SPEAKER_00: sax house tequila i tasted 10 samples the other day one was heads and shoulders above the rest which was a good sign oh so now we're taking that and making it the new baseline and i'm going to try 10 more samples and we're going to go from there i think we're very close to having something

SPEAKER_04: excellent great and then i did a side-by-side taste test of the sample i like the best compared to

SPEAKER_06: classes ultra and it was already better than classes ultra which really retails for like three thousand a bottle really yeah holy so it's going to be better v1's better than their final

SPEAKER_10: product is what you're saying yes and that was not just your taste test but like you and several

SPEAKER_12: people it was me and two other guys who i trust so we we did it together now when you say trust

SPEAKER_13: do you mean underlings or do you mean actually like no he means alcoholics yeah where in your

SPEAKER_16: pay hierarchy are they he recruited them at alcoholics anonymous in in west hollywood are

SPEAKER_25: they level two employees or level four employees one works for me and one's a consultant okay are we

SPEAKER_31: over or underestimating the impact of the ai boom nvidia's been on an all-time heater if you don't

SPEAKER_32: know its market cap is now 1.8 trillion friedberg this week it surpassed google and amazon as the fourth most valuable company in the world there it is folks right behind saudi aramco 16 months ago stock

SPEAKER_33: was trading about 112 a share since then share price has gone up 6.5x on a big number shares went higher

SPEAKER_31: this week after it was reported that nvidia plans to build custom ai chips with amazon meta google and open ai in other news financial times reported open ai hit a two billion dollar run rate for their reoccurring revenue it's about 165 million a month and they think they can double that number in 2025 tons of competition coming out if you didn't see google rebranded their generative ai suite to gemini and they're charging 20 bucks a month for it and then there was this bizarre wall street journal headline that sam was going to raise seven trillion dollars that makes no sense maybe that was the tam we'll get into that freeberg your thoughts on this ascension are we underestimating or

SPEAKER_35: overhyping ai i mean it seems like the compute build out is underway so this is going to continue for some time i think the real question that keeps getting asked is you know when do you really see the

SPEAKER_37: tides recede and what's what's there the compute build out is underway but are we seeing application and productivity gains associated with the capability of that compute some would say yes some would say no but you've got to build out the infrastructure if you're going to assume that there's going to be

SPEAKER_35: these productivity gains in the application layer and everyone's assuming they'll be there so we need to meet the demand which is almost like building out an entirely new internet and so the core of ai

SPEAKER_38: is this matrix multiplication problem and you need these chips that do that really efficiently they're

SPEAKER_37: not traditional cpus which are general purpose chips but they're chips that are very special purpose for a particular set of applications that render the output of whatever model is being run it's sort

SPEAKER_38: of like the internet like you could pretty much create a bogey of any number on how big this can get

SPEAKER_37: at the same time you're seeing some of the other players with different architectures and potentially that are going to be beneficiaries of this build out because they're participants in other parts of the data center or alternative solutions like arm and i don't know if you saw this but in just the last couple of weeks or last week or two arms valuation doubled it's come down a little bit since that big doubling today arm is sitting at 140 billion valuation last week it got as high as 156 and

SPEAKER_38: remember it was only last august so if you guys remember arm was bought by softbank and the vision fund and then i think 25 of arm was held by the vision fund and 75 was owned by softbank last august softbank bought from the vision fund the 25 of the vision fund owned at a valuation of 64 billion but now softbank owns 90 of arm the last 10 trades publicly so at 140 billion dollar valuation softbank's position in arm is 125 billion and i think it really begs the question did masa have a masterful move here yet again because everyone said for years with all the bets this guy was making in the vision fund and some of the misguided bets he was making with softbank and the leverage he was applying on himself and softbank to deploy all this capital during the zerp era everyone was saying you know this guy had a one hit it was alibaba and that was it and clearly he doesn't know what he's doing but now all of a sudden his bet on ai was fairly prescient and it's paying off pretty powerfully he bought the whole business for 32 billion and now he has a a stake that's worth 125 billion seven years later

SPEAKER_40: yeah i mean chip in a chair right well it's really begging the question you only need one the power law right when you're making a long-term investment you can very easily look like a moron over the

SPEAKER_38: short term and to your point the power law all it takes is one of them to work out and it can wipe out the losses on the rest of the portfolio and we may be seeing masak with his whole ai vision story that he's been telling for seven years we may see masa clawing his way out of the hole you only look like

SPEAKER_45: a moron to losers meaning when people were throwing shade at masa it wasn't anybody that's any good i didn't see headlines that said john malone thinks masa is a fraud warren buffett thinks masa is a fraud nobody was saying that because those guys know what the game is and the game is exactly what you

SPEAKER_47: said jacal you must always survive and you need to keep your wits about you and over time if you're prepared and do enough good work you'll get waves of good luck that amplify your hard work and masa

SPEAKER_45: is an example of an incredibly talented person that has found a way to survive more than anything else and so waves of success will hit him the people that complain are the ones that are sort of a little bit stuck on the sidelines and are more frustrated with their own impotence and inability to do

Chamath Palihapitiya: anything now on arm specifically the thing that i would keep in mind is that those guys floated

SPEAKER_47: i think about 15 million shares so there's about 145 150 million shares outstanding 90 owned by them so there's about 10 or 15 million shares outstanding and there's about 12 and a half million shares short going into the earnings report and so the thing to remember is that there was almost an entire turn of the float that was short so i don't know how much of this reaction was just an enormous short squeeze of people that were largely long other chip companies and so they thought they could short arm essentially as a spread trade to minimize volatility but this is an example of where if you don't do this analysis properly gamestop was another where you misjudge or you sub analytically look at the actual share count and what's actually free floating you can get caught on the wrong side and these things can be very

SPEAKER_31: violent and to explain the float to folks you can make a certain number of shares available to the public to trade when you have a small number of those correct chamath available to the public weird things can happen because there's not enough available to short that's exactly right and so that could have been the situation here with this run-up but i think i think the overall point of placing bets and being a capital allocator is the important one to discuss here sacks what are your thoughts on all the crazy bets that masa made we watched a lot of our companies or companies adjacent to our companies get massively overfunded some of them literally got drowned in capital but then you only need to hit one and maybe win it all back what are your thoughts on this high

SPEAKER_53: alpha you know betting style of his look i mean he's a gambler and he is playing a power law so he

SPEAKER_00: only needs one really big return to basically make up for all the mistakes and it seems like he's hit

SPEAKER_59: that once again he did it with alibaba too right yeah i mean he's a major gambler most people would be a

SPEAKER_00: little bit more risk averse i don't think it was a great strategy to be pumping 500 million dollar checks into what were effectively seed companies like they were doing with the vision fund however

SPEAKER_06: obviously he made enough good bets that they're going to pay off that fund well it's a good point

SPEAKER_38: sax i mean none of the i don't i i probably need to be careful because i'm not super familiar with the

SPEAKER_35: portfolio but it doesn't seem like any of the big winners were those seed bets like he doesn't have any returns coming out of that kind of investment strategy doordash doordash yeah doordash was not

SPEAKER_66: like what point did they invest billion or two billion dollar round was yeah pretty important moment we've heard at dinner jason and i at dinner we've heard the the waterfall from the softbank side

SPEAKER_68: and it sounds like it was an enormous number yeah that was definitely there but it was a de-risked

SPEAKER_38: business it was a scaling business seems a little different than some of these companies that

SPEAKER_35: were fairly early on that got monster evaluations and large chunks of capital and then struggled to find ways to deploy that capital which led to unhealthy behavior i think the thing you have to

SPEAKER_47: give a lot of credit for is it's so easy to give up when the peanut gallery is chirping and so the thing that you have to give him a lot of credit for is he has the ability to tune those people out now he probably isn't even living in a world where any of those people that chirping even gets to him and i think that that's a very important thing but kudos to him i mean yeah to be able to tag something for 100 billion here 70 billion there i mean keep swinging and by the way at the end of it all what is it going to change for him absolutely nothing except he'll have some incredible stories to tell about the vol that he took and the roller coaster ride he was on and i think that's going to be the most valuable thing he's going to be able to tell his grandkids these stories and his their eyes will

SPEAKER_75: just be like what and his friends you know i mean i would love to have a dinner with him i don't know

SPEAKER_66: let's do it i don't know come on the pod mas and let's talk about it i've only met him once but i have

SPEAKER_47: a great story to tell about masa when i was on facebook i met him once but anyways dead talent i mean can you tell it all i'm saying is i would love to have dinner with him because i just want to hear these stories evolve like up and down and up and down and i had two lunches with him we had lunch one

SPEAKER_82: day we had such a good time he said can we have lunch again tomorrow how long are you in tokyo i said yeah and i came back the next day and i had lunch with him twice that's amazing and it was great like talking two three hour lunches where we're just talking about every web 2.0 company this is in you know the 2009 uber kind of robin hood period and he was just fascinated by what was going on and all the disruption happening doordash series d 1.4 billion post 2018 he did well the question i was

SPEAKER_35: asking is like doordash was a lot like an arm there's a point of view that the business has proven that there's a market that it can grow into that there's a management team that knows how to deploy

SPEAKER_38: capital versus oh yeah a lot of these early stage bets where when they got too much money they ambled about what they didn't amble about they kind of incinerated it incinerated because what do i do with this money i don't yet have a machine or an engine that can grow with this money and until the engine

SPEAKER_90: can handle the capital like the pizza thing zoom pizza you're talking about yeah i mean if you

SPEAKER_38: there's dozens of them in that portfolio right yes if you don't have a business that can handle the gas you're putting in the tank the engine's gonna blow up the engine has to grow it has to build the volume has to build so that it can actually handle the fuel and i think that's been part of the challenge and i will just say i've said this in the past but there was an era in silicon valley that started around 2010 2009 kind of right after right as right as web 2.0 was starting to venture into more traditional markets meaning tech companies were becoming other companies kind of the mobile local era was was kicking off and there was a strategic concept that got popular in silicon valley on take the market which is when you feel like you could be the winner give the person all the chips and say now go over bet and take the whole market because these are going to be winner take all or these could be winner take most markets so get first mover advantage here's more capital than you need and i remember being pitched this when i was raising my series b that i should raise more than i was trying to raise because i should use the extra capital to take the market and then that mantra just became the de facto standard which is oh you have something that has something it has some edge it has some advantage it started to move in the market here's a ton of capital you don't really need now go take the market and the reality is most of those businesses had absolutely no way of using that

