Wealth tax, dealing with inflation as a capital allocator, big tech earnings, Facebook's rebrand, paternity leave & more
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Segment 1
Oh, baby. No skin on skin. You guys gotta keep the shirt on.
Listen to me. Only the best for my daughter. This is 100% Laura Pianna Vicunha. She's gonna
feel cocky every minute. There is not a
--
You're using Laura Pianna to wipe her when she mama's
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,
isn't it? Aw.
In fact, when you buy one from Laura Pianna, they'll fly one right to you.
The Leonard Winter pride.
Rainman, David Saxon.
And I said We open source it to the fans and make discoveries. Love 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?
Jay Cal, what's the reference?
It's okay. Our friend, Joe Lonesdale, venture capitalists living in Austin, had a tweet that went viral, but maybe not for the best reasons. He said in response to a Dan Primmrak, tweet Dan works at Axios who was talking about Joe Rogan criticizing the amount of time Buttigieg was taking on eternity leave, and Joe Lonza responded. Wow. Great for fathers to spend time with their kids and support moms, but any man in an important position who 6 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 it is or he I mean, 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 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.
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 6 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 out Pete Buttigieg because Pete Buttigieg had 2 kids via surrogate. and I guess he's taking 6 months. Or I don't know. I don't even know how much time he's
taking out.
3
months, but nobody knows if he's, like, working half -- But
Rogan -- -- full time.
--
but Rogan had an issue with it. And then Dan premack basically said, what Rogan doesn't know is at his own company i e Spotify, there's a 6 month policy.
which, by the way, Joe Rogan does not work for Spotify based licensing 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 wanna 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. What's our paternity? He doesn't work there.
Yeah. Fine.
Well, 6 months is a long time, especially mean, that is a long time to take off.
The word loser is a very strong word. Do you think men who take paternity are losers?
No. No. I mean, it's their choice.
--
man who takes 6 months of paternity
or -- No. I no.
I I
wouldn't I wouldn't initially 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
6
months of paternity, would you would that influence whether or not you invest in a business?
Well, look. If you are the principal of a business and you just disappear for 6 months, that's not gonna 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, founders can disappear and move to, you know, islands and private islands, and it doesn't matter.
It's certainly what they did.
But but, look, we all know. I mean, that when you're a start up, you face essential decisions daily, weekly, or monthly. You can't just disappear for 6 months. It's not gonna work.
You might only have 6 months of runway. So if you did take 6 months of paternity, there would be no company when you came in all likelihood?
Let me speak for myself. I couldn't ever take 6 months.
I'll I'll probably take 3 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 it gotten older.
And maybe that's just the limitation that I have and my need to communicate and how I wanna 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 twelve year old than it is with my, you know, 2 day old. So that's just me. You know, I'm gonna be out for 3 weeks to a month then.
But the other thing we're leaving out here is the impression 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 resource, versus at home and 24 hour night nurses, which, you know, we all know what those costs. You're talking about a 1000 or $2000 a day to have 24 hour coverage, but that's nothing to a billionaire. So if you I don't wanna make it about class.
But if you were 2 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 house be at home. You know, I'm more on 24 hours alone with the kid all the time.
As you guys know, I'm from Canada. In Canada, we have a 1 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 in pays
for the salary.
The the the government basically guarantees your job. You go on a effectively unemployment insurance after some period of time where you go from a 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 wanna take the full year.
And by the 6 month mark, she was losing her mind. And, you know, she's a lawyer at a -- Yeah.
--
really good research hospital and she does work that's really valuable to her and that she finds really stimulating, and she just needed more adult connection after 6 months. It was very hard for her to kinda be there. Yeah.
I just think 6 months for the second parent is that seems like a long
I I don't think I could take 6 months off. But I also think if you have resources, there's pockets of time even when I did stay home for I don't know, 1st couple weeks after the kids were born. You know, they're asleep for 3 hours, and then you clean the diapers, feed them, they play for an hour or 2, and then they go back on a nap. You know? It's like your 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 It feels like you're drunk. Yes. 2 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 where, like, Matt's sleeping, I can take care of Tali, but I I don't know how women do it. It's it's incredible.
