E75: Fast shuts down, board culpability, Elon buys 9% of Twitter, deplatforming's evolution & more
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Everybody, welcome to another episode, the all in podcast or favor podcast and a lot of lot of topics on the docket, including but we'll get to that in a minute, tons of up to talk about not just politics but a lot of tech news.

You do sound really hung G R today. J, K, L, you sound like an old man has been smoking cigarettes for three weeks.

You sound rect .

how big your nigh life night.

Admit I didn't go that big. I I want to. Charles was like a there.

like a Martin shine in his thirty.

What does that mean? One to a couple of averages. I'm sorry, on a scale of one to shine, I don't think i've ever been passed the one in my life. So what .

is a six is like, you know, paris hilt in, know in A Y day or like Linda low and in hollywood in the nineties, it's like, you know, like a good time, but not .

crazy.

I'm super high function of you that i'm charly seen .

cannot like li low and wait lunch ent to react five times like.

what do you talking about that?

谢谢。

i don't know what seven is.

We open sources to the .

fans and we.

Joining us, of course, the queen of kin wai is here, the thriller from a milla valley. He puts the iron anxiety you get degree from his google category, the sulton of science. David freeburg with us again.

Right next up, of course, is r of A R. R. He perfected the fly well with his boy, Peter.

lp. S, don't be nervous because he's only investing in software as a service. The world's biggest sample, the rain man himself says.

so that might stick.

And I like this, might be heading towards like a high school talent show kind of.

And finally, the king of Sparks himself, the girl of growth, he puts the dick indicator. He's gonna set her with this sweater from math pi appetite, right? I can't said, anybody know? I can't keep this up every week.

Yes, yes. This become of a very anticipated new feature of the show.

Yes, is a new feature. You know, I forgot we have like what what you're began, you know, all the stuff and. Or I listen, just a quick programing update. All in some, it's sold out. Um basically, it's going to be a great show. We ve got about a dozen speakers lined up, all kinds of great folks and three great parties I want to highlight monday on sunday night will be the poor tournament that's going to be our good fellows. Godfather kind of thing, impressed to impress the family night number two, monday night is going to be a havana White party, where your best lines and Whites, and then closing night party on tuesday night is going to they are miami vice big this party neon and t shirts under suits it's gonna a hell of party two million nine .

hundred and ninety nine thousand seven hundred people don't give IT IT about. You're talking about now I just this party that your growing and seven hundred tickets.

I think there be seven hundred tickets issued and be probably hundred people. The parties, they were pretty good parties.

Uh, we're in the party business here at the island pod.

wow. I've mean the world leads some good parties in my opinion. It's going to three back to back great parties. And the theme of the conference is the problem I most want to solve in the world, or the problem I most want to see solved in the world. So we're asking every speaker to think about that, and we're gonna to talk about the world's biggest problems and then who actually wants to solve them.

The world needs more parties.

Well, that's that's what i'm doing. My that's where to be my time in a talk.

My i've i've watching. We work. So have you guys been watching? Is so frequent good in that that way yeah it's incredible. He elevating the world's consciousness as the mission and then just throw parties is the way to do IT like you really. That is you the .

world's .

conscious ously with with your summer.

I told.

build millions, not make a profit.

Whatever profit makes is going to go to chaos star chAmber fifty person conference he's doing with the all in brand. So every everybody gets to leverage all in brand. You first, you did IT sacks with your call in.

Now i'm doing that with the summer, much with his thing tank. I'm not going to do IT coming soon from freedoms. G be all in unique, special, lose weight like your best.

He's going to. It's it's the all in brand that allows you to lose weight the following way. He brings his best vegan chef to you and up and fucked .

in g garbage is double .

fucking yak.

You, you, you in a chloric .

deficit for the month that that person refuses to .

leave your house.

Me, give me my olive infuse beef.

please. The olive infuse beef.

No, sorry, not all of them. These beef, only eight olive guys.

And then we murder them.

And you.

like you going to have a life, need to elevate .

your conscious ness. Okay, have a party.

Let's go. We need to get some Morales and some .

chick's and make some. Yesterday, we morals. Sean made morals, morals for you.

So good, so good. The moral season is started. Everybody enjoyed lot of different news.

This way you guys appeal, you guys appeal to the common man. The morale season has started.

Morals are that excise tep is more expensive in more, and morals hundred percent that vegan bulshed is more expensive than Normal people list.

We have to elevate the world's consumption of stake and meets um I think a good place. History is we've .

been charged by way. Have you guys ever looked on the back of any cartoon of old milk? How much chemical nonsense in that stuff .

cannot .

really big. I can not really be good for you. What oh my god, give me is the old milk that just oats and water .

doesn't exit .

IT doesn't exist. It's like soy lexicon and gum like stuff can be good for you.

You know, sax drinks and a twelve bounce glass of milk with every dinner .

just drinks milk. I like the whole foods gar, and on, I mean, people trash milk. I get IT, but like as if you're lack us and taller, I understand you in a pinch. Bt, like why go to an an alternative milk that is just riddled with just all of this terrible, terrible stuff.

used to love to eat, breaches so much that whenever we'd have a party, somebody with .

great talks with the ship, with the wheel break.

he would literally eat an entire .

brewhouse on sugar. No, they would put the Brown sugar on top. They would built into sex free break saxes eaten an entire brick of brain front of this.

what? What was the origin of your bre obsession? saxe? You just need some point to me.

A guy.

I think, would ay, what's a matter you just don't have? I mean, what about chatter when a great american, she's now you just prefer the french?

Yeah no.

you still got that fetish.

Great to show .

I to go.

What to do?

We sax. Sax is that .

formatted computer?

This is just plain ice.

Sometimes it's just good to be norwest.

Oh oh, you're back on trying to catch up, trying to catch up OK. Here we go. Listen, we've been talking a little bit about the contraction in tech, the grow stocks uh, having their multiples um lowered and we knew this was coming.

But um it's been a horrible week uh, for large companies, uh, starting the leafs. We knew this was coming. We predicted IT probably six months ago. Fast stock is a one click shack out start up fast to co.

They announced they are shutting down on tuesday, this after the company grew to four hundred fifty employees and generally reported six hundred thousand dollars in revenue. I think that their employees could have made more money if they did one door. I should take delivery.

At its peak, fast was burning ten million dollars a month, according to report setting the information got most of this information well, only generating about fifty seven a months, and revenue three hundred two million dollars. Serious be was LED by stripe in january of twenty twenty one company raised hundred twenty four million dollars. Also Better 点 com， which we talked about.

You remember they had their uh horrific clinger I founder lay off a bunch of employees over sume um and they laid off nine hundred people december first, three thousand people on march eight, according to tech runge for the five thousand remaining employees on April fifth. Better 点 com offer corporate and product design engineering employees the opportunity to voluntarily resigning， exchange for sixty days paid for and insurance coverage Better ceos visual garg uh hopefully, and I correct noted the uncertain mortgage market conditions of the last couple of weeks have created an exceeding chAllenging Operating environment for many companies in our industry. And then going to go puff, which I had the founder on this week, startups and his a pretty good um you know like pretty realistic about the margins in that business.

They'r making a modest cut of three percent of their fifteen thousand steps seems like a reasonable thing to do, given how the market is change. But again, their valuation was absurd. One point five billion at forty had a forty billion of evaluation in december chemotherapies dict.

