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Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the All In podcast, your favorite podcast.
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And a lot of a lot of topics on the uh docket including Well, we'll get to that in a minute.
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Uh tons of stuff to talk about, not just politics, but a lot of tech news.
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You do sound really hungover today, J Cal.
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You sound like an old man that's been smoking cigarettes for 3 weeks. You sound wrecked.
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How big was your night last night? Admit it. I didn't go that big.
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On a scale of 1 to Charlie Sheen, it was like a six.
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It was like a Martin Sheen in his 30s.
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What does that mean, 1 to Charlie a couple of beverages.
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I'm sorry, on a scale of 1 to Charlie Sheen, I don't think I've ever been past the one in my life. So, what is a six?
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A six is like, you know, Paris Hilton, you know, in her heyday, or like Lindsay Lohan in Hollywood in the '90s.
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It's like, you know, like a good time, but not crazy. Mhm.
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Didn't they have to go to rehab?
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Yeah, they had to go to rehab.
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I'm super high five to me.
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Let me tell you something, Charlie Sheen cannot oh, it was just like Lindsay Lohan.
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Wait, Lindsay Lohan, the one who went to rehab like five times?
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Like, what are you talking about? That's a six? THAT'S WHERE WE ARE.
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I DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT SEVEN IS. Let your winners ride. Rain Man David Sacks.
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And I said, we open-sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, Wes Nimes. Queen of Quinoa.
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Joining us, of course, the Queen of Quinoa is here.
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The Thriller from Milla Valley.
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He puts the I in anxiety.
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Got his degree from his Google pedigree, the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, with us again.
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All right, next up, of course, the Tsar of ARR.
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He perfected the flywheel with his boy, Peter Thiel.
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LPs, don't be nervous, cuz he's only investing in software as a service, the world's biggest [ __ ] The Rain Man himself, David Sacks.
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He's an [ __ ] Wait, you called me an [ __ ] An [ __ ] That might stick. I don't know.
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I hope like this might be heading towards kind of like a high school talent show kind of episode, but yeah, go ahead.
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And finally, the king of SPACs himself, the guru of growth, he puts the dick in dictator, he's going to upset her with his sweater, Chamath Palihapitiya. All right, boys.
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I I can't I'm just telling the audience now, I can't keep this up every week.
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Yes, yes, it's become a very anticipated new feature of the show. It is. It's a new feature.
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Wait, you know, I forgot we had like wet our wet your beak and you know, all this stuff and all these like how it flows.
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We come up with new things.
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We come up with new things. Yeah. All right, listen.
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Just a quick programming update.
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All-In Summit sold out, basically.
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And it's going to be a great show.
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We got about a dozen speakers lined up.
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All kinds of great folks.
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And three great parties I want to highlight.
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Monday uh Sunday night will be the poker tournament.
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That's going to be our Goodfellas Godfather kind of theme, dressed to impress the family.
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Night number two, Monday night is going to be our Havana white party, wear your best linens and whites.
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And then closing night party on Tuesday night is going to be our Miami Vice big '80s party, neon and t-shirts under suits.
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It's going to be a hell of a party.
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two million 999,700 people don't give a [ __ ] about what you're talking about right now.
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There's like maybe 300 people that are going to go to this party that you're throwing and they're the only ones that care. 700 tickets.
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I think there's going to be 700 tickets issued and there'll be a probably 400 people at the party.
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So, they're going to be pretty good parties. Uh-huh.
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We're in the party business here at the All-In Pod.
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Well, I mean, the world needs some good parties in my opinion.
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It's going to be three back-to-back great parties.
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And the theme of the conference is the problem I most want to solve in the world or the problem I most want to see solved in the world.
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So, we're asking every speaker to think about that.
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And we're going to kind of talk about the world's biggest problems and then who actually wants to solve them.
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The world needs more parties.
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Well, that's that's what I'm doing.
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That's my That's going to be my 10-minute talk, my TED Talk.
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I've been I've been watching the WeWork show.
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Have you guys been watching it? Oh, fabulous. Apple TV Plus, yeah.
3:57
Like elevating the world's Jared Leto is so freaking good in that as that character, by the way. Yeah, it's incredible. He got to get an Emmy.
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like elevating the world's consciousness as the mission and then just throw parties is the way to do it.
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I feel like you're you really have that vibe. Like, yeah.
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I It's aspirational for me.
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the world's consciousness with your with your summits.
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I I told Bill While pocketing millions of dollars.
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It's I It's not going to make a profit.
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Whatever profit it makes is going to go to Chamath's star chamber 50-person conference he's doing with the All-in brand.
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So, every everybody gets to leverage the All-in brand. Yeah.
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You First you did it, Sachs, with your call-in.
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Now I'm doing it with the summit.
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Chamath's going to do it with his think tank and I'm not going to do it.
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Coming soon from Friedberg, the All-in Munich special.
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Lose weight like your besties.
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He's going to the It's It's It's the All-in brand that allows you to lose weight in the following way.
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He brings his best vegan chef to you. Oh, yes.
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Tempeh [ __ ] tempeh garbage.
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Tempeh and and vegan shakes, your favorite, Chamath.
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It's double [ __ ] yuck, right?
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You vomit after you eat it.
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You're You're in a caloric deficit for the month that that person refuses to leave your house, boom. You lose weight. Everything's solved. You lose weight.
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They're like, "Hey, want some quinoa?" You're like, "No."
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And then you lose weight. No. That's pretty good. Avocado shake.
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me Give me my olive-infused beef, please. The olive-infused beef.
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No, I'm sorry, not olive-infused. Olive fed.
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This beef only ate olives, guys. Right.
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And then we murdered them and ate them.
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You know what You know you guys You're going to have a great life. Yeah.
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You guys need You guys need to elevate your consciousness, okay? And have a party. Let's go.
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We need to get some morels and some chickens and make some Yesterday we had morels.
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Chamath made morels white white asparagus with morels for you. So good. So good.
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The morel season has started. Everybody enjoy it.
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Lots of different news this week.
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You guys appeal You guys appeal to the common man.
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The morel season has started.
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Morels aren't that expensive.
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Tempeh is more expensive than both quinoa and morels. 100%.
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That vegan [ __ ] is way more expensive than normal people food. listen.
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We have to elevate the world's consumption of steak and meats.
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Um I think a good place to start is we've been talking about way, by the way, have you guys ever looked and on the back of any carton of oat milk, how much chemical nonsense is in that stuff? Yeah, no.
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really be Can that really be good for you? No. You know what I want?
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I want Give me Where's the oat milk that's just oats and water? Doesn't exist. It doesn't exist.
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It's like soy lecithin, xanthan gum.
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Like is that stuff can't be good for you?
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You know, Sachs drinks in a 12 oz glass of milk with every dinner. They just drink it.
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way, the almond The almond milk at like the Whole Foods is riddled with sugar and all this other nonsensical chemicals as well.
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Man, I mean I mean people trash milk, I get it, but like uh and as if you're lactose intolerant, I understand you're in a pinch, but like why go to an alternative milk that is just riddled with just all of this terrible, terrible stuff?
6:59
You know, Sachs used to love to eat brie cheese so much that whenever we'd have a party, somebody would bring brie blocks with the sugar with the with the wheel of brie?
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He would literally eat an entire brie wheel on his own. sugar.
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No, they would put the brown sugar on top, they would melt it and Sachs Freeburg, Sachs has eaten an entire brick of brie in front of us. Oh my god.
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What was the origin of your brie obsession, Sachs? Stanford. Happened at Stanford.
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You just at some point became a francophile.
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The last guy I would think that would eat brie. What's the matter?
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You just don't have I mean what about cheddar?
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What a great American cheese.
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No, you just prefer the French, huh? Yeah, you know.
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You still got that fetish for brie?
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We start the a I got to go.
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Yeah, we got [ __ ] to do. We got work to do. I got 45 minutes.
7:45
Zack, Zack, is that fermented kombucha? Stop. Stop.
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This is just plain iced tea.
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Sometimes it's just good to be normal. Normal. Unsweetened.
7:56
Oh, oh, you're back on trying to catch up? Trying to catch up? Okay, here we go.
8:01
Listen, we've been talking a little bit about the contraction in tech, the growth stocks having their multiples um lowered, and we knew this was coming, but um it's been a horrible week uh for large companies uh starting the layoffs. We knew this was coming.
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We predicted it probably 6 months ago. fast.
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com is a one-click checkout startup uh fast. co.
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They announced they're shutting down on Tuesday.
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This after the company grew to 450 employees and generated reported $600,000 in revenue.
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Uh I think that their employees could have made more money if they did one Gordashian day delivery.
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At its peak, Fast was burning $10 million a month according to reports.
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I think The Information got most of this information.
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While only generating about 50K a month in revenue.
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Their $102 million series B was led by Stripe in January of 2021.
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Company raised $124 million in total. Also, better.
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com, which we talked about, you remember?
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They had their uh horrific, cringeworthy founder lay off a bunch of employees over Zoom.
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Um and they laid off 900 people December 1st, 3,000 people on March 8th according to TechCrunch.
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For the 5,000 remaining employees, on April 5th, better.
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com offered corporate and product design and engineering employees the opportunity to voluntarily resign in exchange for 60 days paid severance and health insurance coverage.
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Better CEO is Vishal Garg.
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Uh hopefully I'm pronouncing that correct.
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Noted the uncertain mortgage market conditions of the last couple of weeks have created an exceedingly challenging operating environment for many companies in our industry.
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And then going to Gopuff, which, you know, I had the founder on uh This Week in Startups, and he's a pretty good um you know, like pretty realistic about the margins in that business.
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They're making a modest cut of 3% of their 15,000 staff.
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Seems like a reasonable thing to do uh given how the market has changed.
