Industry veterans, degenerate gamblers & besties Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks & David Friedberg cover all things economic, tech, political, social & poker.
Fri, 01 Apr 2022 09:53
0:00 Sacks' DC trip and foreign policy speaking gig
5:50 Yield curve inversion, breaking down the current state of the markets, understanding the labor market through birth rate and immigration
26:16 How the US can fix its current economic issues, reframing high-skilled immigration
48:54 SEC's new proposed rules around SPACs and climate disclosures for public companies: how will both markets be impacted?
1:10:29 Meta used a GOP firm to run a smear campaign against TikTok in the US: dirty, necessary, or both?
1:19:03 Food shortage update
1:24:33 Sacks and Jason reflect on Biden's inflammatory comments on Putin
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https://twitter.com/DavidSacks
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Intro Music Credit:
https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg
Intro Video Credit:
https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect
Referenced in the show:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/PATH:NYSE
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/03/american-population-growth-rate-slow/629392
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-big-new-wealth-tax-white-house-budget-fy-2023-11648504962
https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/democrats-go-directly-to-the-center
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-22/the-sec-will-regulate-climate
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/30/sec-targets-spacs-with-new-rules-about-forecasts-mergers.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/
https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2022/03/wheat-in-2023.html
https://www.agweek.com/news/usda-nass-to-livestream-prospective-planting-report
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/28/1089300515/biden-putin-remarks-regime-change
I mean, Jason and socks look like ******* two accountants who've just been fired from Lehman Brothers in 2008. Actually, we're carrying our boxes out to the street and getting a taxi. Sax does look appropriate for his setting. How long are you in DC for? Saxy pull you in and out one day. What are you doing? Yeah, I'm fine. Back tonight for the fundraiser tomorrow morning. Who's the fundraiser with? You want to tell everybody? Big boy. Yeah, it's Beatles 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 have a red tie with you sacks. I wore a blue tie today. Really? Oh, you're trolling. Full troll is on. Oh wow. What a little troll artist. Alright, let's get started. Let your winners ride. Man David. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy. We. 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 Quinoid himself, he'll reboot your physique with his munique puts the mana in the kana. And he's your pal from nor Cal, the Sultan of science. David Friedberg. How you doing brother? You have secrets of these things. This is great. You actually do work for this podcast. Keep this going every week. It'll be amazing. I mean, I just feel like getting a plug-in from unique and condo. That was my if I could get 24 folio companies hit hit hit socks in me. Let's go. Alright, well you know he's back with us again. The czar of a RR, the savant of Sass. He quits the *** and Asperger's. He's the sucker. He's a sucker for Tucker. The rain melon himself. David sax. That's so good. All right, Next up, the dictator agitator and our frequent collaborator. He's back-to-back with the Spacks, a trendsetter, with the sweaters. The future he can foresee? Chamath palihapitiya. You got you, everybody. It's not as good as David's, I got to say. Well, there's a lot to go with Asperger's. Tucker. I mean, he's the material for sacks. I could have done 20 minutes, 20 minutes. It 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 the name of it. It's called up from chaos and sponsored by a group called the American Movement and the American Conservative. And they 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, is more restrained, less interventionism. It's too logical, right? 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 in the middle, just declared a new world order. I mean, he is 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 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, right. 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 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 would 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. Well, 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 a Cpl little primer on what this means, the inverted yield yield curve and why people are talking about it this week. Well, I think people. Yeah, we're 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 2 year bond and an interest rate on a 10 year bond and you subtract 1 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 tenderly 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 and to 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 assent, largely taking into account the fact that the Fed has told us that they're gonna 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 0. 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 1st, right. So it's been four months, five months. We've had massive, uh, 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 and 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 ± 5%. Hmm, that really doesn't hang together at some really basic logical level, right? So, so what's gonna 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. OK, 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 earnings season, right. We're at the end of Q1. And I think what's going to happen is really interesting. You're gonna have a handful of companies who have a great handle on their business. Who actually projects 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, we'll get completely whacked. 2 examples over this last week, and we had this debate, you know, the 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 the economy contracting. And we've had about a dozen of these since World War Two. Remember a couple of them in our lifetimes. Obviously, the COVID uh 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 ten years or so. So if we do have a recession and it it seems implausible to me that we would have negative growth for two quarters, so. Well, the other, the other interesting company for example, was uipath. Which UI path got whacked today, 25 or 26% and what they actually reported was that they thought that they were going to increase AR to. You know, 1.2 billion from like 900? That's a that's a huge. At that scale, to grow 3540% in a RR in the year is really quite incredible. But their ACV numbers and their revenue numbers were a little soft. They got whacked and now they're trading, you know, like 11 times AR. 