All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E89: GDP growth negative in Q2, $SHOP layoffs, Alzheimer's fraud, Ginkgo acquires Zymergen & more

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

0:00 Bestie intros! 2:19 GDP growth is negative for a second consecutive quarter, but is the US actually in a recession? How has the White House controlled the narrative? 22:45 Looking at COVID trends with a post-COVID view: e-commerce, remote work, and how they correlate 36:33 "Inflation Reduction Act", how government subsidies can stifle innovation 59:50 Alzheimer's fraud, Ginkgo acquires Zymergen for $300M 1:17:36 Democrats backing MAGA candidates in primaries vs. more moderate republicans: savvy and cynical or too risky? 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 Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.bea.gov/news/2022/gross-domestic-product-second-quarter-2022-advance-estimate#:~:text=Real%20gross%20domestic%20product%20 https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team https://www.google.com/finance/quote/TDOC:NYSE https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-in-joe-manchin-and-chuck-schumers-reconciliation-deal-on-climate-health-and-tax-policy-11658973323 https://twitter.com/jamiedupree/status/1552406981637545993 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/world/africa/congo-oil-gas-auction.html https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0 https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/news/ginkgo-acquire-zymergen/ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/us/politics/democrats-john-gibbs-peter-meijer.html https://twitter.com/ConanOBrien/status/1552358211986006019 https://twitter.com/maga_cy/status/1552360064693915648  

All right, his monthly burn rate would make even Bezos wins. He's living the life of a Sri Lankan prince. He drinks nothing but the absolute highest top shelf. He's lifting Italy's GDP by himself. The dictators backed Mothpolly Hoppatiya. Back to the program. Thank you, Jake. Okay. And you mentioned that burn rate. I thought you could talk about me. I was talking about it. Sometimes he's in tropes. You're not sure which which way it's a misdirect. It's a misdirect comedy. A misdirect is inconceivable that my burn is higher than David's. I have I own one house. How is it possible? And maybe one or two next. You're such an ass. He's analyzing macroeconomic charts and grids. Well, at the same time,

ignoring his kids. He's the Sultan of SAS. It'sids. Well, at the same time, ignoring his kids. He's the Sultan of SAS. It's no surprise. The only thing heavier than his pockets. The bags under his eyes, the rain man is back. David Sacks. It's not bad. Oh, here we go.

Here we go. The admiral of anxiety, he's right with Shrive. He plays a f*** out his PS5, and he also plays what in real life. Meow! The commander of the catboys. David Friedberg. I mean, I'm totally cool with that opening because you're gonna look like an asshole. That's all good. I mean, more of an asshole. I mean, if you didn't ignore it, every time Friedberg spoke, he would have heard that the guy from Anapornah Pictures reached out to him,

gave him a link to download a free game about cats which he downloaded and he's been playing it's now the most popular video game in the world. You introduced the cat game it's on you. By the way what? Sure you are right. It looks like a carpet. Yeah you really do look like one of the characters from Goodfellas like one of the older guys in the Kansas City. Oh yeah.

I have like some guards right off screen here and I got my hands off. I got from Duncan. You remind me of one of the guys in Kansas City from Casino. Absolutely. Sit around the table in that restaurant. It's like, should we whack him? Why take a chance? Boom! You're getting mad and you got my style icon. Joe Petchy's my style icon. You look really bad. Thank you. Thank you. GDP fell by 0.9% in Q2, marking two straight quarters of negative growth.

In Q1, we all know GDP fell 1.6%. Here's the real GDP chart. Current dollar GDP increased 7.8% in annual rate or 465 billion in Q2 to a level of 24.85 trillion home construction down 14% Upstancely because of the interest rates increasing Inventories which helped boost GDP in 21 21 drag down growth in Q2 so supply chains easing taking away two percentage points Chimath what's your take to these year over year comparisons work? We were talking in the chat a little bit about the spike in 2021 versus the dip in 2020. What's your take on this?

I mean, I think you just summarized that people are really fixated on these numbers without understanding basic statistics. So just taking a step back, if you go to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which is an official website of the government of the United States that hosts GDP, the title makes it pretty self-obvious what we're dealing with here, which is says Nick, you can put it up there. Real GDP, the percent change from the preceding quarter.

So things can still go up positively, but still be negative if it doesn't go up by the same or more than the quarter before it. The thing that we really have going on is that over the last eight quarters, we've had all kinds of very turbulent data that's made the trend line unpredictable. And the most obvious way to see this is actually in one specific subsector, which we'll get to in a second, which is around USC Commerce adoption. You see this one huge spike coming out of nowhere.

And then eventually everything has settled back to trend. The same way, I think, what we're waiting to figure out is how many quarters does it take for us to get back to on-trend growth in the economy. We had a massive shortfall in Q2 of 2020. We had a massive surplus in Q3 of 2020. We've had a country that's been getting back to finding equilibrium over the last five quarters. So we don't really know what the steady state growth should be. This is why I specifically had such an issue with the tone the White House took which was trying to explain away this that this isn't a recession by trying to create doubt in the definition.

Instead I think it would have been much better off just repeating what I just said and explaining basic statistics and actually showing that the country is headed in the right direction largely speaking from a really crazy one-time externality that nobody could have predicted, that it's going to take some number of quarters, and so really what you should look at, and Jason, you've pointed to this, is employment and wages, and try to be a little bit more circumspect and overreacting to any one quarter of data. By the way, the Fed exactly just said the same thing yesterday

when they raised 75 basis points. They said we are not gonna give guidance anymore because things are too turbulent. We're gonna remain vigilant on inflation, but mostly we're going to be very near term data dependent. So I would boil all of this and saying, let's not overreact to a quarter's print here or there. And specifically the label,

I think the White House made a mistake in trying to basically think we all didn't understand what our technical recession was. I think instead we should just focus on what we have to do to get back to solid state equilibrium. Yeah, just to put a pin in the definitions, we all know the common definition to successive quarters of negative GDP. However, people have said it's a temporary economic decline during which trade and industry activity are reduced.

So there's a sort of debate and splitting hairs going on, SACS, which was kind of stupid. The big news this morning is that we no longer know what a recession is. This is such a vast and complicated question. You must will be asking what is the meaning of life. Now I remember in the days of Republican presidents, we had a very simple definition of recession, which was two quarters of negative GDP growth,

but now that we have a Democrat in the White House, we just can't know these things. Why even ask such difficult questions, right? I mean, that's basically the media coverage today and it's absurd. I mean, and you saw for the last week the administration that spokespeople have been trying to muddy the waters on the definition of recession and it was laughable as they're doing it, but now you see the media coverage today and you realize like they've bought into this nonsense and they're carrying so much water for the administration. Look, the headline should be the Biden recession has begun. That's it. If you had three minutes or 45 seconds for your Biden over under with SACS, you took

the under you one. You're in a recession. He's the president. And if we had a Republican in the White House, it would be Republican president recession has begun. So the media here is carrying so much water to try and avoid the obvious headline. I just explained it. Instead of reporting the obvious headline, they're now saying that we're approaching recession or we might be in recession. We have all these difficult technical issues.

Listen, we're in a recession. It started. It might be a shallow recession. We don't know yet. Yeah. It's a recession in which the unemployment rate, as of today, is low, although the labor participation rate is also low. So listen, we're at the beginning of a recession. It might turn out we might have a bouncing Q3. This might be more of a double dip. I suspect that's what

it will be. But we know the cause of this. The cause of this recession is inflation. If you look at the economy's growth in nominal terms, it grew at 7.0% because inflation was at 9%, you have to subtract them in real terms. The economy is shrinking. And who is to blame for inflation? Well, Jay Powell at the Fed, because you reacted way too slowly, but also the Biden administration for all the spending they did. How much to an energy they think they could have reacted to quarters?

No, like nine months earlier. So three. We got that we got that first surprise inflation print last summer. It was May, I believe that 5.1%. We started to talk about 10-year break evens, tips in May of last year. Yeah, so they could have got 42. No, the nine months and they continue. Not only do they not raise rates or signal any desire to raise rates for six months, they

continue to quantitative easing for nine months, which just makes no sense. But they should have taken their fall off the accelerator. Not nine months. They only stopped in June of this past year. So we've only been quantitatively tightening for two months. I thought they stopped the bond buying program in March. Maybe that's right. Yeah.

Yeah, but they stopped quantitative easing in March, but you're right. The tightening is just something they're getting started with. But the point is they should have stopped easing, right? Like, why would you need to keep intervening in the markets to buy more, but to basically push out more money? Is the reason for this that Powell and Yellen just haven't lived through highly inflationary times? They're older than I am.

They haven't been in office and doing Fed policy. I just read Volkos book, if you haven't read it, it's pretty great, his biography. What he had to do in 81, 82 was super severe, but we just haven't lived through this in our life. So I guess people are just not used to having to tap the brakes in our time. No, no, look, what happened is that the administration reacted in a political way to the inflation print. They invented this word, well, the word trans-tree existed, but they applied it.

You heard this word used relentlessly for about six months. So the administration went into denial mode. And then by the end of the year, it became clear that it was persistent. And I think the issue with Powell is that he is basically responding to headline risk. Right? So he didn't respond to, you know, the inflation problem last summer. He waits until the headlines tell him he has to react. And so now the thing that he's worried about is recession. Obviously, he knew.

