Episode 1269: Market fit

Zain 0:01

This is a strategist episode 1269. My name is Zain Velji. With me as always, Stephen Carter, Corey Hogan. Guys, what's

Zain 0:08

what's up? Corey, go ahead, please. Hey, thanks so much. Hey, how are you? I

Carter 0:13

I just had some ice cream and now I'm a little chilly and my nipples are hard. So you're

Corey 0:19

you're just, you know what?

Corey 0:23

isn't for the faint of heart. I

Corey 0:24

I shouldn't have done that. You get rid of the people who aren't ready for it, who aren't up for it. And I've always called it

Zain 0:30

it the three minute purge up front. That's why we do this. We get rid of those that can stomach the talk about airlines or condiments or carters. Once vague, now very direct sexual references.

Corey 0:46

but they you know they actually did this with house of cards you know how that it opens with like the killing of the dog yeah

Corey 0:51

they said that that was necessary because otherwise people might be really disturbed by the show later on and so they wanted to kind of get people off the bus if if it wasn't their bus if it wasn't going to take them where they wanted to be i

Zain 1:03

i mean the ultimate way that they did that was that they cast kevin spacey but yeah no i mean point taken I mean, I think the main

Zain 1:10

was by casting him, but point

Zain 1:13

point taken, Corey. Also, the intro, very long.

Zain 1:18

It was a lot

Zain 1:20

night glamour shots of Washington. And if anyone's been to Washington, there's maybe three. Loved it. There's about three glamour shots of Washington. Everything else was, that

Zain 1:28

that was AI generated. Corey

Carter 1:29

Corey and I went to Washington and wrote the segues together. Yeah, you guys got segues. That was great.

Carter 1:35

I mean, that sounds like a before time.

Carter 1:37

Just two men. It really was

Carter 1:38

was a before time.

Zain 1:39

time. Just like side by side, luxuriously taking segues in not their nation's capital. That couldn't happen.

Zain 1:46

That's a before time. It's a good time. It's a before time.

Carter 1:49

on my phone. It

Carter 1:52

It's a great time. What happened

Zain 1:53

happened to segues and why?

Carter 1:56

Yeah, okay. It wasn't because the guy drove himself off of a cliff. That was not true. That was never true.

Zain 2:03

Corey, it's a you question. I feel like you should have inside knowledge on why segways just never segway

Carter 2:08

segway into success. You know what? They weren't artificially intelligent. That's the reason.

Corey 2:13

The segway story is interesting, and I know you don't actually care, but there was all this hype before it came. This was going to be this world-changing method of transportation, and it kind of just seemed silly. And so it became a bit of a punchline. And even though the technology is pretty cool, and it had a lot of practical uses, between its launch and Paul Blart Mall Cop, I think that was the death of the segway. Just goes to show you, you

Corey 2:36

you got to watch out for Kevin Hart.

Zain 2:39

Yeah, you're right. Wow. Two very different. They're very

Carter 2:42

very easily mixed up, though, Corey. Both

Zain 2:44

Both mediocre at what they do,

Zain 2:46

do, but very different.

Zain 2:49

The answer to Corey is yes, I wasn't interested. Let's move it on to our first segment. Our first segment, do you even tech, bro? Carter, we're talking about our favorite AI company. You know what it is. You know which one it is.

Zain 3:02

Canva's dipping their toe in the AI space. they're not our favorite they're not our favorite ai company they're not our favorite

Zain 3:08

i mean they are our sponsor they're our sponsor but i mean it's it's a bit of a stretch cory it's

Corey 3:13

promo code day 45 promo code day 45 you

Zain 3:16

you can't 45 days of them them no

Corey 3:21

you can't subject the patrons to this yes i would make it an ad in the episode yeah that's

Corey 3:27

yeah they don't even know

Corey 3:27

know there's a whole group of listeners of ours there's

Corey 3:30

there's a whole group that that don't know that we debase ourselves for Canva on a weekly basis. And

Carter 3:36

If they have the option. I

Zain 3:37

I feel like they're missing out. This is actually so funny because the ads, I feel like, are part of the show. And now they're missing out. And these are the people that want access to every part of the show.

Zain 3:47

Yeah, no. I feel like patrons now

Zain 3:50

now on, it's a decree, they get more ads.

Zain 3:53

They get more ads than the regular listeners. Make it happen. I

Carter 3:56

I listened to your Canva read last week, Zane.

Carter 3:59

Amaze. I was like over

Carter 4:02

over the moon so good I did

Corey 4:03

did one of them I mean with you I

Carter 4:04

I know that's what I'm comparing Zane's to yeah

Corey 4:10

so we're talking about Canva and AI that's what you were starting to say

Zain 4:17

well no I mean you want to take over the episode there it's fine because I have a whole track it is not we're

Zain 4:23

our different AI company we're talking about OpenAI Corey

Corey 4:26

Corey have you heard of it oh I like OpenAI yeah I do I consult in this space sometimes, Zane. I've heard of the OpenAI. Yes.

Corey 4:33

They're good people. Stop plugging your

Zain 4:34

your frequent or infrequent consulting in this space. Don't do that, Corey. Don't do that. This is not the platform for that. This is only a platform for one thing, which is Canva and Canva for Teams, okay? And maybe one day Douglas. Anyways, Carter,

Zain 4:48

we're going to talk about OpenAI because they have had quite a weekend. They have gotten rid of their co-founder CEO, someone who has spearheaded, without exaggeration, Carter, it's fair to say, billions of dollars of valuation for this company. I don't even know if I can call it a company. Maybe it starts there in terms of our examination. This non-profit that governs a company that was not supposed to make money but has now got profit caps on it. Anyways, the CEO is gone. He's now potentially coming back. There's a lot to talk about as it relates to like strategy, as it relates to governance, as it relates to overall vision and direction, frankly, leadership. So this is where I want to go. This is a non-political topic that might quickly turn political. But it has all the necessary ingredients to make a successful strategist episode. Corey, do you agree? Or do you disagree fundamentally? I can't tell by how you're looking at me right now. I

Corey 5:45

I mean, I think I agree. There's a lot of interesting things going on with this. And I think Sam Altman both made some very poor strategic decisions in the past, which we should unpack. And he's made some, what, at least on Sunday night at 9pm Mountain Time, which is the proper time zone in Canada, made

Corey 6:03

made what looks like some very savvy decisions. decisions and while we still don't know where this is going to end i

Corey 6:09

think one of the cool things he's done is he's set up some optionality for himself and he's gone from like a no win situation almost to a no lose one and big assist from that board but uh but really really been interesting to watch for the past 48 hours carter

Zain 6:22

carter i'll come to you in a second cory since i've heard you infrequently consult in the space can i ask you to give us an understanding of of what you you find interesting about this particular case study or this live wire case study as it relates to the content we so commonly discuss on this podcast? For me, I've laid out a few, including, and I haven't added, just a communication cycle back and forth and how a large social following can really drive a narrative. You know, the media leak side of things are interesting, but what interesting sort of topics do you find in this current sort of last 72 hours between between Friday and tonight that, that you, you, you would want to maybe perhaps unpack on an episode.

