Recapping Chamath's wedding, VC surplus, unions vs Hollywood, room-temp superconductors & more
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Contents6 chapters
§01All-In in Italy!: Recapping Chamath's wedding§02Discourse around obesity and weight loss in the US§03Are there too many VCs?§04Actors/Writers unions vs. Corporate Hollywood, endgame for the modern Hollywood machine§05Equity participations vs. unions, ownership upside vs. downside protections§06Potential impact of room-temp superconductors Special thanks to our Italian audio/video team!§01All-In in Italy!: Recapping Chamath's wedding
Love you guys. Hey, if you guys are, around, you know, and Anyone
want to get a glass of wine and some pasta.
Or maybe next week or something. Who knows? Maybe we
all get together in person. Have a glass of wine.
I see you soon. I love you guys. About to come to Italy, and basically, you're gonna gain £15 for sure.
Okay. So we were there in Italy.
There's a long no.
Is this when we were in Venice?
The quality of Italian white wine is outrageous. Really? It's outrageously.
Do they have a Bikini for you for when we're in Italy.
I would buy that.
Let's just say thank you to the amazing people of Italy for having the greatest country for adults to go on vacation in. What an incredible country? Here we go. In 3, to here. Oh, ah, yeah.
So
what's going to accumulate?
Everybody well.
Motorcycle. Try it again.
32. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All in podcast. We are here in Beautiful, Portofino, Italy, and we have found a new bestie. Introduce yourself.
I Natalie is your name?
That is my name. And don't be surprised by my surname.
Ah, you got a surname. What is the surname?
Palle and Gretia. No. Ah. Sorry. Palihapitiya.
Palle Hapitiya. So your cousins, apparently, and you were on a biotech business. I understand here in Italy.
In my spare time Yes. When somebody else doesn't consume the life out of me.
Got it. Okay. So you're, dealing drugs in Italy, and welcome to the all in pod. In all seriousness, we are here in Italy, because Chamath, and Natalie got married. Big round of
applause. Oh,
very nice. And,
we decided we tape episode very quickly. But tell us, what was it like, at the wedding? Trying Shamoff Palihapitiya. Tell us about the wedding.
Woo. It was,
it was
a lot of work and Chamath was, as you can expect, completely utterly useless.
Yes. We've we've seen this.
In fact, in fact, counterproductive.
He showed on
that time's really, really frustrating.
Yes.
But I love him nonetheless. So here we are. Very happy.
This is the moment I would like to take credit for 30% of the wedding. Ah. And then a number that you can't dispute, you don't really know what it means. Yeah. And then everybody ends up thanking you effusively.
Yeah. Because they're like the 30% that they love the most. That was me.
Yeah. Yeah.
If you wanna make an estimate, 20, 30% chance is, you can't go wrong. Friedberg and Sachs are with us, the Don. Sachs, you had a lot of clandestine meetings here. Any are we any closer to peace in Ukraine, Russia. I saw you talking to some Russian emissaries.
You've been on the continent for a full month. Tell us
how much
you go for 12 hours yesterday.
So Yeah. I know that you've been on some of these crazy yachts out here trying to broker peace. How close are we? And how are you drawing, your time in, Europe this summer?
I I don't think we're too close. But, let me say a word about this happy couple here. So Natalie is brilliant and unstoppable. Chamath is superficial in plastic. So this was like the wedding of Oppenheimer and Barbie.
And, In that analogy, Chamath, your Barbie.
Yes. Absolutely. Lots of substance and fire over here and complete narcissism and plastic over here. Also, the genitalia, the same size as you can. Very smooth over.
Just barely a bump. Yeah. Okay.
Gotta leave you guys a go.
We'll, we'll do show. Natalie, congratulations. We love you, Sis. Congratulations.
Thank
you, Jay Hall, because you celebrated her.
Okay. That's another one. Okay. Here she goes.
I wasn't talking about Chamath. So could you
hear me?
Oh, yeah. So let's
cut you off. Shoot over. Oh, here. Here we go. Here we go.
What a great great, week we've had here. Lots of friends came in.
Lots of friends. Lots of special friends.
Lots of poker.
Lots of poker.
Lots of poker.
Lots of poker players that weren't invited to the wedding. Weren't invited to the poker game.
I mean I mean, we walked into the poker game last night, and there were all these guys that I didn't see at
the wedding. And you invited these guys
No. No. No. No.
Your poker game.
No. Let's be honest.
I didn't get invited
to the Wait.
Let's let's be honest. I think it was the most unbelievably eclectic guest list. Yes. Of any wedding that's ever had. That's very true.
I mean, literally, it's like a 2 by 2 matrix of villainy Yes. Wealth, fame, and infamy.
Yes.
I mean, you had every quadrant covered. Yes.
Yeah. It was incredible. Guy and I were joking. It's like walking into the bar on Tatooine. Yes.
Star Wars.
You know, it'd serve your
guy chained up. I mean, it was a whole rigmarole last night.
Oh my gosh. I could tell that when I was doing my toast, which Chamath told me no holds bar. Just go for it. So if I toast, he really meant roast.
Roast. Yeah. He roast. The Italians did not get the jokes by
the way. Half the audience was laughing. The poker guys were laughing.
Yeah.
And then the family section.
No. No.
I mean, I think a
lot of them got the jokes and they
were
they were in on it. But, what an amazing week we've had here. And thank you for hosting us. Oh, you're welcome. It was absolutely wonderful.
This really is in so many ways.
Wait. We should cut in shots on the video on where we're sitting right now. This incredible deep club. We're looking out here.
Right? Incredible people slits it out. I posted a photo of us just meeting out there. During our little board meeting and people immediately sloothed out. You're at,
like Langostria.
Or what's it?
Langostria Paragis. Langostria.
Yeah. I guess, famous red beach restaurant.
I mean, language area has these 2 incredible restaurants in Milano 3. They're just top of the top, and they have this incredible beach restaurant here. And it's the hotel or, sorry, it's the restaurant that is beside the beach club. That's also owned by the Splendido where we're Yeah. Where you guys are all staying.
So, yeah, it's been it's been an amazing couple days.
This little block is called Paraji.
This part is Paragi. And then if you go just a little bit further, you're in Portofino proper.
Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. So.
Wonderful food. Incredible food.
Unbelievable. We've eaten like kings.
Yeah. And, Queens, that's
the case, maybe. And, just a hospitality and Italy is amazing. One of my favorite places
to say to all of you guys and to all of our friends. I mean, you guys literally flew halfway around the world. For 3 days.
Yeah. You did ruin all our summer plans.
I mean, it was incredible. And and frankly, I picked the we picked the 3 worst days, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
Yeah. If you had a job Everybody had to work. Yeah. A
certain person had two rooms rented at the Splendido just for meetings, and he would just be running back meetings and then trying to go to the mean, it's incredible. You guys I really I
think this whole thing was a conspiracy to convene a high stakes poker game. You know, when we knew you were spending the summer in Italy, there's no poker here. I realized, how do I get the poker
game to come? He probably he netted a profit to cover the wedding
Not no. Not to cover the wedding, but I did I did win a $1,200,000 pot from
that was crazy.
That was crazy.
My favorite poker story is that you gotta call out of the blue.
Oh, I I'm labor. The best.
Get a text. Oh my god.
Need rooms, plenty, though. I'd like 2 in the morning. And I was I I looked at my phone and I'm like, why is texting me at 2 in the morning? Yeah. Need room's plenty though.
And I said, it's Jamath. Is everything okay? Do you need any help? Need rooms, Blendido. And I said, I'm not your fucking travel coordinator.
And he goes, can
you help me get a
room at this Blendido Hotel? I said, what? Your year? And so I said, well, why didn't you just meander into our game? Yeah.
And so actually came to the wedding.
Was he
randomly in the neighborhood?
He was in the area.
Well, he was spending a night in he thought he would hop over. Hey. What? Oh, well, hey.
That's such a bad joke.
Oh, good.
Let's try. I stole that joke.
Bad joke.
You stole it.
I stole it.
Oh, that's how works in Hollywood. Okay? There's a little backstory to all of this. What happened was Chamath told me in the spring, hey, listen, Jakeow. I'm finally, I'm so excited.
I'm gonna marry Nat I said, oh, that's great. You you had the kids, and now you're getting married. It's not the traditional way to do it, but congratulations.
And he
said, yeah. We're gonna have, like, a little name with our families in Italy, very bespoke, the kids, parents. That's it. And then, you know, back in Silicon Valley in the Bay Area, we'll have a backyard party for everybody else. And I said, great.
Let me know where in Italy we're going. And, Nat said, it's just gonna be the immediate Chamath. And I said, great. Where am I going? Tell me the location.
And, if you need an efficient time in. And then, week later, we get an email Matt and, Chamath discussed it. And they said, you know what? Jake House right. We should invite everybody to Italy.
And so thanks for making that decision.
Oh my god. Thank you guys for coming. Yeah. But but It was a dream.
