Pod Insights All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg E132: SEC goes after crypto giants, Sequoia splits, LIV/PGA, Messi's deal + LIVE Q&A! About this episode (0:00) Bestie intros!
(1:48) Why RFK Jr. is resonating
(7:52) US crypto crackdown: action against Binance & Coinbase
(26:08) Sequoia splits off its China and India/SE Asia businesses
(41:55) PGA merges with LIV, Lionel Messi's revolutionary deal with the MLS, Apple, and Adidas
(56:16) Ukraine update, Tucker on Twitter
(1:02:20) LIVE Q&A from Angel Summit in Napa!
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Intro Music Credit:
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Intro Video Credit:
https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect
Referenced in the show:
https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1666193699187875851
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-101
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/06/06/sec-seeks-temporary-restraining-order-to-freeze-binanceus-assets
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-06/coinbase-sued-by-sec-for-breaking-us-securities-rules
https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rHdu5Y2SB3Co/v0
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/07/binance-lawyers-say-sec-chair-gensler-offered-to-be-advisor-in-2019.html
https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1666129111025324035https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20230529/H2797_SUS_xml.pd
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2022-219
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-101
https://nypost.com/2021/08/14/ambitious-sec-boss-gensler-cultivates-sen-elizabeth-warren
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/04/28/crypto-industry-is-absolutely-at-war-against-gensler-warren-blockchain-association-ceo-smith-says
https://www.wsj.com/articles/us-regulators-choke-point-for-crypto-blockchain-occ-framework-backdoor-fdic-banks-warning-8b426152
https://www.piratewires.com/p/crypto-choke-point
https://twitter.com/rezoshm/status/1644881392357060610
https://cointelegraph.com/news/congressman-tom-emmer-says-sec-chair-gary-gensler-is-a-bad-faith-regulator
https://fortune.com/2021/09/24/1-trillion-dollar-coin-janet-yellen-us-debt
https://www.wsj.com/articles/venture-capital-firm-sequoia-to-separate-china-business-as-political-tensions-rise-36e54f85
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/13/sequoia-india-and-southeast-asia-raises-2-8-billion-funds
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/arming-the-enemy-why-u-s-vcs-investing-in-china-ai-is-complicated
https://twitter.com/rabois/status/1643655946579607565
https://twitter.com/TimMeadsUSA/status/1666093487899680768
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/lionel-messis-potential-mls-deal-includes-revenue-from-apple-tv
https://fortune.com/2023/06/08/lionel-messi-mls-apple-adidas
https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1666160795703713792
https://twitter.com/TheChiefNerd/status/1666892516363231236
Transcript 19,033 words · 11 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 David Friedberg? Hey everybody, welcome to the All In Podcast. I'm your moderator for the week, David Friedberg, not the world's greatest moderator. This show is going to be a bit of a shortened version. At the back end of the pod today, we actually are going to show some Q and A from Jason's Launch Summit, which he held in Napa Valley this week. Great event. Thanks for having us up there, J Cal. Thanks for coming. Great speakers, great content, and we did a live Q and A for the All In Pod with the audience there, which we'll transition to about halfway through the show today. J Cal, thanks for your hospitality. Oh, yeah. Thanks for throwing the fun birthday party, the poker night. We had a great time.
0:42 David Sacks? I still don't know what I was doing there.
0:43 Jason Calacanis? You were meeting some of your LPs who you'd never met before.
0:46 David Sacks? It was like a dog and pony show. J Cal was using us as some sort of dog and pony show to raise money.
0:51 David Friedberg? Sax, did you really have LPs there that you had never met?
0:54 David Sacks? No.
0:55 Jason Calacanis? Yes.
0:56 David Sacks? Hold on a second. I had one LP there who I have definitely met many times before.
1:00 Jason Calacanis? Okay, she told us she'd never met you. She wanted an introduction. So maybe she's getting into the spirit of All In and joking with you, but you had a three hour meeting with one of your LPs, I heard. She talked about it the next day. She said she had like two or three hours with you.
1:11 David Friedberg? Chumoff, are you with us today? What's going on?
1:12 Jason Calacanis? You there, buddy? Chumoff is very drunk, by the way. He brought up his own wine. He started margaritas at 2 o'clock.
1:17 David Friedberg? He was drunk by the time we got there.
1:19 Jason Calacanis? What?
1:19 David Friedberg? He showed up at like 2:00 in the afternoon. He was day drinking margaritas in the sun. And then we showed up and he was like falling asleep by the time we were done with the stage.
1:27 Jason Calacanis? I love you guys.
1:30 David Friedberg? I'm here.
1:48 Chamath Palihapitiya? You know, by the way, politics is one of these incredible things where you see the meanest people come out of the woodwork when you even feign support for somebody that they don't support. Now that it's out there that Sax and I are doing this fundraiser for RFK.
2:06 David Friedberg? Oh, yeah.
2:06 Chamath Palihapitiya? If you look at Twitter, some of like the Democratic surrogates are out just...
2:14 Chamath Palihapitiya? Smacking me and Sacks around and it's incredible because these people are like the biggest impostor loser clowns. They've never literally done anything in their whole life and then they show up and then they just like, how dare you work and help build a company? How dare you help build another company? How dare you help now fund other companies? I am a talking mouthpiece who's never done anything except work in one administration as a speechwriter and now I think you guys suck balls. It's like, give me a break.
2:47 David Friedberg? So you, are you a little kind of emotional about that today?
2:50 Chamath Palihapitiya? I actually, I love critiques actually, because I think like you can learn a lot from critiques, but then when mids just spew, I just get annoyed. I think mids should not be allowed to talk.
3:02 David Friedberg? Yeah.
3:03 Chamath Palihapitiya? Well, that's just my thought. There goes half the internet.
3:05 David Friedberg? Sacks, are your Republican cohort friends upset about you hosting a fundraiser for RFK?
3:12 David Sacks? I've got none of that.
3:14 David Friedberg? None of that?
3:15 Chamath Palihapitiya? That's interesting. What's your take on that?
3:17 David Friedberg? Yeah. Do Republicans generally think that it's a good thing if RFK Junior gets the Democratic nomination because he will be easily beatable?
3:24 David Sacks? I don't think they're thinking that way. I think that there's a respect for RFK Junior among many Republicans because he's speaking out on issues that they care about. Like I've talked about, he's denouncing censorship. He's in favor of free speech. He's in favor of civil liberties. And, you know, not the, this massive surveillance state. He's speaking out in favor of peace instead of war. He's speaking out on the border. He had this amazing video.
3:49 Chamath Palihapitiya? That was great.
3:50 David Sacks? A couple of days ago where he went to the border in Yuma, Arizona at 2:00 AM in the morning. And he shows, he shows where the border wall ends. And where the border wall ends, the line begins and people from all over the world are just entering through this hole in the wall in a never-ending stream of people. And then they get loaded onto buses provided by the government. And then they get handed a ticket to supposedly appear in court to resolve their case in three or four years. And they're never heard from again and they're dispersed all over the country. What I don't understand is if the federal government can get its act together enough to provide buses, why can't they get their act together enough to plug the hole in the wall? It's absurd.
4:35 David Sacks? This is like an act of sabotage against the United States. And so he's there just pointing this out. I've never seen anything like this before.
4:42 David Friedberg? It was interesting as a Democrat to do this because that's typically kind of a Republican point, right? And some of the commentary made about RFK Jr., I think it was in the New York Times this week, or someone that covered his candidacy, one of the big media companies, highlighted how much of his agenda seems to be a Republican talking point agenda. Does that sound accurate to you?
5:07 David Sacks? Well, I think even most people in the country who identify as Democrats would be against having an open border. That's what we're talking about. When there's a hole in the wall and people can just start forming a line, and then once they get through the line, they're literally disparate. Hold on, they're basically distributed throughout the country on buses. I don't think most people in the country, even Democrats, would support that. But what he's violating here is the press blackout on what's really going on at the border. So you're right.
5:35 Chamath Palihapitiya? He went there. Yeah.
5:37 David Friedberg? But other Republican talking points. So the points around the vaccine.
5:42 David Sacks? I don't know if that's a Republican. Well, he's expressed, obviously, concerns about vaccines preceding the COVID vaccine. I don't know whether he's right about that or not. I'm not willing to say whether he's right or wrong about that because I just don't know enough. I think he's definitely right about the inefficacy of the COVID vaccine. We've talked about this before. Even Bill Gates admits now that the vaccine doesn't work. It's too short acting and it doesn't hold up against variants.
6:05 Chamath Palihapitiya? It's not a vaccine. Let's just call it what it was.
6:08 David Sacks? It doesn't prevent you from getting the illness.
6:09 Chamath Palihapitiya? It's a death reduction shot. It was a revenue grab by Big Pharma, plastered with non-scientific thinking from a bunch of people who should have known better.
6:20 David Friedberg? Wow. Okay, I think you just got our so much.
6:24 David Sacks? No, that's just the truth. Hold on. What Chamath just said is just like the factual reality and, and you can't get that from the mainstream media. Like, there's no reevaluation. There's no appraisal. They control what we see and hear. It's like Pravda level in terms of the propaganda. And that's why I think RFK Jr. is so interesting is because he is blowing up what the mainstream media wants to control.
6:50 Chamath Palihapitiya? The really interesting thing about him going to the border.
6:52 Jason Calacanis? I agree with Sax is, hey, let's just have a discussion about this and look at the actual facts on the ground that we can agree on. And what he actually did was he pierced the veil of like, this is an issue about a certain group of people. He was there and there are people from Afghanistan, China, all over the world coming in. He made the point that this isn't just about one country and that these people are suffering. And that I thought was like another really important highlight. These people are being trafficked. They're, you know, being abused at the border and that it's going to cost us 10 million a mile to secure the border.
7:22 David Sacks? He had a really good way of talking about it. And he's done this with Ukraine as well, where he emphasizes the humanitarian aspect of it.
7:29 Jason Calacanis? Yes.
7:30 David Sacks? And it's a good way of talking about it. And I think Republicans should adopt some of that. E rhetoric.
7:36 Jason Calacanis? And to Chamath's point, I think it's, it is, I think it's a money grab, Chamath. I do think it lowered death rates, but you know, I, I do think piercing the veil on this and
7:44 David Sacks? None of us are still getting boosted because we know they don't work.
7:47 David Friedberg? Guys, guys, stop. I'm not debating vaccines and politics. We're moving on. We're going to talk about crypto. So this week, the SEC
7:54 Jason Calacanis? There we go.
7:54 David Friedberg? Serious action against Binance and Coinbase. You know, pretty significant, pretty loud. SEC filed 13 charges against Binance entities and the founder's CC. Charges include operating unregistered securities exchanges, broker dealers and clearing agencies misrepresenting their trading controls and their oversight on the Binance US platform and the unregistered offer and sale of securities. The next day, they sought a temporary restraining order to freeze Binance's US assets. And then on Tuesday, the SEC sued Coinbase over their exchange and their staking programs. Stock dropped 12%. The SEC said that
8:37 David Friedberg? the company was operating an unregistered exchange and broker and that 13 of their assets listed on their platform were considered crypto asset securities. Brian Armstrong, obviously, has been on the pod several times, said he's not shutting down his staking service and said regarding the SEC complaint against us today, we're proud to represent the industry in court to finally get some clarity around crypto rules. He's generally made the statement that he has tried multiple times to register with the SEC. They have not had a mechanism for him to register. They have tried to do everything by the book and that the SEC approved their IPO filing, knowing full well the details of their business and their operating model and still allowed
9:17 David Friedberg? them to go public on a US securities exchange despite full knowledge about their business. Chamath, does anything change this week based on the SEC's action or is this just a continuation of, you know, crypto has been rolled back and will continue to roll back here in the US? Or is this something new and a new action and opens up a new front on the government versus crypto?
9:43 Chamath Palihapitiya? It's a good question. I think there's two ways to look at this. One is the conspiracy theorist way, which you see a lot of on Twitter, which is this idea that crypto is making all of these inroads as a replacement mechanism for fiat currency and so governments are really now invested in trying to shut it down. I think that's largely untrue. And then there's the more simple, basic reality, which is that there was one part of the SEC that frankly didn't do the job that they were supposed to by either allowing a few
10:24 Chamath Palihapitiya? of these crypto companies or crypto businesses to go public, either as standalone businesses or as part of other businesses, so Coinbase, Robinhood, et cetera. And then there's this part of the enforcement action after this FTX fiasco, which is a lot of CYA, covering your ass by the SEC, especially because it looked like they had some cozy relationships with them. And so they're coming down hard and they're going to go and systematically dismantle the largest actors and they're going to go through the value chain. So I think the obvious place that they're looking now are... The exchanges, they'll look at the custodial services. They will not approve any ETFs.
