Fast 倒闭、董事会失职、马斯克买入 9% 的 Twitter，与「封号」的演化

Speaker 1 (00:00:00): everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All In podcast, your favorite podcast. And a lot of lot of topics on the docket including well, we'll get to that in a minute. Tons of stuff to talk about, not just politics, but Jason Calacanis (00:00:13): a lot of tech news. David Friedberg (00:00:14): You do sound really hung over today, Jay Kal. You sound like an old man that's been smoking cigarettes for 3 weeks. David Sacks (00:00:20): You sound wrecked. David Friedberg (00:00:21): How big was your night last night? Admit it. Jason Calacanis (00:00:23): I didn't go that big. Let's scale 1 to Charlie sheet. Speaker 5 (00:00:25): It was like a 6. There's David Friedberg (00:00:27): like a mark Sheen in his thirties. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:28): What does that mean one to Charlie Jason Calacanis (00:00:30): Sheen? A couple of beverages. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:31): I'm sorry. On a scale of one to Charlie Sheen, I don't think I've ever been past the one in my life. So what is a Speaker 1 (00:00:35): 6 Jason Calacanis (00:00:36): A 6 is like, you know, Paris Hilton, you know, in her heyday or, like, Lindsay Lowen. in Hollywood in the nineties. It's like, you know, like a good time, but not crazy. David Sacks (00:00:47): Mhmm. Didn't they have to go to rehab? David Friedberg (00:00:49): Exactly. I'm super high functioning. Speaker 5 (00:00:53): Charlie Sheen cannot Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:54): be sick. David Sacks (00:00:54): It was just like Lindsay Lowe and wait. Lindsay Lowe and the one who went to rehab, like, five times? Like, what David Friedberg (00:00:58): are you talking about? Yeah. That's a Speaker 1 (00:00:59): 6 David Sacks (00:01:04): I don't wanna know what 7 is. Jason Calacanis (00:01:07): to let your winners ride. Rainman David Sanders. And it said -- We Speaker 7 (00:01:15): open Joining us, of David Sacks (00:01:17): course, the queen of Speaker 7 (00:01:17): Kinois is here. Jason Calacanis (00:01:25): the thriller from Manila Valley. Speaker 5 (00:01:28): He puts the eye in anxiety. Jason Calacanis (00:01:29): He got his degree. From his Google pedigree, the Sultan of Science David Friedberg with us again, Alright. Next up, of course, Azar of ARR. He perfected the flywheel with his boy Peter Tiel. LPs don't be nervous because he's only investing in software as a service, the world's biggest asshole. David Friedberg (00:01:46): The rain Jason Calacanis (00:01:47): man himself, Steven Sacks. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:49): He's in Wait. David Sacks (00:01:50): You called me a asshole? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:51): A Sashole. David Sacks (00:01:53): That might stick. I don't know. Jason Calacanis (00:01:54): I hope so. David Friedberg (00:01:54): This might be heading towards kinda like a high school talent show kind of episode. But yeah. Go ahead. Jason Calacanis (00:01:59): And finally, the king of Spacks himself, the guru of growth. He puts the dick in dictator. He's gonna upset her with his sweater. Jamal's polyapatier. Alright, boys. I I can't be setting Speaker 5 (00:02:12): the audience to know. I can't keep this up every week. David Sacks (00:02:14): Yes. Yes. It's become a a very anticipated new feature of the show. Speaker 5 (00:02:19): It is. It's a new feature. Jason Calacanis (00:02:21): But, you know, I forgot we had, like, wet wet your beak and, you know, all this stuff. And all these -- -- flows. We come up with new things here. David Friedberg (00:02:29): We come Jason Calacanis (00:02:29): up with new things. Yeah. Alright. Listen. Just a quick programming update. All in sum, it's sold out. Basically, It's gonna be a great show. We got about a dozen speakers lined up. All kinds of great folks. And three great parties I wanna highlight. Monday a Sunday night will be the poker tournament. That's gonna be our goodfellas, godfather kind of theme, dress to impress the family. Night number 2, Monday night is going to be our Havana White party wear your best linens and whites. And then closing night party on Tuesday night, is going to be our Miami vice big eighties party, neon and t shirts under suits. It's gonna be a hell of David Friedberg (00:03:06): a story. Speaker 1 (00:03:07): 22,999,700 David Friedberg (00:03:10): people don't give a shit about what you're talking about right now. There's, like -- Well, Jason Calacanis (00:03:13): I just wanna make David Friedberg (00:03:14): a murderer. go to this party that you're throwing and Jason Calacanis (00:03:17): you're doing what they care. There's 700 tickets. I think there's gonna be 700 tickets issued, and there'll be probably four hundred people at the party. So they'll be pretty good parties David Friedberg (00:03:25): Uh-huh. We're in the party business here at the All in pod. Jason Calacanis (00:03:28): Well, I mean, I the world needs some good parties, in my opinion. It's gonna be Speaker 1 (00:03:32): 3 Jason Calacanis (00:03:32): back to back gray And the theme of the conference is the problem I most wanna solve in the world or the problem I most wanna see solved in the world. So we're asking every speaker to think about that and we're gonna kinda talk about the world's biggest problems and then who actually wants to solve them. David Friedberg (00:03:47): The world needs more parties. Jason Calacanis (00:03:48): Well, that's that's what I'm doing. That's my That's gonna be my 10 minute talk, my TED talk. David Friedberg (00:03:52): I've been I've been watching The WeWork show. Have you guys been watching it on the Speaker 1 (00:03:56): -- David Friedberg (00:03:56): Fabulous. -- TV plus? Yeah. -- elevating the world's Jared Leto is so freaking good in the as that character, by the way. Yeah. It's incredible. David Sacks (00:04:04): He David Friedberg (00:04:04): gotta get an Emmy elevating the world's consciousness as the mission and then just throw parties is the way to do it. I feel like you're you you really get that vibe. Like yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:04:12): I it's aspiration. David Friedberg (00:04:13): You could really -- -- world's consciousness with your with your summits. Jason Calacanis (00:04:16): I I told Bill -- While David Sacks (00:04:18): pocketing 1,000,000 of dollars. Jason Calacanis (00:04:19): it's not gonna make a profit. Whatever profit it makes, it's gonna go to Chemott's star chamber 50 person conference he's doing with the all in brand. So every everybody gets to leverage the all in brand. Speaker 5 (00:04:29): Yeah. First, you did it, Saxx, with your call in. Jason Calacanis (00:04:32): Now I'm doing it with the summit. Shamat's gonna do it his thing tanking. David Friedberg (00:04:36): I'm not gonna do it. Jason Calacanis (00:04:37): Coming soon from Friedberg, be all in unique, special, lose weight like your besties. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:43): He's gonna the it's it's the all in brand that allows you to lose weight in the following way. He brings his best vegan chef to you. David Friedberg (00:04:50): Oh, yes. Tempe -- Tempe and vegan shakes, your favorite amount. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:56): It's double fucking yuck. Right. Jason Calacanis (00:04:59): You don't vomit after you eat it. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:00): You're you're an caloric deficit for the month that that person refuses to leave your house, boom. You lose everything sucked. You lose weight. Jason Calacanis (00:05:07): They're like, hey. Watson Kinwah. You're like, no. And then you lose weight. No. It's breakfast. Give me Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:12): give me my olive infused beef, please. Speaker 1 (00:05:15): The olive infused beef. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:16): No. I'm sorry. Not olive infused beef. Jason Calacanis (00:05:18): All of fat. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:19): These beef only ate olives guys. David Sacks (00:05:21): Right. Jason Calacanis (00:05:22): And then we murdered them. You know you know, you guys you're gonna have Speaker 5 (00:05:26): a great life. David Friedberg (00:05:27): You guys need you guys Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:28): need to David Friedberg (00:05:28): elevate your consciousness. Okay? We have a party. Let's go. Speaker 5 (00:05:33): We need to get some Morels and some chickens and make some Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:36): Yesterday, we have Murrells. Sean made Murrells, white white as nervous with Murrells for you. Jason Calacanis (00:05:42): So good. so good the moral season has started. Everybody enjoyed. Lots of different news this week. David Friedberg (00:05:48): You guys appeal you guys appeal to the common man. The Morell season has started. Speaker 5 (00:05:54): Morells are a that expensive. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:55): Tempe is more expensive than both Quinoa and Morells. 100%. That vegan bullshit is way more expensive than normal people. Alright. Jason Calacanis (00:06:02): Listen. We have to elevate the world's consumption of steak and meats. I think a good place to start is we've been talking about Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:10): By the 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? Jason Calacanis (00:06:20): Yeah. No. I'm not Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:21): interested. be can that really be Jason Calacanis (00:06:22): good for you? No. You know what I want? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:24): Oh my god. Jason Calacanis (00:06:25): Give me -- Where's Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:26): the where's the oat milk that's just oats and water? Jason Calacanis (00:06:28): Doesn't exist. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:29): It doesn't exist. It's like soy, Lexitin, Xanthem gum like stuff can't be good for you? Jason Calacanis (00:06:35): You know, Saxx drinks and a twelve ounce glass of milk with every dinner. They just drink the Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:41): almond the almond milk at, like, the Whole Foods, riddled with sugar and all this other nonsensical chemicals as well. Man, I mean, I mean, people trash milk. I get it, but, like and as you if you're lactose intolerant, I understand you're in a pinch, but why go to an alternative milk that is just riddled with just all of this terrible, terrible stuff. Jason Calacanis (00:06:59): You know, Sax used to love to eat brie cheese so much that whenever we'd have a party, somebody would Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:05): do it in the box with the shoe with the with the wheel of brie. Jason Calacanis (00:07:09): He went there. -- eat an entire briewheel Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:11): on his own. -- sugar. No. They would put the brown sugar on top. They would melt it in sacks. Freebrook. Saxes eating an entire brick of brie in front of this. Oh my lord. Jason Calacanis (00:07:19): What was the origin of your brie obsession sacks? