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i want to play the theme music for this episode okay hold on a second here we go
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[Applause] if you let the indian government plant spies in your office give a little
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whistle [Music] if you have too many bots you can come up with your own metric mdaus
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fda use when you want to incent your staff to not look at the bots give them bonuses
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based on dows based on taos [Music] always let your bonus be your guide when you're on the board and you see
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metrics that you don't like turn a blind eye turn a blind eye i'm sorry sorry i just got subpoenaed
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[ __ ] everybody's getting subpoenaed again this is j cal at his best we gotta stop he's getting ourselves
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[Music] your winners troubles rain man [Music] david source it to the fans and they've
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just gone crazy [Music] is going to be the story of 2022 for sure right before i guess the big case
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between elon and twitter is about to happen i guess in october at some point a twitter
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whistleblower has come forward and dropped a nuke into the middle of what was basically the story of the year
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in business i think the former head of security hired by jack himself and incredibly well respected uh peter
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mudge zat co he's referred to as mudge one of the most respected people in uh the
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security industry again recruited by jack in 2020 after a team of hackers you may remember took over all these
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verified accounts obama biden and and elon's account as well and he was um head of security until
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january of this year eight months ago and he claims through explosive documents a huge
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document dump that twitter execs ignored these twitter executives ignored multiple security
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vulnerabilities now why is this important well obviously if obama biden and other heads of state have their
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twitter handles they could say something that could cause an international incident and that's actually happened
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with hacks before he also says they were not following even the most basic security protocols
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like safeguarding staff access to core software of course all this comes after there were
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saudi infiltrator spies essentially inside of twitter i mean the list of things here
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that he is alleging is truly colossal he dumped these documents to the department
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of justice the sec congress and the washington post he alleges that the vulnerabilities make twitter extremely
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vulnerable to foreign spies hacking and disinformation campaigns and perhaps most importantly to the
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acquisition the complaint also adds that twitter's policy towards fake accounts incentivize quote deliberate ignorance
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by undercounting spam accounts and giving bonuses to execs for increasing users but not finding
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bots saks your thoughts i mean on this we you talked about your uh subpoena or whatever that was uh
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i don't know it's a subpoena i'm being depositioned it's so you're you're having a
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deposition yeah they want they want to depot me too which is kind of amazing but let's let's save that because i
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think this is um more more newsworthy so you'll recall on a previous show we talked about this idea that if twitter
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sues elon to go after the kill fee or to go after damages the question will very
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rapidly become about whether twitter has a bot problem and will discovery reveal
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documents that show that twitter executives knew or should have known there was a problem
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and so i said you know the question will very rapidly become what did twitter executives know and when did they know
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it now i couldn't have predicted that this whistleblower would come forward but what he's basically saying is not only
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is there a bot problem there is a cover-up of the bot problem he's accusing the company of
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positively nixonian uh tactics here so just to build on what you said j-cal he said that
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twitter executives don't have the resources to fully understand the true number of bots in the platform and their
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executives are disincentivized to count them properly because doing so would negatively affect their bonuses so i
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didn't know that their bonuses were in any way tied to uh to this bot issue so he's
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basically he's making the upton sinclair argument that it's hard to get a man to
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understand a problem when his salary depends on not understanding it so that's part of what he's saying he's
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also saying that he's a he's accusing twitter ceo prague agarwal directly let's just say
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these are allegations right these are not proven yet uh but here's what he's saying basically he's saying
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that perag and his lieutenants repeatedly discourage him from providing a full accounting of twitter security
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problems to the company's board of directors they basically prevented him from producing a written report
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he also says that the company's executives ordered him to knowingly present cherry-picked and misrepresented
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data to create the false perception of progress on urgent cyber security issues he also alleges that they went behind
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his back to have a third party consulting firm their report scrubbed to hide the true
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extent of the company's problems and as a result of this he's basically saying that twitter executives committed
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securities law violations by making material misrepresentations and omissions and sec filings and this is
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what got elon to to sort of commemorate zacco's revelations with one of his trademark memes which was the meme of
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jiminy cricket singing give a little whistle from the film pinocchio which i think becomes a called open here
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which just became our cold open so yeah look these are very serious allegations they're not proven yet he's
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working with the same group who worked with francis hogan and i certainly questioned some of the
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things she was saying so i'm not going to automatically accept on faith everything he's saying but i think by
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the same token because he's working with groups that backed francis hogan who was very
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much not on the free speech side of this debate i'd also think you can't just accuse this guy being an elon stooge
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this guy is a respected cyber security authority he's one of these like white hat hackers he's somebody who was an
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early actor literally if you were to ask before all of this before we worked on twitter like
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who would you want as your chief security officer you know give me a short list he'd be on it for any company
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right one of the most respected people who points out vulnerabilities like chemotherapy burger i have a question
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about corporate governance and what seems to be a dysfunctional relationship here you have jack hires somebody to
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solve the security problems then when presenting to the board he's not allowed to tell the truth and they
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the board has given incentives to the management team he's a top five top seven member of the management team so
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what's going on here with this dysfunction where he's hired to tell the truth to fix the problems the board
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is turning a blind eye to it and maybe the management team is not giving the board the data they need to make better
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decisions who how do you game theory this yeah i'm not sure that it's you can come to all those
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conclusions yeah i'm not coming to the conclusion i'm just my mind is wandering of how
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this i read this function comes up i read parts of of his whistleblower i can't claim to
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have read at all it actually isn't super supportive of elon's case the most problematic thing that he
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points out is the following and this is a quote from his complaint he said twitter quote already doing a
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decent job excluding spambots and other worthless accounts from its calculation of mdow
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at best he's alleging that twitter omitted details not that it lied directly so if you kind of take that i think what
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he's really pointing his sights on are as you said disclosures that have nothing to do with the spam issue but
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have a lot to do with security and that is something that typically in a in a public company board
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filters up through the audit committee typically that gets a readout right once a quarter from the rep from the right
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people who talk about here's our cyber security threats and vulnerabilities and then there is a readout from that