11:08 Chamath Palihapitiya? And then eventually, I do think it trickles into all of the staking services. And eventually, I think it'll touch the venture community. And all of those firms and funds that had a huge, robust business in staking these crypto projects in order to get coins, like founding coins and then being able to sell them. J. Cal?
11:31 Jason Calacanis? I mean, I've been talking about this since the beginning because I bought Bitcoin and wrote about Bitcoin when it was maybe 25 cents. And then again, when it was 100. So I've been following this for a long time. And I think, thinking from first principles to stepping back for a moment, you know, what we do in technology is fundamentally disruptive. If it's at its best, if it's truly going to be important in the world. And when you hear that word disruption, you kind of file it as a buzzword. But what it really means at its core is like competition. And it's not just competition disruption. When you say disruption, you're talking about existential competition. Two people go in the ring, one person comes out, like somebody's going to get really fucked up. And if you, people keep bringing up, oh, you're an investor in Uber, they broke the rules, they bent the rules.
12:16 Jason Calacanis? Uber was going against caps. Airbnb was going against like hotels. WeWork was going against like long-term real estate leases. When you look at all those disruptive technologies and what they did at their core, they disrupted on behalf of consumers and lowered prices, increased choice, et cetera. When you get crypto, the crypto crowd literally said, we are going to replace fiat currency. Fiat currency is the government. And so my thesis from the beginning was if the government has a way to stop this, they do not want to be disrupted. What is a government at its core? It's a military, it's a bunch of rules, laws, and it's money.
12:58 Jason Calacanis? That's the kind of pillars of any government's power. We knew the government wasn't going to give this up. And, you know, they, they effed around and found out, but the truth is the, and this is where I have some sympathy for the crypto people. Not the people who are just committing crime with the hallway and just dumping these bags on retail, et cetera. But we do want to have this innovation here. There are some innovative aspects to it, but Gary Gensler said, listen, you already have electronic money. It's called money in the United States. We already have these services. You don't need this. Consumers don't need it. And you have to understand the SEC's function in the world to understand why they're taking this action. Their function is to protect investors. Investors lost a bunch of money, therefore they are going to retroactively inflict pain and hold people accountable
13:42 Jason Calacanis? for their mandate, which is to protect investors. You could have easily resolved this, the SEC. And the companies could have resolved this. The companies could have followed these things as securities and only allowed accredited investors. Top 5% of the country, people who make over 200K a year. They didn't do that. They said, anybody can buy these. Well, that's just not how it works in America and it should change. I think everybody should be able to buy any security they want in America, just like anybody can go play blackjack. And the easiest solution for this just passed in Congress this week and we'll go to the Senate and it'd be a law soon, I think. Allowing every American, the other 94% to take a test and become accredited. If that happens, you take a test just like you take a driver's license test. I know what diversification is. I know how risky these are.
14:26 Jason Calacanis? Once you take that 50 question test, you become accredited and then you can buy these coins if you want to. And that's really the easiest path to resolution here. So we don't have Brian Armstrong move his company to the Middle East or, you know, an island in the Caribbean, which is what he's going to do, I predict. So.
14:42 David Friedberg? Okay. Well, look, we've seen this bill make its way, I think through, is it going to the Senate next or is it?
14:49 Jason Calacanis? Going to the Senate. Yeah.
14:51 David Friedberg? Going to the Senate next. So let's see if it gets done. I think it's a, it's a good point. One thing I'll point out. When individual investors were making money because all of these asset values were inflating, all of the coins were growing and were climbing in value, everyone felt good. There was an emergent cry that we all want to have access to these new instruments. We all have a right to make these investments and to own these assets. And then, as the asset values declined and individual investors began losing money, the emergent cry is, where was the government to help save and protect us? And so, the SEC, I would argue, was probably a little bit hindered when the market was inflating
15:35 David Friedberg? in being able to step in and take action because that would have been counter to the cries of the retail market. But as the retail market took their hits, the SEC has to step in and Congress steps in and everyone starts to say, it's time to act, we should have acted sooner. And this was, you know, fairly predictable.
15:53 David Sacks? I think what's happening is more nefarious than that. So, the SEC is doing two different things. They're alleging two different kinds of crimes. One set has to do with protecting investors from having their funds stolen on these exchanges or at least commingled. FTX did that, right? Where they basically took customer deposits and stole them. What Binance is accused of is taking customer deposits, maybe not stealing them, but commingling them with company funds. That should be looked at and I think crypto customers should be protected against that. However, the case against Coinbase, they're alleging a completely different set of facts, which is effectively what Genzer and the SEC are saying is that it is not legal to operate
16:38 David Sacks? a crypto exchange in the United States. That is what the SEC is saying because Coinbase has basically done everything right. And I believe that Genzer is far exceeding his authority in stating something like that. It is not up to the chairman of the SEC to say that Americans should not be holding crypto. Why, as a free people, should we not be able to buy crypto if we want to? You know, why shouldn't we be able to buy Bitcoin? Now, maybe you apply rules around accredited investor status, there should be protections against unsophisticated investors buying stuff or getting defrauded. That's fine. That's the framework that Brian Armstrong is asking for. But everyone should understand what the SEC is doing right now is...
17:21 David Sacks? Basically usurping congressional authority. It should be Congress that makes the law. If Congress wants to ban crypto exchanges in the United States and prevent the citizens of the United States from owning crypto, let Congress do it. It should not be up to Gensler to do that. And the question is, why is Gensler going this far when previously he had relationships in the industry? Apparently, he was a consultant to Binance and even worse, he was talking to FTX about giving them some special status. And I think the reason is, the scuttlebutt is that he has an alliance with Elizabeth Warren and the rumor is that, you know, she will make him Treasury Secretary if he basically destroys crypto in the US. Sorry, where is the evidence for that? That's just someone's rumor and speculation? This is the scuttlebutt in the industry.
18:06 David Sacks? Okay, so it's someone...
18:08 Jason Calacanis? The back channel. This is in fact the back channel.
18:10 David Sacks? So just to be clear, rumor and innuendo is what you're saying? No, look, what I would say is clear is that Gensler and Elizabeth Warren have an alliance to destroy crypto in the US. This was speculated about before with Operation Choke Point, but now it's clear. They're trying to shut down. What is Operation Choke Point? We've talked about on the show before, it was a series of actions taken.
18:28 Jason Calacanis? It's what you do when you're in a hotel at night.
18:32 David Sacks? No, Operation Choke Point was a series of actions by the US government to basically destroy all the on-ramps to crypto. So you couldn't get money into the system. Now they're going further and they're basically saying it is illegal to operate a crypto exchange in the United States. So Gensler has now played his cards.
18:48 Jason Calacanis? That's not exactly what they're saying.
18:49 David Sacks? Yes, it is. Gensler has played his cards.
18:50 Jason Calacanis? I can explain why you're wrong. What they're saying is it's not just the exchange, it's that the exchange contains unregistered securities. So it's a more nuanced point. I think, I agree.
19:01 David Sacks? What security could you trade?
19:03 Jason Calacanis? Well, if it passes the Howey test or it is registered. And there are people who have actually registered their crypto.
19:09 David Sacks? They're saying that no crypto passes the Howey test. They're going back on that.
19:12 Jason Calacanis? You could pass it if you limited it to accredited investors. And the fact is, Brian Armstrong, Binance, and a lot of crypto projects refused to exclude...
19:24 Jason Calacanis? Non-accredited investors, and I watched this happen up close and personal.
19:27 David Sacks? Well, this is not, you're right about the unregistered securities thing. They're trying to say that all crypto is unregistered securities.
19:34 Jason Calacanis? No, no, they said very specifically it was 16. No, they literally, they named them Saks in the lawsuit. They named the 16 or 13. What was it, Friedberg? So they, they know how to, it was 13. They know how to craft this. They're saying for these specific 13. Now, the industry does feel, you're correct, and the back channel is everybody's against us. But if they had just registered these, they would not have, I don't think they're gonna, Bitcoin is not included in this. Etherium is not included.
20:00 David Friedberg? He doesn't have a way of registering.
20:02 Jason Calacanis? They do. They don't want to. So they claim they don't have a way of registering. They could register it just like we all do when we have private securities.
20:09 David Sacks? A lot of people tweeting about this, that the SEC has put out statements saying, our door is open. Come talk to us. There is no open door. There is no one to talk to. They have no idea how to get registered.
20:20 David Friedberg? How, Chamath, how do you think this is gonna get resolved? Armstrong's talked publicly about going to Congress to try and get some clarifying law passed. Are you familiar with any of the, any of the drafting that might be going on to support his cause here? Or do you think it's gonna get settled in the courts?
20:36 Chamath Palihapitiya? First of all, I think, I think Brian Armstrong is, is a really, really, really good entrepreneur.
20:42 Chamath Palihapitiya? And I'm a really big fan of his.
20:46 Chamath Palihapitiya? That said, I just don't think that there's a lot of political support to visit this issue right now.
20:56 Chamath Palihapitiya? And so unfortunately, I'm pretty skeptical that you're gonna see any form of legislation pass. I unfortunately think that
21:09 Chamath Palihapitiya? the SEC has by and large put the entire sector into mate. And so I think that what Jason said.
21:19 Chamath Palihapitiya? is largely right, which is that it's going to force these companies to preserve enterprise value to leave the United States and to jurisdictionally operate from a different place and to basically IP block and IP gate US residents from using their products and services. I also think that they're going to have to pay large fines. And so the only thing that'll be left is to adjudicate all of the staking stuff that that happened and whether that was right or wrong.
21:48 David Sacks? Right. So the court, it'll get settled, it'll get decided in the court. I agree with that. And I think, I think that when you start talking about minutia like, well, these 16 cryptos are okay or not okay, like you're kind of missing the point. The government led by Gensler is in a full assault on crypto and the goal is basically to either destroy it in the US or drive it offshore. Chamath is right about that. And the question is why? And I think Jake, how you made the point that progressives like Elizabeth Warren see crypto as competition to fiat currency and they do not want there to be a competitor. Now, what is the reason for that? I think it's because of their radical spending schemes. Remember in the first years of the Biden administration, the progressives wanted a four and a half trillion dollar Build Back Better bill.
22:33 David Sacks? Remember Larry Summers told them that you're going to cause inflation and even the $750 billion scope down version that they ultimately passed caused a lot of inflation and it caused the problems that we have now that we're seeing in the economy. But they wanted four and a half trillion. And when people were opposed to it and said, we couldn't fund this, they were in favor of minting trillion dollar coins. Yeah. So these are people who don't want any check on their ability to spend down the full faith and credit of the United States. They would basically spend all the money that we have, they would basically eat the seed corn. Or don't have. That we don't have, that I think you guys agree we should not be spending. And that is why they're the faction in our political system who are most against crypto.
23:16 Jason Calacanis? The two things can't be true. Friedberg, hold on, I gotta, I gotta respond to it. Two things can't be true. One, the government doesn't want to give up control of fiat. I agree with that. The second thing that's also true is that this group of people did not want to play by the rules. They knew the rules. They explicitly broke them for profit. That's why they have them dead to rights. You can name this operation choke point. You can brand it. You can put out any conspiracy theory you want. They did have the option.
23:41 David Sacks? Why is it a conspiracy theory? You agree they're trying to run these guys out of business?
23:45 Jason Calacanis? I said two things can be true at the same time, David. This is a tolerance for ambiguity. Being able to hold two thoughts at the same time.
23:51 David Friedberg? Let me give you, let me give you.
23:52 Jason Calacanis? And they don't want to give up control of fiat. That's what's happening. That's the rule. You have to file as a security. You have to only allow accredited investors.
23:59 David Sacks? You said that Coinbase was a good actor.
24:01 Jason Calacanis? I believe they have good intentions. Yes. I don't believe the other people do. I do believe.
24:05 David Sacks? So now you believe that Coinbase is in violation of the law?
24:08 Jason Calacanis? I believe the securities they're trading are in violation of the law, and that's obvious. If you, but I believe that law should change.