A lot of this, and that people would have to sharp in their pencils. We had a discussion about this, the good time. R I P. What you take is the beginning of the end, the middle, where we add in this cycle. And what's the reasonable thing for founders to do here?

Think, uh, so we probably should take the the macro and then boil IT down to the startup. So at the at the macro level, I think that we're playing a very dangerous game of chicken with the fed. And you can kind of summarized IT in the following way, which is that you know three or four months ago, we only thought that there was going to be a handful of interest in increases.

And increasingly, what has happened? The market remained so resilient that the fed is sort of put out more and more data as the data has justified them being a lot more aggressive and IT kind of crescendo this past week where they basically said, listen you, we're gona move by fifty basis point increments for the foreseeable two or three red takes and we're going to start quantity tightening. What does that mean? That means that instead of basically printing money in coming in, in buying security from the market, right, what happens when they enter the market with money that they literally do print and buy your bonds, they're giving you cash in return.

And typically, what that has LED to is the inflation of all assets, right? Equity assets have gone up. Bond assets have gone up because there's just nothing else to buy. When quantitative tightening happens, they reverse that.

And what they are going to do is about ninety five billion dollars a month of the opposite action, which means there taking money out of the sister, right? Or in this case, what they're gna do is um they're going to let a bunch of maturity roll off and not not renewed them. okay.

So why is this important? Well, it's important because now we're still four percent from the highs, so we have seven percent inflation. We have all this crazy stuff happening.

We have a war, you know, going on. We have uh, massive Price issues. We have supply demand issues and the market keep shaking IT off. So I think what the fans going to do is get even more aggressive. You're going going to probably see, you know a lot of fifties, maybe even in a seventy five point hike, you probably are going to see them, you know even ratched up quantitative lightning until there is a bit of a blood letting in the equity market. They need to see that the markets craft.

And so they literally need to see what percentage drawed down or just to go sideways. What do they need to see in order to inflation coming down a couple points?

Well, the problem that we suffer from is that they're gonna look at the highest level indexes, right? They're not looking at single stocks. And so when they like when you and I think the market is down four percent, we don't feel that because some of our companies are down fifty and twenty percent, right? But that's because we are all focused on high tech growth.

But they look at the broad indexes and the broad and disease have held up really well and will see it's because, you know, if you look inside the S M P, five hundred forty percent of every dollars, you apple, amazon, you know, microsoft of tesla. So where are the situation where I think until the fed sea, that there is a massive trading of liquidity, which means, like you see these indices crack big time, thirty five, thirty six hundred to me. S P, there's just going to keep batching things as IT comes all the way down to our companies in silicon valley.

In tech, what that means is like you have to start planning for the worse than I think the worst means that there is an eighteen month period where you cannot raise money on your terms. You have to raise money on the market terms. Um and so if you're not a position to show good growth over these next two years, I would encourage you to just get your baLance. And in order to wait out sex.

nuclear winner is a possibility here, markets for 我 raising money again， a strong saying could be on the terms of the capital allocators. What what your advice for founders? What are you are seeing in the board room that you're on the board of? And if you are running one of these high groth companies for the past year, what are the first two.

three things you do? I mean, the first thing you got is your burn multiple. I mean, how much you burn to how much incremental A R you generating? You look at fast. They raise one hundred and twenty million what like a year ago that they're out of money now, so they bought ten million months. Like you said, here's a crazy thing.

If they just slammed on the brakes three, four months ago when we were talking on the spot about the coming downturn, they could still have thirty million dollars in the bank. That's a lot of money. The only reason IT doesn't seem like a lot of money is because theyve been burning one hundred million over the past year.

But objectively, thirty million dollars is a groceries b, which is actually a lot of money for a company that only has one hundred thousand and revenue. So they could have saved that company if they had slammed on the big three months ago and rationalize the cost structure. And they didn't. They had the world one hundred miles an hour.

Who's responsible when something like that happens, David, because you we've all seen IT. What is the extension of disbelief that creates this kind of stupidity that that mean?

That's what that is. I mean, you've got you've got people who are kind of drinking the cool aid, and there's nobody advising them to stop if there is or not listening. I mean, like people, people had this situation back in, uh, two thousand, the year two thousand right after for the document crash, we were burning ten million dollars a month like fast.

We had no revenue and no business mile. Okay, we had said the service be always free. We had four months basically of life, and we pulled up on the throat. And what we did is we basically introduced paid accounts.

We started charging transaction fees and we caught the we cut the cost structure, the company, and we made that last forty million dollars less, a lot longer than four months. IT lasted until we could then do another fun rays the following year. And we are able to then raise, with good numbers, real revenue, a business model exacta.

So you know, and that was because we were just paying attention to the changing environment. The world had changed from sort of the pre dot com crash. You know, ninety nine, your business mild and matter, your margins in matter, revenue didn't matter.

Another stuff matter. All that matter was growth. But by, you know, mid two thousand, everything has changed. So you have to be a attuned to what the fund raising environment is looking like. And if you're a hybrid company right now does not generating a lot of revenue to go along with the you Better stay on the brakes and rationalize your construction before it's too late.

David, me like what do you think is going on in this board meeting? I mean, like this is a group of incompetent incompetence. I don't .

even know who's on the board because stripe LED two rounds, I think. And so is that .

part of a David that you in this and we all love stripe, it's a great company. It's it's a legende company. But one of the reasons we don't like to have strategic is maybe they're not thinking the same as a proper .

capital allocation for them. This is peut a why investors. So I think the reason why is strategic investor investors because a strategic for them, I mean, IT was in striped interest to try and back a winner in the whole e commerce chuck out line sort of payment space.

And so they did that. And I don't even know if they had a board seat. And so no is really .

but understand rational decision suspect the some eternally in strike, which is pretty flood, is hey, we can't do IT ourselves because if we did, we will be competing with our customers but picking a winner and putting one hundred and twenty million dollars is time out to the same thing. So I don't understand. I mean, IT doesn't make any sense right?

And stripe, raise money, ninety five hundred billion dollar valuations. So look at all flows down from, you know, the the frothier of the peak.

No, i'm saying I think I have I would have been much more credible for stripe to say this is a critical piece of the infrastructure and value chain and payments we want to own. So we're just going to go and put some of our Better engineers as like a you know site project and see if we can tack away at something that works. I mean, I think a lot of people would have adopted IT.

but they to go to to be clear.

strike blood on the board index was on the board.

Okay, that's interesting. I mean, those are some good investors .

on the board index and who is .

according to crunch base stripe was on the board of a business development person from there. Index was on the board and dom the founder uh and looks like brian sugar, uh who I know who's an Angel investor in a founder. But who knows if that's outdated information?

You remember when phillip captain used to run a website called fuck company?

absolutely.

You want to tell the fuck company and story jack out for all the people that have.

no. I mean, this would have was the dom world was employing all the employees, didn't have a voice. There was no social media at the time.

There was no blogs at the time. The only thing you could really publish on the in the world was like A G. O. City page. You could put up a home page if you knew how to do HTML is even pre myspace um and so a friend of my film apple in who does a very successful cometary dial kid now started fuck company. And IT was a message board. And what he based that people do was he would write three headlines, one sentenced, kind of like before red IT existed, which just put a one mind head, and then was comments underneath that meets a this company, we just got an email. This companies is laying off people, and he would beat all the news stories to the layout, he would just run with any email that came in, and then people would detail and savage the management of those companies underneath that for mouths and explain exactly how ridiculous the spending was in that error where people were burning money like drunk and sellers.

