Nick, can you cue the tape? This is now the worst form of a shot. Oh my god. Oh, I mean, the fact that he hit the rim is a miracle. The most unsolored. What is? Oh, god. Oh, I have to wish we could get slow motion on that. Oh, it's like the ball. The ball is slow forward. Now, look at his hand. Look at the right hand. Look, look at that. What is that about? One hand.
It's, I mean, that has nothing to do with basketball. It was the most unnatural basketball slash athletic movement I've seen. Come on, wasn't that bad?
I mean, the lean forward, the lean forward, the kind of like sassy jump, you know, the sassy jump. When you say sassy, he loves sash aid on the side. It's nice. Like your winter slide. Brain man, David. We open source it to the fans and they've discovered reason. Love you guys.
All right, everybody. Welcome to the All In Podcast with me again, the chairman dictator, Chamath Palihapatea, David Freiberg, the Sultan of Science, and the rain man himself, David Sacks. Our first topic will go to our war correspondent. The US and its allies have struck Houthi targets in Yemen. Sacks. Well, we talked about this two weeks ago on the show, and we talked about it as a escalatory risk in the Middle East back then. And I think that that is playing out now.
We fired, I don't know, maybe a hundred rockets and missiles at Yemen last night. The purpose of this strike is to restore deterrence. And I guess try and prevent the Houthis from attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea. But that deterrence is not working. I mean, there's already a new attack by the Houthis this morning of a commercial ship.
in the Red Sea. So I don't think this is going to have any impact other than to escalate the conflict in the Middle East and put us on a path to war with Iran, which is really where the neocons want to take us. You've heard, obviously, the warmongers like Lindsey Graham are calling for that. But even Speaker Mike Johnson is talking about that. I think that's where this is all headed is a larger war in the Middle East that features the US and Israel going to war with Iran. I think we should all be very concerned about that, actually.
But you have to be fair, it's not just the US. It's now the US, the UK, Israel, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi against the Houthi rebels. That's a big alliance. You've got to think that Iran will think very carefully about how close they want to get to the Houthis in the middle of all of this, because that's a huge armada, if you will, of countries that I don't think you really want to cross as a group.
Well, I think Saudi Arabia and UAE are playing this very carefully, I think. They did not participate in the strikes. They did allow the US to fly overhead or to use its territory, but they released a statement calling for restraint and de-escalation. So I think they're very nervous about this blowing up into a wider regional war. I don't think they want that.
The allies who participated in the campaign of airstrikes were UK, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, and Bahrain. But I don't think they actually did anything. I don't think they contributed any assets. They just provided their names to this operation and provided some diplomatic cover. Freeberg, any thoughts? Well, sex, you posted a comment on Twitter, which I wanted to respond to, where you said China
has the largest shipping volume through the Red Sea. And they're staying out of this conflict letting the US do the dirty work. But the Houthis didn't attack Chinese ships. They specifically attacked Western ships. Isn't that correct? I mean, this is a very targeted, disruptive event that the Houthis have been undertaking for some time now. And they're using these very interesting tactics with drones that can be very destructive and very hard to block and doing it, not a Chinese ship, but at a very targeted enemy.
What the hoodies have said is that they're only attacking ships that are either Israeli or going to Israel, but in reality, they've attacked a much wider range than that. But not Chinese. It may be true that they haven't attacked ships that are declaring themselves to be Chinese ships or Russian ships. However,
There are more Chinese shipping containers on all of the ships are going through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal than any other country. So there's no question that if we're talking about the disruption of global trade, this is going to have a big impact on Chinese trade, whether it's on Chinese ships or not.
or it could benefit them because they can get through that shipping lane and the west can get through. But foreign ships, European ships that have Chinese shipping containers on them are not getting through. So their trade is still getting disrupted. Nevertheless, they don't feel the need to engage in this
militaristic response or participating. So in terms of understanding implications of the escalation in this conflict, let's just quickly talk about number one, I'm assuming shipping prices are going to go up, freight prices are going to go up. But hold on a second, we talked about this with Ryan. Remember the question that I asked him, this is really an issue for Europe. It's not an issue for the United States.
because there are alternative routes. You can go through the Pacific and you can go down through the bottom of Africa, right? And all that does is add like a five or 10% increase. So what we're really debating is what is the risk of inflation and a backup of goods and shipping rates into Europe? And this is why I don't understand why America needs to even get involved. I understand why the Netherlands and the UK and France and all these folks need to send resources to unclog this. That makes a lot of sense.
But I don't see why the US needs to be involved other than providing moral support or logistical support. What is the point? Well, Chamath is exactly my point is the number one type of trade that's going through the Red Sea are shipping containers from China going to European ports. Right.
And as a result of what the hoodies are doing, it's having to go around a little point of Africa. It's adding two or three weeks to the trip and is raising the cost of a shipping container from China from, say, $1,500 to $3,000. Is Europe and China who are impacted the most? But for some reason, it's the US that decides it has to take the lead in doing this. And the problem is that, first of all, the action is futile. I mean, the hoodies have been at war on and off
with the Saudis for a decade, and the Saudis have been backed by Western weapons, and we have not been able to defeat the Houthis. So this missile strike last night is not going to deter them. It's not going to stop them. They're very determined, very tough fighters. Second, they are going to be looking for retaliation. They're going to be looking for blowback. And to come off to your point, they're not going to be looking for retaliation against China or Europe. They're going to be looking at it.
against the United States. So we're incurring this cost and risk on to ourselves. So let me put this question to you then. We have no.
obvious economic incentive to get involved because we can sustain our economy through different shipping ports that at best raise rates five or 10 percent, right? We can absorb that in the economy. A hundred percent, which could drive inflation is a European problem. So there's no economic incentive necessarily to get involved. So what is the incentive? It feels like not to play conspiracy theorists, but like a wag the dog moment, another distraction to add to the plate,
What do you think about that line of thinking? I tweeted something just like that. This does feel it's a wag the dog in the sense that the Biden administration was going to explain the reference for folks that. Yeah, this movie called wag the dog that came out in the early 90s where.
The president is up for reelection and there's a horrible scandal that's about to come out like a Monica Lewinsky type scandal. This is before Monica Lewinsky, by the way, but it really was sort of one of those movies that kind of predicted the future. But at any event, the president's trying to avoid this Monica Lewinsky type scandal. And so the political aides and advisors decide the way to do that is to start a war.
But they don't start a real war they basically manufacture a fake war on a sound stage and a movie studio. And it's pretty hilarious how they keep the whole thing going. David Mamet, who's a brilliant, brilliant writer, wrote that script. But this movie came out right around the time of the Lewinsky scandal with Clinton. And so therefore it took on this larger political and cultural significance.
Yeah, it's been used. So yeah, so wag the dog is, you know, you basically start a war because of the political benefits as opposed to the real necessity of going to war. And I think you can make that accusation here, Chamath, because I think that the Biden administration was looking impotent. I mean, they were basically telling the hoodies to stop there pleading with them to stop interfering with international shipping. The hoodies weren't listening. By the way, the reason why the hoodies are doing this is they're doing an insolidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.
They've demanded that the Israeli invasion of Gaza stop and humanitarian aid be let in, and they're not going to stop interfering with global trade until that happens. So that's the Houthis position. The Biden administration has been telling them to stop, and I think that they were looking increasingly feckless and impotent, and that's why they did this strike. The problem is that the strike's not going to have any impact, and so what's the point?
Well, is it that or is it that I think if you take the wag, the dog analogy to the limit, I think maybe a different interpretation. I'm not saying that they did this, but a different interpretation of that analogy would be that they are struggling domestically. And I think J Cal tweeted this, but if you look at the polls and you look at Dean Phillips, all of a sudden, and you look at what's happening on the Republican side, there's so much activity.
and momentum, frankly, for non-Biden candidates all across the board, that that would be the most wide-the-dog explanation, in my opinion, which is to distract folks from the domestic malaise by pointing someplace far away and saying, we're doing something very righteous here. Let's all get on the same page and support us.
How does that logically make sense to Martha? The U.S. is against wars and people are tired of wars. Like what would be the, there's the only problem I have with the logic of the way to dog theory is nobody wants wars. Who's against wars, Jason? And the American people have been very much against starting farm wars. We've talked about it here. So let's talk about the people that run the country.
That's what you're saying they're doing it the logic here is wag the dog is to curry favor. It's actually said they're rallying this is to rally the american people around like a patriot cause. But this isn't like a you know nine eleven situation where bush got a lot of credibility for saying hey we're gonna go get these terrorists.
Americans don't want more wars right now. The polling is very specific on that. So then, I guess, Saks, what is the logic there to beg the dog if this is something American people don't want? Well, I think you're right, Jason, in the sense that the American people are exhausted by wars, especially Middle Eastern wars. We've just gotten out of two decades of endless forever wars in the Middle East. And I don't think the majority of the American people want to get
back in. So I think you're right on that level. And it's true that if you were to pull the American people and ask them, are you in favor of getting in more wars? They would say, no, the problem is that with every war, the mainstream media starts propagandizing for the wars and they'll basically demonize whoever it is that we're going to go to war with and explaining why they're a huge threat, they'll engage in threat inflation. And so the American people end up supporting it.
