E148: McCarthy ousted, border chaos, Cruise's robotaxi "accident" & more

(0:00) Bestie intros: Jason's operation! (1:57) Airtable correction (5:03) McCarthy ousted as Speaker of the House, what the eight defecting Republicans are looking for, solving the omnibus spending problem (25:20) US Southern Border: Understanding the situation based on data (44:39) Cruise robotaxi "accident" in SF, lack of risk tolerance limiting technological progress in the West (1:09:09) JSX facing potential regulatory capture from incumbent airlines and Friedberg's trip to The Sphere 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 Referenced in the show: https://apnews.com/article/mccarthy-gaetz-speaker-motion-to-vacate-congress-327e294a39f8de079ef5e4abfb1fa555 https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/03/politics/republicans-vote-remove-mccarthy-house-speaker https://www.wsj.com/politics/nancy-mace-explains-why-she-nixed-kevin-mccarthy-as-house-speaker-32148d9d https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/04/kevin-mccarthy-speaker-vote-press-conference https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-oust-mccarthy-matt-gaetz-remove-speaker-of-the-house https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/congress-has-long-struggled-to-pass-spending-bills-on-time https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1709321746673786896 https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/08/politics/house-speaker-republican-vote-mccarthy-webster-chaffetz https://www.wsj.com/economy/central-banking/rising-interest-rates-mean-deficits-finally-matter-74249719 https://twitter.com/CollinRugg/status/1709728378339705099 https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-announces-first-bus-of-migrants-arrives-in-new-york-city https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1556727876757737474 https://youtu.be/-09DzvdLaEw https://apnews.com/article/migrants-new-york-adams-abbott-colombia-58d423ab3e84e5692d50f773803254 https://www.nytimes.com/article/nyc-migrant-crisis-explained.html https://www.statista.com/statistics/455813/alien-apprehensions-by-the-us-border-patrol-by-border https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/border-apprehensions-hit-new-yearly-high-another-migrant-caravan-gathers-n1281995 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/migrant-border-crossings-fiscal-year-2022-topped-276-million-breaking-rcna53517 https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/29/supreme-court-migrant-protection-protocols-remain-mexico-biden https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2023/08/31/border-families-record-crossings-biden https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/23/us/mexico-us-border-patrol-agreement-migration-surge/index.html https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-22176.pdf https://www.nextgenborder.com https://www.anduril.com/hardware/sentry https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-quietly-auctions-trump-border-wall-parts-stunt-republican-effort-restart-construction-report https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB994028904620983237 https://twitter.com/Cruise/status/1709114532042576305 https://twitter.com/usENTchannel/status/1707035020098142404 https://www.valuepenguin.com/car-accident-statistics https://waymo.com/blog/2023/05/waymo-one-doubles-service-area-in.html https://www.jsx.com https://www.united.com https://twitter.com/PopBase/status/1708164333451289062 https://twitter.com/latest_gg/status/1709948932489445478 https://twitter.com/SBJ/status/1677419552991244289 https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/jet-service-jsx-lands-at-center-of-pilot-fight-86a4f669 https://keep-jsx-flying.webflow.io https://www.votervoice.net/JSXAir/Campaigns/107888/Respond

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

• 0:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How was your colonoscopy, by the way?

• 0:01Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, well, uh, that was, uh...

• 0:03David Sacks?

  Talk about your anus.

• 0:05Jason Calacanis?

  Talk about my anus. Have you guys had yours recently? Who's had a colonoscopy?

• 0:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I had mine in December.

• 0:10Jason Calacanis?

  Is that your first one?

• 0:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, my first one.

• 0:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I was delinquent on mine, too. They used to be 50 and they moved the age down to 45. Yeah, they didn't move the age down. Freebrock, have you had one yet?

• 0:21Jason Calacanis?

  That's a yes. We got a yes.

• 0:22David Sacks?

  I'm due.

• 0:23Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, have you had yours?

• 0:24David Sacks?

  I'm due.

• 0:24Jason Calacanis?

  By the way, I got a report, because actually Sax, you did have one. And they found a bunch of DeSantis merchandise up there. You found a DeSantis hat, a DeSantis pin, tons of DeSantis stuff right up your ass. At our age, we should be four for four on the colonoscopies. We're one for four. We gotta get that stat up. Every week, I want to check in here. Propofol, uh, shout out Michael Jackson, is the greatest drug ever. I counted 15 seconds. I was knocked out. I woke up and the next thing I know, I was in the recovery area.

• 0:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Were you groggy?

• 0:54Jason Calacanis?

  I was not groggy. No, I was fine. You literally don't remember anything. No pain, no suffering. I did have-

• 0:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Were you able to have a regular schedule the rest of the day?

• 1:02Jason Calacanis?

  Not really, so, uh, I don't want to dissuade anybody from having this, but you do have to take a drink called PrEP, which clears you out. And when I say clears you out-

• 1:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, I love that. Oh, I love it.

• 1:12Jason Calacanis?

  It clears you out. Yeah, I hit a record low weight. I'm 168 now, so that was the one benefit.

• 1:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, how much weight did you lose?

• 1:18Jason Calacanis?

  Three pounds, maybe?

• 1:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Come on.

• 1:21Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Were you working when you were prepping?

• 1:23Jason Calacanis?

  No. I was working when I was prepping. So Monday when I was prepping, but then, literally, you take this PrEP stuff, an hour later, you're, you need to be ready to evacuate at any time.

• 1:34David Sacks?

  Normally, the diarrhea is coming out of your mouth.

• 1:36Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely, absolutely. Well played. There's your colonoscopy, folks.

• 1:57Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome to another amazing episode of the All In Podcast, episode 148. The docket is absurd. The number of lawsuits and the amount of news that has happened in just the last week has been insane. But we want to, at the top of the show, do a quick correction, right? It's an all-in correction. If we make a mistake here, we don't hide it in the show notes. We just talk about it right up front. Sax, you were in touch with the Airtable CEO, Howie Lu, who's been a guest on This Week in Startup, so I'm going to have him on again, actually, soon. Maybe you could just discuss what we got wrong and how we got it wrong, and then what the correct facts are about Airtable, just quickly here at the top of the show.

• 2:37David Sacks?

  Yeah, well, we had a segment a couple of weeks ago where we were talking about these high-priced, late-stage unicorn rounds needing to get revalued. And the IPO of Instacart was a good example of this, where, yes, it IPO'd at about $10 billion, but the last private round was at $39 billion. So there is a big wave of revaluations or down rounds coming. And we cited some numbers off the internet regarding Airtable. As it turns out, not everything on the internet is true.

• 3:07Jason Calacanis?

  And you're talking about specific journalists might have gotten it wrong?

• 3:10David Sacks?

  Well, this is actually a tweet storm on X that, from a financial account, that, you know, appeared on the surface to be correct. And in fact, it did have some correct information, but it was outdated. It was stale. So just the quick correction here is that the amount of ARR that we cited, which I think was around $150 million, was accurate as of the time they did the last round, but that was like three years ago. Furthermore, the growth rate that was cited, which I think was around 15%, that was off. That was off by about a 3X multiple. So when you put all these things together, I wasn't able to get the exact numbers, but if you just do a little bit of napkin math here, my guess is that Airtable

• 3:53David Sacks?

  is somewhere in the half a billion of ARR club.

• 3:59David Sacks?

  With pretty decent growth. And if you look at the public comps for that, I think the public comps would be something like a Monday, you know, which is doing

• 4:08Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 4:09David Sacks?

  Five to 600 million of ARR coming off a 50% growth rate, maybe forecasting 30% for the next year. That company has been hovering around the $7 or $8 billion valuation range.

• 4:22Jason Calacanis?

  12x.

• 4:23David Sacks?

  Yeah, the claim that was made on X was that Airtable wasn't even worth the 1.4 billion that is raised in VC money. I think that's way off. I mean,

• 4:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 4:32David Sacks?

  And furthermore, you know, what we heard is that Airtable still has something like two thirds of the money that is raised in the bank. So, look, is Airtable worth the 11 billion that it was valued at at the peak? Probably that's not what the public comps indicate. Would I be a buyer personally at roughly half that price? For sure.

• 4:51Jason Calacanis?

  For sure.

• 4:51David Sacks?

  And I think it'll have a nice IPO at some point when they decide they want to do it.

• 4:55Jason Calacanis?

  So just an important reminder for everybody is, you know, listen, if information's on the interwebs, it may not be correct. But the top news story in the country is unequivocally Kevin McCarthy being ousted as Speaker of the House. On Tuesday, he was voted out in a 216 to 210 vote with eight far-right Republicans joining all of the Democrats. So those eight GOP members include or are led by Matt Gaetz, obviously, a group of, I guess, what would be best described, Saks, as Tea Party-esque members of the GOP contingent. They care mostly about spending and curtailing spending, am I correct?

• 5:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, don't forget all the Democrats.

• 5:40Jason Calacanis?

  Well, yeah, I'm putting the Democrats on, I already counted them. I'm just talking about the eight who made this tip over.

• 5:44David Sacks?

  The media is trying to portray them as these far-right, you know, wingers. And I don't think you can necessarily say that because I don't think Nancy Mace fits in that group. I think she does care about spending, but she's not just like MAGA.

• 5:55Jason Calacanis?

  Is it far-right to care about spending? I mean, far-right to me would be more MAGA.

• 5:57David Sacks?

  That's exactly right. I mean, anything that the media doesn't like, they label far-right. But I think Nancy Mace is a good example of somebody who is very concerned about spending discipline, but is not like a MAGA type Republican.

• 6:11Jason Calacanis?

  But what is the, and just to just refine this one more time before I keep going, those eight would, the common thread would be control spending. We're at, we have out of control spending is, is the reason they're voting a no vote for Kevin McCarthy?

• 6:25David Sacks?

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

• 6:48Jason Calacanis?

  And their main issues were?

• 6:50David Sacks?

  Well, I think there's a couple. One was on spending. He had promised that he would stop doing these giant omnivist spending bills where everything would be lumped into one bill. You get like 24 hours to read it and then you got to vote up or down on whether you pass this giant spending bill or shut down the government and everyone feels forced to vote for it. He had promised to do single subject spending bills.

