All right, everybody, welcome to the all in podcast and with me again this week, the Sultan of science, the principal panic attacks, the queen of Kenwa David Friedberg, the dictator, Dr.
So what's the amuse bouge? I did her every time he said something he yelled like he was in all I want another butter Scotch pudding The butter Scotch pudding is delightful I'm four feet away from you Jake how you take the cab slot Sean was so I'm there chef Sean crushed it Chef Sean crushed it once again Were you sounding alarms when the restaurant like almost ran out of something? Alert alert alert restaurant is running low on coffee. We're dangerous
All right everybody welcome to the pod where we you know try to inform you We try to make some jokes here. I just want to make what is a little bit of an opening statement here It's not an apology and it's not a victory lap in any way but there's been a lot of attention I think on the last episode of the pod and perhaps some tweeting from two of the four besties this past weekend I Saw and I you know I'll let you speak for yourself here sacks and we're gonna get into the timeline of what's occurred and And then what are potential outcomes here in solutions to the banking issues that we've witnessed in What is a week since the bank run on Silicon Valley Bank and the shutdown on Friday?
But what I saw and again speaking only for myself here was absolutely terrifying up close and personally Watching people pulling money out of banks and watching people have to set up loans to hit their payroll and This was like one of those surreal moments in a in a movie where like a meteor is coming towards earth and you see it in the telescope and nobody I'll see is it or only a small number of people in the observatory see it and I think part of the reason people listen to this podcast is because we are insiders and speaking again just for myself I'm always trying to be exceptionally candid and transparent with the audience Additionally, I make jokes so sometimes you might laugh during this podcast or you might laugh when you're reading my tweets and And that's part of what I do now I also realize that we have an audience now that is larger than I think any of us expected for this podcast
I certainly Magneto larger than I expected and frankly, I know if this podcast was gonna make a past 50 or 100 episodes and my Twitter following count doubled since we started this podcast and Because you tried to ruin the pot. I think it was because of the caps lock, but anyway putting on that aside
What I would like to say as well is like We are living in a situation that is unprecedented I think the alarm bell I sounded you know was because I saw a fire We'll get into the timeline here, but I sounded that alarm bell after Silicon Valley bank Was put into receivership and when I saw additional bank runs occurring I wouldn't change it I think these were the right the right thing to do was to inform folks now I did use all caps perhaps a little too much That was a little bit of a bit if people didn't understand that maybe I need to adjust my Communication style now that this thing is so popular but I stand by My mode of operating in the world, which is I always want to be candid with people I always want to tell the truth and yes sometimes I make jokes about life and You know dealing with these stressful situations.
That's it. It's not an apology it's more of an explainer and Yeah, maybe I need to adjust the caps lock or how I deliver stuff But I stand by the message of what I said and I think it's important for us to maybe look at The series of events and misinformation that has spread because there are people literally blaming Venture capitalist for the bank run that is now systematic and The balance sheets of multiple banks around the world and I think that should be great for you to maybe just comment on The week that was and the timeline of events.
Yeah, so as usual. You're not apologizing. No, absolutely not apologizing But we'll recognize that this platform is bigger and that maybe on the margins I could adjust my communication strategy, but Chris There's a lot of people who don't know that I make jokes and maybe people don't understand when I'm joking and when I'm serious, right? And so Jason what would you change?
Is there anything you change? Jamal I Think I might not have used a Mad Max image and gift about the end of the world Because people are too stupid to understand that's a joke and a fictional movie. I see so you find yelling effective It depends.
Well, Jake. I agree that I don't think you have anything to apologize for in terms of the substance So what you're trying to get across I personally could have done without the all caps. It was a bit Yeah, what you're basically saying is nobody should listen to you because you're not that important and I I'm gonna agree with that
No, I'm saying understand I might make a joke consider me more of course Of course category.
不,我的意思是理解我可能会开玩笑,把我当成更加幽默的类别当然可以。
Yeah, all right. Let's go back Let's go back and look at the timeline because there are now serious accusations and I would call it really scapegoating And it wasn't just you it was me and Bill Ackman in fact the Wall Street Journal editorial board which I respect a lot mischaracterize what Me and Ackman were trying to do in terms of drawing attention to a regional banking crisis in progress a run on the banks
They called it spreading panic. I don't know how you tweet or publicly discuss a run on the bank. That's currently happening needs to be addressed with an immediate federal intervention. I don't know how you can discuss it without then having someone else mischaracterize it as trying to spread a panic.
But Jake, how the Wall Street Journal didn't mention you so you're off the hook. They didn't know who you are. Thank you. Thank you.
但是,杰克,怎么《华尔街日报》没有提及你,所以你没有事啦。他们不知道你是谁。谢谢。谢谢。
But no, but seriously, so I went back and looked at the timeline of all of this. First, we have to understand that this banking crisis now has swept in five banks - five bank failures. First, was Silvergate, but everyone dismissed that because of some weird crypto bank; then it was SVB, but everyone sort of dismissed it because they said it was based on panic evc's rather than a systemic problem in the banking system. Then it was Signature Bank which got seized on Sunday which I think utterly refuted the idea that this was just a Silicon Valley problem.
Then you had the Fed step in and backstop First Republic, which would have been the next dominant to fall if it wasn't backstopped, and then five - you had Credit Suisse, basically again avoid an outright failure because they got backstopped by the Swiss government.
So we now have five banks in roughly a week, and these are not small banks. Credit Suisse is a g-seb, a globally systemically important bank and the other ones are top 20 top 30 type banks. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in deposits.
Clearly there's a larger phenomenon going on here, and frankly, it's being caused not by anything VCs did because VCs are just depositors. Where does one class of depositors and depositors are not to blame for what's going on here? What's going on is that these banks have huge unrealized losses on their balance sheet, and the losses have come from the Sun's spike in interest rates.
That's what's going on, the Sun spike in interest rates, which is because we've had the most rapid Fed tightening cycle in our lifetimes. In the last year, the Fed funds raised gone from roughly zero and almost 5% that has broken a lot of things, and the banks which have broken first are the ones that had pre-existing problems and they had horrible risk management, but that's who gets broken first in a stress test.
Right, is the most poorly run banks the ones with pre-existing issues, but just because they went first doesn't mean that others don't have similar kinds of issues.
Now I'm not saying this in any way to be panicking with those banks. We find but there are larger issues in the banking system that are worth talking about, and to the point about whether VCs could have spread this, Jake, how you're absolutely right about the timeline. I mean, I went back and checked. I personally never tweeted anything about SVB until Friday afternoon when SVB was already in receivership and the run on the bank had already started with Signature and First Republic, and we could see it with our own eyes.
And then this pod didn't drop the one where we talked about this problem. Didn't drop until Saturday morning when the banks were already closed, and by Sunday night, the Fed had acted and basically implemented our recommendations, which was to basically intervene.
So I don't know how you can blame this search for scapegoats. I think it's getting out of control and it's just not factually accurate. And, you know, that it's convenient to make tech, which is hated right now, the scapegoat. Venture capital is obviously the part of tech that people might hate the most or the easiest target.
But let's talk about the Fed raised those rates because of inflation, and inflation happened because of out of control spending due to COVID and then the second administration. So you had a Republican administration that spent a lot of money, and then a democratic administration schemed out that spent a lot of money. So maybe we could even go backwards from Fed Fund rates going, you know, what looks like parabolic when you look at the chart.
Maybe you could speak to what got us to the Fed making those decisions, Schem out or Freedberg? Maybe I can just do a little cleanup on what Sachs said. I think the issues at Credit Suisse are different than the issues at First Republic, and the issues at First Republic are different than those other three banks - the other three banks, David, that you mentioned, Signature, Silicon Valley Bank, and Silvergate all had very traditional liquidity crises.
也许您可以谈谈是什么促使了联邦储备委员会做出那些决定,是 Schem out 还是 Freedberg?也许我可以简单解释一下 Sachs 所说的内容。我认为瑞士信贷的问题与第一共和国的问题不同,而第一共和国的问题又与其他三家银行的问题不同 - 您提到的另外三家银行,David,即 Signature、Silicon Valley Bank 和 Silvergate,它们都面临了非常传统的流动性危机。
Right - duration mismatching where you have depositors who want their money today but you have assets that mature in 10 years, and as a result, you have huge unrealized losses if you all of a sudden cash them out today versus waiting 10 years.
I think what's happening at First Republic is really just about making sure that that loan book and the depositors can get parked into a combination set of banks that can take care of the balance sheet so that there are no more liquidity issues. At Credit Suisse, they have an enormous amount of liquidity, what that was was I think a lot of speculation around whether they would default on their bonds or whether they would theoretically need more liquidity, but the balance sheet itself was not only liquid but also very solvent.