24:14 David Friedberg? Let me give you a third point.
24:15 Jason Calacanis? Are securities.
24:17 David Friedberg? J Cal, let me give you a third point and Saks. Elizabeth Warren, she may be motivated by the intention to preserve the authority of the fiat. But is it not also possible that a large number of people lost a lot of money? That they worked hard for and they used to buy crypto assets? And then the value of those assets went down and those people lost a lot of value. I had, there was a group of guys that are house painters that painted my house two summers ago and they painted the whole house. They were here every day for hours, every day. So I got to speak to these guys and these, these guys were, were house painters, you know, they, they work for an hourly wage. They do fairly well, but every lunch break, every break they got,
25:03 David Friedberg? all that they would talk about with one another was what cryptocurrency they're buying and trading in and out of with the whole intention of making money. They all believed that they had a good point of view because they read something on the internet or got some tweet or got some text or saw something on Tik Tok about this one. Crypto asset or this crypto asset and they were trading in and out and all of the money that these guys worked hard for was being invested in crypto assets.
25:28 David Sacks? You're right, that set of facts is not great. However, I don't think that's the motivation. I think the motivation is to basically end crypto as a potential competitor to fiat money in the United States. That's the motivation. And they're going to use those fact patterns to basically build public support that. Because look.
25:44 David Friedberg? Fair enough.
25:45 David Sacks? Because we could handle that, okay? We could do the accredited investor test. There should be a framework or a set of guidelines under which it is legal for people to buy and hold or trade crypto in the United States.
25:57 David Friedberg? And lose their money.
25:57 David Sacks? And that's all that Brian has been asking for, is give us a framework. And Genzer is not giving a framework. He's just trying to basically put them out of business.
26:05 David Friedberg? Okay, look, I think we've gone around this topic. This has been a great conversation. I'm going to move forward to the next topic, which I think is really interesting in the vein of both deglobalization, but also, you know, the scale at which venture firms have gotten to. Sequoia decided this week and announced publicly that they're splitting off their China and India slash Southeast Asia funds. As you guys obviously know, Sequoia Capital is a venture capital firm. And within that firm, they manage multiple funds. Some of the funds that they've raised and managed have been specifically targeted in China, where they have $56 billion. I don't know if this number is accurate, but that's an
26:48 David Friedberg? incredible number. $56 billion of assets under management focused just in Sequoia China. And then they have a Sequoia India fund, which has about $4 billion of capital raised in just the last three years. And now they are separating the management company and the oversight of those funds into separate management companies. So Sequoia Capital will no longer oversee those China funds. A new firm has been formed called Sequoia China, that is now owned and run by a separate management team based in China. And Sequoia India is now called Peak 15 Partners, which is owned and operated by a separate team of managers out of India. Roloff Botha will manage the US and European Sequoia Capital.
27:32 David Friedberg? Neil Chen will oversee Sequoia China.
27:35 Chamath Palihapitiya? Chen, Chen, Neil Chen.
27:37 David Friedberg? Chen, I'm sorry, Neil Chen. And Shalendra Singh will oversee Sequoia India. I guess this is a question of did Sequoia get too big? Or are they caving to pressure of the political issues arising with having deep relationships and ties with China? Or as they have said, a lot of competition between these different portfolios and companies within these portfolios amongst each other. Chamath, what's your read on the action? Is there anything to read into this and anything to extrapolate from it?
28:03 Chamath Palihapitiya? Well, it's been a parade of missteps for Sequoia in the last couple of years. And I'll let Sequoia figure out who to blame for this. But the reality is they, I think, felt a lot of FOMO post SoftBank. They raised this large mega fund that kind of straddled all of the sub funds and straddled all of the regions. And so they dangled the carrot of trying to get into the early stage US fund by investing in this big mega fund that also had China and India exposure and growth exposure. Then they tried this like very convoluted evergreen structure right before the market fell apart, where you could basically become a permanent capital vehicle.
28:48 Chamath Palihapitiya? And as far as I can tell from the outside looking in, it just seems like a tax play for the GPs to not have to sell and realize capital gains. But that only works when the stock market keeps going up, which it didn't. And then it summarily crushed tech stocks 80 or 90%. So that was a misstep. And then when you put all these things together, now that China is contracting, and we've said this before, I think China is largely uninvestable for the next 30 or 40 years. It just makes sense to jettison it. Now, I will say, though, that Neil Shen is elite. If you consider in investing, I would say, I have a simple rubric.
29:30 Chamath Palihapitiya? Anybody who's made more than a billion dollars for themselves as an investor, I consider elite. Neil Shen is elite. And so he'll do just fine. Running that Sequoia China business. I was surprised about why they would allow India to leave. There's nobody that elite at Sequoia India by that rubric. But India is a country growing at 6% a year. It literally looks like China in 2008 and 9. And so I'm not sure why you would let them leave. I think that you would want to attach them to yourself because it makes the US business look better. You probably gets differentiated and smoothed out returns.
30:13 Chamath Palihapitiya? But I think this is a little bit of taking-
30:15 David Friedberg? What about the point of view of competition, Chamath? That there was competition between the different portfolio companies? And it was leading to conflict?
30:24 Chamath Palihapitiya? I mean, that's dumb. That happens in the United States. Sequoia has always been known to fund everybody that they think will make money, no matter how much they compete, no matter where they are.
30:33 David Friedberg? It was controversial when they backed YouTube and Moritz was sitting on the board at Google.
30:37 Chamath Palihapitiya? And sure. Look, Sequoia as an organization is elite. They're there to make money for their LPs, period, end of story. And so all of the other words that can go in any press release, basically, I think, try to hide the fact that this is an organization that's had some missteps. They're not on solid ground. They've lost a lot of money and they're trying to figure out what to do next. I, however, if I was running that organization, would have probably done nothing and just let the dust settle. And I think that all of these actions are too close together and it's a little bit, to me, of flailing in the water. And so I don't think it was a good idea to let India leave. I think it made a ton of sense to cut China.
31:24 Chamath Palihapitiya? But I think all of this stuff happened, started happening a few years ago, starting with that eight or nine billion dollar mega fund that they raised to try to compete with SoftBank.
31:33 David Sacks? Sacks, any read on this? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a example, a prominent example of decoupling and decglobalization going on. So I agree, we have to treat India and China separately. With respect to China, I just think it's become harder and harder for Americans to do business in China, both because we don't really have the visibility into that system. And there's too much political uncertainty, so kind of to Chamath's point about it being increasingly uninvestable. But I also think the geopolitical concerns, it's just very hard to straddle those concerns now because the geopolitical competition is heating up so much. I think it's investable for people like Neil Shen, who are insiders in that system.
32:17 David Sacks? So I think, you know, elite Chinese investors can, I'm sure, make money in China over the next few decades. But I think it's just too hard for Americans to figure that out. So I think them parting ways makes a lot of sense. I think it's going to simplify Sequoia's life a lot. India, I agree with Chamath that that's sort of a different question because India is going to be a huge growth economy over the next few decades, and they are a US ally. So it doesn't pose the same geopolitical risk. But my guess is that it was just kind of unwieldy, that it's too unwieldy to kind of merge funding sources and firm management across two firms that are really pretty different, right?
33:00 David Sacks? The US Sequoia firm and then this Indian firm. So my guess is they just decouple because it was just getting too hard to manage. And then if you're an LP, don't you just want the ability to say, okay, I'm going to allocate this much money to India and I'm going to allocate this much money to the US? I think LPs probably like it too.
33:17 Chamath Palihapitiya? Sequoia China is frankly, over the last 15 or 20 years, as good and probably is numerically better than Sequoia US.
33:27 Jason Calacanis? So that was an elite organization just by itself. Sequoia India, I don't think has much to talk about. And so maybe what Roloff decided is this team is just not very good. So we might as well just cut it and we can revisit it later. They probably have some number of years of a non-compete and then they could come back into the market five years with a totally new team and that may be easier. So maybe easier just to just
33:49 David Sacks? Maybe the team there, they want it to be separate. Look, it's hard to cross returns from two totally different funds, right? Because one side, one side's gonna be unhappy with the trade, right?
34:00 Jason Calacanis? Yeah, I can give you the
34:02 David Friedberg? JCal's got actual information to share.
34:04 Jason Calacanis? Well, no, I mean, I have the closest, I think I have the closest.
34:07 David Friedberg? But they were an investor in your company, right, JCal?
34:09 Jason Calacanis? Well, I'm an LP in their funds. They're printing money for me. They backed my second startup. Roloff's on the board of that company and still with me. And I was their first scout when they started the scouts program, which is the highest percentage performing fund I think they ever had.
34:23 David Friedberg? And you're our, you're our resident Captain America. So as a patriot, how do you feel about the
34:28 Jason Calacanis? Well, they are, put that aside. Sequoia's 20% of the NASDAQ. This is the greatest venture firm of all time, hands down. And the Sequoia Fund, which Chamoff referred to
34:38 David Friedberg? You mean companies they've invested in?
34:39 Jason Calacanis? Companies they've invested in are 20% of the NASDAQ, yes. And so the reason the Sequoia Fund came out, this evergreen fund, was because a lot of their LPs wanted Sequoia to manage the public equities going forward because they didn't want to sell them because they realized
34:54 David Friedberg? Bullshit.
34:55 Jason Calacanis? That the massive gains, the gains from Google, Apple, et cetera, of these investments that they did when they were private companies, Cisco, the gains from public forward were greater than the gains in private. And I've been in on these presentations. I've sat through them with the Sequoia team. And so when you manage those public ones, we've all talked about the denominator problem here. The denominator problem is, hey, are they venture returns or are they part of the public equity? So at a giant endowment, they want to put them into the equities bucket, get them out of the venture bucket. And Sequoia saw an opportunity there to manage this evergreen fund. I'm sure there are tax advantages to it, of course.
35:36 Jason Calacanis? But with relation to what they did in China and India, these, these were incredibly Prescient and innovative things they did in 2000 and 2005 when they started India and then China was 2005, I believe. They found domestic teams. You need domestic teams to do this properly, especially in places with different governance and different regulations. And it gives them autonomy. They were incredible investments. But what's happening right now is all venture investments because of AI and chips and the decoupling with China are now under massive scrutiny.
36:12 Jason Calacanis? So they can say there's brand confusion. You can talk about, you know, the collisions and who's going to back this Chinese entrepreneur and Indian entrepreneur who also is operating in the US, right? These businesses operate in the US. And so what really is happening is the government is going to stop all US venture investing in China. That's what's going to happen in the coming months. And so they're just getting ahead of that. And now they will compete. And it really has to do with chips and AI.
36:41 David Sacks? Okay.
36:41 Jason Calacanis? You may have seen some of these stories and nobody's going to invest. If an American invests in AI in China, that's going to be banned and the same with chips.
36:49 David Sacks? Yeah, you're right. There were a bunch of stories about whether US investors should be investing in AI in China. And people were saying this was un-American because it was basically going to give China an advantage against us in this key industry. And I think that point is a good example of what I'm talking about with the geopolitical concerns. It's just getting too complicated.
37:08 Jason Calacanis? Yes.
37:08 David Sacks? For Americans to invest in China. It raises too many geopolitical concerns. And I think Sequoia is massively simplifying its life by just splitting these things up and being out.
37:18 Jason Calacanis? Did you see Keith Verboy's tweets on this?
37:19 David Sacks? Yeah, that's what we're referring to.
37:21 Jason Calacanis? Yeah. Keith Verboy tweeted basically like it's un-American to invest in China at this point.
37:26 David Sacks? Yeah, we've talked about this before. I mean, look, the Chinese relationship primarily used to be seen as an economic relationship. And people were looking for win-win basically trade scenarios. And it was not seen as a moral to invest in China. Now the relationship is primarily seen through a geopolitical lens, which is to say the balance of power, which is a zero sum game. It's about, you know, how much better is the US doing? How much more powerful is it than China? And anybody who's perceived as helping China in that rubric now is looked on skeptically within the United States.
37:55 Jason Calacanis? What do you think about that?
37:59 David Sacks? Well, like I said, I don't think that's going to change. So I think Sequoia is doing the right thing to kind of, like I said, simplify its life.
38:04 Jason Calacanis? What's your personal opinion? I'm curious.
38:07 David Sacks? I think that it should be possible to do business with China without it being seen as either unpatriotic or immoral. However, there are strategic technologies that are just going to be, I think, it's too hard and too risky to be supporting China in.
