E113: DOJ tries to break up Google, vaccine questions, Ukraine escalation & more

1. 0:00 – 2:49

   David Sacks does bestie intros!

   1. JCJason Calacanis0:00

      Sacksy-poo, how much heat and momentum has Nikki Haley gotten this week?

   2. DSDavid Sacks0:03

      Oh my God. Stop trying to make Nikki Haley happen. Fetch is not happening. Stop trying to make fetch happen.

   3. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:09

      Stop trying to make fetch happen! (laughs)

   4. DFDavid Friedberg0:10

      It's happening.

   5. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:11

      Is it happening because it's tomorrow? (laughs) What?

   6. DFDavid Friedberg0:14

      This is like my long Google short Facebook spread trade of last year.

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:17

      That's so great!

   8. DFDavid Friedberg0:18

      It's happening.

   9. DSDavid Sacks0:19

      Fetch is not happening, okay? Stop trying to make fetch happen.

   10. JCJason Calacanis0:22

       Don't let your winner slide. Rain Man David Sacks. I'm going all in. And I said- We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, ... queen of kinwah. I'm going all in.

   11. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:39

       Just as a, um, programming note, we did a Twitter survey and you selected Sacks as the person you wanted to moderate the pod most next. So welcome to Fox News Sunday.

   12. DSDavid Sacks0:51

       (laughs)

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:52

       And here's your host, David Sacks.

   14. DSDavid Sacks0:54

       You're really chafed about this, aren't you, J-Cal?

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:56

       No, I am excited for it! (laughs) I am so excited.

   16. DFDavid Friedberg1:00

       Just to save a keyboard warrior the time, I will never, ever, ever moderate this thing.

   17. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:05

       (laughs)

   18. DFDavid Friedberg1:07

       So I'm here to talk.

   19. DSDavid Sacks1:08

       All right, three, two... Welcome to The All In Pod. I am your host, the Rain Man, David Sacks. The famous Doomsday Clock that atomic scientists use to measure the threat of nuclear annihilation has never been closer to midnight, not even during the Cold War. But since the besties think it's more important to discuss their stock portfolios-

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:26

       (laughs)

   21. DSDavid Sacks1:26

       ... we're gonna save Ukraine for later in the show. Priorities, right gentlemen?

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:30

       (laughs)

   23. DSDavid Sacks1:31

       And why not? Who says you can't take it with you? The dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya is planning to be entombed with his money like an Egyptian pharaoh.

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:38

       (laughs)

   25. DSDavid Sacks1:38

       And with his sweaters too, even though it certainly won't be cold where he's going.

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:42

       (laughs)

   27. DSDavid Sacks1:43

       And of course, he'll throw in the world's greatest moderator, Jason Calacanis, in the tomb to be his servant in the afterlife. It's the role J-Cal has been preparing for all his life by sucking up to every tech founder and VC he can get in a room with.

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:55

       (laughs)

   29. DSDavid Sacks1:56

       I give better odds to the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg. He's just paranoid enough to survive with me in the bunker, even though he still won't be questioning the Davos elites that got us here.

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya2:05

       (laughs) How much did that intro cost?
2. 2:49 – 23:09

   DOJ sues Google over ads business

   1. DSDavid Sacks2:49

      Okay, issue one.

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya2:50

      Issue one.

   3. DSDavid Sacks2:51

      Google breakup.

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya2:52

      Issue one. (laughs)

   5. DSDavid Sacks2:53

      The Justice Department and eight states are now seeking to break up Google's business brokering digital advertising across the internet. This is one of the most important legal challenges the company has ever faced. Filed a lawsuit on Tuesday, the Justice Department did, alleging that Google abuses its role as one of the largest broker suppliers in online auctioneers of ads placed on websites and mobile applications. The filing promises a protracted court battle with huge implications for the digital advertising industry. Of course, Google responded to the lawsuit in a blog post saying that the DOJ's request for it to unwind two previous acquisitions from a decade ago is an attempt to rewrite history. They said the DOJ mischaracterizes how its advertising products work. They say that people choose to use Google because they're effective. And the company highlights other companies making moves in the advertising industry as well, such as Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and TikTok. So, I guess I'll kick it to you, Chamath. Wh- do you think the DOJ has a case here? Do you believe that Google has a monopoly in online advertising and is unfairly using it to gain market share? And is this the right remedy, breaking up the company?

