E75: Fast shuts down, board culpability, Elon buys 9% of Twitter, deplatforming's evolution & more

hey everybody welcome to another episode of the all-in podcast your favorite podcast and a lot of a lot of topics on the docket including well we'll get to that in a minute uh tons of stuff to talk about not just politics but a lot of tech news you do sound really hungover today jkl you sound like an old man that's been smoking cigarettes for three weeks you sound wrecked how big was your night last night admitted i didn't go that big a scale of one to charlie cheat it was like a six there's like a martin sheen in his 30s what does that mean one to charlie we had a couple of beverages i'm sorry on a scale of one to charlie sheen

i don't think i've ever been past the one in my life so what is a six a six is like you know paris hilton you know in her heyday or like lindsay lohan in hollywood in the 90s it's like you know like a good time but not crazy mm-hmm didn't they have to go to rehab let me tell you something charlie sheen cannot say it was just like lindsay lohan wait lindsay lohan the one who went to rehab like five times like what are you talking about yeah that's a 6. i don't want to know what seven is [Music] [Music] joining us of course the queen of quinoa is here the thriller from mamilla valley

he puts the eye and anxiety he got his degree from his google pedigree the sultan of science david friedberg with us again all right next up of course the czar of arr he perfected the flywheel with his boy peter thiel lps don't be nervous because he's only investing in software as a service the world's biggest [ __ ] the rain man himself david sacks he's waiting that might stick i don't know i feel like this might be heading towards kind of like a high school talent show kind of uh episode but yeah go ahead and finally the king of spaxx himself the guru of growth he puts the dick in dictator he's going to upset her with

his sweater mouth probably hopped here all right boys i kept letting the audience know i can't keep this up every week yes yes it's become a very anticipated new feature of the show it is it's a new feature we you know i forgot we had like wet our wet your beak and you know all this stuff and all these things and flows we come up with absolutely come up with new things um all right listen uh just a quick programming update all in summit sold out um basically it's going to be a great show we got about a dozen speakers lined up uh all kinds of great folks and uh three great parties i want to highlight

monday a sunday night will be the poker tournament that's going to be our good fellas godfather kind of theme dressed to impress the family night number two monday night is going to be our havana white party where your best linens and whites and then closing night party on tuesday night is going to be our miami vice big 80s party neon and t-shirts under suits it's going to be a hell of a lot two million 999 700 people don't give a [ __ ] about what you're talking about right now there's like maybe 300 people that are gonna go to this party that you're throwing and

700 tickets i think there's gonna be 700 tickets issued and there'll be probably 400 people at the party so they'll be pretty good parties uh-huh we're in the party business here at the all-in pod well i mean the world needs some good parties in my opinion it's going to be three back-to-back grade parties and the theme of the conference is the problem i most want to solve in the world or the problem i most want to see solved in the world so we're asking every speaker to think about that and we're going to kind of talk about the world's biggest problems and then

who actually wants to solve them the world needs more parties well that's that's what i'm doing that's my that's going to be my 10-minute talk my ted talk i've been i've been watching the wework show have you guys been watching it on fabulous tv plus yeah like elevating the world jared leto is so freaking good in that character by the way yeah it's incredible he gotta get it like elevating the world's consciousness as the mission and then just throw parties is the way to do it i feel like you're you really got that vibe like yeah it's aspirational you can motivate the

world's consciousness with your with your summits i i told bill pocketing millions of dollars it's not gonna make a profit whatever profit it makes it's gonna go to chamot's star chamber 50-person conference he's doing with the all-in brand so everybody gets to leverage the brand yeah first you did it saks with your call in now i'm doing it with the summit chamat's gonna do with his thing tanking i'm not gonna do it coming soon from freedberg the all in munich special lose weight like your besties he's gonna the it's it's the all-in brand that allows you to lose weight in the following way he brings his best

vegan chef to you oh yeah he spins up some [ __ ] tempeh garbage tempe and vegan shake your favorite chamato it's double [ __ ] yuck right yes you vomit after you eat it you're you're in a caloric deficit for the month that that person refuses to leave your house boom you lose everything's solved you lose weight they're like hey want some quinoa you're like no and then you lose weight no that's pretty good give me a cotton give me give me my olive infused beef please the olive infused beef no i'm sorry not all have infused these beef only ate olives guys right and then we murdered them okay and have a party let's go

we need to get some morels and some chickens and make some yesterday we had morels shawn made morels wait a second for you so good so good the morel season has started everybody enjoy it lots of different news this week you guys appeal you guys appeal to the common man the morel season has started morals aren't that expensive tempeh is more expensive than both quinoa and morels 100 that vegan [ __ ] is way more expensive than normal people listen we have to elevate the world's consumption of steak and meats um i think a good place to start is we've been talking by the way by the way have

you guys ever looked on the back of any carton of oat milk how much chemical nonsense is in that stuff yeah that would really be can that really be good for you no you know what i want oh my god give me where's the oat milk that's just oats and water doesn't exist it doesn't exist it's like soy laxative xantham gum like is that stuff can't be good for you you know saks drinks and a 12-ounce glass of milk with every dinner they just drink something with the almond the almond milk at like the whole foods riddled with sugar and all this other nonsensical chemicals as well man i mean i mean people trash milk i get it but like uh and as if you're lactose

intolerant i understand you're in a pinch but why go to an alternative milk that is just riddled with just all of this terrible terrible stuff you know saks used to love to eat brie cheese so much that whenever we'd have a party somebody would do whatever the breed walks with the [ __ ] with the wheel of brie he would literally eat an entire freewheel sugar no they would put the brown sugar on top they would melt it and sacks free brook saks has eaten an entire brick of bree in front of us what was the origin of your brie obsession sacks stanford i've been at

stanford at some point the last guy i would think that would eat bread what's the matter you just don't have i mean what about cheddar what a great american cheese no you just prefer the french huh yeah yeah you still got that fetish for free i gotta go yeah we got [ __ ] to do is that fermented kombucha stop stop this is just plain iced tea sometimes it's just good to be normal unsweetened oh oh you're back on trying to catch up trying to catch up okay here we go listen we've been talking a little bit about the contraction in tech the growth stocks uh having their multiples um lowered and we knew this

was coming but um it's been a horrible week uh for large companies uh starting the layoffs we knew this was coming we predicted it probably six months ago fast.com is a one-click checkout startup fast.co they announced they're shutting down on tuesday this after the company grew to 450 employees and generated reported 600 000 in revenue i think that their employees could have made more money if they did one doordash a day delivery at its peak fast was burning 10 million dollars a month according to reports i think the information got most of this information while only generating about 50k a month in revenue

their 102 million dollar series b was led by stripe in january of 2021. company raised 124 million dollars in total also better.com which we talked about you remember they had their uh horrific cringeworthy founder lay off a bunch of employees over zoom um and they laid off 900 people december 1st 3 000 people on march 8th according to techcrunch for the 5 000 remaining employees on april 5th better.com offered corporate and product design and engineering employees the opportunity to voluntarily resign in exchange for 60 days paid severance and health insurance coverage better ceos vishal garg uh hopefully i'm practicing that correct

