All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

(0:00) Bestie intros + All-In Summit recap (6:50) Fed cuts 50 bps: Economic tailwind, scary signal, or both? (17:35) AI is coming for call centers; how agent training works (33:41) US government wasting $50B for rural internet and EV charging stations (47:10) Reflecting on some rough years in VC: is the model broken? (1:07:18) Reacting to the first Trump/Kamala debate, what factors will make each candidate can win or lose the race Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/19/investing/stocks-fed-rate-cut/index.html https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp500-nasdaq-live-09-05-2024/card/say-goodbye-to-the-inverted-yield-curve--snsL80qp8JX9UvaMCvVc https://mearsheimer.ai https://seekingalpha.com/news/4144652-klarna-shuts-down-salesforce-as-service-provider-workday-to-meet-same-fate-amid-ai-initiatives https://x.com/brendancarrfcc/status/1836079197967532497 https://reason.com/2024/05/30/7-5-billion-in-government-cash-only-built-8-e-v-chargers-in-2-5-years https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/17/spacexs-starlink-has-2500-aircraft-under-contract.html https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/the-us-installed-more-than-1-000-ev-charging-stations-since-summer https://x.com/brendancarrfcc/status/1836435062994121053 https://x.com/brendancarrfcc/status/1834009499931463705 https://x.com/molson_hart/status/1835650978906857948 https://x.com/danprimack/status/1824506087116058665 https://x.com/Jason/status/1768073854545449228 https://chamath.substack.com/p/2023-annual-letter https://x.com/Jason/status/1836820167449326063 https://www.axios.com/2024/04/03/us-global-venture-capital-q1 https://www.wsj.com/articles/university-endowments-mint-billions-in-golden-era-of-venture-capital-11632907802 https://www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-president-election-polls-model https://x.com/GrageDustin/status/1836178999178866766 https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1836516153893519867

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the all in podcast. The channel has been active. We're in the afterglow. We're in the all in summit afterglow. It's so glowing that Friedberg couldn't make it he has been riding a high. Nick told me that in the last week, we just we we've only put out a half the clips and they've already gotten 20 million views. Oh, my Lord. I you know, I will be will be around 50 million, I think, when all the clips are released and you let it bake for a couple of months.

That is an astoundingly large amount of reach. Yeah. And that's just YouTube. We're not doing it on the podcast feed right now. YouTube and X. Well, hopefully we get on the podcast feed. We get another 50 million. But Freeberg's in his afterglow couldn't make it but he's very busy right now. Look how happy is the summit went well.

Is that marijuana? Think he's making potatoes. I think that's his farm. But I mean, the smile is incredible. It's marijuana. It's free birds version of founder. He's in the Foundermode. He's hitting the bog. His Foundermode gives him a bunch of cheese. fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you guys. Queen of Kin Wands. I'm going all in.

He is, he's in the afterglow and he won't be with us this week. But we- He organized such a great conference. Don't you think, Jayco? He did great. I mean, he really took charge of that and- He crushed it. Just did an amazing job. I would like to give him his flowers. Absolutely. It is like at least a trillion times better than the first and at least 50% He crushed it. He crushed it. He crushed it. I would like to give him his flowers. Absolutely.

It is like at least a trillion times better than the first and at least 50% better than the second. I mean, that's how it should go. You know, when you create something in the world, Chamath, what you want to do is you want to, you want to hand it off to professional management to then scale it, right? Not everybody can do the creative act of actually forming something. You need to have these operators to go and then execute your vision. And I just want to give free break his flowers for executing incredibly well.

We all play a role. Jamal Sachs launched a tequila company. I want to say thanks to a Friedberg. He did all of these great speakers. Big thank you to our CEO, John, who put together all the operations Nick did incredible Nick did incredible incredible job with those opening graphics. They went viral. Zach helped with the graphics. You had young Spielberg chipping in you had Laura did an amazing job with stage management. And of course, you know, I focused on the moderation, I got a lot of great things. So everybody plays a role. You got sacks with the tequila Friedberg, Laura, Zach Spielberg, Nick, john, everybody brought

something to the table. Are you finally congratulations to everybody? You scale through people. That's it scale through people. That's it. Did anybody got the joke? We, Chamath, everybody contributed. You understand? Sachs, new tequila company, John operations, your freeborrow content, me with them being the world's greatest moderator up there. Well, it's Chamath's contribution. Oh, yeah. Chamath showed up. Chamath looked great.

I showed up. That's just, he showed up and looked great. I brought my two votes and I brought my vision. Absolutely. I would also say- Fan favorite. What you really did that was amazing was you took a lot of selfies. I was very proud of both of you with the fan service.

Fans were very pleased that you guys took so many selfies. You know, we got a lot of feedback too coming in. So it was a pretty, pretty great feedback. Do you think that you did better as moderator because you finally let go of just the conference organization? What do you think? Yeah, I think that you're able to focus

on your unique value added instead of immersing yourself in a bunch of details that could be handled by the team. I agree. It was absolutely fantastic. But I think it was a process to get you to let go. Well, you know, you have, it's a fair point. I did, people did say my moderation was dialed in, and I appreciate that positive feedback from everybody.

And yeah, there is something to having people you can trust with the content. I thought your moderation was excellent this time. It was better than before because I think that you're actually exceptional as a moderator and I think you're mostly average as a conference producer. I do think as a moderator, you're excellent. I mean, like some of the most memorable moments were you basically drawing out contrasting opinions. And the way that the people engaged with them was so healthy and good. That was the, I think the recurring theme. So I gave you an enormous amount of credit. I think you did an exceptional job. But I also think it's because you were able to focus on what you're doing. I do agree with that. I was talking to Jade about and she said, and Nick also pointed out you were really dialed in, Jake, what's up? And I said, I'm not worrying about the party and the vendors and the front desk and the sponsors.

And it is actually you're able to focus. Did you have some favorite moments yourself there, Sacks? Any favorite moments for your panels or things maybe that exceeded expectations for you? Well, I thought the Mearsheimer Jeffrey sacks panel was great. I thought it would be which is why I helped organize it. But I was just glad that the audience so many people in the audience reacted and said that was the surprise hit of the conference. I would say that was my favorite of the event one of the best

panels I've ever been part of. It's the most viewed it's like slightly above the's one. Really? Oh, just behind you. Elon's slightly ahead, but yeah, it's still like growing. It's like finding an audience. Well, I think that if you look at the one from last year, Graham Allison, where he got a standing ovation, the thing is there are these village elders where they are at a point in their life where they're willing to just be a truth teller. But oftentimes, they're de platformed. And we have the ability to actually bring some of the smartest of them on and give them a voice. And it's incredible how much they resonate because what they say is so logical and sensible. So that's a really important thing that we have now at our

disposal. And I think that people really appreciate it, you know, so we're like, I think we're doing a really important job in doing that. And now the question is, what village elders do we get next year to keep, you know, being truth tellers? Well, give us your thoughts. You know, there's an all in Twitter handle, and he's Chamath, David Sachs, and I'm at Jason and Freberg's at Freberg, just tell us who you think would be great. But Sachs, I know you're super excited and

want to give Biden his flowers, the Fed just cut rates 50 bips and the stock market is tearing it up right now. On Wednesday, Fed cut interest rates by a half a percentage point, taking them down off of a 23 year high. We've been talking about this for two years here on this podcast, first rate cut since March of 2020, which is about when we started this podcast. Jay Powell basically said the Fed thinks inflation is coming down to around 2% nicely. And they don't want the job market to soften any further than it already has. He also mentioned immigration has helped soften the market, the labor market as well, obviously with all those new people looking for jobs.

