All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - #AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

This talk was recorded LIVE at the All-In Summit in Miami and included slides. To watch on YouTube, check out our All-In Summit playlist: https://bit.ly/aisytplaylist   0:00 Tim Urban gives a talk on political discourse in America and explains high-rung vs. low-rung thinking 26:20 The Besties and Keith Rabois join Tim Urban on stage for a roundtable discussion on cancel culture 51:23 Keith Rabois talks about taking a pause on new investments in 2022 and gives his take on other major VC players Follow the guests: https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy https://twitter.com/rabois Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect

Next up is my good friend Tim Irving from Wait But Why I asked him to do this as a favor He gets a huge speaking fee. I said we have no budget He said jayga I think it's 7500 ticket. I said I have no budget. I stole it all um and He has the number one talk In the history of Ted on YouTube My pal Tim Irving Tim Marvin. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome.

You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome.

You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome.

You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. He said something yesterday to Nate Silver when he after about when eight one poker and he was like, you're not Oh, I'm gonna take away your speaking fee and I was like the fuck speaking fee All right, so the title of my talk is Tim talks about politics and other things that are probably a bad idea to talk about in front of all these people and I want to start with why am I even writing about politics?

I don't like politics I like writing about the science and tech in the future and procrastination and things that interest me. But as I'm thinking about the future and all this awesome stuff that we could have, I started to have a bad feeling. I would think of society kind of like a giant organism. And this is how I was grew up assuming

that society was like, it's like a big grownup. But when I looked around, it looked more like a poopy pants six-year-old who dropped its ice cream. And I feel like this is what a lot of people are kind of getting at in these talks. We're talking about all this crazy polarization and mobs. And to me, I just look out and I see this. I see kind of reverting.

And people are acting like they're in middle school and like, we can't communicate and what's going on. So I started putting my mind to this. Now, what was the problem? And the problem is already complicated and I'm not gonna try to get into the whole thing today, but I think that what we can do is have a better framework to talk about the problem.

I think that we are very constrained to this one-dimensional axis. It's like a straight jacket in our conversations. You hear people say, the problem is, you know, the far left and the far right, we need to be in the center, we need to be more moderate. But what is that in the center is just a policy position, right? The far left and far right aren't inherently bad. The far left is just kind of radical and questioning everything and their experimental and the far right is just questioning, maybe we messed up, maybe we should go back to the way things were.

I mean, there's nothing inherently better or worse about any part of the spectrum. But we're using these words to try to get it something else, which is a centrist moderate. We don't really mean in the middle of the spectrum. I think we're talking about a different axis. I call it the ladder. So I think bringing our political discussions into two dimensions can be hugely helpful. Now, sometimes you'll see the political compass,

you'll see politics in 2D, but that's still all what you think. That's all different ways to look at what you think about politics. The ladder is a how you think axis. So there's some nuance to it. It's a spectrum, but for our purposes, let's just focus on the two kind of core ideas. Here, there's high-run political thinking, high-run politics, and low-run politics. So the high-runs, you

can kind of divide into high-run progressivism and high-run conservatism, which I kind of think is like too arguing giants, like they're like, you know, the collective efforts of high-run progressiveism conservatism are kind of like lawyers in a courtroom. They're heated, they don't like each other a lot of the time, they have very different ideas of how things should go, but it's kind of like, you know, the two lawyers in a courtroom, this is kind of a wink that goes on where they understand ultimately, they're on the same team. They're two sides of a truth kind of discovery machine.

And I think this is the same thing. They don't like each other, but they're actually, ultimately, on the same team trying to figure out the roadmap. How do we move forward? And the conversations in high-ranked politics are they're complex. They're nuanced. You know, it's, there's different realms.

There's what it's, right? They'll science in history, arguing about what is. That's hard to figure out. There's what should's, right? Those science and history arguing about what is, that's hard to figure out. There's what should be, right? That's philosophy and ethics. Then there's, you know, even if they agree on those two things, how do we get there, right? What are the right policy strategies,

experimentation, testing? So there's a lot of nuance, there's a lot of complexity. And one of the core defining features is, if this is how you form beliefs, right, you know, you go from, I don't know, some kind of process to I know. High wrong politics is all about truth. They're geared towards truth. They start here.

And I don't know. There's kind of an inherent humility to this process. So I think of humility a little bit like trying to stay on a tight row. It's not easy, right? We are, it's easy for your confidence. You have the done and crew routine, your confidence shoots up when you first learn something and then it goes down after you realize,

you don't know as much as you know. Then sometimes you can go too low. So when you go too low, you're in the insecure zone. You actually know more than you think you know. But you're just not even some kind of imposter syndrome. Above the line, we're in the arrogant zone, very common in politics, obviously. You think you know more than you really actually do.

So you could even measure it. Like this is how much you're full of shit. How much above the amount above the line you are. And in high-run politics, look, no one is greatest staying on the tightrope. It's very hard, but it's, the culture of high-run politics is helpful because it can actually, it humbles you

because people will disagree with you. And it's cool in kind of a high-run political culture to be humble. Like if you say, I don't know or you say, yeah, I haven't thought about that issue. That makes you seem smart in high-run politics, right? It's so it's encouraged. Whatever the culture finds cool, we're going to do more of. A core thing about high-run politics, we don't identify with our ideas. So I think of ideas when you're in this zone

are like a machine that you built. It's like a hypothesis, right? You put the boxing gloves on, you let your friends kick it. Go to town, you throw it out there, people try to argue with it, the besties are big on this, right? They love an opportunity, relish an opportunity to just tell the other person

they're wrong or here's why you're biased or here's why you're being hypocritical. And this is what high-rank politics is about. No one takes it personally. You're just kicking my machine and I'm saying I bet my machine can stand up to it and they're saying I bet it can. And if it does, man, I just got more confident

because I just realized this thing is pretty strong. If they break it, it doesn't feel good, but I just got a little smarter. I just got a little bit less dumb because I learned something I was wrong about. So they're kicking it and, you know, you're watching them box is dialectic. When you watch them box together, sometimes you play devil's

advocate. You take the bat to your own idea. This is kind of how you can move up that humility tight rope to a more knowledgeable place. Principles wise, one of the things that defines high running politics is consistency. It's not, again, there's left-right center. So the principles will totally vary,

but there's consistency either way. So, classic example Elon's talking about yesterday, free speech doesn't count to fight for the free speech of people who you agree with. Every single person in history has had that principle. That's the yellow zone. It's very easy to support for your principles when it's also supporting your team.

The challenge comes when it's not. When it's people you don't like saying things you don't like, for example. Or when it's your team trying to shut down the free speech of others, and you know it's wrong even though you do hate that speech. That's when you have to choose green zone or orange zone. High-ranked politics is great about staying in the green zone. You will see them go against their own team all the time if it doesn't jive with their principles.

I think if you take a big step back, this thing again, it gets heated. People mistake high wrong politics. It's all, we should be all, we should be kind of withdrawn and irrational. But I think it's actually, also, it can be very passionate, very emotional, very heated. People care deeply in high wrong.

They can form coalitions and do marches and still. And stuff like that. It's just that they care about truth. They're consistent with their principles. They don't identify with their ideas. They like to argue. And ultimately, it's a positive some game with a positive effect on the country.

