E75: Fast shuts down, board culpability, Elon buys 9% of Twitter, deplatforming's evolution & more

0:00 Jason's big night out, bestie intros, All-In Summit update and more 8:01 Layoffs and shutdowns: Fast, Better.com, GoPuff; Chamath gives a macro- and micro- overview for startups 14:09 Preventing layoffs, culpability in Fast's shutdown, VC diligence strategy, VC/founder model 41:51 Elon buys a 9% stake in Twitter and joins the board: what does this mean for Twitter, free speech online, evolution of deplatforming 1:03:24 Food shortage update, ideal US objectives going forward Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/live-fast-die-young-behind-the-fall-of-a-one-click-wonder https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/08/better-com-cto-steps-down-agrees-to-voluntary-separation-in-wake-of-mass-layoffs https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/06/better-com-offering-employees-60-days-severance-losing-tens-of-millions-per-month-per-sources https://www.theinformation.com/articles/gopuff-plans-hundreds-of-layoffs-to-cut-40-million-in-costs https://articles.sequoiacap.com/rip-good-times https://sacks.substack.com/p/the-saas-board-meeting https://medium.com/craft-ventures/blitzfail-how-not-to-go-off-the-rails-24ccaf92c410 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-04/musk-takes-9-2-stake-in-twitter-after-questioning-platform https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1511320953598357505 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1511329369473564677 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507259709224632344 https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1511360061670662149 https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1511674851202945024 https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/06/tech/pinterest-climate-change-misinformation-policy/index.html https://gro-intelligence.com/insights/gro-predicts-us-corn-stocks-will-drop-sharply-in-2022-23 https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-state-department-failed-to-prevent-the-war-will-it-now-prevent-the-peace

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  Hey 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 a lot of tech news.

• 0:14David Friedberg?

  You do sound really hungover today, J Cal. You sound like an old man that's been smoking cigarettes for three weeks.

• 0:20David Sacks?

  You sound wrecked.

• 0:21David Friedberg?

  How big was your night last night? Admit it.

• 0:23Jason Calacanis?

  I didn't go that big. On a scale of one to Charlie Sheen, it was like a six.

• 0:27David Friedberg?

  There was like a Martin Sheen in his 30s.

• 0:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What does that mean, one to Charlie Sheen?

• 0:30Jason Calacanis?

  I had a couple of beverages.

• 0:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 six?

• 0:36Jason Calacanis?

  A six 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.

• 0:47David Sacks?

  Didn't they have to go to rehab?

• 0:49Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. I'm super high functioning. Let me tell you something, Charlie Sheen cannot be six.

• 0:54David Sacks?

  It was just like Lindsay Lohan. Wait, Lindsay Lohan, the one who went to rehab like five times? Like, what are you talking about?

• 0:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's a six.

• 1:04David Sacks?

  I don't want to know what seven is.

• 1:22Jason Calacanis?

  Joining us, of course, the queen of Kenwa is here, the thriller from Amilla Valley. He puts the eye on anxiety. He got his degree from his Google pedigree, the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg with us again. All right, next up, of course, the czar of ARR. He perfected the flywheel with his boy Peter Thiel. LPs don't be nervous because he's only investing in software as a service, the world's biggest asshole. The Rain Man himself, David Sacks.

• 1:50David Sacks?

  Wait, you call me a sasshole?

• 1:53David Sacks?

  That might stick. I don't know.

• 1:54David Friedberg?

  I feel like this might be heading towards kind of like a high school talent show kind of episode, but yeah, go ahead.

• 1:59Jason Calacanis?

  And finally, the king of Sacks himself, the guru of growth. He puts the dick in dictator. He's going to upset her with his sweater, Jamar Poli-Hopatia. All right, boys. I can't just let the audience know. I can't keep this up every week.

• 2:14David Sacks?

  Yes, yes. It's become a very anticipated new feature of the show.

• 2:19Jason Calacanis?

  It is. It's a new feature. Well, you know, I forgot we had like wet your beak and, you know, all this stuff and all these like- It ebbs and flows. We come up with new things. We come up with new things. All right, listen, just a quick programming update. All In Summit's sold out. Basically, it's going to be a great show. We've got about a dozen speakers lined up, all kinds of great folks. And three great parties I want to highlight. Monday, Sunday night will be the poker tournament. That's going to be our Goodfellas, Godfather kind of theme, dressed to impress the family. Night number two, 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 80's Party.

• 3:02Jason Calacanis?

  Neon and t-shirts under suits. It's going to be a hell of a party.

• 3:07David Friedberg?

  Two million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, seven hundred people don't give a shit about what you're talking about right now. There's like maybe three hundred people that are going to go to this party that you're throwing and they're going to be like, care?

• 3:19Jason Calacanis?

  Seven hundred tickets. I think there's going to be seven hundred tickets issued and there'll be probably four hundred people at the party. So they'll be pretty good parties.

• 3:25David Friedberg?

  Uh huh. We're in the party business here at the All In Pod.

• 3:28Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, the world needs some good parties, in my opinion. It's going to be three 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.

• 3:47David Friedberg?

  The world needs more parties.

• 3:48Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that's, that's what I'm doing. That's my, that's going to be my 10-minute talk, my TED Talk.

• 3:53David Friedberg?

