SPEAKER_04: Antonio, Elon had a moment of reflection

SPEAKER_08: and he was talking about 2008. He was talking about the imminent collapse,

SPEAKER_11: as he felt it, of SpaceX and Tesla at the same time in December 25th. And he said there were just a handful of people who came out there and put their careers on the line for him. Yourself and Steve Jurvetson specifically mentioned. And Ira. And Ira. And it was a particularly poignant moment for him. He was getting a little choked up about it. Tell us about that bet you made in 2008 and the potentially career-ending bet for you

SPEAKER_14: to bet in an electric car company at that moment. Take us back to that decision.

SPEAKER_17: Yeah. Well, before I do that, I just want to say that I left my wallet backstage because the last time I was with the four of you,

SPEAKER_21: I lost a lot of money.

SPEAKER_17: And I realized that I better leave all the cash somewhere where you can't get it. And you also made me cry.

SPEAKER_24: So I think I might cry again now. Of joy? I mean, no, no. It was more like a humiliation.

SPEAKER_25: We were playing poker.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, we were playing poker. Wait, wait, wait. You pulled a Palmer Luckey? Yeah, you pulled a Palmer Luckey.

SPEAKER_30: No, so if I cry again this time, it will be from a sense of just gratitude for those moments that we got to share. So for us in particular,

SPEAKER_17: because our strategy is so operational, I was there working on supply chain in the factory and on sales in that period, along with my partner, Tim Watkins, and three or four of our supply chain people. And we had a major problem in the supply chain, the cost we had to control. And, you know, Elon was doing the engineering on the very expensive parts. We were doing the, I call it the B parts, the A and B parts. And man, it was brutal. But it was very clear to us that, and remember, it was also the middle of the financial crisis, right? So we had a treasurer portfolio. We had to decide, we did have a lot of capital at the time. These are tiny funds, $120, $3 million funds, where our capital would go, where our people would go. More importantly, where our operating people would go and where I would go. And we decided to focus on Tesla because, first, we really did believe in Elon, when most people didn't. And we saw in him something very special, which I think you probably saw here yesterday, that not only is he a brilliant, brilliant engineer, you know, one in a hundred year kind of engineer, he's a man of deep conviction and deep passion and deep compassion. What he is doing is really trying to bend the arc of humanity for all of us because he really cares. And that came through to us, and we wanted to be on that mission with him. And so we were privileged enough to be there in a moment in time that it mattered. And it was really hard, man. I mean, we had clients. I actually had a client said to me, how do I know this isn't DeLorean? And I said, look, I can tell you for a fact,

SPEAKER_34: we are not selling cocaine out of the back of the factory in the cars. Yeah.

SPEAKER_35: DeLorean being the famous back-to-the-future car.

SPEAKER_24: Exactly.

SPEAKER_36: Where the owner was trafficking cocaine to underwrite the car. Exactly.

SPEAKER_24: I may live in Miami, but even Antonio Garazzo's were not selling cocaine for sure. Sure.

SPEAKER_17: Yeah, but no, it was a crew betting event for us, and it turned out, right, it was the right thing to do.

SPEAKER_34: But yeah, for me, it was, I'm just deeply grateful for these experiences.

SPEAKER_39: I mean, you really doubled down

SPEAKER_40: because you didn't just do Tesla. You also were there in some really critical moments at SpaceX as well.

SPEAKER_17: We were, although I tell you, you know, we doubled down at the time in Tesla. We put more money in Tesla than we were in the financial crisis and then helped lead a convert round there that was really tough for us to do and then put more money in SpaceX. But I tell you, operationally, like in terms of capital stack, I think there were other people around, and SpaceX is also running out of money, and so we put money to SpaceX. Operation, we worked at SpaceX over the years, but it was never as existential in terms of the operations as it was at Tesla. I mean, Tesla was truly, I think, truly existential, and because we were operating guys and I, myself, had been a factory manager, I worked in auto parts, an auto parts factory, I'd run industrial facilities myself, we could kind of uniquely add value there. In the rocket factory, you know, we were just less valuable. But, yeah, both these companies were going down at the same time, and, you know, the amount of stress we were all under was extraordinary. But, you know, looking back on it, it's one of the greatest moments of my career. I mean, this sense of fellowship, you know, one of the, I think the great thing about being in our business, the business we are all in is that we get to back amazing people that are trying to change the world, and in these dark, dark, dark, deep moments, we get to go to war for them. And in those moments, I call them these moments of fellowship where you just care deeply about someone and passionate about the mission, and you get to make a huge difference. Like, these are the highlights of my career. And if you ask my partners, they tell you the same thing. These are the best moments. We've had some together. Three of us have had some together. Actually, we've all had some together here on the stage. We had to fight for something we believed in, and it's a privilege, man, to do it. It's a privilege in that situation. It's a privilege to be there with Elon. It's been a privilege to be there with all of you at different moments in my career, and I'm very grateful for it.

SPEAKER_45: How, do you feel like you come off of a high after having huge successes like that? Like, how do you stay grounded and motivated

SPEAKER_47: to try to find the next one if in the back of your mind there must be a little piece that says it's never going to be as good as this guy or those two things?

SPEAKER_49: I mean, you know, it's an interesting question, Jonathan. I think that there's a couple things in play for us.

SPEAKER_41: One is we keep going because we believe in making the world better. We invest in companies that we believe make a difference with people we respect and we're values aligned with, and that's the ethos of our firm, right? So whether it's large or small, we may never find something that's as important as to how it's SpaceX again,

SPEAKER_17: but we will find more great people and we will help them. Two of our companies here, I mean, we invest in Anderil with Palmer. We have a small investment in Flexport, which should have been one of the biggest mistakes the last 10 years of my career is not putting more money in Flexport. Yeah, I know. We had, we actually, it's kind of a funny story about we had, you know, I'd say kind of a soft handshake on a term sheet at say a price of X and SoftBank came in like two days later and made it 2X and I had too much price memory to keep going and co-lead it. So it was an error. But you have two people on the stage here. They're extraordinary entrepreneurs that are trying to make the world better. Both these companies are really great and making the world much more, particularly now post-COVID and in times of war, making it much safer for all of us. There are people like that out there. There's more of them. They may not be Elon. You know, there's probably one Elon in our generation, but there's lots of great people and I'm very optimistic about what's happening now in the economy. We're seeing incredible, incredible innovation with tremendous entrepreneurs in our pipeline.

SPEAKER_34: So maybe there's another one. I don't know.

SPEAKER_52: Antonio, how do you think about

SPEAKER_53: in the businesses you guys invest in, there can sometimes be a very long capital deployment cycle before you see any real return in terms of business value, whether it's pharma. I know you've done pharma, some of these hardware companies where there's a big build cycle. How much do you need to kind of think about and see a customer and revenue show up before you're willing to say, hey, let's build the big rocket ship to go to the frigging moon and how do you judge and value that business and back a team?

SPEAKER_56: It's a really interesting question. I think it depends on the sector we're in. Yeah.

SPEAKER_41: It depends on

SPEAKER_17: how we, we look at the world share probabilistically and we're looking for companies that we call pro and true where they get bad when the world gets worse. So in the case of pharma or something like SpaceX, we'll think about like what is our, what is our probability tree here, what's our probability lost, probability of 3x, a 5x, a 10x, a 100x and then we'll think about when the capital goes in, what is the actual return on capital? In the talk you guys had with Ryan about what happens to the public markets, the reality is that a business is a machine, you put capital on one side and out the other side comes return, the ROIC, the return of invested capital really matters and if you're kind of a classically trained investor the way I am, we think about that a lot. Yeah. So even though we may be putting a lot of capital in, the question is what's the margin going to be in the back in a company like SpaceX? A lot of capital is going in but we know that if it works and we believe it will work, we're ultimately going to have a company that has tremendous margins even in the industrial sector because of the industry structure it's in. It lives in an oligopoly inside the U.S. and outside the U.S. So it's like in Building Starlink, same thing, capital going in but we know that the margins and the profitability of that business on the back end will be very, very high and so the ROIC will be very good.

SPEAKER_53: Are you backing a lot of deep tech startups like companies, a founder shows up with a PowerPoint and they're like I need 50 million bucks to make our prototype. I mean,

SPEAKER_62: what happens there? It depends on the business. So as an example, you know,

SPEAKER_17: we have passed on things that are, our view, going to have margins that are ultimately competed to a low level and, you know, there are, I don't want to give examples here but there are lots of examples of people that are doing things in, you know, I call it electric aircraft, V-12s, etc. We look at this and say this is going to be a highly competitive market. These are not an end of one. SpaceX is an end of one. If you compare that to someone making an electric vehicle that, say, an electric airplane or electric VTOL, that will not be an end of one. It will be an end of many and an end of many business you're ultimately going to have margin competition that's going to make it that return on capital goes down to basic industrial margins. You know, like it won't be that much better than Boeing's ROIC or Airbus's ROIC because those will be ultimate competitors.

SPEAKER_40: You said it a little too, I think superficially, so let me just double click.

SPEAKER_47: And I think Antonio brings up, I think, one of the most important principles of investing that is so utterly poorly understood, which is ROIC, ROIC,

SPEAKER_45: return on invested capital. Most people don't even know what it means, how to calculate it, no pat over your weighted average cost of capital. These are enormously fundamental principles when you're running a business, especially in a moment

SPEAKER_47: like this because when the rubber meets the road and you need a lot of money and you run into somebody as sophisticated as him, he's already worked from first principles

SPEAKER_45: to understand it. It's really, really, really important to know these things because these are the core foundations of valuation. So obviously DCFs are one framework, but ROIC is incredibly,

SPEAKER_68: incredibly important, especially when you make real things and you need to spend CapEx.

SPEAKER_41: And look, in a world in the last 10 years where money's free, nobody thinks about this very much, we always have thought about it, which informs our investment model, but yeah, Jim Oth's right, I mean, in today's world, if you're an entrepreneur and you can show up and say, listen,

SPEAKER_17: I have a 50, 60, 70% return on capital, every dollar you give me will yield a 70, 80% return on the back end, even though we're losing money along the way, that's a very compelling case

SPEAKER_34: to say, hey, we're losing a bunch of money, we're not really sure what's going to happen, which is what we hear a lot.

SPEAKER_47: This also builds on the question from yesterday, which is how do you present yourself as, you know,

SPEAKER_45: a young emerging company and cut through all the noise and understanding of these things and about future value creation in a moment like this becomes really important as well. So even if people will debate whether it's right, people will give you credit for the intellectual honesty of actually going there and understanding these things.