No, he's worried about inflation mostly, right? He's worried about inflation, but if he looked at yesterday's, right, but if he looked at his comments yesterday, it was more dovish comments. They did 75 point rate hike, but the comments were more dovish. And I think it's because he knows that today we have this second consecutive quarter of negative GDP growth. So now he's trying to balance recession risk against inflation risk. But the point is that the Fed has been very slow to react. And the administration basically just tries to relabel and rebrand problems instead of confronting them head on. Hey, Jim, off when we look at this chart, you pulled up four and we see this massive spike,

Q3, Q4, Q1, Q2, a little bit in Q3 and then Q4. I mean, this massive, one, two, three, four, five, six, just extraordinary quarters or five out of six in terms of GDP, that's all stimulus in your mind, right? This is the money drop. So that was locked down. So in Q2, 2020, Jason, they locked the economy down. Yeah, so people were spending online and we'll get to the

Chimalt story about Spotify, but it's not all of it, but the point is it's some combination of lockdown and access money, right? Access money because because of lose financial conditions, distort what true supply and demand should be. Got it, right? And access money can come from the government. distort what true supply and demand should be. Right. Right. And access money can come from the government. But in this case, access governing money went from the government into the hands of individuals

who then participated in the public markets. And they distorted what it, what it all looked like. And so there was a lot of purchasing activity that was propped up by what seemed like an endless supply of free money. Right. So we love that. Yeah. Good. And so now that that money is getting taken out, we don't yet know what the real equilibrium economic growth rate should be. Because you have to remember, we have not seen an era without federally introduced spending, without federally introduced forms of quantitative easing since the great financial crisis.

So we have been propping up our economy for 14 years straight now. So we have distorted the prices of bonds and fixed income. We've distorted the prices of equities. We've created an asset bubble in crypto out of nowhere. And now we have to do the hard work of figuring out what the real supply demand is in the economy. And we don't know. If we took six quarters here, there's six quarters of just massive GDP spike there from the preceding quarters. And we have two down quarters. Is it going to take six quarters to wash us out or longer? I guess no longer because what David said is now making the problem even worse. So because Powell was catering to whatever pressure he's been getting and he must be getting some severe pressure from the White House, those were really dubbish comments.

But what is the problem when he is dubbish? Well, the practical reality is a couple of things. Number one is typically the yields of long dated bonds go down. Okay. That essentially tells everybody else to reprice assets. What does that practically do? It makes the cost of borrowing roughly cheaper. Okay. It makes the price of equities, particularly ones that are far out on the risk spectrum So specifically let's focus on nasdaq and crypto right tech stocks biotech stocks and and crypto stocks go up much more Aggressively, so what does power will effectively done?

He is synthetically created a form of easing again, right like his job at the federal reserve if you think about the money supply as a pipe, it's to shrink the pipe, to close off demand, to get things in equilibrium. So even though he's doing this, by the language that he's doing, he's effectively allowing market participants to basically guess that the worst is over and now we're going to start to expand the pipe again. And so they go to the end state. So what he effectively did in one speech is basically put a pin at the end of this year and is telling the markets, I'm mostly going to be done. And if anything, I'm probably going to be cutting in the back half of 23, go on your merry way.

And there is no CPU. So the problem with that is, It's now pushing the problem out another eight quarters. Like we need to stop this nonsense. He needs to be definitive and he needs to fundamentally break the back of inflation so that you find out what the true demand is in the economy. Yeah, and it we did point seven five yesterday. The markets rallied on his sort of the assumption that he would do a couple of more of these rate hikes, and then he'd be

done at the second half of the year, and then, hey, maybe we can get back to growth or some normalcy in related to all of this. And by the way, there was an interesting story. The sacks would be interested in. Did you read Paul Vokers biography at sacks? No, I'm not ready. I'm not familiar with his record, but yeah. Like at one point Baker and Reagan took and Volker into a room off of the White House, so it wasn't recorded and just said,

Volker to Volker, the president does not want you to raise rates going into the 84 election full stop. And Volcker's like, well, I wasn't planning on raising them. So there's a lot of politics in this, even though people claim that already done enough. I mean, Volcker raised rates all the way up to like 20% he broke the back of inflation. It created a very severe recession in I think 1981, 82. But by 1983, the economy was rocketing back with lower interest rates and they basically solved the inflation problem. Hopefully we're not in that situation where Powell has to jack up rates so much to break

the back of inflation because it means that we'd be in an even more serious recession. So I hope we're not in a vulgar type situation. But just think about that spread, SACs. 20% versus like 304% we're trying to get to. We've never in the history of America ever had CPI print above four and a half or five percent without inflation being brought down by having Fed funds not also be greater than four and a half or five percent. So at some point inflation will turn over and we'll print 6 and 7%, but that's still not below 4.5 or 5. And right now our target Fed funds rate is between 2.25 and 2.5%. So we could still be only 50% of the way there if inflation remains at 4 to 4 to 5%. And this is what I think market participants don't want to hear

They don't want to hear that there has to be a meaningful form of tightening and Politicians don't want to hear that the White House for sure doesn't want me here The problem is that if Powell Cater is to too much of that feedback He's not going to do what he's supposed to do and why he's put in that job. His job is to get it to 2% and keep price stability and full employment. I do think there is a balance here. I mean, the reality is we do not want pal tightening more than he should or more than is necessary to solve inflation because it will cause a serious recession.

So I think we're caught between two pretty bad options here and it's because I think that what happened last year contributes to this. I mean, look look if you go back to that chart that you just showed What happened in Q2 of 2020? We had a very healthy economy going into 2020 in 2019, right? And then in Q2 of 2020 we had COVID, but we made the situation even worse With lockdowns and we should basically shut down the old economy, brought it back at least in most states in Q3 and then the Fed started printing and Congress started printing $10 trillion. Well, still, by last year, the economy was back, we had something like 5.7% annualized growth.

This year it's negative. Why is that? I mean, this may be the lingering effect of all that stimulus, but I think that it is, but I do think that the administration made it worse by sending checks into an overheated economy. They also created an energy scarcity, and they just kept, you know, spending more money. I'm not saying the White House isn't without fault, David, but I do think that if all of these geniuses could have actually just taken a simple econ and stats one in one class and explained how you're over your measurements work to the American people, I think they're smart enough to understand.

We didn't have to go down this convoluted route. We could have just explained we put a lot of excess money in the economy. We don't yet know what the full effect of that is. We need to let that wash through. In the meantime, you're going to see some crazy numbers from time to time and we just have to be patient. And the other crazy things you're gonna have looking at second and third order effects is all these downstream effects.

People are making business decisions going into these economies, Shopify just laid off 10% of its workforce, about 1,000 people on Tuesday. Their stock is down 10% past five days, overall 70% year to date. And if you look at this chart, and Toby took blame for this, he basically said, listen, we thought that this was going to be a fast forward into the future that people would

adopt e-commerce in a major way. And that would stick. Here's US e-commerce adoption growth rate, massive spike when people were forced to buy all their goods online. And now it is regressing to the mean. I mean, mean reversion is a bitch. If you look at Shopify stock, if you look at Peloton stock, if you look at a firm stock, if you look at ARC,

a lot of these things were trending in a great direction. They had this short-term, crazy behavior in the middle of all of this free money, and now they've mean-roverded. And we're in the midst of finding out what the real price is. I got to give Toby a huge round of applause because he is such a great CEO, and I'll tell you why. Last year, in the middle of all of this wokeism, he wrote this incredible memo,

which was, you know, we're not a family, we're a team, which I thought was exceptionally well-written and really got the point across. This time around, he just owned it. He's like, you know, I made a huge bet that all of this behavior change was going to be discontinuous and permanent and it turned out I was wrong. I'm sorry for that and here's how we're going to have to course correct. In both cases

he kind of just put it all out there and he owned it. And I think that that's all you can do when you make a bet and it's wrong. And here's what he said. It's now clear that that didn't pay off ultimately placed in this bet was my call to make and I got this wrong now. We have to adjust as a consequence. We have to think about it some of you today and I'm deeply sorry for that. I mean everybody made that mistake, right? So, you know, it is, it's just your right, Dr. Moth, just own it. Everyone was thinking the same thing. We're all we're talking about how COVID was this acceleration is virus and it was going to accelerate all these trends. And the acceleration... Well, that's the...

The acceleration... The weight awakening is going to be for all these people who made all these trends. And, well, that's the acceleration. The point of awakening is gonna be for all these people who made all these bets, assuming that it's permanent. And specifically, I mean, especially around real estate and work from home and all of the stuff, benefits, and it's all going to change now. And the reason I say that is the combination of reversion to the mean will impact a company's bottom line.

And those boards of directors and CEOs will say, okay, we're just going to have to reset expectations. And that's going to touch the employees. I don't know if you saw this leech transcript, but, you know, Zach was asked the question from this. Oh, God, that was cool. That was unbelievable. He was asking about his emotional support days. Or something.