noted the uncertain mortgage market conditions of the last couple of weeks have created an exceedingly challenging operating environment for many companies in our industry and then going to go puff which you know i had the founder on uh this week at startups and he's a pretty good um you know like pretty realistic about the margins in that business they're making a modest cut of three percent of their 15 000 staff seems like a reasonable thing to do given how the market is changed but again their valuation was absurd 1.5 billion at 40 at a 40 billion dollar

valuation in december chamafi predicted a lot of this uh and that people would have to sharpen their pencils we had a discussion about this you know the the good times r.i.p what's your take is this the the beginning of the end this the middle where are we at in the cycle and what's the reasonable thing for founders to do here i think uh so you we probably should take the the macro and then boil it down to the startup so at the at the macro level i think that we're playing a very dangerous game of chicken with the fed and you can kind of summarize it in the following way which is that you know three or four months ago we

only thought that there was going to be a handful of interest rate increases and increasingly what has happened the market has remained so resilient that the fed has sort of put out more and more data as the data has justified them being a lot more aggressive and it kind of crescendoed this past week where they basically said listen you know we're going to move by 50 basis point increments for the foreseeable two or three rate hikes and we're going to start quantitative tightening what does that mean that means that instead of basically printing money and coming in and buying securities from the market right so what happens when they enter

the market with money that they literally do print and buy your bonds they're giving you cash in return and typically what that has led to is the inflation of all assets right equity assets have gone up bond assets have gone up because there's just nothing else to buy when quantitative tightening happens they reverse that and what they're going to do is about 95 billion dollars a month of the opposite action which means they're taking money out of the system right or in this case what they're going to do is uh they're going to let a bunch of maturities roll off and not rot not renew them okay so why is this

important well it's important because you know we're still four percent from the highs so we have seven percent inflation we have all this crazy stuff happening we have a war you know going on we have uh massive price issues we have supply demand issues and the market keeps shaking it off so i think what the fed's going to do is get even more aggressive you're going to probably see you know a lot of 50s maybe even a 75 point hike you probably are going to see them you know even ratchet up quantitative tightening until there is a bit of a bloodletting in the equity market

they need to see that the markets crack and so they literally need to see what percentage draw down or just to go sideways what do they need to see in order to look or is it inflation coming down a couple of points well the problem that we suffer from is that they're going to look at the highest level indexes right they're not looking at single stocks and so when they like when you and i think this market is down four percent we don't feel that because some of our companies are down 50 and 60 right but that's because we're all focused on high-tech growth but they

look at the broad indices and the broad indices have held up really well and mostly it's because you know if you look inside the s p 500 40 of every dollar is you know apple amazon you know microsoft etc tesla so we're in a situation where i think until the feds see that there's a massive trading of liquidity which means like you see these indices crack big time 35 3600 in the s p they're just going to keep ratcheting things up as it comes all the way down to our companies in silicon valley and tech what that means is like you have to start planning for the worst and i think the worst means that

there's an 18-month period where you cannot raise money on your terms you have to raise money on the market terms um and so if you're not a position to show good growth over these next two years i would encourage you to just get your balance sheet in order to wait it out saks nuclear winner is a possibility here markets for startups raising money again what saying could be on the terms of the capital allocators what what's your advice to founders what are you seeing in the boardrooms that you're on the board of and if you were running one of these high-growth companies for the past year what are the first two or three things you do i mean

the first thing you got to do is look at your burn multiple i mean how much are you burning relative to how much incremental air are you generating you look at fast they raise 120 million what like a year ago they're out of money now so they burnt 10 million a month like you said here's the crazy thing if they just slammed on the brakes three or four months ago when we were talking on the spot about the coming downturn they could still have 30 million dollars in the bank that's a lot of money the only reason it doesn't seem like a lot of money is because they've been burning 100 million over the past year but objectively 30 million dollars

is a growth series b which is actually a lot of money for a company that only has a hundred thousand in revenue so they could have saved that company if they had slammed on the brakes three months ago and rationalized the cost structure and they didn't so they hit the wall at 100 miles an hour who's responsible when something like that happens david because you we've all seen it what is this suspension of disbelief that creates this kind of stupidity that i mean that's what it is i mean you've got you you've got people who are kind of drinking the kool-aid and there's nobody advising them to stop or if there is or

not listening i mean look paypal had this situation back in uh 2000 the year 2000 right after the com crash we were burning 10 million a month like fast we had no revenue and no business model okay we had said the service would be always free we had four months basically of life and we pulled up on the throttle and what we did is we basically introduced paid accounts we started charging transaction fees and we caught the we cut the cost structure of the company and we made that last 40 million dollars last a lot longer than four months it lasted until we could then do another fundraise the following year and we were

able to then raise with good numbers real revenue a business model et cetera so you know and that was because we were just paying attention to the changing environment the world had changed from sort of the pre-dot-com crash you know 1999 your business model didn't matter your margins didn't matter revenue didn't matter none of that stuff mattered all that mattered was growth but by you know mid-2000 everything had changed so you have to be attuned to what the fundraising environment is looking like and if you're a high burn company right now that's not generating a lot of revenue to go along with it you better slam on the brakes and rationalize your cost structure before

it's too late david tell me like what do you think is going on in this board meeting i mean like this is a group of incompetent incompetents i don't even know who's on the board because stripe led two rounds i think and so you've heard of it david that you you and listen we all love stripe it's a great company it's it's a legendary company but one of the reasons we don't like to have strategics is maybe they're not thinking the same as a proper capital allocator and for them this is peanuts right exactly no look the the reason why it's strategic investor sorry guys i think the reason why a

strategic investor invests is because it's strategic for them i mean it was in stripes interest to try and back a winner in the whole e-commerce checkout line sort of payment space and so they did that and i don't even know if they had a board seat um and so no one was really but i don't i don't understand that strategic decision because i i suspect the rationale somewhere internally in stripe which is pretty flawed is hey we can't do it ourselves because if we did we would be competing with our customers but picking a winner and putting 120 million dollars is tantamount to the same thing

so i don't understand i mean it doesn't make any sense right and stripe raised money at a what 9 500 billion dollar evaluation so look it all flows down from you know the the frothiness at the peak no i'm saying i think i would have it would have been much more credible for stripe to say this is a critical piece of the infrastructure and value chain and payments that we want to own so we're just going to go and put some of our better engineers as like a you know side project and see if we can tack away at something that works i mean i i think a lot of people would have adopted it but i guess to okay that's interesting i mean those are

some good investors um there's there's on the board index and who else according to crunchbase stripe was on the board a business development person from there index was on the board and dom the founder uh and uh looks like brian sugar uh who i know uh who's an angel investor and a founder now but who knows if that's outdated information encryption you guys remember when philip kaplan used to run a website called [ __ ] company absolutely a friend of mine yeah do you want to tell the [ __ ] company story take out for all the people that have no idea well i mean basically what happened was

dot com the dot com world was imploding all the employees didn't have a voice there was no social media at the time there was no blogs at the time the only thing you could really publish on the in the world was like a geocities page you could put up a home page if you knew how to do html there's even pre myspace um and so a friend of mine phil kaplan who does a very successful company called digital kid now started [ __ ] company and it was a message board and what he basically let people do was he would write three headlines one sentence each kind of like before reddit existed where you just put a one-line