This is what drives the country forward. And the science academy, this is what drives knowledge forward. This is what drives innovation forward is people are able to disagree. Now, you get to the other thing that is lowering politics. Lowering politics, I have a name for it.

I call it political Disney World. And I call it that because it's a land of rainbows and unicorns and a bunch of people who will not change their mind under any circumstances. It's a land of good guys and bad guys. The good guys are angels perfectly righteous. The bad guys are awful in every possible way, and the good guys have good ideas,

and the bad guys have bad ideas. And there's a checklist. In high-ranked politics, if someone tells me their position on guns, I have no idea what their position is on climate change, or on abortion, or on immigration, in low-ranked politics. You hear one position from someone, boom, I, you can just look at their demeanor and I know

every single position they've got on every single issue. The same concept in lowering politics. Again, no one thinks they're in lowering politics. So people there will think, yeah, of course, I value truth, but they don't. They're actually starting it. I know. They start at the checklist item and now they say, well, I have to prove this is correct. So when they read an article, they put, they won't read the article. But if they read the article that disagrees with them,

they'll meet their, they're, they're, they're a brick wall in their head about, you know, this can't be true. This person is biased. This is, this is, you know, ad hominem, whatever. And when they read an article that agrees with them when they hear an opinion, they'll, there's all that skepticism disappears. And suddenly it must be true. Yes, of course. So I talked about high-run politics. It's like the ideas are like machines, right? It's not, you know, you don't get sensitive about it. You kick the machine, right?

Low-run politics, it's like a baby, a very cute baby. Who you love so much. So people's ideas, they're sacred in low-run politics. And this is why, you know, you can kick a machine and that's no big deal. If you kick a baby, you're an asshole. And so on the high-runs, people who can disobey, you have two axes here, decency, and agreement, and they're totally different.

You can have people that disagree with you that are awesome. And vice versa, you can have people that agree with you in their assholes. But in low-run politics, it's very simple. People who agree with you, they're good people. People who don't, their assholes. So this is what it comes down to is, you can have people that agree with you in their assholes, but in low-rank politics, it's very simple. People who have greened through, they're good people, people who don't, their assholes. So this is, you know, what it comes down to is, you know, you have a high-ranking discussion

and it kind of looks like this, they're examining things, low-ranking discussion, it's like, fucking shit, that's a cute baby, God, it's such a good baby, how awful are people who don't like the baby? So awful, right? This is very common, if you listen to a low-rank political discussion,

this is essentially what's happening, they're sitting around and they're talking about how right they are and how awful the people in dangerous, the people are who disagree with them. And that's just, they'll just talk about that forever and ever and ever. Principles, same idea here. You actually stick with the left circle. You'll constantly give away here for low-run politics

is that when it's not convenient yellow circle territory, they will almost always jump over to the orange circle. You'll have, again, so free speech you'll see is a perfect litmus test. As soon as it's free speech, people you don't like all those principles disappear. We can, how about COVID marches? All people are completely worked up

about lockdown marches in right wing states. Soon as it's Marchist or racial justice, all good, all good. This is a public health crisis, right? That's orange material. How about all the people who are super anti-immigration policies and surveillance policies and foreign policy and debt issues. And then as soon as it's the other president now, the your president's in office,

all the same policies stay and you're fine with them. You know, the classic example, the debt was the worst thing in the world during Obama's presidency. And then Trump comes in office, starts doing up to these tax packages that are adding to it and suddenly it's no problem. So there's endless examples here.

If high-ranked politics is kind of this positive, some game low-ranked politics, I see it much more, like two screaming giants. And if the high-ranked kind of emergent property is intelligence and progress, the low-ranked emergent property is just strength and fighting for power. It's a battle of good versus evil. And the big goal is not trying to create a more perfect union.

Again, they think that's the goal, but the big goal really is beating the bad guys. It's a zero-sum game that ultimately has a negative effect. So I know I just threw a lot at you because I wanted to kind of cover the different bases of this to give a feel for what I'm talking about here. This is the framework that I think is very useful. I've been living with it now for a few years.

I've been having conversations with it. And I find that it clarifies a lot and it helps with a lot of things. Like, for example, if you just think it's a horizontal axis. So, A, as I said, you know, you mistake that the far left and right must be the problem. But it's not. It's the low wrongs that are the problem.

That's actually what people are trying to say. The moderate centrist, you know, think, that's not what what people are trying to say. The moderate-centrist thing. That's not what they're actually trying to say. They're trying to say high-run, which can span the horizontal axis. There's more than one tug of war going on. We think if you just have one axis, well, it's left versus right. And that is a tug of war. Oaths and the high-end low-runs, that is, you know, they are fighting for what they want.

But there's a tug of war going on from the North and South as well. The progressive, I think I know a lot of people in here probably are thinking, I'm in that upper left guy. That's my guess. And if that's true and it might be true, you do have a tug of war going on against that upper right guy. You also have a tug of war going on against that lower left guy.

This is the thing that I think is important to realize is when you have this, that the people who are on your team, they also hate Trump or whatever, they might be actually like the biggest impediment to what you care about politically. They undermine the progress of what you care about. It also can enhance kind of collaboration because if you're in one of those upper giants, the other upper giant is a lot more on your ultimate team. If you take a big step back, then the lower giant that wears the same color. So once you start to, I think this where I think it helps to kind of loosen some of the

tribalism and give some nuance to our discussions and give some nuance to what we're trying to do. Now, the story I wanted to talk about here is that this is normal, by the way. This is not a problem. Every democracy in the world will have this. The founders knew this would be here. The goal was not to suppress low-rungness. It was to contain it.

And actually, in the economy, to harness it for progress. But in politics, to contain it so it can't totally take over, they contain it by taking away the physical cudgel. You know, you can't just conquer and become a dictator, like so many low-rung giants in other countries have done. There's laws here, and most importantly, there's kind of a high-rung immune system, which is just vigorous defenses, defense against low-rung infringement. Low-rung, this will try to shut down the conversations and the high-runs and the high-runs.

Resist, they say no, fuck off. You can't enforce your echo chamber upon us. You're allowed to have your echo chamber. That's fine, you can't enforce it. So this is how it's supposed to be now. Part of the reason we're all here continually and each talk talking about man politics is awful and things are bad and there's a poopy-paced pants,

six-year-old with the ice cream falling is because of, I think, we've had some big changes to the environment. This is the kind of simple human equation I think about. You've got human nature as constant. The environment is what changes and that produces different behavior. Right? You know, the people who are really hard and during war, you know, they're not different, biologically than us, they just were put in a very different environment and it created

different kinds of people. Our environment has changed a lot and I think it's causing a lot of problems. I think it's causing a low-rung flare-up. Here's one way to think about it. In the 60s, you've got intra-party factions within the parties. You have a lot of progressive Republicans and conservative Democrats, and these factions within the parties, they hate each other, right? Which was a source of tribalism.

Some people were just so focused on the other people in their party, the other factions. There's the national parties, like we have, that we talk about a lot today, Republicans and Democrats nationally, that was a source of tribalism. And then there was this, you know this USSR, and also before that Hitler, like there were all these scary foreign enemies that created this kind of macro tribalism on the national level. So you have patriotism, which is one kind of tribalism,

but it also unifies down below. And the intra-party factions might actually cause the national parties to collaborate sometimes. So it's not that people were less tribal, it's that tribalism was distributed. What's happened is now the inter-party factions have disappeared because the conservative Democrats have all gone to the Republicans,

the progressive Republicans have all gone for lots of reasons, get into some other talk. But that's waned. There's still a little, you still have Bernie and Hillary not liking, people not liking it, but it's much less of a thing. Likewise, you still have, yes, Russia, but mostly, that's not the focus.