I think in the middle of like Zach having like a really serious, you know, heart to heart with the company about how we're gonna have to buckle down and, you know, form a new individual performance. One dude, you know, Schmengi from the back raises and he goes, what about the COVID extra vacation days for those kids? He literally his head almost exposed. He's like, did you not just listen to what I said? I just said if people are not performing at a high level, maybe they shouldn't be here

and you're asking me about more days off. Just fire that person to say like you obviously you don't get it. You didn't listen to anything. I said, you're not right for this team at this time. He said a version of that. He's like, there's a lot of people here that may not be the right thing. Freeberg, when we look at these trends, okay, commerce seems like people are going back to shopping,

but I want to ask you about two specific ones. Healthcare, it does seem like telemedicine was one of those things that got accelerated during COVID. Do you think that's gonna revert to the mean or do you think that doing doctors visits over FaceTime and text and all these consultations gonna stick with us and then what about work from home because that does not seem to be shifting all that much.

Free part. The work from home is not shifting? Well, I mean, people are still staying home and Amazon just put a hold on six buildings where they said, you can finish the outsides, but let's not do the insides because we don't even know what we're going to do with these buildings and what hybrid's going to look like. And Zuckerberg hasn't been able to get people to come back to the office and Apple seems

to be getting people two or three days a week. So it seems like it's still been a struggle and downtown San Francisco is empty. So we're getting mixed. We're getting mixed results back now, I would say is the best way to describe it. So work from home and telemedicine. What do you think, Freiburg? I mean, certainly the knowledge economy seems to prefer

work from home. I mean, you're working on a computer and you don't need to interact with people. And you've got kids. Our family, you're inclined to stay home. So that seems to be a sticking point. You know, younger people probably have their own motivations.

But there was a good stat on telehealth. I'm just trying to find it. And I think telehealth surged during COVID. And 36% of patients used a telehealth service in 2021, 420% increase over 2019. And so despite some reversion post COVID, post lockdowns, there's a significant sticking point that, and I think 60% of telehealth patients are women. So there's particularly female services that are being rendered through telehealth at an increasing rate, then pre-COVID. And so there's a lot of stuff.

I mean, look, we've all had to go to the doctor's office for two hours to get some prescription or get a doctor to give us some advice on something they don't need to physically check us out for. So, you know, certainly seems to be a acceleration in that department. Offices. What was the Amazon like was working

on 15 warehouses they shut down as well? Right? I mean, if you guys remember at the start of COVID, when you placed something on Amazon, it was like a two week delay because they didn't have enough capacity to fulfill the order volume, you know, you look at Toby's chart, it's nearly a doubling

in e-commerce volume in a week. When that happens, Amazon's, you know, plus or minus 5% supply chain has to revert to servicing twice as many customers. It's just not going to happen. So they overbuilt, tried to get ahead of the curve. Remember, they hired like 100,000 workers. And they had to make a pipeline for quarters ahead to build warehouses. Now they're realizing the demand's not going to be there, and they're cutting back on 15 warehouses around the country and not going to build warehouses. Now they're realizing the demand's not gonna be there and they're cutting back on 15 warehouses

around the country and not gonna build them. They were buying up so many warehouses, that a couple of companies that were looking for warehouses in Los Angeles, Northern California, and Amazon just bought an option on every single warehouse they could find, and now they're putting them back on the market, so they definitely went too heavy. And then everybody started betting on Peloton and Teladoc.

And if you look at Teladoc, I mean, it's off 90% from the peak. I would show the Peloton chart as well, but that would just be gratuitous. And some of the stuff to note, like at the end of the day, whatever product is better for the consumer, they're gonna pick.

What's the better way to buy shirts? What's the better way to get, we'll define better. Yeah, I mean, for the consumer, it's like, do you wanna try them on or do you know what your size, right? Do you buy a brand that you know on a size, you know, you're gonna buy it online at this point.

I mean, the one thing COVID did is it basically created a trial by fire. My parents never used DoorDash before COVID. So then they were forced to use DoorDash during COVID. Now they know what it's like. And so, you know, there are now people that never trialed a lot of these services that have trialed them and are now making decisions based on that experience. But that's a beautiful example. So just use your parents. Why do you think, let's assume they did, why do you think they mean reverted to now using DoorDash only in the same percentages they would have otherwise exiled a little bit of grocery?

I think the quality of the food, the time to wait, the experience of going out to dinner, there's a lot of motivating factors that are different by different demos. And so whenever the consumer wants, they're going to pick. If I want to go have a dining experience in person with my friends, I'm going to go do that instead of sitting at home ordering DoorDash and having everyone come sit on the couch and eat dinner together. So I think that there's this, you know, this call it mean reversion, but we have seen, call it a broader exposure and we're really going to see the true market dynamics play out. I don't think everyone wants to buy shoes online. I don't think everyone wants to

buy every piece of clothing online. I think people want to go to the store and try stuff on. I think it's that and I think that there's a lot of want to go to the store and try stuff on. I think it's that. And I think that there's a lot of ancillary social benefits that come with a lot of these activities that you lose if you just optimize for efficiency. So to your point, like, yeah, you can get a burrito, but even going to Chipotle with your friend is more fun. Totally get out of the house. You can get out of the house, shooting the shit, you know, um, it's just, it's and the serendipity. Yeah, you may run into somebody. You, nothing beats that. I will tell you shooting the shit, you know. Yep. It's just, it's end to serendipity. Yeah, you may run into somebody.

Nothing beats that. I will tell you by the way, I do believe that there is a counter narrative to the idea of work from home and e-commerce moving together. I think as people work from home, they wanna go be in person for other activities more. Yes.

So the more you're working from home, the more you wanna go to dinner with people or lunch to people, the more you wanna go shop in person, because you're stuck in the house all day and you want to go do other stuff. And so if you're working in the office, you're going to do more e-commerce. And if you're working at home, you're probably going to do less e-commerce. So there's probably some net net balance. We saw both of them rise together during COVID, but now there's more of a equilibrium being

reached. Well, I mean, if you don't go, I think we're changing. I have you. May stay home for three days straight. And obviously, remember, and just remember 60% of the US population lives in urban areas where this is kind of an effective kind of conversation we're having. I think outside of that, it's a very different world. And so for 40% of Americans, this is not like the conversation that, you know, in deeply

suburban and rural areas. Do you guys know what shadow or ghost quitting is? You know what ghost quitting is? Ghost quitting. I saw it on TikTok. You stop working. I saw it on TikTok. But you're still hitting paid. It's when you decide to quit mentally, but don't actually quit. And so you basically get off the corporate rat race by doing the bare minimum to not get fired at a company. Oh, like tax during the science segment. And so I, you know, I think that there's all of these like invented things that people do that they think they can get away with, which they generally can in a moment of prosperity. We're in a moment of actually like buckling down when earnings matter and profits matter

and investor pressure matters, all of this stuff I think is going to mean revert. So this is sort of my opinion on all of this, which is I think that most of these behaviors will eventually take over, but it's still many years away. And right now we have to go through the process of just getting back to where we were meant to be

in the first place. I think one area with significant, this disequilibrium right now, I mean, to your point is productivity. I think it's very hard to assess and qualify productivity for knowledge workers in this environment. And this is for employed base, right? Remember, we talked about last time,

like a large percentage of the US workforce has moved to more of an independent contractor, sole service provider, kind of model for how they're interacting and working in the world. But I'm talking about knowledge workers in an employed environment. And it is becoming difficult for managers and for companies to assess, you know, the quality and the level of work being produced relative to its potential. It's not the same as it used to be when you'd be able to hack in-person monitoring and interaction. And so, I saw a staff the other day

where it was like most companies are asking workers to come home. Most of the workers are to come to the office. Most of the workers are saying no. And then most of the bosses don't know what to say in response. And they're still sitting on the sidelines like, okay, okay, don't come to work. I to say in response. And they're still sitting on the sidelines like, okay,

okay, don't come to work. They're fired. Yeah, and so there is this signal. And by the way, this may yield a competitive advantage for businesses in the marketplace that figure out how to assess productivity and how to assess performance in their organization right now, in this rapidly shifted, totally different workforce

than what we had a few years ago. Because it's so easy to take four hours off in the afternoon, go to lunch, hang out, have beers, come back, get back online, get back on Slack, do stuff. And so there's this real challenge, I think, for organizations and a real disequilibrium of productivity and output right now. I've had to deal with this.

You guys looked at the TikToks of these people that are like in the life of like a Google like, you're seeing the life of like a Google engineer or a day in the life. They work for the third and the last four hours at the gym. They don't work. They don't work. They're literally smoking weed and playing video games. And everyone knows it too.

And everyone knows it too. And everyone's talking about it. And everyone knows it. And everyone's talking about it. And everyone's talking about it. And everyone's talking about it. And everyone's talking about it. And everyone's talking about it.

And everyone's talking about it. And everyone's talking about it. And everyone's talking about it. And everyone's talking about it. And everyone's talking people just don't know how to manage it. It's a real... I figured out how to... It's a real disequilibrium in the workforce because the way you manage it before is everyone would show up to work or they wouldn't. Someone's not in the office, they're not working, they get fired. Now what do you do? Period.

And no one wants to be monitored, no one wants to manage keystrokes through a friggin' remote computer and figure out how much you're typing. Actually, it's interesting, you mentioned... What do you do, Jake? How do you employ? No, no, no, no, no, no, there are people doing that.