  I've been, I've been watching the WeWork show. Have you guys been watching it on Apple TV Plus? Yeah, like elevating the world's, Jared Leto is so friggin' good in that, as that character, by the way. Yeah, it's incredible.

• 4:04Jason Calacanis?

  He got to get an Emmy.

• 4:05David Friedberg?

  Like elevating the world's consciousness as the mission and then just throw parties is the way to do it. You really should have that vibe, like, yeah.

• 4:12Jason Calacanis?

  It's aspirational for me.

• 4:14David Friedberg?

  Elevate the world's consciousness with your, with your summits.

• 4:16Jason Calacanis?

  I told Bill-

• 4:17David Sacks?

  While pocketing millions of dollars.

• 4:19Jason Calacanis?

  It's not going to make a profit. Whatever profit it makes is going to go to Chamath's Star Chamber 50-person conference he's doing with the All In brand. So everybody gets to leverage the All In brand. First you did it, Sax, with your call-in. Now I'm doing it with the summit. Chamath's going to do it with his think tank and-

• 4:36David Friedberg?

  I'm not gonna do it.

• 4:37Jason Calacanis?

  Coming soon from Friedberg, the all-in, unique, special, lose weight like your besties.

• 4:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's gonna, 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.

• 4:50David Friedberg?

  Oh, yes.

• 4:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Spins up some fucking tempeh garbage.

• 4:53David Friedberg?

  Tempeh and vegan shakes, your favorite, Chamath.

• 4:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's double fucking yuck.

• 4:58David Friedberg?

  Right, yes.

• 4:59Jason Calacanis?

  You vomit after you eat it.

• 5:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're, you're in a caloric deficit for the month that that person refuses to leave your house. Boom!

• 5:05David Friedberg?

  You're losing weight.

• 5:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Everything's solved, you lose weight.

• 5:07Jason Calacanis?

  They're like, hey, want some quinoa? You're like, no. And then you lose weight.

• 5:10David Friedberg?

  No.

• 5:10Jason Calacanis?

  That's pretty good.

• 5:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Give me, give me my olive-infused beef, please.

• 5:15Jason Calacanis?

  The olive-infused beef.

• 5:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I'm sorry, not olive-infused.

• 5:18Jason Calacanis?

  Olive fat.

• 5:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  These beef only ate olives, guys.

• 5:21Jason Calacanis?

  Right, and then we murdered them and ate them.

• 5:24David Friedberg?

  You know, you know, you guys need to do.

• 5:25Jason Calacanis?

  You're gonna have a great life.

• 5:27David Friedberg?

  You guys need, you guys need to elevate your consciousness, okay? And have a party, let's go.

• 5:33Jason Calacanis?

  We need to get some Morels and some chickens and make some.

• 5:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yesterday, we had Morels. Sean made Morels, white asparagus with Morels for you.

• 5:40Jason Calacanis?

  Mmm, mmm, so good, so good. The Morel season has started. Everybody enjoy it.

• 5:47Jason Calacanis?

  Lots of different news this week.

• 5:48David Friedberg?

  You guys appeal, you guys appeal to the common man. The Morel season has started. Morels aren't that expensive.

• 5:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Tempeh is more expensive than both quinoa and Morels. Hundred percent. That vegan bullshit is way more expensive than normal people.

• 6:02Jason Calacanis?

  All right, listen, we have to elevate the world's consumption of steak and meats.

• 6:08Jason Calacanis?

  I think a good place to start is, we've been talking.

• 6:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sorry, by the way, by the way, have you guys ever looked on the back of any carton of oat milk? How much chemical nonsense is in that stuff?

• 6:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, I'm not interested.

• 6:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can that really be, can that really be good for you?

• 6:23Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 6:23David Friedberg?

  You know what I want?

• 6:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, my God.

• 6:25David Friedberg?

  Give me.

• 6:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Where's the, where's the oat milk that's just oats and water?

• 6:28Jason Calacanis?

  Doesn't exist.

• 6:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It doesn't exist, it's like soy lecithin, xanthum gum, like, that stuff can't be good for you.

• 6:35Jason Calacanis?

  You know, Saks drinks and a 12-ounce glass of milk with every dinner. They just drink it.

• 6:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By the way, the 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 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?

• 6:59Jason Calacanis?

  You know, Sacks used to love to eat brie cheese so much that whenever we'd have a party, somebody would bring-

• 7:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you remember the brie blocks with the shit, with the, with the wheel of brie?

• 7:09Jason Calacanis?

  He would literally eat an entire brie wheel on his own.

• 7:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And brown sugar. No, they would put the brown sugar on top, they would belt it. And Sacks, Freebrooke, Sacks has eaten an entire brick of brie in front of us.

• 7:18Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my lord. What was the origin of your brie obsession, Sacks?

• 7:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Stanford. Happened at Stanford.

• 7:24Jason Calacanis?

  He's just at some point became a Francophile? He's the last guy I would think that would eat brie. What's the matter? You just don't have, I mean, what about cheddar? A great American cheese? No? You just prefer the French, huh?

• 7:36David Sacks?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:37Jason Calacanis?

  You still got that fetish for brie or no?

• 7:39David Friedberg?

  Can we start the show? I gotta go.

• 7:41David Sacks?

  Yeah, we got shit to do.