So I think that was just more of a Hanaki reaction to comments from a 9.9% shareholder. Who just said that they can't put in any more equity. But even then I went back. This is the chairman of the Saudi national bank. He was asked on Bloomberg would you give credit suites more money. And he had a very reasonable answer. But it was snapshot in a very awkward way. The first sentence was under no circumstances would he do that? Okay, now if you stop there you could be panic, but the rest of it made a lot of sense which is he said look Inside Arabia if we go above 10% We have to go through regulatory approvals domestically and there are regulatory approvals abroad.
That's a big hill to climb and all of a sudden it no longer becomes a financial investment. It becomes a somewhat political investment and so we're very happy at 9.9%. That was the totality of the statement. But if you just cherry pick the first 45 seconds and ran with it which people on the internet did, this is sort of what caused that second level wave panic at a g-sub. And then the Swiss national bank stepped in and I think that that panic has largely gone.
Okay, so what is the real issue? The issue again is I think we have had a bit of supervisory failure here. Right, because we all know this in any industry. If you let capitalism go totally unchecked but shareholders will demand immediate profits today. It happens in every industry. Except in ones where you can basically gamble on future profits and that's what tech does. But every other shareholder in every other asset class demands money today and that's the same for banks. The problem is the banks are a highly regulated business. They are supposed to be supervised by the regulators. And this is a very clear example where why is there not a real-time spreadsheet? I mean, this is not complicated stuff.
Where assets and liabilities and duration mismatching can be known on a real-time basis where the San Francisco Fed Mary Daly should have a report that's escalated to her. When SBB got over their ski tips which they did in Q4 of 2022. So I think the real question that has to be examined is where were these folks for the last four months when they could have done something. Not just about this but rules in general for all banks that are not the G-Syps. And I think that's a very important question that politicians need to get to the root of.
Friedberg, we discussed this article from seeking alpha which came out on let me get the exact date here December 19th. Title of this seeking alpha story is SBB financial colon blow up risk and the summary in three bullet points. Says Bullet point one potential losses in loan portfolios could severely impair book equity number two unrealized losses in whole to maturity portfolio already equal to book equity number three funding environment for startups. We're pressured to posit base adding even more pressure to the balance sheet in other words start up spending money to cover their burn rate.
And obviously we had the Dodd Frank rules lessened or loosened under the previous administration and that specifically was driven by Silicon Valley bank that had big part in that. So looking back on this and people do want a place blame. Let's talk about the effects that occurred because this was hiding in plain sight. Literally in December in an article that looks like it was written by somebody who went into a time machine and said how do I warn people in December about this. Maybe you could talk about the feds interest rates the spending and what led up to this.
Look issue with the banks. You guys remember when we started this podcast three years ago. We were like they're gonna shut down the economy. There's gonna be crazy second and third order effects of doing that. No one knows what they're gonna be. Here they are and I think that's like the root of what is a rippling effect. You can't shut down the global economy. And stop trade and stop people and have the government step in to write a giant check and not expect that you're gonna have to cash that check at some point.
That's effectively what I think we've been kicking down the the road here. The way we initially tried to resolve the problem was to drop rates to zero. And then spend our way you know back to a growing supported economy and then overshot ended up with you know too much stimulation too lower rates for too long. Responded too quickly with flashback. At the end of the day there was a giant gaping hole blown into the global economy. When we shut down the world from covid. There's no blame. It's just what happened and when that happened there was a massive cost that had to be born at some point.
And it's gonna get born at some point and the rippling in a pond. You don't know where the ripple is gonna hit what part of the pond what leaves it's gonna hit. That's what's going on still and it's such a dynamical system. It's so hard to say with linear certainty. This is what should be done and what could have been done and what they should have done at the time. No one had that predictive capacity back then. They did what they needed to do people thought that they should have. Stimped dropped rates they said we should have written all these big stimulus checks some people said you shouldn't some people said you did certainly.
Some people are being proven right and some people are being proven wrong. But at the end of the day. The economic loss that was realized at that period of time. We're still trying to get out of it and we're still recovering from and I think that's a big part of what's being eaten up right now. And you're gonna see it in the wipeout of certain equity you're gonna see it in the wipeout of these banks of the assets that they hold and and these portfolios and the effects of that are obviously you know still being felt.
Sacks, do you agree that mistakes were made in this banking crisis? There isn't somebody to blame because it's clear that the fed said inflation is transitory and that was wrong. Then they went faster than in history to raise rates. Those seem like two glaring mistakes. Then there's the Dodd-Frank loosening under Trump and with Silicon Valley Bank pushing them, that seemed like a really big mistake.
By the way, I wasn't saying the fed's not to blame for not raising rates fast enough. That was because, as you guys remember, I was the first person to talk about sure what Stand-Ruck and Miller had said, that they're not raising rates fast enough. That we've got massive inflation. We should have been raising rates. I was the first person on this show to be, you know, barking that. So, don't forget, like I was there, okay, like pretty early. What I was pointing out was like we shut down the economy during COVID, the global economy. Yeah, I got just the main cause, that is the cannonball that got blown through the ship. Got it? And everything else is plumbing and patching and work to try and keep the ship afloat. And we're still dealing with that.
And at the same time, as you guys know, we've been loading the ship up with debt, the global ship, the global economy, with debt – 360% global debt to global GDP ratio right now. And as that ship has gotten heavier and heavier, to have a giant hole blown in the side while you're trying to do all this patchwork with all this debt weighing on it. It's a critical challenge. And the ship is feeling acutely here. They're feeling it in Europe now. And we're certainly going to see the global ramifications as we try and fix this economic catastrophe that was caused by COVID at the same time that we've been spending our way into a happier future that it turns out we have to pay the bills for at some point.
同时,正如你们所知,我们一直在给全球经济这艘船装上债务——全球债务占全球 GDP 的比率已经达到了 360%。随着船越来越重,当你试着用所有这些债务做修补工作时,突然在船边被打了一个巨大的洞,这是一个至关重要的挑战。船正在这里感到尖锐的痛苦。欧洲正在感受到它。我们肯定会看到全球的影响,因为我们试图修复这场由 COVID 引起的经济灾难,同时我们一直在花钱过日子,直到最终我们不得不为此付账。
Sacks, your response: the question of who you blame for this banking crisis has really become a political Rorschach test. And I've seen that there's six different parties that people want to blame in this situation, and there's some merit to all of them. But the degrees are very different.
Number one, let's go through them, okay? Number one, the bank management of all these different banks. Clearly, very poor risk management, didn't do a good job. They are to blame. However, and Timothy's right about these banks, they differ in the details, but the point is that they're all operating under conditions of extreme stress. Where did that come from?
Number two, the Fed's rapid rate tightening cycle. Clearly, I think that the combination of poor risk management with the spiking interest rates that basically has precipitated this larger problem.
Number three is I think the Biden administration spending, which in fairness started with COVID before Biden but Biden really intensified it, and then I think it really compounded the problem in the summer of 2021 by claiming that inflation was transitory when it wasn't. That allowed them to keep spending and keep printing money and kept QE going for the other six months. That created the bubble of 2021. Everything got super frothy and then that made the rate height cycle even more vicious because you started six months later. They could've started six months earlier, and it could've been more gradual, and I think that really was a disaster for the economy.
Okay, number four, the D-reg in 2018. I think Elizabeth Warren and Rokana have made what I would call a compelling case. That the D-reg in 2018 have contributed to this problem.
I think in hindsight Creating a two-tier system of banks where one tier are the systemically important banks we're completely guaranteed and backed up by the federal government and then a sort of lower tier a second tier of regional banks was a poison chalice for the regional banking system.
Because in the short-term event They were more lightly regulated which maybe appropriate for you know smaller banks that aren't these mega banks. However, it has also now I think created a situation where people are less confident about them And so the money flows are going from the regional banks to the systemically important banks the SIPs.
So like I said it might be a double-edged sword and I think we're gonna have to look at those regulations and figure out what's the right regulatory regime to create confidence in the regional banking system. We want to thriving regional banking system And so the question is what's the right regulations that get us there and then that is the final two.
But we can talk about later are I'm hearing wokeness getting blamed which listen I think that wokeness was a distraction. There were a lot of crazy programs happening at these banks. But listen if wokeness was the key factor the whole fortune 500 would be out of business because they all do this stuff.
They all do this stuff. So I think I think we're going back to the well a little too often on that critique and I don't want to burn that critique out Because I think that wokeness is bad But it's not the key reason why this stuff happened and then the last Group that gets it's a bit more wokeness we could also maybe frame it as ESG more broadly as the distraction because woke This is charge ESG is real Yeah, what I would say for sure is that if these banks have spend as much time on risk management as they did on ESG or on woke Then this crisis would happen.
So definitely a distraction But not not the thing that like specifically caused it and then just the final thing is VCs. And I just can't fathom at this point Given the multiple bank failures given that we see the larger problem of unrealized losses on bank balance sheets That somehow any class of depositors would be blamed for this that just makes no sense to me.