Didn't tell anyone Jaykow was gonna officiate. So we're sitting there Italian style for, like, 2 hours assembling for the wedding. Nothing happens. You're all just standing around waiting for something to happen. And then Shamoff comes in.
Natalie comes in beautiful, dressed, amazing. Music is incredible. I see. And they sit there for another 10 minutes. And they turn around and they say the efficient.
We just got a letter. The efficient is sick. We need someone we need someone to step in. And then Jake out pops up in the back. I got it.
I got it.
I understand. Knocks the Italian royalty to the right and
the left clouds his way through the audience,
makes his way to the top, pulls out his American bow tie or whatever he had and says, let's do this. And then we had Jay Cal officiate.
You did a way to support you.
In a very Jay Cal way.
Yeah. Were you surprised? Yeah.
I was surprised.
You were surprised.
Yeah. A lot
of people were surprised.
Yeah. You got me.
Yeah. Because your re your regular email said, Jay Cal is gonna officiate, but then we heard nothing for two and a half months.
Yeah.
And no one really knew and but it was a big secret. Right?
We
kept it a big secret. We wanted it to be a surprise and It was just the vows and the poetry.
Oh, the poetry.
Oh, the poetry. Was amazing.
I'm on it. Don't make her don't make
her no. No. No. No. No.
No. No. No. No. No.
No. No. No. No. No.
No. No. No. No. No.
No. No. No. No. No.
No. No. No.
No. No. No. No. No.
No. No. No. No. No.
Yeah. Can you do a dramatic reading of the poem. Yeah. Can you do a dramatic reading of the poem that I
This one's Jamach wrote a poem Rosa. Sorry. And said
But we'll do the setup. That would that comes before.
Well, so this the setup was that Nat would read Shamat's poems, and Shamat would read Matt's poems. And so Nat had this incredible paulo, Quelo, Poems incredibly well thought out. That's right. And, Sorry. Then, Chamath wrote a poem from anonymous that he found, at a rest stop on the 280 written on the inside of the, bathroom stall, roses are red, No.
No. No.
Violence are no. Go go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. You remember it?
You should have it committed to memory.
Let me think. Yeah. Roses are red. Pickles are green. I love your legs.
And what's in between? Oh, god. God. It's so embarrassing.
It was so embarrassing. And she had to read this.
She literally she's drawn up
all of the the
American have the American have the American have the American have the American have the American world laughing. Horrific. It really was like No.
No. No. No. Her. Yeah.
Her Her first poem was a sonnet from bullying Shakespeare. My first poem was Beyonce's cuff. Yeah. Where's the where the last line is will you sit on top of me? Which she has to say, looking at her dad.
It was so it was so then her second poem was, something by Gregory Hoffman.
Who is it? No. Gregory Hoffman.
I think it was. Something Hoffman. Yep. And then mine was Yeah.
This anonymous thing. And her third was e
Cummings and mine was Doctor
Zeus. Charlotte. This was nice.
Yeah. Doctor. Daniel Hoffman. Daniel Hoffman. Yes.
Well, we had a great time. There's been a lot of news. And, Jake, you got here early. Right?
And weren't you, like, camping along the coastlines? Do you
§02Discourse around obesity and weight loss in the US
wanna I went to check
for that, Ed.
He went camping. He was trying to
decide to bring San Francisco to this beautiful pristine.
Yes. Suffocating everywhere.
Leaving a
trail of needles in his way, because epic needles. Sempic needles. Swagovee. Plastic trash. He was trying to show I did I
did post a thirst
trap. I'm very proud. I'm down £41 from the peak.
Twenty pounds with, hiking and using the fasting app that Kevin Rose built.
And then the other half 0. Great Fasting app, and the other half was Ozempic would go I
understand. What does an app do to help you fast? You just fast.
You
you click a button.
Do you eat the app? Yes. An animation then
it Oh,
I see.
Counts down the clock.
What what you're trying to decide whether that you do not, you push a button. Should I you do not, and it says no.
Yeah. It shows you a picture of yourself.
Just a mirror. Picture. It shows
you a 5 picture. Yeah.
The 5 picture.
That's what I did. I took a picture of myself, like, fat Jason, and I just every time I open the refrigerator, there.
Can I ask you a question? Yes. Is it is it are we not allowed to talk about, like, fatness now or
I, I have strong feelings on this. I think when I I ran marathons my whole life, I was very spelt. A 100 £65 until I was 32. And then I added 2 or £3 until you guys knew me. And I hit 2 13 at my peak.
I'm 171 now. 172. And, you know, I wish more people would have done an intervention. You were very clear with me. Hey.
You gotta lose weight. We
did a
lot of that. I have to tell. I'm telling the story. You can't fucking spike the story.
I'm telling
the story.
No. No. No. No. You can't spike the story.
Now this is your wedding present to me. Okay.
Thank you.
Jay Cal. Jay Cal is bordering on morbidly obese.
That was 2 this is when I was 2 13. And your household, 59
a good day. 5 and a half.
Yeah. Uh-uh.
On a
good day.
By the way, for
all for for
for all these people on Twitter, everybody who who meets me always says, oh, you look so much shorter on camera. Maybe it's because I slouch, but I'm six foot 2 just in case everybody's curious.
Have a good day.
Anyways, Jay Cal Jay Cal is is bordering on morbidly obese. So I make a weight bed with him. Yeah.
I was 2:13 and I said I can get to 193. 1
yeah. 193. And I was like, I'll give you 10 k a pound or something. Whatever.
It was a 100 k bet.
It
was a $100,000 And I But it's
a year.
He had a year. A year goes by. I put it in my calendar, and What I do is I schedule the poker game Uh-oh. For the day before knowing that we're gonna play through midnight. So I'm like, oh, I'm gonna set this guy up.
So I waited a whole year. Unbelievable. We played poker. The clock strikes midnight, and he had been eating Pete ice cream, ice cream. I'm watching it the whole time at all.
I'm coming with this $100,000. I never say a scrap like this. Hey. It's time. It's 12:01.
It's time
for the wait. He said
one wait bet. And I said, motherfucker, you made a wait bet with me. I just went
a year ago. I have been 192, 193 for months. I have hit the thing. I I
So he says he starts panicking.
Because I weigh myself in the morning.
He says he's panicking. He says, okay. Give me a few minutes. He runs into my child's bedroom and takes a shit.
No. No. I just took
a lean. I took a lean.
He tried to lose the weight.
Who can poo at midnight? Nobody can poo at midnight.
Anyway, I did on the scale. I'm 195. And so he wants me to kill my clothes off. I'm like, no. I'm not
I say we have to do the way. And now in fairness to Jake, Al, I did not pre agree that I had to that I could pick the time. So he says I have until midnight. Which is true. So I said, okay.
Fine.
He goes home. Goes home. I go on the
He does not eat. He puts on a sweatsuit.
I go for a run up, like, Rocky around severances.
He sweats for 4 hours. He gets, like, a tenth of a pound under before midnight. Yes. And then he's like, you owe me a $100,000. Nope.
And he was kind.
Yeah.
He said, look, put me in the mini 1 for one drop a
hundred drop, and we'll both go and we'll pull it. Drop it up.
We had a great
time. Jake got lost in the first eight hands, and
I'm not sure.
I lasted longer than you.
I should've just you did
a verdict. Okay. Back to you, but that's the feedback story.
But I would say, in terms of weight, it is pernicious in America. I don't think we should be celebrating it or tolerating it. I think we should be compassionate. I think Ozempic and Wagovi, are incredible tools and manjaro. I I don't I I didn't talk about it.
For the 1st year, David, you've done it as well, and you've been honest that you've tried Wagovea, whatever, and you lost a lot of weight. So congratulations. These guys have been skinny forever. But, I think take it seriously. It takes a lot of discipline, but it can be done.
And I encourage people the gains I've gotten from being £40 lighter have been tremendous. I feel great. My energy level is different. My thinking is different. My sleep's better.
Everything's great. And so I just wanna be around for a long time so that we can do a 1000 episodes of the show for you and the fans. And, yeah, being fat sucks the end. And if you suffer
But do you think it's it's being normalized, and do you think that that's healthy?
What do
you think? I, like, I I think
right into the microphone. No one
no one makes no one chooses obesity. Obesity is a struggle just like diabetes. No no one chooses diabetes. Diabetes is a struggle. I've I've, you know, done some work, made some investments, been on the board of some companies that have been involved in trying to address the needs in this space.
And one of the things that we've learned a lot about is how much of a social stigma it feels. People that are struggling with obesity and struggling with diabetes don't feel comfortable actively talking about it. Yeah. Because they hold a deep amount of shame about it.
Yes.
They recognize that there's something deeply and healthy about it, and they feel deep shame because they're often portrayed as having the choice and making the decisions that got them to this point. Yeah. And the truth is We live in a world with extraordinary abundance in the first world. We live in a world with extraordinary opportunities for low cost calorie consumption. We find a lot of joy, in our lifestyles, and it, you know, ultimately living a happy life can lead people to a very sad place.