38:25 Jason Calacanis? Chips and AI?
38:26 David Sacks? Yeah, I mean, look, if somebody is using Chinese manufacturing to make toys or clothes, I don't think that's fundamentally strategic in a geopolitical way. But if you're helping them make the next generation of chips, that's going to raise a lot of questions.
38:44 Jason Calacanis? So a VC firm, Friedberg, can't take out chips and AI from their investment pieces?
38:49 Chamath Palihapitiya? Hold on, I want to say something. Because this reminds me of when Benchmark actually had Benchmark Europe and then they cut it. Do you guys remember that?
38:56 Jason Calacanis? Yeah.
38:57 Chamath Palihapitiya? Yeah. And kind of retrenched. They weren't retrenching from a position of strength. They were retrenching to reestablish themselves after a bunch of missteps. So I think typically these retrenchments happen when there's a little bit of internal chaos and mismanagement and underperformance.
39:12 Jason Calacanis? That's not the case here, I can assure you.
39:14 David Sacks? Yeah, but I actually think retrenching is good because it simplifies things.
39:18 Jason Calacanis? I'm a big fan of it.
39:19 Chamath Palihapitiya? I totally agree with you. My point is, when I saw that overlay fund, I was like, this is questionable. But then when I saw that weird evergreen fund, that to me just seemed like a tax arb. And I thought to myself, as a person who's looked at this exact stuff for my own stuff, what I did was I just converted it to a family office. And from a tax perspective, it was much simpler. But that exact same structure I looked at for myself. And the reason that that structure exists, and Jason, I know you want to think it's because these endowments want them to manage public equities. I still work with a few endowments and pension systems. They don't. And the reason they don't is they're not allowed to. They're not allowed for concentration purposes. They pay other people to manage it. They have these outside
40:03 Chamath Palihapitiya? consultants. And for fiduciary perspective, you have to do all of these things with respect Managing risk and one of the most obvious things that these foundations do is they get distributions and they sell. They don't hold. And so the reason why you'd want to look at the long-term gains of a stock that you distributed is because the GP sold too early, not the LP. And I just don't, I think that you should not just be a blithe surrogate on this topic and actually really think about it.
40:30 Jason Calacanis? Well, I mean, I don't think you need to, well, I'm not, I'm not. And, you know, Square, if you look at something like that, you know, Rudolph's still on the board of Square, I believe. So they, Sequoia has realized over time, you know, as it's been explained to me as an LP, that, you know, these companies grow, the outliers continue to grow massively when they become public. And Sequoia is now staying on the board of those companies. And so they actually have the most insight into it because they backed it when it was two people. And then they're still on the board.
40:58 Chamath Palihapitiya? That's not the point. Money is not infinite. And if you're a foundation and you're legally obligated to distribute some percentage every year, you need the money back.
41:05 Jason Calacanis? And the foundations do get to choose. Some foundations want to go long. Harvard or whoever, I'm just picking, you know, one of the large ones. If somebody's got thirty, forty billion dollars, they may not need to liquidate that and they might very much want to hold for the long term.
41:17 Chamath Palihapitiya? The only person that is in a position to actually hold for the long term because it's so tax advantageous is the GP. That is why that fund was created. And I will bet you, if you ask him under oath, why they did it, I'll tell you it was for themselves.
41:33 Jason Calacanis? And people have the choice.
41:35 Chamath Palihapitiya? I'll bet you a million dollars for charity, whatever you want to do. I bet you if you put him under oath and you subpoena him and you ask him why he did it, he'll say he did it for himself. And that's fine. All I'm saying is that's the kind of complexity that Sacks is talking about that does not add to success. It is over-complexifying something that doesn't need to be complicated.
41:53 Jason Calacanis? Yeah, I disagree with you, but we can just move on.
41:55 David Friedberg? Well, we agree to disagree sometimes here on the All In Podcast. We're going to move on for our last topic of the day with the announcement.
42:03 Chamath Palihapitiya? Can we talk messy?
42:04 David Friedberg? No, no, no, we're not, because we're going to do one last topic, which I think is.
42:07 Jason Calacanis? PGA and messy go together.
42:08 David Friedberg? Yeah. So let's just talk about the PGA.
42:10 Chamath Palihapitiya? Still messy in the PGA.
42:11 David Friedberg? No, we don't have time. Guys, I appreciate the messy interest, but we're going to talk about something less messy or even more messy.
42:16 Chamath Palihapitiya? Who cares what the PGA is called?
42:18 David Friedberg? I actually think it's pretty interesting for a couple of reasons. So as you guys know, the PGA Tour has been around since 1930. I think the PGA Tour makes 1.6 billion dollars a year, if reports are correct.
42:29 Chamath Palihapitiya? I make 1.6 billion a year. Boring.
42:32 David Friedberg? I mean, depends on the year. All of the players on the PGA Tour are independent contractors. So Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, and this is what I think is one of the more interesting aspects of this story, and maybe speaks to a broader kind of set of geopolitical transitions that are underway. The Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund started LIV Golf as an alternative to the PGA Tour. Liv Golf. Liv Golf, they invested $2 billion of capital and offered guarantees to golfers to come and get on their tour. They ended up offering, at one point, Tiger Woods reportedly got an $800 million guarantee
43:17 David Friedberg? to join their tour, which he turned down. Phil Mickelson got a reported $200 million guarantee, which he took to join the tour.
43:25 Chamath Palihapitiya? Hideki Matsuyama got offered 750K, 750 million.
43:28 David Friedberg? Yeah, 750 million. So seven of the 10 top-paid golfers in the world actually signed up. And it caused, obviously, significant disruption to what has effectively been a monopoly, which is the PGA Tour in golf, in professional golf. And here we are, two years later, and it was announced this week that Liv and PGA are merging. And the current PGA Tour Commissioner, Jay Moynihan, will serve as CEO of the new entity. Just by way of reference, Jay Moynihan makes a reported $14 to $15 million a year in salary as CEO of the PGA Tour. He will now be CEO of this combined organization. One big question mark is, how much is he getting paid?
44:09 David Friedberg? And did that help secure and solidify this deal getting done? But I think another big question is, do we think this will actually close? Will this face regulatory and antitrust scrutiny? Will this face CFIUS? Because it is the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund that is effectively taking a large stake in the PGA Tour. Let's go to our resident professional sports team owner, or former minority owner, Chamath. Any takes on this announced merger? What does it say about the PGA's ability to hold action?
44:41 Chamath Palihapitiya? This is what's so crazy about your topic selection. Messi was offered $1.6 billion personally by the Saudis, and you don't want to talk about that because you want to talk about a whole organization playing an antiquated sport that itself generates $1.6 billion.
44:58 Jason Calacanis? Welcome to being the moderator.
45:01 David Friedberg? What's your point?
45:04 Chamath Palihapitiya? I don't care about golf. I don't care.
45:06 Jason Calacanis? The reason this is so controversial is that they're calling it sports washing, trying to make the reputation of Saudi more palatable in the West by using sports, things people love. The reason this has become controversial is because of the hypocrisy of it. The PGA fought against Liv. And this guy Jay Monahan, who is the CEO of this, he basically evoked the 9/11 families and went on a whole thing about how evil Liv was, only to then secure the bag. And then there's some back chat here about, well, there was a lawsuit between the Liv golfers, you know, who are now banned from playing in the PGA when they signed up and antitrust stuff.
45:50 Jason Calacanis? And so the hypocrisy of the group is what's being pulled into question here.
45:56 David Friedberg? Chamath, this is why it's important.
45:58 David Sacks? The players who took the money were ostracized.
46:02 David Friedberg? As supporting an evil regime.
46:03 David Sacks? Right. And now, and now it's clear, and now it's clear that they were smart and Tiger should have taken the money. And actually, the guy who said as much at the time was, was Trump. You know, he, you know, he nailed it. It's like one of these idiots.
46:21 David Friedberg? Once again, he's.
46:22 David Sacks? He basically said that take the money from Liv because eventually Liv and PGA are going to merge. And then the guys who stuck with PGA are going to get nothing and they're going to feel like idiots. He was totally right.
46:34 David Friedberg? Come on, Chamath, you don't think that that's insane? I mean, come on, it's pretty amazing.
46:37 Chamath Palihapitiya? Tell me when you get to Messi.
46:39 David Friedberg? And the fact that these guys were proclaiming that if you're going to go join this tour, you're joining, you know, you're lining up.
46:45 Chamath Palihapitiya? I don't understand whether, I don't understand whether you're naive or dumb. This is like about money. It's always about money. Professional sports has always been about money. What, what, what are we, what are we talking about? Money, money, money, money, money. There's your answer. Money drove the answer. Money drove the split. Money drove the deals. Now money drove the merger. I don't understand. Can we talk about Messi, please? It's so much more interesting.
47:06 David Friedberg? Okay, go talk about Messi, Chamath.
47:08 Chamath Palihapitiya? I mean, the Messi thing is so incredible because Cristiano Ronaldo went to a team in Saudi to play in the August of his career, the last two or three years. And this has been a thing that started with Pelé in the seventies. Pelé came to the New York Cosmos and played. Beckham famously did it as well, came to the L.A. Galaxy. But Beckham did this one interesting thing, which is he said, okay, I'm gonna come to play in the MLS on one condition, really, which is I'll take a huge pay cut and all of this stuff, but I want an option to buy an expansion team for 25 million bucks. Fast forward, he ended up buying Inter Miami. That team is now worth 585 million dollars. So Messi is 36 years old.
47:52 Chamath Palihapitiya? He's about to enter the August of his career. He's won everything. He's done everything possible. He is so incredible. I mean, I love him. I love him. He gets offered 400 million dollars a year for four years to go play in Saudi Arabia, a 1.6 billion dollar deal. And, you know, there's no income tax here. So that's like 1.6 billion dollars right in his pocket. Except the deal that he did, which was for a lot less upfront, is really interesting. He basically said, I'll come to the United States and play in Inter Miami for the Miami Football Club. But I am, you know, basically, I'm not sure he said this, so I'm using my own words.
48:36 Chamath Palihapitiya? I'm the greatest player in the world. Every time I do something magical on the field, I'm creating content that will sell tickets and create brand awareness and move the interest level of soccer in the United States. I'm a content creator, so I want a piece of this content. And so Apple, who signed a 2.5 billion dollar, 10-year license for the MLS, said, you're right. You're probably gonna sell more subscriptions for me. I'll give you a piece of the rev share.
49:04 Chamath Palihapitiya? And then Adidas said, you know what? You're right. You're probably going to sell more shoes for me. I'll give you a piece of those shoes. So in one fell swoop, I think what's amazing is Messi is not an athlete in this deal. I think going back to a theme that we've talked about a lot is he is this ultimate penultimate, whatever. He's an elite content creator.
49:26 Jason Calacanis? He's the equity.
49:27 Chamath Palihapitiya? Who is now creating incredible, who will come to the United States to create this incredible content that will move viewership, move merchandise, and he's going to monetize that. So it's effectively like becoming the Jordan Brand, getting a piece of Netflix all in one.
49:44 Jason Calacanis? He has the equity in those businesses, basically. Yeah, this is a subtle point Shemant's making. In the deal, you have the person who's responsible for distribution. So this would be the same as like the NBA on ABC, ESPN, or TNT. And TNT or ESPN saying, you know what? You're so important LeBron James to play in this or Steph Curry. We're going to give you a piece of the subscriptions to ESPN. So Apple is giving him rev share on their Apple TV League Pass for MLS. That's nuts. Like, and this is, I think it goes back to the live deal with PGA, which is people are looking at these sports leagues and saying, let's get creative.
50:22 Chamath Palihapitiya? It goes back to a different one. The NBA just signed a new collective bargaining agreement that they're going to ratify. I always thought that the real thing that the NBA Players Association should be asking for.
50:33 Jason Calacanis? Equity.
50:34 Chamath Palihapitiya? Was equity.
50:35 Jason Calacanis? Yeah.
50:35 Chamath Palihapitiya? And that equity could be phantom equity in the teams because it's clear that in the absence of the players, there's no viewership and there's no appreciation in the value of those franchises. And so the idea that LeBron, you know, Steph, Dre, KD, don't own a huge piece of the underlying equity gains that they're creating in the period in which their players is pretty crazy. Now, the ownership, their perspective is while we translate that in terms of rev share, but it's really not true. Because if you look at the
51:08 Jason Calacanis? CAGR, the IRR of the franchise values versus the CAGR-ing of the salaries, they're not equivalent.