hit and then there was comments underneath it might say this company we just got an email this company's laying off people and he would beat all the news stories to the layoffs because he would just run with any email that came in and then people would detail and savage the management of those companies underneath it for malfeasance and explain exactly how ridiculous the spending was in that era where people were burning money like drunken sellers i think this time around it's probably important for employees to understand a couple things one is like who doesn't know what they're doing right so like

companies that are making layoffs those are those are happening they shouldn't get punished for that but you got to think like the fiduciaries that are ripping this money and i mean do you really want to be the person that goes to work at a company that's backed by these folks in round two i mean that's not a signal like like the opposite has always been a signal right meaning when mike moritz makes an investment we all pay attention because we all think wow there's a picker you know and he did that with stripe and with so many other you know great companies and so the likelihood of an employee wanting

to work for a mike mort's backed company or mike morick's governed company is very high right same thing with gurley you know same thing with a lot of a lot of really really good investors john doerr but the opposite should also be true then because if it if you really want to work for a peter thiel back company you should probably not work for one of these companies where these folks who are just completely absent are also governing the board because that just means like nobody knows what's going on we haven't had proper governance for a long time in silicon valley so i mean i think that's what we crashed we crashed and the dropout were in some ways about

incompetent boards both of those tv shows no i mean i definitely see this um you know i think you guys know the the incentive for a traditional venture capitalist that that that maybe isn't um you know motivated by improving their craft but they're motivated you know incentivized primarily by making money is to to raise more capital and get more deals and as you guys know like every venture firm has maybe one or two superstars and then they fill out the ranks and hire a bunch of folks who are maybe not superstars or they don't pay as much attention you know it used to be maybe a vc would sit

on a handful of boards and now it's like you're the board representative for 12 companies and that's a you know you're not going to be able to provide quality time and service to and support to the ceo and the company and more importantly as you guys point out like not provide good governance and governance isn't just about are you signing the docusigns as they come in to approve stuff but it's about actually critiquing the business strategy with the ceo at the board discussion critiquing the spending reviewing the financial plan making sure that everyone's aligned that this makes sense in this funding environment to continue to do this work and i don't see

that a lot i don't know about you guys but i see a lot of vcs either pandering to the ceo because we have founder culture hysteria in silicon valley where it's true the best founders make the thousand x returns and that's it but that doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of the businesses um should be left to their own vices just because there are a few um ultra successful founders that there are a lot of businesses that actually need governance in order to achieve outcomes and i see that lacking heavily in silicon valley because the vcs are more incentivized to raise more money to make more

investments and then pay less attention and just go raise the next fund well i think i think you said the key thing there are really very few star pickers in our business um it takes decades to really prove that out and and those popular but those people that are real pickers i don't think put up with [ __ ] they're not just pickers like so john doerr was deeply involved in google in the early days like you're right i'm i'm simplifying our job but what i'm saying is our job okay at the end of the day is we're picking okay and then once you pick you got to do the work if you pick poorly and you do the same amount of work it doesn't matter nobody's going to remember you yeah and

what ends what ends up happening is the vc flushes the deal because it's not going to be the 100 bagger they don't pay as much attention they let the thing right into the sunset and they're moving on to the next thing but there is still a duty and a responsibility i think to the shareholders and the employees of that company to you know do what sacks mentioned which is can you reduce burn under these circumstances and can you actively engage as a board member to encourage leadership to do that and that doesn't happen but you said the key thing there are few practitioners that really have the gravitas to actually enforce those decisions so you know

there's a reason why in during the great financial crisis there was only one organization that even had the courage forget whether it was right or wrong at the time to even write the r.i.p good times deck right it was sequoia nobody else dared to even put that on page let alone give it to all of their companies knowing that it would leak lest they'd be wrong and the reason sequoia could do it is they're looking at a 40-year franchise and saying the integrity of our franchise is at stake we need to keep doing what we've done before and what it did i think in that case was pulled along a bunch of folks that were not as good

as the top few folks and it helped reorganize because if you see the three or four years after that gfc deck sequoia flushed that whole business right there's an entire turnover of that team and so i think what it speaks to is and we talked about this in a few episodes ago if you're seeking out aum you're going to hire a very different kind of person than if you're helping trying to help build companies and the difference is that when you're trying to raise aum your customer is not the company the customer is the lp and what the lp wants to do is be able to write their investment memo and not get fired and

the way that you do that is by pointing to the team and saying well this person worked at this company this person was a vp of that company and it seems credible but between but being able to invest and being able to actually be a good operator is so different look i'll also say one thing that's important you know i don't like this celebration or sorry the the mockery and the entertainment that comes from failure i i thought [ __ ] company like i was young when it when it was out and you know i would read it and kind of giggle at the stupid companies they got funding you know but to me it's not like the

kind of thing that could should kind of be funny or or laughed at or even to mock failed companies i mean it's cynical i think the capital that's available in the markets today that wasn't that that's not what [ __ ] company was i don't i don't think it was people taking pot shots as much as there was a lot of that oh yeah there was a lot of that that and because yeah there was that time did you admit but would you admit in fairness that there was a lot of people telling the truth oh yeah yeah totally no no but but but a lot of it was like this mockery like can you believe this [ __ ] even existed yadda yadda and the cynicism i think you know

kind of um you know it's it stales out the opportunity for for capital to support you know new new ventures new initiatives like this you know i also think that these businesses that today are looking to raise capital that are um you know let's call them good businesses they have a good opportunity they're going to be challenged in a marketplace where everyone is cynical um and i'll say like scarcity breeds success when there wasn't a lot of venture money and um there were only a you know kind of a few investments that could be made each year there was a decision-making process that says you know look how valuable could this be

versus this other opportunity that i could invest my capital into that says okay the best opportunity wins and gets picked and gets capital in a world where everyone was raising a billion dollar second fund or a three billion dollar fourth fund and you suddenly had an influx of 100 billion dollars of venture money in a year it's a lot like what we saw in crypto markets which is an extraordinary explosion in highly speculative bubble assets and a lot of these businesses maybe shouldn't have existed in the first place too much demand for the stock of private companies uh and all the hedge funds that came into it all the mutual funds enough supply of great founders and

serious teams that are working hard on this i think with the case of fast i agree with your general sentiment about dunking in the case of fast what you had was a founder who was on twitter every day tweeting about how great the company wasn't giving startup advice while he was taking none of it and should not have been giving any of it because they didn't even have product uh market fit lesson learned you know you know you know who should be criticized the next person that backs that guy that's it yeah you know that guy he's got a very interesting history actually as well i think if they've done any colleges they didn't do any

diligence on him apparently he had two companies that were kind of major red flags and i think the diligence issue sacks is one maybe you are having a similar experience to me on the early stage we were seeing deals last year close in a week um we normally have 30 days to vet a deal and maybe a week or two to get our diligence wrapped up sometimes these things overlap but it's what was it you know historically a four to six week process and then it went down to a four to six day process and then people were meeting with you one day and saying they're closed the next were you did you feel like over the last couple years people were doing proper

diligence or not and what impact did diligence have on any of this you know certainly i can't speak to what our competitors were doing i don't think our diligence process changed much we would just have a mentality of when there was a deal that was urgent we would drop everything and focus on that deal and get our work done and it can be done quickly although it's easier for sas companies because the metrics that you're looking at are so standardized it's just a it's an easier process what's the most important thing in diligence in your mind what is the like bullet that like people can't the silver bullet thing