And so, generally, I would say that this is not something that should be, stigmatized in an open way, it should be treated with compassion, but it should be spoken about openly, which is that there there is a a challenge and a struggle that people have, and we need to help and everyone needs to kind of be cognizant of the fact that I that's that's the thing.
I think we need to. I think we're normalizing it, and I think it's wrong. Yes. I I when I first came to Canada, You see the pictures when I was, like, fresh off the boat. That's what we used to call immigrants.
I was real thin skinny. Real thin. And then after a year of eating whatever food it was that we could afford, yep, I became really fat, and you could see it in the pictures. And I was fat all through my grade school. I was a little skinny, but skinny fat in the face, but basically fat all through high school.
And then I finally started working out and taking care of myself. And it had a huge impact on my self esteem and my self confidence. It had a huge impact on my health.
Yep.
I saw it basically kill my father. It's given 7 to 11 of my aunts and uncles diabetes. So I think that, like, all of this normalization is unhealthy because it actually is killing people.
What I learned from the dieting is portion control in America is just out of control. It it is the wrong portion sizes. So you see it here, and you see it here. When you eat here, here's a little tuna. Here's a small pasta.
You know, here's some cheese and some grapes for dessert. You're done. And so once I got my portion control, I was fine. Snacking also. I just wish anybody who's suffering from it.
You know, work with your doctors, work with nutritionists.
You were
overweight too for a long time. Were you? Freeman?
Yeah. I What were you overweight from? I I grew up not eating well. I was overweight in college.
Right in the microphone?
College is when I really started to get exercise actively. And because it was never part of my upbringing as a kid was, like, eat well, get exercise. I I was very much self taught at learn how to cook and learned a lot about nutrition on my own. And, you know, look, I I I took action on my own, in my early twenties. So but, yeah, look, I mean, it it's it's so easy to not know where you find yourself and then you find yourself in this place.
And I do agree that being cognizant of where you are and addressing it in an open way in an active way is the only path. I mean, there's just every every cycle we come around with some new easy solution. You guys remember the, what was it? Sensensler?
Sense center.
Sent center.
Yeah. You gotta be careful with that one. Yeah. That would be more. Yeah.
And so, look, I mean, the data far looks great, with these GLP,
you know Flip ones.
Yeah. These drugs seem to be very effective. There's some data now that shows as soon as you stop taking it, the the average person on it gains the weight right back.
And No.
That didn't happen for me.
Increased muscle mass. Maybe not, but, like, yeah, the the, you know, across a large population, there's just data that's showing there's never gonna be an easy path, and it's it's a very difficult,
It's a process. You know, the the thing I learned is if you just have, like, one Oreo a day or every other day, Let's say that's 50 calories. You have one of those every other day. You're gonna get £2 a year for 20 years. Now you're £40 overweight.
It happens very slowly. You add it. And then you just have to be super disciplined, and you can lose a half a pound or a pound a week, and then it can come off. So, I really think it should be a movement in the United States. So much of our downstream issues, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etcetera, seem to be contributed by obesity.
So I think for our entire for the entire country, I think if I ran for president, it would be Wagovee for everybody. Everybody who wants
it have it. There you go. It's my platform. Single issue voters.
There's a platform you can move forward.
That's single issue platform. Get in shape. There's some news, I think. We could we could touch on.
Jack,
how you feeling?
Yeah. Planning a catch. Let's do this.
§03Are there too many VCs?
So there was an article in vice. I guess that name check the all in podcast has said young people instead of wanting to become McKinsey consultants, now want to become members of the all in podcast and be venture Calacanis. I did a little tweetstorm that I thought, and I thought it'd be a great topic for us. I I think for young people going into venture early is not a good idea. I think generally speaking, 80% of the case cases, and I think starting your own company or joining a high growth company or maybe joining a well run large company or even joining a poorly run large companies, you learn what not to do are all better things to do in your twenties, learn, be in the trenches, but I'm curious what you think, Saks, Yeah.
About this issue because we came to venture and investing in our forties, I believe, you know, both of us angel investors and then both of us having funds. So what are you advising a young person who's listening to the podcast coming out of the business school or whatever?
Yeah. I agree with that. I think the main value prop that a VC has to offer a founder is advice. And if you've never walked in the founder's shoes before, if you never founded a company or at least had a significant operating role, how are you in a position to offer them advice? Now, I think there's a period of time during the bull market where people stopped thinking that way, stopped thinking that advice was the model, VCs started competing on the basis of who could be the biggest cheerleader for the founder who could offer the most sort of positive emotional support.
The largest valuation.
Or the biggest valuation or lease governance. The idea of being completely passive, not taking a board seat was actually sold to founders as a positive for them that, like, we'll invest and we'll just, like, stay completely out of the way. And all of those ideas sounded really good when the market was booming and everything was up into the right. But now we're in a situation in which we're going through 2 years of intense turmoil. And a lot of companies aren't gonna make it.
A lot of companies are restructuring. A lot of companies are gonna take down rounds and actually being able to tap your board for advice on how to get through a rough patch actually is pretty important. You realize now that, like, the uninvolved passive investor, that was not a positive value prop. That was an excuse for not having a value prop. And I think at times like this, it's really important to have VCs who've been around the block, who saw the last downturn, who ideally could have warned you that it was coming.
Like, we did on the spot. Like, repeatedly for, you know, a year. Months. Yeah.
And so, yeah, I think that we're now seeing the correction. And I I firmly agree with your analysis that there are too many people who joined the ranks of VC who finally didn't have a value prop. And that's why I mean, in our firm, we require that everyone who joins the investment team have operating experience and ideally founder experience. Because that is ultimately what you're gonna offer founders.
Chamath was too much of this people larping live action role playing VC. With just absolutely no idea how this works. And now what happens to those, you know, actor or VCs who really are faced with portfolios that are upside down, and they really have no idea how to weather a storm. It's this has been a hard 18 months. Let's be honest.
Well, I think that it was a symptom of just the fact that there was a lot of free money in the system. And I don't know. The outcome is gonna be pretty basic, which is that they're gonna lose money for their limited partners. And those limited partners, if they're not totally stupid, will never give these people money again. And these people will need to just find a new job.
And I don't say that in a celebratory way, it's just a very practical ones and zeros monetary assessment of the facts. Look. I think that the weird thing that has happened is that it became, like, this kind of fun thing to be say you were doing. A lot of people used to moonlight and do it on the side. Then there were all these services that will allow you to basically, like, abstract the job.
But the only thing that I would just qualify your statement because I think what you're saying is, like, 90% right, but I don't think that's where the craziest outcome returns have come from? Because if you look at the two people that are really or the three people that have really generated just gargantuan home run returns on a consistent basis, one of them, for example, like Mike Morris really didn't have those bonafides operationally. But I think that what Mike probably has, and I'm saying this not knowing him, is a preternatural, like, judge of psychology, I think. I think he's an incredibly qualified people judger, and there are people like that. Now he's an outlier in order to do that, but the rest of us have to kind of, to your point, do with what we have, which is like, here's our experience and our maturity and, you know, we're telling you what we think.
So I'm really excited, actually, for this wave to kinda crash on shore because the number of founders that are gonna get screwed over by folks that don't know what they're talking about, it's very high. Yeah. And that needs to come to an end as quickly as possible.
Frebert?
Yeah.
I don't think it's just like Moritz. I think that there's a class of Successful venture capitalists. Bill Gurley is a great example. Right? He was an analyst.
Danny Reimerd Index Ventures was an investment analyst
Fred Wilson.
Fred Wilson.
Yeah. A lifetime VC. Yeah.
And and more it's John Dore. I mean, John Dore had
some Dore worked at Intel. He worked
at Intel. But there is there are folks who have an incredible analytical capacity and that analytical capacity translates into incredible selection capability. That selection doesn't necessarily mean that they are gonna necessarily be the best advisors, and I'm not saying that any of those folks are bad advisors. But there are some venture investors. Like, founders fund is very vocal about this and very public about this, that their objective is not to be your partner in helping you make decisions and run your company and recruit people and all the other sort of rigmarole that many VCs go out and They are there to pick the best founders, and the best founders don't need
the VC to be successful. And their job then is to
have incredible selection capacity. So if they can select the best founders and get out of their way, they've made a lot of money and their returns are unbelievable. And then there are some VCs who were really incredible partners to their founders, and they're object to Josh Koppelman at 1st round built an entire firm around this practice which is to partner very closely with founders and to build support and
capabilities and recent Horowitz was built on the same sort of concept
that they would that they would roll all of their fees into building operating support and capacity to support founders and support companies. Both firms have obviously done well in their own right. And so I don't know if there's necessarily one breed that predicts success when it comes to successful venture capital. I will say for my own personal experience. I worked as an investment banker for my 1st 2 years out of undergrad.
I, you know, worked I had a science background. I worked in a short private equity. I worked at Google. I did corp dev and M and A there. I started a company, ran it, sold it, did that with another business where I was on the board.
