All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E96: Adobe acquires Figma for $20B, TPB SPAC, FedEx CEO's recession warning, macro picture & more

Episode Date: September 17, 2022

0:00 Bestie intro! 0:59 Adobe agrees to acquire Figma for $20B 19:21 How Adobe might bundle Figma, regulatory implications 38:59 Analyzing Google's "one off" acquisition of YouTube 49:33 Friedberg bre...aks down the latest TPB SPAC news 1:00:37 Pfizer sued for Title VI violation, substantial legislation change in 2022 1:05:07 FedEx drops after CEO says we're in a global recession, Russia/Ukraine update, UN chimes in on global famine Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/ADBE:NASDAQ https://www.figma.com/blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/15/fedex-ceo-says-he-expects-the-economy-to-enter-a-worldwide-recession.html https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/pfizer-sued-racial-bias-over-minorities-only-fellowship https://twitter.com/LizAnnSonders/status/1570711614277419009 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/us/politics/ukraine-russia-pentagon.html https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/exclusive-war-began-putin-rejected-ukraine-peace-deal-recommended-by-his-aide-2022-09-14/ https://www.axios.com/2022/09/16/un-345-million-starvation-risk-ukraine-war-worsens-crisis

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Little we don't want to talk about brigade in guys though only because it's getting crazy and I had to like mod my stuff So start the recording please start the recording. I'm gonna strike it by brigades. You mean like maga brigades All right listen, no, I'm serious. You think because I can call a mom. I'm gonna strike a mom off Hold on hey donny hey donny. Yeah, Jake. How's that he's been brigadeda. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He can't handle it. He's tapping out. I tap out. I tap out. He calls the dogs. Okay. All right. It's all good. It's all good.
Starting point is 00:00:33 It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good.'t worry about it. What? You're like your winner's ride. Brain man David's eye. I'm going to win. Oh, yeah. And I said we open source into the fans. And they just go crazy. WS, nice.
Starting point is 00:00:56 Queen up. Can walk. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. All right, everybody. Welcome to episode 96 of the All in podcast. We had a bomb drop just yesterday with Adobe, agreeing to acquire Figma,
Starting point is 00:01:11 the design tool, we'll get into that in a minute, what it actually does for $20 billion. This is just astounding for this to happen, period, full stop. It's the largest private company purchase, I believe in history. This company, if you don't know, it helps you design web apps or user interfaces. So if you're a designer, we used to make mock-ups, we'd send them around in the industry as images or PDFs. And then like Google Docs, where you can put comments on somebody else's words and you can collaborate in real time, we call it multiplayer mode.
Starting point is 00:01:44 Figma is multiplayer mode. The company is just a juggernaut. If you work in startups, you get Figma designs all day. And Adobe Stock got crushed because of this. It's down as much as 18% on Thursday. Figma's most recent valuation was $10 billion in June of 2021. They're Series E. So peak market. They had raised 200 million at that time.
Starting point is 00:02:06 There's a lot of details to get into here, but you know, listen, let's ask the Sultan of SaaS here what you think of this because it's double what was an incredible market last year that was overheated. So what does this say about the market? Figma? So what does it say about the market, Figma itself, or maybe Adobe's jumping the fence or being skittish? How do we reconcile this, Sax? Well, if you judge Adobe Stockprices the other day, the market hated the deal. The Adobe Stockprices went down like 15%, and they're $150 billion company roughly. So they lost almost the entire purchase price
Starting point is 00:02:45 in the market capitalization of Figma. I think that's that's basically an overreaction. I know all the news is basically on how Adobe is paying 50 times and that's no longer the multiple. The multiple is more like eight, nine, 10 times for high gross ass companies. There is truth to that, but I think it misses some important details about how fast Figma is growing.
Starting point is 00:03:12 Can we actually throw up on the screen, the AR history of this company? So... And for people who know the multiple is the multiple times top line revenue. So they are really... Okay, so explain that to folks, yeah. Well, AR is just the top line revenue. So that's it. So it's actually. So explain that to folks. Yeah. Well, AR is just the annually recurring revenue. It's subscription revenue.
Starting point is 00:03:30 Sometimes people will look at next 12 months revenue, which is a similar concept, not quite the same, but sort of in the ballpark. So what's interesting about this company, I think it was founded 2011, 2012. It had a very long wilderness period. That's my call, the period where the founders this company, I think it was founded in 2011, 2012. It had a very long wilderness period. That's what I call the period where the founders are trying to figure out what the product
Starting point is 00:03:49 is going to be. Really, for almost five years, they finally launched a private bait in 2015. They then opened it up to public launch in 2016, and they didn't turn on monetization until 2017. So five years into the company that hadn't made a dime. So it's roughly a ten-year-old company, and for the first five years didn't make any money, and then they started to make money five years ago. And then in 2018, I think they turned on the enterprise tier and then it's been kind of off to the races.
Starting point is 00:04:19 That's incredible. Yeah, when I can tell you looking at these numbers, by the way, so I don't know if these numbers are perfectly correct. This is sort of, I would call this scuttlebutt numbers. These are numbers that I believe to be true, but it's not like these are numbers that the company is confirmed or anything like that. This is just me gathering intelligence from talking to people in Silicon Valley.
Starting point is 00:04:38 So this is what I believe to be the case. Can you read the numbers for people that want to watch on YouTube watching this? Yeah, so in 2017, again, the first year they monetized, they did 700,000. They ended the year, 700,000 of ARR. Remember that ARR is kind of a point in time metric. It's the amount of subscription revenue. Your annual run rate subscription revenue at that time. So they ended 2017 with 700,000.
Starting point is 00:05:00 2018, they ended with $4 million. 2019, they ended with $23 million. 2020, they ended with four million, 2019, they ended with 23 million, 2020, they ended with 77 million, 2021, 210 million, and then the estimated number for this year is 450. So you've seen in the press, I think it has been publicly reported, a $400 million dollar AR numbers currently where they're at. I've heard that they're gonna end with something more like 450 this year and then their forecast for next year is or was at some point in time when somebody heard this, 800 million,
Starting point is 00:05:34 forecast for 2023. So my point is I've seen a lot of sass metrics and I can tell you that this AR ramp is phenomenal. I'm sure people have kind of heard about the triple, triple, double, double. That's kind of what VCs want you to do. They want you to triple two years in a row, then they want you to double two years in a row, and so forth. This company did way better than that. I mean, 700K to 4 million is a really fast ramp.
Starting point is 00:06:00 And then 4 million to 23 million is incredible. That's like, you know, over a 5X. And then they did over a 3X going from 23 million is incredible. That's like, you know, over a five X. And then they did over a three X going from 23 to 77 million. I can tell you that is super hard. I think most companies, even the ones that hit, you know, low 20s tripling year over year, they tend to decelerate to two and a half times
Starting point is 00:06:19 or something like that. This company was still growing over three X. Then they roughly tripled again to get to 210. And then since they got to... That's a question. Yeah, so now they're double that. Do you think the triple in 2020 was a COVID pull forward? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:06:35 Or do you think that that was a natural, like a zoom or not? That's what I was gonna say. I mean, it's possible, but... Because people were collaborating on that. I don't see, I mean, so far in the numbers, I don't see a huge slowdown here. I mean, look, once the numbers get into hundreds of millions, it's really hard to maintain the same growth rate. You're compounding off such a large base that it's just inevitable. You can't keep growing three X year over year once you're at, you know, 200 million of ARR. But
Starting point is 00:07:00 the fact they got first from 23 to 77 and then 77 to 210 and now 210. They're at, let's say they're at 400 now and they're going to be at 450 by the end of the year plus. It's, it's pretty amazing. And so, okay. So yeah. So Adobe is paying 50 times current ARR. But if you believe this, they're only paying divide by two. They're paying 25 times end of next year, so like 18 months from now. And then you figure, you know, within say two years after that, they're gonna be, you know,
Starting point is 00:07:34 somewhere between one and a half and two billion of ARR. And as you guys know, there just aren't that many SaaS companies that even get to a billion of ARR. So, so I don't think Adobe is making a bad deal here. I think there's a question about, is there any point at which this product hits some sort of market saturation, but Adobe is in a good position to know that because they understand this market.
Starting point is 00:07:56 They are in this market. It feels to me like, I don't know, I've been using Adobe Photoshop right around when it first came out, like 1992. And this product I've used it, it was built web first. It was built for collaborative use. And Photoshop over the years, they've really tried to take what is a desktop installed software application and then try and create cloud-based features. And it's a terrible, terrible user experience, at least from my perspective, having grown up on using Adobe Photoshop.
Starting point is 00:08:26 But what's most important, I think, is a lot of people think about this on, is it the right price to pay for the company? But at the end of the day, the right price to pay for the company is what Adobe views to be the risk and reward for their business. And they effectively paid roughly 12% delusion of their company to do this deal. So they're saying let's take 12% of our company and effectively de-risk the biggest risk to our business. Take out the biggest threat to our business
Starting point is 00:08:56 for 12% of our company. Not 12%. Was it 12%? You have to factor in the actual drawdown of the stock as well. So it's about 33%. They effectively... Well, I'm talking about, like, assume... Take the price of the stock aside.
Starting point is 00:09:09 The number of shares they're issuing. Because by the way, the deal value went down with the stock. So I read the merger terms last night, and there's a couple of billion of cash, and then a good chunk of it is in stock. And it's 10 billion of cash, and it's 10 billion of cash and it's 10 billion of shares at the price when the deal was announced and to your point. So it's a fixed number of shares. The stock, it's a fixed number of shares. It's not a fixed, it's not a fixed monetary value. So
Starting point is 00:09:35 it's down 20% from the deal announcement. So that 10 billion of stock is now actually about 8 billion of stock. So no, the whole deal is now 18 billion, not 10 billion cash. With a 10 billion cash, Timoth? The 10 billion cash? Yeah. And there's two billion of different RSUs and stock based compensation. But there, but I mean, if you think about it at the time of the merger, they're either, you know, I think they have, they're going to use some term loan that they have to get the cash, but they're effectively issuing 10 divided
Starting point is 00:10:05 by their total share count, which is roughly 6% of their total shares outstanding. So, they're kind of taking 6%, or let's just aggregate the two together and say they're taking roughly 12% delusion, sure the value of this talk goes down. So, look, I think like this deal is really interesting. So first, let's just give huge kudos to the CEO and the team and the investors. What an enormous win for all those folks. That's awesome. It keeps Silicon Valley kind of going, right? And that's just awesome to see these kind of big wins.
