E44: USA's Afghanistan embarrassment, China's new algo laws, future of robots + Italy recap!

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  I am in black.

• 0:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Look at this, I'm down, I'm up a button.

• 0:04Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, up a button, yes.

• 0:05David Sacks?

  This is why the all-in pod is falling apart, is we got one bestie who thinks he's fucking Hemingway. 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.

• 0:18Jason Calacanis?

  And you're a fucking boat.

• 0:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you?

• 0:21Jason Calacanis?

  And you?

• 0:22Speaker 03

  Who the fuck are you?

• 0:22David Friedberg?

  Here's our cold open.

• 0:23David Sacks?

  I'm present. I've been present.

• 0:26Jason Calacanis?

  Present.

• 0:26David Sacks?

  I've been waiting for two weeks.

• 0:28Jason Calacanis?

  Social.

• 0:28David Friedberg?

  And we got the guy who wants to be the next Tucker Carlson.

• 0:31Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, really?

• 0:32David Sacks?

  Yeah, what's wrong with that?

• 0:33Jason Calacanis?

  Did Henry Belcaster write that opening for you?

• 0:34David Sacks?

  No, what's wrong with that?

• 0:35Jason Calacanis?

  Did your writing team write that soliloquy?

• 0:37David Sacks?

  I'm coming in hot, I've been waiting two weeks to go off.

• 0:39Jason Calacanis?

  Three, two.

• 0:45Jason Calacanis?

  Rain Man David Sacks.

• 0:49Speaker 03

  And it said, "We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it." Love you, besties.

• 0:58Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, everybody, welcome back to the All-In Podcast. We took two weeks off for vacation with us today.

• 1:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Vacation!

• 1:05Jason Calacanis?

  Fromcation. Sacks is off his boat and ready to go after the tremendous boat episode. Friedberg, who didn't come to Italy.

• 1:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  David, why are you working from an IRS office?

• 1:18Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 1:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  David Sacks is in an IRS office, yes.

• 1:22Jason Calacanis?

  David Sacks has joined a call center. Which call center are you working from?

• 1:25David Sacks?

  This is a nice white wall.

• 1:26Jason Calacanis?

  This is David Sacks from the call-in app, can I set up your podcast for you, please?

• 1:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sacks, you better fucking get here by tonight.

• 1:31David Sacks?

  Okay.

• 1:32David Friedberg?

  Yeah, Sack, why don't you come?

• 1:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You better play fucking cards, bestie.

• 1:34Jason Calacanis?

  This is bullshit.

• 1:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bestie, you better fucking show up. This lineup is a shitshow.

• 1:37Jason Calacanis?

  Mr. Beast is showing up. Mr. Beast is gonna play cards and he plays eight, queen eight offsuit to crack Phil. It's gonna be very entertaining.

• 1:45David Sacks?

  Alright, I'm flying back this afternoon.

• 1:46Jason Calacanis?

  It's Mr. Beast, Alan, Shipple, Muth. This is gonna be fucking fireworks tonight. Fireworks!

• 1:54David Sacks?

  Alright, alright, I'm coming, I'm coming.

• 1:56Jason Calacanis?

  I am going to lock it up, the eight seat, your eight seat's locked up.

• 1:58David Sacks?

  Wait, what time does it start?

• 2:00Jason Calacanis?

  Asshole.

• 2:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Seven to seven AM.

• 2:01Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's gonna be all night.

• 2:03David Friedberg?

  Is your, uh, is your guest house taken?

• 2:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, you can stay in the guest house if you want.

• 2:07David Friedberg?

  Great.

• 2:08Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go.

• 2:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, we start, David, we start at six.

• 2:11Jason Calacanis?

  Is this the show?

• 2:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes, David, we start at six, but we're gonna break for dinner as normal at seven, so get here by fucking six.

• 2:17David Sacks?

  I'll come, I gotta have dinner with my kids, I haven't seen them in a month, so, uh...

• 2:23Jason Calacanis?

  All right, just so you do you remember their names? It's boop, boop, and boop, and there's three of them. Okay. Yeah, there's three.

• 2:31David Sacks?

  I'll come after dinner, okay?

• 2:33Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Okay, good. Good. Here we go. Uh, first topic of the day is.

• 2:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, you didn't do the intros, asshole.

• 2:38Jason Calacanis?

  All right, three, two.

• 2:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no, you already did that part. Just introduced the, you started with socks and you didn't say myself.

• 2:45Jason Calacanis?

  When did you become the director? Okay, sit down, Scorsese. All right, with us again, the dictator himself, Chamath Palihapitiya.

• 2:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Back from his Italian castle.

• 2:53Jason Calacanis?

  Fresh off his Italian castle retreat. Uh, one button up.

• 2:58David Sacks?

  Maybe we should call you the duke instead of the dictator.

• 3:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 3:01David Sacks?

  Because you're really taking this, this Italian nobility thing to heart.

• 3:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, Jason, Jason invaded, Jason invaded my, my castle. He ravaged my toilets several. He literally had, he co-opted the butler, he co-opted the chef. And when he would bicycle back into the.

• 3:21Jason Calacanis?

  Best life, I'll be totally gone for a week.

• 3:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bicycle, he would bicycle back to the, to the house. The gate would close and they would scurry out with two little cokes, a huge glass filled with ice. I was so confused when I got back. I was like, what's going on? He's like, uh, Mr. Jason, Mr. Jason.

• 3:38Jason Calacanis?

  Mr. Jason, he always.

• 3:39David Sacks?

  Percent, what percent of your book did you write, J Cal?

• 3:42Jason Calacanis?

  Um, well, a nonfiction book typically 60,000 is the target. So I'm going to write 60 and then try to edit it down to 50. And I got the first 10 done.

• 3:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sorry, can I just say on the, on the plane as well as at my house, Jason read us the intro. I'm not going to say what they're about or the title of the book, the first couple of chapters. It's 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.

• 4:15Jason Calacanis?

  Well, a lot of it was informed by the discussions we've been having here. Uh, of course, back in the mix is Friedberg, the queen of Kinwa, uh, in front of some Kmart artwork, uh, that he purchased for his new house. Uh, how are you doing, queen? Uh, how, how are you feeling about your decision to not come to Italy with us? Yeah, queen.

• 4:35David Sacks?

  I don't want to talk about it.

• 4:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hey, can we, can we tell our best Italy story?

• 4:39Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my God, I don't know what the best is. A lot of best Italy stories.

• 4:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 gonna tell it.

• 4:52Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So just to give a little background here.

• 4:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Our friend's 50th birthday.

• 4:56Jason Calacanis?

  Two of our friends had 50th birthdays, me and our other friend. And so we were in Italy for a week as a group, playing cards and celebrating those two birthdays.

• 5:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The joke I didn't make was the following joke, which is, all right, guys, I just want to call up-

• 5:10Jason Calacanis?

  And this is for friend number one, redacted.

• 5:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, redacted, yeah. I just want to call out the elephant in the room. You know, there's really someone very, very famous amongst us.

• 5:20Jason Calacanis?

  Uh oh.

• 5:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, he's known to be one of the richest men in the world. He's known, um, you know, to really, uh, love rockets. He throws, you know, up rockets all the time. Um, the despotic leader of North Korea is here, Kim Jong-un, everybody, and I point to DC.

• 5:38Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my God. That is so unbelievable.

• 5:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wow.

• 5:41Jason Calacanis?

  That was the joke I didn't get to make.

• 5:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wow, you can't tell that joke.

• 5:44Jason Calacanis?

  Because, because it would, in context of, you know, obviously, it would have been a very-

• 5:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 5:49Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, all right, and, uh, yeah, it was just a great trip, I have to say. Uh, I took the two weeks-

• 5:55David Sacks?

  Yeah, my Italy story is that, so the second birthday is J. Cal. The first birthday is a friend who remained nameless. The second birthday, redacted. The second birthday was J. Cal's 50th. Then we find out that J. Cal's birthday was actually like six months ago.

• 6:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Six months ago, November 28th.

• 6:10David Sacks?

  Yeah, nobody, nobody cared. And frankly, none of us went to Italy for J. Cal's birthday.

• 6:15Jason Calacanis?

  We went to the other friend's birthday.

• 6:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We went to the other guys' party.

• 6:20David Sacks?

  Yeah, J. Cal's birthday is like COVID. He keeps trying to bring it back in different variants, and no one wants any part of it.

• 6:32David Sacks?

  So on the last night, the last night of the trip, we had the J Cal birthday party and what do they serve? Pizza. I mean, like, because it's on J Cal's dime. I mean, the rest of the week, we had this like magnificent five star.

• 6:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  God forbid you throw my birthday party for me, Sacks.

• 6:46David Sacks?

  You didn't even throw in any breadsticks. I mean, he was like, he just DoorDash Domino's.

• 6:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We had truffle pizza. Unlimited truffles. It was delicious. I think it was the best meal. I think you're just a little jealous because the dinner you hosted maybe didn't hit the notes you wanted to hit, Sacks.

• 7:02David Sacks?

  Oh, my God, are you serious? We brought in circus.

