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Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the All In Podcast, Your Favorite podcast. And a lot of a 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 a lot of tech news. You do sound really hungover today, jakal. You sound like an old man that's been smoking cigarettes for three weeks. You sound erect. How big was your night last night? Admit it. I didn't go that big. A scale of 1 to Charlie Sheen. It was like a six. There was like a Martin Sheen and his 30s. What does that mean? One to Charlie, a couple of beverages. I'm sorry. On a scale of 1 to Charlie Sheen, I don't think I've ever been past the one in my life. What is a 6A6 is like, you know, Paris Hilton, you know, in her heyday or like Lindsay Lohan in Hollywood in the 90s. It's like, you know, like a good time but not crazy. Didn't they have to go to rehab? Exactly. They did super high function. But let me tell you something, Charlie Sheen cannot be. So. It was just like Lindsay Lohan. Wait, Lindsay Lohan, the one who went to rehab like five times? Like, what are you talking about? Yeah, that's a 6. I can see. I don't wanna know what 7 is. Let your winners ride. The man, David. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy. We. Joining us, of course. The Queen of Quinoa is here. The thriller from Amilla Valley. He puts the eye in anxiety. He got his degree from his Google pedigree. The Sultan of Science, David Frieberg. With us again. All right. Next up, of course, Azar of AR. He perfected the flywheel with his boy, Peter TLLP's. Don't be nervous because he's only investing in software as a service. The world's biggest ******* the Rain Man himself, David Sacks. This *******. ******* that might stick. I don't know. I feel like this might be heading towards kind of like a high school talent show kind of episode, but yeah, go ahead. And finally, the king of Spacks himself, the guru of growth, he puts *** **** ** dictator. He's going to upset her with his sweater. Chamath, Polly. Hypatia. Alright, boys. I can't just letting the audience know I can't keep this up every week. Yes, yes. It's become a very anticipated new feature of the show. It's a new feature. We, you know, I forgot we had like wet or wet your beak and, you know, all this stuff and all these flows. We come up with these flowers, we come up with new things. All right, listen, just a quick programming update. All in. Summit sold out, basically. And it's going to be a great show. We got about a dozen. Speakers lined up all kinds of great folks and three great parties. I want to highlight Monday a Sunday night will be the poker tournament that's going to be our Goodfellas, godfather kind of theme, dressed to impress the family night #2. Monday night is going to be our Havana White Party where your best linens and whites and then closing night party on Tuesday night is going to be our Miami Vice Big 80S party. Neon and T-shirts under suits. It's going to be a hell of a 2,000,000. 999,700 people don't give a **** about what you're talking about right now. There's like, I just want to let people know you're gonna go to this party that you're throwing and they're going to be here. It's 700 tickets. I think there's gonna be 700 tickets issued and there'll be probably 400 people at the party. So they're pretty good parties. We're in the party business here at the alien pod. Wow. I mean, the world needs some good parties. In my opinion. It's gonna be 3 back-to-back great parties. And the theme of the conference is the problem I most want to solve in the world or the problem I most want to see solved in the world. So we're asking every speaker to think about that and we're going to kind of talk about the world's biggest problems. And then who actually wants to solve them? The world needs more parties. Well, that's that's what I'm doing. That's my that's going to be my 10 minute talk. My Ted talk. I've been, I've been watching the we work show. Have you guys been watching it on? Fabulous CV plus yeah click elevating the world's Jared Leto is so freaking good and as that character by the way. Yeah it's incredible he got to get an e-mail like 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 really feel that vibe like yeah it's aspirational you can make the world's consciousness with your with your summits. I I told Bill pocketing millions of dollars it's not going to make a profit. Whatever profit it makes. It's going to go to Chamath star Chamber 50 person conference he's doing with the all in. Brand, so everybody gets to leverage the law and brand. First you did it sacks with your call in. Now I'm doing it with the Summit teammates. Going to do with his think tank and. I'm not going to do it. Coming soon from Friedberg, the all in unique special lose weight like your besties he's going to. It's 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. Oh yeah, spins up some ******* Tempe garbage and and vegan shakes your favorite to mouth. It's double ******* yuck, right? Yes, you vomit after you eat it you're you're in a caloric deficit for the month that that person refuses to leave your house. Boom, you lose everything. Well, you lose. They're like, hey, want some quinoa? You're like, no. And then you just wait. No, that's pretty. Give me Connor. Shave me. Give me my olive infused beef, please. The olive infused beef. No, I'm sorry, not olive infused. Olive. These beef only ate olives, guys, right? And then we murder them and ate them. You know, you know, you know, you're going to have a great life. You guys need to elevate your consciousness, OK? You have a party? Let's go. We need to get some Morales and some chickens and make some. Yesterday we had morals. Shawn made Morales White, white asparagus with morels for you. Mm-hmm. So good. So good. The Morel season has started. Everybody enjoy it. Lots of different news this week. You guys appeal, you guys appeal to the common man. The Morel season has started. Morels aren't that expensive. Tempe is more expensive than both quinoa and morels, 100%. That vegan ******** is way more expensive than normal. People 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 by the way by the way, have you guys ever looked and on the back of? Any carton of oatmilk? How much chemical nonsense is in that stuff? Yeah, not really big. Can that really be good for you? No. You know what I want? My God. Give me where's he? Where's the oatmeal? That's just oats and water doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. It's like soy lecithin, xanthum gum. Like, is that stuff? Can't be good for you. You know, sacks drinks and a 12 ounce glass of milk with every dinner they just drinks. That would be almost the almond milk at, like, the Whole Foods riddled with sugar and all this other nonsense. Chemicals as well, man, I mean. I mean, people trash milk. I get it. But, like, and I see if you're lactose intolerant, I understand you're in a pinch, but, like, why go to an alternative milk that is just riddled with just all of this terrible, terrible stuff? You know, sacks used to love to eat Brie cheese so much that whenever we'd have a party, somebody