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committee chair to the board and then those are noted in your quarterly in your quarterly reports that the
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secretary writes down so i think part of why this guy may not have had the audience is
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it was also written that he was a pretty terrible manager and there were hundreds
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of people in his organization who were just kind of running here and there and so you know you guys have all been
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in the situation where we hire somebody who is an exceptional performer and then we miscast that person by
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putting them in a point of leadership and and being a team manager versus um you know a single kind of like
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um product or engineering expert and it seems that there was a part of that at play as well which decayed the ability
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for management to actually have enough faith and trust in this guy to put him in front of the board so and that's all
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that's just come out in the last few days so i don't know my my reading of the whistleblower claim is
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really that this is the kind of thing that companies like facebook and google and others have
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had issues with the ftc in the past they typically settle those claims they pay a fine snap
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but those things take three to five years to play out so i suspect that this body of content
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more leads to that outcome than is a smoking gun that really helps elon in fact this the the fact that he's
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actually affirmatively stating that their calculation of mdow is actually pretty decent
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actually hurts the claim that elon is making i don't know if i agree with that actually okay go ahead sex so i agree
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with with chamath that the claims he's making are far broader than the bot issue um and far broader than the issues
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that elon's raised so i agree with you about that chamath however i don't agree that what he's saying
00:11:00
isn't specifically helpful to elon's case so what he said is so this is from a cnn business article he said
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zacco's disclosure argues that by reporting bots only as a percentage of m dao rather than as a percentage of total
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number of accounts on the platform twitter obscures the true scale of fake and spam accounts on the service a move
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zacho alleges is deliberately misleading and then uh cnn what you're saying here
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just to do the math the denominator matters here if the denominator was all accounts the percentage of bots would be
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much higher if the denominator is monthly m dows whatever they created it would be
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a much lower denominator and the percentage would change i think as well i'm just i'm just reporting what yeah
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what cnn is reporting in terms of what zacco is alleging i just want to get out on the table cnn broke the story along
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with um what other news was washington post yeah basically what happened is this guy got fired in january and
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started working with these whistleblower lawyers they put together a big report and then that report got leaked to the
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washington post and cnn as well as people on capitol hill so that's kind of what happened here so cnn goes on to say
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zacco says he began asking about the prevalence of bot accounts on twitter in early 2021 and was told by twitter's
00:12:15
head of site integrity that the company didn't know how many total bots are on its platform he alleges that he came
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away from conversations with the integrity team with the understanding that the company had quote no appetite
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to properly measure the prevalence of bots end quote in part because if the true number became public it could harm
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the company's value and image so this is again the options to clear problem that they're
00:12:39
i mean david you have to agree this guy is basically speaking on both sides of his
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mouth i mean these are both direct quotes from his complaint so his complaint at best is very confusing and
00:12:49
a little schizophrenic well it's also just coming out so there'll be more data that that comes
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from by the way i don't i'm not saying that i believe him or disbelieve him but i'm saying if you if you look at the
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quotes the quotes aren't the smoking gun one would want if one was trying to look
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i think we have to remember the the lawsuit has really nothing to do with this problem the lawsuit really boils
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down to one very specific clause which is the pinnacle question at hand which is there is a
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specific performance clause that elon signed up to right which you know his lawyers could
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have struck out and either chose not to or you know couldn't get the deal done without and that specific performance
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clause says that twitter can't force him to close at 54.20 a share and i think the the issue at hand at the
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delaware business court is going to be that because twitter's going to point to all of these
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you know gotchas and disclaimers that they have around this bot issue as their cover story
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and i think that really you know this kind of again builds more and more momentum
00:14:01
in my mind that the most likely outcome here is a settlement where you have to pay
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the economic difference between where the stock is now and 54 20 which is more than a billion dollars or
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you close at some number below 54 dollars and 20 cents a share and i think that that is like you know
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if you had to be a betting person that's probably and if you look at the the way the stock is traded and if you
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also look at the way the options market trades that's what people are assuming that there's a 7 to 10 billion dollar
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swing and if you impute that into the stock price you kind of get into the 51 a share kind of a an acquisition price
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again i'm not saying that that is right or should be right that's just sort of what the market says
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friedberg what's your take on this do you find this person credible highly credible and how damaging do you think
00:14:53
this is to twitter independent of the uh deal to sell the company i think there's two
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tests one is the materiality of what they've reported so and really that comes down to just the
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um the endow reported numbers so if there really is some misstatement knowing this
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statement based on what he's saying that's an issue the other one is the the duty of care
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responsibility of the board meaning um did the information that he's providing actually find its way to the
00:15:23
board if it was blocked by management you know it's it's a judgment call on you know whether or not management was
00:15:32
trying to deceive or whether they were trying to investigate and identify more if the information was brought to the
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board and the board did not act then there's an issue with the boards meeting their duty of care responsibility as
00:15:44
fiduciaries of the company and that's really what he did pitch the board at some point or explain this but not in
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writing yeah if what he's claiming did not make its way to the board then it's hard to say that the board was
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in breach of their duty of care if the ceo and if the ceo blocked it then there's a question on what then the
00:16:07
ceo can be fired right then there's a good case for the ceo to be fired i see so i see you know probably one of three
00:16:13
scenarios here one is you know nothing happens two is that the board is actually
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violating the which i doubt knowing this board i mean knowing who's on this board
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it's probably more likely that the ceo or some executives that block this information from getting to the board
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the board then has to act now that they have the information and they say hey you blocked this information from
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getting to us we need to act and maybe they removed the the leadership that was responsible for that sex in terms of
00:16:38
board governance how much of this has to do with the fact that nobody really owned on the board any significant
00:16:43
equity in twitter is that true yeah i mean i think i mean on the board was the highest right he owned two or
00:16:50
three percent how much did silver lake on jack owned silver lake egon's on the board i mean they're they're they're
00:16:55
owners on the board right this is board yeah we're low to be clear zacco doesn't seem to be pointing his finger
00:17:03
at the board in fact quite the contrary he's saying he wasn't allowed to present to the
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board in the amount of detail that he wanted in written form like he wanted so in a way he seems to be exonerating the
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board he is pointing the finger at twitter executives and the timeline here is instructive basically what happened
00:17:19
is he was hired by jack dorsey back when jack was ceo this is in i think um november of 2020 and at that
00:17:28
time jack had zacco report directly to him he actually took responsibility away from
00:17:34
these issues away from prague who was running engineering gave it to zacco zacco reported directly to him now fast
00:17:42
forward about a year later and jack steps down prague's becomes ceo and then two months later perrog fires
00:17:50
uh zacco and it's in that time period that couple of months where zacco alleges that he's prevented from