Chimath I think the VC the critique is specific to Silicon Valley bank because I think and this article was in the Wall Street journal But what it shows is a really complicated intertwined relationship between VCs and Silicon Valley bank where You know VCs were given very cheap interest rate loans They were given GP call lines of credit. They were given LP lines of credit And then those same VCs would be directing their companies to put their deposits inside of SVB.
Who would then take those deposits and buy and buy risk? And while the reality is all of this stuff will come to light because I think it will get exposed as we go through congressional hearings on all of this But I think the I think pointing the finger at VCs in this specific case is somewhat warranted because there was a little bit of people working in lockstep together.
And there was a lack of functional responsibility around how to be a true fiduciary.
在如何成为真正的信托责任人方面缺乏功能性责任。
So if you come to a board and your founder is 22 years old and you give that person 15 or 20 million dollars I think it makes a fair amount of sense that you are supposed to be The more sophisticated financial person in that room. And if you have incentives that aren't properly disclosed to that CEO And now a set of decisions are made. I think that that There should be some accountability for that or at least some exploration of why that happened.
I just want to make sure the audience understands this because it is a bit in the weeds and it's a bit inside baseball. What you're saying, Chimoff is if I can summarize it. There are people who are the adults in the room venture capitalists.
They have deposits at Silicon Valley Bank They also might have loans that are fantastic with Silicon Valley Bank.
他们在硅谷银行有存款,而且他们可能还有和硅谷银行非常出色的贷款。
I had a mortgage for this office from Silicon Valley Bank and I talked about how on the last episode how great it is They come, they open wine with you, it's white glove service that you wouldn't get it at another bank.
And then they might have loans against what's called the GP carry or the GP Share or they might have mortgages and so there's a conflict there if you're a venture capitalist and you're directing a 22 year old CEO to Silicon Valley Bank maybe You're doing that is I guess you could be interested.
No, the bigger conflict of interest and in some cases Silicon Valley Bank is a limited partner in all of these funds My point is that all of these things Okay, hold on we have to explain that so imagine a situation You go and start a fund Silicon Valley Bank comes to and says Let me be a limited partner and invest with you let me give you some amount of money I don't know where that money comes from from Silicon Valley Bank.
But they Well, let's be realistic more like 25 50 million 100 million.
但是,让我们实事求是,更可能是2500万、5000万或1亿人。
Okay, this is a lot of money. So a million kind of is whitewashing this problem. So you give them a reasonable amount of money. They're like wow, I'm I have tremendous loyalty for you. Thank you. Well, do you need anything else? Do you need personal loans? Do you need lines of credit for your business? Sure. Why not? I take those two.
And invariably on the back end now your loyalty obviously builds up again. Nothing none of this is wrong. But this is what's happening and then you tell your companies to keep your deposits there. Maybe the cash management program is not as strong as it would have been if you were more circumspect and you didn't have those incentives to direct people to one institution only in any other part of the market.
So in the public markets as an example, there is such a bar for disclosure. Okay, and I cannot stress this to you enough related party transactions all of this stuff. We have to tell everything not just for us. But even if our like sister or brother or mother may have a transaction with an entity that we're doing a deal with. And it just isn't the case in private markets and so it's not to say that anything untoward happened. But when people point the finger at VCs I think they are pointing to this whole set of issues and asking the question, shouldn't there have been more disclosure and transparency around it?
And now that this has come to pass shouldn't we explore it? And I think that's what the Wall Street Journal did they started pulling on this sweater thread. And my guess is that you're going to find a whole ball of yarn at the end of it. Sacks.
What do you think of this? I think Jamalath makes a fair point that if VCs have SVB as an investor. And then they're directing startups to use SVB. That is a conflict that should be disclosed by the way. We never did either one of those things we never had SVB as a limited partner. And we also never directed our starts to bank at SVB.
I don't know why we'd ever do that. Moreover, I always try to talk founders out of taking venture debt whether from SVB or elsewhere. So listen, we'll be clear about that. And to be clear, I never directed anybody to a specific bank. I know I always told people to get two or three banks and have redundancy.
Totally, totally. Yeah, totally. And look, founders have multiple VCs typically on their boards. So the idea that like anyone VC directs them which bank to use. This is not that's not realistically what happens at these startups. But look, I think Jamalath is right that when there is a bank failure or any kind of failure at this big.
Then all the practices are going to be under a microscope. And there's going to be some scrutiny of things. And maybe there should be. But my larger point is we're now operating in an environment in which clearly there's a larger set of stresses on the banking system. We've already had now five bank failures or near failures.
Moreover, do any of us believe that this is over? Or do we believe there are more shoots to drop? If we believe that there are more shoots to drop. We may not know exactly what they are. But I think all of us probably believe that we're not the end of this. But but but but just finish the thought.
If we believe there will be more shoots to drop, then clearly the issues cannot just be limited to Silicon Valley. They have to be a larger set of issues. I think that it's important to understand the facility that the Fed created. So what the Fed did this weekend is essentially create a buyer of last resort again.
Now how do they do this? So all of these banks basically have assets. That they bought for a dollar and are now worth 95 cents. And that's what's creating this whole issue. Or 80 cents or 85 cents you pick the number. But they're not worth the dollar that they bought.
What the Fed basically said is okay. Give me that asset, give me that bond. I will value it at a dollar and I will give you a dollar as a loan. And you will pay me interest. And the interest rate I think is what's called OIS. And they added 10 basis points on top. So I think it's about 4.9 percent
So what it allows all of these banks And if you take all of the banks that are not the top 4 in America So the top 4 are JP Morgan, B of A, City and Wells So just ignore those for one second The other end banks If you look at all of the assets that are underwater Because of all the rate hikes that SACs talked about And you add up all those losses That is about $2 trillion
所以它允许所有这些银行,如果你看看美国排名不在前四位的所有银行,即JP Morgan、B of A、City和Wells排名不在前四位的银行,那么只需忽略这些银行一秒钟,其他末端的银行,如果你看看所有因SACs所说的所有利率上涨导致的不良资产负债,然后把所有这些损失加起来,约为2万亿美元。
And the Fed didn't denounce that there was a Beginning and an end to this program Other than saying these would be one year loans And so I think the exposure for the American banking system At a minimum Is going to be this $2 trillion
Because now the incentive If you're a banker right now running one of these banks That has not gone under Is to immediately go to the Fed Put all of those assets to them Get a loan And now take that and buy different assets Different bonds, different US treasuries That are yielding much more Than what your old treasuries were yielding And I think that's the arbitrage that we've unfortunately created
And the other question now though however Is what does that mean for the top 4 banks Right because if it's 2 trillion for everybody else but the top 4 What's the gap for the top 4 That looks like it's somewhere between a trillion and 2 trillion So that's another A amount of money we're going to have to cover The Fed will have to backstop
And then As Friedberg said these checks always come do What do we do in a year Because in a year The problem is The only way to make the banks in a position To repay this much money in one year Is to cut interest rates so massively That these assets massively inflate And now a little bit sudden you're in a position to cover this
So it's a private rate Delta is because it's about they're down 15% 10% in book value these Long returns on your security Again it depends on what they bought We don't really know enough details so I don't want to guess
But if you own these 10 year treasuries You could be off 10 or 15% If you own mortgage-backed securities It could be off a little bit more If you own short-term securities They're off a little bit less But these are with the government You get a loan collateralized by these assets So you still holding them right Yes and they mature
So if the Fed Takes an emergency posture and says Okay guys we want to avert a crisis in a year from now And we're going to cut rates These assets that these banks own will be worth more Which will allow them to repay the loan
As far as I can tell All we've done is we've kicked the can down the road for a year But I do think it's important for people to realize This doesn't solve the problem It just means that mark your calendar for a year from now We have a problem on March 15th 2024 Because all the folks that took money What do we do?
Yeah and so a year to work it out Freeberg would seem Like a good idea Because The Fed is fighting inflation They seem to have gotten some portion of it under control It's not out of control right inflation And maybe if they can slowly You know either start rate cuts or pause
So let's shift the discussion to Hey what are the changes we need to make to the system And how do we think this plays out over the next year Freeberg Shemoth had one suggestion Which was all of these banks Should have a disclosure statement Mark to market every day Week, month, quarter, whatever it is Just like Circles USDC Their stablecoin Has a page with their disclosures of all their holdings So that seems to be a very productive one
We should have them mark to market the the Dodd-Frank stuff As SAC said You know Elizabeth Warren probably correct We need to reverse that So those are two very tangible suggestions What are your suggestions?
