In this episode, David Sachs joins me to talk about the Russian drone strike on Ukraine, and why it may have been ordered by the Putin administration. We also talk about artificial intelligence and David Mamet's new book, Disentitlement.
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00:01:41.000Joining us now is a great friend and a clear thinker, an AI and crypto czar, and also one of the few people that I turn to whenever there is confusion on the Russian-Ukrainian situation, David Sachs.
00:02:18.000What exactly factually happened when Zelensky approved this drone strike against Russia?
00:02:24.000Well, the Ukrainians started planning this, apparently, over an 18-month period or so, they said.
00:02:29.000And what they did is they smuggled in, I think, several civilian trucks that were stocked with drones, and they were able to get them near Russian Air Force bases, some of which were thousands of miles away, you know, all the way on the east coast of Russia.
00:02:46.000And in a coordinated fashion, they released their drones.
00:02:50.000They must have smuggled operators into the country as well, because these are not autonomous drones.
00:02:56.000And I think the operators must have been relatively close to these Air Force bases, and they were able to simultaneously attack.
00:03:04.000Several of these bases and attack a number of these bombers that were on the ground.
00:03:10.000Now, I think the number of about 40 bombers destroyed and 30 percent that I think is exaggerated.
00:03:16.000The articles that I've seen that, again, we don't know for sure, but the ones that I've seen seem to think that around 10 of these bombers were either destroyed or significantly damaged, which is still a.
00:03:37.000So the people that are saying that this is a precipice of World War III might be a little bit leaning in on the over-exaggeration and hyperbole.
00:03:47.000A couple of days prior, David, Zelensky met with an American delegation of Senator Blumenthal and Lindsey Graham.
00:04:05.000No, I don't think – I haven't seen any evidence that would say that the Americans were involved and the White House has said that President Trump was not notified about it.
00:04:14.000So I don't have any more information than that.
00:04:17.000But look, I understand your suspicion.
00:04:30.000So, David, then where does this lead us?
00:04:32.000Is it fair to say that this war is escalating, not de-escalating?
00:04:35.000And has Russia retaliated against this strike so far?
00:04:40.000Charlie, it's definitely an escalation.
00:04:42.000You recall that during the Biden administration, for a couple of years, they were debating whether to allow the Ukrainians to use American and NATO weapons to launch attacks inside of Russia.
00:04:52.000And then finally, in the last couple of months of the Biden administration, they allowed such attacks.
00:04:58.000And it was considered to be a major escalation.
00:05:01.000And now we not only have attacks inside of Russia, we have attacks on Russia's nuclear triad.
00:05:07.000By the way, the reason why these planes were out in the open this way, just sitting on a runway, is not because the Russians are stupid or something like that.
00:05:15.000It's because under the nuclear arms control treaties, Stark and SALT II, Both the U.S. and the Russians are required to keep their nuclear bomber fleets sort of exposed in a way that the other side can kind of count them and see where they are.
00:05:30.000So, you know, this attack will undermine the nuclear arms control treaties because the Russians would have to be pretty dumb now to keep their air assets just sitting on a runway like this.
00:05:41.000That's such an important point, David.
00:05:45.000So it is a pretty big escalation here because the Russians – Obviously, the Ukrainians aren't going to respect those.
00:06:00.000And so now they're going to be incentivized to stop abiding by the terms of those treaties, which is quite unfortunate.
00:06:08.000So this is an escalation, and we have to see how the Russians are going to head back.
00:06:13.000And so the question then is, where does this leave the peace talks in Istanbul?
00:06:19.000And where does this leave the United States of America?
00:06:22.000This is not the best timing for those of us that want to see an end to this war, as we are seeing this massive drone strike.
00:06:30.000And then, of course, Russia is saying, well, why are we even abiding by this treaty?
00:06:34.000President Trump is signaling that he's frustrated with both parties.
00:06:37.000What is the best possible realistic outcome in the coming weeks that we can expect now that it looks like we're heading towards another summer killing season?
