E148: McCarthy ousted, border chaos, Cruise's robotaxi "accident" & more

00:00:00.000 | How was your colonoscopy? Oh, well, that was a talk about

00:00:04.160 | Uranus. Talk about my anus. Have you guys had yours recently?

00:00:08.400 | Who's had a colonoscopy? I have mine in December. My first one.

00:00:11.600 | Yeah, my first one. Yeah, I was delinquent on mine, too. They

00:00:14.520 | used to be 50. And they moved the age down to 45. Yeah, they

00:00:17.720 | didn't move the age down. Freeberg. Have you had one yet?

00:00:19.560 | That's a yes. We got a yes. Do you have you had yours? I'm due

00:00:24.720 | by the way, I got a report because actually, sacks, you did

00:00:27.120 | have one. And they found a bunch of DeSantis merchandise up

00:00:30.720 | there. DeSantis had a DeSantis pin, tons of DeSantis stuff

00:00:34.400 | right up your ass. At our age, we should be four for four on

00:00:38.680 | the colonoscopies. We're one for four. They got to get that stat

00:00:41.360 | up every week. I want to check in here. Propofol, shout out

00:00:45.080 | Michael Jackson is the greatest drug ever. I counted 15 seconds.

00:00:48.440 | I was knocked out. I woke up. And the next thing I know I was

00:00:52.000 | in the recovery area. Were you groggy? I was not groggy. No, I

00:00:56.200 | was fine. You literally don't remember anything. No pain, no

00:00:58.840 | suffering. I did. How were you able to have a regular schedule

00:01:01.600 | the rest of the day? Not really. So I don't want to dissuade

00:01:05.040 | anybody from having this. But you do have to take a drink

00:01:07.800 | called prep, which clears you out. And when I say clears you

00:01:11.360 | out, I love that. Oh, I love it. Yeah, I hit a record low weight.

00:01:14.800 | I'm 168. Now. So that was the one benefit. How much weight did

00:01:17.800 | you lose? three pounds? Maybe? Come on. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

00:01:22.000 | Were you working when you were prepping? No, I was working when

00:01:25.120 | I was prepping. So Monday when I was prepping, but then

00:01:27.040 | literally, you take this prep stuff an hour later, you're you

00:01:31.000 | need to be ready to evacuate at any time. Normally, the diarrhea

00:01:35.120 | is coming out of your mouth. Absolutely. Absolutely.

00:01:38.200 | Well, there's your call.

00:01:39.640 | All right, everybody, welcome to another amazing sort of the

00:02:00.280 | all in podcast episode 148. The docket is absurd. The number of

00:02:06.080 | lawsuits and the amount of news that has happened in just the

00:02:09.960 | last week has been insane. But we want to at the top of the

00:02:13.840 | show, do a quick correction, right? It's an all in

00:02:16.800 | correction. If we make a mistake here, we don't hide it in the

00:02:19.480 | show notes. We just talk about it right up front. Saks, you

00:02:21.960 | were in touch with the air table CEO, Howie Lou, who's been a

00:02:26.040 | guest on this week in startups, I'm gonna have him on again,

00:02:27.920 | actually soon. Maybe you could just discuss what we got wrong,

00:02:33.080 | and how we got it wrong. And then what the correct facts are

00:02:35.640 | about air table just quickly here at the top of the show.

00:02:37.600 | Yeah, well, we had a segment a couple weeks ago, we were

00:02:39.800 | talking about these high price late stage unicorn rounds

00:02:42.720 | needing to get revalued. And the IPO of Instacart was a good

00:02:47.360 | example of this where yes, an IPO did about 10 billion, but

00:02:50.720 | the last private round was at 39 billion. So there is a big wave

00:02:54.360 | of revaluations or down rounds coming. And we cited some

00:03:00.560 | numbers off the internet regarding air table. As it

00:03:04.240 | turns out, not everything on the internet is true.

00:03:06.480 | You're talking about specific journalists might have gotten it

00:03:09.800 | wrong.

00:03:10.240 | We would say this is actually a tweet storm on x that from a

00:03:14.560 | financial account that, you know, appeared on the surface

00:03:17.400 | to be correct. And in fact, it did have some correct

00:03:20.200 | information, but it was outdated. It was stale. So just

00:03:22.920 | the quick correction here is that the the amount of ARR that

00:03:26.840 | we cited, which I think was around 150 million was accurate

00:03:31.240 | as of the time they did the last round, but that was like three

00:03:34.160 | years ago. Furthermore, the growth rate that was cited,

00:03:38.000 | which I think was around 15% that was off that was off by

00:03:41.080 | about a three x multiple. So when you put all these things

00:03:46.000 | together, I wasn't able to get the exact numbers. But if you

00:03:49.400 | just do a little bit of napkin math here, my guess is that air

00:03:53.600 | table is somewhere in the half a billion of ARR club with pretty

00:04:00.240 | decent growth. And if you look at the public comps for that, I

00:04:04.640 | think the public comes to be something like a Monday, you

00:04:07.520 | know, which is doing five to 600 million of ARR coming off a 50%

00:04:14.200 | growth rate, maybe forecasting 30% for the next year, that

00:04:18.360 | company has been hovering around the seven or $8 billion valuation

00:04:21.680 | range. 12x. Yeah, the claim that was made on x was that air table

00:04:25.760 | wasn't even worth 1.4 billion that is raised in VC money. I

00:04:30.440 | think that's way off. I mean, yeah. And furthermore, you know,

00:04:33.680 | what we heard is that air table still has something like two

00:04:36.240 | thirds of the money that is raised in the bank. So look, is

00:04:39.600 | air table worth the 11 billion that it was valued at at the

00:04:42.800 | peak? Probably that's not what the public comps indicate. When

00:04:47.600 | I be a buyer, personally at roughly half that price, for

00:04:50.480 | sure, for sure. And I think it'll have a nice IPO at some

00:04:54.360 | point when they decide they want to do it. So just an important

00:04:56.920 | reminder for everybody is, you know, listen, if information is

00:05:00.280 | on the interwebs, it may not be correct. But the top news story

00:05:04.640 | in the country is unequivocally, Kevin McCarthy being ousted as

00:05:10.680 | Speaker of the House on Tuesday, he was voted out in a 216 to 210

00:05:14.720 | vote, with eight far right Republicans joining all of the

00:05:18.960 | Democrats. So those eight GOP members include or led by Matt

00:05:25.040 | Gates, obviously a group of I guess what would be best

00:05:27.760 | described sacks as tea party s members of the GOP contingent,

00:05:34.560 | they care mostly about spending and curtailing spending. Am I

00:05:37.640 | correct? Don't forget all the Democrats. Well, yeah, I'm

00:05:40.880 | putting the Democrats on already counting them. I'm just talking

00:05:42.840 | about the eight who made this tip over the media is trying to

00:05:45.080 | portray them as these far right, you know, wingers. And I don't

00:05:48.600 | think you can actually say that because I don't think Nancy Mace

00:05:50.760 | fits in that group. I think she does care about spending, but

00:05:53.320 | she's not just like,

00:05:54.640 | right to care about spending. I mean, far right to me would be

00:05:56.880 | well, that's exactly right. I mean, anything that the media

00:05:58.840 | doesn't like they label far right. But I think you know,

00:06:02.680 | Nancy Mace is a good example of somebody who is very concerned

00:06:06.680 | about spending discipline, but is not like a MAGA type

00:06:09.920 | Republican.

00:06:10.600 | But what is the and just to just refine this one more time before

00:06:15.520 | I keep going, those eight would the common thread would be

00:06:18.640 | control spending we're at we have out of control spending is

00:06:21.240 | is the reason we're voting a no vote for Kevin McCarthy.

00:06:25.040 | I think there were a couple other pieces of this. If you

00:06:27.200 | listen to Nancy Mace, some of the other people that were

00:06:29.720 | involved here, a lot of the issue comes down to trust. They

00:06:33.560 | felt like they could no longer trust Kevin McCarthy, they felt

00:06:36.280 | like the things that he had told them in private were not

00:06:40.280 | matching up with the things that he would then later do, or that

00:06:43.400 | he would say, in public or that he would tell the Biden

00:06:46.440 | administration. So I think that main issues were, well, I think

00:06:51.040 | there's a couple. One was on spending, he had promised that

00:06:55.320 | he would stop doing these giant omnibus spending bills where

00:06:58.200 | everything would be lumped into one bill, you get like 24 hours

00:07:01.200 | to read it, and then you got to vote up or down on whether you

00:07:04.240 | pass this giant spending bill or shut down the government,

00:07:07.000 | everyone feels forced to vote for it. He had promised to do

00:07:09.600 | single subject spending bills.

00:07:11.280 | So military education, welfare, whatever.

00:07:14.200 | Yeah, that goes through a regular budget process. So they

00:07:17.240 | felt like he had broke his promise on that. I think also

00:07:19.560 | on the issue of Ukraine, there were some trust issues there

00:07:23.560 | because what he was telling Republicans in private was not

00:07:27.360 | what he was telling the Biden administration in private where

00:07:30.280 | he was telling the Biden administration, don't worry,

00:07:32.080 | we're gonna get the Ukraine funding through. But then he was

00:07:35.480 | sounding different notes with various Republicans. And I think

00:07:38.880 | his true feelings on the matter came out in this press

00:07:42.720 | conference he did after he was ousted, in which he goes on this

00:07:46.640 | long rant about how Putin's the second coming of Adolf Hitler.

00:07:50.560 | And if we don't stop him now, he's going to be you know,

00:07:53.080 | marching into Paris. And I mean, it was sort of this like

00:07:56.280 | unhinged second grade American history style, a view of the

00:08:01.320 | war, which regardless of what your view is on it, I think it

00:08:04.560 | expressed his true feelings on the matter, which is that when

00:08:08.680 | push came to shove, he's more hawkish than Joe Biden. On the

00:08:12.440 | issue of Ukraine, he feels that Biden has not done enough. It's

00:08:15.640 | safe to say that that position is now very out of step with the

00:08:18.520 | Republican caucus. So he is pushing a view on Ukraine that

00:08:24.360 | is now very out of step. Moreover, I think that if he had

00:08:27.960 | just acted as an honest broker on the issue, which is to say,

00:08:30.720 | Listen, I'm just going to represent the views my caucus,

00:08:32.600 | my caucus is divided on the issue, I'm just going to let

00:08:35.240 | them have an up or down vote on it, then I think he could have

00:08:39.080 | survived on that issue. But instead, again, I think he was

00:08:42.400 | trying to manipulate things in a direction of continuing Ukraine

00:08:45.640 | funding, regardless of the views of his caucus.

00:08:48.760 | Gates wants to end CRS continuing resolutions, those

00:08:53.600 | extend the funding deadline from October 1 of holidays, claiming

00:08:56.640 | this buys Congress time to lump all those individual promotion

00:09:00.080 | bills into the omnibus bill, as you correctly pointed out. Gates

00:09:03.240 | wants to end that practice and return to regular order passage

00:09:06.480 | of individual annual spending bills, not the omnibus.

00:09:08.800 | The context that I think is important, that I think is that

00:09:12.080 | the American public should understand is, how is this

00:09:14.960 | actually supposed to work so that we don't normalize what

00:09:18.000 | these CRS are. So the way that it's supposed to work is that

00:09:22.160 | Congress is authorized by law to create 12 spending bills a year.

