E121: Macro update, Fed hike, CRE debt bubble, Balaji's Bitcoin bet, TikTok's endgame & more

1. 0:00 – 2:58

   Bestie intro!

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:00

      What are you eating, Friedberg? Is that buffalo jerky? What is that?

   2. JCJason Calacanis0:02

      It's a red pepper.

   3. DSDavid Sacks0:03

      It is not the biltong, that's for sure.

   4. JCJason Calacanis0:05

      I didn't have time for lunch. I got, I got pistachios, and I got a red pepper.

   5. DSDavid Sacks0:08

      Oh, me too. Oh, wait, wait! Look at this.

   6. JCJason Calacanis0:09

      Hey!

   7. DSDavid Sacks0:09

      Look. Hey!

   8. JCJason Calacanis0:10

      Oh!

   9. DSDavid Sacks0:11

      (laughs) Let's see. Is that our branded pistachios? (laughs)

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:13

       Aren't these the best pistachios?

   11. JCJason Calacanis0:16

       Look it up.

   12. DSDavid Sacks0:16

       They're the best.

   13. JCJason Calacanis0:16

       You got salt, salt and vinegar. Yeah, that's the best.

   14. DSDavid Sacks0:18

       Salt and vinegar. Yeah, yeah, they're the best.

   15. JCJason Calacanis0:19

       Yeah.

   16. DSDavid Sacks0:19

       Are those unpeeled pistachios? (laughs)

   17. JCJason Calacanis0:22

       (laughs)

   18. DSDavid Sacks0:23

       These guys are so rich people peel their nuts.

   19. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:25

       People have been peeling my nuts since the Facebook IPO.

   20. JCJason Calacanis0:29

       (laughs) I'm going all in.

   21. DFDavid Friedberg0:30

       Let your winners ride.

   22. JCJason Calacanis0:33

       Rain Man David Sachs. I'm going all in.

   23. DFDavid Friedberg0:38

       And I said we open sourced it to the fans and they have just gone crazy with it.

   24. JCJason Calacanis0:42

       Love you, Wes Eisinga. Queen of quinoa. I'm going all in.

   25. DSDavid Sacks0:46

       Hey, everybody, welcome to episode 121 of the world's greatest podcast, the All In podcast, with me again, of course, The Dictator himself, Chamath Palihapitiya, The Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, and The Rain Man himself, yeah, definitely, David Sacks. Gentlemen-

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:06

       And you-

   27. DSDavid Sacks1:06

       ... how are we doing?

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:07

       ... the world's greatest-

   29. DSDavid Sacks1:07

       Oh.

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:08

       ... genuflector. (laughs)
2. 2:58 – 32:35

   Fed hikes 25 bps

   1. DSDavid Sacks2:58

      it's a work of art, but we gotta start with the Fed hiking rates by 25 basis points, uh, and the general feeling in the country that maybe the Fed doesn't know what they're doing, and maybe it's time for regime change. The Fed increased rates by 25 basis points yesterday, Wednesday. So the Fed has increased the federal funds rate from nearly zero in March of 2022 to now the range of 4.75 to 5%, fastest rate hike since the '70s. Speculation the Fed might pause rate hikes or even cut to the- the recent banking failures didn't happen. So if you bet that they were gonna pause, you were wrong, and if you bet they were gonna cut, you were also wrong. But the market has ripped a bit a day after. I- which people are trying to figure out in the group chats. Doesn't seem like anybody has a theory here. But let's start with Sax, maybe an explainer, a little bit on how the Fed works. There's a board there. People serve a 14-year term. I guess they replace somebody every two years. And Jerome Powell was placed in 2018 by Trump, and I guess there's a lot of hand-wringing now that they were late on inflation, obviously, and then they went too fast and maybe now they're not slowing down enough. So what's your take on it objectively, Sax? Putting aside-

   2. DFDavid Friedberg4:30

      Yeah.

   3. DSDavid Sacks4:30

      ... partisanship and, you know, for this administration versus that administration. Just objectively, do they know what they're doing and how could they do a better job?

