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E120: Banking crisis and the great VC reset

March 17, 2023 / 01:30:05

This episode covers the recent banking crisis, the role of venture capitalists, and the implications of room temperature superconductors. Guests include David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Sacks.

The hosts discuss the alarming events surrounding the bank run on Silicon Valley Bank and the subsequent failures of multiple banks, including Signature Bank and Credit Suisse. David Sacks emphasizes the systemic issues in the banking sector, attributing the crisis to poor risk management and rapid interest rate hikes.

Chamath Palihapitiya addresses the scapegoating of venture capitalists in the crisis, arguing that they are not to blame for the failures. He highlights the interconnectedness of the banking system and the mismanagement of deposits by banks.

The conversation shifts to the potential of room temperature superconductors, with Friedberg explaining their significance for energy efficiency and technology. The hosts express excitement over the implications of recent research in this field.

Throughout the episode, the hosts maintain a mix of humor and serious analysis, reflecting on the broader economic implications of the banking crisis and technological advancements.

TLDR

The hosts discuss the banking crisis, venture capitalists' roles, and room temperature superconductors' potential impact on technology.

Episode

1:30:05
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all right everybody Welcome to the all in podcast and with me again this week the Sultan of science the prince of
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panic attacks the queen of quinoa David Friedberg the dictator tremath polyhapatia wearing a beautiful Mr B
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sweater and David sacks the Rain Man himself thanks for coming to my Laurel piano dinner on Tuesday Jayco that was
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wonderful thanks uh at least one bestie showed up for you wonderful wonderful dinner I sat as far away from the Laura
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piano people as possible in the arranged seating thank you for that I guess maybe
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you were like I'm gonna contain the damage Bernard Arnold said put put the all caps guy at the end and I said okay
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yeah he still hurt me I was like what's the amuse bouge at dinner every time he said something
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he yelled like he was in office he's like I want another butterscotch pudding the butterscotch pudding is
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delightful Shawn I'm four feet away from me Jay Cal you can take the caps lock Sean was so Ember Chef Sean crush the
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chef Sean crush it once again were you selling alarms when the restaurant like almost ran out of something alert alert
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alert restaurant is running low on coffee we're dangerously low on caviar on this one is
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[Music] [Music] all right everybody Welcome to the Pod where we uh you know try to inform you
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we try to make some jokes here I just want to make what is a little bit of an opening statement here it's not an
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apology and it's not a Victory lap in any way but there's been a lot of attention I
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think on the last episode of the Pod and perhaps some tweeting from two of the four besties this past weekend
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I saw and I you know I'll let you speak for yourself your sax and we're going to
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get into the timeline of what's occurred and then what are potential outcomes here in solutions to the banking issues
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that we've witnessed in what is a week since the bank run on Silicon Valley Bank in the shutdown on
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Friday but what I saw and again speaking only for myself here was absolutely terrifying up close and personally
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watching people pulling money out of Banks and watching people have to set up loans to hit their payroll and this was
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like one of those surreal moments in a in a movie where like a meteor is coming towards Earth and you see it in the
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telescope and nobody else sees it or only a small number of people in the observatory see it and I think part of
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the reason people listen to this podcast is because we are insiders and speaking
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again just for myself I'm always trying to be exceptionally candid and transparent with the audience
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additionally I make jokes uh so sometimes you might laugh during this podcast or you might laugh when you're
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reading my tweets and uh that's part of what I do now I also realize that we have an audience now that is larger than
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I think any of us expected for this podcast I certainly magnitude larger than I expected and frankly I don't know
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if this Pockets was going to make it past 50 or 100 episodes and my Twitter following count
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doubled since we started this podcast because you tried to ruin the putt I think it was because of the Caps locks
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but anyway putting all that aside what I would like to say as well is like we are
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living in a situation that is unprecedented I think the alarm Bell I sounded you know was because I saw a
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fire we'll get into the timeline here but I sounded that alarm Bell after Silicon
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Valley Bank was put into receivership and when I saw additional bank runs occurring I
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wouldn't change it I think these were the right the right thing to do was to inform folks now I did use all caps
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perhaps a little too much that was a little bit of a bit if people didn't understand that maybe I need to adjust
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my communication style now that this thing is so popular but I stand by my mode of operating in
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the world which is I always want to be candid with people I always want to tell the truth and yeah sometimes I make
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jokes about life and you know dealing with these stressful situations that's it it's not an apology it's more of an
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explainer and yeah maybe I need to adjust the caps lock or how I deliver stuff but I stand by the message of what
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I said and I think it's important for us to maybe look at the series of events and misinformation that has spread
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because there are people literally blaming Venture capitalists for the bank run that is now systematic and the the
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balance sheets of multiple banks around the world and I think sax would be great for you
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to maybe just comment on the week that was and the timeline of events yeah so as usual you're not apologizing no
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absolutely not apologizing but we'll recognize that this platform is bigger and that may be on the margins I could
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adjust my communication strategy but Chris there's a lot of people who don't know that I make jokes
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and maybe people don't understand what I'm joking and when I'm serious right and so right Jason what would you change
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was there anything you changed come on I think I might not have used a Mad Max image and GIF about the end of the world
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because people are too stupid to understand that's a joke and a fictional movie I see so you find yelling
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effective it depends well Jay Cal I agree that I don't think you have anything to apologize for in terms of
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the substance of what you're trying to get across I personally could have done without the all caps it was a bit oh
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yeah what you're basically saying is nobody should listen to you because you're not that important and I
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wholeheartedly agree with that I'm saying understand I might joke because of course category yeah all right let's
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go back let's go back and look at the Timeline because there are now serious accusations and I would call it really
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scapegoating uh and it wasn't just you it was me and Bill Ackman in fact the Wall Street Journal editorial board
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which I respect a lot mischaracterized what me and Ackman were trying to do in terms of drawing
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attention to a regional banking crisis in progress a run on the banks they called it spreading panic I don't know
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how you tweet or publicly discuss a run on the bank that's currently happening needs to be addressed with an immediate
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Federal intervention I don't know how you can discuss it without then having someone else mischaracterize it as
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trying to spread a panic but Jake how the The Wall Street Journal editorable didn't mention you so you're off there
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okay they didn't know who you are but thank you but no but seriously so I went back and
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looked at the timeline of all of this and so first of all we have to understand that this banking crisis now
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has uh swept in five banks Five bank failures first or a silver gate but everyone dismissed that because it was
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some weird crypto bank then it was svb but everyone sort of dismissed it because they said it was based on
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panicky VCS rather than a systemic problem in the banking system then it was Signature Bank which got seized on
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Sunday which I think utterly refuted the idea that this was just a Silicon Valley
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problem then you had the feds step in and backstop First Republic which would have been the next dominant of fall if
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it wasn't backstopped and then five you had Credit Suisse basically again avoid an outright failure because they got
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backstopped by the Swiss government so we now have five banks in roughly a week and these are not small Banks they're
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this Credit Suisse is a is a G7 but globally systemically important bank and the other ones are top 20 top 30 type
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Banks we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in deposits so clearly there's a larger phenomenon
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going on here and frankly it's being caused not by like anything VCS did because VCS are just depositors we're
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just one class of depositors and deposits are not to blame for what's going on here what's going on is that
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these banks have huge unrealized losses on their balance sheet and the losses have come from the sun's spike in
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interest rates that's what's going on the sun spike in interest rates is because we've had the most rapid fed
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tightening cycle in our lifetimes in the last year the FED funds race gone from roughly zero to almost five percent that
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has broken a lot of things and the banks which have broken first are the ones that had pre-existing problems
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and they had horrible risk management but that's who gets broken first in a stress test right is the most poorly run
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Banks the ones with pre-existing issues but just because they went first doesn't
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mean that others don't have similar kinds of issues now I'm not saying this in any way to be panicky maybe those
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banks will be fine but there are larger issues in the banking system that are worth talking about in
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to the point about whether VCS could have spread this J Cal you're absolutely right about the timeline I mean I went
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back and checked I personally never tweeted anything about sgb until Friday afternoon when svb was already in
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receivership and the run on the bank had already started with signature and First
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Republic and we could see it with our own eyes and then this pod didn't drop the one where we talked about this
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problem didn't drop until Saturday morning when the banks were already closed and by Sunday night the FED had
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acted and basically implemented our recommendations which was to basically intervene so I don't know how you can
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blame this search for scapegoats I think is getting out of control and it's just
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not factually accurate and you know that it's convenient to make Tech which is hated right now
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chamoth and Friedberg you know the scapegoat Venture capitals obviously the the part of tech that people might hate
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the most or the easiest Target but let's talk about the FED raised those rates because of inflation and inflation