• 7:42Jason Calacanis?

  We got some work to do.

• 7:44David Friedberg?

  I got 45 minutes.

• 7:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sacks, Sacks, is that fermented kombucha?

• 7:48Jason Calacanis?

  Stop, stop.

• 7:49David Sacks?

  This is just plain iced tea.

• 7:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sometimes it's just good to be normcore.

• 7:55Jason Calacanis?

  Unsweetened. 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 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

• 8:39Jason Calacanis?

  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. Their $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 lay off a bunch of employees over Zoom. And they laid off 900 people December 1st, 3,000 people on March 8th, according to TechCrunch. For the 5,000 remaining employees on April 5th,

• 9:23Jason Calacanis?

  better.com offered corporate and product design and engineering employees the opportunity to voluntarily resign in exchange for 60 days paid severance and health insurance coverage. Better CEOs, Vishal Garg, hopefully I pronounced that correctly, 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 in Startups, and he's a pretty good, you know, 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.

• 10:04Jason Calacanis?

  1.5 billion at $40 billion valuation in December. Chamathie predicted a lot of this and that people would have to sharpen their pencils. We had a discussion about this, you know, the good times are our IP. What's your take? Is this the beginning of the end, the middle? Where are we at in this cycle? And what's the reasonable thing for founders to do here?

• 10:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think, so we probably should take the macro and then boil it down to the startup. So 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.

• 11:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 11:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 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 going to do is get even more aggressive. You're going to probably see, you know, a lot of 50s, maybe even a 75 point hike.

• 12:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 crack.

• 12:36Jason Calacanis?

  And so they literally need to see what percentage drawdown or just to go sideways? What do they need to see in order to, or is it inflation coming down a couple of points?

• 12:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 this 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 and P 500, 40% of every dollar is, you know, Apple, Amazon, you know, Microsoft, et cetera, Tesla. We're in a situation where I think until the Fed see that there's a massive trading of liquidity, which means like you see these indices crack big time, 35, 3600 in the S and P, they're just going to keep ratcheting things up.

• 13:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 two years, I would encourage you to just get your balance sheet in order to wait it out.

• 13:53Jason Calacanis?

  Saks nuclear winner is a possibility here. Markets for startups. Raising money, again, as Sean was saying, could be on the terms of the capital allocators. 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?

• 14:14David Sacks?

  I mean, the 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 120 million, what, like a year ago? They're out of money now, so they burnt 10 million a month, like you said. Here's the crazy thing. If they had just slammed on the brakes three or four months ago, when we were talking on this pod about the coming downturn, they could still have $30 million in the bank. That's a lot of money. 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 growth Series 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. They hit the wall at 100 miles an hour.

• 14:58Jason Calacanis?

  Who's responsible when something like that happens, David? Because we've all seen it. What is the suspension of disbelief that creates this kind of stupidity?

• 15:07David Sacks?

  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, 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 million a month, like Fast. We had no revenue and no business model. Okay. And we had said the service would be always free.

• 15:33David Sacks?

  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 cut the cost structure of the company and we made that last forty million dollars 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, etc. 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 dot com crash, you know, nineteen ninety-nine, 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

• 16:15David Sacks?

  two thousand, 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.

• 16:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 16:41David Sacks?

  I don't even know who's on the board because Stripe led two rounds, I think. And so.

• 16:47Jason Calacanis?

  Is that part of it, David, that you, and listen, we all love Stripe, it's a great company, 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 proper capital allocator and for them, this is peanuts.

• 17:02David Sacks?

  Right, exactly. No, look, the reason why a strategic investor.

• 17:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sorry, go ahead.

• 17:06David Sacks?

  I think the reason why a strategic investor invests is because it's strategic for them. I mean, it was in Stripe's interest to try and back a winner in the whole e-commerce checkout line sort of payment space. And so they did that and I don't even know if they had a board seat. And so no one was really.

• 17:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I don't, I don't understand that strategic decision because I suspect the rationale some were 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 a hundred and twenty million dollars is tantamount to the same thing. So I don't understand.

• 17:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It doesn't make any sense.

• 17:44David Sacks?

  Right. And Stripe raised money at a, what, $9,500 billion valuation? So, look, it all flows down from, you know, the frothiness at the peak.

• 17:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 and 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.

• 18:11David Sacks?

  I guess there was a board.

• 18:13Jason Calacanis?

  To be clear, Stripe was on the board, Index was on the board.

• 18:16David Sacks?

  Okay, that's interesting. I mean, those are some good investors. There's a couple of people.

• 18:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who was on the board? Index and who else?

• 18:21Jason Calacanis?

  According to Crunchbase, Stripe was on the board, a business development person from there. Index was on the board and Dom, the founder, and it looks like Brian Sugar, who I know, who's an angel investor and a founder. But who knows if that's outdated information in Crunchbase?

• 18:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you guys remember when Philip Kaplan used to run a website called Fucked Company?

• 18:42Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. A friend of mine, yeah.

• 18:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you want to tell the Fuck Company story, Jake Alph, for all the people that have no idea?

