SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody, welcome to Episode 125 of the all in podcast on a historic day we're taping for 20 really excited that SpaceX was able to launch Starship and it made it off the launchpad and incredibly successful today. day today. We have of course with us the rain man David Sacks, the Sultan of Science David Friedberg, and of course the dictator chamath poly hop atia but two special guests are here special guests Gavin Baker from a tradies. How do you pronounce it? Atreides house Atreides house Atreides if you know dune, and then SpaceX board member Antonio Gracias, one of the first investors in SpaceX and Tony a big day for you. Maybe you could just tell the audience what happened today. Why that is so important in the history of this company.
SPEAKER_05: Well, first, I want to thank you guys for letting me come on and have a little chat with you about this. Today was extraordinarily important for for SpaceX, I think for America and for humanity. And the Starship is the realization of the vision had Elon had 20 years ago 25 years ago, even as a child really to go to Mars. And the engineers here at SpaceX and all the entire team working extremely hard, really just to get this this vehicle off the pad is as you said, right, the this is a brand new vehicle. Everything about it is new. So the engines, the material science, the structure design, all of it new. And the most important thing here was to get off the pad, so we collect data. And this technology platform is the platform that allow us to go to Mars. So from a non engineer standpoint, why this is important is that what we've proven with this flight, we got past a point called Max Q, which is the point at which the vehicle takes maximum stress. That's how I think about it. And so your engineers are taking a lot more description to it, or David Freiberg give you better scripture, but it's the most common stress in the vehicle, which means this vehicle will get to orbit. And this is the vehicle that's going to take us to Mars. So today is the day that all of the hard working people at SpaceX accomplished a goal of making the human race spacefaring. When we look back in history, I believe this will be the day we mark the technological development that we broke through and built a vehicle that could actually go to Mars.
SPEAKER_02: Now, when we look at it, obviously, it didn't make it to orbit. Maybe you can give some context into what is the typical lifecycle of a new rocket ship coming out the Falcon, the original one has done, I think 224 missions, 222 of them successful, I think 160 or so actually landed themselves. Yes. And so you had two or three mulligans, I think, in the development of that maybe two, actually. So what can we expect here? When are they going to stack and rack and launch the next one? Antonio, let's see, what's the timeline here? To getting to orbit? What would we expect versus some of the other projects that we've seen like the Russian rockets?
SPEAKER_05: So look, this is a brand new vehicle. And whenever we develop brand vehicle, it takes a long time development. You know, my understanding all this is, as again, a layman and sort of as a board member, not an executive here is that it'll take at least called two or three months, two or three months to really get the pad rebuilt and get another vehicle back on for testing, maybe longer. But it's really important to note here that we've gotten sort of used to the idea that SpaceX launches rockets, and all these rockets come back and all those vehicles are stable, because the Falcon 99 heavy are so stable, and they're so well engineered and they're amazing vehicles, the most reliable vehicles on earth in human history. This is a brand new vehicle. This was a huge win. And it was an enormous one for the company, an enormous one for the country, just getting off the pad and collecting the data. And now we know it works, we just have to get it stable now get up to orbit. So it's really it's a hard problem. But it's a
SPEAKER_05: solvable problem from here. And the we learned here is that this vehicle does work.
SPEAKER_03: Amazing. Can you guys talk about like, the impact of this vehicle cost to launch payload, like the big metrics that are that kind of help realize that outcome? And I think I saw you did a bunch of really good tweets on this, you shared some of the metrics that I thought were really succinct and really helpful. Yeah, sure. So when this is I think it's a long road to full
SPEAKER_00: reusability. You know, the first step will be Mechazilla, catching the booster doesn't doesn't have legs like the Falcon nine. And then the second step will be landing the starship, which is really hard. But once you do that, they should be able to send over 100 metric tons to orbit at a variable cost of under $2 million per public data. This these are public statements. I would never confirm or deny those days. This is Gavin's
SPEAKER_05: math. $2 million is the cost to get 100 tons into orbit. That's
SPEAKER_03: that's the the metric, variable cost, variable cost. So I think the point get is making
SPEAKER_05: if I might just play that is that it is a step function change. It's not like a small change. It's an enormous change. Right? Can you compare that to the numbers before for folks to
SPEAKER_03: understand? The Falcon nine mass to useful orbit is 17 metric
SPEAKER_00: tons. And the variable costs that you know, I, I have seen Elon tweet about is somewhere around $15 million. So you are lifting more than five times the mass to orbit. And based on other statements at 100 metric tons is a very conservative estimate. And you're doing it at call it 10 to 15% of the cost. So this is a, you know, we can all do the math, but we can envelope it, you know, roughly a 50 x huge change. And this, you know, massively changes unit economics for Starlink for sending anything into orbit. And as Antonio said, it's it's great for SpaceX, it's great for America, and it's great for, for everyone. It's great for humanity. Can you explain how
SPEAKER_03: that then translates into going to Mars, so now we can get 100 tons into orbit for $2 million? What happens next in terms of like, how that payload capacity and low cost enables, you know, full transport to Mars. And, you know, I know that the timelines are tough, but it would be super helpful to just to translate the orbit concept into the let's go to Mars concept. It's important
SPEAKER_05: to know that like the size of this thing, it gives us a scale is the interior space of it is the size of the International Space Station. So it's a huge amount of tonnage, just think about all that it's going to take to get to Mars, right, you gotta, you have to lift payload into orbit, you have to, you know, create a base here on the moon or or in this orbit in the earth to actually refill ships and send them out into space. And this same design will scale up to become the Mars colonial transporter very similar design. That's why it's important. And look, the timeline that I don't know, I'm hoping that it will be while I'm still able to go, that would be great, physically able to go. But that's really why it's important to get this is a small version of the same vehicle we will actually use to go to Mars. And then all the stuff you have to transport to orbit becomes more, more economic. Because, as Gavin just said, we've had, you know, 50 x kind of reduction in cost.
SPEAKER_03: Can I ask you another question? Sorry, I don't mean to monopolize the questions. But these are things that I think are like super important questions, but that a lot of people often ask, or I hear them asking, but what happens with the space industry in the nearer term? So there's this great long term goal get tomorrow, that's a that's a big project. There'll certainly be funding, I'm sure, to run that project. But what other economies now emerge as this, this cost down of 50 x happens? And what else do you think happens besides communications and Starlink? Obviously, there's, that's already a pretty skilled business. What other markets can develop here in the near term? What other economies do you see happening? As a result of this cost?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I mean, look, Gavin could jump in here, too. But the reality is, once you can take that much mass to orbit, you can move anything around the planet very quickly, you can kind of go out, but the birds been below you and come down. So transportation generally changes. You know, if you want to fly to Tokyo from New York City, it goes from being, you know, a day trip to a matter of hours. It's extraordinary.
SPEAKER_03: Or a container ship in a couple hours. Yeah, everything that's rapid transport around the earth,
SPEAKER_05: you're running packages around there, everything gets faster. Yeah, there will be no more trans Pacific or transatlantic
SPEAKER_00: cargo flights, I think in 5,6,7,8,10 years, you're gonna need a big Starship fleet to accomplish that. But I think the transatlantic and trans Pacific aerospace cargo routes go away.
SPEAKER_05: So transportation logistics, I think is a fundamental change, human transport, fundamental change. And then there's all the knock on effects of building this kind of technology. Look, the space program, the American space program that took us to the moon, created the cell phones are used, right? I mean, there's so much this chip designs, all the technology came off of that the same kind of effects we believe will happen here. So it's hard to predict, but it will be a lot of great stuff. And that's kind of the point when you can get payload up
SPEAKER_02: there. Now entrepreneurs can think of a million different crazy ideas and affordably put something up there, whether they want to mine an asteroid, or they have a science project. Now, a thousand flowers, a million flowers can bloom, and entrepreneurs can start thinking about it. And that's already happened to a certain extent with Falcon, yes, that people are able to come up with great ideas. Well, I have to say, and the inspiration provides, it does amazing to be here, and
SPEAKER_05: feel the inspiration and the just the I think that's what I was gonna ask you about if you know, as we wrap here with you
SPEAKER_02: to if you could, if you could take people inside mission control, which were privileged enough to be in the sense of history, and the feeling in that room, if you could describe it for the audience, what those engineers were feeling, and what you in fact felt at that moment, Antonio, and then Kevin.
SPEAKER_05: So I would start by juxtaposing with Monday. So we were here Monday, Monday, Monday, and Monday, I think there was a real sense of concern, you know, the countdown stop around 10 minutes, the vehicle, we had a valve failure, and without that stuck open, basically, and we had to stop and kind of regroup. And by the way, from my perspective, that's like a solid success, because the vehicle did not get destroyed in the pad, yeah, which is like the number one thing that happened here. So that's success. The second and so that was kind of Monday,
SPEAKER_05: and I think Monday was, yeah, caution and intensity. It was it was a very intense, very intense feeling. Can this
SPEAKER_02: will this will this ever happen? Yeah. When will it happen? Yeah. Today, what I felt in that room was a sense of there was a
SPEAKER_05: high sense of intensity, a high sense of focus, and also a sense of people were excited. There was excitement about it. It felt different today. It felt more electric today. They were super focused, but you could feel the excitement in the room, they believed it was going to happen. They thought it was highly probable, and it was going to work. And when it did work, it was a sense of elation and joy. And just you know, this is this is 20 plus years of work. And, you know, even was in the room with the engineers, and it just seeing him light up, seeing the joy that he felt seeing the joy the engineers felt together for me. And having been a board member here investor for a long
SPEAKER_05: time and sort of been a long this company and seeing develop, it brought a real sense of hope. Yeah, for what's going to happen to this country and what's happening to humanity. And it's a joy to my heart. Yeah. Gavin, do you have any emotional feelings there when you watch it? You want to add?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, I think it's also just what I would always strikes
SPEAKER_00: me when I'm here is this is a sandy spit of land. There was no power, no electricity, no potable water, you know, no sewage, no utilities, nothing. And out of this, you know, sandy spit of desert, you know, on the Gulf of Mexico, you know, on the Gulf of Mexico, a extremely talented group of engineers, the last five years have lived in, you know, these, these air streams, you know, a long way from a major city. And it is, it is just an amazing place to visit. And you know, the sense of commitment. And when you talk to anyone at SpaceX, anyone here at Starbase, you know, what are you trying to accomplish? Make humanity multi planetary species now get to Mars. So just the experience of visiting Starbase is amazing. Second, I would just say launches are very visceral. It's shocking if you have not experienced one.
