SPEAKER_00: what are the next steps in your interview process for your cabinet position secretary of treasury chamoff secretary of state sacks jacal uh press secretary honestly press secretary oh my god press secretary can you imagine me in the press briefing room

Chamath Palihapitiya: whoever wins the presidency i just want you guys to know i would i would be a great secretary of sweaters i will source incredible only cashmere vicuna i will redesign the outfits of the entire

SPEAKER_11: military industrial complex yes the navy seals will be in loripiana from head to toe

SPEAKER_14: they're going to go whack osama bin london next time with loripiana forty five hundred dollar french shoes could you imagine seal team six where

SPEAKER_17: absolutely it's going to be great it gets chilly in those apaches and the blackhawks you're going to want like a tashmina wrap or something

SPEAKER_18: have you been to afghanistan at night

SPEAKER_30: all right everybody welcome to episode 151 of the all in podcast with me again today

SPEAKER_32: the sultan of science the queen of quinoa the prince of panic attacks david friedberg the dictator himself chamoff polyhapitiya and your crazy angry history uncle david sacks is here welcome to the program everybody uh we got a very full docket i guess we'll start it off with how the war and the conflict in the middle east is going here sacks you hosted a twitter space with vivek uh and elon on preventing world war three what was the premise and the reason for setting up this trio to talk about

SPEAKER_36: world war three well i think vivek actually had the idea to do it uh we had a couple other folks on

SPEAKER_38: the panel as well we had uh colonel daniel davis who has a podcast called deep dive he's a military expert we had alexander mercuris from the duran which is a top geopolitics podcast and so we were talking about the risk of a series of chain reactions that could happen in the next few weeks here over what's happening in the middle east elon wanted to do it because of what he said which is that he's talking to a lot of world leaders he's talking to a lot of different people and they tell him that the risk of some major war happening or some greater catastrophe is higher than they've ever seen so he was quite concerned about that and you know i think a few things came out of it uh the first is and i think elon took this position most strongly we really need to end the war in ukraine the combination of having a war in ukraine that involves the united states and then a war in the middle east that could also involve the united states and russia has troops in syria there's a lot of ways for this to spiral out of control there's a lot of room for unintended consequences his view was look we've just had five months of counter-offensive here it didn't go anywhere on net the ukrainians didn't take back any territory in fact the russians slightly gained territory so this war is going nowhere it has failed it is time for the administration to work towards a ceasefire and a resolution because having well the ukrainians have not taken back they had a completely failed counter-offensive okay but you said the war has failed so i'm just curious which sorry the counter-offensive has failed okay got it we're now the counter-offensive started on june 4th or 5th it's now october 26 and if you look at the map that the new york times provided ukraine has not taken back any meaningful amount of territory in fact russia on net has gained territory even when it was supposed to be ukraine on offense so there is no prospect of ukraine achieving its objective of evicting russia from their territory so what is the point they have defended themselves

David Sacks: from an invasion from putin yeah you would say that they've ended up successfully hundreds what's

SPEAKER_45: successful about it several hundred thousand didn't get taken over as a country when they were invaded that was russia's goal okay so when they sent the troops in there their goal wasn't to invade

David Sacks: what was their goal then honestly you don't really understand the history of the conflict

SPEAKER_47: no no i mean we've talked about his comment i'm just saying the way you're framing it is that ukraine failed it seems to me they've also the argument could be that they defended themselves

SPEAKER_48: successfully if you look at what's happened this year so let's just put a pin in what happened

SPEAKER_38: last year because i think there's different ways of interpreting it but if you look at what's happened this year and certainly over the last five months ukraine has made no progress in evicting the russians nor is there any prospect of them evicting the russians so the continuation of that war doesn't achieve anything except kill the flower of ukrainian youth and continue the ukrainians are dying in much higher numbers and russia is a much bigger country they've got something like five times the population so moreover with this new conflict in the middle east you create all these unintended consequences and all this risk of escalation being in a proxy war with russia so that was the first thing to come out of the the twitter space was a consensus among the people who were there that it's time to resolve this conflict with russia the united states does not need to be in a proxy war with russia we need to normalize relations it's way too dangerous to be continuing this with what's going on in the middle east the second half of the the twitter space i think was about the scenarios here for what could come in the middle east and just briefly i think that there's three scenarios here for what could happen assuming israel goes into gaza this is what everyone's waiting for is will there be a ground invasion of gaza netanyahu says they're going to do it the theory on why they haven't right now is the u.s is actually moving a bunch of assets into military assets into place they're putting air defense batteries around military bases in the middle east so there's been a lot of reporting that the u.s has told israel to wait until the u.s military is ready for any blowback that could happen but netanyahu has been very clear that they are going in no matter what anybody else says three scenarios could arise from that number one is what israel and i think the administration want which is that they have a successful military operation and the u.s's threats deter hezbollah or iran from getting in so that would be like scenario number one scenario number two would be that the israelis go in it's guerrilla fighting it's much tougher than anybody expects they start to take casualties at the same time you get massive public uproar you get a lot of protests the arab street

David Sacks: erupts more and more leaders across the world denounce israel and so you kind of muddle your way

SPEAKER_38: eventually towards the ceasefire in a couple of months so that would be scenario number two scenario number three is that this thing spirals out of control very quickly where you get hezbollah in the

David Sacks: north invades so you have a second front the west bank could erupt in protests that could potentially create a third front iran could get involved either because they feel the need to defend hezbollah or because you have people like lindsey graham are basically already calling for war with iran so

SPEAKER_51: either side could basically escalate into that so i think what happened with lindsey graham because

SPEAKER_52: he was telling them if iran if they got involved that we would strike back yeah yeah but he wasn't saying

David Sacks: invader i think he's saying pretty clearly i think he's saying pretty clearly that if hezbollah gets involved we're blaming iran for that got it okay so he's chomping at the bit to to basically invade

SPEAKER_57: iran now how could that happen well you're saying you think he's chomping at the bit to invade iran

SPEAKER_58: oh yeah he just sure he gave them the warning to not this is about on the neocon so i'm curious

SPEAKER_36: about that point yeah explain that piece this has been on the neocon agenda for a long time they've wanted to have a war with iran they basically see the iranian regime as an enemy and they want to knock

David Sacks: it off even if you go back to 2003 the beginning of the iraq war there was serious conversation about

SPEAKER_38: whether iraq was the right country to invade a lot of people thought that we should go after iran not iraq and the bush administration's view on that was don't worry we're going to get them all the

David Sacks: question is which one to do first we're going to knock off saddam first in fact what's going to happen

SPEAKER_55: is we're going to be greeted as liberators the invasion is going to be so successful that the rest of

David Sacks: these tyrannical middle eastern regimes are just going to throw up their arms and they're going to basically you know surrender and become democracies that this was the bush administration's claim back in 2003 obviously didn't work out like that but there has been a desire to go into a lot of these countries for a long time and i think there are a lot of these neocons who see iran as unfinished

SPEAKER_38: business and if they get the chance to do that they will so yeah so that see that's the piece of your

SPEAKER_32: analysis there that i thought was most interesting you think lindsey graham wants to invade iran so when he gave that warning in his speech which i think came out today or did it come out yesterday um you think when he gave him the warning hey don't get involved or that's going to be the third front

SPEAKER_65: you actually think it's he wants to invade the united states has that agenda i think there's a lot of

David Sacks: neocons who have that agenda and you see this in the wall street journal which is sort of the lead

SPEAKER_67: leading neocon publication got it okay so let's explain what the world the wall street journal

SPEAKER_32: obviously has been talking about hamas militants being trained in iran a few weeks before the 10-7 attacks and it says about 500 militants from hamas even when 10-7 happened remember there was that

SPEAKER_38: wall street journal story claiming that iran had directed the whole thing yeah and then that was knocked down by israeli officials who said we haven't seen evidence of that as well as washington officials you know kind of the usual unnamed knock that down so the wall street journal has been kind of pushing the the edge here trying to i'd say rattle the saber and gin up some sort of action against iran the latest thing was a story claiming that 500 militants had just been trained by iran so they keep trying to put this idea in play that we need a war against iran is my point okay so

SPEAKER_70: just let me reflect that back to you you're saying lindsey ram wants to invade iran and he's part of the

SPEAKER_32: neocon agenda and the wall street journal is not just straight reporting this the wall street journal

SPEAKER_45: is in trying to incite an incident here and start a war with iran well the wall street journal reflects

SPEAKER_38: the agenda of the people who own it and then the people who are their sources and clearly somebody is leaking these stories to the journal somebody leaked the idea on day one of this crisis that iran was secretly directing the whole thing even though israel itself so that was not true so yeah look they

SPEAKER_52: have an agenda live an agenda so the wall street journal's agenda is to saber rattle and incite a global war with iran or are you saying that they're just useful idiots and that they're being manipulated by the military global complex and the neocons i'm just saying you said the wall street

SPEAKER_80: journal's saber rattling so that's as if the wall street journal wants to start a conflict the wall street journal is beating the drums of war that's what's going on okay so you believe the journalists

SPEAKER_75: at the wall street journal are trying to start a war with iran they are beating the drums of war

SPEAKER_82: that's what the drums of war means to you okay chamath freeberg you think that the wall street journal here is trying to start a war with iran i'll give you a little bit of history here i'm

SPEAKER_84: going to presume you know it so it'll be repetitive but it used to be that iran was a bastion of economic growth and cultural vitality right but if you go even further back there was a duly elected prime minister that was overthrown mohammad mosadeh because he tried to nationalize your oil industry in the 50s in iran and that coup d'etat which was run by the army was sponsored by the uk and us government so we've had a long kind of sordid history with iran for a very long time post world war ii a lot of it has been intertwined with petrodollars and oil so you know we had the shah then there was this duly elected prime minister he tried to nationalize the oil industry he was overthrown in a coup d'etat supported by america and britain they brought back the foreign oil companies including american oil companies then the shah ran for 30 years but then he was overthrown for a whole bunch of cultural issues and so it's gone back and forth and back and forth so i think it's important to keep in mind that

