SPEAKER_02: We had a nice dinner. Chamath hosted a little, and we played a little bit of the cards and there's this new kid there. Oh, big shout out to S***, co-founder of S***, great guy. I'm like, S***, how do you wind up here at the game? And he's sitting here, you know, having a beautiful dinner with us. And he's like, well, and then Chamath goes, and he points to Hellmuth. Hellmuth found a billionaire. When Hellmuth finds a billionaire, what happens? He's tied to the hip. He has like a billionaire bromance. He's a billionaire wrangler.
SPEAKER_04: Hellmuth is like one of those truffle dogs in, like, you know, Alba in Italy. You know, you send him out into the woods. He forages around. He finds it. He finds a truffle, just digs it out.
SPEAKER_02: And that's it. It's like he then he follows like a dog. He follows a billionaire around. Tail wagging, tail wagging,
SPEAKER_04: waiting for his owner to show up and pick this little billionaire off the ground. Hey, here's another one.
SPEAKER_02: Look, daddy, see?
SPEAKER_04: I found another billionaire. Hellmuth is the most insecure person, but he's such a beautiful human being. I mean, it's a great human. It's like it's like the tale of two people. He really is a walking case of schizophrenia and narcissism. Just I mean, that's Chamath saying that.
SPEAKER_00: Let your winners ride. Rain Man David Satt. We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Hey, everybody.
SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All In Podcast with us again, the new chairman and majority shareholder of Laura Piana, Chamath Palihapitiya and the Viceroy of veganism.
SPEAKER_04: Do you like my thin cashmere Gillette that I'm wearing?
SPEAKER_02: Gillette? Do you mean polo? No, Gillette. Oh, Gillette. Okay. Magnifique. Also with us the Viceroy of veganism, the Sultan of Science, David Freiberg, and the regent of the right wing.
SPEAKER_04: David Sachs, the Viceroy of vegans.
SPEAKER_02: Wow. Viceroy of vegans. It came to me in the shower today. I was like, you know, he needs a new one. I switched my background guys.
SPEAKER_04: Do you like it? I just flipped the camera to look the other way just to mix it up. Now we can see your chef picking the vegetables in your garden.
SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah, but before you used to see him pick the herbs.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, the herbs are on this side. Yeah, now you see how you can see the veggies. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah. Oh, there's the sous chef. Okay, there's the prep chef. And there's the head chef. Okay, yes. Everybody showed up today. Okay, great. You know, you seem to enjoy the food, Jason, every time you talk.
SPEAKER_04: But you are always eating when you're at my house. You're always eating. Who's the first RSVP after Phil?
SPEAKER_02: He's eating, he's sending his notes to the kitchen.
SPEAKER_01: Could you just do this a little differently? I do give notes. I do. I do.
SPEAKER_02: Usually positive ones. It's like three out of four positive notes. You know, when I flew with Chamath a few weeks ago, the chef
SPEAKER_03: made gluten free Nutella crepes with homemade Nutella. I mean, it was like the most extraordinary breakfast experience. That Nutella has no sugar.
SPEAKER_04: It's incredible. It's basically all protein fat, and it's sweetened with monk flour sugar. So delicious that they also kill some albino seals.
SPEAKER_02: I've not brought a chef on on the plane with me.
SPEAKER_01: But I think in fairness, your plane's not that big. Yeah, I mean, you've got a small kitchen.
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if a Cessna 142 can finish it.
SPEAKER_01: I'm feeling plane shamed.
SPEAKER_02: I just got to business select on Southwest. So I'm feeling pretty good about myself right now. Alright, everybody, let's get started. A lot of topics people want to talk about. Do you want to start with Rogan or the Canadian truckers? I think Rogan probably leads into the truckers. No,
SPEAKER_04: it might in fact lead into the truckers.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so we covered Rogan and Spotify and Episode 66 a whole bunch since that time. A video surfaced on Saturday, with Joe Rogan repeatedly saying a well the n word and it's pretty rough to watch and he did a mea copa an apology. And overall now Spotify has taken down 70 episodes of his podcast. You know, that's out of over 1000
SPEAKER_04: it was like 113. That's the that's the that's what I saw on Twitter. There's 113 to maybe 70 had the n word but 113. Correct. I stand corrected 110 have been taken down.
SPEAKER_02: I was texting with socks. It's like it's like almost 6% of all
SPEAKER_04: of his episodes they took down. Yeah, so something like that. Yeah, but not all of them were because of that language. No,
SPEAKER_01: that's what I'm saying. But 6% were taken down 6% taken down in
SPEAKER_02: his apology. He said, obviously, he was wrong to use that word for the decade or so. But he pointed out that he did not use it towards a person as a slur but was talking about it more in studying or discussing the n word versus mentioned. Is that
SPEAKER_04: right? Is that distinction? Yeah, or use versus quoting?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. So he said it was taken out of context apologized. He
SPEAKER_02: also made a joke that he immediately said, Oh my god, that's pretty racist. I shouldn't have told that joke, where he compared going to see Planet of the Apes in an all black theater in Philly saying he was in Africa. On Sunday, Daniel X sent a memo to Spotify employees claiming he is not the publisher of the Joe Rogan show. Something I completely dispute. We'll talk about that in a moment. Thoughts on the latest brew ha ha and do we think that Spotify will be able to handle this? What seeming seems to have died down over the last couple of days, and Rogan is now joking about it in his comedy. You know engagements at small comedy clubs. What do you think sex is Joe Rogan gonna weather the storm is Spotify gonna stick with him? Well, okay. So as of the last episode of the all in
SPEAKER_01: pod, they were trying to cancel Rogan for misinformation. And for the reasons we discussed that basically failed because, you know, so many of the times something starts with misinformation eventually becomes the truth. Rogan seemed like a guy who actually just wants to present both sides present a balanced viewpoint. In any event, that whole attempt to cancel and based on misinformation was fizzling out. And then lo and behold, this 22 second clip comes out, and they escalate the charges to racism. If you kind of look at, you know, who's behind this clip, it's pretty clear that it was a democratic super PAC put this together and sort of astroturfed it as a viral video. This is part of an organized attempt to cancel Rogan. Now, as to the merits of the sort of racism accusation against him. I mean, look, let me say that I don't think any body, especially a public figure should be using this kind of language. You know, in this day and age, even if you're just sort of quoting something or mentioning it, you know, he should have he should he should have known better. However, there are also similar clips that are now circulating of Joe Biden doing the same thing using this type of like incredibly incendiary language and like a brazen almost offhanded way. You've got clips of Howard Stern. Wait, you're saying brazen and he said it exactly the same way
SPEAKER_02: as Joe I would say maybe in a cavalier way. He's he's been let me come
SPEAKER_01: back. So you have you have Biden doing it, you've got Howard Stern doing it. So what is the difference? I mean, the the reality here is that we used to in our culture have a distinction between the use of this type of language as an epithet, which was never okay. Or using it. You were referencing it, you might have been quoting it, you might have been quoting a rap song, you might have been quoting a Dave Chappelle routine, you might be reading from a book that you might have been telling a story in which somebody else has said it, you're merely trying to relay what happened. The rules today are that's not an excuse. You can't say it. But the truth is that 10 years ago, 20 years ago, the rules were a little different. That's why Biden said it. That's why Howard Stern has these episodes. And I think it's why Rogan had said it. And I think it's a little bit disingenuous for people to now try and apply the new rules to this old language. And they're doing it very selectively, because they're not trying to cancel these other people who said these things under the old rules. They're trying to cancel Rogan. So I think what you're seeing here is selective cancellation outrage, selective application of these new language rules for the purpose of getting Rogan canceled. Why? For the same reasons we were talking about two weeks ago, or last week, which is he's an outsider, he's an independent voice, he bucks the establishment, he doesn't present the Orthodox view on COVID. And that's frankly why they want to cancel him. Freeburg. I'm just looking at the Howard Stern quote. So in 1993,
SPEAKER_03: Howard Stern, dressed in blackface and use the N word in a skit he did, mimicking Ted Danson talking about whoopee Goldberg, something. And he said, I'll be the first to admit I won't go back and watch those old shows. It's like, who is that guy? But that was my shtick. It's what I did. And I own it. I don't think I got embraced by Nazi groups and hate groups. They seem to think I was against them, too. So I think, you know, Sax is probably right. I mean, Howard Stern's a very different character today. You know, I think the question of if Howard Stern acted that way today, would cancel culture kind of mob him? The answer is probably yes. But I think it's because, you know, Rogan is out here, probably picking a bone with everyone. You know, he's kind of, there's no alignment, there's no tribal behavior with Rogan, right? He doesn't, he's been pretty public about being very liberal. He's been very public about being conservative in some ways. And I don't think he kind of aligns himself strongly with anyone. And so he is a threat to everyone. He's got a huge following. And you know, he speaks openly and honestly, in a way that that is threatening. Certainly his behavior was inexcusable and has been inexcusable. But there are others right. And so it's an important question, which is why him why now? It's also
SPEAKER_02: interesting with that Ted Danson, he was dating whoopee Goldberg at the time, I believe, and Ted Danson was there was a there was a roast of whoopee Goldberg at the Friars Club, Ted Danson dressed in blackface, I think, which will be Goldberg
SPEAKER_02: was in Ted Danson dressed in didn't Howard dress and then
