The Exchanges

Q Yeah, it's like playing poker with Alan Keating. It's just like, how is this guy solvent? He's literally playing every hand of poker, he's losing tons of money, and then all of a sudden, by the end of the night, he hits two big pots, and he's got the nuts both times, and he pulls out of the stall. What's your take on the market today, Chamath?

A Yeah, I mean, I'll just do it again, but I think the, the Shiller PE, Nick, I sent it to you, shows near all-time highs. Then the second is the Buffett Index, which is the sum of all, uh, U.S. equities divided by GDP, is also at all-time highs. So this would generally mean that you need to be increasingly a little bit more risk off. But then the opposite side of that, and I sent you a third one, and this is why it's so confounding, is you have signals showing everything, which is, which typically doesn't happen. And this is this dispersion point where when you see this performance and it's up five percent in the first, you know, half of April, typically the market is up almost 32% on average for the rest of the year. And we were already up, as Sac said, you know, Seven and a half percent already.

AI assessment note: “you have signals showing everything, which is, which typically doesn't happen”

Q I love your point Saks though, about fund size dynamics, fund size dynamics are destiny, right? It really is. And the optimal fund size for venture is somewhere between 256 hundred million according to everybody who's been doing this. For, you know, more than a decade or two, and who's successful, whether it's- Well, and the costs are coming down.

A So as the input costs come down, whether it's for engineers and co-pilots and, and hardware and abstraction layers, then theoretically, greater outcomes should be generated with fewer dollars in, which would again, tell you that fund sizes should actually go down, not up. That the reason they go up is because you get paid an annual management fee. And so obviously the way to wait, the way to make more money Is to get two percent on a larger fixed number every year versus two percent on a smaller number. Or, you know, for example, what we did was we were like, we're going to go and hit grand slams. And so I traded off management fee in return for 30% carry. And that turned out to be literally a multi-billion dollar smart decision because I gave up tens of millions of dollars up front for back end. Now the back end could have gone to zero and maybe it still can. So who knows? But, you know, most folks wouldn't do that. Most folks take the sort of risk adjusted bet and say, you know what, I'll just take the two percent and I'll raise a two hundred million, then a five hundred million, then a billion, then a two billion dollar.

AI assessment note: “greater outcomes should be generated with fewer dollars in, which would again, tell you that fund sizes should actually go down”

Q And it's starting to think about, okay, how do I want to be positioned for the next five years? What are big open-ended growth opportunities? And here comes two companies, one lever to crypto, right? And the other lever to AI. So I don't think it's a surprise. To me, these things are intertwined.

A You're a hundred percent on because here's the thing. The average profit margin of the S and P four 93 is drum roll, please. 12%. The average growth of the S&P four 93 is, drum roll please, single digits. So to your point, why would you be long any of these 493 companies that may turn around and one day just get decapitated by something you don't even know, that's getting cooked up by a couple of kids in a garage using OpenAI or Grok or what have you. It just makes a lot more sense when you find investable companies in the big themes of the future to at a minimum hedge. Right? Be less long the past, and frankly, make some bets about the future. And I think that that's where you're seeing these IPOs just absolutely rip. What is a better comparison, in my opinion, are the companies that are truly levered to the future themes of AI and crypto versus any of these IPOs that have happened of companies that are not. And I think what you see is there's a dispersion there as well, and they are being treated almost as similarly, Jason, as the S and P four 93. It's like, yeah, it's good. Yeah, it's fine. They get some reasonable gains, but if you're levered to any of those two, two trends, you're off to the races because it's just so disruptive. People don't want to be bag holding these old legacy companies.

AI assessment note: “if you're levered to any of those two, two trends, you're off to the races”

Q And how do we feel that it's gone to India? It's not coming to America. I think we knew it wasn't coming to America.

