All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E161: US strikes Houthis, market instability, Q1 rate cuts in doubt, Carta's major mishap, DEI

Episode Date: January 13, 2024

(0:00) Bestie intros! Friedberg's jumper (1:21) US and its allies strike Houthi targets in Yemen (16:24) Markets: Q1 rate cut looks unlikely, December CPI print slightly hot, soft landing in jeopardy? (29:46) Carta's mistake, why verticalized SaaS tools could be in trouble, Chamath's 8090 incubator (51:02) Why and how Sacks is taking on Slack, where Carta went wrong with founders (1:05:17) DEI debate: cultural significance, real solutions, Motte-and-bailey   Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://twitter.com/Jason 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://twitter.com/SpeakerJohnson/status/1745642200866738254 https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-calls-restraint-after-air-strikes-yemen-2024-01-12 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1745723423396118593 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1745604701654298826 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120885 https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1745514413782917262 https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/12/politics/joe-biden-lloyd-austin-yemen-houthis/index.html https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-the-white-house-didnt-know-about-defense-secretary-austins-hospitalization https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-11/fed-s-mester-says-march-is-probably-too-early-for-a-rate-cut https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/citi-swings-18-billion-loss-slew-charges-2024-01-12 https://layoffs.fyi https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcsstus1&f=m https://twitter.com/karrisaarinen/status/1743398553500971331 https://henrysward.medium.com/how-we-handle-captable-information-c98d85d79277 https://henrysward.medium.com/should-carta-facilitate-secondary-trading-c319e0c9f080 https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1744414462986375440 https://twitter.com/coffeewithone/status/1744488896766042277 https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1745542094696145103 https://once.com https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1745552662572208473 https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1742583950944432607 https://www.oscars.org/awards/representation-and-inclusion-standards https://wdwnt.com/2023/04/disney-ceo-bob-iger-doubles-down-on-inclusivity-and-diversity-during-shareholders-meeting https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/30/disney-ceo-bob-iger-says-movies-have-been-too-focused-on-messaging.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4722408/Brian-Truitt-ridiculed-Dunkirk-diversity-review.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/business/pilots-diversity.html https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1735164131806986441 https://www.thecollegefix.com/umich-now-has-more-than-500-jobs-dedicated-to-dei-payroll-costs-exceed-30-million https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

Nick, can you cue the tape? This is now the worst form of a show. Oh my god. Oh, I mean, the fact that he hit the rim is a miracle. The most unassled. What is? Oh, God. Oh, I have to.

We can get slow motion now, that. It's a ball. The ball is so small. It's so small. Now, look at his hand. Look at the right hand. Look, look at the right hand. What is that about?

The one hand is. It's, I mean, that has nothing to do with basketball. Now look at his hand, look at the right hand, look, look at that. What is that about? One hand is. It's, I mean, that has nothing to do with basketball. It was the most unnatural basketball slash athletic movement I've seen. Come on, wasn't that bad? I mean, the lean forward, the lean forward, the kind of like s like sassy jump you know the sassy jump he loves sassy on the side they're nice And I said we open source into the finance and they've just got worries.

Love you, that's nice. Queen of King Walford. Going back to the end. All right, everybody, welcome to the all-in podcast with me. Again, the chairman dictator, Chimouth Polly Haapetea, David Freberg, the Sultan of science, and the rain man himself, David Sachs. Our first topic will go to our work,

I responded. The US and its allies have shrug Houthi targets in Yemen. Sachs. Well, we talked about this two weeks ago on the show. And we talked about it as a escalatory risk in the Middle East back then. And I think that that is playing out now.

We fired, I don't know, maybe 100 rockets and missiles at Yemen last night, the purpose of the strike is to restore deterrence. And I guess try and prevent the Houthis from attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea, but that deterrence is not working. I mean, there's already a new attack by the Houthis this morning of a commercial ship

in the Red Sea. So I don't think this is going to have any impact other than to escalate the conflict in the Middle East and put us on a path to war with Iran, which is really where the Neocons want to take us. You've heard obviously the war mongers like Lindsey Graham are calling for that, but even Speaker Mike Johnson is talking about that. I think that's where this is all headed is a larger war than Middle East that features the US and Israel going to war with Iran.

I think we should all be very concerned about that actually. But you have to be fair, it's not just the US, right? It's now the US, the UK, Israel, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi against the Houthi rebels. That's a big alliance. And you've got to think that Iran will think very carefully about how close they want to get to the Houthis in the middle of all of this, because that's a huge armada, if you will, of countries that I don't think you really want to cross as a group.

Well, I think Saudi Arabia andE or are playing this very carefully, I think, they did not participate in the strikes, they did allow the US to fly overhead or to use its territory, but they released a statement calling for restraint and de-escalation. So I think they're very nervous about this blowing up into a wider regional war. I don't think they want that. The allies who participated in the campaign of airstrikes were UK, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, and Bahrain. But I don't think they actually did anything. I don't think they contributed any assets. They just provided their names to this operation. I'm providing some diplomatic cover.

names to this operation, I'm provided some diplomatic cover. Freeberg, any thoughts? Well, sex, you posted a comment on Twitter, which I wanted to respond to, where you said, China has the largest shipping volume through the Red Sea, and they're staying out of this conflict, letting the US do the dirty work. But the Houthis didn't attack Chinese ships. They specifically attacked Western ships,

isn't that correct? I mean, this is a very targeted, disruptive event that the Houthis have been undertaking for some time now. And they're using these very interesting tactics with drones that can be very destructive and very hard to block and doing it not a Chinese ship, but at a very targeted enemy. Right.

Well, what the Houthis have said is that they're only attacking ships that are either Israeli or going to Israel, but in reality, they've attacked a much wider range than that. But not Chinese. It may be true that they have an attacked ships that are declaring themselves to be Chinese ships or Russian ships. However, there are more Chinese shipping containers on all of the ships that are going through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal than any other

country. So, there's no question that if we're talking about the disruption of global trade, this is going to have a big impact on Chinese trade, whether it's on Chinese ships or not. Or it could benefit them because they can get through that shipping lane and the West. No, not. And the ships can get through, but foreign ships, European ships that have Chinese shipping containers on them are not getting through. Yeah. So their trade is still getting disrupted. And nevertheless, they don't feel the need to engage in this militaristic response or participate in that. So in terms of understanding implications of

the escalation in this conflict, let's just quickly talk about number one, I'm assuming shipping prices are going to go up, freight prices are going to go up. But hold on a second, we talked about this with Ryan. Remember the question that I asked him, this is really an issue for Europe. It's not an issue for the United States because there are alternative routes. You can go through the Pacific and you can go down through the bottom of Africa, right? And all that does is add like a 5 or 10% increase. So what we're really debating is what is the risk of inflation and a backup of goods and shipping rates into

Europe. And this is why I don't understand why America needs to even get involved. I understand why the Netherlands and the UK and France and all these folks need to send resources to unclog this. That makes a lot of sense. But I don't see why the US needs to be involved other than providing moral support or logistical support. What is the point? Well, Chimalt, this is exactly my point, is the number one type of trade that's going through the Red Sea are shipping containers from China going to European ports. And as a result of what the hoodies are doing, it's having to go around the Horn of Africa, it's adding two or three weeks to the trip and it's raising the cost of a shipping container

from China from say $1,500 to $3,000. As Europe and China were impacted the most, but for some reason it.s. that decides it has to take the lead in doing this and the problem is that first of all the action is futile i mean the who sees have been at war on and off with the Saudis for a decade and the Saudis been backed by western weapons and we have not been able to defeat the who teased so this missile strike last night is not gonna to deter them, it's not going to stop them.

They're very determined, very tough fighters. Second, they are going to be looking for retaliation. They're going to be looking for blowback, and to Tamaht to your point, they're not going to be looking for retaliation against China or Europe. They're going to be looking at it against the United States. So we're incurring this cost and risk on to ourselves. retaliation against China or Europe, they're going to be looking at it against the United States. So we're incurring this cost and risk on to ourselves. Okay, so let me put this question to you then.

We have no obvious economic incentive to get involved because we can sustain our economy through different shipping ports that at best raise rates 5 or 10 percent, right? We can absorb that in the economy. 100 percent, which could drive inflation, is a European problem. So there's no economic incentive, necessarily, to get involved. So what is the incentive?

It feels like not to play conspiracy theorists, but like a wag the dog moment. Another distraction to add to the plate. What do you think about that line of thinking? I tweeted something just like that. This does feel... It's a wag the dog in the sense that the binomestration was working. You want to explain the reference for folks that mean? Yeah, there's a movie called Wag the Dog that came out in the early 90s where the president is up for reelection and there's a horrible scandal that's about to come

out like a Monica Lewinsky type scandal. This is before Monica Lewinsky, by the way, but it really was sort of one of those movies that kind of predicted the future. But any event, the president's trying to avoid this Monica Lewinsky type scandal. And so the political AIDS and advisors decide the way to do that is to start a war. But they don't start a real war.

They basically manufacture a fake war on a sound stage and then in a movie studio. And it's pretty hilarious how they keep the whole thing going. David Mamette, who's a brilliant, brilliant writer, wrote that script. But this movie came out right around the time of the Lewinsky scandal with Clinton. And so therefore it took on this larger political and cultural significance. So yeah, so when the dog is, you know, you basically start a war because of the political benefits as opposed to the real necessity of going to war. And I think you can make that accusation here, Tremoth, because I think that the Biden administration was looking impotent. I mean, they were basically telling the hoodies to stop. They're pleading with them to stop interfering with international shipping. The hooties weren't

listening. By the way, the reason why the hoodies are doing this is they're doing an insolidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza. They've demanded that the Israeli invasion of Gaza stop and humanitarian aid be let in. And they're not going to stop interfering with global trade until that happens. So that's the Houttees position. The Biden administration has been telling them to stop and I think that they were looking increasingly feckless and impotent and that's why they did this strike. Is it problem? The problem is that the strike is not going to have any impact.

