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we had a nice dinner chamoth hosted a little uh and we played a little bit of the cards and there's this new kid there
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oh big shout out to the co-founder of is there a guy how do you wind up here at the game uh
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sitting here you know uh having a beautiful dinner with us and he's like well and then chamoth goes
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and he points to hellmuth hellmuth found a billionaire when hellmuth finds a billionaire what
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happens he's tied to the hip he has like a billionaire he's a billionaire wrangler hellmuth is
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like one of those truffle dogs in like you know alba in italy you know you send him out into the woods he forages around
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he finds it he finds a truffle just digs it out waiting for his owner to show up and pick this little billionaire off the ground hey here's another one look daddy see
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i found another billionaire hellmuth hellmuth is the most insecure person but he's such a beautiful human
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being i mean he's a great human it's like it's like the tale of two people he's he really is a walking
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case of schizophrenia and narcissism just i mean that's jamaat saying that let your winners ride [Music] rain man [Music]
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david source it to the fans and they've just gone [Music] hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another episode of the all-in podcast
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with us again the new chairman and majority shareholder of laura piana chamath palihapatiya
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and the viceroy of veganism do you like my thin cashmere gelate that i'm wearing
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chile actually do you mean polo no [Music] also with us the viceroy of veganism the sultan of science
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david friedberg and the regent of the right wing david sachs the viceroy of vegans wow viceroy of vegas it came to me in the
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shower today i was like you know what he needs a new one i switched my background guys do you like it i just flipped the camera to look the other way just to mix
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it up a little bit now we can see your chef picking the vegetables in your garden well yeah well before you used to see him pick the herbs yeah because the
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herbs are on this side but now he's yeah you can see the veggies oh there's the sous chef
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okay there's the prep chef and there's that chef okay yes everybody showed up today okay great
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you know you seem to enjoy the food jason every time you go you talk about [ __ ] but you are always eating when you're at
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my house you're always eating who's the first rsvp after phil he's not just eating he's sending his notes to the
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kitchen could you just do this a little differently i do give notes i do i do usually positive ones it's like three
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out of four are positive notes you know when i flew with chamath a few weeks ago the chef made gluten-free nutella crepes
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with homemade nutella i mean it was like the most extraordinary breakfast experience that nutella has no sugar
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it's incredible it's basically all protein fat and it's sweetened with monk flour sugar
00:03:16
so delicious that they they also kill some albino seals i've not brought a chef on on the plane with me but i think in fairness you're playing it's not that big yeah i mean you've got a small plant
00:03:26
in the kitchen i don't know if a cessna 142 can finish it i'm feeling plain shamed
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i just uh got to business select on southwest so i'm really feeling pretty good about myself
00:03:44
right now all right everybody let's get started a lot of topics people want to talk about do you want to start
00:03:50
with rogan or the canadian truckers i think rogan probably leads into the truckers no it might in fact lead into
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the truckers okay so uh we covered rogan and spotify in episode 66 a whole bunch since that time
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uh a video surfaced on saturday uh with joe rogan repeatedly saying uh well the n-word and uh it's um pretty
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rough to watch and he uh did a mia copa an apology and overall now spotify has taken down 70 episodes of his podcast you know that's out of
00:04:27
over a thousand i thought it was like a hundred and thirteen that's that that's the that's what i saw
00:04:32
on twitter there's a hundred and thirteen two maybe seventy had the n word but a hundred oh okay you're correct i i stand corrected 110 have
00:04:38
been taken down i was texting with sucks it's like it's like almost six percent of all of his episodes they took down
00:04:44
yeah so something like that yeah but not not all of them were because of that lane that's what i'm saying but six percent were taken down six percent
00:04:50
taken down in his apology he said uh obviously he was wrong uh to use that word for the decade or so but he pointed out that he did not use it towards a person as a slur but
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was talking about it more uh in studying or discussing the word versus mentioned is that right is that
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distinction yeah or use versus quoting yeah so he said it was taken out of context apologized um he also made a uh
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joke that he immediately said oh my god that's pretty racist i shouldn't have told that joke where he uh compared uh
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going to see planet of the apes in an all-black theater in philly saying he was in africa
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on sunday daniel x sent a memo to spotify employees claiming he is not the publisher of the
00:05:36
joe rogan show something i completely dispute we'll talk about that in a moment thoughts on
00:05:43
the latest brouhaha and do we think that spotify will be able to handle uh this what's seeming it seems to have died down over the last couple of days uh and rogan is now joking about it in his
00:05:56
comedy uh uh you know engagements uh small comedy clubs what do you think sax is joe rogan gonna weather the storm is spotify gonna stick with him well okay so as of the last episode of the all-in
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pod uh they were trying to cancel rogan for misinformation and for the reasons we discussed that basically failed
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because you know so many of the times something starts with misinformation eventually becomes the truth rogan
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seemed like a guy who actually just wants to present both sides present a balanced viewpoint in any event that
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whole attempt to cancel and based on misinformation was fizzling out and then lo and behold this 22 second clip comes
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out and they escalate the charges to racism if you kind of look at um you know who's behind this clip it's pretty clear that it was a
00:06:44
democratic super pac put this together and sort of astro astroturfed it as a viral video this is part of an organized
00:06:50
attempt to cancel rogan now as to the merits of the the sort of racism accusation against him i mean look let me say that i don't think anybody especially a public figure should be
00:07:03
using this kind of language um you know in this day and age even if you're just sort of quoting something or mentioning it you know he he should have he shouldn't
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he should have known better um however there are also similar clips that are now circulating of joe biden
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doing the same thing using this type of like incredibly incendiary language in like a brazen almost off-handed way you've got clips of howard
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wait wait you're saying brazen and he he said it exactly the same way as joe i would say in a cavalier way he's
00:07:39
he's but let me come back so you have you have biden doing it you've got howard stern doing it
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um so what is the difference i mean the the reality here is that uh we used to in our culture have a distinction between the use of this type of language as an epithet which was
00:07:57
never okay or using it you were referencing it you might have been quoting it you might have been quoting a rap song you might have been quoting a
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dave chappelle routine you might be reading from a book that you might have been telling a story in which somebody
00:08:14
else has said it and you're merely trying to relay what happened the rules today are that's not an excuse
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you can't say it but the truth is that 10 years ago 20 years ago the rules were a little different that's why biden said
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it that's why howard stern has these episodes and i think it's why rogan had said it and i think it's a little bit disingenuous uh for people to now try and apply the
00:08:38
new rules to this old language and they're doing it very selectively because they're not trying to cancel
00:08:44
these other people who said these things under the old rules they're trying to cancel rogan so i think what you're
00:08:49
seeing here is selective cancellation outrage selective application of these new language rules for the purpose of getting rogan cancelled why
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for the same reasons we were talking about two weeks ago or last week which is he's an outsider he's an independent
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voice he bucks the establishment he doesn't present the orthodox view on kovit and that's frankly why they want to cancel him freedberg i'm just looking at the howard stern quote so in 1993
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howard stern dressed in blackface and used the n-word in a skit he did uh mimicking ted danson talking about whoopi goldberg something and he said i'll be the first to admit i
00:09:32
won't go back and watch those old shows it's like who is that guy but that was my shtick it's what i did and i own it i don't think i got embraced by nazi
00:09:38
groups and hate groups they seem to think i was against them too so i think you know saks is probably
00:09:44
right i mean howard stern's a very different character today you know i think the question of if howard stern
00:09:49
acted that way today would cancel culture kind of mob him the answer is probably yes