A Well, India has one massive advantage over China, which is that it has one fifth the labor cost of China, which has one fifth the labor cost of America. So India is a natural place for a lot of this next generation labor to end up. Plus, they have a very educated workforce. Plus, they have a young workforce. In many ways, you could say that it's, it's China circa, 2003. I mean, you have to remember, right? Like China from 2006, I think to like 2012, their GDP grew at like 10% a year. I mean, can you imagine what that must have been like when a country that big is growing that fast? So India is going to have that moment over the next 20 or 30 years. I, I, the only reason I scoffed at what you said.

AI assessment note: “India is a natural place for a lot of this next generation labor to end up.”

Q but here's, here's the thing in China and Indonesia and all these other countries, they are just over the environment as they make things. I think tariffs are very reasonable on that case. Like it's not fair to make it more expensive for us because we're doing it well. And then we outsource it for them to destroy things, right? So, so there are some things there where it doesn't.

A And what I would say is the other, the other side of the, of the tariff knife is that if there are markets though, where you're making something that's fundamentally innovative, where you are, but one maker, the problematic part of where tariffs really affect the U S consumer is then the price of that product of which there are no competitive alternatives. Can go very, very high. And that's inflationary. And I think that that slows down consumption. And then if, if that consumption is not just of something that's a nice to have, but a must have, then it becomes problematic. And so you could see where tariffs could impact certain industries. For example, if there are innovative drugs, I think that that's problematic. If there are innovative technologies of which there's only one vendor, that's problematic. So all of those, Need to get sorted out. But on balance in commodity markets, like look at autos. Autos is a perfect example. There are so many purveyors and providers of autos. There's OEMs all around the world. And so to have a compensatory system Doesn't seem like an unreasonable thing where it's a tit for tat tariff, but in other markets where if you need, for example, a specific piece of equipment from ASML to build a chip, and now all of a sudden that that machine is 25% more expensive or 30% more expensive and they pass that cost downstream, it becomes very speculative …

AI assessment note: “Doesn't seem like an unreasonable thing where it's a tit for tat tariff”

Q Yeah, no, but on the M&A side, don't you think this would be like incredible?

A No, but the only reason I say that again is it is just so early. Like I, in the text, I mentioned this to you guys. I remember, and Sax and I were in the middle of this. We were both right at the beginning of social networking. Sax started Genie. I was in the middle of AIM. And all of a sudden we saw Reed start SocialNet. Then we saw Friendster gets started. Then we saw MySpace get started. And you have to remember, when you look back now, 20 years later, the winner was the seventh company, which was Facebook. Not the first, not the second, it was the seventh, which started two and a half years properly after the entire WebPoint two-o phenomenon started.

AI assessment note: “No, but the only reason I say that again is it is just so early.”

Q Chamath, what do you got? Best performing asset of 2024. What's your prediction?

A I have to do it with the worst performing asset of 2024 because it's a bit of a spread trade, so. I'm going to take the public software index, tech stock index, and my short is going to be the private tech software companies, the late stage, mostly SaaS companies, and I think we've all talked about the reasons why, but I think that the terminal valuations are getting reset in the public markets. I don't think the growth rates are there in the private companies, and so you're going to have a Reset on valuation. In many cases that reset may just be that they stay at the same valuation three years later, even after doubling revenue or more. The problem is you will have taken another 30% dilution between now and then because of all the stock-based comp that these private companies give out. So Long the public tech cycle, short the private late stage tech cycle, expecting a valuation contraction in the latter.

AI assessment note: “Long the public tech cycle, short the private late stage tech cycle”

Q a level of concentration of wealth and power that no republic has ever survived, Is this gonna be a development that just makes wealth and power even more concentrated in even fewer hands? I don't think it has to be. I think that's where, you know, good policy can make a difference. But I think if we just sleepwalk into it, that could happen. It could be even more destabilizing.

A The thing that you just said is the key. It doesn't have to be. It requires very smart, thoughtful legislation. I think that we had some really idiotic legislation under Biden that President Trump and David Sachs have largely unwound. These diffusion rules, the gatekeeping, all of those things, Pete, would have seen us lose to China. Just to be very clear, as a technologist who's in the middle of it, who is investing and building, what I'm telling you is those historic rules were terrible and dumb, and they had one or two companies who would have basically had all the spoils, and the rest of us would have been standing on the outside looking in. That's no longer the case. We can run the race now, but I think what you said there is very critical. It doesn't have to be A winner-take-all or winner-take-most outcome.

