SPEAKER_00: all right everybody welcome to episode 149 of the all in podcast with me again david sachs and chamath polyhapitiya david freeberg couldn't make it this week we're going to carry on without him and it's a difficult week so just a quick opening statement from me about this episode like all of you we're devastated by the terrorist attacks that occurred in israel on saturday and i just want to start the discussion here with two important housekeeping notes first uh this is obviously a very dynamic situation and we're dealing with the fog of war quite literally so we're going to do our best to make sense of what's happening but things will change between when we tape this episode on thursday and you choose to listen to it in all likelihood at some point over

SPEAKER_01: the weekend a second there are going to be some folks out there who claim quite correctly that we are not the experts on this topic and thus we shouldn't chime in with our opinions on the other side the all in community has told me explicitly they want to hear us discuss what happened and they want a sense of normalcy as one loyal listener explained to me last night at a dinner the fact that the four of you can debate hard topics listen to each other and in the end have a deeper understanding of the world gives me hope every week that's why i listen so uh we'll do what we do here every week

SPEAKER_02: we'll have the hard discussion we'll listen to each other deeply hopefully and we'll try to understand

SPEAKER_01: the world in each other just a little bit more and that's worth it at least to me and apparently many of you so with those two quick disclaimers gentlemen anything you want to say up front before i recap where we are five days into this senseless brutality i think that was a pretty good

SPEAKER_08: intro jason i mean you're right we're taping on thursday late morning pacific time by the time

SPEAKER_10: this drops it'll be friday and so a lot could have happened also it's true that the middle east in general and this topic in particular is hugely complicated we will be accused of not being experts but at the same time the audience seems to appreciate our opinions as consumers of information who are trying to make sense of the world yeah so that's all we can really do right and conversations

SPEAKER_13: i think are how we make progress any any thoughts before we get started here and i'll recap what's

SPEAKER_01: occurred chamath any um opening thoughts before we get into the details here on behalf of somebody who

SPEAKER_15: worked in israel have a lot of friends there spent a lot of time there it's really just a terrible devastating situation i've really tried to stay off of social media just because it's allowed me to kind of think a little bit more logically it's fast and furious right now i think on x and it's just a lot of people trying to make sure that their version of the truth is amplified over every other version of the truth which i think is like a is the point in the cycle where you just have to almost unplug from the matrix a little bit and find a few places that seem to be just telling things in an even-handed way which i also find on x and then just kind of reconstruct what happened why it happened what do we do from here i don't know i don't know i have a lot of thoughts on a lot of the issues but the core issue is just i'm just stunned that this happened i don't i don't even know how this

SPEAKER_10: is possible that this happened like jamath i'm not trying to get too weighed in too deeply into the

SPEAKER_24: tweets but i did notice you by the way i have stopped tweeting you've done a couple of retweets

SPEAKER_25: but you paused this week a lot of your tweeting yeah i mean i think you're processing time to listen

SPEAKER_27: and learn and process what's going on right this is not a great time to be having hot takes i have

SPEAKER_10: posted a few things first of all jason you've made the analogy to 9-11 being in new york right now i think that that is the comparison that's been made is that this is israel's 9-11 yeah i think that's a justifiable comparison in in two respects one is this was a terrorist attack it was an atrocity this was a massacre of civilians even if you're somebody who believes in the palestinian cause you should be able to recognize that these were war crimes yeah the videos are coming out the stories are coming out in particular the rounding up and slaughter of 260 attendees at a music festival was really beyond the pale they're clearing some of these uh farming villages and so forth and finding the bodies you know families basically killed anyway we don't need to repeat all of the details here but but this was i think an attack on civilians that is reminiscent of 9-11 and and um has affected the israeli people in a similar way i think the other analogy to 9-11 that's worth discussing is the reaction to this or what israel is going to do and what the reaction is by u.s political figures you heard people like nikki haley basically saying to to netanyahu finish them it wasn't exactly clear whether she was just talking about hamas or the whole gaza strip or maybe iran and then if there was any ambiguity about that you just had lindsey graham come out and say level the place meaning referring to all of gaza yeah it's crazy i'm very concerned that one of the purposes here of of the terrorists was to provoke an overreaction like the u.s uh engaged in after 9-11 remember we were viciously attacked we were wounded we then lashed out and plunged into two decades of wars in the middle east what was the result of that we lost thousands of lives our own soldiers we spent trillions of our treasure millions of people on the other side died yeah and we at the end of the day we only changed the geopolitical map of the middle east in ways that were ultimately unfavorable for us iran became a more powerful country the region became destabilized and we squandered the sympathy that the united states had and its moral position that we had after 9 11 in the eyes of much of the world so the u.s i think fell for the trap that i think bin laden laid which was to provoke us into an overreaction i think that is one of the goals of terrorists is to create such an outrage such a provocation that they will bait the other side into an overreaction i'm quite concerned that could happen here i think that our u.s leaders should be as friends of israel should be counseling a cool-headed response i think braying for war with iran or suggesting that the entire gaza strip should be leveled would be doing exactly the wrong

SPEAKER_39: thing it would ignite the arab street and to your point perhaps that was the goal here and we're

SPEAKER_01: trying to figure out what is the goal of this attack that was planned for years and perhaps that was the goal is to try to take all the hard-fought peace and progress that has been made in that uh process

SPEAKER_00: over the over the last couple years abraham accords and and you know stability and then just you know really create a full-scale escalation i think that's right i mean look i think israel is within

