Ep13. Silicon Valley’s Political 180, META AI, COVID Postmortem | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner

0:00 and instead of a $250 marginal cost to implement a rural Broadband we're going to get fing bulldozers out and and drop fiber lines to a ranch in the middle of nowhere it's stupid hey man good to see you good to see you I mean so much for May and go

0:30 away this Summer's been nuts you've got a near assassination of the president the head of the Secret Service resigns Biden withdraws under pressure from Pelosi kamla has all the delegates now she's the presumptive nominee she raises 80 million bucks the day Biden drops out of the race it really seems to overshadow everything else I mean I don't know how's that inconsistent with selling go away wouldn't that have been a good strategy or wasn't it a good

0:56 strategy I don't no the markets are actually doing pretty F given the background and the context here but it's just trying to stay on top of the events I mean our group chat has been exploding I I find myself 50 to 100 chats behind every time I open the app just because of all the political activity going on and of course we don't talk a lot about politics on this pod we want to talk about business but you know we also look

1:22 at kind of this debate going on about Silicon Valley like The Washington Post reported Silicon Valley realignment leading Tech Titans to back Trump yeah you've been here a long time yeah Silicon Valley has really been dominated by the Democratic party it's been perceived as Pro business and prot Tech enough it's been perceived as fairly moderate on social policies but just in the last few weeks leading traditionally Democratic supporters Ben Horwitz Mark

1:54 andrees Elon who've supported a lot of Democrats in the past have come out in support of trump what's changed why all the sudden have people that have in Silicon Valley that have traditionally supported Democrats why are they moving to Trump and I might even say like if I go back to when I joined and I mentioned this a bit in the the talk I gave it all in on on regulatory capture I think I might even

2:18 describe Silicon Valley as apolitical back then like there just wasn't sure that some people would say yeah I V Democrat but there wasn't any discussion of it within the ecosystem Within the industry while you're at a meeting that relates to a startup like it just didn't come up and that was the the title of my speech was 2 2,851 miles which is the distance right Washington is from here and ironically it's about as far as way

2:44 as you could possibly be in the United States which I think was helpful as I said all of a sudden now though you know you've you've had those people you mentioned come out in a in a way that's very provocative like to it's I think it's provocative not only that they're coming out in favor of trump but it's provocative that they stepped out in this way now Ben and Mark foreshadowed this quite a bit at

3:15 least by 30 days or something they Ann obviously their firm's been getting bigger and bigger and bigger multi-stage multi-industry like specialized funds and as you move into things that they've been moving into crypto defense Tech y like you're getting into heavily regulated Industries so you're G to bump up against this more and you're going to think about policy more and if you listen to what they do on their podcast and if you listen to what they write in

3:44 their blog post that trend has been going on for a while it's not like just just came out of nowhere they've been talking about policy and so you know they went through in their podcast which I think is a must listen M you know great on this Trump they didn't just throw down and walk away they threw down and talked about it for 90 minutes exactly and it's very clear and this was in their foreshadowed piece as well that

4:13 they're looking after the interest of their constituents and their business yeah and I don't think there's anything wrong with that like they have people they represent that are counting on them all their their L based their employee based the entrepreneur they've backed and all you know the the the piece that foreshadowed it said we're going to get more involved in politics and we're going to look after they called it little Tech which you might describe as entrepreneurs who want

4:41 to break through and be disruptive correct they're looking after that constituency because that endemic to everything that they do in work no I think I I think to to be fair they believe like both you and I believe and I think most people in Silicon Valley believe that in fact they talk about this triangle which is technology is the great source of American Advantage it drives our economy which is the strongest in the world which is a great

5:08 source of Advantage which allows us to have a superior military because both technology that we invent is leveraged by our military and we have the financial resources to invest so that leads to American Global Leadership in their podcast one of the things they lay out is what they believe was by the Biden Administration an assault on business business or technology I think they go through a list of things right so one was an assault on business technology being on

5:37 the wrong side of crypto which they believe the blockchain is very important to have an open and and and and permissionless network that people can build on they talk about being on the wrong side of AI obviously you and I have commented on you know the executive order that was wanting to limit the number of flops and you know model sizes and everything before the industry even gets started and then this this crazy idea to tax unrealized capital gains and

6:08 how that in and of itself is not only almost impossible to implement but also would undermine the very incentive that entrepreneurs have to go create businesses and let me just press pause on that one point because I think when you hear especially if anyone's listening to the podcast who's not deeply involved in in a startup and knows what a c table looks like it'd be easy to miss this point or to look over it or to think maybe they're just

6:35 talking about a Nuance that doesn't matter it would be catastrophic to the Venture Capital industry and to the startup industry to tax unrealized capital gains it would be tell us why it would well first of all there's no way to value a private company so so you start with this problem that that how would you go about saying what it's worth and for those of you that have been exposed to 49a which is this God awful policy where we have to get a

7:07 third party to pay them to create this analysis to say what the option price has to be this is the most voodoo magic that I've ever seen in my life like if if then and and it's so crazy they run these models and they produce a number that's like to two decimal points and I've always said they should be they should be forced to they should be forced to give a confidence interval right cuz it would probably be like you

7:34 know from 5 to 20 but they say 1149 right and and there's this other great piece of work that was written in in finance literature which was titled if you're so smart why aren't you rich if these people are Cal capable of calculating perfect stock prices to the to the second decimal point they should be in your business well and there's just something even more basic I mean we just went through this period in 20 and

8:00 21 where companies were valued at 10 billion 15 billion 20 billion you would have actually had to pay a tax somehow you have to come up with the money the the company the the employees of the company the founders of the company have to come up with the money there's no secondary Market there's no ability to get liquid on this I don't even know how they would pay but then the idea and that's the second part they they you

8:22 would literally have to facilitate liquidity for them to pay a tax and then the third point which you just mentioned it would there would be numerous situations where you'd have people pay a tax and then the valuations would collapse right and then they would just have this massive tax loss carry forward with nothing they could do with it and they they'd be wiped out by aack and and it's C putting taxes on unrealized gains is just a Nutty Nutty Nutty concept

8:51 right and by the way Democrats historically have not supported that right and so I think that that was to explain the 180 or the realignment as the Washington Post describes it I think you have to understand that the Biden administration at least perceived by these people in Silicon Valley they did a 180 that it was they were you know introducing policies that were out of alignment with what has historically happened now it's interesting right on the one hand you have venod kosla you

