All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E104: FTX collapse with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong + election results, macro update & more
Episode Date: November 12, 2022(0:00) New bestie game show! (6:20) Election recap: Red wave falls flat, Republican party flips from Trump to DeSantis, a rebuke of extremism (20:47) Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong joins to break down t...he FTX collapse, further contagion risk, regulation, and more! (43:32) Red flags exhibited by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, lack of governance/diligence (1:06:00) Macroeconomic picture, lower than expected CPI print catalyzes market tear, advice for founders Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/us/politics/biden-ukraine-russia-diplomacy.html https://www.wsj.com/articles/ftx-files-for-chapter-11-bankruptcy-11668176869 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-11/summers-says-ftx-meltdown-has-whiffs-of-enron-like-scandal https://fortune.com/2022/11/10/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-joe-biden-democratic-party-second-biggest-donor https://web.archive.org/web/20221109230422/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight https://twitter.com/GordonJohnson19/status/1591062535586848768
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Sacks the United States is maybe not going to send weapons to Ukraine indefinitely and they're asking them to sit down and negotiate something that people on the left
Started to do and got a got smashed for something you've been pushing for so I guess mini victory lap for you sacks
What what's the end game here? Well, yeah?
I mean, I've been talking common sense about this for months just saying that we need to be open to diplomacy because total defeat for Russia also means a maximum risk of nuclear war.
I mean, these things go hand in hand.
That's the paradox of this war, is that if Russia faces the prospect of a total defeat,
that's when they're most likely to escalate this conflict into something much, much worse.
So therefore, we need to be open to diplomacy.
But it was good to hear administration officials over the past week say things that
I've been saying for months and that I've been accused of being like a Putin sympathizer
for.
So apparently there's a bunch of Putin sympathizers in the administration.
And just to read you some of these remarks, actually I want to play like a fun game with
you guys instead of just, oh really?
Yeah, it's just mentioning these quotes.
I want to play a game called Millie or Sax.
So I want you guys to guess whether it was General Millie
who said the quote or whether I said the quote.
Okay.
Does that sound like a fair game?
Yes, fair game.
Let's put some game show music here.
Millie or Sax?
I'm going to read you like four or five quotes
and you guys are going to say whether it was Millie
or Sax who said it. First quote, who said it first quote who said it general millie or sax one of the lessons
That should have been learned from world war one is that European powers refused to negotiate compounded the human suffering and led to millions more dead
Millie or sax sax. I'm going sax. I'm going sax. It's a very historic millie said
No, next one next one go go go. Okay a regional war turned into the first world war because all parties made
Maximus demands and assumed others were bluffing it can happen again
That millie or sax because of bluffing you said bluffing that bluffing is a word that you would use all right
That was sax that was sax maximalist yes, okay?
I would never say maximalist. Yes, he would never say bluffing. Yeah, go ahead.
There's an opportunity to negotiate when peace can be achieved.
Seize it.
Millie or sax?
Millie, it's very pithy.
It's pithy like Millie.
All right, that was Millie.
Yes.
All right, I'm two and one.
Two and one.
I'm two for one.
It's deeply irresponsible not to try for diplomacy when the state is so high.
Sax, that's an emotional statement.
I go mille.
They were sacks.
Oh, sacks.
Damn it.
Two and two, three and one for sure.
There has to be a mutual recognition that military victory
is probably in the true sense of the word.
It may not be achievable through military means,
and therefore you need to turn to other means.
Oh, that's mille.
It's a word salad.
I go mille word salad.
Hold on, hold on.
It's a mille word salad. It's too convoluted for sacks. Sacks. I go milly word salad. Hold on, hold on. It's a milly word salad.
It's too convoluted for sacks.
Sacks.
I go milly, I go milly.
I think it's milly.
That's milly.
Yeah.
It's word salad milly.
That's it, I caught up.
Now I'm three and two tied with chamaf.
Last one.
Last one, okay.
It must be our objective now to help achieve a ceasefire
and negotiate a piece rather than protract the conflict.
Mm, wow, it's so formal.
Millie, so formal.
It feels like somebody said that on the steps of like a building outside.
It's very formal.
To well-spoken, it's crisp.
Can we hear it one more time?
May we hear it one more time?
It must be our objective now to help achieve a ceasefire and negotiated peace rather than
protract the conflict.
Millie, it's a little too formal for a podcast, but in a tweet, it
wouldn't be. So it could be a sex tweet, but I'm thinking, so
podcast, I got to go millie, I got to go millie.
Saks.
No, god damn it, damn it.
You can't tell Millie from Saks is what we've learned.
What a great game.
Right now we're going. What a great game.
Right now we're gonna play the next game.
This is called Bernie Madoff or SBF.
Bernie Madoff or SBF. All right, everybody. Welcome to the all in pod with us again, the dictator in a beautiful
herpals sweater sweater Karen. Man, it's the fall season season so I need to notice the inside the inside of this is
Swade. Oh very nice very nice so multiple animals killed.
I think you're pleasure. God wait. Yeah.
God it. All right. What animal do they kill to make Swade? Is that like a type of leather or what is that?
I hope it's an endangered one.
Actually that version of Swway that he's wearing
is from a white rhino.
So they just take the hide and they throw everything else away.
Oh my God, so horrible.
So horrible.
God, can we take this out of the show?
These are ivory buttons.
The ivory buttons.
Oh no, no, you're mad.
I think it's baby seal fur around the couch. He's sealed, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no did to your Jeppelow ticket. Wait, you don't want to talk about Jeppelow Mint? Why?
Are you embarrassed to fly commercial?
What did you eat?
Ah!
Are you embarrassed to fly J.Kell?
Yeah, I told you.
When I admit, I don't call it like I'm the president.
I'm like, hold on, Mint coming through.
I then I start spreading out.
I think J.Kell class is like the seat by the bathroom.
In the back.
Do you think you save 150 bucks each way?
What is is Jeb Blument the name of like Jeb Blument is their first class
coast to coast.
It is so delightful.
What is that Jeb Blument?
They just have figured out a way to make like sleeper seats, you know, that are very nice.
Oh that's great.
And it's upgraded service where they put like a little wall between you and everybody else.
It's kind of like having a private plane if you didn't.
And Saks is here, the whole cruise here basically.
We'll have a surprise, Bestie Guesty jumping in
in the middle of this.
I'm not going to tell you who.
Because nothing's going on this week.
Nothing is going on this week.
I mean, there's so much to talk about.
Let's just start with the elections.
And then we have to start with my mayor, Copa.
Usually this is like throwing red meat to sacks, but I mean, at this point, all right.
So DeSantis won by double digits in Florida. He got a huge amount of the vote, but all
the Trump high profile Trump back candidates seem to have lost. Dr. Oz, Dan Cox, just
it was a shalacking, I guess, or the red wave became like a puddle or like an eyedropper
or something.
But some of the Trump back candidates did win some of the Peter Teele collection, JD Vance
one.
So I guess that's a big win for Sad.
That was in a Trump candidate though, because if you remember when Trump went to stump for
JD Vance, he forgot his name.
I got this name wrong.
So, so anybody that Trump on your side, you don't need friends.
Anybody that Trump actually cared about turned out to be just a complete dud and lost.
And everybody that kind of had to keep him somewhat around just so that he didn't throw bombs
actually did decently.
But I mean, Trump is just a weight on the neck of the Republican party and it's time to just get rid of them
Sacks what happened to your red wave? Yeah, listen, I got this wrong
I think there's a few reasons for it
So I think when you get an election wrong you have to admit it and figure out what you've what your mistake was
Otherwise, you're not gonna improve. I mean number one. I was looking at, you know, the RCP polling,
the real clear politics where they take an average of all the different polls.
They were adding a factor to it.
They were showing, by the way, plus three or plus four in the Senate for Republicans,
but they were adding a factor to it based on the underweighting that the pollsters did
in the last election cycle.
And it turns out that the pollsters, I think, did a pretty decent job correcting their polls.
And so the RCP overweight turned out
to be just basically completely wrong.
The other thing that I got wrong
was I was just looking at the fundamentals.
I mean, three quarters of Americans think we're on the wrong track
and we're in a recession.
So based on that, you would think that this would be a great year
for Republicans.
And in fact, the out of power party usually wins in a midterm
and Biden's popularity is at historic lows,
at like 41, 42%.
So everything was teed up for the Republicans.
So what went wrong?
I think a couple of things.
Number one, two days before the election,
Trump basically comes out and pre-analysis that he's running.
And this basically plays into the narrative that Biden has already created, that
this is a, this is not a referendum on Biden.
It's a referendum on democracy.
And basically, Trump made it into a choice election.
Who do you like better, Biden or Trump?
And the fact of the matter is, if you look at the exit polling, as unpopular as Biden
is, Trump is even more unpopular.
So that did absolutely nothing to help the
Republicans and I think it really hurt them at the margins. The other thing that turned out,
I think the other big thing that helped Democrats was dobs. And I never thought that it wouldn't
be a factor. But if you looked at the polling before the election, 15% of likely voters said that
it was their number one issue. If you looked at exit polling, after the election, it was 28%.