Starting point is 00:10:37 I read this incredible profile about the founder. And he sounded like such a fascinating person. He basically, it would the profile basically said that he was spending months and months going from office to office all around the world, meeting customers, sitting with customers, reading trouble tickets. That's what he would do. You know, reading help des tickets about the product on vacation. Whenever you see a CEO that is so customer obsessed, typically there's good outcomes. And so this is just another validating point on that theme. Now let's just put Figma aside and let's just talk about Adobe for a second. What is so incredible is you have a company, yes,
Starting point is 00:11:17 they spent $20 billion or whatever, $18 billion now. But the way that they did it is really interesting. If you go back to Zen Desk and Survey Monkey, when those guys announced that merger, it was above a threshold of stock where you have to go to a shareholder vote. And because there was so much turbulence in the market, whether the industrial logic of that deal made sense or not, it didn't matter as much to shareholders when it came time to vote, and they voted it down. So interestingly, Adobe was very clever. They said, I'm going to do half cash, half stock, so that below the threshold, we are below the threshold where it goes to a shareholder vote. Okay, interesting. But then you have to factor in the dilution, not just the dilution of the stock, but then the re-rating of the stock.
Starting point is 00:12:06 And this is where you lose 20% of your market cap, and then you tack on this, you're talking about a $40, $40 billion price tag to get the deal done. And I think that's where the head scratcher was in the public markets, where folks basically rebuilt their model and said, hold on a second, you've been telling me that this problem is a solved problem. But when you pay such a premium, not only does it mean that this product is clearly materially growing and disrupting, but the existing revenue base that I was counting on in my model must be wrong as well. And that's the actual flywheel that now Adobe is in, where people are trying to really figure out
Starting point is 00:12:48 how under pressure are those existing cash flows. And then if you compound that with something else, which is nothing specific to Adobe, but to the whole market, which is now interest rates are going up behind the scenes, you have this sort of parade of terrible for Adobe that they're gonna have to navigate, right? They have a very large portion of cash.
Starting point is 00:13:09 They have a large portion of stock. They have decaying earnings in their core business that they now have to explain. And then they don't really have a lot of earnings. I think Shantanu said that it's going to be year three before it's a creative, which is typically a way of saying, we're going to lose money. And then in year three, we'll make at least a penny. That's's a creative, which is typically a way of saying we're going to lose money and then in year three we'll make it at least a penny. That's what a creative means. Doesn't mean you're going to make billions necessarily.
Starting point is 00:13:31 And so these guys have to find a way for Figma to drop about a billion and a half dollars of free cash into the business for this to kind of make sense in the short term. So I think those are all the mechanics that's sort of putting a lot of pressure on the Adobe stock, but it just goes to show you the amount of disruption that happens. This movement to the cloud or the movement to collaboration. Yeah. Monolithic products are just sort of very much DOA. That is the key.
Starting point is 00:13:53 You know? That is the key. I think you guys did a great job of summarizing it. This is an absolutely great deal for Adobe. It's a transformative deal in the same way the WhatsApp deal was for Facebook. It removes one of the two existential threats to Adobe. And it turns Adobe, I guess, into a growth story now, as pointed out, Adobe's product was single player mode, and Adobe grows at about 12 or 13% quarter right now. And now you have a company that doubles.
Starting point is 00:14:22 And they really have been facing three paradigm shifts in the last five or so years. Obviously, you pointed out one, Friedberg, desktop software downloading it versus cloud-based software. Well, here they go. Now they've got experts in cloud. And then the second one, they have a thing called Creative Cloud.
Starting point is 00:14:38 And they are slowly trying to figure that. It's a paradigm shift inside the company. I don't know if you can say that. They've really struggled. So now they have somebody who's cloud first, Tramoff. Do you guys ever use those products? Those are the dope people you have. But hold on, let me finish here. My third paradigm shift here. Featured for feature, they look very similar. No. So these three paradigm shifts, the one is the desktop versus the web. The other one is subscription. So Adobe was charging $1,000 a year for the
Starting point is 00:15:03 creative cloud. Now they charge 25 bucks a month for it They successfully did that now they've successfully I Think have figured out collaboration software But it only has one thing that they have not done which I think is the real reason they had to buy Figma Adobe see this is the problem with these big public companies Adobe and all of their investors got very addicted to the free cash flow generation of that stock. And it's been an incredible performer. And let's just be on a shantanu is one of the best CEOs of the last few decades in the public market's period end of
Starting point is 00:15:36 story. Okay. Since 2007, he has just run a masterful playbook. At the tail end of that though, you know, in 2022, this is a company that has, I think, six or seven, maybe, I think maybe eight billion dollars of free cash, though, it is a gargantuan moneymaking business. And so they refused in creative cloud to go to that free tier that Figma has. And if you look at all of the stories around Figma, one of the most powerful things they did was basically allow people to use this for free effectively forever. Yeah, bottom-up SaaS. Yeah, absolutely.
Starting point is 00:16:10 And the problem with Adobe is that's a business model disruption that they could not afford in the public markets because if you condition a set of institutional investors to be expecting $7 to $8 billion of annual free cash flow. And although sudden you're willing to torch it to take a quarter of that and take it free, that is probably the biggest reason why they had to buy this thing, which was that they needed to tuck it in and they're like, how can I do it?
Starting point is 00:16:35 Well, I just have to do it by diluting the stock. One time, that was one time stock insurance. Yeah, that was it. It was a one time 12% diluted. There's still, and then it's one and done. It's one and more. But the point you guys are making is more broad, which is it's not just about Adobe. This is the classic innovator's dilemma, right?
Starting point is 00:16:54 Any big company that reaches maturity in their market and has scale and has cash flows, you have a different shareholder base. You move over from growth to value. And once you've got value shareholders, I shareholders, I've been to these institutional meetings when I was on the exact team at Monsanto. They wanted dividends and they wanted stock buybacks. They're like, it's nice to see growth, but at the end of the day, I want to know where it's my dividend going to be and what's my stock buyback target going to be. Then to say, hey, I got to go invest in innovating my way out of
Starting point is 00:17:25 my corner, because in this case, cloud is reinventing my marketplace. It is a very hard place for a manager of a business of that scale to be. By the way, I think there's a growth. Every industry, by the way. I think there's another takeaway that's really interesting here, which is that if you look at big tech companies, I think you almost have to sort them into two buckets, at least in the enterprise. And that sucks. You can tell me if you disagree.
Starting point is 00:17:49 But there's one type of enterprise company, which makes basically a single linear monolithic product or a handful of those monolithic products, right? Think work day, think Adobe, etc. But then there's this other type of company, which are more platform level businesses that have this you know mixture of things that they do relatively well integrated maybe each product is not so great, but together they're pretty decent and you have distribution leverage and you have pricing power think Microsoft in the
Starting point is 00:18:17 Totality of those products so what's interesting to me is you cannot effectively compete as it turns out Against Microsoft at any point product. And Slack, I think, is the best example where Microsoft teams was fundamentally cannibalizing this business, which is what drove Slack into the arms of Salesforce. And you could say that teams was not as great of a product. I would make that claim, but what Microsoft had was distribution scale
Starting point is 00:18:42 and pricing power where you could discount and effectively give it away for free. Adobe isn't in that situation, right? They can't do that kind of stuff. And so when you compete against those kinds of businesses, you have a better chance of winning. The takeaway, I think, for the entrepreneur is when you're thinking about the next enterprise business to start, I would try to bucket these companies that you want to compete with and say, if I'm going to build a newer version of X, make sure that version of X is going after a company like Adobe versus a company like Microsoft because it's much, much, much easier to build value when you're competing against a monolithic product company versus an entangled platform company.
Starting point is 00:19:21 SACS, would you bundle, if you were the CEO of Figma, would you now, I'm sorry, CEO of Adobe, would you bundle Figma into the Creative Cloud, and then just make it one subscription? Would you Microsoft Teams? Yeah, maybe, I don't know, I'm not sure about that. I do think that Microsoft is a little bit unique in its ability to bundle. So, what, so, Tremoth is right about the power of the bundling.
Starting point is 00:19:46 What they do is, I think it's called the E5 bundle. They have all these products that virtually all enterprises use from office to, you know, active directory to, you know, there's like a whole long list of them. And so what they've done is they've created one price for all of those products, they sell as a bundle under a wall-to-wall enterprise license. And what they do is a bundle under a wall to wall enterprise license. And what they do is when they see a new competitor come along,
Starting point is 00:20:08 whether it's Slack or Zoom or Octa, is they'll basically just clone it, create a worse version of that product, and throw it into the bundle. And so now every single enterprise is getting the Slack clone or the Zoom clone or whatever for free. And that has a huge material impact on, you know, it pulls the rug out from under those startups. So now that's not to say that Microsoft product is anywhere near as good as those competitors,
Starting point is 00:20:37 but now all of a sudden the Microsoft product is on a marginal basis free. But then what Microsoft does is, you know, every year or two, they go raise the price of the bundle. So basically, you know, they get you hooked on the bundle, they then use it to systematically kill or undermine a competitor, and then they know your stock, and then they raise the price, they basically have inflation of the price of the whole bundle.