So what's the point? Is it that or is it that I think if you take the wag the dog analogy to the limit, I think maybe a different interpretation, I'm not saying that they did this, but a different interpretation of that analogy would be that they are struggling domestically. And I think Jake held tweeted this, but if you look at the polls and you look at Dean Phillips, all of a sudden, and you look at what's happening on the Republican side, there's so much activity and momentum, frankly, for non-Biden candidates all across the board that that would be the most wipe the dog explanation in my opinion, which is like to distract folks from the domestic malaise by pointing someplace far away and saying we're

doing something very right this year. Let's all get on the same page and support us. How does that logically make sense, Tremoth? If the US is against wars and people are tired of wars, like what would be the, there's the only problem I have with the logic of the way I do dog theory is, is there a war against wars? Who's against wars, Jason? The American people.

There've been very much against starting foreign wars. We's against wars, Jason? The American people. They've been very much against starting foreign wars. We've talked about it here. So let's talk about the people that run the country. No, I know that. So what if you're saying they're doing it, the logic here is wag the dog is to curry favor. Sacchew said they're rallying.

This is to rally the American people around, like a patriotic cause. But this isn't like a you know all nine eleven situation where bush got a lot of credibility for saying hey we're gonna go get these terrorists americans don't want more wars right now the polling is very specific on that so then i guess sacks what is the the logic there

to wed the dog if this is something american people don't want well i i think you're right j, in the sense that the American people are exhausted by wars, especially Middle Eastern wars. We've just gotten out of two decades of endless forever wars in the Middle East, and I don't think the majority of the American people want to get back in. So I think you're right on that level, and it's true that if you were to pull the American people and ask them, are you in favor of of getting in more wars, they would say no. The problem is that with every war, the mainstream media starts propagandizing for the wars.

And they'll basically demonize whoever it is that we're going to go to war with and explaining why they're a huge threat, they'll engage in threat inflation. And so the American people end up supporting it. So we're against war in the abstract, but in every particular case, we end up supporting it. That's what happened with Ukraine. It's even happening right now. If you look at polling for this hoody conflict, I think most Americans believe it's a good

thing to strike the hoodies. So yeah, there are against it in the abstract, but in each particular case, the media is able to manufacture consent for the US involvement. So just to challenge that. Yeah. As well. So now our theory is, or your theory is the media plus the Biden administration are in cohoots to wag the dog create this support of a war in order to distract from domestic issues in order to curry favor with the American public that doesn't really want more wars.

That's where I'm saying, like I think wag the dog might have been something 20 years ago like you're saying that could work as a technique, but I can't imagine anybody would want to do more military action at this point in time when the american public is exhausted from it what you said well i think that's what i think that's not meant is that i don't think wagon the dog is gonna work i think there'll be a short term rally around the flag effect

but i think that overall if this conflict is still going on in november is going to weaken by then by making him look like a president who's lost control of events so i i agree with you that ultimately the perpetuation of this conflict is not ultimately imbite his interest now nonetheless it may factor into their political calculation that in the short term

they think this makes them look good that would seem super incompetent as like a political strategy to me but i mean this is not i mean despite the fact that this administration claimed to be the the foreign policy grown-ups they haven't shown a lot of competence they could even find Lloyd Austin is a secretary defense for five days that's no one was just a little bit no he checked into the hospital for procedure and no one could find them for five days. No one knew where he was. Just the one out. No, he checked into the hospital for a procedure and no one could find him for several days. And there was an article, I think

on CNN talking about how he was managing this hootie strike from his hospital bed. And that was weird. I hope the man's okay. I don't want, you know, but he's got prostate cancer. I know. It's that's sad. He had a UTI. He had a UTI. That's why he was in the hospital. But fair enough, but no one in the White House, the White House couldn't find him for a couple of days. Is that true? They couldn't find him. Yes.

I mean, having a UTI is a very benign kind of thing. He had a prostatectomy and then he got discharged from the hospital and somewhere along the way, he got a UTI, which was severe apparently, went back to Walter Reed. And yeah, in those three or four days, the handoff of power to his deputy happened. She was on vacation on a beach somewhere. And you're right. And the problem was that the other person,

the chief of staff had the flu, so they couldn't escalate to the white. So it person, the chief of staff, had the flu, so they couldn't escalate to the White House. So it was like a comedy of errors, but I don't think there was anything. Anyways. I mean, imagine if you were like a sea level executive at a company and you're going to be out of the office for a few days and unreachable, you would set up a clear chain of command.

You'd have a deputy who the CEO could get a hold of if necessary. In this case, you've got the Secretary of Defense who, if the United States was attacked in some way, is part of the chain of command. The president would need that person in the situation room. So the fact that they couldn't find him for a couple of days is really, I think, unforgivable. How does that even happen? Is that really true that they couldn't find him? Like, they literally could not...

They didn't know what I was for a couple of days. This was widely reported. But they couldn't call him on his cell phone or his chief of staff where that he was. No, they knew where he was. No, they knew where he was. Ah, wow. Yeah. Okay.

All right. Very good. Having kept up on the details of his UTI and his cancer, I hope he's okay. So segueing into markets, the likelihood of a Q1 rate cut is not looking good. We had a slightly hotter than expected. December CPI interest rates hit a 22 year high in July,

as everybody knows, when the Fed raised the range from 0.25 to 5.5, but they've left rates unchanged. If you haven't been following it as inflation has cooled. But in December, the CPI rose 3.4% from your earlier. That was just a slight tick above and of course markets are wondering, is this going to be a glide path into a soft landing or could it be choppy going forward? Freeberg? Higher for longer interest rates? You think that's still going to be the case and what are your thoughts going into the new year? Well Larry Summers put out a note saying that he thinks that the rates are going to stay higher

than the market is predicting based on the yield curve right now. So I think the market is currently saying no cuts in March and high probability of cuts in June. But some folks like Larry are saying might be longer because inflation is very sticky. And if you look at the breakdown on the drivers of inflation, you start to think about what's the underlying business activity that's going on, like car insurance went up by 20%, which was one of the key drivers. And car insurance has always been this lagging indicator, but it does ultimately drive costs up later. The recent car insurance rates go up is because the cost to repair a car goes up and the cost for medical care goes up. When that happens, the insurance companies actually have to file with state regulators to

get approval to raise their rates. And it can take over a year for the regulators to then approve those raising of rates. So by the time the rates get raised, the other factors have maybe leveled out, but you're still going to have some elements of costs that are going to continue to climb for some period of time after you get the core engine tuned down. So these are the sorts of things that I think we're seeing in the current CPI data, is that there are some of these lagging effects of an overheated economy or overstimulated economy that are now starting to play through. And so there's a number of these lagging effects of an overheated economy or overstimulated economy that are now starting to play through. And so there's a number of these. It's not just current insurance, but there's a

lot of things that are going to linger for a while. And they're going to be very hard to work their way through the system very quickly. And as a result, it may be the case that rates are going to need to stay higher for longer. I think the thing with inflation that is worth noting is that a couple of things are true at the same time, which I think is interesting. I think we were the ones in May of 21 that started getting very antsy around inflation and we started to look at the five and ten year break evens. Do you guys remember that? We would like look at that chart a lot. And I think it was very predictive. We also used to look at the future oil curve. You know, not that we're macro-economists,

but I think it's useful if average everyday people can have a few things to look at. If you look at those things today, it tells you the same picture, which is inflation has cooled. We're going through the last kind of like, throws of some of the random variables still being a little sticky, but the broad trend is down. I think it's

indisputable. At the same time, even with the conflagrations in the Middle East, if you look at what people think about the future price of oil. It's also down oil futures are I think about 5 to 10 percent Future prices are about 5 to 10 percent lower than spot right now for whatever that's worth But the third thing which I think is important is we've now started to see folks come back from the new year And start to impact some pretty big layoffs and they're across industries, right? City Bank today just announced 20,000 layoffs. That's a huge amount of people that are going to lose their jobs. So what does all of this mean? It's that I think that people expect that as inflation contracts, the money supply will expand, but

demand has yet to reset properly. So that's the last thing, and I think Freeberg's mentioned this a bunch. Consumer spending has always been crazy. People living on credit, all of this stuff. That is now finally, I think, the last thing that has to get sorted out. So in the absence of demand, back to the way you started Jason, companies will cut expenses in order to maintain profitability because they don't really want to cut prices on less than product really sucks. Yeah, and just to know that city group, as you mentioned, 20,000 cuts by 2026, Google also

laid off hundreds of people, Amazon hundreds of people, Discord laid off 17%, and there's a viral video going around of a woman laid off by Cloudflare, who is only on the team for like six months or something or five months. And it does seem like firing people before the holidays, laying them off is considered, yeah, you don't do it in the fourth quarter. So maybe there was some backed up layoffs that people decided to do into this year, but it certainly feels like SACs people are,

and you said this, I think in the predictions episode or the recap episode, hey, you know, maybe, it's still gonna be a little bit of turbulence and the soft landing isn't guaranteed. Maybe you could expand on that. Yeah, my prediction for the year was bumpy landing. My thoughts soft landing was a little too optimistic. And I also thought that this big stock market rally

that we had in November, December was too much too soon. The market starting in November started pricing in about 1.5% of rate cuts this year, believing that the inflation problem had been licked. And now what we're seeing is, first of all, you had a slightly hotter than expected inflation report. And now we have this escalating situation in Yemen where this war in the Middle East might expand. And just to you understand, I mean, the Houthis have already said that if the United States attacks them and uses Saudi or UAE airspace to do it, that they will consider themselves

at war with Saudi Arabia and UAE and that they will try to do things like light the Saudi oil fields on fire. I don't think they have the capability to do that necessarily, but it's an indication that things are very volatile. Another thing I think we're likely to see in the Middle East is continue to tax on US military bases in Iraq and Syria. So that whole region is a powder keg, and if it develops into a wider regional war, then I think you can see an oil shock. And if there's an oil shock, I think you can kiss Ray cuts goodbye

because that's going to percolate through the whole economy and have a big impact on inflation. So I just think that there's a lot of downside to these very optimistic projections that we're going to get these great cuts. It might happen, but I just see a lot of risks. Yeah. Freeberg, you think these oil shocks are here for the long term or a possibility you've been talking a lot about alternate energy, nuclear, obviously. So, and the US has become a net exporter of oil. So, do you think this risk of oil disruption

from the Middle East is with us for the long term, or do you think that's waning now? There's definitely structural risk because you have a supply chain that can get disrupted in a number of ways and limited alternative options. If you look at the chart I just shared, it's the US strategic petroleum reserve. So we have about 350 million barrels in the strategic petroleum reserve today. That's down from

call it early 21 when we were at 650 million barrels. And it was pretty much at that level for decades after the build-up leading up to 1990. We haven't been at a level this low in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve since 1983. And so there's not a lot of levers for the government to intervene to support the supply, as there may have been in the last couple of years, in the case of some supply shock because of a conflict that arises in a major oil-producing region.

