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Jake out, do you have intros today? No, I don't have time for intros. Oh, come on. All right, fine. He started as a nerd with no followers on Twitter. Now he's a nerd that gets recognized when leaving the shitter. He turned water into wine, he just was to please us. Now he's a mixture of Kermit DeFrog and a science nerd Jesus. He's the man with the stands, the queen of Kinoa, the Sultan of science, the Prince of Prozac, the Lord of Lexapro. He gets stops for selfies all over town. My producer fee gave him a mental breakdown. And the Sultan of Zolof, Mr. David Brewerk. It's true, it didn't give me a breakdown. It's true. But you're over it now. You just named dropped three SSRIs and that intros incredible. Well, I talked to his psychiatrist. He said he's working on the cocktail. Yeah, save some for me. Oh, you're speaking of you. He's got a very quick wit and impeccable grammar. Known for building beautiful products that don't work. Oh, my God. Like Colin and Yammer, he used to invest in SaaS quite a lot. And now he's fighting a brigade of Ukraine bots. He's spending so much time in his bunker. It's starting to get smelly. We see him only three times a week, all in Tucker and Megan Kelly. He'd invest in your startup if you had the knack. But right now he needs that cash for his GOP Super PAC. The world's biggest asset. The rainman himself, Mr. David Sacks. That's all. That's a repeat joke. That's not. I know, but it kills every time. So I'm going to keep repeating it until you stop laughing. His wardrobe costs so much he can't get into a scuffle. He bought all his friends with his white truffles. He scaled Facebook to a billy, that wine collection. It's just fucking silly. He's on the world tour meeting with princes and kings. Is he talking luxury sweaters or maybe bigger things? The dictator himself, Chimoff Polly, Hapatia. That was really nice, actually. Wow. I mean, I appreciate that. You were obviously trying to get invited to dinner tonight. I'm trying to get off the alternate list. Allotted list. He's trying to get off the alternate. The email was harsh, nine was alternate. You were trying to. I know I have a seat. As for me, I'm the world's greatest moderator who can't take a note. Compared to these guys, I'm just a millionaire who's broke. The all-in summit almost killed us. But we came back from Deaths Door. I knew we peaked when Freeberg took over the dance floor. We love the fans, but we love each other more. Thanks for the first 100 fellas. Here's to 100 more. Really good. Wow. That's really, really good. Look at you touching an ice cream. I've only came prepared today. First time. He fought after 100 episodes. He finally figured out he has to prepare. So good. That was the note. Just prepare. Do your job. Do your job. Do your job. Do your job. Do your unremutuated job. Do your job. Speaking of unremutuated, we heard that somebody's grifting off the pod. Oh, yeah. So good point. What we heard, Zach, is that you got a big care package from Montclair. Yeah, that's true. What? What I think we're all going to declare today is that we all want to wet our beak. And if Montclair sends each of us a care package, we will all wear Montclair gear at episode 100. Montclair's my brand. Go go your own brand. Yeah, we decided to... Yeah. Chemosca, Laura Piano, I got Montclair. You go get like, you know, Izzod or something. I don't know. Izzod. Izzod. Actually, I got Izzod too. You have to do... I got a unicorn. I got a unicorn. We got gap kids for J-Cal. Zach, you didn't declare your Montclair gift package by the way. No, I get... That was the discovery we made this weekend. So I want to thank the folks at... There's a company called F***. And they sent me this... Actually, this hoodie, this Montclair hoodie, which I never seen before. Wait, what is this plug? They sent you a hoodie for $1,200 and they get a... I know, you're doing commercial ads. There were several other things that I'll bring you guys each of a shirt from Montclair. Oh, I get the key. Sure. Yeah, you got that too for five. These guys are getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. I'm so excited to hear that. We got a shirt. How bad is your portfolio that you're grifting? Did you put this Montclair stuff onto like eBay after you got it? I was already wearing it. They sent me more. So I'm gonna wear this hoodie. It's pretty cool. What can I say? I'm not gonna wear this too. I'm not gonna... It's three cents and all of a sudden you're grifting. I... Just for everyone listening, I'm looking for a wardrobe. Two cents? Okay, just send my package to a... Let me tell you something. There's no upgrade. I'm gonna be part of it. I think you're fucked. No, I'm gonna bring you guys Montclair shirts to the poker game tonight. Gee, thanks, Zach. Appreciate that. How did you guys even find out that he got this gift? We're at his flea week party and there was a Blue Angels party and there was someone there who started telling me like, did you hear that Zach got this whole thing from Montclair? There's a rat? There was a rat. I'm not telling you there's a rat. He's got a mole. He's got a mole. We were talking about the podcast. We were talking about the site's hat. 100% it was wool away, 100%. No, no, it wasn't wool away. No, 100%. Was it Jeff? I don't know what it was. One of my friends was in the man cave and he saw this like care package from Montclair and he really admired this like jacket. It was like a puffer jacket but with like wool sleeves or something. Oh, so you gave it to him? And I gave it to him. He liked it so much. You gave it to him. I'm like, you take care of him. You're not even on the pod. He's not even on the pod. Give it to producer Nick. So he was walking around with it and he was really appreciative. So maybe he said something or what? I can't believe it. The grip is crazy. Let's just say there was a lot of conversations going on about your care package, Sachs. Well, and it makes us wonder, Sachs. Are there other care packages that have come in and like, have you been promoting other stuff on here? So who makes the couch behind you? Some hot magazines that you wouldn't want to. How much of your Loro Piana have you actually paid for over the past year? That's 100% quite. 100% I would never, I would never accept it for free. Oh, it's important. Wait, no, all joking aside, it's hard if you're running a clothing business, especially if you're like a small niche provider of stuff. So you have a responsibility to pay for this stuff, not to grift and get it for free. No, I know. When I was at the Loro Piano store on 57th Street in Manhattan, the 18,000 square foot store, I was thinking the same thing. These poor people, how do they survive? Well, Loro Piana's on the Loro Piano store. 272 square foot rent. How many million have I would take a walk? How many hours, Friedberg, exploiting poor baby goats? Well, whatever. I mean, the fact is, the market's down. There's going to be a little grifting on the margins. It's understandable. Oh, you're like your winter's ride. Rainman David Sack. Oh, I know it. Oh, yeah. And it said we open sources to the fans and they've just got crazy with it. Love you guys. I'm queen of king. I'm going on the Loro Piano. Friedberg, he loves to produce every 17th episode. It does a great job. I know I like to prepare or at least know what the heck we're going to talk about when we get together. And you're sending prompts. He got these prompts because... He's not doing a job. Yeah. Sorry. Pretty sure. Oh, God. All right. So first up on Friedberg's curiousness. This is... Friedberg. This is how you're going to do it. Let's skip it. No, no. No, no, no. Okay. Go, go, go. Why do you think, Chimoff, people love the podcast? Why do you think they listen? Why do you think they love it? What is the phenomenon? What lightning has been captured in this bottle? First is I think that they appreciate our friendship. It's kind of like odd and quirky. And I think a lot of... It maps to relationships that they have amongst their own friends. So that's what makes it relatable. But the second is that all of us uniquely have a point of view about stuff that matters more and more in the world. I think that's just the basics of it. It's not like technology is going away and it's not like its impact in the world is going away. And the more it becomes mainstream, the more it's important for a lot of folks to understand what's happening. And I think we provide a pretty unfiltered view of it. And we do it where... And this is a lot of credit to Sachs, more than anyone else on this show, has to take a counterpoint and steal men, but would otherwise be controversial views. And if he didn't have his three friends around him, that would make the pod meaningfully worse, I think. But the fact that for people who don't know what steal manning is, what that means? Well, it just means like to inter-intellectual honesty around a point of view and actually put your best foot forward in trying to explain it even when it's not orthodox, even when it's not what the mainstream would say is right. And so what it actually does is it creates a contrast against every other alternative that you have to learn about things, which you find incrementally is biased. And I think that's what we've gotten right. We are four friends that have a reasonable point of view rooted in some amount of success. And I think that that's important because it gives us credibility. And we take all sides of issues. And oftentimes it is not the obvious, simple, reductive answer. And I think that that's where it really shines. Just for people to know about the steal man arguments, want to make sure people are covered. I think most people refer to it as the act of presenting the other argument in the strongest way possible to be intellectually honest. Like the opposite of the shron man. Yeah, the opposite of shron man. Because the way the debate happens on Twitter and so forth is it's almost like the intellectual debate is being attacked using opposition research tactics like a political campaign. So in other words, they go back through anything you might have said or written, take the thing that was most wrong or at least justifiable or the thing they can even just take out a context. And then they'll try to make it about that as opposed to the argument you're actually making. And we just see this tactic over and over again. And it's not an intellectually rigorous way of having a debate about something. You don't learn anything. And deep down inside, you know that it's contrived. And that is the inner nutshell. So it has, it almost in many ways has less to do with how good we are, but frankly, how bad all the alternatives are. So even if you wanted to learn about tech and you go up and you sign up for these newsletters, or if you look at some of these tech sites, they're really terrible. And they have done an increasingly terrible job over the last five years in telling the most important things, the truth and everything in between. And so if you can find a source for an hour or a week that is trying to tell you how basically the world is going to come together in a really integrated, multifaceted way, it's not like we're right. And it's not like we know better than other people. In fact, many times a lot of the criticism I get is how dare you talk about X or how dare you talk about Y because it makes people who are experts in that field, you know, feel like how dare you come into my realm and even have an opinion on, you know, what Russian politics was like in the 1980s. And those things really annoy these folks because they feel that those opinions in that knowledge should be cordoned off and held tightly as this secret that