9:26 have Reed Hoffman who come out and said listen made this really a personality test about Trump he's a liar he's a cheat he's not good for America he's an e existential risk to democracy on the other side you really hear a lot of policy arguments right around whether or not they're Pro business Pro Tech Pro AI Pro crypto Etc and that's really where you see The Clash I do think that Biden now stepping down and kamla taking

9:57 the position right I I think the straw that broke the camels back frankly for a lot of people Elon you know came out and endorsed after this was just the recognition that Biden was not in the mental state to lead on top of being on the wrong side of a lot of these issues yeah you know you know it makes me want to just back up to a super high level last pod we did you were talking

10:21 about how if you take out the mag 7 the S&P was down right you know and you could take that to an extreme case and say imagine if the mag 7 didn't exist like what what would our economy be like what would America be like and what you realize is that you know and not to not to maybe pick on Europe too much but it'd be a little bit like that right like where the the stewards of our

10:47 Industries would be Exxon or Delta or the you know JP Morgan or whatever and those aren't companies that grow very fast yeah I mean the vast majority of the economic wealth that's been created in the last 20 years has been on the back of technology and I think fundamentally I Venture back companies right and so this is and remember you know in a prior Generation you know it was the Lockheed Market Martin it was the you

11:17 know Henry Fords it was the Thomas Edison's that were those innovators and I think the one thing that does pull people together in Silicon Valley is an attack or an assault on Innovation or on technology or entrepreneurship and what's interesting is you know I was watching somebody who who I actually quite like Pete Budaj and he said you know nobody should be surprised by what Silicon Valley is doing because it's just a bunch of rich white guys who are

11:45 advocating for what's in their best interest and what's interesting I I I think Pete got it wrong right and the reason I think he got it wrong is because I don't hear in any of our conversations that we need you know that we're supporting Trump because he's going to lower our tax rate right I do hear things around key policy areas that impact entrepreneurship that people care deeply about yeah I hope that the conversation around the realignment and

12:15 and I I see some movement around this forces the the the next Administration you know if if it is a democratic Administration back to engagement I thought it was really odd that Ben and Mark said you know the that they were stonewalled by gers stonewalled by the White House like they there was not even a willingness to talk about the issues openly right and admittedly this other candidate is is just starting to run but but they talked about Jared and Ivanka

12:45 and Trump and like they asked for meetings and they got them right away and you know they're they're feeling responded to to your point and I think one of the things that happens anytime and this may go back to where you started that Silicon Valley has been a longtime supporter of the democratic party kind of r large anytime you you kind of unequivocally give someone your support for a long period of time they may kind of forget that you're a

13:09 constituent they might take it for granted and I I look at the city of San Francisco who has lost swab and stripe and all these f f ftech companies because of the the the way they structured their their homeless tax the gross receipts thing and it's just like hey like you have a consequence if you don't keep this constituent happy and you've benefited from this constituent being successful and so look it's a part of part of being a democracy is that

13:40 everyone's allowed to have a voice right and I do think that it's worth I think it' be helpful to the industry if the people that push back would say and maybe they're saying this but they say I agree with you on all those issues but I want to support the other candidate for this reason rather than trying to buffoon or or bully the people who are expressing their point of view right and and look at at the high level and I

14:08 know that not everyone in the world will agree with me on this but I I've talked in the past about how you know the single human that's brought the most people out of poverty is ding Xiao ping by bringing entrepreneurism and capitalism to China he brought 500 million people out of poverty and I go back to those Matt Ridley Books like the way you create an increase in prosperity is through growth and the way you can

14:35 get outpaced growth between the countries that exist on this planet is by being really good at Innovation and so I I don't know a better way to help the populace right and I think it's something we should all be able to agree on on both sides of the island by the way I've spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill recently with Democrat Republican Senators Democrat Republican house members and I will say I'm really optimistic I think they're incredibly

15:02 smart people on both sides I think that they both see the right issues on AI on National Defense on issues related to to China on issues related to technology and Innovation I think that there is strong consensus in Washington that the greatest source of our national Advantage is innovation and I happen to agree with that it just seems that this Administration and and and we don't really know what was going on over the course of last 6 or nine months but it kind of

15:32 lost its way with with Silicon Valley which was odd because Silicon Valley was a natural constituency of the democratic party you know Ben and Mark on their on their pod they said they started to to see some things 10 years ago in the 2010s that started to cause some concerns and he pointed out you know this idea that Zuckerberg pledged to give 99% of his wealth away and he was attacked for it and like starting to see

15:59 some cracks in the wall and you're like hold on a second here this should be a something that everybody gets excited about not something that everybody everybody criticizes but we here we find ourselves in 2024 and I think you know the pendulum had just swung too far I do think that you're going to see a Democratic party that you know looks in the mirror comes back to you know Silicon Valley on a lot of these issues Trump was listening and

16:26 said listen you think you ought to get a green card for people have done taken a four-year college degree we're going to staple a green card to everybody graduates from college that was amazing I think that that most everyone in Silicon Valley agrees that that like tripling quadrupling maybe even fxing the size of legal skilled immigrants is huge for Innovation huge for everything that we want to do and everyone's on the same page on that and so it's ironic

16:54 that no one's been able to get there and for for for I think said that on all in right like that's that's amazing like you're going to get a lot of support for saying that right and I you know again it's not about taking political positions here but the case we want to make is that if you attack Innovation entrepreneurship and capitalism it will be to the detriment of the United States right that's something both parties should agree with that and

17:23 that's why regardless of who you're going to vote for I am I am I was I think I was pleased that Ben and Mark brought the issues to the Forefront you know by doing this like like taking a stand because otherwise you just sit back and say oh I have to vote this way because that's what everyone does here and it like I said I think it leads to being taken advantage of a little bit and not being

17:51 paid attention to well and let's end the section with this you know over the 20 years you know 25 years that that you've been here you know yes we're a long way away from Washington but today looks very different right AI policy runs through Washington right you mentioned American dynamism or National Defense all of that is running through Washington the chips act right whether or not we can export chips to certain country runs through Washington right I find myself after a

18:22 10-year Hiatus in Washington spending a lot of time over the course of the last five years how do you feel like do you think that engagement with Washington is a good thing I know that you know top of mind for you is regulatory capture you and I had a conversation about you know this rural Broadband initiative you know tell us a little bit about that and how to balance engagement without falling into you know the abyss of