Corey 7:05

So I'll throw a few on the table here. One is the governance, which you alluded to of open AI is super weird, right? It was this nonprofit group that then created a for-profit company. That for-profit company provides a certain amount of profit to its investors, which include groups like Microsoft, but anything above a certain cap goes back to this nonprofit. This nonprofit has board members that don't have any ownership stake in kind of like the for-profit components of the business. And in fact, we're designed to be kind of a safety breaker, right? And that clearly is not really working well in practice because the minute this happened, a bunch of people made a bunch of phone calls and now it looks like that entire thing is going to be reversed and there might be a new board. So I think that's interesting because it's almost a mini case study in itself about how like you can say you do these things, but clearly OpenAI is not actually running in this way anymore, regardless of what happens over this weekend. And so it becomes a little bit phony and I wouldn't mind unpacking that. Maybe I'll leave that there. The other one, though, is, so Altman's out. And all of a sudden, there

Corey 8:13

there is a clear pressure campaign. I think some of it's organic, and some of it he helped along. There's a lot of talk about how he immediately started conversing with Microsoft about this thing or the next thing. but

Corey 8:24

but he created you know a groundswell of stakeholders pushing back on this board to try to change the outcome but concurrently he started exploring the idea of maybe he'd start his own ai company and even just by putting that out there i think a put pressure on open ai but b he could actually do that and he could kind of flip the script on these things and perhaps create a for-profit company that he himself could benefit in significantly so i think that's really really interesting. And then there's this one in between the hinge point that is the board meeting. And there's been reporting on this, which, you know, also could be part of the media leak strategy really well done by him if it is where it's been leaked that he's really mad at himself for losing connection and control with the board, like that he didn't put the care into the board. The board was much bigger at the start of the year. People left the board for various reasons. The board became six people from nine, became four after the two left, you know, Altman and the president. And he said, like, I didn't put the care and tending into the board that I needed to do. And that's really interesting to me, too, because that's an interesting point about strategy as well, how you sometimes get fixated on things, but the people who are actually running the scoreboard, maybe

Corey 9:37

maybe they don't care about the things you're fixated in. And it's a lesson in audience, I suppose. I

Zain 9:43

I like a few of these topics. I want to start with the first one, Carter, if that's okay with you, which is just this broader concept of we

Zain 9:51

we have seen the politics of effective altruism, of capitalism without its sharp edges, of this like unbridled, I don't need ownership or upside in the company, I'm just doing good for the world, right? Right. And I'm simplifying a lot of Altman's and for some background, right? So Altman has made a shit ton of money. This was an initial Y Combinator guy, found a tremendous amount of upside, you know, was part of what many would argue the tech bro revolution of growth at any cost, right? You know, who cares about revenue? Just grow. We need one of these companies to hit. You dominate the market, you dominate an industry, you create a new vertical, like all these sort of things that we've heard over the course of the last number of years. This guy has made a boatload of cash in that era. And this, while an innovative

Zain 10:40

technology, I don't even know if we've mentioned, we may have that the OpenAI is the parent company of ChatGPT, which is why it's so interesting because of their massive user growth, user sort of pay base that they also even have on the revenue stream. But Carter, the concept of the anti-Elon, the concept of the person who is going to just be in a space to kind of advocate for it, to be on the front edge or the cutting edge, but using the instruments available for capitalism and business to drive this change and to do it morally and ethically. Corey makes an interesting point that maybe the revelatory nature of this conversation that we've had over the past number of days is that that doesn't necessarily exist in modern business, even if there are massive attempts to try to correct it or shape it or navigate it in that direction. Your thoughts on that before we jump into some of the strategy pieces there.

Carter 11:32

Yeah, I think that this is something that we struggle with all the time. I mean, there are forms and functions for things. And we've talked about it even in the political context where we talk about, you know, the board of directors versus the leader's office, right? Like, how do we ensure that there's the right proper power mix between these organizations, between these various structures that have been created? and it's difficult because you know we have in the same way that we have leaders that are very very powerful we also have founders that are very powerful and the board of directors of these organizations you know they often get distracted by you know as they're going through the processes to try and figure out what it is that they should be following what are the things that they should should be chasing in order to make sure that it is a better company. And so we've seen corporations kind of get off track by following the quarterly returns and not investing into longer scale or bigger scale, bigger paybacks. Those are

Carter 12:37

are the challenges of any organization, right? Like if you choose to subvert yourself to single metrics, you wind up in really difficult challenges. challenges and i think this is where we struggle with with open ai the altruism thing doesn't make sense either i remember there was a guy i don't know if you guys know him samuel bankman freed um who uh also had this big idea of of altruism and uh wound up i think

Carter 13:03

i think he nailed it eight billion eight

Carter 13:05

billion dollars a little a

Corey 13:06

a hundred percent different but keep talking but

Carter 13:08

but but didn't actually steal it because they're all going to get their money back anyways my point is this the the the

Carter 13:16

the reasons and rationales for running a company um are perverted all the time right they are perverted when it is to generate just a simple feedback you know to grow at all costs like you said zane or to generate the most positive cash flow for the investors as we see so many times from other organizations uh we're watching the oil and gas community uh just you know not worry about climate change just trying to maximize profits all of these things are perverted it in some fashion. And this one with open AI just seems to be a another example of trying to create something that makes the most, you know, make sense for society, but ultimately doesn't work.

Zain 13:54

It is interesting to me, like the equivalent in our political world is those folks that say we're going to do politics different, right? You know, like it's, you know, the vehicles exist this way, the track is set, we're going to do things differently. And I'm not trying to undercut the entire sort of like CSR elements of business or this, you know, multi-dimensional stakeholder stuff of business as we talk about. But Corey, your thoughts on this as we kind of like dissect and get a peek into OpenAI in this like rare vulnerable, you know, weekend moment of kind of being like, what actually is going wrong in this business, which for any other purpose is a rocket ship in its growth and its market capitalization from a pure capitalist perspective?

Corey 14:36

look, like in the political world, people need to stop telling these fairy tales. You say you're not coming after CSR and multi-stakeholder capitalism. I am. It's fucking bullshit. It's nonsense. That's not the way incentives run in a free market like this. It's marketing. It's just marketing. At the end of the day, it's marketing to consumers. It's marketing to employees. It's just fucking marketing. Wake up. Grow up. These people do not care about you. These organizations do not fucking care about you. somebody has said there's a niche i can fill over there if i tell people that i'm donating one dollar for every x dollars i get and i'll get those customers and the customers who are more price sensitive they'll go to the company that's going to outsource everything offshore to child labor and everybody wins and i don't give a fuck and the stakeholders are happy and this is not a conscious conversation people are having this is the market at work it's a feature and you are telling yourselves you're living a good life because

Corey 15:30

because some corporations are making decisions You want corporations to be better? Don't wait for them to be better. Pass a law. Make a regulation. You've got to put rules around these things because otherwise people will go to the limit they're allowed to and probably even a little bit beyond somehow. So that's the end of my rant about corporations here. here.