SPEAKER_86: a lot of that generation it's not clear to me where their views come from and what i mean by that generation is folks of lindsey graham's generation and older have this multi-layered view of iran because they've seen two or three of these regime changes and they've seen the changing incentives

SPEAKER_84: that america has had towards dealing with them so instead of just kind of kind of putting it out there like we just want to go to war i think it's important to remember that these guys have a historical context that younger folks may not okay that's number one number two i think it's david is right

Chamath Palihapitiya: that there are certain publications that are beating the drums of war the first time that the wall street journal did it it was that iran was the one that essentially was the trigger puller on the october 7th attacks and that was immediately refuted interestingly not by iran which did it later but actually by the united states in israel so i do think that there is some questionable incentives that drove the publication of that article at a very critical point at the beginning

David Friedberg: of this israel hamas gaza yeah an idea of what that incentive would be

Chamath Palihapitiya: no i don't i don't know except to say that the facts are that there was an article that pointed the finger it was written as an exclusive it was written in a moment where things were very heightened and little was known and that these governments had to come out and explicitly disavow and and de-escalate it and so i think that's just an important thing to observe now we're in this second wave where there's a second attempt to now point the finger directly back to iran as having trained these hamas mass terrorists has now engaging in and it's not to say that they're not but it's just that this escalation is definitely happening on a continuous basis and so it's important to frankly understand the historical context and de-escalate so that we don't i think elon is right this is how you sleep walk into war is you read a headline you believe it and then you run with it run with it and the opposite of sleepwalking is underwriting from first principles i think it's important to go and read the historical context of how we've been engaged in iran since world war ii particularly the back and forth the complicated issue of all the petrodollars and then you can view lindsey graham's comments in two veins i think vein number one is he was there with the bipartisan delegation i think it was 10 u.s senators five of each five republicans five democrats so i think it's fair to say that he is not just speaking off the top of his head i think that there's some understanding of what he intended to say and so i do think that this is sort of a back channel way of getting on the record that they really need to de-escalate if they are given an opportunity to engage they should

SPEAKER_101: not i think that's the when you say you're talking about iran yeah iran should de-escalate and

SPEAKER_104: frankly hopefully they listen and they do and they do it lindsey graham's quote just to to put it

SPEAKER_32: out there when he was visiting tel aviv we're here today to tell iran we're watching you if this war grows it's coming to your backyard the idea that this happened without iranian involvement is laughable freeberg what are your thoughts do you think the journalists at the wall street journal are

SPEAKER_52: complicit in trying to incite something here do you think they're just reporting the facts straight

SPEAKER_106: what's your take on this okay can i answer that because i actually have a data point yeah no i mean

SPEAKER_55: and the reason i'm pushing you on it sax you're using the language of conspiracy like complicit to make it sound like i'm leveling an accusation at them when what i'm saying is this is their editorial policy and you can see that by actually reading their editorial so therefore look at an op-ed that came from their editorial board two days ago called biden's red line moment with iran and what it says is here that secretary of state antony blinken warned tuesday that the u.s would respond swiftly and decisively to any attack on american forces from iran or its proxies and then it says that's a welcome message aimed at deterring the mullahs in tehran and their agents but will the president enforce the red line he appears to be drawn he hasn't so far so in other words the journal editorial board is saying that biden has not been tough enough on iran okay now go to the last paragraph it also says here iran is using his proxies to test us resolve the more they attack without iran paying a price the more likely that iran will raise the stakes the paradox mr biden has to appreciate the most stabilizing move for the region would be restoring america as a deterrent power so what does that mean you take these things together they're saying that in order to stabilize the region we need to deter iran but they say that just making threats of deterrence is not enough you actually have to do something so in other words like attacking iran is the stabilizing move which is war is peace it's right out of george orwell so this is what i mean beating the drums and by the way the reason i'm

SPEAKER_32: not saying your conspiracy there's your there are there is editorials then there's news and then there's your imprecise language that i'm just challenging you on because i want you to be precise here if

SPEAKER_47: you're saying the journalists are trying to provoke a war here or you know in the banging the drum and

SPEAKER_112: saber rattling sounds like i think you're well saber rattling and banging the drums are a bit imprecise you're going down a weird rabbit hole of what what the wall street journal believes i think

SPEAKER_55: it's pretty clear that their editorial policy is they are super hawkish on iran they don't think biden's been tough enough on iran they also have published two stories that have been either knocked down or questioned since october 7th that clearly want to lay all the blame for this on iran and so they are ginning up both in their news and their editorial pages they're beating the drums of war

SPEAKER_81: they're trying to basically prime the administration to go to war got it they're trying to goat the

SPEAKER_115: administration but i don't think i don't i don't understand why honestly i feel like we're going

SPEAKER_47: down a rabbit hole look no i'm just trying to understand your position and if you're talking about the editorial page you're talking about the reporting that's all i'm just trying to get you to

SPEAKER_60: be more precise that's all i think both in this case remember if you go back to the reporting on

SPEAKER_55: the ukraine war and i followed a lot of it by all the major publications in my opinion the wall street journal's news coverage of ukraine was some of the most biased and inaccurate of any publication any major western publication and i'll just give you one example here which is on august 31st the wall street journal claimed that ukraine had a major success in its counter-offensive claiming that it had pierced the main russian defensive line okay we are now what is it uh basically two months since then and it's very clear that that did not happen okay that was all nonsense and again read the first paragraphs here not only do they claim to penetrate the main russian defensive line it said it raised hopes of a breakthrough that would reinvigorate the slow-moving counter-offensive

SPEAKER_119: was there a subsequent breakthrough did hopes get raised no this was total nonsense so your position

SPEAKER_32: here is the the journalists who wrote this story are in some way trying to benefit the neocons in the uh military industrial conference i just want to be clear about it because using the wall street journal as a you know an active participant in this as a reporter it's just kind of an explosive um it's not kind of

SPEAKER_38: it is it's an explosive claim and so i'm just trying to be clear really i'm just saying that their reporting on ukraine was highly inaccurate and it was all inaccurate in the same way which is it always

SPEAKER_55: overstated the ukrainian successes in this war so i call that bias i think it's easy to prove i think they have a similar bias which is stated explicitly by their editorial board which is they don't think that biden and dc has been hawkish enough on iran and they would like to see they think the stabilizing

SPEAKER_126: move is for biden to basically take action against iran whatever that means yeah okay freeberg any

SPEAKER_129: thoughts on this before we move on to the next topic nothing on the war on the situation no i'm

SPEAKER_132: good i mean we can pivot off of that i want to say yeah that's why i'm bringing him in i mean i feel

SPEAKER_55: like we're debating the wrong thing which is you're you're actually questioning whether there are war drums beating for iran when i think it's like abundantly clear what we should be discussing is whether that's a wise move for the us i think it's clear that these drums are being beaten i think

SPEAKER_142: the question is why why would we allow that to be the default plan of action my concern

SPEAKER_00: it's everyone's gonna think it's crazy but it's that there's a very very low probability but now

SPEAKER_143: probably much higher than it was that the world marches towards using a nuclear weapon for the first time in a long time and the reason is as sax has pointed out so many times there's significant material and industrial production shortages not just in the us but around the world to support rising conventional wars that seem to be scaling all over and there's going to be multiple fronts and to feed those wars with conventional weaponry there's there's a breaking point our cost of weaponry is 10x russia's cost of weaponry supposedly i mean i'm just quoting sacks on this point but um

SPEAKER_00: if all that is true at some point these conflicts become really difficult to maintain and if we're in the midst of a conflict you may not be able to simply retreat or recede at some point the question

SPEAKER_143: is well how do we gain superiority again and whether that's us or russia backed into a corner or israel backed into a corner who also has a nuclear arsenal there's a a couple of scenarios there's like a

SPEAKER_00: million scenarios from here there's a million realities we could live in from here from today but there's some number of them that end up with someone saying i gotta press the button

SPEAKER_143: and there's remember not all nuclear weapons are these things that wipe out a million people

SPEAKER_00: instantly some of them are small load tactical weapons that is still very low probability but much higher than it was a few weeks ago that we find ourselves walking because of the fact that we're gonna have multiple conflicts and burn through all this conventional weaponry not have industrial production systems to support all these conflicts but every there's a bunch of countries that have a trump card and once you start talking about it it'll seem scary at first then it'll get normalized and then it'll become a question of when and where and how and then all of a sudden it's like holy shit this is a different world we're living in that's a scary place i don't want to be in anything we can do to eliminate those paths from being walked i'm in favor of even if that means seeding strategic advantages today i just don't think that that's a place we want to go

SPEAKER_145: there's like uh nine nuclear powers who do you think is going to be the one who would

SPEAKER_104: actually use a nuclear bomb freeberg you have some speculation there you just think everybody

SPEAKER_45: runs out of bullets and tanks and missiles and then they go to nuclear because they have nothing left

SPEAKER_00: i don't look i i tend to think in terms of like there are multiple parallel scenarios that can play out so i don't have a point of view i'm not going to say deterministically i think this thing is going to happen again i think this is very low probability sure i could see a bunch of scenarios emerging like let's say that russia's got their back against the wall and putin's feeling lost and desperate and he needs to use a tactical weapon to you know get some regional victory again these

SPEAKER_143: tactical nuclear weapons they're they're not necessarily the kinds of things that you would use to level manhattan those exist but there are other weapons in the arsenal that i get worried that someone says we're backed in a corner we have nowhere else to go we can't win this thing conventionally and we cannot lose and that's the moment when someone says this is the let's start talking about this and that conversation happens before it gets used then that conversation becomes normalized and then suddenly it's not this thing we all grew up in a world where this was never a real threat or risk

SPEAKER_00: or conversation there was the cold war and the dismantling and we were kind of headed in a good direction for the last 40 some odd years but now it's like i don't see it going in that good direction anymore so i'm just really nervous about that yeah i think you should be nervous about that