So in the last two months, July and August, CPI has been at a two handle. We talked about that 2.9% in July, 2.5 percent in august here's the cpi over the last decade obviously massive boom uh in interest that you see there from 2021 to 2023 many obviously think we're gonna have more rate cuts probably 25 every meeting for a little bit every meeting for a little bit. And Dow's already at an all time high, surged 300 points on the news. Here's a here's some interesting data about the 50 basis point kickoff cuts. So this is where it gets interesting Chamath fed only started publicizing their interest rate changes in 1994

since 94. Fed has initiated cutting cycles six times. Here's the chart. Take a good look at that. 95 98, 2019. They started with 25 BIPs, Oh one and Oh seven after the great financial crisis, they started with a 50 BIP cut. So obviously there was an emergency 50 B cut in march of twenty twenty when cobit hit. One oh seven twenty twenty very severe situations. And what happened in the markets is what i want to discuss with both of you today in twenty two thousand one market fell thirty one percent in the two years after. That record in two thousand seven market fell twenty 26% after two years. So, and 2020 despite all the fears,

market ripped 44% over two years. What's the more likely scenario chamath? Is this similar to the dot com great financial crisis or similar to 2020? Well, I think 2020 you have to put it a big asterix because the question is, what would have happened had there not been COVID? And had there not been an entire global shutdown? So if you go back to that chart, you could probably just extrapolate and cut out that part that's flat. Because the part that's flat from 2020 to 2022 was largely artificially created. Because on top of that,

we injected so much money into the economy. The reality is we probably would have raised at some rate of change that you could have predicted from 2016. So what do you take away from that? I think that you have to like realize we're at a point in the economy where you cut rates because there's tension. And there's tension

between employment and unemployment. There's tension between earnings, growth, and contraction. And so it's a stimulatory move. So if you look through that stimulatory move, why is the Fed doing this and why will they cut probably all the way down to two or 3% by the end of 26? It's because we now need to stimulate the economy. So the reason why markets tend to fall once the rate cut cycle starts is because the next couple of quarters sort of demonstrate what I think the Fed is expecting, which is that

there's pressure in the economy. We have not seen that flow through in earnings or in how companies describe markets on the field by and large, except for a few. So I think this part of the cycle now will be about all of these companies telling us whether there's nothing to see here, or whether there is actual real pressure. And if there is real pressure, it'll probably look like the several times before where you're just going to have to contract the value of financial assets, because they're just not worth as much when they're earning less.

Okay, Sax, any thoughts here? Just balls and shrugs? I think a lot of people are commenting on the fact that the only other two times where we've had a 50 basis point rate cut in modern history, it has been just before a recession. So I think this happened in 2001, 2007, right before the recession. And the Fed had to do a dramatic rate cut because they could see in the data that things were weakening. So a lot of people are asking the question, well, is that what's going on here?

Now Powell's comments, though, are indicating that the economy is in good shape. He said the economy is in very good shape, basically indicating that they had tamed inflation and that they would look to cut another 50 basis points this year. So Powell's rhetoric is, uh, in a way at odds with the magnitude of this cut. The, you know, so why didn't they just cut 25 basis points? I think people are trying to figure that out. We're in the tea leaves into why 50 because they could just do 25 a month. Sure.

Or five months as opposed to 50. Yeah. If the economy is hot, why wouldn't you tiptoe into rate cuts and just do 25 now? That's the key thing. If you look at the, the dot plot, and if you look at where the smart financial actors are betting, where rates end. So it's hard to sort of like look at any point in time, 50 now 25 later, what does it all mean? It's very hard to know. But what is much clearer is, where do we think terminal rates will be? And, 50 now 25 later, what does it all mean? It's very hard to know. But what is much clearer is, where do we think terminal rates will be in even in the next 18 months? And it is dramatically lower for where they are now. And I think that support sacks your

that argument that you just made, which is, if you're going to basically cut this aggressively over the next year to year and a half by the estimates of very smart financial actors whose job it is to spend every day observing the Fed, then they must see something. Because otherwise, as you said, you could take a much more gradual approach. And so I think that the smart financial actors are guessing recession or guessing contraction. financial actors are guessing recession or guessing contraction. I think what they're also guessing is similar to nonfarm payrolls. We're going to go through a couple of difficult GDP revisions, probably downward. And I think that will have an impact to people's sense of how the economy is doing even more than what their sense is today, which is already teetering on it's at best okay. And I think all of

that has to play itself out. So it's going to be a very complicated and dynamic fall in that respect. Yeah, and I think so much of this has to do with unemployment. We had that period where so many jobs were available. Remember, we talked about it here, 1112 jobs available at the peak. We can debate the numbers, of course, but we all saw it where you just couldn't hire talent in America. There was so few people available to take positions and man, has that changed.

And you get to see it on the ground in early stage startups where this whole narrative, I don't know if you saw it in your board meetings, but Hey, we can't find a person. Hey, we're looking, hey, that search is still going, we're still looking for a director sales, we're still looking for salespeople, we're still looking for developers, we're still looking for operations people. Now it's the opposite. It's like, I just I'm hiring producers here in Austin, because I'm building it my in

person studio, we had like, I don't know, a dozen viable candidates for this position. And I had a hard time picking between, you know, the top three. Now that's distinctly different than my experience for the last five to 10 years where you were like, how do we how do we fill this role? So I think that employment has been broken. And that's the thing that has me concerned because with all these people who came in through the southern border, and then you have people outsourcing to other countries, I wonder if Americans

are going to lose so many of these mid paying jobs and this will dovetail into our next story about Amazon making cuts. I'm very worried about the hollowing out of the upper middle class that elite group of $150,000 jobs that then employ nannies and spend money in the economy. I wonder, I don't know if you're seeing that in your company, Sax. I'm not worried about the hollowing out of that class. You have disdain for them. But I mean, just in terms of the labor market,

what do you see in companies right now? Hiring, the talent pool, et cetera. Well, I mean, hiring the talent pool, etc. Well, I mean, in tech, things are pretty good. I mean, they they're not as absurdly frothy as they were during the bubble of 2020 and 2021. But things are good. You have this huge AI tailwind now, and there's just a ton of investment going into AI. There's a little bit of a tale of two cities going on. If you're in AI, things are really bubbly. If you're outside AI, they've returned to much more normal levels in terms of valuation

and company operations, all that kind of stuff. Just to go back to the state of the economy for a second, the reason why a lot of people were predicting a recession, including me for a while, is that the yield curve inverting has been an almost perfect gauge of whether a recession is coming. It's when basically the Fed raises short-term interest rates above long-term interest rates. Normally, long rates are the ones that should be higher because investors demand a higher rate of return to tie up their money for longer. So something is really off and kind of broken when short rates go above long rates and the yield curve inverts.

And it's always been the prelude to a recession. But the recession doesn't come when the yield curve inverts. It usually comes when the yield curve de-inverts. And the reason for that is because the Fed now sees weakness and dramatically cuts the short rates. So in other words, weakness and dramatically cuts the short rates. So in other words, it jacks up the short rates to control inflation. That works. It trickles through the economy.

The economy cools down and then the Fed says, oh, maybe we've over corrected. They slam on the brakes and then they cut rates to basically make up for the effect in the economy. So the yield curve has finally de-inverted and the question is just, do we now get that recession or did the Fed manage this to a soft landing? I don't think we know, I'm not like calling a recession but this is the thing that people are concerned about. Yeah, well, Sax, we were talking about AI

in the group chat, right? Yeah, I think it's now becoming really clear that call centers are gonna be the first really big disruption caused by AI. Yeah. I mean, all the level one customer support is going to get replaced by AI. I mean, LLMs plus voice because, you know, OpenAI just released their audio API. You saw that at the All-In Summit, we released a Mearsheimer AI where we trained it on all

of his work. And you can go to Mearsheimer.ai and trained it on all of his work. And you can go to mearsheimer.ai and ask it questions. And it will tell you the answers in his voice because we cloned his voice using resemble AI. Anyway, so AI can do voice now and it can be trained extremely well on large data sets to give you answers to questions, which is pretty much what customer support is.

So I think it's now becoming clear that I think within the next two to three years, you're going to see a massive disruption in that industry. I agree with that massively. And I think there's another under-reported story, which is people don't like to call and talk to a customer service agent, like an actual human, if they can avoid it. They would much rather go on YouTube and say, How do I fix this? Or, you know, ask chat GPT, how do I fix this? It's like, I don't want to waste another person's time, just give

me the answer as quick as possible. And AI will give you the answer quicker. YouTube will give you the answer quicker. I've had so many times where I have people who work for me, who are like, I don't know how to do that. And I literally would walk up to their computer and load YouTube and type in, how do I blank and there's a video there. Watch it on to speed, you can do it. That's what's, you know, gonna also kill this. Like, I don't want to talk to a human. Just

change my flight. Just, you know, but you talk about question. Yeah, I mean, you talk about disruption. call centers are a very big part of the economy in certain geographies. Denver, Salt Lake, I mean, parts of Florida. Yeah, exactly. It's a really big deal. If like half the cost gets ripped out of those call centers. Where would you move those people? If you had your choice, could they move to sales? Well, I think sales will be the one that's disrupted after customer support. But I don't know, I think it's going to be very disruptive. One of the reasons I think this is, you know, in the early days of LLMs, people were saying that legal services would be disrupted.