SPEAKER_68: Really important.

SPEAKER_73: You see it a lot where companies slip away from first principles. So, you know, the first principles on a high margin

SPEAKER_53: enterprise software business, you can define ARR and assume some, and then people say, hey, some multiple of ARR is your valuation comp, like your, you know, your multiple. And then another company shows up and the margins are different, the growth profile is different, the revenue retention is different, it's a services business and they try and use a similar sort of comp and all of a sudden everyone's thinking about valuation as a function of some industry standard comp as opposed to going back to understanding how did that comp get created in the first place and what's the nature of the business from which that comp arose and people are doing things like calling revenue ARR, you know, it's not even subscription revenue and so on and I think that happens considerably more and then that investing cycle just becomes, you know, hey, well the next round will be this multiple and, you know, proposition of building a valuable business that can generate cash.

SPEAKER_45: What's your look through into the economy just from your portfolio companies?

SPEAKER_49: Look, we think, I think we're in a recession. I mean, I don't know if someone's already said this but we're in a recession. We're in a recession and this will be like my,

SPEAKER_41: I don't know, 100th cycle or something. I'm pretty old. I like the rest of us here. We've seen it over and over again and, you know, I see David's tweets about go raise two and a half years of money. This is correct. I mean, you need enough capital to get through the problem.

SPEAKER_17: The good news about this recession and, it looks like if you kind of look at the amount of federal debt, the state of the consumer and kind of what's happened in business formation, it actually looks a little like post-World War II to me in that in the World War II period, we had the last massive mobilization or demobilization in our economy occurred in World War II. Right. That happened again in COVID. When we changed, in this case, it's like a mini version of remobilization that we're restarting the economy. We flooded the system with money to get the, to kind of buffer the problem and then restart the economy. And now we have inflation, but we also have lots of business formation and we have new ways

SPEAKER_62: of doing work, which is what happened after World War II. So I'm, I'm very optimistic

SPEAKER_17: because most of these recessions, you know, to really get inflation down, we're going to have to reduce consumer demand and or change oil prices. So for sure, we should be pumping on this country. I know it's not, it's controversial, but that's important to lower oil prices to get inflation down. But the reality is underneath the, the numbers, there's a lot of innovation happening. And that's what happened kind of post-World War II. So I would say we're in a bit of a mini retooling. It's going to be a rough year or two. Hang on, it'll be a rough year or two. But the consumer's in pretty good shape. They're not over levered. We should come out okay. And the U.S. economy is so resilient, man. Like, you know,

SPEAKER_62: we are all either one generation from being immigrants or immigrants here. I think most of us, right? It's the best place in the world to live. We're the most innovative economy in the world. I'm super optimistic of what's happening here because there's so much innovation, so many smart people working so hard to make things better. I think it's going to be great. I think we can get the next couple of years it's going to be great.

SPEAKER_14: Talk about this pumping more oil situation. Obviously, Russia's involved in a, and we talked about it earlier today, had a debate about Ukraine. And then you have maybe some folks in the Middle East not pumping as much oil

SPEAKER_84: as we might like them to. And then Europe decided, well, we don't want to frack here. We want you to do that over there. And then we stopped here. And none of us want to see environmental damage done to the planet, but we also don't want to see dictators take over the planet or the economy come to a halt. What's a reasonable proposal for America and American sovereignty in terms of green and renewables and maybe pumping

SPEAKER_89: some oil?

SPEAKER_41: So look, we were the first institutional investors as a motorist. So I think I have enough bona fides to say this. I believe in green technology, okay? Absolutely 100%. But energy,

SPEAKER_62: and in the same fund we did Tesla, we actually had fracking assets because energy independence is a...

SPEAKER_91: Well, that's incredible. Really?

SPEAKER_62: Yes. In the same fund? In the same fund. Because then, as it is today, energy independence is a national security issue. This is not a partisan issue. Extremely important to understand this.

SPEAKER_92: Extremely important to understand this. It's not about

SPEAKER_17: Democrats and Republicans. It's about wars in the Middle East. And the reality is that the Saudis are not pumping. OPEC is not pumping. This is terrible for America and they know it. They're squeezing their economy the way they live in the 70s. And it's absolutely being done on purpose. So the answer to that in my mind is twofold. One, we should have an... We need industrial policy in this country, but the first thing we should have is an energy policy. Energy policy should look like this. We take all of the background subsidies, literally make them equal, and we give, let's say, $500 billion total, $250 billion in low-cost loans to the energy patch for drilling in places like Texas, Louisiana, and an equal amount

SPEAKER_62: to green energy. And we sprint to a green future. At the same time, we ensure that this country is safe and we have energy security in this country for all the people out there being hurt by high inflation. It's a security problem.

SPEAKER_53: What do you... You guys invest heavily in manufacturing. What do you see in terms of the future of manufacturing, the opportunity for onshore manufacturing? Are there technologies that you guys are excited about that create an advantage

SPEAKER_75: for the United States to build manufacturing capacity to service industry here?

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, look, I think this thing about we outsourced our entire manufacturing base to China because it was cheaper. But the reality is

SPEAKER_17: that the productivity between the U.S. and China right now is about 8 to 1. So a U.S. worker is 8 times more productive than a Chinese worker. We found in cases like Tesla where we actually helped...

SPEAKER_96: In terms of GDP per worker?

SPEAKER_17: Yes. We helped to insource

SPEAKER_62: the supply chain of Tesla. Why is Tesla floating-grade? Because I got news for you. You actually can make stuff in America and it's made very well. Shocking. Shocking.

SPEAKER_98: Let me tell you.

SPEAKER_100: Why do we have this narrative that it can't be done and then we go to Gigafactory and you see it

SPEAKER_30: having been done?

SPEAKER_17: Let me tell you why. And boy, I mean, here's the... I'm probably going to get pillory for saying this, but great companies are built by engineers like Elon Musk. That's the reality of it. And they know they want to control their manufacturing. We do it here so we can iterate faster

SPEAKER_62: and make the product better if the product's good enough, you'll sell it for a great margin. They get optimized by marketing people and destroyed by the CFO. When you put the finance guy in charge and he's like, oh, hey, we can get a lower piece part by sending it to China, but he doesn't understand the iteration cycle of making that product, that guy destroys the company.

SPEAKER_104: And that's what happened in America. Bean counters.

SPEAKER_105: Yeah, we put the CFOs in charge. For God's sake, don't do that. Fuck these bean counters. I mean, can I say that? Fuck that. Let me say that. Let me say that.

SPEAKER_17: If you calculate return on invested capital and you think about this carefully, what happens is these long supply chains

SPEAKER_62: in Asia, they have huge capital deployed, but if capital's cheap, you do that because the piece part price is cheaper. But what happened in Tesla in particular,

SPEAKER_110: when you calculate the overall cost and capital wasn't free because you didn't get any, it was actually much smarter to bring it back.

SPEAKER_53: Right, so the long-term cycle, you make more money. The short-term cycle, you make less money. The short-term cycle, you make more money. I mean, is that another way to think about it for short-term outcomes?

SPEAKER_112: You improve the income statement because you might improve

SPEAKER_62: profitably in the short-term, but you actually hurt the balance sheet because you sell this capital on the water over to China and you're going to bring it back and your iteration cycle goes down because you've got... So what you're saying

SPEAKER_115: is the product's less innovative. It is,

SPEAKER_44: but he's saying something really important, which is that it's the financialization of the P&L that in some ways

SPEAKER_45: led to the decline of American manufacturing in part, meaning if you're a CEO of a business, and you construct your employment agreement and it's based on a certain kind of earnings in a certain period, a certain earnings per share, the incentive to then drive financialization goes up. Now, the perfect example of this is if you compare it, for example, and you did this, the comp package that you gave Elon in 2018 versus the comp package that any other CEO in America got, it was completely black and white. It was opposite land. Yes. And you basically completely said you get nothing now. Let's set these extreme goals and then if you can hit it, you'll get compensated. So much so that, you know, when you had Glass-Lewis and ISS.

SPEAKER_120: They all said vote no, right?

SPEAKER_30: The ISS, Glass-Lewis said no, but they said most things and we're being sued for it so you got to be careful

SPEAKER_17: what I say about it. But yeah, we had a comp package fully voiced on equity appreciation that required creation of new products. And look, I'm going to, I'll pick on Apple here. Apple's the first stock I ever bought. I was 12 years old. My mom actually went to Oakham Bank and bought me a few shares of Apple. I still have it in my account to remind me what it takes to build a company. Steve Jobs dies, terrible. And look, then, you know, Tim Cook takes over. Tim Cook's the supply chain guy. I mean, they've really

SPEAKER_34: optimized profitability. It's unbelievable the, you know, $2 trillion market cap or something now. But man, when's the last time they need a new product?

SPEAKER_126: Yeah. I mean, pretty great.

SPEAKER_125: Great product. Great product, but I mean,

SPEAKER_127: it's not an inch in the world. Incredible free cash flow. Yeah. They aggressively buy back their stock. Yes. And the financialization of that company

SPEAKER_45: has attracted, I mean, if you look at a company, if you can look at the largest shareholder is the most sophisticated financial asset owner in the world, Berkshire. Yes. Berkshire doesn't buy technology companies. They buy incredibly well-run financial assets. And it is. By the way,

SPEAKER_53: look at how Zuck's getting lambasted for the VR investment. Some might say that strategically it's not a great investment, but he's saying, fuck it, I'm going to spend $10 billion a year.

SPEAKER_132: No, no, no. He said it for a quarter and then he had to take it back and cancel it.

SPEAKER_53: Oh, he said that they took it back. Yeah. Yeah, but that's what he wanted to do.

SPEAKER_47: And so to your point, like it's very hard to really build things now.

SPEAKER_17: Yes, but it can be done. And look, I think one of, I am, what is happening in the world today geopolitically is tragic. The war we experience in Ukraine is absolutely tragic. But from all tragedies come some good things. There's always a silver lining. And one of the silver linings here I think should be the acceleration of reshoring of all these products into America to rebuild our industrial base because we actually can do it. I can tell you I am, started my career basically as a factory manager in California. It can be done. There are Americans who want to make stuff between here, Mexico, Canada. We can make pharma. We can make high-tech products. Yes, the price might be a little higher, but I got to tell you the iteration will be better and your value will be better if the product is better. People will pay for it.

