E120: Banking crisis and the great VC reset

(0:00) Bestie intro! (1:35) Recapping the events of the past week (5:39) Understanding the banking crisis (32:55) Solving the global debt problem, righting the ship (54:20) VC market update: Founders Fund splits its eighth fund in two, Sequoia's reported returns, YC cuts its growth-stage team (1:08:36) Science corner: Superconductors (1:24:56) DeSantis update, Ukraine spending run rate, bestie wrap! 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://seekingalpha.com/article/4565388-svb-financial-blow-up-risk https://www.wsj.com/articles/easy-loans-great-service-why-silicon-valley-loved-silicon-valley-bank-6b3f203e https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-silicon-valley-bank-bailout-chorus-yellen-treasury-fed-fdic-deposit-limit-dodd-frank-run-cc80761e https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-16/credit-suisse-got-its-lifeline-now-it-needs-to-win-back-clients https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-15/credit-suisse-top-shareholder-rules-out-more-assistance-to-bank-lf9gfhbr https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/03/16/world/france-pension-vote#france-pension-vote https://www.politico.eu/article/police-fire-dutch-farmer-protest-nitrogen-emission-cut https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64968795 https://www.treasurydirect.gov https://www.axios.com/2023/03/03/founders-fund-slashes-vc-peter-thiel https://www.axios.com/2023/03/15/stripe-50-billion https://www.businessinsider.com/sequoia-capital-venture-capital-returns-university-of-california-2023-3 https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiger-global-writes-down-venture-funds-bets-by-33-in-2022-3f9f6ade https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/13/y-combinator-cuts-nearly-20-of-staff-scales-back-growth-stage-investments https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1633570102326202368 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05742-0 https://youtu.be/4lE8QWtrEvQ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/desantis-ukraine-pro-russia-position-gop-presidential-nomination/673392

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome to the All In Podcast. And with me again this week, the Sultan of Science, the Prince of Panic Attacks, the Queen of Kinwa, David Friedberg, the dictator Chamath Palihopetia, wearing a beautiful Mr. B sweater, and David Sacks, the Rain Man himself.

• 0:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Thanks for coming to my Laura Piana dinner on Tuesday, Jake Al.

• 0:21Jason Calacanis?

  That was wonderful. Thanks. At least one bestie showed up for you. Wonderful, wonderful dinner. I sat as far away from the Laura Piana people as possible in the arranged seating. Thank you for that. I guess maybe you were like, I'm gonna contain the damage.

• 0:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bernard Arnault said, put the all caps got the end. And I said, okay.

• 0:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, he still heard me. I was like, Chamath, what's the amuse bouge?

• 0:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jake Al's joke at dinner, every time he said something, he yelled like he was in all caps.

• 0:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I want another butterscotch pudding.

• 0:55Jason Calacanis?

  The butterscotch pudding is delightful, Sean. Sean's like, I'm four feet away from you, Jake Al. You take the caps lock.

• 1:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sean was so embarrassed. Chef Sean crushed it. Chef Sean crushed it.

• 1:05Jason Calacanis?

  Sean crushed it once again.

• 1:06David Sacks?

  Were you sounding alarms when the restaurant like almost ran out of something? Alert, alert, alert. Restaurant is running low on coffee.

• 1:14Jason Calacanis?

  We're dangerously low on caviar on this one as far as this.

• 1:35Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome to the pod where we, you know, try to inform you. We try to make some jokes here. I just want to make what is a little bit of an opening statement here. It's not an apology and it's not a victory lap in any way. But there's been a lot of attention, I think, on the last episode of the pod and perhaps some tweeting from two of the four besties this past weekend.

• 1:58Jason Calacanis?

  I saw, and I'll let you speak for yourself here, Sax, and we're going to get into the timeline of what's occurred, and then what are potential outcomes here and solutions to the banking issues that we've witnessed in what is a week since the bank run on Silicon Valley Bank and the shutdown on Friday. But what I saw, and again, speaking only for myself here, was absolutely terrifying up close and personally, watching people pulling money out of banks and watching people have to set up loans to hit their payroll. And this was like one of those surreal moments in a movie where like a meteor is coming towards Earth and you see it in the telescope and nobody else sees it, or only a small number of people in the observatory see it. And I think part of the reason people listen to this podcast is because we are insiders,

• 2:41Jason Calacanis?

  and speaking again, just for myself, I'm always trying to be exceptionally candid and transparent with the audience. Additionally, I make jokes. So sometimes you might laugh during this podcast, or you might laugh when you're reading my tweets, and that's part of what I do. Now, I also realize that we have an audience now that is larger than I think any of us expected for this podcast, certainly magnitude larger than I expected. And frankly, I didn't know if this podcast was going to make it past 50 or 100 episodes, and my Twitter following count doubled since we started this podcast.

• 3:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, that's because you tried to ruin the pot.

• 3:15Jason Calacanis?

  I think it was because of the caps locks. But anyway, putting all that aside, what I would like to say as well is, like, we are living in a situation that is unprecedented. I think the alarm bell I sounded, you know, was because I saw a fire. We'll get into the timeline here, but I sounded that alarm bell after Silicon Valley Bank was put into receivership and when I saw additional bank runs occurring. I wouldn't change it. I think these were the right, the right thing to do was to inform folks. Now, I did use all caps, perhaps a little too much, that was a little bit of a bit if people didn't understand that. Maybe I need to adjust my communication style now that this thing is so popular, but I stand by my mode of operating in the world, which is I always want to be candid with

• 3:59Jason Calacanis?

  people, I always want to tell the truth. And yeah, sometimes I make jokes about life and, you know, dealing with these stressful situations. It's not an apology. It's more of an explainer. And yeah, maybe I need to adjust the caps lock or how I deliver stuff, but I stand by the message of what I said. And I think it's important for us to maybe look at the series of events and misinformation that has spread. Because there are people literally blaming venture capitalists for the bank run. That is now systematic and the balance sheets of multiple banks around the world. And I think Sax, it'd be great for you to maybe just comment on the week that was and the timeline of events.

• 4:39David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 4:39David Friedberg?

  So as usual, you're not apologizing.

• 4:41Jason Calacanis?

  No, absolutely not apologizing, but we'll recognize that this platform is bigger and that maybe on the margins, I could adjust my communication strategy. But Chris, there's a lot of people who don't know that I make jokes. And maybe people don't understand when I'm joking and when I'm serious, right? And so.

• 4:56David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 4:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jason, what would you change? Was there anything you changed?

• 5:01Jason Calacanis?

  Come on, I think I might not have used a Mad Max image and GIF about the end of the world. Cause people are too stupid to understand that's a joke and a fictional movie.

• 5:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I see. So you find yelling effective?

• 5:15Jason Calacanis?

  It depends.

• 5:16David Sacks?

  Well, Jay Cal, I agree that I don't think you have anything to apologize for in terms of the substance of what you're trying to get across. I personally could have done without the all caps.

• 5:25Jason Calacanis?

  It was a bit.

• 5:26David Sacks?

  Yeah. What you're basically saying is nobody should listen to you because you're not that important. And I wholeheartedly agree with that.

• 5:34Jason Calacanis?

  No, I'm saying, understand I might make a joke. Consider me more in the Bill Maher category.

• 5:39David Sacks?

  Yeah. All right. Let's go back. Let's go back and look at the timeline because there are now serious accusations. And I would call it really scapegoating of, and it wasn't just you, it was me and Bill Ackman. In fact, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which I respect a lot, mischaracterized what me and Ackman were trying to do in terms of drawing attention to a regional banking crisis in progress, a run on the banks. They called it spreading panic. I don't know how you tweet or publicly discuss a run on the bank that's currently happening and needs to be addressed with an immediate federal intervention. I don't know how you can discuss it without then having someone else mischaracterize it as trying to spread a panic.

• 6:21David Sacks?

  But Jake, how the, the Wall Street Journal editorial board didn't mention you, so you're off the hook.

• 6:26Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, fair enough.

• 6:26David Sacks?

  They didn't know who you were.

• 6:27Jason Calacanis?

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 6:29David Sacks?

  But no, but seriously, so I went back and looked at the timeline of all of this. And so first of all, we have to understand that this banking crisis now has swept in five banks, five bank failures. First, there was Silvergate, but everyone dismissed that because it was some weird crypto bank. Then it was SVB, but everyone sort of dismissed it because they said it was based on panicky VCs rather than a systemic problem in the banking system. Then it was Signature Bank, which got seized on Sunday, which I think utterly refuted the idea that this was just a Silicon Valley problem. Then you had the Fed step in and backstop First Republic, which would have been the next domino to fall if it wasn't backstopped.

• 7:09David Sacks?

  And then five, you had Credit Suisse, basically, again, avoid an outright failure because they got backstopped by the Swiss government. So we now have five banks in roughly a week, and these are not small banks. Credit Suisse is a G-SIB, a globally systemically important bank, and the other ones are top 20, top 30 type banks. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in deposits. So clearly, there's a larger phenomenon going on here. And frankly, it's being caused not by like anything VCs did, because VCs are just depositors. We're just one class of depositors. And depositors are not to blame for what's going on here. What's going on is that these banks have huge unrealized losses on their balance sheet,

• 7:52David Sacks?

  and the losses have come from the sunspike in interest rates. That's what's going on. The sunspike in interest rates is because we've had the most rapid Fed tightening cycle in our lifetimes. In the last year, the Fed funds rate's gone from roughly zero to almost 5%. That has broken a lot of things. And the banks which have broken first are the ones that had pre-existing problems, and they had a horrible risk management. But that's who gets broken first in a stress test, right? Is the most poorly run banks, the ones with pre-existing issues. But just because they went first doesn't mean that others don't have similar kinds of issues. Now, I'm not saying this in any way to be panicky, but those banks will be fine, but there are larger issues in the banking system that are worth talking about.

• 8:35David Sacks?

  And to the point about whether VCs could have spread this, Jake, how you're Absolutely right about the timeline. I mean, I went back and checked. I personally never tweeted anything about SVB until Friday afternoon. When SVB was already in receivership and the run on the bank had already started with Signature and First Republic and we could see it with our own eyes. And then this pod didn't drop, the one where we talked about this problem, didn't drop until Saturday morning when the banks were already closed. And by Sunday night, the Fed had acted and basically implemented our recommendations, which was to basically intervene. So I don't know how you can blame, this search for scapegoats, I think, is getting out of control and it's just not factually accurate.

• 9:14Jason Calacanis?