people can't fake probably off sheet customer references so the first thing we do is focus on the on the metrics right and the the financials the sas metrics all that kind of stuff but then you want to talk to customers and you want to understand the value they're getting out of the product and ideally they're off sheet customers explain what offers just means that you know you frequently ask a founder to give you customer references those are on sheet references the off sheet references are the ones that you find yourself that they never gave you so like the easiest off-shoe references to do are when your own portfolio companies are using some other like

piece of software and they tell you about it so no you know that it's a totally non-conflicted situation so that's what you're looking for so one of your companies is using stripe they tell you how great stripe is they tell you what's good about it what's bad about it but right references you're giving so it's sort of like back door references if somebody tells you here's the references you can do the same thing on founders too you can have on sheet and off sheet references for founders and you can do it for vcs yeah but but look i think um i think it's probably a little bit unfair to blame the board of this company too much because the reality is that vcs don't have the leverage or the power

in this business i mean it's found this this whole construction of the industry is set up around founders and at the end of the day it's up to the founder to run the company and they get to do what they want unless they do something criminal otherwise they're gonna be able to do whatever they want and hold on boards generally are very differential to founders and if the founder is not willing to listen to advice what are you going to do about that well that though this is but this is the point you're making i think is not right you think that if peter thiel gave some

advice to slow the company down that this guy uh would have not taken it of course he would have taken i don't know i don't know about that and we would have to consider it if mike morris actually said it he would have had to consider it i think what you're actually speaking to is in hold on in the rush to put so much money to work we've elevated people who don't understand what the job is to do the job and if they're not credible of course they're going to be ignored we all have ignored stupid board members you've done it too david but even you know let's let's actually look at yammer as an example there were one

or two of us that you would talk to pretty consistently you didn't talk to all of them i would always seek out advice look a good a great founder a good founder always seeks out advice no question about it but look this idea that it's governance versus advice i mean the problem with it being governance is all the institutional incentives for vcs are to be pro-founder so no one wants to jam a founder by making them do something they don't want to do well i'm just saying that's that's the way it is no to be clear that became a competitive tactic that emerged as more venture capital funds were raised and more

venture capital was raised from lps prior to that there was a scarcity of venture capital and vcs could be could have good governance and not have to have this whole pro founder model that became the thing that founders fund and andreessen and others kind of proclaimed as being core to their advantage and the reason to pick them over some other vc who's going to meddle in your affairs and by the way both are true there are most vcs as vinod has said publicly add negative value and i totally agree with him on this because they many vcs particularly the ones who aren't you know valuable and don't really have

much to add try to add stuff try to say stuff and they just you know create negative value in the process but on the other hand the whole pro founder model led to the the wework and ubers of the world that you know i think that's right there's a trader there's a trade off i mean look i remember in the 1990s the default was that the founder just got replaced right like as soon as the company's successful you hire a professional ceo that was just like rules rick schmidt i mean even the mighty google did that yeah no i mean that wasn't that by the way it was pretty much less than the point i was trying to make which was like so much of john doerr's influence

was in getting larry and sergey to take ericon as ceo and i really do think that that was like you know a critical move that created probably the that created the most valuable company uh in history uh right and you know it's it was an important imagine if you had one of these founders fund and by the way you know as you guys know i'm very close to the guys at founders fund and um but but imagine if you had a founder's fund type approach where you said look larry and sergey are the founders they know what they're doing let them do it as opposed to the john doe nuance of let's make sure that we

think about the development of this company successfully over time and then convince larry and sergey through a bunch of meetings and riding bikes and whatever else they did with eric you know to like and then and then what about jim breyer didn't he bring cheryl over to facebook i mean like there's a lot of these stories of the really um you know the vcs that really change the trajectory of the business through their work right and but look all i'm saying is the the the good vcs can still have that influence but it's in the form of advice rather than governance right look we just don't call the show no you're right you're right it's it is it

is advice but but for example governance as an example in in in every board that i take the first thing that i say is here's a template i want i'm not going to ask you a bunch of stuff but i just want some transparent reporting and the first page is always how much money at the beginning of the month how much money did you burn you know how much equity did we give out how much is left in the pool simple basic checks and balances right where you're not asking all kinds of crazy questions you're just like all right how much money are we burning how much dilution did we take now tell me what we've done and those are simple

elements of governance way before you get into advanced level setting what's the speed of the plan what's the elevation where are we at what's the altitude and when you ask people for this today yeah i don't know anyone that doesn't do that i'll be honest like yeah anybody that doesn't do it honestly is being that's not what we're talking about i don't know anyone that doesn't do that i mean i'm talking about i would love to see i would deck and to see if that first page is that page the first page and by the way you know where i learned that from from sequoia and kleiner perkins because back

in the day what i saw from founders was oh this is the first thing i have to report on i was taught by founders when i was a when i was a principal at mayfield they're like this is how you do the job and i was like great thanks i mean i was you know sitting beside these guys that were old hands at doing it and that's how i learned this business through that apprenticeship but there was governance and advice and the governance is just about being transparent about how much money are you burning and so you can't you know to david's point if you had just seen that data even if you take those board decks by the way because you have these information rights i don't

know about you guys but we did it we did it as well you take the board deck you circulate it to your other partners there's lots of times where i see board decks and companies where one of my partners are on the board and i send them an email of like hey here's some bullet points of things to think about that i've seen before et cetera et cetera you don't think nobody at stripe or index could have said uh you're burning 10 million dollars a month and there's no revenue so the point is that data isn't there 30 or 40 million in the bank give me a break guys so this was a whole a cataclysmic failure at the advice level and at the governance level and all i'm

saying is it's a good lesson for folks to learn absolutely yeah so let me point people's attention to two articles i wrote that i think are relevant so first we actually published an article on the sas board meeting deck that we would like people to use and obviously they're free to use it or not to jamaa's point right up at the top as a contact center we need to know what's your monthly burn and how much money is in the bank and that and then we just divide those things to create runway we don't like looking at projections for runway totally we just look at how much you burned last month and how much money you got in the

bank they were down to 30 or 40 million dollars burning 10 million a month somebody should have like thrown up a red flag and said better slam on the brakes right now because you're gonna be out of business in three or four months so so that that's that's sort of piece number one the other piece was an arc i wrote a couple years ago called blitz fail which is how not to go off the rails because a lot there's a lot of literature out there about blitz scaling and a lot of startups think they need to scale as rapidly as humanly possible and i wrote this piece about how fast-growing companies that raise lots of money at high valuations basically go

off the rails and they end up imploding and there's like 11 reasons why this happens i sort of categorize them one of the biggest ones is founder psychology you have a founder who believes that things are always going to be up and to the right it's they they it's funny they're always described the same way described as visionary charismatic and the word crazy is often used but it's crazy good and then when everything goes to [ __ ] all of a sudden the word crazy means something pejorative and bad and you know the problem is that you know these characteristics of being highly

visionary and charismatic they also can be combined with an unwillingness to listen to advice and so you know founders who have those qualities they can be a good thing but they have to seek out advice from people who've had experience otherwise they're going to make a mistake and hit the wall being delusional is you know what you need to start these companies like i'm going to beat these incumbents i'm going to change the world a little bit of delusion is good but not when you're looking at how the runway right like that's when you need to be pragmatic i think um you know there's a term of coachability