So we're against war in the abstract, but in every particular case, we end up supporting it. That's what happened with Ukraine. It's even happening right now. If you look at polling for this hoodie conflict, I think most Americans believe it's a good thing to strike the hoodies. So yeah, there are against it in the abstract, but in each particular case, the media is able to manufacture consent for the US involvement.
So just to challenge that as well. So now our theory is, or your theory is the media plus the Biden administration are in cahoots to wag the dog, create this support of a war in order to distract from domestic issues in order to curry favor with the American public that doesn't really want more wars. That's where I'm saying like, I think wag the dog might have been something 20 years ago, like you're saying that
could work as a technique, but I can't imagine anybody would want to do more military action at this point in time when the American public is exhausted from it. Which is what you said for the last six months on this topic. Look, I tweeted exactly that sentiment is that I don't think wagging the dog is going to work. I think there'll be a short term rally around the flag effect.
But I think that overall, if this conflict is still going on in November, it's going to weaken Biden by making him look like a president who's lost control of events. So I agree with you that ultimately the perpetuation of this conflict is not ultimately in Biden's interest.
Now, nonetheless, it may factor into their political calculation that in the short term, they think this makes them look good. That would seem super incompetent as a political strategy to me, but I'm a political expert. Well, I mean, despite the fact that this administration claimed to be the foreign policy grownups, they haven't shown a lot of competence. They couldn't even find Lloyd Austin who's a secretary of defense for five days. That's not what happened.
No, he checked into the hospital for a procedure and no one could find them for several days. And there was an article I think on CNN talking about how he was managing this hootie strike from his hospital bed. And that was weird. I hope the man's okay. He's got prostate cancer. I know. It's that sad. He had a UTI. He had a UTI. That's why he was in the hospital. But fair enough, but no one in the White House, the White House couldn't find him for a couple of days.
Is that true? They couldn't find him. I mean, having a UTI is a very benign. Well, he had a prostatectomy and then he got discharged from the hospital and somewhere along the way, he got a UTI, which was severe, apparently, went back to Walter Reed. And yeah, in those three or four days, the handoff of power to his deputy
happened. She was on vacation on a beach somewhere. And you're right. And the problem was that the other person, the chief of staff had the flu, so they couldn't escalate to the white. So it was like a comedy of errors, but I don't think it was anything. But anyways, I mean, imagine if you were like a sea level executive at a company,
and you're gonna be out of the office for a few days and unreachable. You would set up a clear chain of command. You'd have a deputy who the CEO could get a hold of if necessary.
In this case, you've got the Secretary of Defense who, if the United States was attacked in some way, is part of the chain of command. The President would need that person in the Situation Room. So the fact that they couldn't find him for a couple of days is really, I think, unforgivable. How does that even happen? Is that really true that they couldn't find him? Like they literally did not call a couple of days. This was widely reported. But they couldn't call him on his cell phone or his chief of staff or the people he was. Wow.
Yeah. Okay. All right. Very good. Having kept up on the details of his UTI and his cancer, I hope he's okay.
So segueing into markets, the likelihood of a Q1 rake cut is not looking good. We had a slightly hotter than expected December CPI interest rates hit a 22 year high in July. As everybody knows, when the Fed raised the range from 5.25 to 5.5, but they've left rates unchanged if you haven't been following it as inflation has cooled.
But in December, the CPI rose 3.4% from a year earlier. That was just a slight tick above. And of course, markets are wondering, is this going to be a glide path into a soft landing? Or could it be choppy going forward freeberg higher for longer interest rates? You think that's still going to be the case? And what are your thoughts going into the new year?
Well, Larry Summers put out a note saying that he thinks that the rates are going to stay higher than the market is predicting based on the yield curve right now. So I think the market is currently saying no cuts in March and high probability of cuts in June.
But some folks like Larry are saying might be longer because inflation is very sticky. And if you look at the breakdown on the drivers of inflation, you start to think about what's the underlying business activity that's going on, like car insurance went up by 20%.
which was one of the key drivers. And car insurance has always been this lagging indicator, but it does ultimately drive costs up later. The reason car insurance rates go up is because the cost to repair a car goes up and the cost for medical care goes up. When that happens, the insurance companies actually have to file with state regulators to get approval to raise their rates. And it can take over a year for the regulators to then approve those raising of rates. So by the time the rates get raised,
The other factors have maybe leveled out, but you're still going to have some elements of costs that are going to continue to climb for some period of time after you get the core engine.
tune down. So these are the sorts of things that I think we're seeing in the current CPI data, is that there are some of these lagging effects of an overheated economy or overstimulated economy that are now starting to play through. And so there's a number of these. It's not just car insurance, but there's a lot of things that are going to linger for a while and they're going to be very hard to work their way through the system very quickly. And as a result, it may be the case that rates are going to need to stay higher for longer.
I think the thing with inflation that is worth noting is that a couple of things are true at the same time, which I think is interesting. I think we were the ones in May of 21 that started getting very antsy around inflation and we started to look at the five and 10 year break evens. Do you guys remember that? We would like to look at that chart a lot. And I think it was very predictive.
We also used to look at the future oil curve, not that we're macroeconomists, but I think it's useful if average everyday people can have a few things to look at. If you look at those things today,
It tells you the same picture, which is inflation has cooled. We're going through the last kind of like throws of some of the random variables still being a little sticky, but the broad trend is down. I think it's indisputable. At the same time, even with the configurations in the Middle East, if you look at what people think about the future price of oil, it's also down.
Well, futures are, I think, about 5% to 10%. Future prices are about 5% to 10% lower than spot right now, for whatever that's worth. But the third thing which I think is important is we've now started to see folks come back from the new year and start to affect some pretty big layoffs and they're across industries, right? Citibank today just announced 20,000 layoffs. That's a huge amount of people that are going to lose their jobs.
So what does all of this mean? It's that I think that people expect that as inflation contracts, the money supply will expand, but demand has yet to reset properly. So that's the last thing. And I think Freeburgs mentioned this a bunch. Consumer spending has always been crazy. People living on credit, all of this stuff.
That is now finally, I think, the last thing that has to get sorted out. So in the absence of demand, back to the way you started, Jason, companies will cut expenses in order to maintain profitability because they don't really want to cut prices unless their product really sucks.
Yeah. And just to note that city group, as you mentioned, 20,000 cuts by 2026, Google also laid off hundreds of people, Amazon, hundreds of people, Discord laid off 17%. And there's a viral video going around of a woman laid off by Cloudflare.
who is only on the team for like six months or something or five months. And it does seem like firing people before the holidays laying them off is considered, yeah, you don't do it in the fourth quarter. So maybe there was some, some backed up layoffs that people decided to do into this year, but it certainly feels like SAC people are, and you said this, I think in the predictions episode or the recap episode, hey, you know, maybe it's still going to be a little bit of turbulence and the soft landing isn't guaranteed. Maybe you could expand on that.
Yeah, my prediction for the year was bumpy landing. My thought soft landing was a little too optimistic. And I also thought that this big stock market rally that we had in November, December was too much too soon. The market starting in November started pricing in about one and a half percent of rate cuts this year, believing that the inflation problem had been licked. And now what we're seeing is, first of all, you had a slightly hotter than expected inflation report. And now we have this escalating situation in Yemen.
this war in the Middle East might expand. And just so you understand, I mean, the Houthis have already said that if the United States attacks them and uses Saudi or UAE airspace to do it, that they will consider themselves a war with Saudi Arabia and UAE, and that they will try to do things like light the Saudi oil fields on fire. I don't think they have the capability to do that necessarily, but it's an indication that things are very volatile. Another thing I think we're likely to see in the Middle East is
continued attacks on US military bases in Iraq and Syria. So that whole region is a powder keg and if it develops into a wider regional war, then I think you can see an oil shock. And if there's an oil shock, I think you can kiss rate cuts goodbye because that's going to percolate through the whole economy and have a big impact on inflation.
So I just think that there's a lot of downside to these very optimistic projections that we're going to get these great cuts. It might happen, but I just see a lot of risk. Yeah. Freeberg, you think these oil shocks are here for the long term or a possibility you've been talking a lot about.
alternative energy, nuclear obviously. The US has become a net exporter of oil. Do you think this risk of oil disruption from the Middle East is with us for the long term or do you think that's waning now? There's definitely structural risk because
you have a supply chain that can get disrupted in a number of ways and limited alternative options. If you look at the chart I just shared, it's the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. So we have about 350 million barrels in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve today. That's down from
call it early 21 when we were at 650 million barrels. It was pretty much at that level for decades after the buildup leading up to 1990. We haven't been at a level this low in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve since 1983. There's not a lot of levers
for the government to intervene to support the supply, as there may have been in the last couple of years, in the case of some supply shock because of a conflict that arises in a major oil-producing region.
That was after the oil crisis of the 70s. And you look at how long it took to build it up and how large we built it. It's a really fast. I've never seen that chart before, but if you look at the, you know, I don't know if you guys remember the oil lines. Did you have them in Canada, Chama? Where in, I remember in Brooklyn, you had an even number odd number license plate thing. If you wanted to get gas, you know, some days was the even number. Some days was the odd number. I remember my parents getting online for gas and waiting for two hours or three hours to get gas.