51:14 David Friedberg? Yeah.
51:14 Jason Calacanis? So I just think it has huge implications to all the professional sports leagues because these big stars should be asking their agents and their managers, how do I do a deal like Messi? I am the ultimate content creator in my league.
51:28 David Friedberg? The dynamics are changing. It will, it will no longer be an employee capital labor situation, but capital is merging with labor.
51:36 Jason Calacanis? Bravo.
51:37 David Friedberg? And labor, labor is basically becoming the equity in the equation and they are getting a piece of the business.
51:42 Jason Calacanis? Just like Silicon Valley.
51:44 David Friedberg? And by the way, the reason we see it happening so much is because of the social media age and it's really incredible.
51:49 Jason Calacanis? It's, but at one point in that.
51:51 David Friedberg? Guys, J K, I know you have more to say. We all have more to say. I just want to highlight, I need to go. I have to go to a kindergarten graduation.
51:57 Jason Calacanis? Congratulations. Congrats.
51:59 David Friedberg? I'll close the show for you. I love you guys. I'll see you later. Adios.
52:02 Jason Calacanis? Love you, Peter. Congrats to your kid.
52:03 David Friedberg? Thank you, guys. Bye.
52:04 Jason Calacanis? But what's really interesting, Chamath, to your point about the CBA, is they're going to make these huge salaries. They're not going to give them the equity as part of their five year deal. They make the money. They then have the ability to invest in a team. So you could be LeBron and you could be investing in the Knicks, maybe, if somebody wanted to sell a percentage of it. You can invest in any NBA team, any sports betting team, any sports betting.
52:30 Chamath Palihapitiya? I actually think there's a simpler way to do this, which is, it's, I think it's fair to say that when you join a team, it's like joining a company.
52:37 Jason Calacanis? Yeah.
52:37 Chamath Palihapitiya? And you can create shadow equity. And that shadow equity says you came in at this point, right? You left at this point. Here was the delta of the value.
52:46 Jason Calacanis? Yep.
52:47 Chamath Palihapitiya? And I think a good agent should be negotiating on behalf of a player. Most players will not get that much, a few basis points of that value.
52:54 Jason Calacanis? Yeah.
52:54 Chamath Palihapitiya? But the idea that a LeBron James can go to a Miami and double the franchise value, double.
52:59 Jason Calacanis? Yeah.
53:00 Chamath Palihapitiya? Right? From, you know, one to.
53:02 Jason Calacanis? Or staff.
53:03 Chamath Palihapitiya? Or Steph, Steph, Steph's a better, okay, great. Steph comes in at 480 million and is now 5.3 billion. So that's a 10 X-ing plus of value. You know, is Steph responsible for 10 or 15%? Should a billion dollars of that go to Steph, Dray and Klay? I think you can make a great claim that it could.
53:20 Jason Calacanis? Yeah, absolutely. They put him on the map. So, yeah.
53:22 Chamath Palihapitiya? It would be, and it would be pretty easy to do. And what this might do is keep people on the same team longer, which is what fans want. They don't want people moving around. That's a great point. And private companies like Cargill or Coke Industries, they have these shadow equity programs that they've had for years, for decades that they've run on behalf of their employees. So we know how to run
53:45 Chamath Palihapitiya? phantom equity programs in private businesses. And I just think the leadership of the NBA Players Association, the NFL Players Association is right now still lacking the sophistication to understand this well enough to then propose when the next time it is to negotiate this kind of a deal. But when you see things like this messy deal, I think it's a game changer.
54:10 Jason Calacanis? It is a game changer. And I think for sports, I don't know if you saw Adam Silver gave, you know, a little press conference with the finals and everything. And he was talking about the Jay Morant situation with the guns. It's just a lot of like topics coming up. But one of the topics that was probably underappreciated was he was talking about the bundle, the cable bundles going away. And that people can't watch like the TNT NBA on TNT, whatever that is with, you know, Charles Barkley, et cetera. And he wants that to be available for free. So he's going to challenge people in the new TV deal. If you want to have the NBA, you have to have it available to everybody because the number of people who can see NBA games has been going down.
54:49 Chamath Palihapitiya? I have a question for you. Do you think more people, do you think more people would pay for a subscription to watch the Knicks games? Wherever they happen to be all over the world or a subscription to watch Steph Curry, no matter what team he plays on?
55:01 Jason Calacanis? The old generations are loyal to the teams. The new generation is loyal to players. So it's a generational.
55:06 Chamath Palihapitiya? Numerical question. Which one's great?
55:07 Jason Calacanis? It's probably a jump ball right now, but it will eventually be, they'll follow the players. Because this new generation follows players like our kids like to follow LeBron from team to team.
55:18 Chamath Palihapitiya? I think you could probably sell a few hundred thousand subscriptions to the Knicks. And I think you'd sell mid millions for Steph.
55:25 Jason Calacanis? What's gonna happen now is I think they're going to, they just want this to be ad-based and to directly subscribe. So I directly subscribe to the NBA. I get every game for $200 a year with no ads.
55:35 Chamath Palihapitiya? You know what, you know what we should do? I actually have, I have a great idea. What we should do is, we should, what Liv did to the PGA, we should do to the NBA. Let's get together 20 billion dollars. Let's start a competitive NBA league where we give the players, no, I'm serious, a structured phantom equity plan. Pay these guys 100 million bucks a year, get all the big guys to come, everybody else will come. And just blow the whole thing wide open. By the way, that's the blueprint now. If you want to really compete with the, with the NFL or the NBA or the NHL, this is what you should do. Put together 20 or 30 billion, which is not that much money. And go for it.
56:10 Jason Calacanis? You only need to get a couple of stars to, to blow it up.
56:12 Chamath Palihapitiya? And if you give stars the equity in the league, they'll convince all the other players to come.
56:16 Jason Calacanis? All right, let's give Saks some red meat here. You, Saks, I'll give you a little red meat. You want Tucker on Twitter. Here's your red meat choices as we wrap. You want Tucker on Twitter. You want a Russian-controlled dam being destroyed for a major flood? Or do you want Chris Christie joining the race? Which red meat would you like? Which red meat we put in front of crazy hair?
56:39 David Sacks? Well, I mean, what's happening in Ukraine is really the big news this week. I mean, Ukrainian counteroffensive has, well, the Ukrainian counteroffensive has started in earnest. And yes, in conjunction with that, you had the destruction of that major dam. Which, it's not clear who did it. I mean, both sides are pointing the finger at each other. So, and there are reasonable arguments for why either side may have done it. In terms of who benefits, it seems to benefit the Ukrainians more because the destruction of the dam washed out a bunch of Russian defensive fortifications and villages of Russian speakers. On the other hand, the Russians were in control of the dam, so it would have been easier for them to carry it out if they had wanted to.
57:24 David Sacks? We just don't know. But I think, you know, events have now moved beyond that. And we are now probably in the third or fourth day of, of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. Of course, it has not been officially declared, but there is major, major fighting happening now where Ukrainian armored divisions are seeking to
57:42 David Sacks? You know, penetrate Russian defensive lines around Zaporizhzhya. And so the long awaited Ukrainian counter offensive has certainly begun.
57:50 Jason Calacanis? How does the the dam relate to the Nord Stream pipeline? Because these are both situations where people are like, who actually did it? What's their motivation? And let's face it, these are chaotic actors at times. And figuring out who has the motivation to do these things seems like a leveling up kind of game because you can't put it past either party in some cases. But in the case of Nord Stream, people saying, hey, it was the Ukraine. But then there's this argument that the Ukraine's not capable of doing it. Or maybe it was sanctioned by the US or the West and then executed by Ukraine. But where do you wind up with all these?
58:27 David Sacks? So on Nord Stream, we're now on our third cover story. The CIA sourcing their stenographers at the Washington Post have now claimed that it was six Ukrainian dudes in a yacht who blew up Nord Stream.
58:41 David Sacks? No, seriously, if you look at this boat, I'll put a photo of the boat on the screen. It's it's pretty silly. The Ukrainians do not have a navy and they certainly don't have Navy SEALs. I don't believe they have the capability to. By the way, this destruction of Nord Stream, Nord Stream was this huge underwater steel and concrete structure.
59:01 Jason Calacanis? It's not that deep, though, because it's only 150 or 200 feet deep at the lower point.
59:07 David Sacks? It's deep enough and it took a lot of explosives. So they had to know what they were doing. So I
59:10 Jason Calacanis? I dove 120 feet once, so it's
59:13 David Sacks? But the point is that when when Nord Stream was first destroyed, the media rushed out to say, well, the Russians did it, even though the Russians had no motive to do it. It was their own. It's their pipeline. They could just turn it off if they wanted to. But this is what we hear is that every time something destructive happens, it's the Russians did it. Why would they attack themselves? Because they're so crazy. We heard this with Nord Stream. When Belgorod, which is a Russian district just across the border from Ukraine, was attacked. It was claimed that the Russians did it. These were Russian insurgents. Now, that's pretty silly. It was Ukrainians dressed in Russian uniforms. And just recently, when there were drone attacks on Moscow, we were also told that, oh, it wasn't Ukrainians who did it. It was Russian dissidents or something, which again, makes no sense. So,
59:56 David Sacks? this is not to say that the Russians didn't blow up that dam. It's just to say that whenever the story is rushed out, that the Russians did something highly destructive, you have to, we need to see some evidence here, and we just don't know.
1:00:09 Jason Calacanis? It's just hard to know. The fog of war is thick. All right. What did you think of Tucker's first show?
1:00:17 David Sacks? Incredible.
1:00:18 Jason Calacanis? And he's getting sued, but he got, the tweet got at least like 90 million views, which means the video probably got 10% of that or something. So probably 10 million views.
1:00:26 David Sacks? I think the video yesterday was at 17 million views or something like that. So I'm sure it's more today. So no, he's getting huge distribution through Twitter. Arguably, it's more distribution. It's almost certainly more distribution than he got through Fox.
1:00:38 Jason Calacanis? Fox was 3 million, right? Yeah, that's how many viewers he gets on Fox?
1:00:41 David Sacks? Yeah, well, Fox is half of that now because they've, they've attracted so much viewership after Tucker left. But, look, the only thing that I think Tucker got through Fox was access to frankly, a viewership base that's not very online. There are a lot of old people who watch Fox who just aren't on social media. That's it, though. Everybody else can see it on Twitter, and he's getting more distribution on Twitter.
1:01:03 Jason Calacanis? Super distribution is the way to go. He's gonna get 25 million people. And of course, monetizing it is the hard part because Fox's subscription revenue and everything else is advertising.
1:01:16 David Sacks? Yeah, but apparently he's creating a list. You know, he advertised the website tuckercarlson.com at the end of his video, and you can go there and sign up for...
1:01:25 Jason Calacanis? You can subscribe direct and get it on his website.
1:01:27 David Sacks? Well, I don't think he's monetizing it yet, but you can sign up for alerts and so forth. So he's clearly creating a list of some kind.
1:01:33 Jason Calacanis? Oh, that's probably because he, yeah, with his contract, he's still getting paid. And so he's like, Daily Wire is the model. I mean, they, they have got well over 100 million in revenue, I understand, and they have a massive subscription business. So there's a clear path there. All right. Hey, listen, for the world's greatest moderator... Living in the Bay Area, David Friedberg and the dictator himself, Chama P. Apatia, and the architect hosting any number of fundraisers for any number of politicians, David Sacks, the Rain Man. I am the world's greatest moderator, taking a week off. We'll see you next week. Oh, and enjoy some Q and A here from the Live Angels Summit. Hundred people in Napa. Thanks for coming, besties. I appreciate you.
1:02:16 Chamath Palihapitiya? Love you, boys.
1:02:17 Jason Calacanis? Supporting the event. Love you, besties. See you next time. Bye bye.
1:02:19 Chamath Palihapitiya? Bye bye.
1:02:20 Jason Calacanis? All right. Welcome to a baptism.
1:02:25 Jason Calacanis? John the Baptist. Are you ready to accept Christ, Friedberg, into your soul?
1:02:31 David Sacks? I honestly have no idea what I'm doing here. I've
1:02:36 David Sacks? I have no idea who these people are, or what this is, or why you're all wearing white. I mean, seriously, I'm sure you're very nice people, but I have no idea what this is.
