E53: Wealth tax, inflation as a capital allocator, big tech earnings, paternity leave & more

oh baby no skin on skin you just got to keep the shirt on listen to me only the best for my daughter this is 100% laurana vuna she's gonna PE any minute there is not you're using laurana to wipe her when she mom no this is the sweater that she's she's got her face on but this is the softest material human you know I mean natural material on Earth really this is not subject to any supply chain constraints a in fact when you buy one from Laura Piana fly one right to you let your winners ride Rainman David and instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it love [Music] you guys isn't it amazing how people in

power cannot take any time off and still remain in power and engaged when you have a baby J K what's the reference okay our friend Joe Lonsdale venture capitalist living in Austin had a tweet that uh went viral but maybe not for the best reasons he said uh in response to a Dan primr tweet a Dan works at axios who was talking about Joe Rogan criticizing uh the amount of time budha was taking on paternity leave and Joe Londale responded wow great for fathers to spend time with their kids and support moms but any man in an important position who takes six months of leave for a newborn

is a loser in the old days men had babies and worked harder to provide for their future that's the correct masculine response uh well it was an opinion from 1957 that's either his or I'm in the way back machine but Joe's old school Joe is a unique individual and he just happened to I think in this whole like not get cancelled debate or don't let yourself get canceled debate the right is now saying like I'm just going to tell you how I actually feel and so Joe told us actually how he felt I don't think he said anything offensive I think you can have a different opinion than what he said but I don't think he said it shouldn't exist he said if

you're in a position of power and you check out for six months it puts everything that you're doing under a lot of pressure that's I think what he said and he called those very specific people losers the context is Joe Rogan called Pete budajudge because Pete Budaj had two kids via surrogate and I guess it's taking six months or I don't know I don't even know how much time he's taking he's at three months but nobody knows if he's like working half time full time but Rogan had an issue with it and then Dan prac basically said what Rogan doesn't know is at his own company I.E Spotify there's a six-month policy which by the way Joe Rogan does

not work for Spotify they license his show so there is no way for Joe Rogan to know the internal policies he is not an employee I mean Jason if you want if you want to hang your hat on that little fig Leaf okay no I'm just saying it's I'm not defending Joe but I'm also saying like how would he know it's not like he went to HR and was like hey uh what's our fraternity he doesn't work there yeah fine well 6 months is is a long time especially I mean that is a long time to take off the word loser is a very strong word do you think men who take fraternity are losers no no it's there choice you think men who take six months of fraternity are no no I

wouldn't I wouldn't necess call him a loser I do think that is a long time for somebody who you know prioritizes work I mean if an entrepreneur took six months of fraternity would you would that influence whether or not you invest in his business well look if you are the principal of a business and you just disappear for six months that's not going to work I mean let's be realistic here unless unless it does in which case then you have other problems well or look if you're at like the stage that Google is at or whatever the founders can disappear and move to you know islands and private islands and it doesn't matter basically what they did

but but look we all know I mean that when you're a startup you face existential decisions daily weekly or monthly you can't just disappear for six months it's not going to work you might only have six months of Runway so if you did take six months of fraternity there would be no company when you came back in all likelihood let me speak for myself uh I couldn't ever take six months I'll I'll probably take three weeks to a month and honestly I agree with David I really didn't do much of anything Nat had to do frankly all of this by herself and so I'm there to just be moral support and help where I can

you know baby needs a diaper change I do that I'll hand feed in a bottle because she's tired of pumping and you know breastfeeding like but I am so peripherally at the edges trying to help and be relevant and try to give her a break here or there that's my role and at some point when the kid gets on a schedule um there's even less stuff necessarily for me to do other than again just be moral and emotional support then of course there's bonding and stuff but you know to be honest with you like I have found as a parent the the connection that I have with my children has gotten meaningfully better as they've gotten older and maybe that's

just the limitation that I have in my need to communicate and how I want to connect with my kids and how I feel I get feedback back that gives me energy to app parent it is much easier for me to find that equation with my 12-year-old than it is with my you know two-day old so that's just me you know I'm going to be out for three weeks to a month and well me the other thing we're leaving out here is the question of resources so Joe Lonsdale uh according to his podcast is a billionaire and his podcast title and so if you're a billionaire and you have unlimited resources at home and 24-hour night nurses which you know we all know what those cost uh

you're talking about a th000 or $2,000 a day uh to have 24-hour coverage but that's nothing to a billionaire so if you I don't make it about class but if you were two working parents and you didn't have the money to hire somebody this is actually practically the only thing you can do somebody has to be with a kid and can one spouse be at home 24 hours alone with the kid all the time as you guys know I'm from Canada in Canada we have a one-year maternity and paternity leave policy it can kind of go both ways the the basically the family gets it and you can allocate it as and how you need

it and who pays for their salary the government basically guarantees your job you go on effectively unemployment insurance after some period of time where you go from 100% of your salary to about I think it's 50% somebody will correct me if I get these details wrong um and then you go through the rest of the year now in both cases my my sister you know when she had both kids you know on the way in she was like I think I want to take the full year and by the six-month Mark she was losing her mind and you know she's a lawyer at a yeah really good research hospital and you know she does work that's really valuable to her and that she finds really stimulating and she just needed

more adult connection after six months it was very hard for her to kind of be there yeah I just think six months for the second parent is that seems like a long time I I don't think I could take six months off but uh I also think if you have resources there's pockets of time even when I did stay home for I don't know the first couple weeks after the kids were born you know they're asleep for three hours and then you clean the diapers feed them they play for an hour or two and then they go back on a nap you know it's like you're it's constantly the stop and start I mean that's the thing that's hardest about is the lack of sleep I think oh my god it

feels like I mean it's funny but like I I forgot what it's like but you know you you reminded quickly it feels like you're drunk yes two hours you wake up you get a 10-minute catnap you wake up and this is where again I go to and I'm such a bit player in this play right now you know at the edges we like not sleeping I can take care of T but I I don't know how women do it it's it's incredible and for those of you listening chth has got his newborn on his chest uh and uh swallowed quite nicely there this is why you should subscribe on YouTube and you can see you can see yes he's using his new daughter

to get YouTube subscriptions up this is they should blow us past 100,000 SI but how do you feel it's so special I feel so lucky um I feel so so lucky this is going to be the most popular Cameo on the Pod since free Burg's dog yeah I mean she this chick is so deliciously cute she's so she's so delicious and I forgot how beautiful the sounds that girls makes versus boys having three boys and two girls now I remember the boys they make kind of interesting noises but not really but my gosh like little baby girl noises oh and you guys SX has two girls you have three free Brig girls it's girls are incredible my go we're all basically girl dads like Kobe oh so what a blessing what a

blessing any news on your front well we had a baby the day after chath had a baby so we're oh right I did see the B congratulations thank you freeberg where's your swaddled infant you're letting you're letting chamath uh win sweep swe here what's going on yeah his vun is on the way I haven't I haven't are you in the Joe laale you you did one day off and then went right back to work she's in the the place where you drop the kids off to get raised and then you pick them up in a year okay you're like Oh you mean like Vulcans you're like Vulcans where you into a learning pod and come back a year later I mean they they sleep most of the day so she's asleep right now actually Alison just