We need to have a real-time dashboard We need to have a real-time dashboard At every single Fed That allows them For every bank that they supervise To know in real-time They should choose to ignore it I'm not sure that should be true But they are their supervisors They should see it They should choose to ignore it But they should not not have it
Freeberg, what are your suggestions going forward As to how we can learn from this situation Forget about the Cannibal As you vividly express there I think very well Great analogy But just going forward How do we keep the ship From taking on water If we do have a Cannibal hit it again
Now we got a hard That's a hard equation to solve We got a hard question That's why I'm asking you We got a lot of demands for money You guys see I think there's a lot of things That are Team unrelated That are all pretty related right now
There's a massive protest underway By labor in France There's a massive protest underway In the Netherlands There are strikes on the underground in London When we talk about global debt In the US debt We often I don't think account for all the debt Which also includes Promissory obligations Made to a workforce
Global workforce That's been working for decades Individuals that have spent their whole lives Committed to some company Or to some government working With the expectation that they're going to retire And have some benefits paid to them And there's this massive Underfunding of those benefits
Quickly talk about unfunded pension liabilities But when you actually kind of account For the number of people And the amount of capital that those people are expecting That the workforce, the global workforce Is expecting to be paid to them in retirement Both public and private It's a massive amount of money that's not funded today And you start to see the cracks in the system
When that population Says Pension payments are not keeping up with interest With inflation Or when there's a threat That pension payments or retirement benefits Are going to kick in at a later age Or you're not going to get them fast enough Or you're not going to get as many as you thought you were going to get
We have that problem in the United States And the form of Social Security And these underfunded pension liabilities That is the critical macro tension in this equation That I think Drives the real problem That's going to come to a head at some point
That blue a whole in the boat. But we're also forgetting that there's like a massive amount of weight that's going to drop on the boat. And I think that it's a really hard equation to solve. We can talk about keeping banks solvent and all this sort of stuff. At the end of the day the Central Bank, it appears in the United States and probably globally, it's going to be one big bank obligations due to me. And guess what? You know, Jason here important statements historically about the importance of democracies. Ultimately, you know, the members of that democracy are going to say this is a benefit that the majority are owed. And that's going to pull things out.
I think the only stopgap, I'll just say one thing. The only stopgap in the next decade is going to be significantly higher tax rates in the United States. I don't see how you're going to fulfill the tension gap that's underway right now with respect to where productivity is going and where capital markets are going and where the demands are on the system from people requiring additional capital to come out to them without taxing assets away from the asset holders. So this would be corporations and high network people. And I think that's why you see the spite and proposal. We may not like it, but at the end of the day, it's going to be the only way to create a stopgap that's going to avoid massive inflation in the near term.
Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Let me just say the only other way, the only other, I'll just say one more thing, Jake, on the only other way, besides, you know, a massive long term tax regime to fill the whole would be some extraordinary productivity gain. And this is where we can all have a hope in a dream and investment and effort around technology, AI automation, people think that their energy job, energy, but if you can get energy down below three cents a kilowatt hour and you can scale its production by tenfold. If you can automate a lot of labor, if you can get AI to do a lot of stuff that we do today, productivity will go through the roof. The economy will grow fast enough to get out of the debt bubble and meet all of these liability obligations. So there are three ways.
Yeah, just to summarize, I think to me, to me, that's the long term, the medium term is going to be this tax stopgap, this very high tax stopgap. And then the short term is going to be all the shenanigans that we're talking about.
Okay, I'll go to you in a second, SAC. So just to recap, there is actually a third way to there are three ways productivity as you very stutately point out and we just highlighted some of the ways productivity could help whether it's energy, AI, etc. The second is of course increasing taxation on the people who are at the top of the pile would be the likely solution. The third is also austerity, cutting spending in some way. But let me also propose one thing here, as we look forward to what do people want out of a bank and how should startups or just individuals deal with bank runs and their trust in banks to Tremots point.
I was thinking about this over the weekend and then this discussion that we would have based on a lot of things you said, SACs, which was people just deposited their money and they don't have the ability to assess if a bank is solvent because the FDIC can't do it and it's their full time job. It's their mandate to make sure these banks are solvent. So how is a consumer going to be able to do that or even a startup founder or even a sophisticated investor like Ackman or any of us before you're in fact sophisticated.
So let me pause for a second here and pause at something. We don't want a bank, we want a bank vault. Consumers do not want their deposits to be used for shenanigans just like many people with rather pay for a social network than have their privacy data sold. So I think we should bifurcate banks into bank vaults and banks. Banks can do what they want with your deposits you get free checking, but what I wanted a bank what I want my startups to use what I want my venture firm to use is I want to pay the bank for services, whether it's 10 basis points 25 basis points, $500 a month, I would rather see my startups pay $1,000 a month in banking fees, $2,000 a month on banking fees for $2 million, whatever it is.
And pay for each check pay for wires pay for white glove service, whatever they choose, but not allowed the banks to take that money and loan it out or do things with it. I just want a vault and I think a vault service is what the majority of consumers want and given what we're seeing with two insane bank run bailouts in our lifetimes as adults for those of us who are in Gen X 2008 and now we would rather pay for services and I leave it to you, Sacks, is this a potential solution because I don't hear anybody saying.
Give me a bank vault and why does that service not exist in the world. Yeah look what people really want are they want a service provider who gives me the ability to make payments which if you're a small business is payroll and payables things like that they want a money market fund to basically earn interest. And they want all that to be safe I mean it's it's very simple the idea that when you go open a checking account at a bank that you are making an unsecured loan to that bank that is not something that any consumer of small business understands that whole model I think is completely obsolete not dated and what I heard so many people say and I think this is not sincere I think it's because they hate tech is that depositors should take it on the chin.
Because somehow they made a stupid decision when they open to checking account it's like are you kidding me listen what do you want the process to be. You want consumers and small businesses when they open a bank account have to review the financial statements of that bank try to figure out all their disclosures where their assets are whether they have toxic assets on the books and if they don't do a good enough job doing that if they're not smart enough to do that then you want them to be disciplined this is the word that I kept. Her being used as we to discipline the depositors the depositors are not in a position to evaluate the balance sheet of these banks that's what the feds are supposed to do that's what the regulators are supposed to do that's what news is supposed to do you're telling me that a bank that an a rating from moody's the week before and had an FDIC seal of approval that somehow they got it wrong and the feds got it wrong but the.
And I'm really is for to get I mean come on that's ridiculous in related news to mouth I would like an airbag in my cars to protect my family but I don't want to evaluate the airbag technology and unpack it and make sure that it's got the right right. Right. Yeah. Let me finish the point it's about consumer protection here and I don't care who the depositors is if the banking system is going down because the feds haven't done their job I mean pal two days before the bank failures was testifying that he didn't see stress in the banking system so either he was lying or asleep at the wheel and they're said the feds had given the seal approval to SVB and all these other banks they'd all passed the regulatory exams and so to now put it on the deposit when the fed screws up and the regulators screw up and Washington screws up by printing all this money and creating this inflation that we've had again out of all the six parties that you could blame I just think it's the least culpable.
Chimoff should there be a service that provides no interest but is just a custodian of money that is absolutely protected where is the bank vault product in the world does it exist because I can't seem to find it some people seem to say I think freeberg you alluded to this maybe in the group chat that if you have a brokerage account that's kind of similar to what I'm saying but it doesn't have it I don't want any interest I don't need any interest for putting this money in the bank for a startup they're not in the business of making one to five percent an optimizer. I have founders who are now sending me five page memos if they can't if we're bank if yeah if the bank can't use your money they're going to charge you so remember I want to be charged that's the service I want but I think this is an important point a bank is a service provider they spend a lot of money building technology having people that work there providing service and infrastructure so for the services that they're offering if you're not going to let them use your money to make investments with your money and they can participate on that game they have to charge you they can't do it.
They charge you they charge you and I think that's really worth it. Freeberg is an honest service provider under the current laws you understand how it works now is that what we're being told is that when you went to the bank thinking you were just getting a service provider and frankly largely a commodity service provider you're getting a phone manager you're getting an instant manager. Yes and you're being told that you actually made a risky investment decision think about that when you open a checking account you weren't just trying to you know again use a vendor you were actually making a risky investment decision that's what they're doing. And you deserve to lose your money if you chose poorly even though nobody else could figure it out and on the extra to figure out.
You should talk about the challenges of your system to someone who lives in Argentina. It's far worse in other parts of the world, and we've come a long way in the last hundred years. We talked about 500 or 600 bank failures on average per year in the 1920s. So, I'm not saying that hey, that's not the case, but there's always been to some degree risk when people are giving their capital over to someone else, and we've certainly made huge strides in progress.
But, I think J. Cal, to your point, you know there is a point of privilege now that people are saying I want to have a position where I know that my money's not going to get used not going to get moved going to be completely safe in a democracy. And what would you pay for that? What's the price, Freeberg? What would you pay for that? Because right now we're basically giving every crypto entrepreneur and seller the high ground because they could make this product. I would pay 10 basis points, literally $10,000 a year per million, is that right? Yeah.