SPEAKER_10: its rights to dismantle and destroy hamas hamas is an organization that in its charter has said they're committed to the destruction of israel they've now committed this atrocity again it was if they had just limited their attack on uniformed israeli officers and military i think that would be one thing but they went much further than that the vast majority of the casualties here are civilians who were murdered in atrocious ways so i think they're a terrorist organization in israel as well within its rights to destroy them however the question is how you do that yeah like a lot of terrorist organizations hamas can kind of melt away into the population of gaza they've apparently have these elaborate tunnel networks they've got bunkers so it's not clear that you can destroy them from the sky through bombing those kinds of bombs would lead to a lot of civilian casualties which will inflame the situation and turn a world opinion against israel at the same time if they go in with ground forces that seems like a really tough situation as well because hamas is waiting for them and they they'll have to fight a guerrilla war in a very tightly packed dense urban area where hamas likely has anti-tank weapons weapons that we've seen that have been so effective against armored vehicles in ukraine again if the fighting gets too hot they can disappear into these tunnel networks there's going to be ieds everywhere it's going to be a very very tough fight for the israelis so i think they're in an incredibly tough spot i'm not quite sure what the right reaction is for them but i do think that if the reaction is this let's call it the lindsey graham level the place reaction i think that could set off a much wider regional war or even a world war and that is not something that's ultimately going to help israel and i hope that our leaders are wise enough to be counseling against that i get the sense that

SPEAKER_39: they're not going to uh go that hard and if you look at the american response to 9-11 you know going into afghanistan and dismantling al-qaeda a noble mission and we didn't have any more terrorist attacks on america or very we thwarted most terrorist attacks there were attempts actually and our intelligence was very strong over the last couple of decades and we haven't had another one of those but you're

SPEAKER_45: right going into iraq and then you know what was the last decade about being in afghanistan we went

David Sacks: into iraq we went into syria went into libya we stayed in afghanistan for 20 years it should have been

SPEAKER_10: a quick surgical strike to take out al-qaeda and their taliban hosts and then we should have gotten out

SPEAKER_00: and even that is incredibly difficult as a mission as you're pointing out here you know hamas can just fade away into the gaza strip uh and into into palestine and you know who knows um shema i guess where we're at right now is trying to make sense of why this happened and what the next couple of weeks

SPEAKER_50: might look like right and so your thoughts i think israel has every right to defend itself and they

SPEAKER_18: should eradicate hamas this is not like we woke up and found out that they were a terrorist organization yesterday or on sunday we've known this for years they've been labeled as such people have been monitoring their money flows for years we know where they were funded but the thing to keep in

SPEAKER_15: mind is that those 30 000 hamas terrorists have also been keeping 2.2 palestinians hostage for the last 20 years and of the 2.2 million palestinians in gaza half are kids and so david's right the thing to keep

SPEAKER_52: in mind is as barbaric as what happened to the israelis were israel in its actions could cause tremendous civilian casualties which will just further inflame the ability to find a long-term peace in the middle east that's really tragic and that's probably part of hamas's kind of sadistic

SPEAKER_15: calculus which is they they probably expected this kind of a reaction and they probably don't care at

SPEAKER_52: the end of the day so it's important to separate palestinians from hamas but i understand and i know

SPEAKER_15: where israel is coming from because we face the same reaction after 9 11. the question that i have is israel is the most sophisticated military and intelligence organization in the world and the reason is because when everybody talks about priorities israel only really has one priority which

SPEAKER_52: is to safeguard the israeli people yeah survive and they've been essentially in a conflict zone with this sort of damocles since the founding of israel so there are three organizations that

SPEAKER_15: really have to figure out what happened here right there's mossad which is the foreign intelligence service of israel there's shin bet which is the domestic security apparatus and there's amman which is the military intelligence group and it's like how did this happen because this should have been

SPEAKER_52: priority one two three and four right and it has always been for them other countries the safeguarding of their people is not necessarily always number one right and then things happen and then you reprioritize

SPEAKER_18: it in many ways that's what happened in 9 11 i guess at some level in america i mean we had all the

SPEAKER_00: signal before that and when we did the 9 11 commission and we found out they were going to flight school here you know and it was pretty clear that it was an intelligence failure for america yeah those are

David Friedberg: the two big thoughts that i have which is there's just going to be so many civilian casualties what will that

SPEAKER_52: do to actually i think that that has a huge negative impact on the long-term chances of peace because then radicals will use that information to further or to attempt to radicalize the next generation of palestinians or other arabs or whatever and so i worry that the progress that was made in the abraham accords all the normalization goes off the rails and that's tragic because most of these people the overwhelming majority of all people everywhere they just want peace they just want to live a peace and life prosperity take care of their family raise their kids so that's really tragic but then

SPEAKER_15: the other the other part of my mind is like how could this have fallen through the cracks and and why were the most sophisticated intelligence organizations caught flat-footed here yeah it is going

SPEAKER_62: to be a lot of uh information that will come out over time and lessons and by the way the reason why that second piece is important is not to point the finger at anybody but it's to de-escalate because

SPEAKER_52: of what sacks said earlier which is that when people who can articulately gird for war are given the bully pulpit and you see american politicians now braying and girding for war i don't think they fully recognize the consequences of that they're not doing a full accounting of what america has lived through in the last quarter century and now to induce other countries to try to do the same i think is so dangerous and so if we can understand where these cracks are at least we can de-escalate those specific individuals attempts to escalate and if we don't do that we're going to find ourselves in a really

SPEAKER_62: complicated war and i don't think anybody wants that nobody wins nobody wins yeah i mean at this

SPEAKER_39: point really the returning of the hostages seems to be the most important you know high order mission that has to occur after that clearly dismantling hamas and this terror apparatus but you know having started to spend some time you know in the region and talking to people over there and again i'm no expert but i have been talking to people who've been working on this you know get people who've been working on trying to create peace in the region for their entire lives and it's this is definitely a setback but i'm an optimist and i actually think that in some ways this is going to create a climate where people are going to really fight to try to uh resolve this situation or at least contain the

SPEAKER_00: situation two states illusion the abraham accords and i think they're this is going to renew people's commitment to peace in the region and i i know many many of the countries over there are really aghast at what happened and they've been working really hard to try to normalize relations there and create peace and prosperity and commerce and you know between the different countries in the region so this is just heartbreaking uh for the loss of human life and how that occurred and then it's also heartbreaking for the peace process and all this progress that's been made recently and so i think it's you know the there's no silver lining here but i do think this will uh maybe the good people of the world will recommit to trying to resolve this issue and create peace in the region that's my hope

SPEAKER_02: i know it's simplistic and uh again no expert but that's my hope and i've been spending time over

SPEAKER_24: there and learning a lot more about the region these these are multi-generational issues that are