And for those of you listening, Shamalff has got his newborn on his chest. And swallowed quite nicely there.
This is why you should subscribe on YouTube, and you can see. You can see that.
He's using his new daughter to get the YouTube subscriptions up. This is good. They should blow as fast as the 100,000 seismic. How do you feel?
It's so special. I feel so lucky. I feel so so lucky.
This is gonna be the most popular cameo on the pause in Friedberg dog.
Yeah. I mean, she this chick is so delicious and cute. She's so she's so delicious. And I forgot how beautiful the sounds that girls makes versus boys, having 3 boys and 2 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, Saks has 2 girls. You have 3 free breakout girls. It's girls are incredible.
Oh, we're we're all basically girl dads like COVID.
So what a blessing. What a blessing. I feel really
-- --
any news on your front? Well, we had a baby the day after each month, had a baby. There were
--
Oh, right. I did see the best. Congratulations.
Thank you.
Freeport, where's your swaddled infant? You're letting you're letting Chamath win sweeps weeks here. Let's go. Yeah.
His Vicunya's on the way.
I haven't I haven't been here.
Are you in the Joe of on sale? You you did one day off, and then we're right back to work.
She's in the 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, do you mean, like, Volcons? You're like Volcons. We -- Yeah. Volcons.
--
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, Allison just sent me a picture. She's sitting on the rocking chair where they're outside right now. Pretty amazing.
I give Lonza a lot of courage for saying what he thought. I really don't think that what he said was altogether that like Villifiable if that's the word you wanna use. I think that there's a lot of reasonable points of view. He could have maybe used better language. But I think where he was coming from, I think a lot of us probably wouldn't do it ourselves.
§02Segment 2
We may never judge anybody else. I would never judge anybody who wants to take 6 months. I know that I could not. I would just I mean, I think may 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 Matt would do or but
Here here's Joe Lonsdale, 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 6 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 and perhaps rightfully so is that
this is just a view of
--
But, Jason, here's can I say something? This is a grading
man who take time to take care of their kids.
look we've talked about this a lot. There 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 AM in the morning super quickly.
Got it. I'm not advocating. He'd be canceled.
And not and and not just him, but everybody else, but, like, There is 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 wanna do that in this case but in most other cases is eventually it will be you that makes a mistake
Sure.
And you wanna 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 Chamath just said, you know, the mistake that we make might even be on this pod today.
I might have already
made it. I'm already made it. I agree that we should all just be a little bit less judgmental. And there there there there the there is an element there is a judgmental element in 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 necessarily make them a loser, but it's not a choice that I would realistically make.
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 $100,000,000 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 m in a position where can't check out even if I wanted to, so I try
to do my best.
That's the point he was trying to make that wasn't that well articulated.
Right.
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 basis -- It would
destroy it would destroy my business.
Yeah. We get text. We get emails. We get phone calls that we have to answer. And so it's not it it it, you know, almost definitely 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 Friedberg 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. Unfiled. And Yeah. And I'm follow. 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 sense censorship and all the shutdown of 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.
Yeah. And and it and it's almost always totally hypocritical So this is a postscript on the whole Chappell debate. It turns out that the leader of this the anti Chappell protests who've been trying to get him 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 ever seen.
When you put it in the group chat, I thought that was a joke. The
the things that
she wrote were so beyond the pale.
Beyond. be
a month.
God. They're like they're like the worst
choice.
--
them on the show.
No. We can't. I I don't even want anybody to speak these things.
I don't wanna include it in the show notes.
They're literally the worst tweet
--
They're the worst
tweets seen.
Seriously. My completely -- -- racist.
Like, I I
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 Chapel 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. Oh, I took
--
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 care 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.
Yeah. And I would also say that her tweets weren't funny. They weren't attempting
to be funny. They are so gross.
They're they are gross. I have a customer service problem with this beeping beep. No.
They're so bad.
I wanna bash I wanna bash this, you know, beeping Asian or whatever over the head blah blah blah blah. Like, a lot of racism towards Asia. you know, Asian people. No.