Remember when you thought Jeff Bezos was going to be president? I still think it's a distinct possibility. Anyway, what would you pay for this product? Just a Chamath or like Bloomberg or Bezos. I don't want to speculate on new products. It's kind of a dumb tangent.
I think the thing that you're bringing up, though, is a dumb tangent, okay. Why doesn't a product like this exist? And I think that it was very well explained. It's that every for-profit business is in the business of making money, and there are physical costs that you have to bear. In the case of a bank, there is physical infrastructure, literally bricks and mortar that go into making the branches, there are lots of people, there is lots of software, there's lots of complex back-office and middle-office things that banks have to do in order to accept money. That has a cost, so I don't see how it will be very easy for somebody to create a bank that just stores your money for you without you being charged quite a lot of money, unfortunately. I think that there has to be a different way to solve this problem, and I think that what we did after the Great Financial Crisis was the regulators wrote down all kinds of new rules.
But the crazy thing in 2008 where those rules were written on paper, and now we're in 2023 and these rules can be written in software, and so I think what it requires is some amount of tactical real-time intelligence that regulators need to have over those that they regulate. And I don't know why we're so afraid of demanding that the next time some of these complicated real-time laws are written in law that they also need to get written in code. And I think that that's a practical solution. It should be the case that every bank that is supervised by the Fed has a dashboard that has all of the key levers that allows what you said, Jason, to happen, which is a real-time market.
Should those or should those not be disclosed to shareholders? That's a different discussion. But the regulators should have 100 percent transparency into how these organizations run because, as SAC said, they are an enormously critical institution that, at best case, after this fiasco, what we've realized is very poorly understood by consumers and that, at worst case, is being mis-marketed to us.
Yeah, I think that shouldn't be allowed. We're also missing the other side of the balance sheet. We haven't talked about it at all, but banks play a really critical and important role as lenders. Banks act as the channel for lending capital to small businesses for lending capital to individuals to buy homes. It's the primary place where capital is provided to help fuel economic growth and prosperity, particularly in the United States where we have such a liquid fluid and available mortgage market to support home buying in America.
And the absence of you know Jason what you're talking about having the ability to use deposits to make loans and have what banks have fundamentally been in this country for over a hundred years, which is taking short-term deposits to make long-term loans and making sure that there's some degree of balance and availability of liquidity to support transactions. And ultimately, mortgage securities came out of the need to generate more liquidity by banks to support depositors, and obviously, there were always inflationary things that happen in the market and bubbles that happened, but it's an important role that banks play.
The lending aspect of banks, if it gets stifled too much because we swing too far the other way, it can actually have a really adverse effect on economic growth and prosperity and the ability for people to afford homes in this country. So that's the other side of the coin and where things can go back.
So, this is where I find like the current banking model to be sort of like weird and maybe obsolete and definitely not what consumers expect.
所以,这是我发现目前的银行模式有点奇怪、可能已经过时,而且绝对不是消费者所期望的。
So, for example, if you go to a bank and you put your money into a deposit account and then they loan it out to make mortgages. Do you realize that you're an investor in those mortgages as the as the depositor I don't think you do.
I mean what they what they do is they take those mortgages socks they package them up they sell them and they get an origination fee and they get the money back.
我的意思是,他们所做的是拿这些房贷,打包出售然后获得一个起初费用再拿回钱。
So they're not that's not always they should be like should be a way well as far go do not exactly so be a way well as far go for example they do a lot of that but if you look at first for public they have a 90 billion dollar loan portfolio on their balance sheet that they've not packaged up and sold.
So the packaging and selling of mortgages generated the liquidity that the banks needed but there's a cost to that so a lot of banks will try and balance out their loan portfolio where they'll package some of it up and sell it but when they do that they take a loss they were they pay.
Maybe they should be required to do that because because because I mean look to the point about mark to market assets it's very hard to mark an asset to market unless it's liquid and publicly traded.
Let me give you an economic point I think that there's about seven trillion dollars in deposits in banks so what you guys are saying happened you're basically sucking seven trillion dollars out of the system that's being used to fuel purchasing in the form of loans and you're taking that said or call it a 10% discount to that so about call it six trillion dollars and you're saying we got to go find a market.
For six trillion dollars of loans and then we're going to have six trillion dollars of cash sitting in a bank account doing nothing and that that challenges the way that cash were going to money market funds so in other words like you'd package up all those mortgage bonds you create a mortgage bond security and then if consumers if depositors want that product they'll just buy it.
But what is a money market it ends up being the same thing where money is you earn interest on cash that's being used to make investments elsewhere so you want to earn interest on your cash it has to be loaned out somewhere to someone.
I understand but what I'm saying is look I'm just brainstorming here I don't you know I don't have the answer but spitballing yes exactly I'm not saying this is what should be done I'm just kind of asking whether it might make more sense what if on the depositor side all of the things you put your money in our money market funds and then when the bank goes out and does its lending business it does ultimately at some point after packets those up and they get turned into securities you know sacks but money market funds you know where that cash goes when you when you invest in a money market fund you're giving money to someone who's using it to make a loan like it is also I understand but then the depositor would never be a risk mark to market is sex is pulling the deposit would never be a risk of being fairly.
I just want to give your shifting the risk equation to the fund manager the money market instead of the manager of the bank and and at the end of the day that money is just the owners of those just the owner of that security that money market fund that that would take the hit okay just as we wrap your case I want to talk on some other issues as well.
There's two things that are super tangible that founders can do right now or people who want to mitigate against these kind of issues the there's something called ICS insured cash sweeps these are accounts that automatically you know we'll put your money into multiple FDI insured institutions 250 K at a time we talked about this previously there's a bunch of folks doing that in Fintech I won't give any of them free plugs here but you can just go look and search for ICS there is also maybe some thought here that the FDIC 250 K limit maybe that's outdated certainly for businesses it is so maybe that should double or triple and obviously that cost would be spread out and then finally you can go to treasury direct a government that government that and I literally have start-ups doing this we have major treasuries they're going there and buying short duration stuff themselves holding it themselves so they don't have to worry this is part this is provided by the government is my understanding and people are buying direct from the government.
I personally am not a fan of start-ups buying T bills because of the duration mismatch problem. They always underestimate when they're going to need their cash, and so I don't like tying up this is if you had a giant treasury. Yeah, but this is for giant treasury always get it wrong. I see this all the time whenever they try to let me just say when start trying to create ladder bond portfolios, they end up needing the money sooner than they thought.
What I much rather see start-up do is buy a hundred percent US T bill backed money market fund run by the absolute biggest of the big financial institutions because you can get in and out of it at any time you want and without paying a fee. And that's so much better than trying to manage your own bond portfolio. Let a professional fund manager do it.
Well, there are people who do provide these kinds of bond ladders. I'm just telling you what the best practice advice going around is. Symbol through like brokerage account sure or multiple ones, right? But now this is I think speaks to Chimoff the fact that we have start-up founders and people having to measure, manage a treasury this granularly. Is this a failure, or is this what should be happening? Should we have to have treasuries in the 10 million or 20 million be this granularly manage or should this just be FDFD I see rates, you know should be just a 10x?
In the absence of regular regulatory changes that protect this money, you need to have a financially sophisticated actor on the board. And again, I go back to that should be your venture capitalist. And that person should not have conflicts of interest with the banks that they direct you to.
I mean, I don't think that that's a very controversial statement. I yeah it's just not happening and I am just flabbergasted that people are not even doing the basic blocking attack on here of having three or four accounts.
I've always had three or four banking relationships always had it split up. Should we move on to some of the other pressing issues?
我一直都有三四个不同的银行账户,这样更安全。我们要不要转移到其他紧迫的问题上呢?
There was a really interesting founders fund story about them breaking their latest fund in half and then there is stripe closing their funding. Which one would you gentlemen like to go to or a different story on the docket?
I think there are four things that are very interrelated okay in startup plan.
我觉得启动计划中有四件非常相关的事情。
Founders fund took their just to make the math simple because I'm going to get the numbers not exactly right but like a two billion dollar fund that they're going to break into two one billion dollar funds.
I think that's one story. It's a one point eight billion dollar fund they're going to break it into two nine hundred million dollar funds. It's their eighth fund, it's being cut in half and it will become eight and nine.
I think what that speaks to is valuations and the marks that we think we have for existing companies and the future value that smart investors like this see.
我认为这表明的是我们对现有公司的估值和我们认为的未来价值以及像这样聪明的投资者看到的价值标记。
All roads lead to it's is we're in for a slog and so trying to put a two billion dollar fund to work doesn't seem to make a lot of economic sense to some of the smartest people in the room so that's that's that.
The second one there, it's according to Axios, Peter Tio led this charge and he is the Contrarians Contrarian. He was the one according to Axios that led that cut of the fund size with some at a founders fund according to the reports.