I think this time around, it's probably important for employees to understand a couple things. One is like who doesn't know what they're doing, right? So like companies that are making layoffs happening, they should not get punish for that.

But you got to think like the fiduciaries that are ripping this money. And I mean, do you really want to be the person that goes to work at the company this back by these folks in round two? how? I mean, that's not a signal. Like like the opposite has always been a signal, right? Meaning when mike mortes makes an investment, we all pay attention because we all think, wow, there's a picker, you know and he did that with stripe and with so many other you know, great companies.

And so the like of an employee wanting to work for a mike mark back company or mike Marks government company is very high, right? Same thing with girls, you know, same thing with, uh, a lot of a lot of really, really good investors, john door. But the opposite should also be true then, because if if, if you really want to work for a Peter tio bad company, you should probably not work for one of these companies where these folks were just completely apps and are also governing the board because that just means like nobody knows what's going on.

We haven't had proper governance for a long time in second valley. So I mean, I think that's what we crashed. We crashed and the drop that were in some ways about incomplete boards, both those T V. shows.

No, I mean, I definitely see this. Um you know I I think you guys know the incentive for a traditional venture capital alist that that that maybe isn't um you know motivated by improving their craft but they're motivated incentivize premiering by making money is to to raise more capital and get more deals.

And as you guys know, like every venture firm has maybe one or two superstars and then they fill up the ranks and hire a bunch of folks or maybe not superstars or they don't pay as much attention. You know, used to be maybe A V C would sit on a handful of boards and now it's like your the the board representative for twelve companies and that, uh, you know you're not going to be able to provide quality time and service to to and support to the sea and the company. And more importantly, as you guys point out, like not provide the governance.

And governance isn't just about are you signing the docker science as they come in to approve stuff, but it's about actually critical the business strategy with the C E. O at the board discussion, critical the spending, reviewing the financial plan, making sure that everyone's a line that this makes sense in this funding environment to have to give this work. And I don't see that a lot.

I don't know that you guys, but I see a lot of he sees either handling to the CEO because we have founder culture hysteria and silicon on valley where it's true the best founders make the thousand x returns, and that's IT. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of the businesses um should be left to their devices just because there are a few um ultra successful founders, that there are a lot of businesses that actually need governance, uh, in order to achieve outcomes. And I see that lacking heavily water valley because the VC are more intensified to raise more money, to make more investment and then pay less attention and just go raise the next five.

And I think he said the key thing, there are really very few star pickers in our business. Um IT takes decades to really prove that out and and pupil, but those people that are real pickers, I don't think put up .

a bullshit from pickers like. So john door was deeply involved in google .

in the early days. But but what i'm saying is our job OK at the end of the day is we're picking okay. And then once you pick, you gotta do the work. If you pick poorly and you do the same amount of work, IT doesn't matter. Nobody y's gna remember you.

yeah. What is what kind of happening is the VC flushes the deal if it's not going to be a hundred baggar. They don't pays much attention, they let the thing right into the sunset and they they move on to the next thing. But there is all duty and a responsibility, I think, to the shareholders in the employees of that company to, you know, do what x mention, which is, can you reduce burn under these circumstances and can you actively engage as a board member to encourage leadership to do that?

And that doesn't happen. But you said that key, think there are few practitioners that really have the gravity to actually enforce those decisions. So you know, there is a reason why, and during the great financial crisis, there is only one organization that even have the courage.

Forget whether IT was right or wrong at the time, even write the R I P. Good times deck, right? IT was choir. Nobody else dare to even put that on the page, let alone give IT to all their companies knowing that they would leak less. They be wrong.

And the reasons the code you could do IT, is they're looking at a forty year franchise and saying the integrity of our franchise at stake. We need to keep doing what we've done before. And what I did IT, I think in that case, was pulled along a bunch of folks that were not as good as the top few folks.

And IT helped reorganized as if you see the three or four years after that, G, F, C, deck to play a flush, that whole business right there is an entire turn over of that team. And so I think what he speaks to is, and we talked about this in a few episodes ago, if you're seeking out A U, M, you're gona hire a very different, kinder person. And if you're helping trying to help build companies.

And the difference is that when you are trying to raise A U M, your customer is not the company, customer is the L P. And what the L P wants to do is be able to write their investment memo and not get fired. And the way that you do that is by pointing to the team and saying, well, this person worked at this company.

This person was A V P at that company. And IT seems credible. But between but being able to invest and being able to act, be a good Operator is so different.

Look, i'll also say one thing that's important. I don't like this celebration or or sorry, the democrat entertainment that comes from failure. I I thought for company like I I was Young when I when I was out and you know, I would read IT and kind of gig at the stupid companies they got funding, you know but to me it's it's not like the kind of thing that could should kind of be funny or or laughed at or even to mock failed companies. I mean, it's cynical. Now I think the capital that available in the .

markets today to building that is that the company that .

I don't think there was people taking part .

of as much people tell people the.

oh yeah, yeah, totally no, no, no. But but a lot of IT was like this mockery. Like, can you believe this shit even existed yet?

A and the synsi I think you know kind of um you know it's IT stalls out the opportunity for for capital to support you know new new venture, new initiative like this. You know I also think that these businesses that today are looking to raise capital that are um you know let's call them good businesses. They have a good opportunity. They're going to be chAllenged in in a marketplace where everyone is cynical. And I also like scarcity breeds success when there wasn't a lot of venture money and um there were only you know kind of a few investments that could be made each year.

There was a decision making process that says, look how valuable can be versus this other opportunity that I could invest my capital and to that says, okay, the best opportunity wins and gets picked and gets capital in a world where everyone was raising a billion dollar or second fund or a three billion dollar fourth fund, and you suddenly had an influence of one hundred billion dollars of venture money in a year. It's a lot like what we saw in crypto markets, which is an extraordinary explosion and highly speculative bubble assets. And a lot of these businesses maybe shouldn't have existed .

in the first place. Too much demand for the stock of private companies and .

all the hetch funds that came into IT.

all the mutual funds they have supply of great founders and serious teams that are working hard on this. I think ink with the case of fast, I agree with your general sentiment about dunking. In the case of fast, what you had was a founder who was on twitter every day twitting about how great the company was, wasn't giving start up advice while he was taking none of IT and should not have been giving any of IT because they didn't even have product uh.

market fit, lesson learn, you know who should be criticized? The next percent that acts that I know .

a very interesting story actually .

think aren't he had two companies that were kind of major red flags. And I think the diligence issue, sacks is one. Maybe you are having a similar experience to be in the early stage.

We were seeing deals last year. Clothes in a week. Um we Normally have thirty days to get a deal and maybe a week or two to get our diligence wrapped up.

Sometimes these things overlap, but it's what was that you know historically a four to six three process. And then I went down to afford to six day process and then people were meeting with you one day and saying they are closed the next. Where you did you feel like the last couple years people were doing proper diligence or not? And what impacted diligence have on any of this?

You know, certainly I can speak to what our competitions were doing. I don't think our iligant process change much. We would just have a mentality of when there is a deal that was urgent, we would drop everything and focus on that deal and get our work done. And IT can be done quickly, although it's easier for us companies because the metrics that you're looking out of the standardized, it's just a is easier process.

What's the most important thing? Intelligence in your mind? What is the like bullet that like people can't the server able thing people can .

fake probably off SHE customer references. So the first thing we do is focus on the on the metrics, right? And the financials, the SaaS metric.