you know how how coachable is this person as a ceo as a leader and i do think that coachability goes hand in hand with intellectual curiosity i mean if you look at the collisions patrick collison and how much breadth he has and some of the topics he's interested in and the things he writes about it indicates to me a high degree of intellectual curiosity and people who are intellectually curious generally are very humble because they're constantly seeking things they don't know and they recognize that they don't know a lot of things and in that same kind of mentality they are willing to recognize that other individuals can have good

points of view that can inform their perspective and they're willing to change their perspective and i think that's a really key key thing that if you look across the the range of successful founder ceos that scale to 100 billion plus valuations for their businesses that to me is one of the more common threads uh is this kind of intellectual curiosity which translates into a coach ability which translates into an adaptability as and and being willing to take advice and so your board is a tool not kind of a governance structure sitting over you we think the less you are like that the more you are likely to feel like you're bored of the governance structure and

umbrella sitting over you telling you what you can't do i don't think that's what governments means by the way well government's meant to it's meant to look out for the shareholders that's the job right sure but but to act as a fiduciary doesn't mean to like tell the ceo what to do this is my point like yeah i'm just saying it's it's not i think i think he's right about i think freeberg's right about how boards are often perceived by founders i think there is an increasing uh let's call it a hollywood director a hollywood auteur mentality towards vc jaycal on the all-in podcast right well it's basically it's basically look there

there are certain incubators out there and accelerators and whatever who teach these young founders that it's all about their vision and anyone who stands in the way of it is basically interfering with them totally and they they are the author like a hollywood director and you got to stay away from those suits the studio guys right ever that's the mentality they're trying to they're teaching them an adversarial mentality an adversarial mentality and look there are to chamas point there are plenty of vcs who don't know what they're doing they have no useful advice to offer but the better mentality to teach a founder would be like look it the world is so complicated and building a company is so

complicated it's going to be 10 times more difficult if you don't seek out advice so go find board members who will let you ultimately do what you want but will still give you the advice if something's going wrong and what was true at one point in time when paul graham gave this advice and he set up y combinator you didn't want to say their name but it is paul graham had a terrible experience in his company with venture capitalists so he set up that wartime stance between founders and the investment community and you know founders fund became the antithesis of the traditional venture funds and they were going to be founder focused so but that advice then might

have been true and now it's not now we've sung the pendulum too far the other way we did two things because we saw this ten years ago when i started seed investing and then when i started building positions of over five percent i just said to founders if we own over five or ten percent we should have an option of a board seat and we'll do board seat we'll do board training with you we'll just teach you we'll take like here's some decks that we've seen from other you know here's some decks that are available and we'll show you what a board is like and then i would have three founders come two would sit on one's board meeting and i would do three

back-to-back board meetings bring your counsel bring your founders and sit in on the other two board meetings and we'll have a little socratic discussion about what was good about each board meeting we did board meeting training as a proxy for venture worthiness later on and when those companies did go out to the adventure and they had an esop and they had board minute meetings they just looked more impressive to the venture community so i know people say don't do a board it's not cool it actually turns out doing a one-hour board meeting four times a year six times a year even as a seed stage company it does differentiate

you to the venture community i find all right moving on and speaking of boards elon bought a uh chunk of twitter last week a nine percent stake and he's joining the board uh that makes him the largest individual or the larger shareholder um individual or institutional uh he brought the shares in uh march twitter ceo parag agarwal uh tweeted i'm excited to share we're appointing elon musk to our board uh and then jack tweeted in support i'm really happy elon is joining the twitter board exclamation point just to give some level setting here uh in q4 of 2021 twitter had 1.5 billion in revenue up 22 year-over-year they've really been

starting to ring the register over there uh daily active users are solid but modest 217 million uh daily active users 38 million of which in the us 179 million are international and their stated goals uh for q4 of next year 2023 so in a year and a half they want to have 315 million and they want revenue in 2023 to hit 7.5 billion again they're on a 6 billion run rate so i guess that would be an increase of 25 percent uh just general thoughts on uh and elon obviously has been making uh some twitter suggestions uh for the product saks you worked with elon at paypal thoughts on

what this does for that wasn't why you're laughing it's like such a funny transition sexy work with elon and paypal worked for it i'm sure i'm sure he's gonna have some great product ideas but what this is really about is free speech you know right before elon announces he is doing polling asking the twitter user base whether twitter was succeeding or failing in his mission to be an open town square and open marketplace of ideas something like 70 said they were failing at it elon on many occasions has spoken up for free speech he believes that twitter's historic mission is as an open town square and i think he's going to bring that emphasis to the board and it's a

great thing now i think the person who had the best take on the reaction to this was mike solana and he had a few funny tweets about who does he work for is he a founder's fun guy i think yeah i think he he works for peter or founder's fund but he's got a he also writes a great news sub stack newsletter kind of like a blog post called uh pirate wires it's worth checking out is he's a pretty in addition to being a pretty sharp analyst he's actually says a lot of funny things too he's iconoclastic and yeah yeah he he he'll he'll swing the sword yeah so the way he put it is that you know elon joining the board has all the worst people on twitter furious they

think that this guy might actually say free speech and for authoritarians that is an existential threat and then he added um i don't get what the problem is guys if you want censorship you can just go build a new social media company and do censorship there it's a free market thereby turning on its head everything they've been saying which is you know when the people who the authoritarian the authoritarian people who love censorship whenever anyone complained about censorship they would always say well just go create your own social network you know we're free to do whatever you want whatever exactly well this is this is

the free market acting in a way they don't like which is finally somebody who believes in free speech is one to stand up by the largest stake in twitter join the board i mean this is fabulous i think it's really fabulous i think it's pretty amazing yeah and the stock went up 30 percent what do you think yeah i texted you guys in the group chat i think that if he is able to make free speech cool again he'll he'll actually do more doing that than potentially through spacex and tesla and that's already saying a lot because free speech really is this fundamental principle of democracy and it's been decaying we don't know

the implications of a large technology company keeping free speech as a principled pillar of their reason to exist right because we have seen free speech kind of decay and we've seen sort of you know random decision making that seems arbitrary by a lot of these technology companies and you know the payments companies freebrook was mentioning visa and mastercard earlier in the group chat but all of these things can change on a dime if elon makes free speech cool again and figures out a way to make that a principle that everybody can embrace because then if you really believe in that then you go to the next logical

conclusion which is what david has said for forever which is the only solution to you know speech you don't like is more speech and then that creates a surface area that i think you can technically maneuver around so meaning what are the real problems in all of this speech creates it creates a you know content moderation issue right it creates a a spam issue and it creates a sort of wisdom of the crowd's ranking rating issues so misinformation comes to mind yeah but that's that's the wisdom of the crowd's ranking rating issue in my bro so i guess the point is that you know if he can get the twitter employee base

fundamentally on side of this idea of free speech as a principle that i think is enormous because you know that none of the other big tech companies will ever even do that and the capital structures of those companies will never allow a single strong voice like his to enforce that idea so this is the only company where that could happen and i think you know we want to see what this how this plays out i think it's a really really big deal all right freeberg yeah i'll tell you what i think changes facebook twitter even google all acquiesced to significant external pressure over the years i've said this in the past i