  And, you know, it's convenient to make tech, which is hated right now, Chamath and Friedberg, you know, the scapegoat, venture capitalists, obviously the part of tech that people might hate the most or the easiest target. But let's talk about the Fed raised those rates because of inflation and inflation happened because of out of control spending due to COVID. And then the second administration. So you had a Republican administration that spent a lot of money and then a Democratic administration, Chamath, that spent a lot of money. So maybe we could even go backwards from Fed fund rate going, you know, what looks like parabolic when you look at the chart. Maybe you could speak to what got us to the Fed making those decisions, Chamath or Friedberg?

• 9:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Maybe I can just do a little cleanup on what Sack said. I think the issues at Credit Suisse are different than the issues at First Republic. And the issues at First Republic are different than those other three banks. The other three banks, David, that you mentioned, Signature, Silicon Valley Bank, and Silbergate all had very traditional liquidity crises, right? We talked about this last week, which is duration mismatching where you have depositors who want their money today, but you have assets that mature in 10 years. And as a result, you have huge unrealized losses if you all of a sudden cash them out today versus waiting 10 years.

• 10:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think what's happening at First Republic is really just about making sure that that loan book and the depositors can get parked into a combination set of banks that can take care of the balance sheet so that there are no more liquidity issues. At Credit Suisse, they have an enormous amount of liquidity. What that was, was I think a lot of speculation around whether they would default on their bonds or whether they would theoretically need more liquidity. But the balance sheet itself was not only liquid but also very solvent. So I think that was just more of a panicky reaction to comments from a 9.9% shareholder, who just said that they can't put in any more equity. But even then, I went back, this is

• 11:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  the chairman of the Saudi National Bank, he was asked on Bloomberg, would you give Credit Suisse more money? And he had a very reasonable answer, but it was snapshotted in a very awkward way. The first sentence was, under no circumstances would he do that? Okay, now if you stop there, you could be panicked. But the rest of it made a lot of sense, which is he said, look, in Saudi Arabia, if we go above 10%, we have to go through regulatory approvals domestically and there are regulatory approvals abroad. That's a big hill to climb and all of a sudden, it no longer becomes a financial investment, it becomes a somewhat political investment. And so we're very happy at 9.9%. That was the totality of his statement, but if you just cherry pick the first 45 seconds and

• 12:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  ran with it, which people on the internet did, this is sort of what caused that second level wave panic at a G-SIB. And then the Swiss National Bank stepped in and I think that that panic has largely gone. Okay, so what is the real issue? The issue again is I think we have had a bit of supervisory failure here, right? Because we all know this in any industry. If you let capitalism go totally unchecked, shareholders will demand immediate profits today. It happens in every industry, except in ones where you can basically gamble on future profits. And that's what tech does. But every other shareholder in every other asset class demands money today, and that's the same for banks.

• 12:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The problem is the banks are a highly regulated business. They are supposed to be supervised by the regulators. And this is a very clear example where, why is there not a real-time spreadsheet? I mean, this is not complicated stuff where assets and liabilities and duration mismatching can be known on a real-time basis, where the San Francisco Fed, Mary Daly, should have a report that's escalated to her when SVB got over their ski tips, which they did in Q4 of 2022. So I think the real question that has to be examined is where were these folks for the last four months when they could have done something not just about this, but rules in general for all banks that are not the GSIPS?

• 13:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think that's a very important question that politicians need to get to the root of.

• 13:34Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, we discussed this article from Seeking Alpha, which came out on, let me get the exact date here, December 19th. Title of this Seeking Alpha story is SVB Financial: Blow-Up Risk. And the summary in three bullet points says, Bullet Point 1: Potential losses in loan portfolios could severely impair book equity. Number 2: Unrealized losses in hold-to-maturity portfolio already equal to book equity. Number 3: Funding environment for startups where pressure deposit base is adding even more pressure to the balance sheet. In other words, startups spending money to cover their burn rate. Friedberg. And obviously, we had the Dodd-Frank rules lessened or loosened

• 14:17Jason Calacanis?

  under the previous administration. And that specifically was driven by Silicon Valley Bank. They had a big part in that. So looking back on this, and people do want to place blame, let's talk about the effects that occurred, because this was hiding in plain sight. Literally in December, in an article that looks like it was written by somebody who went into a time machine and said, "How do I warn people in December about this?" Maybe you could talk about the Fed's interest rates, the spending, and what led up to this issue with the banks.

• 14:48David Friedberg?

  Look, you guys remember when we started this podcast three years ago? We were like, "They're gonna shut down the economy? There's gonna be crazy second and third order effects of doing that? No one knows what they're gonna be? Here they are." And I think that's like the root of what is a rippling effect. You can't shut down the global economy and stop trade and stop people and have the government step in to write a giant check and not expect that you're gonna have to cash that check at some point. That's effectively what I think we've been kicking down the road here. The way we initially tried to resolve the problem was to drop rates to zero and then spend our way, you know, back to a growing, supported economy and then overshot, ended

• 15:33David Friedberg?

  up with, you know, too much stimulation, too much stimulus, too lower rates for too long, responded too quickly, whiplashed back. At the end of the day, there was a giant gaping hole blown into the global economy when we shut down the world from COVID. There's no blame, it's just what happened. And when that happened, there was a massive cost that had to be born at some point. And it's gonna get born at some point. And the rippling in a pond, you don't know where the ripple's gonna hit, what part of the pond, what leaves it's gonna hit. That's what's going on still. And it's such a dynamical system, it's so hard to say with linear certainty, "This is what should be done and what could have been done and what they should have done at the time."

• 16:18David Friedberg?

  No one had that predictive capacity back then. They did what they needed to do. People thought that they should have dropped rates, they said we should have written all these big stimulus checks. Some people said you shouldn't, some people said you did. Certainly, some people are being proven right and some people are being proven wrong. But at the end of the day, the economic loss that was realized at that period of time, we're still trying to get out of it and we're still recovering from it. And I think that's a big part of what's being eaten up right now. And you're gonna see it in the wipeout of certain equity, you're gonna see it in the wipeout.

• 16:50David Friedberg?

  Of these banks, of the assets that they hold and these portfolios and the effects of that are obviously, you know, still being felt.

• 16:57Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, do you agree that mistakes, that this, uh, there isn't somebody to blame because it is clear that the Fed said inflation is transitory, that was wrong, and then they went faster than in history to raise the rates. Those seem like two glaring mistakes and then the Todd, the Dodd-Frank loosening under Trump and with Silicon Valley Bank pushing them, that seemed like a really big mistake.

• 17:26David Friedberg?

  By the way, I wasn't saying the Fed's not to blame for not raising rates fast enough.

• 17:29Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 17:30David Friedberg?

  That was, because you guys remember, I was the first person to talk about

• 17:32Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 17:33David Friedberg?

  what Stan Druckenmiller had said, that they're not raising rates fast enough, that we've got massive inflation, we should have been raising rates. I was the first person on this show to be, you know, barking that. So, don't, don't forget, like, I was there.

• 17:43Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 17:44David Friedberg?

  Like, pretty early. What I was pointing out was like, we shut down the economy during COVID, the global economy.

• 17:48Jason Calacanis?

  That is the main, yeah, I got you. That is the main cause.

• 17:50David Friedberg?

  And that is the big, that is the cannonball that got blown through the ship.

• 17:52Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 17:53David Friedberg?

  And everything else is plumbing and patching and work to try and keep the ship afloat, and we're still dealing with that. And at the same time, as you guys know, we've been loading the ship up with debt, the global ship, the global economy with debt, 360% global debt to global GDP ratio right now. And as that ship has gotten heavier and heavier, to have a giant hole blown in the side while you're trying to do all this patchwork with all this debt weighing on it, it's a critical challenge.

• 18:16Jason Calacanis?

  The ship is sinking.

• 18:17David Friedberg?

  And it's one that we're feeling acutely here, they're feeling it in Europe now, and we're certainly going to see the global ramifications as we try and fix this economic catastrophe that was caused by COVID, at the same time that we've been spending our way into a happier future that it turns out we have to pay the bills for at some point.

• 18:34Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, your response.

• 18:36David Sacks?

  The question of who you blame for this banking crisis has really become a political Rorschach test, and I've seen that there are six different parties that people want to blame in this situation. And there's some merit to all of them, but the degrees are very different. Number one.

• 18:51Jason Calacanis?

  Let's go through it. Let's go through them.

• 18:52David Sacks?

  Okay, number one, the bank management of all these different banks, clearly, very poor risk management, didn't do a good job, they are To blame. However, and Chamath is right about these banks, they differ in the details. But the point is that they're all operating under conditions of extreme stress. Where did that come from? Number two, the Fed's rapid rate tightening cycle. Clearly, I think that the combination of poor risk management with the spike in interest rates, that basically has precipitated this larger problem. Number three is, I think, the Biden administration's spending, which, in fairness, started with COVID before Biden, but Biden really intensified it. And then I think it really compounded the problem in the summer of 2021 by claiming that inflation was transitory when it wasn't.

• 19:36David Sacks?

  That allowed them to keep spending and keep printing money and kept QE going for another six months. That created the bubble of 2021. Everything got super frothy and then that made the rate hike cycle even more vicious. Because you started six months later. They could have started six months earlier and it could have been more gradual. And I think that really was a disaster for the economy. Okay, number four, the dereg in 2018. I think Elizabeth Warren and Ro Khanna have made what I would call a compelling case that the dereg in 2018 have contributed to this problem. I think in hindsight, creating a two-tier system of banks where one tier are the systemically important banks, who are completely guaranteed and backed up by the federal government.

• 20:20David Sacks?

  And then a sort of lower tier, a second tier of regional banks, was a poisoned chalice for the regional banking system. Because in the short term, it meant they were more lightly regulated, which may be appropriate for, you know, smaller banks that aren't these mega banks. However, it has also now, I think, created a situation where people are less confident about them. And so the money flows are going from the regional banks to the systemically important banks, the CIBs. So, like I said, it might be a double-edged sword. And I think we're gonna have to look at those regulations and figure out what's the right regulatory regime to create confidence in the regional banking system. We want a thriving regional banking system. And so the question is, what's the right regulations that get us there?

• 21:02David Sacks?

  And then the final two that we can talk about later are, I'm hearing wokeness getting blamed, which, listen, I think that wokeness was a distraction. There were a lot of crazy programs happening at these banks. But listen, if wokeness was the key factor, the whole Fortune 500 would be out of business. Because, because they all do this stuff. They all do this stuff. So I think, I think we're going back to the well a little too often on that critique. And I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to burn that critique out because I, I think that wokeness is bad, but it's not the key reason why this stuff happened. And then the last group that gets-

• 21:33Jason Calacanis?

  And for wokeness, we could also maybe frame it as ESG more broadly as the distraction because wokeness is charged, ESG is real.

• 21:40David Sacks?