There was homophobic tweets. There was a Asia Asian hate tweets. I mean, it, Latina, Hispanic. I mean,
it was frustrating. -- trying to be funny. That's the thing.
It wasn't even it wasn't even
a failed attempt to humor. So you here you have Chappell 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 wanna cancel him. They're really to think that Chapelle's stand up routine is hateful really requires, I think, deliberate abtousness. 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 the it's a total active 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 kinda Internet slews.
That would be a narrative violation, David. If if somebody is virtru emailing 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 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 -- Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
I don't I don't think she should be canceled, but I
--
And and this what if she said when she was drunk? What if she had a nervous breakdown?
I can only imagine the the the difficult path 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?
I think that would be a nice place for everybody to aim to go. And then and 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 dung cancellation route But then there was actually a productive discussion about between CEOs, etcetera. And I thought what was very interesting about it was he he started talking to Gary Tan, who You know, it's like, listen. We have a 4 monthly practice at our venture firm. And and Joe said, do you really take a 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 push sense of operational context, losing key leaders, cold turkey for 6 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 3 or 4 or 6 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 Saxx, 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 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 6 months, that's gonna cause your team to lose. So I think that's maybe what he was saying.
That's a perfect analogy, Saks, because if we were looking at LeBron James or Kevin Durant, 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 6 months of games. They miss one game, maybe 2. 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 3 years left that LeBron and KD have left.
I'll give you one final anecdote to end this 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.
§03Segment 3
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 and I
came up with 4 months for either the father of
the mother irrespective of the context. And that's how we started the original policy. 4 years later, though, when I had my first kid, I took, like, 3 weeks and it came back because the grind was too hard.
Yeah. Alright. I think 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.
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 gonna get paid for? And in the course of 1 week, we've seen the tax proposals flip, I think, multiple times to ones that have never been tested and may not even be legal in the United States 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 3 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 wanna 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 wanna 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 Wyden had been working on this proposal theoretically for the past 2 years. And at no point did he bother to float the trial balloon with his colleagues and the senate to even see whether these people actually supported it beyond some folks on the progressive left who are ideologically fixated on 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. You 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 cokes. 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 would have been paying 1,000,000,000 of dollars. and the cokes would not have paid
0.
Because their entities are private and yours are public just so the audience understands.
Yes. How insane is that? And yet we were the ones about
-- --
say a great second order observation. So not that clearly didn't think through.
That was my only issue with the thing. It's like if you wanna try to ram and jam this thing through, go ahead and try. I'm not gonna 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 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 slippery slow from 700 to 7000000 to 70000000. And what it does is it allows tax and spend politicians A blank ledger to go absolutely crazy and just fund every single hair brained 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 5,000,000 and if you're above y, you pay another 3, so
8%. 5%
or 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 version of the bill 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 confiscatory nature of this? I never heard the word used. That way, confiscatory. where we're going back and saying, listen. You want so much.
We're just gonna take 20 or 30 percent a minute.
We all pay property taxes. And so we there is a experience we've all had with paying a percentage of some of assets that we own, people have 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
€1,300,000
per year and it was shut down and came back basically
1999, 2000.
And between the year 2000 and the year
2016, 20 5
percent 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 I I think that we've all seen this experience. And Switzerland does this. I think you get taxed in your total assets, and 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, immigration and people realize there's always a better choice. The the question we have in the United States is if we introduce a wealth tax like this, where will successful Americans immigrate 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 where Americans gonna move to?
Canada. You're
successful. Canada? I mean, are you gonna 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 that'll be run here.
Now Remember, this wealth tax wasn't produced 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 down from the shelf and said, let's try
this now. They've never had committee hearings on it. They've never had committee Mark on it. It's been tried and repealed in European countries. And like you said, they pull it down in the 11th hour.
Why? Because there are carefully laid plans, which they've been concocting for 3 months. We're throwing overboard when cinemas 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, will 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 Rubaging 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 for 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 the market is telling 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 the 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, then 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 in structure 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 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.
§04Segment 4
Let's be honest, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were did not win the nomination. The country specific wanted a moderate. Biden was sold as a moderate, go back to the way it was, moderate dems, 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 in sheep's clothing perhaps. and and we didn't want this. This we didn't want Trump.