sent me a picture she's sitting on the rocking chair where they're outside right now pretty amazing I give Lono a lot of Courage for saying what he thought I really don't think that uh what he said was altogether that like vilified better language but I think where he was coming from I think a lot of us probably wouldn't do it ourselves we may never judge anybody else I would never judge anybody who wants to take six months I know that I could not I would just I think either I'm too selfish or whatever but um I'm not sure there's just that much to do as the secondary and to David's point if I was asked to be the primary I think I could probably step in and do 10% of what Nat

would do but here here's Joe lonsdale's super blind spot he made this very gender specific with men and women in certain roles and he basically is saying you know a man who takes six months off is a loser so he is not just giving his opinion he's attacking people who do take the time off and then he says listen in the old days men had babies and worked harder to provide for the future that's the correct masculine response so I think what triggered people about his response and perhaps rightfully so is that this is just a view but Jason here can I say something this is degrading men who take time to take care of their kids but look we've

talked about this a lot there is an opportunity for folks like us to take a step back and slow down in how we interpret a tweet that's written at 8: a.m in the morning super quickly I'm not advocating he' be canceled and not and and not just him but everybody else but like there's an opportunity to teach empathy here where I'm not saying you have to agree with him but you can also choose to see what he's trying to say through the exact words that he used decide that you agree or disagree and then just move on yeah of course you know what I mean and and I think that the reason why folks may want to do that in this case but in most other cases is

eventually it will be you that makes a mistake sure and you want to be let off the hook by other people that are empathetic enough to say I really disagree with what you're saying but you don't deserve to be punished Beyond disagreement I love what jamath just said you know the mistake that we make might even be on this pod today I might have already made it I already I agree that we should all just be a little bit less judgmental and um there there there the there is an element there is a judgmental element in Joe's tweet that that's probably the part I don't agree with is look if someone wants to do that fine take the time doesn't make them a loser but it's

not a choice that I would realistically make yeah it's totally unrealistic it's not even startups like you know I'm I'm getting these I'm getting put to these multi hundred million dollar decisions a day I can't you know I could pause the business but that'll have so many Downstream implications unfortunately I picked a job or am in a position where I can't check out even if I wanted to to so I try to do my best that's the point you was trying to make that wasn't that well articulated I think I don't think any of us are a situation where we can straight up walk away from work for any meaningful time I mean on a daily basis desty it would destroy my business yeah we get texts we get emails we get phone

calls that we have to answer and so it's not it it you know almost definitionally isn't an option to just walk away but for those who it is and if that's their choice that's what it is the the great thing about Freedom isn't that you can say whatever you want it's that you don't have to listen to what anyone else is saying and you know for people that that disagree with Joe I feel like you always have the option to not listen and you always have the option to walk away unfollow and yeah and unfollow and the whole idea of cancel culture and you know punishing people for the things they say regardless of what they say and and the censorship and all the shutdown

of of voices and channels for people to have a voice I think it um it takes the freedom away that's inherent in the idea of you know your choice to not listen yeah and and it and it's almost always totally hypocritical so just as a postcript on the whole Chappelle debate it turns out that the leader of the the anti- Chappelle protest who''s been trying to get him cancelled at Netflix it turns out this this person has like a treasure Trove of the most angry hateful vile tweets that I or anybody has ever seen when you put it in the group chat I thought that that was a joke the the things that she wrote were so beyond the pale Beyond they're like they're like the worst play

them on the show no we can't I I don't even want anybody to speak these things I don't want to include it in the show notes they're literally the worst tweets I've seen Ser most racist like like I've never seen such explicit racism in the 21st century basically aside from these tweets and um and this is the person who's trying to cancel Chappelle was out there with the megaphone and who the Press was fawning over by the way and she said in her thing yeah those were from a long time ago I've already owned up to those so let's move on wait owned up how owned up how and it's kind of like you know let me play the

empathy card on me but then you know I so meaning I expect you to see through what I'm going through and that those expressions were in a moment in time so see past them and see my true character that's what she's asking that's what she's asking the world to do you know about her but then you're not willing to do it to any for anybody else and that's where I think that double standard just doesn't work anymore and I think this is what people are getting really fed up with and yeah and I would also say that her tweets weren't funny they weren't attempting to be funny oh God they are so gross have a customer service problem with this beeping beep they so I want to

bash I want to bash this you know beeping Asian or whatever over the head blah blah blah blah like a lot of racism towards Asia you know um Asian people no there was homophobic tweets there was Asia Asian hate tweets I mean it Latina Hispanic I mean it she wasn't even trying to be funny that's the thing it wasn't even it wasn't even a failed attempted humor so you here you have Chappelle who I think is dishing it out in an equal opportunity way making you know funny uh observations about really he's criticizing our culture not specific groups and he's being deliberately misinterpreted by the people who want to cancel him they're really to think that

Chappelle's standup routine is hateful really requires I think deliberate uh obtuseness you have to deliberately misinterpret what he's saying and so you have these people out there trying to do that and meanwhile they are guilty of the it's a total Act of projection because they are guilty of everything they accuse Chappelle of well not all of them this person in particular the leader the leader and of course the Press doesn't dig any of this up it all happens through the through kind of Internet sleo that would be a narrative violation David if if somebody is virtue signaling and they are leading a cancellation movement it's it's kind of

a narrative violation to say well they maybe they should be canceled by the same standard or you know quite easily I think the thing that I don't think she should get canceled let's just there go yeah yeah yeah I don't I don't think she should be cancelled but I and and this what if she said it when she was drunk what if she had a nervous break I can only imagine the the difficult path that this lady has gone through and on the off chance that she's listening I'm totally cool with your journey I understand you made some mistakes we've all I'm going to let you off the hook can you please try to let the next person off the hook I think that would be a nice place for everybody to aim to

go and then and just to Circle back with with Joe when he started explaining himself self in the thread when it became a conversation with a wider group of people the journalists went on the pure dunk cancellation route but then there was actually a productive discussion about between CEOs Etc and I thought what was very interesting about it was he he started talking to Gary tan who you know was like listen we have a four-month leave practice at our Venture firm and and Joe said do you really take 100% off cold turkey or did you work parttime and stay in touch like a responsible leader of your firm and of course Gary did just that right and then Joe says you know what I shouldn't have

written loser and appreciate the PUSH Pack in more intensive operational context losing key leaders cold turkey for six months seems unnecessary but I respect the different takes here and I think that really is an actual good discussion about this is hey well maybe if you're an intense leader and you don't have the ability to take a couple of months off well maybe you should take a couple of Fridays off and and then there was a really interesting discussion what's better for a leader to do spend a little more time every year or to spend three or four or six months in the beginning when you're as you just said chamath on the periphery here and trying to be helpful on the margins

maybe for the secondary person if it is in 5050 sacks it is actually better for you to pick up some Fridays or whatever and and take over the whole well I'm glad I'm glad you read that clarification by Joe because I think what he basically is saying is that yeah he the initial language he used he he would he basically clarified that and it sounds like what he's saying is listen if you're on a high performance team and you're the star player and you disappear for six months that's going to cause your team to lose so I think that's maybe what he was saying that's a Perfect Analogy saxs because if we were looking at Lebron James or Kevin Durant and they had a baby mid-season or