believe the founders of those companies are all philosophically fundamentally philosophically aligned with the notion of free speech and absolute freedom of information you know enabling truth-finding over time and the um the edge cases of those platforms ultimately um identify and uncover ways that they can be used against what you know many would consider kind of the the betterment of society and as a result they acquiesce to external pressure that drives some of these censorship decisions and drive some of these these behavioral changes by management but i think that if you concentrate

the ownership of those businesses and rather than have kind of a distributed shareholder base meaning the public markets were the largest single shareholder in twitter to date uh has been jack dorsey at 2.3 percent he actually serves the shareholders and the shareholders ultimately want to see the stock price go up and they ultimately want to see the business make more money and as a result they don't have the same sort of you know the the stakeholders there have kind of a different set of alignments over time you know they're not necessarily the same long term uh or focus meaning does the philosophy come

before the money and i think as you kind of concentrate ownership you have the opportunity and the option now uh to you know make make those sorts of decisions that you can't make when you're broadly unstuck but facebook and google are concentrated they have a different class structure yeah so what are you talking about the issue chamoth is in those companies they're scared to death that they'll lose their employees and have chaos at work government no the issue is government employees it's pressure from above and below it's yeah it's shareholders it's shareholders and government regulators right and so in both cases

to the pressure and employees it's a good point yeah i understand but i'm not sure how twitter changes any of that there it does i'll tell you why because if we look what's happened is le sometime last year i think it happened around chappelle and i think it happened because of coinbase we saw a group of folks say you know what enough's enough yeah we told you to bring your whole self to work we told you we would do your laundry and then at some point netflix was like listen you don't have to agree with every comedian on our platform there's a range of comedians

and if you disagree with this one you can do a walk out you can protest you can make your feelings hurt or you can choose to not work here and then daniel kind of did the same thing he said listen at spotify we're gonna put labels on it if you don't like joe rogan don't work here and then of course we know coinbase did it and toby from shopify did it and now you have twitter doing it and when you apologize and you start listening to this very vocal minority when they're upset and they want to cancel people or they want to de-platform people what do they do they double down you've shown that you're going to listen to them they're

not doing it at coinbase anymore they're not going to do it at spotify anymore they're not doing it at netflix and apple acquiesced right they're like we don't like you know antonio's book chaos monkeys and he said these three things in an award-winning book that we find or we're gonna fire him i think at some point apple's to have to say you know what leave your feelings at work and this is a company leave them at home thank you this is why elon is so dangerous to to these people is because he won't be pushed around the fact of the matter is that this whole woke mob thing it's a paper tiger they don't have the support of most the

population it's a handful of very noisy voices on twitter and social media who insist on having a monopoly on the right to shape all of our narratives yeah they want a monopoly on moral outrage they want to monopoly moral outrage they want a monopoly but they also want a monopoly on the ability to basically to to define uh what is acceptable and and what what the narrative on any topic is going to be and all it takes is one strong person to stand up to the mob as we saw brian armstrong do at coinbase and the mob dissipated he took you know brian had to find another target they find another exactly so yeah elon doing this is a really big deal because again he cannot

be pushed around and he is showing leadership here and all it will take to end this woke censorship is for other founders to stand tall the way that elon has and let's see let's go into the news um employees kind of gripe about i don't think he'll care what regulators gripe about and i don't think he'll care what other shareholders gripe about he'll talk about the long-term opportunity the philosophical alignment with mission and and plow forward and i think that that level of leadership is what separates some you know great businesses from others but this is a very listen there were moments of de-platforming

that were earned by people like alex jones who was saying that the you know families of sandy hook were false flags and their children weren't murdered there are you know milo yiannopoulos and some of these alt-right nazi sympathizing people throwing up swat stickers you know people promoting violence or brigading on these services to attack people into docs people those people those were just cancellations d platformings from youtube in your opinion well i mean anybody inciting violence i think we would all agree should be just platformed jason look at how it's evolved we start with isolated cases like alex jones like a milo that nobody likes and nobody supports the

next thing you know the president united states is being de-platform but again that's supposedly based on him inciting a crowd then what's happening today now we have entire categories of of opinion being banned it starts with code i agree anyone's exactly my point anyone who is descending and now there's invalid anybody who has a single percentage opinion on covet gets banned now anybody who has a dissenting opinion on climate change can be banned there's a story this week on cnn where pinterest have all come look pinterest is a photo sharing site i don't know no one's talking about climate change on pinterest and yet i was but then i got

you hardcore i mean it just shows this censorship now is on autopilot i mean even sites where the conversation is not taking place are banning entire categories of thought and opinion because it disagrees with you know what the experts agree and j cal you could point out your alex jones case to make the case that deplatforming should be allowed the problem is as soon as you make that case it's only a slight other people point to a slight degree away from the next case and then a slight degree away from the next case and then fast forward three years and you're banning entire topics of conversation that ultimately may end up being proven

to be a topic of conversation we should have had and if you look back by the way what great movie woody harrelson the people vs larry flint larry flint was a pornographer it was easy for everyone to chastise him and for everyone to say you know what let's go ahead and de-platform this guy back then and ban him and charge him by the government and at the end of the day he fought for his rights for free speech now all that being said larry flint was publishing using his own printers and selling on the street in a very legally compliant way there is a difference in having someone else's

platform be the mechanism that you use to promote your voice if they choose like pinterest and twitter and youtube and facebook and google to change how their platform operates stacks i actually think that's a commercial decision made by a private company they should have the right to do that but they're going to lose users over time they're going to end up looking like idiots when they're wrong by banning certain topics that we should be having conversations about over time and i do think that there are other mechanisms for us to use the free and open internet this is why i think the free and open internet is more important than anything to have conversations using other

platforms i mean and i'm i'm i mean hold on i just want to respond to david since he did you know counter my point i agree with you i think it went overboard and i think there are more reasonable solutions i think a time-based a bam would have been better for somebody like trump um and maybe waiting to see what happens with the january 6 commission putting that aside i know it's very controversial um you know when you just look at what spotify did to our podcast i don't know if you've looked at us in spotify every other episode says coven19 information here i think this is one of

the best things if people want to talk about ivermectin and it's an open science and freebird you know more about it than any of us and people want to debate it why not link them to the questions credible sources i think that's a great solution i have a question yeah is there an oat milk tag on spotify yes because the service oat milk oat milk oat milk wait when you listen to all in pod on spotify there's a tag that says there's coven at 19. yeah get covered 19 information here yeah to freeburg's argument about these companies should be free to do whatever they want so i know that free bur i want to make two points about this first of all i know freeberg is sincere and

genuine in that belief however most of the people making that argument are completely disingenuous about it because on the one hand they say that these companies should be free to limit speech when they like the outcome of that censorship but meanwhile in congress they're pushing six bills forward to regulate these companies as monopolies so they don't believe that they should be free to do whatever they want they believe that they're monopolies and indeed many of them are monopolies and even the ones that aren't monopolies act the same as all the other ones they act as a cartel to limit speech so that's point number one is that nobody believes this argument that these companies

should be free to do whatever they want the second point is that listen the founding document of our country the is the declaration of independence it says that all of us have rights they're inalienable that means they cannot be taken away okay and in the first couple hundred years of this country it meant that those rights meant that the government couldn't take away your right to free speech but now today where does speech occur it it occurs on these giant social networks that are privately owned they're owned by these large corporations and the fact of the matter is if they take away your right to free speech on these platforms if they censor you if it's a great

