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By the way, boys, black, look at this. I'm down, I'm, I'm up a button, up a button. This is why the all in pod is falling apart is we got one best use thinks he's ******* humming 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 your total mess and you and you guys are cold open present. I've been present. Present. I've been waiting for two weeks social and we've been waiting for. Even that Tucker Carlson. Ohh, really? Henry Belcaster right. That opening for you? No, what's wrong? You're writing team, right? That soliloquy. I'm coming in hot. I've been waiting two weeks to go off 3 two. Let your winners ride. Man David. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy. Queen. OK, everybody, welcome back to the all in podcast. We took two weeks off for vacation with us to vacation from cation. Sacks is off his boat and ready to go after the tremendous boat episode. Freedberg who? David? Why are you working from an IRS office? What? David? David? He's joined the call center. Which call center are you working for? David Sacks from the call in app. Can I set up your account for you, please? Better ******* get here by tonight, OK? Making cards, bestie. It's best. You better ******* show up. This list is a ****. Mr Beast is showing up, Mr Beast is gonna play cards, and he plays eight. Queen 8 offsuit to crack fill. It's going to be very entertaining, right? I'm. I'm flying back this afternoon. It's Mr beast. Alan sheppell. Muth. This is going to be ******* fireworks tonight. Fireworks. I am going to lock it up. The AC. Your eight seats locked up. Wait, what time does it start? *******. 7:00 to 7:00 AM. Is your guesthouse taken? No. You can stay in the guesthouse if you want. Great. Here we go. No, we start. We say that we started this. Yes, David, we start at 6, but we're going to break for dinner as normal at 7. So get here by ******* six. I'll come. I gotta have dinner with my kids. I haven't seen him in a month, so. Alright, just so you. Do you remember their names? It's boom and boom and there's three of them. OK? Yeah, there's three. I'll come after dinner. OK? OK, good. Good. Here we go. First topic of the day is you didn't do the intros, *******. No, no, you already did. That part just introduced the you started with socks. And you didn't say myself, did you become the director? OK, sit down. And Scorsese alright with us again? The dictator himself, Chamath Palihapitiya, back from his Italian castle. Fresh off his Italian castle. Retreat 1, button up. Maybe we should call you the Duke instead of the dictator. Yeah, because you're really taking this, this Italian nobility thing to heart, you know? Jason. Jason invaded my, my castle. He ravaged my toilets, several of them. He literally had. He Co opted the Butler, he Co opted the chef. And when he would bicycle, living best life, I'll be totally honest for 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 Mr Jason. Mr Jason, Mr Jason. He always percent what percent of your book? Did you write jakal? Well, a nonfiction 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 1st 10. Done guys, sorry, can't 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, both the idea. 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. A lot of it was informed by the discussions we've been having. Here. Of course, back in the mix is freedberg, the Queen of Kinowa, in front of some Kmart artwork that he purchased for his new house. How you doing, Queen? How do you feeling about your decision to not come to Italy with us? Yeah, queen. I want to talk about it. Hey, can we, can we tell our best Italy story? Oh my God. I don't know what the best is. A lot of best Italy story is, 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. So just to give a little background here, our friend's 50th birthday. Two of our friends had 50th birthdays, 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 alright, guys, I just want this friend #1. Redacted. Yeah, redacted. Yeah. I just want to call out the elephant in the room. You know, there's really someone very, very famous amongst us, you know, he's known to be one of the richest men in the world. He's known, you know, to really love rockets. He throws, you know, up rockets all the time. The despotic leader of North Korea is here, Kim Jong-un. Everybody and I point to DC Oh my God, that is so. The joke I didn't get to wow. You can't tell me that joke because because it would it would in context of you know, obviously it would have been very yeah alright and. Yeah, it was just a great trip. I have to say I took two weeks. Yeah, my Italy story is that so? The 2nd birthday is jakal. The 1st birthday is a friend to remain nameless. The 2nd birthday redacted. The 2nd birthday was Jake House 50th. Then we find out that Jake's birthday was actually like six months ago. Six months ago, November 28. Yeah, nobody, nobody cared. And frankly, none of us went to Italy for Jake House birthday. We went three months ago. Guys, we are the other guys party. Yeah, Jakkals 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 Jackal birthday party. And what do they serve? Pizza? I mean, like, because it's on Jakkals dime. I mean, the rest of the week we had this, like, magnificent 5 star. Do you throw my birthday party for me snacks? You didn't even throw in any breadsticks. I mean, he was like, he just DoorDash Domino's. 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 sacks. Oh my God. Are you serious? We brought him. He doesn't wanna ******* truth from bluff. 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. I got so mad at one of my kids because it was so dark and the kids were in the pool and he kept diving. Yeah. And I kept saying stop, I can't see. Yeah. And so I was just like, he never none of the kids should have been in the pool. I agree with that. And and the truth of the matter is, you know, my five years old was in the pool too and all I could do is keep an eye on, keep an eye on us. So worried about playing lifeguard with my 3. I didn't. 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 sacks because sacks and I went down to that restaurant. We made them open up the wine closet, we rated it. We found the best 3 bottles of wine, and we brought them back for everybody. And then, and then, I'm not sure if you remember this. We taped an episode of Call in in which 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. We're launching on September 2nd. So all these. Yeah. Nice. Congrats. Yeah, that's gonna be a big deal. And congratulations to the all in syndicate members who wet their beaks and to my syndicate members. 