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. We'll get valuation reset on any faint weakness. And so, you know, it's gonna be really up to the CEO's 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 you sacks. Best ways to fight a recession. Cut spending. I'm sorry? Increased 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 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 recessions to be determined, I think there's a very good chance because we already we're 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 I'm plugging the 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 delayed reaction there. So these are all negative indicators and I think we're either gonna have a recession or something very close to it. And they typically last 11 months, right, Sachs. So how long would the recession be? You think it's typically 11 months, two quarters? Six quarters? Yeah, normally it's like 18 months till 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's 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 of the 1970s style stagflation, where we continue to see inflation with the 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. You spend less money and that's why there's there's recession. Like, I mean, you're paying 6 bucks for gas. You have less money to go out for dinner every week, right? You pay. Uh, 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 these stagflation, airy effects to 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. Then 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 chamah? Well, it's all this is super confounding. It's just 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 bursts 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 two 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 5060% labor participation. So 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% of the people that died were probably in the workforce in some way. So you had all those people. We have a, you know, troublesome issue with births 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 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, etcetera, 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 would come here. Odds were, maybe you'd get a masters or PhD and then stay here. None of those people, 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 and then you add to that the fact that labour participation which when we were coming up 6768% of people in the country were work, choosing to work and now we're we're down in the 60% and maybe ticking up to yeah 62% it looks like on that Fred website, so. We we 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 economics. We need to boost it. 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 freeberg. Where 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, I'm, 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 and 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 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 consumable durables 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's that seems to be at this point dragging on. What do you think about the argument, though, that there's a substitutional effect, meaning 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. 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 use 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. Charmouth is that if people, if prices go up, then entrepreneurs are gonna look and, you know, there's a better way to do this. You wanna go on vacation? You wanna stay somewhere for two weeks? You can't afford the hotel? OK, let's try this new thing like this Airbnb. Somebody rents you their apartment, they move in with another person for the week. You use their apartment and you can rent for 159 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 Nimbyism 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 that 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. Sachs, what's your question? Well, I thought 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 in the next year or two. Look, the 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. They spiked the punch bowl. They spiked the punch bowl big time. Yeah. And we're already seeing it. 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 2/3 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 it needs to be inverted for at least 90 days typically. But again I think if you look at the 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 growth. Why? 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 debt. 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. Buckmiller 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 of spending in the whole build 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 they even when they brought it out they liked that they had mansions. Report behind it. And then the next day, mansion came out and disavowed it and said, no, no, I don't support this. I mean, what does the administration thinking? It makes no sense. I mean, clearly foreign policy. I mean, I strongly believe we could have cut a deal on Ukraine a year ago to defuse 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 know, you don't even need to do that. It was working and don't **** it up. 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, I pass. Yeah. OK. 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, OK, 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 xenophobic, really. 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 populist 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, look, obviously the immigrations are very fraud 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 H1B's or we 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 that you 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 difference. He's a massive that for a long time and it works in Canada and you're I think you're absolutely Australia, New Zealand, UK. All have this. It's like, yeah, what? What does our country need right now? OK, 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. Explain 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, the, 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, that'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, Freeburg. 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 friggin 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 our 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 a land based 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 3 grand a year or 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 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 then 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. 