Starting point is 00:21:01 I think it's very anti-competitive actually. I think it's very anti-competitive actually. I think it's a kin to dumping. I'm not sure what the logical stopping point of it is. I don't know if we can have a healthy SaaS market if Microsoft is allowed to keep doing this forever because think about it. I mean, they will just every year, they will take the hot SaaS company to Azure, clone it. It'll be a shitty version. They'll throw it into their bundle, and now they're dumping the product in the market. It's basically free, it's free until they basically drive, they drive out the competitor or destroy it, or basically undermine this
Starting point is 00:21:36 market cap to the point where it can no longer make the kinds of investments it needs to pose a real threat to the Microsoft larger entity, right? So think about how any competitive this is and you don't hear a word about this from Lena Khan or Washington. They're only focused on social networks. No, it's so funny. It's like she's more focused on, you know, making sure Amazon doesn't buy Roomba that, you know, this stuff that's happening. Or Facebook doesn't buy one VR around.
Starting point is 00:22:02 It's not very sophisticated approach. This is the kind of stuff that actually really matters. I really think you nailed it on the head sacks. It's an impossible strategy to defend against. The other thing that is interesting, by the way, about all of this is, if you think that the valuation, the takeout premium, was basically 2x post-to-post. What that means is that if Figma was last value to 10 is now worth 20, does that mean that Canva, which was last price that 40 is worth 80, potentially to Adobe? If you add those two together now, what you really have is basically the entire totality of the creative cloud for Adobe is basically embedded now in these two businesses at an extreme premium.
Starting point is 00:22:47 And so it makes it very difficult now, I think as well, for Adobe to execute a strategy here without it being forced to do some more expensive diluted M&A. Well, and the other problem, Tremoff is, this is gonna ring bell. So when I said before, there were two existential threats. Canva is the other one.
Starting point is 00:23:06 And that is the other paradigm shift that's occurred. And computing is that making things radically simple. You talked about a freeberg, Photoshop is complex, and it's single player. Canva is how people create any kind of marketing materials today, and they don't hire a designer anymore. The job of graphic designer is now everybody's job. Everybody can make something on Canva.
Starting point is 00:23:24 But then I think Sacks or Freeberg, maybe you have thoughts on this. If you're Alina Khan and they do make a run at Canva Adobe, now are you saying like, hey, wait a second, you're not running the table on all design tools, you can't buy it. It's a weird classification. It's only called design tools
Starting point is 00:23:42 because it was sold to someone that was called a designer before and that's not the case anymore. called design tools because it was sold to someone that was called a designer before, and that's not the case anymore. Now it's a tool that anyone can use in the enterprise setting or in a small business setting or in an individual setting to create stuff. And that wasn't the case with Photoshop. And I think that's what makes this arguably a very different business, a bigger business, a more transformative business, arguably a very different business, a bigger business, a more transformative
Starting point is 00:24:05 business, and a farther reaching business. I don't think that there's necessarily a speaking of the Figma deal, right? A case to be made here that they're preventing the extinction of their monopoly. They're buying what looks like a very different business, and it's really additive. It's a business that can turn anyone into a creator. It's really cool. Well, yeah, but you're kind of speaking about both sides of your mouth now because on the one hand, you're saying it's a different business, but on the other hand, you said that
Starting point is 00:24:33 this is basically protecting them against an existential disruption to their core business. So if it's an existential disruption to their core business, how could it not be in the same market? Of course, it's in the same market. Well, there are new entrants, competitors. Yeah. There are new entrants and there are, you know, different underlying, you know, technology trends. This is all about cloud, but nonetheless, I don't see how these things aren't competitors with each other to some degree. So I don't know how this doesn't get seriously reviewed.
Starting point is 00:25:00 Yeah, I it feels so it feels so similar to Facebook, Instagram, and Google YouTube. And by the way, it's similar in both those examples in a number of ways. Both Facebook, Instagram was not competing in the same product as Facebook at the time with the newsfeed or whatever. It was a photo sharing service that clearly created a broader addressable market that got more people
Starting point is 00:25:22 to use a social network. And YouTube, and people thought they were overpaying, right? And then YouTube, everyone thought it was crazy. They paid a billion six for that business, and it's probably the greatest acquisition of all time. It's been the greatest managed acquisition of all time, I should say. And that business, similarly, I think Google recognized that people were going to move to video content as an alternative to text-based web content,
Starting point is 00:25:45 and that it was a bigger picture of opportunity than what they were pursuing and in the lane that they operated in at that time, and they were right. And in both cases, it was more about paying whatever it took to get the deal done. Then, hey, how many users do you have? How much revenue? How much EBITDA? What's your ARR? All that stuff goes out the window when you're sitting in that strategic driver seat at that big company and you're saying, this is a bigger market, these guys
Starting point is 00:26:08 are transforming the market and ultimately over time that will eclipse us. And you can say, hey, you're protecting your business, but really you're protecting your market. I mean, the market is going to go away is what the vision is, like the market that you exist in today isn't going to exist in the same way in 5, 10 years. And that's what you're trying to buy your way into. I have a question in a statement. The statement is, I think Canvas should absolutely go public versus sell because it seems like they'll have a much easier time competing against whomever
Starting point is 00:26:39 that they compete with. I do think that David, you're right, that there is a lot here for regulatory review, because if you go back and think about Visa-plad, it's not dissimilar, meaning you have a young startup that has this really credible and viable technology potentially being acquired by, in that case, it was one of a duopoly. But here, you could make a very credible claim that it's in a market where it's roughly a monopoly because there aren't really that many meaningful alternatives. So, I think Saks is right that there's some, you know, there's a case here. Yeah, there's a case here where it just depends on the part. I literally my question. Yeah, or this.
Starting point is 00:27:22 Well, not just Roomba, how about that VR game that Facebook was alive? That was a tiny acquisition that maybe have a million users. It makes no sense. Look, I see it's being punitive. They're just basically. Exactly. They are being punitive. I think it seems like, well, it seems like what the antitrust authorities are doing
Starting point is 00:27:39 right now in Washington is they've got a list of companies that they think are putatively suspect. And our job is to stop these companies from accumulating more power. And it's really about seeing everything through this lens of power. But that's not what the competition authority is supposed to do. There's supposed to ensure competition. It's about anti-flushing. It should be a rule book, right?
Starting point is 00:27:59 And the problem with just approaching things in this way of the punitive way, we just have to stop these companies is it it creates a chilling effect on reasonable existence to look in valley. There aren't that many great exits, and we want them to go through. Now, I think if monopolies need to be rained in, there are other tools to use besides just saying that those companies can't acquire other companies no matter how unobjectionable they are. I mean, let's do things like a lot of side-loading. Let's basically... What explain with that is?
Starting point is 00:28:30 Well, that's basically a way to say that. I think Google, the Android already does it that iOS does not, where you would be able to basically install an app or download an app without going through the Apple App Store. You could enable competitive app stores. Basically, I think it's a real issue that you have operating system in Oplies. I mean, Google Android and iOS with Apple and then Amazon with sort of white label products.
Starting point is 00:28:55 Those are all operating systems that are competing with apps on their own platform. And there have to be some constraints and rules around that. Otherwise, the operating system will eventually dominate and replace any app they want to on the platform. We saw, that's what the whole Microsoft thing was about. Microsoft NetScape was 100% about that. So I think if you can show that somebody has an operating
Starting point is 00:29:16 system monopoly, there absolutely should be rules and constraints around that. Does it mean the company should never be able to buy anything? No, I mean, I think all that does a stifle innovation without really getting to the crux of what the issue is. I think you nailed it. A good first step would be allow other app stores. So Google's app store could be on iOS, iOS is app store could be on another platform, etc. And the other issue here is Lena Conspin pretty clear, her entire thesis in taking the job was, well,
Starting point is 00:29:42 I want to prevent a downstream competitive issues. So future competition, there's no better example of a future competitive issue and future consumer harm, I think is how she phrases it, than this acquisition. If you're going to do it through the lens of future consumer harm, this creates future consumer harm because Figma is not going to compete with Adobe. You're saying that it does. It does massively, massively. I mean, this is the dissonance here. It is great for consumers because they will bundle it.
Starting point is 00:30:12 They'll bundle the two things together and it'll make it more valuable and reduce churn and it'll make it simple to buy. So that's good for consumers, right? You get more free stuff. But future harm and a future competitive harm here is the marketplace will be less competitive if there is one less independent strong company in it. That's, and if you, if they buy Canva, that's the definition of downstream competitive harm.
Starting point is 00:30:36 It will be a less competitive marketplace with these two companies together. Full stop. So, Jacob, do you, if you're Lena Khan, you actually pay attention to this Adobe Figma thing in like a serious way, or are you still more focused on Amazon and, you know, Facebook? Well, I would hope that they would do multiple things. And I'll reduce it. Saying what would you do? If I was her, I would create a rule book and apply the rule book evenly and fairly. And this is the problem.
Starting point is 00:31:07 This feels very political. It feels like the going after Facebook because of the downstream political issues Facebook causes and they're ignoring the Microsoft issue and they're ignoring issues like this. It just feels like they have their thumb on the scale. If you look at what happened to the visa plate thing, it was an enormous blessing in disguise because the thing went away and I think like a $5 billion acquisition then the platform ran around and raised money and it's like a multiple teens billion and it's going to be a wonderful independent company to your point Jason that will now create more competition in a space that desperately
Starting point is 00:31:40 needed. Now in that case that was sort of like financial payments and rails and visa master card blah, blah, blah, blah. But that could also be, you know, if there is a lot of attention paid to the deal and it doesn't end up being consummated, that could be the positive outcome. But if you want to keep your competition closed, if you ask me if I'm a betting man,
Starting point is 00:31:59 I think this thing is gonna close. I think it closes, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it closes because it doesn't intrude on the hot buttons of Washington, not because the merits of the antitrust are superior to the Roomba deal or to that VR deal that Facebook wants to have. This is all about political and cultural hot buttons. It's so weird. Yeah, but I think we all understand what's really going on. It's all political.
Starting point is 00:32:26 But hey, Jayce, can I go back to your question? I think it was a really good question. I've had more chance to think about it. Should Adobe change the pricing of Figma? Should they basically bundle it? I've spoken about the merits of what Microsoft does. I don't think that Figma should do that here. Now, they've had a chance to think about it.
