SPEAKER_00: So wait a second, you guys, I saw that you were at a KOTU conference or a TPG conference. You were at some banking conference, SACS?

SPEAKER_02: Brad and I were both at the KOTU Summit.

SPEAKER_03: KOTU. KOTU is a large investor. Is it a hedge fund, private equity?

SPEAKER_02: They're a late-stage fund. It's a big late-stage fund.

SPEAKER_04: Summit's a really big word. Was it a summit or was it more like a meeting?

SPEAKER_02: Well, it's like a two-day conference in Santa Barbara.

SPEAKER_05: Oh, nice. They've done it a number of years in a row now. Last year, Brad and I went and we met with SBF.

SPEAKER_09: Did I ever tell you that SBF story?

SPEAKER_08: No, let's go. Who's got crazier hair right now, you or SBF?

SPEAKER_11: Give us a quick, take that hat off for a second. Take that Montclair off for a second and let's get a side-by-side. Oh my God, SACS is using no product. It's not that bad. You're starting to look like the emperor, like Senator Palpatine from Star Wars.

SPEAKER_00: I mean, people are having a field day with this crazy hair. But what was the vibe? If you said there was a vibe two years ago, the vibe was

SPEAKER_18: crypto mania. SBF was the bell of the ball. I suppose he'll be the bell of the ball when he goes in the Huskow as well.

SPEAKER_20: No, it looks like he's getting off.

SPEAKER_21: He's getting up. I thought he was getting off. Is the fix in? Is the Ivy League fix in?

SPEAKER_20: I agree.

SPEAKER_09: Can you imagine if he gets off? He's almost as protected as Hunter Biden. Here we go.

SPEAKER_24: Okay, everybody. Freeberg's not here this week. Insert jokes and conspiracy theories for the mids.

SPEAKER_10: There's going to be about 8,000 messages on a subreddit about Freeberg missing this week and SACS

SPEAKER_28: missing last week. I'll let you guys all read into it. But what would you say, Brad? Brad Gershner back, of course, fifth bestie. Brad, what would you say the vibe was at this one? If it was SBF lunacy two years ago, what was the vibe this year?

SPEAKER_30: Well, you know, first, they put on an incredible event. It's called East meets West.

SPEAKER_32: And it was really about bringing, you know, CEOs and founders from China to the states and connecting them with founders and CEOs in the United States. I think it's somber, right? There's a recognition that we've seen a bounce in the public markets, you know, off of this devastation in 2022. But I think, listen, they gave a great tough love speech discussion with the 1400 unicorns that are out there. And they said, do not expect your unprofitable tech company to bounce like one of the Magnificent Seven, right? Those are highly profitable companies traded at 1920 times earnings. And if you are burning cash today, there, you can't come back to the well. So you need to either figure out how to get profitable, figure out how to get fit. Or you need to sell your business. Because you know, the there's not an endless stream of money. So I thought it was a sober view, you know, Larry Summers was there. And I think a lot of the people called 22, right? We're looking for a hard landing in q1 of this year, probably including, you know, the Larry was probably more in that camp. And I think everybody still views this distribution of probabilities over the course of the next four quarters. And, you know, whether it's Druckenmiller, Sternlich this morning on CNBC, or whether it's Larry Summers, they're all saying, Well, we could 30% chance of a hard landing q4, q1. So I would say it was so

SPEAKER_37: Yeah, I could tell it was sober sacks. Go ahead. You want to say something?

SPEAKER_05: Well, I would say last year, it was somber in a different way. Because you got to remember, in the first half of 2022, you had this huge decline in the markets around growth stocks, because interest rates had started going up, we had the whole regime change. But I don't think founders had internalized the way that it applied to them. And then the thing that has happened over the past year is that sales have been hit, you know, every software company that I know is reforecasting down. It's so much harder to grow customers are consolidating vendors, sharpening their pencils, seed expansion has been replaced with seed contraction.

SPEAKER_42: So negotiations are hard, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: It's much harder now to sell software than it was, let's say, a year ago. You know, 2x is now the new 3x. If you can grow 2x in this environment, it's basically growing 3x before. It's funny to me

SPEAKER_44: that how much the Fed's actions impact buying behavior. That's the thing that I understand.

SPEAKER_10: The psychology is distinctly different. Yeah.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah, the psychology really is different. I mean, we knew that the Fed's behavior influence valuations and sort of capital markets, but the way that it influences the business outlook and how willing companies are to spend money.

SPEAKER_00: And KOTU is no different. I see they hired Billy McFarlane from Fyre Festival to do the food.

SPEAKER_50: Um, what is this? I mean, KOTU should be ashamed of themselves. Look at this focaccia, some vegetable soup with the broth drained out, super-

SPEAKER_53: Oh, that is so wrong. That is so wrong. Look at this. I mean, it looks like a dog went to the bathroom.

SPEAKER_54: Brad and I opened our lunchbox and we're like, uh, let's, let's go somewhere else. Oh my God, KOTU on a budget. Wow.

SPEAKER_57: It looked like a surprise. Someone had put a surprise in our,

SPEAKER_03: it looks like Freedberg's dog, uh, put a surprise in the KOTU lunchbox. Wow. Well, listen, it's

SPEAKER_64: good. KOTU LP should be very happy looking at that $7 lunch that they put out there. I mean,

SPEAKER_65: Brad, should we tell the SPF story from last year summit? I mean, last year we talked about the, maybe founders hadn't internalized it yet,

SPEAKER_44: but the markets had corrected, but the one founder who was super bullish and optimistic and talking about how he was spraying money all over the place and he was acquiring companies and who was followed around by minions and had everyone like a, a beehive surrounding him and trying to

SPEAKER_67: talk to him was SPF. And so I remember, yeah. So I remember thinking like, who's going to be this year's SPF, you know, somebody here is way too optimistic.

SPEAKER_70: Was that somebody with an AI company? Was Sam Altman there? Sam Altman there. So basically the KOTU conference went from bullshit to dog shit.

SPEAKER_78: Dude, the great part about this is you two guys, Brad is like, look at Brad is so uncomfortable. Brad's like, I like this invite. I got a good invite. Chamath and I are invited to nothing.

SPEAKER_80: We give no shits about KOTU or their budget. They do put on a really good event. Incredible firm.

SPEAKER_44: And I think that the message they gave to founders this year and last year was great. It was actually really appropriate. Whether founders choose to listen is a different story. But the message

SPEAKER_05: they've been conveying is similar to the message we've been conveying for the last year and a half.

SPEAKER_82: Hey, Chamath, any more jokes we can make about KOTU since you and I get invited to nothing?

SPEAKER_84: No, I mean, I'm not making fun of KOTU. I was just making fun of the fact that we went from literally bullshit with SPF to what looks like dog shit.

SPEAKER_90: By the way, I bet they would invite you if you wanted to go. I'm pretty sure they would send 10 invitations if I even faint a desire to go.

SPEAKER_92: But I'm in Milan right now.

SPEAKER_67: The pod is very popular there, by the way.

SPEAKER_97: I know, you did a focus group. Tell everybody, can we play the focus group or was that, I think we can play it.

SPEAKER_44: Well, just a fan came up to me. I mean, when I say fan, this is like a very high profile person. This woman works at Netflix. She works at Netflix and her husband is the founder of a startup. She said she was a fan of the pod,

SPEAKER_05: so I started asking her questions about it because, you know, we've been having this debate over the last couple of weeks about what issues we should be talking about. And certain people on the pod never want to discuss politics. It's not like I only want to discuss politics. I just don't want to exclude it. I think we should just be talking about whatever the biggest issues are in the world in any given week, current events, whether it's business, markets, or politics. And she confirmed that was basically right. Don't change it. So I don't know why we would want to change the formula for the pod at this point.

SPEAKER_107: Every week, Sax, there's a group of people who are like, stop talking about politics. And then

SPEAKER_109: there's another group of people and their feedback is, why didn't you talk about Hunter Biden, Ukraine, Ukraine, Putin, China, whatever. And so the docket is the docket. Just to let the

SPEAKER_107: audience know, not that it's like all that big of a deal. It should be fairly obvious. Everybody has equal input on the docket. So it's not like anybody owns the docket. If you want to talk about something, you talk about something. But some people want to not talk about politics. Some people want to talk about a lot of politics. The Magnificent Seven for those people who didn't catch the reference is I think something Kramer has been talking about on CNBC. Seven stocks make up the most most of the gains this year, Meta, Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Apple.

SPEAKER_70: Can I tell you guys my welcome back to Milan story? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So I'm back in Milan for the summer. On his throne.

SPEAKER_114: So I have a chef Stefano. And if you could say hi to Stefano, all my friends, butlers, everybody.

SPEAKER_67: I can tell you're back in Italy, because the buttons are gone.

SPEAKER_70: I'm working from my office here. But this morning, I went to Coppola, which is my stylist, my hairdresser. And the thing is, there's like a hierarchy in the hairdressers. And so Roberto, this guy, Roberto, he's like the sort of top of the ticket. And Nat has first dibs with Roberto. And I have this other guy who's excellent. His name is Joquino. Yes. You guys will see Joquino in a few weeks. Anyways, the best thing about the haircuts at this place Coppola is you get a hair fluffer, which means that as Joquino Roberto cuts your hair,

SPEAKER_119: a guy comes and he just like he like does this and then he like You're patting your hair in a very he he fluffs your hair. Very uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_125: It's nothing that doesn't exist anywhere that will never get disrupted by AI. And it's incredible. A hair styling, the hair fluffer, the hair fluffer gets like a 50 euro tip doesn't matter what he does.

SPEAKER_114: Wow, when sacks rolls in, you're gonna need two fluffers with that. You're gonna need one on each side. I mean, the tufts are getting crazy.

SPEAKER_70: Zach, tell me if you want Joquino to cut your hair because when you come because he will do it, he'll do an incredible job. And I'll ask him to bring the hair fluffer.

SPEAKER_18: All right, listen, I think we just going back to the Kochu thing. I know we're in a high interest

SPEAKER_137: rate lunch environment. The Herp environment is hard right now for everybody. But we did get the feedback. Let's play the feedback.

SPEAKER_139: Hey, guys, I'm at the Kochu summit and just met a fan here who wants to explain the magic of the pod because you guys keep wanting to change things and mess things up. So here we go.