He was too hot, and we don't want this too left crazy let's just take everybody's money, randomly change the tax code. I don't think American citizens wanna 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 but -- But
these there's I think these progressives so so it used to be that taxation was a necessary evil. You you you tax people because you gotta 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 focus a modern maniacal 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 tap 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 gonna be on the economy.
Well, I mean and there has a shit was, in fact, ban the billionaires that was their roof. But, you know, before we get to that, I just wanna 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 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, Chamath, your point.
I have 2 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
$1,850,000,000,000
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 declare victory. Unfortunately, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in the house said no, I'm not ready to dance yet. And 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 gonna 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 that's a I think it's a $1,000,000,000,000 bill.
Right? That's a
$1,875,000,000,000,000
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 passed 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 who watch it to listen to this podcast. You guys gotta get something done because if you go into the mid term with nothing done. With the Democratic President, Democratic Senate, Democratic House, this is going to be a bloodbath.
Well, the 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 it'll probably end up being a $1,750,000,000,000 bill. It'll be stacked on top of the spending that's already happened. One point remember, binary passed 1,900,000,000,000 of COVID relief, another 1,200,000,000,000 of infrastructure. No.
That hasn't passed yet.
Well, it's going to along with this now 1,750,000 sorry,
1,750,000,000,000
of this new social spending bill assuming -- Right.
So it's about
$55,000,000,000,000
a $5,000,000,000,000,000 -- Just the 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 $5,000,000,000,000,000 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
$22,000,000,000,000
of money created in the last 3 or 4 years. Right. Now you go back so so now 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 year and it will be persistent.
And inflation comes in two ways.
Way number 1 is if you massively increase the supply of
money. Why? Let's just say the economy had a $100. And now all of a sudden you just print another 100 to another is $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 really distorted inflationary cycle that's gonna really hurt the United States because as Saks talked about we cannot print enough money to pay for the debt when interest rates go up.
This is this is the number one 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 And P, all time highs, crypto markets, all time highs, shibu, inu worth, 30, $40,000,000,000 bubble. I'm seeing SAS multiples 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 percent to Chamath Point, it might be persistent. You look at treasury the treasury interest rates that 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 percent inflation rate. You're at negative3.5%. 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 the yield because how do you earn a return on your money? You don't want it to be
You buy do 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
--
They're trying to hit the one outer.
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?
5050.
I mean, I'm just putting a number on it. Like, obviously, the industry and and economy is doing fantastic, but it seems
5050.
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 gonna 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 attacks 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 2 examples. Number 1 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 moved their minimum wage up. We're talking about entry level quick service jobs that now pay 7 to $25 per hour. Right. So, 2 a half to 3 plus times the proposed federal minimum wage.
The free model.
And so and so what government didn't and wasn't able to do the free markets have done. 2nd example, we Friedberg to get free community college inside of one of these bills. It was drops. 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.
§05Segment 5
Let me ask a question about inflation. If who is inflation going to hurt the most and who's gonna gain the most from it? Because it does seem like consumables gas station, you know, supermarket trips, etcetera, are going through the roof. In that case, you know, that's gonna have no impact on the top third of people because gallon of milk at 3.6. $9 doesn't matter.
But then you look at inflation on stocks, it's gonna 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 gonna 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. If you have savings, it if if you can afford to put all of your savings 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 in your savings or in something more conservative, you're gonna get absolutely eroded by inflation over time. It's gonna kill you. And you know, the housing prices will go up.
The the the the middle class young couple that wants to buy a house for the first time. that's gonna 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.
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 speculative and good question.
Friedberg, a scientific question here. Are we starting to go into a self fulfilling prophecy around inflation what happened in the seventies, which is we've been talking about it so much. Then 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 gonna put
$2
on my grilled cheese, and we just get the cycle of everybody saying, how much can I add to the cost of something?
I am trying to remember there was an earnings interview I saw yesterday, kinda, which was the company? Anyway, their 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 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 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 kinda 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 gonna 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. I 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 a little scary.
