I mean, Jason and sacks look like fucking two accountants who’ve

just been fired from Lehman Brothers in 2008. Absolutely.

Absolutely. We’re carrying our boxes out to the street and

getting a taxi. Sacks does look appropriate for his setting.

How long are you in DC for? Saxapill? You in and out one

day? What are you doing? Yeah, I’m flying back tonight for

the fundraiser tomorrow morning. Oh, who’s the

fundraiser with? You want to tell everybody? Big boy. Yeah,

it’s an April Fool’s joke. I’m hosting a fundraiser for a

Democrat. Blue state. He’s trolling everybody with his

blue state. Put your red tie on. Put your red tie. You ever

red tie with you, Sax? I wore a blue tie today. Really? Oh,

you’re trolling? Full troll is on. Wow. What a little what a

little troll artist. Alright, let’s get started.

Rain man, David Sacks.

And instead, we open source it to the fans and they’ve just

gone crazy with it. Love you guys. Queen of Kinwans. Alright

everybody, welcome to another episode of the All In Podcast

with us. Back from his Tahoe vacation, you were certainly

missed even though the episode was record setting. The Queen

of Kinwa himself, he’ll reboot your physique with his munique.

Puts the mana in the kana and he’s your pal from NorCal, the

Sultan of Science, David Friedberg. How you doing,

brother? You have a whole sequence of these things? This

is great. You do actually do work for this podcast? If you

can keep this going every week, it’ll be amazing. I mean, I

just felt like getting a plugin from Unique and Kana. That was

my if I could get two portfolio. Okay, go. Hit Sax and

me. Let’s go. Alright, well, you know that he’s back with us

again. The czar of ARR, the savant of Sass. He puts the ****

in Asperger’s. He’s a sucker. He’s a sucker for Tucker, the

rain man himself. David Sacks. That’s so good. Alright, next

up, the dictator agitator and our frequent collaborator. He’s

back to back with the SPACs, a trendsetter with his sweaters.

The future he can foresee a Chamath Palihapitiya. We got

you, everybody. It’s not as good as David’s, I gotta say.

Well, there’s a lot to go with Asperger’s, Tucker. I mean, he’s

the material for Sax. I could have done 20 minutes. 20 minutes.

I could have done 20 minutes on Sax. Sax, you are, of course,

in DC with some star chamber thing. You, Bannon, TL, who’s,

who, what, what star chamber **** are you doing in? No, I

spoke at a foreign policy conference today called. What’s

the name of it? It’s called Up From Chaos and sponsored by a

group called the American Moment and the American

Conservative. What did you speak about? Well, it’s called

Up From Chaos because our foreign policy has been chaos

for the last 30 years. The United States has been in seven

wars. We’ve, how many trillions have we spent on nation

building? We’ve lost all of those wars. Name one war we’ve

won. Look at all the lives that have been lost. Thousands and

thousands of our soldiers. And then, you know, millions of

innocent people all over the world. I’ve said it before.

This is what happens when the United States goes around the

world stampeding like a raging elephant. We need a more

restrained foreign policy. So, that’s what I’ve been

articulating. I don’t know why, what about that makes it either

conservative or liberal. But, you know, what we need is more

restraint. First of all, it’s too much interventionism. It’s

too logical, right? Yeah. You know, it’s it’s it’s pretty

much everyone in this town. I mean, there’s no lobby for

decreasing our involvement, right? Because I mean, the

military industrial complex has gotten so big and so powerful.

I mean, Trump did not want to start wars. It was a key piece

of his platform. And it did seem up until and we’ll get into

this obviously, up until the gaffe from Biden 12 hours after

I said you weren’t giving him the benefit of the doubt. It

threw me right under the bus. Biden just declared a new world

order. I mean, he has bought into all this. Regime change

with Putin. Yeah. And he said regime change. I mean, he’s

bought into this liberal interventionism. Obama was much

better. I mean, Obama had all the right instincts. He

deescalated things in Ukraine. We could have had the situation

back in 2014. Obama pulled the plug. And he deescalated in

Syria. Over the over the objections of his staff. I mean,

the problem is, if you the Obama basically got played by the

staff and the establishment, because Obama was there for

eight years, and he knew that, you know, it was all about

doing the right thing. And also about the legacy and the

judgment that would look back on his decisions, whereas

everybody else is like, Well, I’m here for this four year

grift, and I’ll be back for another four years later. So,

you know, the more chaos, the better for a lot of those

people. He couldn’t get us out of Afghanistan. Why couldn’t he

get us out of Afghanistan? sack because he wanted to write he

got played by the general. So Ben Rhodes wrote a book, Ben

Rhodes was sort of one of Obama’s right hand guys. And he

coined a term that stuck for called the blob, which is the

term for this sort of Washington foreign policy

establishment, all the people in the State Department, and the

think tanks and the sort of the journalists who love being the

drums of war, I mean, that whole establishment that just is

addicted to war. And, you know, if you read that Atlantic

magazine interview called the Obama doctrine, where Obama’s

interviewed, he lays it out, he says, Look, there is a foreign

policy playbook that presidents are expected to follow. In

response to any provocation, any incident, you’re supposed to

react in a highly militarized way. And if you don’t, you get

attacked. And the generals, he wanted to get out of Afghanistan,

but the general started leaking against him, that it’d be a

fiasco. And then, unfortunately, Obama didn’t stick to his guns.

He didn’t want to take those political hits. It was

unfortunate. He really should

have. We’ll get into Ukraine at the end of the show. But let’s

talk a little bit about markets up top here. The US yield curve

inversion is upon us. Maybe you could give us CP a little primer

on what this means the inverted yield yield curve, and why

people are talking about it this week?

Well, I think people were talking about it. The reason

they were is that they believe that it predicts a recession.

And specifically, what they look at is the interest rate on a

two year bond, and an interest rate on a 10 year bond, and you

subtract one from the other. And when it inverts, what

effectively what it means is that, you know, typically, in a

healthy economy, you want rising interest rates over a

long period of time. And the reason you would want that is

that you are guessing that the economy will be healthy, there’ll

be a nominal amount of inflation, so things will

tend to increase in price. And as a result of that, you need to

get paid more for the future than today. Right? So if you

want me to take 10 year risk, you need to pay me a little bit

more than if you want me to take two year risk. And so things

should go up into the right. But when all that stuff, 10

years out, all of a sudden, is trading for a lower yield than

today. What people think will happen is that, you know,

governments will cut interest rates massively. They tend to do

that in order to stimulate the economy, right to get money back

into the system. And they tend to do that because of a

recession. And so people look at the difference between the two

year bond and the 10 year bond, and they try to guess what’s

going to happen. Here’s the problem with all of this, it

turns out that it’s not as correlated. As one thinks the

Nick, I posted this link, so you can just put it up there. But

a bunch of economists at the Fed actually went and you know, you

have access to this data, they back tested this. And what they

found was that there was actually a more predictive signal

of recessions, which is the difference between the three

month T bill and the 18 month T bill. And if you look at the

threes 18 spread, they call that the forward spread at the

at the Fed. That’s actually not showing a recession at all. In

fact, that shows a very healthy ascent, largely taking into

account the fact that the Fed has told us that they’re going

to rip in a bunch of rate increases over the next year to

18 months. So what are we to do with all of this? Well, when

there’s been a recession, it has typically been true that both

the twos 10s and the forward spread have collapsed to zero,

or gone negative. That’s this inversion. It has never really

been the case that twos 10s inverts, while the forward

spread stays up, and you have a recession. In the past, we’ve

mentioned that when oil has these kinds of price spikes, it

typically forecasts a recession. So if you put all of

this data together, it’s a really murky picture. So what

are you supposed to do? It’s not totally clear to me. But I

think that the general way that I think the market is reacting

to this is probably inappropriate. And I’ll tell you

why. And the setup, by the way, because of this

inappropriateness is actually quite interesting. So why is the

reaction inappropriate? Look, if you think about where we were

in November, and where we are today, almost April 1, right,

so it’s been four months, five months, we’ve had massive

exposition of inflation. We’ve had massive disruptions to the

supply chain. We’ve had the beginning of a war whose end is

somewhat indeterminate today. That’s causing a bunch of spikes

in a bunch of really critical commodities the entire world

needs. We’ve had a Federal Reserve that went from hiking

50 or 75 basis points to hiking 200 to 250 basis points by the

estimated average. And so all of these things have happened yet

the market is basically at an all time high, plus or minus

5%. That really doesn’t hang together at some really basic

logical level, right? So So what’s going to happen? Well,

Brad said this last week, what has actually happened under the

hood is a dispersion, which means the crappy companies have

gotten crushed. And the good companies have gotten whacked,

but not crushed. Okay. And then when they rally, they rally

disproportionately in favor of the good companies. So what are

we doing right now, I think we are going to see this diversion

of companies. And we’re about to go through earning season,

right, we’re at the end of q1. And I think what’s going to

happen is really interesting, you’re going to have a handful

of companies who have a great handle on their business, who

actually project strength, I know what I’m doing. I know how

I’m going to perform, the levers are in my control, I’m going to

invest for the future, I’m going to go and consolidate a market,

those companies will get rewarded. And then anybody else

who has a whiff of indecision, or whose structural business is

flawed, and then they use all of these other issues as a reason

to explain their flawed business will get completely whacked. Two

examples over this last week, and we had this debate, you

know, that people were talking about restoration hardware, and

the CEO basically saying the sky is falling, and there’s a huge

recession. And, you know, my comment is, well, if you take

the other side of the coin, restoration hardware sells

overpriced crappy furniture into a housing market that’s

basically shut down, because refi rates are at 5%. There’s the

other explanation for why his business is crappy. It doesn’t

necessarily have to be a recession.

And just to clearly define it, a recession is two quarters or

more of negative growth, the economy contracting. And we’ve

had about a dozen of these since World War Two, we remember a

couple of them in our lifetimes, obviously, the COVID situation

created a recession for a couple of quarters. And then we had

the Great Recession, which lasted, I think that was almost

was over a year, right? That was six quarters, I think five

quarters. So these happen every 10 years or so. So if we do have

a recession, and it seems implausible to me that we would

have negative growth for two quarters. So the other the

other interesting company, for example, was UiPath, which UiPath

got whacked today 25 or 26%. And what they actually reported was

that they thought that they were going to increase ARR to, you

know, 1.2 billion from like 900. That’s a that’s a huge at that

scale, to grow 3540% in ARR in a year is really quite incredible.

