i am black look at this i'm down i'm up a button oh up a button this is why the all-in pod is falling apart is we got one bestie who thinks he's having away we got another one who thinks he's italian nobility we got another one who all he wants to do is geek out about science and discuss nothing topical i mean you guys are a total mess and you're a little mess and you are cold open i'm present i've been present present i've been waiting for two weeks social and we got the guy who wants to be the next tucker carlson oh really velcaster write that opening for you no what's wrong with your writing team right that's a little bit i'm coming in hot i've been waiting two weeks to go off three two let your winners ride brain man david sasson and instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy love you okay everybody welcome back to the all-in podcast we took two weeks off for vacation uh with us today vacation from caisson uh sax is off his boat and ready to go uh after the tremendous boat episode friedberg who david why are you working from an irs office what david sacks is in the irs office has joined a call center which call center are you looking for this is david sacks from the call-in app can i set up your podcast for you please you better get here by tonight okay yeah you better play cards bestie this is best you better show up this line up is a shit mr beast is showing up mr beast is going to play cards and he plays eight queen eight offsuit to crack phil it's going to be very entertaining all right i'm flying back this afternoon it's mr beast alan ship muth this is going to be fireworks tonight fireworks all right i'm going to lock it up the eight seat your eight seats locked up wait what time does it start seven to seven a.m no it's good is your uh is your guest house taken no you can stay in the guest house if you want great here we go no we start we started in the show david we started this is the show yes david we start at six but we're gonna break for dinner as normal at seven so get here by six i'll come i gotta have dinner with my kids i haven't seen them in a month so uh all right just so you do you remember their names it's boop and boop and there's three of them okay yeah yeah there's three i'll come after dinner okay all right okay good good here we go uh first topic of the day is no you didn't do the intros go all right three two no no you already did that part just introduced you started with sax and you didn't say myself when did you become the director okay sit down scorsese all right with us again the dictator himself chamath palihapitiya back from his italian castle fresh off his italian castle retreat uh one button up maybe we should call you the duke instead of the dictator yeah because you've really taken this this italian nobility thing to heart you know jason invaded my my castle he ravaged my toilets several he literally had he co-opted the butler he co-opted the chef and when he would bicycle best life i'll be totally honest for a week he would bicycle he would bicycle back to the to the house the gate would close and they would scurry out with two little cokes a huge glass filled with ice i was so confused when i got zero what's going on he's like uh mr jason mr jason mr jason what percent what percent of your book did you write jkal um well a non-fiction book typically 60 000 is the target so i'm going to write 60 and then try to edit it down to 50 and i got the first 10 done guys sorry can i just say on the on the plane as well as at my house jason read us the intro i'm not going to say what they're about or the title of the book the first couple chapters it's amazing the idea no no no i legit the idea is amazing the title is fantastic and what he's written so far is exceptional i was genuinely like it's great it's really really great well a lot of it was informed by the discussions we've been having here uh of course back in the mix is friedberg the queen of quinoa uh in front of some kmart artwork um that he purchased for his new house uh how are you doing queen uh how are you feeling about your decision to not come to italy with us yeah queen i don't want to talk about it hey can we uh can we tell our best italy story oh my god i don't know what the best is a lot of best italy stories well i want to tell two stories and one of them is the joke i didn't make at the speech which i thought was the best joke and i want to just get your reaction so i'm just going to tell you okay so just to give a little background here our friend's 50th birthday two of our friends had 50th birthday it's me and our other friend and so we were in italy for a week as a group playing cards and celebrating those two birthdays the joke i didn't make was the following joke which is all right guys i just want to say this is for friend number one redacted yeah redacted yeah uh i just want to call out the elephant in the room you know there's really someone very very famous amongst us um oh oh you know he's known uh to be one of the richest men in the world he's known um you know to really uh love rockets he throws you know up rockets all the time um the despotic leader of north korea is here kim jong-un everybody and i point to dc oh my god that is so important joke i didn't get to me wow you can't tell that joke because because it would in context of you know obviously it would have been a very yeah uh all right and uh yeah it was just a great trip i have to say uh i took my yeah my italy story is that so the second birthday is jcal the first birthday as a friend to remain nameless the second birthday redacted the second birthday was jcal's 50th then we find out that jcal's birthday was actually like six months ago six months ago november 28th yeah nobody nobody cared and frankly none of us went to italy for jcal's birthday we went to the other guys we went to the other guy's party yeah jcal's birthday is like covid he keeps trying to bring it back in different variants and no one wants any part of it so on the last night the last night of the trip we had the jcal birthday party and what do they serve pizza i mean like because it's on jcal's dime i mean the rest of the week we had this like magnificent five stars you throw my birthday party for me snacks you didn't even throw in any breadsticks i mean he was like he just door dashed dominoes we had truffle pizza unlimited truffles it was delicious i think it was the best meal i think you're just a little jealous because the dinner you hosted maybe didn't hit the notes you wanted to hit sax oh my god are you serious we brought it he flew in a troop from blusphan he flew in his first food i was talking about the pizza versus you know by the way i just want to say that that whole circus thing in the in the water uh i got so mad at one of my kids because it was so dark and the kids were in the pool yeah and he was like oh my god what's going on he kept diving yes and i kept saying stop i can't see you and so i was just like he never none of the kids should have been in the pool i agree with that and the truth of the matter is you know my five years old was in the pool too and all i could do was keep an eye on him because i was so worried about it i was playing lifeguard with my friends i didn't enjoy the show for that reason yeah they had the time of their lives yes they loved it and actually that was that was definitely worth it and the day before i want to give credit to sax because sax and i went down to that restaurant we made them open up the wine closet we raided it we found the best three bottles of wine and we brought them back for everybody oh and then and then i'm not sure if you remember this we taped an episode of call-in in which uh i was a little drunk yeah i was drunk i was confused yeah so anyway the whole world can listen to us drunk on call-in in uh we're launching on september 2nd so oh wow yeah nice congrats yeah that's gonna be a big deal and uh congratulations to the all-in syndicate members who wet their beaks and to my syndicate members uh people don't know this but it was the absolute record we've ever had for any syndicate i believe at the end of the day we had 150 slots and we had 950 people apply sax amazing we had a million or so in allocation and i think we had seven million in demand i am really excited i'm really excited about this yes i'm really excited about this product it's the best i've been involved in creating it's better than yammer it's better than paypal truly spicy take yeah wow i'm really glad daddy daddy got a little tasty poop sax don't hurt your um don't hurt your elbow patting yourself on the back there but go ahead continue you got a little product manager elbow there don't dislocate your triceps the feedback we've gotten from users has been incredible i mean it's just the reactions i'll tell you what's good about it here's here's what i think you nailed um as a person who's been in podcast for over a decade the critical um aspect of this is when you pop up your club or room on call-in it creates a podcast out of it with an rss feed and you can go listen to the previous show so if you are listening to this and you wanted to create your own version of all-in you could do it on call in just get three of your knucklehead friends and talk about your adventures on boats and private jets and drinking coffee and you could do it on call in just get three of your knucklehead friends and talk about your adventures on boats and private jets and drinking fine wine wherever you are and you can start your own podcast yeah it's not really expensive why not included right it's not the key insight it's not about the room it's about the show you know like everything we think of as social audio is really just a feature of creating a show creating a new podcast and uh so anyway people really like it i'm very excited september shows have been created in the beta this is the thing that's blown me away is like well over a hundred i think maybe a couple of hundred if you go to the show directory you and and the cover art that people have created is really really elaborate you know people are really getting into it i've said this before i think you're a phenomenal you're a phenomenal uh product builder so i think this is really exciting yeah under underrated product builder i would say but no it's just interesting that this doesn't exist somebody should have made this already like there's zen caster and riverside for recording podcasts there's libsyn for hosting them what uh what's happened as a as a protected minority i'd like to ask this question what happens what's happening to clubhouse um i think it's a real relevant i'll be i don't i don't want to dunk on founders but um i think that they uh no but why can't they just do these features it sounds like i mean i'm not i'm not trying to take anything away they will copy sex's features for sure i think they will copy it at some point yeah but but i think that it's a good it's a good question and i really think there's different visions here so i mean i've listened to their founder talk about his vision and it's very much about creating this live serendipitous type experience like kind of like a cocktail party and that's fine we're not doing that we're creating long tail podcasting is what we're doing and my experience is informed by what we've all been doing on the show for last year and a half which is podcasting right and the thing that i've seen that i didn't know until we did the all-in pod is how much work goes into what jcal does behind the scenes it's incredible we got nick doing six hours of post production on the show i want to automate all that work away so anybody can do what we do and that's like a very different vision no offense nick no i mean not everybody is going to want to put the type of post-production into this they don't have you know i've got six people on our podcast team like it's not everybody's got that infrastructure so over time you'll build that i believe it um i think it will turn out great all right let's get to our first um topic here uh while we were away the united states started the process of leaving afghanistan after a 20-year war uh in which i think it's pretty safe to say that was an unwinnable war and uh we uh have failed like the russians did sax had a uh tweet uh that was a well getting a little bit of play on the old twitter what we're seeing before our eyes is the collapse of the american empire because the people in charge are completely corrupt and incompetent but we can't talk about that because insiders can never criticize other insiders the larry summers rule did i tweet that you did oh um yeah i mean you might have had a couple of drinks and then sorry you he actually didn't he just texted that in