SPEAKER_06: love you guys. Hey, if you guys are around, you know, and you want to get a glass of wine and some wine later, maybe next week or something. Who knows? Maybe we all get together in person have a glass of wine. I see you soon. I love you guys.
SPEAKER_01: You're about to come to Italy and basically you're gonna gain 15 pounds.
SPEAKER_07: Okay, so we were there in Italy. There's a long time ago. This is when we were in Venice. The
SPEAKER_06: quality of Italian white wine is outrageous. Really? It's outrageous. Do they have a men's bikini for you? For when we're in Italy? I would buy that. Let's just say thank you to the
SPEAKER_03: amazing people of Italy for having the greatest country for adults to go on vacation in. What an incredible country.
SPEAKER_05: Here we go in three, two, hey. Oh, ah, yeah. So what's going through puberty?
SPEAKER_07: Hey everybody, welcome. Motorcycle. Try it again. Three, two, hey,
SPEAKER_05: everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All In podcast. We are here in beautiful Portofino, Italy, and we have found a new bestie. Introduce yourself. Natalie is your name?
SPEAKER_00: That is my name. I'm surprised by my surname. Ah, you've got a
SPEAKER_05: surname. Uh, what is the surname? Pallyangritia. No. Ah,
SPEAKER_00: sorry. Pallyhappitiya. Pallyhappitiya. So your cousins,
SPEAKER_05: apparently, and you run a biotech business, I understand, here in Italy. In my spare time. When somebody else doesn't
SPEAKER_00: consume the life out of me. Got it. Okay. So you're dealing
SPEAKER_05: drugs in Italy and welcome to the All In pod. In all seriousness, we are here in Italy because Chamath and Natalie got married. Big round of applause. Very nice. And we decided we tape an episode very quickly. But tell us, what was it like at the wedding marrying Chamath Pallyhappitiya? Tell us about the wedding. It was, um, was a lot of work and Chamath
SPEAKER_00: was, as you can expect, completely utterly useless. Yes. We've seen this. In fact, in fact, counterproductive. He showed up. At times really, really frustrating. Yes. Um, but I love him nonetheless. So here we are. Very happy. This is the
SPEAKER_01: moment I would like to take credit for 30% of the wedding. Ah. And then a number that you can't dispute. You don't really know what it means. And then everybody ends up thanking you effusively because they're like the 30% that they love the most. That was me. Yeah. If you want to make an estimate, 20, 30%
SPEAKER_05: chance is, uh, you can't go wrong. Friedberg and Sax are with us. The Don. Sax, you had a lot of clandestine meetings here. Any, are we any closer to peace in Ukraine, Russia? I saw you talking to some Russian emissaries. You've been on the continent for a full month. Tell us. How did you go for 12 hours yesterday? Yeah. I know that you've been on some of these crazy yachts out here trying to broker peace. How close are we and how are you enjoying your time in Europe this summer? I don't think we're too close, but let me say a
SPEAKER_07: word about this happy couple here. So Natalie is brilliant and unstoppable. Chamath is superficial and plastic. So this was like the wedding of Oppenheimer and Barbie. And, uh, in that analogy, Chamath, you're Barbie. Yes, absolutely. Lots
SPEAKER_05: of substance and fire over here and complete narcissism and plastic over here. Also the genitalia, the same size. They can very smooth over just barely a bump. Yeah. Okay. Uh, okay. We'll, uh, we'll do a show. Natalie. Congratulations. We love you, sis. Congratulations. Thank you, Jaycal, because you
SPEAKER_00: celebrated her. Okay. Here she goes. I wasn't talking about
SPEAKER_00: Chamath. So can you cut you off? Oh, here we go. Here we go.
SPEAKER_04: What a great, great, uh, week we've had here. Lots of friends
SPEAKER_05: came in. Lots of friends, lots of special friends, lots of
SPEAKER_01: friends, lots of poker, lots of poker players that weren't
SPEAKER_02: invited to the wedding. I mean, I mean, we walked into the poker game last night and there were all these guys that I didn't see at the wedding and you invited these guys. No, no, no poker game. No, let's be honest. Let's be honest. I think it was the
SPEAKER_01: most unbelievably eclectic guest list of any wedding that's ever had. That's very true. I mean, literally it's like a two by two matrix of villainy, wealth, fame, and infamy. I mean, you had
SPEAKER_01: every quadrant covered. It was incredible guy and I were
SPEAKER_02: joking. It's like walking into the bar on Tatooine. I could tell that when I was doing my toast, which my told
SPEAKER_07: me no holds barred. Just go for it. My toast. He really meant roast roast. Yeah. The Italians did not get the jokes by the
SPEAKER_02: way. Half the audience was laughing. The poker guys were
SPEAKER_07: laughing. And then the family section, not a lot of them got
SPEAKER_05: the jokes and they were in on it, but, uh, what an amazing week we've had here. Um, and thank you for hosting us. It was absolutely wonderful. This really is in so many ways. We
SPEAKER_02: should cut in some shots in the video on where we're sitting right now. This incredible club. We're looking out here. I posted
SPEAKER_07: a photo of us just meeting out there doing our little board meeting and people immediately sleuthed out. You're at
SPEAKER_07: I guess famous red beach restaurant. I mean, language
SPEAKER_01: Maria has these two incredible restaurants in Milano three there just top of the top. And they have this incredible beach restaurant here. And it's the hotel or sorry, it's the restaurant that is beside the beach club. That's also owned by the Splendido where we are, where you guys are all staying. So yeah, it's been, it's been an amazing couple of days. This little block is called Paraji. This part is Paraji. And then if you go just a little bit further, you're in Portofino proper. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Wonderful food. Incredible food.
SPEAKER_05: Unbelievable. We've eaten like Kings and Queens as the case may be. And, uh, just the hospitality in Italy is amazing. One of my favorite places to go. I just want to say to all of you
SPEAKER_01: guys and to all of our friends, I mean, you guys literally flew halfway around the world for three days. Yeah. You did ruin
SPEAKER_02: all our summer plans. I mean, it was incredible. And frankly, I
SPEAKER_01: picked the, we picked the three worst days, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Yeah. If you had a job, he had to work. Yeah. A certain person had two rooms rented at the Splendido just for meetings and he would just be running back meetings and then trying to go to the, I mean, it's incredible. You guys, I really need a lot. I think this whole thing was a conspiracy to
SPEAKER_07: convene a high stakes poker. You knew you were spending the summer in Italy. How do I get the poker game to come to Italy netted a profit to cover the wedding. No, not to cover the
SPEAKER_01: wedding, but I did. I did win a $1.2 million pot from that was crazy. That was crazy. My favorite poker story is that you
SPEAKER_07: got a call out of the blue neighborhood. It's the best. I
SPEAKER_01: get a text. Oh my God. Need rooms, Splendido. I'd like two in the morning. And I was, I looked at my phone and I'm like, why is texting me at two in the morning? Yeah. Need rooms, Splendido. And I said, it's Jamaat. Is everything okay? Do you need any help? Need rooms, Splendido. And I said, I'm not your fucking travel coordinator. And he goes, can you help me get a room at the Splendido hotel? I said, what you're here. So I said, well, why don't you just meander into our game? Yeah. And so actually came to the wedding randomly in the
SPEAKER_02: neighborhood. He was in the area. Well, he was spending a
SPEAKER_05: night in so he thought he would hop over. Hey, that's such a bad joke. I stole that joke. You stole it
SPEAKER_06: from, I saw, Oh, that's how it works in Hollywood. Okay.
SPEAKER_05: There's a little backstory to all this. What happened was Chammoth told me in the spring, Hey, listen, J-Cal, I'm finally, I'm so excited. I'm going to marry Nat. And I said, Oh, that's great. You had the kids and now you're getting married. It's not the traditional way to do it, but congratulations. And he said, yeah, we're going to have like a little thing with our families in Italy, very bespoke, the kids, parents, that's it. And then, you know, back in Silicon Valley in the Bay Area, we'll have a backyard party for everybody else. And I said, great, let me know where in Italy we're going. And Nat said, Amore, it's just going to be the immediate family. And I said, great, where am I going? Tell me the location. And if you need an officiant, I'm in. And then a week later, we get an email, Nat and Chammoth discussed it. And they said, you know what? JCal's right. We should invite everybody to Italy. And so thanks for making that decision. Oh my god, thank you guys for coming. It was a dream.
