All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E35: Biogen's controversial Alzheimer's drug approval, the billionaire space race, real estate, Bitcoin & more

Episode Date: June 13, 2021

Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Show Notes: 0:00 Bestie intro, Chamath's whereabouts 2:54 Breaking down Biogen's Alzheimer's drug & the FDA's controversial approval 26:46 Billionaire space race: Is Bezos going to space too risky or a smart marketing move? How the space industry is a perfect example of effective government intervention. Can anyone dominate space? 42:55 Big Tech getting back to the office: what is the new normal for companies with thousands of employees? 56:49 Recent factors on the commercial & private real estate markets, inflation head fake 1:05:01 ProPublica's report on billionaire tax returns 1:15:58 Bitcoin toxicity, Snowflake's CEO apologizes for comments on merit & diversity 1:32:48 Science corner with Friedberg: Induced pluripotent stem cells & cloning Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Referenced in the show: https://www.statnews.com/2021/06/07/fda-grants-historicapproval-to-alzheimers-drug-designed-to-slow-cognitive-decline/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-10/harvard-expert-quits-fda-panel-as-furor-over-biogen-drug-grows https://www.instagram.com/p/CP0MSOqnYEo https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-lets-more-employees-choose-full-time-remote-work-or-return-to-the-office-11623258049 https://news.yahoo.com/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-on-slack-acquisition-135151402.html https://socketsite.com/archives/2021/04/visualizing-all-the-vacant-office-space-in-san-francisco.html https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-you-sell-a-house-these-days-the-buyer-might-be-a-pension-fund-11617544801 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10YIE https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Research/Journal-Article/Buffetts-Alpha https://www.ft.com/content/42daca9e-facc-11e7-9bfc-052cbba03425 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-07/snowflake-ceo-offers-apologies-support-for-hiring-diversity Tweets: https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1401938511826067457 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1386825367948644352 https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1403394491143315456 https://twitter.com/Jason/status/140302318070958080  

Like Jacob you get any closer to the camera. I mean your face is like right up in it. We can see your bloodshot us Oh, God, it's really a nice start times a little rough. I jank A little rough on jank. That's true. I want my second cup of coffee or any This is a lifestyle choice. We may regret Hey everybody, hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the All in podcast. It's Saturday morning. It's ridiculously early, but we're taping the show because one of the besties happens to have left the continent with us from an undisclosed location,

Chimath Polyhapatia. Are you in a wine cellar or in catacombs? I am in, I am in, look at it, wait for it, wait for it. Wow. Were you able to see that or no? No. Are you in the cathedral somewhere? You mean the ceiling of your room?

No, I was trying to see it. It's incredible. You paid for the four walls and now you can afford the roof. Okay, hold on, hold on. Okay, hold on, I'll do a little, I'll do a little, let's see if you can just see outside and get a sense of the view. Oh, you can't.

Oh no, it's hard. We can't just stop. Oh, well, Bestie lifestyle happening there. She's got a hold of her second. And then that's my architect. Hold on. Look at this. Wow. I love how the house is already built and he's still paying the architect. Yeah, he's like, do we favor this came out great. But can you rip down these four rooms and then just start over? All right. Well, we lostessie C as he walks around his castle in some European country. Welcome to life styles of the rich and famous. What time is it there for you? Well, it's a six in the

afternoon, six in the evening. I was in London last week and holy macro. The weather, if you want to see climate change, spend some time in Europe because literally day over day, London on the first day I landed was called it 24 degrees Celsius. So whatever that is, 80, 78, maybe beautiful. Literally the next day, it was 62 and raining. And it just kept bouncing back and forth. It is the weirdest thing. And if you're in Europe right now, you just see some of the craziest weather patterns literally day over day, massive thunder showers, then it's completely normal. I mean, no wonder everybody here takes climate change. So seriously, you actually feel it every day.

And with us as well, David Sacks is here, the rainman himself tearing up the Twitter. We've been off for two weeks. So there's a lot to cover. And of course, the queen of Kinwa, chairman of the production board, David Friedberg, right off the bat. I think we got to go science and get the Friedberg ratio up from the get. Biogen has an Alzheimer's drug that on Monday, the FDA approved. It's the first new treatment for Alzheimer's in almost two decades.

And biologians drug is not a cure for Alzheimer's. And free-brog will get into that. It does not reverse the disease's progression, but it does mitigate it gets it getting worse. Very strange moment in time. The FDA's advisory panel, remembers of it, have quit because they didn't want to approve this drug

because it had such a modest efficacy, three quit, but unanimous vote against approval. Right, so unanimous vote against then three quit. And this is, I think out of 10 or 11 individuals, so this is truly significant. The drug is going to cost $55,000. It still requires brain scans and all this kind of stuff, but it's hope for people's suffering.

And so the FDA approved it. Friedberg, tell us on a science basis what we're seeing here is what's happening in journalism and social media now happening in science or is this some other, you know, search-to-truth or some other issue. The biogen drug that was approved this week is called adjucanomab. Remember any drug that ends with MAB, MAB means monoclonal antibody.

So it's an antibody, and antibodies, we've talked about in the past, are proteins that can be made by our immune system and proteins that bind to a specific target that then tells your immune system to clear that target out of your body. So that's what monoclonal antibodies do. And we have been using biological drugs, monoclonal antibody drugs for decades now, to target specific cells or specific proteins in our body that we can then remove from our body and that can

reverse or change human health in very significant ways. So this is a class of drugs that is very efficacious for having specific outcomes across many disease states. And so years ago, researchers at the University of Zurich were looking at people with Alzheimer's that were having slowly progressive dementia and they looked at antibodies that they could find in their brain. And they found this antibody that they saw was binding to Amaloid plaque. And Amaloid plaque is one of the theorized mechanisms by which Alzheimer's progresses.

That is, Amaloid plaque builds up in your brain. You start to have dysfunction and inflammation and the Amaloid plaque may be the driver of Alzheimer's, but that is not proven. So they then ultimately gave it to a company called Neurimmune who licensed it to biogen and biogen started testing it. And they took this antibody that they discovered and they turned it into an antibody, you can now get injected into your body,

goes into your brain, the idea is it binds to emaloid plaque and removes it from your brain. And so theoretically, this should slow down or stop Alzheimer's. But it turns out that as they ran this test across thousands of patients, it didn't have as much of an effect. And in fact, the data across many, many patients

showed that it didn't really off of a placebo baseline, meaning people that didn't get the drug versus people that did get the drug, that it wasn't really that different in terms of cognitive scores and tests and all this other stuff. So they abandoned it a few years ago. They kind of got this, they stopped the trial. They had this kind of negative outcome and you know, biogen got beat up for it. And then all of a sudden they refiled about nine months later with the FDA saying, well,

look, when we look at the patients with the highest dosage of the drug, because they gave it in three different doses, so the people that got the most antibodies, this particular group of people had a 23% decline in the progression of their Alzheimer's, which is kind of one way of slicing the data. And as a result, they went back to the FDA and people were like, well, you know, some of the tests don't really show that still. There were some cognitive test results that didn't show that that was the case. And they fought back against, and some people were pushing back against it. And we're not sure, no one knows for sure how it all kind of came together at the end,

but the FDA ultimately approved this drug. And here's what's challenging about this. You basically will go in, you'll get an injection of this antibody, just like you do with many other antibody-based therapies. It costs roughly $5 to make antibody therapies, just to be clear. So when you make them, five bucks roughly is the cost, and they're charging $56,000 for this treatment. So that's problem one in the pharmaceutical kind of debate is should we be charging the

quality of life premium? And number two. Yeah. And then part, you know, the kind of second issue is like should this thing have been approved when it wasn't really That efficacious and you could slice the data slightly and now all payers, you know Meaning all people who are insured or the government or whoever it is that's responsible for insurance payments is Ultimately bearing the cost of everyone with Alzheimer's and there's 15 million people in the United States with Alzheimer's They're gonna raise their hand and say oh my god anything that gives me any chance or any hope I wanna get.

But if it costs $56,000, is it really the responsibility of the insurance company and all the payers to give everyone a hope, even if the drug may not work? Now the downside and the side effects is negligible. There's no risk to taking this drug. So it's all about the cost and the upside. And that is the big philosophical debate right now.

It's like, first of all, should we approve drugs like this? Should we allow pharma companies to charge whatever they want, even when the efficacy is very low, and the cost is very low to make this stuff? And how do we ultimately decide what we can do? Should this be a classic risk reward? Tremoth, how do you look at this on a financial basis? Yeah, let me give you a market investing kind of view on this. Look, I've been taking biotech pretty seriously

over the last 18 months just trying to learn because I think basically freeberg in, you know, accepted me with this idea that you have to know it. So here's what's interesting in the setup for what I've learned and putting a little bit of my knowledge together, which is dangerous. But the setup for Alzheimer's is really scary. If you're black, you're a 20% more likely to get it. If you look at the distribution of all patients, 60% and upwards of 64% or 65% are women. So if you think about the distribution of this disease,

it's the disease of minorities and it's the disease of women. Now that's problematic in and of itself because if you want to have any form of equality it seems like this is something that we have to tackle. The second interesting thing as a set up to this is every single Alzheimer's drug that's ever gone through the FDA has been rejected and has failed. And what's interesting and the more social science around this is, this is also where two of the more infamous insider trading events ever happened was around failed Alzheimer's drug. The first, which is less known, but inside baseball is what happened at SAC, which was a huge hedge fund.