Starting point is 00:32:43 The reason is this, that you have to think of pricing as not an element by itself, but as sort of the most important element of a go-to-market strategy. And there's no way that you can basically reprice Figma completely as part of some other bundle and expect not to create massive disruption to your go-to-market organization. So for example, you've got now a whole huge sales team at Figma, including enterprise sales. They are commissioned based on the quotas that they close, and that's based on the ECV of the deals, and so on. If all of a sudden you price this as being free,
Starting point is 00:33:19 because it's part of some bundle that enterprises get, because they're buying old Adobe, now all of a sudden those sales people can't earn commission on that sale. They can't be incentivized to take that product to market the same way. The marketing team is tasked with feeding the sales team. So now all of a sudden, they're like, well, wait a second. Can we spend money to basically promote this product when it's going to lead to a deal that's priced at zero because the enterprise already has an ELA with Adobe. So you can't just look at a pricing change in isolation.
Starting point is 00:33:48 You have to look at it as the tip of the spear of the whole go to market. I can tell you what's going to happen because I kind of experiences with Yammer when Microsoft bought my company 10 years ago. And by the way, I'm not critical of Microsoft at all. They were an extremely high quality acquire that lived up to all the promises and did everything they said they were going to do. I think if you ever get an offer for Microsoft, you should take it really seriously. high quality acquire that lived up to all the promises and did everything they said they were going to do. I think if you ever get an offer from Microsoft, you should take it really seriously.
Starting point is 00:34:08 I think, like I said, I think they're a great company, great acquireer. But I can tell you what happened is that once Yammer was folded in to the office suite and didn't have its own independent pricing and didn't have its own independent sales team, it just disappeared. I mean, the promotion of it to stop because nobody had an incentive to basically go sell it. Nobody had an incentive to go market and promote it. And it just kind of disappeared.
Starting point is 00:34:32 And that is why you remember a couple of years after we sold it, Slack kind of came out of nowhere. And there was no one to really oppose them because, you know, all the promotional activity we had done around the AMR just ended. Because again, we weren't, we didn't have the incentive that was created by the sales organization. Just to explain the pricing thing, David, I think that the way this decision will get made, and I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it will get made not by the sales teams
Starting point is 00:34:58 and not by the product teams, but it will get made by the CEO and the CFO in talking to their largest shareholders. And the reason is because there is an implied cost of capital that Adobe has. In fact, right now, if you look at all of the models that all of the analysts use is roughly around 9%. And so they're going to have to achieve a return on top of that cost of capital. What that means is that they're going to be forced to find a way in short order to make this a creative and to start generating incremental cash flow. And I think that they will be hard pressed not to bundle and not to do these creative packaging strategies. Because otherwise, I think that there is a risk that this free cash flow machine that
Starting point is 00:35:48 folks have become very addicted to it, it'll be starts to shrink. And that will have huge ramifications, I think, to the stock and to the executives and to the morale. And so I think that they're going to do whatever it takes. And by the way, you've seen that, you've seen that in other companies who've gone into this phase of their growth, Oracle being the best example, you know, they have consistently found ways to package, to bundle, to cross sell, to upsell, and they have incrementally walked free cash for generation up.
Starting point is 00:36:19 If they do that, they're taking a huge risk because here's what's going to happen is, so I agree with you about what may happen. This may be decided by the CEO and the board, but I think if they do this, they could blow it. I mean, the Dillon Field, the founder in his blog post on this said that Adobe is committed to letting them run independently. Well, you can't run independently if you don't know if you're on independent pricing. You just can't.
Starting point is 00:36:42 Before how long is the question? How long because you need to get two years for your- If all of a sudden Adobe sales people can sell this product and include it in their bundle and the marginal price is basically free because it's part of some bundle, that means the sale has been taken away from whoever the dedicated sales people are
Starting point is 00:36:59 on the Figma side of the house. I can tell you that will create irrationality in the sales organization. And very soon, they'll be pressure to consolidate the Figma sales organization with the larger Adobe Sales organization. They will be moved in. They may become product specialists or experts,
Starting point is 00:37:16 but the go-to-market efforts will be consolidated. And then Dylan's going to end up running, a quote standalone version of Figma that doesn't have its own good market organization. And then you don't get the feedback into product from your sales and marketing team. So all of a sudden you're running a product and engineering team, but you don't have eyes and ears in the market. I hear all of that.
Starting point is 00:37:36 I think that the Facebook WhatsApp merger is probably pretty instructive, which is Jan had two years roughly where he was left alone to kind of like run independently and then slowly and slowly it was absorbed back into the mothership and you know that was a product with zero monetization but there was a lot of strategic touch points within what's happened and you know core Facebook app and everything else that they were doing and I think that you have to do that because when you're spending tens of billions of dollars on something There needs to be an industrial logic that is beyond just let me just buy this thing and stick it on the shelf and let it be on its own So I think that you know that die is sort of cast
Starting point is 00:38:17 I think we're just debating the timeline in which it happens. Let's talk about Yeah, you know, you're probably right and that's what usually happens is is when they promise the founder That you'll be left alone that usually last two years Yeah, you know, you're probably right. And that's what usually happens is when they promise the founder that you'll be left alone, that usually last two years, that goes into Denali. That's coincidentally usually the length of the urn out or the golden handcuffs. That's how long my golden handcuffs were. And they left us alone for one year.
Starting point is 00:38:39 By the way, our error tripled that year. But then once they got serious about integration, the organization started emerging. And really, I was just running a product organization, which is fine, but that's not running an independent company. Because like I said, you lose your eyes in the ears. You lose the pulse of the market when you're not selling into the market. Freiburg, how did YouTube do it so well? People in a very different situation, they were Google basically took a team of two dozen people and their infrastructure was terrible and they basically rebuilt the entire company.
Starting point is 00:39:15 So it was the complete opposite. Think about them taking the front end shell of YouTube and then they rebuilt everything underneath it, ran it, and then they actually put their own people in to optimize the front end. They put their own ad sales team on top of it. I mean, they just bought a skeleton of a growth engine and they built everything. And so it was a very different story. And the one thing that YouTube, the one thing that Google did so well with that acquisition was the conviction bet that they made on the business.
Starting point is 00:39:49 And they made billions and billions of dollars of investments into that business for years before it started to make money. And that is a very hard thing to do because to Chimops Point, you often have this question of where you're free cash flow, where's your dividend, where's your buybacks, as a business gets to a certain point of maturity. But what Google had that many businesses of that scale have never had before is their extraordinary growth rate that continued even as they were of that scale.
Starting point is 00:40:15 So the leeway that Google's executives and board were given by shareholders was extraordinary, not to mention the dual voting where Larry and Sergey could decide to do whatever the heck they wanted, but they really were able to take advantage of their high growth rate, to take all this cash they were generating and reinvest it into this YouTube platform, as well as many other things, many of which haven't worked out, but when they do work out, you have a business that I think YouTube's probably worth what?
Starting point is 00:40:42 300, 400, 500500 billion at this point, and it's really paid back multiple. So YouTube's really a one-off, because it's a one-off acquirer, and it was a one-off kind of acquisition and integration scenario that we haven't seen before. Well, Google and Effect God, when they acquired YouTube, was a flywheel. I mean, it was a brand, and it was a network effect.
Starting point is 00:41:01 And the network effect was massive. It was off to the races. And I remember Google had Google videos, but they just couldn't come close to catching YouTube because the flywheel of creators wanted to be where all the viewers were and viewers wanted to be, where the most content was, it was just impossible to catch. But that organization was relatively tiny at the time
Starting point is 00:41:20 it was acquired and it didn't have any monetization. And it was being delused by legal problems that Google legal could solve. Very unique situation. Yeah. That was one of the bold acquisitions of all time. But what was incredible is right after the acquisition and Google started to scale this thing, most of the content being watched on YouTube was copyright content. And I was at a conference and I remember Philippe D'Amon, the CEO of Viacom stood up and Larry Page
Starting point is 00:41:46 and Eric or Larry Insurgier. Someone was on stage and he yelled at them. And he was like, you guys are making all this money and growing this YouTube business off of the back of our content. And you know, the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act says that someone can file a take-down notice and then the platform has a period of time
Starting point is 00:42:06 to respond and to deal with it. And the amount of time it was taking them to deal with it, new content was being uploaded and then they'd have to file another take down notice. So it created this insurmountable, you know, copy right thing. And then what did Google do that YouTube would have never been able to do to Sax's point?
Starting point is 00:42:22 They built an engine that could automatically recognize copyright content and pull it down before it was made publicly available. The finger print. Runing the user experience of Instant Upload and Availability of Content for other content. Well, the finger print system was even more nuanced than that. The finger print system not only told him, hey, this is an SNL skit or this is a music video from Prince, it said, what would you like to do? And it put the power in their hands and said, turn it off, claim it, and we get the money from it. And then it was like, well,
Starting point is 00:42:49 we're telling you before you even know about it. And what all these people did was they say, okay, yeah, you can make a remix of my Prince song or this episode of a TV show. We'll collect the money. And that was just the revenue share was the brilliant part about it. And by the way, in the Congress. This just speaks to how singularly, how singular and unique that deal was because I don't think any other company at that time maybe Microsoft would have been able to develop technology
Starting point is 00:43:13 to do this and do it at the scale and do it with this low latency and high speed for users and so on. It really was a singular transaction. Which Freiburg I think speaks to their accumulation of talent, especially in their early years, where they were just like, higher smart people will figure out what to do with them later. They actually had those people sitting around who could just go jump on the YouTube team.
Starting point is 00:43:33 Oh my God. Solar Commongar went and ran YouTube and absolutely crushed it. Probably one of the best CEO runs that's never talked about in the history of tech. He stepped in and he ran YouTube. And now Susan runs it. You know, another incredible run of monetizing that thing since. But I mean, and these are people, by the way, both Solor and Susan were sub 30 employee people at Google. So yeah, good point.
