SPEAKER_03: Oh, baby. No skin on skin. It's kind of keep the shirt on. Listen
SPEAKER_02: to me. Only the best for my daughter. This is 100% Laura Piana Vicuna. She's gonna be caught in a minute. There is not
SPEAKER_03: a using Laura Piana to wipe her when she was no this is the
SPEAKER_02: 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. Oh, oh, in fact, when you buy one from Laura Piana, they'll fly one right to you.
SPEAKER_02: 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?
SPEAKER_01: J Cal, what's the reference? Okay, our friend Joe Lonsdale,
SPEAKER_03: venture capitalist living in Austin, had a tweet that went viral, but maybe not for the best reasons. He said, in response to a Dan primrack tweet, Dan works at Axios, who was talking about Joe Rogan criticizing the amount of time Buddha JAG was taking on paternity leave. And Joe Lonsdale 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. Well, it was an opinion from 1957. That's either his or the wayback machine. But Joe's old school. Joe is a unique individual. And he just happened to, I think, in this whole, like, not get canceled debate, or don't let yourself get canceled debate. The right is now saying, like, I'm just gonna tell you how I actually feel. And so Joe told us actually how he felt.
SPEAKER_02: 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 up Pete Buddha judge, because Pete Buddha judge 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 three months, but nobody knows if he's like working half time, Rogan time, but Rogan had an issue with it. And then Dan pre Mac basically said, what Rogan doesn't know is at his own company, ie Spotify, there's a six month policy, which by the way, Joe Rogan does not work for Spotify based
SPEAKER_03: licenses show. So there is no way for Joe Rogan to know the internal policies is not an employee.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, Jason, if you want if you want to hang your hat on that little fig leaf, okay.
SPEAKER_03: 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, what's our paternity? He doesn't work there. Yeah, fine. Well, six months is a long time,
SPEAKER_00: 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
SPEAKER_03: paternity are losers? No, no. I mean, it's their
SPEAKER_00: choice. Man who takes six months of paternity.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, no, I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily call him a loser. I
SPEAKER_00: do think that is a long time for somebody who, you know, prioritizes work. I mean, if an entrepreneur took six months of paternity, would you
SPEAKER_01: would that influence whether or not you invest in his business?
SPEAKER_00: Well, look, if you are the principal of a business, and you just disappear for six months, that's not gonna work. I mean, let's be realistic. Unless unless it does, in which case, then you have other
SPEAKER_02: problems.
SPEAKER_00: 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 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 gonna work, you might only have six months of runway. So if you did take
SPEAKER_03: six months of paternity, there would be no company when you came back in all likelihood.
SPEAKER_02: Let me speak for myself, 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 that 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, 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 connection that I have with my children has gotten meaningfully better as they've gotten older. And maybe that's just a limitation that I have and 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 be a 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
SPEAKER_03: one thing we're leaving out here is the question of resources. So Joe Lonsdale, according to his podcast is a billionaire, 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 costs, you're talking about 1000 or $2,000 a day to have 24 hour coverage, but that's nothing to a billionaire. So if you don't make it about class, but if you were to 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 the kid and can one spouse be at home, you know, I'm 24 hours alone with the kid all the time. As you guys know, I'm from Canada and Canada, we have a one
SPEAKER_02: year maternity and paternity leave policy can kind of go both ways that the basically the family gets it and you can allocate it as in how you need it. And in pays for the salary, the government gear 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. And then you go through the rest of the year. Now, in both cases by 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 she you
SPEAKER_02: know, she's a lawyer at a 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. I just think six months for the second parent is that seems like
SPEAKER_00: a long time. I don't think I could take six months off. But I also think if
SPEAKER_03: you have resources, there's pockets of time even when I did stay home for I don't know, the first couple of 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, 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 forgot
SPEAKER_02: what it's like, but you know, you're reminded quickly. It feels like you're drunk. Yes. Two hours you wake up, you get a 10 minute cat nap, 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 were like not sleeping, I can take care of Tali, but I don't know how women do it. It's it's incredible. And for those of you listening, Chamath is going to be a great
SPEAKER_03: player. Chamath has got his newborn on his chest and swallowed quite nicely there.
SPEAKER_02: This is why you should subscribe on YouTube. You can see, you can see that he's using his new daughter to get the YouTube
SPEAKER_03: subscriptions up. This is good. They should blow his past 100,000 times. But how do you feel?
SPEAKER_02: So special. I feel so lucky. I feel so so lucky.