18:52 regulatory capture I I I'm going to just admit like that I'm very skeptic like like the the way that legislation gets written is it gets written by the incumbents we're already seeing you know this massive fight in Ai and we've pointed to these articles before like the political article but the the leaders with their closed Source AI models are spending more money than any startups ever spent you know in lobbying

19:23 efforts and they're drafting the language that ends up in the EU Doctrine you know and so they're going to look at I I don't know why they wouldn't look after themselves the thing that it would take and I I owe it to my I've told some people that followed that I'm going to fund some research to study best practices in other countries but it it would take putting people in agencies that are non-conflicted and smart enough about

19:52 the subject matter very hard to do right you know right that that that actually write the policy on behalf of the consumer or the citizen it also means I think that engagement by Silicon Valley to fight back against the incumbents who are trying to do the capture right so I mean if if you're sitting here on all of these issues sitting on your hands you know then that's a problem but I will also stipulate that there are now large

20:17 incumbents in Silicon Valley you know you referenced some of the leading AI companies that have closed models that may in fact want to engage in the capture themselves you know and and and prevent open source let's let's go a little bit down the the Elon case because I do think I don't know who to blame it on maybe if you're a Democrat I'll just pitch this as a as someone that's on neither side but like if you're a Democrat maybe you see a way

20:48 that Elon picked the fight with Biden I think if you're on the other if you're on Elon side he kind of feels like Biden picked the fight I mean we we do know there was an EV Summit where he was not invited and holding an EV Summit without inviting Tesla who has like 95% of the shipments in the US is I don't know how you even do it with a straight face right like it's theater like that flat

21:13 and I don't even think they're hiding it right like when Biden was sign was signing some bills in the Rose Garden he's surrounded by six people in Union jackets right and he tried he tried to pass an EV credit that would only be be eligible to a car built by a union worker right right and well well one I just I mean it's it's certainly not pro-innovation correct correct and so anyway then and then this other one

21:37 that's really bizarre the FCC for a long time has looked over rural Broadband initiatives right and there's immense regulatory capture in this most of these programs are funded Cost Plus I happen to have some rural property in Texas and if you ask for anything they'll do it because they get to bill the government Cost Plus cuz you're in a rural location so I I could get a fourth phone line and they would dedge they would D they would like dig a two mile

22:09 trenching Rock like just because they get to make 30% profit whatever the activity is so anyway they decided they were going to spend 42 billion on Rural broadband and between 10 years ago and now star Link's been built and there's just I don't know way to better way to say this but like if you want Broadband in the middle of nowhere in America starlinks Perfection yeah right like it was that's what this was designed for in

22:42 fact because of the way starlink works if you're by yourself and isolated in an area you'll get much better starlink performance than if you were in a city it couldn't be better and and you're going to get like you be you could get 200 megabits or 300 megabits now the the powers that be at the landline companies have written the laws that say oh well you know what will you stay up during a rainstorm right you know and so they

23:13 disqualify Starling because it might not work if the it's the heaviest rain like for five minutes a year right and it's just so stupid in this recent hurricane that went through Houston I I paid attention but like I was looking for this for this reason but like some of the landline Broadband things went out and guess what they were out three days right cuz someone had there was like a flooded cabinet someone had to go in and take that apart so

23:43 starlink may not have worked during the the worst hour of the storm yeah but it worked the next day right as soon as you could get power and plug in your ant so so so 40 for 42 billion what did we get well for well that's the other thing so according to Brendan Carr who is one of the four FCC Commissioners he says zero zero people have been connected so not only but but but yeah I mean look

24:07 everyone knows governments not very successful in implementing things but they they disqualified the very best new Solution that's perfect perfect where the marginal cost of implementing it is a is a starna the cost of antenna right and you could strike a deal with with starlink and probably get that cost reduced or do it at at cost like the government could have you know gone in and done like a bomb analysis and say let's build one for the done any of

24:36 those things you could have probably got it down to $250 and instead of a $250 marginal cost to implement a rural Broadband we're going to get fing bulldozers out and and drop fiber lines to a ranch in the middle of nowhere it's stupid right and I can only I can only surmise that that happened for political reasons well or regulatory capture one of the two this is related to another topic you and I have talked about and

25:07 and this all goes to like why has there been this realignment or perceived realignment in Silicon Valley I wonder if there's something else going on as well you know forever we've had kind of this fourth estate in the media it's called the fourth estate because it you know we have three branches of government and you had you know the Nightly News and the newspapers that work very closely you know with those branches of government to report on what

25:33 was going on but really over the course of the last 5 years 10 years we've had this explosion in the democratization of media if you will right and you have all these citizen journalists and just over the last four years let's think since covid really right you you you have people who feel like we you know you have this libertarian streak in Silicon Valley which I would agree is already slightly distrustful of government yeah right and now they feel like based on

26:04 this reporting they were lied to about Co they were lied to about censorship in in in big online media yep they were lied to about Biden's Health being the latest thing and so I think there's something deeper going on here that you've kind of lit this fuse where people are looking around and saying you know this just doesn't feel like government is shooting us straight and that there's a real dialogue going on about what's best for America so I

26:35 think there's been a real breach of trust that also needs to be mended and so again I think there are people of Goodwill on both sides but you know when I have people when I hear people say well there's a realignment because you just have a bunch of rich white billionaires in Silicon Valley that are doing what's in their best interest I think they need to really look in the Mir and take a deeper analysis as to the

27:01 situation right and and certainly there are problems that have been well documented about Trump there have been you know problems on the other side but I think if Democrats want to win back this natural constituency in Silicon Valley there needs to be a real realignment on some of these issues let's shift gears we have open source going Frontier today meta dropped a new model it's 4 405 billion parameter model mod it's the First open- Source really

27:30 Frontier quality model it now stands on top of the leaderboard for a lot of charts importantly they updated their their Community policies right so now this can be open and permissively licensed including for commercial use synthetic data generation distillation fine-tuning you know Zuck wrote a letter in defense of Open Source I saw beautiful you tweeted about it Elon then responded to your Tweet and said it was an impressive model he said Zuck

28:01 deserved a lot of credit for open sourcing it so what did we learn today because there was some debate as to whether 405 was going to be open sourced or not Bill what have we learn today and why is this so important well I think there's two things we could talk about so you tell me which one you want to talk about first there's the the strategy between behind why would a company like Facebook meta choose

28:24 this methodology and then there's the question of what's Happening with the large language model competition which one did you want to let's talk about just meta's decision to do this and the commitment to open source and why it's so important yeah so so Mark Mark first of all everyone should go read what Mark wrote It's not Ultra long it's about four or five pages but he lays out a lot of it you know and he he talks about

