E133: Market melt-up, IPO update, AI startups overheat, Reddit revolts & more with Brad Gerstner

1. 0:00 – 8:12

   Bestie intros: Chamath flies public + Poker recap

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:00

      I'm so fucking tired. I've slept six hours in three and a half days. Six hours-

   2. JCJason Calacanis0:05

      So wait, wait, you went-

   3. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:06

      ... maybe seven hours.

   4. JCJason Calacanis0:06

      ... to the World Series-

   5. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:07

      Fuck.

   6. JCJason Calacanis0:07

      ... of Poker with Helmuth? So you spent-

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:11

      No, no, no. First of all, I flew public. Took Southwest.

   8. JCJason Calacanis0:14

      What?

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:15

      Yeah, cost me $49.

   10. JCJason Calacanis0:15

       You were on a Southwest flight?

   11. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:17

       Yeah, it cost... I got a ticket for 49 bucks. It's like, so fucking incredible.

   12. JCJason Calacanis0:19

       Oh, did you sit in seat A1, also known as J Cows res- reserve seat? It has my name on it.

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:24

       Well, I was in the front row.

   14. JCJason Calacanis0:26

       Okay.

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:26

       Y- y- it's great. Like, Southwest has these numbers, and what they do is-

   16. DFDavid Friedberg0:30

       Hold on, you were in first class on Southwest?

   17. JCJason Calacanis0:32

       No, no, no, no. Premium Plus.

   18. DFDavid Friedberg0:34

       He was in the front row.

   19. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:35

       No, there's like, these signs that, that like, have a number that attaches to your ticket, and then you stand in that line, and then you go on in this orderly way. And so I was... I had like, A5 or something, so I was like, the fifth person on, and then I sat in the front and I put my bags-

   20. JCJason Calacanis0:50

       Mm-hmm.

   21. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:50

       ... up top.

   22. JCJason Calacanis0:51

       Yeah. You carried your bags, yeah.

   23. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:52

       An hour later, I was in Vegas. It was so easy. Southwest is phenomenal. And then I flew back. Anyways, and after, after losing as much money as I did, it felt good to fly for $49. I gotta be honest with you.

   24. JCJason Calacanis1:03

       Well, austerity measures have-

   25. DFDavid Friedberg1:04

       Oh my god.

   26. JCJason Calacanis1:05

       ... their benefits. You can sleep better at night with austerity measures. And did you go to the all-you-can-eat buffet and take it to go as well?

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:11

       No, I never do that.

   28. NANarrator1:12

       Let your winners ride. Rain man, David Sacks. We're going all in. As I said. We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you guys. Queen of Kinwah. Going all in.

   29. DFDavid Friedberg1:30

       Why did you fly Southwest?

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:31

       Why did I fly Southwest? Well, the plane's in Europe with Matt. That's number one. And then two, I just wanted some flexibility to get in and out depending on when I busted these tournaments. So let me tell you about these tournaments.
2. 8:12 – 25:10

   FED pauses hikes momentarily, IPO window status, state of the market

   1. JCJason Calacanis8:12

      listen. There's a big docket today. We've got a lot on the plate. David Sacks is busy in a star chamber right now selecting the next president of the United States. He's picking a VP and the Cabinet for whoever's gonna win, so he couldn't make it today. So we brought the fifth bestie, Brad Gerstenher back, and great timing, because the FED decided to pause rate hikes in just yesterday, I guess. And this would have been the 11th consecutive rate hike. Is that about right?

   2. DSDavid Sacks8:37

      Sounds right.

   3. JCJason Calacanis8:38

      And they anticipated two more 25 basis hikes before the end of the year. So here's just the, um, FED fund's effective rate. So you can all can see it here over time. And there was also some big news this week. Couple of 2023 (laughs) IPO candidates started to be floated. Obviously, we've been hearing about Reddit and Stripe for a while, but ARM confidentially filed for an IPO back in April, and they're seeking to raise between eight and 10 billion later this year. And that would be, uh, a pretty big deal for SoftBank, which owns the firm. And that could, I guess, save SoftBank, which has had a, just a brutal run with the two different opportunity funds-

   4. DSDavid Sacks9:22

      Sorry, why would this sa- save SoftBank? The ARM deal is being done... Is, what's the valuation that's being done at?

