Look at John Quincy Adams here. Yeah, hey, hey Quincy, how you doing? That hair! Look at that hair. John Quincy Adams needed a way to achieve this look. He did, he did. I did it all natural. I mean, it's a lot. It's a look. You're like some movie star from the 1970s who are still working.
Do me a favor, pull up a picture of Graydon Carter for a second and then put that side by side with Sacks. Let's see. Just see how zoom in on that. Sacks, this is where you're headed by the law. You're headed to Crazy Town. This is where you're headed. You can just poof it out on the sides and you get a little woof swoop on the top. Crazy town. This is where you're headed.
请帮我一个忙,先找一张 Graydon Carter 的照片,然后再与 Sacks 的照片并排放在一起,看看两者的差距。把它们放大一下看看。Sacks,这就是法律将要让你走向的疯狂之地。你将会像这个样子,两侧凸出,顶部微微向上卷曲。疯狂之地,这就是你的去处。
Accentric Sacks. Pull up a picture of Steve Bannon's hair. He's a wise statesman. I think this is what happens. When you get too close to power, you get more eccentric with your hair. So like too much power equals crazy hair. Now look, this is my theory. Graydon Carter, too much power of vanity fair. He went hair crazy. Now you look at Bannon.
You get me a Bannon photo here. You start to see they go longer, they go wafty, they just they get volume and they're just like, fuck it. I'm just, I'm not going to cut it. I'm going to let it go wild. And of course, the old, I mean, he's the penultimate. You look at Trump's hair. This is where it gets truly crazy. This is where you're headed, Sacks. You keep getting this close to power. This is where your hair is headed.
I'm so glad this podcast never broke up because where would we get this amazing insight for J. Cal? I'm glad for keeping this all together, it makes it all worth it. It's very true. It is true. You get like eccentric and you get crazy hair. This is men get too close to power. And the hair gets wild. Unchecked power. Unchecked hair.
We had a good meeting last night. We had an all-in summit meeting. I said, Freeberg, give me a call. Let's catch up on this stuff. He's like, oh, I'm in the bath right now with my candles. And I'm like, yeah, okay, whatever. That's cool. He's like, no, no. And he presses the video button.
And then I'm exposed, I kid you not to the most bubbles I've ever seen in a bubble bath. I like bubbles. And he is peeking his head out from over the bubbles. And he's like, look. Which had exactly in the flip. He was the camera around and I got his toes pointing out and I kid you're not there six candles around the bathtub.
I'm like, this is like the Prince of panic attacks. He had to come down for his phone call with me. So now when he has a phone call with me, it's so intense and everything's getting so intense with the summit that he has to do self-care. Yeah, that'd be emotionally ready. He's self-carrying. Your wife wasn't anywhere to be found to see you in the bathtub with the candles. I take a bath every night. Who are you romancing yourself or what? I think he was romancing this spreadsheet with the profit life of all in summit.
I have about 18 minutes of self-care every day. 18 seconds, we're in it. All right, let's get the show started in. Three, two. Three, two. What your winners tried. Rainman David Sack. I'm going to win. And I said we open sources to the fans and they've just got crazy with me. Love you guys. I'm queen of Kenwap. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 130 maybe of the all in podcast. We're still here cooking with oil with me.
每天我有大约18分钟的自我关爱时间。18秒,我们就开始了。好的,让我们开始吧。三、二。三、二。挑战者Rainman David Sack。我要赢。我说我们要向粉丝公开源代码,他们对我疯狂支持。爱你们。我是Kenwap之王。我一定会胜利的。大家好,欢迎收听第130期的《全力以赴》播客。我还在,一直在坚持。
Of course, the dictator himself, Chimoff, Ali, Haapatia. Prince of panic is hack Sultan of science, the queen of Kenwap, David Friedberg, and the power broker himself, the emperor. He did it in sacks, the emperor of his new republic. Anybody have any interest anything going on? Interesting this week. Any interesting moments for people on the national stage? No? Okay.
Now let's get right into the docket. First around the docket. Ron DeSantis, governor on DeSantis. He announced his bid on the internet on something called Twitter Spaces. It looks like almost 10 million viewers have seen it so far across all the different spaces. Donald Trump wasn't too pleased. He said Rob, my big red button is bigger, better, stronger, and it's working truth because when Elon fired up the Twitter Spaces, it went to 650,000 viewers in under five minutes and then blew up everybody's phones.
My phone was melting. I could have cooked the nag on the back of it, the Twitter app crashed so many times. But then sacks with his meager following of a half million people or something, then restarted the stream. And so 15 minutes of technical snafu's were relieved.
我的手机简直要熔化了。Twitter 应用崩溃了好几次,我都能用它煮后脊肉了。但是 Sacks 的 half million 个追随者(或者其他同等数量的人)重新开始直播,这样就解决了 15 分钟的技术故障。
And then there was a announcement and I'll let you take it from there. Sax. You're going to take you behind the scenes. Take us behind the scenes. Take us behind the scenes. How did it come together, Sax?
Oh yeah, even better. Yeah, the way it came together is I think the Dessantis team were interested in potentially doing something different for their announcement. He also did an appearance on Fox News afterwards and I think he did a town hall. But I think they saw an opportunity to break new ground here in terms of presidential announcements by doing it on Twitter Spaces. And so the Dessantis campaign connected with Twitter and Elon and I agreed to kind of co-host the space with him and he does an announcement.
Now you're right, we had about 15 minutes of technical difficulties because the interest was so intense. At the time the room crashed, it had over 700,000 people in it and there were a crash because some of you were trying to get in it. I think there was well over a million people trying to get in it. So you normally don't have this kind of interest. I think this is by far the biggest Twitter space.
The engineers there told me that the previous order of magnitude was more like 100,000 out of a million. And then you combine that with the fact that Elon's account has over 100 million followers and that basically led to a new level of scale. And you guys understand that when you get to a new level of scale as a platform, there's always going to be some challenges. So in an event the engineers were there trying to figure out how do we solve this and we realized the simplest thing to do would speed or restart the room on my account instead of Elon's and then Elon joined the coast and we brought Santa's in and it all worked perfectly at that point.
The audio was pressed. We had over 300,000 people in the room. There was also another room that had been set up by Mario Nual who's like a big Twitter space host and he had hundreds of thousands of people in there and then he had live commentary from people he invited. And so this ability to fork Twitter spaces into many different rooms and each room gets to decide who they want to be their host and their speakers allows you to do live commentary and in a way that you can never have done before. So it was really innovative, I think.
Super innovative and for people who don't know Twitter spaces was really a rush job at Twitter. They did that in reaction to Clubhouse. It's still basically a beta product that predates Elon being there and it doesn't have yet the infrastructure or scale of the code base. I don't think like YouTube and Twitch do which you know have been working on this problem for I don't know 15 years. Maybe the live product. Yeah go ahead.
The first is I thought to Santis did a really good job just rolling with the punches. Okay. Because I think whether he wins, you're not going to look back on this moment as the defining moment of the campaign, nor whether he loses will you say that this was where it was at all the beginning of the end. Instead what this was was a really seminal moment, I think in further divorcing ourselves away from the mainstream media.
And you know that it was that important because Biden tried to troll the whole thing. You can show this link. This link works. And I actually think this was a really terrible idea by the Biden team because never specifically acknowledges how important the moment was. And the fact that even the president of the United States was grinding the link and couldn't get in because there was so much interest is really important. And I think what it speaks to is the fact that we are now showing credibly that you don't need to listen to four channels to shape your consciousness. And you can just go straight to the source.
And what SAC said is right. If you now have a moderated forum that then gets put out to 50 or 60 different Twitter spaces all at the same time framing and reframing, it gives people a chance to come to their own conclusion in a totally unique way. So I think it was really, really an important moment for citizen journalism and podcasting and audio formats and all of the things that I think we've been a small part of. But I think that it's really must have tilted the mainstream media and it tilted the establishment and you can see that in Biden's tweet.
Second thing, I think DeSantis did a really decent job in rolling with the whole thing and being super cool and just being committed to the process. And I think that says a lot about him as well, which was again, it's a question Mark and I've said this before, the big money guys got close and then took a step back. So this could be a very good moment for them to reevaluate because I thought he did a very good job.
So I agree. So I was there. I was live. I was seeing what was happening behind the scenes. When DeSantis came on after we had 15 minutes of technical difficulties, there wasn't a hint of anger. There wasn't a trace of irritation. There wasn't any freaking out that we were potentially ruining his presidential announcement. The guy was completely calm. And more than that, he was in good spirits. I mean, if you listen to the recording, he's happy. His tone was great.
His tone was really good. I mean, and then of course it was very substantive. He spoke in a very articulate way about all the issues. When Congressman Thomas Massey came on to make a comment or question, he was telling a kind of amusing anecdote about when they were in Congress together. And Massey was one of the only members of Congress who had a Tesla, but he comes from Kentucky. So I think his license plates had Kentucky coal on it. KY coal. So anyway, the guy was in good spirits.
So I think it does say a lot about what he would be like as a president, cool under fire, doesn't get thrown off his game. Again, not an angry guy, which I think will be a real contrast with, let's say some of the other people in the race. Trump was sort of angrily truthing during the whole thing. So I think it was a pretty strong contrast. Trupping the act of posting to truth social. Exactly.
So the contrast between the personalities could not have been stronger. Now, to the other point, the traumatic about the traditional media, you're right about what they're saying. If you look at the headlines this morning from traditional media outlets that really started within minutes of the technical difficulties, the New York Times called the announcement of Fiasco. NBC News called it a meltdown. Politico called it horrendous. And why? I mean, if you. You don't call that? Winning.
I mean, if they are losing their cool, that's clearly they feel threatened by the fact that a major presidential candidate chose to go direct. Even the Wall Street Journal headline is DeSantis looks to rebound after botched Twitter announcement. But again, what they feel to acknowledges, and I'm not a DeSantis supporter per se, I'm open-minded to him, but I haven't decided one way or the other. But this is a guy that managed to get millions of people in a nanosecond to be activated to hear what he had to say. That is different than basically giving talking points and having surrogates, blather through Fox or CNBC or CNN to hundreds of thousands of people. This is a really important moment, I think, what happened.
Okay. We've got all the positive. So, if this was a political rally, a traditional political rally that had started 20 minutes late, would anybody have said that was a disaster? That happens all the time. No, it was the crashing that made people be like, oh, my phone crashed, you know. I was using the app. I got crashed out of the app, but I had my phone did not crash. No, yeah, that's what I'm saying. The app crashed a couple of times because. The app crashed. Your phone did not crash. Yeah.
But any event. Look, this was at the end of the day, this was an event that started 20 minutes late. Once we started on my Twitter account, in my Twitter space, it worked perfectly. There was no problem. And that's the recording that you can go on Twitter now and listen to. We had about 300,000 people contemporaneously in my Twitter space. I think Mario had a couple hundred thousand. But if you look at the numbers today, there's already 10 million views for this thing.
By the way, that's exactly what I predicted. Three to 10 million on the replay. And that's what you have to look at is replay because the world has moved to asynchronous. This was three o'clock in the afternoon in Silicon Valley and six o'clock. And so when was that in the afternoon? In the afternoon.