It's a really interesting chart, isn't it? Because that was after the oil crisis of the 70s, and you look at how long it took to build it up, and how large we built it. It's a really fast, I've never seen that chart before, but if you look at the, I don't know if you guys remember the oil lines, did you have them in Canada, Chema, where in I remember in Brooklyn,

you had an even number or odd number license plate thing. If you wanted to get gas, some days was the even number, some days was the odd number, I remember my parents getting online for gas and waiting for two hours or three hours to get gas. Yeah, by the way, I'll say this is not a real cost today that we're experiencing, but SX is pointing out. There's a number of ways that this can become a real cost.

I was in Austin this week, and the thing that shocked me the most was how cheap gas was in the gas station. You can get gas for like two bucks and 25 cents a gallon. Pretty awesome. It's like $6 when you're in league, like, like, don't, yeah. Just so everyone understands how the SPR got depleted.

Last year when inflation was the top story, you know, on the front page of every newspaper and gas prices were hitting what, $78, the administration started releasing crude from the SPR to try and bring the price down. And they did that for about a year, and they were basically subsidizing the price of oil. Now that's why our stockpoll is low. And that was a really great political strategy, but if we end up in a real crisis, we're

going to have less dry powder to deal with it. So we could have a perfect storm of things coming together here, where at precisely the time we end up getting involved in a big war in the Middle East are tools to mitigate the oil shock that would create have been reduced by what the administration's done over the past year. Now, I don't know that that's going to happen. I mean, I still think we're several steps away from a regional war. But you look at how many fronts now we have conflict in the Middle East.

There's about five different fronts where there's conflict. You've obviously got Israel's war in Gaza. You've got his Bala in the North, basically firing rockets. You've got US bases in Syria and Iraq coming under attack and now we have the US striking Yemen. So there's just so many ways that this could spiral out of control. Is in the SPR designed so that when we have an economic crisis like this to use it, like a minutes? Yeah, the Biden administration is a lot to dip in. By the way, you have to give credit to the Biden administration in one form.

It's not necessarily skill per se, but when you look at the SPR depletion, they were selling at incredible moments in the market. And the energy department, I actually, I think they, they just announced that they're buying another, you know, four or eight billion dollars to replenish the SPR. So they'll be doing that now. But they were selling, if you look at these price points, they were selling when prices were $80 and $90 a barrel

and not they're buying it back at 70. So at least the United States can take some solace in the fact that we arbbed out a few billion dollars for treasure. I wonder how the SPR relates to consumption. We see this chart, but it's in the number of barrels, 350 million barrels or something like that, is that what the chart says? And then peak that six or seven hundred thousand. I wonder what it needs to be, Chamath, who are freeberg on as a percentage of our consumption

as more EVs hit the market, right? And as the number of miles per gallon goes up. So I couldn't find a chart for that. I tried to find, if anybody in the audience knows, the SPR in relation to consumption, that would be a very important chart, no. I think they're pretty independent, Jason. How so?

Like, we just build it up independent of what we need. No, the strategic petroleum reserve is essentially that. It's not meant to be something that's meant to book and usage. You know, in a highly functioning market, there's theoretically an infinite amount of oil that's available. And so if there's more consumption, you'll be able to find more oil. You'll just have to pay a different price for it. This SBR is meant to be used in very different kinds of situations. It's more interesting. Yeah, right. There's a disruption. When there's so many disruption. It's supposed to be a break-clost different kinds of situations. Like a war. Yeah, right? Like when there's a disruption. When there's so many disruption.

That's supposed to be a break last in case of emergency. Yeah, exactly. But how many days is it supposed to last? Is what I'm sure of getting at? Like that's what I wonder because over time, are we consuming more oil now as a country or are we consuming less? I would think consuming more.

But the thing you have to keep in mind is that even in an acute shock, what you can't just look at the SPR because we have now domestic oil capability Right and a lot of that developed under two presidents Obama and Trump and both of them deserve a lot of credit because we have a capability now To be self-sufficient and we are a net exporter because of the work that happened neck- during that time. Yeah, Neck S. Oh my gosh. Do you guys see all of this mushyguna with card of this week? Crazy. Absolutely. Actually, it's on the docket. So those of you who don't know card is cap table software. If you don't know what the cap and cap table is, which many of you might not, stands for capitalization. What is it? It's a Google

or an Excel sheet that says, who owns the number of shares in a company? This gets very complex in private companies, and they've made quite a business out of it. Wait, wait, wait, can I pause you? There, there was a lot of comments that said exactly that. It gets very complicated. I apologize.

I've owned equity in companies for 20 years. What the hell is exactly complicated? Well, I don't understand that statement. I'm not directing it at a UJSON. Yeah, yeah, but I can tell you. Yeah, because I feel like that is like some BS statement. Yeah, it's not. The thing is you as acting as a priced round individual

in a lot of these cases, it was very simple to do a priced round. But when you insert it's safes into this, a simple agreement for future equity that Y-combinator created and you put capital convertible notes into this, founder started doing like dozens of these schemoth and at the early stages, the cleanup work and understanding how many shares people owned, especially with... But Jake, what I'm saying is what... Okay, let me stop. Let me ask you differently. Yeah, sure.

We did this with spreadsheets. Let me answer your question. Okay. So, in a private company, let's say a company issues options to an employee and they don't have a good record of that. The employee executes the options. They now believe that they own shares. Unlike in a public company where there's a broker of record, every share is registered in a public company. You know who owns the shares. Unlike in a public company where there's a broker of record, every share is registered

in a public company. You know who owns the shares, you know what broker is holding those shares, and every share is traded through a public exchange. So there's a record of every transaction that takes place with every share in a public company. In a private company, there's no independent legal regulator that tracks all the shares. So you could issue options to an employee and forget that you did that, put the document in a drawer, and the employee shows up five years later and they're like, wait, or I'm experiencing this.

I've had advisors show up, be like, look, here's my advisory agreement. I was given an option. I'm asking you a different question. You're saying something, great, I get that. I'll tell you what I think the killer feature was. Why is that complicated to implement in software? I'll tell you, I think the killer feature for CARDA,

it was called eShare's back then, was getting the shareholder to sign for their stock certificates. So to Freeberg's point in the old world, where it was all done by email and a spreadsheet, they would literally have to send you a paper stock certificate to put in a fallout of software. If you lost it, you have to sign a document. It's of stocks to keep it in the fall catapult. You lost it. You have to sign a document with a lawyer saying, oh, I lost my certificate.

I promise you I lost it. All that. I think the killer feature was digitizing the stocks certificates. And then you would sign for them using like a e-signature on Karta. And they would just keep it for you. I get it. I'm not saying that it's I'm not debating the value guys. You're saying why the software can't be.

Yeah, why the software can't be. This is not complicated, nothing you guys is so complicated, but what happened was, because I remember when the market tipped, right, is I got one email from a company that was using eShare's back then, and I would just do the digital signature, and I started getting a few more,

and a few more. Pretty soon there was a network effect. I don't want to have to wonder where my digital stock certificates are. I just know that they're all at Carta. That's very convenient for me as an investor. I think it's very convenient for the company to be able to manage all the stuff digitally. So look, I mean, DocuSign is not a complicated technology either, and that is what, a multi-billion-dollar company, because there's a very strong network effect. You don't want to have to have all of your

signatures at a whole bunch of different companies. So I think that's how it kind of got off to the races. And then since then, they've been able to add more workflows, they've been able to add fund management, they've been able to add a number of things to make it stickier and more feature rich. And it's not that expensive. It's like 10,000 years, something like that. It's kind of getting very expensive for startups. We're talking 10,000 a year is expensive. I mean, for a seed state startup, it's a lot. And then we invested in a company called Cake Equity that's doing it for like a thousand dollars a year to Chimaltz Point. You tweeted, why can't this be a thousand dollars a year? Chimau's point, you tweeted, why can't this be a thousand dollars a year? Go to cake equity, you'll see. Well, can we just go to my tweet?

Like I was confused by all of this stuff. So we haven't even gotten to the story yet. So just sorry, Jason, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, sorry, that's okay. So anyway, what you're hearing is, this software is very integrated into startup culture. We all have a lot of opinions on it because the cap table is where all the value is recorded.

The cap tables have gotten much more complicated, but this is not like building the TikTok algorithm or chat GPT to be clear to Chimaltz Point. This is not really hard software to build. So correct on that. And SACS, correct to your point, it's super convenient if everybody uses the same platform. And for a Series A, B, C company spending $10,000 a year on this is not that big of a deal, although there are cheaper options. But VCs and investors use it too to track their portfolios.

