E98: Big tech starts making cuts, Fed incompetency, global debt, Russia/Ukraine & more

Big Tech’s austerity marked a structural end to Silicon Valley’s 18-year employee boom, not just another round of cuts. Meta planned a smaller workforce, Google questioned productivity and Apple faced weaker iPhone demand; the panel expected tighter compensation, fewer perks and less job-hopping as growth companies become cash-flow businesses.

The technology downturn had already reached Hollywood, where lavish competition for creative talent had abruptly stopped. A showrunner told David Sacks that buyers had effectively disappeared as Netflix and its rivals reassessed huge talent deals, illustrating how falling growth-stock valuations were withdrawing real money from writers and producers.

For surviving startups, the same contraction could dramatically improve access to talent and lower operating costs. Engineers previously receiving $300,000 salaries and million-dollar equity packages from Big Tech were becoming available, failed startups were releasing workers, advertising demand was weakening, and remote hiring had widened the talent pool beyond expensive technology hubs.

The central market disagreement was timing: several speakers expected a hard recession, while Chamath Palihapitiya believed equities could already be near their lows. He argued stocks historically bottom early in tightening cycles and estimated markets might be within 3–5% of the lows; others remained concerned about unemployment, mortgages and collapsing demand.

The panel’s most concrete institutional proposal was to modernize central banking around real-time data rather than lagging economic reports. They discussed opening Federal Reserve models to public scrutiny and feeding payments, rents and sensor data into software that could adjust rates continuously in tiny increments, with human oversight.

David Sacks treated Ukraine as the episode’s largest unresolved market risk, while Chamath and Freeberg questioned how much further escalation would still transmit economically. Sacks argued that disappearing diplomatic “off-ramps” increased tail risk; the counterargument was that markets had already spent months rerouting energy, commodities and financial exposure.