SPEAKER_142: Hey, everyone. My husband and I listen to your podcast pretty much religiously. And there is this incredible magic that the four of you have, the repartee, the back and forth. It's super informative, but you're all sort of rooting for characters almost. So it's almost like a scripted show in some way. So I have my favorite character. My husband has his favorite character. I won't say who's who, but I want you all to stay together and keep doing the show. But it's fantastic. And we love it. And you work at Netflix, right? I work at Netflix. Back in the day, I produced shows. So I was just telling David, trying to get that magic. You can put any number of scripts together. But once you get the cast on the floor and actually start getting, you know, that chemistry going, that's when the magic happens. And you

SPEAKER_139: guys kind of just nailed it. All right. So that's a professional right there. So stop screwing with

SPEAKER_20: the formula. Stop protesting. Oh, I mean,

SPEAKER_00: the camera really does that 10 pounds, doesn't it? I take two things away from this. Number one, she's much more charismatic on camera than sacks. She stole the show. She's delightful. And then to

SPEAKER_70: that sweater. Oh, my Lord. Fantastic. No, the sweaters fantastic. The shirts fantastic. I just think

SPEAKER_94: they may not have been. I don't think the intention was to mesh the two together, but

SPEAKER_157: they're out with each other. Too many buttons for you, Chamath? No, bro. Too many buttons.

SPEAKER_158: When you have a cream colored sweater, you can't wear a red checkered shirt. It's just not. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Red striped. Anyways, it's a, yeah. I mean, it looks like you're wearing an

SPEAKER_18: Italian tablecloth under there from a pizzeria combined with like an $8,000 sweater. It's great.

SPEAKER_163: But the hair, I mean, the hair is out of control. I think the hair is fantastic. I do. Don't, don't

SPEAKER_165: do not cut the hair. Don't let your Kino touch your hair, bro. I'll just get it fluffed. I'll tell

SPEAKER_166: him just fluff it. Don't just. Let's talk about the Zuck Elon cage match. Oh yeah. Oh my God. This

SPEAKER_54: is a little worried for my friend here. Yeah. I don't know if Elon is completely up to date on

SPEAKER_44: what kind of shape Zuck is in. Zuck is in tremendous shape. He's got like a dojo at his house. He's been getting training in, you know, mixed martial arts from. Jiu Jitsu. The Gracies or whoever, you know, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Yeah. He's been competing in events. Zuck is in tremendous shape and, um, no joke here. Now, Elon's a big guy. Elon's a monster, but I don't think Elon's not,

SPEAKER_05: Elon's not in this kind of shape. You don't have time to work out like this. I hope you get some sort of Gracie on your team to train you up for this thing. Also, Elon has a neck injury that he got from that sumo thing years ago. Yes. And he's had to have surgeries on it. So it would

SPEAKER_190: really suck if that would get re-triggered. Here's the thing though. He did take on a sumo wrestler.

SPEAKER_18: We were there for that at his birthday party and he held his own against the giant sumo wrestler. If Elon does get on top of and do the war on top of Zuck, Zuck has no chance. He will get worse.

SPEAKER_193: You're telling me what he should do is

SPEAKER_117: abandon the mission to Mars. Yes. Stop electrifying the world.

SPEAKER_197: Totally. And stop free internet around the world. Movement. Yeah. So he can beat up Zuck. I mean, if you were to put that to a vote,

SPEAKER_199: I think most people would put beating up Zuck as number one.

SPEAKER_74: This is the dumbest fucking idea I've ever heard in my life. Oh my God.

SPEAKER_203: I love the banter between the two of them. And let's just say we can all agree out of all the companies, right? There's only one contender to Zuck getting fit, right? Getting that company fit, getting himself fit is Elon. Yeah. 75, 80% of the people gone and product velocity is on fire at Twitter. So this is, this would be a cage match between the two who have defined this era of

SPEAKER_206: getting fit. All right, let's get to the docket here. What the fuck are you talking about? He's

SPEAKER_125: using the fitness guy burned a quarter trillion dollars and then found a way to stop it.

SPEAKER_211: Oh, there you go. That's very different than firing on all cylinders in three companies.

David Friedberg: I didn't say he was firing on all cylinders. And by the way, I am the only one of anybody, I think that knows them both well. Maybe Saks. Well, it's kind of like, you know,

SPEAKER_54: if you've got like a faucet running and it's spilling over the sink and then you turn it off,

SPEAKER_44: that doesn't make you a firefighter. Exactly. It doesn't make you a plumber.

SPEAKER_125: You know, there's this feature of a bathtub where when you get into it and the water gushes so violently over the, over the outside of it, and then there's a drain at the top as well

SPEAKER_225: as the bottom. And so then eventually it just stops. Yes, you could. Yeah, but Chamath raised a

SPEAKER_54: good point, which is look, Elon's a big guy. If he got training in MMA, I'm sure he'd do fine,

SPEAKER_44: but we don't want Elon spending two hours a day for the next six months or whatever. Because Zuck's been doing MMA, I guess for a while now. A couple of years. Maybe years.

SPEAKER_228: He's into it. Yeah. All right. Well, listen, there's been some updates.

SPEAKER_107: This, uh, war between Russia and the Ukraine or the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. You wrote a piece about it in, what was it? The Federalist, I think this week, titled the truth about Ukraine's falling, failing counter-offensive and the peace that could have been. Why don't you give us an

SPEAKER_230: overview of what you wrote and what your take is on the state of affairs right now?

SPEAKER_05: Well, the thing that's been going on since around June 4th or June 5th is this long-awaited Ukrainian counter-offensive. This has been touted for a long time. This is going to reverse Russian territorial gains. Ukraine's going to use all of this modern Western equipment, these leopard tanks that have come from Germany and Bradley's from the United States and a lot of other NATO or American equipment, and they're going to push Russia out of their country. This has been told to us since the fall of last year, since that sort of Kharkiv counter-offensive produced some Ukrainian territorial gains. You've had former generals like Ben Hodges and Petraeus say that this counter-offensive is going to be highly successful. Where it stands right now is that around 18 or 19 days into it, it has produced minimal gains. In fact, it's been somewhat of a disaster. It's hard to get conclusive estimates of

SPEAKER_44: personnel and material losses, but I think as many as a quarter of the tanks and armored vehicles have already been destroyed. And the casualties may be as high as around 10,000 out of an army that was trained up for this purpose of around 50,000. So, so far it has not gone well. The Ukrainian army hasn't even made it to the first line of defense. So what the Russians did is they created three fortified lines or belts of defense. And then in front of that is what they call a gray zone or security zone or crumple zone, which is an area they can test, but it's not technically a fortified line. The Ukrainians are still in that sort of gray zone. They are not punching through. They are not even at the first Russian fortified line. To give you some idea of what's involved here, the Russians have these obstacles. There's basically trenches that have been dug. There's ditches that would stop tanks or sort of force them to go in a certain direction, steer the traffic. There's extensive minefields. They've got these things called dragon teeth, which are concrete bollards that stop tanks or move them in a certain direction. Then the Russians have massive amounts of artillery. They've got infantry on the ground that helps spot the artillery. And if all of that doesn't take out these Ukrainian tanks, they've got these attack helicopters that come in almost uncontested, because at this point it doesn't look like the Ukrainians have any air defense. And they've also got fixed wing aircraft that are capable of dropping precision munitions. So it really seems like the Russians have fixed a lot of the problems that they had last fall in their army. And so far,

SPEAKER_233: it seems like this counter offensive is not going anywhere. We're 16 months into this Chamath and

SPEAKER_107: clearly fatigue is setting in. It's not commanding the news cycle here in America. And on a percentage basis, even the neocons and Republicans are dropping their support for this at a pretty precipitous rate, which is predictable. Americans don't want to be in forever wars. We all know that. So what's your take on

SPEAKER_113: how this winds up, especially in relation to a our budget and be this upcoming election, which this seems to be will be a major issue if this isn't resolved. By the time we get into the 24 election

SPEAKER_235: cycle. As part of answering this, I have a question for Sachs. But is it true that there was a ceasefire

SPEAKER_94: like Putin had a press conference where he showed a document that he said was a ceasefire that then the United States apparently sent Boris Johnson over to Russia, Ukraine to basically blow it,

SPEAKER_239: blow up the agreement? Yes, this is finally correct. This wasn't a ceasefire. This was

SPEAKER_106: a peace deal before the war started, correct? No, it was after. Or this is what they claim?

SPEAKER_44: There were rounds of negotiation before the war. Notably, there was a round of diplomacy between Blinken and Lavrov in January, the month before the war, where Blinken said that we cannot compromise on NATO's open door policy, that sort of diplomacy fell apart. But then after the war, there was a meeting of the Russian delegation and Ukrainian delegation in Istanbul under the supervision of Erdogan in Turkey. Naftali Bennett also had a similar process. In both cases, the West rejected

SPEAKER_243: a peace deal. Allegedly. This is Putin we're talking about, right? Nobody knows.

SPEAKER_44: Well, hold on a second. Let me come back to the evidence for it in a second. But what the deal would have provided is that the Russians would move back to pre-war lines if the Ukrainians would agree not to become a member of NATO. However, the Ukrainians could still receive specified security guarantees from the West. That was the deal. Now, well, we have now multiple data points. You've got Naftali Bennett saying that he thought a deal was taken among these lines, but it was rejected by the West. You also have now Putin showing the very document, which was signed by the Ukrainian delegation. So this was the document. Well, he flashed the document, right? Nobody has this document. It hasn't been released yet. I hope the Russian government releases it for the purposes of history so we can inspect it. But nobody contests that this document is real. Remember, if he's just making this up, you would think that Erdogan would basically come forward and say, no, this is fake. There's too many people who are in that room who'd be able to say this document is fake. No one has done that. So I think there's every reason to believe this document is real. Now, it is not a final agreement. It appears to be a preliminary agreement or an outline, but the outline is that Russia is saying we will move back to pre-war lines if you agree not to become part of NATO. And that deal was rejected when Boris Johnson flew into Kyiv and basically told the Ukrainians, we do not want to make a deal with Putin. We want to pressure Putin. And the source for that is not the Russians. The source for that is a Ukrainian publication called Ukrainian Pravda, UP. And they ran an article in May of 2022 that I can put on the screen. And it is the source for saying that Boris Johnson came in and told Zelenskyy, we do not want to make a peace deal. We, the West, are not ready to make a deal with Putin. We want you to fight Putin or pressure Putin. And if you do, we will give you advanced weapon systems. And that is when the

SPEAKER_248: deal fell apart, if you look at the timing of it. Allegedly. Allegedly. This has been lightly sourced

SPEAKER_44: here, so let's just be clear. No, no, no. But you have to consider the source here. This is a pro-Ukrainian publication writing in May of 2022. Now, the tone of the article and what they basically say in this article is that Zelenskyy accepted Boris Johnson's offer. In other words, he took the gamble. And at this point in time, you've got to remember, this is two months after the war started. It looked like the Ukrainians were doing well. So, UP was essentially praising Zelenskyy in this article for taking the West up on this deal to pressure Putin rather than make peace. Now, a year later, it looks like this gamble was a disaster. Yeah. And so, that is the real conclusion here. A deal was available, but

SPEAKER_251: the West chose not to take it. By the way, Fiona Hill, who is a Russia hawk, and you could almost put her, I'd say, neocon adjacent, has basically said that this type of deal was available. The West did not want this deal.