28:49 when meta has run into other closed system companies it's created a lot of frustration and limitation to you know what he Pur his Innovation and he mentioned the Apple world that he's kind of forced to live in right something happened over the past I'd say 15 years where some of the smartest companies in Silicon Valley have developed a new strategic play where they use open source as a defensive weapon rather than

29:20 as an offensive weapon that's my terminology one of the first to do it was Google with Android and it's really hard for people to put themselves in the mindset when that iPhone shipped and when Apple had only let AT&T have it and it was on AT&T's terms and Google convinced the rest of the world all the handset manufacturers the carriers to support this model by telling them it was going to be open I think they backed

29:49 up on that a little bit but that worked like that got them to get behind this thing and and I guess if you look at the China Market the the the openness that that at or that Verizon and and Samsung thought they were getting into with Android did play out there like there's no there's no Google or or apple in the China China Market but then others started to do this too Google did it again with kubernetes which is a

30:19 piece of technology that lets you move your workloads very easily between clouds they were worried Amazon was running away with AWS so they took a piece of technology that was inside their company kubernetes and made it free and they got the Linux Foundation to help organize which the Linux Foundation is very good at and they they they got IBM they got they got all these you know hundreds of players behind kubernetes and eventually it became so successful that Amazon had to

30:47 give up and support it and that has allowed more fluid transfer of workloads and it's leveled the playing field a bit Facebook created this thing called open compute project and they basically said if you want to sell computers into our data center we're going to write a spec about the or we're going to write a list of specifications that those things have to meet in order to go in there well one of them is basically no

31:16 proprietary technology right so it's almost like a patent deflection move that says we're only going to support open- Source things here and by the very definition if it qualifies to come in it doesn't have any proprietary technology right which has been a Hu and and by the way people say oh well who would agree to that well Dell sells into there Cisco sell like all these people end up kind of just agreeing and selling in and

31:43 so that that is a remarkable move by Facebook to lower their cost of their infrastructure and to keep it lower and to keep themselves out a position where they can be held up there's been a recent move in the map World to to create an open source map project because they're worried about Google having too much power so this has become a kind of a new go-to move by you need a lot of resources to do this you

32:07 can't like a obviously there are startups that get behind open sources but if you're going to play this defensive move you need to be right a big player you usually need to get the help of others here meta I think just became concerned and you and I have talked about this but I think some of the players in the AI world brought this upon themselves by claiming that they were going to change the world in so

32:32 such dramatic ways you you awaken the Giants right if you if you cause everybody's you know investor call to be what are you g to do about AI you're gonna wake up right all the Giants right right and so in this case meta didn't want anyone to end up in an advantage position to them because they were so much better in AI or they didn't want they didn't want to become dependent on a third party for an AI tool that they

33:04 needed and couldn't have I thought I thought one of the most interesting parts of the letter and and and Mark's pod on it today is you know he said it's become personal you know he first he points to Linux and Unix and is just being a great unlock by unleashing the power of the long huge huge fan of this idea the long tale of Developers but one of the things he said he's like he's like this is personal to me right

33:32 because he said with apple you know where we saw ecosystem control by a single company that extracted most of the rents out of the mobile ecosystem he said it was bad enough that we had to pay a big tax right because that tax hurts all the developers in the ecosystem he's like but you could tolerate the tax he said but it was absolutely soul crushing he used that phrase which I thought was interesting when you develop work really hard on a

33:59 product Improvement and then you have a company that says no you can't release that into your product for whatever reason right right and so it seemed to me that this has become extraordinarily personal yep right here you have a company that produces tens of billions of dollars of profit in the back room it can fund all of you know all of these models for as far as the I can see and they made a decision to make

34:24 it open I think that has broad economic implication ations for the entire ecosystem right if you're a closed model company the question first is okay I'm going to have to compete and keep up with this Frontier level competition that's hard enough it takes a lot of resources but number two Mark's going to give it away you know meta is going to give it away for free now you have to develop a business model that can compete with free yep and

34:51 so this reminds me and I we'll put a link to it in in the notes but years ago I wrote a blog post post about Android and I said it doesn't matter this so so similar to what you just said it doesn't matter if they can make money on Android it turns out they figured out how to sure but it creates a moat that's so wide around the castle I think I drew a picture I talked about like okay yes

35:17 you have the water moat but now they're going to char the Earth for five square miles outside around the water but you're not getting to our goddamn castle exactly so it has and and you know not every company can afford a multi-billion dollar moat extender right but but it makes a lot of sense for these companies to do it and and there's no one today that is listening to Mark's podcast playing with the new models by the way

35:46 on grock they're like nutty fast and saying oh like that guy's stupid like no one's saying that like he looks like a genius today he also said today that they've already laid out the compute cluster for llama 4 so this was llama 3.1 was a large 405b model also distilled into an 80 and an 8B or 70 and an 8B version but they said they've already laid out the compute cluster for llama 4 they've

36:18 already laid out the data architecture for it they've run the research on it so it seems to me and our team's best guess is that llama 4 is going to come in the back half of the year right maybe in November December time frame they probably don't want to be more than a couple months behind GPT 5 so they probably think you're going to get a new release right after 40 from from open AI that they can then try to quickly

36:42 leap frog with llama 4 but what was interesting he said not only have we laid out llama 4 but he said it's kind of fun and fascinating we've laid out five six and seven okay and he said the models are all going to be bigger they're all going to cost a lot more money billions of dollars and he kind of alluded to what SAA said a few weeks ago that you and I heard which he said this

37:06 isn't going to be a straight line he reminded folks the of the internet bubble and said you may have to go through a bubble here right so if you're a venture capitalist Bill and you're hearing this okay first you got to go compete with free second you're going to have to spend billions for a long time and these gu you know the incumbents are going to compete third that we may in fact have to cross this Chasm you know

37:30 some bubble like Chasm I I I think what it does is it you know it's also a shot across the bow of those folks who might want to start Clos model companies to go compete with that no doubt and and and one other thing I I would highlight like for for for the listening audience like every startup you know whether you an AI startup or whether you're a startup that's been around a while that wants to

37:57 you know enhance their product with AI this should make you tickled pink like you should be so happy that he made these decisions and went because as you said he not just he didn't he went further in terms of openness today than the model was was per more permissions and the hugging face team was clapping and celebrating on Twitter as well for for this reason and so for as as Mark and Ben like to call Little Tech this is