Absolutely. And so. A group from one to the other just to be clear. So I mean, first, company started using it for their cap tables, then they got into the fund management business. So if you were a fund, you were receiving all of your stock certificates, then you started using it to communicate with your LPs. So we started

doing that and it's very convenient for that. So it's a really more of a network effect business than a hard software business. I think it's exactly it's totally totally because this business has benefited from the network effects. So they had such strong network effects. Here's thehaha, the Donnie Brook that came up this past week. Donnie, you can look it up. I like that word. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

So the company, I bet you knew a lot of Donnie's in Brooklyn. We, I was involved in a couple of trucks, I'm being honest. And they, they, they escalated from Bruhaha's typically, not unlike an average episode of this podcast. And so there are probably some Donnie Brooks involving Guy's name, Donnie. Yeah, Donnie was typically the guy who started him. This episode is going to be named Donnie Bruhkepiso, please. So the company had a massive violation of trust as they were expanding to figure out other businesses to come into.

They got into what's called the secondary market. For those of you who don't know what the secondary market is, people like to trade stocks of private companies. You may have heard people buying and selling, Stripe or SpaceX. And so employees, early investors might sell their shares to other people. Now this is not happening as a primary offering from the company where they raised money and issued new shares.

This is people who have shares. Carda was in a great position to do this because they had the cap table. Now on your cap table might be a hundred investors. Thirty of them might be your friend's family, very quiet. It could be Jeff Bezos, who was a seed investor in Google. Some folks at Carda, who were in the the secondary business violated the trust and the privacy of companies who had angel investors or early stage investors on their cap table and started contacting them directly saying, hey, do you want to sell your shares in company A to

this person? We're trying to create a market for it. They got called out publicly, the CEO and reward who is a unique individual as many CEOs are, try to do some comms. It was a disaster of comms for a couple of days while they tried to explain basically breaking their own terms of service and it all ended up with them selling the secondary business, which I understand was a tiny business for them. Overall, your thoughts gentlemen, I don't know if anybody has gone. Why did you say he was an interesting individual?

You mean, he communicates directly in a very effervescent, candid way, like some founders do. Effervescent. Wow, that's a nice, nice, effervescent. I mean, I'm just trying to see. What I was saying, is she sparkling? I think he is bad at PR, but entertaining to listen to, right? Like I think maybe they should have had a little bit

of a slightly more thoughtful approach to this, but it all happened in real time. So it's very difficult to deal with the crisis in real time, I think. I have two comments. Go ahead. The first is I actually disagree with David Sacks. I think that there's literally no concept of network effects

in this business and it makes no sense here. And the reason is that when you look at the public markets which are an infinitely larger, we have a vibrant public stock market that has no concept of this and it works. Where you have companies like computer shares, you have companies like SSNC, there's just a plethora of providers that do fund administration. And frankly, I'm glad that there's a plethora of providers. I use some of them and I trade one against

the other to get a constantly cheaper price. We use the distribution agents and depending on which bank I'm working with on whatever deal, I have shares at multiple different agents, and they also cost virtually nothing. And I don't see a world where that deflationary cost reduction doesn't come to this market either because I don't see this as a as a defensible area of software. I think it's a necessary piece of software. So I kind of like randomly tweeted out just kind of like, oh, because I was just watching from the sidelines.

Now, in full disclosure, I was a hard investor. I sold all my equity in a secondary transaction actually. Speaking of secondary transactions. Yeah, I had a good trade. I sold it all to, and a half years ago. So I have no opinion one way or the other on this company. I understand process automation, but I don't think process automation is defensible.

So if you build software around process automation, you will be competing in a race to the bottom on price. That is, and I have not seen a single example of a company that's proven this otherwise. There are different companies that create real lock-in because of what they build. That is one. So I tweeted this out. Some person sent me this and Jason to your point.

The two most prevalent competitors that they showed me were mantle and never heard of it. I think one is a YC company and one is not, but mantle and pulley, I think, were the two that came up the most often. And Jason to your point, what they both told me was Karta is like 10K a year, 12K a year, and these guys are 90% discounted at a tenth of the price, which again proves there is not a lot of super compelling software walk in here. It's useful stuff, but that useful stuff is eventually going to get as close to free as possible. These guys are proving it.

And then last night while we were at poker, I got this thing, somebody in two days, oh, built an open source competitor and just put the code out there and said, here you go, take it. Isn't that incredible? Exactly. Guys, that happened in two days from that tweet.

Right. And by the way, I don't know if I got how crazy is that? If I got a stocks to get from what's the name of this thing? Open source clone by by card.com. I'd like grown. I'd be like, oh, here we go. I've got to like, first of all, that's totally not true. Find my shirts and like five different sides and this thing's probably going to be out of business in six months.

Oh, my, that's not true and you know it. You know it. You don't know where the shirts are. I can actually care. You'll be seriously annoying to have to deal with. I can actually tell you what's happening in the market with startups. Startups are looking at the alternatives.

They want to save money. The bigger companies are probably not as price sensitive to MOT. So, you know, spending $20,000 as a series B company, nobody cares. But for the startups, they tend to find the most efficient software, and the exactly right Chimalt found that.

Yeah, my comment is less about Carta itself and its price point. My observation is twofold. One is software that doesn't have a fundamental lock-in, yeah, does not have pricing power. Number one, and number two, we are almost at the tipping point of a set of tools that will allow competitors in a matter of days to compete with an 80% feature-complete solution at a fraction of the price. That's my generalized observation as manifested in this

CARDA example in less than a week. What do you do with some observation like this? If you have this 80% observation. And so then I was like, well, you know what? I'm just going to go for it. So I'm just being it up for you here. So I'm starting this thing. And I've been working on this idea for a little bit, but and I've been experimenting with it with some of my companies. But then I was like, you know what? We should just do this. So the concept here is we're going to build this incubator. It's called 8090.

I have a team. I have a bunch of developers offshore. And we are going to basically create a hit list of software that we think is relatively straightforward and mispriced and could be built much more efficiently in 2024 using all of these co-pilots and tools. And our boundary conditions will be, can we deliver 80% of the functionality at 10% of the price?

So at a 90% discount. So 80, 90 is what the name of the incubator is. And what was interesting is when I tweeted this out, we had 1200 people essentially give us a product roadmap. They told us the software that they would want, they told us the features that they need, they told us the things that they don't need. And so the idea here Jason,

I think is I'm just gonna build this in the wild. I'll create the list of companies, we'll publish that out, let people vote on it. Okay. Then we'll publish the PRDs of what the 80% version is, and we're gonna work backwards with my team in South Asia to try to build these things at a 10% price point. So Sachs, your thoughts, your Assass Investor,

it's your vertical, your thoughts on Chimaltz Plan to be the most hated person in Silicon Valley. I underpricing every piece of Satsoper by 90% in real time. Well, can he do it in your estimation? Well, I think there probably are categories where you could do that. But in general, what I would say is that it always looks easier from the outside than from the inside, meaning that you look at any particular

SaaS category leader and you're like, this is easy. Like I could do this. And then when you actually get into it, you realize that, okay, the product I'm seeing is kind of an iceberg. I'm just seeing the tip of the iceberg below the waterline is all the business logic that's been written into the system. There's like a much deeper and longer list of features. Not an every category. You might be right that in some categories, you don't need the product depth, but in many other categories,

there's just a lot of subtle features, usability issues have been figured out. Integrations, you know, with other. On-going support. On-going support. Training. And then you have the whole sales and marketing component to it. So what ends up happening is you attack a category saying oh this is gonna be easy

you know a year to into it you're like wow like the category leader we're not even close to where it is in terms of table stakes here and it ends up being more of a slog than you thought and then you find out the market doesn't actually have as much of a sudden switch i'm not saying it can't be done find out the market doesn't actually have as much of an incentive to switch. I'm not saying it can't be done. There are categories where I think the category leader has become stagnant and has stopped innovating and I think those are ripe for disruption. I mean, look, I'm kind of trying it in a way. We're going to be launching my cycle or soon. I feel a lot better about that because Slack out of Quarer doesn't hasn't really innovated in a a few years. And Salesforce, by the way, just announced zero hiring in 2024 and the Slack teams were like,

what, how are we supposed to hit our roadmap without more people, like what's going on here? So there is, there is that. Yeah, so look, I definitely think it can be done. But I don't know, I think you gotta choose carefully the categories where the iceberg isn't bigger than you think, basically. Well, Seth, I't bigger than you think. Well, Seth, I want, do you think that there's a shift

in the business model for SaaS companies that emerges from what you're talking about, where I think right now sales are marketing cost as a percent of revenue on average for a scaling enterprise software company around 55% of revenue or something in that range? Does that number get compressed by bringing price down? So you bring price down, but you need fewer people

to go in and do the selling fewer folks. So that does not been the pattern. I mean, look, everyone was saying things like this when enterprise software shifted from on-prem to the cloud. When we went from Oracle and Seabolt to Salesforce.com, people would say, oh, it's going to finally change the business. Sales won't become that important. Products can be all important.

It was true to some degree. I mean, I do think that. You tried to do it. That was what you pioneered at Yammer. You tried to do bottom up. Yeah, so there was a product-led growth became a thing. A very important thing. And I still think that's the best way

to build a SaaS company is you let the users just try it on a freemium basis as opposed to having sales knock on the CIO's door, let the employees pull the product into the company, then go close the deal. So it did make important changes, but it did not get rid of sales. I mean, you know, what I believe doing this stuff way back in 2008 is you'll be able to get rid of sales and just make enterprise products completely self-distributing. That never happened. Peal have been predicting that the death of sales for a long time and it's never happened.