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But again, their valuation was absurd, 1.
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5 billion at 40 at a $40 billion valuation in December.
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Chamath predicted a lot of this uh and that people would have to sharpen their pencils.
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We had a discussion about this, you know, the the good times are IP. What's your take?
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Is this the the beginning of the end, the the middle?
10:22
Where where are we at in this cycle?
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And what's the reasonable thing for founders to do here?
10:25
I think uh so you we probably should take the the macro and then boil it down to the startup.
10:30
So, at the at the macro level, I think that we're playing a very dangerous game of chicken with the Fed.
10:41
And you can kind of summarize it in the following way, which is that, you know, three or four months ago, we only thought that there was going to be a handful of interest rate increases.
10:52
And increasingly what has happened, the market has remained so resilient that the Fed has sort of put out more and more data as the data has justified them being a lot more aggressive.
11:04
And it kind of crescendoed this past week, where they basically said, "Listen, you know, we're going to move by 50 basis point increments for the foreseeable two or three rate hikes, and we're going to start quantitative tightening." What does that mean?
11:14
That means that instead of basically printing money and coming in and buying securities from the market, right? So, what happens?
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When they enter the market with money that they literally do print and buy your bonds, they're giving you cash in return.
11:29
And typically what that has led to is the inflation of all assets, right?
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Equity assets have gone up, bond assets have gone up because there's just nothing else to buy.
11:39
When quantitative tightening happens, they reverse that.
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And what they're going to do is about $95 billion a month of the opposite action, which means they're taking money out of the system. Right?
11:51
Or in this case, what they're going to do is they're going to let a bunch of maturities roll off and not not renew them.
11:56
Okay, so why is this important?
11:59
Well, it's important because you know, we're still 4% from the highs.
12:03
So, we have 7% inflation.
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We have all this crazy stuff happening.
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We have a war, you know, going on.
12:07
We have massive price issues.
12:10
We have supply demand issues.
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And the market keeps shaking it off.
12:15
So, I think what the Fed's going to do is get even more aggressive.
12:16
You're going to probably see, you know, a lot of 50s, maybe even a 75 point hike.
12:20
You probably are going to see them, you know, even ratchet up quantitative tightening until there is a bit of a bloodletting in the equity market.
12:34
They need to see that the market's cracked.
12:37
And so, they literally need to see what percentage drawdown or just to go sideways?
12:40
What do they need to see in order to Or is it inflation coming down a couple points?
12:44
Well, the problem that we suffer from is that they're going to look at the highest level indexes, right?
12:49
They're not looking at single stocks.
12:50
And so, when they see like when you and I think the market is down 4%, we don't feel that cuz some of our companies are down 50 and 60%. Right?
12:58
But that's because we're all focused on high-tech growth.
13:00
But they look at the broad indices and the broad indices have held up really well and mostly it's because, you know, if you look inside the S&P 500, 40% of every dollar is, you know, Apple, Amazon, you know, Microsoft, etc. , Tesla.
13:12
So, we're in a situation where I think until the Fed see that there's a massive trading of liquidity, which means like you see these indices crack big time, 35, 3600 in the S&P, they're just going to keep ratcheting things up.
13:28
As it comes all the way down to our companies in Silicon Valley and tech, what that means is like you have to start planning for the worst, and I think the worst means that there's an 18-month period where you cannot raise money on your terms.
13:44
You have to raise money on the market terms.
13:46
Um and so if you're not in a position to show good growth over these next 2 years, I would encourage you to just get your balance sheet in order to wait it out.
13:53
Sacks, nuclear winter is a possibility here.
13:55
Markets for startups raising money, again as you're trying to say, could be on the terms of the capital allocators.
14:03
What what's your advice to founders?
14:05
What are you seeing in the boardrooms that you're on the board of?
14:08
And if you were running one of these high-growth companies for the past year, what are the first two or three things you do?
14:14
I mean, the first thing you got to do is look at your burn multiple.
14:16
I mean, how much are you burning relative to how much incremental ARR you're generating?
14:18
You look at Fast, they raised 120 million what, like a year ago?
14:23
They They're out of money now, so they burnt 10 million a month, like you said. Here's the crazy thing.
14:27
If they had just slammed on the brakes three or four months ago, when we were talking on this pod about the coming downturn, they could still have $30 million in the bank. That's a lot of money.
14:36
The only reason it doesn't seem like a lot of money is cuz they've been burning 100 million over the past year.
14:42
But objectively, $30 million is a gross series B, which is actually a lot of money for a company that only has 100,000 in revenue.
14:49
So they could have saved that company if they had slammed on the brakes 3 months ago and rationalized cost structure, and they didn't.
14:55
So they hit the wall at 100 miles an hour.
14:59
something like that happens, David?
14:59
Cuz you We've all seen it.
15:01
What is this suspension of disbelief that creates this kind of stupidity?
15:05
That I mean, that's what it is.
15:07
I mean, you've got you've got people who are kind of drinking the Kool-Aid, and there's nobody advising them to stop, or if there is, they're not listening.
15:14
I mean, look, PayPal had this situation back in 2000, the year 2000, right after the dot-com crash.
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We were burning $10 million a month like fast.
15:24
We had no revenue and no business model, okay?
15:26
We had said that the service would be always free.
15:33
We had four months basically of life and we pulled up on the throttle and what we did is we basically introduced paid accounts.
15:38
We started charging transaction fees and we cut the we cut the cost structure of the company and we made that last $40 million last a lot longer than four months.
15:48
It lasted until we could then do another fund raise the following year and we were able to then raise with good numbers, real revenue, a business model, etc.
15:57
So, you know, and that was because we were just paying attention to the changing environment.
16:02
The world had changed from sort of the pre dot com crash, you know, 1999, your business model didn't matter, your margins didn't matter, revenue didn't matter, none of that stuff mattered.
16:12
All that mattered was growth, but by, you know, mid 2000, everything had changed.
16:17
So, you have to be attuned to what the fund raising environment is looking like and if you're a high burn company right now that's not generating a lot of revenue to go along with it, you better slam on the brakes and rationalize your cost structure before it's too late.
16:32
David, tell me like what what do you think is going on in this board meeting?
16:35
I mean like this is a group of incompetent incompetence.
16:42
I don't even know who's on the board because Stripe led two rounds, I think, and so look, when you of it, David, that you you and listen, we all love Stripe, it's a great company, it's it's a legendary company, but one of the reasons we don't like to have strategics is maybe they're not thinking the same as a a proper capital allocator and for them this is peanuts. Right, exactly.
17:02
No, look, the reason why a strategic investor Sorry, go ahead.
17:04
I think the reason why a strategic investor invests is because it's strategic for them.
17:08
I mean, it was in Stripe's interest to try and back a winner in the whole e-commerce checkout line sort of payment space.
17:17
And so they did that and I don't even know if they had a board seat.
17:19
Um and so no one was really But I don't I don't understand that strategic decision because I I I suspect the rationale somewhere internally in Stripe which is pretty flawed is, "Hey, we can't do it ourselves because if we did we would be competing with our customers."
17:34
But picking a winner and putting $120 million is tantamount to the same thing. So I don't understand.
17:43
I mean Stripe It doesn't make any sense.
17:44
And so Stripe raised money at a what? $95 billion valuation.
17:46
So look, it all flows down from you know, the the frothiness at the peak.
17:51
No, I'm saying I think I would have It would have been much more credible for Stripe to say this is a critical piece of the infrastructure and value chain in payments that we want to own.
17:59
So we're just going to go and put some of our better engineers as like a you know, side project and see if we can tack away at something that works.
18:06
I mean I I think a lot of people would have adopted it.
18:11
But I guess there was a board To be clear, Stripe was on the board. Index was on the board.
18:15
Okay, that's interesting.
18:16
I mean those are some good investors.
18:17
Um there's a couple of people Index and who else?
18:20
According to Crunchbase, Stripe was on the board.
18:22
A business development person from there.
18:26
Index was on the board and Dom, the founder uh and uh looks like Brian Sugar uh who I know uh who's an angel investor and a founder.
18:35
Uh but who knows if that's outdated information in Crunchbase.
18:38
remember when Philip Kaplan used to run a website called FuckedCompany? Absolutely.
18:42
Good friend of mine, yeah.
18:44
Do you want to tell the FuckedCompany story Jake out for all the people that have no idea what that is?
18:47
basically what happened was dot com the dot com world was imploding.
18:49
All the employees didn't have a voice.
18:51
There was no social media at the time.
18:52
There was no blogs at the time.
18:54
The The only thing you could really publish on the in the world was like a a Geocities page.
18:58
You could put up a homepage if you knew how to do HTML. It's even pre-MySpace.
19:01
Um and so a friend of mine, Phil Kaplan, who does a very successful company called DistroKid now, started FuckedCompany and it was a message board.
19:10
And what he basically let people do was he would write three headlines, one sentence each, kind of like before Reddit existed, where you just put a one-line hit.
19:17
And then there was comments underneath them.
19:19
They'd say, "This company, we just got an email, this company's laying off people."
19:22
And he would beat all the news stories to the layoffs cuz he would just run with any email that came in.
19:27
And then people would detail and savage the management of those companies underneath it for malfeasance and explain exactly how ridiculous the spending was in that era, where people were burning money like drunken sailors.
19:40
I think this time around it's probably important for employees to understand a couple things.
19:45
One is like, who doesn't know what they're doing, right?
19:48
So, like companies that are making layoffs, those are those are happening, they shouldn't get punished for that.
19:52
But you got to think like the fiduciaries that are ripping this money in, I mean, do you really want to be the person that goes to work at a company that's backed by these folks in round two?
20:02
I mean, that's not a signal.
