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Let your winners ride. Rain Man, David. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy. Weed. Alright everybody, welcome to another episode of the All in podcast episode #70. We made it to 70 episodes. Which is just shocking to me. And we're recording a little bit earlier because one of our besties had to change their schedule chamath, and it's a crazy day to be doing this. Last night, Putin decided to invade the Ukraine late Wednesday night, early into Thursday morning. Putin? Started a special military operation in quotes to demilitarize the Ukraine. And we've been watching this build up for weeks. You're missing it, he said to demilitarize and did not supply and denotified. Yes, of course, because the Ukraine was filled with so many Nazis. His trolling continues. I guess just starting it off. Sacks, you're a big Putin fan. Along with Tronchin, you're the right wing. So tell us, how glorious is this invasion for the Republican Party? Interesting. What? It's well, that's funny, but it's also it's also kind of sad, because what you're doing right there is exactly what the whole Twittersphere is doing, which is anybody who wants to actually deescalate and diffuse this war before it escalates and metastasizes into something much worse gets announced. As a Putin apologist, I have no dealings in either. You know, Russia or Ukraine for that matter. Ukrainian cash is not lining my pockets. Like many of our politicians, their families in Washington, I have no interest except preserving the safety of the United States of America. And the point is that I think Biden, that the one clear, lucid point that he made in his last speech, I know he's giving one today, is that the United States of America would not intervene militarily in Ukraine. We should all understand that. He made it very clear the troops that were being sent over there were to defend. Our NATO allies. Ukraine is not one. We do not have a Treaty obligation to defend them. What is happening right now is tragic. Putin is the aggressor. It's a humanitarian disaster. I do feel bad for the people of Ukraine. Our thoughts and prayers are with them. However, we are not going to intervene militarily in that conflict, nor should we, because we cannot risk starting World War three. It is not a vital American interest who rules the Donbass in a way that it is a vital American interest to avoid a war with Russia and the tragedy. Here, the second tragedy is that we did not do everything we could to diplomatically try and solve this problem. And what do I mean by that? On this pod, three weeks ago I said that Ukraine was never going to be part of NATO. Why? Because Biden just said it. We can't defend them militarily against Russia. We were never going to admit that. Why didn't we give up that card that we don't know for sure what would have happened, but if we had been willing to basically affirm that we believe in Ukraine's sovereignty, but they are not being part of NATO? Might have diffused this conflict. We had consensus on that. We said like, hey, what if I think actually I suggested, what if we said a five year you know moratorium on them joining or something. Absolutely put that out there. Can I just ask sex one question on this? OK. Yeah. Sex. Do you not think that the US, you know, regardless of the obligations under. NATO. Faces a little bit of an issue on a global stage where, you know, we we told this leader back down, don't do this, and then we don't respond militarily that that action effectively reduces America's influence and credibility when it comes to these sorts of defensive statements in this kind of global theater. And our privacy is being challenged because we lay down the law. We said this is not allowed. You cannot do this. There's going to be repercussions. And then it happens and. There are economic sanctions and, you know, maybe we'll talk in a second about some other potential repercussions, but by not doing something militarily. We weaken ourselves and we weaken our position and it gives permission to others to take action that may be counter ultimately the kind of the US interests abroad. OK, so in response I have to well quote what Barack Obama said and we've mentioned in a previous post he said the fact is that Ukraine, which is and this is back in the the Atlantic interview he gave, the fact is that Ukraine which is a non NATO countries can be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do. This is an example where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are. And what we are willing to go to war for. The fact of the matter is, none of us on this pod one is send our sons and daughters to go fight and risk their lives and die to determine who rules the Donbass or even Ukraine. We sympathize with them. We may impose sanctions on their behalf, we may arm them militarily, but we are not willing to fight. And so therefore, us trying to lay down this law to Putin was a bluff, and he called our bluff. And the smart thing we can do right now is not to escalate. Look, we've already gone to the river. He's got, you know, we basically try to barrel and bluff him at every street we got to the river. He has now invaded. We're now in a showdown. What do you want to do now? You want to escalate this even more? The only way that we could make this worse is to precipitate a World War. Now, if our absolute priority, our absolute priority right now should be to make sure that this war doesn't spread, my prediction is, as of right now, it would be very unpopular to go to war or for the US to enter the war in a on the battlefield. I I do think. And I don't know if we're gonna hear more about this today, but I do think that the cyber war is beginning today. the United States has talked at length about having, you know, a tremendous cyber capabilities and my understanding is as of this morning, a number of state websites were down in Russia and a number of. Uh, you know, Russian cyber interests were under attack. And so we may see the US kind of confront Russia on another battle stage, not on the, you know, on the field, on the physical field. But if over the next couple of weeks this continues their days, and I was just looking at CNN this morning and BC and there were these images that started to come out of like, you know, Ukrainian. Airplanes that had been downed and if you start to see images of children. You know, helpless children, buildings being bombed, bodies strewn on the street. Does that not change kind of the American opinion on whether or not we should do something here? And will that not kind of lead us potentially into a war that, you know, today I think we all, you know, where many people would say strategically doesn't make sense, economically doesn't make sense. You know, we're only going to lead to kind of escalation. But don't you think that American opinion typically changes when imagery arises, when, you know, the sort of brutality of war? Images out of some wars. And we have in the past, yeah. But even today, it's like the first day. And there's like these really gruesome, awful photos coming out. And I I could see people getting sympathetic to that and starting to kind of, you know, bang the the war drum saying, this is ridiculous. We can't let this tyrant do this. It's awful. Well, it's already, it's already happening, you know? But This is why we should not conduct foreign policy by Twitter. We should not Twitter prize the situation. And this is when, this is when cooler heads need to prevail. The fact of the matter is when Soviet tanks. They rolled into Hungary in 1956, or Czechoslovakia in 1968, across the Prague Spring or Poland in 1981. Across solidarity we did nothing because avoiding war with the Soviet Union was more important, even though we sympathize for those people. And in. 2008, we've been in this situation before. 