Sex, 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. I don't think we're gonna have hyperinflation here, but we're at 5.1% now. And if people think it's gonna be worse next year and the Fed's not gonna raise rates, it could even be higher next year.
And I think people are gonna 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. They're a lot higher than they're used to. I think you could see a lot of unhappiness out there.
one of the 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 this 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 gonna hold off buying this because I'm not paying 15 k over sticker. So and I can pay 15 or 6.
I was like, ah, do I wanna do that? Ah, the other car's okay. I'll just put snow tires on it. So are a lot of people Chamath as part of this psychological 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 also bad for the
system.
--
stop consuming food.
I mean, food prices are going through the roof. Yeah. You might instead of getting, you know, fillet mignon, you might get chicken.
Okay. Well, there's gonna be a lot of unhappy people who are eating chicken for Christmas instead of flight. I mean, serious.
I'm coming to
your house. I'm getting flights.
I'm good. I'm gonna go, your house for lunch, and I'm going to Mods 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 2 or 3 spikes and waves of risk that we've seen globally, they've come from large multi 100,000,000 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 100,000,000 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 to
18
months. Man, this is an ugly, ugly 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 I'm not gonna answer I'm not gonna 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 wanna even answer this question yet.
Okay. Well, let me let can I I'll let me further describe the the the problem. So this happened in the late 19 seventies. We had stagflation. We had sort of every year we had increasing inflation because of the expectation game.
And the thing that broke it was you had Paul Volker come in at the Fed, and you jacked up interest rates And he actually caused a pretty severe recession in, like, 80 I think it was, like,
82 8182.
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 back of inflation. And, actually, interest rates came down for you know, as a result of Volker 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 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 it set the stage for the boom in the Reagan era and beyond. and and the Clint era as well. Now what's the difference between then and now? Well, for one thing, the government debt as a percentage of GDP when Reagan took office was around 31%.
Okay? So when Volker 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 the government debt is a 125 percent of GDP. So if and this goes back to the to the Druck and Miller point, from previous pot, if the the Fed were to jack up interest rates to say the historical norm of
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 the the problem is it's it's not clear whether we're gonna have, you know, interest rates going up or persistent high inflation. those are the threats to the the sort of economic boom we're seeing. Now the flip side of it is that the reason why the stock market is one of the reasons is that at an all time high is because earnings right now are fantastic. So the economy is doing very the companies are doing very well, but we just had for q 3 The GDP growth was at 2% annualized, which was sort of an anemic number.
§06Segment 6
It's a lowest it's been since this COVID recovery started. So it's, 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 gonna, like, pretend like I know what's gonna 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 mark the crypto market, the SaaS investing we're doing.
We don't wanna heat. 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 shiba wallet where 8000 turns into 5,700,000,000. 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 memecoin. All of a sudden some guy 13 months ago put 8 k 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 $5,700,000,000 of value or 10% the entire market cap of Shiva. people get tilted by that.
Then there was an article today in Bloomberg where there's a gentleman, a sixty six year old man in Singapore Who's a billionaire? Am I right? So he was successful in his own right. However, he had made in his entire career about 1 or 2,000,000,000. And he has made 7,000,000,000 in the last 2 years speculating on Tesla call options.
Wow. I'm not kidding. So buying short dated calls Right? Writing the writing 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 reasonable. Right?
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 write back, guys. I have to I have to deal with 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 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 a go to multiples of ARR that we've never seen before.
50, 75.
I would say a 100 time I'd say a 100 times ARR is sort of the rule of thumb right now. And you're seeing -- What scale? A $5,000,000 company is worth 500,000,000? Anywhere from 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 I mean,
absolutely worth -- -- between a
$100,000,000,000,
which is no sense. Well, no. It does if well, he
he I'll he may give you the argument for why it could sense. Okay. Let's say the company is expected to go 3.3 x this year and 3 x next year. That's basically a 10 x over the next 2 2 years. So that a 100 x in 2 years will only be at 10 times ARR 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, 30, 40,000,000,000. So they're trading at
30, 40, 50, 60
times ARR in the public markets on big, big numbers. So my point is -- How
hard is it to go 3 x, 3 x? That is I mean, going 3 x is hard. Going 3 x, 3 x back to back, that's like winning 2 n you know, NBA championships from being in the finals. It's hard.