20:02
Like Like the opposite has always been a signal, right?
20:06
Meaning, when Mike Moritz makes an investment, we all pay attention.
20:10
Because we all think, "Wow, there's a picker." You know?
20:14
And he did that with Stripe and with so many other, you know, great companies.
20:17
And so the likelihood of an employee wanting to work for a Mike Moritz-backed company or a Mike Moritz-governed company is very high. Right?
20:22
Same thing with Gurley's, you know?
20:25
Same thing with a lot of a lot of really, really good investors, John Doerr.
20:32
But the opposite should also be true then.
20:33
Because if it if you really want to work for a Peter Thiel-backed company, you should probably not work for one of these companies where these folks who are just completely absent are also governing the board.
20:41
Cuz that just means like nobody knows what's going on.
20:45
We haven't had proper governance for a long time in Silicon Valley, so I mean, I think that's what what we we crashed We crashed and the Dropout were, in some ways, about incompetent boards. Both of those TV shows.
20:55
No, I mean, I definitely see this, um you know, I think you guys know the the incentive for a traditional venture capitalist that that that maybe isn't um you know, motivated by improving their craft, but they're motivated, you know, and incentivized primarily by making money is to to raise more capital and get in more deals.
21:19
And as you guys know, like every venture firm has maybe one or two superstars, and then they fill out the ranks and hire a bunch of folks who are maybe not superstars, or they don't pay as much attention.
21:28
You know, it used to be maybe a VC would sit on a handful of boards, and now it's like you're the board representative for 12 companies.
21:35
And that's a you know, you're not going to be able to provide quality time and service to to and support to the CEO and the and the company.
21:42
And more importantly, as you guys point out, like not provide good governance.
21:45
And governance isn't just about are you signing the DocuSigns as they come in to approve stuff, but it's about actually critiquing the business strategy with the CEO at the board discussion, critiquing the spending, reviewing the financial plan, making sure that everyone's aligned that this makes sense in this funding environment to continue to do this work.
22:03
And I don't see that a lot.
22:05
I I don't know about you guys, but I see a lot of VCs either pandering to the CEO because we have founder culture hysteria in Silicon Valley where it's true, the best founders make the 1,000 x returns, and that's it.
22:18
But that doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of the businesses um should be left to their own vices just because there are a few um ultra successful founders, but there are a lot of businesses that actually need governance uh in order to achieve outcomes.
22:31
And I see that lacking heavily in Silicon Valley because the VCs are more incentivized to raise more money, to make more investments, and then pay less attention, and just go raise the next fund.
22:41
Well, I think I think you said the key thing.
22:42
There are really very few star pickers in our business.
22:44
Um it takes decades to really prove that out.
22:46
And And those people But those people that are real pickers, I don't think put up with [ __ ] from anybody. just pickers.
22:53
Like so, John Doerr was deeply involved in Google in the early days. Like Yeah, you're right.
22:58
I'm I'm I'm simplifying our job, but what I'm saying is our job, okay, at the end of the day is we're picking, okay?
23:03
And then once you pick, you got to do the work.
23:05
If you pick poorly and you do the same amount of work, it doesn't matter.
23:09
Nobody's going to remember you.
23:10
Yeah, and what ends What ends up happening is the VC flushes the deal cuz it's not going to be the 100 bagger.
23:14
They don't pay as much attention.
23:16
They let the thing ride into the sunset.
23:18
And they're they're moving on to the next thing.
23:20
But there is still a duty and a responsibility, I think, to the shareholders and the employees of that company to, you know, do what Sachs mentioned, which is can you reduce burn under these circumstances and can you actively engage as a board member to encourage leadership to do that?
23:33
And that doesn't happen all But you said the key thing.
23:35
There are few practitioners that really have the gravitas to actually enforce those decisions.
23:40
So, you know, there's a reason why in during the Great Financial Crisis, there was only one organization that even had the courage, forget whether it was right or wrong at the time, to even write the RIP Good Times deck, right? It was Sequoia.
23:50
Nobody else dared to even put that on the page, let alone give it to all of their companies knowing that it would leak lest they be wrong.
23:58
And the reason Sequoia could do it is they're looking at a 40-year franchise and saying the integrity of our franchise is at stake.
24:03
We need to keep doing what we've done before.
24:05
And what it did, I think, in that case was pulled along a bunch of folks that were not as good as the top few folks, and it helped reorganize cuz if you see the three or four years after that GFC deck, Sequoia flushed that whole business, right?
24:19
There's an entire turnover of that team.
24:20
And so, I think what it speaks to is, and we talked about this in a few episodes ago, if you're seeking out AUM, you're going to hire a very different kind of person than if you're helping trying to help build companies.
24:32
And the difference is that when you're trying to raise AUM, your customer is not the company, the customer is the LP.
24:38
And what the LP wants to do is be able to write their investment memo and not get fired.
24:43
And the way that you do that is by pointing to the team and saying, "Well, this person worked at this company.
24:49
This person was a VP at that company." And it seems credible.
24:55
But between but being able to invest and being able to actually be a good operator is so different.
25:02
Look, I'll I'll also say one thing that's important.
25:04
You know, I I don't like this celebration or sorry that the mockery and the entertainment that comes from failure.
25:09
I I thought [ __ ] company.
25:12
Like I was young when it when it was out and you know, I would read it and kind of giggle at the stupid companies that got funding.
25:19
You know, but to me it's not like the kind of thing that could should kind of be funny or or or laughed at or even to mock failed companies. I mean, it's cynical.
25:28
I think the capital that's available in the markets today to support the building That wasn't that that's not what [ __ ] company was.
25:36
I don't I don't think it was people taking potshots as much it was people that. Oh, yeah. There was a lot of that. That that and cuz Yeah.
25:41
But would you admit But would you admit in fairness that there was a lot of people telling the truth? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Totally. No. No. No.
25:47
But but but but a lot of it was like this mockery.
25:49
Like can you believe this [ __ ] even existed?
25:50
Yadada and the cynicism I think you know, kind of you know, it's it's steals out the opportunity for for capital to support you know, new new ventures new initiatives like this.
26:02
You know, I also think that these businesses that today are looking to raise capital that are you know, let's call them good businesses.
26:13
They have a good opportunity.
26:15
They're going to be challenged in a marketplace where everyone is cynical.
26:18
Um and I'll say like scarcity breeds success.
26:22
When there wasn't a lot of venture money and there were only a you know, kind of a few investments that could be made each year.
26:31
There was a decision-making process that says, you know, look how valuable could this be versus this other opportunity that I could invest my capital into?
26:38
That says, okay, the best opportunity wins and gets picked and gets capital.
26:43
In a world where everyone was raising a billion-dollar second fund or a three-billion-dollar fourth fund and you suddenly had an influx of a hundred billion dollars of venture money in a year, it's a lot like what we saw in crypto markets, which is an extraordinary explosion in highly speculative bubble assets.
27:00
And a lot of these businesses maybe shouldn't have existed in the first place.
27:04
Too much demand for the stock of private companies uh And all the hedge funds that came into it, all the mutual funds that came into it.
27:11
supply of great founders and serious teams that are working hard on this.
27:14
I think with the case to fast, I agree with your general sentiment about dunking.
27:19
In In the case of fast, what you had was a founder who was on Twitter every day tweeting about how great the company was and giving startup advice while he was taking none of it and should not have been giving any of it because they didn't even have product uh market fit. Lesson learned.
27:34
You know You know who You know who should be criticized?
27:35
The next person that backs that guy. That's it.
27:39
You know that guy is what he got he's got a very interesting history actually as well.
27:42
I think if they'd done their due diligence They didn't do any diligence on him.
27:46
Apparently, he had two companies that were kind of major red flags.
27:47
And I think the diligence issue, Sachs, is one maybe you are having a similar experience to me on the early stage.
27:55
We were seeing deals last year close in a week.
28:00
We normally have 30 days to vet a deal and maybe a week or two to get our diligence wrapped up.
28:03
Sometimes these things overlap, but it's What was it, you know, historically?
28:07
A four to six week process and then it went down to a four to six day process and then people were meeting with you one day and saying they're closed the next.
28:16
Were you Did you feel like over the last couple years people were doing proper diligence or not?
28:19
And what impact did diligence have on any of this?
28:21
You know, I certainly I I can't speak to what our competitors were doing.
28:26
I don't think our diligence process changed much.
28:27
We would just have a mentality of when there was a deal that was urgent, we would drop everything and focus on that deal and get our work done.
28:35
And it can be done quickly.
28:38
Although it's easier for SaaS companies because the metrics that you're looking at are so standardized, it's just It's an easier process. It's just easier.
28:46
What's the most important thing in diligence?
28:47
In your mind, what is the like bullet that like people can't the silver bullet thing people can't fake?
28:53
Probably off-sheet customer references.
28:55
So, the the first thing we do is focus on the on the metrics, right?
28:57
And the the financials, the SaaS metrics, all that kind of stuff.
29:01
But then, you want to talk to customers and you want to understand the value they're getting out of the product.
29:07
And ideally, they're off-sheet customers.
29:08
Explain what off-sheet means.
29:10
Off-sheet just means that, you know, you frequently ask a founder to give you customer references.
29:16
Those are on-sheet references.
29:16
The off-sheet references are the ones that you find yourself that they never gave you.
29:21
So, like the easiest off-sheet references to do are when your own portfolio companies are using some other like piece of software and they tell you about it.
29:30
So, no you know, that it's a totally non-conflicted situation.
29:35
So, that that's what you're looking for.
29:37
So, one of your companies is using Stripe, they tell you how great Stripe is, they tell you what's good about it, what's bad about it.
29:44
But references you're giving, so it's sort of like back channel references.
29:45
If somebody tells you, "Here's my references."