In fact, the focus is so not here that when there's a foreign thing now, usually we'll just use it as like political fodder for our national debate. All the Russians are on their side, no, they're on their side, right? And there's no patriotism that unites anymore. What you have is one big old political divide. And all the tribalism, from all those things, has concentrated into one place,

which isn't unhealthy. That's not great. I don't think that's good. And so this is one environmental change. No one's fault. It's just what happened. Then you also have a lot of things with the electoral map. You have between Jerry Mandering and geographic sorting. You have purple counties turning mostly red and blue now, which means primaries are actually electing the farthest right. And left people is opposed to people who can win a general election. There's a lot of other kind of little environmental changes. But one huge one that we talk about is the media. I think of a media, I'd like to place them on a media matrix accuracy

on the y-axis and the objectivity. So where you want to be is the top middle, right? And actually, for a long time, there was incentive magnet to be there for ABC, CBS, NBC, right? They didn't want to seem like they were inaccurate and had to cater to the whole country, which kept them somewhat close to that. There was this incentive magnet.

Today, you have cable TV, and then eventually, you have talk radio, and you've got, then the internet and all these websites, you have tribal media, which isn't totally different set of incentives you cater to one side only You it's more bias The more clicks and accuracy is just not a concern to the audience as they end up having and then you have this feedback loop Like was discussed yesterday where once you Cater to that now you have to keep that going. You've now lost a neutral audience.

And so now we have a lot of Americans super addicted to a really trashy reality show. Real politicians are watching them. And then I took me a long time to make this by the way. And then, I took me a long time to make this by the way. I think McConnell is my favorite. Anyway, so then you've got, of course, the big bomb drops in our environment. You've got social media. This is a real graph showing people retweet things they agree with to people they agree

with almost entirely, right? It's these algorithmic bubbles. It's insane. And so if you're one of the people that actually, I follow all kinds of different people, you're very rare. Because, and it didn't, again, it didn't used to be this way. John Ronson talks about how it used to be

a radical deshaming like Twitter. You go on and be like, oh, I do this embarrassing thing. People would be like me too. And it'd be like, oh, so nice and fuzzy at the very beginning. And then it turned into, wait a second, this bad guy is harassing women at work and now actually this woman has power for the first time. She can talk about it on social media, can create a whole kind of coalition against it,

and he gets fired and it's exhilarating and that's good, right? This is speaking truth to power. Problem is, now people are exhilarating and they're saying who's next, right? And you have this new source of power, which again, can be used for good, but it's gotten picked up by a lot of the low-rank tribes who have started to use this cudgel, not started, it's been a while now, creating mobs to actually enforce low-rank politics. And what happens is you end up with high-ranked world, very scared, kind of caught off guard. The normal defenses, the normal immune system,

is not doing its job. And so what happens when the high-run world gets scared? This is a very, you know, it can set off a domino effect. Imagine we picture, this is the high-run world, these are brains. This is what a bunch of high-run people in a community think. They all think different things based on the color, right? Now if we draw a circle around them, this is imagining what they're saying is the circles color. So here is the perfect Taiwan community, right? Everyone is to diverse, you know, thinking, and they're saying what they're thinking and it connects together into this super brain, and it's awesome, right? But now, maybe the social media cudgel, maybe something else starts

to be a little bit scary, and this one group starts to say, the only opinion that's okay is the orange opinion. Anyone who says anything other than the orange opinion is an awful person. The high wrong immune system's supposed to kick in and say, cool, fuck off. If it doesn't say that, everyone starts getting scared.

And then cowardice starts to spread. And before you know it, everyone's just saying the orange out loud, even if they don't agree with it. No one wants to outwardly say what they think anymore. And the problem is, you can't actually see what's going on in the brains. You only know what people are thinking based on what they're saying. So all people see is this.

So if you're this guy who actually has one opinion and actually is full of diverse thinking around them, they don't know that. They assume it must look like this. Everyone starts to feel like, I'm the only one who thinks this. I'm the only one who doesn't like this movement or this politician or whatever. And the group intelligence that's so awesome about high-run politics, it disappears.

I think what we're seeing is, if you know, why are things so bad? I don't think it's because we moved to the farm right and far left. I think it's because you have a low-run flare-up generated by changes of the environment, and the high-runs have been caught off guard by really rapid environment changes and they've just disappeared.

They've shrunk away. And the low-runs are running, you know, buck wild. You can see this on the right, I think, mostly in Washington. You see the depth ceiling, the debt ceiling being used as a weapon in a way that should never happen. You see, Maconnell and the Senate, not putting through a Senate candidate, Supreme Court candidate because it's the last year, totally unprecedented, that's not the rule.

Then four years later, they go and they put their own candidate, this is low wrong shit. Of course, Trump with the election, I mean, Reagan's big thing was the peaceful transition of powers, what makes a special, and Trump, of course, is the exact opposite. On the left, I think we see it less in Washington, and much more in culture. I think, wokeness is two things. It's a far left ideology, and it is far left. It's postmodern, and it's Marxist. That's fine.

You can have those things in the high rungs. The thing that makes wness low-wrong is the way they treat others. You can go and have your own, but you can have your own echo chamber and do it with the woke mantra is, what a low-wrong person in a liberal country is supposed to say is, I don't like these ideas,

so I won't listen to them. What you're not supposed to be able to say is, I don't like the ideas, so no one is allowed to listen to them, right? A disinvitation on campus, which has been very common, right? It's not saying, I won't go to that talk, which is a low wrong thing to say. It's much worse. It's saying, no one on this campus is allowed to hear that talk. And we see that having played out.

We see James Bennett, the editor of the New York Times op-ed section, getting fired because he published an op-ed by Tom Cotton that 62% of the country agreed with, but it didn't jive with woke orthodoxy. You see Denise Young and Apple, a black woman who's ahead of diversity, who says, to me, diversity is not, you know, it's more complicated than just about something like race. When I look at a 12 blue-eyed blonde hair guy's, I see diversity. I see different people, diverse and different ways. She was fired for saying that. You can go on and on.

Medical journals are retracting papers that have never retracted papers before because double peer review papers because they get a rise on Twitter from the Woke Mob. So I think we're seeing this in different ways. But to me, it's all one big story, which is that we're having a low-run flare-up and these low-run giants are out of hand. They're doing things they're not supposed to be able to be doing and they're doing that because the immune system is failing and that's why we all look like this.

Now the good news is, I do think this can change. I don't think most people are like this. I think most people are, and by the way, if you think this is all another binary divide, we are all high-run and and low wrong in different times. And that's one of the big differences here. I think that if we want to get out of this and get back to here, we need two things. We need awareness, which is the first thing. We need to be aware of, I think, this access and to think about not just where am I being bullied intellectually? What's really the low wrong thing and what's not? But also, where are we being low wrong? What's really the low-rank thing and what's not?