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 going to 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 on autocracies arise, all those sorts of awful things. And or really I would say both 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 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 long term growth minimizing minimizing progress to improve the the the the rate of equity of distribution of gains, right and and it's 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 2nd order effect. So it becomes a really difficult thing to and and people don't really see it this way. People see kind of the 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's income 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, etcetera, etcetera, 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 other people just canceling AP math in California. Precisely. Precisely. And then and then the the, the, the rippling effect of no more AP math and no more SAT's is, you know, roro like, you know. Yeah. Fast forward 20. I brought back the don't know if you saw this week I brought back SAT's as a qualifier after they paused it. I think a lot of people are starting to realize this is a a road to nowhere. Sax. What do you think is to chamotte? 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 gotta differentiate between high school and low skill immigration, like what you called the point system. I mean, if you look at who's founding companies in Silicon Valley, something like 40% of startups have an immigrant cofounder. 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, who's willing to say that? Well, you could just say 3 buckets. You know, here's people who need amnesty, right, because they're being prosecuted and 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 is so great? OK you know, each of those buckets is going to 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 shouldn't be, you know, we're 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 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 loskill let in more high school people and 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 etcetera, etcetera. And that's somewhat controversial, but I think we can all agree the most controversial bucket. Our 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, O 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 be a very large imbalance that our economy and our country cannot really recover from. You know what? It's you you sparked 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 looked 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 ALS 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. The 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. There was a stat in this article as an example in the county of Los Angeles. There are now in the last 20 years we've seen a 50% reduction in the birth rate in LA. From 150,000 births a 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 we need to figure out how to solve this problem because it's it's it's a, it's a, it really impacts GDP. It impacts all these other issues that Freebook 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 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 free Brooks said are really well defined in history. If you go back thousands 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 taxed. Sir, 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 they're there are more productive ways to, to, to solve these problems. Well, that's where the wealth tax that was floated, which seems DOA already, but this concept of everybody having who's over $100 million having to assess while they're worth and give 20% back minimum each year. Uh, is that dividing of the pie? And maybe they could 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, to compensate for the damage you're creating to the environment. These are not controversial ideas. The problem is that, you know, what Zach 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. And it then, so, for example, you know, why does the administration have to write this law, potential law or proposal in a way that's 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 DOA within 8 minutes of it being announced, Manchin says. This is dead. What is the point of that theater? It's virtual signaling, aren't you a donor? You should know, right? What would they tell you? I mean, what's the Democratic Party saying? I think 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 like. It's like throwing a cat a ball of yarn. It seems like that that populist, progressive left is becoming a bigger base than it was historically. In the Democratic Party it is. I'm not sure how big it is, but in the Democratic Party, yeah, look, it's where all the energy is, the darker party, it's where a lot of the donors are. That yeah, that is who's driving the agenda and the Democratic Party today. That is why the Democrats are gonna get smacked in November. Read Roy to Shari's sub stack. 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 the sheriff predictions coming true. And he recently, in 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 + 12? I mean, they're going to have a huge, I think, wave in November. You know, you gotta remember that professionals, meaning college educated voters, are only about 1/3 of the electorate. I think about 37% and then the other 63% are working class. The working class does not like this extreme social, cultural, progressive agenda. They don't like seeing their statues ripped 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 going 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 went three landslide elections, 19801984. 88 and then, and you know, the Democrats nominate these like horrible candidates. Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Dukakis, and then who comes along? Bill Clinton. On the Greeks, easy on the Greeks. Dukakis was pretty great. OK, 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 Dark Eyed 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 his but his image at that time was that he was pretty centrist. He was so so 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 who could drag them back to the center. Now listen, I mean all we have right now are foreshadowings of this. We have the Youngkin victory last year. We have the fact those 3 school board members, San Francisco got kicked out. You know, we'll see what happens to chase Boudin on June 7th. 