So, you know, I've I've been on a couple of different places around the table that, you know, I think have given me the ability to to provide advice. I don't know if I necessarily have the same skill set that the team at founders fund and, Mike Moritz and others might have at this astute extraordinary ability to spot founders and and bring them in. So I think everyone needs to kinda recognize what they do bring to the table, be very clear about what that is. And I think to your point, there has just been an incredible bull market over the last 15 years since 2008, more money has I I heard an incredible statistic, by the way. I don't wanna get it wrong, so maybe we should fact check me after this from someone at your wedding, who I was talking to for a long time.
And he was like, he was like, basically, the top 1% of VCs didn't beat what would have happened. If you just bought the top 5 public tech companies and, you know, effectively did a rebalance over the past 15 years, the bull market, I mean, the aggregation of value and technology has largely been 5050 to public and private. Yeah. So you could have just bought a few stocks and held onto them and beat all of the VCs over the last 15 years. Even though a bunch of VCs have made good money and their IRR looks like 12%, but you have to beat the risk adjusted
returns on ventures. Yeah. Even and this is not to throtiated even all of those people that you mentioned are fucking terrible. Right. Like, you should not have invested in any of those.
Right. Because there's no way to turn it in any of those funds because you get a small allocation. One fund as well.
3 funds do crappy. Over the past 10 years or 15 year forgot the number. We've seen the public market cap of these top tech companies grow from 1,000,000,000,000 to 10,000,000,000,000. That's a 10 x.
Yeah. So
all you had to do was buy those and you would have made 10 x, and that works out to north of 25% IRR. Yeah. And there's very few VCs that have been able to be 25% IRR. They assume now he was telling me his model shows that over the next 10 years, it'll be roughly 70:30. So it'll be about 30% will accrue.
And and they think over the next 10 years, it's gonna go from 10,000,000,000,000 to 25,000,000,000,000. Which is still a great return just to build on this. Shows how much of a hurdle there is in venture to be successful.
I started the business in 2011. So now this is the 12th or 13th year. Just how hard this game is. I had about a 31, 32% gross IRR going into last year. And then my IRR fell off a cliff because I couldn't get into obviously, there's, like, there's no money to distribute.
We're just nothing to distribute. Yeah.
So my IRR start to decay. And then I had this really, really fucked up choice. I have to start selling stuff earlier than I would have otherwise to get the money back out.
So to your point. Right.
Now it takes courage. Then it
it it's a really tough game over the long period
of time.
Yeah. A really tough game.
I I think there's also something going on you know, in the United States and society where there are some idealized jobs. We talked about sacks elites, surplus elites, And I I wanna dovetail this with what's happening in Hollywood, the writers strike, and the actor strike. And I was looking at it. There's some unbelievable number of actors in SAG, some unbelievable number of riders. They all make, just incredibly small amounts of money on average.
And, obviously, there's some big fish who do well, but it does seem like there's too many people who want too many of these idealized jobs. And and venture is one of those. And I I just would like young people to understand also Be careful what you wish for. This job has seemed easy just like it might seem easy for Tom Cruise or Christopher Nolan when you see them or Tarantino, what you don't see is all of the people who try to become Tarantino who try to become, you know, Tom Cruise. And there are far too
10 to 15 years before they realize that they're not.
And they did not actually have the fundamental skills or the work ethic that is required to become Tarantino. I listen to Tarantino's podcast. He does a Have you heard the video archives podcast yet? You have to get on this. It's him and his the co writer of, who did you write pulp fiction with?
Roger Avery.
Roger.
So him and Roger Avery is my favorite podcast right now. They just talk about films. Their knowledge of films is so unbelievable And the detail in which they talk about that is so crisp. They finish each other sentences in the way when maybe you listen to this podcast you know, we all go, oh, John Door. Oh, no.
He worked at Intel. Oh, this person, yeah, Maritz. He was a journalist. We have a a deep, deep understanding of this business that comes from 30 years within it or 20 years. And I think you have to.
I know it sounds corny, but you have to pay your dues you have to put 60, 70 hours in a week to get that elite job. And the problem today, I feel is and for people who are listening who are young people coming out of schools, if you're not willing to sacrifice 60, 70, 80 hours a week for a decade or 2, you're just not going to be successful in
by the way. And young people push back on this, and I think the simplest way to reframe it is in the following. Do you really think, for example, let's pick NBA basketball. Do you think you would be really interested or find credible that the best player in the NBA only practice 3 hours a week. Does that happen?
Or do you think they're practicing 3 hours in the morning and then also 3 hours in the afternoon and they give up their live The most incredible thing that I saw in the NBA was all of these men literally gave up their life to play that game to perfect it. And that's true for anything. And so I don't understand how whether if you're a filmmaker, whether you wanna be an investor, whether you wanna be an athlete, whether you wanna be an actor, a surgeon. It's just an like, it's an immutable law of physics, so so just get over it, which is you need to put in tens of 1000 of hours. And if you cannot or won't, you should not expect the success and you should not complain.
And and also the
the because it's not free.
Yeah. The these these guys Do you agree with that or not? Yeah. Look. I mean, LeBron, 20 what was it?
2016 when they came back and won against 7? 2016? Yeah. I don't wanna 2016. I don't wanna bad scar tissue.
Yeah. Right. But, the next day,
they were,
you know, his teammates go out and celebrate, you know, what LeBron did on Instagram the next day. Posted a photo at 7 AM if it Ron is
what you have.
Yeah. Working out. But, look, one thing I'll say, LeBron knows what his skill is, and he knows what his game is. I think every individual needs to figure out what their skill is and what their game is and not to find glory in what others have found to be their skill and their game, that there is something that comes from mastering
any craft that gives an
individual joy and purpose in life. And you see this in basketball. You see it when these athletes really find what they love, and they do it, and they commit to it. And there are things that we each realized we are good at, and there are things that we've all certainly realized we are not good at. And identifying that mastering one's craft is the key to any person being successful and happy, I believe.
I just just just assuming that there's a a thing out there that everyone makes money
out of it.
Distraction alert. All of our wives are about to go swimming.
Oh my
lord. They're so hot. My old lord.
Look at my wife. Oh, Jesus. God on my day. I hit
the jackpot. It's beauty and
the beast. You
can relate. Chihuahua. Well, when
I went, I got it.
We were joking at breakfast today. We were
like, my wife must have low self esteem because she's married to me.
Saks had the best slide. He's like, if you Google, not that he don't pay, you find this picture of her holding a tiger, but a lion by
the lion by the tail. Which is a lot more exciting than holding a Sri Lankan by the Schlong.
I was playing Epic Man for Sacks when he did the roast last night. I was his, like, laughing guy. Every time he hit it, I just went back to table.
You didn't get, help me off cliff. Oh, it's waiting for that.
Poor, how long he is?
Away off the cliff.
I mean, my god.
I think he knows
how you know what happened? Kath told me what happened. So the the backstory is Phil Chamath is a narcissist.
And No. No. If you know Phil Hamuth, you know that.
Yeah. That's implied. And he just cannot give a speech. And so best friend. We He's not my best friend.
He's
quite nice. He'd be really excited.
But he's he he gives horrible speeches
He you're you're
gonna hear a best
friend's like free parking hour.
Every speech. Well, Phil, every speech he gives at every event, it's all about himself.
It's all about himself.
That's why we say 7 seconds fell, but
it's incredible because it could
be Goes off the roof.
It could be a wedding, Apartments, a funeral, a personal matter.
But but in our chat, so when when Shamal said, okay. Phil's gonna give a speech. Feels like, of course, I'm gonna give a speech. Every speech I give is amazing. I tell him every time.
$70. Then he goes. The last
event I gave a speech. It brought the house down. Everyone was laughing. I killed it. It was Doyle Brunson's funeral.
Oh my god. No, dude.
Like, what? What? You killed me at a funeral?
So I asked I asked Hamid to do to do this toast. And I was like, okay. Well, we'll do 4 of them. I thought if we start with Helmyuth, it'll just be so bad.
Yeah. You bought them out early.
Yeah. You bought them out early. And then the rest
of you guys set the bar.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. But Saks crushed it.
Saks got just nailed it. Saks
Cross crushed it. Yeah. I think
we're all still amazed at
made up the stairs. You know, it was it was a hike.
It was 4
hundred steps to that.
Yeah. It looks good. He lost
let's see what I got.
It was
pretty impressive.
This has been a great episode of the ultimate pod.
§04Actors/Writers unions vs. Corporate Hollywood, endgame for the modern Hollywood machine
Do anybody see Oppenheimer yet? I'm so excited.
How how do we see it?
It's it's gonna be a an honor of the Barber Heimer wedding.
Yeah. I'm not I'm not Barbara Heimering it. I that's how
I'm good.
But the see it in IMAX. I I know Nolan had a Nolan's, like, so about 70 millimeter prints.
He's like, you
have to watch it.
And Do
you know the metronome and in the city? Is it? So we should just the theater and invite some fans. Or just go. Yeah.
I mean, we should do that. No. Actually, let's rent it.
Let's rent it. This week. I've rented it. It's I think it's sold out into, like, 6.
Limited time. Oh, the theater is.
We just have to call them and say, hey. Can we rent the thing? They'll do
a show.