Yeah, by the way, I'll say this is not a real cost today that we're experiencing, but as Sax is pointing out, there's a number of ways that this can become a real cost. I was in Austin this week, and the thing that shocked me the most was how cheap gas was the gas station. You can get gas for like two bucks and 25 cents a gallon. Pretty awesome. It's like $6 when you're in like, like, yeah.
Just so everyone understands how the SPR got depleted last year when inflation was the top story, you know, on the front page of every newspaper and gas prices were hitting what seven or eight dollars, the administration started releasing crude from the SPR to try and bring the price down.
And they did that for about a year and they were basically subsidizing the price of oil. Now, that's why our stockpile is low. And that was a really great political strategy. But if we end up in a real crisis, we're going to have less dry powder to deal with it.
So we could have a perfect storm of things coming together here, where at precisely the time we end up getting involved in a big war in the Middle East are tools to mitigate the oil shock that would create have been reduced by what the administration sent over the past year. Now, I don't know that that's going to happen. I mean, I still think we're several steps away from
a regional war. But you look at how many fronts now we have conflict in the Middle East. There's about five different fronts where there's conflict. You've obviously got Israel's war in Gaza. You've got Hezbollah in the north, basically firing rockets. You've got US bases in Syria and Iraq coming under attack. And now we have the US striking Yemen. So there's just so many ways that this could spiral out of control.
Is in the spr designed so that when we have an economic crisis like this to use it like a minute. Yeah, you're the Biden administration is allowed to dip it. By the way, you have to give credit to the Biden administration in one, in one form. It's not necessarily skilled per se, but. When you look at the spr depletion, they were selling at incredible moments in the market and the energy department, I actually, I think they.
They just announced that they're buying another $48 billion to replenish the SPR, so they'll be doing that now. But they were selling, if you look at these price points, they were selling when prices were $80 and $90 a barrel, and now they're buying it back at 70. So at least the United States can take some solace in the fact that we arbed out a few billion dollars for treasure.
I wonder how the SPR relates to consumption. We see this chart, but it's in the number of barrels, $350 million barrels or something like that. Is that what the chart says? And then peaked at $600,000 or $700,000? I wonder what it needs to be, Chamath, or Freeburg, as a percentage of our consumption, as more EVs hit the market. And as the number of miles per gallon goes up,
So I couldn't find a chart for that. I tried to find if anybody in the audience knows the SPR in relation to consumption, that would be a very important chart. No, I think they're pretty independent, Jason. How so? We just build it up independent of what we need? No, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is essentially that. It's not meant to be something that's meant to
bookend usage. If in a highly functioning market, there's theoretically an infinite amount of oil that's available. And so if there's more consumption, you'll be able to find more oil. You'll just have to pay different price for it. This SBR is meant to be used in very different kinds of situations. This is interesting. Yeah, right. Like when there's a disruption, when there's an acute disruption.
That's supposed to be a break glass in case of emergency. Exactly. But how many days is supposed to last? That's what I'm sort of getting at. That's what I wonder because over time, are we consuming more oil now as a country? Or are we consuming less? I would think consuming less. But the thing you have to keep in mind is that even in an acute shock, you can't just look at the SPR because we have now domestic oil capability. Right. And a lot of that developed under two presidents Obama and Trump. And both of them deserve a lot of credit because we have a capability now.
to be self-sufficient. And we are a net exporter because of the work that happened. Not gas during that time. Yeah, not gas. Oh my gosh. Do you guys see all of this, Michigena with Carta this week? Amazing. Absolutely. Actually, it's on the docket. So those of you who don't know Carta is cap table software. If you don't know what the cap and cap table is, which many of you might not, stands for capitalization. What is it? It's a Google or an Excel sheet that says who owns the number of shares in a company. This gets very complex in private companies.
And they've made quite a business out of it. Wait, wait, wait, can I pause you there? There was a lot of comments that said exactly that. It gets very complicated. I apologize. I've owned equity in companies for 20 years. What the hell is exactly complicated?
Well, I don't understand that statement. I'm not, I'm not directing it to you, Jason. Yeah, yeah. But I want, I can tell you, yeah, well, because I feel like that is like some BS statement. Yeah, it's not. The thing is you as acting as a price round individual in a lot of these cases, it was very simple to do a priced round. But when you insert it safes into this,
You know, a simple agreement for future equity that Y Combinator created and you put capital convertible notes into this founder started doing like dozens of these from off and at the early stages, the cleanup work and understanding how many shares people owned, especially with jake out what I'm saying is what like, okay, let me stop. Let me ask you differently. Yeah, sure. We did this with spreadsheets.
Let me answer your question. Okay. So in a private company, let's say a company issues options to an employee and they don't have a good record of that. The employee executes the options. They now believe that they own shares. Unlike in a public company where there's a broker of record, every share is registered in a public company.
You know who owns the shares, you know what brokers holding those shares, and every share is traded through a public exchange. So there's a record of every transaction that takes place with every share in a public company. In a private company, there's no independent legal regulator that tracks all the shares. So you could issue options to an employee and forget that you did that, put the document in a drawer, and the employee shows up five years later and they're like, wait,
I get it. I've experienced this. I've had advisors show up. Look, here's my advisory agreement. I was giving options. I'm asking a different question. You're saying something. Great. I get that. I'll tell you what I think the killer feature was. Why is that complicated to implement in software? I don't tell you. I think the killer feature for CARTA, I was called eShares back then, was getting the shareholder to sign for their stock certificates.
So to Freeberg's point in the old world, where it was all done by email and a spreadsheet, they would literally have to send you a paper stock certificate. You put in a file. And if you lost it, you have to sign a document with a lawyer saying, Oh, I lost my certificate. I promise you I lost it. All that. I think the killer feature was digitizing the stock certificates. And then you would sign for them using like a e-signature, you know, on carda.
and they would just keep it for you. Well, I get it. I'm not debating the value, guys. You're saying why does the software complicate it? Yeah, why does the software complicate it? No, I don't think it's super complicated. But what happened was, because I remember when the market tipped, right, is I got one email from a company that was using eShares back then, and I would just do the digital signature, and I started getting a few more and a few more. Pretty soon, there was a network effect. I don't want to have to wonder
Where are my digital stock certificates are? I just know that they're all at carda. That's very convenient for me as an investor. I think it's very convenient for the company to manage all this stuff digitally. DocuSign is not a complicated technology either, and that is what, a multi-billion dollar company, because there's a very strong network effect. You don't want to have to have all of your signatures at a whole bunch of different companies.
So I think that's how it kind of got off to the races. And then since then, they've been able to add more workflows. They've been able to add fun management. They've been able to add a number of things to make it stickier and more feature rich. And it's not that expensive. It's like 10 grand a year or something like that. It's kind of getting very expensive for startups. We're talking 10 grand a year is expensive.
I mean, for a seed state short, it's a lot. And then we invested in a company called Cake Equity that's doing it for like $1,000 a year. To Chamoc's point, you tweeted, why can't this be $1,000 a year for the Cake Equity you'll see? Well, can we just go to my tweet? I was confused by all of this stuff. Well, we haven't even gotten to the story yet. So just sorry, Jason, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, sorry.
So anyway, what you're hearing is this software is very integrated into startup culture. We all have a lot of opinions on it because the cap table is where all the value is recorded. The cap tables have gotten much more complicated, but this is not like building the tiktok algorithm or chat GPT to be clear to Chamat's point. This is not
really hard software to build so correct on that and sachs correct to your point it's super convenient if everybody uses the same platform and for a series a b c company spending ten twenty thousand dollars a year on this is not that big of a deal although there are cheaper options the season investors use it too to track their portfolios.
Absolutely. And so it grew from one to the other, just to be clear. So I mean, first, companies started using it for their cap tables, then they got into the fund management business. So if you were a fund, you were receiving all of your stock certificates, then you started using it to communicate with your LPs. So we've started doing that. And it's very convenient for that. So it's more of a network effect business than a hard software business. I think is exactly. Totally, totally. This business has benefited from the network effect.
So they had such strong network effects. Here's the brew, ha, ha, the Donnie Brook that came up this past week. Donnie, but you can look it up. I like that word. Yeah. Yeah. So the company, I bet you knew a lot of Donnie's in Brooklyn.
We always involved in a couple of drugs if I'm being honest, and they escalated from Bruja Haas, typically, not unlike an average episode of this podcast. And so... There are probably some Donnie Brooks involving guys named Donnie.
Yeah, Donnie was typically the guy who started in business. The next episode is going to be named the Donnie Brook episode, please. The company had a massive violation of trust as they were expanding to figure out other businesses to come into. They got into what's called the secondary market. For those of you who don't know what the secondary market is, people like to trade stocks of private companies. You may have heard people buying and selling Stripe or SpaceX.
And so employees early investors might sell their shares to other people. Now, this is not happening as a primary offering from the company where they raise money and issue new shares. This is people who have shares. Carda was in a great position to do this because they had the cap table. Now, on your cap table might be a hundred investors, 30 of them might be your friends, family, very quiet. You know, it could be Jeff Bezos who is a seed investor in Google.
some folks at CARTA who were in the secondary business violated the trust and the privacy of companies who had angel investors or early stage investors on their cap table and started contacting them directly saying, hey, do you want to sell your shares in company A to this person? We're trying to create a market for it.