But the second that's very well known is Martha Stewart. And why she went to jail was around a The speculation and the insider trading of the face three results of an Alzheimer's drug which ultimately turned out to fail It was almost the surest money on Wall Street Which is every time some one of these drugs came to market you just bet against it and it would turn out that these stocks would Collapse so there is the social and market setup. I am super torn But I think there are some positive points to make on this thing. But let me give you the negative case. The negative case is, what is the FDA doing

approving a drug where there's no clear evidence that at least the clinical benefits and it could give families sense of false hope? What are you doing in terms of process if you have a unanimous vote against approval? So why do you even bother having an FDA advisory committee of outside experts if they're just going to do what you want? And it could set up precedent where companies can get drugs approved on limited evidence. Now, here's the positive point, which is they may be taking a long-term view,

and what they could be really doing is creating a market that ultimately incentivizes other folks to come in, where then ultimately those people are the ones that find the solution, right? Because this biogen drug, biogen came out and basically said, we think this is a hundred billion dollar market. So now all of a sudden, you must believe capitalism is going to take hold and a lot of young startups will say, well, shit, I should be going after this market as well. And so by going after that, after biogen, then maybe you actually do get to the solution. And just a kind of a

little bit of trivia, it turns out that the acting FDA commissioner in 2016, this woman Janet Woodcock, she was the one that approved a different form of drug in the exact same setup. That one was at electress and which is basically for Dushan muscular dystrophy. And at a negative panel vote, she basically said, no, we're going with this. The scientific community reacted similarly back then. But she basically took the view that, you know, you're doing no harm exactly what you said, free brick as a safety says it's fine. You're doing no harm to the patients by approving this drug. And maybe it might turn out to work in the end. And in that specific case for Dushan muscular dystrophy,

what we see four years later is that now there are a lot more companies focused on finding a solution and they're pouring a ton of money into R&D and maybe one of those things will break through. So I think she could just be running the same playbook here in Alzheimer's, which is important enough that somebody needs to do something. You're saying the economic incentive could drive further innovation into the space that ultimately could benefit patients more truly than this current drug? I think so, and I think like, you know, look, a lot of, like, I think, drugs that are potential solutions, in many ways, I think, what the FDA is doing are two things, which I think are really positive. The first is that they're accelerating their approval timelines, right? So you can have breakthrough approval and innovations.

And so you can get to market much, much faster. The best example is what we've seen in these vaccines. But the second thing is if you have a well-structured safety study that says that these things are not harmful to humans. Then, yeah, David, it's basically saying, sell a $56,000 drug. There's a $10,000 copay. Now, we should talk about that because that shows how broken Medicare plan B is, part B, sorry. But yeah, they're creating a $100 billion market at enough.

Yeah, but should that be the case, or should it be regulated? Because ultimately, if the regulators are approving the drug and enabling the commercial opportunity, shouldn't the regulators also say, you know what, you could have this commercial opportunity, but you can only charge X, because we're not gonna have the taxpayer pay the Y,

or pack the... Yeah, okay, freeberg, let me ask a really basic question here. Why is there no document put out by the FDA saying, here's how we came to this decision in plain English, or is there, because I looked for that, couldn't find it. In other words, the same way there was a vote, they could say, hey, listen, we understand the vote, we're overruling it for this reason.

And why isn't there an interim step? The FDA's not your doctor, right? So I think the way things are set up is your doctor is meant to be informed about the panel's review of drugs and there are labels that doctors need to be able to read and understand. And then the doctor's job is to make a decision

on treatment for their patients and make a recommendation to their patients. So ultimately, the FDA is not a consumer organization. The labels that get approved, what the pharmaceutical companies have to say about their drug, all of that stuff is overseen by the regulators of the FDA. And then that is then used by the doctors to make treatment decisions.

And ultimately, they can kick this back and say, listen, Jason, but couldn't they kick it back and say, we want you to do one more trial or some bridge step here. Hey, you can do 10,000 people over the next three days. They do that. And by the way, and they are going to do continuing studies on aducanemab as it goes into market. And they always do that. And they always ask for more data are going to do continuing studies on aducanemab as it goes into market. And they always do that and they always ask for more data and they do this continuous review. The FDA is a really strong body and a really strong regulatory body and we should all feel kind of pretty well,

you know, safe and secure. But the issue is really, I think the economic question on the other end, which is they could have a hundred drugs tomorrow. And then what happens to the economics of healthcare, if everyone's allowed to charge any price they want for any care if it has even the slightest range of efficacy we're not going to be able to afford anything you know just so this is where like you know regulatory bodies run into each other because the effort so Alzheimer's Alzheimer's is a drug of the old right health care expenses are covered by Medicare old. Right? Healthcare expenses are covered by Medicare. And in Medicare, there's a section called Medicare Part B, which effectively is a way for these drugs to go to market. Just so you guys know, under Medicare Part B plan, a physician gets a 6% kickback of the price of the drug. Your doctor gets 6% of that $57,000. That's a terrible incentive.

It's an incredibly bad incentive. And so $3,000 every time you put somebody on this, it's quite a spiff. It is. And so Medicare Part B has been this mechanism that people have wanted to undo for a long time. Now, if you're sitting in the FDA, you can't change that, because that's covered by CMS. Yeah, that's not your jurisdiction.

I think it's like this weird intergovernmental agency warfare, push and pull and trying to move the incentives. This all goes back to, if Congress can't act, then all these folks have all of these other random tools. They just have to throw this spaghetti against the wall. And this is the kind of stuff that happens because Congress should actually be fixing this in a more substantive, holistic way. And until they do it, this is what's going to happen. This is no different than what we saw during the pandemic, where we had health regulators

coming in, local health regulators, public health officials saying everything shut down, because they're incentive is to save lives. They're incentive is not to balance the tradeoff between saving lives and protecting the people versus the economic damage and the fallout and the cost of it. And there are two different agencies, and ultimately the synthesis of these decisions isn't being managed by a leader anywhere or by a leading organization anywhere,

and that's where things inflate and get ugly and get nasty over time. Okay, SACS, as a free market monster, what do you think SACS? How would you approach releasing these drugs as a? No, but you're for less regulation. When you see this regulatory mass of spaghetti and, you know, costs and price gouging,

you know, if we take the most cynical look at it, because 15 million people times $55,000 here, I'm no genius at math, but my SATs tell me enough that that's gonna be, this drug's gonna make what, 10 billion a year, 20 billion a year, something in that range. If they just get a fraction of those people. So I mean, I agree with Freebergange Moth that we shouldn't give doctors and incentive

to choose one treatment or another, right? I mean, that just seems totally warm. But going to the sort of larger issue of FDA approval, I would make it a little bit easier to get drugs approved. I mean, look, I think that double blind tests is the gold standard if the drug clearly doesn't work, you don't approve it. But this is a case where the evidence is a little bit inconclusive. And in a situation like that where it's a drug that might help people who are facing a deadly disease, and all zymers is one of the worst, it's not only, you know, event the prognosis is terminal, but it also is deteriorative,

and it's devastating for patients and their families. These people have nothing to lose. And so I would let the drug through, I think, and then watch how it performs over the next couple of years. They could always revoke the approval in two years. You know, in other words, almost consider the usage of the drug over the next couple of years. They could always revoke the approval in two years. In other words, almost consider the usage of the drug over the next couple of years as a stage 4 trial. The one group who's not complaining about this are patients, I mean Alzheimer's patients,

want the ability to test this. Generally speaking, I think we should give people who are facing again a terminal prognosis, the ability to try these drugs. Yeah, and Frebra, correct me if I'm wrong, the reason, or maybe Tremoth, you're better for this, but just looking at the economics of this, taking care of somebody with Alzheimer's, and if you, in the starts to hit people at 65 and people start living to 78, 85 years old, they need to have care. A person with Alzheimer's, the issue is not their ongoing maintenance in terms of their brain. It's their day-to-day life. They cannot be left alone. So they have to be either institutionalized or have

home care, and then you're talking about a hundred thousand a year, and I think Medicare and some other people pay for that. So 55K, if the person can take care of themselves. That's how pricing is done, Jason. That's exactly right. Is that how they do it? So pricing is typically done based on the long-term cost benefit of the drug, to the paying system. So they'll take a look at like, hey, here's how much we're going to benefit people, or benefit the paying system.

Therefore, we can charge X dollars for getting this drug. That's why today, you can go get a carti therapy or something, you know, some sort of therapy that is going to be highly efficacious and they'll charge you a million dollars or a genetic, there's a few that are getting approved now for genetic diseases and that, you know, million dollar one time fee because you get the treatment once it costs, you know, technically nothing, the COGS are zero to make this stuff.

You get that treatment they charge you a million dollars, because the long-term care of the progression of that disease is so high that they can economically rationalize that. And so is that ethical or moral? On the pricing, kind of clarify one thing. So we're talking about it at $56,000 a year, that is true, but it's basically $4,800 per shot.

You get a shot once per month, and that costs $4,800, and so you multiply that by true, but it's basically $4,800 per shot. You get a shot once per month, and that costs $4,800, and so you multiply that by 12, and you get to 56,000 number. Now, it's $4,800 to get this monthly shot, an outrageous amount of money for what could be a breakthrough Alzheimer's treatment.

I don't necessarily think so. I mean, that is the sticker price. That's not what the patient is going to pay, right? The patient's going to pay the $10,000 co-pay, but divide that by 12. You're going to pay about $850 per month for what could be a breakthrough treatment. I mean, to me, the real issue is whether it works, and since there are some positive indications, but it's inconclusive, I would say Ty goes to the runner here, meaning you can try it, and let's revisit it in two years

and see if it works. But it wasn't a tie as far as scientists were concerned. So what is the disconnect there, Chimoff? Because I think what they were looking for, they were looking for a causal link. And the problem is, at some point along the way over the last few years, we started with the hypothesis that Amaloid plaque was causal of Alzheimer's. And then we

moved to a place where there was some correlation. And then we moved to a place where we said, actually, it may not do much of anything. But I actually agree with Sachs. I think the FDA did something really novel here, which is that they applied an extremely aggressive free market approach to a market that has been completely bereft of solutions. And so if you can create a hundred billion dollar market overnight, I think it stands to reason that a lot of people will look at the increase in biogen's market cap and the profits that biogen can make over the next 10 or 15 years and say, I will attack that and do that cheaper, faster, better. It happens in every other market. I think the point here is that it probably shouldn't have been the FDA's role

to create competition, but for whatever reason, whether it's how the capital markets and biotechnology are structured or the way that Medicare Part B kind of works and creates these odd incentives, we are where we are. And so I tend to think that it's probably better that this drug was approved. I also agree with Sachs that in general, I think as long as you have a reasonably defensible safety study, we should probably be in the business of getting more drugs approved faster. And the reason is that it allows smart, clever, hardworking people to connect the dots and ways that right now we don't know anything about, like just like, you know, a random factoid to prove this point.