SPEAKER_92: And resiliency. And resilient. Listen, for 100%. 100%.

SPEAKER_137: All right.

SPEAKER_138: We are setting up a couple of microphones here. Antonio's been gracious enough to join us for some Q&A. The audience is filled with entrepreneurs,

SPEAKER_11: capital allocators, artists, and builders. So we're going to put a couple of microphones out there. Hopefully some lights on the microphones

SPEAKER_138: if I can see them. Line up and remember the rule. We don't need to know about your company. Just a tight, concise question. Anybody does any marketing or promotion? We're all going to groan. Let's practice a groan. Three, two, groan. No guard. You can say your name. You can say your favorite bestie.

SPEAKER_149: Also, wait, before we start. Yeah. If Chris, is Chris Malloy?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Okay. Everybody, you guys may want to just know Chris, whenever you're in Vegas, Chris is the guy at Carbone in Las Vegas, which is the most, you know, hardest restaurant to get.

SPEAKER_153: Oh, we'll bring up a bottle of wine from Carbone. Anyways, that's Chris Malloy. Say hi to him. Get his number and text him if you're ever in Las Vegas and want to go to him. Get that guy out

SPEAKER_157: with that bottle. I mean, only Chamath would bring the captain of Carbone to our event.

SPEAKER_160: Oh, could you drink? Let's drink some wine. Yeah, let's do it. That's fantastic.

SPEAKER_163: Nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_164: All right, first question. Tell us your favorite bestie and then... Yeah,

SPEAKER_163: we're still doing

SPEAKER_165: favorite besties, right? Favorite bestie and then a quick

SPEAKER_164: tight question. Go.

SPEAKER_165: All right, favorite bestie, J-Cal, point guard of the century to this team, so hats off to you. My question is, first of all, we've been here all week in the last three days watching these cards fall from the sky and we all know that you guys center around this poker table, this beautiful game. My question is, how does that game

SPEAKER_167: influence both your relationships and decision making in business and your personal lives?

SPEAKER_168: Great question. Chamath, start us up and you can go to the back and the next person, queue up. How is poker influence?

SPEAKER_84: Friendship, our lives. How has the poker game itself had an impact on our lives?

SPEAKER_40: Okay, I think, I really do believe this, but I think it's the most incredible game

SPEAKER_47: and training ground for business because in any given moment you are forced to deal with

Chamath Palihapitiya: the spectrum of good information to moderate information to bad information, good outcomes, moderate outcomes,

SPEAKER_47: bad outcomes. you're taking risk, you're learning information, you're adjusting your style, and the most important thing is you're forced to anchor to your core values or not. How you behave at the table is how you behave in life. You know, you can take these wins poorly. That's like a new

SPEAKER_172: for Phil Helmuth.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah. You can take these wins poorly, you can take these wins well, you can take the losses poorly, you can take the losses well. I would encourage all of you to learn to play the game with your friends. It's a beautiful, beautiful game. You can start a weekly game, Saks.

SPEAKER_175: Well, the poker game at Chamath's house

SPEAKER_177: is how I got to be friends with Chamath, right? I mean... I'm just saying, this is what you guys tell your wives

SPEAKER_24: why you stay up all night playing poker because I've been there with you guys. It's pretty freaking degenerate.

SPEAKER_180: We're all holding hands.

SPEAKER_24: Exactly. We're talking about our feelings. Baby, it's training.

SPEAKER_183: It's training for business. No, it is training for business. I'm kidding you, but I've been there. It is training for business. I've been there. I've seen the drinking and the food too. It is training for business.

SPEAKER_187: We're not degenerates, but go ahead, Saks. Well,

SPEAKER_189: I was just saying, Chamath, I mean, didn't you invest in Yammer after I started playing in your

SPEAKER_191: weekly poker game?

SPEAKER_190: Yeah, and it was actually so degenerate. What really happened after that was I was in Las Vegas

Chamath Palihapitiya: in 2011. I had just left Facebook. I moved to Vegas and I was on the phone with Saks in between playing tournaments and he let me in invest in Yammer literally like and you did me an incredible solid because I put money in and you know what this is like. Nine months later he sells to Microsoft and I returned a third of my first fund. Ooh, yum, yum. And it really solidified my reputation so I mean,

SPEAKER_193: I owe you a big one.

SPEAKER_17: I got to figure about this though. So David Saks, I've known David for 25 years but he did Yammer. I want to put money in. He said no because if This is a true story.

SPEAKER_24: It's a true story. He said no. He said no because if this fails you are my backup plan.

SPEAKER_197: Oh, for a job. Yes. Well, you didn't offer me a job.

SPEAKER_199: I wanted David to come join me. I was so afraid of losing everyone's money when I founded a company. You know? He literally took

SPEAKER_189: a little time from me. I wanted to have like one friend whose money I didn't lose but you know that was a long way of thinking about it. We should have had you in there.

SPEAKER_202: I mean, how is the game? Well, before Chamath are you leaving? No, I'm grading glasses. Come back for a sec. Okay. He'll get glasses.

SPEAKER_206: He's getting wine. I'll tell you guys one thing. Chamath is one of the most generous people you will ever meet. Unbelievable. He is unbelievable. Unbelievable. And for all of his for all of his bluster about his frigging mink coats and shit like chinchilla chinchilla he has brought together a group and he largely is the reason that I think the game grows

SPEAKER_53: and goes on and you saw some of the amazing people that we've had on stage here and some of our friends are here that we're playing our game with that really that network has been built and solidified because of Chamath and his generosity and friendship. It's really something I've learned to appreciate in my life and you know Thank you. Say thanks, yeah.

SPEAKER_11: I mean it's it's a tremendous group and yeah

SPEAKER_214: Amazing people Amazing people and the consistency

SPEAKER_08: of it has been amazing and it's a degenerate group Chamath had this like little tiny two million dollar house

SPEAKER_84: with like a one and a half car garage when he was at Facebook and we would play in the garage that little tiny place you had, remember? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_11: You know before you bought the two houses next door and knocked them down and gentrified

SPEAKER_08: but true story Sax said hey you know you're doing these conferences

SPEAKER_11: you should invest in the companies and this is when I put the fix in for him to win TechCrunch 50 at Yammer with Yammer he said I have to win and then his wife told my wife he has to win so then I basically got the whole jury to vote for him with Yammer he wins and he goes hey schmuck

SPEAKER_222: All of my success is due to J. Cal you guys understand

SPEAKER_138: it was a good fix I put the fix in for him but he said listen I want to thank you for this and you should start a fund instead of doing all this work at the conference why don't you just invest in the companies I'll put 250k into your fund

SPEAKER_11: I'll be the anchor I said that's incredible really and he said yeah and then I went to the poker table I told the story and then Dave Goldberg rest in peace one of our great friends and certainly the best amongst us thank you he said I'll put money in too thank you and he put money in and then Billy said I'll put money in and everybody said they put money in and Friedberg said I'll take a pass

SPEAKER_232: but you know we'll put that aside anyway I was all locked up in other stuff yeah he's like I got a quinoa farm I've got to take care

SPEAKER_239: cheers cheers

SPEAKER_233: cheers

SPEAKER_236: okay okay all right

SPEAKER_102: let me see you thank you thank you

SPEAKER_241: scholarship

SPEAKER_102: and this is a true this is a true story Bill Lee's there he couldn't make it here but he's one of our great friends

SPEAKER_11: and one of you Elon's best friends in the world and he said of course I'm in would you mind if I tell our billionaire friend the co-founder of eBay Jeff Skoll and he tells him Jake how's doing a fund you should do it I meet Jeff Skoll's money manager and Jan and I said hey here's what I'm doing I'm a first time fund manager I don't know what the fuck I'm doing I'm a former journalist and he said how much is the fund I said 10 million he said I'll take half and I said I'm sorry and he said I'll take five million and that was the biggest check I ever got and it was because of Billy and literally that first fund was raised around the poker table in one night and that changed the trajectory of my career and that really is the fellowship and it started with David and you hosting and I remember it was like yesterday and I think maybe also a good moment

SPEAKER_247: to just maybe cheers to Goldie Dave Goldberg no longer with us

SPEAKER_250: and Tony Shag who played in the game as well two incredible men next question

SPEAKER_251: hey my name is Bobbin favorite bestie is Chamath great to meet you last night by the way

SPEAKER_132: Antonio is also our people he's the bestie alright listen we know Chamath's the bestie quick with the question let's go yeah

SPEAKER_251: my main question is when you guys actually decided to manage capital for people like what really was the scariest step in taking that leap and taking that risk I know a lot of you are GPs solo GPs so

SPEAKER_258: I mean Zach you made a big leap

SPEAKER_261: what's the scariest step well I mean even as a founder like I mentioned before I was like so worried about losing people's money I mean that was like I mean I don't know if like founders today even care that much that just seems but it just seems like oh company didn't work move on to the next one I mean maybe that'll change now that the environment is not going to be

David Sacks: it's free flowing but I was always like really worried I was going to lose people's money and you know it was something that sort of I remember

SPEAKER_47: when I started social capital I think I was playing I was either playing golf

SPEAKER_45: or I had dinner with Chase Coleman in New York and Chase says to me I'll tell you the one piece of advice Julian gave me when I started Tiger Global I said what was that this is in 2009 and he said this is a death sentence

SPEAKER_47: and I was like well what does that mean and he said you are the only person that's going to live with this because you're responsible especially based on who your LPs are for folks that if you really think about who they are it's just going to create this thing there and it's like you know and I was I was lucky in that moment because we were we were able to get like the Knight Foundation and Mayo Clinic and these folks that are doing

SPEAKER_45: these good works but then you're representing their capital it's heavy it's heavy because you make this decision and if it's wrong you just feel literally like you're derelict and you're taking money away from sick children or you know free speech I mean it's

SPEAKER_47: it was a that's a brutally stressful thing to lose money on behalf of people

SPEAKER_267: by the way I'll recommend as a founder if you raise money raise money from your friends too and it'll really change how you operate

SPEAKER_14: yeah I mean I raised the first fund from my friends and I tell you I took every single deal very seriously and I did my diligence and I was very thoughtful about it

SPEAKER_41: from I live in Chicago

SPEAKER_17: from my friends in Chicago and I literally said to one of my partners at the time if this doesn't work I have to move I'll have to

SPEAKER_271: live in Chicago because in Chicago you might get killed if you'd like something bad