29:48
can do the same thing on founders, too.
29:49
You can have on-sheet and off-sheet references for founders.
29:50
And you can do it for VCs.
29:52
Yeah, but but look, I think um I think it's probably a little bit unfair to blame the board of this company too much because the reality is that VCs don't have the leverage or the power in this business.
30:06
I mean, it's found this this whole construction of the industry is set up around founders.
30:09
And at the end of the day, it's up to the founder to run the company and they get to do what they want.
30:15
Unless they do something criminal, otherwise they're going to be able to do whatever they want. And or I disagree. Hold on.
30:19
Board Boards generally are very deferential to founders.
30:23
And if the founder's not willing to listen to advice, what are you going to do about that?
30:28
Well, that No, this is but this is the point you're making I think is not right.
30:33
You think that if Peter Thiel gave some advice to slow the company down that this guy uh would have not taken it?
30:36
Of course he would have taken know. I don't know about that.
30:39
He we had to consider it.
30:41
If Mike Moritz actually said it, he would have had to consider it.
30:44
I think what you're actually speaking to is in the Hold on.
30:45
In the rush to put so much money to work, we've elevated people who don't understand what the job is to do the job.
30:51
And if they're not credible, of course they're going to be ignored.
30:54
We all have ignored stupid board members.
30:57
You've done it, too, David.
30:58
But even, you know, let's let's actually look at Yammer as an example.
31:01
There were one or two of us that you would talk to pretty consistently.
31:04
You didn't talk to all of them.
31:06
I would always seek out advice.
31:07
Look, a good a great founder, a good founder always seeks out advice. No question about it.
31:12
But look, this idea that it's governance versus advice.
31:14
I mean, the problem with it being governance is all the institutional incentives for VCs are to be pro-founder.
31:19
So, no one wants to jam a founder by making them do something they don't want to do.
31:24
Well, I'm just saying that's that's the way it is now.
31:26
way, no, to be clear, that became a competitive tactic that emerged as more venture capital funds were raised and more venture capital was raised from LPs.
31:34
Prior to that, there was a scarcity of venture capital, and VCs could be could have good governance and not have to have this whole pro-founder model that became the thing that Founders Fund and Andreessen and others kind of proclaimed as being core to their advantage and the reason to pick them over some other VC who's going to meddle in your affairs.
31:51
And by the way, both are true.
31:53
There are most VCs, as Vinod has said publicly, add negative value, and I totally agree with him on this.
31:59
Because they are many VCs, particularly the ones who aren't, you know, valuable and don't really have much to add, try to add stuff, try to say stuff, and they just, you know, create negative value in the process.
32:10
But on the other hand, the whole pro-founder model led to the the WeWorks and Ubers of the world that, you know, I think we all agree. There's a trade-off. There's a trade-off.
32:19
I mean, look, I remember in the 1990s, the default was that the founder just got replaced, right?
32:22
Like, as soon as the company's successful, you hire a professional CEO.
32:26
That was just like rule of thumb.
32:29
Eric Schmidt, I mean, even the mighty Google did that.
32:30
Yeah, no, I mean, that was By the way, that was pretty much last That was the point I was trying to make, which was like, so much of John Doerr's influence was in getting Larry and Sergey to take Eric on as CEO.
32:40
And I really do think that that was like, you know, a critical move that created probably the that created the most valuable company uh in history.
32:48
Um and you know, it's it it it it it was an important Imagine if you had one of these Founders Fund and by the way, you know, as you guys know, I'm very close to the the guys at Founders Fund and um but but imagine if you had a Founders Fund type approach where you said, "Look, Larry and Sergey are the founders.
33:04
They know what they're doing. Let them do it."
33:05
as opposed to the John Doerr nuance of let's make sure that we think about the development of this company successfully over time.
33:10
And then convince Larry and Sergey through a bunch of meetings and riding bikes and whatever else they did with Eric, you know, to like And then And then what about Jim Breyer?
33:19
Didn't he bring Sheryl over to Facebook?
33:21
I mean, like, there's a lot of these stories of the really um you know, the VCs that really changed the trajectory of the business through their work. Right.
33:28
And but look, all I'm saying is the the the good VCs can still have that influence, but it's in the form of advice rather than governance. Right.
33:35
We we look, we just don't call the shots. right. You're right. It's It is It is advice.
33:39
But But for example, governance as an example, in in in in every board that I take, the first thing that I say is, "Here's a template I want.
33:45
I'm not going to ask you a bunch of stuff, but I just want some transparent reporting."
33:51
And the first page is always, "How much money you had at the beginning of the month?
33:54
How much money did you burn?
33:54
You know, how much equity did we give out?
33:57
How much is left in the pool?"
33:57
Simple, basic checks and balances. Right?
34:02
Where you're not asking all kinds of crazy questions.
34:04
You're just like, "All right, how much money are we burning?
34:06
How much dilution did we take?
34:08
Now tell me what we've done."
34:08
And those are simple elements of governance.
34:10
Way before you get into advice. setting.
34:14
What's the speed of the plane?
34:16
What's What's the elevation? Where are we at? What's the altitude?
34:18
And when you ask people for this today, it's do that, too.
34:21
Yeah, I don't know anyone that doesn't do that. I'll be honest. Like, Yeah.
34:24
Anybody that doesn't do it, honestly, is being completely irresponsible.
34:29
know anyone that doesn't do that.
34:29
I mean, I'm talking about I would love to see I would love to see a No, there's a little bit of that going on.
34:34
There's a little bit of that going on.
34:35
a fast board deck and to see if that first page is that page. The first page.
34:40
And by the way, you know where I learned that from?
34:41
From Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.
34:43
Because back in the day, what I saw from founders was oh, this is the first thing I have to report on.
34:47
I was taught by founders when I was a when I was a principal at Mayfield.
34:51
They're like, this is how you do the job.
34:52
And I was like, great, thanks.
34:54
I mean, I mean, I was, you know, sitting beside these guys that were old hands at doing it.
34:59
And that's how I learned this business through that apprenticeship.
35:01
But there was governance and advice.
35:02
And the governance is just about being transparent about how much money are you burning.
35:07
And so, you can't, you know, to David's point, if you had just seen that data, even if you take those board decks, by the way, because you have these information rights, I don't know about you guys, but we did it we did it as well.
35:18
You take the board deck, you circulate it to your other partners.
35:22
There's lots of times where I see board decks in companies where one of my partners are on the board and I send them an email of like, hey, here's some bullet points of things to think about that I've seen before, etc. etc.
35:30
You don't think nobody at Stripe or Index could have said, uh you're burning $10 million a month and there's no revenue?
35:38
So, the point is that data was not there.
35:40
30 or 40 million dollars in the bank. Give me a break, guys.
35:42
So, this was a whole a cataclysmic failure at the advice level and at the governance level.
35:48
And all I'm saying is it's a good lesson for folks to learn. Absolutely.
35:52
Yeah, so many point people's attention to articles I wrote that I think are relevant.
35:57
So, first, we actually published an article on the SaaS board meeting deck that we like people to use and obviously they're free to use or not.
36:05
To Chamath's point, right up at the top as a context setter, we need to know what's your monthly burn and how much money is in the bank.
36:11
And that and then we just divide those things to create runway.
36:14
We don't like looking at projections for runway. Totally.
36:15
We just look at how much you burned last month and how much money you got in the bank. Totally.
36:21
Monthly cash flow Right, exactly.
36:22
And when they were down to 30 or 40 million dollars burning 10 million a month, somebody should have like thrown up a red flag and said, "You better slam on the brakes right now cuz you're going to be out of business in three or four months."
36:31
So So that that that's that's sort of piece number one.
36:35
The The other piece was an article I wrote a couple of years ago called Blitzscaling, which is how not to go off the rails because a lot There's a lot of literature out there about Blitzscaling, and a lot of startups think they need to scale as rapidly as humanly possible.
36:50
And I wrote this piece about how fast-growing companies that raise lots of money at high valuations basically go off the rails and they end up imploding.
36:58
And there's like 11 reasons why this happens.
37:00
I sort of categorize them.
37:02
One of the biggest ones is founder psychology.
37:04
You have a founder who believes that things are always going to be up into the right.
37:07
It's they they It's funny.
37:10
They're always described the same way.
37:11
Described as visionary, charismatic, and the word crazy is often used, but it's crazy good.
37:16
And then when everything goes to [ __ ] all of a sudden the word crazy means something pejorative and bad.
37:22
And you know, the the problem is that, you know, these characteristics of being highly visionary and charismatic, they also can be combined with an unwillingness to listen to advice.
37:33
And so, you know, founders who have those qualities, they're they can be a good thing, but they have to seek out advice from people who've had experience.
37:42
Otherwise, they're going to make a mistake and hit the wall.
37:44
Being delusional is you know, what you need to start these companies.
37:48
Like I'm going to beat these incumbents.
37:50
I'm going to change the world.
37:52
A little bit of delusion is good, but not when you're looking at how the runway, right?
37:55
Like That's when you need to be pragmatic.
37:58
I think um you know, there's a term of coachability.
38:02
You know, how how coachable is this person as as a CEO as a leader?
38:07
Um and I do think that coachability goes hand in hand with intellectual curiosity.
38:10
curiosity. I mean, if you look at the Collisons, Patrick Collison, and and how much breadth he has in some of the the topics he's interested in and the things he writes about, it indicates to me a high degree of intellectual curiosity and people who are intellectually curious generally are very humble
38:26
because they're they're constantly seeking things they don't know and they recognize that they don't know a lot of things and in that same kind of mentality they are willing to recognize that other individuals can have good points of view that can inform their perspective and they're willing to change their perspective. And I think
38:39
And I think that's a really key key key thing that if you look across the the the range of successful founder CEOs that scale to 100 billion dollar plus valuations for their businesses, that to me is one of the more common threads is this kind of intellectual curiosity which translates into a coachability which translates into an adaptability is and being willing to take advice.