So you have a hysterical overreaction by the traditional media. Why am I? Simply don't like that Elon is just remediating them by letting the politicians go direct. And then he's restored the platform, being a free speech platform. So they jumped on this the first second they could to try and portray as a disaster. But there was an article in Politico at this morning and they were asking voters in Iowa what they think about it. And they're like, what? You know, it's not, it's an elite thing. It's not. Yes, not even on the radar.
Freeberg, we heard all the positive here. Any constructive feedback on it or thoughts on it generally.
Freeberg,我们听到了所有积极的信息。您对此有任何建设性的反馈或一般性的想法吗?
No, look, I mean, I would love to see all the political candidates engage in long form discussion like this so that an audience can really get a sense of who they are and what they think in a direct way and uninterrupted way. And in a deeper way, sort of like the conversation we all had with RFK last week and sacked it with DeSantis yesterday.
And I would love for the voters to engage in that content to better understand the candidates rather than tee off of short talking points and short ads.
我希望选民可以参与这些内容,更好地了解候选人,而不是仅凭短暂的口号和广告来选择。
I think one of the saddest commentaries on modern democracy is that you can spend a dollar to buy a vote that all of these campaigns functionally try and raise capital to go and do advertising and that the advertising creates these little 30 second sound bites that actually change people's opinions. And it's a really sad, it will it, they otherwise they wouldn't spend the money.
And I think it's a really sad state of affairs that we spend money to change people's opinions by shortening everything to a sound bite. Instead of doing what maybe would have happened a long time ago, you know, we often talk about the town square. If you lived in a village with 60 people and someone was going to run for the mayor of that village, you'd all go to the town square. You'd hear that person have a debate, have a discussion, you talk with them and that dialogue would inform your decision about who you're going to vote for.
But you know, with 300 million people in this country and short attention spans and jumping around from one thing to another, there aren't a lot of great forums for any of us to really engage with candidates, particularly on the national level and make a better informed decision hearing from that person directly. Instead, everything is about driving narrative and chopping things up and getting the sound bite and driving the emotional reaction.
And I think one of the greatest things that's happening right now that, you know, could be a great benefit for this modern democracy is the sort of stuff that we've been doing on our podcast and RFK coming on board. Like last week and what's accented with Twitter and I really hope that more politicians do that and that more people engage and consume that sort of content to make their decision and ignore the idiotic sound bites and the stupid 30 second ads and the nonsense that, you know, third party's youth to try and drive narrative.
So yeah, look, I mean, I think that's generally the positive trend that I took away from it.
所以,我认为这是我从中得出的普遍积极趋势。
Jake, how do you think? I have some notes for Shaxx. I'm always, you know, careful not to be too critical, you know, in the moment because I don't, people will weaponize them and say, oh, Jason said this because, you know, he's Elon and he's team Elon or he's friends with Shaxx. But I think everything's said so far. This tweaked the media a great start.
The thing that I think was there were probably one or two misses here that I think you can build on Shaxx and you were very involved in the campaign with DeSantis. I think it wasn't the free for all that Elon had said it would have been, right? So he pitched it as like, hey, this is going to be uncensored and everybody's going to get to ask hard questions and that didn't happen. And you know, I think that is in stark contrast to what Trump did because I was doing the media analysis of this.
And so I think the follow up needs to be where he actually takes questions, not from fans, not from people who are already voting for him, but really, you know, a little bit more of the contancorous people, the people who maybe are voting for Trump, the people who are maybe in the biting camp. And that's what was the masterstroke of Trump's CNN town hall. He went into the, you know, the lions then or what most people perceive was going to be the lions then and he took on all comers. He fought hard.
And that one was, I think, a bigger win. I don't think DeSantis. Because that was not a presidential announcement. So just to be clear, yes, this was a launch event declaring that he's running. So in that context, yes. Yeah.
So you want to compare it to what these things usually are, which is a guy standing at a podium in front of his supporters. Where to that, this was much more interesting dynamic and engaging. I agree with you that at some point he's going to step into the lion's den, do a town hall on a place like CNN. And I think he probably will. In fact, I think he did, yeah, I think he did a town hall. More here. I think he actually did a town hall in Florida, later that night.
So yeah, I agree with you. It just wasn't that kind of event. Now, to the point about involving more people, you know, one of the things I learned hosting this thing is there are literally thousands of people raising their hands.
Yes, you can't store it. I was scrolling through this in real time in the app. I wanted to call them more people, but it was just there was no way to do it. This is something at scale. They need to add to the interface, which is maybe pre-populating a list, sorting it by the number of followers, whatever. And this is my second point about this.
But it can. And that's what I think the follow up, you know, having if DeSantis wants to come here and have like a two hour discussion, we kind of get into it a little more. That would be, I think, really good for him because I think he's got the potential to win over moderates. And I don't think this one over moderates didn't win over anybody who was in, you know, the left or in the moderate left.
And that was one of the things I noticed is my second point about it is what a great group of listeners. If you look at who showed up to listen, Bill Ackman, Michael Dell, because you know, you are sort by your followers. So, but I think it sorts it by the number of followers that have it sort of by your followers who then have the most followers. So you're going to see it's a bit of a echo chamber that way.
Okay. Okay. Sure. But they were still very prominent people in the world prominent people follow you. Okay. But they weren't coming to follow me. They were coming to listen to this. My point is still the same. Michael Dell, Bill Ackman, we're coming. But that's why you saw them because they're your followers. We all understand that. They still showed up for this in the middle of the day. I think that is really interesting and that. Yeah. Yeah. That's all my point. It's really interesting. Now, powerful people showed up for it. Full stop.
I have a question for you. Sorry, Jason, whatever you do. Oh, yeah. And then I just had a couple of other ones. Elon was a bit underutilized in this format. And that's a challenge when you have Elon in the room because people want to ask Elon questions.
So, this is something I think he's going to have to, you know, contend with people who don't want it to hear Elon ask questions, then the people who are asking the questions wanted to ask Elon questions. So, you do get like a little bit of how to utilize Elon in this format.
I heard a lot of fact channel from important people. Like, I wanted to Elon ask a question or maybe the two of them get into it. So, for a follow-up one, getting some people, you know, who maybe don't traditionally get to ask questions because let's face it, in traditional media, the only people get to ask questions are these anchors on news channels?
I want to hear Michael Dow or Bill Acman ask a question. That's the opportunity in Twitter spaces. Maybe letting Elon ask a tough question, then a follow-up or, you know, like we did here with RFK. I would have been totally open to that. I just couldn't manage it. There was just so many people in the room.
I didn't see Acman actually. I mean, I totally believe he was there, but I didn't see it. The only criticism people had of usac says, you're a major donor and you stack the deck was the most cynical version of it with like five people who were just super-affusive. But this is his launch party.
So, I think in that context, you can accept it. I would have called on Bill Acman if I known he wanted to speak, but I can't see whether he raised his hand or not. I didn't see him in the room. So, what would I want to say to him? Call on Bill Acman and he's like, oh, guys, I don't want to talk. I don't want to put him in that spot. Can we get him on this pod so we can grill him about abortion and fiscal policy? Who, Bill Acman? I don't know. I don't speak for the campaign, but I can put in the request for him. You put it up to say, just.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You put 150 dimes in. Get him on hold on. Can you tell us the actual TikTok of how this whole thing came to be?
哇,等一下,你放了150个十分硬币。请把他放在等待音乐上。你能告诉我们这件事情是如何发生的吗?
The campaign within the last week or two had the idea of should we explore doing it on Twitter spaces? And I think they were open to doing it. And. Sax didn't know about it when I put it in our group chats. Sax was like, he is. Yeah, you found out about it. I was being fussy. Shus. Oh, okay. Jo, okay. I thought you didn't. Good.
No, sometimes Elon will just tweet something without telling anybody. I just go directly. No, I mean, I help. Look, the. The Sanctus people reached out to Elon on Twitter. They also reached out to me about it and we discussed it. They were excited breaking new ground, just doing different. And I think they deserve credit for that.
Can I ask a follow-up question? Just on the descent, this thing himself, because you've seen him up close. Do you know why Schwartzman, Griffin, Petr Fry stepped in, took a half step back? And do you know what it's going to take for them to just lean in and just make this effect to complete so that he's really well-finished to be Trump? I don't know what their issues are, but I did see. I don't know this.
Was this name Petr Fry or whatever? Yeah. I don't know him, but I did see a press article and he was referencing book bannings. So that to me, to show that he was buying into some, you know, crazy left-wing press narratives. I think that was the best part of. And I asked the Sanctus about that. So by the way, for people who started. By the way, that was the one thing that was new news for a lot of people was the book banning. Can you explain the issue and the spin and the clarification on book banning in Florida?
这个人叫彼得·弗赖或者其他什么名字吗?是的。我不认识他,但我看到了一篇新闻报道,他提到了禁书问题。所以我认为,这表明他认同了一些疯狂的左翼新闻叙事。我认为这是最有意思的部分。我向 Sanctus 询问了这个问题。顺便说一下,对于那些不了解情况的人来说,禁书是他们最关心的事情之一。你能解释一下禁书问题、对该问题的解读以及佛罗里达州的禁书问题的澄清吗?
It's very simple. They haven't banned any books in Florida. But the question is, what books are taught in the curriculum and what's in the school library? And some of these books were positively pornographic. I mean, they had so on. The Sanctus had an event where somebody was actually reading what was in these books. And the mere reading of what was in the books actually got labeled on social media by the algorithms. So there was a lot of stuff that's just not appropriate for kids. No one is restricting your ability to buy or read whatever books you want in the state of Florida's ridiculous. There's a legitimate question about what's in the curriculum.
By the way, I remember when we had debates on campus about this is back a long time ago, like the late 80s, early 90s when they were throwing dead white males out of the curriculum, you know, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, people like that. The people on the right who were opposing that never made the argument that this was censorship. Everybody understands that when you're dealing with a curriculum, you have to make choices. You can't teach everything. So the question is, what are you going to limit it to?
I think that when people actually dug into some of these books, they realized that they're not appropriate. So in any event, his answer was along those lines that you should go listen to it for yourself. But I think that he did address that issue. I think he's kind of exposed it as a left-wing media narrative. And I think he deconstructed it. And I think that was helpful because I think there are a lot of centrist who all they've heard about DeSantis is that he's banning books or the Disney issue, which we also asked him about. And we covered that, I think. So yeah, we talked about some of these controversies.
The issue here, just to summarize it is, the left is framing the banning quote unquote, but just the not inclusion of certain books, which are graphic that have sex in them from certain age groups in schools as part of a curriculum. So they're saying these books are banned in Florida. The more accurate way to say this, these books are not being used in curriculum for these age groups. Parents, if they want to buy them, can buy them and then can read them. So this is where this conversation is kind of breaking down. And I think is a complete waste of time.