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happened because of out of control spending due to covid and then the the second Administration so you had a
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republican Administration that spent a lot of money and then a democratic Administration shamata spent a lot of
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money so maybe we could even go backwards from fed fund rate going you know what looks like parabolic when you
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look at the chart maybe you could speak to what got us to the FED making those decisions chamoth
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or Friedberg maybe I can just do a little cleanup on what Sac said I think the issues that Credit Suisse are
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different than the issues at First Republic and the issues that first Republic are different than those other
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three Banks the other three Banks David that you mentioned signature Silicon Valley Bank
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and silvergate all had very traditional liquidity crises right we talked about this last
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week which is duration mismatching where you have depositors who want their money
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today but you have assets that mature in 10 years and as a result you have huge unrealized losses if you all of a sudden
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cash them out today versus waiting 10 years I think what's happening at First Republic is really just about making
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sure that that loan book and the depositors can get parked into a combination set of banks that can take
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care of the balance sheet so that there are no more liquidity issues at Credit Suisse they have an enormous
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amount of liquidity what that was was I think a lot of speculation around whether they would default on their
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bonds or whether they would theoretically need more liquidity but the balance sheet itself was not
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only liquid but also very solvent so I think that was just more of a panicky reaction to comments from a 9.9
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shareholder who just said that they can't put in any more Equity but even then I went back
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this is the chairman of the Saudi National Bank he was asked on Bloomberg would you give credit Suites more money
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and he had a very reasonable answer but it was snapshotted in a very awkward way
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the first sentence was under no circumstances would he do that okay now if you stop there you could be panicked
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but the rest of it made a lot of sense which is he said look in Saudi Arabia if we go above 10
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percent we have to go through regulatory approvals domestically and there are regulatory approvals abroad that's a big
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hill to climb and all of a sudden it no longer becomes a financial investment it
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becomes a somewhat political investment and so we're very happy at 9.9 that was the totality of a statement but if you
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just cherry pick the first 45 seconds and ran with it which people on the internet did
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this is sort of what caused that second level wave Panic at a g-sub and then the
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Swiss National Bank stepped in and I think that that Panic has largely gone okay so what is the real issue the issue
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again is I think we have had a bit of supervisory failure here right because we all know this in any industry if you
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let capitalism go totally unchecked shareholders will demand immediate profits today it happens in every
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industry except in ones where you can basically gamble on future profits and that's what tech does
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but every other shareholder in every other asset class demands money today and that's the same for banks the
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problem is the banks are a highly regulated business they are supposed to be supervised by The Regulators
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and this is a very clear example where why is there not a real-time spreadsheet I mean this is not complicated stuff
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where assets and liabilities and duration mismatching can be known on a real-time basis where the San Francisco
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fed Mary Daley should have a report that's escalated to her when svb got over their ski tips which they did in Q4
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of 2022 so I think the real question that has to be examined is where were these folks
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for the last four months when they could have done something not just about this
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but rules in general for all banks that are not the gcps and I think that's a very important question that politicians
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need to get to the root of Friedberg we discussed this article from Seeking Alpha which came out on let me get the
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exact date here December 19th title of this Seeking Alpha story is svb financial colon blow up risk and the
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summary in three bullet points says bullet point one potential losses in loan portfolios could severely impair
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book Equity number two unrealized losses in hold to maturity portfolio already equal to book Equity number three
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funding environment for startups will pressure deposit based adding even more pressure to the balance sheet in other
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words startups spending money to cover their burn rate Free Bird and obviously we had the Dodd-Frank
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rules lessened or loosened under the previous administration and that specifically was driven by Silicon
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Valley Bank they had a big part in that so looking back on this and and people do want to place blame let's talk about
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the effects that occurred because this was hiding in plain sight literally in December in an article that
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looks like it was written by somebody who went into a time machine and said how do I warn people in December about
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this maybe you could talk about the fed's interest rates the spending and what led up to this look issue with the
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banks you guys remember when we started this podcast three years ago we were like they're gonna shut down the economy
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there's gonna be crazy second and third order effects of doing that no one knows
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what they're gonna be here they are and I think that's like the root of what is a Rippling effect
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you can't shut down the global economy and stop trade and stop people and have the government step in to write a giant
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check and not expect that you're going to have to cash that check at some point that's effectively what I think we've
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been kicking down the the road here the way we initially tried to resolve the problem was to drop rates to zero and
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then spend our way you know back to a growing supported economy and then overshot ended up with you know too much
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stimulation too much stimulus two lower rates for too long responded too quickly
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whiplashed back at the end of the day there was a giant gaping hole blown into the global economy
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when we shut down the world from covet blame it's just what happened and when that happened there was a
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massive cost that had to be born at some point and it's gonna get born at some point
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and the Rippling in a pond you don't know where the Ripple is going to hit what part of the pond what leaves it's
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gonna hit that's what's going on still and it's such a dynamical system it's so hard to say with linear certainty this
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is what should be done and what could have been done and what they should have done at the time no one had that
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predictive capacity back then they did what they needed to do people thought that they should have drop rates they
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said we should have written all these big stimulus checks some people said you shouldn't some people said you did
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certainly some people are being proven right and some people are being proven wrong but
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at the end of the day the economic loss that was realized at that period of time
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we're still trying to get out of it and we're still recovering from it I think that's a big part of what's being eaten
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up right now and you're going to see it in the Wipeout of certain Equity you're going to see it in the Wipeout
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of these banks of the assets that they hold and these portfolios and the effects of
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that are obviously you know still being felt Saks do you agree that mistakes that this uh there isn't
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somebody to blame because it is clear that the FED said inflation is transitory that was wrong and then they
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went faster than in history to raise the rates those seem like two glaring mistakes and then the Todd the
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Dodd-Frank loosening under Trump and with Silicon Valley Bank pushing them that seemed like a really big mistake by
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the way I wasn't saying the feds not to blame for not raising rates fast enough okay that was because you guys remember
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I was the first person to talk about sure what Stan drucken Miller had said that they're not raising rates fast
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enough that we've got massive inflation we should have been raising rates I was the first person on this show to be you
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know barking that so don't don't forget like I was there okay like pretty early what I was pointing out was like we shut
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down the economy during covet that is the main yeah so that's the main cause that is the Cannonball that got blown
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through the ship got it and everything else is plumbing and patching and work to try and keep the ship afloat and
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we're still dealing with that and at the same time as you guys know we've we've been loading the ship up with debt the
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global ship the global economy with debt 360 Global debt to Global GDP ratio right now and as that ship has gotten
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heavier and heavier to have a giant hole blown in the side while you're trying to
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do all this Patchwork with all this debt Weighing on it it's a critical challenge
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we're feeling acutely here they're feeling it in Europe now and we're certainly going to see the global
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ramifications as we try and fix this economic catastrophe that was caused by covid at the same time that we've been
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spending our way into a happier future that it turns out we have to pay the bills for at some
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point sex your response the question of who you blame for this banking crisis has really become a political Rorschach
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test and I've seen that there are six different parties that people want to blame in this situation and there's some
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Merit to all of them but the degrees are very different number one okay number one the bank management of
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all these different banks clearly very poor risk management didn't do a good job they are to to blame however and
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tremath is right about these Banks they differ in the details but the point is that they're all operating under
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conditions of extreme stress where did that come from number two the fed's rapid rate tightening cycle clearly I
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think that the the combination of poor risk management with the spike in interest rates that basically has
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precipitated this larger problem number three is I think the Biden administration's spending which In
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fairness started with covid before Biden but Biden really intensified it and then
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I think it really compounded the problem in the summer of 2021 by claiming that inflation was Transit story when it
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wasn't that allowed them to keep spending and keep printing money and kept QE going for another six months
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that created the bubble of 2021 everything got super frothy and then that made the rate cycle even more
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vicious because you started six months later they could have started six months earlier and it could have been more