And you saw some very highly valued startups rocketing up based on that. I think the problem with that is the error rate. So when you think about AI applications, you have to think about what is the tolerable error rate that the industry will allow? Because we know that AI's get things wrong, they can hallucinate, and you're never gonna be able to make it perfect. I mean, you can improve the quality,

but it's still gonna have some errors. And when you're dealing with like legal services, for example, you just can't have mistakes. This is not tolerated. However, customer support is different. Customer support is already organized into levels, level one, level two, level three, based on difficulty. And there's already, in a sense, a mechanism for failover.

If the level one customer support person can't answer the question, they kick it up to level two. So there's a place for LLMs to start in customer support person can't answer the question, they kick it up to level two. So there's a place for LLMs to start in customer support which is replacing all the level one and then working their way up the chain to level two as they get better and better. And so what I'm saying is that the level of accuracy now, especially with the new PhD level reasoning models

is good enough. You don't need to wait for like some perfect LLM model. And I think this is why this is going to be a big, big disruption. Millions of people potentially are going to have their jobs disrupted or at least transformed. Well, it could be the end of the entire career as well, Chamath. If you were to look at this four by four sort of quadrant chart that Sachs is describing, which is the cost of an era, and the actual complexity of the job, perhaps, or the cost of the job. How do you look at this? I know you're working on software

that kind of does this with your startup as well. does this with your startup as well. I mean, I'll preview one use case from 8090, which is pretty stunning. You know, we work with a very complicated set of people and processes because of the field in which they're in. And David, your point is exactly right. It took us a fairly long time. What were at a point now where we've been running a power software. Versus the old legacy deterministic solution. And we've been running it at a hundred percent accuracy now for about ten days. So this is still very new. It's an incredible thing because to your, our first version was like, in the mid 80s, then we were in the mid 90s, then we were, you know, 9798%, but there was still

errors. And it just took a lot of engineering to figure out how to get to 100. But now it's at 100. And it's been consistently at 100. And so we're all kind of like scratching our head, because now the next step is, well, what do we do? To your point. What what do we do? Do we so we're figuring that out right now. But the art of the possible is that I think well crafted AI software is as good as deterministic software in the sense that the error rates will be equivalent in production and at the level of a

very highly regulated public company. And I think that's the gold standard because in those sectors, those companies have zero tolerance. It's not a toy. It's not even you know, level one customer support. It's system of record type work. Yeah. But it shows what's possible. And to your point, Sachs, we're doing that today, even though they're the best models. Imagine how good those under the underlying models will get in a year from now. Yeah, right. And we'll be able to take on more and more work. It's it's very stunning. Actually, it's really have you

guys worked with the O one preview yet I just literally have been using this new reasoning engine that open AI released and it is extraordinary and it's kind of thinking about the next three or four prompts you would do and I literally just got this wobbly show. The thing that hit the I've hit the limit for my paid account because this thing is so intense on compute, I guess. Well, the thing with the one is that I think it's starting

to add reasoning. But the way that you do reasoning is sort of this idea that you have this chain of thought. And I think that that's a very powerful but early concept. And as we refine those ways in which these models get to better answers. The wonderful thing is that OpenAI will preview O01 and then they'll have the actual O1 production build probably in the next couple of months, which will be probably pretty spectacular. But then you'll see something from Claude, you'll see something from Llama. And the real art, I think, and this is where I do think it's a little bit of alchemy still, which I think is good because it keeps humans involved all of us involved. Yes.

Is how do you stitch all of those things together to get to a 0% error rate? What what's accent? You know, how do you minimize the blast radius and how do you make sure these things are super high quality? Right. Well, and people don't it's still a very hard technical problem. Go ahead, Saxon. Then I'll show you what. So one of the reasons why I'm bullish on this customer support use case is because there's a very large data set to train on. You've got all of the product

documentation that companies very created. You've got all of the previous email support, you know, and calls. Yeah, the calls have been recorded. So you can now train the AI on that. So there's a very large body of can now train the AI on that. So there's a very large body of data to train the AI model on and it's not necessarily the most proprietary. It's not like dealing with people's medical records or even confidential legal documents, something like that. So the data is readily available and then the foundation models are getting really good. I think there's a big question here about value capture, which is there's a number of startups now

that are becoming very highly valued that are chasing this disruption, this sort of customer support agent disruption, and they're getting into very high valuations, even unicorn valuations already. And the question is, well, wait, if the foundation models are advancing at such a rate, exactly, like a year from now, why couldn't like a developer, just a startup of a few guys

take next year's model, such a train it, and then come out ties the you're making such a good point this. So when we were trying to figure out like what applications we would build and like which sectors of the economy we would go after. I was like, guys, we got to go after the hardest, most regulated places, because those are the things and places and people that have absolutely zero tolerance

for error and where you're going to need to do some amount of customization and specialization to actually solve these problems. And Sachs, to your point, like when you see, and I said, you cannot, we cannot touch customer service. We cannot touch it because it's going to get commoditized and run over by these foundational models within a year. Right. You'll be able to deploy these. It's just too easy. You'll be able to do it on a local computer. I mean, you'll just download the entire database of every call on a MacBook with an M3 build on that. The other thing that's now possible. And you saw this with Klarna because Klarna put out this like cryptic tweet slash

press release where I think maybe it was in their earnings, Nick, maybe you can find this where they're like, we've deprecated Salesforce and worked it. That was strange. How can a company that big deprecate those two systems of record? How is that even, it's, how is it possible? I think it means they're writing their own, right? Well, I'll tell you how it's possible. And so this is like this next crazy thing

that's been happening. We've been doing a version of this to go after some other sources of software. We haven't had the balls to be honest, to go have six or workday. But here's how they do it. They write these agents. And these agents can spawn other agents, right? So it's very classic kind of machine that builds a machine. And you start to observe the inputs and outputs of a system, right? I'm hyper simplifying, but I'm just, it'll make the point. And over

time, what the agents start to do is by observing the inputs and the outputs, they start to guess on what the intervening code is. And the code paths must be in the middle to generate the outputs based on these inputs. And so over time, what happens is you develop a digital twin and then you run that against that counterfactual against workday or Salesforce. And then at some point, you're like, it's the same. And you just turn it off. And you're saving yourself 10s or 100s of millions of dollars. So that's, it's a version of what Karna did. It takes an enormous amount of technical strength to do it. It also takes tremendous, I think, executive courage and leadership, because I think that's a very difficult decision to embark on. But if

you're an engineer, that must be an unbelievably exciting technical challenge to be a part of. But but that's the basic premise of what they were able to do. Hopefully, they share more and maybe they even open source what they did, because I think it would just be an amazing thing for all of us to look at. Yeah. I mean, to, to restate it, watch people use a piece of software. And then based on what they do, you could write a code, which you could take a video of a video game today, like angry birds. and somebody did this, you give the Angry Birds

iPad game from 15 years ago to AI, it's gonna back into the code just by watching it. So why not just watch people use Salesforce or Workday? And those are very expensive products, thousands of dollars per user, right? I wanna get Sax's point of view. The thing in enterprise software that we were always told is you cannot touch these systems of record.

Don't ever start a systems of record company. Don't try to touch these systems of record companies. Don't try to disrupt them. It's an impossible task. But then the question is, if you have these things, why do you necessarily need a system of record in the way that you needed to before when you're writing all this clunky

deterministic. What do you think? Well, I saw the clarinus story where they said they were going to rip out Salesforce and work day because they're able to write their own bespoke code using AI. I mean, I have to say I'm a little bit skeptical of that story for a couple of reasons. One is, if that's their goal, why wouldn't they have open source this these products they created,

you might as well get the whole ecosystem working on it because they're not trying to sell this product that they've internally created. They're just trying to rip out the cost. So why not let the whole ecosystem see it? The other thing is if it's so easy to do, why hasn't the market already been flooded with new startups that are effectively able

to reverse engineer? I don't think you're right. with new startups that are effectively able to reverse engineer? I don't think you're right. I don't think it's easy to do because I don't think there's a generalization here. That's productizable. Do you know what I mean? Like, I do think that these are very custom specific things. So maybe there's like some scaffolding. But I don't think that that scaffolding has a ton of economic value. I think it's really good open source stuff. Yeah, I think it's what you build on top of it. And so that hasn't been figured out yet for sure.