the group okay so that was a confidential text to our thought to our group that we're not supposed to even say exist well no it's okay don't beep it it's okay i mean it's it's it's true it's it's not exactly what i tweeted but it's similar to things i've been tweeting and tragically uh yesterday um isis k which is an afghan affiliate of the islamic state claimed responsibility for uh two suicide bombings outside of the airport and that tragically killed over 100 people 90 afghan citizens and 13 american service members i guess you know we're not here to talk about um wars it's not exactly in the mandate but everybody wants our opinion on this so let's get started sax you have strong opinions we'll start with well it's yeah i mean how can you not talk about this this feels to me this is one of those events where you know i was glued to my tv for days i think i was in france at the time the taliban overrun the country and i was like oh my god this is a terrible thing to happen to people and yeah it was you know the afghanistan war's been going on for 20 years no one's been talking about it it's just this thing that's been happening in the background but all along we've been assured by the pentagon that we're winning hey you know don't worry about this we got this and then you wake up one day and all of a sudden we've lost the war and the taliban's overrunning the country and you're like what is going on here you know not only is the the botched withdrawal incompetent the fact that we were lied to for two decades about what was really happening um the the idea that the botched withdrawal incompetent the fact that the botched withdrawal incompetent the fact that the botched withdrawal that we had created you know we were how many times were we told that we had created this afghan army it was 300 uh strong we spent you know two trillion dollars in the country uh you know being and we were told the whole time that we were building institutions there uh that you know that we were creating a democracy in the middle east that we were even you know um promoting gender equality and uh lecturing the taliban on toxic masculinity or something like that and then we find out one day that poof the whole thing was just kind of a lie it was this giant debacle and now we can't even get our uh we can't even get our civilians out of the country not only that but we we've seen 12 people 12 american servicemen and women killed yesterday trying to 13 trying to protect the airport uh almost a hundred um afghans uh now we'd only have to not only contend with the taliban whose positions i don't think any of us know about but we also have to deal with isis k which is like some you know off shoot affiliate of isis run by a guy who was actually summarily killed by the taliban but that didn't clearly stop anybody the the level of honestly just to say the the lying that we've been doing on this topic is just utterly um it's really really scary you know how could we have gone 20 years two trillion dollars 2400 american lives and counting and found a way to just basically waste all this money and tell ourselves these lies for so long and it turns out none of it was true um and then the back half of it is that we look like a little bit of a country that's sort of in decline because we can't even figure out an orderly withdrawal it's not as if you know this thing came out of the blue out of nowhere this was a negotiated withdrawal so we had months to plan for this you know and we had months to do the right honorable moral thing for all of these for for all of these people that helped us in that country just to give you a small anecdote you know the day that kabul was overrun you know the democrats were actually tweeting out about uh celebrating librarian day that's what they were focused on jason and i on the way back you know i we flew back with my with my mom and my sister we stopped in toronto to drop them off and we were like oh my god we're gonna be like oh my god we're gonna be like oh my god we're gonna be like oh my god we're gonna be like oh my god we're gonna be like oh my god we're gonna be and the planes beside us jason do you remember this yeah i think i think brett or paul were telling us my pilots were telling us these planes uh had been going back and forth saving refugees in afghanistan and it's like wow what an honor to just be beside these these amazingly heroic men and women and you know i don't know jason if you saw but as we were refueling they came and boarded and they were getting ready to leave again meanwhile that america cannot get their money back and so we're going to have to take that back and we're going to have to give them back and so i think that's what's so shameful it's like not only did we spend the money not only did we lose all these lives not only didn't we have an orderly withdrawal we couldn't even at the end guarantee the safety of americans or do the right thing for all these people who risk their lives to help us fight clearly a useless war freiburg you have lots watching all this i know you don't like when we delve into politics too much but what do you yeah you have any thoughts you want to add yeah i kind of use a little bit of a startup analogy like america never really found product market fit with what we were trying to do in afghanistan there's some fantastic um gallup polling that's been done in afghanistan over the past uh 15 20 years already and they've actually had people on the ground polling there and most recently which has been consistent for over 10 years polling shown that 87 to 90 percent of afghanistan's population has been consistent for over 10 years and 90 percent of afghans said that the government is corrupt this is the government you know put in power put in place by the united states 90 percent say businesses are corrupt and if you go back to a poll they ran in 2010 the question was in general which of these statements comes closest to your point of view sharia law must be the only source of legislation 56 percent of the afghan population in 2010 believed that to be true and another 38 percent said sharia law must be a source of legislation but not the only source that leaves just seven percent of people that think that sharia law should not be is it sharia or sharia sharia sorry sharia law should not be part of the um legislative process uh in defining the afghan laws and constitution and so um you know it's really telling that you know it's almost like when you when you start a company and you try and create a product and you sell it to a customer base you got to figure out what the product is you got to make sure the customers want it and then the the idea for the startup works the problem here is our views as a nation and maybe western democracy doesn't necessarily fit with what that market wants and we can certainly make the case that we believe that our ethics and our values are superior and provide more of an opportunity for individual freedom and liberty things that we believe should be available around the world but if the market's not buying it the customers don't want it you're really just raising a ton of venture money trying to create a product that no one really wants and at the end of the day you're you're trillion dollars down and you're going to be able to sell it to a million people and that's the problem and you have to shut the thing down and it goes bankrupt and that's effectively what went down here and if you look at the history of afghanistan remember they were in the soviet afghan war in the 80s nearly the entire decade of the 80s then the taliban came along and provided a degree of stability in the 90s and then all of a sudden this al-qaeda 9 11 war began um you know after taliban had been in power for a year and it's been 20 plus years of strife and 20 years of strife and challenge where the population have increasingly viewed the government's government to be corrupt businesses to be corrupt and here's a really interesting statistic which also came out of this polling that gallup does over the last 10 years the percentage of afghans that are happy with their present household income has gone or are not happy sorry with their present household income has gone from 60 to 90 nine out of ten afghans as of last year were not making enough money to make ends meet so you put all of these facts together you've got this long history of strife with this you know company effectively coming in trying to tell you how to run your government how to run your country that doesn't match with your beliefs on on your your the way you think a government should be built you've got all this turmoil that's happened historically you know it really was um i would say to some degree this inevitable failure of a startup that got overfunded that never found product market fit that never really got off the ground certainly the exit strategy on how do you wind something down in this case and it certainly relates to human lives and the tragedy of the partners that we had on the ground um was was totally mishandled but the broader picture here is like we i think it's more corrupt than that i think that we basically engaged in a two trillion dollar wealth transfer from the people of the united states the citizens of the united states to the military industrial complex that's what we did well i mean i have two points i want to i want to build on from from your freeburg and now yours chamath which is the original mandate here was to go and get rid of al-qaeda and to also you know kill osama bin laden and to not have uh the taliban giving safe harbor to al-qaeda that quick that mission got accomplished in large part in the first year or two and then uh when we finally got to osama bin laden in pakistan i think it it probably would have been a better idea to understand this is an unwinnable war get in there destroy the taliban leave and then say if you come back we'll do it again but we're not going to stay here for 20 years to your point freeburg and try to create a revolution if the people are not ready for it i think that we have to start looking at our foreign policy and saying we do need we do have a better view of human rights clearly than the middle east uh and certainly afghanistan and we do want to promote human rights around the world and freedom we're not doing that we're not we're not we're not freedom fighters of democracy or justice we should be we should be we are led by motives of revenue and profit i know that but we should be and when we went and we kicked the nazis asses and we beat japan when you know they were trying to dominate the world we were doing it to stop communism and i think when you look at nation building and these these kind of revolutions to friedberg's point they have to want it as well so we should be working with the countries that are teetering on going from authoritarianism to democracy and we should take the high ground and we should be the more authority of the world because if we're not who's going to be i i agree with that part but i think the right thing to do is just to open our doors and say you know what we're here there's a draft right and the smart and the capable and the willing we're willing to basically bring uh inside of our borders so that they can work on our behalf and that's what other countries i think get right about all of this stuff like again as a canadian um you know the canadian perspective of this is not that you deploy troops and you get embroiled in these you know debacles over 20 years and thousands of lives and trillions of dollars it's the exact opposite they're there to support humanitarian efforts right they're there to send peacekeeping forces as they go they're there to support humanitarian efforts right they're there to support humanitarian efforts right they're there to support humanitarian efforts right they're there to support humanitarian efforts right they're there to support humanitarian efforts right but otherwise their real response is to actually then open the borders for folks that want to be there who are then wanting to trade up jason to those values because that's the simple way to self-select instead of saying i'm going to impose my version of democracy over there i'm actually going to show you what our version looks like over here and if you want to come the doors are open certainly being an example is step one and we i think do that largely well but we do need to sometimes intervene and i think that's the question here is when is it just to intervene when there is human rights on the line and a country is teetering on authoritarianism or democracy like where is that line the just cause here was to go get osama bin laden because he attacked us and we should have gotten