SPEAKER_01: We didn't tell anyone JCal was going to officiate. So we're
SPEAKER_02: sitting there Italian style for like two hours assembling for the wedding. Nothing happens. You're all just standing around waiting for something to happen. And then Chammoth comes in, Natalie comes in beautiful, dressed amazing, music is incredible. And they sit there for another 10 minutes. And they turn around and they say the officiant, we just got a letter the officiant is sick. We need someone. We need someone to step in. And then JCal pops up in the back. I got it. I got it. Knocks the Italian royalty to the right and the left. Flows his way through the audience, makes his way to the top, pulls out his American bow tie or whatever he had and says, let's do this. And then we had JCal officiate. You did a very JCal way. Yeah. Were you surprised? Yeah, I was surprised. You were surprised. Yeah. A lot of people were surprised. Yeah. You got me. Because your original email said JCal is going to officiate, but then we heard nothing for two and a half months and no one really knew. And it was a big secret, right?
SPEAKER_05: We kept it a big secret. Why don't it be a surprise? And it was just the avows and the poetry. Oh, the poetry shared was amazing. Amore! Amore! Don't make her do that. Can you do a
SPEAKER_01: dramatic reading of the poem that I wrote for you? Oh, this was...
SPEAKER_02: Chamath wrote a poem. But do the setup that comes before.
SPEAKER_01: Well, so the setup was that Nat would read Chamath's poems and
SPEAKER_05: Chamath would read Nat's poems. And so Nat had this incredible pualo-quello poems, incredibly well thought out. And then Chamath wrote a poem from Anonymous that he found at a rest stop on the 280 written on the inside of the bathroom stall. Roses are red. Violets are... No, go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. You remember it? You should have it committed to memory.
SPEAKER_00: Let me think. Yeah. Roses are red. Pickles are green. I love
SPEAKER_00: your legs. And what's in between? Oh, God. God. It's so embarrassing.
SPEAKER_02: It was so embarrassing. And she had to read this. She literally just dropped it. In front of all of the Italian aristocrats. And the Americans all rolled laughing. Horrific. It really was like a prawn tattoo. Her first poem was a sonnet from Moline Shakespeare. My first
SPEAKER_01: poem was Beyonce's Cuff It. Yeah. Where the last line is, will you sit on top of me? Which she has to say, looking at her death. It was so awkward. It was so awkward. Then her second poem was something by Gregory Hoffman. I think it was something Hoffman. And then mine was this anonymous thing. And then her third was E.E. Cummings. And mine was Dr. Zeus. What's up? It's charming. It was nice. But Dr. Zeus was quite a... Daniel Hoffman. Yes. Well, we had a great time.
SPEAKER_05: There's been a lot of news. And Jekyll, you got here early, right?
SPEAKER_07: Weren't you, like, camping along the coast long as you went... Yes. I went to the hotel. You went camping. Decided to bring San Francisco to this beautiful, pristine... Defecating everywhere. Yes. Leaving a trail of needles in his wake. Ozempic needles. Ozempic needles. We're going to be. Plastic trash.
SPEAKER_02: He was trying to show...
SPEAKER_04: I did post a thirst trap.
SPEAKER_05: I'm very proud. I'm down 41 pounds from the peak, 20 pounds with hiking and using the fasting app that Kevin Rose built. And then the other half, zero. Great fasting app. And the other half was Ozempic. We're going to be... I don't understand, what does an app do to help you fast?
SPEAKER_01: You just fast. You just don't eat? You click a button. Do you eat the app? It gives an animation and then it counts down the clock.
SPEAKER_07: When you're trying to decide whether to eat or not, you push a button. Should I eat or not? And it says no. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: It shows you a picture of yourself. Just a mirror. A fat picture? It shows you a fat picture of yourself. Yeah. A fat picture. That's what I did. I took a picture of myself, like fat Jason, and I just, every time I open the refrigerator, it's there.
SPEAKER_05: Can I ask you a question?
SPEAKER_01: Yes. Is it, are you not allowed to talk about, like, fatness now? I have strong feelings on this.
SPEAKER_05: I think when I ran marathons my whole life, I was very svelte, 165 pounds until I was 32. And then I added two or three pounds until you guys knew me. And I hit 213 at my peak. I'm 171 now, 172. And, you know, I wish more people would have done an intervention. You were very clear with me. Hey, you got to lose weight. We did a weight bad. Oh, my God. I have to tell. No, no, no. I don't want to do weight loss. I'm telling the story. You can't fucking spike the story.
SPEAKER_01: I'm telling the story. I'm not going to. No, you can't spike the story now. This is your wedding present to me. Okay. Thank you. J Cal. J Cal is bordering on morbidly obese. This is when I was 213.
SPEAKER_05: You're how cold? Five, nine on a good day. Five, eight and a half. On a good day. By the way, for all these people on Twitter, everybody who meets me always says, oh, you look so much shorter on camera.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's because I slouch, but I'm six foot two just in case everybody's curious. On a good day. Anyways, J Cal is bordering on morbidly obese. So I make a weight bed with him. Yeah, I was 213.
SPEAKER_05: I said I can get to 193. Yeah, 193.
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, I'll give you 10K a pound or something. Whatever. It's 100K bed. It was $100,000 bed. And I hit it.
SPEAKER_01: It's a year. He had a year. He had a year. A year goes by.
SPEAKER_01: I put it in my calendar. And what I do is I schedule the poker game for the day before knowing that we're going to play through midnight. So I'm like, oh, I'm going to set this guy up. So I waited a whole year. Unbelievable. We play poker. The clock strikes midnight. And he had been eating pizza and ice cream. Drinking ice cream. And I'm watching him the whole time like, I'm going to win this $100,000. I never see a spread like this. And then I say, hey, it's time. It's 1201. It's time for the weight. He says one weight bed. And I said, motherfucker, you made a weight bed with me $100,000 a year ago. I have been 192, 193 for months.
SPEAKER_05: I have hit the thing. So he says he starts panicking.
SPEAKER_01: He says, I weigh myself in the morning. He says he's panicking. He says, okay, give me a few minutes. He runs into my child's bedroom and takes a shit. I just took a lead. I took a lead. He tried to lose the weight. Who can poo at midnight? Nobody can poo at midnight. Anyway, I get on the scale.
SPEAKER_05: I'm 195. And so he wants me to take all my clothes off. I'm like, no, I'm not taking my clothes off.
SPEAKER_01: We have to do the weigh in. Now, in fairness to Jake, I did not pre agree that I had to that I could pick the time. So he says I have until midnight, which is true. So I said, okay, fine. He goes home, goes home. I go on this. Does not eat. He puts on a sweatsuit. I go for a ride. I'm like Rocky around San Francisco. He sweats for four hours. He gets like a tenth of a pound under before midnight. Yes. And he's like, you owe me $100,000. Then he was kind. He said, look, put me in the mini one for one drop, one drop, and we'll both go pull it.
SPEAKER_04: We'll drop it. We had a great time. Jake, I lost in the first eight hands.
SPEAKER_01: And I lasted longer than you. I should have just let it burn.
SPEAKER_06: OK, back to you.
SPEAKER_05: But anyway, but I would say in terms of weight, it is pernicious in America. I don't think we should be celebrating it or tolerating it. I think we should be compassionate. I think Ozempic and Wigovi are incredible tools and Manjaro. I don't I didn't talk about it for the first year. David, you've done it as well. And you've been honest that you've tried Wigovi or whatever and you lost a lot of weight. So congratulations. These guys have been skinny forever. But I think take it seriously. It takes a lot of discipline, but it can be done. And I encourage people the gains I've gotten from being 40 pounds lighter have been tremendous. I feel great. My energy level is different. My thinking is different. My sleep's better. Everything's great. And so I just want to be around for a long time so that we can do a thousand episodes of the show for you and the fans. And yeah, being fat sucks. The end.
SPEAKER_05: And if you think but do you think it's it's being normalized and do you think that that's healthy?
SPEAKER_01: What do you think?
SPEAKER_02: Like, I think right into the microphone. No one no one makes no one chooses obesity. Obesity is a struggle. Just like diabetes. No one chooses diabetes. Diabetes is a struggle. I've done some work, made some investments, been on the board of some companies that have been involved in trying to address the needs in the space. And one of the things that we've learned a lot about is how much of a social stigma it feels. People that are struggling with obesity and struggling with diabetes don't feel comfortable actively talking about it because they hold a deep amount of shame about us. They recognize that there's something deeply unhealthy about it and they feel deep shame because they're often portrayed as having the choice and making the decisions that got them to this point. Yeah. And the truth is we live in a world with extraordinary abundance in the first world. We live in a world with extraordinary opportunities for low-cost calorie consumption. We find a lot of joy in our lifestyles. And it you know ultimately living a happy life can lead people to a very sad place. And so generally I would say that this is not something that should be stigmatized in an open way. It should be treated with compassion but it should be spoken about openly. Which is that there is a challenge and a struggle that people have and we need to help and everyone needs to kind of be cognizant of the fact. That's the thing. I think we need to I think we're normalizing it and I think it's wrong.