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 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 in immigration is just such an easy one. And and courting 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 jakal. They do not want unlimited number of immigrants coming. They want to limit it, but they would like to see their family member 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. Minister for them. Reasonable. I'm telling you that. It's not. It's not like what you think. The the 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, OK, 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. Alright, let's get into some other things happening in the market. SC is proposing a new set of rules to regulate spacks. I wonder if anybody here can chime in on this. Well, I wrote who knows about what? I wrote a I wrote an editorial in Bloomberg basically a year ago. Spelling out a bunch of new regulations that I thought the FCC 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 a 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 2nd. 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. But generally speaking, what do you think happens in the SPAC space? We had 600 of them. It's gonna start this. It's gonna consolidate to the ten 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 IPO business? No, it just meant that the 95 small banks that did IPO's went away and it consolidated to six. And the league tables, you know, just churned between the six JPMorgan one years the top, you know, then it's Morgan Stanley, then it's Goldman Sachs, then it's BA, then its Credit Suisse. Similarly, sparks will consolidate around six or seven players and you know, we'll do most of the business. What do you think freeberg of this new SEC announcement that they're considering climate disclosures for public traded? But he's 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 what 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 specs and then I'll answer that question. You know, if you read the comment, 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 in filings by specs. 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 S1 need to be kind of factually referenced referenceable. And that's not true when it comes to forecast and that's why they're not included in this ones and in an IPO, but in aspect the appeal. As you can tell, you're forward-looking forecast, paint the rosy picture like you would for a startup and then theoretically the investor should make an assessment of the the risk and the upside and the and the objectives of the business is saying they're going to 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 we're not. Achieved and that's the big motivation here. So the real fundamental question with respect to China'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 businesses forward-looking prospects? Or should we simply keep all forward-looking prospects or you know forecasts like this, 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 spacks have kind of forced them 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 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 would be for great. All of that stuff, Jason, is in the spirit of disclosure and transparency. I just wish they would have done you you still think it's important to have forward-looking statements and needs inspected. I mean if that ends up becoming you know the the cornerstone of this proposed regulation, I don't think it's. 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 middle men serves a market better, or having a combination of some middle men 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 debt asset, that unproductive asset, and put it directly into the hands of somebody who will make it productive. I'm gonna, you know, build some oil fields. I'm going to make a battery factory. Battery factory. I'm going to make shoes. Yeah, 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 wanna drive. A car. And if you want to drive a big car called the truck, you have to get a different task. So you want to drive a motorcycle side and take that. By the way, Jason, I just wonder why not have it? Probably 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. Well, now when we go public, have to create these disclosures around scope one, scope two, scope 3 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'll wind its way in, meander its way through the courts. It'll take years. There will 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 win trial experts win the lawyers, win lobbyists, lobbyists. 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 borne 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 borne 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 burned 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 that 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 that, 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, cancer. I mean, so that's an argument. 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 have been talking, 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 for climate. Yeah, pretty controversial sex. 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 OK, I'll ask both carbon. Should corporations be responsible for the downstream carbon from their customers and the upstream inputs, at least disclosure plus side? Who's ultimately going to have to pay for that? Or is this? The answer to the former is yes. The answer to the latter is if you you know, there's a there's a term **** in, **** out 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 the down in your on 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 freeberg or not? You agree, disagree or agree with drama? No, no, I agree it should be recorded. I'm saying, OK, it's not possible. I'm saying the only winners in this will be the consultants. You agree with that? 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. 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 had 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 the just the very very simple question. Just that well when it came to Volkswagen, a leaker leaked the information and and that's and the press got on it and and that's how it was regulated. It was it was in the review. Mira. That's how Volkswagen got busted there was we're gonna we're gonna fix it. Changed a bunch of whistleblowers. I mean that's what happened also within RJR Nabisco and the cigarettes as well. The movie once 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. We have a big tax on tax on cigarettes. Yeah, sure. But to lower consumption. Yeah. Yeah, but we don't, you know, we don't force these companies to basically subsidized a portion of our health care 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 I the measurement can't be bad, but I guess it's what you're saying. The general 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 gonna put that, you have to have one of these companies put the sensors on your factory and Ernst and young have to audit it. It's a small oddity of 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 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 than 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. OK, 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 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 my point is that the 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 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 2 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. Jamod I proposed. 