Starting point is 00:43:55 Nick, we thought the slides contrasting valuation to ARR. This is actually more interesting than just who made all the money. So I actually created a plot. ARR is the red chart and it's the right axis. So as we talked about, they're at around 400, 450 million of ARR right now. And then the left axis is expected value. Basically, this was their valuation. And it's in purple. And obviously, it goes up to the 20 billion
Starting point is 00:44:24 or 22 billion that Adobe just paid. You can see E was the last round they did in 2021 where they're valued at 10 billion. Before that, they're valued at 2 billion in 2020. And then, you know, the series C, I think they're valued at like 440 million or something like that. And then I think the B, they're valued at like 125 million and then the A they were valued at like 50 isch million, you know, and then they were seed and so forth. I
Starting point is 00:44:51 think what you see here is that is how efficient in a way venture capital is where it's tracking just slightly ahead of ARR. It is predicting where the hockey stick is good. So first of all, look at a RR. It is as close to up your hockey stick as I've ever seen in SaaS, kudos to them. I mean, the crazy thing is just how long it took for the hockey stick to get going normally. That's why didn't you invest in this company? Did you see it? Well, no, we didn't see it.
Starting point is 00:45:19 Also, look at what a late bloomer of this thing is. You know, like, you have to kind of see it. Like hockey stick didn't really start inflecting until 2018, 2019, right? So your table is more striking where these guys for years were toiling away and then all of a sudden this thing just took off, right? It's really incredible. This was such a late bloomer and for anyone who's doing a SaaS company and you're in it five years and you still have zero revenue. And that doesn't mean you're dead.
Starting point is 00:45:45 I mean, they basically were as zero. He brined for five years. I didn't think so. Absolutely nothing. And that was a $20,000 exit five years later. He was conducting. I think the only hard round to invest in this company would have been, if you were going to invest in, I think that 2014, time period 2015, because you were investing in a company
Starting point is 00:46:05 that hadn't even launched yet, that had been grinding for three or four years. By the way, the founder was like 19 when he started this, he was a teal fellow, he was one of the first, 20 under 20 teal fellows. He really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he dropped out of school to do this.
Starting point is 00:46:20 And they spent several years in the wilderness. I think that's when it would have been hard to invest. Maybe not the first seed round, because you could tell this guy was brilliant. He had a really specific idea. Moving design tools to the cloud was, I think, like a very clear and sensible vision, clear, you know, why now underlying trends. I always say my three biggest traits for entrepreneurial success, one of them is grit. I mean, if you have a high index on grit,
Starting point is 00:46:48 you're able to grind your way there. It's really, that's a really incredible. This chart is brilliant because, you know, what we see in the seed stages right before that series A is where most people give ups acts. You know, you get three or four years in, people aren't paying for the products, you're under-resourced,
Starting point is 00:47:05 and they don't get the A, and they got a, you know, that 2013, 2014, 15 period, they were probably trying to get an A, about to take them two years to get the A, and then somebody finally decided. So easy for a young person to give up and go get a friggin' job at Google or go back to school and to grind it out, to have the grit and the persistence and commit to your vision, he didn't pivot away. He persisted and he executed. He clarified. He clarified.
Starting point is 00:47:31 He clarified, right? Yeah. But he didn't go five steps away and say, I'm gonna do a new startup and, you know, he's integrated his business, right? And he's no private here, yeah. Dylan's field, by the way, is the founder. I had him on the pod back in the day.
Starting point is 00:47:42 And really, the, you know, ultimate cost of our focus. Cost of our customers, like we said, by the way is the founder. I had him on the pod back in the day and really the you know ultimate customer focus customer customer like you said you need to just have your pulse on what your customers are saying constantly because the answer is there you just have to develop it and give it to them. By the way also in this chart that's I think very interesting sex I'm interested in your position on this if you look at this chart one more time, they could have turned on monetization I think a year or two before they did. So they purposely didn't charge for it
Starting point is 00:48:10 to get the network effects going. I would love to see in here the number of users as a third vector, you know, as a third line on here. Because I think they started getting a lot of users in 2014, 2015, 2016. That's when, that's why they got the seed. But they purposely did not charge to let the network refer. Yeah, 2015 was a private bait. I don seed, but they purposely did not charge to let the
Starting point is 00:48:25 network of her. 2015 was a private beta. I don't think they were even had a product in 2014 that was usable yet. 2015 was private beta. 2016 was public launch and then they turned on monetization in 2017 and then they turned on enterprise pricing in 2018. So I think that's a pretty sound progression. I'm not, I mean, to be honest, I'm not a big fan of taking three or four years in the wilderness to build
Starting point is 00:48:46 your product. I think you need to get to market sooner. But I do think it is a little different in a existing industry where the table stakes are high. Adobe is not a cloud-based product, but those were very rich, client products. To get to the point where you could even compete with them with the classic Clay Christensen, Innovators to Lema, lightweight version of the product, there were significant table stakes there. And it was a significant technical challenge to move design
Starting point is 00:49:15 tools into the browser. They had to do a lot of cutting edge browser tech. The browser wasn't ready for it. This chart is going to be calling in a few years. Now that I'm doing after all in 48 hours after, I think that's correct. Come join me within your questions. Spacks are back. I don't know if you saw in the news, but Freeberg launched a SPAC. Freeberg is going to go. No, no, no, no.
Starting point is 00:49:39 He announced a target and a merger agreement. Incredible. So now he goes into the D-SPAC process. Now, we have two out of four besties have SPACed. Freeberg, you want to tell us about what you're SPACed? Well, I mean, we announced that we're emerging the production board SPAC, which is a TPP acquisition corp with Lavoro, which is the largest agricultural inputs
Starting point is 00:50:00 retailer in Brazil and operates across Latin America. You know, we've got a good slide in the presentation that I think echoes some of the points I've talked about on our podcast here about the importance of having resiliency and redundancy and global food supply chains and increasing famine risk. So we've got a slide that shows for about 30 years, you know, we've reduced the number of people globally that have been undernourished down to about 600 million, as of about three or four years ago. And in the last three years, we've seen that number spike back up to 800 million, which we thought we were done with global famine. And now here we are facing these issues again, climate change, the lockdown, supply chain disruption, the Ukraine war and all the other geopolitical tension issues.
Starting point is 00:50:48 So that's been a big thesis of mine individually. You guys know we've talked offline about some investments I've made and my strong interest in the area. Brazil and Latin America is the largest ag export market in the world. So they produce calories for the rest of the world. And farmers, they're largely lagging in terms of technology adoption. I've got a nice Brazilian farm as my background today. But technology adoption doesn't look like it does in the US. There's a huge opportunity to influence and drive
Starting point is 00:51:15 productivity up in that region. And so we partnered with the largest Agri-tailer. Agri-tail is the local locations that work with farmers. They have these teams called agronomists, they meet with the farmers typically weekly, help them make decisions about what products to use, what to do, how to do it. And so with the footprint and the reach that they have, and then we can really drive up productivity per acre across the region, increased total global calorie production. And that's why I'm so excited about it.
Starting point is 00:51:41 Fundamentally, it's also a great business. All the financials are presented in the investor presentation and will be published with the SEC here in the next couple of days. But it's a scaled business. It's a profitable business and it's growing pretty significantly. So it's got great tailwind.
Starting point is 00:51:58 It's a great base business. But for me, there's huge opportunity to continue to drive with their drive technology through the platform that they've built. And that's why we're also making a hundred million dollar investment off our balance sheet into the company. So that's big thing. Big thing. And we put two thirds of our, these founder, promoters, they're, you know, the only vest if we can hit the stock price of 1250 and 15 over the next three years. Otherwise, we lose them
Starting point is 00:52:25 So we've really tried to align ourselves with shareholders and really put our money where our mouth is on this and show people that You know that this is a real strategic partnership for us. It's not just you know an investment that we intend to kind of You know hold for a short period of time This is a key platform for me, for our TPP business, and for many of the companies that we operate at TPP. So I'm super excited. It's been a long time coming. It's been a very hard process.
Starting point is 00:52:52 This Chimath can attest. And as we all talk about, capital markets are very difficult right now. Getting a transaction announced is the first step. Now there's a bigger step of getting a closed. But yeah, a lot of work, but I'm super excited about this. Thanks for letting me talk about it.
Starting point is 00:53:10 Yeah. Well, and the other thing I just want to double click on there, Chimath, this idea that two thirds of the sponsor promote have to hit certain hurdles. I think that's probably a pretty good thing for folks who maybe want to invest to just say, hey, yeah, this is great. Where there's some alignment in how these shares get distributed, yes? I mean, I think it's a good feature. I think the thing with SPACs in general in a moment like this is that it actually performs
Starting point is 00:53:38 better in periods of high volatility. And the reason is because you have this redemption feature, which essentially allows you to get back your basis. And so meanwhile, while, you know, Friedberg was hunting for a deal or whatever, that cash, you know, that you've contributed into this back sits in a savings account that then actually is generating some, you know, reasonable interest as rates co-op. The whole combination of all of this stuff actually makes back a pretty good risk adjusted vehicle when the markets are highly volatile.
Starting point is 00:54:11 If at any point you don't like how you feel, even if you love the deal, you just vote to redeem, get your $10 back and effectively win the market. Let's say the market goes down 30% from here to March of next year when freeberg's deal closes. Well, an investor could theoretically just say, you know what, I just want my $10 back. Now, all of a sudden, they've gotten zero. They've felt zero percentage of that drawdown. And that's what's so interesting about this structure in a moment like this.
Starting point is 00:54:38 So I think there's a lot of really interesting features that that's backs in the future. I think we'll have to incorporate in order to in order to be a successful tool in the toolbox. One thing I learned from, I guess, the pattern AG company that I think you incubated as well, or was that a company, yeah, you incubated as well. Yeah, and you you guys invested through the three or launch platform, right? Yeah, so we invested this into it, is that the way this retail works is we have farmers, but then there are these retailers, or these sales reps, I guess they call them in the industry, that service the farmers.