But their ACV numbers and the revenue numbers were a little

soft, they got whacked. And now they’re trading, you know, like

11 times ARR. So you have some of these companies that are

going to blame macro headwinds, but they may actually just have

a, you know, a flawed business model. You’ll have these other

companies who actually overperform, but may have been a

little bit too highly valued, who will get valuation reset on

any faint weakness. And so, you know, it’s going to be really up

to the CEOs and these boards when they write their earnings

releases. To be very precise, those that have a handle on

their business, I think are going to get really rewarded. And

those that don’t need to blame the macro market and just get

all the bad news out now, because this is the quarter, it

doesn’t get any better from here.

sacks, best ways to fight a recession, cut spending, I’m

sorry, increase government spending, cut taxes. Where are

we at in terms of how many bullets we have left to do these

kind of things? We don’t really have a, you know, ability to

spend more money. And I guess lowering interest rates is the

other way to stimulate it. Do we even know we’re going into a

recession? So do you think we’re going into a recession? If we

are? Is there a way to reverse it through the the normal

tactics? We’re definitely going into a slowdown. And whether it

becomes a recession to be determined, I think there’s a

very good chance because we already were headed for a

slowdown because of interest rate increases because of

inflation. And now on top of it, we got all the supply chain

disruptions from this war. And we know that, you know,

unplugging 144 million Russians in the Russian economy, we’ve

basically unplugged that from the global economy. So that’s

going to hit our economy, if there’s a little bit of a

delayed reaction there. So these are all negative

indicators. And I think we’re either going to have a

recession, or something very close to it.

They typically last 11 months, right? So how long would the

recession be? I think it’s typically 11 months, two

quarters, six quarters?

Yeah, normally, it’s like 18 months. So you get back to where

you’re supposed to be or something like that. But you’re

right, we have very limited tools to fight this, because

we’ve already spent, I mean, we’ve already broken the glass

in case of emergency for COVID. We spent something like 10

trillion. By the way, that’s what caused a lot of the

problems is we flooded the zone with liquidity. Now we’re

trying to mop that up with interest rate increases that

slowing down the economy. So there’s nothing left to really

spend. You can’t really drop interest rates much more. And

if you do, you’ll get much worse inflation. So it seems to

me that we don’t have a lot of tools here. And we could end

up with something like a stack 1970 style stagflation, where

we continue to see inflation with a slowing economy.

Let’s unpack what that experience would be like. economy

slowing, there’s less job openings, people are spending

less money, while the prices of goods and services continue to

go up.

That’s why they spend less money. And that’s why there’s

there’s recession. Like, I mean, you’re paying six bucks for

gas, you have less money to go out for dinner every week,

right? You pay, you know, twice as much for an airplane ticket,

you don’t spend as much on the hotel. I mean, like, you know,

the the rippling effects of the rate of inflation are decreased

spending. And there isn’t enough time for, you know, the the new

job creation engine to catch up. And, you know, without a

stimulus effect, you’re in trouble. That’s really the

situation we’re in. And that’s what, you know, can kind of

cause the stagflationary effects to, to drag on

almost every other time we’ve had a recession, people couldn’t

find jobs. And I can remember them qualitatively people

saying, Hey, I want to get a job, I need more money, I can’t

find one. And now we’re sitting here with more jobs than we can

fill still over 10 million jobs available, and people are still

resigning from jobs. So how do we factor in the labor market?

Well, it’s all this is super confounding. It’s not like

previous ones.

It is I actually think Jason, the explanation for all of this

is not necessarily about the supply demand dynamics of labor,

but our social policies related to our birth rate and

immigration. I posted this article link for you guys to

read in the Atlantic, but basically, our birth rate in

2021, absolutely fell off a cliff, it was less than 300,000

net births in the entire country. And net birth is

defined as immigration plus births minus deaths. And when

you look under the covers, you know, we had to really

discontinuously bad things, one that was, that has been

building since Trump and one that was acute. The thing that

was acute was that in 2021, after we had vaccines, which is

crazy thing to think about, we had a million deaths, basically,

right, because of COVID. So that’s a million people that

largely exited the workforce, plus or minus. Obviously, some

not not all of those people working, but I think the

overwhelming majority, probably 50%, we have 50 60% of our

participation, more, more, more, I suspect I suspect some

could have been retired, right? That’s what I’m saying. I think

it’s probably like 70 80% of the people that died were probably

in the workforce in some way. So you had you had all those

people leave. We have a, you know, troublesome issue with

birth and birth rates. All Western economies do basically

as a standard of living goes up. And as the equality between

men and women go up, birth rates go down without commenting on

the the dynamics of that. That’s just that is just true. And so,

you know, we should celebrate that in the sense that like, you

know, you want increasing equality, you want people to

have more choice, etc, all these things. So how do you make up

for the gap? Well, you make up for the gap in immigration. And

the problem is that Trump closed the door. Yeah. And Biden has

not reopened the door. And so you know, we have had a

meaningful fall off in immigration. It doubly

compounded because then because of COVID, we had border

controls, and we shut the borders completely. So even if

you know, you were a student that will come here, odds were

maybe you’d get a master’s or a PhD and then stay here, none of

those people can so nobody can get in. So that’s the real

problem that we have to solve, Jason, which is that you’re not

going to get, you know, families to all of a sudden have kids,

you know, that that’s a 18 year problem, if you started that

problem today to get them into the workforce or 25 year

problem. So immigration is really the only solution. And we

don’t really have the sponsorship to do that at a

domestic policy level.

Well, then you add to that the fact that labor participation,

which when we were coming up 67 68% of people in the country

were work choosing to work. And now we’re, we’re down in the 60%

to maybe ticking up to 62% it looks like on that Fred website.

So we need to greatly increase the number of people in the

country and the people participating in the labor

force. If we’re to avoid a recession, right? More people

working, we need more economic action. We need to boost it.

Yeah, I would encourage everybody to read this Atlantic

article, because I think Nick Thompson does a very good job of

just basically summarizing the issues that that we have.

freebird. What are your thoughts here? If is it getting

more people to participate in the labor force importing more

people both? And then how do you how do you get that to

actually happen?

Sorry, Derek Thompson, not Nick Thompson.

Look, I’m not an economist, but I don’t know if that really

solves the acute runaway problem that we’re experiencing right

now. One thing I’ll say about inflation, let’s say you’re

running a company, and you raise your prices, you’re not

often going back dropping your prices again. And you know, you

have to have a catch up effect for income and savings to make

up for the increment in pricing. And that’s really, you know, a

key driver right now that the rate at which prices are going

up, and you know, sure gas and other commodities trade back

down. But consumables durable typically stay high, after they

inflate, you end up having, you know, kind of this persisting

effect, and it’s really hard to kind of just grow your way out

of that. So, you know, without stimulus, and so, you know, I’m

not sure that the labor solution is going to solve this kind of

acute problem that we’re going to be facing that that seems to

be dragging on.

What do you think about the argument, though, that there’s

a substitutional effect, meaning, yeah, when prices of

goods rise, people find cheaper goods. And then separately, what

happens is, you know, part of a productive society is you make

better and more interesting and more useful goods and services.

And, you know, incrementally, especially if you use technology,

those things tend to be deflationary. So they do get

cheaper, meaning, you know, you used to pay for photo storage,

Dropbox comes along, gives it away for free, then Google comes

along and gives everything away for free. Yeah. So you have this

deflationary natural deflationary effect where you

tend to save money on the things you used to pay for, because a

lot of people find that they can build a different kind of

business model to monetize giving it to you or subsidizing,

I think that’s the key Chamath is that if people if prices go

up, that entrepreneurs are going to look at it, you know, there’s

a better way to do this. You want to go on vacation, you want

to stay somewhere for two weeks, you can’t afford the hotel.

Okay, let’s try this new thing like this Airbnb, somebody rent

you their apartment, they move in with another person. For the

week, you use their apartment, and you can rent for 150 night

instead of 350 at a hotel, that that pricing, when there’s

runaway pricing, people come up with better solutions for

people. Yeah, I think I think that that’s generally been true.

And by the way, the if you think about the the biggest areas that

have been sticky, which are energy policy and housing

policy, the way that we’ll have to unlock better pricing in

those markets will be because we deregulate not not by

increasing regulation, but by massive deregulation, you know,

we have massive nimby ism up and down the stack that prevents us

from building the housing supply we need, that has to get fixed,

right. And we need to have better energy policy. Like, for

example, you take a state like California, you know, it’s the

most populous state in the country, it’s the richest state

in the country, but it has an electricity prices that are

three times higher than the national average. That doesn’t

make any sense. Right. And so you know, how do you expect

renewables to really compete? When people are still

incentivized to fire coal and nat gas, it doesn’t make any

sense whatsoever. These prices cannot be this high, they’re

high because of lobbying and because of lobbyists, and

special interests. And so if you rip that stuff out by

deregulation, you actually allow, as you said, Jason

entrepreneurs to do the right thing, and they will push

prices back down.

Saks, what’s your question? Well, you might want to comment

on what we’re talking about entrepreneurs creating products

and services that lower prices that then you know, maybe

create the the exit ramp here to inflation and stagflation,

some combination of that that’s going to be upon us.

Sure. I mean, there’s a lot of entrepreneurial energy in the

US, it’s strong there, that technology does cause deflation,

it’s deflationary. But this is not going to help us get out of

what’s coming over the next year or two. Look, the bottom

line is that we had a massive government overreaction to COVID

in which we printed and spent way too much money, something

like 10 trillion plus. And, you know, this is the classic

hangover. After the party, you know, they put the punch bowl

out for way too long. And now we’re all gonna pay the price

for it despite the punch bowl, they spike the punch bowl big

time. Yeah. And we’re already seeing it and think about like

all the advice we’re giving our portfolio companies to slow

down their spending and extend their runway. Every board in

America is going to be doing that. So it becomes a

self-fulfilling prophecy. But this yield curve inversion is,

you know, fairly predictive. I mean, it’s not perfect. But,

you know, CNBC had this report today, historically, it’s met

when the yield curve inverts has been a better than two thirds

chance of recession at some point in the next year, and

greater than 98% chance of recession at some point in the

next two years. So it looks to me like

needs to be inverted for at least 90 days, typically. But

again, I think if you look at the the forward spread from the

Fed, it’s, it’s more accurate than the two stands. But your

point is the same. Something is happening that we need to take

seriously. And none of the outcomes here are growthy good

outcomes. And the policy wonks in Washington, really need to

figure out what their position is going to be on this stuff and

what they push next in terms of legislation, because we’re going

to be going into the back half of the year in a midterm

election where the economy is slowing, interest rates are

high, prices are high. This is a horrible setup for the day.