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, AR15 and a car and go speeding down the highway. But they're not allowed to invest in gopuff. Yeah, no, they're too. They're not sophisticated. You can shoot the bullets in the air while you're going down the road that's 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 gotta take a 8 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 open in a market, but they are, but they are not affected by secondary shares of stripe. No, they're just yes. And so there's the stupidity of it. Well, here's the other thing. You can have two different things. You have the tests and you know the person's 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 have you made, I don't know, 150,000 in the last two years? You made 75,000 a year. OK, you could put 15,000 of them. Take another one. 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'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 till the cows come home, but you can't buy a scratch off ticket in a star. Makes no sense. Alright, so actually been quiet in all of this. I know that you hate the environment and regulation with your thoughts. I'm not. I'm not. I'm just not deep in this topic, so I don't wanna weigh in. Alright, well, here's one you are deep in Facebook hired a GOP lobbying firm to smear Tik T.O.K, according to The Washington Post. Taylor Lorenz. He said this is there's something you're deep and it's the GOP. Before that, you said you said he's like into destroy the environment or something. Yeah. No, he doesn't care about the environment. So I mean, sex is never going to go into the forest and even go near a tree. He doesn't go outside. He's barely look at him. Sealed bedroom to his family. He closed the curtains. He's like, ohh beautiful view of the sky, ohh nature. Like the Pope. His car has one of these things. He doesn't even have to sit down. It's just think clothes. He stands up his bulletproof glass, you know, he just waves. As he goes by exact have you taken? Outside, sometimes I'd much prefer going to an outdoor shooting range than an indoor shooting range. So so you're going shooting, you send an outdoor one. So this is a really crazy story. Teller runs broke it uh, Facebook paid the GOP lobbying firm? Yeah actually I had her on the show. Here is the excerpted from the internal targeted victory e-mail obtained by The Washington Post quote get the message out that while Meta Facebook is currently a punching bag, Tik T.O.K is the real threat, especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 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 are member of Congress. Be focused. Uh, 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? Tik T.O.K here. I think we all agree. 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 the. They could be right about this, but doing a dirty tactic, I think Tik T.O.K should be banned. It's a dirty trick in a way for them to deflect attention from the cells 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 what you don't you think Tik T.O.K should be allowed in the United States? Really? I don't know about that, but I I just think that what do you think about it for problems people have with Facebook, they should have them like 10X with Tik T.O.K. That's kind of my point. But that 1000% in agreement on this Tik T.O.K is run by a country that we wondered do they care about the data and then they literally passed the law. If you want to run your company, the government has to have the data I have fallen into. The tick tock rabbit hole and I would like to come clean. Ohh with you guys. There's some there's something on Tik T.O.K called Sandwich Bros what are these guys? These 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. GUI cheese, I mean, no. Some of these ******* sandwiches these guys are making. Dude, I've watched an hour straight of sandwich toxic. Wait, here's the best part. So then there was 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, *** **** 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 yeah. Bacon. Avocado, bacon, bacon, bacon. Maybe some Pickles in there. Get a little. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing that I find. So chicken tikka masala burrito. That's probably my watch one. And the guy made it from scratch. Like everything from scratch. I love that. And 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. Yeah, it's a lot of conflicted feelings. What does go around trying to program? And me with all the sandwich stuff. Maybe you're too. Then you need to sandwich will be. Maybe they're obesity. Be vegan. But that sandwich? Yuck. It looked horrible. I think this UG, they're trying to program shamah. No offense to get back, but yuck. That's what they want. They want you to get fat. What are you seeing on your tick tock feed right now, freedberg, 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 their algorithm? There are no freeberg. Exactly. 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? Tell me the best vegan sandwich you ever had. Like the best one? Like, is there one? That's sawdust? Quinoa, quinoa, cucumbers, there's a there's a great sandwich shop in Berkeley. You guys, you know, none of you. I don't think ever go to Berkeley, but I live in Palo Alto. Berkeley is. You get one ubered over to you. What? What? What is it? What's in it? Bocado, sprouts. Sprouts. I don't like. There's one I like that's got the the the feta cheese. Like the really good, sharp, salty feta cheese. Yeah. OK, so feta cheese is actually voted one of the best sandwich shops in California, I think. Yeah. Yeah, really good. No, I made myself a Tempe avocado sandwich for lunch today. Oh yeah, that's that's fantastic. You know, I was going to do that myself, but instead I just decided to slam my hand with a hammer because it's more enjoyable. She's like, smash my hand bag. Ah, I had crab ravioli. Ohh, wonderful. Wonderful. This is absolutely great. You murdered those crabs. Delicious. OK, but let's just go around the horn. Should yes or no Tik T.O.K be banned? Should a Chinese company be allowed to have a social network at scale in the United States? Yes or no? Freedberg. 