Corey 15:49

Next thing I want to say here, it

Corey 15:51

it is really interesting to see how this organization was set up, this board, which by the way, Elon Musk, you talked about the anti-Elon, Elon Musk was one of the people who helped set up OpenAI and nobody was more mad than Elon Musk when OpenAI became a for-profit organization. Like he called Sam Altman in and basically said, you have absolutely betrayed this vision that we set together. Yes,

Zain 16:17

the background there, and Corey, you may want to help me fill it, was OpenAI was going to kind of be the moral arbiter nonprofit that kind of had a technology base under it. Sam Altman and the board directors did not get shares directly from OpenAI and its upside that it was having from a pure market capitalization perspective. And then Altman kind of did a minor pivot, which included taking investment from Microsoft and other organizations, but had a profit cap rather than a non-profit motive, which for anyone who's ever sat on a board of directors of a non-profit, if your CEO comes to you and says that we're going to actually have a profit cap, despite, you know, and even brushing aside what laws that might be breaking, it's a fundamentally different model and is a fundamentally different structure, one might argue, in terms of what it's trying to promote. That's some background. Well,

Corey 17:06

Well, yeah, sure. And I mean, I just played the cynic for a minute here. But to be fair, part of the logic at the time was, this is a space that requires massive injections of capital to be relevant. And so if we get the money from groups like Microsoft, which allow them to benefit from a technology that

Corey 17:23

that we are going to create ethically, right, that we are going to build in an ethical fashion, well,

Corey 17:28

well, then everybody wins, right? And we'll make sure that a lot of this money funnels back into this nonprofit and allows us to take on a lot of the governance work and the non-glamorous work that needs to occur in artificial intelligence in order for it to be a safe technology down the road. So this was kind of the logic. It was a cake and eat it too kind of argument that occurred here. but what's clear now after this weekend after this pressure campaign from microsoft and from all of the other investing groups here but most predominantly microsoft is like

Corey 17:57

like the board is not actually in charge because the minute this occurred despite the fact that microsoft has no seats on the board not even observer status on the board microsoft found out apparently minutes before altman was fired um what happened next was microsoft called and i have no doubt a version of of the conversation was, you're not getting another penny from us. And we're going to pull out any money we haven't already fully committed here, if you continue down this path. And that plus employee pressure saying, we actually kind of liked what Sam Altman was doing. It just made the board realize that they were out entirely on a limb. You know, the Wall Street Journal had some interest in reporting that the board of OpenAI, they didn't have any lawyers, any communications people on the ready because they assumed OpenAI's lawyers and communications people would just do this work for them.

Corey 18:50

But they didn't because

Corey 18:51

they were actually on Team Altman here,

Corey 18:54

right? Which actually also tells you something else about this board, which it was foundationally detached from the work that was going on at OpenAI. So, you know, their criticism that there's not kind of forthright communication between Altman and the board, maybe some truth to that if they're so so removed that they don't even understand where the employees would be, but clearly misread the situation. There's

Zain 19:16

There's so many interesting lessons on board governance, which I think apply to like the broader political world and the broader leadership world. But Carter, I want to throw a few things on the table, just for your reaction as it relates to some of the lessons that we are seeing, not just over this weekend with Sam Altman and OpenAI, but just broadly in terms of leadership. And one of them is, we

Zain 19:36

we talk in politics, Carter, about leader-centric politics, That it's all about who's at the top. It seems like we're back to that era again. Corey, you might argue from your perspective that we've always been in that era where the cult of personality, if not the personality in that individual leader, can drive so much of not just the narrative, but a company's value. you, that it is like we're almost in this aligned age between our politics and our business, that this cultural moment is at the apex of people, rather than the fact that open AI, even the day Sam Altman leaves, still has its market capitalization and upside, but we're very much in a leader-centric world. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that, Carter. Yeah,

Carter 20:17

well, I mean, I think that it basically boils down to something I talk about quite frequently, and that is characters and story. um when you have you know when steve jobs returns to apple um he is you know the founder returning to to resurrect the ship and take us on the right direction um you

Carter 20:33

you know lee iacocca gets hired to turn around chrysler um there are many different examples of these

Carter 20:41

larger than life characters that are invited into to manage companies and deal with companies that create um a story and a character structure that we understand and

Carter 20:51

and we can root for um that is

Carter 20:54

is one of the very successful elements of of developing the brand of these organizations because we you know we live in a world of brands right like brands

Carter 21:03

brands are are something that are super important to our society and i'm going to just use that then to bridge off and talk a little bit about what's important to our society because cory kind of touched on this and i want to just make it perfectly clear we

Carter 21:17

we had this idea And I don't I'm not sure that it begins with Reagan, with Reaganomics. I'm not sure that it begins with Adam Smith, you know, with the with his with his thoughts about, you know, how economics works. But I think that in

Carter 21:30

in general, there have been these beliefs from time to time that we can allow corporations and organizations to, through a laissez faire marketplace, take care of us in society, because it will help us in society and our and organizations can have society's best interests at heart. And the reality is that sometimes even individuals don't have society's best interests at heart. We don't have society's interests at heart. It is up to society to have society's best interests at heart.

Carter 21:59

Corey mentioned rules and regulations. And I think that that's where we have to keep coming back to. Tax people, tax corporations have clear sets of rules and expectations, whether they're about pollution, whether they're about corporate governance. I mean, we've hedged around this idea about even the nonprofit and whether or not it's, you know, 100%, I'm putting this wording in quotations, legal. It certainly is unprecedented. It's, you know, nonprofits aren't designed to house organizations

Carter 22:33

organizations that make money. That's just not how they're supposed to be designed. so it's it's a recipe for trouble because you're doing you're using the wrong instrument for the wrong outcome which is so often the case when uh you know government abdicates its responsibilities you

Corey 22:49

you know i mean i i think ultimately i'd summarize my view is make laws for the things you need corporations to do and accept they're going to do whatever they can to maximize profit within those constraints i fucking love corporations you know i'm an mba i i love the market at work But be honest with yourselves about what the market does and what the market actually cares about here. And if you actually want people to do things, pass

Corey 23:12

pass a law, pass a regulation, because otherwise somebody will always find the market at the floor. They will. That's just how it works. Well,

Zain 23:19

Well, so can I pick up on this? Because I don't know if we've ever explored this with the intersection of like political organizing and political sort of values, Carter, which is how should political entities, and let me just choose the left here for the natural purposes that you will find shortly, how should they deal, to Corey's point, if they bind that thesis, how should they deal with business? One of the criticisms that the political left, especially in this country, often faces is that they're not friendly for business. Corey ultimately here is saying, listen, he likes corporations, and I'm not labeling you as someone on like the left, Corey, but I'm just saying like let's put your argument out there and then let's attach it to the political left sort of thing. If you like corporations, but you also want to regulate them heavily, what is like the modern day argument or relationship or entanglement, so to speak, that the political left and progressives should have with corporations? How should they deal with them, Carter, from a rhetoric perspective? How should they deal with them from a pure sort of policy perspective? Also knowing that progressives, especially in this country, and let me even narrow down even more to this province, have to get the mandate that's available, not a perfect mandate where they can kind of have Puritan views on everything, including, you know, how the capitalist system works, so to speak. I'm kind of curious to explore this for a bit. Well,

Carter 24:33

Well, I mean, just don't accept the idea that rules and regulations aren't necessarily corporate friendly. I think that there are corporations that understand that good