I'll say him I'll say the more important thing which in Peter and I on the same where the largest I'll peace in our funds and so you know as the largest I'll peace in our funds I think this is a no brainer decision.
Number two, strike basically takes a 50% haircut which is this single best run most highly valued company in Silicon Valley again that's going to eviscerate the company a lot of TVPI and a lot of people's portfolio is a lot of theoretical money that LPs were going to get.
I think the third thing is there's a person that went and filed a FOIA request that UC Berkeley to get Sequoias returns and it turns out that the best investor in the game quote unquote since 2018 has not really done that well.
And I think the University of California invested over $800 million in Sequoias since 2018 and I think is a return what some 40 million bucks on that number.
And then the fourth which just came out today is that Tiger wrote down the value of their private book by 33% for 2022 and so you know I think Tigers and you have basically has gone from 100 billion to 50 billion in a year.
There's one more note to add to that YC basically let go of their growth team this week. YCominator for people didn't know what was called the continuity fund they were doing late stage investing and that got cut which is a signal and the 17 employees are gone now and Gary 10 I think is making the right decision.
You know they have to focus on what they're great at which is the earliest stage of the company and they had called this one look now.
你知道,他们必须集中精力做他们擅长的事情,也就是公司早期阶段,他们把这个叫做"现在看看"。
This is the most interesting thing for me in the following way. I think the YCominator Unicorn hit rate is 6% right so every hundred companies that come out of YC which costs only about 10 million dollars to seed right six of them become worth a billion dollars or more and obviously some become worth much much more.
And so if you see how difficult it is even for a growth fund that's attached to that funnel to be successful and make money because obviously this thing was tonning cash you would not have cut it.
I don't think anybody would do that so I think it was a very challenging strategy at a challenging moment in time and so I applaud these guys were having the discipline to do it but if you take them all in totality it is a complicated place in venture capital and start a plan holy macro like it's a reset.
It's tough to make money, be a lot of folks may not know exactly what they're doing, see a bunch of evaluations are totally wrong and D we're going to have to start doing the cleanup work now resetting all of it which just takes years as you guys remember into the city took us took us five years to fix this.
It's a hard reset sacks what do you when you look at these in totality what would you say?
当你全面审视这些内容时,这就是一个彻底的重启,你会怎么说呢?
I agree with what trim off the said. I mean it is going to be a hard reset, a lot of restructuring, a lot of cap tables, there's a lot of mess to clean up.
All of that being said, I think I'd rather be an investor today than an investor two years ago or one year ago because at least the valuations have corrected to some degree and then also we have this really interesting AI wave happening now and there's a lot of opportunities to invest in that new you know cycle.
So at least there's like an interesting product cycle. It's getting me excited to go to work and see these new demos from all these different companies whereas you know you go back a year or two and just the product innovation since seem as world changing as it does now so.
I think that as bad as things are my guess is that the new ventages of VC are going to be better than you know call it 2021 for sure. That's not going to be a high bar. It's not a high bar but still. Wow that's the same thing but actually to moth this is a contradiction. Trash this is the contradiction is that it felt better to be a VC in 2021 but in hindsight we know that the vintage is going to be not good.
We're asked how many told on but today it feels not great to be a VC but I think the vintage will be a lot better. But anybody would tell you that at some point you're going to have to divorce yourself from emotion to be a reasonably good investor over long periods of time. How many data points do we need to realize that too many people were put into this game that may not have known what they were doing and we're going to have to go and work through all of those excesses. And I think it's just going to take a lot of time.
US limited partners are in a really difficult spot. European investors I think are probably in a pretty difficult spot. There are a couple of right right points around the world the folks that are still optimistic and doing well. I think Middle East is one. Southeast Asia is another. But other than those it's just a whole group of folks that just have to get completely re-underwritten from first principles.
Even when you have an incredible platform like Sequoia, five years of no returns on 800 billion dollars for somebody like UC Berkeley, what it really means without commenting on Sequoia's performance is that UC Berkeley is effectively out of business in being a limited partner for the foreseeable future. Well, and I think that that has that has implications.
So even if you think these ventages are great, I don't think they're open for business. And frankly, even if they wanted to be open for business, how do you go to an IC when they look at all of the totality of those dollars that have not made anything, how do you justify the next 800 billion? I just think it's very hard.
I agree that LPs are out of it. I think the story was garbage because all funds go through a J curve and they're literally talking about the majority of the funds in that vintage 2008-2019-2021. They're all, literally, the definition of the J curve, the third, fourth, fifth year. One of the most important things you need to be able to do is measure how long does it take the Delta T to 90% of calling committed capital? And how long does it take the Delta T to return one XDPI?
I can tell you Jason, if you're a reasonably good fund, those numbers should be between five and seven years for both. Which none of those funds I've had the average for a normal venture fund is around five to seven years to call 90% of the capital and around five to seven years to return one XDPI. I'm just telling you that's what the average is. And if you talk to firms.
So all I'm saying is there was a period of time where in the absence of getting money back again, this is not a Sequoia thing. It just means that there was an entire coal-hort and years of capital allocation that is not necessarily in a J curve, it's impaired. Because if after five years, you've returned nothing, sometimes you just have to see the writing on the wall.
Explain the J curve one more time for folks and then what is your analysis of that Sequoia story? Well, the J curve, the theory behind it is that when you start deploying a new fund, you're drawing fees down to pay for the firm and the investments you've made have not been marked up yet. So the value of the fund is actually going down because some of it's going to eaten up in fees and you haven't really had a chance for any of those investments to be successful.
And then what happens? And shut down tap it early. I don't even know about that. I just think they have a chance to get marked up. But then what happens is you start getting markups and now at least on paper, the value of the fund goes up and then hopefully those markups eventually turn into distributions or DPI like Jamath is talking about.
Yeah, we have a vintage 2017-2018 fund that's actually fully returned at this point. You exited some secondaries for acquisitions? No, we just had some exits. But look, I think that is a little bit on the early slash lucky side. But we haven't really seen much of the J because you know, you should be getting markups within two years, I think on your investments if the companies are looking good. At least historically, that was the case.
Freeberg, any thoughts on this collection of stories with venture basically having the great venture recent? The end of the super cycle, the beginning of the next. It's happening. Okay, we're in the thick of it.
By the way, I would just go back to the point that with all the problems Jamath is talking about, the reset and the wipeout that needs to occur. I think this is still, I think that's part of what makes this a better time to be an investor. This is what I'll say about that, SACS.
I think I agree with you. I disconnect asset values and asset prices from fundamental business value being created. So the market bid stuff up prices went up. That doesn't really mean that businesses aren't fundamentally good, that there aren't amazing technology businesses being built today that are going to affect billions of lives tomorrow.
If you are tracking a public company's stock and you like the business, you spend time with management, you see what they're building, you see their revenues growing, their profits are growing, they're making great products, people are happy with what they're doing. But the stock is really expensive, you don't want to buy the stock. Suddenly the stock drops by 80%. Nothing about the business has changed. It's just that the market is paying less to own shares in that company.
That's a great time to buy that stock. I think that's the moment we're in in Silicon Valley. Everyone's like, oh my God, it's over. There's things are terrible. Just because the asset prices of the shares in companies has gone down does not mean that the quality of the businesses has changed or that there isn't fundamental value being created in Silicon Valley.
In fact, the contrary point to SACS comment is that it is a great time to be buying these shares. It is a great time to be investing. It is a great time because as we've talked about countless times, there are extraordinary technologies from AI to biotech becoming software to fusion, to novel applications with AI and SACS. On and on and on.
Many of the amazing things we've talked about that I think can and will affect many industries and billions of lives are being built today and they're not going to stop being built. You can now buy the stock at 80 percent off. If you're investing today and if you're a builder today, as long as the capital keeps flowing to support the building work, which I think to some degree it will because there's still enough of it sitting there.
You're not going to have a lot of these crazy growthy rounds with high prices and all the nonsense that went on the last couple of years. But there's certainly a lot of opportunity to create real business value and right now an opportunity to buy shares pretty cheap and participate meaningfully in that value creation.
I'll tell you the thing I'm seeing on the field and like playing the game on the field is something we've been talking about for the last year. We started a program called Founder.University and it's basically like a 12 week course on how to build your MVP. We had 350 people join the last one.
What's the discount code people can use to this? No discount code. It's free for founders basically. If it's free for founders if they come to the 12 weeks. But anyway, what I did was. I said. No, it's Founder.University because it's an extension. But in the words of of SACS. Let me finish. Please let me finish.
What we did was we just said anybody who gets to an MVP and it's two or three builder co-founders will give them a 25 K check. And I did 20 or 30 of these 25 K checks in the last couple of months of just the founders right now who have been laid off by other companies.