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. OK, got it. We know where you stand, sax. Well, I I want. I'd want to know that they're not, that it's not spyware. Right. So, yeah, if it's spyware, that's illegal. If it's illegal, stop it. But, like, OK, 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. Other side of things being that India has banned. Yeah, they banned it. They're smart. Indian, yeah. Are smart and pragmatic. I just think it's a slip. I think it's a, it's a slippery slope because then you end up seeing China ban iPhones and I mean, you know, the whole thing kind of. We're already banned. They already banned Twitter Facebook and Instagram in their country. They don't allow us. And there's still a lot, there's, there's a big consumer market in China for US goods and services, and it just seems like it's very slow. 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. 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 Tik T.O.K. 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 Mao kind of range, monthly active users range. You do have to 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 should just be a general expectation. For any product. Because, look, let's let's be honest and and 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 they have. Twitter had it. They had two people from the Kingdom were right there. So. So my point is I think that that these things are probably true, right? Like in the 10s of thousands of employees that work in big Tech, there's probably at least five or ten of these people. Work on behalf of foreign governments. 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 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 free bird. A couple of weeks ago. You outline the the potential of famines caused by. Putin's insane, you know, war in Ukraine. That's not what I said, but sure, OK. Highlighted the framing, framing the way I want. But you commented on the possible famine caused by Putin's insane war. Again, not what I said, but yeah, yeah. Well, let's go to famine before sax loses his mind about Biden's. Quote of regime change, which I'll let you end on. So actually 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 with famine. So can you unpack that for us? I, I will tell you that we are already seeing a lot of scrambling happening for. A 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. 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 up 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 gonna put a couple of links in here and these links. Uh, Nick, are not in order with respect to what I'll say, but I'll, you know, 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 drones might blow them up. And I mean, look, you're in the middle of a war zone if 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. 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. The production has gone up and so as a result we're seeing fertilizer prices shoot up. And in a lot of countries, what I 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 Schnitkey. Gary is B AG economist. He's like the number one AG economist in the world. He's at University of 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 and Illinois. Illinois is the, you know, largest corn producing state in the US and a critical supplier of 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. Uh, you know, these, these, these are not assuming rent. The problem is when you factor in the cost of rent, the average rent in Illinois $227.00. So a lot of farmers in Illinois rent their land about half to. 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 is 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 it's going to be less production over the next year. That means famine hits US in a year. That's a big problem. Sachs wants to know why they don't just use DoorDash or Ubereats. He's 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. Yeah, there's there's, you know, some left. He's like, everybody get out of the way. He's gonna do his eyeball. He's about to play. I shall clear out. Alright, here we go. 21 David go. Alright, here we go. So right as we got off air and I was defending. Hey listen your your mind reading Biden? He's never said regime change. You got to give him some credit here. You're you're you're taking Mad Men. Putin's. You know, uh 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 walked this back, but go ahead and take your victory lap, sacks. Oh my God. Am I getting an apology here from Jackal, too? Not an apology. I. You know, I at the time, I was right, but I didn't. You said I was 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. That's 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 it that. A Kinsley gaffe, a kinsley gaffe. The New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, who said a gaffe in Washington is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. That's what Biden did. He accidentally told the truth about what the administration's policy has been. 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. Holly Bennett from Israel. Spin 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. Right. And and the problem with that is, is very dangerous. I mean just look at what freeberg just said about the food insecurity that's causing it is very dangerous for us to protract this conflict so that that, you know, famine could be worse, the war could spread, it could degenerate, we could 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 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 are upset at the end of the day were these, like, Neo Cons. Like, no, no, what Biden said is true. We should try and topple Putin. Yeah, theoretically he should go, but not right. Right now. It's like, which is which is valid. And that was actually very clarifying for U.S. policy because, yeah, regime change should not be our goal. I think, I think the, I think the, the administration said something the effect of he was speaking as a man, not as a president. I mean, let's, I mean, can we be honest about Biden? I mean they they don't know what he's going to 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 gaffe. It's a huge mistake. You we're 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 2 crazy grandpas. One that wants to put the USSR back together and one that wants to be the person who ousted 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 he spent trillions and we got nothing out of it. You're a piece, Nick. We like it. I'm just, I don't see pieces. I'm a realist. 