• 7:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, he flew in a fucking troop from last thing. He flew to circus.

• 7:07Jason Calacanis?

  I was talking about the food. I was talking about the pizza versus.

• 7:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, by the way, I just want to say that that whole circus thing in the in the water, I got so mad at one of my kids because it was so dark and the kids were in the pool. And he kept diving into the water. And I kept saying, stop, I can't see you. And so I was just like, he never, none of the kids should have been in the pool.

• 7:29David Sacks?

  I agree with that. And the truth of the matter is, you know, my five years old was in the pool too. And all I could do was keep an eye on him.

• 7:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Keep an eye on him.

• 7:35David Sacks?

  He was so worried about it.

• 7:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was playing lifeguard with my five as well.

• 7:38David Sacks?

  I didn't enjoy the show for that reason.

• 7:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, me too. They had the time of their lives.

• 7:43David Sacks?

  Yes, they loved it. And actually, that was that was definitely worth it.

• 7:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And the day before, I want to give credit to Sacks because Sacks and I went down to that restaurant and we made them open up the wine closet. We raided it. We found the best three bottles of wine and we brought them back for everybody.

• 7:58David Sacks?

  Ah, and then and then I'm not sure if you remember this, we taped an episode of Call In in which.

• 8:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was a little drunk.

• 8:04David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 8:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was drunk. I was confused.

• 8:06David Sacks?

  Yeah. So anyway, the whole world can listen to us drunk on Call In in, we're launching on September 2nd. So.

• 8:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, wow. Nice. Congrats.

• 8:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's gonna be a big deal. And congratulations to the All In Syndicate members who wet their beaks and to my Syndicate members. People don't know this, but it was the absolute record we've ever had for any syndicate. I believe at the end of the day, we had 150 slots and we had 950 people apply Saks.

• 8:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Amazing.

• 8:33Jason Calacanis?

  We had a million or so in allocation and I think we had 7 million in demand.

• 8:38David Sacks?

  I am really excited.

• 8:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm really excited about this product.

• 8:43David Sacks?

  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.

• 8:50Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, spicy take.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Wow. I'm really glad Daddy, Daddy got a little tasty food.

• 8:59Jason Calacanis?

  Saks, don't hurt your, um, don't hurt your elbow patting yourself on the back there, but go ahead, continue.

• 9:05David Sacks?

  That's all.

• 9:06Jason Calacanis?

  You got a little product manager elbow there?

• 9:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Don't dislocate your triceps.

• 9:10David Sacks?

  The feedback we've gotten from users has been incredible. I mean, it's just the reactions really strong.

• 9:14Jason Calacanis?

  What's good about it? Here's, here's what I think you nailed.

• 9:18Jason Calacanis?

  As a person who's been in podcasting for over a decade,

• 9:22Jason Calacanis?

  the critical, um, aspect of this is when you pop up your club or room on Call-In, it creates a podcast out of it with an RSS feed. And you can go listen to the previous show. So if you are listening to this and you wanted to create your own version of All-In, you could do it on Call-In. Just get three of your knucklehead friends and talk about your adventures on boats and private jets and drinking fine wine wherever you are and you can start your own podcast.

• 9:52David Sacks?

  Yeah, it's not really about the room.

• 9:54Jason Calacanis?

  Wine not included.

• 9:54David Sacks?

  Right, it's not the key insight, it's not about the room, it's about the show. You know, like everything we think of as social audio is really just a feature of creating a show, creating a new podcast. And, uh, so anyway, people really like it, I'm very excited.

• 10:08Jason Calacanis?

  How many shows have been created in the beta?

• 10:11David Sacks?

  This is the thing that's blown me away is like well over 100, I think maybe a couple of hundred. If you go to the show directory, you'd, and, and the cover art that people have created is really elaborate. You know, people are really getting into it.

• 10:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't know why somebody's never made it. You're a phenomenal, uh, product builder, so I think this is really exciting.

• 10:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, 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 Libsyn for hosting them.

• 10:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What, uh, what's happened as a, as a protected minority? I'd like to ask this question. What happens, what's happening to Clubhouse?

• 10:48Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's irrelevant. I don't want to dunk on founders, but I think that they

• 10:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why can't they just do these features? It sounds like I'm not trying to take anything away from you, David.

• 11:01Jason Calacanis?

  I guarantee you they will copy Saks's features for sure. I think they will copy it at some point.

• 11:04David Sacks?

  Yeah, but I think that it's a good question, and I really think there's different visions here. So I mean, I've listened to their founder talk about his vision, and it's very much about creating this live serendipitous type experience, like kind of like a cocktail party. And that's fine. We're not doing that. We're creating long tail podcasting is what we're doing. And my experience is informed by what we've all been doing on the show for last year and a half, which is podcasting, right? And the thing that I've seen that I didn't know until we did the all in pod is how much work goes into what J Cal does behind the scenes.

• 11:35Jason Calacanis?

  It's incredible.

• 11:35David Sacks?

  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.

• 11:44Jason Calacanis?

  No offense, Nick. No, I mean, not everybody is going to want to put the type of post-production into this. They don't have, you know, I've got six people on our podcast team, like it's not everybody's got that infrastructure. So over time you'll build that. I believe it. I think it will turn out great. All right, let's get to our first topic here. While we were away,

• 12:06Jason Calacanis?

  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 failed 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.

• 12:43David Sacks?

  Did I tweet that?

• 12:44Jason Calacanis?

  You did. Yeah, you might've had a couple of drinks and then.

• 12:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sorry, he actually didn't. He just texted that in the group.

• 12:52Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so that was a confidential text to our group that we're not supposed to even say exists.

• 12:57David Sacks?

  Well, no, it's okay. Don't beep it. It's okay. I mean, it's, it's, it's true. It's, it's not exactly what I tweeted, but it's similar to things I've been tweeting.

• 13:05Jason Calacanis?

  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. Sacks, you have strong opinions? We'll start with that.

• 13:38David Sacks?

  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, overran Kabul. And, yeah, it was, you know, the Afghanistan war's been going on for 20 years, no one's been talking about it, it's just this thing that's been happening in the background, but all along we've been assured by the Pentagon that we're winning, "Hey, you know, don't worry about this, we got this." And then you wake up one day, and all of a sudden we've lost the war, and the Taliban's overrunning the country, and you're like, "What is going on here?" You know, not only is the botched withdrawal incompetent, the fact that we were lied to for two decades about what was really happening, the idea that we had created, you know, we were, how many times were we told that we had created this Afghan army, it

• 14:23David Sacks?

  was 300 strong, we spent, you know, $2 trillion in the country, you know, 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.

• 14:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Not only that, but we've seen 12 people, 12 American servicemen and women killed yesterday, 13 trying to protect the airport, almost 100 Afghans. Now we'd only have to not only contend with the Taliban, whose positions I don't think any of us know about, but we also have to deal with ISIS-K, which is like some, you know, offshoot affiliate of ISIS, run by a guy who was actually summarily killed by the Taliban, but that didn't clearly stop anybody.

• 15:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The, the level of, honestly, just to say the, the, the lying that we've been doing on this topic is just utterly, um, it's really, really scary. You know, how could we have gone 20 years, $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. Um, and then the back half of it is that we look like a little bit of a country that's sort of in decline because we can't even figure out an orderly withdrawal.

• 16:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's not as if, you know, this thing came out of the blue, out of nowhere. This was a negotiated withdrawal, so we had months to plan for this, you know, and we had months to do the right honorable moral thing for all of these, for, for all of these people that helped us in that country. Just to give you a, a small anecdote, you know, the day that Kabul was overrun, you know, the Democrats were actually tweeting out about, uh, celebrating Librarian Day. That's what they were focused on. Jason and I, on the way back, you know, I, we flew back with my, with my mom and my sister, we, we stopped in Toronto to drop them off, and the planes beside us, Jason, do you remember this?

• 16:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, two big planes, cargo planes.

• 16:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think Brett, I think Brett or Paul were telling us, or my pilots were telling us, these planes, uh, had been going back and forth, saving refugees in Afghanistan. And it's like, wow, what an honor to just be beside these, these amazingly heroic men and women. And, you know, I don't know, Jason, if you saw, but as we were refueling, they came and boarded and they were getting ready to leave again.

• 17:14Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 17:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 risked their lives to help us fight clearly a useless war.

• 17:37Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, you have thoughts, watching all this? I know you don't like when we delve into politics too much, but what do you, yeah, you have any thoughts you want to add?

• 17:45David Friedberg?

  I don't know about politics as much as, um, I kind of use a little bit of a... Startup analogy, like America never really found product market fit with what we were trying to do in Afghanistan. There's some fantastic Gallup polling that's been done in Afghanistan over the past 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's shown that 87 to 90% of Afghans said that the government is corrupt. This is the government, you know, put in power, put in place by the United States. 90% say businesses are corrupt.

• 18:30David Friedberg?

  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 but not the only source. That leaves just 7% of people that think that Sharia law should not be...

• 18:55Jason Calacanis?

  Is it Sharia or Sharia?

• 18:56David Friedberg?