SPEAKER_00: This is gonna be the most popular cameo on the pod since Freeburg's dog.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, she this chick is so delicious. 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. And you guys know sax has two girls, you have three freeburg all girls. It's girls are incredible. We're all basically girl dads like oh, so what a blessing. What a blessing. I feel really like
SPEAKER_03: any news on your front. Well, we had a baby the day after tomorrow at a baby. There were all right. I just did the best. Congratulations. Thank you. Freeburg. Where's your
SPEAKER_00: swaddled infant? You're letting you're letting Shemagh when sweeps weeks here. What's going on? Yeah, his vicunias on the
SPEAKER_02: way. Are you in the Joe Lonsdale you did work. She's in the place
SPEAKER_01: 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
SPEAKER_03: Vulcans? You're like Vulcans? We have welcome into a learning pod and come back a year later. I mean, they sleep most of the
SPEAKER_01: day. So she's asleep right now. Actually, Allison just sent me a picture. She's sitting on the rocking chair where they're outside right now. Pretty amazing. I give Lonsdale a lot
SPEAKER_02: of courage for saying what he thought. I really don't think that what he said was altogether that like vilifiable if that's the word you want to use. I think that there's a lot of reasonable points of view, he could have maybe use 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 me either I'm too selfish or whatever. But 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 or but here's Joe Lonsdale super blind spot. He made this very gender
SPEAKER_03: 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 video but Jason here, can I say
SPEAKER_02: something? This is like degrading men who take time to take care of their kids. But look, we've talked about this a lot. There's an opportunity for folks like us to take a step
SPEAKER_02: back and slow down and how we interpret a tweet that's written at 8am in the morning super quickly. I'm not advocating he be canceled and not 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. 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 disagreeing with it. I love what your mouth just said, you know, the mistake
SPEAKER_00: that we make might even be on the spot today. I might have already made it. I agree that we should all just be a little bit less judgmental. And 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 actually make them a loser. But it's not a choice that I would realistically make. Yeah, it's totally unrealistic.
SPEAKER_02: Not even startups like, you know, 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 locations. Unfortunately, I picked a job or am in a position where I can't check out even if I wanted to. So I try to do my best.
SPEAKER_01: That's the point he was trying to make that wasn't that well articulated. I don't think I don't think any of us are in a situation where we can straight up walk away from work for any meaningful time. I mean, on a daily day, destroy, destroy my business.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we get texts, we get emails, we get phone calls that
SPEAKER_01: we have to answer. And so it's not 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 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, really well said that disagree with Joe, I feel like you always have the option to not listen, and you always have the option to walk away on file and yeah, and unfollow. And the whole idea of cancel culture and, you know,
SPEAKER_01: punishing people for the things they say, regardless of what they say, and the censorship and all the shutdown of voices and channels for people to have a voice. I think it, it takes the freedom away. That's inherent in the idea of, you know, your choice to not listen.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it's almost always totally hypocritical. So this is a postscript on the whole Chappelle debate, it turns out that the leader of this, the anti Chappelle protests, we've been trying to get them canceled 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 seen. When you put it in the group chat, I thought that that was a
SPEAKER_02: joke. The things that she wrote, were so beyond the pale, beyond beyond. They're like, they're like the worst way them on the show. No, we can't. I don't even want anybody to speak these things. I don't want to include it in the show
SPEAKER_03: notes. They're literally the worst tweet. They're the worst
SPEAKER_00: tweet seen seriously, like completely racist. Like, I've never seen such explicit racism in the 21st century, basically, aside from these tweets. And, 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,
SPEAKER_02: in her thing, yeah, those are from a long time ago, I've already owned up to those. So let's move on.
SPEAKER_03: Wait, how I owned up how owned up how?
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah. And I would also say that her tweets weren't funny. They weren't attempting to be funny. They are so gross.
SPEAKER_02: Customer service problem with this beeping beep.
SPEAKER_03: There's no I want to bash I want to bash this, you know, beeping
SPEAKER_00: Asian or whatever over the head, blah, blah, blah, blah, like a lot of racism towards Asian, you know, Asian people know there was homophobic tweets, there was a Asia Asian hate tweets. I mean,
SPEAKER_02: it Latina Hispanic, I mean, she was even trying to be funny.
SPEAKER_00: That's the thing was even it wasn't even a failed attempt to humor. So you hear you have Chappelle, who I think is dishing it out in an equal opportunity way making, you know, funny 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 there, really to think that Chappelle's stand up routine is hateful really requires, I think, deliberate 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 that. It's a total act of projection because they are guilty of everything they accused Chappelle of.