But also, where are we being low-ranked? Because we all can do this. This is a huge part of our brain that wants to go and identify with our ideas and be hypocritical. So where am I doing it? Where are the people around me doing it? And maybe realizing, okay, maybe the people that on the high-rungs when I am there,

that disagree with me horizontally, maybe those are my friends a lot more than the low-rung people that are voting for the same candidate. And finally, awareness without saying anything out loud is useless, right? Awareness has to be coupled with courage. People have to start speaking out. And actually, the high-rung immune system is built of courage. It's built of people actually standing up

and you've seen this with some companies declaring we will not, we will not upload political plays. That's courage in the face of a cudgel that's trying to get them to be political. And so I think if you can have a little bit more awareness and a little bit more courage, this kind of, this low-run flare-up can be, I think, controlled.

And I think we can end up in a better place. Thank you. What? What? What? What? Wow. What?

What? Amazing. It's truly epic. What an amazing talk to follow the talk we had earlier, I think, with, I don't know if you've got to witness it, the Palmer Lucky talk. I was trying to think about how to trash you because it was so popular to do it. So you were going to go low-rong. Yeah, I was. But, I mean, in fact, you know, that, I think Palmer and I had some low-rong moments where, you moments where he was doing the anti-hillary stuff. I was dunking on him for it. And then we saw an example of maybe adult high-run behavior of like, hey, let's sit here

and talk about the differences. I want to put out there just talking about the woke movement for a second. One of the major challenges I had in this event was certain people attending the event made some people in that group unwilling to come to the event, no offense, Keith. In other words, Keith sacks, and then even Glen Grunwald and Greenwald, I'm sorry, and Matt Taibi were triggers for certain people to not come speak.

They were gonna kick the baby. They were gonna kick the baby. They were gonna kick the baby. And so, I think, and then on the right, we have, I think, some pleasure in knowing you're triggering the lives. And it's exacerbated this. It's hard for me as a conference producer or a podcast producer to get the two sides

to sit and just have a reasonable discussion at the time, how do we break that log jam of the right just loves to troll and trigger the lives and the lives are like, I'm not even participating in the discussion with this group of people, that group of people, you know, the. I think we're key. You just can't put it in. Yeah. Oh, by the way, please welcome Keith Roboi. He triggers a lot of lives. But let's start there. And then Keith, I'd love to hear your respond to this dynamic,

which I know you are fully aware of. Yeah. So I think that we can get some clear definitions here. Not wanting to go to something that, you know, a high-runner says, oh, they disagree with me, great, let me go. And that's what they really want to hear, because I want to learn something, right? The low-runner says, fuck those evil, awful people, I'm not going to go, right?

They storm away. Fine, you're in a liberal country, live and let live. You, these are both okay. What's not okay is the low-rongers, in pressuring you to kick off those speakers because otherwise they're going to start a movement, a petition, a boycott of your show that's gonna end up hurting you in some way,

taking, smearing you on social media and to pressuring this to not happen at all. That's saying no one's allowed to go to that conference. That's what's not okay. It's interesting you bring this up. I shared with you that back channel. It was beautiful. There was back channel of, you know,

how beautiful a moment was with the high-run discussion we just had. There was also a dark moment before the event where a group of people who did not agree were doing what you're saying. The woke mob was saying, we need to get other people on the left. Oh, David,

David, that's time. David, there's just a tell me when Rob Boy got here. So there was literally to your point, an intolerance level of, not only are we not gonna come to all in summit because sacks or this person or that

person are there, we're going to start telling other people to not go and not participate. It literally happened and I had to stop. But this is a so look, this conference did happen, those people did come ideas were spread, so this is a victory for high-runness, this is. So then to you Keith, tell us why is it so pleasurable to trigger the lib's David and Keith? No, in all seriousness, you love to debate, you take all comers, no problem, you want to get in the arena. What you're seeing now? How does I actually just interject on that? Sure. So, I mean, speaking for myself, I don't get any pleasure in triggering lives, and that's not my objective,

and I don't think it's necessarily key to either. What you're really doing is because we are willing to debate and we're not afraid to have the conversation, you're now redefining that as triggering other people. No, we're not, we're just willing to have a conversation. Yeah! Yeah! Now, I think it's really easy to tell who are the people who have good points to make and have intellectual confidence because they're the ones willing to show up and have conversations. And I think it's the biggest cop out for anybody to say why can't be your comfort big eyes see this name of this name on your agenda how lame is that

what and and to be honest you know a lot of the positions uh... i think you and paumer probably disagree on the approach to you can he's probably very pro supporting that and you might be a little more dubbish yeah so i think two points first of all i i i i'd

i'd took on this fools errand like ten years ago of correcting everything wrong on the internet that we want to get there to see an idea uh... i thought it might got myself out of that but the reason why did it was i felt like wow someone in uh... he doesn't know any better might read something that's wrong and they might believe it and so at least if I start correcting it,

they'll see that there's multiple perspectives and then they'll have to dig in as opposed to just take this for granted. The second thing is, yeah, I have no desire to trigger the lives, but I do feel I have a platform and I don't want to die without having used whatever influence I have to proselytize for ideas I believe in.

So if I have 300,000 followers, I feel I would be neglecting like my life, like benefits of my life, if I'm not proselytizing for the few five, six, seven, eight, nine things I care about. And so I don't wanna wake up one day and say, I wish I had done X, Y, or Z, and it could have maybe changed the world.

Can I have Tim a question around? His name's Tim. Hey, nice to meet you. Tim, David Freiborne. How are you? We actually Hey nice to meet you. Tim, David Freibor. How are you? We actually have a member for you. Do you think that over time, content has gotten shorter. Sound bites have become kind of the primary form of content.

You know, we used to be, we'd sit down and read books, and we'd read newspapers, and we'd watch these long-form news hour conversations. And then, you know, things got shorter, they got faster, they got quicker, and as a result, we ended up kind of debasing ourselves and ending up in this point where everything has to be reduced to that primal instinctual reaction moment. And it gets even more significantly fueled

by the feedback loops associated with social media. So the things that you see more of are the things that really you trigger that kind of primal emotional sense more. Is that a big driver, do you think, societally, in terms of have we become more tribal over the last century? Yeah, I think environmental changes

are just, it's like they will produce behavioral changes. And it can be sometimes a feedback loop where you have shorter content, more emotional, kind of triggering content, like you said. There's almost like pheromones. Evolutionarily, it wins. Yeah, and Twitter actually, there's a phenomenon where actually, virality dumbs down information because nuanced information doesn't hit as hard. Totally.

And so when you have, it's kind of like evolution, where you see the tweet that ends up super viral, it's survived 100 other competing tweets to get there. And the ones that are rising to the top, there's a mechanism right now that is pushing, is kind of forming a magnet down in political Disney world that is pulling us down. And one of the questions I have for Elon

is like, what's how can that somehow be? What one idea that a friend and I were kicking around is some kind of almost like Wikipedia managed to somehow stay somewhat nuanced and neutral in a way. Could there be some kind of like giant 10,000 pool of moderators that actually kind of put, you know, rank things by, maybe high-rung and low-rung, and the algorithm doesn't necessarily suppress the low-rung stuff, it just doesn't push it, which right now the algorithm is... You're talking about moderation, editorialization almost.