SPEAKER_272: I thought you were eating the weather no no no I mean these guys lose your money he was talking witness protection

SPEAKER_24: yeah exactly these guys lose your money people are kind of like oh I'm sad about it Chicago would like break your legs and burn your house down man it's a whole different a whole different thing alright let's take another question oh sorry

SPEAKER_274: no keep going

SPEAKER_17: no the second thing I mean honestly the worst thing for me the worst scary thing for me was just the people I had three or four guys that had worked with building companies before that and I knew I just felt if I disappointed them if we failed I would have felt terrible

SPEAKER_278: yeah it certainly makes you focus on the game it's like being staked in poker

SPEAKER_280: you play better sir I have a question for the 17th most important person from PayPal I'm just kidding I'm just kidding

SPEAKER_283: obviously Friedberg is my favorite bestie

SPEAKER_285: alright fine let's go let's go nerd

SPEAKER_286: Friedberg love alright Friedberg soak it in

SPEAKER_283: you've been talking about how all this increased money supply has been sending the asset prices up and now it's unwinding I don't think we've heard you talk about crypto specifically bitcoin has obviously come down but it's still over three times where it was pre-pandemic curious what you think will happen in that world as this unwinds you want me to address that sure

SPEAKER_261: it was for you 17th most important so the thing the thing about the crypto market to understand is that it's like a liquidity sponge the more liquidity there is out there the more people feel empowered to make speculative investments and crypto is like the most speculative now that's not to say you know it's not real I actually do believe in bitcoin I think there'll be a number of other sort of alt currencies that work but probably the vast majority will not and there's been a tremendous amount of speculation and inflation there and so that space is in the process of correcting you know I've never been able to say like what the right price levels for any of this stuff are let's say you believe in bitcoin long term let's say you believe it's going to be the first non-fiat currency what price should that be today you know it's there's no like discounted cash flow analysis you can apply to it so it's always been very hard to know what the prices of these things should be and so in practice the price is a function of how much liquidity is in the system and when you go through a period of liquidity getting destroyed it's no surprise that crypto goes first with it

SPEAKER_84: Antonio have you touched I mean you were so into physical assets and building real things like spaceships and rocket ships

SPEAKER_14: when you watch this crypto bubble you know grow and burst and grow and burst and now it's burst again what's your take

SPEAKER_274: well first I want to tell you I bought my first crypto I mean I think in 2017 because David Sachs and Bill Lee were pushing the Ponzi scheme

SPEAKER_21: on me

SPEAKER_34: so they were like they were I was at a birthday party I think you were there too they were like they were hawking bitcoin so I bought some nobody had heard of it at that point

SPEAKER_17: so here's my general view I actually think I think that bitcoin in particular is a bet on rising political risk and on political freedom economic freedom is closer to political freedom and last time I looked Ukrainians are the third largest holders of bitcoin and if I were staying in Taiwan today I would have 10-50% assets bitcoin so this removes the ability to control currency capital controls from governments I think this is very important and it should survive price levels I don't know I do have a you know a reason why bitcoin is a hedge to political risk globally and that's how we think about it we have invested in infrastructure assets in and around a blockchain with Dave we have a couple assets because we believe that blockchain itself is a platform shift in the technology of tracking assets this was a real thing and it's going to happen it's going to change the way we do finance so we invest

SPEAKER_116: in infrastructure

SPEAKER_303: got it let's take another question Ted is right is there Mike over there oh I'm sorry

SPEAKER_138: we're going to take one from here we'll alternate so tight is right

SPEAKER_307: yeah hi car mantra CEO of credo I have to say I'm a science nerd Friedberg but J. Cal it's been awesome today and I want to say you guys like your courage and bravery to do what you've done with the pod and watching this today like thank you thank you yeah you've talked a lot about later stage I'm wondering if you could like tune in a little bit more on pre-seed and seed and kind of what you're seeing in terms of valuations and metrics that you've got to hit in the earlier stages

SPEAKER_317: it's very simple you know I invested in Uber

SPEAKER_11: Thumbtack and Calm for 15 million dollars combined that was their combined valuation post money post money and those all three companies had products in the market and then what we saw over the last five years

SPEAKER_84: is people wanting credit for a white paper a prototype an MVP to the tune of 15 to 50 million dollars and we did sit out some of those and said listen when the product is ready let's take a look at the product and talk to the first two or three customers to David's point about zero to one customers is the really hard hurdle and now it's back down to six to 15 million for a company that has a product in market and maybe 50 to 100 times yearly revenue for a valuation so to the extent you can get to 200k in yearly revenue you can get you know a 10 to 20 million dollar valuation so I'd say halfway back to normal and perhaps a permanent you know livable reset because the outcomes have been pretty fantastic so the early stage should go up the only thing you really need to raise money is to build a world-class product and just get a couple of customers who are absolutely blown away by what you've built that's all you need but everybody gets concerned with the theatrics and the performative stuff and their network and nonsense and who you are and where you came from none of it matters build a world-class product that two

SPEAKER_168: or three people are obsessed with and you'll get the C-check focus

SPEAKER_321: I think Brad if Brad Gerstner had sorry to interrupt your applause J-Cal

SPEAKER_322: I'll take one little I can get

SPEAKER_261: so I think Brad Gerstner made a really important point on this which is the new normal is going to look like the old normal meaning the pre-COVID normal we had the abnormal period was this two-year COVID period where 10 trillion of liquidity is pumped into the system things are going back to what they look like before all that happened and maybe before the Fed started with this zero interest rate policy so we're actually getting back to normal understand that the environment we're entering now is the normality the abnormal period was the inflation we saw in assets over the past couple of years that's the reset that everyone's going to have to wrap their heads around

SPEAKER_324: Sachs you're my boy

SPEAKER_328: finally finally one percent I think there may be some preference falsification around this because people don't want to admit they're conservative all the polling shows this

SPEAKER_331: but anyway thank you sir

SPEAKER_332: and your second favorite bestie is Tucker go

SPEAKER_334: for early stage investors which most of you are in an increasingly digital world where there are large SaaS solutions for nearly everything how do you think about selecting companies and founders in the early stage that are coming to market with a small amount of utility and how do you think about they compete with companies with

SPEAKER_261: yeah so I think you know one of the things I really like about SaaS which is your software as a service basically B2B software it's business software okay that's sold as a subscription is that the world's never gonna run out of new ideas for business software business keeps changing so therefore the software that businesses need will keep changing and there will always be an opportunity there for new companies new verticals new niches there'll always be you know new worried about running out in terms of how we evaluate the actual idea you know we've actually been super transparent around the metrics that we need to see it really does start with a company hitting the metrics hurdle that we need to see for for example series a you know it's a call it you're roughly more or less a million dollars of ARR you want to be growing 15% month over month certain net dollar retention certain capital efficiency we've all we've published it you know on our website on our blog so it's it starts with that and then once we know that like our thresholds have been hit then we get into more qualitative or subjective factors like you know what do we think about this founder in this market but one thing I like about it is just it's it's very well defined like what we're looking for and so you know just go to our blog you'll see we'll tell you exactly there's no mystery to it

SPEAKER_336: outside of productivity tools though

SPEAKER_47: there's not a single company that can stay in one category and become really big what does that mean there's not a single public company that doesn't have now an entire strategy that says we sell at SMB mid market and enterprise and so the thing for SaaS businesses unless you're like a really powerful productivity tool like a slack or an Atlassian your valuation capped in the mid to high single digit billions as it currently stands today that's just the law of the math in the public markets on how you're rewarded though how do you grow out of it you have to embrace a strategy that actually does more where you become a system of bodies

SPEAKER_45: over time in order to maintain valuation we're

SPEAKER_73: going to try and move faster so

SPEAKER_340: we can get more people another question here hi

SPEAKER_344: there guys favorite besties probably four-way tie but maybe Chamath edges out just a bit it's not a tie

SPEAKER_348: quick question tight is right

SPEAKER_344: so you know you guys have done incredibly well so what would you do if you're dropped in the middle of say Kansas take away the resource take away the network and take you back to age

SPEAKER_354: what would you do and why Antonio

SPEAKER_351: take it

SPEAKER_30: I'm actually from Michigan I got dropped in the middle of there with no resources and not a lot to do and I wasn't 25 I was in my early

SPEAKER_17: 20s I would I would find a way to make it work man you should get you should actually whatever scale you want to start at whatever job you have I would try and start a little company there's always people listen a place that grabbed Michigan man you could cut grass I had a little computer company while I was 12 years old doing like networking for people in the old days there's always something you can do if you have a valuable skill build a skill start a company and just get started start moving and make good decisions along the way one good decision compounds on top of the other and all four of these guys what they have done in their careers is made very good decisions and they've kept moving when they've had problems

SPEAKER_355: you start early yeah you gotta start early start early

SPEAKER_17: I just want to tell you this they may look like super successful guys now and they are but it wasn't easy and it wasn't linear they've all had ups and downs they've all had problems and they all still do what they do and I have great respect for all four of them I know them all well they keep making good decisions

SPEAKER_112: they're highly resilient and they just keep going and I would tell you do the same thing

SPEAKER_359: the only thing I'd add to that is to keep learning I'm getting some applause here

SPEAKER_360: I haven't had any

SPEAKER_362: I just got here but I would just say

SPEAKER_53: keep learning as well one of the biggest advantages I've had in my career is that I try to always learn new stuff as often as I can and whenever I find an area of interest I pursue it in terms of deepening my understanding of it

SPEAKER_267: and that's always created opportunities for me that I wouldn't have just stumbled across or walked my way into

SPEAKER_250: it's such a great opportunity to have you here and Tony when I asked you to do this you had never been on a podcast before have you never

SPEAKER_368: done this kind of thing

SPEAKER_41: I've never done this kind of thing no it's awesome thanks I'm only doing it because it's a four of you and I am usually very private but I'm enjoying it you have an

SPEAKER_370: incredible voice

SPEAKER_41: you know

SPEAKER_375: it's like very light very NPR very public radio it's like hey everybody

SPEAKER_378: you're listening to

SPEAKER_375: the politics of culture

SPEAKER_379: I'm Antonio Gracias people tell me

SPEAKER_380: I have a voice for radio and pornography yeah it works pretty well go

SPEAKER_384: hey guys I'm Samantha favorite bestie is Friedberg I run the factory automation team for a large semiconductor manufacturer in the United States really unimpressed with the innovation in industrial automation and so really interested to hear your thoughts on where you see the next disruptions in automation and also maybe a question for Antonio where do you see the disruptor specifically in how we get not only the technology but the economies of scale for these really capital intensive businesses in the US