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:22): Stanford. Happen to Stanford. David Friedberg (00:07:24): Did you pray some point Jason Calacanis (00:07:25): in the game David Friedberg (00:07:26): of the country? Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:07:28): The last guy I would think that would he pray. What's the matter? You just don't have I mean, what about cheddar? A great American cheese. No? You just prefer the French. David Sacks (00:07:36): Yeah. You know? Jason Calacanis (00:07:37): You still got that fetish for free or no? David Friedberg (00:07:39): Start this show. I gotta go. David Sacks (00:07:41): Yeah. We got a shit to do. David Friedberg (00:07:42): We got a cup of work to do. I got Speaker 1 (00:07:44): 4 David Friedberg (00:07:44): minutes of minutes. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:46): Sach Saks, is that fermented kombucha? David Friedberg (00:07:48): Stop. Stop. David Sacks (00:07:49): This is just plain iced tea. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:53): Sometimes it's just good to be Norcore. Jason Calacanis (00:07:55): Normcore. Oh, oh, you're back on trying to catch up? Trying to catch up? Okay. Here we go. Listen. We've been talking a little bit about the contraction in tech. The growth stocks having their multiples lowered. And we knew this was coming, but it's been a horrible week for large companies starting the layoffs. We knew this was coming. We predicted it probably 6 months ago. fast.com is a one click checkout startup, fast.co. They announced they're shutting down on Tuesday this after the company grew to 450 employees. and generated reported $600,000 in revenue. I think that their employees could have made more money if they did one DoorDash a day delivery. At its peak, Fast was burning Speaker 1 (00:08:44): $10,000,000 Jason Calacanis (00:08:45): a month according to reports. I think the information got most of this information while only generating about 50 k a month in revenue. Their $102,000,000 series b was led by Stripe in January of 2021. Company raised a Speaker 1 (00:08:57): $124,000,000 Jason Calacanis (00:08:59): in total, all so better dot com, which we talked about. You remember, they had their horrific, cringe worthy founder lay off a bunch of employees over Zoom. And they laid off 900 people December 1st, 3000 people on March 8th, according to TechCrunch, for the Speaker 1 (00:09:19): 5000 Jason Calacanis (00:09:20): remaining employees on April 5th, Better com Waford Corporate and product design and engineering employees the opportunity to voluntarily resign in exchange for 60 days paid severance and health insurance coverage. better CEOs, Vishal Garg. Hopefully, I'm perhaps not correct, 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. And then going to Gopuff, which, you know, I had the founder on this week at startups, and he's a pretty good you know, look pretty realistic about the margins in that business. They're making a modest cut of 3% of their fifteen thousand staff seems like a reasonable thing to do given how the market has changed. But, again, their valuation was absurd, 1,500,000,000 at 40 had a $40,000,000,000 valuation in December. Chamath predicted a lot of this and that people would have to sharpen their pencils. We had a discussion about this. you know, the the good times, our IP, what you take? Is this the the beginning of the end, this the middle? Where where are we at in the cycle? And what's the reasonable thing for founders to do here? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:10:26): I think so we probably should take the the macro and then boil it down to the start up. So at the at the macro level, I think that we're playing a very dangerous game of chicken with the fed. and you can kind of summarize it in the following way which is that, you know, 3 or 4 months ago, we only thought that there was going to be a handful of interest rate increases. 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. And it kind of crescendoed this past week where they basically said, listen, you know, we're gonna move by 50 basis point increments for the foreseeable 2 or 3 rate hikes, and we're gonna start quantitative tightening. What does that mean? That means that instead of basically printing money and coming in and buying securities from the market. Right? So what happens? When they enter the market, with money that they literally do print and buy your bonds, they're giving you cash in return. And typically, what that has led to is the inflation of all assets. Right? Equity assets have gone up. Bond assets have gone up because there's just nothing else to buy. When quantitative tightening happens, they reverse that. And what they're going to do is about Speaker 1 (00:11:43): $95,000,000,000 Chamath Palihapitiya (00:11:45): a month of the opposite action, which means they're taking money out of the system. Right? Or in this case what they're gonna do is they're gonna let a bunch of maturities roll off and not not renew them. Okay. So why is this important? Well, it's important because, you know, we're still 4% from the highs. So we have 7% inflation. We have all this crazy stuff happening. We have a war. you know, going on, we have massive price issues, we have supply demand issues, and the market keeps shaking it off. So I think what the Fed's gonna do is get even more aggressive. You're gonna probably see, you know, a lot of fifties, maybe even a 75 point hike. You probably are going to see them, you know, even ratchet up quantitative tightening until there is a bit of a blood letting in the equity market. they need to see that the markets crack. Jason Calacanis (00:12:37): And so they literally need to see what percentage drawdown or just to go sideways. What do they need to see in order to Chamath Palihapitiya (00:12:43): Where Jason Calacanis (00:12:43): is it inflation coming down a couple of points? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:12:45): Well, the problem that we suffer from is that they're gonna look at the highest level indexes. Right? They're not looking at single stocks. And so when they like, when you and I think this market is down 4%, we don't feel that because some of our companies are down 5060%. Right? But that's because we're all focused on high-tech growth. 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 and p 540 percent of every dollar is Apple, Amazon, you know, Microsoft, etcetera, Tesla. So we're in a situation where I think until the feds see that there's a massive trading of liquidity, which means, like, you see these indices crack big time, 35, 36100 in the S and P. They're just gonna keep ratcheting things up. As it comes all the way down to our companies in Silicon Valley in 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. You have to raise money on the market terms. 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. Jason Calacanis (00:13:53): Zach, nuclear winner is a possibility here. Markets for startups raising money. Again, as Rod saying, could be on the terms of the capital allocators? What what's your advice to founders? What are you seeing in the board rooms that you're on the board of? And if you were running one of these high growth companies for the past year, what are the first 2 or 3 things you do? I David Friedberg (00:14:14): mean, the David Sacks (00:14:15): first thing you gotta do is look at your burn multiple. I mean, how much are you burning relative to how much incremental ARR are you generating? You look at fast, They raised a 120,000,000, what, like, a year ago that they're out of money now. So they burnt 10,000,000 a month like you said. Here's a crazy thing. If they just slammed on the brakes 3 or 4 months ago, when we were talking on this spot about the coming downturn, they could still have $30,000,000 in the bank. That's a lot of money. The only reason it doesn't seem like a lot of money It's because they've been burning a 100,000,000 over the past year. But objectively, $30,000,000 is a gross series b, which is actually a lot of money a company that only has a 100,000 in revenue. So they could have saved that company if they had slammed on the brakes 3 months ago and rationalized the cost structure and they didn't. So they hit the wall at a hundred miles an hour. Jason Calacanis (00:14:58): Who's responsible when something like that happens, David? because you we've all seen it. What what is the suspension of disbelief that creates this kind of stupidity. David Sacks (00:15:07): That I mean, that's what it is. I mean, you've got you you've got people who are kinda drinking the Kool Aid, and there's nobody advising them stop or if there is, they're not listening. I mean, look, PayPal had this situation back in 2000, the year 2000 right after the dot com crash. We were burning $10,000,000 a month like fast. We had no revenue and no business model. Okay? We had said that the service would be all always free. We had 4 months basically of life, and we pulled up on the throttle. And what we did is we basically introduced paid accounts. We started charging transaction fees. We cut the we cut the cost structure of the company, and we made that last $40,000,000 last a lot longer than 4 months. it lasted until we could then do another fundraise the following year. And we were able to then raise with good numbers real revenue, a business model, etcetera. So, you know and that was because we were just paying attention to the changing environment. The world had changed from sort of the pre.com crash, you know, Speaker 1 (00:16:08): 1999. David Sacks (00:16:08): Your bismol didn't matter. Your margins didn't matter. Revenue didn't matter. None of that stuff mattered. all that mattered was growth, but by, you know, mid 2000, everything had changed. So you have to be attuned to what the fundraising 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. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:16:32): David, tell me, like, what do you think is going on in this board meeting? I mean, like, this is a group of incompetent Incompetence. David Sacks (00:16:42): I don't even know who's on the board because Stripe led 2 rounds, I think. And so Is that part of Jason Calacanis (00:16:48): it, David, that you'll you'll 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. David Sacks (00:17:02): Right. Exactly. No. Look. The the reason why a strategic investor Speaker 1 (00:17:05): -- David Friedberg (00:17:05): Sorry. Go ahead. David Sacks (00:17:06): I think the reason why a strategic investor invest is because it's strategic for them. I mean, it was in Stripe's interest to try and back a winner in the whole ecommerce checkout line sort of payment space. And so they did that. And I don't even know if they had a board seat. And so no one was really Speaker 1 (00:17:22): -- Chamath Palihapitiya (00:17:22): But I don't I don't understand that strategic decision because I I I suspect the rationales some are internally in 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. But picking a winner and putting a $120,000,000 is tantamount to the same thing so I don't understand. David Sacks (00:17:43): mean, Stripe Chamath Palihapitiya (00:17:43): raised -- It doesn't make any sense. David Sacks (00:17:45): Right. And Stripe raised money at a, what, $95100,000,000,000 valuation. So, look, it all flows down from, you know, the the frothiness at the peak. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:17:52): No. 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 wanna own. So we're just gonna go and put some of our better engineers as like a, you know, site project and see if we can tack away at something that works. I mean, I I think a lot of people would have adopted it. David Friedberg (00:18:11): But the David Sacks (00:18:12): thing is -- To be Jason Calacanis (00:18:13): clear, Stripe was on the board. Index was on David Sacks (00:18:15): the board. That's interesting. I mean, those are some good investors. There's there's a couple of David Friedberg (00:18:20): people -- -- board index and who else? Jason Calacanis (00:18:22): According to Crunchbase, Stripe was on the board. A a business development person from there. Index was on the board. And Dom, the founder. And looks like Brian Sugar who I know, who's an angel investor and a founder. But who knows if that's outdated information and Do Chamath Palihapitiya (00:18:38): you guys remember when Philip Kaplan used to run a website called Fucked Company? Speaker 1 (00:18:42): Absolutely. Oh, Jason Calacanis (00:18:43): yeah. A friend of mine. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:18:44): Do you wanna tell the fuck company story, Jake, out for all the people that have no Jason Calacanis (00:18:47): idea what happened was dot com the dot com world was imploding. all the employees didn't have a voice. There was no social media at the time. There was no blogs at the time. The the only thing you could really publish on the in the world was, like, a a geocities page. You could put up page if you knew how to do HTML. It's even pre MySpace. And so a friend of mine Phil Kaplan, who does a very successful company called Distrukittenow, started fuck company and it was a message board. And what he basically let people do was he would write 3 headlines, one sentence each, kinda like before reddit existed where you just put a one line hit, and then there was Comments underneath them. It's a this company, we just got an email. This company's laying off people, and he would beat all the news stories to the layoffs because He would just run with any email that came in. 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 sellers. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:19:40): I think this time around, it's probably important for employees to understand a couple things. 1 is, like, who doesn't know what they're doing. Right? So, like, companies that are making layoffs, those are those are happening. They shouldn't get punished for that. But you gotta think like the fiduciaries that are ripping this money in. I mean, do you really wanna be the person that goes to work at a company that's backed by these folks in Round Two? I mean, that's not a signal. Like like the opposite has always been a signal. Right? Meaning, when Mike Moritz makes an investment, we all pay attention. because we all think, wow. There's a picker. You know? And he did that with Stripe and with so many other, you know, great companies. And so the likelihood of an employee wanting to work for a Mike Morck's backed company or Mike Morck's governed company is very high. Right? Same thing with Gurley's, you know, same thing with a lot of a lot of really, really good investors. John Dohr. But the opposite should also be true then because if it if you really wanna work for a Peter Thiel Back Company, you should probably not work for one of these companies. where these folks who are just completely absent are also governing the board. because that just means, like, nobody knows what's going on. Jason Calacanis (00:20:45): We haven't had proper governance for a long time in Silicon Valley. So I mean, I think what what we we crashed we crashed end the dropout were in some ways about incompetent boards, both of those TV shows. David Friedberg (00:20:56): No. I mean, I definitely see this you know, I I think you guys know the the incentive for a traditional venture capitalist that that that maybe isn't you know, motivated by improving their craft, but they're motivated, you know, in advise primarily by making money is to to raise more capital and getting more deals. And as you guys know, like, every venture firm has maybe 1 or 2 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. You know, it used to be maybe a VC would sit on a handful of boards, and now it's like you're the the board representative for 12 companies. And that's a you know, you're not gonna be able to provide quality time and service to to and support to the CEO and the and the company. And more importantly, as you guys point out, like, not provide good governance. And governance isn't just about are you signing the DocuSign 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. And I don't see that a lot. I I don't know about you guys, but I see a lot of VCs either handling to the CEO because we have founder culture, hysteria, and Silicon Valley where it's true. The best founders make the 1000 x returns, and that's it. that doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of the businesses should be left to their own vices just because there are a few ult to successful founders that there are a lot of businesses that actually need governance in order to achieve outcomes. 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. Speaker 5 (00:22:41): Well, I Chamath Palihapitiya (00:22:41): think I think you said the key thing. There are really very few star pickers in our business. It takes decades to really prove that out. And and those but those people that are real pickers, I don't think, put up a bullshit from everybody. David Friedberg (00:22:53): They're not just pickers. Like so John Doe was deeply involved in Google in the early days. Like -- Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:22:58): You're right. I'm 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? And then once you pick, you gotta do the work. If you pick poorly and you do the same amount of work, it doesn't matter. Nobody's gonna remember you. David Friedberg (00:23:11): Yeah. And what ends what ends up happening is the VC flushes the deal because it's not gonna be the 100 bagger. They don't pay as much attention. They let the thing right into the sunset. And they're they're moving on to the next thing. 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 Saks 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? And that doesn't happen Jason Calacanis (00:23:35): at all. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:23:36): You said the key thing. There are a few practitioners that really have the gravitas to actually enforce those decisions. So, you know, there's a reason why in during the financial crisis, there was only one organization that even had the courage. Forgot whether it was right or wrong at the time to even write the RIP good times deck. Right? It was Sequoia. Nobody else dared to even put that on a page, let alone give it to all of their companies knowing that it would leak lest they be wrong. And the reason Sequoia could do it is they're looking at a 40 year franchise and saying the integrity of our franchise at stake, we need to keep doing what we've done before. 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 because if you see the 3 or 4 years after that GFC deck, Sequoia flushed that whole business. Right? There's an entire turnover of that team. 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 gonna hire a very different kind of person than if you're helping trying to built companies. And the difference is that when you're trying to raise AUM, your customer is not the company. David Friedberg (00:24:38): It's the LP. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:24:38): Your customer is the LP. And what the l p wants to do is be able to write their investment memo and not get fired. And the way that you do that is by pointing to the team and saying, well, this person worked at this company, this person was a VP of that company, and it seems credible. But between but being able to invest and being able to actually be a good operator is so different. David Friedberg (00:25:02): Look. I'll I'll also say one thing that's important. You know? I I don't like this. celebration or or, sorry, the the mockery and entertainment that comes from failure. I I thought fuck company. Like, I I was young when it was out and, you know, I would read it and kind of giggle at the stupid companies that got funding. You know? But to me, it's 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. I think the capital that's available in the markets today to support the building Speaker 1 (00:25:34): -- Chamath Palihapitiya (00:25:35): That wasn't that that's not what a fuck company was. I don't I don't think it was people taking potshots as much it was people. Speaker 1 (00:25:39): -- David Friedberg (00:25:39): a lot oh, yeah. There was a lot of that. That that and because yeah. There was a Would Chamath Palihapitiya (00:25:43): you admit but would you admit in fairness that there's a lot of people telling the truth? David Friedberg (00:25:46): Oh, yeah. Yeah. Totally. No. No. No. But the but but a lot of it was like this mockery. Like, can you believe this shit even existed yadayada and the cynicism, I think, you know, kind of you know, it it stails out the opportunity for for capital to support, you know, new new ventures, new initiatives like this. 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. They have a good opportunity. They're gonna be challenged in a marketplace where everyone is cynical. And I I'll say, like, scarcity breeds success. When there wasn't a lot of venture money, and there were only a a, you know, kind of a few investments that could be made each year. 