• 18:47Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, basically 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 only thing you could really publish on the, in the world was like a GeoCities page. You could put up a homepage if you knew how to do HTML. This is even pre-Myspace. And so, a friend of mine, Phil Kaplan, who does a very successful company called Disco Kid now, started Fuck Company. And it was a message board. And what he basically let people do was, he would write three headlines, one sentence each, kind of like before Reddit existed, where you just put a one-line hit. And then there was comments underneath them. It'd say, 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.

• 19:29Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 19:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 that. But you got to think like the fiduciaries that are ripping this money in. I mean, do you really want to be the person that goes to work at a company that's backed by these folks in round two? 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 Moritz

• 20:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  backed company, or Mike Moritz 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 Doerr.

• 20:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 20:45Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 20:56David Friedberg?

  No, I mean, I definitely see this. Um, you know, I, I think you guys know that the incentive for a traditional venture capitalist that, that, that maybe isn't, um, you know, motivated by improving their craft, but they're motivated, you know, incentivized 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 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

• 21:39David Friedberg?

  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 DocuSigns as they come in to approve stuff? But it's about actually critiquing. The business strategy with the CEO at the board discussion, critiquing the spending, reviewing the financial plan, making sure that everyone's aligned, that this makes sense in this funding environment to continue to do this work. And I don't see that a lot. I don't know about you guys, but I see a lot of VCs either handering 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 vices

• 22:24David Friedberg?

  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 VCs are more incentivized to raise more money, to make more investments, and then pay less attention and just go raise the next fund.

• 22:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, 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 a bullshit for anybody.

• 22:53David Friedberg?

  They're not just pickers. Like, so John Doerr was deeply involved in Google in the early days, like

• 22:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, you're right. 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 got to 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.

• 23:11David Friedberg?

  Yeah. And what ends, what ends up happening is the VC flushes the deal because it's not going to be the hundred dagger. They don't pay as much attention. They let the thing ride 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 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 a lot.

• 23:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 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 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 is 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?

• 24:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 help build companies. And the difference is that when you're trying to raise AUM, your customer is not the company.

• 24:38David Friedberg?

  It's the LP.

• 24:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 25:02David Friedberg?

  Look, I'll also say one thing that's important. You know, I don't like this celebration, or, sorry, the mockery and the entertainment that comes from failure. I thought Fuck Company, like, 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 not like the kind of thing that could, should kind of be funny 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.

• 25:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That wasn't that, that's not what Fuck Company was. I don't think it was people taking potshots as much as it was.

• 25:39David Friedberg?

  There was a lot of that. Oh, yeah. There was a lot of that. And because, yeah, there was a ton.

• 25:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Would you admit, but would you admit in fairness that there was a lot of people telling the truth?

• 25:46David Friedberg?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. No, no, no. But, but a lot of it was like this mockery, like, "Can you believe this shit even existed?" yada, yada. And the cynicism, I think, you know, kind of, you know, it's, it scales 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

• 26:29David Friedberg?

  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 billion-dollar second fund or a $3 billion fourth fund, and you suddenly had an influx of $100 billion of venture money in a year, it's a lot like what we saw in crypto markets, which is an extraordinary explosion in highly speculative bubble assets. And a lot of these businesses maybe shouldn't have existed in the first place.

• 27:05Jason Calacanis?

  Too much demand for the stock of private companies.

• 27:09David Friedberg?

  And all the hedge funds that came into it, all the mutual funds.

• 27:11Jason Calacanis?

  Not 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 the case of Fast, what you had was a founder who was on Twitter every day tweeting about how great the company was and giving startup advice while he was taking none of it and should not have been giving any of it because they didn't even have product market fit.

• 27:34David Friedberg?

  Lesson learned. You know, you know, you know who should be criticized? The next person that backs that guy. That's it. You know, that guy is what he is.

• 27:41David Sacks?

  He's got a very interesting history actually as well. I think if they had done any diligence.

• 27:44Jason Calacanis?

  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, 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 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.

• 28:16Jason Calacanis?

  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?

• 28:23David Sacks?

  You know, certainly, 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, it's an easier process.

• 28:45Jason Calacanis?

  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?

• 28:53David Sacks?

  Probably off sheet customer references. So the first thing we do is focus on the, on the metrics, right? And 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 off sheet customers.

• 29:09Jason Calacanis?

  Explain what off sheet is.

• 29:10David Sacks?

  Off sheet 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, it's a totally non conflicted situation. So that's what you're looking for.

• 29:38Jason Calacanis?

  So one of your companies is using Stripe. They tell you how great Stripe is. They tell you what's good about it, what's bad about it. But references you're giving, so it's sort of like backdoor references. If somebody tells you, here's my references.

• 29:48David Sacks?

  And you can do the same thing on founders too. You can have on sheet and off sheet references for founders.

• 29:52Jason Calacanis?

  And you can do it for VCs.

• 29:53David Sacks?

  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 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 going to be able to do whatever they want. And

• 30:20Jason Calacanis?

  I disagree.

• 30:21David Sacks?

  Hold on, boards generally are very deferential to founders. And if the founder's not willing to listen to advice, what are you going to do about that?

• 30:28Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that, no, this is, but this is the point you're making, I think is not right.

• 30:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 taken it.

• 30:39David Sacks?

  I don't know. I don't know about that.

• 30:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And we would have had to consider it. If Mike Moritz 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 can talk to all of them.

• 31:06David Sacks?

  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 problem 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.