Carter 24:45

good regulation, good regulation, and good regulation doesn't mean less regulation. Good regulation means clear, understandable, and enforced regulation is good for business, right? I think that that's one of the things that people have often asked for. When those corporations stood up and stood beside Rachel Notley and said that they supported the carbon tax, one of the reasons that they stood up and said that is that they thought that everybody should be in the carbon tax place, not just people who produce significant amounts of carbon intensity through corporate activities. activities um those were clear and understandable objectives it doesn't mean no regulation there's no world in which no regulation exists except a bad one um corporations need to be you know you don't have to accept their narrative that in in any way shape or form it's bad the other thing is it's it's incumbent upon people to figure out where the regulation is and work to the edge of that regulation whether you're a corporation or you're a political party or whatever the situation may be the working to the edge of the regulation is is how you maximize opportunity i often see the left specifically the left discerning that they're going to be in some way uh better than other political organizations by following rules that don't exist you

Carter 26:08

you know i think of nenshi's desire to to to follow rules that didn't exist around uh fundraising um you know interesting but i'd rather win i'd rather win and if that means that you know because winning means you can change the rules losing because you're following a set of rules that doesn't exist just means that you're weaker and you've weakened society so

Carter 26:30

so i think that corporations have a responsibility to do that for their shareholders and i think that um you

Carter 26:37

you know political organizations Organizations have the responsibility to do that for their voters. Corey,

Zain 26:42

Corey, your thoughts on the relationship of the political left and corporations, if you were to accept your premise that you've kind of put out there around CSR and all this other sort of stuff being a bunch of marketing bullshit in your mind. Leave that in for me before we kind of get to the lessons that OpenAI has taught us this weekend.

Corey 27:00

Well, I think it starts in not denying that markets are a real thing. And way too often you see in rhetoric on the left, like this notion of, well, that's not true. I'll raise a tax and it won't make a difference. Everybody will still stay here. It won't affect profits. They're still going to make money, so they're still going to be here. That's not actually how economic decision making happens here. So here's a couple of basic rules that I would suggest for somebody who wants to take kind of a pro-market approach here with a progressive bend. One is just set the floor for behavior. Don't drown them in red tape. Find very specific things that you want to address and say, these are the expectations. It's not a thousand of them. It's 10. And here's the 10 that I require you to do. Don't ask them to donate. Don't ask them to step up or be good corporate citizens. That's bullshit. That's actually an out for them. tax them, and spend that money on social priorities. Acknowledge that differences between markets do drive economic decision-making, so you need to collaborate and coordinate with jurisdictions to reduce those differences. That means going to the table with other provinces, trying to knock down provincial trade barriers, trying to make sure that when you are working with other jurisdictions, you have collaborated to the point you can and then designed your policy not to put your companies at disadvantage relative to those competitors. There's lots of work that's been done in this space. I'm not going to go down that hole really deep, but we do this all the time. We do this with the carbon tax. Tie free trade to labor rights is an obvious one, but be clear at the end of the day, not all economic activity is good economic activity and just be really transparent with businesses. But ultimately go back to my first point, like don't deny market behavior. Like, you know, at the end of the day, you can say, I understand that would make more economic profit. I still don't want to do it. But like, just sit there and say, I don't believe that will not change things is ridiculous. And it's just kind of a denial of certain economic facts that have been proven, as Carter said, you know, since the days of Adam Smith, like have been known since the days of Adam Smith. So

Zain 28:59

So Carter, reflect on this. And then tell me about the opposite argument when when when in the media, you see, if you believe this, right, if you're like ingesting this as a political belief, and saying, Okay, I'm not going to deny that the market exists, I'm not going to try to be like anti-business about it. I'm going to use the power of laws, regulations, et cetera. Carter, I love your point about clarity, not so more so volume. I think that's a really sharp point that you made. But how would you then politically and strategically react if that is your belief going forward to when corporations maximize profit, right? Because I think the other side of it is when you see the Rich Kruegers of the world, let me point him as an example, at Suncor, we're going to get back to basics. Fuck all this other stuff that we've been doing, effectively acknowledging and different sort of casing Corey's point being like, it's a bunch of bullshit that wasn't giving us money back into our pockets. And we're just going to do the thing that puts money back into our pockets. How should you then react if you're like accepting Corey's premise? You want to jump in on this first, Corey? Go ahead.

Corey 29:58

Well, yeah, because I wasn't on the episode where you guys were talking about Rich Krueger and Carter, you were shitting down his throat. I wish I had been there. This is what I actually wanted to go back to. Rich Krueger's not wrong. wrong it's not his job to do that shit it is not his job to do that shit and he's going to be at an economic disadvantage if he attempts to you know what should happen a law should be passed that requires him to do those kinds of things taxes should be levied that give government the ability to do those kinds of things and the notion that you're going to rely on the goodwill of a random corporation to do things is childish it is just childish and it's buying into a fantasy of capitalism that you don't need nobody needs carter

Zain 30:37

carter i'll say i'm continually confused about this because i i don't know how to act beyond the moral outrage which is like that's so fucking stupid the climate you know like all that sort of stuff but you know if you're buying cory's premise i'm curious to hear your response well

Carter 30:53

well i mean i think that the the problem that i see with that cory is that the rich kruegers of the world the ones who are out there saying you know what i I understand what you're trying to achieve, but I'm going to actively work against you. And that's really what he was saying is that I recognize that this is what we're trying to achieve, but I'm going to just maximize shareholder value by just kind of digging deep and trying to get the last gasp of success out of this instead of investing in longer term, more successful ventures. I mean, that's basically what he was saying. So I think he was being an asshole. I think that he was ignoring the fact that there are great returns to be found in renewable markets, and those returns are being found everywhere. That's fine, and shareholders

Corey 31:37

shareholders can make that decision, and they can sell their shares in this very specific vertical that Rich has decided to build, and they can buy shares in the renewable space if they want to. but there

Carter 31:49

there is one place that i agree with cory and that is that the one of the unfortunate pieces

Carter 31:56

pieces of feedback of a market-based solution like the carbon tax is that it has certain failures there will be people who are willing to pay the price there are you know there's people driving around my street all the time with their black smoke coming out the back of their fucking cars because they don't care how much it costs for gas they got money in their pockets the their money in their jeans, and they're prepared to spend the dollars in order to make whatever their point is. So I think that that's one of the challenges with market-based solutions as opposed to actual regulation-based solutions. So I partly agree with Corey, even though I really don't want to. Corey,

Zain 32:36

Corey, what would you say as it relates to like the political rhetoric here, right? So there's like the policy side of it, which you've like been like, in your case, you think, you know, know this guy's right to maximize profit so to speak but you know what do you think of like the bully pulpit that is rhetoric um or or the the persuasion mechanism that is rhetoric perhaps that's a better way of saying it in order to convince capitalism to go and keep on this track that society you know may suggest is going to be we're going to see more of and open ai and and suncor are two very different examples to be absolutely clear right like they might be a different size of the coin sort of thing right i don't know one trying to connect to

Carter 33:12

to them do Do something that

Zain 33:13

that is perhaps fundamentally should be a for-profit enterprise, but trying to case it in this sort of altruism movement, going even further beyond a B Corp, putting into a nonprofit shell. And then, of course, another, which is a for-profit company saying we're going to actually strip away all the non-for-profit elements within our institution. But on rhetoric, Corey, where would you say you would go if you're the political left on rhetoric against capitalism and big business? Because it's all over the place right now, right? You're seeing some deny that America or North America should be a capitalist institution or an institution writ large. Others go after the regulation argument that you are. Others just say, you know, if we can get iterative improvements to improving capitalism, let's do that. Where would you be on the rhetoric for political gain right now?