SPEAKER_94: I think, Jason, maybe to give you an answer, my thought is that this week was a very bad week

Chamath Palihapitiya: for establishment politics and institutions. Because on the one hand, if you take the Russia incident

SPEAKER_94: and the Ukraine war, what you saw was that there were ample numbers of off-ramps that we chose, frankly, to not take so that we could engage our enemy in some long drawn out war on the hopes that it just depletes their resources. That's kind of rolling the dice, I think, in a very dangerous way. I think this week, we also saw some published stuff on COVID and the COVID vaccine, which also debunked a lot of widely held truths. And it turned out that folks that may have been conspiracy theorists,

SPEAKER_70: quote unquote, were right there as well. So I think it's just an uncomfortable set of facts that again, just reinforce that if you're not really thinking for yourself, you're not going to see the totality

Chamath Palihapitiya: of what's actually going on. I think with respect to Russia, Ukraine, everybody has moved on. And so sadly, the only people that are left over are the people that have to fight the war, we're still separated from their families, there's the people that are dying. There was an article, I think today, they recruit prisoners, right? So obviously, some of the prisoners of Russia users are still pretty crazy. That person went on some rampage inside of a train, killed a couple people, stabbed some other people, there was just pictures of blood everywhere. I mean, this is just a horrible situation. And it's still not clear to me why we didn't take the offering.

SPEAKER_257: But if in fact, it's real. So I just want to keep putting that disclaimer out there because Putin flashing a document doesn't make all this true. It doesn't mean it's not true.

SPEAKER_260: Well, what about Ukrainian Pravda?

SPEAKER_262: Well, Jason, I would say, I am just being clear here that none of this is confirmed data points

SPEAKER_44: you need. I would say what are you talking about? Naftali Bennett confirmed it. What incentives the Israeli former Israeli leader have to lie about this?

SPEAKER_70: Here's what I would say, Jason, I think that something like that is so profoundly important.

SPEAKER_94: That if it were not true, I think it would have been very important for the powers that be to discredit it almost immediately. So that they didn't have to look like they were warmongering unnecessarily.

SPEAKER_264: Can I also up level and connect to this point about the establishment? Because

SPEAKER_265: I think there's been a lot of pushback to even challenging the status quo, even having a conversation about Ukraine or having a conversation about COVID. And I think if there's one thing this pod represents, the fight going on at Twitter represents, is the need to have this conversation. If we look at the wars the US has engaged in since September 11th, it's estimated three to four million people have died in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, we spent eight trillion dollars. Inflation adjusted,

SPEAKER_39: we spent four trillion in World War Two. Eight trillion represents 25% of our entire national debt. And I've yet to meet a single parent who said to me, I care so much about this Ukraine situation,

SPEAKER_265: I would be willing to put my children in harm's way to fight for the defense of Europe. Okay,

SPEAKER_32: so those data points tell me at a very minimum, we need more of this discussion, more of this debate,

Chamath Palihapitiya: not less. The idea that that we could be tiptoeing closer and closer to some land war in Europe unnecessarily. And I think the bigger issue is, and you can't trust what you're being told. And I think

SPEAKER_271: that that's what's very problematic. That is a bigger picture. And just so we're clear here,

SPEAKER_114: I'm not saying I'm on either side of this. I'm just pointing out that this is all still very thinly sourced. No, it's not. Until the West confirms any of this, I think. What do you expect the West to

SPEAKER_155: do? You expect the State Department to issue a press release saying, yep, we fucked up, it's on me.

SPEAKER_00: My theory, what are you going to do? My theory has been, and I've been very clear on this podcast, my theory has been since the beginning, they want to deplete Russia, and they want to deplete their army and their capabilities and have regime change and Putin. I'm not saying I'm for that just for

SPEAKER_282: the people who are not. I'm not. I'm not. No, no, no, no. You said it would ankle Putin. That was the

SPEAKER_00: crude language. That is what they that is what they plan on doing. Yes, I think that's what they're

SPEAKER_44: doing. Lloyd Austin, our Secretary of Defense said that our purpose was to weaken Russia. Yes. So to knock it out of the ranks of the great powers. I agree that's what their purpose is. Yes,

SPEAKER_46: but I think they want regime change. Yes. That's what Boris Johnson went to keep and said,

SPEAKER_44: we want to pressure Putin, not make a deal with him. So they courted this war. They, they prefer.

SPEAKER_220: That's been my theory since the beginning. They prefer to fight a proxy war of choice that was easily avoidable. And I'm not endorsing that. I'm not endorsing that.

SPEAKER_283: Take NATO expansion off the table. This is not about you, Jason. I'm asking you a simple

SPEAKER_285: question, which is why. No, no, but Sachs just said it was. But Sachs just said it was,

SPEAKER_287: so I'm just clearing it for the record. He did not say that. He just did. He said that was your

SPEAKER_286: position and I'm correcting you. Okay, fair enough, Jason. I have the right to correct you.

SPEAKER_44: That was not my position. I said that's my theory. Okay, fine. I actually agree with you. If you're saying that that was our government's objective, which was to weaken Putin, I agree with you. They chose to fight an optional proxy war of choice that was easily avoidable if they'd just taken NATO expansion off the table because they thought it would weaken Putin. But here's the rub on this. It has not weakened Putin. It has weakened the United States and our allies. Any way you want to look at this thing, look at just the weapons and munitions. So we are out of 155 millimeter artillery shells. We cannot produce enough. This is the crazy thing. We spent 800 billion a year plus on the Pentagon and our national defense. We're out of ammo. I mean, we must be getting so royally ripped off by the military industrial complex. Okay. We cannot produce ammo fast enough. That's why Ukraine's losing this war. The balance of artillery favors Russia. Russia is basically using about 20,000 shells a day. The Ukrainians are using somewhere between three and 6,000. We are out of ammo. We

SPEAKER_233: cannot produce enough. And this actually dovetails nicely with another story this week. There is a

SPEAKER_114: journalist named Matt Iglesias. Is that how you pronounce his name?

SPEAKER_18: No, Iglesias. Yeah. Iglesias. And he said, I mean, he literally said the quiet part out loud.

SPEAKER_114: And I'll just quote, because he was criticizing you and Chamath for hosting RFK. We'll get to that in a

SPEAKER_18: second. But he basically said, this is actually a really good idea for us. Basically NATO equipment plus Ukrainian lives are being traded for Russian equipment and Russian lives, which leaves NATO coming out ahead. That's doubly true because NATO is much richer than Russia. So we win a long-term game of everyone explode their weapons as fast as they can make them. Again, though, what makes that really true is NATO material is killing Russian soldiers while Russian material is killing Ukrainian

SPEAKER_295: soldiers. That's a deal in our favor. I mean, that is a cynical summary of that.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah. He wrote that last year in defense of the war. Basically, like all the neocons, he's sort of an establishment-approved intellectual. They think he's smart. I think he's really foolish. He basically wants to fight the last Ukrainian here for the sole purpose of blowing up Russia's stockpiles. The reason this is so dumb is Russia can always make more. Those lives aren't coming back, but they can always produce more artillery, more weapons. And in fact, the Russian war machine is now ramping up to full production. They are ramping up the number of people in their army. I think it's estimated that by the end of the year, they're going to have 750,000 men under arms. They've ramped up artillery shells production. They were at something like one and a half million at the beginning of the war. We were only producing 14,000 artillery shells a month, mostly for training purposes in the United States. We've since ramped that up to 20,000, but that still massively trails what the Russians can do. Hold on. They're trying to ramp it up to 90,000 a month, but that's going to take till 2028 because it takes time to build. You got to build up new factories, new production lines. You got to issue contracts to suppliers or vendors. It takes time to do this, but the Russians have ramped up their war machine. And then the other thing that's happened is that Russia and China have entered a de facto alliance and including Iran. So you now have the cementing of this giant alliance in Asia between China, Russia, and Iran. They're sharing equipment now together. Iran is producing drones for Russia. Russia is now going to be giving advanced fighter jets to Iran. So this idea that this war has made the West stronger is depleting the West over an objective we didn't need to fight. The war was easily avoidable. And we have now created, I think, the most fearsome opponent that America has ever faced. We have never faced an adversary with a combined manufacturing capacity and raw materials of China, Russia, and Iran. If we were to get in a war, a new world war against this sort of new axis, we could lose. They actually have more manufacturing capacity to produce weapons of war and munitions and ammo than the United States does.

SPEAKER_257: China has been clear that they're not going to provide weapons to Russia. And so I'm not sure

SPEAKER_44: that that alliance is exactly accurate. They've given us no such assurance. All they've said is

SPEAKER_00: they haven't done it yet. It's a theoretical thing that you're talking about here that could be very serious. I think your point, and this is to Brad's point, we should be having a very thoughtful

SPEAKER_107: discussion here, because if China did pick Russia, which they haven't, and they went to war, it would

SPEAKER_306: be war. Well, we should talk about the China relationship actually. Yeah. Okay. Blinken just

SPEAKER_107: went to China and this was the first trip for an American secretary of state since 2018. Obviously, things have been strained with the spy balloon and the visits to Taiwan. Blinken gave some basic goals for

SPEAKER_113: this engagement with China, the fentanyl problem, some detained Americans and protecting US citizens

SPEAKER_257: working in China. Those were kind of the easy check boxes. But they wanted to create also an open line of communication between our militaries, which China wasn't super stoked on or wouldn't agree to.