SPEAKER_92: capital to quote take any market because they didn't even know what their market was yet yeah they

SPEAKER_94: when you're in the product market fit product market fit phase and you don't have the engine as you

SPEAKER_82: called it how do you make the engine go faster you're literally trying to take a bunch of car parts

SPEAKER_31: and then run a formula one race the car is not even track worthy yet and katera you know not to pick on any companies but i remember katera which was doing construction and they just thought they're going to take over the whole construction injury you know industry with this company it raised like 900 million dollars and i believe it's like a zero the whole way you cannot you can't put the money to use capital as a weapon maybe works if you're uber lyft and doordash and you have customers and you

SPEAKER_45: can reduce the price but well you know what's interesting is when you now look at all a bunch of these ai companies every day what you see is every round is a minimum of a hundred million dollars but the the dirty little secret is not that these companies have found product market fit or are scaling revenue massively i'm not talking about open ai i'm talking about these other long tail businesses the hundred million dollars is largely going to compute but as we know and i think we'll talk about this next week when all these announcements are done but you're about to see a one-tenthing of

SPEAKER_47: the compute cost and so what's interesting for those companies is they're going to be left with a lot more money but back to freebrook's point they may be ambling about with too much money at that point so today you raise a hundred million dollars because you need to spend 70 or 80 on compute tomorrow when you only need to spend seven or eight for the same amount of throughput on one hand you could say well this is great i have so much more money i can spend but again we've seen example after example where if you raise too much money when you don't need it you will just run yourself into a brick wall you'll over hire you'll miss hire you'll misallocate and it just goes back to the same thing that we've said

SPEAKER_45: before which is there's just not enough people that actually know how to run companies

SPEAKER_103: yeah and it just becomes a huge distraction did you see sacks today sora did you see sora

SPEAKER_104: controlled by open ai this is breaking news right now yeah this is unbelievable if you haven't seen

SPEAKER_31: it sora is the text video model from open ai they've been talking about this i guess this uh would compete with a staple diffusion do video as well anyway you give a prompt i'll just read this one out loud beautiful snowy tokyo city is bustling the camera moves through the bustling city street following several people enjoying the beautiful snowy weather and shopping at nearby star stalls gorgeous petals are flying through the wind along with snowflakes and this if you weren't studying it would look like a major feature film or tv show yeah sex yeah i mean it's unbelievable i mean it looks to me

SPEAKER_00: like 4k video i mean i'm not sure it actually is 4k but it looks pretty darn close yeah the rendering

SPEAKER_112: resolution can be whatever you want it to be right the fact that you can describe the

SPEAKER_37: the way that you want the camera to move so i'm going to speculate on this you guys know i talked about this quite a while ago on how i think we're going to be a prompt to video meaning people are going to have personalized video games and personalized movie experiences and music eventually where rather than everyone watch the same product made centrally by a producer we'll all make our own product locally i spent some time digging into this over the last year and the big challenge was that the traditional approach for rendering video is you create three-dimensional objects and then you have a rendering engine that renders those objects and then you have a system that defines where the camera goes and that's how you get the visual that you use to generate a 2d movie like this and the best tool out there is unreal engine 5 which is made by epic games i don't know if you guys

SPEAKER_82: have ever seen the demos of it but i've seen it yeah is that what star wars uses with their like virtual sets now when they did the mandalorian i think they're using the unreal engine or unit they

SPEAKER_38: probably are and then there's other tools if you're in movie production you'll use different stuff but unreal engine is just so incredible but it requires the placement and the rendering of 3d objects so where do those objects go and then the physics of the light moving off those 3d objects generate a 2d video is pretty straightforward that's been done for 20 30 years and so the the density the the rate of improvement the color contrast etc is all improved made it look incredible now it's super photorealistic you create photorealistic video but it still requires this concept of where are the 3d objects in 3d space this doesn't do that this was a trained model so we don't know what's going on in the model so how would you train a model to do this without having a 3d space because clearly there's thousands of objects in that rendering if you look at that video thousands of little objects the compute necessary to define each of those objects place them in 3d space is practically impossible today so this is being done through some model that starts to render all of these things together so it is very likely my guess is that openai used a tool like unreal engine 5 and generated tons and tons of video content tagged it labeled it and were then able to use that to train this this model that can for whatever reason that we don't understand do this the output but what's interesting is that this output underneath it you're referring to synthetic training data and yeah exactly exactly and and but what's amazing about this model is that underneath this this model on its own has rendered physics so all of the rules of physics all of the rules of motion all of the rules of perspective all of the rules of how objects sit upon one another next to each other how fluids move if you look at some of the other demos on this tool you can actually see fluid moving it's rendering the movement of fluid or rendering the movement of hair those are like physics models that would typically be deterministically written meaning that a programmer an engineer writes the physics and then the the unreal engine renders the physics in this case the model figured out the physics and the model probably did it in such a reduced way that you could use a reduced amount of compute to generate something that would otherwise take a ton of compute time i mean look at this it's truly amazing nick find the one of

SPEAKER_123: golden retrievers playing in the snow this is way better than this but what's amazing is that the

SPEAKER_38: and by the way if you're listening to this i really recommend going on twitter and typing in openai sorra sora and looking at some of these demo videos it's bonkers and i think it really speaks to what's so incredible right now which is that software is writing itself and it's replacing a lot of human determinism the way that humans think about constructing software is being completely redone with these uh learned models this model learned physics on its own and it renders this thing that looks like the only way we know how to do this today is to create 3d object models in 3d space and use

SPEAKER_125: tons of compute to render the light and just to translate that from geek to yeah you know people listening this is incredible because pixar spent years maybe a decade trying to figure out hair i remember talking to ed catmull and he told me hair was just so hard to get right with wind and lighting they literally built the physics engine for years like maybe even a decade to make hair across the uncanny valley what you're saying here freeberg is somehow this language model this image model

SPEAKER_82: just outputs it and it doesn't actually have a physics model it just outputs it correct

SPEAKER_38: yeah it it well we don't know but the model there may be some determinism built into it so so i don't want to assume anything but the general approach determinism means you write the physics and you write the formula of the physics yep so that the software can execute the physics and render the thing but in this case it may very well be the case like a lot of the other models that are being trained today when you create a model they're trained that it's being trained and on its own it resolves to

SPEAKER_47: figure out how to do the physics is there a limit on the length of these sora videos that you can

SPEAKER_135: generate one minute right now 60 seconds today obviously that'll come off at some but by the way if

SPEAKER_113: you can do 60 seconds you can do two hours right the problem that you have is i mean if we're talking about creating a movie is making edits so i mean obviously i haven't used soria because it just came out today but i've used dolly which is just their prompt image service and i was designing the label

SPEAKER_06: for or the bottle for the all-in tequila for you guys yeah and what i noticed is that it would spit out a bunch of ideas and then i would take one and then want to just make little changes and i would just say okay keep this but just change this one detail it would give me a completely new image so the ai doesn't realize the layers inherent in what it's producing somehow it takes this prompt and generates a response and if you give it that same prompt a hundred times it'll give you a hundred different answers and if you'd say just modify this this or this it can't do it can't reason it can't take criticism well it seems like on some level it's unaware of the output that it's created again yeah a human creating this in photoshop would have a lot of layers and every object in that image would have its own layer and you could have a layer for text and just quickly modify the text when i want to do something as simple as edit the text or change the font again it would give me a completely different image and i just wonder about these videos if you want to create a movie i think you're probably going to be stuck with like the what they give you and then maybe you can import that at some point into an unreal engine and then do work from there the editing part is it doesn't exist yet when

SPEAKER_31: you do text it's easy because you just x you cut and paste it into your grammarly or your notion or whatever you use and you start editing here there's no exporting like you're saying to final cut pro or

SPEAKER_06: something i bet that when they turn this into an api that when you're working in unreal engine you know if you're like a vr designer or something like that or you're like a filmmaker you could probably just get started with a prompt and that could be hugely time-saving if they can make that integration work i think that's pretty interesting

SPEAKER_35: i looked at this a lot over the last year this was one of the biggest challenges is in order to have

SPEAKER_38: an interactive approach to video production or video game production you have to be able to say we'll take that out put that in but like like you said the model doesn't distinguish the objects it doesn't distinguish each of those little flowers or each of those little cherry blossoms or it doesn't even distinguish that there's two people walking down the road the model doesn't have this concept of objects when it renders and so um the traditional model where you have objects in a 3d model that then get rendered into a video allows you to do those sorts of things so what may end up happening is a fusion and this is something we talked about with steven wolfram and others that there are these models that are called compute models that do deterministic compute tasks then there are these ai trained models where we don't really have a sense of how they work but the fusion of the two will unlock a lot of opportunities and that's very likely the next generation of models is not just purely um non-human intervened trained models but the integration of those models with these deterministic models with these compute models and then you can start to do things like instead of saying hey render this whole scene you're saying render all the objects that would go in the scene they get placed in an unreal engine and then the unreal engine outputs the video and so that integration

SPEAKER_120: work i think is the next big phase in ai model development and that'll unlock like insane yeah

SPEAKER_113: because right now you can't use this to create dialogue like actors in a movie scene talking to

SPEAKER_06: each other and acting especially like close-ups of those actors with their facial expressions i don't at

SPEAKER_114: least i don't see any examples like that the way humans want to have a creative process it doesn't work

SPEAKER_31: that's right yeah yeah it'll get there though and if you put something like this out there to the public and said it's 20 bucks a month to do this or 50 bucks a month you can have a lot of consumers who want to buy this product so when i see this i think people are going to pay for this and then going back to nvidia or arm okay more infrastructure to your point freeberg is like what infrastructure do we need for everybody to have pixar on their laptop or on their you know phone and people people