SPEAKER_03: Well, not all of them, this person in particular, the leader, the leader, and of course, the press doesn't dig
SPEAKER_00: any of this up. It all happens through the through kind of internet sleuths, that would be a narrative violation, David, if
SPEAKER_03: 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 let's
SPEAKER_02: there you go. Yeah, I don't think she should be canceled.
SPEAKER_00: But I and this when she was drunk, what is
SPEAKER_03: she had a nervous. I can only imagine that the difficult path
SPEAKER_02: that this lady has gone through. And on the off chance that she's listening. I'm totally cool with her journey. I understand you made some mistakes. We've all I'm gonna let you off the hook. Can you please try to let the next person off the hook?
SPEAKER_03: 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 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 between CEOs, etc. And I thought what was very interesting about it was he started talking to Gary Tan, who, you know, was like, listen, we have a four monthly practice at our venture firm. And Joe said, Do you really take 100% off cold turkey? Or did you work part time 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 pushback 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 then there was a really interesting discussion. It'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, Jamal on the periphery here and trying to be helpful on the margins. Maybe for the secondary person, if it isn't 5050 sacks, it is actually better for you to pick up some Fridays or whatever, and take over the whole, I'm glad I'm glad you read that clarification by Joe, because I
SPEAKER_00: 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, Sax because if we were
SPEAKER_03: 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 missed 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 question
SPEAKER_02: for the first week chapter of our discussion today. 2007 at Facebook, at one point in like one of the umpteen 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, 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. Yeah. And I came up with four months for either the father of 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, I took like three weeks and it came back because the grind was too hard.
SPEAKER_03: All right. I think where we have to go is it's been a crazy week of the reconciliation bill, the infrastructure bill and how to pay for this incredible spending. It's been a meta week. That's it's been it's been a meta week. I mean, and this builds on top of our discussions about inflation, 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 the tax proposals flip, I think multiple times to ones that have never been tested in it and may not even be legal in the United States. Of course, I'm referring to a billionaire tax, which was proposed, 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, Larry Sergei, basically going after the top 10 billionaires in the world, and then maybe it was gonna 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, we want to talk about what's fair, or the process? Well, I thought the process was insane. And what was crazy was that, you know, Ron
SPEAKER_02: Wyden 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 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 that be 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, the Democrats are writing a bill that will disproportionately tax democratic, 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 guys, guys like me
SPEAKER_03: would have been paying billions of dollars. And the coax would
SPEAKER_02: not have paid zero because their entities are private, and
SPEAKER_03: public. Yes. So the audience understand? Yes. How insane is that? And yet we're the ones that is a great second order
SPEAKER_02: observation. So people clearly didn't think through that was my
SPEAKER_03: only issue with the thing. It's like, if you want to try to ram
SPEAKER_02: 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. 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
SPEAKER_02: politicians a blank ledger to go absolutely crazy, and just fund every single harebrained 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 surtax on adjusted gross income. If you're above x, you pay 5 million. And if you're above y, you pay another three. So 8% 5% 5% 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 thing I thought was so stupid. And the thing that really angered me though, was it targeted democratic successful people, and left alone republican successful people, written by the democrats freebird, what are your thoughts on the
SPEAKER_03: confiscatory nature of this and never heard the word used that way confiscatory, where we're going back and saying, listen, you want so much, we're just going to take 20 or 30% of it, we all pay property taxes. So we there is a experience we've all
SPEAKER_01: 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 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, I think it was 1.3 million euro per year. And it was shut down. And so and it was shut down and came back basically 1999 2000. And between the year 2000 and the year 2016 25% of millionaire households emigrated out of France 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. 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 later. So, you know, on the one hand, I think that we've all seen this experience and Switzerland does this, I think you get taxed on your total assets in Switzerland, you have to go negotiate every year, 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 precedent for paying some percentage of assets. Sometimes it's a targeted asset, and sometimes it's not. But the longer range consequences that we've seen is like, you know, emigration and people realize there's always a better choice. The chat the question we have in the United States, if we introduce a wealth tax like this, where will successful Americans emigrate to? 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. Where's where Americans going to move to Canada, very successful Canada? I mean, are you going to move to Vancouver? I mean, you're from Canada, but Zach, 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
SPEAKER_01: that will be run here. Now, remember, this wealth tax was introduced by Warren and others last year. So this wasn't some new concept 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. They've never had committee hearings on it. They've never
SPEAKER_00: 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 there are carefully laid plans, which they've been concocting for three months were thrown overboard when Sinema 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 surcharge? These guys are like burglars rummaging through the house. They hear the sirens. They hear the sirens coming. And they're like, what can we take? Oh, the TVs are bolted down. Where's the jewelry? What can we
SPEAKER_00: 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 really important to note. The market is telling
SPEAKER_01: Congress something here. And the market is members of Congress informed by their, 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 more important fundamental question is, are we really equipped? And do we really have a general economic interest, economic interest, 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, over regulated, bloated government infrastructure and programs and people and, and bureaucracies. And now we've kind of found ourselves through our voted representatives swinging this other way. But it turns out, maybe we swung too far in 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 gonna end up needing to be some sort of reconciliation on spending to make this all work.