SPEAKER_94: Tony did a great job. Yeah. Okay. I think what's really disappointing is that while Tony's over there doing this hard work, which is must be tough to do, because it must have been a little bit like dancing on eggshells a little bit, right? He had to be intense. Yeah, he had to be very thoughtful, very measured. But as far as I could tell, he did a fabulous job. Now, full disclosure, he's a friend of

Chamath Palihapitiya: mine. So maybe I'm biased. But then over here, Biden, it's a mid level fundraiser in California is calling Xi a dictator. How hard must it be for you to try to do your job when your boss is just like completely undisciplined like here. And here's the problem with that is that if the United States actually thought that Xi was a dictator, do you think that a mid level fundraiser that we were all

SPEAKER_125: invited to in Northern California that none of us said yes to is the place to announce a foreign policy

David Friedberg: shift like that? Absolutely not. So it just means that again, there's just more evidence about Biden

Chamath Palihapitiya: being very undisciplined. Now, again, that could be an age issue, it could be a mental acuity issue. We don't know because we're not given a chance to really prosecute that problem. Meanwhile, Tony's there trying to do the best job he can and the sand shift underneath him. Thank God he was able to get the trip done before this thing happened is what I think. But that gap was a very big gap and a very big problem, I think, because whatever goodwill he built up was practically flushed down the toilet if you saw the reaction from the Chinese, which was to be deeply offended. And it makes no

SPEAKER_311: sense to poke. Yeah, when he went to see MBS, and they had to negotiate a fist bump versus a handshake,

David Friedberg: like what is all of this, either unplanned or undisciplined theater? Why are we engaging in any of

SPEAKER_107: this stuff? It doesn't make any sense to him. Joe, Joe Biden's always been known for being a liability in terms of these statements. When he worked for Obama, he was the VP, he also said things, you know, he shot from the hip a lot. You should not be calling him a dictator when you're

SPEAKER_113: trying to do this critical work. It's a stupid move. I think everybody can agree. You were going

SPEAKER_265: to say something, Brad? Yeah, I was just going to say, you know, kind of market reaction going in. So the K web, the Chinese index was up about 20% heading into these series of meetings.

SPEAKER_32: Now, notably Blinken was not scheduled to have a meeting with Xi. And so what happened is on day one, there's a meeting with the foreign minister, right? And it seems that there was some positive trend lines coming out of these first two meetings with the top diplomat with foreign minister, which led to the meeting. And notably in the meeting, he did say, the United States has not changed his policy on Taiwan, we don't support Taiwanese independence. Now, the market reaction post visit was down 10%. And I think this is owing to what Chamath said that people felt like maybe we took a step forward here that we at least had a meeting. But then it was a another step back. And so I think where we sit at the moment is there probably going to be some follow on meetings coming out of this. This was not, you know, a path back to where we were. But I think it was a stabilizing moment. And, you know, again, we were just at the East meets West conference, where there are a lot of Chinese CEOs and founders who were there. And I think the idea there was like things are stable, like not getting worse. And by the way, six months ago, there was a real concern that things were

SPEAKER_317: deteriorating quickly. So I think it's, you know, you can see something constructive coming out of this,

SPEAKER_18: not getting worse was how I felt coming out of it. And then Biden then makes it worse is really it is a I agree, it's just a stupid gap. Let me tell you about some of the reporting from

SPEAKER_57: the Chinese side. So after these diplomatic events, and you're right, Blinken met with

SPEAKER_05: Wang Yi for seven hours, then he got an audience with Xi Jinping. They do these readouts where each

SPEAKER_44: side basically produces a public summary of the meeting. In the Chinese readout, they said that US Chinese relationships are at the lowest point they've ever been. I mean, since I guess, diplomatic relations were kind of reestablished under Nixon. So that from the Chinese standpoint, they believe that relationships are at the worst they've ever been. Moreover, the US sought to put Ukraine on the agenda, the Chinese response to that was we are not interested in discussing our relationship with Russia, that is none of your business. So this idea, there's been this neocon fantasy that somehow China would help us in this war between Russia and Ukraine. And I've said all along that the last thing China wants is for neocons to achieve their objectives with respect to Russia, because then China alone will be in the gun sites of US hawks. So China will do what it has to do to support and even prop up Russia if they have to. Remember, China and Russia, and specifically Xi and Putin, they're the two leaders who've met with each other more often than any other leader. And they've called each other their best friends or most,

SPEAKER_251: I think the language they use was most bosom. Well, most bosom friends was what they called it. Okay. That's a little weird. Bosom buddies. Yeah. But yeah.

SPEAKER_325: Somebody great TV show. Good point. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00: Just to give people exactly what happened.

SPEAKER_18: Biden, when he was at this campaign fundraiser in NorCal that, uh, again, yeah, we were probably invited to people on the show. He was talking about the military Chinese spy balloon. And he said, she got very upset, quote, that this was a great embarrassment for dictators when they don't know what happened. And he continued to say that she didn't know the balloon had been over the continental US and was off course near

SPEAKER_00: Alaska. And this is the kind of thing where he's basically saying she is stupid or, you know, whatever, uh, or there's some level of incompetence over there. It's exactly the wrong message you want to send. Calling him a dictator and calling him stupid and saying he was embarrassed. Like, why would you provoke that to raise money or to be a tough guy? It makes no sense. I mean, it sounds like

SPEAKER_331: Trump's version of foreign. From the Chinese standpoint, they thought the whole balloon thing

SPEAKER_44: was a travesty. I mean, I don't know what the truth of it is, but they feel like it was just

SPEAKER_05: this continuous, uh, drumming up of outrage on the American side against China. And they wanted to

SPEAKER_44: put that behind us in terms of the relationship. I heard Blinken interviewed about this. Chamath,

David Sacks: I agree with you. I have no complaint with Blinken in terms of how he handled this meeting. Tony did a great job. I have a complaint about how,

SPEAKER_251: I have a complaint about how he handled Moscow, but, but not Beijing, but they wanted to put this

SPEAKER_44: balloon business behind them. My guess, I've always said that it never made sense to me that the Chinese would use such a ham fisted way of conducting espionage to fly, deliberately fly a balloon over the US. It never made sense to me. And it became this cause

David Sacks: celeb in the US. And I think the Chinese at a minimum wanted to put it behind us. And then Biden

SPEAKER_00: reopened the issue like this submarine tragedy. The balloon is like made for network television

SPEAKER_257: because it's a live event where you can put live cameras up and you can cover it 24 seven. It's just like Trump. We better be really careful. It's just for the media. It's for the media. It's catnip for

SPEAKER_47: them. We have to be very careful now. I think in our relation with China, because again, you now have

SPEAKER_44: this Asiatic alliance between China, Russia, and, and Iran. It is the most capable, let's say, adversary the United States has ever faced. Remember that when we faced the Soviet Union, their economy was never bigger than one third of the US economy, the Soviet bloc versus the Western bloc. The Chinese economy on a purchasing power parity basis is roughly the same size as the US, and they've got more manufacturing capacities. If you think about the type of manufacturing capacity

SPEAKER_251: the United States had during World War II, that now belongs to China, not the US. We have hollowed out

SPEAKER_257: our manufacturing. I just don't understand why our foreign policy, Brad, I'll bring you into this

SPEAKER_107: discussion. Why our foreign policy isn't being driven by some of the things that we could do

SPEAKER_00: together to collaborate on? Like we have global warming, we have, you know, issues on this planet

SPEAKER_107: that we could collaborate on. And it seems like we're spending no time on those issues and saber rattling. Cuba, another example, why can't we set a goal for the United States to normalize relations with

SPEAKER_00: Cuba and get them on our side, since they are the equivalent of, let's say Ukraine, David, to America, you've you've brought that comparison? Why don't we make peace with Cuba? Why can't we have a peace based foreign policy where we're trying to build bridges? God, Cuba and United States could do amazing things together. And we should be trying to win that relationship instead of living 50 years in

David Sacks: the past over it. I'm not sure there was legitimate outrage over the past week, because we discovered

SPEAKER_44: that China was planning on, they already have an intelligence outpost in Cuba, listening outpost, but also they're thinking about doing training of troops in Cuba. And that would be a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. And we should basically get our backs up over that. The Monroe Doctrine states that no distant great power can bring troops, weapons, or bases into the Western Hemisphere. United States spent over a hundred years basically enforcing Monroe Doctrine. It would greatly diminish US security if we allowed any foreign great power to have troops in the Western Hemisphere. So we deserve to have our horns out over that. The problem is that we have our horns out over everything. And so we're not really taken seriously. We've cried Wolf so many times. I don't think we're really taken seriously by the Chinese on this. And this should be a teaching moment to the foreign policy establishment, because this is Russia's objection. Russia's objection is to having American troops, weapons, and bases directly on their border. This is our objection to what China is seeking to do in Cuba.

SPEAKER_346: Okay, Brad, do you want to add something to that? Or can we move to Kobe?

SPEAKER_265: Just real quickly, I would say, there's a real appetite in the business community to be engaged. This idea that we're going to decouple the world, never have to deal with these folks, right, is just a farce. ByteDance bought a billion dollars worth of Nvidia chips announced this week, right? Like, like, the world is entangled. And I think we would be better off having our political and business leaders in more sync over how to achieve this long term safety and prosperity, as opposed to what feels like a disjointed foreign policy relative to the global reality

SPEAKER_264: around AI and, and what's happening on the business.

SPEAKER_114: I agree. Well said. Yeah. And I mean, it's just so obvious. Why can't we be collaborating on stuff? And we see when you and I made our trip to the UAE. And then we see the Saudis, you know, bringing

SPEAKER_352: movies back, we have certain regions, we're doing a pretty good job of engaging with engagement. You know, reasonable engagement is a good idea.

SPEAKER_94: Yeah, it's because and I think RFK has said this, we have created a very dangerous revolving door

Chamath Palihapitiya: between our most critical institutions, and the largest industrial companies in the United States. And that revolving door creates all kinds of conflicts of interest. And those things get sorted out via revenue and dollars and profits, incentives. And so those incentives will drive us if it's the military industrial complex to go to war. And you're seeing that it'll complicate our foreign policy. So this is why I've always said, the most important thing that we're doing is something that the military industrial complex cannot stop, which is our energy independence. And when you have energy independence and abundant costless energy, I do think that the biggest thing you get is this peace dividend, you stop fighting these wars, you become much more rational abroad. And you're like, Okay, I don't need to fight with all of these people. Because, you know, things are so great

SPEAKER_155: within our borders. You're so right, because we actually have stopped those wars. And now we've

SPEAKER_257: created two other ones, Russia, Ukraine, we can Taiwan, China, what's that?