   6. DFDavid Friedberg4:03

      Yeah, I think that this is a totally ill-founded lawsuit. And I think it just shows more of the personal enmity and anger that some people in the US government has towards entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship than anything else. Now, why is that? Let's just think about what a monopoly is. A mon- a monopoly or a monopolist effectively creates a completely stagnant, non-vibrant market in which they have pricing power and complete control. Now, the argument that I think that refutes that just on its face is if you actually look, number one, at their share, and number two, how the rest of the share has changed over time. So Nick, can you just please throw that up from Bloomberg? This is just in a Bloomberg article that I just shared with you guys. But Google controls 26.5% of a market. 43.4% of that market is with a diverse group of others. Meta has 18.4% and Amazon has 11.7. This is not the type of pie chart you would see if you had a monopolist. So for example, if you went back to the big, big, big monopolist case in the 1980s, which is when we broke up Ma Bell, well, what that circle would have shown is that they basically had effectively 100% share. And what this shows is that there's a huge diversity of people in this market. The second thing is that if you had done this chart many years ago, Amazon would not have really even been there. And over the last five years, they represent almost 12% of the entire market. And it means that if you forecasted forward, they could be at 15 to 20% in a few years as well. So while the pie is growing, and definitely Google takes a lot of the profit dollars, the distribution is so much more than what anything looks like in a monopoly. And so I just think it means that the DOJ is more focused on trying to punish these great American companies than it is in trying to be logical and reasoned. And so I, I don't think this is gonna work. The last thing I'll say about this is that...If you think about what you should have done, if I were the US government, I would have actually focused on search, because search is a monopoly for Google. And while Google would try to argue that there are other ways of acquiring information, that is really not true. And if you could prove that that monopoly then led to pricing power in ads, I think that's a much more nuanced but logical argument that could work. But by focusing on this, I think it's going to get deconstructed, it's going to fail. The Texas version of this exact lawsuit already was thrown out of federal court, so I think that judges in the legal system don't have a lot of patience for this thing. It just meant more to kind of scare American companies and try to play boogeyman and decision-maker, and I don't think it's going to work.

   7. DSDavid Sacks6:56

      Friedberg, let me go to you. I think, you know, Chamath raises a really great point that if you define the market as digital advertising, then, you know, Google's market share is only about a quarter. That doesn't seem like a monopoly. However, what the government says is that you shouldn't look at digital advertising as a whole but rather the sort of brokered advertising that, you know, Google does for third party websites and applications. Let me show a chart from their lawsuit. You can see here that the way they define it, again, they see it as this brokering of, um, sell-side inventory with our website publishers, and then buy-side demand with your advertisers. Defined this way, it looks like Google has 90% or more market share on the sell side because of the DoubleClick acquisition. They've got somewhere between 40 and 80% market share on the demand side with advertisers, and then in the middle, they have over 50% market share of the ad exchange. Is this the right way to look at Google's business, or should we be just thinking about in terms of the overall digital advertising market?

   8. DFDavid Friedberg8:03

      I've been involved in ad networks since about 2002, so it's been, uh... Obviously, I'm not directly involved in the business anymore, but, um, I was pretty close to this and I was pretty close to DoubleClick and the acquisition. I was a business product manager for a period of time on AdWords. So the way that, uh, that, that chart kind of shows the connection between advertisers and publishers is correct, that an ad network, uh, generally speaking, brings buyers of ad inventory to the sellers of ad inventory. And the sellers of ad inventory have the option to sell their inventory on an ad network. And if the money that they're making on those ad slots that they have, whether it's a slot on the side of a page, at the top of a page, or an interstitial video ad, whatever it is, they're gonna keep selling their inventory through that network if they're getting paid the most. And the real reason Google has won is two part. One is because they ran their ad network as an auction, meaning advertisers were competing with each other to pay the most for an ad spot that was the highest quality. There's also an ad quality index, uh, calculation, a click-through index, a bounce-back index. So there's all this data that feeds into Google's ad network auction so that the ad that's shown on the publisher's site is not just the best ad for the publisher but the best ad for the consumer. And then when the consumer clicks on the ad, the publisher gets paid. And the second thing that Google did, and so the, the auction dynamic is a really powerful dynamic, it creates the best price for the publisher and it creates the highest quality ad for the user, which translates typically into higher click-throughs and, and better revenue. What they also did that was really powerful is they did the highest revenue share in the market. So historically, ad networks have like a, I think, initially, like a 60/40 rev share where they only paid publishers 40% of the revenue the advertiser paid. Then the network started to move to a 55/45 model, then a 50/50 model, then a 45/55 model. I believe on average Google currently is paying somewhere between 70 and 80% to their publishers. I gotta check my math on that or, or whatever the latest

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya10:12

      I heard high 60s, yeah. Yeah, high 60s.