SPEAKER_03: Let's be honest, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were did not win the nomination. The country specifically wanted a moderate. Biden was sold as a moderate go back to the way it was moderate Dems, like Clinton and 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 worn and Bernie and sheep's clothing, perhaps. 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 it is these progressives, I
SPEAKER_00: think these progressives so so it 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 are so focused and monomaniacal about this issue of income inequality, the fact that some people have 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 to slide 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 it was in fact, ban the billionaires.
SPEAKER_03: That was their roof. But you know, before we get to that, I just want to say these rules, I think Americans want the rules
SPEAKER_03: 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 and crazy. Chima, your point, I have
SPEAKER_02: 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 chips. So case in point, when Biden came out and said, you know, we have a $1.85 trillion bill now, and we're ready to get this done so that he could, you know, fly to Europe, and, you know, fly to COP26 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, 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 the 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 to 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, Democratic House, this is going to be a bloodbath.
SPEAKER_00: Well, this is why something will will get done. But, 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 gonna know what's in this thing. And, you know, we're spending another, they'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 passed 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 five, five trillion dollars, five trillion wealth redistributions. Progressives will 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
SPEAKER_02: trillion and add it to the all the COVID before and all of the the Fed buying, we've probably had one entire turn of GDP. So call it 20 to $22 trillion of money created in the last three or four years. Right? Now you go back. 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 hundred and others $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 income 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 services are bought by average everyday normal working folks, and their wages are going up. And so I think what we've created is a real lead, distorted inflationary cycle that's going to really hurt the United States because as Sax talked about, we cannot print enough money to pay for the debt when interest rates go up.
SPEAKER_00: This is this is the number one thing causing me concern as well is that you look around it's all time highs for everything. It's all time best everything NASDAQ and S&P all time highs crypto markets, all time highs, Shibu, you know, worth 30 $40 billion bubble. I'm seeing real estate, real estate, I'm seeing SAS multiples at all time highs. 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 rates 5.1%. To Chamass point, it might be persistent. You look at Treasury, the Treasury 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 negative 3.5%. If you just save your money in T bills in sort of risk free, you take the risk free return negative 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 by 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 try to hit the one
SPEAKER_02: outer. Yeah, so then okay, so so you have to ask yourself, okay,
SPEAKER_00: so back to this point about all time highs, is this because everything is really this great? Or how much of this is driven by these sort of distortions? 5050? I mean, I'm just putting a
SPEAKER_03: number on it. Like, obviously, the industry and economy is doing fantastic. But since 5050, here's the other thing that I
SPEAKER_02: 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 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 the 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 still sits today at $7.25. Just this week, McDonald's moved their minimum wage up, Starbucks move their minimum wage up, we're talking about, you know, entry level quick service jobs that now pay 17 to $25 per hour. Right, so two and a half to three plus times the proposed federal minimum wage, the free market. So 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 nation's largest employer, Amazon, actually will just pay you to go to college. Right, so they are replacing
SPEAKER_02: 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
SPEAKER_03: question about inflation, if who is inflation going to 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 369 dollars 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 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
SPEAKER_00: class. If you have savings, it if you can afford to put all of 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 you sort of middle class income, and you don't have your in your savings or in something more conservative, you're going to get absolutely eroded by inflation over time, it's going to kill you. And, you know, housing prices will go up the 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 awash. So for example, prices go up, and then wages go up at the same time. But savings can really get hammered if you're not in financial assets.