SPEAKER_63: this is your guide to answer this for sure and by the way you should talk about automation I don't know if you want to but Tesla yeah

SPEAKER_30: we know a lot of automation one of my partners is like a genius

SPEAKER_17: engineer in this area and you're particularly in the chip business you said right

SPEAKER_392: yeah

SPEAKER_17: so you know TSMC basically took the many this idea of outsourcing manufacturing assets that Intel did with TSMC in the beginning that created that business and moved most of our high technology and chips often offshore into Taiwan this is like a terrible idea and I think as I said earlier we need industrial policy in this country I think we need industrial policy to bring chip manufacturing back it's very important and the problem you have in automation chip manufacturing in particular is you know when you think about where all the great engineers go today they're good at automation they're not going there because they're competing at TSMC so you have a couple info fabs still in the US but we have to have some policy I think actually it's going to require industrial policy to force people like Intel AMD to want to bring stuff back into the US and to really get great talent to want to do it

SPEAKER_384: do you think there's opportunities outside of greenfield models to kind of reinvigorate and unlock the capacity that we have in some of our older manufacturing here in the US

SPEAKER_274: yes I do

SPEAKER_17: look we at Tesla took over this Fremont factory was a former GM Toyota factory and you know we retooled it it was look it would have been we had to do it because we didn't have any money and it was free basically but if you if you took that approach and you got the you got really great entrepreneurs to focus on this problem through an industrial policy they need money to do it I think you'd get great innovation look NVIDIA is actually here in the US this is the reality this is a great chip company and the fabs they use are spread out all over the world but if you gave NVIDIA a fab or two who knows what happens it was the right price yeah Jensen's a great CEO

SPEAKER_400: did you go to that side favorite bestie Jason you keep the ship together you're the glue that keeps it together my name is Chris my friend and I started All In Talk nine months ago the fan page thank you cheers to you it's really

SPEAKER_362: obviously I was at the outdoor mall near my house and my dog attacked another dog and the guy was like it's okay I saw you on TikTok I was like

SPEAKER_408: dude I'm not

SPEAKER_362: so that was because of you thank you

SPEAKER_410: I didn't get sued that was for his quinoa channel it was in your channel

SPEAKER_412: so my question is in the 2022 predictions episode Chamath you talk about all in media idea and starting an all in media channel maybe and I wonder if you guys have talked about that anymore your goals for the future on that because I'm pretty sure everyone would agree here that if you did start one it would do a whole of a lot better

SPEAKER_415: than CNN plus so well that that may not be a very high bar very low bar

SPEAKER_47: we actually we actually did get together the four of us we sat in Freeburg's office what a shit show

Chamath Palihapitiya: people started yelling two people walked out Sax just started to do this

SPEAKER_423: at the table yeah I'm definitely as a driver my dad lets me drive in the driveway it wasn't a productive conversation it was completely

SPEAKER_426: unproductive it was completely that was our first and only meeting

Chamath Palihapitiya: but no but we did take one key step which is that Freeburg said I'm going to get my team to draft the LLC agreement for the four of us which we refused to sign

SPEAKER_47: and now no one

SPEAKER_429: signed it

SPEAKER_47: but it's in our inbox so we're one step closer to starting it but joking aside I still think that it'll become inevitable and I think the reason is the two people the robots non-humans that were uncomfortable with human interaction David's David's I'm like lifters once we do the recap of this I think it'll be I think these two are probably the most shocked

SPEAKER_53: I'll tell you by the way my observation I used to go to TED I went to TED from 2008 until 2019 I stopped going to TED because I thought the content went to shit and it basically got overtaken with like social justice talks and like it started like tech and interesting ideas about where the world's headed and like I listened to our speakers this week the last two days and I'm like man like really fantastic content I'm like this could be the new TED so I got really invigorated by that like I really thought I felt like that was really missing

SPEAKER_440: and by the way I think it's conversations people don't really seem to want to have right like and those are what make them really important and let's just say

SPEAKER_442: you are not the earliest believer in this was going to get pulled off I cannot tell you

SPEAKER_440: how many times I've considered quitting the pod and not even showing up for this event and I give Jason props publicly for doing a great job pulling this thing off

SPEAKER_206: hey guys

SPEAKER_446: my name is Sarah and I really love all of you you got me through a very tough challenging time when I started listening to you I came here over a 16 hour flight from Abu Dhabi so thank you

SPEAKER_450: wow that's a long flight we love you we love you

SPEAKER_446: I have a comment and a question the comment and maybe David I have a lot of relatives in Sweden and when the Ukraine war started this is very amiable innovative beautiful people haven't had a war over 150 years and they were putting gas in their car and supplying cans of goods and got really really nervous about what's happening and were watching closely to see what would be the next step I think if the US did not step in so there was a lot of reality out there for the US to stay I don't know like the savior of the world in a certain way or another Finnish people felt the same way Moldovans so this is a real big reality out in the Western European world not just Eastern Europe so that's on my comment so thank you for the question and this comes from my husband if you're sitting on excess liquidity right now and want to invest for a long time

SPEAKER_459: sex is raising a fund what would you do was that was that a transition from World War 3 to

SPEAKER_463: investment advice stock tips stock tips

SPEAKER_153: stock tips yeah we want to say that is dynamic range right there well done well done you've gone from soup holes you know you had us crying

SPEAKER_468: I know the ups and downs of my life so yes it is like that

SPEAKER_328: why don't we just take the first part because I think it would be good so on Ukraine you know I thought it was important to have this debate today where we got both sides

SPEAKER_261: of the issue and we got two people who are very passionate on both sides and I tend to agree more with Glenn on it but that doesn't mean I don't want to help Ukraine at all I just think we have to keep a close eye on preventing this thing from escalating into World War 3

SPEAKER_471: because the Russians have 6,000 nuclear weapons and their military doctrine says they can use them if they feel that they're existentially threatened and so you know if our objective here is to help the Ukrainians expel the Russians from an invasion that's one thing but if our objective if we have mission creep into destabilizing the Russian regime and to basically trying to take back Crimea which they see as theirs if we're trying to weaken them to the point where they're no longer a great power we're really playing with fire there so we have to be

David Sacks: really careful about our objectives there and make sure that we don't let this thing spiral out of control

SPEAKER_102: Antonio you have thoughts on Ukraine and are we being too dovish or hawkish or doing it just right

SPEAKER_17: so I think we are there's a lot more going on here than may meet the eye and this question was about Sweden and Finland because I want to focus on that that if our friends in particularly northwestern Europe should actually be arming themselves and if they arm themselves we won't have this problem that's the reality of it the reason Ukraine yes that's the reality obviously the time the time for sitting on the sidelines in central Europe is over if you care about your country care about your children care about your families then you should arm yourselves period full stop an American will be here happy to sell you weapons no problem without NATO I think that's true the reason Ukrainians are able to defend themselves is because they have actually been buying weapons and they built their own weapons with the Turks the drones that are being used to destroy the Russian supply lines are not coming from America they're coming from a joint venture with the Turks this is the reality so should we be drawn into a war in central Europe no I think it could start world war 3 should we help these folks defend themselves yes I should and in your particular part of the world yeah for sure start buying some weapons

SPEAKER_478: one question over here yeah tough to follow but my name's Ioana favorite bestie I think Friedberg I think you do a good job of being heard and hearing others equally so I think that's an important skill I'm trying to work on it myself more Friedberg

SPEAKER_482: wow

SPEAKER_478: in terms of my question it's a little more qualitative but some of us were having interesting discussion about first impressions last night and I'm curious to think one in terms of your own first impressions how has your the way that you introduced yourself to others changed as you've grown and what have you learned about that and on the other end what are some of the most notable first impressions others have made on you and why have those stood out to you

SPEAKER_483: that's an interesting question well

SPEAKER_40: seeing as only two of us have emotions maybe we can

SPEAKER_487: yeah we can chop it out sure I'm gonna go to the bathroom

SPEAKER_153: you won't find any emotions there turn the mic off please the quinoa oh my god oh my lord that baba ganoush goes right through you continue

SPEAKER_47: baba ganoush I think that when I was younger I was more insecure so I had to wear what few labels I had on my sleeve and use them as a weapon before others could use their labels on me I honestly felt that way you know and in Silicon Valley at the time you know it really there is a very monocultural aspect of you know folks from a few schools you know folks having worked at a few companies and I had neither you know I worked I went to Waterloo which is in Canada and I worked at AOL so I didn't go to Stanford and I didn't work at Google or Yahoo and there was a there's a great lineage and of of where you know the really credentialed credible folks came from and so you do what any insecure person does you kind of throw what few things you have out there very quickly you know trying to one up the person in front of you and that's calmed down a lot so that's probably the biggest thing that's changed

SPEAKER_11: it has and I think I have a similar observation when I was taking that R train into Manhattan I used to say to myself Jason Calacanis editor in chief Jason Calacanis millionaire and I was like literally had a 16 page photocopy magazine called Silicon Eye Reporter and I was trying to convince myself that someday I would be somebody and I think that narrative was important for me and people when I would give them the 16 page photocopy I'd say here's my magazine they'd say this is a photocopy I'd say no it's a magazine it's got a picture on the cover because for me that was why it was a magazine and it eventually became a very large magazine in fact of 300 pages and today thank you so I think there is something

SPEAKER_84: about manifesting stuff and just you know believing that you're going to get there but today I define myself

SPEAKER_11: by the things I love to do so when people do ask me now hey what do you do I say I'm a writer and I have a podcast and I angel invest and I don't say

SPEAKER_494: it's the number one podcast or I'm one of the top angel investor all the time I just

SPEAKER_496: I just think about what I don't say that and I don't say you know like it's you know

SPEAKER_497: the book is in 11 languages or whatever I got a million dollar advance I just there's no ego about it I just say writer

SPEAKER_498: podcaster angel okay

SPEAKER_501: how did it go in there okay David you okay

SPEAKER_503: what sort of advance are you getting

SPEAKER_502: a million dollars

SPEAKER_503: he said a million dollar advance I mean the book's in 12 languages now thank you I'll sign it

SPEAKER_504: if you have one I'll sign it next question sometimes

SPEAKER_328: sometimes I think Jason's just pimping out all of us to fuel his media career