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um but i think it's because uh you know rogan is out here probably picking a bone with everyone
00:10:02
you know he's kind of there's there's there's no alignment there's no there's no tribal uh behavior with rogan right he doesn't he he's been pretty public about being
00:10:14
very liberal he's been very public about being conservative in some ways and i don't think he kind of aligns himself
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strongly with anyone and so he's a threat to everyone he's got a huge following and you know he speaks openly and honestly
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in a way that that is threatening certainly his behavior was inexcusable and has been inexcusable but there are
00:10:31
others right and so it's a it's an important question which is why him why now it's also interesting
00:10:37
with that ted danson he was dating whoopi goldberg at the time i believe and ted danson
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was there was a roast of whippy goldberg at the friars club ted danson dressed in blackface
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i think with which whoopi goldberg was it ted danson dressed him didn't howard and then howard did a send up of that yeah anyway the point is the more the the standard has changed significantly
00:11:01
less than chamath chime in my book of the year last year was this book wanting by this
00:11:08
uh author luke burgess um he wrote something on sub stack i'll i'll send you guys a link you can put it in here but he said he said the following he said as we regress to a superstitious
00:11:21
quasi-pagan world of witch-burning civil discourse will be replaced with superstition and scapegoating and he was talking about rogan i think
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that the the thing that i was the most proud of in this whole thing uh was daniel ek
00:11:39
i mean disclosure he's a friend of mine so maybe this is biased however i think that spotify
00:11:46
had business principles and this was similar to what brian armstrong did at coinbase i think they
00:11:53
stuck to those principles they made a well-reasoned decision that they explained to their employees and shareholders and then they did the most important
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thing that sachs has always been saying around free speech which was which is more speech
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and so what spotify said when they explained the decision to not de-platform joe rogan was that they
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would take the exact equivalent economic value of what they were paying them him 100 million dollars and invested in
00:12:24
underrepresented historically underrepresented groups to tell their stories to tell you know to make their
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music etc and so effectively doubling you know the universe of that kind of content and so i think if if people are really willing to listen
00:12:40
i think what we should take away from this is here's a really clear-eyed example of the solution to free speech
00:12:47
which is just to get more of it on your platform to have the right disclosures and disclaimers
00:12:53
and then for you know people to go along with their lives so that they can then choose
00:12:59
and i think that that's um that was the that was the one positive outcome that that i saw from this entire episode the rest of it was
00:13:09
uh another attempt at you know uh being morally absolutist and you know scapegoating and then the uh that was before obviously the the n-word thing and then
00:13:24
the n-word thing just brought to light that we live in a very different age where the rules have changed and i think
00:13:31
the open question is um you know if you're going to judge people for past behaviors on current
00:13:36
rules are we allowed to do it selectively or does it apply to everybody and i and i think that you know this is why i think you know we saw people like david simon you know came out and david
00:13:48
simon was very um you know basically excoriated joe rogan but then david simon wrote the wire you know and if you if you watch the
00:13:58
wire which is a you know an incredible piece of television that people point to all the time is one of probably the
00:14:03
greatest shows on television you know every probably you know 13th or 14th word was the n word yeah i have
00:14:11
like two observations here though and then i'll get to you saxony or something you want to chime in on
00:14:17
i i always like to think about intent and then i like to look at the apology and think is this like sincere or not
00:14:24
and when you look at the intent does anybody actually think joe rogan is a racist and i think it's pretty clear
00:14:31
he's not from all of the behavior collectively in his life and then you look at the apology
00:14:37
i thought i felt it was incredibly sincere uh and there were many learning moments in it and he's a comedian which
00:14:43
is kind of this other space where we we ask comedians to make us laugh and make us feel uncomfortable and now we're also
00:14:49
asking them to live by a standard that changes every year and and words come on and off
00:14:55
the allowable list would anybody hear does anybody here actually think or anybody listening to me think joe rogue is actually racist i think the answer is i don't think anybody thinks that and then number two
00:15:06
i i felt the apology was incredibly thoughtful um and well done saks what are your thoughts yeah i
00:15:13
mean i agree i agree with those things um nobody was accusing joe rogan of racism
00:15:19
until the cancellation mob started throwing stones and the misinformation stones didn't work so then they
00:15:25
escalated to racism i think the generalized thing is just take take the context out of rogan for a second
00:15:31
i think that the the formula if i can point to this of cancel culture is now i think pretty
00:15:38
well understood which is if you don't like somebody you need to throw some ism label on them until that ism label sticks
00:15:49
and eventually you will find an ism label but the the thing that this cancel culture doesn't appreciate is everybody
00:15:56
has some ism that that can be attached to them yeah now some isms are worse than others obviously but you know we're all
00:16:06
infallible right i go back to like if you want to quote the bible right there's a there's a beautiful passage into the bible um the book of john
00:16:14
and the whole thing and you guys have heard this quote many times before but let me just give you the setup so
00:16:19
in the law of the land back then adultery was illegal but only for the woman right and so there's a very famous example of a woman who's accused of adultery and uh you know she was about to be
00:16:32
stoned to death which was essentially the punishment and jesus basically draws a line
00:16:38
and says you know he who is without sin should cast that first stone and uh nobody does it de-escalates that conflict and everybody leaves right and there's a very famous essay uh that
00:16:51
rene gerard wrote that basically compared that to a different example in a more paganist context where people did
00:16:57
stone people the idea of all of this is that there's some amount of you know sin that everybody carries and i think that at some point
00:17:10
cancel culture will realize that you have to de-escalate and you have to see through some of this noise you have to have some point of moral resolution
00:17:22
to really move on because this sort of like fatalistic judgment doesn't work anymore so whoever people wanted to
00:17:29
cancel rogan they must be very frustrated today because for all intents and purposes he got off the hook
00:17:34
they may try again in the future with some other ism he may just as well get off the hook in the future right so what
00:17:39
the what is the real solution the real solution is to figure out how to de-escalate and actually have a conversation about the things that he's
00:17:46
doing that really upset you and that is still not what's happening and a path perhaps to resolution let's
00:17:51
get free bergen and then you sex free burger i'll say two things one i i think um i once sat next to tony blair for
00:17:57
dinner you know he was the prime minister of the uk and he told me it was a really funny conversation because he was talking
00:18:03
about his youth and he's like if there were iphones when i was young i would not have ever been elected to public office like you know um he was in a rock
00:18:11
band he i don't know if you guys know his history but you know he was pretty free-wheeling kind of guy and his point
00:18:17
was really broader than that it was that you know all of us have something that people can look to us for and use
00:18:22
against us in some way but i think what's really important with this joe rogan thing and i think the bigger picture for me
00:18:28
dissenting voices and critical voices and outspoken voices are extremely important in the discourse that makes
00:18:35
society progress it is not a good society when people that have dissenting of voices or
00:18:41
offensive voices are shut down society has a better opportunity to chart a new course and to identify new paths sometimes when the dissenting voice is wrong and sometimes when it is right but
00:18:53
in both cases it is important to have that dissenting voice because it allows us to have the dialogue that allows us
00:18:59
collectively to figure out what is wrong and what is right and so this notion of cancel culture and the way that people
00:19:05
like joe rogan are and have been attacked for things that they have said in the past or do say today
00:19:12
um i think is really contrary to the opportunity that the united states presents with this you know
00:19:18
founding principle of freedom of speech sex yeah so i agree with that but i want to build on what chamas said with the
00:19:25
rene gerard analysis of this i mean what we're seeing here is the modern day equivalent
00:19:31
of a primitive you know archaic stoning ritual this is a modern day virtual stoning in which we're not uh killing somebody but we're trying to kill their digital avatar i mean we're basically
00:19:44
trying to remove and destroy their online presence i mean that was really the goal here
00:19:49
and um and and the mechanics of this thing it it only works to the extent that people are unaware of the um the mechanism of the scapegoating as soon as they become aware that this person's
00:20:02
being targeted selectively as a scapegoat it stops working and that was the situation we were in last week where
00:20:09
you had you know neil young through the for he cast the first stone despite being guilty of misinformation many
00:20:15
times himself he's got like a weird history of saying weird things about gmos and gay people and some of the
00:20:21
stuff got dredged back up and and i think that was fair because let he who is without misinformation cast his first
00:20:27
stone and then he got some of his friends you know the these aging you know rockers like joni mitchell and uh crosby stills and ash to to throw the
00:20:38
next stones and then the media got in on this and cnn and msnbc they were throwing stones and it was all motivated by the fact that rogan is simply does
00:20:49
not refuse he refuses to parrot their orthodoxy because you know we can see people like howard
00:20:54
stern who i like stern okay but today howard stern's become a full-fledged covet hysteric i mean he is
00:21:01
fully on board with the covid restrictions and mandates and hysteria that's why he gets diplomatic immunity
00:21:06
to this so this whole the whole scapegoating ritual around rogan was about to fail last week and