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 sacks. We had a million or so in allocation and I think we had 7,000,000 in demand. I'm really gonna be huge. Yes, I'm really excited about this product is the best it's gonna be. Have been involved in creating. It's better than Yammer. It's better than PayPal. Truly. Ohh spicy take wow. Really glad daddy. Daddy got a little taste. Sacks, don't hurt your don't hurt your elbow. Patting yourself on the back there, but go ahead, continue. You got a little product manager elbow there, Patty. There's dislocate. Your tricep feedback we've gotten from users has been incredible. I mean, it's just the reactions, really, what's good about it. Here's here's what I think you nailed. As a person who's been in podcasting for over a decade. The critical 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 fine wine wherever you are and you can start your own podcast. Yeah, it's not 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, of creating a new podcast. And so anyway, people really like it. I'm very excited. September shows have been created and debated. This thing that's blown me away is like well over 100. I think maybe a couple of 100 if you go to the show directory, you and and the cover art that people have created is really elaborate. You know, people are really getting into it. I said why somebody's never made. You're a phenomenal product builder, so I think this is really exciting. Yeah, under underrated product builder, I would say, you know, it's just interesting that this doesn't exist. Somebody should have made this already. Like there's Zen Casser and Riverside for recording podcasts, there's libsyn for hosting them. What? What's happened? As a as a protected minority? I'd like to ask this question. What happens? What's happening to clubhouse? I think it's irrelevant. I'll be. I don't. I don't wanna dunk on founders, but I think that. They why can't they just do these features? It sounds like I'm not trying to take anything away from David, but these are his 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 jacal does behind the scenes. It's incredible. We got Nick doing 6 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, I mean, not everybody is gonna 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 and I think it will turn out great. Let's get to our first topic here while we were away. The United States started the process of leaving Afghanistan after a 20 year war in which I think it's pretty safe to say that was an unwinnable war and we have felt like the Russians did. Sacks had a tweet 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? No. Miss, you might have had a couple of drinks and then sorry, he actually didn't. He just texted that in the group. OK, 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 OK. Don't beep it. It's OK. 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, yesterday, ISIS Kay, which is an Afghan affiliate of the Islamic State, claimed responsibility for 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 war, so it's not exactly in the mandate, but everybody wants our opinion on this. So let's get started. Max, you have strong opinions. We'll start with 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 overran Kabul. And, yeah, it was, you know, the the Afghanistan war has 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, the the idea that we had created, you know, we were how many times we told that we had created this Afghan army. It was 300 strong. We spent, you know, $2 trillion in the country, you know, being. And we were told the whole time that we were building institutions there, that, you know, that we were creating a democracy in the Middle East, that we were. Then, you know, promoting gender equality and lecturing the Taliban on toxic masculinity or something like that. And then we find out one day that **** the whole thing was just kind of a lie. It was this giant debacle, and now we can't even get our 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, almost 100 Afghans. Now we 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, offshoot 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 the lying that we've been doing. On this topic is just utterly uhm. It's really, really scary. You know, how could we have gone 20 years, 2 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, 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 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 we stopped in Toronto to drop them off and the planes beside us. Jason, do you remember this? Cargo plane, I think Bretter Paul were telling us our my pilots are telling us these planes have 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. Well, meanwhile, that America cannot get even to a point of view on the topic. And 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. Will risk their lives to help us fight. Clearly a useless war. Freeberg, you have lots watching all this. I know you don't like when we delve into politics too much, but yeah. You have any thoughts you want to add? Yeah, well, it's about politics. As much as 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 Gallup polling that's been done in Afghanistan over the past 1520 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 showing that 87 to 90% 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% 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% of the Afghan population in 2010 believe that to be true, and another 38% said Sharia law must be a source of legislation, but not the only source. That leaves just 7% of people that think that Sharia law should not be. Is it Sharia or Shariah? Sharia, sorry, Sharia law should not be part of the. Legislative process in defining the Afghan laws and constitution. And so 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 the the idea for the startup works. The problem here is our views as 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. Fixing 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 have to shut the thing down and it goes bankrupt. And that's effectively what what went 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 911 war began, 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 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 10 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 on your your the way you think a government should be built. You've got all of this turmoil that's happened historically. You know it really was 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 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 $2 trillion 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 yours Freeburg and now yours Chamath, which is the original mandate here was to go in, get rid of Al Qaeda and to also. You know, kill Osama bin Laden and to not have 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 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 to 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, freeberg 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 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 let 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 ***** 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 in these these kind of revolutions. To Freedberg's point, they 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 moral 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 is a draft, right? And the smart and the capable and the willing, we're willing to basically bring 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, 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 need to. 