Corey 34:03

political gain? Absolutely. I don't, I mean, one of the challenges, it just globally on a million issues is what is going to be politically advantageous is probably not great policy. And you are never going to go wrong, frankly, by taking rounds out of unpopular billionaires, you know, the plutocrats of the world. And, and, and frankly, there it's been some rapacious behavior. So it's not very hard to understand why that would be the case. But you have a situation where if you're a left wing politician and you want to score some cheap points that will have resonance with people across the spectrum you know talk about big business owners talk about you know big capital and you know again given

Corey 34:43

given you know so there's an irony here i've been thinking a bit about this in the past couple of days i i'll just try to unpack it a bit and say i don't really quite know

Corey 34:53

that either a this is particularly unique of an insight or b it gives anywhere to go from here but But one of the challenges right now, I think, on kind of like policy versus populism is that policy-wise, these

Corey 35:06

these things work, right? Capitalism works for maximizing profits. Central banks work. Vaccines work. All of these things work. Like a number of things work. But at the end of the day, for a lot of people, their life isn't working. They're feeling these things are kind of slipping away. way and so when somebody comes and says like yeah it's the central bank you know you fuck them right like we what we need is like bitcoin and that's going to solve all of our problems here well

Corey 35:34

well it's true that central banks work people are feeling like they're not working for them so they've become very nihilistic about policies that make an awful lot of sense and so i pick on central banks because it's like you know crazy right-wingers often go after central banks but i'll say you can make the same argument with corporations left-wingers like to pick on corporations which work they are wonderful at maximizing profits they are wonderful at maximizing efficiencies and sort of you know like think

Corey 36:01

think about the things that exist in our world that cost pennies that five generations ago would have cost fortunes you know like they they work they do work but they're not working for everybody right now and they've allowed the benefits to go to too few people and so that's a big challenge and that's kind of the policy populism challenge here but if you're on the left you sit there and you see that and you say yeah like if we're talking about benefit not going to people that's where all the benefits going right now they're a pinata you can beat the hell out of them and you're going to be pretty popular for it but at the end of the day some of the solutions that become inherent in actions like that i think are very dangerous to economic well-being overall which is why we've somehow got to reverse all of this madness and And it does start with making sure that we all share more broadly from the benefits of these things.

Zain 36:48

Carter, if folks are still listening at the 34-minute mark, we should probably let them know that we did a full hour on the Albert NDP name change, if that's the content they came here for. I mean, a smart host, a competent, a capable host would have probably said that in the first 30 seconds, plug in the Patreon. But Carter, I think this is a really good time, personally. I think this would be the second best time in my mind.

Zain 37:10

Do you agree? Yeah,

Carter 37:10

Yeah, I mean, this is great, Zane. I mean, once again, you've got full control of it. I'm really impressed. Okay,

Zain 37:15

Carter, thank you. I'm really impressed with the entire thing.

Zain 37:17

Thanks for that blinding insight. Carter, okay, I think there's a few things on the board here that I find interesting. So number one is this broader concept of doing it differently. We talk about this in the political realm often. You know, political parties are machines that are designed to win elections. That's it. Don't overcomplicate it. Don't try to do it differently with that machinery, right? That is what the machine should be set up for. It's an interesting parallel with what we've seen here. Interesting conversations on, like, you know, leadership, on individual leaders driving the sort of narrative. I think we got into a nice little deep dive where we got to explore Corey's mind a bit on the future of capitalism as it relates to the left.

Zain 37:57

But I want to come back to governance, Carter. And, like, we've talked quite a bit about boards on the political party side, mainly because of Take Back Alberta here in the last little bit. We've talked about boards, and I think we did a deep dive on political boards a couple years back. But what parallels do you see about over or underestimating board, either role, competency, or power that this example kind of portrays? And just to lay it out there for people, because Corey did, this was a very strange board. It's a group of folks that are, you know, looking after the purse holders, so to speak, of a $90 billion company that is designed with a nonprofit board. So people who don't have shares, don't have equity. equity so design like any non-profit board think of your local why which by the way i sit on the board of right i do not get upside in the why why would i it's a non-profit that doesn't work that way right i don't know if these board directors got paid but i suspect there was very little you know sort of upside for them even on a financial basis beyond and outside of the shares so they're doing this out of their goodwill their generosity maybe their relationship to the ceo or other folks in the broader tech community none of the vcs or funding partners that you had had funding OpenAI's growth were sitting on this board or had access to that information or were involved in the decision to let go of the CEO. So I want to just add some of the context there. But really, Carter, I'm talking about power and influence of boards. What lessons or sort of parallels do you see between politics and what we saw go down this weekend with this really bizarre story?

Carter 39:33

Well, I think the cult of leadership. I think that the individual that is seen to be the power behind the organization, is becoming or or maybe always was more important than the boards and things along those lines i mean there's there's countless examples of companies that are publicly traded that are controlled by a small group of shareholders um because uh the power of the founder or the power of the organization you know the or the the primary that that that person uh or the the the, the family or whatever. I mean, we all watch succession. We all understand this, um, that, that, you know, whether it's set up formally so that they have control or whether their control is seen to be almost mythical. Um, this was just an example of high

Carter 40:23

high levels of control within an organization, uh, that wasn't

Carter 40:29

wasn't perceived by the people who thought they had power. So the board of directors on paper had the power to fire sam altman um

Carter 40:38

turns out i think i think by the end of this story it's it's at the end of this story i don't think they're going to have had they may have had the power to fire him but they're not going to have the power to keep him fired it

Zain 40:49

it is interesting cory because there's a lot of conversation prediction yeah

Carter 40:52

yeah it's another part of prediction i

Zain 40:54

i wish we had the i wish we had the stinger for it cory i mean a couple of things number one stewie husseini would have never let this happen okay you know that carter

Zain 41:01

stewie stewie would have stewie's

Carter 41:03

stewie's always interested in the profit motive that's all he cared always

Zain 41:06

always interested i mean he would have done maybe a couple lines with kendall but outside of that he would have been like kendall i'm gonna fuck you in a bit and that's what's gonna end up happening okay um stewie which

Carter 41:16

which is how we treat the podcast right like can

Corey 41:19

can i can i say like because you opened up this succession bracket here yeah okay

Corey 41:24

okay i i was wondering about this too so you remember in the 2000s when all of a sudden everybody in politics thought they were working in the west wing yes

Corey 41:31

do you kind of feel like part of what's going on right now is everybody in corporate america thinks they're in succession yeah that's like maybe because this is pretty ridiculous shit like oh we're gonna fuck them and we're gonna surprise them with this and no one's gonna see it like this is not the way these things are my non-profit