• 31:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That didn't used to be the case.

• 31:23David Sacks?

  They don't want to do. Well, I'm just saying, that's, that's the way it is now.

• 31:26David Friedberg?

  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 going to 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.

• 32:11David Friedberg?

  But on the other hand, the whole pro-founder model led to the WeWork and Ubers of the world that, you know, I think we all kind of see the consequences.

• 32:18David Sacks?

  There's a trade-off. I mean, look, I remember in the 1990s, the default was that the founder just got replaced. Right? Like, as soon as the company's successful, you hire a professional CEO. That was just like rule of thumb. Eric Schmidt, I mean, even the mighty Google did that.

• 32:32David Friedberg?

  Yeah, no, I mean, that was, by the way, that was a point I was trying to make, which was like, so much of John Doerr's influence was in getting Larry and Sergey to take Eric on as CEO. 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.

• 32:50David Sacks?

  Right.

• 32:51David Friedberg?

  And, you know, it's, 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 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 them do it. As opposed to the John Doerr nuance of, let's make sure that we think about the development of this company successfully over time. And then convince Larry and Sergey through a bunch of meetings and riding bikes and whatever else they did with Eric, you know, to like, and then, and then what about Jim Breier? Didn't he bring Cheryl over to Facebook? I mean, like, there's a lot of these stories of the really, you know, the VCs that really changed the trajectory of the business through their work.

• 33:28David Sacks?

  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.

• 33:35David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 33:35David Sacks?

  Look, we just don't call the shots.

• 33:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 every board that I take, the first thing that I say is, here's a 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.

• 34:14Jason Calacanis?

  Just basic level setting, what's the speed of the plane? What's, what's the elevation? Where are we at? What's the altitude? And when you ask people for this today.

• 34:20David Sacks?

  We actually do that too.

• 34:21David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I don't know anyone that doesn't do that, I'll be honest, like.

• 34:24David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Anybody that doesn't do it, honestly, is being completely irresponsible.

• 34:29David Friedberg?

  I don't know anyone that doesn't do that, I mean, I'm talking about.

• 34:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would love to see, I would love to see a fast board deck.

• 34:34David Friedberg?

  There's a little bit of that going on.

• 34:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would 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. And 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, by the way, because you have these information rights. I don't know about you guys, but we did it, we did it as well.

• 35:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You take the board deck, you circulate it to your other partners. There's lots of times where I see board decks in companies where one of my partners are on the board, and I send them an email of like, hey, here's some bullet points of things to think about that I've seen before, et cetera, et cetera. You don't think nobody at Stripe or Index could have said, uh, you're burning $10 million a month, and there's no revenue? So the point is that data was not there.

• 35:40David Sacks?

  And there's only $30 or $40 million in the bank.

• 35:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Give me a break, guys. So this was 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.

• 35:53David Sacks?

  Absolutely. Yeah, so let me point people's attention to two 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 or not. To Tomas' point, right up at the top as a context setter, we need to know, what's your monthly burn and how much money is in the bank? And that, and then we just divide those things to create runway. We don't like looking at projections for runway. Totally. We just look at how much you burned last month and how much money you got in the bank.

• 36:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Months to cash out.

• 36:22David Sacks?

  Right, exactly. And when 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 because you're going to be out of business in three or four months. So, so that's, that's sort of piece number one. The, the other piece was an article I 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 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 categorized them. One of the biggest ones is founder psychology.

• 37:05David Sacks?

  You have a founder who believes that things are always going to 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 problem is that, you know, th- 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.

• 37:45Jason Calacanis?

  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 the runway, right? Like, that's when you need to be pragmatic.

• 37:58David Friedberg?

  I think, um, you know, th- there's a term of coachability, you know, how, how coachable is this person as, as a CEO, as a leader? Um, and I do think that coachability goes hand in hand with intellectual curiosity. I mean, if you look at the Colossians, Patrick Colossian, 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.

• 38:40David Friedberg?

  And I think that's a really key, key, key thing, that if you look across the, the range of successful founders, CEOs that scale to a hundred billion dollar plus valuations for their businesses, that to me is one of the more common threads, uh, is this kind of intellectual curiosity, which translates into a coachability, which translates into an adaptability as, and, and being willing to take advice. And so your board is a tool, not kind of a governance structure sitting over you. I think the less you are like that, the more you are likely to feel like your board is a governance structure, an umbrella sitting over you, telling you what you can't do.

• 39:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think that's what governance means, by the way.

• 39:12David Friedberg?

  Well, governance is meant to, it's, it's meant to look out for the shareholders, that's the job.

• 39:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But to act as a fiduciary doesn't mean to like tell the CEO what to do.

• 39:20David Friedberg?

  No, that's right.

• 39:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Like, yeah.

• 39:21David Friedberg?

  I'm just saying.

• 39:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's not.

• 39:23David Sacks?

  No, but I think, I think he's right about, I think Friedberg is right about how boards are often perceived by founders. I think there is an increasing, uh, let's call it a Hollywood director, a Hollywood auteur mentality towards VCs.

• 39:37David Friedberg?

  J. Cal on the All In Podcast, right?

• 39:39David Sacks?

  Well, it's, it's basically, it's basically, look, there, there are certain incubators out there and accelerators and whatever, who teach these young founders that it's all about their vision and anyone who stands in the way of it is basically interfering with them.

