Joining me now is my friend David Sachs.
He's the venture capitalist at Craft Ventures and host of the All In podcast.
David, it's great to step in person, my friend.
Yeah, good to be here.
All right.
So, David, you were the Cassandra on Ukraine. You have been now for two years, far before it was in vogue. So day one, the Ukraine War is happening you all of a sudden, I mean, in some people's estimation, I think, especially for the Neoconzi come out of nowhere and you're very counter narrative.
So where did that come from? Just give us some of the background as.
To why you decide to speak out on the conflict from very very early days and really be intimately involved in trying to help shape the narrative away from the mainstream on Ukraine eight, on how the Ukrainians were doing, and on some of the historical background of the conflict.
Well, I started paying attention to it in January of twenty twenty two because we covered it on our podcast. So, like you mentioned, All In as a weekly podcast, we do current events, a lot of business and markets. We
also do geopolitics and politics at any event. In January of twenty twenty two, the media star reporting that there was this conflict that could even become a war, And you know, I was a little bit familiar with the conflict and with the idea that NATO expansion was something that the Russians really didn't like, and so I started advocating on the pod that just we should just take NATO expansion off the table. That's clearly a huge irritant
here in the situation. And even if you believe that Putin is just using that as a pretext for whatever he's going to do, we should rob him of that pretext by just saying that, you know, EU Craine's not going to become part of NATO. So I started saying that on the pod before the war broke out, and then when the war broke out, I gave a talk
here at an American Moment reiterating that position. And the more I kind of got into it and the more I sort of researched it, the more I realized that this was all kind of the result of a deliberate US policy, kind of a Neocon policy that either wanted this war or certainly wasn't willing to avoid this war. That NATO expansion they weren't willing to take no expansion
off the table to avoid the war. So so yeah, I just started speaking out about it, I guess, using my channels to talk about it, and the more resistance I got, I'd say, the more hysterical resistance I got, the more that kind of encouraged me. I guess I'm just kind of stupid that way. And so here we are two years later.
Yeah, you, in particularly, you drive these people crazy in a way that I honestly aspired to.
I wish I could be in their heads.
I mean, I guess the criticism that I often see is like this guy is a sass adventure capitalist.
I doesn't even know what he's talking about.
But I mean, in my estimation, youment far more correct on the conflict than they have.
So then where are getting your information from?
I mean, this is a question that we get to here all the time, like where do you guys get this information we talked previously, I know about like Advika others.
You know, we're looking at open source channels.
Why and where can you look to get the real information you can help our audience maybe look in the same places.
Yeah, so it's a very interesting question. So what you do when you're an investor or. When you're an investor, you have a track record. It's very easy to size up an investor based on their track record. I mean, that's all you really have to do with these information channels is what do they say was going to happen and then what actually happened. Nobody ever does that in the information space, So you know, I figured out pretty early which channels were sort of telling the truth and
which ones weren't. And the mainstream media in ISW, they were always really shading the truth or not telling us what was really happening in the war, and independent channels were the ones that were giving the information that turned
out to be accurate. And I think the Battle of Bachmot was really a turning point where I could clearly see you had the independent channels I really came to rely on saying that the Russians were actually winning, whereas IW and the mainstream media were saying that the Russian attack had culminated, that was the big word. The independent channels were saying, actually, the Russians they created a cauldron, so it's sort of culmination versus cauldron. Turned out the
cauldron was exactly correct. That the Ukrainians basically destroyed themselves by pouring all these resources in and then with the Summer account offensive same thing. So in terms of like who do I respect, who do I listen to? I mean the Duran as a geopolitics podcast where they summarized the war virtually daily. They've turned out to be much more accurate than other sources. Stephen Bryan, who's a columnist for I think Asia Times, who's a former Undersecuary Defense
so as a weekly call him, he's been very accurate. Daniel, Colonel Daniel Davis has been very good. There's a Twitter account called Aiden who has a podcast called Calibrated with Scott I think is his actual name, and he's turned out to be pretty accurate. I'm probably forgetting there's other ones to but yeah, this.
Is because people ask us the same thing.