SPEAKER_509: you think sometimes hey David

SPEAKER_510: all honesty how is the deal flow gone since you got this podcast

SPEAKER_328: I think it's down 50%

SPEAKER_518: that's since you went on Tucker go hi

SPEAKER_522: today the crypto world

SPEAKER_524: is focused on decentralization speculation and stores of value who here is excited about micropayments and whoever is most excited which industries do you think will be most impacted by the newfound ability to send payments in as little as one hundredth of a penny

SPEAKER_527: go ahead favorite bestie Saks you want to take it yeah go ahead Saks

SPEAKER_261: so you know this question of micropayments has come up all the way since you know back to when I was working on PayPal and one of the problems with micropayments is as the name suggests the amounts are very very small so you have to do a lot of them to create enough volume for them to be meaningful and so there's always sort of this market size problem now for crypto there may be more of an opportunity there because the way that the old credit card rails network works is there's like a 25 cent charge per transaction and so like at PayPal it just didn't make sense to facilitate micropayments because the cost of that transaction always exceeded the fee that we could get so you're right that or I think what you're suggesting with your question is that there is sort of a crypto opportunity to do this in a different way because you can basically do a costless instantaneous transfer using blockchain based currency so I'm sure someone's going to do something interesting with that

SPEAKER_530: and then the question is just what does that aggregate into is it going to be big enough to be by the way

SPEAKER_338: there's an interim step which is also pretty obvious at least to me which is this idea that for example

SPEAKER_47: if Stripe actually took the time to embrace one of these stable coins there's no reason why Stripe needs to actually run on interchange as well because you can just basically swap that dollar in a ledger into USDC let's just pick that as an example not tether not to tilt you run it on those

SPEAKER_338: rails for free and then basically transfer it back and it's not obvious why people don't do this

SPEAKER_261: you need the gas cost to come down so you know like you're running a transaction on Ethereum or certainly Bitcoin is very expensive right now but other chains yeah yeah you need like a chain like a salon or something like something that's like super cheap

SPEAKER_11: and the cognitive load of the transaction just the person deciding do they want to pay a tenth of a penny a penny is sometimes greater than the actual value of the money which then creates almost like friction to them wanting to read the article let's take another question

SPEAKER_540: hi my name is Kate and my favorite bestie right now is Friedberg who often plays devil's advocate and so forces a stepwise

SPEAKER_549: how many people did you pay off go ahead

SPEAKER_540: so we all admire your successes but we've also been hearing from Mar for instance that we need to be comfortable with failure and we need to become resilient so when you look back on your

SPEAKER_539: careers thus far what have been the toughest moments the moments when you've made a mistake that have taught you a lot

David Friedberg: I mean I had two huge ones and Antonio must have some too yeah

SPEAKER_46: mistakes

SPEAKER_558: my mistakes that you learn the most from

SPEAKER_17: man my biggest mistakes in life have been about people and I have over the years made errors in judging people and how honest they were and how good they were and as I look back on that it's because I have a weakness for ideas that are great and sometimes those come with great people and sometimes they don't the reality is there are some bad people out there who are acting really great and doing interesting things and we have we've suffered from that I mean I know David and I were a deal together that suffered from that and it happens so I would be I've learned a lot about that I've gone deep into neuroscience I actually have a we have a woman who's got a PhD in the neuroscience of emotion Caltech now on staff that helps us learn as you said always learning about how to assess people and how to assess their emotional states that's the most important thing I think we've updated in our process and in my own thinking

SPEAKER_564: so you love the idea so much that you ignored

SPEAKER_565: the other data that this person was not honorable truthful no

SPEAKER_274: there are

SPEAKER_17: times when there are two kinds of errors here one type of error is we just didn't see it because the person was so good at being bad they are one of the things a neuroscientist taught us is that about 5% of the human population has a brain anomaly that make them actual psychopaths defined as the amygdala doesn't fire properly when they do something bad guilt fear etc and in our particular industry it's probably like 10% so we raised our base rate forecast to 10% and it's gotten better but there's something you're so good at you just can't see it I mean Theranos Elizabeth Holmes lots of smart people were buying that company we didn't but it wasn't obvious to them obviously then there are moments earlier on when we had yellow flags we overrode because we were so emotionally committed to the idea that we had a business we did in the dental space it was Medicaid dental clinics for kids that were black and Hispanic and I'm from that

SPEAKER_569: I had two huge fielders but they

SPEAKER_47: were more personal moments of learning for me one was we were in the midst of building a phone and it didn't come to pass and if I really think about what I thought the problem was this was when I was at Facebook what the problem then versus now then I would have said Zuck and I had a huge thing and blah blah blah now what I would have said is I didn't really understand my own limitations and what I was really asking of him and the board in that moment and then the second is there were all these moments that were people decisions at social capital that

SPEAKER_45: ultimately manifested in sub quality financial and investment decisions and had I had it to do over again I would not have ignored some of the red flags because I was so desirous to be in the game to you know be in it

Chamath Palihapitiya: that I probably you know looked the other way a little bit on folks that you know I'll just take the practical example I remember

SPEAKER_45: in a 300 million dollar fund I put 25 or 30 million dollars into bitcoin at 50 bucks a coin and when the thing went to like 150 or something just the pressure to distribute was so high as a leader as a leader

Chamath Palihapitiya: versus something

SPEAKER_47: you know my job as a investment partner and so you learn you know you learn what you're good at you learn where your strengths are and you try to just get better

Chamath Palihapitiya: try to fix those weaknesses I mean at the end of the day what we're both saying is the same thing which is ultimately it has nothing to do with anybody else it still comes back to you and what your skill set is in your toolbox and whether you're upgrading your toolbox everything

SPEAKER_82: Friedberg Sacks any mistakes that you're

SPEAKER_14: able to access through your CPUs

SPEAKER_578: in your long term storage

SPEAKER_471: well I think as you get older you learn how to pick your battles better and you just have to decide like what are the occasions that are really worth fighting for which aren't you know and sometimes you just let it go and others you have to fight and just knowing when you should choose which path I think is really important and by the way

SPEAKER_581: the guy you really

SPEAKER_471: want behind you in a battle is this guy so phenomenal investor back when I was on the founder side of the table so

SPEAKER_583: good brawler yeah for sure that's why I got him a samurai sword for his birthday he did yes a samurai sword

SPEAKER_21: the collection of samurai swords you saw in my apartment started with David Sachs a samurai sword ah very nice thank you David it's very sharp too

SPEAKER_590: weren't your kids trying to play with it or something it was not a toy yes it's not a toy

SPEAKER_102: Friedberg anything in that long-term storage tape drives of a

SPEAKER_75: I've made a lot of mistakes it's really hard I'm very hard on myself when I was young I always said there's no limit and I always believed that and when I hit walls in my life it was very very difficult

SPEAKER_53: because it totally countered what I what I felt was possible I always thought everything was going to be a success there's no way I'm going to let anything fucking fail there's no way I'm going to let anything not work my voice is cracking not because I'm crying because I'm losing my voice so we know

SPEAKER_75: it's all we need if you cry now everybody's going to be oh my god

SPEAKER_596: it's all for the vote it's all for the vote he actually does have emotions see but I would say he's smart and kind yeah and a vegan yeah he's perfect the biggest mistake I've made

SPEAKER_213: he's my dream boyfriend maybe coming on the stage was the biggest mistake I've made join in the pop oh man

SPEAKER_75: but I think Antonio's point is right you know you just have to be willing to learn and evolve it's you know I now know that my life isn't about everything I do has to work 100% of the time and being so hard on myself caused a lot of like emotional challenges for me over time but getting getting to this point where I can now be much more calculated

SPEAKER_267: and just move forward quickly and learn from it has been a big evolution for me it's just a general statement yeah

SPEAKER_317: and I would oh sorry well no it's okay I just I was thinking about it while these guys were being so candid and I was immediately going to punt and go to the next question but I thought that would be unfair you know I think two things

SPEAKER_84: one I think a lot of my decision making early on was out of fear fear of losing whatever I had gained up until that point so although I was a risk taker and I was being bold in one way I was also throttling myself because I was just so scared that I would lose whatever gains I had and it made me an imperfect manager of people an imperfect person maybe on edge a little too much and maybe not picking my battles to David's point I saw everything as a battle because those wins were so important to me because they were so hard fought and then I think later in my life I realized I never actually thought about what I enjoyed I just thought about winning to an extent that was not healthy and then after Dave Goldberg died and Tony Shea died I really took a self-assessment of what I enjoyed doing and I mentioned this yesterday you know hanging out with these gentlemen and to Antonio's way of phrasing it which is just beautiful the fellowship I thought that's the joy you know my family my kids my wife and this fellowship with my friends that I wanted to invest in and I made a deliberate effort to be a better friend a better parent a better husband and because of all the gains I got from that and the joy that I got from it and I just thought a little bit God I do like those conversations I do like writing the book I do like throwing the events I'm just going to do things I enjoy which took me 30 years of my career to actually assess what is it that I like and maybe I should enjoy the journey a little bit more so I think it's a great question I appreciate it let's take one more

SPEAKER_606: thank you

SPEAKER_84: enjoy the journey

SPEAKER_608: hi besties my name is Arya I was the third or fourth employee at DoorDash and my question is regarding oh sorry my favorite bestie yeah that was a joke by the way my favorite bestie is Chamath and Sax although it's honestly Sophie's Choice my question is regarding the positive impact that Silicon Valley could have on the political discourse and politics which I know you know there's typically an aversion to in tech you know you all have done a fantastic job outlining what those problems are as well as your guests what I'm wondering is what a viable path forward looks like you know Chamath you mentioned that people in DC pay close attention to the podcast Sax has recently endorsed Michael Schellenberger which I really hope can save our home state and I'm wondering is the solution something akin to a third party like what Andrew Yang is trying to do or some new I don't know Silicon Valley techno party or you know is there

SPEAKER_610: what does that look like I'm curious well I don't think it's set up to actually have a third party

SPEAKER_47: structurally in America so what you have to do practically speaking is field more centrist normal people on both sides whether they're Republicans or Democrats that's a practical thing that we can all do and then we can all show up and vote for those people so that the majority voice is much clearer than it is today because right now the fringes a little bit get to hijack the process and so we take things that are that should be common sense and we pervert them in a way that just makes no progress possible I really do think that we have that impact I'm not sure how much can be quant of that can be quantified but when I spend time in DC I think it's true what I was told and what I've heard from people it's basically