SPEAKER_70: We can't help ourselves. And we'll use the scarcity of commodities, as a boogeyman to basically

SPEAKER_94: incentivize us to go in these foreign misadventures. And it really has to stop.

David Sacks: By the way, just two quick points on that on Taiwan, there's an election next year. And it looks like

SPEAKER_44: right now that the pro-China party might actually take power. Right now, the party that's in power is more of a pro-Western party. And the reason I think is that the Taiwanese are looking at what's going on in Ukraine, and they're looking at the corpses of the Ukrainian youth pile up. And they're thinking maybe it's not such a great idea to be an American proxy state. Or in the words of Henry Kissinger, he once quipped that it's dangerous to be an American enemy, but it's absolutely fatal to be an American friend. I think that this war may be backfiring in terms of the incentives it's creating around Taiwan. Remember, Biden said that this war would basically help protect Taiwan by deterring China. It might actually deter Taiwan from opposing China. So we'll have to see how that

SPEAKER_94: plays out. All an able-bodied person in Taiwan of voting age needs to do is read the newspaper and

Chamath Palihapitiya: understand that in the last two and a half years, we've essentially started a multi-trillion dollar program to deliver ourselves from all the critical resources that China and Taiwan gives us. And so if you're a Taiwanese citizen, the writing is unfortunately on the wall, which is that we are giving ourselves the optionality to not have to do anything. So to your point, David, if you're a rational thinking Taiwanese person, unfortunately, you're forced to be in a position where you may have to head your bets. And if the United States can basically have a chip supply that comes from Europe and Mexico, now all of a sudden, the criticality of TSMC goes away. To wit, I published this tweet

SPEAKER_94: yesterday about Buffett and his trades in Japan, right, he bought these five trading companies. And so just a really novel carry trade that I've really fallen in love with just understanding it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: But the code out to that is that when he did this, and going long Japan, what he actually also did was he delivered himself from China, he had a long position in TSMC, and he said, I'm out. And when they asked him why he sold TSMC, he said, This is a very complicated thing. And he basically said that it's not a bet that's worth making. And I think underneath that, if I had to guess what he's trying to say about Taiwan indirectly, through his sale of TSMC is the odds are that we are not going to get into a land war over there, which means that that asset, and its equity value is in danger, and I don't want to own it. And I think that that's a very clinical summation of his rational action. So to your point, Well, here's what Blinken said, People speak with their dollars.

SPEAKER_18: I think this is very important. You know, the one China policy says Taiwan is part of China, it's not an independent country. But we've had a very ambiguous and tolerance for this ambiguity of Taiwan acting as its own nation, while saying we support the one China policy and that ambiguity has served us very well in the China relationship. Here's a Blinken said at the press conference quote, We do not support Taiwan independence, we remain opposed to any unilateral changes to the status quo by either side. The status quo he's referring to here, Brad is that they get

SPEAKER_114: to be independent in Taiwan. But we don't say they're independent, they are obviously acting in an independent manner, but it is not our business to tell the Taiwanese people that they're independent or

SPEAKER_107: not. It's their decision to determine if they're independent or not. Any thoughts on the trade by Buffett and Blinken's comment at the press conference and this ambiguity?

SPEAKER_317: I think we want to maintain the ambiguity. I think we're basically saying to China,

SPEAKER_32: don't change the status quo, at least for now. Right? While we rebuild these chip fabs in Arizona and other parts of the world. I think most of the wealthy families I've talked to from Taiwan believe that five or six years from now, the US will no longer be in the position where they will need Taiwan and Taipei as much as they do today. And they're worried about

SPEAKER_362: How many years do you think it will take to be independent? Say it one more time and explain it.

SPEAKER_265: Well, it's not about being independent. It's how much longer will Taiwan have what they believe to be

SPEAKER_32: de facto protection from the United States. And I was told by one very influential Taiwanese family that they believe when the fifth chip fab comes online in Arizona, which I think is scheduled for 25 or 26, they intended to have most of their family members out of Taiwan at that period in time. Now, I think most Taiwanese don't envision this being, you know, a violent invasion of Taiwan. It's more of a take under in the same way that Hong Kong was. And so I don't see an American president, frankly, going to war, nor would I want them to go to war over Taiwan. But I think it's in all of our interests to maintain that status quo, which is why taunting the Chinese over the course of the past few years, over Taiwan has seemed like a policy that's not fit with our goals.

SPEAKER_352: Right? Well, if you look at skin in the game, the fact that the chips act went through so quickly,

SPEAKER_18: the fact that Warren Buffett, as you pointed out, your moth made his bat, and this family that has obviously, you know, skin in the game, quite literally, are making these decisions. I think we

SPEAKER_352: know where this is headed, you can just follow the bets. And if you look at the bets in five years,

SPEAKER_00: the dollars, follow the dollars, I mean, and also where people put themselves geographically, everybody left Hong Kong, when the turnover happened or before it, they went to Singapore,

SPEAKER_18: they went to UAE, they voted with their feet and their dollars. And that's obviously what's going to happen here. This is a good pivot. Because this criticism of the Ukraine policy by Matt, that Sachs

SPEAKER_107: pointed out came because there is a belief on his part, and others, that the pod here, all in, is putting its unilateral support behind RFK. That is not true. There are two people on the pod who hosted a fundraiser last week. And here is what Matt incorrectly said, because I have not put my support behind RFK. I think he's very interesting. And I'm glad he's in the race. And neither has Friedberg, but Chamath and Sachs did host one and I'll hand it over to them. But here is what Matt said in his sub stack. And even though it's not the subject of this post, I do want to say that I think it's really sleazy and gross for the hosts of the All In Podcast to be engaging in this Kennedy boosterism as a bangshot way of harming Joe Biden's reelection prospects, not what's saying the recent conversions around Russia policy. Kennedy represents precisely the strand of progressive thought that right of center business people have highly, have rightly spent the better part of the century bemoaning. His is an anti-progress, anti-technology, ultimately anti-human world view that stands against

SPEAKER_257: biomedical progress, against energy progress, and against human flourishing. The guy who wants to blow

SPEAKER_57: up as many Ukrainians as possible in order to deplete. As a meat shield. Yeah. Exactly. He thinks

SPEAKER_227: is anti-human. Listen, I don't even think we should be giving him this much time. Well, no,

SPEAKER_18: but I think it is important that because people now have connected this pod with the rise of RFK.

SPEAKER_44: This was the first major podcast he did. Well listen, what Iglesias is accusing us somehow of supporting RFK, not because of issues, but somehow because it's a bangshot for Donald Trump, which is ridiculous. None of us support Donald Trump. He's not even my preferred candidate in the

SPEAKER_05: Republican lane. Well, what he said was a bangshot against Biden, just to be clear.

SPEAKER_44: A bangshot against Biden. Who you're against. I prefer RFK to Biden. It's that simple. What's wrong with that? He's not even making any arguments here. Look, we've explained in a lot of detail, and I explained in my response, all the issues where I support RFK. He supports free speech over censorship. He supports civil liberties over the surveillance state. He supports peace instead of war. He supports sealing the Southern border, virtually alone among Democrats and talking sense on that issue. And I believe that he's completely correctly diagnosed what we're doing in Ukraine. So on the issues, I support RFK. You disagree with him on some issues,

SPEAKER_352: right? You disagree with him on nuclear, and you may disagree with him in his anti-vax stance,

SPEAKER_381: if he is in fact anti-vax. I just, hold on, let Sachs finish those two. I think he was right about

SPEAKER_44: COVID lockdowns, and I think he was right about COVID, the so-called COVID shot that wasn't even a vaccine, that that should not have been required. But what about those two issues? You

SPEAKER_00: obviously disagree with him on some things. Do you disagree with him on his anti-vax stuff and his

SPEAKER_44: nuclear stuff? I don't know enough about those issues to have like a firm stance. What I would say is that every candidate represents a bundle of issues, and you support the ones who are aligned with you on the issues that are most important to you. On the issues that are most important to me, which are these questions, the great questions of war and peace, and the questions of free speech and censorship. And even I would say the question of the economy and who do we prioritize? Because he wants to prioritize the middle class. On those big questions, I feel like I'm aligned with RFK. Perfect. So that's why I support him. Let me go to Chamath. And by the way, do you think Jack Dorsey is supporting RFK as a bank shot something or other? No,

SPEAKER_05: he's supporting it because he agrees to RFK on these questions of war and peace.

SPEAKER_114: Okay. And free speech. Correct. I'm just letting everybody be very clear about their position,

SPEAKER_113: since this is becoming the support of RFK by this podcast or two of the four people in the podcast

SPEAKER_108: is now becoming kind of national news. Iglesias is even making any arguments here. He's just applying

SPEAKER_44: derogatory labels to us. Yeah. And really what this is, this is a disciplinary tactic or a shaming tactic. Yes. By the sort of enforcers for the establishment. Right.

SPEAKER_05: You want to prevent independent thinkers from stepping out of line. I agree. That's what this is about. It looks like this outsider went to the Dalton school in Harvard university. So there you have it. Yeah. You got a $2 million

SPEAKER_394: education. Doesn't know what a basis point is. He's the guy with the basis points, right?

SPEAKER_78: Oh boy. He failed math. He graduated at Dalton and Harvard. Good luck with your substance, dude.

SPEAKER_352: Oh my God. Chamath, you are pro nuclear. You've been very clear about that. Although you're pro

SPEAKER_18: renewables mostly, you've been clear about that on this podcast and many conversations I've had with

SPEAKER_00: you. You are also pro vaccine, but you're anti what happened with the lockdown. So maybe you could expand upon your support of RFK, why you held a fundraiser firm and what things you agree with money,

SPEAKER_155: maybe what things you don't necessarily agree with them on? Well, first, I actually did.

SPEAKER_94: What I think a lot of people haven't done, which is just listened to him just stop talking, zip the old

Chamath Palihapitiya: yapper. And there is an enormous amount of long form content where you can really understand where he stands on some of these topics. He's right about the war on Ukraine. We shouldn't be in.