would bring blocks with the with the with the wheel of Brie. Eat an entire Brie wheel and brown sugar. No. They would put the brown sugar on top. They would melt it, and sacks freebook saxes eaten an entire brick of Bree in front of us. Oh my Lord. What was the origin of your brew obsession? Sacks? Stanford. I've been a Stanford. You just put some point. Became a frankly free. Yeah, the last guy I would think that would be. Pray. What's the matter? You just don't have? I mean, what about Cheddar? What a Great American cheese? No. You just prefer the French, huh? Yeah. You know, you still got that fetish for. The show. I gotta go. Yeah, we got **** to do. Let's go. Like, 45 minutes sax. Sax is that fermented kombucha. Stop, stop. This is just plain iced tea. Sometimes it's just good to be normcore. Normal, sweetened. Ohh, you're back on trying to catch up. Trying to catch up? OK, 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 six 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 $10 million a month, according to reports. I think the information got most of this information while only generating about 50K a month in revenue. They're $102 million. Series B was led by Stripe in January of 2021. Company raised $124 million in total. Also better.com, which we talked about, you remember? They had their horrific cringe worthy founder. Layoff a bunch of employees over zoom. And they laid off 900 people December 1st, 3000 people on March 8th, according to TechCrunch. For the 5000 remaining employees on April 5th, better.com offer corporate and product design and engineering employees the opportunity to voluntarily resign in exchange for 60 days paid severance and health insurance coverage. Better CEO Vishal Garg, hopefully a process that 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 uh this week in 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 15,000 staff seems like a reasonable thing to do, given how the market has changed. But again, their valuation was absurd 1.5 billion at 40 out of $40 billion valuation in December. Shamati 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 RIP. What's your take? Is this the the beginning of the end? The the middle? Where where are we at in this cycle and what's the reasonable thing for founders to do here? I think so you we probably should take the the macro and then boil it down to the startup, 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 three or four 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 going to move by 50 basis point increments for the foreseeable two or three rate hikes and we're going to start quantitative tightening. What does that mean? 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 $95 billion a month of the opposite action, which means they're taking money out of the system. Right. Or in this case, what they're going to do is they're going to let a bunch of maturities roll off and not rot, not renew them. OK? 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 a massive price issues, we have supply demand issues and the market keeps shaking it off. So I think what the Fed is going to do is get even more aggressive. So you're going to probably see, you know, a lot of 50s, 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 bloodletting in the equity market. They need to see that the markets cracked. And so they literally need to see what percentage drawdown or just to go sideways. What do they need to see in order to look or is it inflation coming down a couple of points? Well, the problem that we suffer from is that they're going to look at the highest level indexes, right? They're not looking at single stocks. And so when they like, when you and I think the market is down 4%, we don't feel that because some of our companies are down 50 and 60%, 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&P, 540% of every dollar is, you know, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etcetera, Tesla. So we're in a situation where I think until the Fed see that there's a massive trading of liquidity, which means like you see these indices crack big time 3536 hundred in the S&P, they're just going to keep ratcheting things up. As it comes all the way down to our companies in Silicon Valley and Tech. What that means is like you have to start planning for the worst, and I think the worst means is that there is 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 two years, I would encourage you to just get your balance sheet in order to wait it out. Sachs Nuclear winner is a possibility here. Markets for startups. Raising money again astronaut saying could be on the terms of the capital allocators. What what's your advice to founders? What are you seeing in the boardrooms 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 two or three things you do? The first thing you got to do is look at your burn multiple. I mean how much are you burning relative to how much incremental AR are you generating? You look at fast, they raise 120 million what, like a year ago that they're out of money now so they burned 10 million months. Like you said. Here's the crazy thing, if they just slammed on the brakes. Three or four months ago, when we were talking on the spot about the coming downturn, they could still have $30 million in the bank. That's a lot of money. The only reason it doesn't seem like a lot of money is because they've been burning 100 million over the past year. But objectively, $30 million is a groceries B, which is actually a lot of money for a company that only has 100,000 in revenue. So they could have saved that company if they had slammed on the brakes three months ago and rationalized the cost structure, and they didn't. So they hit the wall at 100 miles an hour. Who's responsible when something like that happens? David, because you we've all seen it, what is this mention of disbelief that creates this kind of stupidity that, I mean that's what it is. I mean you've got, you've got people who are kind of drinking the kool-aid and there's nobody advising them to stop or if there is or not listening. I mean look, PayPal had this situation back in 2000, the year 2000, right after the.com crash. We were burning $10 million a month like fast. We had no revenue and no business model, OK? And we had said that the service would be. Always free. We had four 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 and we caught the, we cut the cost structure of the company and we made that last $40 million last a lot longer than four 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, 1999. Your business model 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. 