Call centers actually do that. So call centers and sales teams. That makes that. You do, Jake, out to your employees. No, no, no, no, no. There are people doing that. Call centers actually do that. So call centers and sales teams, they have monitoring software. Customer service and call centers totally. Sales people, you can totally track productivity. I'm talking about creators, producers, right? Like, yeah. I actually have come up with some strategies for this.

So we have a lot of writers doing newsletters and stuff like that. And so we did was we created a block in the afternoon. We've been testing where three riders will get together in a pod and they work on a newsletter together. So instead of three riders writing three different newsletters, you have three riders collaborate on three different newsletters, they do one for two hours, one for two hours, one for 90 minutes, one for 90 minutes,

and then in total, if we'd have three people read the newsletters. Well, it's doing four or five million dollars and I was saying it's hundreds of thousands of people a day. But anyway, the point is, I didn't mention the name of the company, there's no plug in here, but by putting your company into a Zoom, you put people in a Zoom or a huddle on Slack, which is like an audio only, and then they have to deliver work to each other. It's kind of how developers work, or sales teams work, with leads, and then in things like like like peer program exactly. And then with and it also makes people less

lonely and it builds social fabric. So there are techniques that are emerging. The other one I've looked at is I tell anybody if you're doing any type of knowledge work, you need to create a notion or a code of page depending on what you use and update us on that and then send it to the group chat, you know, to the general channel, hey, I was working on the strategy for this, so when people say they're working on strategy, I have them documented, and I say, share with us the Google Doc, and I use the Amazon 6-page, you know, philosophy of a right-first culture, and now people have to write it down. So I've been teaching people how to write, use Grammarly, or Hemingway app to be better writers.

And then what you can do is as a manager, you can just look at your notion or your Coda and see the change log. And when I see people in a change log, and I see they made no commits, I'm like, what is this person doing? They said they did all the strategy stuff. Where is it?

Where is the strategy stuff? Write it down. So if you switch to a right first culture and then train people how to write and become more confident writers, all that knowledge gets captured on your knowledge base And you can actually see people getting done. It's not perfect But I think it's actually intellectually better than being in an office if you know how to do it because in an office People are also performative. They're doing like bullshit meetings

They're pretending they're working. They're they're actually reading the news or whatever. So, sex, what are you doing to monitor your employees covertly and keep them productive? We don't need to monitor our employees that way because we're a small team and they're highly motivated. But look, it is an issue. I think where work from home is beneficial is on the hiring side. It's so much easier to hire for a job when your potential pool is anyone in the world. You're not just geographically limited to the city in what your office is. That was the temptation for all these companies to go remote, is it made hiring so much easier. But there's no question that it makes management much harder and scaling the company much harder and building culture much harder.

And so there's some real trade-offs there. I don't think companies have totally wrapped their heads around it. But look, in addition to productivity, there's one other aspect of this economy that I think is really broken. So the Chamber of Commerce says that 3.25 million fewer Americans are working today than they were in February of 2020. So basically, if you go back to the month before COVID, we had over 3 million more Americans in jobs than we do today. And yet, the unemployment

rate is still on the 3% range. And the reason is because that if somebody drops out of the labor force and isn't looking for work, they don't get counted on the unemployment rate. So we do have a, if you define unemployment as a large number of people who aren't working, we have a huge unemployment problem. But the problem is they're not counted because they're supposedly not looking for work. So I don't think this economy is that healthy. And I think that there's a lot of distortions that have been created by government over the last couple of years.

The job data or suspect is what you're saying, right? Like labor participation is that. All the data, job data or suspect is what you're saying, right? Labor participation is down. All the data, the data is suspect, the labels are suspect. I mean, like we talked about, all of a sudden, we can't know what our obsession is. And let's just bring up one other thing that just happened today. So, mansion cut a deal with Schumer to bring back a slimmed down version of BBB. Thankfully, it's not $4 trillion, like Biden wanted. It's $750 trillion, okay?

But what are they calling, Billion, right? Okay, so thankfully, it's a slim-down bill. But what are they calling this? They're all just calling it the inflation reduction hack of 2022. It's like, are you kidding? This doesn't pass the last time. Why are they trolling us with the names of these bills?

The bills are never what's in the bill. Why don't they just call it the green energy bill and the screw private equity bill? I mean, that's basically what it is. Yeah, well, the legislation reduction sells to everyone, right? But Jason, the media, the media is not holding the administration accountable.

If we had, if we had an honest media, the headline today would be by recession begins not going to get it from the end. That's right. Left the station sacks. You can only get it on this pod or other podcasts. Yeah. What did President Manchin get for this deal?

He agreed to it. What did President Manchin get? Well, I mean, he secured some bag, right? Did you see what I got? Did you see what I got? The group shot. He agreed. He's like, I got a pipeline.

You got it. There's going to be a huge handouts and pork for the state of West Virginia. There's no question about it. I mean, if you look at this bill, okay, the, I mean, we just, we should just look at what's in it. And more and more is going to come out over the next few weeks, right? It's only one day. So we're going to learn a lot more about what's in this, but the largest thing. Republicans feel like, can you explain the dynamic as well, FG, get through this? Of why the Republicans felt like now that he double crossed them? Because the Democrats felt

double crossed by Manch, President Manchin, and now the Republicans are feeling double crossed by President Manchin. Well, I don't know that you can use a word, double crossed, because he's not a Republican and he had no obligation. But look, there's no question that Manchin went back on what he said. Just a few weeks ago, he was saying that build back better was unacceptable because it would contribute to the inflation problem. In fact, he's been saying that since last summer,

he's been saying that we have a growing inflation problem. We can't contribute to it with a lot more government spending. Now, he's agreed to a $750 billion of which something like 450 is new spending. So yeah, it's a smaller package than we had before. But if your concern was inflation a few weeks ago, you can't justify this. You certainly can't call it an inflation reduction act. I mean, that's just patently dishonest.

Well, how do they come up with it being inflation reduction? Is it because the healthcare stuff is theoretically going to help consumers have more money to spend? It's a tenuous argument. But if you want to make the argument, there's some cap on what seniors pay for prescription drugs. And then there are subsidies for people who are in the market for an electric vehicle. However, those are small adjustments, those are small rebates to a small segment of the population. I don't think you can argue in good faith

that this bill will reduce CPI. That's just not a plausible argument. And the vast majority of the bill, like you said, are subsidies for clean energy, which are basically handouts to special interests in the donor class and the Democratic Party, just a little bit to itemize some of these things. So the largest single outlay, 60 billion, is for quote, environmental justice initiatives

to address the unequal effects of pollution on low income communities and community of color. This includes 3 billion to invest in community led projects and disadvantaged communities and another 3 billion to support neighborhood equity, safety and affordable transportation access. Another $30 billion shovels of states in the form of grant and loan programs for state's electric utilities to advance the green energy transition.

$30 billion for additional production tax credits to accelerate domestic manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and critical minerals processing. So that's basically going to companies, right? 20 billion in loans to build new clean vehicle manufacturing facilities across the US and 2 billion to revamp existing auto plants to make clean vehicles. 20 billion for the agricultural sector to quote curb emissions. 3 billion to reduce air pollution at ports, 10 billion investment tax credit to

manufacturing facilities for things like electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar panels, it seems redundant to the $30 billion outlay. I just mentioned, but it's another giveaway to Democratic donors and. Wouldn't that be good for? So, Chimath wouldn't that spending be good for energy independence in addition to climate?

Because we've been talking about being energy independent. If we have more EVs, more batteries, more solar, that's a good thing, right? We want to be energy independent. So this seems like we get two wins. We're possibly three. One, we get economic activity, two, we reduce our dependence on foreign oil and three, we stop burning a hole in the ozone and increasing the temperature of the planet. It seems like three good things.

We have to, I think we have to see the force in the trees here. And there's one good part of this bill and then there's the kind of more ugly reality that it avoids. The ugly reality is unfortunately, or fortunately, or maybe with that technique motion of it. We are dependent on fossil fuels for a very long time.

It is a necessary bridge fuel. And so we need to, if we're talking about energy independence, it can't happen without us, frankly, drilling more and subsidizing the capital incentives of private companies to go and do this exploration work, which they have stopped Jason. And the reason they've stopped is that they don't trust that these oil prices will stay this high. And so they don't want to make these outlays and investments for the next five to ten years

because they're worried that it's going to be a rug bowl, which did happen to them in the back half of last decade and the early parts of this decade. So they're like one spit and twice shy. They're not, they're not going to touch this. Are you saying oil companies that would do some exploration, it would cost them whatever amount, two dollars to get the gasoline out of it, to get the gasoline out of the earth and then process it,

but they're afraid it's going to be negative. They're not going to have to sell that gasoline. I think they're afraid that, you know, the United States government may impinge on their ability to actually process it, that there may be tariffs and costs and taxes that they don't have. They'll be upside down. They'll be upside down. So, they just don't want to be, and right now, and you saw this, I don't know if you guys

saw it, but like Shell and Exxon and these guys are printing enormous record profits. So, they're incentives to change the status quo right now is zero. They want less supply because then they can raise prices. They have the perfect situation right now, which is it's an incredibly energy intensive world we live in and we don't have nearly enough energy to do the work that needs to get done. And by the way, and you saw this this week already, where Putin cut Nord Stream by another 50%. It was already running at 40% capacity. He cut it down to 20%. It's only getting worse.