SPEAKER_02: Howard did a send up of that. Anyway, the point is the more the standard has changed significantly. Leslie chock chumath chime in my book of the year, last year was this book
SPEAKER_04: wanting by this author Luke Burgess. He wrote something on substack. I'll send you guys a link, you can put it in here. But he said, he said the following, he said, as we regress to a superstitious, quasi pagan world of witch burning, civil discourse will be replaced with superstition and scapegoating. And he was talking about Rogan, I think that the the thing that I was the most proud of in this whole thing was Daniel Ek. I mean, disclosure, he's a friend of mine. So maybe this is biased. However, I think that Spotify had business principles. And this was similar to what Brian Armstrong did a Coinbase, I think they stuck to those principles. They made a well reasoned decision that they explained to their employees and shareholders. And then they did the most important thing that Sachs has always been saying around free speech, which was which is more speech. And so what Spotify said, when they explained the decision to not deplatform Joe Rogan, was that they would take the exact equivalent economic value of what they were paying them him $100 million, and invested in underrepresented historically underrepresented groups to tell their stories to tell, you know, to make their music, etc. And so effectively doubling, you know, the universe of that kind of content. And so I think if the if people are really willing to listen, I think what we should take away from this is, here's a really clear eyed example of the solution to free speech, which is just to get more of it on your platform, to have the right disclosures and disclaimers. And then for, you know, people to go along with their lives so that they can then choose. And I think that that's, that was the that was the one positive outcome that that I saw from this entire episode. The rest of it was another attempt at, you know, being morally absolutist and, you know, scapegoating. And then the that was before obviously, the the n word thing, and then the n word thing just brought to light that we live in a very different age where the rules have changed. And I think the open question is, you know, if you're going to judge people for past behaviors on current rules, are we allowed to do it selectively? Or does it apply to everybody? And I think that, you know, this is why I think, you know, we saw people like David Simon, you know, came out and David Simon was very, you know, basically excoriated Joe Rogan, but then David Simon wrote the wire, you know, and if you if you watch the wire, which is a, you know, an incredible piece of television that people point to all the time is one of probably the greatest shows on television. You know, every probably, you know, 13th or 14th word was the n word. Yeah, I
SPEAKER_02: have, like two observations here. And then I'll get to you Saxony, if some of you want to chime in on, I always like to think about intent. And then I like to look at the apology and think, is this like sincere or not? And when you look at the intent, does anybody actually think Joe Rogan is a racist? And I think it's pretty clear. He's not from all of the behavior collectively in his life. And then you look at the apology. I thought I felt it was incredibly sincere. And there were many learning moments in it. And he's a comedian, which is kind of this other space where we we ask comedians to make us laugh and make us feel uncomfortable. And now we're also asking them to live by a standard that changes every year and words come on and off the allowable list. Would anybody hear? Does anybody here actually think or anybody listening to me think Joe Rogan is actually racist? I think the answer is I don't think anybody thinks that and then number two, I, I felt the apology was incredibly thoughtful. And well done. Sax, what are your thoughts?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I agree. I agree with those things. Nobody was accusing Joe Rogan of racism until the cancellation mob started throwing stones and the misinformation stones didn't work. So then they escalated to racism. I think the generalized thing is just take take the context out
SPEAKER_04: of Rogan for a second. I think that the the formula if I can point to this, of cancel culture is now I think pretty well understood, which is if you don't like somebody, you need to throw some ism label on them until that ism label sticks. And eventually you will find it ism label. But the thing that this cancel culture doesn't appreciate is everybody has some ism that that can be attached to them. Yeah. Now some isms are worse than others, obviously. But you know, we're all infallible, right? I go back to like, if you want to quote the Bible, right, there's a, there's a beautiful passage into the Bible, the book of john, and the whole thing and you guys have heard this quote many times before, but let me just give you the setup. So in the law of the land back then, adultery was illegal, but only for the woman. Right. And so there's a very famous example of a woman who was accused of adultery. And, you know, she was about to be stoned to death, which was essentially the punishment. And Jesus basically draws a line and says, you know, he who is without sin should cast that first stone. And nobody does it de escalates that conflict and everybody leaves, right. And there's a very famous essay that René Girard wrote that basically compared that to it to a different example, in a more paganist context where people did stone people. The idea of all of this is that there's some amount of, you know, sin that everybody carries. And I think that at some point, cancel cultural will realize that you have to de escalate. And you have to see through some of this noise, you have to have some point of moral resolution to really move on. Because this sort of like fatalistic judgment doesn't work anymore. So whoever people wanted to cancel Rogan, they must be very frustrated today, because for all intents and purposes, he got off the hook. Maybe try again in the future with some other ism, he may just as well get off the hook in the future, right. So what what is the real solution? The real solution is to figure out how to de escalate and actually have a conversation about the things that he's doing that really upset you. And that is still not what's happening. And a path perhaps to resolution. Let's get free
SPEAKER_02: Bergen and then you sex freeburg. I'll say two things.
SPEAKER_03: One, I think I once sat next to Tony Blair for dinner. You know, he was the prime minister of the UK. And he told me it was a really funny conversation because he was talking about his youth. And he's like, if there were iPhones when I was young, I would not have ever been elected to public office. Like, you know, he was in a rock band. He I don't know if you guys know his history, but you know, he was pretty freewheeling kind of guy. And his point was really broader than that it was that, you know, all of us have something that people can look to us for and use against us in some way. But I think what's really important with this Joe Rogan thing, and I think the bigger picture for me, dissenting voices and critical voices and outspoken voices are extremely important in the discourse that makes society progress. It is not a good society when people that have dissenting of voices or offensive voices are shut down. Society has a better opportunity to chart a new course and to identify new paths, sometimes when the dissenting voice is wrong, and sometimes when it is right. But in both cases, it is important to have that dissenting voice because it allows us to have the dialogue that allows us collectively to figure out what is wrong, and what is right. And so this notion of cancel culture and the way that people like Joe Rogan are and have been attacked for things that they have said in the past or do say today, I think is really contrary to the opportunity that the United States presents with this, you know, founding principle of freedom of speech. Sachs. Yeah, so I agree with that. I want to build on what
SPEAKER_01: Chama said, with the Renee Gerard analysis of this. I mean, what we're seeing here is the modern day equivalent of a primitive, you know, archaic stoning ritual. This is a modern day virtual stoning, in which we're not killing somebody, but we're trying to kill their digital avatar. I mean, we're basically trying to remove and destroy their online presence. I mean, that was really the goal here. And the mechanics of this thing, it only works to the extent that people are unaware of the mechanism of the scapegoating. As soon as they become aware that this person's being targeted selectively as a scapegoat, it stops working. And that was the situation we were in last week, where you had, you know, Neil Young through the first, he cast the first stone, despite being guilty of misinformation many times himself, he's got like a weird history of saying weird things about GMOs and gay people and some of the stuff got dredged back up. And I think that was fair, because let he who is without misinformation cast his first stone. And then he got some of his friends, you know, the these aging, you know, rockers like Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills and Nash to throw the next stones. And then the media got in on this and CNN and MSNBC, they were throwing stones. And it was all motivated by the fact that Rogan is simply does not refuse, he refuses to parrot their orthodoxy because, you know, we can see people like Howard Stern, who I like Stern, okay, but today, Howard Stern has become a full fledged COVID hysteric. I mean, he is fully on board with the COVID restrictions and mandates and hysteria. That's why he gets diplomatic immunity to this. So this whole the whole scapegoating ritual around Rogan was about to fail last week. And that's why they escalated is because they saw first of all, Rogan was getting away. And then second, our ability to to run these sorts of like witch hunts, if people start to reject that we lose all of our power. And so that's why this thing escalated into the most sensitive area that we have in our society, this language around race is very hurtful, these hurtful epithets. And these people are playing games with that with with that type of language. And it's very destructive. And but I think people are seeing through it, you know, I really agree with this. I think like the the scapegoating
SPEAKER_04: action as a way to resolve things is losing its effectiveness increasingly, it did work online for some amount of time early on. And David, you're exactly right. It's when the mechanism of action was poorly understood. But now that everybody sees it, and people try to do it all the time, it just stops working. And it's not nearly as effective anymore.