SPEAKER_01: Yes. I when I first came to Canada you see the pictures when I was like fresh off the boat. That's what we used to call immigrants. I was real thin skinny. Real thin. And then after a year of eating whatever food it was that we could afford. Yeah. I became really fat and you could see it in the pictures. And I was fat all through my grade school. I was a little skinny but skinny fat in the face but basically fat all through high school. And then I finally started working out and taking care of myself. And it had a huge impact on my self-esteem and my self-confidence. It had a huge impact on my health. Yeah. I saw it basically kill my father. It's given 11 of my aunts and uncles diabetes. So I think that like all of this normalization is unhealthy because it actually is killing people.
SPEAKER_05: What I learned from the dieting is portion control in America is just out of control. It is the wrong portion sizes. So you see it here and you see it here when you eat here. Here's a little tuna. Here's a small pasta. You know, here's some cheese and some grapes for dessert. You're done. And so once I got my portion control, I was fine. Snacking also. But I just wish anybody who's suffering from it, you know, work with your doctors, work with nutritionists. You were overweight too for a long time.
SPEAKER_01: Were you?
SPEAKER_05: Freeburg?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. What were you overweight from?
SPEAKER_02: I grew up not eating well. I was overweight in college. Right in the microphone. College is when I really started to get exercise actively. And because it was never part of my upbringing as a kid was like eat well, get exercise. I was very much self-taught and learned how to cook and learned a lot about nutrition on my own. And you know, look, I took action on my own in my early 20s. So, but yeah, look, I mean, it's so easy to not know where you find yourself and then you find yourself in this place. And I do agree that being cognizant of where you are and addressing it in an open way, in an active way is the only path. I mean, it's just every cycle we come around with some new easy solution. You guys remember the what was it? Then, then, then, then, then, then. Yeah, I got to be careful that one. Yeah, that was. Yeah. And so, look, I mean, the data so far looks great with these GLP ones. These drugs seem to be very effective. There's some data now that shows as soon as you stop taking it, the average person on it gains the weight right back. No, that didn't happen for me. Increase muscle mass. Maybe not. But like, yeah, you know, across a large population, there's just data that's showing there's never going to be an easy path. And it's a very difficult. It's a process. You know, the thing I learned is if you just have like one Oreo a day or every other day, let's say that's 50 calories.
SPEAKER_05: You have one of those every other day. You're going to get two pounds a year for 20 years. Now you're 40 pounds overweight. It happens very slowly. You add it and then you just have to be super disciplined and you can lose a half a pound or a pound a week and then it can come off. So I really think it should be a movement in the United States. So much of our downstream issues, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc., seem to be contributed by obesity. So I think for our entire for the entire country, I think if I ran for president, it would be for everybody. Everybody, anybody who wants it. We'll be forever is my platform.
SPEAKER_02: Single issue voters. There's a platform you can. Yeah, that's it.
SPEAKER_05: Single issue platform. All right. Get in shape. There's some news I think we could we could touch on. How you feeling?
SPEAKER_07: I got a plane to catch. Let's do this. So there was an article in Vice, I guess, that name check the All In podcast.
SPEAKER_05: It said young people, instead of wanting to become McKinsey consultants, now want to become members of the All In podcast and be venture capitalists. I did a little tweet storm that I thought and I thought it'd be a great topic for us. I think for young people going into venture early is not a good idea. I think generally speaking, 80 percent of the case cases. And I think starting your own company or joining a high growth company or maybe joining a well-run large company or even joining a poorly run large company. So you learn what not to do are all better things to do in your 20s. Learn be in the trenches. But I'm curious what you think, Sax, about this issue, because we came to venture and investing in our 40s, I believe, both of us angel investors and then both of us having fun. So what are you advising a young person who's listening to the podcast coming out of business school, whatever?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I agree with that. I think the main value prop that a VC has to offer a founder is advice. And if you've never walked in the founder's shoes before, if you've never founded a company or at least had a significant operating role, how are you in a position to offer them advice? Now, I think there's a period of time during the bull market where people stopped thinking that way, stopped thinking that advice was the model. VCs started competing on the basis of who could be the biggest cheerleader for the founder, who could offer the most sort of positive emotional support, largest valuation or the biggest valuation or least governance.
SPEAKER_07: The idea of being completely passive, not taking a board seat was actually sold to founders as a positive for them that like, we'll invest and we'll just like stay completely out of the way. And all of those ideas sounded really good when the market was booming and everything was up and to the right. But now we're in a situation in which we're going through two years of intense turmoil and a lot of companies aren't going to make it. A lot of companies are restructuring. A lot of companies are going to take down rounds and actually being able to tap your board for advice on how to get through a rough patch actually is pretty important. You realize now that like the uninvolved passive investor, that was not a positive value prop. That was an excuse for not having a value prop. And I think at times like this, it's really important to have VCs who've been around the block, who saw the last downturn, who ideally could have warned you that it was coming.
SPEAKER_05: Like we did on this pod for 18 months. Like we did repeatedly for a year.
SPEAKER_07: And so, yeah, I think that we're now seeing the correction. And I firmly agree with your analysis that there are too many people who joined the ranks of VC who firmly didn't have a value prop. And that's why I mean, in our firm, we require that everyone who joins the investment team have operating experience and ideally founder experience, because that is ultimately what you're going to offer founders.
SPEAKER_05: Chamath was too much of this people, LARPing, live action, role playing VC with just absolutely no idea how this works. And now what happens to those, you know, actor or VCs who really are faced with portfolios that are upside down? And they really have no idea how to weather a storm. This has been a hard 18 months. Let's be honest.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think that it was a symptom of just the fact that there was a lot of free money in the system. And I don't know, the outcome is going to be pretty basic, which is that they're going to lose money for their limited partners. And those limited partners, if they're not totally stupid, will never give these people money again. And these people will need to just find a new job. And I don't say that in a celebratory way, it's just a very practical ones and zeros monetary assessment of the facts. Look, I think that the weird thing that has happened is that it became like this kind of fun thing to be able to say you were doing. A lot of people used to moonlight and do it on the side. Then there were all these services that will allow you to basically like abstract the job. But the only thing that I would just qualify your statement, because I think what you're saying is like 90 percent right. But I don't think that's where the craziest outcome returns have come from. Because if you look at the two people that are really or the three people that have really generated just gargantuan home run returns on a consistent basis. One of them, for example, like Mike Moritz, really didn't have those bona fides operationally. But I think that what Mike probably has, and I'm saying this not knowing him, is a preternerge world like judge of psychology. I think I think he's an incredibly qualified people judger. And there are people like that now. He's an outlier in order to do that. But the rest of us have to kind of, to your point, do with what we have, which is like, here's our experience and our maturity. And we're telling you what we think. So I'm really excited, actually, for this wave to kind of crash on shore, because the number of founders that are going to get screwed over by folks that don't know what they're talking about, it's very high. Yeah. And that needs to come to an end as quickly as possible. Yeah. I don't think it's just Mike Moritz.
SPEAKER_02: I think that there's a class of successful venture capitalists. Bill Gurley is a great example. Like he was an analyst. Danny Reimer at Index Ventures was an investment analyst. Fred Wilson.
SPEAKER_05: Fred Wilson. Yeah. Lifetime VC.
SPEAKER_02: And Moritz, John Doerr. I mean, John Doerr had some... Doerr worked at Intel. He worked at Intel. But there are folks who have an incredible analytical capacity, and that analytical capacity translates into incredible selection capability. That selection doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to necessarily be the best advisors. And I'm not saying that any of those folks are bad advisors. But there are some venture investors, like Founders Fund is very vocal about this and very public about this, that their objective is not to be your partner in helping you make decisions and run your company and recruit people and all the other sort of rigmarole. That many VCs go out and tout. They are there to pick the best founders. And the best founders don't need the VC to be successful. And their job then is to have incredible selection capacity. So if they can select the best founders and get out of their way, they've made a lot of money and their returns are unbelievable. And then there are some VCs who are really incredible partners to their founders. And their objective... Josh Koppelman at First Round built an entire firm around this practice, which is to partner very closely with founders and to build support and capabilities. Andresin Horowitz was built on the same sort of concept. That they would roll all of their fees into building operating support and capacity to support founders and support companies. Both firms have obviously done well in their own right. And so I don't know if there's necessarily one breed that predicts success when it comes to successful venture capital. I will say from my own personal experience, I worked as an investment banker for my first two years out of undergrad. I had a science background. I worked in a short stint in private equity. I worked at Google. I did Corp Dev and M&A there. I started a company, ran it, sold it. Did that with another business where I was on the board. So I've been on a couple of different places around the table that I think have given me the ability to provide advice. I don't know if I necessarily have the same skill set that the team at Founders Fund and Mike Moritz and others might have at this astute, extraordinary ability to spot founders and bring them in. So I think everyone needs to kind of recognize what they do bring to the table. Be very clear about what that is. And I think to your point, there has just been an incredible bull market over the last 15 years since 2008. More money has... I heard an incredible statistic, by the way. I don't want to get it wrong. So maybe we should fact check me after this from someone at your wedding who I was talking to for a long time. And he was like, basically the top 1% of VCs didn't beat what would have happened if you just bought the top five public tech companies and effectively did a rebalance over the past 15 years. The bull market and the aggregation of value and technology have largely been 50-50 to public and private. So you could have just bought a few stocks and held on to them and beat all of the VCs over the last 15 years, even though a bunch of VCs have made good money and their IRR looks like 12%. But you have to beat... The risk adjusted returns on venture.