They got called out publicly the CEO, Henry Ward, who is a unique individual as many CEOs are, tried to do some comms. It was a disaster of comms for a couple of days while they tried to explain basically breaking their own terms of service and it all ended up with them selling the secondary business, which I understand was a tiny business for them. Overall, your thoughts, gentlemen, I don't know if anybody has strong thoughts. Why did you say he was an interesting individual?
You mean? He communicates directly in a very effervescent candid way. Like some founders do. Effervescent. Wow. That's a nice. Yeah. I mean, I'm just. She's sparkling.
I think he is bad at PR, but entertaining to listen to, right? Like I think maybe they should have had a little bit of a slightly more thoughtful approach to this, but it all happened in real time. So it's very difficult to deal with the crisis in real time, I think. I have two comments. Go ahead. The first is I actually disagree with David Sacks. I think that there's literally no concept of network effects in this business and it makes no sense here.
And the reason is that when you look at the public markets, which are infinitely larger, we have a vibrant public stock market that has no concept of this. And it works where you have companies like computer shares, you have companies like SSNC. There's just a plethora of providers that do fund administration. And frankly, I'm glad that there's a plethora of providers. I use some of them and I trade one against the other to get a constantly cheaper price.
we use the distribution agents. And depending on which bank I'm working with on whatever deal, I have shares at multiple different agents. And they also cause virtually nothing. And I don't see a world where that deflationary cost reduction doesn't come to this market either, because I don't see this as a defensible area of software. I think it's a necessary piece of software.
So I kind of like randomly tweeted out just kind of like, oh, because I was just watching from the sidelines. Now in full disclosure, I was a part of investor. I sold all my equity in a secondary transaction, actually speaking of secondary transactions. Yeah. Is that a good trade? Yeah. I sold it all two and a half years ago. So I have no opinion one way or the other on this company. I understand process automation, but I don't think process automation is
defensible. So if you build software around process automation, you will be competing in a race to the bottom on price. That is, and I have not seen a single example of a company that's proven this otherwise. There are different companies that create real lock-in because of what they build. That isn't one.
So I tweeted this out, some person sent me this, and Jason, to your point, the two most prevalent competitors that they showed me were Mantle, and I think one is a YC company, and one is not, but Mantle and Poli, I think, were the two that came up the most often. And Jason, to your point, what they both told me was carda is like 10K a year, 12K a year, and these guys are 90% discounted at a tenth of the price.
which again proves there is not a lot of super compelling software lock in here. It's useful stuff, but that useful stuff is eventually gonna get as close to free as possible. These guys are proving it. And then last night, while we were at poker, I got this thing, somebody in two days, oh, built an open source competitor and just put the code out there and said, here you go, take it. Isn't that incredible? Exactly. Guys, that happened in two days from that tweet.
Right. And by the way, I don't know if I got how crazy is that? If I got a stock certificate from what's the name of this thing? Open source clone by by carda.com. I'd like grown. I'd be like, Oh, here we go. I've got to like, first of all, that's totally not true. He would have written sites and this thing's probably going to go out of business in six months. That's not true. And you know it.
You know it. You don't know where the certs are. I can actually be seriously annoying. I can actually tell you what's happening in the market with startups. Startups are looking at the alternatives. They want to save money. The bigger companies are probably not as price sensitive.
spending $20,000 as a series B company, nobody cares. But for the startups, they tend to find the most efficient software and do exactly right. My comment is less about CARTA itself and its price point. My observation is twofold. One is software that doesn't have a fundamental lock-in does not have pricing power.
Number one, and number two, we are almost at the tipping point of a set of tools that will allow competitors in a matter of days to compete with an 80% feature complete solution at a fraction of the price. That's my generalized observation as manifested in this card, an example, in less than a week. What do you do with some observation like this? If you have this 80% observation, is there any? So then I was like, well, you know what, I'm just going to go for it.
So I'm not paying it up for you here. So I'm starting this thing. And I've been working on this idea for a little bit, but, and I've been experimenting with it with some of my companies, but then I was like, you know what, we should just do this. So the concept here is we're going to build this incubator. It's called 80 90. I have a team. I have a bunch of developers offshore and we are going to.
basically create a hit list of software that we think is relatively straightforward and mispriced and could be built much more efficiently in 2024 using all of these co-pilots and tools. Our boundary conditions will be, can we deliver 80% of the functionality at 10% of the price, so at a 90% discount?
So 8090 is what the name of the incubator is. And what was interesting is when I tweeted this out, we had 1,200 people essentially give us a product roadmap.
They told us the software that they would want. They told us the features that they need. They told us the things that they don't need. And so the idea here, Jason, I think is I'm just going to build this in the wild. I'll create the list of companies. We'll publish that out, let people vote on it. Then we'll publish the PRDs of what the 80% version is. And we're going to work backwards with my team.
in South Asia to try to build these things at a 10% price point. So SACs, your thoughts, your SACs investor, it's your vertical, your thoughts on Shmoop's plan to be the most hated person in Silicon Valley under pricing every piece of SACs software by 90% in real time. Well, can he do it?
In your estimation, I think there probably are categories where you could do that. But in general, what I would say is that it always looks easier from the outside than from the inside, meaning that you look at any particular SAS category leader and you're like, this is easy. Like I could do this.
And then when you actually get into it, you realize that, okay, the product I'm seeing is kind of an iceberg. I'm just seeing the tip of the iceberg below the water line is all the business logic that's been written into the system. There's like a much deeper and longer list of features, not in every category. You might be right that in some categories, you don't need the product depth. But in many other categories, there's just a lot of subtle features, usability issues have been figured out, integrations, you know, with other ongoing support.
Ongoing support training of the whole sales and marketing component to it. So what ends up happening is you attack a category saying, oh, this is going to be easy. You know, a year or two into it. You're like, wow, like the category leader. We're not even close to where it is in terms of table stakes here and it ends up being more of a slog than you thought. And then you find out the market does initially have as much of incentive to switch.
I'm not saying it can't be done. There are categories where I think the category leaders become stagnant and has stopped innovating. And I think those are ripe for disruption. I mean, look, I'm kind of trying it in a way. We're going to be launching my Slack killer soon.
I feel a lot better about that because Slack out of choir doesn't, hasn't really innovated in a few years. And Salesforce, by the way, just announced zero hiring in 2024 and the Slack teams were like, what, how are we supposed to hit our roadmap without more people? Like what's going on here? So there is, there is. I definitely think it can be done, but I don't know. I think you got to choose carefully the categories where,
The iceberg isn't bigger than you think, basically. Do you think that there's a shift in the business model for SaaS companies that emerges from which I'm out this talking about where I think right now sales and marketing cost is a percent of revenue on average for a scaling enterprise software company around 55 percent of revenue or something in that range. Does that number get compressed by bringing price down? So you bring price down, but you need fewer people to go in and do the selling, fewer
How do you think so? That has not been the pattern. Everyone was saying things like this when enterprise software shifted from on-prem to the cloud. When we went from Oracle and Seabolt to Salesforce.com, people would say, it's going to fundamentally change the business. Sales won't become that important, products are going to be all important.
It was true to some degree. I mean, I do think that- You tried to do it. That was what you pioneered at Yamri. You tried to do bottom-up sales. Yeah, so there was product-led growth became a thing, you know, and a very important thing. And I still think that's the best way to build a SaaS company is you let the users just try it on a freemium basis as opposed to having sales knock on the CIO's door, let the employees pull the product into the company, then go close the deal.
So it did make important changes, but it did not get rid of sales. I mean, what I believe doing this stuff way back in 2008 is we'd be able to get rid of sales and just make enterprise products completely self-distributing. That never happened. People have been predicting that the death of sales for a long time and it's never happened. I think your vision is absolutely right. And I think this in a world of auto-GPTs, it's going to happen. And I think the way that it's roughly going to happen is as follows.
I think what happens is that, and Zoho is another good example of how you can do this, which is what you need are a small set of tools that provide useful capability for a company that work elegantly together. Now, when you work elegantly together, there's a bunch of things that you need. You need security. You need handoffs and handshakes. You need different ways of handling exceptions. You need a common kind of data model. All of those things can actually be configured on the fly dynamically.
buy in between two sets of software if you let the AI actually run an auto configure itself. And so I think the experimentation is as follows. You have product A and product B, you want to adopt them both. They have elements of an agent that can go on auto configure themselves to each other separately. I think what the CFO or the CEO does is allocate a budget.
And that budget is an agent. And what that agent does is it works with these other agents to say, okay, great, I can spend money on these features. That is the thing we've not explored. We've always taken software that we build and all of a sudden pause automation and handed over to people to run it through a relatively archaic go-to-market process.
And I think what's worth trying to figure out in 2024 and beyond is how to use these tools to automate all of the low level negotiation that happens before you can adopt software. I just think it's totally unnecessary. And I think that this is where software can do a very powerful job. On behalf of the salesperson, does it mean the salesperson is totally out of the loop? No, but I do think that if these tools are lightweight enough, especially the young nimble companies,
will actually say, great, my procurement person is actually an AI agent with a budget. And it's the products that then figure out how to negotiate for the share of that budget and then configure how to work amongst itself. That is the key innovation that I think someone will figure out. That is the Zoho 2.0, right? That is the Salesforce 2.0. It's sort of this app, app store, common data bus kind of an idea that I think somebody will build.