Like when you look inside, for example, of who wins a Nobel Prize, right, particularly in the fields of biology and chemistry, et cetera. You have people that are in their 60s and 70s that win awards for research done in their 20s and 30s. So clearly people at some point when they are somewhat less jaded you know, and somewhat more naive maybe have the ability to really transform the world for all of us. And if you can marry that to economic incentives, so folks that understand the markets can also be along for that ride, that in my mind, I think is generally better than a nanny state of babysitters. I agree with that point.

I think, let me frame this to you in a question for you. Of those scientists on that board who voted against this, if their parent or spouse, God for a bit, were suffering from Alzheimer's. How many of them would take the drug out of the dead? This is my point. It's a point I was going to make, which is everyone wants that lottery ticket. There's no downside and only upside because you're not paying for the lottery ticket. The way the system works in terms of paying right now, as a patient and as a doctor, I have

no incentive to manage cost down. Right? All I have is opportunity in front of me. And so as we add more opportunity, it's we give everyone the ability to have a lottery ticket that potentially could cure their disease or make them kind of live forever or have a healthier state of being. You know, we are going to see this proliferation of approvals that end up costing all of us so much that the inflation that we've already experienced in terms of paying costs for healthcare

continues to climb. So the challenge is like, if we are going to continue to operate a socialized model of medicine or even partially socialized where the government's paying some amount of the premium or employers are paying part of the premium or the individual that's getting the treatment

doesn't bear the cost, you're gonna end up seeing everything in flight because you're creating this incentive now. Companies are gonna rush in, they're gonna try and get 10 things approved. Everyone's gonna be taking an Alzheimer's drug in a couple of years because there's gonna be so many available on the market.

And none of them may actually be curing Alzheimer's. Maybe 10% of people get cured, 90% don't. But the cost is gonna be millions of dollars per person for these treatments, and everyone pays that. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing. We need to have a proliferation of innovations. Certainly, the challenge is in the interim period, the inflation we've already experienced in healthcare,

which is just extraordinary, will continue to climb if we don't regulate the actual market for pricing on these things. And on the other side, we pay all the bills or there's some socialized pool to pay all the bills. You can't have it both ways. I'll give you the other side of the argument as well, which is the reason why this could be so valuable.

Again, if you look back to what Jane Lockwood did, with the muscular, muscular district, yeah. In Dushane muscular district, for Janet Woodcock, sorry, pardon me, Janet Woodcock. But if you know anybody whose child has Dushane muscular district, my gosh, what an incredibly debilitating disease you would not want anybody in the world to have it. And again, by approving that drug, what she did,

I think is something pretty incredible because now there are, the number of companies that have, again, come after that market opportunity because she helped define a market. Four of them are already public, just to give you a sense of it. And so the odds, at least numerically, are greater today than they were four years ago.

And that was a potentially non-efficacious drug that, frankly, though, had a legitimate safety study. To your guests, Chimoth and Friedberg, 10 out of 10 of those people on the FDA board would have a spouse or a loved one take it because there's no downside. If you look at BioGen's market cap just to wrap up here, they added $20 billion in market cap in the five days since this announcement happened. So in terms of incentives,

you gotta think every other drug company is saying, hey, I've got something that kinda sorta works and it's really expensive. Can I get a free ticket now? Can I do this compassion thing? Hopefully it's just the former thing, kinda sorta works and then, you know, they go from there.

All right, moving on to our next topic Bezos has decided that he will be the first billionaire in space Three people are going to be going to space in quotes on an 11-minute flight on July 20th 2021 Jeff Bezos in a promotional video on his Instagram Sprung this on his best friend, his bestie, his brother Mark, who agreed to go with him,

and there's bidding of $3 million, I guess, to $4.8. Oh my God, $4.8 now, on Blue Origin site, and just doing back at the envelope math, which I did last week when I heard this announcement. 600 people or so have gone to space. Some of them have gone to space. Some of them have gone multiple times.

Blue origins done 20 some odd flights, two of which went south and probably would have resulted in death. So I think five to 10% of Blue origins flights would have killed. So it was every I've been on them, but obviously they've made progress since then. Two of the 120 plus flights that SpaceX have done, but none in the last six years have had an accident.

And obviously, Virgin Galactic had one tragic accident as well. So is this a wise idea and where we put the percentage risk of ruined slash fatality? I just want to do statistics for a second, Jason. Yeah. Yeah. Just because there were blue origin accidents in the past, doesn't necessarily mean that it has any bearing in predicting the future likelihood

of there being an accident, because the data from the past is from different machines and different things, different processes. So I don't think, you know, to your tweet and the controversy with your tweet and, you know, your point now, I don't think you can necessarily look at the past. This is much more of a kind of deterministic conversation about like, hey, look, here are the things we have done with our systems. And here's why we have a high confidence in this thing, you know, kind of working. Which is obviously why people don't go on the

first 50 rockets or first 20 rockets, whatever it happens to be. But statistically, it's not zero. So I guess the question is, is this a wise move and where would you actually put the odds at? But it could very well be zero now. Yeah, you don't know. Right, we don't know how well their safety systems have been developed and we don't know how, you know, I don't know anything about this,

but I'm pretty sure that if Hazel says go, he's a pretty smart guy, he's not going in anything that's gonna have some high, some even nominal likelihood of death, right? And he knows probabilities and he's been there in the last 15 test flights and he's seen the data and he's probably seen a string of nominal flights and at some point you just feel like, you know, okay,

this is, this is really dialed in here. My prediction is Bezos is gonna come back and he's gonna announce that he's gonna be the CEO of Blue Origin. I think this is what he's going all in on Blue Origin. I think this is what he wants to do with the rest of his life. I think it's been pretty clear that this is such a passion for him. And like, you know, he's got the world's greatest

money machine ever. It's a flywheel. It'll run as a monopoly for decades. He can do whatever he wants to do now. And so when he takes a look at this, what's greater after you've conquered Earth than leaving Earth and moving on? So to me, this seems to be so intellectually interesting to him and so kind of, accidentally interesting. My guess is he goes in full time on Blue Origin now that he's kind of transitioned to the chairman role and he's kind of been pretty bothered about it.

100% 100% David. We're conservative and typically very scared of anything dangerous. Go ahead and have a good conversation. Well, I'll get best of us, quite for dog fooding his own product, but to be honest, I would take a contrarian view overall.

You know, I think sometimes people get so rich and so powerful that there's nobody around them to tell them when they have a bad idea. And quite frankly, I think this is a brain fart that the people around him are telling him smells like perfume. And they should be telling him, dude, what are you thinking? You know, if Jake out said to me he was going up on a rocket, I'd be like, dude, you got at least 30 good years here. You know, Bezos, don't screw up the podcast.

We need the host. We need you down here. Bezos has got like 170 billion after the divorce. He's, you know, so a young guy, and he's gonna risk it to go up in space for like three minutes. I mean, now, yeah, they have sent the crash test dummy up there successfully 15 times,

but this is the first man flight, the first flight with humans on it. He's determined to be on it. If I were his advisor, I would say put a GoPro on the head of the crash test dummy and experience it in virtual reality. We have set up an VR headset on it. No risk of moving.

Exactly, what are you thinking? Yeah, I mean, if this was a stunt that, you know, Richard Branson did early in his career, remember he did the ballooning things and he was trying to become a billionaire and trying to get excitement around his brand. But I think this is totally unnecessary and the risk of ruin here is not zero.

It might be close to zero, but it's definitely not zero. Well, now Branson is trying to beat Bezos into space. So he's announced, he's gonna go up to, and, you know, so these guys are both being daredevil. It's he going up on the galactic, Timoth, how's he going up this space? Is that a virgin galactic flight? Timoth, what do you have to tell you?

Of course, I'm also children of the board. What do you have to tell you? Oh, wait a second, you have a company here on the board of the space flight. I don't know if it wasn't public. You're saying, sorry, did you say it was a public thing? No, I said, Virgin Galactic is a public company of which I'm chairman of said board of directors. I'm not saying anything about anything.

Brancidus is trying to beat Bezos into space by going up before him. There is now a space race going on. And you have to wonder, and then meanwhile, Elon, I wonder how much of this is because of Bezos' pride, because Elon tweeted that Bezos couldn't get it up, because his rocket, Bezos' rocket is only... Doesn't go to actual space.

Yeah, it goes to like some orbital, like lower orbit. You know, space is... I think it gets in halfway up. I think he's somewhere in the 50 to 70 range. I think if he's how much of this little blue pill, blue origin, if you got the little blue origin, hell, he might get to 100%. How great is this space race, by the way? This is so freaking cool, right? I mean, like the government creates all these great contract incentives. This is a good role for government. They come in, they create all these contract incentives.

SpaceX have been making all this money from the US government. They take that money and they invest in creating the space race, this industry that could absolutely transform humanity for the centuries to come. It really speaks to how semiconductors and computing came out of the space race of the mid-20th century. And we could see this kind of like next industrial age arrives for the space industrial age because of these incentives that have been created by the government. It seems to me like there's a good role here the government's played and super cool.

Isn't this in stark contrast to the government doing the space shuttle program, which if you look at the fatalities, there have been about 30 fatalities in going to space 14 of which were on the two shuttles, one that tragically blew up on the way up and one that disintegrated on the way down in our childhoods in the 80s, I believe for most of the time. And it was also incredibly expensive. Look, this is privatization for the win, right? It's set of having the government doing all the R&D and the government is good at some things, but R&D is not one of them. So you let the private sector do the R&D and

the NASA's contracting with these private sector companies. The government is a phenomenal balance sheet. Yes, Saks, how do you feel about the government funding this work, right? Because they're not doing the work, but it's the taxpayers' money that's going to SpaceX and others for contract services that ultimately fuels this innovation engine. Do you feel like this is a good role for government spending? Is to kind of... Well, the question for government as a policy matter is whether we want to go to space.