only they are allowed to talk about into the world. And this is the point where with the internet, all this knowledge is accessible. So the value of that knowledge in my opinion is the least it's ever been. It's the interpretation that's valuable and it's the ability to actually like think narratively around how all these things connect. And this is where I give a lot of credit. I think you guys do an incredible job. I think the way free Brook thinks is super unique. I think the way that sacks as things is unique. I think Jake, how your courage to basically fight back is very special. All of it together is a really unique recipe. It works. What you consistently is the number of people that listen to this of import and influence. I am constantly shocked. And if you are not sure of it, you need to get out of this stupid little echo chamber of Silicon Valley, go to New York, go around the world. And if you're in the right meetings, it's incredible how folks are getting educated using this pot. And I think that's really amazing. Yeah. I think there's like been a tendency in what we call media today, historically kind of communication amongst humans. It was very slow for a communication cycle to go from beginning to end to close because we had print and books and then telegraphs and then telephones and then television and radio. And the internet, I think, has really changed the cycle, the loop cycle to the point that a story iterates and proliferates very quickly. A lot of people talk about the new cycle being very short nowadays. And what that means is that there is a group think approach to resolving to a point of view on what the news is. So the news comes out. Everyone iterates on it. They form their point of view and all of a sudden everyone's on the same point of view. And so there is no room for dissent or debate or discussion because the cycle closes so quickly and everyone coalesces around the same point of view. And nowadays I think we see not just that unipolar behavior, but we see this bipolar behavior where everyone coalesces on their point of view and how their point of view is the opposite of the other side. And everyone has their own heuristic for what the other side is. There's this populism versus elitism siding. There's this red versus blue siding. There's this us versus them siding, US versus China siding, everything is now bipolar. And so you very quickly coalesce around what your poll says and what your poll is instructing you to believe. And that is what is fundamentally wrong with how the system is working today. And I think what people find refreshing about a discourse that doesn't succumb to that bipolarity as a standard is that it provides people the ability to have a real rational out of sync point of view that maybe changes one's point of view and changes one's mind in a meaningful way. And I think that's what's really missing today. And I think maybe sometimes we do a good job and we touch on that. And so that's what I would strive to do is to always try and avoid that bipolarity on everything. You know, the Zen Buddhists call it dualistic thinking. You know, the human brain and generally the universe seems to evolve into this kind of dualism on everything. And it's not really always the case that there are shades of gray that there is nuance, that there is a complex dimensionality to things that I think people really, if they take the time to understand, recognize that maybe it's not left and right, maybe it's not a latent populism, maybe it's not all black and white. And that's an important, hopefully framing that maybe we can bring to light through our diagnosis of what's going on in things right now. Yeah. I like that to that. I think there's a ton of great journalism going out there. We see it. There's a ton of great sub-stacks out there. People go deep. There's other great podcasts out there. And right now it's a tumultuous time for media journalism and getting information and do what's, what sources do we actually trust? Who actually is thinking in a crisp way and informing people and, you know, having been a former journalist. When we were journalists, we knew that we would get 10, 20, 30, 40 percent of a story. We would publish it and we would try our best. Journalism has changed dramatically in the last 20 years and I can tell you journalism is dead. Sorry. I'm sorry. There's still some great journalism occurring. It's on the margins. It's irrelevant and I'll tell you why because the facts are known instantaneously on Twitter and through the internet. We don't need people to relate facts. We need people to wrap facts in context and allow us to come to our own conclusions. That's why I think journalism isn't what it used to be. That's why people who are historically journalists struggle because now they actually have to create context and narrative and have an opinion. But when you publish that into the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, it becomes very confusing. They don't know that that's what they were supposed to do. That's not what they used to do. That's not how Pulitzer prizes were historically given out. And that's why everybody then, you know, Rancin Royals is our thing. That's where I was kind of going is, you know, if you look at it as journalists, people don't know this. But journalists are being compensated. There are little salaries in many cases are based on their follower counts. They're based on what audience they're bringing to the table. And you see this in sub-stack. Stubstack just said, we're going to hire the top journalists who have the most followers on Twitter. But you have to change the word so that you change how people think about it. These people are not journalists. These people are opinion makers. Okay. In some cases, they're doing journalism. In some cases, they're not. No, no, no. There are some cases where they're actually doing real journalism. There are people doing investigative reporting still. It's not the majority of what you see, but it still exists. It's just a very much smaller percentage. But putting that aside, if you think about, but you can't follow the crap. You can't wrap a virtuous blanket around every 1,000 people because of the acts of one. I'm not. And I'm not. I said, there is a range here. It's a small percentage. But there's still a range of percentages. What do you think that percentage is? Of content creation, I put it 5%. So, you know, one out of 20. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I think it's less than 1%. But let me just finish this one thought here. You know, if you are going to be hired and compensated, and we talk about systems here a lot, so just thinking from first principles, if you're a journalist, if you're a writer, opinion writer, whatever, you produce content for Wall Street Journal, for podcasts, etc. Today, let this sink in. Your follow account is what your book advances. It's what your compensation is. It's who hires you. Now, if that's the truth, and it's not all the time, but I think that's the truth. You started at that point, and that your job is not to relay facts. We can get facts in the thousands of words. Exactly. Let me finish my thought here. And so, then what happens is, how is follow account on Twitter actually derived? How do you get that follow account by being tribal? And so, what's happened is, journalists have become tribal. They get big followings. They give spicy takes. They pick a side, and then their compensation follows it. And that's why New York Times said, can we all stop on Twitter? And they literally put an e-tick down. Then you look at this podcast. I think people look at us as, in their mixture, podcasting long-form, taking the time, week after week to spend 90 minutes chopping these things up. I think that's what, to the original question, Freeberg you had, is what people find so great. When people ask me, I say it's really about the fact that there's a friendship here, and it's funny, but it's also informative, and it's insightful, and at times, as you pointed out, Chimoff, random acts of bravery in taking positions that are not popular. And to think that you and Freeberg almost blew this up over a few hundred K. I didn't. No, the two of you equally should share, boy. I wouldn't classify it that way. By the way, I did the point. Here we go. Now the bad feelings are ready, good spices. Just a, I have more of an ethical framework, but yeah, that's mine. Go ahead. Free even worse. Look at Chimoff's during the pot. Just a chime in on this point. I mean, I think I'm in violent agreement with you guys, but I'd frame it a little differently. I think the reason why people seek out our podcasts and other podcasts and substacts is, and sort of in this kind of independent journalism that are willing to pay for it, is because the mainstream media has become totally devoid of substance. It's as partisan and ideologized as it's ever been. Reporters are extremely ideological. You look at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the major television networks. It's all kind of the same thing. There is a little bit of an echo chamber problem in terms of the partisan politics, but the mainstream media is the most ideologized it's ever been. Just to give you one small example that we talked about in the pod, we had two quarters of negative GDP growth, which the media has always considered to be the definition of recession. Then all of a sudden, they said, no, we can't know what a recession is anymore, because they know that'd be a horrible headline for Biden right before the midterm elections. That's more of a partisan version. I think on the, a more ideological version would be just around the Ukraine war. I mean, it's just incredible how biased the coverage is. They don't even present the other side of the story, like this is called the Mishima take, about how we got to this point that we're in. So the American people just aren't being informed at all. We love to talk about how the people of all these other countries are being propagandized by their governments. We never talk about how propagandized the American people are. The media does not present the other side of the story at all on how we got into the Ukraine war and how we're now at the brink of what Biden calls Armageddon. Yeah. So how are we going to get out of it? How are we going to get out of it? Any topic, by the way, I think that's so true. That's so true, my punch. I think it's so many topics that we see effectively short form and short form, meaning it can be presented in a sound bite or on a TikTok clip or in a couple paragraphs where someone's attention span before someone that's attention span lapses out, always misses the dimensionality that got us to that point. And so there's one perspective, one point of view on one dimension. And the dimension, like Zach is talking about about the time and the history of the dynamics of all the countries and all the people and all the interactions that have happened for the past couple of decades that led up to this moment. But then this moment is taken in its context alone and reclassified as being something that is good versus evil. It completely misses the entire storyline of what happened. It's like going to the end of a fairy tale and saying, here's this moment of what happened and all the build up and all the things that occurred are often missing and all the different sides of the story are missing. And I think that that's really what makes it so difficult today to feel like you can trust authority and that you can trust the media that's presented to you as a consumer not just in the US or in the West, but around the world because there's so much that's left out and manipulated and kept away. And what people are waking up to is the