00:21:13
that's why they escalated it is because they saw first of all rogan was getting away and then second
00:21:19
our ability to to run these sorts of like witch hunts if people start to reject that we lose all of our power and so that's why this thing escalated into the most sensitive
00:21:31
area that we have in our society this language around race this very hurtful these hurtful epithets and these people are playing games with that with with that type of language and
00:21:43
um it's very destructive and but i think people are seeing through it you know i really agree with
00:21:49
this i think like the the scapegoating um as a way to resolve things um is losing its effectiveness increasingly it did work
00:22:01
online for some amount of time early on and david you're exactly right it's when the
00:22:07
mechanism of action was poorly understood but now that everybody sees it and people try to do it all the time it just
00:22:14
stops working and it's not nearly as effective anymore it's a burnt out tactic you know we see this
00:22:21
and it's like this marketing channel has been over and everybody knows like okay i'm being marketed to uh and to give it
00:22:26
some context for those people who are wondering you heard rene gerard like three or four times here he's a philosopher
00:22:32
and uh he taught at stanford he had a big impact on peter thiel i don't know if sax actually took any courses with
00:22:37
him and there's a book me peter david i mean like if you did you take courses with him i never took any courses but uh
00:22:44
peter told me about his ideas in college and i read some of his books yeah his books are incredible i mean
00:22:50
he is one of the most uh powerful thinkers uh of this i mean he passed away reminds me of joseph
00:22:56
campbell the power of meth like they were really thinking about the the sort of base basic tenets of like human the
00:23:03
human condition and how people behave it's really worth double clicking on i think also interesting uh in terms of
00:23:10
forgiveness and blackface justin trudeau has appeared no less than three times in his youth in
00:23:17
blackface and it's it's not a joke it's literally true justin trudeau like the reason why um the the racism label was planted on rogan is
00:23:29
because he's heterodox the reason why that racism label has not yet really been planted on justin trudeau is
00:23:35
because he's orthodox he's quite he's quite part of the ingrained establishment he comes from royalty in
00:23:41
canada growing up pierre trudeau you know we were we were liberals growing up we were members of the liberal party
00:23:47
we'd made donations to the liberal party you know in our lore there is no greater symbol than pierre
00:23:54
trudeau his father and so when you're the son of somebody like that you get an enormous amount of
00:24:00
um credit in your bank account that you're born with and he was able to burn through so much of it by doing things
00:24:06
that anybody else in any other situation may have been judged much more harshly for and he
00:24:11
wasn't um and he becomes prime minister and then he's able to get re-elected but you know his day of reckoning reckoning is
00:24:18
coming um because he is revealing himself to be a part of this establishment with
00:24:25
these views that are actually really uncomfortable and you know quite grotesque because of how
00:24:31
judgmental they are of everybody else and that's a great segue and then just finally sacks it correct me if i'm wrong
00:24:38
here joe rogan has voted democrat his whole life he holds largely democratic beliefs he's for universal healthcare he's pro-trans he's pro-gay he supported bernie sanders and he was a voting for
00:24:52
bernie sanders he's a really stupid person for the democrats for democratic politicians like biden to alienate
00:24:58
because he's a hero to young people he's a hero to the working class and his views are fundamentally i'd say more progressive yeah they're 100 progressive yes so it's stupid for them to do this
00:25:10
but it's also stupid for them to be alienating these truckers because democrats were supposed to be the part of the working class so let's pivot to
00:25:16
that issue can i just say one last thing i just want to reiterate this sax because i just i just want to really give you a chance to say it again you've
00:25:23
always said and it's so true the solution to free speech and to protect it is more speech and i just want to say
00:25:29
to daniel eck and the team at spotify you guys must have been in a really difficult spot
00:25:34
but the decision to take that hundred million dollars to increase the funnel for other voices
00:25:41
and historically underrepresented voices is so good and i hope you guys get to the other
00:25:47
side of it but i thought it was a really really really good decision yeah i mean so on eck and the spotify decision i
00:25:52
mean i won't think to that so i applaud them for not canceling rogue and they must have
00:25:57
been under enormous pressure to do so including from their own you know employees the only thing i didn't like in that
00:26:03
statement was when he talked about the user safety and how they need to do a better job of user safety that's a
00:26:09
concept that doesn't make a lot of sense to me i mean rogan is not sneaking into people's living rooms and turning his
00:26:17
show on and pressing play if people don't like it i'm talking about users if users don't like the content they don't
00:26:24
have to listen you don't have to click play he's not literally safety yeah but we've still bought into
00:26:29
this idea of psychological safety that being confronted with any view you don't like is a threat to your safety
00:26:36
that is actually a threat to free speech because it's giving the most hysterical people in our culture the ones who are
00:26:42
most prone to being offended a veto over any idea and speech they don't like yeah if you're uncomfortable you're unsafe
00:26:48
you could remove yourself from that situation if it's a piece of media you don't need to read every book you don't
00:26:53
need to see every quentin tarantino film you don't need to listen to joe oregon or whatever else that you find offensive to you personally i just don't think we
00:27:00
should be feeding that idea that that psychological safety is a legitimate idea we talked about this before with like
00:27:05
you know people at work if they say they feel unsafe that's instantly like an hr
00:27:10
like oh my god you feel unsafe yeah right alert hr comes running over because everybody has a legal requirement if someone's creating a
00:27:17
safety issue in the workplace they have a legal requirement to remove that problem that's why this language got
00:27:22
started is it triggers the machinery of hr to remove people who are doing nothing wrong
00:27:29
as an employee like sax hey listen your work product is not good enough you're like i feel unsafe
00:27:34
right okay anyway let's go to the truckers because i think we're beating this stuff i just want to have one final comment on spotify
00:27:41
i think da i appreciate what daniel did with 100 million dollars that's great and i think it's great that he's supporting free speech and he's holding his ground there i know that's not easy however i think he's intellectually
00:27:53
dishonest saying they're not the publisher of joe rogan i have a three-part test to see if you're a publisher do you pay for the content do
00:28:00
you promote it you produce it if you do two or more of those you're a de facto a publisher in my mind they pay a lot of
00:28:06
money for joe rogan they promote the heck out of him and while they don't produce it in advance by picking the
00:28:11
guests they do have a production-like veto uh on what content they put out there and so if netflix has to own the people they pay uh even if they don't produce it and
00:28:23
they promote then spotify does need to have the same standard and disney and netflix all are
00:28:29
producers of content nobody would argue that and i believe spotify is the producer daniel's not being honest final
00:28:35
thought on this let me just defend spotify for a second okay you guys have been through this i've been through this many times at several of my companies
00:28:41
but when you are in the middle of a firestorm it's very rare that you can put out
00:28:47
these you know press releases where the pride of authorship is one person and in many ways you have to write these pr releases
00:29:00
with all of these guard rails that that think about all of these future issues that may prop up over time and so i
00:29:06
understand that you guys had some issues with some of the words i would just say again look at the action
00:29:11
and the action is he didn't de-platform someone and then he doubled down on free speech and he actually pointed a hundred
00:29:18
million dollar fire hose at people who can now tell their own stories on a platform that is the most important audio platform in the world so i would say
00:29:28
you know you know that's kind of like same thing when i said you know i didn't particularly like sometimes you know brian's essay i could have written it
00:29:35
better but at the end of the day what i saw through it and i admitted this later the substance of what brian armstrong
00:29:41
did was incredibly profound one of the most important things that actually happened in the last few years in silicon valley culture
00:29:47
and i would just say that i think that daniel did something really powerful here and i think that both spotify and coinbase deserve and the employees
00:29:55
and the leaders there deserve a round of applause i think it was a very very hard decision and i think they stuck to their guns irrespective of what
00:30:02
you believe they stuck to their guns canadian truckers are protesting as many of you know
00:30:07
vaccine mandates just breaking today ontario's premier has declared a state of emergency
00:30:14
for the entire province and ottawa police have braced for thousands of protesters to descend for the third
00:30:21
consecutive weekend usa today also reported the convoy could disrupt the super bowl blind state of the union et
00:30:27
cetera the protest has been self-titled the freedom convoy and has been underway since january 29th
00:30:34
29th it appears it uh has spanned several thousand vehicles across the country and the truckers are
00:30:40
blocking key roadways and bridges including the ambassador bridge uh they're seeking an end
00:30:46
to canada's vaccine mandates and it feels like this is now morphing into something a little bit wider than just vaccine mandates maybe it's becoming a occupy wall street
00:31:00
type of protest open to many people with many different uh things that they have uh grievances
00:31:07
about a reporter from barry weiss's common sense newsletter slash media operation wrote what the truckers want jason you're you you just nailed it um i do
00:31:20
think that this is actually occupy wall street 2.0 yeah look it turned out just to get root some
00:31:26
facts so it's not just truckers this is a broad-based coalition of people across
00:31:32
every single race and gender and age group in canada that's participating in this thing in fact the bari weiss article you
00:31:39
know she profiled men women of all ages sikhs you know whites i mean everybody blacks there was so there's a there's a coalition of people second is this really isn't about
00:31:50
vaccination rates because it turns out truckers are 90 vaccinated they're vaccinated at a higher percentage than
00:31:55
the actual broad-based population of canada which is about 78 i think the the point of this and again i care about this so much as a canadian but i i just want to read a quote from
00:32:07