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 the country is teetering on authoritarianism or democracy? Like where is that line? That 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 $6 trillion 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 $6 trillion? That's more than Biden's entire domestic agenda. You know, so we wasted all this money to freeberg's point. We never understood the culture there. And to chamas point, it was a giant money funneling operation to defense contractors. There's a a great piece of reporting by an independent journalist named Michael Tracy, and he talked to frontline grunts about the 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 ten would would break down and disappear, and no one would even know where all the money went. It was like. An unbelievable **** of 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. His name is John F Sopko. He's the special Inspector General for Afghanistan reconstruction. 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, quote, UN quote lessons learned from the Afghan War. And so, for 13 years, Sopko 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 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. OK, Jesus does 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 but by the way, that includes ignoring things like the sexual abuse of young boys by Afghan warlords who are our allies. OK, which the New York Times reported on. We completely swept that under the rug. OK, that's just a table of contents. OK. From one of his latest reports, which is about 100 pages complete incompetence on our in our government complete waste. The Pentagon was telling us the whole time. I mean, while the sky Sopko the cigar, you know, the 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 improving. They had all these 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, we'll be the motivation. 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 is like, what what's, what's the objective for them to be measured? What's the objective? In that case, the objective is to demo is now 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. OK, 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. God, heaven forbid. And then that body comes back and this, this report comes with it, which is effectively what it is. OK, this is the coda to the death of two point, you know, 2400 Americans and $2 trillion. 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 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 Afghans 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 1000 new Afghan troops, OK, but what they don't say is that over 90% of those troops are literate and 85% of them are on drugs. I mean, and this is what the journalists who are on the ground, when they would do the interviews with these, you know, with these, you know, frontline commanders or trainers. They would find this out. Now, why wasn't this in the report? Well, 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 insiders club. There's a dogma. The dogma was we're winning the war, and if you want to 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 the guy who gives them the metrics they want to hear, and then their boss, the the the, the person who's the boss of the frontline guy is going to improve. These 20%, he's gonna shake things another 20% and then the next guy in the chain of command shakes things 20%. And by the time you get all the way to the top, the chairman of the Joint 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 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 ************ themselves about having a 300,000 man Afghan army. And then you know when you actually look under the hood of this thing. There is no army. Is this a 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, Sachs, the minute that you knew that. 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 sex? Because I think that would have been, that's the goal, right? Trump wanted to get out and Biden both wanted. So we just executed twice as good or 50% better. There'd be no problem here. We all want to be out, correct? Yes. That that decision, the decision. To get out was a 70% popular decision when Biden made the decision in April. And then they. And when Trump made it last time, because he did the seat for he negotiates a this is a bipartisan yeah. 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, OK? And there's some blame that needs to be apportioned to Biden. And it's 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 Bagram airfield. At the beginning of July, OK, 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, OK? 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 sieves, the special immigration visas. These are the Afghani translators and helpers who are embedded in our combat unit units. We that that. The State Department, meanwhile, was totally caught up in bureaucracy, slow walking their applications. Those 18,000 translators are now stuck there. OK, they have 50,000 dependents. We're talking about 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. You 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 through, my Lord. So there's basically an assassination list. This is your death kill list, list of the Taliban. I mean this is really unforgivable and it's and it's and this was it's not like this was unknown, OK. 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 should afraid of the 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 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 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 like a hawk and they have in 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 superhighways 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 axis of the United States. Authoritarianism by Biden asked Putin if it was OK for us to stage military resources from. You know from from from close quarters in Asia then Putin was like, no go, Jason. I think what you what you just pointed out is the motivating factor for having a presence in this and other similar similarly situated territories around the world that 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. Or 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 the the success of what we would consider competing states globally. 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, the military presence overseas, the physical presence overseas. 