• 7:11Jason Calacanis?

  So military, education, welfare, whatever?

• 7:14David Sacks?

  Yeah, that goes through a regular budget process. So they felt like he had broke his promise on that. I think also on the issue of Ukraine, there were some trust issues there because what he was telling Republicans in private was not what he was telling the Biden administration in private, where he was telling the Biden administration, don't worry, we're going to get the Ukraine funding through. But then he was sounding different notes with various Republicans. And I think his true feelings on the matter came out in this press conference he did after he was ousted, in which he goes on this long rant about how Putin's the second coming of Adolf Hitler. And if we don't stop him now, he's going to be, you know, marching into Paris. And I mean, it was sort of this like unhinged

• 7:57David Sacks?

  second grade, American history style of view of, of the war, which regardless of what your view is on it, I think it expressed his true feelings on the matter, which is that when push came to shove, he's more hawkish than Joe Biden. On the issue of Ukraine, he feels that Biden has not done enough. It's safe to say that that position is now very out of step with the Republican caucus. So he is pushing a view on Ukraine that is now very out of step. Moreover, I think that if he had just acted as an honest broker on the issue, which is to say, listen, I'm just going to represent the views of my caucus. My caucus is divided on the issue. I'm just going to let them have an up or down vote on it. Then I think he could have survived on that issue.

• 8:40David Sacks?

  But instead, again, I think he was trying to manipulate things in a direction of continuing Ukraine funding regardless of the views of his caucus.

• 8:48Jason Calacanis?

  Gates wants to end CR's continuing resolutions. Those extend the funding deadline from October 1st to the holidays, claiming this buys Congress time to lump all those individual promotion bills into the omnibus bill, as you correctly pointed out. Gates wants to end that practice and return to regular order. Passage of individual annual spending bills, not the omnibus.

• 9:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The context that I think is important, that I think is that the American public should understand is how is this actually supposed to work so that we don't normalize what these CRs are? So the way that it's supposed to work is that Congress is authorized by law to create 12 spending bills a year. And each of those bills have to map to the large parts of the government. So there's a military bill, there's an education bill, there's a, you know, HHS bill, et cetera, et cetera. And those are supposed to be negotiated on the House floor and passed. The Senate is allowed to do a version of the same. If those two things are different, meaning the Senate doesn't take the House bill and

• 9:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  creates their own, the law says that you have to create what's called a conference. And a group of people, half senators and half congresspeople, sit in a room, hash out and mediate a resolution, and that is what goes to the president's desk to be signed. That's how it used to be done. But about a decade ago, all of that broke down.

• 10:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And now what happens is you have this thing that Sacks mentioned, which is called the CR, which is essentially a backdoor. It's this release valve that is supposed to be an in-emergency break glass type measure that has become fundamentally normalized. And I think what's important to call out is what happened here isn't getting the just attention because it's being characterized on party lines and not actually being characterized with how America is legally supposed to work as defined in the Constitution. So the Congress is supposed to pass 12 spending bills a year. It's then supposed to get negotiated or approved by the Senate, and then it should go to the President.

• 10:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  When you override that with these continuing resolutions, this is the issue that Friedberg's been talking about. You balloon the deficit, you balloon the debt, you have all kinds of pork barrel spending, there's zero accountability, the bullets cost $6,000, the umbrella holders cost $15,000, all of this nonsense that just brings us closer and closer to some sort of default or economic contagion. So I actually look at this issue not as Republican versus Democrat, the far-right wing. I think that's misguided interpretation by the mainstream media. I think what this is, is the first chance in a while where you're not allowed to pass a continuing resolution, where you will have to propose 12 bills the way the law says

• 11:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  you're supposed to. And what that'll mean is that you'll have to negotiate a compromise to get those 12 bills passed. Now, what's crazy is the Senate actually has six of those bills on their desk, and they haven't even negotiated it. And I think the reason is because they know that the CR is always in the offing. But if this continuing resolution is not allowed because you fired the Speaker, then they'll have to negotiate those bills. And part of what McCarthy did to get elected was say, "We will return to the law." And not use the in emergency break class. And I think that's what's not, it's not understood well, I think, by Americans as that is the actual process. We haven't been doing it for a decade.

• 12:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I'm not a fan of Gates. But I'm glad that somebody did this because somebody has to draw a line in the sand. The Republicans and Democrats equally have been responsible for breaking the way the American government spends money. And so this is the best way to fix it.

• 12:37Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, you agree with what's gone down here and that this is worth shutting the government down, et cetera? Or do you think this is like where to make the stand? Because you've been very pro controlling spending, SFI. And so do you think that this is the best way to do it, I guess?

• 12:55David Friedberg?

  It's more about the United States is facing a fiscal emergency. National debt, reported by the Treasury Department, increased by $275 billion in a one day report yesterday. $275 billion in a day. The entire TARP program during O A was $400 billion. That's how out of control our fiscal condition is. And this is a function of rising rates, a function of spending. And, you know, as we talked about many times over, there's an arithmetic to this that at some point it becomes ever escalating until you step in and do something dramatic about it. So I'm hopeful and I mean, there's a lot of rhetoric. You can watch all the news channels and see a lot of these congresspeople get on camera and talk about different things.

• 13:40David Friedberg?

  I think we're seeing more frequently now, people talking about the fiscal crisis that the US is facing. And that this action provides a mechanism, as Chamath points out, for forcing everyone to the table to figure out, how do we reduce the impact? How do we chart a path to a solution? Because right now, if you asked anyone in Congress, what's the strategic plan here? There is not going to be an answer from anyone. Everyone's got a different point of view and everyone's fighting over the deck chairs. On the Titanic, and we've got a more significant problem. We're hitting an iceberg. So, yeah, I'm hopeful that this causes hopefully a turning point in the never-ending spending spree,

• 14:25David Friedberg?

  where everyone gets elected and everyone promises to the folks that they're representing and the folks that funded their political campaigns, some amount of money back out from the government, and everyone gets that free money. And at some point, something's got to turn around or the whole thing kind of goes down. So hopefully this is that moment. I don't know.

• 14:43Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks, do you think that this is...

• 14:44David Friedberg?

  By the way, if the government shut down for weeks and months to try and figure this out and for everyone to get aligned with here's the long-range strategic plan presented to the American people on how we prevent the US from either inflation or bankruptcy, then I think everyone will feel like it was worth it.

• 15:02Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks, there's been tons of speculation about what this is, what's, what this is actually about? Is it about Ukraine? Is it about out-of-control spending? Is it about Matt Gaetz and Kevin McCarthy having some sort of personal grudge against each other? What do you, what do you think is at the core of this, Sacks?

• 15:17David Sacks?

  Well, probably all of the above, but I think it's fundamentally a rejection of the status quo. Kevin McCarthy, if nothing else, is a figure of the status quo. I mean, he's worked for 20 years through the system. He's a great fundraiser. I actually attended an event for him down the street here. Of course, all the donors love him. And, look, I like Kevin McCarthy. I've contributed to Kevin McCarthy. But at the end of the day, I'm not sure that Kevin McCarthy is a guy who's going to get us out of this mess. And the fundamental problem is he's just too conciliatory. And the idea that you're going to impose spending discipline and get us out of the budgetary mess that we're in, the idea that you're going to make that omelet without breaking a few eggs, I think is just kind of silly. So I think we need a tougher speaker who's going to actually

• 16:02David Sacks?

  live up to the promises of stopping these omnibus bills, going back to single-subject bills, who is going to represent the views of the majority of the Republican caucus on, you know, indefinite, infinite Ukraine spending, because he's kind of off-center of the Republican Party on that.

• 16:19Jason Calacanis?

  Why can't the Republican Party... Be in unison on this is explain what the what's the rift inside the GOP right now?

• 16:28David Sacks?

  Well, the GOP actually has debates in this party. What you see is the Democrats are in total lockstep and they just support whatever is the status quo. But the Republicans actually have debates inside their party and there is a big debate right now on how we handle Ukraine. And I think there is growing opposition to a blank check as long as it takes policy towards Ukraine. We've already appropriated over 100 billion. What's the return on investment of that? The counteroffensive failed.

• 16:54Jason Calacanis?

  That's the key. You think that's the key, not the the CRs?

• 16:57David Sacks?

  I think it's both of those issues combined with the fact that increasingly McCarthy was not seen as an honest broker. Listen, I think McCarthy could have had whatever views he wanted to if he was perceived as somebody who actually represented a majority of the Republican caucus. But what Nancy Mace, what Matt Gaetz, what these others who rebelled were saying is, listen, what Kevin told us is not what he did. And I personally witnessed this aspect to McCarthy. Okay, so when I went to this event down the street here, I heard him gave this whole Pootler rant. And then afterwards I came up to him and said, Kevin, what are you talking about? Or do you really want to cause war or three? And all of a sudden he backpedaled and he started saying these conciliatory things.

• 17:38David Sacks?

  And I was like, okay, maybe he just went on this like toot where, you know, it was kind of off topic.

• 17:45Jason Calacanis?

  He tooted?

• 17:47Jason Calacanis?

  Did you retooted?

• 17:50David Sacks?

  But after I kind of had this like sidebar with him, I'm like, okay, maybe it's not so bad. Maybe, you know, I think he he promised that he would impose.

• 17:58Jason Calacanis?

  Saying he's in the pocket of special interests. Let's be clear.

• 18:01David Sacks?

  Well, I think he.

• 18:02Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, not quite, Jason, because he didn't quote tooted. He's just.

• 18:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He didn't quote to it and he just tweeted.

• 18:06Jason Calacanis?

  He retooted it.

• 18:08David Sacks?

  What I would say is that he was really good in any particular meeting at saying conciliatory things to get somebody to like him and to get.

• 18:18Jason Calacanis?

  He's a BS artist is what you're saying.

• 18:20David Sacks?

  Well, I mean, I think a lot of politicians are, right? And so he told me what I wanted to hear. I think he promised that he would get an accountant.

• 18:27Jason Calacanis?

  Would you have been with the eight or with the rest?

• 18:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, and guys, the fundamental.

• 18:29Jason Calacanis?