SPEAKER_02: 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 a speculative and good question. A scientific question here. Are
SPEAKER_03: we starting to go into a self fulfilling prophecy around inflation? Hala what happened in the 70s, which is, we've been talking about it so much than anybody who is thinking about raising prices as 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 gonna 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 am trying to remember there's an earnings
SPEAKER_01: interview I saw yesterday. God, which was the company? Anyway, they're their company in the industrial supply chain. And he said that they're raising rates to get ahead of the supply costs going up for them, so that their margins won't get squeezed. And I think that's, it's almost like that, what you're referencing is a little bit of a run on the bank mentality, where those with pricing power, raise prices, and as a result, you end up kind of seeing 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 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 yeah, I mean, this is kind of part of the scary scenario that everyone's trying to manage against. So 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 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, both Gary Sachs, what do you think psychologically is going
SPEAKER_03: on with raising prices? Yeah, so expectations are definitely part of the inflation game,
SPEAKER_00: 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 have had hyperinflation, that's how you get a spiral. Now, I don't think we're gonna 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. I think you could see a lot of unhappiness out there.
SPEAKER_03: One of the thing I'm thinking about is, is the logical thing for a person to do in this hyper inflationary, you know, market is to say, you know what, this car, I went to look at a car, and I wanted to get to drive in the snow. And I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna hold off buying this because I'm not paying 15 k over sticker. So and I can pay for dinner service. I was like, I do I want to do that. The other car is okay. I'll just put snow tires on it. So are a lot of people chamath and as part of this psychological, you know, spiraling out of control situation, then some group of people might say, you know what, I'm gonna opt out of consumerism. And I'm just gonna lower my burn rate and stop consuming, which is also bad for the stop consuming food. No,
SPEAKER_00: this is inflation. Instead of getting, you know,
SPEAKER_03: flaming on you might get chicken. Okay, well, there's
SPEAKER_00: gonna be a lot of unhappy people who are eating chicken for Christmas instead of play. I'm serious. I'm coming to your
SPEAKER_03: house. I'm good. I'm gonna go your house for lunch. And I'm going to matz for the surf and turf after guys.
SPEAKER_02: 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 because 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 pecking 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 wages rise. So consistent and persistent wage inflation will 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 rerated. And if the Fed stops tapering, and you know, hikes rates two or three times over the next 12 or 18 months, man, this is an ugly, ugly stock market. One of the things people
SPEAKER_03: 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 gonna answer I'm not gonna answer this question. And
SPEAKER_02: you know why? Because I can't. Got it. Okay. Because of the public market? I don't I don't want to even answer this question yet. Okay, well, can I I'll further describe the problem. So this
SPEAKER_00: happened in the late 1970s, we had stagflation, we had sort of every year we had increasing inflation because the expectation game. And the thing that broke it was you had Paul Volcker come in at the Fed, and he jacked up interest rates. And he actually caused a pretty severe recession in like 80, I think it was like 82 81 82. I think by 83 we're coming out of it and then the economy absolutely boomed interest rates came way down because he broke the back of inflation. And actually interest rates came down for you know, as a result of Volcker and the Fed controlling inflation, they came down for 4040 years, basically. And that those that decrease in interest rates fueled everything it made debt a lot cheaper. It 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. So you had it set the stage for the boom in the Reagan era and beyond and the Clinton era as well. Now, what's the difference between that and now? Well, for one thing, the government debt as a percentage of GDP, when Reagan took office was around 31%. Okay. So when Volcker jacked up interest rates, it didn't really create that much more of a debt service costs for the United States for the federal government. Now today, the the government debt is 125% of GDP. So if and this goes back to the to the Druckenmiller point from previous pot, if the the Fed were to jack up interest rates to say the historical normal 4.9%, debt service would go 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 places the debt service. So you know, the tools for controlling this aren't exactly clear. So this I think is fundamentally that the problem is it's not clear whether we're going to have, you know, interest rates going up or persistent high inflation. Those are the threats to 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 that 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 COVID recovery started. So it's, you know, 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 SaaS investing we're doing. We know we're on a heater. Can I say that's the that's the part that really scares me. So for example, when everybody gets
SPEAKER_02: tilted, because there's some Shiba wallet, where 8000 turns into 5.7 billion, right. So for those that don't know, there was a you know, Shiba Inu coin, which is a shit coin, which was basically there to ape the other shit coin dogecoin, the dogecoin, right, a meme coin, all of a sudden, some guy 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
SPEAKER_02: wallet holds $5.7 billion of value, or 10%, the entire market cap of Shiba. People get tilted by that. Then there was an article today in Bloomberg, where there's a gentleman, a 66 year 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 2 billion. And he has made a billion. And he has made 7 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 wave, 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 reason. Also, if you're a capital allocator, or you're building