Zain 41:45

-profit board were somehow found itself and i'm not talking about any of the particular ones i said on a couple but like

Corey 41:51

like i'm not trying

Zain 41:51

trying to target any one of them but if those people found themselves in a situation where we're We're raising – we have a $90 billion market capitalization. We fire the CEO without investigation, without maybe even realizing the fact that his next move might be to either sue us to start his own company for not sharing information, end quote, quote unquote. I mean, it seems like some people here were playing checkers, and maybe they didn't have the skill to play chess sort of thing. And I'm not criticizing

Corey 42:18

criticizing – They're not even playing checkers. They're hitting the board with their

Zain 42:21

their dumb, meaty hands. It's like ridiculous. Well, talk to me then, Corey, about power here, right? Because they've got to do this. And in politics, we often kind of look at the board as an aside, outside of the flashpoints of Take Back Alberta. And this was a couple weeks ago, right? So it's fresh in our minds. They took over the board. Great. We'll forget about this in a couple months. And then boom, they have an ability to do something. They ousted Kenny. They organized to oust Kenny. Now, of course, that was less bored and more organizing. But, you know, there are these sort of moments where we forget their ability, despite their competence, to do certain things. And I think that's such an interesting dynamic that we have in this era of cult of leadership, where it's like, it's Trudeau, or it's Pierre, or it's Danielle, and it's all these people. But there's this board, regardless of what you think of their size, their competence, their makeup, how they got there, that controls some very important aspects of the current ecosystem that we find, whether it's in business or in politics.

Corey 43:19

Well, it's a great point. And, you know, it doesn't matter what – actually, I think political boards are the perfect jumping off point for this, right? Because on paper, the board of a political party has a ton of authority. In practice, the board of a political party does not, right? Like on a day-to-day basis, they simply don't, right? Right. And it's true. I think of organizations, big and small political and non-political corporate nonprofit, whatever it, it actually only matters a little what's on the paper. You only have the power to do the things that says you can have on the paper. If everybody's going to let you do them, like if all of the stakeholders around are going to allow that to occur. And here there were some very powerful stakeholder groups who clearly were disinterested in the board's decision, you know, and let's be clear, the board was set up to be worried about the safety of ai sam altman himself regularly talked about how this was the board's purpose which made it unique and he himself was accountable to this board and this board could fire him right but there were funders there you know the the valuation hadn't gone through but there was estimates of 80 billion us that's a lot of money in canadian coin here right

Corey 44:26

there was also the reality that microsoft had had put in you know 13 billion dollars and and counting for 49 microsoft a massive company one of the world's largest by almost any measure you can imagine had been tooling their entire business towards tools that were created by open ai right like this was not like some sort of idle fling for them this was becoming core to their business that's a kind of power that actually even exceeds the 13 billion that's on the paper there right especially when you think about a town like silicon valley and all of the things that are going on the employees were it sounds like you know not to the person obviously since yeah you know uh ilia suits cover there was one of the people who was going against sam yeah but like the employees seem to have been with sam altman here so this this board seems insanely isolated you know i can only imagine a conversation where there's four board members sitting there and saying well

Corey 45:22

well on paper we're allowed to do this and on

Zain 45:25

paper they hadn't talked to anybody well Well, on paper, the dotted line and the conditionality of terminating a CEO probably existed, right? They're like, if X leads to Y, then like, you know, like, oh my goodness, like that's a fireable offense in like its most one-dimensional term.

Corey 45:42

but it's, you know, but I, you know, I have, we don't know the details here, but I'm trying to imagine like there might, for

Corey 45:49

for a situation like this to occur in a normal, healthy organization, and I will say you can be a normal, healthy organization that has to fire its CEO. For a situation to occur like this in a normal, healthy organization, there would be kind of like months of conversations, critical feedback from the board saying, we're not getting what we need from you here. There would be mediation. There would be people brought in. There would be conversations with the funders, you know, to make sure that there was comfort with it. There would be kind of a seasoning of the employees to allow them to at least see some of these things coming and not have them come out of the blue like this and just rock their world on a random Friday. And none of that seems to have happened. None of that seems to have happened.

Zain 46:27

Carter, what's the parallel you see between the world we often talk about, operate in, in politics, and Corey's point here around the power on paper versus the actual exercising authorities? You've probably witnessed this in your own right, having seen political boards. So, you know, maybe I kind of go down to a baseline question based on your answer around, like, are we overestimating and over-crediting the value that some of these political boards might have? I

Carter 46:55

I mean, I look at the power of a cabinet. The power of a cabinet is so weak right now. It is probably the weakest it's ever been. I just finished reading a book about Churchill and World War II and the cabinet's backs and forths and the challenges that Churchill was having with Lord Halifax during the first month of his prime ministership. And I don't think any of that would exist in today's society. In today's society, it is get on board with the prime minister, get the fuck out of here. And I think that, you know, there are responsive roles in response. The diffusion of responsibility isn't necessarily a bad thing. Having people be responsible for different pieces of oversight is probably pretty good. In politics, we've all been given it up. We've said to Justin Trudeau, you're in charge of the liberals, you're now in charge of the government, you're in charge of your cabinet. You know, people forget that the liberals aren't the government. The cabinet's the government. The prime minister is not the dictator. The cabinet's supposed to be running the government. The prime minister is just the first minister. minister. But in today's society, we've given that away. And we've gone with this cult of, you know, cult of personality. And because I don't know if it was easier or, or what, but even when you compare it to the American frame, right, the American frame that these people were never going to, you know, the president would never campaign, they would never debase themselves that way. And that didn't last because the president there was power to be had. And the The moment there's power to be had, people are going to act to get it. And, you know, in today's society, that means that they are acting to get it from their colleagues within within their own caucuses. And the board of directors, if you will, the cabinet that's supposed to be running our country has

Carter 48:53

now been reduced to a couple of mandate letters and, you know, lining up to meet with the chief of staff to the to the first minister.

Zain 49:02

That's interesting. Carter, taking my interpretation of political boards in a different direction, but I like it around cabinets, so to speak, and their influence. Corey, final thoughts for you, and weave this question in. Are we going to see more of this? And let me define this. This being companies that have that continued social mission that sort of lathers on even heavier than we're seeing before, for-profit companies cased with the non-profits, kind of like we've seen here with Sam Altman and others. There's this sort of general movement of wearing your politics, wearing your advocacy, your social mission on your capitalist sleeve. Do you feel like that era is coming to an end? Do you feel like you're sort of thinking around like let it be in its more defined box is coming to kind of back into into vogue? I'm kind of curious to get your thoughts on this, both from your strategist perspective and also sort of your business hat, so to speak, as well.

Corey 49:54

mean, maybe we're at a it's time to call bullshit moment here. Because if you have a situation where a board, which in theory has all of the powers to do exactly what they did for exactly the purpose they did it, right? The entire purpose of the board was to set up to make sure AI was being created in a safe way. That's the entire reason this organization exists. And

Corey 50:15

this was the decision they made, that they were no longer comfortable with the communication they were getting and that AI was being created in a safe way with all of these launch of commercial products being rushed to market. That's what the reporting is, again, as of like, well, now 9.50 or whatever mountain time here.