   5. JCJason Calacanis9:28

      SoftBank acquired ARM for 32 billion in 2016. They don't know the valuation right now. They haven't put that out there yet.

   6. DSDavid Sacks9:34

      I mean, they were originally looking for anywhere from 30 to 70. But, I mean, Brad, where do you think that comes out?

   7. JCJason Calacanis9:38

      I have no idea.

   8. DSDavid Sacks9:39

      I think that, you know, they're shopping to get these anchor tenants into ARM. If the IPO market was super hot and this was really easy to get done, this would've been done, you know. So I think, you know, they're tiptoeing now because they need to get it into the public market. But, you know, I, I, I think that anybody who does an IPO today, okay, is going to demand a, you know, a rate of return into that offering that is a significant margin of safety relative to all deals that were done in '20 and '21. And what that means is on the road show, investment banks go and they try to drum up demand. They wanna have anchors in the IPO book. They call firms like ours. They call strategic investors. They wanna size up what that is. And, you know, they give you their expectation of fair value or where they think the IPO will trade to. Of course, you meet with management. You ascertain and develop your own expectations of fair value. What I'm saying is, maybe in the peak, you know, in '20 and '21, people were getting thinner and thinner in terms of the margin of safety they demand. I, my expectations, whether it's ARM, whether it's Databricks or other companies that are starting to queue up, and these are fantastic companies, right? Make no mistake about it. NVIDIA tried to buy ARM, and, you know, Databricks is doing over a billion in revenue, growing extraordinarily fast, led by an incredible team. But in order to get into the public markets, they have to, you know, step in with a bigger discount than they would of, you know, pre this correction.

   9. JCJason Calacanis11:20

      Yeah. And, uh, just to put some numbers on it, ARM had agreed to be acquired by NVIDIA for 40 billion before the talks fell through. That was due to regulatory scrutiny. Bloomberg says ARM is aiming for a valuation of 70 billion. Obviously, there's no confirmation about that. That's just the news, hopefully intelligently speculating about it.

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya11:35

       What exactly would you be buying for $70 billion?

   11. DSDavid Sacks11:38

       Yeah, I thought-

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya11:39

       They missed it.

   13. DSDavid Sacks11:40

       Yeah.

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya11:41

       ARM had a window where they had to make some really important product decisions to be able to actually have reference designs that actually made sense beyond just simple mobile processors and CPUs, and they don't have any of that. So they have a good cash cow business. It's probably worth 25 billion. They paid 30 some odd.

   15. DSDavid Sacks12:00

       32. Yeah.

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya12:01

       They could've gotten it out for 40 something, but it's a mid-20s billion dollar company. No more.And if you're- and if- if you buy it at the 20s, you're buying a cash flow yielding asset.

   17. DFDavid Friedberg12:11

       And the-

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya12:12

       Good luck to all the players, I guess, is what I would say.

   19. DFDavid Friedberg12:14

       ... clearly, it's a function of SoftBank seeking liquidity, right? I mean, they, uh, they've had this position for how many years now? Four years?

   20. JCJason Calacanis12:25

       No, more. I think this was-

   21. DFDavid Friedberg12:27

       Six, maybe?

   22. JCJason Calacanis12:27

       Six years?

   23. DFDavid Friedberg12:28

       Something like that, yeah.

   24. JCJason Calacanis12:29

       When did they buy it? Was it 2016? I think it was longer. Yeah, 2016, they bought it. So this has been-

   25. DFDavid Friedberg12:34

       And in the fiscal year-

   26. JCJason Calacanis12:35

       ... yeah, seven, seven.

   27. DFDavid Friedberg12:35

       ... ending March, the Vision Fund alone took a $32 billion write-down. Obviously, SoftBank has a big chunk of the Vision Fund.

   28. JCJason Calacanis12:44

       But this is not in the Vision Fund, right? This-

   29. DFDavid Friedberg12:46

       And it's not in the Vision Fund, exactly. It's on, uh-

   30. JCJason Calacanis12:47

       This is on balance sheet.
3. 25:10 – 33:25

   Film, cold plunge, and sauna talk

   1. DFDavid Friedberg25:10

   2. JCJason Calacanis25:11

      Great drop. Uh, (laughs) great reference, Brad. When you-

   3. DFDavid Friedberg25:13

      Great. By the way, I, I gotta tell you, I just saw that movie.