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, as the other global players, in particular China, you know, take advantage of these openings? Yeah. Well, 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 the superhighway they're going to build to get that out and. Either economy. That is how they're gonna spend their capital. In Afghanistan, meanwhile, we spent over 2 trillion. 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. OK, now the the president. Well, you know, it's it's a little too cynical. We were also protected. We were educating women in this country. Don't forget the pronouns. Pronouns, they them. It's very important. Right. We go there to lecture people on their pronouns that no, that that is too far, too cynical. So we went there to protect some people who wanted democracy and to allow women to read. And to be fair, we society. We just flushed that. We just flushed that right down the toilet. Sorry, I know that we we just not conflate that. We just won election. 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 presents? 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 gonna 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 2,000,000 Vietnamese to make the country safe for democracy. You know what? The Vietnamese. At the end of that, we'd rather have our 2 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 1st 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 it has led to the crumbling of the American of of of the 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 head saying, if not these guys, then who is going to figure this out? What are we going to lead us out if if, chamath and sacks if you're. Don't want to be if you don't want to support democracy in the world. What happens to Taiwan in your world? This signed Taiwan's death warrant. 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-40 sevens from the 80s. This is China. So if we can if we can't beat and win in Afghanistan, I mean we also what are our jet? I mean, I'm sorry guys, but this is alone. It's not worth it. With a group of Japan, South Korea, Australia and the UK, we should be defending Taiwan, in my mind. What do you think, free Burke? Should we try and defend Taiwan when this inevitably leads to the Chinese Government finding their windows? 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, it should be clear it Taiwan is right now democratic, so we would be defending a democracy. Freeberg Jakkals asking a specific question if China invades Taiwan. Do you think the United States should get involved? On a principled 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 on a principle basis, you'd say let's go defend the weak and go protect them because they, they share principles and ideals with us. But the, the, the backlash, the challenge would be if we were to do this global trade would stall. There would be massive issues at home with people saying that we're getting involved in 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 speculating a bit here, but the actual cost isn't just about sending a few 1000 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 2530 million people losing their jobs over the next decade because of the economic fallout that occurs in our doing that and so on and so forth. And a lot of American prosperity that we get to enjoy, 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 sacks to do a little bit more of this, because what we're talking about here is not giving up an authoritarian state, right, that wants to be authoritarian. We're talking about a democracy on the 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 in that country. Since 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 they, it's a free enterprise system. It's democratic capitalism there. There's basically 24 million 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 it's there's a big difference between trying to. Plant democracy or nation build versus in a country that's never had it before in thousands of years and basically being friends and allies with the 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 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% 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 gonna 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 is 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, JL, we're stumbling forward. We're not serious problem. 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. Of half our stack with the Jack 8 off suit. 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 establishing credibility. Basically 9/11 911 put us on tilt. OK? And we've been losing pots for the last 20 years. Now we just lost the big one. And the question is, to Tomas Point, are we gonna lose the rest of our stack? Are we going to go take a walk around the block like mute? Time to recenter, time to time 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 a it's a pretty scary set of things that's happening over there. But it's also 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 policy makers 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 and then we can talk about China is continuing their crackdown of tech companies and has proposed a ban on foreign IPO's. 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 in 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 E shamati 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 reviewed and then the the second is around the capital markets and the money flow and that and this is a really big deal. So what is a VI E because you're gonna hear this a lot. V i.e. Is what's called a variable interest entity and what it is is just a massive workaround. So essentially what happened was a V i.e. Was a legal business where you know an entity had control of a company, OK, through a contract but not through. Equity. So it's kind of like, you know, sacks, like I had a contract with Colin that said I can dictate, you know, who does what, etcetera, 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 ******* ham. As we all know, they had a bunch of these V i.e. 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. OK, 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. Let's 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 E structure and they basically created all of these, you know, camens. 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, d.com, JD, all of these folks have these V i.e. And what's interesting about these VIES is it's written clear as day, but not a single investor seem 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. 