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. I don't even know who's on the board because Stripe led 2 rounds I think. And so look, when you heard of it, David, that you you and listen we all love stripe. It's a great company. It's it's a legendary company, but. One of the reasons we don't like to have strategics as maybe they're not thinking the same as a proper capital allocator and for them this is peanuts, right, exactly. No, look, the the reason why a strategic investor, sorry, I think the reason why strategic investor invests because it's strategic for them. I mean it was in stripes interest to try and back a winner in the whole e-commerce 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, but I don't, I don't understand that. Strategic decision, because I I suspect the rationale somewhere internally in stripe, which is pretty flawed is, hey, we can't do it ourselves because if we did, we would be competing with our customers, but picking a winner and putting $120 million is tantamount to the same thing. So I don't understand. It doesn't, it doesn't make any sense, right. And Stripe raise money at what, ninety $500 billion valuations. So look, it all flows down from, you know, the, the frothiness that the peak? No, I'm saying I think I would have, it would have been much more credible for Stripe to say this is a critical piece of the infrastructure and value chain in payments that we want to own. So we're just going to go and put some of our better engineers as like a, you know, side project and see if we can tack away at something that works. I mean I think a lot of people would have adopted it. But I guess there was a pretty clear stripe was on the board, index was on the board. OK. That's interesting. I mean those are some good investors. There's there's a couple of people on the board, index and who else? According to Crunch base, Stripe was on the board, 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 crunch guys, remember when Philip Kaplan used to run a website called? Dropped company? Absolutely. The friend of mine, yeah. You wanna tell the **** company story, Jake? All for all the people that have no idea. I mean, basically what happened was.com the.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 only thing you could really publish on the in the world was like a a Geocities page. You can put up a home page if you know how to do HTML is even pre Myspace. And so a friend of mine, Phil Kaplan, who does a very successful company called Distro Kid now started **** company. And it was a message board. And what he basically let people do was. He would write 3 headlines, one sentence each. Kind of like before Reddit existed where you just put one line hit and then there was comments underneath it. Say this company, we just got an e-mail, this company's laying off people and he would beat all the news stories to the layoffs because he would just run with any e-mail 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. I think this time around it's probably. Important for employees to understand a couple of things. One 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. But you gotta think like the fiduciaries that are ripping this money in, I mean, do you really want to be the person that goes to work at a company that's backed by these folks in round two? I mean that's not a signal like, like the opposite is 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 Moritz backed Company or Mike Morks governed company is very high, right. Same thing with girlies, you know, same thing with a lot of, a lot of really, really good investors. John dorr. But the opposite should also be true then, because if it if you really want to work for a Peter Thiel backed company, you should probably not work for one of these companies where these folks who are just completely absent are also governing the board because that just means like nobody knows what's going on. We haven't had proper governance for a long time in Silicon Valley. So I mean I think that's what we we crashed. We crashed and the dropout were in some ways about incompetent boards, both of those TV shows. 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, and incentivized primarily by making money is to to raise more capital and get more deals. And as you guys know, like every venture firm has maybe one or two superstars, and then they fill out the ranks and hire a bunch of folks who are maybe not superstars. Or they don't pay as much attention. 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 going to 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 docu signs 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 don't know about you guys, but I see a lot of VC's either pandering to the CEO because we have founder culture hysteria in Silicon Valley where it's true the best founders make the thousand X returns and that's it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of the businesses should be left to their own devices just because there are a few ultra 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 VC's are more incentivized to raise more money to make more investments and then pay less attention and just go raise the next fund. I 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 people. But those people that are real pickers, I don't think put up with ******** from and not just pickers like. So John Dorr was deeply involved in Google in the early days. Like, you're right, I'm, I'm, I'm I'm simplifying. Good job. But what I'm saying is our job, OK at the end of the day is we're picking OK 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 going to remember you. Yeah. And what what ends up happening is the VC flushes the deal because it's not going to be the 100 bagger. They don't pay as much attention. They let the thing ride into the sunset and 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 sacks 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. But you said the key thing. There are few practitioners that really have the gravitas to actually enforce those decisions. So, you know, there's a reason why. And during the great financial crisis, there was only one organization that even had the courage, forget whether it was right or wrong at the time, to even write the RIP Good times deck, right? It was Sequoia. Nobody else dared to even put that on the page, let alone give it to all of their companies knowing that it would leak, lest they be wrong. 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 three or four 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 going to hire a very different kind of person than if you're helping, trying to help build companies. And the difference is that when you're trying to raise a Yum, your customer is not the company, it's your customer is the LP. And what the LP 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 at 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. 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 the entertainment that comes from failure. I I thought **** company like I was young when it when it was out and you know I would read it and kind of giggle at the stupid companies that got funding. 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 the building, that wasn't that. That's not what **** company was. I don't think it was people taking potshots as much. It was people that, Oh yeah, there was a lot of that, that, that and cause. Yeah, there was, you admit. But would you admit in fairness that there's a lot of people telling the truth? Oh yeah. Yeah, totally. No, no, but but. But a lot of it was like this mockery. Can you believe this **** even existed? Yadda yadda. And the cynicism, I think, you know, kind of, you know, it's it stalls 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 going to be challenged in a marketplace where everyone is cynical and I'll say like. Scarcity breeds success. When there wasn't a lot of venture money and there were only a, you know, kind of a few investments that could be made each year. 