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providing a written report to the board that twitter executives instruct him to cherry pick that they basically
00:18:05
um try to amend this third-party consulting firm's report in order to make the situation
00:18:11
look better in order to hide the extent of the company's problems so i think this is i think the allegations as far
00:18:17
as they go are mainly a problem for twitter executives and and look i you know i don't know the truth these things
00:18:23
they're just allegations uh i think this guy is a respected super sort of white hat hacker in the cyber community at the
00:18:31
same time i don't know maybe is a bad manager or maybe there are other reasons for removing him could be a bad man
00:18:37
yeah and you can't ignore the fact that under whistleblower laws if twitter gets
00:18:42
fined as a result of these allegations he could get 30 so listen we don't know the truth of it
00:18:47
however i do think that this whole thing is a windfall for elon's case because it does seem to provide
00:18:56
substantiation for elon's assertion that there's a bot prom at twitter now and a cover-up about it
00:19:03
and a cover-up about it exactly yes and a cover-up that would basically potentially
00:19:08
invalidate the company's sec disclosures on the subject there's a question there's a question of
00:19:15
law and a question of fact with regard to elon's case so in other words at the end of the day what they're going to be
00:19:20
litigating in delaware is a contract dispute is elon contractually required to close and elon's assertion is i'm not
00:19:29
because this bot issue so there's a question of law where if if everything elon says about the bots is true
00:19:36
is he required to close and i don't know what the legal ramifications that are but i think with respect to the question
00:19:42
of fact which is is elon right about the bot issue there's no question that this
00:19:47
is a bombshell that can only help his case by the way to your point the the the stock was kind of pricing in
00:19:55
a 70 likelihood of this thing closing if you looked at just how all this stuff was trading and it went down to 60 once
00:20:01
that whistleblower report came out and people had a chance to digest it so to your point it definitely moved the goal
00:20:07
posts a little bit towards to elon's favor there is uh you know an important thing
00:20:13
to point out here which stacks just uh touched on there was a whistleblower program that was created in 2012 and uh
00:20:19
by the sec uh as part of dodd-frank i believe or in part of the evolution of dodd-frank
00:20:25
uh and they've given out now over one billion dollars in whistleblower awards these awards come out of the sec fine so
00:20:32
you often wonder like hey they give this huge se c fine who got it well it turns
00:20:36
out whistleblowers now are massively incented because if you're a whistleblower it's a career ending
00:20:41
potentially jason you're not you're not saying the other part which is when you go to these organizations to now help
00:20:47
develop a whistleblower lawsuit what has actually happened is you're not whistleblowing
00:20:52
moral or ethical breaches you're whistleblowing things that can come back to an issue that the sec and the ftc can
00:20:58
make an issue of because that's where the financial fines come and that's where the remuneration and motivation so
00:21:03
for example like you could have a company that's illegally um i don't know killing dogs horrible
00:21:11
but you know the whistleblower claim will be about you know their disclosures in a 10k of how many dogs they killed to
00:21:17
the sec right in this case you know how many what did they tell the yeah uh and that's why he gave this to the sec doj
00:21:23
the other interesting wrinkle here and by the way there's been two the whistleblower program i did a bunch of
00:21:28
reading on it this week they also don't disclose who the whistleblowers are so this isn't a case
00:21:33
where you have to come out like francis did uh or mudge did you a lot of these awards are being given quietly so and
00:21:39
there's been two rewards over a hundred million dollars and they don't say what the award was based on you know who did
00:21:46
who who the whistleblower is or who the company is they've been doing this in a very stealthy way and it seems to be
00:21:52
highly uh effective the big difference i think with francis compared to this one
00:21:56
is francis just a pm you know who was not a top five or 10 employee not even close to that
00:22:02
this is a top five top seven employee who had access to the board and was giving reports to the board at least
00:22:07
orally the final point on this i would like to get everybody's um commentary on if it is true
00:22:14
that they essentially um were forced twitter was forced by the indian government to put a government
00:22:21
agent on the payroll i think agent means spy how explosive is that and then how many
00:22:26
that to me is the most important thing that is not getting nearly enough coverage it's like you had a government
00:22:31
come to a company that's based in america and it's not it's not the united states
00:22:37
government that did it and basically said we need you to place an agent of our intelligence services inside of your
00:22:42
company and it seems like they were like okay where do you want them to sit now sacks if that's true
00:22:49
would i wonder if they would be required to tell the cia and our government that
00:22:53
their arms being twisted like this seems unprecedented to me and if they didn't well
00:23:01
this is all alleged so but if true sacks what i think the bigger button over jason you should also ask the next one
00:23:07
which is if they did it to twitter which is kind of small what about the big honeypots of users
00:23:12
google apple google facebook tick tock snap and what about countries outside of just india what
00:23:22
about the united states no i mean what about the united states uh well yeah we have access to the stuff
00:23:29
you know through the courts there's supposed to be a process the process is you go to court and you
00:23:34
get a warrant not that it's a high bar but a prosecutor has to go show probable cause and get a search warrant present
00:23:40
it to the company and then they turn over the data this you're right it's explosive in the
00:23:46
sense that what they're saying is that these government agents this is what zacco says according to time magazine
00:23:52
the purported agents had direct unsupervised access to internal information which i think means dms when the
00:23:59
accounts are created who owned which account the ip addresses that's what i'm guessing they had access to which is you
00:24:06
you do not want to trust me i'm guessing i'm guessing don't put anything in your
00:24:09
dms folks i'm guessing what it doesn't mean is the twitter menu in the cafeteria
00:24:13
yeah no yeah not that i mean not that anybody's been to that cafeteria in three years
00:24:19
anyway i mean there's literally forty seven dollars olive oil they had direct unsupervised access to the salad
00:24:26
bar i think i think you can basically i think you could you have to make an assumption that if if
00:24:35
governments are doing this to one company they're doing it to all companies yeah but you would think
00:24:39
right that you know because would put up a fight or apple would put up a fight but who knows you think they probably
00:24:46
fight when they went into china the opposite don't you think they do the opposite
00:24:51
well actually what they did what there's actually an even sneaker way to do it what apple did when they went there is
00:24:55
they said we're not providing cloud services in china uh but all the cloud services are provided by this
00:25:01
third-party company so then they could have plausible data that's not what this is about this is just giving an example
00:25:06
of how you this is understand but i'm asking you a question do you think that uh foreign governments have put pressure
00:25:13
on the largest american tech companies to place agents and do you think they exist in there
00:25:18
they've definitely put to the first part they've definitely put pressure we see that obviously then the question is
00:25:23
would arg would the would apple or google do this and not inform the government or not put up a fight i don't
00:25:29
know well i think it's fair to say that the the senate intelligence committee is
00:25:33
going to halt twitter and have like a closed-door meeting and then the question is you
00:25:37
know will they haul everybody else in and it's just is i i think what what is what what is an important question is
00:25:44
is this a duriger kind of business tactic at the highest levels of every company and we just don't know it and
00:25:50
are typically not read into it and we would never know in the absence of this whistleblower thing and my question is
00:25:55
do does our government know that our companies are acquiescing to these governments well that's been a problem
00:26:00
for a long time actually so there was a op-ed by a microsoft executive talking about this a number of months back where
00:26:06
the argument was well the government has to go get a search warrant to get your data from these companies but these
00:26:11
companies don't put up a fight like they don't it's they don't challenge the warrant at all
00:26:16
and why because they don't have an interest they have an interest in being cooperative right the article is
00:26:21
basically saying that if you're the subject of a search warrant meaning they're going to google to get
00:26:27
information about jason the government should have a duty to inform jason so that your lawyers can go challenge it
00:26:33
and that was the legal change that needed to be made we had this conversation i think last year
00:26:39
that is a change that should be made because in the old days when the government would present you with a
00:26:43
search warrant they'd have to go to you because all of your documents were in your possession they would be at your
00:26:48
office they'd be at your house so they would come knocking in your door give you the search warrant you could give it
00:26:53
to your lawyer they could challenge it that doesn't happen anymore now the government just goes and gives a search
00:26:57
warrant to a big tech company because your data is in the cloud but their argument is you don't own that data the
00:27:02
big tech company does the big tech company has no incentive to fight the government and they just get access to
00:27:07
all of your data and you don't even know well you're not an investigator it's not
00:27:10
an argument you agree to that when you sign their terms of service yeah the current situation is bad enough that
00:27:16
essentially you have very little protection and rights over your data but what's happening here the allegation is
00:27:23
even worse which is that government operatives are working with the company in a way that provides them access
00:27:29
without them even getting a search warrant yeah they can just spy on their ex-girlfriend their you know
00:27:34
brother-in-law whoever they can just spy on a celebrity do whatever they want i'd always assumed that
00:27:41
this was happening covertly meaning like look if you're a tech company and you know you have a very bright i don't know
00:27:47
phd on a visa and you hire that person to work in computer vision i'm just making this up
00:27:53
how do you really know that that person is not an agent of another foreign country and obviously
00:27:58
the overwhelming majority are not but once you have hundreds or thousands of people
00:28:07
you know that that you brought into your company all it takes is one person you know for example we just saw i think in
00:28:12
apple there were two people that were just recently arrested for stealing all of
00:28:18
apple's autonomous um auto data and documents and design schematics and all of that stuff and one of the
00:28:26