Draymond had a baby mid-season which I'm sure has happened to you know folks it's not like they say I'm not playing the next six months of games they miss one game maybe two they go back on the road and I think everybody understands like yeah you can't give up one of your 10 primary years or three years left that LeBron and KD have left I'll give you one final anecdote to end this chapter of our discussion today uh 2007 at Facebook at one point in like one of the UMP reorgs we were doing as we were trying to get out of the primordial ooze I was in charge of HR and everybody at that company was young except for a handful of people and then there was

finally a person and I think it was our this HR person that that at some through some weird convolution of events reported to me uh who got pregnant who was pregnant and we didn't have a policy because nobody had ever gotten pregnant before and you know I remember saying oh we have to come up with a policy and what I did was I was like well what would I want which is the easiest way for me to answer most questions and I came up with four months for either the father or the mother irrespective of the context and that's how we started the original policy four years later though when I

had my first kid um I took like three weeks and it came back because the grind was too hard yeah all right I think I think where we have to go is it's been a crazy week of uh the reconciliation Bill the infrastructure Bill and how to pay for this uh incredible spending it's been a meta week meta it's been it's been a meta week I mean and this Builds on on top of our discussions about inflation uh as well as the supply chain issues that builds on the conversation we had about covid and the new president so we're trying to get the wealth we're trying to get the reconciliation Bill done and part of that is hey how is this going to get paid for and in the course

of one week we've seen uh the tax proposals flip I think multiple times to ones that have never been tested and and may not even be legal in the United States of course I'm referring to a billionaire tax which was proposed uh which would be a penalty or a tax on assets that are liquid but that have not yet been sold and it would look back three years essentially going after Bezos or Elon lar Sergey basically going after the top 10 billionaires in the world and then maybe it was going to be the top 700 then it became a millionaire tax all of this to try to pay for these bills while so much money has been poured into the system that you know

nfts and stocks are going through the roof where do we want to begin gentlemen should we does anybody have thoughts on this brief billionaire tax that was floated and what that says about where we are as a country in terms of how we think about the success of our greatest entrepreneurs do we want to talk about what's fair or the process well I thought the the process was insane and what was crazy was that you know Ron weiden had been working on this proposal theoretically for the past two years and at no point did he bother to float the trial balloon with his colleagues in the Senate to even see

whether these people actually supported it Beyond some um folks on the Progressive left who are ideologically fixated on you know this confiscatory way of running the country the funniest thing about that bill to me and I let the powers at B know this is hey guys I've always been on the record I'm happy to pay whatever tax you want I feel super blessed to be in America whatever we want me to pay 30% 80% I don't care but I had a real issue with the way that bill was written because I'm like um the Democrats are writing a bill that will disproportionately tax Democratic uh successful billionaires and it'll leave intact the

coax who is literally the boogeyman to the progressive left who wants to write this bill and I thought how could you even write this bill this way it is so stupid you're saying because those people own private assets and this goes after guys like me would have been paying billions of dollars and the CES would not have paid zero because their entities are private and yours are public just so the audience understands yes how insane is that and yet we're the ones that is a a great second order observation these people clearly didn't think through that was my only issue with the thing it's like if you want to try to RAM and jam this thing through go

ahead and try I'm not going to be the one that that you know files a lawsuit the day after it's passed and takes it to the Supreme Court which will get heard and you know this conservative Supreme Court would not have allowed this this tax to stand you can't Target 700 people uh but by the way the reason you can't Target 700 because there's a slippery slope from 700 to 7 million to 70 million and what it does is it allows tax and spend politicians a blank ledger to go absolutely crazy and just fund every single hairbrained pork barrel scheme that they can come up with and that's really what we stopped was an important slippery slope and then in its place I

think is a tax that is fair a simple Sur tax on adjusted gross income if you're above X you pay five million and if you're above y you pay another three so eight% 5% three% on every kind of income and I think like that's a really reasonable way to get folks to pay more that seems like a good start but the first version of the bill was so stupid and the thing that really anchored me though was it targeted Democratic successful people and left alone Republican successful people written by the Democrats free bir what are your thoughts on the confiscatory nature of this I've never heard the word used that way confiscatory where we're going back

and saying listen you won so much we're just going to take 20 to 30% of it we all pay property taxes so we there is a experience we've all had with paying a percentage of some of assets that we own people of all income brackets every year to your local government to fund local services that everyone uh participates in so you know I don't think it's unfounded now if you look at history as a guide you know France introduced a wealth tax to people making over uh I think it was 1.3 million euro per year um and it was shut down and came back basically 1999 2000 and between the year 2000 in the year 2016 25% of millionaire households immigrated out of France uh during this period and

the amount of tax revenue that was lost during that period of time was greater than the new revenue generated from the wealth tax that was introduced and so France ultimately scrapped the wealth tax um and there have been a number of other you know reasonably good examples of European countries putting in place these wealth taxes and then kind of removing them uh later so um you know on the one hand I I I think that we've all seen this experience and Switzerland does this I think you get taxed on your total assets in Switzerland and you have to go negotiate every year uh with respect to how much you pay it's a very weird process so on the one hand there

is this kind of experience and and precedent for paying some percentage of assets sometimes it's a targeted asset and sometimes it's not but the longer range consequences we've seen is like you know immigration and people realize there's always a better choice the CH the question we have in the United States if we introduce a wealth tax like this where will successful Americans immigrate to um you can see how people could leave France and go to Belgium or go to the UK or go to Switzerland or go somewhere else where they might be better off uh where where are Americans going to move toada you're a successful Canada I mean are you going to move to Vancouver I mean you're from Canada but

saaks would you move you know where would you move to you know it's almost like there ends up being this kind of you know I think really interesting experiment that'll be run here now remember this wealth tax was introduced by Warren and others last year so this wasn't some New Concept that that was Fly by Night this has been one of those things that's been on the shelf for a while what happened is they pulled it down from the shelf and said let's try this now they've never they've never had committee hearings on it uh they've never had committee markups on it it's been tried and repealed in European countries and like you said they pull it down on the 11th Hour why because their

carefully laid plans which they've been concocting for three months were thrown overboard Cinema said she wouldn't support the rate increases now I don't know why they wouldn't go to her at the beginning of the process instead of waiting till the end of the process but so because of that they're scrambling around trying to find any source of Revenue so it's oh well a billionaire tax work no well what about a corporate AMT how about that no what about a millionaire search charge these guys are like burglars rubbing through the house they hear they hear the sirens they hear the sirens coming and they're like what

can we take oh the TVs are bolted down can't get that where's the jewelry what can we take and it's just you can't set you can't set tax policy this way and this whole idea that we can set tax policy based on our intuitions of fairness without having hearings to ask the question what will this do to the economy how much damage will it cause this is absurd I'll say it's it's really important to note um the market is telling Congress something here and the market is members of Congress informed by their uh their constituents the market is saying maybe we shouldn't be spending this much because there isn't a place to fund it and no one's raising their hand and saying this is something

we can all align on and so I think the the more important fundamental question is are we really equipped and do we really have a general economic interest economic interests meaning people measure things and vote with dollars to support these sorts of social programs and it seems to me the indication is no and this seems to me to be primarily a response of the pendulum swinging the other way post the Trump era where you know the Trump era was all about blowing up these ineffective overregulation bloated government infrastructure and and programs and people and and bureaucracies and now we've kind of found ourselves through our our voted Representatives swinging this other way