  Yeah, what I, what I would say for sure is that if these banks have spent as much time on risk management as they did on ESG or on woke, then this crisis wouldn't have happened. So definitely a distraction, but not, not the thing that like specifically caused it. And then just the final thing is VCs. And I just can't fathom at this point, given the multiple bank failures, given that we see the larger problem of unrealized losses on bank balance sheets, that somehow any class of depositors would be blamed for this. That just makes no sense to me.

• 22:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Chamath? I think the VC, the critique is specific to Silicon Valley Bank because I think, and this article was in the Wall Street Journal, but what it shows is a really complicated, intertwined relationship between VCs and Silicon Valley Bank where, you know, VCs were given very cheap interest rate loans, they were given GP call lines of credit, they were given LP lines of credit, and then those same VCs would be directing their companies to put their deposits inside of SVB, who would then take those deposits and buy, and buy risk. And while the reality is all of this stuff will come to light because I think it will get exposed as we go through congressional hearings on all of this. But I think the, I think pointing the finger at VCs in this specific case is somewhat warranted

• 22:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  because there was a little bit of people working in lockstep together and there was a, a lack of functional responsibility around how to be a true fiduciary. So if you come to a board and your founder is 22 years old and you give that person 15 or 20 million dollars, I think it makes a fair amount of sense that you are supposed to be- The more sophisticated financial person in that room. And if you have incentives that aren't properly disclosed to that CEO, and now a set of decisions are made, I think that that there should be some accountability for that, or at least some exploration of why that happened.

• 23:29Jason Calacanis?

  I just want to make sure the audience understands this because it is a bit in the weeds and it's a bit inside baseball. What you're saying, Chamath, is, if I can summarize it, there are people who are the adults in the room, venture capitalists. They have deposits at Silicon Valley Bank. They also might have loans that are fantastic with Silicon Valley Bank. I have a mortgage for this office from Silicon Valley Bank and I talked about how, on the last episode, how great it is. They come, they open wine with you, it's white glove service that you wouldn't get at another bank. And then they might have loans against what's called the GP carry, or the GP share, or they might have mortgages. And so there's a conflict there. If you're a venture capitalist and you're directing a 22-year-old CEO to Silicon Valley Bank,

• 24:11Jason Calacanis?

  maybe you're doing that is, I guess what you're saying could be explored.

• 24:16David Sacks?

  No, the bigger conflict of interest.

• 24:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And in some cases, Silicon Valley Bank is a limited partner in all of these funds. My point is that all of these things-

• 24:23David Sacks?

  Yes, that's the bigger conflict of interest.

• 24:23Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, hold on, we have to explain that.

• 24:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So imagine a situation. You go and start a fund. Silicon Valley Bank comes to you and says, "Let me be a limited partner and invest with you. Let me give you some amount of money." I don't know where that money comes from, from Silicon Valley Bank, but they-

• 24:38Jason Calacanis?

  A million dollars, yeah.

• 24:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, let's be realistic, more like 25, 50 million, 100 million. Okay, this is a lot of money. So a million kind of is whitewashing this problem. So you give them a reasonable amount of money. They're like, "Wow, I have tremendous loyalty for you. Thank you." "Well, do you need anything else? Do you need personal loans? Do you need lines of credit for your business?" "Sure, why not? I take those too." And invariably, on the back end, now your loyalty obviously builds up. Again, nothing, none of this is wrong, but this is what's happening. And then you tell your companies to keep your deposits there. Maybe the cash management program is not as strong as it would have been if you were more circumspect and you didn't have those incentives to direct people to one institution only. In any other part of the market, so in the public markets as an example,

• 25:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  there is such a bar for disclosure, okay? And I cannot stress this to you enough. Related party transactions, all of this stuff. We have to tell everything, not just for us, but even if our like sister or brother or mother may have a transaction with an entity that we're doing a deal with. And it just isn't the case in private markets. And so it's not to say that anything untoward happened, but when people point the finger at VCs, I think they are pointing to this whole set of issues and asking the question, shouldn't there have been more disclosure and transparency around it? And now that this has come to pass, shouldn't we explore it? And I think that's what the Wall Street Journal did. They started pulling on this sweater thread. And my guess is that you're going to find a whole ball of yarn at the end of it.

• 26:07Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, what do you think of this?

• 26:08David Sacks?

  I think Chamath makes a fair point that if VCs have SVB as an investor and then they're directing startups to use SVB, that is a conflict that should be disclosed. By the way, we never did either one of those things. We never had SVB as a limited partner and we also never directed our startups to bank at SVB. I don't know why we'd ever do that. Moreover, I always tried to talk founders out of taking venture debt, whether from SVB or elsewhere. So listen.

• 26:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we've been clear about that. And to be clear, I never directed anybody to a specific bank.

• 26:39David Sacks?

  I know.

• 26:39Jason Calacanis?

  I always told people to get two or three banks and have redundancy.

• 26:42David Sacks?

  Totally, totally. Yeah, totally. And look, founders have multiple VCs typically on their boards. So the idea that like any one VC directs them which bank to use is just not, that's not realistically what happens at these startups. But look, I think Chamath is right that when there is a bank failure or any kind of failure this big, then all the practices are going to be under a microscope and there's going to be some scrutiny of this. And maybe there should be. But my larger point is we're now operating in an environment in which clearly there's a larger set of stresses on the banking system. We've already had now five bank failures or near failures. Moreover, do any of us believe that this is over? Or do we believe there are more shoes to drop? If we believe that there are more shoes to drop,

• 27:25David Sacks?

  we may not know exactly what they are, but, but I think all of us probably believe that we're not at the end of this. But, but, but just to finish the thought, if we believe there will be more shoes to drop, then clearly the issues cannot just be limited to Silicon Valley. They have to be a larger set of issues.

• 27:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that it's important to understand the facility that the Fed created. So what the Fed did this weekend. Is essentially create a buyer of last resort again. Now, how do they do this? So all of these banks basically have assets that they bought for a dollar and are now worth 95 cents. And that's what's creating this whole issue or 80 cents or 85 cents. You, you pick the number, but they're not worth the dollar that they bought. What the Fed basically said is, okay, give me that asset, give me that bond. I will value it at a dollar and I will give you a dollar as a loan and you will pay me interest. And the interest rate, I think, is what's called OIS. And they added 10 basis points on top. So I think it's about 4.9%.

• 28:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So what it allows all of these banks. And if you take all of the banks that are not the top four in America. So the top four are JP Morgan, B of A, City and Wells. So just ignore those for one second. The other N banks, if you look at all of the assets that are underwater because of all the rate hikes that Saks talked about. And you add up all those losses. That is about $2 trillion. And the Fed didn't announce that there was a beginning and an end to this program, other than saying these would be one year loans. And so I think the exposure for the American banking system at a minimum is going to be this $2 trillion.

• 29:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because now the incentive, if you're a banker right now, running one of these banks that has not gone under is to immediately go to the Fed, put all of those assets to them, get a loan. And now take that and buy different assets, different bonds, different US treasuries that are yielding much more than what your old treasuries were yielding. And I think that's the arbitrage that we've unfortunately created. And the other question now, though, however, is what does that mean for the top four banks? Right? Because if it's $2 trillion for everybody else but the top four, what's the gap for the top four? That looks like it's somewhere between a trillion and $2 trillion. So that's another.

• 29:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Amount of money we're going to have to cover, the Fed will have to backstop. And then, as Friedberg said, these checks always come due. What do we do in a year? Because in a year, the problem is, the only way to make the banks in a position to repay this much money in one year is to cut interest rates so massively that these assets massively inflate, and now all of a sudden, you're in a position to cover this.

• 30:19Jason Calacanis?

  Describe what that delta is, because it's about, they're down 15%, 10% in book value, these longer-term treasuries.

• 30:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It depends on the security. Again, it depends on what they bought. We don't really know enough detail, so I don't want to guess. But if you own these 10-year treasuries, you could be off 10% or 15%. If you own mortgage-backed securities, it could be off a little bit more. If you own short-term securities, they're off a little bit less.

• 30:41Jason Calacanis?

  But these are with the government.

• 30:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You get a loan collateralized by these assets. So you're still holding them, right?

• 30:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, and they mature.

• 30:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So if the Fed takes an emergency posture and says, okay, guys, we want to avert a crisis in a year from now, and we're going to cut rates, these assets that these banks own will be worth more, which will allow them to repay the loan. As far as I can tell, all we've done is we've kicked the can down the road for a year. But I do think it's important for people to realize, this doesn't solve the problem. It just means that mark your calendar for a year from now. We have a problem on March 15, 2024. Because all those folks that took money, what do we do?

• 31:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and so a year to work it out, Friedberg would seem like a good idea, because the Fed is fighting inflation. They seem to have gotten some portion of it under control. It's not out of control, right, inflation? And maybe if they can slowly, you know, either start rate cuts or pause. So let's shift the discussion to, hey, what are the changes we need to make to the system? And how do we think this plays out over the next year? Friedberg, Chamath had one suggestion, which was, all of these banks should have a disclosure statement, mark to market, every day, week, month, quarter, whatever it is, just like... Circles USDC, their stablecoin, has a page with their disclosures of all their holdings.

• 32:08Jason Calacanis?

  So that seems to be a very productive one. We should have them mark-to-market the Dodd-Frank stuff, as Sacks said, you know, Elizabeth Warren, probably correct. We need to reverse that. So those are two very tangible suggestions.

• 32:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We need to have a real-time dashboard. We need to have a real-time dashboard at every single Fed that allows them, for every bank that they supervise, to know in real time.

• 32:31Jason Calacanis?

  Should the public see that?

• 32:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They can choose to ignore it. I'm not sure that should be true, but they are their supervisors. They should see it. They should choose to ignore it, but they should not not have it.

• 32:42Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, what are your suggestions going forward as to how we can learn from this situation? Forget about the cannonball, as you vividly expressed there, I think very well, a great analogy. But just going forward, how do we keep the ship from taking on water if we do have a cannonball hit it again?

• 33:02David Friedberg?

  No, we got a hard, that's a hard equation to solve.

• 33:06Jason Calacanis?

  Clearly, that's why I'm asking you.

• 33:09David Friedberg?