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 is a one or two posts ago. The way they did that was that they cancelled the vies. They said online tutoring? Nope, sorry, these things can't exist anymore. And so essentially we have the situation now where Vies are part of 58. Companies, uh, massive Chinese mega cap companies that are in the huge indexes in 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 IE in a bunch of other areas. We're going to start with regulation. We could cancel the V i.e. Later. And so we've essentially put the capital markets, in my opinion, on pause. And so now let's transition to this other. It's in China's 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 can have to delist these Adrs. I don't exactly know what would happen. I think what happens is that correct? No, you you have capital loss, Jason, because when they cancelled the online tutoring, IE the stock price is 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 E structure for Baba, I mean it is a ******* babushka doll of nesting entities. This or that, I don't know how 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. OK. So the the capital markets are now I think getting a really constrained. The complement to this is that they're starting to now introduce legislation as a prelude in my opinion to canceling some of these, IE in the most important area that we care about, which is tech. So Jason, to your point. The Chinese 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. #2. Providers shall not 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 seek completely generic, non personalized results. The algorithm recommendation shall adhere to make. This is incredible to mainstream values. I don't know what that means. They must be 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 datas. With these watchdogs, these watchdogs will now start to increasingly take board seats on the on, on Chinese companies. So you put these two things together. It is a take a moment in China Tech. It's a takeover. Yes, yes. I mean so, 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 1 towards the end that you mentioned. The algorithm recommendation service provider shall be here to mainstream values actively spread. Positive energy and promote applications 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 Uighurs. 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 weekers. Well, they're they're they're going to 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. Can you? I would. I would say though, that the first part of what I said about their regulations to me seemed 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, read 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. Why we're seeing great progress, but Free Brook, 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 agree with you. I agree with you generally, yeah. But I do think it it creates an incentive and a motivation also because if you don't agree with their their their principles. You know you're gonna find yourself looking for an alternative. So you know, I don't know which. 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 that that are taking place. And Jacob, I know you spent a lot of time on this as well, but you know, 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, 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 would get some votes. So 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 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, we talked about all the ways that we could have spent these trillions of dollars. Better the nation building. Here's here's the fundamental problem. I agree with that. I mean, I wish we had spent the six 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 good these special interests get at extracting money from the system while providing so little value. You know, we spent, so the these contractors spent or we they they charge so much. But basically deliver so little in Afghanistan, do you really think it's gonna be much different for the trillion dollar, the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that's coming? You know, and if we created licking their lips, they're looking at exactly the the, the people, the the groups are going to get that money who are going to feast on that trillion dollars are people who their skill set is lobbying, OK? That is what they spend their time doing. Sorry, no, 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 businesses lobby. That is your value. Yeah, that is your still saying. Exactly. So this idea that we can basically spend a trillion dollars on some domestic innovation program, the problem is it will never go to the right people, will never go to the innovators. Hmm. The best thing we could do is not spend the money, quite frankly. So smaller government? Or how about how about this not a government that's $20 trillion in debt. I don't know how it's like smaller or small government to if we were to save 6 trillion would still be 14 trillion in debt. It's not a small government I think they're good jumping off point here might be the Supreme Court eviction moratorium and the Supreme Court not upholding it and where 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 stimulus. Yeah, I think the stream court threw out Biden's eviction moratorium as unconstitutional. Look, I think it's great. You know the the government should not be preventing eviction. You know, especially not the federal government. Understand how this is supposed to work. I mean, all you. Look, 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 that those people should be helped, the right way to help them is to give them the money to pay their rent. Not to say tell landlords sorry, like you can't collect rent anymore. Stimulus to those people. That's it's a, it's a taking, it's it's a clear taking from landlords to say that ohh, 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 online and then we have all this free rent concept or just you don't have to pay your rent at. 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. So have you talked on landing, you've talked about this before in California. We have a labor shortage in California because we we've basically run a controlled experiment in the UB i.e. Universal basic income where we've basically been paying people not to work or paying them regards to 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, COVID is not an excuse for shirking your adult responsibilities. You know, we all have. Responsibility to go to work, to pay our rent, you know, to pay our parking tickets. And COVID has been this excuse for suspending, you know, this, this sort of normal life. And the problem is COVID is 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, we 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 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 free bird free. You wanna talk about the prop 22? Supreme Court decision, etc. Yeah, there was an appeals court, appeals, you know, appeals court, that overturned some elements of the California Prop 22, which was a heavily lobbied California proposition, lobbied by Uber and Lyft and other businesses that have built effectively marketplaces for independent contractors like drivers and delivery people and so on. The SEIU, which is a big employees union, had, you know, fought very hard to pass legislation in California. That made it effectively very difficult for people to operate as independent contractors, enforcing companies like Uber and Lyft to treat them like full time employees or to treat them like employees. That's a prop 22 was to counter the Union funded legislation 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. 