E161: US strikes Houthis, market instability, Q1 rate cuts in doubt, Carta's major mishap, DEI

SPEAKER_05: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, I mean, the fact that he hit the rim is a miracle. The most unaslept, what is, oh God. Oh, whoa, look at that. I have to, whoa, wish we could get slow motion on that. Oh, it's like the ball, the ball is slow mo. It's like the ball is three forward. No, look at his hand, look at the right hand, look. SPEAKER_08: Oh, look at the right hand. Look at that, he let, what is that about? SPEAKER_05: One hand is. I mean, that has nothing to do with basketball. SPEAKER_06: It's not a basketball. It's not a basketball. I mean, that has nothing to do with basketball. It was the most unnatural basketball slash athletic movement I've seen. Come on, wasn't that bad? SPEAKER_05: I mean, the lean forward too. SPEAKER_05: The lean forward, the kind of like sassy jump, you know, the sassy jump. What are you saying when you say sashay? He loves sashay on the side, baby, it's nice. Oh, I'm going on it. SPEAKER_03: Let your winners ride. Rain Man David Saks. We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy. Love you guys. I'm the queen of Kena. SPEAKER_06: I'm going on it. All right, everybody, welcome to the All In Podcast. With me again, the chairman dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Freberg, the Sultan of Science, and the Rain Man himself, David Saks. Our first topic, we'll go to our war correspondent. The US and its allies have struck Houthi targets in Yemen. Saks? SPEAKER_02: Well, we talked about this two weeks ago on the show, and we talked about it as a escalatory risk in the Middle East back then, and I think that that is playing out now. We fired, I don't know, maybe 100 rockets and missiles at Yemen last night. The purpose of the strike is to restore deterrence and I guess try and prevent the Houthis from attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea, but that deterrence is not working. I mean, there's already a new attack by the Houthis this morning of a commercial ship in the Red Sea. So I don't think this is gonna have any impact other than to escalate the conflict in the Middle East and put us on a path to war with Iran, which is really where the neocons wanna take us. You've heard, obviously, the warmongers like Lindsey Graham are calling for that, but even Speaker Mike Johnson is talking about that. I think that's where this is all headed is a larger war in the Middle East that features the US and Israel going to war with Iran. I think we should all be very concerned about that actually. SPEAKER_05: But I mean, you have to be fair. It's not just the US, right? It's now the US, the UK, Israel, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi against the Houthi rebels. That's a big alliance, and you've gotta think that Iran will think very carefully about how close they wanna get to the Houthis in the middle of all of this, because that's a huge armada, if you will, of countries that I don't think you really wanna cross as a group. SPEAKER_02: Well, I think Saudi Arabia and UAE are playing this very carefully, I think. They did not participate in the strikes. They did allow the US to fly overhead or to use its territory, but they released a statement calling for restraint and deescalation. So I think they're very nervous about this blowing up into a wider regional war. I don't think they want that. The allies who participated in the campaign of airstrikes were UK, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, and Bahrain, but I don't think they actually did anything. I don't think they contributed any assets. They just provided their names to this operation and provided some diplomatic cover. SPEAKER_07: Freeburg, any thoughts? Well, Sax, you posted a comment on Twitter, which I wanted to respond to, where you said China has the largest shipping volume through the Red Sea, and they're staying out of this conflict letting the US do the dirty work. But the Houthis didn't attack Chinese ships. They specifically attacked Western ships. Isn't that correct? I mean, this is a very targeted disruptive event that the Houthis have been undertaking for some time now, and they're using these very interesting tactics with drones that can be very destructive and very hard to block, and doing it not at Chinese ships, but at a very targeted enemy. Right. SPEAKER_02: Well, what the Houthis have said is that they're only attacking ships that are either Israeli or going to Israel, but in reality, they've attacked a much wider range than that. But not Chinese. It may be true that they haven't attacked ships that are declaring themselves to be Chinese ships or Russian ships. However, there are more Chinese shipping containers SPEAKER_02: on all of the ships that are going through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal than any other country. So there's no question that if we're talking about the disruption of global trade, this is gonna have a big impact on Chinese trade, whether it's on Chinese ships or not. SPEAKER_07: Or it could benefit them, because they can get through that shipping lane and the West cannot. SPEAKER_02: Their own ships can get through, but foreign ships, European ships that have Chinese shipping containers on them are not getting through. So their trade is still getting disrupted. And they need that. Nevertheless, they don't feel the need SPEAKER_02: to engage in this militaristic response or participate in that. So in terms of understanding implications SPEAKER_07: of the escalation in this conflict, let's just quickly talk about number one, I'm assuming shipping prices are gonna go up, freight prices are gonna go up. SPEAKER_05: But hold on a second. We talked about this with Ryan. Remember the question that I asked him. This is really an issue for Europe. It's not an issue for the United States, because there are alternative routes. You can go through the Pacific and you can go down through the bottom of Africa, right? And all that does is add like a five or 10% increase. So what we're really debating is what is the risk of inflation and a backup of goods and shipping rates into Europe? And this is why I don't understand why America needs to even get involved. I understand why the Netherlands and the UK and France and all these folks need to send resources to unclog this. That makes a lot of sense. But I don't see why the US needs to be involved other than providing moral support or logistical support. What is the point? SPEAKER_02: Well, Chamath, this is exactly my point, is the number one type of trade that's going through the Red Sea are shipping containers from China going to European ports. SPEAKER_02: And as a result of what the hoodies are doing, it's having to go around the Horn of Africa. It's adding two or three weeks to the trip and it's raising the cost of a shipping container from China from say $1,500 to $3,000. It's Europe and China who are impacted the most. But for some reason, it's the US that decides it has to take the lead in doing this. And the problem is that, first of all, SPEAKER_02: the action is futile. I mean, the hoodies have been at war on and off with the Saudis for a decade and the Saudis have been backed by Western weapons and we have not been able to defeat the hoodies. So this missile strike last night is not gonna deter them, it's not gonna stop them. They're very determined, very tough fighters. Second, they are gonna be looking for retaliation. They're gonna be looking for blowback. And Chamath, to your point, they're not gonna be looking for retaliation against China or Europe, they're gonna be looking at it against the United States. So we're incurring this cost and risk onto ourselves. SPEAKER_05: So let me put this question to you then. We have no obvious economic incentive to get involved because we can sustain our economy through different shipping ports that at best raise rates five or 10%, right? We can absorb that in the economy. 100%, which could drive inflation, is a European problem. So there's no economic incentive necessarily to get involved. So what is the incentive? It feels like, not to play conspiracy theorists, but like a wag the dog moment, another distraction to add to the plate. What do you think about that line of thinking? SPEAKER_02: I tweeted something just like that. This does feel, it's a wag the dog in the sense that the Biden administration was looking- You wanna explain the reference for folks that may not get it? SPEAKER_05: Yeah, there's a movie called Wag the Dog SPEAKER_02: that came out in the early 90s where the president is up for reelection and there's a horrible scandal that's about to come out, like a Monica Lewinsky type scandal. This is before Monica Lewinsky, by the way, but it really was sort of one of those movies that kind of predicted the future. But in any event, the president's trying to avoid this Monica Lewinsky type scandal. And so the political aides and advisors decide the way to do that is to start a war. But they don't start a real war. They basically manufacture a fake war on a sound stage and then in a movie studio. And it's pretty hilarious how they keep the whole thing going. David Mamet, who's a brilliant, brilliant writer, wrote that script. But this movie came out right around the time of the Lewinsky scandal with Clinton. And so therefore it took on this larger political and cultural significance. SPEAKER_08: Yeah, it's been used- So Wag the Dog is, you basically start a war SPEAKER_02: because of the political benefits as opposed to the real necessity of going to war. And I think you can make that accusation here, Chamath, because I think that the Biden administration was looking impotent. I mean, they were basically telling the Houthis to stop. They were pleading with them to stop interfering with international shipping. The Houthis weren't listening. By the way, the reason why the Houthis are doing this is they're doing it in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza. They've demanded that the Israeli invasion of Gaza stop and humanitarian aid be let in, and they're not gonna stop interfering with global trade until that happens. So that's the Houthis' position. The Biden administration has been telling them to stop. And I think that they were looking increasingly feckless and impotent, and that's why they did this strike. The problem is that the strike's not gonna have any impact. SPEAKER_02: And so what's the point? SPEAKER_05: Well, is it that or is it that, I think if you take the Wag the Dog analogy to the limit, I think maybe a different interpretation, I'm not saying that they did this, but a different interpretation of that analogy would be that they are struggling domestically. And I think J. Cal tweeted this, but if you look at the polls and you look at Dean Phillips all of a sudden, and you look at what's happening on the Republican side, there's so much activity and momentum, frankly, for non-Biden candidates all across the board that that would be the most Wag the Dog explanation, in my opinion, which is to distract folks from the domestic malaise by pointing someplace far away and saying, we're doing something very righteous here. Let's all get on the same page and support us. SPEAKER_06: How does that logically make sense, Jamal? SPEAKER_06: The US is against wars and people are tired of wars. Like what would be the, this is the only problem I have with the logic of the Wag the Dog theory is nobody wants wars. SPEAKER_06: Who's against wars, Jason? The American people. They've been very much against starting foreign wars. We've talked about it here. SPEAKER_05: Let's talk about the people that run the country. No, I know that. So what if you're saying they're doing it, SPEAKER_06: the logic here is Wag the Dog is to curry favor, Saks, you said they're rallying. This is to rally the American people around like a patriotic cause. But this isn't like a 9-11 situation where Bush got a lot of credibility for saying, hey, we're gonna go get these terrorists. Americans don't want more wars right now. The polling is very specific on that. So then I guess Saks, what is the logic there to Wag the Dog if this is something American people don't want? SPEAKER_02: Well, I think you're right, Jason, in the sense that the American people are exhausted by wars, especially Middle Eastern wars. We've just gotten out of two decades of endless forever wars in the Middle East. And I don't think the majority of the American people wanna get back in. So I think you're right on that level. And it's true that if you were to poll the American people and ask them, are you in favor of getting in more wars, they would say no. The problem is that with every war, the mainstream media starts propagandizing for the wars. And they'll basically demonize whoever it is that we're gonna go to war with and explaining why they're a huge threat. They'll engage in threat inflation. And so the American people end up supporting