   4. DFDavid Friedberg4:38

      No, I don't think they know what they're doing. They clearly reacted way too late to the inflation. We've talked about this before. We had that surprise inflation print in the summer of 2021, 5.1%. They said it was transitory. They didn't react until November. They continued QE for another six months, and they suddenly got hawkish in November of 2021, and they didn't even start the first rate increase until March of 2022. So they were really asleep at the wheel and late to react to the inflation by about nine months. Now, I think they're potentially making the opposite decision, which is they are late to recognize what stress and distress the economy is under right now, and Powell had... There, there was three choices they could have made at this meeting. They could have raised rates, which is what they did; they could have cut rates, which they didn't; or they could have done nothing, basically held pat; and the argument for raising rates is just that, well, we have this inflation problem, we need to keep raising interest rates until, uh, the rates are above inflation and that will bring inflation down, then you can start to lower rates. That's sort of the conventional view. I think the problem with that view is it ignores that we've just seen a run of bank failures and there's tremendous stress building up in the banking system from unrealized losses on long-dated bonds, also unrealized losses on commercial real estate loans.... and we've barely scratched the surface of seeing that problem. That's, I think, the next shoe to drop in this whole thing. So, I think that the right decision here was to either cut rates or to stand pat. You may have seen that Elon said, "Listen, we should be cutting rates here. There's way too much latency in this inflation data. The economy is seizing up and we don't need to be raising rates right now, we actually need to be cutting them." I think that probably if it were me looking at the upside, downside of these decisions, I probably would have just stood pat because, again, we've just seen this banking crisis. Why won't you just wait one month to see? Maybe there is latency in the inflation data, maybe the banking crisis is not over. Why won't you just stand pat for one month? You can always raise rates in a month. I think that this move here could, in hindsight, be seen as the straw that breaks the camel's back.

   5. DSDavid Sacks6:53

      Chamath, would you have paused and waited to see another card, uh, and then watched the hand develop or do you think they're doing the right thing by raising or should they have cut?

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya7:02

      I think they did the worst thing possible, which is they took the middle path. If you think about what the Fed has the ability to do, they obviously have the ability to raise and lower interest rates, but what we don't talk about is they have a balance sheet that can absorb assets. For the last 10 or 15 years, we've had a phenomenon called quantitative easing. And for folks that have- don't understand what that means, that is essentially the Federal Reserve buying assets out of the market and giving people money for it, so that that... people can then go and buy other things with that money. Last June, they started what's called quantitative tightening, which is essentially reversing that policy and restricting the liquidity in the system. So, if you look at those tools and you sort of play a game tree on what the Fed could have done, I think that you have two choices. One is you massively let inflation run amok where you have no tools to fix or you have massive illiquidity in the financial system, but you actually do have tools to fix that, which is through some combination of quantitative easing and tightening depending on how much liquidity you want in the system. So, I think, actually, I disagree with Sax. I think they should have done the opposite. They should have raised 50 bps. It would have created a little bit more chaos in the short term, but it would have set us up to understand what was fundamentally broken and still give the Federal Reserve the ability to use their balance sheet and use liquidity in the future to solve the problem. They took the worst option, which is neither did they cut nor did they raise enough. And so this problem that Sax represents actually is the fundamental problem now, which is you won't have enough clarity in signal to really know whether this 25 basis point enough. Look, I've maintained now for nine months that rates are going to be long, higher than we like and longer than we want. And so I think it's high time that we acknowledge that we have a sticky inflation problem whose back we have to break. We've known since Volcker era what we need to do to do that, which is you need to get interest rates to be greater than terminal inflation, which means that a 5% Fed funds rate is insufficient. So, we're gonna need to see a print of five and a half, 5.75%, and that's when you're gonna have enough contraction, and then the Fed can come back with liquidity. But if they don't take these steps, we're gonna be in this very choppy, neither here neither there situation, and I think that is what causes the real damage because it's the corrosive effects of uncertainty and what that does to lending, to risk-taking, and that I think is really bad for the economy.

   7. DSDavid Sacks10:04

      Freberg, where do you land? We have Sax saying they should have stood pat. We have Chamath saying either go hard, take the medicine.