• 39:53David Friedberg?

  Totally.

• 39:53David Sacks?

  And they, they are the auteur, like a Hollywood director.

• 39:56David Friedberg?

  Totally.

• 39:56David Sacks?

  You've got to stay away from those suits, the studio guys, right? Ever. That's the mentality they're trying to, they're teaching them.

• 40:02Jason Calacanis?

  An adversarial mentality.

• 40:04David Sacks?

  An adversarial mentality. And look, there are, to Chamath 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 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 will still give you the advice if something's going wrong.

• 40:28Jason Calacanis?

  And what was true at one point in time, when Paul Graham gave this advice and he set up Y Combinator, you didn'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've been true and now it's not. Now we've sung the pendulum too far the other way. We did two 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. Where 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.

• 41:13Jason Calacanis?

  And we'll show you what a board is like. And then I would have three founders come, two would sit on one's board meeting and I would do three back to back board meetings. Bring your counsel, bring your founders and sit in on the other two board meetings. And we'll have a little Socratic discussion about what was. Good about each board meeting. We did board meeting training as a proxy for ventureworthiness later on. And when those companies did go out to get venture and they had an ESOP and they had board minute meetings, they just looked more impressive to the venture community. So I know people say, don't do a board. It's not cool. It actually turns out doing a one 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. All right, moving on and speaking of

• 41:52Jason Calacanis?

  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, I'm really happy Elon is joining the Twitter board exclamation point. 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

• 42:36Jason Calacanis?

  active users, 38 million of which are 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. Sax, you worked with Elon at PayPal. Thoughts on what this does for... That wasn't why you're laughing.

• 43:13David Friedberg?

  It's like such a funny transition. Sax, you work with Elon at PayPal.

• 43:18Jason Calacanis?

  Work for Elon, I guess.

• 43:19David Sacks?

  I'm sure he's gonna 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 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. He 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 tweets about this.

• 43:56Jason Calacanis?

  Who is Mike Solana? Who does he work for? Is he a Founders Fund guy?

• 43:58David Sacks?

  I think, yeah, I think he, he works for Peter or Founders Fund, but he's got a, he also writes a great news, Substack newsletter, kind of like a blog post called Pirate Wires. It's worth checking out. He's a pretty, in addition to being a pretty sharp analyst, he's, actually says a lot of funny things, too.

• 44:14Jason Calacanis?

  He's iconoclastic and, yeah, he, he, he'll, he'll swing the sword.

• 44:17David Sacks?

  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 here."

• 44:53Jason Calacanis?

  Parlor, truth, whatever.

• 44:54David Sacks?

  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 willing to stand up by the largest stake in Twitter, join the board. I mean, this is fabulous.

• 45:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's really fabulous.

• 45:07Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's pretty amazing, yeah. And the stock went up 30%. What do you think, Chuma?

• 45:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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, Friedberg was mentioning Visa and Mastercard earlier in the group chat.

• 45:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 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 that 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 issue. Misinformation comes to mind. But that's a wisdom of the crowds ranking rating issue in my book. So I guess the point is that, you know, if he can get the Twitter employee base fundamentally

• 46:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  on side of this idea of free speech as a principle, that 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. All right, Friedberg?

• 47:05David Friedberg?

  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 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 betterment of society.

• 47:46David Friedberg?

  And as a result, they acquiesce to external pressure that drives 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 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 stakeholders there have kind of a different set of alignments over time. You know, they're not necessarily the same long term or focus, meaning does the philosophy

• 48:31David Friedberg?

  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 own stock.

• 48:43Jason Calacanis?

  But Facebook and Google are concentrated.

• 48:45David Friedberg?

  Yeah. They're dual class. Yeah.

• 48:48Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 48:53David Friedberg?

  Government. No, the issue is.

• 48:55Jason Calacanis?

  And the government.

• 48:56David Friedberg?

  It's both.

• 48:57Jason Calacanis?

  Also, you can also lose all your employees.

• 48:58David Friedberg?

  It's both. It's pressure from above and below. It's, yeah, it's shareholders, it's shareholders and government regulators, right? And so in both cases, you acquiesce to the pressure. And employees, it's a good point, yeah.

• 49:08Jason Calacanis?

  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 what's happened is sometime last year, I think it happened around Chappelle, and I think it happened because of Coinbase, 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 Ek kinda did the same thing. He said, listen, at Spotify, we're gonna 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.

• 49:53Jason Calacanis?

  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 deplatform 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, or 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 this is a company.

• 50:30David Sacks?

  Leave them at home.

• 50:30Jason Calacanis?

  Leave them at home. Thank you.

• 50:31David Sacks?

  This is why Elon is so dangerous 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 want a monopoly on moral outrage. They want a monopoly on moral outrage. They want a monopoly. But they also want the monopoly on the ability to, basically, to define what is acceptable and what the narrative on any topic 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.

• 51:16David Sacks?

  He took, you know, Brian had to suffer.

• 51:18Jason Calacanis?

  They go find another target. They find another target.

• 51:20David Sacks?

  Exactly. So.

• 51:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 51:22David Sacks?

  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.

• 51:35Jason Calacanis?

  And let's, let's go into the nuance.