Yeah. Look, I think that if you're only using a few use cases of these big complicated software packages, then yeah, it's probably easier than ever to deprecate them, eliminate them from your stack and just have your own internal engineers build specifically what you need in a more tightly integrated way. I think that is possible. Nick show this tweet to these guys. Here's the tweet. This is a crazy one. Yeah.

So so look at but look at the code. Look at the actual product itself for a second. Yeah, but the price garbage. I mean, look how ridiculous this is. But that was 600, sorry, it was a billion dollars that NYC. Okay, so here's the deal. Well, this is this egregious. New York City's public college system paid Oracle $600 million to build our course management portal. It's built on top of Oracle's PeopleSoft suite, which they refused to customize without an extra

$400 million to hit $1 billion. New Yorkers got the image below and pay 5 million plus a year for hosting. Look, this is egregious government waste. I mean, that site looks like it's pathetic. I mean, honestly, this looks like it could have been done with a SharePoint site and you pay some consultant to stand it up for 1% of the cost. And there are better plot more modern platforms than that. So this is just incredibly wasteful and inefficient government spending. They're going for retro. They were going for retro. They wanted to hearken back to the 90s. The reason I wanted to show this to you is I think that these kinds of things will not be possible in the future. I just don't see how one could spend a billion dollars if one tried to, to enable that feature. It would be impossible.

Right. But that's 600 million that was wasted on that crappy portal. That shouldn't have happened even without AI. Because there's much better ways. You could buy a much better ways there you could you could buy a much better product for 1% of the cost so or 0.1% of the cost there must be some regulatory capture going here where somebody's got a record no like a ten year relationships that's a ten year relationship with somebody in Albany

that you know it's ways fraud and. It's the same thing that's happening with rural internet. Do you see that story? You want to talk about that? Paradoxically, it's our next story. So let's go for it. In related news of our government burning our money, we're all broadband, rural, broadband, and EV charging, $42 billion and $7.5 billion, almost $50 billion combined. Let's just go over these

two programs real quickly here. Both were part of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill in 2021, $42 billion carved out to provide high speed internet to people living on farms in rural locations. $7.5 billion carved out to build 500,000 EVs chargers over 10 years. It's been 1000 days since the bill was passed. So let's check on the progress. Zero people have been connected. According to FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, and eight 12345678 EV chargers have been built as of May, according to Auto Week magazine, what's even crazier. Private industry already solved these problems.

United Airlines just announced they're putting Starlink on a thousand of their planes, and they're gonna offer it for free. And Starlink now has 2,500 planes under contract with a bunch of other airlines. And in the second half of 2023 alone, the private sector built over 1000 charging stations in the US. These are two problems that have already been solved.

Saks, why are we burning $50 billion in the future with things that have already been solved. We've solved for this you I own electric cars, I have you know the answer. You know the answer. Say the answer, Jason. Corruption. No, come on, Jason. Incompetence. Really? Craft. Keep going. I mean, you tell me with corruption, graft, buying votes from your constituents. They haven't they haven't delivered any of it. way with corruption, graft, buying votes from your constituents? They haven't they haven't delivered any of it.

Incompetence. Yes. Well, there's there's a couple of things going on here. So one is typical government waste, fraud and abuse where they've allocated 42 billion for rural internet haven't hooked anyone up and we could spend a fraction of that giving people starlink and allowing the private sector to do its job. And why even pay for it, Sachs? Why are we paying for it if it's available for a hundred bucks? That's the baseline, but it's worse than that because on top of the waste, fraud, and abuse and the fact that the government is grossly incompetent and inefficient,

you also have naked political retaliation going on here. That's the answer. Yeah, exactly. And Brendan Carr, who's an FCC commissioner, pointed this out. He said that in 2023, the FCC canceled or revoked an $885 million contract with the company by claiming Starlink is not capable of providing

high speed internet. Then a year later, of course, that was a lie. And then a year later, the FCC is now claiming that Starlink provides so much high speed internet that the word monopoly should be tossed out. Yeah. So look, this is just pure naked retaliation. The Biden-Harris administration doesn't want to admit that Elon has the best solution for rural internet, just like they couldn't admit he made the best electric cars. Remember when they did that EV summit and they didn't invite him?

That was just nakedly political because he's not in their team. Right. So look, I mean, the Biden-Harris administration, look, it's blue no matter who. And Elon has drifted from being sort of independent and not aligned to... He was blue. He was blue. Let's call it what it is. I mean he voted for Hillary and Obama he said. He's no longer team blue and so they're punishing him for this. Yeah. And it's costing taxpayers a huge amount of money. I think this is one of the worst decisions by the current administration and if Trump gets in there he should reverse it on day one.

Well, I mean, you to investigate. I mean, I think how we got to the point of wasting 50 billion dollars. That requires an investigation, I think. Chamath, your thoughts? One comment is, and this is so sad, but I'm so desensitized by the amount of waste that I don't know whether 50 billion is a lot or a little anymore when it comes to the United States government. Isn't that sad? Like, because now everything I hear is normal, hundreds of

billions and trillions, but 50 billion is an enormous amount of money. Right? Well, that's a good point. I remember, you know, back in the day, 60 minutes used to do these segments on waste, fraud, and abuse at the Pentagon, different parts of the government. $42 billion just spent on something that really taxpayers could have for free

or without the government getting involved. And, you know, 42 billion that was lining someone's pocket when the service doesn't even work, that would have been a scandal. And the media would have covered it. But the media doesn't even cover it these days. And again, it's because the media has become so tribal that it's better dead than red and blue, no matter who. And so because the media would have to admit that Elon's already solved this problem, they just can't go there. They won't

even cover this. And so we have no accountability. There's no accountability on the government. If I had to just take a step back and just generalize going forward. Do we want to live in the kind of administrative state where they will pick people that they dislike, based on totally random criteria, a tweet, a meme, a post, and then all of a sudden punish a bunch of the rest of us because of that. They're punishing all of America because they collect our taxes to waste on it. And then they punish the people that they actually say they're going to uplift by not delivering what they promised. And if you take Elonan out of it for a second, the the problem was when we cross

the chasm and did it with the first guy, him. But the reality is there's only one of him and then there's a lot of the rest of us and what will happen is people just get added to this list of folks that certain nameless faceless people in the administrative state dislike. And what happens is the country slows down, and the country wastes money and the country pilfers it away. And that has to stop. And so what really bothers me about these things is a, I don't know how to undesensitize myself to the fact that all of a sudden now,

because of just all of this sloppy waste, I didn't react as much as I should have to just $50 billion being flushed down the toilet on these two projects. And then to Jason, your point, it is a solved problem that you can give incredibly cheaply. And the fact that it's not left private enterprise to solve this and instead, it's just brazen partisanship combined with retaliation combined with incompetence. And by votes by giving this money to other vendors who are giving them donations.

