All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E44: USA's Afghanistan embarrassment, China's new algo laws, future of robots + Italy recap!

Episode Date: August 28, 2021

Show Notes: 0:00 Intro & Italy recap 12:06 An embarrassment in Afghanistan: breaking down how it happened 34:49 China's potential checkmate in Afghanistan, CCP cracking down on IPOs & algos 1:00:27 Rent moratorium ends, Prop 22 ruled unconstitutional, the shrinking role of agency 1:14:24 Boston Dynamics & TeslaBot, Bezos embarrasses himself with lawsuits 1:34:49 Post-credits scene Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect

Either way, it's black. Look at this. I'm down. I'm up a button. Up a button, yes. This is why the all-in pod is falling apart. Is we got one best to use. Thinks he's fucking having a way. We got another one who thinks he's Italian nobility. We got another one who all he wants to do is geek out about science and discuss nothing topical. I mean, you guys are a total mess.

And you're a total mess. And you're a fucking fool. And you? They're cold open. I'm present. I've been present. Present. I've been waiting for two weeks. I'm present. I've been present. Present.

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Queen of kilowatt. I'm going all in. Okay, everybody, welcome back to the All In Podcast. We took two weeks off for vacation with us to vacation from Cation, Saks is off his boat and ready to go after the tremendous boat episode, Friedberg, who David, why are you working on an IRS office? Dave Saks is in IRS.

Saks is joined the call center. Which call center? Very well. This is David Saks from the call in app. Can I set up your pack? I see you better fucking get here by tonight. Okay. Yeah, so I can better play fucking cards bestie This is better you better fucking show up. This line up is a shit. Mr. Beast is showing up Mr. Beast is gonna play cards and he plays eight Queen eight offsuit to crack fill. It's gonna be a very entertaining.

All right, I'm flying back this afternoon. It's Mr. Beast, Alan Shippell, Mewth. This is gonna be fucking fireworks tonight. I am coming up to make you. Lock it up the eight seats locked up. Wait, what time does it start? 7 to 7 a.m. No, it's gonna be your, is your get's health taken? No, you can stay in the guest house if you want great

Here we go. No, we started we started Yes, David we started six, but I we're gonna break for dinner as normal at seven so get here by fucking I gotta have dinner with my kids. I've been seeing them in a month. So a month. So, uh, all right, just so you remember their names, it's and there's three of them. Okay. Yeah, there's three. I'll come after dinner. Okay. All right. Okay. Good. Good. Good. Good. Here we go. First topic of the day is, you didn't do the intro's asshole. Go ahead. No, no, you already did that part. Just introduce the you would start with socks and you

didn't say myself. Why did you become the director? Okay, sit down and score Saisy. All right, with us again, the dictator himself, Tremauhth Polly Haapatia, back from his Italian castle. Fresh off his Italian castle retreat, one button up. Maybe we should call you the Duke instead of the dictator. Yeah.

Because you're really taking this Italian nobility thing to heart. You know Jason invaded my castle. He ravaged my toilet. He literally had, he co-opted the butler, he co-opted the chef. And when he would bicycle back into the best life. We totally on for a week. He would bicycle back to the house. The gate would close and they would scurry out with two little coaks, a huge glass filled with ice. I was so confused when I got back. What's going on? He's like, oh, Mr. Jason, Mr. Jason.

Mr. Jason, he always. What percent of your book did you write, Jake? How? Well, a nonfiction book typically 60,000s the target. So, I'm going to write 60 and then try to edit it down to 50. And I got the first 10 done. Sorry, can I just say the right? On the plane, as well as at my house, Jason read us the intro.

I'm not going to say what they're about or the title of the book. The first couple chapters. It's fucking amazing. Oh, wow. The idea, no, no, no. I legit, the idea fucking amazing. But the idea, no, no, no. I legit, the idea is amazing. The title is fantastic and what he's written so far is exceptional.

I was genuinely like, it's great. It's really, really great. Well, a lot of it was informed by the discussions we've been having here. Of course, back in the mix is Friedberg, the Queen of Kenwa in front of some K Kmart artwork that he purchased for his new house. How are you doing, Queen? How do you feeling about your decision to not come to Italy with us? Yeah, Queen. I don't want to talk about it.

Hey, can we tell our best Italy story? Oh my god, I don't know what the best is. There's a lot of best Italy stories. Well, I want to tell two stories. And one of them is the joke I didn't make at the speech, which I thought was the best fucking joke. And I want to just get your reaction. So I'm just going to tell. So just to give a little background here, our friend's 50th birthday. Two of our friends had 50th birthday.

It's me and our other friend. And so we were in Italy for a week as a group, playing cards and celebrating those two birthdays. The joke I didn't make was the following joke, which is... All right, guys, I just want to call up. And this is for friend number one, redacted. Yeah, redacted, yeah. I just want to call it the elephant in the room.

You know, there's really someone very, very famous amongst us. Oh. You know, he's known to be one of the richest men in the world. He's known, you know, he's known, uh, to be one of the richest men in the world. He's known, um, you know, to really, uh, love rockets. He throws, you know, rockets all the time, um, the despotic leader of North Korea is here. Kim Jong-un, everybody, and I point to DC. Oh, no, that's not a soul.

I know. Wow. I didn't get to be. Oh, wow. You can't tell that, Joe, because, because it would, it would, it would in context of, you know, obviously it would have been. Oh, wow. Joe, I didn't get to make it. Oh, wow, you can't tell that, Joe. Because it would have been in context of, you know, obviously, it would have been a very good. Yeah. All right, and yeah, it was just a great trip.

I have to say, I took it to me. Well, my, yeah, my Italy story is that, so the second birthday is J. Cal. The first birthday is a French or main name list. The second birthday, redacted. The second birthday was J. Cal's 50th. Then we find out that J. Cal's birthday was actually French remain nameless. The second birthday, redacted. The second birthday was J.Cow's 50th. Then we find out that J.Cow's birthday was actually like six months ago.

Six months ago, November 28th. Yeah, nobody cared. And frankly, none of us went to Italy for J.Cow's birthday. We went for the other guys, we went to the other guys party. Yeah, J.Cow's birthday is like COVID. He keeps trying to bring it back in different variants and no one wants any part of it. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So on the last night, the last day of the trip, we had the Jekyll birthday party.

And what do they serve pizza? Pizza. Like because it's on Jekyll's time. I mean, the rest of the week, we had this like, magnificent five star. I mean, I've been throwing my birthday party for me, Saks. You didn't even throw in any breadsticks. I mean, he was like, eat this door dashed hominose.

We had truffle pizza. I was like, I was like, it was delicious. I think it was the best meal. I think you're just a little jealous because the dinner you hosted, maybe didn't hit the notes you wanted to hit, Saks. Oh my God, are you serious?

We brought in some to celebrate. I mean, you put in a fucking troop from Blossom. He pulled a shirt from the food. I was talking about the pizza versus. You know, by the way, I just want to say that, that whole circus thing in the, in the water, I got so mad at one of my kids because it was so dark and the kids were in the pool.

Yeah. And he kept diving, yeah, and I kept saying, stop, I can't see. Yeah, I know. And so I was just like, he never, none of the kids should have been in the pool. I agree with that. And the truth of matter is, you know, my five years old was in the pool too. And all I could do was keep an eye on him. So worried about it. I was playing with my friend. I didn't enjoy the show for that reason. Yeah. They had the time of their lives. Yes. they loved it. That's actually that was that was definitely worth it.

And the day before I want to give credit to Saks because Saks and I went down to that restaurant. We made them open up the wine closet. We rated it. We found the best three bottles of wine and we brought them back for everybody. And then and then I'm not sure if you remember this. We taped an episode of call in in which I was a little drunk. Yeah, I was drunk. I was confused. Yeah. So anyway, the whole world can we taped an episode of call in in which I was a little drunk. Yeah, I was drunk. I was confused. Yeah. So anyway, the whole world can listen to us drunk on call in in we're launching on September 2nd.

So yeah, nice congrats. Yeah, it's going to be a big deal. And congratulations to the all in syndicate members who wet their beaks and to my syndicate members. People don't know this, but it was the absolute record we've ever had for any syndicate. I believe at the end of the day, we had 150 slots and we had 950 people apply sex. We had a million or so in allocation. And I think we had seven million in demand. I am really excited. I'm really excited. It's going to be huge.

Yes, I'm really excited about this product. It's the best product I've been involved in creating. It's better than Yammer. It's better than PayPal. Truly. Oh, spicy take. Wow. I'm really glad Daddy.

Daddy, that's really good. Sax, don't hurt your elbow padding yourself on the back there. But go ahead, continue. That's all. That's all. You got a little product manager elbow there? Pat, just dislocate your tricep. The feedback we've gotten from users has been incredible. I mean, it's just the reactions really strong.

I'll tell you what's good about it. Here's what I think you nailed. As a person who's been in podcasting forever a decade, the critical aspect of this is when you pop up your club or room on call-in, it creates a podcast out of it with an RSS feed and you can go listen to the previous show. So if you are listening to this

and you wanted to create your own version of all-in, you could do it on call-in. Just get three of your knucklehead friends and talk about your adventures on boats and private jets and drinking fine wine wherever you are. And you can start your own podcast. Yeah, it's not really about the word. It's not really about the word.

Right, it's not the key insight. It's not about the room, it's about the show. You know, like everything we think of as social audio is really just a feature of creating a show, creating a new podcast. Anyway, people really like it. I'm very excited. So, I'm happy shows have been created in the beta.