SPEAKER_38: let me give you a couple of examples so so first of all i agree with freeberg's point that humans who are convinced of the righteousness of their cause have a tremendous ability to wave away or justify any sort of tactical implications so for example we did use two atomic bombs to end world war ii that wasn't the only time it was advocated if you go back to i think it was around 1950

David Sacks: macarthur wanted to win the korean war by using 20 to 30 atomic bombs and his plan was to so thoroughly

SPEAKER_38: irradiate the border between china and north korea that china would never be able to invade through uh invading army for something like 50 years truman had to fire him because truman didn't agree with the strategy and by the way macarthur was not some crazy you know he was not some like wacko he was

SPEAKER_55: the most respected man in america in 1950 and truman paid a huge political price for having to fire him it was one of the reasons why truman couldn't run for re-election again so this idea that like rational people would never use these things not true the generals in 1962 during the cuban missile crisis were all ready to take the nukes off the chain if the soviets were willing to break the the

David Sacks: naval blockade so you know it's not just foreign powers who have rattled the saber on nukes we've done it at various points through our history too let me give you a more mundane example just earlier

SPEAKER_55: this year biden said that we were out of 155 millimeter artillery ammunition and so we had to give ukraine cluster bombs remember this just a year before that same administration had said the use of cluster bombs was a war crime so in other words they were able to change their morality on the use of cluster bombs because tactically they were out of the type of ammunition they want to use they had nothing left so you know i think this kind of reinforces freeberg's point now look at our inventory replacement times for key systems this is a report by csis that is a military think tank in washington what they show is that our industrial capacity is so hollowed out that it's going to take us five plus

David Sacks: years to replace our stockpiles of artillery ammunition of javelins of stingers of uh gimlers

SPEAKER_38: that's another type of rocket system and so we are like dangerously low on key types of ammunition

SPEAKER_55: and yet remember when 60 minutes did that interview with biden they said to him well gee if we're in a war both on behalf of ukraine and behalf of israel doesn't that pose any trade-offs and biden's response was no we're the most powerful nation in the world for good measure he said we're the most powerful nation in the history of the world so he doesn't see any trade-offs he doesn't see any limits on american power quite frankly i think this is why he's dangerous is because he still thinks that the us is living in 1991 he's been in washington for 50 years and he only remembers the unipolar moment all of his instincts and experience have been shaped by that period of time when the us was the only superpower that we were the global hegemon we're no longer in that position anymore you know first of all russia and china are strong they are great powers too and iran is much stronger than iraq iran is four times the size of california and has roughly 90 million people and they got a lot of engineers and even if we did want to attack them it's not exactly clear how you would stage that attack just getting to iran would require flying over some very dangerous territory it's not clear we have the uh we have the bases or the air clearance rights from allies to be able to even get to iran moreover

SPEAKER_38: iran apparently has a very strong missile program so they may even have the ability to fire missiles or hypersonic missiles at our aircraft carriers that are sitting in the mediterranean sea so if we get in a war with iran it's no joke this is not going to be shock and awe this could be a very very dangerous

SPEAKER_55: situation for the united states which is why when people are just kind of making these idle threats they should be very careful about that because iran is hearing that too and they're getting ready and and one last point on that thanks to our destabilizing the middle east with the iraq war and the syria regime change operation iran now has proxies in both iraq and syria they've got iraqi hezbollah they also have proxies in yemen with the houthis and all of those groups could stage attacks

SPEAKER_32: on american military bases there we've gone down the worst case scenario here use of a nuclear bomb the united states invading iran here's just a list of the nine countries that are nuclear powered

SPEAKER_70: and that have nuclear bombs rather than nuclear powered and as you can see um russia u.s china france uk pakistan india israel and north korea israel denies they actually have them and pakistan has been the one who has been profiling proliferating them getting bombs to north korea and helping iran with their program iran obviously does not yet have a nuclear bomb but we don't know how far they are because intelligence is sparse on that topic based on my cursory research what's the best case sorry jake

SPEAKER_38: i just want to be clear i just want to be clear that i don't see nuclear use as likely yes that was

SPEAKER_141: freeberg's point yeah um sorry i did not say it was likely at all either not at all no no you said

SPEAKER_70: it's a small possibility and we just spent 10 minutes talking about that small possibility i just

SPEAKER_00: just want everyone like let's say something goes from two percent chance to eight percent chance it's now 4x in the next 20 years that's right a significant shift in risk and i think there have been others like ray dalio i think or warren buffett some people have said that the chance of us using a nuclear weapon over a long enough period of time approximates 50 to 100 it starts to get very high because you know at some point these things proliferate the intelligence the capabilities proliferate they get into the wrong hands but there's all these different scenarios that emerge so the probability might be low on any given period of time but over a long enough period of time these things become a real kind of concern the nukes that were dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki are like 20 kiloton yields i mean we have massive massive massive warhead multi-warhead missiles that have many many many megatons of yield but there are sub 20 sub 10 kiloton yield nukes

SPEAKER_143: that can be deployed in a conventional in what people would call a tactical setting so you're not

SPEAKER_67: trying to be the suitcase new they're not literally suitcases they're on trucks but tactical nukes are uh

SPEAKER_32: have been produced by russia china and the united states are the known tactical nuclear powers well

SPEAKER_00: they're also they're they're in different forms of delivery but they're not you know you don't take a bomber up and put it over a city and blast the whole city drive them in a van is the idea yeah no it's not necessarily about being on a van it's like they can be on short range tactical systems so the point is like yeah you're caught in a corner you have nowhere to go and you can't lose and if you have one of these things i mean just take all human history aside and all convention aside if you've got this thing you're trapped in a corner you got nowhere to go and you can press this button and win

SPEAKER_47: you might press the button and so let's do the other side what's the best case scenario here obviously we haven't had the ground invasion we've had uh qatar and saudi and a number in the united states

SPEAKER_32: obviously doing some pretty hardcore diplomacy and we've had some hostages released so you know and i've been spending some time here in the middle east there is a theory that people have brought up multiple times here that there's a deal going on right now to get the hostages a larger number of them and that the ground invasion may not occur this is just a theory that a number of people have been talking about here and maybe they're just optimists but is there an optimistic scenario here tamath is there a uh golden bridge out of here is there a possible path to you know the peace process getting back on track or does it all just seem hopeless and if there is and if there is a possible path what would that look like let's just see if we can come up with uh any optimistic framing or or theory here why

David Friedberg: it's just as bad as the other side okay so you don't see one yeah how about we just look at the facts

Chamath Palihapitiya: on the ground the facts are that we have this long simmering war between russia and ukraine that doesn't seem to have an end and there doesn't seem to be a loss of life at which they're willing to stop or whether the international community is willing to force a ceasefire and then now you have this one which is in the thousands and will escalate into defense of thousands but it seems like it's on a path to be slow and simmering so i don't know what to say except that it does not seem to be escalated and the reason it isn't escalating is that there is enough emotional impact that's causing people to understand that the stakes are high and so when the actual actions are relatively de-escalatory i find that the rhetoric ratchets up right it's almost inversely proportional you know it's kind of like what was the the phrase in world war ii about churchill iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove is that is that the phrase something like that but the idea is that when you act decisively you say little and when you have no plan of really escalating you say a lot so i think that right now we're saying a lot which actually counterintuitively to me says we're not planning to do much of anything and i

David Friedberg: think that that's good so i'm all for lindsey graham braying as long as we don't take it too seriously and and sleepwalk into some escalation sacks any chance that this uh gets de-escalated and

David Sacks: what might that look like sure i think there's a chance i think like what would it look like yeah

SPEAKER_38: well what it looks like i think is that the ground invasion keeps getting paused either because the

David Sacks: u.s needs more time to get its military in place or because the israeli military realizes this is

SPEAKER_38: going to be a very difficult operation and they need more time to plan and while that's happening there's a serious diplomatic effort going on and while that's happening there's also more pressure being brought to bear against israel to not go in so for example you saw erdogan this week make some statements i actually thought they were pretty outrageous where he described hamas as basically being freedom fighters but warning israel not to go in there were much more reasonable remarks by king abdallah of jordan basically at least recognizing the atrocity that had taken place against israel but also trying to advocate for the lives of palestinian civilians in gaza and telling them that would be a mistake to go in so you're seeing like a wide range of opinions across i'd say major players in the middle east but all of it the gist of it is basically telling israelis not to go in so you've got all these delays and pressures going on and so maybe there's some chance it could de-escalate i personally think that that's still unlikely and the main reason for that is i think israel is determined to go in i think netanyahu has made that clear i think from the israeli point of view they don't feel like they have a choice they've suffered the biggest massacre of of jews since the holocaust and they can't be perceived as simply standing by and doing nothing that would make them look extremely weak in a region of the world where you don't want to look weak they have to annihilate hamas i guess is the the thinking well they say that their objective is to destroy hamas but i think that probably from their standpoint they'd consider it a success if they could significantly degrade

David Sacks: hamas set them back 10 years and get the hostages back destroy their capability to wage war against israel to undermine their tunnel networks and so forth so i think israel still feels like this is something they have to do and so i kind of think that the most realistic good case scenario is that if they do go in that the military operation for various reasons is not a long one and eventually a ceasefire can be agreed to before this can escalate out of control and so there's a bunch of like very delicate red lines there for a lot of different players and so in order for that scenario to work out i think it's going to take some very deft behind the scenes diplomacy from the biden administration really and i'm not sure they're capable i'm not sure they're up to that task so this is why i think

SPEAKER_47: it's such a dangerous situation but can i ask you a question by the way is graham speaking on behalf of the united states officially with the president's approval he can't possibly be freelancing that i didn't

SPEAKER_32: have any i i tried to research it online i couldn't find any um well why don't you fill in the blanks

SPEAKER_84: jason sanctioned or not well jason think about this david texted this into the group chat and then

SPEAKER_87: tweeted it as well do you think muhammad bin salman is meeting with a group of 10 senators that's just

SPEAKER_106: off on an adventure no okay well there's your answer yeah yeah no no i'm just look at this

SPEAKER_38: photo i think this the picture says a thousand words so you have a delegation of senators they count about 10 centers there yeah yeah they're meeting with muhammad bin salman five republicans and five democrats and who has the seat of honor right next to mbs in the front of the room so i