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gradual and I think that really was a disaster for the economy okay number four the d-reg in 2018 I think Elizabeth
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Warren and rokana have made what I would call a compelling case that the d-reg in
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2018 have contributed to this problem I think in hindsight creating a two-tier system of banks
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where one tier are the systemically important Banks who are completely guaranteed and backstop by the federal
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government and then a sort of lower tier a second tier of regional Banks was a poison chalice for the regional banking
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system because in the short term it meant they were more lightly regulated which may be appropriate for you know
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smaller banks that aren't these Mega Banks however it has also now I think created a situation where people are
00:20:38
less confident about them and so the money flows are going from the regional Banks to the systemically important
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Banks the sibs so like I said it might be a double-edged sword and I think we're gonna have to look at those
00:20:49
regulations and figure out what's the right regulatory regime to create confidence in the regional
00:20:55
banking system we want a thriving Regional banking system and so the question is what's the right
00:21:00
regulations that get us there and then the final two that we can talk about later are I'm hearing wokeness getting
00:21:06
blamed which listen I think that wokeness was a distraction there was a lot of crazy programs happening at these
00:21:12
Banks but listen if wokeness was the key factor the whole Fortune 500 would be out of business because because they all
00:21:18
do this stuff they all do this stuff so I think I think we're going back to the well a little too often on that critique
00:21:23
and I don't want to I don't want to burn that critique out because I I think that
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wokeness is bad but it's not the key reason why this stuff happened and then the last group that gets super wokeness
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we could also maybe frame it as ESG more broadly as the distraction because woke
00:21:38
this is charged ESG is real yeah what I would say for sure is that if these banks have spent as much time
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on risk management as they did on ESG or on woke then this crisis wouldn't happen
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so definitely a distraction but not not the thing that like specifically caused it and then just the final thing is VCS
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and I just can't fathom at this point given the multiple bank failures given that we see the larger problem of
00:22:00
unrealized losses on bank balance sheets that somehow any class of depositors would be blamed for this that just makes
00:22:07
no sense to meth I think the VC the critique is specific to Silicon Valley Bank because I think and this article
00:22:13
was in the Wall Street Journal but what it shows is a really complicated intertwined relationship between VCS and
00:22:20
Silicon Valley Bank where you know VCS were given very cheap interest rate loans they were given GP call lines of
00:22:27
credit they were given LP lines of credit and then those same VCS would be directing their companies to put their
00:22:33
deposits inside of SPV who would then take those deposits and buy perhaps and buy risk and while the reality is all of
00:22:40
this stuff will come to light because I think it will get exposed as we go through Congressional hearings on all of
00:22:45
this but I think the I think pointing the finger at VCS in this specific case is
00:22:51
somewhat warranted because there was a little bit of people working in lockstep together and there was a a lack of
00:22:56
functional responsibility around how to be a true fiduciary so if you come to a board and your founder is 22 years old
00:23:05
and you give that person 15 or 20 million dollars I think it makes a fair amount of sense that you are supposed to
00:23:11
be the more sophisticated Financial person in that room and if you have incentives that aren't
00:23:19
properly disclosed to that CEO and now a set of decisions are made I think that that there should be some
00:23:26
accountability for that or at least some exploration of why that happened I just
00:23:29
want to make sure the audience understands this because it is a bit in the weeds and it's a bit inside baseball
00:23:33
what you're saying shamoth is if I can summarize it there are people who are the adults in the room Venture
00:23:39
capitalists they have deposits at Silicon Valley Bank they also might have loans that are fantastic with Silicon
00:23:46
Valley Bank I have a mortgage for this office from Silicon Valley Bank and I talked about how on the last episode how
00:23:51
great it is they come they open wine with you it's white glove service that you wouldn't get at another bank
00:23:56
and then they might have loans against What's called the GP carry or the GP share or they might have mortgages and
00:24:05
so there's a conflict there if you're a venture capitalist and you're directing a 22 year old CEO to Silicon Valley Bank
00:24:10
maybe you're doing that is explored no the biggest conflict of interest and in some cases Silicon
00:24:19
Valley Bank is a limited partner in all of these funds my point is interesting okay hold on we have to
00:24:25
explain that so imagine a situation you go and start a fund Silicon Valley Bank constituent says let me be a limited
00:24:32
partner and invest with you let me give you some amount of money I don't know where that money comes from from Silicon
00:24:37
yeah well let's be realistic more like 25 50 million 100 million okay that's a lot of
00:24:44
okay so a million kind of is whitewashing this problem so you give them a reasonable amount of money
00:24:49
they're like wow I'm I have tremendous loyalty for you thank you well do you need anything else do you need personal
00:24:54
loans do you need lines of credit for your business sure why not I take those two
00:24:59
and invariably on the back end now your loyalty obviously builds up again nothing none of this is wrong but this
00:25:05
is what's happening and then you tell your companies to keep your deposits there maybe the cash
00:25:10
management program is not as strong as it would have been if you were more circumspect and you didn't have those
00:25:14
incentives to direct people to one institution only in any other part of the market so in
00:25:20
the public markets as an example there is such a bar for disclosure okay and I cannot stress this to you enough related
00:25:28
party transactions all of this stuff we have to tell everything not just for us but even if our like sister or brother
00:25:36
or mother may have a transaction with an entity that we're doing a deal with and it just isn't the case in private
00:25:42
markets and so it's not to say that anything untoward happened but when people point the finger at VCS I think
00:25:48
they are pointing to this whole set of issues and asking the question shouldn't there have been more disclosure and
00:25:54
transparency around it and now that this has come to pass shouldn't we explore it
00:25:59
and I think that's what the Wall Street Journal did they started pulling on this
00:26:02
sweater thread and my guess is that you're going to find a whole ball of yarn at the end of it sax what do you
00:26:08
think of this I think tremath makes a fair point that if VCS have svb as an investor and then they're directing
00:26:15
startups to use svb that is a conflict that should be disclosed by the way we never did either one of those things we
00:26:22
never had sdb as a limited partner and we also never direct our starts to the bank at svb I don't know why we'd ever
00:26:28
do that moreover I always try to talk Founders out of taking Venture debt whether from svb or elsewhere so listen
00:26:35
can we be clear about that I've never directed anybody to a specific bank I know able to get two or three Banks and
00:26:41
have redundancy yeah totally and look Founders have multiple VCS typically on their board so
00:26:47
the idea that like anyone VC directs them which bank to use is this not that's not realistically what happens at
00:26:53
these startups but look I think chamoth is right that when there is a bank failure or any kind
00:27:00
of failure this big then all the practices are going to be under a microscope and there's going to be some
00:27:04
scrutiny there we go and maybe there should be but my larger point is we're now operating in an environment in which
00:27:10
clearly there's a larger set of stresses on the banking system we've already had
00:27:15
now Five bank failures or near failures moreover do any of us believe that this is over or do we believe there are more
00:27:22
shoes to drop if we believe that there are more shoes to drop we may not know exactly what they are but but I think
00:27:27
all of us probably believe that we're not the end of this but but but just a thought if we believe there will be more
00:27:33
shoes to drop then clearly the issues cannot just be limited to Silicon Valley they have to be a larger set of issues I
00:27:41
think that it's important to understand the facility that the FED created so what the FED did this weekend
00:27:48
is essentially create a buyer of Last Resort again now how do they do this so all of these Banks basically have assets
00:27:55
that they bought for a dollar and are now worth 95 cents and that's what's creating this whole issue or 80 cents or
00:28:01
85 cents you you pick the number but they're not worth the dollar that they bought
00:28:05
what the FED basically said is okay give me that asset give me that Bond I will value it at a dollar and I will
00:28:13
give you a dollar as a loan and you will pay me interest and the interest rate I
00:28:18
think is what's called ois and they added 10 basis points on top so I think it's about 4.9 percent
00:28:24
so what it allows all of these Banks and if you take all of the banks that are not the top four in America so the top
00:28:31
four are JPMorgan B of A City and well so just ignore those for one second the other
00:28:37
end Banks if you look at all of the assets that are underwater because of all the rate hikes that sax talked about
00:28:44
and you add up all those losses that is about two trillion dollars and the FED didn't denounce that there
00:28:52
was a beginning and an end to this program other than saying these would be one-year loans
00:28:57
and so I think the exposure for the American banking system at a minimum is going to be this two trillion dollars
00:29:05
because now the incentive if you're a banker right now running one of these banks that has not gone under
00:29:12
is to immediately go to the Fed put all of those assets to them get a loan and now take that and buy different
00:29:21
assets different bonds different U.S treasuries that are yielding much more than what your old treasuries were
00:29:29
yielding and I think that's the Arbitrage that we've unfortunately created and the other question now though
00:29:36
however is what does that mean for the top four Banks right because if it's two trillion for everybody else but the top
00:29:42
four what's the gap for the top four that looks like it's somewhere between a trillion and 2 trillion so that's
00:29:49
another amount of money we're going to have to cover the FED will have to backstop and
00:29:54
then as Friedberg said these checks always come due what do we do in a year because in a year
00:30:03
the problem is the only way to make the banks in a position to repay this much money in one year
00:30:10
is to cut interest rates so massively that these assets massively inflate and now all of a sudden you're in a position
00:30:18
to cover this so this is Delta is because it's about they're down 15 10 and Book value these
00:30:26
longer terms of security again it depends on what they bought we don't really know enough details so I don't
00:30:31
want to guess but if you own these 10-year treasuries you could be off 10 or 15 if you own
00:30:36
mortgage-backed Securities it could be off a little bit more if you own short-term Securities they're off a
00:30:41
little bit less but these are with the government you get a loan collateralized by these assets so you're still holding
00:30:47
them right yes and they mature so if the FED takes an emergency posture and says
00:30:52
okay guys we want to avert a crisis in a year from now and we're going to cut rates these
00:30:57
assets that these Banks own will be worth more which will allow them to repay the loan
00:31:03
as far as I can tell all we've done is we've kicked the can down the road for a year
00:31:09
but I do think it's important for people to realize this doesn't solve the problem it just means that mark your
00:31:15
calendar for a year from now we have a problem on March 15 2024 because all perfect folks that took money what do we
00:31:24
do yeah and so a year to work it out Freeburg would seem like a good idea because
00:31:31
the FED is fighting inflation they seem to have gotten some portion of it under control it's not out of control right
00:31:37
inflation and maybe if they can slowly you know either start Ray Cuts or pause so let's shift the discussion to hey
00:31:46
what are the changes we need to make to the system and how do we think this plays out over the next year Freeburg
00:31:52
chamoth had one suggestion which was all of these Banks should have a disclosure
00:31:57
statement Mark to Market every day week month quarter whatever it is just like circles usdc their stablecoin has a page
00:32:06
with their disclosures of all their Holdings so that seems to be a very productive one we should have them Mark
00:32:11
to market the Dodd-Frank stuff as Sac said you know Elizabeth Warren probably correct we need to reverse that so those
00:32:18
are two very tangible suggestions real-time dashboard we need to have a real-time dashboard at every single fed
00:32:26
that allows them for every bank that they supervise to know in real time I'm not sure that should be true but
00:32:36
they are their supervisors they should see it they should choose to ignore it but they should not not have it
00:32:43
Freeburg what are your suggestions going forward as to how we can learn from this
00:32:47
situation forget about the Cannonball as you vividly expressed there I think very
00:32:53
well a great analogy but just going forward how do we keep the ship from taking on water if we do have a
00:33:01
cannibal hit it again now we got a hard that's a hard equation to solve it that's why I'm asking you that's why
00:33:09
I'm asking you suggestions a lot of Demands for money you guys see I I think there's a lot of
00:33:17
things that are seem unrelated that are all pretty related right now there's a massive protest underway by
00:33:24
labor in France there's a massive protest underway in the Netherlands there's strikes on the Underground in
00:33:33
London when we talk about global debt and U.S debt we often I don't think account for all
00:33:40
the debt which also includes promissory obligations made to a Workforce Global Workforce that's been working for
00:33:47
decades individuals that have spent their whole lives committed to some company or to some government
00:33:53
working with the expectation that they're going to retire and have some benefits paid to them