   10. DFDavid Friedberg10:14

       Yeah, so c- but call it 70. And so it is a very competitive share. Now, the, the point being, because it's an auction system and because it's opt-in by the publisher, if they're not paying the highest price, the publisher can go and get ads from somewhere else. And historically, publishers built their own sales force to sell ads and to, to source advertisers and to make money off of their ad inventory. And it turns out it was a lot more effective to use an ad network to do that. The other ad networks simply haven't been as good at building an auction model and building competitiveness. But I will tell you that when you get to a certain volume, and it's not a big volume, you don't need a million advertisers bidding against each other. You only need a few dozen advertisers. And once you have a few dozen advertisers bidding against each other, you start to get very competitive in inventory. So Google's real lock-in with publishers and the real reason they win in this marketplace is because they, they pay the publishers the most. And if you try and break this up and if you actually do try and, you know, uh, get into the, the weeds of this whole system and change it, the publishers ultimately will make less money. And this will be a real problem on the publisher side that they're making the most money, they're getting the highest share of advertiser spend, and consumers are getting the best quality experience. That's what makes Google's model so hard to tackle from an antitrust perspective because it's giving consumers-

   11. DSDavid Sacks11:30

       So basically, are... Is what you're saying that because fundamentally this is an auction model, it prevents Google from extracting monopoly rents?

   12. DFDavid Friedberg11:39

       Correct. And, and they already pay the highest share on their ad network back to the publishers, and so you could go in and say, "Hey, high 60s or 70%, they should be paying 90%." What's the real right number if they're already paying-

   13. DSDavid Sacks11:50

       Right.

   14. DFDavid Friedberg11:50

       ... more than anyone else to the publishers? They're already making a lower margin than anyone. And I'll say, let, let me just, let me just add two more things, sorry, which I think are just-

   15. DSDavid Sacks11:58

       Well, can I go to J-Cal first? I just wanna get-

   16. DFDavid Friedberg11:59

       Yeah.

   17. DSDavid Sacks11:59

       ... J-Cal in here.

   18. DFDavid Friedberg12:00

       Yeah, yeah.

   19. DSDavid Sacks12:00

       Even though he wouldn't do the same for me.

   20. DFDavid Friedberg12:02

       Yeah (laughs) .

   21. DSDavid Sacks12:02

       Uh, J-Cal, do you agree with Friedberg that, uh, that the reason for Google's success is that they're hyper efficient?And this auction mechanism prevents monopoly behavior?

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya12:12

       No, I, there is monopoly behavior going on at Google, obviously, with search and putting their own content and services up top. And to Chamath's point, like that's probably the easier target. Here, this just feels like they are maybe 10 years behind. They should have just blocked the DoubleClick, you know, acquisition in 2008 and this consolidation of power. The, the, what publishers would say, to Friedberg's point, is when you're selling your own advertising, you get a much higher CPM when you go direct to Samsung, or IBM, or Disney, and so you want to create those direct relationships. How much do those direct relationships cost? It's probably 20 or 30%, which is exactly to the percentage that, uh, Google was taking off the top. So Google's pretty aware of that, but it's just paradoxical that they're doing this at this time, David, because Amazon has developed a huge ad business. Netflix and Disney have now have ad tiers for their services to go up against YouTube so... And then for the first time, we're even talking about Google Search supremacy being challenged by ChatGPT. So...

   23. DSDavid Sacks13:16

       Right. So do you think-

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya13:17

       Much like what happened with Microsoft, you know, they're, they're just late. 10 years too late, maybe.

   25. DSDavid Sacks13:21

       Right, right. So to use one of your favorite words, is the DOJ acting as a rug puller here for Google?

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya13:27

       (laughs) .

   27. DSDavid Sacks13:27

       In the sense that they're trying to unwind 10 year old acquisitions. Does that, does that make sense?

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya13:32

       Yeah, it doesn't make much sense to me.

   29. DSDavid Sacks13:33

       Shouldn't the government be able to unwind acquisitions that happened a decade ago? Does that make any sense?