  We got a lot of demands for money. You guys see, I think there's a lot of things that are, seem unrelated, that are all pretty related right now. There's a massive protest underway by labor in France. There's a massive protest underway in the Netherlands. There are strikes on the underground in London. When we talk about global debt and US debt, we often, I don't think, account for all the debt, which also includes promissory obligations made to a workforce, a global workforce that's been working for decades. Individuals that have spent their whole lives committed to some company or to some government

• 33:53David Friedberg?

  working with the expectation that they're going to retire and have some benefits paid to them. And there's this massive underfunding of those benefits and those pools of capital. We very quickly talk about unfunded pension liabilities. But when you actually kind of account for the number of people and the amount of capital that those people are expecting, that the workforce, the global workforce is expecting to be paid to them in retirement. Both public and private. It's a massive amount of money that's not funded today. And you start to see the cracks in the system when that population says my pension payments are not keeping up with interest, with inflation, or when there's a threat that pension payments

• 34:37David Friedberg?

  or retirement benefits are going to kick in at a later age, or you're not going to get them fast enough, or you're not going to get as many as you thought you were going to get. We have that problem in the United States in the form of social security and these underfunded pension liabilities. That is the critical macro tension in this equation that I think drives the real problem that's going to come to a head at some point. We blew a hole in the boat, but we're also forgetting that there's like a massive amount of weight that's going to drop on the boat. And I think that it's a really hard equation to solve. We can talk about keeping banks solvent and all this sort of stuff. At the end of the day, the central bank, it appears in the United States and probably globally, it's going to be one big bank, right? They're basically going to take on the whole balance sheet themselves.

• 35:21David Friedberg?

  And at the same time, you've got a lot of folks saying, I want to get paid more. I have obligations due to me. And guess what? You know, Jason, your important statements historically about the importance of democracies, ultimately, you know, the members of that democracy are going to say, this is a benefit that the majority are owed. And that's going to pull things out. I think the only stopgap, I'll just say one thing, the only stopgap in the next decade is going to be significantly higher tax rates in the United States. I don't see how you're going to fulfill the tension gap that's underway right now with respect to where productivity is going and where capital markets are going and where the demands are on the system from people requiring additional capital to come out

• 36:06David Friedberg?

  to them without taxing assets away from the asset holders. So this would be corporations and high net worth people. And I think that's why you see this Biden proposal. We may not like it, but at the end of the day, it's going to be the only way to create a stopgap that's going to avoid massive inflation in the near term. Reducing.

• 36:24David Sacks?

  That's not why you see the Biden proposal.

• 36:26David Friedberg?

  Hold on, hold on one second. Let me just say the only other way, the only, I'll just say one more thing, Jake. The only other way besides. You know, a massive long-term tax regime to fill the hole would be some extraordinary productivity gain. And this is where we can all have a hope and a dream and an investment and an effort around technology. AI, automation, people think that they're

• 36:46Jason Calacanis?

  Energy.

• 36:47David Friedberg?

  ... some job. Energy. But if you can get energy down below three cents a kilowatt hour and you can scale its production by tenfold, if you can automate a lot of labor, if you can get AI to do a lot of stuff that we do today, productivity will go through the roof. The economy will grow fast enough to get out of the debt bubble and meet all of these liability obligations.

• 37:05Jason Calacanis?

  So there are three ways, just to summarize.

• 37:07David Friedberg?

  Yeah, so that's why I think, I think, to me, to me, that's the long term. The medium term is going to be this tax stopgap, this very high tax stopgap. And then the short term is going to be all the shenanigans that we're talking about.

• 37:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I'll go to you in a second, Sax. So just to recap, there is actually a third way, too. There are three ways productivity, as you very astutely point out, and we just highlighted some of the ways productivity could help, whether it's energy, AI, et cetera. The second is, of course, increasing taxation on the people who are at the top of the pile would be the likely solution. The third is also austerity, cutting spending in some way. But let me also propose one thing here. As we look forward to what do people want out of a bank? And how should startups or just individuals deal with bank runs and their trust in banks? To Chamath's point, I was thinking about this over the weekend and in this discussion that we would have, based on a lot of things you said, Sax, which was, people just deposited

• 38:01Jason Calacanis?

  their money and they don't have the ability to assess if a bank is solvent because the FDIC can't do it and it's their full-time job. It's their mandate to make sure these banks are solvent. So how is a consumer going to be able to do that? Or even a startup founder, or even a sophisticated investor like Ackman, or any of us, if we're in fact sophisticated? So let me pause for a second here and posit something. We don't want a bank. We want a bank vault. Consumers do not want their deposits to be used for shenanigans, just like many people would rather pay for a social network than have their privacy data sold. So I think we should bifurcate banks into banks

• 38:43Jason Calacanis?

  Vaults and banks. Banks can do what they want with your deposits. You get free checking. But what I want in a bank, what I want my startups to use, what I want my venture firm to use is I want to pay the bank for services. Whether it's 10 basis points, 25 basis points, $500 a month, I would rather see my startups pay $1,000 a month in banking fees. $2,000 a month on banking fees for $2 million, whatever it is, and pay for each check, pay for wires, pay for white glove service, whatever they choose. But not allow the banks to take that money and loan it out or do things with it. I just want a vault. And I think a vault service is what the majority of consumers want.

• 39:22Jason Calacanis?

  And given what we're seeing with two insane bank run bailouts in our lifetimes as adults, for those of us who are in Gen X, 2008 and now. We would rather pay for services and I leave it to you, Sax. Is this a potential solution? Because I don't hear anybody saying, give me a bank vault and why does that service not exist in the world?

• 39:41David Sacks?

  Yeah, look, what people really want are they want a service provider who gives them the ability to make payments. Which if you're a small business is payroll and payables, things like that. They want a money market fund to basically earn interest. And and they want all that to be safe. I mean, it's it's very simple. The idea that when you go open a checking account at a bank, that you are making an unsecured loan to that bank. That is not something that any consumer or small business understands. That whole model, I think, is completely obsolete and outdated. And what I heard so many people say, and I think this is not sincere, I think it's just because they hate tech. Is that depositors should take it on the chin.

• 40:24David Sacks?

  Because somehow they made a stupid decision when they opened a checking account. It's like, are you kidding me? Listen, what do you want the process to be? You want consumers and small businesses, when they open a bank account, to have to review the financial statements of that bank, try to figure out all their disclosures, where their assets are, whether they have toxic assets on the books. And if they don't do a good enough job doing that, if they're not smart enough to do that, then you want them to be disciplined. This is the word that I kept heard being used, is we need to

• 40:54Jason Calacanis?

  The punitive, yeah.

• 40:55David Sacks?

  ... the depositors. The depositors are not in a position to evaluate the balance sheet of these banks. That's what the feds are supposed to do. That's what the regulators are supposed to do. That's what Moody's is supposed to do. And you're telling me that a bank that had an A rating from Moody's the week before and had an FDIC seal of approval, that somehow they got it wrong and the feds got it wrong, but the customer is supposed to get it right? I mean, come on, that's ridiculous.

• 41:21Jason Calacanis?

  In related news, Chamath, I would like an airbag in my cars to protect my family, but I don't want to evaluate the airbag technology and unpack it and make sure that it's got the right CO2 in it.

• 41:32David Sacks?

  Right. Yeah, let me finish the point. It's about consumer protection here. And I don't care who the depositor is. If the banking system is going down because the feds haven't done their job. I mean, Powell, two days before the bank failures, was testifying that he didn't see stress in the banking system. So either he was lying or asleep at the wheel.

• 41:52Jason Calacanis?

  Asleep at the wheel, like in scenarios.

• 41:53David Sacks?

  And like I said, the feds had given the seal of approval to SVB and all these other banks. They had all passed the regulatory exams. And so to now put it on the depositor when the feds screws up and the regulators screw up and Washington screws up by printing all this money and creating this inflation that we've had, again, out of all the six parties that you could blame, I just think it's the least culpable.

• 42:16Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, should there be a service that provides no interest, but is just a custodian of money that is absolutely protected? Where is the bank vault product in the world? Does it exist? Because I can't seem to find it. Some people seem to say, I think, Friedberg, you alluded to this maybe in the group chat, that if you have a brokerage account, that's kind of similar to what I'm saying, but it doesn't have it. I don't want any interest. I don't need any interest for putting this money in the bank for a startup. They're not in the business. of making one to 5% and optimizing for that. I have founders who are now sending me five page

• 42:49David Friedberg?

  If they can't, if the bank, if, yeah, if the bank can't use your money, they're going to charge you. So remember,

• 42:55Jason Calacanis?

  I want to be charged. That's the service I want.

• 42:57David Friedberg?

  But I think this is, this is an important point. A bank is a service provider. They spend a lot of money building technology, having people that work there, providing service and infrastructure. So for the services that they're offering, if you're not going to let them use your money to make investments with your money and they can participate on that gain.

• 43:13Jason Calacanis?

  They have to charge you.

• 43:14David Friedberg?

  They charge you. And I think that's really where the

• 43:16David Sacks?

  But Friedberg, Friedberg, they're not a service provider under the current laws. You understand how it works now is that what we're being told is that when you went to the bank thinking you were just getting a service provider and frankly largely a commodity service provider.

• 43:29David Friedberg?

  You're getting, yeah, you're getting a fund manager. You're getting an asset manager.

• 43:31David Sacks?

  Yes. And you're being told that you actually made a risky investment decision. Think about that. When you opened a checking account, you weren't just trying to, you know, again, use a vendor. You were actually making a risky investment decision. That's what they're trying to say. And you deserve to lose your money if you chose poorly, even though nobody else could figure it out. None of the experts could figure it out. None of the regulators could figure it out.

• 43:52David Friedberg?

  You should talk about the, the challenges of your system to someone who lives in Argentina. It's far worse in other parts of the world. And we've come a long way in the last hundred years. We talked about 500 or 600 bank failures on average per year in the 1920s. So I'm not saying that, hey, that's not the case, but there's always been to some degree risk when people are giving their capital over to someone else. And we've certainly made huge strides in progress. But I think, J Cal, to your point, you know, there is a point of privilege now that people are saying, I want to have a position where I know that my money's not going to get used, not going to get moved, going to be completely safe in a democracy.

• 44:23Jason Calacanis?

  What would you pay for that? What's the price, Friedberg? What would you pay for that? Because right now, we're basically giving every crypto entrepreneur at Zelle, you know, basically the high ground because they could make this product. I would pay 10 basis points, literally $10,000 a year per million. Is that right? Yeah.

• 44:38David Friedberg?

  Remember when you thought Jeff Bezos was going to be president?

• 44:42Jason Calacanis?

  I still think it's a distinct possibility. Anyway, what would you pay for this product? Chamath or like Bloomberg or Bezos?

• 44:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't want to speculate on new products. It's kind of a dumb tangent. I think the thing that you're bringing up though is

• 44:57Jason Calacanis?

  dumb tangent. Okay.

• 44:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why doesn't a product like this exist? And I think that it was very well explained. It's that every for-profit business is in the business of making money, and there are physical costs that you have to bear. In the case of a bank, there is physical infrastructure, literally bricks and mortar, that go into making the branches. There are lots of people. There is lots of software. There's lots of complex back office and middle office things that banks have to do in order to accept money. That has a cost. So I don't see how it will be very easy for somebody to create a bank that just stores your money for you without you being charged quite a lot of money, unfortunately. I think that there has to be a different way to solve this problem.