  I'm just curious, but Sax, would you have voted with the eight or would you vote? With the rest as if you

• 18:33David Sacks?

  I think I would have voted with the aid. I mean, even though I like, look, I like McCarthy. He's a likable guy, but again, I think that press conference he held revealed the truth of it, which is he was BSing me. His real view is that we need to support Ukraine for as long as it takes. And he told me something different.

• 18:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  His grand bargain was that he would stop these continuing resolution pork barrel bills. That was the grand bargain. That was the thing that said, and if I don't do it, you guys can vote me out. Do you guys remember this?

• 19:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 19:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, that was his negotiation. So if this really was kind of like a fait accompli, the minute he decided to pass and yet another pork barrel bill.

• 19:08Jason Calacanis?

  He also seemed kind of frustrated that he just, he seemed like he was spent in dealing with all this.

• 19:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, surprising to me is why the Republican Party allowed Matt Gaetz to get all of the attention and to be like the organizing principle because he's such a loathsome individual to so many people, both in the Republican Party and outside. The guy, the guy broke a fundamental promise and that promise wasn't that provocative. It's just like, yeah, we're going to pass 12 bills. We're just going to follow the law. And he couldn't follow the law. And so why doesn't anybody else stand up? Why does it have to take these eight kind of coalescing with, with the Dems? It's, it's really nutty, actually.

• 19:44David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Jason Calacanis?

  It's a very strange series of events.

• 19:47David Sacks?

  And by the way, I think you make just your last point there. This would not have happened if Hakeem Jeffries didn't send down word that all the Democrats were supposed to vote with Matt Gaetz. I think that this is a vote against their long-term interest because the fact of the matter is that Kevin McCarthy ultimately was a very pliant speaker and he was giving the Democrats what they wanted on spending, on keeping government funded and open forever at higher and higher rates of spending. And on Ukraine, they're never going to get somebody who is more compliant.

• 20:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  To your point, I think what, what is really interesting and hopefully beneficial for America is we've broken the seal on unseating the speaker interim.

• 20:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They kind of like violate a handful of these defined things. And I hope one of these things is the best thing we could do for America is just force all of these folks in Congress to negotiate 12 bills a year. Keep them busy, focus on those bills, get to like a compromise, get it to the Senate, get it voted, get it to the president's side. That's it. If they if they just did that, we would probably spend a third to half of less than we do now.

• 20:57Jason Calacanis?

  Is Gates the winner in all this? Does he look like?

• 20:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By the way, just just so you guys know, like, when you try to propose elements of a bill, right, in one of those real bills, okay, it has to go to the the CBO and it has to get scored, right? So, for example, we've tried to propose certain aspects of legislation. And no matter whatever we think about it, there at least is an independent body that scores it and says, here's the X year cost, the Y year cost, here's the benefits. And so you get a very clear sense and a transparent sense that's published, everybody about what this is. In CR, you can avoid all of that stuff. There is no close study of any of this stuff. And, you know, David is right. You get it on a Thursday night at like 8:00 PM and you vote Friday at 6:00, you know, or like at midday. How

• 21:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  is anybody supposed to approve a multi trillion dollar package logically? You know it's riddled with nonsense.

• 21:49Jason Calacanis?

  It makes no sense that you don't break up the work and do it thoughtfully each time. I guess, should they change this ability for one member to propose a resolution to remove the sitting speaker? Yeah.

• 22:02David Sacks?

  It's comically easy to vacate the speaker based on the rules they passed. However, I think it's important to understand why that rule happened. It happened because McCarthy was so desperate to become speaker. If you go back to the history of this thing, McCarthy was actually passed over for speaker back in 2015, when he made this gaffe on TV about the Benghazi Select Committee being set up to hurt Hillary's poll numbers. Obviously, that wasn't an admission that helped Republicans. And he only got the job this year by making it so easy to take it away from him. And remember, they did like 15 rounds of voting. So this is the problem, frankly, one of the problems with McCarthy is he has a little bit too desperate. Desperate to have the job. Sometimes when you get a guy who is so desperate for a job,

• 22:44David Sacks?

  they're not that effective in it because they're too worried about it being taken away. What you want is a guy who is like, look, take it or leave it. I could do this job or not do this job. That's the only way you're going to get somebody tough in the job. I think the guy they should look to right now would be Jim Jordan. I think Jim Jordan would be excellent because at the end of the day, you want a speaker who's going to be feared not loved, like Nancy Pelosi. Quite frankly, you need a Republican speaker who's going to be tough, who doesn't give a shit if you like him or not. I mean, this is, I think, Kevin's downfall is that he cared too much about people liking him. As a result, in the room, he would always tell you something that you liked. But the problem is that he can't deliver on that.

• 23:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So let's get ready to move on to the next topic, but just a final question here. Do you guys think a shutdown in a couple of weeks, because that's how long the extension is, would be productive for the country if it if it becomes the backstop against out of control spending?

• 23:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If it stops the CR process, it'll be effective to the tune of above $500 billion. It'll be half a trillion dollars effective.

• 23:44Jason Calacanis?

  So the a couple of weeks of the the government not spending money.

• 23:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Meaning if you if you kill the omnibus bill.

• 23:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 23:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And or you have like an extremely slimmed down version of that bill and you revert back to this 12 bills a year process that's supposed to be the law.

• 24:00Jason Calacanis?

  It'll be more effective.

• 24:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You'd save half a trillion dollars.

• 24:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 24:03David Sacks?

  Just to finish the point on that, I think we have to just look at this Wall Street Journal article that came out this morning where it was called Rising Interest Rates Mean Deficits Finally Matter. Finally, there's a recognition.

• 24:14Jason Calacanis?

  We called it. We called it.

• 24:15David Sacks?

  Yeah. Finally, there's a recognition, both politically and economically, that our deficits and debt are too big. And the key point of this article is, it says, most of the increase, this is in long term rates, is due to the part of yields called the term premium, which has nothing to do with inflation or short term rates. So until now, our interest rate problems have been about the Fed raising short term rates to combat inflation. Now we're seeing a separate problem, which is long rates are going up. And the long rates are going up because of this concern that the federal government has too much debt. And so bondholders are starting to demand. And a higher long-term premium to hold that debt is what we've been warning about for a long time now. For a year.

• 24:56David Sacks?

  And it's finally happening. So unless the political system gets serious about reducing deficits, even if inflation comes down and even if the Fed cuts short-term rates, you're going to have a problem with long-term rates remaining high. And that is going to keep the cost of capital high. And that is going to reduce long-term innovation in the economy. It's bad for us. It's horrible for us. Yeah, terrible for us.

• 25:20Jason Calacanis?

  Let's go to another troubling situation. What's happening at the southern border? Obviously, videos of migrants crossing the southern border are all over X, Reddit, YouTube, etc. One side saying it's chaos, the other side arguably been ignoring it. So let's start with the two numbers that we actually know have put a bunch of time into trying to figure out if there are any accurate numbers. Talked to a bunch of people on Twitter and other places. There are only, we have very, very flawed data on what's actually happening there. We do have anecdotal videos. Obviously, our friend Elon went down to the border and did a video himself. The best data with the caveat that it's very flawed is the count of encounters. This is not folks who get through.

• 26:03Jason Calacanis?

  This is folks who were encountered. So this is the official Southernland border encounters from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency since 2022, 2020 and 2021. There were obviously COVID issues on the border, so it was much more locked down. Half a million people in 2020, 1.7 in 2021, 2.4 rounding up there. And in 2023, supposedly rounding up 2 million through 10 months, tracking on pace for 2.3, the exact same as last year. However, it certainly doesn't look like that. It's the exact same. Again, that's from the Border Patrol. And that is encounters, not actually people who got through. And then the border states are saying that those numbers are wrong

• 26:48Jason Calacanis?

  and there's a lot more people getting through. And Eric Adams in New York, where a lot of these people are being sent. And this has obviously been the most politicized issue, I think, of the last decade. Governor Abbott, in August of 2022, quote, "New York City is the ideal destination for these migrants who can receive the abundance of city services and housing that Mayor Adams has boasted about within the sanctuary city." Here are the clips, and then I'll get your responses from those when we get back.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  This is horrific when you think about what the governor is doing, the governor of Texas, but we are going to set the right message, the right tone of being here for these families.

• 27:29Speaker 05

  Before we began busing illegal immigrants up to New York, it was just Texas and Arizona that bore the brunt of all of the chaos and all the problems that come with it. Now the rest of America is understanding exactly what is going on.

• 27:45Jason Calacanis?

  All right, so this is obviously something that New York City is unable to handle. Those are from August of last year when this was flaming up. According to Abbott, Texas has given bus tickets to 42,000 migrants, and as of late September, 119 migrants have arrived in New York City since the spring of '22. About 13% of New York City migrants have been bussed in from Texas. I'll stop there and just get your general reactions to what you all believe is happening at the border, since we're getting a highly politicized take on each of these. It's become super polarized, and the numbers, any accurate numbers, do not exist. Sax?

• 28:24David Sacks?

  I don't think it's hard to understand what's going on at the border. I think there are people who...

• 28:29Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I said it's hard to understand the numbers of what's going on.

• 28:32David Sacks?

  I don't even think the numbers are that hard.

• 28:33Jason Calacanis?

  You have a better source of numbers?

• 28:35David Sacks?

  I have some numbers that are similar to yours, but...

• 28:37Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 28:38David Sacks?

  So, Statista goes back to 2019. So, the numbers I have are about, in 2019, which is when Remain in Mexico went into effect, the number was 851,000. Then it went down to 400,000 because of COVID and Title 42. Then in 2021, we had about 1.7 million, which was a new record. Then in 2022, we were up to 2.7 million, which was a new record. And the question is, what is happening? In two thousand twenty-three, obviously, we don't have a full year of data, but given that we've eliminated Remain in Mexico and Title forty-two, I don't think anybody seriously doubts that we're headed for a new record.

• 29:15David Sacks?

  And in fact, The Washington Post had articles in August and September saying that those months were all-time records, and now they're surpassing eleven thousand daily migrant encounters at the border just twice last week. So, and you know what Elon reported from the border.

• 29:31Jason Calacanis?