SPEAKER_38: are willing to pay for these i don't know if you guys saw this but there was another big breakthrough announced today with the um the new gemini pro one five can you just pull up sundar's announcement on

SPEAKER_95: it yeah sundar now has found the password to his twitter handle he's he's tweeting yeah the reason i

SPEAKER_38: want to talk about this if you just scroll down so when you prompt an ai model you put in a certain number of words into like an llm model today and it's words back out the more words you put into the model the more compute intensive or challenging it is to do the compute work needed to render the output so open ai their gpt4 turbo model has 128 000 tokens which means about 128 000 words can be fed into the model to get an answer back out so you could put like a whole essay or 100 pages of text and it will read a document for you you get a whole book and it could give you a summary in a couple of seconds what google just announced with gemini 1.5 pro is a 1 million token context window up to 10 million token context window in total i don't know what's going on here because the problem is the way these models are kind of traditionally built is that that creates a non-linear scaling and compute needs to be able to increase that that context window like that so there is some architectural work that's gone on to allow these models to scale up in a way that we did not think possible when these models first came out which is crazy to think was only like 24 months ago that they started to get kind of looked at like this 18 months maybe yeah and so there's two kind of things that are happening one is that these models are getting chopped up in a way that you can run small models in a highly trained way locally and you don't need a massive general purpose model and so that's going to make compute needs very small for very specific tasks and the other one is that there's other architecture that's happening in deploying the models that's allowing massive context windows like this so it totally changes how scalable they are with the same number of chips or the same amount of compute or the same amount of power so there are all these amazing moore's law effects happening right now in ai technology development on the chip level on the architectural level on the how they're being built and how they're being deployed that completely changes the concept that i think most folks had when these first came out two years ago and the potential so i think sky's still the limit we don't really know how big this is going to get but all of these efficiency gains mean that we can do so much more with so much less and by the way when you can do more with less it doesn't mean you need less chips it means you need a lot more chips because the fact that you can do a lot more with much fewer chips means everyone's going to want to do it now more people can afford to do it so it unlocks the opportunity for uh for compute and so it really starts to rationalize the nvidia thesis that it could be worth

David Friedberg: 10 trillion dollars potentially for people in the audience to understand what this context window

SPEAKER_31: means i'm sorry if i was too technical no no no i'm just i always like to just give an example or two after you explain it the context window for example you could upload the transcript of this podcast

SPEAKER_125: right and there were only certain services like claude maybe where you could put a pdf attachment boom you put it in there and say hey summarize this using your language model and using this content now you could be able to say hey take me every mr beast video take me you know take the top 10 000 videos on youtube take the transcripts summarize them for me give some analysis on it and that was only available to

SPEAKER_31: developers prior to these large context windows being open and that's going to just open up a massive

SPEAKER_105: amount of application right the results are actually not that much better there's these third-party

SPEAKER_45: service benchmarks lumbat is probably the most often referred to but what you see if you just look at for example all the gpts even as they increase the number of parameters in a model the quality of that model doesn't necessarily increase with the rate of parameter increase so you have this thing of a little bit of diminishing return which is more a problem of what we said before which is eventually when you're scouring the open internet doesn't matter how fast or how how big you scour the open internet the open internet is a bounded space and so you get the same answer so all of these things are they're interesting marketing where but i would just encourage us all to keep in mind that the shift is not necessarily these kinds of things

SPEAKER_47: it's kind of like saying you know in a chip like oh wow we built this ship on three nanometer

SPEAKER_103: okay what does it mean well no i think the piece respectfully you might be missing here is like

SPEAKER_125: your proprietary data might not be in that language model so by having this context window and you can add something that you have on your hard drive that's not how it works so my point is

SPEAKER_45: the context window is not correlated to the quality of the model outputs correct but consumers and

SPEAKER_125: business users haven't been able to put their data into the models because that has nothing to do with

SPEAKER_45: the context window that existed when the context window was smaller but that's what you

SPEAKER_31: think you do things like rag with right but most people don't have access to that this is like

SPEAKER_45: consumers can now just take something off their hard drive yeah rag is different than what this is okay like this is this what what you guys just spent all this time talking about is equivalent to saying i built this chip with on a seven nanometer process or a three nanometer process and what i'm

SPEAKER_47: saying is it is technically more burdensome as freeberg said it's technically much more sophisticated and complicated but the the translation to quality in the consumer is not what that means so a three nanometer chip is not two times better than a seven nanometer chip for the consumer similarly a context window that's five times bigger than the one before it doesn't make a model five times better to the consumer these are orthogonal ideas it's not to say that it isn't an important thing but i i would say that it's a reminder for me that we're in the early phases where there's a lot of hay that people can make but it's important to look at these third party benchmarks that try to sort through and sift through what matters and what doesn't matter and one of the interesting things that third party benchmark services have figured out is that irrespective of the exponential growth of these things like parameter size quality is only growing

SPEAKER_97: linearly and now sub linearly so it's just an interesting point i understand your point now

SPEAKER_31: my point is man when we when you are a consumer of this and i've been talking to people trying to get their data into you know the context window to be able to ask a question they're always like how do i put

SPEAKER_82: more in there how do i put more in there and then these language models because of the copyright issues

SPEAKER_31: they're not able to upload blade runner and then say hey make me something but i was able to and just to give a very real example i did um a podcast around the ray crock movie the founder that we were referencing earlier i uploaded the screenplay i found a pdf of the book and i found two other like essays about ray crock like hbs studies and i said give me like a timeline of it and i used something called google notebook which has a big context window you can upload all this stuff and that's where i'm seeing consumers and what these things are capable of vis-a-vis the context window it just

SPEAKER_105: unleashes in people's minds so many applications that you can do there are two examples today that

SPEAKER_45: caught my eye that i think are worth bringing up the first one is from meta meta published this paper

SPEAKER_47: today which was like pretty crazy and essentially what they said is that for the realm of the software

SPEAKER_45: worker the software engineer what they basically built is this llm tool that runs over llama called test gen and it essentially does automated unit testing to such a high degree of accuracy so you know in the software development if you want to spit out a product you have to go through this thing where you have to functionally run unit tests and make sure the thing works as advertised

SPEAKER_47: and this paper essentially now allows you to traverse a code base understand it generate these unit tests with high accuracy so where is this valuable think of remember the software bugs in like the boeing triple 737 max issue jacow where it turned out that it was just bad software tools like this now will be able to run unit tests where you will not be able to get out get that plane out the door unless all of these functional unit tests not only have been written but run and have been passed successfully and it'll all be done by bots which means that you can't gain that system so that's

SPEAKER_168: that's something today that that is the last thing developers get to is writing the unit test right

SPEAKER_47: it's always like which is why there's all kinds of bugs and security holes in code now i thought that that was a pretty large breakthrough and i think we're going to go through a bunch of fine tunes on this that make it interesting and then i saw this other thing which caught my eye even more which was this thing that nat friedman tweeted out which is this thing called magic.dev and what essentially it is is like a co-worker and what they are claiming and i don't know if it's true is that now you can basically have this thing understand your style of code and actually be able to write code that is just as good as the way you write code so now it's not a co-pilot but effectively a co-worker and this is the first real example of what i've seen of a claim that basically says hey you know we can now be an add-on to your workforce and this to me is just so gargantuan because like if you look at the amount of opex inside of any company that sits inside of r d if you look at the amount of stock-based compensation right if you replace humans with bots which is what this is you're going to crush those things sbc at the limit goes to zero because you don't have to give stock to a bot right you want to give stock to people and opex gets shrunk because now you just pay a license to magic.dev or i don't know how they're going to make money on this but really really really fascinating stuff it is a scary there was another open source project

SPEAKER_31: uh i think it's called maggie mgie i don't know if you saw that frayberg but apple has been working

SPEAKER_82: on an open source image project and so you're kind of going to see i think in ios 18 or the next iphone 16 they're going to have an image model on baked onto that phone where is where is apple in all

SPEAKER_125: of this it's unbelievable no they they're where are they they are building an image model and you're going to be able to talk to your phone they haven't announced anything i think you're going

SPEAKER_38: to see a chip on the next set of mobile devices 100 that will run models locally yep and so this goes back to the point about how the hell is the government going to regulate ai models which is the stupidest thing i've ever heard um well not the stupidest it's probably you know probably top 20 but the fact that they're gonna like be able to be fully vertically designed that they can have the hardware and the software and integrate all the way through to the application layer they're gonna have i would imagine incredible intuitive ai features built into all of their products that can run locally rather than all the other stuff that's going on where you've got to make a request on the internet and get the results back over the internet it'll be pretty powerful

SPEAKER_182: but obviously no data right we don't know what they're doing we're just speculating here well

SPEAKER_31: no i mean you have breadcrumbs and the breadcrumbs are they have an image model and i just dropped in the hugging face of it you can basically upload an image and just give it a text prompt of how to change the image so you know if nick were to use this he could upload a picture of mutual moth and say you know give him five o'clock shadow give him a mustache whatever and actually nick nick will you do

SPEAKER_113: that real quick while we're talking while you're doing that can you bring up the video of the robot's life in a cyberpunk setting that's beautiful is this a sora rendering yeah this is

SPEAKER_06: sora so beautiful so it's really cool so but here's the the limitation and this goes back to what me and fear were talking about earlier okay so you've got these people in the background let's

SPEAKER_35: say they're trying to make the theater backwards by the way you can see the human feet aren't correct

SPEAKER_06: sort of like a dolly problem yeah what's cool is that okay so those cars aren't moving they're static you've got some movement of these background people right at least so they're kind of they're the extras in a movie but if you wanted to tell sora this is my guess that okay i want the people in the background to be doing this it would render a whole different image like your robot might change too