Here's 20 times. I once went to
a showing of, interstellar there and Christopher Nolan came and spoke and got to meet him and speak to him afterwards. He's a very soft spoken guy, and he's not very sociable. He doesn't sorta like Saks. You don't wanna make eye contact and actually talk with you, but, you know, we challenge them.
Are you making fun of people with Asperger's?
But he was great. I mean, I
Hello, pot. It's Kettle calling.
I will say, he he's he's, what, top 3 filmmakers of our time? Top 4?
There is a
For me, it's Ridley Scott. Tarantino Nolan.
Is a very funny moment.
Where where's your list, Saxe, right now?
You gotta put Scorsesee on that list.
Oh, right. Of course. PT Anderson.
No. No PT Anderson.
Dennis still in the wave.
Hit or miss.
Woody Allen? Can we mention that name?
I mean,
I can't say that. Believe.
It's hard to watch It's hard to watch the whole I
I like, makes it too hard. I like, Oh my god. No. Nick, Nick, please those up. There's a very funny moment on the the first the first dinner.
Yeah. You know, we did this great thing. You Nick, beep up the names when sat down. Everybody's like,
the the and I was waiting
for David to sit. Yeah. And he
just keep talking and talking. Yeah. Talking and talking. And finally, that went to do, you know, like, sit the fuck down right now and had to get this fucking thing going.
So who do you got? You got score says, hey, of course. Yeah.
I mean, you're talking about, like, currently a live filmmakers. I think that
Active filmmakers are back.
Listing mentions pretty good. I don't have to think about it for missing anybody.
Yeah. Really Scott's up there for you.
Yeah. Yeah. Really Scott. Yeah. I mean, he's still making
Christopher Nolan is pretty excellent.
He's very productive.
Too. That's the thing about what's happening every 2 years.
Michael Bay versatility, Michael Bay.
I don't I
don't know if we're discussing number 1, but,
I met Michael Bay in Costa Rica
Can you yeah.
That's what
you're getting at the
end of the story.
That's all I got. Can you did you ask for the $30 back? For transformers?
No. I mean, like, I
I didn't particularly know Like, I cannot watch any of his films. I cannot watch any of those. Yeah.
It's He's a very nice guy.
Yeah. I don't I'm sure he's great. So, also on the docking.
He's gotten Napoleon coming out. The trailer looks amazing.
Amazing. Well, anything with what he
keeps saying is making no. No.
No. No. No. No. Ridley Scott.
I'm walking Phoenix playing Napoleon. It's kind of interesting.
I hate to go deep into the, do you guys wanna talk about zirp bad behavior, or you wanna talk about resolution of this Hollywood stuff and what it means writ large.
Well, the Hollywood stuff, look.
I think it's fascinating.
I tweeted about this a couple weeks ago. My observations on this were twofold. One is that it's gonna have the exact opposite effect that they want. If what they want if what the writers and the actors guild want is to show the owners of the studios, how valuable they are. The problem is that this moves the owners and the studios one step closer into the hands of tools that will disintermediate
the actors and the writers. They'll embrace that technology.
They'll they'll embrace the AI tools that you guys have talked about. You were showing something around even like yesterday or whatever. So, like, the point is, like, I don't see it as very effective And then my second thought is, like, I just think that unions in general are probably not a very effective way to get these concessions anymore versus the tax that the union members pay. And you can just see that in terms of, like, the number of people in unions are just kind of decaying pretty quickly. The wage gains are pretty de minimis.
It's just not an effective mechanism of negotiations.
Sachs, the unions are a way for average performers to fight to get a little bit more, but Right. It it's the antithesis of having a meritocracy and people fighting for their best possible pay. And so the conundrum I have is I'm seeing all these Marvel actors, superhero actors getting dropped off at the protests. And they're complaining about Bob Eiger making 25,000,000. Mhmm.
When Tom Cruise or, you know, Robert Downey Junior, you pick the person. I'm not singling anybody out. But those people who got to the top of the heap after 20, 30, 40 years in the business are getting paid 50,000,000 a picture.
Yeah.
A 100,000,000 a picture of back ends. And and so what's your take on what's going on here because there it seems that I don't wanna say hypocritical, but it feels like they're talking out of both sides of their mouth. They want to have an auction to the highest bidder for these incredibly talented writers, director, producers as it should be, but then they also wanna fight for the average.
Right. Well, some some of the union demands, I think, are reasonable in either why they want them. So for example, I think they were arguing for more residuals for, like you said, the kind of lower level performers so that they can get health care.
Yeah. Which ones? Yeah.
Yeah. So I I I can understand that. At the same time, they're demanding that writer's rooms not use AI software.
Which they're already doing.
Yeah. Which is just crazy because AI is gonna be incorporated into all software. So to not be able to use the latest features of whatever word or Google docs or whatever screenwriting software.
Yes.
That's like the king in order to the tights to stop. You know, this this march of technology is not gonna work. I think that's, like, really off base. So I I can sympathize with some of the demands other ones I think are hard to see. In terms of your point about the economic, I mean, look, the the basic problem about with Hollywood is it's a winner to take all business.
I mean, you've got a few actors who become big stars. This is true actually with all the creative industries is their power law businesses. You know, JK Rowling makes a $1,000,000,000 as an author the 10,000 author or whatever makes all of
us suffer. Fantasy. Yeah.
Person makes a living.
Yeah. Exactly.
They're living a month.
Yeah. Can't even make a living. And the reason by the way is because there's a lot of people willing to do it for free. Humans are fundamentally creative. There's a lot of people willing to be actors for free or Sure.
Honest with society or right or whatever creatively because they're willing to do their art for free.
Podcasters.
Right. And so the reality is the reason Hollywood doesn't have to pay these sort of the entry level actors very much is there's a lot of people willing to do too
many people want that job.
A lot of people on it.
And it doesn't need to be in a structured production system anymore anymore. I you guys saw the latest, Disney earnings release and Eiger said, we are going to consider selling Machio and a bunch of other channels. There may actually be a spin off because content creation for that mid tier or that tail no longer makes sense. It's not viable because there's so much content being generated by this very long tail that's accruing a lot of the eyeballs and a lot of the hours of consumers' mindset and time. I I think that there's a big
Well, just just to connect that idea. So we were talking earlier about career choices So first of all, it's it's I agree with what you guys said about the time commitment you have to make, but it's not really about time per se. It's about your obsession level. Can you be obsessed with something so that 60, 70 hours a week feels like nothing to you? Because you're so immersed.
You're so obsessed with it.
Right.
The way that Tarantino and Avery are obsessed with classic films and have the whole database in their head. So if you wanna pursue one of these careers in a winner take all space, like writing, like acting, whatever, you better just be completely obsessed.
Gotta be all in.
Yeah. You gotta be all in. I'd say furthermore
It'd be unique. It will make you novel.
Yeah.
I mean Even if you are all in, You still have to have luck and scale.
And And, yeah,
and furthermore, you have to know where the bar is. So I think a lot of people this is one of the things I noticed when I was producing a movie is a lot of people look at, like, the worst actor or the worst screenwriter and say, I'm better than that person. So I'm gonna make it. But your bar is not the worst person who's made it. Your bar is the best person who hasn't made it.
That's the person you're really competing. Next up, It's the next step. It's the person you're going on auditions and your competing against someone who hasn't made it yet, but they're amazing. And you don't necessarily know where that bar it's as much harder to see. Yeah.
But that's where the bar really is.
Right. I look. I think there's also a big disruption as well
said.
Yeah. Totally. And as we extend the long tail of consumer content creation into what is effectively now the infinite tail of AI generation, AI generated content creation, it is gonna totally disrupt
and change the game of
media of content generally speaking we're getting to a point now where you can effectively tie together rendering engines with scripting, with scene definition, with directorial lines, all the stuff that it goes into pre production and production, can be generated, through through AI, through scripting, and then queued and tweaked by a human, but, ultimately, it increases the scale. Like, all technologies do, it increases leverage for human. And we could see a hundred times more films come out. Each of which costs 1 100 the cost. You know, one of the best production companies in LA is Blumhouse.
You know, they make they make they make get out.
2,000,000 dollars. They make up
2,000,000 bucks, and they make a bunch of them because they cost so little to make. And if any one of them hits, they make a 180,000,000 bucks or 200,000,000 bucks at the box office. It's a fantastic business model. Film it's very much a unique model in Hollywood, and it's really changed the game quite a bit. And I think we're gonna see something similar emerged because of generative AI and the tooling.
And then people start to question, what
is it called?
But, I look, one one one thing one thing I do wanna say, I do think that there's also a change in Hollywood that's gonna be driven as we talked about before by the ability to generate personalized film personalized content, rather than one piece of content for everyone where you have to make blockbusters. Everyone watches it. There is a question, however, of culture, and culture is, you know, shared experience, stories, and beliefs shared experience stories and beliefs can still be realized through personalized media, through personalized, content generation, think about, you know, an old narrative, an old tale that was told, you know, via, people speaking to each other around a campfire. The the epics and the morals of the story are still there, but everyone tells it a differently. I think that's what we may end up seeing Hollywood production or AI generated production.