  Sharia, sorry. Sharia law should not be part of the legislative process in defining the Afghan laws and constitution. And so, you know, it's really telling that, you know, it's almost like when you 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...

• 19:41David Friedberg?

  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 a 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, you know, 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

• 20:21David Friedberg?

  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 not happy, sorry, with their present household income, has gone from 60% to 90%. Nine out of 10 Afghans as of last year were not making enough money to make ends meet. So you put all of these facts together, you've got this long history of strife with this, you know, company effectively coming in, trying to tell you how to run your government, how to run your country, that doesn't match with your beliefs on 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

• 21:04David Friedberg?

  that got overfunded, that never found product-market fit, that never really got off the ground. Certainly, the exit strategy on how do you wind something down in this case, and it certainly relates to human lives and the tragedy of the partners that we had on the ground, was totally mishandled. But the broader picture here is like...

• 21:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's more corrupt than that. I think that we basically engaged in a $2 trillion wealth transfer from the people of the United States, the citizens of the United States, to the military-industrial complex. That's what we did.

• 21:31Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, I have two points I want to build on, from yours, Rebergen, now yours, Jamath, which is, the original mandate here was to go in, get rid of Al Qaeda, and to also...

• 21:42Jason Calacanis?

  You know, kill Osama bin Laden and to not have the Taliban giving safe harbor to Al Qaeda. That quick, that mission got accomplished in large part in the first year or two. And then when we finally got to Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, I think it 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, Friedberg, 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.

• 22:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're not doing that. We're not, we're not, we're not freedom fighters of democracy or justice.

• 22:32Jason Calacanis?

  We should be.

• 22:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should be. We are led by motives of revenue and profit.

• 22:36Jason Calacanis?

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

• 23:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I disagree.

• 23:01Jason Calacanis?

  And we should take the high ground and we should be the more authority of the world.

• 23:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I agree with that.

• 23:05Jason Calacanis?

  Because if we're not, who's going to be?

• 23:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I, I, I agree with that part, but I think the right thing to do is just to open our doors and say, you know what, we're here, there's a draft, right? And the smart and the capable and the willing, we're willing to basically bring inside of our borders so that they can work on our behalf. And that's what other countries, I think, get right about all of this stuff. Like, again, as a Canadian, you know, the Canadian perspective of this is not that you deploy troops and you get embroiled in these, you know, debacles over 20 years and thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. It's the exact opposite. They're there to support humanitarian efforts, right? They're there to send peacekeeping forces as they need to, but otherwise their real response is to actually then open the borders for folks.

• 23:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 24:05Jason Calacanis?

  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 is human rights on the line and a country is teetering on authoritarianism or democracy? Like, where is that line?

• 24:23David Sacks?

  The just cause here was to go get Osama bin Laden because he attacked us. And we should have gotten out of that country as soon as we realized that bin Laden was no longer there. I mean, that was basically after the Battle of Tora Bora. And if we didn't leave then, we certainly should have left after we got bin Laden in around 2010. So what were we still doing there? We were engaged in this exercise of nation building, which, by the way, we spent $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

• 25:02David Sacks?

  domestic agenda. You know, so we wasted all this money. To Freiburg's point, we never understood the culture there. And to Chamath' point, it was a giant money funneling operation to defense contractors. There's a great piece of reporting by an independent journalist named Michael Tracy, and he talked to frontline grunts about the wasteful spending. You know, they'd send 12 Humvees to some local Afghan partner, only two of them would ever get there. The other 10 would break down and disappear, and no one would even know where all the money went. It was like an unbelievable orgy of wastefulness. And, you know, one other important detail on this, there's a guy who I think should be much more famous to all of us. His name is John F. Sopko. He's the Special

• 25:47David Sacks?

  Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, that short for cigar. He was appointed by Congress about 13 years ago to look into what was really happening in Afghanistan, and to report on, quote, quote unquote, lessons learned from the Afghan war. And so for 13 years, Sopko has been very quietly diligently interviewing people, 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?

• 26:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 26:24David Sacks?

  Just the chapter titles: harmful spending patterns, resistance to honesty, personnel struggles, willful disregard for critical information, incorrect theories of change, poor understanding of local context. And by the way, that includes ignoring things like the sexual abuse of young boys by Afghan warlords who are our allies, okay? Which the New York Times reported on. We completely have swept that under the rug, okay? That's just a table of contents, okay? From one of his latest reports, which is about 100 pages.

• 26:55Jason Calacanis?

  So complete incompetence in our government, complete waste.

• 26:58David Sacks?

  The Pentagon was telling us the whole time, I mean, while this guy, Sopko, the special inspector general, was telling us the truth of what was happening, you've got the Pentagon telling us and the elected leaders the whole time that we're winning this war, that things are improving, they had all these bogus metrics to prove it. And, you know, and so it's a systemic failure.

• 27:21David Friedberg?

  But Sax, what would be their motivation to say it's not working?

• 27:25David Sacks?

  Look, I think, I think that, well, right, what would be the motivation?

• 27:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, 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.

• 27:36David Sacks?

  But let's talk about the metrics, because this is actually an important point.

• 27:39David Friedberg?

  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?

• 27:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The objective is to demonstrate, no, the objective is to demonstrate leadership. The objective is to basically say, you know what? This is really not working. And this is about putting yourself in the position of a person whose child is over there, okay? If any of our children were there who signed up because they thought they wanted to do the right thing and, and, and, you know, be in the army or the navy or the Marines, found themselves in Afghanistan. Got killed, God, heaven forbid. And then that body comes back and this report comes with it, which is effectively what it is. Okay, this is the coda to the death of 2.2400 Americans

• 28:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 28:41David Sacks?

  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 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, you know, the commanders on the ground saying, well, today, we trained 1,000 new Afghan troops. Okay. 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

• 29:22David Sacks?

  the interviews with these, you know, with these, you know, frontline commanders or trainers, they would find this out. Now, why wasn't this in the report? Well, because the military is a culture that's based on advancement. It's basically, the Pentagon is a big country club. It's a big insiders' club. There's a dogma. The dogma was, we're winning the war. And if you want to advance in that organization, you're not going to be the one, you're not going to be the skunk at the garden party who tells the generals that they're full of 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 shade things another 20%. And then the next guy in the chain of command shades things 20%. And by the time you get all the way to the

• 30:05David Sacks?

  top, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is telling Biden, we have an army that's 300,000 strong. These guys are going to take over the country. We're not going to have a problem. We're going to have plenty of time to get our people out. And that is why we had a lackadaisical withdrawal strategy. These guys thought they had all the time in the world, because systemically, they've been bullshitting themselves about having a 300,000 man Afghan army. And then, you know, when you actually look under the hood of this thing, there is no army. It's just basically a bunch of kleptocracy.

• 30:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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, Sax, 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

• 31:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 31:36Jason Calacanis?

  Let me ask you a question. If Biden had run an orderly exit, and then it spiraled into Taliban and reverted back to what it was, how would you feel about all this, Sax?

• 31:46David Sacks?

  I think, I think.

• 31:47Jason Calacanis?

  That would have been, that's the goal, right? Trump wanted to get out.

• 31:50David Sacks?

  Yes.

• 31:50Jason Calacanis?

  And Biden both wanted to get out. So if we just executed twice as good or 50% better, there'd be no problem here. We all want to be out, correct?

• 31:56David Sacks?

  Yes, that, that decision, the decision to get out was a 70% popular decision when Biden made the decision in April, and then they.

• 32:04Jason Calacanis?

  And when Trump made it last time, because he did the ceasefire, he negotiated.

• 32:07David Sacks?

  This is a bipartisan decision to get out. Let's not pretend otherwise. It was clearly the correct decision to get out. But here's where Biden screwed it up. Okay. And there's some blame that needs to be apportioned to Biden and to the, to the generals. And we don't really know who screwed it up. But collectively, they did. The big mistake, the original sin of this withdrawal is that they pulled out of Bagram Airfield at the beginning of July. Okay, they didn't just pull out, they literally ghosted the Afghan, I mean, they pulled out in the middle of the night without telling anybody. The Afghan's army, who are our allies, woke up the next morning, and the Americans were just gone. And the electricity had been turned off. I mean, this was unbelievable. And so the problem is, we then lost our air superiority over the country. We lost our ability

• 32:51David Sacks?

  to conduct close combat air support. We lost our ability to do a mass evacuation. Okay, we basically gave up our central military asset in the country before we got the civilians out, before we got our allies out. And there were 18,000 of these so-called 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. Okay, 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

• 33:36David Sacks?

  let them through.

• 33:37Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my lord. It was basically an assassination list. This is your death list.

• 33:40David Sacks?

  They've given a kill list. They've given a kill list to the 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 are afraid of the, about the safety of our Afghan allies. You need to get them out now. The State Department is taking too long processing the Special Immigration Visas. You're totally caught up in red tape bureaucracies. Solve this problem." Blinken did nothing. He was another deer caught in the headlights.

• 34:12Jason Calacanis?