Their dog-id, pragmatic, absolutely customer-centric product-centric founders whereas the last five years have been filled with theatrics and white papers and ICOs and just nonsense and absurd valuations and people want an credit for work not done. And now people are actually building MVPs and their dog-id product-driven founders customer-centric mission-driven founders and it feels to me like 2010 all over again.
Which means if you are a product-led CEO and you're a mission-driven CEO who actually builds something, you stand out so much in this ecosystem and have people begging for money sending me long emails and decks and totally trustable market. I'm just like, can you just build a product and show me that you can actually deliver a product and then we'll start the process of the rewards-based system here.
The reward-based system in Silicon Valley is so magical when it works. You get money from founder university or tech stars or Y-combinator, then go to a seed fund, then go to a series A fund. That milestone-based funding was so broken and now it's back and it's so functional when it's working. It's just a magic of Silicon Valley is when people work and get rewards, work and get rewards. And it just creates this great pace and dynamic that I'm glad to see.
在硅谷,如果奖励制度运作良好,它会像魔法一样神奇。你可以从创业者大学、科技巨头或 Y Combinator 获得资金,然后到种子基金,再到 A 轮基金。这种基于里程碑的融资方式曾经很糟糕,但现在它回来了,当它运作良好时它非常有效。在硅谷,当人们工作并获得回报时,它就像魔法一样,会创造出这种伟大的节奏和动态,我很高兴能看到它。
Just as we wrap here, everybody's been begging for a science corner. Enough about the chaos in the world. Everybody wants the Sultan of science to tell us and educate us about something and Saks needs to use the Lou anyway. So let's do a science corner here.
Room, temperature, superconductor. You sent me a link. I read the abstract of this paper and I don't know which language I need to put this into Google translate, but I couldn't understand any of it. So please, I literally read the abstract that I was like, I couldn't get through the first two sentences without having to start doing searches.
I'll start with just like the simple explainer on superconductors. You know, materials that conduct electricity are called conductors. So conductors, electrons move through them like a copper wire. That's how electricity flows. And all conductors have some amount of resistance, meaning not all the electrons kind of flow through at a perfect rate. They bump into the atoms in the material in the wire and they generate heat. You know, you've ever felt a wire while electricity flowing through it gets hot, right? So that's because the conductor has some resistance, which means the electrons bump into the walls of the atoms in the material. They generate heat and you lose electricity, you lose energy, you lose power.
And so in 1911, it was discovered when mercury was reduced to a very, very cold temperature that there was a point at which the material conducted electricity with absolutely no resistance. So the electrons flowed through the material completely unbounding, un, you know, not bouncing into the material, not generating any heat. And having no resistance mean you're losing no power in transmission of that electricity.
But a number of other super interesting effects occur. Number one is that magnetic fields now reflect off of that metal perfectly. So if you put a magnet, you ever see that image of it and Nick, we could probably pull one up in the YouTube video. We put a magnet on top of a superconductor. It actually floats because the magnetic field like the north and the north pushes against each other and it floats up.
So superconducting materials kind of became this fascination in the early 20th century that oh my god, if we can actually make materials that superconduct, there are all these amazing benefits. One of the benefits is you could have no loss in electricity being transmitted. Today 15% of power is lost in the transmission from the power station to your home.
You could also do interesting things like create maglev or frictionless trains that float, you know, like magnets floating off the ground on top of a superconducting track. And by having no friction, you could push the track the train once and you wouldn't need to use any energy to move it along. So you could have basically powerless transportation. You could have really powerful new microprocessors. So a superconductor microprocessor instead of a traditional semiconductor microprocessor would use just 1% of the energy of a semiconductor microprocessor. Think about that. All the AI stuff we're talking about, all the chips that we're talking about dropping the energy needs by 99% if those chips were made from a superconducting material.
And one of the more interesting applications of superconducting materials could be infinite battery storage. So you could take a superconductor, turn it into a coil and the electricity would just flow through it infinitely because it would never turn into heat. And then when you're ready for that power, you just plug in and you get the power out. The actual loss of energy in a superconductor battery, less than 5%. And that's compared with significantly more energy loss used in chemical systems. And you wouldn't need to kind of get all the materials that we're struggling to get now to generate batteries. So the idea of generating like superconductors and industrial scale has always been super interesting.
Today, the way that we generate superconducting materials is we have to make a material super super cold. In 1987, a physicist named Chu developed one of the first ceramic superconductors where they discovered a new way of generating superconductivity. It wasn't just taking a metal and cooling it down very, very cold because when you get it very, very cold, the atoms stop moving and the electrons inside pair up and it's called Cooper pairing and they flow through.
And he said we could actually do this with a hotter temperature. And he demonstrated this in a ceramic, E3 and Barym copper oxide, super confusing name. But basically he took a bunch of materials and baked them in an oven and they turned into this really interesting material that became superconducting. And then the race was on because what he did is he made a superconductor that could superconduct at the temperature of liquid nitrogen and liquid nitrogen is really cheap.
So we can just use and that's actually how all MRI machines run today is you have superconductors that reflect the magnetic fields in the super in the MRI machine and they're using liquid nitrogen to stay cool. And so there's a lot of industrial applications today that use superconducting materials using liquid nitrogen. But in order for us to do all the stuff I mentioned like maglev trains and infinite battery storage and superconducting microprocessors, we have to get superconductors.
We have to discover a material that can superconduct at room temperature so that we can sit with it in a computer on our desktop or we can have it run on a railroad track or you know we can put it in our backyard to store energy. And there's been this race and there's all these different classes of materials that physicists and material scientists have spent decades trying to figure out what can superconduct at room temperature we started with metals, you know copper and we tried carbon nanotubes and full rain tubes.
We had all these different ceramics like like was like I talked about and there have been literally tens of thousands of ceramics that people bake in ovens and try and see how superconducting they are. Basically, take the material and you cool the temperature and you measure the resistance. And as soon as it hits superconductivity boom there's this magic moment where it drops to zero and it becomes superconducting and there's this big change over effect so everyone's trying to find that temperature which can happen at room temperature.
And people have found superconductivity on the surface of DNA and organic molecules but you can't scale that. People have found you know superconductivity on all these weird kind of material on the surface of things but no one's ever been able to industrialize it. In 2015 there was a new kind of material called a hydride which is basically taking a thin metal and putting it in hydrogen gas and kind of baking it for a couple of days and the hydrogen sticks to the metal and then you would use this hydride as a new kind of conductor and hydrides that turned out had really good superconducting potential.
They would superconduct at room temperature but they needed super high pressure so you'd actually have to leave them in like something that's like hundreds of times the pressure of the atmosphere and so that that's not really technically an industrially feasible either. So this guy named wrong ideas published a paper a couple of weeks ago that got a ton of press and a ton of controversy and basically he said look I've got this new hydride and it's I've got this really you know weird metal that no one ever talks about.
And I baked it with this with hydrogen gas and this hydride can actually superconduct at you know room temperature and at only one gigapast gal which is still greater pressure than room temperature but it basically starts to show on the chart of are we getting there can we actually get there that maybe we are. And so this paper was published in nature a couple of weeks ago and it got a ton of a ton of coverage because everyone's like oh my gosh the problem is this particular individual.
You know the lead research or on the paper he's pretty controversial because he made a room temperature superconducting claim back in 2020 in a paper he published in nature and after he made that that claim a lot of scientists tried to replicate what he did and they were not. And then the journal retracted his paper and he had a method that he took data noise out of the measurement system he was using and the way that he took the data noise out people said actually skewed the results and made it look like it was superconducting when maybe it wasn't.
And he actually had a talk that he did it that was published on YouTube a year later where he said he raised 20 million dollars from Sam Altman and Daniel and a bunch of other investors and it turns out that also wasn't true and then he came back and said well I didn't actually raise the money. I was talking to them about raising the money so this guy's kind of a sketchy character in the space but the temperature at which he was able to generate or claims to have generated and he did get peer review and did get published.
A superconductor is at room temperature it's a slightly high pressure but if it's real and it does get repeated it's one of the next steps that we're almost going to be getting to this point of true room temperature superconducting materials and then this whole industry will be. Transmission lines battery storage maglev trains superconducting microprocessors.
You know many new industries can and will emerge from this material discovery if it's proven to be real so you know it's a super interesting storyline a lot of people in the material science world and scientists. Chemists physicists are kind of going crazy about this and there was a survey done by quantum magazine and half the scientists were like this is bullshit and the other half was like this is going to change the world so we don't really know yet where this is all going to settle out but I thought it was worth kind of talking about and bringing it up because if room temperature superconductivity is really realized in the next decade it's another one of these kind of black swan technology discoveries that we none of us are thinking about right now but it totally transforms all these markets and very quickly.
And very quickly kind of increases like we were talking about earlier productivity makes renewable energy super super cheap makes computing power 99% less power intensive AI chips will explode using this technology so a lot of super interesting applications if room temperature superconductivity comes to light super interesting story I thought we should share it and talk about yeah, I would love to get your insights on it and then sacks I would like to understand how many emails and what you order from Uber Eats during that segment catch my.