00:09:27.720 | And each of those bills have to map to the large parts of the

00:09:32.200 | government. So there's a military bill, there's an

00:09:34.440 | education bill, there's a, you know, HHS bill, etc, etc. And

00:09:39.640 | those are supposed to be negotiated on the House floor

00:09:43.120 | and passed, the Senate is allowed to do a version of the

00:09:46.600 | same. If those two things are different, meaning the Senate

00:09:50.040 | doesn't take the house bill and creates their own, the law says

00:09:53.320 | that you have to create what's called a conference. And a group

00:09:56.560 | of people, half senators and half Congress people sit in a

00:10:01.120 | room, hash out and mediate a resolution. And that is what

00:10:04.720 | goes to the President's desk to be signed. That's how it used to

00:10:08.440 | be done. But about a decade ago, all of that broke down. And now

00:10:14.800 | what happens is you have this thing that Saks mentioned, which

00:10:17.880 | is called the CR, which is essentially a backdoor. It's

00:10:22.200 | this release valve that is supposed to be a in emergency

00:10:25.840 | break glass type measure that has become fundamentally

00:10:29.640 | normalized. And I think what's important to call out is what

00:10:34.040 | happened here isn't getting the just attention because it's

00:10:37.600 | being characterized on party lines, and not actually being

00:10:40.800 | characterized with how America is legally supposed to work as

00:10:43.840 | defined in the Constitution. So the Congress is supposed to pass

00:10:48.520 | 12 spending bills a year, it's then supposed to get negotiated

00:10:52.360 | or approved by the Senate, and then it should go to the

00:10:54.160 | President. When you override that with these continuing

00:10:58.080 | resolutions. This is the issue that freeberg has been talking

00:11:01.520 | about you balloon, the deficit, you balloon the debt, you have

00:11:05.280 | all kinds of pork barrel spending, there's zero

00:11:07.400 | accountability, the bullets cost $6,000, the umbrella holders

00:11:11.400 | cost 15,000. All of this nonsense that just brings us

00:11:15.080 | closer and closer to some sort of default or economic

00:11:18.520 | contagion. So I actually look at this issue, not as Republican

00:11:23.000 | versus Democrat, the far right wing, I think that's misguided

00:11:26.920 | interpretation by the mainstream media. I think what this is, is

00:11:30.360 | the first chance in a while, where you're not allowed to pass

00:11:33.400 | a continuing resolution, where you will have to propose 12

00:11:37.920 | bills, the way the law says you're supposed to. And what

00:11:42.440 | that'll mean is that you'll have to negotiate a compromise to get

00:11:45.720 | those 12 bills passed. Now, what's crazy is, the Senate

00:11:50.360 | actually has six of those bills on their desk, and they haven't

00:11:52.840 | even negotiated it. And I think the reason is because they know

00:11:56.680 | that the CR is always in the offing. But if this continuing

00:12:00.160 | resolution is not allowed, because you fired the speaker,

00:12:03.440 | then they'll have to negotiate those bills. And part of what

00:12:08.040 | McCarthy did to get elected was say, we will return to the law

00:12:12.400 | and not use the in emergency break class. And I think that's

00:12:16.840 | what's not, it's not understood. Well, I think by Americans, as

00:12:19.840 | that is the actual process. We haven't been doing it for a

00:12:23.040 | decade. And I'm not a fan of gates. But I'm glad that

00:12:27.400 | somebody did this, because somebody has to draw a line in

00:12:30.160 | the sand, the Republicans and Democrats equally have been

00:12:32.400 | responsible for breaking the way the American government spends

00:12:35.400 | money. And so this is the best way to fix it.

00:12:37.680 | Freiberg, you agree with what's gone down here and that this is

00:12:41.320 | worth shutting the government down, etc. Or do you think this

00:12:46.080 | is like, where to make the stand? Because you've been very

00:12:49.680 | pro controlling spending, as I and so do you think that this is

00:12:54.040 | the best way to do it? I guess

00:12:55.600 | it's more about the United States is facing a fiscal

00:12:59.040 | emergency. National debt reported by the Treasury

00:13:03.360 | Department increased by $275 billion in a one day report

00:13:07.120 | yesterday, $275 billion in a day, the entire TARP program

00:13:12.360 | during Oh, it was $400 billion. That's how out of control our

00:13:16.400 | fiscal condition is. And this is a function of rising rates, a

00:13:19.000 | function of spending. And, you know, as we talked about many

00:13:23.160 | times over, there's an arithmetic to this, that at

00:13:25.120 | some point, it becomes ever escalating, until you step in

00:13:29.400 | and do something dramatic about it. So I'm hopeful. And I mean,

00:13:33.040 | there's a lot of rhetoric, you can watch all the news channels

00:13:35.480 | and see a lot of these Congress people get on camera and talk

00:13:38.080 | about different things. I think we're seeing more frequently now

00:13:43.800 | people talking about the fiscal crisis that the US is facing.

00:13:48.320 | And that this action provides a mechanism, as Chamath points out

00:13:53.440 | for forcing everyone to the table to figure out how do we

00:13:56.000 | reduce the impact? How do we chart a path to a solution?

00:13:59.720 | Because right now, if you asked anyone in Congress, what's the

00:14:02.360 | strategic plan here, there is not going to be an answer from

00:14:05.280 | anyone. Everyone's got a different point of view. And

00:14:07.720 | everyone's fighting over the deck chairs on the Titanic. And

00:14:12.840 | we've got a more significant problem. We're hitting an

00:14:15.240 | iceberg. So yeah, I'm hopeful that this causes hopefully a

00:14:20.760 | turning point in the never ending spending spree, where

00:14:25.800 | everyone gets elected, and everyone promises to the folks

00:14:29.080 | that they're representing and the folks that funded their

00:14:31.200 | political campaigns, some amount of money back out from the

00:14:34.160 | government, and everyone gets that free money. And at some

00:14:37.480 | point, something's got to turn around, or the whole thing kind

00:14:40.160 | of goes down. So hopefully, this is that moment. I don't know

00:14:43.080 | sacks eating. By the way, if the government shut down for weeks

00:14:46.200 | and months, to try and figure this out, and for everyone to

00:14:49.240 | get aligned with here's the long range strategic plan presented

00:14:52.760 | to the American people on how we prevent the US from either

00:14:56.840 | inflation or bankruptcy, then I think everyone will feel like it

00:15:01.560 | was worth it.

00:15:02.160 | sacks has been tons of speculation about what this is

00:15:04.320 | what's what this is actually about. Is it about Ukraine? Is

00:15:07.720 | it about out of control spending? Is it about Matt

00:15:11.080 | Gates, and Kevin McCarthy having some sort of personal grudge

00:15:14.360 | against each other? What do you what do you think is at the

00:15:16.000 | core of this sacks?

00:15:17.440 | Well, probably all the above, but I think it's fundamentally a

00:15:20.920 | rejection of the status quo. Kevin McCarthy, if nothing else

00:15:23.800 | is a figure of the status quo. I mean, he's worked for 20 years

00:15:26.640 | through the system. He's a great fundraiser. I actually attended

00:15:30.120 | an event for him down the street here. Of course, all the donors

00:15:33.080 | love him. And look, I like Kevin McCarthy, I've contributed to

00:15:37.280 | Kevin McCarthy. But at the end of the day, I'm not sure that

00:15:40.760 | Kevin McCarthy is a guy who's going to get us out of this

00:15:43.240 | mess. And the final problem is he's just too conciliatory. And

00:15:48.360 | the idea that you're going to impose spending discipline and

00:15:51.080 | get us out of the budgetary mess that we're in the idea that

00:15:54.560 | you're going to make that omelet without breaking a few eggs, I

00:15:56.560 | think is just kind of silly. So I think we need a tougher

00:16:00.720 | speaker who's going to actually live up to the promises of

00:16:04.080 | stopping these ominous bills going back to single subject

00:16:07.640 | bills, who is going to represent the views of the majority of the

00:16:12.440 | Republican caucus on, you know, indefinite, infinite Ukraine

00:16:16.120 | spending, because he's kind of off center of the Republican

00:16:18.880 | Party on that.

00:16:19.800 | Why can't the Republican Party be in unison on this is explain

00:16:24.840 | what the what's the rift inside the the GOP right now?

00:16:28.080 | Well, the GOP actually has debates in this party. What you

00:16:31.320 | see is the Democrats are in total lockstep, and they just

00:16:33.600 | support whatever is the status quo. But the Republicans

00:16:37.120 | actually have debates inside their party. And there is a big

00:16:39.400 | debate right now on how we handle Ukraine. And I think

00:16:43.240 | there is growing opposition to a blank check, as long as it takes

00:16:47.280 | policy towards Ukraine, we've already appropriated over 100

00:16:50.280 | billion, what's the return on investment of that? The

00:16:53.040 | counterfeit?

00:16:53.560 | You think that's the key, not the, the CRS?

00:16:57.160 | I think it's both of those issues combined with the fact

00:16:59.920 | that increasingly McCarthy was not seen as an honest broker.

00:17:02.960 | Listen, I think McCarthy could have had whatever views he

00:17:06.080 | wanted to, if he was perceived as somebody who actually

00:17:09.400 | represented a majority of the Republican Caucus. But what

00:17:13.560 | Nancy Mays, what Matt gates, what these others who rebelled

00:17:17.040 | were saying is, listen, what Kevin told us is not what he

00:17:20.520 | did. And I personally witnessed this aspect to McCarthy. Okay,

00:17:24.440 | so when I went to this event down the street here, I heard

00:17:27.480 | him gave this whole pootler rant. And then afterwards, I

00:17:30.320 | came up to him and said, Kevin, what are you talking about? Or

00:17:32.040 | do you really want to cause war three, and all of a sudden he

00:17:35.080 | backpedaled and he started saying these conciliatory

00:17:37.400 | things. And I was like, okay, maybe he just went on this like

00:17:40.920 | to where you know, it was kind of off topic.

00:17:43.480 | He tooted. Did you read to it?

00:17:48.240 | But after I kind of had this like sidebar with him, I'm like,

00:17:53.840 | okay, maybe it's not so bad. Maybe, you know, I think he

00:17:57.200 | promised that he would impose

00:17:58.480 | saying he's in the pocket of special interests. Let's be

00:18:00.920 | clear. Well, I think he

00:18:02.640 | well, no, not quite Jason, because he didn't quote to it.

00:18:04.840 | He's just quoted and he just tweeted.

00:18:06.560 | What I would say is that he was really good in any particular

00:18:12.680 | meeting at saying conciliatory things to get somebody to like

00:18:17.640 | him and to get his back is what you're saying. Well, I mean, I

00:18:21.480 | think a lot of politicians are. So he told me what I wanted to

00:18:24.560 | hear. I think he promised that he would

00:18:25.880 | would you have been with the eight or with the rest? Guys,

00:18:29.200 | the fundamental

00:18:29.760 | concerns with sacks, would you have voted with the eight? Or

00:18:31.680 | would you voted with the rest as if you

00:18:33.120 | I would have voted with the eight? I mean, even though I

00:18:35.240 | like, look, I like McCarthy. He's a likable guy. But again,

00:18:40.320 | I think that press conference he held revealed the truth of it,

00:18:43.120 | which is he was BSing me his real view is that we need to

00:18:47.160 | support Ukraine for as long as it takes. And he told me

00:18:50.280 | something different.

00:18:50.880 | His grand bargain was that he would stop these continuing

00:18:53.840 | resolution pork barrel bills. That was the grand bargain. That

00:18:56.720 | was the thing that said, and if I don't do it, you guys can vote

00:18:59.520 | me out. Do you guys remember this? Yeah, you know, that was

00:19:01.760 | his negotiation. So it this really was kind of like a

00:19:04.720 | fait accompli the minute he decided to pass and yet another

00:19:07.640 | pork barrel bill.

00:19:08.480 | He also seemed kind of frustrated that he just he seemed

00:19:11.080 | like he was spent in dealing with all this. So it's

00:19:13.280 | surprising to me is why the Republican Party allowed Matt

00:19:15.760 | Gates to get all of the attention and to be like the

00:19:19.200 | organizing principle because he's such a loathsome

00:19:22.320 | individual to so many people, both in the Republican Party and

00:19:24.960 | outside. The guy the guy broke a fundamental promise. And that

00:19:29.280 | promise wasn't that provocative. It's just like,

00:19:32.000 | Yeah, we're gonna pass 12 bills, we're just gonna follow the law.

00:19:35.360 | And he couldn't follow the law. And so why doesn't anybody else

00:19:39.280 | stand up? Why does it have to take these eight kind of

00:19:41.120 | coalescing with with the Dems? It's it's really nutty,

00:19:43.920 | actually. Yeah, it's a very strange series of events. And by

00:19:47.720 | the way, I think you make your last point there, this would

00:19:50.400 | not have happened if Hakeem Jeffries didn't send down word

00:19:53.600 | that all the Democrats were supposed to vote with Matt

00:19:56.040 | Gates. I think that this is a vote against their long term

00:20:01.240 | interests. Because the fact the matter is that Kevin McCarthy

00:20:04.160 | ultimately was a very pliant speaker. And he was giving the

00:20:08.080 | Democrats what they wanted on spending on keeping government

00:20:11.640 | funded and open forever at higher and higher rates of

00:20:14.720 | spending. And on Ukraine, they're never going to get

00:20:17.480 | somebody who is more compliant.