fact as Chimac points out that so much of that information, the direct information is available now. And so this investigation, this ability to uncover the data and the storylines and the perspectives that are typically missing from one form of media is making people realize that there's so much that's being left out. The live 100% 100% and I think in this podcast, that's what's really shocking to people nowadays and I think that's what makes maybe to some degree hold our conversation a little more peeling. I'll drop to you on the second there's sex, but I did see this happen in three specific topics that we discussed here. If you remember, we talked about abortion and we were on that topic very early and no one wanted to talk. I remember when we started talking about the number of weeks, maybe how Europe looks at this, that wasn't part of the popular conversation. It was always just are you against choice? Are you for killing babies? It was like a very two dimensional look at it. Immigration. Nobody would talk about the numbers. Nobody talked about recruitment. Nobody talked about the point systems used in other countries. It was almost like those basic things were not allowed to be discussed. Why can't the media discuss those nuances and freedom of speech is I think the biggest one and the search for truth. Nobody wants to talk about the fact that the ACLU used to actually protect unpopular speech and unpopular speech is the hardest thing in the world to protect, but how did that become something we can't even talk about now and just the snap, silencing of any opinion, whether it's shipowl or pick a topic in freedom of speech, Trump, etc. Who gets protection for freedom of speech and we'll talk about it later on the news with Alex Jones, obviously a very controversial topic as well. Go ahead, Sacks. You wanted to add something to it. Well, I think just to take this Ukraine situation as an example, I think the media's biggest power is the power to define when time begins on an issue. What did it mean? Well, with Ukraine, we're part of an escalatory spiral that's been going on for well more than eight or nine months. This issue's been going on since 2008. A decade. Over a decade. So, in other words, if you come in in like the seventh inning, okay, so to freeworks point, you come in at the end of the story and it's been an escalatory spiral, but the media just pretends like time begins on February 24th. Of course, you're going to have a certain kind of you on the subject. Whereas if you know the history of the situation, if you know that back in the 1990s, you had people like George Kenan who was the architect of our Cold War containment policy, you had William J. Perry who was Bill Clinton's defense secretary, you had Henry Kissinger, you had John Mirschimer, all warned that bringing NATO right up to Russia's front porch was extremely provocative to them, that they would see that as a provocation, it would eventually lead to a moment of crisis. When that moment of crisis finally came, you know, we're not told that this was predicted. We're told that anyone who says that this war has anything to do with NATO expansion is basically a Putin apologist and is spouting Putin talking points. All right. Let's not, let's save some of that for the Ukraine talk. We're going to talk about it in the news section. No, you could agree or disagree with that. Take. But the point is the media doesn't even portray it. They really just pick a side and they, I think I like your analogy of like just coming in for the last 15 minutes of the game and just describing that. You know, you need to have a deeper discussion of how did we get here? How did we get here on immigration? Why don't we have a point system? Why do we look at people suddenly coming from south of the border differently than we did just 20 years ago? How did that become a politicized issue? What's the right solution here? Especially if we can't hire people for basic jobs in the United States? Everybody wants to know this question. So what you're, you have a favorite moment or a least favorite moment, a great moment in the show history and then I guess one move on maybe to some audience questions here. But let's, let's get this one because an embarrassing moment, your favorite moment, your least favorite moment, a moment now you look back on and you're particularly proud of Chimac. I love the cold opens. I think that they are unbelievably human and funny and normalizing. They are by far the best part of the pod in life. And yeah, that's my absolute favorite part by like miles and miles. So actually got a favorite moment other than Ukraine, other than Ukraine. I know you got Ukraine on the brain. Probably when you started talking like Joe Pesci. The Joe Pesci voice. I can't do it on command. I'm not your monkey, Saks. Don't you talk to me like that. Fucking fucking batting. I'm not seriously. You have any other favorite moments or things you're particularly proud of, things that people tell you, hey, I love this part of the show. I'm also proud that we were able to err our dirty laundry a little bit in public and still get over ourselves and our own egos and we're still here. I think that takes a lot of courage and a little bit of maturity that's not in public like visibility all the time in the media. I like that sentiment a lot. I think there's a lot of push. They were uncomfortable about it. I think there's a lot of personal growth that's going on here for everybody inbound. Afreeberg, you got a favorite moment, are there, you know? I don't like it when you and sex fight. That's just a no. That's your least favorite moment when we are. I literally turn my headphones off and I do some emailing. It really is just, it really is just this political thing, but yeah, it does come up. You know, I don't like the fact. All the moments I've been interrupted by you that just happened five seconds ago, like those are usually pretty tough. Go ahead. Frank. I don't know. What I did enjoy, I did enjoy meeting people at the summit who shared that this has been like a really important thing for them to listen to. I think I was at a pizza coffee in the city and some guy came up to me. This was early after, early when we were doing the podcast. And he was like listening to you guys has really helped me get through COVID and he was like locked in his apartment and he didn't have a lot of friends and he didn't have a lot of people to talk with and just being able to hear through, you know, kind of a good conversation around when's this going to end? How's COVID going to, you know, what's going to change in the city and hearing our friendship really made a big difference for him and it was actually really interesting. That was off the show, but it made me realize that this show actually is impactful and helpful and it gave me kind of the energy to keep going even though I've had frustrations in the past. So I don't know. I like those moments a lot to be honest. That there's real value here for people. I also thought the summit was a lot of fun. I mean, I had a good time. But, you know, I think we're steering towards, I think we're steering towards summit 2023. That was me starting to pot a little bit. I think we've all done maybe. I think we've all done maybe. We've all done. I've listened. As far as I'm concerned, you do it. You produce it or you hire a producer. I'll show on. I don't need to make a producer fee. You can do it. You can take the producer fee, whatever it is. All right, guys, I got a couple of questions here from the audience. You guys see this list? You can stand out for you guys. Well, you peck, you peck. So here's a question. We got it over email from Nathan. And Nathan said, we know the reasons, the reason you guys started the pod, what is the motivation of each bestie to continue doing it every week? I ask myself that every week. You're me, but does that? You're me, though. That sucks, it's therapy. It says therapy, I said, why am I doing this? No, I'm just thinking about taking a break. Not because I don't like doing it, but it is time consuming. And I do want time to get back to doing some business writing. I was on a pretty good track to publish a book about SaaS before we started doing the pod. I had written a lot of business blogs. And this is kind of cutting to that. Taking a break? How many weeks? I don't know. What are 10 weeks? What are you thinking? Maybe like a month or something? Yeah. Oh, four weeks. You can take 10 weeks maybe. I don't know. Four to 10, all right. I've got like a hard work. Right now, Black Gverson is like doing jumping jacks in his backyard and put me in the game. Well, we could do that. I mean, I've got like five half-written business blogs in my hopper that I really want to finish. And so I don't know. The show does take a lot of cognitive energy. That's what you're saying. It takes a lot of those cycles. It takes a lot of your time each week, sex? I mean, as you guys know, the taping is only a couple hours, but then it's just keeping track of all the issues. And then, you know, if I'm preparing takes for this pod, I also turn some of those takes into articles. This is the cost. This is the cost. This is the new week or the American conservator, whatever. So I'm publishing a lot. And responding. And then tweeting takes as I'm coming up with them. Now, my question is, which is I think the load for sex because he is the most heterodox is the heaviest. And this is like poorly understood. It's easy to just basically be on the side of the current conventional wisdom or to not have an opinion and to talk about things that are orthogonal. But David is consistently the one that wades into the middle of the ocean. And I can understand why you like the dogs. There's an undershadow there. No, because he gets to track under. No, Jason, he has to be more prepared than the rest of us. Yes. Because he is more open to the attacks from all of these knitwits. It's just this. It's just this. He just is. On Twitter, I'm being told that I'm a little Jesus in our blah, blah, blah. These are like uninformed knitwits. You know, they're the cancer. The cancer of people who comment on Twitter is the following. They suffer from the worst kind of cancer, which is a lack of belief in themselves. And so what they do is they point to other people and try to convince yet more people to not believe in them. But that has nothing to do with anything. It's just misdirection from their core problem, which is they don't believe in themselves. And so, you know, David has to fight all of that stuff off, but he has to fight it off with logic, which must be exhausting. You know, my approach has just been to turn off comments and to not start. This is the single biggest problem, I think, with social media is it's at this heightened point where it's this virulent strain of a lack of belief in oneself that manifests in this hatred that you direct to anybody else that believes in himself. Interesting content, interesting theory. Yeah, and I would just just add to that, you know, it's not like I haven't heard any of the arguments that they're making. I guarantee you they have not heard the arguments I'm making, but I've heard all the arguments are making. 