out of that country as soon as we realized that bin laden was no longer there i mean that was basically after the battle of tora bora and if we didn't leave then we certainly should have left after we got bin laden in around 2010. so what were we still doing there we were engaged in this exercise of nation building which by the way we spent six trillion dollars on nation building exercises in the middle east between afghanistan and iraq for what for not this is why the electorate is in such a foul mood how many of our domestic disputes are caused by the fact that we squandered that six trillion dollars that's more than uh biden's entire domestic agenda um you know so we wasted all this money to freiburg's point we never understood the culture there and to chamath's point it was a giant money funneling operation to defense contractors there's a great piece of reporting by an independent journalist named michael tracy and he talked to frontline grunts about the wasteful spending you know they would send 12 humvees to some local afghan partner only two of them would ever get there the other 10 would break down and disappear no one would even know where all the money went it was like an unbelievable orgy of wastefulness and you know one other important detail on this there there's a a guy who i think should be much more famous to all of us uh his name is john f sopko he's the special inspector general for afghanistan reconstruction uh that short for cigar he was appointed by congress about 13 years ago to look into what was really happening in afghanistan and to report on quote lessons learned from the afghan war and so for 13 years sapco has been very quietly diligently interviewing people from everyone from frontline troops to commanders about what's really been happening in afghanistan and he's been really good at that and he's been really good at that and he's been really good at releasing these reports that everyone in dc knows about but nobody in the country knows about let me just read you these are just the chapter titles from his latest report okay oh jesus just the chapter titles harmful spending patterns resistance to honesty personnel struggles willful disregard for critical information incorrect theories of change poor understanding of local context and by the way that includes ignoring things like the sexual abuse of young boys by afghan warlords who are our allies okay which the new york times reported on we completely have swept that under the rug okay that's just a table of contents okay from one of his latest reports which is about 100 pages so complete incompetence on our in our government complete waste the pentagon was telling us the whole time i mean while this guy sapco the cigar you know the special inspector general was telling us the truth of what was happening you've got the pentagon telling us and the elected leaders the whole time that we're winning this war that things are in proving they had all these uh bogus metrics to prove it and you know and so it's just it's a systemic failure but sex what would be their motivation to say it's not working look i i think i think that well right what would be the motivation you're right you can't you can't fix what you don't measure and so basically like if you want to lie there there you have it we have that now for 20 years of lying let's talk about the metrics because this is actually an important point but this is my point it's like what what's what what's the objective for them to be measured what's the objective in that case the objective is to demonstrate no the objective is to demonstrate leadership the objective is to basically say you know what this is really not working and this is about putting yourself in the position of a person whose child is over there okay if any of our children were there who signed up because they thought they wanted to do the right thing and and and you know be in the army or the navy or the marines found themselves in afghanistan got killed by the military and they were killed by the military and they were killed by the military god heaven forbid and then that body comes back and this report comes with it which is effectively what it is okay this is the coda to the death of two point you know 2400 americans and two trillion dollars i would be so heartbroken i am heartbroken just thinking about this like this is not that's not what we're about so we can't keep doing this and we can't keep lying we can't rationalize lying anymore right well i i agree with that and let me just speak to the point about the metrics because the problem was not that we didn't have any metrics the problem is that the metrics are bogus now why is that well first of all the mission was very unclear it's not clear how you measure the success of transforming a country to afghanistan like afghanistan to our values i mean what what really are the metrics for that so what the military started doing is not measuring outputs but measuring inputs so you have you know the commanders on the ground saying well today we trained a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis and we're going to train a thousand new afghanis because the military is a culture that's based on advancement because the military is a culture that's based on advancement it's basically the pentagon is a big country club it's a big it's basically the pentagon is a big insiders club there's a dogma the dogma was insiders club there's a dogma the dogma was we're winning the war and if you want to we're winning the war and if you want to advance in that organization you're not advance in that organization you're not going to be the one you're not going to be the skunk at the garden party who tells the generals that they're full of you're basically gonna be the guy who gives them the metrics they want to hear gives them the metrics they want to hear and then their boss the the person who's and then their boss the the person who's the boss of the front line guy is going to the boss of the front line guy is going to improve things 20 he's going to shade to improve things 20 he's going to shade things another 20 and then the next guy in the chain of command shades things 20 and by the time you get all the way to the top the chairman of the georg chiefs is telling biden we have a an army that's 300 000 strong these guys are going to take over the country we're not going to have a problem we're going to have plenty of time to get our people out and that is why we had a lackadaisical withdrawal strategy these guys thought they had all the time in the world because systemically they've been bullshitting themselves about having a 300 000 man afghan army and then and then they're going to have a 300 000 man afghan army and then and then they're going to have a 300 000 man afghan army and then you know when you actually look under the hood of this thing there is no army it's just basically a bunch of kleptocracy i think what happened at the end of this thing is even more dangerous for the future on top of everything you said david which i agree with is that what we basically said is that we will engage in whatever cover-up is necessary because we're not willing to lead and talk about the mistakes we've made and to do the things that are necessary to really fix it and that's what's really sad because as he said as you said sax the minute that you knew that uh bin laden wasn't there we had a choice then the minute you knew that he was already dead we had a choice and the choice was to do the right thing and instead what happened was we got caught up in virtue signaling we got caught up in personal advancement we got caught up in the grift we got caught up in graft we got caught up in corruption we got caught up in the you know military industrial complex and here's here's where we are and the crazy thing is biden had a moment where he could have stepped in and said you know what guys i'm looking at all of this data here's the new plan and he didn't do it either let me ask you a question if biden had run an orderly exit and then it spiraled into taliban and and reverted back to what it was how would you feel about all this i think that would have been that's the goal right trump wanted to get out yes and biden both wanted to get out so if we just executed twice as good or 50 better there'd be no problem here we all want to be out correct yes that's that that decision the decision to get out was a 70 popular decision when biden made the decision in april and then they made it last time because he did that's right this is a bipartisan decision to get out let's not pretend otherwise it was clearly the correct decision to get out but here's where biden screwed it up okay and there's some blame that needs to be apportioned to biden into the to the generals and we don't really know who screwed it up but collectively they did the big mistake the original sin of this withdrawal is that they pulled out of biden's decision to get out and then they lost this withdrawal and then they lost this Bagram Airfield at the beginning of July. Okay, they didn't just pull out, they literally ghosted the Afghan, I mean, they pulled out in the middle of the night without telling anybody the Afghans army who are our allies woke up the next morning, and the Americans were just gone. And the electricity had been turned off. I mean, this was unbelievable. And so the problem is, we then lost our air superiority over the country, we lost our ability to conduct close combat air support, we lost our ability to do a mass evacuation. Okay, we basically gave up our central military asset in the country before we got the civilians out before we got our allies out. And there were 18,000 of these so called civs, the special immigration visas. These are the Afghani translators and helpers who are embedded in our combat units. The State Department, meanwhile, was totally caught up in bureaucracy, slow walking their applications. Those 18,000 translators are now stuck there. Okay, they have 50,000 dependents, we're talking about the Afghan army, and they're stuck there. And they're stuck there. And they're spouses and children and that so they have no way of getting out and then the final thing that just takes the cake is that we gave a list to the taliban of here's our biggest helpers when if they go to the checkpoints we want you to let them follow lord it was basically an assassination list i mean this is really unforgivable and it's and it's and this was it's not like this was unknown okay there was a bipartisan working group of both democrats and republicans who wrote a letter to blinken at the state department back in may saying we are afraid of about the safety of our afghan allies you need to get them out now the state department is taking too long processing the special immigration visas you're totally caught up in red tape bureaucracies solve this problem blinken did nothing he was another deer caught in the headlights they could have also just uh instead of making people fill out all these forms and all this red tape i heard one commenter saying like the right thing to do in situations like this is to just get everybody out put them in a holding uh location and then process them there in other words if this person says they're translating their family and they have you know relatively good paperwork get them out put them into that holding pattern and then figure out how to process them later we got to wrap on this discussion get to some other topics but the interesting thing to watch here is what's going to be the future of afghanistan and i don't know if you guys saw the financial times story but china is watching this uh like a hawk and they china and russia are just sitting there laughing well china is even worse they have aspirations of partnership in this region with pakistan already and afghanistan and building super highways and expanding their train network and having their own silk road essentially to to get to the middle east from china and this is going to be the uh axis of uh look at the united states authoritarianism by biden asked putin if it was okay for us to stage military resources from you know from from from close quarters in asia then uh putin was like no go jason i think what you what you just pointed out is the motivating factor for um having a presence in this and other similar similarly situated territories around the world yeah a lot of people assume it's about imperialism and imposing kind of american democratic principles and ideals i think that's the way the narrative is sold internally here at this country but the truth from the intelligence community and i think the folks that maybe are a little bit more thoughtful and long-term thinking about this