• 45:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think that what we did after the Great Financial Crisis was the regulators wrote down all kinds of new rules. But the crazy thing in 2008 were those rules were written on paper. And now we're in 2023, and these rules can be written in software. And so I think what it requires is some amount of tactical real-time intelligence that regulators need to have over those that they regulate. And I don't know why we're so afraid of demanding that the next time some of these complicated real-time laws are written in law, that they also need to get written in code. And I think that that's a practical solution.

• 46:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It should be the case that every bank that's supervised by the Fed has a dashboard that has all of the key levers that allows what you said, Jason, to happen, which is a real-time mark-to-market. Should those or should those be disclosed or should they not be disclosed to shareholders? That's a different discussion. But the regulators should have 100% transparency into how these organizations run, because, as Sacks said, they are an enormously critical institution that, at best case after this fiasco, what we've realized is very poorly misunderstood by consumers. And that, at the worst case, is being mis-marketed to us. And I think that that shouldn't be allowed.

• 47:10David Friedberg?

  We're also missing the other side of the balance sheet. We haven't talked about it at all. But banks play a really critical and important role as lenders. Banks act as the channel for lending capital to small businesses, for lending capital to individuals to buy homes. It's the primary place where capital is provided to help fuel economic growth and prosperity, particularly in the United States where we have such a liquid, fluid and available mortgage market to support home buying in America. And the absence of, you know, Jason, what you're talking about, having the ability to use deposits to make loans and have what banks have fundamentally been in this country for over 100 years, which is taking short-term deposits to make long-term loans and making

• 47:55David Friedberg?

  sure that there's some degree of balance and availability of liquidity to support transactions. And ultimately mortgage securities came out of the need to generate more liquidity by banks to support depositors. And obviously, there was all these inflationary things that happened in that market and bubbles that happened. But it's an important role that banks play. And the lending aspect of banks, if it gets stifled too much because we swing too far the other way, it can actually have a really adverse effect on economic growth and prosperity and the ability for people to afford homes in this country. So that's the other side of the coin and where things can go bad.

• 48:25David Sacks?

  So this is where I find like the current banking model to be sort of like weird and maybe obsolete and definitely not what consumers expect. So for example, if you go to a bank and you put your money in a deposit account and then they loan it out to make mortgages, do you realize that you're an investor in those mortgages as the depositor? I don't think you do.

• 48:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, because what they do is they take those mortgage sacks, they package them up, they sell them and they get an origination fee and they get the money back.

• 48:54David Friedberg?

  Not always, no.

• 48:55David Sacks?

  But not always, but maybe they should be, maybe they should have to.

• 48:58David Friedberg?

  B of A Wells Fargo do not, exactly. So B of A Wells Fargo, for example, they do a lot of that, but if you look at First Republic, they have a $90 billion loan portfolio on their balance sheet that they've not packaged up and sold. So the packaging and selling of mortgages generated the liquidity that the banks needed, but there's a cost to that. So a lot of banks will try and balance out their loan portfolio where they'll package some of it up and sell it. But when they do that, they take a loss or they pay a fee.

• 49:21David Sacks?

  Maybe they should be required to do that because, I mean, look, to the point about mark-to-market assets, it's very hard to mark an asset to market unless it's liquid and publicly traded.

• 49:32David Friedberg?

  Let me give you an economic point. I think that there's about $7 trillion in deposits in banks. You guys are saying happened, you're basically sucking seven trillion dollars out of the system. That's being used to fuel purchasing in the form of loans. And you're taking that set or call it a 10% discount to that. So about call it six trillion dollars. And you're saying, we got to go find a market for six trillion dollars of loans. And then we're going to have six trillion dollars of cash sitting in a bank account, doing nothing. And that that challenges.

• 49:59David Sacks?

  No, that cash will go into money market funds. So in other words, like you'd package up all those mortgage bonds. You create a mortgage bond security. And then if consumers, if depositors want that product, they'll just buy it.

• 50:09David Friedberg?

  What is the money?

• 50:10David Sacks?

  They'll just buy, hold on, they'll just buy the ticker symbol.

• 50:12David Friedberg?

  Yeah, but what is a money market? It's it ends up being the same thing where money is you you earn interest on cash that's being used to make investments elsewhere. So ultimately, if you want to earn interest on your cash, it has to be loaned out somewhere to someone.

• 50:24David Sacks?

  I understand, but what I'm saying is, look, I'm just brainstorming here. I don't, you know, I don't have the answer.

• 50:30Jason Calacanis?

  Spitballing.

• 50:31David Sacks?

  Yes, exactly. I'm not saying this is what should be done. I'm just kind of asking whether it might make more sense. What if on the depositor's side, all of the things you put your money in are money market funds? And then when the bank goes out and does its lending business, it does ultimately at some point have to package those up. And they get turned into securities, you know?

• 50:48David Friedberg?

  Sax, but money market funds. You know where that cash goes? When you when you invest in a money market fund, you're you're giving that money to someone who's using it to make a loan. Like it is also.

• 50:58David Sacks?

  I understand, but then the depositor would never be a risk.

• 51:00Jason Calacanis?

  It would be marked to market as Sax's point.

• 51:01David Sacks?

  The depositor would never be a risk. It would never be a risk of bank failure.

• 51:04Jason Calacanis?

  I I just want to give.

• 51:05David Friedberg?

  You're shifting the risk equation to the fund manager, the money market, instead of the manager of the bank. And at the end of the day, that money has to be loaned out by someone.

• 51:12David Sacks?

  Just the owner of that security, that money market fund, that would take the hit.

• 51:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, just as we wrap here, because I want to talk on some other issues as well. There's two things that are super tangible that founders can do right now, or people who want to mitigate against these kind of issues. There's something called ICS, insured cash sweeps. These are accounts that automatically, you know, will put your money into multiple FDI insured institutions. 250K at a time. We talked about this previously. There's a bunch of folks doing that in fintech. I won't give any of them free plugs here, but you can just go look and search for ICS. There is also maybe some thought here that the FDIC 250K limit, maybe that's outdated. Certainly for businesses it is, so maybe that should double or triple. And obviously that cost would be spread out.

• 52:00Jason Calacanis?

  And then finally, you can go to treasurydirect.gov right now and buy short-term government debt. And I literally have startups doing this who have major treasuries. They're going there and buying short-duration stuff themselves, holding it themselves.

• 52:12David Sacks?

  Who's Treasury Direct?

• 52:15Jason Calacanis?

  This is provided by the government is my understanding. And people are buying direct from the government.

• 52:22David Sacks?

  I personally am not a fan of startups buying T-bills because of the duration mismatch problem. They always underestimate when they're going to need their cash. And so I don't like tying up cash in bonds.

• 52:35Jason Calacanis?

  This is if you had a giant treasury. Yeah, I agree with you, but this is for giant treasuries at a small point.

• 52:40David Sacks?

  I see this all the time. Whenever they try to, let me just say, when startups try to create laddered bond portfolios, they end up needing the money sooner than they thought. What I'd much rather see startups do is buy 100% US T-bill-backed money market fund, run by the absolute biggest of the big financial institutions, because you can get in and out of it at any time you want and without paying a fee. And that's so much better than trying to manage your own bond portfolio. Let a professional fund manager do it.

• 53:06Jason Calacanis?

  Well, there are people who do provide these kind of bond ladders. I'm just telling you what the best practice advice going around is.

• 53:13David Sacks?

  Why don't you just buy a ticker symbol through like a brokerage account?

• 53:15Jason Calacanis?

  Sure, or multiple ones, right? And but now this is, I think, speaks to Chamath. The fact that we have startup founders and people having to measure, manage a treasury this granularly, is this a failure or is this what should be happening? Should we have to have treasuries in the $10 million or $20 million range be this granularly managed? Or should this just be FDIC rates, you know, should be just 10x?

• 53:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, in the absence of regulatory changes that protect this money.

• 53:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You need to have a financially sophisticated actor on the board. And again, I go back to that should be your venture capitalist. And that person should not have conflicts of interest with the banks that they direct you to. I mean, I don't think that that's a very controversial statement.

• 54:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's just not happening. And I am just flabbergasted that people are not even doing the basic blocking and tackling here of having three or four accounts. I've always had three or four banking relationships, always had it split up. Should we move on to some of the other pressing issues? There was a really interesting Founders Fund story about them breaking their latest fund in half. And then there is Stripe closing their funding. Which one would you gentlemen like to go to or a different story on the docket?

• 54:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think there are, there are four things that are very interrelated.

• 54:38Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 54:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In startup land. So Founders Fund took their, just to make the math simple, because I'm going to get the numbers not exactly right, but like a $2 billion fund that they're going to break into two $1 billion funds, I think that's one story.

• 54:51Jason Calacanis?

  It's a $1.8 billion fund. They're going to break it into two $900 million funds. It's their eighth fund. It's being cut in half and it'll become eight and nine.

• 54:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think what that speaks to is valuations and the marks that we think we have for existing companies and the future value that smart investors like this see. All roads lead to, it's, we're in for a slog. And so trying to put a $2 billion fund to work doesn't seem to make a lot of economic sense to some of the smartest people in the room. So that's, that's that.

• 55:22Jason Calacanis?

  And just one note there. It says, according to Axios, Peter Thiel led this charge and he is the contrarian's contrarian. He was the one, according to Axios, that led that cut of the fund size with Summit Founders Fund, according to the reports, opposing him.

• 55:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll say the more important thing, which in Peter and I are the same, we're the largest LPs in our funds. And so, you know, as the largest LPs in our funds, I think this is a no brainer decision. Number two, Stripe basically takes a 50% haircut, which is the single best run, most highly valued company in Silicon Valley. Again, that's going to eviscerate.

• 55:58Jason Calacanis?

  Private company.

• 55:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  A lot of.

• 56:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  TBPI in a lot of people's portfolios, a lot of theoretical money that LPs were going to get. I think the third thing is, there is a person that went and filed a FOIA request that UC Berkeley to get Sequoia's returns. And it turns out that the best investor in the game, quote unquote, since 2018, has not really done that well. And I think in, the University of California invested over $800 million in Sequoia since 2018, and I think has returned, what, some 40 million bucks on that number? And then the fourth, which just came out today, is that Tiger wrote down the value

• 56:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  of their private book by 33% for 2022. And so, you know, I think Tiger's AUM basically has gone from 100 billion to 50 billion in a year.

• 56:56Jason Calacanis?