   8. JCJason Calacanis10:11

      I don't know. I'm not, like, an economist on judging the balance that they're trying to weigh right now. I think everyone's got a different... Y- you can hear a cacophony of opinions on this one. What I'm more interested in is, you know, we talk a lot about the banking crisis underway, and I know we're going to talk about this question on commercial real estate in a minute. But if you look at the yield on the 10-year Treasury, I think, um, coming out of this past two weeks, you know, the yield on the 10-year Treasury dropped from 4.1% down to, looks like it closed at 3.4% today, nearly a 0.7% decline in the past two and a half, three weeks. And that's also off of 3.8% since the start of the year. And remember when we talked about the impact on asset values of banks, I think if you look holistically at the roughly $7 trillion of assets held at banks, some, you know, whatever the, the, the set of banks that are, that we looked at, the average kind of equity ratio is about 15%. So, you know, a 2%, or sorry, a 3% adjustment over 10 years on the Treasury impacts the value of a chunk of that portfolio down 25%, which starts to put you into dangerous territory, and there's obviously a distribution of what that does to certain banks that are overweight, you know, 10-year bonds, whether they're loan obligations on mortgages or Treasuries or corporate bonds or real estate bonds, uh, real estate debt. And so the more encouraging point that I think we should pay attention to is, does the market tell us that these short term rate actions are driving down the long, the medium and longer term rates in a way that will improve the balance sheets of all these institutions that own a lot of this debt?... particularly the banks and, and funds and so on. And, you know, I'll do the, the math here real quick, but just in the last two weeks, the impact on the 10-year Treasury has probably had a pretty sizable impact. You know, we talk about unrealized losses, it's reduced those unrealized losses, it's improved them. So, I think that that's, like, the more important metric to be tracking is, you know, if you look at all the assets that we're all worried about right now, are they going up in value or down in value in a way that introduces more stability into these kind of banking systems that we care about? And I think right now, it looks like maybe things are improving, um, and that might be part of the optimism around, you know, equity markets and folks buying and so on.

   9. DSDavid Sacks12:50

      Yeah, and so this is, I guess, where people have started to talk about the next shoe to drop. We obviously had this time-based liquidity issues with Silicon Valley Bank. Now, the Wall Street Journal is talking about commercial real estate and how much debt there is. Uh, since COVID, obviously, people are doing more remote work, a lot of the skyscrapers, it's not just San Francisco, but in many locations, remain empty or underutilized. People are now having their leases come up. Uh, every year, more and more of these leases will become vacant and then we'll see if these buildings are worth what people paid for them. Smaller banks hold around 2.3 trillion in commercial and real estate debt, including rental apartment mortgages. Almost 80% of commercial mortgages are held by banks according to this Wall Street Journal story. Sachs, you are an owner of some commercial real estate and, uh, you play in the space, you have a lot of firsthand knowledge. What, what is your, putting aside your personal holdings or exposure, what is your take on what you're seeing? What is the game on the field right now in terms of commercial real estate in San Francisco and beyond?

   10. DFDavid Friedberg13:59

       Well, if you talk to the commercial real estate guys, they'll tell you that the situation is dire. Um-

   11. DSDavid Sacks14:03

       Dire.

   12. DFDavid Friedberg14:04

       There's two... Dire. The, there's two problems. First, there's a credit crunch going on. So there's just no credit available. If you're a commercial real estate developer and you have a building and you wanna refinance your construction loan or put long-term debt on a building, you just can't do it. I mean, the banks are not open for business. They literally don't want the business. And I think that comes back to the fact that banks right now are hunkered down in a defensive posture, they're seeing deposits flee from their banks, unless of course you're one of the top four-

   13. DSDavid Sacks14:35

       Does that, does that freeze on the banks predate the Silicon Valley Bank crisis and it was exacerbated? Were, were people having a hard time getting loans before that?

   14. DFDavid Friedberg14:44

       It predates it, but definitely what you're see- what you saw with SVB and these other banks, including Credit Suisse, is that, you know, banks now are getting much more paranoid. And that's why you saw that if you look at the, the discount window, which is when the banks go to the Fed as lender of last resorts and basically post collateral to get liquidity, we had the biggest spike in discount window borrowing since the 2008 financial crisis. Yeah, that line (laughs) on the right side, that is, that is a spike in one week's borrowing. This exceeds anything that happened in 2008. The warning signs should be flashing red over something like this. Now, to bring it back to commercial-

   15. DSDavid Sacks15:25

       And to be clear, that's banks who have real estate exposure going to the Fed, going to the government saying, "Hey, can we get some money to cover these?"

   16. DFDavid Friedberg15:34

       It's not specifically about real estate, it's more about bank liquidity.

   17. DSDavid Sacks15:37

       Bank liquidity.