justin trudeau because i think it encapsulates what this is really about the quote is the small fringe minority
00:32:13
of people who are on their way to ottawa who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing do not represent the views of canadians and i think it's that phrase unacceptable
00:32:26
views that really points to what the real issue here is which is that there are a lot of people who now say it's been two years
00:32:37
enough with mask mandates enough with all of this you know almost police state that's
00:32:44
developed all of the emergency use power that politicians have taken let's reclaim our democracy and let's
00:32:51
have you know freedom again and under the political viewpoint of the ruling liberal party which by the way is now going into revolt as well a bunch of liberal mps have just completely flipped
00:33:03
because of this statement it summarizes what trudeau is saying which is what you believe is
00:33:09
unacceptable to me and so now i will quash you or that canada has one viewpoint uh freeberg did any of you
00:33:15
guys listen to the new york times daily podcast that our friend sent out the link to this morning yes you know to me
00:33:21
these are the same story it was uh actually uh um an interview uh with a reporter who highlighted some work that she had done and identified that phil murphy the
00:33:32
the democratic governor of new jersey had done some uh some some polling and some some focus group discussions uh with some of his constituents and the overriding tone was one of emotion one
00:33:46
of feeling left out of the life that they believed they should have been living over the past two years and ultimately i think the tone speaks
00:33:54
very clearly to what the truckers are saying which is everyone feels more than ever incredible overreach into their personal
00:34:00
lives by the government and by different governments whether it's local or federal here in the us or
00:34:05
by this canadian government or you know go to australia or the uk and the sentiment seems to be
00:34:10
similar everywhere i don't think that any time since world war ii have we seen the government create such
00:34:17
restrictions and such mandates in in democratic republics uh like the united states um that we just saw over the past
00:34:24
two years and i think the fact that it's continuing when folks are now seeing you know on the ground every day
00:34:32
uh you know the mildness of omicron or like you know the big the challenges that their kids are facing in school and
00:34:38
you kind of put these things together and you say to yourself why is my government restricting my life and causing
00:34:44
the challenge that i'm being forced to face for what and i think that's a tone that everyone feels everywhere in the west
00:34:50
today i think in the east it's a little bit different right um uh because of the uh the mindset there
00:34:55
but i think here collectivism collectivism and i think here where we pride individual liberty and freedom as
00:35:02
kind of the foundation of these democracies to have the government tell us what we have to wear
00:35:08
shots we have to put in our arms where we can go and when how we can behave in ways that were never legislated in ways
00:35:15
that were never kind of debated and discussed publicly uh just feels overreaching at this point i think everyone's hit their breaking
00:35:20
point and this is another one of these examples this trucking thing is another one of these examples of people manifesting their breaking point and
00:35:27
sacks to the point we've been discussing over and over again things have changed radically since the beginning of the pandemic you believed in mass mandates
00:35:34
early because hey no downside we talked about that and we didn't want hospitals to be overrun
00:35:40
which is reasonable you wanted to have oxygen we were all you know trying to make plans for hey how bad is this going
00:35:45
to be but we're sitting here two years later and it's pretty clear omicron which i had uh thank you saks um is is a
00:35:51
nothing burger as we said here thanks excellent saxacron i helped you is sick when i've been around you yeah i went to sax's party and all i got was an eight thousand dollar gift bag and
00:36:04
omicron uh the gift bag's pretty great at sax's parties no i think i think getting omicron helped you because it
00:36:10
enabled you to see that this for you was largely a nothing burger and so you could come out of your house and start acting normal i think there's a lot of
00:36:16
people all over the country are like you're saying that you haven't left your house for two years do you remember the photos of saks at the beginning of kovit
00:36:22
when he was wearing the triple mask and the club well look i supported mass m mandates at the beginning of the pandemic when faulty was telling us mastin work let's
00:36:35
let's not forget that um you know i was supporting when the health officials told us they didn't work why because it
00:36:40
was the only thing we had we didn't have a date david david come on he was he was doing us a favor by lying to us by his
00:36:47
own admission he said i lied to you so that we could preserve these masks for frontline workers well thank you thank
00:36:53
you anthony fought one of many one of many noble eyes that he's been telling here we go he's an he's a noble liar
00:37:00
he's in right now by may of 2020 i would say my biggest political loser pick from 2020. go on take it easy on
00:37:07
your picks i know you want to do your victory lap it's only february you give us until like june for the check-in okay
00:37:12
colonel kurtz contains mass we're the main alternative to lockdowns that's the way i saw it in the summer of 2020 and i
00:37:19
was saying and these crazy lockdowns just do mass and then once we had the vaccine and all coveted restrictions
00:37:24
that was a year ago and now we still have these restrictions a year later and that is what the truckers are rebelling against just like you said these are ordinary people who are sick and tired of having to show
00:37:36
their papers and have to deal with these mandates um and um and and for that they've been
00:37:42
like absolutely demonized i mean trudeau comes out and says that they're basically white supremacist and racist
00:37:47
and homophobic every epithet he can throw at them sorry to your point he used every he did use every ism he
00:37:53
really did try to cancel them at first and this is what's really painted him in a corner he went on national tv and he
00:37:58
said these people are racist and misogynist that's specifically what he said and it actually turned out that the
00:38:05
overwhelming majority of them were not they were just normal ordinary law-abiding canadians who were just fed
00:38:11
up with the overreach and then then what happened was the polling said you should bring these convoy leaders in sit them
00:38:18
down and talk to them and then the political calculus though was impossible for him because he had already called
00:38:24
them racist and misogynist so then how could he bring them in right exactly yeah how do you negotiate with nazis
00:38:30
basically so then what he did was he ran out of ottawa so instead of staying in ottawa now he's under uh in a secure
00:38:36
location for his city oh my god oh he feels unsafe so trigger warning in fairness uh when
00:38:42
you bring 8 000 people together and you get a wide enough group of people there was swat stickers and white confederate
00:38:48
flags that were flown so it might have been two of a thousand but that did happen with this game from
00:38:54
the protest movement which i just said yes without any protest movement there's always to be a handful of people who go
00:39:00
too far and are too extreme but they did not represent the vast vast majority of the people who turned out which are ordinary citizens and trudeau seized on a handful of isolated examples
00:39:12
to try and demonize these guys and i think it's blowing up in his face the fact of the matter is the truckers
00:39:18
did not start this fight it's the zealotry of our elites of our professional class that started this
00:39:24
fight they will not give up on these mandates that's the fundamental problem well and while they go to the super bowl
00:39:29
with no mascot i think what you're seeing here with this trucker thing i think it's going to have huge ripple effects because it's showing the schism
00:39:36
in the democratic party between the professional elites and the working class here you have the working class
00:39:42
remember these were the essential workers these are the people bringing us our food most have already had kovid
00:39:47
over the last couple of years they couldn't sit behind a computer and do their job in their pajamas on zoom all
00:39:53
day okay so these guys know the reality of covid just like you learned the reality jason
00:39:59
when you actually got it and yet we've got this neurotic class of professionals within the democratic party who don't
00:40:06
who are these coveted dead enders don't want to give this stuff up and that's the fundamental divide and i think biden's gonna have to choose which
00:40:12
side are you on are you on the side of the working class or the professional class trudeau has chosen his side he is
00:40:18
the effete elite face of these coveted dead enders and um and bonnie's gonna have to choose
00:40:24
who he supports and then those are dwindling you have governors now who are uh democratic governors in many states
00:40:30
who are saying listen uh omicron is obviously different and look at the charts look at the data
00:40:37
we have to talk about this new york times story on how new jersey and several other these blue states dropped
00:40:42
the mass mandates it was absolutely extraordinary i mean it's not extraordinary the risk assessment is different david what was extraordinary
00:40:48
about it is that i mean i think it's kind of obvious more than extraordinary if omicron is less deadly it's an upper
00:40:55
respiratory doesn't kill people who are vaccinated and most people are vaccinated pretty obviously it's time to
00:41:00
pivot and open everything up it sounds like an obvious decision biden really misses moment here so i think you know
00:41:05
like free bricks said it was phil murphy he's a democratic governor of new jersey he was supposed to have an easy re-elect
00:41:10
win by 20 to 30 points he narrowly squeaks by by two to three points okay so then he conducts the focus groups to
00:41:17
find out what do we miss why were we so off on this thing and they find out that people in second tired of these mandates
00:41:23
he goes to the white house okay and shows these findings and says guys we have to get off this losing position on
00:41:29
covet and the white house sits on his hands and does absolutely nothing so murphy is like we can't wait anymore so
00:41:35
he unilaterally goes without white house support this is all in the new york times article this is not like some right-wing publication saying this okay
00:41:43
so he unilaterally says okay we're getting rid of the mass mandate okay and then five other states do the same thing
00:41:49
because they realize we can't wait anymore and biden is just nowhere to be found and pasaki is saying well we're
00:41:54
deferring to the cdc they're deferring to you know rachel wolinski at the cdc and randy why gartner at the teachers unions and these health officials like barbara ferrer and l.a county all of
00:42:05
whom are saying we cannot lift these mandates yet they don't want so they are completely on the wrong side of this and
00:42:11
then biden really steps in it by saying to trudeau in canada listen you guys got to clear this bridge do whatever you need to do to clear this bridge basically implying that the civil
00:42:23