So I kind of stuff but then you want to talk to customers and you want to understand the value they are getting out of the product and ideally, they are offshore customers. Explain what SHE this means that, you know, you frequently ask a founder to give you customer references. Those are all shed references.

The off sheet references are the ones that you find yourself that they never gave you. So like the easiest office references to do are when your own portfolio companies are using some other like pieces software and they tell you about IT. So you know that it's a totally non conflicted situation. So that's what you are looking for. So what a euro companies .

is using stripe, they tell you how great stripe is. They tell you what's good, what bad about IT, but references are giving. So it's sort like back to our references if somebody .

tells you hear and you can do the same thing on founders too, you can have on shed off SHE references for founders and you can do IT for yeah but bit look, I think I think is probably a little bit unfair to blame the board of this company too much because the reality is that VS don't have the leverage of the power in this business. I mean, it's found this this whole construction the industry is set up around founders.

And at the end of the day, it's up to the founder to run the company and they get to do what they want unless they do something criminal. Otherwise, they are going going to do whatever they want. And boards on boards generally are very differential. The founders and if the founders not willing to listen to advice, what are you going to do about that?

Well, no, but this is the point you're making, I think is not right. You think that if Peter till gave some advice to sold the company down, that this guy, uh, would have not taken IT? Of course you have, and we would have to consider IT.

If my more is actually said, he would have had to consider IT. I think what you're actually speaking to is on in the rush to put so much money to work, we've elevated people who don't understand what the job is to do the job. And if they're not credible, of course, they're going to be ignored.

We all have ignored stupid board members. You've done a two, David, but even, you know what? Let's actually look at embers, an example. There were one or two of us that you would talk to pretty consistently.

even talk to all of them. I would always k advice. Look at a great founder, a good founder.

Always advice, no question that. But look this idea that its governance. First advice. I think the problem with that being governance is all the instruction sentence for VC are to be profounder. No one was a jam, a founder, by making them do something they don't want to do. Well, understand way.

That became a competitive tactic that emerged as more venture capital funds were raed. The more venture capital was raved from L. P. S.

Prior to that, there was a scarcity venture capital and VC could be could have good governance and not have to have this whole profounder model that became the thing that founders fund and recent others kind of program as being called their advantage and the reason to pick them over some other VC. He is going to metal in your affairs. And by the way, both are true.

There are most VS, as the node has said, publicly add negative value. And I totally agree with him on this because many vcs, particularly they wants who aren't you know valuable and don't really have much to add, try to add stuff, try to say stuff and they just you create negative value in the process. But on the other hand, the whole profounder model LED to the the wee work and umbers of the world that you know I think right.

there's A A trade off. I mean, look, I remember in the one thousand nine hundred and ninety the default, the foundered scot replaced, right? Like as soon as the company is successful, you hire E A professional .

CEO that was just like rule that I mean, even did .

that yeah no, I mean that by the the point I was to make which was like so much of john doors influence. Was in getting larrian surging to take eric on A C E O. And I really do think that that was like, you know a critical move that created probably that created most valuable company uh, in history and right and you know it's IT was an important imagine if you had one of these founders fund and by the way, you guys know i'm very close to the the guys, the founders, but but imagine if you had a founders fun type approach where you said, look there and circular the founders, you know what are doing.

Let them do IT as opposed to the john dore newmans of let's make sure that we think about the development of this company's successful ly over time and then convincing, surging through a bunch of meetings and writing bikes and whatever else they did with eric, you know to like and then and then what about jim? Ya didn't he bring shero over to facebook? I mean, like there's a lot of these stories of the really the VC that really changed the trajectory of the .

business through their work, right? But but look, all i'm saying is the good VC can still have that influence, but it's in the form of advice .

rather than governance. Call the IT is advice. But but for example, governance as an example in in every board that I take. The first thing that I say is here's a template I want. I'm not gonna you a bunch of stuff, but I just want some transparent reporting.

And the first page is always how much money at the begin of the month? How much money did you burn, you know, how much equity did we give out? How much is left in the pool? Simple basic checks and baLances, right, where you're not asking all kinds of crazy questions.

You're just like how much money every morning, how much solution to be take. Now tell me what we've done. And those are simple elements of governance way before you get .

into a high level setting. What's the speed? What's the elevation, where we, what's the altitude? And when you ask .

people for this today.

but I know that dos.

anybody that doesn't do IT honest.

I would love to see.

I would, there's a little bit of deck. There's, I would like to .

see a fast board deck and to see if that first page is that page, the first page and Better way, you know, where I learned that from from the coia and clinton brokers because back in the day, what I saw from founders was, oh, this is the first thing I have to report on. I was taught by founders when I was in, when I was a principle that may feel they're like, this is how you do the job. And I was like, great.

thanks. And I was like, sitting beside these guys that were old hands are doing IT. And that's how I learned this business through the apprentice. But there was governance and advice. And the governance is just about being transparent about how much money are you burning.

And so you can't, you know the David point, if you had just seen that data, even if you take those board text, by the way, because you have these information rights, I don't know, but you guys but we do that. We do that as well. You take the board deck, you circulated to your other partners.

There's lots of times where I see board decks. S and companies were one of my partners around the board and I send them an email. I K, here's some bullet points of things to think about. But i've seen before I said you don't think nobody at stripe index could have said, uh, you're burning ten million dollars a month and there's no revenue. So the point .

is that the dollars bank .

give me a break, guys. So this was A H A catechisms c failure at the advice level and at the governance level. And all i'm saying is it's a good lesson for folks to learn. absolutely.

yeah. So point peals attention to articles. I know that I think relevant at first.

We actually published an article on the password meeting deck that we would like people to use, and obviously they're freeze user or not to the mos point right up at the top as a context that we need to know what's your monthly burn and how much money is in the bank. And and then we just divide those things to create runway. We are not like looking at projections for runway totally.

We just look at how much you burn last month and how much money you got to. And like, right, actually they were down to thirty or forty million dollars burning ten million a month. Somebody should have like three up red flag and said Better same on the brakes right now because you can be out of business in three or four months so so that sort of peace.

Number one. The other piece was not that I wrote a couple of years ago called blitz fail, which is how not to go off the rails because a lot there's lot of literature out there about blitz scaling, and a lot of stories think they need to scale as rapidly as humanly possible. And I wrote this piece about how fast curing companies that raise lots of money at high valuations basically go off the rails and the end up in floating.

And there's like eleven reasons why this happens. I sort of categorize them. One of the biggest ones is founder psychology.

You have a founder who believes that things always going to be up into the right. It's funny. They're always describe the same way described as visionary cosmetic.

And the weird crazy is often used, but it's crazy good. And then when everything goes to shit, all this on the world, crazy means something majority and bad. And the problem is that these characteristics of being highly visionary and cosmetic, they also can be combined with an unwillingness to listen to advice. And so, you know, founders who have those qualities that they can be a good thing, but they have to seek out advice from people who've had experience otherwise are going to make mistaken hit the wall.

Being delusions is what you need to start. These companies like, i'm going to beat these incoming ts, i'm going to change the world. A little bit of illusion is good, but not when you're looking at how the runway like that's when you need to be pragmatic.