SPEAKER_03: companies, like, how do you know if you're doing a good job? If everybody just is going to be right back, guys, I have to I have to do the goods. Yeah, okay. Got a quick baby change. I think what's hard about this is, okay, so one of the areas
SPEAKER_00: where it's sort of like best times ever, or is the SaaS 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. 5075 I would say 100 times I'd say 100 times ARR is
SPEAKER_00: sort of the rule of thumb right now. And you're seeing what scale a $5 million company is worth 500 million. Anywhere from
SPEAKER_00: 1 million to 10 million? I mean, absolutely worth between 100 and
SPEAKER_03: a billion dollars, which makes no sense. Well, no, it does. If
SPEAKER_00: well, he may give you the argument for why it could make sense. Okay, let's say the company is expected to go 3.3 x this year, and three x next year, that's basically a 10 x over the next two years. So that 100 x in two years will only be a 10 times error multiple. And by the way, if you look at the comps, for the companies that have gone public, the SaaS companies have gone public, like look at toast being worth what 3040 billion. So they're trading at 3040 5060 times ARR in the public markets on big, big numbers. So hard is it to go three x three x that is me going three x is
SPEAKER_03: hard going three x three x back to back. That's like winning two and you know, NBA championships.
SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's that hard. I mean, it's not for you. But
SPEAKER_03: you're the king of SaaS. I know I'm being dead serious for the for a SaaS founder with a million to go from one to three and then three to nine. How many out of 100 actually go from one to nine? Yeah, I'll tell you
SPEAKER_00: 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, 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 tripled the year after that. So, you know, and then we tripled the year after that, well, a category defining SaaS companies.
SPEAKER_03: Microsoft, but I'm just saying that it's entirely possible.
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot more yammers today, or companies that growth trajectory. So I mean, but look, this is what's led to, you know, our fun to which we started investing in 2019, which has a SaaS focus already has five unicorns in it from companies that we invested in the cedar series. 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? Like, what's the downside? And how long will this sustain? Just
SPEAKER_02: to build your just to build on your point, there are these businesses that have, 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 to their intrinsic value. But this is the sign of this histrionic behavior that I think 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 growing from 300% market, 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
SPEAKER_02: know any of those things.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I did. So this is the conundrum is I actually do believe like, so I believe 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, 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 then I see, you know, 125% debt to GDP, and the the sort of radical 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 flip side of it is, we could keep having a boom for five more years, you know, and so the market So what are you doing? You can't send it out. But but but you know, but on on, I was listening to Vinnie lingams show on beep on call in. It's called it's called crypto music. No, he and Sonny Madra do a great show that we all just got 25 bips. You guys should all listen to a
SPEAKER_03:
SPEAKER_00: show. It's called crypto musings. They were talking about all the the dog coins. The other night, it was Shiba Inu and doge coin. 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 life changing money, and Shiba Inu, sell, take it off the table, if you can keywords 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 value eight 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 life changing money in a in a highly risky position, that's not diversified. 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. Yes. Yeah, I mean,
SPEAKER_03: I think it's absolutely I mean, I gotta say when when you saw
SPEAKER_02: these quarterly earnings, there is no better business in the world than Google, single handedly par excellence, the most incredible money making 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. And freeberg's been
SPEAKER_03: saying this on the podcast forever. But just to give people an idea, QT revenue at Google was up 41% year over year to $65 billion in a quarter. And by the way, that is high margin
SPEAKER_01: by margin, the incremental revenue on the core Google products generated an increment operated incremental 50% EBITDA
SPEAKER_01: margin. And they just adjusted their cap x 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 last five years instead of three. So they're like, and I've been saying this since the beginning, because I worked at Google, and Urs 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. We didn't build a they built it a 10,000 port switch called firehose, which helped increase the throughput of the data centers and have these massively parallelized indexing and and production servers. 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, 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 monopolistic 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 enterprises run. And the reinvestment of capital has been extraordinary base. If you look at YouTube, in the quarter, YouTube generated this insanity, YouTube is now operating at a nearly $30 billion revenue run rate. And that's just like pure margin incremental revenue for Google, layered on, you know, built off of the same ad ad network 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% of your Netflix and just put
SPEAKER_03: Google twice, it should be. And then you look at Google Cloud, YouTube in their own. And Google Cloud is now operating at a
SPEAKER_01: $20 billion run rate. And you know, they can just throw these services on top of all these flywheels that they've built. And they become massive enterprises unto themselves. I mean, it is a behemoth that is effectively not a tax in a bad way, but a tax on the internet, because they are core infrastructure service, almost everything that we all consume and use, to everybody, and they build the internet for everybody. They have been extremely smart about competitive pricing. As we saw recently, they dropped the commission in the Play 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 up this pixel six phone that looks like an incredible piece of equipment that's cheaper than they're an incredible company.