David Sacks: personally would like to believe that lindsey graham is just an outlier and he doesn't speak for anybody but unfortunately this delegation saw fit to put him in the front of the room i consider that

Chamath Palihapitiya: very scary well i think it's also fair to say that the office of mbs would have coordinated that decision

SPEAKER_188: with the white house before receiving them that's that's typical political protocol yeah it just was

SPEAKER_32: never explicitly said he didn't say on behalf of the president or the president has sent us here it just seemed like a disjoint i hadn't never seen that before all right uh i guess we'll move on to some business issues here the macro picture is uh quite confounding gdp as we were talking about in our group chat grew 4.9 percent year over year in q3 higher than the 4.3 percent expectations and much higher than the 2.1 percent growth in q2 highest year-over-year gdp since uh q4 2021 uh and we thought we were going into a recession we'd have a couple of quarters of um contraction that hasn't happened cpi in september was 3.7 slightly above the 3.6 estimates and chamath what do you take from all of this this crazy high growth gdp is this because of stimulus government spending what what is this uh confounding you know uh inflation coming down and getting somewhat under control and then crazy gdp grow i

SPEAKER_87: don't know i don't think anybody knows but it's really confounding for the markets i think it's

Chamath Palihapitiya: really bad for markets in general it's probably the worst for private companies because you have this effect now where everybody's been wanting to price in a recession right everybody wants to see that shoe drop where they say oh okay here it is something softening demand is softening and then when you see a print like this where the economy is expanding you're kind of confused and you're like well where where is this softening going to come from and so what happens is people become very overreactive to small amounts of data and that actually started to come out i think basically since august and what's been happening since august is that every time a company reports the sector that's gotten the most attention has been fintechs and the reason is that fintechs tend to be on the bleeding edge of capturing consumer demand and if consumer demand shrinks that's probably the first sign that there's going to be a recession right because consumption is about almost 70 of the us economy and so since august what you've seen are the large leading edge public fintech companies just get absolutely murdered and yesterday was an even worse day because what happened yesterday was a company was basically worldline started to report softness in spending now that spending was not even in america that spending actually happened to be within a segment of their customer base in germany and that was enough to just literally sink the stock i think 60 in a day so we have on the surface a healthy growing economy but underneath the surface what we what we are betting on increasingly is that consumer demand has basically stopped so you can see here audien is down 50 since the beginning of the year but again most of this was since august block is down another 35 paypal is down 30 so so that's one thing which is this is a big bet that consumption is slowing and shrinking the economy will be in a recession over these next two or three quarters which will give the fed the motivation and

SPEAKER_86: the justification to lower rates starting in the middle of next year that's the big bet in the

Chamath Palihapitiya: market but separately if you take a different lens and look at this data we all have a bigger problem in silicon valley land which is how do the capital markets take companies public when this is happening and the reason why this data is so important is we've said this a thousand times there are only two companies that can structurally open the capital markets for all startups one is spacex starlink but that's on its own path and not going public soon and the other is stripe and you could probably

SPEAKER_87: add tick tock to that as well no because that's a chinese company with all kinds of overhang so no

David Friedberg: i would disagree with 30 or 40 u.s ownership i would disagree with that but no okay so i think

Chamath Palihapitiya: it's starlink and stripe and the the problem now for stripe is that the public comps dollar for dollar are off 50 which from the beginning of the year which then says that if you apply that rateably to its valuation they did around at 55 billion then the market clearing trade may be 25 to 30 billion now now 25 to 30 billion for stripe you're incinerating 70 billion dollars of equity value right and about five to ten billion dollars of actually painting capital so what does that do for silicon valley and for vcs i think it's going to put a lot of pressure on companies and valuations so yeah we're in for a real slog so on the surface for the real economy i think it's generally decent news for startup land i think it's not good and then specifically within startup land sectors like

SPEAKER_104: fintech are in pretty bad trouble i think and the late stage obviously still very much in trouble freeberg any thoughts on the startup economy you had some thoughts on this i think too i'd like to hear

SPEAKER_143: your guys's experiences but there's definitely been a big hold up in series b c d later rounds because so much of the market questioning is you know when when is the next round going to get done which is based on when can the companies potentially go public and ultimately if you don't see a path to a window opening up you don't fund the pre-ipo round you don't fund the late stage round the growth stage round everything gets held up and a lot of rounds that are getting done lately have been these kind of convert or bridge rounds where existing investors are funding the company to give it another year or two of runway that was definitely the case for most of this year coming out of 22. i think post the summer it seems like a lot of folks i'm talking to are starting to wake up there's even more series b at lower prices and everyone's kind of capitulating and accepting that there are still great businesses out there it's just that they got overpriced in their a or their b and let's price them at a lower valuation

SPEAKER_82: and then rounds are sort of starting to get done in the fall here i'll have you react to this data

SPEAKER_32: sax um carta manages cap tables for folks but they have produced this chart and this is carta companies only so this is a subsection who knows carta may power the cap tables of 10 20 of silicon valley the

SPEAKER_70: rest are done on other pieces of software or even in google sheets or literally in an excel sheet by an

SPEAKER_47: attorney who is working with the company if you look at this chart in 2020 and 2021 you had about 70

SPEAKER_32: startups shutting down per quarter in 2022 you see that number double and we start seeing 129 141 a quarter and then in 2023 this last quarter q3 uh rocketing up to 2020 so roughly three times what we see in the boom markets sacks and any thoughts on this data i have a couple of observations but i wanted to go to

SPEAKER_38: you first well this is not surprising to me at all this is the bubble of 2021 working its way through the system we know that there were these gigantic rounds that were funded in 2021 especially in the second half where you had this asset super bubble it wasn't just in tech it was like all growth stocks crypto everything and so there were a lot of startups that raised huge funding rounds at the peak of the market and they haven't had to raise for a couple of years well now they're starting to run out of cash and they do have to raise they're finally being forced to go back into market and a lot of them are either burning too much money or they don't have the numbers to justify another round or if they do it's a structured round down round or again they just are unable to raise they have a broken process and they eventually start winding down so i think you're going to see this dynamic for the next 18 months or so but this is not a new dynamic this is the lagging indicator of what we've been talking about since the regime change of the first half of 2022 is that the markets started looking for different things instead of growth at all costs it's been about growth with unique economics and efficiency and the valuations went way down and there's a lot of companies that no longer qualify

David Sacks: and they're getting weeded out so this is just a delayed reaction to things we already knew that's the

SPEAKER_32: key part the delayed reaction as well i'll just note when a company does shut down that process typically takes two or three quarters and for a founder to accept the shutdown that might take one two three quarters as well so anything you're seeing in 2023 that might be a shutdown where the employees were

SPEAKER_82: all laid off in late 2022 but i mean i see that i have a question for you guys what what turns this around i'll tell you what i'm seeing in the early stage we are seeing many companies come to founder

SPEAKER_32: university and two or three people who want to build a company who can't get jobs at google or stripe they're not hiring so we'll see two or three developer teams working on a project and then raising two fifty five hundred k at a five to twelve million dollar valuation and then very quickly

Chamath Palihapitiya: getting to ten to fifty k right monthly what about all this money that we need to return so that we can recycle and keep doing this job what what needs to happen sacks friedberg what do you guys think needs to happen to get to crack because like the three ipos we've had have not fared particularly well and the market just seems to get harder and harder for tech companies even

SPEAKER_00: profitable ones right yeah i mean i think i think profitability is key i think that's the great evolutionary forcing function here it's like a tale of two world of two startups the one startup needs

SPEAKER_143: cash for a long period of time and the other one's found a path to profitability the one that's found a path to profitability they have an infinite number of options available to them it might take longer to get public or whatever but they can wait it out because they don't need money the one that needs cash continuously and will for a long period of time is really screwed what about the multiple of

Chamath Palihapitiya: these profitable companies that seems to have changed materially i'll tell you something that's

SPEAKER_32: starting to happen as well chamath is that the public markets are looking at their stocks if they're undervalued and then dara uber is reportedly planning like buying back upwards of 20 of the uber shares in the next five years and then you look at a company like snap which is majority control with super voting shares they're still losing three or four hundred million a quarter so i think freeberg's exactly right tell it to cities some people refuse and then if the stock is so cheap people start buying it back uh and and the the freezing of employees and the expenses going down while revenue goes up and earnings increase i think that's the setup if you're looking for the setup i think it's the public market companies showing the path profitability buying back stock

SPEAKER_217: and then these small companies how does that how does that help private companies go public

SPEAKER_47: if the private companies follow suit and they're profitable and they control costs and they people

SPEAKER_32: get greedy looking at how profitable they are as opposed to their 50 growth rate they start looking at their increasing earnings and how much cash they're throwing off and i think that's starting to trickle down through the startup ecosystem people are trying to get to profit profitability quickly i don't know you asked the question was can people turn it around i think if they do that's what it's

SPEAKER_38: going to be is profitability yeah i mean i think you guys are kind of talking about two different things sure any particular company can still get its house in order and create a great business and they'll eventually get you know liquidity they'll go public the question is i think which moth is getting at is that the exit comps have changed if you were a tech investor or let's say a real estate investor before the regime change you were underwriting to completely different exit comp and now those exit comps have totally changed and so it's going to be very hard for those investors to make a good

David Friedberg: return so they're going to lose their money like instacart yeah i'll give you a mathematical example

Chamath Palihapitiya: just to illustrate what david just said if you have a company with 300 million of arr you are in a rare

SPEAKER_84: group of say 30 or 40 companies period okay so very very very few companies get to that level of scale

Chamath Palihapitiya: but if you are at a hundred percent net dollar retention okay which means that you're kind of treading water essentially your customers may grow but the value of each customer isn't particularly growing so you know you have you have pretty nominal growth that company now comps to roughly three to five times ar now the problem is if you go and look back through crunchbase or any of these other service pitch book the number of companies that traded above 1.5 billion dollar valuation as a sas business there's like 70 of them but there's only seven of them that have 300 million of so what do