And this is you know, you're someone that I really look to, you know, for my information, which I'm sure people will call me out on. But I mean, I guess it gets back to the track rider question and what you're talking about with the conflict. But at the base like passion level, I mean I can assume I know I personally, I mean I've spoken out on BLM,
I'm spoken on COVID a lot of things. I have never seen any more pushback, and on NATO expansion on Ukraine specifically, it might be the single most controversial topic. So why do you feel passionate about it? Like, why do you even care? You know, you've got this investment thing going on. I would assume this is probably not the best thing for that, you know, in terms of some of the people, the milliu that you surround yourself with.
So why do you care?
Well?
I just can't believe what a big blunder the United States is making. I mean, this was a horrible policy decision. This is easily the biggest foreign policy mistake by the US since the Iraq War. It might end up being
a bigger mistake than the Iraq War. It was entirely avoidable, and yet you have the whole mainstream media stampeding us into this policy and the sort of the taboo they're trying to create around it, where a lot like the Iraq War, where anyone who opposed it was considered unpatriotic or sort of treasonous. That's the argument that you're making that is made today. In fact, I think it's even worse the sort of the consensus that they're trying to
manufacture around this. So I think that I guess I wouldn't speak out as much about it if I thought that the issue is being covered accurately, and it is such an important issue. I mean, this could lead to World War three, or what I call woke War three, if we're not careful. So I think that, you know, just again, the magnitude of the policy mistake and the importance of the issue relative to how inaccurately it's been covered sort of encourages me to kind of keep posting about it.
What do you mean by world War three? Dig into that a little bit.
Yeah, Well, one of the things I noticed early on in this war is that there's been a fusion of the woke left and the neocon right in supporting this war, and they both support the same cancelation tactics. They've both tried to make it unacceptable to support the idea of
a negotiated settlement. Apparently any kind of peaceful resolution in the conflict other than total Ukrainian victory is pro Russian in their view, And you know, and it's you saw this actually, remember when Elon came out pretty early in the war with his peace proposal. I think this is in I think this must have been around September of twenty twenty two.
That sounds right, Yeah, it was in the height of the ukn't craze.
Right right, exactly, yeah, And it is a craze. And Zelenski himself came out to denounce that Elon's proposal as pro Russian and there was this huge pylon. But that and that's just one example. But the point is just anyone who has contracted the official narrative basically gets demonized as as pro putin, a puppet for the outside, what have you. And the problem with this is that it creates a one way ratchet because there's only one acceptable position,
which is to keep escalating the war. And that is in fact what we've seen. I mean, the administration has continuously escalated the type of support they're going to provide. In the beginning, Biden said that providing things like F sixteen's or Abram's tanks or long range missiles could start World War three. Now they've done all those things. So we've seen this pattern where the thing that initially was considered to be too risky eventually you know, it becomes normalized.
And the discussion we're having right now, led by European leaders like Macron, is what we send in ground troops. And again this has been dismissed now, but the pattern we've seen is this thing starts to get kind of normalized by talking about it, the fearor sort of dies down, and then the deep sate kind of does what they want.
So I think it's very important that there is actually like a healthy public debate about this question because it could lead somewhere even more disastrous than it's already led.
I totally agree.
So give us the kind of the forks of the decisions where for where we go from here? So as you said, you know, we've Macrone and Germany kind of in a spat here, and so it's like Macrone and the Brits and then Germany kind of weirdly in the middle somewhere where do the Europeans do?
What do you think that they're going to do? What do you think the US is going to do?
Let's say we have two forks here some aid, no aid, and then finally the Ukrainians kind of in this question, where are some possible like decision trees.
We could see the conflict going well.
It's very interesting the debate you're seeing in Europe. The pressure is really on o Love Schultz right now to deliver these these Taurists missiles, these long range missiles. Jen Stoltenberg, the Secretary of General of Natives, already said that it's now acceptable for the Ukrainians to hit targets inside of Russia. And then you've got Macron saying that that he's trying to normalize the idea of ground troops. So where all of this is headed is World War three if we
go for it. It's kind of ironic that Macron's the one pushing this because he's the one in the past he's always talked about strategic autonomy for Europe, that you're atuet making its own decisions. Apparently what he means by that is that Europe should be even more hawkish than the United States, that Europe should adopt the American position, but actually push it even further. It's not that Europe should rethink whether the American position on this war is
actually good for them. The American position on this ward has been disastrous for Europe. It's basically, especially Germany has plunged the europe tribes exactly.