   4. JCJason Calacanis25:16

      Yeah.

   5. DFDavid Friedberg25:16

      I, I had to reference it because I saw it over the weekend. Have you seen that movie?

   6. JCJason Calacanis25:19

      Of course, of course. Yeah, what was your take?

   7. DFDavid Friedberg25:21

      What an unbelievable film. I've, I had not seen that film. I had-

   8. JCJason Calacanis25:24

      Very kind.

   9. DFDavid Friedberg25:25

      ... kept kinda postponing it. Incredible. Anyway-

   10. JCJason Calacanis25:27

       Yeah.

   11. DFDavid Friedberg25:27

       ... uh, shout out.

   12. JCJason Calacanis25:27

       What is it? What movie? It's, uh-

   13. DFDavid Friedberg25:29

       Everything Everywhere All at Once. It won best picture at, at the Oscars last year. And-

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya25:35

       I don't trust the best picture awards at the Oscars. For a few years, I've just been duped by that award.

   15. JCJason Calacanis25:40

       Hmm.

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya25:41

       Like, you get some really crap ass movies that are, like, um ...

   17. DFDavid Friedberg25:44

       Watch this movie and then report back. Let's, I won't even say anymore.

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya25:47

       Like, politically correct or whatever.

   19. DFDavid Friedberg25:48

       Yeah.

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya25:48

       And then they, they get this award, you know.

   21. JCJason Calacanis25:49

       Yeah, there was a little virtue signaling. They were doing a little catch-up because of Oscars So White, the movement to try to balance things out. In fact, people-

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya25:57

       Well, that doesn't exactly reinforce trust. That actually destroys complete trust and reputational credibility.

   23. JCJason Calacanis26:03

       Yes. They're, uh, virtuous. And actually, that was something people said, that Everything Everywhere All at Once was possibly, uh, because it's an Asian cast.

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya26:11

       I don't even know, what is it, what is it?

   25. JCJason Calacanis26:13

       It's a sci-fi adventure surrealist kind of romp. Michelle Yeoh is in it. Uh, she's very famous.

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya26:20

       Ooh, from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?

   27. JCJason Calacanis26:22

       Correct. There you go.

   28. DFDavid Friedberg26:22

       Yeah, exactly. There you go.

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya26:23

       Oh, she kicked ass in that movie.

   30. JCJason Calacanis26:25

       Ke Huy Quan is in it, who played Short Round in Indiana Jones-
4. 33:25 – 50:27

   AI's impact on tech and growth stocks surging, Google's position, AI's "$20T question"

   1. JCJason Calacanis33:25

      here. AI.

   2. DSDavid Sacks33:26

      Yeah.

   3. JCJason Calacanis33:26

      Are people getting too much credit and public markets kind of running with this before it's actually ready for prime time? Just to add to Freidberg's point here, uh, there are a lot of people talking about doing things. In start-ups, I see people actually doing things. I would say four out of five start-ups, uh, that we've invested in and the majority of them that we're being pitched on right now are not only talking about AI, which they were all talking about it three years ago, they're actually implementing it now because the toolsets are available. I just had a call. Thank you, Freidberg, for putting me in touch with the Google people. I just did a call this past week with Google and they gave me some previews of what they're working on. I can't say anything about it, but it's, it's mind-blowing. I think Google's not as far behind closed AI as we think.

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya34:05

      Brad, what's your read on Google now? We had a little-

   5. DSDavid Sacks34:08

      Yeah.

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya34:08

      ... kerfuffle when I, when I talked about Sundar's reaction to, you know, AI and the concerns that others might have on folks talking about the company. I mean, what's your point of view on Google today? I don't know if you've talked about this.