And let’s think about what the priorities of the administration

have been throughout all of this. I mean, one year ago, they

did that whole $2 trillion American rescue plan, they were

warned by people like Stanley Druckenmiller, that retail was

back, the consumer was back, and yet they still printed 2

trillion, that caused a huge amount of inflation, it totally

backfired. And that wasn’t the end of it. If they had their

way, we would have had 4 trillion more spending in the

whole bill back better. Now Biden just floated this new

trial balloon over this unrealized gains tax. So last

year, they floated the trial balloon about basically doing a

wealth tax. And everyone hated it. And now they just proposed

it again. It was insane. And even when they brought it out,

they leaked that they had mansion support behind it. And

then the next day, mansion came out and disavowed and said, No,

I don’t support this. I mean, what is the administration

thinking? It makes no sense. Well, I mean, clearly foreign

policy. I mean, I strongly believe we could have cut a deal

on Ukraine a year ago, to diffuse this whole situation

before it turned into a war. Now we got a war over there.

Let’s talk about what they should do. I mean, number one on

the list for me is, we should be getting every entrepreneur from

around the world, any really intelligent person who wants to

go to graduate school here into this country, we need to have,

like, a Manhattan project to just scoop up all these mutant

geniuses from around the world and get them here and get them

starting companies here. You don’t even need to do that. It

was working. I don’t fuck it up in Bush, Obama, all you had to

do was just leave it alone. Everybody who was any good at

anything, wanted to come to the United States, including the

three of us. Yeah. And all of a sudden, it’s like, Nah, it’s

good. Yeah, pass. Okay, I guess. Yeah. Well, I mean, if

you set out that you hate entrepreneurs, and you resent

them for success, don’t be surprised if they want to stay

in a country that but I don’t think that’s what it was. I

think it was much crueler than that. I think that we went to a

posture that said, Okay, you know what, net new immigration

was viewed as something that was displacing people wasn’t a net

value creator was, you know, in some cases viewed very

xenophobically. And that is really problematic, because it’s

actually about a large population issue. And it’s about

how you construct a healthy, thriving population. Yeah, this

was Trump’s worst. Yeah, worst approach. He was best approach,

clearly not starting wars, worst approach, shutting the borders

down for some populous reason when we actually need people in

the country. Well, hold on. But see, the way you just framed

that is why I think there’s a problem, which is like,

obviously, the immigration is a very fraught issue. But the

choice that’s being presented to us by our political parties is

either you’re in favor of immigration, you know, like

bringing in all these superstars, like we have

founders in Silicon Valley, that makes sense. Or you’re in

favor of open borders. I mean, why are those the two choices

that we either have h1 bs, or you have an open border? I mean,

that makes no sense. I mean, what we should have is a

sensible immigration, first of all, we should strip the border

security issue out of it. Because whatever the number of

immigrants,

everyone should be pro border security. I mean, we need a

point based system, we need to be have a reasonable discussion

between democrats and republicans about a point based

system. There’s a qualitative distance for a long time, and it

works in Canada. And you’re I think you’re absolutely

Australian, New Zealand, UK, they all have this. It’s like,

what does our country need right now? Okay, do we need people?

You know, who are laborers? Or do we need people starting

companies? Do we need, you know, scientists, you’ve

noticed, but to me, this is very equivalent to the removal

of SAT and ACT scoring and admissions in college. The

notion of merit, the notion of performance is not one that

really matters in this country as much right now, as much as

the notion of equity. And equity really has kind of become the

mainstay of not just how we’re making policy decisions on a

local level. But a lot of these kind of national issues are

becoming about equity. And it’s about, you know, equitable

consideration for wealth creation for existing citizens

in the United States, and the perception that a minority of

people or some majority of people actually missed out on

significant wealth creation over the past couple of decades

as globalization and technology advances have accelerated

growth in our economy. And the share of that growth has been

disproportionately assigned to a small percentage of people.

And I think it is that same notion that drives a lot of the

kind of sub decisions, the local decisions that we’re making,

as well as these important policy decisions. And the point

that I think is critical, it’s really hard to get across to

everyone, or anyone for that matter, is that, you know, and

I’ve talked about this a lot, but progress brings everyone

forward, but it doesn’t bring everyone forward symmetrically,

right? Progress brings everyone forward, give an example,

Freiburg. So Amazon’s a great example. I’ve used it a lot.

With Amazon, we’ve all been given access to more goods and

cheaper goods than we would have had before. So we all

benefit from that progress, right? Everyone can get on an

app and get a frigging inflatable swimming pool

delivered to their home and the vitamins they need within 24

hours at half the price of what it would have cost them to go

down to the local Ace hardware store. That’s an incredible

benefit for all of us. So our share of wallet on that sort of

goods has gone down, therefore, we can spend more get access to

more stuff, and we’re all prospering. And if you think

back to what life was like 30 years ago, 20 years ago, to

those of you who, you know, we’re spending money 20 years

ago, or whatever, it’s an incredibly different

proposition than what we had back then. And it really has

changed the world and changed all of us as consumers ability

to consume more. That’s amazing. The problem is Jeff Bezos is

worth $160 billion. So everyone looks at that, and they want to

lambaste Jeff Bezos, and they want to say this is unfair. And

equity becomes the discussion, which is why is one guy worth

$160 billion. The reality is he benefited everyone, everyone

got benefit from the value that he helped create in this world

in this market. And then the reaction is, we got to stop

this from happening. We can’t let people be worth $160

billion without putting their eye on the point that you know

what, I’m spending three grand a year less because of this

possible because of this technology that he brought to

market. And so there’s a lot of these solutions that I would

say, are progressive, they progress us all as a society,

everything from biotech, to technology and software to any

sort of business or services innovation that people are

willing to pay money for that people are willing to embrace

in an open and free market. And then what happens is the spoils

of that progress aggregate in a minor in a in a small way to a

small number of people. And that’s the payoff in capitalism.

But when that happens over and over again, for 250 years, you

fast forward. And by the way, a lot of those compound, people

wake up and they say, I don’t want that anymore. And they miss

the fact that progress is taken for granted. And here we are, we

want to give up progress, and we want to get equity. And it’s

going to cause a real ripple effect that’s going to last for

decades. And it’s not the first time we’ve seen it, right? This

has happened historically, over cycles that last hundreds of

years. And it’s happening now in the United States and in the

entire Western world. And I think it’s going to be really

unfortunate, generally for progress. And all the ones, you

know, all the advocates for equity are going to kind of

what’s the solution? I think you’re totally right. What’s the

solution? Because that’s, it’s just a really sad. I’ve thought

about this a lot. And you know, I look at what China did. And

everyone’s gonna say I’m pro China. But what was interesting

about China recently, is they ratchet up and they ratchet down

that free market system. So they allow progress, and then they

disallow progress when the equity meter goes the wrong way.

And so if you kind of think about an equity meter and a

progress meter, you have to balance those two over time,

because otherwise, what happens is you spring back, and then the

springing back is when governments change revolutions

happen, you know, democracy falls apart, autocracies arise,

all those sorts of awful things. And really, I would say those

cyclical things that happen, I don’t want to characterize any

of them as good or bad, but the cyclical things that happen with

society over time. And so you know, that is effectively what’s

happening, guys, like the ultra high tax rate, the regulatory

regime, you know, the government coming in and stopping

Facebook, I mean, these sorts of behaviors are almost like an

attempt to mute and ratchet down both inequity, as well as

the, you know, unfortunate side effect of progress. And I think

you’re basically punishing excellence. And that is

challenging for a long term,

minimizing progress to improve the rate of equity of

distribution of gains, right. And it’s very hard, because by

the way, what you’re also doing is you’re relating a first

derivative and a second derivative effect. And so, you

know, first order and second order effect. So it becomes a

really difficult thing to and people don’t really see it this

way. People see kind of the very, you know, myopic view of

I got to redistribute wealth, I got to help people that are out

of jobs, these guys have only seen their income go up by 10%,

while everyone else’s income has gone up by 40%. And so, you

know, politicians, you know, legislators react to that

circumstance. But the zooming out is that circumstance erodes

as we all made progress with respect to security, with

respect to health, with respect to food availability, with

respect to consumables, being cheaper, etc, etc, all these

great things that progress has given us. And, you know, there’s

a ratcheting effect. The hope I have is that that ratcheting

isn’t too binary, it doesn’t flip too far back the other way

too fast, in which case you have a socialist state arise, a

revolution arise, you know, all the things that we’ve seen kind

of come out of people just canceling AP math in

California, precisely, precisely. And then and then

the rippling effects of no more AP math and no more SATs is,

you know, row row, like, you know, yeah, fast forward 20

MIT brought back the I don’t know if you saw this week, MIT

brought back SATs as a qualifier. After they paused it,

I think a lot of people are starting to realize this is a

road to nowhere. Saks, what do you think is to Chamath’s point?

Like, is there a solution to get America behind excellence

and pragmatic, you know, kind of solutions for immigration? And

if there is a way to do that, how would you do it?

Well, I think like we’re talking about, you got to kind

of unpack the issue. So like we talked about strip border

security out of it, don’t make that part of it, then I think

you got to differentiate between high skill and low skill

immigration, like what you call the point system. I mean, if you

look at who’s founding companies in Silicon Valley, something

like 40% of startups have an immigrant co founder. So

clearly, immigrants bring a ton of entrepreneurial energy to the

US. But we also, it’s in our selfish interest to make sure

that the immigrants were letting in actually have the skills

that make them potential founders. So I think it’s just

would be smart for us to think that way. And you can’t even

really have that conversation. It seems like today to have more

of a skills based immigration system. I mean, who’s willing

to say that?

Well, you could just say three buckets, you know, here’s

people who need amnesty, right? Because they’re being

prosecuted, persecuted in their country. And they’re here

because of humanitarian reasons. Here’s a bucket for

high performers who are going to add to our economy and create

jobs. And then here’s another bucket, which is a lottery and a

lineup system. Hey, you want to come here because you don’t

have skill, but you want to come here because the country so

great, okay, you know, each of those buckets is gonna have its

own process. And your your odds might be different in each

bucket. You know, is that so hard for people to grok? Right?