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya13:38

       No.
3. 23:09 – 40:27

   EU probes Microsoft over Slack complaint based on "bundling" Teams

   1. DFDavid Friedberg23:09

   2. DSDavid Sacks23:09

      Right. Okay, so shifting gears. Microsoft has just been sued on antitrust grounds, or rather, there's a probe by the EU, and this was based on a complaint actually from Slack. Slack filed a complaint back in 2020 that Microsoft was basically engaging in, in bundling or tying of products. The allegation is that Microsoft unfairly ties Microsoft Teams and other software to its widely used Office Suite. Do you guys think that's a better claim?

   3. DFDavid Friedberg23:39

      Okay, so-

   4. DSDavid Sacks23:40

      I mean, I'll just say, like, you know, there was an episode that we did, I think back in September, where I basically railed against Microsoft for exactly this kind of bundling. It seems like the EU has picked up that theory and wants to go after bundling.

   5. DFDavid Friedberg23:54

      We did Slack Series A, I was on the board, took it public, blah, blah, blah. I'll tell you the thing that we talked about a lot. That was the thing that I was always, like, the most afraid of, which is how can we compete with a better product in the face of superior distribution? I think what Microsoft did was anti-competitive, but I don't think it was monopolistic. And I think that the EU in that time...... has a much better framework of laws that they had demonstrated up until now they were willing to enforce around anti-competitive pricing. And so part of what Slack was trying to do was create some air space for that to get into the ether, to the discussion, that it's like, "We could build the best product in the world, but if Microsoft gives it away with this other product that is quasi-essential, they'll always beat us and there's nothing we can do about it. What do you think?" And I think that was basically the question that was posed to the European authorities because we thought that they would pay attention to it. What's interesting about it is that then, you know, when the acquisition happened to Salesforce, it sort of waters down that claim because now Salesforce also has a set of really essential products that are useful and needed in the market that Slack can go and attach themselves to. And in many ways, David, it forced the hand of Slack to be acquired by Salesforce.

   6. DSDavid Sacks25:20

      Right.

   7. DFDavid Friedberg25:20

      And if not Salesforce, it would have to have been somebody else. But could it have been an independent company had we not had to compete against Teams in that way? Meaning if we had to compete against another well-funded startup, would it still be public? I suspect so. I don't think we would have sold to Salesforce.

   8. DSDavid Sacks25:37

      Well, that, that's exactly was my point when we talked about this last time, is that if Microsoft can basically clone the sort of, the breakthrough innovative product, you know, let's say they do one every year and then they put a crappy version of that-

   9. DFDavid Friedberg25:53

      10% worse.

   10. DSDavid Sacks25:53

       ... in their bundle.

   11. DFDavid Friedberg25:55

       Yeah.

   12. DSDavid Sacks25:55

       Yeah. 10%, 20% or 50% worse, but they give it away effectively for free as part of the bundle. And then they basically pull the legs out from under that other company so it can't be a, a vibrant competitor. And then the next year, they'll just raise the price of the bundle, right? And they've done that with Slack, they've done that with Okta, they've done that with Zoom. You know, can't J-Cal, can we have a vibrant tech ecosystem, at least in B2B software, if Microsoft can just keep doing that indefinitely?

   13. JCJason Calacanis26:22

       Yeah, it's, it's a difficult question. I, I don't know though if what the consumer harm is here if you keep adding great features to a bundle. So to take the other side of the argument, you know, Zoom has now added channels, like Slack. Slack has added huddles, which are essentially Zoom calls. And now they're both gonna try to add the Coda and Notion wiki, wiki-style, you know, documents to both Zoom and Slack. So everybody's copying everybody's features, everybody's incorporating everybody's features. It takes a little bit of time. This is actually a lot better behavior from Microsoft than the old days when they would do something called vaporware. They used to announce products to chill people from buying them, so they would announce a Slack two years before Slack came out just to get people to not install Slack. They did that with Lotus Notes. They said they had a Lotus Notes competitor coming for two years and it never materialized. So, I think the marketplace will compete, and if you look at Slack itself, it's still growing the same percentage growth it did inside of Salesforce that it did as an independent company, so it's growing at a similar pace.

   14. DSDavid Sacks27:26

       I don't know about that. Wait, Nick, can you pull up this chart?

   15. JCJason Calacanis27:29

       Yeah, it was, like, high teens or something. Was there, was there, I mean, was there growth?