And just to give the Democrats their do what happens if then Trump does the same thing for a solution that you support and you need and you think should be everywhere. The point is we don't want any of this stuff under any administration. And the minute that one administration breaks the seal and makes it acceptable, it becomes part of the water table. And that's the real problem. We broke the seal on this crazy multi, multi trillion dollar spending, and it is just never stopped since then. And you know the incentives really matter. If you look at a private company, if you were at Klarna and to our previous

story and you go to the boss and say, I know how to get rid of these, this wasteful spending we're doing here, we can get rid of all tier one calls with AI and save that money, you get a promotion. If you're in the government, you can't if you're a politician, and you cut this program, your constituents get upset, you don't have that stuff being built in your district. There's a perverse incentive that you can't buy the votes, which is why these folks are constantly

trying to buy votes. And the good news is the good news is, I really applaud the people that have the courage to show this stuff on X, to tweet this stuff out so that the rest of us know about it, and the person that talked about the NYC thing. But then the next step has to happen, which is that we all need to decide that this stuff needs to stop, otherwise it's going to bankrupt our country. And we have to celebrate it. That's the key. If we can celebrate people saving money again, like Malay is getting a lot of credit. And that's up to us, leadership and podcasting, or the media, or influential people have followings. If you point out, hey, this is a waste,

go save this money. And somebody does save the money. Well, why don't we start celebrating people saving the money and doing the right thing here? Because this is our children's future. Is it true that Kamala was the broadband czar that was responsible for this thing? I mean, it's who knows? It's just no because I saw it. I saw that a bunch of senators wrote a letter to her and they claim that she was the broadband czar but I don't know if that's true or not true. And whether she was I mean, we just remember she was the AI czar, but I don't know if that's true or not true. And whether she was responsible. Remember, she was the AIs are I mean, the administration did put her nominally in

charge of various technology initiatives. Here's an idea, save money, get the get the best solution at the lowest price, and then reevaluate that as you go. And I just want to point out with the this is a subtle point. But Elon also open sourced his patents for the superchargers and let anybody do them. And he opened up the superchargers to other vehicles, which he didn't have to do. And when they gave him a loan back in the cylindra days and the fiscal days, remember, they gave these incentives in the form of loans, he's the only

guy who paid it back, everybody else failed. So now you're punishing the guy who actually built the infrastructure for both of these projects. So the reward for actually doing the right thing, which Starlink did SpaceX did and Tesla did is to be punished. And then you're giving a leg up to somebody else who's building these charts, who's more qualified to build these charges at scale, or a satellite network at scale, the person who's already done it. He's already done it. CW I do worry that there's a growing version of the Elon derangement syndrome that's also kind of like festering. Dr. John Gerstle Yeah, for sure.

CW Which just it just stops people from thinking rationally. Dr. John Gerstle Of course. I mean, we're talking about laying fiber lines, cable modems to people who are hundreds of miles into the countryside. That makes no sense when you can just beep, put a satellite dish up today. What are we even talking about? I mean, government has never been particularly efficient, but there was a period of time where people would at least care about wanting to make it more efficient. And it would be a scandal if there was political corruption to try and bias the result in a

way that actually deprived the intended recipients of the program from getting the services they were supposed to get and cost the government way more money than it needed to. We're so far beyond being that country anymore, where we actually debate the best policy. We're now it's just like we're warring political tribes. And the objective of the party is to punish its political opponents to engage in retaliation, and to basically loot the public coffers as much as possible on behalf of their constituents. And this is basically

happening. You know, it's completely dysfunctional. Well, let's use this podcast. If you see government waste, tell us and no one really cares because the media doesn't really shine a light on it because they're they're completely tribalized as well. I agree with everything you're saying except the last part. I don't think it's on behalf of their constituents. I don't think any of us see any benefit from any of the spend? No, no, I meant their donors, the donor constituents. Yes. Not the citizens of the country. Yeah.

But who's winning in this? It's not like this 42 billion lining the pockets of, I don't know, name the... For sure. How do you think these contracts get awarded? For sure. All those fiber companies that are going to lay that fiber are going to get that money. And then they're going to kick back 40,000 contributions. It's been three or four years. They haven't done a single thing. I still think they're cash the checks.

It seems like we're at the stage of just pure incompetence and retaliation. We're not even at the stage of actually then giving it to anybody else. I mean, that would be. So they're giving the money away, and they're so incompetent, they're not getting the political benefit from it.

They're so incompetent, they can't get out of their own way. But somebody is getting that call it 50 billion that we don't need to spend. And the way that money is awarded is going to be political. We're going to think that they're going to turn around and get big political contributions. Of course. Well, I think I think that I think the good news is that the more of these things we shine a light on, the harder it'll be to hide when

these grants are actually given or what the execution is and, and to your point- Let's start a running list. Let's start a running list. No, to your point, Sax, maybe like, you know, we need a revival of the 60 minutes, you know, waste fraud and abuse. On this program, we'll do it at the end of the show every time we'll have a running list at allin.com of just every one of these scandals and we'll feature a running list at all in calm of just every one of these scandals and we'll feature it. So leak it to us first, send it to us. My DMs are open. All right, listen, early stage investing has always been hard. There was a tweet storm this week that

Y combinator might be having a hard time replicating their early success. We'll discuss it now. A thread this week from ex user Molson heart caught a couple people's eyes. He made the case that it's been a rough decade for why see based on the accelerator top companies page why see list of top companies by twenty twenty three revenue there. And you'll notice is not a lot of companies from the recent cohorts of the fifty companies featured only three are from the classes after twenty twenty most of them being from the early twenty ten eight tens. Obviously that's because they've been around longer, but it sparked a big discussion that there were so many winners from the 2009 to 2016 era. And that maybe the class size at YC has expanded a whole bunch. And maybe that's part of the problem. But there's a bigger problem in VC that we've talked about here.

Here's a chart from Carta that just shows the percentage of VC funds that have made a distribution since 2017. Over 40% of 2018 vintage funds have not made a single distribution yet. And it's getting to the point, year five, six or seven, where you probably should have had some distributions occur. Obviously, a lot of this has to do with maybe M&A and those early wins being taken off the table. We've talked about that a whole bunch. But here's the chart that kind of gets really interesting. An explosion in fund managers occurred, as we all know, and

this chart shows from pitch book, the first time first time VC managers that raised a second VC fund as a share of all first time VC managers, and it's now down from above 50% to below. Gosh, 15%. So what are your thoughts here? Chama? really tough business. Every year, for the last seven, six years, seven years, I have published my returns, which most VCs don't want to do. I do it because I go back and I look at it. And I think having public accountability actually drives some good decisions. They may seem suboptimal in the moment, but they in the long run, turn out to be good decisions. And the biggest one has been generating liquidity.

So Nick, you can throw up this thing, but I'm sure there are funds in each of these vintages that have done way better than me. So I'm not I'm not saying you know, it is what it is. But what I want to point out is, if I go and look inside of these funds and tell you how hard it has been to generate this DPI, it's like it's like dragging an entire just sack of potatoes over the finish line. It's like like a truck of dead bodies over a finish line. It is super, super hard. And the things that we have fought are two. One is that the gestation of companies has totally blown out. We used to be in a world where by year five,

six or seven, you could return money. You just can't do that anymore, unless you get extraordinarily lucky, which by the way, I got when sax was running Yammer. It was an enormous win for all of us, but that is just exceptionally rare. And that was M&A in year what five or six? Yeah, but there's so few, there's so few entrepreneurs capable of that. He's one of maybe five or 10. So other than that, I've never really had a company that has generated liquidity in year five, six or seven, they've always generated if they've generated it at all, in years 11, 12 and 13. And so the problem with that is that at some point, you have these paper marks that

say you're winning, and things are working, but there's no path to liquidity. So then what I did was I stepped in to the secondary markets and I would sell. And it would really upset certain founders. But I was very clear that when I was running outside capital, and I was running outside capital on behalf of really it organizations that I believed in the Broad Foundation, the Mayo clinics, Memorial Sloan Kettering. My job was to get the money back. You know, these were their pension funds. These were the things that they use to build facilities, cancer research, cancer research, I

didn't have the, you know, ability to just sit on my hands and say, Oh, you know what, year 15, don't worry. So it's just meant to say that the tactics of generating liquidity and venture are very misunderstood and very underappreciated. And even then you sell some things that are just absolute winners that had you waited another five or six years

would have turned another one or two turns. But that's not the job. The job is not to maximize absolute every single win. The job is to return capital in a reasonable time period, so that your investors don't run out of money to give. Yeah, it's so it's a tough game, man. It is really, really, really tough. Yeah. And the inside. And sorry, by the way, and I feel this now because, you know, the last five or six years has been entirely my own capital. And my gosh, it's hard. Yeah, managing liquidity is impossible, especially when you can't rely on anybody else. So well, thank God for the secondary markets even emerging, because at the same time that the secondary markets emerged and people were willing to buy venture assets, you know, going into their second decade,

I would have been in real trouble without the without reasonably liquid myself included. I mean, my numbers, my numbers would be a quarter of what they are. Yeah. And I took advantage of almost every time I had one of those opportunities to sell some shares, pair some positions. And that's how we got our DPI as well, because let's face it, MellinaCon and the anti-tech sentiment has led to these large companies not buying startups, and instead they compete with them.