SPEAKER_228: you what happens guys like the jig is up okay uh what's going on here consolidation

SPEAKER_70: i guess and and some of them will flame out i mean look at instacart the la the people who were the last four rounds they either lost money or broke even so and that means time

SPEAKER_104: adjusted versus what they could have made in the markets they lost money so what happens if stripe is only worth 30. i mean how much uh has been invested into that company what's the total paid

David Friedberg: in capital again i think we all want stripe to be worth a hundred we want it to be worth 200 billion

Chamath Palihapitiya: because it would help frankly it is the rising tide that lifts all boats but if if unit level profitability is scrutinized and then comped appropriately to the public markets as sac said we're going to have to take that signal and apply it to our entire portfolio and so it goes all the way back to eventually the seed in the series a as well which is really good jason as you've said many times just getting the inflation under control and in check but it will mean not just changing valuations but it will mean changing salaries right it will mean totally different equity packages a lot of hard work i almost think that maybe none of the hard work has actually yet started so i don't know i'm just putting that out there guys do you think that we've all just kind of been hoping maybe that all of this would pass and now we're getting more and more signals that we actually have to do a pretty hard valuation reset yeah i mean if you look at the

SPEAKER_38: altimeter charts that jam on balls put out i mean the valuation levels are returning to let's call it the pre-covid mean in fact they're slightly below the pre-covid mean because the 10-year treasury has a higher rate so yeah we're going back to something that was more like i don't know 2015 levels of valuation and maybe even slightly worse again because long-term rates are higher so cost of

SPEAKER_50: capital and hurdle rate are that's what i'm saying i'm seeing 2012 valuations valuation of uber when

SPEAKER_38: i invest was 5 million you know yeah let me just tell you it's a lot harder for people to make money when the money supply is shrinking than when the money supply is growing for obvious reasons when the money supply is shrinking it's like you're playing a game of musical chairs

SPEAKER_55: and you're just hoping that you still have a seat whereas when the pie is increasing it's a lot easier

SPEAKER_236: to get like a piece of it but when the pie is shrinking it's hard to get a piece musical chairs

SPEAKER_52: as you're describing is what you're it's literally the description of the venture capital industry and gps right now a lot of people are losing their seats yeah and i think there's a lot of shutdowns

SPEAKER_47: at venture firms i think a lot of venture firms are going to shut down there's gonna be zombie funds

SPEAKER_143: i think we gotta believe the extraordinary outcomes make up the bulk of returns in venture from you know the singular companies and there's a few of them right those 15 billion dollar exits created every year i don't know if it's unicorns as valued in private markets or actual exits but as we know every couple of years there's a company that comes along that's worth 10 billion and every once a decade there's a company that comes along that ends up being worth 100 billion and the bulk of the returns in the entire venture landscape comes from those handful of companies i think we end up focusing a lot on market metrics as the performance driver for venture returns but the truth is it's the performance driver for the mid-tier of venture returns and that mid-tier of venture returns is skating along at 2x uh multiple after 10 years or 3x after 10 2 to 2 to 2 and a half x after 10 years that's the top quarter right and so whatever it is 1.8x and now those guys are all underwater so instead of being 1.8x they're all going to return 0.7x or 0.5x and they're going to lose money no i think

SPEAKER_242: but the i think the 50th percentile returns money okay but the truth is so now they're going to lose

SPEAKER_00: money but the truth is whichever funds get the tiger by the tail whoever gets the uber at 5 million whoever gets the slack at whatever you got in at whoever got to the spacex or whatever sacks got in

SPEAKER_143: at you're going to be fine because like the multiples in markets don't matter as much if

SPEAKER_84: you're generating i don't think that's true i don't think that's true because if it happens in a fund

Chamath Palihapitiya: and that all of those deals except spacex happened in a different valuation framework where rates were zero so i think the question the more intellectually honest question is what would slack and uber have gone public at today with a five percent 10-year and i think the answer if you're going to be intellectually honest is a very different valuation than when it went out when the 10-year was zero it's

SPEAKER_38: going to be hard to make outsized returns unless and until the entry price is completely correct and i think they've partially corrected but they may not have fully corrected because people i think

David Sacks: always want to believe that there's going to be a bounce back yeah and it takes time to kill that hope

SPEAKER_00: i think i think that might be the capitulation capitulation is yeah i think i think that capitulation is starting to happen to be honest i mean that that was my observation i think i feel like everything was so shut down last year the start of this year through the summer and then in the fall like just the last couple of months it feels like there's this capitulation where it's like okay

SPEAKER_143: we're worth 80 percent less but we need money let's do the deal okay we'll put money in i don't

Chamath Palihapitiya: think the reset can happen until stripe goes public i'll be very specific i think that is the company that sets the cascading valuation framework for every other company so i think all of this is a bunch of people us blathering on and making stuff up i think the true numerical forcing function

SPEAKER_86: the clearing event happens when they go public because it will it will be you won't be able to

Chamath Palihapitiya: hide like i think we all would say it's the best run company that's private it's the most technical it's gotten the most people it's gotten the most pristine cap table it's raised the most money at the like it's done everything right it's the gold standard yes and what their valuation is is then what you can expect if you are of that caliber or you can expect a lower valuation if you are not of their caliber and i think that until we know what that is we're all going to be hoping and but we know that hope isn't a strategy so my takeaway from all of this is just more that people have to really right-size the portfolio sell what you can find liquidity where there are people that want to buy at different entry prices they may not be the price that you thought originally but you know makes

SPEAKER_86: sense for them and their risk profile in this moment in time all of this stuff has to happen to actively

SPEAKER_50: manage to exits i think well and there's a new phenomenon that's going on that i've been seeing a

SPEAKER_32: lot of i've been approached by a number of people who are doing buying strips of gp interest and strips of lp interest in venture funds from the last 10 years i got offered for a 5x on paper fund like 3 point whatever x you know and you could clear out like you're saying some of your shares i got offered you know half price basically by some people who i think i don't want to say the bottom feeders but i think they're maybe optimistic about certain names and yeah i've noticed that the amount of activity

David Sacks: from secondary brokers seems to have increased and yeah and and specifically that the emails that i get that are interesting are the ones where they're asking me to sell shares so when someone's offering

SPEAKER_38: you that doesn't mean anything because there may not be any transactions clearing but when they have definite buyer interest at a certain price that tells you that the market now has found or is in the process of finding the market clearing price yeah so i think i think we do actually know from the secondary market kind of where a lot of these unicorns are at my guess what would you say on

SPEAKER_261: average half yeah half price there's yeah that's what i see i see a lot of half price action but that

Chamath Palihapitiya: i'm not trying to be a wet blanket guys but the average sas company that's public is down 75 percent if you look at the fintech space these companies are down 80 to 90 so how can half be

SPEAKER_38: reasonable well just for certain names yeah because i think the the really bad names don't get any liquidity like there's just no buyers so you're talking about names where there's already

David Sacks: a buyer so that's going to bias it towards the better companies no no i'm saying when square and

SPEAKER_86: odd yen these are great companies right that are down 80 90 percent how can a private liquid

David Sacks: company be only down 50 percent maybe it's not priced correctly but maybe also there's been two or three years of growth since that last private valuation so maybe there's some selection bias

Chamath Palihapitiya: maybe it's there's 20 30 growth yeah but but adjun and stripe of all i mean square have also grown

SPEAKER_70: by 50. i mean you also have let me we have a comp on this which is instacart 39 billion peak

SPEAKER_32: profit market valuation it's trading at like six and a half billion which i think is exactly what you said jamoth when we were pricing it we we looked at that 800 million remember i think why not not but i i had said 800 million and i just put it at like there was 800 million in advertising revenue and i said okay you know seven eight nine times that that top line or if i said if it was if it was 50 margin you could give it 20x so i think that's how i came up with my number and i think we came up with eight based on that and you know sure enough that's basically where it's trading

David Sacks: 6.8 billion yeah that's amazing it's down 26 since it ipo now i will say that instacart is an example

SPEAKER_38: of a company that has historically had very high burn and it's a very capital intensive business relatively whereas a good software business like take a clavio for example uh is much more capital efficient and should be doing better clavio is down 16 since this ipo yeah market cap out 7 billion so yeah it's an ugly story i mean even for the names that just ipoed it's not looking too good yeah i

SPEAKER_275: mean revenue profits that that clears it out i do think there's going to be a lot of gps who are

SPEAKER_279: arm down 21 percent that's a big number that's a lot of money yeah look i think the market has just

SPEAKER_38: turned very negative very recently it comes back to this gdp report you know when i saw the 4.9 number i mean the thing that occurred to me the the larger theme is that there's such a divergence

SPEAKER_32: right now between main street and wall street explain why the gdp is so strong right now and

SPEAKER_47: that would indicate that the economy is strong therefore stocks should go up right why why is that not happening i think this is then that's maybe confusing for people well i mean i'm not sure i can

SPEAKER_38: fully explain it because i think there's a lot of contradictory data but if you look at main street

David Sacks: you're seeing whatever 4.9 gdp growth you're seeing pretty robust employment numbers the consumer seems to be holding up but if you look at wall street and the investment side of things it's pretty miserable the whole stock market this year is being held up by seven stocks the so-called magnificent seven is the top seven tech names in the s p 500 if you look at the overall s p 500 excluding those names it's flat for the year and it's basically giving back all the gains and now those seven names are starting to crack so just in the last google and tesla went down a bit yeah

SPEAKER_38: yeah we're seeing them go down and so yeah and facebook so we're seeing and then you know microsoft had a great quarter but it's now down it's giving back that that pop so you're seeing that on the investment side of things uh it's still pretty grim out there because people are now pricing in higher

David Sacks: rates for longer that's basically what's happening and the thing i wonder about i mean here's the disconnect is that ultimately what happens on wall street affects the consumer there are 401ks go down in value the value of their houses go down because now you can't if you if you sell your house you lose your three percent mortgage now you have to get a new one at eight percent so everyone stopped trying to sell their house the number of real estate transactions has gone down a lot that's gradually