sort of stuff is that the absence of an american presence in certain parts of the world will enable um the uh the success of what we would consider competing states globally um and you know there is still that unanswered question ultimately of how do we compete on a global stage given what is currently a very negative view on our having a presence overseas a military presence overseas a physical presence overseas um in these sorts of territories and it begs the question of does that really set us up for challenges and failures in the 21st century as a nation-state um as the other global players in particular china you know take advantage of these openings yeah well i i agree with that and let me just let me just say why china is so smart and we are so dumb china is going to afghanistan right now and cutting deals with the taliban to build a highway so they can get to the rare earth minerals which afghanistan is rich in and they're going to use the superhighway they're going to build to get that out and feed their economy that is how they're going to spend their capital in afghanistan meanwhile we spent over 2 trillion and we have nothing to show for it you know they go abroad in search of rare earth minerals we go there to lecture people on toxic masculinity it is absurd okay now the president well you know what sex is a little too cynical we were also protecting pronouns don't forget the pronouns yes we don't forget pronouns that's right they them it's very important that's right we go there to lecture people on their pronouns no that that is just far too cynical no it's not we went there to protect some people who wanted democracy and to allow women to read and to be oh we just decided we just flushed that right down the toilet sorry i know that we do we just not conflate that we just want to lecture them but david david is right we knew that the minute we pulled out we were casting 50 of that population to a complete state of stasis that was completely not known so what are you saying that we should have stayed there with some presence well this is this is like the argument in vietnam tell the truth we should have just told the truth we're leaving we don't have a plan and this is going to risk all women it's going to risk people that helped us and we are not sure what's going to happen but you know what we decided we're leaving that was the truth remember remember the vietnam war we killed two million vietnamese to make the country safe for democracy you know what the vietnamese said at the end of that we'd rather have our two million people back we see these wars in terms of ideology we think we're going there to spread democracy they see it in terms of nationalism all they see is a foreign invader trying to impose their values that's why they don't buy into what we're doing and by the way the whole idea that we're going to plant madisonian democracy in the soil of the middle east that was a 20-year folly that cost us trillions and one of the reasons why there are no madisons over there there are no madisons there are no jeffersons there are no washingtons who is going to take up that cause what we had in afghanistan is this president ghani who's a crook who was off on the first helicopter with millions of our dollars that is how stupid we are it's the last place we should be trying to do democracy there's other places where it's teetering and we can probably be more helpful the american president john quincy adams this is back when america had a rational foreign policy he said america does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy that used to be our foreign policy now we involve ourselves all over the world to impose our values for no reasons it is costing us a fortune and has led to the crumbling of the america of of american wealth and power and it completely erodes our trust in institutions particularly the institution of the federal government and we're left just scratching our heads saying if not these guys then who is going to figure this out what are we doing uh chamath and uh sax if you're don't know if you don't want to support democracy in the world what happens to taiwan in your world this signed taiwan's death war i'm sorry but you should just assume we should just let taiwan go no my point is the following taiwan will when the when prc has the right window be under complete chinese control and we because of how we have executed this and how we've executed the rest of our middle asia strategy means that we will not really engage and the reason is because it will be an enormous food fight inside the united states where all of these past experiences of us this up will come up should we defend taiwan free except by the way the difference is we're not going to we would not be going to war with a bunch of like tribal people in the mountains carrying sticks and ak-47s from the 80s this is china so if we can't if we can't beat and win in afghanistan i mean we also what are our chat i mean i'm sorry guys but our chances alone it's not worth it with a group of japan south korea australia and the eu we should be defending taiwan in my mind what do you think freeberg should we try and defend taiwan when this inevitably leads to the chinese government finding their window as chamath is predicting again i don't think that the motivating factor could necessarily be imposing democratic principles as the priority if you were to to to actually weigh that decision you would realize that you should probably have a presence in some latin american countries you should probably have a presence in central africa where there are authoritarian regimes that are doing terrible things but we don't have a competing global interest there to defend against well to be clear it taiwan is right now democratic so we would be defending a democracy freebrook jay cal's asking a specific question if china invades taiwan do you think the united states should get involved on a principles basis or do i think the united states will get involved either one yeah i mean i think the challenge is the escalation with china right so that's going to be the big calculus it's really about what's the what's the long-term cost certainly on a principle basis you'd say let's go defend the weak and go protect them because they share principles and ideals with us but the the backlash the challenge would be if we were to do this global trade would stall there would be um massive um issues at home with people saying that we're getting involved in an overseas war all of the reasons that from a political perspective it would stall our economy it would cause all these you know i'm kind of um speculating a bit here but the actual cost isn't just about sending a few thousand troops over and surrounding the island and protecting people it's actually much more severe than that and if you were to weigh it it could be that we end up with 25 percent of the world's population and we're not going to be able to do it in the next decade because of the economic fallout that occurs um in our doing that and so on and so forth and a lot of american prosperity that we get to enjoy um you know kind of kind of declines and so that's the real calculus and i don't know how to do that calculus but i think that is the calculus that that is being done by the intelligence community to figure out the answer to that question let's swing it to sax to do a little bit more of this calculus because what we're talking about here is not giving up an authoritarian state right that wants to be authoritarian right we're talking about a democracy on the risk board and we're talking about a risk board that would be taken and flipped from a democracy like hong kong has been flipped i think it's a i think it's a very important distinction that taiwan is already a democracy they got there on their own they've done a lot of hard work building that country since uh that basically the the country became separate from mainland china i think in 1945 it's never been under the control of the ccp it's uh it's a free enterprise system it's democratic capitalism there's basically 24 million free soldiers and they're not going to be able to get out of the country they're going to be in free souls who live on that island and if we show any weakness and we frankly already have by what we've done in the middle east if we show any weakness they will fall under the boot of the communist regime so i think there's a big difference between trying to plant democracy or nation build uh verse in a country that's never had it before in thousands of years and basically being friends and allies with a country that already is a democracy and just wants to be free and i think our message to china should just be we like things the way they are we don't want them to change that's it we have a policy of what's called strategic ambiguity to taiwan it basically says that we may come to the defense of taiwan or we may not and i think we should just continue with that policy i think our message should just be we like the status quo we don't think it should change let's leave things alone i think that that's fine but i think we need to be investing hundreds of billions the trillions of dollars we wasted in afghanistan could have been better served building an infrastructure in america for chips and semiconductors and a bunch of these critical components because then it would give us a lot more bargaining room to uh actually be able to play out that strategic ambiguity more fully i think the reality is that despite the policy framework the practical economic reality is that we would be engulfed in a war if if taiwan were taken over by china because as friedberg said our economy would ground to a halt because those critical assets are linchpins for how massive swaths of the american economy work yeah i'll tell you one thing we should be making plans for i don't know if our military is competent enough but we've talked on this pod before about how what 70 percent of the advanced chips come out of taiwan companies like tsmc if china takes over that island i mean those chips are the new oil right we're going to be dependent on them in a way we never should be for our supply chain you're right your mouth we never should have gotten this dependent but frankly our military needs to have a plan to sabotage those chip factories because we can't let them fall under the control of the ccp i don't know if they're competent enough to do that but but if taiwan falls it needs to be a poison chalice for the ccp we're going to need to make some decisions here because russia with crimea and the ukraine and their ambitions and then china taking over hong kong and looking at taiwan i mean i think the lesson here is if you're a dictator and you are allowed to take over other regions and other you know countries you're not going to stop it's the nature of dictators and we have to at least put our foot down you know afghanistan's a show but these other places we're flat-footed right now jay kell we're starting i know that's why this is a serious problem and so and so we need to we need to sort of like recenter ourselves and get momentum you know you to use a poker analogy we basically just bluffed off half our stack with the jackade offsuit and then what and then when you get the ace king suited you have no chips to play with yeah right you know and you're just like what was i doing credibility basically 9 11 9 11 put us on tilt okay and we've been losing pots for the last 20 years now we just lost the big one and the question is to jama's point are we going to lose the rest of our stack are we going to go take a walk around the block like mute center center time to recenter on the recentering thing china is going in the opposite direction in a way that could actually help us meaning like you know it's uh it's a pretty scary set of things that's happening over there but it's also a kind of a risk to the economy and so i think that's a really good point a kind of instructive about how we could recenter ourselves because there's, they're actually enacting the laws that we all talk about, we've been talking about for seven months, but they're actually willing to do it. And they, and so if American policymakers would actually pivot to what's going on over there with the China or should we go to robotics? Let's Let's finish China and then we can and then we can talk about China is continuing their crackdown of tech companies, and has proposed a ban on foreign IPOs. The Wall Street Journal had some exclusive reporting today, I'll just read a quote and then hand it over to Chamath. China plans to propose new rules that would ban companies with large amounts of sensitive consumer data from going public in the US people