Starting point is 00:55:10 And so that's where this, yeah, that's where we have this technology. That's right, they don't know how else is a farmer is supposed to know what to buy and what to do. So Ag retail, the local retail store, the people that work there are called agronomists. And so the agronomists are like technical sales people. They understand the science and the technology
Starting point is 00:55:31 of farming, they understand what the farmers have done in the past, and then they partner with them to help them decide what to do going forward, what products to buy, how to use them, how to get the most out of their land. And so when new technology, when new Ag technology comes to market, it's the retailer that can influence the farmer to make a decision on making a switch or using a tool or using some software
Starting point is 00:55:54 to drive that decision. And so that's why ag retail is so important. And why it's critical for any new technology to get adopted and farming, it has to go through retail. You know, there's the big ag input companies. There are the seed companies and the chemistry companies and the protection companies and the software companies. They all don't sell direct to farmers typically,
Starting point is 00:56:13 they're going through these retailers. And so, yeah. If they're a version of Lavoro that's been, that's an American company that's public or not. Yeah, it's called Nutri-N. And so Nutrient owns CPS, which is the largest retail chain in the US, Ag Retail Chain in the US,
Starting point is 00:56:32 about I think 70, 80% of Nutrient's business is actually fertilizer production, and then the rest is the retail business. That's the key comp that we actually show in our financial presentation that we published yesterday. How is Nutri and Dunn just as a public market? Do people understand the value that it creates in the marketplace?
Starting point is 00:56:52 Yeah. In the last year, as we've talked about on the show, companies that are in the fertilizer business are making money hand over fist because of the issues with the supply chain for natural gas, pot ash, and phosphates. And so if you have access to supply, like Nutriand does, and various other fertilizer companies do, you are absolutely minting money this year. And so they're having record earnings right now. And people are kind of estimating that the fertilizer market will reset and as a result, these companies are over-earning right now, which means that they're getting low-forward multiples. But generally speaking, these businesses have done very well. I would
Starting point is 00:57:38 say the US is about 15 years ahead of Latin America. And remember Latin America produces and exports more calories than the US. And corn farmers in Brazil, for example, are only getting half the yield of corn farmers in America, or a little more than half per acre, yield per acre. And the reason is the retailers in the US are so sophisticated that they're introducing services and they make a bunch of money selling services now. That wasn't the case 20 years ago. So now they're offering farmers advice using software and other custom soil testing services and whatnot. And that's really changed agriculture.
Starting point is 00:58:14 It's given farmers data that they didn't have before and help them make better decisions using that data that didn't exist before. And that's really, I would say, concentrated in the US that kind of sophisticated behavior. I think it's really important we see it happen around the world now because we need to grow more food and we need to do it without expanding land and acreage and so on. And we need to do it more sustainably, which is another trying to keep part of this. Did you worry a lot about like the FX risk of, you know, all these inputs coming into Brazil having to deal in local currency, then having to get the revenues out into US dollars and all of that stuff. How did you think about that?
Starting point is 00:58:51 Yeah, it's a good question. So when all ag commodities around the world, most commodities, they trade in dollars. And so if the dollar strengthens against the local currency, the REI, the farmers actually make more money, and the input companies charge more money in local currency. So basically the entire ag market and around the world commodity markets, generally speaking, inputs and outputs create in dollars. And so if you're a local business, you actually make more money when your local currency goes down and you're willing to spend more money. And so businesses in a commodity cyclical business generally are currency hedged because of that because they're selling stuff in dollars.
Starting point is 00:59:40 And then as a result, the places that they're buying stuff from charge them more in their local currency and they can still make a good spread. So, you know, there may be fluctuations in FX risk, but generally speaking, I think we see, and I'm just speaking generally here not about this particular transaction, we generally see, and we saw this at Monsanto, so that's a good example. All AgAinput companies, when the local currencies devalue in a market that they're selling into, they charge more. The farmer is going to afford to pay more because they're making more selling their product into the markets. I think this company is super interesting.
Starting point is 01:00:16 I'm rooting for you. It looks really cool. It seems like a very good antirevaluation, good margin of safety, too. Yeah, I'm going to be $1.2 billion, $1.2 billion valuation if I'm reading correctly here. So, yeah, congratulations, hard to get a deal done. At this time, we will do no FX for an exchange, just trading $1 or one currency for another.
Starting point is 01:00:37 Did you guys see that there was a title six lawsuit filed against Pfizer for some, you know, in the civil rights act, there's something called Title VI, which means that if you take federal funds of any kind, you can't discriminate. And Pfizer has a program to recruit African-American and Latino people into the company. And they're not being sued because Pfizer takes NIH grants, they work with the US government. They work with Medicare. They work with Medicaid. And so as a result of that, it's really happening one month before something else that we talked about, which is there's the affirmative action case that's going to the Supreme Court where I think it's Harvard actually push people pushing back on Harvard's ability to have some form of race-based admissions. So I just don't know if you guys were, we're monitoring this. For me, I just took a step back and I thought, look at what has happened legislatively in 2022. We basically repealed Roe v Wade.
Starting point is 01:01:43 The Supreme Court also went after a concealed carry in New York and said that New York cannot legislate against concealed carry, which had pretty big ramifications with respect to gun laws. The consensus opinion is that we're going to repeal affirmative action in the next month, or the Supreme Court is going to do that. These are three pieces of an enormous change in the United States civil society that has happened in a really small condensed period of time. So I have these thoughts on affirmative action, but my other thought is like, it's incredible how conservatives have been able to organize and how disorganized progressive have been
Starting point is 01:02:21 in order to create a counter maneuver against them. Because this has been a systematic effort since Carl Rove literally wrote about it in the mid 2000s and said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to raise a bunch of money, we're going to redistrict everything, we're going to get the state legislators on our side, we're going to basically fund the federal society, we're going to, and they did it. And in 20 years, they've created an enormous amount of change that I'm not sure all Americans agree with. Meanwhile, the progressives are just kind of like naval gazing at each other. I mean, and then you left off this past week, Chimath, that it seems like the gay marriage bill is going to be put to a vote and that they're
Starting point is 01:03:00 not going to be able to find. I didn't see that. What? Yeah. And Ted Cruz said he's not going to vote for it because it's attacking religious freedom. So we had talked on a previous episode, and I think, Zach, you said you didn't think gay marriage would come up. And- Well, no, if I had to guess what the political gamesmanship is here, because they think it's not going
Starting point is 01:03:17 to pass, they want to bring it up for a vote, because it preserves the issue and it tends to spice the wedge issue. When it looked like they had enough votes, they weren't going to put it up for a vote. So I don't know. I think there's a lot of gamesmanship here. Look, I think enough Republican should vote for this just to pass it. I don't think. Why wouldn't they? Well, I think there are some issues with the way the bill is written in terms of maybe requiring religious organizations to perform gay marriages. I think that somebody
Starting point is 01:03:43 should just make an amendment to clarify. That's not the case to solve this religious freedom issue. I think if that happened, then you get more Republicans on board or at least it wouldn't have an excuse. But yeah, look, I would like to see enough Republicans vote for this to take it off the issue. I don't think gay marriage is at any risk of being overturned by the stream court. Remember, it was Gorsuch who wrote that opinion. So, I think this is a scare tactic that progressives are able to use to fundraise off, you know, their base. Nonetheless, it'd be nice if enough Republicans would vote to canonize, you know, marriage
Starting point is 01:04:24 equality so that they wouldn't be able to do that. That's the smart play here for Republicans. Yeah, it looks like, by the way, breaking news in the Washington Post, Democrats have postponed the same sex marriage vote until after the midterms. So, but I mean, you can understand why people are going to be nervous about this after maybe they're going to turn that because they want to run on it as an issue. They want to have that as an issue. I mean, you're supposed to force it. The 70% of people are in favor, right? 80% of people are in favor.
Starting point is 01:04:50 Republicans want to be smart, find 10 Republicans in the Senate who can support this and now it's now that you're going to support it. Come on, Republicans, have a brain. Don't let them change the issue from this economy that's spiraling out of control. I mean, the Republicans are clueless. What do you guys think is going on there? All right, yeah. So FedEx stock has dropped as much as 25% as we're taping this this Friday after the CEO. After a little, I don't know if you saw the video I sent to the group chat, but Jim
Starting point is 01:05:23 Kramer was kind of pushing him. Do you think this recession, do you think this recession, he finally said, yes, I think just a global recession. They missed on revenue and they have cut their predictions for next year, severely, and the stocks weigh down. I think based on what I heard on CNBC and reading some stories right before this breaking news is happening. Some people think this is 60, 40 market versus management. But either way, I think the Fed's interest rates are doing their job and less packages are being shipped because people are, Tremont, you
Starting point is 01:05:54 would think, spending less money. And that was the whole point of this exercise. Was this a slowly economy down, Fribert? I think this is a little bit of a scratcher. This is a new CEO, so I think the game theory on this is that it made a lot of sense for him to reset expectations. I get that, and I think that that's a reasonably smart thing to do when you're incoming leader of a very complicated organization. That really is at the end of the bull whip, so to speak, on consumer demand. The problem is there's just so much conflicting data.
Starting point is 01:06:29 Retail sales was pretty reasonable. China actually looked a little bit stronger than people expected just this past week on some data that came out there. It looks like Europe is going to really draw a hard line and make sure that they spend whatever it takes to have enough energy so that their productivity doesn't fall off a cliff. All of those signals would say that we're not at the precipice of this kind of like cratering of demand. And then you have Powell basically saying, yeah, we're going to go another 75 and we're
Starting point is 01:06:58 going to take rates to probably somewhere between 4 and 5%. So the FedEx data point was pretty starkly in contrast with at least some of the data that we've seen over the last few weeks. So I don't know, it was a bit of a head scratcher. They got three things working against them. Number one, Amazon just continues to build out local delivery infrastructure at an incredible pace. continues to build out local delivery infrastructure at an incredible pace. At the end of 2020 Amazon was already up to 25% market share, which put them ahead of both FedEx and UPS. And FedEx has seen their market share decline for the past eight or nine years now.