All parents want control over at what age or what stuff their kids are exposed to. And so there is a thoughtful discussion to be had there. And maybe the discussion is this is something parents should decide. Yeah, of course, but it's not even a conversation. It's a hoax. It's a fake media narrative they're trying to pin on him. And DeSantis has been the subject and victim of these types of fake media narratives, which are deliberate. The media is not trying to have a conversation. They're trying to disqualify the guy. And they did this. This goes all the way back to COVID when he opposed lockdowns and kept schools open. And they called him death Santas.
So the media has had it in and for this guy since the beginning, because he refuses to go along with their narratives on things. This is the same reason they a Elon is Elon is defying their narrative control. So you put these two guys together, okay, hold on. Even before the technical difficulties, let's be clear. The media's heads were exploding. That DeSantis and Elon were going to be in the room together. Look at the vanity fair article. The headline was DeSantis announcing with Elon because David Duke wasn't available. Okay. The Atlantic was saying that this whole Twitter space was a hate group. I mean, literally.
Paragraph 1:
So these people were losing their minds before we even got into the technical difficulties. And then they pounced on that. That there was a 20 minute delay. They pounced on that as some sort of fiasco, which it wasn't.
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Will DeSantis cut spending and cut our taxes? We cut spending. We didn't get into that. Have you ever had a conversation with him about balancing the budget and federal debt? Do you know his position on cutting like long-term capital gains and taxes? I don't know his position on that. I can't speak to him.
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Let me give you the elevator pitch. I mean, the nutshell for DeSantis is he calls it the Florida Blueprint. He's saying, look at what we've done in Florida. Look at what we've achieved at Florida. Let's take Florida nationwide. Florida has had a great economy. Florida has had a balanced budget. Zero taxes. No, because I don't. That's the state tax. If you have zero taxes, you have my book.
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No. Are they real? Okay. The dictator has spoken. If people want to look up this issue, there's a book called Gender Queer. There's a story about it in the New York Times. It's a graphic novel about coming of age for a non-binary person, which is fine. Great. It's very graphic. It's a graphic graphic novel. It has explicit scenes. These kind of books, most parents would say, I would like to wait for my graphic novel on cutting my taxes to zero. Okay. There you go. It's called The DeLotter's Guide to Santerity.
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Come on, guys. Overall, great job. Yeah, get him on the pod here and we'll have a great discussion with him. Yes, that's a great job, Saksipu. Great job. Please invite him to our pod. I think we each have our own issues. We'd love to. Or else we're just going to go with the other Republican candidates. Nikki, Haley, and I'm proud of you. Or also voting for. Yes. I don't know.
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All right. Well, thanks, guys. Yeah, I think. Great job, brother. I think it'd be great to get Nikki Haley. That's a no. No, just say no. No, I'm not going to stand. I'm going to put in the ass to the Santer's for sure. All right.
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Well, that's great. We're going to be here for more folks. So a lot of other news going on. I think a good place for us to go to next. Maybe do we want to do the debt ceiling, defense spending, or Nvidia? Let's go together. In my opinion.
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US debt ceiling is at 31.4 trillion currently. Treasury Department recently warned the federal government could be unable to pay its bills as soon as June 1st, Fitch put the US credit rating, which is the highest rank of triple A on negative watch. So negative watch means it's trending towards bad and that it's imminent that they might lower it due to this debt limit deadline.
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It seems like we're not making much progress every couple of days. We seem to swing one way or the other, the stock market has kind of shrugged it off. And the last time the US credit was downgraded was in 2011, but we avoided that.
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Shemoth, what's going on here? What do you think the eventual outcome in? Is there a chance that these knuckleheads who represent us are going to default and cause chaos? Or do you think this is all kabuki theater and we're going to wind up in the same place, which is they raise it and make some modest concessions?
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August 5th, 2011. The SMP downgraded the United States from triple A to double A plus. You know what happened? Absolutely fucking nothing. Okay.
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So I do think that this is another opportunity for the little red riding hoods to get their panties in a bunch. But these downgrades don't need much of it. You're referring to there. You talking about free birds? Yeah, what are you talking about? Talking about all these guys. Wait a second, is that Biden? Talk about the media.
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I think that these third party credit rating agencies are not particularly that accurate and sophisticated. They don't know anything that you don't know. They're not getting access to. Moody's gave SVB and A rating the week before it went into receivership. This is my exact point. Well done. This is my exact point. None of these companies know what they're doing. These companies are in the business of putting a letter on a document and then selling access to that document.
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So whether it's S&P, Fitch or Moody's, I would tell you to ignore it and come to your own conclusion. I think that this budget ceiling thing is happening now every couple of years. And it seems like the real thing we should be talking about is whether Biden's going to use the 14th amendment and just ram a budget through.
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Explain that. Explain that. So under the 14th amendment, the president of the United States has in their discretion the ability to make sure that the United States can pay their debts. And that wasn't necessarily thought of as a way to work around the debt ceiling impasse. But because Congress refuses to pass any structural laws that allow the budget to ebb and flow with tax receipts, we get caught in the situation. Again, roughly every handful of years.
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I'm going to pass a budget via executive order.
我会通过行政命令来通过一项预算。
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From a game theory perspective, what that does is it forces Republicans to sue Biden, take him to the Supreme Court and say this is unconstitutional.
从博弈理论的角度来看,这样做会迫使共和党人起诉拜登,将他带到最高法院,并声称这是违宪的。
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The problem with that is that that probably really does tank the economy in the way that it creates enough uncertainty where capital markets freeze up and liquidity just absolutely goes away. And again, liquidity has been shrinking for the last 18 months anyways. So it get even worse.
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So I think the bringsmanship right now between McCarthy and Biden is basically that veiled threat.
因此,我认为麦卡锡和拜登现在之间的竞争就在于暗示的威胁。
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If Biden effectively isn't going to get something done, I think he's going to test the 14th amendment now.
如果拜登无法有效地推动某项事情完成,我认为现在他将会考验第14修正案。
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If the 14th amendment turns out to be a reasonable way in order to pass a budget, the good news is not just for Biden, but for any future president, including Republican presidents, will not have to be held hostage by Congress.
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They will in the 11th hour be able to pass a budget that works.
在最后关头,他们将能够通过一个有效的预算。
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The implications of that though is that now you will not get consensus.
这意味着现在你将无法获得一致意见。
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And whatever's happening in that moment, you'll see more of.
无论此时此刻发生了什么,你都会看到更多。
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So if you have a spending president, they'll just continue to spend.
因此,如果你有一个爱花钱的总统,他们只会继续花钱。
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And if you have an austerity president, they'll continue to cut.
如果你的总统实行财政紧缩政策,他们会继续削减开支。
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And that'll have implications on either side.
这将对双方都有影响。
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Just actually think this is over issues of 14th amendment or do you think it's a valid use of it?
你认为这仅仅是因为第14条修正案的问题吗?还是你认为这是它合理使用的体现?
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No, it's not going to fly.
不,这不可能实现。
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I mean, it's true that the 14th amendment has some language about the full faith and credit of the US shall not be compromised.
我的意思是,第14条修正案确实有一些关于美国完全信任和信贷不得受损害的语言。
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However, it's never been tested or tried.
然而,这从未经过测试或尝试过。
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So no one exactly knows what it means.
因此,没有人确切知道它的意思。
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Progressives are now saying that the language means that Biden could just keep spending without the dead limit being raised.
进步派现在说,这种语言意味着拜登可以继续支出而不需要提高债务上限。
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But by himself through cold water on this, he said that he didn't think he had that authority.
但他自己否决了这件事,称他认为自己没有那个权力。这句话的意思是他不认为自己有权力去做这件事情。
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And even Lawrence O'Donnell, the other night, who's a big progressive on the media, he was saying that if the Dems were going to take this attack, they need to do it months ago before they started negotiating on a debt limit increase.
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In other words, if you're going to take that position, why would you have negotiated that you, the president are effectively conceding, you don't have that authority when you start negotiating.
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That being said, I think they're going to be able to. Reuters had to report this morning that there are only 72 billion apart now in their positions, which is a relatively small amount.
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So my guess is they're going to work this out.
所以我猜他们会解决这个问题。
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Now what should the fate of the debt limit be moving forward?
现在,债务限制的命运应该如何前进呢?
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I mean, the thing that's so stupid about our budget process is we spend the money and then argue about whether we're going to pay the credit card bill.
我是说,我们的预算进程非常愚蠢,因为我们花完了钱之后才开始争论是否要支付信用卡账单。
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The way that the debt limit should work is you raise the debt before you spend it.
债务限制应该如何运作的方式是在你花钱之前先增加债务。
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Congress should have to vote first on whether they want a deficit or debt spend.
国会应该首先投票决定他们是否要进行财政赤字或债务支出。
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Then you decide how much you're going to spend.
然后你决定要花多少钱。
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So this thing, this vote needs to be moved up before they spend it.
所以这件事情,这个投票需要在他们花掉之前提前进行。
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And I think if you did that, it'd be a lot harder for the politicians to spend money, because if you had an up or down vote very early on saying, should we even be in deficit, I think a lot of people would say, no, we're not in a war.
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If we break any thoughts on the debt ceiling, if not, we'll go on to the government accountability vis-a-vis the defense spending.
如果我们没有解决关于债务上限的想法,我们将继续探讨政府在国防支出方面的责任。
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I mean, look, we're running a $2 trillion a year deficit and it's forecast to continue to be at that level for several years.
我是说,看,我们每年都有2万亿美元的赤字,并且预计将在未来几年保持在这个水平。
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And it's going to take pretty radical changes in how we tax and spend to make up that gap.
为了填补这个差距,我们需要进行相当彻底的税收和支出改革。
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So this is a problem that is going to continue and repeat.
因此,这是一个将继续发生和重复的问题。
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And it does beg the question, would you want to buy bonds from an entity that's generating 4 trillion in revenue and spending 6 trillion and has a plan to do that for the foreseeable future and it's only seeing its economy or its underlying revenue-based grow by 2% a year?
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It seems like that would be a very hard start-up to fund.
看起来这将是一个非常难以获得资金的创业公司。
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And there would be a very difficult growth investment to make, particularly in an environment like this.
在这样的环境下,特别是在经济发展困难的情况下,进行一项非常困难的成长投资。
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So I'm just pointing out that this is becoming a more kind of systemically risky situation for the US that we spend the way we do and we have to keep coming back to having these debates about its appropriate or not.
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And now they've narrowed down the way that the Republicans seem to be kind of going about getting this done. What's still done is they're only focusing on roughly 15% of the overall federal budget and they're saying we'll kind of make some tweaks in that little range there and save some pennies, save some nickels.
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But we've got a much more fundamental problem to deal with, which is how do we stop running these deficits and running the data?
但我们需要解决一个更根本的问题,那就是我们如何停止这些赤字和数据的运行?
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But I mean, I'm going to sound like a friggin' No, I think you're right. The inflation is here and the crowding out of private investment and private borrowing is now occurring because the government borrowing is so big.
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I mean, our treasury, our government debt of what, three, two trillion, that has to be finance somehow and all that money is going to finance government instead of being put to other uses.
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So I think that the downsides are already here. You can't run two trillion dollar deficits every year. That's unsustainable.