So I don't know. I mean, I think this bill could be good. I haven't looked at the specifics to give you a very good story. Well, the specifics aren't even out yet. It's very fun, great, great, great, great. It's very fun, great, great, great. I did see the EV credits, Friedberg,

and I thought that these were particularly well-constructed. see the EV credits, Friedberg, and I thought that these were particularly well-constructed. 7,500 bucks off of a new car, but you have to be in the 150k salary or less on your taxes of rich people can't get these. It can only be for an $80,000 new car, a $50,000 or $25,000 used. They did seem to be starting pretty well. I do know that those incentives did work in the early days of Tesla because when you went to the website, you would look at the price and you know, this would be 10% off of a brand new car. And they did drive sales. And it was pretty significant. What are your thoughts on the EV tax credit? Is that something

that's a wise thing? And then what do you think overall about spending a couple of hundred billion dollars on reducing emissions and becoming more energy independent at the same time. It seems like a lot of all strategy to you. Nope, it seems like a total waste of money. Okay, unpack it now, please. So the EV tax credit is just giving away money to EV car manufacturers.

There's already enough demand. The prices are low enough. There's enough consumer interest. there's enough consumer intent. I don't think you need to put this money out there, distort some market that's already functioning well. And this goes back to my point about the role of government and how we create incentives or spend money. This is not a place we need to be spending money because there isn't an absolute need. There's no data that indicates that this will accelerate a transition to a carbon-free economy or that it's even needed.

It really is a point of view that people hold and they believe that EVs are good, they're good for climate change. We should accelerate it, therefore we should spend money on it without any accountability or proof that these tax credits will actually motivate a market to move faster or quicker than it is already moving. And so it is just spending taxpayer dollars that could theoretically not be spent or be spent in a more effective way to improve the lives of people broadly in this country. So yeah, I don't fully agree with it.

I haven't seen any data that tells me this makes sense. And I don't think $7,500 off of $75,000 EV is attractive. The EV is $7,000. $7,000 GM and others have great low-priced EVs and there's a ton of market demand and they can't keep up with production. And giving people $7,500 off a car that the manufacturers are still struggling to keep up with making because there's so much demand already. You don't need to do it. It is so much cheaper to drive an electric vehicle now by plugging this thing in and spending money on gas that people already want to buy these things. They pay for themselves super fast. Every consumer wants to save money on transportation and you will save money by buying an electric vehicle. So you will already

buy an electric vehicle. You don't need government money to get you to buy an electric vehicle. Dr. Feiburkspint, there is a lot of analysis that's been done on consumer adoption patterns and typically for a new, good or service, the tipping point is around 5% mass market adoption from when it goes from early adopters to the mass market and EVs just cross 5%. So to his point, the historical data would tell you that we're now past the critical point where it's no longer questionable and now it's just gonna happen. So it's not early adopters,

we're getting to the mass market. Now it's mass market. I mean, I'll tell you like the best thing about EV adoption were for me, for having an EV is never having to go to the gas station to process. Amazing, yeah. I just, just that one thing is again. Well, I'll just give you guys,

currently it's about 34.6 kilowatt hours per 100 miles. Okay, I'll just, let's just do some math together. Let's say, kill it one hour in the US cost about 10 cents. Okay, so that's about $3.50 to drive 100 miles in an electric car. That's a lot cheaper than paying $15 for gas to drive the same distance in a gas car. You don't need the tax credit to get people to buy these things. These cars are financeable. There's a very liquid, very active lending market.

You get paid back on these cars within a few months. If you're... If you were going to direct some stimulus to... I would not stimulate anything right now. you get paid back on these cars within a few months. And if you're, better than you direct, if you were gonna direct some stimulus to, I would not stimulate anything right now. We just talked about how we don't need to stimulate the economy. I would not do any of those.

I'm not sure about the economy. I'm talking about to, you believe global warming's happening, freebergues. Look, you want my point of view on climate change and industry. Yes. I think, I think humans are on a driven, naturally market-driven path to resolving carbon output in our industrial systems.

And I don't think that government intervention with tax credits and specific consumer products is actually going to accelerate or resolve these changes that are needed. We need to not change consumer behavior. Consumers always want to have cheaper, faster, better. At the end of the day, what we need to do is change the way that we're producing and making things

because that's ultimately what's going to drive this transition. And guess what? Consumers are demanding things that are more efficient, that are more effective. And efficiency ultimately resolves to less carbon, ultimately resolves to less land, less energy. And industry has always resolved to greater efficiency. Natural market forces improve the efficiency

of every industrial system. So stimulus, not necessary. Mankind has ever created. And I think that it does it. It is a matter of time and a matter of natural evolution that we will resolve all of the factors that are driving climate change from animal agriculture to transportation systems to energy systems. These are all going to get completely rewritten. Will we do it in time-technical tools? We absolutely will. And at the end of the day, we can pull carbon out of the atmosphere and resolve it into products.

We have tools to do that as well. So I am an eternal optimist, but in this particular case, I think that this century, much of what we're throwing our hands about, and you remember at the beginning of the 20th century, we thought we were going to run out of food. Then suddenly, we invented the Haberbosh process and created fertilizer out of air. It was an incredible, incredible invention that saved mankind. We have had time and time again in the history of humanity, these thoughts that weren't an existential crisis. We thought we would have peak oil. And we have had these, and we have had these points of view that weren't an existential crisis and humanity is about to end. And every single time we figured out a way out of it. And we didn't figure out a way

out of it because the government came along and said, here's a tax credit. And we've gotten sick, and we've gotten drunk on government spending. And we think that it is the solution to every problem we have as a species. You know the biggest solution to our problems is our ingenuity. And then they'll let the markets figure it out. Consumers are smart businesses are smart. They will figure out ways to resolve these solutions. They don't need to have these handouts. And I think that that's a really important point that we've kind of missed. And I'll say, we were talking earlier about the economy. This stimulus, we've been giving ourselves caffeine since 2008 when the Fed started to build up this balance sheet. And we got used to the idea.

Remember before this, it was like, oh my God, multi-million dollar bills, and then it became multi-billion dollar bills, then we had an $800 billion bailout in 2008. And suddenly, it was the multiple of 100 billion and the multiple of a trillion. And this expectation now, we've kind of reset the clock. And everything now is in what multiple of 100 billion and the multiple of a trillion. And this expectation now, we've kind of reset the clock and everything now is in what multiple of 100 billion

or what multiple of trillion we're gonna spend on stuff. And no one's even batting an eye at the size of these the bills anymore. Freeberg, what is a bigger existential threat to the United States? Is it climate or is it overspending by our government? I think it's over. I think the biggest threat is productivity.

I think that as a society, we've gotten to the point that we are so well off that we have so many things that we don't realize we didn't have 50 years ago and you know, read Pinkner's book on Enlightenment now and just go through those 200 charts inputs in there. It will blow your mind and then if you actually sit down and think about it and have a broader perspective on where we sit in this country today

versus where we were 100 years, 50 years, even 30 years ago, you will say, oh my God, we live in an absolute luxurious state in this country. Golden era, and it is a condition that unfortunately reaps, you know, a decline in productivity because at that point, we're entitled to some degree some people are entitled. There are many people in this country

that are still very hungry. There are many people in this country that still wanna progress. And frankly, I think a lot of the lack of behavior from government entities actually holds us back from accelerating our productivity out there. Because it gives people many incentives and many reasons in industry industry many incentives and many reasons to not solve problems. And I think that we solve problems and we're left to our own.

Shema. There was an article I posted Nick you can put it in about the Congo and that they've decided to auction a bunch of land to oil companies. And I think before they tried to heed sort of the West's directives and they said, okay, well, let's build a land bank and we'll put a bunch of money in. And so then the people in the Congo will have money for things. And you won't have to sell off the oil rights. And only tens of millions of dollars showed up. And then the Congolese were like, they threw up their hand, I'll just read the quote because I think it's interesting. Congo's sole goal for the auction said the government official is to earn enough revenue to help

the struggling nation finance programs to reduce poverty and generate badly needed economic growth. That is our priority, he said. Our priority is not to save the planet. It's quite a stark statement when you read it, but the reality is in one generation, what will happen is they will feed the world's desire for fossil fuels that will generate a lot of revenue. Hopefully, it doesn't get pilferred and so it gets invested in healthcare and education. Within a generation,

this country could be in a completely different situation, allowing the productivity of that entire population of that country to do what they think is right. So I'm generally of the belief that freeberg is right on this. Do you think that we should subsidize EVs to increase the percentage and then also for solar? Just give me those two, Chimoff, solar and EVs. Do you think they should be subsidized or not in the United States? It depends on how and at what point of the market cycle. The government's job is to create economic incentives that tip the balance of power towards investment.