SPEAKER_38: right well sax this is where your context window matters so if you repeat the statement instead of writing and then iterating if you just re-prompt it and your prompt got longer and longer and longer with the degrees of specificity you needed that's the way you use these models today and to your point what humans are looking for from a ux perspective is an iterative approach to rendering is an iterative approach which isn't feasible in a world where the this this is all a matrix it's a three-dimensional matrix there's two dimensions of pixels and then the third dimension is the next image the next image and the next image and so that matrix is re-rendered from scratch it doesn't have a concept of what are the objects that i'm rendering it has a concept of a matrix of pixels and so it will re-render a matrix of pixels based on a redefined prompt but what you're describing would require a very different model architecture than the way all of these trained models operate today this is going to

SPEAKER_45: revolutionize pornography i think it's the first place no no i'm not saying it as a joke i think that's

SPEAKER_47: that's where you're going to see this first because then all these issues potential issues of underage people or exploited folks it goes completely away your pr guy's going to cut this

SPEAKER_191: and you know it'll kill only fans yeah i was about to say gambling is where every revolution

SPEAKER_47: starts that's where exactly technological that's where payments started that's where the web started that's where payments got refined but i think that in pornography you're going to see this basically

SPEAKER_82: destroy pornography and only fans well i don't want to bring up something uh that's super offensive but there was a certain pop music star who had a bunch of images just a couple of weeks ago

SPEAKER_196: that were ai generated yeah deep fakes right yeah there were a bunch of deep fakes of a pop star i

SPEAKER_197: don't want to like actually highlight the person's name because then it just i think can sense more

SPEAKER_31: of it but x did a really good job of blocking all of them watermarking them and saying you can't do this and so this is like a whole new world you can take any person on the planet and make porn out of

SPEAKER_105: them that is realistic well i don't mean that i just mean that you'll be able to make pornography in

SPEAKER_45: a way that is totally yeah uh non-human involved which is generally better i would say for all humans

SPEAKER_04: involved what's great about the deep fakes is that if you have a sex tape come out you can just say it's

SPEAKER_200: a deep fake totally i was about to ask him what is the prompt you're going to use to make love to

SPEAKER_105: yourself tonight with the new sora model chamab embraces chamab all i hope is i i may just need

SPEAKER_49: to publish some data so that whatever deep fake gets some parts accurate this is apple oh short apple

SPEAKER_202: stock this is yeah it's not very good yeah what is this model this is an apple model it's called

SPEAKER_155: maggie mgie this is apple's open source image model it's way behind this looks like gpt 0.1 they got

SPEAKER_168: work to do but it's open source it's gonna go faster it's very hard to make fine tune changes in

SPEAKER_06: these models or to get the result that you want but that's fine this is just a this is v 0.9 so if

SPEAKER_47: you guys want to see a great fine tune the juggernaut excel fine tune uh oh i would just say try it it

SPEAKER_191: it is a fine tune that does not allow bad looking people the whole the whole concept is only beautiful people so it doesn't matter what your prompt is but these people come out it's going to be incredibly

SPEAKER_82: good looking people i've ever seen as if the standard wasn't uh already high enough with filters

SPEAKER_207: and everything else but this is going to be revolutionary for independent film i mean this

SPEAKER_06: is obviously just tip of the iceberg but you know the problem with independent film right now is that the economic model literally doesn't work it's too expensive to make an independent movie relative to the return and so the independent movie business has almost dried up almost completely this is going to revolutionize it because it'll bring the cost down close to zero now i i don't i don't agree with freeberg that everyone's going to design their own entertainment because most people are lazy

SPEAKER_38: no i'm not saying design sex the way you think about creative production processes is what's going to change it's all going to reduce down to sitting down and it's like when you ask your spouse or partner or whatever what do you want to watch tonight and they answer something that something

SPEAKER_135: will then be delivered to you instantly that's what's going to be so powerful well you mean the

SPEAKER_38: ai is going to create it on the spot for you it certainly will but i i think that there's a certain element of culture that gets integrated into personal yeah i i mean i i don't think we have time for

SPEAKER_06: this but i have like a whole philosophy people still want curation i mean if you look at something like youtube um or really any user generated content site there are roughly 100 times more people who are passive than people who are active and actually create stuff whatever the ratio is there's always a lot more passive viewers than there are creators so there's i'd say most of the content will be created by people who actually care enough to do it again let's call it one or two percent of the

SPEAKER_187: population and then of those one percent might actually be really good at it yeah but here here's where

SPEAKER_31: freeberg i think has a really good point because i have been looking into this imagine if you took the soprano something you and i love sax and you just said hey for each season give me 10 more

SPEAKER_125: minutes per episode and give me like two more characters or whatever now you when you watch it the next time you can say just fill it in i want every episode to be 90 minutes instead of 50 minutes or i've been doing this thing uh with my daughters we're into star wars and the clone wars etc

SPEAKER_31: people have been cutting shows like andor or rogue one clone wars the prequels etc and the bad batch and they're putting in together like timelines and they're making their new versions of it by super cutting the different series that are filling things in so you're going to be able to say hey tell me the whole star wars saga with a little more perspective from obi-wan or give me a little more perspective from this person and that that's going to just make these things like these

SPEAKER_65: franchises so much more watchable and deep and rich yeah so this is my point sax is i don't think it's

SPEAKER_38: about ground up personal media creation i think that it's about the curation model changes the creator or the central creative force comes up with a genre with a bunch of characters like a star wars and general like arcs of stories and then you can go in and you can view it from any character's point of view imagine watching the star wars movie from darth vader's point of view imagine watching the star wars movie where you just stayed on endor the whole time and you watch the news on the tv

SPEAKER_219: while you're hanging out that's your fantasy you with the you with the ewoks yeah so you're right that

SPEAKER_06: there's a great opportunity for some of these cinematic universes to kind of open up the creative assets and let the fan base do whatever they want with them or create you know these alternatives i still think that it's that one percent of the viewership that actually cares enough to do that and the reason is because that i think what you see with all these uh demos is that it's really easy to get the first 90 percent it's really hard to get the next nine percent and then the final one percent you know to get to the level of of course yeah to get it dialed in to the point where again

SPEAKER_38: the first thing it gives you but the benefits could outweigh those costs and this is true in 3d video game playing i don't know if you play fortnite but there's all sorts of stuff that you feel could be better but the overall value of that experience far outweighs the missing elements of it not being truly photorealistic and i think that's where this stuff goes it's ski week next

SPEAKER_45: week and i've done this for all both of my older boys and i'm doing it now for my youngest boy who is four and a half almost five we are going to watch this entire week all of the star wars

SPEAKER_47: fantastic and then i got a downloaded history of feature of all the movies yeah from and i got an

SPEAKER_105: order the order was not what i thought it's not as released obviously no you want to do timelines so

SPEAKER_232: you want to have the prequels i did that once and i will tell you it was super disappointing rogue one

SPEAKER_45: uh the star wars the original sequel well you're saying this order is not good here's what i was told this is what was the internet was the most popular you start with the phantom menace yeah

SPEAKER_47: then attack of the clones then revenge of the sith yeah then solo is optional

SPEAKER_38: rogue one optional yeah rogue one not optional then four five and six obviously a new hope that's when your kids will lose their mind they'll be like what is this it's like five and six are too slow

SPEAKER_47: for kids yeah that's the problem seven the force awakens and eight the last jedi then nine the rise

SPEAKER_239: of skywalker skip the last three yeah the last year garbage they fall asleep during four five six

SPEAKER_240: yeah four five six are the prequels are probably the most watchable they're very they in in retrospect

SPEAKER_155: they're great but there's also the clone wars which is absolutely fantastic i would sprinkle in some

SPEAKER_45: clone wars episodes nat and my daughters i'm forcing them to sit with us for this entire that's gonna watch all this no she's ready to shoot herself in the face yeah this is her worst night

SPEAKER_38: she and my daughters are like i put the over under on nat sticking through maybe a hundred minutes of

SPEAKER_245: this and she's done she's done amore why do you poison the kids with this nerd stuff and they're never going to get the girlfriend this is not the felini this is uh how about they watch something where the people make a love instead of the lights they're able to cut people hand off watching this exactly he said no there's no love and a joy uh there's uh people like light swords it's no fun but to

SPEAKER_255: bridge the gap between your two vision sax and uh freeberg's it's just natural points is so great

SPEAKER_213: chamath and i will talk when we talk to each other for literally 20 minutes as nat we'll just have

SPEAKER_259: a conversation but it's a conversation we're having i don't know why chamath this deal has such a high interest rate on the convertible note so why would you do that to me i'm your friend

SPEAKER_262: who's going to be on the board that this person looks like a dum-dum what's going on i don't

SPEAKER_259: understand well it's a independency chamath you don't need to have a super smart person just a different

SPEAKER_262: perspective is the opposite of a white truffle the white truffle is delicious this a product that smells

SPEAKER_269: like a pool but anyway between we're literally just talking uh we're coming tonight are you making

SPEAKER_82: it for dinner or not we need to have to i'm not i'm i'm gonna try to make it by dinner i just have uh i have to give a keynote at a podcasting conference oh my god are you wait sorry are you kidding me

David Friedberg: no i'm not kidding you guys banned me from having advertising here i have to make cheddar i got bills

SPEAKER_125: to pay just because there's an eight in front of the uber stock price doesn't mean i can retire

SPEAKER_103: will you be there by 7 pm or not i'm going to make it by seven yes i don't keep me in so we are

SPEAKER_82: going to start dinner when you get there perfect i will not do david sacks time okay thank you but between freeberg and dave you know sacks you said it's like one or two percent of the audience

SPEAKER_125: for you know show with a million viewers or 10 million viewers that could be tens of thousands of lunatics and i don't know if you knew this but you remember when luke skywalker showed up spoiler alert in the mandalorian everybody was like oh his young face does not skip the uncanny valley this is why you got to watch the mandalorian so then some kid did his own ai re-rendering of luke skywalker

SPEAKER_82: you know after return of the jedi but you know after he defeats the emperor and they then hired that

SPEAKER_125: kid to work at disney and lucasarts so what's happening is all these people who are making content for the star wars universe they are going to be the next generation of creators so between a mr beast way over here and lucasart there's going to be a new fill-in and it's going to be all these great one percenters making interesting with ip that's owned by other organizations i think it's a whole new