   16. DSDavid Sacks27:31

       I mean, it looks, it looks like from this chart that Slack has kind of leveled off.

   17. JCJason Calacanis27:34

       No, no, no, that's the number of users. I was talking about revenue.

   18. DSDavid Sacks27:36

       Okay.

   19. JCJason Calacanis27:37

       If you look at Slack's revenue quarter over quarter, it's basically been the same.

   20. DSDavid Sacks27:40

       But wasn't there a report that it's been a little bit of a disappointment to Salesforce or no?

   21. JCJason Calacanis27:45

       Well, I mean, you know, this number here that we're looking at where it says 75 million Microsoft Teams members, 12 million Slack members.

   22. DFDavid Friedberg27:53

       Uh, by the way, if you wanted to, if you wanted to play conspiracy theorist, maybe that's why there was a falling out between Benioff and Brett. I mean, Brett was the champion of this deal, you know, $28 billion acquisition. And $20 billion, it's threading a needle. The, the only one of that scale that's really worked out definitively has been LinkedIn. So if Slack hiccuped in a moment when we also had a regime change in rates and valuations, now look at Benioff as looking down the barrel of a activist investor program from Elliott. Man, I mean, yeah, maybe it's not doing as well as they needed it to.

   23. DSDavid Sacks28:28

       I got the sense that Benioff was genuinely sorry that Brett decided to leave and that it was voluntary, voluntary on Brett's part. And regretted, basically, as opposed to, you know, a non-regretted termination.

   24. DFDavid Friedberg28:41

       I have no idea. Like I said, I was p- I was pre-qualifying with saying, "Let's play conspiracy theorist for a second." (laughs)

   25. DSDavid Sacks28:45

       (laughs) Yeah, fair enough, fair enough. Okay, so J-Cal, let, let me-

   26. DFDavid Friedberg28:47

       By the way, can I have a suggestion? Wait, yeah, I have a suggestion. Here's a s- suggestion for the regulators that are listening or watching our podcast. A really valuable thing for the industry that you could do would be to introduce transparency on ELAs. What are those? Enterprise licensing agreements. These are these things that these big companies use to throw everything and the kitchen sink into a deal when they sell to a company. But if there was transparency, and there was a sense of how those things were priced, so think of it like the FDA saying, "Here's, you have to publish your ingredients," right? "And what percentage of it is this and that?" It would be really beneficial because it would slow down the tendency of these big companies to try to kill the small companies with these poorer products. And something around ELAs and more transparency around pricing to the market could be a good governor without having to go down the path of all this anti-trust legislation after the fact.

   27. DSDavid Sacks29:41

       I think there is some good advice for regulators there. I think they should focus on anti-competitive tactics and, like, clarifying what those are as opposed to some of these crazy lawsuits to break up companies, uh, that don't seem to have well-grounded theories. It'd be, I think, better to focus on the specific tactics that create the harm and identifying what those are. J-Cal, your point about how what Microsoft is doing doesn't seem to be harming anybody, it seems to benefiting consumers, I think that's a, a valid point, but I would bring up a, a different example which is, if you look at the anti-competitive behavior of dumping, where a company will basically dump its product on the market for free, destroy all the other competitors, and once they're out, they can raise prices because the barriers to entry are high. There's a huge cost of, like-... basically entering the industry. I think that this bundling behavior is a form of dumping, where in the short run it looks like consumers are benefiting 'cause they're getting Zoom, a Zoom clone for free, or you know, a Slack clone for free. But then what happens is once they've, you know, hobbled those companies, they raise the price of the bundle. So I think if we wanna have a healthy long-term ecosystem, I think this type of like bundling behavior is, is bad.

   28. DFDavid Friedberg30:53

       Great point.

   29. DSDavid Sacks30:53

       I think it's anti-competitive.

   30. DFDavid Friedberg30:55

       It's a great point.
4. 40:27 – 1:12:14

   Pfizer CEO grilled at Davos, analyzing studies questioning vaccine effectiveness

   1. DFDavid Friedberg40:27

   2. JCJason Calacanis40:27

      Yeah.

   3. DFDavid Friedberg40:27

      Let's have that be the last word on this topic, because we've been going for a while. But I'm glad you brought up Pfizer, because this brings us to issue two-

   4. JCJason Calacanis40:34

      Oh boy. Oh boy. (laughs)

   5. DFDavid Friedberg40:35

      (laughs) Which is, and I think we can show this clip. Red meat for David. Red meat for David. Yeah, so Albert Bourla, who is the CEO of Pfizer, went to Davos last week.