This is the thing that's blown me away. It's like well over 100. I think maybe a couple of 100. If you go to the show director, and the cover art that people have created is really elaborate. People are really getting into it. I know why somebody is never made it. You're a phenomenal Product builder. So I think this is really exciting. Yeah under underrated product builder I would say, but no, it's just interesting that this doesn't exist somebody should have made this already like there's Zencaster

And Riverside for recording podcasts. There's Libson for hosting them. What what's happened as a protected minority? I'd like to ask this question. What happens? What's happening to clubhouse? I think it's irrelevant. I don't I don't want to dunk on founders, but I think that they Why can't they just do these features? It sounds like I'm not trying to guarantee you they will copy these are this features for sure I think they will copy it at some point. Yeah, but I think that's a good question. And I really think there's different visions here. So I mean, I've listened to their founder talk about his vision.

And it's very much about creating this live certain dipitus type experience, like kind of like a cocktail party. And that's fine. We're not doing that. We're creating long-tailed podcastings, what we're doing. And my experience is informed by what we've all been doing on the show for last year and a half, which is podcasting, right?

And the thing that I've seen that I didn't know until we did the All in Pod is how much work goes into what J.C.O.T. does behind the scenes. It's incredible. We got Nick doing six hours of post-production on the show. I want to automate all that work away so anybody can do what we do. And that's like a very different vision.

No, that's Nick. No, I mean, not everybody is going to want to put the type of post-production into this. They don't have, you know, I've got six people on our podcast team. Like it's not everybody's got that infrastructure. So over time, you'll build that, I believe it. Man, I think it will turn out great.

All right, let's get to our first topic here. While we were away, the United States started the process of leaving Afghanistan after a 20-year war, in which I think it's pretty safe to say that was an unwinnable war. And we have felt, like the Russians did, Saks had a tweet that was getting a little bit of play on the old Twitter. What we're seeing before our eyes is the collapse of the American empire because the people in charge are completely corrupt and incompetent. But we can't talk about that because insiders can never criticize other insiders. The Larry Summers rule.

Did I tweet that? You did. Yeah, I mean, you might have had a couple of drinks and then sorry, he actually didn't, he just texted that in the group. Okay, so that was a confidential text to our group that we're not supposed to even say exists. Well, no, it's okay, don't be, it's okay.

I mean, it's true, it's not exactly what I tweeted but it's similar to things I'm tweeting. And tragically, yesterday, ISIS K, which is an Afghan affiliate of the Islamic State, claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings outside of the airport, and that tragically killed over 100 people, 90 Afghan citizens and 13 American servicemembers. I guess, you know, we're not here to talk about wars.

It's not exactly in the mandate, but everybody wants our opinion on this. So let's get started, Zach. You have strong opinions. We'll start with that. Well, it's, yeah, I mean, how can you not talk about this? This feels to me, this is one of those events where, you know, I was glued to my TV for days. I think I was in France at the time the Taliban overrun Kabul. And yeah, it was, you know, the Afghanistan war has been going on for 20 years.

No one's been talking about it. It's just this thing that's been happening in the background, but all along we've been assured by the Pentagon that we're winning. Hey, you know, don't worry about this, we got this. And then you wake up one day and all of a sudden we've lost the war and the Taliban's overrunning the country. And you're like, what is going on here? Not only is the botched withdrawal incompetent, the fact that we were lied to for two decades

about what was really happening, the idea that we had created, how many times were we told that we had created this Afghan army, it was 300 strong. We spent $2 trillion in the country, you know, being, and we were told the whole time that we were building institutions there that, you know, that we were creating a democracy in the Middle East that we were even, you know, promoting gender equality and lecturing the Taliban on toxic masculinity or something like that. And then we find out one day that poof, the whole thing was just kind of a lie. It was this giant debacle. And now we can't even get our, we can't even get our civilians out of the country.

Not only that, but we've seen 12 people, 12 American servicemen and women killed. Yes, here they're trying to 13, trying to protect the airport, almost a hundred Afghans. Now we don't only have to not only contend with the Taliban whose positions I don't think any of us know about, but we also have to deal with ISIS K, which is like some off-shoot affiliate of ISIS run by a guy who was actually summarily killed by the Taliban, but that didn't clearly stop anybody. The level of, honestly just to say the lying that we've been doing on this topic is just utterly, it's really, really scary. You know, how could we have gone 20 years,

$2 trillion, $2,400 American lives and counting, and found a way to just basically waste all this money and tell ourselves these lies for so long, and it turns out none of it was true. And then the back half of it is that It turns out none of it was true. And then the back half of it is that we look like a little bit of a country that's sort of in decline because we can't even figure out an orderly withdrawal. It's not as if this thing came out of the blue out of nowhere.

This was a negotiated withdrawal. So we had months to plan for this. And we had months to do the right honorable moral thing for all of these people that helped us in that country. Just to give you a small anecdote, the day that Kabul was overrun, the Democrats were actually tweeting out about celebrating librarian day. That's what they were focused on. Jason and I on the way back, we flew back with my mom and my sister, we stopped in Toronto to drop them off. And the planes beside us, Jason, do you remember this?

Yeah, I think Brad, I think Brad or Paul were telling us, my pilots were telling us, these planes had been going back and forth, saving refugees in Afghanistan. And it's like, wow, what an honor to just be beside these amazing, the heroic men and women. And I don't know Jason if you saw,

but as we were refueling, they came and boarded and they were getting ready to leave again. And meanwhile, that America cannot get even to a point of view on the topic. And I think that's what's so shameful. It's like, not only did we spend the money, not only did we lose all these lives,

not only didn't we have an orderly withdrawal, we couldn't even at the end guarantee the safety of Americans or do the right thing for all these people who risk their lives to help us fight clearly a useless war. Freeberg, you have that? Watching all this. I know you don't like when we delve into politics too much, but yeah, you haven't even thought you wanted. Yeah. I love it about't like when we delve into politics too much, but what do you have any thoughts you want to add? Yeah.

I love it about politics as much as I kind of use a little bit of a startup analogy. Like America never really found product markets it with what we were trying to do in Afghanistan. There's some fantastic gallop polling that's been done in Afghanistan over the past 15, 20 years already, and they've actually had people on the ground polling there. And most recently, which has been consistent for over 10 years, polling shown that 87 to 90% of Afghans said that the government is corrupt. This is the government put in power, put in place by the United States.

90% say businesses are corrupt. And if you go back to a poll they ran in 2010, the question was in general, which of these statements comes closest to your point of view, Sharia law must be the only source of legislation. 56% of the Afghan population in 2010 believed that to be true. And another 38% said Sharia law must be a source of legislation, 56% of the Afghan population in 2010 believed that to be true. And another 38% said, Sharia law must be a source of legislation, but not the only source.

That leaves just 7% of people that think that Sharia law should not be... Is it Sharia? Sharia, sorry, Sharia law should not be part of the legislative process in defining the Afghan laws and constitution. And so, you know, it's really telling that's really telling that it's almost like when you start a company and you try and create a product and you sell it to a customer base, you got to figure out what the product is, you got to make sure the customers want it.

And then the idea for the startup works. The problem here is our views as a nation and maybe Western democracy doesn't necessarily fit with what that market wants. And we can certainly make the case that we believe that our ethics and our values are superior and provide more of an opportunity for individual freedom and liberty things that we believe should be available around the world. But if the market's not buying it, the customers don't want it.

You're really just raising a ton of venture money, trying to create a product that no one really wants. And at the end of the day, you're trillion dollars down, and you have to shut the thing down and it goes bankrupt. And that's effectively what went down here. And if you look at the history of Afghanistan, remember they were in the Soviet Afghan war in the 80s, nearly the entire decade of the 80s, then the Taliban came along and provided a degree of stability in the 90s, and then all of a sudden, this al-Qaeda 9-11 war began, after Taliban had been in power for a year. And it's been 20 plus years of strife and challenge

where the population have increasingly viewed the government to be corrupt, businesses to be corrupt. And here's a really interesting statistic, which also came out of this polling that Gallup does. Over the last 10 years, the percentage of Afghans that are happy with their present household income has gone or are not happy. Sorry, with their present household income

have gone from 60% to 90%. Nine out of 10 Afghans, as of last year, were not making enough money to make ends meet. So you put all of these facts together. You've got this long history of strife with this, you know, company effectively coming in trying to tell you how to run your government, how to run your country. That doesn't match with your beliefs on your, the way you think a government should be built.

You've got all of this turmoil that's happened historically. You know, it really was, I would say to some degree, this inevitable failure of a startup that got overfunded, that never found product markets hit, that never really got off the ground. Certainly, the exit strategy on how do you wind something down in this case, and it certainly relates to human lives and the tragedy of the partners that we had on the ground was totally mishandled. But the broader picture here is like, we know. I think it's more corrupt than that. I think that we basically engage in a $2 trillion wealth transfer from the people of the

United States, the citizens of the United States, to the military, industrial complex. That's what we did. Well, I have two points I want to build on from from New York, Freeberg, and now New York, which is the original mandate here was to go in, get rid of Al-Qaeda, and to also kill Osama Bin Laden and to not have the Taliban giving safe harbor to Al-Qaeda, that mission got accomplished in large part in the first year or two. And then when we finally got to Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan,

I think it probably would have been a better idea to understand this is an unwinnable war. Get in there, destroy the Taliban, leave, and then say, if you come back, we'll do it again, but we're not going to stay here for 20 years to your point, Freeberg, and try to create a revolution if the people are not ready for it. I think that we have to start looking at our foreign policy and saying, we do need, we do have a better view of human rights clearly than the Middle East. And certainly Afghanistan. And we do want to promote human rights around the world

and freedom. We're not doing that. We're not freedom fighters of democracy or justice. We are led. We should be. We are led by motives of revenue and profit. I know that, but we should be. And when we went and we kicked the Nazis asses

and we beat Japan when they were trying to dominate the world, we were doing it to stop communism. And I think when you look at nation building and these kind of revolutions to Friedberg's point, they have to want it as well. So we should be working with the countries that are teetering on going from authoritarianism to democracy, and we should take the high ground,

and we should be the moral authority of the world. Because if we're not who's going to be? I agree with that part, but I think the right thing to do is just to open our doors and say, you know what, we're here. There's a draft, right? And the smart and the capable and the willing. We're willing to basically bring inside of our borders so that they can work on our behalf.