SPEAKER_02: The ground shaking, yeah, feeling your chest, you feel it in your field. The Yeah, you feel your body shaking like an earthquake. Yeah, it but it doesn't stop.
SPEAKER_00: And it's incredibly dramatic. You know, the rocket, it's going so slow at first, and then it accelerates. And then you hear this enormous crackling noise that's, you know, louder than any concert, louder than any, you know, sports stadium, then blast of hot air hits you, you feel it. And I would say, a lot of people at launches cry. It's a very emotional experience, often for people who are not. It's hard not to get emotional.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think just that human beings can accomplish something
SPEAKER_00: like this is amazing. And then what I would just say is, you know, there was the rocket flew for four minutes, and went through Max Q. It went to 39 kilometers, the Soviet in one, which was comparable rocket only reached 12 kilometers. Like the team was ecstatic. Yeah. The joy on their faces. Happy, cheering.
SPEAKER_02: I've never seen anything like it. Yeah, it was awesome. It was
SPEAKER_00: very inspirational. And I felt very, very grateful to be there. Yeah. Incredible. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: Can I give you one thought of what I'm feeling right now? Yeah. The after effect. The after effect afterglow.
SPEAKER_02: It's just an extraordinary sense of gratitude. I mean, there has
SPEAKER_05: been so much sacrifice here. And we wouldn't sit over 20 years from from Elon, of course, and the amount of just, you know, unbelievable work done from him and the entire team at SpaceX as engineers, everyone who works here. Yeah, it's been extraordinary. And it just really, I'm just deeply grateful. Incredible and grateful to you all for having us on. Thank you. Incredible. It's great to hear that perspective because you
SPEAKER_01: would not have gotten it from off the Twitter feed. You know, from the mainstream media, David, if you'd come here with us, you could have gotten Yeah,
SPEAKER_05: David, you were invited. You were invited. You almost we almost shanghaied you from Miami. There's a new term called Starship as opposed to Shanghai. We're going to Shanghai. Starship
SPEAKER_01: you. We're gonna Starship you next time. Yeah, I'm bummed I couldn't be there. But I'm excited to see how excited you guys are. And just the point I was making is that when I was reading the mainstream media coverage of this, it was almost like ghoulish. It was like a type of glee. It was almost unbelievable that the rocket blew up, but they didn't they didn't really mention any of the things you're mentioning. I mean, from the point of view of the people who are there, it was a triumph. And it was exciting because of the data that was collected and the fact that this rocket even got off the earth and achieved this is true for four minutes, but the media never really conveyed that. So thank you for giving us a perspective that you just would not have gotten today from the New York Times or other mainstream media.
SPEAKER_00: And just to add to that just a little bit of context. You know, this is an iterative design process with rapid improvement. This Starship had 31 engines that were made over the course of one year had different tolerances behaved unpredictable, unpredictably. You know, this was far from the best Starship, the one that's going to launch in three months or two months or four months or five months or whenever it is, they've already made over 1000 discrete improvements to it. And that was before they got all the data for today. And then there's a Starship after that, and after that.
SPEAKER_02: So I think it really is the what the mainstream media just failed to understand is the process under which a new rocket platform is deployed and how revolutionary this is. They are iterating at a speed here. That's not what I don't think people can comprehend. I mean, on this, that's not important.
SPEAKER_05: They don't, they don't care. They don't care. And it was a way
SPEAKER_04: to paint somebody who they dislike and they are threatened by a negative light. The front page of the Wall Street Journal says SpaceX's Starship explodes shortly after launching uncrewed test flight. If you take Antonio Gracias his explanation, which was articulate and transparent and fair. And this headline, you could not be more further apart on the spectrum of truth. Antonio just said that this is a day this is for the audience of which there are millions of people now. Antonio said this is the day that you look back on when we are multi planetary as this Cambrian moment, if you will, this incredible point of innovation and human ingenuity and teamwork and sacrifice. You know, Gavin said it as well just giving up five years of your life to move in the middle of nowhere live in an Airstream trailer. And then the Wall Street Journal was basically perspective is rocking goes. I mean, it was just fireworks. It was just a firework display. Right? I said no to my own teacher. I just said, Look, Joe, ignore,
SPEAKER_05: please ignore the news media. Yeah, it's total BS. This is a huge success. It's a huge success. And you know, we should just step back for a second and enjoy success. Because part of the problem the news media is this is a moment that should galvanize our country. I mean, SpaceX is about America, SpaceX is an American company. This is about America. I think
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_04: they can't see that it galvanizes potentially galvanizes support for a human being that they feel deeply threatened by. And that's what it all comes down to ultimately. And that's what you see in the headlines. That's why what's so interesting about this is that the behavior of the mainstream media to now paint this as something unsuccessful or a joke or rocket goes boom or fireworks. When you look back on something as meaningful as this, it'll just make them even less credible. That's what that's unfortunately what they're doing to themselves is shooting themselves in the foot.
SPEAKER_02: It's pretty sad. Yeah. And this was in the Wall Street Journal. This is CNN, New York Times, everybody just painted it as a failure. And it's like, oh, here's a collection of headlines. Well done producer. I mean, literally, you would think if you read the mainstream media that SpaceX failed. And it really the when I was talking to Elon months ago about this, you know, he said, Listen, 5050 we get off the launchpad. Yeah, if we can get off the launchpad, and we don't blow up the launchpad, that's a huge success. The fact that this thing got as far as it is in four minutes, and they got all that data. And they've got when you see the scale of this factor, and I hope you all get to come down here and all Americans get to see this because for me, you know, and being friends with the along for as long as I have, and to watch him go from the idea of this, and he showed me, I went with Elon to see the the Hawthorne factory when he was considering renting. And from that moment to now, to see the suffering that he went through personally to do this, and the team, the amount of suffering to get to this point has been so tremendous. But when you go to the Gigafactory in Texas, when you see what's happening here at Starbase, it should let you know that this is still the greatest country in the world with the greatest entrepreneurs. And he is truly the greatest entrepreneur of our lifetime. And I'm not just saying that because he's my bestie. I'm saying it because it's objectively true. And when you see headlines in the press, look at what has been accomplished. Look at the Tesla's on the road. Look at what happened with this rocket ship and judge the man by what has been produced to date and understand he's going to keep going. And the team he has inspired is relentless. I spoke, I sat there on the deck, an hour or two after all this went down. And I just ate some chips and salsa with a half dozen of the people who were in Mission Control. They love the podcast. They listen to every episode of all in I kid you not. And they said, Will you talk about this on all and I said, Well, we talk
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_02: about some all in. Thank you for what you've done for humanity. This is the most inspiring thing I've experienced. We love you guys, SpaceX. charge ahead, be relentless as you've been. And know that despite these absolutely insignificant headlines, what you're doing is so meaningful to every American and every human on this planet. Don't stop, go faster, go harder, be more relentless. We're all cheering and we're in awe of you. This is one topic we can all agree on. This is something
SPEAKER_02: that can galvanize America is to be involved in. We are leading the world again. Yes, we're leading the world in the space race again. We're going to be on the moon. We're going to be on Mars. What about Uranus? You know, free bird keeps asking. I love you, brother. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming on.
SPEAKER_03: Bye, guys. Thanks for coming on. Bye, guys. See you, Gavin. Bye,
SPEAKER_04: Antonio. That was great. I'm surprised I beat you mouth to
SPEAKER_01: the punch there. Yeah. Oh, no, we were all cute. Tomahawk was
SPEAKER_03: having a moment. He was awake, daydreaming about the future. And not thinking about the line. I was taking the number of shares
SPEAKER_04: of SpaceX I know and multiplying it by a billion trillion. Billion trillion dollars per share. Wow. Yeah, the rest of us
SPEAKER_02: are thinking about humanity, America, inspiring people. And Shabbat's got his like little calculator out. I'm gonna have
SPEAKER_04: like a babushka of planes, a plane. Wow, right to ruin the moment. Make it about you. Oh my god. I
SPEAKER_01: did have a business question about how the starship impacts starlink. Very simple. There's a graphic online you can find on
SPEAKER_02: the SpaceX YouTube channel. And they show the starship. And it literally looks like a goddamn Pez dispenser shooting out the next version of starlink. And these are, you know, without I don't want to speak about any specifics, but you can you can watch it spit them out. You can put out more, and they're obviously going to be more powerful. And if you have seen the size of the satellite, I have starlink at both houses, the ski house and my main house as a backup. It's getting scary how good it is. And if you look at the size of them, and I again, I don't want to speak about any future products. It's not my place. But if you see the size getting smaller, there's one or two things that we all know about technology, cheaper, faster, better, smaller, just so I would just say if you're if you're a fan of starlink, just keep those words in mind. Yeah, it's gonna be pretty amazing what starlink is going to be able to do. Yeah, I thought that I maybe I read this somewhere that
SPEAKER_01: starship can carry 600 plus satellites, whereas the previous top of the line rocket, the Falcon nine could only carry was it like 50 or something or yeah, maybe a little less. Yeah, there's like 3040. So so you're talking about 20 times the number of satellites can go up and at a lower expense. Yeah, and I guess SpaceX has gotten permission from the FCC to put up about 12,000 starlink satellites. So you could do that, you know, with, I guess just just 20 you know, 20 missions,
SPEAKER_01: the big disruption is going to happen by the end of 2026.