I don't think it's that hard. I mean, it's
--
Not for you, but you're the king of SaaS. No. I'm I'm being dead serious. For the for a Sachs founder with a 1,000,000 to go from 1 to 3 and then 3 to
9,
how many out of a 100 actually go from 1 to 9? Yeah.
I'll tell you Yammer's trajectory, and this is back this is over a decade old. We went from 1,000,000 in our first full year selling the product. to well, back in those days, we looked at total contract value of 7,000,000 of TCV. That was about 5,000,000 of ARR and then it it tripled the year after that. So, you know and then we tripled the year after that.
Well, what a a category defining SaaS company. So you're taking
-- --
Microsoft. But but but I'm just saying that it's entirely possible. There's a lot more Yamers today or companies with that growth trajectory. So, I mean, But look, this is what's led to, you know, our fund too, which we started investing in 2019, which has a SaaS focus already has 5 unicorns in it from companies that we invested in the Cedar City.
That's crazy.
So but look. I mean, when 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 Well,
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 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, Compasset team. You're like, oh, well, it's growing from 300% to stressful 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 in staying power? This is why, you know, I've I think there are some great businesses in SaaS but I also think there's a lot of head fakes.
And in the public markets particularly people just wanna buy that growth as David said because they're chasing yield. They're not 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 to so so this is the conundrum is I actually do believe like, so I believe my own portfolio doubling down on all these companies, and I do believe in SaaS. And I think the reason why these SaaS 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 display. So, 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 1st of a new year, you're starting with a
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 SaaS and Nasdaq and S and P and crypto. And and then I see, you know, a 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 5 more years. You know? And so the
market is going up to 5 more years.
No. You can't sit out.
You can't sit out. But but but but, you know, but on on I was listening to Vinny Lingum's show on Beep on call in. It's it's called it's called crypto music.
There we go.
No. He and Sunny Moder do a great show that
you guys -- -- all just got 25 bps.
So -- We just
--
You so I'll listen to his show. It's called Crypto So they were they were talking about all the the dog coins. The other night, it was Shiba Inu 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 life changing money, and Shiva, you know, sell.
Take it off the table if
you can't.
keywords being if you can. So, look, I you know, this boom could last for another 5 years. It could last for another 10 years and evaluate valuations could keep going up, the earnings could keep going. You don't wanna 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, I think it's absolutely
--
I mean, I gotta say when when you saw 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.
Well and and Friedberg's been saying this on the podcast, revor. But just to give people an idea, QTHIA revenue at Google was up 41% year over year. to
$65,000,000,000
in a quarter.
And by the way, that is high margin
--
High margin. -- the incremental revenue on the core Google products generated an increment operated at an incremental 50% EBITDA margin. And they just adjusted their their their CapEx depreciation and amortization schedule because they realized that their computers that they use in their data centers last 4 years instead of 3, and the networking equipment last 5 years instead of 3 So they're like and and I've been saying this since the beginning because I worked at Google and is still there, and he runs all the data centers and the networking infrastructure. When I worked at Google, there was this async project where we built a 10,000 we didn't build it. They built it, a 10,000 port switch called firehose, which helped increase the throughput of the data centers and have these massively paralyzed indexing and and and production servers.
§07Segment 7
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, 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 2 decades. And it is extraordinary beyond anything we've ever seen in human history how well this commercial enterprise has run. and the reinvestment of capital has been extraordinary. They've if you look at YouTube in the quarter, YouTube generated this is insanity.
YouTube is now operating at a nearly $30,000,000,000 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 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%. We
have Netflix and just put Google twice. It should be And then you look at Google Cloud YouTube in there on its own.
And Google Cloud is now operating at a $20,000,000,000 run rate. And, you know, they they can just throw these service is 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 to service almost everything that we all consume and use Yeah.
But they give it to everybody for free, and they build the Internet
for everybody.
They have been 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 gonna 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 the iPhone.