I think your vision is absolutely right. I think this in a world of auto-GBT's, it's going to happen. I think the way that it's roughly going to happen is as follows. I think what happens is that Zoho is another good example of how you can do this, which is what you need are a small set of tools that provide useful capability for a company that work elegantly together now when you work elegantly together there's a bunch of things that you need you need security you need handoffs and handshakes you need different ways of handling exceptions you need a common kind of data model. exceptions, you need a common kind of data model. All of those things can actually be configured on the fly dynamically, by and between two sets of software, if you let the AI actually run an auto configure itself. And so I think the experimentation is as follows. You have product day and product B, you want to adopt them both. They have elements of an agent that can go and auto configure themselves to each other. Separately, I think what the CFO or the CEO does is allocate a budget, and that budget is an agent.

And what that agent does is it works with these other agents to say, okay, great, I can spend money on these features. That is the thing we've not explored. We've always taken software that we build and all of a sudden pause automation and hand it over to people to run it through a relatively archaic go-to-market process. And I think what's worth trying to figure out in 2024 and beyond is how to use these tools to automate all of the low-level negotiation that happens before you can adopt software. I just think it's totally unnecessary. And I think that this is where software can do a very powerful job. On behalf of the salesperson, does it mean the salesperson is totally out of the loop? No, but I do think that if these tools are lightweight enough, especially the young nimble companies will actually say, great, my

procurement person is actually an AI agent with a budget and it's the products that then figure out how to negotiate for the share of that budget and then configure how to work amongst itself. That is the key innovation that I think someone will figure out. That is the Zoho 2.0 right that is the Salesforce 2.0. It's sort of this app, app store, common data bus kind of an idea that I think somebody will build. I would like to try to help. Well, people have started building in Chimoff because you're starting to see the features overlap in many programs. You're seeing HubSpot, Salesforce, ZenDesk. They're all kind of getting into each other's business.

Yeah, those are, that's a great observation, but those are all closed products. What I mean is like there is like a totally open protocol and set of standards for how, sure, product day, integrates and interacts with, product B on many levels, right, from security to data model and everything in between. And I think that that is what needs to get figured out and be very much an open source idea.

The great part about this is, this is going to be massive competition. It will lower prices. It will add features and the team over at 37 signals is doing something similar. If you look at once.com, they are also going to go after Slack, SACs, and they're going to just charge one time for the software. I think I mentioned it on a previous one, but their concept is, yeah, just my gosh, can we take a moment actually, Nick, can you throw up my tweet? Can you take a moment to just say thank you to Stuart Butterfield and what he pulled off? Thank you. As a series A investor, I thank you. Yeah, 27 times ARR is looking like a pretty great exit

multiple. Oh, there's my reply. Oh, yeah, look at my reply. Yeah, I mean my gosh What a deal and at the time it was they were public and people were wondering like hmm It's just a good deal or not should they have stayed independent, but the product velocity never seem to get going. How are you? Thinking about what the critical go-to-market MVP capability is for Slack. So this year's what I'm curious about there's Chat right But the problem with chat in my opinion is that slack has become totally overrun where you could be a five person company and all of a sudden

You have 500 channels. So there's no scarcity. And that scarcity is in my opinion what makes all corporate chats in this modern version teams included, totally unusable, so much noise and distraction. So how are you thinking about that problem? I totally agree with that. What you hear from every single company that has more than, I don't know, 50 employees is that Slack doesn't scale. Because what happens is you have a channel get created and there's a whole bunch of conversations in there that are kind of munched together. And if anybody in the company wants to participate in any one of those conversations, they have

to join that entire channel. And as a result, every single employee ends up in every single channel. And it's just a giant mess, and there's way too much noise. So I think that the channel model was beautiful in terms of lane. People get started really easily. You just jump into a channel and start posting. That's why it took off. But it's not particular enough in terms of addressing conversations to the right people.

So that's basically one of the problems that we're fixing. The other thing I've heard from people is that we love chat, but we also really like the feed that Yammer had as a way to quickly scroll through new stuff. You get a top level corporate feed. People forget that. There was like this, hey, you want to get the pulse of the entire organization go to this one corporate feed. The first one's to figure out that like a feed should be used inside

of an enterprise, not just in a consumer social network. So in any event, I see those are like two of the main concepts is combining feed and chat in a way that actually makes sense and solving the noise, the signal noise problem. Do you have a name for it yet? Yeah, it's going to be called glue. Oh, I love that. Can I remind you, can I remind you that as a as a humble investor,

sir, I think I was part of Yammer and Slack. So I'm not going to add an allocation. I can add value. You're in. You're in. There's just one requirement for the early investors is you guys actually have to use it. You got to do a rip and replace on your slack and.

What? Sure. Sure. If you're willing to do that, you're in. Perfect. I'm in. I'll take $2.50. Okay.

Yeah. Lock my interest list. I'll take $2.50. Yeah. I mean, so I think we're going to do is before launch, we'll do like a seed round. Nice. Right now it's all been incubated by crafts. So we'll do a seed round.

We've got a 50-year round. For this year. So like $6 million posts. Six posts. I'll put a 50 round. I'm not a fifties team round. So it's like six million posts six posts. I'll put a 50 in at six pre. 56 posts. How do we get that? It won't be a super expensive round because what we want to do is incentivize influencers

to like support the product, switch to the product. So it really is going to be. Do you have glue dot com? We have glue.ai. Oh, wow. Nice. I was going to get 80 90.ai. But then I didn't like it. You know what I got instead?

Tell me if you like this 80 90.ink. So it's just 80 90.ink. Yeah, that's fine. It doesn't matter. Everybody searches. I mean, eventually you fake it till you make it. If the 80 90 domain happens, you get it, or you put get or go 8090.com.

So do that before the show gets published. What is it, get or go? Like if people have an app, get 8090. Get 8090 or go 8090. So, you know, if it's a service, you say go 8090. And if it's whatever, you say get, if it's an app or something, right? Like you're just gonna go get it here at the Stomach name.

It's just so easy to remember. I also got vcsaskoboon.com. Oh, absolutely. Well, I have wet, you're, people don't remember this for a call back. I have wetyourbeak.com. I think it just allows to. What your beak.com just goes to our website.

So that, I mean, that was the basic scandal. Sacks, they let the sales team doing secondary apparently or somebody broke a rule They weren't exactly clear with it. It sounded to me like You know, they didn't want to throw anybody under the bus exactly But how big of a violation is it to let people go sell into the cap table Secondary shares without the CEO your customer even knowing that you access that data Where would you access that data. Where would you put that on a violation of trust scale?

I think it was a huge issue for them because the only reason it starts to give their data to Karta is because they trust them to keep it private. Yes. And I think a big part of the problem with the Karta vision of creating the secondary marketplace is that founders don't want it. Fundamentally, that's the problem. I mean, Karta is in the perfect position to rationalize and make liquid the secondary market. The vision was correct in that sense.

The reason for that is because Karta not only has the cap table and they know who all the investors are, they also have all the documents. They go all of your corporate documents, the buy laws, all that kind of stuff. They can very easily execute these transactions. So, Karta was in a great position to replace all of these secondary brokers who are running around creating books on their own. The problem they have is that at the end of the day, founders don't really want secondary markets to take place in their company shares. And I think there's a few reasons for that. One is price discovery. I think a lot of these startups now, if their shares were to be freely traded, would be trading below.

Bad timing. Below the last round's marks. I don't want it. Second, the founders don't necessarily want their investors getting out and then getting new investors on the cat table that they don't know. So founders are somewhat particular about who their shareholders are. It's different than public companies in that way. Apple doesn't really care who their shareholders are. Private companies do care. Do you think that that's sustainable in a world where companies take 14 or 15 years and they're trying to retain talent? Well, I think it would be better for everybody if there was more organized liquidity. I mean, one of the things I love that SpaceX is done is that for the last number of years

now, they've had a tender offer every year. Not even every year, like almost every quarter, right? It's every six months I think was what my understanding of it is, but yeah, I mean, it would be pretty much the same as that example. So with SpaceX, it's been up and to the right on a pretty consistent basis. So every tender round has been a bump. Sometimes it's been up and to the right on a pretty consistent basis. So every tender round has been a bump. Sometimes it's been a small bump, sometimes it's been a larger bump. The company I don't think has gotten greedy.

So they haven't tried to shoot the moon and raise the valuation too much. So they're able to keep a very organized process. And they've had this attitude from the beginning of letting their employees and investors get liquidity when they need to. So it's been great. But that's very different. By the way, that sort of organized tender process is very different than the secondary market that Carta was organizing, right? Because Carta was trying to do what all these secondary brokers are doing, which is they hit up people wanted at a time and just say, are you looking to buy yourself and they're trying to organize

secondary transactions that are not part of an official process. And I think that's a huge part of the problem here. Freiburg, did you have thoughts on it? Well, I mean, there's an element of secondary transactions and private companies that are unstructured generally being a problem. The issue with CARDA was, was there a violation of trust

with respect to the transparency onto the cap table that they have access to because they have all the data in their systems. And when I was at Google in 04 or so, Sergei was kind of throwing around the idea, why don't we start a hedge fund? Because we have all this data about what people are searching for and we can see all of this consumer behavior. And we could trade on that and have a huge data advantage in the marketplace. And ultimately, whether or not there was an impropriety of the use of data and even if we excluded personal data and search data just using internet-based traffic and internet data, the perception

of the problem would have damaged Google's brand so much. First of all, is there an actual conflict where you're taking people's what they consider to be private data? And using that to make money from their data without their permission or acknowledgement or explicit consent? And secondly, even if you are doing this in a way that doesn't use their data because you just generally have knowledge about who buyers and sellers are in the market. Outside of your software, the view that you may be using the data in conflict can damage your brand and damage your customer relationship so much. So it seems in hindsight a little silly, but I think to Chamos Point earlier, it may indicate the necessity for them to think about building another business on top of the score software business that is a more true marketplace driven business so they can make over time more money and that's probably where this all came from.