They just say, we'll build it in-house because you're not letting us buy it, and it's broken the entire ecosystem now. That's broken, the IPO process is broken. I tried to flip that on its head with SPACs. Some work, some didn't. Many didn't in the end. Many of mine didn't work out at the end. There was a period where it looked like it was working. But these are all attempts at changing the liquidity cycle of these companies because the way that

things stand today, we are not in a sustainable industry. It is if you raise funds and think about fee generation, but it is not if you think about returning money to founders, LPs, getting employees compensated for many years of oil that they put in, it's a very tough game right now. Well, Sachs, right now we're seeing people do things like selling their early SpaceX or their early Stripe, whatever it is, to other VCs, to later stage funds, a lot of ways to try to secure DPI. What's your thoughts on the state of venture today,

given all this data that we're looking at today? Well, two points. So first, I agree with Jamath that the state of venture today, given all this data that we're looking at today? Well, two points. So first, I agree with Chamath that the amount of time it takes to generate an outcome for, I'd say, most startups is longer than the 10-year period of these funds. And these funds can be extended up to 12 years usually, but then what do you do after that? It just takes a lot longer than that in a lot of cases

to generate a meaningful outcome. I just had two companies that I invested in in my second fund. So in 2019 and 2020, so four years ago and five years ago, just got marked up. And it was a big markup that companies doing, well, I call them late bloomers. It took four to five years for them to accomplish

what they wanted to in terms of building out the tech. I mean, I invested at the earliest stage. So that's how long it took, and now they just did growth rounds and they're kind of off to the races. But I could easily be 10 years from here to get to a liquidity event. So you're talking about more like 15 year funds.

So I agree with that point. The second thing though is that the big thing that's happened in our industry is we had a bubble in 2020 and especially 2021. And we just had a ton of capital come into the industry because the Fed and the the federal government airdrop $10 trillion liquidity onto the economy in reaction to COVID. And not all that money went into VC, it went into a lot of places, but the VC industry was flooded with cash.

And you see this in the deployments. I mean, in those bubble years, there was something like 200 billion a year of capital deployment when normally it's 60 to 100 billion. So if twice the amount of money is going into the industry and is being deployed, and rounds are now twice as big, and valuations are twice as big and valuations

are twice as big, that has a huge outcome, a huge effect on returns. So for example, the average venture fund is like a 2X return. But if the entry prices were artificially double, then there goes your return right there. You get 2X becomes 1X. So I think we're just in the hangover of this massive liquidity bubble that didn't originate in the venture capital industry. It came from, frankly, the federal government, but we're just downstream of that.

Now what I would say is I do think we're at the tail end of working that out. The good news is that we now have maybe the most exciting tech wave ever, which is AI, definitely the most exciting tech wave since the which is AI, definitely the most exciting tech wave since the internet came along in the mid to late 90s. So the hope is we're finally going to have like really exciting things to invest in again. But yeah, look, I think we're at the tail end of the last cycle and the beginning of a new cycle. And vintage distortion is so real, you know, it's very hard to understand how each of these

vintages with your late bloomers or overpriced things, companies getting $100 million around totally had a billion dollar valuation before they have product market fit. And those distortions were just so pronounced the last five to 10 years that we're now sorting them out like a like a house of mirrors where you don't know who's tall, who's fat, who's skinny, what the reality is here. And the other big thing is this peanut butter effect that you know, I tweeted about today, you know, during peak Zerp, you had all these exceptional team members, you know, the number 2345 person at a company that

was doing great, they would leave to start their own company. So the talent got spread, then you had so many of these founders rushing into the same vertical. So you'd have 20 startups because there was too much capital pursuing the same opportunity. You pursue the same opportunity. What happens to earnings? They get spread. Then what happens to customers? They get spread across 20 different products competing for the same customer. And then what happens with, you know, ownership stakes for us as GPS and LPs to mouth the ownership stakes because the valuations went up so much they got spread like peanut butter. Instead of a series A getting 20% of a company, it got you 10 instead of a C check getting you 5% it got you one. There's no DPI possible.

You nailed it and sacks nailed it. But And the thing to remember is both of those two things now work together to erode the return stream for the general partner, but really most importantly, for the limited partner. So I do think that we are in a situation where the average returns are going to decay by 50% to 100% because of what Sachs said and because of what you said. On top of that, I don't think we know what the

actual cap structure needs to be for a successful AI company. Is it 20 people that does the work of 2000 now because they have all of these agents and systems that work on their behalf. If that's true, giving that company hundreds of millions of dollars is actually the opposite of what you want to do, you want to give that company 10 or 15 and then let them cook. And so we have a we have a right sizing of capital problem that needs to happen. The data would tell you though that the industry understands that. So the fact that we've gone from 50% of people being able to raise a fund to 12%

means that a lot of people will get washed out of the industry, less capital being raised, which probably is foreshadowing the fact that these companies will need a lot less capital. But you know, that has a lot of implications as it ripples through our economy. It has, I think it's very good for the early stage. I think, you know, you guys are very good there. You've talked about how it's good for you. It's very complicated, I think, for the expansion and growth stage capital. And then I think it's going to be, there's going to be another turn on what happens on the IPO markets, because you can't have so many companies waiting with very, very few ways of accessing public market capital and exposure. I just think that

is fundamentally broken and we're gonna have to reinvent. We tried once with SPACs, we're gonna have to go back to the drawing board and try again. Correct listings, secondary markets that are more fluid. I don't know what it is, but we need to do something because the status code doesn't work.

I think there's so many good points that we're hitting here. I'll just say the other thing to build on your point about, hey, these take less capital. You have to look at what does your ownership after you've been diluted half by 50% as a seed or series of a investor, you're going to be down to half. So if you own 10%, you own five, if you owned seven, like YC or we do in a company, you're going to own three. You're going to really have to model out is the valuation you're looking at, what does it pencil out to for an outcome? And when I did this with our investments, I saw a leak in my game, which was, hey, I'm putting 100k into a $25 million round or a $50 million

round as a follow on investment, you know, to support the founder. Okay, what does that do for my LPs? Well, that 100k would need to hit some extraordinary outcome, five, 10, 20, $40 billion in order for us to return the fund. So now my team understands, Hey, take that 125 K that 250 K that 500 K do more for do four more accelerator companies with it, because those could return the fund. And that's that fund bath, people stop doing I think all these fund managers who are getting wiped out, they never penciled out, what does this company I'm giving a million dollars need to hit in order for me to return my fund.

And now they're finding out that the doesn't work tweeted. Look at that. You know, everybody's course correcting. I mean, it's basically the capital deployments gone back to where it was in 2019, let's call it. So again, we had this bubble, the phone started building in 2020, but you had COVID, people didn't know what to think. So there was some restraint, I guess. And then 2021, it just went wild. That was nuts, man. I mean, the question is, those little vintages are just going to be garbanzo beans.

21, 22. Well, you know, that's such an going to be garbanzo beans, 21, 22. Well, you know, that's such an interesting point. If you could return capital, you're going to look like a euro. Also, Chamath, I remember, I don't know if it was Michael Moritz or Doug Leone, but I was talking to Sequoia about the time dispersion of your fund, like over what period time are you deploying a fund? And man, people started deploying funds in 18 months because they can raise the next fund so quick. So like, screw it, I'm going to deploy this fund in 18 months, 24 months, and LPs were saying to me like,

what period are you going to deploy this? And I said, well, you know, I was taught by Fred Wilson, and this person 36 months, 48 months would be a good window to deploy capital because you know, it's it out. I think you're seeing the dirty little secret of the venture business, which is at some point people get to a fork in the road. If they hyper optimized for returns, I'll put benchmark output, Fred Wilson and usv output Sequoia is early stage fund, they have to introduce time diversity, they keep the funds small, and they look to hit grand slams. But

there are many other people and I would say the most of the set outside of that, take the road more traveled, which is then you optimize for size, which then becomes a fee game. And so you optimize for velocity, get the funds out as quick as possible, raise a new fund. They have no intention of generating returns because they have no ability to. When you have absolutely no time diversity in this business, in a pool of capital,