Starting point is 01:07:40 So that's kind of a key point. Number two is people are just chipping less stuff, doing more stuff digitally. And number three is this recession impact, where they obviously have key economic indicators that allow them to do a better job forecasting deliveries than most companies I would imagine. And so they can see order volume and trading volume and use that as a predictor for what volume
Starting point is 01:08:04 for shipping is gonna be in the future. And I would guess that all three continue to work against them. It's not like they have a lot of diversification in the business and other ways to expand out into. So you've got a key, vertically integrated player, namely Amazon, that is investing heavily to replace whatever they use you for. I think as of a few years ago, Amazon is only like 2% or 3% of FedEx is revenue anyway. But still, I would imagine Amazon is playing a key role here.
Starting point is 01:08:32 Your first comment to me is now, that sounds like the most credible explanation. And to blame a recession is sort of a little bit of hiding the cheese. It's probably fair to say that their lunches get hidden by Amazon. so I can understand why FedEx is under a lot of pressure because of that. But if you just compare it to just all the other data,
Starting point is 01:08:52 it doesn't seem like this whole thing makes any sense. What you just said about competition makes to me a lot of persents. And yeah, competition with digital and Amazon. I mean, digital, like how much do you guys sign letters today versus eSign? I mean, there's just a much do you guys sign letters today versus e-sign? I mean, there's just a, you know, I'm giving an example, maybe that's a 1% impact and there's probably a few more things
Starting point is 01:09:11 and these things all layer up. Well, they could be losing market share while still growing because e-commerce is growing so violently in the world. But, Saks, what do you think? I think what's going on here is that whatever the issues of FedEx and no matter how overstated these warnings may have been, I think they're directly correct. He's saying that the world's headed for a global recession and directly he appears to
Starting point is 01:09:34 be right. I mean, things look really grim. We just had this inflation report that was much worse than what people were expecting. It was, inflation was supposed to go down to 8.0 percent, and actually it was 8.3 percent. That's why the stock market cratered a few days ago. It was like the worst day in the stock market. I think maybe all year or certainly since June, we're almost towards the June lows. Now this FedEx executive is saying we're headed for global recession.
Starting point is 01:10:07 So it seems to me that the economic news is just pretty grim here. And we're in a, we're in stiflation. The Fed has to keep raising interest rates. At the same time that we have persistent I chronic inflation. And you have to wonder, I tweeted a few months ago that the White House economic advice or Brian Deese, he said that in this interview with CNN that the Biden administration was willing to endure
Starting point is 01:10:31 a global recession in order to keep Russia from controlling the Donbass region in Ukraine. Well, mission accomplished. It looks like it's getting its wish. The administration has made some progress in the Donbass, but we are also having a global recession. What percentage of this, what percentage of the recession and inflation has to do with the Russian invasion of Ukraine? I think it's meaningful.
Starting point is 01:10:52 It's meaningful. We know it's a huge exacerbator of all these problems. What percent, if you were going to put a number on it? Listen, I don't think the economy is going to get better with the risk of war three hanging over our heads. How does that work? Yeah, but what percent of the economic issue do you think is percentage wise impact? I don't think we're in a recession.
Starting point is 01:11:09 Or should you answer? I don't think we're in a recession yet. You know, retail sales are still quite strong. There's just a lot of signals that tell us that people are still consuming a lot of things. And that GDP is pretty reasonable and that jobs and wages are pretty much quite full. So I think SACs, you are right, that we will be there because you can only bring rates up so high until you break things. Do you see there's a tweet by I think a Charles Schwab analyst today about that issue of
Starting point is 01:11:39 wages and she was tweeting off to find it that for the second year in a row, we now have, because of inflation, we now have real wage decreases. So you may be right about like where things stand today, but this is about the trajectory right now of the economy, and the trajectory is not good. Inflation is not coming down as fast as people were anticipating. It's worse than expected. You have this situation in Ukraine where, listen, we can all cheer on Ukrainians for this counteroffensive that appear to be successful, but we are playing with fire over there. I mean, I don't recall a time during the Cold War where we did anything remotely this risky. You have American generals.
Starting point is 01:12:22 American generals were taking credit for this counteroffensive. Do you see this New York Times story where they talk about the inside moment of these Ukraine counteroffensive? So you now have America. America is now giving Ukraine more and more advanced weapons, okay? This sort of the long-range artillery. They're telling them where to point the weapons. They're giving them the intelligence for it.
Starting point is 01:12:43 They're training them on how to use it. They've got commanders on the ground there, and they actually are hand correcting the battle plans, the Ukrainians had a counter-offensive plan, the Americans said that's not good enough, and they rewrote it. So the Americans are now doing everything in this war except pulling the triggers and taking the bullets, and I don't want to minimize the sacrifice that Ukrainians are making because they are dying in huge numbers. And we can all respect and admire the sacrifice they're making for their own country. But this is a very risky strategy for the United States of America to be pursuing.
Starting point is 01:13:19 I mean, we are basically playing with fire. And we are, you know, this close to being a war with a nuclear arm Russia. And we never came close to this type of behavior during the Cold War. And I don't understand what's changed so much that we have to take this kind of risk. Now at the beginning of this conflict, I said that I was open to arming the Ukrainians under Cold War rules, Cold War rules, meaning covertly like we did in Afghanistan. We now have multiple examples of the administration
Starting point is 01:13:45 boasting and taking credit, taking credit for the counter-offensive, for the sinking of the mosfah, for killing Russian generals, this seems very risky to me. So, Saks, a court premise of the discussions we've had here is that the United States screwed up the negotiation with Putin by not taking NATO off the table. Reuters reported that Putin rejected a Ukrainian peace deal at the start of the war. At the start of the war, Russian chief envoy on Ukraine told Putin that a provisional deal with Kiev had been struck. Deal would have satisfied Russia's demand that Ukraine stay out of NATO. Two of three sources said the push to get a deal finalized occurred immediately after Russia's
Starting point is 01:14:26 February 24th invasion. Does that change any of your thinking on what's happened here and Putin's copability? I think it's a data point, you know? But let me explain why I don't think it's despositive. And by the way, I saw the article every NeoCon on Twitter was basically tweeting this, trying to prove that this. Yeah, now I was sitting on everybody's proofs on your shimer analysis. Let me tell you why it does. Okay, first of all, if you
Starting point is 01:14:51 read the article closely, this offer did not come until after the invasion started. Okay, and we already knew Zalinsky was publicly saying in the early weeks of the war that they were willing to take Ukraine off the NATO off the table. So this isn't that much news. It happened after. The other key point here is not only to happen too late, but also the offer did not come from the Americans. This is a really important point to understand about the Russian position on this. And I'm just saying this based on all their public pronouncements. The Russians made an ultimatum in December, and then Lavrov Negoti with Blinken in January. They were absolutely insistent that they would accept nothing less but a written guarantee from Washington.
Starting point is 01:15:34 Why is that? Well, the written guarantee was necessary because they've always claimed that James Baker Eukard Gorbachev over, you know, German re-unification, and not one inch eastward. So they've always demanded a written assurance from the Americans. And the reason they wanted from America, and not Europe, is because they know that Europe are America's poodles. And Ukraine is a client state of America, so listen, they wanted a written guarantee from America before the war started.
Starting point is 01:16:02 They never got that. Now if your point is to Putin do everything he could to avoid this war, absolutely not. I will absolutely grant you that. But we already knew that. The question is, did the U.S. State Department do everything they could to avoid this war? And my point is absolutely not. They should have taken this Ukraine issue off the table in writing before the invasion. Got it. Okay. And they're talking about Ukraine. No, no, I just, it was major news and we have an obligation, I think, to. I'm glad to, I'm glad to, I'm glad to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, article and they're like, see, there's nothing to this one. Giving you the opportunity, so X, now let me ask you another question for free, Burke.
Starting point is 01:16:49 The other follow up people would like us to have made here is we predicted famine and massive disruption in food. We debated that here. You were pretty clear that this was going to be, or could be disastrous. It hasn't turned out to be disastrous yet. What's the update on,, is shipping, not shipping? Are we going to have global famine or are we not going to have global famine? What's the update there based on this conflict?
Starting point is 01:17:12 Yeah, we have a massive starvation problem. The UN told everyone, I mean, no one writes about this stuff because it's seemingly not interesting in mainstream media, which I don't freaking understand. But the UN thinks that 345 million people now are incrementally marching towards starvation. And so I think they did this at their meeting yesterday because of the war in the Ukraine. So David Beasley, whom, who I know well, he's the executive director of the war in the Ukraine. So David Beasley, who I know well, he's the executive director of the UN World Food Program. He told the UN Security Council yesterday that 345 million people are now facing
Starting point is 01:17:54 acute food insecurity in 82 countries where the UN operates, which is two and a half times the number of acutely food insecure people that existed before the pandemic hit. And so this is creating, like we talked about, these rippling effects in terms of, initially, it was fertilizer cost, which means less food is being produced locally. Then there was the acute crisis of getting food out of the Ukraine. And now it's less planted acres and less yield getting out of those acres, which, you know, we said was going to start
Starting point is 01:18:22 to happen in the back half of this year. And if you look at the price, a good proxy for this is the price for corn. We're at near record highs for the last couple of years. In terms of corn pricing, the 2023 futures pricing for next December for corn is at 620 a bushel, you know, and it kind of peaked out right around the middle part of the Ukraine crisis in April at 6.73. So we're getting right back to that high point. And so this is a major problem that's brewing. And as I highlighted at the beginning of our talk today, which I show in the presentation for the the Lavouro Transactually I talked about earlier. We have done an incredible job building a resilient food supply and excellent global supply chains to feed people around the world going back 30 years. And we've been able to steadily decrease the number of people that are food insecure or facing famine. And famine in the UN definition is less than 1200 calories per day
Starting point is 01:19:27 on average for a year. And so we went from like a billion people around the world facing famine about 30 years ago and got that number all the way down to 600 million. And then in the last two and a half, three years, it's shot back up to 800 million. And now the UN thinks it's going to shoot up even more. So we may even be retracing our way all the way back
Starting point is 01:19:46 30 years because of the crises that have enveloped the region around Ukraine and the resulting impact on fertilizer availability, fertilizer pricing, and so on. And as I mentioned a few weeks ago, many ammonia fertilizer plants, which is nitrogen fertilizer, the main kind of component of fertilizer in Europe are being shut down because they run on natural gas.
