Ep13. Silicon Valley’s Political 180, META AI, COVID Postmortem | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner

40 thoughts on “Ep13. Silicon Valley’s Political 180, META AI, COVID Postmortem | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner”

• Guys. This is the most important pod in the valley. All-in is great but now has veered political. Fine, love them, listen religiously. You guys get into the weeds. Important that you distill the 90 min A16z pod because it’s super important to elaborate on their views but many don’t have the patience.

  PLEASE stay true to your mission.

• Always love the pod! Thank you both for the amazing perspective and incredible viewpoint! ❤😂🎉

• Im a Democrat and the taxing of unrealized gains is a terrible idea!!

• 20:09 What it means, Bill, is that people with the traits described, should run for office. They don’t even need to quit their jobs.

• Of course there is a silly google warning posted on the video saying watch out for Covid misinformation, click our link for the only allowed narrative you must follow 🤦 yeah we need a post-mortem on Covid badly.

• Another great pod, love the way you guys talk about politics and government with a very strategic point of view and zero emotion. Being practical and applying first principles. Keep up with the great work.

• Trump is an threat to the permanent bureaucracy

• If Bill and Brad went 8 hours every week, I think we’d all find the time. They continue to just hit the right notes so consistently.

• for the sake of the podcast move on from politics/COVID

• Bay Area really needs to steer clear of being loyal to parties. Support policies, not parties. If you get a reputation for supporting parties and not issues, when the party you support is not in power, there's a lot of potential for blowback. Resisting tax on unrealized gains is looking after your own interests. Supporting a whole party is usually working against a lot of other people's interests.

• completely agreed on Daniel Ek from Spotify!!

• This is what I don’t like about people covering Tesla. Why don’t you guys discuss the concerns around the tesla stock… like why only one side of the story …

• Been tuning in since the first pod. Think this was the best so far. Awesome guys, keep it going.

• Tax on unrealized gains that is crazy! Oh wait I pay that every month at my house.
  Yeah, I know it’s not the same. I’m not running a business exactly my point. I’m not running a business. Why am I paying a tax on my expected appreciation for a place that I haven’t sold?
  Too many taxes, too many bad taxes.

• Maybe if we get lucky enough a whole cohort of people could do a post mortem on a host of things that have gone on these last years while still trying to move ahead constructively GREAT POD THANKS GUYS

• Great podcast

• Meta open source = they run out of data lol

• In the UK, they tried the "let covid burn itself out" strategy. The hospitals immediately filled up, and they had to give up. We can forget history on both sides. You would need a healthier and younger population and a highly available healthcare system. Everybody says how we should not have locked down schools because the students would be fine, without thinking about the teachers. In many areas they had to teach the kids from home because the teachers were getting sick and dying (or retiring early because they were not getting paid enough to die for your little angel), and there was nobody to teach the kids in person anyway.

• what is open source about this podcast? what is the "source"?

• The machinations of Silicon Valley's tech titans in the face of political upheaval expose a profound hypocrisy at the heart of America's innovation hub. Bill Gurley's musings and Pete Buttigieg's acquiescence to the valley's self-interest are mere symptoms of a deeper malaise. We witness these digital patricians wringing their hands over a political climate they helped create, their performative concern for San Francisco—a city they've remade in their image—dripping with disingenuous nostalgia. Their exodus to remote work, decrying a city "going to hell in a handbasket," is not mere reaction but a calculated move in a long game of urban exploitation.
  Yet, framing this solely in terms of political affiliations or monetary interests misses the forest for the trees. The underlying issue, glaringly apparent to the masses but conveniently overlooked by the tech elite, transcends the facile dichotomies of left and right, profit and loss. It is, at its core, a question of power—who wields it, why, and to what end. The antidote lies not in the hollow promises of technological utopia or the facile solutions of venture capitalism, but in the collective power of the people. We, the people, must reclaim our digital sovereignty, our urban spaces, and our political discourse from those who would shape our destinies while claiming to act in our interest. Only through this radical reconfiguration of power can we hope to address the underlying issues that plague not just San Francisco, not just Silicon Valley, but our entire interconnected world.

• Great podcast

• Politics is inevitable ❤

• Bill brings up the cost aspect and inefficiency of implementing 'rural broadband' but I was also thinking the environmental impact of bulldozing nature to install the lines. Ridiculous, absurd dumb big government in practice.

