All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E148: McCarthy ousted, border chaos, Cruise's robotaxi "accident" & more

Starting point is 00:00:00 How was your colonoscopy, buddy? Oh, well, that was a... Talk about Uranus. Talk about my anus. Have you guys had yours recently? Who's had a colonoscopy? I have mine in December, my first one. Yeah, my first one.

Starting point is 00:00:12 Yeah, I was the link one on mine too. They used to be 50 and they moved the H down to 45. Yeah, they didn't move the H down. Free break, have you had one yet? That's a yes, we got a yes. I'm due. Sacks have you had yours? I'm due.

Starting point is 00:00:24 By the way, I got a report because actually Sacks, we got a yes. Sacks have you had yours. I'm do. By the way, I got a report because actually Sacks who did have one and they found a bunch of DeSantis merchandise up there. You found a DeSantis hat, a DeSantis pin, tons of DeSantis stuff right off your ass. At our age, we should be four for four on the colonoscopies, we're one for four. We got to get that stat up every week. I want to check in here. Prophefall, shout out Michael Jackson is the greatest drug week. I want to check in here. Prophefall, shout

Starting point is 00:00:45 out Michael Jackson is the greatest drug ever. I counted 15 seconds. I was knocked out. I woke up and the next thing I know I was in the recovery area. Were you groggy? I was not grog. No, I was fine. You literally don't remember anything, no pain, no suffering. I did have... But were you able to have a regular schedule the rest of the day? Not really. So I don't want to just wait anybody from having this, but you do have to take a drink called prep, which clears you out.

Starting point is 00:01:10 And when I say clears you out, I love that. Oh, I love that. I love that. Yeah, I hit a record low weight on 168 now. So that was the one benefit. Well, how much weight did you lose? Three pounds, maybe. Come on.

Starting point is 00:01:21 Oh, yeah. Were you working when you were prepping? No. I was working when I was prepping So Monday when I was prepping, but then literally do you take this prep stuff an hour later? You're you need to be ready to evacuate at any time normally the diarrhea is coming out of your mouth Absolutely Alright everybody welcome to another amazing episode of the All in podcast episode one, four, eight. The docket is absurd. The number of lawsuits and the amount of news

Starting point is 00:02:08 that has happened in just the last week has been insane. But we want to at the top of the show do a quick correction, right? It's an all-in correction. If we make a mistake here, we don't hide it in the show notes. We just talk about it right up front. Sacks, you are in touch with the Airtable CEO,

Starting point is 00:02:24 Howie Liu, who's been a guest on this weekend startups. You're going to have mine again actually soon. Maybe you could just discuss what we got wrong and how we got it wrong and then what the correct facts are about AirTable just quickly. We're at the top of the show. Yeah, well, we had a segment a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about these high price late stage unicorn rounds needing to get revalued. And the IPO of Instacart

Starting point is 00:02:47 was a good example of this, where yes, an IPO at about 10 billion, but the last five rounds at 39 billion. So there is a big wave of revaluations or down rounds coming. And we cited some numbers off the internet regarding air table. As it turns out, not everything on the internet is true. And you're talking about specific journalists in my regarding it wrong. We would say- Well, it was actually a tweet storm on X that from a financial account that appeared on the surface

Starting point is 00:03:17 to be correct. And in fact, it did have some correct information, but it was outdated. It was stale. So just the quick correction here is that the amount of ARR that we cited, which I think was around 150 million, was accurate as of the time they did the last round, but that was like three years ago. Furthermore, the growth rate that was cited, which I think was around 15%. That was off. That was off

Starting point is 00:03:40 by about a three X multiple. So when you put all these things together, I wasn't able to get the exact numbers. But if you just do a little bit of napkin math here, my guess is that air table is somewhere in the half a billion of ARR club with pretty decent growth. And if you look at the public comps for that, I think the public comps be something like a Monday, you know, which is doing five to 600 million of ARR coming off a 50% growth rate, maybe forecasting 30% for the next year, that company has been hovering around the seven or eight billion dollar valuation range. Twelve X. Yeah, the claim that was made on X was that air table was even worth the 1.4 billion that is raised in VC money.

Starting point is 00:04:30 I think that's way off. I mean, yeah. And furthermore, you know, what we heard is that air table still has something like two thirds of the money that is raised in the bank. So look, is air table worth the 11 billion that I was valued at at the peak? Probably that's not what the public comps indicate. Would I be a buyer personally at roughly half that price for sure? For sure.

Starting point is 00:04:51 And I think it'll have a nice IPO at some point when they decide they want to do it. So just an important reminder for everybody is, you know, listen, if information's on the interwebs, it may not be correct. But the top news story in the country is unequivocally Kevin McCarthy being a speaker of the House on Tuesday. He was voted out in a 216 to 210 vote with eight far-right Republicans joining all of the Democrats. So those H-O-P members include or led by Matt Gaetz, obviously, a group of, I guess, what would be best described, SACs as T-party-S members of the GOP contingent, they care mostly about spending and curtailing spending. And my correct self.

Starting point is 00:05:38 Don't forget all the Democrats. Well, yeah, I'm putting the Democrats on, I already kind of, I'm just talking about the eight who made this tip over. The media is trying to portray them as these far right, you know, wingers. And I don't think you can just say that because I don't think Nancy Mase fits in that group. I think she does care about spending, but she's not just like Mac. Was it far right to care about spending?

Starting point is 00:05:55 I mean, far right to me would be a Mac. Exactly right. I mean, anything that the media doesn't like, they label far right. But I think, you know, Nancy Mase is a good example of somebody who is very concerned about spending discipline, but is not like a MAGA type Republican. But is the, and just to just refine this one more time before I keep going, those eight would the comment thread would be control spending, we're at, we have out of control spending is, is the reason they're voting a no vote for Kevin McCarthy.

Starting point is 00:06:25 I think there were a couple other pieces of this. If you listen to Nancy Mason, some of the other people that were involved here, a lot of the issue comes down to trust. They felt like they can no longer trust Kevin McCarthy. They felt like the things that he had told them in private were not matching up with the things that he would then later do or that he would say in public or that he would then later do, or that he would say in public, or that he would tell the Biden administration. So I think that- And the main issues were-

Starting point is 00:06:50 Well, I think it was a couple. One was on spending. He had promised that he would stop doing these giant omnivast spending bills where everything would be lumped into one bill. You get like 24 hours to read it, and then you got to vote up or down on whether you pass this giant spending bill or shut down the government, everyone feels forced to vote for it. you get like 24 hours to read it and then you got a vote up or down on whether you pass this giant spending bill or shut down the government everyone feels forced to vote for it. He had promised to do single subject spending bills. So military education, welfare, what happened? Yeah,

Starting point is 00:07:14 that goes through a regular budget process. So they felt like he had broke his promise on that. I think also on the issue of Ukraine, there were some trust issues there because what he was telling Republicans in private was not what he was telling the Biden administration in private, where he was telling the Biden administration, don't worry, we're going to get the Ukraine funding through, but then he was sounding different notes with various Republicans. And I think his true feelings on the matter came out in this press conference he did after he was ousted, in which he goes on this long rant about how Putin's the second coming of Adolf Hitler,

Starting point is 00:07:50 and if we don't stop him now, he's gonna be marching into Paris. And I mean, it was sort of this unhinged, second grade American history style, a view of the war, which regardless of what your view is on it, I think it expressed his true feelings on the matter, which is that when push came to shove, he's more hawkish than Joe Biden on the issue of Ukraine. He feels that Biden has not done enough. It's safe to say that that that is now very out of step. Moreover, I think that if he had just acted as an honest broker on the issue, which is to say,

Starting point is 00:08:30 listen, I'm just going to represent the views of my caucus. My caucus is divided on the issue. I'm just going to let them have an up or down vote on it. Then I think he could have survived on that issue. But instead, again, I think he was trying to manipulate things in a direction of continuing Ukraine funding, regardless of the views of his caucus. Gates wants to end CRs, continuing resolutions, those extend the funding deadline from October 1st of holidays, claiming this bias, Congress time to lump all those individual

Starting point is 00:08:59 part-mortem billes into the omnimus bill as you correctly pointed out. Gates wants to end that practice and return to regular order, passage of individual annual spending bills, not the omnibus. The context that I think is important, that I think is that the American public should understand is how is this actually supposed to work, so that we don't normalize what these CRs are. So, the way that it's supposed to work is that Congress is authorized by law to create 12 spending bills a year. And each of those bills have to map to the large parts of the government. So there's a military bill, there's an education bill, there's a, you know, HHS bill, et

Starting point is 00:09:38 cetera, et cetera. And those are supposed to be negotiated on the House floor and passed. The Senate is allowed to do a version of the same. If those two things are different, meaning the Senate doesn't take the House bill and creates their own, the law says that you have to create what's called a conference and a group of people, half senators and half Congress people sit in a room, hash out and mediate a resolution, and that is what goes to the president's desk to be signed. That's how it used to be done. But about a decade ago, all of that broke down. And now what happens is you have this thing that Sachs mentioned, which is called the CR, which is essentially a backdoor.