  You send that link, can you send that link so we can pull it up?

• 29:33David Sacks?

  Yeah, I'll have to.

• 29:33Jason Calacanis?

  And then also, just so you know.

• 29:34David Sacks?

  That was NBC News.

• 29:36Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I was gonna say, Satista is an aggregator, they don't do primary research, as you know. So, which one?

• 29:41David Sacks?

  Yeah, but those numbers were pretty similar to yours.

• 29:44Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe from the same source.

• 29:45David Sacks?

  We also have the video evidence, we have the fact that Elon went down there and reported exactly what we're seeing in other contexts, which is new records virtually every day and every week and every month. The Border Patrol agents are basically being overrun, and so you made the correct point that this only measures encounters, it doesn't measure the actual number of people going through. Well, if Border Patrol is overrun, then the number of encounters relative to the number of people getting through is obviously going to be very understated. So, I think we're on track for another huge record in two thousand twenty-three, and the point is that the pace is accelerating. Elon gave the simple math, there's eight billion people in the world, how many of them would want to be in the United States if they could? Probably billions.

• 30:29Jason Calacanis?

  At least half of them, yeah.

• 30:30David Sacks?

  At least half of them, and I don't blame them, okay, I want to be in this.

• 30:33Jason Calacanis?

  Best country in the world, yeah.

• 30:35David Sacks?

  Okay, but obviously, we can't handle all the people who want to be here, and the word has gone out via social media, via word of mouth, that the border is effectively open. And we've seen numerous videos, it wasn't just Elon, when RFK went down there to Yuma, Arizona.

• 30:51Jason Calacanis?

  There was a hundred different countries.

• 30:51David Sacks?

  There was a big hole in the wall, and people were just lining up, and.

• 30:54Jason Calacanis?

  But it was a hundred different countries, right? I mean, it was not just Mexico.

• 30:56David Sacks?

  A hundred different countries, and Elon broadcast the exact same thing coming from Eagle Pass. So, the point is, you've got all of these different points where there is no wall, and people are just lining up and being let through, and in some cases, they're just running through because the Border Patrol is overrun. We effectively have no border. I mean, let's admit the truth now.

• 31:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 31:19David Sacks?

  And I think that the mainstream media and the Biden administration, their policy was basically see no evil, hear no evil and to deny the reality of what was happening. Eric Adams was one of the first Democrats to break ranks, saying, listen, we can see the migrants lining up in tents going around the block. We are trying to put them up in hotels. It's costing us $12 billion. We can't afford it. But Eric Adams has always been a little bit of a maverick inside the Democratic Party. We talked about how he was tough on crime during the Chesa Boudin era, which is why I supported him.

• 31:50Jason Calacanis?

  He's a moderate.

• 31:51David Sacks?

  But he was a moderate. But then you had Kathy Hochul, who's the governor of New York, who's nothing if not a machine politician, just in the last week, saying, we cannot handle this. So she broke ranks, which was, I think, a big news story. And now the latest is that the Biden administration itself might be breaking ranks. I think, Chamath, you posted a really interesting story that Mayorkas, who's the Secretary of DHS, just posted a notice in the Federal Register, which said, there is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States. They don't want to say a wall.

• 32:28Jason Calacanis?

  Don't say the W word.

• 32:29David Sacks?

  In order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States. Now, there was no press conference on this. The way that this got reported is some reporter was doing their job, keeping track of the Federal Register, and saw that Mayorkas had posted a notice saying that they need to construct a wall. Now, Biden hasn't said this. No one in the administration said this, but clearly.

• 32:50Jason Calacanis?

  For obvious reasons, yeah.

• 32:51David Sacks?

  For obvious reasons. So.

• 32:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jason, what do you think the obvious reason is?

• 32:54Jason Calacanis?

  Well, the obvious reason is Trump's entire presidency was predicated on, hey, we're going to build this wall. And to go back and say that he was right is untenable to this administration.

• 33:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  National security. It's like.

• 33:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. And so they're going to do the right thing, obviously, and build the wall, but they don't want to say it. So it's just ridiculous. But just one important point to what David said. New York City has a right to shelter. So that means every immigrant who comes there, they have to put them in a hotel. And these are like, turns out, four or $500 a night hotels. So this has become cataclysmic. There obviously needs to be a border. And it's ridiculous to say there shouldn't be a border. Nobody believes that. I don't know why this administration just can't admit that there needs to be a border of some kind. And we could talk about what that is. Well, no, actually, it's a better solution than a wall, but we'll get to that.

• 33:40David Sacks?

  What is it?

• 33:42Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I don't want to jump to him. He had something to say. So, Chamath, I'll explain in a second if you want, or I can jump to it.

• 33:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, jump to it, jump to it.

• 33:48Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so, obviously, people are talking about a wall. Walls are a terrible solution, because there are ladders that can go over them pretty easily. What you really need to have is eyes on it, and the two best solutions, you can see them here, Israel has had a really

• 34:03Jason Calacanis?

  they understand borders really well, and so what you're seeing, if you're watching, are these towers which do a great job of monitoring the border, and you could put about 2,000 of these towers, they have a range of easily a mile. This is next-gen water by EBIT Systems, it's a Israeli-based company, it's 160-foot surveillance tower. Andral actually has a sentry tower as well, our friend, friend of the pod, Palmer Luckey's company, Andral, and obviously, oh, and the Border Patrol already has 10 of the towers.

• 34:35David Sacks?

  Why do you see as an either-or? I'm just curious. Like, why would you do both?

• 34:39Jason Calacanis?

  I think that these smart lampposts, as I call them, are the number-one first thing to do, because you could deploy these in a fraction of the time. You could have 2,000 of these in under a year, for $4 billion, and so these only cost $2 million each. The 10 towers that were put in were put in at $26 million in the pilot, so if you put 2,000 of these towers in, and you just picked four different vendors, so they do 500 each, and you test them, that would be $4 billion. That would be nothing. What do you do when you, when the camera spots a person? You send intercepts there, and then you build the walls where people are crossing most. So, that would be my, that would be the most logical.

• 35:15David Sacks?

  Crossing most. They're crossing at the holes.

• 35:17Jason Calacanis?

  Obviously, you build, you look for hotspots, David, so you would, but we don't, there's hotspots that we don't know about. So, I'd say, you deploy these for $4 billion very quickly, and then where there are hotspots, you obviously build walls. But you're still gonna need-

• 35:27David Sacks?

  Can I be frank about this?

• 35:29Jason Calacanis?

  Sure, be as frank as you like.

• 35:30David Sacks?

  Look, regardless of what you think about Trump, this Mayorkas revelation completely and utterly vindicates his approach to wanting to build a wall, and there's so many people who won't just admit that he was right, that we need a strong border wall, not because it's perfect, not because you can't climb over it if you have the right tools, but because a wall is more defensible- Than an open field. Now, look, I'm all in favor of these towers and the cameras and my understanding is that a lot of the parts of Trump's wall did have cameras on them.

• 35:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I know.

• 36:00David Sacks?

  But the point is that you have video now coming out of thousands of people streaming across, running.

• 36:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the word is out.

• 36:07David Sacks?

  You need a wall to stop that. You also then need cameras and border guards and all the rest of it.

• 36:12Jason Calacanis?

  Just so you know, 2,000 miles of wall is going to be like a decade long project. So that's my only point.

• 36:18David Sacks?

  Okay, it's only a decade long if you allow all of these court challenges that are designed to frustrate it. The fact of the matter is, and look, we don't need 2,000 miles of wall because there are a lot of natural barriers along the border. You know, where you have deep rivers or mountains or whatever, we're not going to need the wall. However, there are pieces of the wall that were literally laying on the ground. They were unfinished from Trump's term. By the way, Trump should have gotten that done. He didn't. In any event, whatever. The point is, the Biden administration was actually selling those pieces of wall for scrap metal for two cents on the dollar. This was a story that came out. Now they're admitting that we need the wall. That was pure politics. That makes no sense. They had the construction materials. They should have just finished it.

• 36:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That is kind of ridiculous.

• 37:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the American public.

• 37:01David Sacks?

  It's utterly ridiculous.

• 37:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's like crazy. It's because the American government didn't like who said the right thing.

• 37:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 37:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And the tone in which he said it.

• 37:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. And they didn't like the separating of children from whatever and they politicized that. Both parties are equally

• 37:19Jason Calacanis?

  just gross to this issue and incompetent. It should be a point based system. You lock the border and you allow people in. You know, as I've said 10 times on this podcast, based on merit, what they're going to contribute to our society, that's recruitment. Some amount of people who are need asylum because they're going to be murdered, i.e. Afghanistan, people who supported us, Afghans who supported us during the war. And then finally, the orderly process of people applying to come in here. Do your jobs, everybody. It's just super easy.

• 37:47David Sacks?

  Please, Nick.

• 37:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What happens when you get to the border, guys? Do you just get admitted to America?

• 37:52David Sacks?

  Guys, this is insane, okay? The Biden administration started auctioning off what they called spare border wall parts, okay? I mean, how does Biden live this down?

• 38:04Jason Calacanis?

  I think this could cost him the election.

• 38:05David Sacks?

  Yeah, you're 100% right about that.

• 38:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think this is like, this is a setup for a very bad ad.

• 38:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Absolutely.

• 38:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, I think this is just because it's become so politicized. Point-based system, recruitment over chaos. Build a wall, build sensor towers.

• 38:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What do you do in the meantime? There are tens of thousands of people a day hitting the southern border.

• 38:26Jason Calacanis?

  We have a National Guard. We have something called the National Guard. We send them there. They have to be deployed anyway. You just deploy the National Guard.

• 38:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but say more, say more. Like, you would put the military to basically turn these people around?

• 38:37Jason Calacanis?

  Of course, of course you turn them around, yes, that's it.

• 38:39David Sacks?

  Well, specifically.

• 38:41Jason Calacanis?

  National Guard will be quickest, the towers we second quickest, and the wall's gonna take forever, but you need a wall.

• 38:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But how do you, but how do you process the asylum claim? Because isn't the whole point of asylum like, you can't send them back to this country in which they're going to be killed in? And so.

• 38:54Jason Calacanis?