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, OK, the best opportunity to get wins and gets picked and gets capital in a world where everyone was raising a billion dollar second fund or a $3 billion fourth fund and you suddenly had an influx of $100 billion of venture. In a year, it's a lot like what we saw in crypto markets, which is an extraordinary explosion and highly speculative bubble assets. And a lot of these businesses maybe shouldn't have existed in the 1st place. Too much demand for the stock of private companies and all the hedge funds that came into it, all the mutual funds that came with supply of great founders and serious teams that are working hard on this. I think with the case to fast, I agree with your general sentiment about dunking. And in the case of fast, what you had was a founder who was on Twitter every day. Tweeting about how great the company was in 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. Lesson learned. You know who, you know who should be criticized? The next person that backs that guy, that's it. You know that guy is he's got, he's got a very interesting history actually as well. I think if they had done little colorful, they didn't do any diligence on him. Apparently he had two companies that were kind of major red flags and I think the diligence issue sacks is 1. Maybe you are having a similar experience to me on the early stage. We were seeing deals last year closed in a week. We normally have 30 days to vet a deal and maybe a week or two to get our diligence wrapped up. Sometimes these things overlap, but it's what was it, you know historically a four to six week process and then it went down to a four to six day process and then people were meeting with you one day and saying they're closed the next. 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? You know, 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 SAS companies because the metrics that you're looking at are so standardized. It's just a it's an easier process. 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 probably off sheet customer references. So 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 want to talk to customers and you want to understand the value they're getting out of the product and ideally they're offering customers. Explain what option 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 she 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, but you know that it's a totally non conflicted situation so that's what you're looking for. So one of your companies is using stripe, they tell you how great stripe is, they tell you what's good, what's bad about it, but references you're giving. So it's sort of like backdoor references if somebody tells you here's. And then you can do the same thing on founders too. You can have on sheet and off sheet references for founders. And you could do it for VC's. Yeah, but but look, I think. I think it's probably a little bit unfair to blame the board of this company too much, because the reality is that. VC's don't have the leverage or the power in this business. I mean, it's found this, this whole construction in 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 going to do whatever they want and just hold on. Boards generally are very deferential to founders. And if the Founders not willing to listen to advice, what are you going to do about that? Well, that 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 have. I don't know. I don't know about that, and we would have to consider it. If Mike Morris actually 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 one or two of us that you would talk to pretty consistently. You didn't talk to all of them. I would always seek out advice. Look at 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 problem with it being governance is all the institutional incentives for VC's are to be profounder. So no one wants to jam a founder by making them do something, didn't you? They don't want to do well, I'm just saying that's that's the way it is now. 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 LP's. Prior to that, there was a scarcity of venture capital, and VC's could be, could have good governance and not have to have this whole profounder model. That became the thing that Founders Fund and Andresen and others kind of proclaimed as being core to their advantage and the reason to pick them over some other VC who's going to meddle in your affairs. And by the way, both are true. There are most VC's, as Vinod has said publicly, add negative value. And I totally agree with him on this because they many VC's, 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 we work in Ubers of the world that you know, I think that's right. There's a trade is a trade off. I mean look, I remember in the 1990s, the default was the founder of Scott replaced, right. Like as soon as the company is successful, you hire a professional CEO. That was just like rule of Rick Schmidt. I mean even the mighty Google did that. Yeah. No, I mean that was by the way, it was pretty much the point I was trying to make, which was like so much of John Doors influence was in getting Larry and Sergey 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 and you know it's it was an important imagine if you had one of these Founders fund and by the way you know you guys know I'm very close to the the guys at Founders Fund and but imagine if you had a founders fund type approach where you said look Larry and Sergey are the founders. They know what they're doing, let him do it as opposed to the John door nuance of let's make sure that we think about the development of this company successfully over time and then convince Larry and Sergey. There a bunch of meetings and riding bikes and whatever else they did with Eric, you know, to like. And then and then what about Jim Breyer? Didn't he bring Cheryl over to Facebook? I mean like there's a lot of these stories of the really, you know, the VC's that really change the trajectory of the business through their work. Right. And but look, all I'm saying is the the the good VC's can still have that influence, but it's in the form of advice rather than governance, right. Look, we just don't call the show. No, you're 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 the template I want. I'm not going to 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, all right, 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 advice. Full setting. What's the speed of the play? What's what's the elevation? Where are we at? What's the altitude? And when you ask people for this today, that should do that too. Yeah. I don't know anyone that doesn't do that, I'll be honest. Like, yeah, anybody that doesn't do it, honestly is being. That's not completely irresponsible. I