So, Dobbs turned out to be twice as significant as what the early polling was showing.
And if you remember Jason, go back to the episode we did on abortion.
I said the shrewd play for Republicans here was the Roberts compromise.
What did Roberts want to do?
He basically was going to allow the 15 week restriction on abortion, but not have the headline of Rowe Wade overturned.
And that basically is what DeSantis implemented in Florida.
He basically restricted abortion after 15 weeks.
It's the purple state compromise.
It's where I think the purple states and where most of the country is going to end up.
And the sooner Republicans get their heads wrapped around that fact that better they're
going to be long term
yes you want question there sacks yeah who stacked the supreme court deliberately to turn over
roe v. wind listen i mean there this was a long term priority of republican policy that's
that's another question jack out well no we do have to recognize that trump said he would do that
he did it so this is doubly trump's fault Every party nominates justices that align with their values. And it cycles.
Yeah, but Trump said he's going. Trump said he would specifically do it in order to know
what the president doesn't choose who dies in the Supreme Court and when.
Yeah, right. There are more.
Yeah, it's also more complicated than that because what this job's decision did is
throw the issue back to the states. And the fact of the matter is that now it's up to each of these states to determine where they
are going to come out in this issue.
If you look at, there were ballot initiatives in red states like Kansas and like Kentucky.
That's right.
That's what I'm saying.
Is there are pro-life ballot initiatives in red states that lost?
You can see all over the country that the Republicans try to go too far, or they
do try to go too far when they try to impose a total ban.
But it seems to be popular is this what I'm saying is the purple state compromise.
It's what DeSantis did in Florida.
It seems like most of the country, we talked about this on that episode.
Most of the country is in the messy middle.
They want abortion to be safe,
legal, rare, and early. They're willing to support it in say the first 15 weeks, but then
after that, there needs to be some restrictions that I'm saying most of the country supports
that. Now, it's also the case that Democrats, though, are sticking out a pretty extreme
position too, because most of the Democrats were taking the position that abortion should
be legal up into the ninth month, which is not even, that's more radical than even
row.
Row said that you can restrict it after 23 weeks.
So you know what we said on that podcast Jason was the party that gets the middle first
on this issue as the one that's going to do well.
Not just this issue.
Yeah, and I think, yes, I think it's true on this and I think it's true on other things.
So look, I think theans can correct your pretty easily
if they listen to folks like
de santis and young kin and kemp
uh... people who understand that they have to is a compromise here
and the ones who basically insist
on pushing a total ban
are gonna go down and flames there's a couple of things i think that are
worth
looking at now that
we have all the exit polling and the results. The Democrats strategy of helping to promote
these extremist magacandidates in the primaries turned out to be a huge winning strategy because
every single one that they helped put up against the Democrat, the Democrats won.
that they helped put up against the Democrat, the Democrats won. But number two, so what that shows is the extreme right cannot field a winning candidate.
But on the other side, all of these extreme left-leaning Democrats also did not do
very well either.
And so you're back to David what you said, which is we have been saying for a while, the
winning strategy is that messy middle. It's the moderate person that kind of like tax to the center. And this is what
you see everywhere around the country, all of the ballot initiatives, every time you
had an extremist ballot initiative, whether it was a complete ban on abortion in a red
state or whether it was tax the rich policy in a blue state, they failed.
And so I think the message that you have to take away is the extreme left doesn't work.
The extreme right doesn't work.
If you look at, for example, like Kathy Hoko almost lost in New York State because of
who?
Because of like AOC and all of that extreme is progressive rank and file of that party.
So people need to really understand and look at the data on the ground.
If you want to win in 24, you got to be in the middle and you got to clean up all of this
extremist rhetoric.
Freeberg?
Any thoughts?
I think the Georgia Senate runoff race that we had in the 2020 election cost the US $10 trillion. And I think it, because if you'll remember, that was the race that when the Democrats
won, tipped the power in Senate to the Democrats and all this legislation for the last two years
was passed, including a lot of the fiscal stimulus and spending that very likely may have
faced significantly more opposition than could have been faced
where the Democrats had the White House and the Senate and the House.
And so that single seat and the loss of that seat in the runoff to the Democrat Party,
I think, ended up allowing a lot of loose behavior over the last two years that's going
to cost this country for a very long time.
And in part, perhaps we can argue a lot of the inflationary pressure and now the debt
load, the US debt load increasing by $10 trillion in the last two years since that election,
by the way.
And so I think one of the most important things that perhaps people don't cognizantly
recognize but feel in some way is that having a balance of power is really important in this country.
And so to some degree, while there may be issues that folks can argue about, disagree about, and there may be candidates that are vile to us,
I think ultimately, folks are recognizing the benefit and the value in having a good legislative debate and a good check in balance in this country.
And so I think that there's a lot ofACs is saying that ties into that kind of emotional
conditioning that's probably underway.
Okay.
SACs.
Trump said he was going to announce.
He went after DeSantis called him to sanctimonious.
Obviously, the Trump endorsements here didn't help.
Roe v. Wade didn't help the situation.
What is going to happen here is the Republican party finally going to cut ties
because they want to start winning or is Trump going to just announce next week and cause
massive chaos? What's going to happen in the Republican party in the coming weeks?
Because we're 14 months away from Iowa, right? I mean, this is now the next issue.
The question comes down to do Republicans want to start winning elections, yes or no. And freeberg bought up the right point in the last election cycle. He's right that the reason
why we got $10 trillion of unnecessary spending is because of that Georgia runoff seat. We're about
to have another one where Purdue won that seat on election night and then we're not going in the runoff.
Why did things go against Purdue? Because Trump
had a six week hissy fit after the election, the Georgia runoff happened on January 5th,
and then all culminated in the ride on January 6th. So the fact of the matter is, Trump has
been having this extended hissy fit and living in denial since the loss in 2020. And as a
result of that, we lost the Georgia runoff. I think we did worse than
we had to in this midterm. I think we're going to lose the Georgia runoff again if Trump continues
with these antics. And so it really comes down to Republicans, do you want to win? And look, I know
that there's call it 40% of the country, passionately loves Trump, but here's the problem. He's
capped at 40%. Independence and moderate
centrist will not give the guy another look. And so you cannot win a major national
election in this country with 40% of the vote, no matter how passionate that 40% is.
You know what 40% is? 40% is Charlie Quest, the guy who distanced his beat, who wiped out
in Florida, that was a 6040 election. That is what a 40% of the
electorate looks like.
Land slide.
It's a landslide, exactly. So the bottom line is that who your messenger is in politics
is incredibly important. And Trump just gives his enemies way too much to work with. Now,
if he weren't or a Republican, it might be different take Federman, for example. Okay, this guy Federman. Okay, he's being portrayed as this man
of the people, he's got the goatee and the tattoos and the hoodie or whatever. Who is he
really? He's a trust fund kid who never had a job until his mid 40s. But the press completely
gives him a pass on that. They would never do that for a Republican. If Federman were
a Republican, the press would expose him in two seconds. Now, that's a complaint, but the fact that matters Republicans
just have to accept it. These are the rules of the game. If you're a Republican candidate for
office, you have to be perfect. You have to be focused. You have to be disciplined. You have to be
dissantists. You cannot give your opponents something unnecessary to work with. Every fight
dissantists picks has been a smart fight that he's won. And the
same thing with Len Youngkin as well. He doesn't give his opponents things to work with. And
unless Republicans realize that these are the kinds of candidates we need to nominate
in this media environment, we're going to keep losing elections.
Yeah. Jamoth, any final thoughts here as we wrap up election?
I'm going to DC next week, the rounds high five and fast clapping.
Yeah.
Just finished the thought one other quote from New Hampshire governor, Kristen, who
knew who's kind of a, he's a Republican who's been in spas with Trump.
He said, listen, the message of this election is first fix crazy, then fix policy.
If you're coming across like you're crazy, the voters will reject you.
Now, that doesn't mean you can't stand for principle.
Ron DeSantis says that Florida is where woke goes to die.
He says, we will fight woke in the boardrooms, we'll fight in the classrooms.
This is certainly not a liberal position.
These are pretty conservative positions he's taking, but he does it in a calculated,
disciplined way.
I'll say this right now.
He is a winning candidate and the scale of Reagan, if the Democrats
also don't figure out how to clean up their act because the other message that's so interesting
that I took away is the legislative agenda that works is actually what Biden has always
believed.
The problem is that Biden seems to get distracted or confused or hijacked by the left wing of
his party, and they introduced all these unbelievably crazy iterations of progressive policy that
just are not popular, even in blue states, just look at the number of bills that fail.
So he also has to fix what he's doing, by the way.
But he doesn't think so. He but he doesn't think that could fail.
Uh, the US judge in Texas.
I'm not sure you can tell me if this is legit or, uh, or not.
No, they stayed that, that what we should talk about that in the context of the economy,
actually, but that was predictable.
That was predictable that the college loans, the internet is coming out.
Yeah, constitutional for a president to spend half a trillion dollars without Congress's
approval.