So if you are sitting here 15 years ago, the price of solar panels was sky high. It was incomprehensible that we could make solar equivalent to any other form of energy. The only way that we were able to close the gap was through government subsidies. But what that did was allow a bunch of companies to build businesses, to make revenues, and then also to make profits that then the public markets valued, those public markets then put pressure on those companies to take those profits to become more efficient to make the panels cheaper, and 15 years later

were now at parity. So that was a really great example of the government stepping in to smooth out an imbalance in the investment incentive of the private markets. That is where they are exceptional. So in any market, they should be able to do this. But I think what Free Brook is saying is, when then they do do it successfully, and a market starts to germinate on its own, where supply and demand happens naturally between the private markets, the worst thing a government can do is step in, because it completely perturbs what true supply or true demand is, and that is what causes all of this crazy stuff that we deal with.

J.K. Fast forward, assume that there's a $7,500 tax credit for EVs that artificially makes EVs cheaper. And then a better technology than EVs comes along. Let's assume it's some nuclear fusion, cold fusion, and miscar fusion car like from back to the future. And that car inevitably has to fight against the cheaper car because the cheaper car is subsidized by the government.

We see this in a lot of markets that already exist in food, in energy, in infrastructure, where government subsidies that are embedded in the operating model of that industry, and that industry becomes kind of reliant and dependent on it, totally distorts the ability for the market to naturally transition to a more productive, more efficient state. And that more productive, more efficient state ultimately is cheaper, better for consumers and better for the planet. And we're And we hold ourselves back when we insert government dollars into well-functioning markets. I do think the government has an important role, as I mentioned last time, in pure science, in seeding new markets, in seeding these opportunities, in identifying

paths that are quantum leap efficiency improvements in production systems, in industrial systems, in ways of living. Once those have been identified, those breakthroughs have been kind of catalyzed. Boom, let the market take off because it's going to take off. But we shouldn't be in this business. And so you believe EV's and solar are there already? Absolutely. They're cheaper. And so let me just give you one point of reference.

Let's use Chimoff's Congolese example. Let's assume that there's someone that lives in the Congo. And I said to this person who's probably subsisting on less than $3,000 a year of income, and they're probably living day-to-day on finding food. And you said to this person, in the United States, they have these cars, they're called electric cars, and they're cheaper than gas cars.

And you make more money, or you save money by buying one of these cars and they're cheaper now. And we're giving people $7,500 to buy one. This person who's making three grand a year would say, what? It is a state of luxury that allows us to do this. And frankly, I think it's a state of excess abundance. And that's what I'm most worried about. Sax, what are your thoughts on the government giving these type of subsidies to accelerate solar and EVs?

The whole bill seems anachronistic. You know, first of all, it's raising taxes by $739 billion at a time when we're entering a recession. I don't know any economists who thinks that tax increases. Help the economy. We just talked about how the economy is in a really tenuous position. So this is not the right medicine right now. Then you've got the fact that the vast majority of the spending this bill goes to these energy subsidies, which are just, they're not going to help the average person. There's very little money in this bill that helps the average working

class person. These are basically handouts, there's basically pork burl spending, for Democratic party donors and special interests. And like Freeberg, I think to start to take you to very well, they're not necessary right now. The what's driving demand for electric vehicles, the solar panels, and so on, is first of all, the products is keep getting better and better, and second, they keep moving down the cost curve

as technology and innovation gets better. These products get cheaper. That's what's fundamentally driving the demand. We don't need the government now. Again, we need to accelerate it. In an anachronistic way to shovel out all this money at a time, we can't afford it. And look, I'm glad that 300 billion of the bill is supposedly going to deficit reduction. I hope those numbers actually materialize. But we're still 30 trillion in debt. And now that interest rates have gone from basically zero to around 3%, the imputed debt service on our debts basically gone has increased by almost a trillion dollars. That is a lot of money. So just like somebody who had a variable mortgage, the United States is on a

variable mortgage with our debt. And so when interest rates go up, we're going to have to pay our debt. And so when interest rates go up, we're going to have to pay our interest. If interest rates stay at this call at 3% level, which is roughly where the 10-year T-Bills been bouncing around at, that is a lot of debt service, a trillion dollars a year of debt service. So, I think we're probably entering an overall era of austerity that lasts more than just this year or even this presidency. And I think we'll look back at all this wasteful spending, this last 10, 20 trillion of spending

as money we need to spend, they're going to be paying for for a long time. So to be shoveling out another 300 billion plus of these programs, and again, once again, going to corporations and special interests, not to the average, you know, person who needs it, it's just so irresponsible. I have a question for free, but one of the one of your exceptions there was investments in science. You want to talk about your opinion on the quality of the grant process at the NIH and whether we are doing the real work necessary to get the right things funded?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a good transition to what happened this week, which was that there was a major potential fraud uncovered in Alzheimer's research, which has led to over a billion and a half dollars of funding and grants being given out. To follow on Alzheimer's research programs in the years that followed this initial paper. So, you know, in. 2006, there was a paper published in the journal Nature. published in the journal Nature about amyloid data proteins that impaired memory and brains, which then became kind of the leading theory for the cause and the driver of Alzheimer's disease.

And much of the research and funding that followed from there, which is now up to nine, several billion dollars in total funding in private and public institutions. Last year alone, the NIH funded $287 million in research into emeloid beta. And it turns out that the initial paper was shown to be fraudulent. And so, you know, just recently, the journal science published in detail an analysis of the photos of the Western blood measurements, the protein recognition images that the scientists

used in this initial paper were forged, and that many papers of his were then forged years later. And this paper is one of the most cited papers in Alzheimer's research, and much of the work that's been done on Alzheimer's came out of this. And if you guys remember last year, we talked about that biogen drug. That biogen drug is meant to stop amoled data plaque. And the projection is that Alzheimer's drug.

And remember, there was a panel of scientists that looked at the data for that drug that biogen got approval for from the FDA. And they all said this does not show conclusively in any way that it improves Alzheimer's. And the FDA still approved the drug because so much of the NIH funding went into the research for amyloid beta. And so the assumption has always been this is the cause of Alzheimer's, this is the way to resolve it, and everyone gets so strongly held in that core belief. And there's so much money behind it that we can't turn away and say maybe we're wrong. And this is the problem when

science meets money. Once you go from funding something and then suddenly a whole bunch more money pours into it, everyone's going to look bad and everything's going to fall apart. And everyone fears that the system fails. If you realize that something you did and said was so totally wrong. We can even argue this is what happened recently with COVID, the masks, the vaccines, all of the statements that were made that you have to keep doubling down.

Every system has bad actors, you know, people plagiarize fraud, whatever, is this like a systematic thing and doesn't science protect against this because people then do double blind studies and try to replicate studies? Two things. Because like Jason Blair eventually got caught right at the New York Times. It was only a matter of time before somebody said like his description of my back porch

was not accurate. I never lost this during that. Let's say that you're a smart up and coming scientist. Your job is to, it's to publish research that gets attention and that you can then go raise grants from the NIH and others on. So you want to get some good papers out, you want to get attention, and then you want to forward the research that's already being done. It is to no one's incentive to go out and try and retest something that someone's already published on. Even though that's what you're supposed to do in science, there's no motivation, there's no dollars to do this.

It's a disincentive to your career, it's a disincentive to your ability as a scientist to source funding and to source grants to go back and retest assumptions that are already strongly held beliefs in the industry. I'll give you another strong example that just came out two weeks ago. You know, you guys heard of SSRI anti-depressant drugs, right? 37 million Americans are on these drugs. The market is projected to be at about 25 billion in the next few years. That's how much Americans are spending on these antidepressant drugs. Half a sex, but yes, come on.

Yeah, right. So there was a paper published in Nature a few weeks ago. And the Nature Journal pulled all the research and all the data from 17 other studies that was across several hundred thousand patients. And their conclusion was that there is effectively no proof that these SSRI drugs have an effect on depression, have a positive effect on depression, that serotonin and the idea that, you know, serotonin uptake should kind of have a driving effect on depression.

And this has been the assumption that's been held now for, you know, for many years. I mean, you know, I think the original paper on this was published probably north of 20 years ago. But the industry is so big, right? The drug companies are making 20, 25 billion dollars a year on this drug, on these drugs. And scientists are incentivized to further that research that supports that research. And so they can go out and get NIH grants because it's already an accepted proven belief that this is driving their business.

There is a solution to this, like for every dollar that's spent on primary, you know, a dollar needs to be sent on double-blind testing it and making sure that it's accurate. Should there, because we have this issue in journalism, right? Everybody is a content creator, re-blogger, and opinion journalist, but there's very few now investigative journalists left. The actual problem is the peer-review systems entirely, in my opinion. Like the problem with this study is that this was done by an up and coming researcher in 2006 at the University of Minnesota, under a researcher who was well known.

And so there was zero incentive as freeberg said to really push back. When well credentialed scientists tried to find this amyloid beta star 56, they couldn't find it. And lo and behold, those articles don't get published because they don't get accepted. Why? Because it unravels the entire gain that folks will play.

So if you're a well-educated PhD with postdoc in the right places supporting other people, it's just a loop that goes on forever. The article goes on to talk about how that person who wrote that initial article eventually got this very prestigious multi-year grant from the NIH by a person who was his reviewer, who worked on the 2006 paper with him. I mean, these are some pretty blatant conflicts of interest, but the reason they don't get uncovered is like, who's going to step in and all of interest, but the reason they don't get uncovered is like, who's gonna step in

and all of a sudden become the... Let me strike an analogy here. There's a seedling of fraud here, obviously. Some guy took some freaking photos and Photoshopped them and doctored them or whatever. But we then tell ourselves stories. And those stories get us access to money, which allows us to pursue more science, which is meant to forward the market.