2008, Georgia, the Republic of Georgia, Putin invaded on behalf of these breakaway Russian sort of dissident provinces, South Asia and Abkhazia. Why did that happen? Well, if you remember back in 2008, there was a lot of talk about Georgia joining NATO and you had, you know, the Warhawk, Senator John McCain, go over there and declare we're all Georgians now. And So what happened all of a sudden, these breakaway provinces, the Russified? Provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia started rebelling. That gave Putin the excuse to roll in there and the tanks. A year later he left, but there was no more talk of Georgia joining NATO. So and again, we, George W Bush was president at the time. We did nothing militarily. We just sent humanitarian assistance. That was it. So we've been in this situation before. We should not. I keep hearing in the media, on cable news and on Twitter, this is historically unprecedented. We must act. No, we've been in this situation before, in 2008. And all those previous times we were in this situation in 2014 when Putin invaded Crimea. Ask you a question, Zach, we we had this concept of, hey, maybe if we said, hey, we won't admit them into NATO. And do you think that if we had actually made that concession or said we're not going to let them into NATO for a decade and whatever, do you think that would change Putin's behavior, yes or no? Well, it's it's honestly, it's hard to know. I mean, I can't, I can't prove a counterfactual. However, I think it was tragic not to try. I do think, I think, I think it should be the goal of diplomats. Sure to try and and again, as I said on previous pot, it was the sleeves off our vest. Ukraine is not going to be a member of NATO. So to give that up would have was basically giving them nothing. It was almost meaningless to us. And instead of making that concession, what happened? Blinking came out with this statement. NATO's door is open and will remain open. It was perhaps the most provocative thing he could have said in that situation and they would have had to been voted in. That would have would have happened anyway. Let me ask you this question. You've been complaining about the media and Democrats banging the drum of war and you're saying they're more hawkish, that on the other side of the table you have. Trump came out and said that Putin's move on the Ukrainians genius and the guy is very savvy. And then you have Pompeo saying I have enormous respect for him. And that is a very talented statesman, has lots of gifts. And he knows how to use power. We should respect that. So your party, uh, your crew is praising Putin. Do you think the praising of Putin is wise in this kind of situation? Now, look here, here's what's going on. First of all, the the the Warhawks and the people beating the drums of war is happening on both sides of the aisle and on both, both, both sets of cable news. I was watching Fox last night and they were all but, you know, cheerleading for war, basically saying we have to go on offense. And I watched it too. Yeah, they were saying we have to go on offense. That what, what is? Biden doing saying that we're not gonna intervene militarily. I'm like watching these people who are acting, you know, it reminded me of Doctor Strangelove where you have Slim Pickens, the cowboy riding the atomic bomb and the way down. They were excited. And I'm watching the cable news and all these people are acting this way and I'm like, what in the world is going on? You know, it's raining. It's all this is a big part of what I tried to point out our prediction show at the end of last year. You know, the the if a country is happy if the economy is growing. If there isn't significant risk of inflation, no one wants to go to war. When those are not the case, there's a tendency to say we got to do something. And if you don't, you're you're anxious. And if you don't have anything to do and some conflict arises, that's a good place to kind of apply your energy and your pressure. Let me bring the dictator himself into this jamapa you've been silent thus far. Any thoughts on what we're seeing here? I was letting the proletariat speak. OK. So are you the bourgeoisie or or what? That sweater is very bourgeois, I have to say. I mean, I mean, sweater Karen right now is drafting she's multiple emails. She's melting. I think they're going to be a go fund me to revoke that sweater from you. What is a story with that sweater? That's what. That's what. Trudeau. Trudeau, Trudeau will reinvoke in state of emergency to stop that. So, yes, those seats that go fund me. I mean, this feels like we're processing this chamath so quickly that the Ukraine just asked. On Twitter today for everybody to tell at Russia how they feel about what they're doing and the Ukraine I this is happening in real time. His tweeting memes now about Putin, this seems almost surreal and is getting very strange in terms of how we're interpreting it. I mean is there an off ramp here or we just going to have to deal with Putin doing this every number of years and this is just going to be you know, a year or two of you know? Conflict, I don't know, but here's what's important to two points. One is the economic sanctions have begun and the economic damage to Russia have been starting to be inflicted, right. I think Germany basically suspended the certification of Nord Stream team. That has a huge economic impact on Russia, right. I think the ruble against the dollar was off 9 or 10% this morning when I woke up here in Europe. So it so it's down even more so now. The interesting thing about that was that I read an article in the Wall Street Journal, maybe you can pick this up and this is a few years ago. Preceding this, Russia had built massive amounts of U.S. dollar reserves. In fact, they had been depleted over like the last little crisis that they went through and then they had rebuilt all these dollar reserves. So in some ways it may have been the case that these guys had this plan all along and they put some, you know, they built up their bank accounts just in case because they knew that this would happen. The other thing is there's a quote from HR McMaster. He said that deterrence is there is a simple equation. It's it's the product of will and capability, right, will times capabilities and so you know if you're going to be. Deterrent on the world stage, militarily, not only do you have to have an incredible military capability, you also have to have the will to go to war is what he said. And I think in America, you know, what Freeberg said is I think if you pulled a lot of people, you know, people are pretty exhausted after all of these different conflicts. And so I'm not sure that the will is there to go to your and so the best off ramp is to try to find some amount of economic pressure points and then to negotiate some sort of, you know, release valve from all of that. Economic pressure in return for some normalization behavior. I think that's really the best chance. You know, I have to be honest with you. When I was thinking about the odds of this just from a financial perspective and you know whether I should be doing something different than putting something on, I thought that there was zero chance that this would happen. Literally. I I put it as close to zero as possible because I thought in 2022 it just didn't seem like this could be possible. And here we are and it seems like it is. I hope everybody in the clan is safe. Space. But I think that Biden's gonna announce some pretty crippling sanctions. And I think the West is going to be very punitive financially. And that's probably the opera. But it depends on it depends how long that stuff will last. Because again, like I said, I think Russia's foreign currency reserves are pretty strong going into this conflict. Let me let me then pass the ball to you, sax. There's there's gonna be a lot of people who are gonna die, both Russians and Ukrainians. Sadly, if this thing keeps escalating, there's 190,000 Russian troops on the border or making their way into the Ukraine. Is there an off ramp here in your mind in any way do you think the sanctions will work and and God these the the poor citizens of Russia, I mean are they going to crack at some point and is this going to blow back onto Putin because what did they seem to get out of? This I guess is a question. Do the Russian people support this and will they support it and an extended basis? Well, OK, so there's a few questions there. OK. So the the fact of the matter. Is so, so I think you're right that Putin has bought himself a headache here, right? I mean the the, the eastern parts of Ukraine that are, you know, ethnically Russian, the areas of the Donbass, they will, those people will support him. But the western part of Ukraine that wants to be free, that's not ethnically Russian, that is going to be a headache for him to manage. I don't think he wants this problem long term. It's probably going to be more like the situation we had in Georgia in 2008. He goes in for a year. He institutes perhaps some sort of puppet government or some government that's more favorable to him and then he gets out. Probably this is if there's no escalation. I think it's very important I keep making this point. The most important thing Biden can do is to make sure that this does not escalate militarily and that we do not get militarily involved. I think sanctions will happen. I mean that's pretty clear. Probably we have to move forward with that. But but at the same time. It was sanctions work in terms of being a strong deterrent, no, I don't think so. There was a very good article by Neil Ferguson and Ken Griffin, actually in the Wall Street Journal talking about what we should do. They made the point that sanctions don't usually work. However, what we should really be striving for is energy independence. So 100%. So yes. But the crazy thing is America, despite having these huge natural gas reserves, 7% of our natural gas is coming from Russia right now. So why? Because we stopped. Shocking. We stopped the, you know, Biden canceled the Keystone Pipeline. And then in Europe, the situation is even worse, which is they're completely dependent on on Russian natural gas. Germans are. And the UK yeah, not France. The op-ed made the point that we could be investing in liquefying natural gas and exporting it to Europe to create more energy independence and that would remove their