Thank God this when Nathan who runs a battery group at Carnegie Mellon introduced me to ranga two years ago me and my partner J we were like holy shit this is outrageous. And we tried to spin it out into a natural company but the University of Rochester blocked it. And so we've been following this guy for two years and all the trials and tribulations but. It's a really really exciting thing if it does come to you got capital blocked explain why you get capital blocked in a situation like that why wouldn't they allow you to spin it up it is interesting because like typically universities have a tech transfer office and you can do these deals pretty cleanly so you know when you go to stand for the tech transfer offices quite sophisticated at MIT it's quite sophisticated there these pretty standardized deals and.
And roll the percentage what is the standard deal explain to the audience how a tech transfer deal would work and how does the university make money from it if you're a profit you invent something or even if you're a student it's technically owned by the school. And so if you want to commercialize it you go to them and use basically say here's a capital partner of mine and we want to go and start a company around it and what they will normally say is okay great give us a piece of equity and give us some royalty in some cases depending on what it is especially.
The equity tends to be in the mid single digit percentages the royalties tend to be in the mid single digit percentages it depends on how okay yeah call it five five six seven percent but it can be a lot when you think about a you know a school like Stanford who's spinning out hundreds of these things a year. But if you're if you're a school that doesn't historically do a lot of tech transfer or has a lot of cutting edge R&D you wouldn't have that team and so Rochester didn't necessarily have it now look rung is probably getting bombarded by 30 other people who pay 10 times more than what I was trying to pay 18 months ago it's a really interesting thing and I think there'll be some there'll be some what's there is anybody know what the top tech transfers of all time were like was Google a tech transfer of freeberg do you know like yeah because they drank was out of the what it's there for the no yeah Larry and Larry and Sergey gave Stanford I think one percent yeah they give them a percent yeah yeah because back rub because back rub was written while Larry was a PhD there so technically they you know they had some part of it.
Carnegie Mellon ranked as top tech transfer university I'm just seeing here in terms of the rankings university Florida Columbia Stanford Harvard is so much some of them are terrible like and some of them are cronyism so like you go to some of the universities and the tech transfer offices have deep relationships with certain vcs and investors at the only work on and they always get first picks and first days and they're super tight with them they don't run a real market process and then some tech transfer offices just give away the farm for nothing and then some tech transfer offices think that they own it and they should get paid 60% royalties for the thing it's all over the map and some of them are sophisticated and some of them are not so it's it's actually quite surprising.
And then we're going to talk about the importance of fundamental research and the importance of you know the support from academic institutions and governments and other aspects when you're still not sure what the technology is that to do that I think is a good collective social benefit and then to industrialize it commercialize it requires I think a market based approach which is you take that capability try and build a business find customers make money and that's really how you get it to be funded to be scaled because you're never going to you shouldn't have to put you know government and academic money behind that sort of effort but private market participants should and so you know it's interesting I mean I think I'm not holding my breath I've been you know I did a science project in 1993 when I was probably 12 or 13 years old on super conductors and I got a E3 and Barium Copper Oxide disc and I got some liquid nitrogen from UCLA and I poured it on the disc and I floated a magnet above it and I had a poster board and a computer presentation back then and I was super enthralled about the future of superconductors and exactly what I said today is what I said back in 1993 so you know 30 years ago it was so busy dating I didn't think you had time for super conductor experiments yeah look I don't think I don't think that this stuff has really it's been it's been like fusion it's always been a promise around the corner physicists have always had hope we've taken incremental steps towards it but it's always felt like one of those things we were always getting 50% closer to the wall it's like you're never actually reaching the wall and so and it's a dream one yeah.
By the way I will say one area that that that a lot of people think holds a lot of promise for super conducting research is in quantum computing because you can actually model on a molecular level what might be going on right now the BCS theory is the theory on Cooper pairing that happens in ceramics is the only way that we really understand how superconducting actually works why it works why there's no resistance at certain temperatures for certain types of materials for most materials we have no friggin clue why it happens we don't understand the physics of it there's something going on on a quantum mechanical level that we just don't get and so if we can understand it better through quantum modeling using quantum computers all of a sudden we may be able to actually start to come up with ideas for molecules and crystal structure that would allow us to make superconducting material that we simply don't have enough time in our lifetime to run all the experiments in a lab today we can simulate it and so that's why quantum computing could play a real role in advancing our ability to discovery and superconducting materials and like I talked about these are like not just one but like two or three order of magnitude improvements in the efficiency of certain systems of industry on earth today so it shows how the compounding benefits of technology and things you cannot see around the corner can suddenly cause these explosive growth moments in technology and in industry.
I don't know what when quantum computing gets here when it gets here it might discover superconducting and then when that gets discovered boom energy cost drop by 99% computing goes up by 100 fold so there's these amazing things that are still like in front of us that each one of which could be you know really great exponential triggering events and we're seeing a little milestone today but yeah I don't know.
Sax reaction sounds good. How many moves did you play in your 12 chess games with you guys I got stuff to do. Freeberg was talking about superconducting points did you go up? I look I got shit. Well let's go. Oh, Sax. All right listen this has been a great episode.
Sax checks for the best comment on the Atlantic article that says Ronda Santas has peaked already. Don't forget that. Don't do it don't do it. Why you got a troll. I didn't see that but it's in the Atlantic.
Oh you want to know why the Atlantic suddenly has turned on him is because of the biggest backers of the war they those guys have all these like new cons over there and so he gave a statement saying that you know our support for Ukraine shouldn't be a blank check and some other comments expressing let's say skepticism of what we're doing over there and that was totally inaccessible to them so all these new cons are registering disappointment. But I would argue that's a electoral asset not a liability.
I have a prediction given what's going on with these banks and what's going on in this kind of I think we all agree the soft landing concept is over we're going to be in a recession. The war is going to end there because we're not funding this an American the American public is not going to want to see tens of billions of dollars going to Ukraine and to fund this war in year two or three hundred's a billion. I'm just saying every month yeah I know this spending run rate of this war is actually greater than what we did in Afghanistan and Afghanistan ended up being a 20 year multi trillion dollar operation that just flushed all that money down the drain.
So yeah I mean we're in a greater run rate than Afghanistan. Yeah. Do we know what the monthly run rate is for this? Oh my god. How is it possible? We've appropriated over 130 billion Jamath and Afghanistan we spent two trillion over 20 years. So there's a hundred billion a year run rate. Yeah this is. Think about what a monumental waste of money that was and now look at the financial crisis we're in. Can you imagine if we could have two trillion back? I mean all these trillions that we just squandered instantly we would take that. Just all those trillions and trillions we squandered on stuff that didn't matter and now we're paying the price for it.
That could be education could be universal health care could be paying down the debt. How about paying down the debt's vulnerable inflation? Exactly. Let's think logically here the number one issue for this country in the next election. I am with Friedberg his great prediction from the year end show is we need a president and we need an administration that is fiscally responsible and controls the balance sheet in a logical fashion like the last two administrations have not seem capable of doing.
I am with Friedberg single issue voter balanced the budget get spending under control austerity measures. And then we have a tax tag. All right for the Sultan of science. Sorry what's that can you repeat that?
What I wanted to say from office are there any plugs for the remaining part of the episode Mr. Beast is curing blindness and buying people shoes has he been canceled yet. Tax aren't you excited about superconductors and the benefit for AI and energy storage and energy costs and humanity. Yeah what does it do to burn rate of assassins? Yeah but I'm not I'm not like an expert at assessing like hard science or hard tech. I mean I'm a software investor.
I'm just a simple man. I'm just a software investor.
我只是一个简单的人。我只是个软件投资者。
All right everybody for the rainman himself David sacks the dictator trim off polyhapatia and the Sultan of science. The principal panic attacks no more. Mr. David Friedberg I'm the world's greatest monitor undisputed.
Congratulations everybody on another successful episode and Friedberg when are we locking in the date for all in summit 2023. My replies my DMs are filled people want to know.
Do you have the day locked it down and we had a parking issue where they don't want us parking there so soon as we get the two. We don't need to park there everybody that's we told so now they've gone back to their committee to get approval for us doing it without parking and just doing so.
Or walk a shuttle or sort of people. Uber Uber Uber Uber Uber let's get that we should be hopefully if they accept it then we are okay. How many shuttles do we have to take to your rings?
Yeah exactly how am I the prince of panic attacks I think you're the king of caps locks at this point. They were called me J caps J caps was the best what I heard talking about panic attacks J. K.L. this weekend man panicking panicking.
I was a sheer terror shirt I have literally gotten rid of the caps lock everybody relax you can follow me twitter.com slash Jason will see you all next time bye bye.
We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. W었는데細in It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release that out What your B, what your B, B What's good for you?