And then the question is how do we get there? I definitely believe that if we believe it's important to have a space station to get to space to kind of advance the frontiers of, you know, humankind, then it's a worthy program to fund. And then the question is, well, how do you get there? And I think, you know, funding SpaceX and these, or it's not funding, it's contracts with SpaceX to deliver the product is a much better idea than having the government trying to develop it itself. Right. Because those are milestone-based with some level of competition,

even if people might complain about the bidding process, et cetera, the contract is for a duration of time and for deliverables. If the deliverables are not bad or the contract expires, then we start the whole process over again. And this, correct me if I'm wrong, is a must-do for us, because we cannot let the Communists and the Thoreterians own space.

We have no choice being the democratic West of owning space and getting there before them and dominating space. Nobody can own space, but I think the United States is an incredible balance. Sure. Nobody can own space. I mean, are you kidding me?

What if somebody gets up there who decides to put nuclear missiles up there and decides anybody else who puts satellites up there, we're gonna just nuke them and laser them? You're not gonna own it. You don't even need a nuke quite frankly. You could drop a tungsten rod from space, okay? Just like a giant steel rod.

And by the time it hits the ground, it's going so fast that it basically can blow up or Assassinate anybody The two of you I mean at the two become no, this is real like the two of you are like that like be Arthur and the golden girls I'm the mother Can and be Arthur here blathering on military the room of plan again and be Arthur here blathering on military I have you not seen the such a disease have you not seen the Chinese putting rockets over Taiwan and military exercises these people are not Jason playing

games Jason I understand nobody all I'm saying is there's no owning it okay it's too vast it's effectively infinite you can't own it okay you can have certain areas you can dominate you can you dominate or you can't own it. Okay, you can have certain areas where it may be. You can dominate it. You can dominate space. Yes, you dominate space. Of course, you can dominate space. I would say so. And they don't play by the rules.

I mean, did you guys not see what happened with Hitler in Europe? He dominated Europe for a number of years. Jason, listen. Of all parts of space that you can dominate, maybe the one planet is Uranus. Other than that, there's nothing. You guys are so naive about the intentions of Russia

and China, it is phenomenal. They have 100 year plans to dominate humanity and they are willing to put millions of people into concentration camps. They have no problem going to space and deciding we're gonna own the satellites and we're gonna knock other satellites out of the sky. I can't believe you are so anti-Trump and the same.

It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. You're so incredible. You're so funny. Can I just say one thing? I think back to what we said before, the US is an incredible balance sheet. And what Freeperic said is so true, which is like coming out of the Apollo program, we really created so much technological innovation.

It propelled the US forward. We unfortunately gave a lot of it up, but hopefully this time around we can do it again. And by the way, just last week, I guess it was last week, or a month ago, we got that chips act in play, which is a quarter trillion dollars for semiconductors and other things. So we're slowly getting there, but this is where the US can do a lot of good, which is just to act as a funding source. And then let private markets kind of take over the rest of it. By the way, we've talked about this on the past couple of podcasts, but there is, I think,

$90 billion earmarked in this new bill for enabling American manufacturing progress. And so it will be through a similar sort of funding mechanism. It looks like, as what we're seeing here, it could be a fantastic boon for innovation and infrastructure. Yeah, I just want to say, what other categories should we model this after sex? Should we do this for nuclear? Should we do it for education, for housing?

Before we move on, I mean, look, Jake, I want to come to your defense on this point because I think it's just wrong to say that there aren't like vast and important military applications of space. The fact of matter is you look at the history of warfare, it's critical to have the high ground. Whoever has the high ground ultimately wins the war. This is why the person we do, the Greeks have the high ground. Yeah, we have the high ground.

That's what the guy is. The guy is 5.3. That's the guy that's 5. You have to see me with the spear.. Let me see you with the spear. You haven't seen me with the spear in the shield. Or a me. Let me finish the point. The first thing we do in a war, a conflict,

is establish total air superiority. It's the reason why our infantry doesn't take massive losses. It's, we want to establish artillery that sort of protects the infantry. Look, the future artillery is going to be from space. It is the ultimate high ground. It I grew with J. Cal.

It's naive to think that the other side that other powers are not pursuing military applications. We have to have the ability to defend ourselves against space based attacks and to have those those abilities ourselves those capabilities And so that is part of what's factoring in here with the space. I get it. I get it I know what you guys want a giant laser I don't think it has to be a laser. I think it can be low tech You know, I mean, just if you just literally shot ball bearings at other satellites, it would rip through them, right?

I mean, the tungsten rod programs an actual program, right? So yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a funded military program. Oh my God. By the time if you drop something from space, it hits the ground at like mock 35. Phil, how did you say that? He's invaded our podcast and taken the body of David. No, but in all seriousness, this program that we're seeing great success with inspiring the greatest entrepreneurs of our time to go after big prizes like this, could we not do

this with nuclear energy, housing, and education? Or is that kind of out of the question? What do you mean you lose? Let me just point out, by the way, the things you just pointed out are the things that are now most regulated. And it's the regulatory burden, which ultimately stifles innovation, whereas in this case, we're enabling innovation without putting a lot of regulatory burden on space at this stage, right?

And so as soon as I tar, which is one of these regulatory bodies, starts to step in and maybe we start to limit things that can be done in space and so on and so forth, you may see things kind of get damaged like nuclear energy got damaged because the fear of the downside ends up you know kind of counterbalancing the opportunity of the upside. And it's something we've seen time and time again with every innovation cycle in every industry. And you know, you're right. Right now we're in this opportunistic moment in the space race. But as soon as kind of the regulatory burden becomes heavy, you're going to see the same thing that happened with housing, the same

thing that happened with nuclear energy, and all the other kind of innovation cycles that kind of got stifled, not just in the US, but globally. Yeah. So, we don't think for nuclear, we'll see this happening anytime soon. Man, that would be an incredible... Nobody wants nuclear, if there's a huge nimbabre problem with nuclear, right? Which is who really wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard? I mean, not gonna happen.

I don't think it's realistic. It's one of these ideas that, you know, sounds great in theory, but then in practice, no one's willing to raise their hand and say, I want that in my hands. I have a really easy solution for that. Why don't you just make anybody who has to live within X zone of a nuclear power plant have a tax credit of a million dollars a year. They still don't you just make anybody who has to live within X zone of a nuclear power plant have a tax credit of a million dollars a year? They still don't want it. Look, I think the future of alternative energy is solar.

It's an inexhaustible supply. The cost of solar power is... Not going to be enough. We can't get it out there. The cost of solar panels keeps going down. The cost curve is going down exponentially. And look, ultimately, all life on this planet is solar powered, right?

Because fossil fuels come from the remains of dead dinosaurs who were eight plants and plants are solar powered. So ultimately, the sun is the ultimate source of energy, not wind, not nuclear, not windmills. What's geothermal? It's going to be solar. Geothermal capacity is still like 100 billion years based on our current consumption rate, but there's limited research relative to the opportunity in geothermal. But yeah, totally agree with you, SACs. In a microcosm of, you know,

the reopening of the pandemic, we've been at record low caselo loads and deaths are so low now from COVID-19 in the low hundreds that it's probably hard to know. Friedberg, you tell me if I'm wrong or right. If people are of those three or four hundred people dying a day, that's with COVID from COVID, etc. But anybody, I think it's intellectually correct to say that anybody who over the age of 12 who wants a vaccine could get it and anybody who's in a high risk group certainly now has had over six months to get a vaccine. So we're basically done and now the question becomes what happens to society? Are we going to go back to work? Apple employees wrote a letter about Apple's demand, I'm using air quotes here, Apple's demand, I'm using air quotes here, that people come back to work three days a week. Amazon just adjusted their return to work policy. Backing off their claim of in March that they're going to return to an office-centric culture, they announced that employees can do two

days remote three days in the office. That seems to be the three for two. Google has a similar policy. They're expecting people to return to the office three days a week in September. Twitter said you can work from home forever because Jack is an introvert and doesn't want to come back to work, I guess. Facebook employees either need approval to can you work from home full time

or they will need to be back in the office 50% of the time, but Zuckerberg personally said that he is embracing remote work. Here's the quote, I found that working remotely has given me more space for long-term thinking and helped me spend more time with my family, which has made me happier and more productive at work, which I guess is either devastating for real estate or this is a great negotiation that's going on. You had some choice quotes about Apple employees doing three that's going on, you had some choice quotes about Apple employees doing three letters, slash petitions in three weeks.

Yeah. Yeah. So, look, I don't have a problem with the work from home policy. My problem is with the fact that the Apple employees keep doing what they do, which is sign these petitions. And of course, it's all the snowflake language around. We're not being listened to, we're not being heard. Then they want to dictate to management the way that the company should work.

They've circulated petitions to get other employees fired. They circulated petitions to make Tim Cook take a stance against Israel. Now they're circulating petition on work from home. Of course, that is what Apple employees do. And Apple management is doing what it seems to do, which is cave to these petitions every time. And so they're in an infinite loop where the employees have realized they can run the company by forming these sort of boycotts and petition mobs. And it's working. Now, again, my objection is not to work from home. Most of my portfolio companies are now working from home or fully distributed, they're hiring employees everywhere.

It's been very liberating for them to be able to hire talent anywhere in the world. And so I think the work from home question, the reason why these big companies are struggling with it, I think quite frankly, is because it's about their ability to supervise their employees. I think that work from home because it's about their ability to supervise their employees I think that work from home makes it best employees better But it allows the worst employees to hide and I think what this really comes down to is a fear on the part of

Apple and Google on Facebook they've got a thousand employees who aren't really working and are gonna be able to completely hide Mm-hmm, and I think that's what this policy comes down to. So that's the failure of management or just the nature of work for the whole? I think it's the nature of these gigantic companies where they've got so many employees that they're trying to figure out how to supervise them all and make sure they're actually doing work.

There's this funny tweet that's going around. I don't know if it's true or not, but it got retweeted about somebody saying that I've gotten six jobs during the pandemic. They're all work from home, and I'm waiting to get fired from them for people realizing I'm not doing anything. So I think this work from home controversy ultimately is about the ability of these large companies to supervise a workforce that they don't know what they're doing if anything.