100%. I'm totally familiar with 1938, Munich, Neville Chamberlain, all this kind of stuff. I just don't think that is the correct understanding of what's happening right now. I think the correct historical analogy is either 1914 with War I and the Blankcheck Guarantee or it's 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis. The people on the other side generally don't understand that. They are just kind of part of this like Twitter mob who's buying into the current thing and whatever they're told by the media. So it is a little bit exhausting. I think that that's what people don't realize is, you know, when this thing got very popular, the two or three days after an episode comes out becomes your text, your email, your DMs, and your replies become filled especially again. I would encourage you to keep doing this thing and just to turn off comments and don't go back. It's hard for the first few weeks and then you realize 99% of people who comment have nothing important or useful or interesting to say. Like zero, like negative zero. And you forget that there is like 99.99% of the world that just reads your content and couldn't even care about their comments. Yeah, that's important. So what you have to say and ignore all these other things. Twitter, I agree that would make it less exhausting but it would still be time consuming. There is a bunch of business blogs I wanna get done. So. I mean, I said you take two weeks off, you come back and see how you feel. I mean, you can do it week by week too. I mean, just take one week off and see it. See how it feels to catch up. I think you'll, I think you'll, and then you'll be on the week from back. He'll be back. He'll be back. Great question from Nathan. Thank you for your participation. Yes, Nathan. Next question, I actually like this one. I'm gonna pull it out. It's an email question from Juan T. Oh, hey, Juan said. Juan said, Bill Gurley recently put out a piece explaining how this might be as good a time as in a decade to build a company. How are you guys seeing your own portfolio companies trying to take advantage of the situation? And I guess I'll add you guys agree on how do you think about this as a moment for company building? I could take that one. I am seeing a lot of the companies that were, you had done a great job raising around seed round series A, never got product market fit, now wrap it up. They're shutting down. They're doing the wind down process. And then we're seeing lists of very talented people, and I've talked about this before on the show, the consolidation of talent behind the winning ideas, the experiments that actually worked, products that got some traction, are now having an easier time hiring talent. And so to Bill's point, he's got a lot more experience in this than the four of us put together, is absolutely right. When you build in this down market, yeah, it's harder to raise money of course. But talent is what makes great products and products that delight customers get the fly will going. And if you survive through this, and you have that talent, you're not going to face 20 copycats, and there's not 50 new products coming out a day. People have more time to actually engage and try a product, which they've been burnt out on. And the peanut butter spreading, we got this thin layer of peanut butter talent. Now it's getting consolidated in the winners. So absolutely a great time for five CEOs and founders, or 10 founders across five companies, to consolidate down to two, do those tuck-in acquisitions and get focused and build really good teams and cut the weakest people on the teams. There's a lot of weak talent that have been overpaid and aren't actually contributing to these teams, and they need to get cut, and then you pull in the All Stars. It's a fantastic time, you saw 100% right. All of the, if you look back in history since 2000, all of the best performing funds of all times were the ones that were formed right in the middle of the downturns, 0308, 0909. These are the ventages that have always been the best. And what that means, it's a proxy for investing, which is it's the hardest time right now. It's when you have the shakiest hand when you're writing the check, but it'll probably be where all of the real money is made, or the real generational wealth, both for the entrepreneurs who have the courage to start, and the investors who have the courage to invest. There was a story that I heard in New York. I was talking to a really well-known hedge fund, or family office. And they were talking about how they were meeting with a CEO of a Fintech Unicorn, very well-known Fintech Unicorn. And they said they left the meeting, and they said, this person had an un-brewed, leaveable disrespect for money. And it was the most arrogant interaction that they had ever heard, and they said, under no circumstances, would we invest in this guy in this company? At any price, and low and behold, a year later, that company is now visibly going through a bunch of hiccups. And it just reminds me that Jason, we've always had two problems when times are good. Problem number one is that there's never been a check and balance on that kind of behavior, a lack of respect for capital, and almost a disregard for business models, which is just inexcusable. And I think it's partly the fault of a very young entrepreneur, but it's also partly the fault of a board who doesn't know how to direct that person. Enablement is real. But then the second thing is we've always had this, this big tech put on the table where every time you would try to really hone in on running a lean, highly efficient organization, the alternative would be to go work at Google Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, where the terms are just completely different to what the experience was at a startup. And the bigger the gap, the harder it was for you to be able to hire and retain good people without just copying them. And now that that's also coming off the table, that is a key moment. So, girly is 100% right. There is no longer the big tech put. Those are the generals that are about to get shot over the next eight to 12 months, in my opinion, in the public markets, in terms of market cap and employment and perks. And then second is that these really thoughtful investors who felt pretty deeply disrespected will now be able to call the shots. And these founders will have to come back hat in hand and either apologize or just completely find a different religion. And I think in that, you'll have a lot of amazing opportunities to build companies. I think it's well said, tax, what are you seeing? Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, look, when TimesRose Frothy, as they were, a lot of bad ideas get funded, and there's a lot of bad behavior that occurs. I don't think all of it's intentional. Some of it is just the lack of discipline that when capital is just so freely available, people are building their businesses in ways that were optimizing solely for one variable, which was top line growth. They just weren't paying enough attention to gross margins or burn. And when you then have a downturn in capital is not so available, you have to build your business in a much more capital efficient way. And you can't create fake businesses where you're buying growth that's not economically justified, where you've got negative, unicognomics around the growth. So I think that this downturn is going to create a shakeout. It's going to weed out bad ideas, bad practices, and a lack of sort of focus, bad boards and... Or on top of that, and one trick ponies. Or no boards for indicators. One trick ponies. There's just a lot of one trick ponies out there who've optimized growth but don't have a real business. And it's going to require entrepreneurs to play sort of more like multi variable calculus or math, not just single variable. It is extremely difficult to convert TVPI to DPI. The value, paper values into actual distributions, and that takes a skilled hand. And I think that a lot of young folks were hired in adventure that fundamentally did not know what they were doing. They've neither ever built a company or helped build a company or actually learned how to generate returns. But they became very good at buying free call options on companies. I remember a lot of people, the way that you, these young people, I remember I heard a story that you would sell against girly. So let's just say you were trying to do a deal and Bill gives you a term sheet from benchmark and you get somebody else. The young folks were like, oh, Bill's too negative and he doesn't get it. And they would try to convince these entrepreneurs that these rainy days don't happen. My experience with girly is he is the most sophisticated investor of our generation. And what I mean by that is he was trained as an equity analyst that really understood business models and cost of capital. And so in a moment like this, the way that girly would help you on a board is meaningfully more important than how some middling VP at some Randall startup who's now a junior partner at venture firm because that person has literally no clue. And so these companies are gonna go through a very difficult moment, which again is the reason why a good steady hand who knows what they're doing will make a ton of money in this next cycle. And for people who don't know TVPI, let me just give you a quick definition. This is the total value divided by the paid in capital. So total value is distributions. Like, hey, here's your Robin Hood stock, here's your Uber stock, here's cash plus the net asset value. What's that fancy word for the value of the shares of the companies that haven't had an exit? And so you divide those two numbers, you get a ratio, 1.5, 1.2, et cetera. But to Schmott's point, net asset value is debatable in some of these, right? And distributions are what matter. You can't eat the the RRR. You gotta eat the stuff that's been distributed. All right, let's keep going. I'll do one more. I'm gonna skip over. Well, I'll just, the question on Twitter that got the most votes was, what's the exact net worth of each bestie? I would make the case that's probably not the best way to measure oneself. And, you know, I don't think we're gonna do it. I also would argue that we're probably all exposed to a lot of fuzzy math with private assets that we own and in terms of companies we're invested in. I still don't care. Like, how does that correlate with happiness in life? It doesn't, so it doesn't really. Stupid question. I don't think it's a big focus in terms of objectives. I'll say the next one, they got a lot of votes, which I really like. It's a lagging indicator and a byproduct of what we do. There are moments when what we do reflects in value that frankly, where we are over earning. And then there are periods where what we do is under reflected and we are under earning. And so the through line has to be that you need to survive in both good times and bad times, which means you gotta like what you're doing. And if you get caught up in a numerical number, there's all kinds of math you can do to make it look a lot bigger than it is, but it's all meaningless. Yeah, I would argue as long as you're actively developing yourself over time, the weighing machine will do its job. That's what I think that's the most. In my 20s, when I was at AOL, he said, you know, if you're a bit because at the time, I grew up on welfare, I thought the goal was to make money. I didn't know any better. I've learned later that there's a lot more leading indicator of happiness and things that actually cause you're a tough one. Why truffles? Why truffles? I was gonna say friendship, my family, but yeah. A friendship family. Lapse, I had to find it. It's laughs and friendships, you know? Friendships. But he said to me, you know, your goal should be to just be in the upper few percent of your age bracket and just enjoy what you're doing. And he said, let time take care of everything else. Because as long as you find something you're, you know, you decently enjoy and are good at, you'll just get better and better at that thing. And then at some point, you know, you will lose track of what the, you know, measurement of that is because you're just too caught up in how much you enjoy doing the