And that's what other countries, I think, get right about all of this stuff. Like, again, as a Canadian, you know, the Canadian perspective of this is not that you deploy troops and you get embroiled in these, you know, debauchles over 20 years and thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. It's the exact opposite. They're there to support humanitarian efforts, right? They're there to send peacekeeping, right? They're there to send peacekeeping forces as they need to. But otherwise, their real response is to actually then open

the borders for folks that want to be there who are then wanting to trade up Jason to those values because that's the simple way to self select. Instead of saying, I'm going to impose my version of democracy over there, I'm actually going to show you what our version looks like over here. And if you want to come, the doors are open. Yeah. Certainly being an example is step one. And we, I think, do that largely well. But we do need to sometimes intervene. And I think that's the question here is, when is it just to intervene when there are human rights on the line? And a country is teetering on authoritarianism or democracy? Like, where is that line?

The just cause here was to go get Osama Bin Laden because he attacked us. And we should have gotten out of that country as soon as we realized that Bin Laden was no longer there. I mean, that was basically after the Battle of Torra Bora. And if we didn't leave then, we certainly should have left after we got Bin Laden in around 2010.

So what were he still doing there? We were engaged in this exercise of nation building, which by the way, we spent $6 trillion on nation building exercises in the Middle East between Afghanistan and Iraq. For what? For naught, this is why the electorate is in such a foul mood.

How many of our domestic disputes are caused by the fact that we squandered that $6 trillion? That's more than Biden's entire domestic agenda. So we wasted all this money to Freeberg's point. We never understood the culture there. And to Chamos Point, it was a giant money-funny operation to defense contractors. There was a great piece of reporting

by an independent journalist named Michael Tracy. And he talked to frontline grunts about the wasteful spending. They had sent 12 humvees to some local Afghan partner, only two of them would ever get there. The other 10 would break down and disappear and nobody would even know where all the money went. It was like an unbelievable orgy of wastefulness.

And one of their important details on this, there's a guy who I think should be much more famous to all of us. His name is John F. Sopco. He's the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. That short for cigar. He was appointed by Congress about 13 years ago to look into what was really happening in Afghanistan. And to report on quote unquote lessons learned from the Afghan war. And so for 13 years, Sopco has been very quietly, diligently interviewing people from everyone from frontline troops to commanders about what's really been happening in Afghanistan.

And he's been releasing these reports that everyone in DC knows about, but nobody in the country knows about. Let me just read you, these are just the chapter titles from his latest report. Okay. Oh, Jesus. Just the chapter titles, harmful spending patterns, resistance to honesty, personnel struggles,

willful disregard for critical information, incorrect theories of change, poor understanding of local context. And by the way, that includes ignoring things like the sexual abuse of young boys by Afghan warlords who are allies, which the New York Times reported on. We completely swept that under the rug. That's just the table of contents. From one of his latest reports, which is about 100 pages, that's...

So completing competence in our government, complete waste. The Pentagon was telling us the whole time, I mean, while this guy, Sopco, the special inspector general was telling us the truth of what was happening, while this guy, Sopco, the special inspector general, was telling us the truth of what was happening. You've got the Pentagon telling us and the elected leaders the whole time that we're winning this war, that things are improving,

that all these bogus metrics to prove it. And so it's a systemic failure. But, Saks, what would be their motivation to say, it's not working? Look, I think that, well, right, what would be their motivation to say it's not working? Look, I think I think that well, right, what would be the motivation? You can't you can't fix what you don't measure. And so basically like if you want to lie, there, there you have it. We have that now for 20 years of lying. Let's talk about the metrics because this is actually an important point. But this is my point is like, what's what's the objective for them to be measured? What's the objective in that case?

No, the objective is the demonstrator. No, the objective is to demonstrate leadership. The objective is to basically say, you know what? This is really not working. And this is about putting yourself in the position of a person whose child is over there. Okay. If any of our children were there who signed up

because they thought they wanted to do the right thing and and and you know be in the army or the navy or the Marines found themselves in Afghanistan got killed got heaven forbid and then that body comes back and So this report comes with it Which is effectively what it is? Okay, this is the Koda to the death of 2.0, you know, $2,400 Americans and $2 trillion, I would be so heartbroken. I am heartbroken just thinking about this.

Like, this is not, that's not what we're about. So we can't keep doing this and we can't keep lying. We can't rationalize lying anymore. Right, well, I agree with that. And let me just speak to the point about the metrics, because the problem was not that we didn't have any metrics. The problem is that the metrics are bogus. Now, why is that?

Well, first of all, the mission was very unclear. It's not clear how you measure the success of transforming a country to like Afghanistan to our values. I mean, what really are the metrics for that? So what the military started doing is not measuring outputs, but measuring inputs. So you have the commanders on the ground saying, well, today we trained 1,000 new Afghan troops, OK?

But what they don't say is that over 90% of those troops are illiterate, and 85% of them are on drugs. I mean, and this is what the journalists who are on the ground when they would do the interviews with these frontline you know, with these, you know, frontline Commanders or trainers, they would find this out. Now why wasn't this in the report? Well, because the military is a culture that's based on advancement It's basically the Pentagon is a big country club. It's a big insiders club. There's a dogma The dogma was were winning the war and if you want to advance in that organization

You're not going to be the one. You're not going to be the skunk at the garden party who tells the generals that they're full of shit. You're basically going to be the guy who gives them the metrics they want to hear and then their boss the person who's the boss of the frontline guy is going to improve things 20% he's going to shape things another 20% and then the next guy in the chain of command shapes things 20% and by the time you get all the way to the top the chairman of the George chiefs is telling Biden we have an army that 300,000 strong these guys are going to take over the country we're not going to have a problem we're going to have plenty of time to get our people out and that is why we had a lack of days call withdrawal strategy these guys thought they had all the time of the world because systemically they've been bullshitting themselves about having a 300,000 man Afghan army. And then, you know, when you actually look

under the hood of this thing, there is no army. Is this a basically a bunch of kleptocracy? I think what happened at the end of this thing is even more dangerous for the future. On top of everything you said, David, which I agree with, is that what we basically said is that we will engage in whatever cover-up is necessary because we're not willing to lead and talk about the mistakes we've made and to do

the things that are necessary to really fix it. And that's what's really fucking sad. Because as he said, as you said, it sucks, the minute that you knew that Bin Laden wasn't there, we had a choice. Then the minute you knew that he was already dead, we had a choice. And the choice was to do the fucking right thing. And instead what happened was we got caught up in Virtue signaling. We got caught up in personal advancement. We got caught up in the grift. We got caught up in graft. We got caught up in corruption. We got caught up in the, you know, military industrial complex. And here's here's where we are. And the crazy thing is Biden had a moment Where he could have stepped in and said you know what guys? I'm looking at all of this data. Here's the new plan and he didn't do it either

Let me ask you a question if Biden had run an orderly exit and then it spiraled into Taliban and and reverted back to it, how would you feel about all this? I think that would have been, that's the goal, right? Trump wanted to get out and Biden both wanted to get out. So it was just executed twice as good or 50% better. There'd be no problem here. We all want to be out, correct? Yes, that decision, the decision to get out was a 70% popular decision

when Biden made the decision in April and then they lost the straw. Last time was he did the AC for him. This is a bipartisan decision. To get out, let's not pretend otherwise, it was clearly the correct decision to get out, but here's where Biden screwed it up, okay? And there's some blame that he's for your portion to Biden and to the generals and we don't really know who screwed it up, but collectively they did. The big mistake, the original sin of this withdrawal is that they pulled out of Bagram airfield at the beginning of July.

They didn't just pull out, they literally ghosted the aff... I mean, they pulled out in the middle of the night without telling anybody. The Afghans army who are allies woke up the next morning and the Americans were just gone and the electricity had been turned off. I mean, this was unbelievable. And so the problem is we then lost our air superiority over the country. We lost our ability to conduct close combat air support. We lost our ability to do a massive actuation, okay? We basically gave up our central military asset in the country before we got the civilians

out, before we got our allies out. And there were 18,000 of the so-called SIVs, the special immigration visas. These are the Afghani translators and helpers who were embedded in our combat units. The State Department, meanwhile, was totally caught up in bureaucracy, slow-walking their applications. Those 18,000 translators are now stuck there. They have 50,000 dependents. We're talking about spouses and childrens and that so they have no way of getting out and then the final thing that just takes the cake is That we gave a list to the Taliban of here's our biggest helpers when if they go to the checkpoints

We want you to let them for more. So there was basically an assassination list. This is your death list I'm giving a call to the absolutely a Taliban. I mean, this is really unforgivable, and it's, and it's, and this was, it's not like this was unknown, okay? There was a bipartisan working group of both Democrats and Republicans who wrote a letter to Blinken at the State Department back in May, saying we should afraid of the safety of our Afghan allies,

you need to get them out. Now, the State Department is taking too long, processing the special immigration visas. You're totally caught up in red tape bureaucracies, solve this problem. Blinken did nothing. He was another deer caught in the headlights. They could have also just,

instead of making people fill out all these forms and all this red tape, I heard one comment are saying, like the right thing to do in situations like this is to just get everybody out, put them in a holding location and then process them there. In other words, if this person says they're a translate and their family and they have, you know, relatively good paperwork, get them out, put them into that holding pattern and then figure out how to process them later. We got a wrap on this discussion,

get to some other topics. But the interesting thing to watch here is what's going to be a future of Afghanistan and I don't know if you guys saw the financial time story, but the interesting thing to watch here is what's going to be the future of Afghanistan and I don't know if you guys saw the financial time story, but China is watching this like a hawk and they have a Russia just sitting there laughing. Well, China is even worse. They have aspirations of partnership in this region with Pakistan already and Afghanistan and building super highways and expanding their train network and having their own silk road essentially to get to the Middle East from China.