don't know anyone that doesn't do that. I mean, I'm talking about. I would love to see, I would love to see a little bit more going on. There's a little bit of love 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 I was 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 governance 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. Other 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 e-mail 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 striper index could have said you're burning $10 million a month and there's no revenue. So the point is that data is not doing 30 or $40 million in the bank. Give me a break, guys. So this is 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, yeah. So we point people's attention to two articles I wrote that I think are relevant. So first, we actually published an article on the SAS Board meeting deck that we would like people to use and obviously they're free to use or not to Tomas 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 runway totally. We just look at how much you burned last month and how much money you got in the bank. Just tell me they were down to 30 or $40 million burning 10 million a month. Somebody should have like thrown up a red flag and said better slam on the brakes right now you'll be out of business in three or four months. So so that that's that's sort of piece #1 the the other piece was an archive wrote a couple of 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 startups 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 and 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 going to be up into the right. It's they they it's funny. They're always described the same way. They're described as visionary, charismatic, and the word crazy is often used, but it's crazy good. And then when everything goes to **** all of a sudden the word crazy means something pejorative and bad and. You know the the the problem is that you know the 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 going to make a mistake and hit the wall. Being delusional is, you know what you need to start these companies. Like, I'm going to beat these incumbents, I'm going to change the world. A little bit of delusion is good, but. Not when you're looking at how the runway, right? Like that's when you need to be pragmatic. I think you know, there's a term of coachability. 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 colicins Patrick collision and and how much breath he has and some of 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. And informed 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 CEO's that scale to $100 billion 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 is and and being willing to take advice and so you're bored as a tool not kind of a governance structure sitting over you think the less you are like that the more you are likely. To feel like you're bored of the governance structure, an umbrella sitting over you, telling you what you can't do. I don't think that's what governments means, by the way. Well govern. It's meant to be. It's meant to look out for the shareholders. That's the job. Right. But to act as a fiduciary doesn't mean to like tell the CEO what to do. This is my point. Like, yeah, I'm just saying so there it's it's not saying I think I think he's right about, I think Freeberg right about how boards are often perceived by founders. I think there is an increasing, let's call it a Hollywood director, a Hollywood auteur mentality towards VCJ on the all in podcast, right. It's basically, it's basically, look there, there are certain incubators out there and accelerators and whatever who teach these young founders. That is all about their vision, and anyone who stands in the way of it is basically interfering with them. And they they are the auteur, like a Hollywood director, and you got to stay away from those suits, the studio guys right over. That's the mentality they're trying to they're teaching them an adversarial mentality, an adversarial mentality. And look, there are to chamas point, there are plenty of VC's 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 going to be 10 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 we'll still give you the advice if something's going wrong. And what was true at one point in time when Paul Graham gave this advice and he set up, why? Combinator. You don't want to say their name, but 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 going to be founder focused. So but that advice then might have been true and now it's not. Now we've swung the pendulum too far the other way. We did two things because we saw this ten years ago when I started seed investing and then 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 will just teach you. We'll take like here's some decks that we've seen from other. You know, here's some decks that are available and we'll show you what a board is like. And then I would have three founders come. Two would sit on one board meeting and I would do 3 back-to-back board meetings. Bring your Council, bring your founders and sit in on the other two board meetings and we'll have a little Socratic discussion about what was good about each board meeting. We did board meeting training as a proxy for venture worthiness later on. And when those companies did go out to the adventure and they had an ESOP and they had board minute meetings, they just looked more impressive to the venture community. So I know people say don't do a board. It's not cool. It actually turns out doing a one hour board meeting 4 * a year, 6 * a year, even as a seed stage company, it does differentiate you to the venture community I find. All right, moving on and Speaking of boards. Elon bought a chunk of Twitter last week, a 9% stake, and he's joining the board. 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 and support. I'm really happy you're joining the Twitter board! Just to give some level setting here. In Q4 of 2021, Twitter had 1.5 billion 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. 217 million daily active users, 38 million of which in the US, 179 million are international. And their stated goals for Q4 of next year, 2023, so in a year and a half, they want to have 315 million and they want revenue in 2023 to hit 7.5 billion again. They're on a $6 billion run rate. So I guess that would be an increase of 25%. Just general thoughts on and Elon obviously has been making some Twitter suggestions for the product sacks you worked with Elon at PayPal. Thoughts on what this does for? That wasn't like you're laughing. It's like such a funny transition, sax. You work with Elon and PayPal work for you. I'm sure he's going to have some great product ideas, but what this is really about is free speech. You know? Right before Elon announces he is doing polling, asking the Twitter user base whether Twitter was succeeding or failing in his mission to be an open town square, an open marketplace of ideas, something like 70% said they were failing at it. Elon, on many occasions, has spoken up for free speech. He believes that Twitter's historic mission is as an open town square, and