guys was um arrested right before he was trying to fly back to china and so somehow they figured it out they
00:28:34
were able to get him he was not a us citizen but then another guy that did it was a u.s citizen but both were of
00:28:39
chinese origin it just goes to show you that the covert nature of industrial espionage is probably at an all-time
00:28:47
high right and i think that's that's a risk that every company has to manage and do the
00:28:52
best that they can but this is different this is an overt risk this is just a literature and
00:28:58
saying open the door give us a badge we're coming in and this is why i think you have to deal with this case very
00:29:03
delicately and in a different way yeah uh and for people who don't know google does what's called the transparency
00:29:09
report twitter also has one so they they do try to put out by category search warrants subpoenas etc
00:29:17
exactly how many warrants they're getting and the the tech companies are at least trying to be transparent about
00:29:23
it to the extent they can but this is going to lead to a lot of people moving off of the cloud i predict
00:29:29
we're seeing and in fact apple is now storing your data uh and a lot of your privacy information
00:29:35
locally on your phone and if it's encrypted they can't hand it over as we saw with the um
00:29:41
the terrorist shooting it was at san bernardino uh where they couldn't unlock the phone and they went to the israeli
00:29:46
spy company to do it so you know i think i think the companies here at least in the united states want
00:29:50
to defend their users but this is could be uh make people rethink the cloud and i've seen a couple of pitches from
00:29:56
startups i think you're confusing issues of course they're going to try to defend
00:29:59
their users in the united states but what if you have if you let somebody into a different country and that's not
00:30:04
as if it's not as if those servers are not accessible yeah and i'm not confusing this year i'm just talking
00:30:09
about the united states here for a minute i do think you're going to see people buy
00:30:13
many servers to put uh or rent their own cloud services that are encrypted and impossible to unlock and so look for
00:30:20
that trend to come or more companies to encrypt it and say we don't have the keys to mop so isn't it crazy that like
00:30:26
you know we spent the last 20 years pushing the cloud and the thing that may actually unwind the cloud is just the
00:30:33
utter lack of privacy that we all have now i've just had like we've just created
00:30:38
these massive honey pots where you know any state or non-state actor can essentially just have
00:30:45
an incredibly detailed understanding of who you are yep and why because we weren't willing to pay
00:30:50
five bucks a month for storage everything needed to be free i think it's part of isn't this part of
00:30:56
the philosophy behind decentralized services that you know it gets crypto yeah i mean i i don't like using that
00:31:06
term but just decentralized services where the data doesn't sit on some centralized
00:31:12
enterprise controlled servers but the data is distributed either on a chain or in your phone or in some way
00:31:20
you know your identity your information your content isn't uh isn't centrally controlled
00:31:27
and that that fundamental principle may actually come to kind of bear over the next
00:31:31
couple of years and decades that yeah that model is more appropriate for us for me and therefore the services
00:31:39
that are built that way are gonna win in the market the challenge is ultimately how do you finance those because those
00:31:44
services right i mean they they they don't have as much of it you have to pay you have
00:31:48
to pay for them you know if you're willing to pay five or ten dollars a month for your privacy consumers are
00:31:53
doing it for you i i use the brave browser in vpns and these are becoming a major category uh you hear it on podcast
00:32:00
advertising all the time uh duckduckgo brave vpns are like vpns aren't just for hackers anymore they're like real like
00:32:09
um something that i think that's really important which is that you know over the last 20 years for all of us we've
00:32:15
been building these products on the internet we've actually done a little bit of a disservice because we've
00:32:20
basically created these expectations of consumer surplus and we've never given people true sets
00:32:27
of trade-offs we've always said oh you'll get more and it's essentially free because we'll back into an
00:32:32
advertising model that that supports us being able to give you more and more for
00:32:36
free but it turns out that it has some real consequences and i do think that not enough of us actually understand why
00:32:43
privacy is important but when you start to hear these examples and it'll be important to see what what the true
00:32:48
details of this twitter situation are i think that the pendulum starts to swing in the other direction where we
00:32:54
say okay you know what i'll eat out at chipotle one night a week less and instead i'm going to reallocate that
00:33:01
money to making sure that i have you know some amount of privacy you can do it for 25 bucks a month you know two or
00:33:07
three hundred bucks a year which is a big number for you know maybe the average joe but it's it's it's it's
00:33:12
being packaged and bundled right now so that you're seeing the vpns the anonymous search engines
00:33:20
the browsers all starting to bundle they're bundling a set a suite of services and so i i think this is upon
00:33:26
us now and consumers get it and they want to protect their privacy so and apple has said this is going to be our
00:33:32
reason for you to choose our cloud is that we're going to put the local settings
00:33:36
we're gonna put your data on your phone encrypt it we don't have access to it use use apple for this reason of course
00:33:43
they're also building a multi-billion dollar ad business at the same time in apple news and their app store so
00:33:50
there's that i guess we should move on here we'll we'll see what happens with this the other big news story
00:33:56
that people are talking about this week and we talked about i guess last year was student loan debt relief
00:34:02
interestingly uh about 85 days before the midterms joe biden has decided to unilaterally
00:34:10
give 10 to 20k of debt relief to people who have student loans you have to have under 125 k in yearly income as an
00:34:22
individual 250 as a household and the student loan pause program which happened during covet has been extended
00:34:29
to the end of this year i'm not sure why there's they explained why apparently it takes four months for them
00:34:37
to turn on their cobol written software that runs these loan services mighty so i'm supposed to change takes more
00:34:44
questions it's gonna take it's gonna take four months to restart the software that that calculates your loan balance
00:34:50
and is able to print a bill we're so incompetent okay anyway you have to apply for this um
00:34:55
and as we know student loan is student loan debt is 1.75 trillion uh this is going to cost us
00:35:01
another 300 billion can't imagine what's going to happen with this 1020k people buying nfts and stocks and
00:35:09
housing and we're going to hit the uh i guess bloomberg had a report that said that
00:35:15
look we we we passed the inflation reduction act we talked about it last week but one of the key pillars of that
00:35:21
is that there's a 300 billion of expected revenues coming in and we essentially turned around and
00:35:27
just gave that back to a very very small segment of the american population bloomberg's analysis was that it's going
00:35:35
to create somewhere between 0.1 and 0.3 percent extra inflation on top of all of that
00:35:43
and so you know you really have to ask yourself like what what was the white house trying to
00:35:48
accomplish i think number one they made a campaign promise and so you know i think biden needed to make sure
00:35:54
that he fulfilled that but nobody was really happy right the progressives wanted something extreme
00:36:01
everybody else said you know this is not really the right thing to do because it doesn't really solve the sim
00:36:08
the the root cause of what we're dealing with you know if it would have been much
00:36:11
better if you said hey listen um you know we're going to make this stuff expungeable on bankruptcy that would
00:36:17
have been really useful um what happens if you actually tried to i don't know you were from the inner city and you
00:36:22
worked your ass off you became a doctor you have 300 000 in debt but now you're uh you know a resident and you make 120
00:36:28
6 000. well you know you're you know you're kind of sol here so there's a lot of folks that they probably wanted
00:36:35
wanted to help that they didn't help then there's all the blue collar folks who are like why why this giveaway only
00:36:41
to these folks then there are the people that paid off their loans thinking why did i pay my loans off
00:36:46
then there's the incentives that it creates for colleges which is well i'm just going to keep jacking up tuition
00:36:51
because if they did it once they may do it again so all of these things i think are sort
00:36:57
of a little bit of you know uh it's a little bit of a head scratcher and then the last thing which
00:37:02
we can talk about at the end is i don't think this is what gets people out to vote and i don't think it's what
00:37:08
people care about ultimately at the polls which if there is a political calculation to make that's important and
00:37:14
specifically when you look at what happened last night in a bunch of these districts
00:37:20
every progressive candidate got absolutely shellacked they lost across the board and so the
00:37:28
progressive talking points around this stuff fundamentally when push comes to shove
00:37:33
doesn't work for democratic voters and then second is there was a really hotly contested
00:37:39
seat which was a democrat versus a republican i think it's pat ryan versus this guy
00:37:45
mark molinaro the republican he was leading the entire way and then this guy won 51-49 and this
00:37:52
is a very centrist down the middle dem so all the signs are like this may not have
00:37:58
been the smartest thing to do but i don't think joe biden had a choice because he made the promise and he had
00:38:03
to live up to it freeburg is this a fair thing to do a smart thing to do a cynical thing to do to buy votes where
00:38:09
do you fall down on this issue this is absolutely moronic i think that the fact that
00:38:17
eight million households are eligible for this relief and ten to twenty thousand dollars is
00:38:23
relief uh is provided to a a minority of americans is uh exactly what jamal said which is
00:38:31
kind of distorted politics at its worst there this is a 300 billion dollar bill to the
00:38:38
u.s taxpayer and the ultimate beneficiary of that bill while we all might want to say it's
00:38:43
the people that are getting debt relief that have taken out these student loans that money was transferred to somewhere
00:38:48
and you know where it was transferred to university endowments and the profit and
00:38:54
the pockets of for-profit educational institutions if there were a free market for education in the united states and
00:39:02
the government was not involved in the process of funding and supporting the educational infrastructure in this
00:39:08
country individual citizens would have the right and the obligation to make decisions about whether or not the money
00:39:14
that they're spending on tuition actually has a positive roi for them by spending ten thousand or a hundred
00:39:20
thousand dollars am i going to make more than that much money back when i graduate and unfortunately we've lulled
00:39:26
our citizenry we've lulled our country into complacency where that decision and that calculus is no longer required
00:39:34
because uncle sam is there to give you all the money you want to go to college and the hungry money-hungry institutions