SPEAKER_00: going to take generations to figure out um and it's it's two steps forward one step back obviously uh but man for the politicians and the people negotiating this piece and they work so tirelessly on this

SPEAKER_02: for their whole lives you know keep at it i mean that's all we can do right i mean jason i think

SPEAKER_10: disrupting the process that was happening towards normalization of relations between israel and arab states specifically the gulf monarchies i think was one of the objectives here yeah so i mean israel's contention for a long time is they want to negotiate peace they they want to negotiate but they don't have a partner to negotiate with whether you believe that or not that was that was their position and with the abraham accords we saw that they started to be able to negotiate again normalization with three gulf arab states without involving the palestinians and it looked like that issue was being put to one side and that they were kind of going around it and the idea being look if you won't negotiate with us then we'll figure out a way to move forward without you the big news that you know it's been going on in the last few months is that supposedly israel and saudi arabia were close to working out some sort of normalization and i think that process has been put on hold until i think this has been dealt with and so i think one of the takeaways here is the idea that you're going to be able to get to middle east peace without resolving this palestinian question i think this is basically a a return to to the reality that that issue is simply going to have to be dealt with i don't think we're going to get to a larger deal in the middle east we're not going to resolve all these problems until this long festering problem of of the treatment of the palestinians is is dealt with i think you're right that the two-state solution is the only possible solution that makes sense i mean what's the alternative a one-state solution means that either it's run by the israelis but presiding over hostile palestinian minority that may eventually one day be the majority and you're forced into some sort of apartheid state or the palestinians are running that one-party state and it means that the jews have been pushed into the sea so neither one of those solutions looks very good so that leaves you with a two-state solution however hard however impossible it seems to negotiate that it's the only option yeah it's

SPEAKER_52: the only option and it's a real opportunity i think the my hope is that instead of pushing saudi away this actually pulls saudi closer and says okay this is a chance to really normalize the global perception of the middle east because if there can be a way for israel and saudi to build a bridge here i have a lot of hope that there can be a lot of stability and a lot of the good work i mean again like man as a democrat who has been left homeless who is now definitely in the center but probably leaning increasingly right i'm left yet again with an appreciation despite the messenger of the message of the trump administration because what those guys did was pretty incredible in hindsight these abraham accords the accords with israel and the gcc the almost accord between israel and saudi to really be able to like find a long-lasting peace is just a real example for the world and

David Friedberg: those guys did a lot of really good work and it's it's a miracle actually when you when you look at

SPEAKER_75: it what they did you know despite the fact listen i'm no fan of trump and i am too homeless but this is

SPEAKER_77: where if you want to objectively look at what they did that was good work it was you have to you have

SPEAKER_52: to and in fact this is a moment where you have to start to re-underwrite like is your not you jason but i'm just saying collectively is one's trump derangement syndrome causing more damage than anything that trump could have actually done and i think the answer is yes because like it's now causing us to not see that good work and then embrace and extend it so much of the work that happened in that administration turns out to have been right and that's what's so frustrating for me the work on the border wall we didn't like the messenger so we killed the message turned out it was right issuing long-term debt to refinance when rates were at zero we didn't like the messenger so we killed the message a structural piece in the middle east we didn't like the messenger so we killed the message when are we going to stop shooting ourselves in the foot and when are we going to actually see and take the time to look past who was saying things and actually listen to them word for word i'll give you an example i started to tweet three links a day over the past three days and the only reason i did that was i thought things were so hyper contentious and hyper partisan that i just wanted to show a few sides right and one day i found a couple links two of which one was from jonathan greenblatt of the adl who i thought had a very powerful message and one was from mike flynn and his message was also actually pretty powerful if you just read it and if you took the names off all the content was so valuable both points of view but the minute it goes into the world people immediately judge and they kill the message because of the messenger and this is exactly a moment where you have an opportunity to just stop

SPEAKER_83: doing that because the stakes are so high it's infuriating actually quite honestly it's infuriating to

SPEAKER_00: see it we had this last week on the show when we were talking about reducing spending matt gates is not the perfect messenger but his message was the message we've been talking about which is hey we have to control spending so you i can understand people not liking matt gates there's gates there's a lot of things to not like about i can understand people not liking trump and get over it well and then you know it's

SPEAKER_75: it's bizarre that his son-in-law went to do all this work but yet he did it and it had success that's another example it's weird if you send your son-in-law to do it but i listened to the podcast you know what

SPEAKER_52: it's not weird because at the end if you listen to this podcast the most important thing that is resoundingly obvious about jared kushner is that he is incredibly thoughtful and incredibly competent and right why did we have to spend years being fed all of these stupid lies because one can judge for oneself but jared kushner is thoughtful he's smart and i thought to myself i was fed all these lies for years about how this guy was like moping around in the shadows and this and that

SPEAKER_88: and it was all not true well no when i say it's non-traditional if you sent you know any president's son-in-law daughter-in-law whatever child to go to the middle east on its surface this seems insane but in fact he they did good work and so it's not traditional it's not what you would expect

SPEAKER_00: thoughtful and competent that's what i thought after i that's what i got out of it as well