SPEAKER_02: It's a burnt out tactic. You know, we see this in society, this marketing channels been overburnt. And everybody knows like, okay, I'm being marketed to and to give it some context for those people who are wondering, you heard Renee Girard, like three or four times here. He's a philosopher. And he taught at Stanford, he had a big impact on Peter Thiel. I don't know if Sax actually took any courses with him. And there's a book me Peter David, I mean, like, if you take courses with
SPEAKER_04: him, I never took any courses. But Peter told me about his ideas in
SPEAKER_01: college. And I read some of his books. Yeah,
SPEAKER_04: his books are incredible. I mean, he is one of the most powerful thinkers of the show. I mean, he's he passed away. It reminds me of Joseph Campbell, the power of meth,
SPEAKER_02: like they were really thinking about the sort of basic basic tenants of like human the human condition and how people behave. It's really worth double clicking on, I think, also interesting, in terms of forgiveness and blackface. Justin Trudeau has appeared no less than three times in his youth in blackface. And it's not a joke. It's literally true. Justin Trudeau, like the reason why the the race ism
SPEAKER_04: label was planted on Rogan is because he's heterodox. The reason why that race ism label has not yet really been planted on Justin Trudeau is because he's Orthodox. He's quite he's quite part of the ingrained establishment. He comes from royalty. In Canada growing up, pure Trudeau, you know, we were we were liberals growing up, we were members of the Liberal Party, we'd made donations to the Liberal Party, you know, in our lore, there is no greater symbol than pure Trudeau, his father. And so when you're the son of somebody like that, you get an enormous amount of credit in your bank account that you're born with. And he was able to burn through so much of it by doing things that anybody else in any other situation may have been judged much more harshly for. And he wasn't. And he becomes Prime Minister, and then he's able to get reelected. But you know, his day of reckoning, reckoning is coming. Because he is revealing himself to be a part of this establishment with these views that are actually really uncomfortable and, you know, quite grotesque because of how judgmental they are of everybody else.
SPEAKER_02: And that's a great segue. And then just finally, sacks it. Correct me if I'm wrong here. Joe Rogan has voted Democrat his whole life. He holds largely democratic beliefs. He's for universal health care. He's pro trans, he's pro gay. He's supported Bernie Sanders. And he was a voting for Bernie Sanders. He's a really stupid person for the Democrats for democratic
SPEAKER_01: politicians like Biden to alienate because he's a hero to young people. He's a hero to the working class and his user fundamentally might seem more progressive. Yeah, they're 100%
SPEAKER_02: progressive. Yes. So it's stupid for them to do this. But it's
SPEAKER_01: also stupid for them to be alienating these truckers because Democrats were supposed to be the party of the working class. So let's pivot to that issue. Can I just say one last thing? I just want to reiterate this
SPEAKER_04: sacks because I just I just want to really give you a chance to say it again. You've always said and it's so true, the solution to free speech and to protect it is more speech. And I just want to say to Daniel lack and the team at Spotify, you guys must have been in a really difficult spot. But the decision to take that hundred million dollars to increase the funnel for other voices and historically underrepresented voices is so good. And I hope you guys get to the other side of it. But I thought it was a really, really, really good decision. Yeah, I mean, so on Ekken, the Spotify decision, I'm just I
SPEAKER_01: want to think to that. So I applaud them for not canceling Rogan, they must have been under enormous pressure to do so including from their own, you know, employees. The only thing I didn't like in next statement was when he talked about the user safety and how they need to do a better job of user safety. That's a concept that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I mean, Rogan is not sneaking into people's living rooms, and turning his show on and pressing play. If people don't like it, I'm talking about users. If users don't like the content, they don't have to listen. You don't have to click play. He's
SPEAKER_02: not literally turning the safety. Yeah, that was really bought into this idea of psychological safety that being
SPEAKER_01: confronted with any view you don't like is a threat to your safety. That is actually a threat to free speech because it's giving the most hysterical people in our culture, the ones who are most prone to being offended a veto over any idea that and speech they don't like. Yeah, if you're uncomfortable,
SPEAKER_02: you're unsafe, you could remove yourself from that situation. If it's a piece of media, you don't need to read every book. You don't need to see every Quentin Tarantino film. You don't need to listen to Joe Rogan or whatever else that you find offensive to you personally, I just don't think we should be
SPEAKER_01: feeding that idea that that psychological safety is a legitimate idea. We talked about this before with like, you know,
SPEAKER_02: people at work, if they say they feel unsafe, that's instantly like an HR, like, Oh, my God, you feel unsafe, yeah, right alert. HR requirement, if someone's
SPEAKER_01: creating a safety issue in the workplace, they have a legal requirement to remove that problem. That's why this language got started is it triggers the machinery of HR to remove people who are doing nothing wrong.
SPEAKER_02: Like sacks. Hey, listen, your work product is not good enough. You're like, I feel unsafe. Right? Okay, anyway, let's go to
SPEAKER_01: the truckers because I think we're beating this. I just want
SPEAKER_02: to have one final comment on Spotify. I think that I appreciate what Daniel did with $100 million. That's great. And I think it's great that he's supporting free speech and is in these holding his ground there. I know that's not easy. However, I think he's intellectually dishonest saying they're not the publisher of Joe Rogan, I have a three part test to see if you're a publisher. Do you pay for the content? Do you promote it? Do you produce it? If you do two or more of those? You're de facto a publisher in my mind. They pay a lot of money for Joe Rogan, they promote the heck out of him. And while they don't produce it in advance by picking the guests, they do have a production like veto on what content they put out there. And so if Netflix has to own the people they pay, even if they don't produce it and they promote, then Spotify does need to have the same standard and Disney and Netflix all are producers of content. Nobody would argue that and I believe Spotify is the producer Daniels not being on Final thought on this. Let me just defend Spotify for a
SPEAKER_04: second. Okay, you guys have been through this. I've been through this many times at several of my companies. But when you are in the middle of a firestorm, it's very rare that you can put out these, you know, press releases, where the pride of authorship is one person. And in many ways, you have to write these PR releases with all of these guardrails that that think about all of these future issues that may pop up over time. And so I understand that you guys had some issues with some of the words, I would just say, again, look at the action. And the action is, he didn't de platform someone, and then he doubled down on free speech. And he actually pointed $100 million firehose at people who can now tell their own stories on a platform that is the most important audio platform in the world. So I would say, you know, you know, that's kind of like same thing when I said, you know, I didn't particularly like sometimes, you know, Brian's essay, I could have written it better. But at the end of the day, what I saw through it, and I admitted this later, the substance of what Brian Armstrong did was incredibly profound, one of the most important things that actually happened in the last few years in Silicon Valley culture. And I would just say that I think that Daniel did something really powerful here. And I think that both Spotify and Coinbase deserve and the employees and the leaders there deserve a round of applause. I think it was a very, very hard decision. And I think they stuck to their guns, irrespective of what you believe they stuck to their guns. Canadian truckers are protesting as many of you know,
SPEAKER_02: vaccine mandates just breaking today Ontario's premier has declared a state of emergency for the entire province and Ottawa police have braced for 1000s of protesters to descend for the third consecutive weekend USA today, also reported the convoy could disrupt the Super Bowl by the state of the union etc. The protest has been self titled the freedom convoy and has been underway since January 29th 29th. It appears it has spanned several 1000 vehicles across the country and the truckers are blocking key roadways and bridges including the ambassador bridge. They're seeking an end to commit Canada's vaccine mandates. And it feels like this is now morphing into something a little bit wider than just vaccine mandates. Maybe it's becoming a Occupy Wall Street type of protest open to many people with many different things that they have grievances about a reporter from Barry Weiss is common sense newsletter slash media operation, wrote what the truckers want. Jason, you're you you just nailed it. I do think