SPEAKER_37: paradigm for media and content it's going to be so different the automated stuff that's customized for

SPEAKER_38: you it's almost like what youtube and instagram did for user generated content there's going to be this whole new model of ai generated content the real winners are going to be the technology platforms that bring these tools in a simple intuitive way that to sax's point doesn't challenge the user to do work but makes their life feel easier and better and brings them a more rich experience than they're

SPEAKER_126: getting today from any other media source and that's going to be a game changer all right lots going

SPEAKER_281: on in ai i thought i'd bring up a really interesting story that happened just around stock options and

SPEAKER_31: employees and advice you're going to get generally speaking just tons of chaos at the startup bolt if you don't remember that's a one-click checkout startup it was founded by a guy named ryan breslow he's been on my other podcast this week in startups he went viral in 2022 after he called yc and stripe like mob bosses and had this whole conspiracy theory of how they were trying to kill this company don't know if it's true or not but at its peak bolt was valued at 11 billion dollars to month and they're buying back shares at a 300 million dollar valuation down 97 yada yada what makes this interesting was that in 2022 breslow announced a new stock auction program for his employees on twitter and he did this in a very bombastic lecturing kind of way to the entire industry saying that bolt would offer loans to any employee to exercise their options early we all know about these types of loans from their balance sheet that is the idea here yes and he called it the most employee-friendly plan possible and said that half of bolt's 600 plus employees took the deal yeah he's since deleted the entire thread but at the time a lot of vcs who'd been through this before you know explained to ryan it's a terrible idea here's ggv's jeff richards for what it's worth almost every private company still finally did this in the 90s was an absolute disaster employees spent years paying back loans for worth of stock tax bills for merely exercising etc yada yada and his now deleted tweet was over half our employees chose this plus i would strongly encourage my family and friends to choose this but vcs say it didn't work in the 90s so it's a disaster vc twitter pumps the tweet this is why vc-run companies are never able to make strides for employees

SPEAKER_155: obviously all those options at 11 billion are worthless now but sorry they did this when they were worth 300 million 11 billion and it was reported that at the same time in a new industry

SPEAKER_31: publication that breslow was selling his shares in secondary brezzo confirmed with that newsletter that he had sold 10 million and uh sources uh anonymous sources yada yada i take that forward it's where it said he didn't tell the team he was doing that two investors also accused the company of misleading shareholders and raising capital on inflated metrics sec investigated but did not recommend any action sex jamath i don't know if either want to take this this is really mechanical but it does speak to what happens when things implode should employees be taking loans to buy

SPEAKER_155: these kind of stocks at a minimum hopefully these loans are non-recourse and at the maximum if they

SPEAKER_49: were recourse but it looked like these guys were doing these kinds of shady things they have to kind

SPEAKER_240: of forgive the loans and eat it there's a reason why almost no one does these types of exercise loans

SPEAKER_113: anymore i mean whoever the vc was who pushed back was right i mean these things were common 20 something

SPEAKER_06: years ago people stopped doing it and the reason why is that well there are a couple of reasons so the mechanics of the loan are that the company loans you the money to pay down the exercise price the strike price for the options and then you're supposed to pay the company back at some future date basically when you can sell the shares and in effect from the point of view of the balance sheet of the company this was cashless because it would loan the exercise price to the employee who would then exercise and pay that money back to the company so everyone's like well what's wrong with this this just seems like simple mechanics where no one loses the employee gets to start the clock on their shares for long-term capital gains that's why they would do it the problem is that what people discovered is that if the company didn't work out and those shares became worthless then the employee is still on the hook for the loan and if they don't pay the loan back then there's a loan forgiveness issue in other words the forgiven amount of the loan or the defaulted amount of the loan becomes ordinary income and so what happens is you end up having to recognize as income the loan that you never pay back so you can lose furthermore if there's spread at the time that you exercise between the strike price and the fair market value of the shares then although if if it's the right kind of option if it's nice so you can defer paying tax on that spread however people got whammied by the amt that that spread still counted for alternative minimum tax so there are a lot of people during the first dot-com bubble who exercised thinking they can't lose because the market was always up and to the right and then the company would go bust and they would get hit with a big amt and then they would get hit with a loan forgiveness issue so that's why everyone stopped doing these things

SPEAKER_38: yeah i mean really importantly getting taxed on that spread you owe that money no matter what no matter what no matter what the irs demands that money and the cal california franchise tax board demands that money so i just want to be very specific so people understand this if the value of your company's gone up to two dollars a share as a private company and your options are 10 cents a share you pay 10 cents a share to get those shares you owe tax on the dollar 90 difference and ultimately if the company's now worth less than a dollar when you're finally able to sell or it shuts down you actually have money you have to pay to the irs the franchise tax board and you did not make enough money to cover the tax bill the way a lot of these companies do this is they do a cashless early exercise or cashless exercise loan meaning you don't even have to put money up to to pay the 10 cents a share the company is just covering it for you to sax's point you end up getting taxed for that later if you don't pay it back so the whole thing creates a lot of tax obligations and it's a very complicated structure and system and the reason options exist is so that people could buy their options and not have to pay taxes at the time that they receive them because if you just get shares in a company rather than options the value of those shares is your tax bill even if you can't sell the shares well it's income so it's income and so options were created as a way that you would have a strike and the strike was the fair market value so you're actually not getting any value today and so you can avoid the tax bill but now it leads to all these other tax loops way too complicated for rank and file

SPEAKER_160: employees is what it comes down to like i saw this with like senior executives trying to get like the

SPEAKER_38: top five positions you know a cfo or something the whole thing is to reduce your tax bill from 50 to 20 and at the end of the day you open up all of these other problems if you try and do that completely

SPEAKER_06: one of the stupidest things about the way this was used is that they would give the exercise loan to employees who are leaving the company because they said that you know normally when you're a departing employee from a company you have three months to exercise your options or you or you lose them so they were saying that this would be a solution to that right we're loading the money to exercise all they're doing is creating a huge tax problem for that former employee and you're right the average employee is not sophisticated enough to navigate all these issues it's not clear also why you'd want to create this complicated benefit for departing employees it seems like if you're going to do this you would want to do it for a key exec who's joining the company that's the only context in which i've seen it by the way yeah same so they were trying to solve a problem using this complicated device that that really backfired but it's not even a problem that you should try and solve in that way i mean there's a much simpler solution which is extend the period of time that employees have to exercise if you don't want them to lose their option if they don't exercise within three months give them 10 years and

SPEAKER_113: there are a bunch of companies that have done that where they give you a lot longer to exercise the

SPEAKER_31: option the trend i'm seeing with startups like early stage sharp seed stage startups which are really indicative of what startups will do later on hiring people cash basis paying them hourly outside the united states not having to worry about stock options not having to worry about health care just finding a global workforce and using these third-party tools there's a lot of third-party tools to manage employees in portugal or manila or canada or whatever south america and they're just saying you know what stock options are going to be for like an elite group the top 10 of the company and then

SPEAKER_197: we're going to automate the rest of the jobs with ai and we're going to outsource and have hourly workers or full-time contractors outside the united states it's the undeniable trend terrible

SPEAKER_06: why that's throwing the baby out with the bath water one of the most magical things about startups in silicon valley is that when it worked everyone got rich i mean you have the story of the google chef who made 100 million dollars or the secretary of microsoft who got to retire it you know those are

SPEAKER_302: extremely graffiti artists at facebook graffiti artists he didn't really what's his name david

SPEAKER_06: david show the matter is that silicon valley had a share of the wealth mentality where the rank and file employees did participate in the ownership of the company and they got equity and it was highly motivating or it is highly motivating sure for not just like lower level employees but mid-level employees and senior employees to basically get equity in the company that's one of the things that makes silicon valley companies special or companies created outside silicon valley but using

SPEAKER_306: this methodology template yeah so i think you're getting rid of options altogether is a terrible

SPEAKER_31: now what they're doing is more like for the core team that's in silicon valley options but then like for work that is not considered as essential you know just hiring people offshore who don't

SPEAKER_06: we're trying to get those people then to work nights and weekends the way that you might be if you're the owner of the company they're not going to have an ownership mentality yeah i agree i mean

David Sacks: i guess nine to five workers that way and i think what people are starting to realize is like

SPEAKER_197: maybe there's with these remote workers a lot of people are doing nine to five work and maybe that

SPEAKER_130: like hard working culture just doesn't exist in silicon valley like it used to you may be able to find

SPEAKER_45: hard working entrepreneurial like folks that don't necessarily speak english that now with these ai tools basically become some of your best folks but there are many countries that don't value equity don't have an understanding of it and so to jason's point it's almost more of a complication to try to give it so that may be the balancing thing sacks that happens which is that all these tools actually allow somebody in some country that speaks some language that's not english but who can be completely committed who becomes this linchpin of a business and gets paid an extremely great salary in american terms that makes them rich in their country get to the same place maybe maybe i don't know their

SPEAKER_110: infrastructure needs to be built for stock options in other countries because i don't know that that

SPEAKER_45: exists or just pay people more cash because a lot of folks have different again stock options make sense when you have a differential in taxation between stock equity and income yes but in other places where you have a flat tax or no income tax whatsoever what's the difference yeah if you're in

SPEAKER_236: dubai paying one percent like you could just ship it right yeah ship it i mean you can always go back

SPEAKER_37: to a model where people vest shares rather than vest options and those shares vest on a trigger of time

SPEAKER_38: and a liquidity event and that way they can't exercise or real or they won't get taxed prior to

SPEAKER_114: the liquidity event happening but then they will have to pay ordinary income tax rates on their shares