but it turns out maybe we've swung too far and the market is now voting and saying this just isn't a playing field we should be on and so you know where they end up here I think regardless it's going to end up needing to be some sort of reconciliation on spending to make this all work let's be honest Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were did not win the nomination the country specifically wanted a moderate uh Biden was sold as a moderate go back to the way it was moderate Dems like Clinton like Obama this is the classic Coca-Cola this isn't new Pepsi nonsense and we got Hoodwinked basically and I think what a lot of Democrats are seeing now especially the moderate ones is hey wait

a second Biden is Warren and Bernie and sheep's clothing perhaps uh and and we didn't want this this we didn't want Trump he was too hot and we don't want this to left crazy let's just take everybody's money randomly change the tax code I don't think American citizens want to live in a world where we change tax code at the 11th Hour that is scary to people all people people who have savings if you care about the economy but but these progressives I think these progressives so so used to be that taxation was a necessary evil you you you tax people because you got to pay for government and government programs everybody hates it but but you do it and

you try to figure out the way of achieving the revenue government needs in the least destructive way possible but I think progressives now they're so focused and monomaniacal about this issue of income inequality the fact that there's some people who've gotten richer than everybody else that I think they're willing to tax those people I mean they would like to siphon off money from those people I think they would siphon it off just to light it on fire just to level people and so they don't really care what the impact is going to be on the economy well I mean and their position was in fact ban the billionaires that was their roof but uh

you know before we get to that I just want to say these rules I think Americans want the rules to be simple and I don't think people want you changing the rules at the last minute and then making them retroactive I think all Americans want taxes to be predictable and simple not just change them willy-nilly because you change the budget this seems so unthoughtful crazy chamat your point I have two points to make the first is that I don't think anybody really knows what's in these bills and as a result of nobody really knowing what's in these bills they're used as negotiating chits so case in point when Biden came out and said you know we have a$

1.85 trillion dollar bill now and we're ready to get this done so that he could you know fly to Europe and you know fly to cop 26 and kind of you know declare Victory unfortunately the progressive wing of the democratic party in the house said no I'm not ready to dance yet and you know they have consistently refused to sign an infrastructure Bill until they got what they needed from this other Bill and so when Pelosi called the vote she had to pull it because they weren't going to get the votes necessary to get this bill passed so what this says to me is that even with spending it doesn't matter whether you're spending five because that's a I

think it's a trillion dollar bill bill right that's a$1 trillion bill this is a$ 1.875 trillion bill nobody cares about the quantity and nobody cares about the details they care about some perceived moral Victory this is the only reason why we're seeing this you know Mexican standoff that we're seeing today if these things were so substantively important we would have passed the first bill we would have negotiated a reasonable second version and pass that too instead we're here going through the end of the year with nothing done and I just want you know the Democratic Leadership who listens to this because we know a lot of people in Washington

listen to this podcast you guys got to get something done because if you go into the midterms with nothing done with a Democratic president Democratic Senate and Democratic house this is going to be a bloodbath well this is why something will will get done but uh you know I think the political realities are that at the end of the day the Democrats will come together and pass something but it's concerning that we're just talking about doing something because it will help you in the midterms you know in the immortal words of Nancy Pelosi you have to vote for the bill in order to find out what's in it I

mean at the end of the day we're not even going to know what's in this thing and um you know we're spending another it'll probably end up being a$ 1.75 trillion bill it'll be stacked on top of the spending that's already happened one point remember Biden already pass 1.9 trillion of covid relief another 1.2 trillion of infrastructure no that hasn't passed yet well it's going to along with this now 1.75 million sorry 1.75 trillion of this new social spending Bill assuming right so it's about five5 trillion 5 trillion wealth redist progressives have will have set the stage for this to be perceived as some sort of failure it's by the way David if you go back then if you take

that five trillion and add it to the all the covid before and all of the uh the FED buying we've probably had one entire turn of GDP so call it 20 to 22 trillion doar of money created in the last three or four years right now you go back J so so now so now you go back to Jason what you started the thing that I have struggled with the most in these last few weeks is trying to come to a conclusion on inflation My worry is that it's here and it will be persistent and inflation comes in two ways way number one is if you massively increase the supply of money why let's just say the economy at $100 and now all of a sudden you just print another 100 so now there's $200

what will happen is all of the goods and services that make up that 100 will get repriced to absorb the 200 so prices go up inflation goes up the second way that inflation can happen is if middle and lower inome people buy and spend because when rich people have extra money they just buy Financial assets that's why you get financial bubbles but practical goods and service are bought by average everyday normal working folks and their wages are going up and so I think what we've created is a really distortive inflationary cycle that's going to really hurt the United States because as saaks talked about we cannot print

enough money to pay for the debt when interest rates go up this is this is the this is the number one thing causing me concern as well is that you look around it's alltime highs for everything it's alltime best everything NASDAQ and S&P alltime highs crypto markets all-time highs Shibu enu worth 3040 billion do bubble uh I'm seeing SAS mules real estate I'm seeing SAS multiples at all-time highs and so you have to wonder is this a new normal is this sustainable or is it some sort of inflated bubble then you look at the inflation ratees 5.1% to Chamas point it might be persistent you look at treasury the treasury uh interest rates the yield is 1.6% on the

10-year T Bill okay so effectively your real interest rate for Savers is 1.6% minus the 5.1% inflation rate you're at - 3.5% if you just save your money in t- bills in sort of uh risk-free you take the risk-free return Nega 3.5% so now you have everybody going out there trying to chase yield because how do you earn a return on your money you don't want it to be bu you buy stocks or nfts or houses so people start going into riskier and riskier assets to basically try and make up for the loss of inflation and so you have to wonder they're trying to hit the one outter yeah so then okay so so you have to ask yourself okay so back to this point about all-time highs is this because

everything is really this great or how much this is driven by these sort of distortions 50/50 I mean I'm just putting a number on it like obviously the industry and E and economy is doing fantastic but seems 50/50 here's the other thing that I wanted to make in just the last portion which is I think what we've realized as well at the end of this is I I actually again now to use this empathy card I'm going to give the progressives my empathy card and say I understand what you're trying to do and I believe in a lot of what you're trying to do is to even the starting line for everybody right now a lot of what you end up proposing distorts that goal by trying

to you know even out the outcomes and even the finish line but I really do think they want to even the starting line but here's a thing that we all have to realize now all the things that the progressives want to tax and fund are actually being done by private corporations and I think we just have to acknowledge that and make a decision about whether as a society that's okay or not I'll give you two examples number one is the federal minimum wage we have tried for years and we have debated raising this minimum wage it's still sits today at $725 just this week McDonald's moved their minimum wage up Starbucks moved their minimum wage up we're talking

about you know entrylevel quick service jobs that now pay1 17 to $25 per hour right some two and a half to three plus times the proposed federal minimum wage the fre Mar and so and so what government didn't and wasn't able to do the free markets have done second example we tried to get free Community College inside of one of these bills it was dropped now depending on where you go the the nation's largest employer Amazon actually will just pay you to go to college right so they are replacing that intention and a version of the GI bill but as a private organization so I think what we also have to realize is that maybe some of these policy decisions is