SPEAKER_04: Because this next generation set of licenses, spectrum licenses that the FCC sold, came with a condition that you had to launch satellite capacity by the end of 2026. I think otherwise you lose it. Or you have to do your first launch, I think by the end of 20. Any of the point is that the only company that actually has the capability to build and to launch is SpaceX. So they have a complete monopoly. And because they're advantaging their own solution, it puts everybody else behind the eight ball. So not only will they probably offer the best global internet connectivity at every single natural point in the world that you could be, which is going to be a really big leap. They're going to do it, Jason, as you said, had a throughput that's going to surprise people. And it's also going to render every other existing provider in a really difficult situation who's like, you know, what is their alternative, you can't launch with ULA because they're inconsistent. You can't launch with Blue Origin because they're inconsistent. You can't launch with the Europeans in general, because they're inconsistent. SpaceX is the only solution, but then SpaceX is just going to advantage themselves. And there's nothing illegal about that. So you're going to be left with a bunch of these existing telecommunications companies in a really difficult spot in the next couple years. So it's going to be really dynamic space, I think very much worth paying attention to on senses regards
SPEAKER_02: the all in community. Stay in a nap, man has not slept in the last couple days. He's taking a well deserved nap right now. So hopefully, we'll have them on in a future episode. Very quick very quickly. Where are you taping from? Jake? I'll just
SPEAKER_01: curious, where are you taping from there? I met Starbase. And
SPEAKER_02: there are little tiny homes and he lent us one to stay in here. And yeah, it's because it's just inspiring to be here. It's been it's been a great experience. And I've been this is I've been here a couple times. And the scale of the factory, the ships, and just over the last, like they said, the less I've been here a couple times, maybe three or four years ago. And it really is growing exponentially. And the other really positive thing is, people are driving, again, back to the enthusiasm in the public. And what you don't see mirrored in the press, which I think was a really astute point, sex. I met a guy who gave me a ride in his golf cart. I was I was late to a meeting. Guy says, Hey, are you going somewhere? And I said, Yeah, because I was literally running on the street trying to get catch a flight. And the guy drives me in his golf court. And I say, Hey, he says, Hey, you here for the launch? I said, Yeah, I'm here for the lunch. He says, so am I say, Can I ask you, do you work for SpaceX? He says, No, I'm just a fan of Elon's. I'm a fan of SpaceX. And I said, Can I ask you, he drove from his I drove 19 hours to somewhere in Texas, Houston or something. He drove 19 hours to come here to spend the week to see the launch. And the crowds here have gotten bigger and bigger. And there's hundreds of people. I think I call San Padre Island over here with a little beach community, kind of like a, like a Las Vegas on the beach or a Reno or New Orleans. And they're just lined up there with cameras. These are Americans, just Americans in RVs, in cars, setting up cameras to see history happen. And it's it really is truly inspiring. These are just salt of the earth, normal folk. This isn't the media. This isn't like affluent people or necessarily, but just Americans who are inspired in and that's, I think, what all entrepreneurs who hear these stories about what's going on down here, you'll overestimate what you can do in a year, you're going to underestimate what you can do in 10. And I think that's, you know, we all know you long pretty well here and have watched this journey. They're cooking with oil, they're moving fast. And the iteration process is extraordinary. And they're making everything here. And it's Americans making everything that the tiles I remember being here three years ago, and Elon and I at two in the morning, we're walking through the factory while where they were working 24 hours a day trying to figure out the tiles on Starship to get it back in. And they were making the tiles themselves. And just trying to figure that format that that's the level of detail that's occurring here. And as Gavin said, there's 1000 different things changing on each iteration of this. So more great stuff to come, I believe. Yeah. That's been another episode of Phil Hellmuth
SPEAKER_04: mentions his relationship with Elon. Thanks, everybody for tuning in.
SPEAKER_02: No, I mean, what am I supposed to do? You know, like, I'm sorry that my friend, you know, started a rocket ship company, I don't apologize for it. You guys doing great stuff in the world as well. So do we want to talk about AI? Do we want to go to this tiger marking down their book? Where would you like to go, gentlemen, we can talk about the fox settlement with dominion. That was something you and I talked about last week, sex, I'd love to get your opinion on that they paid $787 million in this settlement for defamation. It didn't go to trial. You were hoping it would go to trial. How do you feel? I mean, and this is an extraordinarily large settlement. So yeah, but what
SPEAKER_02: are your what are your thoughts on this? You wanted to see this go to the mountain, go to the Supreme Court and maybe see the laws in the United States change eventually. Catch us up on your reaction to this ginormous fine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's
SPEAKER_01: funny you call it a speeding ticket. Because when I saw this or reminded me of a scene at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, where Martin Sheen says that charging man with murder in this place is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indianapolis 500. I mean, the analogy here is that the media is so dishonest, whether it's CNN or MSNBC or the New York Times, I mean, or if they're constantly inaccurate or whatever and still defending box. So for this one network to get a fine of like 800 million, it's like pretty, pretty incredible. I mean, they should be handing out a lot more of these in my in my view, not just a fox. But yeah, look, I would like to see to that end, I would like to see the standard in New York Times
SPEAKER_01: versus Sullivan revised by the Supreme Court, the standard is actual malice. So you have to prove not just that the press told a lie, but that there was malice behind it. And that's what this trial would have been about. And Fox, so what should
SPEAKER_02: it change to? Yeah. I think that changed to what would be a better standard in your mind? I think that if the media makes a
SPEAKER_01: mistake, they should have to correct it. And I would say the correction needs to be at the same level that they publicize the original story. So if they make a mistake, if it's untruthful, and it damages someone's reputation, and they refuse to post a correction, then I think they should be liable. That seems fair to me. If you were to put something on
SPEAKER_02: page a one, if you were to give it five minutes at the start of a show on whether it's Rachel Maddow, or Tucker, whoever makes the mistake, it can be anybody. If they made the mistake in the first five minutes top of the show, they don't get to bury down the website. They don't get to bury it on page seven. They got to say it up front. Hey, listen, we made a mistake. Correction. Here's the mistake. Correct. Yeah, I think it's
SPEAKER_01: reasonable correction should get similar publicity as the original story. And by the way, if they correct it, that would be like a safe harbor. But if they refuse, and they publish a lie, and it damages somebody, then they should be liable for that. I think there should also be some. That's what I think.
SPEAKER_02: But yeah, I'm in agreement with that. Because they there is the trick in journalism to bury the correction. And there's another trick that I think needs to be looked at. It's a little more nuanced, which is somebody makes a mistake, or an accusation in a
SPEAKER_02: publication. And then the next publication says, Oh, the New York Times, Fox News, CNN said this, but they don't check it themselves. So they're using another publication as like a proxy to kind of give them some level of protection. I think they should have to on a firsthand basis. Right? No,
SPEAKER_01: that's the game they play. You're right. So they start with a super shady source. Yeah, that, you know, it just attributes it to some sort of anonymous source, then the second most shady publication quotes that one, and then the third most shady quotes that and then it goes to the whole food chain. Yeah. So you're right. Reposting something in the echo chamber because other publications are doing it. You're right. That should not be protected. They should have to do their own sourcing, basically.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, or just some base level of fact checking if you and now if you called it Fox opinion, that's slightly different than calling it Fox News. So maybe the part of this is branding a chamath or freeburg. Any thoughts on this? Just in
SPEAKER_04: general, Fox, I think has only 4 billion of cash. So they just spent 20 some odd percent of it paying this off. And if I were a shareholder, the question I would ask is, did we actually make enough money to justify having to pay almost $800 million of our cash balance? The answer is probably no. And this is the first of a bunch of lawsuits that they have. The next one, which is I think is like smart o matic, which is another voting machine company. That's an even bigger lawsuit, actually, that's a two and a half billion dollar lawsuit. And so it's good to be the same outcome and another settlement. And so now all of a sudden, you would deplete half their cash, all for a lie to do what at some point, some smart business governance needs to kick in over at Fox, and they need to realize that this stuff just doesn't make economic sense. Maybe they thought it made political and ratings sense. But you can't justify that when it costs $2 billion. There's a concept here, I think sex that is particularly
SPEAKER_02: interesting in Finland. When you get a speeding ticket, speaking of speeding tickets, your speeding ticket is proportional to your net worth. And so these NHL players who like to speed and Nokia executive, it was given the equivalent and this is a bit excessive of $103,000 fine for going 45 into 30 zone on its motorcycle, and an NHL player got a $39,000 fine two years earlier. I think that this is part of the problem is sometimes fines don't match the crime and or the they're not proportional enough for the person to feel them. And so then we kind of can joke that they're speeding tickets. One very rich person said to me, you know, when they would, they had watched them park, you know, incredibly illegally in a small town. And I said, you're gonna get a pretty serious ticket. That's in a pretty gnarly spot to be parking. And they said, Oh, you mean the VIP parking charge? And I was like, Yeah, that kind of sucks. But okay. There might be some concept here of a proportional fine. And I think the EU is starting to work on that as well. Because, you know, big tech was ignoring this is going to embolden a lot of people to take matters into
SPEAKER_04: their own hands and sue some of these media companies if the lie is egregious enough, and it negatively impacts them enough, I think it would embolden a lot of folks. So, Sachs is right that up until now, most folks haven't done anything about this. But if you feel like the media has really wronged you in a meaningful way. There's probably also now a lot of private equity organizations that would do the lawsuit finance or hedge funds that would do the lawsuit finance. And so now you're free rolling it, right? So you you get one of these folks to pay it, they get 50% of the gains, you get 25%, the lawyers get 25%, and you go and you litigate. I'm
SPEAKER_04: sure that you'll see more not less, because this fine is it's really big. And again, we don't know the end of all of these 2020 election hoax shenanigans, because this is the first not the last of these. I do think it's a really big number. I mean, I did. I did
SPEAKER_01: want the the case to go to all these courts so they could revise New York Times versus Sullivan. But I do wonder about the size of the settlement here. It's just it seems extraordinary. They paid it. There was an interest. It's a settlement. Yeah, they voluntarily agreed to do it. Yeah, absolutely. So. So in any event, look, I hope to Martha's
SPEAKER_01: right that this actually incentivizes more actions against media companies, because I think their feet needs to be held to the fire. And they need to do a better job publishing the truth. There was an interesting thread by a Twitter poster called Kanakoa. Do I don't know if you guys saw this, where he posted an hour of footage by Democrats and democratic groups and more democrat leading political science experts questioning whether voting machines could be hacked. Basically, this, this idea that voting machines could be hacked is not it's not an allegation that is unique to Fox. So apparently, there's evidence that Fox knew it was bogus. So they definitely should not have run with it. But I do wonder, hey, why? Why shouldn't other people be liable for this too? Well, I mean, the question is, I think those internal text
SPEAKER_02: messages between the host who knowingly knew it was false, and then we're doing it. I think that's why they took that settlement because 800 million or whatever. So is a lot less than 1.4 1.5. And so there's speculation that maybe they got
SPEAKER_01: some bad discovery. They got some discovery problems. Yeah, but I'm just saying that problems in these allegations