SPEAKER_06: hold on we're making it sound like exercising options is a bad thing it can be a very good thing i mean if you're an early employee of a startup and the options are worth pennies and you can exercise for i don't know a few hundred dollars then that's a great tax benefit because you start the clock taking on long-term capital gains treatment and when you sell those shares eventually if there's liquidity event you get taxed at a capital gains rate not an ordinary income rate that's the tax benefit that's why people want to be able to exercise their options in the first place the problem is that as you join the company later and later the strike price of the options goes up and so therefore if you want to exercise you're going to have to write a pretty big check and so you're going to take a meaningful risk some people do that and that's fine the trouble comes in when you try to get cute and go around taking that risk by saying okay well the employee doesn't have to go out of pocket for their exercise price we're going to loan them the money well they thought that they had figured out a way to avoid taking that risk but as it turns out all you end up doing is potentially incurring amt and a loan forgiveness issue so there's no way around the fact that if you want to exercise your options to get the potential tax benefit of a lower tax rate you have to also take the risk of losing the strike price that that check that you write into the company that's a fair trade right if you want the potential benefit you take the potential risk but that doesn't that doesn't mean that you should never exercise there's a lot of cases again i think if you're early at a company

SPEAKER_319: you should low thousands of dollars low hundreds of dollars go for it there's all kinds of ways

SPEAKER_45: where when the basis is extremely low it's nominally not a lot of money so you can take the risk but when you start talking about tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of

SPEAKER_168: dollars and then using loans and leverage and you've got the risk of ruin coming out bad news bears all

SPEAKER_32: the way around no bueno all right sex here's your red meat did you see the poll about biden's age and his the unfavorable percentage of people who think he is too old how can i not see

SPEAKER_325: that i think the most important thing that we should talk about is that president biden has decided

SPEAKER_274: to not go through a cognitive test as part of his annual physical it's the first time it's ever

SPEAKER_31: happened joe biden now 81 years old 82 at the start of his second term if he wins he'll be 86 at the end making him by far the oldest president ever trump is 77 he would be 78 and a half when he gets his second term if he won 82.5 at the end of his term here's a histogram of age of presidents these are the oldest just to give you a everybody obviously refers to reagan as the oldest president prior to this he was a spry 69 at the start of his presidency and by the end he was 77 which is

SPEAKER_331: younger obviously than biden and trump today so sax thus or shema thoughts let's just say that we've

SPEAKER_45: had a bunch of these issues over the last few years president trump didn't disclose his tax returns is that a huge issue i think people made it to be a huge issue but it's more of an issue of judgment but i don't think it fundamentally compromises his ability to leave the country you had a different

SPEAKER_99: issue not with the president but with the current defense secretary who had prostate cancer the

SPEAKER_45: disclosures were let's just say somewhat suboptimal he had a uti he got emergency admitted to the hospital he just had another acute issue and those disclosures weren't good but you're talking about an acute kind of a thing where if you're incapacitated there's a chain of command that immediately kicks in those are a class of issue that i think people can find things that are wrong with probably correlated to one's political affiliation the other side probably cares more than the side that the that the leaders on but i think this issue is a really big one and i posted this clip of kjp basically saying nothing to see here move on and the first comment was elon which i think nailed it he said a basic cognitive test should not be something that someone who controls nuclear strikes

SPEAKER_47: is allowed to skip and i think that that is part of the fundamental issue that i have with what they decided to do here which is that it just massively increases the risk that you could have somebody that was fundamentally unelected running and making decisions and i think that is a huge issue and it's an enormous reason why for me this was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back and why i just absolutely cannot vote for biden anymore i was trying to find there's a new story okay i was trying to find a lot of good reasons to support him stability normalcy all of this stuff but this is not what stability looks like and i go again back to this very simple thing a cognitive test for somebody that can control the ability for us to go to war or for us to completely eviscerate entire populations through weaponry that he and he alone controls should be something that is just mandatory you can't skip it this is not a thing where it's a nice to have i think it's a must have and in the absence

SPEAKER_105: of it i think it compromises his ability to be a legitimate choice and we do have a minimum age

SPEAKER_31: sacks and what shamatha is saying is what the majority of americans are saying abc news ran a poll 86 of americans across both parties think biden is too old to be president 59 said both biden and trump were too old you said on a previous episode sacks that you thought the public should decide not and that that doesn't need to be a cognitive test are you sticking with that or do you think you're going to maybe move to chamat's position and mine cognitive tests should be mandatory

SPEAKER_207: to be president well i think it's a tell that they won't take the cognitive test because they're

SPEAKER_113: worried that he might fail just like it was a tell that they refused to do the super bowl interview which the president always does that's the most softball interview that biden could possibly have and they refuse to do it obviously because his aides and advisors are nervous about how that might go

SPEAKER_06: we had the her report come out where the special counsel investigated the classified documents case for biden said that we can't prosecute this guy he'll be too sympathetic a defendant because he's manifestly senile and he'll come across as an old man who can't remember what happened so that's why they decided not to prosecute him the babylon b had a hilarious headline or take on this which was man deemed too senile to stand for trial still fit to run country that's the situation we're in he

SPEAKER_113: can't stand for trial but he's still running in the country yeah and the thing that was most damning

SPEAKER_06: about the her report was not just what the special counsel wrote but it was by his reaction to it apparently he demanded that he wanted to go out and do a press conference that very day to refute the idea that his memory was bad or that he was senile and he then did this press conference and it completely backfired he came across as kind of an old man shaking his fists yelling get off my lawn i mean that was basically the the vibe that he gave to the press and then the thing that he got wrong was he confused egypt from mexico in regards to the whole crisis in gaza so it would have been one thing if it was just her saying that biden was senile but then biden himself came out and seemed to confirm it by making these mistakes and gaffes so they know they have a problem so to my original question would you

SPEAKER_31: be in favor and will you change your position here that we should have cognitive tests for the

SPEAKER_06: presidency of the united states yes i think that the real issue is that biden would fail such a test i mean that's the problem is that he is cognitively impaired and the thing to realize about these sorts of conditions is they're not static there's a trajectory to them so in the same way that biden is manifestly worse than he was a year ago or three years ago yeah it was obviously sharper yeah whatever this condition is it's going to be worse okay i won't ask you a third time to answer the

SPEAKER_110: question but you are choosing not to answer the question so freeberg what do you say when you say

SPEAKER_06: that should the president take a cognitive test sure he should take a cognitive test should it be the

SPEAKER_94: law of the land just like we have a 35 year minimum age i'm just asking you to be specific you could make

SPEAKER_06: him take a cognitive test but the point is that let's say the doctor says yeah he's cognitively impaired is that going to bar someone from running for office constitutionally no that's not going to be part of the the constitutional requirements you're you have to pass a constitutional amendment yes would it be a good idea for someone to take a cognitive test part of their physical to be president sure but is that going to be a constitutional requirement no you can't have some doctor

SPEAKER_45: by the way that that's my whole point like you you could take a physical bill clinton did that and people used to joke about his cholesterol levels and he would go for a jog and stop at a mcdonald's so i'm not saying by any means that the results should bar you from the ability to run it should still be up to the voters but just like we would make sure that acute or chronic health conditions

SPEAKER_47: were well understood right the idea that this entire body of judgment which is around your brain around the judgment of the president of the united states to basically say no we're good here we can skip it i think that that's really dangerous and it's part and parcel of a systematic set of behaving now by the democratic party which i think is really not where they want to be so the only person that's really stood up to all of this is dean phillips yep but he is being prevented and railroaded from even being able to put that issue on the table so that the voters can decide my fundamental view is the voters should decide but all of these tests should be done and skipping them is a form of a tell as david said and i think that this is the most important tell that we've been given about the amount of cognitive decline that he suffered and john stewart by the way had the funniest version of this john stewart's essentially monologue was like hold on everybody is out here giving sound bites that say he is a chess grand master in private but then he shows up in public and it looks like he can't even play checkers yeah freeberg let me let me jump to you there

SPEAKER_82: you shared the clip with us what were your thoughts what are your thoughts on this whole issue cognitive

SPEAKER_38: tests i don't i mean i don't think a cognitive test should be the law because you're starting to get

SPEAKER_35: into edge cases where you'll create lots of different requirements like what's the strategic test and you know what's the under pressure test and there's obviously a lot of ways that folks can game and challenge and create new systems for a new criteria the system of democracy however is meant

SPEAKER_38: to solve these problems the system of democracy is meant to allow individual voters to say we judge that someone is not equipped or prove us wrong which is what the voters are saying and doing right now based on the polling data the majority of voters in the united states are saying we do not think that this individual is equipped to be president rather than respond to that with a cognitive test we are stuck with a single candidate and i think it speaks more to the problem of the democratic caucus and how the electoral system works in the united states today where the insiders get to decide who the nominee is for the party and those insiders are self-dealt they are getting benefits by putting someone in the seat for next term because that person is in the seat this term and is approving things that they want this term and so it feels very corrupt and it feels very unfair and very undemocratic i think it leads to either a sense that the individual voters rise up and say we want a third party because the way that this two-party system works in the way that the caucus system works isn't fair or we end up seeing a really unfortunate outcome where you have a similar sort of like january 6 type event where folks are just fed up with the whole system and don't trust it and if the citizens lose faith in democracy we're we're in peril but as john stewart said in his monologue it is the responsibility of the citizens of this country to step up and not lose faith but to take action and to resolve to a solution we have the power we have the authority as voters and if enough of us get together and say there should be a third party or we do not want this individual to be the candidate something will change rather than just resolve to letting the insiders set the

SPEAKER_110: terms of the caucus third party is seeming more and more viable as we've talked about here people

SPEAKER_31: forget the case of ross perot getting 19 rfk looking pretty favorable and the third party candidate something i think the two parties dismiss all the time but it is completely possible so maybe this is the time that this is the breakout season for it as sacks alluded to the her report also came out it was released special counsel robert her republican and trump appointed ag declined to prosecute biden because he feared they couldn't reach the standard of reasonable doubt as sacks pointed out and i'll just quote from the report we conclude that the evidence does not establish mr biden's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and they also said he was an elderly man with a poor memory or that's

SPEAKER_197: how a jury would view biden democrats felt this was partisan obviously and then pointed out a bunch of times that trump has misstated people's names or been confused is there any correlation here between

SPEAKER_110: the two candidates in your mind chamath is trump right behind biden in terms of this and is he too old to run as well and do you think the gaffes that he's made are comparable i think that he looks much

SPEAKER_325: younger and sprightlier than biden does to be totally honest yeah and look at the schedule he