So in any of.
That that that's sort of the debate that's been set up in terms of where this goes from here. We will either escalate or the Ukraine will lose. It's very simple. I mean, there's nothing really we can do any more to help them. And whether this sixty billion or not past this doesn't matter. We're out of ammunition to give them. I mean, uless we're going to deplete the stock policy at a reserved for our own readiness, which would be
very dangerous. I would though, yes, it is possible, but the bottom line is we don't have the ammunition and they don't have the manpower anymore so, and they wasted a lot of time when they should have been building defensive fortifications. They were sort of charging headlong into the minefields and during the sum counter offensive. So it's entirely too late now I think for Ukraine to be building
the proper kinds of defensive fortifications that they need. So the simple reality is what you're seeing right now is it's not a stalemate. It's never been a stale mat It's always been a war of attrition. The Ukrainians have been at treated the Russians are getting more powerful. They have more soldiers, are enlisting, more coming out of training, and their industrial capacity is really ramping up. They have this huge industrial war machine that they inherited from the
Soviet Union east of the Urals. It's now been fully ramped up and is producing more of everything, more of artillery, shells, drones, tanks, planes, everything.
Yeah, And you know it's interesting because you go back to twenty twenty two, I think it fell out for some of those two. You're like, man, these Russians, you can't even beat the Ukrainians, right, And it's like, wow, three years later, you've replaced every single one of these dead people with conscripts. Doesn't seem to be that much consternation Domestically. You produce in four and a half million shells.
Europe can barely deliver half a million. If we were to get into some port of prolonged conflict Russia, China.
Whatever, do you think America?
How long do you think it would take America to actually reach full readiness? Because I fear, a truly fear, that this war has only exposed and then further depleted us to the point where it could take years to be able to ramp up production, even if we were to really be in a situation where we had a genuine strategic interest in front of us and we may have to make some serious concessions.
Yeah, I think the war has really exposed the extent to which we've deindustrialized ourselves and how we've hallowed out our defense industrial base. If you look at artillery ammunition, for example, at the beginning of the war, we were producing about fourteen thousand shells a month. We're now what two years into it, and they've only as of a few months ago, what I saw publicly reported was that they had roughly doubled production to twenty eight thousand a month.
That's still only what is that about three hundred thousand a year. It's one tenth what the Russians can do. It's pathetic, And what the Pentagon has said is that we're going to double it this year and then double it next year. That's still only gets you to generously one hundred thousand a month, which is a quarter to a third maybe of what the Russians can do now, never mind what they're going to be able to do in two years.
So we have figured out or learned.
I think just how pathetic our dib or has become. And the other thing we've learned is that it is how inefficient it is. So the Newer Times reported that the cost to the United States are producing one artillery shells in the five to six thousand dollars range, it costs the Russians six hundred dollars. So now, at the beginning of the war, You're right, the Russians were accused
of being this incredibly inept kleptocracy. The idea is that their military was hollow colass because you know, their kleptocracy had stolen everything. Well, as it turns out, we're ten times more inefficient than they are. So what does that make us If they're a acocracy oligarchic kleptocracy, we just have a different kind of kleptocracy.
Yeah, let's say.
And that's the fascinating part is you know, in many ways people part of the case for Ukraine is we got to weeken Russia. And I'm like, well, it seems as if every step that we've made and by par attracting the conflict, you blood the army. It's very key if we go in the history of military conflict. We've rapidly increased their industrialization for their defense capacity. They have
become more sanctioned proofd today than ever before. I mean, they seem better capable of mounting even more arrest of action against the West. I'm not shaying that they want to necessarily that before the war had happened. On top of adding some eight hundred miles to our NATO border with the expansion, which goes to the root of the conflict that we began this interview with.
So I call this Biden's big backfire.