dependency on Putin. That energy independence here, problem with energy independence is it takes too long. And we went through a massive capital under investment cycle over the last six or seven years. And so you know in order to start this up you need to just started actually putting money in the ground six or seven years. And the problem today is if we put money into the ground now that's not going to yield any sort of return on invested capital for another six or seven years. And so when you look at these Nat gas companies every single one to a name has basically said we are not going to put every, any incremental capital into US domestic net gas or shale or even offshore. The real solution is to actually go fully alternative and to go to renewable energy because you can today. Right. Uh, deploy solar vastly more aggressively in the United States. Look, at the end of the day, the thing that is completely abundant and has the best implications all around is solar. And it's gotten cheaper than coal and and and and and stuff like why, why are we only 3% penetrated in the United States? Right. We can manufacture these panels. We can deploy them broadly right now. You know, we're in this situation where California is actually revisiting the ITC credit or the the net metering law. Sorry, rather. We could have huge implications for the California solar market. It could actually destroy that whole market. And so, you know, we have to get really organized, David, to your point. But there is a path to energy independence. I think it's alternative energy. It's wind and solar because we can do it today and you can do it really quickly and you can basically meet from the entire capital investment cycle that you need to do for netcast week. We've already missed the training. Well, and also you could have Germany could start turning back on nuclear power plants if they could get their citizens to pick nuclear over war. And that seems like a pretty easy choice. It takes too long. Look recently arriving there 20 years. Doing it for 20 years, they've been turning them off for 20 years. I know they could. That means they don't have to rebuild them, They could just turn them back on, which is which Jason. But that's not how it works. It's not a light switch. We're building a new one in the US that's the point they could put them back on. It's still, yeah, it's still years between these things, but it's not doing it. But you gotta think chamath the threat of doing it would terrorize the Saudis and the Russians if all of a sudden the EU said we are going to go massive solar, massive nuclear and we're going to be energy independent. Just the threat of that. Dramatic effect. I'm not sure any country is going to is going to really have a massive reaction to any other country. Talking about a multi year investment cycle, I do think Jason to your point solar is not about to your investment cycle. It can literally happen in bucks and she is much more disruptive. So for example you could if you took $3 trillion of build back better and instead said you know what, we're just going to put solar everywhere. Everywhere. That would be you take $3 trillion of solar and you put it literally everywhere in the United States. I think everybody would support it. You would have domestic job creation like nobody's business. You would take so much carbon out of the air and you would, you would have more enormous energy defendants, while it would give you a degree of freedom so that the next time you're pushed to war, you can actually evaluate it under very different, you know, risk calculus than if you actually need the energy from the country. Have to go. Wait, that's the point. And just for a Fact Check here. Nuclear power in Germany accounted for 13.3% of German electrical supply in 2021. France, by the way, 7080%, and that was generated by 6 power plant. Switch three were switched off at the end of 2021. They literally just turn these off chamah. And the other three I know, but the decision was not made yesterday Jason, when I pointed this is these are 20 year decision. No it was Fukushima that pushed them actually in the sentiment of and they also had 70% of their electricity on a couple of weeks come from renewable. So the Germans so suddenly thought that they didn't live in a shady area and they could get by with just solar which is a big mistake this turning these off Germany. If they didn't turn these off they would have a different approach here too. You could be sure of that. So like I'm I'm a fan of solar but I'll just make the point. Natural gas burns. From a climate standpoint, it burns much cleaner than oil, and oil burns much cleaner than coal. So natural gas is a way better than a lot of the alternatives, and the main problem with it is that when you frack you can get. The release of water, but well that, but that's in the ground. But in terms of the release of methane, which is a greenhouse gas that's actually worse than CO2. And so you can actually get, you know, methane release. But in the US we have techniques for recapture of it, whereas I don't think Russia cares about that. So we'd be a lot better off. I think solar is part of the answer, but I don't think we should be turning our backs on the enormous reserves of natural gas that we have here in this country. Friedburg, what are your thoughts you're hearing three of us talk about? Energy uh, give us your science, boy, uh, superpowers here. And what? What do you think is the clearest shot on goal here for energy independence as an option to war? I'll just point out that the notion that there are countries that are jockeying or positioning. To stop the train towards renewable alternatives for energy production this century, the number of countries in that bucket are close to 0. You know, Saudi Arabia took. Saudi Aramco public specifically so that they under kind of MBS's. Strategic direction. Diversify away from, you know, the fossil fuel dependency of their economy and diversify into other assets. So they are going to sell down their equity interest in in Saudi Aramco overtime and invest in things. You know, they probably made their first bet and regret it with SoftBank, but they'll probably make other bets to try and invest in kind of next Gen industries. And so, you know, if you look at the money that's going from even Exxon. And you know, there's a guy locally here in San Francisco who ran a very significant board proxy fight to get on the board of Exxon and he won and he's jockeying for continued and increased investment from an R&D perspective in renewables and alternatives. And we're seeing this across the board. There's going to be in the next couple years, if not already many of these fossil fuel dependent businesses and countries have or are making a massive shift towards alternative renewable sources of energy. So I don't think that there's any enemy here. There's no evil. Like all the folks that have been dependent on in the past are aware of the fact that this is not where the future is. We do have to transition. So the reason I bought energy stocks in December and the reason I made this point was threefold. One is because we have, as a result of this general consensus view, under invested in energy infrastructure and the demands that are going to come out of the X COVID economic growth cycle cannot be met with the current energy infrastructure and you're going to see energy prices. Continue to climb, coupled with the fact that when war or conflict arises, typically you see stockpiling and you see trade routes being shut down and you see energy prices climb. And so, you know, I think generally we're in a little bit of a transitionary state. Everyone knows where the puck needs to be, everyone's headed there. But for now, I think everyone's trying to navigate how do we get through the next couple of years and in this particular year, you know, get through the season of uncertainty. You know, how how fast is the economy growing? How much have we actually under invested in infrastructure and how much renewables do we have coming online now? I think the right answer. If I were to be president of the world, I would immediately deregulate nuclear and make nuclear fission reactors a mainstay of energy production here in the US and I think that there are a number of techniques we could undertake for safer. Can a building without all the regulatory cycles and process needed to get these things stood up. You know China as I've mentioned in the past is over the next 30 years committed to building. Check this number out. I think we talked about this 140 nuclear power stations. They're estimated cost I believe is on the $3 billion per station range. They are going to increase their total energy production capacity with these nuclear power stations on the order of 15 to 20%. So they will take coal offline as they bring those online or they will kind of start to have a cleaner mix of energy rather than building an infrastructure. So you know if we as the United States intend to be an economic challenge to China this century, if we intend to compete effectively with them. We are going to have a really hard time