SPEAKER_55: working its way through the system so at some point the consumer realizes that they're just not as wealthy as they thought they were that's the wealth effect and they just stopped spending as freely and we already know that credit card debt and especially credit card servicing costs are at all-time highs because of these high interest rates so at some point you just wonder if the consumer is like wiley coyote and has gone off a cliff but just hasn't looked down yet yeah just like the

SPEAKER_32: country just like our government it's like we're just everybody's just spending and and nobody's

SPEAKER_47: actually paying attention to the balance sheet whether it's the government or individuals apparently because credit card debt's now at its highest and people are still yolo i don't i mean is because

SPEAKER_32: the only possible explanation with the consumer is that consumers wages and the unemployment the low unemployment persistent low unemployment the number of jobs available is just making everybody super

SPEAKER_47: confident but that's got to end at some point right doesn't it i think if companies keep cutting

SPEAKER_38: their belts i don't think wall street and main street can be disconnected forever i think it's got to reconcile one way or another yeah i agree so i would describe our economic situation as as fragile

David Sacks: i mean i think most commentators like bill ackman still thinks that things are going to turn south that this this gdp number is sort of a peak number i don't know it's just things still seem kind

SPEAKER_236: of shaky to me and not exactly not exactly the recipe that you want when you have this massive

SPEAKER_297: geopolitical instability yeah exactly that that double whammy and then plus the election coming up and the

SPEAKER_32: chaos that that could cause in the country it's kind of like that quote about going bankrupt how did it happen slowly and then all at once i think that's kind of what we're heading towards this has been happening slowly and then everybody's going to wake up with a heck of a credit card bill at 15 or 20

SPEAKER_70: and they're not going to be able to pay it well the government will have to intervene they're they're

SPEAKER_87: they can't be in a situation where i agree with jama a large percentage of the u.s consumers just can't

SPEAKER_143: this is my point of view on yeah on consumer and all this commercial real estate and the bank loans eventually the fed monetizes all this stuff it's the only path which by the way will inflate a lot

David Sacks: of financial assets and if that happens actually you bring up another data point we haven't discussed which is there's a major storm cloud out there which is major u.s banks are facing large unrealized losses so bank of america had unrealized losses of 131 billion on securities in q3 jp morgan chase had unrealized losses of 40 billion in its um held to maturity portfolio in q3 and citigroup did not disclose its losses for q3 but it had 24 billion of losses at the end of q2 so remember this dynamic that we had with svb and all these banks back in was it like march where all these regional banks were basically had these large and realized losses and then it created a run on a few of them well now the biggest banks are starting to face that unrealized losses problem now i don't think like bank of america jp morgan or citigroup are gonna have a run on the bank but they're clearly not doing

SPEAKER_126: that great and at some point there's gonna have to be a reconciliation of that unless they hold it to

SPEAKER_70: maturity i guess we should do just a quick hit here on this cruise follow-up story we had talked

SPEAKER_32: earlier about the cruise accident and self-driving well a lot of news has come out about this gentleman that is um potentially explosive as we all know just to catch everybody up on october 2nd there was

SPEAKER_70: a hit and run accident and this tangentially uh included that cruise vehicle uh the cruise vehicle a woman tragically got hit by a car driven by a human that that car ran off that woman got knocked into uh in front of a cruise self-driving car which then ran her over uh okay california

SPEAKER_47: is dmv has suspended cruise uh and their permit because allegedly the company withheld footage of the incident if you remember we had a little discussion here about the taxi had rolled over

SPEAKER_70: the person and then we talked about hey you know you're not supposed to move off of the person when we

SPEAKER_47: we did our whole joke about uh emt jcal uh well it turns out after the av collision the cruise vehicle apparently pulled the woman forward 20 feet and this has been confirmed now by cruise but when cruise gave that information to the regulatory agency the california dmv they didn't show that footage in other words they showed just the first half of the footage and that has gotten their license suspended so we have or we're left to interpret why did cruise not tell the full truth to the dmv and now friedberg to your point about society taking risks now we have allegedly cruise i don't know what the most generous way to say this is but they either omitted or they straight up lied

SPEAKER_38: to the california d dmv dmv i mean jacal if it's true that they lied and were deceptive about the video then yeah that's like do not pass go go directly to jail time i mean that's really bad yeah one point i made last time was i didn't think cruise was sophisticated enough tech or really gm who's their backer was

David Sacks: sophisticated enough technologically to get this right and i still maintain that and so if on top of that they were deceptive about what happened then that's like the kill shot one question i have jacal is there was an mbc reporter who was on the scene just happened to be on the scene and i remember her reporting that cruise was not responsible so i'm just wondering like where the disconnect here is

SPEAKER_32: between all these various reports i have a theory yeah i have a theory which is not responsible for the accident but then responsible potentially for the subsequent the dragging of the the body so i think that's the the issue here is that they may be able to claim hey we had nothing to do with the accident but then in what happened after the accident yes the the technology fell apparently or maybe the technology never took into account what happens if you run somebody over that was rocketed under your car and maybe that's just a freak accident that we have to get used to that possibility happening and that could happen with obviously a human driver so it's just a possibility that that could happen

SPEAKER_104: you don't think that that edge case is hard-coded

SPEAKER_75: i mean the edge case of how would the car know there's a person underneath it i don't know no

Chamath Palihapitiya: no but i'm saying you're you're bringing up something so obvious as to be comical which is like

SPEAKER_84: of course there has to be to some emergency cut off when there's like some obstruction

SPEAKER_32: anyway sure let's let all the facts i think we'll wait for the rest of the facts to come out we've got i think 80 of them here 90 of them but freeberg you had told us uh in the group chat that hurricane otis would uh potentially be disastrous for mexico and uh turns out you are correct uh 27 people are dead in mexico and maybe you could explain to us why this storm is unique uh and why if you think this that we're seeing more of these uh or are we seeing more of these or is the coverage in the media yeah you know in the reaction to it getting distorted i don't know about the media

SPEAKER_143: coverage the big story with hurricane otis is that it went from being kind of a tropical storm to being a category 5 hurricane in about six hours and then it made landfall in acapulco at a category 5 hurricane and no hurricane forecasting models had predicted this and hurricane forecasting models are what are you know typically run off of ensemble models meaning that there are multiple things that may happen and that those simulations are run on very compute intensive systems and there are many many simulations being run all the time every six hours these simulation runs are done and then you look at

SPEAKER_00: these and you create a probability of things that may happen and none of the forecasts had any probability associated with this event happening it was so out of the bounds of anything we have seen historically that none of the models had any chance ascribed to this tropical storm suddenly evolving into a category

SPEAKER_143: five hurricane in six hours and then making landfall on a city with a million people we can look at pictures if you guys want and what happened in acapulco it's obviously pretty devastating there's

SPEAKER_00: apparently no power line standing in the entire region here's some photos i mean look at this like wow 165 mile an hour sustained winds the eye wall went through the the town a million people by the way many of whom live in not concrete reinforced buildings up against the mountain there and so the devastation

SPEAKER_143: is really extraordinary but the the shocking thing is that there was no prep there was no warnings there was no alerts there were a ton of tourists sitting in these hotels look at the i don't know if you have

SPEAKER_00: any of the hotel photos nick but it's insane there are zero windows left in any of the hotels any of

SPEAKER_143: the condos any of the resorts they are gone so imagine you're you're like in acapulco you're drinking beer and tequila and then you go to sleep and this thing hits at 1 a.m as a category five hurricane and destroys everything there's no power there's nothing so if you pull up the first chart most of the energy that that is absorbed from the sun ends up in our oceans so you know we talk about atmospheric carbon increasing energy retention and people can debate that all they want where the carbon comes from etc etc at the end of the day there is energy coming into the earth from the sun and that energy is being retained the vast majority of that energy is retained by the oceans so the first couple hundred

SPEAKER_00: meters of the oceans retain north of 90 percent of the energy uh absorbed by earth if you go to the next slide so that results in water temperatures going up so if you look at um this is compared to the

SPEAKER_143: the uh 1955 to 2006 average and you can measure ocean heat content but ocean heat content has risen fairly linearly since the 90s and you can kind of see uh you know how much excess is that related to temperature perfectly or no so this is ocean temperatures over time uh so here you can see 2023 and so this shows you um the average sea surface temperature so 2023 has been such an outlier and this is also because of these um el nino phenomena but there's obviously over time if you were to look at the average sea surface temperature trend it's rising linearly with heat content over time and in particular in 2023 there's an extraordinary rise in temperature so off the coast of acapulco the sea surface temperature was 88 degrees fahrenheit i mean it was so hot the water like imagine an 80 that's like a david sack swimming pool it's so warm um you know going down many meters in the ocean so when a storm goes over that level of heat it takes heat out of the ocean and that heat coming out of the ocean increases the wind speed and then the wind speed pulls more heat out of the ocean and that's how these things become escalatory until they hit something cold like a mountain or the the land the land is much cooler and then these things start to dissipate and break apart that's why these things form over the ocean so the point is no models predicted this and that's because we've never seen this level of energy

SPEAKER_00: stored in the oceans before and the model training has never really accounted for this sort of extreme condition this extreme condition obviously is is what some folks are arguing is becoming more frequent so it brings into question you know this this this ability for us to actually forecast the the rise in the temperature over time is driving this um and then oh from an economic perspective this is but one of the key points i wanted to make when an event like this happens there's a market called the

SPEAKER_143: reinsurance market and the reinsurance market sets the price for covering insurance companies against a big loss where you can lose a ton of stuff at once insurance companies like to write insurance policies like car insurance is a great business because there's never one big event that causes everyone to get in an accident on the same day but with property insurance a hurricane can cause everyone to lose on the same day so insurance companies need to buy reinsurance and then there's these big reinsurance companies and they have pools of capital and there's capital markets involved and bonds that are sold to protect reinsurance so there's you know hundreds of billions of dollars trillion dollar plus in reinsurance when an event like this happens those reinsurance markets take a loss and the loss causes them to raise rates significantly and it's and when that happens the reinsurance markets harden is what they say and then rates go up next year for reinsurance and then the insurance companies pass those rates on to consumers and to property developers and to the people that have mortgages and the more of these events happen even though it just happened in acapulco it impacts insurance rates everywhere so as we see the events like what happened in maui what happened in acapulco what happened in miami you can start to see more of these things start to happen at the same time the cost for insuring property goes up and that starts to make this whole system very difficult to maintain because if the cost for insurance doubles or triples and people can't really afford it but the mortgages require that they have it in all of these high-risk coastal cities and coastal areas that's where an economic hit either has to be absorbed by the federal government or