thing. And I thought that he had no idea what he was talking about. And now 25 years later, I can tell you, he was totally right. Totally right. Yeah. By the way, this was a question I was trying to skip over. So, it led to a good fork, yeah. Okay. What is happiness? Yeah. I think after, you know, observing outcomes for 25 years in tech, what I would say is that if you're smart, hardworking, don't have behaviors that sabotage yourself and, you know, take intelligent risks, you will be successful in this business. I mean, technology is such a wind at your backs. It's such an engine at wealth creation. How can you not do well? But the exact magnitude of how well you do, I think it's ultimately, it is substantially affected by timing. And, you know, like if you were employee, whatever number X at Google, you're gonna do better than most founders, even of a unicorn company. And when you found your company, and then when you exit, what the market is doing, those things have a huge impact on the, on the magnitude. So, you know, whether you end up being, you know, a billionaire or a centimillionaire, you know, a decommillionaire, whatever you want to do, those things are very affected by timing and chance, but not whether you're gonna be successful at a substantial level. And so, just, you know, be smart, be hard working, don't sabotage yourself, you know, get into tech, and you will do well. And you're in the process. Trust the process. The exact amount of how well you do will be dependent on some, you know, stochastic factors, but not the fact that you're gonna do well. We are enormous beneficiaries of having been born when we were, because we are a bunch of late 40 and early 50-somethings that in the prime of our career in tech, the Federal Reserve took rates to zero. And we had no idea a priority, how important that would be in all of our outcomes, but they were. And even more importantly, PCs, internet, and mobile happened. All of that hard work was done beforehand by an entire court of people that had to fight much stronger headwinds than we had to fight. So, you know, David, I just want to build on that. Like, we were extraordinarily lucky. And so, don't get caught up in that, because there's all these factors you can't control. I'll say one more thing that I think is the most important observation I've made in terms of whatever it is building wealth over time, is to make sure you're building equity in yourself. If you're in a services business, and every day, and whether that's serving the clients of the company you work for, or just serving clients on behalf of yourself, and everything you do is a transaction. And that transaction doesn't build on itself, doesn't compound value in some way. Then you're missing out at an opportunity, every year that goes by, that you're earning income, where you're not building equity, is a non-compounding year. And it's compounding equity value that I think ultimately pays off for you as an individual. And I can give a lot of examples of this, but if you're in a, let's say a brokerage business, and you just do deals, and you might have a good year, you might have a bad year. The real question you need to ask yourself is, what is compounding? Are you growing a client base? Are you growing your skill set? Are you next year able to do more things or have more options than you had this year? And if the number of options you have is declining or a static every year, then you're limiting your equity value, and that ultimately will translate into limited wealth creation. And then I chime in on that point around equity, so... When I discovered what equity was, this was a dollars in law school, and actually the guy who explained to me was Antonio Grosius. A light bulb really went off for me, because my dad is a doctor, and I was on a path to becoming a lawyer, and in both those cases, you're a professional. The way you get paid is you, more or less, charge an hourly rate. And so the amount of money you can make is capped, right? Just take the number of hours in the day, and in the week, multiple apply it by your rate, and that's the most money you can make in a year. And the difference between that and equity is with equity, you own a piece of a business, and that business could be ultimately worth any amount, and so your equity could therefore be worth virtually any amount, and so you're uncapped. And so just, if you wanna have outside success, you have to have equity in something. I think that is exactly right. If you're just basically working for wages, you, even if you are the best of what you do, and you get paid an insane hourly rate, you, again, you can be successful, but you're not gonna be uncapped. And so that is the beauty, that's the beauty of Silicon Valley is, all these companies offer equity to everybody. And it's not just shares in something, you can actually get equity and create leverage in your life. In this era, more than any human has ever had in any era prior, because of software, and computing and automation. You can create a website that prints cash for you every day if you wanted to. You can create a service that you get leverage out of, and there's equity value in that. And I think that's really key, because then you can go build another one, another one, and you're building value over time. And that's just the most simplistic example of how technology today provides leverage that can really allow anyone to pursue a path of equity. And I think you made a good point about, what are you getting leverage off of? So there's a bunch of different things you can do. You need to be a leverage off of. You need to be a leverage off of. Right? So the old way was leverage off labor. And I guess if you were to own like a consulting firm or like some sort of factory, then the more people you have working, the more money you would make, the other way would be like, you can get leverage off capital, like a fund manager, or you can get leverage off of technology, because software can basically create these super scaled outcomes. So you need to figure out like, what is it you're getting leverage off of? Yeah, so I'll do the last one, which I thought was a really good question, and it got a lot of votes from Marcos or Tees. If you had to start from scratch, no money, no connections, only the knowledge you have right now, and a hundred bucks, what would you build in 2022? I would build something in energy transition or in life sciences. With a hundred dollars. Yeah. I would build a startup incubator, venture fund of some type, a way to fund entrepreneurs and just be a capital allocate or much earlier in my career. I would create a B2B software company that actually, I'm already creating it, so I haven't unveiled it yet, but there's something I'm keeping right now. Go David, go, whoa, whoa, where's the bad week? Well, whoa, whoa, wait, what my way, your beak, what is going on here? I haven't gotten the subscription documents. Have you raised money, sir? I have not raised money yet. When I was on the internet. I have not gotten my subscription documents, sir. You could think of this idea as EM or 2.0. So, Jake, you're not in because you criticize the EM, but it wasn't joke. I gave you the, I let you win TechCrunch 50. This is, I put the fucking fixes. David, just to put my pitch in, I ran EM and I CQ, help Facebook, was an investor in the EM, was the series A investor in Slack, so I'm ready for you. Yeah, you were there. We were there for us when we needed you back at the EM, or days, unlike Jake Hell. So, we're talking about your wife came to my wife, they're like, sack, cast, and sack, sacks has to win tech for 50. Let me in, sacks. Let me in, let me in. Let me in, let me lead it. Let me in, let me lead it. Let me lead it. Let's just let us do the three round round round. We run, we run, we run, we run. We run, we run, we run. Yes, we run. We run, we run. Thank you. Did you just agree on TV? Yes. Well, assuming, oh, and there's one thing you have to do, which is you've got to rip out Slack and use this instead. Yes, 100%, 100%. I will start to be all in community. I'm going to be very honest with you. The day I left Facebook, I stopped using it. The day we sold, we distributed Slack, stopped using it. Don't worry, Bummy. I am 100% aligned with you. I'm all in. I'm all in. Absolutely. All right. Let's do the shelf. FreeBarg, you didn't answer that question. What would you do? Well, actually, I would get some water vaporizers, and then I would get some molecule, and I would make a new super protein that was made out of, good, sorry. Good, good. Keep going. I like it. I think it'd be something with protein slurry. You'd make some kind of steak that takes better these things. Pro-teens slurry. It's some sort of protein. I would definitely build a business again. I think the challenge is as you move past that stage in your career, where you have the willingness and the time to be 120% building one product every day, it's really hard to go back to that. And I think if I was in a position again, where I had no money and had no... I think that's the key part of the question. Not the $100 part. Yeah, I think I would go back to building something. I do think the intersection of life sciences with software creates this era of opportunity. It would probably be something in the realm of AIML meets life sciences, where you can actually work in a leveraged way with software to drive outcomes in these important markets. I would actually create... Free-broken-out. A broken-out. A broken-out. A broken-out. We could have started something. Maybe we can't still. Oh. Not too late. The co-founders. Sacks will let you in the pre-round if you let us in your pre-round. Okay, sounds good. They're all right. Okay, Kelly, you want to take us forward? Should we go forward? Okay, let's see what's on the docket. We've got Russia's invasion of Ukraine. You had Biden last week saying we're facing the risk of Armageddon. How is that not the top story? Go, Saxipook, go take it. All right, here we go. Let me just queue it up for Sacks. By the last week, so we're facing risk of Armageddon, that's your T.O. Okay, here we go. And then Leon Panetta, just this T.O.J. Cal, we don't need, everyone knows what's going on. Then you had Leon Panetta. Leon Panetta, who was the former Secretary of Defense and Director of Central Intelligence wrote an op-ed for Politico, saying that intelligence analysts have now raised the probability of a use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine from 1% to 5% at the beginning of the war to 20% to 25% now is what he says. And I don't think he'd be saying that if this wasn't pretty much conventional wisdom in Washington now, I mean, Panetta is sort of a very respectable figure in the beltway. And Biden said it right for the first time. And Biden said that we're facing a most dangerous situation and the highest risk of nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis called the risk of Armageddon. The problem is that nobody is willing to say what we should be doing differently to avoid this situation. So people are always attacking us for having a point of view on foreign policy. First of all, this affects us. I don't know why we're not allowed to have a point of view. But in our business thinking, where there is an existential issue, you have the attitude of drop everything and figure this out. If somebody told you that there's a 25% chance of your company blowing up, maybe in the next few weeks, you would drop everything and focus on that problem. But it's like, after the Armageddon comments, it's like the media just passed over it. It's like, oh, this is like crazy Biden or whatever. It was minimized. It was contextualized. The White House walked it back. Nobody's really