• 51:37David Friedberg?

  I don't think he'll 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-

• 51:59Jason Calacanis?

  And listen, 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, 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 and to dox people. Those people, those were just cancellations, deplatformings from YouTube.

• 52:27David Friedberg?

  In your opinion?

• 52:28Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, anybody inciting violence, I think we would all agree should be displatformed.

• 52:32David Sacks?

  Jason, look at how it's evolved. We start with isolated cases like Alex Jones, like a Milo that nobody likes and nobody supports. The next thing you know, the President of the United States is being deplatformed. But again, that's supposedly based on him inciting a crowd. Then, what's happening today? Now we have entire categories of opinion being banned. It starts with COVID.

• 52:53Jason Calacanis?

  I agree. That's exactly my point. There were valid ones and now there's invalid. I agree.

• 52:57David Sacks?

  Anybody 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 of all come, look, Pinterest is a photo sharing site. I don't know, no one's talking about climate change on Pinterest. And yet-

• 53:14Jason Calacanis?

  I was, but then I got deplatformed.

• 53:17David Sacks?

  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.

• 53:33David Friedberg?

  And Jake, how you could point out your Alex Jones case to make the case that deplatforming should be allowed. The problem is as soon as you make that case, it's only a slight degree, it's a slight degree away from the next case and then a slight degree away from the next case. And then fast forward 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 deplatform this guy back then and ban him 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 Flynt was publishing using his

• 54:18David Friedberg?

  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, Sax, 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 and other means.

• 54:56Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, and I'm, I'm, I mean, hold on, I just want to respond 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 6 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 Free Bird, you know more about it than any of us. And people want to debate it. Why not link them to the most credible sources? I think that's a great solution.

• 55:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have a question.

• 55:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 55:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is there an oat milk tag on Spotify?

• 55:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 55:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because if there is.

• 55:41David Friedberg?

  Oat milk, oat milk, oat milk. Wait, when you listen to All In Pod on Spotify, there's a tag that says there's COVID. COVID-19.

• 55:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, get COVID-19 information here.

• 55:50David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 55:50David Sacks?

  Kind of got to Friedberg's argument about these companies should be free to do whatever they want. So I know that Friedberg, I want to make two points about this. First of all, I know Friedberg 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 six 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 believes this argument that these companies should be free to do whatever they want. The second point

• 56:36David Sacks?

  is that, listen, the founding document of our country, the, is 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 first couple hundred years of this country, it meant that those rights meant that the government couldn't take away your right to free speech. 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 deplatform you, you do not have a right to free speech in this country. That right needs to be protected.

• 57:16Jason Calacanis?

  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 taken off, if you look what happened to Milo and Alex Jones, like they don't exist in the public sphere anymore, right?

• 57:28David Sacks?

  They've been unpersoned. 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 depersoned. 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 we stop this now, it'll keep going.

• 57:46Jason Calacanis?

  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 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 winds 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 governance changes and people lobby for that, do we think that there is

• 58:25Jason Calacanis?

  any kind of situation where Trump has his Twitter handle or Facebook accounts reinstated? And should he have them reinstated?

• 58:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 two thirds 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 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.

• 59:03David Sacks?

  You know that the current thing is moving on from Ukraine when the topic all of a sudden is January 6th all over again and Trump, which it is on MSNBC. It's all January 6th 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.

• 59:25Jason Calacanis?

  Well, what's your feeling on Trump? Should he be reinstated? If you were running Twitter, would you have done a time-based?

• 59:31David Sacks?

  If you don't like Trump, just don't follow him. I mean, but, but frankly, it's, it's, um, listen, I don't miss the tweets at all.

• 59:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My thoughts have evolved.

• 59:40David Sacks?

  I don't miss the tweets at all. I really don't.

• 59:42Jason Calacanis?

  They were damaging your party. That's how you felt.

• 59:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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, et cetera, et cetera. Now, come two years later, and to see all of the stuff and the escalation of deplatforming.

• 1:00:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 1:00:25Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So your opinion has evolved and intelligent people should respond to new data. I appreciate that.

• 1:00:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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, I'm much more on David's original camp now, which is we just need to establish this as a pillar of society and not deviate and find credible voices on both sides and then algorithmically and through people power, meaning through crowd, you know, 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.

• 1:01:14Jason Calacanis?

  Faber, 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 6th is conceding.

• 1:01:25David Friedberg?

  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 Truth app. I heard they took it down like it wasn't even working, right? The, uh, the new thing he built.

• 1:01:36Jason Calacanis?

  What is that, what is that SPAC trading at? Was it at 20 billion or something?

• 1:01:40David Friedberg?

  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 going to 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 just 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.

• 1:02:04Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know what else to say. I mean, it's Twitter's decision. They're curating their audience. All these guys want to 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.

• 1:02:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I hope Elon takes a slide jammer to that.

• 1:02:18David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, it's exactly what Shama 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, whoa, whoa, these companies are monopolies.

• 1:02:29Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and here's another opportunity. If you're not libertarian and believe in like, you know, free speech and, you know,

• 1:02:36Jason Calacanis?

  Constitution, like you could buy shares, you could lead a group, start a Dow, 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.

• 1:02:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you're 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.

• 1:03:10David Sacks?