00:33:58
and there's this massive underfunding of those benefits and those pools of capital we very quickly talk about
00:34:04
unfunded pension liabilities but when you actually kind of account for the number of people and the amount
00:34:11
of capital that those people are expecting that the workforce the global Workforce is expecting to be paid to
00:34:16
them in retirement both public and private it's a massive amount of money that's
00:34:22
not funded today and you start to see the cracks in the system when that population
00:34:28
says my pension payments are not keeping up with interest with inflation or when
00:34:35
there's a threat that pension payments or retirement benefits are going to kick in at a later age well you're not going
00:34:41
to get them fast enough you're not going to get as many as you thought you were going to get we have that problem in the
00:34:44
United States in the form of Social Security and these underfunded pension liabilities
00:34:48
that is the critical macro tension in this equation that I think drives the real problem that's going to
00:34:57
come to a head at some point we blew a hole in the in the in the boat but we're also forgetting that there's like a
00:35:03
massive amount of weight that's going to drop on the boat and I think that it's a really hard
00:35:08
equation to solve we can talk about keeping Bank solvent and all this sort of stuff at the end of the day the
00:35:13
Central Bank it appears in the United States and probably globally it's going to be one big bank right they're
00:35:18
basically going to take on the whole balance sheet themselves and and at the same time you've got a lot of folks
00:35:24
saying I want to get paid more I have obligations due to me and guess what you know Jason here
00:35:32
important statements historically about the importance of democracies ultimately
00:35:37
you know the members of that democracy are going to say this this is a benefit that the majority are owed
00:35:43
and that's going to pull things out I think the only stop Gap I'll just say one thing the only stop Gap in the next
00:35:49
decade is going to be significantly higher tax rates in the United States I I don't see how you're going to
00:35:55
fulfill the tension Gap that's underway right now with respect to where productivity is going and where Capital
00:36:00
markets are going and where the demands are on the system from people requiring additional Capital to come out to them
00:36:06
without taxing assets away from the asset holders so this would be corporations and high net worth people
00:36:13
and I think that's why you see this Biden proposal we may not like it but at the end of the
00:36:19
day it's going to be the only way to create a stop Gap that's that's that's going to avoid massive inflation in the
00:36:23
near term reducing Supply proposal hold up hold on one second let me just say the only other way the only I'll just
00:36:29
say one more thing Jacob you can go the only other way besides you know a massive long-term tax regime
00:36:35
to fill the hole would be some extraordinary productivity gain and this is where we can all have a hope and a
00:36:40
dream and an investment and an effort around technology AI automation people think that their energy job energy but
00:36:48
if you can get energy down below uh three cents a kilowatt hour and you can scale its production by tenfold if you
00:36:54
can automate a lot of Labor if you can get AI to do a lot of stuff that we do today productivity will go through the
00:37:00
roof the economy will grow fast enough to get out of the debt bubble and meet all of these liability obligations so
00:37:05
there are three ways yeah I think I think to me to me that's the long term the medium term is going to be this tax
00:37:12
stop Gap it's very high tax top Gap and then the short term is going to be all the shenanigans that we're talking about
00:37:17
okay I'll go to you in a second sax so just to recap there it's actually a third way too there are three ways
00:37:22
productivity as you very astutely point out and we we just highlighted some of the
00:37:27
ways productivity could help whether it's energy AI Etc second is of course increasing taxation
00:37:34
on the people who are at the top of the pile uh would be the likely solution the
00:37:38
third is also austerity cutting spending in some way but let me also propose one thing here
00:37:43
as we look forward to what do people want out of a bank and how should startups or just individuals deal with
00:37:51
bank runs and their trust in Banks to tremont's point I've been I was thinking about this over the weekend and then
00:37:56
this discussion that we would have based on a lot of things you said Saks which was people just deposited their money
00:38:02
and they don't have the ability to assess if a bank is solvent because the FDIC can't do it and it's their
00:38:08
full-time job it's their mandate to make sure these Banks were solvent so how is
00:38:12
a consumer going to be able to do that or even a startup founder or even a sophisticated investor like Ackman or
00:38:17
any of us if we're in fact sophisticated so let me pause for a second here and posit something
00:38:23
we don't want a bank we want a bank vault consumers do not want their deposits to be used for shenanigans just
00:38:33
like many people would rather pay for a social network than have their privacy data sold so I think we should bifurcate
00:38:41
Banks into bank vaults and Banks Banks can do what they want with your deposits you get free checking but what I wanted
00:38:48
a bank what I want my startups to use what I want my Venture firm to use is I want to pay the bank for services
00:38:54
whether it's 10 basis points 25 basis points 500 a month I would rather see my startups pay a thousand dollars a month
00:39:02
in banking fees two thousand dollars a month on banking fees for two million dollars whatever it is and pay for each
00:39:09
check pay for wires pay for White Glove service whatever they choose but not allow the banks to take that
00:39:15
money and Loan it out or do things with it I just want a vault and I think a vault service is what the majority of
00:39:21
consumers want and given what we're seeing with two insane Bank Run bailouts in our lifetimes as adults for those of
00:39:28
us who are in Gen X 2008 and now we would rather pay for services and I leave it to you sax is this a potential
00:39:35
solution because I don't hear anybody saying give me a bank vault and why does that service not exist in the world
00:39:41
yeah look what people really want are they want a service provider who gives them the ability to make payments which
00:39:47
if you're a small business is payroll and payables things like that they want a money market fund to basically earn
00:39:54
interest and um and they want all that to be safe I mean it's it's very simple the idea that
00:40:01
when you go open a checking account at a bank that you are making an unsecured loan to that bank that is not something
00:40:09
that any consumer or small business understands that whole model I think is completely Obsolete and outdated and
00:40:16
what I heard so many people say and I think this is not sincere I think it's just because they hate Tech is that
00:40:22
depositors should take it on the chin because somehow they made a stupid decision when they opened a checking
00:40:29
account it's like are you kidding me listen what do you want the process to be you want consumers and small businesses
00:40:35
when they open a bank account have to review the financial statements of that bank try to figure out all their
00:40:41
disclosures where their assets are whether they have toxic assets on the books and if they don't do a good enough
00:40:46
job doing that if they're not smart enough to do that then you want them to be disciplined this is the word that I
00:40:52
kept her being used is we need to distributive the depositors the depositors are not in a position to
00:40:59
evaluate the balance sheet of these Banks that's what the feds are supposed to do that's what the Regulators are
00:41:05
supposed to do that's what movies is supposed to do and you're telling me that a bank that had an a rating from
00:41:10
Moody's the week before and had an FDIC seal of approval that somehow they got it wrong and the FEDS got it wrong but
00:41:17
the interested I mean come on that's ridiculous in related news chamoth I would like an
00:41:23
airbag in my cars to protect my family but I don't want to evaluate the airbag technology and unpack it and make sure
00:41:30
that it's got the right right let me finish the point it's about consumer protection here and I don't
00:41:38
care who the depositor is if the banking system is going down because the feds haven't done their job I mean pal two
00:41:45
days before the bank failures was testifying that he didn't see stress in the banking system so either he was
00:41:50
lying or asleep the feds had given the seal of approval to sgb and all these other Banks they
00:41:57
had all passed the regulatory exams and so to now put it on the deposit when the
00:42:03
FED screws up and The Regulators screw up and Washington screws up by printing all this money and creating this
00:42:09
inflation that we've had again out of all the six parties that you could blame I just think it's the the least culpable
00:42:15
chamoth should there be a service that provides no interest but is just a custodian of money that is absolutely
00:42:24
protected where is the bank vault product in the world does it exist because I can't seem to find it some
00:42:29
people seem to say I think Freeburg you alluded to this maybe in the group chat that if you have a brokerage account
00:42:33
that's kind of similar to what I'm saying but it doesn't have it I don't want any interest I don't need any
00:42:39
interest for putting this money in the bank for a startup they're not in the business of making one to five percent
00:42:45
and optimizing for that I have Founders who are now sending me five page memos if yeah if the bank can't use your money
00:42:52
they're going to charge you so remember I want to be charged that's the service I want but but I think this is an
00:42:58
important point a bank as a service provider they spend a lot of money Building Technology having people that
00:43:03
work there providing service and infrastructure so for the services that they're offering if you're not going to
00:43:09
let them use your money to make investments with your money and they can participate on that gain they have to
00:43:13
charge you they charge you and I think that's really worth it provider under the current laws you
00:43:20
understand how it works now is that what we're being told is that when you went to the bank thinking you were just
00:43:25
getting a service provider and frankly largely a commodity service provider you're getting yeah you're getting a
00:43:30
manager yes and you're being told that you actually made a risky investment decision think about that when you
00:43:36
opened a checking account you weren't just trying to you know again use a vendor you were actually making a risky
00:43:42
investment decision that's what they're trying to say and you deserve to lose your money if you chose poorly even
00:43:48
though nobody else could figure it out none of the experts could figure it out you should talk about the the challenges
00:43:53
of your system to someone who lives in Argentina it's far worse in other parts of the world and we've come a long way
00:43:58
in the last hundred years we talked about 500 600 bank failures on average per year in the 1920s so I'm not saying
00:44:04
that hey that's not the case but there's always been to some degree risk when people are giving their Capital over to
00:44:09
someone else and we've certainly made huge strides in progress but I think Jake out to your point you know there is
00:44:14
a point of privilege now that people are saying I want to have a position where I
00:44:18
know that my money's not going to get used not going to get moved gonna be completely safe why would you pay for
00:44:23
that what's the price free Burke what would you pay for that because right now we're basically giving every crypto
00:44:28
entrepreneur and sell it you know basically The High Ground because they could make this product I would pay 10
00:44:34
basis points literally 10 000 a year per million is that right yeah remember when
00:44:39
you thought Jeff Bezos was going to be president I still think it's a distinct possibility anyway what would you pay
00:44:45
for this product or like Bloomberg or Bezos I don't want to speculate on new products it's kind of a dumb tangent
00:44:54
I think the thing that you're bringing up though is Dom tangent okay why doesn't a product like this exist
00:45:02
and I think that it was very well explained it's that every for-profit business is in the business of making
00:45:08
money and there are physical costs that you have to bear in the case of a bank there's physical infrastructure
00:45:15
literally bricks and mortar that go into making the branches there are lots of people there is lots of software there's
00:45:22
lots of complex back office and middle office things that banks have to do in order to accept money that has a cost so
00:45:29
I don't see how it will be very easy for somebody to create a bank that just stores your money for you without you
00:45:37
being charged quite a lot of money unfortunately I think that there has to be a different way to solve this problem
00:45:45
and I think that what we did after the great financial crisis was The Regulators wrote down all kinds of new
00:45:52
rules but the crazy thing in 2008 where those rules were written on paper and now we're in 2023 and these rules
00:46:02
can be written in software and so I think what it requires is some amount of tactical real-time
00:46:10
intelligence that Regulators need to have over those that they regulate and I don't know why
00:46:17
we're so afraid of demanding that the next time some of these complicated real-time laws are written in law that
00:46:25
they also need to get written in code and I think that that's a practical solution it should be the case
00:46:32
that every bank that's supervised by the Fed has a dashboard that has all of the key
00:46:37
levers that allows what you said Jason to happen which is a real-time Mark to Market should those or should those be
00:46:43
just should or should they not be disclosed to shareholders that's a different discussion but The Regulators
00:46:48
should have a hundred percent transparency into how these organizations run because as Sac said
00:46:54
they are an enormously critical institution that at best case after this Fiasco what we've realized is very
00:47:01
poorly misunderstood by consumers and that at the worst case is being mismarketed to us
00:47:08
yeah and I think that that shouldn't be allowed we're also missing the other side of the balance sheet we haven't
00:47:13
talked about it at all but Banks play a really critical and important role as lenders
00:47:19
thanks act as the channel for Lending Capital to small businesses for Lending Capital to individuals to buy homes
00:47:26
it's the primary place where capital is provided to help fuel economic growth and prosperity uh particularly in the
00:47:34
United States where we have such a liquid fluid and available mortgage Market to support home buying in America
00:47:39
and the absence of you know Jason what you're talking about having the ability to use deposits to make loans
00:47:47
and have what banks have fundamentally been in this country for over 100 years which is taking short-term deposits to
00:47:53