disobedience needs to be met by force and then you've got harvard professors and cnn analysts saying slash their
00:42:29
tires take away their trucking licenses starve them out you know so this has been the response and the response to
00:42:35
that is now there's a trucker convoy getting started in the u.s and they're going to march on washington they're going to drive to washington great and
00:42:42
between now and then biden better figure out what side he's going to be on uh because if he doesn't handle this right
00:42:48
i think it's gonna be the end of his presidency peaceful civil disobedience is fine as long as they're not blocking ambulances getting people to and from
00:42:54
hospitals that's fine especially the vaccinated is this scranton joe the the the guy who
00:43:01
said he would take us back to normalcy the the representative of the working class is that who the president united
00:43:07
states is or is he in the trudeau camp the you know the the fouchy and the wilinsky and the referees
00:43:14
and easily thank you you're asking a rhetorical question i think that the the polling data
00:43:20
makes the answer pretty clear which is that the democratic party is lurching towards establishment insiders and working normal ordinary people
00:43:32
have in larger and larger numbers started gravitating towards to the republican party minorities in far larger numbers than we ever expected have started lurching towards
00:43:45
the republican party and so the answer is sort of in the polling data and what what
00:43:51
the actual facts on the ground have been you know i mean we we forget because we were all so ready to to to cast away our trump derangement syndrome syndrome but he did get i think
00:44:02
what was it nine million more people to vote for him in this past yeah the working class whether they're
00:44:09
it's the white working class or the non-white working class are moving in huge numbers i think i think i think the margin of non-white working class who
00:44:16
moved to the republicans the last election was 18 points they got 18 points more share than eight
00:44:22
years ago so the working class regardless of their race is moving towards the republicans while the
00:44:27
democrats are becoming this more effete elite professional class party this woke elite party
00:44:34
and you know i think biden sort of is caught in the middle of this and i think he's running out of time to try and
00:44:40
reestablish that he's gonna have a centrist presidency that does not completely kowtow and defer to the left of his party to this sort of woke elite thinking you know you see democratic
00:44:51
political scientists like roy tishera writing about this like every week saying this is your last chance this is
00:44:57
your moment to save your presidency i don't know if he's listening okay friedberg we made some great progress in
00:45:03
science this week in nuclear fusion do you want to tee this up for us i'm happy to so let me just give a little
00:45:10
background for maybe a minute on on fusion so you know the um the way energy is made in the sun and in all stars is through this process of nuclear fusion where hydrogen
00:45:22
uh nuclei the protons inside of hydrogen atoms shoot around at such a high energy and they're so dense because of the
00:45:29
amount of hydrogen it all causes gravity to pull them all together they get really dense they start slamming into each other when they slam into each
00:45:35
other they fuse into helium and ultimately the heavier elements and release energy in the process and that is what fusion is
00:45:41
so you know we talk about nuclear energy on earth all nuclear energy that we've generated on earth
00:45:46
as a species to date has been through fission where we take much heavier elements like plutonium and uranium and
00:45:52
they break apart by squeezing them together and they release energy but this creates radioactive material it's dangerous it's very very expensive and
00:45:59
so on so there's always been a question since roughly the 1950s on whether or not we could recreate the conditions of
00:46:06
the sun or stars on planet earth by creating a plasma by creating the same sort of plasma that exists inside of
00:46:12
stars very hot very fast very dense hydrogen that can slam into itself and slam into atoms and fuse into helium and release energy does that same plasma exist on
00:46:24
uranus yeah god you're gonna give him a wedgie let science boy finish oh sorry i'm back to you never gets old was it 69 mega joules or 420 mega joules
00:46:38
yeah so plasma fusion's always been this kind of holy grail of energy because if you can actually generate plasma fusion
00:46:44
the amount of energy it takes to create the plasma is less than the energy that comes out of the plasma so it's it's effectively positive infinite free cheap
00:46:52
plasma and so the the system that people have been building for the last 25 30 years is these uh these donut-shaped
00:46:59
systems called tokamax they're they they're like a circle like a donut and they spin the plasma around inside and so it takes a
00:47:05
lot of energy and magnets and so on to try and make this work you know it's a company we talked about a few months ago called commonwealth fusion systems which
00:47:12
uses a new superconducting material to control that plasma and use instead of using expensive magnets may just raise
00:47:18
1.8 billion dollars and uh you know more recently uh the joint european taurus which is managed by the uh the atomic energy authority in the united kingdom uh just
00:47:30
this week demonstrated um energy output uh from their tokamak plasma fusion system where they generated you know 59 megawatts of energy in five seconds
00:47:41
uh which is um a record uh the prior record was set in 1997 by that same agency they generated 16 megawatts of
00:47:48
power output so it was a great breakthrough and you know to make this all possible has required
00:47:54
uh technical breakthroughs in electronics uh technical breakthroughs and sensors and computing and hardware
00:48:00
in material science and superconductors and so all of this is starting to coalesce that plasma fusion might
00:48:06
actually become a reality and the eye care system which is the biggest construction project in europe
00:48:11
35 nations have contributed a total of roughly 50 to 60 billion dollars to make this system
00:48:17
um is is going to go online around 2027 they've been building it for 20 years it's going to be a 500 megawatt
00:48:23
demonstration system and if it works then it opens up the door that in the future we may actually be able to turn
00:48:29
plasma fusion into an energy source for all of humanity it basically would use water plasma fusion is made from taking
00:48:36
hydrogen which you would get from water spinning it around heating it up getting it to be really really dense and
00:48:41
ultimately driving power out of it the implications are extraordinary right so over the next few decades it is
00:48:47
appearing more likely that we will have plasma fusion systems working on earth and as that happens energy becomes free
00:48:54
and it becomes unlimited and with unlimited free energy we can terraform earth right we can take uh
00:49:00
ocean water desaline turn it into fresh water we can pump that into deserts turn them into rain forests
00:49:06
um you know the total annual production of energy on earth today is about 170 terawatt hours that amount of energy
00:49:12
could be generated from just a 10 foot by 10 foot by 10 foot cube of water that's the amount of energy the amount
00:49:18
of material that would be turned into photons that would drive all of the electricity we need on earth so it's an incredible technology an incredible
00:49:25
breakthrough we're starting to see this stuff happen one area that i wanted to kind of just highlight which no one talks about but
00:49:31
which i think is extraordinarily um important about a hundred years from now let's say
00:49:37
as these plasma fusion systems work it's certainly going to be true that we'll have abundant free
00:49:42
energy during the back half of this century and that'll change everything we'll decarbonize the atmosphere we'll
00:49:47
terraform the planet we can make whatever we want we can build things etc but the same system of plasma fusion theoretically could be used to fuse heavier elements than just helium so
00:49:59
fast forward 100 or 200 years if we can actually make plasma fusion systems work
00:50:04
we could also and to make helium to make energy we could also use them to make heavier elements like the rare earth
00:50:11
metals that we talk about being so important here on earth to make um batteries or phosphorus uh which you know we're gonna run out of on planet earth in about 100 years which is a critical component of agriculture and feeding
00:50:22
ourselves so you know over the next call at 100 years plasma fusion systems i think back
00:50:28
half of this century come online provide us with abundant free energy and then in the 22nd century i think this idea of
00:50:33
nucleosynthesis the idea that we can actually make the rare earth or the heavier elements that are limited
00:50:39
natural resources here on earth where we could turn water into gold or water into lithium or water into molybdenum or you
00:50:46
know into beryllium or whatever um starts to become a reality um and so this to me like i feel like we're on the
00:50:52
eve of plasma fusion being a reality you know based on some of the results we're seeing and it's one after the other eye care is going to come online
00:50:58
you know commonwealth fusion had their their materials break through and on and on and on so this seems to be building up and so the twentieth and they're
00:51:04
gonna hit a tipping point yeah that's right i think the 2030s and the 2040s are where this becomes real and all
00:51:10
these problems and concerns we have about climate change and carbon in the atmosphere all of this
00:51:15
stuff can be reversed with infinite energy and so so i'm optimistic and i'm i'm excited about a lot of what we're seeing
00:51:22
let me ask you one question obviously when people start hearing about nuclear reactors and fission and then they start
00:51:28
learning about fusion they immediately have the chernobyls of the world and fukushima's come to mind and nuclear
00:51:33
bombs in this case when this reaction occurs my understanding i've interviewed a couple people working on these reactors
00:51:41
is that the reaction just fizzles out it just stops and then it's not radioactive
00:51:46
so these these are not radioactive materials that naturally decay into radioactive
00:51:51
ions or or particles that can damage the body or damage these are literally just hydrogen atoms
00:51:58
that are spun around so hot and smashed into each other so if the machine breaks everything just turns off that's it and
00:52:03
the output even when it's working my understanding is some natural uh like just air and water so there's no output
00:52:11
there's no there's nothing right there's no environment there's nothing to deal with so let me fast forward 200
00:52:16
years so now assume these systems work as you guys know all technology over time gets better
00:52:23
faster cheaper smaller so in 200 years we could find that we have plasma fusion reactions in every pocket in every computer in every phone imagine a world where we no longer need
00:52:34
batteries where we no longer need transmission lines and where a system can literally pull hydrogen out of the
00:52:40
air generate electricity on the fly and it sounds crazy but people thought people would have never thought that the
00:52:46
batteries that we put inside of phones would have existed when the first flow cell battery cell was made you know whatever you know during the early days
00:52:52