因此,我认为其不利影响已经出现。每年两万亿美元的赤字支出是不可持续的。
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Now I think that you guys referenced what happened in 2011. That's worth discussing for a second because I actually think that what was agreed to in 2011 was excellent.
我觉得你们指的是2011年发生过的事情。这值得讨论一下,因为我认为2011年达成的协议是优秀的。
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Obama and the Republicans in Congress agreed to a thing called the sequester where they agreed that they would freeze both defense and non-defense discretionary spending until they could get their act together and agree on what the budget should look like.
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And so the theory was the Republicans agreed to the pain of freezing defense, Democrats agreed to the pain of freezing non-entitlement.
因此,理论是共和党同意军事开支的冻结痛苦,民主党同意非福利的冻结痛苦。
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Social spending, and that's how the deal was cut. I actually think that made a lot of sense.
第十段:
社会支出,这就是交易达成的方式。我实际上认为这是很有道理的。
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And I think we should have kept operating under the sequester until we got to a balanced budget.
我认为我们应该继续遵守自动减支政策,直到我们达到一个平衡预算。
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But the reason that broke quite frankly is because of the lobbying power of the military industrial complex is so great in both.
但坦率地说,两国破裂的原因是因为军工复合体的游说力量太大了。
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The Republican and Democratic parties that they basically wanted the sequester overseas to keep raising the defense budget.
共和党和民主党都希望通过减少海外支出来增加国防预算。
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I think it's just that there's never been a degree of accountability for the spending that's being done because of this assumption that we'll always be able to pay our debt and we'll always be able to take on more debt.
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And I think that you see the other conversation, the other topic that we were going to talk about was this lack of accountability and defense spending that we should play the John Stewart clip.
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I think who does he interview the undersecretary of defense or something? What is her title? Deptary Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks was discussing the defense budget.
我想他采访了国防部副部长或其他人吗?她的头衔是什么?国防部副部长凯瑟琳·希克斯正在讨论国防预算。
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When I see a state department get a certain amount of money and a military budget be ten times that and I see a struggle within government to get people like more basic services.
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But I'm a human being who lives on the earth and can't figure out how $850 billion dollars to a department means that the rank and file still have to be on food stamps.
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Like to me, that's fucking corruption. I'm sorry.
像我这样的人来说,那就是该死的腐败。对不起。
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And then there was a story that came out this week according to Bloomberg, the government accountability office disclosed that the Pentagon is currently unable to account for hundreds of thousands of spare parts for the F-35 jets.
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The Pentagon has never passed an audit. The Pentagon has never passed an audit and it's accepted.
五角大楼从未通过审计,而这一事实已被接受。
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And it's acceptable in the same way that it's acceptable to never balance the budget to always spend and give everyone what they want and to find ourselves in this kind of late-stage problem where we've gotten away with it for so long that both of those factors, whether it's the downgrade on the rating, whether it's the fact that we end up in these battles over whether to raise the debt ceiling every couple of years or whether we can't pass an audit.
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All of these factors are symptoms of the same underlying problem, which is that there is no accountability for how we operate the kind of fiscal condition of the federal government.
所有这些因素都是同一个潜在问题的症状,即我们在联邦政府财政状况的运作方面没有任何问责制。
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You know, the other thing it leads to is all these optional wars.
你知道,它还导致了所有这些可选的战争。意思是,它引发了一系列不必要的战争。
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So let me give you an example. So all of these wars are always.
让我给你举个例子。所有这些战争都是永恒的。
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They're all free. Yeah, they're all off-book.
他们都是自由的。是的,他们都是非官方的。
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So take Ukraine. We've appropriated what, 130 billion.
以乌克兰为例。我们已拨款1300亿。
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That's not part of the defense budget. We have 80 billion in the defense budget. And then we just stack the 100 billion or so for Ukraine on top of that and it's off-book.
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Now if we said the reason we're funding Ukrainians because it improves the national defense of the United States, why wouldn't they just come out of the defense budget?
如果我们说我们资助乌克兰是因为这能提高美国的国家防御力,为什么不直接从国防预算中拨出来呢?
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If you force people to make actual choices, actual decisions, and they could say, okay, we could spend 100 billion on Ukraine or we could spend 100 billion on stockpiling tanks or F-35s or whatever for the United States, now you actually force some prioritization decisions.
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But because the wars are always off-book, they're just additive. You just tack them on. And we did that with an Afghanistan. We did that in Iraq.
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We spent something like $8 trillion and that was just added to the national debt. Yeah, we can't afford these anymore.
我们花了大约8万亿美元,但这笔钱只是被算入了国家债务中。是的,我们再也无法负担得起这些费用。
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It's becoming clear to everybody that there has to be some accountability. And Chimada I guess seems like there's a couple of unpopular stances to take when you're running for office.
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One of them is Social Security, Retirement Age. As we saw in other countries like France where people are arguing over 62, 64 years old, whatever it is. And so these entitlements, job requirements, if you want to get unemployment, and then of course, defense spending, you seem un-American.
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If you don't want to take care of old people, you seem un-American. And you know, weak if you don't want to support the government, is there a path towards celebrating an administrator as CEO and executive who tells honest truth to the American people, which is, hey, we've been on a binge.
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We've been going on vacation. Nobody's looking at the bills. And we need to have a staycation. We need to cut costs. We need some austerity here. Is there a path for somebody, Ron Desentus, Chris Christie, RFK, whoever it is, to win over the American public, to win over moderates with an austerity?
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And then, if you want to get a day, balance the budget, message, or is it just too un-popular to even bring that up? Right. Just think that you guys don't psychologically understand how to get what you want.
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I think the best way to get what you want, which I would want to, which is a healthy economy where there's accountability for spending, is to not look at expenses. And all of this talk is always about expenses, but to look at revenue and limit revenue more drastically.
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And I think the best way to limit revenue dramatically at the federal and state level is to just minimize taxation as much as possible. And I think that is something that Democrats and Republicans have a hard time fighting.
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Nobody wants to raise their hand and say, I want new taxes. Nobody says that. Right. And I think that if you attach that to some sort of spending guidelines, like what David says with a sensible foreign policy, you just end up spending a lot less.
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You want to fight a foreign war? OK, great. Well, you know what? It's part of the existing budget. Let's go figure out why we want to do it. We want to have more accountability and defense spending. OK, well, look, the defense budget is a half of what it used to be because we just have half the revenue.
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I think that if you start to go and talk about austerity and cutting social security and healthcare benefits, it's literally a non-starter. People close their eyes. They plug their ears and you get nowhere.
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Now separately, I think the step even before you look at taxation, so minimizing government revenue is to figure out how to refinance. So if you're a homeowner and you got a mortgage in the 80s, you were paying 12, 14, 15, 16%.
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If when rates kept going down, you were the people around you, didn't have the common sense to refinance that. That was negligence. Similarly, we're in a position today to refinance our debt wall and push out these maturities past 100 plus years.
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We are the only country that has a viable, stable economy that looks like it can still continue to thrive at scale. Take advantage of that. You lose nothing by giving us the optionality, generating some 100-year debt, refinancing a bunch of this short-term stuff.
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And then second, inflation helps us. And it helps us because it allows us to inflate the value of these dollars that allows us to pay off our short-term maturity.
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So these are two practical, simple things that are uncontroversial that should happen today. And then separately, I think you need to look at minimizing revenue. And then you can cut expenses.
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But if you flip them around, I'm just telling you, I want any of this to happen, but I'm telling you, nothing will change and you guys will still be crying wolf in five years.
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It will still be the same. It will just be a different debt to GDP number that gives you anxiety. Speaking of anxiety, freeback your response.
它还是一样的。只是GDP债务数字不同会让你感到焦虑。说到焦虑,请给出你的反馈意见。
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I don't agree. I think we need to balance the budget. And I think that if we don't, we can continue.
我不同意。我认为我们需要平衡预算。如果我们不这样做,问题就会继续存在。
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What did you agree with? Financing, pushing out 100-year debt?
你同意了什么?融资,推出100年期债券吗?
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No, no. I don't agree.
不,不,我不同意。
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Reducing revenue solves the problem. I think that, and by the way, one of the problems with the democracy, Chamotte, is that you speak about it as if everyone benefits from a tax cut.
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Generally, there is some disproportionate benefit to a tax cut. And that's why it's less likely to happen because the majority will benefit by keeping taxes high for a minority, whether that's some corporate minority or whether it's some wealthy individual minority. And that's why I think the opposite is more likely to happen, which is we're more likely to see taxes go up in order to bridge the gap to continue to fund programs that everyone wants to, everyone wants an and they don't want an or.
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And as a result, they'll kind of continue to seek revenue because there are other places to get revenue that don't affect me, meaning it doesn't affect the majority. And I don't mean me personally. I'm just speaking about a voter and a voter would say, if there's a way to tax other people for me to get the things I want, they will vote yes for that. And that's ultimately what the system ends up finding. And I think that's what's more likely to end up happening. That's all.
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Yeah, look, I mean, I agree with part of both of what you're saying, which is I agree with Fibre that we need to balance the budget. There's no excuse for running peacetime deficits this large. We're really going to regret this one day. On the other hand, I agree with Jamal that if you just try to solve the problem by raising taxes, the politicians will just keep spending. I mean, you have to starve to the beast, I think, in order to control it. At least that's been a view, I think, for a long time. Do you agree with Jamal on that point?
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Here's the thing. You cannot solve this problem by raising up to 70% tax rates like we had in the 1970s and I can prove it. Well, if this chart, France is a good example of this too. So what you see in this chart here is this is federal C sub percentage of GDP. What I see when I eyeball this is if you were to put a regression line on that, it'd be at around 17% with a plus or minus of 2%. And the times when you get up to 19%, or a little bit close to 20%, or we have great economic conditions or money printing. So the Clinton era from was a 92 to 2000 was an economic boom. We got up to almost 20%, but we've never, ever been able to get more than 20% of GDP and federal tax receipts even during the 1970s when the top marginal rate was 70%.
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What happened, Zach? Yeah, why is that? The people start doing economic activity? No, it curtail's investment in economic activity. This is the last one I've done. I've been talking about it for hundreds of years. Taxation doesn't solve this problem. I don't disagree. I don't disagree. I just thought. Blood from a stone. And the reality is, is that when you try to tax rich people in a confiscatory way, they spend a lot more on lawyers and accountants to figure out how to structure their income in a way that, or they leave. Where they tap out, you know, like if you're paying 50%, 60% taxes, like what's the incentive to go to work? And if you're sitting on a big nut, you can just be like, no, you know what, I'll just enjoy my life a little bit more because each incremental dollar 50%, 60% is going to taxes. And then I have to pay my team. You just sort of get to the other things I could answer.
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I asked a question on Twitter, you know, because we all talked in our group chat about the concept of passing a balanced budget amendment, which would be an amendment to the US Constitution that says, you know, Congress has an obligation and the executive branch has an obligation to generate a budget surplus, you know, every year. And you could have a balanced budget amendment that provides certain exemptions to this, like in a year of war, for example, where Congress declares an emergency or declares a war. And in those cases, theoretically, like if there's some sort of emergency that we have to address and overfund, you can kind of resolve to this. But man, I just might.