SPEAKER_01: And this is not to throw shade at even all of those people that you mentioned are fucking terrible. Like you should not have invested in any of those because there's no way to ton it in any of those funds because you get a small allocation. One fund does well. Three funds do crappy. Over the past 10 years or 15 years, I forgot the number, we've seen the public market cap of these top tech companies grow from 1 trillion to 10 trillion.
SPEAKER_02: That's a 10x. So all you had to do was buy those and you would have made 10x and that works out to north of 25% IRR. And there's very few VCs that have been able to beat 25% IRR. They assume now, he was telling me his model shows that over the next 10 years, it'll be roughly 70-30. So it'll be about 30% will grow. And they think over the next 10 years, it's going to go from 10 trillion to 25 trillion, which is still a great return. Just to build on this. But it shows how much of a hurdle there is in venture to be successful. I started the business in 2011.
SPEAKER_01: So now this is the 12th or 13th year. Just how hard this game is. I had about a 31-32% gross IRR going into last year. And then my IRR fell off a cliff because I couldn't get into... Obviously, there's like, there's no money to distribute. Well, there's nothing to distribute. So my IRR start to decay and then I had this really, really fucked up choice. I have to start selling stuff earlier than I would have otherwise to get the money back out. So to your point. Right. Now it takes courage. Then it's a really tough game over long periods of time. Yeah. A really tough game. I think there's also something going on, you know, in the United States and society where there are some idealized jobs.
SPEAKER_05: We talked about SACs, elites, surplus elites. And I want to dovetail this with what's happening in Hollywood, the writer's strike and the actor's strike. And I was looking at it. There's some unbelievable number of actors in SAC, some unbelievable number of writers. They all make just incredibly small amounts of money on average. And obviously there's some big fish who do well. But it does seem like there's too many people who want too many of these idealized jobs. And venture is one of those. And I just would like young people to understand also, be careful what you wish for. This job has seemed easy, just like it might seem easy for Tom Cruise or Christopher Nolan. When you see them or Tarantino, what you don't see is all of the people who tried to become Tarantino, who tried to become Tom Cruise. And there are far too... Ten to 15 years before they realize that they're not.
SPEAKER_02: And they did not actually have the fundamental skills or the work ethic that is required to become Tarantino.
SPEAKER_05: I listen to Tarantino's podcast. Have you heard the Video Archives podcast yet? You have to get on this. It's him and his co-writer of... Who did you write Pulp Fiction with? Roger Avery. Roger Avery. Him and Roger Avery, my favorite podcast right now, they just talk about films. Their knowledge of films is so unbelievable. And the detail in which they talk about that is so crisp. They finish each other's sentences in the way with maybe you listen to this podcast, we all go, oh, John Doerr, no, he worked at Intel. Oh, this person, yeah, Moritz, he was a journalist. We have a deep, deep understanding of this business that comes from 30 years within it or 20 years. And I think you have to, I know it sounds corny, but you have to pay your dues. You have to put 60, 70 hours in a week to get that elite job. And the problem today, I feel is, and for people who are listening, who are young people coming out of schools, if you're not willing to sacrifice 60, 70, 80 hours a week for a decade or two, you're just not going to be successful in that career. By the way, and young people push back on this, and I think the simplest way
SPEAKER_01: to reframe it is in the following. Do you really think, for example, let's pick NBA basketball. Do you think you would be really interested or find credible that the best player in the NBA only practiced three hours a week? Does that happen? Impossible. Or do you think they're practicing three hours in the morning and then also three hours in the afternoon and they give up their lives? The most incredible thing that I saw in the NBA was all of these men literally gave up their life to play that game to perfect it. And that's true for anything. And so I don't understand how, whether if you're a filmmaker, whether you want to be an investor, whether you want to be an athlete, whether you want to be an actor, a surgeon, it's just like, it's an immutable law of physics. So just get over it, which is you need to put in tens of thousands of hours. And if you cannot or won't, you should not expect the success and you should not complain.
SPEAKER_02: Because it's not free. Yeah. These guys... Do you agree with that or not? Yeah. Look, I mean, LeBron, what was it, 2016 when they came back and won in game seven? 2016? I don't want to add scar tissue. Yeah, right. But the next day, his teammates go out and celebrate. You know what LeBron did on Instagram the next day? Posted a photo at 7am of himself in the gym. LeBron was working out. Yeah. Working out. But look, one thing I'll say, LeBron knows what his skill is and he knows what his game is. I think every individual needs to figure out what their skill is and what their game is and not to find glory in what others have found to be their skill and their game. That there is something that comes from mastering any craft that gives an individual joy and purpose in life. And you see this in basketball. You see it when these athletes really find what they love and they do it. And they commit to it. And there are things that we each have realized we are good at. And there are things that we've all certainly realized we are not good at. And identifying that and mastering one's craft is the key to any person being successful and happy, I believe. I just just just assuming that there's a thing out there that everyone makes money. Distraction alert.
SPEAKER_01: All of our wives are about to go swimming. Oh, my Lord. They're so hot. Yeah. My Lord. Look at my wife.
SPEAKER_05: Jesus. God almighty, I hit the jackpot. Beauty and the beast. Now you can relate. Huh?
SPEAKER_04: Well, we were joking at breakfast today. We were like, my wife must have low self-esteem because she's married to me.
SPEAKER_02: Sax had the best slide.
SPEAKER_01: He's like, if you Google Natalie, don't pay, you find this picture of her holding a tiger lion by the tail, which is a lot more exciting than holding a Sri Lankan by the schlong.
SPEAKER_07: I was playing epic man for sax when he did the rose last night.
SPEAKER_05: I was just like laughing guy every time he hit it. I just went back to the table.
SPEAKER_02: You didn't get help me off the cliff. I was waiting for that. Poor hell. Oh, my God.
SPEAKER_05: You know what happened?
SPEAKER_01: Cat told me what happened. So the backstory is Phil Hamid is a narcissist. And if you know Phil Hamid, you know that.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's him. And he just cannot give a speech.
SPEAKER_01: And he's your best friend. He's not my best friend.
SPEAKER_01: But he gives horrible speeches. You and he are best friends. Like every speech, Phil, every speech he gives at every event.
SPEAKER_07: It's all about himself. It's all about himself. That's why we say seven seconds to fail.
SPEAKER_05: But it's incredible because it could be a wedding, a bar mitzvah, a funeral.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter. But in our chat. So when when Jamal said, okay, Phil's going to give a speech, Phil's like, of course,
SPEAKER_07: I'm going to give a speech every speech I give is amazing. The last event I gave a speech, it brought the house down. Everyone was laughing. I killed it. It was Doyle Brunson's funeral. Oh, my God. No, dude.
SPEAKER_05: You killed it at a funeral.
SPEAKER_01: So I asked how many to do this toast. And I was like, okay, well, we'll do four of them. But I thought if we start with how many, it'll just be so bad. Yeah. You bought them out early. Yeah. You bought them out early. And then the rest of you guys at the bar. But Sax crushed it. Sax crushed it.
SPEAKER_07: I think we're all still amazed that made up the stairs. You know, it was 400 steps to that.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it looks good. He was pretty impressive.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: This has been a great episode of the only part. Did anybody see Oppenheimer yet?
SPEAKER_05: I'm so excited. How do we see it?
SPEAKER_07: It's going to be a Barbenheimer double feature in honor of the Barbenheimer wedding. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: I'm not Barbenheimer.
SPEAKER_02: Nolan's like so about 70 millimeter prints. He's like, you have to watch it. And you know the Metronon in the city.
SPEAKER_04: So we should just rent the theater and invite some fans or just go.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. I mean, we should do that. Let's rent it this week. I've rented it. I think it's sold out until I get very limited time. Oh, the theater is. We just have to call them and say, hey, can we rent the thing? They'll do a show. Here's 20 times. I once went to a showing of Interstellar there, and Christopher Nolan came and spoke and got
SPEAKER_02: to meet him and speak to him afterwards. He's a very soft spoken guy, and he's not very sociable. He doesn't sort of like sex. He doesn't want to make eye contact and actually talk with you. But we challenged him. Are you making fun of people with Asperger's? But he was great. I mean, Hello, pot. It's kettle calling. I will say he's what top three filmmakers of our time top four. There is for me, it's Ridley Scott Tarantino Nolan.