of of chemistry electrical chemistry so you know the idea that we've been able to shrink batteries as we have um the idea
00:52:59
that we've been able to make generators like we have today these were concepts that would have been so foreign so i do think that in 200 years if plasma fusion
00:53:06
systems work there's nothing about the laws of physics that says they're limited in scale to only being large they theoretically could be reduced down
00:53:13
to there's no limit to the size they could drop down to and so there could be a world 200 years from now where plasma
00:53:18
fusion reactors exist in every component that needs electricity um and so ultimately you could see putting these these systems on um spaceships and using them to convert
00:53:29
elements from one form to another and we could live for you know a hundred thousand years on a spaceship and just recycle the elements
00:53:36
on that spaceship to produce all our food and our air and everything and yeah for sure we could get to uranus with
00:53:41
that absolutely the summary and back you come back you could circle his anus so that was my
00:53:47
diatribe on plasma fusion i'm super excited about some of the processes right now sax is wondering how do we wet
00:53:52
our beaks tell us where to place the bet there's nowhere yet this is i mean honestly i don't place bets on things
00:53:58
that take a hundred thousand years it's only a hundred years oh hundred years sorry hundred thousand
00:54:03
things that might materialize in four years sorry hundred weeks he needs to upgrade his bills are due next month
00:54:12
i got bills to pay i got bill a big part of the you know just speaking markets for a second i mentioned to you guys at the end of last year that i made a bet on energy stocks and the reason i made a bet on energy stocks is because
00:54:25
some of the breakthroughs that we're seeing in decarbonization and renewable energy has driven a reduction in capital
00:54:31
improvements across energy infrastructure because people are so optimistic about what's over the horizon
00:54:37
and they're so pessimistic about carbon intensive energy systems that we actually have under invested over the
00:54:43
past few years in energy infrastructure that it's turning out today is critically needed so while this is a
00:54:48
great long-term kind of optimistic world scenario and it's going to decarbonize energy production and energy systems in
00:54:55
the near term we're actually struggling a bit to meet our energy demands and there's a lot of leverage that energy
00:55:00
producers have over those that are the consumers as we're seeing currently with the russia ukraine europe crisis and so
00:55:06
on and so part of the reason for the climate energy stocks over the last couple of weeks has been largely driven
00:55:12
by the fact that we're realizing that this under investment in capex has created a decline in productivity of these assets relative to the demand and
00:55:18
so suddenly everyone's like oh my gosh these things are going to be able to charge more commodity prices are going up and so on so you know it's very hard
00:55:26
to think about playing an investment cycle around this stuff because in the near term there's still significant demand and we only have carbon intensive
00:55:33
systems to produce energy well i was going to yes youtube if does this mean on an investment thesis you might see a
00:55:38
massive spike in carbon-based fuel systems and the sovereign wealth funds and then a dramatic drop-off no okay
00:55:46
what do you predict will happen the nobody will support anybody investing in pulling more oil out of the ground
00:55:51
they'll they'll support trying to get more from what we have um but you know i i don't know if i don't know if you guys saw but you know um there's no support for this whether
00:56:04
you're an investor and you go activist on some of these oil companies you know whether you're i think there biden had a big setback because you know he had cleared a whole like
00:56:14
millions of acres of offshore land for uh some point some kind of energy extraction that was then just reversed by the courts no no but nobody has support for this stuff but that's
00:56:26
but what you're saying is exactly right and it's exactly the reason oil prices are climbing i just sent you guys a link to what's going on today they're but
00:56:33
they're climbing for the wrong reason so look let's just be realistic here we you know we have a cartel it's called
00:56:40
opec you know uh and what they do is they decide output and we have some balance checks and balances to opec namely russia and a few other actors who will try to then regulate
00:56:53
supply and demand so that there's mutually assured destruction the net result of all of that right now
00:56:58
is that we do have some constraints apply for the amount that we need to get to get back to the level of production
00:57:04
we had pre-pandemic so we are going to have some sustained energy prices but you saw something really important this
00:57:09
past week everybody was waiting for this big cpi print right the consumer price index print everybody thought it was
00:57:15
going to be a bad number it was a pretty bad number but the markets were pretty responsive
00:57:22
to it and um and then it's been pretty responsive the rest of the week despite a whole bunch of stuff i don't know if
00:57:28
you guys saw but like yesterday there was this crazy article where you know one of the fed governors was like we should raise by a hundred basis
00:57:34
points by july and you know we should do eight eight raises and and the markets were like what are you talking about
00:57:40
and why is that because now people have started to look you know i've mentioned this before when
00:57:45
you go into a rate cycle we're kind of past worrying about how many we kind of look
00:57:52
to the end and decide what we want to believe about the future and one of the most interesting things
00:57:58
is the rate of change of this inflation was actually lower month over month and so if you think about it that way we had a bad cpi print but it's actually not going up as much and
00:58:10
in fact it's starting to trail off and a lot of economists now forecast basically this inflation peaking or
00:58:17
already having peaked over the last few weeks consumer sentiment is not so good a lot of us are now shifting our consumption away from goods to more services we're stopping
00:58:29
you know the hoarding of the toilet papers of the world if you will and so i'm not a big buyer of this trade
00:58:35
to be honest with you freeburg i think that it works in the short term i don't think it's an investment i think at some
00:58:40
point you're going to have to make a decision about what your view on energy is i know i i agree i don't think this is a long term it's a trade not an
00:58:46
investment that's right but i do i do think that the macro sentiment sent the market in one direction and creates this up it created a buying opportunity which
00:58:53
i was pretty clear about and i do think that some of this global tension stuff we're seeing is only going to drive it up for a while i do i do think however
00:58:59
that the the uh this uh big tech spread trade is moving from a trade to an investment actually and that i didn't expect
00:59:12
and the reason is i talked to a bunch of folks on wall street over this past week and they told me two things and one of
00:59:18
them is a segway because i think we should talk about microsoft which is another brilliant move in the lexicon of business but
00:59:25
what they said was facebook has become a funding short for other investments now what does that mean everybody was crowded into big tech we
00:59:35
talked about this before right those five stocks were broadly owned they were effectively the index
00:59:40
but after that um after that earnings report a lot of investors including retail
00:59:47
investors had to decide where to reallocate their capital and had to decide where to invest
00:59:54
where the money was going to come from to invest in these other names that were really beaten up and what folks on wall street have been
01:00:00
telling me is that you know facebook has become what's called a funding short meaning there is no bid to buy that from
01:00:05
institutional owners they'd rather on the march and sell it to generate the cash to then take and invest in other things
01:00:12
and what you saw over this past week is the bottoming out of a lot of these growth stocks that were beaten up right
01:00:19
they rallied pretty significantly every day three four five six percent rallies um and other names in big tech have
01:00:25
rallied really well including microsoft and um and so i i'm i i think that there
01:00:30
is the potential a small potential that that's going from a trade to an investment actually a sustainable trend
01:00:36
that you can bank on for you know several years investment hold the stock for five ten years the trade that spread
01:00:41
trade you can have for a long period of time but for the winners to be the winners in that just so people get refreshed google's microsoft google
01:00:47
microsoft google and then you feel amazon facebook obviously and netflix are the losers in that trade
01:00:55
still feel that way i think that microsoft and google are far and away the winners far and away the winners and look you
01:01:00
saw you saw you saw this microsoft thing today or sorry this past week so smart you know yeah so just to give catch
01:01:06
people up on that microsoft has made another savvy move to get approval for their 75 billion activision blizzard uh
01:01:13
acquisition they promised their video game app store would operate with open market principles
01:01:20
ceo of the year uh satya nadel uh and others trapped into washing uh in nadal uh nadella right there at the end um trouble to watch this week to meet with regulators regarding the acquisition so
01:01:32
they i guess are proactively going to washington as opposed to other people who maybe are not quote from microsoft
01:01:38
president brad smith we are more focused on adopting adapting to regulation than fighting
01:01:44
against it that's some really interesting there's a there's a famous story about
01:01:49
this explorer named hernando cortez where you know we've all heard this analogy or this this this uh little phrase before
01:01:57
um where you know when they were exploring um coming from europe and you know they hit
01:02:03
the caribbean islands and then you know looking for america et cetera the famous phrase is burn the boats yep right can't
01:02:09
go back we have to find our way make it work um the the way that that's been extended in
01:02:15
business is sort of what we would call scorch the earth and there's a competitive move that a
01:02:20
lot of businesses if they're smart enough can execute which is to effectively take a key market
01:02:26
and take an economic view of that market where you say that we're going to take all the economic value away from it
01:02:33
and i think this is a first step towards a really interesting play that microsoft could pull which is essentially to
01:02:40
scorch the earth of app stores which is google's and apple's really big money printer to make a completely open
01:02:46
permissible platform with very little to no take rate and in a market as big as video games
01:02:53
i think what it does is it creates pressure on all these other mega platforms to essentially copy them and i
01:02:59
think fredberg mentioned this before google has actually been the best in doing this by finding these key markets
01:03:04
or i think it was saks you know chrome and other things and giving them away for free google is in a position to make
01:03:10
the app store effectively free and then that puts apple on a little bit of a desert island so jason back to why i
01:03:16