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 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 door dash, 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, you know tasks and projects that they can run. Are they now going to be seeing that those marketplaces stop working? Because when you have to start treating those people like employees, the flexibility and freedom of 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. You know we're we're now facing once again this crisis of you know are are basically lower income people people that want to have flexible labor going to be restricted from having access to to gig jobs because the unions want to force everyone into a full time job. Which you know as our friend Bill Gurley 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 school away from Bill Gurley and and here it is. There's one big issue that I don't think is talked about enough which is. You know, they, if you polled 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 state that voted 2 to one, you know, in favor of Biden, they came down very strong 6040 that they didn't want this to happen. And there's one entity that's really been pushing this the whole time, going all the way back to 85, and that's the SEIU. It is a single union. But to call him 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. They spend more money lobbying than any other organization in our country and have for many, many years. They only represent 2,000,000 members, but they oddly, those members are in hospitality, healthcare and government services. 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 $400.00 four $120.00, which is the minimum member Union fee for the two million they have. They want to expand that to these drivers, so they don't actually want to help them. They want to add to their cost. But they're the, they're the, they're the one that's been pushing this the whole time. And I think it's worth just saying one thing on this, which is, you know, this is really kind of a question not about California and Prop 22, but it's a question about what is work. And all the tech companies that are enabling a new form of work globally. People don't want to have 40 hour week jobs. People don't want to have to go sit at a desk all the time. People want to have flexibility in their lives. They want to have gigs. Technology 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 you know, a non progressive. Policy to say that everyone has to be pigeonholed into working, you know, full time, 40 hour week labor jobs, be employees and not have the flexibility of running their own business in their own way with the with their own time and choosing what they want to 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 work globally. And the craziness of all this, David, is that. Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, door dash drivers, etcetera, are getting paid a fortune now because there's a labor shortage and. These ride sharing companies have given a minimum $21.00 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, you know, doctors, whoever. Can be freelance, but if you're a rideshare driver or a freelance writer, you don't get to be. And it seems just incredibly unfair. It is. And, you know, one of the best things about COVID, I think, for all of us is that we learnt 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 mean, I think it's one of the lasting consequences of COVID that's actually been very positive for a lot of people. And here you have the government. Basically trying to take away a 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 a B5 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, you know, inventing these specious grounds for overturning Prop 22, which is what the people want. So it's ridiculous. And, you know, the common threat 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 the 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 it where only rich people can invest. And now you're seeing it with this freelancing. We're, you know, my dad would have loved to have an extra shift or two to make extra money and he 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. There are people right now in America I think are focused too much on symptoms, meaning, you know, they want to fight for the right hashtags, they want to fight for the right pronouns, they want to make sure that, you know, this person gets cancelled for things that happened 8 or 10 years ago. And I think what they don't understand is these are all symptoms and this is, 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 whose 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 look the American treasury for another trillion dollars. That's where we are, yeah. And the perfect the perfect representation of that is Gavin Newsom. He represents both of these trends. He is one of the most corrupt governors we ever had there. As soon as COVID happened, they suspended all sorts of, you know, the, the, the, the process for contracting so that his campaign contributors could get all these special contracts he cut a sweetheart deal to PG&E to absolve. Of liability for all the fires they've been causing. And on and on it goes the the, the $12 billion to the homeless industrial complex. And then he disguises it with all this woke virtue signaling. And so, you know, I just give a shout out to the recall campaign and the election is on September 14th with the ballots have gone out. If you want to send a message to the political class that the 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 let's let's talk about the AI bot 1st and then and then Bezos. Alright, so if you haven't been watching, Boston Dynamics tweeted a video which will play right now as I talk over it, and it's basically they're 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 it's like break dancing in France, yeah, but from heights and jumping over things as well and helping the French. The French are like parkour experts. Yeah. I mean it's I think parkour is French for jumping. I made that up, but. You look at these sacks. Do parkour. No, absolutely. I have never seen him do that before. I have seen him so drunk that he's on the floor, but never seen him do bark but don't get in the way. DRC. This robot looks more dexterous than