Kabil and Jamal's point here to Santa's won Miami-Dade County, which went for a Hillary
by 30 points.
He showed that a competent executive, an energetic, youthful operator who actually runs the
state well, can win over moderns and independence.
And Democrats.
These are the types of candidates Republicans are.
Yeah, he's a winner.
He's a winner.
We got a call breaking in here.
We have a special bestie guest.
He knows it's been a big news week.
It's not just the elections.
FTX, crypto exchange went belly up.
And we thought, well, let's bring somebody in
who's super credible in crypto.
And that's friend of the pod.
He's credible because he's wearing a tie.
Yeah.
Hey, Brian, I'm strong.
How are you doing, Brian?
Brian, aren't strong. You look fantastic. Yeah, What are you testifying today? I'm doing great.
It's not it's not Montclair and it's not Laura Piano, but you know, normally I just I just
wear the black t-shirt and the hoodie, but you know, when times like this, I got to go talk to
media and policymakers, regulators, and it's a it's a good time to, you know, spruce up the image.
This is a week to break out the tie.
Yeah.
Hey, listen, men's warehouse, it never looked better.
You look great.
Thank you.
I see a red tie and I think fiscally responsible.
I guess Brian, just to kick it off, FTX in spectacular fashion blew up this week.
And it's pretty gnarly.
You run in exchange as well.
What's your take
on what happened with FTX, and then what is your position in terms of making sure your customers
understand that Coinbase is not going to have a similar fate to all the other exchanges that seem
to be blowing up every couple of months? Yeah. Well, first of all, I mean, I think we were all
shocked that somebody like Sam who seemingly is so smart and capable ended up in this
really the situation where he appears to have done something quite unethical and illegal.
So my job right now this week has been to go out there and just help people understand
that Coinbase is not like that. We've been pursuing a different strategy for the last 10 years.
We're a public company. We're regulated, our financial statements are audited, they
can show that customer funds are segregated, they're backed one to one, we're not investing
customer assets without their explicit direction.
And so that's been the first step is just to make sure people understand that.
But then after that, we need to kind of think about how we go forward as an industry here
and both take a long-term perspective, make sure the good companies
in the space aren't allowing one or two bad actors to kind of mess it up for everybody
else.
And it feeds into the whole regulatory story, too, because companies like Coinbase are already
regulated, but we're regulated like a traditional financial service business, but we don't have
clarity about the crypto-specific regulations, like what's a commodity, what's a security,
and that lack of regulatory
clarity, I believe, has pushed a lot of this business offshore to these less regulated exchanges.
That's part of what caused the blow-up today. They were based in the Bahamas, and there's not
sophisticated financial regulators overseeing what they were doing. Brian, there's a lot to unpack,
but maybe we can just take a step back and for the uninitiated or for the
person who's only been just following this very superficially.
Can you just in a nutshell explain what happened?
Yeah, so my understanding is, and again, this is from Pete's, but I've talked to and I spoke
with Sam and see CZ briefly during this, but I didn't get details from them.
I got it from other people.
You spoke to them this week.
Yeah, I mean, this was all going down. I mean, I spoke to Sam about, you know, he was
trying to raise a emergency financing and things like that. And I spoke to CZ about why he
was considering buying the asset. I thought it was a bad idea.
But my understanding of what happened at this point, and again, I don't have all the facts.
This is just my understanding is that, you know that FTX was in a position where they had
this market maker, Alameda, that was investing in risky things. That's fine. Market makers
hedge funds, they're designed to take more risk. It appears at this point that back during the last
shake-up in the crypto industry where Teraluna and Voyager and Celsius and three arrows went under,
it appears that
Alameda took a big loss at that time as well. They may have even been underwater. And instead
of just saying, hey, you know, this hedge fund is going to blow up, too, which would have
been unfortunate. People would have, you know, Sam would have lost money. It's embarrassing,
but it's not illegal for a hedge fund to blow up. It happens with some regularity. Instead
of just letting it blow up, it seems like at this point, he took customer funds.
Well, you have to explain, he owns both.
That's for the people that may not understand that.
Right.
So it's a related card.
He owns his own exchange called FTX,
and he owns his own head front called Alameda.
Which operates inside of FTX as well as in other places.
Right. But again, Alameda seems to have blown up, sorry,
Brian, back to you.
Yeah. So it seems they had this solvency issue. And instead of just letting it blow up,
Sam basically said, hey, we have a bunch of customer assets over here at FTX, or he somehow
basically made a loan from FTX into Alameda to try to prop it up. I don't know why he
did that. I mean, that's the moment in my mind
where he crossed the line into probably committing fraud.
And I think he probably lied to users, lied to investors,
and he went around and tried to bail out
these different companies like Voyager and BlockFi
and to sort of prop up this thing.
And maybe he thought he could trade his way out of it
or something, I'm not sure,
but that seems to be where the mistake was made.
Brian, can I ask one question,
which I think will help frame the contagion risk
set of questions that everyone's having.
When people have an asset,
we all talk about customer deposits and customer assets
held at these exchanges,
but those assets and those deposits
are very often some form of coin.
I have some amount of Bitcoin, some amount of Ether, some amount of something else.
Is it the case that there is an assumption of total asset value that's held in a portfolio
of coins that doesn't necessarily match the individual user's accounts?
And then when one coin goes down in value, nominally, to dollars, that the whole value of the portfolio
goes down and now you can't actually make the customers
whole. So in the statements that have been made by these guys
and other exchanges, that we have enough liquidity to cover
customers accounts that the assumption might be we have enough
liquidity if you assume the current market price for a whole
bunch of different coins. But then if one coin tanks, the total liquidity tanks, and they don't
actually have it matched up correctly because now the customer account value didn't go down
as much as the exchange of the total asset value. Does that make sense?
It does. Is that part of the contagion risk that's going on here? Is that they're not matched
truly between customer accounts and the exchanges, you know, holding
of coins.
So, not exactly.
Okay, so if you're a regular financial service business that's put, you're not a bank,
you know, we're regular it as a trust company, a money transmitter, etc.
You're required to hold customer assets one for one.
And to nominate it in the asset.
So in other words, if you say the customer has one Bitcoin, you have to hold one Bitcoin. If they say they have $100, you have to hold $100. And so that's
the case with Coinbase. You don't have to take our word for it, by the way. You can look
at our audited public financial statements as a public company with an independent, you
know, big four accounting firm who went to go verify all of that. And that's what various
custodians and exchanges, that's what they all should be doing. If, by the way, if you're
regulated as a bank, you can actually go invest some of those,
but there's very strict regulation around that and capital requirements and whatnot.
And we're not a bank.
So we hold one to one.
Now, if you're an investment fund or a hedge fund or something like that, then you can
try to take positions in different coins and different assets and they could go up and
they could go down.
You know, you may lose your investor's money, but there's no such thing as the customer assets
being involved in that.
There needs to be clear segregation of those customer funds and from what an investment
fund would be or corporate funds.
That's where they got in trouble.
They basically co-mingled customer funds with their hedge fund.
Classic fund. Can you explain the contagion, by the way, just so we can...
Because everyone's been talking about the contagion and understanding what's next.
So that's why I just want to... Yeah, because I think people are going to be asking
that a lot this weekend. Yeah, so I do think there is some contagion risk here.
I think there's other firms that had... First of all, there's firms that had money just
sitting in FTX, and that's now going through bankruptcy court. So that's been bad.
I mean, multi-coin came out publicly and said that they had 10% of their portfolios sorted
on FTX.
There's other firms that Alameda may have had loans with, and those firms are probably
struggling.
I don't want to say who, but we have received a couple of inbound calls from other people
trying to get emergency financing.
There's people who may have just totally different from FTX and Alameda.
They may have just had their own portfolio that they took margin or leverage on to buy
crypto and now is the prices have come down a little bit.
They're getting stopped out.
So that's all been very challenging.
And again, just for the sake of clarity, I should say that Coinbase did not have any
material exposure to
Alamed FTX or FTT token.
We just talk about this issue of customer deposits because this is really a
Pucks the issue from a legal standpoint, right?
I mean, I remember when I was doing PayPal like 22 years ago and the company was like six months away from running out of money
I remember the lawyers told us really clearly
You cannot use customer deposits to fund the operating expenses of your business.
In other words, if this business ends up going bankrupt,
you'll still have all the customer money there
and they'll be able to get it back.
And it was really clear like, hey, if you use customer funds
to pay for the burn of the business to operate the business,
that is a do not pass go, go directly to jail type offense.
And so like that's really the heart of this.
Now I read in some articles covering this
that the way it worked is that Alameda had a bunch of these
FTT or these FTX tokens called FTT.
And they basically use that as like a marker as collateral.
So they basically borrowed, was it like 6 billion of customer
funds from FTX and then they used their own token to then as collateral.
So back stop it. Yeah exactly. And then what happened is apparently like
CZ got wind of this and he owned a whole bunch of these tokens and he's signaled that he
was going to dump it and the price basically went down. And so now all of a sudden, the collateral for the customer loans was insufficient, and
then there was a run on the bank.