  It's an imperfect process, Chamath, obviously.

• 38:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So Sax and I, and a few other folks, we held a fundraiser for Vivek Ramaswamy last week, and we talked about this a lot. And one of the things that we learned is that all the people that come to the southern border are trained in YouTube and TikTok and Instagram, exactly what to say so that you have to accept the asylum claim.

• 39:16Jason Calacanis?

  And for the asylum, there should be a limited number of them. That's it. Just you have this many per year that we can take.

• 39:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I understand, but, but you don't know whether that person who was helping us in Afghanistan ends up coming in October and not in March, and that's the reason why they can't get in. The, the thing that I learned is that it's a, it's a specific script, it's available in multiple languages, right? So anybody who gets to the southern border knows exactly what to say so that America is forced to accept you.

• 39:42David Sacks?

  That's not how asylum should work.

• 39:44Jason Calacanis?

  The bad news is not everybody's gonna get in. Not everybody will get in, that's it.

• 39:47David Sacks?

  Jake, there's two things we need to do in addition to, to your point about sending troops to the border, because we do need the manpower.

• 39:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's obvious.

• 39:55David Sacks?

  Number one, to Chamath's point, you can't just say the word asylum and get in. That doesn't make sense. You should have to produce evidence of action. Meeting the case for asylum, which is not being economically disadvantaged. It's being politically prosecuted where if you're

• 40:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 40:09David Sacks?

  Sent back to your home country, they're going to put you in jail or kill you. And there aren't many countries in the world, quite frankly, where that is going to be a valid claim. Just to be honest about it. I mean, if you have a freedom fighter from Iran coming over, who's going to be put in jail or killed, let them in. But that's not most of the people lining up at our border.

• 40:28Jason Calacanis?

  If you're coming from Mexico, there's a very small chance that you are being

• 40:32David Sacks?

  The other thing we've got to do is you've got to reinstitute remain in Mexico. That was the policy.

• 40:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 40:37David Sacks?

  You can't have people just waiting on this side of the border because they're never going to show up in court.

• 40:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I mean, listen, we, we want immigration to this country. It has to be logical. And the fact is, everybody wants to come here. That's a great thing. We should be taking advantage of that, but it can't be chaos. It's got to be orderly. That's what everybody wants. I don't know why, how this became a political issue. Everybody wants orderly. Everybody wants recruitment. Nobody wants an open border.

• 41:01David Sacks?

  But J K L, in order for it not to be a political issue, you need both parties to agree. And they currently don't. I mean, think about it. What's in Biden's interest right now? Is to do a 180 on this issue before it's too late.

• 41:11Jason Calacanis?

  He's got to do it. Yes, absolutely. And it's very simple for him to say, which is

• 41:14David Sacks?

  But he hasn't done it.

• 41:15Jason Calacanis?

  Because everybody knows that the border doesn't have a wall. We've seen an increase. There's been a 10x increase. This, the situation on the field has changed. Therefore, we're going to change. And we're going to do all these things. And if one of them is building a wall and you want to say gotcha, you can say gotcha, but it's the right thing to do because data has changed my opinion. Where do we get to the point where data can't change your opinion? Data should change your opinion. The data is clear that more people are coming through. That's why I made such a point at the top of this is like, we don't even have good data. What these sensor towers would do would at least give us data and would give us clarity. And then you only need, you know, a unit every half mile. So you need 4,000 units patrolling the border and they would catch everybody. If this isn't as expensive as people think it is.

• 42:02Jason Calacanis?

  This could be, I mean, the last, the last amount of money we gave, what was the last appropriation for Ukraine, Sax, since I'll give you a red meat?

• 42:10David Sacks?

  Well, we've already appropriated or authorized over a hundred billion and there's asking for another 24 billion.

• 42:16Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so for three or four percent of that cost, we could have these sensor towers.

• 42:20David Sacks?

  It's crazy. We're defending Ukraine's border, but not our own.

• 42:22Jason Calacanis?

  It's a very valid point. Independent.

• 42:24David Sacks?

  This is what has the populist Republicans up in arms. It's this combined with the, the lack of fiscal discipline.

• 42:31Jason Calacanis?

  Now, the craziness about this is if we were sitting here 20 years ago, the Republicans were trying to open the border to have more low skilled workers to work in restaurants, to work in businesses. That's not the place we are today. We have too many people coming in. These are not just

• 42:46David Sacks?

  It's even worse than that.

• 42:48Jason Calacanis?

  Workers to, to pick vegetables. It's a different group.

• 42:51David Sacks?

  There was a point in time, Jason, where the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which is really the voice of the GOP establishment.

• 42:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 42:58David Sacks?

  Supported a constitutional amendment in favor of an open border. This was very much the point of view of the old Republican Party, which was this libertarian, open borders, open trade, free markets position. And the results of those policies have been partially disastrous. I mean, I understand the value of free trade and so forth, but and obviously want to have high skilled immigration. We've talked about that. But it was too much of a good thing. I mean, they didn't draw intelligent distinctions. But we still have, I think this, to your point about the battle inside the Republican Party, we still have that old GOP establishment and now there's this new populist wing that wants to make, I think sensible changes.

• 43:38Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the Wall Street Journal story from 2001? Open after borders. Why not? There it is.

• 43:44David Sacks?

  Yeah, that was Bob Bartley, who was the longtime editorial page editor. He was kind of like a hero in the conservative movement. When I was in college, I read a great book by him called The Seven Fat Years about supply side economics. And I think he was right about a lot of that stuff, but along with that economic policy came, I think this open borders, completely open trade view that I think produced a lot of negative results and has to be revisited. And by the way, there's a third leg of that stool, which is forever worse. The Wall Street Journal is one of the most pro-Ukraine publications there is, both in the news pages and in the editorial page.

• 44:23David Sacks?

  And they have never revisited the results of our disastrous foreign policy where we keep intervening all over the world. This is the old Republican Party. There's a new Republican Party that is emerging. And unfortunately, Kevin McCarthy found himself on the wrong side of that divide.

• 44:39Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So moving on to our next topic, there was a notable accident with a cruise robot taxi in San Francisco this week, or not. This is being framed by some as the first automated cruise vehicle to get in an accident, but what actually happened is not accurate. So there was a hit and run incident in San Francisco. A woman was struck by a human driver. That human driver fled the scene. The hit and run launched tragically the woman underneath a cruise vehicle. The cruise vehicle braked aggressively, according to Cruise, but stopped with its rear tire on top of the woman's leg. Police asked Cruise to keep the vehicle in place and lock it, which they did. Emergency respondents arrived and used the jaws of

• 45:21Jason Calacanis?

  life to get the car off the woman's leg. Local media picked the story up.

• 45:27David Friedberg?

  Wait, the police asked Cruise to leave the car, leave the car on the woman's leg?

• 45:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 45:34David Friedberg?

  Why would they do that?

• 45:36Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I think actually, sometimes moving, no, no, I do think for my time as EMT, sometimes moving the person can cause more damage than leaving it until you have the emergency services on the scene. So they like to wait for emergency services because moving it, you could have a broken bone, hit your femoral artery, and then you could bleed out. So they just say, stay where you are. Don't make any more movements until

• 45:59David Friedberg?

  Dude, and leave the car on top of them? That's ridiculous.

• 46:02Jason Calacanis?

  It's on the person's leg. So that would mean that they're not in any danger. It might be painful. But if you were to move them, I was taught this when I was in EMT, if you move people, you have to be very careful because you could cause a spine injury, they could become paralyzed, or you could cut a major artery. You gotta be very.

• 46:18David Friedberg?

  How long were you in EMT?

• 46:19Jason Calacanis?

  I was the first class of what was called EMTFRs, first responders, and I worked at Bravo Ambulance in Brooklyn. I was on a volunteer one for about three or four years.

• 46:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did you have like a tight outfit, like a tight polo?

• 46:30David Friedberg?

  What did you wear?

• 46:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Like skinny jeans. Did you have skinny jeans?

• 46:33Jason Calacanis?

  You wore green pants and a white collared shirt. And yeah, I never told you guys the first call I ever got.

• 46:41Jason Calacanis?

  I never told you that story? Were you like, were you like a sexy paramedic? Or were you just like a? I can be whatever you want me to be. Whatever works for your fantasies. He's blushing. But I'll tell you my first call. You were a sexy paramedic. I was a little sexy as a paramedic. Got him blushing. Here's my first call. I swear to God, it's the night before Thanksgiving, Wednesday night. It's a big night in Brooklyn. I don't know if in other places, but the night before Thanksgiving, everybody goes out and parties. So big Wednesday happens. First call comes in. I was, I was originally the person who picked up the, I was the operator at the nine one one. But then my second job, I was on the bus. And so first call, first shift is big Wednesday. Guy gets, we get a call that a guy got stabbed. We go, the guy is outside TJ Bentley's and I kid you not, the guy was in charge of the ambulance says, cut the jacket off.

• 47:24Jason Calacanis?

  I take my shears and we have these really sharp scissors and boom, we go right up the sleeve. We cut his jacket. He goes, oh, my members only jacket.

• 47:33Jason Calacanis?

  We cut him open and his giant hairy chest, blood is pumping out like it's like a little uh water fountain. And the, the guy who was running the bus, I remember this yesterday, he puts his hand up both the, I show this guy, you got bigger problems than this member only jacket. He says, get the masked pants. The masked pants, just so you know, are used in war. We get trained in them. You never use them. Masked pants are a blood pressure cuff. You put over people's pants to take the blood from their legs, put it into their chest so that they at least survive. The guy says, get the masked pants. I said, get the masked pants. The masked pants are packed away. You never use them. I'm getting the masked pants out. We're, we're wailing down fourth avenue to get this guy and his blood pressure is dropping, his heart rate's dropping, blood all over the bus. We're trying to control the bleeding. He survived.

• 48:18Jason Calacanis?

  Did you save him? We saved him. Yeah. But that was my first call. First call. Nuts. This was a volunteer gig? Like you didn't get paid for it? Nope. No, not everything's about money, Free Bird. Not everything's about money. I'm not saying it is. I'm just asking. I'm joking with you.

• 48:33David Sacks?