They saw a need to build something that was more than just monthly efficiencies. They weren't making money from it and they shut it down. It's true that Carta is trying to become a multi-product business. They started with start cap tables and then they added fund management and they added this broker business. But if you read Henry's last blog, the secondary market is what he originally wanted to disrupt, is he always wanted

to create the secondary market. And he created the cap table business, the SaaS software, as a way to get to that. I think what he's realized is that the real value is in the SaaS software and this marketplace is not that valuable. I mean, the SaaS business is doing something like 250 million a year of revenue and the broker business was only doing a few million. Yeah, 3 million. So I think the value has turned out to be in the SaaS and moreover, this broker business was compromising the trust and safety or the perception of trust that the company has from customers.

The problem with that SaaS revenue is if you look at mantle and pulley, that 250 million could be 25 million. And cake. My investment. Yeah. And cake, sorry. Yeah. And cake. But the point is, the fact that there are many competitors, I think is a

sign of a low barrier to entry and a lack of a true fundamental lock-in. Let's say you are an investor and you're looking at Poli or Mantle. Why would you even think that's an attractive company to invest in? If success looks like you're compressing a $250 million market down to $25 million, like what's the point? Well, I think a lot of these competitors got funded during the whole Zerb era where everything got funded. I mean, if you were to look at that market today, why would you even fund a disruptor? Well, so look, I think there are other strategies. There are other strategies you could add on to this and adjacencies. My understanding is mantle and pulley raised in the

low single digit millions. That gives them a lot of room to run a $25 and $50 million business profitably and never raise any more money. The problem is on the opposite side. If you raise money, eight or nine or $10 billion, when companies trade at 20 times, and now companies trade at six times, now all of a sudden, you have to have $1.3 billion of revenue a year to break even. And I think that's the six times. Now, all of a sudden, you have to have $1.3 billion of revenue to break even.

And I think that's the real problem. So it's not that Henry hasn't built a great company. I think he deserves a lot of credit. The question is entry point and the question is upside. And the upside is governed by the difficulty of the things that you're doing and how much pricing power you have for those difficult things. And so I think what we're realizing is that there are a few difficult things in software,

few, and it's just like it's just true. And as a result, every product, this is not a card of thing, every product, we'll see a ton of competitors. So the only thing that you can do is have an extremely leveraged op-ex and an extremely low cost to serve. That is the only protective mechanism one has.

It seems to me on the outside looking in. Unless you have an Instagram, you're right. That product is infinitely better with everybody or a TikTok. Now you can spend as much money as you want to be in big. But that's not what I think procedural software is. Yeah, I don't, I mean, look, we're gonna have to agree to disagree. I think there is some pricing risks to card it from these competitors,

but my guess is it ends up being stickier than that. But in any event, I mean, I do think that Henry at the end of the day pulled off a nice save by just getting rid of the business altogether. I think that was a smart way to respond. Clearly, the first response didn't work. No. The first response was a response to rage. Yeah. Yeah. It was a very confusing denial where he said this isn't our policy, but he also blamed. He also got into it and blamed the person who called them out on it was like What why are you calling us out on this and then like every founder was like because you've highlighted our trust and he was like

Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, well Also people are showing people are showing like email Campaigns that have been going on for months and it seemed much more organized and it yeah It's very hard to believe that this was just an accent instead of a deliberate strategy. And you could see the whole startup community was evaluating its options in real time on X. And that's when he came out and hit the whole thing with a sledgehammer and just said, we're gonna get out of this business.

Smart, and I think it was really smart to do that. It's kind of called the crisis. Like I said, I don't think this is a business that startup founders want their captable software to be engaged in. No, definitely not. And just by the way, there's a third point on that. One reason was probably discovery. Another reason was having undesirable shareholders.

The third reason is just founders don't want to create a competing fundraising process to primary financing. Yeah. I think this is actually a really important point. The reason why founders don't want there to be a secondary market is because their company may need to raise money. Yeah, you want to go through the front door to the CEO and the board, not the side door to get a, get some exposure to the company.

Well, I think in the Zerp era where there was all this excess funding flying around, then it made sense to let secondaries happen. But in a world in which funding is scarce You want that money to go into the company not into the pockets the early shareholders And so I think like the timing of this whole thing is like really off it all feels like kind of a function of Zerp in a Some way agree All right, so actually we're in the group chat talking about this viral clip about Star Wars You wanted to chime in on it, maybe you could queue it up,

Nick. I mean, as you may recall, my pick for Business Loser of 2023 was Disney, and it seems like they haven't learned anything from the horrible year they've just had. What is the balance of activating a force for change, but also trying to permeate that patriarchy, that power structure. And is that a part of the calculation of your art as well and what's been the reaction to that? Oh, absolutely. I like to make men uncomfortable. I enjoy making men uncomfortable.

This is the new director of Star Wars. All right, you're that, sir. Well, I saw the comment on that tweet was, this is gonna be the biggest Disney flop yet, doesn't know what it said. I mean, look, I don't know what Bob Eiger is doing. He seems to want to burn Star Wars to the ground, like the rest of the Disney brands by playing politics.

This director doesn't seem to have had a lifelong fandom for the franchise that she didn't really talk about how she had grown up marinating in this universe, loving its characters. Her background is in documentary filmmaking and there's nothing wrong with that, but there's no indication from her that she truly loves Star Wars. And in fact, the comments that she truly loves Star Wars and in fact the comments that she's making right now are indicating that she's going to politicize it. The patriarchy is not why anybody is a fan of Star Wars that goes to see its movies. So nobody wants to see that movie.

It's the opposite. It's the opposite. They want to avoid it. They don't go to Star Wars movies for the politics. And she's also trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. I mean science fiction may skew male in its fanbase But it's not because sci-fi franchises don't like strong female characters I mean just stepping out to the larger world for a second. You've got Ripley and aliens You've got Sarah Connor and the Terminator movies. You've got Princess Leah

Trinning the Matrix Matrix, you've got Princess Leia, Padme, Asoka in Star Wars. You seem to know a lot of these female characters. You're deeper in Star Wars, you're a show guy. You've got some good posts here. So, that's the idea that there aren't strong female characters in Star Wars is that's just kind of a myth, right?

And so it's not like the universe needs to be reset in this way. And you could just see the whole fan community kind of grown to this comment because they're just like, oh, here we go again, Star Wars is going to ruin another franchise by playing politics. And the amazing thing is that, you know, Iger doesn't seem to learn from this at all. But there's nothing wrong with having a female director either, right, so I mean, you're not saying that. You're saying that a particular person who has a political agenda in how they want to

shape the story of Star Wars. Of course. Right. Of course. I'll also say, I think one of the core driving narratives, emotional narratives of Star Wars is the oppressor oppressed story political, it's a highly political story. I've always said, I think Star Wars has been

like the most anti technology effector in society since the 70s, because Star Wars is all about, I've said this before, but the Ewoks destroying the death star and like the no tech overcoming the oppressor, big tech. And so we have to destroy big tech. And anyone who has the better technology is very likely the oppressor. And they have all the wealth and they have all the power

and they have all the control. And so those who do not have the power, do not have the wealth, do not have the control, do not have the technology, have to go and destroy that whether it's the empire or that, you know, kind of evil force. And that's the core narrative of Star Wars. So I do think that at its heart, Star Wars, in and of itself, is an oppressor-oppressed storyline that relates very deeply to technology and wealth and has helped shape the Western psyche for a couple of decades in a very

meaningful way, or has really reflected maybe perhaps the Western psyche. What did you think of it before? And to where? I think you're superimposing current day terminology on a movie that was created in the first one in the 1970s when intersectionality did not exist. Yes, there are political overtones to Star Wars. You've got the rebel alliance against the empire.

That is not diversity politics. Sorry, it it's about i'm not saying diversity politics i i it's really about the corruption of power i mean you know the famous phrase uh... by lord act in which is power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely to me those are the political overtones of star wars is not yet so you always have to divide that and have intersectional categories. It was about war. I mean, let's be honest, it was Lucas was a child of the Vietnam War era

and he was highly influenced as well as Francis Fourcopola. And yeah, the Americans with all this wealth and power came into the jungle to try and destroy a peasant nation and cause death on a pot of peasant nation and the peasant nation survived in one. And there was a narrative to that that I think is reflected in this and is reflected very deeply

in a lot of the stories that have come since. And I'm not saying DEI is, as a solution was the storyline out of the original Star Wars, but the original Star Wars was very much driven by the leverage that technology provides to those in power that gives them, you know, extraordinary influence over those who don't

have power. Well, if there were political overtones to the original two trilogies, and actually, I think there were some really interesting themes, especially in that second one, where palpitations. Not even political. Not even political. Let me just be clear. Social, right?

So social systems, which. I understand, but my point is that Lucas didn't hit anybody over the head with those themes and his goal certainly wasn't to make anyone feel uncomfortable his goal was to entertain and whatever political or social overtones that were very much in the background because that's what good art does one of the reasons why

hollywood produces so few really interesting movies these days is because the political overtones are really in the forefront and they really hit you over the head with them. And so therefore they're just not very entertaining. It's not very good art. And I think that's why the fan community was like, oh, here we go again. Let me just make sure people understand this is a nine-year-old clip.

And for contacts, this is probably during like the early days of the DEI movement just so we're clear on that But you had another point to make David good. But Zach, I think that Hollywood has imposed upon itself Certain degrees of restriction on the artistry of the artists in the community because the standards now to be nominated for best picture Define a number of DEI representation and inclusion standards and they're listed here. So in order to, and I, if you guys will remember it at our summit in L.A., I asked going to paltrow about this and she wasn't familiar with these changes that had been put in place. But in order to qualify for a best picture nomination, you have to meet some of these standards.