Oh my God, what a brilliant idea. The big on-sub problem in the pandemic with respect to work from home is, how do you onboard new people, in my opinion? Like, if you have an established company with established people, where everybody knows each other, it seems like all positive to be able to work from home because there's trust, there's decorum, there's social norms, there's all these things that were established together. But what happens when all of a sudden you introduce one, two, three, four, five,

five hundred new people into the mix? How do you onboard these folks? How do you get, and I think that's not a solve problem. And until you do that, I'm not sure that work for Momo will be as effective as it can be because I think you'll just get a lot of people that that language a little bit as they switch jobs. Now, maybe what that means is they'll switch jobs less because they'll just say actually this is net better. My crappy job got a little bit better, so there's no reason to move. On your point of commercial real estate, Jacob, I actually think it just brings the utilization down, but I'm not sure it destroys it, because I think people

need the physical plant. Now, maybe over time, they'll get much smarter about getting smaller spaces and having flexed spaces, so like things like we work do better, because then you use that for overflow space, or that's how you actually have a primary outfit. But yeah, those are my thoughts. Freiburg, any thoughts? I think it's going to be hard to... What I'm hearing, I don't know if you guys have talked to a lot of CEOs, but I just hear it's kind of a little bit tough right now to find the balance of the rules around when

to be in work because people have meetings in the off, they'll have a meeting. 80% of the people will show up to the meeting. 20% will be remote and then it's a huge headache for everyone to be like, okay, we're all in the room, we're all having a conversation, now we got to zoom the people in that aren't here. And this person decided not to show up today and it's kind of become a little bit of a weird photo, or what's the right word?

Fopah. To come into like, A fucks, Po. Right, to not come into work while everyone else is meeting in person and it's just becoming a little bit of a conflict across the organization right now. It's gonna be sticky for a while. I'm not sure there's gonna be a great solution and it's gonna vary by company. Also, it's going to be sticky for a while. I'm not sure there's going to be a great solution

and it's going to vary by company. Also, it's very different. As you guys know, when, you know, what I was single in my early 20s working at Google, oh, here it comes. Uh-oh. Well, no, it was like, it was going to work. It was like, it's cool. Here's the like, no, it was like, it was cool. Like, it was great to go to campus every day. Now that I'm married with kids, bop, bop. No, it was like, it was cool. Like, it was great to go to campus every day. Now that I'm married with kids, you know, like being around your kids more often, you got obligations at home, it's very different, right?

Your priorities change. And so when you have a diversity in the workforce of people with different home lives and so on. What if you're married, but you don't know, and you have kids, but you can't remember their names. David overdue, sucks. I mean, but at that moment in time, correct me if I'm wrong, Friedberg, you know, Google was taking people out of Stanford, Harvard, MIT, whatever. And they were basically giving them another four years in college with this like college

campus experience. It's great experience. It was fucking a freaking barista made your coffees anytime Anytime you want a coffee, walk over to a counter, and there's a barista, and he makes you whatever you want. You get all these amazing snacks, and you go down the slide to your meeting. I mean, it's like... When you say it was great experience,

do you mean that it was fun for the employees? Like it was like a fun life experience, or do you mean they actually got good work experience? Fun life experience. Yeah, yeah. But it was like useless. It was useless from like a skills or like resume, like from building your career, it was useless, right?

Well, the work itself was useful. At least for me, at least at that era at Google when it was a private company, I loved that work. It was an incredible experience for me. I made a lot of friends and built incredible career experience working at Google when it was a private company. But what about now? I mean, Google has this reputation

that there's thousands of employees not doing anything. It was satirized. Totally. By the employees sitting on the roof of the show's look in Valley, ULU. Yeah, exactly. ULU, ULU, ULU. Yeah, so look, I mean instead of sitting on the roof,

they're gonna be sitting on their couch at home. It's like, I guess it's an improvement But I think that's really what it comes down to what what Facebook said in its statement was kind of interesting There was a part in there where they kind of implied that work from home would be like a perk You know and that high performers would get it and then low performers would have to come into the office more And that probably is the right approach, because in order to let people work from home, you have to trust them to be much more self-motivated

to get their work done. And quite frankly, the employees who want to hide, you got to make this feel coming to the office. You can see it's like in jail where the good inmates get through. Totally. Yeah, absolutely. If you were telling the yard,

yeah, if you were it's congegal visits, if you were running a 500 to a thousand employee SaaS company based in Silicon Valley with offices around the country or whatever, what would you do right now? What would your work from home policy be today? Well, most of my companies that are in that position are going fully, remotely distributed. And it is, and they're going to be some challenges to be sure, but I just think it's inevitable. Now, some of them, I do think there is a strong cultural advantage.

We talked about this before. It's made this point around having everyone in the same office or at least having hubs. So I am a fan of developing hubs. You might have like an engineering hub somewhere that, you know, and then you've got some remote engineers, you might have like a customer service hub. I do think that like call centers, for example, you're much better off having everybody work from the same call center, because that is like a total

productivity job where it's about like how many units of work can you do within a certain amount of time. It's way easier to measure and manage that work when it's all happening in one place. And those call centers tend to be in locations that aren't as expensive as the Bay Area. At Metro Mile, we have a big customer service and claim center in Tempe, Arizona. And we have gone fully remote since the pandemic

and productivity per unit, per employee's gone up since going distributed. Because it turns out that, I'm not gonna pine too deeply on this, but the throughput increases when people are maybe not being distracted in the office or something. So, and you can actually track it. And that's a very measurable job, right? So the throughput and everything can be measured.

So I would kind of make a counterpoint there that maybe we're seeing something different. Yeah, I mean, look, you maybe you maybe write about that. I mean, it all comes down to, do you have, do you have systems that can manage the, the sort of sprawl? And if you do, I mean, and you can really measure the output and you can ensure the employees are delivering results, that's, that's a win-win. I, I created a super lightweight version of this where since Slack is so dominant, I just tell people, you need to have a start

and end to the day so you can get on with your personal life. Just at the start of the day, do an SOD in Slack and the general channel. You just say two or three bullet points of what you're working on today. And then at the end of the day, reply to that, same one with your EOD, just what you got done today today. And then at the end of the day, reply to that, same one with your EOD.

Just what you got done today, and then inform your employees, and then you don't need to be managed. So if you can do that for five minutes at the start of the day, and just five minutes into the day, and then on Friday, before you leave for the, you can close up the week, give me an EOW of what you got done this week.

And then on Saturdays, like today, when we're taping this, I go through, have a cup of coffee, read all the EOWs, and I get feedback. And it has made it so clear who's a contributor in the company and who's not. And when I, I instituted this pre pandemic, and I had two people quick, because they were like, I don't want to do it. And it turned out that those people were the lowest performers. I think you should call it a TPS report. It, you know, I would, you could frame it as such, like micro-managing and I said,

you can either frame this as micro-managing or you're setting an intention of what you're gonna do in your workout and then you record what you did in your workout. Since I started using the tonal system and since I started using Hydra, I'm not advertising them here, but they both have measurements

and I did 6,500 pounds on the tonal, and I'm like, I want to break that record this weekend. I want to do 7,000 pounds. I want to do five exercises. And I went from doing three exercises, three reps to five exercises, four reps. And if I want to measure it. If I do slash apple slices into slack, do I get apple slices? Absolutely.

We will bring you, you could also pick milk or chocolate milk or strawberry milk. What did you guys think of that's press release that Salesforce sent out, which said something to the effect of like they are becoming an entirely Slack centric company. They're going to rebuild, I guess the entire architecture of SFDC around or Salesforce around. Of course, we predict predict it down the show. Slack is going to be the, they're going to rename Salesforce. Slack.

No, but I don't really understand what that meant other than the actual headline of the statement. I'm wondering if you guys understand what it means. Well, I think I understand what Benioff is getting at, which I saw on the interview that he did recently where he talked about their quarterly results, which I guess were their best ever. It was like a fabulous quarter for them. What he talked about, Benioff is very good at connecting his products to larger societal trends. And the big trend

that he's kind of hooking on to is this distributed work trend. And the way he described it is, you know, basically this is the future companies are trying to figure it out, but they need a saddle, because I guess this is a trend that could sort of buck them off the horse. He's trying to say that Slack is going to be the thing that anchors your company now for this new era of remote distributed work. I think it's brilliant marketing. Brilliant. Absolutely. There they're there. He's absolutely brilliant. He has built such an incredible organization. I mean, the scale of Salesforce over these last 20 years, my gosh, he is a star, star of stars. I mean, I sent you guys in the Slack,

or I sent you guys in the chat, this socketsight.com, which is a cool real estate site for San Francisco that's been around for two decades. I think it's hilarious. They calculate how much open office space by how many Salesforce towers are empty in, and it's 16 million of square feet of vacant office space now spread across San Francisco. But this seems to me at the same time we're having a crazy housing crisis.