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But you know, we've been a war for something like two out of every three years since the Cold War ended. How many of those wars sacks were voted on by Congress as the other issue, you know? Well, what happened is we did the authorization for the use of force, I think goes all the way back to, was it like 2001, where it's basically we declare a war on terrorism in response to 9-11. And they use that authorization to go into Afghanistan, which I think was understandable. Then they use that same one to go into Iraq, then they use it to go into Syria. And only recently, only a few months ago, do they actually repeal that use of force as a way to keep authorizing new wars?
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So they really should go back to Congress for every new war.
因此,每次发动新战争都应该回到国会。这样做可以确保行动的合法性和透明度。
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But the problem is, you know, Freeberg, I agree with you that we need to have a balanced budget amendment, but it's going to contain a caveat or exception for war.
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Sure. And we're just in war all the time now. Sure.
当然。现在我们一直处于战争状态。当然。
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But I think that there's ways to create some mechanism that forces that issue to actually come front and center as opposed to being what you're arguing, which is, hey, it's always on the back burner. Therefore, it's always bubbling over.
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But what was surprising to me was just the incredible negative sentiment I got from so many people who are so deeply, have this deeply held belief that the only way to support growth in our economies through federal spending and that that has become the driver that has become the handicap of our country.
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It has become the handicap of our economy. It has become the handicap of our people.
这已经成为我们经济的障碍,也成为我们人民的障碍。
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And as a result, because it means that we now have this instead of having an incentive to drive productivity through private commercial and economic activity through innovation, through productivity gains through business building.
因此,这意味着我们现在不再有通过创新、提高生产力和建立企业的私营商业和经济活动来推动生产力的刺激。
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This now dependent on what we have now identified is a highly unaccountable system of spending.
现在我们所确定的是一种高度不可靠的支出系统,这取决于它。
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And that unaccountable system of spending ends up putting a lot of dollars into the pockets of cronies and the pockets of folks that aren't actually driving job growth or aren't driving productivity.
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There are certainly programs that work. But overall, there's no level or degree of accountability that asks the question, did that program work?
确实有一些程序是有效的。但总体而言,没有任何层次或程度的问责能够问出这个问题:这个程序有效吗?
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Did we spend a dollar and get more than a dollar back for what we spent?
我们花了一美元,收回超过一美元的价值了吗?
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There's no assessment of that, whether it's a war or whether it's defense spending.
对此没有进行评估,无论是战争或国防开支。
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There's always some kind of intellectual argument that says, I don't think that's true.
总是有某种智力争论,声称“我不认为这是真的”。
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I think the OMB releases a report after a report saying that all of this stuff sucks and doesn't do anything.
我认为美国办公管理和预算局一而再,再而三地发布报告,声称所有这些东西都是无效的,什么都做不了。
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Just nobody actually. No one cares.
其实没有人在意。没有一个人。
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You're right. You're right.
你说得对,你说得对。
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I think what you're saying is inaccurate. This is my point. I think it's important to get the facts right.
我认为你所说的不准确。这是我的观点。我认为把事实搞清楚很重要。
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What you are saying is not true.
你所说的不是真的。
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They do do an accounting.
它们确实会进行会计工作。
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That accounting sucks. It shows that there's tons of waste. Nothing changes.
这种会计方式很差,它表明浪费的程度很高。但是没有什么变化。
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So now what do you want to do, David? Is the real question.
现在,大卫,你想做什么?这是真正的问题。
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What do you want to do knowing that?
你知道这个之后想做什么?
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We shouldn't spend on things that don't have a positive return. This is my point.
我们不应该把钱花在没有积极回报的事情上。这就是我的观点。
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That's why we're now in this very difficult situation.
这就是为什么我们现在处于非常困难的境地的原因。
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That's not happening.
这不会发生。意思是原文所描述的情况不会发生。
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Now what would you like to do?
现在你想做什么?
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Well, the reason it doesn't happen is because the way that politics decides things has nothing to do with the merits of it.
道理很简单,政治决策的方式与其价值无关,所以这种现象不会发生。
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It has to do with someone for some time.
这与某人有关一段时间了。
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I am not debating that. I agree.
我不是在争论那个。我同意。
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I'm just saying what do you guys want to do now?
我只是在说,现在你们想做什么?
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Well, I think our education system has like fundamentally betrayed the country because we just keep teaching people that somehow the government can solve all these problems.
我认为我们的教育体系从根本上背叛了国家,因为我们一直在教人们,好像政府可以解决所有这些问题。
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And really, it's just a product of special interest lobbying for things.
实际上,这只是特殊利益游说的产物。这些特殊利益团体在游说中寻求自己的利益。
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And that's why we perpetuate these programs that don't work.
这就是为什么我们会继续支持那些没有效果的项目。
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I think the best way to think about government spending is that in every dollar, there's probably 15 or 20 cents that actually does some good.
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You get things like tarp, which turned out to be a pretty decent program.
你可以得到像防水帆布(tarp)这样的应用程序,结果证明它是一个相当不错的程序。
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There were things like the DOE loans that got things like Tesla into the marketplace, right?
DOE贷款等事情使特斯拉等公司进入市场,对吧?
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There's things like the IRA today that will de-lever ourselves and create a piece dividend because we won't need to fight over resources and oil from other countries.
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But the problem is that that represents the minority of the dollars.
但问题在于这只代表了一小部分美元。
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Okay, now that we know that that's true and we've known that that's true for decades, I guess, again, I'm just asking a practical question.
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There are a couple things you can do.
你可以做几件事情。
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One of the points I'd make is I think you're probably right in your assessment, that 50 cents that's what you're calling wasted, that money does end up somewhere.
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It ends up in someone's pockets, probably the pockets of the shareholders, of some contractor, or the donors of individuals or employees.
它最终落入某些人的口袋,可能是股东、承包商或个人捐赠人或员工的口袋。这些人最终受益于这项活动。
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Well, there's also individuals that benefit.
好的,还有一些个人也会受益。这句话意思是指还有些人会从中获益。
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But functionally, what's going on is it's a system of wealth transfer.
但从功能上来看,这是一个财富转移的系统。
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And that's not necessarily bad.
这并不一定是坏事。
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The question is, is the transfer of wealth happening to the right groups that we intend to support with these social programs?
问题是,我们所支持的社会计划是否将财富转移给了我们打算支持的正确群体?
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Or is it not?
这句话的意思是什么呢?
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And I think Sax's point, which I think we could all probably align on, is it's not.
我认为Sax的观点是,我们都可能会同意,即这不是。
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And I think that's probably a set of standards for accountability that we should probably try and create.
我认为我们应该尝试创造一组负责任的标准。
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But where does that money end up?
那些钱最终去了哪里?
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It ends up buying homes, feeding people.
最终它购买房屋,养育人们。
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They're going to restaurants, you're buying cars. And I don't like there's like a fleet of megayots in America. Well, I guess what I'm asking is where, even that leakage of 50%.
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Doesn't that just end up in the normal economy? Yeah, it ends up supporting individuals and maybe the other ones. So why is that so bad?
这不是最终流入正常经济吗?是的,它支持个人,或者可能还支持其他人,那么为什么这件事情有那么不好?
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Here is what I was saying. But that's what I'm saying. It is a wealth transfer. It is a system of wealth. Where it ends up in people's pockets. And that that system ultimately benefits a lot of people in need and a lot of people that we as a society intend to support here in the US.
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I don't think it just goes to poor people. But that's my other point. There's this plan. But it's not just corporate welfare. Yes. There's so much corporate welfare. It's not all just going to needy people. It's going to your special interest.
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On some level, we can accept the inefficiency of government. I like your idea of constraining how much of a canvas they have to paint with and how much revenue they bring in.
在某些方面,我们可以接受政府效率低下的事实。我赞成你的想法,限制政府可以运用的资金和收入的数量。
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And I think what we have to accept is that the reason this country gets bailed out is because we have tremendous entrepreneurs, an amazing capital allocation system, a very fluid market for building corporations and capitalism is so vibrant here that no matter what happens, we always seem to make the next Google Uber Nvidia, whatever it is, Airbnb.
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And I can tell you, you know, spending a lot of time traveling, meeting with people in Japan, in UAE, etc. They're all looking at the massive entrepreneurial drive that we have in the United States to build global companies and how we do it over and over and over again.
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And the only countries that seem to be able to do this at scale, you know, maybe Sweden and some of the Nordics, obviously China, but other countries have not figured out how to build global corporations. And that is what bells us out every time is entrepreneurial.
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Yeah, I take out the calisthenics. Yeah, the deficit is getting so big that we can't bail out that way. Think about it. We have two trillion in deficit every year. That is two Googles. Yeah, it's an Apple. It's an Apple every year. It's a great money. We're spending an Apple every year. We have to address it, but the point is that's how we have bailed ourselves out historically.
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Is massive capital allocation and entrepreneurship? I want to remind you guys what happened at the end of the 70s. We had all these inflationary problems. We had all of these taxation problems where people thought all of a sudden 70% tax rates were going to solve the problem, what you guys talked about.
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And instead the exact opposite thing happened, which was the guy that got elected. Ronald Reagan and I just want to remind you what the Electoral College was between Image and Recarter, 489 to 49. Like a bigger, just shellacking. I don't think we've seen in modern US politics, to the guy that basically said enough with this, we're going to tone it all down and we're going to cut revenues.
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So I do think that people have an appetite for them. And I think that people. Yeah, but the debt to GDP in 1988 was only 30%. So we just have a lot less drive out of it. I have a lot to work to do. We've got a lot to work to do.
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But let me say this. Look, Chamath, I actually agree with what you're saying in this sense. OK, if you look at my simple chart of federal tax receipts as percent of GDP, OK, the highest it's ever been in the history of the United States is 19.75% in 2000. We had the dot-com bubble.
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OK, that's the highest it's ever been. And we had periods of high tax rates and low tax rates. It never went above 20%. So the simple math here is you do a forecast of what do you think GDP is going to be over the next year? You get independent economists to do it. And you say the federal government can't spend more than 20% of GDP because we've never extracted that we've never figured out a way to extract it.
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It's perfect. More than 20%. Your logic is perfect. Out of the economy. The logic is perfect there. Your aggression is so. It's very important because what your aggression says is we're actually spending a lot of energy fighting over two to three hundred basis points at any given time.
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Right. And what we should be focusing on is more important. Why are we doing that? Why are we spending so much time getting our pennies in a bunch over two to three hundred basis points? We need to stop wars, increase our education system, stop the wars.
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By the way, and inspire people to start companies and make it easy to start companies. The BIL, the IRA, and the CHIPSAC, all three. The biggest components in all three bills, this is Biden's signature legislation, is creating energy independence for America, which will have an enormous piece of it and you will not fight these stupid endless wars.
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Every single one of them goes back to oil, right? With the exception of. Always about resources. What has it never been about resources in modern history? Well, and now it's going to be CHIPS is the modern resource.