00:06:45.000Well, Charlie, in order for there to be a peace deal, there has to be some sort of overlap in what the two sides are willing to accept.
00:06:53.000And I just don't see what that is at the present time.
00:06:56.000The Ukrainians have said that they won't give up a square inch of territory.
00:07:10.000They think that a ceasefire would be the equivalent of trying to call time out in the middle of a war, and the Ukrainians will just use that time to regroup and rearm and take a losing position and fortify it.
00:07:22.000So, you know, there doesn't appear to be a, you might say, like a contractual, somewhere for the two parties to agree on.
00:07:30.000Again, the Ukrainians are unwilling to agree to a permanent peace that recognizes this de facto loss of territory, and they still think they're going to win the war.
00:08:08.000Just to step back for a second, Charlie, I mean, here's my larger frame on the war, is that there's really two wars going on.
00:08:15.000There's the war of attrition, which is the war that the Russians are fighting, and its purpose is to demilitarize Ukraine.
00:08:20.000And they're running a very slow, methodical, but ultimately efficient meat grinder operation that is killing roughly 20,000 Ukrainians a month and destroying their population.
00:08:38.000They want to create perceptual victories that they can use in the media to try and convince their Western backers that this war is not lost, that they can win this war.
00:08:50.000Because the second that Western support for Ukraine ends, the war is over.
00:08:54.000I mean, so it's of the highest priority for the Ukrainians to keep the And so you saw a really extreme example of this earlier in the year with the Kursk offensive.
00:09:08.000This was an offensive that ultimately yielded no military benefit to Ukraine.
00:09:13.000In fact, they lost something like 75,000 men.
00:10:06.000It might actually get Russia to escalate.
00:10:07.000But in any event, that might be a game changer.
00:10:10.000But there's no evidence they're able to wage 100 of these attacks.
00:10:15.000This appears to be more of a one-off that caught the Russians off guard, surprised them, and now they're going to basically plug those holes.
00:10:32.000More firepower, more artillery, even more drones, and more air power.
00:10:38.000And so the Ukrainians are on a course to basically lose this war.
00:10:42.000And so in response to that, the Ukrainians are fighting a PR war in which they try to convince their Western backers to keep supporting them.
00:10:49.000It's a little bit like in the Hunger Games, where the plucky hero has to keep playing to the cameras in order to get the support of the capital.
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00:12:39.000What is the optimistic take on artificial intelligence?
00:12:42.000Well, I think the optimistic take is that it's a great opportunity that this is going to lead to enormous productivity.
00:12:49.000We need a productivity boom in our economy if we're going to get out of this massive amount of debt that we're in.
00:12:54.000And these tools are going to be incredibly powerful assistants that essentially power up employees, that these AI digital assistants, these AI agents are going to make employees more productive.
00:13:08.000You're already seeing that in coding, for example, that there's all these new coding assistant tools that have really exploded in popularity.
00:13:15.000And at the current time, they don't replace coders.
00:13:21.000And so coders really love them, and that's why they're taking off.
00:13:24.000So I think the optimistic take here is the AI works for us.
00:13:28.000And then the pessimistic take is that the disruption is so large that the humans can't keep up, essentially, would be the pessimistic take.
00:13:36.000Yeah, and so do you think that at any point in time there is a chance to – Should there be a consolidation?
00:13:47.000What do you make about this Whisper campaign that we already have reached artificial general intelligence and there is sentience, but we don't know it yet?
00:13:56.000For example, ChatGPT news came out last week that there was a kill switch built within ChatGPT and the large language model basically overrode it.
00:14:06.000What is your response to that kind of doomerism that this technology is going to get wildly out of control?
00:14:11.000No, there's no evidence whatsoever of the AI ascension.
00:14:21.000It's very hard to put a percentage on that.
00:14:24.000Obviously, it's been vividly portrayed in movies, things like that.
00:14:27.000But people are acting like that's a guaranteed scenario, and I don't think you can know that.