And this is going to be the axis of the United States authoritarianism by Biden as Putin. If it was okay for us to stage military resources from, you know, from close quarters in Asia. And Putin was like, no, go. Jason, I think what you just pointed out is the motivating factor for having a presence in this and other similarly situated territories around the world. Yeah.

A lot of people assume it's about imperialism and imposing kind of American democratic principles and ideals. I think that's the way the narrative is sold internally here at this country. But the truth from the intelligence community and I think the folks that maybe are a little bit more thoughtful in long term thinking about this sort of stuff is that the absence of an American presence in certain parts of the world will enable the success of what we would consider competing states globally. And there is still that unanswered question, ultimately of how do we compete on a global

stage given what is currently a very negative view on our having a presence overseas, the military presence overseas, the physical presence overseas, the physical presence overseas, in these sorts of territories. And it begs the question of does that really set us up for challenges and failures in the 21st century as a nation state, as the other global players, in particular China,

take advantage of these openings. Yeah, well, I agree with that, and let me just say why China is so smart and we are so dumb. China is going to Afghanistan right now and cutting deals with the Taliban to build a highway so they can get to the rare earth minerals, which Afghanistan is rich in.

And they're gonna use the super highway they're gonna build to get that out and feed their economy. That is how they're gonna spend their capital in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, we spend over two trillion, and we have nothing to show for it. You know, they go abroad in search of rare earth minerals. We go there to lecture people on toxic masculinity. It is absurd. Okay. Now the, the president.

Well, you know, it's, it's a little too cynical. We were also protected. It's not. We were educating David in our country and forget the pronouns. Yes. We go to get the pronouns. That's right. They then, it's very important. That's right, we go there to elect your people on their pronouns. No, that is too far to cynical, No, it's not. We went there to protect some people who want a democracy

and to allow women to read and to be, Oh, we just, we just, we just flush that, we just flush that right down the toilet. Sorry, I know that. But we just not conflate that we just want to lecture them. But David, David is right. We knew that the minute we pulled out, we were casting 50% of that population

to a complete state of stasis that was completely not known. So are you saying? I'm not saying that. We should have stayed there with some presence. Well, this is like the argument in Vietnam. No, tell the truth. We should have just told the truth. We're leaving. We don't have a plan, and this is like the argument in Vietnam. No, tell the truth. We should have just told the truth. We're leaving.

We don't have a plan, and this is going to risk all women. It's going to risk people that helped us, and we are not sure what's going to happen, but you know what, we decided we're leaving. That was the truth. Remember the Vietnam War, we killed two million Vietnamese to make the country safe for democracy. You know what the Vietnamese said at the end of that?

We'd rather have our two million people back. We see these wars in terms of ideology. We think we're going there to spread democracy. You know what the Vietnamese said at the end of that? We'd rather have our two million people back. We see these wars in terms of ideology. We think we're going there to spread democracy. They see it in terms of nationalism. All they see is a foreign invader trying to impose their values. That's why they don't buy into what we're doing. And by the way, the whole idea that we're going to plant Madisonian democracy in the soil of the Middle East, that was a 20-year folly that costs us trillions. And one of the reasons why there are no medicines over there. There are no medicines. There are no Jefferson's.

There are no Washington's. Who is going to take up that cause? What we had in Afghanistan is this President Gaudi who's a crook who is off on the first helicopter with millions of our dollars. That is how stupid we are. It's the last place we should be trying to do democracy. There's other places where it's teetering and we can probably be more helpful. The American President John Quincy Adams, this is back when America had a rational foreign policy, he said,

America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. That used to be our foreign policy. Now we involve ourselves all over the world to impose our values for no reasons. It is costing us a fortune and is led to the crumbling of the American wealth in power. And it completely erodes our trust in institutions, particularly the institution of the federal government. And we're left just scratching our head saying, if not these guys, then who is going to have to do a time on? If, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, No, my point is the following, Taiwan will, when PRC has the right window, be under complete Chinese control, and we, because of how we have executed this and how we've executed the rest of our middle Asia strategy,

means that we will not really engage. And the reason is because it will be an enormous food fight inside the United States, where all of these past experiences of us fucking this up, well, come on, should we defend Taiwan free-per-per-per-per-per? By the way, the difference is we're not going to, we would not be going to war with a bunch of like fucking tribal people

in the mountains carrying sticks and AK-47s from the 80s, this is China. So if we can't beat and win in gasses, I mean, we also... What are our jets? I mean, I'm sorry guys, but the chance is alone, it's not worth it with a group of Japan, it's over. It's over. It's over.

It's over. It's over. We should be defending Taiwan and my mind. What do you think, Freiburg? Should we try and defend Taiwan when this inevitably leads to the Chinese government finding their windows, Chimoth is predicting? Again, I don't think that the motivating factor could necessarily be imposing democratic principles as the priority. If you were to actually weigh that decision, you would realize that you should probably have a presence

in some Latin American countries. You should probably have a presence in Central Africa where there were authoritarian regimes that are doing terrible things, but we don't have a competing global interest there to defend against. Well, it should be clear, Taiwan is right now democratic. So we would be defending a democracy. Freeberg, Jacob's asking a specific question. If China invades Taiwan, do you think the United States

should get involved? On a principle's basis, or do I think the United States will get involved? Either one. Yeah, I mean, I think the challenge is the escalation with China, right? So that's gonna be the big calculus. It's really about what's the long-term cost. Certainly on a principle a principle basis, you'd say let's go defend the week and go protect them because they

share principles and ideals with us. But the backlash, the challenge would be if we were to do this, global trade would stall. There would be massive issues at home with people saying that we're getting involved in an overseas war. All of the reasons that from a political perspective, it would stall our economy. It would cause all these, you know, I'm kind of speculating a bit here, but the actual cost isn't just about sending a few thousand troops over and surrounding the island and protecting people. It's actually much more severe than that. And if you were to weigh it, it could be that we end up with 25, 30 million people losing

their jobs over the next decade because of the economic fallout that occurs in our doing that and so on and so forth. And a lot of American prosperity that we get to enjoy, you know, kind of kind of declines. And so that's the real calculus. And I don't know how to do that calculus, but I think that is the calculus that is being done by the intelligence community to figure out the answer to that question. Let's swing it to SACs to do a little bit more of this calculus because what we're talking about here is not giving up an authoritarian state that wants to be authoritarian. We're talking about a democracy on the risk board

that will be taken and flipped from a democracy like Hong Kong has been flipped. I think it's a very important distinction that Taiwan is already a democracy. They got there on their own. They've done a lot of hard work building that country since that, basically basically the country became separate from mainland China, I think in 1945. It's never been under the control of the CCP.

It's a free enterprise system, it's democratic capitalism. There are basically 24 million free souls who live on that island. If we show any weakness, and we frankly already have, by what we've done in the Middle East, if we show any weakness, they will fall under the boot of the communist regime. So I think there's a big difference between trying to plant democracy or nation-build

in a country that's never had it before in thousands of years, and basically being friends and allies with a country that already is a democracy and just wants to be free and I think our message to China should just be we like things the way they are we don't want them to change that's it we have a policy of what's called strategic ambiguity to Taiwan it basically says that we may come to the defense of Taiwan or we may not. And I think we should just continue with our policy. I think our message should just be, we like the status quo, we don't think it's a change.

Let's leave things alone. I think that that's fine, but I think we need to be investing hundreds of billions, the trillions of dollars we wasted enough, can't extend could have been better served, building an infrastructure in America for chips and semiconductors and a bunch of these critical components because then it would give us a lot more bargaining room to actually be able to play out that strategic

ambiguity more fully. I think the reality is that despite the policy framework, the practical economic reality is that we would be engulfed in a war if Taiwan were taken over by China because as Friedberg said, our economy would ground to a halt, because those critical assets are linchpin for how massive swaths of the American economy work. Yeah, I'll tell you one thing we should be making plans for. I don't know if our military is competent enough, but we've talked on this pod before about how what 70% of the advanced chips come out of Taiwan, companies like TSMC, if China takes over that island,

I mean, those chips are the new oil, right? We're gonna be dependent on them in a way we never should be for our supply chain. You're right, Jamal, we never should have gotten this dependent. But frankly, our military needs to have a plan to sabotage those chip factories because we can't let them fall under the control of the CCP.

I don't know if they're competent enough to do that, but if Taiwan falls, it needs to be a poison chalice for the CCP. We're gonna need to make some decisions here because Russia with Crimea and the Ukraine and their ambitions, and then China taking over Hong Kong and looking at Taiwan. I mean, I think the lesson here is,

if you're a dictator and you are allowed to take over other regions and other countries, you're not going to stop it is the nature of dictators. And we have to at least put our foot down, you know, Afghanistan is a shit show, but these other places, we're flat footed right now, J.K.L. We're stuck in a forward, we're not serious problem. And so we need to sort of like re-center ourselves and get momentum, you know, to use a poker analogy. we need to sort of like recenter ourselves and get momentum. You know, to use a poker analogy,

we basically just bluffed off half our stack with the Jackade offsuit. And then when you get the Asking suited, you have no chips to play with. Yeah, right. You know, and you're just like a star, what was I doing? So credibility.