And this is all-
By the way, this happens in the public markets a lot as well.
So like when you see heavily-shorted names, or when you know that certain hedge funds are
on the brink, other hedge funds will go in and essentially force a margin call and a
stop out, because then it's what causes
all of these runs.
If you look actually inside a GameStop, the reason why you got all this gamification
in the GameStop equity and a bunch of these other names wasn't part because of this
dynamic.
Folks that are highly levered, folks that don't have the right matching of risk and what
happens is they're solvent but a liquid. And then if you run
the instrument into the ground, they both become insolvent and illiquid all at the same
time. And I know all the other frauds.
So Brian, the question is now that we know what happened, which is all of these crazy inner
party related transactions and you know, all of this stuff seems very illegal.
There was a bankruptcy filing today.
And up until today, it seemed like this issue
was really about FTX International and Alameda.
And it didn't touch FTX US, which for a lot,
a long time tried to position itself as, you know, well run and
regulated as Coinbase, to be, you know, they tried to say that.
But now, if you look inside the Wall Street Journal, all the articles say that this is actually
FTX Group, so the whole thing seems to be imperiled.
Can you just help us explain that?
Because there, now that's a lot of US people that were following the rules, thinking that
this thing was matched one to one that maybe also affected.
Yeah.
So, look, I don't know who inside FTX is and its orbit of companies actually knew that
the fraud had been taking place.
It would not surprise me.
I have no idea, to be honest, but it would not surprise me if FTX US people and employees
had no idea that this was happening.
I am imagining if Sam was doing, when he started doing this, he probably wanted to keep it
to a very small group, otherwise this is the kind of thing that leaks and the whole thing
blows up.
Now that being said, I don't necessarily think FTX US is worth anything as a business right
now because of the brand being so tainted.
And there probably was not great separation of these entities in the sense of,
you know, like, did they have truly separate boards and beneficial owners and governance? And
Sam seems to have, you know, it appears that they didn't, F.D.X. didn't really have a CFO or
maybe even like a real board or anything like that. And so it's all on red image. We found that there was an article that appeared
that said that the head of compliance at FTX was also the head of compliance at a poker site called
Ultimate Bet, which in the 2010s did this exact thing apparently, some version of this where
they went in and they looked at whole cards of poker players. And then a few employees inside
the business would basically play against these folks knowing what the whole cards of poker players, and then a few employees inside the business
would basically play against these folks knowing what the whole cards were, ran this cheat,
stole millions of dollars.
Somehow that person found a way to be head of compliance with FTX 10 years later, which
is incredible.
But back to this question.
So, so now what happens now is you have the international business and the US business and Alameda research all rolled up into this one
frozen entity, right?
With now regulators having to so do you know what happens in a process like this?
Like is it that the the DOJ and the SEC get priority or is there some international
monetary like who who's who unwinds all of this How, how do people get their money back if at all?
Yeah. So I'm not an expert at this, but my high level understanding is that the bankruptcy
courts will essentially, and I believe they filed bankruptcy in the US, which is an interesting
thing. I didn't know why they did that versus Bahamas. But anyway, the bankruptcy court
will basically go through and try to find any assets of value. They still have some tokens in value.
They have a venture portfolio.
I think Sam owns 9% of Robinhood.
There's various things that they may own.
Then they'll auction those off to various bidders on distressed assets and then try to distribute
those funds to the customers.
I don't know the exact process beyond that though.
If you remember the Mattoff down, took many years, and for years he was trying
to find assets and then he found a market sold them.
There's just the trustee, I think he's still active.
And then, you know, it's tried to redistribute the funds.
Obviously, so many more customers here than there was with Matov, but it can be a very long
and winding process to identify all the assets, then run the market sale process on them,
then figure out who gets what first and
then distribute. There was an interesting thing that Larry Summers did, I think for Bloomberg, where
he was asked whether this was Lehman or Enron and he said it seems more like an Enron than it is Lehman.
And Brian, I'm just curious how you think about it. Like is this sort of a fraud perpetuated by a group of executives
to essentially take advantage of a situation?
Or do you think that this is more like a Lehman situation,
which is a well-run business, I guess,
that just got caught in a liquidity trap?
I think it's, my guess is it's a little more like Enron
in the sense that, I mean, yes,
they were over levered in that kind of thing,
but the minute that they moved customer funds in some way, shape, or form, to backstop the hedge fund,
that was in my mind, fraud, and that's more like N-Run. Do you think now that we have to open
the gates on regulation, like the whole point of crypto in some ways was, trust nobody.
in some ways was trust nobody. Decentralization is the key, but here what we see is a lot of people were tricked into trusting FTX and having their deposits there, and it was a centralized
exchange which caused all these problems. It almost violates the principles of what
the whole product market fit was supposed to be. So what should sort of the observer expect and what do you expect
as a business in terms of how governments now react to all of this?
Yeah. Well, I think it's really important to distinguish between the centralized players
in crypto, which are custodians, exchanges, etc. Coinbase has a big business there. And
the decentralized players, which are, you know, self-custodial wallets, DeFi, protocols, Web3,
that whole world.
So, the centralized players should be regulated,
and today they're regulated already,
like kind of traditional financial service businesses,
but they don't have the regulation clear
when it comes to the crypto aspects.
So, for instance, in the US,
we actually don't still have clarity about
what is a commodity, what's a security, which one should CFTC regulate versus SEC, that kind of thing.
And that lack of regulatory clarity and frankly, the climate of regulation by enforcement,
the negative rhetoric from Chair Gensler in particular has created this sort of chilling
effect in the US that has pushed a lot of that centralized actor's activity offshore.
In fact, 95% of the
trading volume in crypto is now outside the United States, and it's come down a lot since the
beginning of this year, even. Now, the decentralized players, Self-Castodial Wallets DeFi Web 3, this is
where crypto really has an opportunity to make a more fair and free and transparent system, because
you can go look at any smart contract
to see exactly what it's doing,
anybody can audit the code.
If you have a self-custodial wallet,
you can just trust yourself.
You don't have to trust any other intermediary out there.
And that's where you get true decentralization.
And I think that's actually,
no, those areas still have a couple of their own challenges.
You know, sometimes people will lose their password
or their phone and they'll lose their own
money.
If you're trusting yourself, you still have to trust that you're going to do that piece
correctly, but there's a lot of good things we can do there around making social recovery
mechanisms and NPC wallets and things like that.
We remember just a couple of months ago, Gary Gensner started saying, hey, these things
are all securities.
And you went and visited the SEC a couple of years years ago or you tried to, they wouldn't meet with
you. You were very public. You did a tweet story and we talked about this on my other
pod. That, hey, like we want to meet, we want to talk about that. Now, we're still in a
position where the SEC's position is these are all securities, which means the anything
that's trading, it would have to be limited to accredited investors, et cetera. What should
the United States do here? And how close are we to getting clarity? Because I know you're
trying to talk to the SEC directly about, can we just get some clarity here? Can people
buy these tokens or not? What is the status of are they tokens? Are they securities or are
they not here in the United States? Yeah. So luckily since then, we have had a lot of productive
dialogue with both the SEC
and the CFTC and Treasury and all kinds of people in Congress. And I do think the US is making
some steps in the right direction. There was actually, there was a bill going through Congress recently
called the DC CPA or the staff now Bozeman bill, although it's having some challenges now frankly
due to this FTX blowup because SBF was one of the people pushing that bill forward. But regardless of that, the sort of system that we should have is there should
be a clear designation between what is a crypto commodity, and that can be regulated by
the CFTC, and what is a crypto security. Now, this is one of those legal, and by the way,
what is also a stable coin and artwork and other things that are not any of those things?
The challenge lies in that there's kind of a fuzzy line between what is a commodity
and what is a security.
And a lot of this law is based around the how we test, which says a security is an investment
in a common enterprise with an expectation of profit.
And so it's basically a point-based system.
And in the absence of really getting a clear
list between the CFTC and the SEC are in this turf battle, I would love it if they could basically
put out a list, get their heads together and put out a list, hey, CFTC is going to do these,
SEC is going to do these, a bunch maybe are in the middle, let's let the courts figure that out or
whatever. But that just hasn't happened. And it's a missed opportunity in the US.
So if the how we test is not perfect given the dynamic nature of cryptocurrencies and all the innovation,
if Brian Armstrong was going to say, hey, this is in the best interest of Americans, balancing,
you know, some amount of security and safety for people making bets on this currency
and allowing innovation, what would you say is the best definition, the best way for us to
regulate crypto coins? Putting NFTs aside, putting down sites, just specifically. Yeah,
excuse me. Hold on, hold on, let me just tweak your question. Sure, build on it.
Because we should switch to SPF as well and just talk about the person. But to me, it seems the whole
issue, if you come back, like what is the first string that you pulled that unraveled the sweater was the fact that these tokens were created out of
thin air.
They had no meaningful value.
Somebody prescribed a value and all of a sudden, everybody else in the economy, all of a
sudden said, yeah, I'll take that as collateral.
You look, you cannot do that in the regular world.