If you look at all of his claims at the beginning of the war, they've all come true in reverse. He said that we would weaken Russia in order to prevent them from waging this type of war again. In fact, we've made the Russian military stronger. It's larger, it's larger than it was before. It's produced far more weapons, the industrial base is ramped up. Plus it's now battle tested
on battle hardened, especially against Western weapons. So it's a much more formidable military Biden has created on the part of the Russians than when we started. Meanwhile, it's the United States that has seen in stockpiles depleted and hollowed out. Then you look at the economic claims that Biden made. He said that sanctions would crush the Russian economy. In fact, the Russian economy is growing faster than any of the G seven economies.
It's really booming.
And it's our European allies economies that have been crushed by the sanctions. So you know this policy that he's pursued has really boomeranged and again come true in reversed. Then you take the humanitarian claims he said that we would help ease the suffering of the Ukrainians. In fact, we've led to I think our support of this proxy war and our willingness to fight to the last Ukrainian, like Lindsay Graham said, this is the best way we've
ever spent, using Ukrainians to kill Russians. This has led to an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe in Ukraine, where something like ten million plus people, mostly women and children, have left the country. I think at least half million casualties killed, are seriously wounded, and the population of the country has reduced from something like forty four million to twenty eight million. Yes, and if you look at the demographic pyramid, something like ten to twelve million or pensioners.
They can't really work.
So what we've done is really leading to the demographic death in this country.
So I want to shift gears a little bit.
In the early days of the war in Gaza, you and I, as many others were warning about expanded war in the Middle East. So we're several hundred days now or whatever into the conflict of Gaza.
Do you still worry about that?
In President Biden's handling, how would you rate the handling of the conflicts so far?
Well, what I said about in the wake of October seventh, the first thing I said was that it's a little bit of reminiscent of nine to eleven, that the purpose of an outrageous terrorist attack is usually provoking overreaction. Yes, and I hope that the Israelis would react wisely and not in the nine to eleven manner like the United
States did. It's safe to say now that the Israeli reaction is exactly it has to be exactly what a moas wanted, because they've created this humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and it's basically turned the whole Middle East and most of the world against israel I mean that I'm actually shocked by some of the arguments that I'm seeing now that this this sort of decolonization narrative that used to really just be in academic circles has now kind of
gone mainstream, and you're seeing lots of people on social media take the position that that that the Israel doesn't have a right to exist, you know, which I strongly disagree with. But I think this has been that reaction has been caused by the way that Israel has reacted to this.
Yeah, obviously every reaction is an eco operation, right exactly.
Well, I think Biden made a huge mistake of basically going to the Middle East initially and hugging.
And Yahoo and giving him a carte blanche.
I mean, if you look at the history of the relationship between American presidents and you know, Israel the prime ministers in war, it's usually the American role to pull the Israelis back from going too far. Yes, so you know, Eisenhower stopped these release from going too far with Suez. Let's see, it was Kissinger and Nixon who stoped from
going too far. In nine seventy three, Reagan called up Knock and began in nineteen eighty two and said that stop bombing Lebanon, you're creating a holocaust, actually use that word. So it's historically been the American role not to encourage the Israelis to basically go to the limit, but to kind of pull them back before they do something that frankly is not in their own interests, never mind ours.
And Biden kind of missed the opportunity to do that, to kind of set some boundaries on what America is willing to support. And I think it's been disastrous for the Israelis. I don't think that what they're doing is in their own interest. When they started bombing Gaza, I basically tweeted that I also got ratio for this, that yeah, Israel has a right to defend itself. What happened on
October seventh was an outrage and an atrocity. And yet it's pretty obvious that indiscriminately bombing a civilian population in Gauza is going to backfire horribly on them, right, And that's what I see you happening.
So I said that the most controversial thing I've spoken out on is Ukraine. I think the discussion you and I have had, why is this so difficult. So you and I swim in right wing circles. I think it's fair to say, or at least you have, you know, much longer than I have. What you and I are saying right here is anathema for a lot of people, but it's self evidently obvious, especially if you're going to in play, if you were going to embrace a restraint
philosophy whenever it comes to Ukraine. It equally applies to the enmeshment that we've had over some twenty some years in the Middle East with respect Israel, and you can say that we should, as you said, take a leading role and we should try to at least concur some restraints for our own sake, if not for you know, the survival of the Israeli state. But I don't see a lot of the discussion, David, amongst the right wing politicians that I am. What explains that?