00:39:39
that are there to educate you are taking that money putting it in their endowments or in the pockets of their
00:39:44
shareholders and at the end of the day it turns out that that decision may not have been the best decision and we're no
00:39:49
longer holding ourselves individually to take responsibility for the decisions that we've made and we're creating
00:39:56
misincentives because of the government programs that have been created by telling people you need to get a higher
00:40:01
education the government is going to pay for it for you and it doesn't matter if
00:40:05
it does or doesn't work because at the end of the day if it doesn't work we're just going to pay it back for you anyway
00:40:09
we'll bail you out and there's a middle class in the united states of america that is going to end up paying the tax
00:40:15
bill primarily because that's where most tax dollars come from for the minority of people that made a
00:40:20
bad decision and it's not necessarily their fault they made that decision because the infrastructure in the system
00:40:27
was set up to tell they were duped yeah go to college get a good degree it'll always work having a good life you'll
00:40:33
make more money and the and the reality is that they aren't and that they don't the roi for many of these degrees has
00:40:39
been negative you make less money than you would have if you were actually in the workforce
00:40:44
earning an on-the-ground experience and progressing your career you do not need a degree in philosophy or history or
00:40:50
german studies to be able to go and be effective in the technology workforce or in the services workforce and i think
00:40:56
that we're seeing that play out the biggest challenge now is if we're going to provide this loan
00:41:01
relief and not reform the educational infrastructure and the and the requirements for whether or not an
00:41:08
educational system is eligible for support from the federal loan program we are not actually solving the fundamental
00:41:14
problem we are keeping this gravy train running and we're not actually getting to the root cause of where this money is
00:41:19
flowing and this is exactly what happens i will rehash my point that i've made a
00:41:23
hundred times at the end of empires everyone sees that the money train is leaving the station and everyone jumps
00:41:29
and grabs what they can and that's exactly what's going on we think that we're a rich nation but we're becoming
00:41:34
complacent and this is unfortunate and it's a really sad sign i think we need to fix this educational infrastructure
00:41:39
we need to make eligibility requirements for whether or not loans are actually going to have a positive roi for
00:41:44
students and then individuals ultimately need to be educated on that and made held accountable to whether or not
00:41:49
they're making the right decisions for themselves sachs should each american pay a thousand dollars to let these
00:41:54
eight million people off the hook because that's what this is going to cost no of course not i agree with
00:41:59
everything if people say i don't like you i just gave you the softball of all softballs no i mean look i think this is
00:42:04
an issue where all four of us are on the same page i agree with everything that jamasa and what freeberg said i mean
00:42:09
this bill is unfair or it rewards relatively well-off college grads over working class people it's going to add
00:42:17
300 billion to the deficit i mean joe manchin should feel like a sucker right now because they just spent the 300
00:42:23
billion of supposed savings that he just agreed to i just add it's it's unconstitutional i
00:42:31
mean that the constitution expressly says no money shall be drawn from the treasury but in consequence of
00:42:37
appropriations made by law so i don't understand how biden can even do this by an executive order i expect this to be
00:42:44
challenged and taken to the supreme court and i think there's a very good chance it'll end up like biden's other
00:42:50
executive orders that were ruled unconstitutional remember there was the vaccine mandate that he tried to do and
00:42:55
there was the eviction moratorium that he tried to do and they're both ruled unconstitutional i think there's a good
00:42:59
chance that this will also be ruled unconstitutional and like like you guys mentioned it's
00:43:05
inflationary i mean these are basically stimmy checks which we don't need right now and it's going to make tuition go up
00:43:10
because the more government subsidizes something the more those providers have an incentive to raise the cost so this
00:43:17
is just a jump the shark moment i think for policy making the question is why are they doing it and i think it really
00:43:23
speaks to the nature of the democratic party today which is the democratic party has shifted from being
00:43:31
a blue collar sort of more economically populist party economically left party to being a professional class that is
00:43:39
college educated culturally left more woke party and this is the ultimate example of that where the democratic
00:43:46
party is basically passing this payoff and giveaway to their sort of woke college graduates at
00:43:52
the expense of their blue-collar the blue-collar part of their coalition and you know a democratic political
00:43:58
scientist that i like to read roy tuchera just today he had a blog post called the democrat shifting coalition
00:44:05
where he pointed out that if you look at polling if you look at the generic ballot among white college graduates
00:44:12
they favor democrats by 12 points whereas the white working class which is say non-college voters they favor
00:44:19
republicans by 25 points so one of the biggest gaps in the electorate is college versus non-college that is the
00:44:26
fundamental gap it's bigger than even you know than any other gap than racial gaps or anything like that this is
00:44:32
really the key gap in the electorate and this is a payoff to the basically to the
00:44:37
foot the new foot soldiers of the democratic party if you think about it the old
00:44:42
stereotype of a foot soldier of the democratic party would be a union representative they were the ones
00:44:47
getting out the vote that person's been replaced with sort of a woke college graduate who joins the democratic
00:44:53
socialist of america and they go out and they're the ones pounding the pavement and doing the ballot harvesting so
00:44:59
there's been a real change in what this party is about and i think that's the explanation for why they're passing this
00:45:05
legislation and then we'll go to your freebird the mfas from sarah lawrence college have
00:45:09
taken over the democratic party well let me ask you guys let me ask you guys a question yeah when you guys
00:45:15
graduated uh everyone went to undergrads tomorrow you went to undergrad in canada right
00:45:21
i have no grad degree right but when you guys graduated college what do you think the ratio 80 20 90 10
00:45:29
50 50 00 100 was the first two years of experience you guys had in the workforce
00:45:35
versus um the education and knowledge you you garnered in college how important 90 percent workforce
00:45:41
90 percent offers first time i went to school at night so i was working while i was at school right i went to high
00:45:47
school a hundred and zero i i went to school university of waterloo that has a program called co-op where you have to
00:45:54
alternate school and work it takes an extra year to graduate but you end up getting 24 months of full-time work
00:46:00
experience so it was the same and you graduate with a lot less debt i graduated with half the debt i would
00:46:05
have otherwise sacks i mean do you feel the same i mean you wouldn't got a law degree
00:46:10
that's different i mean look i think that it used to be the case that people would go get these
00:46:16
degrees and they would take out these loans because there was a perceived roi of getting this education and i think
00:46:22
one of the deeper issues we have today is it's very unclear what the roi is i mean what is the return on getting a
00:46:29
degree in you know social studies or art history or frankly some woke studies at
00:46:36
one of these prestigious universities their graduates go out and they're not especially qualified for a higher paying
00:46:41
job and actually i think one of the really revealing parts of this executive order is not just the debt forgiveness
00:46:48
part we haven't really touched on there's another provision that caps repayment levels so basically it says
00:46:53
that the monthly payments on undergraduate loans be limited to five percent of monthly
00:46:58
income now who is that the payoff to that is the payoff to the art history major from amherst who ends up being a
00:47:04
barista at starbucks you know or the democratic political operative who works for the dsa gathering votes i mean
00:47:12
that is who this would be or the let me give the let me give the counter argument to you saxon i want to
00:47:17
hear your response to this so the counter argument is hey listen the airlines got bailed out for a
00:47:22
trillion dollars you know cumulatively um 2008 financial crisis 700 billion or something to that number i'm going to
00:47:29
respond there is a caveat to that which is we actually made money on that bill i'm going to respond
00:47:35
okay great and then number three hold on and number three um me too airlines banks and then the trump tax break 1.5
00:47:43
billion so why can't a bunch of students get but 300 billion that is the counter
00:47:49
argument everybody we don't complain when you know the rich people get bailouts and the rich corporations and
00:47:55
airlines do but now we're suddenly complaining about this little pittance here what's your best response to that
00:47:59
free bird well i'm not saying that's my position former uh treasury secretary of the
00:48:04
united states had a tweet storm about this and he said you know the student loan issue arises arouses passion
00:48:11
um here are some observations and some responses there is no analogy with bank bailouts student loans are grants that
00:48:17
cost the government money the bank bailouts were loans at premium interest in which the government actually turned
00:48:24
a profit and it's important to think about all government services being infrastructure funding where you are
00:48:31
funding some underlying tubing or mechanism that allows society and the economy to progress
00:48:38
versus making up for the dollar mistakes or decisions that were made in the past
00:48:42
i also have issues not just with this but with the issues of people buying homes in coastal cities that they get
00:48:49
bailed out at the price of that home at the fair market price when a hurricane hits because they paid a premium taking
00:48:55
on the risk of a hurricane or a flooding event hitting their home why should the
00:48:59
u.s government and the u.s taxpayer come in and say you know what i'm going to reimburse you for the full value of your
00:49:04
home which frankly should have been 50 of what you paid for it because it's sitting on a coastline and that's a big
00:49:09
problem that we generally have is we try and use the government as a system for providing bailouts to make up for past
00:49:16
investment mistakes made by individuals and businesses and i think that there's a very clear distinction that you can
00:49:21
make when you decide whether or not a and we use the term bailout anytime we're spending money but the reality is
00:49:27
if you're making an investment that has some payoff for economic growth and for people and for this country to progress
00:49:34
in some measurable way that is a good way to assess whether or not that is a reasonable investment versus saying you
00:49:40
know what i'm covering someone else's liability and when you do that we're actually burning money and we're putting
00:49:46
ourselves deeper in a hole as a nation and making it harder to do the former to make the infrastructure investments and