1:02:48 Jason Calacanis? Have you seen the Wicker Man?
1:02:49 David Sacks? Jake How is like, we're taping an episode in Napa, and I'm like, what? On a, you know, off day. What was this?
1:02:55 Jason Calacanis? Monday.
1:02:56 David Sacks? Today's Monday. It's Monday.
1:02:57 Jason Calacanis? Are you okay, buddy?
1:02:58 David Sacks? Yeah.
1:02:59 Jason Calacanis? You low blood sugar?
1:03:00 David Sacks? Yeah, actually, I do. Bring us like a cheese plate or something. Can we get a cheese plate?
1:03:04 David Friedberg? Cheese plate and guacamole and chips?
1:03:08 David Sacks? Please. But honestly, like, I didn't sign up for this. I thought we
1:03:13 David Sacks? I thought we disagreed to a podcast, and somehow we've been roped into doing some dog and pony show for Jake How's LPs.
1:03:21 Jason Calacanis? By the way.
1:03:22 David Sacks? Is that true, or what?
1:03:23 Jason Calacanis? These are a bunch of your LPs as well. You just have never met them.
1:03:29 Jason Calacanis? Literally. Okay, I'll drink it. Yes, yes, sir. Literally, somebody's like, Jake How, I'm with this incredible endowment. We're incredibly successful. I'm like, oh, that's great. Yes, you heard I'm raising a fund. They're like, no, no, no, no, no. Um, we heard Sacks is gonna be here. I'm like, yeah, you wanna meet him and invest in his fund? Oh, no, we've invested in all his funds. We just never met him.
1:03:48 Jason Calacanis? And I said, wow, that's one way to do it. That's how successful Sacks is.
1:03:51 David Sacks? That's pretty funny.
1:03:52 Chamath Palihapitiya? Two things they've never seen: Sacks and a distribution.
1:03:57 Jason Calacanis? We're off to a hot start.
1:04:00 Chamath Palihapitiya? Great fucking decision whoever you are. You're a real fucking genius back there.
1:04:05 David Sacks? Well, except for the fund we already paid back.
1:04:11 Jason Calacanis? Oh my god, I lost control of it in the first 90 seconds. Why should tonight be any different?
1:04:17 David Sacks? Except for the five-year-old fund that's already fully returned.
1:04:20 Chamath Palihapitiya? Okay, well, all right. Whoa, easy.
1:04:22 Jason Calacanis? So, uh, welcome to the Angel Summit. Uh, these are my besties. We do a podcast called All In. We thought we'd do it live. This is the fourth time we've ever appeared on stage together. The first two times were at Friedberg's LP conference in the Presidio, yeah?
1:04:39 David Sacks? I resonated that one too.
1:04:42 Jason Calacanis? We know you are.
1:04:43 David Friedberg? Zach's first time coming out to see humans since COVID. He came out in his mask, he took his gloves off. It was very uncomfortable for him, but he eased into a seat.
1:04:52 Jason Calacanis? And then, of course, we did the All In Summit, uh, last year in Miami. And, uh, this is the fourth time, so it's great to be out here. We have a couple of news items on the docket we could start with, or we can go right to Q and A with these many audience members who have a lot of questions. What would you gentlemen like to do?
1:05:09 David Friedberg? Chamath has a few words he'd like to say, go ahead.
1:05:11 Chamath Palihapitiya? Whatever you guys want to do.
1:05:13 Jason Calacanis? Chamath is drunk, by the way.
1:05:14 David Friedberg? He's drunk.
1:05:15 Jason Calacanis? He texted us. You can see that grin on his face. That's the Chamath grin he gives when he decided, like X Capital.
1:05:23 David Friedberg? It's scheming.
1:05:24 Jason Calacanis? That he would not have LPs and he would just invest his own money. He does not care. So it's, the gloves are off. Let's do Q and A. Jay Levy says, Sax, what's the path for DeSantis to win the nomination? Um, and get the base of Trump? Oh, red meat.
1:05:40 David Friedberg? Oh, good.
1:05:40 Jason Calacanis? Starting out with red meat. Here we go.
1:05:42 David Sacks? I think the path basically is he has to win Iowa and/or New Hampshire. It's just that simple. But keep in mind that Trump did not win Iowa last, or in 2016, Ted Cruz did. Iowa tends to be more religious. I think DeSantis is trying to outflank Trump on the right, actually, on certain issues. And so he's on the ground there campaigning. From what I understand, he's generating a lot of interest and enthusiasm. And he's gonna keep plugging away at it. I think he's gonna out-hustle Trump. I'm not saying he's gonna win, but I think he is gonna work harder. And the path would be that over the next, what is it, like nine months, that Trump's style and message, which is admittedly much more
1:06:27 David Sacks? entertaining than DeSantis, but kind of fatiguing, whether that kind of gets old, and DeSantis' more like disciplined messaging, people just kind of wake up and say, you know what, like, I don't really want to go back to the chaos of the whole Trump show. This seems like better to me. So that's basically what I think has to happen, is Trump fatigue has to set in, and people realize that there's a different way.
1:06:53 Jason Calacanis? Was that CNN Town Hall a sign that some group of people find him incredibly entertaining, and the media themselves want him back because it's great for ratings, ala Mencken on session? Or is it a sign that, like, my god, that's so fucking exhausting, like you're saying, Sacks? What do you think?
1:07:11 David Sacks? I think that the base liked the Town Hall because it was Trump walking into the lion's den, standing up to the mainstream media, which is what they like. But I don't think it did anything to help him in the general, because I think that viewers who don't like Trump or aren't entertained by Trump, I mean, there's nothing there to really grab on to, I don't think. So, but, but look, I think your point about who does the media want to get the Republican nomination? Definitely Trump, because he's good for ratings.
1:07:41 Jason Calacanis? I mean, it really is that simple.
1:07:43 David Sacks? And they think they can beat him. So, right now, the Biden people, the Trump people, and the media all want Trump over DeSantis. And that is why, like, DeSantis is getting just bashed by everybody right now, is because...
1:07:58 David Sacks? You know, everyone's kind of aligned on this, but the minute that Trump gets the nomination, it's all gonna turn. The media all of a sudden is gonna turn on Trump, and then we're gonna see what the real campaign's gonna be about.
1:08:08 Jason Calacanis? DeSantis is in show business, as they said on Secession. Was that the quote? He's show business? He's box office? Box office. He's not box, yeah. DeSantis is in box office. He's somebody who actually can execute running.
1:08:18 David Sacks? Right, right. But also, that's why he'd be a good move for Republicans, I think, is because he doesn't give the Democrats as much to work with.
1:08:25 Jason Calacanis? Yeah.
1:08:26 David Sacks? Trump's entertaining, but he gives his enemies so much to work with.
1:08:29 Jason Calacanis? All right, another question from the back. Go ahead, stand up. Tell us your name.
1:08:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, Sal Daher from Boston. And the question is much less exciting. Regarding, sort of, you know, the problem of bank runs and bank insurance by the Fed and bailing out, you know, average people bailing out wealthy people. I've heard a lot of solutions about this. I've been so careers in banking for a while. The idea of having senior management and the board have direct liability if the feds have to step in to rescue the bank. Do you think that that could be a step in the right direction in preventing banks from
1:09:15 Speaker 04 taking risks they really shouldn't have taken? I mean, the 2008 disaster, the subprime crisis could have been addressed with this. I think this crisis with SVB could have been addressed with management just having a lot more to lose.
1:09:27 David Sacks? Okay, so let me just first take issue with the terminology of bailout. I know that's what everyone calls it. A bailout, in my mind, is when the shareholders or the bondholders of the bank get bailed out by taxpayers. That happened in 2008. It did not happen here. Here, the question was whether depositors get made whole or not. I personally don't consider that a bailout. I understand that there are people who do, but it is a slightly different issue. As to the bank management, you know, you're talking about like a strict liability standard here that...
1:10:00 David Sacks? Basically, you're talking about piercing the corporate veil and making the bank executives and their directors liable for mismanagement of the bank. And that is
1:10:11 David Friedberg? That's a pretty high bar.
1:10:11 David Sacks? That's a really high bar. And the problem with it is that I would never serve on the board of a bank. I mean, I probably wouldn't anyway. But if you told me that I could be liable
1:10:21 David Friedberg? Piercing the veil is really dangerous.
1:10:24 David Sacks? Right. We have a thing called the business judgment rule, you know, in Delaware where if directors and officers of the company perform their job in a good faith way, making the best decisions they can, and it goes wrong, they're not typically liable for that. Maybe the corporation's liable, but they're not personally liable.
1:10:43 David Friedberg? Look, if you did that, the managers wouldn't invest the cash in anything because they wouldn't want to take any risk of loss. And in order to operate the business, which has a bunch of people working there and a bunch of banks that they got to operate, they're going to charge you a fee to hold your money for you. And so what happens is interest rates turn negative and you basically have to pay someone to hold your money for you. And that's what's a little bit messed up about the way the banking system works today is you're effectively giving a money manager the right to invest your money for you. They take your money, they pay you a low interest rate, and they go invest it in high interest rate stuff by taking on risk with your capital. And ultimately, they can take losses on that. And if you wanted to make them liable for those losses, they're not going to take that risk. And the bank is going to have to change its business model from being an arbitrage business
1:11:28 David Friedberg? to being a service fee business. And they're going to have to figure out other ways to charge you service fees, including charging you to hold your money in order to make money. And that's what a lot of the banks are now doing. First Republic and others have now proclaimed that they're going to start charging a lot more service fees to hold your money, and they're going to start taking a lot less risk. So we're already headed in that direction. But that's fundamentally what I think would
1:11:47 Jason Calacanis? Let's take another question from the audience.
1:11:48 Speaker 05 Good evening. I'm Lisa Thong Sutton, Las Vegas, Nevada, GP in the Veteran Fund. As investors, you all invest in entrepreneurs. Theoretically, you support American entrepreneurship. What role, if any, do you think VCs should have in shaping, advocating, supporting conservative economic policy in the country?
1:12:09 Jason Calacanis? Chumoff?
1:12:10 Chamath Palihapitiya? Zero.
1:12:14 Chamath Palihapitiya? I think that you have to know the role that you're doing if you're a venture investor, which is you're buying a deep out of the money option. And I think that you want to motivate the people that you are partnering with to take really thoughtful but outsized risks. And so I don't think there's a lot of room for conservatism. I do think that there's room for misallocation of capital, and I think that there's people that can help guide that. But the reality is that when you start a company, it's 95% likely to fail. And the venture investor is signing up for a 70% or 80% probability that they lose capital,
1:12:59 Chamath Palihapitiya? maybe a 10% or 15% or 20% chance that they get their money back, and then the small 5% chance that it becomes reasonable. So in that lens, I don't think that's where conservative economic policies really should play a role. I think you just kind of got to go for it, and if it's going to win, it's going to win big, and if it doesn't, you lose one extra money. I think like where you want conservative economic and rational thinking is when you go to the extreme other end, which is just like the large-scale decisions that affect the economic vibrancy of the country in which you live. And there, on the margins, you probably want to be more rational than irrational.
1:13:42 Chamath Palihapitiya? But as a venture investor, I think you want to be irrational. But I also think you have to be very judgmental. And the reality is that most companies aren't going to work, and most people... This may seem controversial. Most people actually, when push comes to shove, are a little afraid of the decisions they need to make to be truly successful.
1:14:05 Chamath Palihapitiya? They're not willing to fire the people that they need to fire. They're not willing to be extreme in the product they want to build. They're not willing to price it. They're not willing to go to market in an extreme way. And it tends to be that these companies fail because of that.
1:14:17 Jason Calacanis? A lack of courage, a lack of conviction.
1:14:19 Chamath Palihapitiya? I don't want to say it's a lack of courage or conviction because that's a very heightened word. I just think that when push comes to shove, most people implode with the pressure of making a very, very hard decision.
1:14:29 Jason Calacanis? Interesting. All right.
1:14:31 Chamath Palihapitiya? In my experience, yours could be different.
1:14:32 Jason Calacanis? No, I mean, I agree with you largely. When a startup does fail, if the experienced people around it are watching and can't get through to the founder or the founding team, it's typically they are blocking their own success. They're unwilling to fire their co-founder, their CTO, as the example you're alluding to perhaps, or raise the price of the software and lose some customers, or to drive people to work harder because you've got a competitor in the space. And that's why you see extreme people win in our pursuit. And I think there's been just a great fallacy that's gone on, that you can have live-work balance or life-work balance. And you could have this nirvana where you have it all. The fact is, the great companies are made by people who make great sacrifices, period, full stop.