   7. DSDavid Sacks34:20

      Yeah, yeah, no. Well, I mean, I think, you know, I had this, I had this dinner, this incredible dinner actually, Thursday at the pub and, you know, it's, it's how I know S- Silicon Valley's back because it was just, like, serendipitous. We threw it together in the afternoon, you know. It was just like four extraordinary, you know, CEOs there and, you know, you had Mustapha, the, one of the co-founders of DeepMind there and Rich Barton from Expedia and Zo- uh, just, just an incredible group. And the $20 trillion question i- is, how does the entire open architecture of the web get re-architected in the age of AI? Another way of ask- asking the question, because we're all kind of playing small ball, right? We're all talking about, "Oh, you know, our TPUs and GPUs, you know, and who, what cloud's gonna get accelerated." That's kind of the small ball. The big ball here, the $20 trillion question that has defined the entire internet for our entire careers has been web search. And I will tell you that the conversation around that table, there's increasing confidence that whatever comes next, right, the top of the funnel is up for grabs. And all of those dollars over a period, again, of five years, seven years, is going to get redistributed. And make no mistake, Google is well-positioned to make its claim for that. But its claim is going to come at the expense of search. And so Google may create the best AI in the world, but it's gonna have to fight off the cannibalization of core search. And the question is, in this new thing... And so Rich Barton, you know, uh, an incredible, um, product founder, right? Think about Expedia-

   8. JCJason Calacanis36:00

      CEO of Zillow.

   9. DSDavid Sacks36:02

      Yes, and Zillow. So he's founder of Expedia and founder of Zillow. Two vertical search engines that dominated, right, their particular verticals. And the topic of the conversation was that the new UI, right, the new u- way you interact with your customers, right, is not optimizing a web page. It's not optimizing an application. He calls it the race to intimacy. The race to intimacy that you have to build a conversational UI-

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya36:31

       I've run that race a few times.

   11. DSDavid Sacks36:32

       Right. (laughs) And, no, and it's a related race, which I'm o- because-

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya36:35

       I think that was a sprint, not a marathon. (laughs)

   13. BGBrad Gerstner36:39

       ... sometimes it's been a marathon.

   14. DSDavid Sacks36:40

       And the penultimate question is-

   15. BGBrad Gerstner36:41

       Not in your direction.

   16. DSDavid Sacks36:43

       ... who ends up on top?

   17. CPChamath Palihapitiya36:45

       I'm a runner.

   18. DSDavid Sacks36:45

       Yeah, are you always on top, Chamath?

   19. DFDavid Friedberg36:46

       (laughs) Oh, this is-

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya36:48

       I, I run really good middle distances, and then if I need to just make it, you know, run a Boston marathon, I can if I want. But I don't want to.

   21. DFDavid Friedberg36:54

       Oh, okay. Yeah, sure you can. (laughs) Yeah.

   22. DSDavid Sacks36:56

       But I think, you know, I took a poll around the -

   23. CPChamath Palihapitiya36:58

       Does he think... Sorry, does he think Zillow is dead? I mean, he's not a longer shareholder, I'm guessing?

   24. DSDavid Sacks37:02

       I, uh, I... I mean, those, he's-

   25. DFDavid Friedberg37:03

       No, he's the CEO.

   26. DSDavid Sacks37:04

       He's the CEO, he's the chairman-

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya37:05

       Sorry, sorry, not Zillow. Sorry, not Zillow. Uh, Expedia. Pardon me. What does he think about Expedia and travel and search?

   28. DSDavid Sacks37:09

       Well, we, you know, you and I had this conversation. Gurley chimed in, Nikesh chimed in on Twitter. Well, you're not on Twitter, but they chimed in, you know, uh, about the conversation from last week's pod. Every vertical search engine and Google itself, that architecture is suspect, right? The question's just over what timeline is it suspect? But the world is moving past ten blue links. Information retrieval that look like a card catalog is not-

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya37:37

       Yeah.

   30. DSDavid Sacks37:37

       ... where we're going.
5. 50:27 – 1:04:22

   Jay Trading beating the market, how Brad formulates and sizes public bets, how GPs should handle distributions, CalPERS mistakes

   1. JCJason Calacanis50:27

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya50:27

      (laughs)

   3. JCJason Calacanis50:27

      No, my J trading is up right now, jtrading.com. Shout out, uh, to my trades. I did it as, for fun. I'm up, like, 20% returns-

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya50:34

      How, how come you're only-

   5. JCJason Calacanis50:34

      ... versus 6%.

   6. Well, Jake-

   7. ... versus the market.

   8. ... you went kinda quiet for a while. So when you're down, you don't talk about it? And then the thing comes up and you talk about it?