Did you guys see this?
Which is everyone tweaks their content in their own personal way. They consume it in their own way. But the Hollywood studios, how much of a role do they ultimately end up playing? And does this start to go ten times more what we've seen in YouTube? Content consumption goes way up.
And the number of folks that are contributing to it goes way up by 10 or a 100 x. I I
think this is one of the fundamental things that the unions and Hollywood have not yet groked completely, which is they're not fighting each other. They're fighting TikTok, YouTube, podcasts, and people making their own content. That's taken.
They're fighting. They're they're fighting Jimmy Donaldson. They're fighting mister b.
They're fighting mister b. They're fighting each other over the last
scraps in the dark bottle.
Exactly. They're fighting anything entirely. They're fighting these
the people that spend 2 hours a week listening to us rant on about stuff. Right?
Like, they're fighting people. That's 2 less hours.
What I'm saying?
It's 2 less hours of broadcast TV. And then at Mr. Beast, these kids watch his videos five times. They watch 2 minutes away.
He's probably the only person in recent memory that has rebuilt, event based viewership because people know Saturday mornings at noon eastern time is when these videos drop 100 of millions of people. It's appointment television. It's appointment television. Now back by the way, when you hear, you know, the story about Mister Beast, that's a guy that's been doing it since he was thirteen years old.
Studying it.
He's twenty four years old. So that's 11 years where he's literally only lived and breathed everything and in the lab. I'm sorry. Generation in the lab down to the very pixel. Right?
Like, when he for example, like And
the cuts. Remember just cuts on his video?
Remember he told us about, like, thumbnails. He has an entire PhD thesis that he's earned just on thumbnails.
Yeah. And that's a level of commitment. I think what Hollywood needs to do just to to put it out there is the the leadership in Hollywood gets compensated on a corporate level And then they come up with this, you know, pay and sometimes residual, sometimes not, and scraps where the talent I would encourage them to read something like, an autobiography by Kurosawa and study the Tahoe system where everybody was aligned inside the company. If I'm running Disney, I'm hiring the top 2 or 300 riders, putting them full time on staff, giving them equity, and getting everybody rowing in the right direction. They do not have time to fuck around They need to be in alignment, making great content, and the incentive structure matters.
If Bob Eiger is getting compensated by stock options, the actors Robert Downey Junior, who's the guy, the incredible director of swinger's and Fabro. Fabro, I I was talking to Fabro at an event, and I was like, how much, like, equity in Disney did you get for doing Mandalorian and, like, launching Disney plus for them? And he's like, 0.
0. And I'm like,
why just
Well, if you if you look at back up a $100,000,000 If you know, but if you look and this is what's crazy. If you look at the biggest content producers of that older generation, they locked up the equity. You know, Spielberg owns equity in the movies that he made. George Lucas owns equity in the movie.
We own part
of the studios. He
was the old Christopher Nolan cut on, on Oppenheimer? No. I think he gets, 20% of the gross off the first dollar.
That's absurd. Yeah.
And he got a $100,000,000 budget and a $100,000,000 marketing commit. On the on the the deal?
Joker was, taught taught Phillips.
Yeah. Todd Phillips.
So What is
the perfect example? I was
talking to Todd Phillips, actually. I got to have dinner with him some.
Great guy. Yeah.
Yeah. Great guy. And he waived his fee on Joker to take a big chunk of the equity.
Because I feel very take
that on the hangover. And he owned the IP of the hangover. He owned the sequels and hangover 1 and 2 amazing hangover 3.
That you can miss it. Yeah. Yeah.
Toddfield. But he made more, I think, on hangover 3.
Yeah.
And he got all those guys, Gallifinakis, etcetera. They got their biggest payday on number 3.
Right.
And you you have to craft a deal. We have equity.
The
other The studio the studio was less bullish than he was on both hangover and Joker because they're
both We shows you how it
comes on. Movies. So they allowed him to take equity in exchange for giving back
his seat. You only wanna spend 50,000,000 on a superhero film. That's never gonna work. And then he's like, Yeah. It made a 1,000,000,000.
Joker made a 1,000,000,000.
Right. They thought it was too dark. Yeah.
Under estimating audiences, as always in Hollywood.
I'll tell you very funny poker story.
It's showing here. Your Disney
right now, I'm gonna ride it out. I think their IP collection is amazing. I think there's a chance that, you know, depending on how, the FTC winds up being run over the long term that Disney could be, selling pieces of that business. And I think that it could become an acquisition target itself at some point.
You wanna hear a Todd Phillips focus, sorry?
I play a part with him. Yeah.
He's he's fine. Todd Phillips is a very, very disciplined poker player.
Yeah.
You know, he's got, like, a stop loss. He hits the stop loss. He's done, and he's very funny. And jokes around, you know, bus balls, whatever. And there was a while where he would play in the big game in LA with us.
And he didn't say much. He was very focused and tight is right. And then he did the steal and then hangover 3 comes out. And all of a sudden, you know, he's got chirping chips.
You're splashing the pot?
I bus Phillips in a pot, and he looks at me, and he called me slumdog billionaire after
I just
thought the guys at the table thought it was so funny because that movie slumdog millionaire had just come out. So then they all started calling me slummy. Slum tied to me. That's gonna suck. It took me a year for them to get stop calling me then.
Yeah. Yeah. Pretty great.
§05Equity participations vs. unions, ownership upside vs. downside protections
On the union thing, I'll tell you So recently, it was just announced that Anchor steam shut down. Anchor steam was this beer, this native beer in San Francisco that's been around forever.
Japanese brewery bought them. Right?
It was bought by Sapporo several years ago.
And Anchor seems shut down.
Anchor seems shut down. Yeah.
I used to go there all the time for, like, work events. You do, like, an off-site there and Go to the brewery. It's
in. Yeah.
It was, like, one of the original brews, award winning beer, iconic. Well, it's out of business now. And the
reason is, well,
it was losing money. And you wanna know why is because 3 years ago, the workers all voted to unionize. There were only something like 60 workers, 62 workers. And 3 years ago, they voted unionized, and they voted themselves big pay increases. Yeah.
And so I guess support had to go along with it. 3 years later, it supports like, shut the whole thing down.
I think that's fine.
And that's and that's You gotta be careful what you wish for.
Overplay your name. I really think the
thing with unions that they get wrong is unions fight for exactly this, which is this short term increase in current compensation. And I think what unions do very poorly is actually understanding the long term equity that the employees and members of that union actually create. I tweeted this a few weeks ago as well, but The single biggest reason that motivated me when I sold my piece of the warriors was obviously just the crazy increase in the valuation. Right? I bought it for, you know, 300, 600.
300, and it was worth 5,200,000,000 at the time. But the second biggest reason was my huge fear was that I, as an owner, I just wanted to cash in the chips because I think the most right thing to do for the union, like the NBA Players Association, is to fight for equity. Yeah. If, like, Michael Jordan single handedly has created $15,000,000,000 of equity in the NBA. Yep.
How much has he captured? 1 or 2,000,000,000, but not from the league. He captured it accidentally from shoes. Right? How much money is LeBron James actually created for the NBA?
It's enormous. Yep. How much is he?
He may have captured that.
They're not trying to get the right piece of the outside.
They're not gonna get the right piece of
the inside. Doesn't do well. Then the the labor contracts become a source of huge and flexibility.
Huge and flexible can't
make the necessary business changes. So to your point, the business gets shut down.
So to your point, like, when you when what happens now is there's these huge luxury taxes in professional sports. And so folks bloke the payroll. They try to get all these players, but if you don't win and get to the playoffs. You're not selling more merch. You're not getting incremental share of TV revenues.
You're not getting ticket revenues. And all of a sudden, you have these massive luxury taxes you have to pay and not enough revenue to pay for it. And so these teams, all of a sudden, now start to gush money have to make capital calls because these things that sound incredible up
front start to become real weights on these businesses.
The real thing all unions in all industries, I would I would tell you all to do is figure out how to get the equity upside in the business in which your members are working in and are creating value.
Right. And in exchange for that, have more forgiveness on the downside. So the business is actually persevere, whether the storm is supposed to have to shut
down. Exactly.
Alignment know, align the incentives are just so critical. I was talking to the head of one of the giant publishers. I wouldn't say which one. Dibness biz insider. I don't know which one it was, but, they were being unionized.
And I said, wow, is this a disaster for your business? He said, oh, Jay Cal, greatest thing ever. I said, why? He's like, now when people come to us and they wanna get paid more, we just take out the chart. How many years have you been here?
Oh, 5? Okay. Yeah. 1, 2, 3, 4,5, 72,000. And they said, well, no.
But I bring more page users, whatever. It's like, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Pageview multiplier.
Point 15. Okay. So you're 78k. And then just basically That's
what happens at business insider. Yeah.
But that's kinda Who knows? Which That's probably why they're, a clickbait business. And then that
drives perverse incentives. It's like, why not align it with what is the profitability of the business? What is the growth of the business? A bonus pool, a base level of cash, if the unions are coming in, they are literally rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. And it's that simple.