SPEAKER_05: There's a very funny. Where's your last sex right now?
SPEAKER_07: You got put Scorsese on that list. Oh, right. Of course. So that he Anderson.
SPEAKER_05: No, no. Pts.
SPEAKER_05: Hit or miss.
SPEAKER_07: Woody Allen. Can we mention that name?
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I can't say that. Please. It's hard to watch that. It's hard to watch the whole. I like makes it too hard. I like.
SPEAKER_01: No, Nick. Nick, please. There's a very funny moment on the first dinner. Yeah. You know, we did this great thing. Nick, people up the names when sat down. Everybody's like, and I was waiting for David to sit. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: And he just keep talking and talking, talking and talking. And finally, that was like, sit the fuck down right now and have to get this fucking thing going. So who do you got?
SPEAKER_05: You got Scorsese, of course. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: You're talking about, like, currently alive filmmakers. I think the active filmmakers, unless you mentioned, it's
SPEAKER_07: pretty good. I don't have to think about it for missing anybody.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. Really? Scott's up there for you.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Yeah. Really, Scott? Yeah. I mean, he's still making Christopher Nolan is pretty excellent.
SPEAKER_01: He's very productive, too. That's the thing about every two years.
SPEAKER_02: Versatility. I don't know if really, that's my number one.
SPEAKER_01: But I met Michael Bay in Costa Rica. Can you get that beginning of the story? That's all I got. Can you did you ask for the $30 back for Transformers?
SPEAKER_05: No.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I didn't particularly know he was. Can I watch any of his films? I cannot watch any of those. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: He's like a very nice guy. I'm sure he's great.
SPEAKER_05: So also on the dock, he's got Napoleon coming out.
SPEAKER_07: The trailer looks amazing. Amazing.
SPEAKER_05: Anything with walking. Michael Bay is making no no no no.
SPEAKER_07: Ridley Scott. Oh, Ridley Scott. Walking Phoenix playing Napoleon. It's kind of interesting.
SPEAKER_05: I hate to go deep into the. Do you guys want to talk about dessert, bad behavior, or you want to talk about the resolution of this Hollywood stuff and what it means writ large? Well, the Hollywood stuff. I think it's fascinating. I tweeted about this a couple of weeks ago.
SPEAKER_01: My observations on this were twofold. One is that it's going to have the exact opposite effect that they want. If what they want is what the writers and the Actors Guild want is to show the owners of the studios how valuable they are. The problem is that this moves the owners and the studios one step closer into the hands of tools that will disintermediate the actors and the writers. They'll embrace that technology.
SPEAKER_05: They'll embrace the tools that you guys have talked about.
SPEAKER_01: You are showing something around even like yesterday or whatever. So like the point is, like I don't see it as very effective. And then my second thought is like I just think it unions in general are probably not a very effective way to get these concessions anymore versus the tax that the union members pay. And you can just see that in terms of like the number of people in unions are just kind of decaying pretty quickly. The wage gains are pretty de minimis. It's just not an effective mechanism of negotiation. Sax, the unions are a way for average performers to fight to get a little bit more.
SPEAKER_05: But it's the antithesis of having a meritocracy and people fighting for their best possible pay. And so the conundrum I have is I'm seeing all these Marvel actors, superhero actors getting dropped off at the protests and they're complaining about Bob Iger making twenty five million when Tom Cruise or Robert Downey Jr. Pick the person. I'm not singling anybody out, but those people who got to the top of the heap after twenty, thirty, forty years in the business are getting paid fifty million a picture, one hundred million a picture of back ends. And so what's your take on what's going on here? Because it seems I don't want to say hypocritical, but it feels like they're talking out of both sides of their mouth. They want to have an auction to the highest bidder for these incredibly talented writers, directors, producers, as it should be. But then they also want to fight for the average. Right. It's confusing to me. Some of the union demands, I think, are reasonable and I understand why they want them.
SPEAKER_07: So, for example, I think they're arguing for more residuals for, like you said, the kind of lower level performers so that they can get health care. The average ones. Yeah. So I can understand that. At the same time, they're demanding that writers rooms not use software, which they're already doing. Yeah. Which is just crazy because AI is going to be incorporated into all software. So to not be able to use the latest features of whatever word or Google Docs or whatever screenwriting software. Yes. That's like the king of order. The tides to stop. You know, this is a march of technology. It's not going to work. So I think that's really off base. So I can sympathize with some of the demands. Other ones I think are hard to see in terms of your point about the economics. I mean, look, the basic problem with Hollywood is it's a winner take all business. I mean, you've got a few actors who become big stars. This is true, actually, with all the creative industries is their power law businesses. You know, JK Rowling makes a billion dollars as an author. The 10,000 author or whatever makes a fantasy person makes a living.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, exactly. They're living months. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: Can't even make a living. And the reason for that, by the way, is because there's a lot of people willing to do it for free. Humans are fundamentally creative. There's a lot of people willing to be actors for free or sure. On a subsistence or right or whatever creatively because they're willing to do their art for free. Podcast. Right. And so the reality is the reason Hollywood doesn't have to pay these sort of the entry level actors very much is there's a lot of people willing to do that job. There's too many people. A lot of people. And it doesn't need to be in a structured production system anymore.
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_02: You guys saw the latest Disney earnings release and Eiger said, we are going to consider selling that geo and a bunch of other channels. There may actually be a spin off because content creation for that mid tier or that tail no longer makes sense. Not viable. Profitable because there's so much content being generated by this very long tail that's accruing a lot of the eyeballs and a lot of the hours of consumers mindset and time. I think that there's a big... Well, just can I connect that idea?
SPEAKER_07: So we were talking earlier about career choices. So first of all, I agree with what you guys said about the time you have to make, but it's not really about time per se. It's about your obsession level. Can you be obsessed with something so that 60, 70 hours a week feels like nothing to you because you're so immersed, you're so obsessed with it the way that Tarantino and Avery are obsessed with classic films have the whole database in their head. So if you want to pursue one of these careers in a winner take all space, like writing, like acting or whatever, you better just be completely upset. You gotta be all in. Yeah, you gotta be all in. I'd say furthermore... And be unique. What makes you novel?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. I mean, even if you are all in, you still have to have luck and skill. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: And furthermore, you have to know where the bar is. So I think a lot of people... This is one of the things I noticed when I was producing a movie is a lot of people look at like the worst actor or the worst screenwriter and say, I'm better than that person. So I'm going to make it. But your bar is not the worst person who's made it. Your bar is the best person who hasn't made it. That's the person you're really competing against. Next up. It's the next up. It's the person you're going on auditions and you're competing against someone who hasn't made it yet, but they're amazing. And you don't necessarily know where that bar is because it's much harder to see. Yeah. But that's where the bar really is. Right.
SPEAKER_02: I think there's also a big disruption. It's really well said. Yeah, totally. And as we extend the long tail of consumer content creation into what is effectively now the infinite tail of AI generation, AI generated content creation, it is going to totally disrupt and change the game of media, of content, generally speaking. We're getting to a point now where you can effectively tie together rendering engines with scripting, with scene definition, with directorial lines, all the stuff that goes into pre-production and production can be generated through AI, through scripting, and then tuned and tweaked by a human. But ultimately, it increases the scale like all technologies do. It increases leverage for humans. And we could see 100 times more films come out, each of which costs one 100th the cost. One of the best production companies in LA is Blumhouse. They make... Para Films for $2 million. They make it for $2 million. And they make a bunch of them because they cost so little to make. And if any one of them hits, they make $180 million or $200 million at the box office. It's a fantastic business model. Genre films. It's very much a unique model in Hollywood, and it's really changed the game quite a bit. And I think we're going to see something similar emerge because of generative AI and the tooling. And then people start to question... What is it called? What is it called?
SPEAKER_02: One thing I do want to say, I do think that there's also a change in Hollywood that's going to be driven, as we talked about before, by the ability to generate personalized film, personalized content, rather than one piece of content for everyone where you have to make blockbusters and everyone watches it. There is a question, however, of culture. And culture is shared experience, stories, and beliefs. Shared experience, stories, and beliefs can still be realized through personalized media, through personalized content generation. Think about an old narrative, an old tale that was told via people speaking to each other around a campfire. The ethics and the morals of the story are still there, but everyone tells it a little bit differently. I think that's what we may end up seeing Hollywood production or AI generated production rendering, which is everyone tweaks their content in their own personal way. They consume it in their own way. But the Hollywood studios, how much of a role do they ultimately end up playing? And does this start to go 10 times more what we've seen in YouTube? Content consumption goes way up, and the number of folks that are contributing to it goes way up by 10 or 100x. I think this is one of the fundamental things that the unions and Hollywood have not yet
SPEAKER_05: grokked completely, which is they're not fighting each other. They're fighting TikTok, YouTube, podcasts, and people making their own content. They know it. They're fighting Jimmy Donaldson.