  There's one more note to add to that. YC basically let go of their growth team this week, Y Combinator, for people who didn't know what was called the continuity fund. They were doing late-stage investing, and that got cut.

• 57:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, gosh.

• 57:08Jason Calacanis?

  Which is a signal, and the 17 employees are gone now. And Gary Tan, I think, is making the right decision. You know, they have to focus on what they're great at, which is the earliest stage of the company, and they had conflicts with this one.

• 57:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, this is, this is the most interesting thing for me in the following way. I think the Y Combinator unicorn hit rate is 6%, right? So every 100 companies that come out of YC, which costs only about $10 million to seed, right? Six of them become worth $1 billion or more, and obviously some become worth much, much more. And so if you see how difficult it is, even for a growth fund that's attached to that funnel, to be successful and make money, because obviously if this thing was tonning cash, you would not have cut it. I don't think anybody would do that. So I think it was a very challenging strategy at a challenging moment in time, and so I applaud these guys for having the discipline to do it.

• 58:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But if you take them all in totality, it is a complicated place in venture capital and startup land. Holy mackerel. Like, it's a reset. A, it's tough to make money. B, a lot of folks may not know exactly what they're doing. C, a bunch of valuations are totally wrong.

• 58:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And D, we're going to have to start doing the cleanup work now of resetting all of it, which just takes years, as you guys remember in 2000. It took us, it took us five years to fix this.

• 58:29Jason Calacanis?

  It's a hard reset. Sax, what do you, when you look at these in totality, what would you say?

• 58:34David Sacks?

  Well, I agree with what Chamath just said. I mean, it is going to be a hard period with a lot of resets, a lot of restructuring, a lot of cap tables, there's a lot of mess to clean up. All of that being said, I think I'd rather be an investor today than an investor two years ago, or one year ago, because at least the valuations have corrected to some degree. And then also, we have this really interesting AI wave happening now, and there's a lot of opportunities to invest in that new, you know, cycle. So at least there's like an interesting product cycle. It's getting me excited to go to work and see these new demos from all these different companies, whereas, you know, you go back a year or two and just the product innovation just didn't seem as world-changing as it does now.

• 59:16David Sacks?

  So I think that as bad as things are, my guess is that the new vintages of VC are going to be better than, you know, call it 2021 for sure.

• 59:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's not going to be a high bar.

• 59:31David Sacks?

  It's not a high bar, but still.

• 59:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, that vintage is trash.

• 59:34David Sacks?

  Actually, Chamath, Chamath, this is the contradiction.

• 59:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That vintage is trash, trash.

• 59:38David Sacks?

  This is the contradiction, is that it felt better to be a VC in 2021, but in hindsight, we know that the vintage is going to be not good. Whereas today, hold on, but today, it feels not great to be a VC, but I think the vintages will be a lot better.

• 59:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But anybody would tell you that at some point, you're going to have to divorce yourself from emotion to be a reasonably good investor over long periods of time. How many data points do we need to realize that too many people were put into this game that may not have known what they were doing? And we're going to have to go and work through all of those excesses. And I think it's just going to take a lot of time. US limited partners are in a really difficult spot. European investors, I think, are probably in a pretty difficult spot. There are a couple of bright, bright points around the world of folks that are still optimistic and doing well. I think Middle East is one, Southeast Asia is another.

• 1:00:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But other than those, it's just a whole group of folks that just have to get completely re-underwritten from First Principles. Even when you have an incredible platform like Sequoia, five years of no returns on $800 billion for somebody like UC Berkeley, what it really means without commenting on Sequoia's performance is that UC Berkeley is effectively out of business in being a limited partner for the foreseeable future. Right? And I think that that has that has implications. So even if you think these vintages are great, I don't think they're open for business. And frankly, even if they wanted to be open for business, how do you go to an IC when they look at all of the totality of those dollars that have not made anything? How do you justify the next 800 billion? I just think it's very hard.

• 1:01:17Jason Calacanis?

  While I agree that LPs are out of it, I think the story was garbage because it all funds go through a J curve and they're literally talking about the majority of the funds in that vintage, 2008, 2019, 2020, 21, they're all in literally the definition of the J curve, the third, fourth, fifth year.

• 1:01:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  One of the most important things you need to be able to do is measure how long does it take the delta T to 90% of calling committed capital? And how long does it take the delta T to return 1X DPI? I can tell you, Jason, if you're a reasonably good fund, those numbers should be between five and seven years for both.

• 1:01:53Jason Calacanis?

  Which none of those funds have hit.

• 1:01:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The average for a normal venture fund is around five to seven years to call 90% of the capital and around five to seven years to return 1X DPI. I'm just telling you that's what the average is. And if you talk to firms. So all I'm saying is there was a period of time where in the absence of getting money back, again, this is not a Sequoia thing. It just means that there was an entire cohort and years of capital allocation that is not necessarily in a J curve. It's impaired. Because if after five years, if after five years you've returned nothing, sometimes you just have to see the writing on the wall.

• 1:02:35Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, explain the J curve one more time for folks. And then what is your analysis of that Sequoia story?

• 1:02:40David Sacks?

  Well, the J curve, the theory behind it is that when you start deploying a new fund, you're drawing fees down to pay for the firm and the investments you've made have not been marked up yet. So the value of the fund is actually going down because some of it's getting eaten up in fees and you haven't really had a chance for any of those investments to be successful.

• 1:02:59Jason Calacanis?

  And shutdowns happen early.

• 1:03:02David Sacks?

  I don't even know about that. I just think it's they haven't had a chance to get marked up. But then what happens is you start getting markups and now at least on paper, the value of the fund goes up and then hopefully those markups eventually turn into distributions. Or DPI like Chamath is talking about. Yeah, we have a vintage 2017, 2018 fund. That's actually fully returned at this point.

• 1:03:22Jason Calacanis?

  You exited some secondaries or acquisitions?

• 1:03:24David Sacks?

  No, we just had some. We just had some exits, but look, I think that is a little bit on the early slash lucky side. But we haven't really seen much of the J because, you know, you should be getting markups within two years. I think on your investments, if the companies are looking good, at least historically that was the case.

• 1:03:42Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, any thoughts on this collection of stories with venture basically having the great venture reset?

• 1:03:51Jason Calacanis?

  The end of the super cycle, the beginning of the next.

• 1:03:53David Friedberg?

  It's happening.

• 1:03:55Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, we're in the thick of it.

• 1:03:56David Sacks?

  But by the way, I would just, I would just go back to the point that with all the problems Chamath is talking about, the reset and the wipeout that needs to occur, I think this is still, I think that's part of what makes this a better time.

• 1:04:08Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely.

• 1:04:09David Sacks?

  To be an investor.

• 1:04:10David Friedberg?

  This is what I'll say about that, Sax. I think I agree with you.

• 1:04:15David Friedberg?

  I disconnect asset values and asset prices from fundamental business value being created. So the market bid stuff up, prices went up. That doesn't really mean that businesses aren't fundamentally good, that there aren't amazing technology businesses being built today that are going to affect billions of lives tomorrow.

• 1:04:37David Friedberg?

  If you are tracking a public company's stock and you like the business, you spend time with management, you see what they're building, you see their revenues growing, their profits are growing, they're making great products, people are happy with what they're doing, but the stock's really expensive. You don't want to buy the stock. Suddenly the stock drops by 80%. Nothing about the business has changed. It's just that the market is paying less to own shares in that company. That's a great time to buy that stock. I think that's the moment we're in in Silicon Valley. Everyone's like, oh, my God, it's over. Things are terrible. Just because the asset prices of the shares in companies has gone down does not mean that the quality of the businesses has changed or that there isn't fundamental value being created in Silicon Valley.

• 1:05:21David Friedberg?

  In fact, the contrary point to Sacks's comment is that it is a great time to be buying these shares and it is a great time to be investing. And it is a great time because, as we've talked about countless times, there are extraordinary technologies from AI to biotech becoming software to fusion to novel applications with AI and SaaS and on and on and on. Many of the amazing things we've talked about that I think can and will affect many industries and billions of lives are being built today and they're not going to stop being built. And you can now buy the stock at 80% off. So, you know, if you're investing today and if you're a builder today, as long as the capital keeps flowing to support the building work, which I think to some degree it will because there's still enough of it sitting there,

• 1:06:05David Friedberg?

  you're not going to have a lot of these crazy growthy rounds with high prices and all the nonsense that went on the last couple of years. But there's certainly a lot of opportunity to create real business value. And right now, an opportunity to buy shares is pretty cheap and participate meaningfully in that value creation.

• 1:06:18Jason Calacanis?

  I'll tell you the thing I'm seeing on the field and like playing the game on the field is something we've been talking about for the last year. We started a program called Founder.University and it's basically like a 12-week course on like how to build your MVP. We had 350 people join the last one.

• 1:06:32David Friedberg?

  What's the discount code people can use to?

• 1:06:33Jason Calacanis?

  There's no discount code. It's free for founders, basically. It's free for founders if they come to the 12 weeks. But anyway, what I did was...

• 1:06:40David Friedberg?

  Go to www.

• 1:06:42Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's Founder.University because it's an extension. But in the words of Sacks, let me finish. Please let me finish. What we did was, we just said, anybody who gets to an MVP and it's two or three builder co-founders, we'll give them a 25K check. And I did 20 or 30 of these 25K checks in the last couple of months of just the founders right now who have been laid off by other companies, they're dogged, pragmatic, absolutely customer-centric, product-centric founders, whereas the last five years have been filled with theatrics and white papers and ICOs and just nonsense and absurd valuations and people wanting credit for work not done. And now people are actually building MVPs

• 1:07:27Jason Calacanis?

  and they're dogged, product-driven founders, customer-centric, mission-driven founders, and it feels to me like 2010 all over again.

• 1:07:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That first part is so well said. People wanted all this credit for work not done and for progress not achieved. That game is over.

• 1:07:43Jason Calacanis?

  Finished.

• 1:07:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Finished.

• 1:07:46Jason Calacanis?

  Which means if you are a product-led CEO and you're a mission-driven CEO who actually builds something, you stand out so much in this ecosystem and I have people begging for money, sending me long emails and decks and totally addressable market. I'm just like, can you just build a product and show me that you can actually deliver a product? And then we'll start the process of the rewards-based system here. You know, the reward-based system in Silicon Valley is so magical when it works. You get money from Founding University or, you know, Techstars or Y Combinator, then go to a seed fund, then go to a Series A fund. That milestone-based funding was so broken and now it's back and it's so functional when it's working. It's just the magic of Silicon Valley is when people work and get

• 1:08:29Jason Calacanis?

  rewards, work and get rewards. And it just creates this great pace and dynamic that I'm glad to see. Just as we wrap here, everybody's been begging for a science corner. Enough about the chaos in the world. Everybody wants the Sultan of Science to tell us and educate us about something and Saks needs to use the loo anyway, so let's do a science corner here. Room temperature, superconductors. You sent me a link. I read the abstract of this paper and I don't know which language I need to put this into Google Translate, but I couldn't understand any of it. So please, I literally read the abstract and I was like, I couldn't get through the first two sentences without having to start doing searches.