SPEAKER_207: maintains this is nothing like biden's i mean look democrats are trying to both sides the issue because

SPEAKER_06: it's their only choice they're stuck with a candidate who's an obvious decline and the problem for democrats wasn't just the her report which like you said jacal they can dismiss as partisan because they control the media the problem is that biden himself demanded to go out in front of a press conference to refute the her report and he ended up confirming it and the people of the united states can just look at joe biden and every time he talks no matter how much they try to hide him when he does speak the american people are left with the impression that this is somebody who's invisible decline trump although he does misstate a word or two here and there does not give that impression trump maintains a vigorous schedule not only is he running a presidential campaign he's battling he's in court every other day fighting all this lawfare he is willing to give interviews in fact he barely turns down a press interview and most importantly he's willing to do a hostile interview he's willing to step into the lion's den he's willing to go on cnn to those town halls and basically battle i think that's your best with these reporters i think that's why it won't even sit down for the super bowl interview which is as much of a softball interview as you're ever gonna get yeah

SPEAKER_365: yeah no no i mean that's your that's your best point i think who's who's who does a two or three

SPEAKER_31: if you can't do a two or three hour interview i don't think you could be president who do you

SPEAKER_273: think is going to run the country in the second term if biden were to win you know that that is

SPEAKER_06: the question you think it's biden no the staff runs it listen this will be this will be a regent president where the presidency becomes an office instead of a person and it's run by powerful ministers like in some sort of european system that's what we'll get or happened under reagan

SPEAKER_369: and the fact of the matter is or sacks has happened under ring you can only in the last couple of

SPEAKER_06: years of reagan is exactly what happened in this humility start to or not similarly he had alzheimer's and it really i think started to become a factor in the last couple of years it was the last two

SPEAKER_373: years yeah but the first six years were very strong 25 of his presidency who was running the

SPEAKER_10: country is the question yeah it's a valid question do you think there's a difference jacow between 25

SPEAKER_94: and 50 no no it i i think it's like we only have i'm just looking for other corollaries where this

SPEAKER_45: happened and what happened uh who who is no i think that this isn't a corollary exactly because when he ran when bragan ran for a second term he was cognitively sharp it was true that he was diagnosed with early onset alzheimer's in the second year of his second term and then that was

SPEAKER_12: not properly disclosed to americans that was just it was just the beginning in the last two years

SPEAKER_06: if you look at if you look at the 1984 campaign the morning in america campaign reagan still did debates he was still sharp on his feet he was debating mondale remember yeah he gave speeches all the time he maintained a vigorous schedule there was no evidence of there being a problem my only point

SPEAKER_31: here to moth is like does the public has a right to know when these things happen and it seems to have happened a couple of times in history well so i would take friedbrook side i'm not sure that the

SPEAKER_47: public you could say irrespective of whether the public has a right to know the public has a right

SPEAKER_45: to judge and i think in order to judge you have to make yourself available so that you can actually see it in front of your own eyes or hear it or listen to it or watch it or what have you and that's the second problem that i think we're starting to see which is it is so controlled how

SPEAKER_47: we get to interact with with our leader and i think that should give people some pause so that they ask themselves why would this happen and i think that that's worth internalizing you freeberg would you vote

SPEAKER_31: for a presidential candidate who does not debate or who does not subject himself to you know serious strenuous confrontational adversarial interviews those two things are those two things a requirement

SPEAKER_35: for you to vote for somebody i don't know how much that matters anymore the problem with the two-party system is you vote for your party no i know but to you if like a trump a biden they just

SPEAKER_31: refuse to do it because we're getting to the point where maybe they're just going to refuse to actually

SPEAKER_119: biden or trump trump has refused to do any debates so maybe they're just both going to refuse to

SPEAKER_378: debate would you vote for a candidate if they refuse to debate is my question to you freeberg

SPEAKER_35: i mean i'm just in a very different mindset on this stuff i'm not excited to vote for a candidate that's not making their priority to fix the fiscal problem with the u.s all right so you're back to

SPEAKER_227: that topic yeah it's not that topic it's like for me it's like there's a car driving towards a wall and you've got your foot on the gas pedal it's like which guy do you want to keep the foot on the gas pedal like i don't care like we got to take the foot off the gas pedal that's the point you

SPEAKER_102: perceive there's a difference between the two in spending you're talking okay so yeah you're you're voting

SPEAKER_110: for a third party candidate that would lean towards chamath you would you vote for somebody they can't

SPEAKER_31: win in the system well i mean they can't until they can right until they do so we'll see chamath would you vote for a candidate who didn't debate or subject themselves to a rigorous adversarial

SPEAKER_06: interview not unless i wanted to shadow government okay sac same question to you jason you're acting as if we need to have all of these tests because we don't know whether biden has a cognitive problem

SPEAKER_08: or not we know including trump in this i'm including trump in this like the debate issue

SPEAKER_06: i think we also know about trump trump maintains a vigorous enough schedule he takes enough difficult interviews he does enough speeches what about the debate part that's the one i'm curious

SPEAKER_31: if he refuses to debate would you would you still be willing to vote for him you know or any candidate

SPEAKER_06: you're acting like we need to judge this question based on proxies for the real issue when the real issue is that we know one of these candidates has basically dementia he's in visible decline

SPEAKER_94: i'm not asking you this about biden i'm asking you in general because we're talking about norms one of the norms of you know releasing your taxes i mean i'm not asking you about button i think you're

SPEAKER_04: changing the subject from the core substantive issue we have already all agreed that biden is in

SPEAKER_329: cognitive decline i'm asking you another question i'm opening up the aperture as the moderator here

SPEAKER_225: and i'm asking you to address another question i think canada should debate period okay that's what

SPEAKER_350: i'm asking i don't know why you're going back and telling me what i think because i think that the

SPEAKER_06: tactic of democrats the mainstream media right now is that they can't there's no way for them to paper over or deny the visible reality of biden's decline so they're trying to muddy up the waters they're trying to claim well trump is old too or that trump refused to debate too they're trying to both sides of the issue i think we all know that biden has a problem that trump does not have now i think that chamatha is also right that there's a lot of democrats who are comfortable voting for a shadow government they're fine with the presidency being a figurehead or a rubber stamp and i think the reason why they're fine with it is because democrats basically control most of our ruling institutions really all of them i don't think you can name one major institution run by republicans and they don't need a president to do anything other than be a rubber stamp republicans are looking for something different republicans need a president who's willing to push back on the permanent bureaucracy in washington push back on the deep state or the state department creating new wars they want someone to push back on wall street they want someone to push back on all these institutions republicans are looking yeah populists are looking for a tribune of the plebs basically to push back on this senatorial class that runs washington for their own benefit democrats are different democrats are the ruling elite and they're fine with the president basically just being a figurehead who will sign

SPEAKER_110: their legislation does he drop out chamath at this point is is this the moment we're going to look

SPEAKER_31: back on and say this is the peak when that 86 percent poll comes out and all this negative press do you think biden is there's an exit ramp here and do you think there'll be a different candidate fielded by

SPEAKER_393: the democrats no this is uh this was their way of saying we're going for it okay freeberg you have

SPEAKER_111: any thoughts on that you think they'll make a switch on biden yeah i think there's a chance

SPEAKER_35: there's a chance last we got a few conversations that led me to think that there are not super influential people in the party but people that are in the party that you know have connections to people of influence in the party i'd love to hear chamath's like conversations you may have had around this stuff too but people are not happy in the party yeah very like very much unhappy and everyone would love to see someone else now the assumption is gavin is going to be shoved in that seat and that's also a losing proposition so if you shove gavin in the seat you're in a worse place than you are with biden in the seat with respect to your shot at winning and it's a little late now but i still think that there's a chance sacks what do you think

SPEAKER_209: biden drops first of all the only reason these people are unhappy is because they think that

SPEAKER_06: biden's problems have become so manifest that it might cost them the election that's what they're worried about they don't care about the fact that the bison biden presidency will be run by staffers as long as those staffers will basically do what they want sign their legislation or veto the question we're asking you will he drop out no he's already said he won't look the problem that people in the democratic party have who have this concern about biden biden losing the election because of this cognitive issue is that there is no mechanism to replace a candidate who has won all the necessary primary votes against his will biden has said he's going to be the nominee he has no desire to to drop out so unless he changes his mind or there's some act of god he's going to be the nominee the time for democrats to make this change was a year ago it required mounting a primary challenge to biden the way that dean phillips has done the problem is that the democratic party elders and the powerful people in the party said we're going with biden and so no one wanted to run against him and they basically set up the primary calendar so that biden would win and he is going to win he'll have all the primary votes he needs locked up by the end of march and dean phillips is not going to be able to basically stop him so there is no mechanism to remove biden he's going to be the candidate you know barring act of god unless he can be persuaded to step down so it's not going to happen

SPEAKER_38: what do you think about this new third party effort in dc no labels have you heard about it have you

SPEAKER_401: been pitched it i've heard of it i haven't been pitched it chamath have you been pitched it i hosted

SPEAKER_325: a dinner at my house with some folks about it and yeah i mean i think like it could be interesting

SPEAKER_105: i think that the is there room for a third party in the country you think yes and i and i think that

SPEAKER_45: there is a very reasonable chance and i would put reasonable somewhere between 30 and 50 percent that this third party gets created after the presidential election and that is the one of the very likely outcomes of rfk's candidacy because it is an infrastructure that will have gotten on presidential ballots in 50 states and it's an infrastructure that if people are willing to fund specifically

SPEAKER_47: no labels and other people i think the artifact could be a third party and if if rfk can get

SPEAKER_45: 30 plus support which in some states i think he will i think that there's a decent chance that would be an enormous outcome obviously the most disruptive outcome for rfk would be that he won the presidency but i'm just saying that a very powerful outcome that has huge longitudinal benefits to america would be that his candidacy essentially is the is the founding story of a third party yeah and that was the shame of what happened with perot i think that there was a chance that perot could have done that and he must have been under just an enormous amount of pressure i can't