I think there's a term of coach ability. You know how how cultural is this person as as a CEO as a leader um and I do think that coach ability goes hand in hand with intellectual curiosity. I mean, if you look at the collison's patric collison and and how much bread he has in some of the the topics he's interested in and the things he writes about IT indicates to me a high degree of intellectual curiosity. And people who are intellectually curious generally are very humble because they they're constantly seeking things they don't know, and they recognized that they don't know a lot of things. And in that same kind of mentality, they are willing to recognize that other individuals can have good points of view that can inform their perspective, and they are willing to change their perspective. And I think that's a really key, key, key thing that if you look across the the range of successful founder CEO that scale two hundred billion dollars lus valuations for their businesses, that to me is one of the more common threads is this kind of intellectually curiosity, which translates into accountability, which translates into an adaptive city is and and being willing to take advice and see your board is a tool, not kind of a government structure are sitting over you. I think the less you are like that, the more you are likely to feel like your board of the government structure, your umbrella setting over you.

telling you what you can do. I don't think that's what governance .

means by the what is meant. It's meant to look out for the shareholder. That's the job.

sure. But but act as a fiduciary doesn't mean to like tell the C E. O what to do.

This is my point like here. So it's not I think he's right about.

I think, feeders right about how boards often perceived by founders. I think there is an increasing this called a hollywood director, a hollywood autour mentality towards VC j call .

in the all in podcast, right?

It's basically, it's basically look there. There are certain incubators out there, accelerators and whatever, who teach these Young founders that is all about their vision. And anyone who sees the way of IT is basic interfering with them. They are the ottar like a hollywood director, and you ve got to stay away from those suits the studio guys, right ever. That's the mentality they're trying.

They're teaching them an adverse mentality.

an adverb talk. And look, there are touch mos point. There are plenty of VC. I don't know what they're doing to have no useful advice to offer.

But the Better mentality to teach a founder would be like, look, if the world is so complicated and building a company is so complicated, it's got me ten times more difficult if you don't seek out advice. So go find board members who will let you ultimately do what you want, but we will still give you the advice. If so.

this is going wrong. And what was true at one point time when poll gram gave this advice and he set up White combination, you don't want to say their name, but IT is program had a terrible experience in his company with venture capital. So he set up that wartime stand between founders and the investment community.

And you know, founders fund became the antithesis of the traditional venture funds, and they were going to be founder focus. But that advice then might have been true. And now it's not.

Now we've sung the pencil too far the other way. We did two things because we saw this ten years ago when I started seed investing, and then when I started building positions of over five percent. I just said to founders, if we all over five or ten percent, we should have an option of a board seat.

And we'll do board seat, we'll do board training with, we will just teach. You will take, like, here's some decks that we've seen from mother, you know, here's some deaths that are available, and we will show you what a board is like. And then I would have three founders come.

Two would sit on one's board meets, and I would do three back to back board meetings, bring your council, bring your founders and sit in on the other two board meetings, and will have a little pycroft discussion about what was good about each board meeting. We did board meeting training as a proxy for venture worthiness later on. And when those companies did go out to adventure and they had an e stop and they had born minute meanings, they just looked more impressive to the venture community.

So I know people say, don't do a board, it's not cool. IT actually turns out doing a one hour board meeting four times a year, six times a year, even at A C stage company IT, does differentiate you to the venture community. I find, all right.

Moving on a speaking of boards. Elan bought a chunk of twitter last week at nine percent stake and he's joining the board. H that makes them the largest individual or the largest shareholder, individual or institutional.

Uh, he bought the shares in a march twitter CEO parag agrawal, uh, twitted. I'm excited to share we're appointing you on us to our board and then jack treated and support. I'm really happy you on destroying the twitter board examination point.

Just to give some level setting here. Uh, in q four of twenty twenty one, twitter had one point five billion in revenue, up twenty two percent year over a year. They've been starting to ring the register over there.

Uh, daily active users are solid but modest. Two hundred seventy million a daily active views are thirty eight million, of which in the U. S. One hundred seventy nine million or international. And there are steady goals for cufa of next year twenty twenty three.

So in a year and a half, they won't have three hundred fifty million, and they want revenue in twenty and twenty three to hit seven point five billion again. And they are on a six billion dollars n right? So I guess that would be an increase of twenty five percent.

Uh just general thoughts on uh and elon obviously has been making uh some twitter suggestions uh for the product sex you worked with. You want to paypal thoughts on what this does for that? Wa, you're having.

It's like such a funny transition. sex. You work with .

the alloted paypal.

some great product ideas. But what this is really about his free speech, you know, right before elon announcement, he is doing polling asking the twitter user based whether twitter was succeeding or fAiling in this mission to be an open town square and open marketplace ideas, something like seventy percent said they were fAiling at IT. Elon, on many occasions has spoken up for free speech.

He believes that twitter is stark. Mission is as an open town square. And I think he's going to bring that emphasis to the board, and it's a great thing.

Now I think the person had the best take on the reaction to this was Michelle a, and he had a few. funny. Who is that?

Who does he work for? See a founders fun guy.

I think yeah I think he works for Peter founders fund, but he's got a he also like a great new substate newsletter, kind like a black post called wires worth checking out. This is a pretty in addition to be a pretty sharp panellists.

he's actually is a lot of funny things to his iconic close. Again, swing the sort.

yes. So the way he put IT is that elon, join the board has all the worst people on twitter furious. They think that this guy might actually say free speech and for authority ans that is an existence al threat. And then he added, I don't get what the problem is, guys, if you want censorship, you can just go build a new social media company and do censorship. There is a free market, thereby turning on its head everything day and saying, which is know when the people who, the authority an, the authoritarian people who love censorship, whenever anyone complained about censorship.

they would always take .

social network, are free market acting the way they don't like, which is finally, somebody who leaves in free speech is want to stand up by the largest stake in twitter. Join the board. I mean, this is fabulous.

Think it's really.

I is pretty amazing. Thirty.

I texted you guys in the group chat. I think that if he is able to make free speech cool again, he'll he'll actually do more doing that then potentially through space x and tasia and that's already saying a lot because free speech really is this fundamental principle of democracy and it's been decaying. We don't know the implications of a large technology company keeping free speech as a principled pillar of their uh reason to exist, right?

Because we've seen free speech kind of decay and we've seen sort of you random decision making that seems are arbitrarily by a lot of these technology companies and you know the payments companies free purpose mentioning VISA aster card earlier in the group chat. But all of these things can change on a dime if elon makes free speech cool again and figures out a way to make that a principle that everybody can embrace. Because then if you really believe in that, then you go to the nexo logical conclusion, which is what David has said for forever, which is the only solution to, you know, speech you don't like is more speech.

And then that creates a surface that I think you can technically manuvre around the meaning, what are the real problems in all of the speech? Creates a, creates a you know, content moderation issue, right? IT create A A spam issue and IT creates a sort of wisdom of the crowd's ranking rating issue.

So this information comes to mind.

no, but that that's a wisdom of the crowd ranking rating issue in my book. So I I guess the point is that you know, if he can get the twitter employ base fundamental on side of this idea of free speech as a principle that I think is enormous because you know that none of the other big tech companies will ever even do that and the capital structures of those companies will never allow a single strong voice like is to enforce that idea.

So this is the only company where that could have. And I think, you know, we want to see what this how this plays up. I think it's a really.

really big deal. All right. Freeburg, yeah, i'll tell you what I think .

changes .

facebook, twitter, even google all across to significant external pressure over the years. I said this in the past. I believe the founders of those companies are all philosophically, fundamentally philosophically aligned with the notion of free speech and um absolute freedom of information, you know enabling truth finding over time and the um the edge cases uh of those platforms ultimately um identify and uncover ways that they can be used uh against what you know many would consider kind of the Better part of society and as a result they act.