with energy prices being what they are here in this country. China is already 30 to 40% cheaper than us on an industrial scale basis with their current energy infrastructure and when their nuclear comes online over the next decade, their prices are going to drop even further. Nuclear should be in the four to five cent per kWh range today. China is in the kind of, you know, 7 to 8 cent per kWh range. the US for industrial I think is in kind of a 9 cent $0.10 range, 8 to 10 cent depending on where you look. So, you know, they're already cheaper. They're going to get even cheaper. And so not just from like what's the right transition from a security point of view, but energy is going to be so critical in this next century for us to maintain our footing as a competitor to China, particularly as think about this for a second. If automation is the future of manufacturing, then electricity and energy ends up being the biggest cost driver for those systems. And if our, if everything is on parity and everyone got the same automation systems, whoever's got the cheaper energy wins. And to dovetail you and chamath both positions, a friend of ours said, hey, you know nobody wants to live near nuclear power plants and. They've already got the grid going there because it has to be there. Surround the nuclear power plant with a solar farm because it's the most efficient way. So actually pairing these two things, perhaps even with some batteries, solves the entire problem. And what do we think, Sachs, is the eventuality here in terms of the relationship between Russia and China now that we've wrapped up the energy and then, you know, are all of us, I think don't want to go to war here? So I guess there's two questions here of escalation and I'll let you pick which one. You want to go for escalation with Taiwan or? Because if Putin is not held, we don't hold the line here. You know, Putin picks another country to or another region to go after in 2023-2024. At what point do you say we got to hold the line? Well, I mean, I think the line is we have existing NATO treaty obligations to protect the members of NATO under Article 5. We have to come to their defense. Ukraine is not one. Georgia is not one. So to me, that's the line, or is our existing treaty obligations. And This is why we should not want to add some of these countries to NATO is because it involves us in their disputes and drags us into war. You know, on Twitter, all I hear is that this is 1938 all over again and we cannot appease a dictator, and that is. One lesson of history, and it's an important lesson. However, there are other lessons of history, and it seems to me that the situation we're in could be more like 1914, which is World War One. What happened in World War One? Basically conflicts between minor powers dragged major powers into wars and basically Germany gave Austria that this so-called Blank check War guarantee and then that led to a war with Russia and then that dragged the you know Britain and France and eventually the United States so. You know, it was a case where nobody, none of these powers, wanted to be in a war with each other. And yet somehow inertia and threats and escalations and miscalculations and folly all sort of tumbled their way into it. And that, I think, may be the historical precedent here that we want to avoid. I think we need to be very careful not to let you know every conflict all over the world drag us into these, these types of wars and disputes, sex, do you think? American primacy is coming to an end. I hope not. But if if our goal is to preserve American primacy, which I think it should be, then we need to be smart about how we use our strength, and we don't want to fritter it away. And what I've been doing for the last 20 years, frittering away our strength in wars we didn't need to be in in the Middle East, we spent how many trillions on nation building there? That turned out to be a total folly and waste of money. Look at this. And we have a $30 trillion national debt if we want. This century, to be an American Century like the last one, we need to preserve our strength and use it wisely and not involve ourselves in every conflict. And, you know, so look, we need to protect our NATO allies. I agree with that. But we don't need to be creating disputes and and evolving ourselves in wars that we have no obligation to get involved in. We need energy independence and we need to deliver our balance sheet for American finances. And it's possible, but it's going to require a lot of focus and sacrifice. I really think the thing that I just made-up that is actually really quite genius, which is redirect that $3 trillion build back, better build to just pure solar everywhere in the United States. It would be so disruptive. I mean, it would just be so disruptive, could you imagine? It becomes a dividend. It's like it's Ubi in a way. Everybody gets no electrical bill. I I don't think it would allow people to have free electricity forever, but I do think it would subsidize basically the deployment of energy infrastructure to every single household in America in a way that would just completely shake up, frankly, the political world order. Because, you know, what you guys said is so true. A lot of this stuff rests on, you know, the politics around natural resources, right? So, you know, today it's oil. Tomorrow, it's going to be some rare earth, you know, in 10 years it could be copper and lithium. And we want to find ourselves with the ability to be clear eyed and focused in our response to these issues. But if we need critical resources that can only come from one other place or two other places. And we don't have the engineering ingenuity that figured out how to, you know, deliver our reliance. And we're going to get dragged into not just this conflict, but a whole bunch of other conflicts going forward. I'd say yes, and we could be. Energy independent for free right now, if we were just to repeal some of these executive orders, I mean, we were energy independent like a year or two ago until. Yeah, but we banned fracking. Why? Why do the fracking when solar is available? It seems to me like we want to actually preserve the environment, stop global warming. So if solar is available and nuclear is available, why would you advocate for fracking and ripping up the Earth and, you know, polluting it? I'm a fan of solar. It's really just about costs and time to deployment. Got it. OK, so you see it? The bridge, hey, maybe we do it for five years, 10 years. Long term. I think solar is the answer, but I think that's a long term strategy. The other thing that is confounding is like Americans. And this is another thing. I was just watching the media and I did exactly what you did, David. As I put on Fox, I was like, let me get their interpretation of this because the Trump folks are praising Putin and then these guys are wanting to go to war. So it feels like there's some. Inner conflict or civil war going on in in the Republican side of things, but even on the on the yeah and then on the left you have this craziness. They were I mean Wolf Blitzer and everybody was so excited about this war. They were like stay tuned and Oh my God, we're going to be 24 hour coverage. They were. Like orgasmic in in their coverage. Remember CNN got their got their big yeah start with the Gulf War. That was it. Well, that was to shine. I remember being a kid watching that. That is the language freak. That was the language they were using. So Don Lemon was saying. And we have the full resources to give you blow by blow coverage of everything happening. Stick with CNN. This is where we do our best work. And it was literally like war **** and it was really uncomfortable to watch. Combined with sacks. And this is what I wanted. But maybe three throw this one to you. They kept talking about how Americans were going to suffer at the pump. And I just thought, this is so crazy and just saying there's 190,000 young Russian men who are gonna die. Countless Ukrainian civilian civilians who are going to die potentially, and this thing could escalate, a sack said. You, you know you you can't play games with war. He could. The dominoes can fall in all directions, and you have no idea when you light off these grenades. And and we're talking about our pain at the pump. Very weird. Very weird times. Freeburg. Any thoughts? America's weird. It's weird. I wanna if, if, if free bird doesn't want to respond to that. I wanna, I wanna talk with the media coverage. I'll add to that. I mean, you flip over to MSNBC, John Bolton is on MSNBC. And one of the weirdest things happening in our politics now is that all the neocons who used to be members of the Republican Party, who worked for George W Bush and got us into the Iraq war have now all become Democrats and they're all over. They're supposedly the the conscience of the country over on CNN and MSNBC. And beating the drums of war, it's absolutely unbelievable and one of the the one of the tactics they use that I think we should talk about. Is and this goes all the way back to the Vietnam War, is that anybody who merely tries to, let's say, understand the other side or