focusing on this and we'll be doing differently. And in fact, what Pineda recommends and Petraeus said the same thing is that if Russia uses a tack nuke in Ukraine, then we should respond by attacking Russia directly. Now if we do that, we are literally in World War III. And remember, at the beginning of the war, Biden was really clear that we weren't going to get directly involved. He vetoed the idea correctly of the no fly zone, which would have required us to shoot down Russian planes. Biden, remember, he was asking the press conference at the beginning of the war by Lester Holt. He said, Holt said, Mr. President, what if Americans are trapped behind enemy lines in Ukraine? Would you send in American troops to go get them? Biden said no. I think very properly said no because he said, listen, we do not want to risk war III. But now because of mission creep and a slippery slope, and we've all gotten more involved in this war, we've got a more emotionally committed, you now have Pineda and Petraeus calling for us to directly attack Russia and get in World War III. The Russians almost certainly would respond with nuclear because that's all they've got. They don't have the conventional forces to stand up to us. So look at how close we have now gotten to the brink of a nuclear showdown. And has anybody reassessed? Is anyone calling for us to reevaluate? Because that's the conversation we should be having right now. And Freeberg this brings up two points that I think you can comment on. Naval actually, the founder of Angel, this angel investor and just public thinker, I would say public intellectual. He came on to call him with the two of you. And he outlined, who does get to have an opinion on Ukraine and other issues, which has dovetail with this, like who gets to be an expert in the world today? And of course, at the same time, not only SACS has been commenting on, hey, what's the off-ramp here? Elon has been talking about, hey, how do we get out of this? Do we have some votes by these regions that have been annexed or that are in dispute? AOC now is getting criticized on infrastructure people shouting her down at a public event today or yesterday that she's a war monger and she won't speak out against war. How do you frame the public dialogue about this, Freeberg? And then do you see a potential off-ramp here other than Putin leaves Russia, which is I think the public stands by a lot of folks. Putin can end this. He just has to leave Ukraine in order for this to end. So two questions there for you, Freeberg. It's very hard to have good dialogue about any situation where an argument could be made on the grounds of morality in an absolute sense, making it really difficult to have a discourse around what the right thing to do is because you don't agree fundamentally on the objective you're shooting for. One side says the objective is to preserve the integrity of democracy and the freedom of people. And the other side says the objective should be to secure the interests of the West and the United States and preserve the world from nuclear holocaust. I think that's what makes this a challenging conversation. The objective can be reframed and then from that objective each side can make their own case without being forced to take in the point of view of the other side. And it's why we're at a bit of a standstill and it's also why it's so easy to get swept up in a mass point of view, a coalesce point of view of the masses that makes one feel good about what may end up being a very bad situation. It feels good to say I'm doing this for freedom of the people. I'm doing this to save lives. And the end of the day it may cause a nuclear war. And it's okay because I feel good going into this debate that this is the right thing. It's the morally superior thing to do. What's very hard is that we can't actually say as a group our objective should be to preserve the integrity of democracies around the world to an extent. And that's a nuanced point of view. To an extent means I'm willing to preserve the democracies through certain actions but I'm not willing to cross a certain line. And absolutism doesn't need to come into play. That's what I think is making this such a very difficult conversation. And it's why it's so hard to actually have a conversation around it. And it's really I would argue the most poignant and the most dramatic moment in what we talked about earlier, which is this deep seated kind of bipolarity. And once you're sitting on your pole you don't want to come off and you don't realize that so much of the dialogue is in this middle and we have to come to some point of view that maybe this isn't about an absolute outcome. It's not absolutely going to be a nuclear war and it's not absolutely going to be the end of democracy. There's some conversation in the middle that's very difficult to have and people that work somewhere in the world, hopefully ambassadors foreign policy people, state department people, hopefully are having the more nuanced critical conversation about how do we resolve to the maximal outcome that doesn't necessarily take us to an absolute end. From off to that point, it's going to be an imperfect outcome here. I think this is much, much simpler than all of this. Leon Panetta is a senior counselor to this defense contracting agency called Beacon Global Strategies who works on behalf of Raytheon. I found that out while feedback was talking in a two second Google search. I suspect that if you looked for Patreus's conflicts of interest, you would find that through some Byzantine set of strategic consulting organizations and whatnot, he also works on behalf of the defense industry. You have these people who will generate more revenue and more profit if there is a massive war. Those people have been trying to push us into a land war in Europe since this whole thing started. This is yet another attempt. It's just the most final way of doing it. I would just encourage people whenever you see all these folks clamoring for war. Just to keep in mind that they are riddled with conflict and that you can find it out. This information is sitting in plain sight on the internet and you can figure out whether this person is really advocating a truth that makes sense or they're getting paid to shill a revenue generating mechanism for some part of the military industrial. Sex, how much of this is people talking their book, their book being the military industrial complex in your mind? I think it's a big part of it. I think all these Washington think tanks are funded by defense contractors. I think it's short-sighted, obviously, because if it leads to a nuclear war, there's nobody in the defense industry that won't be anything left. But look, I think that Washington is wired for war in part because there's a huge lobby for it for all these defense contractors and what's the lobby for peace? I mean, there's no one really arguing for peace. Speaking of this, Elon. I'll tell you what's lobbying for peace. I'm going to connect what may seem two disparate ideas together, but the single biggest thing I think that will prevent nuclear war is the inflation that we're feeling. And the reason is because it allows the Fed, in my opinion, for the first time really in the last 15 years to act properly. And if they hold the line and they take interest rates to four, five percent, I think one non-obvious outcome of all of that is it becomes extremely expensive next to impossible to finance military adventurism abroad. And that's a practical economic outcry of really meaningfully high rates greater than zero. And so I actually think the reality is that for a lot of these governments, the more that inflation sticks around, the stickier it is, the higher rates are in general, the bigger the problems at home are and the less prone they're going to be likely. I actually think that explains the escalation of this rhetoric because people want to try to make this issue and put it on the table. But you understand that these folks don't say it's a 90% likelihood. They go from 1% to 25%, which if you understand probabilities is effectively a left-tailed risk that's effectively the same. And the reason they're trying to do it is they're trying to get it back, David, as you say, to timestamp it, to get it in front of people's perspectives to make it important. In a moment where everybody increasingly, not just in the United States, but in the UK, in Europe, are looking internally and trying to figure out how to keep their economies in a reasonably functioning way and how to make sure that they're financial and other infrastructure keeps working. And that is not necessarily a priority when rates are zero. But when rates are 4%, I mean, just by the way, if you guys saw what happened today, it was the competing of two narratives this week. There was the financial narrative of the UK having to bail out their pension system, right? Of all of a sudden, the pensions being forced sellers, of those forced sellers now spilling into the United States debt markets around CLOs and collateralized loan obligations and junk debt, which then could theoretically spill as a contagion to other parts of the market. That was narrative one. And all of that, by the way, is a result of hiding inflation and the fed moving up rates and other countries being forced to attack inflation with higher rates and creating all these dislocations, narrative one. Versus narrative two, which is, hey, all of a sudden, we have to put the nuclear risk on the table. And if you actually saw the print that was spilled, the disproportionate amount of the rhetoric actually focused on the former narrative and not the latter. And so I think that that's why these folks are escalating the rhetoric in order to kind of create inequality so that they get enough print on that version of the outcome. What you're saying is you have the world saying we can't afford to have this conflict. We are broke. Well, not too many chaotic issues. I think the world is saying we are increasingly under enormous domestic pressure. And as a result, we cannot spend on things abroad. We can't afford this. And then the other side saying, well, we need you to afford this. So nuclear is going to happen. There's going to be a nuclear annihilation. No, no, no, no. There's a small strain of folks who would economically benefit who are now ratching it up. They're rhetoric so that that second path becomes more and more on the table. What do you think of this freeberg, this analysis that Shemaat has? These two polar, these two groups vying for the attention and or budget of the world. The military industrial complex versus yeah, citizens saying our country can't afford this. We need to focus inward. Not citizens of central banks. Okay, but I think the central banks influence by citizens, right? Like this is a whole system here. We're talking about people are watching their pensions go away. They're watching jobs get cut. If I was a betting man, I spent that I would guess that the next half a trillion to a trillion dollars that is spent in Western world economies will be to subsidize something that's broken internally inside of one of our countries, whether it's the UK pension system or whether it's the high yield credit markets and it will not be to finance military adventurism in Russia. People just to just answer that point. So there's an article today in the Washington Post about how the US government's debt service is going to be around 570 billion this year, which is a 45 percent increase. Biden's budget for 2023 is only 1.6 trillion. So you're talking about something like over a third now of the official budget is already going to debt service because it's not variable, right? It's a variable, right? Exactly because so much of it is that it's not locked in in long term rates. So because interest has gone up so much, the debt service has gone up and interest rates are still going up. And so, you know, Druckermiller had those points around how the debt services within a decade is going to eat up practically the whole federal budget. So Jamalath is right that we've never really had to choose between guns and butter before in the past. It was just, let's just do both and we'll rack up more national debt. I do think there will be more and more pressure to question this type of spending and why we've already given Ukraine $80 billion in handouts when we can't afford to basically pay for, you know, major entitlements at home. So I think there'll be more pressure. Now, I don't know if that pressure is going to come in time though to de-escalate this Ukraine more. It's not. And that's what concerns me. And just to cut to the chase on this, I think where the rubber meets the road on Ukraine is Crimea. It's and why? Because the Russians have a major naval base there. It's of a stopel. It's the home of the black sea fleet. And they will never give that up. They are willing to use nukes, I believe, to basically protect that asset. It's a vital interest of their swallon. 