AI assessment note: “The thing that you just said is the key. It doesn't have to be.”

Q Chamath, quick follow-up on that. I'm curious on Google. This is the, because I, I oscillate a lot on this particular name. Can Google win if search declines?

A Yes. And I think that what probably has to happen is, bear with me when I say this, but if you had to boil down Google's economic North Star metric, right, not the value North Star, the economic North Star metric would be price per click. And I do think that Google is extremely well positioned to pivot that to price per token. And I think that they have some emergent classes of physical AI, but they have the largest pool of people where they can generate a price per token value framework through YouTube, through Gmail, through Workspace. I think through search, but probably it's a different kind of model. It just requires them to rip the bandaid off at some point, but yeah, I think Google can do it.

AI assessment note: “Yes. And I think that Google is extremely well positioned to pivot that”

Q Chamath, quick follow-up on that. I'm curious on Google. This is the, because I, I oscillate a lot on this particular name. Can Google win if search declines?

A Yes. And I think that what probably has to happen is, bear with me when I say this, but if you had to boil down Google's economic North Star metric, right, not the value North Star, the economic North Star metric would be price per click. And I do think that Google is extremely well positioned to pivot that to price per token. And I think that they have some emergent classes of physical AI, but they have the largest pool of people where they can generate a price per token value framework through YouTube, through Gmail, through Workspace. I think through search, but probably it's a different kind of model. It just requires them to rip the bandaid off at some point, but yeah, I think Google can do it.

AI assessment note: “Yes. And I think that what probably has to happen is”

Q Why, why'd you say more so quickly? I'm curious.

A Oh, so this chart, which I think is like a Very dangerous vanity metric is why. So what Microsoft touts is what percentage of code is generated by AI without answering the more important question, which is, is that code useful and good? And if you ask that second layer, Nick, I sent you this tweet from Jan LeCun, and I'll tell you that this is my lived experience as well, is most code generated by AI is crap. And most of the tools that we use, you know, the reason we call these tools app crappers is because most of the code that it generates is crap. So it's great in a single player mode. But transitioning from single player mode to a complex enterprise environment is not possible today. So I think that Microsoft puts these metrics out because they want to seem that they're on the front line of it. But I suspect that this is just like, you know, how you used to hire McKinsey consultants to fire people because it was good air cover. It's probably just air cover to fire a bunch of folks that they probably wanted to get rid of anyways, but it's not related to that chart. And the reason is that Yann LeCun's tweet is true. When you allow these models to run over complicated tasks over long periods of time, The error rates compound to such a degree that the, that the resulting output is not worthwhile. And so until that problem is fixed, which I'm sure it will be, and I, and I, and I…

AI assessment note: “this chart, which I think is like a Very dangerous vanity metric is why”

Q reflection of, I could overlay the stock chart of, you know, Fox and Comcast and, you know, CBS and just have all of those have imploded. I think people have been kind of substituting right away. I think the, the question then that you have to ask is, is there a reason that maybe the Netflix product is fundamentally more unsafe or detrimental to someone's health than the prior broadcast?

A Well, the one thing that I would say is, and this is not a Netflix commentary, but a general commentary, which is online products versus linear products have the power and the benefit of this algorithmic Targeting and personalization. And I think that what Netflix has successfully figured out and a bunch of other products have successfully figured out is that you can hyper tune to what people think they want. But what people think they want is not necessarily what they need. I think when you had linear television, you kind of had to take what was given. You didn't love cheers, but you watch cheers. You didn't love saying elsewhere, but you watched it. Now, it's that you can go into a place where the thing really feeds you. And it gives you a very visceral feedback loop. And you can stay there binge watching something for an entire weekend. And what didn't I think the question is, what didn't you do?