00:20:19.000 | To your point, I think what what is really interesting and

00:20:22.320 | hopefully beneficial for America is we've broken the seal on

00:20:26.000 | unseating the speaker interterm if they kind of like violate a

00:20:31.880 | handful of these defined things. And I hope one of these things

00:20:34.840 | is the best thing we could do for America is just force all of

00:20:39.280 | these folks in Congress to negotiate 12 bills a year. Keep

00:20:42.560 | them busy, focus on those bills, get to like a compromise, get

00:20:47.120 | it to the Senate, get it voted, get it to the President's

00:20:49.120 | assignment. That's it. If they if they just did that, we would

00:20:53.080 | probably spend a third to half of less than we do now.

00:20:56.720 | This is Gates, the winner in all this to see it look like

00:20:59.360 | by the way, just just so you guys know, like when you try to

00:21:01.280 | propose elements of a bill, right in one of those real

00:21:03.520 | bills, okay, it has to go to the CBO and it has to get scored.

00:21:07.640 | Right. So for example, we've tried to propose certain aspects

00:21:10.520 | of legislation. And no matter whatever we think about it,

00:21:14.240 | there at least is an independent body that scores it and says,

00:21:18.680 | here's the x your cost, the y your cost, here's the benefits.

00:21:21.760 | And so you get a very clear sense and a transparent sense

00:21:24.040 | that's published everybody about what this is. In CR, you can

00:21:27.480 | avoid all of that stuff. There is no close study of any of this

00:21:34.800 | stuff. And you know, David is right, you get it on a Thursday

00:21:38.960 | night at like 8pm. And you vote Friday at six, you know, or like

00:21:43.280 | at midday. How is anybody supposed to approve a

00:21:46.160 | multitrillion dollar package? Logically, you know, it's

00:21:48.840 | riddled with nonsense.

00:21:49.840 | And it makes no sense that you don't break up the work and do

00:21:52.440 | it thoughtfully each time. I guess, should they change this

00:21:56.800 | ability for one member to propose a resolution to remove

00:22:00.320 | the sitting speaker? Yeah,

00:22:01.880 | it's comically easy to vacate the speaker based on the rules

00:22:05.040 | they passed. However, I think it's important to understand why

00:22:07.920 | that rule happened. It happened because McCarthy was so

00:22:10.240 | desperate to become speaker. If you go back to the history of

00:22:14.080 | this thing. McCarthy was actually passed over for speaker

00:22:17.440 | back in 2015. When he made this gaffe on TV about the Benghazi

00:22:22.680 | select committee being set up to hurt Hillary's poll numbers.

00:22:25.440 | Obviously, that wasn't an admission that helped

00:22:27.960 | Republicans. And he only got the job this year, by making it so

00:22:31.800 | easy to take it away from him. And remember, they did like 15

00:22:34.400 | rounds of voting. So this is the problem. Frankly, one of the

00:22:37.840 | problems with McCarthy is he has a little bit too desperate to

00:22:40.240 | have the job. Sometimes when you get a guy who is so desperate

00:22:44.200 | for a job, they're not that effective in it, because they're

00:22:46.440 | too worried about it being taken away. What you want is a guy

00:22:50.080 | who's like, look, take it or leave it. I could do this job or

00:22:52.600 | not do this job. That's the only way you're gonna get somebody

00:22:54.760 | tough in the job. I think the guy they should look to right

00:22:56.960 | now would be Jim Jordan. I think Jim Jordan would be excellent.

00:22:59.400 | Because at the end of the day, you want a speaker who's going

00:23:03.560 | to be fear not loved, like Nancy Pelosi, quite frankly, you need

00:23:07.760 | a Republican speaker who's going to be tough, who doesn't give a

00:23:10.520 | shit if you like him or not. I mean, this is I think Kevin's

00:23:13.280 | downfall is that he cared too much about people liking him. As

00:23:16.600 | a result, in the room, he would always tell you something that

00:23:20.520 | you liked. But the problem is that he can't deliver on that.

00:23:23.440 | Yeah, so let's get ready to move on to the topic. But just a

00:23:25.400 | final question here. Do you guys think a shutdown in a couple of

00:23:28.720 | weeks, because that's how long the extension is would be

00:23:31.640 | productive for the country if it if it becomes the backstop

00:23:35.200 | against out of control spending?

00:23:36.200 | If it stops the CR process, it'll be effective to the tune

00:23:39.400 | of above $500 billion. It'll be half a trillion dollars

00:23:44.080 | effective. So the a couple of weeks of the government not

00:23:49.080 | spending money, meaning if you if you kill the omnibus bill,

00:23:52.040 | yeah. And or you have like an extremely slimmed down version

00:23:55.960 | of that bill, and you revert back to this 12 bills a year

00:23:58.760 | process, that's supposed to be the law, it'll be more

00:24:01.120 | effective. You'd save half a trillion dollars.

00:24:03.200 | Yeah, just finish the point on that. I think we have to just

00:24:05.640 | look at this Wall Street Journal article that came out this

00:24:07.360 | morning, where it was called rising interest rates mean

00:24:10.720 | deficits finally matter. Finally, there's a recognition

00:24:14.160 | of it. We called it Yeah, finally, there's a recognition,

00:24:17.000 | both politically and economically that our deficits

00:24:21.000 | and debt are too big. And the key point of this article is

00:24:24.400 | says most of the increase, this is in long term rates, is due to

00:24:28.560 | the part of yields called the term premium, which has nothing

00:24:30.800 | to do with inflation, or short term rates. So until now, our

00:24:34.840 | interest rate problems have been about the Fed raising short term

00:24:37.920 | rates to combat inflation. Now we're seeing a separate problem,

00:24:41.080 | which is long rates are going up. And the long rates are going

00:24:44.120 | up because of this concern that the federal government has too

00:24:46.640 | much debt. And so bondholders are starting to demand a higher

00:24:51.080 | long term premium to hold that debt is what we've been warning

00:24:54.840 | about for a long time now for a year, and it's finally

00:24:57.080 | happening. So unless the political system gets serious

00:25:00.440 | about reducing deficits, even if inflation comes down, and even

00:25:04.960 | if the Fed cuts short term rates, you're going to have a

00:25:08.520 | problem with long term rates remaining high. And that is

00:25:11.600 | going to keep the cost of capital high. And that is going

00:25:14.600 | to reduce long term innovation in the economy. It's bad for us.

00:25:17.480 | It's horrible for us. Yeah, terrible for us.

00:25:20.080 | Let's go to another troubling situation. What's happening at

00:25:23.640 | the southern border, obviously, videos of migrants crossing the

00:25:27.360 | southern border are all over x Reddit, YouTube, etc. One side

00:25:31.440 | saying it's chaos, the other side, arguably been ignoring it.

00:25:35.840 | So let's start with the two numbers that we actually know,

00:25:38.640 | put a bunch of time into trying to figure out if there are any

00:25:41.800 | accurate numbers, talk to a bunch of people on Twitter and

00:25:44.400 | other places. There are only we have very, very flawed data on

00:25:49.240 | what's actually happening there. We do have anecdotal videos.

00:25:51.840 | Obviously, our friend Ilan went down to the border and did a

00:25:54.400 | video himself. The best data with the caveat that it's very

00:25:58.240 | flawed is the count of encounters. This is not folks

00:26:02.480 | who get through. This is folks who were encountered. So this is

00:26:06.800 | the official Sutherland border encounters from the US Customs

00:26:10.720 | and Border Protection Agency since 2022 2021. And 2021. There

00:26:15.000 | were obviously COVID issues on the border. So it was much more

00:26:18.120 | locked down half a million people in 2020 1.7 and 2021 2.4

00:26:24.480 | rounding up there and in 2023 supposedly rounding up 2 million

00:26:29.560 | through 10 months tracking our pace for 2.3 the exact same as

00:26:32.600 | last year. However, it certainly doesn't look like that. It's the

00:26:36.800 | exact same again, that's from the Border Patrol. And that is

00:26:40.360 | encounters not actually people who got through and then the

00:26:45.160 | border states are saying that those numbers are wrong. And

00:26:48.720 | there's a lot more people getting through and Eric Adams

00:26:50.760 | in New York, where a lot of these people are being sent. And

00:26:55.440 | this has obviously been the most politicized issue I think of the

00:26:58.800 | last decade. Governor Abbott, in August of 2022, quote, New York

00:27:04.840 | City is the ideal destination for these migrants who can

00:27:07.400 | receive the abundance of city services and housing that Mayor

00:27:10.160 | Adams has posted about within the sanctuary city. Here are the

00:27:13.920 | clips and then I'll get your responses from those when we get

00:27:16.160 | back.

00:27:16.960 | This is horrific when you think about what the governor is doing

00:27:22.440 | the governor of Texas, but we are going to set the right

00:27:25.200 | message the right tone of being here for these families.

00:27:28.720 | Before we began busing illegal immigrants up to New York, it

00:27:34.240 | was just Texas and Arizona that bore the brunt of all of the

00:27:38.880 | chaos and all the problems that come with it. Now the rest of

00:27:42.320 | America is understanding exactly what is going on.

00:27:45.880 | All right. So this is obviously something that New York City is

00:27:50.240 | unable to handle. Those are from August of last year when this

00:27:53.400 | was flaming up. According to Abbott, Texas has given bus

00:27:56.240 | tickets to 42,000 migrants. And as of late September 119

00:28:01.280 | migrants have arrived in New York City since the spring of

00:28:03.400 | 22. About 30% of New York City migrants have been bused in from

00:28:07.120 | Texas. I'll stop there and just get your general reactions to

00:28:12.240 | what you all believe is happening at the border since

00:28:15.080 | we're getting a highly politicized take on each of

00:28:17.480 | these, it's become super polarized. And the numbers, any

00:28:21.680 | accurate numbers do not exist. Saks.

00:28:23.800 | I don't think it's hard to understand what's going on at

00:28:26.680 | the border. I think there are people who

00:28:29.920 | like that. It's hard to understand the numbers of what's

00:28:31.960 | going on. I don't even think the numbers are that hard. You have

00:28:34.120 | a better source. And I have some numbers that are similar to

00:28:36.600 | yours. But so statistic goes back to 2019. So the numbers I

00:28:42.120 | have are about in 2019, which is when remain in Mexico went into

00:28:46.600 | effect, the number was 851,000. Then it went down to 400,000

00:28:52.200 | because of COVID and title 42. Then in 2021, we had about 1.7

00:28:57.720 | million, which was a new record. Then in 2022, we were up to 2.7

00:29:01.240 | million, which was a new record. And the question is what is

00:29:04.400 | happening in 2023. Obviously, we don't have a full year of data.

00:29:08.320 | But given that we've eliminated remain in Mexico, and title 42,

00:29:12.080 | I don't think anybody seriously doubts that we're headed for a

00:29:15.120 | new record. And in fact, the Washington Post had articles in

00:29:18.880 | August and September saying that those months were all time

00:29:22.080 | records. And now they're surpassing 11,000 daily migrant

00:29:26.080 | encounters the border just twice last week. So and you know what

00:29:30.560 | what Elon reported from the link, he sent that link. So we

00:29:33.280 | pull up and then also just news.