  He always wants to be a superhero.

• 48:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 48:35David Sacks?

  That's all can be clear.

• 48:37Jason Calacanis?

  I texted, I texted Jamie.

• 48:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jason's brother and I asked him if this was true and I asked for a photo. Hey Nick, you wanna, you wanna put up the photo, the second one please?

• 48:48Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, there I am. There I am. If your heart stops, this is the guy you wanna come restart.

• 48:54David Friedberg?

  Jake Hall, Big Wednesday.

• 48:56Jason Calacanis?

  Dave, did your heart stop? Did your heart stop, Dave? Cause I'm gonna resuscitate it.

• 49:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Nick, show the other one. This is, this was the original outfit that when he became a paramedic.

• 49:05Jason Calacanis?

  This better not be X rated. Oh, God. Oh, there.

• 49:08David Friedberg?

  I like the second one better.

• 49:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we know which one you like better, Dave.

• 49:12David Sacks?

  Is that a nurse? Is that a thermometer he's got? What, what does he have in his hand there? A needle or a thermometer?

• 49:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that's like a Coke bottle.

• 49:20Jason Calacanis?

  I think that could be a thermometer. We might need to check your temperature, David.

• 49:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's like a Pepsi bottle.

• 49:25Jason Calacanis?

  What the hell? We're gonna take your temperature, Dave. I don't know if you're gonna like it.

• 49:28David Sacks?

  What kind of temperature does that take?

• 49:30David Friedberg?

  For you in a couple of weeks, Jake.

• 49:31Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I know it's gonna be really hot.

• 49:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Uh, Jason, you did a great job as a paramedic. We really, we really appreciate your contributions.

• 49:39Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, great job. All right, back to the story about Cruz. Uh, this terrible accident. Wow, we got derailed.

• 49:46David Friedberg?

  Yeah. Well, thanks for the work you did, Jake Hall. Thanks for your service.

• 49:49Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so.

• 49:54Jason Calacanis?

  I'm gonna take your vitals. Okay, local media picked up.

• 49:58David Sacks?

  Do you have that eagle tattoo on your arm, too?

• 50:01Jason Calacanis?

  That was, that was removable. Local media picked up on this, uh, reporting that Cruz was responsible for the incident. Director of News for the San Francisco Chronicle, which is a lunatic publication. Woman run over by Cruz self-driving car on Market Street in downtown San Francisco. Pulled from under rear axle. Circumstances under investigation. The San Francisco Standard posted on X, "A woman suffered traumatic injuries after being trapped under a Cruz Robo taxi in downtown San Francisco Monday night." Fire Department spokesperson said. A few weeks ago, as you know, a video circulated on X, formerly known as Twitter, of 20 or so Cruz vehicles causing a massive traffic jam at an intersection in Austin.

• 50:46Jason Calacanis?

  The Robo taxi, uh, provider issue has become very divisive here in San Francisco.

• 50:53Jason Calacanis?

  There are now multiple companies working on automotion.

• 50:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Guys hear that people in San Francisco will put pylons?

• 50:59Jason Calacanis?

  They cone it.

• 51:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They cone it to brick the car?

• 51:01David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 51:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 51:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why would they do that?

• 51:03Jason Calacanis?

  Because they're lunatics and it represents technology.

• 51:06David Friedberg?

  That's the real story here. The real story is the very deep disdain for technological progress. And the second story, I think, that's so important is the total lack of assumption of risk generally in the U.S., which limits progress in meaningful ways. Let me just pull up some data that I shared here. So Nick, if you pull up this first chart, I'll give you guys some, some numbers. For every hundred million miles driven in the U.S., there's about one and a half deaths, car accident deaths. There's about 3.2 trillion miles driven per year in the U.S. So about 45,000 people die from auto accidents each year. This is a crazy number. 2.3 million people have auto accident-related injuries in the U.S. each year.

• 51:50David Friedberg?

  And there's 6 million car crashes each year in the U.S. That's one crash for every half million miles driven. Pretty, you know, incredible statistics. So if you look at this chart, it kind of shows the car fatalities over time. Now, what's the leading cause of car fatalities? We'll go to the next chart.

• 52:07Jason Calacanis?

  Distracted driving.

• 52:08David Friedberg?

  Number one, I should have, I should have done this as a quiz. Number one, DUI.

• 52:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jesus, that is unbelievable that even today?

• 52:17David Friedberg?

  Yeah. Number two, speeding.

• 52:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 52:20David Friedberg?

  Not using your seatbelt. So all of the same.

• 52:23Jason Calacanis?

  By the way, all three of those are the same.

• 52:25David Friedberg?

  Yeah. So 80% of those, 80% of deaths are DUI, speeding and seatbelt nonuse. Now go to an autonomous driving world.

• 52:33Jason Calacanis?

  Those are all opt-in.

• 52:34David Friedberg?

  So now go to an autonomous driving world. You won't see DUIs. Those things are programmed to not speed. Obviously, they're not going to run if you don't put your seatbelt on. And then the fourth one is distracted driving. The real question is what incremental accidents or what incremental errors do autonomous cars make that might, you know, kind of cause new deaths or new accidents? But the net is that we have an incredible number of car accidents, 6 million accidents a year, two and a half million injuries a year, 45,000 deaths a year, most of which can be prevented by things that are just basic human stupidity.

• 53:08Jason Calacanis?

  The first three are all opt-in.

• 53:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So what you're saying is Warren Buffett and GEICO are probably responsible for lobbying and creating this mess in San Francisco. Do the insurance companies even need to exist?

• 53:19Jason Calacanis?

  Deep State Chamath.

• 53:21David Friedberg?

  Conspiracy Corner. Well, I actually think there's a very different driver for why these things. So I just want to make the case, first off, that if you if you zoom out and you don't take the anecdotal story of the woman trapped under the cruise car, it's an awful story. But that anecdote allows people to heighten their fear and heighten their emotion and create a response to autonomous driving as if that is a cause of a problem. But if you zoom out and you ask the question, dude, 50,000 people a year are dying because of human stupidity that we can just completely take off the streets, it's such a no brainer that this technology should progress. Agreed. And I'll give you guys another story. In 1999, there was the clinical trials for gene therapy had begun. And there was a guy named Gelsinger.

• 54:04David Friedberg?

  He was a young kid, I think he was 18 or 19 years old, and he passed away from the gene therapy. And it turns out that there was actually doctor malpractice that was primarily responsible for his death. After that happened, the FDA and the regulators stepped in and they basically put a halt to all gene therapy clinical trials for about seven years. The number of lives that were lost during that seven years that went on that we did not make progress on getting gene therapy programs to market is significantly higher than the number of people that would have lost lives, which, by the way, it turns out when you go back to this, this particular death was driven by doctor malpractice, not by the gene therapy technology necessarily itself. And a lot of the stuff was understood.

• 54:47David Friedberg?

  And I think we've heard Peter Thiel and others speak a lot about how the US has lost our appetite for risk. We say that if anyone dies or if any bad thing happens, a new technology should not progress. But when we look at the benefit of new technology relative to the cost of it, many of these technologies should progress at an accelerated pace, not at a decelerated pace. And the stepping in to stop these things from moving forward because, number one, we're rootly afraid of new technology. Number two, we, you know, we kind of want to, there's a lot of regulatory capture and incumbency that wants to see these things not succeed. I think we're really denying ourselves, in many cases, the opportunity to realize progress because we're so concerned about any loss. Nuclear fission is a really great example of this.

• 55:30David Friedberg?

  Three Mile Island accident and Fukushima. You know, if you look at the total number of lives lost, and there's incredible statistics, which I should probably not pull off the top of my head, I should probably make sure I get the right numbers. But Chernobyl is another good example. If you look at the total number of incremental cancers and the total number of lives that were lost from Chernobyl, you look at Three Mile Island, you look at Fukushima.

• 55:50Jason Calacanis?

  Chernobyl was 46.

• 55:51David Friedberg?

  You can make a statistical argument that even with those extraordinary cataclysmic disasters, the number of lives that could have been improved, the number of lives that could have been saved, the progress that people have been, could have been, could have made, the number of people that could have been pulled out of poverty if we made cheap abundant energy available at an accelerated pace rather than at a decelerated pace, it could have had a much more significant effect. So I view this in the lens, this autonomous driving backlash in the lens of what we see with a lot of new technologies, which is we lose our appetite for risk, we lose our tolerance for any sort of incremental loss, and we lose perspective on the fact that that loss is far, far, far outweighed relative

• 56:33David Friedberg?

  to the gains that you gain if you can get that technology into market faster, not slower. And I think that's just such a real kind of storyline that's not told very often about how technology and progress is limited, particularly in the modern age. Because once you have enough stuff, you're not willing to take as much risk. Meanwhile, you see China building 450 nuclear fission stations and the US building none. And I think that that's part of the story of where the US is today.

• 56:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 56:59David Friedberg?

  I mean, I know that was a big rant, but for me, I'm just like so sensitive to this stuff. You know, like all of this like anti-tech stuff and anti-progress stuff, because you then pick an anecdote and you focus on the anecdote and you miss the bigger fucking picture.

• 57:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, what's so funny about San Francisco is it's the city that both is the first to approve the testing of it, and then where there's a small fraction of citizens who try to go and sabotage it.

• 57:23Jason Calacanis?

  I guess the next issue is how close are we to having these at-scale cruises currently in San Francisco, Austin, and Phoenix? Waymo, very expensive cars, by the way. They're currently in San Francisco and Phoenix 24/7. They're going to launch in LA soon. And Tesla's been working on this.

• 57:42David Friedberg?

  You know what's another example of this? SpaceX, some shrapnel got blown into the uninhabited desert lands around Boca Chica, Texas.

• 57:51Jason Calacanis?

  You're talking about Starship?

• 57:52David Friedberg?

  Yeah, Starship.

• 57:53Jason Calacanis?

  The big one, yeah.

• 57:54David Friedberg?