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 that says, okay. The best opportunity wins and gets picked and gets capital. in a world where everyone was raising a $1,000,000,000 second fund or a $3,000,000,000 4th fund, and you suddenly had an influx of a $100,000,000,000 of venture money in a it's a lot like what we saw in crypto markets, which is an extraordinary explosion in highly speculative bubble assets. And a lot of these businesses maybe shouldn't have existed in the first place. Jason Calacanis (00:27:05): Too much demand for the stock of private companies. David Friedberg (00:27:09): And all the hedge funds that came into it all the mutual funds Jason Calacanis (00:27:11): kicking off? Speaker 1 (00:27:11): -- Jason Calacanis (00:27:12): enough supply of great founders and serious teams that are working hard on this. I think with the case of fast, I agree with your general sentiment about dunking. In in the case of FAST, what you had was a founder who was on Twitter every day tweeting about how great the company wasn't 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 market fit. David Friedberg (00:27:34): Less and learned. You know you you know who you know who should be criticized? The next person that backs that guy. That's it. Yeah. You know, that guy is Speaker 7 (00:27:40): a -- He's got he's got a David Sacks (00:27:41): very interesting history, actually, as well. I think if they've done David Friedberg (00:27:44): a little diligence Speaker 1 (00:27:44): -- Jason Calacanis (00:27:44): They didn't do any diligence on him. Apparently, he had 2 companies that were kind of major red flags. And I think the diligence issue, Saks, is one maybe you are having a similar experience to me on the early stage, we were seeing deals last year close in a week. We normally have 30 days to vet a deal, and maybe a week or 2 to get our diligence wrapped up. Sometimes these things overlap. But It's what was it, you know, historically, a 4 to 6 week process, and then it went down to a 4 to 6 day process. And then people were meeting with you one day and saying they're closed the next. Were you did you feel like over the last couple of years, people were doing proper diligence or not? And what impact did diligence have on any of this? David Sacks (00:28:23): You know, I certainly, I I can't speak to what our competitors were doing. I don't think our diligence process changed much. 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. And it can be done quickly. Although it's easier for SaaS companies because the metrics that you're looking at are so standardized. It's just a It's an easier process. Jason Calacanis (00:28:45): What's the most important thing in diligence? In your mind, what is the, like, bullet that, like, people can't the silver bullet thing people can't fake? David Sacks (00:28:53): Probably off sheet customer references. So the the first thing we do is focus on the on the metrics. Right? And the the financials, the SaaS metrics, all that kind of stuff. But then you wanna talk to customers and you wanna understand the value they're getting out of the product. And, ideally, they're off sheet customers. Jason Calacanis (00:29:09): Explain what off David Sacks (00:29:10): sheet means. Speaker 1 (00:29:10): -- David Sacks (00:29:10): just means that, you know, you frequently ask a founder to give you customer references, those are on sheet references. The off sheet references are the ones that you find yourself that they never gave you. 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. So no you know, that it's a totally non conflicted situation. So that that's what you're looking for. Jason Calacanis (00:29:38): So one of your companies is using Stripe tell you how great Stripe is. They tell you what's good about it, what's bad about it. But -- Right. Speaker 1 (00:29:44): -- Jason Calacanis (00:29:44): references you're giving, so it's sort of like backdoor references. If somebody tells you here's my references -- And you can David Sacks (00:29:48): do the same thing founders too. You can have on sheet and off sheet references for founders. Jason Calacanis (00:29:52): And you could do it for VCs. David Sacks (00:29:53): Yeah. But but, look, I think I think it's probably a little bit fair 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. I mean, it's found this this whole construction of the industry is set up around founders. 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. unless they do something criminal. Otherwise, they're gonna be able to do whatever they want. And Speaker 1 (00:30:20): -- David Sacks (00:30:20): I disagree. Hold on. boards generally are very differential to founders. And if the founder's not willing to listen to advice, what are you gonna do about that? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:30:28): Well, that no. This is but this is the point you're making, I think, is not right. You think that if Peter Thiel gave some advice to slow the company down that this guy would have not taken it? Of course, he would Jason Calacanis (00:30:39): have taken it. I don't know. I don't know about that. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:30:40): And we would have had to consider it. If Mike Morris had Julie said it, he would have had to consider it. I think what you're actually speaking to is in hold on. 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. And if they're not credible, of course, they're going to be ignored. We all have ignored stupid board members. You've done it too, David. But even, you know, let's let's actually look at Yammer as an example. There were 1 or 2 of us that you would talk to pretty consistently. You didn't talk to all of them. David Sacks (00:31:06): I would always seek out advice. Look, a good a great founder, a good founder always seeks out advice. No question about it. But look, this idea that it's governance versus advice. I mean, the with it being governance is all the institutional incentives for VCs are to be pro founder. So no one wants to jam a founder by making them do something Jason Calacanis (00:31:23): they don't David Sacks (00:31:24): wanna do. Well, I'm just saying that's Speaker 7 (00:31:25): that's the way it is now. David Friedberg (00:31:26): 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. 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 gonna meddle in your affairs. And by the way, both are true. There are most VCs, as Vinod has said publicly add negative value, and I totally agree with him on this. Because they 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. But on the other hand, the whole pro founder model led to the the WeWork and Ubers of the world that, you know, I think we Speaker 1 (00:32:17): -- Jason Calacanis (00:32:17): That's right. David Sacks (00:32:18): There's a trade there's a trade I mean, look, I remember in the 19 nineties, the default was that the founder just got replaced. Right? Right. Like, as soon as the company is successful Speaker 1 (00:32:26): -- Chamath Palihapitiya (00:32:26): Right. Speaker 1 (00:32:26): -- David Sacks (00:32:26): you hire a professional CEO. that was just, like, rule Jason Calacanis (00:32:29): of thumb. Schmidt. I mean, even the mighty Google did that. David Friedberg (00:32:32): Yeah. No. I mean, that wasn't that by the way, Jason Calacanis (00:32:34): it was that was the point David Friedberg (00:32:35): I was trying to make, which was, like, so much of John Doe's influence was in getting Larry and Sergei to take Eric on as CEO. And I really do think that that was, like, you know, a critical move that created probably the that created the most valuable company in history. Jason Calacanis (00:32:50): Right. David Friedberg (00:32:51): And, you know, it's 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 but but imagine if you had a founder's fund type approach where you said, look. Larry and Sergei are the founders. They know what they're doing. Let them do it as opposed to the John Doe nuance of let's make sure that we think about the development of this company successfully over time. and then convince Larry and Sergei through a bunch of meetings and riding bikes and whatever else they did with Eric, Jason Calacanis (00:33:17): you know, to, like and then and then what about Jim Brier? Didn't he David Friedberg (00:33:20): bring Cheryl over to Facebook? I mean, like, there's a lot of these stories of the really, you know, the VCs that really change the trajectory of the business through their work. David Sacks (00:33:28): Right. 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. Look. We just don't call the shots. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:33:37): No. No. You're right. You're right. It's it is it is advice. 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. I'm not gonna ask you a bunch of stuff, but I just want some transparent reporting. And the first page is always how much money at the beginning of the month? How much money did you burn? You know, how much equity did we give out? How much is left in the pool? simple basic checks and balances. Right? Where you're not asking all kinds of crazy questions. You're just like, alright. How much money are we burning? How much dilution did we take? Now tell me what we've done. And those are simple elements of governance way before you get into David Sacks (00:34:13): a device. Speaker 1 (00:34:14): -- Jason Calacanis (00:34:14): level setting. What's the speed and play? What's what's the elevation? Where are we at? What's the altitude? And when you ask people for this today -- We David Sacks (00:34:21): actually do that too. David Friedberg (00:34:21): Yeah. I know anyone that doesn't do that. I'll be honest. Like -- Yeah. Speaker 1 (00:34:24): -- Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:24): anybody that doesn't do it, honestly, is being -- Well, David Friedberg (00:34:27): that's not what we're talking about. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:28): I don't David Friedberg (00:34:29): know anyone that doesn't do that. I mean, I'm talking about Speaker 1 (00:34:31): -- Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:31): I would love to see. I would love Jason Calacanis (00:34:33): to see a little bit of that going on. There's a little love Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:35): to see a fast board deck and to see if that first page is that page. The first page and by the way, you know where I learned that from? From Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. Because back in the day, what I saw from founders was, oh, this is the first thing I have to report on. I was taught by founders when I was a when as a principal at Mayfield. They're like, this is how you do the job. And I was like, great. Thanks. I mean, I was, you know, sitting beside these guys that were Old hands at doing it, and that's how I learned this business through that apprenticeship, but there was governance and advice. And the is just about being transparent about how much money are you burning. 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. You take the board deck. You circulate it to your other partners. There's lots of times where I see board decks and 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, etcetera, etcetera. You don't think nobody at Stripe or Index could have said, you're burning $10,000,000 a month and there's no revenue. So the point is that data David Sacks (00:35:39): is not there. -- 30 or 40,000,000 in the bank. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:35:42): Give me a break, guys. So this was a whole a cataclysmic failure at the advice level and at the governance level. And all I'm saying is it's a good lesson for folks to learn. Absolutely. David Sacks (00:35:54): Yeah. Somebody point people's attention to 2 articles I wrote that I think are relevant. So first, we actually published an article on the SaaS board meeting deck that we'd like people to use and, obviously, they're free to use it or not. to Chipas point right up at the top as a contact center, we need to know what's your monthly burn and how much money is in the bank. And that and then we just divide those things to create runway. We don't like looking at projections for runway. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:36:17): Totally. David Sacks (00:36:18): We just look at how much you burned last month and how much money you got in the bank. Most cash out. Jason Calacanis (00:36:22): Right. Exactly. David Sacks (00:36:23): And they were down to 30 or $40,000,000 burning 10,000,000 a month. Somebody should have, like, thrown up a red flag and said, better slam on the brakes right now because you're gonna be out of business in 3 or Speaker 1 (00:36:32): 4 David Sacks (00:36:32): months. So so that that that's that's sort of piece number 1. The the other piece was an archive wrote a couple years ago called Blitz Fail, which is how not to go off the rails because a lot there's a lot of literature out there about Blitz scaling. and a lot of start ups think they need to scale as rapidly as humanly possible. 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. And there's, like, 11 reasons why this happens. I sort of categorize them. One of the biggest ones is founder psychology. You have a founder who believes that things are always gonna be up and to the right. It's they they it's funny. They're always described the same way. described as visionary, charismatic, and the word crazy is often used, but it's crazy good. And then when everything goes to shit, all of a sudden, the word crazy means something pejorative and bad. And, you know, the 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. 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. Otherwise, they're gonna make a mistake and hit the wall. Jason Calacanis (00:37:45): Being delusional, is, you know, what you need to start these companies. Like, I'm gonna beat these incumbents. I'm gonna change the world. A little bit of delusion is good, but not when you're looking at half the runway. Right? Like, that's when you need to be pragmatic. David Friedberg (00:37:58): I think, you know, there's a term of coach ability. You know, how how coachable is this person as as a CEO as a leader. And I do think that coachability goes hand in hand with intellectual curiosity. I mean, if you look at the Calacanis, Patrick Percolicin, and and how much breadth he has and 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 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 that's a really key key key thing that if you look across the the the range of successful founder and CEOs that scale to a Speaker 1 (00:38:47): $100,000,000,000 David Friedberg (00:38:48): 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 coach ability, which translates into an adaptability as and and being willing to take advice. And so your board as a tool not kind of a governance structure sitting over you. Jason Calacanis (00:39:04): And the David Friedberg (00:39:05): less you are like that, the more you are likely to feel like you're bored of the governance structure and umbrella sitting over you telling you what you can't Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:10): I don't think that's what governance means, by David Friedberg (00:39:12): the way. Well, governance meant to it's it's meant to look out for the shareholders. That's the job. Right? Sure. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:16): But but but act as a fiduciary doesn't mean to, like, tell the CEO what to do. This is my point. Like -- Yeah. David Friedberg (00:39:21): I'm just saying -- So it's it's not saying Speaker 1 (00:39:23): -- David Sacks (00:39:23): I think I think he's right about I think Friedberg right about how boards are often perceived by founders. I think there is an increasing let's call it a Hollywood director, a Hollywood author mentality. towards VCs. David Friedberg (00:39:37): Cal and the all in podcast. Right? David Sacks (00:39:39): Well, it's it's basically it's basically look. There are 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. And they they are the auteur like a Hollywood director, and you gotta stay away from those suits, the studio guys. Right? Ever? That's the mentality they're trying to they're teaching them Speaker 1 (00:40:02): -- Jason Calacanis (00:40:02): An adversarial mentality. David Sacks (00:40:04): An adversarial mentality. And look, there are to Chomass Point, there are plenty of VCs who don't know what they're doing. They have no useful advice to offer. 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 gonna be ten times more difficult. If you don't seek out advice, 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. Jason Calacanis (00:40:28): And what was true at one point in time when Paul Graham gave this advice, and he set up Y Combinator. You don't wanna say their name. But it it is Paul Graham had a terrible experience in his company with venture capitalists. 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 gonna be founder focused. So but that advice then might have been true, and now it's not. Now we've sung the pendulum too far the other way. We did 2 things because 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. 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. we'll show you what a board is like. And then I would have 3 founders come. 2 would sit on one's board meeting, and I would do 3 back to back board meetings, bring your counsel, bring your founders, and sit in on the other 2 board meetings, and we'll have a little socratic discussion about what was good about each board meeting. 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 meeting meetings, they just looked more impressive to the venture community. I know people say don't do a board. It's not cool. It actually turns out doing a 1 hour board meeting, four times a year, six times a year even as a seed stage company. it's it does differentiate you to the venture community, I find. Alright. Moving on to speaking of boards, Elon bought a chunk of Twitter last week, a 9% stake, and he's joining the board. That makes him the largest individual or the largest shareholder, individual or institutional. He bought the shares in March, Twitter CEO, Parag Agarwal, tweeted I'm excited to share. We're appointing Elon Musk to our board. And then Jack, tweeted in support. Jason Calacanis (00:42:17): I'm really happy Elon is joining the Twitter board, exclamation point just to give some level setting here. In q 4 of 2021. Twitter had Speaker 1 (00:42:23): 1,500,000,000 Jason Calacanis (00:42:25): in revenue, up 22% year over year. They've really been starting to ring the register over there. Daily active users are solid but modest. Speaker 1 (00:42:33): 217,000,000. Jason Calacanis (00:42:35): Daily active users, 38,000,000 of which are in the US a 179,000,000 are and their stated goals for q 4 of next year 2023. So in a year and a half, they wanna have 315,000,000. And they want revenue in 2023 to hit Speaker 1 (00:42:50): 7,500,000,000. Jason Calacanis (00:42:52): Again, they run a $6,000,000,000 run rate. So I guess that would be an increase of Speaker 1 (00:42:55): 25 Jason Calacanis (00:42:56): percent. Just general thoughts on and Elon obviously has been making some Twitter suggestions for the product. Sachs, you worked with Elon at PayPal. Thoughts on what this does for that wasn't why you're laughing. David Friedberg (00:43:13): What's, like, such a funny transition. Saks, you work with the Alonid PayPal. Work for you David Sacks (00:43:18): on there. Jason Calacanis (00:43:19): I'm sure David Sacks (00:43:19): I'm sure he's gonna grab some great product ideas, but what this is really about is free speech. you know, right before Elon announces, he is doing polling, asking the Twitter user base whether Twitter was succeeding or failing in this mission. to be an open town square and open marketplace of ideas, something like 70% said they were failing at it. Elon, on many occasions, has spoken up for free speech. She believes that Twitter's historic mission is as an open town square. And I think he's gonna bring that emphasis to the board, and it's a great thing. Now I think the person who had the best take on the reaction to this was Mike Solana, and he had a few funny Jason Calacanis (00:43:55): tweets about this. Who does he work for? Is he a founder's fun guy? David Sacks (00:43:58): I think yeah. I think he he works for Peter or founder's fund, but he's got a he also writes a great news sub stack newsletter kind of like blog post called PirateWires. It's worth checking out. He's he's a pretty in addition to being a pretty sharp analyst, he's actually says funny things too. Jason Calacanis (00:44:14): He's iconoclastic and yeah. Yeah. He he he he'll he'll swing the sword. David Sacks (00:44:18): Yeah. So the way he put it is that, you know, Elon joining the board has all the work people on Twitter furious. They think that this guy might actually say free speech and for authoritarians, that is an existential threat. And then he added, I don't get what the problem is, guys. If you want censorship, you can just go build a new social media company and do censorship there. It's a free market. 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 all say, well, just go create your own social network. You know, we're free to do whatever. Jason Calacanis (00:44:53): Truth, whatever. David Sacks (00:44:54): Exactly. Well, this is this is the free market acting the way they don't like, which is finally somebody who believes in free speech is wanting to stand up by the largest stake in Twitter, join the board. I mean, this is fabulous. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:45:06): I think it's really fabulous. Jason Calacanis (00:45:07): I think it's pretty amazing. Yeah. And the stock went up 30%. What do you think, Shamak? Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:45:12): I texted you guys in the group chat. 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. Because free speech really is this fundamental principle of democracy and it's been decaying. We don't know the implications of a large technology company, keeping free speech as a principled pillar of their reason to exist. Right? 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 and, you know, the payments companies, Freebrook was mentioning Visa and Mastercard earlier in the group chat. 