Chamath Palihapitiya: required listening or viewing it helps shape people's opinions doesn't mean they follow it but I think it helps people think about things in a more normal way I think what happened today is like a perfect example like the way that Glenn Greenwald and Antonio Garcia Martinez debate like that's probably for some of you was really unsettling maybe raise your hand if you were just like you felt awkward honestly just be honest with you okay well you shouldn't because that's normal my point is it helps you make it seem more normal because those guys were not saying to each other that you're worthless and you're not they were just debating

SPEAKER_612: by the way we went out for a beer

David Sacks: after that yeah this is my point so the three of us I was like okay we need to like go out and get a drink and cool down so

SPEAKER_45: I'm not chastising you for feeling that way I'm just saying this is what the culture does to folks it makes you even afraid to hear people

Chamath Palihapitiya: debate things and still have respect for each other the way that he and Palmer kind of dealt with that that's incredible the courage that Palmer had to say what he did and then for him to be the first guy to walk out and then to own

SPEAKER_47: that that's a I think those are really important moments and you have

SPEAKER_193: you have 700 more people capable of being

SPEAKER_47: that way because of what just happened so yeah I think it's a slow march but I think we're we're doing we're riding a small dent in a small way

SPEAKER_261: 20 years ago every political show on TV was a debate format like going all the way back to Willie Buff Buckley versus Gore Vidal or Pat Buchanan versus Michael Kinsley on Crossfire I mean they were all debates now like none of them are debates it's all just their own little echo chambers I think it's one of the reasons why this pod is successful is we actually can have debates and there is a divergence of views

SPEAKER_615: what do you think Antonio is there some have you ever

SPEAKER_21: listened to this pod I was on one once dancing in the background oh that's right yes thank you the dancing bear

SPEAKER_617: yeah he did dance behind him I recorded an episode from his house when you look

SPEAKER_84: at politics any interest there any behind the scenes work you've done and how do you think about it just as we get into as Gen Xers

SPEAKER_620: boomers are going away I mean we're going to kind of inherit this whether we like it or not

SPEAKER_17: yes I would say a couple things first whenever you have times you look historically I think it's important to contextualize this when you have moments of large technological change you always have political disruption because the means of communication have changed the Gutenberg press the tall ship and you just go back and look it always leads to a lot of disruption and often to war and so the question of are those of us who are technologists at the top of the system do we have a responsibility to steward this technology responsibly we absolutely do I believe we do and I think that has been forgotten that's number one number two I have been involved in campaigns and it's interesting right now what I'm doing is supporting any centrist candidate that I think is good on either side of the aisle of the aisle I'm a registered democrat I support democrats for most of my life but the reality is now all I care about is sensible people that I think are really good and I'm engaging in micro-targeting efforts across the spectrum in primary races I would encourage all of you and anyone up here who cares about the American political system to engage in the primaries because the primaries are what determines the quality of the candidates that actually are up for election and they're actually decided by very few people like how many of us actually voted in the primary like very few of you very few of you okay so rather than us just complain about the divisiveness of American politics next time please go vote

SPEAKER_62: in the primary and go vote for the center's candidate

SPEAKER_590: by the way did I hear a lot of support from Michael Schellenberger out there

SPEAKER_628: let's have him on the pod maybe yeah

SPEAKER_629: hi favorite bus is Chamath I heard you speak with Vinod Khosla at Hack the North at the University of Waterloo so my question is Amar talked about these like startup generating systems like Stanford or PayPal do you see like over the pandemic do you see any like remote or distributed systems that have like appeared or do you see any like building that are not just

SPEAKER_630: centered in one geographical location I'll be really

SPEAKER_47: honest I'm not a huge believer in this whole decentralized work movement I don't think any high quality work can get done on difficult problems so I think that there are types of

SPEAKER_45: products and types of problems that can be solved in a remote way certain forms of software for certain kinds of products but for example let's just say you're trying to engineer you know a pharma drug I don't believe that unless you're sitting there collaborating talking debating you can do that necessarily over a zoom if you're trying to build something physical you know we have a business that 3D prints rockets those guys can't do that by just you know zooming around and having a couple calls that doesn't happen so I think it's too premature to kind of say working together has no value I also think there's a huge cultural divide that will get created in America between these companies that come together and the companies that and I think that the ones that come together have a chance of having more empathy in the end because there are moments where

Chamath Palihapitiya: you can actually get to know the people you're working with every day and I think that that gives you margin for error because everybody sometimes is a little you know dealing with their own things in their lives sometimes can be a little rude and we all have tolerances those tolerances are higher when you spend time with people and they're much much lower when you're just in a zoom so I'm you know

SPEAKER_193: I'd love to believe that everybody's gonna be Airbnb being in a castle and a tent and a

SPEAKER_47: buck and tree house but I'm just not sure that that's realistic to really solve the big problems that America has

SPEAKER_164: you believe in the work from home Antonio you have a strong feeling one way or the other

SPEAKER_41: I'm more on Shavas camp than not but I will say we have some great companies that are fully remote we have a

SPEAKER_17: coalition example in cyber security it's fully remote run by wonderful CEOs under the age of 35 and he's found a way to make it work and I've learned a lot from him and so I'm trying to be very open algorithm about this and I think there are people that make it work I can't make it work I want my people in the office we invest in pharma we invest in biotech and we have some biotech companies that have made it work remotely and some that insist on bringing people back if you're in a lab obviously you have to be back but I think there'll be a mixed environment and I also think there's an interesting retooling going on in productivity I think the productivity numbers in American that we're seeing today are wrong because they're not capturing what's happening underneath the technology because these remote environments so I don't know yet I think it's going to depend on the CEO and how good people are and the type of industry you're in

SPEAKER_14: yeah I'm keeping an open mind towards it I know that for investing it was so much more efficient you know people could do 20 minute zooms instead of two hour meetings

SPEAKER_45: but I mean think of the problem that that created look at the overhang when

SPEAKER_268: you could raise tens of

SPEAKER_45: billions of dollars over zoom that turned out to not be a good

SPEAKER_268: thing well

SPEAKER_84: and but also if you're a capital allocator being able to meet with three times as many people you could find more companies

SPEAKER_47: so I talked to a friend of mine who raised billions of dollars over the

SPEAKER_45: last couple year cycle and he said I was able to raise 50 million dollar checks in 30 minute meetings now I'm spending five hours for a 10 million dollar check and my reaction to him in the back of my mind was that's probably how it should be well

SPEAKER_17: part of that's the quarter that makes the

SPEAKER_45: entire system a

SPEAKER_643: little bit healthier

SPEAKER_17: yeah I mean we raised 1.7 dollar fund during COVID and it was all done doing Zoom raising new fund now and I'm flying around the world taking meetings but part of that just because people are coming back to the office and the liquidity cycle has gotten is reversed on us now right so the denominator has gotten it's gotten harder to get capital but for sure I think I agree with Chamath here like being able to allocate 10 million dollars in a venture fund in two years over Zoom and think that's on just the metrics and not see people I think that's a bad idea

SPEAKER_494: yeah I'm talking about 250k 500k might be okay take another question here

SPEAKER_646: my name is Kenneth Brown the third and my favorite bestie is Jcal the charisma is legendary he's my favorite bestie too by the way don't be offended and then my question is what advice would you give to non-technical people trying to fit into the tech oriented startup venture world I'm an econ major but this just seems exciting like how do I become a part of it

SPEAKER_647: and Tony have thoughts

SPEAKER_30: and I think that the the best way to do this is to find a company you

SPEAKER_17: think is great and get a job that's a reality I mean I would just I would associate myself with the business that I really respect you'll respect and if the job is in the mail room the job is a janitor whatever just figure it out because what happens to high growth companies is they need good people and you'll be surprised how much being the first person in and the last person to leave if there's an office and doing the work that people ask you to do with a smile and a great attitude like those people may move up fast so I would just find a way in man wherever it is however it is make it happen and start moving up

SPEAKER_266: by the way you're not you're not non-technical you're not yet technical and I think that's the opportunity that sits in front of everyone that you can become technical I had a my cousin who was a music major UCLA worked in music and then he came back from COVID and he started learning how to

SPEAKER_53: program online taught himself spent six months in his parents basement teaching himself how to retool his life and got some contract jobs on Reddit and boards

SPEAKER_267: and other stuff and he got this amazing full-time job offer a few weeks ago and it was really amazing that I got to watch him transform himself in his life over the last year and a half just by taking that on himself and he became technical it wasn't that he had a non-technical degree it's that he just wasn't yet technical and I think everyone has that opportunity

SPEAKER_652: I'll tell you a great

SPEAKER_45: quick story he's a minority guy grew up in Houston really wanted to work at Tesla couldn't get a job couldn't get a job couldn't get a job finally got a job on the line he was making 16-20 bucks an hour worked there did well transferred worked there did well transferred ends up in the supply chain group ends up working in battery supply chain ends up basically being two layers between him and Elon gets into an MBA goes there for a few years works on the side

SPEAKER_47: and he ended up raising a bunch of money to start a battery business recently and this is an example of what he just said which is you know

SPEAKER_45: there are these jobs available and then it's just you know is your chutzpah and your hustle and he's an example but it's a very motivating example to me because it just shows it's so possible

SPEAKER_47: you know and there are phenomenal organizations that identify talent and will move you up really quickly

SPEAKER_267: and knowledge is literally free and experience is up to you

SPEAKER_14: yeah the overriding I think advice you're getting here is that skills are acquirable and my lord

SPEAKER_84: getting to 50-60% proficiency on a skill just given what's on YouTube or MIT Open Courseware or any number of websites you can do it in a matter of weeks now of course going from 60-70 70-80 that might take months and then eventually years but startups are looking for generalists they're looking for people who can say I need somebody who's going to do the accounting and figure out how to do an email merge and build a mailing list and then I need somebody to help with recruiting if you can just become 30-40-50% as you know good at each of those things at a startup you know before people get specialized eventually you'll have 10 people doing recruiting

SPEAKER_656: but in the beginning it's one third of somebody's job

SPEAKER_655: so I love startups for that

SPEAKER_45: the sign of a great culture of a company is how little the obvious labels matter once you're inside of it and the best companies like a Tesla can become a trillion dollar market cap because they find the kid working on the line and then four years later is running the battery supply chain it happens because you're looking at the quality of the individual and their potential where they went to school doesn't matter their gender doesn't matter their ethnicity doesn't matter none of it matters because the people don't see it