I would like to try to help. Well, people have started building in Chamath because you're starting to see the features overlap in many programs. You're seeing HubSpot, Salesforce, Sendas. They're all kind of getting into each other's business. But it's a great observation, but those are all closed products. What I mean is there is a totally open
protocol and set of standards for how, sure, product day integrates and interacts with product B on many levels, right, from security to data model and everything in between. And I think that that is what needs to get figured out and be very much an open source idea. The great part about this is this is going to be massive competition. It will lower prices. It'll add features and the team over at 37 Signals is doing something similar. If you look at once.com, they are also
going to go after Slack, Sacks, and they're going to just charge one time for the software. I think I mentioned it on a previous one, but their concept is, yeah, just. Can we take a moment actually? Can you throw up my tweet? Can you take a moment to just say thank you to Stuart Butterfield and what he pulled off? Thank you. As a series A investor, I thank you. 27 times ARR is looking like a pretty great exit multiple. Oh, there's my reply. Oh, yeah. Look at my reply.
Yeah. I mean, my gosh, what a deal. And at the time it was, they were public and people were wondering like, hmm, was this a good deal or not? Should they have stayed independent? But the product velocity never seemed to get going. How are you thinking about what the critical go-to-market MVP capability is for Slack? So this year's what I'm curious about. There's chat, right?
But the problem with chat, in my opinion, is that Slack has become totally overrun where you could be a five person company and all of a sudden you have 500 channels. So there's no scarcity. And that scarcity is, in my opinion, what makes, what makes all corporate chats in this modern version teams included, totally unusable, so much noise and distraction. So how are you thinking about that problem? Yeah. I totally agree with that.
What you hear from every single company that has more than, I don't know, 50 employees is that Slack doesn't scale because what happens is you have a channel get created and there's a whole bunch of conversations in there that are kind of munched together. If anybody in the company wants to participate in any one of those conversations, they have to join that entire channel.
And as a result, every single employee ends up in every single channel. And it's just a giant mess and there's way too much noise. So I think that the channel model was beautiful in terms of letting people get started really easily. You just jump into a channel and start posting. That's why it took off. But it's not particular enough in terms of
of addressing conversations to the right people. So that's basically one of the problems that we're fixing. The other thing I've heard from people is that we love chat, but we also really like the feed that Yammer had as a way to quickly scroll through new stuff. You have top level corporate feed. People forget that there was like this. Hey, you want to get a pulse of the entire organization go to this one corporate feed. The first ones to figure out that like a feed should be used inside of an enterprise, not just in a consumer social network. So in any event,
I see those are like two of the main concepts is combining feed and chat in a way that actually makes sense and solving the noise, the signal of noise problem. Do you have a name for it yet? Yeah, it's going to be called glue.
who I love that. Can I remind you that as a humble investor, sir, I think I was part of Yammer and Slack. So I can add value. You're in, you're in. There's just one requirement for the early investors is you guys actually have to use it. You got to do a rip and replace on your Slack. Sure. Sure. If you're willing to do that, you're in. Perfect. I'll take $2,500. Yeah. Lock me in for a slice.
I mean, so I think what we're going to do is before launch, we'll do like a seed round. Right now it's all been incubated by craft. So we'll do a seed round. I'll take about a 50 million. So like 60 million posts, six posts. I'll put 50 in at six pre 56 posts. But it won't be it won't be a super expensive round because what we want to do is incentivize, you know, influencers to like support the product switch to the product. So it really is going to be do you have glue.com?
We have glue dot AI. Oh, wow. Nice. I was going to get 80 90 dot AI, but then I didn't like it. You know what I got instead. Tell me if you like this. 80 90 dot ink. So it's just 80 90 ink. That's fine. It doesn't matter. Everybody searches. I mean, eventually you fake it till you make it. If the 80 90 domain happens, you get it or you put get or go 80 90 dot com. So do that before the show gets published. What does it get or go?
Like if people have an 80 90 or go 80 90. So, you know, if it's a service, you say go 80 90. And if it's whatever you say, get if it's an app or something, right? Like you're just going to go get it here at the Stomie name. It's just, I also got VC sasko boom.com. Oh, excellent. Well, I have wet your people don't remember this for a call back. I have wet your beak.com. I think it just goes to what your beak.com just goes to our website. So that, I mean, that was the basic scandal.
sacks. They let the sales team doing secondary apparently or somebody broke a rule. They weren't exactly clear with it. It sounded to me like, you know, they didn't want to throw anybody under the bus exactly.
But how big of a violation is it to let people go sell into the cap table, secondary shares without the CEO or your customer even knowing that you access that data. Where would you put that on a violation of trust scale? I think it was a huge issue for them because the only reason starts to give their data.
to Carta is because they trust them to keep it private. Yes. And I think a big part of the problem with the Carta vision of creating the secondary marketplace is that founders don't want it. Fundamentally, that's the problem. I mean, Carta is in the perfect position to rationalize and make liquid the secondary market.
The vision was correct in that sense. And the reason for that is because Carta not only has the cap table and they know who all the investors are, they also have all the documents. They got all of your corporate documents, the buy laws, all that kind of stuff. They can very easily execute these transactions.
So Carta was in a great position to replace all of these secondary brokers who are running around creating books on their own. The problem they have is that at the end of the day, founders don't really want secondary markets to take place in their company's shares. And I think there's a few reasons for that. One is price discovery. I think a lot of these startups now, if their shares were to be freely traded, would be trading below. Bad timing. Below the last round. Yeah, bad timing.
Second, the founders don't necessarily want their investors getting out and then getting new investors on the cap table that they don't know. So founders are somewhat particular about who their shareholders are. It's different than public companies in that way. Apple doesn't really care who their shareholders are. Private companies do care. Do you think that that's sustainable in a world where companies take 14 or 15 years and they're trying to retain talent?
Well, I think it would be better for everybody if there was more organized liquidity. I mean, one of the things I love that SpaceX has done is that for the last number of years now, they've had a tender offer every year. And not even every year, like almost every quarter, right? It's every six months, I think was what my understanding of it is. But yeah, I mean, it would be interesting for that example. So with SpaceX, it's been up and to the right on a pretty consistent basis. So every tender round has been a bump. Sometimes it's been a small bump. Sometimes it's been
a larger bump. The company I don't think has gotten greedy. So they haven't tried to shoot the moon and raise the valuation too much. So they've been able to keep a very organized process. And they've had this attitude from the beginning of letting their employees and investors get liquidity when they need to. So it's been great. But that's very different. By the way, that sort of organized tender process is very different than the secondary market that Carta was organizing, right? Because Carta
was trying to do what all these secondary brokers are doing, which is they hit up people one at a time and just say, are you looking to buy yourself and they're trying to organize secondary transactions that are not part of an official process. And I think that's a huge part of the problem here. Free break. Did you have thoughts on it? Well, I mean, there's an element of
secondary transactions and private companies that are unstructured generally being a problem. The issue with CARTA was, was there a violation of trust with respect to the transparency onto the cap table that they have access to because they have all the data in their systems? And when I was at Google in 04 or so, Sergey,
was kind of throwing around the idea, why don't we start a hedge fund? Because we have all this data about what people are searching for, and we can see all of this consumer behavior, and we could trade on that and have a huge data advantage in the marketplace. And ultimately, whether or not
There was an impropriety of the use of data. And even if we excluded personal data and search data, just using internet-based traffic and internet data, the perception of the problem would have damaged Google's brand so much. First of all, is there an actual conflict where you're taking people's, what they consider to be private data and using that to make money from their data?
without their permission or acknowledgement or explicit consent. And secondly, even if you are doing this in a way that doesn't use their data because you just generally have knowledge about who buyers and sellers are in the market.
outside of your software, the view that you may be using the data in conflict can damage your brand and damage your customer relationships so much. So it seems in hindsight a little silly, but I think to Chamos point earlier, it may indicate the necessity for them to think about building another business on top of this core software business that is a more true marketplace driven business so they can make over time more money. And that's probably where this all came from. They saw a need to build something that was more than just monthly subscription fees.
They weren't making money from it, and they shut it down. It's true that Carta is trying to become a multi-product business. They started with, you know, start cap tables, then they added fund management, then they added this broker business. But if you read Henry's last blog, the secondary market is what he originally wanted to disrupt, is he always wanted to create the secondary market. And he created the cap table business, the SAS software, as a way to get to that.
I think what he's realized is that the real value is in the SaaS software, and this marketplace is not that valuable. I mean, the SaaS business is doing something like 250 million a year of revenue, and the broker business was only doing a few million. Yeah, 3 million. So I think the value has turned out to be in the SaaS, and moreover, this broker business was compromising the trust and safety or the perception of trust that the company has from customers.
The problem with that SaaS revenue is if you look at mantle and pulley, that 250 million could be 25 million.
End cake. My investment. Yeah. End cake. Sorry. Yeah. End cake. But the point is, the fact that there are many competitors, I think, is a sign of a low barrier to entry and a lack of a true fundamental lock-in. Let's say you are an investor and you're looking at polio or mantle. Why would you even think that's an attractive company to invest in? If success looks like you're compressing a $250 million market down to $25 million. What's the point?