38:59
And so your board is a tool not kind of a governance structure or sitting over you.
39:04
We we we are like that the more you are likely to feel like your board is a governance structure or an umbrella sitting over you telling you what you can't do.
39:10
I don't think that's what governance means by the way.
39:11
Well, governance meant to it's it's meant to look out for the shareholders. That's the job. Right.
39:16
Sure, but but to act as a fiduciary doesn't mean to like tell the CEO what to do.
39:20
This is my point like I'm just saying like It's it's not say it's not I think I think he's right about I think Friedberg is right about how boards are often perceived by founders.
39:27
I think there is an increasing let's call it a Hollywood director a Hollywood auteur mentality towards VCs.
39:37
J Cal on the All-in podcast, right?
39:39
Well, it's it's basically it's basically look there there are certain incubators out there and accelerators and whatever who teach these young founders that it's all about their vision and anyone who stands in the way of it is basically interfering with them. Totally.
39:52
And they they are the auteur like a Hollywood director and you got to stay away from those suits the studio guys, right?
39:58
That's the mentality they're trying to they're teaching them.
40:01
An adversarial mentality.
40:04
An adversarial mentality.
40:04
And look there are to Chamath's point there are plenty of VCs who don't know what they're doing.
40:08
They have no useful advice to offer.
40:10
But the better mentality to teach a founder would be like look it the world is so complicated and building a company is so complicated, it's going to be 10 times more difficult if you don't seek out advice.
40:20
So, go find board members who will let you ultimately do what you want, but will still give you the advice if something's going wrong.
40:28
And what was true at one point in time when Paul Graham gave this advice and he set up Y Combinator, you don't want to say their name, but it is Paul Graham had a terrible experience in his company with venture capitalist.
40:36
So, he set up that wartime stance between founders and the investment community and you know, Founders Fund became the antithesis of the traditional venture funds and they were going to be founder focused.
40:47
So, but that advice then might have been true and now it's not.
40:51
Now we've swung the pendulum too far the other way.
40:52
We did two things cuz we saw this 10 years ago when I started seed investing and then when I started building positions of over 5% I just said to founders, if we own over 5 or 10% we should have an option of a board seat and we'll do board seat we'll do board training with you.
41:07
you. We'll we'll just teach you, we'll take like here's some decks that we've seen from other, you know, here's some decks that are available and we'll show you what a board is like and then I would have three founders come, two
41:16
would sit on one's board meeting and I would do three back-to-back board meetings, bring your counsel, bring your founders and sit in on the other two board meetings and we'll have a little Socratic discussion about what was good about each board meeting. We did board
41:26
We did board meeting training as a proxy for venture worthiness later on and when those companies did go out to get venture and they had an ESOP and they had board minute meetings, they just looked more impressive to the venture community.
41:37
So, I know people say don't do a board, it's not cool.
41:40
It actually turns out doing a 1-hour board meeting four times a year, six times a year, even as a seed stage it it does differentiate you to the venture community, I find.
41:51
All right, moving on and speaking of boards, Elon bought a chunk of Twitter last week, a 9% stake and he's joining the board.
41:58
That makes him the largest individual or the largest shareholder individual or institutional.
42:03
He bought the shares in March.
42:06
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal tweeted, "I'm excited to share we're appointing Elon Musk to our board.
42:14
Uh, and then Jack tweeted in support, I'm really happy Elon is joining the Twitter board, exclamation point.
42:18
Just to give some level setting here.
42:20
Uh, in Q4 of 2021, Twitter had 1.
42:23
5 billion in revenue, up 22% year-over-year.
42:25
They've really been starting to ring the register over there.
42:29
Uh, daily active users are solid but modest, 217 million uh, daily active users, 38 million of which are in the US, 179 million are international.
42:41
And their stated goals uh, for Q4 of next year, 2023, so in a year and a half, they want to have 315 million.
42:45
And they want revenue in 2023 to hit 7. 5 billion.
42:51
Again, they're on a $6 billion run rate, so I guess that would be an increase of 25%.
42:57
Uh, just general thoughts on uh, and Elon obviously has been making uh, some Twitter suggestions uh, for the product.
43:04
Sacks, you worked with Elon at PayPal.
43:07
Thoughts on what this does for That wasn't Why you're laughing?
43:11
It's like such a funny transition.
43:13
Sacks, you worked with Elon at PayPal.
43:18
Worked for Elon, I guess.
43:19
sure I'm sure he's going to have some great product ideas, but what this is really about is free speech, you know, right before Elon announces he was doing polling, asking the Twitter user base whether Twitter was succeeding or failing in its mission to be an open town square, an open marketplace for ideas.
43:34
Something like 70% said they were failing at it.
43:36
Elon on many occasions has spoken up for free speech.
43:39
He believes that Twitter's historic mission is as an open town square, and I think he's going to bring that emphasis to the board, and it's a great thing.
43:47
Now, I think the person who had the best take on the reaction to this was Mike Solana.
43:54
And he had a few funny tweets about this. Who does he work for?
43:56
Is he a Founders Fund guy?
43:57
I think yeah, I think he he works for Peter at Founders Fund, but he's got a he also writes a great news Substack newsletter, kind of like a blog post called uh Wires. It's worth checking out.
44:08
He's He's a pretty In addition to being a pretty sharp analyst, he's actually says a lot of funny things, too.
44:14
He's iconoclastic and yeah, he he he he he'll he'll swing the sword.
44:16
Yeah, so the way he put it is that, you know, Elon joining the board has all the worst people on Twitter furious.
44:22
They think that this guy might actually save free speech, and for authoritarians, that is an existential threat.
44:30
And then he added, um I don't get what the problem is, guys.
44:32
If you want censorship, you can just go build a new social media company and do censorship there. It's a free market.
44:37
Thereby turning on its head everything they've been saying, which is, you know, when the people who the authoritarian the authoritarian people who love censorship, whenever anyone complained about censorship, they would always say, "Well, just go create your own social network, you know, we're free to do what we want over here." truth, whatever. Exactly.
44:53
Well, this is This is the free market acting in a way they don't like, which is finally somebody who believes in free speech is going to stand up, buy the largest stake in Twitter, join the board.
45:03
I mean, this is fabulous.
45:05
I think it's really fabulous.
45:07
I think it's pretty amazing, yeah.
45:09
And the stock went up 30%.
45:09
What do you think, Chamath? Yeah.
45:12
I texted you guys in the group chat.
45:12
I think that if he is able to make free speech cool again, he'll he'll actually do more doing that than potentially through SpaceX and Tesla, and that's already saying a lot.
45:26
Because free speech really is this fundamental principle of democracy, and it's been decaying.
45:29
We don't know the implications of a large technology company keeping free speech as a principled pillar of their uh reason to exist. Right?
45:40
Because we have seen free speech kind of decay, and we've seen sort of, you know, random decision-making that seems arbitrary by a lot of these technology companies.
45:50
And, you know, the payments companies, Friedberg was mentioning Visa and MasterCard earlier in the group chat.
45:56
But all of these things can change on a dime if Elon makes free speech cool again and figures out a way to make that a principle that everybody can embrace?
46:02
Because then if you really believe in that, then you go to the next logical conclusion, which is what David has said for forever, which is the only solution to, you know, speech you don't like is more speech.
46:12
And then that creates a surface area that I think you can technically maneuver around.
46:17
So, meaning, what are the real problems in all of this speech?
46:20
It creates It creates a, you know, content moderation issue, right?
46:22
It creates a a spam issue, and it creates a sort of wisdom of the crowds ranking rating issue.
46:28
So, Misinformation comes to mind. Yeah.
46:29
But that's a that's a wisdom of the crowds ranking rating issue in my book.
46:33
So, I I guess the point is that, you know, if he can get the Twitter employee base fundamentally on side of this idea of free speech as a principle, that's I think is enormous because you know that none of the other big tech companies will ever even do that.
46:47
And the capital structures of those companies will never allow a single strong voice like his to enforce that idea.
46:56
So, this is the only company where that could happen, and I think, you know, we want to see what this how this plays out.
47:02
I think it's a really really big deal. All right, Freeberg.
47:04
Yeah, I'll tell you what I think changes Facebook, Twitter, even Google all acquiesced to significant external pressure over the years.
47:16
I've said this in the past.
47:16
I believe the founders of those companies are all philosophically fundamentally philosophically aligned with the notion of free speech and um absolute freedom of information, you know, enabling truth finding over time.
47:31
And the um the edge cases uh of those platforms ultimately um identify and uncover ways that they can be used uh against what, you know, many would consider kind of the the the the betterment of society, and as a result they acquiesce to external pressure that drives some of these censorship decisions and drives some of these um these behavioral uh changes by management.
47:57
But I think that if you concentrate the ownership of those businesses, and rather than have kind of a distributed shareholder base, meaning the public markets where the largest single shareholder in Twitter to date uh has been Jack Dorsey at 2.
48:09
3%, he actually serves the shareholders.
48:11
And the shareholders ultimately want to see the stock price go up, and they ultimately want to see the business make more money, and as a result, they don't have the same sort of uh you know, the the the the stakeholders there have kind of a different set of alignments over time.
48:25
You know, they're not necessarily the same long-term uh or focus, meaning does the philosophy come before the money?
48:31
And I think as you kind of concentrate ownership, you have the opportunity and the option now uh to you know, make make those sorts of decisions that you can't make when you're a broadly owned stock.
48:41
But, Facebook and Google are concentrated.
48:45
They have a dual-class structure, and they're dual-class, yeah.