You you if
both the beer industry and Hollywood are both shrinking industries. And so when you got unions demanding more and more of a shrinking pie, something's gonna break. Now look, just to be clear, I'm in favor of unions demanding things like better working conditions and health care and just like the basics. Yeah. But, you know, when they try to go for things like, I don't know, banning AI and Weird.
Yeah. And proposals that distort the cost structure of the business to the point where it's just not feasible. It's not profitable. That doesn't work.
Also, the question is, why collar workers who can move so freely between jobs? Yeah. So elite? Why would any white collar worker who is learning and sharpening their blade and increasing their value year after year? Why would they even want to join a union?
There was a podcast union that started in Spotify and, gimlet media, all of this stuff, and one of the podcasts, I think it was a reply all. They didn't wanna join the union because they're like, well, we're overcompensated. We're a hit show. And then they were all claimed that they
were Look at
what's happening in the schools.
So can we steal that?
You can't get rid of a bad teacher because they're in the union. So it's like a huge procedure.
They put them in a building. Right. The incompetent teachers Can we have a
real man? The pro case of joining a union in 2023? Can we I
mean, if you could get benefits, like, some basic level of benefits?
Look, I I think that the pitch, and, Jake, this is why I asked you this a few ago, you know, tell us your experience having grown up in a family that I think unions are pretty proliferate in these Cops firemen. Cops firemen.
Yeah. I mean, if you are
The pitch is you're you're part of a membership. You have a voice. Yeah. And that voice always is your advocate. And that that advocate looks out for benefits, comp, time off, whether or not on how you get fired, all the things that you feel you may be unfairly treated by management.
There's nothing novel here.
I don't I don't know if
that's It's a it's a strong appealing point.
Yeah. So I don't know if that's the best steel
man for it
because employ it's it's a competitive labor market if you have skills that companies want. So you should be able to negotiate for a lot of these things yourself. I think the steelman case for unions and the reason why they formed in the first place is because American industry was basically owned by an oligopoly. They were themselves monopoly. So if you have a monopoly of industries like US Steel or standard of oil, then there's not a competitive labor market.
They just set the price as they set the condition That's why the unions got started is you needed a, basically, monopoly of labor to face off against a monopoly of business. That's how it got started. And I think in those conditions, we're talking about the early 1900.
People are losing limbs in factories.
Yeah. Of course.
It was very different working conditions.
Different working conditions.
And now you're talking about much more competitive industries, but look.
Yeah. There was a great deal of lay like, manual labor needed to get productivity out of businesses and enterprise. So, you know, so much of industry changed where things became automated, where they became specialization and differentiation amongst the workforce. And it wasn't everyone is just using their arms to do things. And, you know, the this is obviously now measurable and the idea that you can basically you know, capture management or do a hostile takeover of the corporation or the equity, I I think is effectively what's happened with a lot of these these these
And I'll be honest, Knowing what I know about unions, if you were to do a deep dive into, you know, the police unions or the firefighter unions or the meditation unions or the teacher unions and you look at their pensions and their overtime, you would see some pretty significant abuse that the unions have built up over years to where people can make $300,000 a year in 2 or 3 years. They goose that up because then they base their pension on the average of the last 3 years. And what basically happens is all the senior guys say, listen, all over time goes to these 3 guys who are retiring in 3 years, and none of the junior guys can take any overtime. And when it's your turn
Right. You
get that. All that and then we're gonna goosher pay. So And what what that does unreasonably Yeah.
Is the pension calculation, the pay into the pension is based on some assumption of today. As that starts to happen, the pensions become underfunded because they no longer have enough capital to make all the disbursements that are supposed to happen. And there's a big argument now that there's probably over a $1,000,000,000,000 of underfunded pension liabilities in the United States, many of which are based on the fact that these payout principles were defined by some negotiation with a union.
And their games. And there's a large difference between somebody writing a listicle or rewriting a Washington Postarium business, a listicle?
A listicle?
A listicle? Yeah. Somebody rewriting a listicle and buzzfeed or you know, somebody rewriting a Wall Street journal Paywall story and business insider, then somebody running into a
running into
a burning building or, you know, Right. Having a target on their back as a cop in San Francisco. These are very different jobs. And the white collar knowledge workers are lasting what? What's the average tenure right now?
36 months? Less. 30 months? I mean, you're obviously moving from place to place. What's the point of the union
a competitive labor market. And and to your point, it's true that in some cases, the unions do get a better deal for their members. However, there is a deadweight law for the union itself because the union's representing its own interest.
1 a half percent.
So they're taking something
they talk to.
They're skimming. You gotta pick
the VIN.
That scorsese movie. Was it the Irish?
Irishman. Yeah.
You really just get a taste of the corruption that was involved.
There was some skimming going on. Yeah. Everybody gets a little skim. Well, all of a sudden, one and a times And
then also the pension fund starts getting, you know, rolled into mob projects or whatever. I mean, that's, like, a while ago, but Yeah. I I There was some significant downside.
I my view of it is we lived in a decade of surplus elites you know, having these luxury jobs, and I'll put in the luxury jobs being a journalist, being a venture capitalist, you know, these elitist luxury jobs and in some of them, they became so wildly overcompensated. I think they wanted to feel oppressed. They wanted to feel like they need a representation, and I think they were larping to use the term again, live action role playing, that they were gonna be in a union. Like, they wanted
Their larping is being victims.
Right. They wanted to, like, literally, the business insider people were putting up pictures of Henry Balaji and his
energy. Grievances.
Yes. And they're on the street holding a ticket sign up And I'm like, what's the matter? Is your keyboard not ergonomic enough at home?
Right. You
haven't been to an office in 3 fucking years.
I
didn't get the latest flavor of of kind bars or ever.
Yeah. No. They can get the cherry. The the cranberry. The kind bars.
Walnut. Queue. Queue. Kind bars. I mean, like, leave the unions for the people who are actually the front lines.
It's That's
it. Lose the time. Alright.
So, I think, well,
we could wrap. Should we wrap? It's probably wrap time. Would you wanna do a quick science, corner update? I got a lot of tech.
§06Potential impact of room-temp superconductors Special thanks to our Italian audio/video team!
Hello, actually. Room temp superconductor. Yeah. See that?
There is a, actually, it's a very, interesting You
you may remember a few episodes ago, and if you if you don't remember kinda can go back and watch it, where I talked a little bit about the effort to try and identify a material that can be superconducting a room temperature, which means no resistance electrons can flow through the material with no resistance, perfect electricity transfer across distance, and also enables the meissner effect where magnetic waves can reflect off of the material, which can allow things like levitating trains, which is very low friction transportation. All these benefits of superconducting materials, quantum computing, etcetera. So yesterday, and and I've gotten literally dozens of emails and notes about this in the last 12 hours. There was a paper published by a team in South Korea who seemed like a very legit team. There's no reason why they would kind of make a a fraudulent claim that there is a material that they've identified and measured to show has superconducting properties at room temperature and ambient pressure where a lot of these efforts historically have been made at room temperature, but they use 200 times atmospheric pressure to compress it.
And it turns out that this material that they're using is a lead, appetite, which is a, it's a hexagonal crystal that uses a calcium phosphate and lead and that some of the cows, the lead gets replaced with copper, and the copper causes the hexagon, the crystal structure to compress a little bit that compressed crystal allows the electrons to flow through. This is their theoretical explanation on what's going on. It will be replicated. People will try and do what they are now claiming they did to damage rate this. There was some condensed matter, physics people that sent me an email and said, they don't think that this is real.
They have a great deal of skepticism.
Now let me
but I sorry. Let me just say two things about this. You can read the paper. You can read the paper. It's on the internet.
Yeah. The sleep. The camera manager is asleep.
Put his glasses on. He's sleeping behind here. He's just we're sleeping.
Let me take let me take a few things. Firstly, think it's unlikely that these guys are gonna make a fraudulent claim. If they did make a fraudulent claim, it would be the end of their careers. The reputation would be damaged. So that may happen.
If they did not make a fraudulent president Stanford, if they did not make a fraudulent claim and it is it does turn out to be real,
then I do think it'll end
up being the the most important discovery in physics of this century.
Okay.
So it's either
us complete utter Friedberg.
No. No. No.
Or it changes the universe.
I think serious.
No doubt. Look, I I know you guys I know you guys are joking about it, but Yeah. We talked about the importance of this material in technology. Yes. It's a And an everyday life and an energy
I wanna build on top of what you're saying. The thing that you're saying the more generalized concept is we have such a poor understanding of the periodic table, just broadly speaking. Of condensed matter of physics. There's so much about physics
and quantum
mechanics. And just That are still we we are just literally poking around poking around. Around. Trying to figure out what's going on, and that would led to this discovery supposed to
I've made this analogy before, but if you take the periodic table and it actually kind of looks like the United States of America, we have, like, a really good sense of, like, the upper northwest and like the East Coast. And otherwise, we don't know anything. And I think it it was about two and a half years ago, right, the beginning of the pandemic, there are these three guys and I that started with this idea of just building some machine learning to experiment in silica around different materials. Right? And can you guess physical properties.