it. So we're against war in the abstract, but in every particular case, we end up supporting it. That's what happened with Ukraine. It's even happening right now. If you look at polling for this Houthi conflict, I think most Americans believe it's a good thing to strike the Houthis. So yeah, they're against it in the abstract, but in each particular case, the media is able to manufacture consent for the US involvement. SPEAKER_06: So just to challenge that as well. SPEAKER_06: So now our theory is, or your theory is, the media plus the Biden administration are in cahoots to wag the dog, create this support of a war in order to distract from domestic issues, in order to curry favor with the American public that doesn't really want more wars. That's where I'm saying, I think wag the dog might have been something 20 years ago, like you're saying, that could work as a technique, but I can't imagine anybody would want to do more military action at this point in time when the American public is exhausted from it. Which is what you said for the last six months on this poll. Yeah. SPEAKER_02: Look, I tweeted exactly that sentiment is that I don't think wagging the dog is gonna work. I think there'll be a short term rally around the flag effect, but I think that overall, if this conflict is still going on in November, it's gonna weaken Biden by making him look like a president who's lost control of events. So I agree with you that ultimately the perpetuation of this conflict is not ultimately in Biden's interest. Now, nonetheless, it may factor into their political calculation that in the short term, they think this makes them look good. SPEAKER_06: That would seem super incompetent as like a political strategy to me, but I'm a political expert. SPEAKER_02: I mean, despite the fact that this administration claimed to be the foreign policy grownups, they haven't shown a lot of competence. They couldn't even find Lloyd Austin, who's the Secretary of Defense for five days. No one knew where he was. That's not what happened. SPEAKER_07: No, he checked into the hospital for a procedure SPEAKER_02: and no one could find him for several days. And there was an article, I think on CNN, talking about how he was managing this hootie strike from his hospital bed. SPEAKER_05: And that was weird. SPEAKER_02: I hope the man's okay. I don't want, you know, but- He's got prostate cancer. SPEAKER_02: I know, that's sad. And he had a UTI. SPEAKER_05: He had a UTI, that's why he was in the hospital. SPEAKER_02: But fair enough, but no one in the White House, the White House couldn't find him for a couple of days. SPEAKER_06: Is that true they couldn't find him? Yes. Having a UTI is a very benign kind of thing. SPEAKER_06: Well, he had a prostatectomy SPEAKER_05: and then he got discharged from the hospital. And somewhere along the way, he got a UTI, which was severe apparently, went back to Walter Reed. And yeah, in those three or four days, the handoff of power to his deputy happened. SPEAKER_05: She was on vacation on a beach somewhere. And you're right. And the problem was that the other person the chief of staff had the flu so they couldn't escalate to the White House. So it was like a comedy of errors, but I don't think it was anything. But anyways. SPEAKER_02: I mean, imagine if you were like a C-level executive at a company and you're gonna be out of the office SPEAKER_02: for a few days and unreachable, you would set up a clear chain of command. You'd have a deputy who the CEO could get ahold of if necessary. In this case, you've got the secretary of defense who if the United States was attacked in some way, is part of the chain of command. The president would need that person in the situation room. So the fact that they couldn't find him for a couple of days is really, I think, unforgivable. How does that even happen? Is that really true that they couldn't find him? SPEAKER_06: Like they literally could not call. SPEAKER_02: They didn't know where he was for a couple of days. This was widely reported. SPEAKER_06: But they couldn't call him on his cell phone or his chief of staff or the people who- Nobody knew where he was. SPEAKER_06: Wow. Yeah, okay. All right. Very good. Having kept up on the details of his UTI and his cancer, I hope he's okay. So segueing into markets, the likelihood of a Q1 rate cut is not looking good. We had a slightly hotter than expected December CPI. Interest rates hit a 22 year high in July, as everybody knows when the Fed raised the range from 5.25 to 5.5. But they've left rates unchanged if you haven't been following it as inflation has cooled. But in December, the CPI rose 3.4% from a year earlier. That was just a slight tick above. And of course, markets are wondering, is this gonna be a glide path into a soft landing or could it be choppy going forward? Freeburg, higher for longer interest rates. You think that's still gonna be the case? And what are your thoughts going into the new year? SPEAKER_07: Well, Larry Summers put out a note saying that he thinks that the rates are gonna stay higher than the market is predicting based on the yield curve right now. So I think the market's currently saying no cuts in March and high probability of cuts in June. But some folks like Larry are saying, might be longer because inflation is very sticky. And if you look at the breakdown on the drivers of inflation, you start to think about what's the underlying business activity that's going on. Like car insurance went up by 20%, which was one of the key drivers. And car insurance has always been this lagging indicator, but it does ultimately drive costs up later. The reason car insurance rates go up is because the cost to repair a car goes up and the cost for medical care goes up. When that happens, the insurance companies actually have to file with state regulators to get approval to raise their rates. And it can take over a year for the regulators to then approve those raising of rates. So by the time the rates get raised, the other factors have maybe leveled out, but you're still gonna have some elements of costs that are gonna continue to climb for some period of time after you get the core engine tuned down. So these are the sorts of things that I think we're seeing in the current CPI data is that there are some of these lagging effects of an overheated economy or overstimulated economy that are now starting to play through. And so there's a number of these. It's not just car insurance, but there's a lot of things that are gonna linger for a while, and they're gonna be very hard to work their way through the system very quickly. And as a result, it may be the case that rates are gonna need to stay higher for longer. SPEAKER_05: I think the thing with inflation that is worth noting is that a couple of things are true at the same time, which I think is interesting. I think we were the ones in May of 21 that started getting very antsy around inflation, and we started to look at the five and 10-year breakevens. Do you guys remember that? We would look at that chart a lot, and I think it was very predictive. We also used to look at the future oil curve. Not that we're macroeconomists, but I think it's useful if average everyday people can have a few things to look at. If you look at those things today, it tells you the same picture, which is inflation has cooled. We're going through the last kind of like throws of some of the random variables still being a little sticky, but the broad trend is down. I think it's indisputable. At the same time, even with the conflagrations in the Middle East, if you look at what people think about the future price of oil, it's also down. Oil futures are, I think, about five to 10%. Future prices are about five to 10% lower than spot right now, for whatever that's worth. But the third thing which I think is important is we've now started to see folks come back from the new year and start to effect some pretty big layoffs, and they're across industries. Citibank today just announced 20,000 layoffs. That's a huge amount of people that are gonna lose their jobs. So what does all of this mean? It's that I think that people expect that as inflation contracts, the money supply will expand, but demand has yet to reset properly. So that's the last thing, and I think Freeberg's mentioned this a bunch, consumer spending has always been crazy, people living on credit, all of this stuff. That is now finally, I think, the last thing that has to get sorted out. So in the absence of demand, back to the way you started, Jason, companies will cut expenses in order to maintain profitability, because they don't really wanna cut prices unless their product really sucks. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, and just to note that Citigroup, as you mentioned, 20,000 cuts by 2026. Google also laid off hundreds of people, Amazon, hundreds of people. Discord laid off 17%, and there's a viral video going around of a woman laid off by Cloudflare, who was only on the team for like six months or something, or five months, and it does seem like, yeah, firing people before the holidays, laying them off is considered, yeah, you don't do it in the fourth quarter, so maybe there was some backed up layoffs that people decided to do into this year, but it certainly feels like SACS people are, and you said this, I think, in the predictions episode, or the recap episode, hey, you know, maybe it's still gonna be a little bit of turbulence, and the soft landing isn't guaranteed. Maybe you could expand on that. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, my prediction for the year was bumpy landing. I thought soft landing was a little too optimistic, and I also thought that this big stock market rally that we had in November, December was too much too soon. The market, starting in November, started pricing in about 1.5% of rate cuts this year, believing that the inflation problem had been licked, and now what we're seeing is, first of all, you had a slightly hotter than expected inflation report, and now we have this escalating situation in Yemen, where this war in the Middle East might expand, and just so you understand, I mean, the Houthis have already said that if the United States attacks them and uses Saudi or UAE airspace to do it, that they will consider themselves at war with Saudi Arabia and UAE, and that they will try to do things like light the Saudi oil fields on fire. I don't think they have the capability to do that necessarily, but it's an indication that things are very volatile. Another thing I think we're likely to see in the Middle East is continued attacks on US military bases in Iraq and Syria. So that whole region is a powder keg, and if it develops into a wider regional war, then I think you can see an oil shock, and if there's an oil shock, I think you can kiss rate cuts goodbye, because that's gonna percolate through the whole economy and have a big impact on inflation. So I just think that there's a lot of downside to these very optimistic projections that we're gonna get these huge rate cuts. It might happen, but I just see a lot of risk. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. Freeberg, do you think these oil shocks are here for the long term or a possibility? You've been talking a lot about alternative energy, nuclear, obviously, and the US has become a net exporter of oil. So do you think this risk of oil disruption from the Middle East is with us for the long term, or do you think that's waning now? SPEAKER_07: There's definitely structural risk because you have a supply chain that can get disrupted in a number of ways and limited alternative options. If you look at the chart I just shared, it's the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. So we have about 350 million barrels in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve today. That's down from, call it early 21 when we were at 650 million barrels. And it was pretty much at that level for decades after the buildup leading up to 1990. We haven't been at a level this low in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve since 1983. And so there's not a lot of levers for the government to intervene to support the supply as there may have been in the last couple of years in the case of some supply shock because of a conflict that arises in a major oil producing region. SPEAKER_06: It's a really interesting chart, isn't it? Because that was after the oil crisis of the 70s. And you look at how long it took to build it up and how large we built it. It's a really fascinating, I've never seen that chart before, but if you look at the, I don't know if you guys remember the oil lines. Did you have them in Canada, Chama? Where I remember in Brooklyn, you had an even number or odd number license plate thing. If you wanted to get gas, some days was the even number, some days was the odd number. I remember my parents getting online for gas and waiting for two hours or three hours to get gas. SPEAKER_07: Yeah, by the way, I'll say this is not a real cost today that we're experiencing, but as Sax is pointing out, there's a number of ways that this can become a real cost. I was in Austin this week, and the thing that shocked me the most was how cheap gas was at the gas station. You can get gas for like two bucks and 25 cents a gallon. Pretty awesome. It's like $6 when you're in Lake Tahoe. Yeah. SPEAKER_02: Just so everyone understands how the SPR got depleted, last year when inflation was the top story on the front page of every newspaper and gas prices were hitting what, $7 or $8, the administration started releasing crude from the SPR to try and bring the price down. And they did that for about a year, and they were basically subsidizing the price of oil. Now, that's why our stockpile is low. And that was a really great political strategy, but if we end up in a real crisis, we're gonna have less dry powder to deal with it. So we could have a perfect storm of things coming together here, where at precisely the time we end up getting involved in a big war in the Middle East, our tools to mitigate the oil shock that would create have been reduced by what the administration's done over the past year. Now, I don't know that that's gonna happen. I mean, I still think we're several steps away from a regional war, but you look at how many fronts now we have conflict in the Middle East. There's about five different fronts where there's conflict. You've obviously got Israel's war in Gaza. You've got Hezbollah in the north basically firing rockets. You've got US bases in Syria and Iraq coming under attack, and now we have the US striking Yemen. So there's just so many ways that this could spiral out of control. SPEAKER_06: Isn't the SPR designed so that when we have an economic crisis like this to use it? The Biden administration is allowed to dip in. SPEAKER_05: By the way, you have to give credit to the Biden administration in one form. It's not necessarily skilled per se, but when you look at the SPR depletion, they were selling at incredible moments in the market. And the Energy Department, I think they just announced that they're buying another four or $8 billion to replenish the SPR, so they'll be doing that now. But they were selling, if you look at these price points here, they were selling when prices were 80 and $90 a barrel, and now they're buying it back at 70. So at least the United States can take some solace in the fact that we arbed out a few billion dollars for treasure. SPEAKER_06: I wonder how the SPR relates to consumption. We see this chart, but it's in the number of barrels, right? 350 million barrels or something like that. Is that what the chart says? And then it peaked at six or 700,000. I wonder what it needs to be, Chamath or Freiburg, as a percentage of our consumption as more EVs hit the market, right? And as the number of miles per gallon goes up. So I couldn't find a chart for that. I tried to find it. If anybody in the audience knows the SPR in relation to consumption, that would be a very important chart, no? I think they're pretty independent, Jason. How so? We just build it up independent of what we need? SPEAKER_05: No, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is essentially that. It's not meant to be something that's meant to bookend usage. In a highly functioning market, there's theoretically an infinite amount of oil that's available. And so if there's more consumption, you'll be able to find more oil. You'll just have to pay a different price for it. This SPR is meant to be used in very different kinds of situations. This one is interesting. Yeah, right, when there's a disruption. SPEAKER_06: When there's an acute disruption. SPEAKER_02: That's supposed to be break glass in case of emergency. Exactly. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, but how many days is supposed to last is what I'm sort of getting at. That's what I wonder because over time, are we consuming more oil now as a country or are we consuming less? I would think we're consuming less. We're consuming more, but the thing you have to keep in mind SPEAKER_05: is that even in an acute shock, you can't just look at the SPR because we have now domestic oil capability. And a lot of that developed under two presidents, Obama and Trump. And both of them deserve a lot of credit because we have a capability now to be self-sufficient. And we are a net exporter because of the work that happened during that time. Oh my gosh, do you guys see all of this meshigona with CARTA this week? Crazy. SPEAKER_06: Absolutely, actually it's on the docket. So those of you who don't know CARTA is cap table software. If you don't know what the cap in cap table is, which many of you might not, stands for capitalization. What is it? It's a Google or an Excel sheet that says who owns the number of shares in a company? This gets very complex in private companies and they've made quite a business out of it. Wait, wait, wait, can I pause you there? SPEAKER_05: There was a lot of comments that said exactly that. It gets very complicated. I apologize. I've owned equity in companies for 20 years. What the hell is exactly complicated? SPEAKER_05: Well- I don't understand that statement. I'm not directing it to you, Jason. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can tell you. SPEAKER_06: SPEAKER_05: Because I feel like that is like some BS statement. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it's not. The thing is you as acting as a price round individual in a lot of these cases, it was very simple to do a priced round. But when you inserted safes into this, a simple agreement for future equity that Y Combinator created, and you put capital convertible notes into this, founders started doing like dozens of these, Chamath, and at the early stages, the cleanup work and understanding how many shares people owned, especially with- No, but JCal, what I'm saying is, SPEAKER_05: like, okay, let me stop. Let me ask you a different way. Yeah, sure. We did this with spreadsheets. Let me answer your question. SPEAKER_07: Okay. SPEAKER_07: So in a private company, let's say a company issues options to an employee, and they don't have a good record of that. The employee executes the options. They now believe that they own shares. Unlike in a public company, where there's a broker of record, every share is registered in a public company. You know who owns the shares, you know what broker is holding those shares, and every share is traded through a public exchange. So there's a record of every transaction that takes place with every share in a public company. In a private company, there's no independent legal regulator that tracks all the shares. So you could issue options to an employee and forget that you did that, put the document in a drawer, and the employee shows up five years later, and they're like, wait. Or I've experienced this. I've had advisors show up, be like, look, here's my advisory agreement. I was given options. I'm asking a different question. SPEAKER_05: You're saying something. Great, I get that. I'll tell you what I think the killer feature was. It was complicated to implement in software. I don't understand. I'll tell you, I think the killer feature for Carta, SPEAKER_02: it was called eShares back then, was getting the shareholder to sign for their stock certificates. So to Freiburg's point, in the old world, where it was all done by email and a spreadsheet, they would literally have to send you a paper stock certificate that you put in a file cabinet. And if you lost it, you have to sign a document. SPEAKER_07: With a lawyer saying, oh, I lost my certificate. I promise you I lost it. SPEAKER_07: All that sort of stuff. SPEAKER_02: So I think the killer feature was digitizing the stock certificates, and then you would sign for them using like an eSignature on Carta, and they would just keep it for you. No, I get it. SPEAKER_05: I'm not saying that it's, I'm not debating the value, guys. SPEAKER_05: You're saying why is the software complicated? SPEAKER_02: Yeah, why is the software complicated? This is not complicated. Nothing you guys have said is complicated. No, I don't think it's super complicated, but what happened was, because I remember when the market tipped, is I got one email from a company that was using eShares back then, and I would just do the digital signature, and I started getting a few more and a few more. Pretty soon, there was a network effect. Like, I don't wanna have to wonder where my digital stock certificates are. I just know that they're all at Carta. That's very convenient for me as an investor. I think it's very convenient for the company to be able to manage all this stuff digitally. So look, I mean, DocuSign is not a complicated technology either, and that is what, a multi-billion dollar company, because there's a very strong network effect. You don't wanna have to have all of your signatures at a whole bunch of different companies. SPEAKER_02: So I think that's how it kind of got off to the races, and then since then, they've been able to add more workflows, they've been able to add fund management, they've been able to add a number of things to make it stickier and more feature-rich, and it's not that expensive. It's like 10 grand a year or something like that. SPEAKER_06: It's kind of getting very expensive for startups. We're talking- 10 grand a year is expensive? SPEAKER_06: I mean, for a seed-stage startup, it's a lot, and then we invested in a company called Cake Equity that's doing it for like $1,000 a year. To Chamat's point, you tweeted, "'Why can't this be $1,000 a year?' Go to Cake Equity, you'll see." Well, can we just go to my tweet? SPEAKER_05: I was confused by all of this stuff, so- Well, we haven't even gotten to the story yet, SPEAKER_06: so just sorry, Jason, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, sorry, since we got- SPEAKER_05: So anyway, what you're hearing is SPEAKER_06: this software is very integrated into startup culture. We all have a lot of opinions on it, because the cap table is where all the value is recorded. The cap tables have gotten much more complicated, but this is not like building the TikTok algorithm or ChatGPT, to be clear, to Chamat's point, this is not really hard software to build. So correct on that, and Sax, correct, to your point, it's super convenient if everybody uses the same platform, and for a Series A, B, C company, spending $10,000, $20,000 a year on this is not that big of a deal, although there are cheaper options. And VCs and investors use it too, SPEAKER_07: to track their portfolios. SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, and so- It grew from one to the other, just to be clear. So I mean, first, companies started using it for their cap tables, then they got into the fund management business. So if you were a fund, you were receiving all of your stock certificates, then you started using it to communicate with your LPs. So we've started doing that, and it's very convenient for that. So it's more of a network effect business SPEAKER_07: than a hard software business, I think is Sax's point. Totally, totally, because it's super network. This business has benefit from the network effects. So they had such strong network effects. SPEAKER_06: Here's the brouhaha, the Donnybrook, SPEAKER_06: that came up this past week. Donnybrook. So you can look it up. SPEAKER_02: I like that word. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, me too. SPEAKER_02: So the company- I bet you knew a lot of Donnys in Brooklyn. SPEAKER_06: I was involved in a couple of Donnys, if I'm being honest, and they escalated from brouhahas, typically. SPEAKER_06: Not unlike an average episode of this podcast. There are probably some Donnybrooks SPEAKER_02: involving guys named Donny. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, Donny was typically the guy who started- This episode is gonna be named the Donnybrook episode, SPEAKER_07: please. SPEAKER_06: So the company had a massive violation of trust. As they were expanding to figure out other businesses to come into, they got into what's called the secondary market. For those of you who don't know what the secondary market is, people like to trade stocks of private companies. You may have heard people buying and selling Stripe or SpaceX, and so employees, early investors, might sell their shares to other people. Now, this is not happening as a primary offering from the company where they raise money and issue new shares. This is people who have shares. Carta was in a great position to do this because they had the cap table. Now, on your cap table might be 100 investors. 