SPEAKER_94: And he's right about free speech, which is we should have it. He's right that the COVID vaccine

Chamath Palihapitiya: was not a vaccine. And really what it's done is actually discredit the word vaccine, unfortunately, in a lot of people's minds. He actually is a person that is pro vaccine for all these other vaccines, he himself is vaccinated, his children are vaccinated. You would all know this stuff if you just took two minutes to just listen to it. He is against the COVID vaccine. And what I would say

SPEAKER_94: is, I'm very sympathetic to that. I'm very sympathetic to the job the FDA had to do. And I think they

SPEAKER_117: generally did do a great job. But we ran something through, and we allowed it to be labeled a word

Chamath Palihapitiya: that misappropriates what it is. It's not a vaccine. And the problem with that is that it now makes people mistrust the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. That's crazy. You shouldn't mistrust the MMR vaccine or D tap. But because those things are lumped in with the same thing as a COVID vaccine, that is at best 30 or 40% efficacious. We have these problems. He calls that out pretty honestly. So I like the fact that he actually speaks in nuance. I like the fact that when I listen to him, I find that the talking head think police are generally lying, it confirms what I believe about them. Because he just says things in a very plain spoken, intelligent way. And I think that there are a lot of folks who don't want to think who want to be given the simple answer, who want to just reject what he stands for, and just take the establishment view in the hopes that they'll get, I don't know, maybe accepted by the establishment, the establishment just wants to curate power. And I just think that people should be thinking for themselves. If you listen to the Rogan podcast, if you listen to the Jordan Peterson podcast, there are millions and millions and millions of links and page views and discussions and thoughts and there's probably 1000s of minutes of RFK explaining what he thinks on basically any topic you can imagine, you can get to your own conclusion. And I think what I think you'll find, and this is true for me, is there's 10% of stuff you are just vehemently supportive of 70% of stuff that's like quite reasonable and fair. And then there's the rest, which is a spectrum of things I disagree with. But then you're left with a blended expected value where you're like, man, this guy is really better than all the other alternatives. Brad, I'll let you go. And then I'll give

SPEAKER_265: my position. What I find most insidious about the opposition to this discussion is people are upset

SPEAKER_32: that you're not swearing an allegiance to a dogmatism. Right? The truth of the matter is this group has

SPEAKER_265: hosted dinners for Ro Khanna, for Senator Manchin. We've hosted dinners for DeSantis. Right? Had I been

SPEAKER_39: here? I would have put my name on the dinner for Kennedy because I want to gather information. I'm an analyst. I want to think for myself. How can we spend trillions and put ourselves into potentially harm's way without having a real conversation in Congress and on these pods about the risk of war? Why can't we have an authentic postmortem about the efficacy of the COVID vaccine without being

SPEAKER_265: ashamed? The revolution going on in this country, which is fantastic from my perspective, is that there is no longer a monopolistic control over the discussion. And that's why this podcast and this friendship and the conversation we all had here is resonating with people because they also want to hear all the different sides because most people are capable, are way smarter than the elites on the coast thing. You know, I'm from Indiana, lots of smart folks who think for themselves in Indiana, but they're told told by coastal elites what to think. And they reject this. And that's what you're seeing in this discussion. And so many of these others, it's not about that. It's not about vaccines. It's not about a war. It's about their control over how you think and them wanting to force you to

SPEAKER_44: swear to an orthodoxy. I think that's really well said. Yeah, that is well said. But the way they try to control what you think is by labeling candidates so as to exclude them or make them sound crazy. So, J. Cal, I mean, you kind of introduced RFK as an anti-vaxxer. I don't think

SPEAKER_251: that is the correct way to describe his position or the singular way that he should be labeled.

SPEAKER_00: No, I don't, I don't believe that. I said, here are the things he believes that we agree with. And then I gave the things that the media is saying, you know, so I was trying to present the totality of it.

SPEAKER_114: And I said, he is obviously in favor of the middle class and all this stuff. So

SPEAKER_00: I want to be clear on my position here. So I am in support of vibrant long form debate like we have here. And I'm in support of anybody who takes on the establishment, because there are crazy incentives. As we talk about here, incentives matter. And we are long overdue for a discussion on vaccines. But it's very important that everybody understand here that everybody on this podcast took the COVID vaccine. And everybody here, our kids have been vaccinated. It's not a vaccine. It's not a vaccine.

SPEAKER_131: Exactly. So they took the COVID reduction.

SPEAKER_54: We were injected with an experimental mRNA treatment because we got hoodwinked by the media

SPEAKER_44: into thinking it would prevent us from ever getting COVID, which it did not do. I think it's fair to say, two months later, I got Delta variants.

SPEAKER_94: I think it's fair to say, vaccines are good. And the COVID thing was not very good.

SPEAKER_107: And it reduced death in older people, and probably was the only group of people. And we'll know when

SPEAKER_05: we do a postmortem. But do not take this mRNA, like flowing through our bodies, who knows, it might be a time bomb.

SPEAKER_18: Well, and then, for people who are wondering, like, if we should even be having these discussions, the hypocrisy of the media, I think is very important to look at here, because the media has been attacking this podcast over and over again, not that it matters. But when we moved into the top, 100, top 50, top 10, that's when the knives came out. And I would like to remind the media of the

SPEAKER_00: long history of investigative journalism and debates, what was once a conspiracy theory often goes on to win a Pulitzer Prize. And, you know, the hypocrisy here is crazy. Because if you look at some of the greatest stories and investigative journalists pieces, they started with these debates, rumors, et cetera. Abu Ghraib. That was the New Yorker. Ralph Nader.

SPEAKER_424: That was Cy Hirsch's reporting. That was Cy Hirsch's reporting. And he can't get the time of day.

SPEAKER_44: And now they're discrediting him. Right. He can't get the time of day for his report on who really destroyed Nord Stream.

SPEAKER_05: The Catholic Church sex scandal. The Boston Globe. The mainstream media does not perform the function that you're describing anymore. They act as the bodyguard

SPEAKER_431: for the elite, for the establishment. They actually have even of late done. They are stenographers for the people in power.

SPEAKER_00: Not exactly true. They have actually done incredible reporting. But there is a group of them, which is towing the party wine. Because you have the New York Times in their expose on the taxi

SPEAKER_434: commission. That won a Pulitzer in 2020. What? Taxi caps?

SPEAKER_00: And then you look at, I know you don't follow Pulitzers or investigative journalism. In 2020, Brian Rosenthal at the New York Times did a massive expose on the predatory New York City taxi.

SPEAKER_57: Industry. And then at the same time, there's a few other issues that might be more important to

SPEAKER_00: the nation. It was an example of protectionism and rent seeking. The Enron scandal, big tobacco,

SPEAKER_10: 60 minutes. What about the pretzel monopoly in the south part of the Bronx?

SPEAKER_441: What about that hot dog vendor on? No, you guys are uninformed. Didn't have all of his licenses up to date. I thought there was a whole lot about the big

SPEAKER_00: expose on that. The fact is, at the same time that the New York Times, CNN were attacking what Uber was doing, the New York Times won a fucking Pulitzer for their coverage of predatory loans by

SPEAKER_448: rich, powerful people in New York City. I bet they also did a great story on the

SPEAKER_54: guy selling trinkets outside Penn Station without a license. For somebody who's a man of the people,

SPEAKER_190: like yourself, Zach, you should actually be more informed. Okay. Well, what they should be reporting on,

SPEAKER_44: for example, what the, if they really, if the Pulitzers work the way they should is where patient zero came from on COVID because Michael Schellenberg just reported this over the last week and it got picked up by the wall street journal that patient zero, it turns out was a researcher at the lab who was performing gain of function research. Yeah. Shocker. Another conspiracy

SPEAKER_431: theory proven true. And we'll wind up being a Pulitzer. He deserves a Pulitzer.

SPEAKER_131: He does. And the crazy thing about this quote unquote conspiracy theory turned out to be true

SPEAKER_70: is like it brought together the most odd bedfellows, Rand Paul and Jon Stewart. When Rand Paul and Jon

David Friedberg: Stewart can be in a room and agree on basically the totality of a topic, we should all just pay attention because it's not, it's not a normal world in which these two guys would otherwise get along.

SPEAKER_125: Right. And both of them nailed it from day one. Right. They have the same name. But now connect

SPEAKER_44: the dots further. Okay. Why was the truth suppressed? Why did it not come out? Because Fauci had funded gain of function research at the Wuhan lab via eco health Alliance. So he knew that if at the beginning of this pandemic, it turned out that he had been partially responsible for the creation of this virus that had now turned into a pandemic around the world, his career would have

SPEAKER_00: been over. And it's worse Saks. It's even worse than that. 46% of the advertising on TV news comes from

SPEAKER_18: pharma. And we did not always allow pharma spending. And this is may not be one to one. It may not be that a specific person doing a report at CNN or Fox or any of the networks is saying, Oh, I'm going to lose my job if I write something critical of pharma, but they're not doing the investigative pieces on I can tell you this on the people who have 46% of their advertising revenue unless it really, you know, gets to the final inning on something and right and that is something that we need to question, right? The media is

SPEAKER_00: funded 46% by pharma companies, and pharma companies were given a pass. And if you criticize any of the pharma

SPEAKER_422: companies, the media is going to come for you. And so listen, I'm not a tinfoil, but you do have to

David Sacks: look at a sentence. No, that is not tinfoil. Listen, the media is funded by big pharma and its primary sources

SPEAKER_44: are these high level government employees who've been there forever, who leaked them information. That is why the New York Times was carrying water for Fauci and big pharma. This is the marriage of state power and corporate greed that RFK junior denounces. Yeah. Well, there you have it folks. So and he believes

SPEAKER_466: he could be assassinated by the CIA. No, he didn't say it like that. He didn't say it like that. He was

SPEAKER_94: asked what what is his strategy on campaigning and all of that stuff. And he said, Look, I'm going to do as

Chamath Palihapitiya: much as possible. But one thing that I'm going to avoid are like these open air parades just because there's just a lot of folks that we can't control crowd control. Yeah. Okay. Reasonable.