Well, I think a lot of these competitors got funded during the whole zerp era where everything got funded. I mean, if you were to look at that market today, why would you even fund a disruptor? Well, so look, I think there are other strategies too. There's other strategies you could add on to this in adjacencies. My understanding is mantle and pulley raised in the low single-digit millions. That gives them a lot of room to run a $25 and $50 million business profitably and never raise any more money.
The problem is on the opposite side, if you raise money at eight or nine or $10 billion when companies trade it 20 times and now companies trade it six times, now all of a sudden you have to have $1.3 billion of revenue a year to break even.
And I think that's the real problem. So it's not that Henry hasn't built a great company. I think he deserves a lot of credit. The question is entry point and the question is upside and the upside is governed by the difficulty of the things that you're doing and how much pricing power you have for those difficult things. And so I think what we're realizing is that there are a few difficult things in software, few, and just like it's just true. And as a result, every product, this is not a card a thing, every product.
We'll see a ton of competitors. So the only thing that you can do...
is have an extremely leveraged op-ex and an extremely low cost to serve. That is the only protective, protective mechanism one has. It seems to me on the outside looking in. Now, work effects are also important. Unless you have an Instagram, you're right. That product is infinitely better with everybody or a TikTok. Great. Now you can just, you can spend as much money as you are. Airbnb. But that's not what I think procedural software is.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, we're going to have to agree to disagree. I think there is some pricing risk to card it from these competitors, but my guess is it ends up being stickier than that. But in any event, I mean, I do think that Henry at the end of the day pulled off a nice save by just getting rid of the business altogether. I think that was a smart way to respond. Clearly, the first response didn't work. No, the first response. Yeah, it was a very confusing denial where he said this isn't our policy, but
And he also blamed, he also got into it and blamed the person who called him out on and was like, why are you calling us out on this? And then like every founder was like, because you violated our trust and he was like, oh yeah, sorry. Yeah. Well, people are showing like email campaigns that have been going on for months and it seemed much more organized and it was very hard to believe that this was just an accident instead of a delivered strategy. And you could see the whole star community was, was
You know, evaluating its options in real time on X. Yeah. And that's when he came out and hit the whole thing with a sledgehammer and just said, we're going to get out of this business smart. And I think it was really smart to do that. It's kind of called the crisis. Like I said, I don't think this is a business that startup founders want their cap table software to be engaged in.
No, definitely not. Just a third point on that. One reason was probably discovery. Another reason was having undesirable shareholders. The third reason is just founders don't want to create a competing fundraising process to primary financing. I think this is actually a really important point. The reason why founders don't want there to be a secondary market is because their company may need to raise money. You want to go through the front door to the CEO and the board, not the side door to get some exposure to the company.
Well, I think in the zerp era where there was all this excess funding flying around, then it kind of made sense to let secondary's happen. But in a world in which funding is scarce, you want that money to go into the company, not into the pockets, the early shareholders. And so I think like the timing of this whole thing is like really off. It all feels like kind of a function of zerp in its own way. Agreed.
All right, so actually we're in the group chat talking about this viral clip about Star Wars. You wanted to chime in on it. Maybe you could queue it up, Nick. I mean, as you may recall, my pick for business loser of 2023 was Disney. And it seems like they haven't learned anything from the horrible year they've just had. What is the balance of activating a force for change, but also trying to
permeate that patriarchy, that power structure, and is that a part of the calculation of your art as well, and what's been the reaction to that? Oh, absolutely. I like to make men uncomfortable. I enjoy making men uncomfortable. This is the new director of Star Wars. All right, your thoughts, sir?
Well, I saw the comment on that tweet was this is going to be the biggest Disney flop yet. Isn't that what it said? I mean, look, I don't know what Bob Iger is doing. He seems to want to burn Star Wars to the ground like the rest of the Disney brands by playing politics.
This director doesn't seem to have had a lifelong fandom for the franchise. She didn't really talk about how she had grown up marinating in this universe, loving its characters. Her background is in documentary filmmaking, and there's nothing wrong with that.
There's no indication from her that she truly love Star Wars, and in fact, the comments that she's making right now are indicating that she's going to politicize it. The patriarchy is not why anybody is a fan of Star Wars that goes to see its movies. Nobody wants to see that movie. It's the opposite. It's the opposite. They want to avoid it. They don't go to Star Wars movies for the politics.
She's also trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. I mean, science fiction may skew male in its fan base, but it's not because sci-fi franchises don't like strong female characters. I mean, just stepping out to the larger world for a second, you've got Ripley in Aliens, you've got Sarah Connor in the Terminator movies, you've got Princess Leia, Trinity in the Matrix, you've got Princess Leia, Padme,
Ahsoka in Star Wars. You seem to know a lot of these female characters. You're deeply star wars. I'm a star wars geek. You got some good policy. So it's not this idea that there aren't strong female characters in Star Wars is that's this kind of a myth, right? Yeah.
So it's not it's not like the universe needs to be reset in this way and you could just see, the whole fan community, kind of grown to this comment because they're just like, oh, here we go again. Star Wars is going to ruin another franchise by playing politics. And the amazing thing is that, is that, you know, I yours doesn't seem to learn from this at all.
But there's nothing wrong with having a female director either, right, sex? I mean, you're not saying that. You're saying that a particular person who has a political agenda in how they want to shape the story of Star Wars. Of course. Right. Now, I'll also say, I think one of the core driving narratives, emotional narratives of Star Wars is the oppressor oppressed
It's a highly political story. It's a highly political story. Well, I've always said, I think Star Wars has been like the most anti-technology effector in society since the 70s because Star Wars is all about the, I've said this before, but the Ewoks destroying the Death Star and like the no tech overcoming the oppressor big tech. And so we have to destroy big tech and anyone who has the better technology is very likely the oppressor.
And they have all the wealth, and they have all the power, and they have all the control. And so those who do not have the power, do not have the wealth, do not have the control, do not have the technology have to go and destroy that, whether it's the empire or that kind of evil force. And that's the core narrative of Star Wars. So I do think that at its heart, Star Wars in and of itself is an oppressor, oppressed storyline that relates very deeply to technology and wealth.
and has helped shape the western psyche for a couple of decades in a very meaningful way, or has really reflected maybe perhaps the western psyche. What do you think of Anne? I think you're super imposing current day terminology on a movie that was created in the first one in the 1970s when intersectionality did not exist.
Yes, there are political overtones to Star Wars. You've got the Rebel Alliance against the Empire. That is not diversity politics. Sorry, it's about. I'm not saying diversity politics. It's really about the corruption of power. I mean, you know, the famous phrase by Lord Acton, which is power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely. To me, those are the political overtones of Star Wars. It's not. Yeah. So you always have to divide that world into intersectional categories. It was about war.
I mean, let's be honest, it was Lucas was a child of the Vietnam War era and he was highly influenced as was Francis for Coppola. And yeah, the Americans with all this wealth and power came into the jungle to try and destroy a peasant nation and cause death at a pot of peasant nation. And the peasant nation survived and won.
And there was a narrative to that that I think is reflected in this and is reflected very deeply in a lot of the stories that have come since. And I'm not saying DEI is as a solution was the storyline out of the original Star Wars, but the original Star Wars was very much driven by the leverage that technology provides to those in power that gives them extraordinary influence over those who don't have power.
Well, if there were political overtones to the original two trilogies, and actually, I think there were some really interesting themes, especially in that second one were Palpatine. Not even political. By the way, not even political. Let me just be clear, social, right? So social systems, which I understand.
But my point is that Lucas didn't hit anybody over the head with those themes and his goal certainly wasn't to make anyone feel uncomfortable. His goal was to entertain and whatever political or social overtones that were very much in the background because that's what good art does. One of the reasons why
Hollywood produces so few really interesting movies these days is because the political overtones are really in the forefront and they really hit you over the head with them. And so therefore, they're just not very entertaining. It's not very good art. And I think that's why the fan community was like, Oh, here we go again.
Let me just make sure people understand. This is a nine year old clip and for context, this is probably during like the early days of the DEI movement, just so we're clear on that. But you had another point to make David go. But Zach, I think that Hollywood has imposed upon itself
A certain degrees of restriction on the artistry of the artists in the community, because the standards now to be nominated for best picture, define a number of D.E.I. representation and inclusion standards and they're listed here. So in order to, and I, if you guys will remember it at our summit.
In LA, I asked Gwyneth Paltrow about this, and she wasn't familiar with these changes that had been put in place. But in order to qualify for a best picture nomination, you have to meet some of these standards. And these standards include on-screen representation, beams, and narratives that relate to having at least one of the lead characters or significant supporting actors come from my minority background, including
ethnic background or or by gender could get nominated for an Oscar. Look, I'm so Asian. Look, I'm in the parens here or at least 30 or 30% of the actors in a secondary cat in the secondary group have to be women, racial or ethnic
group, LGBTQ+, or people with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing. The main storyline, theme or narrative of the film is centered on an unrepresented group, either women, racial or ethnic group, or LGBTQ positive. They can meet the criteria if the creative leadership team has at least two of the following creative leadership positions met by one of the underrepresented groups, and so on and so forth. If you're an artist,
a filmmaker, and you wanted to make a film, a World War II biopic, which was on the front lines in World War II and was entirely white nails. Would you have been able to be nominated for Best Picture, or would you have had to go and, you know, take some actions that have would have affected your artistry and your freedom of expression in making that film? And as a big fan of film, and you guys, I think all of us are probably in the same boat, at least a couple of us are three of us are three of us are. This would have limited a lot of the best pictures of all time, I would say.