80% of the population of Crimea, they're Russian. And three quarters of them, according to polling that was done by Gallup and by a German polling firm, so not Russian polls, indicated that they see themselves as Russian and will be part of Russia. So if we support a self-determination, we'd be fine with Crimea being part of Russia. But here's the rub. We have to understand nationalism demands that every square inch of Crimea goes back to Ukraine. And it is State Department policy right now that we will never recognize Crimea as being Russian. We'll never recognize the annexation, which happened back in 2014. So something's got to give here. Something's got to give. Either we have to sit down Zelensky and say to him, listen, you're not getting back Crimea, we're going to make that part of a peace deal. Or we are going to back the Ukrainians in their military effort to retake Crimea with the result that I think is quite likely that the Russians will be willing to use a tactical nuke to prevent their total defeat. So at some point, we're going to have to choose here which of these outcomes do you want? Do you want to basically go for a negotiated settlement, which means telling the Ukrainians they cannot have everything they want? Or do you really want to risk a nuclear war to take back Crimea, which is Russian and the people that see themselves as Russian? So we need to make a choice here. Yeah, so Elon put out a tweet and got savage for it. And he outlined sort of what you're saying here. So do you think his plan? He said redo elections of annex regions under UN supervision, Russia leaves if that is the will of the people. And then he says Crimea formally part of Russia has it's been since 1783, what are supply to Crimea? A short as you're saying. Ukraine remains neutral. Should the West force Ukraine to accept these type of terms, essentially elections, and I don't know why Crimea wouldn't be part of that election process? Do you think UN supervised elections in those regions should occur and we should force the Lensky to do that? So actually who pays the pipe or calls to the tune, of course we need to have a point of view on how this war should be resolved. Should we force them to do that? Listen, it's not about force. They can fight on and do whatever they want as long as they want. Hold on with our American weapons. That's what you said. That's what American weapons. So you think he should do that. Hold on so American weapons. If he doesn't. If Zalinsky wants our weapons and support, which appear to be infinite, we should not give him a blank check guarantee. The blank check is what started World War I. The German Kaiser gave Austria a blank check guarantee and it led to World War I. That is how great powers get pulled into the wars of minor powers. And we absolutely have to have a point of view on how we do not get pulled into this. And I think one of our lines should be that we are not going to fund the Ukrainians in retaking Crimea. Got it. So just to clear this so we can move on to the next topic. You're in support of removing our not giving further weapon support to the Ukraine in last day. Negotiate this. It's not going to come to that. We need to have a point of view on how the war gets resolved. But you are in support of that. Stopping our support if they don't sit down and negotiate a settlement here. That's what you would do. America needs to have a point of view of what is in its own interests. What is in our interests is for this to get resolved diplomatically at some point through negotiating settlement, not for to escalate into a nuclear war that we could get pulled into. The only way that's going to happen is if Crimea goes back to Russia, I'm telling you, they will be willing to pull out all the stops. They could even use taknukes before Crimea. Can you answer the question though that I asked three times. Would you remove American support in weapons if they don't accept that? If Ukraine doesn't accept that, would you be comfortable taking away our support in West? I don't think it's going to come to that, but yes, we should be willing to threaten that. Okay, that's it. I'm just trying to get you to answer that one question. Hold on a second, they are a client state of the US. They do not call the shots. We're America, we call the shots. We're the big dog here. That's the bottom line. You really want to get pulled into a nuclear war because if you don't want to do that one question, we should pull out the real. Let's get real. Okay. This is about our future. You know, we are American nationalists, at least I am. I'm not a Ukrainian nationalist. I support self-rule. I think we accomplished something by preventing Kiev from getting toppled, but I wanted to support self-rule for the people of Crimea. It's time for a settlement in Saxon, my team. I think the most important thing that we can all be thankful for, which I think will prevent a lot of wars in the next 10 or 20 years' inflation and non-zero interest rates. It's just going to be really tough. I want both of those factors. I want both of those factors. I want both of those factors. The UK cannot do anything right now other than make sure that they have foreign currency reserves to back up the pound, which they don't really have that much. They're going to need money to bail out their pension system. Whoever thought it was a good idea to allow pensions to run levered risk was obviously insane. Could you imagine if it turned out that the teachers pensions and the firefighters pensions in America were running levered long? They are. They're not all. There's high-ears of now. I mean, it's just breaking point. No, it's clear. You know what a pension is? I know. I'm not trying to get it all lead. It's just a dead end. No, no, no, no. I'm saying. I'm saying don't use some fancy intellectual argument. I'm saying practically speaking, the treasure is not allowed to call Goldman Sachs and say, I'm going to run two turns of leverage on this money. That is not allowed to happen in the United States. Okay. I get in some fancy way it could be thought of as levered long with all kinds of indirection, but that is not how the world works today, practically speaking. It is how the UK works. A treasure in a UK pension system is allowed to call an investment bank and actually run levered. That is insane. Okay. So my point is when rates are non-zero, all of that jig is up. Governments are forced to batten down the hatches and husband cash for God knows what will break in the system. And I think that that is and is disruptive as that is, it may actually be the bullwork against war. The jig is up, folks. I mean, I think that's what we should take away from this is. We can't afford this and the United States is funding it. We have to force a settlement here and it would be a profile courage. And maybe the silver lining of inflation. Okay. Andy Jassy's had an all hands meeting. Amazon is freezing hiring for corporate roles in its retail business. Almost 90 VPs are higher. Level execs have left Amazon since 2021. Earlier this week, there was an all hands presentation and the slides were leaked to business in cider. Some of them constraints, breed, resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and innovation. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense, the slide, instructed employees to accomplish more with less. Sounds familiar. Sounds like something the US needs to do and foreign policy needs to do. Amazon leadership team urged employees to double down on frugality. Jassy also spoke in the meeting just a couple of quotes and then I'll get your thoughts Chimoff. It's on a lot of people's minds and of course none of us know for sure what's going to happen. But there are a lot of signs that point to this being a difficult and rough economy ahead of us. How long that will last? But I think it's one of the things that we are thinking about and we decided that we're going to be more streamlined in how we expand in 2023, good companies that last a long period of time who are thinking about the long term always have this push and pull. Chimoff, what do you read into this? I'll say three quick things. One is that today, Thursday, October 13th, we had an inflation print which was worse than expected and the markets are materially higher. So strange. Why? Well, we talked about this a few weeks ago, but my thought then and it's the same that I think now is that we've effectively seen the near term bottom and we're now consolidating. So every opportunity people have to justify that most of the news is behind them. They take and they use that as a reason to buy. So that's number one, which is that we are sort of near the end. The second, however, is that if we do see another leg down, there is really only one cohort of company that hasn't been really whacked and I'll summarize it very quickly by saying it's Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google. That's it. Even Facebook has now been sort of put into the bucket of everybody else where we've been crushed 60, 70, 80% in those companies. So what does that mean? Well those four companies are now being identified for what they may be, which in capitalism is called over earning. Okay. They are making more money than we think is appropriate. This letter from Andy Jassy is his way of effectively telling his major shareholders that he is now moving the business to become more of a cash cow business. Tim Cook made this incredible decision in 2016, 17, 18 that effectively did the same thing. That's when Buffett came in. That's when he established a huge ownership in the stock. That's when the stock absolutely ripped because it moved into a different bucket in people's minds. It became growth at a pretty reasonable price. And I think Andy is making the case that Amazon is going to become one of these garb stocks growth at a reasonable price. He's going to generate a ton of cash flow. He's going to keep expenses nominal. He's going to return a ton of cash to shareholders with buybacks. That's the reading in between the lines of that letter. I think it's a really profound statement and a very smart move because you haven't seen that letter or a version of that letter yet from Microsoft. And you started to see hints of that letter from Sundar where he said he knows. And he's not almost stabilizing. He's not there yet. He's in the appetizer part. He's a loose bush where he's like, you know, guys, you got to work harder. Hey, guys, let's create some fancy acronym. But