  They could have also just, instead of making people fill out all these forms and all this red tape, I heard one commenter saying, like, "The right thing to do in situations like this is to just get everybody out, put them in a holding location, and then process them there." In other words, if this person says they're translating their family and they have, you know, relatively good paperwork, get them out, put them into that holding pattern, and then figure out how to process them later. We got to wrap on this discussion, get to some other topics. But the interesting thing to watch here is what's going to be the future of Afghanistan. And I don't know if you guys saw the Financial Times story, but China is watching this like a hawk. And they

• 34:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  China and Russia are just sitting there laughing.

• 34:55Jason Calacanis?

  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

• 35:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They look at the United States and

• 35:17Jason Calacanis?

  Authoritarianism.

• 35:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Biden asked Putin if it was okay for us to stage military resources from, you know, from, from, from close quarters in Asia. And Putin was like, no, go.

• 35:28David Friedberg?

  Jason, I think what you, what you just pointed out is the motivating factor for having a presence in this and other similar, similarly situated territories around the world.

• 35:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 35:40David Friedberg?

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

• 36:25David Friedberg?

  sorts of territories. And it begs the question of, does that really set us up for challenges and failures in the 21st century as a nation state? As the other global players, in particular China, you know, take advantage of these openings.

• 36:37David Sacks?

  Yeah, well, I agree with that. And let me just let me just say why China is so smart and we are so dumb. China is going to Afghanistan right now and cutting deals with the Taliban to build a highway so they can get to the rare earth minerals, which Afghanistan is rich in, and they're going to use the the superhighway they're going to build to get that out and feed their economy. That is how they're going to spend their capital in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, we spend over 2 trillion and we have nothing to show for it. You know, they go abroad in search of rare earth minerals. We go there to lecture people on toxic masculinity. It is absurd. Okay, now the president.

• 37:14Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you know what, Sax, it's a little too cynical. We were also protecting.

• 37:18David Sacks?

  No, it's not.

• 37:18Jason Calacanis?

  And educating women in that country and protecting them.

• 37:21David Sacks?

  Yes.

• 37:22Jason Calacanis?

  From being gay.

• 37:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Pronouns.

• 37:23David Sacks?

  That's right.

• 37:24Jason Calacanis?

  They them. It's very important.

• 37:26David Sacks?

  That's right. We go there to lecture people on their pronouns.

• 37:28Jason Calacanis?

  No, that is far too cynical, Sax.

• 37:30David Sacks?

  No, it's not.

• 37:31Jason Calacanis?

  We went there to protect some people who wanted democracy and to allow women to read and to be members of society.

• 37:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We just flushed that. We just flushed that right down the toilet. Sorry.

• 37:42Jason Calacanis?

  I know that.

• 37:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We do. Let's not conflate that. We just want to lecture them. 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.

• 37:57Jason Calacanis?

  So are you saying, Sax, that we should have stayed there with some presence?

• 38:00David Sacks?

  Well, this is this is like the argument in Vietnam.

• 38:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 38:15David Sacks?

  Remember, remember the Vietnam War? We killed 2 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 2 million people back. We see these wars in terms of ideology. We think we're going there to spread democracy. They see it in terms of nationalism. All they see is a foreign invader trying to impose their values. That's why they don't buy into what we're doing. And by the way, the whole idea that we're going to plant Madisonian democracy in the soil of the Middle East. That was a 20-year folly that cost us trillions. And one of the reasons why, there are no Madison's over there. There are no Madison's, there are no Jefferson's, there are no Washington's. Who is gonna take up that cause? What we had in Afghanistan is this President Ghadi, who's a crook, who is off on the first helicopter with millions of our dollars.

• 39:00David Sacks?

  That is how stupid we are.

• 39:03Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 39:09David Sacks?

  The American President John Quincy Adams, this is back when America had a rational foreign policy. He said, "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy." That used to be our foreign policy. Now we involve ourselves all over the world to impose our values for no reasons. It is costing us a fortune and it has led to the crumbling of the American wealth and power.

• 39:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And it completely erodes our trust in institutions, particularly the institution of the federal government. And we're left just scratching our heads, saying, "If not these guys, then who is gonna figure this out?"

• 39:46Jason Calacanis?

  So what do we do with Taiwan? If Chamath and Sacks, if you're... Don't wanna be... If you don't wanna support democracy in the world, what happens to Taiwan in your world?

• 39:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This signed Taiwan's death warrant. I'm sorry, but you should just assume that Taiwan...

• 40:00Jason Calacanis?

  So we should just let Taiwan go?

• 40:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, my point is the following. Taiwan will, when the, when PRC has the right window, be under complete Chinese control. And we, because of how we have executed this and how we've executed the rest of our Middle Asia strategy, means that we will not really engage. And the reason is because it will be an enormous food fight inside the United States, where all of these past experiences of us fucking this up will come up.

• 40:28Jason Calacanis?

  Should we defend Taiwan, free bird?

• 40:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Except, 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, if we can't beat and win in Afghanistan,

• 40:46Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, we also.

• 40:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What are our chances? I mean, I'm sorry, guys, but this is like.

• 40:50Jason Calacanis?

  Our chances alone, it's not worth it with a group of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the EU. We should be defending Taiwan, in my mind. What do you think, Friedberg? Should we try and defend Taiwan when this inevitably leads to the Chinese government finding their window, as Chamath is predicting?

• 41:07David Friedberg?

  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 are authoritarian regimes that are doing terrible things. But we don't have a competing global interest there to defend against.

• 41:39Jason Calacanis?

  Well, to be clear, Taiwan is right now democratic. So we would be defending a democracy.

• 41:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Friedberg, Jekal is asking a specific question. If China invades Taiwan, do you think the United States should get involved?

• 41:52David Friedberg?

  On a principles basis, or do I think the United States will get involved?

• 41:56Jason Calacanis?

  Either one.

• 41:57David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the challenge is the escalation with China, right? So that's going to be the big calculus. It's really about what's the, what's the long-term cost? Certainly, on a, on a principle basis, you'd say, let's go defend the weak and go protect them because they may 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

• 42:42David Friedberg?

  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 decaying. 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.

• 43:01Jason Calacanis?

  Let's swing it to Sacks 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 would be taken and flipped from a democracy like Hong Kong has been flipped.

• 43:15David Sacks?

  I think it's a, I think it's a very important distinction that Taiwan is already a democracy. They got there on their own. They've done a lot of hard work building that country since that basically the, the country became separate from mainland China. I think in 1945, it's never been under the control of the CCP. It's a, it's a free enterprise system. It's democratic capitalism. There's basically 24 million free souls who live on that island. And if we show any weakness, and we frankly already have by what we've done in the Middle East. If we show any weakness, they will fall under the boot of the communist regime. So I think it's, there's a big difference between trying to plant democracy or nation build. Versus in a country that's never had it before in thousands of years.

• 44:01David Sacks?

  And basically being friends and allies with a country that already is a democracy and just wants to be free. And I think our message to China should just be, we like things the way they are. We don't want them to change. That's it. We have a policy of what's called strategic ambiguity to Taiwan. It basically says that we may come to the defense of Taiwan or we may not. And I think we should just continue with that policy. I think our message should just be, we like the status quo. We don't think it should change. Let's leave things alone.

• 44:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that that's fine, but I think we need to be investing hundreds of billions. The trillions of dollars we wasted in Afghanistan could have been better served. Building an infrastructure in America for chips and semiconductors and a bunch of these critical components. Because then it would give us a lot more bargaining room. To actually be able to play out that strategic ambiguity more fully. I think the reality is that despite the policy framework, the practical economic reality is that we would be engulfed in a war. If, if Taiwan were taken over by China. Because as Friedberg said, our economy would ground to a halt. Because those critical assets are linchpins for how massive swaths of the American economy work.

• 45:12David Sacks?

  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 going to be dependent on them in a way we never should be for our supply chain. You're right, Chamath, 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.

• 45:49Jason Calacanis?

  We're going to need to make some decisions here because Russia with Crimea and the Ukraine and their ambitions, and then China taking over Hong Kong and looking at Taiwan. I mean, I think the lesson here is if you're a dictator and you are allowed to take over other regions and other, you know, countries, you're not going to stop. It's the nature of dictators. And we have to at least put our foot down. You know, Afghanistan's a shit show, but these other places.

• 46:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're flat-footed right now, J. Kell. We're stumbling forward.

• 46:17Jason Calacanis?

  I know. This is a serious problem.

• 46:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so we need to, we need to sort of like re-center ourselves and get momentum. You know, to use a poker analogy, we basically just bluffed off half our stack with the Jack 8 offsuit. And then, and then when you get the ace king suited, you have no chips to play with.

• 46:33David Sacks?

  Yeah, right.

• 46:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, and you're just like, what was I doing?

• 46:36Jason Calacanis?

  Our credibility.

• 46:37David Sacks?

  Basically, 9/11, 9/11 put us on tilt, okay? And we've been losing pods for the last 20 years. Now we just lost the big one. And the question is, to Chamath's point, are we going to lose the rest of our stack? Or we're going to go take a walk around the block like Muth does?

• 46:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Re-center ourselves.