But you know, we’re, we’re sitting for in the economy. I

mean, it’s very easy for us to say this, because we are

sitting in Silicon Valley. And for us, immigration is an

economic good, it’s a benefit. But if you are in a part of the

country or a part of the economy where you’re in a low

wage job, maybe you’re a service employee, or you’re a

union employee in the Midwest, the more immigrants that are

let in that are low skill, they compete with you and drive your

wages down. And that’s why people are against it. So

that’s basically the conundrum is, as long as you’re talking

about immigration as being a single thing, it’s going to

have a lot of political opposition. That’s why we need

to, you know, bifurcate it between high school and low

skill. People and exactly less low skill, the least if you had

to rank them from least controversial to most

controversial. I think letting in high skilled labor is

probably the least controversial thing. Then, and

there is always controversy around this, it’s always on the,

you know, the bucket of people for humanitarian grounds,

right? Some people agree, some people disagree, should these

people be considered refugees? Should they not? How many of

your family members should you be able to sponsor? How many

not, etc, etc. And that’s somewhat controversial. But I

think we can all agree the most controversial bucket are folks

that would otherwise come that would be considered lower skill.

Because they are the ones that really put pressure in very

practical, measurable ways into the economy. And we just have

to, to your point, segregate and differentiate how we think

about this problem. Because again, if you take immigration,

the word away, and actually just use immigration as an input

to this equation on population stability, we have population

instability right now. So unless we figure out something

between live births and deaths, which I don’t think we’re going

to solve tomorrow, oh, it’s going to create a very large

imbalance that our economy in our country cannot really

recover from, you know what it’s you we spark by thinking there,

it really is a framing issue, we should not call high skilled

labor coming here. As immigration, we should be

flipping that to talent acquisition, we should be

looking at it as America is trying to get more talent here.

So we can win the industries that matter. And if we look

at it as this is talent acquisition has nothing to do

with immigration, this is us going out and sourcing the

smartest people to come here. So our companies win against

other companies in the global economy to create more jobs for

American talent acquisition could be something we could be

investing in, we should be thinking, how do we win that all

the problems that alias, the solution is in some hard working

group of men and women of which some will be entrepreneurs who

want to be here. You know, we’re trying to figure out how to

actually build our own chips, while there are semiconductor

experts getting trained, whether here or abroad, who would want

to be here to do that job on behalf of the United States,

right? We want to figure out climate independence. There are

men and women being trained here and abroad, who want to be here

and solve that problem on behalf of the United States on and on

and on and on. And that’s what it means to be and I’ll use a

sports analogy, you know, the LA Lakers, right? That’s what it

means to be, you know, the the New England Patriots, everybody

wants to play for you. And so when you’re in that position,

and you have that branding tailwind, you have to use it to

your advantage to stack the deck in your favor so that you’re

constantly winning championships. Otherwise, you’re

being really derelict in your duty. And I think, you know,

hopefully, if people look at the broad population level issue

that we just exposed because of COVID, there was a stat in this

article as an example, in the county of Los Angeles, we are

now in the last 20 years, we’ve seen a 50% reduction in the

birth rate in LA, from 150,000 births year to about 100. And if

you forecast that forward, you know, before the turn of the

century, the county of Los Angeles will have zero net

births. If you run if you run if you run the that’s insane.

Yeah. So we need to figure out how to solve this problem.

Because it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it really impacts GDP, it impacts

all these other issues that Friedberg just talked about as

well, the sense of equality and fairness, if we’re not creating

and growing, we are going to fight over how to split a

shrinking pie. And that does tend to lead to revolution.

Yeah, that’s when people it could get really gnarly, we’re

not growing entrepreneurs are not coming here, new jobs are

not being created. Imagine if Amazon wasn’t created, the

historical implications for what Friedberg said are really well

defined in history. If you go back 1000s of years, you look at

every single time, you know, an empire goes through that period

of decline, when they have net negative growth, economic

growth, and they have this sort of rising populism, what they

end up doing is they end up fighting. And they have

different ways of fighting, right, but they end up fighting

over how to reallocate a shrinking pie. And there are

many of those outcomes when they fight that ends up in, you

know, really turbulent moments in history.

And that’s where this wealth tax. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah,

that’s where we have a responsibility to make sure you

don’t end up going through, you know, a Russia scenario, a China

scenario, you know, and there are more productive ways to

solve these problems.

Oh, that and that’s where the wealth tax that was floated was

floated, which seems that’s the DOA already. But this concept

of everybody having who’s over $100 billion, having to assess

all their worth and give 20% back minimum each year is that

dividing of the pie, and they can allocate less money towards

can we all agree that like, you know, on the margins, when you

make a lot of money, you can and should pay more taxes. I don’t

think that’s a super controversial idea. You know, on

the margins, if you are a massive polluter, you should pay

some taxes to compensate for the damage you’re creating to

the environment. These are not controversial ideas. The problem

is that, you know, what SAC said is true, you take a sensible

concept, and then you pervert it, because you have to contort

it with all this language to make it political, and it loses

all of its value in it. And so for example, you know, why does

the administration have to write this law, potential law or

proposal in a way that so obviously violates the

Constitution of the United States? Are they that dumb? I

don’t think they’re that dumb. But they do it to appease some

political aspect of the Democratic Party. And then as a

result, it becomes do a within eight minutes of it being

announced mansion says this is dead. What is the point of that

theater? It’s virtual signaling? Yeah. Aren’t you a donor? You

should know, right? What would they tell you? I mean, what’s

the Democratic Party saying? What they would say off the

record is that these were sacrificial totems to the

progressive left, meaning that they do it for window dressing

to destroy like, it’s like throwing a cat a ball of yarn.

You know, like that, that populist progressive left is

becoming a bigger base than it was historically.

In the Democratic Party, it is. Yeah, I’m not sure how big it

is. But in the Democratic Party, yeah, look, it’s where all the

energy is the Democratic Party. It’s where a lot of the donors

are. That Yeah, that is who’s driving the agenda in the

Democratic Party today. That is why the democrats are going to

get schlocked in November read Roy to share his substack. He

is the democratic political consultant who wrote the

emerging democratic majority predicting this is back in

2002. He wrote a book about how there would be a new democratic

coalition of young voters and minorities and women, and they

would come together and that would create, you know,

democratic majorities and democratic presidents forever.

And then Obama wins in 2008. And it looks like to share his

predictions coming true. And he recently in the last two years

has been warning that that something’s happened that he

could never have predicted, which is that working class

voters are now moving out of the Democratic Party, not just

whites, but also Hispanics and Asians, even black voters who

are working class are all moving to the Republican Party. So he

believes the Republican Party is losing its national majority.

Why? Because progressives have taken over and on cultural and

social issues, they are much more liberal than the working

class of this country. So basically, what’s happened is

the Democrats have become a professional class party. And

the Republicans are in the process of transforming into a

working class party. And that’s turning everything upside

down. But ultimately, you know, with young kid winning in

Virginia last year, and I think the Republicans on generic

ballot are up like what, plus 10 plus 12. I mean, they’re

going to have a huge, I think, wave in November. You know,

you got to remember that professionals meaning college

educated voters are only about a third of the electorate, I

think about 37%. And then the other 63% are working class,

the working class does not like this extreme socio cultural

progressive agenda. They don’t like seeing their statues rip

down. They don’t like this sort of what they see as kind of this,

this antagonism towards American history and American

icons. They don’t believe in, in socialism, you know, and so

on down the line. And the Democratic Party is

increasingly speaking only to itself. I mean, they are in an

echo chamber. And I think these progressives are gonna have to

lose a few elections before they realize, I mean, the same

thing happened to the Democratic Party. Back in the 1980s,

right, you had Ronald Reagan, and then George Herbert Walker

Bush win three landslide elections, 1980, 1984, 88. And

then five, and the Democrats nominate these like horrible

candidates, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Dukakis, and then

who comes along Bill Clinton,

easy on the Greeks, easy on the Greeks. Dukakis was pretty

great.

Okay, like, we found the one fan, we found the one fan.

Yeah, who comes along in 1992, Bill Clinton, and he has this

whole new faction within the Democratic Party, the DLC. And

his explicit mandate was to lead them back to the center. And

then he chooses Al Gore, as his running mate to double down on

that image. I don’t think Al Gore actually was that centrist,

I think is that but his image at that time was that he was

pretty centrist. So you had, yes, I mean, I think at that

time, so their Democratic Party had to lose for about 12 years

before they nominated a candidate and put him at the

leadership of the party, you could drag them back to the

center. Now, listen, I mean, all we have right now are

foreshadowings of this, we have the Yunkin victory. Last year,

we have the fact those three school board members, San

Francisco, got kicked out. You know, we’ll see what happens to

Jason Boudin on June 7. So we’re getting these glimmers.

And I think November will be a big test. But where I think this

thing is headed is that the working class voters of this

country don’t like this radical progressive shift in the

Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party is going to

keep losing until they’re willing to make changes.

Well, immigration is just such an easy one. And according the

working person is what the Democrats did forever. So I

don’t know how they how they can screw this up.

But remember, working class voters don’t working class

voters are not in favor of immigration, J. Cal, they do not

want unlimited number of immigrants coming on unlimited,

but they would like to see their family members driving

their wages down. But they do want their family members to be

allowed in. So for the folks who know you talk to you talk to

Hispanic voters who are citizens in America, they are not in

favor of unlimited immigration, because it creates weight

pressure for them. Reasonable. I’m telling you that it’s not

it’s not like what you think. The more the higher you are

economically in the social strata, the more professional

you are, the more you like immigration. Because like for

people like us, we like immigrants because they found

companies and we invest in them, we see the economic vitality

that they bring. But if you’re a working class, okay, you do not

want that wage pressure. You just don’t. So unless the

Democrats figure out a way to talk about it the way we’re

talking about it, where we separate high skill and low

skill, they will lose with that message.

All right, let’s get into some other things happening in the

market SEC is proposing a new set of rules to regulate SPACs.

I wonder if anybody here can chime in on this. Well, I wrote

who knows about it. I wrote a I wrote an editorial in

Bloomberg, basically a year ago, spelling out a bunch of new

regulations that I thought the SEC should adopt. They adopted

a lot of them in this draft. So I think that that’s really good.

They missed a couple of key things. And this is again,

tying back to this other thing when we’re in this phase right

now, where we are really questioning how capitalism

should work. I think that there are two reactions that people

can have. One is you pass more regulation that entrenches

existing advantages. And the other is you pass regulation

that either deregulates or democratizes the market. And if

I had to cast the half of my proposals that the SEC adopted,

I would say it falls more into the first bucket than the

second. And Jason, you’ve spoken to the second bucket of laws

that the SEC could also change, which is, you know, it’s in

their power to give people an on ramp to prove that they are

qualified and accredited so that they can participate in some of

these really, you know, vibrant ways of making money beyond

just investing in the S&P 500, like investing in startups, if

you if you’re educated and capable of doing the SEC at the

same time proposed a bunch of legislation around reporting

requirements for ESG. And if you look at both of these two

buckets of laws, I think they’re rooted in good ideas. And I

think that there are some good concepts in it. But who really

wins? I think if you look at it, the American Bar Association

had a huge victory here because the amount of incremental

regulation is going up, which means you know, what was a 300

page filing with the SEC will now be 350 pages, right? I think

that benefits lawyers, I think it benefits consultants, I think

it benefits the accountant. So I think it benefits the ecosystem

people that participate, it’s not so clear how normal everyday

folks benefit from a lot of this stuff. So I think if you strip

it all away, what I would say is, I think the SEC is trying to

do the right thing. But I would really encourage them to do the

second half of what they should be doing, which is making these

on ramps. Better built,

generally speaking, what do you think happens in the SPAC space,

we had 600 of them, it’s gonna, it’s gonna consolidate to the

10 of us that know what we’re doing. Got it. Just like, you

know, look, the IPO rules are extremely sophisticated. Did it

hurt Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs as IPO business? No, it

just meant that the 95 small banks that did IPOs went away.