any of the Terminators we saw in the films. And then adding to that. And if you didn't know Boston Dynamics got bought by Google, I'm sure Freeberg 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, the South Korean automaker, because apparently the. Softies that Google didn't want to be involved in, uh, government contracting with robots, i.e. Making soldiers of the future, which obviously, I don't know, the Chinese have. I wouldn't characterize the whole story like that. I mean, remember like there there was, well, Google bought Boston Dynamics in 2013 and remember Boston Dynamics has 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, you know, advanced neural Nets being applied to kind of. You know, automation system so you could get things to mimic real life. And the idea at Google, this was when they had set up Google X. And we're starting to kind of do a lot of this, you know, Moon shot type tech, 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, you know, build this into kind of a next Gen robotics platform they have. Andy Rubin, who previously started and ran Android company was called. Is there a Google bought it, turned into Android run the run the unit and they made several other acquisitions. They rolled them all up into this kind of robotics platform. They had spent I think 400 million on Boston Dynamics and hundreds of 1,000,000 more on these other companies. And ultimately I think the challenge was less about like you know who does or doesn't want to do contracts with us. But it was more about the fundamental question that is 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, right, where do you find product markets there? 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 put this in the right place. The discussion between narrow AI and general correct, and this is exactly the same question, jakhal is like, you know is you know, 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, right? You don't need to mimic a human. When you're moving a package, you don't necessarily need to have four legs. To do it, you can have it on four wheels and just have a a simple system that moves it around. And so, you know, I think SoftBank, you know, Massa son had this whole belief with Vision fund one when he raised the 100 some odd billion dollars that you know the singularity where machines were going to be smarter and better than humans in every way, intelligence and dexterity and all these things were about was about to kind of, we're about to pass that moment and this was part of that core thesis he had, which is this is going to be the robotics company and I think as we've seen they can mimic parkour. But they can't do all the other things humans can do. And if you're, you know, trying to get a machine to do something that a customer needs, it's really not Parker, let's be honest. They can't even walk a dog because they would 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 at Boston Dynamics that 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. So it's related in a related story, Elon, then. Revealed the Tesla Bot plans at his AI day. He's done a couple of his AI 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 5/8. So I'll be 1/2 inch taller than it, but it will weigh significantly less than me and it will move up up to five mph and can carry 45 pounds. Elon said the reason he was doing that is so human could easily overtake it in case it becomes. Idea, which was quite entertaining. Chamath you think this is? What are the chances Elon has a robot like this and it's operating in 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 tests on the road. Yeah, no comment. And I think it's awesome. Oh, OK, can't comment. Alright, leave it at that. Actually. Have any comments on this? I worked with 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 it kind of makes sense. It's just another innovative thing he's doing. So we talk about Elon versus Bezos on the space. Want to let people know by the way, the robot going at 5 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 657585 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 5 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 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 the version zero of Tesla. Now look at the company. I mean, you know, it's about iterating, that's how you get to products. So it's just so stupid and short term. And by the way, 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 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's gonna 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, uh, I think it's great and I really think the people that. Are just so low like. There's like this loathing going on. I just don't understand. What do you think will differentiate the opportunity for success? With Larry Page owning and running Boston Dynamics, then Massa 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 a track rate, partners not been able to turn Boston Dynamics 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 NASA is an island. I mean, he's just absent, so he's irrelevant. I don't think anybody knows what the **** he looks like. I mean, we do. Uh, but, uh, you know, he's frittered away enormous potential, I think. I think. Masa is a master capital allocator, but 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 going to buy the 1st 1000 to go colonize Mars or work at a space station to build **** in space, and it's going to have them working in the Tesla factory and for the boring company carrying rocks out of tunnels. He's the customer. Of course he knows and Massa. Wasn't the customer Mouser was looking to increase, uh, whatever money he has to do? But it's also, it's also skill set like, Massa, of course, is an incredible visionary and investor, but he's not going to be the guy correct 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 past and now, you know, it's kind of like the player that just keeps getting better and better. I think that's Elon Musk. Great sacks. 