that's what they heard you know in physics let me State my position I
01:41:56
totally agree yeah here's the thing you know after covid without me even making a comment on climate change 100 we've
01:42:03
told so much [ __ ] in the name of science during covet yeah they told us the vaccines were safe and effective I
01:42:09
just want to clarify my position before you respond to it it's undeniable that temperatures have
01:42:14
risen I think it's a crazy experiment to run to not try to lower it it's just a crazy experiment the planet is precious
01:42:22
I don't think we should run it I am not dogmatic about it it's not a religious thing I'm not genuine experiment we're
01:42:28
running Jacob it's called human development and growth yes and the temperature goes up so why
01:42:34
wouldn't we use Renewables when not pollute because not polluting is is good too when you have
01:42:44
self-proclaimed scientific experts and or 16 year old girls shaming everybody with pretty flimsy data
01:42:56
there was a while where we where everybody just said Mom they must be right and covet exposed the hoax and so
01:43:02
now we're a lot less prone to believe these self-proclaimed intellectuals and their jargon and their nonsense so
01:43:12
ask me how much money have I invested in climate change with all that data zero ask me how much money I've invested in
01:43:20
technologies that will benefit climate change as a byproduct of National Security hundreds of millions of dollars
01:43:25
yes and the reason I give you that example is that for me that framing was just such a turn off because I couldn't
01:43:32
buy into it yeah there are multiple reasons the more pragmatic realistic framing which allowed us to actually say
01:43:40
maybe you're right but maybe you're wrong but let's not even debate the issue let's just go and make sure we're
01:43:44
not dependent on another country and fighting endless Wars that got me off my ass to do stuff and I think there's a
01:43:49
lot of people in America that are in that second category they don't want absolutely emotionally riddled Dogma to
01:43:56
drive their life and how they're forced to make decisions you can come up with three or four really good reasons to not
01:44:02
keep burning fossil fuels they're dirty they're pollutants there are better options that are more sustainable that
01:44:09
are more cost effective it's more cost effective to put solar in than to burn coal or build a new coal plant so
01:44:15
there's economic reasons we're automatically going to trust I'm not blindly trusting anybody I'm
01:44:27
taking the body of evidence and saying that entire body of evidence geopolitical really looked at the
01:44:32
evidence I don't believe in gunship on this issue okay anyway I haven't gone deep on this issue that's all I'm saying
01:44:39
listen to what I'm saying if you listen as opposed to telling me what I think and you listen to what I'm telling you
01:44:45
there are many reasons to pursue sustainable energy clean energy and geopolitics is one of them and you know
01:44:54
uh polluting the environment is one of them and temperatures Rising if that indeed results in Damages to
01:45:01
the oceans and you know weather patterns there are five or six great reasons to stop burning coal and stop burning oil
01:45:09
look at these two climate whitewashers we're living in In This Moment people were so convinced they just needed to
01:45:16
Royal the country around the hurricane hitting California then by the time it landed it was a
01:45:22
storm there was rain in Los Angeles I asked people here when I got here I said how is Hurricane they're like it wasn't
01:45:28
a hurricane and in fact the news were so tilted about it they had to call it it could have been a hurricane
01:45:35
ratings second is this thing in Maui it turns out Michael schellenberger has done some pretty good work on this is
01:45:43
exposing that a lot of the reason these fires may have started was because of this radical climate agenda that caused
01:45:50
the utility to not invest in the protective measures they should have around power lines that is crazy Jason
01:45:58
oh yeah I'm not defending what happened in Maui it's obviously incompetence we should be bearing we have the same issue
01:46:04
in California which is dogmatic belief there's a consequence I'm not saying you are I'm trying to
01:46:12
make this point when people dogmatically believe Bodies of Evidence that they themselves don't interrogate fully they
01:46:19
may it may lead them to conclusions and then actions that you are now seeing have measurable human consequences if
01:46:25
you look at PG e in California it's riddled with these issues yeah they shut our power off because they're afraid
01:46:30
that wind is going to blow down power lines and start fires yeah I mean and we just need to bury them so so I think
01:46:36
that it would be great to like not debate the climate issue put a pin in it and instead just say we all want our
01:46:41
kids to be able to have clean air around us we want clean water to drink and we want to make sure that we have the
01:46:48
resources to be productive as human beings without having to send our kids to war or without putting the country in
01:46:53