• 1:09:12David Friedberg?

  I'll start with just like the simple explainer on superconductors.

• 1:09:15Jason Calacanis?

  Please.

• 1:09:16David Friedberg?

  You know, materials that conduct electricity are called conductors. So, conductors, electrons move through them like a copper wire. That's how electricity flows. And all conductors have some amount of resistance, meaning not all the electrons kind of flow through at a perfect rate. They bump into the atoms in the material in the wire and they generate heat. You know, you've ever felt a wire while electricity is flowing through it, it gets hot, right? So that's because the conductor has some resistance, which means the electrons bump into the walls of the atoms in the material, they generate heat and you lose electricity, you lose energy, you lose power. And so in 1911, it was discovered when mercury was reduced to a very, very cold temperature,

• 1:10:00David Friedberg?

  that there was a point at which the material conducted electricity with absolutely no resistance. So the electrons flowed through the material completely unbounding, you know, not bouncing into the material, not generating any heat. And having no resistance means you're losing no power in transmission of that electricity. But a number, number of other super interesting effects occur. Number one is that magnetic fields now reflect off of that metal perfectly. So if you put a magnet, you ever seen that image of it? And Nick, we could probably pull one up in the YouTube video where you put a magnet on top of a superconductor, it actually floats. Because the magnetic field, like the north and the north push against each other and it floats up.

• 1:10:42David Friedberg?

  So, superconducting materials kind of became this fascination in the early 20th century, that oh my God, if we can actually make materials that superconduct, there are all these amazing benefits. One of the benefits is you could have no loss in electricity being transmitted. Today, 15% of power is lost in the transmission from the power station to your home. You could also do interesting things like create maglev or frictionless trains that float, you know, like magnets floating off the ground on top of a superconducting track. And by having no friction, you could push the train once and you wouldn't need to use any energy to move it along. So you could have basically powerless transportation. You could have really powerful new microprocessors.

• 1:11:23David Friedberg?

  So a superconductor microprocessor, instead of a traditional semiconductor microprocessor, would use just 1% of the energy of a semiconductor microprocessor. Think about that. All the AI stuff we're talking about, all the chips that we're talking about, dropping the energy needs by 99% if those chips were made from a superconducting material. And one of the more interesting applications of superconducting materials could be infinite battery storage. So you could take a superconductor, turn it into a coil, and the electricity would just flow through it infinitely because it would never turn into heat. And then when you're ready for that power, you just plug in and you get the power out. The actual loss of energy in a superconductor battery, it's less than 5%. And that's compared with significantly more energy loss used in chemical systems, and

• 1:12:06David Friedberg?

  you wouldn't need to get all the materials that we're struggling to get now to generate batteries. So the idea of generating like superconductors in industrial scale has always been super interesting. Today, the way that we generate superconducting materials is we have to make a material super, super cold. In 1987, a physicist named Chu developed one of the first ceramic superconductors, where they discovered a new way of generating superconductivity. It wasn't just taking a metal and cooling it down very, very cold, because when you get it very, very cold, the atoms stop moving, and the electrons inside pair up, and it's called Cooper pairing, and they flow through. And he said, "We could actually do this with a hotter temperature." And he demonstrated this in a ceramic, yttrium barium copper oxide, super confusing name, but basically, he took a bunch of materials and baked them in an oven, and they turned

• 1:12:51David Friedberg?

  into this really interesting material that became superconducting. And then the race was on. Because what he did is he made a superconductor that could superconduct at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. And liquid nitrogen is really cheap, so we can just use it. And that's actually how all MRI machines run today, is you have superconductors that reflect the magnetic fields in the MRI machine, and they're using liquid nitrogen to stay cool. And so there's a lot of industrial applications today that use superconducting materials using liquid nitrogen. But in order for us to do all the stuff I mentioned, like Maglev trains, and infinite battery storage, and superconducting microprocessors, we have to get superconductors, we have to discover a material. That can superconduct at room temperature. So that we can sit with it in a computer on our desktop, or we can have it run on a railroad track.

• 1:13:37David Friedberg?

  Or, you know, we can put it in our backyard to store energy. And there's been this race, and there's all these different classes of materials that physicists and material scientists have spent decades trying to figure out what can superconduct at room temperature. We started with metals, you know, copper, and we tried carbon nanotubes and fullerene tubes. We had all these different ceramics like I talked about. And there have been literally tens of thousands of ceramics that people bake in ovens and try and see how superconducting they are. Basically, you take the material, and you cool the temperature, and you measure the resistance. And as soon as it hits superconductivity, boom, there's this magic moment where it drops to zero, and it becomes superconducting. And there's this big changeover effect. So everyone's trying to find that temperature, which it can happen at room temperature.

• 1:14:22David Friedberg?

  And people have found superconductivity on the surface of DNA and organic molecules. But you can't scale that. People have found, you know, superconductivity on all these weird kind of material on the surface of things, but no one's ever been able to industrialize it. In 2015, there was a new kind of material called a hydride, which is basically taking a thin metal and putting it in hydrogen gas and kind of baking it for a couple of days. And the hydrogen sticks to the metal. And then you would use this hydride as a new kind of conductor. And hydrides, it turned out, had really good superconducting potential. They would superconduct at room temperature, but they needed super high pressure. So you'd actually have to leave them in like something that's like hundreds of times the pressure of the atmosphere.

• 1:15:06David Friedberg?

  And so that's not really technically and industrially feasible either. So this guy named Ranga Dias published a paper a couple of weeks ago that got a ton of press and a ton of controversy. And basically, he said, "Look, I've got this new hydride. And I've got this really, you know, weird metal that no one ever talks about. And I've baked it with hydrogen gas. And this hydride can actually superconduct at, you know, room temperature and at only 1 gigapascal, which is still greater pressure than room temperature. But it basically starts to show on the chart of are we getting there? Can we actually get there? That maybe we are." And so this paper was published in Nature a couple of weeks ago. And it got a ton of coverage because everyone's like, "Oh, my gosh."

• 1:15:51David Friedberg?

  The problem is, this particular individual...

• 1:15:56David Friedberg?

  You know, the lead researcher, Ranga Diaz, on the paper, he's pretty controversial. Because he made a room temperature superconducting claim back in 2020 in a paper he published in Nature. And after he made that claim, a lot of scientists tried to replicate what he did, and they were not able to. And then the journal retracted his paper. And he had a method that he took data noise out of the measurement system he was using, and the way that he took the data noise out, people said, actually skewed the results and made it look like it was superconducting when maybe it wasn't. And he actually had a talk that he did that was published on YouTube a year later, where he said he raised 20 million dollars from Sam Altman and Daniel Ek and a bunch of other investors. And it turns out that also wasn't true. And then he came back and said, "Well, I didn't actually raise the money.

• 1:16:41David Friedberg?

  I was talking with them about raising the money." So this guy's kind of a sketchy character in the space. But the temperature at which he was able to generate, or claims to have generated, and he did get peer review and did get published, a superconductors is at room temperature, it's at slightly high pressure, but if it's real and it does get repeated, it's one of the next steps that we're almost going to be getting to this point of true room temperature superconducting materials. And then this whole industry will blow up. Transmission lines, battery storage, Maglev trains, superconducting microprocessors, you know, many new industries can and will emerge from this material discovery if it's proven to be real. So, you know, it's a super interesting storyline.

• 1:17:24David Friedberg?

  A lot of people in the material science world and scientists, chemists, physicists are kind of going crazy about this. And there was a survey done by Quantum Magazine, and half the scientists were like, "This is bullshit." And the other half was like, "This is going to change the world." So we don't really know yet where this is all going to settle out, but I thought it was worth kind of talking about and bringing it up. Because if room temperature superconductivity is really realized in the next decade, it's another one of these kind of black swan technology discoveries that none of us are thinking about right now, but it totally transforms all these markets and very quickly kind of increases, like we were talking about earlier, productivity, makes renewable energy super, super cheap, makes computing power 99% less power intensive, AI chips will explode using this technology.

• 1:18:07David Friedberg?

  So a lot of super interesting applications if room temperature superconductivity comes to light. Super interesting story. I thought we should share it and talk about it.

• 1:18:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Shama, I would love to get your insights on it. And then, Sax, I would like to understand how many emails and what you ordered from Uber Eats during that segment. Go ahead, Shama.

• 1:18:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Venkata Viswanathan, who runs a battery group at Carnegie Mellon, introduced me to Ranga two years ago. Me and my partner Jay, we were like, holy shit, this is outrageous. And we tried to spin it out into a natural company, but the University of Rochester blocked it. And so we've been following this guy for two years and all the trials and tribulations, but it's a really, really exciting thing if it does come to pass.

• 1:18:49Jason Calacanis?

  You got capital blocked? Explain why you would get capital blocked in a situation like that. Why wouldn't they allow you to spin it out?

• 1:18:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It is interesting because typically universities have a tech transfer office and you can do these deals pretty cleanly. So when you go to Stanford, the tech transfer office is quite sophisticated. At MIT, it's quite sophisticated. There are these pretty standardized deals and royalty percentages.

• 1:19:09Jason Calacanis?

  What is the standard deal? Explain to the audience how a tech transfer deal would work and how does the university make money from it?

• 1:19:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you're a prof and you invent something, or even if you're a student, it's technically owned by the school. And so if you want to commercialize it, you go to them and you basically say, here's a capital partner of mine and we want to go and start a company around it. And what they will normally say is, okay, great, give us a piece of equity and give us some royalty in some cases, depending on what it is.

• 1:19:35Jason Calacanis?

  How much?

• 1:19:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The equity tends to be in the mid-single-digit percentages. The royalties tend to be in the mid-single-digit percentages. It depends on how.

• 1:19:43Jason Calacanis?

  Five percent, okay.

• 1:19:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, call it five, five, six, seven percent. But it can be a lot. When you think about a school like Stanford who's spinning out hundreds of these things a year.

• 1:19:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But if you're a school that doesn't historically do a lot of tech transfer or has a lot of cutting-edge R and D, you wouldn't have that team. And so Rochester didn't necessarily have it. Now, look, Ranga is probably getting bombarded by 30 other people who will pay 10 times more than what I was trying to pay 18 months ago. It's a really interesting thing and I think there'll be some, there'll be some.

• 1:20:15Jason Calacanis?