Basically 9-11, 9-11 put us on tilt, okay? And we've been losing pots for the last 20 years. Now we just lost the big one. And the question is to Jamal's point, are we gonna lose the rest of our stack? Or are we gonna go take a walk around the block like Muthi-Center ourselves? And re-Center.

Talk to re-Center. Talk to re-Center. Talk to re-Center. On the re-Centering thing, China is going in the opposite direction in a way that could actually help us. Meaning like, you know, it's a pretty scary set of things that's happening over there,

but it's also kind of instructive about how we could recenter ourselves, because there's, they're actually enacting the laws that we all talk about, we've been talking about for seven months, but they're actually willing to do it. And they, and so if American policy makers would actually give it to what's going on over there with the China, or should we go to robotics? Let's, let's finish China, and then finish China, and then we can talk about. China is continuing their crackdown of tech companies and has proposed a ban on foreign IPOs.

The Wall Street Journal had some exclusive reporting today. I'll just read a quote and then hand it over to Jamath. China plans to propose new rules that would ban companies with large amounts of sensitive consumer data from going public in the US people familiar with the matter said and in addition to that under these new rules, they are looking at the algorithms that are being run in different services and making them transparent end. The Chinese government will basically control the algorithms that have caused so much chaos here

in the United States with Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. And then finally, they're going to close the loophole on VIE's. Tremathi want to explain what this means from a market perspective. Today's a really big day because of these things, Jason, as you just said. So let me just break this down because I think it's interesting for us to all learn about this together. So one thing is around the technology, which I'll talk about in a second, which you just talked about, and then previewed. And then the second is around the capital markets and the money flow. And that, and this is a really big deal.

So what is a VIE? Because you're going to hear this a lot. A VIE is what's called a variable interest entity. And what it is is just a massive workaround. So essentially what happened was a VIE was a legal business where an entity had control of a company through a contract but not through equity. So it's kind of like, you know, SACS, like I had a contract with Colin that said, I can dictate, you know, who does what, like I had a contract with Colin that said, I can dictate, you know, who does what, et cetera,

but I don't own any equity. Now, the company that completely ran a foul of all of these things was Enron. And back in 2001, Enron went fucking ham, as we all know, they had a bunch of these VIEs, and they used it to basically shield a bunch of losses and do a bunch of shady things. So then there was a bunch of accounting laws that were introduced.

China on a completely separate track around that same time, well, it's like, hey, listen, we want to control our economy. So we're going to prohibit foreign ownership. So just for all you guys to know, China to this day does not allow a foreigner to own a piece, a large sections of the Chinese economy. Okay, so as of 2018, which is the last updated list as far as I could find it, there are 33 sectors of the economy

where China says you cannot be a foreigner and own an equity. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I've got a local partner. No, you cannot own an equity. Yeah, it's after you want to start a business there, you have to have a partner like Yahoo did.

So all technology companies fall under this, all data companies, any education company, any media company, so you can imagine it's basically every part of the economy that matters. And so with, because of all these restrictions, you know, the Chinese internet companies were like, hey, hold on a second, I need to get access to the capital markets. What do I do? They dusted off the VIE structure and they basically created all of these, you know, Cayman's holding companies. And that's where all the American investors would go and buy equity from or contribute equity to. And so, you know, Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu,

Dede.com, JD, all of these folks have these VIEs. And what's interesting about these VIEs is it's written clear as day, but not a single investor seemed to care. But in the prospectuses of these Chinese companies, they were clear. It doesn't mean you actually have a claim on the assets. It doesn't mean you can actually make a demand of management. I mean, if you saw this in an American prospectus, you would not put a single dollar into these companies, but in fact, the exact opposite happened because people were greedy and chasing the money.

And these risks, by the way, came back to bear because Jason, I think you were the one that gave the example of the Chinese tutoring guys, where, you know, overnight, this guy lost 99% of his net worth. I think this was a one or two pods ago. The way they did that was that they canceled the VIEs. They said online tutoring, nope, sorry, these things can't exist anymore. And so essentially, we have the situation now where VIEs are part of 58 companies, massive Chinese mega-cap companies that are in the huge indexes in the United States.

These 58 companies account for $2 trillion a market cap. We are now in a situation now where the Chinese government basically says, for online tutoring, we're going to cancel the VIEs. In a bunch of other areas, we're going to start with regulation. We could cancel the VIEs later. We've essentially put the capital markets, my opinion on pause. And so now let's transition to this other part. Capital markets in China. Capital markets in China, I think now are the most volatile they've ever been. Essentially, the people's Republic of China,

the government, the CCP chooses how and who will make money. And they are basically putting their foot down in a big way in the capital. What happens to the 1.62 trillion in existing shares that have been bought by people around the world would there be some way to unravel that or a tender offer? You're gonna have to deal with these ADRs. I don't exactly know what would happen. I think what happens is that I'm a correct. No, you have capital laws, Jason, because when they canceled the online tutoring VIEs, the stock price is basically went to zero. So you could eviscerate $2 trillion of market cap tomorrow if they decide, you know what,

that VIE for Alibaba, by the way, Nick, I'll extend it to you, but it's a thing of art. If you look at the VIE structure for Baba, I mean, it is a fucking babushka doll of nesting entities and this or that. I don't know how any investor who bought chairs in Alibaba actually took the time to understand what they were actually buying. They suspended disbelief because they were greedy. So the point is that's happening. Okay, so the capital markets are now, I think, getting really constrained. The compliment to this is that they're starting to now introduce legislation as a prelude in my opinion

to canceling some of these VIEs in the most important area that we care about, which is tech. So Jason, to your point, the Chinese cyberspace watchdog today, or yesterday, I think it was, they just published a list of draft regulations that will now become law. I'm just going to read this to you. So let me just FYI for you guys. So let me just give you a sense of them. Users must be provided with a convenient way to see and delete all the keywords that an algorithm uses to profile them. Number two, providers shall not have that. Providers shall not record illegal and undesirable keywords in the user points of interest or as user tags

and push information content to them, and they may not become discriminatory or biased based on that information. Users must be informed that algorithms are being used on them to recommend content or products to them, and they must be allowed to opt out and see completely generic non-personalized results. The algorithm recommendation shall adhere to main, this is incredible, to mainstream values. I don't know what that means. They must actively spread positive energy and promote the application of algorithms for

the better. Providers shall regularly review and evaluate and verify these algorithms, models, and data with these watchdogs. These watchdogs will now start to increasingly take board seats on Chinese companies. So you put these two things together. It is a takeover moment in China tech. It's a takeover. Yes.

Yes. I mean, so some of those provisions sound like privacy regulations we might want to adopt over here. Completely. But I think we should focus on the one towards the end that you mentioned. The algorithm recommendation source provider shall adhere to mainstream values. Actively spread positive energy and promote applicants. Wow.

For the better. Now, how do you actively spread positive energy? I mean, as a business person under that regulation, like, what does that even mean? I mean, it basically means it means what you're not spreading, David. It means you're not spreading a protest in Hong Kong. It's means you're not talking about the weagers. It means you're not talking about TNM and Square. You're not creating social unrest. This is a way for them to say, you know, positive energy means don't criticize Xi Jinping or the CCP

or bring up topics that are in the no-fly zone like the Uyghurs. Well, they're going to have content moderation, guys. Yeah, they're bringing it all under their control. That's what it's about. I mean, this is the type of thing that despite all of our problems, makes me very happy to be an American. Yeah. Can you imagine? I would say, though, the first part of what I said about their regulations, to me, seem really intelligent

And I think Americans would want that and if American policymakers Would actually just suspend disbelief for a second go to the Chinese website Meet Nick we can put a link into the into the show notes of where the regulations were published and actually try to implement those laws I think we as Americans we'd all want most of them except that one Yeah, well, that's what the devil does they mix the lies with the truth in order to get you to be convinced to give up your freedoms. Friedberg, what are your thoughts? I'm getting increasingly convinced that this idea of decentralized blockchain based

government governing might work in the 21st century. I just feel like there, you know, we keep hearing more about the overreach and the ineptitude of centralized institutions like CCP and the US government and You know, I'm not here in anyone that says man, you know, this is a great Well, I was seeing progress. No, but freeberg. I think I think the CCP is actually pretty good I what they do we may not agree with them, but I think they're probably... I agree with you. Generally, yeah. But I do think it creates an incentive and a motivation also because if you don't agree with their their their principles, you know, you're going to find yourself looking for an alternative.

So, you know, I don't know, we should, this is probably not the right time or forum for this conversation. We should probably do it on another show. But we should talk about some of the innovations, blockchain innovations that are taking place. And Jake, I know you've spent a lot of time on this as well. But you know, the worth kind of talking about the notion that, you know, can you see governing move to the blockchain? And what does society look like in maybe the 22nd century if this becomes a reality and how does the world kind of evolve there?

Well, in the crypto world, you would put in some effort, you would have some skin in the game and you would, because of your processing power, your nodes on the network, we'd get some votes. So it'd be like in a democracy, how much money you had, or how much work you produced, you had some sort of say, which kind of sounds like ours. I mean, imagine if the US government, instead of, you know, having some folks go to Congress

and say, I want a trillion dollars and spend 25 years in Afghanistan, you know, it was more of a distributed decision-making process where data was available in real-time metrics were used to make the decision. And the folks that actually contributed dollars to the network ended up being the ones that made the decisions based on how many dollars they've contributed or based on some other principle of decision making that doesn't aggregate institutional ineptitude, which is part of the issue we've seen here.

Well, so I think that brings up an interesting point, which is we talk about all the ways that we could have spent these trillions of dollars better than nation building. Here's the fundamental, I'm not agree with that. I mean, I wish we had spent the six trillion that we spent on nation building in the Middle East. I wish we had spent that at home domestically on our own priorities. But here's the problem is, I think what Afghanistan, specifically the military industrial

complex shows is how good these special interests get at extracting money from the system while providing so little value. You know, we spent so the middle we these contractors spent or we they they charge so much to basically deliver so little on Afghanistan. Do you really think it's going to be much different for the trillion dollar or the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that's coming. You know, and if we create it, they're looking their lips. They're looking at it.