• 46:51David Sacks?

  And re-center.

• 46:52Jason Calacanis?

  Time to re-center. Time to take a little walk.

• 46:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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, it's a pretty scary set of things that's happening over there, but it's also a kind of instructive about how we could re-center ourselves, because there's, they're actually enacting the laws that we all talk about. We've been talking about for seven months, but they're actually willing to do it. And they, and so if American policymakers would actually just...

• 47:19Jason Calacanis?

  Should we pivot to what's going on over there with the China or should we go to robotics?

• 47:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's, let's finish China and then we can, and then, and then we can talk about...

• 47:25Jason Calacanis?

  China is continuing their crackdown of tech companies and has proposed a ban on foreign IPOs. The Wall Street Journal had some exclusive reporting today. I'll just read a quote and then hand it over to Chamath. China plans to propose new rules that would ban companies with large amounts of sensitive consumer data from going public in the US, people familiar with the matter said. And in addition to that, under these new rules, they are looking at the algorithms that are being run in different services and making them transparent. And the Chinese government will basically control the algorithms that have caused so much chaos here in the United States with Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. And then finally, they're going

• 48:07Jason Calacanis?

  to close the loophole on VIEs. Chamath, you want to explain what this means from a market perspective?

• 48:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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, you know, an entity had control of a company,

• 48:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  okay, through a contract, but not through equity. So it's kind of like, you know, Saks, 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 afoul of all of these things was Enron. And back in 2001, Enron went fucking ham, as we all know. They had a bunch of these 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, was like, hey, listen, we want to control our economy, so we're going to prohibit foreign ownership. So just for all you guys to know, China to this day does not allow a foreigner to own

• 49:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  a piece, large sections of the Chinese economy. Okay, so as of 2018, which is the last updated list, as far as I could find it, there are 33 sectors of the economy where China says you cannot be a foreigner and own any equity.

• 49:54Jason Calacanis?

  You have to have a local partner.

• 49:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, you cannot own any equity.

• 49:58Jason Calacanis?

  Well, if you want to start a business there, you have to have like a partner like Yahoo did.

• 50:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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, Caymans, 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, DD.com, JD, all of these folks have these VIES. And what's interesting about these VIES is it's

• 50:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  written clear as day, but not a single investor seemed to care. But in the prospectuses of these Chinese companies, they were clear. It doesn't mean you actually have a claim on the assets. It doesn't mean you can actually make a demand of management. I mean, if you saw this in an American prospectus, you would not put a single dollar into these companies. But in fact, the exact opposite happened because people were greedy and chasing the money. And, and these risks, by the way, came back to bear because Jason, I think you were the one that gave the example of the Chinese tutoring guys where, you know, overnight this guy lost 99% of his net worth. I think this was a one or two pods ago. The way they did that was that they canceled the VIES. They said, online tutoring? Nope,

• 51:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 of market cap. We are, we are, we are now in a situation now where the Chinese government basically says for online tutoring, we're going to cancel the VIES. In a bunch of other areas, we're going to start with regulation. We could cancel the VIES later. And so we've essentially put the capital markets, in my opinion, on pause. And so now let's transition to this other part.

• 52:08Jason Calacanis?

  Capital markets in China.

• 52:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 markets.

• 52:25Jason Calacanis?

  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?

• 52:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're gonna have to delist these ADRs. I don't exactly know what would happen. I think what happens is this-

• 52:38Jason Calacanis?

  It's unprecedented, am I correct?

• 52:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, you have capital laws, Jason, because when they canceled the online tutoring VIEs, the stock prices 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 send 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 shares in Alibaba actually took the time to understand what they were actually buying.

• 53:10Jason Calacanis?

  They suspended disbelief because they were greedy.

• 53:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So the point is, that's happening, okay? So the capital markets are now, I think, getting really constrained. The complement to this is that they're starting to now introduce legislation as a prelude, in my opinion, to canceling some of these 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 gonna 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-

• 53:57Jason Calacanis?

  I'd like to have that.

• 53:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 54:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The algorithm recommendation shall adhere to main this is incredible to mainstream values. I don't know what that means. That means harmony in China. They must actively spread positive energy and promote the application of algorithms for the better. Providers shall regularly review and evaluate and verify these algorithms, models and datas. With these watchdogs, these watchdogs will now start to increasingly take board seats on the on Chinese companies. So you put these two things together. It is a takeover moment in China tech. It's a takeover.

• 54:59David Sacks?

  Yes, yes. I mean, so, so some of those provisions sound like, you know, privacy regulations we might want to adopt over here.

• 55:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Completely.

• 55:07David Sacks?

  But I think we should focus on the one towards the end that you mentioned. The algorithm recommendation source provider shall adhere to mainstream values. Actively spread positive energy and promote application for the better. Now, how do you actively spread positive energy? I mean, as a business person, under that regulation, like, what does that even mean? I mean, it basically means.

• 55:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It means what you're not spreading, David. It means you're not spreading a protest in Hong Kong. It means you're not talking about the Uyghurs. It means you're not talking about Tiananmen Square. You're not creating social unrest. This is a way for them to say, you know, positive energy means don't criticize Xi Jinping or the CCP or bring up topics that are in the no-fly zone like the Uyghurs. Well, they're, they're, they're gonna have content moderation guidelines.

• 55:51David Sacks?

  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.

• 56:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 56:00David Sacks?

  Can you imagine?

• 56:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would say, though, that 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. 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?

• 56:29David Friedberg?

  I'm getting increasingly convinced that this idea of like decentralized blockchain-based government governing might work in the 21st century. I just feel like there, that, you know, we keep hearing more about the overreach and the ineptitude of centralized institutions like CCP and the US government and.

• 56:50David Friedberg?

  You know, I'm not hearing anyone that says, man, you know, this is a great.

• 56:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I.

• 56:56David Friedberg?

  We're seeing great progress.

• 56:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but Friedberg, I think the CCP is actually pretty good. What they do, we may not agree with them, but I think they're.

• 57:03David Friedberg?

  I agree with you. I agree with you generally, yeah. But I do think it creates an incentive and a motivation also because if you don't agree with their principles, you know, you're going to find yourself looking for an alternative. So, you know, I don't know, 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 Jek, I know you spent a lot of time on this as well. But, you know, it'd be worth kind of talking about the notion that, you know, can you see governing move to the blockchain? And what does society look like in maybe the 22nd century if this becomes a reality? And how does the world kind of evolve there?

• 57:48Jason Calacanis?

  Well, in the crypto world, you would put in some effort, you would have some skin in the game and you would, because of your processing power, your nodes on the network would get some votes. It would be like in a democracy, how much money you had or how much work you produced, you had some sort of say, which kind of sounds like ours.

• 58:05David Friedberg?

  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.

• 58:15David Friedberg?

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

• 58:39David Sacks?

  Well, so I think that brings up an interesting point, which is, you know, when we talk about all the ways that we could have spent these trillions of dollars better, the nation building, here's the fundamental, and I agree with that. I mean, I wish we had spent the six trillion that we spent on nation building in the Middle East, I wish we had spent that at home domestically on our own priorities. But here's the problem is, I think what. Afghanistan and 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, we, these contractors spent, or we, they, they charged so much to basically deliver so little in Afghanistan. Do you really think it's going to be much different for the trillion dollar, the 1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill that's coming?

• 59:24David Sacks?

  You know, and if we create it.

• 59:25Jason Calacanis?

  They're licking their lips. They're looking.

• 59:26David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. The, the, the people, the, the groups who are going to get that money, who are going to feast on that trillion dollars are people who their skill set is lobbying. Okay? That is what they spend their time doing. Sorry, I think it's backwards. 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 is lobbying.

• 59:48Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that is your value. Yeah, that is your skill set.

• 59:50David Sacks?

  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.

• 1:00:01David Sacks?

  The best thing we could do is just not spend the money, quite frankly.

• 1:00:05Jason Calacanis?

  So smaller government.

• 1:00:08David Sacks?

  Or how about, how about just not a government that's 20 trillion dollars in debt? I don't know how it's like smaller or small government to if we were to save 6 trillion, would still be 14 trillion in debt. It's not a small government.

• 1:00:20Jason Calacanis?

  I think a good jumping off point here might be the Supreme Court eviction moratorium and the Supreme Court not upholding it. And what are your thoughts on that, Sacks? Cause 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 stimmys.

• 1:00:46David Sacks?

  Yeah, the, I think the Supreme Court threw out Biden's eviction moratorium as unconstitutional. Look, I think it's great. You know, the government should not be preventing eviction, you know, especially not the federal government. I don't understand how this is supposed to work. I mean, all you do, look, I don't want to see anybody get evicted, but the reality is you have to pay your rent. And if, and if there are groups of people who can't pay their rent, and the government decides that, that those people should be helped, the right way to help them is to give them the money to pay their rent, not just to tell landlords, sorry, like, you can't collect rent anymore.

• 1:01:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, Congress could give more stimulus to those people.

• 1:01:23David Sacks?

  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?

• 1:01:31Jason Calacanis?