And it consolidated to six and the league tables, you know,

just churned between the six JP Morgan one year is the top, you

know, then it’s Morgan Stanley, then it’s Goldman Sachs, then

it’s B of A, then it’s Credit Suisse. Similarly, SPACs will

consolidate around six or seven players. And you know, we’ll do

most of the business. What do you think Friedberg of this new

SEC announcement that they’re considering climate disclosures

for public traded companies, this would basically not only

what they’re doing in terms of consuming, or, you know, allowing

greenhouse gases and emissions, but also this scope three

concept, your inputs, what is your supply chain doing? And

what are your consumers doing? So if you’re making the iPhone,

what happens to the iPhone when the consumer gets rid of it? Or

what did it take to get those minerals out of the ground to

make the iPhone? What do you think? Is this a net benefit? Is

it the lawyers win? Or does measuring all this actually mean

we’re going to see publicly traded companies manage it

better? A lot of opting into it already, like Google and Apple

are doing it on their own accord. But what do you think

generally of this regulation? Well, I’ll say let me just say

something on the SPACs. And I’ll answer that question. You

know, if you read the comment that the first SEC proposed

rule, it was to amend the definition of a blank check

company to make the liability safe harbor for forward looking

statements, such as business forecasts unavailable and

filings by SPACs. So you know, this was, you know, I think one

of the primary points of appeal over the past couple of years,

we’ve all been private market, sophisticated private market

investors. When we take a pitch or hear a pitch from a company,

we all have the experience and the know how, not always

correctly, but at least we know what to look for what to ask.

And over time have learned through our wounds, and our

failures to appropriately diligence forecast and

understand what they mean and what they say. And, you know,

because the public markets historically through an IPO are

available to retail investors, you know, generally, whatever

the definition is of unqualified, or, you know, folks

who may not have the level of sophistication that, you know,

some regulatory body has deemed is needed to be able to do that

level of diligence. The statements that are made in an

IPO and an S1 need to be kind of factually referenced,

referenceable. And that’s not true when it comes to forecasts.

And that’s why they’re not included in S1s in an IPO. But

in a SPAC, the appeal was you can tell your forward looking

forecast, paint the rosy picture like you would for a startup.

And then theoretically, the investor should make an

assessment of the risk and the upside and the objectives of

the business is saying they’re going to go shoot for and

achieve. And it’s pretty evident, and I think we all knew

this, you know, coming out of last year that, you know, many

investors made investments on the basis of those forecasts,

you know, being to some degree, reasonably achievable or likely

achievable. And it turns out that in many cases, they were

not and were not achieved. And that’s the big motivation here.

So the real fundamental question, with respect to

Chamath’s point about markets, is how much do you want to have

the government and a regulator play the role of deciding who

is and who isn’t sophisticated enough to make an assessment

about a business’s forward looking prospects? Or should we

simply keep all forward looking prospects, or, you know,

forecasts like, you know, out of those documents, and it’s an

important conversation to have. Because for years, people have

been saying, I want to invest in private companies, but I’m not

a qualified investor. Therefore, I’m only going to be able to

invest in public companies. And as we’re seeing the problem with

investing in private companies or speculative companies, is

that you’re investing on the come. And more often than not,

that doesn’t end up happening. And that’s a really hard lesson

to learn. And SPACs have kind of forced the retail market that

have not historically invested in private companies to learn

that lesson very fast.

This is why, by the way, in my what I what I was asking the SEC

to do on top of the things that they already did was I said,

make us all invest our own money. You know, make the

sponsor really monetarily at risk, I’ve invested a minimum of

$100 million in every single deal I’ve done as a SPAC

sponsor. That’s a lot of money,

more skin in the game and disclosing that would be great.

And maybe even having a clearinghouse where you could see

the percentage of cash to the ultimate raise that the promoter

has

that stuff were great. All of that stuff, Jason is in the

spirit of disclosure and transparency. I just

trust you still think it’s important to have forward

looking statements and needs. In fact, I mean, if that ends up

becoming, you know, the cornerstone of this proposed

regulation, I don’t think it’s a I don’t think it’s a

cornerstone. I think what I think the thing is that there

are really important businesses that need good stewards to help

them get into the public markets to raise money to fund their

business. And there are some people who really understand

that. And there are many others who don’t. And the thing that

that the SEC should make a decision on is whether just

having a bunch of middlemen serves a market better or having

a combination of some middlemen and some principles, all

competing is better. Because remember what like what is

capitalism really, you have these trapped sources of money,

right? When you buy an equity, right, or you buy a bond, you’re

putting money into a trapped asset, it’s an unproductive

asset, it may yield some return, but it’s not really generating

it is dead money. Capitalism is about creating an incentive for

you to take that money out of that dead asset, that

unproductive asset and put it directly into the hands of

somebody who will make it productive, I’m going to, you

know, build some oil fields, I’m going to make a battery

factory, battery factory, I’m going to make shoes, whatever it

is, right. And so, you know, having more competition, that

creates the incentives for that process to happen to go from

point A to point B, should be the goal of the government.

Because in the absence of that, again, going back to the

previous conversation, you’re going to basically shrink the

incentives of productivity. And I don’t think that’s what

anybody wants to have happen.

Such an easy solution to all of this, we have a test if you want

to drive a car. And if you want to drive a big car called the

truck, you have to get a different test. You want to

drive a motorcycle, so I didn’t take that.

By the way, Jason, I just want to have a test.

You brought up a really good point earlier. And I just

wanted to put a fine point on what you said.

Let’s just say all these companies, let’s all of our

startups included will now when we go public have to create

these disclosures around scope one scope to scope three

emissions. And there’s this weird concept called

materiality that exists in law, which will now again, have to

get adjudicated. Let’s say Apple doesn’t disclose what’s

actually happening in their factories. Somebody can now sue

them because they will say that’s a material disclosure

that you didn’t disclose. Well, guess what will happen that

will wind its way in meander its way through the courts.

It’ll take years, there’ll be 10s and 10s of millions of

dollars spent on that litigation because Apple will vehemently

defend the right that it wasn’t a material disclosure, because

the implications otherwise, will be measured in the billions

or 10s of billions of dollars. So who really wins consultants

when trial experts when the lawyers when lobbyists lobby,

I just I just I just want to frame this up for a second.

Because I think it’s important for people to think about,

you know, costs that are external to the business

operation, meaning costs that are born by the broader society

by other members of society, not the business itself. So let’s

say that you’re a company that makes products with a lot of

sugar, and you know, or cigarettes that you know, we

know, when people consume a lot of sugar, cancer goes up,

obesity goes up, diabetes goes up, the cost for cancer

treatment, the cost for diabetes treatment, the cost for medical

treatment associated with smoking or sugar or alcohol is

born by a health system, where the ultimate cost is shared by a

large group of society by an all number of members, whether

that’s a public health insurance program or a private one, there’s

a group that shares that cost. And so you as a consumer are not

paying that cost today. The question is, should you be

paying that cost? And this is true for co2 emissions for

carbon emissions, you know, you drive a gas guzzling car, you

purchase gasoline, there is carbon that goes in the

atmosphere, you’re not going to end up individually fixing the

carbon out of the atmosphere later, the rest of us are going

to have to bear that cost as our homes burn down, you know, as

floods cause, you know, houses to wash away, as all the

catastrophe that we’re all predicting is going to happen

starts to happen. So the question is, how do you account

for those external costs? And then the second question that

will arise in a market based system that we have is who’s

going to pay for those costs. Right now, we all assume those

costs, and we don’t charge anyone for them. We don’t just

we don’t charge anyone for the obesity epidemic. We don’t

charge anyone for the cancer epidemic associated with

cigarettes until we had that big legislation that you know,

the DOJ knocked that off. We don’t charge anyone today for

carbon emissions that we’re all going to have to pay the cost

for. And so you know, the first step is identifying and

quantifying the external costs of the product or service that

you’re providing, and deciding whether or not to tax the

consumer of that product, whether or not to tax the seller

of that product, and ultimately how to transition that capital

back to the repair mechanism for pulling the effects of that

product back out of the system in this analogy, Coca Cola, if

people drank too much of it and got fat would be responsible for

their diabetes treatment. Well, this goes back to the sugar tax

point, which is should we have a sugar tax because there’s a

quantifiable effect that too much sugar has on human health,

obesity, diabetes? Yes, sir. I mean, so that’s an argument,

right. And so in order to do that, the first step is

disclose the risks disclose the associated conditions that arise

from the product or service that you’re offering. And I think

that’s part of the intention. And a lot of very smart,

progressive people in capital markets, some good friends of

mine, we spend in talk have been talking for years about the

importance of this level of disclosure, because it is the

first step in truly accounting for climate you’re talking

about? Yeah, for climate. Yeah, pretty controversial. So you

think we should charge? We should charge Coca Cola for

diabetes? Well, go ask the question of should you charge

for a carbon related product for Okay, I’ll let’s both carbon.

Should corporations be responsible for the downstream

carbon from their customers and the upstream at least

disclose it and decide who’s ultimately gonna have to pay for

that? Or is the answer to the former is yes. The answer to the

latter is if you you know, there’s a there’s a term shit

in shit out. Yeah. And garbage in garbage out. I’ve spent a lot

of time in climate. I know what’s measurable and what’s

not. I’ve looked at the space a lot. And I just think that there

is no credible way to execute on David what you’re saying you

want. All it’s going to do is going to create a bunch of money

that flows to consultants that create BS nonsensical reports.

And in your mind, the downstream and the downstream

implication of that will be lawsuit upon lawsuit that gets

adjudicated by the courts on this concept of materiality.

You think we should be recording a free burger? Now you disagree

or agree with tomorrow? No, I agree. It should be recorded.