SPEAKER_10: is that he's thoughtful and competent yeah yeah he brought some fresh ideas just so the audience is clear what we're talking about is he just did an interview with lex friedman and the first hour was on what's happening with israel and hamas must must watch i think i thought it was excellent excellent excellent it was excellent he did just in terms of having fresh eyes he did things like focus groups he's like okay what is what what does what does the arab street think about various topics and he actually did focus groups in various countries to find out so i mean i think kushner made a number of really interesting points showing how difficult it's going to be to get to a two-state solution but first you have to set up what does the the palestinian side say and what they say is look gaza is effectively an open-air prison you've got over two million people packed into this very tight area there's something like 50 unemployment it's impoverished the conditions are deplorable and they don't have their own state they don't have rights and it's been like this for a long time so that's sort of the the basic pro-palestinian argument kushner's response to that was well yeah but you know israel left in 2006 it left tamas in control gave them the keys effectively the reason why there's such high unemployment is because hamas is corrupt and doesn't enforce property rights and they scare away all the investment nobody wants to invest there yeah and israel did give work permits so people could leave gaza to go to work and look what happened i mean when they try to open up the walls you have a massacre so these are the points that he made look i think both sides of this have legitimate arguments and points to make i think that the conditions of the palestinians in gaza is deplorable and you have to feel for the civilians who live there of course but then you know the israelis have a right to live without fear the fear that their security is in jeopardy and that this territory can be the launching pad for terrorist attacks on their soil so it's going to be an extremely difficult thing i think to to reconcile this but you know kush kushner made a couple other interesting points said listen the gaza part of this is not that hard because the boundaries the territory lines are not in dispute there's no religious areas that are in dispute for example you don't have the status of the temple mount or you know east jerusalem and there's an economic plan to revitalize gaza strip so you really just need a negotiating partner for the israelis to figure that out and of course now the problem is who do you negotiate with i mean hamas is is a terrorist organization that is dedicated to the destruction of israel so it's a really a tragic situation you look at it and you're like this

SPEAKER_00: should be easy to work out but it's not it's a relatively small area it's a relatively small number of people it's it's two million people we we should be able to figure out the rest of the free world how to at least have a path towards this and the first step is getting rid of hamas right like there's

SPEAKER_10: no choice but they have to go i don't really know that's feasible jason i mean look if there was a button that israel could push to eliminate every member of hamas yeah sure they'd be within the rights to to push that the problem is that hamas is now deeply integrated yeah embedded in a civilian population of over 2 million that's densely packed how do you root them out it's going to take decades it's going to take decades and they're basically supported by that population as far as we can tell yeah and you know again if you if you take measures that are perceived as too drastic by the rest of the world then you will inflame the opinion of other countries you'll turn it against israel so again it's a really tough situation but i think that the us should not only affirm its support for israel it should not only denounce the atrocity that happened on 10-7 but i think it needs to reiterate the biden administration does its support for a two-state solution i think that the us has to be on record that what's in everybody's long-term interest including israel is ultimately a two-state solution and the palestines are eventually going to have to have their own state there's simply

SPEAKER_39: no way around that right yeah and the the free world i think is in the process of getting engaged and making this happen because it's in everybody's interest this can't keep going on um and so hopefully this again i don't want to say silver lining but i i hope that this the good that comes out of this is that the world focuses on resolving this conflict or were you surprised at all jason by

SPEAKER_52: the amount of people that seem to be almost justifying fat was shocking to me i mean i i the the fact

SPEAKER_01: that people could make any kind of equivalence between terrorist activity and the the level of brutality i i can't even describe it because it'll trigger my ptsd which i had after 9 11 and it still affects me i'm sitting here not far from ground zero and you know for people you know educated people oncologist campuses or just otherwise to blame the israelis for the murder of children for people

SPEAKER_88: being and then justifying rape and torture and kidnapping i mean there is no justification and there is no equivalency there's no equivalency here and this is one of the big problems and you know these dopey kids on harvard's campus or whatever they have never experienced evil

SPEAKER_24: stanford cornell we can we literally just dismiss these idiots because these are kids

SPEAKER_50: who have never faced i don't think you can i think one of the things that was shocking to me was the

SPEAKER_109: level of basically either subtle or latent anti-semitism unconscious yeah subtle whatever

SPEAKER_52: that it unlocked and i was also shocked that just sax has used this word before but it's true but our leading educational institutions have really become woke madrasas they are inculcating kids with

SPEAKER_75: just some virulent poison i think the reaction is always to go after to support the underdog i think

SPEAKER_80: in this group of people whatever they perceive it that is a exactly that is an idiotic simplification that the smartest schools in the world educating the smartest kids in the world should be capable of seeing

SPEAKER_88: fast that's how they think that it can't be that's not my feeling i can't get that there's it's half anti-semitism it's half they just think who's the underdog i'm taking that side yeah i think it's that

SPEAKER_10: simple it is in the woke mindset yeah well look i think it was disgusting and disturbing to see these organizations and these elite institutions being unable to denounce hamas's terrorist attack and the atrocity that took place or turning out in the streets to celebrate what happened and we saw a lot of that too look even if you support the palestinian cause even if you believe that they've been mistreated even if you think that their land has been occupied they deserve their own state even if you believe that war against the state of israel is justified on that basis these were still war crimes these were beyond the pale of war again hamas did not just attack some military installations on the border and kill soldiers or capture soldiers the vast majority of the people who were killed were civilians and there was no conceivable military purpose and for example paragliding into a music festival a festival for peace by the way and then rounding up and slaughtering the concert goers there was no conceivable military justification for going into

SPEAKER_88: these kibbutzes or farming communities you know families no it's deranged history it's deranged so it's deranged it's terrorism and the fact that they can't frame it as terrorism is insane but think

David Friedberg: about what happened okay i just want to frame the order of events okay 10 7 happens and i think within 36

SPEAKER_52: hours or less let's take harvard as an example okay the the pinnacle of the woke madrasas they had all these student organizations immediately come out trying to justify this thing without any information right because in the first 36 hours obviously not nearly as much information was available as to exactly what happened then it's been available now as an example i should read the statement just so people have

SPEAKER_00: clarity please joints joint statement by harvard palestine palestine solidarity groups on the

SPEAKER_88: situation in palestine we the undersigned student organizations hold israeli the israeli regime entirely

SPEAKER_00: responsible for all unfolding violence today's events did not occur in a vacuum the last two decades millions of palestinians in gaza have been forced to live in an open air prison israeli officials promised to quote open the gates of hell and the massacres in gaza have already commenced palestine palestinians in gaza have no shelters or for refuge and nowhere to escape in the coming days palestin palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of israel's violence this is

SPEAKER_133: deranged sociopathic my point is you thought you have like 15 or 20 of these student organizations