30 of them might be your friends, family, very quiet. It could be Jeff Bezos, who was a seed investor in Google. SPEAKER_06: Some folks at Carta who were in the secondary business violated the trust and the privacy of companies who had angel investors or early-stage investors on their cap table and started contacting them directly saying, hey, do you wanna sell your shares in company A to this person? We're trying to create a market for it. They got called out publicly. The CEO, Henry Ward, who is a unique individual as many CEOs are, tried to do some comms. It was a disaster of comms for a couple of days while they tried to explain basically breaking their own terms of service, and it all ended up with them selling the secondary business, which I understand was a tiny business for them. Overall, your thoughts, gentlemen? I don't know if anybody has strong thoughts. Why did you say he was an interesting individual? SPEAKER_06: He communicates directly in a very effervescent, candid way, like some founders do. SPEAKER_05: Effervescent, wow, that's a nice, nice. I mean, I'm just trying to- SPEAKER_06: What I'm saying, he's sparkling? SPEAKER_06: I think he is bad at PR, but entertaining to listen to. I think maybe they should have had a little bit of a slightly more thoughtful approach to this, but it all happened in real time. So it's very difficult to deal with the crisis in real time, I think. I have two comments. SPEAKER_05: Go ahead. The first is I actually disagree with David Sachs. I think that there's literally no concept of network effects in this business, and it makes no sense here. And the reason is that when you look at the public markets, which are infinitely larger, we have a vibrant public stock market that has no concept of this, and it works. Where you have companies like computer shares, you have companies like SSNC. There's just a plethora of providers that do fund administration. And frankly, I'm glad that there's a plethora of providers. I use some of them and I trade one against the other to get a constantly cheaper price. We use the distribution agents, and depending on which bank I'm working with on whatever deal, I have shares of multiple different agents and they also cost virtually nothing. And I don't see a world where that deflationary cost reduction doesn't come to this market either because I don't see this as a defensible area of software. I think it's a necessary piece of software. So I kind of like randomly tweeted out, just kind of like, oh, because I was just watching from the sidelines. Now in full disclosure, I was a card investor. I sold all my equity in a secondary transaction actually. Speaking of secondary transactions, SPEAKER_06: was that a good trade? SPEAKER_05: I sold it all two and a half years ago. So I have no opinion one way or the other on this company. I understand process automation, but I don't think process automation is defensible. So if you build software around process automation, you will be competing in a race to the bottom on price. That is, and I have not seen a single example of a company that's proven this otherwise. There are different companies that create real lock-in because of what they build, that isn't one. So I tweeted this out. Some person sent me this and Jason, to your point, the two most prevalent competitors that they showed me were Mantle and Pulley. I think one is a YC company and one is not, but Mantle and Pulley, I think were the two that came up the most often. And Jason, to your point, what they both told me was Carta is like 10K a year, 12K a year. And these guys are 90% discounted at a 10th of the price, SPEAKER_05: which again proves there is not a lot of super compelling software lock-in here. It's useful stuff, but that useful stuff is eventually gonna get as close to free as possible. These guys are proving it. And then last night while we were at poker, I got this thing, somebody in two days, built an open source competitor and just put the code out there and said, here you go, take it, isn't that incredible? Guys, that happened in two days from that tweet. SPEAKER_02: How crazy is that? If I got a stock certificate from, what's the name of this thing? SPEAKER_02: Open source clone. BuyBuyCarta.com, I'd like groan. I'd be like, oh, here we go. I've gotta like find my certs in like five different sites SPEAKER_02: and this thing's probably gonna go out of business in six months. Come on, that's not true and you know it. SPEAKER_05: You don't know where the certs are. SPEAKER_06: You don't care. It'd be seriously annoying to have to deal SPEAKER_02: with something new. I can actually tell you what's happening SPEAKER_06: in the market with startups. Startups are looking at the alternatives. They wanna save money. The bigger companies are probably not as price sensitive, Chamath. So, spending $20,000 as a Series B company, nobody cares. But for the startups, they tend to find the most efficient software and you're exactly right, Chamath on that. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, my comment is less about Carta itself and its price point. My observation is twofold. One is software that doesn't have a fundamental lock-in does not have pricing power, number one. SPEAKER_05: And number two, we are almost at the tipping point of a set of tools that will allow competitors in a matter of days to compete with an 80% feature complete solution at a fraction of the price. That's my generalized observation as manifested in this Carta example in less than a week. SPEAKER_06: Well, what do you do with some observation like this? If you have this 80% observation, is there anything you could- So then I was like, well, you know what? SPEAKER_05: I'm just gonna go for it. So I- I'm not heating it up for you here. So I'm starting this thing SPEAKER_05: and I've been working on this idea for a little bit, and I've been experimenting with it with some of my companies. But then I was like, you know what? We should just do this. So the concept here is we're gonna build this incubator. SPEAKER_05: It's called 80-90. I have a team. I have a bunch of developers offshore and we are going to basically create a hit list of software that we think is relatively straightforward and mispriced and could be built much more efficiently in 2024 using all of these copilots and tools. And our boundary conditions will be, can we deliver 80% of the functionality at 10% of the price? So at a 90% discount. So 80-90 is like sort of what you're- 80-90 is what the name of the incubator is. And what was interesting is when I tweeted this out, we had 1200 people essentially give us a product roadmap. SPEAKER_05: They told us the software that they would want. They told us the features that they need. They told us the things that they don't need. And so the idea here, Jason, I think is I'm just gonna build this in the wild. I'll create the list of companies. We'll publish that out, let people vote on it. Then we'll publish the PRDs of what the 80% version is. And we're gonna work backwards with my team in South Asia to try to build these things at a 10% price point. So, Saxx, your thoughts, you're a SaaS investor. SPEAKER_06: It's your vertical. Your thoughts on Chamat's plan to be the most hated person in Silicon Valley by underpricing every piece of SaaS software by 90% in real time. Can he do it in your estimation? I think there probably are categories SPEAKER_02: where you could do that. But in general, what I would say is that it always looks easier from the outside than from the inside. Meaning that you look at any particular SaaS category leader and you're like, this is easy. Like I could do this. And then when you actually get into it, you realize that, okay, the product I'm seeing is kind of an iceberg. I'm just seeing the tip of the iceberg. Below the waterline is all the business logic that's been written into the system. There's like a much deeper and longer list of features. Not in every category. You might be right that in some categories you don't need the product depth, but in many other categories, there's just a lot of subtle features. Usability issues have been figured out. Integrations with other- Ongoing support. Ongoing support. Training. And then you have the whole sales and marketing component to it. So what ends up happening is you attack a category saying, oh, this is gonna be easy. A year or two into it, you're like, wow. The category leader we're not even close to where it is in terms of table stakes here, and it ends up being more of a slog than you thought. And then you find out the market doesn't actually have as much of an incentive to switch. I'm not saying it can't be done. There are categories where I think the category leaders become stagnant and has stopped innovating, and I think those are ripe for disruption. I mean, look, I'm kind of trying it in a way we're gonna be launching my Slack killer soon. I feel a lot better about that because Slack out acquired hasn't really innovated in a few years. SPEAKER_06: And Salesforce, by the way, just announced zero hiring in 2024, and the Slack teams were like, how are we supposed to hit our roadmap without more people? What's going on here? So there is that. I definitely think it can be done, but I don't know. SPEAKER_02: I think you gotta choose carefully the categories where the iceberg isn't bigger than you think, basically. SPEAKER_07: Do you think that there's a shift in the business model for SaaS companies that emerges from what Chamath is talking about, where I think right now sales and marketing costs as a percent of revenue on average for a scaling enterprise software company around 55% of revenue or something in that range? Does that number get compressed by bringing price down? So you bring price down, but you need fewer people to go in and do the selling, fewer folks in the market? That has not been the pattern. SPEAKER_02: I mean, look, everyone was saying things like this when enterprise software shifted from on-prem to the cloud. When we went from Oracle and Siebel to Salesforce.com, people would say, oh, it's gonna fundamentally change the business. Sales won't become that important. Product's gonna be all important. It was true to some degree. I mean, I do think that- You tried to do it. SPEAKER_06: That was what you pioneered at Yammer. You tried to do bottom-up sales. Yeah, so there was product-led growth became a thing, SPEAKER_02: you know, and a very important thing. And I still think that's the best way to build a SaaS company is you let the users just try it on a freemium basis as opposed to having sales knock on the CIO's door, let the employees pull the product into the company, then go close the deal. So it did make important changes, but it did not get rid of sales. I mean, you know, what I believe doing this stuff way back in 2008 is we'd be able to get rid of sales and just make enterprise products SPEAKER_02: completely self-distributing. That never happened. People have been predicting the death of sales for a long time and it's never happened. SPEAKER_05: I think your vision is absolutely right. And I think this, in a world of auto GPTs, it's going to happen. And I think the way that it's roughly gonna happen is as follows. I think what happens is that, and Zoho is another good example of how you can do this, which is what you need are a small set of tools that provide useful capability for a company that work elegantly together. Now, when you work elegantly together, there's a bunch of things that you need. You need security, you need handoffs and handshakes, you need different ways of handling exceptions, you need a common kind of data model. All of those things can actually be configured on the fly dynamically by and between two sets of software, if you let the AI actually run and auto configure itself. And so I think the experimentation is as follows. You have product A and product B, you want to adopt them both. They have elements of an agent that can go and auto configure themselves to each other. Separately, I think what the CFO or the CEO does is allocate a budget and that budget is an agent. And what that agent does is it works with these other agents to say, okay, great, I can spend money on these features. That is the thing we've not explored. We've always taken software that we build and all of a sudden pause automation and hand it over to people to run it through a relatively archaic go-to-market process. And I think what's worth trying to figure out in 2024 and beyond is how to use these tools to automate all of the low level negotiation that happens before you can adopt software. I just think it's totally unnecessary. And I think that this is where software can do a very powerful job on behalf of the salesperson. Does it mean the salesperson is totally out of the loop? No, but I do think that if these tools are lightweight enough especially the young nimble companies will actually say, great, my procurement person is actually an AI agent with a budget. And it's the products that then figure out how to negotiate for the share of that budget and then configure how to work amongst itself. That is the key innovation that I think someone will figure out. That is the Zoho 2.0, right? That is the Salesforce 2.0. It's sort of this app app store, common data bus kind of