00:49:53
make the investments that allow us to move forward and i think that that's a really good way to clarify these things
00:49:58
and frankly the list of things that people say this is fair this this is not fair yada yada go down that list and ask
00:50:04
yourself that question is it a positive roi to progress our country forward or is it a bailout for people that had some
00:50:10
liability they took on that they can't cover and i think for all those things that are unfair a really important point
00:50:16
we cannot get caught up in the endless cycle of making up for other people's unfair uh um benefits that they got from
00:50:24
this from this government because at the end of the day that's a road to nowhere
00:50:28
we will burn through everything we have and everyone will scramble for money and
00:50:32
that's the state that we're in right now where everyone's raising their hand and
00:50:35
they're seeing 800 billion dollar bills 600 billion bills coveted relief pandemic relief ppp loan relief and
00:50:42
everyone says well what about me and at the end of the day everyone's what about me is going to drive us into
00:50:48
an infinite black hole that we will never get out of and we have to change our mindset and take individual
00:50:53
responsibility and recognize that the dollars that we're spending have to have an roi for progression of us as a whole
00:51:00
and this is a really dangerous place that we're in right now if the education comments okay can i
00:51:06
make can i make it i'm sure you're making something last question to sex am i am i too monologue today i feel like
00:51:10
i'm very passionate no no you're doing great i mean the fact that you have passion about
00:51:14
something maybe it was an extreme video game yeah that almond milk gave you a little bit those cashews
00:51:19
maybe four cashews going forward mean this is definitely bug this guys this stuff really bugs me i'll be honest take
00:51:23
it easy on the dates yeah i'm like dude like this stuff just it makes me feel like what are we doing it's just uh
00:51:29
did you put chia seeds in your see yeah that's it was it was it the goji berries
00:51:34
the goji version go easy on the goji berries that's a super food right there if you if you have if you have chia
00:51:38
seeds in the morning it's a huge bm that's about to hit it's just you're just waiting for the wave to yeah yes i
00:51:43
mean for sure i have two comments comment number one is i think the thing that shows that this could have been
00:51:50
better is that it was completely silent on the ability to expunge your student loans in bankruptcy the ability to
00:51:58
discharge that is the single biggest change you could make to the system to be fair to everybody and introduce a
00:52:06
better roi risk scoring calculation mechanism okay so great so this is in all direct
00:52:13
agreement but go ahead and i'll explain it okay in all debt markets right whenever you lend money
00:52:18
there is an assumption of risk that you're taking and that fits on a curve of highly likely to default zero
00:52:24
likelihood of default and that manifests in a risk scoring so a fico score but in
00:52:30
the debt markets right and there's these companies that provide that moody's and
00:52:33
s p they say you're an investment grade debt you know you're a triple a plus you're a junk debt so you're you know
00:52:40
you're a triple b minus or whatever and depending on where you are you pay different rates this is the same in car
00:52:47
insurance it's the same in home insurance it's the same in health insurance but in all of those cases if you go
00:52:55
upside down you can declare bankruptcy and you can discharge those nets here we don't have that idea so if you
00:53:02
go bankrupt for whatever reason this debt will stay with you forever which is deeply unfair second is if you actually
00:53:09
flipped it and you could allow it to be discharged then the companies that provided these
00:53:14
loans would be forced to risk score you and the reason why that would be so powerful
00:53:20
is that that would then create the forcing function for universities to actually deliver what they promise
00:53:28
and so who do you think is really against the ability to discharge in bankruptcy it's the
00:53:34
universities and the university endowments so you know if i were progressives the thing that i would have pushed more
00:53:40
than a handout to a few people which by the way didn't even you know really scratch the surface of
00:53:47
the debt that they have anyways and it also served to piss off everybody else i would have focused on this bankruptcy
00:53:54
issue because that is a meaningful lasting change and the second is why don't you go and
00:53:59
actually get a large portion of this money from all these university endowments because the longer that these
00:54:05
folks run what is effectively a multi-trillion dollar asset management business they're always going to treat education
00:54:15
and the roi that comes from it as a second-class citizen okay and that is what i think is wrong and if
00:54:22
you were to just fix this one thing and then even the threat of actually confiscating some of the 50 billion
00:54:29
dollars that harvard has or the 49 billion dollars that utimco has you would start or the ut system has you
00:54:35
would start to see the seeds of change where administrators would think to themselves i have to
00:54:42
deliver something of value because these kids are getting loans they're going to be risk scored and i
00:54:48
don't want to be the person that's like a low end borrower right i'm not serving
00:54:52
junk paper to the market i want to serve people that are going to go and really drive a huge roi so then saks you'd have
00:54:59
an alignment between the people giving the loan and perhaps the value of the degree and so you could say hey we'll
00:55:05
give loans to stem degrees at a different rate uh or a different number of them or a different amount of cash or
00:55:12
a different interest rate than we would for i don't know getting a degree in philosophy or like i
00:55:19
did psychology right you just give a different one based on the outcome that makes total sense to you yes yeah i i've
00:55:26
said well for a long time that we should be allowing student debt to be discharged in
00:55:30
bankruptcy just like any other type of debt just like credit card debt just like other types of debt jamal's right
00:55:35
that would create some risk to the underwriter so that they would have to actually assess
00:55:41
whether this person getting that degree would be able to repay the debt but you have to ask the question is it a bug or
00:55:47
a feature that they're trying to remove market forces and i would argue that this is deliberate that progressives in
00:55:54
the democratic party don't want there to be accountability for what you learn in college why
00:56:00
because as i mentioned it's these colleges that are putting out the foot soldiers of the democratic party i mean
00:56:06
listen there's a 37 point gap in party preference just based on one variable which is whether you are professional
00:56:14
class or working class meaning college degree or no college degree and that spans across different racial groups and
00:56:21
other party lines so the fact of the matter is that if you go to college and get a degree you are much
00:56:28
much more likely to become progressive now why is that i think it's because a lot of these
00:56:35
colleges have basically become re-education camps i mean these are the woke madrasas
00:56:40
of uh yes but look these places are worth madrasas and what do they do they graduate these people
00:57:00
clerics of our woke theocracy these people go on and then they go enforcers become suicide bombers yes
00:57:09
it's not it's not like violent like that but listen we we look down on some of these theocratic societies and we don't
00:57:15
realize how like them we are i mean look these kids who graduate from these woke
00:57:19
madrassas they go off to become the speech police i mean they go enforce community moderation at social networks
00:57:26
they become the foot soldiers all right let me just wake up no no this is the check out
00:57:32
let me say one thing it's true right how did you explain it 37 point gap okay so
00:57:38
if you're in the democratic party listen if you're the democratic party which is run by woke progressive
00:57:43
political operatives why would you want to defund the factories that are brainwashing more young students to
00:57:49
basically join your ranks okay i want to say two things i want to say two things
00:57:52
one is um i think that the the university in the college degree has been used as um a heuristic
00:58:01
uh for progression out of um blue collar to white collar it says if you get a hollow and j cal you i know you can
00:58:08
speak to this because you know you come from a family that uh that works blue collar and you
00:58:15
know you got a college degree but i think there is this um uh you know kind of assertion in the united states and and
00:58:22
it has now become one could argue a meme that if you get a college degree you're
00:58:26
no longer blue collar you're now white collar and the reality is that the quality of that degree varies greatly
00:58:32
based on where you go the major and the experience you get to accompany that degree and as a result you may not
00:58:38
necessarily transfer from blue collar to white collar but you have the degree you
00:58:41
say you're now white collar and then you're working a blue collar job with a hundred and twenty thousand dollars of
00:58:45
debt um and so that heuristic isn't true and what we need to examine is why that
00:58:52
heuristic is no longer true and what we can do about it yeah i mean secondly secondly i do want to make a
00:58:58
defense for college i think that there there is a incredible benefit to broadening individuals exposure to
00:59:05
topics research um and areas that they may not have naturally been interested in or that they will not necessarily get
00:59:12
trained in and there is an important role that that educational infrastructure has in allowing us to be
00:59:17
a more enlightened populace meaning we can understand history we can understand philosophy we can understand the things
00:59:23
that shaped our our world and our livelihoods and what makes us who we are today and we can understand the sciences
00:59:29
and the maps that affect us so we can better understand the world and the people around us so there is a role but
00:59:34
the real question is how do you integrate that educational role into a technical training program or into a
00:59:40
real world development program skills that that basically make an educational system more than just a checkbox that
00:59:47
doesn't actually do anything for you but gives you that exposure accompanied by and maybe that's the requirement with
00:59:53
you know with federal loans is that there should be some skill or some i think i think the minute i think the
00:59:58
minute i don't want to lose the important breadth of exposure that college is meant to bring to people
01:00:04
yeah yes and that's valid go ahead chip off and then i'll wrap up my final account no i was just going to say i i
01:00:09
really think people do not understand how how meaningful of a change it would be if you were able to discharge your
01:00:16
student debt in bankruptcy it is the most powerful market function we could create to make these
01:00:22
universities more accountable and i think if you guys look at my annual letter i put a chart in there but you
01:00:29
know part of the problem that we have in these universities these leading universities is that these have become
01:00:34
graveyards okay there is a geruntocracy that runs these things with an iron fist
01:00:41
and as these folks have stayed in these jobs for enormous amounts of time now 40
01:00:46
50 plus years the average person is in their mid to late 70s now who are the administrators of our leading
01:00:52