Starting point is 00:10:22 It's this release valve that is supposed to be an in-emergency break-glass type measure that has become fundamentally normalized. And I think what's important to call out is what happened here isn't getting the just attention because it's being characterized on party lines and not actually being characterized with how America is legally supposed to work as defined in the Constitution. So the Congress is supposed to pass 12 spending bills a year. It's then supposed to get negotiated or approved by the Senate and then it should go to the President.

Starting point is 00:10:55 When you override that with these continuing resolutions, this is the issue that Freeberg's been talking about. You balloon the deficit deficit you balloon the debt you have all kinds of pork barrel spending there's zero accountability the bullets cost six thousand dollars the umbrella holders cost fifteen thousand all of this nonsense that just brings us closer and closer to some sort of default or

Starting point is 00:11:18 economic contagion so i actually look at this issue not as republican versus democrat the far right wing. I think that's misguided interpretation by the mainstream media. I think what this is is the first chance in a while where you're not allowed to pass a continuing resolution where you will have to propose 12 bills the way the law says you're supposed to. And what that'll mean is that you'll have to negotiate a compromise to get those 12 bills passed.

Starting point is 00:11:48 Now, what's crazy is the Senate actually has six of those bills on their desk, and they haven't even negotiated it. And I think the reason is because they know that the CR is always in the offing. But if this continuing resolution is not allowed because you fired the speaker, then they'll have to negotiate those bills. and part of what McCarthy did to get elected was say we will return to the law and

Starting point is 00:12:13 Not use the in emergency break class and I think that's what's not it's not understood well I think by Americans as that is the actual process We haven't been doing it for a decade. And I'm not a fan of gates, but I'm glad that somebody did this because somebody has to draw a line in this end. The Republicans and Democrats equally have been responsible for breaking the way the American government spends money. And so this is the best way to fix it. Freeberg, you agree?

Starting point is 00:12:39 With what's gone down here and that this is worth shutting the government down, etc. Or do you think this is like where to make the stand? Because you've been very pro controlling spending, SFI, and so do you think that this is the best way to do it, I guess? It's more about the United States' is facing a fiscal emergency, national debt reported by the Treasury Department increased by $275 billion in a one-day report yesterday, $275 billion in a day. The entire tarp program during 08 was $400 billion. That's how out of control our fiscal condition is.

Starting point is 00:13:17 This is a function of rising rates, a function of spending. As we talked about many times over, there's an arithmetic to this that at some point, it becomes ever-escalating until you step in and do something dramatic about it. So I'm hopeful, and I mean, there's a lot of rhetoric. You can watch all the news channels and see a lot of these congresspeople get on camera and talk about different things.

Starting point is 00:13:40 I think we're seeing more frequently now, people talking about the fiscal crisis that the US is facing, and that this action provides a mechanism as Chamoff points out for forcing everyone to the table to figure out how do we reduce the impact, how do we chart a path to a solution, because right now, if you have to anyone in Congress, what's the strategic plan here? There is not going to be an answer from anyone. Everyone's got a different point of view,

Starting point is 00:14:07 and everyone's fighting over the deck chairs on the Titanic, and we've got a more significant problem. We're hitting an iceberg. So yeah, I'm hopeful that this causes hopefully a turning point in the never-ending spending spree where everyone gets elected and everyone promises to the folks that they're representing and the folks that funded their political campaigns. Some amount of money back out from the government and everyone gets that free money and at some

Starting point is 00:14:37 point something's got to turn around or the whole thing kind of goes down. So hopefully this is that moment. I don't know. Shacks you think that by the way, if the government shut down for weeks and months to try and figure this out and for everyone to get aligned with, here's the long range strategic plan presented to the American people on how we prevent the US from either inflation or bankruptcy, then I think everyone will feel like it was worth it. Sacks has been tons of speculation about what this is, what this is actually about.

Starting point is 00:15:06 Is it about Ukraine? Is it about out of control spending? Is it about Matt Gaetz and Kevin McCarthy having some sort of personal grudge against each other? What do you think is at the core of this, Sacks? Well, probably all of the above, but I think it's fundamentally a rejection of the status quo. Kevin McCarthy, if nothing else, is a figure of the status quo. I mean, he's worked for 20 years through the system. He's a great fundraiser. I actually attended an event for him down the street here, and of course, all the donors love him. And look, I like Kevin McCarthy. I've contributed to Kevin McCarthy, but at the end of the day, I'm not sure that Kevin McCarthy is a guy who's going to get us out of this mess.

Starting point is 00:15:44 And the fundamental problem is he's just too conciliatory. The idea that you're going to impose spending discipline and get us out of the budgetary mess that we're in, the idea that you're going to make that omelette without breaking a few eggs, I think is just kind of silly. I think we need a tougher speaker who's going to actually live up to the promises of stopping these omnibus bills going back to single subject bills who is going to represent the views of the majority of the Republican caucus on indefinite infinite Ukraine spending because he's kind of off center of the Republican party on that.

Starting point is 00:16:19 Why can't the Republican party be in unison on this? Is it explain what the explain what the what's the rift inside the the gop right now well that you actually has debates in this party you will you see is the democrats are in total lockstep and they just support whatever is the status quo but the republicans actually have debates inside their party and there is a big debate right now on how we handle you crane

Starting point is 00:16:42 and i think there is growing opposition to a blank check as long as it takes policy towards Ukraine. We've already appropriated over 100 billion. What's the return on investment of that? The counter-efficiency failed. So you think that's the key? You think that's the key, not the CRs? I think it's both of those issues combined with the fact that increasingly McCarthy was not seen as an honest broker. Listen, I think McCarthy could have had whatever views he wanted to if he was perceived as somebody who actually represented a majority of their public and caucus but What Nancy May is what Mac aides what these others who rebelled were saying is listen What Kevin told us is not what he did and I personally witnessed this aspect to McCarthy

Starting point is 00:17:24 Okay, so when I went to this event down the street here, I heard him gave this whole putler rant. And then afterwards I came up to him and said, Ken, what are you talking about? Did you really want to cause War III? And all of a sudden he backpedaled and he started saying these conciliatory things. And I was like, okay, maybe he just went on this like two

Starting point is 00:17:41 where it was kind of off topic. And two. He tuned in? He tuned in where, you know, it was kind of off topic. He tuted. Did you retweet it? But after I kind of had this like sidebar with him, I'm like, okay, maybe it's not so bad. Maybe, you know, I think he, he promised that he would impose. He's in the pocket of special interests. Let's be clear. Well, I think he, well, no, not quite Jason, because he didn't quote to it. He's just, he well, no, not quite Jason because he didn't quote to it. He's just

Starting point is 00:18:05 a quote to it. And he just he retuted it. But what I would say is that he was really good in any particular meeting at saying conciliatory things to get somebody to like him and to get him. He's a B. S.R. is what you're saying. Well, I mean, I think a lot of politicians are. Not a part. And so he told me what I wanted to hear. I think he promised that he would get in the council. Would you have been with the eight or with the rest? Well, and the guys, the fundamental, the current, the sex, would you have voted with the eight or would you have voted with the rest as if you were?

Starting point is 00:18:33 I then would have voted with the eight. I mean, even though I like, look, I like McCarthy, he's a likable guy, but again, I think that press conference he held revealed the truth of it, which is he was be asking me, his real view is That we need to support Ukraine for as long as it takes and he told me something different His grand bargain was that he would stop these continuing resolution pork barrel bills

Starting point is 00:18:55 That was the grand bargain that was the thing that said and if I don't do it you guys can vote me out Do you guys remember this? Yeah, you know that was his negotiation? So it this really was kind of like a feather complete The minute he decided to pass and yet another pork barrel bill, you also seem kind of frustrated that he just he seemed like he was spent in dealing with all this. So it's surprising to me is why the Republican Party allowed mad gates to get all of the attention and to be like the organizing principle because he's such a load some individual to so many people both in the Republican party and outside. The guy, the guy broke a fundamental promise and that promise wasn't that provocative.

Starting point is 00:19:31 It's just like, yeah, we're going to pass 12 bills. We're just going to follow the law and he couldn't follow the law. And so why doesn't anybody else stand up? Why does it have to take these eight kind of coalescing with, with the Dems? It's, it's really nutty actually. Yeah. It was a very strange series of events. And by the way, I think you make a just your last point there.