think you can keep apple in that basket of shorts the competitive pressures are mounting by by the moves of microsoft that i
01:03:22
think are easier for google to copy and very difficult for companies like apple to copy because it creates an incredible
01:03:28
um disincentive yeah and also as part of this open app store concept they would let you use any payment system so if you're on an iphone and you wanted to use apple pay with a google app purchase
01:03:39
you could do that and if you were on you know microsoft you could use paypal as an example saks what do you what do
01:03:45
you think about inflation okay there was a really interesting chart on inflation that actually zero hedge tweeted
01:03:50
and um i threw it up in the notes here where they said real hourly earnings are negative 1.7
01:03:57
it's the 10th month in a row where u.s incomes aren't keeping up with inflation so the problem here is that
01:04:05
you know people's incomes have increased with inflation but not as much as the inflation rate so the net effect of it
01:04:12
is that people are feeling worse off when they go to the grocery store to buy groceries or whatever they need they
01:04:18
don't feel as rich that's the fundamental problem here and i think there's a lot of people out there who
01:04:23
think that there's a free lunch that if we printed two trillion worth of stemi checks this is the whole
01:04:30
that two trillion dollar bill last year they shoveled through i think the idea was we're going to print as much money
01:04:35
as we can for the election and it's going to help us in the midterms actually as it turns out it boosted
01:04:40
inflation so much that people are feeling worse off even though their wages went up slightly because on a net
01:04:46
basis their earnings are down so i just think it's a good reminder that um you can't just like print uh wealth you can't print your way to prosperity no free lunches there's no
01:04:58
free lunches yeah or we're gonna create addiction to universal income or universal subsidy um that's the alternative is people are gonna basically try and vote to make some programs that were initially meant
01:05:09
to be temporary more permanent in order to keep up the uh the lifestyle that they've been come accustomed to just uh
01:05:15
just to build on saks's point uh the university of michigan consumer sentiment was released i think it was
01:05:20
today this morning and it shows exactly what he's saying which is that you know consumers propensity and confidence in
01:05:26
the economy has been falling off a cliff you know the month over month change was almost uh it was down 8.2 percent the
01:05:33
year over year change is down almost 20 percent current economic conditions was down 20
01:05:40
and then index of consumer expectations down 19 so to to sax's point people are scared yeah well we've been we've been talking on the show for the last i'd say a couple of months about balancing the risk of
01:05:52
recession versus the risk of inflation inflation i think has gotten slightly worse the print went from the last print
01:05:59
was like seven point one percent now some point five percent so to jamaa's point earlier it's getting worse but the
01:06:05
rate of how fast it's getting worse is speaking but the risk of recession i think is increasing
01:06:11
because what's keeping this economy going is the consumer and if the consumer sentiment now all of a sudden
01:06:16
is tanking and people feel poorer because of inflation i just you know now the the risks are
01:06:22
starting to become sentiment as sentiment goes down this is where governors play a critical role because
01:06:27
if they don't open up these economies we can't actually have a consumer-led consumption rebound of the economy
01:06:33
because there aren't any services to buy because you can't actually be around anybody so if the economy remains
01:06:38
effectively closed and people are done buying you know tubs of margarine and toilet paper
01:06:44
because you know armageddon isn't coming as we were worried it would what are we supposed to be doing so this
01:06:50
is how these things interplay so we have to get these again going back to where we started we have to get this economy
01:06:55
open and we have to just get back to some sense of normalcy and the consumer will lead us out but i think saks you're
01:07:02
right on the margin i think the risk is towards a recession because people don't see this thomas sowell who's a
01:07:07
well-known stanford he's a i think he's a senior fellow at hoover um you know he he has this comment which is effectively
01:07:13
taxes are bad for the rich and the poor but inflation is bad just for the poor and the reason he says that is because you know if you're wealthy you can
01:07:24
transition to assets that are sort of inflation adjusted or inflation protected right you can consume assets
01:07:30
or you can purchase assets to protect yourself but inflation is an exceptionally regressive means of the
01:07:36
government taking compensation away from you current compensation and it disproportionately affects working class
01:07:41
ordinary people and so if you have real wages that are negative inflation that's high that's confiscatory right
01:07:48
you are you are meaningfully less well-off than you were before and you know the wealthy folks have a way to
01:07:53
hedge but normal ordinary working class people do not and on the margin then if they then do not go out and spend
01:08:00
the problem will be some sort of recessionary effect i also think if we open up more people might
01:08:06
since they're so lonely and getting weird staying at home i think they might actually want to go do jobs to socialize
01:08:11
and do things i'm seeing people want to get out and do you know trips with their teams and
01:08:17
they're and they're sick of staying home salesforce just bought a retreat center we saw this south of the city of the bay
01:08:23
area and because benioff's got a concern i guess that all these employees he hired over two years
01:08:28
who've never met another salesforce employee are getting weird and lonely and uh you know
01:08:34
history is going to be very i think david you're right i think history is going to be really judgmental of biden
01:08:39
if he is the last person to basically give the green light and all of these democratic governors basically revolt
01:08:46
and open up under underneath you know uh either silence or the complete opposite point of view this is a really bad setup well national journal which again is not some right-wing publication
01:08:58
they're just sort of uh an analyst of what's happening in washington said that by an article biden is blowing his covet
01:09:04
moment he was elected to lead us back to normalcy all he had to do was say guys it's time for the restrictions to come
01:09:09
off and take credit for the fact that we were that the whole country was ready to move on and he's kind of missed it
01:09:17
and but this trucker convoy is coming to washington and gives him one more chance i think
01:09:23
to get on the right side of this because there's really two ways he can react one is to treat them as
01:09:29
you know domestic terrorists you know racists white supremacists insurrectionaries or
01:09:35
he can you know embrace them yeah and situations all he has to do is say listen we love you we respect you we hear you we agree with you it's time for these mandates to end and you know what thank
01:09:48
you rachel wolinski and anthony fauci for your service we understand you're just trying to keep the country safe but
01:09:54
thank you very much we're ready to move on we're getting rid of all these restrictions his popularity would like bounce five
01:10:00
points ten points if he did that yeah i'm betting he's going to i mean he's he's always represented the working men
01:10:05
and women of this country that's been his thing from the beginning i bet you he does embrace them and if you look at omicron remember the scariness of
01:10:11
december hey this thing is spreading 30 40 50 times faster i wonder if it's going to have the same death
01:10:16
rate and we didn't know and now we know and it's february two months later we know that the curve in south africa same
01:10:23
as a curve in new york and california up and down and then the only people who die seemingly are
01:10:29
immunocompromised or unvaccinated or both so it feels like the perfect guy who really led us back to normalcy i
01:10:35
mean we really need to give credit to all the people who fought it's the moms who went to these school
01:10:40
board meetings were denounced as domestic terrorists they were the ones who put pressure to repeal these mass mandates on their kids which by the way
01:10:46
aren't even fully off in new york and california adults don't wear mass anymore but the kids do it's the
01:10:52
scientists it's the scientists of the great barrington declaration who were demonized and called fringe and kooks
01:10:58
and conspiracy theorists they're the ones who provided the real data against lockdowns not the nih it's these
01:11:03
truckers who are basically opposing mandates these are the people who are dragging us back to normalcy and it's
01:11:08
the politicians who are reacting to that when the polls change and i think what the people want now is
01:11:14
some real leadership it's a politician who gets up there and leads us back to normalcy why can't biden do that there's
01:11:21
a great article in the times and they profiled you know a couple people and one of them was a mom in new york who's
01:11:26
running for congress against you know an intense and entrenched democrat and she's
01:11:32
i mean you know she's just a good hearted mom who was like this is enough enough's enough i need to get back to
01:11:38
normalcy my kids need to get back in school we still have mass mandates here in california kids are still wearing a
01:11:43
massive school yeah it's becoming tribal warfare amongst the democrats in california because
01:11:49
even when you know the the governor basically said okay mass mandates can go on ex-date
01:11:55
the the county supervisors have not decided so for example in santa clara county you know uh they've not said yes in l.a county there's a health
01:12:07
an unelected bureaucratic health director named barbara ferreira she calls the shots on covet after newsome basically said that the
01:12:13
mass can come off she says no they can't not until april who is this person giving us orders she
01:12:19
told this to the board of supervisors down there and we're all just supposed to listen now the reason why she has
01:12:25
this authority is because newsom is granted to her under a new state of emergency so what he should do is end
01:12:31
that what is the emergency the super bowl is happening this weekend in the state and everyone's going to be there massless i mean i was at the warriors
01:12:37
game last night and you had people wearing the most flimsy of masks that does nothing to protect
01:12:44
people taking them off while they're eating and drinking and then people walking around with signs the security guards had signs that said please put
01:12:50
your mask on and they were walking up to people i kid you not and putting this like little round sign
01:12:55
uh in people's faces and not talking to them just you know and they would stand there until you put your mask back on and like you're literally eating a hot
01:13:01
dog and then you put the hot dog down and then they come up and put the sign in your face then you put your mask up you take another bite of your hot dog i
01:13:06
mean it's getting unnecessarily confrontational and just weird and and nowhere else are you seeing it and then you go to a restaurant and the employees are wearing masks and nobody else i hope i
01:13:18
