Opinion
The NFL blackballed Colin Kaepernick following his 2016 national anthem protests
“The NFL blackballed Colin Kaepernick after this.”
Opinion
Rosenthal: The IPL is structurally superior to the NFL
“To me, this is not a controversial statement. The IPL is better set up structurally than the NFL. It is the Most perfect sports league that exists.”
Opinion
Rosenthal: Taylor Swift Enterprise Value Is $11B Using Disney's 20x Multiple
“Disney trades at 20 X free cash flow. Taylor is five hundred and fifty million in free cash flow. That's a eleven billion dollar enterprise value for Taylor.”
Opinion
Rosenthal: Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie deserve all credit for Azure's vision
“I kind of think all of the credit for the vision for it and the championing it for the initial seven years within Microsoft goes to Steve and to Ray.”
Insight
Ilya Sutskever argued next-token prediction inherently requires true world understanding
“The more accurately an LLM predicts that next word, i.e. The name of the criminal. Ipso facto, the greater its understanding, not only of the novel, but of all general human-level knowledge and intelligence, because you need all of your experience in the world…”
Opinion
The SR-71 Blackbird Was Effectively a Decoy for Space Satellites
“This is heretical to say, because it's so beloved, but I think the Blackbird was a decoy. We were getting everything we needed from space. We just didn't want anybody to know about it.”
Insight
Streaming's high-volume content firehose fundamentally breaks Disney's historical IP flywheel
“That whole strategy of a fire hose of content is completely orthogonal to the flywheel strategy of only the best content very infrequently.”
Opinion
Nintendo's intellectual property rivals Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm combined
“Nintendo is like Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm combined. I mean, they have some of the very best IP in the entire world. They've got three franchises that can stand toe to toe with anything at Disney in Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon.”
Insight
Animated IP outperforms live action in flywheel entertainment business models
“The IP that works best for Flywheel Dynamics almost has to be animated, i.e. Not live action, because with live action characters, the characters are too bound up in the actors that play them, and that creates all sorts of problems.”
Insight
Ancillary products do not cannibalize core entertainment IP
“The beauty here and the discovery that Disney makes is that when you put the IP into these other ancillary nodes, it doesn't cannibalize the core IP.”
Insight
Vanguard's mutual structure starves its technology and customer service of reinvestment capital
“Vanguard, the downside of its structure is that there are no excess profits that can be invested for the long term in things like technology and things like customer service.”
Opinion
Ferrari Is Arguably the Only Legitimate Luxury Brand Founded Post-1950
“I think you could maybe even argue they are the only legitimate luxury brand established in the second half of the 20th century.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
The NFL is the largest single-property media business in the world
“I'm pretty sure the NFL is the largest single media business in the world. Not an aggregate diversified media business, but like, if you consider the league as a single property, then I think it is the largest individual single property in the world.”
What-if
Major broadcast TV networks would not exist today without NFL football
“For those networks for the last decade, run the counterfactual of the networks no longer had football. They don't exist anymore. This has been life support for them for a decade.”
Assertion Partly supported
Sequoia refused to raise a mulligan fund after the dot-com crash
“We interviewed Doug Leone who was, you know, one of the, I guess, two stewards ago of Sequoia, and he told us that after the dot-com crash for the Sequoia fund that was the dot-com bubble fund, every other venture firm out there, after the bubble popped, were …”
Assertion Supported
Warren Buffett's legendary Coca-Cola investment has actually underperformed the S&P 500
“He would have been better off buying the S&P Over that same time period. Including dividends over that same time period. The S and P 500 is up about 11% annually. So the famous Berkshire Hathaway Coca-Cola investment today is actually underperforming the marke…”
Assertion Contradicted
Google Is Only Company with Both Frontier Model and AI Silicon
“Somebody put it to me in research that if you don't have a foundational frontier model, Or you don't have an AI chip, you might just be a commodity in the AI market, and Google is the only company that has both.”
Opinion
The 2011 Google Brain 'Cat Paper' Drove Hundreds of Billions in Revenue
“I think it's not that much of a leap to say that the cat paper led to probably hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue generated by Google and Facebook and ByteDance over the next decade.”
Opinion
Google's DeepMind Buy Directly Spawned Modern AI Labs
“This company and this purchase of it by Google was the butterfly flapping its wings equivalent moment that directly leads to OpenAI, ChatGPT, Anthropic, and basically everything.”
Assertion Supported
Noam Shazeer Urged Google Leadership to Replace Search with Transformer Models
“Gnome, though, immediately starts advocating to Google leadership. Hey, I think this is going to be so big, the transformer, that we should actually consider just throwing out the search index And the 10 blue links model and go all in on transforming all of Go…”
Assertion Supported
OpenAI Rushed ChatGPT Launch After Learning of Anthropic's Chatbot Plans
“So, Anthropic was working on what would become Claude, and rumors were out there, and people at OpenAI Got wind of like, oh, hey, Anthropic and Dario are working on a chat interface. We should probably do one too. And if we're gonna do one, we should probably …”
Opinion
Google Chrome Kept the Web Alive as a Viable Application Platform
“I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that Chrome kept the web alive. As a viable platform for applications.”
Assertion Supported
Steve Jobs Lawsuit Threats Kept Pinch-to-Zoom Off Early Android Devices
“So Steve Jobs threatens to sue Google over implementation of multi-touch gestures. And so, as a result, Android for several years doesn't have things like pinch to zoom or the sort of swipe operating system UI navigation gestures, and I'm pretty sure if you re…”
Opinion
Google Is the Only Tech Giant to Extend Its Business Across Eras
“Nobody stretches a business model across technology eras. Nobody. And Google did it.”