Starting point is 00:19:50 This would not have happened if Hakeem Jeffries didn't send down word that all the Democrats were supposed to vote with Mac Ains. I think that this is a vote against their long term interest because the fact the matter is that Kevin McCarthy ultimately was a very client speaker and he was giving the Democrats what they wanted on spending, on keeping government funded and open forever at higher and higher rates of spending and on Ukraine. They're never going to get somebody who is more compliant. To your point, I think what is really interesting and hopefully beneficial for America is we've broken the

Starting point is 00:20:25 seal on unseating the speaker, interterm, if they kind of like violate a handful of these defined things. And I hope one of these things is the best thing we could do for America is just force all of these folks in Congress to negotiate 12 bills a year. Keep them busy. Focus on those bills. Get to like a compromise. Get it to the Senate. Get it voted. Get it to the president's side. That's it. If they if they just did that, we would probably spend a third to half of less than

Starting point is 00:20:56 we do now. It's gays. The winner and all of us to see it look like just just so you guys know like when you try to propose elements of a bill, right? In one of those real bills, okay? It has to go to the the CBO and it has to get scored. Right? So for example, we've tried to propose certain aspects of legislation. And no matter whatever we think about it, there at least is an independent body. That scores it and says, here's the X year cost, the Y year cost. Here's the benefits.

Starting point is 00:21:21 And so you get a very clear sense and a transparent sense that's published everybody about what this is. In CR, you can avoid all of that stuff. There is no close study of any of this stuff. And, you know, David is right. You get it on a Thursday night at like 8 p.m. and you vote Friday at 6, you know, or like at midday. How is anybody supposed to approve a multi trillion dollar package logically? You know it's riddled with nonsense. It makes no sense that you don't break up the work and do it thoughtfully each time. I guess should they change this ability for one member to propose a resolution to remove the speaker?

Starting point is 00:22:01 Yeah. It's comically easy to make the speaker based on the rules they passed. However, I think it's important to understand why that will happen. It happened because McCarthy was so desperate to become speaker. If you go back to the history of this thing, McCarthy was actually passed over for speaker back in 2015 when he made this gaff on TV about the Benghazi select committee being set up to hurt Hillary's poll numbers. Obviously, that wasn't an emission that helped Republicans. And he only got the job this year by making it so easy to take it away from him.

Starting point is 00:22:33 And remember, they did like 15 rounds of voting. So this is the problem. Frankly, one of the problems with McCarthy is he has a little bit too desperate to have the job. Sometimes when you get a guy who is so desperate for a job, they're not that effective in it because they're too worried about it being taken away. What you want is a guy who is like, look, take it or leave it. I could do this job or not do this job. That's the only way you're going to get somebody tough in the job. I think the guy they should

Starting point is 00:22:56 look to right now would be Jim Jordan. I think Jim Jordan would be excellent because at the end of the day, you want a speaker who's going to be fear not loved, like Nancy Pelosi, quite frankly, you need a Republican speaker who's going to be tough who doesn't give a shit if you like him or not. I mean, this is, I think, Kevin's downfall is that he cared too much about people liking him. As a result, in the room,

Starting point is 00:23:18 he would always tell you something that you liked, but the problem is that he can't deliver on that. Yeah, so let's get ready to move on to the topic, but just a final question here. Do you guys think a shutdown in a couple of weeks? Because that's how long the extension is, would be productive for the country if it becomes the backstop against out of control spending. If it stops the CR process, it'll be effective to the tune of about $500 billion. It'll be half a trillion dollars effective.

Starting point is 00:23:44 So, a couple of weeks of the government not spending on it? $500 billion. It'll be half a trillion dollars effective. So a couple of weeks of the government not spending money, meaning if you kill the omnibus bill, or you have an extremely slimmed down version of that bill and you revert back to this 12 bills a year process that's supposed to be the law, there'll be more effect. You'd save half a trillion dollars, probably. Just to finish the point on that, I think we have to just look at this Wall Street Journal article that came out this morning, where it was called Rising Insurance rates mean deficits finally matter. Finally, there's a recognition. We called it. Yeah. Finally, there's a recognition,

Starting point is 00:24:17 both politically and economically, that our deficits and debt are too big. And the key point of this article is it says most of the increase This is in long term rates is due to the part of yields called the term premium Which has nothing to do with inflation or short-term rates? So until now our interest rate problems have been about the Fed raising short-term rates to combat inflation Now we're seeing a separate problem which is long rates are going up and the long rates are going up because of this concern that the federal government has too much debt. And so bondholders are starting to demand a higher long-term premium to hold that debt.

Starting point is 00:24:54 It's what we've been warning about for a long time now. And it's finally happening. So unless the political system gets serious about reducing deficits, even if inflation comes down, and even if the Fed cuts short-term rates, you're going to have a problem with long-term rates remaining high, and that is going to keep the cost of capital high, and that is going to reduce long-term innovation in the economy. It's bad for us.

Starting point is 00:25:17 It's horrible for us. Yeah, terrible for us. Let's go to another troubling situation. What's happening at the Southern border, obviously, videos of migrants crossing the Southern border are all over X-rated, YouTube, et cetera. One side saying it's chaos, the other side arguably been ignoring it. So let's start with the two numbers that we actually know.

Starting point is 00:25:38 I've put a bunch of time into trying to figure out if there are any accurate numbers, talk to a bunch of people on Twitter and other places. There are only, we have very, very flawed data on what's actually happening there. We do have anecdotal videos. Obviously, our friend Elon went down to the border and did a video himself. The best data with the caveat that it's very flawed is the count of encounters. This is not folks who get through. This is folks who were encountered. So this is the official southern land border encounters from the US Customs and Border Protection Agency since 2022, 2020 and 2021. There were obviously COVID issues on the border. So it

Starting point is 00:26:17 was much more locked down. Half a million people in 2021.7 and 2021. 2.4 rounding up there and in 2023, supposedly rounding up 2 million through 10 months, tracking on a pace for 2.3, the exact same as last year. However, it certainly doesn't look like that. It's the exact same. Again, that's from the border patrol and that is encounters, not actually people who got through. And then the border states are saying that those numbers are wrong, and there's a lot more people getting through, and Eric Adams in New York, where a lot of these people are being sent.

Starting point is 00:26:55 And this has obviously been the most politicized issue, I think, of the last decade. Governor Abbott, in August of 2022, quote, New York City is the ideal destination for these migrants who can receive the abundance of city services and housing that mayor Adams has posted about within the sanctuary city. Here are the clips and then I'll get your responses from those when we get back. This is horrific when you think about what the governor is doing, the governor of Texas, but we are going to set the right message, the right tone of being here for these families. Before we begin busing illegal immigrants up to New York, it was just Texas and Arizona that bore the brunt of all of the chaos and all the problems that come with it.

Starting point is 00:27:41 Now the rest of America is understanding exactly what is going on. Alright, so this is obviously something that New York City is unable to handle. Those are from August of last year when this was flaming up. According to Abbott, Texas has given Bustick as to 42,000 migrants. And as of late September, 119 migrants have arrived in New York City since the spring of 22. About 30% of New York City migrants have been bust in from Texas. I'll stop there and just get your general reactions to what you all believe is happening at the border since we're getting a highly politicized take on each of these. It's become super polarized and the numbers, any accurate numbers do not exist, sex.

Starting point is 00:28:23 I don't think it's hard to understand what's going on with the border. I think there are people who want to... Well, I said it's hard to understand the numbers of what's going on with the border. I don't even think the numbers are that hard. You have a better source in number. I have some numbers that are similar to yours, but...

Starting point is 00:28:37 Okay. So Satista goes back to 2019. So the numbers I have are about in 2019, which is when remain in Mexico went into effect. The number was 851,000. Then it went down to 400,000 because of COVID and title 42. Then in 2021, we had about 1.7 million, which was a new record. Then in 2022, we are up to 2.7 million, which was a new record. And the the question is what is happening in 2023? Obviously, we don't have a full year of data, but given that we've eliminated Remain in Mexico and title 42

Starting point is 00:29:12 I don't think anybody seriously doubts that we're headed for a new record and in fact the Washington Post had articles in August The September is saying that those months were all time records and now they're surpassing 11,000 daily migrant encounters of the border just twice last week. So, and, you know, what Elon reported from the border. You said that link. He said that link. So we'll probably have to.

Starting point is 00:29:34 And then also just, you know, that was amazing news. That was amazing news. I was gonna say, Statista is an aggregator. They don't do primary researches here now. So, which one? But those numbers were pretty similar to yours. Maybe from the same source, who knows? We also have the video evidence.

Starting point is 00:29:47 We have the fact that Elon went down there and reported exactly what we're seeing in other contexts, which is new records virtually every day and every week and every month. The Border Patrol agents are basically being overrun. And so you made the correct point that this only measures encounters. It doesn't measure the actual number of people going through. Well, if border patrol is overrun, then the number of encounters relative to them, people getting through is obviously going to be very understated. So I think we're on track for another huge record in 2023.

Starting point is 00:30:19 And the point is that the pace is accelerating. Elon gave the simple math. There's 8 billion people in the world. How many of them would want to be in the United States if they could? Probably billions. At least half of them. At least half of them.