make long-term loans and making sure that there's some degree of balance and availability of liquidity to support
00:47:58
transactions and ultimately mortgage Securities came out of the need to generate more liquidity by Banks to
00:48:03
support depositors and obviously there was all these inflationary things that happened in that market and Bubbles that
00:48:08
happened but it's an important role that Banks play and the lending aspect of banks if it gets stifled too much
00:48:13
because we swing too far the other way it can actually have a really adverse effect on economic growth and prosperity
00:48:19
and the ability for people to to afford homes in this country so that's the other side of the coin on where things
00:48:24
can go bad so this is where I find like the the current banking model to be sort
00:48:29
of like weird and maybe Obsolete and definitely not what consumers expect so for example if you go to a bank and you
00:48:36
put your money in a deposit account and then they loan it out to make mortgages do you realize that you're an investor
00:48:42
in those mortgages as the as the depositor I don't think you do I mean because what what they what they do is
00:48:48
they take those mortgage sacks they package them up they sell them and they get an origination fee and they get the
00:48:54
money back Wells Fargo do not exactly so B of A Wells Fargo for example they they do a
00:49:03
lot of that but if you look at First Republic they have a 90 billion dollar loan portfolio on their balance sheet
00:49:07
that they've not packaged up and sold so the packaging and selling of mortgages generated the liquidity that the banks
00:49:13
needed but there's a cost to that so a lot of banks will try and balance out their loan portfolio where they'll
00:49:18
package some of it up and sell it but when they do that they take a loss or they pay maybe they should be required
00:49:22
to do that because because yeah because I mean look to the point about Mark to Market assets it's very hard to mark an
00:49:29
asset to Market unless it's liquid and publicly traded let me give you an economic point I think that there's
00:49:33
about seven trillion dollars in deposits in Banks so if what you guys are saying
00:49:37
happened you're basically sucking seven trillion dollars out out of the system that's being used to fuel purchasing in
00:49:43
the form of loans and you're taking that step or call it a 10 discount to that so
00:49:47
about call it six trillion dollars and you're saying we got to go find a market for six trillion dollars of loans and
00:49:54
then we're going to have six trillion dollars of cash sitting in a bank account doing nothing and that that
00:49:59
challenge is the way that cash will go into money market funds so in other words like you'd package up all those
00:50:03
mortgage bonds you create a mortgage Bond security and then if consumers if depositors want that product they'll
00:50:09
just buy it on cash that's being used to make investments elsewhere so ultimately if
00:50:20
you want to earn interest on your cash it has to be loaned out somewhere to someone I understand but what I'm saying
00:50:26
is look I'm just brainstorming here I don't you know I don't have to say it I don't have spitballing yes exactly I'm
00:50:32
not saying this is what should be done I'm just kind of asking whether it might make more sense what if on the depositor
00:50:37
side all of the things you put your money in are money market funds and then when the bank goes out and does its
00:50:42
lending business it does ultimately at some point have to package those up and they get turned into Securities you know
00:50:48
sexy but money market funds you know where that cash goes so when you when you invest in a money market
00:50:53
fund you're you're giving like money to someone who's using it to make a loan like it is also I understand but then
00:50:58
the depository would be marked to Market as sex is never be at risk of bank failure I just
00:51:04
want to give you're Shifting the risk equation to the fund manager the money market instead of the advantage of the
00:51:09
bank and at the end of the day just the owner of that security that money market fund that would take the
00:51:16
hit okay just as we wrap here because I want to talk on some other issues as well there's two things that are super
00:51:21
tangible that Founders can do right now or people who want to mitigate against these kind of issues there's something
00:51:29
called ICS insured cash sweeps these are accounts that automatically you know will put your money into multiple FDI
00:51:37
insured institutions 250k at a time we talked about this previously there's a bunch of folks doing that in fintech I
00:51:45
won't give any of them free plugs here but you you can just go look and search for ICS there is a also maybe some
00:51:51
thought here that the FDIC 250k limit maybe that's outdated certainly for businesses it is so maybe that should
00:51:57
double or triple and obviously that cost would be spread out and then finally you
00:52:02
can go to treasury direct.gov right now and buy short-term government debt and I
00:52:05
literally have startups doing this who have major treasuries they're going there and buying short duration stuff
00:52:10
themselves holding it themselves so they don't have to worry this is part this is provided by the
00:52:16
government is my understanding and uh people are buying direct from the government I personally am not a fan of
00:52:24
startups buying t-bills because of the duration mismatch problem they always underestimate when they're going to need
00:52:30
their cash and so I don't like tying up accounts this is if you had a giant treasury yeah
00:52:38
always get it wrong I see this all the time whenever they try to let me just say when starts trying to create
00:52:43
laddered Bond portfolios they end up needing the money sooner than they thought what I'd much rather see startup
00:52:48
do is buy a hundred percent UST Bill backed money market fund run by the absolute biggest to the big
00:52:57
financial institutions because you can get in and out of it at any time you want and without paying a fee and that's
00:53:02
so much better than trying to manage your own Bond portfolio let a professional fund manager do it well
00:53:07
there are people who do provide these kind of bond ladders I'm just telling you what the best practice advice
00:53:13
through like a brokerage account sure or multiple ones right and but now this is
00:53:19
I think speaks to chamoth the fact that we have startup Founders and people having to measure manage a
00:53:27
treasury this granularly is this a failure or is this what should be happening should we
00:53:33
have to have treasuries in the 10 million or 20 million range be this granularly managed or should this just
00:53:40
be FDI FDIC rates you know should be just a 10x well in the absence of regular regulatory changes that protect
00:53:49
this money you need to have a financially sophisticated actor on the board and again I go back to that should be your
00:53:56
venture capitalist and that person should not have conflicts of interest with the banks
00:54:03
that they direct you to I mean I don't think that that's a very controversial statement
00:54:07
yeah it's just not happening and I I am just flabbergasted that people are not even doing the basic
00:54:14
blocking and tackling here of having three or four accounts I've always had three or four banking relationships
00:54:19
always had it uh split up should we move on to some of the other pressing issues
00:54:22
there was a really interesting Founders fun story about them breaking their latest
00:54:28
Fund in half and then there is stripe closing their funding which one would you gentlemen like to go to or a
00:54:33
different story on the docket I think there are there are four things that are very interrelated okay in startup land
00:54:39
so Founders fund took their just to make the math simple because I'm going to get
00:54:45
the numbers not exactly right but like a two billion dollar fund that they're gonna break into two one billion dollar
00:54:50
funds so I think that's one 1.8 billion dollar fund they're going to break it into two 900 million dollar funds it's
00:54:55
their eighth fund it's being cut in half and it'll become eight and nine I think
00:54:59
what that speaks to is valuations and the marks that we think we have for existing companies and the future value
00:55:07
that smart investors like this see all roads lead to it says we're in for a slog and so trying to put a two billion
00:55:16
dollar fund to work doesn't seem to make a lot of economic sense to some of the smartest people in the room so that's
00:55:21
that's that the second thing it's according to axios Peter Thiel LED this charge and he is uh the contrarians
00:55:28
contrarian he was the one according to access that led that cut of the fund size with
00:55:34
Summit uh Founders fund according to the reports about closing him I'll say the more important thing which in Peter and
00:55:40
I are in the same we're the largest LPS in our funds and so you know as the largest LPS in our funds I think this is
00:55:45
a no-brainer decision number two stripe basically takes a 50 haircut which is the single
00:55:53
best run most highly valued company in Silicon Valley again that's going to eviscerate private company yeah a lot of
00:56:02
tbpi and a lot of people's portfolios a lot of theoretical money that LPS were going to get
00:56:08
I think the third thing is there's a person that went and filed a foia request that UC Berkeley
00:56:17
to get sequoia's returns and it turns out that the best investor in the game quote unquote since 2018
00:56:26
has not really done that well and I think in the University of California invested over 800 million
00:56:34
dollars in Sequoia since 2018 and I think has returned what some 40 million bucks on that
00:56:39
number and then the fourth which just came out today is that tiger wrote down the value of their
00:56:45
private book by 33 percent for 2022 and so you know I think tigers and um basically has gone from 100
00:56:53
billion to 50 billion in a year there's one more note to add to that YC basically let go of their
00:56:59
growth team this week y combinator uh for people didn't know what was called the continuity fund they were doing late
00:57:04
stage investing and that got cut gosh which is a signal and the 17 employees are gone
00:57:11
now and Gary 10 I think is making the right decision you know they have to focus on what they're great at which is
00:57:16
the earliest stage of the company and they had conflict with this one look yeah this is the most interesting thing
00:57:22
for me in the following way I think the Y combinator unicorn hit rate is six percent right so every 100 companies
00:57:30
that come out of YC which costs only about 10 million dollars to seed right six of them become worth a billion
00:57:37
dollars or more and obviously some become worth much much more and so if you see how difficult it is
00:57:43
even for a growth fund that's attached to that funnel to be successful and make money because
00:57:51
obviously if this thing was ton in cash you would not have cut it I don't think anybody would do that
00:57:56
so I think it was a very challenging strategy at a challenging moment in time and so I applaud these guys for having
00:58:01
the discipline to do it but if you take them all in totality it is a complicated
00:58:06
place in venture capital and startup land holy mackerel like it's a reset a it's tough to make money b a lot of
00:58:12
folks may not know exactly what they're doing see a bunch of valuations are totally wrong
00:58:18
and D we're going to have to start doing the cleanup work now of resetting all of
00:58:22
it which just takes years as you guys remember it took us it took us five years to fix this
00:58:29
yeah it's a hard reset sax what do you when you look at these in totality what would you say well I agree with what
00:58:35
chamoth just said I mean it is gonna be a hard period with a lot of resets a lot
00:58:38
of restructuring a lot of cap tables there's a lot of mess to clean up all of that being said I think I'd rather be an
00:58:44
investor today than an investor two years ago or one year ago because at least the valuations have corrected to
00:58:54
some degree and then also we have this really interesting AI wave happening now and there's a lot of opportunities
00:59:00
to invest in that new you know cycle so at least there's like an interesting product cycle
00:59:06
it's getting me excited to go to work and see these new demos from all these different companies whereas you know you
00:59:11
go back a year or two and just the product Innovation just didn't seem as world changing as it does now so I think
00:59:17
that as bad as things are my guess is that the new vintages of VC are going to be better than you know call it 2021 for
00:59:27
sure that's not going to be a high bar it's not a high bar but still wow trash crash this is the contradiction is
00:59:39
that it felt better to be a VC in 2021 but in hindsight we know that the Vintage is gonna be not good whereas
00:59:47
David how many hold on but today it feels not great to be a VC but I think the vintages will be a lot better
00:59:53
but anybody would tell you that at some point you're going to have to divorce yourself from emotion to be a reasonably
00:59:58
good investor over long periods of time how many data points do we need to realize that too many people
01:00:04
were put into this game that may not have known what they were doing and we're going to have to go and work
01:00:10
through all of those excesses and I think it's just going to take a lot of time U.S
01:00:16
limited partners are in a really difficult spot European investors I think are probably
01:00:21
in a pretty difficult spot there are a couple of bright bright points around the world the folks that are still
01:00:27
optimistic and doing well I think Middle East is one southeast Asia is another but other than those it's just a whole
01:00:36
group of folks that just have to get completely re-underwritten from first principles even when you have an
01:00:42
incredible platform like Sequoia five years of no returns on 800 billion dollars for somebody like UC Berkeley
01:00:49
what it really means without commenting on sequoia's performance is that UC Berkeley is effectively out of business
01:00:54
in being a limited partner for the foreseeable future wow right and I think that that has that
01:01:00
has implications so even if you think these vintages are great I don't think they're open for business
01:01:05
and and frankly if even if they wanted to be open for business how do you go to an IC when they look at all of the
01:01:12
totality of those dollars that have not made anything how do you justify the next 800 million I just think it's very
01:01:17
hard while I agree that LPS are out of it I think the story was garbage because it all funds go through a J curve and
01:01:24
they're literally talking about the majority of the funds in that vintage 2008 2019 2000 2021 they're all in
01:01:31
literally the definition of the J curve the third fourth fifth year one of the most important things you need to be
01:01:35
able to do is measure how long does it take the delta T to 90 of calling committed capital and how
01:01:43
long does it take the delta T to return 1X DPI I can tell you Jason if you're a reasonably good fund those numbers
01:01:50
should be between five and seven years for both which none of those funds have hit the
01:01:55
average for a normal Venture fund is around five to seven years to call ninety percent of the capital
01:02:04
and around five to seven years to return one xdpi I'm just telling you that's what the average is and if you talk to