hope you can find it so there was this clip on twitter um when the mask mandate was lifted in
01:13:25
nevada and it was a clip of kids in like grade two or three and they went crazy okay and the reason they were so excited was like they got to be normal again and
01:13:39
the explanation i had never heard this more beautifully said these children can finally see their friends emotions on their face oh my god can you imagine if you're four
01:13:51
five six seven years old and you cannot understand the emotions of other kids because you're covered up in a mask and you've only had an experience in school two years in school my six-year-old has
01:14:03
never attended a day of school without a mask you know i was about to say right like that's there's kids out there who have never had you know i was at i was
01:14:09
at uh like the i was at horses with one of my kids last weekend there were a bunch of kids out there writing
01:14:15
it's sunny it's outside they're on a horse they're all wearing masks in a voluntary optional situation i'm
01:14:22
just like how brainwashed this generation that we're raising i mean they're going to be so neurotic but they're also like brainwashed
01:14:29
i mean it's it's crazy we see it in the bay area like i'll have a party with the kids or
01:14:34
a group of kids come over and there's two or three parents who show up at the house we only do outdoor parties
01:14:40
obviously two or three of the 10 kids will have masks on their parents will have masks
01:14:45
on and like the most intense n95 like sealed masks and i'm like you want to take your mask off for a picture and one
01:14:50
of the kids refused to take her mask off for a picture outside at a birthday party i was like
01:14:56
okay listen i mean when i supported the mass mandate the very beginning of the pandemic
01:15:01
it was always as an interim measure if i had known that people would want to continue this thing forever there's no
01:15:07
way i would have supported it but it also probably was effective in the early days with the first round we know what the psychological impact to children is
01:15:13
when they don't understand other people's emotions and you do it over a long period of time no we don't i think that's a fair statement we don't know
01:15:19
the impact sure and it's probably not zero and so at some point we need to look at the risks calculate some expected value and the people we need to prioritize are those
01:15:33
that are the youngest okay and i've said this before and it's like the teachers unions need to understand
01:15:39
that calculus parents already understand that calculus i don't think the state legislators
01:15:46
governors in the federal bureaucracy yet understands this calculus but it's time to return to normal and it's time to
01:15:52
return sorry and on this point i would like to bring up something um uh the aclu thing
01:15:58
um just because i think i would love to get your take on you know talking about civil liberties and freedoms
01:16:04
there are things that are happening here under our noses every day um under democratic and republican uh presidents that to me when i saw this on
01:16:15
the aclu twitter feed yesterday was shocking jason do you wanna um tee that up all right in other news
01:16:21
the cia has been secretly conducting surveillance programs to capture americans private information on
01:16:26
thursday uh democratic centers widen and heinrich sent a letter to director of the cia and
01:16:34
the director of national intelligence the letter called for greater transparency in the cia into the cia's data collection of private us citizens
01:16:41
basically the cia used executive order 12333 which was signed by reagan in 1981 to
01:16:48
gather data on u.s citizens the letter notes the program was quote entirely outside the statutory framework that
01:16:55
congress and the public believe govern the collection and without any judicial congressional or
01:17:01
even executive branch oversight that comes from fisa that's the foreign intelligence surveillance act election
01:17:07
quote what these documents demonstrate is that many of the same concerns that americans have about their privacy and civil
01:17:12
liberties also apply to how the cia collects and handles information under executive order and outside a fisa law
01:17:18
in particular these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor
01:17:24
searches of americans the same issue that had generated bipartisan concern in the visa i mean where where where is the
01:17:31
mainstream media while they breathlessly run around chasing cancellation stories
01:17:36
where are they to report and to hold accountable this stuff and where are politicians in
01:17:42
actually doing their job but you know i don't think there's ever been this kind of overreach that's just constantly been
01:17:48
going on with zero accountability or transparency into it you know the fbi is responsible for domestic laws right and
01:17:56
the fbi has a very clear path in which they need to get warrants in order to be able to surveil u.s citizens and then
01:18:03
the fact that we give an agency whose responsibility is actually foreign yes to be cia is supposed to work only
01:18:10
on international not domestic and then to basically spy on its citizens with zero accountability reporting it seems
01:18:15
to be a pretty important issue that should at least be discussed especially in a world now where executive power
01:18:20
just keeps ramping up and ramping up what's going on and there's zero transparency or accountability if i
01:18:26
didn't randomly see this on an aclu tweet would we even be talking about this probably not and the and the other
01:18:31
thing that's no crazy about it is i think the way they get away with this chamath and this has been something that
01:18:37
the patriot act had um a similar technique is they the cia and some other organizations will track international people of interest you know money launders et cetera and then say in order
01:18:50
to track them well anybody they contact in america is fair game uh or if they're you know and
01:18:55
so you can get the metadata from the phone calls and the emails and i think that's how a lot of this gets just what
01:19:01
this letter seems to say is we just there's a broad scale surveillance program against u.s citizens that is
01:19:06
indeterminate uh in scope and scale right so we don't know that seems very different than that and then in in
01:19:13
parallel to this there's also that announcement that the department of homeland security is creating this major
01:19:18
apparatus infrastructure to go after domestic terrorists well look if they mean people who actually like set off
01:19:25
bombs or commit real crimes fine but trumath you asked where the media is the media is defining routine political
01:19:32
dissent as domestic terrorism now i mean you hear this type of threat inflation we've heard these truckers even
01:19:38
described as insurrectionists so you know how are these programs going to be used is really the question you
01:19:45
create this massive infrastructure under the executive branch we've seen that in washington
01:19:50
this trend towards criminalizing political disagreements where democrats republicans have been
01:19:55
putting their partisans in jail for years but are they now going to apply this to political disagreements in the
01:20:01
country can they use these powers to go after truckers who are engaging in civil disobedience can they use these
01:20:08
surveillance powers to go after somebody who just tweets things on social media that they don't like i mean these are
01:20:13
the open questions yeah it's very scary well and it's also hard to determine because you might have some people on
01:20:18
the right who are protesting uh something in a very valid way and then you get some whack jobs like the oath keepers who are
01:20:25
bringing in tons of weapons outside the dc area on january 6. so there's a valid concern here with all those weapons the
01:20:31
oath keepers brought and their plans to do a coordinated takeover after they first got in there but then you have the
01:20:37
other [ __ ] where they are probably just there to have fun and bang drums and and support trump right
01:20:42
so do you think these truckers are engaged in insurrection well i mean we don't know and i don't think so no i
01:20:47
mean if they if they bring a bunch of guns then yes we should have concerns but i don't think they are the slippery slope is when you have an executive
01:20:54
order that is not governed by the standard guard rails that we use to have checks
01:21:00
and balances between these kinds of government agencies and the people and the elected officials that we elect
01:21:05
here's how it basically gets in a really tricky place you have let's i'm just going to use justin trudeau's quote okay
01:21:12
but replace that person with any politician in power hey there's a small fringe minority of people um who are on
01:21:18
their way here they hold unacceptable views well you know what that person is going
01:21:23
to do that person is going to want to do everything in their power to basically understand break apart um and tear up
01:21:30
that fringe minority group now isn't that scary right when you have this overheated political rhetoric that describes your political opponents your your dissenters
01:21:42
the state yeah as enemies as white supremacists as nazis they're as insurrectionaries as domestic terrorists
01:21:49
why wouldn't then the law enforcement arms of our government then treat them that way i mean does the department of
01:21:55
homeland security or the cia or the fbi do they understand that the politicians are just engaging in rhetoric and in
01:22:02
threat inflation or will they take that those invocations literally to what we have to
01:22:08
investigate and stop these i think they've done a department of justice done a pretty good job of that i just want i just brought this up because i
01:22:15
think it's really important for somebody in the mainstream media of which many listen to this podcast sure you have a
01:22:20
responsibility to actually double click into this issue and figure out what's going on please yeah for on behalf of
01:22:26
all of us by the way like if you guys look i mean wall street journal new york times bbc everyone covered it today but
01:22:32
the story today is that lawmakers made this claim with no details and no evidence so i'm sure
01:22:39
the investigations are underway i mean the journalists are clearly leaning in to identify you know the the evidence
01:22:45
behind the story and i'm sure more will come out over the coming days and weeks and in fairness like you said is the justice department doing this
01:22:50
even-handedly they were very specific with the the january 6 interruptions acts where they went after oath keepers
01:22:57
because they had a coordinated they're a militia they literally referred to themselves as a militia and those people
01:23:02
are getting treated very different than the people who broke glass or sat on pants pelosi's death those people are getting three months suspended sentences
01:23:09
six month sentences and the oath keepers who are a militia they call themselves a militia they're dangerous and they're
01:23:15
treating them very differently and they're the only ones who are being charged with the more serious 10 to 20 year sentences so i would say they are
01:23:22
doing a great job all right everybody this has been an amazing journey from uh truckers to joe rogan and all the way
01:23:30
to uranus and back four the rain man david sacks the sultan of science dude nobody knows your outro jason dictionary they know we are they live
01:23:45
for the show people love it love you boys we'll see you all next time love you besties [Music]
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