SPEAKER_01: about electronic voting machines being hackable or rigged. This seems like an allegation that's been made. That's actually
SPEAKER_02: interesting, not just in 2020. But it's been made multiple
SPEAKER_01: times by whichever side loses. Yes. So I would wonder why more parties aren't liable for this, by the way, the hanging chair never I never bought into. I never bought into those allegations. I said so at the time, I thought they were bogus. I thought the whole Sidney Powell thing, you know, the release the cracking or whatever was ridiculous. So I don't feel too bad for Fox or anything like that. But it seems to me, like I'm saying they're they're not the only ones speeding here. There's a lot of people who need to get speeding tickets. Yeah,
SPEAKER_02: there is a roadmap for the press to learn from this and to get better, right? Like to maybe take to heart that maybe the public now is looking at them and assuming that the trust in media has is that an all time low? Alex Jones got fined a
SPEAKER_03: billion dollars, right? It's a judgment judgment judgment. The
SPEAKER_02: Fox thing's a settlement, right? He got a judgment of over a billion from multiple courts. Yeah. So he said a bunch of
SPEAKER_03: stuff that, you know, was in court provable to be false. And then he kind of restated it and he got, you know, this massive fine. I think there's an interesting question here on how far this goes with respect to, you know, maybe it invites the lawsuits, like you guys say, where there's things that are more on the on the line. And then we really start to have kind of a tough set of conversations that maybe there are things that are factually debatable, arguable, opinionated, or they were true at a certain point, and then you didn't really have evidence to disprove it. What are you allowed to say? Are you only allowed to say things that you've proven or things that haven't been disproven? And that becomes a pretty tough set of conversations. And what I think might be interesting from here, if so much of media over time gets replaced by chat and AI aggregating lots of different information, synthesizing that and making representations back to us, and that becomes our primary source of call it news, or quote media in the future. What happens when those models or the synthesis of data or the source of the data leads to a statement that has a similar sort of descent around whether or not it's true or not. And that you really end up kind of ending up in a pretty cloudy environment. You know, by started starting this process, I think is a very insightful one,
SPEAKER_02: we'll get to in a minute, I just coming as a coming from a journalism background myself, and then becoming a commentator, there really needs to be three or four very simple things that the media needs to do. Number one, more fact checking, and number two, less anonymous sources, it's they were like too much on anonymous sources. And then there needs to be very clear delineation between what is a fact and what is an opinion. And the public is trying to sort this out. Is it Fox News is an opinion? And what you're saying is this an opinion or is this a fact? Did you do journalism? Or did you just have an opinion? Is Rachel Maddow an opinion? Or did she actually have a journalist check these facts? And I think this is where self policing and maybe rebuilding their rebuilding trust is on the media. It is now the news and the media's job to rebuild trust. And if not, they're gonna get more fines. But let's get into, I think some of the stuff we're seeing with AI we had talked on this show before, many times about the corpus of data, under which these models are being built, or Reddit announced plans to start charging companies that uses data training and models. The co founder Steve Huffman, who came back after Conde Nast had bought Reddit and then sold it back to the founders. And paradoxically, I believe Sam Altman has a major investment in Reddit, he said more than any other place on the internet. Reddit is a home for authentic conversations is a lot of stuff on the site that you'd only ever say in therapy, or never at all. A lot of people use pseudonyms, obviously. And the Reddit corpus of data is incredibly valuable. But we don't need to give all that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free, crawling Reddit generating revenue and not returning any of the value to our users is something we have a problem with. It's a good time for us to tighten things up your thoughts, Shemagh on what we talked about two different episodes, maybe we'll play drop a clip in here, Nick, if you want to impose, it's going to be the large data sets, Quora Yelp, the App Store reviews, Amazon's reviews. So there are large corpuses of data that you would need like Craigslist has famously never allowed anybody to scrape Craigslist, the amount of data inside Craigslist as but one example of a data set would be extraordinary to build chat GPT on chat GPT is not allowed to because you as you brought up robots dot tst last week, there's going to need to be an AI dot txt, are you allowed to use my data set in AI and under and how will I be compensated for it? Will the rights to the data will will Google just say to Quora, hey, we'll give you a billion dollars a year for this data set. If you don't show anybody else, they should come off. Those were our previous discussions that we just played. What do you think? It's so
SPEAKER_04: incredible. We are witnessing such an important moment for Silicon Valley, but frankly, how the world works. And it's just everything is changing. That's what I'm just in awe about that. You know, we talked about this and we were basically spit balling something two or three months ago. And not but 60 or 90 days later, these things come to pass. Right? We talked about something in one week and then, you know, 14 days later, it's completely upended like how impressed sacks was about plugins. And then plugins were rendered useless, and somewhat impotent two weeks later by auto GPTs. It's just so profound, I think what's going on. So Google today announced that they're going to merge two organizations that I thought were so orthogonal to each other, disparate brain and deep mind. The cultures just seem so totally different. But now they're merging those two things together something that I thought would never happen. They did it. So all these competitive pressures are so real. I was in LA, for the Breakthrough Prize, I was flying home with somebody on Saturday, I won't say who it is, but they are right at the bleeding edge of a lot of this AI stuff. And they let go a third of their company replaced it with an agent within six weeks of training. So how is this not going to affect everybody else? I guess is maybe the bigger question. And then I go back to what I said last week, which is that we've talked about a lot of the positive things. And I think it's important to make sure that people understand that there are a bunch of non trivial negative things. And I think I shared one on Twitter, which was around this company that use an AI model to build a library of 40,000 toxic compounds that could kill all kinds of numbers of humans. So there's all kinds of really, really tough things going on right now that I think to me means it's the moment where I have the least sense of how to do my job. And so I've tried to kind of like put a pin in everything and just go back to learning mode. It's a bit humbling is what you're saying like it's incredibly humbling
SPEAKER_02: entire rulebook even for us as capital allocators company formation. It has you it has you chum off wondering even as I do this as a CEO, I'm like, should I be using models to do parts of
SPEAKER_04: the workflow inside of my business? Inside the portfolio companies that were invested in? Am I supposed to go into the board meeting now on Monday and say, hey, x, y, z person just did one, two and three, and cut opex by a third? Do I demand the CEO do that? Do I force change if they don't do it? Do I say, so I don't I don't I don't exactly know what to do. The carousel is spinning increasingly fast. I don't know
SPEAKER_02: what to do. It's spinning increasingly faster. And we're
SPEAKER_03: all on it. I'll just say a general point, which I kind of made that this event today. It feels like the pace of change is so high that you're kind of in a dust storm. You don't really know where you're going to end up. So it's very hard to sit as an investor right now and say I'm going to pick these things because you know, two weeks later, you just don't know whether that path even exists anymore, because the dust storm washes it away, or it's just blown away. And I think that there will as a result, there will be a lot of money lost by investors by companies building in this space. net net, the index for investing in like.com companies. The majority, a large amount of money was lost during that era. But from that era also emerged a whole of winners. And those winners ended up creating extraordinary value. I think we're at a point in time right now, where we could see 10 times the value generated in this phase of technology advancement than we saw during the internet and the advancement of the internet. And if if that is true, I think you'll end up seeing certainly the same thing happen, which is the index will lose money. But the few winners will accrue such extraordinary gains. The problem is, you can't deterministically pick those winners today, because of the storm problem. You just don't know the path totally. So if you were to meet Jeff Bezos versus some CEO of some.com selling pet stuff, back in 1995 to 9794 to 97, would you have recognized Jeff Bezos was going to stand out? Would you have recognized Larry and Sergey were going to stand out? Would you have recognized Bill Gates was going to stand out or Zuck? At the end of the day, this is harder than it has ever been in terms of predicting a technology cycle. But what we still know to be true is that the capital will be allocated within a company, the operations will be run, managed, and driven and led by an individual or set of individuals. And that's effectively what I think a lot of investing in the cycle is going to come down to. We're all going to sit here and pontificate and intellectually masturbate ourselves to some, you know, genius, you know, path that we think is going to evolve. And at the end of the day, most of it won't turn out to be true. And that path won't be real. Because this is such a dynamical system right now. There are so many feedback loops, one thing makes one step change, and it changes every step. But what we still know is that great leaders can lead, you know, and especially coming out of this, this Elon discussion, and seeing the extraordinary achievements he he's delivered, particularly today. I think that's maybe what a lot of early stage venture is going to shift to an AI, it's really, you know, finding great people. And I'll tell you one thing for sure. And I was kind of commenting on this earlier today was, I really think a lot of series C and later companies, and I know, we're going to talk about this implosion discussion later. So many of those companies have a valuation that's less than their preference stack. And as a result, those founders that work there, and those employees that are there, are getting their equity wiped out. They'll have to be free. Freeberg, can you just explain what that means technically to
SPEAKER_02: the audience?
SPEAKER_03: When you when you when you raise money into a startup, the investors that give you that money that invest that money, it's effectively alone, you owe them that money back first, before your shares get paid out in the future. So if the company ends up being worth less than the money that they've invested, they get the money first. And ultimately, if the company goes public or gets sold, they can convert their what are called preferred shares into common shares and participate. So even though you only quote, sold 20% of your company, for let's say $200 million, that $200 million actually has to get paid first. So now you've raised this $200 million, the investors, the company is now reprised, because the market has come down by 80%. And investors are saying, hey, your company is now worth 175 million, your company is now worth less than what you owe the prior the price, the preferred investors. And if it's worth less than what you owe, which I think is the case for over 70 or 80% of series C and layer companies. You know, we can kind of Yeah, and this, but this number comes from what I shared a few months ago, which is that 70% of publicly traded companies that went public in the last three years, are trading below the cash that they've raised. So if you translate that on a one to one basis to the private market, you know, and these, by the way, were the best companies actually got public. So in the private market, you've got to assume that something in that late stage market is on the order of 70 80% is worth less than their preference stack. So a lot of those employees are going to run, those founders don't want to go work for the VCs when they get recapped and get offered a 4% because it looks like they're gonna start AI companies. And I think that's fantastic. And I think that's what's really shifting right now. That's kind of a big dynamic is a lot of these I'm calling them zombie corns are going to see this kind of mass exodus of talent. And a lot of the investors that don't know how to price stuff and don't want to deal with recaps in the late stage, are diverting their attention to seed and a lot of the early stuff. And so there's both a rush of talent and a rush of capital to this kind of very early stage. And so we'll create this massively bubble ethic, you know, index of AI stuff. But some number of these things with some great leaders will emerge and will accrue extraordinary value across many industries.