00:14:33.000I think it's very important for your viewers to understand that the so-called doomerism is not this grassroots sort of concern that's emerged.
00:14:45.000It's a very well-funded, top-down, astroturfed campaign that's being waged by so-called effective altruist organizations.
00:14:56.000And they're funded by a few very wealthy, very left-wing Silicon Valley technologies.
00:15:21.000And part of the goal here is regulatory capture for their companies.
00:15:24.000Part of the goal is that these left-wing billionaires basically just believe in government control over everything.
00:15:29.000And in fact, they not only want national AI controls, they want international AI controls.
00:15:34.000And they want to basically empower globalist institutions to run these controls.
00:15:40.000So it's global AI governance here is the goal.
00:15:43.000And the tactic is to try and scare us into having such fear of AI that we're basically willing to hand this enormous power to the government and to these globalist institutions.
00:15:55.000I think there are legitimate concerns about AI.
00:15:58.000The future is unknown, and that can be scary.
00:16:00.000But I don't want to hand all this power to the government because, I mean, the government wielding AI in an Orwellian way probably is the central risk of AI.
00:16:10.000I mean, that is probably – woke AI in the hands of the deep state is probably the concern I have about.
00:16:16.000The future of AI that I think is probably the highest probability, because there's evidence that that was already happening.
00:16:22.000Remember when Google launched Black George Washington?
00:17:03.000I think that the DeepSeek moment was real in the sense that before DeepSeek, I mean, it's almost a rounding error.
00:17:21.000So they've gotten very good at AI very quickly.
00:17:25.000Now, if you look at lower levels of the stack, which is the chips, the chip manufacturing, the chip design, we still have a pretty big lead at lower levels of the stack.
00:17:34.000And I think that if we move quickly, we can build out more AI compute than them.
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00:20:36.000So both peacefully looking at individual outrages like men and women's sports and open borders and so forth.
00:20:46.000I tried to That the protagonist is undergoing.
00:20:56.000And if you write a good play, they have to be formed into a plot, which is to say, thank you.
00:21:00.000At the end of the play, you have to say, oh, I thought these were individual incidents, but now I perceive the overriding thrust of the play.
00:21:10.000And the final moments, that's how you write a tragedy.
00:21:13.000So that's what I tried to do with this book.
00:21:15.000And what I came up with was this was not an attempt to take
00:21:43.000but rather what they were was an open city.
00:21:46.000That just as when Paris was abandoned, In 1944, the Nazis got out of town and the Allies had not yet taken over.
00:22:07.000And because there was no law, you had a lot of people settling scores.
00:22:13.000They would say, oh, the communists are fighting, the Trotskyists are fighting the Stalinists over there, and the resistance are fighting the Trotskyists over there.
00:23:18.000So then it began to make sense that what you had was a conference table of low-level bureaucrats who'd never had power, now had the greatest power in the world.
00:23:32.000Yeah, and so the story of the last four years, and I want to talk about the book Disenlightenment, you're basically articulating that there was no leader.
00:23:44.000Dad was gone, if you will, and the family was running amok.
00:23:48.000And there was no structure and there was no order.
00:23:51.000What does President Trump represent from a literary view in how you're trying to tell the story in the modern era?
00:23:58.000Well, I'm not quite sure what you mean by literary view, but let me see what I can do with that.
00:24:08.000Well, because you were saying you're trying to view the current times from as a playwright, where you say, as we write a tragedy, we try to figure out what's going on.
00:24:16.000What role does President Trump play as you look at things through the incidents into a plot?
00:24:52.000He says, the savage sees a railroad train and sees the puff of smoke.
00:24:57.000And because he sees the puff of smoke first, he thinks the puff of smoke causes the railroad train.
00:25:04.000Similarly, when we see people extruded by various political movements, and everyone has his or her favorite, we can say, "Oh, they are causing what comes after them," because obviously we saw them first.
00:25:18.000But he says, to a certain extent, that can't be true, because Napoleon invaded Russia with five million men, and he went home with his tail between his legs, but a leader cannot give an order which cannot be obeyed.