38:26 phenomenal correct phen it may not be for open AI which I don't I don't know Brad GTH but I saw a funny tweet today where he said is is open AI the new Netscape which is somewhat provocative but but Mark created that question and I would say this I'm gonna I'm gonna stop and let you go but like last thing when I I just don't think that that Sam Alman realizes when he talks about

38:58 things in such a grand fashion how it makes people like Zuckerberg feel or if Zuckerberg has to take a question is AI G to make you irrelevant like gets under skin a little bit I me I do I do think about it this way you know if you're open AI you got to go raise your next four or five billion dollars right remember meta had allocated $20 billion a year to reality labs and there was a

39:26 report last week that they may you know tighten their belt on reality labs to the tune of 20% okay so that's four or five billion dollar of savings on a research project that they have in reality Labs that they can reallocate to AI now what I would say on the open AI front I actually think that they're doing extraordinarily well and here's the interesting thing about open AI in the face of all this they consu you know Zuckerberg said I

39:55 want to have the number one consumer applic in AI by the fall but if you look at chat GPT 40 since it was released web visits have gone from 1.8 billion to 2.6 billion visits per month daus have gone from 60 million to 100 million and so you know as I say to my team there's only one way you know to build a business either you got to get a consumer to pay you or you got to get an

40:21 Enterprise to pay you and the only other company that's really shown traction with consumers pain you know at that scale is is open AI so the question is can they build a consumer product that is durably better than the alternative right that meta is going to put out there and Mark mentioned that there are hundreds of millions of people using meta AI but they're not really paying a subscription and using a standalone product right it's embedded with in all

40:51 the other products a lot of the time you're using it you probably don't even know you're using it yet but I do think that meta has a history of grinding out good products and I suspect it will get there but no doubt about it this is going to put a lot of pressure on the closed Source model companies well you and you and I mean I I I like those numbers you're you're referring to I think are are just at a high level

41:18 they're not necessarily the paid paid constituents no no no those are those are total users yeah and and I playing around with credit card data I I think open a is about 2 billion and thropic about 100 million and perplexities at like 25 million just I'm guessing I think that's directionally right on the $20 thing but at 12 months the retention even in open AI is like 35% so I doubt that anyone that that is looking

41:49 at that even at two billion feels great about that as a durable business model and you add to it mark saying I like Mark's not going to charge it would feel really great if it didn't cost you $3 billion every year to build a new model in order to compete I mean that like ultimately the cogs in these businesses right that you have to because these are super quickly depreciating assets right you have to you have to keep Reinventing

42:17 that model every single by the way I pay for all of them I play because I love playing with them and they're so much fun and so fantastic I I would say I think one of the retention problems is simply all the substitutes that are available and If meta is going to and then and then if speed's going to matter like as speed there were these old stories if Google made itself like 30 milliseconds faster like there were more searches

42:41 like and that play with the Llama grock demo like yeah it's a different experience I don't know how much that will drive yes so anyway I just think there's a lot of Alternatives if Mark if if we're right about Mark's intention to he took it personally he's playing defensively he's going to make his version free yeah there there there's no doubt about that and he might run it for four years with no ads right and I think

43:10 you know this fast inference and you know it's it's grock it's cerebrus has fast inference you're you know fireworks another Benchmark investment I think you know his inference optimized on top of of of Nvidia right you're now getting to the point with these inference engines that they're going to be you know it's faster than you can read certainly you and I had a conversation about this that doesn't really matter because all of these interactions you know particularly when

43:39 we think about multi- chained agent interactions right you may have a hundred different interactions computer to computer interactions before you ever see an answer and so speed really matters because computers can talk to each other at you know the fastest speed you can possibly you know kind of contemplate and so reducing that latency unlocks a lot of innovation you know that will be good and I think there's a lot of that coming you know I was

44:08 really impressed today with the the alliances that meta had built you know and Mark pointed that out but really from from AWS to to data bricks to snowflake to Accenture you know the grocs of the world fire Etc everybody you know launched with optimized versions of this they've been playing with it so you know in the case of data bricks or snowflake they can basically take these optimized models

44:39 immediately to their companies they can do fine-tuning they can do synthetic data generation whatever their companies might want to do so part of the way that open- Source works is by running the field right getting everybody into the the the pool no doubt while while you were saying that I went back to the kubernetes Wikipedia page so on launch the principal competitors were VMware mesosphere Docker Azure and then you know a few months later a AWS came

45:11 in but yes if you're a participant in the market who is looking for your own solution to be advantaged and there's someone who wants to make a piece of it free and open rather than closed and paid right that's awesome for you and so you're right it becomes this attractor that brings the other parties to the table to to play right and yeah that's part of why it's so powerful in this defensive way what I call a

45:43 defensive strategic play you are able to bring the other people in right right it's it's it's really fun and and once again I think it's good for entrepreneurs I think it's good for society right like like 15 20 year patents on big Pharma drugs is not good for society this is the opposite this is technology getting Freer cheaper more available you know and and I'll give you credit for this in a lot of conversations I've had in

46:10 Washington your work on regulatory capture has actually made its way into a lot of congress people's minds and offices right they're on the lookout for regulatory capture awesome right and so I think it it's pretty wild Zuck went from a few years ago you know having a bullseye on himself in Washington DC and now you know he's somebody that people point to as a real asset against against closed models yeah and I hadn't thought about this until you just said

46:39 that so thank you for for triggering this in my brain but maybe there's a bit of a Halo you get from from open source for sure so you you look like you know you're the good guy and not the bad guy so you know by the way by the way I I do think it's worth mentioning on on the AWS thing just from talking to entrepreneurs in the AI space Microsoft certainly is advantaged by being or Zur is advantaged by being the

47:09 hosting system that has access to open AI oh for sure and Amazon doesn't so not surprised yes that that AWS was in the Ali you know kind of yeah yeah featured on launch dat makes sense that's they they want they need a response to that yeah and it you know we could talk about this for a long time let Le let's continue on we have a few more topics we want to talk about we we we'll make

47:35 these a little bit more lightning round but you had me listen to a podcast you know this week excellent podcast with with Dr Jay bachara and Rick ruin yeah you know Jay's a Stanford kind of economic epidemiologist was one of the senior authors on the great barington declaration in in April of 2020 and that was really this the seminal paper that showed that the covid death rate was Far lower than people thought and that the virus had

48:05 penetrated far deeper into the population by April of 2020 than people thought which then had broad implications on whether or not we should lock down you know we're now four years later tell us why you know you you were telling all your friends to listen to this pod yeah you clearly are still agitated about the fact that there's been no postmortem here why is this so important for society that you know that we listen to this that we come to terms