actually a little bit of you know getting tilted by the fact that private organizations are acting more nimbly to actually implement this Progressive agenda because it actually exists in America if you're willing to take the time to look let me ask a question about inflation if who is inflation going to um hurt the most and who's going to gain the most from it because it does seem like consumables gas station you know Supermarket trips Etc are going through the roof in that case you know that's going to have no impact on the top third of people because gallon of milk at 36 $9 doesn't matter but then you look at inflation on stocks it's going to make it go up so a rich person isn't impacted

by their gas or their groceries but somebody in the middle class or uh who's poor that's going to dramatically impact them so if we spend more does that actually create a larger wealth Gap Sachs look inflation is devastating for the middle class um if you have savings it if you can afford to put all your savings and financial assets the way that the super wealthy can then your financial assets will go up but if you have a good sort of middle class income and you don't have your and your savings are in something more conservative you're going to get absolutely uh eroded by inflation over time it's going to kill you and you know housing prices will go up the the um the the middle

class young couple that wants to buy a house for the first time that's going to be much harder to achieve because housing prices will inflate away so I think you know there is there are some effects that are a wash so for example prices go up and then uh wages go up at the same time but savings can really get hammered if you're not in financial assets it hurts the middle class first but it also hurts it hurts everybody because again unless you're perfectly hedged going into a rising rate environment you will own assets that are just specul freedberg a scientific question here are we starting to go into a self-fulfilling prophecy around around

inflation Allah what happened in the 70s which is we've been talking about it so much that anybody who is thinking about raising prices says well everybody else is Raising prices so even if my grilled cheese sandwich hasn't been impacted by all of this and I didn't have to give raises to my employees they're happy at their current salaries I'm just going to put $2 on my grilled cheese and we just get this cycle of everybody saying how much can I add to the cost of something I trying to remember there's an earnings uh interview I saw yesterday uh God which was the company anyway they're um their company in the industrial supply

chain and he said that they're raising rates to get ahead of the supply cost going up for them um so that their margins won't get squeezed and I think that's uh it's almost like that what you're referencing is a little bit of a run on the bank mentality where um those with pricing power raise ra raise prices and as a result you end up kind of seeing the the the trickling effects because competition can't catch up so if everyone's kind of raising rates and there's not enough competitive Advantage the one thing that's making this even harder right now is the gluts in the supply chain which are reducing the competitive um uh market dynamics that

we might normally see where One customer raises one company raises rates and another company says wait our rates are going to stay the same but because so many people are challenged by getting product there's enough demand for their product everyone can raise rates together we're seeing this in the energy markets now so um yeah I mean this is kind of part of the scary uh scenario that that everyone's trying to manage against um I don't know what the science is and I'm not an economist but it certainly seems to me like the psychology of managers and business owners and and Boards is such that they're saying let's get ahead of the curve let's raise rates and as a result

you're seeing the trickling effect of inflation throughout the whole economy so um little scary Sox what do you think psychologically is going on with raising prices yeah so so expectations are definitely part of the inflation game people raise prices if they expect inflation in the near future and then that feeds on itself and that's how if you look at countries that have had hyperinflation that's how you get a spiral now I don't think we're going to have hyperinflation here but we're at 5.1% now and if people think it's going to be worse next year and the fed's not going to raise rates it could even be higher next year and I think people are going to start getting upset about this

you know when they buy their Thanksgiving turkey and their Christmas ham and those prices are way higher than they think and they're already paying gas prices that are a lot higher than they're used to um I think you could see a lot of unhappiness out there one other thing I'm thinking about is is the logical thing for a person to do in this hyperinflationary you know Market is to say you know what the these I went to look at a car that I wanted to get to drive in the snow and I was like you know what I'm just going to hold off buying this because I'm not paying 15K over sticker so and I can pay 15 stickers I was like ah do I want to do that H the other car is okay I'll just

put snow tires on it so are a lot of people chimen as part of this psychological you know spiraling out of control situation then some group of people might say you know what I'm going to opt out of consumerism and I'm just going to lower my burn rate and stop consuming which is also bad for the how you going to stop consuming food food prices are instead of getting you know Fame andan you might get chicken okay well there's gon to be a lot of unhappy people who are eating chicken for Christmas instead of fet I me serious I'm coming to your house so I'm getting fet so I'm good I'm going to go your house for lunch and I'm going chamat for

the surf and turf after guys rich people don't create inflation the middle class and lower middle class create inflation there's just not enough rich people to matter they're irrelevant so when you look at the last two or three spikes and waves of risk that we've seen globally they've come from large multi hundred million person cohorts of people right those could be in Asia those could be specifically in China those could be in the United States plus all around the world of certain loose monetary conditions that's what we have now we have a multi hundred million probably approaching more than a billion person strong liquid buying pool of people that

are again as I said if the if the lowest on the packing order is now making 17 bucks an hour we all know this guys it's not as if the inflation stops at 50,000 bucks a year everybody's wag is Rise so consistent and persistent wage inflation will allow allow you to spend more because that's just what people do we also have high savings rates so people will feel more flush with money the point is that everybody will spend they will spend more you know you can't get cars you can't get this you can't get that all this pent up demand will get fed and the downstream implication is I think that prices will rise but it will disproportionately hurt the middle class

and the lower middle class and then these asset bubbles will probably deflate or they'll have to get rated and If the Fed stops tapering and you know hikes rates two or three times over the next 12 or to 18 months man this is an ugly ugly uh stock market one of the things people have been asking me to ask all of us on the Pod is what are our strategies right now given the turmoil we're in so maybe we can go around the horn and what we're thinking about in terms of our strategies to deal with inflation while maybe not getting ahead of our skis and being the bag holders anybody have I'm Not Gon I'm not going to answer

this question and you you know why because I can't got it okay because of the public Mark I don't I don't want to even answer this question yet okay well let can I I'll let me further describe the the the problem um so this happened in the late 1970s we had stagflation we had sort of um every year we had um increasing inflation because of the expectation game and the thing that broke it was you had Paul vulker come in at the fed and he jacked up interest rates and uh he actually caused a pretty severe recession in like 80 I think it was like 82 uh 81 82 I think by 83 we were coming out of it and then the economy absolutely boomed interest rates came way down because he broke the back

uh back of inflation and actually interest rates came down for you know as a result of vulker and the FED controlling inflation they came down for 40 40 years basically and that those that decrease in interest rates fueled everything it made debt a lot cheaper it uh in it made the stock market boom because the Net Present Value the discount rate went down so the net present value of all those future earnings went up um so you had it it set the stage for the Boom in the Reagan Era and Beyond and and the Clinton ero as well now what's the difference between then and now um well for one thing the government debt as a percentage of GDP when Reagan took office was around 31%

okay so when vulker jacked up interest rates it didn't really create that much more of a Debt Service cost for the United States for the federal government now today the uh the government debt uh is 125% of GDP so if and this goes back to the to the Dr and Miller point from previous pod if the the FED were to jack up interest rates to say the historical Norm of 4.9% Debt Service would go from from 2% of the federal budget to 30% you would have a massive crowding out of government programs so how we fund all that Debt Service very unclear so we're caught between a rock and a hard place the rock is we have inflation that could be persistent the hard place is The Debt