Sundar's got courage. No, no, no, but he's got courage. He is going to rip the bandaid off too. And so I think what it means is these three and maybe these four companies are going to draw a hard line in the sand and say, we are not over earning. Do not abandon this stock. That again will help put in a bottom in the stock market. What do you think, Freybar? You worked at this company and, you know, the principles across the board. The saber rattling will turn into saber swinging. And Q4, Q1, you think Google Apple? Cut coming. Amazon is affected in a different way because they operate this physical supply chain business. They're delivering goods to people's homes that people are buying. So they're, they really have to change their trajectory very quickly. It was incredible. You guys remember when COVID hit, you tried to place an order on Amazon. It was like three weeks to deliver because the infrastructure wasn't there to do it. So they actually were seeing more orders than their system had predicted. And they did massive build out. They hired what? A million people or something in their network to meet demand. And then over the next year, earnings went through the roof. Their infrastructure and employee headcount went through the roof. And now we're obviously coming back down the other side of a mountain. And they're having to shift strategy and shift their operating model yet again. Because a broader set, and that's because they're in the direct commerce business, Microsoft, Google and other kind of software companies, some of which benefit from advertising, which is almost like a first derivative on the consumer market or a first derivative on the spending of companies that sell to consumers. Have a little bit of a different calculus. They're a much higher margin business, 30% EBITDA kind of business with EBITDA margin business with a very distinct kind of set of challenges on how advertising revenue is going to be affected over the next couple of quarters. And balancing that against their cloud platform, which is sold to enterprises and their media consumption platform, which is generally like YouTube at Google's case, which is less affected. So it's not as much of a direct calculus. I will say what's happened over the past decade, which we're now seeing change is these companies have had extraordinary growth, hiring people to no end. There's always been kind of this extended expense on human capital. And that expense on human capital has driven the average cost per employee through the roof. And it's not just the salaries. It's the cost of the RSUs. It's the cost of the facilities and the free ice cream and the gyms and all the other stuff that's gone on to compete. That's now changing. And so it really is creating a different model for operating that hasn't existed for the last decade where everything has been, how many more things can we throw in the kitchen, throw it like the kitchen sink at this problem to get all the human capital here. And I think that's really what's going to kind of structurally change in the valley. It's not as acute as what Amazon is dealing with. It does feel like those are the last cities to fall, Chimoff. There are the ones. There are the ones that take the index to 3,200. If we're going to try to do it, there's only one place to look. You've whacked everybody else. Everything is down, 50 to 90% in some cases. And then finally, the way, just at the end of last year, a quarter of every S&P dollar was crowded in those names, a quarter. So you've got to go there. Yeah. Also, they're automatically bought. They're automatically bought by these index funds. Who is at the wheel saying we're not going to take the money out of them, right? Who in their right mind is taking money out of Apple Amazon? And Microsoft, where do you put it? I guess is everybody's question, right, Chimoff? If you take it out of there, where do you put it? Well, no, I think it's just that when you have patterns of selling, typically as I've seen it, my experience is that initially it's the algorithms that really start to push a market in a direction. Then you have the more traditional fund complexes. That's the hedge funds and the long only's. They follow suit. And then the last group tends to be retail. And it works in reverse the other way as well. And so obviously there's exceptions to all of these, but as a general rule. So if retail starts battling on Amazon, and Apple, yeah, they are sellers now. But again, time to buy it. But again, this is where a sort of organized capital now is finding a bottom. Again, like when you start to shake, just think about the psychology of like being delivered bad news after bad news. You go through the cycles, right? There's denial, there's anger, there's depression, there's bargaining. But then at some point there's acceptance. And in that acceptance phase, you're like, yeah, you're right, things are bad. But when you see a market rally into a print like this, it's a, it's really, really interesting psychological turning point. As a proof point to what you're saying, Sachs, Chimath and Sachs, I want to get your comment on this, venture capital firms like Sequoia, Excel and others that have now changed their status as, you know, just private companies, but also dabbling in public are buying public equities, which basically means they see more opportunity in public underpriced tech stocks, growth stocks, etc. Then they do in late stage private companies, correct? And so the Wall Street Journal story, I'm assuming, Sachs. Yeah, I saw that. What is, what do you read? What's your read into that? Is it overblown or is it indicative of something? I think it's probably overblown because Sequoia created that fund. That is a hedge fund. And in recent, Horowitz became a registered investment advisor so they could buy public securities. So, look, I don't think most venture funds are all of a sudden investing in public markets. We aren't even allowed to do that as far as I know, normally we ever try to. So I think probably it's exactly- You have to give up Sachs, your VC exemption, but you could do it. You could do it, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we wouldn't want to, but it's kind of the point. But look, I can't explain why the market did what it did today. It could have liked Chimath said it could have spent some sort of algorithmic, you know, buying or selling, but I just think that the overall news today was the economic news was just another really bad report. I mean, just look at these headlines from the New York Times today. Okay, I'm going to read you the headlines on a single sort of scrolling page here. Number one, inflation came in much faster than expected, bad news to the Fed. Takeaways from another painful inflation report. Three, disappointing inflation data keeps Democrats on defense head of midterm elections. For food prices climb again, weighing on household budgets. Five, rent inflation remained depeted, troubling sign. Six, use car prices aren't declining as much as the comments of the host. Slow down, slow down. Seven. Give free burger chance to take some dynamics. Take his annex, free burger. Gas prices fall slightly, but overall energy costs are soon expected to rise. And eight, retirees are getting an 8.7% so security cost living raises the biggest in decades. I guess that one is sort of positive, but it's like, literally negative headline after the end of the day in line. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Can I reinterpret that for you? I think the way to think about it is this gives the Fed the resolve it needs. It's going to go by 75. It's probably going to go another 75. We're going to have rates by four to 450 to 5%. Probably within Q1, which means if you're trying to figure out where the bottom is, it's rumply nowish. And so that's why you see smart money, David shaking this thing off and starting to enter the market. And so again, and the other version interpretation is when rates are 4 or 5%. The cost of servicing United States debt is so meaningful as a percentage of their budget. The incremental spend that they would need to make to enter a new war is too much, I think. I love this point. I love this point. We're weaving all these things together. Do we work? Yeah, well, look, so, so, right. So on the economics page of the New York Times, it's just disaster's headline after the disaster's headline. The New Turnt the Foreign Policy page, you got Tom Friedman writing a column here saying we are suddenly taking on China Russia at the same time and Tom Friedman historically has been a huge hawk and he is even saying. He's saying puppet breaks. You have come on the breaks. Never fight Russia and China at the same time. Yeah. So he says we are an uncharted waters. I just hope these are not our new forever wars. It's like, whoa, so basically look, our economic base, our economy is crumbling at home at the same time that we are doing unprecedented saber-addling abroad. This does not compute. We need to take a time out. No, you know, I know. You know, I know I know. But my prediction is that we will not enter a new war with rates flexing up as aggressively as they are. Love it. I love weaving these two stories together. I think it makes a lot of sense. We didn't have time for Alex Jones, but we'll save that for another episode. Gentlemen, I think it's our best episode ever. It's an honor and a privilege to spend this hour and or so with you every week. I love you like brothers. And it's been a great hundred episodes. I look forward to a hundred more sacks if you need a mental health break. Dr. Friedberg's side. No, no, no, no. David will be back next Friday. David will be back. I just want to say, for applies, David, don't read your replies. Get off of that. I just want to say how much I love you guys. And I'm really proud of what we've created. And I'm really excited to get to the next hundred. And I'll see you guys tonight. I'll break out the white trouble. So we're all, you want to keep going. That's the news today. I'm in for a handy. I'm in for a handy. I love you, sacks. I will say that Jake House moderation has been a lot better since he got brigaded. That is what he is saying. He'll be. He'll see you next Friday. I love you, Tremont. I love you, Tremont. I love you, freeberg. Let's see if we can get sacks to do it. It's been a hundred episodes. He hasn't said it yet. But I love David's sacks. David, are you coming tonight? Sacks, are you coming? Yeah, I'll come. You're coming. Oh, wait, wait, wait. Let me check. I'll get back to you offline. Oh, Jesus Christ. God Jesus. Hold on a second. Hold on a second. Sacks, I love you. Let's see if we can just say it. I love you. Back at you. That's too. Back at you. Freeberg, can you say I love you, Tup? Can you say I love you? I see you. I see you. I love you. What did you tell Kulio? Freeberg, I love you. I appreciate you. Oh, you're too much. Okay, we're back at you. I appreciate you. That's a hundred, baby. That's a hundred. We'll see you in the next episode. I love you, Tup. I'll see you tonight. Bye. Bye. We'll let your winners ride. Bring man David's sacks. I'm going to win. And it said we open source it to the fans. And they've just gone crazy with it. I love you, S. I'm sweet. I can't walk. I'm going all in. What? What? What? What? What? What? Besties are gone. Go through it. That's my dog taking a wish. You drive away. Six. Wait at all. Oh, man. My ham is the actual meat. We should all just get a room and just have one big hug. Because they're all just like this like sexual tension. But we just need to release a thousand. What? That'd be. What? You're a beer of beef. Beef of beef. What? We need to get merchies aren't there. I'm going all in. I'm going all in.