48:46
So, what are you talking about?
48:48
The issue, Chamath, is in those companies, they're scared to death that they'll lose their employees and have chaos at work.
48:54
No, the issue is government. Well, it's both.
48:56
Also, you can also lose all your employees. There's both.
48:57
There's pressure from above and below.
49:00
It's yeah, it's shareholders it's shareholders and government regulators, right?
49:04
And so, in both cases, you have to acquiesce to the pressure.
49:05
And employees, it's a good point, yeah.
49:07
I understand, but I'm not sure how Twitter changes any of that. There it does. I'll tell you why.
49:12
Because if we look what's happened is sometime last year, I think it happened around Chapelle, and I think it happened because of Coinbase, we saw a group of folks say, "You know what? Enough's enough.
49:22
Yeah, we told you to bring your whole self to work.
49:24
We told you we would do your laundry.
49:26
And then at some point, Netflix was like, "Listen, you don't have to agree with every comedian on our platform.
49:32
There's a range of comedians, and if you disagree with this one, you can do a walkout, you can protest, you can make your feelings hurt, or you can choose to not work here."
49:38
And then, Daniel Ek kind of did the same thing.
49:40
He said, "Listen, at Spotify, we're going to put labels on it.
49:44
If you don't like Joe Rogan, don't work here."
49:45
And then, of course, we know Coinbase did it, and Tobi from Shopify did it.
49:50
And now you have Twitter doing it.
49:52
And when you apologize and you start listening to this very vocal minority when they're upset and they want to cancel people or they want to de-platform people, what do they do? They double down.
50:06
You've shown that you're going to listen to them.
50:08
They're not doing it at Coinbase anymore.
50:10
They're not going to do it at Spotify anymore.
50:11
They're not doing it at Netflix.
50:12
And Apple acquiesced, right?
50:15
They're like, we don't like, you know, Antonio's book Chaos Monkeys and he said these three things in an award-winning book that we find are we're going to fire him.
50:22
I think at some point Apple's going to have to say, you know what?
50:26
Leave your feelings at work.
50:26
And and this is a company Leave them at home. Thank you.
50:31
This is why Elon is so dangerous to to these people is because he won't be pushed around.
50:34
The fact of the matter is that this whole woke mob thing is a paper tiger.
50:39
They don't have the support of most of the population.
50:42
It's a handful of very noisy voices on Twitter and social media who insist on having a monopoly on the right to shape all of our narratives.
50:51
You know, they they want a monopoly on moral outrage.
50:56
They want a monopoly on moral outrage.
50:57
They want a monopoly but they also want the monopoly on the ability to basically to to define what is acceptable and and and what the what the narrative on any topic is going to be.
51:07
And all it takes is one strong person to stand up to the mob as we saw Brian Armstrong do at Coinbase and the mob dissipated.
51:15
He took, you know, Brian had to suffer They target.
51:18
They find another target. Exactly. So Yeah.
51:20
Elon doing this is a really big deal because again, he cannot be pushed around and he is showing leadership here.
51:27
And all it will take to end this woke censorship is for other founders to stand tall the way that Elon has.
51:34
And let's let's go into the nuance.
51:37
care what um employees kind of gripe about.
51:41
I don't think he'll care what regulators gripe about.
51:42
And I don't think he'll care what other shareholders gripe about.
51:46
He'll talk about the long-term opportunity, the philosophical alignment with mission, and uh and plow forward.
51:54
And I think that that level of leadership is what separates some, you know, great businesses from others.
51:57
But this is a very there were moments of deplatforming that were earned by people like Alex Jones, who was saying that the you know, families of Sandy Hook were false flags and their children weren't murdered.
52:11
There are, you know, Milo Yiannopoulos and some of these alt-right Nazi-sympathizing people throwing up swastikas, you know, people promoting violence or brigading on these services to attack people and to dox people.
52:23
Those people, those were just cancellations, deplatformings from YouTube. in your opinion.
52:27
Well, I mean, anybody inciting violence, I think we would all agree should be deplatformed.
52:31
Jason, look at how it's evolved.
52:33
We start with isolated cases like an Alex Jones, like a Milo that nobody likes and nobody supports.
52:39
The next thing you know, the president of the United States is being deplatformed, but again, that's supposedly based on him inciting a crowd.
52:46
Then, what's happening today?
52:46
Now we have entire categories of of opinion being banned. It starts with COVID.
52:53
Anyone who has Anyone who has a dissenting opinion now is invalid.
52:56
Anybody who has a dissenting opinion on COVID gets banned.
53:00
Now, anybody who has a dissenting opinion on climate change can be banned.
53:04
There's a story this week on CNN where Pinterest of all Look, Pinterest is a photo-sharing site.
53:10
I don't know No one's talking about climate change on Pinterest, and yet I was, but then I got deplatformed.
53:17
I mean, it just shows this censorship now is on autopilot.
53:19
I mean, even sites where the conversation is not taking place are banning entire categories of thought and opinion because it disagrees with, you know, what the experts say.
53:33
And J Cal, you could point out your Alex Jones case to make the case that deplatforming should be allowed.
53:37
The problem is as As as you make that case, it's only a slight degree it's a slight degree away from the next case and then a slight degree away from the next case and then fast forward 3 years and you're banning entire topics of conversation that ultimately may end up being proven to be a topic of conversation we should have had.
53:56
And if you look back, by the way, what great movie, Woody Harrelson, The People vs. Larry Flynt.
53:59
Larry Flynt was a pornographer.
54:02
It was easy for everyone to chastise him and for everyone to say, "You know what?
54:05
Let's go ahead and deplatform this guy back then and ban him and and charge him by the government.
54:11
And at the end of the day, he fought for his rights for free speech."
54:14
Now, all that being said, Larry Flynt was publishing using his own printers and selling on the street in a very legally compliant way.
54:21
There is a difference in having someone else's platform be the mechanism that you use to promote your voice.
54:27
If they choose, like Pinterest and Twitter and YouTube and Facebook and Google, to change how their platform operates, Zach, I actually think that's a commercial decision made by a private company.
54:36
They should have the right to do that.
54:38
But they're going to lose users over time.
54:41
They're going to end up looking like idiots when they're wrong by banning certain topics that we should be having conversations about over time.
54:45
And I do think that there are other mechanisms for us to use the free and open internet.
54:50
This is why I think the free and open internet is more important than anything, to have conversations using other platforms and other means.
54:55
I mean and and I'm I'm I'm I'm in Hold on, I just want to respond to to David as he did, you know, counter my point. I agree with you.
55:02
I think it went overboard and I think there are more reasonable solutions.
55:05
I think a time-based ban would have been better for somebody like Trump.
55:09
Um and maybe waiting to see what happens with the January 6th Commission, putting that aside, I know it's very controversial.
55:14
Um you know, when you just look at what Spotify did to our podcast, I don't know if you've looked at us in Spotify, every other episode says COVID-19 information here.
55:22
I think this is one of the best things.
55:24
If people want to talk about Ivermectin and it's an open science and Freeberg, you know more about it than any of us, and people want to debate it, why not link them to the most credible sources?
55:32
I think that's a great solution. Have a question. Yeah.
55:37
Is there an oat milk tag on Spotify? Yes, after all there is.
55:39
Oat milk, oat milk, oat milk.
55:41
Wait, when you listen to All-In Pod on Spotify, there's a tag that says there's COVID COVID-19?
55:46
Yeah, get COVID-19 information here. Yeah.
55:50
Okay, but back to Friedberg's argument about these companies should be free to do whatever they want.
55:53
So, I know that Friedberg I want to make two points about this.
55:56
First of all, I know Friedberg is sincere and genuine in that belief.
55:59
However, most of the people making that argument are completely disingenuous about it because on the one hand, they say that these companies should be free to limit speech when they like the outcome of that censorship.
56:08
But meanwhile, in Congress, they're pushing six bills forward to regulate these companies as monopolies.
56:14
So, they don't believe that they should be free to do whatever they want.
56:17
They believe that they're monopolies and indeed many of them are monopolies and even the ones that aren't monopolies act the same as all the other ones.
56:25
They act as a cartel to limit speech.
56:27
So, that's point number one is that nobody believes this argument that these companies should be free to do whatever they want.
56:33
The second point is that listen, the founding document of our country the is the Declaration of Independence.
56:41
It says that all of us have rights. They're inalienable.
56:43
That means they cannot be taken away, okay?
56:48
And in the first couple hundred years of this country, it meant that those rights meant that the government couldn't take away your right to free speech.
56:55
But now today, where does speech occur?
56:57
It It occurs on these giant social networks that are privately owned.
57:02
They're owned by these large corporations.
57:03
And the fact of the matter is, if they take away your right to free speech on these platforms, if they censor you, if they It's a great point, David. It's a great point.
57:11
you do not have a right to free speech in this country.
57:13
That right needs to be protected.
57:15
The founding fathers did not anticipate that four people would be mitigating the majority of conversations online.
57:21
It's you know, like if you're if you're taken off if you look what happened to Milo and Alex Jones.
57:25
Like they don't exist in the public sphere anymore, right?
57:26
Like they literally When these big tech companies all get together as a cartel to deprive you of your free speech rights, you have been depersoned.
57:35
You've been digitally depersoned.
57:37
And they're not just doing it on speech, they're also taking away your right to engage in payments, in transactions, to earn a living.
57:41
And unless we stop this now, it'll keep going.
57:46
We we have to address the giant elephant in the room. Huge, uh which is Trump.
57:48
Uh I think a lot of this, uh you know, he hit its pinnacle when people were saying the the sitting president of the United States could not be on Twitter.
57:57
That was, I think we all agree, ridiculous and absurd that the president who was duly elected couldn't have a Twitter account.