If you had to impose standards on what the artists were allowed to do or how they were allowed to make their film, and that's really what's taken over Hollywood. So, I would say it's not just a Bob Iger Disney thing, but this has become a standard in Hollywood, that the DEI movement has so deeply affected the intentionality of what has historically been a truly creative.
I agree. If you talk to Hollywood writers, if you talk to Hollywood writers, I'll tell you that things have become extremely politicized and it's a mess. I agree. It's been a little bit contradictory about this. In April of last year, there was this article saying that Eiger was doubling down on inclusivity and diversity. And he described that as shareholders meeting. By November, he was saying that Disney movies have become too focused on messaging. So he seemed like he was finally getting it that after the horrible year they had,
But then we had the Star Wars news and it seems to suggest that they were hiring a director who really wasn't right for the material. So we'll just have to see my sense is that they have not made the course correction they need.
If you want to see the peak of this, there was a bunch of blowback on Dunkirk and absolutely toward a force of a film, if you haven't seen it, especially go see it in IMAX, just extraordinary Christopher Nolan film that it lacked diversity and gender diversity. It's a war film, historically, kind of hard to make it about anything else if it was just on narrowly focused on a couple of battles. And so, yeah, this has gotten to the point of, yeah, a little bit of absurdity.
I relate this very much to the point that we made a couple months ago about stand-up comics being restricted and canceled based on the things that they say that are offensive to the narratives of social inclusion and DEI. These are artists who should have freedom of expression, creative freedom, unlimited creative freedom. If we want to have a different set of standards for how we value the art that comes out of it, fine. But I don't think that it ends up being true to what the peer group would otherwise recognize and say.
you know, is the greatest art of the year is the most impressive achievement of the year in some particular artistic discipline. It's really sad. There's also been this change in live performances in symphonies used to be that to avoid discrimination in auditions for symphony orchestras.
auditions were conducted behind a curtain so the director and those who were making the election on who would get to join the orchestra would listen and they wouldn't see the person performing because they were behind a curtain. Recently that trend has changed and now those artists are required to perform not behind a curtain but in front of the curtain so that we can judge them not on their musicianship and their artistry but on their race on their gender.
and on some other standards. So I think this is obviously part of a very broad narrative, but it's very deeply affecting- Can I ask you a question? Community of Arts, because I'm about to bring you in on this, Jamal. Yeah. Is listenership of the symphony gone up or down? It's a loaded question. It's been going down for a long time, but I don't know how to do it. Symphony's around the world are seeing decline in audience, but it happened before the changes. Yeah. It's been happening. Yeah. Has it accelerated or has it slowed the negative decay to zero? I'm not sure.
I'm not sure it's the main difference. To be honest, if it hasn't made a difference, then it has made a difference. I think this is part of a wider discussion of DEI. The goal of some forms of art, like these live performing arts, may not necessarily the audience growth. The goal may be finding the best of this. I suspect it should be to sustain itself indefinitely.
I mean, that's a big point. I've had it, which has the quality of roads. Has the quality of roads fewer people will care because there are other options that you can go to that are high quality. And then these things will die off. And maybe that's what it's supposed to happen.
I mean, this is part of a water discussion about, I think, DEI facing the reality of whether it's like, I guess, this whole pilot thing with Boeing and who's getting hired to be pilots and training and what should the focus of a company board be? What should the cope focus of hiring be? The problem, I think, with the argument you guys are having, in my opinion, is that it's a little too premature. And the reason is that there are other people who will make semi credible claims.
while you guys make some incredible claims, and no progress is made on this whole discussion as a touch of cinema and Hollywood or music. What's much easier if you want to dismantle DEI, which will eventually come and cleanse Hollywood and the symphony, is if you go to the jobs where it's irrefutable, where even the most ardent defender of DEI says, you know what, I can't take that risk with my own family or with my own life and the lives of my family.
And I think that we would be better off if we just focus in a really disciplined way on those and get the criteria to be entirely based on skill. And then eventually it'll come back in Hollywood and the symphony will also get cleansed. So doctors, pilots,
I mean, I would say certain doctors, I would just say pilots for sure. I would say surgeons. I would say that you could probably go through. I haven't bought enough about it to know, but you could go through and say systematically, what are the categories in the professional world that we interact with every day where
skill can be the only criteria must be because otherwise innocent lives will be lost. That's an important question. I agree with you that the fundamental choice that we have a society is whether skills is going to be the determinant of success, skills and merit or whether it's going to be about something else. And as soon as you tell somebody that they can't get the job, even though they're the most qualified,
because of their race or gender, then I think that is racism or sexism. So it's doubly bad. I think the reason why this happens is because people don't really have the right skin in the game. So the reason why the recent discussions about pilots and where their cockpits should have this sort of DEI program is that everyone can relate. Everyone has skin in the game. If you're kids,
are going to fly on a plane, the only determinant you want for who the pilot is is skill. Obviously, because you have real skin in the game. The problem is people will falsify their preferences when they're discussing other people flying on the plane. So people will start saying, well, we need to have DEI programs. In other words, when it doesn't affect me, you're willing to basically virtue signal and gently reflect towards these programs.
And I think that that's the fundamental problem is that people will pretend to support something other than skill in all these contexts where they're not directly affected. But as a society, we are with respect to aviation specifically, my thought is that this is a very easy skill to determine who is high quality versus not because you have such sophisticated
training apparatus and scheme simulators, simulators, and all of this stuff, it's easy to know how to rank people from one through end. And I think that as a society, if you wanted an efficient transportation infrastructure and aviation infrastructure where the consequences are really bad, if things go wrong, you just want the best period end of story. However, I think it's also fair to say that then the government owes the people
a responsibility to advance the technology if they actually want to have a multifaceted hiring criteria. So what do I mean? We can have a lot more automation in the cockpit. The reason we don't is because of how certain lobbies are able to affect
rules inside the federal transportation infrastructure. And we know this because our friend has been trying to, our friend Sky Dayton, wonderful pilot.
has been trying to improve airline safety. And he's talked about this a lot. And these things get blocked by the pilots union and otherwise because they don't want to get disintermediate. Okay, fair enough. That's the game. Well, if that's the game, at some point we need to have a conversation as a society that says, okay, look, if we're going to hire on a multifaceted basis for pilots, let's also tell Boeing and Airbus, you need to build even better, more automated planes.
That's a fair trade-off. The great irony of all this sex is it's illegal to hire based upon gender, race, et cetera. And then at the same time, people are trying to hold this contract of, hey, we want more diversity, we want more inclusion at the same time in their heads and we're seeing lawsuits happen.
Want tech companies to report on their diversity, they want venture firms to report on diversity and investment, but it's illegal, and you can be sued if you were to give investment dollars based on race, gender, et cetera, and fierce founders, I believe is the name of the firm that's being sued.
for only investing in a certain demographic of women. Yeah, we're to ask people their sexual preference. You're not allowed to ask that. So I don't know. I've always had a problem with how do you keep these two things in your mind in our own venture firm? And I just said to folks, just to get a diversity target and now to hire people, whether it's on a Hollywood film set or in your company, you've got to go ask them what their sexual preference is.
I mean, it's crazy that we're being asked to do that. And what I did in our company was I said, hey, if we don't feel we're getting enough applicants for the programs, finding a university, the accelerator, we could have efforts to increase the number of applicants, but we can't make investment decisions based on anything other than the merit of the company, or we will get sued. And so this is, I think, the problem in corporate America with these issues is how do I
try to help this problem if we think there is a diversity problem in our particular industry, which is noble and thoughtful and wouldn't criticize any before that. But then the rubber meets the road at legal and then performance, right? And then this is very hard for, I think, leaders to manage those two dichotomies. I could see a case for why barbers and priests should be multifaceted. Good bedside manner, crack a few jokes, be able to listen, relatability, ability.
But if a pilot, but the first time, like the thing is now, this thing is so on the front burner of people's minds that heaven forbid if there is an incident or a near incident.
you're going to see lawsuits that are going to focus on this issue. Show me the training records of the pilots and show me, show me how they fared relative to alternative folks that you either did hire or didn't hire and, you know, why was this selection? It's going to be a mess. We might even see that with Harvard and their selection of their president. Like, why was this person selected as president, right? And did we check the new one or the past one? Like, was there, did we know about the plagiarism stuff? You know, did we not know about it?
And this is, I think, the race to nowhere when you get into identity politics. And I think this is why everybody, and I think Coleman Hughes said it really brilliantly when he was on this pod, talking about his TED Talk. We at least want the aspiration of having a colorblind society. I think what Coleman said that was really, I think, profound was, where can we actually affect change that will be important?