SPEAKER_04: I really agree with a lot of what you're saying the thing to keep in mind is that the problem with the use of auto GPTs as an example is that the order of magnitude of capital that you need has now just gone down. Yeah, yeah, instead of a $10 million series A. So we used to, you know, people in the height, we're doing 30 and $40 million series A's into crazy, very bubbly ideas and NFTs and all this other stuff. That's idiotic today. Because a two or three person company can now do the work of 20 to 30 people. And the amount of capital that they need is really their salaries, plus the cost of renting some GPUs on your favorite pick your cloud. And so all of a sudden, you can get huge amounts of progress in weeks and months, with hundreds of thousands or low millions of dollars. So if you've raised all of a sudden, a $5 billion fund, because you were trying to do late stage deals, and now all of a sudden said, well, wait, we'll just pivot to early stage. But what are you going to do find this 30 person company, that's not going to work, because you have to know how to write 500,000 to million dollar checks with two or three people. And I love it really, and really help them and really understand their technical ability to execute, right? Yeah, but then it also quickly becomes a thing where maybe you're better off just doing 500 of these two and three person teams. We tried this experiment, seven years ago,
SPEAKER_04: this thing called capital as a service where we were doing this automated investing. I don't know if you guys remember this, but it was like some machine learning that we did on all of our portfolio companies. And all somebody had to do was fill out a form and send us some metrics. And we would have a machined decision, right? So humans would not be allowed to make the investment decision. The problem that we ran into was there was a lot of great companies all around the world. But the administrative burden of supporting 500 companies was unbelievably large and complicated. Oh, you have a company in Indonesia? Well, there's another company in South Korea, and here's a company and you know, they're raising a new round board approval, they got to do this and signatures. I
SPEAKER_02: mean, it's hard to scale. Yeah. So so the VC, which is a
SPEAKER_04: software light people heavy, artisanal business, all of a sudden becomes misfactored, right? So you actually need to be highly automated and use software yourself in order to put 500 three person teams on the field. So this is what I mean by it's really, I think freeberg's use of the term dust storm is a really good one. It's extremely, extremely confusing what to do. And if you have large amounts of money that may actually now what used to be a real differentiator, and a key to success may actually become an impediment because you get to burst you you are forced to do business in a classical way. And that has changed, frankly, in the last 90 days. What do you
SPEAKER_04: think, Saks? What's the question? Because we're touching
SPEAKER_01: a lot of different things here. Do you feel like this is a dust
SPEAKER_02: storm, and it's murky, and it's just hard to place bets as a capital allocator? Because something comes out the next day, or 48 hours later, or the next week that takes the previous idea and wipes it out? And then how do you scale and be capital efficient? Well, we're at the early stages of a huge new wave.
SPEAKER_01: And I think that creates a lot of opportunity. So yeah, you've got to basically separate what's really interesting from the fool's gold, there's definitely gonna be a lot of that. But at least there's a reason now to believe that, say, dozens of unicorns could be created in the next couple of years. So before we were getting kind of long in the tooth on some of these tech cycles, I mean, cloud social mobile, I mean, there was a reason to believe that those earlier waves that sort of played out that the big winners already been determined, and maybe there wouldn't be too many more big winners in those spaces. But now we have a whole new catalyst for founders to do all sorts of new things. And so I tend to think that's super exciting, you know, we're in the early stages. And I do think there will be dozens of new unicorns minted in various aspects of AI could be in AI infrastructure, you know, whether you're seeing now there's a lot of funding that's gone into vector databases or platforms for creating agents. Or it could be in AI copilots, basically that tackle various professional categories and create a copilot for coders or copilot for doctors or lawyers, or architects, I think there's going to be potentially multiple unicorns created in in those categories. I think there's going to be SAS software products that were just good before, but now will actually be great, because the incorporation of API APIs from, you know, AI foundation models, we'll just turbocharge the capabilities. And so there's a whole bunch of SAS products that I think become newly interesting and better, they go from being vitamins to painkillers. So, you know, we're looking in all those categories, and I think we'll end up making some bets. But there's also going to be a lot of companies that are flashes in the pan or get undermined, you know, there'll be SAS companies that actually become less attractive because of disruption from AI. But look, I think all of this, this Maelstrom is great for an investor. I mean, if you're going to spray and pray, it's not good. You got to be selective about where you take your shots. But I think this is the most exciting environment we've been in in a number of years. I mean, it makes me want to go to work every day and see it's so funny to say that sex because I literally am looking for an
SPEAKER_02: office space in San Mateo to start like doing the incubator in person again. And on Monday, I'm having 60 companies come to San Francisco will be at my attorney's office. And we're having like a founder university with just all these new startups that we invested in to just hang out for a day. The enthusiasm right now is amazing. And what's really unique is the developers who had three out of seven companies they interviewed with offer them 150 or 250 k packages, RS use whatever. Now there's no offer from Facebook. There's no Apple, there's no Twitter, there's no Google or Microsoft offer coming in to be the backstop against starting a company. So what are they doing? They're saying, You know what, I got two friends who got laid off, I got one friend who's halfway out the door, let's just start something, let's just start something who can give me 100k, who can give me 500k. And it's, it's, it's so invigorating to see the talented people, not people who've learned how to, you know, hack a pitch deck together and tell a story. But people were actually coding and making MVP is it's truly exhilarating right now the amount of two and three person startups I'm seeing. Yeah. And so while you'll have this, and it's an incredible, I've never seen this amount of destruction and creation occurring simultaneously. I love this zombie concept. You have one half of your portfolio coming apart at the seams, layoffs, reducing their targets. While people are coming in the door with products that are absolutely awe inspiring. I just give one example, I had a company come out of our founder university gave them $25,000 to incorporate a developer and his brother who's a screenplay writer. They're taking screenplay writing software sacks, and you'll appreciate this having produced two amazing movies. Thank you for smoking and the Dolly film is called
SPEAKER_01: Dolly land. Dolly land. Yeah, coming out in two months.
SPEAKER_01: Coming out in two months. Congratulations to me award
SPEAKER_02: winning Oscar winning producer is gonna win an Oscar this time. He's you know, the screenplay writing tools that have existed. You're like what word processors with formatting. What they're doing is they're saying, hey, write some dialogue. And then you can have dialogue and say, hey, make it a little snappier, make it a little Tarantino ish, make it a little more, you know, sorcanish, and then make a storyboard with, you know, stable diffusion. And I was like, well, this is the genius idea. I mean, it's unbelievable. Of course, I'll give you $25,000 for your incorporation. And then they're coming to the exhalation, give another 100k. And in every single piece of software, well,
SPEAKER_04: that company in success ever raised 25 or $30 million? Do you think? No, I think there'll be 12 people, I think it'll be 12
SPEAKER_02: people. I'll give them. But this is my 100k and then a million.
SPEAKER_04: Our industry raises $100 billion a year on the premise that each company before they become a unicorn will absorb between 500 and a billion dollars. Yeah, I'm gonna own 20% 10 to 20% of the
SPEAKER_02: company for low millions. And, and we'll see mid journey is 12
SPEAKER_04: people and no, it's totally bootstrapped. Like I guess what I'm saying is, because in the world of AI, so much work is done for you for free. This is why I'm asking, maybe we will have to change how we do business on the Hollywood
SPEAKER_01: example, there's about to be a Writers Guild strike. And they may want to think twice about that. Because this is not the time where you want to be encouraging the industry to find alternatives to writers, you want to get back in the office
SPEAKER_02: and you want to say, Hey, can I is there any other work I can do this weekend boss? Did you see the news about BuzzFeed today? They had one a Pulitzer, they just shut down BuzzFeed news, the entire news division gone, another 15% gone, the layoffs, and then there was a report this week that Zuckerberg is doing his third round of layoffs, another 4000 people that puts him at 24,000. Yeah, with a hiring freeze. So the way I
SPEAKER_01: describe the current funding environment is it's a tale of two cities. It's the best of times is the worst of times. If you're a hot AI startup that's able to tap into the zeitgeist that's doing something that's perceived as cutting edge or relevant, there's a strong why now and you're early, you know, your early stage, you're able to raise money for that the spigot is turned back on, there's a lot of funding for those types of early stage startups. But if you're a series C stage startup, you're a late stage startup with a, it's called a pre AI model, the spigot is just turned off completely. I mean, let's look at that chart from crunch base where the amount of series C funding has gone from something like 10 billion a quarter last year to like zero. I mean, this is hardly I thought this
SPEAKER_02: was an error in the chart. Look at this chart, everybody is seriously funding to us companies by quarter, there is
SPEAKER_01: just no growth stage funding is just completely dried up. I mean, look at that. I mean, it got cut in a half, and then it
SPEAKER_02: got cut in half again. And then it just flatlined. So when you see this, is your thesis, let me ask you this, is your thesis here that people aren't trying to raise money, and they're just busy cutting their companies down to a smaller team size, and they'll come back out in the second half of the year, or that anybody with that amount of dry powder is out of the game now? Yeah, I think that we're in this awkward stage where the the
SPEAKER_01: companies who raise money, and call it 2020 and 2021. All those valuations are obsolete. And you've had a lot of late stage players leave the game, or they're in the penalty box or in timeout. I mean, look at tiger, for example, the single most active funder at late stage is trying to figure out how much to mark down his portfolio. So I just think that a lot of the funding has dried up there, this idea that there's tons of dry powder sitting out there, I think is a myth. Or maybe it's there, but there's no willingness to deploy it. The valuations are all out of whack. And VCs generally would rather lead around in a new startup with a fresh cap table, then in a cap table, they got to restructure because no one was talking about a year ago, is what we talked about a year ago,
SPEAKER_02: Jamal, I asked you point blank, would you if they cut the valuation? And, you know, they redid everything and said, Hey, listen, we understand this is reality, would you get involved and cut a check? And you're like, I don't want to deal with that kind of, you know, that kind of hard bucket, too hard, too hard bucket for you. Yeah. And so now once again, a year, six months or a year after we talk about this, it has now manifested. This is metastasized into No, it hasn't even started.