48:36 with it that we think about this yeah I would encourage anybody and everybody to listen to this it's on Rick's podcast called Techna I can't pronounce it Tech yes I give up Rick obviously is is one of the most interesting Americans on the planet and inredible record producer he wrote this great book on kind of design and how he thinks about creation that came out last year and his podcast has this breath of

49:08 of of guests that's just phenomenal so I listen to it quite a bit and I'm a huge Rick Rubin fan even though I can't pronounce the name of his podcast and yeah so he had Jay on and they talked for two hours kind of about and they covered I think maybe like a good two three four fouryear period of Co and everything Jay went through and you know you were talking earlier about like the media just kind of blocking and not

49:36 doing research I I think if everything from the origin of Co to the responsiveness to co for whatever reason we were in this weird place and some of this came out in the in the Twitter files where if you said anything that wasn't 100% consistent with what fouchy and Collins were saying it was labeled misinformation conspiracy theory and I was I did a bunch of research at the time but I I I I looked and found this

50:05 incredible New York Times piece about the Tower collapse in Miami and maybe we'll put it in the showes because it's just so amazing so someone spent you know six months probably thousands of hours of investigative journalism to figure out exactly what happened yeah and they had these infographics they had it's like amazing and you you look at the origin of Co we we have I don't know 20 million people dead probably the worst catastrophe since World War II and

50:37 no one was looking like no one was looking no one was doing the work that who these New York Times journalists did for this collapse of this this building yet the consequences were a THX and like 10,000x bigger and I don't know if it was Trump derangement syndrome I don't know if you know I don't know why I mean and the Twitter files once again had a lot of this where people tried to talk up or and and so to me one thing should

51:04 be obvious to everyone we don't want to go through this again right yet you look at how people talk and I I and if you hadn't listened to Jay I would I I would be I would say if this happens again are we any smarter are we going to make any better decisions his concern is that we're not right and so I would argue that the reason to do the postmortem yes is that you know you know you had

51:31 three prominent senior authors on this paper 6,000 signatories and it basically was early in the pandemic and at odds with the conventional wisdom okay the conventional wisdom was that you needed to lock down keep people separated that it wasn't that deeply penetrated you know of disease and we could prevent it from spreading he was basically making the case because they they by the way he had instincts had the data he had he also had instincts that that lockdowns

52:02 would have massive consequences which they did right right but he wasn't given a voice and Francis Collins called him a fringe epid epid and this is a celebrated in fact he's he his his area of study is economic epid epidemology yeah and so he's actually thinking about how these things interact with our global economic system he's like the perfect person to listen to and he got attacked and I think anytime and I I

52:34 might I might include this in in how some of the people responded to Ben and Mark and and and I remember I triggered on Kevin Scott when people questioning llm scaling called them trolls like anytime your reaction is not to react to the argument but to throw this label this negative label out of the other side my brain says you don't have the goods right right and that's what he said what was interesting here is you know it was all ad hominum

53:07 attacks they wanted to be you know was like excommunicating them from science you know because you had the head of the NIH and you had fouchy who were ca calling them Fringe players they didn't deal with any of the facts right the science was that they had the sewage data from Santa Clara County and from LA County they knew the the the the penetration and they of course knew the death rate you know that they could

53:32 calculate they knew among younger people that there was almost zero deaths and among older people you needed to take a different sort of of of precaution now Jay what makes him interesting is you know he actually had two relatives in India who died from covid it wasn't like this guy didn't care about Co it wasn't like he was you know some cie was one of the most celebrated scientists who actually looked at data did the research

53:58 put together you know a very important paper now this is a person who was celebrated by the NIH he was on NIH review panels he had written over he said something they didn't like a 100 different papers Etc and the reason you know so when you said I need to listen to this I'm thinking to myself that's been four years ago yeah but he says something at the end of the podcast where he said the problem is we're no

54:24 better prepared today than we were then and the exact same rush to judgment right lock everything down we're prone to do it again the next time because we haven't done the proper postmortem here and the proper postmortem is that we need to do the science and the research and one one thing obviously I hope everyone goes and listens to it but one thing that he uncovers they've gone back through and looked at excess deaths at a number of different countries and

54:53 lockdowns achieve nothing like and and I think he makes a solid argument I think most people believe there were consequences to lockdowns definitely with kids yes lost generations of kids from school increased suicide rates you know lost education and and all of my kids were in high school and it was horrific for them not to have the experience that so many of us cherish from those moments in time it actually I get a little little upset thinking about

55:21 it but but there's more than that really because we need to go back through and look at everything there were you know there were there there's a lot of questions about the origin of Co if you look at what's what's being discussed with in congress with and what they're uncovering it it it's really really needs more more work to be done and I think Katherine Bach and alen Chan there's people that you should follow on Twitter they're uncovering that finally

55:48 there were these incentive systems pushed through hospitals where like you could charge 30% more if a patient had covid so like anyone gone back through and see if that was really a good idea did that or did people take advantage of it and then they over select they probably did there were there were questions about how that I brought up during my regulatory capture speech about the different types of tests that could be done in their cost and which

56:12 was more accurate or not and all that stuff while we don't have an a pandemic this would be a great time to go in depth and I hope that whoever is our next president will put together a panel and I hope Jay's in charge of it I have no idea if Jay has that kind of time in his life to to go review everything that happens so that we can be better prepared next time well said well said

56:37 let's talk about whiz this deal Google was rumored to be buying whiz for 23 billion bucks there's a second hope high-profile deal the first was HubSpot that seems to you know have kind of blown up that Google was supposedly going to do ASF the CEO of whiz came out and said not to worry you know we're going to get to a billion dollars in revenues and then we'll go public you know any anything to take away here I

57:04 mean my read on it just at at a quick level is you know if this were to go public it would probably Trade It 13 or 14 times forward that would be like 13 or 14 billion not 23 billion are these things blowing up because people all of a sudden get cold feed about antitrust do we think that a trump Administration is going to loosen up m&a anything to see here well I mean one thing I would say is

57:28 that these are if if you're lucky enough to to be involved in a situation where one of these deals comes down it's it's it's hard to know what to do yeah you know and I I mean it's not nearly this number but I remember when Instagram you know got their offer of I think it was 1.1 1.2 billion and they had like 20 20 employees and and we had funded the the 14th photo sharing site and Matt comes in and says should we do