  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 starting to unwind. And then we have all this free rent concept of 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, but at some point, there has to be some landing.

• 1:02:03David Sacks?

  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, the universal basic income, where we've basically been paying people not to work, or paying them regardless of whether they work. Guess what? They don't take jobs. And so we actually have a labor shortage in California despite having high unemployment. At some point, the government's gonna have to say to people, like, look, COVID is not an excuse for shirking your adult responsibilities. You know, we all have a responsibility to go to work, to pay our rent, you know, to pay our parking tickets. And COVID has been this excuse for suspending, you know, this sort of normal life. And the problem is, COVID's gonna be around forever. It's like

• 1:02:46David Sacks?

  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.

• 1:02:52Jason Calacanis?

  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

• 1:03:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Prop 22.

• 1:03:04Jason Calacanis?

  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,

• 1:03:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Reinforce that dynamic and you put these two things together and folks just want to sit on the sidelines.

• 1:03:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Let's get Friedberg about Friedberg. You want to talk about the Prop 22, um, Supreme Court decision, et cetera?

• 1:03:33David Friedberg?

  Yeah, there was an appeals court.

• 1:03:36Jason Calacanis?

  Appeals court.

• 1:03:37David Friedberg?

  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, um, 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, um, you know, fought very hard to pass legislation in California that made it, um, effectively very difficult for people to operate as independent contractors and forcing companies like Uber and Lyft to treat them like full-time employees or to treat them like employees.

• 1:04:15David Friedberg?

  And so Prop 22 was to counter the union-funded legislation, um, which basically provided more freedom and flexibility to workers where there weren't all these very arbitrary random rules that if you're a writer, you can be an independent contractor, but if you're a driver, you cannot, you know, all this nonsense that that took place because the unions were trying to increase the scale and scope of their union base. Um, and so Prop 22 was passed in California after much spending and lobbying and it passed by a pretty decent margin. And then this court ruling, basically in the appeals court, overruled the constitutionality of some elements of Prop 22, which brings into question whether that Prop 22 is actually going to hold in California. Therefore, are all these people who are drivers for Uber, delivery people for DoorDash, um,

• 1:05:00David Friedberg?

  and all these companies that are creating like Thumbtack and, you know, all these companies that are creating marketplaces for individuals to have flexible work, to go and work where they want, when they want, to find gigs, to find, you know, short-term jobs, to find, um, you know, tasks and projects that they can run. Are they now going to be seeing that those marketplaces stop working? Because when you have to start treating those people like employees, the flexibility and freedom that those marketplaces enable stalls out and and kind of, you know, as we're already seeing. So it's it's super nasty and the implications are that we're now seeing, um, You know, we're now facing once again this crisis of, you know, our basically lower

• 1:05:41David Friedberg?

  income people, people that want to have flexible labor, going to be restricted from having access to gig jobs, because the unions want to force everyone into a full-time job, which, you know, as our friend Bill Gurley pointed out, is kind of like an archaic element of, yeah, the 19th and 20th century. I mean, this is like a old school way of work.

• 1:05:59Jason Calacanis?

  Let's play a clip from Bill Gurley, and here it is.

• 1:06:01Speaker 05

  There's one big issue that I don't think is talked about enough, which is, you know, if you poll the drivers, they're not looking for any changes. They're really happy with the flexible work product. If you look at the voters of California, they stepped up and voted and made it very clear, in a state that voted 2 to 1, 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 to call them a single union understates it, because they are the granddaddy of special interest groups. I sent along some data,

• 1:06:43Speaker 05

  maybe you can put on the screen. They spend more money lobbying than any other organization in our country, and have for many, many years. They only represent 2 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 want to expand their footprint. What they're really after is putting $400, $420, which is the minimum member-union fee for the 2 million they have, they want to expand that to these drivers. So they don't actually want to help them, they want to add to their cost. But they're the one that's been pushing this the whole time.

• 1:07:26David Friedberg?

  And I think it's worth just saying one thing on this, which is, you know, this is really kind of a question not about California and Prop 22, but it's a question about what is work. And all the tech companies that are enabling a new form of work globally. People don't want to have 40-hour-a-week jobs. People don't want to have to go sit at a desk all the time. People want to have flexibility in their lives. They want to have gigs. Technology enables us to quickly find short-term jobs, short-term opportunities to work on things and make some money and figure out how we want to build our lives in a more flexible way, figure out how workers want to build lives in a more flexible way across all industries. And it's really, frankly, you know, a non-progressive policy to say

• 1:08:11David Friedberg?

  that everyone has to be pigeonholed into working, you know, full-time, 40-hour-a-week labor jobs, be employees and not have the flexibility of running their own business in their own way with their own time and choosing what they want to go do and work on. And so this sort of legislation and this sort of battle is a really important one for defining the future of work in the United States, which will ultimately represent the future of work globally.

• 1:08:34Jason Calacanis?

  And the craziness of all this, David, is that Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, DoorDash drivers, et cetera, are getting paid a fortune now because there's a labor shortage. And these ride-sharing companies have given a minimum $21 an hour fee. So I don't know exactly what's going on here, but it seems to me like it's a union grab because everybody else who's affluent or rich, real estate folks, you know, doctors, whoever, can be freelance. But if you're a rideshare driver or a freelance rider, you don't get to be. And it seems just incredibly unfair.

• 1:09:15David Sacks?

  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 and prohibit freelance work, flexible hours, gig-type jobs. These are the sort of modern, flexible working relationships that people want. Why are they getting rid of it? Because of lobbying pressure. From the SEIU, which only has 2 million members, it's not even a big union, but they got Lorena Gonzalez in their back pocket. She passed AB5 in California.

• 1:09:57David Sacks?

  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've got this activist judge, basically, you know, inventing these specious grounds for overturning Prop 22, which is what the people want. So it's ridiculous. And, you know, the common thread to me on this show that I've come to realize about American politics is just the degree of special interest corruption. And, you know, people are used to thinking in terms of left versus right. It's not. There's a special interest corruption that pervades everything. You've got this union that is destroying freelance work and flexible working relationships because of corruption, because it benefits them. You've got defense contractors in Afghanistan who are just looting,

• 1:10:42David Sacks?

  looting the Pentagon and the federal budget because it's in their interest. You've got these special interests of both the right and the left. This is the central problem in American politics. And, you know, what they do to cover up the naked self-interest is they disguise it in a kind of woke virtue signaling. So they'll start, you know, talking about, you know, how what they're doing is for the benefit of these drivers when the drivers don't even want it.

• 1:11:06Jason Calacanis?

  And to build on that, I'd say, you know, my great realization from having this conversation with you all every week is that we are starting to propose a nanny state in which people have no agency. Even if they want to have agency over their life and career, you are taking it away. And then if there's no repercussions to people's behavior and they have no agency, they become, you know, disenfranchised from society. And why are they going to participate? And then what kind of society do we have if people can't make their own choices? And you see it also in, you know, accreditation laws. And you see it where only rich people can invest. And now you're seeing it with this freelancing where, you know,

• 1:11:48Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 1:11:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They're willing to participate on things that ultimately...

• 1:12:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  On things that they think matter, but don't necessarily solve the core root cause problems. There are people right now in America, I think, are focused too much on symptoms. Meaning, you know, they want to fight for the right hashtags. They want to fight for the right pronouns. They want to make sure that, you know, this person gets canceled for things that happened eight or 10 years ago. And I think what they don't understand is these are all symptoms. And this is, this is not what solves the problem. Right? We have a water crisis in America. We have a food, impending food crisis as we shut off the water. We have a climate crisis that's engulfing the entire nation.

• 1:12:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're still in the middle of a pandemic that we can't control. We have an economic system that's fragile, that's dependent on a country who's sometimes our friend and sometimes our foe in China. These are huge transformational issues that we can't get organized around. And so instead, we spend our time at the edges on the symptoms. And we think the symptoms are if we get the pronouns right, everything's going to come together and everything's going to get fixed. The looting will stop, the graft will stop, the corruption will stop. And it turns out, actually, it emboldens those people to say, hey, wait a minute, I'm tricking these people. Everything that I wanted to happen can happen. Let them focus on the pronouns while I continue to loot the American Treasury for another trillion dollars.

• 1:13:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's where we are.

• 1:13:31David Sacks?

  Yeah, and the perfect, the perfect representation of that is Gavin Newsom. He represents both of these trends. He is one of the most corrupt governors we've ever had. There were, 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 woke virtue signaling. And so, you know, I would just give a shout out to the recall campaign. The election is on September 14th, but the ballots have gone out. If you want to send a message to the political class that this special interest corruption has got to stop, let's cut the head off the snake here.

• 1:14:16David Sacks?

  Just vote to recall Gavin Newsom on question one.

• 1:14:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Period.

• 1:14:20Jason Calacanis?

  All right. You guys want to end on Jeff Bezos? Let's, let's, 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. And it's basically their robots which have been picking up heavy objects and walking around doing parkour. If you don't know what parkour is, it's basically people jumping off the side of objects and flipping and doing balance beams and vaulting themselves all around. It is basically robots. It's like breakdancing in France. Yeah, but from heights and jumping over things as well. The French are like parkour experts.