SPEAKER_04: that this is actually Occupy Wall Street 2.0 Yeah, look, it it turned out just to get root some facts. So it's not just truckers. This is a broad based coalition of people across every single race and gender and age group in Canada that's participating in this thing. In fact, the Barry Weiss article, you know, she profiled men, women of all ages seeks, you know, whites, I mean, everybody blacks there is so there's a there's a coalition of people. Second is this really isn't about vaccination rates, because it turns out truckers are 90% vaccinated, they're vaccinated at a higher percentage than the actual broad based population of Canada, which is about 78%. I think the the point of this and again, I care about this so much as a Canadian, but I just want to read a quote from Justin Trudeau, because I think it encapsulates what this is really about. The quote is the small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa, who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing do not represent the views of Canadians. And I think it's that phrase unacceptable views that really points to what the real issue here is, which is that there are a lot of people who now say it's been two years, enough with mask mandates, enough with all of this, you know, almost police state that's developed all of the emergency use power that politicians have taken. Let's reclaim our democracy and let's have, you know, freedom again. And under the political viewpoint of the ruling Liberal Party, which by the way is now going into revolt as well. A bunch of liberal MPs have just completely flipped because of this statement. It summarizes what Trudeau is saying, which is what you believe is unacceptable to me. And so now I will quash you or that Canada has one viewpoint. Freeburg, did any of
SPEAKER_03: you guys listen to the New York Times daily podcast that our friend sent out the link to this morning? Yes, you know, to me, these are the same story. It was actually an interview with a reporter who highlighted some work that she had done and identified that Phil Murphy, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, had done some, some some polling and some some focus group discussions with some of his constituents. And the overriding tone was one of emotion, one of feeling left out of the life that they believe they should have been living over the past two years. And ultimately, I think the tone speaks very clearly to what the truckers are saying, which is everyone feels more than ever, incredible overreach into their personal lives by the government, and by different governments, whether it's local or federal here in the US, or by this Canadian government, or, you know, go to Australia or the UK, and the sentiment seems to be similar everywhere. I don't think that any time since World War Two, have we seen the government create such restrictions and such mandates in in democratic republics, like the United States, that we just saw over the past two years. And I think the fact that it's continuing when folks are now seeing, you know, on the ground every day, you know, the mildness of Omicron, or like, you know, the big, the challenges that their kids are facing in school, and you kind of put these things together, and you say to yourself, why is my government restricting my life and causing the challenge that I'm being forced to face? For what? And I think that's a tone that everyone feels everywhere in the West today. I think in the east, it's a little bit different, right? Because of the mindset there, but I think here is collectivism, collectivism. And I think here, where we pride individual liberty and freedom, as kind of the foundation of these democracies, to have the government tell us what we have to wear shots, we have to put in our arms, where we can go and when how we can behave in ways that were never legislated in ways that were never kind of debated and discussed publicly. Just feels overreaching. At this point, I think everyone's hit their breaking point. And this is another one of these examples. This trucking thing is another one of these examples of people manifesting their breaking point. And sacks to the point we've been discussing over and over
SPEAKER_02: again. Things have changed radically since the beginning of the pandemic, you believed in mask mandates early because hey, no downside, we talked about that. And we didn't want hospitals to be overrun, which is reasonable. You want to have oxygen, we were all, you know, trying to make plans for Hey, how bad is this going to be? But we're sitting here two years later. And it's pretty clear. Omicron, which I had, thank you, sacks is a nothing burger. As we said here. Thanks sacks. sacks. Ocron. I helped you. Maybe a superhero. Thank you. All I've ever gotten is sick
SPEAKER_04: when I've been around you. Yeah, I went to sacks. And all I got was an $8,000 gift bag and Omicron. The gift bags pretty
SPEAKER_02: great at Sax's parties. I think I think getting Omicron helped
SPEAKER_01: you because it enabled you to see that this for you was largely a nothing burger. And so you could come out of your house and start acting normal. I think there's a lot of people all over the country or like that you haven't left your house for two
SPEAKER_03: years. Do you remember the photos of sacks at the beginning of COVID when he was wearing the triple mask and the was scared to death. He Colonel cursed.
SPEAKER_02: Well, look, I supported mass made mandates the beginning of
SPEAKER_01: the pandemic when Fauci was telling us mass didn't work. Let's let's not forget that. I was supporting when the health officials told us they didn't work. Why? Because it was the only thing we had. We didn't have David, David, David, come
SPEAKER_04: on. He was he was doing us a favor by lying to us by his own admission. He said I lied to you, so that we could preserve these masks for frontline workers. Well, thank you. Thank you, Anthony. One of many one of many look noble lies that he's
SPEAKER_01: been telling. Here we go. He's in he's a noble liar. He's in
SPEAKER_04: right by May of 2020. I would be my biggest political loser.
SPEAKER_03: Luther pick from 2020. Go on, take it easy on your pics. I
SPEAKER_02: know you want to do your victory lap. It's only February give us till like June for the check in. Okay, Colonel Kurtz continue mass were the main alternative to lockdowns. That's
SPEAKER_01: the way I saw it in the summer of 2020. And I was saying and these crazy lockdowns just do mass and then once we had the vaccine and all COVID restrictions that was a year ago. And now we still have these restrictions a year later. And that is what the truckers are rebelling against. Just like you said, these are ordinary people who are sick and tired of having to show their papers and have to deal with these mandates. And, and for that they've been like absolutely demonized. I mean, Trudeau comes out and says that they're basically white supremacists and racist and homophobic, every epithet he can throw at them. Sorry, to your point, he used every he did use
SPEAKER_04: every ism, he really did try to cancel them at first. And this is what's really painted him in a corner. He went on national TV and he said these people are racists and misogynists. That's that's specifically what he said. And it actually turned out that the overwhelming majority of them were not they were just normal ordinary law abiding Canadians who are just fed up with the overreach. And then then what happened was the polling said, you should bring these convoy leaders in, sit them down and talk to them. And then the political calculus, though, was impossible for him, because he had already called them racists and misogynists. So then how could he bring them in? Right? Exactly. Yeah. How do you negotiate with Nazis, basically?
SPEAKER_01: So then what he did was he ran out of Ottawa. So instead of
SPEAKER_04: staying in Ottawa, now he's under in a secure location for his seat. Oh, my God, he feels unsafe. So trigger warning. In
SPEAKER_02: fairness, when you bring 8000 people together and you get a wide enough group of people, there was Swat stickers and whites Confederate flags that were flown. So it might have been two of 8000. But that did happen within the protest movement, which I just said, yes, with any protest movement,
SPEAKER_01: there's always gonna be a handful of people who go too far and are too extreme. But they did not represent the vast, vast majority of the people who turned out which are ordinary citizens. And Trudeau seized on a handful of isolated examples to try and demonize these guys. And I think it's blowing up in his face. The fact of the matter is, the truckers did not start this fight. It's the zealotry of our elites of our professional class that started this fight. They will not give up on these mandates. That's the fundamental problem. And while they go to the Super Bowl with no mascot, I think what you're seeing here with this trucker thing, I think it's gonna have huge ripple effects because it's showing the schism in the Democratic Party between the professional elites and the working class. Here you have the working class. Remember, these were the essential workers. These are the people bringing us our food. Most of them already had COVID over the last couple of years, they couldn't sit behind a computer and do their job in their pajamas on Zoom all day. Okay. So these guys know the reality of COVID, just like you learned the reality, Jason, when you actually got it. And yet we've got this neurotic class of professionals within the Democratic Party, who are these COVID dead-enders don't want to give this stuff up. And that's the fundamental divide. And I think Biden's gonna have to choose which side are you on? Are you on the side of the working class or the professional class? Trudeau has chosen his side. He is the effete elite face of these COVID dead-enders. And, and Biden's gonna have to choose who he supports. And then those are dwindling. You have governors now who are
SPEAKER_02: Democratic governors in many states who are saying, Listen, Omicron is obviously different. And look at the charts. Look at the data. We have this New York Times story on how New Jersey and
SPEAKER_01: several other of these blue states off the mask mandate. So it's absolutely extraordinary.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's not extraordinary. The risk assessment is different, David was extraordinary about it is that
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think it's kind of obvious more than
SPEAKER_02: extraordinary. If Omicron is less deadly, it's an upper respiratory doesn't kill people who are vaccinated, and most people are vaccinated. Pretty obviously, it's time to pivot and open everything up. It sounds like an obvious decision.