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 harder than ever when most people are, you know, doing. Most people would do it, Larry, did you know, go buy an island or 7 and yours and hang out, you know? Yeah. Alright, 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's plans were. This lawsuit has delayed Spacex's work on the project, according to The Verge. I don't know 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. How sad is this? That'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 are technical people do? We don't. We don't take our toys and run from the sandbox crying like a *****. We stay there and we keep iterating, trying to make things work. Yeah, we don't act like patent trolls. Ave Ave slogan for you, jakal. Go ahead, winners do and losers Sue. Winners do and loser. Sue. OK, folks, there you have it. It's all in podcast. We're back. We're back from the big vacation. It happened. Yeah. Make the banger. Make a banger. Alright, I remember. What's your freeberg? Do you have any thoughts on these, on the lawsuit? I feel bad for babies. I feel like he's just getting so beat up on this ship. It's it's honestly, it's 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 the 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 the, you know, federal agencies when he lost contract and he did that when they know bid them. If I get it, I get it and slightly different till 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 contract with with one customer or have you know private industry figure out ways to make money from this and and fund it, that's the challenge is it's just it's another product market fit question, right. The market is 1 customer. Today and is almost 60 years old, he's got 150, two, $100 billion. It's going to cost him two or $3 billion. One, two, 3% of his net worth to do all this. Just ******* do it, Bezos, and stop crying and you're talking lawsuits. He may end up doing that. Yeah, but the problem is he's about, he's just, he's losing the competitor. No, but he's losing the human capital that's required. So there is a huge, there is a huge little press cycle about this. One person was like the the leader of the. 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 to pull out 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 Elon does when he does these PR events, and he gets all this attention and publicity and gets positive press and maculates, and then Bezos does them and he's like, oh has no besties. There's no bestie. Taking benzos aside, he's bestie. It's basically made no, he may have bessies, but they're not. They're not doing the job that other besties do for other people. 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 blind 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 ******* infographics. Basos. 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+ and I should be singing the solo. For the choir practice, and like some other person is like, got the solo, you get the ******* solo next year. Bezos? Bezos offered you a huge consulting fee. Jacal would you be his bestie? Consiglieri for sure. For sure. By the way, I hire I, I hired this *******. He flies back with me. I mean, he literally ate everything on the plane and then in the talking about and then hold on, let me see what we're eating. Let me finish. Wait, let me finish. My single said to me, 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 pulled for more of my bag. 2022 I was shot, Eric. It's the real scope. This ************ was looting, looting, looting. I I littered all your lactate. We we all take advantage of C Oh my God, this this other guy, this ************ free bird once was so buried. He got so ******* mad he grabbed all the lactaid in my, you know, a little medicine cabinet and ran out. Then came back. He was angry and he was like, I'm so ******* angry because he had lost a big pot right during poker. Then he took all the pistachios and shove them his podcast. Afghan war Lord. It's just silly. Yeah, I still remember. He's like, **** it, I lost 10 times. I'm gonna bet, get back $37 and like, God, so sad. So sad. All right, I'll see you all. Wait, Freeburg, you want me to prepare the house? You want me to prepare the, the, the? I think so. I think, yeah, I think so. I think so. That'd be awesome if you could do that. Oh my God. I'm not gonna have some. I'll bring some tests. Some binax tests, too. Yeah, I mean, just as an aside, Bill Gurley was talking about this. We talked about this earlier in the pandemic. Why don't we have ******* $1.00 test? Friedberg? Why does everybody not have 100 tests everywhere? Binax now tests. And literally, lateral flow strips may cost pennies to make. It's how much it cost to buy 20 bucks. Why is it that a dollar? Why couldn't be Biden or Trump get that done? Is it some grift? Graft? Greed? Talk about this. He's the. The guy to talk about it. But Umm, I mean if people were taking those everyday we could. I think you guys may remember this like tweeted about this over a year ago. It's 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 the **** 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 fifty cent tests and made them just free and available to schools to. Workplaces to everything. It's it's absolutely insane that people can. People can't be freelance writers or drive an Uber for two hours a day in California. Exactly. We can. We can mandate that, but we can't mandate a 25 cent, 50 Cent test and put them in everybody's ******* mailboxes. I'm on fire now. It's ******* stupid. Everything is so dumb. Everybody's a grifter in this government. Incompetent ********. I would like, I would like to, I would like to vote no. I would like to go to war with Fiji because it's beautiful. Occupy. I'd like an island, and I think that Fiji probably has a lot of them. Well, Fiji is not respected in French, so we should, because I think it's a little closer. Yeah, go there and spread pronouns. Also, I'd like to go to war with Iceland, but only in the summer time, because I hear it's beautiful, though. Germany over the Gelato I'm going to war with Florence over Gelato. In my country, for pizza and the pasta I'm occupying Tuscany. We'll need to build a Bagram in all these places just to accommodate all the private jets. They're gonna come in. I mean, but just in closing, let's just, let's just say thank you to the amazing people of Italy for having. What an incredible, greatest country for adults to go on vacation in. What an incredible country. Florence is amazing. Tuscany is outrageous, beautiful. Venice is incredible. Everything is delightful. I love Sardinia. Love you, Italy. I love you so much and I love you so much. Next year, alright, we'll see you. Italia I'll see you next time on the All in podcast. Bye bye. Let your winners ride, Rain Man, David sat. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Why? Best. My dog's driveway. Ohh man. Should all just get a room and just have one big huge order because they're all like this, like sexual tension, but they just need to release stuff out there. B. See what we need to get merchants? David Sacks, you come to me. From your boat in Sicily? Hunt my daughter's wedding day, sacks, you come to me and you ask me not to interrupt you so that Henry Belcaster can make a clean cut of your speech? Well, you could stop by acting like a man, David Sacks. Drop it on the podcast. Let me finish my thought. 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, sax. Rescue for a favor, sacks. I would ask you for an allocation and all in. In your call in app. Could I ask you to lead the Series B and on that day I expect the valuation because measure it. With what I've done for you today. OK, David Sacks. It's a pretty good bit. Look at Don Cannoli over here.