We have to external pressure that drive some of the censorship decisions and drives some of these um these behavioral uh, changes by management. But I think that if you concentrate the ownership of those businesses and rather than have kind of a distributed shareholder base, meaning the public markets were the largest single shelter in twitter today, h has been jack orca at two point three percent. He actually serves the shareholders.

And the shareholders ultimately want to see the stock Price go up, and they ultimately want to see the business make more money. And as a result, they don't have the same sort of the stakeholders there have kind of a different set of aligned over time. You know they're not necessarily the same long term. Uh, or or focus meeting. Does the philosophy come before the money? And I think as you kind of concentrate ownership, you have the opportunity in the option now uh to you know make make those sources of decisions that you can make when you're a broadly on stock.

facebook and google .

contre structures.

So what are you talking about?

The issue in companies are scared to also, if you also usual your employees, but employees .

are writing and now it's ah its shareholders.

shareholders and government regulators, right. And so in both cases, you are to the pressure in employees at a good point. Now I understand, but i'm not sure how twitter changes .

any of that there IT does because if we look what's happened is sometime last year, I think IT happened around trip al, and I think that happened because of coin base. We saw a group of folks say, you know what? Enough enough ah we told you to bring your whole self to work.

We told you we would do your laundry. Ry, and then at some point in networks was like, listen, you don't have to agree with every comedian on our platform. There is a range of comedians.

And if you disagree with this one, you can do a walk out, you can protest, you can make your feelings, or you can choose networker. And then the anal kind of did the same thing. He said, listen at spotify, we're going to put label s on IT.

If you don't like your rogan, don't work here. And then of course, we know coin base did IT and tell before shop if I did IT and I have twitter doing IT. And when you apologize and you start listening to this very vocal minority, when they're and they want to cancel people or they want to do platform people, what do they do? They doubled down.

You've shown that you are going to listen to them. They're not doing IT at coin base anymore. They're onna do IT at spotify anymore.

They're not doing IT at netflix and apple that we asked right there like we don't like, you know antonios book chaos monkeys and he said these three things in an award winning book that we find her, we're going to fire him and they get some point. Apples going to have to say, you know what? Leave your feelings at work. This is a company.

Leave you. This is why elon is so dangerous to these people, is because he won't be pushed around. The fact matter is whole woke mob thing.

It's a paper tiger. They don't have to support. The most of the population is a handful. A very noisy voices on twitter and social media who insisted on having a monopoly on the right to shape all of our narratives.

And they want a monopoly on moral outrage.

They want monopoly moral outrage. They want a monopoly, but they also want a monopoly on the basically to to define what is acceptable and what the narrative of on any top is going to be. And all IT takes is one strong person to stand up to the mob. As we saw brian on strong do at point base and the mob dissipated, he took brian .

in the target.

They exactly. So yeah, elon doing this is a really big deal because, again, he cannot be pushed around and he is showing leadership here, and all IT will take to end. This woke censorship is for other founders to stand .

tall the .

way that you want has and let let to employees kind of gripe about, I don't kill care what regulators gripe about and I don't think kill care what other shareholders gripe about. He'll talk about the long term opportunity, the philosophical element with mission and and put forward. And I think that level of leadership is what separates some you great businesses from others.

But this is a version. There were moments of deep platforming that were earned by people like alex Jones, who was saying that know families of Sandy hook were false flags and their children were murdered. There are no milloy oppos.

And some of these alt right, not these sympathising people thrown up sugars, you know, people promoting violence or burgers on these services to attack people, to dox people, those people, those were just cancellations. Deep platforming from youtube in europe. Ion, well, I mean, anybody in citing violence, I think we would all should be this platform.

Jason, look at how it's evolved. We start with isolated cases like a milestones like a milo, and nobody likes and nobody is supports. The next thing, you know, the present united states is being deep platform.

But again, that's supposedly based on him in citing a crowd. Then what's happening today? Now we have entire categories .

of of opinion being banned. IT starts .

with coding. Anyone who want coit gets banned. Now anybody as a sending opinion climate change can we ban? But there's a story this week on CNN we're pin interest of all.

Pinter is a photo sharing site. I don't know. No one is talking about climate change on picture.

And yet I but then I got.

I mean, IT just shows this censorship now is on auto pilot. I mean, even sights where the conversation is not taking place are banning entire categories of thought and opinion because IT disagrees with you. What the experts and j.

you could point out your alex jone's case to make the case that deep platforming should be allowed. The problem is, as soon as you make that case.

it's only a slight degree.

Point is a slight degree away from the next case and in a slight degree away from the next case. And then fast forward three years and your banning entire topics of conversation that ultimately may end up being proven to be a topic of conversation we should have had. And if you look back, by the way, great movie watty Harrison, the people was Larry flint.

Larry flint int was a pornographer. IT was easy for everyone to chat tize him and for everyone to say, you know what, let's go ahead and deep platform this guy back then and ban him and and charged him by the government. And at the end of the day, he fought for his rights for free speech.

Now, all that being said, Larry flint was publishing using his own printers and selling on the street in a very legally complaint way. There is a difference in having someone else's platform be the mechanism that you use to promote your voice if they choose, like penter's and twitter and youtube and facebook and google to change how their platform Operates. sex.

I actually think that the commercial decision made by a private company, they should have the right to do that. But they are onna lose users over time. They're gona end up looking like idiots when they're wrong by banning certain topics that we should be having conversations about over time. And I giving up their other mechanisms for us to use the free and open internet. This is why I think the free open internet is more important than anything to have conversations using other platforms.

I am and I I mean a how that I try respond today, a counter my point, I agree with you. I think I went overboard and I think there are more reasonable solutions. I think a time based a ban would have been Better for somebody like trump.

Um and maybe waiting to see what happens with the january six commission. Putting that aside and know it's very controversial. You know when you just look at what spotify did to our podcast, I don't if you've looked at us and spotify, every other episode says covered nineteen information here.

I think this is one of the best things if people want to talk about. I ve remitting and it's an open science and freier you know more about IT than any of us. People wanted debate IT. Why not link them to have credible sources? I think that's a .

great solution. You is an old milk tag on spotify. milk. Listen to old .

pod on spotify. There's a tag that says.

yeah, get cover one thousand nine and information .

here yeah I get to freeburg argument about these. Comply should be free to do whatever they want. So I know that freeburg, I don't want to make two points about this.

First, while I know freeburg is sincere and genuine in that belief, however, most of the people making that argument are completely just ingenuous about IT, because, on the one hand, they say that these comply should be free to limit speech when they like the outcome of that censorship. But meanwhile, in congress are pushing six bills, ford, to regulate these companies of monopoly. So they don't believe that they should be free to do over they want.

They believe that thermo poles, and indeed many of them armanos, and even the ones that ARM monos, act the same as all the ones they act as a cartel to limit speech. So that point, number one, is that nobody believes this argument that these cases should be free to do, ever they want. The second point is that, listen, the founding document of our country is the decoration independence.

IT says that all of us have rights. They're inalienable. That means they cannot be taken away.

okay? And in the first couple hundred years of this country, IT meant those rights, meant that the government could take away your right to free speech. But now today, where the speech occur occurs on these giant social networks. They're privately own, their own ned by these large corporations. And the fact the matter is, if they take a way your right to free speech on these platforms, if they sensor you, if they take platform to you do not have a right to free speech in this country, that right may be protected.