AI assessment note: “online products versus linear products have the power and the benefit of this algorithmic Targeting”

Q existential one for our industry, right? I mean, if we don't get these companies to go public, Um, in my opinion, we are, um, as an industry gonna have to face really hard questions with the ultimate funders of our industry, who, by the way, are not our funds, but are the investors in our funds, right? And eventually, they are going to demand from us, right, um, capital back.

A Well, sorry, Tom, and Thomas, just to build on your point, it's actually not even those nameless, faceless people, because so much of that money, for example, in sovereign wealth funds and pension funds, theoretically come from these citizens who will at some point Need the money because of all of these other existential issues that they're dealing with. And so these, these pension systems and others will really have to justify, um, well, you know, they say I'm going to swing for the fences here to make up for my deficits, but with those deficits aren't actually made up and you've paid two percent a year for 13 years and you've burned through a quarter of your capital and fees and you have nothing to show for it. The jig is going to be up, I think.

AI assessment note: “just to build on your point, it's actually not even those nameless, faceless people”

Q and the NASDAQ. Yeah, let me pull up this last chart before I go to you, Chamath. It's been a strong year for the market, uh, S&P and NASDAQ, both up 11% year to date as of Thursday morning, but obviously a massive, I guess, do we call it a correction when it's, yeah, 20% is correction territory, Chamath? So, your thoughts on the wider U.S. market and the sell-off?

A I think we're in a low-key recession. So, I think that we're going to probably go through a couple of very difficult revisions of old data. The thing to remember about non-farm payrolls isn't as much what the number is, but if you actually look to the number of times it then gets revised, the reality is that these things get revised constantly, and right now we're in this trend where we are overestimating and revising down. Sachs mentioned this, that that was the same with GDP. So we are, I think, in a tough situation. And then what you're seeing is folks that run very cyclical businesses are telling us in very plain spoken English that demand isn't there. So the one that was interesting this past week, Jason, you mentioned millennials, but like Airbnb, where you think all these young people are running around YOLO-ing whatever cash they have. Airbnb had a massive warning on demand. So when I think the excess capital, whether it's the steamy check or what have you, has been exhausted. You're now starting to see it bear out in these cyclical businesses. I don't think the demand is there. I think we're in a recession. It probably becomes more obvious in Q three and Q four. And so Powell's going to have to cut. The question is, will he overreact to the pressure? And cut 75 to a hundred versus 25 and take it slow.

AI assessment note: “I think we're in a low-key recession.”

Q Okay, here's a question from Aditya, 50 dollars. At the level of money and power you all have as a group, how do you think about your legacies, if at all?

A I don't. Um, and I think that that is a really, really terrible way to live your life. Um, there have been in humanity about a hundred billion people that have ever lived. And if you took a sampling of a random thousand people and said, who do you remember from history? The overlap of the same five or 10 people would be almost universal, which is to say that a hundred billion minus five people are not going to be remembered. And so this goal of trying to be remembered, uh, I'm not sure accomplishes much. I think what's important is just to make sure that you don't have a lot of regrets and that when you have the chance to try something fun or try something memorable or challenging, um, because you thought you would get something out of it, you did it as opposed to how will people judge me for this and how will I be written? I just think it's a legacies. Forget it, man. Like your great grandkids won't know you. There's a decent chance Your grandkids may not even know you. So like what, like just, you gotta live to be happy today. Uh, that's my personal view. I just think this whole legacy thing is nuts.

AI assessment note: “I don't. Um, and I think that that is a really, really terrible”

Q Why do you love it so much Chamath? Tell them. Competition.

A I do think that it's hard right now for companies to get access to capital. I think more diverse and more flexible ways where smart investors can allocate their money into the ideas that they want are better. I think that the duopoly hasn't created enough competition. So the NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange haven't innovated. And in fact, they've, they've probably been a little regressive. In terms of filing requirements, listing requirements, in terms of board composition, they've fallen for a bunch of things that don't actually point to the economic rationale or value in a company. And so I think if you have a third player, there's a chance that more competition will create more rational behavior, which will flow into the companies themselves. So I'm a huge fan of this. I think that the stock exchanges right now are. Too brittle. Because, and there's, and that large reason is because there's only two of them.