wants to deescalate or get out of a conflict they try to portray as unpatriotic. I mean this again, this goes all the way back to the Vietnam War, where the Vietnam protesters were portrayed as unamerican and unpatriotic. Well, it turns out they were right. That was a mistake for us to get embroiled in Vietnam. And similarly the Iraq war. It turns out that was a gigantic mistake. But in 2003, David Frum is like one of the leaders of this group. Wrote an article called Unpatriotic Conservatives in which he attacked and sort of maumau. The there were, you know, conservatives like Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak who were against the Iraq war. And he called them unpatriotic and implied that they were unamerican because and somehow in the pocket of Saddam Hussein because they were against us. Our involvement in the Iraq war. Well, they were right. They turned out to be right. And yet they were demonized and called in patriotic. And where are we today, those same people? I'm seeing David Frum on Twitter now. Tune the patriotism of people who merely want us not to escalate this, not to get involved, and maybe to try and understand our enemy. Because, I mean, this is one of the problems with twittering our foreign policy is, look, we can see Putin as an aggressor, we can see him as a thug or an authoritarian or as a dictator, but nonetheless, we should still try and understand our enemy. And anybody who tries to promote a greater degree of understanding or diplomacy gets attacked by these people as being Putin apologists. Chamath you you said you didn't see this coming. You thought this is a very small probability. I think we all felt it was a pretty small probability that Russia would actually go through this. You thought it was actually something I actually, I do freeberg you did think it was going to happen as a certainty? Yeah. Wait, wait. You thought was a certainty that America would get involved because of the wag the dog scenario? Or that Putin would do it because. This is not like, a surprise that Putin did this. I mean, this has been a long time coming. Yeah. I mean, it just felt like, I I, I thought that he would Saber rattle and we come to some resolution here and. But what does he want? It seems like nobody. And. And this is what everybody keeps saying that really? By the way, I think that's a really complicated question. I feel like there's decades of and layers of, like, to this story, it's like, you know, war and peace. And then you read like 1/2 of the final chapter and you're like, Oh yeah, OK like, there's a lot to the story that's going to be really hard. Us to unpack. So, you know, I'm not sure there's a very simple like what does Putin want as much as there is a significant narrative that that that backs the history, you know, post Soviet history with Ukraine and the relationships. I mean, you, you guys may remember that there was a president, a presidential candidate or a president that was poisoned by Putin at some point. I mean, there's been like a long history to this that I don't think is something that we can reunification is what most people would put that under is this. There's. Economic there are social, you know, there are individuals, cultural motives. I mean, there's a lot driving this. There's a lot of influence within that country that I don't think we really fully grasp within the country of Russia. I mean, that we don't fully grasp related to some of the cultural relationships with some of the population in the in the Ukraine. And so, you know, it's a very difficult question to simply answer. Can I take a shot at it? Yeah, sure. OK. What does Putin want? So I want to there was an article by Peter Beinart, who was an editor of the new. People like he's not, you know, some far right conservative or whatever. He published this quotes from a memo that was written by Bill Burns back in 2008. So Bill Burns is the current DCI as a director of Central Intelligence, the head of the CIA. He is also a Russian expert. He speaks Russian fluently. He is the he and he spent many years over there in our government and he works for Biden. He's Biden's head of the CIA, so he is the highest ranking Russian expert in our government. In 2008 he wrote a memo. To Condoleezza Rice was in the Secretary of State, and what he said is this is about Ukrainian entry into NATO, he said. Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite. Not just Putin, he says. In more than 2 1/2 years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin, sharpest liberal critics, I've yet to find anyone who views Ukraine and NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. So burns. Pointed out to the then Secretary of State that this was a huge red line. And since then, since 2008, Putin has been very consistent that Ukrainian entry into NATO has been a red line. And even in the speech that he gave last week, he talked about, he talked about this and he said that. I'm quoting Putin from his speech. He says if Ukraine was to join NATO, it would serve as a direct threat to the security of Russia. So, you know, in response to Putin's speech and on Twitter, I keep hearing. That Putin is this madman. We can't understand what he wants. That the only possible explanation for his behavior is either senility. He's gotten crazy. He's gone mad. And, you know, I'm looking at this and I'm like, OK, maybe those things are true, but you can't say that he hasn't been clear about what his red lines are. He's been saying this for 20 years, that Ukraine joining the NATO alliance is an absolute red line. And you know, I mentioned before on this pod that imagine if the Cold War is still going on and the Warsaw Pact still existed and, you know, Justin Trudeau was going to lead Canada into the Warsaw Pact. We would absolutely be up in arms about that. We would not let that happen. It is that kind of issue for Putin and we just act like this guy is insane. That has no point of view. I'm not, we don't have to believe he's right, but to basically say that his he he has no interest in Russian security, that we need to give any weight to, that we just need to dismiss all of his concerns out of hand. It just, you know, this is not the history of the situation. Did you read anybody? Read Madeleine Albright's New York Times space? It's pretty interesting because she was in the position when they first met him and he's been talking about the Ukraine and reunification for 20 years and it's probably a good lesson for the entire. Planet that dictators are going to, you know they they have a certain, to your point chamath of like having well and capabilities. A lot of people have capabilities, a lot of people don't have will to start wars anymore on this planet. And and he clearly is in that group, I think as hard as it is, but but Jason, we, we don't know. Here's the thing, by not taking NATO off the table as an issue, we don't know whether his true aim here is the restoration of the Russian Empire or merely to avoid, you know, this border country being part of a military alliance that he views as a threat. So I don't know what the answer is, part or door #3. He wants more attention. He wants to be more. Globally relevant, right? But we made the mistake of not taking this issue off the table and so. If we had taken the issue off the table, then we could get to the real heart of the issue. Maybe it would have diffused the situation, or the EU and NATO had done it right. It's not just us in this like the the people in Europe have a big say here, as we're discussing this on a on a Thursday, February 24th, Biden has announced a coalition of partners, EU Australia. Others are doing pretty significant sanctions, it seems, limiting Russia's ability to do business in dollars, EUR and yen, imposing major sanctions on the Russian banks, trying to cripple the ruble. Blocking four major Russian banks, freezing all of their assets in America, adding sanctions to Russian elites? I guess that's the oligarch class and Russia's largest state owned enterprises will no longer be able to raise money from. A coalition of governments. Biden assumes this will degrade their military advancement. And I have a funny Russian story to tell. So right when I was when I was still running, when I was managing not just my money but other people's money, and I was raising funds, eventually, you know, you you get LP commitments from all kinds of people interested in investing with you if you're generating great returns. Right. Meaning, you know, rich family offices all around the world want to give you capital. And there's a very strict process. America, where when you get capital in, you have to make sure that those folks basically pass a, you know, an anti money laundering check and a know your customer kind of check KYC checks. And one of these checks is actually a Gray list and a black list that treasury and the DOJ kind of manage. And every now and then they'll put people on and off the list. And there's a very famous person in Russia who I will not say, when I was raising money for my last fund, this is probably in 2014 or 15. He was on the, he was not on the list and you know, very