01:02:10
firms so all I'm saying is there was a period of time where in the absence of getting money
01:02:16
back again this is not a sequoia thing it just means that there was an entire cohort
01:02:23
and years of capital allocation that is not necessarily in a J curve it's impaired because if after five years if
01:02:30
after five years you've returned nothing sometimes you just have to see the writing on the wall sax explain the J
01:02:36
curve one more time for folks and then what is your analysis of that Sequoia story well the J curve the theory behind
01:02:42
it is that when you start deploying a new fund you're drawing fees down to pay for the firm and the Investments you've
01:02:49
made have not been marked up yet so the value of the fund is actually going down
01:02:53
because some of it's getting eaten up in fees and you haven't really had a chance
01:02:57
for any of those Investments to be successful and then what happens early right I don't even know I just think
01:03:04
it's they haven't had a chance to get marked up but then what happens is you start getting markups and now at least
01:03:08
on paper the value of the fund goes up and then hopefully those markups eventually turn into distributions or
01:03:14
DPI like jamath is talking about yeah we have a vintage 2017-2018 fund that's actually fully
01:03:21
returned at this point you exited some secondary or Acquisitions no we just had some we just had some exits but look I
01:03:27
think that is a little bit on the early slash lucky side but we haven't really seen much of the J because you know you
01:03:34
should be getting markups within two years I think on your Investments if the companies are looking good at least
01:03:41
historically that was the case freeberg any any thoughts on this collection of stories with Venture basically having
01:03:47
the great Venture reset the end of the super cycle the beginning of the next it's happening yeah okay we're in the
01:03:55
thick of it but by the way I would just I always go back to the point though with all the problems tramatha's is
01:04:00
talking about the reset and the Wipeout that needs to occur I think this is still that I think that's part of what
01:04:06
makes this a better time absolutely to be an investor this is what I'll say about that sex I think I agree with you
01:04:15
I disconnect asset values and asset prices from fundamental business value being created
01:04:22
so the market bid stuff up prices went up that doesn't really mean that businesses aren't fundamentally good
01:04:29
that there aren't amazing technology businesses being built today that are going to affect billions of lives
01:04:35
tomorrow if you are tracking a public company stock and you like the business you spend time
01:04:43
with management you see what they're building you see their revenues growing their profits are growing they're making
01:04:47
great products people are happy with what they're doing but the Stock's really expensive you don't want to buy
01:04:52
the stock suddenly the stock drops by 80 percent nothing about the business has changed
01:04:57
it's just that the market is paying less to own shares in that company that's a great time to buy that stock
01:05:03
I think that's the moment we're in in Silicon Valley everyone's like oh my God it's over there's uh things are terrible
01:05:08
just because the asset prices of the shares in companies has gone down does not mean that the quality of the
01:05:16
businesses has changed or that there isn't fundamental value being created in Silicon Valley in fact the contrary
01:05:22
point to Sax's comment is that it is a great time to be buying these shares and it is a great time to be investing and
01:05:30
it is a great time because as we've talked about countless times there are extraordinary Technologies from AI to
01:05:37
biotech becoming software to Fusion to novel applications with AI and SAS and on and on and on many of the amazing
01:05:44
things we've talked about that I think can and will affect many Industries and billions of lives are being built today
01:05:50
and they're not going to stop being built and you can now buy the stock at 80 off so you know if you're investing
01:05:56
today and if you're a builder today as long as the capital keeps flowing to support the building work which I think
01:06:02
to some degree it will because still enough of it sitting there you're not going to have a lot of these crazy
01:06:06
growthy rounds with high prices and all the nonsense that went on the last couple years but there's certainly a lot
01:06:11
of opportunity to greet real business value and right now an opportunity to buy shares pretty cheap and participate
01:06:17
meaningfully in that value creation I'll tell you the thing I'm seeing on the field and like playing the game on the
01:06:21
field is something we've been talking about for the last year we started a program called
01:06:25
founder.university and it's basically like a 12-week course on like how to build your MVP we had 350 people to join
01:06:32
the discount code people can use to there's no discount code it's it's free for Founders basically if they if it's
01:06:37
free for Founders if they come to the 12 weeks but anyway what I did was no it's founder dot University because
01:06:43
it's an extension but uh in the words of uh of sex let me finish please let me finish
01:06:52
what we did was we just said anybody who gets to an MVP and it's two or three Builder co-founders we'll give them a
01:06:58
25k check and I did 20 or 30 of these 25k checks in the last couple of months of just the
01:07:05
founders right now who have been laid off by other companies they're dogged pragmatic
01:07:11
absolutely customer-centric product-centric Founders whereas the last five years have been filled with
01:07:17
theatrics and white papers and icos and just nonsense and absurd valuations and people wanting credit for work not done
01:07:24
and now people are actually building MVPs and they're dogged product driven Founders customer Centric Mission driven
01:07:31
Founders and it feels to me that first part is so well said people wanted all this credit for work not done
01:07:39
and for Progress not achieved that game is over finished finished which means if you are
01:07:47
a product LED CEO and you're a mission-driven CEO who actually built something you stand out so much in this
01:07:52
ecosystem and have people begging for money sending me long emails and decks and total addressable Market I'm just
01:07:59
like can you just build a product and show me that you can actually deliver a product and then we'll start the process
01:08:05
of the rewards based system here you know the the the the reward-based system in Silicon Valley is so magical when it
01:08:12
works you get money from founder University or you know Tech Stars or Y combinator then go to a seed fund then
01:08:18
go to a serious a fund that milestone-based funding was so broken and now it's back and it's so functional
01:08:25
when it's working it's just a magic of Silicon Valley is when people work and get rewards work and get rewards and it
01:08:31
just creates this great pace and dynamic that I'm glad to see just as we wrap here everybody's been begging for a
01:08:38
science Corner enough about the chaos in the world everybody wants the Sultan of science
01:08:45
to tell us and educate us about something and sax needs to use the loo anyway so let's do a science corner here
01:08:52
room temperature superconductors you sent me a link I read the abstract of this paper and I I don't know which
01:09:00
language I need to put this into Google translate but I couldn't understand any of it
01:09:04
so please I literally read the abstract and I was like I couldn't get through the first two sentences without
01:09:10
having to start doing searches I'll start with just like the simple explainer on superconductors please
01:09:16
um you know materials that conduct electricity are called conductors so conductors electrons move through them
01:09:23
like a copper wire that's how electricity flows and all conductors have some amount of resistance meaning
01:09:31
not all the electrons kind of flow through at a perfect rate they bump into the atoms in the material in the wire
01:09:37
and they generate heat you know you've ever felt a wire while electricity is flowing through it gets hot right so
01:09:42
that's because the conductor has some resistance which means the electrons bump into the walls of the atoms in the
01:09:48
material they generate heat and you lose electricity you lose energy you lose power
01:09:53
and so in 1911 it was discovered when Mercury was reduced to a very very cold temperature that there was a point at
01:10:02
which the material conducted electricity with absolutely no resistance so the electrons flowed through the material
01:10:10
completely unbounding on you know not bouncing into the material not generating any heat and having no
01:10:18
resistance mean you're losing no power in transmission of that electricity but another number of other super
01:10:23
interesting effects occur number one is that magnetic fields now reflect off of that metal perfectly so if you put a
01:10:30
magnet you ever seen that image of a Nick we could probably pull one up in the YouTube video where you put a magnet
01:10:35
on top of a superconductor it actually floats because the magnetic field like the
01:10:40
North and the north push against each other and it floats up so superconducting materials kind of became
01:10:45
this Fascination in the early 20th century that oh my God if we can actually make materials that
01:10:50
superconduct there are all these amazing benefits one of the benefits is you could have no loss in electricity being
01:10:55
transmitted today 15 of power is lost in the transmission from the Power Station
01:11:00
to your home you could also do interesting things like create maglev or frictionless trains
01:11:05
that float you know like magnets floating off the ground on top of a superconducting track and by having no
01:11:11
friction you could push the Trap the train once and you wouldn't need to use any energy to move it along so you could
01:11:16
have basically powerless transportation you could have really powerful new microprocessors so a superconductor
01:11:26
microprocessor instead of a traditional semiconductor microprocessor would use just one percent of the energy of a
01:11:33
semiconductor microprocessor think about that all the AI stuff we're talking about all the chips that we're talking
01:11:37
about dropping the energy needs by 99 if those chips were made from a superconducting material and one of the
01:11:44
more interesting applications of superconducting materials could be infinite battery storage so you could
01:11:48
take a superconductor turn it into a coil and the electricity would just flow through it infinitely because it would
01:11:53
never turn into heat and then when you're ready for that power you just plug in and you get the power out the
01:11:57
actual loss of energy in a superconductor battery less than five percent and that's
01:12:02
compared with you know significantly more energy loss used in chemical systems and you wouldn't need to kind of
01:12:07
get all the materials that we're struggling to get now to generate batteries so the idea of generating like
01:12:12
superconductors in industrial scale has always been super interesting today the way that we generate superconducting
01:12:17
materials is we have to make a material super super cold in 1987 a physicist named Chu developed
01:12:25
one of the first ceramic superconductors where they discovered a new way of generating superconductivity it wasn't
01:12:30
just taking a metal and cooling it down very very cold because when you get it very very cold the atoms stopped moving
01:12:36
and the electrons inside pair up and it's called Cooper pairing and they flow through and he said we could actually do
01:12:41
this with a hotter temperature and he demonstrated this in a ceramic Atrium barium copper oxide super confusing name
01:12:48
but basically he took a bunch of materials and baked them in an oven and they turned into this really interesting
01:12:52
material that became superconducting and then the race was on because what he did
01:12:56
is he made a superconductor that could superconduct at the temperature of liquid nitrogen and liquid nitrogen is
01:13:01
really cheap so we can just use them that's actually how all MRI machines run today if you have superconductors that
01:13:06
reflect the magnetic fields in the super in the MRI machine and they're using liquid nitrogen to stay cool and so
01:13:12
there's a lot of industrial applications today that use superconducting materials
01:13:15
using liquid nitrogen but in order for us to do all the stuff I mentioned like maglev trains and Infinite Battery free
01:13:21
storage and superconducting microprocessors we have to get superconductors we have to discover a
01:13:27
material that can superconduct at room temperature so that we can sit with it in a computer on our desktop or we can
01:13:34
have it run on a railroad track or you know we can put it in our backyard to store energy and there's been this race
01:13:41
and there's all these different classes of materials that physicists and material scientists have spent decades
01:13:46
trying to figure out what can superconduct at room temperature we started with Metals you know copper and
01:13:52
we tried carbon nanotubes and fullerene tubes we had all these different Ceramics like like with like I talked
01:13:58
about and there have been literally tens of thousands of ceramics that people bake in ovens and Prime see how
01:14:04
superconducting they are basically you take the material and you cool the temperature and you measure the
01:14:09
resistance and as soon as it hits superconductivity boom there's this magic moment where it
01:14:14
drops to zero and it becomes super conducting and there's this big changeover effect so everyone's trying
01:14:19
to find that temperature which it can happen at room temperature and people have found superconductivity
01:14:24
on the surface of DNA and organic molecules but you can't scale that people have found you know
01:14:30
superconductivity and all these weird kind of material on the surface of things but no one's ever been able to
01:14:34
industrialize it in 2015 there was a new kind of material called a hydride which
01:14:39
is basically taking a thin metal and putting it in hydrogen gas and kind of baking it for
01:14:45
for a couple of days and the hydrogen sticks to the metal and then you would use this hydride as a new kind of um
01:14:51
conductor and hydrides that turned out had really good superconducting potential they would superconduct at
01:14:58
room temperature but they needed super high pressure so you'd actually have to leave them in like something that's like
01:15:04
hundreds of times the pressure of the atmosphere and so that that's not really technically an industrially feasible
01:15:09
either so this guy named ranga Diaz published a paper a couple weeks ago that got a ton of
01:15:15
press and a ton of controversy and basically he said look I've got this new hydride
01:15:21
and uh it's I've got this really you know weird metal that no one ever talks about
01:15:26
and I've baked it with this um with hydrogen gas and this hydride can actually superconduct at you know room
01:15:32
temperature and at only one gigapascal which is still greater pressure than room temperature but it basically starts
01:15:38
to show on the chart of are we getting there can we actually get there that maybe we are and so this paper was
01:15:44