SPEAKER_02: It they are so incredibly well run at the top Sundar is an incredible CEO. And they are they running a money printing pests 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 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 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
SPEAKER_03: 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 what do you what did you guys think about meta? Oh, my God. I mean, that was Did you watch the
SPEAKER_03: video? I watched the whole thing. I watched two minutes of
SPEAKER_02: it. And then I stopped watching. I mean, it's basically you have
SPEAKER_03: 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 of 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 Clegg 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, do 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. But it was basically Zuckerberg taking credit for every single virtual reality or augmented reality thing you've seen over the last 20 years, he literally took everything from education to HoloLens 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 meta verse is crazy, when they could do it on a distributed, decentralized crypto 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 compute platform, Zuckerberg needs to be stopped from doing it by the market. Jake, how are you? I think you're crazy. I think you've lost your mind. I haven't. Yeah, I think you've lost your mind. Oh my god, I have a counter argument to Okay, David, you
SPEAKER_02: start. Well, I don't even know if I could categorize what I'm
SPEAKER_00: about to say as a counter argument. I don't even know how to counter that all I would say. All I would say is look, I think it's really great that Facebook is spending all this r&d money on metaverse virtual reality. Oculus is a really cool product. I think, Jason, you 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. Using Oculus for the first time was one of the most unique experiences I've ever had with computing, but I admit, I don't use it anymore. It's just not something better or worse than Pornhub the first time.
SPEAKER_00: But any event, look, I think I think the worst. That's his way of saying worse.
SPEAKER_00: I think that the fact that Facebook wants to do all this r&d and virtual reality great, changing the name of the company. However, at this point in time, it felt to me, like a little bit like Philip Morris changed 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, but it feels like they're running from their name. And, and basically, it's almost like saying, you know, this whole business of social networking has been so sullied, that we 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 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. 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. Well, they're losing young people at an extraordinary rate
SPEAKER_03: on Facebook, US teenagers were projected to decrease by 45% over the next two years, young adults between the ages of 20 years old and stuff were expected to decline by 4% or tick tock, I think is probably more tick tock is big. Yeah, during that same timeframe viral leaked memo obtained by the way, I mean, how in the world is Facebook or Instagram more
SPEAKER_00: dangerous than tick tock? I don't get it. No, Dick talk is drenched. Which but by the way, our Stan making our own
SPEAKER_03: fanmaking our Henry bellcaster of all tick tock is reporting that we have like millions of views over there. So there's some rogue much I love tick tock.
SPEAKER_01: Tick tock. You're right, you're right. The tick tock account that there's
SPEAKER_00: an all in tick tock account done by a fan. And we got like 2 million views in the last week. It is absolutely bonkers. We
SPEAKER_02: just passed Rachel Maddow and a bunch of folks.
SPEAKER_00: More popular than all of MSNBC. Yeah. Well, I mean, come on way
SPEAKER_03: to set the benchmark. Friedberg. Do you guys remember a year ago Larry Ellison negotiated this
SPEAKER_01: deal with Trump to buy tick tock?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he's gonna throw in linei. Friedberg is
SPEAKER_01: Martha son was supposed to be on tik tok sport. Yeah, that's by the way.
SPEAKER_03: Xi Jinping is on linei right now and Larry Ellison got ticked to our trade. Nobody talks about the Billy that Ellison kicked
SPEAKER_02: into Tesla right before.
SPEAKER_01: He's such a boss. He made like $12 billion. He's such a boss. He put a billion dollar investment joined the board told everyone. Talk all talk all the the smack you want about this guy, but he's landing spaceships on a drone ship in the middle of the ocean. What do you figure it out? And he'll figure it out and 15 x since then. But wait, I have one question for
SPEAKER_03: freeburg is Zuckerberg pulling a Larry Page ie, somebody else becomes CEO of the Facebook collection of companies and then he becomes the chief product officer and doesn't have to go to Senate hearings? No, I think he's way more active and driven
SPEAKER_01: in terms of product direction and Larry ever was. So I don't think they're the same person and I wouldn't like in these two. What about the meta strategy of changing the name?