SPEAKER_01: They're fighting Mr. Beast. They're fighting each other over the last scraps of the dirty model.
SPEAKER_05: Exactly. And I think they need to get insane.
SPEAKER_02: The people that spend two hours a week listening to us rant on about stuff, right? They're fighting the Bo-Tess sisters. Well, that's two less hours. That's what I'm saying. It's two less hours of broadcast TV.
SPEAKER_05: And then Mr. Beast, these kids watch his videos five times. They watch each one five times. He's probably the only person in recent memory that has rebuilt event-based viewership because
SPEAKER_01: people know Saturday mornings at noon Eastern time is when these videos drop. Hundreds of millions of people. It's appointment television. It's appointment television. Now, by the way, when you hear the story about Mr. Beast, that's a guy that's been doing it since he was 13 years old. Studying it. He's 24 years old. So that's 11 years where he's literally only lived and breathed everything in the laboratory in the lab down to the very pixel. Right. Like when he, for example, like the cuts. Remember, remember his cuts on his video? He told us about like thumbnails. He has an entire Ph.D. thesis that he's earned just on thumbnails. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: And that's a level of commitment. I think what Hollywood needs to do just to put it out there is the leadership in Hollywood gets compensated on a corporate level and then they come up with this, you know, pay and sometimes residual, sometimes not and scraps for the talent. I would encourage them to read something like an autobiography by Kurosawa and study the Toho system where everybody was aligned inside the company. If I'm running Disney, I'm hiring the top two or three hundred writers, putting them full time on staff, giving them equity and getting everybody rowing in the right direction. They do not have time to fuck around. They need to be in alignment, making great content. But the incentive structure matters. If Bob Iger is getting compensated by stock options, the actors, Robert Downey Jr., who's the guy, the incredible director of Swingers and Faver. Favreau, I was talking to Favreau at an event and I was like, how much like equity in Disney did you get for doing Mandalorian and like launching Disney Plus for them? And he's like zero, zero. But I'm like, why do you know if you look at back up a hundred million dollars?
SPEAKER_01: You know, but if you look and this is what's crazy. If you look at the biggest content producers of that older generation, they locked up the equity. You know, Spielberg owns equity in the movies that he made. George Lucas owns equity in the movie. He owned part of the studio. The deal Christopher Nolan cut on on Oppenheimer.
SPEAKER_02: No, I think he gets 20 percent of the growth off the first dollar. That's absurd. Yeah. And he got a hundred million dollar budget and a hundred million marketing commit on the on the deal.
SPEAKER_05: Joker was Todd Phillips. So this is the perfect example. I was talking to Todd Phillips, actually.
SPEAKER_07: I got to have dinner with him last summer. Great guy. Yeah, great guy. And he waived his fee on Joker to take a big chunk of the equity because he did that on
SPEAKER_05: the hangover. And he owned the IP of the hangover. He owned the sequels and hangover one and two. Amazing hangover three. You can miss the laugh. Yeah, but he made more, I think, on hangover three. Yeah. And he got all those guys, Galifianakis, etc. They got their biggest payday on number three. Right. You have to craft a deal. We have equity. The other crazy, you know, the studio was less bullish than he was on both hangover and Joker
SPEAKER_07: because they were both shows you how unusual movies. So they allowed him to take equity in exchange for giving back. They're like, you only want to spend 50 million on a superhero film.
SPEAKER_05: That's never going to work. And then he's like, yeah, it made a billion. Joker made a billion. Right. They thought it was too dark.
SPEAKER_07: Underestimating audiences, as always.
SPEAKER_05: I'll tell you a very funny poker story with Todd Phillips.
SPEAKER_01: Are you going to keep your Disney stock?
SPEAKER_05: Right now, I'm going to ride it out. I think their IP collection is amazing. I think there's a chance that, you know, depending on how the FTC winds up being run over the long term, that Disney could be selling pieces of that business and I think that it could become an acquisition target itself at some point.
SPEAKER_01: You want to hear a Todd Phillips poker story? I play poker with him.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, he's fun. Todd Phillips is a very, very disciplined poker player.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. You know, he's got like a stop loss. He hits the stop loss. He's done. And he's very funny and jokes around, you know, bust balls, whatever. And there was a while where he would play in the big game in LA with us. And he didn't say much. He was very focused and tight as right. And then he did this deal and then hangover three comes out and all of a sudden, you know, he's got chirping chips. He splashed in the pot. I bust Phillips in a pot and he looks at me and he called me slumdog billionaire. The guys at the table thought it was so funny because that movie slumdog millionaire had just come out. So then they all started calling me slummy. That's going to stick. It took me a year for them to get stopped calling you that. Yeah. Pretty great on the union thing.
SPEAKER_07: I'll tell you a story. So recently it was just announced that Anchor Steam shut down. Anchor Steam was this beer, this native beer in San Francisco that's been around forever.
SPEAKER_05: Japanese brewery bought them, right? It was bought by Sapporo several years ago.
SPEAKER_02: Anchor Steam shut down. Anchor Steam shut down. Yeah. I used to go there all the time for like work events. You do like an offsite there and go to the brewery. It was like one of the original micro brews award winning beer.
SPEAKER_07: I was out of business now. You're kidding. Let me guess. Well, it was losing money. And you want to know why is because three years ago the workers all voted to unionize. There were only something like 60 workers, 62 workers. And three years ago they voted to unionize and they voted themselves big pay increases. Yeah. And so I guess Sapporo had to go along with it. Three years later, Sapporo's like, yeah, shut the whole thing down.
SPEAKER_05: And that's the thing is you got to be careful what you wish for.
SPEAKER_07: Just overplay your head. I really think the thing with unions that they get wrong is unions fight for exactly this, which is
SPEAKER_01: this short term increase in current compensation. And I think what unions do very poorly is actually understanding the long term equity that the employees and members of that union actually create. I tweeted this a few weeks ago as well, but the single biggest reason that motivated me when I sold my piece of the Warriors was obviously just a crazy increase in the valuation. Right. I bought it for, you know, 300, 600 and it was worth 5.2 billion at the time. Whatever. But the second biggest reason was my huge fear was that I as an owner, I just wanted to cash in the chips because I think the most right thing to do for the union, like the NBA Players Association, is to fight for equity. Yeah. It's like Michael Jordan single handedly has created $15 billion of equity in the NBA. Yep. How much has he captured? One or two billion, but not from the league. He captured it accidentally from shoes. Right. How much money is LeBron James actually created for the NBA? It's enormous. Yep. How much is he? He made 500. They're not trying to get the right piece of the upside.
SPEAKER_07: But also when the business doesn't do well, then the labor contracts become a source of huge inflexibility and you can't make the necessary business changes. So to your point, the business gets shut down.
SPEAKER_01: So to your point, like what happens now is there's these huge luxury taxes in professional sports. And so folks bloat the payroll. They try to get all these players. But if you don't win and get to the playoffs, you're not selling more merch. You're not getting incremental share of TV revenues. You're not getting ticket revenues. And all of a sudden you have these massive luxury taxes you have to pay and not enough revenue to pay for it. And so these teams all of a sudden now start to gush money, have to make capital calls because these things that sound incredible upfront start to become real weights on these businesses. The real thing all unions in all industries, I would tell you all to do is figure out how to get the equity upside in the business in which your members are working in and are creating value. Right.
SPEAKER_07: And in exchange for that, have more forgiveness on the downside. So the business actually persevere, whether the storm is supposed to have to shut down. Exactly. Alignment. Alignment. Alignment incentives are just so critical.
SPEAKER_05: I was talking to the head of one of the giant publishers. I wouldn't say which one. Giveness Insider. I don't know which one it was, but they were being unionized. And I said, wow, is this a disaster for your business? He said, Jake, how crazy thing ever. I said, why? He's like, now when people come to us and they want to get paid more, we just take out the chart. How many years have you been here? Oh, five. OK, yeah. One, two, three, four, five, seventy two thousand. And they said, well, no, but I bring more page views. It's like, yeah, OK, yeah, page view multiplier point one five. OK, so you're seventy eight K. And that just basically happens at Business Insider. Yeah, that's kind of who knows why they're a clickbait business.
SPEAKER_07: And then that drives perverse incentives.
SPEAKER_05: And it's like, why not align it with what is the profitability of the business? What is the growth of the business? A bonus pool, a base level of pay. And if the unions are coming in, they are literally rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. And it's that simple. Well, both the beer industry and Hollywood are both shrinking industries.