SPEAKER_04: I think we are started. Okay, I think I think we're still being really prescient. Like the tiger thing was very important, because they are in many ways, at the front of the line, in terms of the number of companies they've touched the amount of capital they've written. And because they're in the middle of a very large fundraise, their need to mark to market quite accurately so that their existing LPs know what they're signing up for in this next fund. So they're the ones that have the most incentive to move the marks. But it still leaves an entire industry of folks that don't necessarily need to do that, because they have, whether it's dry powder, that dry powder is real or not. The point is that there's a lot of money that hasn't been deployed. And so again, I've asked this question before, what is their incentive to really mark their book down 50%? They don't have an incentive, why would they do that they would rather let it decay down naturally, I'll give you an example of this or do converts that keep it alive that
SPEAKER_03: basically allow them to delay. Yeah, I mean, but even the
SPEAKER_04: convert market free birth that was hot for about six months, and then it just Yeah, no, nobody's doing that stuff either. But I'll give you one example, there's a very good company that we are investors in along with every kind of big blue chip tier one muckety muck organization, we did the A and they stacked on afterwards. And when we thought about what our evaluation should be, we did something we got to a number which was a third of what the mark was. And we're like, well, if we think the price is two thirds off, we should probably just sell it now. And we actually went and got some term sheets from some private equity firms to validate it. And what they was incredible, they both independently got to that same number. And so while the deal was closing, we went through the end of quarter, we moved the mark down and we pointed to that valuation. And we said, Look, this is what these two other very well known firms have said, this is what we've said. So this is what our new valuation is. And you know, we're trying to sell it and we ended up selling it. But every other organization didn't touch their their valuation, that valuation, the private equity folks, maybe you could explain to the audience
SPEAKER_02: why the private equity folks are such a good backstop in terms of valuation versus a venture capitalist. Well, I think that
SPEAKER_04: venture capitalists, we tend to be glass half full. And we are conditioned, especially if you do your job well, to be smart buyers of deep out of the money options. What does that mean? It's like when you meet an entrepreneur and you give them three or 4 million bucks or $500,000 or whatever, at some nominal valuation, you're not trying to get your money back, you're trying to figure out whether he is a Zuck or an Elon or Larry Page, and all of a sudden, you get 1000x on your money back, right. So we are buying these deep out of the money options. Most of them don't hit. But when they do, they can just have these crazy statistical outlier outcomes. So we're trying to buy the future. And we tend to be believers of what can go right. Private equity has refined a
SPEAKER_04: very powerful toolkit of putting two or three orders of magnitude of the money we put into companies to work on the premise that the glass is actually half empty, and what can go wrong and how do we mitigate that risk. And so they tend to be much more sober. I think in my experience dealing with them in what is the true valuation of a business? What are the upsides of a business? What are the warts on a business, they really kind of see the truth, the ground truth much better than feces do in general,
SPEAKER_02: because they're closer to public markets. And they're they flip these things.
SPEAKER_04: Their margins are much thinner. They're they're trying to make one to five 1.6 x their money to x is a huge outcome for them. Yes. So they have a much more sober version of reality. A bunch
SPEAKER_02: of this tiger stuff. Yeah, got released. And I mean, they're their funds underwater, just like Masayoshi sans fund is underwater. And it's going to be years of pain and suffering to get out from under this. And so again, I think sacks now that with tell of two cities, anybody else want to chime on this before we talk a little bit about well, for our friend of the pod, Brian Armstrong. Yeah, I've been I've been investing off balance sheet
SPEAKER_04: since 2018. And six months ago, we started to explore whether we should raise a fund. And I think it was like two weeks ago, we brought the senior partners in me and the five other guys that run our business. And we said, we're not going to raise a fund. And the biggest reason is this dynamic, which is that, you know, we have dollars of private assets, I don't actually know what they're really worth. But I have a responsibility to try to get as much of that capital out. And so I thought the best thing to do is just to take our time and try to figure it out. Because I have way more questions and answers right now. And that's really the first time since I've moved to Silicon Valley where I've held had that sensation is a sensation humility.
SPEAKER_02: I think it's like, I mean, I'm joking, but it is it is for somebody like you who has done so well placing bets, deeply deeply. I mean, I say that as a joke, but I mean it as like a point of self awareness for you. Because, listen, you play some amazing bets, whether it's the Warriors or Facebook, or Bitcoin, or
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_04: whatever, or slack or whatever, I don't know whether I should be writing $200 million checks or $200,000 checks. And I don't know whether I should be doing that sort of as an incubator, actually, as an accelerator, what I'm doing, or actually just as a series A detached investor. So I don't know, I'm trying to take the time to figure it out. And I and my thought was, if I raise a fund right now, I could barely stand the idea of me putting money to work right now of my own capital without any answers, but then the idea of like having a bunch of sovereign wealth funds and folks that were ready to work with us. I don't know, I just I just took up the right time, just to tell you my
SPEAKER_02: fundraising story. I am publicly raising launch fund for I get over $50 million in just, you know, high net worth individuals, you know, and family offices who are interested, immediately close down on 2627 28 of it, and then I'm going to go out on the road to meet with LPS and Silicon Valley bank blows up. Nobody can take a meeting that month, right. And so now, thank the Lord, I said, I'm going to have a one year window to raise the fund. And I talked to some old school VCs, Fred Wilson, Bill Gurley, these people would take a year to raise a fund. It used to be or I'm sorry, in the height of this bubble, you tell me a sax the quickest you close one of the crafts funds. But I was hearing people saying they're closing funds within two or three months. I think we're back to it's a year on the road to close a fund. What's your experience accidents and you're an all star? So I'm curious, the shortest to the reality. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: I think it's just depends on your situation, to be honest. But but I, I think the important thing for founders to know is just that the way that late stage financing is dried up is very real. I'll give you like two data points just this week. So I got my first notification from a portfolio company. This is a company I invested in before craft. It's not a craft investment, but my personal investments, and they're doing a pay to play round. You know what that is? That is that means
SPEAKER_02: pain. Yeah. Yeah. So basically, the way it works is they say
SPEAKER_01: they're going to raise $20 million. Well, by the way, they said they went out to raise growth funding. weren't able to get a term sheet from anybody. And no takers, no takers. And this is a good product. I mean, a lot of startups use this product. I think they're ARRs in the 20 something million, maybe 30 something million. It's not like doubling your viewers growing like, let's call it 50% year over year. This is a company that should have been able to raise money. I don't understand why they weren't maybe because they're burning too much money. So instead of cutting costs the way they should, they're doing like a $20 million pay to play round. And what that means is that everybody is an investor in the company, you either have to do your prorated share of the 20 million or you get diluted 10 to one, if you had 10% of the company, you have to put in $2 million,
SPEAKER_02: or your 10% of the company is now 1%. No, it'd be maybe more because you would look at let's say 50%
SPEAKER_01: of the companies owned by the investors and the other 50% is common, just to take round numbers. Okay, if you own 10% of the company, that would actually be 20% of the prefer. Yes, yeah,
SPEAKER_02: the employees are not buying chairs in this 20% of the of the of the 20 million, which is 4 million.
SPEAKER_01: 4 million. Yeah, exactly. So basically, you have to own 1%.
SPEAKER_01: Right, right. So basically, it's almost like a capital call, where you just have to pony up more money in order to preserve your ownership in the company. If it makes you feel better, but super punitive. I had one of
SPEAKER_04: those just happened to me as well. And I was just like, we'll put in the bare minimum because like the thing that it puts you in a painter in a corner where you're like, well, I've been with this thing for eight or nine years. Is this the moment
SPEAKER_04: to basically lose all of that compounding or value or work that you put in or seen their team do? And it's just a really tough position. Right?
SPEAKER_01: So look, I'm not on the board. So I don't know what reasoning went into this. But what they should be sending out to all the shareholders is look here, all of our metrics. Here's our burn, you know, here's the steps we took to reduce our burn. I don't really like the idea of having to do essentially a capital call from your existing investors. When you haven't reduced your own burn. I mean, why can't the company operate that break even if you're at 30 something million of ARR, you should operate that you may not want to operate a break even but you should be able to but sex This is what I mean. I'll tell you after we stopped
SPEAKER_04: taping who it was that that told me this about their company, but they were basically able to let go a third of their workforce by moving a bunch of work to models. And let me guess the founders get to keep their shares or they
SPEAKER_02: get re up in this whole Michigan. No, no, no, but wait, hold on. Can we can I just finish the
SPEAKER_04: point? So, so the point is, like, if you can cut off x by a third, by using all of these new AI, you know, models and GPTs and auto GPTs, what are you as a board member or shareholder
SPEAKER_04: supposed to do? And also, as a founder, don't you have to go there first before you start to ask people for more money? And why are people doing that first much more aggressively? And so this is what doesn't make any sense to me. That's exactly my point is what steps were taken to cut costs
SPEAKER_01: before you just went to the investors to pony up more money. That's what I want to know if they actually did that work. And this is like the last money they need. Okay, then, you know, I'll pony up my share. And by the way, we need investors that you know, we
SPEAKER_04: don't and we need investors to be much more aggressive and holding folks accountable because these examples need to be better discussed. While effects yz company was able to do it, why aren't you able to do it? And if it's because we're not technically capable, Matt, that's maybe a plausible answer. But even that reason will go away in a few months, I suspect. But if it's that we just have such institutional rot, we're incapable of doing it. Well, then you might as well just not write the check because that company is going to get undercut by some new white sheet version of that business that doesn't have any of these impediments that management has told you a bunch of patients in a way to mop and sacks management
SPEAKER_02: has told you they're incapable of running this business. This concern in a in a thoughtful way. I had this happen to us as well. And the question I have you sacks is in these situations where this pay to play happens. You basically everybody gets wiped out except those who play. But the founders and the management team always seem to get re up and they're whole because the new investor doesn't want the management team not incentivize. So in these kind of situations, it's kind of like the management team gets to reboot the cap table. And they don't get penal. I don't know. I actually I don't I don't have
SPEAKER_01: those details yet. Yeah. Remember, I didn't lead around.