I think he's going to bring that emphasis to the board and it's a great thing. Now. I think the person who had the best take on the reaction to this was Mike Salana and he had a few funny tweets about this. Who does he work for? Is he a founders fund guy, I think, yeah, I think he he works for Peter, our Founders fund, but he's got a he also writes a great news sub stack newsletter, kind of like A blog post called pirate Wires. It's worth checking out is he's a pretty. In addition to being a pretty sharp analyst, he's actually says a lot of funny things, too. He's iconoclastic and yeah, yeah, he, he, he, he'll, he'll swing the sword. Yeah. So the way he put it is that, you know, Elon joining the board has all the worst 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 always say, well, just go create your own social network. You know, we're free to do what you want over your true whatever. Exactly. Well, this is this is the free market acting in a way they don't like, which is finally somebody who believes in free speech is 1 to stand up by the largest stake in Twitter, join the board. I mean, this is fabulous. I think it's really fabulous. I think it's pretty amazing. Yeah. And the stock went up 30%. What do you think? Yeah. 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. Freebook 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 then if you really believe in that, then you go to the next logical conclusion, which is what David has said for forever, which is the only solution to, you know, speech you don't like is more speech. 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 spam issue. And it creates a sort of wisdom of the crowds ranking rating issues. So misinformation comes to mind. Yeah, but that's that's the 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 that 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 want to see what this how this plays out. I think it's a really, really big deal. Alright, freeberg. Yeah, I'll tell you what I think changes. Facebook, Twitter, even Google all acquiesced 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 overtime 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 drives some of these censorship decisions and drives 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 where the largest single shareholder in Twitter to date has been Jack Dorsey at 2.3%, he actually serves the shareholders. And the shareholders ultimately want to see the stock price go up and they ultimately want to see the business make more money. And as a result, they don't have the same sort of, you know, the 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 focus meeting, 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. But Facebook and Google are concentrated. They have a dual class structure in class. Yeah. So what are you talking about? The issue chamath is in those companies, they're scared to death that they'll lose their employees and have chaos at work. Government? No, the issue is government. Also crucial your employees. Down below, it's, yeah, it's shareholders, it's shareholders and government regulators, right. And so in both cases, you are wise to the pressure and employees. It's a good point. Yeah, I understand. But I'm not sure how Twitter changes any of that there. It does. I'll tell you why, because if we look at what's happened is let sometime last year, I think it happened around Chappelle. And I think it happened because the coin base, we saw a group of folks say, you know what, enough's enough. 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, and if you disagree with this one, you can do a walkout, you can protest, you can make your feelings hurt, or you can choose to not work here. And then Daniel Eck kind of did the same thing. He said, listen at Spotify, we're going to put labels on it. If you don't like Joe Rogan, 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 want to cancel. People or they want ad 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 going to do it at Spotify anymore. They're not doing it at Netflix and Apple acquiesce, 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 going to fire him. I think at some point Apple is going to have to say, you know. Leave your feelings at work and and this is a company. Leave them at home. Thank you. This is why Elon is so dangerous to to these people is because he won't be pushed around. The fact of 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. And they they want a monopoly on moral outrage. They want a monopoly. Well, outrage. They want a monopoly, but they also want a monopoly on the ability to basically to to define what is acceptable and and and what the what the narrative on any topic is gonna be. And all it takes is 1 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 another target. They find another time. 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. And let's let's go into the new 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 listen. There were moments of deep platforming 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, Milo Yiannopoulos and some of these alt right Nazi sympathizing, people throwing up SWAT stickers, you know, people promoting violence or brigading on these services to attack people into docs. People, those people, those were just cancellations, deep platforming from YouTube, in your opinion. Well, I mean, anybody inciting violence, I think we would all agree, should be dis platformed, Jason. Look at how it's evolved. We start with isolated cases like Alex Jones, like Amilo. Nobody likes and nobody supports. The next thing you know, the President of United States is being deep platformed. But again, that's supposedly based on him inciting a crowd. Then what's happening today? Now we have entire categories of of opinion being banned. It starts with COVID. Anyone exactly my point. Anyone who dissents ones. And now there is invalid I everybody who has a similar scenario what is a dissenting opinion on COVID gets banned. Now anybody who has dissenting opinion on climate change can be banned. There's a story this week on CNN where Pinterest. All come look. Pinterest is a photo sharing site. I don't know no one's talking about climate change on Pinterest. And yet I was. But then I got too hot. 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, and jakal, 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 slight people point to a slight degree away from the next case, and then a slight degree away from the next case. And then Fast forward three 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, what great movie? Woody Harrelson. The people versus Larry Flynt Larry Flynt was a pornographer. It was easy for everyone to chastise him and for everyone to say, you know what? Let's go ahead and deep platform 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. Twitter and YouTube and Facebook and Google to change how their platform operates. Sacks. I actually think that's a commercial decision made by a private company. They should have the right to do that, but they're going to lose users over time. They're going to end up looking like idiots when they're wrong by banning certain topics that we should be having conversations about over time. And I do think that there are other mechanisms for us to use the free and open Internet. This is why I think the free and open Internet is more important than anything to have conversations using other platforms, other means, I mean, and and I'm I'm I mean hold on. I just wanted to respond to to David since. 