SPEAKER_661: they see work ethic they see results yeah they see

SPEAKER_45: integrity so that's another litmus test for you is like in the companies even if you're a CEO and if you're building if every other day you're reminding everybody else of like where people need to have gone to school and where they should have been that's a road to nowhere let's give

SPEAKER_664: Antonio a big round of applause very nice

SPEAKER_667: thank you thank you very

SPEAKER_669: much appreciate it thank you thank you

SPEAKER_670: next question

SPEAKER_672: thank you

SPEAKER_673: over here yeah

SPEAKER_672: we kept

SPEAKER_673: Antonio here for like two hours I know

SPEAKER_672: I feel bad he's like I've never been on a show before he's like

SPEAKER_676: alright

SPEAKER_656: we're gonna

SPEAKER_634: just take 14 to 20 more questions go Sonny Lampa here

SPEAKER_679: Chamath's my favorite bestie there you go

SPEAKER_681: huh because of him I shop at

SPEAKER_679: Laura Piana only so thank you so I just got a question for Friedberg I know that you wanted to talk about this yesterday about this sort of consumer credit crisis on the horizon that you see as potentially like the next shoe to drop so I think you wanted to mention something yesterday about it but because of time and stuff I don't

SPEAKER_362: have anything

SPEAKER_266: more to add than what I said on the pod I'm not like I don't think this is like a high certainty I'm just concerned there's a lot of loans out there a lot of buy now pay later a lot of stuff that has floating rates attached to it if we're

SPEAKER_53: going to have a recession we're going to see job loss you're going to see these and by the way these auto loan portfolios have like crazy outperformed over the last few years and now that these and a lot of those auto loans are floating rate those asset values are inflated people are losing jobs you could see a bunch of these things start to create a bit of a cascading effect over the next couple quarters depending on how this but I do think it's going to be pretty kind of surprising buy now pay later I saw a stat I

SPEAKER_689: do you most want to solve right now

SPEAKER_692: binary lifters actually edible quinoa actually I've been working on so

SPEAKER_440: look I've spoken about this publicly I think it's a big problem I was going to talk about it in

SPEAKER_267: lot of the systems that we use to basically make our food it's a big infrastructure play you know a couple square miles you know using Elon's analogy you could basically recreate all the food on earth you could distribute those systems and so I think that it can be extremely carbon negative it sucks carbon out of the atmosphere it would create incredible jobs it's an incredible infrastructure opportunity it would return billions of acres of land back to whatever natural form we want them to be so that's an area that I'm spending a lot of time in and that I'm particularly excited about awesome thank you

SPEAKER_697: okay number two hi there I'm Katie Croft nice to be you all imagine a parallel timeline where I say you're all my favorite

SPEAKER_700: because it's all true so I'm curious kind of extension of the media question have you given much thought to forming a consortium or community with the all in podcasts and kind of what further applications of that because if you think about the force multiplicity of any number of these minds in the same room working towards the problems we've talked about from education to on-shoring energy it could probably be pretty considerable the impact there because we have such respect for what you guys do and how you're doing it and the discourse you're having that we're clearly all die hards here so I'm just curious if you thought about it I'm trying to inception you here

SPEAKER_317: yeah I think so I mean this is a shit ton of work but I think it is and we all have day jobs you know step one was to try to

SPEAKER_84: see and I told the best is let's see if we can each make getting to the pod each a priority and a habit and that took the first year or so now it is a habit we all value doing this it has had tremendous impact on our lives personally and professionally it's been very inspiring for each of us so we had to lock into that first doing this was a ton of work and we'll see if it's sustainable and we have some other ideas we wanted to do a college tour was the other thing we

SPEAKER_317: were and then having them build a media company to take on CNN

SPEAKER_224: we haven't really given it much thought but you never know they were here

SPEAKER_317: totally randomly we're not recruiting or anything but you know anything's possible

SPEAKER_705: hi besties again I'm rejoice I run a talent marketplace for early entry workers we use gamification to accelerate the question is about the great resignation which we believe is a half told narrative

SPEAKER_708: so how can their own labor supply and demand

David Friedberg: wow I think that's a very difficult problem

SPEAKER_47: to solve I think again if as a supporter of capitalism I think one of the biggest things that we don't get right is how money gets to the right problems I've said this roughly before but like money is really just a voting way of deciding what you think is important in the world

SPEAKER_45: and that's why the accumulation of money as just a practical matter forget moral or philosophical is so

Chamath Palihapitiya: important because you can vote what you want the thing is that aggregation happens easily distribution is terribly broken and so the ability for folks to solve practical

SPEAKER_47: problems is very hard because the ROI isn't obvious and getting money from capital pools like us to individuals and sole proprietors is a basic I think it is a very broken A because the systems don't exist B because the laws don't allow it and until that gets solved I'm not exactly sure how a business who can actually build for the future well or solve their supply forecast or demand forecast can actually get the capital you need because the lubricant that allows you to solve that problem is money has

Chamath Palihapitiya: so I mentioned this thing we tried this thing called capital as a service doesn't get to the sole proprietor level but it gets to small 5-10 person companies we would send $50,000 checks here's how hard it is the cost of getting a $50,000 check we did this fishery in Indonesia it cost us $125,000 to give them $50,000 we

SPEAKER_67: it just goes to show you how really complicated

SPEAKER_713: in the system okay fourth question and then one more after that

SPEAKER_714: hey I'm Prem as a Waterloo poker player favorite besties Chamath I'm very into next gen manufacturing but as a pre-seed investor my concern is follow on financing how do we get more investors interested in investing in the physical world because at least in Canada it seems like most investors

SPEAKER_47: capitalism right now which is that technology investors by and large and I don't mean to disparage anyone here are not well rooted in the principles of math and finance and I think that that's a real problem because in

Chamath Palihapitiya: the person that is receiving that information is unfortunately not as well instructed as they should be to understand how to make a decision from that that's what we have today so it's a little bit of a miseducation problem and it's going to affect the non-sexy areas rockets will always get money but 3D manufacturing at scale may not because of this exact issue because people don't know what Roik means

SPEAKER_268: sir you have the final question

SPEAKER_718: favorite bestie is Friedberg and hate to end on a recession question

SPEAKER_721: why do you guys think it upsets you

SPEAKER_75: so much well because

SPEAKER_723: you're the biggest pain in the ass you are the most fucking

SPEAKER_724: neurotic person every time we post an episode we should cancel the episode we fucked everything up again why do we keep screwing up we're going to destroy the I read the first nine

SPEAKER_727: comments and the down vote rate I was on YouTube somebody

SPEAKER_724: set the volume

SPEAKER_731: the amount of noise we deal with from this one they're not going to stop it's like literally you should

SPEAKER_734: not reward him it's like his inner monologue is crazy you know if you had a two-year-old child who you've given too much

SPEAKER_739: it seems

SPEAKER_718: like a common theme on the stage these last couple days is you all feel like we're in a recession or heading towards a recession but I get a feeling that you have the confidence that this is going to be a quick recession like a year so my question would be why do you feel after 13 years of market manipulation by the Fed that it's going to be cured in under a year

SPEAKER_45: no I think you're right the average recession as measured like if you look back historically is two quarters

Chamath Palihapitiya: the problem is that we've never really figured out what it's going to take with the distortion of money that never should have been in the system because if you think of a supply demand imbalance as being a naturally self-balancing phenomenon if you perturb one side of it by an enormous amount exactly to your point I think the open question that the world has right now is is that really a two-quarter problem well the Fed has told you that they're going to take three years to get three trillion you've heard from David that ten trillion was put in probably another three or four trillion was productively used but that still leaves another three trillion of sloshing around money that we don't know so I think it's an

SPEAKER_170: open question I don't know what you guys think Friedberg how many months how many quarters Sachs how many quarters if you had to guess

SPEAKER_440: again I just hate this definition of recession where it's about GDP decline when we had a lot of

SPEAKER_267: the underlyings in those numbers for GDP that I feel were like artificially inflated for a couple of quarters because of a bunch of the structural stuff we've talked about so I don't know like if you look deeper at economic growth companies signing up more customers so like a lot of technology companies are about increasing productivity with their tools with what they're selling and those businesses are going to continue to do well and to grow and to increase a lot of the structural stuff that we saw with the GFC the one thing I am concerned about which I've highlighted is this consumer credit risk and besides that it seems like you know things are you know on good footing so I don't know like the technical recession definition probably a couple quarters yeah

SPEAKER_261: you never know and I think the best way to look at the future is by doing scenario planning so we basically we could say this could be a you know short medium or long recession short would be six months medium might be 18 months and you know long might be two years plus and we just say I don't know say one third one third probability and that kind of gives you some picture

SPEAKER_748: exactly

SPEAKER_261: so now what we're telling our portfolio companies is you want to have two and a half years of runway right now because you got to go raise six months before you run out of cash and you really want to have cushion because things could be choppy for two years I'm not saying they're going to be but they could be you don't want your company to run out of money and die just because of macroeconomic conditions that are no fault of your own so if you can try to engineer that amount of runway that's better I also think that here's the thing about a quick recession is or the prospect for one we don't know what other shoes are going to drop consumer credit is still a shoe that we don't know if it's going to drop look six months ago did we think we'd be talking about tiger global or softbank for that matter

SPEAKER_471: potentially teetering on the verge of being redempted out of business

SPEAKER_752: or coinbase and peloton just withering to nothing

SPEAKER_328: things can change fast we don't

SPEAKER_261: know what systemic risk is in the system that hasn't been flushed out yet and we won't be out of this until it feels like

SPEAKER_755: everything's been flushed out and then the market's back and things are sort of on an upward trajectory again clearly we're not there

SPEAKER_758: real estate crypto doesn't feel like that's rushed out yet either so do we have a clip to play as an outro I don't

SPEAKER_760: know was this the clip of the cut clip before we go can we please say thanks to the

SPEAKER_762: team that works here and the team Jason your team at all in

SPEAKER_764: incredible team thanks to everybody all of you guys have worked so hard they really put a lot of effort into this

SPEAKER_137: pretty

SPEAKER_769: like dungeon dragon sleepovers in grade seven and grade eight

SPEAKER_770: I was actually programming Pascal and we made a water moisturizer and it was a binary lifter much like the ones you have on Tatooine we made a complete replica of Uncle Owens water vaporizers on Tatooine and that took six years but it was great

SPEAKER_773: you should have seen the look on our teachers faces okay

SPEAKER_775: you guys have your cold open let's go