Yeah, exactly. The people, the groups, we're gonna get that money who are gonna feast on that trillion dollars are people who their skill set is lobbying, okay? That is what they spend their time doing. Sorry, it was Jennifer. No, listen, and if you are really good at lobbying, why would you even waste your time trying to get good at delivering value?

You're not. That's your business's lobby. Well, that is your value. Yeah, that is your style. Exactly. So this idea that we can basically spend a trillion dollars on some domestic innovation program, the problem is it'll never go to the right people, never go to the innovators. The best thing we can do is not spend the money quite frankly. So smaller government. The best thing we can do is not spend the money quite frankly. So smaller government. How about this not a government that's $20 trillion in debt?

I don't know how it's like smaller or small government to, if we were to save $6 trillion, it would still be $14 trillion in debt. It's not a small government. I think the good jumping off point here might be the Supreme Court eviction moratorium and the Supreme Court not upholding it and where your thoughts on that sex because it does relate to this never ending free money train, no repercussions of personal behavior and you know spending insanely forever, it seems like we're never going to stop with the Stimmies. Yeah, I think this room court throughout Biden's eviction moratorium is unconstitutional. Look, I think it's great.

You know, the government should not be preventing eviction, especially not the federal government. I don't understand how this is supposed to work. I mean, all you do, look, I don't want to see anybody get evicted, but the reality is you have to pay your rent. And if, and if there are groups of people who can't pay their rent and the government decides that, that those fuels should be helped, the right way to help them is to give them the money to pay their rent, not just to tell landlord sorry, like you can't collect your rent anymore. Congress can give more stimulus to those people.

Yes, it's a taking, it's a clear taking from landlords to say that, oh, your tenants don't have to pay you anymore. How does that make sense? Well, how do we unwind the free money train? Because there's 10 million job openings right now that are not getting filled. And then we have unemployment starting to unwind or the bonus unemployment is our rent.

And then we have all this free rent concept or just you don't have to pay your rent. At some point, it feels like we have to let the free market come back and maybe people can't pay their rent so they go take one of the 10 million jobs. I know that sounds cold-hearted. You've talked about this before in California. We have a labor shortage in California. We've basically run a controlled experiment in the UBI, universal basic income. We're basically paying people not to work or paying them regardless of whether they work. Guess what?

They don't take jobs. And so we actually have a labor shortage in California despite having high unemployment. At some point, the government is going to have to say to people like, look, COVID is not an excuse for shirking your dollar responsibilities. We all have responsibility to go to work, to pay our rent, to pay our parking tickets. COVID has been this excuse for suspending this sort of normal life. The problem is, COVID's going to be around forever. It's like the cold or the flu. It can't continue to be this excuse for people not working, not paying rent, not doing what they're supposed to be doing.

I think on top of that, though, I think Jason, maybe you want to talk about this. I think on top of that, we are amplifying that by taking people's agency away. And we are... Prop 22. And Prop 22 is a perfect example of that, which you should talk about. But when you put these two things together, on the one hand, you have a government that basically wants to subsidize opting out of the system. And then you have a set of laws that, if they're not unwound, reinforce that dynamic, and you put these two things together, and folks just want to sit on the sidelines.

Yeah. Let's get free, Berger. You want to talk about the Prop 22, Supreme Court decision, et cetera? Yeah, there was an appeals court. Appeals court. Yeah, an appeals court that overturned some elements of the California Prop 22, which was a heavily lobbied California proposition, lobbied by Uber and Lyft and other businesses that have built effectively marketplaces for independent contractors, like drivers and delivery people and so on. The SEIU, which is a big employees union,

had fought very hard to pass legislation in California that made it effectively very difficult for people to operate as independent contractors and forcing companies like Uber and Lyft to treat them like full-time employees or to treat them like employees. And so Prop 22 was to counter the union-funded legislation which basically provided more freedom and flexibility to workers, where there weren't all these very arbitrary random rules. If you're a writer, you can be an independent contractor, but if you're a driver, you cannot. All those nonsense that took place because the unions were kind of increased the scale

and scope of their union base. So Prop 22 was passed in California after much spending and lobbying, and it passed by a pretty decent margin. And then this court ruling basically in the appeals court overruled the constitutionality of some elements of Prop 22, which brings into question whether that Prop 22 is actually going to hold in California. Therefore, are all these people who are drivers for Uber, delivery people for DoorDash, and all these companies that are creating like thumbtack and all these companies that are creating marketplaces

for individuals to have flexible work to go and work where they want, when they want to find gigs, to find short-term jobs, to find tasks and projects that they can run, are they now gonna be seeing that those marketplaces stop working because when you have to start treating those people like employees, the flexibility and freedom that those marketplaces stop working because when you have to start treating those people like employees, the flexibility and freedom that those marketplaces enable,

stalls out and kind of, you know, as we're already seeing. So it's super nasty and the implications are that we're now seeing, you know, we're now facing once again this crisis of, you know, are basically lower income people, people that wanna have flexible labor gonna be restricted from having access to gig jobs because the unions wanna force everyone

into a full time job, which, you know, as our friend Bill Gurley pointed out, it's kind of like an archaic element of, yeah, the 19th and 20th century. I mean, this is like a- Let's play a little bit more. A trip from Bill Gurley and here it is. There's one big issue that I don't think

is talked about enough, which is, you know, if you pull the drivers, they're not looking for any changes. They're really happy with the flexible work product. If you look at the voters of California, they stepped up and voted and made it very clear in a state that voted two to one, you know, in favor of Biden. They came down very strong 60, 40 that they didn't want this to happen.

And there's one entity that's really been pushing this the whole time, going all the way back to 85. And that's the SEIU. It is a single union, but the column of single union under States, it because they are the granddaddy of special interest groups. I sent along some data, maybe you can put on the screen. They spend more money lobbying than any other organization in our country and have for many, many years.

They only represent two million members, but oddly, those members are in hospitality, healthcare, and government services. They're not even in this industry. So they're taking the dues from their members and using it to fight these battles because they wanna expand their footprint. What they're really after is putting $400, $420,

which is the minimum member union fee for the two million they have, they wanna expand that to these drivers. So they don't actually wanna help them, they wanna add to their cost. But they're the one that's been pushing this the whole time. And I think it's worth just saying one thing on this, which is, you know, this is really kind of a question

not about California in Prop 22, but it's a question about what is work? And all the tech companies that are enabling a new form of work globally. People don't want to have 40 hour a week jobs, people don't want to have to go sit at a desk all the time. People don't wanna have 40-hour-week jobs. People don't wanna have to go sit at a desk all the time. People wanna have flexibility in their lives. They wanna have gigs.

Technology enables us to quickly find short-term jobs, short-term opportunities for work on things, and make some money, and figure out how we wanna build our lives in a more flexible way. Figure out how workers wanna build lives in a more flexible way across all industries. And it's really, frankly, a non-progressive policy to say that everyone has to be pigeonholed into working full-time, 40-hour-week labor jobs, be employees, and not have the flexibility

of running their own business in their own way with their own time and choosing what they want to go do and work on. So this sort of legislation and this sort of battle is a really important one for defining the future of work in the United States, which will ultimately represent the future of work globally. And the craziness of all of this, David, is that Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, Doris drivers, et cetera, are getting paid a fortune now because there's a labor shortage. And these ride-charing companies have given a minimum $21 an hour fee. So I don't know exactly what's going on here, but it seems to me like it's a union grab

because everybody else who's affluent or rich, real estate folks, you know, doctors, whoever can be freelance, but if you're a rideshare driver or a freelance writer, you don't get to be. And it seems just incredibly unfair. It is. And, you know, one of the best things about COVID, I think for all of us, is that we learned that we could do our jobs from anywhere. We didn't have to go into an office. We didn't have to work the standard, whatever, nine to six hours. We could be anywhere. We had flexibility. And I mean, I think it's one of the lasting consequences of COVID that's actually been very positive for a lot of people. And here you have the government basically trying to take away a prohibit, freelance work, flexible hours, gig type jobs. These are the sort of modern, flexible, working relationships that people want.

Why are they getting rid of it? Because of lobbying pressure from the SEIU, which only has two million members, it's not even a big union, but they got Lorraine Gumsalis in their back pocket. She passed AB five in California. The people at California didn't want it. Remember, 58% of Californians said we don't want this,

so they overturned it in this ballot initiative and now you got this activist judge basically, you know, inventing these species grounds for overturning Prop 22, which is what the people want. So it's ridiculous. And you know, the common thread to me on this show that I've come to realize about American politics is just the degree of special interest corruption. And people are used to thinking in terms of left versus right. It's not.

There's a special interest corruption that pervades everything. You've got this union that is destroying freelance work and flexible working relationships because of corruption because it benefits them. You've got the fence contractors in Afghanistan who are just looting the Pentagon and the federal budget because it's in their interest. You've got these special interests thatoting the Pentagon and the federal budget because it's in their interests. You've got these special interests that both the right and the left. This is the central problem in American politics. And what they do to cover up the naked self-interest is they disguise it in a kind of woke virtue signaling. So they'll start talking about

how what they're doing is for the benefit of these drivers when the drivers don't even want it. And to build on that, I'd say, you know, my great realization from having this conversation with you all every week is that we are starting to propose a nanny state in which people have no agency. Even if they want to have agency over their life and career, you are taking it away. And then if there's no repercussions to people's behavior and they have no agency, they become disenfranchised

from society, and why are they going to participate? And then what kind of society do we have if people can't make their own choices? And you see it also in accreditation laws and you see it where only rich people can invest and now you're seeing it with this freelancing where my dad would have loved to have an extra shift or two to make extra money and he's not allowed to. 80% of drivers want flexibility.