SPEAKER_01: Biden really misses moment here. So I think, you know, like freeburg said, it was Phil Murphy, he's a democratic governor of New Jersey, he was supposed to have an easy reelect win by 20 to 30 points, he narrowly squeaks by, by two to three points. Okay. So then he conducts the focus groups to find out what do we miss? Why were we so off on this thing? And they find out that people are sick and tired of these mandates. He goes to the White House, okay, and shows these findings and says, guys, we have to get off this losing position on COVID. And the White House sits on his hands and does absolutely nothing. So Murphy is like, we can't wait anymore. So he unilaterally goes without White House support. This all in the New York Times article. This is not like some right wing publication saying this, okay. So he unilaterally says, okay, we're getting rid of the mask mandate. Okay, and then five other states do the same thing because they realize we can't wait anymore. And Biden is just nowhere to be found. And Psaki is saying, well, we're deferring to the CDC. They're deferring to, you know, Rachel Walensky at the CDC, and Randy Weigartner at the teachers unions, and these health officials like Barbara Furr in LA County, all of whom are saying we cannot lift these mandates yet. They don't want so they are completely on the wrong side of this. And then Biden really steps in it by saying to Trudeau in Canada, listen, you guys got to clear this bridge, do whatever you need to do to clear this bridge, basically implying that the civil disobedience needs to be met by force. And then you've got Harvard professors and CNN analysts saying slash their tires, take away their trucking licenses, starve them out, you know. So this has been the response. And the response to that is now there's a trucker convoy getting started in the US, and they're going to march on Washington, they're going to drive to Washington, great. And between now and then Biden better figure out what size going to be on. Because if he doesn't handle this, right, I think it's gonna be the end of his presidency. Peaceful civil disobedience is fine, as long as
SPEAKER_02: they're not blocking ambulances, getting people to and from hospitals. That's fine, especially the vaccinated. Is
SPEAKER_01: this Scranton Joe, the guy who said he would take us back to normalcy, the the representative of the working class? Is that who the President United States is? Or is he in the Trudeau camp? The you know, the Fauci and the Wolinski and the Barbara Ferrer's easily influenced? You're asking a
SPEAKER_04: rhetorical question. I think that the the polling data makes the answer pretty clear, which is that the Democratic Party is lurching towards establishment insiders. And working normal ordinary people have in larger and larger numbers started gravitating towards to the Republican Party. Minorities in far larger numbers than we ever expected, have started lurching towards the Republican Party. And so the answer is sort of in the polling data and what what the actual facts on the ground have been, you know, I mean, we forget, because we were also ready to cast away our Trump derangement syndrome syndrome, but he did get I think, what was it 9 million more people to vote for him in this past election? Yeah, the working class, whether they're the white working class
SPEAKER_01: or the non white working class are moving in huge numbers. I think I think I think the margin of non white working class who moved to the Republicans last election was 18 points. They got 18 points more share than eight years ago. So the working class, regardless of their race is moving towards the Republicans while the Democrats are becoming this more a feat elite professional class party, this woke elite party. And, you know, I think Biden sort of is caught in the middle of this. And I think he's running out of time to try and reestablish that he's going to have a centrist presidency that is not completely kowtow and defer to the left of his party to the sort of woke elite thinking. You see democratic political scientists like Roy to share a writing about this, like, every week, saying this is your last chance. This is your moment to save your presidency. I don't know if he's listening. Okay,
SPEAKER_02: Friedberg, we made some great progress in science this week in nuclear fusion. You want to tee this up for us? I'm happy to. So
SPEAKER_03: let me just give a little background for maybe a minute on fusion. So you know, the the way energy is made in the sun, and in all stars is through this process of nuclear fusion where hydrogen nuclei, the protons inside of hydrogen atoms shoot around at such a high energy and they're so dense because of the amount of hydrogen all causes gravity to pull them all together, they get really dense, they start slamming into each other, when they slam into each other, they fuse into helium and ultimately the heavier elements and release energy in the process. And that is what fusion is. So you know, we talked about nuclear energy on Earth, all nuclear energy that we generated on Earth, as a species to date has been through fission where we take much heavier elements like plutonium and uranium, and they break apart by squeezing them together and they release energy. But this creates radioactive material. It's dangerous. It's very, very expensive and so on. So there's always been a question since roughly the 1950s on whether or not we could recreate the conditions of the sun or stars on planet Earth, by creating a plasma by creating the same sort of plasma that exists inside of stars very hot, very fast, very dense hydrogen that can slam into itself and slam into atoms and fuse into helium and release energy. Does that same plasma
SPEAKER_04: exists on Uranus?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, God, you're gonna give him a wedgie. Let Science Boy finish. Oh, sorry. Back to you.
SPEAKER_01: Never gets old. Was it 69 megajoules or 420 megajoules?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so plasma fusions always been this kind of holy grail of
SPEAKER_03: energy because if you can actually generate plasma fusion, the amount of energy it takes to create the plasma is less than the energy that comes out of the plasma. So it's effectively positive, infinite, free, cheap plasma. And so the system that people have been building for the last 2530 years is these, these donut shaped systems called tokamaks. They're like a circle like a donut, and they spin the plasma around inside. And so it takes a lot of energy and magnets and so on to try and make this work. You know, it's a company we talked about a few months ago called Commonwealth fusion systems, which uses a new superconducting material to control that plasma and use instead of using expensive magnets may just raise $1.8 billion. And, you know, more recently, the joint European
SPEAKER_03: Taurus, which is managed by the Atomic Energy Authority in the United Kingdom, just this week demonstrated energy output from their tokamak plasma fusion system, where they generated, you know, 59 megawatts of energy in five seconds, which is a record. The prior record was set in 1997. By that same agency, they generated 16 megawatts of power output. So it was a great breakthrough. And you know, to make this all possible has required technical breakthroughs in electronics, technical breakthroughs in sensors and computing and hardware and material science and superconductors. And so all of this is starting to coalesce that plasma fusion might actually become a reality. And the ITER system, which is the biggest construction project in Europe, 35 nations have contributed a total of roughly 50 to $60 billion to make this system is it's going to go online around 2027. They've been building it for 20 years, it's going to be a 500 megawatt demonstration system. And if it works, then it opens up the door that in the future, we may actually be able to turn plasma fusion into an energy source for all of humanity. It basically would use water plasma fusion is made from taking hydrogen, which you would get from water, spinning it around, heating it up, getting it to be really, really dense, and ultimately driving power out of it. The implications are extraordinary, right. So over the next few decades, it is appearing more likely that we will have plasma fusion systems working on earth. And as that happens, energy becomes free, and it becomes unlimited. And with unlimited free energy, we can terraform Earth, right, we can take ocean water, de-sal it, turn it into fresh water, we can pump that into deserts, turn them into rainforests. You know, the total annual production of energy on Earth today is about 170 terawatt hours, that amount of energy can be generated from just a 10 foot by 10 foot by 10 foot cube of water. That's the amount of energy, the amount of material that would be turned into photons that would drive all of the electricity we need on Earth. So it's an incredible technology and incredible breakthrough. We're starting to see this stuff happen. One area that I wanted to kind of just highlight, which no one talks about, but which I think is extraordinarily important. About 100 years from now, let's say, as these plasma fusion systems work, it's certainly going to be true that we'll have abundant free energy during the back half of this century. And that'll change everything will decarbonize the atmosphere will terraform the planet, we can make whatever we want, we can build things, etc. But the same system of plasma fusion theoretically can be used to fuse heavier elements than just helium. So fast forward 100 or 200 years, if we can actually make plasma fusion systems work, we could also enter to make helium to make energy, we could also use them to make heavier elements, like the rare earth metals that we talked about being so important here on Earth to make batteries, or phosphorus, which, you know, we're going to run out of on planet Earth in about 100 years, which is a critical component of agriculture and feeding ourselves. So, you know, over the next call it 100 years, plasma fusion systems, I think back half of this century come online, provide us with abundant free energy. And then in the 22nd century, I think this idea of nucleosynthesis, the idea that we can actually make the rare earth or the heavier elements that are limited natural resources here on Earth, where we can turn water into gold or water into lithium or water into molybdenum or, you know, into beryllium or whatever, starts to become a reality. And so this to me, like, I feel like we're on the eve of plasma fusion being a reality, you know, based on some of the results we're seeing, and it's one after the other eye tear is going to come online, you know, Commonwealth fusion had their materials breakthrough and on and on and on. So this seems to be building up. And so the 20 and a tipping point. Yeah, that's right. I think the 2030s and the 2040s are where this becomes real. And all these problems and concerns we have about climate change, and carbon in the atmosphere, all of this stuff can be reversed with infinite energy. And so I'm optimistic, and I'm excited about a lot of what we're seeing. Let me ask you one
SPEAKER_02: question. Obviously, when people start hearing about nuclear reactors and fission, and then they start learning about fusion, they immediately have the Chernobyl of the world and Fukushima has come to mind and nuclear bombs. In this case, when this reaction occurs, my understanding, I've interviewed a couple people working on these reactors, is that the reaction just fizzles out, it just stops. And then it's not radioactive.
SPEAKER_03: So these, these are not radioactive materials that naturally decay into radioactive ions or particles that can damage the body or damage. These are literally just hydrogen atoms that are spun around so hot and smash into each other. So if the machine breaks, everything just turns off. That's
SPEAKER_02: it. And the output, even when it's working, my understanding is some natural, like just air and water. So there's no output, there's no, there's no environmental thing to deal with. Let me fast forward 200 years. So now assume these
SPEAKER_03: systems work. As you guys know, all technology over time gets better, faster, cheaper, smaller. So in 200 years, we could find that we have plasma fusion reactions in every pocket, in every computer, in every phone, imagine a world where we no longer need batteries, where we no longer need transmission lines, and where a system can literally pull hydrogen out of the air, generate electricity on the fly. And it sounds crazy. But people thought people would have never thought that the batteries that we put inside of phones would have existed when the first flow cell battery cell was made, you know, whatever, you know, during the early days of chemistry, electrical chemistry. So you know, the idea that we've been able to shrink batteries as we have the idea that we've been able to make generators like we have today, these were concepts that would have been so foreign. So I do think that in 200 years, if plasma fusion systems work, there's nothing about the laws of physics that says they're limited in scale to only being large, they theoretically could be reduced down to there's no limit to the size they could drop down to. And so there could be a world 200 years from now where plasma fusion reactors exist in every component that needs electricity. And so ultimately, you could see putting these these systems on spaceships, and using them to convert elements from one form to another. And we could live for, you know, 100,000 years on a spaceship, and just recycle the elements on that spaceship to produce all our food and our air and everything. And yeah, for sure, we could get to Uranus with that. Absolutely. The
SPEAKER_03: summary and back, you could circle his anus. So that was my
SPEAKER_03: diatribe on plasma fusion. I'm super excited about some of the progress. So right now, Sax is wondering how we wet our beaks.