The founding fathers are not anticipate that four people would be mitigating the majority of conversations online. If you if you're taking off, if you look at have to below and alex Jones, like they don't exist in the public sphere anymore.

They've been percent when these big to companies all get together as a car. Tel, to the preview of your free speech rights, you have been d person. You've been deep person. And they're not just doing on speech. They're also taking away you're right to engage in payments in transactions to earn a living.

And unless we are, we have to address the giant elephant in the room huge um which is trump. Uh I think a lot of this uh you know he hit its pinacle when people are saying the sitting president, the eight states could not be on twitter that was I think we all agree, ridiculous and absurd, that the president who was duly elected couldn't have a twitter account.

But then with the january six in the insights of the violence and all the stuff that's coming out and obviously will see what that all went up, i'm curious what everybody thinks here about should trump IT, or is trump being put back and reinstated on facebook or twitter? And IT proposed me a lifetime ban on twitter. But if corporate governance changes and people lobby for that, do we think that there is any kind of situation where trumped has his twitter handle or facebook accounts reinstated? And should he have them reinstated?

I think, jing, what you suggest that is probably the most reasonable thing, which was there is a time based penalty in a world we're getting through. We're probably a third or two thirds of the way through the january six stuff. So that's gonna come and go. And I think all roads will probably lead to a conclusion that after three years, it's probably located at this guy back and be able to tweet mean it's not this is not you know controversial stuff at this point.

You know that the current thing is moving on from ukraine when a the topic, all of a son is january six all over again. And trump, which IT is on M S N, B C, it's all jane six all the time again. So listen, I mean, this is not a justification for the widespread censorship that we've seen. Like I mentioned, we've gone so far beyond slated cases now its entire categories of thought, and this has been stopped.

What what you're feeling on trump should be reinstated if you were running twitter, would you have done a time if .

you don't like trump s don't follow him I mean but but Frankly, it's it's listen, I don't miss the tweet at all. I don't tweet at all. I really damaging party .

how you felt my thoughts have .

evolved before when he first got banned, I was really supportive of IT um and there was part of me which was just afraid that he would get reelected in such a now come two years later and to see all of the stuff in the escalation, deep platforming.

I think the problem is exactly what you guys have just talked about, which is the person that does IT today points to the person that does IT yesterday, who points to the person that did the day before as the justification. And so even though we don't want to draw a straight line between an alex Jones and a trump and climate change, unfortunately, there is this line. And so in general, now a much more free speech, because I think it's much more fragile than I thought I was before.

So your opinion has evolved illigant. People should respond to new data. I appreciate them.

And I was a person that, you know, as David said, was a little disingenuous in the sense that I kind of was for free speech as long as I was stuff that I agreed with. But two years later, a much more on David's original camp now, which is, we just need to establish this as a pillar of society and not deviate and find credible voices on both sides. And then algorithmically and through people power, meaning through crowd, you know um with with the crowds type stuff, help people figure out what is truth fall and how much truth there is because that's attractant problem. But the minute you start cancelling stuff today, as I sit in twenty twenty two, but I will tell you, I think it's very, very bad because it's going in a really bad place for where .

are where are your thoughts on trump s specific because he does seem like that's a part of the undercurrent here of, you know, he's going to be coming back, possibly going to be running again and january sexes and he's .

got the truth th social network downadup APP listen to what he's got to say. It's working and rolling over there on the the truth APP. I heard they took IT down like I was .

not even working right? The new thing he built.

But what what is that? You know, obviously a reaction, a market driven reaction to the fact that he was taken off twitter and he said i'm going to go make an alternative and that you know certainly proving to be technically difficult. But as we all know, it's not technically impossibly just got probably the wrong people working on IT.

Um but if they wanted to have an alternative platform for hearing that voice, you know have had IT, um I don't know what off to say. I mean, it's twitter's decision. They're creating their audience. All these guides want to be free speech advocates, but at the end of the day, they're all editor realizing and that's just the world we found themselves. I hope that takes .

a slight chAmber to I mean, this ato, which was said is they all believe in free speech and free markets when IT produces the outcome they like. But when the outcome is not what they like, all the son there like, wow, these comes are in on police.

But and here's another opportunity, if you are not liberian and believe in like you know free speech and you constitution, like you could buy shares, you could bleed a group, start to double, start a hedge fund, whatever, build the block to buy a bunch of chairs, and then you can get a board seat on twitter, and you can have this .

debate on the board of twitter, and it's, you are absolutely right. And you can see, by the way, you know small hetch funds with small amounts of couple like engine number one, they're able to go up against IT x on and beat them. So do your point chain for the people that actually want to sensor more if they can organize the capital, they absolutely have the right to do that. And I think that if they if they are able to do IT, they should win.

That's what mixon a was kind of getting out like, look, if you don't like, if you don't like the the free speech is happening .

on twitter go created fluence corporations work the are yeah friedberg update us on you know the ukraine is in month to now sorry, ukraine is in month two sorry for putting that before it's tough habit break freeburg tell us um you know the second order, third order effects of fertilizer and food at this point. We've had this back and forth. And now I think the world distorting to realize, hey, freeburg was right. These downstream effects are gonna significant.

I ask you a question about these, which is, can the world not mobilize if these are about one percent of calories, twenty or thirty percent of in country? Could the world not mobilized to find other chloric sources, rice, fish, soybeans, whatever? Or is our system so fragile that we can rally around sending food to anywhere on the planet, despite the fact that we can fly anywhere in the fiction for two weeks anywhere on the planet?

No the food system is complex and efficient. But IT um does not have strong um redundancy or malabo ah so I take for example, you know how do you get flower? You get flower in um uh in your food from uh a food company that bought the flower from a Miller.

There are mills around the world that process flat weed into flower. You can take that same mill and process corn into flower. There's different technology, different equipment that is same with soybeans and so on. So when you look at how the food supply chain is constructed, you know there's a local point of consumption, which is a store, then there's a food processor and you work your way kind of up the supply chain and there is a certain input that required to make the output that people consume.

And so calories, while they might be fungible, practically speaking or physical h or fundamentally speaking, they're not necessarily fungible, practically speaking, on the ground, when you actually try and plug in, let's say, soybeans into the milling supply chain to make the pasta or the bread that everyone consumes in tunisia, it's not going to work. And the same is true with rights. And then the the more important um dynamic force that's under way is that these markets for food and commodities globally are not controlled by government.

They're controlled by private businesses and there is a market for these products. And so what happens is as the food supply ing thread hit, countries like china and others started to stock pile, they started to buy lots and lots of supply drive up their stocks and their reserves. You for fear of the famine that's about to hit us.

And about nine months. And when they did that, there was now less food available to tunisia territory and egypt and so on. And so we're starting to see the effect of that.

This location driving dynamic market forces were certain buyers stock up and then the folks that can afford to step in not being able to require product and being left to not only do we have a local production, differentially makes IT hard to have all calories be fungible. We're also seeing this dynamic where there's a byre action where the habs have more and have not have less. And that's going to really make this fine and kind of head home in a really, really sad way in the months to come.

We're already seeing as as I mentioned two weeks ago, yeah as I mention a few weeks ago, the fertilizer problem driving action down. So the U. S, D. A farmer port comes out. They survey farmers and figure out how are you going to plant every year.