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In video shares jumped as much as 30% after reporting huge revenue guidance due to AI demand. Q1 revenue, 7.2 BIL, up 19%. Quarter over quarter, not year over year. Quarter over quarter. Revenue beat analysts estimates by more than 600 million for people.
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No, Nvidia is working on GPUs as opposed to CPUs, the graphic processing units. That are being leveraged in AI. There is a massive cycle going on. There's a line out the door to buy these when you see Twitter going into AI, Facebook, Google, and obviously Microsoft. All the cloud infrastructure is moving from CPU to GPU.
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Yes, Freiber? Well, I mean, I was talking with the CEO and CFO of a major data center rate and they shared with me that they were seeing more demand in the last couple of months than they've seen in the prior 10 years. Almost all of that data center build up demand.
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So they'll build data centers for software companies, for Internet companies. It's coming from GPU racks. These GPU racks are much more energy intensive, much more costly, but it's a pretty significant shift underway that businesses that historically didn't even operate their own data centers are now building out their own data centers, have their own training systems to have their own infrastructure to be able to run AI applications and tools. So it's a pretty significant shift underway.
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All of the growth that Nvidia is projecting and highlighted in this earnings report yesterday is coming from their data center line of products. And it's a pretty significant, I mean, I don't know, people have said they've never seen a beep like this or never seen enough a guidance update like this of the scale where I think the street was looking for maybe a $7 billion guide and on revenue for this and they came out and said they're going to guide to $11 billion next quarter, which is just an insane bump for a 90 day outlook.
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I was told from one of their major customers that they had to bag. He's in bag for thousands of GPUs and like the lobbying effort said there's a line around the corner to buy these and you need only use chat, APT or any stable diffusion, et cetera. And you see how long it takes to do a generative AI to use these products. It's like we're back to dial up modem, sacks. We're literally we're waiting for a computer to give us an answer.
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Since the last time that happened that we had to sit there and wait for it to do its job. And I think this is the great renewal for America, another amazing American company. It's only three decades old. It's best years, it's best decades are in front of it, obviously. This is going to be a massive boon for not only Nvidia, but for America or I say, say America. Yeah. Nvidia has basically joined the trillion dollar club now in terms of more hiccup companies.
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It's really amazing. I mean, I'm kind of kicking myself because this was the easiest by ever. That GPT launched on November 30th. We all saw that that immediately ushered in a whole new era in Silicon Valley. There's a ton of VC funding that's poured into AI startups. They all need to train models and those models need to use GPUs. So we all saw this coming and I'm kind of annoyed with myself.
Paragraph 10:
Let me ask you a question. So you say that you kicked yourself obviously the general statement that AI is coming and Nvidia is going to be a beneficiary or Nvidia's products are going to see a boon make sense. But when you look at the valuation of the business, they are currently trading at 70 times the next 12 months evita.
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So how do you think about valuation even at a trillion dollar market cap, at a trillion dollar market cap, they're trading at 70 times next 12 months evita. This seems like they're doubling revenue every six months though, dude. They're doubling revenue.
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I have a big question here. How high does it go? Because at a trillion dollars, what's the right EBITDA level for a business to be worth a trillion dollars? What's the number? And then the question is if it's a hundred billion, how many years does it take them to grow into that and are you really paying the right price or are you paying a premium to get?
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It's a momentum stock man. And we'll be determined if they have competition.
这是一只动能股票。如果它们有竞争对手,我们将会做出决策。
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So is there competition for this company? Chim off you think there's a competitor that will emerge?
那么这家公司是否面临竞争?您认为会出现竞争对手吗?
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Yeah, I mean it's important to understand what a GPU is maybe. So Intel had the run of the place for the first 40 years of compute because it turned out that most of the things that we used it for, Excel, Microsoft Word, a browser operated well on a CPU, which essentially think about it as like a factory that takes in the first order and then puts it out first and first out.
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And the great thing about GPUs is that it can take multiple streams of work at the same time and work on them at the same time, right? So it's very parallel and it has this level of parallelism that makes it very well suited for AI applications.
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I think the thing to keep in mind is that it is a byproduct of a GPU that tries to also do other things. And so as a result of that, you're now seeing a lot of companies building their own silicon and most importantly, all the big tech companies now have some pretty well evolved efforts underway. A lot of these companies have figured out how to do custom ASICs that can do this massively parallel processing.
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And what you're now seeing is chips that are designed against specific models that are optimized for them. The other thing that you're also seeing is that some people are saying, well, you know what? For these massive models, actually, you should just run it all in memory. And so you're having folks that are doing it in massive arrays of FPGA's. That was Microsoft first attempt at all of this.
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So what is the point of me telling you this? I think that, again, we talked about this last week. The biggest cheerleaders of this first point of value creation has really been Wall Street and family offices that wanted to front run where the value creation was going to initially go. And they've been right, which is around chips.
Paragraph 5:
But there was a tweet and Nick, I posted it. Maybe you can throw it up here that shows that if you compare this to the mobile internet, there's always this phased approach in terms of value creation where, let's just say, actually in a new market, mobile a decade ago in AI today, the first dollar of profits tends to go to the chip companies.
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That makes a lot of sense, right? Because they're the ones that are in the bowels of making the elemental capabilities possible. And then you transition that value. And what free bricks as is people realize, hey, hold on, the profit dollars are not going to accrue there because again, this beautiful principle of capitalism is that you can only over earn for a certain amount of time because then competitors emerge and say, hold on, I want to steal those profit dollars from you and take them for myself. So margins compress, right?
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So in the end, Nvidia's gains today will be then spread across Nvidia, Facebook will have their own chip, Amazon will have their own chip, Google already does. Apple will have their own chip. All the memory companies will be in this space, right? So then the profits get smeared there, multiples compress.
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One word is the value grow to the device companies in the mobile internet. Here, I think we still have to debate what is a device company in the world of AI. But the most important thing I think to remember is that where the real value gets accrued is five, six, seven years later when the software and services companies show up and create a huge moat. And those are the Googles and the Facebooks and the apples of the world.
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And so it's a really dynamic moment. I think it's wonderful for Nvidia, it's an amazing story for Jensen who's been really at this game for a very long time. By the way, there's a Jensen has a law of his own that is a sort of companion to Moore's law called Wang's law named after himself, which you can read about, which just talks about the variability of the compute capabilities of GPUs versus CPUs. So if you want to know that, he should get some credit for that.
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But I think it's great. I think we're in the amount of one. Apple is also making their own GPUs. Here at the M2, that has GPUs in it. So you're absolutely correct. We're in the one.
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So we're going to have a few quarters for sure of this hype. And then the smart money will probably figure out where the next lily pad is. And then they'll go to the next.
因此,我们肯定会有一些季度充满热情。然后明智的投资者可能会找到下一个“荷叶”,再去下一个。
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Beautifully said. Beautifully said. Any other thoughts? Free break if we wrap that up on that.
说得非常好,说得非常好。还有其他想法吗?如果我们在此结束,可以免费休息一下。
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I wanted to show this AI demo from Adobe Photoshop every week or so. We see something that's insane. Incredible.
我想每周都展示一下Adobe Photoshop的AI演示。我们会看到一些疯狂的、不可思议的东西。
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And this one was we shared in the group chat. But for those. And we'll keep put this out. Shout out to Belzky. Yeah. So what we see here, if you're listening, is taking a Photoshop, creating an area. And then instead of like cutting and pasting it or refining it, you're putting in a text prompt and saying, oh, but expand the and make this widescreen.
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Or let me grab this deer out of a forest and then put it on a wet alley at night. And then let me highlight this wall over here and put a sign and put a red arrow sign. And it just generates it. And it's doing this. They made specific note when they launched this that all of this is done with stock photography. They have the complete license to so they can monetize this without getting sued like Microsoft is currently being sued.
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And Microsoft actually in addition to the GitHub lawsuit. This turns out Twitter sent a letter over to Microsoft as well.
微软不仅收到了GitHub的诉讼,Twitter也给了微软一封信。
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So incredible demo. The producers here at all in as our production team grows producer Brian made a little video here.
这个演示非常令人难以置信。随着我们的制作团队不断壮大,制片人布莱恩拍了一个小视频。
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Here's Chimoff in before the Lorepianides. That's Tom Ford. Yeah. That's Tom Ford. This is when there are terrible. The hair is terrible. You look tired. The watch. Watch. No, I don't know.
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I played poker. Literally I walked into that to that Cmbc. Oh my god. Really? You went straight from the poker table to the brutal to the squawk. How's that brutal? Well, I was in wait. No tie. But he's wearing a tie. He's a Tom Ford. Yeah.
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He said to you. He said, Chimoff, try this without the without a tie. Is it okay? Oh, you were talking to Tom Ford. Great. What a flex. You know, Tom Ford is not twice in my life. I can tell you both stories. Okay.
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Hold on a second. Yeah, I add, make a yellow sweater as the prompt here. Let's see if he goes to Bert from Ernie to Bert.
等一下。嗯,我打算用黄色毛衣作为提示。让我们看看他是否从厄尼转到伯特。
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There he is. Sri Lankan Bert as we call him in the poker group. Yeah, it doesn't quite get the borders right. That looks terribly. It looks like a worries, Jersey.
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Oh, there you go. Right. Pretty bad. Yeah. Yeah. Change my hair. Change my hair. Can we change his hair? Can we have the hair be less in sync? Less Hassan Manage and more. I understand why they call you a Z's on sorry. I think you had the hair go in there. The hair. Yeah, it's a lot of lift. Is that a buddy? What is that? Is it a buddy? This is like eight years ago. Is it what are you using clay or putty? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a stiff, it's like a stiff hair wax. I think it's how the hair wax. I've got it. Yeah. I've come such a long way since now. Much more style. Much more style.
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I mean, look at Sacks as crazy hair as we probably did in the cold open.
我的意思是,就像我们在冷启动阶段看到萨克斯头发很疯狂一样。
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I thought on the Adobe thing for what it's worth is like, I mean, do they want a mulligan on this $20 billion Figma thing or do they get to see the ongoing revenues that Figma's generating?
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I mean, you can be sure they're the moving to Lena con all kinds of stuff. It's a different product though. I mean, the AI stuff certainly has had an impact, but I mean, so much of the benefit of Figma is its web base, its collaborative.
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It's like people kind of use it online to make stuff together. It's a little different than the other tools that they offered today.
这就像人们在网上一起创造内容。它和现今提供的其他工具有些不同。
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So you don't think it from September to now, like, nothing changes. They should just close this thing at $20 billion or they're half they're half pay. Do you think that they should pay a billion, break it up and then redo the deal at 10 and then it cost 11. They say nine.
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Remember, not all breakup fees mean that you can break up for any reason. So there's only, there's limited outs on what you can pay a breakup fee to get out of it, one of which could be antitrust or regulatory. But otherwise you may be forced to close in court if you don't have a valid reason for terminating the deal.
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Their only hope is to get Lena con to muck it up. Yeah, some leaks coming out. Timoth is your argument more that they bought Figma top of market pricing, which no longer makes sense or is your argument that they're innovating so well that they don't need it?