SPEAKER_327: we end up taking a mass or we can't get insurance right or we take a massive economic loss and so i

SPEAKER_00: just want to say like this seems like an outlier event and oh my gosh we should be sorry and sad but

SPEAKER_143: the truth is the frequency of these events and the risk factors which is this ocean heat temperature rising continuously for a long period of time are going to drive that frequency of events and there's going to be a real economic cost to bear on the order of several trillion dollars over time because someone has to underwrite that real estate and someone has to underwrite the insurance to support that real estate so it may seem like a one-off and oh you know this won't be a big deal but it actually translates economically through the reinsurance and insurance markets into the real estate markets fairly

SPEAKER_00: quickly um and so i just wanted to kind of point out one of the the second order consequences

Chamath Palihapitiya: there was an article in the wall street journal a few weeks ago nick you can probably find it about this exact issue where they profiled the handful of homeowners i think it was in palm beach or west palm beach and they essentially had to sell and leave because they couldn't afford the home insurance or for those that own their home outright they just stopped insuring it because they realized the land value would be fine and so they said if a storm there it is if a storm oh there you go yeah if a storm hits you know west palm and and destroys my home you know hopefully i'll be fine and then i'll just leave and i'll just sell it for the dirt but to your point it's become economically untenable in a lot of places for these folks to be able to insure insure their home look at this on this example a hundred and twenty one thousand dollars a year for home insurance right what by the way so add up

SPEAKER_00: the value well that's because there's a one in ten chance that a hurricane's going to hit them on any given year right and then they lose their whole value so do the math on what the total real estate value in that region is and think about what it gets written gets written down to as

SPEAKER_143: everyone starts to sell and then you do that across all these regions where there's now high risk and lack of insurance available and you have a real economic question on who's going to step in to

Chamath Palihapitiya: support and buoy those asset values now but aren't there state actors now that step in and act as a

SPEAKER_00: reinsure great question in florida they have a reinsurance pool that is largely assumed to be

SPEAKER_143: completely underfunded and so everyone says like florida's got this reinsurance pool they'll write your stuff but in florida if people if you ask people in the reinsurance industry they're like this thing's basically bankrupt it's completely insolvent this isn't real so the federal government's going to be asked to step in and cover that thing at some point and then someone's got to write a trillion dollar check i mean you know you want to complain about sending 100 billion to ukraine and

SPEAKER_00: israel wait until most of the country has to underwrite coastal communities real estate values

Chamath Palihapitiya: so silicon valley actually needs to be pro climate change so that you can reinflate the money supply wow i mean and then the other the other i mean i'm being facetious but i'm kind of not it's really crazy that so many industries it i think sac said it really really quite perfectly when the money supply is shrinking there's just a lot less money to go around when the money supply is growing it's much easier for all of us to grab a share of it and now that it's shrinking you have this weird effect where you actually want government intervention which unfortunately only happens in acute tragedies and calamities and so what are we hoping for now as a society that's a very scary

SPEAKER_82: idea the second effect is who's going to buy these homes if they can't be insured right isn't

SPEAKER_154: that going to crash home prices freeberg that's my point is that these assets aren't worth what

SPEAKER_143: they're currently marked at and if you add up all of the real estate assets in all of these different regions that you know everyone assumes are worth x but the only reason they're worth x is because they're insured and if they're not insured people are gonna have to start to sell them and if they can't afford the insurance they're gonna start some then the real value starts to come out these

SPEAKER_00: sorts of events like acapulco are catalyzing events for forcing the market to rewrite this stuff that's this is the beginning of a cascading effect i saw a really interesting study about the

Chamath Palihapitiya: oceans and just this the salinity of the oceans to all the real estate in malibu and the reason is that you know if you look at the malibu coastline there's a small number of homes but they trade at an extreme amount of economic value but what underpins all of that stuff are that these homes are viable and that you can live in them and that you don't have to replace them and that if you can sufficiently drill far into the bedrock you can keep these homes safe and this study was just talking about how the corrosive effects of the ocean are such now that you can't actually do that to the same rate when you when you actually initially buy these homes so now you have these 50 and 100 million dollar homes that are really at risk of just corroding and falling into the sea interesting yeah that's

SPEAKER_113: always been an issue there and you're right on the pch highway and there's a small amount of land

SPEAKER_32: between you and the water so if it starts rising or it's corrosive you know i've rented those homes before friends of ours have as well and the water just goes right underneath the homes and every year it goes a little bit further onto the home right yeah and you can't in some of the homes now when they when they rent them to you for the summer they say hey listen during high tides you can't get to the beach safely you can like jump off your back porch and jump into a wave but you know low tides you can get down and use the beach if not you have to walk down the street and go down like you know another person's alley to get to the water check out where are you now so i have been in the middle east i got to go to riad for the first time i'm in uae for the second time i don't have any business interest here but i have uh been taking a bunch of meetings and the reason i went is i'm actually and i'll pre-announce it here i'm going to be bringing this week in startups i'm going to do

SPEAKER_286: a series from the middle east and feature the capital allocators and the startups that are growing here at the startup scene here is extraordinary and i'm going to bring my founder university to the region

SPEAKER_32: as well and i'm going to start teaching entrepreneurs here in the region egypt saudi uae qatar anybody jordan who wants to learn how to build a company i'm going to be teaching startups in the

SPEAKER_286: region and so pretty exciting and i think startups you know at their core is hope and personal freedom to change the world and i think if we build deep relationships between these important countries that are playing a bigger and bigger role in the global stage and we we build companies together that's going to be great for america american interests so that's what i'm doing here since people have been

Chamath Palihapitiya: asking yeah what if anything has changed between what you thought of the middle east versus what you think of it now has anything changed did you have a different view of saudi let's take saudi for example what did you think of saudi and mbs before you went and what do you think now after you've been there

SPEAKER_52: well there there was very little change in that society over the last 30 or 40 years and based on

SPEAKER_32: what they've told me you know spending a lot of time with a lot of people there i maybe had i don't know 30 individual meetings or coffees dinners literally 30 different people and um they've told me everything's changed so personal freedoms have changed radically economic freedoms have changed radically the political political system hasn't changed nor do i think that's going to change radically but yes my opinion of it the reality of it is it's changed massively and then on top of

SPEAKER_47: that yeah i i have learned a lot i've never been there the entrepreneurial excitement in the region

SPEAKER_139: saudi do you think you were do you think you were too judgmental before um i have some core

SPEAKER_47: principles that i believe in and what i will say is from doing this podcast with the three of you

SPEAKER_32: and then being thrust into like geopolitics which you know i really haven't been in my life i felt

SPEAKER_47: i needed to get more educated i feel i am more educated now after doing all these meetings and i

SPEAKER_45: think the big education is the people here are are not much different than the folks uh in our country

SPEAKER_47: and they all want peace prosperity personal freedoms they want to have a great life for their families so to that extent i think and each of the countries is very different you know and so you can't paint with a wide brush now of course i know that but there's no substitute for being here and

David Friedberg: spending time with people so so do you think that you just had a misconception or do you think you just

Chamath Palihapitiya: fell for what the media tried to portray these countries when there were incidents like how do you how do you reconcile that as you change your mind about them well i i think things have actually

SPEAKER_47: changed here more than i've changed my mind i i still feel the same way i feel about human rights and you know personal freedoms and everything like that but what i've learned is that this area is changing so quickly and that change is hard and david said something really important you know it's like you need strong people to make these changes here and they're going to make the changes on their time so the other thing i think if there's anything that has influenced me it's probably what what david said you know is like this is going to be hard to make the changes here and another thing you said you know there was one point you said on this pod like hey do you think they care what you think right they actually do care they listen to the pod but the truth is the changes are going to occur here chamath whether we're involved or not and so i think as americans what we have to decide and as business leaders how involved do we want to be in that change and how deep of those relationships do we want to build because if we don't build those relationships there are other people who would like to forge relationships right russia china etc so i think just in terms of the chessboard that we see playing out right now the more america can engage with this region build companies with them i think it's going to be better for humanity and society and i think if you look at china we disengaged and how's that going for us yeah it's going terrible so i want to build companies here and that's the other thing is people are having big talks about all of these issues human rights changes um and so i the thing i want to make sure people understand is i want to see positive change in the world including our country here everywhere and so you know it's never coming from a place of trying to be preachy uh to people i just want to see positive change in the world and you know now with this podcast being so popular people have expectations of us and one of the expectations is we we know what we're talking about and i did not know what i was talking about

SPEAKER_14: in this region because i never spent time here just like sax has never been to ukraine what does he know about ukraine and russia he's never been to either of those places so you know just like

SPEAKER_366: sax is going to go to russia and ukraine and get educated you know i came here to get educated so

SPEAKER_205: that i can represent the pod better i've been to the united states and so i know that the us

SPEAKER_47: shouldn't be involved there i'm joking with you my friend i'm joking but we you know i think we should go uh you know do more travel and it's really inspiring to see what's going on here

SPEAKER_32: on a very pragmatic basis i will say this is going to be the number two region in venture capital and it's going to be that in 10 years because i met with a lot of the family offices and the family

SPEAKER_70: offices here are extraordinary like they built these businesses like really hard-fought businesses 50 years

SPEAKER_139: ago welcome to being a capitalist jason i love it the water's warm in this bathtub join us well no the

SPEAKER_151: thing with these uh these individuals is they're they're coming to the united states to invest in companies here they're not just like they've done money at the table they are of course because