58:05
But then, with the January 6th and the inciting of the violence and, you know, all the stuff that's coming out, and obviously we'll we'll see where that all winds up.
58:11
I'm curious what everybody thinks here about should Trump or is Trump being put back and reinstated on Facebook or Twitter?
58:19
And it's supposed to be a lifetime ban on Twitter, but if corporate governance changes and people lobby for that, do we think that there is any kind of situation where Trump has his Twitter handle or Facebook accounts reinstated, and should he have them reinstated?
58:36
I think Jason, what you suggested is probably the most reasonable thing, which was there was a time-based penalty.
58:43
You know, we're we're getting through.
58:44
We're probably what, a third or two-thirds of the way through the January 6th stuff.
58:47
So, that's going to come and go, and I think all roads will probably lead to a conclusion that after 3 years, it's probably okay to let this guy back and be able to tweet.
58:58
I mean, it's not This is not you know, controversial stuff at this point.
59:03
You know that the current thing is moving on from Ukraine when uh the topic all of a sudden is January 6th all over again and Trump, which it is on MSNBC.
59:11
It's all January 6th all the time again.
59:13
So, listen, I mean, this is not a justification for the widespread censorship that we've seen.
59:18
Like I mentioned, we've gone so far beyond isolated cases.
59:20
Now, it's entire categories of thought, and this has to be stopped.
59:27
Well, what's your feeling on Trump? Should he be reinstated?
59:28
Would you have running Twitter would you have done a time based?
59:30
If you don't like Trump just don't follow him.
59:32
I mean, but but frankly, it's it's um Listen, I don't miss the tweets at all.
59:39
My thoughts have evolved.
59:39
I don't miss the tweets at all. I really don't.
59:40
Um They were damaging your party. That's how you felt.
59:44
My thoughts have evolved.
59:46
Before when he first got banned, I was really supportive of it.
59:48
Um and there was part of me which was just afraid that he would get reelected, etc. , etc.
59:55
Now come 2 years later and to see all of the stuff and the escalation of deplatforming, I think the problem is exactly what you guys have just talked about, which is the person that does it today points to the person that does it yesterday who points to the person that did it the day before as the justification.
1:00:10
And so even though we don't want to draw a straight line between an Alex Jones and a Trump and climate change, unfortunately, there is this line.
1:00:21
And so in general now, I'm much more free speech because I think it's much more fragile than I thought it was before. Got you.
1:00:25
Your opinion has evolved and intelligent people should respond to new data. I appreciate that.
1:00:31
And I was a person that, you know, as David said was a little disingenuous in the sense that I kind of was for free speech as long as it was stuff that I agreed with.
1:00:40
But 2 years later, I'm much more on David's original camp now, which is we just need to establish this as a pillar of society and not deviate and find credible voices on both sides and then algorithmically and through people power, meaning through crowd, you know, um wisdom of the crowds type stuff, help people figure out what is truthful and how much truth there is because that's a tractable problem.
1:01:07
But the minute you start canceling stuff today as I sit in 2022, what I would tell you is I think it's very, very bad cuz it's going in a really bad place.
1:01:15
Chamath, what are your thoughts on Trump specifically cuz it does seem like that's a part of the undercurrent here of, you know, he's going to be coming back, possibly going to be running again, and January 6th is concerned.
1:01:25
He's got the Truth Social Network. Download the app.
1:01:26
Listen to what he's got to say.
1:01:28
It's rocking and rolling over there on the the Truth app.
1:01:30
I heard they took it down like it wasn't even working, right?
1:01:35
The uh the new thing he built.
1:01:35
What is that What is that SPAC trading at?
1:01:37
Was it at 20 billion or something? Still doing well.
1:01:40
Um but look, they had you know, obviously a reaction a a market-driven reaction to the fact that he was taken off Twitter.
1:01:48
He said, "I'm going to go make an alternative."
1:01:50
And that's, you know, certainly proving to be technically difficult, but as we all know, it's not technically impossible.
1:01:56
He just got probably the wrong people working on it.
1:01:57
Um but if they wanted to have an alternative platform for hearing that voice, you know, have at it.
1:02:04
Uh I don't know what else to say.
1:02:05
I mean, it's Twitter's decision.
1:02:06
They're they're curating their audience.
1:02:08
All these guys want to be free speech advocates, but at the end of the day, they're all editorializing.
1:02:14
And that's just the world we found ourselves in.
1:02:16
I hope Elon takes a sledgehammer to that. Yeah.
1:02:17
I mean, it's exactly what Chamath said is they're all they all believe in free speech and free markets when it produces the outcome they like.
1:02:25
But when the outcome is not what they like, all of a sudden they're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, these companies are monopolies."
1:02:29
Well, and here's another opportunity.
1:02:31
If you're not libertarian and believe in like, you know, free speech and, you know, Constitution, like you could buy shares, you could lead a group, start a DAO, start a hedge fund, whatever, build a block to buy a bunch of shares, and then you can get a board seat on Twitter, and you can have this debate on the board of Twitter.
1:02:47
And it's an important debate.
1:02:50
You are absolutely right.
1:02:50
And you can see, by the way, you know, small hedge funds with small amounts of capital like Engine No.
1:02:55
1, you know, they were able to go up against it Exxon and beat them.
1:02:59
So, to your point, Jason, for the people that actually want to censor more, if they can organize the capital, they absolutely have the right to do that.
1:03:06
And I And I think that they if they if they're able to do it, they should win.
1:03:10
That's what That's That's what Mike Solana was kind of getting at.
1:03:12
It's like, "Look, if you don't like If you don't like the the free speech that's happening on Twitter, go create your own social network cuz that's what they were saying Buy the shares and have influence.
1:03:21
That's how corporations work.
1:03:21
The shares are the votes. Yeah.
1:03:23
Friedberg, update us on you know, the Ukraine is in month two now.
1:03:29
Uh I'm sorry, Ukraine is in month two.
1:03:31
Sorry for putting the the th before it.
1:03:33
It's a tough habit to break.
1:03:35
Friedberg, tell us um you know, the second-order, third-order effects of fertilizer and food at this point.
1:03:39
We've had this back and forth.
1:03:41
And now I think the world is starting to realize, hey, Friedberg was right.
1:03:45
These downstream effects are going to be significant.
1:03:51
I asked you a question about these, which is can the world not mobilize if these are about 1% of the calories, 20 or 30% of the calories in certain country?
1:04:00
Could the world not mobilize to find other caloric sources?
1:04:04
Rice, fish, soybeans, whatever.
1:04:04
Or is our system so fragile that we can't rally around sending food to anywhere on the planet despite the fact that we can fly anywhere and go on vacation for 2 weeks anywhere on the planet?
1:04:14
No, the food system is complex and efficient, but it um does not have strong um redundancy or malleability.
1:04:25
Uh so, uh take for example, you know, how do you get flour?
1:04:30
You get flour in um uh in your food from uh a food company that bought the flour from a miller.
1:04:38
There are mills around the world that process flo- wheat into flour.
1:04:40
You can't take that same mill and process corn into flour.
1:04:46
There's different technology, different equipment that's used.
1:04:48
Same with soybeans and so on.
1:04:48
So, when you look at how the food supply chain is constructed, you know, there's a local point of consumption, which is a store, then there's a food processor, and you work your way kind of up the supply chain, and there's a certain input that's required to make the output that people consume.
1:05:05
And so, calories, while they might be fungible practically speaking or or um philosoph- or fundamentally speaking, they're they're not necessarily fungible practically speaking on the ground when you actually try and plug in, let's say, soybeans into the milling supply chain to make the pasta or the bread that everyone consumes in Tunisia, it's not going to work.
1:05:25
And the same is true with rice.
1:05:27
And then the the more important um dynamic force that's underway is that these markets for food and commodities globally are not controlled by government, they're controlled by private businesses, and there's a market for these products.
1:05:39
And so what happens is as the food supply chain threat hit, countries like China and others started to stockpile.
1:05:47
They started to buy lots and lots of supply, drive up their stocks and their reserves, you know, for fear of the famine that's about to hit us in about 9 months.
1:05:56
And when they did that, there was now less food available to Tunisia and to Eritrea and to Egypt and so on.
1:06:03
And so we're starting to see the effects of that dislocation driving dynamic market forces where certain buyers stock up, and then the folks that can't afford to step in not being able to acquire product and being left.
1:06:15
So not only do we have a local production differential that makes it hard to have all calories be fungible, we're also seeing this dynamic where there's a bifurcation where the haves have more and the have nots have less.
1:06:25
that's going to really make this famine kind of hit home in a in a really, really sad way in the months to come.
1:06:32
We're already seeing as as I mentioned 2 weeks ago, yeah, I I as I mentioned a few weeks ago, the fertilizer problem driving acres down.
1:06:41
So the USDA farm report comes out, they survey farmers and figure out how much they're going to plant every year, and they just downgraded the number of corn acres are going to get planted this year, which is happening starting this month, from 93 million acres to 89 million.
1:06:53
That doesn't sound like a lot, but 4 million acres 4% yeah.
1:06:56
4 million acres coming out of production of corn in the US is an incredible amount of calories that are not going to be planted to corn.
1:07:02
And so that has all these downstream effects.
1:07:06
And again, this this crop doesn't come to harvest till, you know, September, October.
1:07:10
Then it's going to get processed and it turns into food.
1:07:11
So, by the time the the effect of this decision-making hit the marketplace, the availability of calories and the stock piling that's going on, it's like boom.
1:07:21
Some countries are going to be, you know, they're going to have a limited budget.
1:07:23
They're only going to be able to access so much food and they can't access any.
1:07:26
And other countries are going to be fine.
1:07:29
The United States is going to be fine.