well known person. And I thought, wow, this is a great opportunity to get somebody who seems to be doing a lot of really interesting good work. And and not less than two or three weeks after we had signed our LP agreement, I think it was DOJ or Treasury put him on this list and we get it. We get it. You know an e-mail basically saying hey tear up the LPA and you can't take the capital and we had to undo the entire limited partner agreement and. Crazy. What percentage of the fund would that person have been? Ballpark, I don't remember, but he was a, he's a significant person investing significant 510% or something. So I would guess, yeah. Hey, Jason, I just wanna going back on a point I made about energy and energy independence earlier because I actually pulled up the numbers. So you know, the average cost per kWh in the. In China right now, it's about $0.09 uh for for energy production, it is estimated. That nuclear power production should drop to about four cents, but could be as low as one cent per kWh if operated at scale with perfect efficiency, just to give everyone a sense of where not just security risk and kind of, you know, the the green opportunity lies, but also where economic advantage lies in investing in nuclear infrastructure. And so as China builds out 140 nuclear plants here over the next two to three decades, they're going to see their energy cost decline from about $0.09 for industrial use. Potentially, you know, into the sub 5 cent per kWh range, which makes them tremendously competitive on a manufacturing point of view. It's a lot of Bitcoin servers. There's a lot of hash. I think it's never going to happen. I'm not. I love you. That's not going to happen. America, America, America's ability to steal nuclear, I think is a very difficult proposition. And I think our real solution is still the solar it's practical that can be done today and it can be done right now. And just to look at the EU versus the US in terms of gas mileage, which is just stunning the EU. Has mandated everything. America doesn't have the resolve. It's like, it's like we have to, we have to cross so many bridges and you know, we have to really confront a bunch of issues that we that have been riddled with so much inaccuracy, you know, for example, would be environmental impact, the understanding of how nuclear energy works, you know, the NIMBY ISM, Jason, that you referred to about not being able to build these things all around the country. And so reducing the form factor in my opinion is a technical challenge for I think we can overcome, but it still leaves the policy. And there are societal level challenges that I think are very difficult to overcome because you're talking about rewriting history in many ways and and convincing, you know, hundreds of millions of people that things that they had thought were true were no longer true. And I think that's much, much harder than we give it credit for. And cars is the perfect example. Americans now, we're averaging 24 miles to the gallon. The EU is mandated 57 miles per gallon in 2021. They're getting it done in the EU. They're twice as effective. I tweeted, hey, listen Americans, we we need to buy. Better gas mileage cars and move to Eva's. And I was faced with quite a backlash. I mean, it was insane because California did pass their own legislation. And then there was this issue because the car companies pushed back and said, you know, it's too expensive for us to build two different skews, one for California and one for the rest of America. They're already building once for the EU, just to give you 1 counterpoint to your statement about energy independence arising potentially from solar. To generate a GW of capacity and industrial scale solar farm would take about 7500 acres. You know, so that's about 30. I don't think that's how it's, I don't think that's how it's done. I I think a very simple solar installation and everybody so with a simple battery is more than enough to basically give people the power they need. And then these big C and I installations of softening on top of all these big buildings will cover the rest. And I think that you'll still have some amount of Nat gas peakers usage and maybe you can have some amount of solar or hydro or wind, but people are experimenting and figuring out the battery storage capability to supplement this, I think. What we don't have is that at 3% residue solar we don't have a credible alternative, but you know 80% resi solar with battery systems and everybody's home, which is a tractable solution that costs thousands of dollars per home, which the government could subsidized, would be a great use of capital, I think would be transformational for energy. It would completely rewrite the energy calculus. So so again to do that today would cost because when you do something on a residential roof, it costs a lot more than doing it on an industrial scale, so when you build out of 7500 acres. Their facility. You get economies of scale, you get single tubes, everything can run off one wire. When you build it on a roof, you need contractors to come in, you got to wire the home, you got to put batteries in. So the actual amortized cost over the lifetime of that solar installation works out to something on the order of $0.15 a kWh. Whereas if you do it on an industrial scale, it works out to about $0.03 a kWh. So you know your your point makes sense, but it it it makes things more expensive. So then the question is, who's going to fund the delta and if someone actually going to pay for that delta to make this. I'm sure. I'm sure over the next few years we're going to spend trillions and trillions of dollars on nothing. Those trillions and trillions of dollars could probably whatever your gap is. I don't know whether your math is right or wrong, but whatever the gap is that gets us to China as an example in terms of the cost per kWh, the government could substance and there is a quantifiable number and if we had, if we decided whether it was worth it or not, we could decide. But all I'm saying is it it's it's something that we need to put on the table because every time a new president comes into town and gets elected. They generally get this one big shot on goal. You know the last few presidents have tried to either, you know, cut taxes or basically give these massive economic stimulus packages and the net dollar effect of these things is now measured in the trillions of dollars. And I suspect that the net, you know, cost of subsidizing and up shoulder energy that you get a broadly deployed is also in the trillions of dollars. And we should just decide whether that is in a better use of the money. Alright, just to do some quick math here to boost your teammates point. He almost nailed it. Exactly. There are 85 million standalone homes in the US, Japan. I'm just going to assume none of them, for the sake of this argument, have solar on them, but 3% do, I think average cost of putting solar on homes. 20 to 35,000, I picked the number 30,000. Yes, yes, hold on a second. But but in Australia it costs 5000. OK. Have a cheaper system or something? No, it's because of all the nonsense that exists in the United States. Subsidized it so, but just to give the raw cost here, if it was $30,000 to put on 85 million, you can do it. You can do it for $5000 at home because Australia, which is 1/6 the size of America is able to do it with no subsidies direct to the consumer for $5000 in installation. So that. This is possible. I'm gonna pick the $30,000 crazy price in America. $2.5 trillion to put solar on every home at the end like where you were $30 trillion in debt, 10% of our debt would make us energy independent forever. The the the plan gets better when you do math. Sorry, and think of the think of the amount of savings you do to the environment. Think of the lack. I don't know if you saw this, but there was a UN report without the criticality and importance of emerging wildfire threats to our ecosystem and our ecology. And you know, for all of us that lived in California, do you guys remember how the sky was? Orange and red two years ago or those yeah crazy pictures from Los Angeles. So if you if you have a have less of a reliance on these aging utilities and these utilities infrastructure, there will be less forest fires, the air will be cleaner, people will be more resilient. Think of the times that for example in Texas where there is a massive freeze right where people were shut out of had they couldn't have power because the actual traditional utilities were shut down. If it's only 2 1/2 trillion dollars, I think we should have done this yesterday. I can't believe the numbers that low actually. Considering the things that when we put two and half trillion dollar price tags on things and spend the cost of upgrading, I'm just pulling some numbers here off of the Internet, but replacing our electrical grid would be 5 trillion. So if you think about the replacement cost of the actual, which we're gonna have to do at some point, and the upgrade cost of 500 billion a year or the maintenance of 500 billion a year, this actually starts to seem very reasonable and achievable if