an idea that I think somebody will build. I would like to try to help. Well, people have started building in Chamath SPEAKER_06: because you're starting to see the features overlap in many programs. You're seeing HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk. They're all kind of getting into each other's businesses. SPEAKER_05: That's a great observation, but those are all closed products. What I mean is like, there is like a totally open protocol and set of standards for how product A integrates and interacts with product B on many levels, right? From security to data model and everything in between. And I think that that is what needs to get figured out and be very much an open source idea. The great part about this is, SPEAKER_06: this is gonna be massive competition. It will lower prices, it'll add features and the team over at 37signals is doing something similar. If you look at once.com, they are also gonna go after Saks and they're gonna just charge one time for the software. I think I may have mentioned it on a previous one, but their concept is- Yeah, you did. Yeah, just- My gosh, can we- Can we move on now? SPEAKER_05: Can we take a moment actually, Nick, can you throw up my tweet? Can you take a moment to just say thank you to Stuart Butterfield and what he pulled off? Thank you. As a series A investor, I thank you, sir. SPEAKER_02: 27 times ARR is looking like a pretty great exit multiple. SPEAKER_05: Oh, there's my reply. Oh yeah, look at my reply. Yeah, I mean, my gosh. SPEAKER_05: What a deal. SPEAKER_06: And at the time it was, they were public and people were wondering like, hmm, was this a good deal or not? Should they have stayed independent? But the product velocity never seemed to get going. SPEAKER_05: How are you thinking about what the critical go-to-market MVP capability is for Slack? So this here's what I'm curious about. There's chat, right? But the problem with chat in my opinion is that Slack has become totally overrun where you could be a five person company and all of a sudden you have 500 channels. So there's no scarcity. And that scarcity is in my opinion, what makes all corporate chats in this modern version, teams included, totally unusable, so much noise and distraction. So how are you thinking about that product problem? SPEAKER_02: I totally agree with that. What you hear from every single company that has more than, I don't know, 50 employees is that Slack doesn't scale. Because what happens is you have a channel get created and there's a whole bunch of conversations in there that are kind of munched together. And if anybody in the company wants to participate in any one of those conversations, they have to join that entire channel. And as a result, every single employee ends up in every single channel. And it's just a giant mess and there's way too much noise. So I think that the channel model was beautiful in terms of letting people get started really easily. You just jump into a channel and start posting. That's why it took off. But it's not particular enough in terms of addressing conversations to the right people. So that's basically one of the problems that we're fixing. The other thing I've heard from people is that we love chat but we also really like the feed that Yammer had as a way to quickly scroll through new stuff. So we're having that people too. You had a top level corporate feed. SPEAKER_06: People forget that. There was this, hey, if you wanna get the pulse of the entire organization, go to this one corporate feed. We were the first ones to figure out that a feed SPEAKER_02: should be used inside of an enterprise, not just in a consumer social network. So in any event, I'd say those are two of the main concepts is combining feed and chat in a way that actually makes sense and solving the noise, the signal of noise problem. Do you have a name for it yet? It's gonna be called Glue. Who I love that. SPEAKER_05: Can I remind you that as a humble investor, sir, I think I was part of Yammer and Slack. So I can add value. SPEAKER_02: You're in, you're in. There's just one requirement for the early investors is you guys actually have to use it. You gotta do a rip and replace on your Slack and shift to Glue. Sure, sure. SPEAKER_06: If you're willing to do that, you're in. SPEAKER_02: Perfect, I'm in. SPEAKER_06: I'll take 250, 500K. Yeah, lock me up for a slice. SPEAKER_02: I'll take 500. Yeah, I mean, so I think what we're gonna do is before launch, we'll do like a seed round. SPEAKER_02: Nice. Right now, it's all been incubated by craft. So we'll do a seed round. I'll take 50 million. What about a 50 million for influencers? SPEAKER_07: So like 50 million. So like six million posts, six posts? I'll put 50 in at six pre. SPEAKER_05: 56 posts. How about that? SPEAKER_02: It's gonna be that cheap, but it won't be a super expensive round because what we wanna do is incentivize influencers to like support the product, switch to the product. So it really is gonna be- Do you have glue.com? SPEAKER_02: We have glue.ai. SPEAKER_05: Oh, wow. Nice. I was gonna get 8090.ai, but then I didn't like it. You know what I got instead? Tell me if you like this. 8090.ink. So it's just 8090.ink. Yeah, it's fine. It doesn't matter. SPEAKER_06: Everybody searches. SPEAKER_06: I mean, eventually you fake it till you make it. If the 8090 domain happens, you get it, or you put get or go 8090.com. So do that before the show gets published. What is it, get or go? SPEAKER_06: If people have an app- Get 8090. Get 8090 or go 8090. So if it's a service, you say go 8090. And if it's whatever you say, get, if it's an app or something, right? Like you're just gonna go get it here at this domain name. It's just easier to remember. I also got vcsascoboom.com. SPEAKER_05: SPEAKER_06: Oh, excellent. Well, I have wet your... People don't remember this for a callback. I have wetyourbeak.com. I think it just goes to... Wetyourbeak.com just goes to our website. So I mean, that was the basic scandal. SPEAKER_06: Saks, they let the sales team doing secondary apparently, or somebody broke a rule. They weren't exactly clear with it. It sounded to me like, you know, they didn't want to throw anybody under the bus exactly. But how big of a violation is it to let people go sell into the cap table, secondary shares without the CEO or your customer even knowing that you access that data? Where would you put that on a violation of trust scale? Saks. SPEAKER_02: I think it was a huge issue for them because the only reason startups give their data to Carta is because they trust them to keep it private. Yes. And I think a big part of the problem with the Carta vision of creating the secondary marketplace is that founders don't want it. Fundamentally, that's the problem. I mean, Carta is in the perfect position to rationalize and make liquid the secondary market. The vision was correct in that sense. And the reason for that is because Carta not only has the cap table and they know who all the investors are, they also have all the documents. They got all of your corporate documents, the bylaws, all that kind of stuff. They can very easily execute these transactions. So Carta was in a great position to replace all of these secondary brokers who are running around creating books on their own. The problem they have is that at the end of the day, founders don't really want secondary markets to take place in their company's shares. And I think there's a few reasons for that. One is price discovery. I think a lot of these startups now, if their shares were to be freely traded, would be trading below. Bad timing. Below the last round's mark, so they don't want it. SPEAKER_02: Second, the founders don't necessarily want their investors getting out and then getting new investors on the cap table that they don't know. SPEAKER_02: So founders are somewhat particular about who their shareholders are. It's different than public companies in that way. I mean, Apple doesn't really care who its shareholders are. Private companies do care. SPEAKER_05: Do you think that that's sustainable in a world where companies take 14 or 15 years and they're trying to retain talent? SPEAKER_02: Well, I think it would be better for everybody if there was more organized liquidity. I mean, one of the things I love that SpaceX has done is that for the last number of years now, they've had a tender offer every year. Not even every year, like almost every quarter right now. SPEAKER_06: It's every six months, I think, was what my understanding of it is. But yeah, I mean, it would be good for this to be more. Think about that example. SPEAKER_02: So with SpaceX, it's been up and to the right on a pretty consistent basis. So every tender round has been a bump. Sometimes it's been a small bump, sometimes it's been a larger bump. The company, I don't think, has gotten greedy. So they haven't tried to shoot the moon and raise the valuation too much. So they've been able to keep a very organized process. And they've had this attitude from the beginning of letting their employees and investors get liquidity when they need to. So it's been great. But that's very different. By the way, that sort of organized tender process is very different than the secondary market that Carta was organizing, right? Because Carta was trying to do what all these secondary brokers are doing, which is they hit up people one at a time and just say, are you looking to buy or sell? And they're trying to organize secondary transactions that are not part of an official process. And I think that's a huge part of the problem here. SPEAKER_06: Freeburg, did you have thoughts on it? SPEAKER_07: Well, I mean, there's an element of secondary transactions SPEAKER_07: in private companies that are unstructured generally being a problem. The issue with Carta was, was there a violation of trust with respect to the transparency onto the cap table that they have access to because they have all the data in their systems? And when I was at Google in 04 or so, Sergey was kind of throwing around the idea, why don't we start a hedge fund? Because we have all this data about what people are searching for and we can see all of this consumer behavior. And we could trade on that and have a huge data advantage in the marketplace. And ultimately, whether or not there was an impropriety of the use of data, and even if we excluded personal data and search data, just using internet-based traffic and internet data, the perception of the problem would have damaged Google's brand so much. First of all, is there an actual conflict where you're taking people's, what they consider to be private data, and using that to make money from their data without their permission or acknowledgement or explicit consent? And secondly, even if you are doing this in a way that doesn't use their data, because you just generally have knowledge about who buyers and sellers are in the market, outside of your software, the view that you may be using the data in conflict can damage your brand and damage your customer relationship so much. So it seems, in hindsight, a little silly, but I think to Chamath's point earlier, it may indicate the necessity for them to think about building another business on top of this core software business that is a more true marketplace-driven business, so they can make, over time, more money, and that's probably where this all came from. They saw a need to build something that was more than just monthly subscription fees. And the truth is, they weren't making money from it, SPEAKER_06: and they shut it down. SPEAKER_02: It's true that Carta is trying to become a multi-product business. They started with startup cap tables, then they added fund management, then they added this broker business. But if you read Henry's last blog, the secondary market is what he originally wanted to disrupt, is he always wanted to create the secondary market, and he created the cap table business, the SaaS software, as a way to get to that. I think what he's realized is that the real value is in the SaaS software, and this marketplace is not that valuable. I mean, the SaaS business is doing something like 250 million a year of revenue, and the broker business was only doing a few million, yeah, three million. So I think the value has turned out to be in the SaaS, and moreover, this broker business was compromising the trust and safety, or the perception of trust, that the company has from customers. SPEAKER_05: The problem with that SaaS revenue is, if you look at Mantle and Pulley, that 250 million could be 25 million. And Cake, my investment, yeah. And Cake, sorry, yeah, and Cake. But the point is, the fact that there are many competitors, I think is a sign of a low barrier to entry, and a lack of a true fundamental lock-in. SPEAKER_02: Let's say you are an investor, and you're looking at Pulley or Mantle. Why would you even think that's an attractive company to invest in if success looks like you're compressing a 250 million dollar market down