I don't know if you're monitoring this, but it turns out that banks and hedge funds and now redfin and, you know, open door and all these companies are buying homes. Homes are getting bit up. At the same time, mortgage is in all time low and people are moving around and we're not constructing. So I think we had a 60 or 70% decline in new housing being released into the market. And now we've got a full blown housing crisis in the country. I'm gonna go back, AutoLum Lim

and put up my 10 year break even. I think going to go back, uh, auto-lonlim and put up my, uh, 10-year break even. I think this whole inflation thing is a head fake. And I think that, um, the, right now, we're in this weird position where the home builders are not necessarily sure whether they're going to rip in the capital necessary to build a bunch of homes. The reason they would slow down is if they think that inflation is coming, rates go up, mortgage rates go up, and then demand falls off. But if it turns out to be a head fake, the builders will then actually build what's necessary. And they have the capital capacity to do it, but I don't think that they've had the the economic justification and the courage to do it. And in fairness to them, it's because

a 10 year break even has gone straight up since the depths of the pandemic, which is essentially again, just to get everybody up to speed, it's how the market thinks about the future forward inflation rate. Anyways, over the last three or four months, or three or four weeks, sorry, since we talked about it,

it's kind of steadily started to fall off. And I think there's a prevailing sentiment that, we're gonna to see some short-term spikes we saw it this past week in CPI. Energy went bananas right, the cost of energy, the cost of certain things, but then we're going to get back to normal and when we get back to normal inflation will be back in size. And Dale Greenlight, a lot of projects, and I think you'll see housing supply kick back

up really aggressively. That'll be good for us. Yeah, two points there, I think. So I hope Jamoth is right about the long-term inflation prognosis. It's very important for investment in growth companies, growth stocks, and high-tech companies that the inflation that long-term interest rate remains low. So I hope you're right. I think that ultimately what's happening is there's a battle going on between sort of a fiscal, monetary policy coming out of Washington, which is highly inflationary,

and then technological deflation. So for the last 25 years, because we've had this explosion of productivity around technology, it's driven down the prices of pretty much everything that's not where the prices aren't set by the government. So, healthcare, universities, things like that, the prices have gone up because the government's paying for it. Everything else, the prices aren't set by the government. So, healthcare, universities, things like that, the price have gone up because the government's paying for it. Everything else, the prices come down massively. So, we were kind of in this battle

between sort of government inflation and technological deflation. I don't know which one's gonna win. I do think that the sort of the policies we're seeing, creating a lot of government debt and the Fed continuing on this never ending QE are pretty scary, but in any event, I hope you're right about where this ends up. I think on the the other point was was sorry, what were we we're on we're talking about the housing. Yeah, the housing

So this is a really interesting sort of populous narrative that's evolving where you've got I mean, it's I think both the left and the right can agree that it's a pretty scary thing that you now have major hedge funds buying up huge stocks of housing in the US driving up prices. So first time home buyers can't buy a home. I mean, that is a very scary, it's a nightmare. It's a nightmare. It's a nightmare trend. And I think you're seeing a reaction to it on the left that California now proposed some new policy where they want the state of California to pay for 50% of first time home buyers houses, which just seems insane to me. But you know, and then on the on the right, Tucker just did a segment coming down attacking BlackRock these big hedge funds

for basically for driving up the prices. So I think you're going to see a unanimity on the populist left and right in reaction to these hedge funds. But the thing that no one's really talking about that they need to be talking about is the nimbism. I mean, Jason, you mentioned it. The reason why we don't have enough housing is because it's too hard to build. And Tremoth is right that the builders could get the capital for it, but it is too hard

to get these projects approved. That is the thing we've got to, that is the change we've got to make. To build on that, I think what's happening now becomes the catalyst to break the dynbyism. If all these black rocks are buying up all the homes, if young people and young families can't buy a home, despite mortgage rates being ridiculously low, and despite them having the money to do it and the desire to do it, then that's going to create a massive societal of people, I believe. And then that's going to either drive people to other states like Texas is benefiting

because they're pro development. It's going to catalyze the massive movement of people out of New York, out of California, whatever states are giving too much red tape. It's gonna try people to those states because that's where the housing people is gonna be built or those states are gonna crack under the pressure and say, you know what?

We're gonna let you build in Sacramento. And you guys know, I have a housing company in my portfolio. And they are getting absolutely day loose with people begging them to do affordable housing in different locations. The biggest problem they're having is sorting through all the projects. And what are we going to do? But the great news is technology exists now to build modular homes in factories like Tesla does cars and ship them to site and take six months to a year out of the construction process. So then it just becomes a matter of regulations and which date decides that they're gonna let people buy a home for the first time. And if California doesn't let people buy a home for the first time, who's gonna pay taxes here?

Where's the growth gonna come from? This is gonna be a stall moment, I think. Just just you know, then the other the other really terrible thing about home ownership is that it is where the preponderance of wealth creation for average Americans comes from. And so when you lock people out of home ownership, you're essentially ripping away 60 to 70% of how they're ever going to make real wealth. And so yet again, you exacerbate Jason to your point, the inequality that we have where a few folks make all the money, and then everybody else, they're kind of shut up from the equity market. They're shut up from private investing, and then they're shut up from owning a home, and

no wonder people are pissed because it's like, you throw your hands in the air and it's like literally creating a revolution. You pulled up three ladders at once. You can't invest. You can't invest in how it happens. Tell me how I can just earn some money so that I can pay for my kids to go to college, take a vacation and have a nice life whenever,

tell me how to do it then. Yeah, because look, just to summarize, government doesn't have a good answer. We're pulling up the ladder of home ownership. We've pulled up the ladder with accredited evasion. You can't invest in private companies. We've made higher education far too expensive. We pulled up that ladder.

I mean, what's left for the average citizen to grow their wealth? This is a crazy thing. We pull up the ladder. And then in response, government creates a program to subsidize people and bail them out at the end. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. I mean, Mike's a lot of had a really funny tweet

about the California program, which was, it's amazing the lengths to which people will go to avoid building new housing, new supply. It's like we subsidize home buyers for this artificial price increase we've caused by limiting the supply. Or you're eliminating people's student loans. Just allow supply and demand.

Yeah, just make more colleges and make them cheaper. What do you guys think about this whole pro-public, speaking of health, health, and equality, this pro-public elite of tax records? Somebody inside the IRS or it was hacked, we don't know. Yeah, this is clearly a whole person. Got a hold of basically 3,000 the tax records, many going back many years of 3,000 of the wealthiest Americans, and pro-publica has slowly started to digest and issue news reports about them. And it shows that in some years, guys like Bezos paid no tax whatsoever.

We're able to take huge deductions. At one point, actually, Bezos in a year where we made kind of like billion dollars was able to essentially didn't claim he made nothing and then made so little or made negative dollars that he got a $4,000 tax credit That's typically reserved for people You know people people who It was a tax for your kids. Yeah, it's it's not for a billionaire essentially, but you know the this was a lot I think the big story here is the leak more than Capital gains how capital gains works. We all know how capital gains work.

ProPublica has gotten agenda. Obviously, this is a left leaning investigative journalism funded by the left and donations. And they do a great job with investigations. But in this case, they're just telling everybody what we already know, which is if you have giant holdings, you can get a loan against them. Whether it's you own a home and you can get a mortgage against it or equity line or if you own a bunch of stock,

you can get a margin loan. I mean, it's not really news. I think this is like starting the pot and the big news is who released this data and then, you know, there are some countries. I believe Sweden is one of them where tax records are probably published. Top level. Yeah, they have to be published. And so I think the way the United States is going is we're going to force people to publish their tax records and we're going to force some sort of minimum for people with oldings, aka wealth tax. And I'm not saying I agree with either of those, but I think that this is the way it's going. And somebody posted to our I'd be in favor of publishing more IRS agents are

coming on line. I'd be in favor of publishing tax returns. I have no, I think that that's a really good idea. As a flex, mostly. No, no, I think it's a really smart thing to do. I think like you would see a lot less shady behavior if you had to publish this stuff. When you publish your tax return to mock, would you do a shirt list holding up your tax return in a mirror and take a selfie

and then that's how you would publish it or something. Listening to it sweat. More like a one tier, one tier, or like done by two. It should just be a picture of you with a wheel barrel of cash. Just you dumping it into a frame. I think one thing I'll say is I think these stories

have highlighted just an incredible ability to shift the narrative and create a different kind of dialogue around taxation, because as we all know, the principle of taxation in the United States is that you are taxed on income. And income is a recognized game, meaning when you sell an asset for cash or for some other asset, then you do a job or you do a job and then you get paid, you get that cash that you can now go use to go buy something or to do whatever you want to do with.

That is the transaction moment that you get taxed on. Everyone saying, well, this guy's a billionaire. He has these billions of dollars. He paid no taxes. He didn't necessarily make billions of dollars of income that year. His stock value may have gone up billions of dollars, but if we all taxed each other when our stock values went up each year, and we didn't get a rebate when our stocks went down People would feel pretty upset the average America and the average person would probably feel pretty upset if they got taxed every time

There's there stock portfolio went up and then they didn't get to have a rebate when their stock portfolio went down So the principle of taxation is such that when you sell those shares and you ultimately generate income That's when you get taxed. But the narrative is very quickly shifting where people are like, oh, this guy's a billionaire stated, you know, he didn't pay taxes. They don't say anything about how much income he actually made. And a lot of these guys don't need income because- Yeah, they have a dollar salary.

They pay like, you know- Well, they effectively have a credit card. One way to think about it is wealthy people have a credit card as It's to mouth point it out because they can buy everything on loan. They can buy everything they want on credit because down the road, everyone knows you guys have billions of dollars when you're going to pay consumption taxes on those. So if they do take the billion dollar loan and you buy houses, your bank consumption should be to be honest. Not on your own.

It's actually even more perverted. So if you take a loan and then you use that loan to actually invest, the United States tax law says that all that interest you pay is deductible as well. And so the arbitrage that you find yourself in is if you have, yeah, you have these assets, you go to a bank, they'll they'll lend it against because they want to, you know, what is the bank's job? A bank's job is to generate interest, right? So, you know, they want these big fish as customers. Right.

And so, and then, and then part of the tax code is that it's tax deductible. And so it's one of these things that I think structurally gets people very confused about what's right or wrong, but it happens. And it happens, um, hasn't there any common sense solution, Saks? Well, let's just say just keep in mind that when somebody lives on a credit card, like one day that credit card comes to you, and it's not a problem for Bezos because Amazon stocks just keeps going up and up and up, but you will occasionally hear about some rich person going broke.

And the reason is always that they took on too much debt, and then their stock price went down, and all of a sudden they owe more than the value of the collateral and then they're just done. And so you do, yeah, exactly. So you do take a big risk. When you live on margin, you are taking a big risk. Most people don't do that. Most people who have gains will eventually cash out.