And if you think these properties are better at a certain thing, can we then go and actually make samples and figure it out? And we pointed it at batteries And we said, let's just take the cheapest form of batteries LFP lithium, right, that's used in the model 3, and let's make better LFP. And what we're finding is Holy shit. Like, we don't know anything. And there are these, like, really big breakthroughs, one which we'll probably announce in, like, the next few weeks because we just raised a bunch of money around this idea.
But it's all just people experimenting better and smarter. And really what you find is that there just aren't enough of those people doing it. And so the cycle time is just too long.
Well, and this is where AI can actually have some it's incredible game. Transformational. As AI gets smarter
Transformation.
Put in the inputs you give it the data set. We don't know what it's gonna come up with, and it could profoundly
The the better version of
Part of
what increase our understanding
of this. Part of what this this Korean team did is they they had separate paper that they published talking about the demonstration of using AI to try and be predictive around quantum mechanics, which is something that people said we can't really do quantum modeling until we get quantum computers. And so there there has been this this belief that once we get quantum computers, we'll be able to understand the physics of, of the quantum skill and be able to do modeling that will allow us to do more discovery. But we are still very much just poking around and theorizing And every cycle, by the way, in superconductor research, there's a different theory on what caused the superconductivity, and it shows how little we do actually.
So these guys, basically, when we were trying to build so if you if you look at like a Tesla model s, right, or model x, these are NMC or NCA batteries, right, very, very, very energy rich. But also very expensive and very complicated batteries. That won't scale to the average everyday car. And what was crazy in our attempt to take LFP, which is the cheap version and make it as keep the cheapness, but as energy dense as NMC and NCA. We ended up doping it with all kinds of random stuff that you would have never guessed in a 1000000 years.
Given 1,000,000,000 of dollars, you would you needed computers to go off and actually make these guesses. So this idea that we're gonna find all this stuff at the periodic table bumbling around, I think, is such an interesting part of the physical sciences.
And, again, this will lead to infinite energy storage in batteries. Yeah. You can put electricity into a battery if you had a superconducting battery. And it would cycle forever.
No resistance.
And then
you could just plug in and get the energy back out. So imagine infinite storage on batteries. You have to reinvent circuitry? Completely.
So you
can there are already super conducting, circuits that are used in quantum computers and other high end applications, but because they're so expensive, to cool and so expensive to operate. They're not ubiquitous,
but the power of having them be ubiquitous would be extraordinary. Right.
Computing for discovery, for AI, for
modeling, the applications of what we'll end up discovering because of the modeling we can now do in a more ubiquitous way is gonna be incredible. These are very profound moments when they do. And if they do happen, we should be excited, optimistic, but obviously very, very cautious about, where and when this may happen.
Yeah. I really love you.
What an incredible week.
So so thankful that you guys came and showed up. It really means a lot to me. Thank you.
Fantastic. Yeah. Incredible. I
really love you guys. Thank you very, very much for
I will see everybody, at the all in summit. Oh my gosh. Yum. Yum.
Is it like in this
is, like, 6 weeks? More. A little more.
You have a new party planning going.
You have a new per
you have
a new person to announce?
I I will announce it, and then we'll take it out if it's not okay. But we did confirm Ray Dahlios, and we'll add him to speaker list. We've got a few other guests that we're not gonna announce. That will be last minute fun surprises for everyone.
Some fun surprise at
the end.
I'm really excited to have a great day.
We're closing in Orie. Yeah.
How the party's going for the summer.
The parties, we, we have narrowed down to 3 themes. We think are gonna be a lot of fun. Hopeeting night, Sunday night the day before the events start. September 10th, I think that is. You have locations yet?
We are negotiating the final contracts with the locations. We've got about a dozen of them, and we're gonna narrow it down to the 3 that give us, the best flexibility we'll have the floor plans, which is the last step. You know, you got, like, 6 weeks. Right? Yeah.
No. No. It's
we have more than enough options
now. So, Sunday night, we'll be
Jay Cal's handling the parties, not me.
I'm doing the party. She's your name.
You wanna hear a great all in summit story?
Yeah. But let me just go through the 3, Yeah. The 3 party themes. So These are all Opening night is gonna be bestie Royale. The bestie who love me at James Bond names So
what is that?
Tuxedos. White tuxedos or you can go as
a bond girl or you can go as Austin hours, anything in that theme, casino games.
But no black tuxedo?
You can go black tuxedo. You can go white tuxedo. You could go Daniel Craig. You could go Sean Connery, Roger Moore. You pick.
You could go to the You go whatever you want.
I like the black tux. I've tried the white tux. It doesn't You
can do it. Yeah. You go for you.
For me, I look like a waiter. Yeah.
And so
it'd be like a I'd like
the I'd like the y'all public spine cisco.
And then, Monday night, we have a I'm
gonna wear his a a bucket hat.
Monday night is gonna be bestie club, breakfast club, big eighties. The location is incredible. I wouldn't say it,
but, not to
be confused with Fight Club where Jake L and I get in a ring. No.
Not a fight club.
Each other today. Yeah.
That wouldn't last very long. That's what
you have. We worked everything out of the board meeting.
Yeah. Did we work everything out between the 2 of you?
Yeah. Everything's good. Board meeting's great. We're gonna
do what I'm saying. You were
embracing afterwards. I saw the 2 of you embracing.
I, of course,
we had to
do that.
To give him a hug.
It was You know, he
he didn't fully let me in.
Oh, it
was like, you ever see Steve 3 p o trying to get a hand solo hug. It does like this. He's like, Oh, there's a 472 to 1 chance that you're my bestie.
Oh, and then, the last night will be bestie runner, a
blade runner send up a cyberpunk theme to wear your best cyberpunk.
Oh, you must have a good, like, punch up person for this kind of stuff. Like, you have a person that was
in the our director.
We've got somebody who's got a stylist department.
Costume department in
the costume department.
Costume department in the
costume department
in the
costume. Yeah.
That's no. That's level 2 in the basement. Sub level 2 in the basement is the assumes.
So, Zach, you know, how
you haven't been to that level in your elevator?
Yeah. You go down. Level 2 is costumes. It's a costume.
Yeah. Level 3 is sets. Okay.
I'll tell you a quick
story all in summit. I'm walking in the streets of Milan. Me, not and we're we're walking just on. And I hear it, Chamath. And I turned around.
It's Damien Bertrand, the CEO of Laura Pianna. And he and so he comes. He's we're so excited to be a part of the all in summit. And I'm like, oh my god. This is I didn't
tell you
Oh, oh,
it's not happening?
No. He
it is. I know.
They're cushioning every seat with, No. No. No.
I oh, don't don't don't ruin it. Okay. I'm not gonna run it. Been working really hard on it.
Anyways, I I saw Damien. He they're excited. He's coming.
Yes. That was a high end sponsor.
Well, he's coming.
We'll see him partner. Yeah.
He's gonna have, Moncler?
We we did we you had every opportunity these last 3 days to do everything you needed to get a sponsorship Alright.
Anyone with Moncler is listening.
What are you guys right there on
the beach?
He's on the beach.
He had the widest.
Oh, okay. You
were just sitting here.
He was right there and the person. Do you see the
yacht right there? That's his boat?
This is his restaurant.
I can't.
This is his restaurant.
I can't I cannot. I can't do enough. I can't do any more than life
for you.
Get on the dinghy. Go to
his phone. You need to get off your phone.
You keep sitting right there. You need
to pay attention.
Yeah. Yeah. Get
playing. Oh my gosh. Oh, never mind. I wanna please
sit in the boot.
I'm not gonna you.
Stop playing chess.
And
you gotta go, yeah.
I know you.
You know the funny
bleep it out, man.
Well, bleeping out. Here's what happens. The guy, Friedberg comes up. He's in a panic.
Oh,
we've got a problem, Jake. Uh-uh, the production has got a problem. We they're gonna kick us out of the restaurant. The guy goes, I don't think it's gonna be a problem. Gonna fix it.
And February's like, how are you gonna fix it? He's like, well, I own the restaurant. And, so I'll ask them.
We bought it.
Do, not to kick you out.
And not gonna be a problem. It's not gonna be
a problem. It's not gonna be a problem. And Don't
think it's gonna be
a problem. And He sat beside for a whole day
Right.
Who is on the board. And I said, David, she's on the board. So if you this is your moment, you sold out their hats. And and this is David. Cut to David.
Beep up the name.
Hold on.
Oh, oh, I hold on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I hear a lot
of stuff. Peter Till and I are in level 4 of my basement.
I'm in a game of blitz with Peter Till.
Hold on. Playing blitz checks. My rating is
6 It's a terrible hangover. Let's get
out of here.
Alright. Everybody's live from
Portofino Hangover.
Thank you, guys. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.
We'll let
your winners ride.
Rainman, David Sacker. And it
said open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. On air when they're trying.
I'm think you, George, because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension, and they just need to release her mouth.
Where did you get Murphy's