I can't call JP Morgan and say, I've invented this thing.
It's called a share in XYZ.
And I'd like you to margin loan,
give me a loan against it.
So Brian, explain like there is a ton of these tokens
that have been engineered, right?
And there's been a ton of these tokens that have been sold.
So what should people do that own these things,
thinking that there was going to be some safety or value
or like how do you know, like, how
do you think about all of these tokens that could be as basically as fragile and shitty
and worthless as FTT?
Yeah, well, there is this concept of like an exchange token and there's a couple other
firms out there that have them and that's something we haven't done.
And I think you're right.
The actual utility of those things is a little questionable.
If someone's going to mark those up on a low supply and then a low float and then somehow
levers that, that's going to get yourself into trouble. But look, I don't want to throw out
the entire concept of people creating tokens. I think there's actually a lot of good stuff there.
It comes down to this idea of if you're trying to raise money for your company
there. And it comes down to this idea of, if you're trying to raise money for your company and through a token, that's fine. That should be a security. And there should be a regulated
way to do that in the US. Like, go register it with the SEC, let it trade on broker dealers.
That's what we've been wanting to do for a long time. And the SEC is taking their time
getting there. They don't get in sort of, to be honest, he doesn't seem that excited about the idea of this whole industry existing. And so, anyway, but it should, it
should exist and it should be happening in a regulated way. So if people want to issue
a token that's raising money for a company, let's regulate it as a security. If they want
to issue a token that's truly on a decentralized protocol, or has some other purpose, like voting
in a DAW or rewards or something like that,
then that's probably not a security
and let's be honest about that
and allow those things to trade in a different environment,
a different regulator under the CFTC.
We're probably running out of time with you
because you said you had a hard stop.
So let's ask the million dollar question.
Tell us about SPF, like, what's, who is this character?
When did you first suspect?
Yeah, what's your read on the psychology?
That this wasn't legit.
Do you think that it was his altruistic intent
that allowed himself to convince himself to do this?
Or giving this was like malicious the whole way?
Or what's your sense of the guy?
Hmm.
So again, I'm speculating here.
I mean, I've spent time with,
I've met up a bunch of times and I have to say,
I did not see this coming.
Like he appeared to me to be a very bright, credible,
competent person, perhaps a bit young,
perhaps, you know, a bit reckless at times,
but not unethical and not committing fraud.
I definitely did not see that.
You know, if I look back to see,
were there any warning signs that I should have thought
twice about it?
You know, one of the things I noticed was that in 2021, Coinbase had a good year.
We did $7 billion in revenue for a billion of positive EBITDA.
We became public as a company.
At that time, FTX did about $1 billion in revenue.
I knew how much money we had for our venture budget and just different investments we wanted
to make.
I knew their revenue.
I had to scratch my head a bunch of times.
And I was like, where is this guy getting all this liquidity?
Because he was like buying 9% of Robinhood.
He was putting like a billion dollars into this.
He was donating to all these politicians.
And I was like, it did not make sense to me
where he was getting all this cash.
People would just kept telling me,
oh, his market maker Alameda is just printing cash.
And I was like, okay, I guess, you know, it seems like a conflict of interest to own an exchange
to market maker.
That's why we haven't done it.
But more power, too, I guess.
And so I was surprised.
I didn't speak up.
I cannot explain the psychology of it at this point, whether he's a pathological liar
or if he's started off good and somehow under the pressure of this whole thing went
bad. But the minute you can go watch the interviews, he's lying to people about why he's bailing
out Voyager and BlockFi.
And he knew at that time that most likely he knew at that time that they were not solvent.
Alameda was not solvent.
And so that's where he crossed a major line in my book.
And we see it time and time again, Elizabeth Holmes, Bernie Mattoff.
I mean, once the line gets too big, you can't get out of it anymore.
If that's the case, really incredible.
And the most important thing at this point, Brian, is that the United States makes a decision
on, do we want to be in crypto?
Do we want to have a say in this and create a regulatory framework that entrepreneurs like yourself can deal if that is the most important thing to happen in the next year
But you're saying the SEC is not motivated. I guess why are they not motivated? They're just CYA want to know they're motivated now
This is a political issue now, so they but let's hear
Very answer here. What do you find out who did sbf give all this money to because he was touted as one of the future
Biggest donors the Democratic Party if you want signals. So if you want signals
I would say there is a pretty big signals here number one
He says going to donate a billion dollars to Democratic Party and he kept touting this like effective altruism
Whatever the saving the world stuff now why do you need to do that unless your reputation laundering and trying to buy political protection? Come on.
You don't think that was a little bit of a signal?
Right. I'll tell you I'll tell you and even more explicit signal. We he pitched us in
that $17 billion dollar round. And I did a zoom with him. And after the zoom,
I'm like, this doesn't make much sense, but I'll have my team
do some work. We did some work and we sent him a two-page deck. And we said, here are our
recommendations for taking the next step. One was the formation of a board. The second was
the creation of dual-class talk. The third was some reps and warranties around affiliated transactions
and related party transactions. And the person that worked there called us back and literally, I'm not kidding you said,
go fuck yourself.
Was quote unquote the response to us.
We're like, okay, so that was the easy decision, but message receives message receive.
But I still thought, okay, I'll just put that in the bucket of these guys are unbelievably
arrogant and smug.
But Brian, I thought what
you thought, which is maybe it's because they've created some money making machine in the
Bahamas. And so they have that level of confidence. But then to see this thing to the extent
of which is now, we're only scratching the surface guys. We're going to find out stuff every
day. It's is gonna be crazy.
But Brian, to the question I asked before about the SEC
and what should happen, you said,
I wanna pick up what you said,
which is the SEC doesn't seem motivated.
Why is the SEC in your mind not motivated?
Well, I think you're right,
I hope that they use this as a moment to come together
and help local companies in the US being built here to end up in a better place.
And I do believe, David, I think said it's right.
It is a political issue at this point.
There is going to be a major impetus
to get the clarity here in the US
and hopefully to help build the companies here in the US
that are going to serve the rest of the world
and in every major financial hub.
So we're committed to building that together with all the regulators around the world. in every major financial hub. So we're committed to building
that together with all the regulators around the world. And crypto is here to stay. This
is a temporary setback, but I'm here to keep building and make this thing happen.
We really appreciate you taking the time.
I think you want to get to last.
Yeah, be in the way.
Listen, I mean story after story here about, you know, SBF was gonna create this billion dollar philanthropy
to save the world, improve humanities,
long term prospects, number two donor
to the entire democratic party, and on and on and on.
And like, quite frankly, what this shows is,
you wanna know what effective altruism means?
It means that you steal other people's money
while bragging about saving the world world while taking a big chunk for yourself
That's what it means. There was a research paper in 2011 and
This research team looked at drug addicts and drug abusers 4,000 people and they found that the biggest addicts had the highest intelligence
That you were twice as likely to become an abuser and addict
If you were any kind of intelligent Quintile quantile that they were twice as likely to become an abuser and addict, if you were any kind of intelligent quintile,
but they were measuring.
And someone explained this to me at the time,
that the smarter you are, the more you can convince yourself
that when you're doing bad things, you're actually doing good things.
Even if you're doing bad things to yourself or bad things to other people,
that you really may actually care about.
You can convince yourself that there's some reason to keep doing it.
He seems like a brilliant guy.
I think that to some extent, he may actually,
I don't know the guy, but he may actually believe that the,
you know, the ends did justify the means and he thought that he was doing good for the world.
And this was something that had to be done in some way and oh it just got a little bit away
for me but it's still worth it. I think the problem is bigger than FTX and I'll say
the uncomfortable part out loud and nobody needs to necessarily comment if you
don't want to but there were an enormous number of venture firms that hock their way into just completely doing zero work here.
I mean, and the tip of the spear is this thing.
Well, who's the guy that works at Foundersfront?
Bullgar, Bulljar, Zibuljar?
Zibuljar?
Delia.
Delia, thank you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That tweet that he had where he basically took
the snapshot of the Sequoia transcript was
one of the funniest things that I've ever seen.
I mean, this was a $215 million decision, and Sequoia documented it and put it on their
own website.
And I think that's an example of something that was happening, which is people just looked
the other way and didn't even want to do the layer of work.
Timot, let me just string together a couple of things we've talked about over the past
few episodes.
And I think you'll agree with this point, but generally speaking, there seems to be
a very heavy lack of governance in investing, given the amount of capital and the velocity
of capital in Silicon Valley, particularly in private markets of late.
And a lot of the stuff that's been talked about or last week we talked about super voting shares
and the founder does whatever they want
and there's no governance and there's no board
and there's no oversight.
And particularly with this FTX situation
where clearly there wasn't a board
that was getting the necessary information
that had the necessary influence
that had the necessary controls, the meta conversation.
But all of these threats tie together the concept that maybe
there's not a lot of governance and not a lot of diligence going on, and the amount
of money that's flowed into Silicon Valley has allowed a lot of this Lucy me.
I'll save you.
I agree with you.
I'll save you.