Service so you know the tools for controlling this aren't exactly clear so this I think is fundamentally the the problem is it's it's not clear whether we're going to have you know interest rates going up or consistent High inflation uh those are the threats to the the sort of economic boom we're seeing now the full side of it is that the reason why the stock market is one of the reasons is at an all-time high is because earnings right now are fantastic so the economy is doing very companies are doing very well but we just had for Q3 the GDP growth was at 2% annualized which was sort of an anemic number it's the lowest it's been since this Co recovery started so it's um you know

it's it's interesting we're at all-time Highs but there's also these like major storm clouds on the horizon and I'm not going to like pretend like I know what's going to happen I just you know when when things are this good I start getting nervous when it's this easy to make money across everything the stock market the crypto Market the SAS investing we're doing can I can I say that's the that's the part that really scares me so for example when everybody gets tilted because there's some Sheba wallet where 8,000 turns into 5.7 billion right so for those that don't know there was a you know Sheba enu coin which is a shitcoin which was basically there to

ape uh the other shitcoin Dogecoin the Dogecoin right a mcoin um all of a sudden some guy uh 13 months ago put 8K into it because the whole market cap was 80k and then all of a sudden over the course of these 400 Days that wallet holds $5.7 billion doar of value or 10% the entire market cap of sheiba um people get tilted by that then then there was an article today in Bloomberg where there's a gentleman a 66y old man in Singapore who's a billionaire right so he was successful in his own right however he had made in his entire career about one or two billion and he has made seven billion in the last two years speculating on Tesla call options wow I'm not kidding so buying

short dated calls right riding the riding the way making money allocating the gains buying the underlying Tesla security over and over and over again and so you know I was talking to Nat about this and I was telling her these these examples and she's like that's what sounds like a bubble because it really is very difficult to be in business and to make these decisions and to be reasonable also if you're a capital allocator or you're building companies like how do you know if you're doing a good job if everybody just is I'm gonna be right back guys I have to I have to deliver the goods yeah yeah okay got a quick baby change I think what's hard about this is okay so so one of the

areas where it's sort of like best times ever are is the SAS Market which is where I invest in and I'm obviously investing in very very early stage companies but we're seeing valuations now go to multiples of ARR that we've never seen before 50 75 I would say 100 time I'd say 100 times AR is sort of the rule of thumb right now um and you're seeing what scale a $5 million company is worth 500 million uh anywhere from 1 million to 10 million I mean absolutely is worth between hundred and a billion dollars which makes no sense well no it does if well let me give you the argument for why it could make sense okay let's say the company is expected

to go 3.3x this year and 3X next year that's basically a 10x over the next two two years so that 100x in two years will only be a 10 times AR multiple and by the way if you look at the comps for the companies that have gone public the SAS companies have gone public like look at toast being worth what 30 40 billion so they're trading at 30 40 50 60 times ARR in the public markets on big big numbers so how hard is it to go 3X 3X that is I mean going 3x is hard going 3X 3X back to back that's like winning two you know NBA championships being in the finals it's hard I don't think it's that hard I mean not for you but you're the king of

SAS no I'm being dead serious for the for a sax founder with a million to go from 1 to three and then 3 to n how many out of a 100 actually go from 1 to nine yeah I'll tell you yammer's trajectory and this is back this is over a decade old we went from 1 million in our first full year selling the product to uh well back in those days we looked at total contract value of 7 million of tcv that was about 5 million of ARR and then it it tripled the year after that so you know and then we tripled the year after that well a category defining SAS company so you're taking Microsoft but but but I'm just saying that it's entirely possible there's a lot more

Yammer today or companies with that growth trajectory so I mean but look this is what's led to you know our fund to which we started investing in 2019 which has a SAS Focus already has five unicorns in it from companies that we invested in the Cedar series crazy so but look I mean when you're seeing like results that good where my head goes is okay this is too good you know what am I missing here or like what's the downside and how long will this sustain just to build your just to build on your point there are these businesses that have I I I would say interesting products that are growing well but they may not actually be very important

companies yet they trade at enormous valuations and then you have these companies that are just so superb and I'm talking about Microsoft Google Apple and Facebook that now trade in many cases at some pretty deep discounts um to their intrinsic value but this is the sign of this histrionic behavior that I think um embellishes the end of a bubble right it's this thing where you look at a growth rate and you don't even ask the structural questions about business quality viability sustainability competitive modes you're like oh well it's going from 300% you know it's only decaying to 200%

I buy well it's like but yeah but what are you buying and is there any longevity and staying power this is why you know I've I think there are some great businesses in SAS but I also think there's a lot of head fakes and in the public markets particularly people just want to buy that growth as David said because they're chasing yield they're not you know do they really understand am I buying this company because I really believe in this database technology versus that streaming technology versus this container technology they don't know any of those things well I to to so so this is the conundrum is I actually do believe like so I believe in my own portfolio and I'm

doubling down on all these companies and I do believe in SAS and I think the reason why these SAS companies get such great multiples is because they're pure software businesses very high gross margins 80% plus gross margins you know once the flywheel gets going they're very hard to displace I mean they have uh it's not just a recurring Revenue subscription type business but you get expansion out of your current customer base so you know on January 1 of a new year you're starting with 120% 150% of last year's Revenue just from your existing customers and then you're stacking the new Revenue courts on top of that so I am a believer in SAS but when I see everything going so well it's

SAS and NASDAQ and S&P and crypto and and then I see you know 125% debt to GDP and the the sort of radical uh spending that's coming out of Washington I just start getting nervous and I don't know if I have like a prescription for people out there I would just be a little bit cautious right now and temper Your Enthusiasm but but look the fli side of it is we could keep having a boom for five more years you know and so theet while inflation going sit out you can't sit out out but but but but you know but on on um I was listening to Vinnie lingham's um show on uh beep on Callin it's called it's called crypto music no he and sunny MRA do a great show that you just got 25 bips we just

you guys should all listen to a show it's called crypto musings they they were talking about all the the dog coins the other night it was Sheba enu and Dogecoin and there's a couple others Vinnie made a great point he said listen if you're out there listening and you're sitting on lifechanging money in Sheba youu sell take it off the table if you can key words being if you can so look I you know this boom could last for another five years it could last for another 10 years and the Valu valuations keep going up the earnings could keep going you don't want to miss out on that bull run but if you've got lifechanging money in a in a highly risky position that's not I'm amending my advice of let

your winners ride to take some take some chips off the table prudently doesn't mean you sell everything but just take some chips off the table to diversify specifically diversify yes yeah I mean I think it's absolutely I mean I got to say when when you saw these quarterly earnings there is no better business in the world than Google singlehandedly par excellance the most incredible moneymaking machine that's ever been created and a close second as it turns out is Microsoft unbelievable I mean just to which is now the most valuable company in the world greater than Apple well and and freedberg has been saying this on the podcast forever but just to give people an idea qy