  That's, that's, that's what Mike Solano was kind of getting at. 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. Cause that's what they were saying.

• 1:03:19Jason Calacanis?

  Or buy the shares, buy the shares and have influence. That's how corporations work. The shares are the votes.

• 1:03:24David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Jason Calacanis?

  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 thub before it. It's a tough habit to break. Friedberg, tell us, um, you know, the second order, third 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 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 in a certain country, could the world not mobilize to find other caloric sources, rice, fish, soybeans, whatever?

• 1:04:06Jason Calacanis?

  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?

• 1:04:15David Friedberg?

  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 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.

• 1:04:57David Friedberg?

  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 fundamentally speaking, 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 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's a market for these products.

• 1:05:41David Friedberg?

  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 nine months. And when they did that, there was now less food available to Tunisia, to Eritrea, to Egypt, and so on. And so we're starting to see the effect 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 the have nots have less.

• 1:06:26David Friedberg?

  And that's going to really make this famine kind of hit home in a really, really sad way in the months to come. We're already seeing, as I mentioned two weeks ago, yeah, 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 they're going to plant every year. And they just downgraded the number of corn acres that are 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 4 million acres, 4 million acres coming out of production of corn in the US is an incredible amount of calories that are not going to be planted to corn. And so that has all these downstream effects. And again, this, this crop doesn't come to harvest till, you know,

• 1:07:09David Friedberg?

  September, October, then it's going to get processed and it turns into food. So by the time the, the effects of this decision-making hit the marketplace, the availability of calories and the stockpile that's going on, it's like boom, some countries are going to be, you know, they're going to 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 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.

• 1:07:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, Sri Lanka does grow a lot of its own food, so they may be okay because

• 1:07:52David Friedberg?

  They're a net importer, right? I mean, they're a pretty big net importer. So they make a lot of food, but 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 are net importers. They, they rely on third-party supplies of food. So

• 1:08:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sure, but, but a lot of what you're talking about though are not, um, they're, they're processed foods that come into the country.

• 1:08:18David Sacks?

  Sax, anything to add here? Well, I mean, I think that the Ukraine war is kind of entering a chronic phase. I mean, the sort of entering a new phase. The first phase, you'd have to say that Ukrainians won, you know, the Russia wanted to topple Zelensky'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, um, and, and really that's What it's now about, uh, 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, uh, Eastern Ukraine.

• 1:09:04David Sacks?

  And I think it's going to go on for a long time. That's what, you know, General Milley testified it could go on for years. I think it's going to become a sort of permanent feature in the background of Biden's presidency. And, um, I mean, I think the good news is that hopefully the World War III uh, 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 were hearing a lot of a few weeks ago. Seems like that's off the table. So now it's just going to be a protracted, I think, uh, civil war going on in the Donbass uh, with between Ukraine and, and, uh, Russia and their proxies.

• 1:09:40Jason Calacanis?

  Which would mean, uh, Sax, correct me if I'm wrong, that Putin will be hobbled forever. 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 this actually does go down this way, that there's like a civil war going on and, and Putin is crippled? That would be checkmate or no?

• 1:10:07David Sacks?

  I think, I, I think that clearly the, the State Department's 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 risky strategy. Because this thing could always spin out of control.

• 1:10:22Jason Calacanis?

  It's risky, but could it be effective? Is there a chance it could be effective?

• 1:10:27David Sacks?

  Well, I mean, if the goal is to blue Pete, 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 don't, 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 a real threat. So, you know, there are costs to us as well. There are clearly costs to Putin of this, but there are huge costs to us as well. Uh, Free Bird. The risk to 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.

• 1:11:11David Sacks?

  From Europe 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 risks 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. It's published in the American Conservative. Look, this war was easily avoidable. I mean, the State Department could have avoided this war very easily.

• 1:11:42Jason Calacanis?

  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?

• 1:12:02David Sacks?

  I don't, I don't think we're going to get regime change, but if we do, there's no reason to believe that we're going to get something much better. In 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'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?

• 1:12:36Jason Calacanis?

  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 lists, Sax and Chamath? Chamath, you go 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

• 1:13:20Jason Calacanis?

  and the West do as a preemptive measure to really solidify democracy and, you know, the world order, a peaceful world order?

• 1:13:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 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.

• 1:14:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay? So, energy independence, I think, beyond anything else.

• 1:14:19Jason Calacanis?

  Strategic.

• 1:14:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Probably an order of magnitude. 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.

• 1:14:59Jason Calacanis?

  So, the road to resiliency. Sax, you're now the Secretary of State. What are your key... Priorities.

• 1:15:06David Sacks?

  The 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 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 the 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 is this fight in the Donbass. There's an agreement already on the table called the Minsk Accords that could allow us to settle that. Meanwhile, pivot to Asia.

• 1:15:50Jason Calacanis?

  Wrap it up.

• 1:15:51David Sacks?

  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.

• 1:16:17Jason Calacanis?

  Great. All right. There you have it, folks. For the Rain Man David Sacks, the dictator Chamath Poli-Hapatia, and the Sultan of Science David Friedberg, I'm your boy Jay Cow, and we will see you all in Miami, May 15th, 16th, and 17th. Love you, boys. Bye-bye. Love you, besties. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

• 1:17:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just, it's like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

• 1:17:34Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going all in.