Let's thank Brian Armstrong for joining us and it was very busy day and what a great
candidate insightful.
Thanks Brian.
Yeah.
Great to have you.
Thanks.
Thank you. And then, cypher, finish your thoughts, Martha. I just wanted to say the second uncomfortable thing out loud, which is there was a lot of venture firms in Silicon Valley in this period of both not doing any work or diligence who also took the extra step and actually created classes and would teach teams how to create these tokens. And those artifacts, those video links and artifacts
are sometimes on their website,
they're still on YouTube, they're inside of Twitter.
And what these folks would do when we talked about this,
the game that they played was they would get a team,
they would create a token,
they would also buy equity at some crazy valuation.
The equity was locked up, but the tokens were not.
And then they would put them on an exchange and sell them to unsuspecting people,
and they would be able to dump these tokens.
And if you look inside of that trend, what you're going to see in Brian just mentioned,
this those were the sale of securities, except it was done in a completely unregulated
way. So if the SEC is really and the DOJ is really going to take this FTT token issue
seriously and what happened to FTX, they're going to start to look at a bunch of other
tokens and token sales and you're going to end up looking at some very well-known venture
firms inside of Silicon Valley.
Okay. This is going to be super gnarly, and we talked about it before on this pod.
There are people who knew better.
So you get a bunch of kids who are living in the Bahamas, in a house, and they're, you
know, winging this thing.
That's one level of responsibility, and they'll go to jail.
But when we talk about venture capital, capital allocators who've been at it for decades
to Schamax Point, and they're teaching people how to do this. And they're hiring attorneys and creating offshore Panama,
BVI, whatever, places to put these coins.
And then teaching people how to do it
and then flipping them potentially,
this is, we're just peeling back the onion on this.
I have a feeling that this is going to be
the turning point in all this.
That token, guys, let's be honest,
is not the only token that has been engineered
by Silicon Valley venture firms.
And it is also not the only token that's gone to zero.
That was engineered by Silicon Valley venture firms.
Well, I mean, who knows, engineered by,
but yeah, Jason too, at the very least.
Oh, Jason, Jason, there's videos today
on some of the most well-known venture firm sites on how to do this.
Oh wow, I'm going to have to see those. Yeah, so they're basically your point,
Shemoth, is there instructing people on how to do this? And that is our
deal of co-obility. It's what they did. Can I ask you guys a point of view on just one big macro
philosophical question? I'm obviously not big in the crypto world and haven't been, but so much of the positioning
has been that these networks get decentralized through the cryptographic verification systems
that obviously enable them to operate effectively and truthfully and correctly and without centralized
control or manipulation.
But ultimately, while these networks themselves
may be decentralized, the user's point of access often
ends up being centralized as a point on the network.
And it is that point on the network that
accrues the same level of influence, power, control,
and value as what we saw in the prior centralized
the network model.
We had Bology on last year,
and you know, I tried to get to this point with him,
we had to cut the conversation short,
but I still not heard from anyone,
and I've spoken with Brian separately about this point.
And the concept I use is like, look media,
if you put all the YouTube videos on a decentralized network,
and anyone can access them and they're distributed everywhere,
you still need to have a really good application, and whoever makes access them and they're distributed everywhere,
you still need to have a really good application,
and whoever makes the best application
is gonna get all the usage,
and then all the users will use that application
and that becomes effectively the point of control
and influence and value once again.
And so it seems to me like in this case,
the exchange was being used as a centralized wallet.
Certainly you can do, you can do exchange through the exchange,
but mechanistically these guys were storing their coins,
their cryptocurrency inside of FTX's wallets.
And so FTX had control over their assets.
And so the network centralized.
And so the decentralized model,
it's a question I'd love to just ask you guys
in your point of view on, does this decentralized model actually ever manifest where everyone
has their own wallet?
And I know there's all these new protocols and these distributed wallets and DeFi things,
but I don't know enough.
Yeah, I don't want to be certainly better, but that's what it does.
This points out to me just you basically recreate an exchange without a regulator.
And for someone who ripped you off in a blue up like I mean, hasn't any different than
what we had in version 1.0?
And is there really a model where decentralized works
are ultimately because of the network effects
and the economy is still getting off?
Okay, so answer.
So answer.
We got the question.
Coach, you're off.
No, I mean, I have, I have,
I don't know the answer to free bird question
because I don't know this space well enough.
I mean, you know, my biggest purchase ever was Bitcoin in 2011. I've bought a bunch of these tokens that have
massively depreciated in value. I think lots of investors have. I kind of fell into it as well,
like I thought, wow, this is incredible. I get get to buy these tokens they do all of this cool stuff they represent all this value and
My experience has been the opposite of that. I've lost a lot of money in these things
And so you know, I really hope that regulators not just obviously I hope that regulators do their do the best they can't to get
Investors money back in FTX
But I really also hope they figure out all
these other tokens as well because you can just rank them in terms of market cap, start
at the top and work your way down. And you will see that these were unregulated securities,
Jason, that were manufactured and sold by our brethren. People who understand the law around accredited investors and the stuff very well.
Yeah, they understand it implicitly.
Do you guys think crypto investing is dead or what do you think?
How do you think people think about that risk profile now inside of?
I think investing in the tokens is going to end, investing in the corporation is going to begin.
And any of the tokens are going to be super regulated.
Building on what you said,
Chimath about the ultimate bet,
is it possible that Alameda, the trading hedge fund,
was looking at the FTX data,
which they had insights into.
And essentially that's the same as seeing
the whole cards in the ultimate bet.
And so they're making their trades
based on what they see the consumers
are making their trades, front-right in their trades,
or otherwise.
That's not illegal.
Citadel does this in the regulated market.
That's what payment for order flow is.
It's the ability to front-run retail volume.
And so in dark pools, that is legal by the law
in the United States.
And that's what allows Citadel and I think Jane Street
and Susquehanna, you know, all these folks basically run these dark pool exchanges for regulated
securities like options and bonds and stocks and they get this order flow and they front-run it
by a millisecond and they just take small big. But they can't print the FTT tokens and otherwise
manipulate the market to the level that I think SBA could.
I just think that there's these really strict walls and segregation, as you heard Brian talk about,
when you have those businesses in these regulated markets, the problem here is that this is totally
wild west, unregulated wild wild west. So who knows what's going on? Really.
And we're pushing the business sacks off of the shores of the United States.
As he said, 95% of this is having offshore.
What do you think should happen regulatory wise sacks in terms of America and competitiveness?
Or do we not need to be competitive in this?
No, I think we should be.
I mean, what if what if crypto and defy is the future of finance?
I mean, it's an important technology that I think we should enable through some sort of constructive regulatory framework.
I think the regulatory...
Where would that start?
I think the regulatory should listen to Brian and help come with appropriate framework.
But to be clear, look, what Sam did is way worse than people going on in exchange and speculating.
I mean, look, I think that people who speculated and the buying and so on these tokens
They're they were using it like a casino. Okay, like that's different than a customer putting their money on
FTX and having their money get stolen that's the big difference So I think there's levels here now Jamal to your point about who's minting these tokens? You're right
Maybe that's like another category
But I do think that the reason why
this is on a different level is because it wasn't Sam's money to give away.
There are such an easy solution to all of my time. I agree with you on that point,
but I think don't underplay when there's an organized process to create an illegal security
nice process to create an illegal security with special rules for them that allows the liquidity for one class of asset and not liquidity for you.
Right, so that's a separate bucket.
I don't think it's the same as what Sam did.
I agree.
No, I agree.
I think that's the answer.
I think that's the answer.
I think it's a graph.
That's something that needs to be looked at and we need a constructive regulatory framework
for that. There is such a simple silver bullet for all of this, which is these things need to be,
there needs to be proper governance.
People have to have skin in the game, insurance, people signing off on the taxes, boards, not
onshore here in the United States, and then we need to have, and I'll keep saying this,
away for Americans to become sophisticated investors.
Only 6% of this country fall into the qualified purchaser
and accredited.
If you want to trade in these things,
or you want to trade in NFTs or private companies,
we should have a driver's license like test,
a firearm like test,
and a sophisticated test,
and let the problem up into it with an education.
The problem is when you have guys like this,
it sets that desire back by a decade, if not more.
Okay, because-
That's really sucks, I agree.
Because every single-
So frustrating.
Every single person inside of Washington right now,
who's anywhere near this
from a regulatory perspective or a policy perspective
is meeting on Monday morning,
and the meeting topic is,
how do we defend the mom and pop folks that lost money here?
Yes.
That's the only thing.
So we took this out of, you know, because I remember I texted into the group chat,
hey guys, well, what do we think the legal ramifications are that drive prosecution?
And one of our friends said legal ramifications, these are political ramifications, which means
that this is going to go to the utmost level and it's going to have the most scrutiny and they're
going to act really quickly.
They're going to drop a hammer instead of having a path to accreditation.
I agree with you.
They're going to drop the hammer because they're constituent some grandma and grandpa
or some people put their college education to some lost everything.
We just need a test, let people prove they're sophisticated
and let them participate if and only if they get out.