familiar with the matter said, and in addition to that, under these new rules, they are looking at the algorithms that are being run, and different services and making them transparent and the Chinese government will basically control the algorithms that have caused so much chaos here in the United States with Facebook and Twitter, and YouTube. And then finally, they're going to close the loophole on VI ease. Chamathi want to explain what this means from a market perspective. Today's a really big day. Because of these things, Jason, as you just said, so let me just break this down. Because I think it's interesting for us to all learn about this together. So one thing is around the technology, which I'll talk about in a second, which you just talked about, and then previewed. And then the second is around the capital markets and the money flow. And that in this is a really big deal. So what is a VI e because you're going to hear this a lot. A VI e is what's called a variable interest entity. And what it is, is just a massive workaround. So essentially, what happened was a VI e was a legal business where you know, an entity had control of a company, okay, through a contract, but not through equity. So it's kind of like, you know, sacks, like I had a contract with Colin, that's it, I can dictate, you know, who does what, etc. But I don't own any equity. Now, the the company that completely ran afoul of all of these things was Enron. And back in 2001, Enron went fucking ham. As we all know, they had a bunch of these VI es, and they used it to basically shield a bunch of losses and do a bunch of shady things. So then there was a bunch of accounting laws that were introduced. China, on a completely separate track around that same time was like, Hey, listen, we want to control our economy. So we're going to prohibit foreign ownership. So just for all you guys to know, China to this day does not allow a foreigner to own a piece, large sections of the Chinese economy. Okay, so as of 2018, which is the last updated list, as far as I could find it, there are 33 sectors of the economy where China says you cannot be a foreigner and own any equity. You have to have a local partner. No, you cannot own any equity. Yeah, exactly. You want to start a business there, you have to have like a partner like Yahoo did. So all technology. companies fall under this all data companies, any education company, any media company, so you can imagine it's basically every part of the economy that matters. And so with because of all these restrictions, you know, the Chinese internet companies were like, Hey, hold on a second, I need to get access to the capital markets. What do I do? They dusted off the VI structure. And they basically created all of these, you know, Cayman's holding companies. And that's where all the American investors would go and buy equity from or contribute equity to. And so you know, Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Didi.com, JD, all of these folks have these VI es. And what's interesting about these VI es is, it's written clear as day, but not a single investor seemed to care. But in the prospectuses of these Chinese companies, they were clear. It doesn't mean you actually have a claim on the assets, it doesn't mean you can actually make a demand of management. I mean, if you saw this in an American prospectus, you would not put a single dollar into these companies. But in fact, the exact opposite happened, because people were greedy and chasing the money. And, and these risks, by the way, came back to bear because Jason, I think you were the one that gave the example of the Chinese tutoring guys, where, you know, overnight, this guy lost 99% of his net worth, I think this was a one or two pods ago. The way they did that was that they cancelled the VI es. They said online tutoring, nope, sorry, these things can't exist anymore. And so essentially, we have this situation now where VI es are part of 58 companies, massive Chinese mega cap companies that are in the huge indexes in the United States. These 58 companies account for $2 trillion of market cap, we are we are we are now in a situation now, where the Chinese government basically says, for online tutoring, we're going to cancel the VI es in a bunch of other areas, we're going to start with regulation, we could cancel the VI es later. And so we've essentially put the capital markets in my opinion, on pause. And so now let's transition to this other markets in China, capital markets in China, I think now are the most volatile they've ever been, essentially, the People's Republic of China, the government, the CCP chooses how and who will make money. And they are basically putting their foot down in a big way in the capital, what happens to the 1.62 trillion in existing shares that have been bought by people around the world, would there be some way to unravel that or a tender offer, you're gonna have to delist these ADRs, I don't exactly know what would happen. I think what happens is that I'm a correct you have capital laws, Jason, because when they cancelled the online tutoring VI es, the stock prices basically went to zero. So you could eviscerate $2 trillion of market cap tomorrow, if they decide you know what that VI for Alibaba, by the way, Nick, I'll send it to you. But it's a it's a thing of art. If you look at the VI structure for Baba, I mean, it is a fucking babushka doll of nesting entities. I don't know how to explain it. But the idea is that any investor who bought shares in Alibaba actually took the time to understand what they were actually buying, they suspended disbelief because they were greedy. So So the point is, that's happening. Okay, so the capital markets are now I think, getting really constrained. The compliment to this is that they're starting to now introduce legislation as a prelude, in my opinion, to cancelling some of these VI es in the most important area that we care about, which is tech. So Jason, to your point, the cyberspace watchdog. Today or yesterday I think it was. They just published a list of draft regulations that will now become law. I'm just going to read this to you. So let me just just FYI for you guys. So let me just give you a sense of them. Users must be provided with a convenient way to see and delete all the keywords that an algorithm uses to profile them. Number two providers shall not have that providers shall not record illegal and undesirable keywords in the user points of interest, or as user tags and push information content to them. And they may not become discriminatory or biased based on that information. Users must be informed that algorithms are being used on them to recommend content or products to them. And they must be allowed to opt out and see completely generic non personalized results. The algorithm recommendation shall adhere to me this is incredible to mainstream values. I don't know what that means. They must have harmony in China, they must actively spread positive energy and promote the application of algorithms for the better. providers shall regularly review and evaluate and verify these algorithms models and data's with these watchdogs. These watchdogs will now start to increasingly take board seats on the company on on Chinese companies. So you put these two things together. It is a takeover moment in China tech. It's a takeover. Yes, yes. I mean, so some of those provisions sound like you know, privacy regulations we might want to adopt over here completely. But I think we should focus on the one towards the end that you mentioned the algorithm recommendation source provider shall adhere to mainstream values actively spread positive energy and promote application for the better. Now, how do you actively spread positive energy? I mean, as a business person under that regulation, like what does that even mean? I mean, it basically means it means what you're not spreading, David. It means you're not spreading a protest in Hong Kong. It means you're not talking about the Uyghurs. It means you're not talking about Tiananmen Square, you're not creating social unrest. This is a way for them to say, you know, positive energy means don't criticize Xi Jinping, or the CCP or bring up topics that are in the no fly zone like the Uyghurs. Well, they're they're, they're gonna have content moderation guidelines. Yeah, they're bringing it all under their control. That's what it's about. I mean, these, this is the type of thing that despite all of our problems makes me very happy to be an American. Yeah, can you I would I would say though, the first part of what I said about the regulations to me seem really intelligent. And I think Americans would want that. And if American policymakers would actually just suspend disbelief for a second, go to the Chinese website, meet Nick, we can put a link into the into the show notes of where the regulations were published, and actually try to implement those laws. I think we as Americans, we'd all want most of them except that one. Yeah, well, that's what the devil does. They mix the lies with the truth in order to get you to be convinced to give up your freedoms. Friedberg, what are your thoughts? I'm getting increasingly convinced that this idea of like decentralized blockchain based government governing might work in the 21st century. I just feel like they're the you know, we keep hearing more about the overreach and the ineptitude of centralized institutions like CCP and the US government and you know, I'm not hearing anyone that says, man, you know, this is a great. Well, I was seeing progress. But Friedberg, I think I think the CCP is actually pretty good. I what they do, we may not agree with them. But I think they're pretty good. I agree with you. I agree with you generally. Yeah. But I do think it creates an incentive and a motivation also, because if you don't agree with their, their principles, you know, you're going to find yourself looking for an alternative. So, you know, I don't know, we, this is probably not the right time or forum for this conversation, we should probably do it on another show. But we should talk about some of the innovations, blockchain innovations that are taking place. And J. Cal, I know you spent a lot of time on this as well. But, you know, I think you know, it'd be worth kind of talking about the notion that, you know, can you see governing move to the blockchain? And what does society look like in maybe the 22nd century, if this becomes a reality? And how do we get how does the world kind of evolve there? Well, in the crypto world, you would put in some effort, you would have some skin in the game, and you would, because of your processing power, your nodes on the network, we get some votes, it would be like in a democracy, how much money you had, or how much work you produced, you had some sort of say, which kind of sounds like ours. I mean, imagine if the US government instead of, you know, having some folks go to Congress and say, I want a trillion dollars and spend 25 years in Afghanistan. You know, it was more of a distributed decision making process where data was available in real time metrics were used to make the decision. And the folks that actually contributed dollars to the network ended up being the ones that made the decisions based on how many dollars they've contributed or based on some other principle of decision making. That doesn't kind of have to be the case. So, you know, I think that's kind of the kind of the aggregate institutional ineptitude, which is kind of part of the issue we've seen here. Well, so I think that brings up an interesting point, which is, you know, when we talk about all the ways that we could have spent these trillions of dollars better than nation building, here's, here's the fundamental problem. I agree with that. I mean, I wish we had spent the 6 trillion that we spent on nation building in the Middle East, I wish we had spent that at home domestically on our own priorities. But here's the problem is I think what Afghanistan is specifically the military industrial complex shows is how do we actually get the money? How good these special interests get at extracting money from the system, while providing so little value? You know, we spent so these contractors spent, or we they they charge so much to basically deliver so little Afghanistan, do you really think it's going to be much different for the trillion dollar, the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that's coming? You know, and if we create it, they're licking their lips, they're licking Yeah, exactly. The people, the groups are going to get that money, we're are people who their skill set is lobbying okay that is what they spend their time doing now listen and