Yeah, to give it a credit rating on maybe a high low scale. I view this as a muting effect. It's an institutionalization of the social networks, where everyone talks about them being free to run as a network without kind of a central system of control, but sometimes that central system of control has an important role in playing moderation, muting editorialization that will kind of avoid some of the adverse consequences. It's definitely optimizing downwards right now.

What do you think Keith? Yeah, I should have you on by Twitter and then. Well, I started to agree. I mean, I grew up in the 70s and 80s and sound by, you know, was the term of art for like 32nd commercials. And that's how we debated politics was 32nd commercials. I don't know any evidence that suggests that tweets today in politics are worse than the

32nd commercials I grew up with. And if you think about polarization, I also have watched, you just watched Europe, European politics in the 70s and 80s. The most extreme ends of politics you have or see. We don't have any of those extremes in the United States still today. So I don't think there's, I think a lot of people like make arguments without evidence

that things have changed. And I actually start with like, first principles like wait, where's the evidence? Like people talk about this information. There's no evidence that they have American voter in 2016 have less information or less accurate information than 1888 or 18, or 1910. In fact, the opposite is true by most serious studies.

So this is all kind of made up in my mind. And yes, even though I should buy Twitter to save the world, but it's not going to be a good financial investment. How does it save the world, do you think? Well, we need a free speech bottle where people can debate ideas, and the left wing of Twitter, the employee base, has completely suppressed ideas. For example, my husband, I happen to know this, wrote an article in Foreign Policy Magazine, like the most prestigious publication in the entire planet for foreign policy debate about the CCP.

Twitter refused for years to allow them to advertise that article published in Foreign Policy Magazine. So there's clearly someone at Twitter suppressing content that's critical of the CCP. And we try to peel into everybody, and they wouldn't change this. So there's either Chinese spies there or a left-wing culture that suppresses debate. This is Foreign Policy Magazine.

If you can't get any more prestigious than that, it's absurd. Let alone the fact that I have 300,000 followers and do not have a blue check. I must have the largest follower of anybody who doesn't have a blue check. And it's all because I have views that are unacceptable. That seems really pretty ridiculous considering

many other VCs who are meaningfully less credentialed. Of course, experience. There's obvious, and I have insiders that Twitter have sent me screenshots of various things. There's no doubt that it's a left-wing monoculture that's suppressing ideas and someone needs to fix that, either the government needs to fix it which is worse than Elon fixing it. But the

government, if the US Congress is turned over, there's going to be a lot of subpoenas flying over to Twitter because there are absolutely foreign governments influencing that some of those decisions are Twitter. Well, I mean, it was in fact proven that there were Saudis inside of Twitter, Saudi national, It was, in fact, proven that there were Saudis inside of Twitter, Saudi National Operation. Yes, the best tweet retort ever, by the way. Yeah. I wish I would be that good.

Yeah, I mean. What was it between? Well, you know, the Saudi prince was complaining, and he said that if he's explained freedom of speech and how that works in your country. Oh, right. Yeah, I mean, 10. Here to the prostate. Should.

No, he's going to. Sorry, I was going to ask. Can you explain cancel culture in your framework? Yeah. So I like to use a couple terms here. There's social bullying, which is no one, if you disagree with me, you can't be my friend. And again, that's okay, right?

I don't think you're an awesome person if you act like that, but you're allowed to. Then there's what I would call idea supremacy, which is, you know, it's kind of, it's like I've been saying, no one is allowed to say this thing, whether you're my friend or not. And if you want to run something on your own property, you can make all the speech rules.

But cancel culture is specifically going into places that are supposed to be high-ranked. What it says on top of Harvard College, Veritas, Veritas, which is them putting their stake down on the ground and saying, we are a high-ranked place. They're not, say, using those words. But that is what they're saying, we are a high wrong place. They're not using those words, but that is what they're saying. We are a place that cares about truth,

that cares about diversity of ideas, that cares about openness and inquiry and curiosity and all of this. And so, cancel culture, it goes into places like that. Google, you know, you started off, they had their all hands meetings. It was all about, you know, and every idea is good,

criticize the leadership like, you know, right? So these things were specifically high-run, right? They were founded on these things. Kansl culture goes into those places and says, our preferred echo chamber, now those rules apply to everyone here. And it's a power, you know, a lot of things want to do that, right? A lot of, you know, I'm sure the pro-lifers would like to go into campuses and say no one can have a pro-choice position. They don't have the power. Cancel culture is a product of a group that's not supposed to have the power to do that, having the power to do that. And I think that comes from the fear of social media.

It comes from this hypercharged tribalism in the environment we live in right now and a lot of things. It's literally a solution. So one of the solutions to many things the life is moving to Miami. And I'm serious about this. Ladies and gentlemen, mayor of Fraser's. One of the most stark things when we moved to Miami 17 months ago was in Miami, you had, it's incredibly refreshing because everybody has a different position. There's literally no environment, socially, politically, culturally, business-wise, where

you won't run into people who voted for Biden or for Trump. Like you cannot go to a dinner of eight people and have people have the same views. You cannot work in a company where people don't have and voted or didn't have views. And if you try to character-ture people, you're going to be wrong all the time. Even I catch myself, like, assuming this person of this demographic is going to be liberal and they're not. And so here, people learn to both be polite, like, sort of like when you're growing up, you're taught, like, you don't debate religion in front of people at dinner, people are polite, but also they have to engage and it's incredibly refreshing because people learn to take an argument and it would be

impossible to live in Miami successfully unless you do this every day. And so I think this is a model for America, like many things in Miami. But keep, over time, doesn't that transform? So like, isn't there a concentration of ideas of mimetics that ultimately kind of rule the juice? And, you know, this whole thing kind of eventually, you end up with two poles, two camps. I mean, isn't this how all society

start the great debate, the great conversation? This is a microcosm of what just happens with human behavior over time. Maybe because of you understand ideas, one of the benefits for me was I grew up in, like, the most woke environments ever. I spent years Stanford and then Harvard, pretty woke places. And all my professors and political science were super liberal.

But I was conservative the whole time and every one of my, you know, says if you read my final exams, they're all conservative. Because I had to learn to master all the liberal arguments and find the weaknesses and the data points and be able to marshal evidence. And that's a healthy thing. So when you encounter people who have different views, like for example, you know, there's controversial laws in Florida, don't say gay, quote unquote, you know, changes in abortion policy here.

People here will talk about them politely and debate them and that's good for everybody. Like I bet you, for example, like, you know, if you read the media or you read Twitter, you think this abortion law changed in Florida is radical. It's actually more permissive than any European country. But nobody knows that. France actually only allows abortion up to 14 weeks. Germany is like 16. So we're 20 here.

So we're more liberal than Europe. But nobody talks about that on Twitter that way, but if you lived in Florida, you would actually know that. By the way, the campus is you just described. They're not here anymore. The amount of testimonials from students saying, if I disagree with the professor on my exam, I will get a bad grade, even worse. Again, this is when there is encroachment by a low-rung giant and there's no pushback

it will keep going. So they've gone to some crazy places. Here's an example, Berkeley, right now, and UCLA in about 20 other schools. if you want to apply to be a chemistry professor, the first thing that you do is you have to fill out a diversity statement. And it's called, that sounds nice, a diversity statement, but it's actually, you have to basically prove that you have a proven track record of social justice activism of the world variety,

not MLK style social justice, very specific social justice and if you are not a proven activist, that has the right political, that's more than even a political litmus test, you have to actually be an activist to get it, to even be seen by the chemistry department. They won't even show the chemistry. So the story's like that, you're just like, oh my god, but that's what happens when the immune system is failing.