Jekyll, haven't you been a proponent
for letting people invest in startups
that are just mom and pops and do advertising access?
I'm only allowed to do that with embedded investors.
I would like there to be a test
and I actually teach a course,
Angel University, six times a year for charity.
I do it for charity.
It's a four hour course where you learn about diversification. You learn about the asset class. You learn about 70, 80% go to zero.
We teach you about the power law. I try to teach people about this stuff so that they can participate
intelligently. It would be the equivalent for your book and thank you for asking the question.
It would be the equivalent if we had a poker test and to play in the World Series of Poker,
you had to go to a five-hour seminar and you had to take a practical test
and you had to say, you know, a flush beats a straight and you had to just prove that you had some level of knowledge of how to play the game.
It's such an obvious path to removing these problems while staying competitive as a country.
And instead, we're letting people do this offshore like CZ with no rules or whatever rules he chooses.
It's just infuriating. It's so stupid. Our politicians are so dumb. So this offshore like CZ with no rules or whatever rules he chooses.
It's just infuriating.
It's so stupid.
Our politicians in Washington are so dumb.
Can I just say something?
I think the challenge is there's always a spectrum of understanding and you'll always
end up seeing the people on the wrong end of the spectrum getting taken advantage of.
There's this notion of adverse selection.
Distributions are not equal.
People will end up kind of opting in
to spend money on things or making investments
that they think are good investments,
but they're actually getting taken advantage of
because they're not savvy enough
where they miss an important angle
or important perspective about the person
or the thing that they're giving their money to.
And there will always be some number of those.
And the way that regulation has worked historically
is not by first saying, hey, let's figure out the right way to create a framework for operating.
It's that some sort of people got advantage.
That story then becomes the regulatory framework.
And that story has repeated itself for 500 years across capital markets.
We're talking about a multi-layered thing here.
We want to see crypto have a framework.
We wanted to blossom here in the United States.
And then there's multiple level of people who are causing chaos in this ecosystem, in
this very promising technology with their goddamn grips, whether it's VCs grifting or SPF
or incompetence.
We just need to clean this framework up.
If people, sometimes people I understand in DC listen to this podcast.
If they're listening, it's essential that America can be competitive here.
It's essential that everybody participate in risk capital and get educated. Let's
clean it up and make a framework that allows all Americans to participate and educates
them and then stops these grifters from doing stupid things. If people were educated, that's
the first step and it's the best step.
You talk about the economy. Sure. You want to talk about Facebook with
11,000. You want to talk about the market popping.
So at the beginning of October, I think what we basically said, kind of generally
speaking is markets up, right?
Markets up.
For nibbling to being constructively positive and basically being positioned
long. Here's this really interesting setup.
We have a bunch of very positive news that I think we all have to process.
First positive news was that inflation ticked down. Now, here's what I'll tell you. There's
a caveat here. I talked to a bunch of pretty smart sharps on Wall Street. And, oh, two things.
Number one is they all gave credit to David Sachs and they said Sachs was totally right.
Double dip recession is coming. But then they said, tell SACS that we think that these are the sharps.
We think that there's a double hump in inflation coming, which means it's coming down to come
back up.
And there's a bunch of reporting vagaries that may cause that.
So keep that in the back of your mind.
But positive news number one is inflation ticking down.
Number two
Jason we talked about this a federal judge basically stayed
Biden's attempt at giving student loan relief now
That would have been a five hundred billion dollar transfer payment from the government into the hands of individuals
It is
Deflationary to not not give that money to people.
It's effectively taking stimulus away from folks.
Number three, it looks like we're headed towards
a split government, which means that we are not
probably gonna see any more stimulus
over the next two years.
Number four, Ukraine wins and curves on.
I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
Number five, the United States announced yesterday through the Wall Street Journal that
they had essentially said no to Ukraine's request for advanced drones. And they said to
Ukraine essentially, you need to go and negotiate an end game here. And number six, China
has started to relax its COVID policies and G is pivoting to economy first.
So if you took all the votes, take seven, don't forget seven.
Facebook, which would not take the medicine, they refuse Black Gershans ladder, cut 11,000
people 48 hours ago.
I don't know.
One of the big book matters that much, to be honest with you.
Well, but it matters that big tech is and they're taking matters to.
No, it matters to us, but it doesn't matter to the economy to be
compiling. I think it does if people are going to start
cutting jobs, but okay, keep going. My point is these seven things are macro level
things that affect everybody. Yep. And I think if you take them together what it
says is that, wow, there's the potential for a lot of great positive developments
over the next six or nine months. And I don't think that that was adequately
priced in the market. but here's the problem.
And this is why we've been rallying.
The problem is that most of this rallying has been
because of a bunch of short covering
by folks that who are pretty pessimistic and negative
after the last few inflation prints.
So this is not really net new buying
that we saw over the last couple days.
So you take it all together. I'm like, it's still going to probably trend up a little bit.
But then again, you know, we talked about this Jason, when the VIX gets into the low 20s
or the high teens, that's probably the short-term top and then it turns around and unfortunately
we're nearer.
Yeah.
The low 20s high teens.
So, that's kind of my thought on things right now.
Okay, freeberg, you already thought something inflation print.
Yeah, so I think there's two things. One of which I'll give credit to a guy named Carl
chew. I hope I pronounced Carl's name right. He's from William Blair. He puts out these
excellent research reports. And we used one of his graphics a few weeks ago. So I put it up here.
And basically he showed that with with the NASDAQ move
that we saw this week.
So you can see this here.
He basically tracked the move in the tenure treasury
against the one day move in the NASDAQ.
And he said that it really indicates
a unique sentiment shift,
whereas in other times you've seen big moves
in the NASDAQ that weren't really seeing significant moves in the treasury
rate on the same trading day, and that this is such an outlier what happened this week.
The only other time that we've seen anything like it was when the Bank of England issue
happened back at the end of September in the last 20 times that we've seen this big of
a move in the NASDAQ in a single day.
So we saw a 31 basis point move in NASDAQ in a single day. And so we saw a 31 basis point move in tenure treasuries in a single day.
The same time that we saw what a seven point move in the NASDAQ.
So he said, because you don't normally see the bond market, the equity market trade in
this way together, it really speaks to a big shift in sentiment.
Now at the same time, what is that shift in sentiment?
That there is going to be less of a driver for the Fed to raise interest rates
at this point because it seems like the inflation print indicates that inflation is coming under
control faster than what folks had otherwise anticipated. And so there may not be as many rate
hikes as quickly as folks were anticipating which will benefit equities and the bottom market
traded with that perspective as well. Now the counter narrative, which I just put a tweet by a guy who I've never heard of before,
but someone shared this with me, his name is Gordon Johnson, and he said, the CPI surprise
may actually be due to a technical print that within the CPI, one of the biggest indicators
is health insurance cost, and the health insurance cost plunged by 4% October to September,
but how many health care costs didn't actually magically collapse. There was just an accounting
difference in how they're shifting, how they're accounting for health care costs that
took place during the month. If you assumed that that was flat month over month, you would end up actually with a
6.7% year over year print, which was higher than expected.
So there is a counter narrative going on in the market.
I don't know how significant this guy is or how much of a voice he has, but I don't know
if we're out of the woods yet.
By some folks are saying the market is saying we're feeling a lot better, but there are
still analysts that are indicating that maybe there is still risk
To be had ahead of us. I think the sharps tend to be on that second second perspective
And by the way, I'll say this week I heard five and a half points even after that print
So is where we're gonna get to I think consensus we have here is is that we're in the endgame now
Maybe what two quarters three quarters four quarters of choppiness?
endgame now, maybe what, two quarters, three quarters, four quarters of choppiness, Chimoff, what would your gut tell you of you?
I've been telling all of our startups that you need to plan to have money through the
first quarter of 2025.
You must.
Yeah, okay.
You absolutely must.
And the way that I've cashed.
The way that I frame that out to them is nine.
Yeah, eight or nine quarters of cash, ideally nine.
And the reason is that we have all of this positive news in the offing, but the problem
is, again, there is still a lot of risk to the downside.
We haven't seen David's second dip in the recession, right?
So that double dip is going to be expensive. And again, the sharps think that inflation will come back at some point in the next six months.
That will keep the feds foot on the gas. Maybe it's two or three more 50 basis point hikes. The point
is Jason, you could be at five and a half. Again, we said this last week, we're gonna get to a point
that's probably higher than what people expect. That's probably around 5.5.
And we'll stay there longer than people want.
That's probably through the middle part of 24.
And if you don't prepare for that worst case scenario, you're doing yourself a disservice.
I think the market can start to rebound in the second half of 24.
But if you're a company, you need to balance and plan for the first quarter of 25 because,
you know, again, most venture investors are going to want to see six months of data on
the ground that things are better before their sentiment changes.
Yeah.
And we're just starting to see the drawdowns.
We're just starting to see the impacts in people's portfolios.
That will drive behavior change. I mean, this
SPF thing is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the money at risk. You know, I went in,
by the way, I did it in analysis. I shared it in the group chat. Hopefully we can show this
up. Brad has a little chart, Nick. Maybe you can throw up the, the, the historic drawdowns.