   6. JCJason Calacanis40:43

      Where?

   7. DFDavid Friedberg40:43

      And he probably expect- to Davos, you know, the-

   8. JCJason Calacanis40:45

      (laughs)

   9. DFDavid Friedberg40:46

      ... the, the, the conference of the surplus elites. And he expected probably nothing but softballs and fawning treatment from the establishment media and instead, he probably had the most uncomfortable walk of his life when two reporters from Rebel News approached him outside-

   10. JCJason Calacanis41:00

       Rebel News?

   11. DFDavid Friedberg41:00

       ... the perimeter and a- started asking him some tough questions. Let's roll tape.

   12. JCJason Calacanis41:04

       What's Rebel News?

   13. UCUnknown guest at Davos questioning Pfizer CEO41:06

       More like can I ask you, when did you know that the vaccines didn't stop transmission? How long did you know that without saying it publicly?

   14. JCJason Calacanis41:14

       Thank you very much. I'm sorry. (laughs)

   15. UCUnknown guest at Davos questioning Pfizer CEO41:16

       It's just a question. I mean we, we now know-

   16. JCJason Calacanis41:19

       Good question.

   17. UCUnknown guest at Davos questioning Pfizer CEO41:19

       ... that the vaccines didn't stop transmission, but why did you keep it secret?

   18. JCJason Calacanis41:24

       Good question.

   19. UCUnknown guest at Davos questioning Pfizer CEO41:25

       You said it was 100% effective, then 90%, then 80%, then 70%. But we now know that the vaccines do not trans- stop transmission. Why did you keep that secret?

   20. JCJason Calacanis41:36

       Have a nice day.

   21. UCUnknown guest at Davos questioning Pfizer CEO41:37

       I won't have a nice day until I know the answer. Why did you keep it a secret that your vaccine did not stop transmission?

   22. JCJason Calacanis41:45

       Incredible command.

   23. DFDavid Friedberg41:46

       We should, we should, we should cut this.

   24. Okay, we can stop from there, but that-

   25. JCJason Calacanis41:49

       Wow, welcome to InfoWars, all in InfoWars crossovers. (laughs)

   26. DFDavid Friedberg41:51

       That's what real journalism looks like.

   27. JCJason Calacanis41:53

       First of all, you know what-

   28. DFDavid Friedberg41:53

       That's what real journalism looks like.

   29. JCJason Calacanis41:55

       Yeah. You, you know what's bad now?

   30. DFDavid Friedberg41:55

       Not a bunch of New York Times reporters covering for powerful people, but asking them tough questions.
5. 1:12:14 – 1:22:39

   Ukraine escalation: US to send tanks and warms to Crimea invasion, reconstruction costs, and more

   1. DSDavid Sacks1:12:14

      on this.

   2. JCJason Calacanis1:12:14

      Woof.

   3. DSDavid Sacks1:12:14

      Okay, look, there's been some important developments in Ukraine that I think we should just cover quickly this week. There were a bunch of things. The Biden administration said they're gonna send Abrams tanks as well as Bradleys and Leopard 2s. The, uh, Abrams tank, in particular, is our best, most expensive tank. At the beginning of the war, they said they would not send them, so they reversed their decision on that. Now, the Ukrainians are saying they want jets as well. That's sort of the next issue that's gonna come up. The Biden administration also in a New York Times article that came out earlier this week said, that they were warming to the idea of, of supporting an invasion of Crimea. Some Europeans like Peter Hitchens are getting very nervous about this level of escalation. He had a pretty amazing piece talking about the risk of this creating nuclear war.And even if the Ukrainians prevail in this war, there was a really interesting statement by Larry Fink at Davos last week saying that he estimated the cost of reconstruction at $750 billion, and Fitch Ratings Agency says that Ukraine is headed towards default. So, major, major developments, I think, in the war this week. I wanna get your guys' opinion on this. We know from history that wars tend to escalate and to be far more costly than the participants ever thought. Is that the track we're on now? And in hindsight, knowing what we know now, should we regret that we didn't use every diplomatic tool we had to prevent the war, most notably taking NATO expansion off the table? Freeberg, I'll go to you.

Episode duration: 1:38:29