They're an incredible company. The this they are so incredibly well run at the top. Sundar is an incredible CEO, and they are They're running a money printing pest at amphitheater Parkway in Mountain View. I was gonna 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 where long growth But we're hedged where, you know, the types of supply constraints that could come in and kick us in the ass would never affect my 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 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 up 40% year over year, also on a big number, $16,000,000,000 in AWS revenue for q 3. So that as a standalone company is now on a what do
you what did you guys think about Meta?
60,000,000,000.
oh my god. I mean, that was did you watch the video? I watched the whole thing. I watched 2 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 gonna be the new world. But instead of us doing everything wrong in screwing the users and their privacy and democracy and creating strife in the world. This time, we're gonna make it open source. This time, we're gonna build a coalition in partnership, and this time, it's gonna 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 gonna be able to play Grand Theft Auto and Nick Clagg 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. will have consensus of how to build the future and you're like, do do you just say that everybody in three d is gonna 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 holo Lens, to, you know, poker games. And he took basically credit that this is gonna be the future in 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 crypto based open source platform. You do not wanna 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.
Jacob.
I
you're I think you're crazy. I think you've lost your mind.
I haven't.
Yeah. I I think he lost my mind. Oh my god. I have a counterargument too. Okay.
David, do you start
--
Well, I I don't even know if if
I could categorize what I'm about to say is a counterargument. I don't even know how to counter that. All I would say
It's insanity.
All I would say is, look, I think it's really great that Facebook is spending all this r and d money on metaverse 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.
Using oculus for the first time was one of the most unique experience I've ever had with computing, but I admit I don't use it anymore. It's just not something I
Better or worse than Pornhub the first time.
But any event look. I think I think that the the fact that
--
That's his way of saying worse.
I think that the fact that Facebook wants to do all this r and 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
--
Well, you're
saying this is a PR marketing strategy.
But it feels like they're running from their name, and And and, basically, it's almost like saying, you know, this whole business of social networking has been so solid 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 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 these these leaks from the so called whistleblower, I think this is a complete we orchestrate a 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've changed the name.
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
23rd. -- and stuff.
Were a expected to decline by 4% or TikTok, I think, is probably more accurate.
TikTok is big. Yeah.
Yeah. During that same time frame via a leaked memo obtained by By the
way, I mean, how in the world is Facebook or Instagram more dangerous than TikTok. I I don't get it.
No. TikTok is deranged, which but, by the way, are Stan making our Henry Bellcaster of TikTok is reporting that we have, like, millions of views over there. So there's some rogue Did
I say that how much I love TikTok?
I love TikTok. He's building our audience.
We're connecting with Chad to you by, so you go TikTok. TikTok. No. You're right.
You're right. The TikTok account, the there's an all in TikTok account done by a fan, and we got, like, 2,000,000 views in the last week. It is absolutely bonkers
next week. We just passed Rachel Maddow and a bunch of folks.
You were more popular than all of MSNBC.
Yeah. Well, I mean, come on. Wait to set the benchmark. Friedberg. That's a fucking nightmare.
Do you
guys do you guys remember a year ago, Larry Ellison negotiating this deal with Trump to buy TikTok
--
That's right. Yeah. He's gonna throw in lanai. Friedberg is
--
And Masa's Masa's son was supposed to be on TikTok's board.
Yeah. That's by the way, Xi Jinping is on lanai right now, and Larry Ellison got TikTok. Fair trade.
Nobody talks about the billy that Ellison kicked into Tesla right before -- And
y'all get him and
see you a sip?
I mean, he made
such a boss.
He made, like,
§08Segment 8
$12,000,000,000. 15. 15. 15. 15.
-- 1,000,000,000.
He's such a boss.
He he put a $1,000,000,000 investment. Join the board. Such a bus. Told everyone in the zip. 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 figuring?
--
out. and he'll figure it out. And 50 next, it's insane.
But, wait, I have one question for Friedberg. Is Zuckerberg pulling a Larry Page, i e, 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 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 liken these
2.
What about the meta strategy of changing the company name?