Starting point is 00:30:31 And I don't blame them. Okay, I want to be in these issues too. That's kind of real quick, yeah. Okay, but obviously we can't handle all the people who want to be here. And the word has gone out via social media, via word of mouth, that the border is effectively open. And we've

Starting point is 00:30:45 seen numerous videos. It wasn't just Elon when RFK went down there to you, Mayor, Arizona. There's a hundred different countries. There's a big hole in the wall and people are just lining up and. Well, but it was a hundred different countries, right? I mean, we it was not a country. And Elon broadcast the exact same thing coming from Eagle Pass. So the point is you've got all of these different points where there is no wall and People are just lining up and being let through and in some cases They're just running through because the border patrol is overrun. So we effectively have no border

Starting point is 00:31:16 I mean let's admit the truth now Yeah, and I think that the mainstream media and the Biden administration their policy was basically Cino evil, here no evil, and to deny the reality of what was happening. Eric Adams was one of the first Democrats to break ranks saying, listen, we can see the migrants lining up in tents going around the block. We are trying to put them up in hotels, it's costing us $12 billion. We can't afford it. But Eric Adams has always been a little bit of a maverick inside the democratic party

Starting point is 00:31:45 we talked about how he was tough on crime during the chase of the new era which is why i support it is a moderate but it was a moderate but then you had kathy hoax who's the governor of new york who's nothing if not a machine politician just in the last week saying we cannot handle this so she broke ranks which was i think a big news story. And now the latest is that the Biden administration itself might be breaking ranks. I think Jamoth,

Starting point is 00:32:11 you posted a really interesting story that, Mallorca, who's the Secretary of DHS, just posted a notice in the federal register, which said there is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the board of the United States. They don't want to say wall. They don't want to say wall. They don't say the devil. They just don't want to be in a very powerful entry since the United States.

Starting point is 00:32:32 Now, there was no press conference on this. The way that this got reported is some reporter was doing their job keeping track of the Federal Register and saw that New Yorkists had posted a notice saying that they need to construct a wall. Now Biden hasn't said this, no one on the administration said this, but clearly for obvious reasons. For obvious reasons. So Jason, what do you think the obvious reason is? Well, the obvious reason is Trump's entire presidency was predicated on, hey, we're going to build this wall. And but I'm saying you go back and say that he was right is untenable to this administration.

Starting point is 00:33:07 National security. It's like, yes. And so they're going to do that. They're going to do that. And obviously, and build the wall, but they don't want to say it. So it's just ridiculous. But just one important point to what David said, New York City has the right to shelter. So that means every immigrant who comes there, they have to put them in a hotel.

Starting point is 00:33:20 And these are like, turns out, $400 or $500 a night hotel. So this has become cataclysmic. They're obviously needs to be a border. And it's ridiculous to say there shouldn't be a border. Nobody believes that. I don't know why this administration just can't admit that there needs to be a border of some kind. And we can talk about what they want. But Shema. Well, though, actually, it's a better solution than a wall, but we'll get to that. What is it? Well, I don't want to jump to my feet. I have something to say. So Shema, I'll explain in a second if you want, or I can jump to it. No, jump to that. What is it? Well, I don't want to jump to my feet. I have something to say. So, I'll explain in a second if you want.

Starting point is 00:33:46 Or I can jump to it. No, jump to it. Okay. So, obviously people are talking about a wall. Walls are a terrible solution because there are ladders that can go over them pretty easily. What you really need to have is eyes on it. And the two best solutions you can see them here. Israel has had a really, they understand borders really well. And so what you're seeing,

Starting point is 00:34:06 if you're watching are these towers, which do a great job of monitoring the border. And you could put about 2,000 of these towers, they have a range of easily a mile. This is next-gen, bordered by EBIT systems. It's a Israeli-based company. It's 160-foot surveillance tower. Andral actually has a century tower as well, our friend of the pod, Palmer Lockies Company, andral. And obviously, the Border Patrol already has 10 of the towers. Well, why do you see as an either war?

Starting point is 00:34:37 I'm just curious, like, why would you go? Oh, I think that these smart land posts, as I call them, are the number one first thing to do because you could deploy these in a fraction of the time. You could have $1,000 of these in under a year for $4 billion. And so these only cost $2 million each. The 10 towers that were put in were put in a 26 million in the pilot. So if you put $2,000 of these towers in, you just picked four different vendors.

Starting point is 00:35:01 So they do 500 each and you test them. That would be $4 billion. That would be nothing. What do you do when you, when the camera spots person? You send intercepts there and then you build the walls where people are crossing most. So that would be mine. So you're making the most crossing most.

Starting point is 00:35:16 They're crossing the walls. You always see you build, you look for hotspots, David. So you would, but we don't, there's hotspots that we don't know about. So I'd say you deploy these for $4 billion very quickly and then where there are hotspots, you obviously build walls.

Starting point is 00:35:26 But you're still good in here. Can you be frank about this? Sure, be as frank as you like. Look, regardless of what you think about Trump, this may or kiss revelation completely and utterly vindicates his approach to wanting to build a wall. And there's so many people who won't just admit

Starting point is 00:35:43 that he was right, that we need a strong border wall, not because it's perfect, not because you can't climb over it if you have the right tools, but because a wall is more defensible than an open field. Now look, I'm all in favor of these towers and the cameras, and my understanding is that a lot of the parts of Trump's wall did have cameras on them. Yeah, no, he gets better for that too.

Starting point is 00:36:00 But the point is that you have video now coming out of thousands of people streaming across running. Yeah, the word is out. You need a wall to stop that. You also need cameras and border guards and all the rest of it. Just so you know, 2,000 miles of wall is going to be like a decade-long project.

Starting point is 00:36:17 So that's only point. No, okay, it's only a decade-long if you allow all of these core challenges that are designed to frustrate it. The fact of the matter is, look, we don't need 2,000 miles of wall because there are a lot of natural barriers along the border, where you have deep rivers or mountains

Starting point is 00:36:31 or whatever, we're not gonna need the wall. However, there are pieces of the wall that were literally laying on the ground. They were unfinished from Trump's term. By the way, Trump should have gotten that done. He didn't in any event, whatever. The point is, the Biden administration was actually selling those pieces of wall for scrap

Starting point is 00:36:46 metal for two cents on the dollar. This was a story that came out. Now they're admitting that we need the wall. That was pure politics. That makes no sense. They had the construction materials. They should have just finished it. That is American public.

Starting point is 00:37:00 Yeah. The American public. It's utterly ridiculous. It's like crazy. It's because the American government didn't like who said the right thing and the tone in which he said it. Yes. And they didn't like the separating of children from whatever they politicized that.

Starting point is 00:37:16 Both parties are equally just grossed at a situation and in common. But I'm a competent. It should be a point-based system. You lock the border and you allow people in, you in, as I've said, 10 times on this podcast, based on merit, what they're going to contribute to our society, that's recruitment. Some amount of people who are need asylum because they're going to be murdered, I.e. Afghanistan, people who supported us, Afghans who supported us during the war, and then finally the order in process of people applying to come in here.

Starting point is 00:37:45 Do your jobs everybody. It's just so- Well, please Nick. What happens when you get to the border guys? Do you just get admitted to America? Guys, this is insane, okay. The Biden administration started auctioning off what they called spare border wall parts, okay. I mean, how does Biden live this down? I think this could cost me a lecture. Yeah, you're 100% right about that. Yeah, I think this is like, this is a set up for a very bad ad. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think this is just because it's become so politicized, point-based system, recruitment over chaos, build a wall, build a sensor tower. What do you do in the meantime? There are

Starting point is 00:38:23 tens of thousands of people a day hitting the southern border. We have a national guard. We have something called the national guard. We send them there. They have to be deployed anyway. You just deploy the national guard. No, but same or the same term.

Starting point is 00:38:33 But same or same or like you would put the military to basically turn these people around. Of course. Of course you turn the right. Yes, that's it. Well, specifically, national guard will be quickest. The towers we second quickest and the wall is going to take forever.

Starting point is 00:38:45 But how do you process the asylum claim? Because isn't the whole point of asylum like you can't send them back to this country in which they're going to be killed in. And so it's an imperfect process, Tremac obviously. So Saxony and a few other folks, we held a fundraiser for Vivek Ramaswamy last week. And we talked about this a lot. And one of the things that we learned is that All the people that come to the Southern border are trained in YouTube and TikTok and Instagram

Starting point is 00:39:12 Exactly what to say so that you have to accept the asylum claim and so far there should be a limited number of them That's it just you have this many per year that we do I understand but but you don't know whether that person who was helping us in Afghanistan ends up coming in October and not in March, and that's the reason why they can't get in. The thing that I learned is that it's a specific script, it's available in multiple languages, right? So anybody who gets to the southern border knows exactly what to say so that America is forced to accept you. That's not how asylum should work. The bad news is not everybody's going to get in. Not everybody will get in. That's it.

Starting point is 00:39:48 Jake, there's two things we need to do. In addition to your point about sending troops to the border, because we do need the manpower. Yeah, it's obvious. Number one, to Chimas Point, you can't just say the word asylum and get in. That doesn't make sense. You should have to produce evidence of actually meeting the case for a silent, which is not being economically disadvantaged, is being politically prosecuted, where if you're sent back to your home country, they're going to put you in jail or kill you.