danger 100 which is exactly my point there are so many reasons to take this serious especially and move to
01:46:59
Renewables and nuclear all right listen this has been an insanely great episode hey uh let me just get one person's
01:47:05
comments so here's your here's your uh red meat for uh Saks here it sounds like there was uh the the the
01:47:13
coup um 60 days later the guy who was running the coup in Russia had a little accident it's so Random uh
01:47:20
maybe your thoughts sex you're talking about burgosian yeah I mean he had some mechanical difficulties
01:47:27
on his PJ I don't know what happened is he not sending that citation in for maintenance what happened they had a bad
01:47:32
engine or something it's so Random poor guy the latest reporting from The New York Times this morning is that
01:47:37
Ferguson's plane was not shot shot down but rather they believe there was an explosive device on it oh okay so we
01:47:43
don't know you know we don't know exactly but it was a bird strike something random like
01:47:48
a bird strike no no somebody took him out somebody took him off the board really oh it must have been it must have
01:47:53
been Ukraine right that's who you're putting it on it's Ukraine no I mean I think it's probably pretty obvious who
01:48:00
did it although we won't know for sure listen I think allegedly yeah allegedly that's what you always say whenever
01:48:12
Hunter Biden's accused of doing something you always have to answer it allegedly there was a little cocaine and
01:48:17
maybe some bribes I think this resolves the question of who came out on top during that Mutiny there were a lot of
01:48:23
people speculating that somehow progosian at the upper hand or he was paid off right remember there was a line
01:48:30
of thinking oh this wasn't a coup if it wasn't a coup then why did Putin Whack Him
01:48:36
backpack and it was exactly 60 days later is that correct that was the other thing is that
01:48:41
gonna ask a question how funny is it then it's like Putin's like paper goes and come come and see me we're good
01:48:46
nothing to worry about it and then it's like listen where are you going to the blocks yeah you can take my
01:48:53
pj and he's like see you later oh thanks for the ride free bird I told you it's like Michael Corleone
01:49:07
apparently there's a meeting about a month ago I remember it being reported where pregosian and the other heads of
01:49:12
Wagner came to meet with Putin and the deal that Putin supposedly offered was that Wagner could stay
01:49:19
together but they had to report to the Russian military and the Wagner commanders were on board with it but one
01:49:25
person objected and that was pregosian oh so it's a little bit like remember that the meeting between Michael
01:49:30
Corleone and mo Green in Vegas you know Michael's like think of a price and mo Green's like you don't buy me out
01:49:39
I buy you one yeah that kind of reaction yep and the guy had some sort of Death Wish I guess you know what they say
01:49:46
beware the dog that doesn't bark Putin said nothing for the last two months he was like yeah it's all good nothing out
01:49:52
of the Putin camp and then boom Putin is a murderous lunatic who must be stopped and contained well I think
01:50:00
that's the opposite of being a lunatic I think this is somebody who is very cold
01:50:03
and calculating okay yeah murderous calculated sociopath he figured out how to defuse a mutiny I don't think it was
01:50:10
a fullanku but a mutiny that would have been very disruptive to his front line if he had basically tried to violently
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suppress it so he cuts a deal where basically he offers banishment to Belarus pregosian was supposed to go to
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Belarus by the way we don't know exactly why pagosian returned to Moscow or St Petersburg he was supposed to be staying
01:50:32
in Belarus or Africa so maybe he violated the terms of his probation we don't know there were all these people
01:50:37
on social media who were pinning their hopes for regime change and liberal reform within Russia
01:50:43
on pregosian which was always absurd because he was this warlord whose behavior and conduct was even more
01:50:49
erratic and violent than Putin so he was never going to be a great vessel for Liberal reform in Russia nonetheless
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they're all these people who pinned their hopes for regime change in Russia on pregosian we can see now what a
01:51:03
stupid idea that was the Russian regime whether you like it or not is stable is not unstable Russia
01:51:10
is winning the war and you may hate Putin but he is still a master of Russia and eventually we're
01:51:16
gonna have to deal with him these fantasies that we're gonna be able to regime change him
01:51:21
I think are absurd and they've led us to this horrible Point okay for the dictator for the Sultan of Science and
01:51:29
it's focused SAS sex with the slick back hair I am the world's greatest we'll let your winners ride
01:51:39
Rain Man David said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music]
01:51:55
besties [Music] it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow
01:52:19
[Music] foreign [Music]