   9. No, I had no... I bought all the stocks I liked and I didn't want to change them.

   10. And do you track them and exit, or what do you do with management?

   11. I'm gonna track the exits, but I haven't exited any. If you go to jtrading.com, you can play along. But, uh, yeah.

   12. DSDavid Sacks50:51

       Jake, how can you only be up 20%-

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya50:54

       (laughs)

   14. DSDavid Sacks50:54

       ... when Facebook has doubled-

   15. JCJason Calacanis50:56

       Oh, sorry, 22.43.

   16. DSDavid Sacks50:58

       Yeah, but Facebook doubled off the bottom. The whole goal of trading, Jake Howell, is to maximize your highest conviction.

   17. JCJason Calacanis51:05

       Teach me. Okay.

   18. DSDavid Sacks51:05

       Maximize your highest conviction. What'd you do, put a nickel? Did you put 5% into Facebook?

   19. JCJason Calacanis51:10

       I don't know. I just, I just bought companies as they went by in the group chat.

   20. DSDavid Sacks51:13

       I know, but what I'm telling you, when you fre-

   21. JCJason Calacanis51:14

       When you talked about it on group chat, I made the trade.

   22. DSDavid Sacks51:16

       ... when you trade companies, you gotta put a lot of chips on the table. I mean, you have pocket aces.

   23. JCJason Calacanis51:19

       Okay, yeah. That's, I think... What's the optimal number-

   24. DSDavid Sacks51:22

       You have pocket aces.

   25. JCJason Calacanis51:22

       As a day trader, Brad, what's the optimal number of names I should have?

   26. You're not, you're not a day trader. You don't trade.

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya51:28

       (laughs)

   28. JCJason Calacanis51:29

       As a, uh, long trader-

   29. DSDavid Sacks51:30

       Yeah, yeah, y-

   30. JCJason Calacanis51:30

       ... what's the optimal number of names I should be in?
6. 1:04:22 – 1:15:11

   Reddit moderators in revolt and how this issue might reshape the future of social apps

   1. JCJason Calacanis1:04:22

      about writing. All right, as everybody knows, uh, Reddit is on strike right now, or I should say the mods who run Reddit are on strike. 95% of Reddits went dark. They basically turned off new posts, or they just went private, basically. Nobody could join. Nobody could see the content, I believe is, uh, what that mean- means, between Monday and Wednesday. And the reason they're doing this is because Reddit decided it would start charging for its API. So, uh, who gets impacted by using the API? It turns out apps. We saw this at Twitter as well when Twitter started changing its pricing for its API, and this means that some of the really high-end Reddit apps would have to pay $20 million a year for access to Reddit's data. Now, they originally had said they were changing this pricing because they were gonna train AI models, uh, and they wanted anybody using that data, i.e. Google Bard or ChatGPT-4 and ClosedAI, they wanted them to pay for it. And Steve Huffman was, uh, explained all this in a New York Times profile in April. You can go search for that, Reddit wants to get paid for helping to teach big AI systems. The largest app is called Apollo, uh, just so you know, if you're, if you're not into those. Reddit really came out with their app really late. This was a function of the 2005 to 2015 timeframe. Back then, web 2.0 startups didn't have a lot of capital, so they let other people build on their APIs and build apps. Some of those apps caught steam and are actually better than the apps developed, uh, at least for a while, it was better than the Twitter app and the Reddit app. So, thoughts on this, Freedberg?

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:05:55

      There's a history here, um, is mimicked at both Facebook and Twitter, both of whom had open APIs that provided access to third party app developers to build tools on top of the platform by accessing either user data or content off of the network and then making that available via some different product function, some different UI than the native tools allowed. If you'll remember, Facebook started to kill off its API, and in the process, killed a number of these third party app developers, the, the most prominent of which was Zynga. I think this was around the 2012 timeframe. Do you guys know if I'm right on that? I think it's right.

   3. DSDavid Sacks1:06:34

      Sounds right.