SPEAKER_52: of all ilks okay so it's not just pro-palestinian groups it was like the harvard seeks association okay like seeks in south asia are the most peace-loving people in the world they're not pro-war of any kind whatsoever or pro-terrorism so all these people write this thing which blames israel okay then the school is totally silent the school doesn't say they neither they neither completely disavow that statement nor do they come out with a more reasonable statement all these ex-faculty and ex-individuals larry summers sort of leading say this is outrageous have an opinion they come out with something that's milk toast in middle of the road then they get soundly rejected by everybody yet again then the administration comes out and gives a cleaned up version that tries to allay everybody's anger because that the first statement i think basically essentially pissed off everybody on both sides then a bunch of alums who've already graduated or who've given money say these student organizations are outrageous we will not hire anybody who's part of this because their views are so immoral that we would never want these people part of our organization and so here

SPEAKER_00: it is bill ackman just so we people have yes bill ackman said i have been asked by a number of ceos if harvard would release a list of the members of each of the harvard organizations that have issued the letter of signing so responsibly for amas's heinous acts to israel so as to ensure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members in other words you must own your words which is okay so

SPEAKER_52: then what happens is individual students actually have to come out who are part of these associations that were signatories to the first release had to disavow the statement and said actually i'm just an indian student at harvard law school there's a nick maybe you can find this tweet of this like indian woman from colorado of indian heritage and she's like you just get auto recruited into these organizations when you join harvard so i'm like well wait a minute this is a place that's supposed to be for like modern free speech progressive thinking and instead what happens is based on your skin color you get auto drafted into some association then you auto sign any press release written by some person that you don't even see or approve what is going on at these places and these are the places that parents and kids are tripping over themselves trying to get into kids will kill themselves if they don't get into and these are the worst institutions in america because back to jason what we talked about earlier which is we need people who can think from first principles those kids are not it and those institutions are not making them and so if we want to have a point in time where when things like this happen we can really figure out what happened in the past that was right and what can we do in the future it's not this and it's not this kind of thinking and if you're going to a school harvard cornell upenn

SPEAKER_62: stanford that are spitting out these kids i think it's a real shame you're spot on i mean how sacks could there any be any question about the difference between military terrorists you know with

SPEAKER_88: machine guns gunning down people dancing peacefully at a music festival at sunrise and then make some equivalency there it and you cannot actually ascertain for yourself that is a terrorist act if you can't from very basically opening your eyes and seeing what occurred and you know thank god in some ways for for x not being censored because you can actually see these things and i know it's very difficult for people to watch i don't have any judgment on people who don't want to watch it but i think when the world sees these videos and you're going to write this letter you should very quickly be able to discern military terrorist fighters from hippie kids dancing at a music festival it's it's plain as day there's there's nothing there's nothing to confuse you here this is the most easy test you you have to be brainwashed to see something other than that these schools are woke madrasas yeah so a

SPEAKER_10: couple of points on that so if you look at their statement i think it's it's appropriate and fine to express concern about the people the civilians living in gaza and what the israeli response might entail i think it is fine and good to do that both for humanitarian reasons and for self-interested reasons if you're a supporter of israel because this could all spiral out of control however these people completely lit their credibility on fire from the first paragraph by saying that israel was entirely responsible for what happened and not having one word of condemnation for the atrocities that had just been committed they cannot even see the war crimes that have occurred yeah so they don't

SPEAKER_64: even mention hamas they don't even mention the actual people that perpetrated the crime right so the

SPEAKER_10: question is what is it about their ideology that blinds them to this atrocious massacre and and i think it is this i do think it has to do with this this woke mindset the the woke ideology is a form of cultural marxism in which people are divided up into oppressor and oppressed groups so in marx's original teaching you had the proletarian and the bourgeoisie basically the oppressed and the oppressor this kind of went through this cultural identity filter with woke where again people are divided up into identity groups and so you've got men versus women white versus black and brown you've got straight versus gay and so on down the line and the the idea is that there's a power structure and if you are in one of these groups and you are by definition oppressed and if you are in one of the oppressor groups then by definition you are guilty in a collective way you're suffering from yes by default the people who

SPEAKER_41: are oppressed are the righteous ones yeah right but i think that what you see is that when you divide

SPEAKER_10: up the world this way first of all this is not a very accurate way of looking at the world i mean there are lots of minority groups in the united states that have done great so for example there's a book written recently about asian americans the united states called the inconvenient minority why is it inconvenient because asian americans have done spectacularly well they get into elite colleges and institutions at higher rates than than whites do which is why they're the primary group that's discriminated against by affirmative action before it was overturned by the street court but the reason why the author called them the inconvenient minority is because their success in america refutes a lot of this sort of simplistic woke delineation between if you're a minority group you're oppressed and if you're you know in this white group you're the oppressor i think jews have fallen into a similar type of categorization which is they're an inconvenient minority they've been historically very successful in america despite there being existence of of anti-semitism and i think that the woke ideology has reacted to this by saying no you know jews are not really an ethnic group they're just whites and so that's been the response right is well let's just put them in the oppressor group so we don't need to explain away their success one of the problems with that is that you have to ignore the existence of anti-semitism and so they do they just pretend like it doesn't exist so here you have a situation where all of these things are in play they've already predefined the palestinians as being an oppressed people and and look and i think in many ways they are but they are not incorrect yeah incorrect but they've defined it in racial terms really right right and they've defined the israelis and and jews really more generally as being part of an oppressor group and so everything fits into that larger narrative and so when members of one of these woke oppressed groups commits an injustice they just can't see it i mean their version of social justice is always defined in terms of collective guilt and if you're a member of an oppressed group by definition you're not capable

SPEAKER_52: of committing an injustice because you don't have the power do you guys think that bill ackman was out of line by saying i don't want to hire kids from these organizations in these schools because it's just like these kids and these schools will bring basically i think what he's implicitly saying is distraction and it will lower the probability that i achieve my corporate goals so these are not good workers

SPEAKER_88: based on your comment about thinking from first principles and and you know being able to assess the situation i think that's probably what happens at a hedge fund you have to place bets and you have to be able to think from first principles and be intellectually rigorous this is the most intellectually lazy approach i'm just going to sign a piece of paper without even thinking so no i don't think he's out of line i think it's an important lesson for people freedom of speech this is owning your words you must own your words in position and it's important that young people learn this now you have to own your words whether it's on social media or signing some stupid petition that you didn't read and and there's a lot of backtracking going on right now by the way i can't believe that if