The things will continue. So what is the antidote to that? If we, for those of us that can't move to Miami. Well, everybody can, we welcome New Yorkers. Those of us that haven't yet. The antidote is leadership. Because what happens is, in each one of these stories, James Bennett getting fired from New York Times,

you'd read the story in detail. Neil is another example for the New York Times for a whole long story. But in each story, the leadership often, because leadership is, you know, most people are not insane like this. Almost, this is again, with the orange circles, almost everyone actually thinks this is insane, these firings, and that's what's scary is they're happening anyway. So in each of these stories, you see a moment when the leadership first says,

well, you know, here we do agree, even though I hate his views too, you know, we value a diversity of viewpoint, and then there's huge pushback, and there's a moment of truth. Are they going to stand up for the veritas and for the core values, or are they going to see the culture to the mob? And what the cancel culture is is these moments of truth, the leadership choosing cowardice. And the actual cudgel of social media doesn't actually hit the person. It's the leader actually going and actually firing them,

the leaders the one who ends up actually being the one. Standing up to the mob is opposed to letting the mob rule you. Yes, which is the hard thing in a lot of these companies. What is current hard to do, you think about we... We see it in all these companies in Silicon Valley. Well, we see it when we do the podcast. We had a moment and we were discussing me, don't say gay slash parents choice bill,

which you look at the framing of that. It's completely hilarious that we framed it as those two things. Either you don't want parents to be able to parent their kids or you hate gay people. It's like, really? Is that what we're talking about here? And we looked at it and a couple of besties were having a conversation.

I wouldn't say who. And we were trying to get educated on it. And I'm like, should people be able to talk about their gay parents in first, great, second, great, third grade? Of course. You're a parent. You're gay.

I'm assuming you don't want people to be able to tell you, you can't be talked about at school. And then it was like, and gender assignment and what gender you choose. And now we're sitting there going, I don't actually know enough about this. Should you introduce that you can be one of 40 genders at six years old or 12 years old?

When should sex education start? I actually don't know. We learned at 15, should it be 12? I don't know. And we were like, is this a discussion we can have on the podcast without us actually consulting with some people who know more than us and discussing it? And I've written about three or four tweets

about the trans swimmer. And I have feelings on it, but I'm like, should I actually tweet that I find it's profoundly unfair that this person gets to win every single women's meet? And I kind of feel bad for the women who now can the best they can do a second place. Am I going to get canceled for that? Because that was my initial response to it. And I don't actually know my position because I don't know that other person's story who's a trans woman, and maybe she does deserve to be in that.

I don't know if anybody has an answer for that. So I'm curious, you know, from the besties themselves, what are your thoughts on are tackling some of those things and not getting canceled or the world back? These things happen on every dimension every day, which is you have more questions and answers. I think Tim, you wrote it in the slide. It's kind of like

you're navigating between high conviction and you know high knowledge, but that's a path and that path happens because you can talk to other people and you can ask questions and you can figure out where you are today. You can figure out where you could be tomorrow. That's what's not allowed anymore on any dimension. It's not anyone specific issue, it's on so many topics. The thing with that is that it gets people very afraid. When you are afraid, I think to your point, what happens is you take the most simplest

productive point of view that can be the most acceptable on any topic, whatever. And this is what causes this snowball to kind of roll down. Yeah, I literally am scared to talk about the trans issue because I feel like I don't know enough. I also don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. I would feel terrible if I did hurt his feelings. So the reason you know what I talk about it is because the social costs of even taking the

risk of having a conversation outweighed any potential benefit. It's just, the conversation gets so hot. But I wanna go back to what Tim said, that the moment of truth is when the leader of the organization has the choice of whether to fire the person who the mob's going after, it seems self-evident that the leader shouldn't

basically join the mob and inflict mob justice on this poor employee, but they do anyway. And the question is why. And I would argue that the reason why is because they're afraid of the New York Times hit piece. That's it. That's what it comes down to. They're afraid that the woke mob will come after them next.

And we've seen it before. When Brian Armstrong implemented his policy of no politics, the workplace, at Coinbase, who then retaliated against him. He got a New York Times hit piece. That was, they are the enforcement wing of the woke mob. When Elon said that he would restore free speech to Twitter, what was the response? The New York Times wrote an article basically

trying to identify him with the apartheid regime in South Africa, even though he was a kid. The headline of the article didn't even match up with the body of the article. The body of the article had more stories. About him as a child. It was also a historical account of a bunch of oppressive things that happened in South Africa.

And when he was a child, he was the important. So the body of the story had nothing but anecdotes about how he even as a young adolescent basically rejected apartheid. And yet the headline, the story, was basically painting him with this brush. So it's basically calling him a racist. And it came from his dad

and they have a super complicated relationship. And so it was like the one person where you couldn't have necessarily guaranteed what would have come out of Errol's mouth and it was still so supportive of Elon. Yeah, right. So we're going to overcome this problem. I think we have to have this recognition that you know that these prestige outlets like the New York Times who for some reason have so much credibility in our culture They have the power or they used to have the power to basically destroy people's careers We have to realize that these are just places that have been hijacked by radicals and like their stories are meaningless. They're completely biased

We have to stop investing them with the cultural power to like destroy people. It's that simple. What happens is there's a lag time. Now do Fox News. There's a difference. There's no other cultural power to destroy anyone. And who have they destroyed? Name some like like what woke mom if they engineered?

Mike the pillow guy. I'm not saying they wouldn't if they could. I'm just saying that they can't because they don't have that kind what they look. I'm not saying they wouldn't, if they could, I'm just saying that they can't, because they don't have that kind of cultural power. Before we... Tim, you were gonna say something. I was gonna say, when an institution like this what happens is a mob like this,

that they don't build anything. You know, they don't create. What they do is they appropriate, they hijack something, they take its existing good reputation, which is a lot of power, and they spend it down. It's not constructive, it's destructive. Yeah, but they'll actually go and, like, they take over and they spend the reputation down, but in the lag time between when the reputation catches up, it can do a ton of

damage. So again, I would say that a lot, I'm scared about what's going on, and like Ivy League institutions, I think they have so much credibility, but a lot of really bad things have kind of happened there. And it's, yeah. Can I suggest we pivot to tech and investing while we keep here? Because we're gonna lose it.

Let's thank to our members for joining us. And we could say that we do a crossover on this. Well done, kids. Yeah. Yeah. Because Keith and I were talking backstage and I was like, what investments have you made? He's like, I've made no investments in 2022. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 2012 yeah last year I led the 13 or 14 in a year so to go to Go to the effectively zero for half the year is like me being on vacation. Can you tell us what your point of view is? Well, I mean I tweeted in October, but you know that we were at the height of the market I tweeted last January that we're gonna see 2000 all over again and so privately internally I've been arguing this internally that this is exactly what's gonna happen and so And so, you know, my behavior should reflect my views. I believe in some consistency and harmonization. So if I believe tech stocks and tech companies aren't worth that much, I can't be investing until they reset.