• 1:15:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, I think parkour is French for jumping. I made that up. But if you look at these.

• 1:15:10David Friedberg?

  Have you seen Sax do parkour?

• 1:15:12Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, no, absolutely. I have never seen him do.

• 1:15:16David Friedberg?

  We'll show that video.

• 1:15:17Jason Calacanis?

  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 Sax in 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 Friedberg has some inside information on that. And then they got sold again. SoftBank had bought them and now they are owned by Hyundai, the South Korean, Hyundai, the South Korean automaker, because apparently the softies at Google didn't want to be involved in government contracting with robots, i.e. making soldiers of the future, which obviously the Chinese have.

• 1:16:02David Friedberg?

  I wouldn't characterize the whole story like that. I mean, remember like.

• 1:16:05Jason Calacanis?

  What was it?

• 1:16:06David Friedberg?

  Well, Google bought Boston Dynamics in 2013.

• 1:16:10David Friedberg?

  And remember, Boston Dynamics had been around for over a decade prior to that. They spun out of MIT like in the 90s, I think. And they were, had always been working on, you know, advanced neural nets being applied to kind of, you know, automation systems so you could get things to mimic real life. And the idea at Google, this was when they had set up Google X and were starting to kind of do a lot of this, you know, moonshot type tech, tech investing as a separate entity outside of the core Google. And it was like leveraging their cash flow to start new projects. The idea was let's, you know, build this into kind of a next gen robotics platform. They had Andy Rubin, who previously started and ran Android. Company was called Danger, Google bought it, turned into Android.

• 1:16:55David Friedberg?

  Run the, run the unit and they made several other acquisitions. They rolled them all up into this kind of robotics platform. They had spent, I think, 400 million on Boston Dynamics and hundreds of 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 and place things? Or an automation system that can move things from point A to point B? And so if you're solving for a customer's problem,

• 1:17:39David Friedberg?

  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.

• 1:17:52Jason Calacanis?

  Parallel the discussion between narrow AI and general AI.

• 1:17:56David Friedberg?

  And this is exactly the same question, J. Cal is like, you know, is, you know, is general purpose AI really what the market needs? Or are there specific applications of neural network or machine learning technologies that allow us to solve for the problems that customers have without needing to replicate the human being? So when you're lifting boxes, you don't necessarily need all the other things that humans have, right? You don't need to mimic a human. When you're moving a package, you don't necessarily need to have four legs to do it. You can have it on four wheels and just have a simple system that moves it around. And so, you know, I think SoftBank, you know, Mas's son had this whole belief with Vision Fund One, when he raised a hundred 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

• 1:18:40David Friedberg?

  dexterity and all these things were about, was about to kind of, we're about to pass that moment. And this was part of that core thesis he had, which is this is going to be the robotics company. And I think, as we've seen, they can mimic parkour, but they can't do all the other things humans can do. And if you're, you know, trying to get a machine to do something that a customer needs, it's really not parkour.

• 1:19:00Jason Calacanis?

  Let's be honest, they can't even walk a dog because they wouldn't know how to deal with the edge cases, uh, if the dog had diarrhea.

• 1:19:06David Friedberg?

  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.

• 1:19:20Jason Calacanis?

  So in related, in a related story, Elon then, uh, revealed the Tesla bot plans at his AI day, he's in a couple of his AI days, and I think they're primarily designed, um, to get AI talent, which is some of the hardest developers to find in the world. Um, and they said that their Tesla bot will weigh 125 pounds, five eight, so I'll be a half inch taller than it, um, but it will weigh significantly less than me and it will move up, up to five miles per hour and can carry 45 pounds. Uh, Elon said the reason he was doing that is so a human can easily overtake it in case it becomes sentient, which was quite entertaining. Uh, Chamath, do you think this is, what are the chances Elon has a robot like this and, um, it's operating in the real world?

• 1:20:03Jason Calacanis?

  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 Teslas on the road.

• 1:20:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, no comment, and I think, uh, it's awesome.

• 1:20:13Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay, can't comment. All right, leave it at that. Uh, Sax, you have any comments on this?

• 1:20:19David Sacks?

  You worked with Elon at PayPal? Yeah, 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 thing?

• 1:20:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, well, I just wanted to let people know. By the way, the robot going at five miles an hour, it's not as outlandish as any of the journalists and idiots out there who don't build anything in the world who were kind of dunking on him like we're saying. If you think about those cars going 65, 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.

• 1:21:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think all those people dunking on him should have just taken a step back and actually asked the question, am I just being really insecure right now? And if so, why am I making fun of this guy who just seems to be, you know, firing on all cylinders? And maybe it's, maybe it's me. Maybe, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe I'm writing this article out of my own insecurity. Maybe I'm feeling a little impotent.

• 1:21:27David Sacks?

  And also to dunk on a guy for the version one, or even the version 0.1 of a product is so ridiculous. I mean, I remember the version zero of Tesla. Now look at the company. I mean, you know, it's about iterating. That's how you get to product. So it's just so stupid in short term.

• 1:21:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And by the way, his-

• 1:21:46David Sacks?

  To dunk on the current product capabilities.

• 1:21:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And his, his, his style of doing these things, I think, makes a ton of sense. When, when, you know, he started with Starlink, it was the same reaction. People were dunking, dunking, dunking, too slow, too expensive, not going to work. And what you find through these events are really technical people building companies that could help him want to be a part of the mission. Right? And so, you know, for whatever it's worth, it's like, I think Starlink's going to be a real thing. I think- This is probably going to be a real thing. I think great companies will get absorbed into this, these efforts. I think, I think it's great. And I really think the people that are just so low, like, there's like this loathing going on. I just don't understand.

• 1:22:30David Friedberg?

  Chamath, what do you think will differentiate the opportunity for success with Larry Page owning and running Boston Dynamics, then Masa owning and running Boston Dynamics, and then Elon trying to take on the same project from scratch? You know, why were these other two kind of well-capitalized, influential businesses that have attract rate partners not been able to turn Boston Dynamics into kind of a successful business, but, but you guys believe Elon will?

• 1:22:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If I had to just categorize them, I would say Larry is absent and is sitting on a hundred billion dollar fortune with no idea what to do. I think Masa is-

• 1:23:08Jason Calacanis?

  On one of seven islands.

• 1:23:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 1:23:33Jason Calacanis?

  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 going to 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 bet on it by 10x.

• 1:24:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But it's also, it's also a skill set. Like Masa-

• 1:24:02Jason Calacanis?

  Of course.

• 1:24:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is an incredible visionary and investor, but he's not going to be the guy-

• 1:24:06Jason Calacanis?

  Correct.

• 1:24:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In the engine room, making the robot. Larry, now, in fairness to Larry Page, he could be that good. And there was a moment in time where Larry was that good, and frankly, better than Elon. But that window has closed and it's well past. And now, you know, it's kind of like the player that just keeps getting better and better. I think that's Elon Musk. Go ahead, Sax, your thoughts?

• 1:24:25David Sacks?

  I mean, nothing to add to that. I think you both made great points. I mean, the amazing thing is that Elon is still working so hard, doubling down, coming up with new ideas, new initiatives. I mean, it's incredible.

• 1:24:34Jason Calacanis?

  Working harder than ever.

• 1:24:35David Sacks?

  When most people are, you know, doing, most people would do what Larry did, you know, go buy an island.

• 1:24:40Jason Calacanis?

  Or seven.

• 1:24:41David Sacks?

  And yours and hang out, you know?

• 1:24:43Jason Calacanis?

  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, infographics, talking about how terrible SpaceX's plans were. This lawsuit has delayed SpaceX's work on the project, according to The Verge. I don't know if that's true or not. Amazon urged the FCC to dismiss the newly submitted plans for SpaceX to launch

• 1:25:20Jason Calacanis?

  another cluster of satellites to power Starlink. And Elon tweeted, "Turns out Bezos retired in order to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX," which is hilarious. What, how sad is this?

• 1:25:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 1:25:52Jason Calacanis?

  What do technical people do?

• 1:25:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We don't, we don't take our toys and run from the sandbox crying like a bitch. We stay there and we keep iterating, trying to make things work.

• 1:26:01David Sacks?

  Yeah, we don't act like patent trolls. I have a new, I have a new slogan for you, J. Cal.

• 1:26:05Jason Calacanis?

  Go ahead.

• 1:26:06David Sacks?

  Winners do and losers sue.

• 1:26:08Jason Calacanis?

  Winners do and losers sue. Okay, folks, there you have it. It's the All In Podcast. We're back. We're back from a big vacation.

• 1:26:16David Sacks?

  Young Spielberg.

• 1:26:17Jason Calacanis?

  Young Spielberg, make it happen.

• 1:26:18David Sacks?

  Yeah, make the banger.

• 1:26:19Jason Calacanis?

  Make the banger. All right, everybody. Friedberg, what's your, Friedberg, do you have any thoughts on these lawsuits?

• 1:26:25David Friedberg?