SPEAKER_227: Yeah. I mean, the conversation on Rogan went something like this. Rogan was asking questions

SPEAKER_44: about the Kennedy assassinations and RFK believes like something like 60% of the American public believes that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. Then Rogan asked him, Well, do you ever feel afraid running for office? And his answer was basically, No, not really. It's not something that I'm preoccupied with. But yeah, I'll take precautions. Does that mean he thinks the CIA is going to assassinate him? No, that's not what he said. But that is how the media reported it, including Fox News that became the soundbite. Well, the soundbite from this podcast was

SPEAKER_468: that he believes his uncle was and his father were that the CIA was involved.

SPEAKER_00: A lot of people, Jason, a lot of people. I am not giving my opinion. I'm giving his opinion on it. He said it on this podcast and the CIA won't release all the information to this day, even though they've

SPEAKER_316: been commanded to do so. So make your own decision, folks. According to Bloomberg, there is a ton of

SPEAKER_107: action for startup shares in secondary markets. If you don't know what a secondary market is, that's when one investor buys shares in a company that's not yet public directly from another investors on the cap table. So if Stripe, which is not yet public or Reddit, there are shares floating around in those companies, either previous employees or previous investors, one firm might see an opportunity there and buy them. As this process of bottoming out has occurred, PitchBook reported, Tiger Global told secondary investors, and that's a class of people who like to buy these, that they could bid on any individual private company in its portfolio. They tried to sell a bundle of these shares, about 30 startups at a time, but they couldn't find buyers according to the reports. So now they're allowing people to bid on per company on a per company basis. Some of these are being marked down a third, 50%, etc. Here's the quote from Bloomberg. As of May 31st, shares of

SPEAKER_320: startups were trading at a median discount of 61% compared to valuations at their latest funding rounds, according to a report by Forge Global Holdings. A16, according to the report, is actively buying shares in secondary. Excel, Bain, Bessemer, Kleiner are also using secondary to grow stakes in their existing investments, doubling down. As it were, crossover firms like KOTU, Tiger Global,

SPEAKER_257: and even Brad's altimeter are actively searching for deals. So Brad, your thoughts on this? Is this

SPEAKER_471: sign of a bottom? And why are you doing this? It's true you're doing it. Yeah, it is. It is true. I mean, our job is to look at all these companies, understand their value. You know, I'm sitting here

SPEAKER_32: looking at a list that I was given this morning, 125 companies secondary, you know, the Goldman Sachs

SPEAKER_265: unprofitable tech index in the public markets is down 64% as of this morning.

SPEAKER_474: Unprofitable public companies.

SPEAKER_265: So they put together a basket, they track unprofitable public companies, down 64% off of its peak as of this morning. So you just quoted the Bloomberg article saying yeah,

SPEAKER_264: these unprofitable tech companies in the private markets are down about 60, 61%. That smells right to

SPEAKER_265: me. The repricings have to occur. These have to occur. Right? There are 1400 unicorns at the end of 2022. And 100% of them will likely do a down round. And if you said what is the average that they're going to be down, it's over 50%. You saw the repricings out of some of the best ones, like a Canva or a stripe where it was down, let's go 30, 40, 50%. But you know, they're going to be companies like in the public markets that are down 80 or 90% and disappear altogether. So we didn't see the repricings. Okay. And by the way, when we say, you know, that article quotes Forge, that is what the sellers are offering to sell shares for. That is not where transactions are clearing. Right? So why hasn't Altimeter purchased any of this because the prices aren't low enough to induce me to get off the sidelines to purchase the shares, but we're within kind of, you know, we're starting to get in the zone where we can underwrite to a margin of safety competitive or better than the public markets for companies that we think are great companies. Now, out of those 1400 unicorns at the end of 22, there are probably less than 5% of those companies I would even want to own at the right price. Right? So it's a small subset of companies, the price has to get to this clearing point. But you know, I think over the course of the next 18 months, we're going to see an acceleration

SPEAKER_32: of market clearing events as these companies need to raise capital, as their employees want to get liquid on shares. And it's a probably see some great opportunities. But most of these things that

SPEAKER_265: get put on sale should not be purchased, right? Most of them, even, you know, the first sale price is never the last sale price, the markdown on the black t shirts will continue.

SPEAKER_257: Jim O'Shaughnessy

SPEAKER_05: deals. It's not primarily what we do, but we're open to it. But Brad, if you were to categorize the 1400 unicorns into one of three categories, what do you think the percentages would be those three categories being zombie corns, like unicorn companies that just don't deserve to exist in our product market fit, and they're going to go away. Category two would be viable companies that are just

SPEAKER_229: overpriced and are headed for a down round. And the number three would be the ones that are actually

SPEAKER_30: headed for an up round. Yeah, I'd say 30 to 40% are these companies that were valued over a billion

SPEAKER_470: dollars that don't have product market fit, they'll disappear. Zombie companies that will disappear.

SPEAKER_265: Right. And listen, just to be fair, let's explain. Most of these companies, right, have less than 200 million of preference, preferred shares that venture capitalists invest into the company. And many of those companies in that 30 40% there's a team, there's some asset of value, they may be able to, you know, sell the talent of the team and recoup David, let's call it 30 40% of the pref stack. Right in that transaction, we're starting to see some of those occur. Then I think the lion's share of the companies that are left, let's call it, you know, another 40%. These are companies that should never have been marked at these prices, right, but they do have a business, and they're going to be marked down, you know, 50 to 80%. But all of the like, none of those have been able to grow through it, then there's less than 10% of the companies, right, whose growth has been so robust through this period, that they've actually grown into or within 10-15% of those prior prices. And if you do all of that work, it puts us back on trendline. Right? The only thing unusual here is how far off trendline, we had 1400 unicorns, right? In 2020, we had I think 145 IPOs. In the last two years, we've had four. Okay, so there's a huge backlog. These companies aren't getting public. Why? Because public market buyers like ourselves, we're not willing to pay the prices that were in the private market. So the first step is to just

SPEAKER_32: have these clearing events. And as David, you and I heard sober talk over the course of the last

SPEAKER_265: couple of days, I think they, you know, said to founders very clearly, you need to sell your businesses or you need to get profitable. There is no middle ground. In other news, Ford has been

SPEAKER_107: issued a conditional $9.2 billion loan from the US Department of Energy to build out three 123 EV battery factories, specifically the loan is coming through the Department of Energy's LPO. So that's the loan program's office, they've got about 400 billion to lend out. You might remember this from 2010, when they gave Solyndra A123 batteries, which eventually went bankrupt and got

SPEAKER_233: bought by a Chinese company, I believe, and Tesla, a $465 million loan, Tesla paid it back, the other two didn't, Tesla paid it back with interest. Jigar Shah, the director of the loan program office described the lending moves as a way to onshore and reshore manufacturing, the goal of the program is not innovation, but to get more of the supply chain to be manufactured in the US guests. Some people are criticizing this just out of the gate with why should we be giving these loans to companies? Shouldn't this be the private sector doing it? Jamath, what are your thoughts here? Is this a good idea? A great idea? Neutral idea?

Chamath Palihapitiya: It's a great idea. Explain. It's us using our balance sheet to make sure that we get to energy

SPEAKER_70: independence. So this is actually a perfect role for government. It's shaping incentives so that capitalism can do its job. What this does for Ford is Ford has a partnership with SK. And so SK has a lot of capability in Korea, but they can bring that know how now domestically onshore to the United States, you'll be hiring 1000s of people, you'll be building battery factories, Ford needs batteries, their forecast is they'll be selling two and a half million electric vehicles by 2026 2027. So whatever Ford does, you can expect GM will also do. You can expect all of the other big companies to do so this is all just great. And at the end of the day, for people to not over this is 9.8 billion,

Chamath Palihapitiya: I guess it sounds like a lot, but we're probably spending $9.8 billion a day fighting wars. So this is a day of just taking a pause on all these dumb wars, and actually becoming energy reliant,

SPEAKER_233: carbon neutral, fixing the climate. It's great jobs, energy independence, and less dependency on autocratic nations, it seems like good idea. Everything should be how about instead of thinking

Chamath Palihapitiya: about it in terms of wars, let's think about it in terms of, so if the, the DoD budget is $800 billion, okay, per year, what is that 2.6 billion a day, 2.7 billion a day. Okay, so we're talking about three days, four days, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you want to say,

SPEAKER_05: I agree with Tamath about the wars. But this is all money we don't have. I mean, we shouldn't be spending the money on wars. And we shouldn't be spending it, I think, on industrial policy. So first of all, one of our friends who's an energy investor, we should beep his name, but was telling me that the energy subsidies that were in the, you know, misnamed inflation reduction act, it is like the biggest bonanza of all time. He said that the energy sector is going crazy now trying to figure out

SPEAKER_44: how to exploit these incentives. And his view is that although I think it was supposed to cost about $350 billion, he thought that it would ultimately cost the government somewhere around a trillion. Because the way these subsidies work is that you just qualify for them, and then you get the subsidy. It's not like the credits run out. So if you qualify, you get it. So this could end up costing the government way more than what was originally projected. And so the question is, well, what are you going to get for all of this money? And in this article on Ford, they were talking about these 7000 jobs that are being created at a cost of $440,000 per job. So it's great that the jobs are being created. But if you look at the efficiency of that, that spend per job doesn't really make sense.

SPEAKER_502: I don't understand how you get that number you take.

SPEAKER_44: That's what the article said it. The article said for 440,000.

SPEAKER_90: I understand. Do you take 9.8 billion and divide it by 7,000? What do you do?

SPEAKER_44: I'm just quoting that paragraph of the article. So the job creation is good, but you got to look at the efficiency of the job creation. The other thing is, the question I would ask you guys actually is, who wants one of these Ford EVs? Do you want an EV

SPEAKER_05: by Ford? I think there are a lot of people that drive a Ford pickup truck. We talked about this

SPEAKER_94: before. So that's one 50 is coming. Yeah, very popular. There was a an article in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago, which talked about the brand consideration cycle that has been going on.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And there was a large look, we're friends with Elon, but we should acknowledge there's a large number of people that are frankly, a little bit turned off by him. And they've been very clear that they want an alternative to Tesla because they don't want to buy Tesla because they don't necessarily prefer him as a

SPEAKER_70: brand ambassador for their car. And the reality of life is that even if you're like maximally incredible,

SPEAKER_94: unless you find some clever way of creating a monopoly, in which case you can be a douche or evil, you're only ever going to capture 30 plus 40% maybe of a market Coke, Pepsi is a good example. And so

Chamath Palihapitiya: there's always going to be long tail alternatives. And you know, I had a chance, for example, in Vegas to drive a Rivian, I was surprised at the quality or drive in a Rivian, I was surprised at the quality of Rivian only because I've been so focused on Tesla my whole life. So yeah, I think there are a lot of people that will buy Ford's doesn't take anything away from what Elon's doing. But I do think there are a

David Sacks: lot of people that will buy it. My problem with industrial policy is this, you think about that EV summit that the White House did, they didn't even invite Elon. And that that was for political reasons,

SPEAKER_05: union reasons. Yeah, partly because of his views on speech, but I think mostly because he's not a union shop. Right. And so that's the real reason why Ford is being doled out this sort of nine point something billion dollar loan, is because they're politically connected with the right people in this

SPEAKER_44: current administration. And that's the problem with industrial policy is that the money gets handed out

SPEAKER_251: by government to the politically connected in this case, as opposed to the companies that may be

SPEAKER_00: producing the best products. The fact is, Tesla did get one of these loans in 2010, when it was a very nascent company. So you got to give them some credit, they took a big risk there.