What do you think?
Well, I think a lot of people think that the way to be quote pro Israel is just to support Israel no matter what they do, ye And I guess I don't think that's intellectually honest. I mean, look, I want Israel to survive and thrive. I just don't see how the current strategy that they're pursuing is in their long term interest. I mean, at the end of the day, here there's going to be what two million plus Palestinians in Gaza. There's another three million plus in the West Bank.
Where are they going to go? What are you going to do with them? I mean, it seems to me that you're radicalizing that population even more. I mean by again by indiscriminately killing civilians, which I don't think you can argue that they're not.
At this point.
That you know, again you're turning this whole population, you're radicalizing them against you, and then again you're losing the support of the world, which you know may not matter in the next month or two, but eventually it seems like it's going to matter. It seems like you look at you look at polling of young people in America, like eighteen to twenty four year olds, really crazy poor result that of eighteen to twenty four year olds, the
majority belief that Israel's just be handed over to Hamas. Yeah, now I think that's an insane view. I mean, I don't score anything like that. But Israel's actions are because they're going so far are going to fement that type of backlash.
Yeah.
I mean, look, we saw so much of a different after the Iraq War as well, in terms of backlash against the United States. It seems again so self evidently obvious. And yet, you know, we come back to this restraint is philosophy. That's actually something I wanted to talk to you a little bit about. I've noticed you. You're one of the few people I view as actually principled within this discussion. I think a lot of people are very, you know, less selectively restrained dis whenever they want to
be and then not. So who are the people what help formed your views? So I've seen you've been attacked previously. I think you were on c SPAN in two thousand and two advocating for the Iraq War.
So give us some political philosophy.
Background of yourself. I you're involved with the teal folks and all of that. So what did you read for you to arrive at the place that you are today, which I think is very unique for a lot of people in your position.
Yeah, yeah, so I think the two intellectual giants for me are John Meerscheimer and Pappy Buchanan. Yes, absolutely, So, you know, pat sort of represents this isolationist school of thought, and then Meersteim represents this realist school of thought. When the two of them agree, I think you can take that to the bank like one hundred percent accurate, and then when they disagree, you have to think a little bit harder about Yeah.
So yeah, I mean, well, so what were some of the big breaking points for you post Iraq?
Like what happened? Just take us back to that time as somebody who was kind of involved in the discourse.
Well, I wasn't really involved in the discourse around Iraq. I mean, some people doing OPO on me discovered some clts that that where I was really promoting a book about about political correctness at Stanford at the time, and then I got a question by Iraq, and really I
just repeated the conventional wisdom at the time. And I think that when I saw the result of the Iraq War and that we had been led into it, I mean so egregiously, and I don't think there's any other word for the untruth that we were told about it, that started to really change my point of view on this Neokon forum policy. I mean, are going into Iraq and the and I mean it wasn't just Iraq who
was also staying in Afghanistan for twenty years. It was the you know, the covert war we waged against Syria, what we did in Libya. I mean, these things were it was a total fiasco. We unleashed you know, incredible amounts of death and destruction, created this huge refugee problem.
In any event, I.
Don't need to recite all of that, but yeah, I think anybody who lived through that and didn't reconsider American's foreign policy and to really start asking questions about the foreign policy establishment that gave us those wars, Yes, hasn't been paying attention.
I couldn't agree more. Libya was a big one for me.
I will say just you know, personally, I want to, you know, just shift gears a little bit.
You talk a lot about free speech.
You've helped Elon, you know, kind of with the takeover of Twitter. So we've been more than a year or so in that. Now what's your assessment. Do you think free speech is better on Twitter?
Is it worse? What do you think?
Oh, it's much better. I mean, thank goodness Elon did that. It's the only the fact or the fact that Elon decided to acquire Twitter. I think it's the only reason we have meaningful free speech online anymore. You have to remember, it's not just about the fact that he rolled back, you know what Twitter was doing. It's also the fact that that censorship movement had a momentum to it, and they kept adding new categories of thought and opinion that
you couldn't you couldn't say. I mean, imagine if we had this Ukraine war under the old Twitter management.