SPEAKER_02: Tell us where to place the bet. It's there's nowhere yet. This
SPEAKER_03: is being honestly, I don't place bets on things that take 100,000
SPEAKER_01: years. It's only 100 years. 100 years, sorry. 100,000 things
SPEAKER_04: that might materialize in four years. Sorry. 100 weeks. He needs
SPEAKER_02: to operate. bills are due next month.
SPEAKER_02: I got bills to pay. I got a big part of the, you know, just
SPEAKER_03: speaking markets for a second. I mentioned to you guys at the end of last year that I made a bet on energy stocks. And the reason I made a bet on energy stocks is because some of the breakthroughs that we're seeing in decarbonization and renewable energy has driven a reduction in capital improvements across energy infrastructure, because people are so optimistic about what's over the horizon. And they're so pessimistic about carbon intensive energy systems that we actually have under invested over the past few years in energy infrastructure that it's turning out today is critically needed. So while this is a great long term kind of optimistic world scenario, and it's going to decarbonize energy production and energy systems in the near term, we're actually struggling a bit to meet our energy demands. And there's a lot of leverage that energy producers have over those that are the consumers, as we're seeing currently with the Russia, Ukraine, Europe, crisis, and so on. And so part of the reason for the climate energy stocks over the last couple of weeks has been largely driven by the fact that we're realizing that this underinvestment in capex has created a decline in productivity of these assets relative to the demand. And so suddenly, everyone's like, Oh, my gosh, these things are gonna be able to charge more commodity prices are going up. And so on. So you know, it's very hard to think about playing an investment cycle around this stuff, because in the near term, there's still significant demand, and we only have carbon intensive systems to produce energy. Well, I was gonna ask you, Tramav, if does this mean on an
SPEAKER_02: investment thesis, you might see a massive spike in carbon based fuel systems and the sovereign wealth funds and that dramatic drop off? No. Okay. What do you predict will happen? The nobody will support anybody investing in pulling more oil
SPEAKER_04: out of the ground. They'll support trying to get more from what we have. But, you know, I don't know if you guys saw, but you know, there's no support for this, whether you're an investor, and you go activist on some of these oil companies. You know, whether you're I think there, Biden had a big setback, because, you know, he had cleared a whole like millions of acres of offshore land for some kind of some kind of energy extraction that was then just reversed by the courts. No, but nobody has support for this stuff.
SPEAKER_03: But what you're saying is exactly right. And it's exactly the reason oil prices are climbing. I just sent you guys a link to what's going on today. They're but they're climbing for the wrong reason. So look, let's
SPEAKER_04: just be realistic here. We, you know, we have a cartel, it's called OPEC, you know, and what they do is they decide output. And we have some checks and balances to OPEC, namely Russia and a few other actors, who will try to then regulate supply and demand so that there's mutually assured destruction. The net result of all of that right now is that we do have some constrained supply for the amount that we need to get to get back to the level of production we had pre pandemic. So we are going to have some sustained energy prices. But you saw something really important this past week. Everybody was waiting for this big CPI print, right, the consumer price index print. Everybody thought it was going to be a bad number. It was a pretty bad number. But the markets were pretty responsive to it. And, and then it's been pretty responsive the rest of the week, despite a whole bunch of stuff. I don't know if you guys saw but like yesterday, there was this crazy article where, you know, one of the Fed governors was like, we should raise by 100 basis points by July. And, you know, we should do eight, eight raises. And the markets were like, what are you talking about? And why is that? Because now people have started to look, you know, I've mentioned this before, when you go into a rate cycle, we're kind of past worrying about how many we kind of look to the end, and decide what we want to believe about the future. And one of the most interesting things is the rate of change of this inflation was actually lower month over month. And so if you think about it that way, we had a bad CPI print, but it's actually not going up as much. And in fact, it's starting to trail off. And a lot of economists now forecast basically this inflation peaking or already having peaked over the last few weeks. Consumer sentiment is not so good. A lot of us are now shifting our consumption away from goods to more services. We're stopping, you know, the hoarding of the toilet papers of the world, if you will. And so I'm not a big buyer of this trade, to be honest with you, freeburg. I think that it works in the short term. I don't think it's an investment. I think at some point, you're going to have to make a decision about what your view on energy is. I know I agree. I don't think this is a long term trade, not an
SPEAKER_03: investment. That's right. But I do I do. I do think that the macro sentiment sent the market in one direction, it creates this up, it created a buying opportunity, which I was pretty clear about. And I do think that some of this global tension stuff we're seeing is only going to drive it up for a while. I do. I do think, however, that the the this big tech spread
SPEAKER_04: trade is moving from a trade to an investment, actually. And that I didn't expect. And the reason is, I talked to a bunch of folks on Wall Street over this past week. And they told me two things. And one of them is a segue because I think we should talk about Microsoft, which is another brilliant move in the lexicon of business. But what they said was, Facebook has become a funding short for other investments. Now, what does that mean? Everybody was crowded into big tech, we talked about this before, right, those five stocks were broadly owned, they were effectively the index. But after that, after that earnings report, a lot of investors, including retail investors had to decide where to reallocate their capital, and had to decide where to invest, where the money was going to come from to invest in these other names that were really beaten up. And what folks on Wall Street have been telling me is that, you know, Facebook has become what's called a funding short, meaning there is no bid to buy that from institutional owners. They'd rather on the margin sell it to generate the cash to then take and invest in other things. And what you saw over this past week is the bottoming out of a lot of these growth stocks that were beaten up, right, they rallied pretty significantly every day, three, four, five, 6% rallies. And other names in big tech have rallied really well, including Microsoft. And, and so I think that there is the potential a small potential that that's going from a trade to an investment, actually a sustainable trend that you can bank on for, you know, several years, investment, hold the
SPEAKER_02: stock for 510 years, the trade that spread trade, you can get for a long period of time, but for the winners to be the
SPEAKER_02: winners in that just so people get refresh. Google's, Google, Microsoft, Google, and then you feel Amazon, Facebook, obviously, and Netflix are the losers in that trade. Still feel that way.