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 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. I think this is one of the best things. If people want to talk about ivermectin and it's an open science and freeberg, you know more about it than any of us and people wanted to. Read it. Why not link them to have questions? Credible sources? I think that's a great solution. I have a question. Yeah. Is there an oat milk tag on Spotify? Yes, because there is oatmeal goatmilk oatmilk. Wait, when you listen to all in pod on Spotify, there's A tag that says there's COVID COVID-19. Yeah, get COVID-19 information here to freeburg's argument about these companies should be free to do whatever they want. So I know that free bird. I want to make two points about this. First of all, I know Freeburg is 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 #1 is that nobody believes this argument. That these companies 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. OK? And in the first 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, we're to 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 point to you, if you do not have a right to free speech in this country, that right needs to be protected. 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 literally personed. When these big tech companies all get together as a cartel to deprive you of your free speech rights, you have been deep person. You've been digitally. Dead person. And they're not just doing it on speech. They're also taking away your right to engage in payments and transactions to earn a living. And unless we stop this now, it'll keep going. We we have to address the giant elephant in the room, a huge, which is Trump. I think a lot of this, you know, he hit its pinnacle when people were saying 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 6 and the inciting of the violence. And you know, all the stuff that's coming out and obviously we'll we'll see where that all winds up. I'm curious what everybody thinks here about. Should Trump or is Trump being put back in reinstated on Facebook or Twitter and it's supposed to be a lifetime ban on Twitter, but if corporate governance changes and people lobby for that, do we think that there is any kind of? Situation where Trump has his Twitter handle or Facebook accounts. Reinstated and should he have them reinstated? I think Jason, what you suggested is probably the most reasonable thing, which was there was a time based penalty. You know, we're, we're getting through we're probably what, a third or 2/3 of the way through the January 6th stuff. So that's going to come and go and. I think all roads will probably lead to a conclusion that after three years it's probably OK 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. You know that the current thing is moving on from Ukraine when the topic all of a sudden is January 6 all over again and 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. Well, what's your feeling on Trump? Should he be reinstated? If you were running Twitter, would you have done a time based. 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. My thoughts, I don't miss the tweets at all. I really don't. I don't damaging your party. That's how you felt. My thoughts have evolved before. When he first got 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 two years later and to see all of the stuff and the escalation of deep platforming. 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 got. So your opinion has evolved and and telligent people should respond to new data. I appreciate that. 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 two 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 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. Freber. What are your thoughts on Trump specifically? Because it does seem like that's a part of the undercurrent here of, you know, he's going to be coming back, possibly going to be running again. And January 6 is considered not 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 what is that? What is that smack training at? What's that, 20 billion or something still doing well. But look, they had. You know, obviously a reaction, 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's got probably the wrong people working on it, but if they wanted to have an alternative platform 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. I hope Elon takes a sledgehammer to that. Yeah, I mean, it's exactly what Jamal 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, whoa, these companies are monopolies. Well, and here's another opportunity if you're not libertarian and believe in, like, you know, free speech and you know. Constitution like it. You could buy shares, you could lead a group, start a down, start a hedge fund, whatever, build the block to buy a bunch of shares and then you can get a board seat on Twitter and you can have this debate on the board of Twitter and it's absolutely right. You are absolutely right. And you can see by the way, you know, small hedge funds with small amounts of capital like engine number one, 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. That's what that's that's what Mike Solano was kind of getting out. It's like look, if you don't like if you don't like the the free speech that's happening on Twitter, go create your own social network because that's what they were saying before but the shares and have influenced. That's how corporations work. The shares of the votes. Yeah. Friedberg update us on you know the Ukraine is in month two now. I'm sorry. Ukraine is in month two. Sorry for putting the thumb before it. It's a tough habit to break. Freeberg 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, Freeberg was right, these downstream effects are going to 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 30% of calories are in country? Could the world not mobilize 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 two weeks anywhere on the planet? 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 flower from a Miller. There are mills around the world that process flat 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. 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 philosophy or fundamentally speaking, they're they're not necessarily fungible, practically speaking, on the ground when you actually try and plug in, let's say, soybeans into the milling supply chain to make the pasta or the bread that everyone consumes. In Tunisia, it's not going to work 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 not have less and that's going to really make this famine kind of hit home in a in a really, really sad way in the months to come. We're already seeing as I mentioned two weeks ago, yeah, I as I mentioned a few weeks ago. The fertilizer problem driving acres down, so the USDA farm report comes out, they survey farmers and figure out how much going to plant every year and they just downgraded the number of corn acres they're going to get planted this year, which is happening starting this month from 93 million acres to 89 million. That doesn't sound like a lot, but four million percent, 4,000,000 acres coming out of production of corn in the US is an incredible amount of calories that are not going to be planted to corn. 