  I feel bad for Bezos. I feel like he's just getting so beat up on this shit. It's, it's honestly, it's a little disappointing, because I think he's got all the right intentions. He's an incredible engineer, obviously an incredible operator. I'd love to see him and Elon succeed in the work they're trying to do, as well as all the other startups that are pursuing this. I am concerned about frankly, the lack of commercial readiness for this industry. I feel like in terms of the hype cycle, we're at that early point where the investment dollars in 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.

• 1:27:07David Friedberg?

  And so they're all fighting over one or two customers and you know Elon filed suits against the you know, federal agencies when he lost contracts.

• 1:27:16Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, he did that when they no bid them.

• 1:27:19David Friedberg?

  I get it. I get it. And slightly different. I get it. But still, like I think at the end of the day, you know, Bezos is willing to put his money where his mouth is. He's offered to put up a billion dollars or more to fund this. I'd love to see multiple companies simultaneously go onto the moon, multiple companies simultaneously go onto Mars. But rather than have, you know, a single contract with one customer. Or have, you know, private industry figure out ways to make money from this and fund it. The challenge is just, it's another product market fit question, right? The market is one customer today.

• 1:27:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but Bezos is almost 60 years old. He's got 150, 200 billion dollars. It's going to cost him two or three billion dollars, 1, 2, 3% of his net worth to do all this. Just fucking do it Bezos and stop crying and filing lawsuits.

• 1:28:05David Friedberg?

  He may end up doing that. Yeah.

• 1:28:06Jason Calacanis?

  But the problem is, he's losing the

• 1:28:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  competitor. No, but he's losing the human capital that's required. So there was a huge, there was a huge little press cycle about this one person who was like the leader 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.

• 1:28:28David Friedberg?

  He's got to crawl out of that hole now.

• 1:28:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Build, iterate and solve. Build, iterate, solve.

• 1:28:35David Friedberg?

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

• 1:28:51Jason Calacanis?

  Bezos has no besties. There's no bestie taking Bezos aside. He's bestie-less Bezos.

• 1:28:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He needs besties.

• 1:28:57Jason Calacanis?

  He may, no, he may have besties, but they're not, they're not doing the job that other besties do for other people. If they're yes men and women and they're not being true besties, they need to tell him when he's got something that's a blind spot. And the blind spot here is he was dunking on Richard Branson and being like, oh, you didn't go to the right height. Here's an infographic. Stop with the fucking infographics, Bezos. What are you, 12 years old? And you're like going to the teacher with like a drawing like, I, I should technically get an A plus and I should be singing the solo for the choir practice. And like some other person is like, got the solo. You get the fucking solo next year, Bezos.

• 1:29:33David Friedberg?

  If Bezos offered you a huge consulting fee, J Cal, would you be his bestie consigliere?

• 1:29:39Jason Calacanis?

  I'm a bestie for hire, for sure. For sure. Our bestie has a service.

• 1:29:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By the way, I hired, I hired this fuck nut. He flies back with me. I mean, he literally ate everything on the plane. And then in the worst.

• 1:29:53Jason Calacanis?

  What are you talking about?

• 1:29:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then, hold on, let me finish.

• 1:29:55Jason Calacanis?

  You were eating tiramisu.

• 1:29:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let me finish.

• 1:29:57Jason Calacanis?

  You doubled on the tiramisu, I singled.

• 1:30:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He said to me, Chamath, you have some great toiletries in the back. I said, yeah, sure. You know, there's Marvis, there's great toothbrushes. And then out of his pocket, he pulls some scope bottles that he had.

• 1:30:12Jason Calacanis?

  More in my bag. I didn't have to buy scope until 2022.

• 1:30:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I, I was shocked.

• 1:30:17Jason Calacanis?

  It's not generic, it's the real scope.

• 1:30:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This motherfucker was looting.

• 1:30:20Jason Calacanis?

  I looted the plane.

• 1:30:22David Friedberg?

  I looted, I looted all your lactaid. We all take advantage of CP.

• 1:30:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh my God, this, this other guy, this motherfucker, Free Bird, once was so buried, he got so fucking mad. He grabbed all the lactaid in my, you know, our little medicine cabinet, ran out, then came 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 them in his pocket.

• 1:30:49David Friedberg?

  It's like an Afghan warlord.

• 1:30:52David Friedberg?

  He's just stealing everything.

• 1:30:55David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's all the same.

• 1:30:56Jason Calacanis?

  I remember that night. The Latin, the Latin. He's like, fuck it, I lost 10 dimes. I'm gonna get back $37 in Latin.

• 1:31:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:31:04Jason Calacanis?

  So sad, so sad. All right, I'll see you. Wait, Friedberg, you want me to prepare the house? You want me to prepare the, the, the?

• 1:31:10David Friedberg?

  I think so. I think, yeah, I think so. I think so. That'd be awesome if you could do that.

• 1:31:13Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:31:14David Friedberg?

  I'm gonna bring some, uh, I'll bring some tests, some Binax tests, too.

• 1:31:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, just as an aside, Bill Gurley was talking about this. We talked about this early in the pandemic. Why don't we have fucking $1 tests, Friedberg?

• 1:31:25David Friedberg?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:31:25Jason Calacanis?

  Why does everybody not have 100 tests everywhere?

• 1:31:28David Friedberg?

  Binax now tests are literally lateral flow strips. They cost pennies to make. It's insane.

• 1:31:33Jason Calacanis?

  How much does it cost to buy?

• 1:31:34David Friedberg?

  20 bucks.

• 1:31:35Jason Calacanis?

  Why is it not a dollar? Why couldn't Biden or Trump get that done? Is it some grift, graft, greed?

• 1:31:42David Friedberg?

  Yeah, you should get Mike Mina on to talk about this. He's, uh, the, uh, the guy to talk about it, but, um.

• 1:31:49Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if people were taking those every day, we could.

• 1:31:51David Friedberg?

  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 and liquid oxygen tanks and all this shit, we should have been printing antigen tests on strips of paper. We have the facilities in the US to do it. And we could have made, you know, 100 billion 50 cent tests, um, and made them just free and available to schools, to workplaces, to everything. It's absolutely insane that we let kind of the.

• 1:32:21Jason Calacanis?

  People can't be freelance riders or drive an Uber for two hours a day in California.

• 1:32:24David Friedberg?

  Exactly.

• 1:32:25Jason Calacanis?

  We can, we can mandate that, but we can't mandate a 25 cent, 50 cent test and put them in everybody's fucking mailboxes. I'm on fire now. It's fucking stupid. Everything is so dumb. Everybody's a grifter in this government, incompetent assholes.

• 1:32:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would like to, I would like to vote.

• 1:32:41Jason Calacanis?

  Newsom.

• 1:32:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would like to go to, uh, war with, uh, Fiji, cause it's beautiful.

• 1:32:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'd like an island and I think that Fiji probably has a lot of them.

• 1:32:53Jason Calacanis?

  Well Fiji is not respecting pronouns, so we should go there.

• 1:32:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's a little closer.

• 1:32:58Jason Calacanis?

  We could go there and spread pronouns.

• 1:33:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Also, I'd like to go to war with Iceland, but only in the summertime because I hear it's beautiful there.

• 1:33:06Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going to war with Tuscany over the gelato. I'm going to war with Florence over gelato. I'm going to occupy Tuscany for the pizza and the pasta. I'm occupying Tuscany.

• 1:33:18David Sacks?

  You'll need to build a Bagram in all these places just to accommodate all the private jets are going to come in.

• 1:33:24Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, but just in closing, let's just, let's just say thank you to the amazing people of Italy for having the greatest country for adults to go on vacation in.

• 1:33:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What an incredible country.

• 1:33:37Jason Calacanis?

  Florence is amazing. Tuscany is outrageous.

• 1:33:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Rome is beautiful. Venice is incredible.

• 1:33:42Jason Calacanis?

  Everything is delightful. I love you. I love you, Italy. I love you so much and I'll be back next year. All right, we'll see you next time. Oh, just love to see you. I'll see you next time on the All In Podcast. Bye, bye.

• 1:34:53Jason Calacanis?

  David Sacks, you come to me from your boat in Sicily

• 1:35:01Jason Calacanis?

  on my daughter's wedding day. Sacks, you come to me and you ask me not to interrupt you so that Henry Belacaster can make a clean cut of your speech. Well, you can stop by acting like a man, David Sacks. Mahoo, I got interrupted on the podcast. Oh, you didn't let me finish my thought.

• 1:35:25Jason Calacanis?

  You wanted this part? You wanted this part on this podcast? Who's the director? Who's the producer? I'll get you this part. But someday, Sacks. I'm gonna ask you for a favor, Sacks. I'm gonna ask you for an allocation in All In

• 1:35:42Jason Calacanis?

  in your calling app. I'm gonna ask you to lead the series B. And on that day, I expect evaluation, cause measure it with what I have done for you today.

• 1:35:55Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, David Sacks?

• 1:35:59Jason Calacanis?

  It was a pretty good bit.

• 1:36:00David Sacks?

  Look at Don Cannoli over here.