published in nature a couple of weeks ago and it got a ton of a ton of coverage because everyone's like oh my
01:15:50
gosh the problem is this particular individual you know the the lead uh research of
01:15:58
ranga Diaz on the on the paper he's pretty controversial because he made a room temperature superconducting claim
01:16:04
back in 2020 in a paper he published in nature and after he made that that claim
01:16:09
a lot of scientists tried to replicate what he did and they were not able to and then the journal retracted his paper
01:16:16
and he had a method that he took data noise out of the measurement system he was using and the way that he took the
01:16:22
data noise out people said actually skewed the results and made it look like it was super conducting when maybe it
01:16:27
wasn't and he actually had a a talk that he did that was published on YouTube a year later where he said he raised 20
01:16:33
million dollars from Sam Altman and Daniel Eck and a bunch of other investors and it turns out that also
01:16:38
wasn't true and then he came back and said well I didn't actually raise the money I was talking with them about
01:16:42
raising the money so this guy's kind of a sketchy character in the space but the
01:16:47
temperature at which he was able to generate or claims to have generated and he did get peer review and did get
01:16:52
published a superconductors is at room temperature it's at slightly high pressure
01:16:59
but if it's real and it does get repeated it's one of the next steps that we're almost going to be getting to this
01:17:05
point of true room temperature superconducting materials and then this whole industry will blow up transmission
01:17:11
lines battery storage maglev trains superconducting microprocessors you know many new Industries can and
01:17:18
will emerge from this material Discovery if it's proven to be real so you know it's a super interesting storyline a lot
01:17:25
of people in the Material Science World and scientists chemists physicists are kind of going crazy about this and there
01:17:31
was a um a survey done by quanta magazine and half the scientists were like this is and the other half
01:17:37
was like this is going to change the world so we don't really know yet where this is all going to settle out but I
01:17:41
thought it was worth kind of talking about and bringing it up because if room temperature superconductivity is really
01:17:46
realized in the next decade it's another one of these kind of Black Swan technology discoveries that we none of
01:17:51
us are thinking about right now but it totally transforms all these markets and very quickly kind of increases like we
01:17:57
were talking about earlier productivity makes renewable energy super super cheap
01:18:01
makes computing power 99 less power intensive AI chips will explode using this technology so a lot of super
01:18:08
interesting applications if room temperature superconductivity comes to light super interesting story I thought
01:18:13
we should share it and talk about it yeah I would love to get your insights on it and then sax I would like to
01:18:19
understand how many emails and what you order from ubereats during that segment venkat vishwa Nathan who runs a battery
01:18:25
group at Carnegie Mellon introduced me to ranga two years ago me and my partner Jay we were like holy this is
01:18:32
outrageous and we tried to spin it out into a natural company but the University of Rochester blocked
01:18:40
it and so we've been following this guy for two years and all the trials and tribulations but
01:18:46
it's a really really exciting thing if it does come to you've got Capital blocked explain why you would get
01:18:52
Capital blocked in a situation like that why wouldn't they allow you to spin it up it is interesting because like
01:18:57
typically universities have a tech transfer office and you can do these deals pretty cleanly so you know when
01:19:02
you go to Stanford the tech transfer office is quite sophisticated at MIT it's quite sophisticated there are these
01:19:06
pretty standardized deals and and royalty percentages what's what is the standard deal how explain to the
01:19:12
audience how a tech transfer deal would work and how does the University make money from it if you're a Prof and you
01:19:17
invent something or even if you're a student it's technically owned by the school and so if you want to
01:19:22
commercialize it you go to them and you basically say here's a Capital Partner of mine and we want to go and start a
01:19:27
company around it and what they will normally say is okay great give us a piece of equity and give us some royalty
01:19:34
in some cases depending on what it is the equity tends to be in the mid single digit percentages the royalties tend to
01:19:41
be in the mid-single digit percentages it depends okay yeah call it five five six seven percent but it can be a lot
01:19:47
when you think about a you know a school like Stanford who's spinning out hundreds of these things a year
01:19:54
but if you're if you're a school that doesn't historically do a lot of tech transfer or has a lot of cutting edge r
01:20:01
d you wouldn't have that team and so Rochester didn't necessarily have it now look rank is probably getting bombarded
01:20:09
by 30 other people who'll pay 10 times more than what I was trying to pay 18 months ago it's a really interesting
01:20:13
thing and I think there'll be some there'll be something does anybody know what the top Tech transfers of all time
01:20:19
were like was Google a tech transfer or Freeburg you know like yeah because yeah
01:20:25
no yeah Larry and Larry and Sergey gave Stanford I think one think of Stanford yeah they give them a percent yeah
01:20:34
because back rub was written while Larry was a PhD there so technically they you
01:20:40
know they had some part of it Carnegie Mellon ranked as top Tech transfer University I'm just seeing here in terms
01:20:45
of the rankings University of Florida Columbia Stanford Harvard because everybody so much some of them are
01:20:51
terrible like and some of them are cronyism so like you go to some of the universities and the tech transfer
01:20:57
offices have deep relationships with certain VCS and investors that they'll only work with and they always get first
01:21:02
picks and first kids and they're super tight with them they don't run a real Market process and then some tech
01:21:07
transfer offices just give away the farm for nothing and then some tech transfer
01:21:11
offices think that they own it and they should get paid 60 royalties for the thing it's all over the map and some of
01:21:17
them are sophisticated and some of them are not um so it's it's actually quite surprising Jake how different all the
01:21:25
universities are in terms of their level of sophistication and the types of deals
01:21:29
they'll do but I will say this work in superconducting research it's another good example going up to going back to
01:21:35
the point a couple episodes ago about the importance of fundamental research and the importance of
01:21:41
um you know the support from academic institutions and governments and other aspects when you're still not sure what
01:21:48
the technology is that to do that fundamental Discovery work I think is a good Collective social benefit and then
01:21:55
to industrialize it and commercialize it requires I think a market-based approach
01:21:58
which is you take that capability you try and build a business find customers make money and that's really how you get
01:22:03
it to be funded to be scaled because you're never gonna you shouldn't have to put you know government and academic
01:22:08
money behind that sort of effort but private Market participants should and so you know it's interesting I mean
01:22:14
I think I'm not holding my breath I've been you know I did a science project in 1993 when I was probably 12 or 13
01:22:22
years old on superconductors and I got a Atrium barium copper oxide disk and I got some liquid nitrogen from UCLA and I
01:22:30
poured it on the disk and I floated a magnet above it I had a poster board and a computer presentation back then and I
01:22:35
was super enthralled about the future of superconductors and exactly what I said
01:22:38
today is what I said back in 1993. so you know 30 years ago it was so busy dating I didn't think you had time for
01:22:44
superconductor experiments yeah look I don't think I don't think that this stuff
01:22:48
that's really uh it's been a it's been like Fusion it's always been a promise around the corner physicists have always
01:22:54
had hope we've taken incremental steps towards it but it's always felt like one of those things where you're always
01:22:59
getting 50 closer to the wall it's like you're never actually reaching the wall and so
01:23:04
yeah by the way I will say one area that that a lot of people think holds a lot of promise for superconducting research
01:23:10
is in Quantum Computing because you can actually model on a molecular level what
01:23:15
might be going on right now the BCS theory is this theory on Cooper pairing that happens in Ceramics is the only way
01:23:21
that we really understand how superconducting actually works why it works why there's no resistance at
01:23:26
certain temperatures for certain types of materials for most materials we have no freaking clue why it happens we don't
01:23:31
understand the physics of it there's something going on on a quantum mechanical level that we just don't get
01:23:35
and so if we could understand it better through Quantum modeling using quantum computers all of a sudden we may be able
01:23:41
to actually start to come up with ideas for molecules and crystal structure that
01:23:46
would allow us to make super productive material that we simply don't have enough time in our lifetime to run all
01:23:51
the experiments in a lab today and we can simulate it and so that's why Quantum Computing could play a real role
01:23:55
in advancing our ability to do Discovery and superconducting materials and like I
01:23:59
talked about these are like not just one but like two or three order of magnitude
01:24:03
improvements in the efficiency of certain systems of Industry on Earth today so it shows how the compounding
01:24:08
benefits of technology and things you cannot see around the corner can suddenly cause these explosive growth
01:24:13
moments in technology in an industry I don't know what when Quantum Computing gets here when it gets here it might
01:24:19
discover superconducting and then when that gets discovered boom energy costs dropped by 99 Computing goes up by 100
01:24:24
fold so there's these amazing things that are still like in front of us that each one of which could be you know
01:24:30
really great exponential triggering events and we're seeing a little Milestone today but yeah I don't know
01:24:34
sax reaction sounds good sax uh how many moves did you play in your 12 chess games
01:24:47
how many points did you go up all right look I got shitzu come on let's go oh sucks all right listen this has been a
01:24:56
great episode thanks to the best comment on the Atlantic article that says Ron DeSantis has peaked already
01:25:02
oh oh yeah don't do it don't do it why you got to troll him let's see that but it's in
01:25:09
the Atlantic oh you want to know why the Atlantic suddenly has turned on him is because they're the biggest
01:25:14
backers of the war they those guys have all these like neocons over there and so
01:25:20
he gave a statement saying that you know our support for Ukraine shouldn't be a blank check and
01:25:26
some other comments expressing let's say skepticism of what we're doing over there and that was totally
01:25:32
inaccessible to them so all these neocons are registering disappointment but I would argue that's a electoral
01:25:38
asset not a liability I have a prediction given what's going on with these Banks and what's going on in this
01:25:43
kind of a I think we all agree the soft Landing concept is over we're going to be in a recession
01:25:48
the war is going to end there because we're not funding this an American the American public is not going to want to
01:25:55
see tens of billions of dollars go into Ukraine and to fight to fund this war in
01:25:59
year two or three hundreds of billions well I'm just saying every month yeah I know the spending run rate of this war
01:26:05
is actually greater than what we did in Afghanistan and Afghanistan ended up being a 20-year multi-trillion dollar
01:26:12
operation that just flushed all that money down the drain so yes we're in a greater run rate than Afghanistan yeah
01:26:20
do we know what the monthly run rate is for this oh my God how is it do they process back we've appropriated over 130
01:26:26
billion Tremors and Afghanistan we spent 2 trillion over 20 years so it's 100 billion a year run rate yeah this is
01:26:33
think about what a Monumental waste of money that was and now look at the financial crisis we're in can you
01:26:37
imagine if we could have 2 trillion back I mean all these trillions instantly we would take that it's
01:26:43
trillions and trillions we squandered on stuff that didn't matter and now we're paying the price for it that could be
01:26:49
education could be Universal Health Care it could be paying down the debt how about paying down the debts we don't
01:26:53
have all this inflation exactly let's think logically here the number one issue for this country in the next
01:26:58
election I am with Friedberg is great prediction uh from the year-end show is we need a president and we need an
01:27:05
Administration that is fiscally responsible and controls the balance sheet in a logical fashion like the last
01:27:12
two administrations have not seen capable of doing I am with Freeburg single issue voter balance the budget
01:27:18
get spending under control austerity measures hashtag all right for the Sultan of science sorry what's that can
01:27:25
you repeat that what I wanted to say Tremont is there are there any plugs for the remaining part of the episode Mr
01:27:31
Beast is curing blindness and buying people's shoes has he been canceled yet Jax aren't you excited about
01:27:37
superconductors and the benefit for AI and energy storage and energy costs and Humanity yeah what does it do to burn
01:27:44
rate of a Sasuke yeah but I'm not I'm not like an expert at assessing like hard science or hard tech I mean I'm a
01:27:51
software investor I'm just a simple man I'm just a software investor all right everybody for the Rain Man himself David
01:27:56
sacks the dictator trim off polyhapatia and the Sultan of science the prince of panic attacks No More Mr David Friedberg
01:28:05
I'm the world's greatest moderator Undisputed congratulations everybody on another successful episode and Freeburg
01:28:12
when are we locking in the date for all in Summit 2023 my replies my DMs are filled people want to know do you have
01:28:26
so now they've gone back to their committee to get approval for us doing it without parking and just doing
01:28:31
something or walking shut up Uber Uber Uber Uber hopefully if they accept it then we are
01:28:39
okay how many shuttles do we have to take to Uranus yeah exactly how am I the prince of panic attacks I think you're
01:28:45
the king of caps locks at this point they were calling me j-caps J caps was the best one I heard talking about panic
01:28:52
attacks Jake hell this weekend man panicking panicking I I was in sheer Terror sure I have literally gotten rid
01:29:00
of the caps lock everybody relax you can follow me twitter.com Jason we'll see you all next time
01:29:06
we'll let your winners ride [Music] and they've just gone crazy [Music] besties [Music]
01:29:40
it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release them out where did you get Mercies
01:29:55
[Music]