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 going to 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 in the stockpiling that's going on, it's like, boom, some countries are going to be, you know, they're have a limited budget. They're only going to be able to access so much food and they can't access any. And other countries are going to be fine. the United States is going to be fine. Western Europe will be fine. China will be fine. Sri Lanka is going to be a mess. Northern and Eastern Africa is going to be a mess. I mean there's like places around the world that we are going to have to scramble. I I don't have a real easy answer. There's no simple plug and play here. It's going to be a really complex set of problems that are going to need to be solved. Well, Sri Lanka does grow a lot of its own food, so they may be OK because they also have water, right? I mean they're pretty big net importer, so they make a lot of food, but they they they rely on imports a lot for for calories there, so. Yeah, I mean, and that's the case with a lot of places around the world. A lot of people think, oh, we have farmers, but most countries. You know, particularly in the developing world or net importers, they, they they rely on 3rd party supplies of food. So sure. But, but a lot of what you're talking about though are not they're they're processed foods that come into the country sacks. Anything to add here? Well, I mean I think that the Ukraine war is kind of entering a chronic Phase I mean this sort of entering a new phase. The first phase you'd have to say that the Ukrainians won the, you know the Russia wanted to topple Solinski's regime, maybe take Kiev, they obviously failed in that. Now we're in this phase where the fighting is over in the Donbass. It's basically the Civil War has been going on there since 2014. And and and really that's what it's now about. Solinski 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 going to go on for a long time. That's what, you know, General Miley testified. It could go on for years. Against him 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 three aspect is off the table. Seems like the calls for us to impose a no fly zone or to put boots on the ground, which you were hearing a lot of a few weeks ago, seems like that's off the table. So now it's going to be a protracted, I think, civil war going on in the Donbass with between Ukraine and and Russia and their proxies, which would mean sax, correct me if I'm wrong, that Putin will be hobbled. Wherever they're not going to be a world power and his power is going to deprecate because he's going to be busy fighting this non winnable war for some period of time, which is in a way saying Biden did it perfectly and checkmated him. I'm saying that's going to be your assessment if she does go down this way that there's like a civil war going on and and and Putin is crippled, that would be checkmate or no. I think I I think that clearly the the State Department strategy here is to make Putin bleed in eastern Ukraine. Extract this thing and make it go on as long as possible. I think that's a risky strategy because this thing could always spin out of control. It's risky. Would it be effective? Is there a chance it could be effective? Well, I mean, if the goal is to blue people bleed Putin, yes, it could be effective 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 is 15 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. Free bird described the risk to the supply chain. We've had to now spend a lot more money building up the defense in Europe. We're going to 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 going to 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, I 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 American Conservative, look, this war was easily avoidable. I mean the State Department could have avoided this war very easily. 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? I don't like regime change, but if we do, there's no reason to believe that we're gonna get something much better. And every case where we 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 has already started. The best option would have been to avoid this war in the 1st 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 State Department in the year 2021 do a much more effective job preventing this war? Let me ask you. 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 it be on the top of each of your list? Sacks and Chamath Shamatha, 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 world order, a peaceful world order. 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 first principles and have the courage to stick it through to get to the other side of it. So there are really two 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 wind and solar. That path was pretty clear, but we got in our own way, we have to get out of our own way, OK. So energy independence, I think beyond anything else strategic, probably an order of magnitude, it is this 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. So the road to resiliency sacks, you're now the Secretary of State. What are your key? Priorities. the US Grand Strategy has always been to prevent the rise of a pure competitor who can dominate their region and then challenge us for global hegemony. 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 followed through and executed it, and now our attention is distracted and bogged down by what's happening in Europe. I would seek a negotiated settlement to this war now that this Zelinski government has survived, Putin has been unable to take. Western Ukraine, and furthermore that Zielinski has given up being part of NATO. The only thing left is rapid is this is this fight in the Donbass. 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, 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 agemy. That should be our main priority geopolitically. Great. All right, there you have it, folks. For the Rain Man, David Sachs, the dictator Chamath Polly Hypatia. And the Sultan of Science, David Freiberg. I'm your boy, Jackal. And we will see you all in Miami, May 15th, 16th and 17th. Love you. Bye bye. Love you bestie. Bye bye bye bye. Let your winners ride, Rain Man, David sat. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Thank you. Why? Besties are. Play a dog taking out in your driveway. Oh man. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge **** because they're always useless. It's like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release stuff out there. Let your feet. We need to get merchants off. I'm going.