1:15:15 Jason Calacanis? And if you're not willing to make the great sacrifice, you're not going to have great outcomes.
1:15:18 Speaker 06 Hi, David Samuel. Earlier today, Jason, you had kind of a doomsayer AI panelist. And my question is, you guys have been thrust into the public spotlight. And we look at deep fakes in the next year or two. As you talk about tweeting on Friday versus Wednesday, how do you think about somebody having each of you saying things that you did not say? And like, how might we know whether Chamath said that or it was a deep fake saying it?
1:15:46 David Sacks? I already have that problem.
1:15:48 Jason Calacanis? Yeah.
1:15:49 David Sacks? There was an article in Business Insider last week where somebody was saying, "I had a phone call I never had."
1:15:54 Speaker 06 So how do we solve this, especially for you as public folks?
1:15:57 Jason Calacanis? Well, two things. Two things. One, I don't think people can say more outlandish and damaging things in AI than we say ourselves on this podcast at times. But number two, you know, as we've discussed many times on this podcast, we have rebooted our trust. In institutions, what we read, what we see, and I think people are now assuming they're being manipulated, assuming something might be fake news or doctored. And I think it's like, people are building up a much higher resiliency to bullshit, lies, manipulation. And if I were to ask 100 people, what is the bias of CNN, New York Times, Fox, MSNBC,
1:16:39 Jason Calacanis? NPR, 90 out of 100 Americans could describe it almost exactly. People are not dumb. This is another fallacy I think we have in this country, is that people are dumb and they're gonna get suckered. People are kind of figuring it out. And we've seen deep fakes for what, 5 years, 10 years now? And they're like, "Yeah, you know, Luke Skywalker didn't look really good in The Mandalorian, but there's a kid who redid it, and now Dolly 2 is doing it." I think we're kind of inoculating ourselves to. What do you think, Friedberg? Deep fakes and truth.
1:17:09 David Friedberg? When the Gutenberg press was invented, a bunch of fake shit was printed and people believed it. I don't think the current iteration with deep fakes is very different from any form of mass media being used to tell people on truth.
1:17:27 Jason Calacanis? It's called the Crusades.
1:17:28 David Friedberg? What's that?
1:17:29 Jason Calacanis? Called the Crusades.
1:17:30 David Friedberg? Crusades, yeah. No, I mean, but look, I mean...
1:17:33 Jason Calacanis? You're 100% right.
1:17:34 David Friedberg? But I don't want to speak about religion negatively in that way. It is one of many institutions of power that leverage mass media historically to get people to believe things, to do things, and to ultimately be able to tax people and get them to provide capital and labor in the interest of those who are in power. And the system of deep faking is one of a long string of using the current toolkit to take mass media and follow that same track. So it will be dealt with in the same way that things have been dealt with, that have been fake news in the past, which is that there will be an opposing voice, and there will be counterarguments, and there will be debates, and it will be rancorous,
1:18:18 David Friedberg? and it will be noisy, and it will be hard to discern, and alternatives will emerge, and tools that identify deep fakes will emerge. It will be the same ongoing battle and seeking of the truth that humanity has tried to do since the dawn of mass media, you know.
1:18:34 Jason Calacanis? Yesterday's conspiracy theories are like tomorrow's Pulitzer prizes, I always say. Like, if you look at Shinon O'Connor ripping up the Pope's picture on Saturday Night Live.
1:18:41 David Friedberg? Right.
1:18:42 Jason Calacanis? In protest and saying like, this is the true enemy. They're molesting children and then the Boston Globe and the movie Spotlight is about them decades later, uh, winning a Pulitzer for uncovering what anybody who's in the room who's Catholic in the seventies and eighties knew or had heard was going on. And so, you know, maybe the timeframe is shortening between when we're being lied to and when we figure it out.
1:19:06 David Friedberg? I actually think it's interesting and good because it forces us to find ways to find the truth more effectively. And, um, you know, it kind of, without the antagonism, I think it's, you know, it's, it's absent, what is the truth? You, you don't, you don't force that debate, you don't force that question. And this will start to reveal ways that we can kind of find things that are actual evidentiary things versus things that someone told me with either historically anecdote or innuendo, or I'm a person in power, or I'm an authority, or I'm an expert. And nowadays it's like, I'm a piece of media, you should believe me. Or here, I'm an image of a person. And that's not going to be the case anymore.
1:19:43 Speaker 07 Hi, I'm Jeff, a full-time corporate VC and part-time angel. Um, my question's about AI and higher education. And it's actually some covert parenting advice, so you can decide who's that's relevant for.
1:19:56 Speaker 07 My son just finished his freshman year of college and I'm questioning what the future is for him in higher education, given all the change that AI is going to
1:20:06 Speaker 07 gonna have on, on every career and every profession. And I'm wondering what advice you'd give to, to your child or, or someone who's in college right now for what, what's an area of study that won't, maybe won't be disrupted by, by AI or, or an area that, um, AI, you'll get leverage from your education, um, through AI?
1:20:27 Chamath Palihapitiya? I think the reality is that most of the existing jobs that we have in the United States are going to go to lower cost locations that have that tool chain to accelerate their capability.
1:20:44 Chamath Palihapitiya? So we're gonna have to reinvent the workforce and the things that we do over the next 30 or 40 years to stay relevant. That's probably like, I think that should just be the operating principle. If you think about it, we used to run great call centers. Okay, those call centers were outsourced to the Philippines and India. But in the next, you know, five or 10 years, you'll have this flawless, unaccented English, or even more eerily, perfectly accented English for the zip code of the person that's calling in so that it sounds like they're talking to somebody that's literally their neighbor. That's like, just makes so much sense, right? So it's like, all this stuff is gonna happen, where like, all these classes of jobs are gonna go away.
1:21:29 Chamath Palihapitiya? I saw this article where a lawyer, two lawyers, used ChatGPT to submit a legal brief. The problem was that it cited cases that didn't exist, and now they're gonna be disbarred. So this is like, serious business, right? Like, you can't do that. Like, that's like, real legal malfeasance.
1:21:49 David Friedberg? So what are your kids studying in college?
1:21:53 Chamath Palihapitiya? You know, if I had to choose something for my kids, I would probably, I would probably tell them to do something mathematical or biological. The reason I would point them to math is that I think that it's irrefutable. There's this great clip between Ricky Gervais and Stephen Colbert. You guys should go and Google this. But it's a clip where he's on the Colbert Show, and Colbert is a deeply devout Catholic, and he's offended by the fact that Ricky Gervais doesn't believe in God. And he asks him, "Why don't you believe in God?" And Ricky Gervais says, "Look, if we wiped out all the books in the world, in a thousand years, everything that's scientific and mathematical would be reestablished. But everything that is religious or theoretically not, you know,
1:22:37 Chamath Palihapitiya? mythical, if you wanna say, would look very, very different."
1:22:43 Chamath Palihapitiya? That's why I don't believe in God. I'm not trying to question that, but it's a way of answering this question, which is I would try to point my children to the body of knowledge that's largely irrefutable, which is biological and mathematical versus belief oriented, because I think these tools will change one's beliefs.
1:23:01 Jason Calacanis? I've been thinking about this a lot, too. I think teaching them to be entrepreneurial, resilient, worldly, ability to communicate, ability to lead other people in teams, that stuff's not going to go away, communication skill, etc. And I'm encouraging everybody who I work with to just use ChatGPT-4 and Bard every day for every single thing that they do. My base thesis right now is that the job freezes, the hiring freezes at all these companies is indefinite. I'm assuming it's indefinite because the amount of work it takes to write a job requisition is more work in some cases than actually automating
1:23:42 Jason Calacanis? with AI already, the job function. And so I think 20-person companies might, you know, double in size in the next two or three years, but still have 20 people. This is going to be a big challenge for society. And if that does come to pass, there's just going to be large swaths of people who are not going to be able to get job interviews for anything other than service jobs. You know, we need a lot more plumbers, electricians, waiters, etc. Those probably jobs won't go away, especially if we don't let people immigrate. So I am super enthusiastic about that efficiency, but I think it also means you have to be entrepreneurial, because if you can't get a job and you can't get mentored, you better create your own opportunity. You better create your own company. And that's what I'm seeing.
1:24:27 Jason Calacanis? That's the game on the field right now. Two or three people who don't have job offers from Uber and Airbnb and Google and Facebook are saying, fuck it, let's start a company, because there's nothing else for us to do. And those are highly skilled people right now doing that.
1:24:39 David Sacks? I'll say two quick things about this topic. So one is, I think there's a lot of AI fear porn out there right now. And I just think that like all these doomer scenarios are, they're not going to play out overnight. I mean, this is going to take a while.
1:24:54 David Sacks? Second, if you think about like job elimination, it's gonna be some super specialized jobs. So for example, I wouldn't want to be a radiologist right now, but doctors will be fine. So I think if you're thinking about like going into a job category that's super specialized and clearly in the way of AI, then that probably is not a good idea. But most general skills like you're talking about and most job categories are gonna be fine. There's just gonna be some specialities within them that may get dislocated. Like I wouldn't want to be a truck driver either, you know, because of self-driving.
1:25:37 David Sacks? But transportation companies are still gonna exist. So I think you just wanna be careful about super specialization, I think. But building general skills is always really good. That really should be the point of college.
1:25:48 Jason Calacanis? Where would you put lawyers and accountants on that? I'm curious.
1:25:51 David Sacks? They're sufficiently general that I don't think they're gonna be eliminated.
1:25:55 Jason Calacanis? But will they be able to do five times the amount of work? Therefore, we won't need as many?
1:25:59 David Sacks? They may be able to get more done, yeah. I would expect them to be able to get more done.
1:26:03 Jason Calacanis? Yeah.
1:26:03 David Sacks? But I don't necessarily think that means we'll need less of them. I mean, the old story about lawyers is that there was one lawyer in a town had no business. Second lawyer came to town and they were both more busy than they knew what to do with.
1:26:17 Jason Calacanis? Induced litigation?
1:26:19 David Sacks? Yeah, lawyers get 30% more productive. They file 30% more lawsuits and, you know.
1:26:24 Jason Calacanis? We're good.
1:26:24 David Sacks? Yeah.
1:26:25 Jason Calacanis? All right, let's take another question. Here's a great question so far.
1:26:27 Speaker 08 Hey guys, Rick Spencer. I hope Chamath gets to choose the wine this evening for dinner.
1:26:31 Chamath Palihapitiya? I did not get to choose your wine, so I apologize in advance.
1:26:34 Jason Calacanis? What kind of a lot of it's trick here? This is delicious.
1:26:36 Chamath Palihapitiya? This is a 2018 Chateau Conlefong, Brusseau.
1:26:40 Jason Calacanis? I love the bestie. Okay, question.
1:26:43 Speaker 08 So you've talked recently in episodes about the speed of AI, the adoption, and how the winners are still unknown. That was reinforced in the sessions today. A room full of investors. How are you thinking differently about your investment, you know, your strategic investment decisions and your strategy? Are there opportunities to look at venture investing differently? Like venture studios, you know, in the future of AI?
1:27:04 David Friedberg? I had this conversation earlier today. I think I started a company in 2006 where we took large data sets.
1:27:13 David Friedberg? And we built predictive models from those data sets. And we use those predictive models to make analytical tools available to a specific vertical, in our case agriculture, farmers. And the models were both deterministic, meaning there was kind of definitions, algorithmic definitions of physical parameters. And there was like all the statistical inference that you get from large data sets. And it made recommendations for farmers. What a lot of people are calling AI today is fundamentally a predictive model on text, on language. I am making a language predictor that gives you a sentence. And it seems so profound because it is how we all interact with computers and interact with one another.