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. Because and if you really believe in that, 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. And then that creates a surface area that I think you can technically maneuver around. So meaning, what are the real problems in all of this speech creates? It creates a you know, content moderation issue. Right? It creates a a spam issue and it creates a sort of wisdom of the crowd's ranking rating issue. Jason Calacanis (00:46:29): So misinformation comes to mind. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:46:31): Yep. But that's a that's a wisdom of the crowd's ranking rating issue in my 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 And the capital structures of those companies will never allow a single strong voice like his to enforce that idea. So this is the only company where that could happen, and I think, you know, we wanna see what this how this plays out. I think it's a really, really big deal. Jason Calacanis (00:47:04): Alright. Friedberg? David Friedberg (00:47:05): Yeah. I'll tell you what I think. changes Facebook, Twitter, even Google, all acquiesce to significant external pressure over the years. I've said this in the past. I believe the founders of those companies are all philosophically, fundamentally philosophically aligned with the notion of free speech and absolute freedom of information, you know, enabling truth finding over time. And the the edge cases of those platforms ultimately identify and uncover ways that they can be used 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 drive some of these censorship decisions and drive some of these these behavioral changes by management. 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 were the largest single shareholder in Twitter to date has been Jack Dorsey at 2.3%. He actually serves the shareholders, and the shareholders ultimately wanna see the stock price go up. they ultimately wanna see the business make more money. And as a result, they don't have the same sort of, you know, the the stakeholders there have kind of a different set of alignments over time. You know, they're not necessarily the same long term or or focus, meaning, does the philosophy come before the money? And I think as you kind of concentrate ownership, you have the opportunity and the option now to, you know, make make those sorts of decisions that you can't make. when you're a broadly owned stock. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:48:43): But Facebook and Google are concentrated. They have a dual cost structure in -- -- class. Yeah. So what are you talking about? Jason Calacanis (00:48:48): issue, Chamath, is in those companies, they're scared to death that they'll lose their employees and have chaos David Friedberg (00:48:53): at work. government. No. The issue is government. Jason Calacanis (00:48:55): No. No. But, also, it's you also lose your employees. David Sacks (00:48:58): It's both it's pressure from above and below. David Friedberg (00:49:00): It's yeah. It's shareholders. It's shareholders government regulators. Right? And so in both cases, you have to the pressure. And and employees. It's a good point. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:49:08): I understand, but I'm not sure how Twitter changes any of that? Jason Calacanis (00:49:12): There it does. I'll tell you why. Because if we look what's happened is last sometime last year, I think it happened around Chappell, and I think it happened because coin base. We saw a group of folks say, you know what? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:49:22): Enoughs enough. Jason Calacanis (00:49:23): Yeah. We told you to bring your whole self to work. We told you we would do your laundry. And then at some point, Netflix was like, listen. You don't have to agree with every comedian on our platform. There's a range of comedians 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. And then Daniel Ek kinda did the same thing. He said, listen. At Spotify, gonna put labels on it. If you don't like Joergan, don't work here. And then, of course, we know Coinbase did it, and Toby from Shopify did it. And now you have Twitter doing it. And when you apologize and you start listening to this very vocal minority when they're upset and they wanna cancel people or they wanna platform people, what do they do? They double down. You've shown that you're going to listen to them. They're not doing it at Coinbase anymore. They're not gonna do it at Spotify anymore. They're not doing it at Netflix. And Apple acquiesced. Right? 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 gonna fire him. I think at some point, Apple's gonna have to say, you know what? Leave your feelings at work and and and -- At home. Speaker 1 (00:50:29): -- Jason Calacanis (00:50:29): this is a company. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:50:30): Leave them at home. David Friedberg (00:50:30): Leave them at home. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:50:31): Thank you. David Sacks (00:50:31): This is Elon is so dangerous to to these people is because he won't be pushed around. The fact the matter is that this whole woke mob thing It's a paper tiger. They don't have the support of most of the population. 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. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:50:53): And No. They they want a monopoly on moral outrage. David Sacks (00:50:55): They want a monopoly outrage, they want a monopoly but they also want a monopoly on the ability to basically to to define what is and and and what the what the narrative on an atopic is gonna be. 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. He took you know, Brian has suffered. Jason Calacanis (00:51:19): another target. They find another target. David Sacks (00:51:20): Exactly. So Yeah. Elon doing this is a really big deal because, again, he cannot be pushed around and he is showing leadership here. And all it will take to end this woke censorship is for other founders to stand tall the way that Elon has. Jason Calacanis (00:51:35): And let's let's go into the nearest Speaker 1 (00:51:37): -- -- David Friedberg (00:51:37): kill care what employees kind of gripe about. I don't think he'll care what regulators gripe about. and I don't think he'll care what other shareholders gripe about. He'll talk about the long term opportunity, the philosophical alignment with mission, and and plow forward. And I think that that level of leadership is what separates some, you know, great businesses from others. But this is a very Speaker 1 (00:52:00): -- Jason Calacanis (00:52:00): Harrison, 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. There are, you know, Melo Eiannopoulos, and some of these outright non these sympathizing people throwing up SWAT Zigger's, you know, people promoting violence or brigading on these services to attack people and to Docs people. Those people, those were just cancellations, deplatformings for Speaker 1 (00:52:27): -- Jason Calacanis (00:52:27): In your opinion. David Friedberg (00:52:27): In your opinion. Jason Calacanis (00:52:28): Well, I mean, anybody inciting violence, I think we would all agree to be dis platformed. David Sacks (00:52:32): Jason, look at how it's evolved. We start with isolated cases like Alex Jones, like Milo that nobody likes and nobody supports, The next thing you know, the president of the United States is being deplatform, but, again, that's supposedly based on him in signing a crowd then what's happening today? Now we have entire categories of of opinion being banned. It starts with COVID. Jason Calacanis (00:52:52): I agree. Anyone who That's exactly my point. David Sacks (00:52:54): Anyone who one's in the other Jason Calacanis (00:52:56): is invalid. I agree. David Sacks (00:52:57): Anybody who has a 71% rate who has a dissenting opinion on COVID gets banned now? Anybody who has a dissenting opinion on climate change can be banned. There's a story this week on CNN where Pinterest have all come look. Pinterest is a photo sharing site. I don't know. Noah's talking about climate change on Pinterest. And yet Speaker 1 (00:53:14): -- Chamath Palihapitiya (00:53:14): I was, but then I got you hot boys. David Sacks (00:53:17): I mean, it just shows this censorship now is on autopilot. 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. David Friedberg (00:53:33): And Jay Cal, you could point out your Alex Jones case to make the case that the platforming should be allowed. The problem is as soon as you make that case, it's only a Chamath Palihapitiya (00:53:42): slight degree. It's a David Friedberg (00:53:43): 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. And if you look back, by the way, great movie Woody Harrelson, the People versus Larry Flint. Larry Flint was a pornographer. It was easy for everyone to chastise him and for everyone to say, you know what? let's go ahead and deplatform this guy back then and ban him and and charge him by the government. And at the end of the day, he fought for his rights for free speech. Now all that being said, Larry Flint was publishing using his own printers and selling on the street in a very legally compliant way. There is a difference in having someone else's platform be the mechanism that you use to promote your voice. If they choose like Pinterest and Twitter and YouTube and Facebook and Google, to change how their platform operates Saks. I actually think that's a commercial decision made by a private company. They should have the right to do that, but they're gonna lose users over time. they're gonna end up looking like idiots when they're wrong by banning certain topics that we should be having conversations about over time. And I do think that there are other mechanisms for us to use the free and open Internet is why I think the free and open Internet is more important than anything to have conversations using other platforms that are aliens. Jason Calacanis (00:54:56): I mean and and I'm I'm I mean, hold on. I just wanna respond to to David since he did you know, counter my point. I agree with you. I think it went overboard, and I think there are more reasonable solutions. I think a time based a ban would have been better for somebody like Trump and maybe waiting to see what happens with the January 6th commission, putting that aside. I know it's very controversial. 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. think this is one of the best things. If people wanna talk about ivermectin and it's an open science and Reaper, you know more about it than any of us, and people wanna debate it, why not link them to -- I have a question. Speaker 1 (00:55:33): -- Jason Calacanis (00:55:33): most credible sources. I think that's a great solution. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:55:35): Have a question. Yeah. Is there an oat milk tag on Spotify? Jason Calacanis (00:55:39): Yes. because Chamath Palihapitiya (00:55:40): if some of it is, Oat milk, goat milk, goat milk. David Friedberg (00:55:42): Wait. When you listen to the all in pod on Spotify, there's a tag that says there's COVID -- COVID Speaker 1 (00:55:47): 19? Jason Calacanis (00:55:48): Yeah. Get COVID 19 information here. Yeah. David Sacks (00:55:50): Kai of a guy to Friedberg argument about these companies should be free to do it whatever they want. So I know that Friedberg I don't wanna make two points about this. First of all, I know Friedberg sincere and genuine in that belief. 