SPEAKER_131: i got into harvard i would get auto drafted into the brown men's association just because of the color of my skin that's going to be in the factory i've ever heard factory group i mean let's point

SPEAKER_10: out the double standard here that these elite harvard students want to be exempt from their their words their statements they don't want to be canceled for that however you know that when some hapless schmuck basically posts some tweet or posted a tweet 10 years ago that gets resurfaced they're the first ones clamoring for their cancellation right yeah they would like for their firing they would

SPEAKER_01: like amnesty for their idiotic opinions yeah well what's good good for the goose here is good for the

SPEAKER_10: gander if they're if they're gonna create a cancel culture where people get canceled for their decade old tweets and so forth and they should be prepared to live by that standard now look personally i would have some degree of forgiveness for a college student being part of an organization that puts out a statement they're claiming they didn't know okay but then why didn't you resign look i don't think there's a good excuse for this other than youthful stupidity so i would i wouldn't cancel them forever but look i do think that it's fine for inappropriate for someone like black and say i

SPEAKER_52: don't want to hire you people yeah and i would just be careful for you to add the word youthful because i think it's a get out of jail free card it's definitely stupidity the question is is the

SPEAKER_131: cake baked and if the cake is baked then there's a big argument to never hiring these people i mean

SPEAKER_166: look i would just say your frontal lobes are still developing until you're 25 years old so i i would

SPEAKER_88: give college kids a bit of a pass if they do stupid stuff you're there to learn you're there to make

SPEAKER_94: mistakes but that's not what this is a huge mistake you're saying the bakes fully baked you mean like their their opinions and who they are what i'm saying is you learn a lot from actions drink too much

SPEAKER_80: don't drink don't exercise enough you get a little sluggish maybe a little overweight i get all of that

SPEAKER_52: i'm not convinced that when you have this fundamentally specific way of thinking that you can unwind that so easily jason so i'm not convinced oh yeah okay sure that this mind virus gets fixed because you all of a sudden need a job i actually think like maybe it's the struggle of realizing that there are deep consequences to this vein of thinking that this oppressed versus oppressor or the other way that it was framed in our group chat is that wokeism and the embracement of socialism is basically running away from excellence it's this idea that everybody has to be the same what communism says we all are the same nobody is special we're all going to work together do the same things we're all going to dress in the same ways it's the collective we there aren't going to be exceptional outliers but the problem is that's not how the world works and so the other part of why these woke madrasas are so terrible is that it teaches i think to work away from excellence and instead of striving for excellence to strive to be part of a collective and i think that that is fundamentally corrosive to america it's corrosive to what god is here it's corrosive to all the great countries in the world

SPEAKER_80: and so then again it's like why would you hire kids who fundamentally don't want to be excellent who

Chamath Palihapitiya: are afraid that if they were excellent they would be guilty of something that's ultimately the question why why would any of these kids go to such an elite school to basically be taught that it's wrong to

SPEAKER_172: excel all right well let's say i think perhaps a good and then as a result not think for yourself

Chamath Palihapitiya: and then as a result sign something like this which is just stupid we'll continue to discuss this topic i

SPEAKER_39: guess in the weeks ahead again hopefully this conversation was productive for the community the all-in community i understand that you know people might have very strong feelings about you know us discussing it but we're here to discuss difficult topics there's one other aspect to this i think we

SPEAKER_10: should talk about which is just the the united states's larger geopolitical situation right now i mean things seem very tenuous i did an event with um palmer lucky actually front of the pod recently front of the pod tell him i said hi my invite got lost yeah we actually had a nice uh debate slash discussion on on ukraine but the thing that i think we agree with is that the u.s better bring more innovation at the military military industrial complex and and figure out like procurement because our whole cost plus system right now is so broken there's an article recently in the new york times where it said that the cost of the united states of producing an artillery shell is six thousand dollars for russia it's six hundred dollars so in other words it costs the u.s ten times what it costs russia to produce an artillery shell even though russia is considered to be this super corrupt kleptocracy where everyone steals everything and yet our procurement system is ten times more than there

SPEAKER_176: we don't have competition and all the politicians are captured correct we have this cost plus accounting

SPEAKER_10: system where every year the price good opportunity to explain that yeah so in every other part of technology price goes down over time right you can produce more of something for less we've seen this with tesla we've seen it with pcs we've seen it with television sets whatever it is the price goes down over time servers yeah or if the price goes up it's because you've developed some fundamentally new capability some new version you know the more powerful chips yeah exactly faster speed but you know we're still making the same artillery shells the same stinger missiles the same javelins and so forth i don't think the capabilities have changed that much but the price goes up every year because it's cost plus and so explain cost plus people may be hearing that for the first time you know most companies sell something and then they have a profit margin but right the way that government procurement works is the profit margin is controlled they're only allowed to market up a certain amount above their cost but the thing that's happened in the defense industry is there's been huge consolidation over the past couple of decades where now you've got a handful of defense companies and it's an oligopoly and many of these key armaments are single source so there's only one producer and they just keep raising the price every year now one of the kind of crazy things about this is and palmer made this point is it's not like

SPEAKER_184: anyone's getting rich because it costs plus it's not like the money is basically making these

SPEAKER_00: companies there's no incentive to lower the price if you lower the price and you're at 10 and you got your six thousand dollars down to four thousand ten percent of four thousand is a lot less than ten

SPEAKER_10: percent of six thousand what's happening is not perverse incentive google like margins what's happening is that these companies keep building their bureaucracies bigger and bigger so they hire lots of staff they make a lot of campaign contributions they fund think tanks and so their cost structure just

SPEAKER_189: keeps getting more and more bloated right they're incentivized to do that the more they charge the

SPEAKER_10: more they make right now why am i bringing this up well we're in a situation now where israel might be on the precipice of well they've declared war against gaza and this thing could spiral out of control and become a regional war they may be asking for weapons soon they may be asking for weapons we've already donated some however earlier this year we used to have an ammunition stockpile in israel the united states did it belonged to us but it was there potentially in case of a problem in the region and that artillery stockpile was basically taken and given to ukraine and remember we ran out of the key type of ammunition in the ukraine war which is 155 millimeter artillery shells that's why we gave them cluster bombs so the u.s is already dangerously low on ammunition and that's before