   18. DFDavid Friedberg15:37

       The banks are saying, "We don't have enough liquidity right now to cover our needs," which are highly volatile right now because basically depositors are moving out of community and regional and small banks into the big four so-called systemically important or SIB banks. So, what's happening is that, again, banks are hunkering down, they're getting very defensive, they do not wanna make new loans because they can't tie up assets, they are trying to stay liquid themselves. So that's what's happening now in sort of with respect to new lending. And then on the other side of it, you have existing loan portfolios. There's something like $20 trillion of commercial real estate debt, and most commercial real estate lending is done by small banks, by community banks. So they are sitting on these huge CRE loan portfolios. And I think something like 300 billion needs to be refinanced or is coming due in the next year. Normally, that's rolled over and refinanced. There was separately, there was a study showing that unrealized losses in these loan portfolios in the banking system may be around $2 trillion. It was a study that was reported on by the Wall Street Journal. So, in the same way that we had huge unrealized losses in these long-dated bonds, I think we also have huge-

   19. DSDavid Sacks16:54

       At Silicon Valley Bank specifically, that's where we saw it.

   20. DFDavid Friedberg16:56

       They were the worst offender, but-

   21. DSDavid Sacks16:58

       Yeah.

   22. DFDavid Friedberg16:58

       ... it's a, it's a systemic problem. I think similarly, we have huge unrealized losses in commercial real estate loan portfolios. And this is, I think, even a more subtle and pernicious problem because with securities like T-bills or mortgage bonds, it's very easy to know what the unrealized losses are. The reason why they hadn't realized the losses was not 'cause they didn't know what they were, it was because of a stupid accounting rule that said they didn't have to realize the losses if they were, were, quote-unquote, "holding them to maturity." With these loan portfolios, we don't know how big the exposure is, and we won't know until you start seeing some defaults and repricings of assets. And you actually see-

   23. DSDavid Sacks17:38

       Really, commercial real estate is a much more dynamic market, right? You have to have a buyer there, you have leases, you have leases coming off at different times, you have subleases occurring, and you have the owners of them flipping them, right? And, and refinancing them constantly to buy new buildings. And so-

   24. DFDavid Friedberg17:53

       Right. And, and th- and those loans aren't as liquid, right? With a mortgage bond, those are basically a bunch of loans, mortgage, home mortgages typically, that have been packaged up and turned into-

   25. DSDavid Sacks18:04

       Mm.

   26. DFDavid Friedberg18:04

       ... a security and there's a liquid marketplace to trade them. In the case of these loan portfolios, there may not be a liquid marketplace so you don't really know...... how impaired that loan portfolio is until you actually get to a place where-

   27. DSDavid Sacks18:17

       When will we know? Wha- 'cause tha- that's the thing I'm wondering. We- I saw a lot of headlines, you know, Pinterest bought themselves out of their new headquarters in the Bay Area, San Francisco, I believe, specifically. I heard Facebook got rid of a couple billion dollars and wrote down some expansion. Amazon is selling buildings. They had gotten a ton of buildings and we saw last week they got rid of another 9,000, or they're planning another 9,000 RIF, and they can't get people to come back to the office.

   28. DFDavid Friedberg18:42

       Right.

   29. DSDavid Sacks18:42

       So, how bad is the overbuild, I guess, is the question-

   30. DFDavid Friedberg18:46

       Well, yeah.
3. 32:35 – 54:27

   Balaji bets on Bitcoin $1M, predictions for hyperinflation, crypto crackdown in the US

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya32:35

   2. DSDavid Sacks32:35

      All right, so let's explain the Balaji bet since that trended and he is the boy who, as you're saying, cried wolf this past week.

   3. DFDavid Friedberg32:43

      Cried Bitcoin. (laughs)

   4. DSDavid Sacks32:44

      Yeah, the boy cried Bitcoin, very well said. (laughs) So a friend of the pod, Balaji, on March 17th predicted that Bitcoin will reach $1 million in 90 days due to US hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is defined as prices going up 50% month over month, just so we're clear on exactly how dramatic that is. He made the bet on March 17th against a pseudo-anonymous, uh, Twitter user, James Medlock, who said they would bet $1 million that the US would not experience hyperinflation. So Balaji sort of inserted Bitcoin into that bet. It wasn't a Bitcoin bet, uh, then, and I think he's done two of these bets. So he's betting two million in total on Bitcoin hitting one million by June 17th, which there's probably no chance of that happening, or a very tiny chance. I'll ask the panel in a second. Bitcoin was trading at, uh, $25,000, $26,000 at the time. It's now trading at over $28,000. And Balaji has been on every podcast known to man (laughs) in the last 72 hours talking about this. I've watched one or two of them, and it's a pretty out there argument, I think. Uh, you can just type in Balaji on YouTube and watch any of the 20 he's done. (laughs) Uh, he believes regional banks are insolvent. He thinks the Feds need to, is gonna need to print a massive amount of money, like we've said here, do more QE and then cut rates. It all seems reasonable, but that, that will lead to hyperinflation.