They'll do that by selling their company or they'll sell a piece of their stock. They'll have a stock selling plan and then they pay taxes. Exactly. And so I feel like it's really unfair how, I don't wanna say it's unfair because people get really riled up when rich people aren't paying taxes. But it's interesting to me how the narratives has been kind of very quickly reframed

without the specificity of the income that was generated by these individuals. And they're just saying, look, this person has all this wealth. They didn't pay any taxes without actually recognizing that this person may have had an income generating event earlier in their life, which they did pay taxes on, or they will have an income generating event later in their life, which they will pay taxes on. And so the truth is a little bit more nuanced than I think, you know, the very quick kind of sound by the press stories kind of indicate. And it's just it's just really, it's been, it's been really interesting to

watch how many people get so riled up and froffy about this moment. And I get that we all, you know, everyone kind of dislikes wealthy people. You know, I certainly did when, when, you know, I was, I had no money and I felt like I was getting screwed by this. You certainly did when we started this podcast. Yeah. But. Yeah. But I think Freeberg Race is a great point, which is that with Bezos, take for example, and look, by the way, maybe he should be paying more tax in other ways, but with respect to his Amazon stock, he built this machine called Amazon. It's this machine that makes all of our lives better for the most part in terms of the delivery of goods and services.

You press a button, somebody shows up the next day. So he builds this incredible machine. He owns a piece of it. He's merely holding on to his ownership in that machine. But the way that the public market is valuing that machine keeps going up and up and up. But to Freeberg's point, he hasn't recognized more income. He doesn't have more cash in his bank account. And so should he be paying taxes in a year?

Well, I mean, here's the thing. If you change the rule, if you change the rule, Chimouth, correct me if I'm wrong here, and you said you have to pay on the gain, then somebody who bought a house in 1980 and it appreciated 100 X in California, by the time they were 70 and they bought it in their 30s, they wouldn't get caught up in this wealth tax or paying for it as they go.

The appreciation. This mechanism exists, now Jason, you said a key thing. This mechanism exists at all parts of the tax code. So yes, a billionaire can basically go to JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, you know, get a margin loan on their stock and live their life. But individual folks who are not billionaires can do that via a HELOC on their home. And a lot of people do that as well. They take home equity lines of credit and they use that to forward finance things as well.

The difference is that because the quantum are so much bigger, you have this ability for rich people to accelerate their wealth creation in a way that normal folks don't. So I'll give you another example. So one example that I just spoke about is you basically take a loan instead of selling things, right? You use that to make investments. All of that interest is tax deductible. Number one, number two is even if you don't need to do that, you can just take a loan on

a small percentage of your capital. Reinvest that. Again, pay the interest. And now you're running implicitly a little bit of leverage. And just to give you a sense of it, there's a really great study by AQR, I think is the name of the hedge one. And they reverse engineered Buffett's returns. And what they saw was that Buffett ran

about 20 to 30% levered his entire career and The way he did that was synthetically by the float of Geico The point I'm trying to make is even the best investors in the world Prove that a small amount of margin and leverage is the key between being average and being the best in the world And if that if he needed that let's be honest, we all need that. And again, we all can't have that. It's only available to a few. And so I'm not saying that the rules are wrong, but the rules do stifle the ability to basically

move up and move down that curve. It's clear how often people move down, people get stopped out, they get margined out, happens all the time. It's very hard to see examples of people moving up. It's because it's harder and harder to get that first little bit of capital that then you can go and run with. Yeah, and see, I think the great, the great reconciliation is what we need to work on as a society. And if you look at what the great reconciliation would be, it's, can I get in great education? Can I get great healthcare and can I have a nice home? And if you just

said, we're gonna have healthcare for everybody in the United States, very easy to pay. And if you just said, we're going to allow the building of single family homes, two or three bedroom homes, and you cannot stop them and any state that tries to stop them is not gonna get whatever amount of federal funding.

And then finally, we said, all trade schools are free. Those are three very simple things. That's a great idea by the way. This, what a fabulous idea Jason. I love it. I reconciled it. And charter schools and charter schools and school choice are everybody.

Yeah. Because that is the number one thing to create a quality of opportunity in this country. The great reconciles are doing incredible ideas guys. And safe communities. Because the number one thing kids need is a great education and a safe household. And you cannot have that when gun care.

And healthcare, you can't have that when gun violence is exploding across the country. Our communities are no longer safe. We have to fix that problem. All right, listen, we're at 75 minutes. Do we want to talk about toxic Bitcoin insanity in Miami? Yeah, what the hell is going on over there? What are these guys doing? All right, so very simple. There was a Bitcoin insanity in Miami. Yeah, what the hell is going on over there? What are these guys doing?

All right, so very simple. There was a Bitcoin conference in Miami. If you go to that conference, you have to agree to not mention other cryptocurrencies. There is a, we all have heard of Bitcoin maximalization or being a Bitcoin maximalist. This means you believe that Bitcoin is the one true cryptocurrency, all other cryptocurrencies do not exist.

This conference has codified that to the point at which people are jumping on stage like maniacs ripping off their clothes to reveal dogecoin shirts. And then people are saying, Bitcoin maximalism now has evolved into Bitcoin toxicity, which is a subset of the Bitcoin movement. What Bitcoin toxicity says is,

in order for Bitcoin to become the one true currency and the reserve currency, we must attack anybody who attacks it. In other words, cult like behavior, either accept Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, whoever, or Hindu God, Zeus, for the Greeks, you have to accept our God, or else we're gonna attack you.

So you can actually see this in practice. I tweeted, if Bitcoin was replaced by technology, what would that look like? And you get massively ratioed on Twitter, which means more comments than likes. I'll take the other side of this if you want. Yeah, go ahead. Well, okay.

So Bitcoin toxicity is now a thing. And it's actually, I believe, making the movement toxic to people and people will not going to want to participate. So it's actually collapsing the project. People do not want to be involved in toxicity and people think that there is many ways to win in crypto. So the crypto community, because of the recent loss of 50%, I think now is in a debt spiral of toxicity, go, sex.

Well, I think this is a fake moral panic on your part. Look, if toxicity means that you think that all these cryptocurrencies are a scam, then Jason, you are guilty of toxicity too, because you think I believe in Bitcoin. I believe in I also know it's worth nobody has been on Twitter morcing that all these cryptocurrencies are a scam. The only disagreement that you and the Bitcoin Max will have is with respect to Bitcoin. But you both agree.

Both sides agree that you and the Max will believe that all these other crypto currencies are a scam. No, we're doing some real technology. You believe that there are scammers in it to be contributed. You've contributed to the toxicity by basically. Absolutely not. I did not. I constantly denouncing every crypto. I didn't and scams I believe technology. It's a real technology

But anyway, it's it's just gross and I think it's I think that in general if I had to summarize what I see I see like there's a vein of Young men basically who are super super frustrated and In cells and Well, I don't know if they're in cells or not, but like. And, um, themselves. And, well, I don't know if they're in cells or not, but like, you know, I think that they, they basically, I think like, ran the race the way they were told. They checked all the boxes, they went to the schools, they got the jobs, they did the thing, they did the that, and it's kind of not working.

And so whenever they find a thing that's new, I think they find acceptance in a community and then man, do they get really rigid about it? And in some ways just stop thinking for themselves. And that's a shame. Call to call to me. Can I quote something? We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact and we're very, very pissed off. So I can fight club.

That's my club. Yeah, of course it's my club. That's a great quote. It's true. It's true. That basically summarizes Twitter. I feel like Instagram is Twitter. It's Instagram.

Instagram made it a hundred times worse. You could see everyday people suddenly becoming rich and famous or at least the perception and using filters to look better. And then everyone feels like they're being left out or everyone feels like they want something that they don't have. And then you're left in this constant state of want and desire and this constant state of unhappiness. So this isn't new, by the way, you know, these are Buddhist

principles that docus, source of unhappiness is really about desire. And if you can let go of, and we create more desire. And comparing yourself to others. Yeah. I think there's a different answer to the Fight Club nihilism than just sort of giving up all desire. I understand the sort of Buddhist approach. I actually wrote in 1999 when I joined PayPal, I wrote an article called Silicon Valley's

Fight Clubs, in which I basically said that startups were the answer to this sort of, you got, remember, Fight Club came out in 1999. And so you had this sort of nihilism associated with this empty materialism. People wanted all these materialistic things, but it didn't really make them happy. But I think that creating something great,

and being part of creating something great is the answer to this. And it's about, it's about preparation the answer to this. And it's about it's about preparation. It's about purpose, just having meaning, mastery, mastery, and we are robbing people of having that experience when we do stuff like universal basic income or tell them they don't need to work, you know, we should be encouraging them to have these great experiences. And this is why I kind of react to these like Apple snowflakes who don't want to come

into their billion dollar spaceship campus. It's like, you know, they're just punching a time clock. You know, they're not really getting any meaning out of their work. And that's the thing I sort of react to. That's so, it's so long. You'd rather than find another place where they can actually find purpose and mastery

rather than be it Apple, be mad, right? Contribute. Contribute. The iPhone have been created by a remote team. Let's be clear. The iPhone would never have happened to have it not been for Steve Jobs. Okay. Period and just story.

You need to have the founder. Yeah, you need to have the founder. No, you just need it to have him. I mean, he could have been anybody, but he himself. Okay, if him with a remote team, could they have made the iPhone? No, Pixel. I don't think so. I mean, I think Apple will probably be a different company if Steve were still here.

Who knows? Which is why I think they want people to come back. And I think what's happening here, I mean, I hate to be super cynical is I think a lot of people left the Bay Area, didn't tell Apple because you're supposed to tell them if you relocate, and they're just trying to extend their tenure at Apple because there is no way to come in three days a week if you're living in Tahoe or further out. I mean, what are you supposed to do?

Get a hotel for two nights a week and then drive back to Tahoe or Phoenix. I mean, these people have left. If Steve were still around, those Apple employees would be racing back to the office because they'd be so excited about what they're working on, they'd be working on new products. And if they didn't, if they didn't have that passion,

Steve would have weeded them out in two seconds. At the end of the day, all you have is a snowflake, by the way. You mentioned snowflake, although you said Apple snowflakes, but the founder of snowflake said in a CNBC episode, essentially, we care about diversity, but we care first and foremost about being a high performing organization, I'm paraphrasing, that services our customers and our shareholders.