Chamath Palihapitiya: they're smart business people we're all smart business people we've always wanted to be in business nobody it's what you said nobody was sitting here wanting to be some preachy know-it-all

SPEAKER_70: yeah so anyway i'm learning a lot i'm having a great time here i don't have currently have any

SPEAKER_32: business interests here but i would say you know a year from now there'll be you know a 12 episode run of this week in startups featuring folks here and then found university to be here building companies with people in the region so i'll be investing in some companies here and helping founders start

SPEAKER_104: companies all right uh sax i i yeah tell us about the speaker sax who is this lunatic and well let's

SPEAKER_10: not call him because he's third in charge he's third in line for the presidency so sax who is he

SPEAKER_205: okay his name is mike johnson he's from louisiana's fourth district he's been in congress for since

David Sacks: 2016 it's his fourth term he is in relative terms a backbencher apparently he's never met with mitch mcconnell that may be a good thing but several members had to google him to find out who he was really here we are the good news in my view is that he did vote against more funding for ukraine however as much as i like him on that issue there are other issues where i think his previously stated views could be problematic for the republican caucus so he's very socially conservative he voted to ban abortion at the federal level he's called gay marriage a dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic on the issue of entitlements he has expressed support for cutting medicare and social security i think trump has rightly figured out that that would be death to the republican party where he is aligned with trump is that he bought into the election denial theories and particularly he bought into the dominion scam that was pushed by cindy powell shout out

SPEAKER_291: cindy powell who uh is uh pleading guilty this week yeah the kraken yeah the crack yeah so was lunatic too

SPEAKER_386: muted of a word to describe this guy sacks would you say or would you i don't think he i wouldn't say

Chamath Palihapitiya: sorry david david how did he get elected because i thought there was like more moderates that were like emers and even scalise is more to the left of this guy so how how did how did is it that all of that ended up with the far far far right person getting elected this is the crazy thing is

SPEAKER_55: that they had better choices and so for example jim jordan is the guy who i think should have gotten it

SPEAKER_38: jim jordan is always supremely prepared for any hearing he's one of the only republicans who knows how to ask tough questions i think he would have run the house with tremendous discipline this is a case where

SPEAKER_55: you're plucking a guy out of obscurity he may not even have the experience to run the house with the necessary discipline moreover he's somebody who the democrats are going to write campaign ads against very easily now you asked the question how did this happen i think that the gop just kind of ran out of gas i mean they went through so many candidates that they exhausted all the options and there were three weeks of chaos and the new york times summed up the feelings of the gop caucus by saying they view johnson as someone who's sufficiently conservative who they do not personally despise so that's really the reason at the end of the day is they just perceive him as a

SPEAKER_390: nice guy but as you know nice guys don't always get the job done i think they were what is happening they kind of ran out of candidates and and they they chose this guy because he's a nice guy now jim jordan this guy's a nice guy he's a nice guy he believes gay people are evil

SPEAKER_51: uh i don't i certainly don't approve of that message but it comes from his religious views

SPEAKER_55: well done republican party but look jim jordan was the right guy here but jim jordan sometimes has sharp elbows and so he's rubbed people the wrong way mike johnson on a personal level has not rubbed people

SPEAKER_51: the wrong way but i agree that the campaign ads are going to write themselves here

SPEAKER_397: he uh he apparently hasn't rubbed anybody

SPEAKER_55: and then the crazy thing is that the one social issue it gets crazier well from my point of view the one social issue or cultural issue where he's not that conservative apparently is on crt he said a bunch of things that indicate that he views the u.s as being systemically racist and doesn't think republicans should should be attacking crt which i think is the one cultural issue where republicans should be on offense they should be opposing the woke mind virus i would like to see them go after that issue and not be trying to re-litigate gay marriage or abortion at the federal level so in my view this this guy is the the wrong mix of of cultural issues and then of course his views on entitlements are a surefire loser for the republicans so the republicans are all like slapping each other's backs and sucking each other's over getting this

SPEAKER_119: done they're all so happy about it but i think it's a disaster in the making whoa yeah it's a disaster

SPEAKER_403: how long does this last how many days give me how many moochies how many sacramochies does this guy last

SPEAKER_38: yeah you give him seven well again the republicans now are so burned by the chaos i just went through that i don't think they want to go back into it too easily wow so it could last it i look you're

SPEAKER_126: right i don't think i don't think he's going to last long term but um but it may be more than a few scare moochies yeah shadow scaramucci only lasted 11 days so yeah that's what i'm saying 100 days the the the a scaramucci is a is a unit that equals 11 days yes so you think like 10 scaram cheese

Chamath Palihapitiya: you could get to you if you have to get to like january 20th of 2025 which is the inauguration what

David Friedberg: are you talking about 365 days right plus another yeah we're talking like 70 days here no we're talking about 41 scaramuchis to get to jan 20th i mean 40 scaramuchis of 2025. 40 and a wake up

SPEAKER_38: oh my lord so what you're going to see is now that the media this already started there's going

David Sacks: to be a drip drip drip of all the things that he's ever said when he was kind of a backbencher and no one was paying attention all these sermons that he's given and so forth they're going to be

SPEAKER_38: you know writing stories about that and they're going to make the guy seem like a wacko or expose that he is a wacko i mean well i i think that um i would say that he's just somebody who's got very

David Sacks: socially conservative views based on being evangelical and might be wildly out of touch with americans yeah i don't want to like offend people in that group by saying he's a wacko but i think you are right that it is not in tune with most voters let's say that hey before we go sacks i gotta ask you uh about the

SPEAKER_108: uh about the trump cases i mean as a lawyer what what do you think is going to happen here we have

SPEAKER_34: all of the crack and people have to the audience what happened well i mean i think everybody's

SPEAKER_32: following it jenna alice uh kenneth cheese bro it's spelled cheese bro but it's chess bro and sydney powell have all now pleaded guilty some of them for uh felonies in fact uh but the others misdemeanors and they're all really apologetic about uh basically this fake electorate's um scam they were running to try to overturn the election and they say there's six more of these 19 people in the rico case who are going to flip next week at the same time trump was doing his um case in new york and was fined 10k for violating this the gag order the second time third time they think he's gonna actually potentially put be put in jail which seems to be something he's trying to do

SPEAKER_11: so what's your take here sacks is it all a deep space deep state conspiracy still the january 6th stuff or were these lunatics actually trying to overthrow the government to be honest when you

SPEAKER_38: mentioned the name jenna ellis all i can really think of is that election hearing in michigan where she made a face because rudy giuliani audibly farted and then it turned out that uh that she got

SPEAKER_55: coveted a few days later and that we think that giuliani had it at the hearing so he may have

SPEAKER_383: farted the covet into her that's what we've learned after all of this with covet is that it's not

SPEAKER_436: it's actually is airborne it's just flatulence based you could you could fart covet onto somebody

SPEAKER_336: we gotta go to a second science corner here freeberg we need an emergency science corner can you fart coveted into somebody's face please freeberg don't decide by me this is a serious question

SPEAKER_439: can it come out your bum as well as your mouth come on should we have put masks or diapers when

SPEAKER_32: we were on airplanes to block the covet from we should have masked and we were masking the wrong

SPEAKER_441: place yes friedberg i got him to smile he almost left hold on put this on the screen yeah

SPEAKER_442: can you catch over that team from afar but but hold on somebody called joe rogan he knows but she said

SPEAKER_443: she says the tltr is unlikely but that's not a no it's not a no that's all the same as impossible

SPEAKER_449: yeah i mean i would can we get fauci to come back where shout out anthony fauci he's got the answer

SPEAKER_32: for us in all seriousness this is uh they're gonna flip all these folks i mean this is like the end of goodfellas here everybody's getting pinched you think giuliani's gonna get go to jail here what do

David Sacks: you think how does this answer i think what's likely happening is that they're flipping these lower level figures in order to flip the next higher level which would be giuliani and john eastman because i i don't think these people have anything on trump so they're going to try and you know use jenna ellis to flip rudy and then they're going to try and see if rudy will flip on

SPEAKER_51: trump but this all begs the question of like was there ever a crime here oh well yeah i mean they

SPEAKER_359: they admit and yeah who's admitted to it the three people who pleaded guilty and like sure because

David Sacks: they don't have their lives ruined by spending their lives in criminal prosecutions that could send them to jail so obviously they're going to cut a deal but that doesn't necessarily mean that like

SPEAKER_38: they're going to get the big guy here on some on some crime and in fact i remember when the tds

SPEAKER_119: crowd was orgasmic over trump's cfo flipping remember when wesselheim yeah he's going to jail for six

SPEAKER_390: months yeah yeah but remember when he supposedly flipped on trump and it turned out to be a big

SPEAKER_11: nothing burger they couldn't get trump you keep trying to get trump knows how to say stuff he's just like hey maybe you guys could do something over here with the election sex i read that he walked out of

SPEAKER_154: the courthouse yesterday and he got like a ten thousand dollar fine for violating a gag order by

SPEAKER_390: threatening a courtroom reporter it's so incredible this whole thing how does the president of the united states who's running again for president not have the right to say what he wants that's crazy to

SPEAKER_47: me well no they said it's the security of these individuals he's going after like the like court reporter like he's going after like the second person what happens what happens if he gets uh

SPEAKER_03: convicted does he miss the election is there some rule that says he can't run what is the the law

SPEAKER_372: they don't know that literally is unknown territory we're in uncharted territory uncharted territory just like the foreign okay everybody just like the hot water in the ocean i think

SPEAKER_432: i think jenna ellis is going to get paid back on rudy for that fart that covet absolutely

SPEAKER_14: she flipped it and the fart yeah that's it that's it all right everybody god i mean at least there's something to laugh about in this horrible terrible end of 2023 it's so depressing right now

SPEAKER_32: now i mean it's just so depressing everywhere isn't it let's pray for peace and um listen this has been another amazing episode of the all in podcast episode 151

SPEAKER_28: rain man david sacks open source it to the faces

SPEAKER_478: queen of

SPEAKER_481: mercies i'm going