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. But meanwhile, in Congress, they're pushing 6 bills forward to regulate these companies as monopolies. So they don't believe that they should be free to do whatever they want. 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, they act as a cartel to limit speech. So that's point number one is that nobody believe this argument that these companies should be free to do whatever they want. The second point is that, listen, the founding document of our country the it's the declaration of independence. It says that all of us have rights. They're inalienable. That means they cannot be taken away. Okay? And in the 1st couple 100 years of this country, it meant that those rights meant that the government couldn't take away your right to free speech. But now today, where does speech occur, it it occurs on these giant social networks that are privately owned. They're owned by these large corporations. 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 David Friedberg (00:57:10): a great point, dude. Jason Calacanis (00:57:11): It's a great point. Speaker 1 (00:57:12): -- David Sacks (00:57:12): do not have a right to free speech in this country. That right needs to be protected. Jason Calacanis (00:57:16): The founding fathers did not anticipate that four people would be mitigating the majority of conversations online. It's you know? Like, if you're if you're taking off if you look what happened to Milo and Alex Jones, like, they don't exist in the public sphere anymore. Right? Like, they David Sacks (00:57:28): literally -- -- person. When these big tech companies all get together as a cartel to deprive you of your free speech rights, you have been depersoned. You've been digitally deperson, 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. And unless Speaker 1 (00:57:44): -- Jason Calacanis (00:57:44): We we David Sacks (00:57:45): have to. Speaker 1 (00:57:45): -- David Sacks (00:57:45): this now, it'll keep going. Jason Calacanis (00:57:46): we we have to address the giant elephant in the room, huge, which is Trump. I think a lot of this you know, he hit its pinnacle when people were saying the the the sitting president of the United States could not be on Twitter. That was, I think, we all agree, ridiculous and absurd that the president, who was duly elected, couldn't have a Twitter account. 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 lines up. I'm curious what everybody thinks here about should Trump or is Trump being put back and reinstated on Facebook or Twitter? And it's supposed to be a lifetime ban on Twitter. But if corporate evidence 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? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:36): I think, Jason, what you suggested is probably the most reasonable thing, which was there was a time penalty. You know, we're we're getting through we're probably, what, a third or 2 thirds of the way through the January 6th stuff. So that's gonna 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. I mean, it's not this is not, you know, controversial stuff at this point. David Sacks (00:59:03): You know that the current thing is moving on from your rain when the topic all of a sudden is January 6 all over again in Trump, which it is on MSNBC. It's all January 6 all the time again. So Listen. I mean, this is not a justification for the widespread censorship that we've seen. Like I mentioned, we've gone so far beyond isolated cases. Now it's entire categories of thought, and this has to be stopped. Jason Calacanis (00:59:27): Well, what's your feeling on Trump? Should he be reinstated? If you were running Twitter, would you have done a time based? David Sacks (00:59:31): If you don't like Trump, just don't follow him. I mean but but frankly, it's it's listen. I don't miss the tweets at all. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:59:39): My thoughts at him. David Sacks (00:59:40): I don't miss the tweets at all. I really don't. Jason Calacanis (00:59:42): They were damaging your party. That's how you felt. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:59:45): My thoughts have evolved before when he first Scott banned, I was really supportive of it. And there was part of me, which was just afraid that he would get reelected, etcetera, etcetera. Now come 2 years later and to see all of the stuff in 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. 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. And so in general now, a much more free speech because I think it's much more fragile than I thought it was before. Jason Calacanis (01:00:26): Gotcha. Your opinion has evolved, and intelligent people should respond to new data. I appreciate that. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:00:31): 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. But 2 years later, a 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, wisdom of the crowds type of stuff, help people figure out what is truthful and how much truth there is because that's a tractable problem. 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 because it's going in a really bad place. Jason Calacanis (01:01:14): Fred, what are your thoughts on Trump specifically? Because it does seem like a part of the undercurrent here of, you know, he's gonna be coming back, possibly gonna be running again, and January 6th as Consecutory. David Friedberg (01:01:25): He's got the truth social network Download the app. Listen to what he's got to say. It's rocking and rolling over there on the the truth app. I heard they took it down like it wasn't even working. Right? the the new thing he built. But let me ask you. Speaker 5 (01:01:37): What is that backtracking at? Was it at 20,000,000,000 or something? David Friedberg (01:01:40): Still doing well. But, look, they had you know, obviously, a reaction, a a market driven reaction to the fact that he was taken off Twitter, and he said, I'm gonna go make an alternative, and that's you know, certainly proving to be technically difficult. But as we all know, it's not technically impossible. He just got probably the wrong people working on it. But if they wanted to have an alternative form for hearing that voice, you know, have at it. I don't know what else to say. I mean, it's Twitter's decision. They're they're curating their audience. All these guys wanna be free speech advocates, but at the end of the day, they're all editorializing. And that's just the world we found ourselves in. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:02:16): I hope Elon takes a slide jammer to that. David Sacks (01:02:18): Yeah. 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 But when the outcome is not what they like, all of a sudden, they're like, woah. Woah. These companies are monopolies. Jason Calacanis (01:02:29): Well and here's another opportunity. 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 could get a board seat on Twitter, and you could have this debate on the board of Twitter. And it's David Friedberg (01:02:48): important to Speaker 1 (01:02:49): -- Chamath Palihapitiya (01:02:50): You are absolutely right. And you can see, by the way, you know, small hedge funds with small amounts of capital like engine number 1, you know, they were able to go up against it Exxon and beat them. 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. And I and I think that they if they if they're able to do it, they should win David Sacks (01:03:10): That's what that's that's what Mike Solana was kinda getting at. It's like, look, if you don't like if you don't like the the free speech that's happening Twitter, go create your own social network because that's what they were David Friedberg (01:03:19): saying before Jason Calacanis (01:03:20): by -- The shares didn't have influence. That's how corporations work. They shares owe the votes. David Sacks (01:03:24): Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:03:25): Friedberg update us on You know, the Ukraine is in month 2 now. I'm sorry. Ukraine is in month 2. Sorry for putting with that before it. It's a tough habit to break. Friedberg, tell us, you know, the 2nd order, 3rd order effects of fertilizer and food at this point. We've had this back and forth. And now I think the world is starting to realize, hey. Friedberg was right. These downstream effects are gonna be significant I ask you a question about these, which is, can the world not mobilize if these are about 1% of the calories, 20 or Speaker 1 (01:03:59): 30% Jason Calacanis (01:03:59): of the calories to join country? Could the world not globalized to find other caloric sources, rice, fish, soybeans, whatever, 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 Speaker 1 (01:04:14): 2 Jason Calacanis (01:04:14): weeks anywhere on the planet? David Friedberg (01:04:15): No. The food system is complex, and efficient, but it does not have strong redundancy or malleability. So take, for example, you know, how do you get flour? You get flour in in your food, from a food company that bought the flour from a miller. There are mills around the world that process wheat into flour. you can't take that same mill and process corn into flour. There's different technology, different equipment that's used. Same with soybeans and so on. 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. And so calories while they might be fungible practically speaking or or 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 gonna work. And the same is true with rice. And then the the more important 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 is a market for these products. And so what happens is as the food supply chain threat hit, countries like China and others started to stockpile. 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. And when they did that, there was now less food available to Tunisia and to Eritrea and to Egypt and so on. 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. 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 have nots have less. And that's gonna really make this famine kinda hit home, you know, in a really, really sad way in the months to come. David Friedberg (01:06:33): We're already seeing as I mentioned 2 weeks ago yeah. I I I I I and and as I mentioned a few weeks ago, the fertilizer problem driving acreage down. So the USDA farm report comes out. They survey farmers and figure out how much they're gonna plant every year and they just downgraded the number of corn acres that are gonna get planted this year, which is happening starting this month from 93,000,000 acres to Speaker 1 (01:06:53): 89,000,000. David Friedberg (01:06:54): That doesn't sound like a lot, but Speaker 1 (01:06:55): 4,000,000 David Friedberg (01:06:56): acres. 