And so while diversity is important, we're gonna fill a role with the best person we can find. And so now the grand debate that has started is, and I think it's related to what happened at Coinbase and Shopify with no more political speech at work, is meritocracy and can meritocracy live alongside equity and equality and diversification or diversity? So diversity and meritocracy in the same organization,

which wins? Mike Moritz wrote this pretty fabulous, I think it was in the financial times a couple of years ago. He got in a little bit of heat for doing it, but essentially what he said was, while we are all talking about the things that we think are important, there's an entire cadre of engineer in China

that are coding 24-7. I think he actually said like 9.9.6 exactly. 9.9 to 9 p.m. six days a week, and they use the same t-g three times and he used that to Illustrate he know he used it to illustrate their commitment to excellence and what he used to see in Silicon Valley where people on the weekend's the parking lots were full keep going from up and but I just bring this up because it's like We've lost the ability to have both things be true meaning it's, meaning it's maybe like at the end of the day Frank Sglutman is a representative and a spokesperson for the values of a company that's a hundred

billion dollar company that came out of nowhere and built something fabulous for people in a matter of a few years. I doubt that he speaks for himself only. No, he specifically said in this comment, and so if this he was speaking for other people who were too scared to talk about it. Okay, but I'm saying, but I'm saying he also, he's, but he's, I don't care about other companies, he speaks for snowflake.

So to the extent he says that as a CEO of snowflake, why can't we respect that an entire company has decided to do something? For example, you know, the other opposite end of this, do you remember this bakery? I think it was in Colorado that like, you know, refused to make a cake. Yeah, refused to make a cake for a lesbian couple. It went all the way to the Supreme Court and they said that this guy had the right to deny them that making the cake.

To me, it makes my blood boil. But at least I live in a country where he has the right to have that opinion and it's in within a legal boundary of reasonableness, I guess. Now I learn from that and I say, okay, that's a legal boundary of reasonableness. And until that laws overturned, that's what it is. This is so much less than that and we can't let this guy actually just go about his day without issuing an apology. That's why the American were engineers that are working 996 in China, eating our lunch every day.

Yeah, I mean, in America, today, you have to agree to another example. I'll give you another example. You have to capitulate and agree to the diversity. Jason, let me give you another example. There is a massive play right now going on in the uranium market. It was brought to my attention. I was like, let me just go look at this. I don't know anything about this,

but I just was curious about what's going on. And effectively what it is, there was a fund that was trying to basically corner uranium and drive the price up. And the entire thing about uranium, which was interesting, is, okay, what is it used for? It's used for nuclear reactors. Well, then you spend a little time understanding nuclear reactors. And I was shocked to learn how clean, how safe, how reliable, how repeatable.

I had all these stupid cobwebs in my head based on a random couple of press releases, 3 mile out of a Fukushima, etc. So when I cleared all of that bias away and I learned about it, then I'm like, why aren't nuclear reactors everywhere? Because it is the fastest way for us to get to carbon neutral. And then I find out the same people who want carbon neutral, i.e. green piece, is one of the largest advocates against nuclear.

And I thought, how do we not, again, be in a position to actually hold two thoughts that are slightly divergent at the same time? We want nuclear energy because it actually supports something that's even more important to the sustainable ecosystem that green pieces there to protect in the first place. And you can't have it. And to me, I find, so I find all of this stuff, again, at Nazim in this list of while we're all naval gazing on this bullshit China's nine nine six. China's nine nine six. Right. We have to have four progress. And by

the way, slotmin, he put out a release, comments I made during a meteor review of last week, may have led some to infer that I believe that diversity in merit are mutually exclusive when it comes to recruitment hiring and promotion. I do not believe this. And I want to personally apologize to anyone who may have been hurt,

we're offended by my comments. So we've been added, said in a statement posted Monday, I've set full person responsibility for the lack of clarity in my comments I think Sleutman's apology actually only buttresses the original point he was making which is that CEOs are afraid to say what they really think Yes He came out he had the bravery encouraged to say what he really thought he then got piled on on Twitter and now he's apologizing for and walking it back It's really kind of ashamed at Jamal's point. How can we have honest conversations

when people are just afraid to say what they think? Whether I agree with Frank Sloopin or not is not the point. The point is that if his entire company and his employees and his executive team have made a specific decision that they view merit as incredibly important. And then they layered diversity in as a result.

Who am I to cherry pick those words? And all of a sudden, I have a wording issue with that because I don't even understand the hiring criteria. It's not as if he published those stuff. So it's not like anybody on the outside had any shred of ability to know the details. Right. And I agree, and here's my problem

with all the people who attacked Frank on Twitter is, you know, have any of those people said one word about school choice or charter schools, the need to release the stranglehold that the education unions have on our kids, they're running these schools for the benefit of the unions, not for the benefit of the kids, they're abolishing advanced math, and how many of the people attacking Frank have said one word about that?

Because if we want to achieve a quality of opportunity in our society, we have to fix the schools. And so it's so easy to attack Frank, but they're unwilling to say one word about school choice because the unions are a political ally and it's inconvenient for them to do so. What about, again, going and actually understanding the clonliness and safety of nuclear and, you know, being able to tell folks on the environment to left that actually this is a path to sustainable energy and a better ecology and biodiversity in the shortest path possible. They just want to shut down the conversation.

They don't want there to be any real conversation or debate. But we're shutting down, to be really honest with you, words, and we're shutting down rather superficial conversations, and nobody ends up addressing the root cause issues of anything. That's the shame. I just think that we are screaming at each other about things that none of us really understand

without taking the time to understand each other, meanwhile, China is 996. I just can't say, which is why we need to, now you agree, Tramoth, we have to win space. Meanwhile, China is 996. The 996, and then you put one space and put one. You put 1.2 billion people that are born in a collective system against holistically defined goals over multi-decade period of time. The only, by the way, going back to where we started just to end maybe the podcast, biotech

is the last bastion where America is completely dominant. Right? Software too. Not really. There are incredible advances that it's been American biotechnological ingenuity through and through. And the question there is going to be, how do we make sure we wrap our arms around this category and continue to do great things? Because in the absence of it, and if we get, again, if you lose the script, some other

country is going to 996 that market from us as well. Yeah, I think, you know, what you're pointing out is we're in this generational competition script, some other country is going to 996 that market from us as well. Yeah, I think, you know, what you're pointing out is we're in this generational competition sort of, sort of cold war type conflict with China. I think our foreign policy is trying to realign around that. You're seeing both Democrats or Republicans really get on the same page now about the threat that China represents. But our domestic policy is not realigned around that. If we really wanna win this cold war against China, we have to be competitive. And we keep doing things to our schools, our kids,

and other parts of our system and our economy, that are anti-competitive. We need more freedbergs. And if you get rid of the advanced programs, we have no freedbergs. We need to clone freedberg. Freeberg, what's the chances we could just clone you and have like a 2,000 more freebergs to solve this biotech problem? Would you be open to that? Can we start the clone wars? Do you think you

would get along with your clone or would you want to destroy your clone? Destroy. That's mimetic. So, you know that? I want 10 clones of myself. Are you kidding me? Can you imagine the round table? You've runnyzny's your art, wrote about this very eloquently many, many decades ago. This goes in one place, which is, you know, it goes into capital murder. I want to clone army of myself. Exactly.

Would you like to just sit down and play chess with your clone all day? Not chess, but he'd like to do something else. Oh, no! Oh, no! That's not an image I wanted. Oh no! You're gonna have a threesome with yourself?

No, no. So nothing sexual. No, no, no, no, stop. That's sort of what you're saying. I'd be cool with clones. I'd create the most closely. You wrestle with your own clone? Well, the rest of the match.

I feel like there's all these different things I want to do in my life that, you know, different careers or whatever. And I could say one sacs out to be an architect. Different life styles? One sacs could be an architect, and one could be a director, and one could be- I want to be a lover. One sucks to be an architect and one could be a director and one could be whatever. One schmatz to be a lawyer.

Do you guys want to have your mind blown for a second? Yes, please. Okay, so there's a concept, a capability called induced pluripotent stem cells, where you can basically take any cell in your body and apply a bunch of chemicals to it and effectively get that cell to convert into a stem cell. What's it converts into a, and so the copy of the cell becomes a stem cell. And this was these guys, Yamannaka factors, they wanted a Nobel Prize for this.

Now you could take that stem cell and turn it into an OVA cell, turn it into effectively an egg cell. A fetus. And then you could induce that fetus to start dividing based on a discovery that was made recently, which hasn't been done in mammals yet, but effectively get it to start dividing without being fertilized and grow, and it would effectively grow a clone. So this has been done in plants, it has not been done in animals. So in theory, in the next decade or two, we could take any hair cell from our own body

converted into a stem cell. This is totally sci-fi. By the way, it's not proven. There's a bunch of discoveries that have been made research that's been done that points to this trajectory, that you could then take that stem cell from, take a cell from your body, turn into a stem cell, turn into an egg cell, induce it to start growing,

and turn it into effectively a clone of your cell. I just want to say, as you've been saying this. Is that begun? I've been shaking my head. Jason has no reaction. Sax is grinning from in here. You're getting it. I mean, you can't get it out of it.

Sax is. I'm gonna be like Saddam Hussein with like 12 clones of myself. You're getting it. Do you want me to make magic with clones of yourself? And then, just think of the possibilities. I love you, Bessie's four, the queen of Kenwaw, Rain Man himself, of the possibilities. I love you besties. For the Queen of Kinwa, Rainman himself and the dictator. I'm Jake Al and this has been a double episode

of the All in Podcast. We'll see you all next time, bye bye. What? We'll let your winners ride. Rainman David Saxton. I'm going to win. Oh yeah. And's actually said. I'm going to the beach. And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, West.

I'm sweet of kinwa. I'm going to the beach. What? What? What? What? What? Besties are gone.

I'm going to the beach. That's my dog taking a wish to drive away to the sea. We're going to the a chat with you. We should all just get a room and just have one big hug or a cheek. Because it's like sexual tension that we just need to release that. What? You're a big, what? You're a big, what?

We need to get merged. I'm going on leave.