They're willing to participate on things that ultimately on things that they think matter, but don't necessarily solve the core root cause problems. They're people right now in America, I think are focused too much on symptoms, meaning, they want to fight for the right hashtags, they want to fight for the right pronouns, they want to make sure that this person gets canceled for things that happened eight or ten years ago. And I think what they don't understand is these are all symptoms. And this is, this is not what solves the problem, right? We have a water crisis in America. We have a food impending food crisis as we shut off the water.

We have a climate crisis that's engulfing entire nation. We're still in the middle of a pandemic that we can't control. We have an economic system that's fragile, that's dependent on a country whose somewhat times our friend and sometimes our foe in China. These are huge transformational issues that we can't get organized around. And so so instead we spend our time at the edges on The symptoms and we think the symptoms are if we get the pronouns right everything's gonna come together and everything's gonna get fixed The looting will stop the graft will stop the corruption will stop and it turns out actually it emboldens those people To say hey, wait a minute. I'm tricking these people Everything that I wanted to happen can happen.

Let them focus on the pronouns while I continue to loot the American treasury for another trillion dollars. That's where we are. Yeah, and the perfect representation of that is Gavin Newsom. He represents both of these trends. He is one of the most corrupt governors we ever had.

As soon as COVID happened, they suspended all sorts of, you know, the process for contracting so that his campaign contributors could get all these special contracts. He cut a sweetheart deal to PG&E to absolve them of liability for all the fires they've been causing. And on and on it goes the $12 billion to the homeless industrial complex. And then he disguises it with all this work virtually signaling. And so, you know, I would just give a shout out to the recall campaign,

the election is on September 14th, but the ballots have gone out. If you want to send a message to the political class that this special interest corruption has got to stop, let's cut the head off the snake here. It does vote to recall Gavin Newsom on question one. Period. All right, you guys want to end on Jeff Bezos.

Let's talk about the AI bot first and then Bezos. All right, so if you haven't been watching Boston Dynamics, tweeted a video which will play right now as I talk over it. It's basically their robots which have been picking up heavy objects and walking around, doing parkour. If you don't know what parkour is, it's basically people jumping off the side of objects and flipping and doing balance beams and vaulting themselves all around. It is basically robots dancing in France. Yeah, but from heights and jumping over things as well and the French are like parkour

experts. Yeah, I mean, it's I think parkour is French for jumping. I mean, that up. But, You look at these, You look at these, Do you see Saks do parkour? No, absolutely. I have never seen him do parkour.

We'll show that to you. I have seen him so drunk that he's on the floor, but never seen him do parkour. But, Don't get in the way of that. Robot, that's a lot of dirt. This robot looks more dexious than the one in do parkour. But don't get a little bit of sex. And a bottle of DRC. This robot looks more dexterous than any of the terminators we saw in the films. And then adding to that, oh, if you didn't know, Boston Dynamics got bought by Google.

I'm sure freeberg has some inside information on that. And then they got sold again, soft bank had bought them. and now they are owned by Hyundai the South Korean Hyundai the South Korean automaker because apparently the Softies that Google didn't want to be involved in Government contracting with robots i.e. making soldiers of the future, which obviously I don't know I don't know The whole story like that. I mean remember like there were one like well Google bought Boston Dynamics in 2013 and Remember Boston Dynamics have been around for over a decade prior to that It's fun out of MIT like in the 90s, I think

And they were had always been working on you know advanced neural nets being applied to kind of you know automation system So you could get things to mimic real life. And the idea at Google, this was when they had set up Google X and we're starting to do a lot of this moonshot tech investing as a separate entity outside of the core Google and it was leveraging your cash flow to start new projects. The idea was let's build this into kind of a next-gen

robotics platform. They had Andy Rubin, who previously started in RAN Android. Company was called Danger, Googlebot had turned into Android. Rung the unit and they made several other acquisitions. They rolled them all up into this kind of robotics platform that had spent I think 400 million on Boston Dynamics and hundreds of millions more on these other companies And ultimately I think the challenge was less about like, you know, who does or doesn't want to do contracts with us

But it was more about the fundamental question that is still the question mark today Which is do we really need general purpose automation or do we need special purpose automation? For industries for customers, right? Where do you find product market fit? Do people really need a robot that does parkour, or do they need an automation system that can lift boxes and pack in place things, or an automation system that can move things from point A to point B? And so if you're solving for a customer's problem, you typically find that the special purpose automation solution is a more elegant, cheaper solution that you can get to market right away,

like building an automated little truck that moves things around, or building a machine that lifts and puts boxes in the right place. Parvalid discussion between narrow AI and general AI. Correct. And this is exactly the same question, Jake. I was like, you know, is, you know, is general purpose AI really what the market needs

or are there specific applications of neural network or machine learning technologies that allow us to solve for the problems that customers have without needing to replicate the human being. So when you're lifting boxes, you don't necessarily need all the other things that humans have, right? You don't need to mimic the human. When you're moving a package, you don't necessarily need

to have four legs to do it. You can have it on four wheels and just have a simple system that moves it around. And so, I think Softbank, you know, Masha Sun had this whole belief with Vision Fund 1 when he raised the 100-some odd billion dollars that, you know, the singularity where machines were going to be smarter and better than humans in every way, intelligence and dexterity and all these things. We're about to pass that moment. And this was part of that core thesis you had,

which is this is gonna be the robotics company. And I think as we've seen, they can mimic parkour, but they can't do all the other things humans can do. And if you're trying to get a machine to do something that a customer needs, it's really not parkour. Let's be honest, they can't even walk a dog because they can't do what the edge edge cases if the dog had diarrhea. And so I think there's core IP, I think there's core IP

at Boston Dynamics that's certainly critically valuable for businesses that are in special purpose automation, which Hyundai is. There's going to be a great set of applications for leveraging that IP into some of the existing product lines and customers that they serve. So in related story, Elon then revealed the test labot plans at his AI day, he's done a couple of his AI days and I think they're primarily designed to get AI talent, which is some of the hardest developers to find in the world.

And they said that their Tesla bot will weigh 125 pounds, 58, so I'll be a half inch taller than it. But it will weigh significantly less than me. And it will move up to five miles per hour and can carry 45 pounds. Elon said the reason he was doing that is so a human can easily overtake it in case to become sentient, which was quite entertaining. Tremac, do you think this is? What are the chances Elon has a robot like this? And it's operating the real world. I saw a bunch of journalists dunking on him that this would never ever happen, which is kind of hard to believe

when there's a million tusses on the road. Yeah, no comment, and I think it's awesome. Oh, okay, can't comment. All right, leave it at that. Sax, you have any comments on this? It was, you work with Elon at PayPal. Yeah, I thought it was a little bit of a surprise that he was working on a robot.

But, you know, obviously this has been an interest of his. He's talked a lot about it. And so it kind of makes sense. It's just another innovative thing he's doing. Should we talk about Elon versus Bezos on the space? Well, yeah, well, what would, I just wanted to let people know. By the way, the robot going at five miles an hour.

It's not as outlandish as I think some of the journalists and idiots out there who don't build anything in the world who are kind of dunking on him. Like we're saying, if you think about those cars going 65, 75, 85 miles an hour on the road, processing the world, doing a neural network, machine learning on the fly to figure out where the car should go, a robot going five miles an hour is an easier task. I think all those people dunking on him should have just taken a step back and actually asked the question,

am I just being really insecure right now? And if so, why am I making fun of this guy who just seems to be firing on all cylinders? And maybe it's me. Maybe I'm writing this article out of my own insecurity. Maybe I'm feeling a little impotent. Yeah, and also to dunk on a guy for the version one, or even the version 0.1 of a product is so ridiculous.

I mean, I remember the version zero of Tesla now look at the company. I mean, it's about iterating. That's how you get to products. So it's just so stupid and short-term to do it. And by the way, he is. To do it on the current product capabilities. And his style of doing these things, I think, makes a ton of sense. When he started with Starlink, it was the same reaction.

People were dunking, dunking, dunking too slow, too expensive, not going to work. And what you find through these events are really technical people building companies that could help him want to be a part of the mission. And so, you know, for whatever it's worth, it's like, I think Starlink's going to be a real thing. I think this is probably going to be a real thing. I think great companies will get absorbed into this, these efforts, I think it's great. And I really think that people that are just so low, like there's like this low thing going on. I just don't understand.

Tom, what do you think will differentiate the opportunity for success with Larry Page owning and running Boston Dynamics then Masha owning and running Boston Dynamics? And then Elon trying to take on the same project from scratch. You know, why were these other two kind of well-capitalized influential businesses that have attract great partners not been able to turn Boston Dynamics into kind of a successful business, but you guys believe Elon will. If I had to just categorize them, I would say Larry is absent and is sitting on a $ billion dollar fortune with no idea what to do. I think Mosa is an island.

I mean, he's just absent. So he's irrelevant. I don't think anybody knows what the fuck he looks like. I mean, we do. But, you know, he's frittered away enormous potential, I think. I think Mosa is a master capital allocator, but not an engineer. And I think Elon is the most important technical product and business mind of our lifetime. I think the answer is even simpler.

He's the customer of the robot. So he understands what the spec should be because he has so many robots working in the factories. So he's going to buy the first thousand to go colonize Mars or work at a space station to build shit in space and he's gonna have them working in the Tesla factory. And for the boring company carrying rocks out of tones. He's the customer, of course he knows.