institutions they are focused on running up endowments and they are focused on the
01:00:58
power and the influence that comes with their position so i i implore anybody who has any
01:01:05
ability to to actually achieve this change there should not be a single logical person
01:01:12
that should not support the ability to discharge student debt in bankruptcy and you will identify
01:01:20
the insider establishment by those that try to stop you you will expose them 100 and i just want
01:01:27
to put a closing thing here for the people listening who have young people making these decisions when we all went
01:01:32
to college as gen xers college was 9 10 11 000 a year in tuition and if you came
01:01:37
out with 10 or 20k and you had an average job or a salary of double or triple that when you graduated it seemed
01:01:43
like a good deal the roi broke now market forces are at work here i just want to point out two of them number one
01:01:50
there is a website grow with google you can just look up right now they're allowing people to get professional
01:01:56
certificates and this is free and if you could pull up grow with google they've identified five different
01:02:02
paths to jobs one of them is digital marketing and e-commerce one's it support data
01:02:07
analytics project management and ux design they have essentially looked at what's needed in the world and
01:02:14
aligned a three to six months online course for [ __ ] free that'll get you a job and you if you have executive
01:02:21
function the ability to sit down shut up and learn can do this first before you make the
01:02:27
decision to go a hundred thousand dollars in debt and then get a 50 000 a year job here at these jobs average you
01:02:34
know 60 70 80k a year and you can do it for free the next piece that the private
01:02:39
market is doing you and i looked into this chamath actually together isas income sharing agreements uh we were
01:02:45
lucky enough to invest in a company called maritos they are providing isas for a college colorado mountain college
01:02:51
for nursing what this means is they will give you your tuition for free it's educate now
01:02:57
pay later you if you go to one of these colleges for nursing you get educated and then
01:03:02
you pay it back and you're capped at paying back like two times whatever the loan is one and a half whatever the
01:03:06
college decides but they take the risk as opposed to harvard with 40 billion that takes no [ __ ] risk and so the
01:03:13
free market i think can also solve this but you have to sit down with your kids and say let's have an roi calculation
01:03:20
at 20k in debt you know okay fine you got a philosophy degree by the way sign off saks final question for you uh i
01:03:27
posted this thing in the group chat but what do you guys think about this you know uh republican
01:03:33
tidal wave becoming a republican ripple that's what uh yeah that's that's what that's it was it
01:03:40
was an odd set of outcomes don't you think i mean biden look biden has had a good
01:03:45
run over the last few weeks um i'm sorry my audio cut out one more time sex can you say it again
01:03:51
i'll say it again the second political report says that the red wave looks more like a red ripple no i think i think
01:03:57
it's right well look i i think a couple of things happened so first biden has got some wins legislatively i don't
01:04:03
think it's good policy i don't think this executive order is good policy i don't think the 750 billion of climate
01:04:09
that pretends to be an inflation reduction act i don't think that's good policy but nonetheless he has delivered
01:04:15
some goodies for his his base for his donors and that has basically ameliorated this story in the press that
01:04:21
democrats are in disarray so you're not hearing that in addition i think bain's got two things going for
01:04:26
him jobs and jobs i mean dobbs there's no question dobbs has helped the democrats quite a bit
01:04:33
it certainly has motivated their base and then the jobs report has been strong look i think overall the economic data
01:04:38
is mixed real wages are not keeping up with inflation but jobs have so far been strong so yeah there's no question that
01:04:45
democrats are in a materially better position they were in june when it looked like a tsunami that being said
01:04:50
the election's still 10 weeks away and i think we'll have to see what happens and i think the economy is still in a
01:04:56
pretty fragile state so 10 weeks is still a long time but yes you're right yeah for what's more things are looking
01:05:03
right now things are a lot better for biden and by the way i do think the republicans have some issues with
01:05:08
candidate quality and so there's a couple of races that you know should have been
01:05:15
more slam dunks and that are not but what was the first word you used there you said dobbs and jobs what was the
01:05:20
first jobs abortion ah the dobbs case yeah got it got it okay okay that i just didn't hear it
01:05:26
perfectly weren't a lot of these wins for biden uh bipartisan well no the inflation reduction act was
01:05:34
passed on straight party lines this this uh college loan forgiveness is something
01:05:37
they can't even get through the senate it's being done as an executive order the the things that were bipartisan hold
01:05:43
on the things that were bipartisan there was that chips act where they got some votes that's great and um and then there
01:05:49
was the guns bill so um yeah look he did get some bipartisan wins there's no question about it i
01:05:55
think the republicans i think the republicans got hoodwinked basically the republicans foolishly
01:06:03
went along with infrastructure and with the chips act they should have forced biden to use
01:06:09
up reconciliation on one of those bills and then they wouldn't be able to get through the 750 billion inflation
01:06:15
reduction act so republicans you know as much of a sort of master strategist as mcconnell is
01:06:24
reputed to be they really got snowed on this one if it's possible for somebody to
01:06:31
um masturbate themselves from the inside out jason's doing it right now there's a reason why we do this from the
01:06:38
chest up okay i think what's likely to happen in november is still that the republicans win one of the chambers
01:06:43
probably the house i think the senate is still up for grabs i don't think it's over i think that'll be important
01:06:48
because biden won't be able to pass some of this legislation that's i think destructive
01:06:54
from a deficit standpoint from an economic standpoint and we've talked about in this pod and i don't think you
01:06:59
guys are too excited about most of the legislation he's passing so quite frankly i'm just hoping for
01:07:05
gridlock i'd like to get back to a situation of gridlock less spending would be certainly great at this point i
01:07:10
mean well if we're trying to fight inflation here while we keep spending money over here it's
01:07:15
it's challenging yeah if you want to get back to uh fiscal responsibility you you got to
01:07:21
vote for gridlock or hopefully moderates come all right we'll uh we'll let sachs go anyway we're
01:07:26
going to go to science anyway and zach's checks his email during that segment so
01:07:30
by the way there's there's an article now you know when we talked about quiet quitting it's now become this huge thing
01:07:35
that everybody's talking about yes and and what's so funny about quiet quitting is just yet another example of gen z
01:07:41
again co-opting something we've already done when we used to do it it was called
01:07:44
coasting and you just be like rest invest yeah but but now it's called quiet quitting yeah they're all up in
01:07:52
their feelings do we want to talk about guy bio uh want to hear about the gut bio so there was a there was a paper
01:07:58
published in um so the journal cell the paper was done by a research team out of herzelia so i'll take a step back
01:08:09
the human body is made up of roughly 10 trillion cells um and there are also somewhere between
01:08:16
10 and 40 trillion bacterial cells that live in your body primarily in your small intestine in your and what people
01:08:23
call the gut biome and so this is a population of microbes bacteria that are basically chemical factors they eat
01:08:30
stuff up and they spit out chemicals and those chemicals end up in our body and it turns out that the gut biome the
01:08:37
bacteria in our gut can actually regulate our health in a very significant way and this was the basis
01:08:43
of our company unique you guys can bleep that out if you want which is now called
01:08:46
supergut and jkl i know you've tried the product which is awesome thank you sent me i bought
01:08:51
munique that helped me with my weight loss and then i just got super gut bar the principle of that business is that
01:08:56
there is a known product a molecule amylose that you can feed the gut biome it doesn't get absorbed by the human
01:09:04
body it sits in the gut biome and the bacteria in your gut certain types of bacteria will eat it their population
01:09:10
will grow and other population of bad bacteria will shrink and the good bacteria release chemicals called short
01:09:17
chain fatty acids that go into your blood and reduce your blood sugar and have a profound effect on on your
01:09:23
metabolism and there are also known gut bacteria that can regulate your sleep your mood your anxiety your energy
01:09:30
levels and your glycemic control the control of blood sugar so it's an incredible are
01:09:36
you telling me are you telling me that cialis is a natural compound is it bacteria
01:09:44
are you saying we have to cancel our cialis prescriptions oh no yeah so guys there's there's a known um
01:09:51
there's a known principle that's really deeply studied now in neurology uh in neuroscience um uh
01:09:57
called the gut brain axis that you can actually profoundly affect um disease and the condition of the brain
01:10:06
and neural conditions by changing the gut biome and so this is this is something that's just being studied the
01:10:11
reason it's all coming to light in the last few years is because of the cost of dna sequencing we it used to be very
01:10:18
very expensive to sequence the dna from your gut biome which you do by looking at your poop and then you know looking
01:10:24
at all the dna that's in the poop and that tells you what you're good by what bacteria in your gut that used to cost a
01:10:28
thousand bucks now it costs five bucks and so in the last couple of years there is this absolute explosion in research
01:10:34
into the gut microbiome and more importantly how the gut microbiome affects human health so this particular
01:10:40
paper looked at the effect that eating artificial sweeteners had on the gut biome and on human health
01:10:48
and so what these researchers did is they um they took 120 people they gave them nothing or gave them sugar or
01:10:56
gave them saccharin or sucralose or aspartame or stevia the four most popular artificial sweeteners and then
01:11:02
they looked at how their gut biome changed and importantly they looked at how their glycemic control or ability to
01:11:08
control blood glucose changed blood glucose as you guys may recall you know you always have glucose in your blood
01:11:14
the more if you have over you know a level of 100 you know you can and it persists you can
01:11:19
actually have really bad health effects and it causes high a1c over time which is diabetes um and so hot and it stores
01:11:25
more fat when you're spiking and so you get yeah when when you have high blood glucose it's actually damaging to organs
01:11:31
it's damaging to cells and over time it can cause very significant deleterious effects to the human body that's what
01:11:37
the disease of diabetes is and does is it's about high blood high blood sugar blood glucose so what
01:11:43
these guys did is they gave people uh saccharin sucralose aspartame and stevia and then measured their blood
01:11:48