we had the will, which means we need to have some politicians who actually aren't in the pocket of big. The number of jobs that Biden would create if he actually ran with this then, and because you do need a lot of local installation capability and other jobs, you would create hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of jobs in the United States. They would be really well paying and you would be pushing us towards a completely energy independent, clean energy, you know, 0 carbon future. That'd be transformational. Yeah. I wonder how many hours of work it is to install. You could actually do that math as well and figure out how many jobs you create. And then how much tax those people? Pay and then how much they spend of that money to put back into the economy. You're probably getting a 3040% rebate on that $2.5 trillion. So it becomes even better because of the high paying jobs, all right? The markets are tanking obviously over the last couple of months. Dow is down 11% year to date. And of course a lot of the growth socks, we've talked about this over and over again from zoom to Netflix, Facebook, Spotify, Coin based Twilio all down over 50% today. The market went down five, 6% on the news and then rebounded. Is this all priced in and is this the bottom of the market Kathy Wood is supposedly buying and I don't know if it's net buying or she's just reallocating, but are are we now in the bargain hunting? Period of the market and and we've bottomed out. Just the smart folks that I talked to who I really you know look up to and respect think that the bottom in the S&P is around 3800 and that what we still need to do is it's one last flush and that last flush will really touch the big cap. Companies, but that growth is largely done sort of getting taken to the woodshed. So in general, I think that so generally buyers of growth now, sellers of value and waiting for this one last you know, 400 point moved down the S&P and I think people think it's roughly the bottom. Now if there's a World War, obviously who knows all about Sarah. But you know so sacks, what's more shocking that we're almost at the bottom or there's people in the markets that chamath really respects? Which is well speaking, Speaking of people that we respect. So I think Brad Gerstner has a really interesting take on this, which is that, sorry, I I should also be clear that I'm recruiting this one person who I really respect, you know who he is. So they're both got it. So Brad Grocers published a couple of charts showing basically multiples in the Internet index and among SAS companies over the last whatever dozen years or so. And what you can see is that over the last two years during COVID, there was a huge spike in multiples for Internet companies and for SaaS companies. And that over the last really since November last 3-4 months has now come down. And as of I would say last week, it was right at about the historical trend and now it's starting to go under. The historical trends. So from a bargain hunting standpoint, you'd have to say that this is the first time that we've been below the the average for a few years now. That's not to say it can't go down even more, because in the same way that you can be above trend, you can also be below trend. And if this war escalates metastasizes, it will go down more. But if this conflict can stay localized and the economy doesn't go into a recession because everything that's happened, then yes, this might be. Bargain hunting, here's the chart for everybody to take a look at from January 20 to January 22, the two years of the pandemic. And I think this is times forward-looking sales. If I'm, if I'm reading a correct, I don't have the full chart here. I just have a screenshot of it. A portion of it, yeah, I think it's enterprise. Enterprise value divided by like 4 looking revenue which is you kind of say is like R yeah, it's sort of like AR, like recurring revenue. And so yeah, we we had this 15X. Went up to 4050 acts, private market deals going at 102 hundred XMR. Those days are over big time and it's we've talked about that ad nauseam. One of the interesting things that I'm seeing is I think people are looking at businesses that have been corrected and saying, hey, what is the true value of this and the I think the best example is Peloton, new CFO, the CFO of Netflix. All right. I love you guys. I love you and stay safe and enjoy your vacation cheers now. So I just without drama, I just want to talk a little bit. Have you guys watched what happened with Peloton and the CFO coming in and just really revitalizing that business very quickly? By the way, Jason, I'll say one thing, I think 2 weeks ago. If you pulled the market there would probably have or if you looked at the the the trading prices of bonds, you probably would have assumed a 95% chance of 1/2 point rate hike in March. And as of today, my guess is that the probability of that is below 5%. And you're probably assuming, you know, 1/4 point rate hike or maybe even a deferral at this point. And I think that's one of the things that's keeping the market up instead of tanking so much this morning, our predicting that it's been such bad news that they'll push it out. Yeah, they're assuming that under the conditions of great uncertainty like this, the Fed cannot act as aggressively as they were planning to act interest. And as a result that that rate hike would be pushed out and it would continue to kind of keep prices somewhat. Plated and continued to support the market with cheaper capital and liquidity. So you know a lot of capital around the world is going to get locked up as armed conflict kind of comes to bear and when that happens you know markets will tighten up and prices will be affected. And so the Fed in in traditional in typical times would want to have an incentive or or would have a motivation to you know inject liquidity into the markets. And so this is not a great time to do a half point rate hike and so it's almost certain at this point that they're not going to do a half point rate hike. It feels to me like huge setup right now. People have capitulated the markets. Gotten demolished. I just think there's some, these companies are still great, still great, great businesses out there and some great companies to invest in, some great stocks to buy all the way from technology through to industrials through to, you know, even some of the energy companies that are going to benefit greatly from this commodity cycle where we're kind of in the middle of. And so there there's going to be, you know, I, I think an opportunity to move away from a speculative behavior into real kind of cherry picking. Productive cash generating businesses in the next you know or or or even growth businesses that are actual you know value creators. So versus being like 10 year speculative kind of bet. So this is a great time to kind of be looking for businesses you really like to own, to identify them to make investments and to hold those investments for a very long period of time. You know you're not going to find a lot of market conditions like this. I mean if we all went back to March of 2020 and you remember the S&P was at 2020. 300 I was going to buy Disney. I never got around to it. So, like, if if at that point you pick businesses that you knew were going to be durable businesses and that you loved and you thought were going to have legs to them, you bought everything from Alphabet to Disney to Lockheed Martin, you know, you could have done tremendously well. So now is a great time to kind of be looking for businesses that you really like and to buy a stake in them. Forget forget about trying to time the bottom. That's a fools errand, right? No, no. If you want to buy stuff you want to hold for 10 years, things are relatively cheap relative to. The time horizon the sacks pointed out and and Gardner pointed out. So things are relatively cheap. Find businesses you like to own and buy them cheap. They could get cheaper but they're kind of at the bottom end. You know the whole, I think the whole time frame around like speculative stuff is kind of wiped out like I think that that that that error is gone now. What are you saying? Well it's it's that plus I think one of the things that happened is that people are realizing now that the burst of activity, especially like an ecommerce type companies that happened during the pandemic that was not ongoing sustainable growth. It was one time growth. In fact in many cases it was sort of worse than one time growth which is it was. Pull forward growth, meaning that growth in the future will be lower because you pulled forward all of that revenue. Well, I think Peloton might be a good example. I mean, everyone bought them during the pandemic, but then after the pandemic, everyone who needs one has got one already. So could also be cars, right? Like people are desperate to buy cars and now there's none available. Right. So what what happened is not only have multiples gone down, but these companies were being comped based on growth rates that were unsustainable. And so now they're all revising their forecasts down. So it's the double whammy and