you're giving away one of your best edges. David just talked about it as a smart practitioner. He was able to nurture these companies and all of a sudden they start to win. If you've all of a sudden flushed all your money in fund one, then you go to fund two, fund three flushed all your money in fund one, then you go to fund two, fund three, by the time something in fund one hits, what are you going to do? You're going to cross the funds, or

you're going to justify taking money from the left hand to pay the right hand, or you're just going to let your ownership wane because you frittered all the money away. These are all the problems that most of these folks have encumbered themselves with. It's very difficult to get out of. It's going to take a look. In fairness to them, they probably got good while the getting is good, so they'll make a ton of money in fees, but they will not be able to raise funds. And those fees are not clawed back, folks, for those of you playing along at home. Yeah. Well, just by the way, I feel better about those late bloomers in my portfolio,

because I know the marks are real. Because if they're getting marked up now then it's very very solid compared to frankly some of those marks that we got in the bubble year like 2021 I call them tiger marks whether it was tiger or not it's just less real quite frankly and a lot of those companies are retrenching and have issues so a mark now it just means something different than a mark then. But look, I want to, you know, just so we're not like totally beating up on VC, there was, you remember that in this bubble period of September 2021, everybody thought that this party would just continue forever. And this is a good example from the Wall Street Journal, where I was talking about how university endowments were minting billions in golden era venture capital. So the bubble wasn't just in VC, it was in the public markets too, because we had ZERP,

right? Like interest rates were zero, liquidity was just flowing. And so it was very easy for companies to get liquid, they IPO'd, and then the valuations were stratospheric. So the distributions to LPs were massive in 2021. And then that led to, again, more funds being able to raise bigger funds. Everyone was just kind of paying it forward and thought the party would just keep going. So this is what happens in a bubble is everybody thinks that it's just going to keep going like that.

Ken, this is why it's so important as a fund manager or an entrepreneur for you to get great advice from people who've been at this for a long time and focus on the process. You cannot control all these outcomes. You cannot control all these meta events. What you can control is your relationship with your customers, building a team,

making great bets, supporting late bloomers. That's the critical part of all this is the process and you can make your process better. And so with my team internally, I'm constantly talking to them about our selection of companies, how we help companies get pulled through and get downstream funding how we literally our big effort this year is how do we introduce our companies to the top VC firms? And we've been working on that as a internal project, right? Of just getting our great breakout companies to the best investors to increase our pull through. It is a process and you have to trust and focus on the process. Yeah. Well, ironically, just, I mean, just to end on sort of a positive

note, if these interest rate cuts are real, like if we just got 50, if we get another 50 this year, if inflation is really tamed, and it's never going to go to zero, but if they go down substantially, and we have this new AI disruption, this new AI tailwind, we could be back in another golden era. It's not gonna be a bubble, but it could be another golden era.

So we'll see. Start companies from your lips to God's ears. Love you guys. I gotta go. Love you. All right, Shamath had to go do work apparently starting this new concept, Saks, which is actually going to work

and at a company. We never got to talk about the debate because we were busy doing the summit and we took the week off from a new episode. People wanted to hear your take. What did you think of Kamala and Trump, the one and only debate we're going to hear apparently? Any thoughts? I think that Kamala Harris performed better than expected. She did that, I think, mostly through having canned answers to topics. And she was able to kind of memorize

those answers and say them. And she was never knocked out of her preparation. She was well prepared. Yeah, I think she was well prepared. However, we now know that these were canned answers because in subsequent press interviews, she gives the exact same thing. It's like a jukebox where you just push the button, create the same answer. Exactly. So she's, she's memorized a certain number of talking points. And that's all she's going to give you no matter what the question is. And if you saw that it's become a meme now where you saw that question when she was asked to give you no matter what the question is. And if you saw that, it's become a meme now where you saw that question when she was asked about inflation.

There's a pause when she's figuring out which greatest hit she's going to play. And then, you know, she, I guess, pushes B-26 in her head and then it begins. So I was born in the middle class. And it's working, apparently, right? It seems like it's it's helping her. I think what you saw is that she got a bounce out of the debate. But now it's sort of like a lot of these bounces, there's been kind of effervescence to it. And then it kind of settles down back to the recurring pattern. And so I think the election is extremely close. But I don't think

Yeah, I mean, every day, it's like a poll going one way or the other. I mean, this is the closest of our lifetime maybe, or that I can remember. I mean, it's nuts how this thing has flipped over and over again. What did you think of Trump's performance? Were you disappointed? There were some rumors, people were a little upset that he doesn't prep as much as he should. What's your, what's your advice there? You know, what's your thoughts? Well, look, I mean, I think that he was in a very difficult situation. You basically had a three-on-one situation where he was up against not just Kamala Harris, but the two debate moderators.

It turns out that Lindsay Davis is Kamala's sorority sister. David Muir was fact-checking him constantly, and some of those fact checks weren't even correct. For example, we now know that the Springfield City Manager has acknowledged complaints about pets being eaten. Oh, here we go. I was wondering if we were going to get through the episode. It's as far back as March. There are videos of him talking about the complaints

at the City Council meeting. Now, you can say that you don't believe those stories or whatever, but those reports were real. But David Muir fact-checked in real time saying that Trump was wrong. And there was like this effort to kind of gaslight and make him sound crazy during the debate when there are in fact sources for what he was saying. And it might have thrown him off a little bit. I noticed like it was like he I agree they going into it. I think they need to negotiate in the future. You know how they're negotiating the microphones on or off audience on or off. I

think they should negotiate. Are we fact checking in real time? Or are we not fact checking and who's doing that? Totally. And they only fact check one candidate. For example, when Kamala Harris repeated numerous hoaxes, like the Very Fine People hoax, the Blood Bath hoax, the Suckers and Losers hoax, I mean, these are things that were already addressed in the last debate and even left-wing sites like Snopes

have said the whole Very Fine People thing is totally made up. Yeah, for people who don't know that, there's been selective edits, and I mean, there's been selective edits forever. But that one is particularly egregious. It's really egregious. The bloodbath one is really egregious too, because he was talking about the bloodbath. Yeah, just make it into a January 6 extension, which it's not. Right. So she was able to say these things and never got

fact checked once, which meant she never got knocked out of her preparation. And let's also be honest, like Trump is hyperbolic. So if you are going to say, you know, oh, we're gonna fact-check Trump, like there's a lot of material there. And he's a hyperbolic guy. That's kind of his schtick, right?

I mean. But here's the thing is that in the wake of that debate, look, I think a lot of people scoring the debate on like technical debaters points would award her the win for that night. I don't clearly she won. Yeah, I don't deny that. However, what I think has been surprising is that in the wake of the debate, you're seeing her support sort of return more to its previous level.

And so what I'm saying is the effect of that's wearing off. And I think one of the reasons why that's wearing off is because Trump still has the killer issues in this election. He's got the border, and he's got inflation and the economy. And Harris may have done well, again, on debaters points, but what substantive answer did she give in that debate, except to say I'm not Joe Biden, which is I guess true. However, what you're basically saying is you won't defend your own administration's record. You are the incumbent.

You're not the change candidate. You're saying that people should vote for you because you're not Joe Biden. What is it about Joe Biden's record? What is it about Joe Biden's policies that you don't agree with? I mean, after all, you cast the tie breaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, you cast it for the two trillion American rescue plan that set off the inflation. So the debate moderators never asked Harris, well, what is it about you that is different than Joe Biden on a policy level, other than the fact that you're different? Apparently, she's pro-gun. I thought that was like a great moment for her. Objectively, I think, you know, and I've said

this forever here on this show, putting our feelings aside about the candidates. I think whoever comes across as the most normal or the most moderate is going to win. And I think she's done a great job of like, for convincing those moderates that she's not crazy and he is what are your thoughts on that because people looked at this very podcast and they've said to me, my god, that's the Trump I want to vote for that Trump 2.0, the all in Trump. And then people are like, he's going back to the insult comic Trump, but I don't want the chaos. What are your thoughts on moderates,

specifically in the swing states and this sort of strategy talk about the teamsters. So Biden when he was specifically in the swing states and this sort of strategy. Let's talk about the Teamsters. So Biden, when he was still in the race, was plus eight among the Teamsters rank and file. And now that Harris is the candidate, Trump has upped something like plus 26 with the Teamsters. Yeah, why is that?