AI assessment note: “if you have a third player, there's a chance that more competition will create”

Q up nuclear and other ones. We just had Phil Deutsch at my conference this week give a great talk on this. Solar is just getting so cheap. Batteries are getting so cheap. Putting batteries in your home, putting solar in, you know, and then putting data centers next to nuclear things. This is all adding up to we can solve this problem. And so you too feel optimistic about this?

A Yeah, totally. I think that climate change stalled when it was an emotional And philosophical rallying cry, largely of the left. When instead it became something about resilience and domestic manufacturing, both sides came together. And I think we're at a point now where the U S's energy independence, plus the amount of reliance on non-carbon based fuels will drive a sea change in the United States. I think it'll be copied in Western Europe. And it's also going to be at enough of a low price point where it'll get embraced In the developing world. So it's a, it's an incredible example of if you want to take an idea and a bunch of solutions and want to die on the hill of messaging and platitudes, it'll make no progress. But if instead you're willing to sort of be less extreme about it and actually just frame it in economic value add, All of a sudden everybody embraces it and it just becomes obvious. So I think that we're going to do wonders over the next. 20 and 30 and 40 years all over the world to push back on the general state of warming. But I think it will have happened because the economic incentives aligned, not because of And the philosophical or emotional framing of the issue.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, totally. I think that climate change stalled when it was an emotional”

Q But don't Stories and Reels undermine that argument? I mean, Reels was a copy of TikTok, and Stories was a copy of Snapchat, and they're both giant products to them.

A Um, I think that you can definitely copy features into an existing product with new distribution, but to invent a new product fully from scratch, that's a carbon copy of something. But again, reels attaches onto Instagram, which is a unique use case. Right. And so I think that, again, it goes back to, you have these five or six established modes of social media that essentially are from large pieces of content to small pieces. That's probably the best organizing principle that we have. And then that's one axis. And the other axis is text, video, audio. And along that spectrum, you can basically compartmentalize all these things. And then there are about four of them. That have real scale. And, and so in as much as you have established distribution, yes, you can copy a feature from somebody else and it will get used, but that's not what this is. So if this instead gets integrated into Instagram, I think it's much more dangerous to Twitter than as a standalone product. As a standalone product, I tend to think it's DOA for the most part. Unless again, it invents something totally new that we're missing.

AI assessment note: “you can definitely copy features into an existing product with new distribution”

Q Well, what do the Germans think? Because this is the Germans pipeline. This, so if we blew it up, that's also an, uh, explain to me your thinking on the chessboard of our relationship with Germany. If we blew it up, would they not also see that as a hostile act?

A This is why I asked if Europe knew, because I think you have to tell Germany that it's going to happen, and I think the quid pro quo With Germany is some amount of guaranteed supply that the US directs into Europe so that they know that their long-term LNG supply is intact so that they become ambivalent, right? There's a point of indifference where the Germans say, okay, we don't know when this thing is going to get turned back on, and we don't know what the implications of it are. Here's what our demands are, meaning our energy supply, our energy needs are. And so as long as the United States can say, look, worst case, we have stuff in the, you know, SPR that we can give you, there's probably a point of indifference where the Germans say, okay, we're just going to turn around and not say anything. And I'm curious, did the Germans say anything when this happened?

AI assessment note: “there's probably a point of indifference where the Germans say, okay, we're just going to turn around”

Q Why do you think Chamath People love the podcast. Why do you think they listen? Why do you think they love it? What is the phenomenon? What lightning has been captured in this bottle?