if you are really good at lobbying why would you even waste your time trying to get good at delivering value you're not that's your business's lobby that is your value yeah that is your skillset exactly so this idea that we can basically spend a trillion dollars on some domestic innovation program the problem is it'll never go to the right people will never go to the innovators the best thing we could do is just not spend the money quite frankly so smaller government or how about how about just not a government that's uh 20 trillion dollars in debt i don't know how it's like smaller or small government to if we were to save six trillion would still be 14 trillion in debt it's not a small government i think a good jumping off point here might be the supreme court eviction moratorium uh and the supreme court not upholding it and what are your thoughts on that sex because it does relate to this never-ending free money train no repercussions of personal behavior and you know spending insanely forever it seems like we're never going to stop with the stimmies yeah i think the stream court threw out uh biden's eviction moratorium as unconstitutional look i think it's great you know the the government should not be uh preventing uh eviction i think it's great you know the the government should not be uh preventing uh eviction you know especially not the federal government i don't understand how this is supposed to work i mean all you do look i don't want to see anybody get evicted but the reality is you have to pay your rent and if and if there are groups of people who can't pay their rent and the government decides that uh that those people should be helped the right way to help them is to give them the money to pay their rent not just to tell landlords sorry like you can't collect the right congress could give more stimulus to those people yes it's a taking it's a clear taking from landlords to say that oh your tenants don't have to pay you anymore how does that make sense well how do we unwind the free money train because there's 10 million job openings right now that are not getting filled and then we have unemployment starting to unwind or the bonus unemployment's online and then we have all this uh free rent concept or just you don't have to pay your rent at some point it feels like we have to let the free market come back and maybe people can't pay their rent so they go take one of the 10 million jobs i know that sounds cold-hearted you've talked about this before in california we have a labor shortage in california we've basically run a controlled experiment in the uh ubi the universal basic income where we've basically been paying people not to work or paying them regardless of whether they work guess what they don't take jobs and so we actually have a labor shortage in california despite having high unemployment at some point the government's gonna have to say to people like look covet is not an excuse for shirking your adult responsibilities you know we all have a responsibility to go to work to pay our rent you know to pay our parking tickets and covet has been this excuse for suspending you know this this sort of normal life and the problem is covet's going to be around forever it's like the cold or the flu it can't continue to be this excuse for people not working not paying rent not doing what they're supposed to be doing i think on top of that though i think jason maybe you want to talk about this i think on top of that i think jason you're right i'm going to talk about this i think on top of that we uh are amplifying that by taking people's agency away and we are prop 22. and prop 22 is a perfect example of that which you should talk about but when you put these two things together on the one hand you have a government that basically wants to subsidize uh opting out of the system and then you have a set of laws that if they're not unwound reinforce that dynamic and you put these two things together and folks just want to sit on the sidelines yeah let's get freeburg about freeburg you want to talk about the prop 22 um supreme court decision etc yeah there was an appeals court appeals court um you know appeals court that uh overturned some elements of the california prop 22 which was a heavily lobbied california proposition lobbied by uber and lyft and other um businesses that have built effectively marketplaces for independent contractors like the california contract which is a big employees union that had um you know fought very hard to pass legislation in california that made it um effectively very difficult for people to operate as independent contractors and forcing companies like uber and lyft to treat them like full-time employees or to treat them like employees and so prop 22 was to counter the union-funded legislation which basically provided a lot of room for people to operate as independent contractors which basically provided more freedom and flexibility to workers where there weren't all these very arbitrary random rules that if you're a writer you can be an independent contractor but if you're a driver you cannot you know all this nonsense that took place because the unions were trying to increase the scale and scope of their union base um and so prop 22 was passed in california after much spending and lobbying and it passed by a pretty decent margin and then this court ruling basically in the appeals court overruled the constitutionality of some elements of prop 22 which brings into question whether that prop 22 is actually going to hold in california therefore are all these people who are drivers for uber delivery people for doordash and all these companies that are creating like thumbtack and you know all these companies that are creating marketplaces for individuals to have flexible work to go and work where they want when they want to find gigs to find you know short-term jobs to find um you know tasks and projects that they can run are they now going to be seeing that those marketplaces have stopped working because when you have to start treating those people like employees the flexibility and freedom that those marketplaces enable stalls out and and kind of you know as we're already seeing so it's it's super nasty and the implications are that we're now seeing um you know we're now facing once again this crisis of you know our basically lower income people people that want to have flexible labor going to be restricted from having access to gig jobs because the unions want to force everyone into a full-time job which you know as our friend bill girley pointed out it's kind of like an archaic element of yeah the 19th and 20th century i mean this is like let's play a little bit from uh bill girley and here it is there's one big issue that i don't think is talked about enough which is you know that if you poll the drivers they're not looking for any changes they're really happy with the flexible work product if you look at the voters of california they stepped up and voted and made it very clear in a in a very clear way that voted and made it very clear in a state that voted two to one you know in favor of biden they came down very strong 60 40 that they didn't want this to happen and there's one uh entity that's really been pushing this the whole time going all the way back to ae5 and that's the seiu it is a single union but to call them a single union understates it because they are the granddaddy of special interest groups i i sent along some data maybe you can put on the screen um they spend more than a million dollars on the union and they're not even in this industry so they're taking the dues from their members and using it to fight these battles because they want to expand their footprint what they're really after is putting 400 420 which is the minimum member union fee for the two million dollars that they're really after is putting four hundred dollars four hundred twenty dollars which is the minimum member union fee for the two million dollars that they're really after and then they're going to put in the money that they're going to put in the union fee and they're going to put in the money that they're going to put in the union fee and they're going to put in the money that they're going to put in the union fee and they're going to put in the minimum member union fee and they're going to put in the minimum member union fee and they're going to put in the minimum member union fee and they're going to put in the minimum member union fee and they're going to put in the minimum member union fee and they're going to put in the minimum member union fee and they're going to put in the minimum member union fee and they're going to put in the minimum member union fee and they're going to put in the minimum member union fee and 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minimum member union fee and they're going to put in the minimum member union fee and they're going to put in the minimum member enables us to quickly find short term jobs, short term opportunities to work on things and make some money and figure out how we want to build our lives in a more flexible way. Figure out how workers want to build lives in a more flexible way across all industries. And it's really... Frankly, a non progressive policy to say that everyone has to be pigeonholed into working full-time 40 hour week labor jobs, be employees and not have the flexibility of running their own business in their own way with their own time and choosing what they want to go do and work on. And so this sort of legislation and this sort of battle is a really important one for defining the future of work in the United States, which will ultimately represent the future of work globally. And the craziness of all this, David, is that Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, DoorDash drivers, etc, are getting paid a fortune now because there's a labor shortage and these ride sharing companies have given a minimum... $21 an hour fee. So I don't know exactly what's going on here, but it seems to me like it's a union grab because everybody else who's affluent or rich, real estate folks, doctors, whoever, can be freelance. But if you're a ride share driver or a freelance writer, you don't get to be. And it seems just incredibly unfair. It is. And one of the best things about COVID, I think for all of us, is that we're not going to be the same. We're going to be the same. We're going to be the same. We're going to be the same. We're going to be the same. We're going to be the same. We're going to be the same. We're going to be the same. We're going to be the same. We're going to be the same. that we learned that we could do our jobs from anywhere. We didn't have to go into an office, we didn't have to work the standard whatever, nine to six hours. We could be anywhere; we had flexibility and I think it's one of the lasting consequences of COVID that's actually been very positive for a lot of people. Here you have the government basically trying to take away and prohibit freelance work, flexible hours, gig-type jobs; these are the sort of modern, flexible working relationships that people want. Why are they getting rid of it? Because of lobbying pressure from the SEIU, which only has two million members, it's not even a big union, but they got Lorena Gonzalez in their back pocket, she passed AB5 in California. The people of California didn't want it. Remember, 58% of Californians said, "We don't want this," so they overturned it in this ballot initiative and now you got this activist judge basically inventing these specious grounds for overturning Prop 22, which is what the people want. So, it's ridiculous. And, you know, the common thread to me on this show that I've come to realize about American politics is just the degree of special interest corruption. And, you know, people are used to thinking in terms of left versus right. It's not. There's a special interest corruption that pervades everything. You've got this union that is destroying freelance work and flexible working relationships because of corruption, because it benefits them. You got defense contractors in Afghanistan who are just looting, looting the Pentagon and the federal budget because it's in their interest. You've got these special interests of both the right and the left. This is a central problem in American politics. And, you know, what they do to cover up the naked self-interest is they disguise it in a kind of woke virtue signaling. So, they'll start, you know, talking about, you know, how what they're doing is for the benefit of these drivers when the drivers don't even want it. And to build on that, I'd say, you know, my great realization from having this conversation with you all every week is that we