And so I don't want to spend money in investing companies that aren't going to make me money. My job is to ultimately return billions of dollars to my LPs. And if I can't do that, I shouldn't be giving anybody any money. So when do you change your mind? Well, there are founders who are ahead of the curve. They're always are, who understand where the world's going. They actually understand the world where the world's going better than I do.

They actually teach me about where the world's going more typically. And if they have appropriate expectations, I'm happy to invest. So the last three or four investments I did make, actually were all interesting enough, about $1.5 million investments. Where the founder walked in and said,

you know, I don't need a lot of money. I could accomplish a lot. I can achieve it in flexion moments, but a very small amount of capital. That was the easiest thing ever to say, yeah, so $1.5 million, I don't need to think about the macro world, I don't need to think about where the NASDAQ's going.

And so the last three or four investments were all incredibly disciplined founders that they made late last year, arguably into January. Now we have doubled down just to be clear about our conversation. We have doubled down in portfolio companies where we've led new rounds, but as far as a new investment from scratch, I haven't made any new ones this year. So when you double down in a moment like this, how do you set valuation, especially if the

last valuation was maybe felt like a top tick? I think the founder has sort of digested where the world is, then we can have a dialogue by valuation, otherwise I actually encourage them to go and shop it. I'd say we will give you money. Well, will you price it at the same mark at a discount now? No, if they have a fair market valuation

from top to your firms, we'll try to be in that zone. But they'll often go to the market and people will be either pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, or they will give them a just disability and then we'll match that. But we've done that a few times where we've encouraged founders. Typically we wouldn't do this because my partner, Brian, Singerman loves to power money into companies that are working. That's been, we've been a high conviction fund for about a decade.

So typically if we like a company, we'll lead the next round and we'll lead the next round. We've done this with Ramp, for example, we've like three or four rounds. But now with evaluation of reset going on, it's been easier sometimes with founders, I really like to say, why don't you go talk to five or people?

Well, it's just like go talk to five other people, and I'll match what they do if they're really top tier people. But like, I want you to get like fair market feedback, you know, not just have to rely upon my judgment car. Are we at the point in the cycle where the down routes, the warrants, the liquidation preferences have happened or are starting to be discussed?

Definitely seeing a lot of liquid preferences again. Explain what it is and why that's important now. Yeah, liquidation preference basically means that the investor is going to get their money back first, regardless of what happens in the world, and that nobody who's a shareholder, nobody who's a founder, nobody who's a common shareholder, basically, means founder or employee, is going to get any money

until the investor gets all their money back times some multiple. And that multiple is based on time and or just a hurdle. It's very scary, but it can be arbitized by success. It's found or sometimes can arbitrage it well, meaning they have asymmetric information about the future of the company. If they really believe they can hit escape velocity in a short period of time, it can be a decent gamble.

I've seen someone like Jack Dorsey at Square did this. Very sophisticated CEO, and he knew what he was doing, and knew why he was doing it, and it's worked out pretty well, actually. But it's, you're playing with a lot of fire, so it's not for everybody, and you should get a lot of feedback and advice before the flat rounds are definitely happening.

The new flat is the up-round kind of philosophy, even in some of our better points. Are those senior-like pref or peri-mix? It depends. And on the round, they're all over the map, actually. So it's the market haven't shifted to the point that every new money coming in senior to all other money. Then how much leverage and what quality investors

have on your cap table? Like sir, for example, someone tries to put a senior like preference on top of my capitol, I'm going to yell at them a lot. And if they ever want a new investment that we're, you know, it's from our fund, they may not want to do that. Do you think that we're a couple turns away

from the discount rounds? Well, some companies are going to have to try. The problem is, for example, we don't like to do those rounds. There's so much brain damage in the politics of that with founders, with buyers, and masters. You can walk us through that. Why? What's about that brain damage?

So, typically, if a found, you think there's an efficient market of pricing, right? Like, I need this much capital, and the market's going to float with the price of that capital is. In private capital, it's not really true. Like, so if someone comes to me and says, you know, my last round was done at 300 million, you know, nine months ago, and today, it'd probably get priced at, let's say, 120 million. I'm more likely to say no than to give them an offer at 120, because I know their prior investors and their prior employees are going to be mad at me and furious at me, and I don't

want a lot of founders me and furious at me. And I don't want a lot of founders and people annoyed at me. And so that brain damage isn't worth it. So more likely, and our fund is more likely to say no, then try to find whether 80, 100, 120, 140 is the appropriate price, which is very bad for the company in some ways, because they might need to capital. And you start them of money? Yeah, they may be able to find somebody else, but we typically have founders fund

really don't like to do those rounds. The only way we would consider it is pretty much if everybody on the cap table called us up, the founder of CEO, the board members, prior investors said, we really want you to do this. And like we're all collectively holding hands and want you to do this, then we seriously consider it. Do you at the end of Q1, do you guys sit around and reset valuations and marks before

you tell your LPs what these companies are worth, meaning your own sense when you sort of generate a sense of valuations? Yeah, we do mark down. Proactively mark down. We do proactively mark down. What's your methodology for that? Peter's views. I mean, I think... Peter's views. I mean, I think... Peter's views.

We'd be open to doing that if we felt like we had an objective methodology for doing. It's very tricky. I think you can. If you... Later stage 1 is a little bit easier because you can apply multiples. There's public comp... You know, public comps. And you just adjust to that.

I think you're earlier stage stuff. Very difficult to do objectively. And it's also not that sent... You're to provide a sensitive to it in terms of how it moves in needle. But the growth stuff, we try to use public homes and be realistic. What do you think about, let's just,

we'll just throw out some firms. Just try, if you had to guess the next 18 months for some of these folks, soft bank, vision fund one and two. I mean, my views on soft bank have been obvious since I, I did New York Times and all things interview. In 2016, you should reread the transcript, but I was like, that strategy just does not

work. Powering money in a company is in hoping that money is the key asset in the key ingredient for success has been false in the history of technology for 50 years. And so they lost $27 billion again, the brand subprime. They used to do well in Latin America, but they got rid of the person who actually knew what he was doing. So, it's just a catastrophic mess. Plus, it has moral issues, you know, less moral issues than before, but still, you know, not the best investor. Tiger? I think they have a skill set gap, but if they're going to try, from what I read publicly, they're trying to invest in

serious A and serious B companies. The skill to be successful at investing serious A and serious B companies is very different than leading growth rounds or private or public growth rounds. And we look at this in our fund and we do both. We have a venture fund of 1.8 billion and a growth fund of 3.2 billion. And we have part, the investment team is basically the same. Most of the investment team, maybe all the investment team is better at one or the other. And if Tiger thinks that they're going to be successful Series A investors, they're in for a very rude awakening, I know about five or ten people on a planet that are successful Series A investors,

it is a very different discipline than deploying capital at large. Yeah, Sequoia? I think Sequoia is the best one fund historically. They are really good at what they do. Obviously, the world is changing around them, like I think like many people, crypto is kind of throwing a little monkey wrench in their model. They have to scale that. They explain that, what do you mean?