Revenue at Google was up 41% year-over-year to $65 billion dollar in a quarter by the way that is high margin high margin the incremental revenue on the core Google product uh generated an increment operated at an incremental 50% ebit margin and they just adjusted their their capex depreciation amortization schedule because they realized that their computers that they use in their data centers last four years instead of three and the networking equipment lasts 5 years instead of three so they're like and and I've been saying this since the

beginning because I worked at Google and ERS is still there and he runs all the data centers and the networking infrastructure when I worked at Google there was this Amazing Project where we built a 10,000 I we didn't build it they built it a 10,000 ports switch called fire hose which helped increase the throughput of the data centers and have these massively parallelized indexing and um uh and uh and production servers um and there was so much investment made from the beginning in building the infrastructure stack the flywheel continues to move spin faster and faster and faster and here they are building their own servers building their own racks their own data centers

literally the most they have their own fiber across the oceans um literally the most vertically integrated business in history with a moat that no one will ever be able to catch up on and I read all these nonsense comments on the internet about people being like why doesn't someone else go after search it's so crazy to me people fail to recognize that what we see is the tip of the iceberg at Google and this flywheel is built by layers and layers of Monopoly istic in a good way monopolistic technical advantages that they've built into this business over the period of the past two decades and it is extraordinary beyond anything

we've ever seen in human history how well this commercial enterpris has run and the reinvestment of capital has been extraordinary they' if you look at YouTube in the quarter uh YouTube generated this is insanity YouTube is now operating in a nearly $30 billion Revenue run rate and that's just like pure margin incremental revenue for Google layered on um you know built off of the same ad ad network uh that they were originally running on Google obviously they have a different ad team now at YouTube but YouTube now has more Revenue than Netflix and is growing at likely 40 to 60% year-over-year Revenue growth rate whereas Netflix is you know considered one of the Fang stocks you

know one of the top stocks and Netflix is only growing at 22% remove Netflix and just put Google twice it should be and then you look at Google YouTube in there on its own Google cloud is now operating at a 20 billion run rate and you know they can just throw these services on top of um all these flywheels that they've built and they become massive Enterprises unto themselves I mean it is a behemoth that is effectively not attacks in a bad way but attacks on the internet because they are core infrastructure to service almost everything that we all consume and use they give it to everybody free and they build the internet for every they been they have been extremely smart

about competitive pricing as we saw recently they dropped the in the store to 15% if I'm making an app and I'm giving Apple 30% now I give Google 15% I'm more inclined to promote my Android app and that's going to affect users and you know they're putting out this pixel 6 phone that looks like an incredible piece of equipment that's cheaper than the iPhone they're an incredible company they are so incredibly well-run at the top Sundar is an incredible CEO um and they are they're running a money printing pest uh at Amphitheater Parkway in Mountain View I was going to say Jason to your point I was talking to somebody and one really interesting

thing that this organization did was um a couple of years ago they basically went long Google and Microsoft and they shorted Apple Amazon and Facebook against it and I asked them why and they said it's the best inflation hedge we could come up with with at massive scale that could work in a way where you know we're long growth but we're hedged where you know the types of Supply constraints that could come in and you know kick us in the ass would never affect Microsoft and Google the same way that it would affect apple and Amazon which by the way in their earnings results they said right Amazon has huge issues on the supply chain side Apple has huge issues on the supply chain side

Amazon was up 15% they missed their numbers although Amazon web services is a 40% year-over-year also on a big number $16 billion in AWS revenue for Q3 so that as a standalone company is now on a what do what did you guys think about meta 60 billion oh my God I mean that was did you watch the video I watched the whole thing I watched two minutes of it and then I stopped watching pts I mean it's basically you you have Facebook in the face of all of the things all the times they got their hand caught in the cookie jar saying this is going to be the new world but instead of us doing everything wrong and screwing the users and their

privacy and democracy and creating Strife in the world this time we're going to make it open source this time we're going to build a coalition and partnership and this time it's going to be awesome and it's it's like a dystopian SNL skit where Zuckerberg is describing the future and he literally describes how proud he is that you're going to be able to play Grand Theft Auto and Nick C is like yeah this is going to be amazing this time we're going to bring all the regulators and the scientists in to tell us how to build it and we'll have consensus of how to build the future and you're like did you just say that everybody in 3D is going to be in a virtual space beating

each other up with bats and guns and killing police officers in Grand Theft Auto luckily they didn't show a clip of it uh but it was basically Zuckerberg taking credit for every single uh virtual reality or augmented real thing you've seen over the last 20 years he literally took everything from education to hollow lens to you know poker games and he took basically credit that this is going to be the future and that instead of this time it being a closed ecosystem it would be an open one that supports nfts and don't worry this time I think any developer who puts any amount of their effort into supporting in any way Zuckerberg's view of the metaverse is crazy when they could do it

on a distributed decentralized Crypt based open-source platform you do not want to give Zuckerberg any more power and if there is even a 10 or 20% chance that this is the next big computer platform Zuckerberg needs to be stopped from doing it by the market jcal I you're I think you're crazy I think you've lost your mind I haven't yeah I I think lost your mind oh my God I have a counterargument too okay David you start well I I don't even know if if I could categorize what I'm about to say as a counterargument I don't even know how counter that all I would say Insanity all I would say is look I think it's really great that Facebook is spending

all this R&D money on metav verse virtual reality Oculus is a really cool product I think Jason you've made the observation that people use it once say it's the coolest thing ever and never use it again there is that element to it they have to solve that um using Oculus for the first time was one of the most unique experien I've ever had with Computing but I admit I don't use it anymore it's just not better or worse than PornHub the first [Laughter] time but any event look I think I think the that's his way of saying words I think that the fact that Facebook wants to do all this R&D and virtual reality great um changing the name of the company however at this

point in time it felt to me like a little bit like Philip Morris changing his name to Altria Group and by the way I don't buy the idea that Facebook is like cigarettes I don't believe that at all I don't think it's it's bad for people in the way that it's been hyped up to be you're saying this is a PR marketing straty but it feels like they're running from their name and uh and and basically it's almost like saying you know this whole business of social networking has been so sullied that we need to appear to be a diversified portfolio of companies of Which social networking is just one small piece a deprecating piece yeah exactly and I don't I don't really buy

into that and I I I think if that was any part of their motivation it's a mistake because I think the only thing Facebook should do about all these accusations is get up on their hind legs and fight because I think like all this these leaks from the so-called whistleblower I think this is a completely orchestrated political hit and they should just fight back and push back on it I think the dangers of social networking have been vastly exaggerated so it seems to me like they're buying into that nonsense by running from their name I so I at least would not have done this right now I would have won that battle and then if it was still

important to change their name then I would have changed the name uh well they're losing young people at an extraordinary rate on Facebook us teenagers were projected to decrease by 45% over the next two years young adults between the ages of 20 Ina were expected to decline by 4% or Tik Tok I think is probably more accurate yeah Tik Tok is Big yeah yeah during that same time frame via leaked memo obtained by by way I mean how in the world is Facebook or Instagram more dangerous than Tik Tok I I don't get it no Tik Tok is dren which but by the way are Stan making our Henry bcer of uh Tik Tok is reporting that we have like millions of views over there so there's some Rogue did I say that how