00:29:35.880 | Testa is an aggregator. They don't do primary research. So

00:29:40.000 | you know, so which one are those numbers are pretty similar to

00:29:43.160 | to yours, maybe from the same source. We also have the video

00:29:46.680 | evidence, we have the fact that you know, Elon went down there

00:29:49.400 | and reported exactly what we're seeing in other contexts, which

00:29:51.920 | is new records virtually every day and every week and every

00:29:55.920 | month. The Border Patrol agents are basically being overrun. And

00:30:00.440 | so you made the correct point that this only measures

00:30:03.520 | encounters, it doesn't measure the actual number of people

00:30:06.840 | going through. Well, if Border Patrol is overrun, then the

00:30:11.080 | number of encounters relative to the real getting through is

00:30:13.920 | obviously going to be very understated. So I think we're on

00:30:17.400 | track for another huge record in 2023. And the point is that the

00:30:21.280 | pace is accelerating. Elon gave the simple math. There's 8

00:30:24.240 | billion people in the world, how many of them would want to be in

00:30:26.520 | the United States, if they could, probably billions, at

00:30:29.680 | least half of them, at least half of them, and I don't blame

00:30:32.520 | them. Okay, I want to be in this country. Okay, but obviously, we

00:30:36.480 | can't handle all the people who want to be here. And the word

00:30:39.760 | has gone out via social media via word of mouth that the

00:30:43.280 | border is effectively open. And we've seen numerous videos. It

00:30:46.960 | wasn't just Elon when RFK went down there to Yuma, Arizona,

00:30:50.640 | 100 different countries, all in the wall, and people were just

00:30:53.640 | lining up and but it was 100 different countries, right? I

00:30:56.160 | mean, we have different countries and Elon broadcast the

00:30:59.280 | exact same thing coming from Eagle Pass. So the point is,

00:31:02.400 | you've got all of these different points where there is

00:31:05.480 | no wall, and people are just lining up and being let through.

00:31:09.360 | And in some cases, they're just running through because the

00:31:13.000 | border patrols is overrun. So we effectively have no border. I

00:31:16.760 | mean, let's admit the truth now. Yeah. And I think that the

00:31:20.480 | mainstream media and the Biden administration, their policy was

00:31:23.560 | basically see no evil, hear no evil and to deny the reality of

00:31:26.680 | what was happening. Eric Adams was one of the first democrats

00:31:29.960 | to break rank saying, Listen, we can see the migrants lining up

00:31:35.440 | in tents going around the block. We are trying to put them up in

00:31:38.800 | hotels is costing us $12 billion. We can't afford it. But

00:31:42.400 | Eric Adams has always been a little bit of a maverick inside

00:31:44.600 | the Democratic Party. We talked about how he was tough on crime

00:31:47.640 | during the chase of Boudin era, which is why I supported as a

00:31:50.740 | moderate, but it was a moderate. But then you had Kathy Hockel,

00:31:53.800 | who's the governor of New York, who's nothing if not a machine

00:31:57.680 | politician, just in the last week saying we cannot handle

00:32:01.160 | this. So she broke ranks, which was I think, a big news story.

00:32:05.040 | And now the latest is that the Biden administration itself

00:32:09.240 | might be breaking ranks. I think Chamath you posted a really

00:32:12.480 | interesting story that may orcas who's the Secretary of DHS

00:32:15.920 | just posted a notice in the Federal Register, which said

00:32:20.000 | there is presently an acute and immediate need to construct

00:32:22.560 | physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border.

00:32:26.400 | That was a wall.

00:32:28.560 | I just wanted to prevent unlawful entries in the United

00:32:31.840 | States. Now there was no press conference on this. The way that

00:32:34.600 | this got reported is some reporter was doing their job

00:32:37.920 | keeping track of the Federal Register and saw that may orcas

00:32:41.640 | had posted a notice saying that they need to construct a wall.

00:32:46.800 | Now Biden hasn't said this. No one in the administration said

00:32:49.720 | this, but

00:32:50.120 | obvious reasons. Yeah.

00:32:51.600 | For obvious reasons. So

00:32:52.960 | Jason, what do you think the obvious reason is? Well, the

00:32:55.240 | obvious reason is Trump's entire presidency was predicated on

00:32:59.880 | Hey, we're going to build this wall. And but I'm saying go back

00:33:02.760 | and say that he was right is untenable to

00:33:05.640 | national security. It's like,

00:33:07.920 | yes. And so they're going to do the right thing, obviously, and

00:33:10.680 | build the wall, but they don't want to say it. So it's just

00:33:12.720 | ridiculous. But just one important point to what David

00:33:14.600 | said, New York City has the right to shelter. So that means

00:33:17.000 | every immigrant who comes there, they have to put them in a hotel

00:33:20.520 | and these are like, turns out four or $500 a night hotels. So

00:33:24.160 | this has become cataclysmic, there obviously needs to be a

00:33:26.560 | border. And it's ridiculous to say there shouldn't be a border.

00:33:29.760 | Nobody believes that I don't know why this administration

00:33:32.040 | just can't admit that there needs to be a border of some

00:33:34.920 | kind. And we can talk about what the wall

00:33:36.880 | Well, no, actually, it's a better solution than a wall, but

00:33:39.920 | we'll get to that. What is it?

00:33:41.480 | Well, I don't want to jump to my he had something to say. So

00:33:44.840 | tomorrow, I'll explain in a second, if you want, or I can

00:33:46.760 | jump to it. No, jump to jump to it. Okay. So obviously, people

00:33:50.040 | are talking about a wall walls are a terrible solution. Because

00:33:53.160 | there are ladders that can go over them pretty easily. What

00:33:56.000 | you really need to have his eyes on it. And the two best

00:33:59.040 | solutions, you can see them here, Israel has had a really,

00:34:01.840 | they understand borders really well. And so what you're seeing,

00:34:05.880 | if you're watching are these towers, which do a great job of

00:34:10.080 | monitoring the border. And you could put about 2000 of these

00:34:13.280 | towers, they have a range of easily a mile. This is next gen

00:34:17.280 | border by EBIT systems is a rally based company. It's 160

00:34:21.280 | foot surveillance tower. Andrew actually has a century tower as

00:34:24.600 | well. Our friend, friend of the pod, Palmer Lucky's company,

00:34:28.640 | Andrew, and obviously, I would the the border patrol already

00:34:32.960 | has 10 of the towers.

00:34:34.200 | Why do you see as an either or I'm just curious, like, why

00:34:38.040 | would you?

00:34:38.360 | I think that these smart lampposts, as I call them, are

00:34:42.920 | the number one first thing to do, because you could deploy

00:34:45.200 | these in a fraction of the time, you could have 2000 of these in

00:34:49.000 | under a year for $4 billion. And so these only cost $2 million

00:34:54.440 | each. The 10 towers that were put in, we're putting a 26

00:34:57.240 | million in the pilot. So if you put 2000 of these towers in, you

00:35:00.760 | just picked four different vendors, so they do 500 each and

00:35:02.840 | you test them, that would be $4 billion. That would be nothing.

00:35:05.960 | What do you do when you when the camera spots a person you send

00:35:09.880 | intercepts there, and then you build the walls where people are

00:35:12.440 | crossing most. So that would be my

00:35:14.040 | crossing most, they're crossing

00:35:16.560 | obviously, you build what you look for hotspots, David, so you

00:35:19.480 | would you but we don't there's hotspots that we don't know

00:35:21.640 | about. So I'd say you deploy these for 4 billion very

00:35:24.000 | quickly. And then where there are hotspots, you obviously

00:35:26.000 | build walls, but you're still gonna be frank about this. Sure.

00:35:29.440 | Be as frank as you like. Look, regardless of what you think

00:35:32.760 | about Trump, this may orcas revelation completely and

00:35:36.440 | utterly vindicates his approach to wanting to build a wall. And

00:35:40.280 | there's so many people who won't just admit that he was right that

00:35:43.920 | we need a strong border wall, not because it's perfect. Not

00:35:47.120 | because you can't climb over it if you have the right tools, but

00:35:49.640 | because a wall is more defensible than an open field.

00:35:53.440 | Now, look, I'm all in favor of these towers and the cameras.

00:35:55.960 | And my understanding is that a lot of the parts of Trump's wall

00:35:58.720 | did have cameras on them. Yeah, no, he gets credit for it is

00:36:01.640 | that you have video now coming out of 1000s of people streaming

00:36:05.880 | across running the word is you need a wall to stop that you

00:36:09.480 | also then need cameras and border guards and all the rest

00:36:12.440 | of it just so you know, 2000 miles of wall is going to be

00:36:15.760 | like a decade long project. So that's my only point. Okay, it's

00:36:18.760 | only a decade long. If you allow all of these core challenges

00:36:22.400 | that are designed to frustrate it. The fact of the matter is,

00:36:24.880 | look, we don't need 2000 miles of wall because there are a lot

00:36:27.880 | of natural barriers along the border, you know, where you have

00:36:30.160 | deep rivers or mountains or whatever, we're not gonna need

00:36:32.440 | the wall. However, there are pieces of the wall that were

00:36:36.080 | literally laying on the ground. They were unfinished from

00:36:38.760 | Trump's term. By the way, Trump should have gotten that done. He

00:36:41.080 | didn't, in any event, whatever. The point is, the Biden

00:36:43.920 | administration was actually selling those pieces of wall for

00:36:46.600 | scrap metal for two cents on the dollar. This was a story that

00:36:50.040 | came out. Now they're admitting that we need the wall. That was

00:36:52.800 | pure politics. That makes no sense. They had the construction

00:36:56.920 | materials. They should have just finished it.

00:36:58.760 | That is kind of ridiculous. Yeah, that's utterly ridiculous.

00:37:02.680 | That's like crazy. It's because the American government didn't

00:37:06.280 | like who said the right thing. Yeah. And the tone in which he

00:37:10.400 | said it. Yes. And they didn't like the separating of children

00:37:14.600 | from whatever and they politicize that both parties are

00:37:17.040 | equally just gross. It should be a point based system, you lock

00:37:23.000 | the border, and you allow people in, you know, as I've said, 10

00:37:26.880 | times on this podcast based on merit, what they're going to

00:37:30.200 | contribute to our society, that's work, that's recruitment,

00:37:32.840 | some amount of people who are need asylum, because they're

00:37:36.520 | going to be murdered, ie Afghanistan, people who

00:37:39.000 | supported us, Afghanis who supported us during the war. And

00:37:42.080 | then finally, the ordering process of people applying to

00:37:44.400 | come in here. Do your jobs, everybody. Please, Nick. What

00:37:48.240 | happens when you get to the border, guys? Do you just get

00:37:50.160 | admitted to America?

00:37:51.360 | Guys, this is insane. Okay. The Biden administration started

00:37:56.760 | auctioning off what they called spare border wall parts. Okay. I

00:38:02.400 | mean, how does Biden live this down? I think it's the cost of

00:38:04.800 | the election. Yeah, you're 100% right about that. Yeah, I think

00:38:07.000 | this is like, this is a setup for a very bad ad. Absolutely.

00:38:10.720 | Yeah. I mean, I think this is just because it's become so

00:38:13.200 | politicized. Point based system, recruitment over chaos, build a

00:38:18.960 | wall build a tower.

00:38:20.800 | What do you do in the meantime, there, there are 10s of

00:38:24.000 | thousands of people a day hitting the southern border

00:38:26.680 | National Guard, we have something called the National

00:38:28.560 | Guard, we send them there, they have to be deployed anyway, you

00:38:30.720 | just deploy the National Guard. But same more, same more, like

00:38:34.000 | you would put the military to basically turn these people

00:38:36.600 | around. Of course, of course, you turn them around. Yes,

00:38:38.920 | that's it. Well, so you build a wall, your National Guard will

00:38:41.680 | be quickest, the towers we second quick quickest and the

00:38:44.040 | wall is going to take forever, but you need a while. How do

00:38:45.680 | you but how do you process the asylum claim? Because isn't the

00:38:48.640 | whole point of asylum? Like, you can't send them back to this

00:38:51.240 | country in which they're going to be killed in. And so it's an

00:38:54.520 | imperfect process, Chamath, obviously. So Saks and I and a

00:38:57.960 | few other folks, we held a fundraiser for Vivek Ramaswamy

00:39:01.360 | last week. And we talked about this a lot. And one of the

00:39:04.160 | things that we learned is that all the people that come to the

00:39:07.720 | southern border are trained in YouTube and Tick Tock and

00:39:10.880 | Instagram, exactly what to say so that you have to accept the

00:39:15.200 | asylum claim. And so the asylum, there should be a limited number

00:39:18.360 | of them. That's it. Just you have this many per year. But you

00:39:21.080 | don't I understand. But but you don't know whether that person

00:39:24.000 | who was helping us in Afghanistan ends up coming in

00:39:27.400 | October and not in March. And that's the reason why they can't

00:39:30.080 | get in. The thing that I learned is that it's a it's a specific

00:39:34.480 | script. It's available in multiple languages, right? So

00:39:37.240 | anybody who gets to the southern border knows exactly what to say

00:39:40.280 | so that America is forced to accept you.