SPEAKER_27: we get potentially another war or another front in this larger global configuration that's happening

SPEAKER_00: another country's war and to be clear we're not at war but we have been right asked to donate weapons to ukraine and we've been asked to donate i think israelians have asked for weapons i don't know if they formally asked but uh we are obviously going to provide i think there's a

SPEAKER_10: uh bill making its way through right now that's going to give some aid to military assistance to

SPEAKER_00: israel by the way we have israel also is a major builder of of weapons too i mean their drone technology is incredibly refined and they sell weapons to russia oh yeah israel is nowhere near the ukraine

SPEAKER_10: situation ukraine is a hundred percent dependent on the united states for its military and for its economy israel has a vibrant military and economy without the united states but the united states does make long-term security guarantees to israel not to fight its wars there's no mutual defense treaty however we do agree to provide them with weapons in the event of a war so we do have obligations like long-standing obligations to them this is an ally we've had for 75 years however our stockpiles are dangerously depleted now because of the ukraine war and on top of that our procurement system is hopelessly broken so in a world of rising multi-polarity where there are other great powers now in the system where there are going to be more and more global threats i don't think we have a chance of maintaining our global position and supporting our allies unless we fix this i mean making artillery shells at 10 times more than what it costs russia that's

SPEAKER_00: ridiculous in silicon valley we have now the funding of military startups and there's a whole new class of warfare supersonics drones innovation is the only advantage we have it's the only advantage we have right i mean this is one of the great things i mean i understand palmer is not a huge fan of mine but i'm a huge fan of the work he's doing and other entrepreneurs are doing to make new weapons to keep us competitive because you can be sure china's making them and so i think it's

SPEAKER_01: absolutely fantastic i thought it was always very weird that google speaking of work madrasa's like google google google employees were refusing to provide services like even basic cloud hosting services to the military that that to to benefit from democracy and living in america while then not supporting the military just seemed like the ultimate luxury belief to use um rob's term from the

SPEAKER_52: all in samich mafia thoughts what does it take guys to for this fever to break for for all of these people to realize that that level of corruption is not sustainable that these ways of thinking are not sustainable that it's not a path to peace and prosperity that we actually want excellence in society we want people to be outliers we want the whole of humanity to move forward and that's not going to happen when we move necessarily as one blob but a few people need to sort of clear the brush and lead

SPEAKER_131: the way and the rest of us will come in and fill it in behind them i think vivek is the manifestation of

SPEAKER_88: it i'll be totally honest like i think the reason he is going up in the polls and the reason people are drawn to him is because he's smart and he's exceptional and he represents one of the great things about america is that there's people who want to win and they're smart and excellent he represents excellence right he represents so i think that's why people are drawn to him and i think people are tired of the military industrial complex they're tired of corruption they're tired of geriatric you know 80 year old politicians we need young successful people to take leadership positions

SPEAKER_50: and by the way i i really agree with what you're saying i think that there's like excellence can

SPEAKER_52: show itself in different forms i think why obama was so profound and joe rogan said this was he was such a statesman he was the best of us but he demonstrated excellence in being composed and measured and thoughtful and strategic he was just so excellent um clinton as well clinton as well clinton

Chamath Palihapitiya: was incredibly steeped in policy he was excellent he was intellectually a massive outlier obama is an intellectual outlier vivek is an intellectual outlier let's get these people to

SPEAKER_62: change and run our system of government please i think we're soaking in it yeah we need smarter more

SPEAKER_10: capable people i mean you look at biden when he gave that speech uh in support of israel i mean a lot of the words were right but he was like slurring his way through it it certainly did not

SPEAKER_88: inspire confidence it was it was his best speech and it was concerning the fact that he's clearly in cognitive decline you can see it in his ability to orate and you know it was his best speech and it was also troubling for me as somebody who voted for him to watch him slur his words or just not it was clear he wasn't all there and you're like geez what are we showing to the world if this is the guy who's running the country and if we re-elect him now we're saying hey we want to have an 84 year old running the country who's not all there and is in cognitive decline let the guy retire let him spend

SPEAKER_50: time with his grandkids i think it's more people who are willing to vote for not for what they want

SPEAKER_91: but to prevent something else and i think that that's of course that's what's so tragic about how

SPEAKER_89: we're thinking as a country right now yeah and just just to dish it out equally i mean i saw trump

SPEAKER_10: give a recent speech where look he is nowhere near the cognitive decline of biden i think he's still compass mentis but he's not as sharp as he used to be either i mean listen i think america's basic situation and this has really been reaffirmed over the past week is that we're no longer in unipolarity anymore we're no longer the sole superpower yeah not for some time china is now a superpower they're probably the low-cost manufacturer of the world so when we talk about being able to make things like armaments and artillery shells and weapons they have the ability to out produce us that is very scary there are other great powers in the system now russia has proven over the last five months through its victory and this counter-offensive that it is a power to be reckoned with we cannot disregard their concerns anymore and not only does america need i think top flight leaders like intellectually who are at the top of their game but we also need new thinking we need to be able to sidestep challenges and conflicts as opposed to walking into every single trap the way that lindsey graham wants us to again i'll go back on the ukraine war i think it's really clear that we could have avoided that war if we had taken nato expansion off the table and whether you believe that or not it was criminal not to try if

SPEAKER_183: it was a five percent chance it was worth trying so i you and i look at our situation we're already mired

SPEAKER_10: in the ukraine proxy war now israel's on the brink we need smarter people and smarter thinking in washington we are no longer the only superpower we're gonna have a really tough time in a multi-polar world if we do not look for ways to de-escalate conflict when we can or in putting aside conflict