Because isn't she pro-union as well? He was Union Joe, so it was in the name. I understand why is that? Because she's isn't she pro union as well? He was Union Joe. So I mean, it was like in the name, I understand why they loved him. There's something about her policies. And I think her the look, I think within the Democratic Party, I think, I think it's partly personality. But I also think it's its policies and cultural issues. So within the Democratic Party, there've always been two tracks, there's the beer track and there's the wine track.

And so, you know, Bill Clinton was classic beer track guy, right? That kind of Bubba image. Beer summit with Obama. Right, and I think Joe Biden was beer track. Then there's kind of the wine track, which is the more, it's the part of the party that cares

about these boutique cultural issues, starting with DEI and equity and trans and things like that. Limousine liberals is what they used to be called, but I like yours wine liberals or the woke wine. Basically, the entire California Democratic Party is very wine track. I mean, Gavin is very wine track. Kamala Harris is very much right. You can understand why a blue collar worker, it doesn't appeal to that.

They want more of that lunch pail traditional Democrat. But that Democratic Party doesn't really exist anymore. I mean, the Democratic Party has evolved to be the party of the professional class, whereas the Republicans are more the party of the working class. And you're now starting to see it. I think Biden was the Democrats last vestige of this working class party. He really worked at being appealing to those voters, you know, the whole Scranton Joe image. Yeah, Union Joe.

Yeah, exactly. Whereas Kamala, when you get her talking in an unguarded moment, and it's not a canned answer, she's going to talk about diversity, equity and inclusion. And that's not what your typical teamster wants to hear. Let me ask you a challenging question because when it's like when I asked you a challenge a bit, if Trump loses, what do you think will be the cause of the loss? If he loses like strategically, when we look back on the last six months, what do you think you would change? What would cause it? Well, look, I mean, the great asset that Kamala Harris has

is not her likability, it's not her track record, it's not her policies, it's the fact that she's got the media behind her. And if you look at, like, for example, ABC News, 100% of the coverage by ABC News is positive, whereas something like 93% of their coverage on Trump is negative. And you saw this that before Harris replaced Biden as the nominee, she had very low favorability ratings. And then the media basically reinvented her as this transformative candidate. So look,

when you've got the media willing to operate as de facto members of your campaign, that's tremendously powerful. If we had a fair media, this election wouldn't be close. So that is the advantage the Democrats had. Now look, should Trump have done the debate with ABC News? No, I think he should have chosen more fair moderators. I mean, to their credit, I think CNN played the Biden Trump debate pretty fair and down the middle. But ABC, I mean, it was predictable that, like I said, I mean, one of the hosts was

her sorority sister, their friends. So you know, I think that if Trump loses, you could say that his willingness to walk into the lion's den, take on all comers, do every interview, you could say maybe that wasn't as strategic as what she did. But at the end of the day, I think that voters will appreciate that both Trump and JD are willing to do basically every podcast, every interview, they're not afraid to answer questions. And when they do answer questions, you can see them thinking, and they don't give you the same

canned answer they've given 10 times before, including at the debate. So yeah, I mean, that's my take. What's yours, J. Cal? On which aspect? Be more specific. Give me a give me a specific. What do you think? What do you if if if she ends up winning? What do you think the reason will be? Yeah, that's a good. That's a good question. If she ends up winning, I think it will be that people believe that they I think it will be that people believe that they, I think it will be that moderates in those swing states and women believe that it's too much chaos and that Trump will be

too much. They want a calmer, same thing reason Biden one, right? Like that there's this like concept that the adults are in the room and it will be calm and it won't be chaotic. And I think people just still see Trump as a bit chaotic. And I think that's the big fear. And I think they've played the abortion card and the right to choose really well. Even though Trump said here, I'm not gonna sign the abortion ban, I'm pro IVF. I think they have that really great win of saying,

hey, you bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade, probably wasn't smart to brag about that. And they have that clip that they can keep reinforcing. So if he does lose, and I don't know that he's going to lose, I think there's a lot of people who are going to go in there and vote for him. But not say it to pollsters and not say it to their family and friends, because they're embarrassed. because of the pressure against orange Hitler. Oh, you know, this whole rhetoric that he's going to, you know,

overturn democracy. So I think it's a pretty good chance that he's going to win. Actually. I don't think that this race, right? They say the statistics in a close race favor him. Yeah, look, I mean, maybe we're asking the wrong question here, which is why would he lose? I mean, I think maybe the real question is, why is he favored to win? Because I think the polls, including Nate Stilvers, still show him favored to win.

And I think that when you look at what the big issues are in this campaign, and what has people agitated and upset, why they think the country is on the wrong track, something like 65% it has to do with the economy has to do with inflation has to agitated and upset why they think the country is on the wrong track, something like 65%. It has to do with the economy, it has to do with inflation, it has to do with the border. I think that on the cultural issues, the trans stuff drives parents crazy. They don't want the government telling them what to do with their kids. So it's hard to think of a killer issue other than maybe abortion that Harris has on her

side. It feels like all the issues cut Trump's way. But again, the thing that Trump doesn't have, and there's no way to for him to fix this is the media is just so in the tank for Harris. Now you raise a good point. Look, could Trump be more disciplined? Yeah, absolutely. However, you know, I think that what amplifies that is the fact that the media is quick to jump on every little thing he says and distorts it. And he sets himself up for it. You know, like part of what makes him activate

the base is that erratic behavior, his shtick, you know, the comedy. And then I do believe that it gets weaponized by the press because it's like such so easy for them. I agree with you that Trump could be more disciplined. However, I don't think it's as bad as what you're saying, because if it were, there'd be no need to make up these obvious hoaxes. There'd be no need to lie about the very fine people or what he said about blood bath. So if he was really saying that many outrageous things,

why would you need to keep inventing things that he didn't say? And if you actually- Oh, I think they're just stacking them. Yeah, the answer to that question is just throw everything you got at him. Yeah, that's everything at him. But look at look at Kamala's interviews. I mean, she hasn't given very many. But I mean, her answers are just I mean, just

watch them. I'm not going to characterize them. But just just watch her actually said it. I mean, Megyn Kelly thinks she's stupid and not bright. I mean, she's not the most dynamic speaker, that's for sure. And she doesn't seem to be able to have a dynamic debate with intelligent people who are experts in their field, let's say, you know, she can't hold her own in the way you can see JD can write and Trump can. So here we go. And just on the on the second

assassination attempt, I don't know if you even want to go there. But I mean, gosh, I'm so glad that he yes, didn't get shot at again. It's this is scary stuff, folks. This rhetoric's got to come down. I keep saying it. Nobody wants to listen to me. But man, well, let's look at the rhetoric that Ryan Ruth was literally quoting on his Twitter, was saying that Trump is basically an existential threat to democracy.

He was quoting what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the mainstream media have been saying chapter and verse. So I think that if you want to ascribe motivation there, where did Ruth get these ideas? They've been took literally what the mainstream media has been saying. One percent of your followers is what I tell everybody. High profile people, you and I both know his name. And I think that's a very important thing. And I think that's a very important thing.

And I think that's a very important thing. And I think that's a very important thing. And I think that's a very important thing. And I think that's a very important thing. And I think that's a very important thing. And I think that's a very important thing. Ryan Routh simply took literally what the mainstream media has been saying. One percent of your followers is what I tell everybody. High profile people you and I both know is one percent of people in your following, and we all have large followings here, and certainly people have extremely large followings, one percent are mentally ill.

Like when I say mentally ill, I mean severely mentally ill. And if it's but one percent of your following, if it's 0.1%, this could be thousands of people. And this is what happened to John Lennon and other famous people who've been killed tragically is those mentally ill people interpret things in a very different way. And when you say a phrase that has triggers in it,

threat to democracy, fight like hell, whatever it is, they interpret it differently. And so just please, folks, when you call the guy Hitler for years, and again, you create millions or billions of impressions around that. And it's not like a one-off statement, but it's something that's drummed into the public over and over again, it seems to me, you're asking for trouble. Stay safe, please tone down the rhetoric everybody and we will see you next it. I'm the queen of Kenwa. I'm going all in. What, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, My avatars will meet me at Blin's house We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy Cause they're all just useless It's like this sexual tension But they just need to release them out What? You're the B

What? You're the B What? You're the B What? That's gonna be a- We need to get merch Fetches are back I'm doing all in I'm doing all in