and Brad's made this point. But what's interesting right now is the markets are actually rallying and I think it might be because of this latest Biden news at this press conference. So the important point here is that Biden did not sanction Putin directly. There was talk about sanctioning him personally or and he also did not remove Russia from the swift system, which is like sort of the key banking system. And I don't know if this is because Biden doesn't want to do it or because Europe won't support the move. Pretty clear. Europe doesn't want to do it. So no one is willing to suffer too much economic loss here to defend Ukraine, never mind sending troops. So it seems to me that the signal here is that both militarily and in terms of economic interest, Europe does not want further escalation, and that may be why the market is rallying. Also, the Fed may hold off on interest rate increases while this is all going on. So, you know, sometimes markets can act in funny ways. Well, they're forward-looking. People are putting money at stake so they have skin in the game. So it's, you know, they they people can talk all they want about what's going to happen with the markets, but unless they're placing bets, that's kind of cheap talk. And here people are actually placing bets on stocks they think will do well in the future. Outlook. That their economic interests or skin of the game, having people, sons and daughters go off to fight and die in some foreign war, that is real skin in the game. What is not skin in the game is people tweeting, you know, their moral outrage and condemnation and whipping things up. And, you know, we should not be listening to that and calling everyone who disagrees them traitors because that's happening to, you know, this is a time for cooler heads, for a veil. You and I are going to actually agree on this, and we're both going to agree that Trump and Pompeo should not be. Fawning over Putin? Yeah, but Jason commented on that. Let's get people want to hear us, get into it. Well, I mean, you can't support them fawning over Putin like that, you do you? I can't imagine you. Look, I I heard. I heard what? What Trump said when he was saying I didn't hear the Pompeo quotes. I can't speak to that. That is a genius. Look, listen, you know, sometimes Trump is being sarcastic when he says things like, oh, what a beauty, you know, he means the opposite. And I think the point Trump was making. Wasn't really about Putin being so great. The point I heard Trump making was that if he were President, this wouldn't be happening now. You can disagree with that. It may be true or untrue, but that was a real point is making. I think that you're letting you know the political partisans try to whip this thing up. And as part again, it's part of this meme of anybody who doesn't support what I want must be a traitor and must be in the pocket of truth of Putin. We have to use this meme warfare to get people freeberg. To shame these politicians into backing like the solar plan and doing something meaningful like this, like and backing nuclear. How do we get the politicians to reflect energy independence as a priority? It feels like it's not a priority for them. Well, I mean, the one of the good things about American democracy is that politicians are generally pretty responsive to what their constituents want to believe. So they use polling data and that polling data drives, you know, if if they want to get reelected, they better do what the the polls are telling them people want them to do. And so ultimately if you can kind of influence people broadly in the United States and that can, that can go both ways. By the way, we have special interest too. And and you have people with weird ideas, right, like, but generally like if something is deeply unpopular, politician risks not getting reelected, they're not going to kind of run to do that. And if something is very popular. Even though it may not be the right thing by some objective framework, you know, they would still run to do that. So, you know, I do think that there is. You know, some degree of of work to be done around, you know, framing for people broadly, you know, via the work maybe that we do on our podcast, but I think more importantly on a repeated way and in a way that's kind of inspiring. An inclusive will drive people to kind of want to see these changes happen, and ultimately politicians should respond coming one other point to to your to your thing about you. You know who who today would be considered. You know, in the words of jinpachi parroting Russian talking points. Barack Obama. If Obama today were out there saying exactly what he told the the Atlantic magazine back in, I think it was 2012 or 14. If he was saying that today, he'd be accused of being in Putin's pocket and being a Putin apologist and a traitor and all this kind of stuff. Because he said that in that interview. He said, listen, Putin was always very businesslike. He was punctual, he showed up. He wanted to negotiate and deal. Basically. He sounded like a guy. Look, we may disagree with him about everything, but he wasn't a madman. He was someone you could talk to, actor he was a. He was a coldly ruthless but rational actor. And that's basically what Obama said. He's someone you could talk Turkey with. And if you say that today, that, hey, maybe we could negotiate our way out of this with Putin. You're accused of being, you know, a puppet of his. Yeah, well, the concept of starting a war in this day and age is just it's crazy. Like it is crazy that he's starting this war and putting all these people at risk and we don't even know what the goal is. You can ask for anything, like what is he exactly asking for? So he may not be. He may have been rational then. Or maybe Obama was trying to steer him towards rationality and praising him publicly to get that more rational Putin to show up. This feels like irrational that we don't know what his goal is. Like the fact that the world can't say if we gave him X he would do Y is, I think, his strategy. Putin's always liked to be this like unpredictable madman, right? No, I mean, we just said that he's a coldly ruthless, rational actor. That's sort of the opposite of a madman. I mean, his red lines have been clear. He's been stating them for for years, that the problem is that again, we're conducting referring him to murdering opponents of his. And there's no question that he's ruthless. He's an authoritarian. Call him a dictator if you want. I've tweeted in support of Alexei Navalny, so I get it. But that doesn't mean he's a madman. He has desires and interests, and it's the job of diplomats. To figure out how to conduct diplomacy and negotiation with people you disagree with. And one of the problems we have today is, again, we've twittered everything. So, you know, we basically figure out the first step is who are the people who should be canceled? You know, who's wearing the white hat? Who's wearing the Black Hat? Let's all rise up. And virtue signal and morals, enunciation and, you know, stick our fingers in our ears and not listen to the other side and. And listen that that is a way to find yourself in greater conflicts, not avoid them. Yeah, alright, so just wrapping up here, let's, uh, let's wrap with Sax's favorite part of the show, sax's favorite moment, where he's super engaged in learning, he's got his thinking cap on, he's taking notes, and that is the science corner. No, not. I thought you gonna say Vendetta corner? Cortana quarter this quarter is actually my favorite part of the show it is now, but people love Vendetta corner in the Twitter community spaces. Who you who your loves it because Twitter is all about vendettas, but I have no vendettas this week. Indebted for are you doing with your time? Yeah, I'm. I'm trying to advocate that this is time for cooler heads prevail. And so, oh, for ***** sake, start a fight with somebody. Are you fighting with Paul Graham? There's nobody here you're telling. From the week off for ski week, I don't think we're fighting over anything. It's not not that I can think of right for the dictator Chamath, Polly, Hypatia, Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, and the Rain Man himself. David Sacks, I'm Jackal, and we'll see you all at the all in summit in May 15, 1617. You can go to the website summit.allinpodcast.co where you just type all in some the all in summit into Google and find it May 15th to 17th in Miami, FL. We're doing it at the New World Symphony and we have a page there where you can vote on speakers, can be 3 days of fun. We have a scholarship there if you can't afford the regular ticket, and you can apply for a scholarship if you're a super fan. And we'll look forward to seeing you there and go vote for some speakers. Bye bye, I love you, bestie. Let your winners ride Rain Man. David Sasha. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Besties are. My dog's driveway. Man. Should all just get a room and just have one big huge order because they're all this useless. Just like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release stuff out there. Let your feet. We need to get merchants on.