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Episode Highlights

  • Communication Style Debate
    A discussion on the effectiveness of using humor and caps lock in serious situations.
    “I always want to tell the truth and yeah, sometimes I make jokes.”
    @ 03m 58s
    March 17, 2023
  • Warning Signs Ignored
    The hosts reflect on how the signs of the banking crisis were overlooked.
    “This was hiding in plain sight.”
    @ 14m 33s
    March 17, 2023
  • Wokeness and Banking Failures
    Wokeness is blamed for banking issues, but it's not the main cause.
    “If wokeness was the key factor, the whole Fortune 500 would be out of business.”
    @ 21m 14s
    March 17, 2023
  • The Role of the Fed
    The Fed's actions have created a buyer of last resort, impacting the banking system.
    “What the FED did this weekend is essentially create a buyer of Last Resort again.”
    @ 27m 42s
    March 17, 2023
  • Pension Liabilities Crisis
    Underfunded pension liabilities pose a significant threat to economic stability.
    “There's a massive amount of money that's not funded today.”
    @ 34m 22s
    March 17, 2023
  • Consumer Protection in Banking
    Depositors should not bear the burden of bank failures due to regulatory failures.
    “Consumers deserve to know their money is safe, not at risk.”
    @ 41m 35s
    March 17, 2023
  • The Search for Safe Banking Solutions
    A call for a banking product that prioritizes consumer safety over profit.
    “Why doesn't a product like this exist?”
    @ 45m 04s
    March 17, 2023
  • Y Combinator's Unicorn Hit Rate
    Only 6% of companies from Y Combinator become unicorns, highlighting the challenges of success.
    “The YC unicorn hit rate is six percent.”
    @ 57m 28s
    March 17, 2023
  • The Venture Capital Reset
    A significant reset is happening in venture capital, with many funds facing tough times.
    “It's a hard reset.”
    @ 58m 29s
    March 17, 2023
  • Superconductors and Their Potential
    Superconductors could revolutionize energy transmission and technology, with minimal energy loss.
    “Superconductors could enable infinite battery storage.”
    @ 01h 11m 57s
    March 17, 2023
  • Ranga Diaz's Controversial Claim
    Ranga Diaz claims to have found a new hydride that superconducts at room temperature, stirring controversy.
    “This paper was published in nature a couple of weeks ago and it got a ton of coverage.”
    @ 01h 15m 44s
    March 17, 2023
  • The Race for Room Temperature Superconductors
    Scientists are racing to discover materials that can superconduct at room temperature, which could revolutionize industries.
    “If room temperature superconductivity is realized, it transforms all these markets.”
    @ 01h 17m 46s
    March 17, 2023

Episode Quotes

  • I always want to tell the truth and yeah, sometimes I make jokes.
    E120: Banking crisis and the great VC reset
  • If these banks spent as much time on risk management as they did on ESG...
    E120: Banking crisis and the great VC reset
  • We don't want a bank, we want a bank vault.
    E120: Banking crisis and the great VC reset
  • It's tough to make money in startup land.
    E120: Banking crisis and the great VC reset
  • The game of wanting credit for work not done is over.
    E120: Banking crisis and the great VC reset
  • It's another one of these kind of Black Swan technology discoveries.
    E120: Banking crisis and the great VC reset

Key Moments

  • Dinner Recap00:17
  • Communication Style03:58
  • Banking Crisis Analysis06:38
  • Banking Under Stress19:06
  • Fed's Rate Tightening19:09
  • Wokeness Blamed21:06
  • Venture Capital Challenges58:06
  • Superconducting Breakthrough1:14:10

Tension Over Time

Words per Minute Over Time

Vibes Breakdown