I can't.
Yeah, remember, like during COVID, there were all sorts of positions that we now know are true that you couldn't say without getting censored exactly. Look, it's the censorship, it's protein and morphs in order to protect official narratives. At least that's what it was doing and still does in other major tech companies. And so I think that it would problem had gotten worse and worse if Elon hadn't essentially pulled an intervention by buying Twitter.
So the other thing is, I know e've ben more recently involved in electoral politics. You did this the launch with Governor DeSantis, and I know you supported him, or at least I think you have something for him.
So what's your s of what went wrong for that campaign? Are you talking a little bit about it?
But I mean a lot of people pointing to the x space that you guys launched on.
Do you think it was a miss? I mean, not your fault. It was good to do, but on his part, you know, was it a mistake for him to do that? Do you think he was too online? What went wrong for him? What do you think?
You know, I don't think that that Twitter space was that big deal. We got started fifteen minutes late, and then the people people are always looking for something to some fault. Fine, Look, I just think that desantss's main problem is that the party wasn't willing or ready to move on from Trump. And you know, Trump would have to like absolutely botch his campaign, and then the answer would be have to be absolutely perfect in order to have a chance, and or maybe maybe it might may
not even work. And the reality is is that Trump is still pretty much, you know, at or near the top of his game. I mean, I think that when Trump did that CNN town hall and he kind of walked into the lions Den and he kind of pulled out of his pocket the tweets that he said, look, I'm January sixth, I tweeted this, this, this.
He was ready for them, That's yeah, he was. Yeah.
Kitlyn Collins had the whole C and N studio inter ear piece trying to get Trump and they couldn't get him. And I think everyone's like, Okay, this guy still on the top of his game. I think that was it. And and you know, look, Justsances didn't run a perfect campaign, but I don't think it mattered. I mean, the reality is the Republican Party is still likes Trump.
So then politically, what do you think is going to happen in this election? What's your assessment?
Well, I mean, if you believe the polling right now, Trump's gonna win. So it's gonna be Trump versus Biden. It's kind of a you.
And I are talking onesdays. It's definitely good to be Trump versus b controversy.
Yeah, I mean, it's funny how we've been talking for months and months and months about whether it's going to be Trump. You know, it was, it was always inevitable. It was sort of unthinkable and yet inevitable at the same time. So, you know, I think we really need
a change an administration in Washington. I get really worried about this administration about whether about how objective they can be on what our next steps in Ukraine are, because just some cost fallacy that they may feel the need to protect their previous policy choices avoid having egg on their face by continually escalating the situation in Ukraine, and Bind by no means has been the craziest on the
Ukraine War. I mean, there are people in Washington, like Lindsey Graham, even like Mitch McConnell who wanted more escalations sooner, or like McCrone in Europe. So you know there are forces pulling him in a direction of even more escalation. And then you know, since he got us into this war, this proxy war, he may his administration may have the incentive to really keep doubling down. So I think it's really important to have a change administration.
My worry with the Trump administration is I covered it extensively at the time. I interviewed him four times at that time, as you could always see that he didn't particularly care about what was going on. He outsourced, I mean, he cared about a few things. We would outsource things.
John Bolton or you know, whoever was running at h r McMaster and these people were nuts.
Yeah, Pompeia, I mean, these people are more psychotic than many of the people in the Biden administration. Do you think that Trump has learned his lesson? Do you think that things will be different in the Trump too kind of policy? Because that's the biggest question to me when I want to change the administration two one hundred percent, But with him, it genuinely is like I never know which way he's going to go.
Well, I think the biggest knock on the first Trump term was personnel, and that Trump ended up choosing a lot of people who didn't support either his policy or at least his policy instincts, right, And my suspicion is he's learned his lesson, if for no other reason than all those people betrayed him. So I think that he hopefully he's done with all those people.
Yeah, all right, well I hope So, David, thank you so much for joining me, my friend.
Really appreciate it all in podcasts, you can go and subscribe, highly recommend it, and we'll have a link down to his Twitter as well where you can go and check him out.
So thank you, David, Thanks for taking the time here.
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