I’m saying okay, it’s not possible. I’m saying the only

winners in this will be the consultants. You agree with

that? Look, I’ll agree these carbon markets are absolute BS

carbon sequestration mechanisms are absolute BS. I mean, none of

this stuff is real right now. It’s all fraudulent markets.

It’s all grifters. It’s all BS trash. Yeah, I’m not trying to

be too disparaging with everyone. There are good

actors out there and good intentions for sure. There is a

tree, but there’s a lot of ways that you can kind of take this

stuff apart and say, you know what, this doesn’t actually add

up. And there’s a good business to be out in the meantime. And

everyone feels good running that business. Simple example,

Jason, how will you know that a sensor that’s on a flu of a

manufacturing plant is accurate? How do you know that it’s not

been doctored? How do you know? Just to say just a very, very

simple question. Just that. Well, when it came to Volkswagen,

a leaker leaked the information and that’s and the press got on

it. And that’s how it was regulated. It was it was in the

review mirror. That’s how Volkswagen got busted. So that’s

how we’re gonna we’re gonna fix. No, that’s a bunch of

whistleblowers. I mean, that’s what happened also within RJ

Nabisco and the cigarettes as well. And what changed as a

result of that? Nothing. No, in the cigarette industry, that

led to the largest fines in the history of corporate America, I

think, up until that time, we still don’t have a tax, we still

don’t have a pool, they don’t have a tax. We have a big tax on

tax on cigarettes. Yeah. It’s a lower consumption. Yeah. Yeah.

But we don’t, you know, we don’t force these companies to

basically subsidize a portion of our healthcare costs. Every

time somebody shows up with lung cancer, it’s not like we say,

you know what, that’s going to be half borne by RJR Nabisco.

Yeah. So I mean, this, the measurement can’t be bad. But I

guess it’s what you’re saying. No, I’m saying the concept is

good. The measurement is literally so terrible as to be

worthless. And so wouldn’t there be a bunch of new companies

that come up, though, that then create the auditing trail. So

you say, hey, we’re going to put that you have to have one of

these companies, put the sensors on your factory, and it’s a

small oddity of, you know, again, there’s a lot of

companies, for example, this is where Silicon Valley, I think

gets a little, you know, caught up in their own nonsense.

There’s a lot of companies in Silicon Valley that have made a

lot of money measuring bits, right? analytics companies,

because the exhaust of a tech company is sitting in some log

file somewhere. That’s just a matter of being parsed, right?

Do some ETL, do some transformations, put it in some

beautiful table, run some query on top of it. Lo and behold, you

can know everything about your company. When you’re measuring

atoms, it’s just a little bit more complicated. And I think

that people underestimate that complexity. So while the desire

of this is good, I think the whole point is that, you know,

if you draft this language the wrong way, again, my own, I want

to be very precise what I’m saying, what I think it will do,

instead of actually causing more conformity and have people

emitting less carbon, it’ll create a shadow industry of

measurement and consulting around this industry, while

people debate materiality when they get caught. Got it. That is

not the point of this. But when you draft laws like this, you

have to think about these implications.

So is there is there an easy answer here or just no easy

answers? In terms of if we want companies to be somewhat more

knowledgeable and responsible in their carbon emissions?

Well, I think that the responsibility ultimately comes

from the end consumer buyer customer of a product. Because

if they have an alternative, that offers them those trade

offs, whether it’s at a higher price or a lower price or the

same price, and they adopt it, then these companies really pay

attention, right? Because ultimately, what they really

care about is their downstream profitability. Otherwise, I

worry that a lot of what’s happening in corporate America

today is basically some form of greenwashing. You know, so for

example, like we joke, but it’s true. When you look at these

carbon offset markets, these indirect offset markets, what

are they? A company spews all kinds of gnarly stuff into the

environment. They hire a consulting firm, I just want to

explain to you how it works today, they hire a consulting

firm who uses an Excel spreadsheet to guesstimate how

badly they have polluted the environment. Okay, it’s a

fundamental guess. Then they go to another company that says,

Well, can you buy me some equal and offsetting amount of

credits. And that company then will go and plant some trees or

buy some trees, claim the trees exist, measure and impute again

in a different Excel spreadsheet, how much you know,

carbon capture is happening by those trees. Do we know that

those trees aren’t getting sold 10 times over to 10 other

companies? We don’t know that. So my point is that we have a

lot of work to do to solve these problems, I would rather see

again, raw capitalism solve this problem. And I think in in

climate change, the most productive thing we could do is

lower the barriers for trapped unproductive capital to get into

the hands of really amazing scientists and entrepreneurs who

are building things that can measurably remove carbon from

the environment. And there’s really two easy ways to do it.

One is have a test. And the other is on the roads, we have a

speed limit. So if you are a non affluent person already, but

you want to dabble in this, it’s a very simple way to do it.

Schmott, I propose, have a written test, just like you have

a handgun or a car test, a driving test. And then how

about you can deploy 10%? It’s so incredible. You just said

this, you can allow an 18 year old person to buy an AR Give me

the name of the gun AR 15 and a car and go speed down the

highway, but they’re not allowed to invest in go puff. Yeah, no,

they’re too not sophisticated. You shoot the bullets in the

air while you’re going down the road is going on. It’s Well, I

mean, there’s no path to it. That’s the frustrating part.

Like in some places, it’s hard to get a gun, you got to take a

eight hour test other places, you can just buy them on the

wherever you allow 18 year olds, you can allow an 18 year old to

take psychedelics and marijuana legally, yes, open in a market,

by a gun, but they are not secondary shares of Stripe. No,

they’re just Yes. And so this is the stupidity of it. Well,

here’s and here’s the other thing, you can have two

different things, you have the test. So now you know, the

person is educated. But you could also say, Hey, listen,

whatever’s on your tax return for the last two years, you can

invest 10% of that a year in, you know, private companies. So

if you made, I don’t know, 150,000, the last two years,

you made 75,000 a year, okay, you can put 15,000.

You will allow people to go and work for startups, to help

build the enterprise value of a startup, let’s pick our favorite

startup, like an Uber, but not invest in their equity before

they go public, right? You’re not sophisticated, you’re

sophisticated enough to build it, you’ll you’re

sophisticated enough to drive for them for years to help them

build a $50 billion company, but not buy a piece of that company

along the way. Yeah, that doesn’t seem right, either. But

you could pull over and buy scratch off tickets and lottery

tickets to the cows come home. But you can’t buy a scratch off

ticket in a store. It makes no sense.

All right, Sachs, you’ve been quiet in all of this. I know

that you hate the environment and regulation. What’s your

thoughts? I’m not, I’m just not deep in this topic. So I don’t

want to weigh in. All right, well, here’s one you are deep

in Facebook hired a GOP lobbying firm to smear TikTok

according to the Washington Post.

What did you say to Sachs?

Here’s something you’re deep in, it’s the GOP.

No, no, before that, you said he’s like into destroying the

environment or something. Yeah, no, he doesn’t care about the

environment. I mean, Sachs is never going to go into the

forest and even go near a tree. He doesn’t go outside.

No, look at him. He’s got a sealed bedroom.

Absolutely, he closed the curtains. He’s like, oh,

beautiful view of the sky. Oh, nature like the Pope, his car

has one of these things. He doesn’t even have to sit down.

It’s just enclosed. He stands up. It’s bulletproof glass.

You know, he just waves as he goes by.

I go outside sometimes I’d much prefer going to an outdoor

shooting range than an indoor shooting range.

So you’re going shooting. It’s an outdoor one.

So this is a really crazy story. Taylor runs broke it.

Facebook paid the GOP lobbying for your friend.

Actually, I had her on the show. Here is the excerpted from the

internal targeted victory email obtained by the Washington Post

quote, get the message out that while meta Facebook is

currently a punching bag, tick tock is the real threat,

especially as a foreign owned app that is number one in

sharing data that young teens are using bonus point if we can

fit this into a broader message that current bills proposals

aren’t where state attorney generals or member of Congress

should be focused. So what do we think? I mean, we’ve talked

here many times about reciprocity. We can’t have our

social networks in China. Why should tick tock be here? I

think we all agree. It sounds like they want to do a PR

initiative around the points that you’ve always made on this

pod. Exactly. No, I mean, that’s the that’s the they could be

right about this, but doing a dirty hack. Yeah. It’s a dirty

trick in a way for them to deflect attention from the

sales onto some other companies problems. So there’s something

distasteful about that. But the point that they’re making is

kind of true. I mean, we should not allow I mean, I’m not

saying we shouldn’t allow them. But I think whatever you don’t

you think tick tock should be allowed in the United States?

Really? I don’t know about that. But I just think that one of

what do you think about whatever people have with

Facebook, they should have them like 10x with tick tock. That’s

kind of my point. 1000% in agreement on this tick tock is

run by a country that we wondered, do they care about the

data and then they literally passed a law. If you want to run

your company, the government has to have the data. I have

fallen into a tick tock rabbit hole. And I would like to come

clean. Oh, with you guys. There’s something there’s

something on tick tock called sandwich bros. What are these

guys? These guys are guys that make sandwiches. And then they

cut the sandwich and then they open it up so that you can see

what’s in the inside of it. Gooey cheese. He I mean, just

know some of these fucking sandwiches. These guys are

Sammy. Dude, I have watched an hour straight of sandwich talk.

Wait, here’s the best part. So then there is this woman who I

thought was going to be incredible. She’s like, you know,

I’m tired of these sandwich bros. I’m going to be the first

woman that really breaks through making sandwiches. I was like,

you go get it. And she made a vegan sandwich. God damn it. And

I was like, where’s the meat? I wanted to be I wanted to be deep

into it. But like, you know, chicken, roast chicken. Oh, my

God is bacon, avocado, bacon, bacon, maybe some pickles in

there. Get a little Yeah, I mean, this is the thing that I

find. So chicken masala burrito, that’s probably my one. And the

guy made it from scratch, like everything from scratch. I love

that. Here’s the problem. It’s such a compelling product. You

feel so terrible using it. So you love it at something and

then you feel very vapid for having used and you have regret.

And then the Chinese are running it. And they’re programming our

children and have all their data and locations. You know,

it’s a lot of conflicted feelings. What do you think

they’re trying to program in me with all the sandwich stuff?

Maybe you’re too thin and you need to eat a sandwich. Maybe

they’re trying to be vegan. But that sandwich? Yuck. It looked

horrible. I think this is UGS. They’re trying to program. No

offense to get fat. But yuck. That’s what they want. They want

you to get fat. What are you seeing on your Tick Tock feed

right now? Friedberg since you’re so obsessed with your

phone? And should should Tick Tock be banned? Should the

Chinese be allowed to program our children with our algorithm?