SPEAKER_47: even imagine what he must have dealt with but that could have been the artifact back then but it

SPEAKER_197: definitely can be the artifact today so we'll see they haven't announced either and there's no timeline for them announcing they've asked to come on this program many times to just talk about the

SPEAKER_94: concept i think like the they want to have like the executive director on or no labels yeah they've

SPEAKER_414: asked i don't love yeah and i was like well maybe when you pick a candidate that would be a better time

SPEAKER_94: than just talking about it in the abstract i think it's a great idea i think that's what americans want

SPEAKER_00: so maybe elections in nine months we're running out of time i mean it's entirely too late to be talking about new candidates who aren't even in the race not going to happen i mean this whole gavin

SPEAKER_06: do some things of fantasy even if biden were to see the light and step down be pressured to do that kamala harris just said i'm ready to serve she wants to be president and even though she's not senile she's actually even more unpopular than biden so you have that huge problem in the democratic party that even if somehow they could prevail on biden to step down now you have kamala harris

SPEAKER_45: ready to serve so how do you pass over her he's not stepping down he didn't go through all of this craziness this past week to step down they didn't evade the cognitive test for him to step down they're not doing all that they're not keeping him away from the media so that he can step down none of that is happening they're not having people come out with the sound bites about how he's got mastery of everything in private so that he can step down he's running donald trump is running and rfk

SPEAKER_47: is running those will be the three people on the ballot in november of 2024. Biden's staff are

SPEAKER_06: the absolute last people who would ever pressure him to step down why because they'd be out of a job i mean from the staff's point of view having a weak president who basically they administer it's

SPEAKER_77: not just a job it's like you you allocate the future as the president of the united states use

SPEAKER_06: it's the best it's the best situation possible for a staffer is to have a president who is borderline

SPEAKER_113: incapacitated and you get to just do whatever you want you are the president

SPEAKER_427: yeah jay cal give us a rundown of the tucker putin thing what'd you think just as a programming note

SPEAKER_102: it came out it dropped right after we taped we would have covered it obviously we're not covering

SPEAKER_125: it for a reason i give him a b on it could have been better but it wasn't bad all things considered

SPEAKER_31: i don't think any journalist is ever going to be able to trap putin or get good information out of him or any of those things and if you have somebody like tucker who is obviously very sympathetic to russia and who believes that you know the west forced putin to invade ukraine you know you're not going to get like a really great interview i did think he had a great moment where he asked for the wall street journal reporter back at that moment to take back with them he did a lot of softball questions he asked 43 questions during the interview about 15 of them were kind of softballs and he had about six

SPEAKER_94: fastballs but he lost control over the interview very early obviously if you watched it and that's

SPEAKER_77: just kind of like you're like chris collinsworth here i'm not asking for a technical analysis of the play i'm asking you what did you think of the interview what did you take away from it what did

SPEAKER_47: you think going in nothing and was there a delta and a change going out just a normal no because i've

SPEAKER_94: watched the other interviews i watched megan kelly's i watched mbcs he's done i did a research on he's done about nine interviews in the last 10 years so it's not like this was anything new and when you watch the other ones it's just putin spinning and pontificating and nothing gets accomplished he doesn't answer hard questions so i had six questions i i said he should ask him he

SPEAKER_31: did ask two of them but he didn't ask the other really hard questions i had and so you know he's not i wouldn't say tucker is like the useful idiot like hillary clinton said but he is biased and he didn't ask enough hard questions i would have asked three or four harder questions but the you're not

SPEAKER_125: going to get a lot out of putin this guy's like a kgb stasi trained manipulator of media it's his

SPEAKER_45: speciality i had two really interesting takeaways the first was if you had wanted to see some crazy madman you actually left that interview thinking okay this is a person that's leading a nation that has a deep historical context that goes back to basically the dawn of christianity of which he has a pretty deep grasp of and it seems that his decisions are rooted in a multi-thousand year history i didn't know that and that was an interesting takeaway for me so that was a broad strategic takeaway so he was a little professorial he was a little historical and all of that to me made it harder for me to leave that interview thinking that he was a crazy person in fact it's more like he's a bit of a methodical thinker i guess the second is much more tactical and i thought super salacious and i wish tucker would

SPEAKER_47: have dug into it which is that in 1999 when he was meeting bill clinton he asked bill clinton can we join nato and bill clinton said to him yes and let's go hash out the details over dinner and then that night they have dinner and clinton says my team says no and to me when i looked at the arc of that interview that was one of these really unique moments where it explains to me so much which is a country that's at the that's birthing a democracy where putin transitioning from yeltsin had to make a lot of very important difficult decisions the idea that he would have made an entreaty to clinton to say can we join nato and then to be told yes and then rebuffed i suspect has an underlying amount of emotion that explains a lot of what's happened since and i think that that should have been explored much

SPEAKER_45: much more i think they glossed over it and they went on but it was a really important moment those

SPEAKER_354: are my two big takeaways from that from that from that interview did you watch your freeberg any thoughts

SPEAKER_35: i don't understand i think when he said that point he was talking in the theoretical not in the i'd like to join nato because the intention of nato was to create a unified defense against the russian armament which is the most significant besides the us and at that point before china's rise ahead of china so i think it doesn't make sense to be like hey there's two sides of this defense system let's unify the two sides of the defense system it literally is a nonsensical proposition not true in 1999 that's totally

SPEAKER_47: not true what was the other side 1999 was where we've tore this whole thing down it's no longer the soviet union right so what is russia we're going to democracy it's probably just an organization that

SPEAKER_45: looks like any other organization like azn what's azn well azn is an organization could they have military defenses supposedly it's but it's a grab bag of countries what's the brits it's another grab bag of this is this is a defense alliance this is an economic alliance but in that moment the the

SPEAKER_75: the justification for nato was the least powerful it said had ever been so in in some ways joining nato would have been akin to dismantling nato and saying we don't need this anymore that's the point

SPEAKER_35: like why would he say why would the us and the western europe allies say let's dismantle nato

SPEAKER_47: he did that's effectively what the historical context of that moment is important he did it at the moment where they were transitioning to a democracy i don't know it's like saying let's get

SPEAKER_75: rid of the defense when russia was transforming into a democracy well when the ussr was breaking

SPEAKER_443: down and transitioning to a democracy yeah how did that democracy go if there was if there was massive

SPEAKER_47: disarmament in russia the question the question is what would have happened had they said yes and clinton took a different path all i'm saying is guys without prejudging it that that was a i think a very important context that is not understood in history i wouldn't dismiss it no no i certainly

SPEAKER_155: i think everybody raised their eyes like really that happened what did you think of that moment and then

SPEAKER_47: also clinton who is so steeped in history and policy is not somebody that would say something like that in an uncalculated way only to pull back that does not seem and i know bill clinton that is not who he is so just in that context he is a very thoughtful person so he would have said that thinking wow this makes a lot of sense on many dimensions and again the concept was it was a it was kind of like let's sit down for dinner and figure out the details and it's like my team says no and of course

SPEAKER_105: the team would say no because it's like well how are we gonna so we haven't heard from clinton

SPEAKER_102: you know confirming this or how it was structured this doesn't make guys it sounds like it was a

SPEAKER_232: theoretical like yeah that was my interpretation that just feels like he said it and kind of

SPEAKER_31: shocked clinton he's like let me look into that that's crazy uh what did you think of that moment

SPEAKER_06: sax and then overall well jason the fact that putin sought to join it or at least made that offer is a well-known well-documented historical fact this is definitely not the first time this has been raised more generally i think what you heard in that interview once you got past the the sort of the ancient history lecture is that putin when he first came to power sought cordial relations with the us and with american presidents and he was rebuffed his attempt to join nato was rebuffed more generally the us reneged on his promise to gorbachev not to expand nato one inch eastward and instead we began multiple waves of of nato expansion and i think it's very important to understand that you don't need to believe putin on this or trust putin american diplomats were saying at the time what the ramifications of this would be and i just want to put two data points in evidence one is george kennan who was the father of the containment doctrine during the cold war he was our most respected cold war diplomat said in the late 90s when they were first debating on nato expansion he said that quote expanding nato would be the most fateful air of american policy in the entire post-cold war era so think about it this is somebody who's been around since the 1940s he was our chief diplomat and defined our containment policy towards the soviet union and he said that expanding nato would be the most fateful air of american foreign policy and he said that a decision like that would inflame the nationalist anti-western and militaristic tendencies in russian opinion it would have an adverse effect on the development of russian democracy and it would restore the atmosphere of the cold war so this is somebody who really knew what he was talking about and warned us not to go down this path and then in 2008 second data point is that bill burns who was our ambassador to moscow who is now joe biden's own cia director wrote a memo to connelly's arise who's then secretary of state called nyet means nyet and what he said in that memo is that nato expansion to ukraine specifically is the brightest of all red lines for the entire russian elite not just putin in other words the idea of bringing ukraine into nato was an idea that was rejected not just by putin or by hardliners but even by liberal reformers inside of russia and nevertheless we persisted in this policy and so i think what you hear in that interview are a lot of points by putin around how he sought good relations with the west but what was our reaction to him pressure pressure pressure we supported the meidanku in 2014 we tried to expand nato into his backyard on his most vulnerable border and then finally we supported these hard right ultra-nationalist neo-nazi elements in ukraine now whether or not you believe everything that putin said my takeaway is that this was a rational actor this was not a madman this is somebody who we could have negotiated with and in fact there was still an opportunity before this war to prevent the war by taking nato expansion off the table we refuse to do that and even today there was this new press story that in the wake of this interview the biden administration still rejects entering negotiations with russia even though putin held out that olive branch in that interview so you know again it's just uh very sad how we have conducted american russian

David Sacks: relations over the last 25 years we turned what could have been an ally into an enemy and proven george canon correct i think this has been the most fateful air of american policy in the last 30 years

SPEAKER_82: all right uh what an amazing episode this has been i think we talked about tucker and putin enough

SPEAKER_454: love you boys for the sultan of science the dictator and the rain man i am the world's greatest

SPEAKER_466: moderator we'll see you next time bye bye bye