Corey 50:32

But this is hardly unique. I mean, it is such an extreme manifestation. And the fact that they can't even hold when all of those conditions favor them should make us really question a lot of the other initiatives we see out there. There are CSR initiatives in corporations that maybe don't actually care that much about CSR. DEI initiatives in organizations that seem to only be giving lip service to DEI. Like it does seem when the rubber hits the road, do these things actually matter to these private corporations? I think you need, I

Corey 51:02

I think you need stronger regulation, because it's becoming incredibly clear through this and other case studies that exist all over the place, that relying on goodwill of a corporation, which is an organization that is just geared entirely towards creating profit, it's just kind of a shitty idea. Like, it's just, it's a foolish idea. And so, you know, I'm not a big like regulate everybody to death kind of guy, but I think we need to be very thoughtful and very purposeful and be willing to regulate where it makes sense to regulate to set a floor that we insist on as a society. Each

Carter 51:34

Each one of these corporations has their own rules and regulations in their policies. It's not like they allow their own staff to just run roughshod through the organization. There are rules and regulations within the corporations to protect the corporation. There should be rules and regulations that are put in place to protect society. That's just common sense, but we've moved away from it too much. And we're asking these corporations to do that work themselves, and they're not going to do it. They're not going to put in the rules that we need.

Zain 52:09

I was going to spend the rest of the time on Preston Manning's report, but now Corey's opened up something that I think is way more interesting. So how about I do this? How long is

Carter 52:18

is this podcast? Carter,

Zain 52:18

Carter, this is a three-hour. Hey, Carter, very quickly, Preston Manning's report. Give me your one-word answer so I can go back to the topic Corey brought up. uh

Carter 52:24

uh the next the next horror for uh for alberta is preston manning oh

Zain 52:30

oh well thank you cory any any quick comments on that before uh before i go back to the way more interesting question you've just put on i mean utterly

Zain 52:36

utterly expected perfect great so that segment's done um cory you mentioned dei can i talk to you about that for a second would

Corey 52:44

talking about that for half a second i mean absolutely would

Zain 52:48

would you have that also be regulated Like, do you not feel like the, I shouldn't say the generosity, but do you not feel like the actual market forces of employees wanting to go to a place that has these policies, that has this environment, that has these sort of things? And the reason I ask is there is a political backdrop here. DEI in the United States is at an assault. We've seen it here a bit with the UCP, right, with kind of mentioning some of their institutions. But in the United States, we're seeing this as part of the anti-woke movement. It's being put into it. I'm kind of curious how you would think about this as it relates to your premise of like smart regulation against corporations, because at some point you might be arguing for not giving them any, not

Zain 53:34

not even room, but any incentive to do anything voluntarily, even if it could have net positive benefits to society. And

Zain 53:40

And I think DEI

Corey 53:40

DEI might be in that category. Yeah.

Corey 53:42

Yeah. So let me be really clear and I'll work backwards on your points here.

Corey 53:47

You said a floor, there will still be corporations that exceed the floor. There will always be corporations that allow you, especially nowadays, like it's becoming so much more the case that you pick these brands because they represent who you are. And if you want to represent who you are in a certain light, there'll be people who go above and beyond. on my point is if you expect the floor to be something that everybody just kind of accept you know if you want a floor that's above the regulatory floor you're kidding yourself that's never going to happen these things are not going to just occur and so you've got to accept that and you've got to set the floor where the floor has got to be set and that's a societal conversation that we can have when i talk about things like dei right and where i question perhaps some some corporations overall commitment to them.

Corey 54:30

The reality is there are corporations right now who are backing away from those initiatives where, you know, all white male boards, you know, despite being large publicly traded corporations. And, you know, I just question whether like, if we've got a problem with that, then I think we got to do something about that. We can't just sort of assume that some corporation is going to do this because it's in the goodness of their heart. Now, do you want to go there? Do you not want to go there? That's an interesting policy conversation i for sure am interested in entertaining and i'm not necessarily saying that it's like the next big thing that everybody's got to go on here my point is simply this

Corey 55:05

if in open ai situation where they are set up and this is their mandate and this is their structure and everything around them is built around the idea they are going to do this one thing but that one thing got in the way of some people's profit and they drop the one thing how much confidence do you have in people making these things happen anywhere else under any other set of circumstances here so if you want to make sure that corporations are inclusive you're

Corey 55:31

you're going to have to set some rules around inclusivity if you want to make sure corporations are representative you're going to have to set some rules around representation you cannot just allow kind of like this this march of history like you know progress is progress is not going to just take over this for you you've got to actually step in there and set some guidelines carter

Zain 55:49

carter your thought your Your thoughts on this, especially around DE&I, I'm kind of curious if you've got any thoughts. We've seen the assault from a pure political basis happen in the U.S. We see it creeping in here. There's an argument that is being made by the right and certainly some members of the center-left, let's be honest, that's saying that we went too fast, too hard on DE&I, that it felt like it was being forced down to people, that it was trying to be a conversation, that we were trying to compress what we hadn't done in the last 50 years in a matter of a couple of years post-2020. There is that loud criticism that you hear, even with people who consider themselves, quote unquote, allies. Your thoughts on this as it kind of enters this broader sort of smart regulation conversation? Go ahead, white guys. Yeah, go ahead.

Zain 56:30

Oh, okay. Corey, the other white guy wants to speak more. No,

Carter 56:33

No, here's the thing. You

Carter 56:36

You know, I think that our society is so perversely

Carter 56:40

perversely out of step with equality that there is no other choice but to say we are going to regulate this. um you

Carter 56:52

has been no recognition of systemic racism there's been no recognition of systemic sexism there's been no recognition uh of issues that plague us and will will continue to haunt us uh through you know it's no it's not lost on me that a lot of these companies that are absolutely spectacularly successful formed you know by immigrants put together by people who are coming from the quote-unquote outside um you

Carter 57:19

you know i i think that the the the story of inclusion the story of of uh you know welcoming and allowing people to succeed is so perverted in north america especially um

Carter 57:35

you have families that have seen poverty their entire lives reaching back to slavery and this idea that we're just going to solve it one day just by saying, well, we hope it will work itself out. It's not going to work itself out. We have to regulate. We have to push for it. And when someone says, well, you know, we don't need this type of thing because look over here where we've done, you know, Elon Musk is succeeding and he's an immigrant. You know, it's just not going to be good enough. You have to, we have to regulate certain things if society is going to get better because Because asking human beings in all our fallibility to do

Carter 58:16

do that work, to make things better on their own, it's just going to fail because we don't have, we're just not, we're not good enough. So let's recognize our fallibility and do what's right. I don't understand why the big deal. I mean, you

Carter 58:33

know, immigration's been our great, our

Carter 58:36

our great superpower that comes with this enormous weakness of racism. And fixing that, leveling the playing field, just

Carter 58:44

just makes everybody stronger. Now, individuals might lose out.

Carter 58:49

Individuals will probably lose out. But society gets stronger sometimes. And it's about society that government and all of us need to be focused on.

Zain 59:00

Corey, you got thoughts on this?