you do not have a right to free speech in this country that right needs to be protected the founding fathers did not anticipate that four people would be mitigating the majority of conversations online it's you know like if you're if you're taking off if you look what happened to bilo and alex jones like they don't exist in the public sphere anymore right like they've been literally when these big tech companies all get together as a cartel to deprive you of your free speech rights you have been de-person you've been digitally de-personed and they're not just doing it on speech they're also taking away your right to engage in payments in transactions to earn a living and unless

we stop this now it'll keep going we have to address the giant elephant in the room huge uh which is trump uh i think a lot of this uh you know he hit its pinnacle when people were saying the the sitting president of the united states could not be on twitter that was i think we all agree ridiculous and absurd that the president who was duly elected couldn't have a twitter account but then with the january 6 and the inciting of the violence and you know all the stuff that's coming out and obviously we'll we'll see where that all winds up i'm curious what everybody thinks here about should trump or is trump being put back and reinstated on facebook or twitter

and it's supposed to be a lifetime ban on twitter but if corporate governance changes and people lobby for that do we think that there is any kind of situation where trump has his twitter handle or facebook accounts reinstated and should he have them reinstated i think jason what you suggested is probably the most reasonable thing which was there was a time based penalty you know we're we're getting through we're probably what a third or two thirds of the way through the january 6 stuff so that's going to come and go and i think all roads will probably lead to

a conclusion that after three years it's probably okay to let this guy back and be able to tweet i mean it's not this is not you know controversial stuff at this point you know that the current thing is moving on from ukraine when uh the topic all of a sudden is january 6 all over again and trump which it is on msnbc it's all january 6 all the time again so listen i mean this is not a justification for the widespread censorship that we've seen like i mentioned we've gone so far beyond isolated cases now it's entire categories of thought and this has to be stopped well what you're feeling on trump should

he be reinstated if you were running twitter would you have done a time based if you don't like trump just don't follow him i mean but but frankly it's it's um listen i don't miss the tweets at all i don't miss the tweets at all i really don't um they were damaging your party that's how you felt my thoughts have evolved before when he first got banned i was really supportive of it and there was part of me which was just afraid that he would get reelected etc etc now come two years later and to see all of the stuff and the escalation of d platforming i think the problem is exactly what you

guys have just talked about which is the person that does it today points to the person that does it yesterday who points to the person that did it the day before as the justification and so even though we don't want to draw a straight line between an alex jones and a trump and climate change unfortunately there is this line and so in general now a much more free speech because i think it's much more fragile than i thought it was before gosh your opinion has evolved and intelligent people should respond to new data i appreciate that and i was a person that you know as david said was a

little disingenuous in the sense that i kind of was for free speech as long as it was stuff that i agreed with but two years later a much more on david's original camp now which is we just need to establish this as a pillar of society and not deviate and find credible voices on both sides and then algorithmically and through people power meaning through crowd you know wisdom of the crowds type stuff help people figure out what is truthful and how much truth there is because that's a tractable problem but the minute you start canceling stuff today as i sit in 2022 what i would tell you is i think it's very very bad because it's going in a really bad place

free bro what are your thoughts on trump specifically because it does seem like that's a part of the undercurrent here of you know he's going to be coming back possibly going to be running again and january 6 is concerned he's got the truth social network download the app listen to what he's got to say it's rocking and rolling over there on the the truth app i heard they took it down like it wasn't even working right the uh the new thing he built but what is that what is that smack trading at was it at 20 billion or something still doing well um but look they had you know obviously a reaction a market driven reaction to the fact that he was taken off twitter and he said i'm gonna

go make an alternative and that's you know certainly proving to be technically difficult but as we all know it's not technically impossible you just got probably the wrong people working on it um but if they wanted to have an alternative platform for hearing that voice you know have at it uh i don't know what else to say i mean it's twitter's decision they're they're curating their audience all these guys want to be free speech advocates but at the end of the day they're all editorializing and that's just the world we found ourselves in i hope elon takes a slight jammer to that yeah i mean it's exactly what chamas said is they're all they all

believe in free speech and free markets when it produces the outcome they like but when the outcome is not what they like all of a sudden they're like whoa these companies are monopolies well and here's another opportunity if you're not libertarian and believe in like you know free speech and you know constitution like you could buy shares you could lead a group start a dow start a hedge fund whatever build a block to buy a bunch of shares and then you could get a board seat on twitter and you could have this debate on the board of twitter and if you're absolutely right you are absolutely right and you can see by the way you know small hedge funds with small amounts of capital like

engine number one you know they were able to go up against it exxon and beat them so to your point jason for the people that actually want to censor more if they can organize the capital they absolutely have the right to do that and i and i think that they if they if they're able to do it they should win that's that's that's what mike solano was kind of getting at it's like look if you don't like if you don't like the the free speech that's happening on twitter go create your own social network because that's what they were saying buy the shares and have influence that's how corporations work the shares are the

votes yeah freedberg update us on you know the ukraine is in month two now i'm sorry ukraine is in month two sorry for putting the thumb before it's a tough habit to break freeberg tell us um you know the second order third order effects of fertilizer and food at this point we've had this back and forth and now i think the world is starting to realize hey freeberg was right these downstream effects are going to be significant i ask you a question about these which is can the world not mobilize if these are about one percent of the calories twenty or thirty percent of the calories are in

country could the world not mobilize to find other caloric sources rice fish soybeans whatever or is our system so fragile that we can't rally around sending food to anywhere on the planet despite the fact that we can fly anywhere and go on vacation for two weeks anywhere on the planet no the food system is complex and efficient but it does not have strong redundancy or malleability uh so take for example you know how do you get flour you get flour in um uh in your food from a food company that bought the flour from a miller there are mills around the world that process flat wheat into flour you can't take that same mill and

process corn into flour there's different technology different equipment that's used same with soybeans and so on so when you look at how the food supply chain is constructed you know there's a local point of consumption which is a store then there's a food processor and you work your way kind of up the supply chain and there's a certain input that's required to make the output that people consume and so calories while they might be fungible practically speaking or philosophical or fundamentally speaking they're not necessarily fungible practically speaking on the ground when you actually try and plug in let's say soybeans into the milling supply chain

to make the pasta or the bread that everyone consumes in tunisia it's not going to work and the same is true with rice and then the the more important dynamic force that's underway is that these markets for food and commodities globally are not controlled by government they're controlled by private businesses and there's a market for these products and so what happens is as the food supply chain threat hit countries like china and others started to stockpile they started to buy lots and lots of supply drive up their stocks and their reserves you know for fear of the famine that's about to hit us in about nine months and when they did that there was now less food available

to tunisia to eritrea to egypt and so on and so we're starting to see the effects of that dislocation driving dynamic market forces where certain buyers stock up and then the folks that can't afford to step in not being able to acquire product and being left so not only do we have a local production differential that makes it hard to have all calories be fungible we're also seeing this dynamic where there's a bifurcation where the habs have more and the have-nots have less and that's going to really make this famine kind of hit home you know in a really really sad way in the months to come we're already seeing as as i mentioned two weeks ago yeah i i