are starting to propose a nanny state in which people have no agency. Even if they want to have agency over their life and career, you are taking it away. And then if there's no repercussions to people's behavior and they have no agency, they become, you know, disenfranchised from society. And why are they going to participate? And then what kind of society do we have if people can't make their own choices? And you see it also in, you know, accreditation laws and you see where only rich people can invest. And now you're seeing it with this freelancer. We're, you know, my dad would have loved to have an extra shift or two to make extra money, and he's not allowed to? 80% of drivers want flexibility. They're willing to participate on things that ultimately on things that they think matter, but don't necessarily solve the core root cause problems. The people right now in America, I think, are focused too much on symptoms. Meaning, you know, they want to fight for the right hash tags. They want to fight for the right pronouns. They want to make sure that, you know, this person gets canceled for things that happened eight or 10 years ago. And I think what they don't understand is these are all symptoms. And this is not what solves the problem, right? We have a water crisis in America. We have a food impending food crisis as we shut off the water. We have a climate crisis that's engulfing the entire nation. We're still in the middle of a pandemic that we can't control. We have an economic system that's fragile, that's dependent on a country who's sometimes our friend and sometimes our foe in China. These are huge transformational issues that we can't get organized around. And so instead, we spend our time at the edges on the symptoms. And we think the symptoms are, if we get the pronouns right, everything's going to come together and everything's going to get fixed. The looting will stop. The graft will stop. The corruption will stop. And it turns out, actually, it emboldens those people to say, "Hey, wait a minute, I'm tricking these people. Everything that I wanted to happen can happen. Let them focus on the pronouns while I continue to loot the American treasury for another trillion dollars." That's where we are. Yeah. And the perfect representation of that is Gavin Newsom. He represents both of these trends. He is one of the most corrupt governors we've ever had. As soon as COVID happened, they suspended all sorts of, you know, the process for contracting and recruiting so that his campaign contributors could get all these special contracts. He cut a sweetheart deal to PG&E to absolve them of liability for all the fires they've been causing. And on and on it goes, the $12 billion to the homeless industrial complex. And then he disguises it with all this woke virtue signaling. And so, you know, I would just give a shout out to the recall campaign. The election is on September 14th, but the ballots have gone out. If you want to send a message to the political class that this special interest corruption has got to stop, let's cut the head off the snake here. Just vote to recall Gavin Newsom on question one. Period. All right. You guys want to end on Jeff Bezos? Let's talk about the AI bot first and then Bezos. All right. So if you haven't been watching, Boston Dynamics tweeted a video which we'll play right now as I talk over it. And it's basically their robots, which have been picking up heavy objects and walking around doing parkour. If you don't know what parkour is, it's basically people jumping off the side of objects and flipping and doing balance beams and vaulting themselves all around. It is basically robots. It's like break dancing in France. Yeah, but from heights and jumping over things as well. No, but the French are like parkour experts. Yeah, I mean, it's I think parkour is French for jumping. I made that up. But have you seen Sax do parkour? No, absolutely. I haven't. Never seen him. We'll show that video. I have seen him so drunk that he's on the floor. I've never seen him do parkour. But don't get in the way of Sax. Don't get in the way of Sax. This robot looks more dexterous than any of the Terminators we saw in the films. And then adding to that, oh, if you didn't know Boston Dynamics got bought by Google. I'm sure Freeburg has some inside information on that. And then they got sold again, SoftBank had bought them and now they are owned by... Hyundai, the South Korean... Hyundai, yeah. Hyundai, the South Korean automaker. Because apparently, the softies at Google didn't want to be involved in government contracting with robots, i.e. making soldiers of the future, which obviously the Chinese have. I wouldn't characterize the whole story like that. I mean, remember like... Well, what was it? Well, Google bought Boston Dynamics in 2013. And remember, Boston Dynamics had been around for over a decade prior to that. They spun out of MIT, like in the 90s, I think. And they were... Had always been working on advanced neural nets being applied to automation systems so you could get things to mimic real life. And the idea at Google... This was when they had set up Google X and were starting to do a lot of this moonshot type tech investing as a separate entity outside of the core Google. And it was like leveraging their cash flow to start new projects. The idea was let's build this into a next-gen robotics platform. They had Andy Rubin, who previously started and ran Android. The company was called Danger. Google bought it, turned into Android. Run the unit and they made several other acquisitions. They rolled them all up into this robotics platform. They had spent, I think, $400 million on Boston Dynamics and hundreds of millions more on these other companies. And ultimately, I think the challenge was less about who does or doesn't want to do contracts with us. But it was more about the fundamental question that was still the question mark today, which is, do we really need general purpose automation? Or do we need special purpose automation for industries, for customers? Where do you find product market fit? Do people really need a robot that does parkour? Or do they need an automation system that can lift boxes and pack and place things? Or an automation system that can move things from point A to point B? And so if you're solving for a customer's problem, you typically find that the special purpose automation solution is a more elegant, cheaper, solution that you can get to market right away, like building an automated little truck that moves things around, or building a machine that lifts and puts boxes in the right place. Parallel the discussion between narrow AI and general AI. Correct. And this is exactly the same question, Jake. I was like, is general purpose AI really what the market needs? Or are there specific applications of neural network or machine learning technologies that allow us to solve for the problems that customers have without needing to replicate the human being? So when you're lifting boxes, you don't necessarily need all the other things that humans have. You don't need to mimic a human. When you're moving a package, you don't necessarily need to have 4 legs to do it. You can have it on 4 wheels and just have a simple system that moves it around. And so I think SoftBank, Masa's son had this whole belief with Vision Fund 1 when he raised 100 some odd billion dollars that the singularity where machines were going to be smarter and better than humans in every way, intelligence and dexterity and all these things, was about to be the best way to do it. And then you have the idea of a robot that can do it. And then you have the idea of a machine that can do it. And then you have the idea of a robot that can do it. And then you have the idea of a machine that can do it. And then you have the idea of a robot that can do it. And then you have the idea of a machine that can do it. And then you have the idea of a robot that can do it. And then you have the idea of a machine that can do it. And then you have the idea of a robot that can do it. And then you have the idea of a robot that can do it. And then you have the idea of a robot that can do it. And then you have the idea of a robot that can do it. And then you have the idea of a robot let's be honest, they can't even walk a dog because they wouldn't know how to deal with the edge cases. If the dog had diarrhea. And so I think there's I think there's core IP Boston Dynamics that's certainly critically valuable for businesses that are in special purpose automation, which Hyundai is, there's going to be a great set of applications for leveraging that IP into some of the existing product lines and customers that they serve. In a related story, Elon then revealed the Tesla bot plans that his AI day he's in a couple of days, and I think they're primarily designed to get AI talent, which is some of the hardest developers to find in the world. And they said that their Tesla bot will weigh 125 pounds, five, eight, so I'll be a half inch taller than it. But it will weigh significantly less than me and will move up, up to five miles per hour and can carry 45 pounds. Elon said the reason he was doing that is so a human can easily overtake it in case it becomes sentient, which was quite entertaining. Chamath, do you think this is what are the chances Elon has a robot like this and it's operating the real world? I saw a bunch of journalists dunking on him that this would never ever happen, which is kind of hard to believe when there's a million Tesla's on the road. Yeah, no comment. And I think it's awesome. Oh, okay. Can't comment. All right, leave it at that. Sachs, you have any comments on this? Um, I was Elon at PayPal. Yeah, I thought it was a little bit of a surprise that he was working on a robot. But, you know, obviously, this has been an interest of his. He's talked a lot about it. And so it kind of makes sense. It's just another innovative thing he's doing. Should we talk about Elon versus Bezos on the space? Yeah, well, I just wanted to let people know, by the way, the robot going at five miles an hour, it's not as outlandish as I think some of the journalists and idiots out there who don't build anything in the world who were kind of dunking on him like we're saying, if you think about those cars going 65 7585 miles an hour on the road processing the world, doing a neural network, machine learning on the fly to figure out where the car should go. A robot going five miles an hour is an easier task. I think all those people dunking on him should have just taken a step back and actually asked the question, Am I just being really insecure right now? And if so, why am I making fun of this guy who just seems to be, you know, firing on all cylinders? And maybe it's maybe it's me. Maybe, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe I'm writing this article out of my own insecurity. Maybe I'm feeling a little impotent. You know, and also to dunk on a guy for the version one or even the version 0.1 of a product is so ridiculous. I mean, I remember the version zero of Tesla. Now look at the company. I mean, you know, it's about iterating. That's how you get to product. So it's just so stupid and short term. And by the way, he's on the current product capabilities. And his his, his style of doing these things, I think makes a ton of sense when when you know, he started with Starlink. It was the same reaction, people were dunking, dunking, dunking, dunking, dunking, and dunking. And, you know, it's just, you know, I'm not saying that they're too slow, too expensive, not going to work. And what you find through these events are really technical people building companies that could help him want to be a part of the mission. Right? And so you know, for whatever it's worth, it's like, I think Starlink is going to be a real thing, I think this is probably going to be a real thing. I think great companies will get absorbed into this, these efforts, I think, I think it's great. And I really think that people that are doing this, I think that they're going to be able to do a lot of things. And I think that I think that it's a great thing. I think it's a great thing. And I think that it's a great thing. And I think that it's a great thing. And I think that people are going to be able to get absorbed into this, I think that it's a great thing. And I think that it's a great thing. And I think that it's a great thing. And I think that it's a great thing. Larry Page owning and running Boston dynamics, then masa owning and running Boston dynamics, and then Elon trying to take on the same project from scratch. You know, why were these other two kind of well capitalized influential businesses that have attract great partners not