SPEAKER_01: I was just an angel investor in the company. So I checked with one of the VC firms that led around and I'm like, Are you going to do this? And they said probably not. You know, and so like the round might fail. I mean, they can make it as punitive as they want. But if the shareholders don't have the money, if the shareholders don't believe that the company has fixed this problems, they're not going to pony up the money.
SPEAKER_03: Let's get free bargain. Yeah, I think one of the problems that a lot of folks are facing is it becomes less about the fundamental value of a business in a lot of these conversations, as you guys know, and it's becoming a lot more about who will fund the next round if the company is still burning money. And that's a social market bet, not a bet on the team or the business or the value. It's that there's someone else that's going to lead the next round. And this is fundamentally why he's called the greater fool. That's called the greater fool
SPEAKER_04: theory. Look, I mean, it's historically we wouldn't call
SPEAKER_03: him a fool if it's just about progress towards profitability. But right now, there's so much trepidation, it's almost like a self fulfilling prophecy, that there's so much trepidation and doing late stage rounds that no one wants to be the last guy in the company. And you're not sure if the next guy is going to be there to fund the last round to get to profitability. And that's why half of biotechs that are public, are trading below cash, because historically, the way biotech companies, which is a really good pointed example of this, they make progress to hit milestones, and then the next round of capital comes in, they make progress, hit milestones, next round of capital comes in. And then eventually you get, you know, phase three approvals and you go sell the company or whatever you get profitable, and they almost always get acquired. And in the case of other companies, if the business has to do three or four things, it's got three or four milestones, it has to hit, in your case, Saks, it might be that they got to get to 50 million ARR, and they got to get, you know, the certain cost function down in the business. And if they can do those two things, and the business profitable, but it's going to take us around a 20, we'll get the first chunk down, and then another round of 30 to get the last chunk done. And no one knows if the next 30 is going to be there. And that's really where a lot of these market dynamics are falling apart, that there's historically been a model in the market of hit milestones, next round shows up, hit milestones, next round shows up. And now no one knows if the next round will show up. So no one wants to fund this round, particularly where there's high burn, it requires a lot of capital to make that bet. So the social, you know, the self fulfilling problem, the social market bet right now is, you know, it self fulfills and we're, you know, we're sitting here, kind of spinning our thumbs wondering if the next guy's gonna fund it. Do you think that only 10 or 15% of companies have now properly
SPEAKER_04: reset value? Like you said 70% of these unicorns are actually zombie horns? Yeah, that's why I think the number from I don't want to I
SPEAKER_03: don't know Tiger's book at all. But when I hear numbers like 20% for a for a fully invested mature book that invested during the peak of the cycle, it doesn't sound right that it's 20%. It sounds like it should be a lot lower, like I think that 20% by the way, you know, comes after like two other
SPEAKER_02: smaller right down. So they might be cumulatively. Tiger, I don't want to talk about Tiger, I think, like, sure,
SPEAKER_03: the statistic of 70% of these public companies trading below their cash, the cash that they've burnt that they've raised in their lifetime. And again, just for anyone that's
SPEAKER_03: now analysts at home, trying to figure out how we get to that number, you look at the retained earnings on the balance sheet. And so the cumulative retained earnings tells you if it's negative tells you how much money they've burnt over their lifetime. And that tells you effectively how much money has been invested. So when you look at the enterprise value, which is the market cap, minus the cash they have today, you get their enterprise value. If their enterprise value is less than their cumulative retained earnings, it means that they're currently worth less than the money they've spent. And that's a statistic that is a fact right now in public markets in technology gone public in the last three years. And then you compare that to private markets. And I don't think we've seen a 70% write down yet. Or, you know, 70% of these things being worth less than the cash. So it's, you know, it's still Yeah, I think you're right. Jamat is probably a another hammer to drop multiple hammers, multiple hammers before we move on to a
SPEAKER_01: different topic. So I think one of the interesting differences in opinion in Silicon Valley is the way that founders and VC see the nature of the relationship. And I've been on both sides of this. I've been on the side of being a founder. And I've been on the side of being a VC. And what you'll see is that VCs always talk about it as a partnership. But a lot of founders will talk about it as if the money is just a commodity. And frankly, when everything's up and to the right, and everything's going great, and you're in a bull market, and you can just keep raising money in definitely because there's always someone would lead the next round, then the money is a commodity. But when you're in a, in a down market, and all of a sudden, there is no market like you can't raise your next round, all of a sudden, it is a partnership because you've got to go to your investors and ask them to do something that they may not otherwise want to do is this was purely a transactional decision, as opposed to a relationship, they might not want to fund your next round. And you're asked them to say, No, actually, believe in our long term relationship. And I think that, you know, this is a type of environment, which you find out it is more of a partnership. And it should have always been it should have always been it
SPEAKER_02: should have been but it but it wasn't. And look, I don't know
SPEAKER_01: what happened with that other company and all of a sudden I get a notification out of the blue. Well, I want to understand the thinking that went into that before, you know, I'm just gonna basically this is where trust comes in, right. And like, I think in a
SPEAKER_02: zero interest rate environment, you know, there's no need for trust, you just this cash splashing around, just grab whoever the latest person in town is who wants to drop a couple of bags, you just take one of their most important
SPEAKER_01: thing to me, like what would make it a partnership is for me to know that the founders have done everything in their power. To reduce costs and put the company on the right trajectory before going out and basically issuing capital calls to the investors. I want to know they've done that work. All right, listen, freeburg. I know you got to go. Take care of
SPEAKER_02: Sultan of Science. I'll just wrap up with the other boys here with one piece of breaking news Stack Overflow says they will join the parade of data providers like Reddit and Twitter that will require permission and payment to use their data sets. And Stack Overflow has a lot of answers to a lot of developers questions in there. I was just going to get your thoughts. SEC obviously sent to wells notice we talked about this before to Brian Armstrong of Coinbase. He said he's thinking about or considering relocating out of the US if the regulatory clarity does not improve cryptos dead in America. It is dead in America. cryptos dead in America. I mean,
SPEAKER_04: now you have a mover you had Gensler even blaming the banking crisis on crypto. So they've the the United States authorities have firmly pointed their guns at crypto.
SPEAKER_02: Is it scapegoat? Or was it a fuck around? Find out moment for crypto? In your mind, or a little bit of both? I don't know. I just think that they were probably the ones that
SPEAKER_04: were the most threatening to the establishment. Okay. And they were the ones that in fairness to the regulators did push the boundaries more than any other sector of the startup economy. And yeah, so now they're paying the price for that the bill has
SPEAKER_04: come due for them. Sax is it a fuck around find out moment? Is it protecting the
SPEAKER_02: American dollar somewhere in between? Or incompetence on regulators part? The more I think about it, the more I think it's probably not a
SPEAKER_01: coincidence that you're seeing all these concerns about de dollarization at the same time they're cracking down on crypto. So look, there were a bunch of crypto companies that might have done shady things. But I think we all agree that Coinbase was not one of them. Coinbase was the gold standard in terms of doing everything right. And they've just agreed asked over and over again for a regulatory framework. They're just like, tell us how to operate and we'll do it. So I think Jamaat is right that they're effectively banning crypto in the United States, they're going to drive all these companies overseas, which is terrible for American innovation. I don't know exactly where blockchain and crypto are going to go from here. But I think that we should find that out in America. You know, we don't want that innovation going offshore. You bring up a really good point, too. It's just like
SPEAKER_04: Coinbase played by the rules stood in line, tried to do the right things. It seems that every step along the way, right? Everything from board composition to executive composition to how they try to interact with the regulators, yet, they were probably the furthest away from getting a license, the one that came the closest was the one that was the most fraudulent, which is FTS. Yeah, fascinating. How is that even possible? I mean, in
SPEAKER_02: because he had skills in gaming the system. Yeah, he's splashy
SPEAKER_01: cashy splashy cashy. Well, he he ponied up large amounts of
SPEAKER_02: money because it wasn't his money. So it was easy for him to
SPEAKER_01: make huge donations. But he knew how to play the game. To quote SPF, he said, This is the dumb game we woke Westerners play. We say the right shibboleth. So everyone likes us. That's the game he was playing, which is my favorite game. He was playing, which is my whole concern about if we jumped the gun on regulating AI too quickly, it'll turn into another, you know, woke game that everyone's gonna play. So
SPEAKER_02: here's, here's how the world works. regulate yourself, behave yourself, act in the interest of consumers, or get regulated or smashed. And I think we've gone over this. We talked about it. In fact, last week, when the movie industry crypto AI, regulate yourself, behave properly, don't push the boundaries too far, you can bend the rules. You don't want to
SPEAKER_04: break them. I think the regulate yourself that you use the MPAA. I don't think that's the right example. I think if you're going to regulate yourself, look at the tobacco industry. They tried to regulate themselves. But what they did was just lie to maximize profit in an area that was much less benign than movies and content. Maybe you could have some lascivious content in a movie or a video game or an album. But that was a lot less harmful than smoking, which not just impacted the smoker, but it turned out the secondhand smoker as well, or the secondhand smoke. So it touched everybody, right? You could be in a restaurant, not smoke, and yet have years of your life taken. So I think that the self regulation for areas that impact everybody, independent of whether you participate in the system or not, is where you have to look for good examples, Jason, and I'm not sure there are many good examples of separate ligation, those kinds of systems. I mean, I like your workshopping it here. I mean, some restaurants
SPEAKER_02: would have a smoking section and a non smoking section before there was regulation, right. And I think if crypto had just thought had been more thoughtful about, hey, which tokens NFT projects we're going to support which ones we're not going to, that maybe they would have avoided a little bit of this. I'm not sure. You know, it's it's hindsight is 2020 here, but a little more regulation. I don't think those smoking non smoking sections work too well.