much I love Tik Tok I love Tik Tok he's building our audience we're connecting with J finally Tik Tok Tik Tok you're right you're right the Tik Tok account there's an all-in Tik Tok account done by a fan and we got like 2 million views in the last week it is absolutely boners we just passed Rachel mat and a bunch of uh folks more popular than all of MSNBC yeah well I mean come on way to set the Benchmark fredberg do you guys do you guys remember a year ago Larry Ellison negotiated this deal with Trump to buy Tik Tok for he's going to throw in laai fredberg is uh and Masa son was supposed to be on Tik tok's board yeah that's by

the way uh xiin ping is on laai right now and Larry Ellison got tick to fair trade nobody talks about the Billy that uh Ellison kicked into Tesla right before to that he AOS he made like1 billion 15 billion he's such a bus he he put a billion dollar investment joined the board told everyone talk all talk all the the the smack you want about this guy but he's Landing spaceships on a drone ship in the middle of the ocean what are you do he'll figure it out he'll figure it out and 15 eggs that's insane but wait I have one question for freeberg is Zuckerberg pulling a Larry Page I somebody else becomes CEO of the Facebook collection of companies and then he becomes the chief product

officer and then doesn't have to go to Senate hearings no I think he's way more active and driven in terms of product Direction than Larry ever was so I don't think they're the same person and I wouldn't liking these two what about the meta strategy of changing the company name um by the way my prediction was that they were I should have done this on the Pod a month ago I said they were going to change their name The Meta I I think that uh at some point as you diversify these businesses um away from your core and you have this core engine driving the business um you know you have to make it look like these businesses can and will operate independently while they might get some

leverage off of one another and one might feed into the other um they need to be able to operate independently from a kind of public perception operating and management perspective that's what alphabet did it's a natural progression of States as you start to do things that are too far distinguished from one another um and so it feels reasonable I think you know is this a whole like PR rebranding maybe to some extent that's helpful but I do think that this idea that we need to do more than we're doing today and we need to make a big hard cold bed on it um is what this represents now the the the the the the important psychological question is he doing it out of a matter of Defense

meaning like does this signal fear about the Core Business um or is it about ambition and aggression and and rebets on New Opportunities and emerging opportunities that he thinks and that's the big debate that I think is kind of going on right now is how much often when you see people make big moves like this it's either out of greed or out of fear and I think um some people are asking the question how much should we be afraid of the core business being eroded based on his making this sort of a big bet oh you think this could perpetuate that or it's a bit of a tell that this is happening a tell got right and and I'm not saying that's the case I'm saying that's the question right and

that's the question a lot of people are asking is this a tell that the core business is at serious risk well he's putting 10 billion into it this year for example this apple you know ad Revenue business I think is climbing by billions of dollars while Facebook's Core Business is being affected by the the uh TR cookie tracking policy change on Apple iOS uh so at the same time that you know Apple's reaping these benefits from the changes that they've made uh in iOS you know people don't really have great visibility into how much it's really affecting Facebook's ad Revenue at this point and this could be as you point out the tell um that maybe things aren't that good and he needs to

diversify he needs to make a big aggressive bet elsewhere so um you know we'll see I mean important question chamath are we going to celebrate the birth of both your and friberg's daughters with a poker game with my gambling do you want me do you want me to give you my thoughts on meta or no you don't care no it's a joke can you take a paternity to go toen I got a board meeting I gotta go bite all right uh for the queen of quinoa wait wait wait don't you want to know what I think I think on The Meta thing I think the the risk is if Google and apple take the hardware costs to zero because I think there's an

incentive in a highly fragmented ecosystem you have to remember when Apple introduced the iPhone there was nothing that came before it so it was completely groundbreaking and I think what Facebook has to figure out is how to make their VR experience so revolutionary that it attracts developers and in the meantime if Apple and Google figure out how to kind of give it away for free and just kind of make it a lowcost Hardware game where everything else Jason as you say is this kind of Open Source thing where it's like a browser yeah right where everything just exists in a dii kind of world like the web and the internet then

then it's a little bit more problematic for all the money spent that's what they have to figure out you think it's GNA be VR or ar what wins the day with consumers well that's a good question I mean they're very different experiences um both can win but talking 20 years from now which one will be used more or 10 years from now 10 to 20 years from now which one will make more money be more relevant be more utilized well I mean AR the dream there is that you wear these glasses that have like the Terminator view where it's like scanning the world and giving information you'll

never forget anyone's name again stuff like that um that would be kind of useful maybe um VR I think is more about immersion uh it's really like a gaming experience I think at least now I think it's all about AR basically what he was saying there he was talking about VR I think VR let you make the worlds and then AR let you experience them concurrently with the real world and it's the same Tools in libraries and kits as a developer making it for VR AR is going to be pretty I think seamless and so I think Apple has skipped VR on purpose and they're going to AR I think Google is basically going to go directly to AR and then where does that leave then

Microsoft already has hollow lens that they've been investing in heavily and they think they got the biggest lead uh that at least we publicly know about so I think it's going to be a race for who can get AR to work and VR is just like kind of a waypoint on the way there there's a lot of stuff going on and I'm I'm sure that people will want to check out of the real world for some amount of their life but they'll probably also want to be in the real world for some part of their life and at some point maybe if those two things merge that won't matter as much and I think if the experience is compelling enough it could happen well I mean if you think about us playing poker on the

poker one of those poker apps if we could put our glasses on sit in our room and see each other at a poker table you know like if bogot wanted to play from Australia and he was you know projected into the seat on the game and we all saw them there with glasses AR glasses that would be amazing wouldn't it be able to you know have two of the people at the game be projected in as it were could be especially if it was Diego I mean that would be pretty great I mean for I'm saying for the good of the game I I did a tweet where I said listen VR people leave it on the shelf and you know Palmer lucky and a bunch of people got in my face about it and then we had like a actually really good discussion

um and I said well what about serious Gamers because I'm talking about serious Gamers they all buy it and then they never use it and they said yeah it's not for serious Gamers I said okay well what about iPad Gamers and casual gamers and bejweled and Candy Crush they're like oh yeah they're not interested in it and I'm like well who are The Gamers then is it the intense ones or the Casual ones they said no there's a new category the number one game like wck room beat saber and golf are like crushing it uh with a million users a month in some cases you know what they all have in common their

physical activities where you get some amount of exercise and it would be very difficult to coordinate in the real world I know but Jason when you look at things like like axi Infinity where you know there are play to earn movements that are happening in in sort of this you know layer three kind of defi world where you're getting paid to basically you know play games that could be a job and then you will spend 8 to 10 hours in a metaverse of some sort so these things are very possible I find it so dystopian uh yeah that's true but I'm sure that our parents find some parts of our lifestyle dystopian and you know we find

certain parts of our kids lives dystopian it's just what happens yeah I don't know all right everybody we will play poker we will play poker yeah we got to play poker at some point I mean we will play poker either either Tuesday or Thursday okay yeah well that's good perfect babies will be like almost a week which which days are you going to flake Tuesday and Thursday which day will you play Tuesday and Thursday Tuesday and Thursday sey I mean do I have to come pick you up I can play on Tuesday all right everybody four the queen of quinoa the Rainman and the dictator I'm Jason kenis we'll see you all next time on all in love you besties let your winners

ride Rainman David and instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it love you [Music] Queen besties are that's my dog taking your driveway oh man my habiter will meet me at we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release Som your your we need to get merch [Music] our I'm going [Music]