And they just downgraded the number of corn makers are going to get a planted this year, which is happening starting this month from ninety three million acres to eighty nine million. That doesn't sound like a lot, but four million, four million acres coming out of production of corn in the U. S.

Is an incredible amount. Calories that are not going to be planted to corn. And so that has all of these downstream effects. And again, this crop doesn't come to harvest to all september, october, then it's going to get process and IT turns into food.

So by the time the the effect of this decision making hit the marketplace, the availability of calories and the stark parliament going on, it's like, boom, some countries are going to be there going a limited budget. They're only going to be able to access so much food and they can access any. And other countries are gonna fine.

United going to be fine. West europe be fine. China will be fine to reload a is gonna a mess.

Northern and eastern africa is going to be a mess. I mean, there's like places around the world that we are going to have to scramble. I don't have a real easy answer. There's no simple plug and play here. It's going to be a really complex set of problem that are going need to be solved.

Well, we like that does grow a lot of its own foot. So they may be OK because they have right?

I mean, they're pretty big, not important. So they make a lot of food, but they were rely on imports a lot for for calories there. So yeah, I mean, that's the case of a lot of places around the world. A lot of people think we have farmers, but most countries, you know, particularly the developing world, or net importers, they they they rely on their party supplies of food. So sure.

but but a lot of what you're talking about there or not their their process food that come into the country sex ending to add here.

Well, I mean, I think that the ukraine war is kind of entering chronic phase. I mean the venture and new phase. The first phase you'd have to say that ukrainians one know the russia wanted to topple sin ski's regime. Maybe take keep the obviously failed in that.

Now we're in this um phase where the fightings over in the down bus, it's basically the civil wars been going on there since two thousand fourteen and um and and really that's what is now about selinski has acknowledge that ukraine will not be part of nato. So that issue is kind of off the table. And so what you're really fighting over now is the status of these disputed territories in the eastern in ukraine.

And I think it's going to go on for a long time, as we know, general family text fied could go on for years against to become a sort of permanent feature in the background of biden presidency. And I mean, I think the good news is that hopefully the war three aspect is off the table. Seems like the calls, trust imposed, no fly zone, or to put boots on the ground, which you were hearing a lot of a few weeks ago, seems like that sort the table. So now this is going to be a protracted, I think, uh, civil war going on on the dawn bus, uh, with between ukraine and and russia in their proxies.

which would mean a sex rec min, if i'm wrong, that putin will be forever. They're not going to be a world power and his power is going to deprecate because he's going to be busy fighting this non winnable war for some period of time, which is in a way saying biding IT IT perfectly and checked to him and saying, that's going to be assessment. If you go down this way that there's like a civil war going on, prod is crippled that would be checked.

made or no. I I think that clearly the the state department strategy here is to make putin bleed and the craye and to protract this thing, make IT go on as long as possible. I think that's a risky strategy because this thing could always spend out of control.

It's really, but could IT be effective, is a chance that could .

be effective. Well, I me, if the girl is a blue pete, bleed putin n yes, that could be affected of bleeding putin. However, I don't know that that needed to be the key geostrategic objective, the united states, right now.

I I don't, I don't know because like china is our main threat. China is a peer competitor to the united states. Russia is not.

Our economy is fifteen times bigger than russia, as china's economy is about the same sizes of our that is a real threat. So you, there are cost to us as well. There are clearly cost to putin of this, but there are huge cost to us as well.

Freezer described the rist supply chain. We've had to now spend a lot more money building for the defense in europe. We're going to pin down in europe.

Uh, we should really be moving from those resources from europe to to east asia. I mean, that's really where the pivoted asia is, what we thought we were so be doing and took quite recently. Now we're going to bog down there, and there's still recent inflation and recession in the us.

And I think if we are in a recession later this year, I think a lot of people in the U. S. Will be asking, what is this all for? And if you go read my article that just came out yesterday with those based on my speech um this publish the american's conservative look, this war was easily avoidable. I mean, the state department could avoid .

this war very easy. I I listen to your speech. I thought your points that you were very clear on. He put and started this. He is aggression is his responsibility.

But, you know, we do need to think about our foreign policy as a country and regime changes, probably not a winning strategy for us, although in this case, IT might IT seems like possibility now. So who knows? I I do not change.

But if we do, there's no reason to believe they going to get something much Better. In every case where we pushed for regime change, we've actually gotten the same or worse. Um so yeah I don't think that should be our objective.

Um you know I look I think we have a bunch of bad options now the wars ready started. The best option would have been. To avoid this war in the first place. And if this thing drags on for years in the U. S. Economy, tips into recession, people will look back and say, why did the job I and state department in the year twenty twenty one, do a much more effective job preventing this war?

Let me let me just follow question as we rap here. Um chmagh, uh, i've been thinking about what what should a strategic objective be for america? And the number one strategic objective I could think of was, or one of the top ones, would be to build a strong relationship with india, which obviously, you know IT has an adversarial relationship with china already on the board of pakistan, and then obviously, you know, that has relations with russia.

What would be on the top of each of your list? Sex and chamar trim, the first on priority here. If we're thinking fresh, looking at the world with china in retreat, sort of just engaging from the west with russia on their heels, what could the united states in the west do as a preemptive measure to really solidify democracy and beat the the world daughter, a peaceful world daughter?

How answer is slightly differently, which is we need to put ourselves in a position to not be dependent on any country, because then we can actually dictate what we think the right approach and solution is from first principles, and have the court to stick a through to get to the other side of IT. So there are really two things we need to do. The first, which we've kind of perverted unnecessarily as energy independence.

And we've allowed too many people to conflate money, the water, on what energy independence means. You know, nobody, nobody was ever advocating for coal, but you know, the amount of cold that we could have burned as a bridge field, l to L N G, which could have been a bridge field to things like nuclear and and wind and solar. That path was pretty clear, but we gotten our own way.

We have to get out of our own way. okay? So energy independence, I think beyond anything else strategic, we in order of managed IT is the most important thing. And then second dearly, there are certain areas for the future of those future economies where we need to have complete capability and know how.

And the most important ones fair are the specially chemicals that we need, specially chemicals that we need to basically support climate change, large, to support battery production rdt large. And then semon doctors get those two things completely under U. S. control. On top of energy, independence and honesty, we would be a dominant world power for the next two hundred years on our terms.

So the road tourist ency sex, you are now the secretary of state. What are your key priorities? The U.

S Green rage has always been to prevent the rise of a peer competitor who can dominate their region to global. Huge is only one country in the world that can do that right now to us, which is china. So the pivot to asia, as obama said, was fundamentally correct that we have not fAllen through an executed that, and now our attention is distract and bog down by, was happening in europe.

I would seek and negotiated settlement to this war. Now that the zelinski government has survived, pun has been unable to take western ukraine. And furthermore, that zillion ski has given up being part of nato.

The only thing left o that is this is this fight in the down bus. There's there's an agreement already on the table called the minsk accords that allows a settle that meanwhile, piven to asia wrapped up. Meanwhile, pivot to asia, create a strong alliance of countries in east asia who are threatened by china. We already, our friends with many of them, you've got japan, south korea, taiwan, you've got vietnam, create a balancing alliance of those countries to prevent china from rising to the point where can threaten us for a global of germany. That should be our main .

priority geopolitically. great. All right. Do you have a folks for the rain mind of sax, the dictor to mah poli hopeth a and the certain of science? David free, boring on my boy jaw, and we will see you all in miami, may fifteen and sixteen th and seventeen th .

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