Corey 59:03

i got lots of thoughts here you know so

Corey 59:06

so i should say that there are studies that show that diverse boards have economic benefit right they're less likely to have these blind spots you could imagine if open ai had a board that was diverse in ways maybe maybe not ethnic maybe not cultural but had different viewpoints it wouldn't have made some of the mistakes it made you don't want boards to be kind of monochromatic

Corey 59:25

monochromatic in any sense right they they should be taking in interests and viewpoints from all sorts of different ways, right? Diverse boards tend to do better. However, boards don't tend to naturally want to go there for, you know, reasons tend to do more of like a click nature and whatnot, right? There are other initiatives of DEI where the economic benefit to a corporation is less obvious, like creating scholarships for employees for DEI and things of that. And I think those are the things that are most particularly at threat.

Zain 59:54

We're going to leave that segment there. Carter, moving on to our final segment, in our over under in our lightning round oh

Carter 59:58

oh thank god i didn't get canceled this is a great day for me that's

Corey 1:00:02

that's that's kind of an after the oh

Corey 1:00:04

okay yeah like we we don't yeah yeah

Corey 1:00:06

yeah carter no that's

Zain 1:00:07

fine it's it's yeah it's not once again this is a reminder for the i don't know how many how many times we've had to remind carter um this is not uh live on air

Zain 1:00:15

carter well this is not one of the oh we lost the radio gig a long time ago after you you dressed down that remember you guys

Carter 1:00:21

guys when When we used to do live television.

Carter 1:00:26

That was a full-lived pleasure.

Carter 1:00:27

pleasure. I still do

Zain 1:00:27

do it weekly, multiple times. You know, it's good.

Carter 1:00:29

Yeah, I don't anymore. I don't know why.

Carter 1:00:35

do. Okay, good. Thanks,

Corey 1:00:36

Yeah, you were fired.

Carter 1:00:38

Thanks. Very helpful. Very helpful, Corey.

Zain 1:00:40

Hey, Carter, are you in or out on the Michael on Michael violence that we're now seeing, as reported by Fife and Chase in the Globe and Mail? So we're seeing that Michael Spavor is blaming his fellow prisoner, Michael Kovrig for Chinese detention, alleging that he was used for intelligence gathering. This is quite the story. I've been, you know, as much as this episode has been in service of Corey Hogan's obsession of Sam Alton and OpenAI this weekend, the story I've been following is the Michael on Michael violence. Carter, I've got no question other than to say, are you in or out on it for the pure drama that this is producing?

Carter 1:01:13

I'm out. It seems to me that China was the one who was actually holding them okay

Zain 1:01:19

cory carter's no fun are

Zain 1:01:21

are you in or out on this particular canadian on canadian uh foreign drama that we're that we're now seeing it's

Corey 1:01:28

it's the greatest i i'm entirely in on it i can't wait to see who gets dragged into it next year i love that global affairs canada already had to say something like it's

Zain 1:01:37

it's yeah this is this is not yeah exactly so

Carter 1:01:38

so i'm the only grown-up in the room suddenly

Carter 1:01:40

suddenly i yeah no carter yeah

Zain 1:01:42

yeah no what is going on uh

Zain 1:01:45

uh cory is Is this a good time to tell Carter that the board of the Strategist Media Corporation is now letting him go? Is this an appropriate time?

Corey 1:01:52

Well, we'll get Annalise on to read the statement, too.

Zain 1:01:55

Yeah, that's good. That's good. She'll do it. She'll do it. Carter, you just don't fit our DEI policy anymore. I'm

Zain 1:02:00

I'm really sorry. I've been expecting it.

Carter 1:02:02

it. I've been expecting

Carter 1:02:03

it. I'm tired anyway as these shows go too long now. I'm looking for a snooze. I'm tired. I want to go to bed. I've

Zain 1:02:09

I've got one more question for both of you. I'm not going to make this a long over-under lightning round. Corey,

Zain 1:02:14

Chrystia Freeland is ready and set to represent the fall fiscal update Tuesday. We're hearing through leaks, as we often do, that this is going to talk a lot about the cost of living. This is going to also maybe potentially have some crackdowns for short-term rentals like Airbnb. We're hearing those sort of stories come out, at least in the media ahead of Tuesday. Any advice you'd have for Chrystia Freeland as she puts out this fiscal update? She puts out this broader story that the government is trying to paint regarding the country's finances, the economy. What advice would you have for her? Carter, same question coming to you in a moment.

Corey 1:02:52

Well, you know, when you put out a fiscal update, there are a lot of communications documents that go with it. And if you don't have the communications chops, you can head over to Canva.com and use promo code Dave45 to develop

Corey 1:03:04

develop all of the materials you need to support your fiscal update.

Zain 1:03:08

That was really good. And then once again, that domain is canva

Corey 1:03:12

.me. Oh, it's canva.me. Okay. That's why you do the reads usually. Canva

Zain 1:03:15

Canva.me slash day 45. I mean, listen, tell you something. I

Zain 1:03:17

mean, Ramadan's coming up.

Zain 1:03:20

And if you need to make cards

Corey 1:03:21

cards for Ramadan, yeah,

Zain 1:03:23

yeah, Ramadan posters, you could do that. If you believe in something else, you can also make Ramadan

Corey 1:03:29

Ramadan content. You can take a Ramadan poster. You can also make Ramadan content.

Zain 1:03:32

You could modify it.

Corey 1:03:34

Yeah, absolutely. Honestly, I don't know. So I don't – I think when you think about this fiscal update, it's hard to imagine anything that's going to change the macro narratives that are kicking around right now. It would have to be one hell of a shift. And the very fact that it is about cost of living is ultimately – well, it has to be done because that's such a top issue for Canadians.

Corey 1:03:55

You've been government since 2015. You're wearing a lot of cost of living. This is kind of defensive ball.

Zain 1:04:02

Carter, any advice you'd –

Zain 1:04:06

Carter, any advice you'd have for Christopher Freeland as she—oh,

Zain 1:04:09

yeah, sorry, Carter. Yes, any advice you'd give.

Carter 1:04:12

The hard thing for me is, I mean, I get why they're going after Airbnb and short-term rentals. I understand that. But it's a service that Canadians like and understand and want to use. um i understand kind of the the idea that you know the there

Carter 1:04:33

real term real real world consequences for taking inventory out of long-term rentals um but i i would propose that coming after them with uh regulation isn't necessarily a way to go after it i would probably recommend at least taking a look at going after this with uh some sweeteners you know the good old-fashioned send checks to canadians uh i'm becoming apparently less fiscally conservative every day cory

Zain 1:05:01

cory um final question for you do you think anyone uh liked this episode uh

Zain 1:05:06

uh i did yeah

Carter 1:05:07

yeah it was great

Corey 1:05:08

that matters there's a little bit too much zane velge content for me but otherwise it was pretty good i

Carter 1:05:12

i thought zane stuff i mean it's uh it's nice it's

Zain 1:05:15

you can you You can give your review afterwards on our WhatsApp chat. We're going to leave it there. That's a wrap on episode 1269 of The Strategist. My name is Zane Belchuk. With me, as always, Corey Hogan, Stephen Carter, and we'll see you next time.

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