  And they come in and they're like, shut the whole thing down. You can't have shrapnel flying around. Think about the risk tolerance equation here. So if you delay SpaceX by six months to make sure that shrapnel doesn't fly through the desert, that's six months. Longer till humans can perhaps inhabit the moon, go to Mars, do all these extraordinary things. This is what I mean about the lack of tolerance for risk. We have to assume that there is a cost in moving things forward. There has to be a cost in progress. You don't go fight a war and try and move the front lines of a battlefield further into the enemy territory and assume you're going to have no loss. And all of human progress needs to be thought about in a similar way.

• 58:37David Friedberg?

  We have to have some degree of loss and some tolerance for risk as we try and make progress with our species. And technology always is going to have setbacks. It's always going to have mistakes. But if the net benefit far outweighs those mistakes, we have to be willing to accept it and get everyone to kind of take a broader perspective on what we're doing. That this isn't just about maintaining status quo and not getting hurt. This is about the great benefits we get from moving things forward. And we've lost that in such a profound way over the last 50 years in Western culture.

• 59:09Jason Calacanis?

  Another great example of this to add to your tirade is challenge trials. And these have been banned for a long time. And if you don't know what a challenge trial is, is you introduce something like, let's say COVID into a person who has had a COVID vaccine. And yeah, they're assuming some risk in doing this, but if it was a young person, as we saw, it probably wouldn't be that much risk and there are people who would do it. And there, this whole concept of challenge trials could reduce in the long term a massive amount of deaths, but it's not allowed because of ethics issues. What are your thoughts on that, Friedberg? Challenge trials?

• 59:42David Friedberg?

  I mean, it's, look, there's so many examples. We could just keep going through this. From energy markets and nuclear technology to biotechnology, to space technology, to, I've lived it. I mean, like GMO technology and bioengineering and food systems, there's a fear and a concern. And like Rob Henderson said at our summit, I've always viewed those to be luxury beliefs, that this idea that I don't want to have my precious things changed, when the benefit really accrues mostly to the poorest people in the world.

• 1:00:11Jason Calacanis?

  Explain why that is, by the way, because that's an important point that people don't realize.

• 1:00:15David Friedberg?

  When you make things more productive, whether it's an acre of land to make more food, or a unit of energy and the cost comes down per unit of energy, those of us who already have a lot of stuff and have all of our basic needs met, we have housing, we have shelter, we have food, we have energy, we can afford it, we live in a great environment, we live in a place that we can do whatever the heck we want, anytime we want. We don't care if the price goes up by 30%. I'm happy to go down to Whole Foods and feel good, to plop down an extra 50% to buy an organic banana. Someone who only makes $8,000 a year cares very deeply about that cost delta. They need to see the cost of food go down, the cost of energy go down, the cost of medicine go down. The improvement that's driven by technology

• 1:00:59David Friedberg?

  and has been for 10,000 years mostly accrues to the poorest people in society first. And that's the problem. And so we all who are in charge, those of us who are rich, who are elite, who have power, who have control, who have influence, who run the fucking government, we all get to raise our hand and say, "I don't want to take any more risk because one person died." Meanwhile, a million people are starving to death over the next three months. And you can make that same story and you can connect those dots in every area of technology that humans have lost their risk tolerance for in the wealthy industrialized West. And we are largely, I think, not just hurting ourselves because of the economic costs and all the other stuff that's going on that we're now seeing as very apparent, but we're also limiting the intelligence

• 1:01:44David Friedberg?

  and the energy to make technology and progress it that could benefit the whole world. We're limiting its ability to diffuse. And I think it's really profoundly sad. And I hope that we one day look back at this era as almost like a pseudo dark ages and we wake the [bleep] up someday and recognize that we need to take some degree of risk and have some tolerance for making progress.

• 1:02:07Jason Calacanis?

  All right, listen.

• 1:02:07David Friedberg?

  Leave me out, whatever.

• 1:02:08Jason Calacanis?

  It's a family problem.

• 1:02:11David Friedberg?

  I get a little passionate about the whole anti-tech stuff.

• 1:02:13Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, we like it, we like it. Hey, and listen, 35 people died building the Golden Gate Bridge, right? Like, the people wanted to see that progress, people took risk. That's it. No risk, no reward.

• 1:02:24David Sacks?

  To that point, I think it took two years to create the Bay Bridge and 17 years to do the repair to it. I mean, that's how crazy things have gotten.

• 1:02:30David Friedberg?

  Two billion dollars to two billion dollars to build those suicide nets on the side of the Golden Gate Bridge and some fraction of that to build the whole frigging bridge. You know, and even on a dollar adjusted basis, it's ridiculous.

• 1:02:40Jason Calacanis?

  It was five, it's interesting you said that 550 million to build the bridge in US dollars. And then, yeah, it was the same amount to build the nets. So.

• 1:02:49David Sacks?

  Can I ask a question about the cruise thing? So do you believe that cruise will have a good solution to self-driving? I'm just like a little bit skeptical. Are they owned by GM now?

• 1:02:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:00David Friedberg?

  But didn't they raise money from SoftBank? Isn't there some like independent funding as well that happened?

• 1:03:04David Sacks?

  I thought it was sold to GM. I'm just like.

• 1:03:06Jason Calacanis?

  It was part of GM.

• 1:03:07David Friedberg?

  I think it was sold to GM and then they set it up as a sub and they like, like Alphabet did with Waymo. Alphabet's raised five billion in outside money into Waymo. And I think that Cruise or GM tried to do the same thing where they've got SoftBank and a bunch of institutional investors in Cruise.

• 1:03:21Jason Calacanis?

  It's majority owned by GM.

• 1:03:22David Friedberg?

  I'm pretty sure that's right.

• 1:03:22Jason Calacanis?

  But it was spun out because GM didn't have the ability to bankroll it. It's obvious that these are getting there. The question is, is I think it's more like 10 years before this is fully deployed. Also, you have to build all the cars. If Elon does get out this robo taxi vehicle for 25K, which he seems like is well on the way with the Model 3 to getting to. This was an early mock-up from Walter Isaacson's book,

• 1:03:46Jason Calacanis?

  which looks pretty sharp and it doesn't have, it's like a two-seat car. So these things zipping around San Francisco, et cetera, at a reasonable speed, 25, 35 miles an hour. I think he's pretty close to having this. I use the self-driving beta, full self-driving FSD. I use it all the time. I used to only use it on highways. Now I use it on side roads. I disengage it when it's on roads that are not clearly marked, you know.

• 1:04:14David Friedberg?

  Have you guys taken a Cruise or a Waymo ride?

• 1:04:17Jason Calacanis?

  I haven't taken either. I got invited to the beta though for Cruise.

• 1:04:20David Friedberg?

  You guys want to take one?

• 1:04:23David Sacks?

  Personally, I would not trust the cruise ride. I don't believe they're responsible for this accident, as it turns out, but I'm just skeptical that some of these initiatives are going to pan out. I think Tesla's getting it.

• 1:04:35David Friedberg?

  Why are you skeptical?

• 1:04:36David Sacks?

  Yeah, I think it's a hard problem to solve and I'm just dubious about GM's ability to develop tech at this level of sophistication.

• 1:04:47David Friedberg?

  You think Tesla will get there?

• 1:04:49David Sacks?

  I think Tesla's already there.

• 1:04:50David Friedberg?

  Well, if an autonomous Tesla drove up and picked you up, would you do that? Would you take a ride to that?

• 1:04:54David Sacks?

  I mean, not today, but I mean, when they get there, which I don't think will be 10 years. I mean, it seems like Tesla's this way ahead of everybody else.

• 1:05:01David Friedberg?

  Chamath, what do you think? Where do you think the tech is?

• 1:05:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think this is a, an inference problem for Tesla and it's a learning problem for everybody else. So I think in order to build level five autonomy, you have to have good reasoning. And I think in order to have good reasoning, you just need to have enough training data where you literally see every potential branch and node in a decision tree. And so it's one thing to be able to scan a light, know that it's green and then go forward. But when you multiply that by every intersection, every light in every city, it's a massive, massive learning problem. So the thing that GM and Cruise don't have, in my opinion, is a path to acquire enough data to be credible. Could they solve a limited set of streets in San Francisco? Yeah, yes.

• 1:05:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so if you have the city sort of block off certain parts of the neighborhoods and say, no more human driven vehicles in these sections, only these three or four licensed providers can be inside of it. I think that Cruise and Waymo could work. But if you're going to live in a world where there's autonomy, meaning like humans can drive wherever they want, I think Tesla's the only one, because I think they've acquired and they are acquiring so much training data that for them, they're fine tuning reasoning. And it's exactly what Jason just described. Jason is a perfect example of a consumer now who has adopted it,

• 1:06:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  call it 70% of his use cases and is incrementally kind of like getting towards 90% or 95%.

• 1:06:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think that that's impressive. I would agree with Jason. I use FSD 100% on the highways. And depending on where I'm going, so like this weekend, when I, when I came to David, your house, Sax's house, full FSD the whole way.

• 1:06:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, 28101, it's bulletproof.

• 1:06:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bulletproof and then in the city.

• 1:06:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And navigating to get into, into David's house. I thought it was, it was pitch perfect. And there was one or twice where I'm actually the person that's panicking and disengaging FSDs.

• 1:07:02Jason Calacanis?

  Like intersections, right? Left turns.

• 1:07:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And also just on the highway, like I get a little skittish at times if it goes, if it speeds up or whatever. My point is Tesla is so close to it. So I, I do trust that they'll have a credible solution in the next four or five years. And these other companies, I think that they need to have a solution for training and I don't see it.

• 1:07:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. The, the point is there's over a million cars recording because when you buy a Tesla, you turn on self-driving, it's in every car. And so every car is recording data all the time. As opposed to GM. GM doesn't take the time to put the $10,000, $20,000 package.

• 1:07:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Half a million new sensors, collecting millions of miles a quarter.

• 1:07:44Jason Calacanis?

  A quarter.

• 1:07:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Being added to the network.

• 1:07:46David Sacks?

  Exactly. What Tesla did years and years ago is even before self-driving was a thing, they put all the cameras in the cars to collect the data. And you're right, GM doesn't do that.

• 1:07:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If GM did that to their legacy gas cars and then funneled that into Cruise, I think they would have a decent shot, but they are not doing that.

• 1:08:03Jason Calacanis?