00:39:42.720 | That's not how asylum should work.

00:39:44.280 | The bad news is not everybody's gonna get in. Not everybody will

00:39:46.720 | get in. That's it.

00:39:47.400 | Jake out. There's two things we need to do in addition to your

00:39:50.240 | point about sending troops to the border, because we do need

00:39:52.800 | the manpower. Yeah, it's obvious. Number one, to Chamath's

00:39:56.120 | point, you can't just say the word asylum and get in. That

00:39:58.920 | doesn't make sense. You should have to produce evidence of

00:40:01.640 | actually meeting the case for asylum, which is not being

00:40:06.000 | economically disadvantaged. It's being politically

00:40:07.920 | prosecuted, where if you're sent back to your home country,

00:40:11.000 | they're going to put you in jail or kill you. And there aren't

00:40:13.160 | many countries in the world, quite frankly, where that is

00:40:17.680 | going to be a valid claim, just to be honest about it. I mean,

00:40:20.160 | if you have a freedom fighter from Iran coming over, who's

00:40:23.840 | going to be put in jail or killed, let them in. But that's

00:40:26.360 | not most of the people lining up at our border.

00:40:28.160 | If you're coming from Mexico, there's a very small chance that

00:40:31.000 | you are being

00:40:31.920 | the other thing we've got to do is you got to reinstitute

00:40:34.360 | remain in Mexico. That was the policy. Yeah. You can't just

00:40:39.080 | waiting on this side of the border because they're never

00:40:40.720 | going to show up in court. Yeah.

00:40:42.280 | I mean, listen, we, we want immigration to this country. It

00:40:45.480 | has to be logical. And the fact is, everybody wants to come

00:40:48.120 | here. That's a great thing. We should be taking advantage of

00:40:51.200 | that. But it can't be chaos. It's got to be orderly. That's

00:40:54.560 | what everybody wants. I don't know why how this became a

00:40:56.560 | political issue. Everybody wants orderly. Everybody wants

00:40:59.680 | recruitment. Nobody wants an open

00:41:01.520 | border. But Jake, in order for it not to be a political issue,

00:41:04.000 | you need both parties to agree and they currently don't. I mean,

00:41:06.680 | think about it. What's in Biden's interest right now is to

00:41:09.360 | do a 180 on this issue before it's too late.

00:41:11.360 | He's got to do it. Yes, absolutely. And it's very simple

00:41:13.960 | for him to say, which is but he hasn't done it because everybody

00:41:16.480 | knows that the border doesn't have a wall. We've seen an

00:41:20.200 | increase, there's been a 10x increase, this the situation on

00:41:23.360 | the field has changed. Therefore, we're going to change.

00:41:25.720 | And we're going to do all these things. And if one of them is

00:41:27.880 | building a wall, and you want to say gotcha, you can say gotcha.

00:41:30.640 | But it's the right thing to do. Because data has changed my

00:41:34.200 | opinion. Where do we get to the point where data can't change

00:41:37.000 | your opinion? Data should change your opinion, the data is clear

00:41:41.160 | that more people are coming through. That's why I made such

00:41:42.920 | a point at the top of this is like, we don't even have good

00:41:44.880 | data. But these sensor towers would do would at least give us

00:41:48.000 | data. And we give us clarity. And then you only need, you

00:41:51.520 | know, a unit every half mile. So you need 4000 units patrolling

00:41:56.200 | the border, and they would catch everybody. It this isn't as

00:41:58.920 | expensive as people think it is. This could be I mean, the last

00:42:03.480 | the last amount of money we gave, what was the last

00:42:05.920 | appropriation for Ukraine, SAC since I'll give you a red

00:42:08.600 | meal?

00:42:09.100 | Well, we've already appropriated or authorized over

00:42:12.600 | close to 100 million. And there's 24 billion.

00:42:16.280 | Okay, so for three or 4% of that cost, we could have the sensor

00:42:19.800 | towers. It's crazy.

00:42:20.920 | We're defending Ukraine's border, but not our own.

00:42:22.720 | It's a very valid point. Independent.

00:42:25.160 | The populist Republicans up in arms. It's this combined with

00:42:29.120 | the the lack of fiscal discipline.

00:42:31.200 | Now, the craziness about this is if we were sitting here 20

00:42:34.040 | years ago, the republicans were trying to open the border to

00:42:36.960 | have more low skilled workers to work in restaurants to work in

00:42:41.320 | businesses. That's not the place we are today. We have too many

00:42:44.480 | people coming in. These are not just

00:42:45.960 | it's even worse.

00:42:46.800 | skilled workers to pick vegetables. It's a different

00:42:50.400 | group.

00:42:50.880 | There was a point in time, Jason, where the Wall Street

00:42:53.960 | Journal editorial page, which is really the voice of the GOP

00:42:56.760 | establishment, yes, supported a constitutional amendment in

00:43:00.280 | favor of an open border. This was very much the point of view

00:43:04.320 | of the old Republican Party, which was this libertarian, open

00:43:08.240 | borders, open trade free markets position. And the results of

00:43:13.040 | those policies have been partially disastrous. I mean, I

00:43:16.720 | understand the value of free trade and so forth. But and

00:43:19.320 | obviously want to have high skilled immigration. We've

00:43:21.160 | talked about that. But it was too much of a good thing. I

00:43:24.360 | mean, they didn't draw intelligent distinctions. But we

00:43:27.360 | still have I think this to your point about the battle inside

00:43:30.840 | the Republican Party. We still have that old GOP

00:43:33.600 | establishment. And now there's this new populist wing that

00:43:36.280 | wants to make, I think, sensible changes.

00:43:38.520 | Here's the Wall Street Journal story from 2001. Open after

00:43:42.440 | borders. Why not?

00:43:43.200 | There it is. Yeah, that was Bob Bartley, who was the longtime

00:43:48.320 | editorial page editor. He was kind of like a hero in the

00:43:50.480 | conservative movement. When I was in college, I read a great

00:43:53.000 | book by him called the seven fat years about supply side

00:43:56.440 | economics. And I think he was right about a lot of that stuff.

00:43:58.760 | But along with that economic policy came, I think this open

00:44:03.200 | borders, completely open trade view that I think produced a lot

00:44:08.120 | of negative results and has to be revisited. And by the way,

00:44:11.080 | there's a third leg of that stool, which is forever worse.

00:44:13.880 | The Wall Street Journal is one of the most pro Ukraine

00:44:17.600 | publications there is both in the news pages and in the

00:44:21.720 | editorial page. And they have never revisited the results of

00:44:26.800 | our disastrous foreign policy where we keep intervening all

00:44:29.120 | over the world. This is the old Republican Party. There's a new

00:44:32.960 | Republican Party that is emerging. And unfortunately,

00:44:36.520 | Kevin McCarthy found himself on the wrong side of that divide.

00:44:39.840 | Alright, so moving on to our next topic, there was a notable

00:44:42.400 | accident with a cruise robo taxi in San Francisco this week or

00:44:47.040 | not. This is being framed by some as the first automated

00:44:51.880 | cruise vehicle to get in an accident. But what actually

00:44:54.440 | happened is not accurate. So there was a hit and run incident

00:44:58.800 | in San Francisco when we were struck by a human driver, that

00:45:02.120 | human driver fled the scene. The hit and run launched tragically

00:45:05.720 | the woman underneath a cruise vehicle, the cruise vehicle

00:45:08.280 | braked aggressively according to cruise but stopped with its rear

00:45:11.200 | tire on top of the woman's leg. Police asked crews to keep the

00:45:14.880 | vehicle in place and lock it which they did. Emergency

00:45:19.360 | respondents arrived and use the jaws of life to get the car off

00:45:23.760 | the woman's leg. Local media picked the story up.

00:45:26.680 | And the way the police asked crews to leave the car leave the

00:45:31.400 | car on the woman's leg.

00:45:32.760 | Yes. I do that. Well, I think actually, sometimes. No, no, I

00:45:40.320 | do think for my time as an EMT, sometimes moving the person can

00:45:43.680 | cause more damage than leaving it until you have the emergency

00:45:46.360 | services on the scene. So they like to wait for emergency

00:45:49.680 | services in LA because moving it because they could have a broken

00:45:52.880 | bone hit your firm femoral artery, and then you could bleed

00:45:56.400 | out. So they just say stay where you are. Don't make any more

00:45:58.400 | movements until

00:45:59.280 | dude, car on top of them. That's ridiculous.

00:46:02.520 | It's on the person's leg. So that would mean that they're not

00:46:05.960 | in any danger, it might be painful. But if you were to move

00:46:09.360 | them, I was taught this when I was an EMT, you if you move

00:46:12.320 | people, you have to be very careful because you could cause

00:46:14.160 | a spine injury, they can become paralyzed, or you could cut a

00:46:16.600 | major artery, you got to be very

00:46:18.040 | how long were you an EMT?

00:46:19.400 | I was the first class of what was called EMT frs first

00:46:22.440 | responders. And I worked at Bravo ambulance in Brooklyn as

00:46:26.120 | on a volunteer one for about three or four years.

00:46:27.920 | Did you have like a tight outfit like a tight polo? What do you

00:46:30.840 | wear? Skinny jeans? Just skinny

00:46:33.520 | jeans, green pants and a white collared shirt. And yeah, I

00:46:38.280 | never told you guys the first call I ever got. I never told

00:46:41.600 | you that story. Were you like, were you like a sexy paramedic?

00:46:43.800 | Or were you just like a pair of

00:46:44.920 | me whatever you want me to be sure. Whatever works for your

00:46:47.760 | fantasies.

00:46:48.400 | He's blushing.

00:46:49.320 | My first call you're a sexy paramedic. I was a little sexy

00:46:53.280 | as a paramedic got him blushing.

00:46:54.760 | Here's my first call. I swear to God, it's a night before

00:46:57.240 | Thanksgiving Wednesday night. It's a big night in Brooklyn. I

00:46:59.600 | don't know if in other places, but the night before

00:47:01.120 | Thanksgiving, everybody goes out and parties. So big Wednesday

00:47:03.440 | happens. First call comes in. I was I was originally the person

00:47:06.520 | who picked up the I was the operator at the 911. But then my

00:47:09.520 | second job I was on the bus. And so first call first shift is big

00:47:13.960 | Wednesday guy gets we get a call that a guy got stabbed. We go.

00:47:18.040 | The guy is outside TJ Bentley's and I kid you not the guy was in

00:47:22.320 | charge of the ambulance says cut the jacket off. I take my

00:47:24.800 | shears. We have these really sharp scissors and boom, we go

00:47:27.640 | right up the sleeve we cut his jacket. He goes Oh, my members

00:47:30.920 | only jacket. We cut him open. And his giant hairy chest. Blood

00:47:37.440 | is pumping out like it's like a little water fountain. And the

00:47:41.680 | the guy who was running the bus I remember was I just he puts his

00:47:44.360 | hand up out there shows this guy. You got bigger problems in

00:47:47.040 | this member only jacket. He says get the mast pants the mast

00:47:50.000 | pants just so you know are used in war. We get trained in them.

00:47:53.200 | You never use them. mast pants are a blood pressure cuff you

00:47:56.080 | put over people's pants. Oh yeah, take the blood in their

00:47:58.600 | legs. You put it into their chest so that they at least

00:48:01.400 | survive. The guy says get the mess but I said get the mass

00:48:04.840 | pants. The mass pants are packed away. You never use them. I'm

00:48:07.760 | getting the mass pans out. We're whaling down Fourth Avenue to

00:48:11.880 | get this guy and his blood pressure dropping his heart

00:48:14.600 | rates dropping blood all over the bus. We're trying to control

00:48:17.240 | the bleeding. He survived. You save him. We saved him. Yeah,

00:48:19.880 | but that was my first call. First call. Nuts. This was a

00:48:24.240 | volunteer gig. I volunteer paid for it. Nope. Not everything's

00:48:28.120 | about money. Freebird. Not everything's about money.

00:48:30.000 | Freebird. I'm not saying it is. I'm just asking. I'm joking.