And I think that's early education. It could be providing pre-K, it could be providing, you know, support for people with childcare. So that, you know, they could get into, you know, more job training, et cetera. So like where do we, where do we put our efforts? If we do want to see a more inclusive, diverse, just world is I think the question. Backing up a second, I think there's a fundamental dishonesty about the DEI movement that's really coming to the fore right now.
On the one hand, deactivists will explicitly say that their goal is to engineer job categories to explicit population numbers.
But like you said, that's actually illegal to do. So when they get in a lawsuit, like the Harvard affirmative action case that went this from court, they'll deny that they're discriminating against Asian Americans. So when they're preaching for what they want to do, when they talk about, say, Kendi style anti-racism, they will say that the explicit goal here is proportional representation. But then when that results in discrimination against groups that are basically selected against, they'll deny that that's what they're doing.
And i think it's gotten to the point now where they just can't maintain both things being true. And we i think we saw this in the dust up that just happened between elan and mark cuban where you know i was saying look we should be a color blind meritorious society we just shouldn't discriminate for or against anybody on the base of race.
And then Cuban jumps in says, oh, no, no, that's not what DEI is doing. DEI is just trying to expand the pool of applicants. And it's just not true. I mean, I don't know if he's being disingenuous. I don't know if he's virtually signaling. I think they were talking through each other. I mean, you do want to expand the pool. If you're not getting a pool of diverse applicants, there's nothing wrong with that expanding the pool. But what you are correct. There was a DEI grip that occurred. I think that's kind of what you're alluding to. And I can tell you the answer.
I think that if you look at the DI movement, it goes way, way beyond just explaining the pool of applicants. It explicitly puts its thumb on the scale in terms of what it's looking for in terms of hiring and promotion. It turned into a grift, and I can tell you the inside story on this. And it's going to come out eventually, but there was a, I don't know if you experienced this in any of your companies or if anybody's willing to talk about it, but company has
lack of diversity in their company, then diversity activists, and this is, I think, where it really started to build up resentment. Diversity activist comes in, says, hey, you have problems. They call them out on social media. There was a Twitter
brigade comes in, oh my god, look how horrible this company is people go, I'm sorry, we didn't want to be horrible. And then they say, oh, well, hire us. And we'll teach you how to do DEI and let's build a DEI group and we want to be consultants, pay us to come in, pay us to speak at your organization, to tell you what you're doing wrong, and then rally a reverse support of it after you've gotten paid.
for solving the problem for them. And I saw this shake down a curve, and I had people ask me for advice, I'm like, hey, what do we do here? And you can just imagine, you know, you're a person of good faith who wants to do the right thing, and then these DEI folks come in and then try to brigade you, basically, publicly shame you in order to get like rich DEI contracts. And we saw this with like the size of DEI groups at companies, and you're wondering, well, what are these people actually doing? Are they
What does a DEI department actually do inside of a company that is a creative or valuable? It creates more bureaucracy to do more DEI. Exactly. Exactly. That's why I keep saying bigger. Did you guys see the size of the Michigan DEI group? Did you see that tweet? I thought this was a Babylon B story when I first saw it because there are 250 people working for a DEI. 500 people at Michigan. Why?
I don't know how many people, I don't know, but there's been $30 million on payroll benefits. I mean, look, big companies can kind of afford this stuff, but startups cannot. I mean, this is really the kiss of death for startups. You just can't afford to have these large bureaucracies. And then also, you know, when you're a startup founder,
If you have six months of runway, 12 months of runway, you might not have the luxury to be looking at your statistics and saying, you know what? We've got 10 people who are of this demographic. Statistically, we should have this. So the next hire we need to make our sales numbers has to be of this composure. And I have seen people do this act. You've probably seen it too on boards or whatever. Hey, we need to hire more of this type of person in this profile.
And, you know, then hiring gets slowed and, you know, yeah, it's, it's challenging. And it's also illegal. So I don't know how you win in this thing. Other than have a colorblind society as a goal, at least, you know, and to your efforts. Are you familiar with a Mott and Bailey tactic?
No, if you heard of this, this is a rhetorical technique or fallacy. No, I love this one. Yeah, I love a good. So this comes from medieval times. The modern Bailey was a type of castle where the Bailey was this wider area that was just defended by a wooden wall. So it's not that secure. The law was basically the
stone fortress on the hill. A modern Bailey tactic is when you go out and stake out a very aggressive position, you take the Bailey basically, but then when you get challenged, you retreat into the mott and pretend like you never took the Bailey position.
Ah, the Bailey position is basically the Kendi style anti-racism where you say, look, we have to achieve proportional representation in every job category. And that is what the DI movement in the main advocates for. But then when they get challenged by somebody like Elon or by somebody like the Supreme Court, they retreat into the mod and to say, no, no, we weren't trying to do that. We're just trying to expand the pool of qualified applicants because who could be against that?
And they'll claim that they were never doing the whole proportion representation thing. And then on top of it, they'll say, well, listen, obviously, increasing the pool of qualified applicants is so unobjectionable that if you're against that, then you must be racist. And then you get all the accusations. And so this is basically the rhetorical technique that the movement uses to defend itself. But eventually, when this stuff gets litigated, as it just did at the Supreme Court,
You start to pick this apart and you see that there's a lot of evidence that they are actually engaged in overt discrimination against certain groups like Asian Americans. No easy answers here, but I for one thing that that's bad. Yeah. There was something really nice about a merit based society if there was fairness at the starting line, but you know, that's, that's the thing I've learned is not everybody starts at the same place. And so if you just look at, it seems to me, and listen, I'm no expert,
But the starting line seems to matter most. So if we could focus on making it as equal and fair and just when it comes to education, that seems to me to be like the quickest solution to feeling better about all this. I just think we should have seven day, 365 day a year school available.
public school available, competitive schools available to make the world more just and give people more opportunity, right? Skills training, et cetera. Why do you think that having school 365 days a year will make the world more just?
Well, because I do think that if you had more competition in schools and you had parents who care or students who care and they could get more education and there was more available, then you could say, well, how many days a week did you go to school? How much effort did you put in? And there was just more high quality school available. And if you look at public schools right now, there's just, it's very unjust how poor the schools are.
and how poorly run they are and what the teachers unions have done to these schools and disadvantaged communities. And if I look back on my life and I look at people who did well, they had engaged parents and they had opportunities in education that other people didn't. And that seems... How does keeping the school open all year around change that?
think about parents who maybe don't have coverage for their kids after two thirty or three o'clock and then those kids you know we call them we were called latchkey kids i think uh... in the eighties and nineties you're having the ability for them to do more enriching things to be in chess club to be in tikwondo club to to do a little extra math whatever it is
That could be something society could do for a very low cost or skills training even, right? Hey, this is a culinary school after school. This is a culinary school on the weekends. This is a coding school on the weekends. It doesn't have to be just them. It could be welding. It could be, like I said, you know, could be design, whatever it is, more opportunities for people to learn more skills.
Without, you know, having the benchmark be, my parents can afford Kumon. My parents can afford a chess tutor, right? We live in a time of incredible privilege, and all of us have unlimited resources. And many of the people who listen to this podcast have a lot of resources to hire tutors for their kids and give them more opportunity. I didn't have that opportunity.
You know, and if I had that opportunity, I would have learned chess faster, right? I would have had more opportunity for you. It just wasn't available to me. And then there's a lot of people who started behind me who certainly didn't have it available, single parent, you know, in a worse school environment than Brooklyn where I grew up. So I don't know, do you disagree tomorrow?
Would you have a better idea of how to make the world more fair and just than education and skill strength? I think education is probably the most important. I do think that we need to find it fashionable again to have nuclear families.
I think that if you look at the marriage rates of 20 and 30 year olds, it's meaningfully depressed relative to older cohorts, including ours. We're the last generation where it's a structural part of our identity is being married. And I think that that has long term implications because when you look at the success rates of how to grow kids, poverty matters a lot less than having a structural nuclear family, meaning a two parent household.
And so I think that there's a lot of work we need to do to figure out how to reincentivize folks to want to commit to a single person, not this rampant promiscuity, but just kind of walk down and find somebody and build a long-term partnership with them. I think that that's really crucial for a functioning society. Giving tax incentives is the way to do that or just cultural norms.
I haven't studied the problem to have. Yeah, I've heard this before. I just don't know how that gets implemented in society, right? And I can think of ways that tutoring and having more education available vouchers, et cetera. I mean, if you gave every parent under a certain dollar amount of income a year, a voucher to hire tutors, man, that could change the world, right? It could change a lot of people's faith. We need more to parent households. That would certainly help more.
All right. Well, we got we really got into it here in the end when what a what a great episode. All right. Four. The rain man, David Sachs with a tight haircut. Now the dream is over. I mean, it's just it's a new year. I don't know who got to you. It's a new year.
It's an election year. It's a, it's a big year for you. Clean it up. Clean it up for. I think it's just a huge critical mistake. I think you were, you were going to a certain iconic look and I think you've blown it. I, I, I'm going to take the other side of that bet. And for David Freiburg, the CEO of Ohalo and Trimoth Polyapatia, the founder of the new 80 90 incubator and the chairman dictator of the all in LLC. I am the world's greatest moderator.
Yes you are and age a investor and we'll see you on next time. Bye bye. Love you boys. Love you guys. Bye bye.