And then eventually the market gets forwarded so much and you spend a billion and a half dollars and it turns out the whole thing doesn't work. Just like stock markets, it starts out as a voting machine in the beginning and it's a weighing machine over time. The same is true in science. You will have a voting machine in the beginning where everyone has some belief, some theory, some hypothesis, and they all want to believe it, and they forward it, and they fund it, and they fund it. But ultimately, if it's not true, and it doesn't actually resolve, in real world change, the market will collapse, the stock will collapse. And that's what just happened with Amaloid data and Alzheimer's to a large degree. There's a billion and a half dollar market cap. You can think about it, or a billion and a half dollar is a funding that's gone into this. No, that's to a large degree. There's a billion and a half dollar market cap, you can think about it, or a billion and a half dollar is a funding

that's gone into this- No, that's not a year. That's pretty good. No, there was a billion and a half of NIH funding over time. This is just the NIH money. No, what I'm saying is the NIH budget per year for Alzheimer's and dementia is 1.9 billion.

Yeah, yeah. And half of it, if you look at the tags, if you just search the tags, half the money has gone into Alzheimer's disease, amyloid beta. So the point is you could orient the terms you used and the way in which you wrote your grants to disproportionately affect the likelihood of getting money. Separately, there's a whole body of researchers that have felt for a very long time that specific forms of infection viruses, Lyme disease could actually be a precursor to Alzheimer's

and it has been poorly researched because the funding dollars weren't there. So there's a lot of other theory, mitochondrial dysfunction. So, Freeberg, when we look at this, a bad actor committing fraud can send the entire deployment of capital in science on a multi-billion dollar. No, it's the trajectory of the human race. Come on, like, it's not just about like, we didn't get the dollars in. It's if you don't take the path, the drug doesn't get discovered.

That's a really big deal. And now the drug is in the market. Biogen gets approval and people start taking it and we're seeing the data, it doesn't work. And no one wants to use it. So the market has collapsed and you kind of go back to the origin. It's like the market collapses ultimately, the weighing machine happens because the science doesn't work.

It's not there. And there was no incentive, no one got paid along the way. Imagine if there was a bounty program to go and disprove papers. I mean, imagine if there was a system where people... That's what I was talking about. What is the safeguard? And we do have that in public markets, it's called shorting. No, there is. Short stocks. It's called shorting. No, there is short stocks.

It's called pub peer. The problem is if you go to pub peer and all of a sudden put your name out there as someone calling it out, your professional career inside a research institution is finished. Right, if your job is to do your own heroes. No, if your job is to disprove other people's stuff,

you don't forward your career, right? I mean, there's a real challenge. Those people should be heroes. There's those are like bug bounty programs. They be heroes. Those are like bug bounty programs. They have to look at it like bug bounty programs in tech or shorting stocks. The problem is that this community is extremely small, highly specialized and their impacts

are enormous on all of society. But you can't replace them with somebody else very easily because it takes an enormous amount of expertise. Like if you read that science article, the amount of work science took six months of due diligence before they even had the courage to put this thing out there. They had all kinds of different teams trying to prove what this guy had found before they were willing

to put ink to this thing. Yeah, when things are starting to feel like they're altering, moving to market or getting to market, the more money starts to flow in. Another good example of this is Xymrogen and Ganko. Okay, so in the past week, Zymrogen was acquired for $300 million, so it was announced that they're gonna be acquired by Ganko BioWords,

both of whom were public companies. Ganko went public and I think a $20 billion market cap as a SPAC a few months ago, Zymrogen went public at, you know, $4 billion or whatever they went public at. Zymrogen being public at $4 billion or whatever they went public at. Zymrogen being acquired for $300 million comes off of them, having raised a total of one and a half billion dollars a capital from many investors, including Softbank and in their IPO, since they were founded in 2013.

Both of these businesses do exactly the same thing or similar things, which is pursue the industrialization of synthetic biology. Sympetic biology has been talked about or pursued for 20 years in an industrial setting. The kind of Gen 1 of synthetic bio companies was Amorous, Givo, Kior, Solazine. These companies were all engineering cells. You change the genome or the DNA of the cells. You get those cells to make a product. You want them to make.

You put them in what's called a bio reactor and they make the product. You can make bioplastics. you can make animal proteins, you can make fuel. And so these, and you put sugar water in the tank. So you're programming the organism to make stuff for you. And there's a lot of technical challenges, right? How do you change the genome? How do you get it to be more productive? What are the environmental conditions of the bioreactor? How do you scale this thing up and so on? And so many of them had early stage proof points and then extrapolated out that this is going to work at scale.

So all the Gen 1 companies largely failed, GVO, Key or Solazine. They were all trying to compete with the price of oil and they lost. And so they could never actually, the science worked in the lab, but getting it to a big scale, there was a million things that suddenly were kind of proven or disproven along the way. And they all kind of pivoted and became cosmetics companies and kind of did high-end food and other stuff. And then Ginkgo and Zymrogen were kind of gen two. They were like, we're going to reduce the cost, improve the time scale of these synthetic

biology programs. And they started using industrial robots and arms. Zymrogen made a bunch of kind of strategic errors where they were like, we're going to make the products and design the organisms. So it took a lot more money, a lot more time. And as they kind of stepped up and tried to scale up, it turns out a lot of the things that they believed to be true weren't quite true. But the CEO did a great job selling the story.

Josh Hoffman, he went out for years and he told everyone, you know, we're going to kind of create this factory and we're going to make everything in the world using biology. It's going to transform the world that we've talked about. Is it a true story? Yeah, and so, look, so much of the fundamentals are true. But the industrialization, the amount of capital these guys raised and what they promised they would deliver on when turned out not to quite beat the economics, not to quite get there.

And the market decisions they made about what products to go after, how quickly to scale up, building their own facilities. There was just a lot of strategic errors, and I think the storytelling got ahead of where the business was. We saw this a lot in other businesses in the past years. We've talked about crypto and other markets, but these were really key examples because the science is so compelling, and the narrative is so compelling. If it's right, and if it works, it changes the world.

I think the same was true of Amaloid data and Alzheimer's. Everyone wanted it to be true. SSRIs, everyone wants there to be a cure for depression that you take a pill and it you solve depression. Everyone wants to have a drug that you take and it ends Alzheimer's. Everyone wants to print all the world's products and a factory using cells.

But there's a lot more to it. And as you kind of get through the nuanced 10 to to 20-year cycle of science moves to technology, moves to industry, those stages are wrought with errors and issues and ultimately may not actually yield what we expected it to yield. And those stories start to fall apart. And that's what happened once I'm origin. They're getting brought to nothing. Well, we look back on this freedberg in 20 years and say, hey, yeah, these things were

total train racks. They flipped the car. But it was a step in the right direction. And car, but it was a step in the right direction. And yeah, that was 100% step in the right direction. We've heard that capital, but you know, something will be built on top of it, just like mainframes or many computers to smartphones. The first system of, call it synthetic biology, a recombinant DNA, where we took DNA from one organism and we put it in a, you know,

micro-op to make stuff for us was Genentech in 1978. Gen, prior to 1978, the way we got insulin is we actually processed pig parts. So it would take like, you know, hundreds of kilograms of pig parts to make just a few grams of insulin. And Genentech took the DNA for human insulin and they put it in a bacterial cell and they made human insulin in a bioreactor. And that really kind of ushered in this era of, you know, industrial synthetic biology

that all of these companies kind of followed suit to do in different markets. But remember, biologics, the entire farm industry and biologic drugs is all made this way. We take the DNA to code for certain antibodies or proteins, we put it in microbes and those microbes make those products for us. That biologics drug industry is a $350 billion annual revenue industry today.

And so it works. It's just a matter of when and what the right products are. Industrial lens science, $25 billion annual revenue today. So there are markets that are working. It is working. But this whole like we're going to change the world overnight. Isn't really true. And so these stories catch up to us.

And I think we've seen this where I call it science meets money. You know, money usually wins. And the science isn't quite there yet. And so we've seen this in kind of... The genetic story is amazing. I mean, Tom Perkins from Cliner Perkins fame, like will that company into being, and they, yeah, it's pretty amazing how in the old days, eventually, they basically

built these companies like you're doing today for your bark in like a production board model. He basically incubated Genentech and then surprised the world with like, hey, we have synthetic insulin here. It was like true. Yeah, look, I mean, the potential, the extrovert Silicon Valley. There isn't a single material or food or a fuel or product that we ultimately won't be able to make using synthetic biology. It's just a matter of how do we get from here to there. And the storytelling kind of gets you a bunch of money and then you get ahead

of your skis and then boom, you fall down. Same happened and Alzheimer's, same happened with SSRIs. And I think we'll see this happen a lot. But like when science gets exciting, a lot of money gets behind it and sometimes it can kind of, you know, get ahead of its skis and fall down. But it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it

was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was How's that doing? Did you fall asleep in the board meeting? We're not on the board. It's not the one we brought you freeberg.