Starting point is 00:40:12 There aren't many countries in the world, quite frankly, where that is going to be a valid claim, just to be honest about it. I mean, if you have a freedom fighter from Iran coming over, who's going to be put in jail or killed, let him in. But that's not most of the people lining up at our border. If you're coming from Mexico, there's a very small chance that you are being bullied. The other thing we've got to do is you got to reinstitute remain in Mexico. That was the policy.

Starting point is 00:40:36 Yeah. You can't agree 100% just waiting on this side of the border because they're never going to show up in court. Yeah. I mean, listen, we want immigration to this country. It has to be logical. And the fact is everybody wants to come here. That's a great thing.

Starting point is 00:40:50 We should be taking advantage of that, but it can't be chaos. It's got to be orderly. That's what everybody wants. I don't know why, how this became a political issue. Everybody wants orderly. Everybody wants recruitment. Nobody wants an open board. Well, but the Jekyll, in order for it not to be a political issue,

Starting point is 00:41:04 you need both parties to agree and they currently don't. I mean, think about it. What's in Biden's interest right now is to do a No one wants an has changed. Therefore, we're going to change. And we're going to do all these things. And if one of them is building a wall and you want to say, gotcha, you can say gotcha, but it's the right thing to do because data has changed my opinion. Where do we get to the point where data can't change your opinion? Data should change your opinion. The data is clear that more people are coming through. That's why I made such a point at the top of this is like, we don't even have good data. What these sensor towers would do would at least give us data and would give us clarity. And then you only need a unit every half mile.

Starting point is 00:41:53 So you need 4,000 units patrolling the border and they would catch everybody. It isn't as expensive as people think it is. This could be, I mean, the last amount of money we gave, what was the last appropriation for Ukraine, Saxons, I'll give you a red meme. Well, we've already appropriated or authorized over 100 billion. And there are 4% of that cost. Okay. So for three or 4% of that cost, we could have these censor towers. It's crazy. We're defending Ukraine's border, but not our own. It's a very valid point. Independent. The publicist Republicans up in arms. It's this combined with the lack of fiscal discipline. Now, the craziness about this is if we were sitting here 20 years ago,

Starting point is 00:42:34 the Republicans were trying to open the border to have more low skilled workers to work in restaurants, to work in businesses. That's not the place we are today. We have too many people coming in. These are not just low skilled workers to pick vegetables. It's a different group. There was a point in time, Jason, where the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which is really the voice of the GOP establishment supported a constitutional amendment in favor of an open border. This was very much the point of view of the old Republican party, which was this libertarian open borders, open trade, free markets position. And the results of those policies have been partially disastrous. I mean, I understand the value

Starting point is 00:43:17 of free trade and so forth, but, and obviously, when I have high school immigration, we've talked about that. But it was too much of a good thing. I mean, they didn't draw intelligent distinctions, but we still have, I think, this to your point about the battle inside the Republican Party, we still have that old GOP establishment, and now there's this new populist wing that wants to make, I think, sensible changes. Here's the Wall Street Journal story from 2001. Open after worse. Why not? There it is. That was Bob Bartley, who was the long time editorial page editor. He was kind of like a hero in the conservative movement.

Starting point is 00:43:51 When I was in college, I read a great book by him called The Seven Fat Years about supply-side economics. And I think he was right about a lot of that stuff. But along with that economic policy came, I think this open borders completely open trade view that I think produced a lot of negative results and has to be revisited.

Starting point is 00:44:10 And by the way, there's a third leg of that stool, which is forever worse. The Wall Street Journal is one of the most pro-Ukrain publications there is, both in the news pages and in the editorial page. And they have never revisited the results of our disastrous forum policy where we keep intervening all over the world. This is the old Republican party.

Starting point is 00:44:32 There's a new Republican party that is emerging. And unfortunately, Kevin McCarthy found himself on the wrong side of that divide. All right, so moving on to our next topic, there was a notable accident with a cruise robot taxi in San Francisco this week or not. This is being framed by some as the first automated cruise vehicle to get in an accident, but what actually happened is not accurate. So there was a hit and run incident in San Francisco

Starting point is 00:44:59 when a woman was struck by a human driver. That human driver fled the scene. The hit and run launched tragically the woman underneath a human driver. That human driver fled the scene. They hit and run, launched tragically the woman underneath a cruise vehicle. The cruise vehicle break aggressively according to cruise, but stopped with its rear tire on top of the woman's leg. Police asked cruise to keep the vehicle in place

Starting point is 00:45:16 and lock it, which they did. Emergency respondents arrived and used the jaws of life to get the car off the woman's leg. Local media picked the story up. The way police asked crews to leave the car, leave the car on the woman's leg. Yes. Why would they do that? Well, I think actually, um, sometimes moving. No, no, I do think, um, for my time as EMT, sometimes moving the person can cause more damage than leaving it until you have the emergency services on the scene. So I like to wait for emergency services because moving it, you could have a broken bone hit your femoral artery and then you could bleed out.

Starting point is 00:45:56 So they just say, stay where you are. Don't make any more movements until EMT's car on top of them. That's ridiculous. It's on the person's leg. So that would mean that they're not in any danger. It might be painful. But if you were to move them, I was taught this when I was in EMT.

Starting point is 00:46:11 If you move people, you have to be very careful because you could cause a spine injury. They can become paralyzed or you could cut a major artery. You got to be very... How long were you in EMT? I was the first class in what was called EMT FRs, first responders, and I worked at Bravo Ambulance in Brooklyn as on a volunteer one for about three or four years.

Starting point is 00:46:28 Did you have like a tight outfit, like a tight polo? What are you wear? A skinny jeans. Did you have skinny jeans? You wore green pants and a white collar shirt, and yeah, I never told you I was the first call I ever got. I never told you that story. Were you like a sexy paramedic or were you just like a paramedic?

Starting point is 00:46:44 I can be whatever you want me to be sure about. Whatever works for your fantasies. Oh, he's blushing. I never told you that story. Were you like a sexy paramedic or were you just like a paramedic? I can be whatever you want me to be sure. Whatever works for your fantasies. He's blushing. He's blushing. But I'll tell you my first call. You are a sexy paramedic. I was a little sexy as a paramedic.

Starting point is 00:46:54 So I've got him blushing. Here's my first call. I swear to God, it's a night before Thanksgiving. Wednesday night, it's a big night in Brooklyn. I don't know if another place is, but the night before Thanksgiving everybody goes out and parties. So big Wednesday happens. First call comes in.

Starting point is 00:47:05 I was originally the person who picked up the Aussie operator at the 911, but then my second job I was on the bus. And so first call, first shift is big Wednesday. Guy gets, we get a call, that guy got stabbed. We go, the guy is outside TJ Boutnese, and I kid you not, the guy was in charge of the ambulance says, cut the jacket off. I take my shears, we have these really sharp scissors, and and boom we go right up to sleep. We cut his jacket he goes oh my members only jacket

Starting point is 00:47:32 We cut him open and his giant hairy chest Blood is pumping out like it's like a little Water fountain and the the guy who was running the bus, I remember, I just, he puts his hand up, I show this guy, you got bigger problems in this member only jacket. He says, get the mass pants. The mass pants, just so you know, are used in war. We get trained in them, you never use them. Mass pants are a blood pressure cuff. You put over people's pants to take the blood from their legs, put it into their chest so that they at least survive. The guy says, get the mass pants. I said, get the mass pants. The mass pants are packed away. You never use them. I'm getting the mass pants

Starting point is 00:48:08 out. We're whaling down fourth avenue to get this guy and his blood pressure is dropping, his part reached dropping blood all over the bus. We're trying to control the bleeding. He survived. He saved him. We saved him. But that was my first call. First call. Nuts. This was a volunteer gig. Volunteer paid for? Nope. Not everything's about money, free bird. Not everything's about money, free bird.

Starting point is 00:48:30 Well, I'm not saying it is. I'm just asking. I'm joking with you. Yeah, I guess all of it is meant to be a superhero. Yeah. Guys, I texted Jamie, Jason's brother, and I asked him if this was true, and I asked for a photo.

Starting point is 00:48:45 Hey Nick, you want to you want to put up the photo? Oh no, please. Oh, there I am. There I am. If you're a hard stop, this is the guy you want to come research. Yeah, I'll be Wednesday. Oh, there we go. Dave, did your hard stop?

Starting point is 00:48:57 Did your hard stop. Dave, because I'm going to resuscitate it. Nick showed the other one. This is the original outfit that when he became a paramount. Oh no, this better not be x-rated. Oh God. Oh there, I like the second one better. Yeah, we know which one you like better days.

Starting point is 00:49:12 Oh, is that a nurse? Is that a thermometer he's got? What is he having to say? That's a needle. That's a needle or thermometer. I think that's like a coat bottle. I think that could be at the thermometer. We might need to check your temperature, David.