Yes or no, Friedberg?

That’s what you’re looking at? Well, just mentioning the

product makes you want to use it. So it’s so addicting. What

is so addicting about it?

Friedberg, tell me the best vegan sandwich you ever had,

like the best one, like, is there one that sawdust?

quinoa, quinoa, cucumber, there’s a there’s a great

sandwich shop in Berkeley, you guys. None of you I don’t think

ever go to Berkeley. I live in Palo Alto. It’s too far. Yeah,

Berkeley is I’ll get one. I’ll actually get one ubered over

to you. Well, what is it? What’s not in it? Avocado sprouts?

Yeah, sprouts. I don’t know. Actually, there’s one I like

that’s got the the feta cheese, like the really good, sharp,

salty feta cheese. Yeah. Okay. So it’s actually voted one of

the best sandwich shops in California. I think. Yeah, yeah.

Really good. No, I made myself a tempeh avocado sandwich for

lunch today. Oh, yeah. That’s Yeah, that’s fantastic. You

know what, I was gonna do that myself. But instead, I just

decided to slam my hand with a hammer.

Just like smash my hand bag. Oh, I had crab ravioli. Oh,

wonderful. Wonderful. This is absolutely great. You murdered

those crabs. Delicious. Okay, but let’s just go around the

horn. Should yes or no, tick tock be banned? Should a Chinese

company be allowed to have a social network at scale in the

United States? Yes or no? Friedberg? No, yes, I don’t

think that we should be restricting the products and

services that people choose to use. Even from a communist

country that is likely spying on them. Okay, got it. We know

where you stand sacks. Well, I’d want I’d want to know that

they’re not that it’s not spyware. Right? So yeah, but

spyware sure that’s illegal. If it’s illegal, stop it. But

like, so you’re saying you trust you trust the Chinese

government? No, I don’t trust them. It would be a serious it

would be an issue I’d seriously look at I might come out

on the India side of things. But I’d like to understand a

little better like what the India side of things being that

India has a band. Yeah, they just they’re smart. Indians are

smart. I would think about that. I just think it’s it’s a

slippery slope. And then you end up seeing China ban iPhones.

And I mean, you know, the whole thing kind of already banned.

They already banned Twitter, Facebook and Instagram in their

country. There’s still a lot. There’s a big consumer market

in China for us goods and services. And it just seems like

it’s pretty slow. Where do you think I think you guys nailed

it, which is that I think these things have to be quid pro quo,

it doesn’t make any sense, in my opinion, for us to allow a

non American company to thrive, where in that same end market,

our products are not allowed to compete. Absolutely. So I think

there are two things that matter to me, which is that, you know,

if we’re going to allow tick tock to thrive here, it seems

like there needs to be some version of a deal that says,

Facebook, Google, you know, these core products and

services just need to have a chance where consumers can vote.

That’s one thing. And I do think separately, what David said is

really importantly true. And I don’t think it applies to just

tick tock. But whenever a product gets to a certain level

of scale, and we can define what that threshold is, but it’s

probably in the half a billion to a billion mile kind of range,

monthly active users range. You do have to a way of like, you

know, going through the source and making sure there’s no crazy

spyware in there. And I don’t know exactly how to do that. But

I think that that that should just be a general expectation

for any product. Because look, let’s let’s be honest. And we’ve

had this conversation before, you don’t think the odds are

high that at some point, some very talented knowledge worker

that is on an immigrant visa inside of one of these large

tech companies isn’t actually working on behalf of a foreign

Oh, they had Twitter had it they had two people from the

kingdom right there. So So my point is, I think that that

these things are probably true, right? Like in the 10s of

1000s employees that work in big tech, there’s probably at

least five or 10 of these people that work on behalf of foreign

government. So we don’t know what they may or may not have

introduced in certain elements of the code. So it’s not

unreasonable to fund a, you know, an organization that can

audit this code base. But I think that I would rather let

them stay in order to open up that end market for our

products. All right, we have to wrap on this. Freebird a

couple weeks ago, you outline the pasta, the potential of

famines caused by Putin’s insane, you know, war in

Ukraine. That’s not what I said. But sure. Okay, I’m framing

it and framing the way I want, but you commented on the

possible famine caused by Putin’s insane war. Again, not

what I said. But let’s go to famine before sacks loses his

mind about Biden’s quote of regime change, which I’ll let

you end on section get your victory lap. But somebody came

for you and said, Hey, listen, freeberg basically doesn’t know

what he’s talking about. Because commodity markets are

showing that India and other folks are going to step up and

there’s not going to be a problem of famine. So can you

unpack that for us?

I will tell you that we are already seeing a lot of

scrambling happening for redundancy in these commodity

supply chains. And there’s a couple of issues, which I

highlighted before I’ll highlight again, number one is

just the ability to export. So while there may be product

commodity products sitting in these markets, getting them on

ships out of Russia out of Ukraine, even if sanctions and

trade restrictions are lifted and make them available, it’s

very difficult because a lot of the carriers are concerned

about insurance and liability, as they would be forced to go

into a port and do a transaction with an entity that they’re

supposed to not do transactions with. So there’s a lot of

reasons why these ships are not going to port, not picking a

product and not bringing it to where it needs to go. Critical

risk in Africa in the near term. So this is an acute

problem with respect to transport. The next problem is

with respect to planting. As of this week, and I’m going to put

a couple of links in here. And these links, Nick are not in

order with respect to what I’ll say. But I’ll, you know, I’ll

kind of put a bunch of these things out here. But there is an

expectation that we could see up to an 80% decline in planted

acres in the Ukraine. And there’s a bunch of really good

anecdotes in this particular story about how farmers are

scared about going out and planting because groans might

blow them up. And I mean, look, you’re in the middle of a war

zone, you’re not in a rush to go out and plant. And so there’s a

lot of planting that needs to happen in order for us to have,

you know, the expectation of the supply coming out of the field

in about six months. So that’s kind of the second stage of the

problem is a large export market for goods coming out of Ukraine

and Russia might be don’t you know, might we might have a kind

of significant reduction in inventory as the number of acres

that are planted goes down. And then the third thing that I

highlighted before, which is absolutely still very true, and

I’ve put some data in here that you can all look at is related

to the price of fertilizer. So fertilizer prices through the

roof, because nat gas has gone up. So ammonia prices have gone

up. potash exports are prohibited from Russia. So

potash has gone up. And so as a result, we’re seeing fertilizer

prices shoot up. And in a lot of countries, what I’ve included

here, in this particular link in the chat, and Nick on the

YouTube, you can kind of put this on the screen. But there’s

a guy named Gary snicky. Gary is the ag economist. He’s like

the number one ag economist in the world. He’s at University

Illinois, everyone reads all his stuff in the industry. This

guy breaks everything down to unit economics numbers helps

people make decisions about what to plant when what the

economics are. And he highlights the current economics for

planting in Illinois. Illinois is the you know, largest corn

producing state in the US and a critical supplier of our, you

know, national kind of food supply. And he points out that,

you know, as of right now, you would have to invest in

Illinois, about $810 to have a $243 return on corn, because

the price of fertilizer has gone so high. So you invest

810, you expect to make a little over 1000. And these,

you know, these, these are not assuming rent. The problem is

when you factor in the cost of rent, the average rent in

Illinois $227. So a lot of farmers in Illinois rent their

land about half do. And so for a lot of farmers, it’s actually

uneconomical, not just in Illinois, but around the world

now, where the cost of the inputs, the cost of rent, the

cost of production exceeds the expected profit coming out of

the farm. And so farmers are not going to plant. And so you

know, we’re seeing kind of a major issue with with these

farmers around the world kind of making planting decisions right

now that are informed by upside down economics. This is being

monitored, you know, fortunately, in the US, the USDA

reported today that it looks like the price of corn is such

that a lot of farmers are going to go back and plant soybeans.

And we’re seeing basically a historic planting survey coming

out today that says farmers are in fact going to go out in the

field, they are in fact going to plant. But this is not true

everywhere. We don’t we haven’t done the calculus on it yet. But

there’s a ton of anecdotal support and a ton of survey data

that’s coming out, showing that farmers aren’t going to plant

the acres that they normally would plant because costs are so

high. That means there’s going to be less production over the

next year. That means famine hits us in a year. That’s a big

problem. Saks wants to know why they don’t just use DoorDash or

Uber Eats is to just order more food if they can’t. This is not

what’s going through David’s mind right now. David’s mind is

David is honing in. He’s like LeBron in the fourth quarter.

There’s, you know, left. He’s like, everybody get out of the

way. Give me just ISO ball. He’s gonna do it. He’s about to

play out there. All right, here we go. One David go. All right,

here we go. So right as we got off air, and I was defending,

hey, listen, you’re, you’re mind reading Biden. He’s never

said regime change. You got to give him some credit here.

You’re, you’re taking madman Putin’s, you know, version of

events over our own presidents. And then 12 hours later, I’m on

the ski lift and crazy grandpa decides to say for God’s sake,

this man, referring to Putin, cannot remain in power. Of

course, the White House walk this back, but go ahead and take

your victory lap sacks. Oh, my God, am I getting an apology

here from Jake out to an apology? You know, I was right,

but you said I was, it was basically pro Putin because of

what I said. And now you’re admitting that I was telling the

truth. No, I admit that. Biden crazy grandpa said something he

shouldn’t have said. And that maybe that reflects truly how he

feels. And right, that’s called so in Washington, they call that

a Kinsley gaffer, the New Republic editor, Michael

Kinsley, who said, a gaff in Washington is when a politician

accidentally tells the truth. That’s what Biden did. He

actually told the truth about what the administration policy

has been. Yes. And you know, you can see this in the fact that

look, who’s playing peacemaker right now in these peace

conversations. It’s been Macron from France. It’s been enough

Tali Bennett from Israel. It’s been Erdogan from Turkey. It has

not been anyone from the United States. We’ve been strangely

absent. And to the extent we said anything about the peace

process, it always seems to be us throwing cold water on it. So

there’s been a lot of people, you know, prominent

commentators, like Neil Ferguson, who I quoted before,

and others who have speculated that the United States’s goal

here is not a rapid resolution to the conflict, but rather to

protract it in order to make Russia bleed in order to

destabilize and topple the Russian regime. I think it was

actually quite and the problem with that is it’s very

dangerous. I mean, just look at what Freiburg just said about

the food insecurity that’s causing it is very dangerous for

us to protract this conflict, so that you know, famine could

be worse, the war could spread, it could degenerate, we could

get drawn into it somehow, we want this thing to be over as

quickly as possible. And I think it was actually the Biden

gaffe net net was a very positive thing, because they had

to walk it back so quickly, and severely, and severely, that it

basically it showed the whole world. And you know, the media

administration, no, we really need to end this quickly. We

can’t be dragging this thing out. So I think by stating what

their clandestine policy was so clearly, it forced them to have

to disavow it. And the only people who were upset at the end

of the day, were these like neocons, well, you know, no, no,

no, what Biden said is true, we should try and topple Putin.