SPEAKER_07: And so when you got unions demanding more and more and more of a shrinking pie, something's going to break. Now, look, just to be clear, I'm in favor of unions demanding things like better working conditions and health care and just like the basics. Yeah. But, you know, when they try to go for things like, I don't know, banning AI and weird and proposals that distort the cost structure of the business to the point where it's just not feasible, it's not profitable. That doesn't work. Also, the question is, white collar workers who can move so freely between jobs.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. So elite. Why would any white collar worker who is learning and sharpening their blade and increasing their value year after year, why would they even want to join a union? There was a podcast union that started in Spotify and Gimlet Media, all of this stuff. And one of the podcasts, I think it was Reply All. They didn't want to join the union because they're like, well, we're all over compensated. We're a hit show. And then they were all claimed that they were in the schools. But can we steal that? You can't get rid of a bad teacher because they're in the union.
SPEAKER_07: So it's like a huge procedure. They put them in a building where the incompetent teachers.
SPEAKER_05: Can we have steel man, the pro case of joining a union in 2023?
SPEAKER_05: I mean, if you could get how do you feel man benefits like some basic level of benefits? Look, I think that the pitch and Jake, how this is why I asked you this a few episodes
SPEAKER_02: ago, you know, tell us your experience having grown up in a family that I think unions are pretty proliferant in these cops, firemen, cops, firemen. Yeah. I mean, if you were the pitch is you're part of a membership, you have a voice and that voice always is your advocate and that advocate looks out for benefits, comp, time off, whether or not and how you get fired, all the things that you feel you may be unfairly treated by management. There's nothing novel here. It's a strong, appealing point. Yeah. So I don't know if that's the best steel man for it because look, it's a competitive labor
SPEAKER_07: market if you have skills that companies want. So you should be able to negotiate for a lot of these things yourself. I think the steel man case for unions and the reason why they formed in the first place is because American industry was basically owned by an oligopoly. They were themselves monopolies. So if you have a monopoly of industries like us steel or oil, then there's not a competitive labor market. They just set the prices. They set the conditions. That's why the unions got started is you needed a basic monopoly of labor to face off against the monopoly of business. That's how it got started. And I think in those conditions, we're talking about the early 19 hundreds. People were losing limbs in factories.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, of course. It was very different working conditions. Different working conditions.
SPEAKER_07: Now you're talking about much more competitive industries. But look, there was a great deal of manual labor needed to get productivity out of businesses
SPEAKER_02: and enterprise. So much of industry changed where things became automated, where they became specialization and differentiation amongst the workforce. And it wasn't everyone is just using their arms to do things. And this is obviously now measurable. And the idea that you can basically capture management or do a hostile takeover of the corporation or the equity, I think is effectively what's happened with a lot of these these and I'll be honest, knowing what I know about unions.
SPEAKER_05: If you were to do a deep dive into the police unions or the firefighter unions or the sanitation unions or the teacher unions, and you look at their pensions and their overtime, you would see some pretty significant abuse that the unions have built up over years to where people can make three or $400,000 a year in the last two or three years. They goose that up because then they base their pension on the average of the last three years. And what basically happens is all the senior guys say, listen, all overtime goes to these three guys who are retiring in three years, and none of the junior guys can take any overtime. And when it's your turn, you get all that. And then we're going to goose your pay. So what that does unreasonably is the pension calculation, the pay into the pension is based
SPEAKER_02: on some assumption of today. As that starts to happen, the pensions become underfunded because they no longer have enough capital to make all the disbursements that are supposed to happen. And there's a big argument now that there's probably over a trillion dollars of underfunded pension liabilities in the United States, many of which are based on the fact that these payout principles were defined by some negotiation with a union and their games. And there's a large difference between somebody writing a listicle or rewriting a Washington
SPEAKER_05: Post story business, a listicle, a listicle, somebody rewriting a listicle in BuzzFeed or somebody rewriting a Wall Street Journal paywall story in Business Insider, then somebody running into a burning building or having a target on their back as a cop in San Francisco. These are very different jobs. And the white collar knowledge workers are lasting what? What's the average tenure right now? 36 months? 30 months? I mean, you're obviously moving from place to place. What's the point of the union? It's a competitive labor market.
SPEAKER_07: And to your point, it's true that in some cases the unions do get a better deal for their members. However, there is a deadweight loss for the union itself because the union is representing its own interests. One and a half percent. So they're taking something. They got to skim. They're skimming. They got to pay the big Scorsese movie. Was it the Irishman? Yeah. You really get a taste of the corruption that was there was some skimming going on.
SPEAKER_05: Everybody gets a little skim all of a sudden one and a half times. And then also the pension fund starts getting rolled into mob projects or whatever.
SPEAKER_07: I mean, that's like a while ago, but yeah, there were some significant downsides.
SPEAKER_05: My view of it is we lived in a decade of surplus elites having these luxury jobs. And I'll put in the luxury jobs being a journalist, being a venture capitalist, these elitist luxury jobs, and in some of them they became so wildly overcompensated. I think they wanted to feel oppressed. They wanted to feel like they needed representation. And I think they were larping to use the term again, live action role playing that they were going to be in a union. Like they wanted to... They're larping as being victims.
SPEAKER_07: Right.
SPEAKER_05: They wanted to like literally the business insider people were putting up pictures of Henry Bellagette and his energy. They were larping grievances.
SPEAKER_07: Yes.
SPEAKER_05: And they're on the street holding a picket sign up. And I'm like, what's the matter? Is your keyboard not ergonomic enough at home? You haven't been to an office in three fucking years. They didn't get the latest flavor of KIND bars or whatever.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, no, they didn't get the cherry, the cranberry walnut.
SPEAKER_05: Q U. Q U. KIND bars. I mean, like leave the unions for the people who are actually on the front lines. Let's take it loose. All right. So I think we could wrap. Good. Should we wrap?
SPEAKER_02: It's probably wrap time. You want to do a quick science corner update? I got a lot of room temp superconductor. Yeah. There is a actually it's a very interesting work control. Episodes ago, if you don't remember, you kind of can go back and watch it where I talked a little bit about the effort to try and identify a material that can be superconducting at room temperature, which means no resistance. Electrons can flow through the material with no resistance. Perfect electricity transfer across distance and also enables the Meisner effect where magnetic waves can reflect off of the material, which can allow things like levitating trains, which is very low friction transportation. All these benefits of superconducting materials, quantum computing, etc. So yesterday and I've gotten literally dozens of emails and notes about this in the last 12 hours. There was a paper published by a team in South Korea who seemed like a very legit team. There's no reason why they would kind of make a fraudulent claim that there is a material that they've identified and measured to show has superconducting properties at room temperature and ambient pressure, where a lot of these efforts historically have been made at room temperature, but they use 200 times atmospheric pressure to compress it. And it turns out that this material that they're using is a lead apatite, which is a hexagonal crystal that uses calcium phosphate and lead, and that some of the lead gets replaced with copper and the copper causes the hexagon, the crystal structure, to compress a little bit. That compressed crystal allows the electrons to flow through. This is their theoretical explanation on what's going on. It will be replicated. People will try and do what they are now claiming they did to demonstrate this. There was some condensed matter physics people that sent me an email and said they don't think that this is real. They have a great deal of skepticism. Well, let me but sorry, let me just say two things about this. You can read the paper. You can read the paper. It's on the Internet. The cameraman put his glasses on.
SPEAKER_01: He's sleeping behind here. He's just or sleep. Let me let me say a few things.
SPEAKER_02: Firstly, I think it's unlikely that these guys are going to make a fraudulent claim. If they did make a fraudulent claim, it would be the end of their careers. The reputation would be damaged. So that may happen if they did not make a fraudulent president of Stanford. If they did not make a fraudulent claim and it is and it does turn out to be real, then I do think it'll end up being the the most important discovery in physics of this century. OK, so complete utter fraud or it changes the universe. Look, I know you guys are joking about it, but we talked about the importance of this material in technology. Yes, it's an everyday life. I want to build on top of what you're saying.
SPEAKER_01: The thing that you're saying, the more generalized concept is we have such a poor understanding of the periodic table, just broadly speaking, of condensed matter, of physics.
SPEAKER_02: There's so much about physics and quantum mechanics. And just that we are still we are just literally poking around, poking around, trying to figure out what's going on. And that's what led to this discovery, supposed discovery. I've made this analogy before, but if you take the periodic table and it actually kind
SPEAKER_01: of looks like the United States of America, we have like a really good sense of like the upper northwest and like the East Coast. And otherwise, we don't know anything. And I think it was about two and a half years ago at the beginning of the pandemic. There are these three guys and I that started with this idea of just building some machine learning to experiment in silica around different materials. Right. And can you guess physical properties? And if you think these properties are better at a certain thing, can we then go and actually make samples and figure it out? And we pointed it at batteries and we said, let's just take the cheapest form of batteries, LFP, lithium, right, that's used in the Model 3 and let's make better LFP. And what we're finding is, holy shit, like we don't know anything. And there are these like really big breakthroughs, one which we'll probably announce in like the next few weeks because we just raised a bunch of money around this idea. But it's all just people experimenting better and smarter. And really what you find is that there just aren't enough of those people doing it. And so the cycle time is just too long. Well, and this is where I can actually have some incredible gain.