00:48:32.480 | With you. Yeah, I want to be a superhero. Yeah. That's all I

00:48:37.200 | texted. I texted Jamie. Jason's brother and I asked him if this

00:48:42.320 | was true. And I asked for a photo. Hey, Nick, you want to

00:48:46.480 | you want to put up the photo? No, please. Oh, there I am.

00:48:49.280 | Heart stops. This is the guy you want to come restart.

00:48:54.760 | Did your heart stop? Did your heart stop? I'm gonna

00:49:00.160 | resuscitate it. Nick show the other one. This is the original

00:49:03.760 | outfit that when he became a paramedic. No, this better not

00:49:06.120 | be x rated. Oh, God. Oh, there. I like the second one better.

00:49:10.080 | Yeah, we know which one you like better days.

00:49:12.280 | A nurse is that a thermometer he's got? What does he have in

00:49:16.120 | his hand?

00:49:16.400 | Needle?

00:49:16.880 | thermometer. I think that's like a coke bottle. I think that

00:49:21.120 | could be a thermometer. We might need to check your temperature.

00:49:23.400 | David. It's like a Pepsi bottle. What the hell? We're gonna take

00:49:26.160 | your temperature, Dave. I don't know.

00:49:28.160 | This would be what kind of temperature does that take for

00:49:30.200 | you?

00:49:30.360 | Well, I know it's gonna be really hot.

00:49:33.360 | Oh, Jason, you did a great job.

00:49:35.920 | We really, really appreciate your contributions. Wow. Great

00:49:40.160 | job. All right. Back to the story about cruise. This

00:49:43.800 | terrible accident. Wow, we got derailed. Yeah. Well, thanks for

00:49:47.680 | the work you did. J. Cal. Thanks for your service. Okay, so

00:49:50.240 | I'm gonna take your vitals.

00:49:57.360 | Okay, local media picked up your eagle tattoo on your arm, too.

00:50:00.520 | That was that was removable. local media picked up on this

00:50:03.880 | reporting that cruise was responsible for the incident.

00:50:06.760 | Director of News for the San Francisco Chronicle, which is a

00:50:10.760 | lunatic publication. Woman run over by cruise self driving car

00:50:15.440 | on Market Street in downtown San Francisco, pulled from under

00:50:19.360 | rear axle circumstances under investigation. The San Francisco

00:50:23.680 | standard posted on x a woman suffered traumatic injuries

00:50:26.960 | after being trapped under a cruise robo taxi in downtown San

00:50:31.240 | Francisco Monday night. Fire Department spokesperson said a

00:50:34.720 | few weeks ago, as you know, a video circulated on x formerly

00:50:38.400 | known as Twitter of 20 or so cruise vehicles causing a

00:50:41.800 | massive traffic jam at an intersection in Austin. The

00:50:46.200 | robo taxi provider issue has become very divisive here in San

00:50:51.680 | Francisco. There are now multiple companies working on

00:50:55.560 | sure that a mutual in San Francisco will put pilot on it.

00:50:59.320 | They call it to brick the car. Yeah, yeah. Why would they do

00:51:03.120 | that? Because they're lunatics. And it represents technology.

00:51:06.200 | That's the real story here. The real story is the very deep

00:51:10.120 | disdain for technological progress. And the second story I

00:51:13.720 | think that's so important is the total lack of assumption of risk

00:51:18.480 | generally in the US which limits progress in meaningful ways. Let

00:51:22.760 | me just pull up some data that I shared here. So Nick, if you

00:51:25.480 | pull up this first chart, I'll give you guys some some numbers.

00:51:28.920 | For every 100 million miles driven in the US, there's about

00:51:32.360 | one and a half deaths car accident deaths. There's about

00:51:35.600 | 3.2 trillion miles driven per year in the US. So about 45,000

00:51:39.360 | people die from auto accidents each year. This is a crazy

00:51:42.080 | number 2.3 million people have auto accident related injuries

00:51:48.480 | in the US each year. And there's 6 million car crashes each year

00:51:53.080 | in the US. That's one crash for every half million miles driven.

00:51:56.440 | Pretty, you know, incredible statistics. So if you look at

00:52:00.280 | this chart, it kind of shows the car fatalities over time. Now,

00:52:04.040 | what's the leading cause of car fatalities will go to the next

00:52:07.040 | distracted driving. Number one, I should have I should have done

00:52:10.800 | this as a quiz. Number one DUI.

00:52:12.840 | Jesus, that is unbelievable that even this day.

00:52:17.160 | Yeah. Number two, speeding. Number three, not using your

00:52:21.360 | seatbelt. So by the way, all three of those are the same.

00:52:24.760 | Yeah, also 80% of those 80% of deaths are DUI speeding and

00:52:29.840 | seatbelt non use. Now go to an autonomous

00:52:32.760 | driver. Those are all opt in.

00:52:34.440 | So now go to an autonomous driving world. You won't see

00:52:37.160 | DUI is those things are programmed to not speed.

00:52:40.040 | Obviously, they're not going to run if you don't put your

00:52:41.880 | seatbelt on. And then the fourth one is distracted driving. The

00:52:44.600 | real question is what incremental accidents or what

00:52:47.760 | incremental errors to autonomous cars make that might, you know,

00:52:51.880 | kind of cause new deaths or new accidents. But the net is that

00:52:56.280 | we have an incredible number of car accidents, 6 million

00:52:59.360 | accidents a year, two and a half million injuries a year 45,000

00:53:02.760 | deaths a year, most of which can be prevented by things that are

00:53:06.320 | just basic human stupidity. The first three are all opt in. So

00:53:09.800 | what you're saying is Warren Buffett and Geico are probably

00:53:13.440 | responsible for lobbying and creating this mess in San

00:53:16.080 | Francisco. Do the insurance companies need to exist a

00:53:19.640 | chamat? conspiracy corner?

00:53:22.360 | Well, I actually think there's a very different driver for why

00:53:25.280 | these things so I just want to make the case first off, that if

00:53:28.000 | you if you zoom out and you don't take the anecdotal story

00:53:31.000 | of the woman trapped under the cruise car, it's an awful story.

00:53:34.640 | But that anecdote allows people to heighten their fear and

00:53:37.720 | heighten their emotion and create a response to autonomous

00:53:41.240 | driving as if that is a cause of a problem. So if you zoom out

00:53:44.840 | and you ask the question, dude, 50,000 people a year are dying

00:53:47.840 | because of human stupidity that we can just completely take off

00:53:50.680 | the streets. It's such a no brainer, that this technology

00:53:54.200 | should progress. And I'll give you guys another story in 1999.

00:53:57.840 | There was the clinical trials for gene therapy had begun. And

00:54:02.160 | there was a guy named Gelsinger. He was a young kid, I think he

00:54:05.480 | was 18 or 19 years old, and he passed away from the gene

00:54:08.880 | therapy. And it turns out that there was actually Dr. malpractice

00:54:12.560 | that was primarily responsible for his death. After that

00:54:16.760 | happened, the FDA and the regulators stepped in, and they

00:54:19.880 | basically put a halt to all gene therapy clinical trials for

00:54:22.840 | about seven years. The number of lives that were lost during that

00:54:27.120 | seven years that went on that we did not make progress on getting

00:54:29.680 | gene therapy programs to market is significantly higher than the

00:54:34.920 | number of people that would have lost lives, which by the way, it

00:54:37.240 | turns out when you go back to this, this particular death was

00:54:41.160 | driven by Dr. malpractice, not by the gene therapy technology

00:54:44.720 | necessarily itself. And a lot of the stuff was understood. And I

00:54:47.880 | think we've heard Peter Thiel and others speak a lot about how

00:54:50.400 | the US has lost our appetite for risk. We say that if anyone dies

00:54:55.080 | or if any bad thing happens, a new technology should not

00:54:57.840 | progress. But when we look at the benefit of new technology

00:55:01.400 | relative to the cost of it, many of these technologies should

00:55:04.560 | progress at an accelerated pace, not at a decelerated pace and

00:55:07.880 | the stepping in to stop these things from moving forward

00:55:10.520 | because number one, we're really afraid of new technology.

00:55:13.320 | Number two, we you know, we kind of want to there's a lot of

00:55:15.840 | regulatory capture and incumbency that wants to see

00:55:18.440 | these things not succeed. I think we're really denying

00:55:21.320 | ourselves in many cases, the opportunity to realize progress

00:55:25.520 | because we're so concerned about any loss. nuclear fission is a

00:55:28.920 | really great example of this three mile island accident and

00:55:32.280 | Fukushima. You know, if you look at the total number of lives

00:55:35.040 | lost, and there's incredible statistics, which I should

00:55:37.640 | probably not pull off the top of my head, I should probably make

00:55:39.840 | sure I get the right numbers. But Chernobyl is another good

00:55:42.200 | example. If you look at the total number of incremental

00:55:44.040 | cancers, and the total number of lives that were lost from

00:55:46.640 | Chernobyl, you look at three mile island, you look at

00:55:48.680 | Fukushima, you can actually six, you can you can make a

00:55:52.760 | statistical argument that even with those extraordinary

00:55:56.760 | cataclysmic disasters, the number of lives that could have

00:56:00.280 | been improved the number of lives that could have been saved

00:56:02.840 | the progress that people have been could have been could have

00:56:05.440 | made the number of people that could have been pulled out of

00:56:07.800 | poverty if we made cheap, abundant energy available at an

00:56:11.200 | accelerated pace rather than at a decelerated pace, it could have

00:56:14.280 | had a much more significant effect. So I view this in the

00:56:16.760 | lens, this autonomous driving backlash in the lens of what we

00:56:19.640 | see with a lot of new technologies, which is we lose

00:56:22.440 | our appetite for risk, we lose our tolerance for any sort of

00:56:25.720 | incremental loss. And we lose perspective on the fact that

00:56:29.240 | that loss is far, far, far outweighed relative to the gains

00:56:33.880 | that you gain if you can get that technology into market

00:56:36.240 | faster, not slower. And I think that's just such a real kind of

00:56:40.480 | storyline that's not told very often about how technology and

00:56:44.040 | progress is limited, particularly in the modern age,

00:56:46.600 | because once you have enough stuff, you're not willing to

00:56:48.120 | take as much risk. Meanwhile, you see China building 450

00:56:51.320 | nuclear fission stations, and the US building none. And I think

00:56:55.040 | that that's part of the story of where the US is today. Yeah, I

00:56:59.920 | mean, I know that was a big rant. But for me, I'm just like

00:57:02.040 | so sensitive to this stuff, you know, like, all of this like

00:57:05.000 | anti tech stuff and anti progress stuff, because you then

00:57:08.240 | pick an anecdote and you focus on the anecdote and you miss the

00:57:11.000 | bigger fucking picture.

00:57:12.000 | Well, what's so funny about San Francisco is this, it's the city

00:57:15.000 | that both is the first to approve the testing of it. And

00:57:19.080 | then where there's a small fraction of citizens who try to

00:57:22.760 | go and sabotage it, I guess the next issue is how close are we

00:57:26.040 | to having these at scale cruises currently in San Francisco,

00:57:30.240 | Austin and Phoenix, waymo. Very expensive cars, by the way.

00:57:34.920 | They're currently in San Francisco and Phoenix 24 seven

00:57:38.240 | and launch in LA soon. And Tesla has been working on this. You

00:57:42.200 | know, it's another example of this SpaceX, some shrapnel got

00:57:46.080 | blown into the uninhabited desert lands around Boca Chica

00:57:50.680 | Texas. You're talking about Starship? Yeah, Starship. The

00:57:53.840 | big one. Yeah. And they come in and they're like, shut the whole

00:57:56.840 | thing down. You can't have shrapnel flying around. Think

00:57:59.840 | about the risk tolerance equation here. So if you delay

00:58:02.800 | SpaceX by six months, to make sure that shrapnel doesn't fly

00:58:07.240 | through the desert, that's six months longer till humans can

00:58:11.720 | perhaps inhabit the moon, go to Mars, do all these extraordinary

00:58:16.840 | things. This is what I mean about the lack of tolerance for

00:58:19.840 | risk. We have to assume that there is a cost in moving things

00:58:23.400 | forward, there has to be a cost in progress. You don't go fight

00:58:26.720 | a war and try and move the front lines of a battlefield further

00:58:30.440 | into the enemy territory and assume you're going to have no

00:58:33.120 | loss. And all of human progress needs to be thought about in a

00:58:36.800 | similar way, we have to have some degree of loss and some

00:58:39.840 | tolerance for risk as we try and make progress with our species.