A First is I think that they appreciate our friendship. It's kind of like odd and quirky. And I think a lot of, you know, it maps to like relationships that they have amongst their own friends. So that's what makes it relatable. But the second is that all of us uniquely have a point of view. About stuff that matters more and more in the world. I think that's just the basics of it. Like, it's not like technology is going away. And it's not like its impact in the world is going away. And the more it becomes mainstream, the more it's important for a lot of folks to understand what's happening. And I think we provide a pretty unfiltered view of it. We do it where, and this is a lot of credit to sacks more than anyone else on the show has to take a counterpoint and steel man, what would otherwise be controversial views. And if he didn't have his three friends around him, that would make the pod meaningfully worse, I think.

AI assessment note: “First is I think that they appreciate our friendship. It's kind of like odd and quirky.”

Q this stage these last couple days is you all feel like we're in a recession or heading towards a recession, but I get a feeling that you have the confidence that this is going to be a quick recession, like a year. So my question would be, why do you feel after 13 years of market manipulation by the Fed, that it's going to be cured in under a year?

A No, I think you're right. The average recession as measured, like, if you look back historically, is two quarters. Um, the problem is that we've never really figured out what it's going to take with the distortion of money that never should have been in the system. Because if you think of a supply-demand imbalance as being a naturally self-balancing phenomenon, if you perturb one side of it by an enormous amount, exactly to your point, I think the open question that the world has right now is, is that really a two-quarter problem? Well, the Fed has told you that they're going to take three years to get three trillion. You've heard from David that 10 trillion was put in. Probably another three or four trillion was productively used. But that still leaves another three trillion of sloshing around money that we don't know. So, I think it's an open question. I don't know what you guys think.

AI assessment note: “No, I think you're right... I think it's an open question.”

Q when you see this, you call this with your spread trade. Maybe you could walk us through what you saw, you know, whatever it was three, four, five months ago, and then what you're seeing now and at this level with two hundred fifty billion dollars wiped off the market cap. What do you what do you think about the future of this as a trade and as a company?

A Well, I think the trade did what it was supposed to do, which is in a period of a lot of volatility. I saw an opportunity to You know, just reduce my risk exposure. Look, I'm generally long, very risky assets, right? I mean, all of us are in the business of building companies that have huge volatility, because all of our companies generate earnings very far in the future. And so, you know, in November of last year, I was trying to figure out what I could do to shield myself. And the reason I wanted to shield myself was because I saw Elon and Jeff in part selling, but also I saw that clearly we were going to go through a period where that high growth tech was going to trade down. So I sold some of that high growth tech. But then I also wanted to figure out a way where I could be Less exposed to some of that volatility by continuing to hold what I had. And the best way that I figured out how to do that was to do the spread trade. And so, you know, what I saw at the time was that there is one business above all others that I think is immune amongst big tech from any sort of real long-term issues. And that's Microsoft. And I think David expressed the reason well is that it's an enterprise business. Now, you know, politicians generally don't tend to care about enterprise businesses. They have enormous longitudinal growth in front of them. And they're able to do things on the margins…

AI assessment note: “Well, I think the trade did what it was supposed to do”

Q people are raising salaries to try to get people to come back to work. They're turning off the bonus unemployment early in some states. We're here in October. This is all supposed to be turned off by now. So I guess I'll start with you Chamath in terms of the markets here. What do you think is happening and is this an acute risk or just something that will pass?

A I think the, well, this is where I think I kind of generally disagree with the market. I think that most people are under the impression that these are short term, um, Kind of contractions and expansions and that this is just the thing that needs to get work through the system as we readjust to a post COVID world, blah, blah, blah. I think it's different. And the reason I think it's different is if you just look at, uh, one thing and one thing only, which is that we have a massive labor shortage in America. And there is an incredible stat that I saw, um, which was the average hourly earnings. Of non-manager people in hospitality and travel. And the average salary, the mean salary was around 20 some odd dollars an hour, and it's now 33 bucks an hour. And so what that to me says is that we are going through a really sustained period where you cannot get people to do the work that needs to get done. Biden had to call the port of LA and try to get these guys to be open. 24 hours a day. The president of the United States is calling a local port, trying to get it to stay open. But why can't they stay open? Because you have longshoremen, you have all these unionized folks who will expect to get certain levels of compensation, which they deserve in order to do that work 24 seven. But then all of that is going to get put through the system. And if you still have millions of jobs, it nee…

AI assessment note: “I think it's different... we are going through a really sustained period”

Q Um, what is the consensus view? It seems to be the markets are still up. NASDAQ futures up to 80 still. What, what causes us to wake up tomorrow or the next day and have the futures down three, four or 500 bits?