So for people that care about early stage technology, since 2018 through
2021 and including an estimate for 2022, we have injected $1 trillion into venture capital.
And if you look at historically how money has been lost in periods like this and you layer
that into 2018 to now, what it basically tells you is about $500 billion of that trillion
from 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22 is going to be destroyed.
We haven't even started to see that yet, right?
And then if you factor in another hundred billion or so from older
ventages, we're talking about a 600 or 700 billion dollar
destruction of paid in capital.
So there's still, for all the good news, there's still a bunch of
these unfortunate pieces of bad news that have to work its
way through the system.
Yeah.
And for people who are looking at the chart right now, and you can see the charts on Spotify
or if you search for all in on YouTube, we have a video version there, you just take a
look at 1997, the peak TVPI was 7.5x, 7.5x, cash on cash money, and what actually got
realized was 5x, right?
So what paper said and what got distributed were two different things.
Anacdotally, what I'm seeing in the startup world,
Chimath, is people are taking the medicine,
and a lot of people are shutting their companies down.
They're giving up on raising money,
and then asking me, which portfolio company
can I get a job at?
Because I, on my personal balance sheet,
have been, you know, taking a 5K draw a month,
and I have two kids, I need a job.
Can you get me a job at Amazon or another portfolio company?
And a lot of aquahires have started to happen.
And so what's happening is the consolidation of talent.
People who would be a great number three or four person, but maybe they weren't suited
to be the number one person are now consolidating into startups with these layoffs at meta and
other corporations.
We're starting to see very talented people
who had peak comp of 300, 700 K a year
are gonna go to startups or there's more companies.
And that is also positive.
More consolidation of talent, stronger companies.
Did you guys hear the story yesterday
that Nick, if you could just leave out the name,
t*** told about his friend.
His friend basically makes $140,000
working for a tech startup,
and then also makes $280,000 working for Meta.
And so, and he's been working at both of those companies
virtually for the last two years.
The guy makes $450,000 a year, and nobody knows,
and he says he works about 20, 22 hours a week.
On both, combined.
So the 80 hours and remember,
when we started in startups in the late 90s and into the turn of the century,
the number of hours that was expected at a startup was what,
sacks when you were at a week. 60 hours a week, I would say. 60, 60, 80. That was expected,
baseline. 60, 60. Yeah. Baseline 10 hours a day plus coming on the weekend for a couple hours.
Yes. Yeah. For sure, a day plus coming on the weekend for a couple hours. Yes. Yeah. For sure. Easily.
I mean, probably more early days of Facebook are our executive manager meetings wouldn't start till 9pm.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think Elon's going to be a trailblazer in a lot of ways on this Twitter thing.
You know, first he did the big head cover reduction, but then he also just this past week said, everyone needs to come to the office.
If you don't come to the office, you don't come to the office, you have a good excuse.
If you're an exceptional performer and you've got a good reason, they don't have to.
But the baseline is everyone comes to the office.
By the way, just to put this point into focus, Nick, can you just throw up this chart for
these guys to see because I think it's just ridiculous?
This is basically what we're dealing with, which is like, if you look at, and these are just a couple of examples, but this is
meta-amazon snowflake data dog versus Gilead Raffion and Exxon. What is the point of this?
The point of this is just to show you that we have had a massive rotation away from our industry.
Is the point, right? Where normally normally the things that we would work on were
just so well received by so many different kinds of investors that unfortunately just isn't the case
anymore. And I think it just goes to show you that the reason why this is happening is because
people are hedging their bets about how long the economic pain lasts. That's why, you know,
they'd rather be long health care stocks, industrial
defense companies, and oil companies. Because at the end of the day, they're banking on oil
and war and sickness versus social media and e-commerce and SaaS software. And if we look
at this chart, just no matter how good, by the way, this is not an indictment on these
companies. Go watch the prediction episode from last year.
I think that was a prediction.
I'm going to say, yeah, you and I nailed it on crypto.
We both said crypto is going to crater.
These four horsemen here, data dog, meta-amazon, snowflake down, 23 to 27%, and then the Gilead
Raytheon Exxon cohort, 8 to 28% up.
I think, Jamoth, what this says also is, we don't think your management style
and how you're running these businesses
is appropriate for this moment in time.
Please consider some austerity measures
and some thoughtfulness in how you treat shareholders.
These are my partners.
Well, I mean, it's just watching the number,
you know, how people are running companies,
I think we took it too far in Silicon Valley. We took it too far, whether it's just watching the number, you know, how people are running companies. I think we took it too far in Silicon Valley.
We took it too far.
Whether it's, I know, I know that I know it's sort of a pet issue of hours because we have
to deal with some incredible hubris and Eric and sometimes on the boards of these companies
because folks don't want to listen to, to reasonable advice and we come off as wet blankets.
But that chart, to be honest, is because of what we
explained last week, which is when rates go up, the value of a dollar that you earn today is just
meaningfully, meaningfully more worthwhile than a dollar that you may earn even two or three years
in the future. That's why that chart looks the way that it does. And if you believe that David's forecast of a double dip procession is accurate, which
again, most of the sharps do, and then you also lay or end this idea that inflation could
come back, you have to be really defensively positioned.
You know, you can't take a lot of risk, which is why startups have to expect that if that's
the dynamic and $600 billion is going to get destroyed in venture
capital portfolios, how open are VCs going to be for business? They're probably not going to be
that open. And so you have to plan, I think, for the middle, for the early part of 25.
If Amazon, and how do you get incremental dollars in these tech companies? Amazon does a riff, some austerity measures, they raise prices a little bit if they can,
maybe you see more incremental dollars coming today.
And maybe that incentivizes people.
Look what happened.
We were at $89 for Facebook shares last week, Timoth.
When he made the riff, 107, he went up like $15, $20.
What does that tell you?
I mean, I think it tells you that a lot of people were short going into that and they were probably caught offside a little bit by the magnitude of it. I think that that's good.
The the issue that a lot of these companies have even in the face of rifts is that you have to reset expectations now on earnings.
And if you do that, the problem is that when you flow that through to
what people think the S&P will look like in a year, there's some real issues. So this is not free,
you know, it's really hard treading. And I just I would I would just encourage people,
it feels wonderful to have a few days of like it's like a respite in the middle of a huge storm,
right? It feels like we've been getting whipsawed back and forth, and it feels nice.
The sun came out, the wind went down.
The sun came out.
I would just really encourage people in this moment
to reset your energy, which I think is good,
but you gotta go back into that office
and you gotta find the money and the wherewithal.
I think to last through 24, if possible.
It's grind time.
Facebook by the way, 27 months.
27 months. Not for you in at least two years. Two years, yeah. It's 24 time. Facebook by the way. 27 months. Not at least two years.
Two years.
It's 24 months is the new, yeah.
Eight quarters is the new six quarters.
And by the way, you know, the thing that employees need to do now in this moment is to hold
the management teams of your companies accountable because in those Q and A's, hopefully
you're not just glad-hanting, talking about bullshit.
You actually go and ask the question, how much money do we have?
What decisions are you going to make to get this company to be in a position to survive?
That is really what's at stake here for the venture capital industry.
It's just survival of as many of these companies as possible through these next two years.
The conversation has to shift from culture and features to the bottom line
and grinding it out and just proving it to Wall Street and to the investment community that
your business is worthy of investment as you're saying. The dollars today matter.
All right, it's been a crazy week. Thank you to David Friedberg for showing up. Unfortunately,
no time for science corner. Apologies to the Friedberg science, go in there. No time for science, go in there. No time for science, go in there. No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there. No time for science, go in there. No time for science, go in there. No time for science, go in there. No time for science, go in there. No time for science, go in there. No time for science, go in there.
No time for science, go in there. No time for science, go in there. No time for science, go in there. No time for science, go in there. No time for science, David Sacks. People don't understand what you're saying when you say that, Jason.
Oh, they know you're an asshole.
They're there.
No, that's what they think you're saying.
They don't know.
Oh, they don't know we're adding the sass to it.
Yeah.
So David also is a great executive in software as a service in addition to being an
asshole.
So you put the two together and you get Sassel.
No, I'm just joking.
David's a wonderful person.
People are really excited that you and I are friends again.
It's a amazing moment.
That was your chance to make a joke, so I actually missed it.
I threw it up there for you.
I threw up the softball for you.
You were just saying, you're not what I'm afraid.
All right, we'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.
We'll let your winners ride.
Bring man David's side.
And it said we open-source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.
I love you, Sackett.
I squeen up, you know what?
I'm going on a beach. What, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what Oh, go through that. That is my dog taking it away. She's driving away. Sit down.
Oh, man.
My ham is the actual meat.
We should all just get a room and just have one big huge or two.
Because they're all just like this like sexual tension
that we just need to release them out.
What, you're that big?
What, you're a beer of beef?
Beef of beef?
What?
We need to getä¹° cheese aren't there?
I'm going all this.
I'm doing all this.
I'm doing all this.