to 25 million? Like, what's the point? SPEAKER_05: Well, I think a lot of these competitors got funded SPEAKER_02: during the whole ZURP era, where everything got funded. I mean, if you were to look at that market today, why would you even fund a disruptor? SPEAKER_05: Well, so look, I think Mantle's raised in that. SPEAKER_05: But there are other strategies, too. SPEAKER_06: There's other strategies you could add on to this in adjacencies. SPEAKER_05: My understanding is Mantle and Pulley raised in the low single digit millions. That gives them a lot of room to run a 25 and 50 million dollar business profitably and never raise any more money. The problem is on the opposite side. If you raise money at eight or nine or 10 billion dollars, when companies trade at 20 times, and now companies trade at six times, now all of a sudden you have to have 1.3 billion dollars of revenue a year to break even. And I think that's the real problem. It's not that Henry hasn't built a great company. I think he deserves a lot of credit. The question is entry point and the question is upside. And the upside is governed by the difficulty of the things that you're doing and how much pricing power you have for those difficult things. And so I think what we're realizing is that there are few difficult things in software, few. And it's just true. And as a result, every product, this is not a Carta thing, every product will see a ton of competitors. So the only thing that you can do is have an extremely leveraged OPEX and an extremely low cost to serve. That is the only protective mechanism one has. It seems to me on the outside looking in. Now, unless- Network effects are also important. SPEAKER_05: Unless you have an Instagram. You're right, that product is infinitely better with everybody. Or TikTok, great. Now you can spend as much money as you want. Uber, Airbnb. But that's not what I think procedural software is. SPEAKER_06: SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, we're gonna just have to agree to disagree. I think there is some pricing risk to Carta from these competitors, but my guess is it ends up being stickier than that. But in any event, I mean, I do think that Henry, at the end of the day, pulled off a nice save by just getting rid of the business altogether. I think that was a smart way to respond. Clearly the first response didn't work. SPEAKER_02: No. The first response was sort of like a very- The first response enraged people, yeah. It was a very confusing denial where he said this isn't our policy, but the sales people were doing it. SPEAKER_06: He also got into it and blamed the person who called him out on it. It was like, why are you calling us out on this? And then every founder was like, because you violated our trust. And he was like, oh yeah, sorry. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well also people were showing email campaigns that have been going on for months, and it seemed much more organized. And it was very hard to believe that this was just an accident instead of a deliberate strategy. And you could see the whole startup community was evaluating its options in real time on X. And that's when he came out and hit the whole thing with a sledgehammer and just said, we're gonna get out of this business. Smart. And I think it was really smart to do that. It's kind of called the crisis. Like I said, I don't think this is a business that startup founders want their cap table software to be engaged in. SPEAKER_06: No, definitely not. And just by the way, just a third point on that. SPEAKER_02: One reason was price discovery. Another reason was having undesirable shareholders. The third reason is just founders don't wanna create a competing fundraising process to primary financing. I think this is actually a really important point. The reason why founders don't want there to be a secondary market is because their company may need to raise money. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, you wanna go through the front door to the CEO and the board, not the side door to get some exposure to the company. SPEAKER_02: Well, I think in the ZURP era where there was all this excess funding flying around, then it kinda made sense to let secondaries happen. But in a world in which funding is scarce, you want that money to go into the company, not into the pockets of the early shareholders. And so I think the timing of this whole thing is really off. It all feels like kind of a function of ZURP in its own way. Yeah, agree. SPEAKER_06: All right, Zach, you were in the group chat talking about this viral clip about Star Wars. You wanted to chime in on it. Maybe you could cue it up, Nick. SPEAKER_02: I mean, as you may recall, my pick for Business Loser of 2023 was Disney. And it seems like they haven't learned anything from the horrible year they've just had. What is the balance of activating a force for change, SPEAKER_01: but also trying to permeate that patriarchy, that power structure? And is that a part of the calculation of your art as well? And what's been the reaction to that? SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely. I like to make men uncomfortable. I enjoy making men uncomfortable. This is the new director of Star Wars. SPEAKER_02: All right, your thoughts, Zach? Well, I saw the comment on that tweet was, this is gonna be the biggest Disney flop yet. Isn't that what it said? I mean, look, I don't know what Bob Iger is doing. He seems to wanna burn Star Wars to the ground like the rest of the Disney brands by playing politics. SPEAKER_02: This director doesn't seem to have had a lifelong fandom for the franchise. She didn't really talk about how she had grown up marinating in this universe, loving its characters. Her background is in documentary filmmaking, and there's nothing wrong with that, but there's no indication from her that she truly loves Star Wars. And in fact, the comments that she's making right now are indicating that she's gonna politicize it. The patriarchy is not why anybody is a fan of Star Wars. It goes to see its movies. So nobody wants to see that movie. It's the opposite. It's the opposite. They wanna avoid it. She's also trying to go to Star Wars movies for the politics and she's also trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. I mean, science fiction may skew male in its fan base, but it's not because sci-fi franchises don't like strong female characters. I mean, just stepping out to the larger world for a second, you've got Ripley in Aliens, you've got Sarah Connor in the Terminator movies, you've got- SPEAKER_07: Princess Leia. SPEAKER_02: Trinity in the Matrix, you got Princess Leia, Padme, Ahsoka in Star Wars. You seem to know a lot of these female characters. SPEAKER_06: You're deeper than Star Wars. Yeah, I did. I'm a Star Wars geek. You got some good pulls here. Yeah, Padme. SPEAKER_02: So this idea that there aren't strong female characters in Star Wars, that's just kind of a myth, right? So it's not like the universe needs to be reset in this way. And you could just see the whole fan community kind of groaned at this comment because they're just like, oh, here we go again. Star Wars is gonna ruin another franchise by playing politics. And the amazing thing is that, Iger just doesn't seem to learn from this at all. SPEAKER_07: But there's nothing wrong with having a female director either, right, Zaks? I mean, you're not saying that. You're saying that a particular person who has a political agenda in how they wanna shape the story of Star Wars is the issue? Of course. Right. Of course. I'll also say, I think one of the core driving narratives, emotional narratives of Star Wars is the oppressor oppressed storyline. SPEAKER_06: It's a highly political story. SPEAKER_06: I've always said, I think Star Wars SPEAKER_07: has been the most anti-technology effector in society since the 70s, because Star Wars is all about the, I've said this before, but the Ewoks destroying the Death Star and the no tech overcoming the oppressor big tech. And so we have to destroy big tech and anyone who has the better technology is very likely the oppressor. They have all the wealth and they have all the power and they have all the control. And so those who do not have the power, do not have the wealth, do not have the control, do not have the technology have to go and destroy that whether it's the empire or that kind of evil force. And that's the core narrative of Star Wars. So I do think that at its part, Star Wars in and of itself is an oppressor oppressed storyline that relates very deeply to technology and wealth SPEAKER_07: and has helped shape the Western psyche for a couple of decades in a very meaningful way, or has really reflected maybe perhaps the Western psyche. What did you think of Andor? SPEAKER_02: I think you're super imposing current day terminology on a movie that was created in the first one in the 1970s, when intersectionality did not exist. Yes, there are political overtones to Star Wars. You've got the rebel Alliance against the empire. That is not diversity politics. Sorry, it's about. I'm not saying diversity politics. It's really about the corruption of power. I mean, you know, the famous phrase by Lord Acton, which is power corrupts and absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. To me, those are the political overtones of Star Wars. It's not. So you always have to destroy that power. Intersectional categories. SPEAKER_06: It was about war. I mean, let's be honest. It was Lucas was a child of the Vietnam war era and he was highly influenced as well as Francis Ford Coppola. And yeah, the Americans with all this wealth and power SPEAKER_07: came into the jungle to try and destroy a peasant nation and cause death upon a peasant nation. And the peasant nation survived and won. And there was a narrative to that that I think is reflected in this and is reflected very deeply in a lot of the stories that have come since. And I'm not saying DEI is as a solution was the storyline out of the original Star Wars, but the original Star Wars was very much driven by the leverage that technology provides to those in power that gives them extraordinary influence over those who don't have power. SPEAKER_02: Well, if there were political overtones to the original two trilogies, and actually I think there were some really interesting themes, especially in that second one where Palpatine's power- By the way, not even political. SPEAKER_07: Let me just be clear. Social, right? So social systems, which- I understand. SPEAKER_02: But my point is that Lucas didn't hit anybody over the head with those themes. And his goal certainly wasn't to make anyone feel uncomfortable. His goal was to entertain and whatever political or social overtones there were, were very much in the background because that's what good art does. One of the reasons why Hollywood produces so few really interesting movies these days is because the political overtones are really in the forefront and they really hit you over the head with them. And so therefore they're just not very entertaining. It's not very good art. And I think that's why the fan community was like, oh, here we go again. SPEAKER_06: Let me just make sure people understand. This is a nine-year-old clip. And for context, this is probably during like the, you know, early days of the DEI movement, just so we're clear on that. But you had another point to make David. Go ahead. SPEAKER_07: Well, Sax, I think that Hollywood has imposed upon itself certain degrees of restriction on the artistry of the artists in the community. Because the standards now to be nominated for best picture define a number of DEI representation and inclusion standards. And they're listed here. So in order to, and I, if you guys will remember it at our summit in LA, I asked Gwyneth Paltrow about this, and she wasn't familiar with these changes that had been put in place. But in order to qualify for a best picture nomination, you have to meet some of these standards. And these standards include onscreen representation, beams and narratives that relate to having at least one of the lead characters or significant supporting actors come from a minority background, including ethnic background or by gender. SPEAKER_05: I could get nominated for an Oscar. Look, I'm so lucky. South Asian. SPEAKER_05: Look, I'm in the parens here. SPEAKER_07: Or at least 30% of the actors in the secondary group have to be women, racial or ethnic group, LGBTQ+, or people with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing. The main storyline, theme or narrative of the film is centered on an unrepresented group, either women, racial or ethnic group, or LGBTQ+. They can meet the criteria if the creative leadership team has at least two of the following creative leadership positions met by one of the underrepresented groups and so on and so forth. If you're an artist, a filmmaker, and you wanted to make a film, a World War II biopic, which was on the front