Starting point is 00:49:24 It's like a Pepsi bottle. What the hell? We're gonna take your temperature, David. I don't know if you're gonna like it. This would be at the moment. We might need to check your temperature, David. It's like a Pepsi bottle. What the hell? We're going to take your temperature, Dave. I don't know if you were the Lincoln. This would be a good opportunity. What kind of temperature does that take? For you, or like a more like jaco. Well, I know it's going to be really hot.

Starting point is 00:49:34 Jason, you did a great job. It was a good time. I'm happy to be really. We really appreciate your contributions. Wow, great job. All right, back to the story about cruise. Now, this terrible accident. Wow, we got you, Ralph. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:49:47 Well, thanks for the work you did, J.Kell. Thanks for your service. Okay, so. Okay. Yeah. Oh, it's good to take your vitals. Okay, local media picked up a... Do you have that illegal tattoo on your arm too?

Starting point is 00:50:01 That was, that was removable. Local media picked up on this reporting that Cruz was responsible for the incident. Director of News for the San Francisco Chronicle, which is a lunatic publication. Woman run over by cruise self-driving car on Market Street in downtown San Francisco pulled from under rear axle circumstances under investigation. The San Francisco standard posted on X, a woman suffered traumatic injuries after being trapped under a cruise robot taxi

Starting point is 00:50:29 in downtown San Francisco, and Monday night, fire department spokesperson said. A few weeks ago, as you know, a video circulated on X, formerly known as Twitter, of 20 or so cruise vehicles, causing a massive traffic jam, and an intersection in Austin.

Starting point is 00:50:46 The Robotaxi provider issue has become very divisive here in San Francisco. There are now multiple companies working on a mutual in San Francisco. We'll put pilots in. They come in to break the car. Yeah. Yeah. Why would they do that? Because they're lunatics and it represents

Starting point is 00:51:05 technology. That's the real story here. The real story is the very deep disdain for technological progress. And the second story I think but so important is the total lack of assumption of risk generally in the US, which limits progress in meaningful ways. Let me just pull up some data that I shared here. So Nick, if you pull up this first chart, I'll give you guys some numbers. For every 100 million miles driven in the US, there's about one and a half deaths, car accident deaths. There's about 3.2 trillion miles driven per year

Starting point is 00:51:37 in the US. So about 45,000 people die from auto accident each year. This is a crazy number. 2.3 million people have auto accident teacher. This is a crazy number. 2.3 million people have auto accident-related injuries in the US each year. And there's 6 million car crashes each year in the US. That's one crash for every half million miles driven. Pretty, you know, incredible statistics. So if you look at this chart, it kind of shows the car fatalities over time. Now, what's the leading cause of car fatalities?

Starting point is 00:52:06 We'll go to the next chart. Distracted driving. Number one, I should have done this as a quiz. Number one, DUI. Jesus, that is unbelievable that even today. To this day? Yeah, number two, speeding. Yeah, number three.

Starting point is 00:52:19 That's not using your seat belt. So, by the way, all three of those are the same? Yeah, so 80% of those, 80% of deaths are DUI speeding and seatbelt non-use. Now go to an autonomous driving world. And I think words, those are all opt-in. So now go to an autonomous driving world. You won't see DUIs. Those things are programmed to not speed. Obviously, they're not going to run if you don't put your seatbelt on. And then the fourth one is distracted driving. The real question is what incremental accidents or what incremental errors do autonomous cars make that might kind of cause new deaths or new accidents. But the net is that we have an incredible number of car accidents, 6 million accidents a year,

Starting point is 00:53:00 2.5 million injuries a year, 45,000 deaths a year, most of which can be prevented by things that are just basic human stupidity. The first three are all opt-in. So what you're saying is Warren Buffett and Geico are probably responsible for lobbying and creating this mess in San Francisco. Do the insurance companies even need to do this?

Starting point is 00:53:19 To ex-state Chema. Conspiracy corner. Well, I actually think there's a very different driver for why these things. So I just wanna make the case, first off, that if you zoom out and you don't take the anecdotal story of the woman trapped under the cruise car, it's an awful story.

Starting point is 00:53:35 But that anecdote allows people to heighten their fear and heighten their emotion and create a response to autonomous driving as if that is a cause of a problem. If you zoom out and you ask the question, dude, 50,000 people a year are dying because of human stupidity that we can just completely take off the streets, it's such a no-brainer that this technology should progress.

Starting point is 00:53:55 And I'll give you guys another story. In 1999, the clinical trials for gene therapy had begun. And there was a guy named Gelsinger. He was a young kid. I think he was 18 or 19 years old and he passed away from the gene therapy. And it turns out that there was actually doctor malpractice that was primarily responsible for his death. After that happened, the FDA and the regulators stepped in and they basically put a halt

Starting point is 00:54:20 to all gene therapy clinical trials for about seven years. The number of lives that were lost during that seven years that went on that we did not make progress on getting gene therapy programs to market is significantly higher than the number of people that would have lost lives, which by the way, it turns out when you go back to this particular death was driven by doctor malpractice, not by the gene therapy technology necessarily itself, and a lot of the stuff was understood. And I think we've heard Peter Tiel and others speak a lot about how the US has lost our appetite for risk. We say that if anyone dies or if any bad thing happens, a new

Starting point is 00:54:56 technology should not progress. But when we look at the benefit of new technology relative to the cost of it, many of these technologies should progress at an accelerated pace, not at a decelerated pace, and the stepping benefit of new technology relative to the cost of it, many of these technology should progress at an accelerated pace, not at a decelerated pace. And the stepping in to stop these things from moving forward because number one, we're really afraid of new technology. Number two, we kind of want to,

Starting point is 00:55:15 there's a lot of regulatory capture and competency that wants to see these things not succeed. I think we're really denying ourselves, in many cases, the opportunity to realize progress because we're so concerned about any loss. Nuclear fission is a really great example of this. Three-mile island accident and Fukushima, you know, if you look at the total number of lives off and there's incredible statistics which I should probably not pull off the top

Starting point is 00:55:38 of my head, I should probably make sure I get the right numbers. But Chernobyl is another good example. If you look at the total number of incremental cancers and the total number of lives that were lost from Chernobyl, you look at three-mile island, you look at Fukushima. You can make a statistical argument that even with those extraordinary cataclysmic disasters, the number of lives that could have been improved, the number of lives that could have been saved, the progress that people could have been made, the number of people that could have been improved, the number of lives that could have been saved, the progress that people could have been, could have made, the number of people that could have been pulled out

Starting point is 00:56:07 of poverty if we made cheap abundant energy available at an accelerated pace rather than a decelerated pace, it could have had a much more significant effect. So I view this in the lens, this autonomous driving backlash in the lens of what we see with a lot of new technologies, which is we lose our appetite for risk, we lose our tolerance for any sort of incremental loss. And we lose perspective on the fact that that loss is far, far, far, far outweighed relative

Starting point is 00:56:33 to the gains that you gain if you can get that technology into market faster, not slower. And I think that's just such a real kind of storyline that's not told very often about how technology and progress is limited, particularly in the modern age, because once you have enough stuff, you're not willing to take as much risk. Meanwhile, you see China building 450 nuclear fission stations and the U.S. building done. And I think that that's part of the story of where the U.S. is today. I mean, I know that was a big rant, but for me, I'm just like so to this stuff. Like all of this anti-tech stuff and anti-progress stuff, because you then pick an anecdote

Starting point is 00:57:09 and you focus on the anecdote and you miss the bigger fucking picture. Well, what's so funny about San Francisco is it's the city that both is the first to approve the testing of it and then where there's a small fraction of citizens who try to go and sabotage it. I guess the next issue is how close are we to having these at scale cruises currently in San Francisco, Austin and Phoenix, Waymo, very expensive cars, by the way.

Starting point is 00:57:35 They are currently in San Francisco and Phoenix, 24-7, they're going to launch an LA soon. And Tesla has been working on this. You know what's another example of this? Space X, some strarapnel got blown into the uninhabited desert lands around Bocachika, Texas. You're talking about starship? Yeah, starship. The big one, yeah. And they come in and they're like, shut the whole thing down.

Starting point is 00:57:57 You can't have shrapnel flying around. Think about the risk tolerance equation here. So if you delay SpaceX by six months to make sure that Straffinol doesn't fly through the desert, that's six months longer till humans can perhaps inhabit the moon, go to Mars, do all these extraordinary things. This is what I mean about the lack of tolerance for risk. We have to assume that there is a cost in moving things forward. There has to be a cost in progress. You don't go fight a war and try and move the front lines of a battlefield further into the enemy territory, and assume you're going to have no loss.

Starting point is 00:58:34 And all of human progress needs to be thought about in a similar way. We have to have some degree of loss and some tolerance for risk as we try and make progress with our species. And technology always is going to have setbacks. It's always going to have mistakes. But if the net benefit far outweighs those mistakes, we have to be willing to accept it and gets everyone to kind of take a broader perspective on what we're doing. That this isn't just about maintaining status quo and not getting hurt. This is about the great benefits we get from moving things forward.