They miss the first wave of crypto. Crypto has returned a decent amount of money for people. And so I think that's tarnished the brand a bit with crypto people specifically, but they're working on fixing that. They have a really good team. The team is aging still pretty well. One of the hardest things in Venture is you age non-gracefully in this job. By the time you're my age, you're probably too,

you're already past your prime. And I kind of compare, because I went to law school with people who are US senators, and I had breakfast in Miami with one of the more prominent U.S. senators. And I said, I'm basically getting to the tail end of my career intact. And he said, I'll be the bottom 20% of the youngest 20% in the U.S. Senate. And there's a big contrast. But anyway, I think they're excellent at what they do. Reboy for Senate? Sorry.

Reboy for Senate? You might run for Senate? Oh, I'm not ready for Senate. No, maybe my husband. Second career. I think I'll take the politics. And recent? Encrypto, they're excellent. Let me ask you, I want to take the other side of the crypto. Missing the last crypto insanity.

If this thing does all get torched as it seems to be, and nobody shipping actual products that touch customers, that actually saw problems in the world. Sitting out that crazy frenetic moment might actually look astute because some of these projects, I do not see them shipping products. I think that you're saying something that's practically true, but I think it's also saying something that is practically true, which is if you're a fund that has that crypto deal flow,

at least my understanding of that playbook is you see the project, you make sure that you get some amount of the flow of tokens, you're allowed to monetize those tokens very quickly. And so, as long as you're in the flow, there's money to be made. There's a lot of money to be made, and I think what Keith is saying, and this is where Sequoia may have made an excellent decision, which is that form of money making is not very reliable. And I think that there's going to be a lot of questions about that once there's a regulatory framework. Yes, and it might turn out to be a lot of questions about that. Once there's a regulatory framework, yes. And it might turn out to be a lot of loss.

I think three points. Mostly I agree with that. I think first of all, it depends what you think your vision of what a venture fund does or what you do as a partner. So to me, I think I'm in the company building mode. And so people who are not building companies, I'm not really interested in making money.

I'm not in the hedge fund mode. So tokens without successful products and iconic companies aren't interesting to me even if they're a trend capital. We did think at Founder's Fund though that all the alpha was in Bitcoin. So going back a decade, not me, but my partner's bought a lot of Bitcoin

and he made a lot of money with Bitcoin because without the alpha was there not in the company building. A year or two ago, we started a shift and I think appropriately, I think there may be some alpha. Now we're in the end of one business, Founder's Fund meaning the right founder, it's worth us investing, the wrong founder may be some alpha. Now we're in the end of one business, founders fund, meaning the right founder. It's worth us investing, the wrong founder, it's not.

And so there are crypto projects and crypto companies where the founder is extraordinary. And we would love to be the primary investor, if we can. And then there's a bunch of other companies that might be successful, but that's not our business. We are in the end of one, find the next Elon.com. Isn't the fundamental problem that a lot of the way these crypto projects are designed is that you don't have protective provisions, preferred shares, and the operating system

that venture runs on. Not at all. Nothing. And they're asking you to give them a donation of $100 million for a token that has some Panamanium Foundation, and you don't have a board seat. I mean, this seems incredibly high risk and undisciplined to me. They are high risk, but we're in the business of high risk in some ways, like the protective provisions,

I think we don't really care that much about them at Founders Fund. It is one of the thesis that Peter started the fund with, which is these terms are way overrated. They're ultimately the companies that succeed or the Facebook's, the Palantir's, the SpaceX's. That's where you make your money in this business and worrying about what goes wrong.

But those companies have awards. They do have awards and I actually believe in boards, but I believe in boards is being a mentor or a consigliary, not in governance safe. Of course, okay, great. But you're not buying Chuck E. Cheese. Like I never give a term sheet. I never give a term sheet that has a board provision for me.

The founders requires me to join the board. Got it. But I mean, the tokens are, I think, are part of the problem, and I can't get my head around. Well, yes. The issue with tokens is a little more structural of, when you have liquidity prior to success, that's not necessarily a good incentive.

Like I think success, liquidity should follow success with product, follow with users, follow attraction, not be in advance. So what happens to those teams when they get flush with a billion dollars in tokens or a hundred million in tokens, they wind down the process. And they haven't shipped the product. It has misaligned a bad or perverse incentives all over.

Talk about you mentioning in the back. In a moment like this, the people that it's hardest for right after the entrepreneur is you said, the junior partners set these organizations. Just describe the dynamic now of having to run an organization where you're trying to tell people just go to the beach for a year. Yeah, I mean, I think, look, the way you become successful in venture is you give money to a founder who turns it into an icon of company. That is how you get promoted.

I think that's the job. And so if you tell your colleagues like, well, don't make any investments right now, they're thinking in the back of the mind, well how do I become successful? So it's easy for me to say this, it's easier for Peter to say this, it's easier for Brian to say this, but it's not so easy for people who want to make their career to say don't make any investments. Now that said, if you make a lot about investments, Semmel Shaw has a good blog post about this, your portfolio is your career. Why don't you make five or 10 investments in venture? If those aren't good, you're never gonna get great. I don't know if there's a single example

of a VC who became successful. Where the first five or seven didn't show some signs of brilliant. It's literally the story of the people on the stage right now is that we either got lucky or we were good or some combination of the early investments actually hitting. Oh, I'm definitely worse.

Like my first five investments, three of them became public companies. And some of them, because you just can't. I mean, definitely worse than I used to be. I mean, I hit two unicorns in the first four. How does it happen? It's just luck, I think. I do think there's some luck to it, or maybe your network. Well, that work.

So for me, it was easy because these were people that we worked, David and I worked with at PayPal. And I was smart enough to at least follow the people that were launching companies after PayPal and give them some money. So I didn't have to know much about Ventura other than just follow my former colleagues. We have to wrap it up a lunch.

We're gonna end with SACS telling us his most illustrative and funny story about Keith Roboi from Stanford. So many good ones. some great moment with Keith I don't know the two of you this is you could you could feel the friendship and all the memories coming through for sacks right now All these great. I could flip it Keith and maybe since I like the work of the Keith and I did it paypal better I guess yeah, okay fine whatever Stanford PayPal, give us the moment. What do you think of the best stories? Well, one good one that I think is instructive is,

I was kind of this opinionated person running around all the time, probably half right, half wrong, and David was basically running the company at the time. And I could occasionally sabotage some projects. And David had a really good way of reframing and channeling my energy, which I think is applicable to most people. He's like, basically, I don't mind if you send me any

of this feedback, but you have to send it to me directly and not to other people. And then you would like filter it if it's like, if it's right, I'll act on it and not, et cetera, I'll debate it with you. But it was actually constructive for the organization. So I felt liberalized, liberalized to basically give the feedback and try to

you know, edit our course and it would be channeled and useful, but it wasn't distracting people. And so I think that is something like a lesson I'll take it with me that I actually now uses a CEO or a talk. This is what's so crazy about this. I've heard this exact story from Reid Hoffman tell me that about you. I think it was either it was either PayPal or at LinkedIn where you would send these emails and it was just PayPal or at LinkedIn where you would send these emails. And it was just like lighting everybody and everything on fire. Oh my God, the emails were really good.

The emails were really good. The emails, let's make it like letters from Reboy. I reread the emails and I'm like, shit, I can't write that well anymore. Letters from Reboy, a memoir. Let's give it up, it's Peter Boyd. What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What a album. What? You're the beef! What? You're the beef! Beef! What?

We need to get merch. I'm going on a list! I'm going on a list! you