And these standards include on-screen representation, beams and narratives that relate to having at least one of the lead characters or significant supporting actors come from my minority background, including ethnic background or by gender. I could get nominated for an Oscar. Look. I'm sure. So Asian look, I'm in the Perens here. Or at least 30 or 30% of the actors in a secondary cat in the secondary group have to be women racial or ethnic group, LGBTQ

plus or people with cognitive or physical disabilities or who are deaf or hard of hearing. The main storyline theme or narrative of the film is centered on an unrepresented group, either women, racial or ethnic group, or LGBTQ positive. They can meet the criteria. If the creative leadership team has at least two

of the following creative leadership positions met by one of the underrepresented groups, and so on and so forth. If you're an artist, a filmmaker, and you want it to make a film, a World War II biopic, which was on the front lines in World War II and was entirely white males,

would you have been able to be nominated for best picture or would you have had to go and take some actions that have affected your artistry and your freedom of expression in making that film? And as a big fan of film, and you guys, I think all of us are probably in the same boat, at least the couple of us are. Three of us are. Three of us are. Three of us are. This would have limited a lot of the best pictures of all time, I would say, if you had to impose standards on what the artists were allowed to do or how they

were allowed to make their film. And that's really what's taken over Hollywood. So I say, I would say it's not just a Bob Iger Disney thing, but this has become a standard in Hollywood that the DEI movement has so deeply affected the intentionality of what has historically been a truly creative. I agree. You talked to Hollywood writers. If you talked to Hollywood writers, I'll tell you that things have become extremely politicized and it's a mess.

Iger has been a little bit contradictory about this. In April of last year, there was this article saying that Iger was doubling down on inclusivity and diversity. And he described that in a shareholders meeting. By November, he was saying that Disney movies have become too focused on messaging. So he seemed like he was finally getting it that after the horrible year they had. But then we had the Star Wars news news and it seems to suggest that they were hiring a director who really wasn't right for the material.

So we'll just have to see, my sense is that they have not made the course correction they need. If you want to see the peak of this, there was a bunch of blowback undunker and absolutely toward a force of a film if you haven't seen it, especially go see it in IMAX, just extraordinary Christopher Nolan film that it lacked diversity and gender diversity. It's a war film, historically, kind of hard to make it about anything else if it was just on narrowly focused on a couple of battles. And so, yeah, this has gotten to the point of, yeah, a little bit of absurdity.

I relate this very much to the point that we made a couple of months ago about stand-up comics being restricted and canceled based on the things that they say that are offensive to the narratives of social inclusion and DEI. These are artists who should have freedom of expression, creative freedom, unlimited creative freedom. If we want to have a different set of standards for how we value the art that comes out of it fine, but I don't think that it ends up being true. So what the peer group would otherwise recognize and say, you know, is the greatest art of

the year, is the most impressive achievement of the year in some particular artistic discipline. It's really sad. There's also been this change in live performances in symphonies. It used to be that to avoid discrimination in auditions for symphony orchestras, auditions were conducted behind a curtain. So the director and those who were making the election on who would get to join the orchestra would listen and they wouldn't see the person performing because they were behind a curtain. Recently, that trend has changed and now those artists are required to perform not behind

a curtain but in front of the curtain so that we can judge them not on their musicianship and their artistry but on their race, on their gender and on some other standards. So I think this is obviously part of a very broad narrative but it's very deeply affecting. Can I ask a question? A community of arts. Yeah, it's about to bring you in on this. Jamal. Yeah. Is listenership of the symphony gone up or down? It's a load of going down for a long time. Symphony, Symphony, the world, we're seeing decline in audience, but it happened before the changes. It's been happening. Yeah. Has it accelerated or has it slowed the negative decay to zero?

I'm not sure. I'm not sure it's the indifference. Yeah, to be honest. Well, if it hasn't made a difference, then you're then it has made a difference. I mean, I think this is part of a wider discussion of DEI. But the goal of some of some forms of art like these life performing arts may not necessarily be audience growth. The goal may be finding the best options. Perfect. But I suspect it should be to sustain itself indefinitely.

I mean, that's a big point. I've had it which I disagree. As the quality of roads, as the quality of roads, fewer people will care because there are other options that you can go to that are high quality. And then these things will die off. And maybe that's what it's supposed to happen. I mean, this is part of a water discussion about, I think, DEI facing the reality of whether

it's, I guess, this whole pilot thing with Boeing and who is getting hired to be pilots and training and what should be the focus of a company board be? What should the focus of hiring be? The problem, I think, with the argument you guys are having, in my opinion, is that it's a little too premature. The reason is that there are other people who will make semi-credible claims while you guys make semi-credible claims, and no progress is made on this whole DEI discussion, as it touches cinema and Hollywood or music. What's much easier if you want a dismantled DEI,

which will eventually come in cleanse Hollywood and the symphony, is if you go to the jobs where it's irrefutable, where even the most ardent defender of DEI says, you know what, I can't take that risk with my own family or with my own life and the lives of my family. And I think that we would be better off if we just focus in a really disciplined way on those and get the criteria to be entirely based on skill. And then eventually it'll come back

in Hollywood and the symphony will also get cleansed. So doctors, pilots, I mean, I would say certain doctors, I would just say pilots for sure. I would say surgeons, I would say certain doctors, I would just say pilots for sure. I would say surgeons, I would say that you could probably go through. I haven't bought enough about it to know, but you could go through and say, systematically, what are the categories in the professional world that we interact with every day where skill can be the only criteria must be because otherwise innocent lives will be lost That's an important question I agree with you that the fundamental choice that we have a society is whether

Skills is going to be the determinant of success skills a merit or whether it's going to be about something else You know, and as soon as you tell somebody that they can't get the job, even though they're the most qualified, because of their race or gender, then I think that is racism or sexism. So it's doubly bad. But to me, I think the reason why this happens is because people don't really have the right skin in the game. So the reason why the recent discussions about pilots and where their cockpit should have this sort of DEI program is that everyone can relay.

Everyone has skin in the game. If your kids are going to fly on a plane, the only determinant you want for who the pilot is is skill. Obviously, because you have real skin in the game. The problem is people will falsify their preferences when they're discussing other people flying on the plane. So people will start saying, well, you know, we need to have DEI programs. In other words, when it doesn't affect me, you're willing to basically virtue signal and genuflect towards these programs. And I think that that's the fundamental problem is that people will pretend to support something other than

skill in all these contexts where they're not directly affected. But as a society we are. With respect to aviation specifically, my thought is that this is a very easy skill to determine who is high quality versus not because you have such sophisticated training apparatus and scheme simulators, simulators and all of this stuff. It's easy to know how to rank people from one through end. And I think that as a society, if you want an efficient transportation infrastructure and aviation infrastructure where the consequences are really bad, if things go wrong, you just want the best period end of story.

However, I think it's also fair to say that then the government owes the people a responsibility to advance the technology if they actually want to have a multifaceted hiring criteria. So what do I mean? We can have a lot more automation in the cockpit. The reason we don't is because of how certain lobbies are able to affect rules inside the federal transportation infrastructure. And we know this because our friend has been trying to our friends, Skydaten, wonderful pilot, has been trying to our friend Skydaten wonderful pilot Has been trying to improve airline safety and he's talked about this a lot and these things get blocked by the pilots Union and otherwise because they don't want to get disintermediate. Okay, it fair enough. That's the game

Well, if that's the game at some point we need to have a conversation as a society that says okay Look if we're going to hire on a multifaceted basis for pilots, let's also tell Boeing and Airbus you need to build even better, more automated planes. That's a fair trade-off. The great irony of all this, Saxx is it's illegal to hire based upon gender race, etc. And then at the same time, people are trying to hold this construct of, hey, we want more diversity, we want more inclusion, time people are trying to hold this construct of, hey, we want more diversity, we want more inclusion at the same time in their heads. And we're seeing lawsuits happen.

So they're, you know, want tech companies to report on their diversity. They want venture firms to report on, you know, either diversity and investment, but it's illegal. And you can be sued if you were to give investment dollars based on race, gender, et cetera. And fierce founders, I believe it was the name of the firm that's being sued for only investing in a certain demographic of women. Yeah, we're to ask people their sexual preference. You're not allowed to ask that.

You're going to be employment at the same time. So I don't know. I've always had a problem with how do you keep these two things in your mind in our own venture firm? And I just said to folks just this is to get our diversity target. And now to hire people, whether it's on a Hollywood film set or in your company, you've got to go ask them what their sexual preference is. That's, I mean, it's crazy that we're being asked to do that. And what I did in our company was I said, Hey, if we don't feel we're getting enough applicants for the programs,

finding a diversity of the accelerator, we could have, we could have efforts to increase the number of applicants, but we can't make investment decisions based on anything other than the merit of the company, or we will get sued. And so this is, I think, the problem in corporate America with these issues is how do I try to help this problem? If we think there is a diversity problem in our particular industry,

which is noble and thoughtful, when criticized anybody for that. But then the rubber meets the road at legal and then performance, right? And then it's very hard for, I think, leaders to manage those two dichotomies. I could see a case for why barbers and priests should be multifaceted. Good bedside manner, crack a few jokes, be able to listen, relate ability, relate ability, push back a pilot. But the first time, like the thing is now,

this thing is so on the front burner of people's minds that haven't forbid, if there is an incident or a near incident, you're gonna see lawsuits that are gonna focus on this issue. Show me the training records of the pilots and show me how they fared relative to alternative folks that you either did hire or didn't hire. And you know, why was this selection? It's going to be a mess. We might even see that with Harvard and their selection of their president. Like why was this person selected as president, right? And did we check the new one?