Yeah, well, I, it was three people brought, but I've known them since they were small. But yeah, I, I, I, I, I, there was a deal that came in that looked interesting, but it was a little bit out of our area, so we went to freeberg with it. But it is an interesting business because these guys provide a tooling service to other symbiocompanies. And so it's a recurring revenue service. It's a pickson shovels, exactly. Yeah.

It was very sass-like in that regard. Like a boosh-g-doll of nerds. Yeah. They were all right. So we work in sacks as a wake. Okay, sacks. Well, we're talking about an area where I'm not going to be able to contribute a lot to the discussion of SSRI.

I'm not going to pretend to know. I'm just a consumer. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. been more free for some time now. It is. Is there was more, there were more stories this week about this cynical ploy by the Democratic Party to fund the Democratic candidates. No, hold on. We talked a little bit about this last week, but they spent. You should be really opposed to this, Jake L. Uh, yeah, listen, as an independent, I think it's grass. It's dependent. I am an independent. You're an independent only votes for Democrats, so. Not true.

Not true. I'm going to vote for Liz Cheney for president, I think. Liz Cheney or Bezos, those are my questions. Jake, have you ever voted for a Republican candidate for any office ever? I had, yeah. You have really? Yeah.

Yeah. I'm a moderate. I don't feel like I voted for, um, I voted for, um, if I vote for. I think we're gonna say Reagan, we're gonna say wrong, we're too young to know. Patrick Morgan.

Patrick Morgan. He was a Democrat. It's been a long life, but I did vote. I remember for Republican and when I lived in New York, David Sacks has a look on his face that says,

finish your stupid banter so I can go on my model. Okay, go, go, go, go, Sacks. Hold on, Henry Belk has her in three, two, go. No, I don't really have a model on it, but I just think that this is, this is a pretty amazing story that you've got Democrats spending almost $50 million this primary season boosting mega candidates. Yes.

At the expense of moderate GOP candidates. Perfect. So let's get the crazies in there. Yeah, I mean, that's right. I'm not severe if you get crazy, but in a year, in a year in which you get a red wave, it's really dangerous. And it totally undermines what the Democrats are saying in their January 6th, it's completely cynical. I agree. You can't, you can't on the one hand say, you can't on the one hand say that we're facing an unprecedented

existential crisis for our democracy and on the other hand be giving money to the very same people you're saying or the threat to democracy it makes no sense it just shows that completely cynical backing anything that is talking No, you're no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no That's the disconnect. No, no, I get it. You're trying to get too cute. What do you think about Liz Cheney? I'm curious. Well, I think for her, if she was a nominee, she's a warm-monger, just like her father. She's like, she's basically Darth Vader 2.0. So that's my biggest problem with her, is no, I would not, I would not vote for her. There's not, there's not a war. She doesn't want to get us involved in and there's not a war she doesn't want to get us involved in. And there's not a country she wouldn't try and impose democracy at the end of a barrel.

Okay, so that's what I don't like her. But to your point, Democrats say they want to work with more Republicans like Liz Cheney. But if you look at who they're donating money to, they're donating money to support the MAGA election denier against every single Republican who voted for impeachment. Okay. So you look at like the specific races. It's completely cynical and it's just about winning.

Just like the report. Just to give you one example, Democrats, they gave, they launched $450,000 of ads to take out a grand rapids congressman, Peter Peter Major who also voted for Trump's impeachment. They did this with a Republican in California, David Valedale, and it just on and on. So, you've got on the one hand, you've got Democrats saying that this is an unprecedented threat to democracy. They want to work with more reas or Republicans who aren't denying the election. While at the same time, trying to basically fund the campaigns of the Maga candidate. Yeah, the reason they're doing it, obviously, is if you fund one of these maniacs, then they're easy to repeat. So they're trying to serve up somebody who is an easy candidate

to be able to get the strategy. But in a year... Is it effective strategy? I think it's a very dangerous strategy because... What is effective was my question. strategy because I don't think so because this year, I think this November is likely to be a wave election. And when you get a wave election, the specific candidate matters less and party matters more. So you could get some of these crazy swept into office. So I think it's a cynical and counterproductive strategy. And you say that Republicans do it too. I can't remember any example of what Trump is doing.

It's like supporting Trump is the... I can't remember. I can't remember a single time ever where Republicans have basically funded the Soros in the audience loves it, you're welcome. I just think this is very stupid and dangerous. But let me ask you a question. It's of a piece. audience loves it, Chavad. I just think this is very stupid and dangerous, but let's. Let me ask you a question.

It's of a piece. It's of a piece. Okay, it's of a piece with the administration claiming we're not in a recession, trying to redefine a recession now that we're in one. It's of a piece with Joe Manchin, all of a sudden calling the slimmed down BBB, the Def Sir Reduction Act, after saying that it would increase the deficit. And the media is not holding these guys accountable. Let's ask you a question. That's why they're doing it.

Politicians are going to be as dishonest as the media allows them to be. And the media is not holding accountable. Corner no Brian kept the White House on his tweet. So the White House now says it's only a recession. If you see a salamander wearing a top hat. Absolutely. The comments are the best.

One guy's like, what about a rabbit wearing a pancake? There's a rabbit with a pancake card. Let me ask you a serious question. Jake, we're at Jake Alcursor going beyond just the specifics of the political issue. I think we really have a problem with the media class. I mean, the media is carrying water for these Democrats because they agree with the ideological agenda. We do not have an honest media who's willing to hold the party in power accountable. Given what you've said about being disgusted by the denying this voter fraud, conspiracy

stuff by Trump, whatever, if Trump wins the nomination, which I think he will, how are you going to be able to, when we're on the show, a year from now, and Trump has the nomination, or 18 months from now, whenever it is that he locks it up, and he will lock it up if he runs. I don't think so. So if he does, though, would you conceivably be able to back Trump for a second term? Would you be able to come in this program

and say, I back Trump as a Republican, because you don't want to vote for a Democrat. What would you do? Just not vote, because you don't like Trump. You said you would not support him. Listen, politics is always a choice of the lesser of two evils. There are a lot of issues about Trump. So I hope I'm not in that situation. Listen, I, what would you do? Listen, the election that America does not want in 24 is by a versus Trump. I think the race that they want, I think the choice they want to make is actually DeSantis versus Newson. That's the choice I'd like to make. So look, I'm on the DeSantis train,

that's where I'm supporting for 24. You know, if it ends up being something different, we can talk about that. If it was Bezos DeSantis, what would you do? Would you vote for Bezos DeSantis? You go DeSantis really? Yeah. What about you, Tramoth? Would you go Bezos or DeSantis? Who would you vote for Bayesos or DeSantis? You go DeSantis, really? What about you, Tramoth? Would you go Bezos or DeSantis? Who would you vote for? Bezos or DeSantis? I, Bezos or DeSantis, hmm,

well that's a tough one, probably DeSantis. Okay, free Burke, Bezos, I'm gonna sit this question out. Let's keep going. Okay, right, everybody, there you have it everybody. It's a dumb question, Jake Al, because Bezos is not running. I mean, and honestly, the fact that people are even discussing that.

It's a thought experiment. No, but the thought experiment, the reason why I would go to Sanctus is at least he knows how to play the game of politics. Basis would just, in a matter of a week, be like, why did I do this? I have to live in the world. Exactly. It's just a way.

It's a stupid idea. He is living with Basis life. Listen, Jacob, Basis had two tweets criticizing the administration on inflation and you're like he's running for president he's running no no there's two there's other reasons come on something such a power he bought the Washington Post he bought the biggest house in DC and he gave that ten billion dollar climate patch i think those are all little cards that you could

check boxes and if you write a biography as those probably has houses all over the world is a means running for president of those countries come up uh... you're just scared you're scared of the basis president you know that he would roll over dissentist he would roll dissentist even if bezzas were dumb enough to run for president i think he's too smart to do that the democratic party would never nominate him.

That's not- Why, he would ask some security test because of unions. Look what happened to Bloomberg. I mean, listen, don't go any wrong. I'd love to see a candidate like Bloomberg or Bezos nominated by the Democratic Party because they clearly understand economics, right? Would it be a masterstroke by the Democratic Party

to embrace a model? I would like to- I would look to you, candle like that, but look at what happened to Bloomberg. Bloomberg spent $100 million dollars and he lasted to the first question of the first debate. They knocked him out. The first question of the first debate. And then, you know, Elizabeth Warren knocked him out by just basically calling the billionaire and he's there stunned. He had no answer. Terrible. Yeah, he did terrible, terrible. But I mean, it would be a masterstroke.

If they went with a moderate, you know it. All right, everybody, for David Sacks, Chimoff and Freedberg, I'm Jake Hale. We'll see you next time on episode 9. Love you. Love you. Back at you in time. Love you, sexy pool. David Sack We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, West. I squee of kinwa I'm going home, are you? What? What? What? What? I'm going home, I'm going home.

Besties are gone. That's my dog taking a wish to drive away. Six. Oh, man. My hamlet, the dash are wimmy, I'm going to go. We should all just get a room and just have one big hug, or two, because they're all just like this, like, sexual tension that we just need to release that.

What? That beat, what? You're a beer of beef. Beer of beef. What? We need to get merch. I'm going all in. We need to get mercy.