00:58:43.720 | And technology always is going to have setbacks, it's always

00:58:46.800 | going to have mistakes. But if the net benefit far outweighs

00:58:50.160 | those mistakes, we have to be willing to accept it and gets

00:58:53.360 | everyone to kind of take a broader perspective on what

00:58:56.240 | we're doing, that this isn't just about maintaining status

00:58:59.200 | quo and not getting hurt. This is about the great benefits we

00:59:02.160 | get from moving things forward. And we've lost that in such a

00:59:05.480 | profound way over the last 50 years in Western culture.

00:59:09.120 | Another great example of this to add to your tirade is challenge

00:59:13.880 | trials. And these have been banned for a long time. And if

00:59:17.280 | you don't know what a challenge trial is, is you introduce

00:59:19.280 | something like let's say COVID into a person who has had a

00:59:22.440 | COVID vaccine. And yeah, they're assuming some risk in doing

00:59:25.960 | this, but it was a young person, as we saw probably wouldn't be

00:59:28.360 | that much risk. And there are people who would do it. And

00:59:30.600 | there are this whole concept of challenge trials could reduce in

00:59:34.240 | the long term, a massive amount of debts, but it's not allowed

00:59:37.240 | because of ethics issues. What are your thoughts on that

00:59:40.920 | freebird challenge trials?

00:59:42.440 | I mean, it's look, there's so many examples, we could just

00:59:45.440 | keep going through this and from energy markets and nuclear

00:59:48.320 | technology to biotechnology to space technology to I've lived

00:59:52.840 | it. I mean, like GMO technology and bioengineering and food

00:59:56.200 | systems, there's a fear and a concern and like Rob Henderson

00:59:59.600 | said at our summit, I've always viewed those to be luxury

01:00:02.400 | beliefs, that this idea that I don't want to have my precious

01:00:05.880 | things changed, when the benefit really accrues mostly to the

01:00:09.720 | poorest people in the world, that people that can't afford

01:00:12.400 | is by the way, because that's an important point that people

01:00:14.400 | don't realize, when you make things more productive, whether

01:00:18.640 | it's an acre of land to make more food, or a unit of energy

01:00:22.600 | and the cost comes down per unit of energy. Those of us who

01:00:25.600 | already have a lot of stuff and have all of our basic needs met

01:00:28.720 | we have housing, we have shelter, we have food, we have

01:00:30.600 | energy, we can afford it, we live in a great environment, we

01:00:33.280 | live in a place that we can do whatever the heck we want,

01:00:35.440 | anytime we want. We don't care if the price goes up by 30%. I'm

01:00:39.560 | happy to go down to Whole Foods and feel good to plop down an

01:00:42.480 | extra 50% to buy an organic banana, someone who only makes

01:00:46.200 | $8,000 a year cares very deeply about that cost Delta, they need

01:00:51.840 | to see the cost of food go down, the cost of energy go down, the

01:00:55.160 | cost of medicine go down, the improvement that's driven by

01:00:59.040 | technology and has been for 10,000 years, mostly accrues to

01:01:03.000 | the poorest people in society first. Well, that's the problem.

01:01:06.680 | And so we all who are in charge, those of us who are rich, who

01:01:09.880 | are elite, who have power, who have control, who have

01:01:12.480 | influence, who run the fucking government, we all get to raise

01:01:15.200 | our hand and say, I don't want to take any more risk, because

01:01:17.240 | one person died. Meanwhile, a million people are starving to

01:01:20.640 | death over the next three months. And you can make that

01:01:23.440 | same story and you can connect those dots in every area of

01:01:26.920 | technology that humans are have lost their risk tolerance for in

01:01:31.120 | the wealthy industrialized West. And we are largely I think, not

01:01:35.760 | just hurting ourselves because of the economic costs and all

01:01:38.760 | the other stuff that's going on that we're now seeing is very

01:01:41.000 | apparent. But we're also limiting the intelligence and

01:01:44.440 | the energy to make technology and progress it that could

01:01:48.680 | benefit the whole world. We're limiting its ability to diffuse.

01:01:51.760 | And I think it's it's really profoundly sad. And I hope that

01:01:57.080 | we one day look back at this era as almost like a pseudo dark

01:02:00.200 | ages. And we wake up someday, and recognize that we need to

01:02:04.160 | take some degree of reason.

01:02:05.360 | All right, listen, whatever.

01:02:08.480 | So I got a little passionate about the whole anti tech stuff.

01:02:13.640 | Hey, we like it. We like it. And listen, 35 people died building

01:02:17.920 | the Golden Gate Bridge, right? Like, the people wanted to see

01:02:20.240 | that progress people took risk. That's it. No risk, no reward.

01:02:24.280 | To that point. I think it took two years to create the Bay

01:02:26.680 | Bridge and 17 years to do the repair to it. I mean, that's how

01:02:29.720 | crazy things have gotten

01:02:30.800 | $2 billion to $2 billion to build those suicide nets on the

01:02:34.320 | side of the Golden Gate Bridge and some fraction of that to

01:02:36.320 | build the whole friggin bridge. And even on a dollar adjusted

01:02:39.560 | basis. It's ridiculous. It was five. It's interesting. He said

01:02:41.960 | a 550 million to build the bridge in US dollars. And then

01:02:45.760 | yeah, it was the same amount or build the nets. So

01:02:48.760 | that's a question about the cruise thing. So do you believe

01:02:52.080 | that crews will have a good solution to self driving? I'm

01:02:55.440 | just like a little bit skeptical. Are they owned by GM

01:02:58.160 | now? Yeah. But didn't they raise money from SoftBank? Isn't

01:03:02.120 | there some like independent funding as well that happened? I

01:03:04.720 | thought it was sold to GM. I'm just like, it was part of it was

01:03:07.600 | sold to GM and then they set it up as a sub and they like like

01:03:10.760 | alphabet did with Waymo alphabets raised 5 billion in

01:03:13.080 | outside money into Waymo. And I think that crews or GM tried to

01:03:16.720 | do the same thing where they've got SoftBank and a bunch of

01:03:18.880 | institutional investors in cruise.

01:03:20.840 | But majority of my show that's right. Yeah, it was spun out

01:03:24.000 | because GM didn't have the ability to bankroll it. It's

01:03:26.720 | obvious that these are getting there. The question is, is I

01:03:29.160 | think it's more like 10 years before this is fully deployed.

01:03:31.600 | Also, you have to build all the cars. If Elon does get out this

01:03:36.400 | robo taxi vehicle for 25k, which he seems like is well on the way

01:03:39.840 | with the Model 3 to getting to this was an early mock up from

01:03:43.560 | Walter Isaacson's book, which looks pretty sharp, and it

01:03:47.800 | doesn't have it's like a two seat car. So these things

01:03:50.440 | zipping around San Francisco, etc. at a reasonable speed 2535

01:03:55.440 | miles an hour. I think he's pretty close to having this I

01:03:59.120 | use the self driving beta, full self driving FSD I use it all

01:04:04.840 | the time. I used to only use it on highways. Now I use it on

01:04:08.080 | side roads. I disengage it when it's on roads that are not

01:04:12.640 | clearly marked. You know,

01:04:14.480 | have you guys taken a cruise or a way more road?

01:04:17.280 | I haven't taken either. I got invited to the beta though for

01:04:20.040 | cruise. You guys want to check it out.

01:04:21.520 | Personally, I would not trust the cruise ride. I don't believe

01:04:26.680 | they were responsible for this accident as it turns out. But

01:04:29.280 | I'm just skeptical that some of these initiatives are going to

01:04:33.120 | pan out. I think Tesla's

01:04:35.520 | why are you skeptical? Yeah,

01:04:37.240 | I think it's a hard problem to solve. And I'm just dubious

01:04:41.800 | about GM's ability to develop tech at this level of

01:04:46.800 | sophistication. Tesla will get there. I think Tesla is already

01:04:50.160 | there. Well, if an autonomous Tesla drove up and pick you up,

01:04:52.680 | would you do that? Would you take a ride in that? I mean, not

01:04:55.040 | today. But I mean, when they get there, which I don't think will

01:04:58.680 | be 10 years. I mean, it seems like Tesla's this way ahead of

01:05:01.000 | everybody else.

01:05:01.680 | Come off. What do you think? Where do you think the tech is?

01:05:03.720 | I think this is a an inference problem for Tesla. And it's a

01:05:06.880 | learning problem for everybody else. So I think in order to

01:05:10.120 | build level five autonomy, you have to have good reasoning. And

01:05:13.960 | I think in order to have good reasoning, you just need to have

01:05:16.120 | enough training data where you literally see every potential

01:05:19.960 | branch and node in a decision tree. And so it's one thing to

01:05:23.920 | be able to scan a light, know that it's green and then go

01:05:26.200 | forward. But when you multiply that by every intersection,

01:05:29.240 | every light in every city, it's a massive, massive learning

01:05:32.680 | problem. So the thing that GM and crews don't have, in my

01:05:36.320 | opinion, is a path to acquire enough data to be credible.

01:05:39.840 | Could they solve a limited set of streets in San Francisco?

01:05:43.240 | Yeah. Yes. And so if you have the city, sort of block off

01:05:50.080 | certain parts of the neighborhoods and say, no more

01:05:53.640 | human driven vehicles in these sections, only these three or

01:05:57.560 | four licensed providers can be inside of it. I think that crews

01:06:02.560 | and Waymo could work. But if you're going to live in a world

01:06:05.920 | where there's autonomy, meaning like humans can drive wherever

01:06:08.800 | they want, I think Tesla is the only one because I think they've

01:06:11.640 | acquired and they are acquiring so much training data that for

01:06:15.040 | them, they're fine tuning reasoning. And it's exactly what

01:06:19.120 | Jason just described. Jason is a perfect example of a consumer

01:06:22.240 | now, who has adopted it, call it 70% of his use cases, and is

01:06:28.360 | incrementally kind of like getting towards 90% or 95%. And

01:06:33.560 | I think that that's impressive. I would agree with Jason, I use

01:06:36.040 | FSD 100% on the highways. And depending on where I'm going, so

01:06:41.440 | like this weekend, when I when I came to David, your house,

01:06:43.720 | Texas house, full FSD the whole way. Yeah, to 101. It's

01:06:48.600 | bulletproof, bulletproof. And then in the city. Yeah. And

01:06:52.400 | navigating to get into into David's house, I thought it was

01:06:55.960 | it was pitch perfect. And there was one or twice where I'm

01:06:59.800 | actually the person that's panicking and disengaging. Yes,

01:07:02.680 | like intersections, right, left turns. And also just on the

01:07:05.960 | highway, like I get a little skittish at times if it goes if

01:07:08.440 | it speeds up or whatever. My point is, Tesla is so close to

01:07:13.160 | it. So I do trust that they'll have a credible solution in the

01:07:16.480 | next four or five years. And these other companies, I think

01:07:19.640 | that they need to have a solution for training and I

01:07:23.000 | don't see it. Yeah, the point is, there's over a million cars

01:07:27.760 | recording because when you buy a Tesla, you turn on self

01:07:31.640 | driving, it's in every car. And so every car is recording data

01:07:34.880 | all the time. As opposed to GM, GM doesn't take the time to put

01:07:38.320 | the $10,000 20,000 off package half a million new sensor

01:07:41.520 | collecting millions of miles a quarter, a quarter added to the

01:07:45.680 | network. Exactly what Tesla did years and years ago is even

01:07:48.800 | before self driving was a thing. They put all the cameras in the

01:07:51.960 | cars to collect the data. And you're right, GM doesn't do

01:07:54.960 | that. If GM did that to their legacy gas cars, and then

01:07:58.560 | funneled that into cruise, I think they would have a decent

01:08:01.360 | shot, but they're not doing that. Here's a light of waymo in

01:08:05.920 | and I brought this up because you know, I think there's two

01:08:09.000 | different strategies going on here. Tesla's going for the

01:08:12.160 | whole magilla. They want to be able to do dirt roads you've

01:08:14.800 | never been on waymo and crews are working from constrained

01:08:18.640 | areas that they can perfect. And Phoenix is the perfect area

01:08:21.880 | because that's a grid based system, very wide highways, and

01:08:25.840 | it was planned. And so if you have a planned community, you

01:08:28.520 | know, it's not like a city in Italy or France, where it's like

01:08:33.000 | the roads have been there for 800 years. When you have some

01:08:36.640 | modern city where it's a grid based system, Austin falls into

01:08:40.040 | this as well for a large portion of Austin, it's going to be

01:08:42.920 | fairly easy to do those. And so that's what we'll see my

01:08:45.960 | prediction is we'll see this. Also, it's very flat, obviously

01:08:49.160 | no hills and also weather. So you know, the Northeast will be

01:08:52.480 | the last place when you go to Boston, or, you know, you're in

01:08:55.640 | other places that don't have a grid based system and you have

01:08:58.400 | ice and snow. This stuff is 10 plus years out, but in a dry

01:09:02.600 | place with consistent weather like California, Phoenix, etc.