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 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. For clearly for oil and energy Afghanistan, I mean, those were about oil. That was our final stand. What were we doing? They're trying to build a new state, a new new sort of democracy in Afghanistan. They were was revenge for 911 laden? Yeah. That was legitimate. That was a legitimate reason to go there. Which was to get Osama bin Laden. That was the just cause wack. But you know what? Once and and and you know what? We should have got him at Tora Bora instead of outsourcing solution to the locals. That was a total screw up. Huge mistake. Once that job was done, we should have been out of there. Out of there. Absolutely. What a what a misadventure. Yeah what do we have any do you have any thoughts sacks on like the end game here because it does seem like Putin is getting exhausted and maybe he he gets the win. I think we know these concessions gonna is gonna be it's it's basically Ukraine's going to 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. It. That's a fait accompli. It happened in 2014. And then the last part is that 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't agree. Well, 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 gonna end in, is it gonna end in under 60? Suggested sacks suggested 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, OK, let's give this a shot. But yeah, if you're, if you could achieve a ceasefire, if you could get a ceasefire here, we're terrible. End this. Yeah. If you could get a ceasefire, have the UN observers come in, administered an election. Crimea. There's no doubt which way Crimea would go. I don't know what would happen in Luhansk or Dinettes. 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 while crazy idea. I mean, it's gotta end. I mean, it's gotta end in month two. This is becoming super damaging for Putin, right? I mean, these economic sanctions. Philosophy you see giving, there is a story that was on MSN. It's like 837. Did you really? Yeah, come on. Putin in Russia is 83%. His approval ratings have gone up. We thought now you could say it's fake or whatever, but apparently this is a reasonably decent polling operation. This is a poll by Levada Center and Independent pollster in Moscow. Apparently his polling, his poll numbers were 69%. In 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 jakal. They're national pastime. You ever read dust? Dust freeski? Yeah. No, never. I don't like to read war and peace. Actually, I would much rather watch the next Marvel movie or a kurzawa film I am not interested in. Yeah, listen, my whole speech was about the fact that impression primacy could have prevented this situation last year. That's not to say that we caused it. It was. It's Putin's decision to invade. It's his war. The bloodshed is on him. However, more effective diplomacy could have diffused the situation a year ago, and we totally blew it. We just totally blew it. And this is gonna 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 recession, because this is the straw that breaks, breaks the camels back. It voters are going to take 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 Luckey 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 and just as a general concept, I have a theme I was just going to float by y'all think a lot of the talks and a lot of the the zeitgeist is around the problem. 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, free break. If you can give a maybe a little talk. Chamath, David. I would be great if the four besties gave a little 15 minute solo talk. We can have a lot of these solo talks. Position. Here's what I'm solving for. And then conversations about moving forward. Do you know Dalio? You should get Dalio. I think he'd be great. I don't know. And Captain Wood looks like, I think Kathy Woods coming too, by the way, there's a new video that Dalia just put out, which is like the 45 minute animated documentary version of his book. And it really good. I watched it. I haven't watched it to read the book and 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 and then ordered the book. Yeah, I thought it was really. Are 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. YouTube thing is just superb. It's very accessible. I mean, and incredibly, incredibly good. Highly recommend. Yeah. I mean, look, I I agree with you. I agree with you. One of you guys get Dalio on the thing. Let's get him. Yeah. Dalia, reach out. I know. We know. You're listening. So, considering the question to ask, DOLIO is listening. I think he is, actually. I think it's fan of the show. I think the question to ask DOLIO is how do you revitalize a late stage empire? That's right. That's good. That is the question. Question? Can it be the well? No. Can it be done? I think it's the real question. All in summit, May 15, 1617. Candy 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, 1617, the conference is the 16th and 17th, 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 bow 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 for that. 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 15th. That's going to be when we tell everybody if they're officially in or out. But we have been increasing the ratio. It 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 going to be a brown. It's going to be diversity here. It's diversity equals power sex. I hope there's diversity of ideas too. Yeah. OK, well, there you have it, folks. For the Rain Man, David Sachs. Sultan of science. And wait to see one 1/3 of my besties tonight. Thanks a lot, guys. Yeah, I'm showing up. I mean, you gotta see if you're you're the 1 / 3. Well, I mean, these guys, you gotta remember, you can, these guys would have to, you could their drivers translator. But these guys would have to have their drivers, Nick, keep 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 the drunken $5000 worth of your wine. It's a it's a little bit overbearing. What are you gonna for tonight? It'll be some really good stuff. Probably some like older Sasaki. I'm thinking 80 fives, but freeberg, if you come, I can also make some death pain. The best tempeh and sprout ravioli you've ever had. You it's good for the family. It's good for the planet. It's good for the animal. What is Tempe? It's soybean fermented soybeans. Delicious. You know what? Can I can I tell you what I what? I think? Yuck. Yuck. But I mean, in fairness, your chef always makes something exceptional. For Freiburg, when it comes to dinner, it's always you're always a generous host and your chef is always exceptional. Gonna get your get saxes driver and come down. Come September, help zambelli up the Miranda grabbed me. Free burgers, come. Come, come. Just get a driver. Sax. When do you land? Late, late tonight. I'm go on tilt. Come on, tilt. Well, no, no chips on till like 3:00 AM or something. Ohh, 3:00 AM. My God, **** that. The game's over by then. Alright. See you later, besties. Love you guys. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye bye bye. Back at you. Let your winners ride Rain Man David Sack. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. I'm going. Besties are. My dog's driveway. Ohh man. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge order because they're all just useless. It's like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release some out there. Beat your feet. We need to get merchants. I'm going.