Starting point is 00:59:04 And we've lost that in such a profound way over the last 50 years in Western culture. Another great example of this to add to your tie rate is challenge trials. And these have been banned for a long time. And if you don't know what a challenge trial is, is you introduce something like, let's say COVID into a person who has had a COVID vaccine. And yet, they're assuming some risk in doing this, but if it was a young person, as we saw, probably wouldn't be that much risk and there are people who would do it. And there are this whole concept of challenge trials

Starting point is 00:59:33 could reduce in the long term a massive amount of deaths, but it's not allowed because of ethics issues. What are your thoughts on that free bird, challenge trials? I mean, it's, look, there's so many examples. We could just keep going through this. And from energy markets and nuclear technology to biotechnology, to space technology, to I've lived it. I mean, like GMO technology and bioengineering and food systems,

Starting point is 00:59:57 there's a fear and a concern. And like Rob Henderson said at our summit, I've always viewed those to be luxury beliefs that this idea that I don't want to have my precious things changed when the benefit really accrues mostly to the poorest people in the world. The people that can't afford it. The people that can't afford it. The people that can't afford it. The people that can't afford it. The people that can't afford it.

Starting point is 01:00:15 The people that can't afford it. That's an important point that people don't realize. When you make things more productive, whether it's an acre of land to make more food or a unit of energy and the cost comes down per unit of energy. Those of us who already have a lot of stuff and have all of our basic needs met, we have housing, we have shelter, we have food, we have energy, we can afford it, we live in a great environment, we live in a place that we can do whatever the heck we want anytime we want.

Starting point is 01:00:36 We don't care if the price goes up by 30%. I'm happy to go down to Whole Foods and feel good to plop down an extra 50% to buy an organic banana. Someone who only makes $8,000 a year cares very deeply about that cost delta. They need to see the cost of food go down, the cost of energy go down, the cost of medicine go down, the improvement that's driven by technology and has been for 10,000 years, mostly accrues to the poorest people in society first. Well, that's the problem.

Starting point is 01:01:06 And so we all who are in charge, those of us who are rich, who are elite, who have power, who have control, who have influence, who run the fucking government, we all get to raise our hand and say, I don't want to take any more risk because one person died. Meanwhile, a million people are starving to death over the next three months. And you can make that same story, and you can connect those dots in every area of technology that humans have lost their risk tolerance for in the wealthy industrialized West. And we are largely, I think, not just in hurting ourselves

Starting point is 01:01:37 because of the economic costs and all the other stuff that's going on that we're now seeing as very apparent, but we're also limiting the intelligence and the energy to make technology and progress it that could benefit the whole world. We're limiting its ability to diffuse. And I think it's really profoundly sad. And I hope that we one day look back at this era as almost like a pseudo-dark ages and we wake the f*** up someday and recognize that we need to take some degree of

Starting point is 01:02:05 reason, have some products for making progress. All right, listen to me, I'm like, whatever. It's a family problem. I'm a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little I wanted to see that progress. People took risk. That's it. No risk, no reward. To that point, I think it took two years to create the Bay Bridge and 17 years to do the repair to it. I mean, that's how crazy things have gotten.

Starting point is 01:02:31 $2 billion to $2 billion to build those suicide nets on the side of the Golden Gate Bridge and some fraction of that to build the whole frigging bridge. And even on a dollar adjusted basis, it's ridiculous. It's interesting. It's interesting. You said, $550 million to build the bridge in US dollars. And yeah, it was the same amount to build the nuts.

Starting point is 01:02:48 So they have- You can ask a question about the cruise thing. So do you believe that cruise will have a good solution to self-driving? I'm just like a little bit skeptical. Are they owned by GM now? Yeah. But didn't they raise money from soft bank? Isn't there some like independent funding as well that happened?

Starting point is 01:03:04 I thought it was sold to GM. I'm just like, what? Part of it was sold to GM and then they set it up as a sub and they like like Alphabet did with Waymo Alphabet raised 5 billion and outside money in the Waymo and I think that crews or GM tried to do the same thing where they've got soft bank and a bunch of institutional investors in crews It's matured Yeah, right. It was spun out because GM didn't have the ability to bankroll it. It's obvious that these are getting there. The question is, is I think it's more like 10 years before this is fully deployed. I'll see you have to build all the cars. If Elon does get out this robot taxi vehicle for

Starting point is 01:03:37 25k, which he seems like is well on the way with the model 3 to getting to, this was an early mockup from Walter Isaacson's book, which looks pretty sharp and it doesn't have, it's like a two-seat car. So these things zipping around San Francisco, et cetera, at a reasonable speed 25, 35 miles an hour, I think is pretty close to having this. I use the self-driving beta, full self-driving FSD.

Starting point is 01:04:04 I use it all the time. I used to only use it on FSD. I use it all the time. I used to only use it on highways. Now I use it on side roads. I disengage it when it's on roads that are not clearly marked. Have you guys taken a cruise or a Weimo road? I haven't taken either. I got invited to the beta though for cruise.

Starting point is 01:04:20 You guys want to take a look? Personally, I would not trust the cruise ride. I don't believe they're responsible for this accident as it turns out, but I'm just skeptical that some of these initiatives are going to pan out. I think Tesla is getting it. Why are you skeptical? Yeah. I think it's a hard problem to solve. And I'm just dubious about GM's ability to develop tech at this level of sophistication. You and Tesla will get there. I think Tesla is already there. Well, if an autonomous Tesla drove up and picked you up, would you do that when you take

Starting point is 01:04:53 a ride to that? I mean, not today, but I mean, when they get there, which I don't think will be 10 years, I mean, it seems like Tesla is this way out of everybody else. Timoth, what do you think? Where do you think the tech is? I think this is an inference problem for Tesla, and it's a learning out of everybody else. Tim off, what do you think? Where do you think the tech is? I think this is an inference problem for Tesla, and it's a learning problem for everybody else. So, I think in order to build level 5 autonomy, you have to have good reasoning, and I think

Starting point is 01:05:14 in order to have good reasoning, you just need to have enough training data where you literally see every potential branch and node in a decision tree. And so, it's one thing to be able to scan a light, know that it's green and then go forward. But when you multiply that by every intersection, every light in every city, it's a massive, massive learning problem. So the thing that GM and crews don't have, in my opinion,

Starting point is 01:05:37 is a path to acquire enough data to be credible. Could they solve a limited set of streets in San Francisco? Yeah. Yes. And so if you have the city sort of block off certain parts of the neighborhoods and say no more human driven vehicles in these sections, only these three or four licensed providers

Starting point is 01:05:59 can be inside of it. I think that cruise and Waymo could work. But if you're going to live in a world where there's autonomy, meaning like humans can drive wherever they want, I think Tesla's the only one because I think they've acquired and they are acquiring so much training data that for them, they're fine-tuning reasoning. And it's exactly what Jason just described.

Starting point is 01:06:20 Jason is a perfect example of a consumer now who has adopted it, call it 70% of his use cases, and is incrementally kind of like getting towards 90% or 95%. And I think that that's impressive. I would agree with Jason. I use FSD 100% on the highways, and depending on where I'm going, so like this weekend when I came to David your house, Saksis house, full FSD the whole way. Yeah, two way 101, it's bullet proof. Bullet proof and then in the city. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:06:52 And navigating to get into David's house, I thought it was it was pitch perfect. And there was one or twice where actually the person that's panicking and disengaging FSD's like intersections, right? Left turns. And also just on the highway, like I get a little skittish at times if it goes, if it speeds up or whatever. My point is Tesla is so close to it.

Starting point is 01:07:13 So I do trust that they'll have a credible solution in the next four or five years. And these other companies, I think that they need to have a solution for training and I don't see it. Yeah, the point is there's over a million cars recording, because when you buy a Tesla, you turn on self-driving. It's in every car, and so every car is recording data all the time, as opposed to GM.

Starting point is 01:07:37 GM doesn't take the time to put the $10,000, $20,000 package. Half a million new sensors, collecting millions of miles of quarter, being added to the network. Exactly. What Tesla did years and years ago is even before self-driving was a thing, they put all the cameras in the cars to collect the data. And you're right, GM doesn't do that. If GM did that to their legacy gas cars and then funneled that into cruise, I think they would have a decent shot, but they are not doing that. Here's a map of Waymo. And I brought this up because I think there's two different strategies going on here.