   5. CPChamath Palihapitiya34:12

      (laughs) It's not, it's not reasonable. (laughs)

   6. DSDavid Sacks34:14

      Well-

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya34:14

      It all seems possible.

   8. DSDavid Sacks34:15

      No, no, it's not that it's reasonable, but we just print- we just printed that-

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya34:18

      Yeah.

   10. DSDavid Sacks34:18

       ... they're gonna cut rates. We just discussed, they're gonna eventually cut rates and there'll be more QE. So that part is reasonable, um, just that one little piece. But then he believes, is the part that is (laughs) kind of out there, that hyperinflation's gonna devalue the dollar and this is the time. Um, he does not, and I made a bunch of... I- I asked him this a bunch of times and, and he would not be honest about it, uh, or didn't wanna answer my question. I said, "Hey, what percentage are you in Bitcoin?" Somebody says he's 99% in Bitcoin. He- he will not confirm. And so I was like, "Well, if you own 1,000 Bitcoins, if this goes up, you know, a very small amount, four or 5%, you're gonna pay for the bets and, uh, are you talking your own book here or not?" Sachs, what do you think of this overall bet?

   11. CPChamath Palihapitiya35:01

       (laughs)

   12. DSDavid Sacks35:01

       Is it a stunt?

   13. DFDavid Friedberg35:02

       Yeah.

   14. DSDavid Sacks35:02

       H- he's saying like, this is the lifeboats moment, and just to add to it-

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya35:06

       (laughs)

   16. DSDavid Sacks35:06

       ... he says you have to leave the United States and get to Singapore, uh, or a place, or if you're gonna stay in the United States, you need to get to Wyoming or Texas or somewhere that explicitly allows Bitcoin because the closer you are to the United States banking system... What happened to Silicon Valley Bank on that fateful weekend where people couldn't get their cash and were gonna have to, you know, uh, miss payroll? He says that's the dry run for the entire US banking system. Sachs?

   17. DFDavid Friedberg35:31

       So first of all, I don't think you can disparage Balaji because someone who cries wolf says this repeatedly and makes a dire prediction repeatedly and is wrong. And we can't say yet that Balaji is wrong. Do I think that we're gonna have a million dollar Bitcoin in 90 days? I personally find that very unlikely, but you can't say yet. Uh, he stuck his neck out making a prediction that will be easily falsified if he's wrong. Second, the last time that Balaji made a dire prediction-

   18. DSDavid Sacks36:00

       Yeah.

   19. DFDavid Friedberg36:00

       ... was COVID, and he was right about that.

   20. DSDavid Sacks36:03

       He was right about that one. (laughs)

   21. DFDavid Friedberg36:03

       So you can't say that this is just, like, a doomer who throws out crazy predictions and is always wrong. He's actually pretty selective about his-

   22. DSDavid Sacks36:10

       He nailed that one.

   23. DFDavid Friedberg36:11

       ... predictions.

   24. DSDavid Sacks36:12

       Yeah.

   25. DFDavid Friedberg36:12

       Yeah, there is a tweet from January 30th of 2020 in which he basically predicted a pandemic based on a coronavirus and laid out a whole bunch of consequences that mostly came true.

   26. DSDavid Sacks36:24

       Hmm.

   27. DFDavid Friedberg36:25

       Which is why we're talking about this. This is not just some, like, random person, like, he actually has-

   28. DSDavid Sacks36:29

       Yes.

   29. DFDavid Friedberg36:30

       ... a pedigree and a track record.... but here's my view on it, is-

   30. JCJason Calacanis36:33

       (laughs) In doom and gloom.
4. 54:27 – 1:16:04

   Should the commercial real estate sector receive a similar treatment as regional banks? Math and solutions on 100% FDIC insurance

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya54:27

   2. DSDavid Sacks54:27

      I guess the moral hazard comes up, Sachs. And the critique, I think, uh, that people have had, uh, of you, you know, focusing on bank bailouts, et cetera.... has been, you have been anti-bailout and now, hey, maybe backstopping the deposits, not backstopping the bank. The shareholders lost, you were very clear about that. But let's talk about moral hazard here for a minute. E- are we sort of getting-

   3. DFDavid Friedberg54:54

      I'm not for bail- I'm, when did I say I was either for or against bailout?