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I think it's a little bit of both, but it's more that I think this generative AI stuff allows you to refresh. I tweeted this out so Nick, maybe you can put it up there. But I think the first thing is that your feature set can catch up pretty quickly. So even if you set out a team and said just copy exactly what Figma has with a copilot enabling 50 engineers, that's like 500 engineers cranking on something. I would be surprised if they couldn't just replicate the product end to end. That's the first thing. Then the second thing is I think that you've seen VC funding basically crawl to a halt. And so the question there is how many of those companies are just going to stop spending because they're just not going to exist. And then the third thing is if we're sort of hashtag austerity, people are going to look at everything they're spending money on and try to be really disciplined about it.
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If you roll all those things together, SACs, my thought is maybe the deal still makes sense, but does it make sense at 20 billion and does it then just create a whole suite of shareholder lawsuits after the fact that are just going to say these three things and regurgitate them at nauseam? That's the curiosity I had.
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Well, so we're here. Let's talk a little bit about the state of Silicon Valley, SACs. We were talking offline after the show last week. You've slowed down investment at your firm craft. You're being thoughtful. You're working on the existing portfolios.
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How would you describe your activity so far in the first half of 2023 as a firm if you're so willing to share that?
如果您愿意分享的话,您目前的公司在2023年上半年的活动如何描述?
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My take on what's happening in Silicon Valley right now or tech more generally is it's a tale of two cities. It's the best of times for AI startups and the worst of times for everybody else.
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The AI startups, there's a lot of interesting things happening there and money is being pushed up them by VCs. It's very frothy, arguably bubbly, but then at the same time, if you're a pre-AI company, maybe the one that raised a lot of money and a big valuation in 2020 or 2021, it's a pretty tough time.
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I don't know of any startup, especially like later stage startups who are hitting their numbers. The one is reforcasting down. Everyone's missing. I think that speaks to the larger economy is not doing that well.
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I think the economists a year from now may say that their recession had already begun. It certainly feels like that. That's what Drucks said at the SON conference.
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I think that startups are absolutely seeing that in their sales right now. Sales are slipping, it's taking longer, buyers are sharpening their pencils. It's a really tough environment, I think, for software startups that are actually trying to make sales.
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AI startups are a little bit exempt for that because people are still investing based on the dream, not based on the metrics.
人们仍在根据梦想而非数据进行投资,因此人工智能初创公司在一定程度上是豁免的。
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I would say that we're very interested in AI and we're starting to make some investments, but we also like to invest based on metrics, not just on a dream. We're being somewhat cautious about how we approach it.
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You make a small seed bat in somebody who has a dream, if I can translate here, but if you're going to make a bigger bat, a series A, a series B, you're going to want to see some numbers on the board.
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You're going to want to see some product in more things. I think that's a really good way of putting it because I think the standards change at each round.
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And at the seed stage, you can absolutely just make a bat based on the dream or just based on a founder. Great founder going after the AI space idea still a little bit to be flushed out, you can make that bat. 500K, 750K. Yeah. Bigger. Or even like 3 million will do as a big seed round.
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Every time you get to series B or series C, we want to see like all the standard metrics. We want to see net dollar retention, expansion, all that kind of stuff.
每次你达到B轮或C轮时,我们希望看到所有标准指标。我们想看到净美元保留率、扩张率等等这些东西。
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It's really hard for the later stage startups because they raised and this is the lesson. If you're raising a 3, 4, 500 million sacks, curriculum if I'm wrong here, you're not, you have to build into that valuation.
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And let's face it, that valuation A was never realistic. It was overpriced. And then B, you got the headwinds and your customer is saying, oh, you want 40,000 a year for this SaaS product, we'll give you 12.
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And what position are you in to turn down the 12? You got to take the 12. You got three competitors who are going to roll up and take the 12. So it's hard.
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Actually, can I give you an update? Please. Remember I mentioned there was a startup in my portfolio, actually my angel portfolio. Yes. That was to be made a play around the cram down.
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And I think it's absolutely tragic because of what I learned, which is the founders got cram down to because a year ago they brought in a professional CEO. And I think as a result of this, they're probably going to get nothing for 10 years at work, whereas if they had just cut costs.
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Damn it. And you know, the company has 32 million of ARR. So imagine if they cut their own backs to a million a month, they could have run 20 million dollars of EBITDA, pivot to the private equity model, sell that company for 150 million, half would have gone to pay off the investors and the other half would have gone to the common they probably would have made $10 million each.
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And now they're going to get zero because they burnt too much money, didn't want to cut costs. They bought into the dream of bringing in the professional CEO is going to re-excellerate growth to never down out, never does. And so it's like so frustrating to me because I like feel so bad for these founders. I wish they had called me a year ago.
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Because listen, yes. And here's the thing is if you're only growing 10, 15, 20% or even 50% of the year, you're not a VC backable startup. You are a private equity play. So you got to pivot to that model of making your business work as a casual positive business. That's how you're going to get an exit.
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And if you're growing 100% plus a year, you can continue to be VC back. So it's so important for founders to understand whether they're even eligible for venture capital anymore.
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And if they're not, you have to make a different kind of model work if you want to see a return. Yeah. And when this happens to cram down around, those founders, if they want a refresh, they have to prove their worth. They're not just going to get a refresh to keep the relationship going. This is $30 million in revenue. They don't need the founders anymore. Look, these guys have been working for 10 years. So even if they got a refresh, they have to put in four more years of work. And the other thing is this cram down around, I think was way too big. They raised 25 million with a 3x lick breath. So a lick breath. 75 million off the top. Off the top. They got to repay back. The big is triple. Yep. Oh my God.
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This is where board governance is so important. Chimapa, huh? Like, I mean, who is on the board of these companies? We don't know. I was on the board. I was on the board. I was on the board of these companies. These are people who have never had to build a company. And they may be educated or they may have been an executive company. And then some VC who was feverishly raising funds just hired some dope, put them on the board of this company. And then just the stupidity compounds and trickles down. It's so frustrating. Compounding stupidity. This is the beginning of the beginning. All of these people who have zero judgment are going to fuck so many companies up. It is the beginning of the beginning.
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And well, Chimapa, it's not just the bad board members. It's the view for so many years that who you put on your board didn't matter. And remember, there was all these VCs who had a model where it's like, well, we don't take a board seat. And they were selling that to founders as a positive as a feature as a feature, not a bug. And the reality is for a lot of VCs actually not being on the board probably is the best they can offer. But you know, that model works. That model works when everything is up and to the right where like this model of boardsies don't matter. Governance doesn't matter. That is a model in a boom where everything just keeps going up and to the right. But when you add a tough time, that is when you need a board member who's seen this movie before, who knows what a cram down round is, who knows what's going to happen to you at your hands when you get screwed into taking a three-hit story. You want the gray hair pilot. You know, in the right seat to say, hey, listen, we're going to get to some, you want that hair. You want that sex here.
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Alright, Freeberg, you are always candid about your own journey. You've had huge wins, climate.com for a belly racing funds. But you know, sometimes things don't work out. What do you, what's your take on some of these hard lessons of great ideas, you know, spun up during this really hard market?
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I mean, I think just to echo the point you guys are making in the last 15 years, we've been in a call it structurally inflated environment because of the zero interest rate policy since the O8 financial crisis. And everything's been up into the right or so much. It's been so easy to kind of inflate things, fill up hot air balloons and go up into the right. And unfortunately, most folks who are working in the investor community that are sitting on boards weren't around for the dot-con crash the last time this happened. And I think, you know, just to kind of echo your point, why it's so challenging, I think, right now to figure out a way out.
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There are, there's a lot of failure going on in Silicon Valley right now. You know, Sachs, you talk a little bit about having paths for exit and options for SaaS companies. But there are many sectors in startup land that don't have those sorts of options in biotech, in symbiot, in FinTech, in direct to consumer e-commerce. There's a lot of markets that, and a lot of types of businesses that feel like there isn't a great way out. And it's having a deep psychological poll on entrepreneurs, on founders, on CEOs, and everyone is experiencing some degree of failure in this environment.
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There are very few folks who aren't feeling the secute pressure and the secute pain. You know, I heard some pretty horrific stories this week from a friend of mine and someone who ended up in the hospital because of the pressure he was under. And it's really trying. And you know, even within our friend group, I mean, not our direct friend group within our broader community of investor friends, there are very few people who aren't feeling this extraordinary pressure that they've got a book that is declining in value and they don't know how to get out of the hole. And you know, that pressure is like, is, generates deep questions about one's ability and generates deep existential thought for entrepreneurs and investors about what the hell am I good at? And no one's really talking about this out loud, but it is happening across the valley.
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We all have these thoughts. We all have these dialogues as the failure begins to set in in the slow motion, train wreck of a market that we've all been talking about for weeks and months. How do you deal with it? Look, I mean, I just think that number one, it's worth acknowledging and it's worth having the conversation that no one is alone going through this pain.
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It is not a one off that these companies are failing. It is that we are all dealing with failure right now. And we are all trying to figure out what is the best path forward. And it is the kind of thing that you just have to work your way through and you have to persist through this pain.
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But this existential question of am I good enough? Do I have the skill set I thought I had? Am I just an idiot? Did I blow it up? I have never had no clones, all the kind of interfere and turmoil that everyone is dealing with.
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You are not alone going through it. A lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of investors are in the exact same place. Now with respect to going forward, I think having integrity with respect to how you handle these situations and having thoughtfulness about your reputation because this is not a one and done environment here in Silicon Valley.
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Failure is part of the process. And how you deal with people, deal with investors, deal with entrepreneurs, deal with each other, deal with your employees during these difficult times says a lot about your character and your ability. When you do this the next time, it will set you up for success.
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And as any great athlete will tell you, you build muscle during the times that you are failing and then you are ready to go and execute the next time around. So let's save it for the next quarter. But let's play well as best we can right now through this quarter. Richemoth, clearly you want to jump in here.
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What are your thoughts on separating your identity from your startup, from your work and having a more balanced view of yourself so that when things go wrong, maybe you're not as devastated and don't wind up in a hospital bed.
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When things go wrong, they go wrong in bunches. Just like when things go right, they tend to go right in bunches. I called Free Bird last week and I was telling him a story about two or three of my businesses just all just pounding, eating dirt. And what I said to him was and then we have a mutual investment that's doing pretty well.
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And I needed to use the one that was doing well to make myself feel better about the three-fever eating dirt. And I said to him something to the effect of it's just like nothing is working. I feel like literally nothing is working. It's tough place to be. The only thing that you can do in those moments is just realize it would be so much worse to just be on the sidelines.
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Oh, I like it. And I think that's all you can do. Then you go and hang out with your friends, go hang out with your family, kiss your wife, have as good of a time as possible outside the context of work and then you just start with the grind again. But we are in a moment where in most companies there is something pretty wrong. It's either your burn product, your customers team, and riff, and by the way, that's always the problem. But it tends to be balanced by a few things in your portfolio that are always going well so that as an investor you can maintain some equanimity through the whole process.
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But Freeberg is right when there aren't enough of these positives and there's just a parade of terrible. You're just like, wow, this whole portfolio is it all about to fail? And then I get a massive wave of imposter syndrome of like, what am I doing here? And then I have to recognize holy shit. This is my 24th year. Take a deep breath.