Starting point is 01:20:11 And so government agencies and the local producers are turning those plants off to make more natural gas available for heating. Would you describe this freeberg as, because we are seeing the EU, you know, they remember they made that legislation. By the way, this is why South America is so important, but sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, it makes sense. Would you describe this though, because the EU was also at the same time, the UN was, you know, highlighting these concerns, the EU was also praising the massive progress we made from the, the Russia and the Ukraine, Russia and Ukraine, allowing fertilizer, allowing exports
Starting point is 01:20:42 in this resiliency, we got, we got wheat wheat moving and then we got some fertilizer exports moving. So two steps forward, one step back would be how you describe this maybe? Yeah, that gas prices are still elevated, right? And that gas availability in Europe is obviously significantly restricted. We'll get through it. We'll get through it. Do you think we can manage this? Yeah, look, I don't know how many, look, there's some number of people,
Starting point is 01:21:05 some number of tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people who are gonna starve between here and there that otherwise weren't gonna be starving. By the way, there's always, you know, some hundreds of millions, as I mentioned, of people around the world that are starving under 1200 calories a day. And that number climbing some incremental amount,
Starting point is 01:21:22 that's an incremental 300, 400 million people that didn't need to starve. And that's a condition we're now gonna be facing. And so people like, yeah, yeah, people are still leading, they're still food around the world. We don't pay much attention to these third world countries. We don't pay much attention to these underdevelop nations because we don't have press coverage there.
Starting point is 01:21:42 And when people are on the streets and unable to eat, it doesn't seem to make everyday mainstream media coverage, but it is happening, and statistically, it is a massive problem. Yeah, we're doing a great job of covering Kanye and Kim, but maybe get some reporters to cover the people starting. We've covered it, and I appreciate you guys giving me a chance to talk about it, because I think it's super important. I mean, I think that's a part of it.
Starting point is 01:22:02 When this show is at its best, I think we're highlighting things that other people are ignoring. Listen, I think that's a part of the important thing. When this show is at its best, I think we're highlighting things that other people are ignoring. I just want to say on this Ukraine situation, and this applies to this episode as well as all the previous ones, I don't want to be right about this issue. Just like, I'm sure Freiberg doesn't want to be right about famine coming true. We don't want these things to happen. Okay.
Starting point is 01:22:19 If I could choose now come right now, I would say be great if the Russian army collapsed because of its morale problem, tucked its tail between its legs, went back to Moscow, and then the Ukraine had the good sense to respect the rights of the Russian speakers living in the Donbass and Crimea, and this whole thing basically tamped down and basically was over, okay. But look, I think there's an equal and opposite chance, so that doesn't happen. That certainly could happen, okay, but I think there's an equal and opposite chance that that doesn't happen. That certainly could happen, okay? But I think there's an equal and opposite chance that instead what happens is that we climbed the escalatory ladder that Putin, I think, we are backing him into a corner. Everybody says that he cannot survive the loss of this war.
Starting point is 01:22:57 And yet, we're not willing to give him an off ramp. So what choice does he have but to escalate? So what does that mean? It could mean a full mobilization of that country. It could mean they resort. If they can't achieve their aims by conventional weapons, maybe they resort to unconventional weapons. We don't know. This seems like a highly volatile, risky situation. And I just think that, you know, we the United States of America need to be thinking very clearly about what is in our interest because all I see is a identification we're so interested in helping and identifying with the Ukrainians that we've
Starting point is 01:23:33 lost sight of an American interest that's separate and independent of Ukraine's desire for self-determination. I can understand and respect their nationalism and their patriotism, but we are a different nation. We better think really carefully about our interests here. Yeah, and I think David, sometimes you're misinterpreted as, this is a partisan issue for you. You're a dove, you're David the dove. I have a dove, David the dove.
Starting point is 01:23:55 You are a dove, not a hawk. You want peace. Listen, I believe that if America is gonna risk war with a nuclear arm power, there better be a vital interest at stake. Otherwise, we should find every diplomatic off-ramp we can. So, do you feel optimistic about our ability to navigate Jamoth, the Ukraine situation, the war in Ukraine, famine, supply disruption, energy? Do you think we'll get through all this? Are you optimistic?
Starting point is 01:24:23 I think that rates are gonna go somewhere between four and a half to five percent. I think Stan Druckermiller is right. And I've said this, I don't know, I know, at nauseam, so I'll just keep saying it, but I think everybody has consistently been wrong. And they have wanted inflation to be a transitory phenomenon that goes away and they've been consistently wrong. Even in our group chat, we see these forecasts.
Starting point is 01:24:51 They've been utterly consistently wrong. So rates are going to go higher than people expect. It'll stay around longer than people want. This will have an impact to the economy. That impact in 2024, 2025 will not be that great. So that's one thing. If you want to focus on Ukraine for a second, there's something that I think we should focus on, which I read this interesting article about Russian mothers.
Starting point is 01:25:20 And you know, in the 1980s, when Russia was at war with Afghanistan, there were these bodies that were sent home to Russia, and these mothers got very, very upset and they protested. And then, you know, in 2000, early 2000s, I think there was a nuclear submarine that basically sank, got shot and sank, and then Russian mothers protested in the Chechen war. They are a group of individuals in Russia that have enormous organizing power. It turns out. And they, you know, they, they really can tell what the real temperature is on the ground. What Putin has done so far is that he's largely
Starting point is 01:26:06 recruited people from these Spartan communities inside of Central Russia and used third-party contractors. So he's minimized the risk of the real cohort of the Russian population who will really stand fervently against what's going on. So until you see that happening, those guys have a long way to go. And I think that this thing is going to drag on for a really long time. So it's a paid army. Therefore, it's obscuring the impact on actual citizens in Russia. It's half paid, but the other half are from places where their organizing power is limited. And I think that that was Putin's, you know, calculation, seeing what has happened before
Starting point is 01:26:43 again, sort of like the tip of the spear of these Russian mothers. And we're not seeing that. So that means that the ability for him to manage perception inside of Russia is pretty good. Pretty good. Greater than people expected. Yeah. Greater than people expected. So this is going to go on for as long, for much longer than people think. So I would just prepare for this inevitable outcome and just kind of, you know, manage another year of slogging it through a choppy waters. Might be one way to look
Starting point is 01:27:17 at this. And I think it's a very good way to say that I think we're in a very volley choppy market for the foreseeable future. Yeah. And they're in lies some opportunities. And also maybe some discipline in various markets. One thing to just keep in mind, where most people feel these rate hikes is in the 30 year fixed mortgage, right? This is where most Americans are going to feel it. And if you look at the chart, you know, like this is a big jump up from our Absolutely free money environment that most Americans were feeling doing you know
Starting point is 01:27:49 You know, what do they call it when you take out equity on your mortgage like a second mortgage or a credit line credit line People were you know experiencing a lot of free money and upgrading their kitchens and taking money out of their homes Yada yada but when you look at it historically You know even at 6% or even if it goes to 7% for mortgages, it's a lot less than we experience, our parents experienced and we experienced for the first half of our adult lives. So I think it's surmountable and this number you don't think is going to get up to above 10%, right? The 30 you're fixed. You don't see that happening. So I think it's manageable, which is going to be choppy. All, Sachs, it didn't get to promote it, but he has a wonderful film at the Toronto Film
Starting point is 01:28:28 Festival about Dolly. He is doing an awesome Dolly experience with the AI that paints pictures. We're just going to insert into the end of the program. The beautiful work he's doing there in his Dolly film is supposed to be excellent. It's the second film, David, is producing after thank you for smoking. So congratulations to our own little Scorsese for the Sultan of Science, the dictator, and David the Dove. I'm the world's greatest moderator, Jason Calakana, and we'll see you next time.
Starting point is 01:28:58 Bye-bye. Bye-bye. All right, so I'm at the Dolly Land exhibit here at the St. Regis. The St. Regis Hotel is a very important hotel in Dolly's life. He actually lived in the penthouse of the St. Regis in New York. And the St. Regis Hotel has very graciously agreed to host this exhibition for us. And this exhibition is basically a rendering of Dolly's studio or what Dolly's studio might have looked like. And those works of art are actually generated by GPT-3, the so-called Dolly engine.
Starting point is 01:29:35 So thanks to the OpenAI team and Sam Altman for giving us access to Dolly. And so fans can just come here and they can use these tablets to enter, you know, what art they want to create, they can just enter terms, and the engine will spit out art that is made, not obviously by Salvador Dali, but is in the style of Salvador Dali. So I thought it was a very cool way to commemorate the film. We are premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend. This is an independent movie I've had in development for something like over a decade and the great actor, Academy Award-winning actor Ben Kaseley plays Dali and gives
Starting point is 01:30:22 a phenomenal performance. So we're excited to premiere this movie, show it to the world for the first just gone crazy with it. I'm going all the way! What? What? What are we going to fly? I'm going to fly. Besties are gone. Go through.
Starting point is 01:30:54 That's my dog taking it away. She's right, wait. She's got sex. We're going to die. Oh man. My ham is the actual meat. We should all just get a room and just have one big huger because they're all kids. It's like this sexual tension that we just need to release that out.
Starting point is 01:31:11 What your beef? What your beer beef? Beef? What? We need to get my cheese aren't that bad. I'm going on lean! I'm going all it.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.