   4. DSDavid Sacks54:56

      I just clearly stated you were not. I just clearly stated you're not. I'm saying this is the critique that people have had of you, so I'm giving you a chance to address it.

   5. CPChamath Palihapitiya55:03

      Why, w- why are you giving him people's critiques of him? Nobody-

   6. DSDavid Sacks55:06

      When, because-

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya55:07

      Come on.

   8. DSDavid Sacks55:07

      ... I want him to talk about the future moral hazard of-

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya55:09

      What, what people?

   10. DSDavid Sacks55:10

       ... more and be-

   11. CPChamath Palihapitiya55:10

       User76542 on Twitter? Who cares what that person thinks?

   12. DFDavid Friedberg55:13

       (laughs)

   13. DSDavid Sacks55:13

       And... okay. I, I was also thinking about the Wall-

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya55:15

       W- why do you give, why do you give these-

   15. DFDavid Friedberg55:15

       Let me, let me jump in, so people-

   16. DSDavid Sacks55:16

       I, I was also thinking about the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and everything.

   17. CPChamath Palihapitiya55:20

       ... any air time.

   18. DFDavid Friedberg55:20

       Let me jump in and just clarify. I was really clear that SVB's shareholders-

   19. DSDavid Sacks55:24

       Yes.

   20. DFDavid Friedberg55:24

       ... should be wiped out.

   21. DSDavid Sacks55:25

       Yes.

   22. DFDavid Friedberg55:25

       Their bond holders should be wiped out.

   23. DSDavid Sacks55:27

       As I just said.

   24. DFDavid Friedberg55:27

       Their management stock options should be wiped out. In fact, if it turns out that they should have known the thing was about to go under, I think their stock sales should be clawed back. So I'm not in favor of bailing out SVB. I don't care about SVB.

   25. DSDavid Sacks55:40

       Yes, of course. Now, let's do that for commercial real estate.

   26. DFDavid Friedberg55:42

       No, the question is what you do with deposits and depositors.

   27. DSDavid Sacks55:45

       Correct. Let me know that.

   28. DFDavid Friedberg55:45

       I think there is a real debate about how you treat depositors in a banking crisis. And I think there are two views on that. There is kind of an old-fashioned view and then there's kind of a more modern regulatory view. The old-fashioned view is that if your money is in a bank and that bank goes under and, you know, you're over the FDIC amount, you lose your money. And we need people in the system to lose their money because that creates discipline on the banks. It'll make those depositors do a better job shopping for the right bank. That's kind of what I would call the old-fashioned hard-line view. There's a more modern regulatory view, which is that... listen, the typical depositor, even a fairly sophisticated depositor like a small business or even a high net worth individual, they're not in a position to evaluate the balance sheet of these banks. How are they gonna figure out if there's, like, toxic assets that are hidden on the balance sheet of these banks?

   29. DSDavid Sacks56:42

       The regulators didn't see it (laughs) with Silicon Valley Bank-

   30. DFDavid Friedberg56:45

       Right.
5. 1:16:04 – 1:25:46

   TikTok CEO grilled by US lawmakers: What is TikTok's endgame in the US?

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:16:04

      the rules.

   2. DSDavid Sacks1:16:04

      The CEO of TikTok which claims to be an American company now, or an international company, was in front of Congress today. His name is Shou Chew. This is the first time he's really, I think, spoken publicly in an extended period. Four and a half hours, he was grilled, and it was absolutely brutal. It's the first time I've seen a congressional hearing (laughs) that was bipartisan in a long time. And he said that, quote, uh, "The bottom line is this is an American da- this is American data on American soil by an American company overseen by American personnel," and then was immediately squirrelly when asked if Chinese employees, including engineers, have access to this US data and he said, "This is a complex subject," over and over again. He was evasive and this did not look good for TikTok.

   3. DFDavid Friedberg1:17:03

      Well, I think-

   4. DSDavid Sacks1:17:03

      The question now becomes does it become divested and go public or does it get shut down? Sacks?

Episode duration: 1:34:28