SPEAKER_01: 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 to better. I think that at some point, as you diversify these businesses, away from your core, and you have this core engine driving the business, 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, they need to be able to operate independently from a kind of public perception and operating a 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. 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 bet on it, is what this represents. Now, the important psychological question, is he doing it out of a matter of defense, meaning like, does this signal fear about the core business? Or is it about ambition and aggression and rebates 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 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
SPEAKER_03: a towel that this is happening? A tell a guy right. And I'm not saying that's the case. I'm
SPEAKER_01: saying that's the question, right? Right. And that's the question one people are asking. Is this a tell that the core business is at serious risk? Why do you he's putting 10 billion into it this year, for
SPEAKER_03: example, this Apple, you know, ad revenue business, I think is
SPEAKER_01: climbing by billions of dollars while Facebook's core business is being affected by the cookie tracking policy change on Apple iOS. So at the same time that, you know, Apple is reaping these benefits from the changes that they've made 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 that maybe things aren't that good, and he needs to diversify, and he needs to make a big aggressive bet elsewhere. So, you know, we'll see. I mean, important question. Shemagh, are we going to celebrate the birth
SPEAKER_03: of both your and freebirds daughters with a poker game? Yeah, gambling. Do you want me to give you my thoughts on that
SPEAKER_02: or no, you don't know what's the joke? Can you take paternity to
SPEAKER_03: go to listening? I got a board meeting. I gotta go. Bye. All right. For the queen of Kenwa. Wait, wait, don't you want to
SPEAKER_03: know what I think? I think on the meta thing. I think the the
SPEAKER_02: 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 low cost 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 defy 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. Do you think it's gonna be VR or AR? What wins the day with consumers? Well, that's
SPEAKER_00: a good question. I mean, they're very different experiences. Both can win. But we're not talking 20 years from now, which one
SPEAKER_03: will be used more or 10 years from now 10 to 20 years from now, which one will make more money, be more relevant to be more utilized? I mean, AR the dream there is that you were
SPEAKER_00: 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. That would be kind of useful. Maybe VR, I think is more about immersion. It's really like a gaming experience. I think at least now. I think it's all about AR. And basically what he was saying there. He was
SPEAKER_03: 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 and 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 and then Microsoft already has HoloLens that they've been in a lot of ways. They've got HoloLens that they've been investing in heavily and they think they got the biggest lead that at least we publicly know about. So I think it's gonna be a race for who can get AR to work and VR is just like kind of a waypoint on
SPEAKER_02: the way there. There's a lot of stuff going on. And 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 people get to work, that distinction won't matter as much. And I think if the experience is compelling enough,
SPEAKER_03: it could be. Well, I mean, if you think about us playing poker on the poker at 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 Bogue 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? Sure, be able to, you know, have two of the people at the game be as connected in as it were, could be, especially if it was
SPEAKER_03: Diego, I mean, that would be pretty great. I mean, for that day, for the good of the game. I did a tweet where I said, Listen, VR, people leave it on the shelf. And I, you know, Pama lucky, and a bunch of people got in my face about it. And then we had like, actually really good discussion. 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 bejeweled and crush? 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, it's a new category. The number one game like rec room, beat saber and golf, are like crushing it 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
SPEAKER_02: at things like like axie infinity, where you know, there are play to earn movements that are happening in in sort of this, you know, layer three kind of defy world where you're getting paid to basically, you know, play games, that could be a job, and then you will spend eight to 10 hours in the metaverse of some sort. So these things are very possible. I find it so dystopian. 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 it is. Yeah. I don't know. All right, everybody, we will play
SPEAKER_03: poker. We will play poker. Yeah, we gotta play poker at some
SPEAKER_02: point. I mean, we'll play poker either either Tuesday or Thursday. Okay, yeah, well, that's good. Perfect. babies
SPEAKER_03: will be like, almost which which days are you gonna flake Tuesday
SPEAKER_02: and Tuesday? Will you play Tuesday and Thursday and
SPEAKER_03: Thursday sexy? Let's pick you up. I can play on Tuesday. All
SPEAKER_03: right, everybody for the queen of Kenwah, the rain man and the dictator. I'm Jason Calacanis. We'll see you all next time on all in love your besties. Let your winners ride. Rain Man David
SPEAKER_02: is your driveway. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge door because it's like this like sexual tension because they just need to release your feet. We need to get