  What's the greatest, does anybody know what the top tech transfers of all time were? Like, was Google a tech transfer or Friedberg? Do you know?

• 1:20:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:23Jason Calacanis?

  Because Payrank was out of that.

• 1:20:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, what did Stanford take?

• 1:20:26Jason Calacanis?

  No, yeah, Larry and Sergey gave Stanford, I think, 1%.

• 1:20:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They did give Stanford. Yeah, they gave them a percent, yeah.

• 1:20:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Stanford's really good about that though. Because Backrub was written while Larry was a PhD there. So technically, they, you know, they had some part of it.

• 1:20:41Jason Calacanis?

  Carnegie Mellon ranked as top tech transfer university I'm just seeing here in terms of the rankings, University of Florida, Columbia, Stanford, Harvard.

• 1:20:49David Friedberg?

  It varies so much. Some of them are terrible, like, and some of them are cronyism. So like, you go to some of the universities and the tech transfer offices have deep relationships with certain VCs and investors that they'll only work with.

• 1:21:00Jason Calacanis?

  Ah.

• 1:21:01David Friedberg?

  And they always get first picks and first dibs and they're super tight with them. They don't run a real market process. And then some tech transfer offices just give away the farm for nothing. And then some tech transfer offices think that they own it and they should get paid 60% royalties for the thing. It's all over the map. And some of them are sophisticated and some of them are not. So it's actually quite surprising, J Cal, how different all the universities are in terms of their level of sophistication and the types of deals they'll do. But I will say, this work in superconducting research, it's another good example, going up to, going back to the point a couple of episodes ago, about the importance of fundamental research and the importance of, you know, the support from academic institutions and

• 1:21:44David Friedberg?

  governments and other aspects, when you're still not sure what the technology is, that to do that fundamental discovery work, I think, is a good collective social benefit. And then to industrialize it and commercialize it requires, I think, a market-based approach, which is you take that capability, you try and build a business, find customers, make money, and that's really how you get it to be funded, to be scaled. Because you're never gonna, you shouldn't have to put, you know, government and academic money behind that sort of effort. But private market participants should. And so, you know, it's interesting. I mean, I think, I'm not holding my breath. I've been, you know, I did a science project in 1993, when I was probably 12 or 13 years old, on superconductors. And I got an yttrium-berium copper oxide disk, and I got some liquid nitrogen from UCLA,

• 1:22:29David Friedberg?

  and I poured it on the disk, and I floated a magnet above it, and I had a poster board and a computer presentation back then, and I was super enthralled about the future of superconductors. And exactly what I said today is what I said back in 1993. So, you know, 30 years ago.

• 1:22:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He was so busy dating, I didn't think you had time for superconductor experiments.

• 1:22:46David Friedberg?

  Yeah. Look, I don't think, I don't think that this stuff... Has really, it's been like fusion. It's always been a promise around the corner. Physicists have always had hope. We've taken incremental steps towards it. But it's always felt like one of those things where you're always getting 50% closer to the wall. It's like you're never actually reaching the wall. And so

• 1:23:04Jason Calacanis?

  Anecdotally?

• 1:23:05David Friedberg?

  Yeah. By the way, I will say one area that a lot of people think holds a lot of promise for superconducting research is in quantum computing because you can actually model on a molecular level what might be going on. Right now, the BCS theory is this theory on Cooper pairing that happens in ceramics. It's the only way that we really understand how superconducting actually works, why it works, why there's no resistance at certain temperatures for certain types of materials. For most materials, we have no friggin clue why it happens. We don't understand the physics of it. There's something going on on a quantum mechanical level that we just don't get. And so if we could understand it better through quantum modeling, using quantum computers, all of a sudden, we may be able to actually start to come up with ideas for molecules and crystal structure that would allow us to make superconducting material that we

• 1:23:48David Friedberg?

  simply don't have enough time in our lifetime to run all the experiments in a lab today and we could simulate it. And so that's why quantum computing could play a real role in advancing our ability to do discovery in superconducting materials. And like I talked about, these are like not just one, but like two or three order of magnitude improvements in the efficiency of certain systems of industry on Earth today. So it shows how the compounding benefits of technology and things you cannot see around the corner can suddenly cause these explosive growth moments in technology and in industry. I don't know what, when quantum computing gets here. When it gets here, it might discover superconducting. And then when that gets discovered, boom, energy costs drop by 99%, computing goes up by a hundredfold. So there's these amazing things that are still like in front of us that each one of which could be, you know, really great exponential triggering events.

• 1:24:31David Friedberg?

  And we're seeing a little milestone today, but yeah, I don't know.

• 1:24:35Jason Calacanis?

  Sax's reaction?

• 1:24:37David Sacks?

  Sounds good.

• 1:24:39Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, how many moves did you play in your 12 chess games with Peter Chilwell?

• 1:24:45David Friedberg?

  Guys, I got stuff to do.

• 1:24:46Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg was talking about superconducting.

• 1:24:48David Sacks?

  How many points did you go up? All right, look, I got shit to do. Come on, let's go.

• 1:24:53Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Sacks. All right, listen, this has been a great episode.

• 1:24:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hey, Sacks, thanks to the besties.

• 1:24:57Jason Calacanis?

  Do you have a comment on the Atlantic article that says Ron DeSantis has peaked already?

• 1:25:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, oh, oh, don't trigger.

• 1:25:04Jason Calacanis?

  Uh-oh, don't do it, don't do it. Why you gotta troll him?

• 1:25:07David Sacks?

  I didn't see that, but it's in the Atlantic. Oh, you want to know why the Atlantic suddenly has turned on him? It's because they're the biggest backers of the war. They, those guys have all these like neo-cons over there. And so he gave a statement saying that, you know, our support for Ukraine shouldn't be a blank check and some other comments expressing, let's say skepticism of what we're doing over there. And that was totally unacceptable to them. So all these neo-cons are registering disappointment. But I would argue that's an electoral asset, not a liability.

• 1:25:39Jason Calacanis?

  I have a prediction. Given what's going on with these banks and what's going on in this kind of a, I think we all agree. The soft landing concept is over. We're going to be in a recession. The war is going to end there because we're not funding this and American, the American public is not going to want to see tens of billions of dollars going to Ukraine and to fund this war in year two or three.

• 1:26:00David Sacks?

  Hundreds of billions.

• 1:26:01Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I'm just saying, every month, yeah.

• 1:26:03David Sacks?

  I know the spending run rate of this war is actually greater than what we did in Afghanistan. And Afghanistan ended up being a 20-year, multi-trillion-dollar operation that just flushed all that money down the drain. So, yeah.

• 1:26:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Are you serious? We're on a greater run rate than Afghanistan?

• 1:26:19David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:20Jason Calacanis?

  Do we know what the monthly run rate is for this?

• 1:26:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, my God. How is it possible?

• 1:26:23Jason Calacanis?

  And do they pay us back?

• 1:26:24David Sacks?

  We've appropriated over 130 billion, Chamath, and Afghanistan, we spent 2 trillion over 20 years. So it's 100 billion a year run rate.

• 1:26:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this is.

• 1:26:33David Sacks?

  Think about what a monumental waste of money that was. And now look at the financial crisis we're in. Can you imagine if we could have 2 trillion back? I mean, all these trillions that we just squandered.

• 1:26:42Jason Calacanis?

  Instantly. We would take that back instantly.

• 1:26:43David Sacks?

  All those trillions and trillions we squandered on stuff that didn't matter, and now we're paying the price for it.

• 1:26:48Jason Calacanis?

  That could be education, could be universal healthcare, could be paying down the debt.

• 1:26:52David Sacks?

  How about paying down the debts without all this inflation?

• 1:26:54Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. Let's think logically here. The number one issue for this country in the next election, I am with Friedberg, his great prediction from the year-end show, is we need a president and we need an administration that is fiscally responsible and controls the balance sheet in a logical fashion, like the last two administrations have not seemed capable of doing. I am with Friedberg, single-issue voter, balance the budget, get spending under control, austerity measures, hashtag. All right, for the Sultan of Science. Sorry, what's that? Can you repeat that? What I wanted to say, Chamath, is are there any plugs for the remaining part of the episode? Mr. Beast is curing blindness and buying people's shoes. Has he been canceled yet?

• 1:27:36David Friedberg?

  Sacks, aren't you excited about superconductors and the benefit for AI and energy storage and energy costs and humanity? Yeah, what does it do to burn rate of a SaaS company?

• 1:27:45David Sacks?

  Yeah, but I'm not, I'm not like an expert at assessing like hard science or hard tech. I mean, I'm a software investor.

• 1:27:51Jason Calacanis?

  I'm just a simple man. I'm just a software investor. All right, everybody, for the Rain Man himself, David Sacks, the dictator Chamath, Polly Hapatia, and the Sultan of Science, the prince of panic attacks no more, Mr. David Friedberg, I'm the world's greatest moderator, undisputed. Congratulations, everybody, on another successful episode. And Friedberg, when are we locking in the date for All-in Summit 2023? My replies, my DMs are filled, people want to know. Do you have the date?

• 1:28:20David Friedberg?

  Soon, soon, soon. We had a parking issue where they don't want us parking there. So as soon as we get them to-

• 1:28:25Jason Calacanis?

  That's fine, we don't need to park there. Everybody-

• 1:28:27David Friedberg?

  I know, that's what we told. So now they've gone back to their committee to get approval for us doing it without parking and just doing shuttles or walking.

• 1:28:32Jason Calacanis?

  Shuttles or people, Uber, Uber, Uber, Uber. Let's get that Uber sock for sale.

• 1:28:36David Friedberg?

  Hopefully, if they accept it, then we are okay.

• 1:28:39Jason Calacanis?

  How many shuttles do we have to take to your anus? Yeah, exactly.

• 1:28:43David Friedberg?

  How am I the prince of panic attacks? I think you're the king of caps locks at this point.

• 1:28:48Jason Calacanis?

  They were calling me J-Caps. J-Caps was the best one I heard.

• 1:28:51David Friedberg?

  Talking about panic attacks, J-Cal this weekend, man. Panicking, panicking.

• 1:28:55Jason Calacanis?

  I was a sheer terror, sheer terror. I have literally gotten rid of the caps lock. Everybody relax. You can follow me, twitter.com/jason. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

• 1:29:14Speaker 04

  And instead, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, Westlife. I'm the queen of Kenwa.

• 1:29:26Speaker 04

  Besties are back. That's my dog, can you get a nose in your driveway, Tim?

• 1:29:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big U-Jorgie because they're all just... It's like this sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.

• 1:29:45Speaker 04

  What? You're the bee! What? You're a bee! What? You're a bee? Bee! What? We need to get merch! Besties are back!