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And it's great that it's exhilarating where I think it's back to 2000 and I just immigrated here. That's the conversation to Martha and I had. It's beautiful talking about like a string of difficult things we were all dealing with. A couple of weeks ago we announced that we returned all the money to all our customers at Cana, which was this molecular beverage printer company I've been working on for a few years.
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I plowed north of $30 million of our capital into building this business. We had two term sheets last year, both of which vaporized as the markets that degraded. It was really a brutal experience for me and these were very high valuations and we were, we needed funding to get the production line stood up to manufacture that device. So we were that close. I'm in.
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And as the market went south, pre-revenue hardware companies became less fundable and despite our reputation and a great working product and a manufacturing ready prototype, we couldn't get it done. It was a really kind of brutal experience to go through the nose. Even after you've had a lot of success in your life, believe it or not, you still get a lot of friggin' nose and you get a lot of, I don't believe you. And then to just have to get to a point with this one was really difficult and there's been other kind of frustrating experiences of late.
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And then you kind of have a call one day with another investment and you're like, oh my God, this thing could be a home run. And that just comes out of nowhere. And as long as we kind of stay in it as an investor and you keep it as a builder and you kind of keep building, you don't know when that good knock on the door is going to come. Yep. You got to stay in the game. You got to stay in the game. And one day you just nail a sale that you just weren't expecting or a partnership or an M&A inbound or something that happens that you weren't expecting. It pays for all the pain and all the loss and all the turmoil and all the downside.
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I always used to tell people, for every four days I'd be failing. I'd have one day of success. But that one day of success would get me slightly ahead of where I was at the start of the week. But 80% of it was failing. I mean, right now it's like 19 days of failure and one day of success. But that one day of success, the goal is you used to have a couple of those punctuated moments that are big enough that make up for all this stuff. If you just keep it, if you just keep grinding and if you just keep grinding as an entrepreneur, you keep grinding as an investor and stay in the game.
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Living with the power, etc. You're describing living with the power, though. There's a very relatable poker analogy in this. There's a guy that makes poker content. His name is Jonathan Little. He's great. He'll be up to Angel Simon. He's wonderful. I've been thinking about hopping into one tournament at the WSOP this year. It's one of the big buying tournaments, so I'm like, let me just take a little tournament refresher. I was just looking for any content and I found his and he had this beautiful slide, which he said, if you are a mid-level poker player, you should expect to final table everyone in 100 tournaments, roughly. I thought about that for a second and I was like, that's a 1% success rate. If that is your 99th tournament, you have to be pretty resilient to go through 98 losses where you don't cash.
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You don't make the money and you're just putting money out. You're deep in a j-curve and you're like, is this ever going to work out for me? It's a really, really good reminder that it is the grind. I thought that was really interesting. You had a single or double, I guess, with Collin, maybe you could talk a little bit about that experience and what decision you made there.
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We were obviously investors, so we're a bit conflicted. I'd love to hear your candid thoughts on why you decided to sell. We put together a great team and they built an amazing product. I think it's by far the best social audio product and then they actually added video to it as well and podcasting features. It's the synthesis of video and audio podcasting with social audio. We got acquired by Rumble.
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It's a base hit type acquisition. It's a small deal, relatively speaking, but the team wanted to do it and the main reason is because we got to hundreds of thousands of users, but in the consumer space, you really need to get to millions. Frankly, tens of millions is what it takes to have a successful consumer product. Rumble does have tens of millions of users. The team wanted to find a home and there's a lot of synergy with Rumble. If companies have a mission that's aligned around free speech, Rumble is sort of the free speech alternative to YouTube. It's a video platform.
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What Colin will do is give Rumble studio capabilities. It'll be very synergistic for all the creators to be able to create content and call and then post it in Rumble. It's not a huge outcome for anyone. It's sort of a push for the investors, depending on where Rumble stock ends up. Look, you can build a really great product and a great team, but unless you hit, that lighting in a bottle of distribution, you won't get to the next level. I'm happy about the deal. I think the team's happy about the deal and it's a good outcome for everybody involved, but it's not a home run. It's more of a base head and that's what most things are.
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Getting used to a high failure rate and living inside the power law, where one investment out of 30 or 40 or 50 results in 90% of your funds returns for that specific fund or maybe two wins, represent 95%. That's a hard thing for the human brain to handle, as is, the J-curve, as Trimoth points out correctly.
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Man, you invest for two or three years and then you watch that all those things go down in value for two or three years. The value, I'm sure, of the portfolio go down for two or three years before it actually rebounds and goes back up.
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I remember, man, I had a run where everything I touched turned to gold and then Mahalo hit 10 million in revenue and then, boom, Panned Update. It just goes up and smoking. You're like, what just happened? I saw web logs 18 months after starting it. I had the Silicon Valley report. I just Uber investment. Everything I touched went to the moon. That's working. Yeah.
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And then it's just a very frustrating experience where you can't make something work and you know, like, I should be able to make this work. Why isn't it working? There's a very heavy blanket of humility setting over Silicon Valley right now. And I think all of us who have had springs of successes and repeat successes and things that we touch have worked and we do all the same things and we do the right things and we do them the same way in the right way.
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It doesn't work and then it doesn't work again and then it doesn't work again. It creates a very different psyche, whether you're an entrepreneur building a business or an investor investing in businesses that what used to be the case isn't the case anymore is the tides have shifted.
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It's a daunting challenge to work your way psychologically through this moment. But progress doesn't change. Innovation isn't going to stop. It's not going to keep shifting forward and the opportunities to continue to build and innovate are not going away.
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So I for one and deeply optimistic and excited about what the future holds. But man, you got to put your freaking game face on right now to get through this. Yeah, for sure.
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Well, yeah, and I would say there's one other exogenous variable here, which is I don't think any of us realized how much our sentiment was affected by one guy's decision at the Fed. Yeah. Yeah, because you know what, when there's a lot of money in the system, everyone feels great. Totally. And all the portfolios look great. And when the money is being sucked out of the system.
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The buyers are buying. Oh my God. Like when the money is being sucked out of the system, everyone's results look terrible. Yeah. It's, you know, it's like before a tsunami, the big wave gets pulled out and then this tsunami comes in. Yeah. The money is being sucked out of the system like the tie before a tsunami and the tsunami is going to be all the failures and bankruptcies. But what I would say is just in the same way that things weren't as good as they appear to be during the asset bubble, they're probably not as bad as they appear to be.
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Now, however, you have to give yourself time to get through this. Yeah. So call it a recessionary cycle. And it's so frustrating to me when founders don't want to cut their burden. The burn is the one thing they totally control.
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And they have all these excuses for why they can't cut to an earlier level spending that they were, the company was working fine at. And we can't get them to go back to cut back to some earlier state of being. So I've just like, if Zuckerberg can do it, they can do it.
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And you know, after seeing what Elon did at Twitter where he reduced the staff by 80%. I'm like, I realize there's no good excuse anymore. Yep. For not giving yourself the maximum chance of survival. And if you over cut, like he admits he probably did. He literally in the day, Farber, great interview he did with him. He said, you know, like we probably over cut, we cut people who were great. And we hopefully can welcome them back to Twitter as we get this thing on stable footing.
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But we're going to make mistakes because we had an existential crisis. Elon Musk cut too many people, admits it and says he's going to bring them back. It's no fault of theirs. And he said he's going back into growth mode. So, you know, like sometimes you cut, you might cut too deep is the point. And you know, that's set you up for growth. And if you had some of you had some of you in bed.
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I have two shout outs. Okay. Here we go. The first is to one of our besties. Got a tax from Jason Koon. He bink the main event at the Triton for $2.5 million. Yeah. Being credible. I mean, he's so strong. He's a guy's a beast. So, I like Koon. It's so great to have a professional poker player in our circle. Finally, like somebody who's great guy.
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He's just totally over time. And we can learn from him. Yeah. But he's so open and he teaches us open just to be around him, you know, rational, emotionally stable, rational, humble, humble, professional poker player. Like happens to basically be the best poker player in the world. But you could you would never know it. You would never know he never bring it up. Like he is literally the greatest. And he won the Triton 2.5 million.
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Yeah. The second shout out is to the model Y team at Tesla. I have been a die hard model X user from the beginning. Right. I think I had number 13. So I've been I've had three or four of these things. And I was like, wait a minute. Maybe this Y is really all it's cracked up to be. And I'm a bit of a curmudgeon and I have high expectations, but I just want to say that car kicks absolute ass. It is perfect. Incredible. It is incredible. That model Y for going to be the best selling car.
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It's going to be the best selling car in America. If you get the base level, it's actually cheaper than the average car in America now with incentives. It's so, so good. So huge shout out to the model Y team at Tesla. You guys nailed it. Yeah. It might be a reliable product. And we I love it.
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I don't want to diminish the X. I don't want to diminish the price of the car. But the Y is so sustainable. It's incredible. It's the best car ever made. It is. It is the best. Yeah. It's a great car. It's a great, great car.
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It's a great car. I can't wait for the cyber truck. That thing looks like a beast. I can't wait to take that up a top roadster. I love the roadster. You know, I've been taking my 12 year old roadster out and my kids love going for ice cream in the original roadster 1.07. I've been taking it out every weekend or two or two. Any number one? You have number 16 of the roadster, which somebody offered me $4 million for. I paid $164. I have number one of the Model S signature series.
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So I have signature 16 of roadster. They did 100 signatures and they did a thousand signatures of the Model S. And I have number one of that and somebody offered me a million dollars for that. I have number of the founders edition number 13 of the X. Yeah. That's pretty special. Yeah. It's a special vehicle.
我拥有一辆 Roadster 的 16 号签名版,他们制作了 100 辆签名版 Roadster 和 1000 辆签名版 Model S。我的 Model S 有 number one 的签名版,有人给了我一百万美元。我还有 Model X 的创始版号码 13,这个车很特别。
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All right. Listen, everybody. All in Summit is basically so how are we doing? How is the all in Summit doing guys? We're starting to do our outreach and figure out speakers. Yes. Yes. So, it's exciting.
好的,听着,大家。 All in Summit 的基本情况是怎么样的?大家 All in Summit 进展得如何?我们开始进行外联,选择演讲者。是的,是的,这很令人兴奋。
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All right, everybody. Four. The Sultan of science, the dictator and Steve Bannon 2.0 David Sacks, the architect, the architect. The architect. I like that. I remain. I remain. The world's greatest moderator. So excited for this weekend, boys.
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See you tomorrow at the Tarmac on the Tarmac. Bye-bye. Love you, bye. We're like your winners, ride. Brain man, David Sacks. I'm going on a beach. And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, S.
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I squeed a kid. I'm going on a beach. What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? That's fine. That's fine. Mesty is our goal. Go through it. That's my dog taking it. Let's hear it. I'm going on. Get out of my house.
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We just have one big huge orange. Because we're all just like this like sexual tension. We just need to release that thing. What? Your aunt B. What? Your aunt B? B. What? We need to get乙. Mesty is our aunt. I'm going to leave I'm going to leave.