SPEAKER_01: The smoke went all over the place. Exactly. Do you remember you remember coming out of a bar and
SPEAKER_02: you woke up the next day and your clothes smell like smoke? No, no, you'd have to you'd have to take a shower when you went
SPEAKER_04: to a bar or a restaurant or a club. You would have to come home take a shower because your hair and your clothes smell of smoke goes you couldn't sleep in a bed then your bed had to get
SPEAKER_02: to change your sheets discuss
SPEAKER_01: remember when you went on a commercial flight then a smoking section and smoking section non smoking section? Yeah, it's a tube the smoke gets all over the place. No, you know, you're on the wrong airline when they have the
SPEAKER_02: welded shut ashtrays they used to have an ashtray in every seat in but in the armrest was his friend a friend of mine this is
SPEAKER_04: like such a throwback but a friend of mine well known guy that you know I'll say the name you can bleep it out. Please bleep that out please very important we don't want to is an
SPEAKER_04: notorious smoker and so I flown with him. That's the worst and we get in there on his plane and then we he shuts the door and I'm like smells a little odd in here smells a little clovey seven hours I'm gonna be
SPEAKER_02: to the pilots get hazard pay I mean how do you compensate I mean this is not a turbo prop he's on he can't crack the window
SPEAKER_04: No. Is a global huge global it was it was at least three cabins you could go to the cabin felt so sick I
SPEAKER_04: mean it's the worst is the absolute worst smoking is the worst all right well we didn't so long to the Sultan of silence
SPEAKER_02: as a science rather they're pulling up date here sacks I don't mean to poke the bear and it was a rough week with the Fox News News bring it up bring it up no go for it quick polling
SPEAKER_02: update between putting Ron I'm sorry DeSantis and Trump gonna happen to Santa's is not happening in late March news of Trump's indictment boosted him over to Santa's by 26 percentage points among Republicans and republic leaning independents but earlier this week the same poll show that Trump's lead shrunk by 10 points in the last two weeks to just a 16 point advantage which is still significant but there's more a
SPEAKER_02: University of New Hampshire survey center poll I don't know if any of these polls are reasonable or not that seems like call people on the phone who's got a landline released Wednesday showed a 20 point to Santa's deficit what's going on here sacks did your boy peak too early? No, I don't think so if
SPEAKER_01: you if you look at the Republican primary field, just answers is the only person who's got a shot other than Trump. You look at Nikki Haley, she's pulling in the 345% range, all the others are at one or 2%. There's not a candidate other than to Santa's that has over 5%. So in my view, this is a Trump to Santa's race. Now what you saw is that when Alvin Bragg press charges and indicted Trump, it created a lot of sympathy for Trump among Republicans. Effectively, what happened is Republicans registered their displeasure with Alvin Bragg by indicating support for Trump. Let's go and that's that's what you expect to happen. And a lot of people speculated that might be the purpose of brags prosecution is to make Trump the candidate. So we knew that was happening. But I think this this new poll that you just mentioned is really interesting because it shows that that sugar high of Trump's poll ratings was a temporary bounce and it's coming down somewhat. And so you know, what you saw actually is that this huge poll bounce that Trump got is somewhat normalizing. Now, there's no question that this answers is running behind Trump and he's got his work cut out for him if he's going to upset Trump as the nominee, but this thing is just getting started. I mean, to Santa's isn't even formally announced yet. And remember, we're still very, very early in this race. The primary battle that this most reminds me of would be Obama versus Hillary in 2007. And at this time in 2007, Hillary had a huge advantage over Obama. She was considered the favorite she was considered the the one who couldn't lose. And it was Obama that pulled off a huge upset. And he did it by out fundraising her out hustling her, especially in building organization and some of those early primary states. And then he eventually created a narrative that it was time to turn the page. But he didn't do that until much later in the year, much closer to the the primary. The first republican primary is not till February. So there's plenty of time here. And I you know, we'll see what happens. So that's, I think Nikki Haley is going to win the Republican
SPEAKER_04: nomination. The more people here, here's the thing. The number of people that have told me the most impressive moment with DeSantis was before they met him. The second most impressive moment was their first meeting. And then it just falls off a cliff where he becomes more and more unimpressive, the more and more time you spend with this guy. Hey, Nikki Haley, come on the pod.
SPEAKER_02: Nikki Haley is the opposite. Nikki Haley announced that in
SPEAKER_01: all of q1 in all of q1 she raised $5 million extremely unimpressive. You're probably 20% of that. Shemoth
SPEAKER_02: and Nikki Haley come on the pod will double it.
SPEAKER_01: How much of these 5 million was was you?
SPEAKER_04: I can say definitively you said q1 zero. Zero. But let me ask a question here. I because I am not
SPEAKER_02: informed on it. But you are a master strategist here. 1600 rated chess player sacks.
SPEAKER_01: That's not that good. Well, I mean, it's double 800 where I'm at you killing me in
SPEAKER_02: 27 moves on average. DeSantis is fighting with Disney over and over again. He's getting a little involved in the LGBTQ everything and he just seems to be getting involved in the culture wars. Is that like a primary strategy and then he moves to the center when he comes to the general or and do you agree with this general fighting with Disney and the culture war stuff? Well, he's strategically not your personal opinion on these issues. I know that you're a very tolerant person. Yeah. So I think this is an issue that works for him
SPEAKER_01: certainly in the Republican primary, but I also think it's gonna work for him in the general. And you have to remember that this bill that they're fighting over was a parental rights bill that basically it gave parents the right to know what their kids were being taught in schools. And it basically prohibited the teaching of this sort of gender ideology in schools. And I think most parents are on board with that now. Yeah. He didn't go look at it. Yeah, he didn't go look in a pick a fight with Disney. Disney then got involved and took the side that calling this a don't say gay bill, which I think does factually is not true. The bill doesn't mention, you know, gay or homosexuality or anything
SPEAKER_01: like that. It was really about this trans issue. And Disney got involved. And this was Bob Chapek. And Bob Chapek lost his job and Iger came in and Iger has said that he, he had basically lectured the Disney employees saying that we need to stay out of politics. And we need to respect our audience's views. So I think that it was Disney who kind of interfered, I think this is overall played to distance his benefit. And look, the problem for Disney, they may win the battle over this or that tax benefit that they're fighting over. But they've lost the war over this issue, because parents used to be able to trust that they could just pop their kid down in front of a Disney movie, or a Disney show like Disney was like the babysitter. And they just 100% absolutely trusted all Disney content. And if you look at polling now Disney's brand, it used to have like a NPS of like in the 50s is now in the single digits because let's call it half the country's parents, the more Republican ones don't fully trust Disney's content and programming anymore. Really? Yeah, I trust implicitly. Well, could they ever do that subjection? Why I've
SPEAKER_02: never seen anything objectionable. A lot of parents
SPEAKER_01: are questioning what content Disney might be putting in their their recent programming. Obviously, we're not talking about the stuff that we grew up on. So look, whether you believe that is a problem or not, what I'm saying is this has this has been a brand disaster for Disney getting involved with DeSantis this way they should really, I think, just try to patch this thing up. I don't understand the benefit. It's a bad look for both. It's a bad look for both people. Yeah. Well,
SPEAKER_01: I think I understand the benefit for DeSantis. I don't understand the benefit for Disney. If I were them, I'd be trying to patch this up.
SPEAKER_02: I think there's a really valid discussion to be had about representation in movies and all that stuff. And I'm very pro that the thing I think all parents agree is we should just at least know what's being taught to our kids and we can have a thoughtful discussion about it. There seems to be some small group of people that thinks we should hide from parents what they're actually getting what's being taught and I find that's very strange. I think just a little bit of like transparency and what's being taught in schools is an obvious thing that nobody should be disagreeing on it. To Sax's point, I think it was Pew that put out a study
SPEAKER_04: recently. It is the most polarizing issue amongst Americans where Democrats and Republicans are literally on opposite sides of the spectrum. That's gonna be a big issue. On the whole trans issue. Now, despite the polarization, in terms of the quantity of the number of people, it's actually an important issue for a small percentage of both sides. So it's a highly complicated political dynamic in America. Yeah. Very. So this is where DeSantis clearly has taken the approach that not only is this important to the base to win the nomination, but it's going to scale into the general. And it could very well be but it's a very divisive issue. Yeah, I wish people were given a little bit more consideration
SPEAKER_02: and maybe they could have I feel like maybe we're covering this issue too much. I you know, I've heard some other folks in the community saying like, maybe people could be given a little bit of their privacy and to handle these things. I think you're right, Jake. How in this sense, I think this
SPEAKER_01: issue has become a lightning rod. And, and whenever you have a lightning rod issue, the amount of attention paid to it, it seems disproportionate to the attention on that issue. However, I would say that this is a lightning rod for a larger issue, which is the quality of education in this country, which I think is shockingly bad. And it's bad, because of the decline of standards. They're getting rid of advanced math, they're getting rid of unions, test taking competition, and the schools are run by these unions who are managing it for their own benefit, not for the benefit of the students. And look, there is a significant ideological component that's crept into these schools as well. So look, I think that overall, I think that when you get into the general, you have to up level
SPEAKER_01: the issue and talk about it in broader terms that every kid in our country deserves a high quality, non ideological education. I think if you can do that, you will get seven years to get 70 80% of the public on your side on this issue.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I feel like yeah, it's I think that's right. Yeah, I think we can all agree on that Democrats, Republicans, everybody in between if you're a parent, you're not looking for an ideological battle at school, you're looking for math, science, technology, history, creativity, you know, there's a whole bunch of other things that we should be really focused on. Alright, listen, there's been another amazing episode of the all in podcast to people going to the Episode 125 meetups, you can all in meetups. Our team over there we have super fans
SPEAKER_02: are doing it in over 50 cities the day this comes out so you may miss it but you can sign up for the next one. I'll be phoning in and zooming into them. So for the fans, you crazy lunatics getting together Have a great time. Have a great time and tweet it and mention us on Twitter. For the Sultan of Science, the Rain Man, the dictator, I am the world's greatest moderator and we'll see you next time. Bye bye. Bye bye.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, man. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because it's like this like sexual tension but they just need to release your feet. We need to get merges are