as i mentioned a few weeks ago the fertilizer problem driving acreage down so the usda farm report comes out they survey farmers and figure out how much they're going to plant every year and they just downgraded the number of corn acres they're going to get planted this year which is happening starting this month from 93 million acres to 89 million that doesn't sound like a lot but four million percent yeah four million acres coming out of production of corn in the u.s is an incredible amount of calories that are not going to be planted to corn and so that has all these downstream effects and again this this crop doesn't come to harvest till you know september october then it's

going to get processed and it turns into food so by the time the the effects of this decision making hit the marketplace the availability of calories and the stockpiling that's going on it's like boom some countries are going to be you know they're going to have a limited budget they're only going to be able to access so much food and they can't access any and other countries are going to be fine the united states is going to be fine western europe will be fine china will be fine sri lanka is going to be a mess northern and eastern africa is going to be a mess i mean there's like places around the world that we are going to

have to scramble i i don't have a real easy answer there's no simple plug-and-play here it's going to be a really complex set of problems that are going to need to be solved well sri lanka does grow a lot of its own food so they may be okay because they're in that importer right i mean they're a pretty big net importer so they make a lot of food but they they rely on imports a lot for for calories there so yeah i mean that's the case with a lot of places around the world a lot of people think oh we have farmers but most countries you know particularly in the developing world are net importers they they they rely on third-party

supplies of food so sure but but a lot of what you're talking about though are not um they're they're processed foods that come into the country sacks anything to add here well i mean i think that the ukraine war is kind of entering a chronic phase i mean the sort of entering a new phase the first phase you'd have to say that ukrainians won the you know the russia wanted to topple zilinski's regime maybe take kiev they obviously failed in that now we're in this uh phase where the fighting is over in the donbass it's basically the civil war that's been going on there since 2014. and um and and really that's what it's

now about uh zielinski has acknowledged that ukraine will not be part of nato so that issue is kind of off the table and so what they're really fighting over now is the status of these disputed territories in eastern ukraine and i think it's going to go on for a long time that's what you know general miley test fighting could go on for years i think it's going to become a sort of permanent feature in the background of biden's presidency and um i mean i think the good news is that hopefully the war three uh aspect is off the table it seems like the calls for us to impose a no-fly zone

or to put boots on the ground which you were hearing a lot of a few weeks ago seems like that's off the table so now is this going to be a protracted i think civil war going on in the donbass uh with between ukraine and and uh russia and their proxies which would mean uh sacks correct me if i'm wrong that putin will be hobbled forever they're not gonna be a world power and his power is going to deprecate because he's going to be busy fighting this non-winnable war for some period of time which is in a way saying biden did it perfectly and checkmated him i'm saying that's going to be your assessment if this actually does go down

this way that there's like a civil war going on and and putin is crippled that would be checkmate or no i think i i think that clearly the the state department's strategy here is to make putin bleed in eastern ukraine and to protect this thing and make it go on as long as possible i think that's a risky strategy because this thing could always spin out of control could it be effective is there a chance it could be effective well i mean if the goal is to bleed putin yes it could be effective bleeding putin however i don't know that that needed to be the key geostrategic objective of the united states right now i don't know i don't know because look

china is our main threat china is a pure competitor to the united states russia is not our economy is 15 times bigger than russia's china's economy is about the same size as ours that is a real threat so you know there are cost to us as well there are clearly cost of putin of this but there are a huge cost to us as well uh freebird described the risk the supply chain we've had to now spend a lot more money um building up the defense in europe we're going to be pinned down in europe uh we should really be moving some of those resources from europe to east asia i

mean that's really where the pivot to asia is what we thought we were supposed to be doing until quite recently now we're gonna be bogged down there and there's still risks of inflation and recession in the us and i think if we are in a recession later this year i think a lot of people in the u.s will be asking what was this all for and if you go read my article that just came out yesterday with those based on my speech is published in the american conservative look this war was easily avoidable i mean the state department could have avoided this war very easily i thought i listened to your speech i thought your points that you were very

clear on hey putin started this he is the aggressor it's his responsibility but you know we do need to think about our foreign policy as a country and regime change is probably not a winning strategy for us although in this case it might it seems like it's a possibility now so who knows uh i don't know i don't think we're gonna regime change but if we do there's no reason to believe that we're gonna get something much better in every case where we push for regime change we've actually gotten the same or worse um so yeah i don't think that should be our objective um you know i look i think we have a bunch

of bad options now that the war's already started the best option would have been to avoid this war in the first place and if this thing drags on for years and the u.s economy tips into recession people will look back and say why didn't joe biden's state department in the year 2021 do a much more effective job preventing this war let me ask you let me ask this follow-up question as we wrap here um chamoth uh i've been thinking about what it what should a strategic objective be for america and the number one strategic objective i could think of was uh or one of the top ones would be to

build a strong relationship with india which obviously uh you know it has an adversarial relationship with china already on the border of pakistan and then obviously you know has relations with russia what would be on the top of each of your lists saks and chamoth chemical first on priority here if we're thinking fresh looking at the world with china in retreat uh sort of disengaging from the west with russia on their heels what could the united states and the west do as a preemptive measure to really solidify democracy and you know the the world order a peaceful world order i'll answer it slightly differently which is

we need to put ourselves in a position to not be dependent on any country because then we can actually dictate what we think the right approach and solution is from first principles and have the courage to stick it through to get to the other side of it so there are really two things we need to do the first which we've kind of perverted unnecessarily is energy independence and we've allowed too many people to conflate and muddy the water on what energy independence means you know nobody's nobody was ever advocating for coal but you know the amount of coal that we could have burned as a bridge

fuel to lng which could have been a bridge fuel to things like nuclear and wind and solar that path was pretty clear but we got in our own way we have to get out of our own way okay so energy independence i think beyond anything else strategic probably an order of magnet it is the most important thing and then secondarily there are certain areas for the future of those future economies where we need to have complete capability and know-how and the most important ones there are the specialty chemicals that we need especially chemicals that we need to basically support climate change writ large to support

battery production writ large and then semiconductors get those two things completely under us control on top of energy independence and honestly we would be a dominant world power for the next 200 years on our terms so the road to resiliency saks you're now the secretary of state what are your key priorities the u.s grand strategy has always been to prevent the rise of a pure competitor who can dominate their region and challenge us for global hegemony there's only one country in the world that can do that right now to us which is china so the pivot to asia as obama said was fundamentally correct but we have not

followed through and executed it and now our attention is distracted and bogged down by what's happening in europe i would seek a negotiated settlement to this war now that the zielinski government has survived putin has been unable to take western ukraine and furthermore that zilinski has given up being part of nato the only thing left okay is this is this fight in the dawn bass there's a there's an agreement already on the table called the minsk accords that could allow us to settle that meanwhile pivoting to asia yeah wrap it up meanwhile pivot to asia create a strong alliance

of countries in east asia who are threatened by china we already are friends with many of them you've got japan south korea taiwan you've got vietnam create a balancing alliance of those countries to prevent china from rising to the point where it can threaten us for global hegemony that should be our main priority geopolitically great uh all right there you have it folks for the rain man david sacks the dictator polly hoppetea and the sultan of science david freeman i'm your boy jacao and we will see you all in miami may 15th 16th and 17th love you boys bye bye love you besties [Music]

besties [Music] it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow [Music] we need to get mercy's [Music] i'm going on [Music]