SPEAKER_05: Transformational. As I get smarter, you put in the inputs, you give it the data set. We don't know what it's going to come up with. And it could profoundly the better version of part of what we're understanding.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_05: Part of what this Korean team did is they had a separate paper that they published talking
SPEAKER_02: about the demonstration of using AI to try and be predictive around quantum mechanics, which is something that people said we can't really do quantum modeling until we get quantum computers. And so there has been this belief that once we get quantum computers, we'll be able to understand the physics of the quantum scale and be able to do modeling that will allow us to do more discovery. But we are still very much just poking around and theorizing. And every cycle, by the way, in superconductor research, there's a different theory on what causes superconductivity. And it shows how little we do actually.
SPEAKER_01: So these guys, basically, when we were trying to build, if you look at like a Tesla Model S or Model X, these are NMC or NCA batteries. Very, very, very energy rich, but also very expensive and very complicated batteries that won't scale to the average everyday car. And what was crazy in our attempt to take LFP, which is the cheap version, and make it as keep the cheapness, but as energy dense as NMC and NCA, we ended up doping it with all kinds of random stuff that you would have never guessed in a million years, given billions of dollars. You would you needed computers to go off and actually make these guesses. So this idea that we're going to find all this stuff at the periodic table bumbling around, I think is such an interesting part of the physical sciences. And again, this will lead to infinite energy storage in batteries.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. You can put electricity into a battery if you had a superconducting battery, and it
SPEAKER_02: would cycle forever. No resistance. And then you could just plug in and get the energy back out. So imagine infinite storage on batteries. You have to reinvent circuitry completely. There are already superconducting circuits that are used in quantum computers and other high end applications. But because they're so expensive to cool and so expensive to operate, they're not ubiquitous. But the power of having them be ubiquitous would be extraordinary for computing, for discovery, for AI, for modeling the applications of what we'll end up discovering because of the modeling. We can now do it in a more ubiquitous way. It's going to be incredible. These are very profound moments when they do. And if they do happen, we should be excited, optimistic, but obviously very, very cautious about where and when they have it. Yeah. I really love you. What an incredible.
SPEAKER_01: So thankful that you guys came and showed up. It really means a lot to me. Thank you. Fantastic. Yeah. Incredible. I really love you guys. Thank you very, very much for that. All right.
SPEAKER_05: We'll see everybody at the All In Summit. Oh, my gosh. Yum, yum.
SPEAKER_01: It's in like six weeks.
SPEAKER_05: More. A little more. You have a new party planning going. You have a new person to announce?
SPEAKER_02: I will announce it and then we'll take it out if it's not okay. But we did confirm Ray Dalio, so we'll add him to the speaker list. We've got a few other guests that we're not going to announce that will be last minute fun surprises for everyone. Always some fun surprises at the end. I'm really excited to have Ray Dalio. Oh, great story. Yeah. How are the parties going for the summit? For the parties, we have narrowed down to three themes we think are going to be a lot
SPEAKER_05: of fun. Opening night, Sunday night, the day before the event starts, September 10th, I think that is. You have locations yet? We are negotiating the final contracts with the locations. We've got about a dozen of them, and we're going to narrow it down to the three that give us the best flexibility. We'll have the floor plans, which is the last step. You know, you got like six weeks, right? Yeah. No, no. We have more than enough options now. So Sunday night... Just so you guys know, JCal's handling the parties, not me.
SPEAKER_02: I'm doing the parties. She's your next person.
SPEAKER_01: You want to hear a great all in summit story? Yeah, but let me just go through the three party themes.
SPEAKER_05: So opening night is going to be Bestie Royale, the best you love me a James Bond theme. So what is that? Tuxedos? White Tuxedos. White Tuxedos, or you can go as a Bond girl, or you could go as Austin Powers, anything in that theme, casino games. But no black tuxedo? You can go black tuxedo, you can go white tuxedo. You could go Daniel Craig, you could go Sean Connery, Roger Moore, you pick. I'm going Sean Connery. You go whatever you want. I like the black tux.
SPEAKER_01: I've tried the white tux. It doesn't... You can do it. Yeah, you go... It's not working for you. For me, I look like a waiter. And so it'd be like a spy. I like the yacht club of San Francisco.
SPEAKER_05: And then Monday night we have a... I'm going to wear his bucket hat. Monday night is going to be Bestie Club, Breakfast Club, Big 80s. The location is incredible, I wouldn't say it, but...
SPEAKER_02: Not to be confused with Fight Club where JKL and I get in a ring and smash each other to bits. Yeah, that wouldn't last very long.
SPEAKER_05: Bestie Club. We worked everything out of the board meeting.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, did we work everything out between the two of you?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, everything's good. Board meeting's great. We're in the same. You were embracing afterwards.
SPEAKER_01: I saw the two of you embracing.
SPEAKER_02: Of course we hugged. I tried to give him a hug. It was awkward. He didn't fully let me in. It was like, you ever see 3PO trying to give Han Solo a hug? It does like this.
SPEAKER_05: He's like, oh, there's a 472 to one chance that you're my bestie. Oh. And then the last night will be Bestie Runner, a Blade Runner send up a cyberpunk theme. Wear your best cyberpunk. Oh, you must have a good punch up person for this kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_01: Like you have a person that... He's got an art director. He's got somebody... He's got a costume department.
SPEAKER_05: The costume department in the... Yeah, we call it the costumes. No, that's level two in the basement. Sub level two in the basement is the costumes. So, Zach, you know how you haven't been to that level in your elevator? Yeah, level two is costumes. The costumes. Yeah, level three is sets. Okay, I'll tell you a quick story.
SPEAKER_01: All in Summit. I'm walking in the streets of Milan. Me, Nat, and we're walking just on Via Monte Napoleoni in Milan. And I hear, chma. And I turn around. It's Damian Bertrand, the CEO of L'Oropiana. And so he comes. He's like, we're so excited to be a part of the All in Summit. And I'm like, Oh my God, this is... I didn't tell you this. Oh, it's not happening?
SPEAKER_01: No, no, it is.
SPEAKER_05: I know. They're cushioning every seat with... No, no, no. Don't ruin it. I'm not gonna ruin it.
SPEAKER_01: But my team has been working really hard on this. Anyways, I saw Damian. They're excited. He's coming. Yes. That's a high end sponsor. That's a high end partner. Do we have Montclair?
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_07: You had every opportunity these last three days to do everything you needed to get a
SPEAKER_01: sponsorship from Montclair. If anyone from Montclair is listening.
SPEAKER_07: What are you talking about?
SPEAKER_02: The guy's right there on the beach. He's on the beach. He's at the wedding. You were just sitting next to him.
SPEAKER_05: He was right there and the person... Do you see the yacht right there? That's his boat. This is his restaurant. This is his restaurant.
SPEAKER_02: I can't do enough.
SPEAKER_01: I can't do any more than what I've done for you. Get on the dinghy.
SPEAKER_05: Go to his boat. You need to get off your phone. He's sitting right there. You need to pay attention.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. Get playing chess.
SPEAKER_03: And you'll be like, oh yeah, I know you. No, the funniest...
SPEAKER_05: Beep it out, Nick. Well, bleep it out. Here's what happens. The guy, Freiburg comes up. He's in a panic. Oh, we've got a problem, Jake. How the production has got a problem. They're going to kick us out of the restaurant. The guy goes, I don't think it's going to be a problem. I'm going to fix it. And Freiburg's like, how are you going to fix this? Like, well, I own the restaurant and so I'll ask them. We bought it. Do not to kick you out.
SPEAKER_06: And, sorry, not going to be a problem.
SPEAKER_02: It's not going to be a problem. And he sat beside for a whole day who is on the board.
SPEAKER_01: And I said, David, she's on the board. So if you, this is your moment, you sold out their hats. And this is David cut to David bleep out the name. Hold on. Oh, oh, hold on.
SPEAKER_03: Peter Thiel and I are in level four of my basement. I'm in a game of blitz with Peter Thiel.
SPEAKER_05: Hold on. Blitz. Playing blitz chess.
SPEAKER_03: My rating is 600. Terrible hangover. Let's get out of here. All right, everybody live from Portofino.
SPEAKER_05: Four hungover. Thank you, guys. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We'll see you next time on the All In podcast.
SPEAKER_04: Thank you. I love you. Besties.
SPEAKER_06: Oh man! My haberdasher will meet me at the end of the night. We should all just get a room and have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like sexual tension but they just need to release them now. Wet your beak! Wet your beak! We need to get merch!
SPEAKER_05: The merchies are back!