A There's, there's one thing and so far it hasn't happened and if we avoid it, we're going to fade a really big out here. Um, which is Trump declares victory right now. I think that is the disaster scenario because I think Biden's going to get up there. He's not going to say much of anything. He'll be very kind of down the middle, you know, kind of let's take a wait and see approach. We're waiting until tomorrow. There's a lot to go grind it out, blah, blah, blah. But if Trump comes out and says, we won, we're done. Let's move on. It's gonna be a panic, because look, I mean, he's, you can't certify Georgia, apparently. Right. So, you know, there, there's a, there's a path where there's seven or eight states that have to go through on a meticulous recount.

AI assessment note: “Trump declares victory right now. I think that is the disaster scenario”

Q Well, I, I think the biggest challenge we're having right now is trying to get private sector to lock in for some things that might not have a payoff for five, 10 years, and how do we avoid student body left, student body right with administrations coming and going? So we're, we're trying, we're, we're working on that.

A Well, this is an incredibly nuanced, and I think an important point, because we have this very vibrant, as you know, tax equity and transferability market That allows a lot of these organizations to make these five and 10 year investment cases. And, you know, for all the issues with the IRA, of which there are many, I think the one narrow aspect that it did was, um, it calmed the markets about the future of those specific ITC credits and transferability. And it's a critical thing because there was a report, you probably saw it, but, you know, FERC said, 90 plus percent of our incremental electrons as of December Were from sources that were leveraging these ITC credits and that transferability. So to your point, we have this very delicate balancing act of making sure we.

AI assessment note: “tax equity and transferability market That allows a lot of these organizations to make these”

Q How do you know what a good glass of wine is, or something like that?

A Well, I really think it comes down to your own personal taste. I'll give you a perfect example of this. So there's, uh, Merlot gets shat upon a lot by fake intellectuals, but it creates some of the best wines possible. As an example, um, if you were to go into the old world, there's something you probably heard of called Chateau Petrus. Those are like five to 50,000 dollars a bottle. But if you go to Italian old growth Merlot, uh, like Masetto, That's probably one to 3000 dollars. So enormously just an order of magnitude cheaper. It is incredible and pound for pound better than Petrus. And if you put it against it in a blind tasting, you would prefer the Meseta over the Petrus. So what, what does that mean? I think it means that there is a lot of people that just want to demonstrate they can spend money. And that's dumb because I think there's just a lot of incredible wine. That's much cheaper than that. Then if you go all the way down to like, you know, for example, last summer, I, I gave these guys some of this, but the most incredible white burgundy I have found is Charles Boussin. 80 euros a bottle. Absolutely incredible. And it'll run circles around PYCM. It's running circles around Kosh Duri, which are thousands of dollars. So you gotta try a lot, and you gotta go with tastes good, and who cares what anybody thinks. By the way, I will pre-reveal this, but Uh, I think I to…

AI assessment note: “Well, I really think it comes down to your own personal taste.”

Q units in. They figured it out in Texas, Florida, Nevada. The only people who can't seem to figure this out, you know, is like New York, LA, and San Francisco, just happens to be liberal elite enclaves. And it's not hard on a conceptual basis. Just allow people to build some more units and different types of units. And then the price will go down. Chamath, any, any thoughts here?