57:59 this and like like it's easy to want to be on the yes side in these situations because it's it's like wow this might and and I can remember very famous situations where people walked away from these deals and never got close to that number again so the consequences are high it's like a really intense poker moment like where you're making a gut call and so and and there's the also the famous you know Google didn't sell to Yahoo for a billion and

58:30 then became one of the most powerful companies of all time Microsoft Facebook for turning down 23 or whatever the number was is a higher number that makes me talk with a higher voice right right right because as we've often discussed like it gets exponentially thin at the top the number of people that make it to a billion is a fraction of the number that make it to 100 million and the number that make it to 10 billion is a

58:55 fraction of like it's the the Air's thin as you climb the mountains so kudos to them if they're just that confident in the business there's some rumors today that it may be that the crowd strike situation makes them feel that that they may have more Running Room I I I wouldn't I I have a hard time believing this one was a concern about the antitrust because Google doesn't have a huge security business and and there there's actually concern

59:24 about consolidation around Palo Alto and and Microsoft and Cisco in the in the industri OR In Crowd strike so so I would think they'd be supportive of it and if you thought Trump were coming in I think there'd be less reason even to worry about it so I don't see that I that that's probably the one thing I would press on is you know the Betty markets I think are now 6040 with kamla in the race of you know of

59:52 of of trump winning the election you know we've been in this period in Silicon Valley for four years where companies just stopped like they may have sent their m&a teams to the beach for all I know there just has not been a lot of activity certainly among the hyperscalers relative to what had existed before it seems to me they did a three things instead they bought back their own stock they all started issuing dividends and they bought Nvidia chips

60:18 right they they they you know they tighten their belts on people they weren't spending more money on people all the companies became a lot more profitable there just was a real lack of m&a which is a problem for Silicon Valley right and I and I I would say like having been in these situations before usually the partner that's involved in the company the one that's on the board or that led the investment they're usually pretty they tend to

60:43 be overly confident and that's often balanced by the the other partners back at home so when you circle around the table and have these discussions they're like really are you sure you don't and if we've been in an environment where liquidity's been scarce the odds that they were sitting there pushing hey hey maybe we should do this maybe we should do this I would think would be high we saw this unusual Sequoia event where they actually recycled stripe out of their

61:12 own dollars right which speaks to the fact that the LPS feel a need having to come up with alternative liquidity in a world where m&a can't get done I mean m&a was not on Mark L but it could have been it could have been as as another you know another problem that we face in Silicon Valley part of the vibrancy of this ecosystem relies on the you know not just the IPO Market but also the m&a

61:39 market yeah and so you know I think there's always been a a peer pressure to appear particularly confident and to play the long ball game amongst Venture capitalists and they almost F they almost fall over each other trying to express is bravado so kudos to index and Sequoia and and others that have have turned down Greylock I'm just looking at the list Andre and Thrive that that said no and the team obviously but

62:11 but boy you know we we talk about valuations being discounted future expectations nothing smells like that when you walk away from 23 billion hey you know I I I I think it would be less in the public markets today but they've clearly built a terrific business no doubt I've heard nothing but good things I don't I don't and by the way one thing that could be very positive that comes out out of this is if they turn

62:35 and run at the IPO markets very quickly yes because I would love for the list of I I I I think we have a bit of constipation here and we talked about this at the CO2 event I think people have gotten overly conservative about what they need to be a public company so I hope they run a as fast as humanly possible and we we've had talk about these you know potential AI IPOs coming I would I'd love for you

63:03 and I to on this call to be talking about IPOs more than we are yeah you know I I'm I just got off a a board call company we're we're Mutual investors in that's that's going to come public in September October and you know it it's it's exciting to be talking about companies coming to the public market again and I think I think it's best days and and and its maximum Innovation is still in front of it right

63:30 and I I was just reminding them like all of that can occur post goinging public right and so I think for whiz as well so today you know Tesla reported tonight they miss their numbers a little bit on on on margins the stock's down seven or eight% but interestingly enough Elon said on the call if you don't believe that Tesla is going to solve autonomy seller stock okay so he's like this is not just about the number of

63:58 cars we sold in the quarter gross margin like the reason you're in this stock is because of autonomy and so I want to talk a little bit you know you and I spent a whole pod talking basically about 12.3 but you know now they are on to 12.5 he he he mentioned 12.5 and 12.6 on the call today you know what we've been able to discern is these models are much bigger right they're running like five X larger models on the edge on the

64:27 car so rather than a billion parameter model maybe something like four or five billion parameter model the rates of improvement continue to accelerate and so here's how it manifests itself bill you know in in we went and did some testing of our own on this in 12.3 you know you could take your hands off the wheel for like 40 seconds before it told you to re-engage by 12.4 you could take your hands off the wheel for for up to 4 minutes right a lot

64:59 longer period of time and it has eye tracking and so you could look away a little bit before you know it was telling you to take control of the wheel on 12.5 and 12.6 we think it get to the point where there are 100% handsfree so it doesn't constantly ding you to grab the wheel and you can really start looking away from the road for for longer periods of time now of course you won't have to do that but I'm just

65:23 saying it will do it before kicking in it Warning Systems because they're confident in the in in in the efficacy of the model in order to bet you know Elon said because the 12.5 and 12.6 are so good they're going to look for approvals in China and Europe around you know around I was wondering when that was coming because they the the Whos of the world they have to apply for licenses for the car to to run in independently

65:53 and so I always knew that would be a step before they were live interestingly one of our analysts who covers but they said Europe and and they didn't and not us well in the US they already can can run full self-driving in States like Texas but not without a driver they have to apply no no the drivers in the car the dri the drivers in the car so one of our analysts went to China to test

66:17 all the L2 and l4s you read you've read some of watch all the videos you read the headlines of like deploying 10,000 cars in Wuhan overnight Etc and here's what she you know came back she came back and reported she said you know they're still catching up to fsd1 now remember fsd1 was so they're like three years behind on full self-driving those were still the deterministic models before the big breakthrough of 12.3 she said but here's what's crazy

66:50 although they're far inferior models the Chinese consumers seem very receptive to being hands off the wheel eyes off the road and everybody's at this Huawei xia Xiao ping Neo all these different companies and so she was in them and she said she had some really lousy experiences in the cars but she was blown away at the Chinese consumer's willingness to adopt the technology well keep in mind I mean you you you you've heard a similar story about like leap