lines in World War II and was entirely white males, would you have been able to be nominated for best picture or would you have had to go and take some actions that would have affected your artistry and your freedom of expression in making that film? And as a big fan of film, and you guys, I think all of us are probably in the same boat, at least a couple of us are. Three of us are. Three of us are. SPEAKER_07: This would have limited a lot of the best pictures of all time, I would say, if you had to impose standards on what the artists were allowed to do or how they were allowed to make their film. And that's really what's taken over Hollywood. So I would say it's not just a Bob Iger Disney thing, but this has become a standard in Hollywood that the DEI movement has so deeply affected the intentionality of what has historically been a truly creative- SPEAKER_07: I agree. If you talk to Hollywood writers, SPEAKER_02: they'll tell you that things have become extremely politicized and it's a mess. Iger has been a little bit contradictory about this. In April of last year, there was this article saying that Iger was doubling down on inclusivity and diversity, and he described that at a shareholders meeting. By November, he was saying that Disney movies have become too focused on messaging. So it seemed like he was finally getting it, that after the horrible year they had. But then we had this Star Wars news, and it seemed to suggest that they were hiring a director who really wasn't right for the material. So we'll just have to see. My sense is that they have not made the course correction they need. SPEAKER_06: If you want to see the peak of this, there was a bunch of blowback on Dunkirk, an absolutely tour de force of a film if you haven't seen it, especially go see it in IMAX, just extraordinary Christopher Nolan film, that it lacked diversity and gender diversity. It's a war film, historically, kind of hard to make it about anything else if it was just narrowly focused on a couple of battles. And so yeah, this has gotten to the point of, yeah, a little bit of absurdity. SPEAKER_07: I relate this very much to the point that we made a couple months ago about stand up comics being restricted and canceled based on the things that they say that are offensive to the narratives of social inclusion and DEI. These are artists who should have freedom of expression, creative freedom, unlimited creative freedom. If we want to have a different set of standards for how we value the art that comes out of it, fine. But I don't think that it ends up being true. So what the peer group would otherwise recognize and say is the greatest art of the year is the most impressive achievement of the year in some particular artistic discipline. It's really sad. There's also been this change in live performances, in symphonies, used to be that to avoid discrimination in auditions for symphony orchestras, auditions were conducted behind a curtain. So the director and those who were making the election on who would get to join the orchestra would listen and they wouldn't see the person performing because they were behind a curtain. Recently, that trend has changed and now those artists are required to perform not behind a curtain, but in front of the curtain so that we can judge them not on their musicianship and their artistry, but on their race, on their gender and on some other standards. So I think this is obviously part of a very broad narrative, but it's very deeply affecting- Can I ask a question? SPEAKER_07: The community of arts. Yeah, I was about to bring you in on this, Chumaf. SPEAKER_05: Is listenership of the symphony gone up or down? SPEAKER_07: It's been going down for a long time, but I don't know what that has to do with diversity. Symphony around the world are seeing decline in audience, but it happened before the changes. It's been happening, yeah. SPEAKER_05: Has it accelerated or has it slowed the negative decay to zero? I'm not sure. I'm not sure it's made a difference. Yeah, to be honest. Well, if it hasn't made a difference, then it has made a difference. SPEAKER_05: I mean, I think this is part of a wider discussion of DEI. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, Chumaf. SPEAKER_07: Sorry, the goal of some forms of art, like these live performing arts, may not necessarily be audience growth. The goal may be finding the best audience. Perfection. No, but I suspect it should be SPEAKER_05: to sustain itself indefinitely. I mean, by the way, that's a big point I've had, SPEAKER_07: which I disagree with. As the quality erodes, fewer people will care, SPEAKER_05: because there are other options that you can go to that are high quality, and then these things will die out. And maybe that's what it's supposed to happen. SPEAKER_06: I mean, this is part of a wider discussion about, I think, DEI facing the reality of whether it's like, I guess, this whole pilot thing with Boeing, and who's getting hired to be pilots, and training, and what should the focus of a company board be? What should the focus of hiring be? SPEAKER_05: The problem, I think, with the argument you guys are having, in my opinion, is that it's a little too premature. And the reason is that there are other people who will make semi-credible claims, while you guys make semi-credible claims, and no progress is made on this whole DEI discussion as it touches cinema and Hollywood, or music. What's much easier, if you wanna dismantle DEI, which will eventually come and cleanse Hollywood and the symphony, is if you go to the jobs where it's irrefutable, where even the most ardent defender of DEI says, you know what, I can't take that risk with my own family, or with my own life, and the lives of my family. And I think that we would be better off if we just focus in a really disciplined way on those, and get the criteria to be entirely based on skill, and then eventually, it'll come back in Hollywood, and the symphony will also get cleansed. So doctors, pilots, I mean, I think it could be- SPEAKER_07: I would say certain doctors, I would just say pilots, SPEAKER_05: for sure, I would say surgeons, I would say that you could probably go through, I haven't thought enough about it to know, but you could go through and say, systematically, what are the categories in the professional world that we interact with every day where skill can be the only criteria? Must be, because otherwise, innocent lives will be lost. That's an important question. SPEAKER_02: I agree with you that the fundamental choice that we have as a society is whether skills is gonna be the determinant of success, skills, and merit, or whether it's gonna be about something else. And as soon as you tell somebody that they can't get the job even though they're the most qualified because of their race or gender, then I think that is racism or sexism. So it's doubly bad. But, J'mon, I think the reason why this happens is because people don't really have the right skin in the game. So the reason why the recent discussions about pilots and weather cockpits should have this sort of DEI program is that everyone can relate, everyone has skin in the game. If your kids are gonna fly on a plane, SPEAKER_02: the only determinant you want for who the pilot is is skill, obviously, because you have real skin in the game. The problem is people will falsify their preferences when they're discussing other people flying on the plane. So people will start saying, well, we need to have DEI programs. In other words, when it doesn't affect me, you're willing to basically virtue signal and genuflect towards these programs. And I think that's the fundamental problem, is that people will pretend to support something other than skill in all these contexts where they're not directly affected. But as a society, we are. SPEAKER_05: With respect to aviation specifically, my thought is that this is a very easy skill to determine who is high quality versus not, because you have such sophisticated training apparatus and schemes and- Simulators. Simulators and all of this stuff. It's easy to know how to rank people from one through N. And I think that as a society, if you want an efficient transportation infrastructure and aviation infrastructure where the consequences are really bad if things go wrong, you just want the best, period, end of story. However, I think it's also fair to say that then the government owes the people SPEAKER_05: a responsibility to advance the technology if they actually want to have multifaceted hiring criteria. So what do I mean? We can have a lot more automation in the cockpit. The reason we don't is because of how certain lobbies are able to affect rules inside the federal transportation infrastructure. And we know this because our friend has been trying to, our friend Sky Dayton, wonderful pilot, has been trying to improve airline safety. And he's talked about this a lot. And these things get blocked by the pilots union and otherwise because they don't want to get disintermediate. Okay, fair enough. That's the game. Well, if that's the game, at some point we need to have a conversation as a society that says, okay, look, if we're gonna hire on a multifaceted basis for pilots, let's also tell Boeing and Airbus you need to build even better, more automated planes. SPEAKER_05: That's a fair trade off. SPEAKER_06: The great irony of all this, Sax, is it's illegal to hire based upon gender, race, et cetera. And then at the same time, people are trying to hold this construct of, hey, we want more diversity, we want more inclusion, at the same time in their heads and we're seeing lawsuits happen. So they want tech companies to report on their diversity. They want venture firms to report on either diversity and investment, but it's illegal and you can be sued if you were to give investment dollars based on race, gender, et cetera. And Fierce Founders, I believe is the name of the firm that's being sued for only investing in a certain demographic of women. Yeah, or to ask people their sexual preference. SPEAKER_07: You're not allowed to ask that in an employment application. SPEAKER_06: I've always had a problem with how do you keep these two things in your mind in our own venture firm? And I just said to folks just to get personal- This is considered a diversity target SPEAKER_07: and now to hire people, whether it's on a Hollywood film set or in your company, you've got to go ask them what their sexual preference is? That's, I mean, it's crazy that we're being asked to do that. SPEAKER_06: And what I did in our company was I said, hey, if we don't feel we're getting enough applicants for the programs, founding of university, the accelerator, we could have efforts to increase the number of applicants, but we can't make investment decisions based on anything other than the merit of the company or we will get sued. And so this is, I think, the problem in corporate America with these issues is how do I try to help this problem if we think there is a diversity problem in our particular industry, which is noble and thoughtful, and I wouldn't criticize anybody for that, but then the rubber meets the road at legal and then performance, right? And this is very hard for, I think, leaders to manage those two dichotomies. SPEAKER_05: I could see a case for why barbers and priests should be multifaceted, good bedside manner, crack a few jokes, be able to listen. Relateability. Pathetic, reliability. SPEAKER_05: Perspective. But if a pilot, but the first time, like the thing is now this thing is so on the front burner of people's minds that heaven forbid, SPEAKER_05: if there is an incident or a near incident, you're gonna see lawsuits that are gonna focus on this issue. Show me the training records of the pilots and show me how they fared relative to alternative folks that you either did hire or didn't hire and why was this selection? It's gonna be a mess. We might even see that with Harvard SPEAKER_06: and their selection of their president. Like why was this person selected as president, right? And did we check their- The new one. Or the past one. Did we know about the plagiarism stuff? Did we not know about it? SPEAKER_06: And this is I think the race to nowhere when you get into identity politics. And I think this is why everybody, and I think Coleman Hughes said it really brilliantly when he was on this pod, talking about his TED Talk. Like we at least want the aspiration of having a colorblind society. I think what Coleman said that was really, I think profound was, where can we actually affect change that will be important? And I think that's early education. It could be providing pre-K. It could be providing support for people with childcare so that they could get into more job training, et cetera. So where do we put our efforts if we do wanna see a more inclusive, diverse, just world is I think the question. Backing up a second, SPEAKER_02: I think there's a fundamental dishonesty about the DEI movement that's really coming