• I understand BGs' argument here but they seem to have forgotten what happen on Jan 6. What Trump is willing to do to stay in power…

• Blaming Crowdstrike entirely for the crapshoot last week, would be like blaming a shoelace provider to the shoemaker for him forgetting to put proper glue on the sole, causing a number of people to slip and breaking their leg. My point? Microsoft should sandbox-test ALL new upgrades of third party software, but even more so, we are after all talking about critical infrastructure here. There should exist in each country, for all software used for critical infrastructure, test-centers that make sure ALL new upgrades and releases of any critical infrastructure software, are tried and tested before released and implemented in the open. The cost of last weeks shutdown would be enough alone to finance these centers. This in itself sounds to me like a unicorn opportunity. You're welcome.

• 34 year old guy working in finance here. Respect your guys opinion on a lot. But the support from Silicon Valley for Trump is wild to see. This guy has promised to gut the bureaucracy that protect our water and regulated our industries (history shows this leads to some type of financial overheating recession / worse living standards). His Supreme Court has already gone most the way there with the Chevron decision. He has promised retribution on his political opponents. He claims the election was a fraud (when he was the one calling Georgia election officials fishing for votes…). This is no normal election. That’s what all you guys are missing. To think that way and portray that message to the masses is just irresponsible. Letting this guy back into office is just love of money and pure self interest which in my books ain’t very patriotic. Is your life really that hard right now in tech?? Going to be basically more
  of the same if dems win. I don’t claim the democrats are a great party. Maybe they hurt tech and don’t listen to you guys like they used to, boo hoo haha. Is that the country you really want to live in when you are complaining about regulatory capture 😵‍💫😵‍💫. The point on unrealized gains tax is a moot point, never going to happen, pure scare tactics / not a part of the parties platform. You should read the project 2025 if you are afraid of “actual” platforms for America, yikes 😮. Will be curious what happens when Trump loses and he claims it was rigged, because you know it coming. Hope you guys think long and hard about these points. You guys are super smart, have to weigh risk everyday. I love this country, best country in the world! Let’s keep it that way!

• Excellent episode. Also, if i may weigh in, THIS should be the format going forward. Your same-room dynamics somehow seems much better than when you are in a cam2cam set up.

• Just want to make a slight correction to what you said at 1:04:44. In 12.3, there was a steering wheel nag so you needed to put your hands on the wheel every couple of minutes, but by 12.4 this was completely eliminated and it changed purely to eye tracking (100% hands free). However as a result, the eye tracking became much more strict and you now needed to look at the road nearly 100% of the time.

  I think you got this wrong in your description, it's not that the progress is being measured by how long you needed to go before paying attention (i.e. looking forward and nagging at longer intervals), it's that they fundamentally changed the way you interacted with the platform from 12.3 to 12.4.

  12.5 seems to be bringing no changes to this except that you now can wear sunglasses and it will still track your eyes through there (still 100% hands free).

• Ben and Mark are angry because they want to have influence over politicians. Biden is not giving it to them because a16z literally wants to implement crony capitalism. They are backing people like Trump and his team like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller simply because they know Trump, as a convicted felon, is so corrupt that a16z can have unlimited access to influence the policy. Such a shame for Silicon Valley

• If you think about election in 2020, every decision of Covid will be understood easily

• happening all why these astronauts are in space in limbo

• You guys crush it! Not only is the content amazing (I learn a ton every pod). But I also have to say that your broadcast production is amazing!! Kudos to whoever handles it. Please don't stop bring the knowledge to the rest of us.

• Bill's comment on a post mortem and putting Jay on as head of the review panel was the best. Government F'd us here big time!

• Good staff

• Trump said he wanted green card for students who graduated with 4 year degree. The next day, his campaign walked it back. They know, solutions doesnt help them with fundraising.

• No way to value a private company? Dude, VCs do it every time they dump cash into a preferred round. Cmon BG 🙏🏽

  I agree it would be insane to tax unrealized cap gains. But the reasons are really simple: tax needs to kick in once there’s real liquidity.

• You are falling into a political trap. You are attacking straw men arguments, like your friends Ben and Marc did, and insulting our intelligence. I say this as a big fan.

• Thoughtful discussions gentlemen. Thanks!

• We're still in that weird place. YouTube has a Covid disinformation warning sitting right below your faces.

• Hickey? Bill has a hickey, and he didn’t bother to cover it up?? What’s the world coming to???

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