SPEAKER_88: why are we not building deep ties with as many countries as possible deep cultural ties deep economic ties deep diplomatic ties every time we are in dialogue with a country and we're building a relationship with that country that means free people of the world are winning you know and every time we isolate a country that does not go well we're sanctioning half the world that's another big part of this problem yeah and so you know it's the normalization of relationships and the deepening of relationships that is the high order bit and you need somebody in office who can do that and you know if you look at how the you know the hawks in the gop or the hawks in the democratic party think they think that we have to be at war with everybody they think we have to isolate everybody you know the fact that trump went and that famous moment where he walked over the in the dmz in north korea and was talking to kim jong-un that moment you see on kim jong-un's face we can put it in here he is so happy to

SPEAKER_216: be recognized now listen i understand yeah he has like people suffering he has a shocked look on his face like i can't believe this is happening right the same way he did when dennis rodman came over no it's like it's like a fan meeting taylor swift if you look at those videos and you compare it to

SPEAKER_86: this it's the same and culture is our export and i know this is what we're talking about jason is

SPEAKER_10: soft simplistic yes it can't all be it can't all be hard power because other countries have it too now so we have to work on our soft power but you're not going to enhance american soft power with all this belligerent rhetoric really this omnidirectional belligerence that's coming out of washington and this is why i think the smart thing for blinken to do or the biden administration is yes you reaffirm that you stand with israel in the face of this unspeakable atrocity at the same time and you don't have to do this right now because it is a little bit tough to do it right now but it's a hundred

SPEAKER_41: hostages you have to re reaffirm your support for the two-state solution and i think the united

SPEAKER_223: states has always supported by the way i think i think tony's done a really good job but again

SPEAKER_52: at the end of the day tony works for president biden and it's like biden hasn't been nearly as definitive as he could have been and tony's had to clean it up so one example of this is like in the wall street journal they immediately on sunday that was she went to blaming iran right and then both the israeli military intelligence and american intelligence they had to do an entire press circuit to try to disarm this in a way that was not seen in a long time and you have to ask yourself why why is that even happening and it's like well whatever special interests wanted to get that on the front page of the wall street journal was able to do it but it has dangerous implications and then what you need is a really strong leader that can step up and say this is false this is not happening this is what we need you needed an obama in that situation and i think that this is sort of clinton or clinton reagan and and i think that this is an opportunity for us to ask ourselves okay who is the most dynamic excellent candidate that can give us this and be open-minded and not make this line about republican versus democrat right now because the world is getting super complicated we need someone hyper hyper excellent and intellectually competent well i will say this

SPEAKER_10: for for trump is that um he's the only president in recent memory who didn't give us any new wars best quality yeah i think he has i have a lot of despite despite all of his issues i think he has a unique ability to project strength to the american public while not being one of these super hawks he's actually i'd say relatively dovish well he he actually walked through his secret plan he's

SPEAKER_80: he said i can't remember where this clip but he said whenever he met with these folks he basically left a 10 chance that he would nuke him that's what he said and it turned out that that

SPEAKER_173: 10 was just enough for the where everybody just enough crazy for everybody to stay in line it was

SPEAKER_214: just enough see i see i i think the u.s already has enough deterrence i think we've maxed out on

SPEAKER_10: deterrence i think the thing that was smart about trump was that he was willing to do business yes he was willing to negotiate and he didn't feel the need to make these moral condemnations all the time he was willing to meet with kim jong-un he was willing to meet with putin and and xi jinping and he avoided uh criticizing them personally he didn't call them dictators he talked about how smart they are yeah it's the art of the deal right i mean at the end of the day he's looking to do business and we need a little bit more of that and i think this is why jerek christian was successful

SPEAKER_214: is he went in there with the mindset of a businessman yeah how do we find something that's beneficial to

SPEAKER_50: both sides totally right i think that when trump was elected i was told that it was the end of the

SPEAKER_52: world and that's what i thought and i'd already underwritten him as an f okay and then four years into the presidency he was probably like a c in my mind and then as i get a little bit of distance away i realized no hold on a second this guy was like a bb plus like he was pretty good and unfortunately the few things that if he if he could have just pushed through would have really saved america the biggest one being these hundred year bonds it it would have kept america from getting to the precipice of fiscal ruin and we'd be in a highly different situation and i'm not sure we could have ever given him credit for it but the further and further i get away from him and the less emotional i am

SPEAKER_80: he did a pretty good job he was a pretty good president don't forget that he tried to overturn

Chamath Palihapitiya: and steal the election i voted for hillary clinton i voted for joe biden but this is the honest assessment the guy who did for the things that he was supposed to do a good job and for where

SPEAKER_52: every other president found a way to frankly make our situation a little bit worse specifically around wars he did not do that and that is a huge accomplishment that i think needs to be

SPEAKER_62: acknowledged and he would have ripped up the constitution and taken the presidency and stolen

SPEAKER_52: it so just give that in mind as well lest we get him that's it that's why he's not that's why he's not

David Sacks: an a he's a b b plus okay jason you have to admit if it weren't for the black swan of covid he would

SPEAKER_69: have been re-elected in a landslide landslide it's quite possible he would have been re-elected yeah i

SPEAKER_10: mean i and also yeah by the way i mean at this rate the way things are going in this country right now both economically and internationally he's going to waltz into the white house he's going to spend all of his time in the next year in in the courthouses battling all these lawsuits the lawfare against him he's not going to be able to campaign and it won't even matter because people are going to be

SPEAKER_251: so done with this and nobody wants him as president again so i think that's that nobody wants that

SPEAKER_01: everybody wants new choices all right everybody if you do not want to hear us talk about complex issues in the world you can unsubscribe from the pod we're going to be here every week having hard

SPEAKER_00: discussions listening to each other and learning together uh you don't have to agree with any one of us uh but we are um we're happy to have the difficult conversations and learn every week here

SPEAKER_02: and yeah our thoughts and prayers go out to the families and the friends of those impacted by this heinous terrorist attack and i did i don't know if anybody has any other closing remarks here but obviously we're heartbroken and we hope that peace prevails and that the hostages are released as

SPEAKER_00: quickly as possible well said all right everybody this is episode 149 of the all in podcast uh next week we'll we'll talk about all the different topics but for this week we're going to let it sit

SPEAKER_02: where it is right now see you next time bye-bye