SPEAKER_229: But let's think about that for a second. Okay, because I know that example comes up a lot. And a 123 and Solyndra. Yeah, so Elon was basically a fluke. I mean,

SPEAKER_44: you get like a once in a generation entrepreneur who have to be working on this EV problem, and he got that loan. If you're to take Elon out of that government portfolio, it all looks like Solyndra. Yep. So the question is, like, what is this portfolio going to look like? Is there really going to be another Elon in there? Because if not, there's gonna be a lot of Solyndras. Well, even if they break even, there's gonna be a lot of subsidies to companies like Ford, which are politically connected. And I think a point Freeberg would make if he were here, is that at some point, you're gonna have to turn off the subsidies, because we can't afford it.

SPEAKER_251: And then at that point, is that factory gonna be self sufficient?

SPEAKER_513: Brad, you want to you've heard the two sides of the story here?

SPEAKER_471: Yeah, no. And listen, while generally against industrial policy, I come down on Shema's side, I think this is a once in a generation opportunity to reduce our national security

SPEAKER_32: risk profile, and to achieve what is really a national security imperative, which is energy independence. It's not going to happen just according to the invisible hand of the market. We see our, you know, great power competitors who are using this against us, frankly, and have robust industrial policies. So I'm willing to stipulate that there will be those inefficiencies in this system. But I was lucky, lucky enough last night, I was having dinner with the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Wally Adeyama, who was out here meeting with founders, including battery founders in Silicon Valley, on this very subject. And I know some of the companies who are getting checks from the US government to scale up, right, innovative battery technologies, innovative chip manufacturing.

SPEAKER_265: And I have to say, this is the best of America, I see some really great public private partnerships

SPEAKER_32: that are on shoring vital national interest in chips and batteries. And so I'm happy to see it happening. But I also know there will be grift and there will be waste along the way. But compare that, David, to the 8 trillion we've spent over the last 20 years on war policy, and what we've gotten from that. So you know, you know, I'd rather see us take chances here on innovative battery technologies

SPEAKER_517: than waste, potential waste, but not as wasteful as a war. Well, of course, I mean, the first thing we

SPEAKER_44: got to do is turn off all these crazy wars, but that can't be the bar, because that's a very low bar. I mean, anything's more productive than war, wasting the money blowing up other countries that we don't

David Sacks: need to be involved in. I mean, remember, we do have a $32 trillion debt.

SPEAKER_109: I think a great thing to do here is what they should have done with Tesla, which is,

SPEAKER_107: when they give that $500 million loan to Tesla, they should have gotten 10% of that in warrants to buy Tesla shares at the IPO, 50 million at that IPO would have gone what 200x. And that would have been

SPEAKER_18: an incredible payday. So if they give this 9.2 billion to Ford, why not get 900 million in warrants to

SPEAKER_520: buy shares and Ford? Do you want the government to become a VC? No, I want them to get a little

SPEAKER_18: participation in the upside of the company. I don't want them to own it. I want them to have potential participation. Well, I'm giving a modest number here. So right now, they're a VC without

SPEAKER_428: participation. But right now, they're a loan that gets paid back with interest. And I'm saying,

SPEAKER_107: give them some upside in the equity, even if it's a small piece. Would you object to that, Sachs?

SPEAKER_108: You basically want to make them a venture debt provider, like SVB? Basically, yeah,

SPEAKER_107: like venture debt. Like give them a pot sweetener. Yes. Yes. Give them a pot sweetener. Why not?

SPEAKER_382: It didn't work out so good for SVB. You may not remember that, but it would have worked out

SPEAKER_228: incredibly well with their pressing. Jason doesn't solve my problem. You might drive a

SPEAKER_44: better deal for the US government in that case, which is fine with me, but it doesn't solve my objection, which is at the end of the day, these decisions are going to be made based on political criteria. Got it. Okay. And we're going to end up with crony capitalism and state capitalism,

Chamath Palihapitiya: as opposed to entrepreneurial capitalism. But this is in support of that, because this is a deal where that 9.8 billion does come over. But these are basically like loans and loan

SPEAKER_94: guarantees, and you still have to put up the equity yourself. That doesn't solve anybody's problem, meaning you need to still be entrepreneurial. And there needs to be risk capital. In this case, the risk capital is coming from Ford and SK. And I think that that's my understanding of this

SPEAKER_257: is that this was like 90% of the cost or 95% of the cost. So there's not much risk capital here from

SPEAKER_70: Ford or SK. I mean, it might be opportunity cost, but it's not the full cost of these three factories, almost $13 billion. So there's still a non trivial amount of risk risk capital that has to get put to

SPEAKER_405: work here, man, I would love to only have to put up 20% on the dollar. 30 cents on the dollar in my

David Sacks: investments. I think Brad does make a good point about the security of our supply chain. I'm more

SPEAKER_44: willing to use this sort of industrial policy. We're talking about something that is vital to the security of the United States. I think you can make your, you can make that argument with chips. I don't think electric vehicles rise to that quite that level. Batteries might, I don't know. I wouldn't say batteries do, but I think obtaining a secure supply of the rare earths that are needed to make batteries. There's maybe a role for government in that. David, the reason batteries must

SPEAKER_32: is because the only way to wean ourselves off of the dependence we have on fossil fuels around the world. And even though we produce, and we're now a net exporter of oil, the reality is we're still in entanglements around the world, because the world is dependent upon those fossil fuels. And so I do think

SPEAKER_471: that that is a national security interest having, you know, energy independence, not only for ourselves,

SPEAKER_233: if Germany was energy independent and kept their nuclear running and didn't have Nord Stream, we'd have a different situation here right now. We'd have a much different situation.

SPEAKER_539: Drill. We got plenty of oil and gas over here. All right, everybody. There you have it from the

SPEAKER_114: architect. Drill, baby. Drill. Trigger warning. I liked your Greta Thunberg tweet, Chamath. That was a really good tweet. Shout out to Chamath's tweet. Oh my God, the number of, number of people. I mean,

SPEAKER_70: did the mids like it or the mids hated it? What happened? Can I just address what this means? So when I think of somebody as a mid, it's somebody that is just a hapless, impotent cuck that can't think for

SPEAKER_206: themselves. Matt Iglesias. And so what I what I don't mean is that, you know, you, you, you have become a billionaire every week. You know what this is? It's the all in podcast for clicks. If you 10 people have started, can I finish it? Yes. Gotcha. It has nothing to do with your

Chamath Palihapitiya: financial status. It's just everything to do with your open mindedness. And there are these people that are just so reactive on Twitter. Hmm. I feel a little bit sad because like in a few years, they'll still be very unaccomplished and yet still be wondering who they can blame now,

SPEAKER_543: and it'll just be them. Blame themselves. So I would just encourage these people to just fucking do some work. Put your head down. Do the work. My God, build something make something. So anyways, most most of the comments were really great and interesting. And then there's a couple of people who are like, Oh my God, how dare you? You know? And it's like, How dare I what? How dare I

SPEAKER_329: what exactly? You can tell that this podcast has truly become successful when the mainstream media

SPEAKER_528: fights up and punches up to try to get us to respond to them to get more people to subscribe

SPEAKER_70: to their Substack while playing Matt. I'll tell you the funniest thing. The funniest thing was I did this tweet about Buffett. And then people are like, Oh, but I thought you compared yourself to Buffett. And I was like, No, no comparison, just benchmarks. And then they get tweaked about the word comparison versus benchmark. And then Carson block jumps in and I texted Carson on the side. I was like, bro, I'm just trolling the mids. Just don't worry. This is all bullshit. It's all just for

SPEAKER_543: shits and giggles. I do it. I do it when I'm either pooing or I haven't jet lagged.

SPEAKER_114: It's on Ambien or while taking a dump or both. No Ambien for the dictator, the architect and bestie Brad, the fifth bestie and our mass our new mascot, Matt, the mascot, who'll be writing three more substacks about us. I am the world's greatest

SPEAKER_548: moderator. Can we make that shit bread logo our logo? Yes. Make to go choose austerity measure lunch.

SPEAKER_550: We salute you. The all in lunch will not be us. By the way, did you guys touch it? Do you know

SPEAKER_553: what it was? Was it bread? Did you touch it? I didn't touch it. No. What was it? I abandoned it immediately. It's a vegan pretzel. I don't know. Is that what they call poop? Dog poop now? A vegan

SPEAKER_554: pretzel? Is that what they call it? Friedberg was going to be there. A vegan? Well, I mean,

SPEAKER_05: zoom in on that. What is it? The WEF wants us eating insects, so this is next. I think that's

SPEAKER_557: probably what it is. It looks like a vegan donut slash a doo-doo. It looks like a French bulldog's

SPEAKER_559: doo-doo. The one that sacks his face when he opened that box. He just dropped it on the ground. Just like literally took it out of his hands and let it fall. Sheer disgust.

SPEAKER_44: I thought my seven-year-old had played a trick on me because he's into those types of like gags. It looks like one of those fake doo-doos, the rubber ones. I bought a fake

SPEAKER_564: doo-doo on Amazon once. I've done that. You throw it on me. The fake doo-doo is great. I'm going to buy

SPEAKER_18: some fake doo-doo. Actually, you know what they should do? They should put that, KOTU should make fake doo-doo and put it in the gift bag for all in Summit. That would be a great little merch item.

SPEAKER_569: All right. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye. Love you, boys.