Yeah, theoretically, he should go but not right, right now.

And that was actually very clarifying for us policy,

because regime change should not be our goal.

I think I think I think the administration said something

effective. He was speaking as a man.

I mean, let’s, I mean, look, can we be honest about Biden? I

mean, they they don’t know what he’s gonna say next. I mean,

he’s his. I mean, I don’t mean to, you know, speak ill of

anybody. But cognitively, this is a huge gap. It’s a huge

mistake. We’re trying to resolve this thing. And then you give

Putin exactly the ammunition he wants. Oh, look, it’s regime

change. See, and I think what we may have here is two crazy

grandpas, one that wants to put the USSR back together. And one

that wants to be the person who asked Putin, neither of those is

what the world wants.

It’s a real bummer that we are kind of on the second stage

here, just idling around looking around while these other

countries are sort of creating a, you know, almost like this

new world order around us. That’s

Yeah, we played our hands right. We played our hand very badly,

because we keep intervening in all these countries where

there’s no upside. I mean, I keep talking about it. All of

these wars where we spent trillions, we got nothing out

of it. You’re a peacenik. We like it. I’m just, I don’t see

the pieces. I’m a realist. First of all, I do like peace

better than war. But I don’t understand the point of going to

war when there’s no vital American interest that’s been

jeopardized. Our security is not jeopardized. Our economy is not

jeopardized. In fact, us protracting the war is going to

jeopardize those things. So well, I don’t get what American

policy is designed to achieve or has been designed to achieve

for the last 20 years. We’ve just been stumbling around the

world, making all these like virtue signaling statements

about values. And then meanwhile, we end up like bombing

the hell out of these countries. Well, the Middle East was for

clearly

Afghanistan.

I mean, you know, those were about oil.

What were we doing? They’re trying to build a new state, a

new, new sort of democracy in Afghanistan.

That was legitimate. That was a legitimate reason to go there,

which was to get Osama bin Laden. That was the just cause

whack. But you know what, once and you know what, we should

have gotten a Torah bore instead of outsourcing it to the locals.

That was a total screw up huge. But once that job was done, we

should have been out of there. Absolutely. Absolutely. What a

what a misadventure. What do we have? Do you have any thoughts

acts on like the endgame here? Because it does seem like Putin

is getting exhausted. And maybe he he gets the win.

It’s gonna be it’s it’s basically Ukraine’s gonna be

neutral. They can’t be part of NATO. They get some security

guarantees from the Western exchange for that. Crimea is

part of Russia. That’s a fait accompli. It happened in 2014.

And then the last part is what they’re really fighting over,

which is this Donbass region, where you’ve got Russian ethnic

speakers going up against Ukrainian far right nationalists

how close and they can agree with both those sides are willing

to fight. So that’s the issue. And look, the truth of the

matter is, I think it’s going to result in some form of

independence for these disputed territories of Donetsk and

Luhansk. Right? I mean, and, but the reality is United States

of America doesn’t have a vital interest 37 days into this. Is

it going to end in under 60?

Just it’s actually just the right approach, I think, a month

ago, which is let all of those people vote.

Just have a plebiscite have a referendum,

create a create a referendum, let them vote, let them be

self deterministic. And that may be the most reasonable middle

ground for both sides to say, Okay, let’s give this a shot.

But if you’re right, if you could achieve a ceasefire, if

you could get a ceasefire here, and this, yeah, if you could get

a ceasefire, have the UN observers come in administer an

election, Crimea, there’s no doubt which way Crimea would go.

I don’t know what would happen in Luhansk or Donetsk. I think

they probably would go independent. So let’s just do a

vote. It’ll be about self determination, not appeasement.

And let’s find out. That’s what we should be pushing for.

Yeah, people getting to vote on their future. Well, crazy idea.

I mean, it’s got to end. I mean, it’s got to end in month two,

this is becoming super damaging for Putin, right? I mean, these

economic sanctions. Plus, you see, there’s a story that was on

MSN. It’s like a 37. Russia is 83%. His approval ratings have

gone up. We thought not, you could say it’s fake, whatever.

But apparently, this is a reasonably decent polling

operation. This is a poll by Levada Center, an independent

pollster in Moscow. Well, apparently his polling, his poll

numbers for 69% of January, they’ve gone up. Look, Russians

will rally around the flag just like what about the resources

and they’re suffering in that country. And they are suffering.

But the Russians are very good at suffering. J. Cal, this

international pastime. You ever read Dostoyevsky? Yeah, no, no,

I don’t like to read it. War and Peace. No, I don’t. Actually,

I would much rather watch the next Marvel movie, or a Kurosawa

film. I am not interested in. Yeah, listen, my whole speech

was about the fact that American diplomacy could have

prevented the situation last year. That’s not to say that we

caused it. It was Putin’s decision to invade. It’s his

war. The bloodshed is on him. However, more effective

diplomacy could have defused the situation a year ago. And we

totally blew it. We just totally blew it. And this is going to

hurt us. This I mean, look, this is one of those things that

the administration thinks doesn’t affect them. But you

know what, when our economy goes into a recession, because this

is a straw that breaks, breaks its camel’s back, it voters are

going to take it into consideration. You know, we do

we do hire people in many, many industries to do their job. And

the people that are hired to be diplomats, their job is to be

diplomatic, and to find compromises. All right,

everybody, it’s time to wrap here. Some exciting news on the

conference front Palmer lucky of Andrew technologies, building

weapons and systems and defensive systems is going to

come to the event. He’s not. He’s a fan of the pod. Apparently

he’s a big fan of David saxes. So we’re going to talk about the

military. And just as a general concept, I have a theme I was

going to float by y’all think a lot of the talks and a lot of

the the zeitgeist is around the problem I want to solve. So I’d

like you all to think about that. I think this will be a

celebration of people who are trying to solve important

problems in the world. So what are you solving for is going to

be the I think the theme of the event, what are you trying to

solve for? And so freeberg, if you can give maybe a little talk

to math, David, I would be great if the four besties gave a

little 15 minute solo talk, we’re gonna have a lot of these

solo talks, position, hey, here’s what I’m solving for. And

then conversations about freeberg, do you know, Dalio,

you should get Dalio, I think he’d be great. I don’t know.

Okay, and Catwood looks like I think Cathie Woods coming to

but by the way, there’s a new video that Dalio just put out,

which is like the 45 minute animated documentary version of

his book. And really good. I watched it. I watched it. And I

thought it was really great. It’s all about how empires rise

and fall. And it’s pretty clear that he thinks we’re a late

stage empire. And he talks about a lot of the things that we’re

talking about on the show. And I watched it this week. I thought

it was exceptional. The book. Yeah, I thought it was really

I’m halfway through. Oh, look at you guys coming around. You

gotta listen to me like you have to watch it on YouTube

because his animations are excellent. Very nice. Yeah. It’s

very accessible. I mean, it’s incredibly, incredibly good.

Highly recommend. Yeah. I mean, look, I agree with you. One of

you guys get Dalio on the thing. Let’s get him. Yeah. Dalio

reach out. I know we know you’re listening. So I think the

question to ask Dalio is I think he is actually I think he’s fan

of the show. Yeah. I think the question to ask Dalio is how do

you revitalize a late stage empire? That’s right. That’s a

good that is the question question. Can it be done? Well,

can it no can it be done? I think is the real question. All

in some it may well. I think can is too theoretical. I think

it’s more how would you do it? Yeah. Yeah. If it’s possible,

what would the path be? And it’s gotta be something about

building the pie, not shrinking it. That’s for sure. May 15 16

17. The conference is the 16th and 17 625 of 700 tickets

allocated. If you’d like to apply for a scholarship, go

ahead and do that. It’s not going to be a bro down the

ratio has congrats to you, Jason, for really pushing the

diversity and yeah, getting a lot of scholarships and women

and people of color. It’s good. Thank you. Really, really,

really great to see so many people applying. If you didn’t

get a response back for your application, you’ll get it by

April 15. That’s going to be when we tell everybody if

they’re officially in or out, but we have been increasing the

ratio was organically 9095% male female, and now it’s a 6535.

So we’re really making progress on that front. So it’s not

going to be a bro down. Sorry, sacks. It’s not gonna be a bro

down. It’s gonna be diversity here. Diversity equals power

sacks. I hope there’s diversity of ideas, too. Yeah. Okay. Well,

there you have it, folks. For the rain man, David sacks.

Sultan of science. Wait to see one. One third of my besties

tonight. Thanks a lot, guys. Yeah, I’m showing up. I mean,

you got to see you’re the one over three. Well, I mean, these

guys, you got to remember, you can these guys, you can see

their drivers translator, but these guys would have to have

their drivers make beep the name. Yeah, these guys would

have to have their drivers drive them 30 minutes and then wait

for them outside and then drive them home after they’ve drank

in $5,000 worth of your wine. It’s a little bit overbearing.

What are you gonna pour tonight tomorrow? It’ll be some really

good stuff. Probably some like older sasakai I’m thinking

85s. Oh, but free bird. If you come I can also make some

tempeh tempeh. The best tempeh. It’s good for the family. It’s

good for the planet. What is tempeh? It’s soybean fermented

soybeans. Delicious. You know what? Can I can I tell you what

I what I think? Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. I mean, in fairness, your

chef always makes something exceptional for free bird when

he comes to dinner. Yeah, it’s always you’re always a generous

host and your chef is always exceptional. Get your get saxes

driver and come down. Send the heli send the heli up to

Miranda. Grab me. Free burgers. Come. Come. Come. Just get a

driver. Saks. When do you land? Late late tonight. I’m cool on

tilt. Come on tilt. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. Like a 3 AM or

something. Oh, 3 AM. My gosh. I don’t know. **** about it. The

game’s over by then. Alright. See you later. Besties. Love you

guys. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye. Bye. Back at you. We’ll let

your winners ride. Rain Man, David Sax and instead, we

open-sourced it to the fans and they’ve just gone crazy with

it. Love you. Queen of Quinoa.

Besties are gone. That’s my uh dog taking a notice in your

driveway.

Oh man. We should all just get a room and just have one big

huge orgy cuz they’re all just useless. It’s like this like

sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

You’re a B.