01:09:06.040 | It's it's, it's it's now, right? It's now I think, okay, in Bill

01:09:11.040 | Gurley's regulatory capture corner. We have an interesting

01:09:16.080 | story about J s x if you don't know jet suite x that to the J

01:09:20.000 | s x stands for this is an airline that offers hop on public

01:09:23.960 | charter flights out of FBOs, tiny airports usually reserved

01:09:28.640 | for private jets, and they give passengers the private jet

01:09:31.680 | experience for the cost of roughly a first class ticket at

01:09:35.280 | major airlines, maybe double the cost of coach ticket 700 bucks

01:09:39.840 | one way from Westchester to Miami $1400 round trip, not a

01:09:43.880 | bad deal. By comparison, United on the same day are between 500

01:09:48.760 | and 800. First class from Newark to Miami. Jet suite x has 47

01:09:53.640 | airplanes with 1200 crew members.

01:09:56.160 | Let me cut in and give you my anecdote. On Saturday, I took a

01:09:59.240 | J s x flight from Vegas to Oakland. What were you doing in

01:10:04.200 | Vegas? I went to the opening night of the YouTube concert at

01:10:07.120 | the sphere

01:10:07.640 | opening night at the sphere.

01:10:09.360 | It was incredible. Yeah, this year, I looked at the photos and

01:10:12.240 | the videos. I wasn't super impressed. Is it impressive in

01:10:15.080 | person because it didn't come across in the videos.

01:10:16.880 | Yeah, it's incredible. You got to go see it. I think it's

01:10:19.120 | incredible how. So it's the first like live experience that

01:10:23.320 | I think you have kind of live analog elements like a band and

01:10:28.240 | this incredibly immersive digital experience because it's

01:10:30.520 | a 360 foot tall dome. And the entirety of the interior of the

01:10:34.400 | dome is a digital screen. So there were these scenescapes

01:10:38.280 | that they created that were like dynamic video on these walls,

01:10:41.720 | that it's hard. I don't think the videos do it justice like

01:10:45.080 | when you're actually when you're in this room during this shot

01:10:48.360 | right here, and I was kind of sitting center I was also I went

01:10:50.600 | down on the floor looks like you're in the desert or

01:10:52.240 | something. It's like you're there, dude. I mean, it's

01:10:55.880 | inexplicable. It's more real than VR. It's like you're in

01:10:59.520 | this world. And they even did these amazing integrated scenes

01:11:03.480 | where they had like helicopters flying overhead. And then they

01:11:06.080 | had spotlights coming out of the ceiling while the helicopters

01:11:09.720 | were flying in the video above you. They did like a hot air

01:11:12.680 | balloon flying above you and they drop like a rope down. So

01:11:15.520 | it was this total integration of like physical and virtual

01:11:19.000 | content. And I think like you to to be honest, as great as the

01:11:22.480 | concert was, is almost like the most boring thing you could

01:11:25.880 | probably do with that setup. Over time, you could probably

01:11:28.800 | integrate a lot more things you could have giant sets and giant

01:11:32.440 | scenes and people you know, doing stuff physically Star Wars

01:11:35.320 | movie, Star Wars in real life, you could have like, the

01:11:39.680 | siege of Carthage and you can have ships on the ground and

01:11:42.080 | then you can see the battle scene behind you and you'd be

01:11:43.840 | like in the middle of it. The whole thing was really

01:11:46.200 | incredible. I heard about the sound. Hundreds of speakers. So

01:11:50.200 | when I was down on the floor, I went right by the stage on the

01:11:52.360 | floor. The some of the sound is actually distorted down there

01:11:56.480 | and it's not that good. When you're in the seats that set

01:11:59.320 | back where the sound is really designed hundreds of speakers

01:12:01.520 | like built into the wall. I heard each seat. There's there's

01:12:04.920 | seat speakers, but really comes from the dome and the dome sound

01:12:09.200 | when you're sitting in the seats is really like immersive and

01:12:11.320 | incredible. So you took JetSuite X back and then I did get three

01:12:14.480 | eggs. By the way, I will my prediction on the sphere. I

01:12:17.560 | think there'll be like dozens of these things soon enough. Okay,

01:12:20.280 | because this can become like a new form of live entertainment

01:12:23.000 | venues, not just a stage where someone stands on it and plays

01:12:25.240 | music. It's a new model and more than musical artists. I think

01:12:28.600 | you'll see like new kinds of art and new kinds of things happening

01:12:31.840 | on these in these things. Anyway, there's also video on

01:12:34.640 | the outside. So you can do advertisements or make it look

01:12:37.000 | like a pumpkin or make it look like a basketball. I saw that

01:12:39.440 | it'll get cheaper and cheaper over time. The first one was

01:12:41.520 | what to two and a half billion dollars, they'll make smaller

01:12:44.000 | versions of it, it'll be a couple 100 million. It's almost

01:12:45.880 | like IMAX theater. So roll them out all over. So back to JetSuite

01:12:48.800 | X 240 bucks, you drive up just like an FBO, like a private

01:12:52.880 | terminal, drive up, walk in, no security, no lines, no check in,

01:12:57.480 | get on, get off. It's like flying a

01:13:00.440 | way to have some check in so they know your name and stuff.

01:13:03.000 | Yeah, you walk up and they they you give them the ticket. And

01:13:06.360 | then they do a gate side check in, they take your bag and they

01:13:09.280 | put it all they take it out under the plane, save an hour on

01:13:12.320 | either half hour. Oh my god, dude, it's so hassle free. It's

01:13:15.440 | ridiculous. And like when my mom comes to visit, she takes it.

01:13:18.320 | She loves it. But obviously, there's got to be some catch. I

01:13:22.120 | don't really know these regs, but there's some catch. I'll

01:13:24.680 | explain that now. So they have 47 airplanes 1200 crew members,

01:13:29.280 | American Southwest and several major aviation unions are

01:13:32.560 | accusing JSX of exploiting a regulatory loophole that they

01:13:37.440 | can hire pilots who are too old to fly for commercial airlines

01:13:40.600 | and who don't have the requisite 15 hour 1500 hours of flying

01:13:44.880 | experience because they are a smaller airline. JetSuite X says

01:13:49.520 | its captains average over 8000 flying hours, and first officer

01:13:53.320 | average over 3000 flying hours. So they're blowing past the

01:13:56.960 | regulation. So that's obviously a red herring. According to

01:14:00.280 | JetSuite X, two huge US airlines and their labor unions want

01:14:03.280 | companies like JetSuite X small air carriers that actually care

01:14:07.720 | about providing you with much needed choice and high quality

01:14:10.640 | service to be legislated out of existence. And by the way,

01:14:14.400 | JetSuite X has a couple of the other airlines I think United

01:14:17.160 | has an investor. So the other airlines actually want this

01:14:20.400 | there obviously is a difference in security. But one difference

01:14:23.720 | is not how many hours the pilots have obviously, it's going

01:14:28.040 | through TSA. So the ability to not go through TSA is such a key

01:14:32.440 | part of this experience and to not go through a big terminal,

01:14:34.920 | JetBlue and United support JSX. And I think they're exploring

01:14:39.040 | doing this themselves. So regulatory capture at its best,

01:14:44.360 | I guess

01:14:44.760 | I'll take the unpopular side of this. I think it's easy to blame

01:14:49.160 | this regulatory capture boogeyman here. Okay, I think

01:14:52.240 | JetSuite X seems like an amazing service. It has Starlink, a

01:14:56.440 | bunch of my friends have taken it, they seem to enjoy it a lot.

01:14:59.600 | But here is the the the clever arbitrage that JetSuite X is

01:15:06.560 | taking, which is that they fly under what's called part 135 of

01:15:10.920 | the FAA. And that is when you take a private plane and you

01:15:13.880 | charter it, the airlines fly under what's called part 121.

01:15:17.200 | And the rules are very different if you're 121 versus part 135.

01:15:21.120 | And the biggest rule is the training of the pilots, which is

01:15:24.920 | that there are minimum hour requirements to be a commercial

01:15:28.000 | airline pilot, which is about 1500 hours, versus 250 hours for

01:15:33.440 | a part 135 charter pilot. So I think the question is, is that

01:15:38.520 | it's one thing where you charter a plane with two or three of

01:15:41.800 | your friends, that's a part 135 license in a small plane. But

01:15:46.480 | when you take a large plane with nobody else, you don't know. I

01:15:50.800 | think there's a pretty credible argument that that's a

01:15:52.720 | commercial airline. And I do think that it's reasonable that

01:15:56.040 | if you're running a commercial airline through a loophole, at

01:16:00.360 | some point, if you get big enough, that loophole is going

01:16:02.400 | to be obvious, obvious enough that people will ask it to be

01:16:04.960 | closed. I think what you want to have is this loophole closed,

01:16:09.720 | or you decide that part 135 where there are so many people,

01:16:14.320 | the pilots should be at a certain flight training

01:16:17.400 | standard.

01:16:18.120 | And to JetSuite X's defense, they reported their captains

01:16:22.360 | average over 8000 flying hours. So that is a magnitude more five

01:16:26.800 | x more than five times the rules and first office average over

01:16:30.720 | 3000. So why not just up that number of hours to 500 or 1000?

01:16:34.520 | Yeah, or just make it make everybody 15.

01:16:36.320 | To your point, just like say, go to the FAA and say, Look, we're

01:16:39.520 | going to continue to fly part 135. But here are the exact we

01:16:42.400 | promise to never hire a pilot that is not under this 1500 hour

01:16:46.560 | threshold, etc, etc. There's all kinds of ways to go around it.

01:16:49.760 | But I do think it's important to acknowledge that they're

01:16:52.120 | basically running a United. Yes, they're pretending that it's a

01:16:55.360 | private plane. And I think that there are some Yeah, it's a mini

01:16:58.080 | United yet. No, because United runs those regional legs as

01:17:02.680 | well. Yes. In in equivalent size planes. So I do think it should

01:17:06.560 | exist. I just think that it should exist on a relatively

01:17:09.960 | level playing field. I don't want somebody else to use a

01:17:12.680 | loophole. So I would not want them to use a loophole either

01:17:14.920 | part 135 exists. I'm actually in agreement to take a private

01:17:17.840 | plane and charter it not to run an airline.

01:17:20.520 | All right, everybody. This has been another amazing episode of

01:17:23.400 | the all in podcast. Thank you to from his sphere of influence,

01:17:27.960 | David Freeberg, the Sultan of science, and the rain man

01:17:31.360 | himself, hot water burn baby, David Sachs and the dictator

01:17:36.560 | himself. Moth Polly. I love you boys. I am the world's greatest

01:17:42.360 | moderator and we'll see you next time. Bye bye.

01:17:50.200 | Rain Man David

01:17:51.240 | we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with

01:17:58.160 | it. Love you.

01:17:58.960 | besties are

01:18:08.200 | dog taking a driveway

01:18:17.880 | we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy

01:18:20.600 | because they're all like this like sexual tension that they

01:18:23.560 | just need to release

01:18:24.320 | what you're about to be

01:18:27.520 | your feet

01:18:29.480 | we need to get

01:18:31.880 | merch

01:18:33.200 | going all in. I'm going all in.

01:18:42.520 | you

E148: McCarthy ousted, border chaos, Cruise's robotaxi "accident" & more

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