4,000,000 acres coming out of production of corn in the US is an incredible amount of calories that are not gonna be planted to corn. And so that has all these downstream effects. And, again, this this crop doesn't come to harvest till, you know, September, October, then it's gonna get processed and it turns into food. So by the time the the effect of this decision making hit the marketplace, the availability of calories and the stockpiling that's going on It's like boom. Some countries are gonna be you know, they're gonna have a limited budget. They're only gonna be able to access so much food, and they can't access any. And other countries gonna be fine. The United States is gonna be fine. Western Europe will be fine. China will be fine. Sri Lanka is gonna be a mess. Northern And Eastern Africa is gonna be a mess. I mean, there's, like, places around the world that we are gonna have to scramble. I I don't have a real easy answer. There's no simple plug and play here. it's gonna be a really complex set of problems that are gonna need to be solved. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:07:49): Well, Sri Lanka does grow a lot of its own food, so they may be okay because they -- They're David Friedberg (01:07:52): in that importer. Right? I mean, they're a pretty big net importer. they make a lot of food, but they they they rely on imports a lot for for calories there. So yeah. I mean, that and that's the case with Jason Calacanis (01:08:02): a lot of places. Around the world, a lot of people think, oh, David Friedberg (01:08:04): we have farmers, most countries, you know, particularly in the developing world, are net importers. They they they rely on 3rd party supplies of food. So -- Sure. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:08:13): But but a lot of what you're talking about, though, are not they're they're processed foods that come into the country. Jason Calacanis (01:08:19): Saks, anything to add here? David Sacks (01:08:20): Well, I mean, think that the Ukrainian war is kind of entering a a chronic phase. I mean, the source of entering a new phase. The 1st phase, you'd have to say that Ukrainian won. You know, the Russia wanted to topple Zelensky's regime, maybe take Kyiv. They obviously failed in that. Now we're in this phase where the fighting's over in the Donbass. It's basically the civil war that's been going on there since 2014. And and and really, that's what it's now about. Zelensky has acknowledged that Ukraine will not be part of NATO. So that issue is kind of off the table. And so what they're really fighting over now is the status of these disputed territories in Eastern Ukraine. And I think it's gonna go on for a long time. That's what, you know, general military test fight could go on for years. I think it's gonna become a sort of permanent feature in the background of Biden's presidency. And, I mean, I think the good news is that, hopefully, the war 3 aspect is off the table. It seems like 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. So now is this gonna be a protracted, I think, civil war going on in the Donbass with between Ukraine and and Russia and their proxies. Jason Calacanis (01:09:40): Which would mean, at Saks, correct me if I'm wrong, that Putin will be hobbled forever. They're gonna be a world power, and his power is going to deprecate because he's gonna be busy fighting this non winnable war for some period of time. which is in a way saying Biden did it perfectly and Chuck made it him. I'm saying that's gonna be your assessment if the techy guy looked down his way that there's, like, a civil war going on and and and Buddhist has crippled? That would be Checkmate or no? David Sacks (01:10:07): I think I I think that, clearly, the the state departments strategy here is to make Putin bleed in Eastern Ukraine and to retract this thing and make it go on as long as possible. I think that's a a risky strategy. because this thing could always spin out of control. Jason Calacanis (01:10:22): It's risky, but could it be effective? Is there a chance it could be effective? David Sacks (01:10:27): Well, I mean, if the goal is to blue pea bleed Putin, yes, it could be effective of bleeding Putin. However, I don't know that that needed to be the key geostrategic objective of the United States right now. I I don't know. I don't know. Because, look, China is our main threat. China is a peer competitor to the United States. Russia is not our economy. It's fifteen times bigger than Russia's. China's economy is about the same size as ours. That is the real threat. So, you know, there are cost to us as well. There are clearly cost to Putin of this, but there are huge cost to us as well. FreeBird described the risk to supply chain. we've had to now spend a lot more money building up the defense in Europe. We're gonna be pinned down in Europe we should really be moving some of those resources from Europe to to East Asia. I mean, that's really where the pivot to Asia is what we thought we were supposed to be doing until quite recently. Now we're gonna be bogged down there. And there's still risk of inflation and recession in the US. And I think if we are in a recession later this year, think a lot of people in the US will be asking, what was this all for? And if you go read my article that just came out yesterday with those based on my speech, is published in the Americans conservative. Look. This war was easily avoidable. I mean, the state department could have avoided this war very Chamath Palihapitiya (01:11:42): easily. Jason Calacanis (01:11:42): I thought you're I I listened to your speech. I thought your points that you were very clear on, hey. Putin started this. He is the aggressor. It's his responsibility. 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. Although, in this case, it might it seems like it's a possibility now. So Who knows? David Sacks (01:12:03): I don't know. I think we have regime change. But if we do, there's no reason to believe that we're gonna get something much better. In every case, we're gonna push for regime change, we've actually gotten the same or worse. So, yeah, I don't think that should be our objective. You know, I look. I think we have a bunch of bad options now that the war's already started. The best option would have been to avoid this war in the first place. 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 Jason Calacanis (01:12:36): let me ask let me ask this follow-up question as we wrap here. Chamath, I've been thinking about what it what should a strategic objective be for America. And the number one strategic objective I could think of was or one of the top ones would be to build a strong relationship with India, which obviously you know, it has an adversarial relationship with China already on the border of Pakistan and then obviously you know, has relations with Russia. What would be on the top of each of your list, Saxon, Shamoff, Shamoff, you were first on priority here, if we're thinking fresh, looking at the world with China in retreat, sort of disengaging from the west with Russia on their heels, What could the United States and the West do as a preemptive measure to really solidify democracy and you know, the the moral order, a peaceful world order. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:13:29): I'll answer it slightly differently, which is we need to put ourselves in a position to not be dependent on any country. Because then we can actually dictate what we think the right approach and solution is from 1st principles and have the courage to stick it through to get to the other side of it. So there are really 2 things we need to do. The first, which we've kind of perverted unnecessarily is energy independence. and we've allowed too many people to conflate and muddy the water on what energy independence means. 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. We have to get out of our own way. Okay? So energy independence, I think, beyond anything else Speaker 1 (01:14:19): -- Jason Calacanis (01:14:19): Strategic. Speaker 1 (01:14:20): -- Chamath Palihapitiya (01:14:20): probably an order of magnet. It is the most important thing. 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. 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. Jason Calacanis (01:14:59): So the road to resiliency, Saks, you are now the secretary of state. What are your key priorities David Sacks (01:15:06): US grand strategy has always been to prevent the rise of a peer competitor who can dominate their region and then challenge us for global hegemony. There's only one country in the world that can do that right now to us, which is China. So the pivot to Asia, as Obama said, was fundamentally correct, but we have not fallen through and executed it. And now our attention is distracting and bogged down by what's happening in Europe. I would seek a negotiated settlement to this war. Now that this Zelensky government has survived, Putin has been unable to take Western Ukraine and furthermore that Zelensky has given up being part of NATO, the only thing left Chamath Palihapitiya (01:15:41): Okay. Jason Calacanis (01:15:41): So wrap Chamath Palihapitiya (01:15:42): for that. David Sacks (01:15:42): It's this it's this fight in the Donbas. There's a there's an agreement already on the table called the Minska Courts that could allow us to settle that Meanwhile, pivoting to Asia Speaker 1 (01:15:50): -- David Friedberg (01:15:51): Yeah. Speaker 1 (01:15:51): -- David Sacks (01:15:51): wrap it up. Meanwhile, pivot to Asia create a strong alliance of countries in East Asia who are threatened by China. We already are friends with many of them. You've got Japan, South Korea, Taiwan. You've got Vietnam. create a balancing alliance of those countries to prevent China from rising to the point where it can threaten us for global hegemony. That should be our main priority geopolitically. Jason Calacanis (01:16:18): Great. Alright. There you have it, folks. For the rainman, David Sachs, the dictator, Shamoff, Palihapitiya, And the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, I'm your boy, Jacob. And we will see you all in Miami, May 15th, 16th, 17th. Love you, boys. Bye bye. Love you, besties. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:16:37): Bye bye. Jason Calacanis (01:16:38): Bye bye. David Sacks (01:16:41): What your winter's ride. Jason Calacanis (01:16:43): Rainman, David Sachs. And it Speaker 7 (01:16:48): said, we open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. David Sacks (01:16:57): like, what, airliners ride? Besty's RV. Jason Calacanis (01:17:03): That is my dog's I'm missing your driveway. We should all just get a room and just have a one think you, George, because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual friendship that they just need to release somehow. What? David Friedberg (01:17:19): You're the b p What? David Sacks (01:17:21): You're a thief. What? What? Jason Calacanis (01:17:24): Where did you get Murphy's arms at? -- all day.