1:07:30
Western Europe will be fine. China will be fine.
1:07:31
Sri Lanka is going to be a mess.
1:07:36
Northern and Eastern Africa is going to be a mess.
1:07:37
I mean, there's like places around the world that we are going to have to scramble.
1:07:40
I don't have a real easy answer.
1:07:42
There's no simple plug-and-play here.
1:07:44
It's going to be a really complex set of problems that are going to need to be solved.
1:07:47
Well, Sri Lanka does grow a lot of its own food.
1:07:51
So, they may be okay cuz they also have a importer, right?
1:07:53
I mean, they're pretty big net importer.
1:07:54
So, they make a lot of food, but they they they rely on imports a lot for for calories there.
1:07:58
So, yeah, I mean, that's the case with a lot of places around the world.
1:08:02
A lot of people think, oh, we have farmers, but most countries, you know, particularly in the developing world, are net importers.
1:08:09
They they they rely on third-party supplies of food.
1:08:12
So, but a lot of what you're talking about though are not um they're they're processed foods that come into the country.
1:08:18
Sachs, anything to add here?
1:08:19
Well, I mean, I think that Ukraine war is kind of entering a a chronic phase.
1:08:24
I mean, they're sort of sort of entering a new phase.
1:08:25
The first phase, you'd have to say that Ukrainians won.
1:08:30
You know, the Russia wanted to topple Zelenskyy's regime, maybe take Kyiv.
1:08:36
They obviously failed in that.
1:08:36
Now, we're in this phase where the fighting's over in the Donbas.
1:08:42
It's basically the civil war that's been going on there since 2014.
1:08:46
And and and really that's what it's now about.
1:08:49
Zelenskyy has acknowledged that Ukraine will not be part of NATO.
1:08:52
So, that issue is kind of off the table.
1:08:54
And so, what they're really fighting over now is the status of these disputed territories in eastern Ukraine.
1:09:04
And I think it's going to go on for a long time.
1:09:05
That's what, you know, General Milley testified it could go on for years.
1:09:08
I think it's going to become a sort of permanent feature in the background of Biden's presidency.
1:09:14
And I mean, I think the good news is that hopefully the World War III aspect is off the table, it seems like.
1:09:22
The calls for us to impose a no-fly zone or to put boots on the ground, which you you were hearing a lot of a few weeks ago, seems like that's off the table.
1:09:30
So, now this is going to be a protracted, I think civil war going on in the Donbas with between Ukraine and and Russia and their proxies.
1:09:38
Which would mean Sax, correct me if I'm wrong, that Putin will be hobbled forever.
1:09:43
They're not going to be a world power, and his power is going to deprecate because he's going to be busy fighting this non-winnable war for some period of time, which is in a way saying Biden did it perfectly and checkmated him.
1:09:59
So, I'm saying that's going to be your assessment if this actually goes down this way, that there's like a civil war going on, and and and Putin is crippled.
1:10:06
That would be checkmate or no?
1:10:06
I think I I think that clearly the the State Department's strategy here is to make Putin bleed in eastern Ukraine and to protract this thing and make it go on as long as possible.
1:10:16
I think that's a risky strategy because this thing could always spin out of control.
1:10:22
It's risky, but could it be effective?
1:10:25
Is there a chance it could be effective?
1:10:27
Well, I mean, if the goal is to bleed bleed Putin, yes, it could be effective at bleeding Putin.
1:10:31
However, I don't know that that needed to be the key geostrategic objective of the United States right now. I don't I don't hold on.
1:10:38
I don't know because look, China is our main threat.
1:10:40
China is a pure competitor to the United States. Russia is not.
1:10:45
Our economy is 15 times bigger than Russia's.
1:10:47
China's economy is about the same size as ours. That is the real threat.
1:10:51
So, you know, there are costs to us as well.
1:10:53
There are clearly costs to Putin of this, but there are huge costs to us as well.
1:10:57
Freebird described the risk to the supply chain.
1:10:59
We've had to now spend a lot more money building up the defense in Europe.
1:11:04
We're going to be pinned down in Europe.
1:11:09
We should really be moving some of those resources from Europe to to East Asia.
1:11:12
I mean, that's really where the pivot to Asia is what we thought we were supposed to be doing until quite recently.
1:11:17
Now we're going to be bogged down there.
1:11:21
And there's still risk of inflation and recession in the US.
1:11:23
And I think if we are in a recession later this year, I think a lot of people in the US will be asking, "What was this all for?"
1:11:30
And if you go read my article that just came out yesterday which was based on my speech, um it's published in the American Conservative.
1:11:37
Look, this war was easily avoidable.
1:11:39
I mean, the State Department could have avoided this war very easily.
1:11:42
your I listened to your speech.
1:11:42
I thought your points that you were very clear on, "Hey, Putin started this. He is the aggressor.
1:11:48
It's his responsibility."
1:11:49
But, you know, we do need to think about our foreign policy as a country and regime change is probably not a winning strategy for us.
1:11:57
Although, in this case, it might It seems like it's a possibility now. So, who knows?
1:12:02
Uh I don't I don't think we're going to get regime change, but if we do, there's no reason to believe that we're going to get something much better.
1:12:07
In every case where we push for regime change, we've actually gotten the same or worse.
1:12:11
Um so, yeah, I don't think that should be our objective.
1:12:14
Um you know, I look, I think we have a bunch of bad options now that the war has already started.
1:12:20
The best option would have been to avoid this war in the first place.
1:12:23
And if this thing drags on for years and the US economy tips into recession, people will look back and say, "Why didn't Joe Biden's State Department in the year 2021 do a much more effective job preventing this war?"
1:12:36
Let me ask you Let me ask this follow-up question as we wrap here.
1:12:37
Um Chamath, uh I've been thinking about what it what should a strategic objective be for America?
1:12:44
And the number one strategic objective I could think of was uh or one of the top ones would be to build a strong relationship with India, which obviously uh you know, it has an adversarial relationship with China already on the border of Pakistan and then obviously you know, has relations with Russia.
1:13:05
What would be on the top of each of your list, Sachs and Chamath?
1:13:07
Chamath, you go first on priority here if we're thinking fresh, looking at the world with China in retreat uh sort of disengaging from the West with Russia on their heels.
1:13:17
What could the United States and the West do as a preemptive measure to really solidify democracy and you know, the the world order, a peaceful world order?
1:13:29
I'll answer it slightly differently, which is we need to put ourselves in a position to not be dependent on any country.
1:13:36
Because then we can actually dictate what we think the right approach and solution is from first principles and have the courage to stick it through to get to the other side of it.
1:13:43
So, there are really two things we need to do.
1:13:45
The first which we've kind of perverted unnecessarily is energy independence.
1:13:53
And we've allowed too many people to conflate and muddy the water on what energy independence means.
1:13:56
You know, nobody's Nobody was ever advocating for coal, but you know, the amount of coal that we could have burned as a bridge fuel to LNG, which could have been a bridge fuel to things like nuclear and and wind and solar, that path was pretty clear, but we got in our own way.
1:14:09
We have to get out of our own way, okay?
1:14:15
So, energy independence, I think beyond anything else strategic yeah probably an order of magnitude, it is the most important thing.
1:14:24
And then secondarily, there are certain areas for the future of those future economies where we need to have complete capability and know-how, and the most important ones there are the specialty chemicals that we need, specialty chemicals that we need to basically support climate change writ large, to support battery production writ large, and then semiconductors.
1:14:46
Get those two things completely under US control on top of energy independence, and honestly, we would be a dominant world power for the next 200 years on our terms.
1:14:58
So, the road to resiliency, Sachs, you're now the Secretary of State, what are your key priorities?
1:15:05
The US grand strategy has always been to prevent the rise of a pure competitor who can dominate their region and then challenge us for global hegemony.
1:15:12
There's only one country in the world that can do that right now to us, which is China.
1:15:18
So, the pivot to Asia, as Obama said, was fundamentally correct, but we have not followed through and executed it.
1:15:24
And now, our attention is distracted and bogged down by what's happening in Europe.
1:15:27
I would seek a negotiated settlement to this war.
1:15:30
Now that the Zelenskyy government has survived, Putin has been unable to take Western Ukraine, and furthermore, that Zelenskyy has given up being part of NATO, the only thing left Okay, so wrap it up.
1:15:41
is this is this fight in the Donbas.
1:15:43
There's a There's an agreement already on the table called the Minsk Accords that could allow us to settle that.
1:15:48
Meanwhile, pivoting to Asia Yeah. Wrap it up.
1:15:51
Meanwhile, pivot to Asia, create a strong alliance of countries in East Asia who are threatened by China.
1:15:58
We already are friends with many of them.
1:16:00
You've got Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, you've got um Vietnam.
1:16:05
Create a balancing alliance of those countries to prevent China from rising to the point where it can threaten us for global hegemony.
1:16:15
That should be our main priority geopolitically. Great.
1:16:16
Uh all right, there you have it, folks, for the Rain Man, David Sacks, the dictator Chamath Palihapitiya, and the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg.
1:16:28
I'm your boy, J Cal, and we will see you all in Miami May 15th, 16th, and 17th. Love you, boys. Bye-bye. Love you, besties. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
1:16:40
You got to let your winners Rain Man David Sax.
1:16:48
And I said, we open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.
1:16:51
Love you as Queen of King Wah. Besties are back.
1:17:03
And if my dog takes a dump in your driveway, Sax. Oh, man.
1:17:09
Casheroo, meet me at the bunny ranch.
1:17:09
We should all just get a room and just have like one big huge orgy cuz they're all just useless.
1:17:14
It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. What?
1:17:19
Wet your feet, [ __ ] Wet your Wet your feet. What?
1:17:24
We need to get Mercy's Besties are back.