By the way, my prediction was that they were I should have done this on the pod a month ago. I said they were gonna change our name to beta. 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, 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 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? Or is it about ambition and aggression and and rebets on 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 the sort of a big bet? Or you think this could
perpetuate that, or it's a bit of a tell that this is happening?
A tell.
Got it. Right.
And that that and I'm
I'm not saying that's the case. I'm saying the question. Right? Right. And that's the question a lot of people are asking, is this a tell that the core business is at at serious risk
Why do you he's putting 10,000,000,000 into it this year?
For example, this Apple, you know, ad revenue business, I think, is climbing 1,000,000,000 of dollars while Facebook's core business is being affected by the the cookie tracking policy change on Apple Ios. So at the same time that, you know, Apple's 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, Patel, that maybe things aren't that good, and he needs to diversify and he needs to make a big aggressive that elsewhere. So, you know, we'll see. I mean
--
An important question, Chamath, are we gonna celebrate the birth of both your and Friedberg daughters with a poker game? Yes.
--
by gambling? No. You want me
to do you want me to give you my thoughts on better, or no? You don't care.
No. What's a joke? Can you take paternity to go to -- I got a board meeting. I gotta go by Alright. For the Queen of Kenwa.
Wait.
Wait. Wait. Don't you wanna 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 0 because I think there's an incentive in a highly fragmented ecosystem. If you 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 DeFi kind
of world. 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 stocks, it's gonna be VR or AR? What wins the day with consumers?
Well, that's a good question. I mean, they're very different experiences.
Both can win.
But we we're not we're not what I I think 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.
I mean, AR, the dream there is that you wear these glasses that have, like, the Terminator view where like scanning the world and giving information, you'll never forget anyone's name again, stuff like that. That would be kinda 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. Basically, what he was saying there, he talking about VR. I think VR lets you make the worlds and then AR lets you experience them concurrently with a real world. And it's the same tools and libraries and kits. as a developer making it for VR AR is gonna 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 gonna go directly to AR. And then where does that leave? And then Microsoft already has 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 where 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 wanna be in the real world for some part of their life. And at some point maybe if those two things merge, that distinction 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 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 Bo get wanted to play from Australia, he was, you know, projected to see it on the game when we all saw them there with glasses, AR glasses, That would be amazing, wouldn't it?
Sure.
Be able to, you
know, have 2 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 the I'm taking the good of the game. I did a tweet where I said this in VR. People leave it on the shelf and that, you know, Paul Milwaukee and a bunch of people got in my face about it.
And then we had, like, a actually really good discussion. hand I said, well, what about Sirius gamers? because I'm talking about Sirius gamers. They all buy it, and then they never use it. And they said, yeah.
It's not for Sirius gamers. They said, okay. Well, what iPad gamers and casual gamers in bejeweled and candy crush. They're like, oh, yeah. They're not interested in it.
And I'm like, well 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, Beats Saber and Golf are like crushing it with a million users a month in some cases.
You know what they all have in common? They're 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 there are play to earn movements that are happening in in sort of this layer 3 kind of DeFi world where
--
Yeah. 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 the metaverse of some sort. So these things are very possible.
I find it so dystopian. 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.
Alright, everybody. We will play poker.
We will play poker. Yeah.
We gotta play poker
at some a little bit booked. Either either Tuesday or Thursday.
Okay. Yeah. Well, that's good. Perfect. Babies will be, like, almost a week.
Which which
days are you gonna flake Tuesday Thursday?
Yeah. Which day will you flake Tuesday Thursday? Tuesday Thursday, sexy Tuesday. I mean, do I have to come pick you up?
I can play on Tuesday.
Alright, everybody. 4, the queen of Kinois. Waco. The rain man and the dictator. I'm Jason Kelly Tennis.
We'll see you all
Next time.
On all in. Love you, Basins.
The Ledger winner's ride.
Rainman, David Sanders. And it
said -- We open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. besties are golf. Don't
13.
That is funny on dog taking a notice of your driveway.
You should all just get a room and just have one big huge ordeal because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual friendship that they just need to release somehow.
You're a thief. What? What? Where did you get mercies are back? I'm going on.