SPEAKER_02: I think that Microsoft and Google are far and away the
SPEAKER_04: winners, far and away the winners. And look, you saw you saw you saw this Microsoft thing today or sorry, this past week, so smart, you know, so just to give catch people up on that Microsoft has made
SPEAKER_02: another savvy move to get approval for their $75 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition. They promised their video game app store would operate with open market principles. CEO of the year, Satya Nadell and others travel to Washington, Washington, in Adele, Nadella, right, this an anthea, travel to Washington this week to meet with regulators regarding the acquisition. So they are proactively going to Washington as opposed to other people who maybe are not quote from Microsoft President Brad Smith, we are more focused on adopting, adapting to regulation than fighting against it. That's some really interesting. There's a famous story about this explorer named Hernando
SPEAKER_04: Cortez, where, you know, we've all heard this analogy, or this this, this little phrase before, where, you know, when they were exploring, coming from Europe, and you know, they hit the Caribbean islands, and then they are looking for America, etc. The famous phrase is burn the boats. Yep. Right? Can't go back, we have to find our way make it work. The, the way that that's been extended in business is sort of what we would call scorched the earth. And there's a competitive move that a lot of businesses, if they're smart enough can execute, which is to effectively take a key market and take an economic view of that market, where you say that we're going to take all the economic value away from it. And I think this is a first step towards a really interesting play that Microsoft could pull, which is essentially to scorch the earth of app stores, which
SPEAKER_02: is Google's and Apple's really big money printer to make a
SPEAKER_04: completely open permissible platform with very little to no take rate. And in a market as big as video games, I think what it does is it creates pressure on all these other mega platforms to essentially copy them. And I think Friedberg mentioned this before Google has actually been the best in doing this by finding these key markets, or I think it was sacks, you know, Chrome and other things and giving them away for free. Google is in a position to make the app store effectively free. And then that puts Apple on a little bit of a desert island. So Jason back to why I think you can keep Apple in that basket of shorts. The competitive pressures are mounting by by the moves of Microsoft that I think are easier for Google to copy, and very difficult for companies like Apple to copy because it creates an incredible disincentive. Yeah. And also as part of this open app store
SPEAKER_02: concept, they will let you use any payment system. So if you're on an iPhone, and you want to choose Apple Pay with a Google app purchase, you can do that. And if you're on, you know, Microsoft, you can use PayPal as an example. Sachs, what do you what do you think about inflation? Okay, there was a
SPEAKER_01: really interesting chart on inflation that actually zero hedge tweeted. And I threw it up in the notes here, where they said real hourly earnings are negative 1.7%. It's the 10th month in a row where US incomes aren't keeping up with inflation. So the problem here is that, you know, people's incomes have increased with inflation, but not as much as the inflation rate. So the net effect of it is that people are feeling worse off when they go to the grocery store to buy groceries or whatever they need. They don't feel as rich. That's the fundamental problem here. And I think there's a lot of people out there who think that there's a free lunch that if we printed 2 trillion worth of STEMI checks, this is the whole that $2 trillion bill last year, they shoveled through, I think the idea was, we're going to print as much money as we can for the election. And it's going to help us in the midterms. Actually, as it turns out, it boosted inflation so much that people are feeling worse off, even though their wages went up slightly, because on a net basis, their earnings are down. So I just think it's a good reminder that you can't just like print wealth, you can't print your way to prosperity, no free lunches, there's no free lunches, yeah, or we're going to
SPEAKER_03: create addiction to universal income or universal subsidy. That's the alternative is people are going to basically try and vote to make some programs that were initially meant to be temporary, more permanent, in order to keep up the lifestyle that they've become accustomed to. Just just to build on
SPEAKER_04: Saxe's point, the University of Michigan consumer sentiment was released, I think it was today this morning. And it shows exactly what he's saying, which is that, you know, consumers propensity and confidence in the economy has been falling off a cliff. You know, the month over month change was almost it was down 8.2%. The year over year change is down almost 20%. Current economic conditions was down 20% and then index of consumer expectations down 19%. So to to Saxe's point, people are scared. Yeah, well, we've been we've been talking on the
SPEAKER_01: show for the last, I'd say a couple of months about balancing the risk of recession versus the risk of inflation. Inflation, I think has gotten slightly worse. The print went from the last point was like 7.1%. Now it's some point 5%. So to Thomas point earlier, it's getting worse, but the rate of how fast it's getting worse is lowing. But the risk of recession I think is increasing. Because what's keeping this economy going is the consumer. And if the consumer sentiment now all of a sudden is tanking, and people feel poor because of inflation, I just you know, now the the risks are starting to become a sentiment goes down. This is where governors play a
SPEAKER_04: critical role. Because if they don't open up these economies, we can't actually have a consumer led consumption rebound of the economy because there aren't any services to buy because you can't actually be around anybody. So if the economy remains effectively closed, and people are done buying, you know, tubs of margarine and toilet paper, because you know, Armageddon isn't coming as we were worried it would, what are we supposed to be doing? So this is how these things interplay. So we have to get these again, going back to where we started, we have to get this economy open, and we have to just get back to some sense of normalcy and the consumer will lead us out. But I think Saks, you're right on the margin, I think the risk is towards a recession because people don't see this Thomas Sowell, who's a well known Stanford, he's a I think he's a senior fellow at Hoover. You know, he has this comment, which is effectively taxes are bad for the rich, and the poor, but inflation is bad just for the poor. And the reason he says that is because, you know, if you're wealthy, you can transition to assets that are sort of inflation adjusted or inflation protected, right, you can consume assets, or you can purchase assets to protect yourself. But inflation is an exceptionally regressive means of the government taking compensation away from you current compensation, and it disproportionately affects working class ordinary people. And so if you have real wages that are negative inflation, that's high, that's confiscatory, right? You are you are meaningfully less well off than you were before. And, you know, the wealthy folks have a way to hedge but normal ordinary working class people do not. And on the margin, then if they then do not go out and spend, the problem will be some sort of recessionary effect. I also
SPEAKER_02: think if we open up, more people might, since they're so lonely and getting weird staying at home, I think they might actually want to go do jobs to socialize and do things I'm seeing people want to get out and do, you know, trips with their teams and they're and they're sick of staying home Salesforce just bought a retreat center. And we saw this out of the city, the Bay Area and because Benioff got a concern, I guess that all these employees he hired over two years who've never met another Salesforce employee are getting weird and lonely. And, you know, I think history is going to be very I think, David, you're right. I think history is going to be
SPEAKER_04: really judgmental of Biden, if he is the last person to basically give the green light and all of these democratic governors basically revolt and open up under underneath, you know, either silence or the complete opposite point of view. This is a really bad setup. Well, National Journal, which again, is not some right wing
SPEAKER_01: publication, they're just sort of an analyst of what's happening in Washington. So the Biden that an article Biden is blowing his COVID moment, he was elected to lead us back to normalcy, all he had to do was say, guys, it's time for the restrictions to come off, and take credit for the fact that we were that the whole country was ready to move on. And he's kind of missed it. And but this trucker convoy is coming to Washington gives him one more chance, I think, to get on the right side of this, because there's really two ways he can react. One is to treat them as, you know, domestic terrorists, you know, racists, white supremacists, insurrectionaries, or he can, you know, embrace them. And so it's all he has to do is say, Listen, we love you, we respect you, we hear you, we agree with you, it's time for these mandates to end. And you know what, thank you, Rachel Wolinsky and Anthony Fauci for your service. We understand you're just trying to keep the country safe. But thank you very much. We're ready to move on. We're getting rid of all these restrictions. His popularity would like bounce five points 10 points if he did that. Yeah, I'm betting he's going to I mean, he's he's always
SPEAKER_02: represented the working man and woman of this country. That's been his thing from the beginning. I bet you he does embrace them. And if you look at Omicron, remember the scariness of December, hey, this thing is spreading 3040 50 times faster, I wonder if it's gonna have the same death rate, and we didn't know. And now we know. And it's February. Two months later, we know that the curve in South Africa, same as a curve in New York and California up and down. And then the only people who die seemingly are immunocompromised or unvaccinated. So feels like the perfect time really led us back
SPEAKER_01: to normalcy. I mean, we really need to give credit to all the people who fought to it's the moms who went to the school board meetings were denounced as domestic terrorists. They're the ones who put pressure to repeal these mass mandates on their kids, which by the way, aren't even fully off in New York and California. Adults don't wear masks anymore, but the kids do. It's the scientists is the scientists of the Great Barrington Declaration who were demonized and called fringe and kooks and conspiracy theorists. They're the ones who provided the real data against lockdowns, not the NIH. It's these truckers who are basically opposing mandates. These are the people who are dragging us back to normalcy. And it's the politicians who are reacting to that when the polls change. And I think what the people want now is some real leadership. It's a politician who gets up there and leads us back to normalcy. Why can't Biden do that? There's a great article in the Times and they profiled, you
SPEAKER_04: know, a couple people and one of them was a mom in New York, who's running for Congress against, you know, an entrenched, an entrenched Democrat. And she's, I mean, you know, she's just a good hearted mom who was like, this is enough enough enough, I need to get back to normalcy. My kids need to get back in school. We still have mass mandates here in California. Kids are still
SPEAKER_02: wearing masks. It's really it's becoming tribal warfare amongst the Democrats in
SPEAKER_04: California, because even when you know, the, the governor basically said, okay, mask mandates can go on x date. The the county supervisors have not decided. So for example, in Santa Clara County, you know, they've not said yes. In LA County, there's a health director, an unelected
SPEAKER_01: bureaucrat, a health director named Barbara Ferrer, she calls the shots on COVID. After Newsom basically said that the mass can come off, she says no, they can't not until April. Who is this person giving us orders? She told us to the Board of Supervisors down there. And we're all just supposed to listen. Now, the reason why she has this authority is because Newsom is granted to her under Newsom state of emergency. So what he should do is end that what is the emergency the super roles happening this weekend in the state and everyone's going to be their massless. I mean, I was at the Warriors game last night. And you had
SPEAKER_02: people wearing the most flimsy of masks that does nothing to protect people taking them off while they're eating and drinking. And then people walking around with signs, the security guards had signs that said, please put your mask on. And they were walking up to people like kid you not, and putting this like little round sign in people's faces and not talking to them just you know, and they would stand there until you put your mask back on. And like you're literally eating a hot dog. And then you put the hot dog down and then they come up and put the sign in your face and you put your mask up, you take another bite of your hot dog. I mean, it was getting unnecessarily confrontational and just weird and nowhere else. So you're seeing it and then you go to a restaurant and the employees are wearing masks and nobody else's hope. I hope you can find it so weird. There was this clip on Twitter,
SPEAKER_04: when the mask mandate was lifted in Nevada. And it was a clip of kids in like grade two or three. And they went crazy. Okay. And the reason they were so excited was like they got to be normal again. And the explanation I had never heard this more beautifully said, these children can finally see their friends as emotions on their face. Oh my god, can you imagine if you're four or 567 years old and you cannot understand the emotions of other kids? Because you're covered up in a mask. And you've only had an experience in school.