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:06:35

      And, you know, we saw the same thing happen i- in Twitter, where, if you guys remember in the early days, a lot of users accessed tweets from people that they followed through third party apps, and third party apps all competed for, uh, the user, and ultimately, Twitter's management team realized that having direct access to the user, being able to control the UI, the UX, and not just become a, a data network, but to actually become a, a service for users-

   5. DFDavid Friedberg1:07:03

      ... made a similar sort of change. So, you know, Reddit's motivation around AI training is, is an interesting one, but it does speak to this idea that these social network companies, social in the sense that the users themselves are creating the value, they're creating the content, at both Facebook, at Twitter, and at Reddit. Ultimately, the company loses the value if that data, that content gets extracted, uh, and they can't monetize it or capture the value somehow. And it's a lot different. You know, every company ultimately wants to become a platform company, meaning that they can offer multiple products or services to users that sit on top of some, you know, network that they've created. And in the process, create a network effect because more products, more apps creates more users, more users, you know, begets more, more, uh, more apps and so on. That works well in some contexts, like an Apple App Store context. But in the context where there is a network unto itself, like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, meaning that there is already a user network that is generating value in the form of the content that's being produced and consumed, you don't necessarily gain anything by then building an app network on top of it. And I think that's been one of the kind of key learnings that's repeated itself over and over with Twitter and Facebook. The thing about Reddit, it's always been a community service. If you guys remember, like in 2014, 2015, Ellen Pao stepped down after there was a Reddit revolt. She was the CEO at the time. And she fired an employee at Reddit that ran the Q&A site for Reddit's mods and their users. And the network, the community was super pissed off when this happened, and they all revolted and they were gonna shut down the service. And ultimately, Ellen, you know, got removed from her role as CEO when this happened. So, you know, because so much of the value of Reddit isn't in the management team, it's not in the, the work that the software engineers do that run the company, it's not the, the VCs or the shareholders, the value of Reddit is inherent in the community. It's inherent in the individuals that build the content on that platform. And that community has convened many times in the past at Reddit to change the rules, to say, "This is what we want this community to become, and this is how we want this management team to operate." And so it's a really uniquely positioned business. It says a lot about how social networks in this kind of modern era are operating. It really speaks to how much of the value ultimately accrues to the shareholders in a business like this, when the users themselves can step in and unionize and say, "Hey, you know what? We're not gonna allow this much value to be pulled out of the network in this way. We want this to change." So I think it'll, it'll have a lasting effect in terms of investing in social network or social media type businesses, where the users are generating so much of the value and have the ability to kind of communicate with one another and control where value ultimately falls.

   6. JCJason Calacanis1:09:48

      Chemath, you were, uh, at Facebook, I think, when Zuckerberg realized enabling a bunch of folks to use the API wasn't as good as controlling the user experience, having a uniform user experience, and, uh, it got deprecated. And I remember Zynga and a bunch of other people had games and were sucking users off the platform. There was a LinkedIn competitor at one point that was growing at a incredibly violent pace, and I guess y'all made a decision, "We don't want you sucking our user base (laughs) off the platform." Maybe you could expand on what the decisions were at Facebook at the time.

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:10:21

      That was one of the things I ran, I think. One of my teams was responsible for Facebook platform. Yeah, it was just a very clinical decision around enterprise value. Look, the, the thing with Reddit is that it's a hot mess. And in order to try to create enterprise value, they decided to really leverage the mods so that there was some l- level of control, and that control was necessary so that they could basically sell ads. That's how this thing moved in lockstep, because the minute that there was corporate venture investors and other investors, and a need to generate enterprise value and is it worth 2 billion or 5 billion or 10 billion? Whatever the number was that they thought they were worth, they had to make money, right? And Huffman was very straightforward about that, and wanting to go public and the whole nine yards. But because it was such a hot mess, the mods became this integral part of the ecosystem so that they could actually drive reasonable revenue. But then what happened was, it also allowed them to basically take over. And I think that it was a pretty significant miscalculation, because I think that what they needed to do was really redefine the economics of how revenue generation splits would work before they could do all of this stuff to try to monetize the API. So I think, like, they got the order of operations wrong, but I also think it's very fixable, and I think that they have some very smart people around that table. So as long as they're, again, willing to be clinical and unemotional, like we were, they'll get to the right answer, which is give them a healthy rev share. That's the future. Friedberg, you know, what version of what Friedberg said is true. The content creators need to get paid, you know? Why, you know, you see content creators now on YouTube making millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, in a few unique cases, billions, and then we are all content creators, yet most of us on these old legacy platforms make nothing. So-

Episode duration: 1:58:06