1:27:56 David Friedberg? And as a result, it is kind of viewed as this sea change across all of these industries instantaneously. It's this whole new era. But the fact is that, generally speaking, the digitization of things and the amount of data that's being generated on Earth is going up by some order of magnitude every number of months. And our ability to make predictions and build predictive models that are useful to specific vertical segments is improving every sequential cycle that this is happening across every vertical. And it has continued and it hasn't changed and it's not any different. So there's in this area of genomics and bioinformatics, there is an absolute sea change happening in human health, in synthetic biology, in our ability to understand and predict
1:28:39 David Friedberg? the biological world and make changes and create new drugs, create new systems for producing molecules, for producing things that humans consume. And it is all buoyed by machine learning applied to large data sets and genomics and other metadata associated with human health and biology. And we're seeing the same thing in other areas, whether it's chemistry, material science, industrial application, consumer markets, and so on. The era of what people are now calling AI is an interface layer of language that's really creating transformational opportunities on how these tools, how these systems, how these models can be utilized and provided to all these different verticals. And allows us to rethink business models, to rethink interaction models,
1:29:22 David Friedberg? and to really change the economics of different businesses and the utility and the productivity of humans because it is about speech, it is about communication, it's about what we fundamentally do as a species. So I would argue that the general Trajectory of machine learning, the general trajectory of data generation, our ability to make predictions, generate value across all these different markets is continuing in the way that it has been continuing for the last 20 years, and it is profound in its own right. And I wouldn't say that there's a massive sea change in that evolution because of large language models. Large language models create another set of opportunities. So I would kind of create a distinction and make sure that the categorization of the investment opportunities in large language models be assessed on its own.
1:30:07 David Friedberg? And everyone's all over the place, as you guys probably heard today. Foundational models are getting disrupted every other week. They're being decreased in size, parameters are being reduced, they're being commoditized. You can run these things on M2 chips. Everything is up in the air right now, and it's friggin nuts. You're gonna invest in a company at a $500 million valuation, and six weeks later it's gonna be worth zero. Because someone open sourced the exact same thing that you can now do for 100K. So that's very difficult and very different than, but there are still like these incredible points of inflection happening across all these other industries with respect to machine learning. And that's where I spend my time. Chamathie, want to add what you're looking at?
1:30:42 Jason Calacanis? I think this is gonna be the big question, yeah.
1:30:44 Chamath Palihapitiya? Six or seven years ago,
1:30:47 Chamath Palihapitiya? there was this Google earnings release where they talked about building their own silicon. I've told this story before, but I pinged those guys and I was basically like, I just want to meet the team that built the TPU.
1:30:59 Chamath Palihapitiya? Long story short, a year later, I put them in business. And, you know, we've been building silicon for this moment for years. It's been really, really hard.
1:31:09 Chamath Palihapitiya? And the reason it's been really, really hard is that Nvidia is just really, really good. CUDA is very, very complete.
1:31:19 Chamath Palihapitiya? And it's just very difficult to justify why one would build,
1:31:25 Chamath Palihapitiya? once you have something that you think is profound, through, you know, implement multiple Sacks to like multiple points of silicon, just doesn't make any sense.
1:31:34 Chamath Palihapitiya? That being said, I still think you need to be at the absolute bottom of the stack and the absolute top of the stack. I think I'm a little too biased for saying the former, which is, I'm hoping that there's vendor diversity and silicon diversity, because I think it's gonna be really important. I don't think we want to have a world where Nvidia runs away with it. So I think there's investment opportunity there, just because I think everybody should want that to happen. And then at the absolute top, Friedberg's right that All these foundational models, I think, are changing so rapidly that the thing that you want to figure out is like, what are you seeding it with to drive learning that's unique? And that's a data problem. So there's an example that I've given.
1:32:16 Chamath Palihapitiya? This was an example given to me by Nikesh Arora. So it's not, I'm not going to take credit for it. He's the CEO of Palo Alto Networks. But he was telling me, you know, when you look at travel, the travel space, all the public travel companies are like $300 billion of public market cap. Expedia, Travelocity, all these companies, but they're pure middlemen. And they sit on top of a data feed that comes from a handful of companies. One of them is Sabre. And so I went in, I looked at Sabre. Sabre is like a $1.3 billion company, a small little company. But they are the ones that go into all the airlines, extract all this gobbledygook data,
1:32:59 Chamath Palihapitiya? normalize it, and allow Expedia, Travelocity, Booking.com to exist. In a world of machine learning, where, and AI, where theoretically you can have conversational languages inside of WhatsApp, or Messenger, or Instagram, you see this beautiful picture, you're like, book me a ticket to that place. Well, Sabre is actually the key value creator there. And all these Expedia examples that are plugins to GPT make no sense. They make no economic sense. Those companies should go to zero. So I've used that as a way, a forcing function for me to try to prove that there's really these two barbells. It's a barbell. Bookends. One is a silicon and one of these sort of like data providers.
1:33:44 Chamath Palihapitiya? That's probably an investable thing that's defensible. Everything in the middle, I think what, what Feebrecht said is true, which is, today it looks like it's worth a couple billion dollars, tomorrow's worth nothing. And so I think you have to be very careful.
1:33:56 David Friedberg? If you listen to, there's an interview that Stephen Wolfram did with Lex Friedman, if you guys listened to it, a few weeks ago.
1:34:03 Chamath Palihapitiya? I had him on my pod a couple of weeks ago, but haven't heard the free.
1:34:05 David Friedberg? Wolfram?
1:34:06 Chamath Palihapitiya? Yeah. He's incredible, yeah.
1:34:08 David Friedberg? He's incredible. If you listen to that interview, I think Wolfram does a great job of describing the difference between inferential models, or statistical models, and computational models.
1:34:17 David Friedberg? Statistical models are where you take large data sets and you build statistical models that infer and predict things in the future or predict things that you ask it to predict from the data set that it's trained on. And then it creates a statistical representation, it has a probability of being right or wrong in every prediction it makes, and it creates a distribution of outputs from the model. And you can train a model from nothing today using a bunch of tools that are open source and generally available and a bunch of great silicon and all this amazing stuff that's now out in the world. But there's a bunch of things that you can't generate data and you can't necessarily train models on, and that requires computational models.
1:34:56 David Friedberg? Models where you actually have to build some system that creates a deterministic outcome. And deterministic means that it doesn't have a distribution of things that could happen, it has one thing, and it calculates it, like 2 plus 4 is 6. There isn't a probability distribution on it being 6. 2 plus 4 is computable. It is calculable. It is 6. The great unlock that I think is ahead of us still, generally speaking with respect to large language models, is the connection back to computational models, is the connection back to structured data where you can make requests and integrate structured data into the output, combined with inferential output, and computational models where you can take
1:35:39 David Friedberg? the inference, you can take the request, and figure out what computational models can I now run in addition to making a prediction about an output. And that's where so much of the value is going to lie, and it's going to require incredible software engineering talent, applied math, statistics, all the stuff that's made data science, generally speaking, so successful over the last two decades is going to continue, and it's going to be this integration between computation and inference, and it's going to be applied in lots of different markets, and it's going to be really powerful, and we're all going to have our minds blown.
1:36:13 Jason Calacanis? Just in terms of the seed stage or super early pre-seed stage, two or three people who are obsessed with this technology, who are playing with it every day, who are keeping up to speed on it, and who understand some customer base, whether it's delighting themselves or delighting some other customer base, I'm willing to take that small bet on, that 100K to 250K bet.
1:36:34 Jason Calacanis? Because in the previous paradigm shifts or platform shifts, cloud computing, apps, and before that desktop computing and the web, you saw people start tinkering with stuff. And whatever their first two ideas were are long forgotten because they figured something else out. And I kind of feel like that's the stage we're in. There were a lot of people who were playing with iPhones in the App Store and, you know, they made a calculator or a flashlight that got built into the operating system as I think Friedberg is specifically pointing out, like you could just be part of the model and your whole business is wiped out. We have one company that's trying to make itineraries for travel. And I looked at what they're building and then, you know, they're figuring out prompts, they're figuring out the interface, they're figuring out what people want. And I did the same searches
1:37:19 Jason Calacanis? on ChatGPT 4 and I was like, it's not that much better, what you're doing, but it's better and your ideas are better. And so I think that they'll win the race and they only have to please, you know, whatever number of users. And this company could wind up being, like I said before, a 20-person company that does 50 million in revenue. And I think that's going to be a very interesting future. And it reminds me of the app economy. There were a small number of apps, things like DistroKid or Instagram, where small teams built things that printed money and had incredibly high margins. So I think that's part of the opportunity here. I do agree with Chamath's point, data is the new oil. Whatever data set you have that you have that's unique is incredibly powerful in terms of defensibility and could
1:38:02 Jason Calacanis? help you to outpace one of the generic models.
1:38:07 David Friedberg? This dude's been waiting.
1:38:08 Jason Calacanis? Okay, dude, who's been waiting?
1:38:09 Speaker 09 All right.
1:38:10 Jason Calacanis? Lightning round.
1:38:11 Speaker 09 Thanks, David, for the mic. My name is Raed Messi, with Transform VC in San Francisco. My question's for you, Chamath.
1:38:18 Chamath Palihapitiya? Finally. Jesus Christ.
1:38:22 Chamath Palihapitiya? What the fuck, these guys in here?
1:38:25 Speaker 09 So on the last one or two episodes, I can't recall, you brought up this whole idea of how do we get non-US-born American patriots to run for president? So as the growth hacking drunken master, what do you recommend? How do we propel this idea? How do we have it pick up steam and not have to wait 25 years or whatever?
1:38:48 Chamath Palihapitiya? It can't happen in the next few years. I do think there's a small probability it could happen in 25 to 30 years, but... Like, the problem is that the people that
1:39:02 David Friedberg? Only J Cal can be president on the stage, by the way.
1:39:04 Chamath Palihapitiya? Yeah, the three of us are foreign born.
1:39:06 Jason Calacanis? That's how fucked up this is. But I'll put you guys in my cabinet. You've all got positions.
1:39:10 Chamath Palihapitiya? I think the how is that you have enough bottoms-up citizen journalism and opinion formation that people can independently decide that on the margin, this is a good idea. Like, look, I'm not interested in running for government, but if David were in charge of something very important, treasury or state, I would have immense confidence. If Friedberg were in charge of something, I would have immense confidence. So, the idea that guys like this
1:39:44 Chamath Palihapitiya? the idea that guys like this, and
1:39:46 David Friedberg? Oh, because I'm born here, so you don't have to say that. Don't worry, you'll get the Department of Sanitation work.
1:39:51 Jason Calacanis? I'm definitely gonna win.
1:39:52 David Friedberg? For sure, I'm gonna win.
1:39:53 David Sacks? Perfect job. Most master general.
1:39:57 Chamath Palihapitiya? I do think it's a little, it's a little crazy that guys like these two get disqualified just because they emigrated when they were like four and six. That's insane. So, I think that if we're in the business of actually deciding that you want the best people for this country on the court so that we keep winning championships, you don't tell Janus, "Oh, you know, you were born in Greece, so ciao ciao, you don't get to play." That's crazy. Put them on the court and let them win. So, I do think it takes 25 or 30 years, though, of us saying this, because it has to be a groundswell of people that say, "I just want to win because I'm seeing all these other countries starting to win more, and I don't think I want that for my children."
1:40:42 Chamath Palihapitiya? I do think it takes a generation. I don't think it happens today.
1:40:45 Jason Calacanis? Alright, guys. In a couple of hours, it will be The Sultan of Science's birthday. And Alan Keating's, and Alan Keating's. And. Keating, that's right. Alan Keating's birthday. So I thought it would only be fitting if a hundred All In super fans took a moment. I'm gonna sing in Italian. And sung "Happy Birthday" to Dave Friedberg. Three, two, one.
1:41:14 Speaker 10 Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Friedberg. Happy birthday to you.
1:41:33 Jason Calacanis? And many more. Alright Sultan of Science. I know your wish was to be a top 10 podcaster. It's come true finally. I'm like, I gotta go into podcasting. Yes. Whoa, I'm big brown, amazing. Thank you, Ashley.
1:41:52 David Sacks? We'll let your winners ride.
1:41:55 Speaker 10 Rain Man David Sack.
1:41:59 Speaker 10 And instead, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, S. I'm the queen of Kinoah. Let your winners ride. Let, let your winners ride.
1:42:12 Speaker 10 Besties are back.
1:42:15 Speaker 10 That's my dog taking a notice in your driveway.
1:42:20 Speaker 10 Oh, man.
1:42:23 Chamath Palihapitiya? We should all just get a room and just have one big, huge orgy because they're all just just like, it's like this like sexual tension, but they just need to release somehow.
1:42:31 Speaker 10 What, you're the bee? What, you're a bee? Where are your feet? Bee? What? That's gonna be good. We need to get merch. Besties are back.
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