Starting point is 01:08:11 Tess was going for the whole Mugula. They want to be able to do dirt roads you've never been on. Waymo and crews are working from constrained areas that they can perfect. And Phoenix is the perfect area because that's a grid-based system, very wide highways, and it was planned. And so if you have a planned community, you know, it's not like a city in Italy or France where it's like the roads have been there for 800 years, when you have some modern city where it's a grid-based system, Austin falls into this as well for a large portion of Austin,

Starting point is 01:08:42 it's going to be fairly easy to do those. And so that's what we'll see. My prediction is we'll see this. Also, it's very flat and obviously no hills and also weather. So, the northeast will be the last place. When you go to Boston or you're in other places that don't have a grid-based system

Starting point is 01:08:58 and you have ice and snow, this stuff is 10 plus years out. But in a dry place with consistent weather, like California Phoenix, etc. It's now, right? It's now, I think. Okay, in Bill Gurley's regulatory capture corner, we have an interesting story about JSX. If you don't know Jetsuite X, that's what the JSX stands for. This is an airline that offers hop-on public charter flights out of FBOs, tiny airports usually reserved for private jets, and they give passengers the private jet experience for the cost of roughly a first-class ticket at major airlines, maybe double the cost of a coach ticket, 700 bucks one way, from Westchester to Miami, 1400 miles around Trip, not a bad deal.

Starting point is 01:09:45 By comparison, United on the same day are between 5800 for first class from Newark to Miami. Jet Sweet X has 47 airplanes with 1200 crew members. Let me cut in and give you my anecdote. On Saturday, I took a JSX flight from Vegas to Oakland. What were you doing in Vegas? I went to the opening night of the YouTube concert at the sphere.

Starting point is 01:10:08 Opening night at the sphere? At the sphere? Yeah, the sphere. I looked at the photos in the video as I wasn't super impressed. Is it impressive in person? Because it didn't come across in the videos. Yeah, it's incredible.

Starting point is 01:10:18 You got to go see it. I think it's the first. Incredible how? So it's the first live experience that I think you have kind of live analog elements like a band and this incredibly immersive digital experience because it's a 360 foot tall dome and the entirety of the interior of the dome is a digital screen. So there were these scene shapes that they created that were like dynamic video on these walls that it's hard.

Starting point is 01:10:42 I don't think the videos do it justice. Like when you're actually, when you're in this room during this shot right here and I was kind of sitting center, I was also, I went down on the floor. Looks like you're in the dasager or something. It's like you're there. Dude, I mean, it's inexplicable.

Starting point is 01:10:56 It's more real than VR. It's like you're in this world. And they even did these amazing integrated scenes where they had like helicopters flying overhead. And then they had spotlights coming out of the ceiling while the helicopters were flying in the video above you. They did like a hot air balloon flying above you and they dropped like a rope down. So it was this total integration of like physical and virtual content. And I think like you too, to be honest, as great as the the concert was is almost like the most boring thing

Starting point is 01:11:25 You could probably do with that setup over time you could probably integrate a lot more thing You could have giant Sets and giant scenes and people you know doing stuff physically a scar worse movie Star Wars movie in real life you could have like the the siege of Carthage and you could have ships on the ground And then you could see the battle scene behind you and you'd be like in the middle of it. The whole thing was really incredible. I heard about the sound. I heard about the sound. Hundreds of speakers. So when I was down on the floor, I went right by the stage on the floor. The some of the sound is actually distorted down there and it's not that good. When you're in the seats that set back where the sound is really designed, hundreds of speakers

Starting point is 01:12:01 like built into the wall. I heard each seat. That's a bit submitted. There's seat speakers, but really it comes from the dome. And the dome sound when you're sitting in the seats is really like immersive and incredible. Okay, so you took Jetsu X back. And then I took Jetsu X. By the way, my prediction on this fear, I think there'll be like dozens of these things soon enough because this can become like a new form

Starting point is 01:12:22 of live entertainer. It's not just a stage where someone stands on it. And you stand someone stands on it. It's a new model and more than musical artists. I think you'll see like new kinds of art and you kinds of things happening on these things. Anyway, it's also video on the outside so you can do advertisements or make it look like a pumpkin or make it look like a basketball. I saw that. And then we'll get cheaper and cheaper over time. The first one was what two two two and a half billion dollars. They'll make smaller versions of it. It'll be a couple hundred million. It's almost like I'm X-feiter. It's a roll amount all over. Okay. So back to JetsuiteX. 240 bucks. You drive up just like an FBO, like a private terminal. Drive up. Walk in. No security. No lines. No check-in. Get on. Get off. It's like flying on a...

Starting point is 01:13:00 Wait, that hasn't been some check-in, so they know your name and stuff. Yeah, they walk up and they give them the ticket. And then they do a to be some check-in so they know your name and stuff on the right-hand. Yeah, they walk up and they, you give them the ticket, and then they do a gate-side check-in, they take your bag and they put it all, they take it under the plane. See, save an hour on either half hour on the, oh my God, it's so bad.

Starting point is 01:13:15 It's so free, it's ridiculous. And like when my mom comes to visit, she takes it, she loves it. But obviously, it's gotta be some catch. I don't really know these regs, but there's some catch-up. I'll explain that now. So, they have 47 airplanes, 1200 crew members, American and Southwest, and several major aviation

Starting point is 01:13:32 unions are choosing JSX of exploiting a regulatory loophole that they can hire pilots who are too old to fly for commercial airlines and who don't have the requisite 15 hour, 1500 hours of flying experience because they are a smaller airline. JetSuitex says it's captain's average over 8,000 flying hours and first of all, average over 3,000 flying hours. So they're blowing past the regulation. So that's obviously a red herring. According to JetSuitex, two huge US airlines and their labor unions want companies like

Starting point is 01:14:04 JetSuitex, small air carriers airlines and their labor unions want companies like Jetsuitex, small air carriers that actually care about providing you with much needed choice and high quality service to be legislated out of existence. And by the way, Jetsuitex has a couple of the other airlines, I think, united as an investor. So the other airlines actually want this. They're obviously is a difference in security. But one difference is not how many hours the pilots have, obviously. It's going through TSA. So, the ability to not go through TSA is such a key part of this experience and to not go through a big terminal.

Starting point is 01:14:35 JetBlue and United support JSX and I think they're exploring doing this themselves. So, regulatory capture had its best, I guess. I'll take the unpopular side of this. I think it's easy to blame this regulatory capture bogeyman here. Okay. I think JetSuiteX seems like an amazing service. It has starlink, a bunch of my friends have taken it. They seem to enjoy it a lot. But here is the the the clever arbitrage that Jet Suite X is taking, which is that they fly under what's called part 135 of the FAA. And that is when you take a private plane and you charter it. The airlines fly under what's called part 121. And the rules are very different if you're 121 versus part 135. And the biggest rule is the training of the pilots,

Starting point is 01:15:24 which is that there are minimum hour requirements to be a commercial airline pilot, which is about 1500 hours versus 250 hours for a part 135 charter pilot. So I think the question is, is that it's one thing where you charter a plane with two or three of your friends. That's a part 135 license in a small plane. But when you take a large plane with nobody else, you don't know, I think there's a pretty credible argument that that's a commercial airline. And I do think that it's reasonable

Starting point is 01:15:55 that if you're running a commercial airline through a loophole, at some point, if you get big enough that loophole is going to be obvious enough that people will ask it to be closed, I think what you want to have is this loophole closed, or you decide that part 135 where there are so many people, the pilots should be at a certain flight train on standard. And to Jets Redaxe's defense, they reported their captain's average over 8,000 flying hours. So that is a magnitude more 5X, more than five times the rules and first office average over 3,000. So why not just

Starting point is 01:16:32 up that number of hours to 500 or 1,000? Or just make everybody 15,000. Or just to your point, just like say, go to the FAA and say, look, we're going to continue to fly part 135. But here are the except we promised to never hire a pilot that is not under this 1500 hour threshold, et cetera, et cetera. There's all kinds of ways to go around it, but I do think it's important to acknowledge that they're basically running a united, but they're pretending that it's a private plane. And I think that there are some mini united. Yeah, it's a mini united.

Starting point is 01:16:58 Somewhere between the two. No, because united runs those regional legs as well. Because in equivalent sized planes. So I do think it should exist. I just think that it should exist on a relatively level playing field. I don't want somebody else to use a loophole, so I would not want them to use a loophole either. Part 135 exists. I'm actually in agreement to take a private plane in charter.

Starting point is 01:17:18 Not to run an airline. All right, everybody. This has been another amazing episode of the All in Podcast. Thank you to from his fear of influence, David Freiberg, the Sultan of science, and the Rain Man himself, Hot Water Burn Baby, David Sacks, and the dictator himself, Moth Polly Humpet. Love you boys. I am, the world's greatest moderator, and you'll see you next time.

Starting point is 01:17:44 Bye bye. Bye bye! Bye bye! I'm going all in! What? What? What? What? What? Besties are gone! Go thrifty! That's my dog taking a wish to drive away. Sit next!

Starting point is 01:18:13 Get it off! Oh man! My ham is a bit out of your room. We should all just get a room and just have one big huger. Because they're all just like this like sexual tension but we just need to release that out then. I'm doing all the good

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E148: McCarthy ousted, border chaos, Cruise's robotaxi "accident" & more

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.