been able to turn Boston dynamics into kind of a successful business? into kind of a successful business? But but you guys believe Elon will, if I had to just categorize them, I would say, Larry is absent and is sitting on $100 billion fortune with no idea what to do. I think seven islands. Yeah, I mean, he's just absent. So he's irrelevant. I don't think anybody knows what the fuck he looks like. I mean, we do. But you know, he's frittered away enormous potential, I think. I think masa is a master capital Alex. Alex. Alex. He's a master capital, but he's not an engineer. And I think Elon is the most important technical product and business mind of our lifetime. I think the answer is even simpler. He's the customer of the robot. So he understands what the spec should be because he has so many robots working in the factories. So he's gonna buy the first 1000 to go colonize Mars or work at a space station to build shit in space. And he's gonna have them working in the Tesla factory and for the boring company carrying rocks out of tongues. He's the customer, of course he knows. And masa wasn't the customer. Masa was looking to increase whatever money he has to do. But it's also it's also skill set like masa, of course, is an incredible visionary and investor, but he's not going to be the guy in the engine room making the robot. Larry now, in fairness to Larry Page, he could be that good. And there was a moment in time where Larry was that good and frankly, better than Elon. But that window has closed and it's well passed. And now, you know, it's kind of like the player that just keeps getting better and better. I think that's Elon Musk. Good sex. Your thoughts. I mean, nothing to add to that. I think you both make great points. I mean, the amazing thing is that Elon is still working so hard doubling down coming up with new ideas, new initiatives. I mean, it's working harder than ever, when most people are, you know, doing most people would do it Larry did, you know, go buy an island or seven and yours and hang out, you know? All right, Bezos is lost his way. And he left his position as CEO of Amazon to focus on Blue Origin. And then he sued NASA over the moon program accusing NASA of wrongly evaluated its lunar lander proposal, giving all the funds to SpaceX. He then did a series of like infographics talking about how terrible SpaceX his plans were. This lawsuit has delayed SpaceX his work on the project according to the verge and if that's true or not, Amazon urged the FCC to dismiss the newly submitted plans for SpaceX to launch another cluster of satellites to power Starlink. And Elon tweeted, turns out Bezos retired in order to pursue a full time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX, which is hilarious. What? How sad is this that it's a huge miscalculation in the following way, which is that in order for Jeff to achieve his ambitions, he needs deeply technical people. And this is the simplest way to basically turn them off because this is not what technical people do. What a technical people do. What a technical people do. What a technical people do. We don't we don't take our toys and run from the sandbox crying like a bitch. We stay there and we keep iterating trying to make things work. Yeah, we don't act like patent trolls. I have a new I have a new slogan for you J Cal. Go ahead. Winners do and losers sue. Winners do and losers sue. Okay, folks, they have it. It's the all in podcast. We're back. We're back from vacation. Yeah, make the banger. Make a banger. All right, everybody. What's your free bird? Do you have any thoughts on these? I feel bad for Bezos. I feel like he's just getting so beat up on this shit. It's, it's honestly, it's a little disappointing, because I think he's got all the right intentions. He's an incredible engineer, obviously an incredible operator. I'd love to see him and Elon succeed in the work they're trying to do as well as all the other startups that are pursuing this. I am concerned about frankly, the lack of commercial readiness for this industry. I feel like in terms of the hype cycle, we're at that early point where the investment dollars and the number of companies exceeds the market demand. And therefore, there's this fight over the one or two customers, which is basically NASA and the federal government. And it's creating this really nasty set of circumstances. Because that's where the money comes from. That's where the customers are right now. And so they're all fighting over one or two customers. And you know, Elon filed suits against, you know, federal agencies when he lost contracts. He did that when they know bid them. I get it. I get it. And slightly different. I get it. But still, like, I think at the end of the day, you know, Bezos is willing to put his money where his mouth is, he's offered to put up a billion dollars or more to fund this, I'd love to see multiple companies simultaneously going to the moon, multiple companies simultaneously going to Mars. But rather than have, you know, single contracts with one customer, or have, you know, private industry figure out ways to make money from this and fund it. The challenge is just, it's another product market fit question, right? The market is one customer today. And Bezos is almost 60 years old, he's got 150 $200 billion, it's going to cost him two or $3 billion 123% of his net worth to do all this just fucking do it Bezos and stop crying and you're right. He may end up doing that. Yeah. But the problem is, he's losing a competitor. No, but he's losing the human capital that's required. So there was a great there was a huge cycle about this one person who was like, the the leader of the of the lander project who just quit and went to SpaceX. My point is, other engineers don't want to see that this is the way to win. He's got he's got he's got a lot of that hole now. Yeah, build, iterate and solve. Build, iterate solve, it certainly seems the case that his PR stunt with shooting himself into space didn't do him any favors either. You know, it's almost like everyone sees the great work you want to us when he does these PR events. And he gets all this attention and publicity and gets positive press and accolades. And then Bezos does them and he's like, oh, he has no besties. There's no best taking Bezos aside. He's bestie list. No, he may have besties, but they're not they're not doing the job that other besties do for other people. If they're yes, men and women, and they're not being true besties, they need to tell him when he's got something that's a blind spot. He needs a real spot. Here is he was dunking on Richard Branson and be like, Oh, you didn't go to the right height. Here's an infographic. Stop with the fucking ink graphics. Bezos, what are you 12 years old? And you're like going to the teacher with like, a drawing like I I should technically get an A plus and I should be singing the solo for the choir practice and like some other person is like got the solo. You get the fucking solo next year basis offered you a huge consulting fee. J Cal would you be his best the consigliere for sure. By the way, I hired I hired this fucknut. He flies back with me. I mean, he literally ate everything on the plane. And then I'm like, what are you talking about? And then let me say we're eating tiramisu. Let me finish. Let me finish on the term. So I single said to me, Chmoth, you have some great toiletries in the back. I said, Yeah, sure. You know, there's Marvis there's great toothbrushes. And then out of his pocket he pulls some scope bottles that he had more of my bag. I was shocked Eric it's the real scope. This motherfucker was looting. I looted looting. I looted all your lactate. We all take advantage of see. Oh my god, this this other guy, this motherfucker free bird once was so buried. He got so fucking mad. He grabbed all the lactate in my little medicine cabinet and ran out back. He was angry and he was like, I'm so fucking angry because he had lost a big pot right during poker. Then he took all the pistachios and shove them in his pocket. It's like an Afghan warlord. Yeah. I remember that. And the last day he's like, fuck it. I lost 10 dimes. I'm gonna get back $37 in. Oh my god. So sad. So sad. Oh my god. Wait, free bird. You want me to prepare the house? You want me to prepare the the the room? I think so. I think I Yeah, I think so. I think so. That'd be awesome. You could do that. Oh my god. I'll bring some tests some Binax tests. Yeah. I mean, just as an aside, I Bill Gurley was talking about this. We talked about this early in the pandemic. Why don't we have fucking $1 test Friedberg? Oh, my god. Everybody not have a hundred everywhere. Binax now tests are literally lateral flow strips. They cost pennies to make. It's insane to buy 20 bucks. Why is it a dollar? Why didn't Biden or Trump get that done? Is it some grift? graft? greed? Yeah, you should like, you know, to talk about this. He's the guy to talk about it. But I mean, if people were taking those every day, we could I think you guys may remember this. I tweeted about this over a year ago, like last April, where we could actually print these antigen tests for pennies in the US. I mean, when we had that, like whole emergency authority thing, and we were making masks and liquid oxygen tanks and all this shit. We should have been printing antigen tests on strips of paper. We have the facilities in the US to do it. And we could have made you know, 100 billion 50 cent tests, and made them just free and available to schools to workplaces to everything. It's absolutely insane. But people can't people can't be freelance riders or. Yeah. I mean, you know, I mean, we can't be freelance riders or drive an Uber for two hours a day in California. We can we can mandate that but we can't mandate a 25 cent 50 cent test and put them in everybody's fucking mailboxes. I'm on fire now. It's fucking stupid. Everything is so dumb. Everybody's a grifter in this government incompetent assholes. I would like to I would like to vote news. I would like to go to war with Fiji because it's beautiful. I'd like an island. And I think it's beautiful. I think it's beautiful. I think it's beautiful. I think that Fiji probably has a lot of them. Well, Fiji is not respected. I think it's a little closer. Yeah. Yeah. So go there and spread pronouns. Also, I'd like to go to war with Iceland but only in the summertime because I hear it's beautiful. I'm going to war with Tuscany over the gelato. I'm going to war with Florence over gelato. I'm going to occupy Tuscany for the pizza and the pasta. I'm occupying Tuscany. You'll need to build a Bagram in all these places just to accommodate all the private jets that are going to come in. Bagram. Bagram. I mean, but just in closing, let's just let's just say thank you to the amazing people of Italy for having the greatest country for adults to go on vacation in. What an incredible country. Florence is amazing. Tuscany is outrageous. Rome is beautiful. Venice is incredible. Everything is delightful. I love you. I love you, Italy. I love you so much. And I'll be back next year. All right. We'll see you all next time. I'll see you next time on the All-In Podcast. Bye bye. Let your winners ride. Rain Man David Sacks. And it's said we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you. I'm the queen of Kinwa. I'm going all in. Let your winners ride. Let your winners ride. Let your winners ride. Besties are here. Gold thirteen - I was playing on a dog to I noticed your driveway - No - Oh no - Oh man - My avatager will be me at playt punishment - We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy - 'Cause they're all just useless - It's like sexual tension, but we just need to release them - Oh. - What the bee what the! - Your bee - We need to get merch - Our back! - ♪ I'm doin' all this ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ I'm doin' all this ♪ ♪ ♪ - David Sachs, you come to me from your boat in Sicily on my daughter's wedding day Sachs, you come to me and you ask me not to interrupt you so that Henry Bellicaster can make a clean cut of your speech Well you can stop by acting like a man David Sachs - I gotta interrupt it on the podcast Oh, you didn't let me finish my doc - - You wanted this part? You wanted this part on this podcast? Who's the director? Who's the producer? I'll get you this part But someday, Sachs I'm gonna ask you for a favor, Sachs I'm gonna ask you for an allocation in All In in your call-in app I'm gonna ask you for a favor, Sachs I'm gonna ask you to lead the Series B and on that day I expect a valuation 'cause measure it with what I've done for you today Okay, David Sachs - - That's a pretty good bit - Look at Don Cannoli over here - Don Cannoli -