00:25:32.000For example, Napoleon could have said, we're going to invade Russia, and a lot of people thought that was a good idea, or wanted to go along, wanted to get out of the house, but he couldn't have said, let's invade Australia.
00:25:45.000The question he asked is, what is power?
00:25:47.000What is the relationship of the individual to the mass?
00:25:50.000And that's a question that's been plaguing me for a long time.
00:25:53.000And I thought it has to be that the mass extrudes the individual.
00:26:00.000Who we see first, and that the individual turns around and says, wait a second, I got a lot of people following me by accident.
00:26:07.000Jasmine Crockett's a perfect example, AOC.
00:26:09.000I got a lot of people following me by accident.
00:26:48.000The second is Donald Trump, who looked at the horror.
00:26:54.000That the left had made of our magnificent country where people are whispering in the streets and people are arrested for walking on the Capitol grounds and thrown in jail and lose their livelihood because they wouldn't put something in their arm which they thought and may turn out to have been poison.
00:27:15.000This guy comes along out of nowhere and says, okay, I get it.
00:27:32.000It's a bunch of small problems, and if we attack them, sometimes we're going to win and sometimes we're going to lose, but we're going to be free.
00:28:24.000It inspires half the country to not accept the basic democratic principle that we have elections and when you lose...
00:28:35.000They don't see themselves as the loyal— You, like me, have built a career out of nothing except talent and a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work, which are foolish.
00:28:47.000David, tell us more about the interaction and your thoughts here.
00:28:51.000Well, I went on to say, too, here's a perfect example, that Bill, who's not a dumb person, he's a very smart person, you know, he's in a very difficult position, because a lot of his sympathies, which even come out, are with Americanism and with conservatism.
00:29:05.000But he's got to be very, very careful about expressing them, because if he does, he loses his job.
00:29:51.000That's ridiculous because he doesn't say those words.
00:29:55.000P.S. Anyone who's ever been in an, God forbid, in an unfortunate lawsuit and gets the shit beat out of him by somebody who's in the wrong, and it's happened to a lot of people, and if you're beaten, the judge says, go away, you don't have to say, I concede.
00:30:22.000And God bless him because the election was stolen and we had four years of horror.
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00:33:15.000But she ran out of juice on the one thing, and so she's not going to give it up, so she goes to the other.
00:33:22.000So the Jews have always been a proximate victim because we've been guests at everybody else's house for 2,000 years.
00:33:28.000Now, for the first time, we aren't guests at everybody else's house because we've got our own country, and a lot of the world, when they want a proximate victim, says, wait a second.
00:34:05.000So now there are the cops, and a lot of people are enraged because the go-to victim to excuse their own confusion and their own failures is saying that's enough now.
00:34:20.000And that goes to show that there is this relentless urge amongst most people to blame others for their problems.
00:34:28.000And they try to blame the Jews, and they try to blame Israel.
00:34:32.000And it's a country with half the world's jewelry, the size of New Jersey, gets almost all of the geopolitical protest, anger, and backlash.
00:35:12.000She goes further to say that civilization, the idea is that Western civilization is Jewish.
00:35:19.000It starts with the Old Testament, and it was taken up by the Christians.
00:35:25.000And through the medium of Jesus Christ.
00:35:28.000And it's the idea that the individual has rights given by God, and there are certain things we should not do to each other.
00:35:34.000This is civilization that led to the founding of the United States of America, which, if you read the Declaration of Constitution, they all come right out of the Torah.
00:35:48.000What Trump is doing and what the right is doing is saying, let's go back to law.
00:35:54.000It's not our job to help to better our neighbor's life.
00:36:00.000And this is the difference between the Golden Rule and its precursor, which is what Rabbi Hillel said, is the essence of the Torah.
00:36:09.000What's hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.
00:36:12.000It's very different than the other idea, which is do others as they want to do to you, which is the growth of liberalism, and we've seen the failure of it.
00:36:20.000David, thank you so much for your time.