Chamath
speaker
939 appearances
12 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard 3 Jun
Chamath’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 2.
Appearances
Oh my God, I'm like so sick of this topic of job loss or job disruption. I got in so much trouble last week. You asked a question about whether the upper middle class is going to suffer because they're all going to be put out of work by AI. And I just kind of brush it off, not because I'm advocating for that, but just because I don't think it's going to happen. Hmm.
This whole thing about job loss is so overdone. There's going to be a lot of job disruption. But in the case of coders, just as an example, I think we can say that coders, depending on who you talk to, are 10%, 20%, 30% more productive as a result of these coding assistant tools. But we still need coders. You can't automate 100% of it. And the world needs so many of them.
The need for software is unlimited. We can't hire enough of them. At Glue, by the way, shout out if you're a coder who is afraid of not being able to get a job, apply for one at Glue. Believe me, we're hiring. I just think that this is so overdone. There's going to be a lot of disruption in the knowledge worker space. Like we talked about the workflow at call centers and service factories.
There's going to be a lot of change. But at the end of the day, I think there's going to be plenty of work. for humans to do. And some of the work will be more in the blue collar space. And I agree with Jamath that this is a good thing. I think there's been perhaps an over emphasis on the idea that the only way to get ahead in life is to get like a fancy degree from one of these universities.
And we've seen that many of the universities, they're just not that great, they're overpriced, you end up graduating with a mountain of debt, and you get a degree that is, you know, maybe even far worse than computer science, this is completely worthless. So if people learn more vocational skills, if they skip college, because they have a
a proclivity to do something that doesn't need that degree, I think that's a good thing and that's healthy for the economy.
Let's hear it.
It's not a bit.
It could be a bit. I'll write you a song next week.
Well, I think Freeberg's right that we're at the beginning stages of, I think what will soon be referred to as the third Lebanon war, The first one was in 1982. Israel went into Lebanon and occupied it until 2000. Then it went back in 2006, left after about a month, and now we're in the third war. It's hard to say exactly how much this will escalate. The IDF is exhausted after the war in Gaza.
There's significant opposition within Israel and within the armed forces to a big ground invasion of Lebanon. So far, most of the fighting has been Israel using its air superiority overwhelming firepower against southern Lebanon. And I think that if Israel makes a ground invasion, they're giving Hezbollah the war that Hezbollah wants.
I mean, Hezbollah would love for this to turn into a guerrilla war in southern Lebanon. So I think there's still some question about whether Netanyahu will do that or not. At the same time, it's also possible that Hezbollah will attack northern Israel. Nasrallah has threatened to invade the Galilee in response to what Israel is doing.
If Hezbollah and Israel are in a full-scale war with ground forces, it could be very easy for Iran to get pulled into it on Hezbollah's side. And if that happens, I think it's just inevitable that the United States will be pulled into this war. So yeah, look, I think we are drifting, and we have been drifting, into a regional war in the Middle East that...
you know, ideally would not pull in the US. I think the US should try to avoid being pulled in, but I think very likely will be pulled in if it escalates. And then meanwhile, in terms of the war in Ukraine, I mean, I've been warning about this for two and a half years, how dangerous the situation was. And that's why we should have availed ourselves of every diplomatic opportunity to make peace.
And we now know, because there's been such universal reporting, that in Istanbul, in the first month of the Ukraine war, there was an opportunity to make a deal with Russia where Ukraine would get all this territory back. It's just that Ukraine would have to agree not to be part of NATO, would have to agree to be neutral and not part of the Western military bloc that was so threatening to Russia.
The Biden administration refused to make that deal. They sent in Boris Johnson to scuttle it. They threw cold water on it. They blocked it. They told Zelensky, we'll give you all the weapons you need to fight Russia. Zelensky believed in that. It has not worked out that way. Ukraine is getting destroyed. It's very hard to get honest reporting on this from the mainstream media, but...
The sources I've read suggest that the Ukrainians are losing about 30,000 troops per month. And that's just KIA. I don't even think that's wounded, that on a bad day, they're suffering 1,200 casualties. It's more than even during that failed counteroffensive last summer that Ukraine had. During that time, they were losing about 20,000 troops a month. So the level of carnage is escalating.
Russia has more of everything, more weapons, more firepower, air superiority, and they are destroying Ukraine. And it's very clear, I think that Ukraine, it could be in the next month, it could be in the next two months, it could be in the next six months, I think they're eventually going to collapse. They're getting close to being combat incapable.
And in a way, that poses the biggest danger, because The closer Ukraine gets to collapse, the more the West is going to be tempted to intervene directly in order to save them. And that is what Zelensky was here in the U.S. doing over the past week, is arguing for direct involvement by America in the Ukraine war to save him. How did he propose this?
He said, we want to be directly admitted to NATO immediately. That was his proposal. request. And he called this the victory plan. So in other words, his plan for victory is to get America involved in the war and fighting it for him. But that is the only chance Ukraine has.
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