Or the past one. Like did we know about the plagiarism stuff? You know, did we not know about it? And this is I think the race to know where when you get into identity politics. And I think this is why everybody, and I think Coleman Hughes said it really brilliantly when he was on this pod. I heard about his TED talk. Like we at least want the aspiration of having a colorblind society. I think what Coleman said that was really

I think profound was, well, where can we actually affect change that will be important. And I think that's early education. It could be providing pre-K. It could be providing support for people with childcare. So that, you that, they could get into more job training, et cetera. So where do we put our efforts? If we do want to see a more inclusive, diverse, just world, is, I think, the question. Backing up a second, I think there's a fundamental dishonesty about the DEI movement that's really coming to the fore right now. On the one hand, DEI activists will explicitly say that their goal is to

engineer job categories to explicit population numbers. But like you said, that's actually illegal to do. So when they get in a lawsuit, like the Harvard affirmative action case that went this from court, they'll deny that they're discriminating against Asian Americans. So when they're preaching for what they want to do, when they talk about, say, candy style anti-racism, they will say that the explicit goal here is proportional representation. But then when that results in discrimination against groups that are basically selected against, they'll deny that that's what they're doing. And I think it's gotten to the point now where they just can't maintain both things being true. And I think we saw this in the dust up that just happened between

Elon and Mark Cuban, where Elon was saying, look, we should be a colorblind, meritorious society. We just shouldn't discriminate for or against anybody on the base of race. And then Cuban jumps in says, oh, no, that's not what DEI is doing. DEI is just trying to expand the pool of applicants. And it's just not true. I mean, I don't know if he's being disingenuous. I don't know if he's first you singling. But I think they were talking through each other. I mean, you do want to expand the pool if you're not getting a pool of diverse applicants. There's nothing wrong with that. Expanding the pool. But what you are correct, there was a DEI griff that occurred. I think that's kind of what you're all looting to. And I can tell you the ins.

I think that if you look at the DI movement, it goes way, way beyond, just expanding the pool of applicants. It explicitly puts its thumb on the scale in terms of what it's looking for in terms of hiring and promotion. It turned into a grift. And I can tell you the inside story on this. And it's going to come out eventually. But turned into a grift, and I can tell you the inside story on this, and it's going to come out eventually, but there was a, I don't know if you experienced this in any of your companies, or if anybody's willing to talk about it, but company has lack of diversity in

their company. Then diversity activists, and this is, I think, where it really started to build up resentment, diversity activists comes in, says, hey, you have problems. They call them out on social media. There's a Twitter brigade comes in, oh my God, look how horrible this company is. People go, oh, I'm sorry, we didn't want to be horrible. And then they say, oh, well, hire us. And we'll teach you how to do DEI. And let's build a DEI group. And we want to be consultants, pay us to come in, pay us to speak at your organization, to tell you what you're doing wrong,

and then rally a reverse support of it after you've gotten paid for solving the problem for them. And I saw the shake down a curve, and I had people ask me for advice on like, hey, what do we do here? And you can just imagine, you know, you're a person of good faith who wants to do the right thing,

and then these DI folks come in and then try to brigade you, basically, publicly shame you in order to get rich DEI contracts. And we saw this with the size of DEI groups that come, isn't you wondering, well, what are these people actually doing? What does the DEI department actually do inside of a company that is a creative or valuable? It creates more bureaucracy to do more DEI. Right. Exactly. Because that's why I keep saying bigger.

Did you guys see the size of the Michigan DEI group? Did you see that tweet? I thought this was a Babylon B story when I first saw it because there are 250 people working for a DEI. 500 people at Michigan. What? There's one in the data. That's the about five, five, five hundred people at Michigan. Why? There's a donor. That's the donor, my leader.

500 out of how many people? I don't know, but there's been 30 million dollars in a payroll unit. Yeah, I mean, look, big companies can kind of afford this stuff, but startups cannot. I mean, this is really the kiss of death for startups. You just can't afford to have these large bureaucracies. And then also, you know, when you're a startup founder, if you have six months of runway, 12 months of runway, you might not have the luxury to be looking at your statistics

and saying, you know what, we've got 10 people who are of this demographic, statistically we should have this. So the next hire we need to make ourselves numbers has to be of this composure. And I've seen people do this, actually you've probably seen it too on boards or whatever. Hey, we need to hire more of this type of person, this profile, and then hiring gets slowed,

and it's challenging. And it's also illegal. So I don't know how you win in this thing other than have a color blind society as a goal at least, you know, and to put your efforts. Are you familiar with a Mott and Bailey tactic? No, Tom. Who heard of this? This is a rhetorical technique or fallacy. No, I heard this one. Yeah, I love a good. So this comes from medieval times. The mod and Bailey was a type of castle where the Bailey was this wider area

that was just defended by a wind wall. So it's not that secure. The block was basically the stone fortress on the hill. So a mod and Bailey tactic is when you go out and stake out a very aggressive position, you take the Bailey basically, but then when you get challenged, you retreat into the mod and pretend like you never took the Bailey position. The Bailey position is basically the Kendi style anti-racism where you say, look, we have

to achieve proportional representation in every job category. And that is what the DI movement in the main advocates for. But then when they get challenged by somebody like Elon or by somebody like the Supreme Court, they were treated into the mod and to say, no, no, we weren't trying to do that. We're just trying to expand the pool of qualified applicants because who could be against that? And they'll claim that they were never doing the whole proportion of representation thing. And then on top of that, they'll say, well, listen, obviously increasing the pool of qualified applicants is so unobjectionable that if you're against that, then you must be racist and then you get all the

accusations. And so this is basically the rhetorical technique that the movement uses to defend itself. But eventually, when this stuff gets litigated, as it just did at the Supreme Court, you start to pick this apart, and you see that there's a lot of evidence that they are actually engaged in overt discrimination against certain groups like Asian Americans. No easy answers here, but I for one think that that's bad.

Yeah, there was something really nice about a merit-based society if there was fairness at the starting line, but you know, that's the thing I've learned is not everybody starts at the same place. And so if you just look at, it seems to me, and listen, I'm no expert, but the starting line seems to matter most.

So if we could focus on making it as equal and fair and just when it comes to education, that seems to me to be like the quickest solution to feeling better about all this. I just think we should have seven day, 365 day a year school available, public school available, competitive schools available to make the world more just and give people more opportunity, right? Skills training, etc. Why do you think that having school 365 days a year will make the world more just?

Well, because I do think that if you had more competition in schools and you had parents who care or students who care and they could get more education and there was more available, then you could say, well, how many days a week did you go to school? How much effort did you put in, and there was just more high-quality school available. And if you look at public schools right now, it's very unjust how poor the schools are and how poorly run they are and what the teachers' unions

have done to these schools and disadvantaged communities. And if I look back on my life and I look at people who did well, they had engaged parents and they had opportunities in education that other people didn't. That seems how does keeping the school open all year round change that. You think about parents who maybe don't have coverage for their kids after two, thirty or three o'clock and then those kids, you know, we call them, we were called Lachke kids I think in the 80s and 90s. You're having the ability for them to do more enriching things, to be in chess club, to be in take one doe club, to do a little extra math, whatever it is, that could be something

society could do for a very low cost or skills training even, right? Hey, this is a culinary school after school. This is a culinary school in the weekends. This is a coding school in the weekends. It doesn't have to be just them. It could be welding. It could be, like I said, you know, it could be designed, whatever it is, more opportunities for people to learn more skills without, you know, having the benchmark be, my parents can afford kumon. My parents can afford a chest tutor, right? We live in a time of incredible privilege and all of us have unlimited resources. And many of the people who listen to this podcast have a lot of resources to hire tutors for their kids and give them more opportunity.

I didn't have that opportunity. You know, and if I had that opportunity, I would have learned chess faster, right? I would have had more opportunity for it. It just wasn't available to me. And then there's a lot of people who started behind me who certainly didn't have it available, single parent, you know, in a worse school environment than Brooklyn where I grew up. So I don't know, do you disagree, Jamar?

Would you have a better idea of how to make the world more fair and just than education and skill strength? I think education is probably the most important. I do think that we need to find it fashionable again to have nuclear families. I think that if you look at the marriage rates of 20 and 30-year-olds, it's meaningfully depressed relative to older cohorts, including ours. We're the last generation where it's a structural part of our identity is being married.

And I think that that has long-term implications because when you look at the success rates of how to grow kids, poverty matters a lot less than having a structural nuclear family, meaning a two-parent household. And so I think that there's a lot of work we need to do to figure out how to re-incentivize folks to want to commit to a single person not this Rampant promiscuity, but just kind of lock down and find somebody and build a long-term partnership with them I think that that's really crucial for a functioning society giving tax incentives the way to do that or just cultural Norms, I don't study the problem to have a way to decide. Yeah, I've heard this before I just don't know how that gets implemented in society, right? And I can think of ways that tutoring and having more education available vouchers,

et cetera. If you gave every parent under a certain dollar amount of income a year, a voucher to hire tutors, man, that could change the world, right? It could change a lot of people's fate. We need more two-parent households. That would certainly help more. All right, well, we really got into it here in the end, when a great episode.

All right, four, the rainman, David Sacks, with a tight haircut now, the dream is over. I mean, it's just, I don't know who got to you. It's a new year. It's an election year. It's a big year for you. I think it's just a huge critical mistake. I think you were going to a certain iconic look and I think you've blown it. I'm going to take the other side of that bet. And for David Freiberg, the CEO of O'Hallow and Tremont Polly Hoppapatia the founder of the new 8090 incubator and the chairman dictator of the all in LLC

I am the world's greatest moderator. Yes, you are and danger investor. And we'll see you on next time. Bye-bye Love you boys. Love you guys. Bye-bye We'll let your winners ride. Rainman David Sack I'm going on the beach And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. I'm the US, I'm the queen of kilowatt I'm going on the 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, That's my dog taking a wish, you drive away. So, sex. We're not on.

Oh, man. The gesture will meet me at once. We should all just get a room and just have one big hug, George, because they're all kids. It's like this sexual tension that we just need to release that out. What, you're the bee. What, you're a bee. You're a bee.

Be a bee. What? We need to get merch. I'm going on leave. I'm going on leave.