And Masa wasn't the customer, Masa was looking to increase whatever money he had. But don't think that's a good idea. But it's also skillset like Masa is an incredible visionary and investor, but he's not going to the guy for in the engine room making the robot Larry now to infernist to Larry page He could be that good and there was a moment in time where Larry was that good and frankly better than Elon But that window has closed and it's well-past and now, you know It's kind of like the player that just keeps getting better and better. I think that's Elon Musk. Good sex. You're that's I mean nothing to add to that. I think you both make great points. I mean the amazing thing is that Elon is still working so hard

Doubling down coming with new ideas new initiatives. I mean More than ever when most people are you know doing most people would do it Larry did you know go buy an island or seven and Yours and hang out, you know, yeah island or seven and yours and hang out, you know. Yeah. All right. Bezos is lost his way and he left his position as CEO of Amazon to focus on Blue Origin. And then he sued NASA over the moon program, accusing NASA of wrongly evaluated its lunar lander proposal, giving all the funds to SpaceX. He then did a series of like info graphics, talking about how terrible SpaceX's plans

were. This lawsuit has delayed SpaceX's work on the project according to the verge. I don't know if that's true or not. Amazon urged the FCC to dismiss the newly submitted plans for SpaceX to launch another cluster of satellites to power Starlink. And Elon tweeted, turns out, Baso's retired in order to pursue a full-time job, filing lawsuits against SpaceX, which is hilarious. How sad is this that it's a huge miscalculation in the following way, which is that, in order for Jeff to achieve his ambitions, he needs deeply

technical people. And this is the simplest way to basically turn them off because this is not what technical people do. What do technical people do? We don't take our toys and run from the sandbox crying like a bitch. We stay there and we keep iterating trying to make things work. Yeah, we don't act like patent trolls. I have a new, I have a new slogan for you, Jake Howe. Go ahead. Winners do and loser sue. Winners do and loser sue. Okay, folks, they have it.

It's the all in a podcast. We're back from a big vacation. Make it happen. Yeah, make the banger. Make the banger. All right, everybody. What's your freeberg? Do you have any thoughts on these on the lawsuits?

I feel bad for Bayezas. I feel like he's just getting so beat up on this shit. It's honestly, it's a little disappointing because I think he's got all the writing tensions. He's an incredible engineer, obviously an incredible operator. I'd love to see him and Elon succeed in the work they're trying to do, as well as all the other startups that are pursuing this.

I am concerned about, frankly, the lack of commercial readiness for this industry. am concerned about, frankly, the lack of commercial readiness for this industry. I feel like in terms of the hype cycle, we're at that early point where the investment dollars and the number of companies exceeds the market demand. And therefore, there's this fight over the one or two customers, which is basically NASA

and the federal government. And it's creating this really nasty set of circumstances, because that's where the money comes from. That's where the customers are right now. And so they're all fighting over one or two customers, and you know, you on file suits against, you know, federal agencies when he lost contracts and it's... No, no, he did that when they no bid them. I get it.

I get it. And slightly different. I get it, but still, like I think at the end of the day, Bezos is willing to put his money where his mouth is. He's offered to put up a billion dollars or more to fund it. I'd love to see multiple companies simultaneously go into the moon, multiple companies simultaneously go into Mars, but rather than have single contract with one customer, or have private industry figure out

ways to make money from this and fund it. But it's a challenge. It's just, it's another product market fit question, right? The market is one customer today. And that's the right price. Yeah, but Bayesos is almost 60 years old. He's got $150, 200 billion. It's gonna cost him two or three billion dollars,

one, two, three percent of his net worth to do all this, just fucking do it, Bayesos, and stop crying and... You're actually making me... He manned up doing that. Yeah, but the problem is... He's just fucking do it based. So some stop crying and you're watching me. He man that doing that. Yeah. But the problem is he's just using the competitor. No, but he's losing the human capital that's required.

So there was a huge there was a huge. That's a little incest cycle about this one person. He was like the leader of the of the lander project who just quit and went to SpaceX. My point is other engineers don't want to see that this is the way to win. He's got a lot of that bull now. Yeah. Build, iterate, and solve.

Build, iterate, solve. It certainly seems the case that his PR stunt with shooting himself into space didn't do him any favors either. It's almost like everyone sees the great work Elon does when he does these PR events. And he gets all this attention and publicity and gets positive press and accolades.

And then Bezos does them and he's like, oh, no. Bezos has no besties. There's no bestie taking Bezos aside. He's bestieless. He needs better. I asked that was Bezos. No, he may have besties, but they're not. They're not doing the job that other besties do for other people.

If they're yes men and women and they're not being true vests, these, they need to tell them when he's got something that's a blind spot. He need to go on a spot. Here is, he was dunking on Richard Branson and be like, oh, you didn't go to the right height. Here's an infographic. Stop with the fucking incrobatics, Bayesos. What are you 12 years old?

And you're like going to the teacher with like a drawing like, I, I should technically get it a plus and I should be singing the solo for the quark practice and like some other person is like got the solo you get the solo next year, Bezos. Bezos offered you a huge consulting feature, Cal would you be his bestie? I'm considered a area of these friends. For sure. For sure. By the way, I hired this fuck nut. He flies back with me. I mean, he literally ate everything on the plane. And then in the room, and then I let me finish eating that tiramisu. Let

me finish. Let me finish. I'm told on the turban so I said to me, Chimath, you have some great toiletries in the back. I said, yeah, sure. You know, there's marvus, there's great toothbrushes. And then out of this pocket, he pulled some scope bottles that he had for the more of my bag. I was shocked. I was shocked. I was shocked.

And it's not generic, it's the real scope. This motherfucker was looting. I looted the pudding. I looted all your lactate. We all take advantage of see. Oh my God. This, this, this other guy, this motherfucker, free bird. Once was so buried, he got so fucking mad. He grabbed all the lactate in my, you know,

a little medicine cabinet. And right now, send him back. He was angry and he was like, I'm so fucking angry because he had lost a big pot right during poker. Then he took all the pistachios and shoved it in his pocket. That's like an Afghan warlord. He's a... He's still an average free-bear stole the pistachio.

Yeah, it's almost a statue of an alien. He's a demon man. Not the left. And the left, he's like, fuck it, I lost 10 dimes. I'm gonna get back $37 in like 10 dimes. So sad, So sad. Wait, do you want me to prepare the house? Do you want me to prepare the the the the the the I think I think I think so I think so that'd be awesome.

You can do that. Oh my God. I'm not gonna put up with it. I'll bring some tests some Binax tests. Yeah. I mean just as an aside I feel girly was talking about this. We talked about this early in the pandemic. Why don't we have fucking one dollar test Friedberg? Oh my God. Everybody not have a hundred tests everywhere. My next now tests are literally lateral flow strips. They cost pennies to make. It's how much you cost to buy. Twenty bucks? Why is it a dollar? Why couldn't I didn't or Trump get that done? Is it some gift? Graphed? Greed? Yeah, you should be fine. For me be like for me to talk about this. He's the guy to talk about it, but. I mean, if people were taking those every day, we could.

I think you guys may remember this, I tweeted about this over a year ago, it's like last April, where we could actually print these antigen tests for pennies in the US. I mean, when we had that like whole emergency authority thing and we were making masks in liquid oxygen tanks and all this shit, we should have been printing antigen tests on strips of paper. We have the facilities in the U.S. to do it. And we could have made, you know, a hundred billion fifty cent tests and made them just

free and available to schools, to workplaces, to everything. It's absolutely insane. But people can't be freelance writers or drive an Uber for two hours a day in California. Exactly. We can mandate that, but we can't mandate a 25 or drive an Uber for two hours a day in California. We can we can mandate that But we can't mandate a 25 cents 50 cent test and put him in everybody's fucking mailboxes. I'm on fire now So fucking stupid everything is so dumb. Everybody's a grifter in this government incompetent assholes Well, I would like to I would like to vote news. I would like to go to war with Fiji, because it's beautiful. I'd like an island, and I think that Fiji probably has a lot of them. Well, Fiji is not respected in French politics, just because I think it's a little closer.

Yeah, so Fiji. We can go there to spread pronouns. Also, I'd like to go to war with Iceland, but only in the summertime, because I hear it's beautiful. I'm going to war with the gelato. I'm going to war with Florence over gelato. I'm going to occupy Tuscany for the pizza and the pasta. I'm occupying Tuscany. You'll need to build a bargrarm in all these places, just so accommodating. All the private jets are going to come in. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I mean, ha, but just in closing, let's just, let's just say thank you to the amazing people

of Italy for having the greatest country for adults to go on vacation and what an incredible country. Florence is amazing. Tuscany is outrageous. Rome is beautiful. Venice is incredible. Everything is delightful. I love you.

I love you, Italy. I love you. I love you Italy. I love so much And I love you so much here. All right, we'll see you on the next time I'm on the other side of the world. Oh, there's a lot between us. I it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. I'm going home, yeah! I'm going to be a We should all just get a room and just have one big huge or because they're all It's like this like sexual tension, but we just need to release that

What you're that big what you're Merchants I'm going on leave! David Sacks, you come to me from your boat in Sicily. Hon, my daughter's wedding day. Sacks, you come to me and you ask me not to interrupt you so that Henry Bella cast that can make a clean cut of your speech. Well, you can start a fire acting like a man, David Sax. No, I got to interrupt you, not the podcast. Oh, you let me finish my daughter. You wanted this part? God can't, oh he left me to the Shema door.

You want this part? You want this part on this podcast? Who's the director? Who's the producer? I'll get you this part. But someday, Saks, I'm gonna ask you for a favor, Saks. I'm gonna ask you for an allocation and all in, and you're calling up. I'm gonna ask you to lead the series B?

And on that day, I expect the valuation because measure it with what I've done for you today. Okay, David Sacks. It's a pretty good bit. Look at Don Canoli over here. Don Canoli. a good bit. Look at Don Canoli over here.