67:22 frogging technology so in Africa there you know there no landline straight to mobile and so everything you know changes in a different way car ownership in China was relatively low like five or 10% so most people are either bicyclists or or commuters and and so that would be one reason why your expectations would be in a very different place than if you were an American who loves your car and I mean we this is this this is for another pod

67:52 but we spent I don't know 100 years 70 to 100 years maximizing America's structure and layout and topology for that damn car yeah yeah yeah one of the things you and I have debated back and forth on this pod is just the impact that AI is going to have and the timeline against it against which it's going to have the impact and you've called into question right the the the magnitude of the impact perhaps from the

68:21 llm but we but we've been in lock step that this is having a major impact on full self-driving autonomy and you know likely on Robo taxi and so it does feel to me like this is one of those places where you know now if you're in San Francisco it's not surprising to see two or three Whos around you I think you're going to see a lot of people driving down the streets in their Teslas in the not too distant future right

68:48 they're going to be reading a book They're going to be looking away their hands are not going to be on the wheels and and you know and obviously in the robo tax is reported to pull the steering wheel out of the car allog together by the way on that last thing I'm going to put one more podcast in the in the in the list that I was that I found super interesting which was Mish Alaskan who is an entrepreneur

69:13 that runs an AI company here in Silicon Valley he went on the Sequoia podcast but he he was at he was at Google deep mine and he talks about alphago and he has some different perspectives on alphago and and and but but when when problems are finite and there's this great book about infinite and finite games like chess the ability for these models to compete and innovate is so much higher than when you have open-ended problems and one of the

69:44 things about self-driving is I think you can Define it in a way where it's a finite game which is no wreck like no wreck becomes the finite game and so they're able to these models are able to go a lot farther right when there's a finite game that can be played and and anyway his his talk is super interesting and and it it makes me think about the areas where AI is going to accelerate faster because you can do those kind

70:11 of things the open-ended AGI thing is actually in my mind it's going to take the longest because it's the hardest problem yeah I think there are a bunch of discret things you can Define as finite games you know customer service being an example of that but conversion on a website could potentially be done that way for sure so what what the heck happened with crowdstrike this week right not only did it lose 30% of its value all my

70:39 friends were complaining that they couldn't fly you know get from point A to point B Airlines ground to a halt what do you think this reveals to us about kind of the nature of systems that are being built in the cloud today and what are the things we ought to be looking out for or concerned about as a result a whole bunch of things went through my mind one the one that actually I think jcow brought it up

71:04 first but it it is just so like such a strong argument is why didn't you stage gate how this is rolled out like how could you let it have this big an impact like if you did increasingly large groups every two hours you you wouldn't have never had this impact on the world deployment engineer that needed to on vacation I don't know like someone like so crowd and I think that's on crowd strike so and and I there were other

71:33 people there there's a Twitter account that's really good at kind of analyzing crisis PR who went through his stuff I think they could have talked about things like that why that failed rather than like they they gave a technical description of what happened and say oh we uncovered it but that doesn't really help that doesn't say why this isn't going to happen again cuz there was a policy process failure you know on top of this the other thing that that if

72:01 you read Matthew prince who wrote a large analysis of this and keep in mind Matthew runs a different company Cloud flare in the security space and he's very worried about a very specific thing here I I just went and read a whole bunch so I didn't know this ahead of time but apparently Microsoft will argue the reason that these security companies have access to the current was because they were forced to let them have access because of an EU ruling okay that

72:31 related to how big and powerful Microsoft is now there were no non-microsoft boxes that failed and if and people will say oh well you know Apple doesn't allow you to have access to the Cel and so what what Matthew's worried about is that Microsoft's able to use this to reverse the EU initiative and then push these players out and a lot of people don't know this but Microsoft's now one of the top four security companies in the world and may

73:01 want to do that and so that's a new kind of dimension of competition that I think people need to pay attention to I I'm also struck like I I there was a funny article that said Southwest was spared by this because they weren't on Windows 95 yet or they weren't on Windows like some they were on really really old windows machines and I'm and I just don't understand why anyone that has a terminal that matters is is

73:34 running windows at all right like and maybe it's a testament to just the the power of the network effect of Windows and all this stuff but but you would think there'd be a hardened Linux thing that would be so much less susceptible to this kind of risk you know we have these esoteric conversations all the time time we're investing in these startup companies but you know the world has become software and you know we take for granted every day the amount

74:04 of software that's running around us that's getting us from point A to point B soon to be driving our cars for us Etc and you you know with it I think you know comes significant responsibility and again circling back to where we started the conversation you start taking down Airlines that really makes people in Washington unhappy oh I believe that right and so part of the reason I think that you know the nature

74:35 of the relationship between DC and Silicon Valley is changing is forever changed is also as simple as this our lives today are so you you know twisted around all of these Technologies whether it's the phone we carry in our pocket or the software that's getting us from point A to point B to the AI we're going to be using in the future and so I think that this symbiotic relationship this P you know figuring out how to make sure

75:06 that we're managing the relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley is in the most productive way possible for this country is is is is going to be super important no longer acceptable for us just to stick our head in the sand and say we're 2851 miles away you know engagement I think is going to be the new course and in that regard I think policies are going to matter like I don't think any any party can take

75:36 Silicon Valley one of the Articles said that people were forced to implement crowd strike because of regulatory reasons so they had it implemented because someone had told them they had to right so that's another interesting Dimension to this whole thing hey before we wrap I have two things I need to do super quick one I'm going to try and pronounce Tetra grammaton which is the name of Rick Ruben podcast and and apparently it's a important Hebrew

76:05 symbol from way back before Christ so I I I want to do him Justice there and then second I would like to call out with respect Mr Daniel eek at Spotify who just printed amazing numbers and took his stock to an all-time high he's been grinding away at Spotify for a very long time it's a great product that I love to use super Innovative a lot of people thought he couldn't make positive cash flow because of the the way that

76:34 the U music label deals are structured but he's he's after it he did he had a fun social media post before he did his earnings call which is I thought was clever I think I think it I love how he does this and he's just he's so thoughtful he's so wonderful he's so available he gives back to other entrepreneurs he cares about especially about Europe where he came from and and the company and I anyway I

76:58 wanted to well the Stock's up 12% today it's up 100% over the course of last year 100 20% over the course of last years seven billion today yeah so he's he's built an amazing business but more importantly again getting back to what we just talked about he makes our lives better every day for all those who use the product our lives are just happier every day so kudos to him on a great quarter all right man all right

77:20 great to see you let's wrap as a reminder to everybody just our opinions not investment advice