  Here's a map of Waymo in, and I brought this up because, you know, I think there's two different strategies going on here. Tesla's going for the whole Magilla. They want to be able to do dirt roads you've never been on. Waymo and Cruise are working from constrained areas that they can perfect. And Phoenix is the perfect area because that's a grid-based system, very wide highways, and it was planned. And so if you have a planned community, you know, it's not like a city in Italy or France where it's like the, the roads have been there for 800 years. When you have some modern city where it's a grid-based system, Austin falls into this as well for a large portion of Austin, it's going to be fairly easy to do those. And so that's what we'll see. My prediction is we'll see this.

• 1:08:47Jason Calacanis?

  Also, it's very flat, or obviously no hills, and also weather. So, you know, the northeast will be the last place. When you go to Boston, or, you know, you're in other places that don't have a grid-based system, and you have ice and snow, this stuff is 10-plus years out. But in a dry place with consistent weather like California, Phoenix, etc., it's now, right? It's now, I think. Okay, in Bill Gurley's Regulatory Capture Corner, we have an interesting story about J S X. If you don't know, JetSuite X, that's what the J S X stands for. This is an airline that offers hop-on public charter flights out of FBOs, tiny airports usually reserved for private jets, and they give passengers the private jet experience

• 1:09:32Jason Calacanis?

  for the cost of roughly a first-class ticket at major airlines, maybe double the cost of a coach ticket, 700 bucks one way from Westchester to Miami, $1,400 round trip, not a bad deal. By comparison, United, on the same day, are between 500 and 800 for first class from Newark to Miami. JetSuite X has 47 airplanes with 1,200 crew members.

• 1:09:56David Friedberg?

  Let me cut in and give you my anecdote. On Saturday, I took a J S X flight from Vegas to Oakland.

• 1:10:03Jason Calacanis?

  What were you doing in Vegas?

• 1:10:04David Friedberg?

  I went to the opening night of the YouTube concert at the Sphere.

• 1:10:07Jason Calacanis?

  Opening night at the Sphere?

• 1:10:09David Friedberg?

  It was incredible. Yeah, the Sphere.

• 1:10:11Jason Calacanis?

  I looked at the photos in the videos. I wasn't super impressed. Is it impressive in person? Because it didn't come across in the videos.

• 1:10:16David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's incredible. You gotta go see it. I think it's the first...

• 1:10:19Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible how?

• 1:10:20David Friedberg?

  So, it's the first, like, live experience that I think you have kind of live analog elements, like a band, and this incredibly immersive digital experience, because it's a 360-foot-tall dome, and the entirety of the interior of the dome is a digital screen. So, there were these sceneries that they created that were like dynamic video on these walls, that it's hard... I don't think the videos do it justice. Like, when you're actually...

• 1:10:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it didn't do justice, yeah.

• 1:10:46David Friedberg?

  When you're in this room during this shot right here, and I was kind of sitting center, I was also... I went down on the floor for a while.

• 1:10:51Jason Calacanis?

  Looks like you're in the desert or something.

• 1:10:53David Friedberg?

  It's like you're there. Dude, I mean, it's inexplicable. It's more real than VR. It's like you're in this world. And they even did these amazing integrated scenes where they had like helicopters flying overhead. And then they had spotlights coming out of the ceiling while the helicopters were flying in the video above you. They did like a hot air balloon flying above you and they drop like a rope down. So it was this total integration of like physical and virtual content. And I think like YouTube, to be honest, as great as the concert was, is almost like the most boring thing you could probably do with that setup. Over time, you could probably integrate a lot more things. You could have giant sets and giant scenes and people, you know, doing stuff physically.

• 1:11:34Jason Calacanis?

  A Star Wars movie.

• 1:11:35David Friedberg?

  Star Wars movie in real life. You could have like the Siege of Carthage and you could have ships on the ground. And then you could see the battle scene behind you and you'd be like in the middle of it. The whole thing was really incredible.

• 1:11:46Jason Calacanis?

  What about the sound? I heard about the sound.

• 1:11:49David Friedberg?

  Hundreds of speakers. So when I was down on the floor, I went right by the stage on the floor. The some of the sound is actually distorted down there and it's not that good. When you're in the seats that's set back where the sound is really designed, hundreds of speakers like built into the wall.

• 1:12:02Jason Calacanis?

  I heard each seat has a speaker.

• 1:12:04David Friedberg?

  There's there's seat speakers, but really it comes from the dome. And the dome sound, when you're sitting in the seats is really like immersive and incredible.

• 1:12:11Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so you took Jet Suite X back.

• 1:12:13David Friedberg?

  And then I took Jet Suite X. By the way, I will, my prediction on the sphere, I think there'll be like dozens of these things soon enough. Because this can become like a new form of live entertainment. It's not just a stage where someone stands on it and plays music. It's a new model and more than musical artists, I think you'll see like new kinds of art and new kinds of things happening on these, in these things. Anyway.

• 1:12:33Jason Calacanis?

  And it's also video on the outside. So you can do advertisements or make it look like a pumpkin or make it look like a basketball. I saw that.

• 1:12:39David Friedberg?

  And it'll get cheaper and cheaper over time. The first one was what, two, two, two and a half billion dollars. They'll make smaller versions of it. It'll be a couple hundred million. It's almost like IMAX theaters. They'll roll them out all over.

• 1:12:47Jason Calacanis?

  So back to Jet Suite X.

• 1:12:49David Friedberg?

  240 bucks. You drive up just like an FBO, like a private terminal. Drive up, walk in, no security, no lines, no check in, get on, get off. It's like flying a charter.

• 1:13:01Jason Calacanis?

  There has to be some check in so they know your name and stuff.

• 1:13:03David Friedberg?

  Yeah, you walk up and they, you give them the ticket and then they do a gate side check in. They take your bag and they put it all, they take it out under the plane.

• 1:13:11Jason Calacanis?

  So you save an hour on either a half hour.

• 1:13:13David Friedberg?

  Oh my God, dude, it's so hassle free. It's ridiculous. And like when my mom comes to visit, she takes it. She loves it, but obviously there's gotta be some catch. I don't really know these regs, but there's some catch on how they're able to do this.

• 1:13:24Jason Calacanis?

  I'll explain that now. So they have 47 airplanes, 1,200 crew members. American and Southwest and several major aviation unions are accusing JSX of exploiting a regulatory loophole that they can hire pilots who are too old to fly for commercial airlines and who don't have the requisite 1500 hours of flying experience because they are a smaller airline. JetSuite X says its captains average over 8,000 flying hours and first officer average over 3,000 flying hours. So they're blowing past the regulations. So that's obviously a red herring. According to JetSuite X, two huge US airlines and their labor unions want companies like JetSuite X, small air carriers that actually care about providing you with much-needed

• 1:14:09Jason Calacanis?

  choice and high-quality service to be legislated out of existence. And by the way, JetSuite X has a couple of the other airlines, I think United, as an investor. So the other airlines actually want this. There obviously is a difference in security. The one difference is not how many hours the pilots have, obviously. It's going through TSA. So the ability to not go through TSA is such a key part of this experience and to not go through a big terminal. JetBlue and United support JSX and I think they're exploring doing this themselves. So regulatory capture at its best, I guess.

• 1:14:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll take the unpopular side of this. I think it's easy to blame this regulatory capture boogeyman here. I think JetSuite X seems like an amazing service. It has Starlink. A bunch of my friends have taken it. They seem to enjoy it a lot. But here is the clever arbitrage that JetSuite X is taking, which is that they fly under what's called Part 135 of the FAA, and that is when you take a private plane and you charter it. The airlines fly under what's called Part 121, and the rules are very different if you're 121 versus Part 135. And the biggest rule is the training of the pilots, which is that there are minimum

• 1:15:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  hour requirements to be a commercial airline pilot, which is about 1,500 hours versus 250 hours for a Part 135 charter pilot. So I think the question is, is that it's one thing where you charter a plane with two or three of your friends, that's a Part 135 license in a small plane. But when you take a large plane with nobody else you don't know, I think there's a pretty credible argument that that's a commercial airline. And I do think that it's reasonable that if you're running a commercial airline through a loophole, at some point, if you get big enough, that loophole is going to be obvious enough that people will ask it to be closed. I think what you want to have is this loophole closed,

• 1:16:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  or you decide that Part 135 where there are so many people, the pilots should be at a certain flight training standard.

• 1:16:18Jason Calacanis?

  And to JetSuite X's defense, they reported their captains average over 8,000 flying hours. So that is a magnitude more, 5X, more than five times the rules. And first officer average over 3,000. So why not just up that number of hours to 500 or 1,000? Or just make everybody 1,500.

• 1:16:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or Jason, to your point, just like, say, go to the FAA and say, "Look, we're going to continue to fly Part 135, but here are the exact, we promise to never hire a pilot that is not under this 1,500 hour threshold, et cetera, et cetera." There's all kinds of ways to go around it, but I do think it's important to acknowledge that they're basically running a United, but they're pretending that it's a private plane.

• 1:16:56Jason Calacanis?

  It's a mini United. Yeah, it's a mini United. Yeah, it's somewhere between the two.

• 1:16:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, because United runs those regional legs as well, in equivalent sized planes. So I do think it should exist. I just think that it should exist on a relatively level playing field. I don't want somebody else to use a loophole, so I would not want them to use a loophole either. Part 135 exists.

• 1:17:16Jason Calacanis?

  I'm actually in agreement with you.

• 1:17:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  To take a private plane and charter it, not to run an airline.

• 1:17:20Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. This has been another amazing episode of the All In Podcast. Thank you, too, from his sphere of influence, David Friedberg, the Sultan of Science, and the Rain Man himself, Hot Water Burn Baby, David Sacks, and the dictator himself, Shmoff Polihampati.

• 1:17:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Love you, boys.

• 1:17:40Jason Calacanis?

  I am the world's greatest moderator, and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

• 1:17:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bye-bye.

• 1:18:07Speaker 06

  Besties are back.

• 1:18:10Speaker 06

  That is my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 1:18:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension but they just need to release somehow.

• 1:18:25Speaker 06

  What your feet. What your feet. Feet. What? Where did you get merch? Besties are back.