SPEAKER_02: My six year old has never attended a day of school without
SPEAKER_01: a mask. Right? Like that's there's kids out there who are
SPEAKER_02: never had. I was at I was at like the I was at Horsey
SPEAKER_01: with one of my kids last weekend. There were a bunch of kids out there writing. It's sunny. It's outside. They're on a horse. They're all wearing masks in a voluntary optional situation. I'm just like how brainwashed this generation that we're raising. I mean, they're going to be so neurotic, but they're also like brainwashed. To me, it's, it's crazy. We see it in the Bay Area. Like I'll have a party with the kids
SPEAKER_02: or a group of kids come over and there's two or three parents who show up at the house. We only do outdoor parties, obviously. Two or three of the 10 kids will have masks on their parents will have masks on and like the most intense and 95 like sealed masks, and I'm like, you want to take your mask off for picture and one of the kids refused to take her mask off for a picture. Outside at a birthday party. I was like, okay, listen, I mean, when I supported the mask mandate, the very
SPEAKER_01: beginning of the pandemic, it was always as an interim measure, if I had known that people would want to continue this thing forever. There's no way I would have supported it also probably was effective in the early days with the first we know what the
SPEAKER_02: psychological impact children is when they don't understand other
SPEAKER_04: people's emotions, and you do it over a long period of time. No, we don't. I think that's a fair statement. We don't know the impact. Sure. It's probably not zero. And so at some point, we
SPEAKER_04: need to look at the risks, calculate some expected value. And the people we need to prioritize are those that are the youngest. Okay. And I've said this before, I've said this before, and it's like, the teachers unions need to understand that calculus. Parents already understand that calculus. I don't think the state legislators, governors and the federal bureaucracy yet understands this calculus. But it's time to return to normal and it's time to return to sorry, and on this point, I would like to bring up something. The ACLU thing, just because I think I would love to get your take on, you know, talking about civil liberties and freedoms. There are things that are happening here under our noses every day. Under Democratic and Republican
SPEAKER_04: presidents that to me when I saw this on the ACLU Twitter feed yesterday was shocking. Jason, do you want to tee that up? All right. In other news, the CIA has been secretly conducting
SPEAKER_02: surveillance programs to capture Americans private information on Thursday. Democratic senators Wyden and Heinrich sent a lot sent a letter to director of the CIA and the director of national intelligence. The letter called for greater transparency in the CIA into the CIA data collection of private us citizens, basically, the CIA used executive order 12333, which was signed by Reagan in 1981. To gather data on US citizens, the letter notes the program was quote, entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern the collection and without any judicial congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes from FISA. That's the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act collection quote, what these documents demonstrate is that many of the same concerns that Americans have about their privacy and civil liberties also apply to how the CIA collects and handles information under executive order and outside of fees. A law in particular, these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that had generated bipartisan concern in the visa. I mean, where where where's the mainstream media while they
SPEAKER_04: breathlessly run around chasing cancellation stories? Where are they to report and to hold accountable this stuff? And where are politicians in actually doing their job? But, you know, I don't think there's ever been this kind of overreach that's just constantly been going on with zero accountability or transparency into it. You know, the FBI is responsible for domestic laws, right? And the FBI has a very clear path in which they need to get warrants in order to be able to surveil us citizens. And then the fact that we give an agency whose responsibilities actually foreign, yes, to be CIA is supposed to work only on international not domestic. And
SPEAKER_04: then to basically spy on its citizens with zero accountability or reporting, it seems to be a pretty important issue that should at least be discussed, especially in a world now where executive power just keeps ramping up and ramping up what's going on, and there's zero transparency or accountability. If I didn't randomly see this on an ACLU tweet, would we even be talking about this? Probably not. And
SPEAKER_02: the and the other thing that's no crazy about it is I think the way they get away with this chamath. And this has been something that the Patriot Act had a similar technique is they the CIA and some other organizations will track international people of interest, you know, money launders, etc. And then say in order to track them, well, anybody they contact in America is fair game. Or if they're, you know, and so you can get the metadata from the phone calls and the emails. And I think that's how a lot of this gets just this, what this letter seems to say is we just there's
SPEAKER_04: a broad scale surveillance program against us citizens that is indeterminate in scope and scale, right? So we don't know. That seems very different than that. And then in in parallel to
SPEAKER_01: this, there's also that announcement that the Department of Homeland Security is creating this major apparatus, this infrastructure to go after domestic terrorists. Well, look, if they mean people who actually like set off bombs or commit real crimes, fine. But chamath, you asked where the media is the media is defining routine political dissent as domestic terrorism. Now, I mean, you hear this type of threat inflation, we've heard these truckers even described as insurrectionists. So you know, how are these programs going to be used is really the question, you create this massive infrastructure on the executive branch, we've seen that in Washington, this trend towards criminalizing political disagreements where democrats republicans have been putting their partisans in jail for years, but are they now going to apply this to political disagreements in the country? Can they use these powers to go after truckers who are engaging in civil disobedience? Can they use these surveillance powers to go after somebody who just tweets things on social media that they don't like? I mean, these are the open questions. Yeah, it's very scary. Well, and
SPEAKER_02: it's also hard to determine because you might have some people on the right, who are protesting something in a very valid way. And then you get some whack jobs, like the oath keepers, who are bringing in tons of weapons outside the DC area on January 6. So there's a valid concern here with all those weapons, the oath keepers brought, and their plans to do a coordinated takeover after they first got in there. But then you have the other dipshits, who are there are probably just there to have fun and bang drums and support Trump right. So you think these truckers are engaged in
SPEAKER_01: insurrection? Well, I mean, we don't know. And I don't think
SPEAKER_02: so. No, I mean, if they if they bring a bunch of guns, then yes, we should have concerns. But I don't think they are the slippery
SPEAKER_04: slope is in when you have an executive order that is not governed by the standard guardrails that we use to have checks and balances between these kinds of government agencies and the people and the elected officials that we elect. Here's how it basically gets in a really tricky place. You have it, let's I'm just going to use Justin Trudeau's quote, okay, but replace that person with any politician in power. Hey, there's a small fringe minority of people who are on their way here. They hold unacceptable views. Well, you know what that person is going to do that person is going to want to do everything in their power to basically understand break apart and tear up that fringe minority group. Now, isn't that scary, right? When you have this overheated political rhetoric
SPEAKER_01: that describes your political opponents, your dissenters, the state, yeah, as enemies as white supremacists as Nazis, they're insurrectionaries as domestic terrorists, why wouldn't then the law enforcement arms of our government then treat them that way? I mean, does the Department of Homeland Security or the CIA or the FBI? Do they understand that the politicians are just engaging in rhetoric in threat inflation? Or will they take that those invocations literally to what we have to investigate and stop these? I think they've
SPEAKER_02: done a Department of Justice done a pretty good job of that. I just want I just brought this up, because I think it's really
SPEAKER_04: important for somebody in the mainstream media of which many listen to this podcast. Sure. You have a responsibility to actually double click into this issue and figure out what's going on, please. Yeah. For on behalf of all of us, by the way,
SPEAKER_03: like if you guys look, I mean, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, BBC, everyone covered it today. But the story today is that lawmakers made this claim with no details and no evidence. So I'm sure the investigations are underway. I mean, the journalists are clearly leaning in to identify, you know, the the evidence behind the story, and I'm sure more will come out over the coming days and weeks. And in fairness, like you said,
SPEAKER_02: is the Justice Department doing this even handedly, they were very specific with the January 6 interaction sacks where they went after oath keepers because they had a coordinated, they're a militia, they literally refer to themselves as militia. And those people are getting treated very different than the people who broke glass or sat on pants, Pelosi's desk, those people are getting three months suspended sentences, six month sentences, and the oath keepers who are a militia, they call themselves a militia, they're dangerous. And they're treating them very differently. And they're the only ones who are being charged with the more serious 10 to 20 year sentences. So I would say they are doing a great job. Alright, everybody, this has been an amazing journey from truckers to Joe Rogan and all the way to Uranus and back for the Rain Man David Sacks. The
SPEAKER_02: Sultan of Science dude, nobody's your outro Jason. Love you boys. We'll see you all next time. Love you besties.
SPEAKER_00: Let your winners ride. Rain Man David Sacks. We open source it to the fans and they've
SPEAKER_01: just gone crazy with it. I'm going all in.
SPEAKER_04: Besties are gone. That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway. Taking a notice in your driveway. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge door because they're all just like this like sexual tension that they just need to release.
SPEAKER_01: What you're about be what you're being good. Boy.