A The data from Austin says once you relax the permitting constraint, you'll get more units built. And for every unit that comes online, it literally drives down the rent. So if you want low rent, you need to have more units. If you want more units, you need to permit more aggressively. That's it. So it's just a decision. The same political will that it would take Mamdani to pass this law. He could actually pass some permitting reform and it would do a lot more good. The thing on private property, the reason I asked Freeberg to explain it is I really believe what he's saying is really important. It's like funny to me, this idea that at the limit, let's just say you're driving your car and all of a sudden somebody jumps in it and they're like, well, you know, now I'm here, you can't kick me out. Or, you know, you go outside, you leave your door open to go get a FedEx package or Amazon box and somebody runs in and sits on your couch. And now all of a sudden they can't, you can't kick them out. And it sounds so ludicrously dumb. If you force the owners of physical property to not be able to credit check and differentiate who they rent their apartments to, what's going to happen is rents will go up even more. So I suspect that what they should do is they should pass this law. And they should observe what the outcome is. And then you can do a pretty scientific A B comparison between N…

AI assessment note: “The data from Austin says once you relax the permitting constraint, you'll get more units built.”

Q market is saying, wait, hold on, we might start to see diverging performance. What I read from that in one element is the market's starting to try and sort out who are going to be the winners and losers, who's well positioned versus maybe falling behind, right? So I think we're going to start to see some divergent performance from the max seven. I think it's going to reward not.

A Can you put that back up there for a second? I mean, I think that's so interesting because if you look at the conditions on the field today, you know, Google's down eight percent, but again, I would tell you as a user, Gemini models are exceptional, like absolutely just bar nonexceptional. I think Anthropic is incredible for CodeGen, incredible. What I see is every single company on this list that isn't NVIDIA baking and rolling their own silicon. Yet Nvidia is up and the rest are down. I told you that I spent time last week at Tesla. I would not be sleeping on this business. I think that it is yet again back into the land of being misunderstood. The only one that I understand why it's down this much is Apple. Because it's not clear that they're even baking something in private. There's nothing public. There's nothing private. It just seems like they're transitioning into being a cash cow and getting into sort of that cash harvesting mode. But it's almost weird that the price action is what it is, because I would have thought that Google would be up. Meta would maybe be a little flattish to down. Nvidia is up, but maybe it could be down. Tesla's down, but it should probably be up. Amazon's basically break even and Apple is down. And I think that kind of makes sense. That's sort of how I read this table.

AI assessment note: “sort of how I read this table.”

Q 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 developers prior to these large context windows being open. And that's going to just open up a massive amount of application, right, Shamar?

A The results are actually not that much better. There's these third party service benchmarks. Lombard 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 ware, but I would just encourage us all to keep in mind that the shift is not necessarily these kinds of things. It's kind of like saying, you know, in a chip, like, oh, wow, we built this chip on three nanometer. Okay, what does it mean?

AI assessment note: “The results are actually not that much better.”

Q people in D.C. pay close attention to the podcast. SACS has recently endorsed Michael Schellenberger, which I really hope can save our home state, and I'm wondering, is, is the solution... Something akin to a third party, like what Andrew Yang is trying to do, or some new, I don't know, Silicon Valley techno party, or, you know, is there, is, you know, what does that look like? I'm curious.

A Well, I don't think it's set up to actually have a third party structurally in America, so what you have to do, practically speaking, is field more centrist, normal people on both sides, whether they're Republicans or Democrats. That's a practical thing that we can all do, and then we can all show up and vote for those people, so that the, the majority voice is much clearer than it is today, Because right now the fringes a little bit get to hijack the process. Um, and so we take things that are, that should be common sense and we pervert them in a way that just makes no progress possible. Um, I really do think that we have that impact. Uh, I'm not sure how much can be, of that can be quantified, but when I spend time in DC, I think it's true what I was told and what I've heard from people. It's basically required listening or viewing. It helps shapes people's opinions. Doesn't mean they follow it, but I think it helps people think about things in a more normal way. I think what happened today is like a perfect example, like the way that Glenn Greenwald and Antonio Garcia Martinez debate, like, that's probably for some of you is really unsettling, maybe. Raise your hand if you were just like, you felt awkward. Honestly, just be honest with you. Ok, well, you shouldn't because that's normal. My point is, it helps you make it seem more normal. Because those guys were not saying to…

AI assessment note: “I don't think it's set up to actually have a third party structurally”