to the fore right now. On the one hand, DEI activists will explicitly say that their goal is to engineer job categories to explicit population numbers. But like you said, that's actually illegal to do. So when they get in a lawsuit, like the Harvard affirmative action case that went to the Supreme Court, they'll deny that they're discriminating against Asian Americans. So when they're preaching for what they wanna do, when they talk about say, Kendi style anti-racism, they will say that the explicit goal here is proportional representation. But then when that results in discrimination against groups that are basically selected against, they'll deny that that's what they're doing. And I think it's gotten to the point now where they just can't maintain both things being true. And I think we saw this in the dust up that just happened between Elon and Mark Cuban, where Elon was saying, look, we should be a colorblind, meritorious society. We just shouldn't discriminate for or against anybody on the basis of race. And then Cuban jumps in and says, oh, no, that's not what DEI is doing. DEI is just trying to expand the pool of applicants. And it's just not true. I mean, I don't know if he's being disingenuous. I don't know if he's virtue signaling. I think they were talking through each other. SPEAKER_06: I mean, you do wanna expand the pool if you're not getting a pool of diverse applicants. There's nothing wrong with that, expanding the pool. But you are correct. There was a DEI grift that occurred. I think that's kind of what you're alluding to. And I can tell you the inside story on the grift. I think that if you look at the DEI movement, SPEAKER_02: it goes way, way beyond just expanding the pool of applicants. It explicitly puts its thumb on the scale in terms of what it's looking for in terms of hiring and promotion. SPEAKER_06: It turned into a grift. And I can tell you the inside story on this. And it's gonna come out eventually. But there was a, I don't know if you experienced this in any of your companies, or if anybody's willing to talk about it, but company has lack of diversity in their company, then diversity activists, and this is, I think, where it really started to build up resentment. Diversity activists comes in, says, hey, you have problems. They call them out on social media. There was a Twitter brigade comes in. Oh my God, look how horrible this company is. People go, oh, I'm sorry, we didn't wanna be horrible. And then they say, oh, well, hire us. And we'll teach you how to do DEI. And let's build a DEI group. And we wanna be consultants. Pay us to come in, pay us to speak at your organization, to tell you what you're doing wrong. And then rally a reverse support of it after you've gotten paid for solving the problem for them. And I saw the shakedown occur. And I had people ask me for advice on like, hey, what do we do here? And you can just imagine, you're a person of good faith who wants to do the right thing. And then these DEI folks come in and then try to brigade you, basically publicly shame you in order to get like rich DEI contracts. And we saw this with like the size of DEI groups that companies and you're wondering, well, what are these people actually doing? Are they just, what does a DEI department actually do inside of a company that is a creative or valuable? SPEAKER_02: It creates more bureaucracy to do more DEI. Right, exactly. It feeds on itself. And that's why it keeps getting bigger and bigger. Did you guys see the size of the Michigan DEI group? SPEAKER_05: Did you see that tweet? I thought that was a, SPEAKER_06: I thought this was a Babylon Bee story when I first saw it because there are 250 people working for DEI. SPEAKER_06: 500 people at Michigan. SPEAKER_05: What? SPEAKER_06: What's the denominator? SPEAKER_05: 500 out of how many people? I don't know, but they're spending $30 million on payroll benefits. Amen. SPEAKER_02: I mean, look, big companies can kind of afford this stuff, but startups cannot. I mean, this is really the kiss of death for startups. You just can't afford to have these large bureaucracies. SPEAKER_06: And then also, when you're a startup founder, if you have six months of runway, 12 months of runway, you might not have the luxury to be looking at your statistics and saying, you know what? We've got 10 people who are of this demographic. Statistically, we should have this. So the next hire we need to make our sales numbers has to be of this composure. And I have seen people do this, Zach. You've probably seen it too on boards or whatever. Hey, we need to hire more of this type of person, this profile, and then hiring gets slowed. Yeah, it's challenging. And it's also illegal. I don't know how you win in this thing other than have a colorblind society as a goal, at least. And to put your efforts- Jason, are you familiar with a Mott and Bailey tactic? SPEAKER_02: No, Tom. Have you heard of this? This is a rhetorical technique or fallacy. SPEAKER_06: No, I haven't heard this one. Yeah, I love a good- SPEAKER_02: So this comes from medieval times. The Mott and Bailey was a type of castle where- Oh, yes. The Bailey was this wider area that was just defended by a wooden wall, so it's not that secure. The Mott was basically the stone fortress on the hill. So a Mott and Bailey tactic is when you go out and stake out a very aggressive position. You take the Bailey, basically, but then when you get challenged, you retreat into the Mott and pretend like you never took the Bailey position. The Bailey position is basically the Kennedy-style anti-racism where you say, look, we have to achieve proportional representation in every job category. And that is what the DEI movement in the Maine advocates for. But then when they get challenged by somebody like Elon or by somebody like the Supreme Court, they retreat into the Mott and to say, no, no, we weren't trying to do that. We're just trying to expand the pool of qualified applicants because who could be against that? SPEAKER_02: And they'll claim that they were never doing the whole proportional representation thing. And then on top of it, they'll say, well, listen, obviously increasing the pool of qualified applicants is so unobjectionable that if you're against that, then you must be racist. And then you get all the accusations. And so this is basically the rhetorical technique that the movement uses to defend itself. SPEAKER_02: But eventually when this stuff gets litigated, as it just did at the Supreme Court, you start to pick this apart and you see that there's a lot of evidence that they are actually engaged in overt discrimination against certain groups like Asian Americans. SPEAKER_05: No easy answers here, but I for one think that that's bad. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, there was something really nice about a merit-based society if there was fairness at the starting line. But that's the thing I've learned is not everybody starts at the same place. And so if you just look at, it seems to me, and listen, I'm no expert, but the starting line seems to matter most. So if we could focus on making it as equal and fair and just when it comes to education, that seems to me to be the quickest solution to feeling better about all this. I just think we should have seven-day, 365-day-a-year school available, public school available, competitive schools available, to make the world more just and give people more opportunity, right? Skills training, et cetera. Why do you think that having school 365 days a year SPEAKER_05: will make the world more just? SPEAKER_06: Well, because I do think that if you had more competition in schools and you had parents who care or students who care and they could get more education and there was more available, then you could say, well, how many days a week did you go to school? How much effort did you put in? And there was just more high-quality school available. And if you look at public schools right now, it's very unjust how poor the schools are and how poorly run they are and what the teachers unions have done to these schools in disadvantaged communities. And if I look back on my life and I look at people who did well, they had engaged parents and they had opportunities in education that other people didn't. And that seems- SPEAKER_06: How does keeping the school open all year round change that? SPEAKER_06: You think about parents who maybe don't have coverage for their kids after 2.30 or three o'clock and then those kids, we were called latchkey kids, I think, in the 80s and 90s. You're having the ability for them to do more enriching things, to be in chess club, to be in Tae Kwon Do club, to do a little extra math, whatever it is. That could be something society could do for a very low cost or skills training even, right? Hey, this is a culinary school after school. This is a culinary school on the weekends. This is a coding school on the weekends. It doesn't have to be just STEM. It could be welding. It could be, like I said, it could be design, whatever it is. More opportunities for people to learn more skills without having the benchmark be, my parents can afford Kumon. My parents can afford a chess tutor, right? We live in a time of incredible privilege and all of us have unlimited resources. Many of the people who listen to this podcast have a lot of resources to hire tutors for their kids and give them more opportunity. I didn't have that opportunity. And if I had that opportunity, I would have learned chess faster, right? I would have had more opportunity for it. It just wasn't available to me. And then there's a lot of people who started behind me who certainly didn't have it available. Single parent and in a worse school environment than Brooklyn where I grew up. So I don't know. Do you disagree, Jamar? Would you have a better idea of how to make the world more fair and just than education and skill-strain? SPEAKER_05: I think education is probably the most important. I do think that we need to find it fashionable again SPEAKER_05: to have nuclear families. I think that if you look at the marriage rates of 20 and 30-year-olds, it's meaningfully depressed relative to older cohorts, including ours. We're the last generation where it's a structural part of our identity is being married. SPEAKER_05: And I think that that has long-term implications because when you look at the success rates of how to grow kids, poverty matters a lot less than having a structural nuclear family, meaning a two-parent household. And so I think that there's a lot of work we need to do to figure out how to re-incentivize folks to want to commit to a single person, not this rampant promiscuity, but just kind of lock down and find somebody and build a long-term partnership with them. I think that that's really crucial for a functioning society. Do you think tax incentives is the way to do that or just cultural norms? SPEAKER_05: I haven't studied the problem to have a real idea. SPEAKER_06: I've heard this before. I just don't know how that gets implemented in society. And I can think of ways that tutoring and having more education available, vouchers, et cetera. I mean, if you gave every parent under a certain dollar amount of income a year a voucher to hire tutors, man, that could change the world, right? It could change a lot of people's fate. We need more two-parent households. SPEAKER_06: That would certainly help more. All right, well, we really got into it here in the end. Man, what a great episode. All right, for the Rain Man, David Sacks. With a tight haircut now, the dream is over. I mean, it's just- SPEAKER_02: It's a new year. SPEAKER_06: I don't know who got to you. SPEAKER_02: It's a new year. SPEAKER_06: It's an election year. It's a big year for you in the election. SPEAKER_02: Clean it up for the election. I think it's just a huge critical mistake. SPEAKER_06: I think you were going to a certain iconic look and I think you've blown it. I'm gonna take the other side of that bet. And for David Freeberg, the CEO of Ohalo and Trimath Palihapitiya, the founder of the new 80-90 incubator and the chairman dictator of the All In LLC. I am the world's greatest moderator. Yes, you are. And Angela Vester. And we'll see you on next time. Bye bye. Love you boys. Bye bye. SPEAKER_03: Bye bye. Bye bye. We'll let your winners ride. Rain Man, David Sacks. I'm going all in. And it said- We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, S.I.T. The queen of Kanoi. I'm going all in. I'm going all in. Let your winners ride. I'm going all in. I'm going all in. That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway. Sacks. SPEAKER_04: Oh, man. Oh, man. My haberdasher will meet me at- We should all just get a room and just have one big huge door because they're all just useless. It's like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. SPEAKER_02: Wet your the B. Wet your B. Wet your B. B. Wet your- We need to get merch. Besties are back. SPEAKER_08: I'm going all in. I'm going all in.