glucose and their ability to convert sugar in the blood and absorb it and use it and that's called glycemic control
01:11:56
the way you guys you guys have probably done this in the doctor you take a glycemic control test you drink a bunch
01:12:00
of sugar water and they measure your blood sugar every couple of minutes and then they show the curve on how
01:12:05
effectively your body can metabolize that glucose and if it cannot metabolize that glucose well you have bad glycemic
01:12:12
control and ultimately that is diabetes and what they found was that if you eat saccharin and sucralose which we always
01:12:20
assumed were better than sugar they actually adversely affect your ability to control um blood glucose
01:12:28
saccharin and sucralose in particular drive up your blood glucose and makes it harder for your body to metabolize
01:12:35
glucose out of your blood aspartame and stevia were relatively benign oh really because that's what's in coke
01:12:43
zero that's what i drink there you go and so so that was kind of the realization and then they went deep and
01:12:48
they actually analyzed the microbiome and they showed that there were profound differences in how these compounds
01:12:55
affected the microbiome it turns out that sucralose for example is more likely not being absorbed by your
01:13:00
intestines so it's sitting in the intestinal walls and the bad bacteria are eating it and the the good bacteria
01:13:06
that are supposed to be making short chain fatty acids and all these chemicals that regulate blood sugar um
01:13:11
have a lower population and so we actually see a profoundly negative effect from eating certain compounds
01:13:17
have you shipped your poop to test these like yeah we just did a clinical trial at supergut
01:13:24
by the way and we found uh and we published it so it's it's public but wait ha just the audience doesn't even
01:13:30
know the stuff exists in all likelihood you basically take a poop and you put it
01:13:35
in a vial and you send it and they analyze your poop i don't mean to be graphic here but have you done this
01:13:40
before how does this work i i i do it everywhere i've done it yeah and and i think it's um look here's here's the
01:13:45
issue jason i think and i want to i want to say two things that i think are really important
01:13:49
to say number one is um we know very little about what bacteria do what in your gut
01:13:58
how which we're starting to understand which ones are beneficial which ones make good chemicals that your body use
01:14:03
and regulate your cells and regulate your health and and remember we have a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria
01:14:08
in our gut they're making chemicals and they're eating chemicals the chemicals they make affect our cells the chemicals
01:14:14
they eat affect our body so the way that we um evolve our health is actually profoundly affected by our gut biome so
01:14:21
we don't know enough yet to say definitively this bacteria is good this bacteria is bad we're starting to have a
01:14:26
good sense of that the second way just yeah just so you know just to double down on this like there's a form of
01:14:32
therapy it's experimental but it's called fecal microbiome uh transplantation fmt you heard about
01:14:37
us but you know we are finding now that you can take feces from healthy individuals that have
01:14:43
good you know gut biome and good bacterial counts and if you put it you know injected into people that are
01:14:50
suffering from a bunch of different diseases it actually is looking like it's curative so parkinson's ms
01:14:57
ibs colitis so it just goes to show you that this that somebody would put a good gut by
01:15:03
but there's bacteria into another person's intestines where do you put the poop it's no you don't
01:15:10
walk through the bum no no yeah you can do it there or you can take a pill uh so there's a little
01:15:14
tilt and it's got the the fecal stuff in it you swallow it and it and it no no you want to eat somebody else's poop you
01:15:20
give you a picture i said i said it in a way so that we could see his reaction to in
01:15:25
the bum and jason was like this how does this impact your anus that's what everything the audience wants to
01:15:31
know freyberg how actually your reign is here's the other point i wanted to make
01:15:35
which ties to what jamal said this is really important jkl yeah so the gut biome is an ecosystem like a rainforest
01:15:42
there are trees that grow monkeys climb the trees they poop there's jaguars jaguars eat the monkeys the trees grow
01:15:48
because of the monkey poop there's a whole ecosystem all these organisms all these microbes regulate one another and
01:15:54
feed one another and this is why probiotics do not work probiotics are single microbes single
01:16:01
bacterial strains or fungal strains that we put into a pill and we swallow it and
01:16:05
just because that microbe happens to have some beneficial effect you know on its own in a petri dish it does not
01:16:12
survive in your gut biome because it's like putting a house cat in a rain forest the jaguar will eat the house cat
01:16:18
the house cat has nothing to eat etc it doesn't inoculate inoculate means that it survives thrives and the population
01:16:24
grows so when we take probiotics it's just passing right through our gut it doesn't stay there and doesn't matter
01:16:30
and it turns out that the reason fecal microbiome fecal transplants work is because you're
01:16:36
taking the whole microbiome from someone else's gut and you're putting it in your
01:16:40
gut that's the rain forest the whole rain forest and so all the organisms that are needed that self that regulate
01:16:45
one another all of the small molecules that that regulate that cross regulate each other they all go in your gut and
01:16:51
then they actually change your entire gut and your gut becomes the rainforest of someone else's gut and so if someone
01:16:57
else has a healthy gut meaning my anus can be uranus jason wait there it is so we put our anuses
01:17:04
together and then a monkey goes between them and then the rain forest is well let me ask you questions the fda has not
01:17:09
approved any of this yet when will the fda be approving these treatments there are a lot of there are a lot of clinical
01:17:15
trials going on for fecal transplant ucsf has a huge clinical trial for ms as chamath pointed out right now
01:17:21
where they are actually doing fecal transplants on patients without ms into people with ms and significant you know
01:17:26
the early data of these sorts of treatments as indicated that there can be a very profound effect on the
01:17:32
frequency of lesions appearing on the brain uh which is one of the primary symptoms of ms and so these organisms we
01:17:40
don't yet know why but some of them will it's already coming out there's no it's
01:17:51
not like a binary switch we're discovering new things there's a cup there's a set of companies that are
01:17:55
discovering what are called small molecules so they're finding what are the little chemicals that those good
01:18:00
bacteria are making in your gut and what can we turn those chemicals into drugs and so they're trying to turn those into
01:18:06
drugs other companies are saying you know what this is a set of good bacteria let's just put them in your body and
01:18:11
figure out a way to get them to inoculate and stay other companies are saying let's do fecal transplants and
01:18:16
other companies are basically just saying let's change this is what we do at supergut let's just change the
01:18:20
feedstock for your gut biome and you can actually evolve the rainforest into a different state by changing what you're
01:18:27
feeding the bacteria in your gut and there's certain molecules you can feed the gut bacteria and then the
01:18:32
populations will change into a more beneficial state why are people saying like eating drinking kombucha and
01:18:38
fermented um vegetables pickles whatever uh apples are like great at fixing your
01:18:45
biome and then taking sugar out is good for your biome this is another thing i keep hearing like
01:18:51
people are sick are making single-point claims like that because they have invested in a lifestyle and
01:18:57
they want to defend their choices it's not the same it's not to say that those things are
01:19:01
bad those are all good but i think what we know and the fecal transplantation is
01:19:06
the most simple way of pointing this out is that it's a broad scale holistic approach that gets the best results so
01:19:12
as you know like if you if you had if you've had a kid that's had you know diarrhea for example right you know
01:19:18
sometimes what we'll do now is instead of giving the kid some sort of diuretic suppressant what you actually give them
01:19:24
is a probiotic right and what you're trying to do is to reintroduce healthy bacteria into that
01:19:31
child's stomach in a way that allows them to self-manage and self-heal while the bad you know
01:19:39
uh diarrhea-causing stuff kind of gets washed away as an example so will one thing be a cure-all for you no
01:19:47
i think that you should be very skeptical of those claims that's why everybody says a healthy well-balanced
01:19:52
diet is really important because we do not know conclusively this is why you know i i
01:19:59
tend to believe that the broad holistic diet works the best in moderation yep because you just don't know what you're
01:20:06
not getting we don't know that you know we don't know you can't say conclusively
01:20:10
that there isn't a form of bacteria that is created specifically when you consume
01:20:16
animal protein that is extremely helpful to you we don't know that that's not true not now we don't know that that is
01:20:21
true either right and there's a ton of research going on to try and figure that out right now
01:20:26
have we figured out any of it though like yeah yeah this whole genetic ginger movement yeah we could we could do 12
01:20:31
episodes on this there is so much amazing discovery happening this is a good paper to highlight that which is
01:20:36
like hey maybe avoid products that have saccharine and sucralose in them but my my big thing is there is no diet
01:20:43
whether it's keto whether it's the south beach diet whether it's specific vegetarianism whether it's veganism
01:20:49
nothing is a cure-all for what ails you there is nothing and by the way one important point in
01:20:55
this paper one of the points that these guys highlighted which we see all the time in microbiome research is that
01:21:01
there are what are called responders and non-responders that within a population
01:21:05
it's not like everyone that eats sucralose has the same negative effect some people have a really negative
01:21:10
effect and some people have a mild to moderate to neutral effect and so there's a range of your
01:21:15
particular physiology your particular gut biome that will respond differently to different inputs into your body and
01:21:22
that's the most important thing to figure out because people need to spend time eating and sampling to understand what
01:21:30
makes you feel better or worse this is why i i have an issue with you know the broad-based claims of this
01:21:36
path will solve all your problems it's just not true you have to solve it for yourself and it's it's through iteration
01:21:41
and then the the the yeah anyways it does seem like non-processed foods whole foods things that exist in nature
01:21:49
that seems to me directionally correct as the way to go and then the fake stuff and the processed stuff may be less good
01:21:54
for you you agree with that this is why i think that there there is a little bit
01:21:57
of a scam being run on people who want to be healthy like for example have you guys looked at the ingredient list on
01:22:03
oatley you know everybody loves oat milk but have you looked at the ingredient list
01:22:08
are you really telling me conclusively that that is healthier than milk it's insane
01:22:13
i mean i could tell i could argue both ways but yeah i mean look at the chemicals look at the chemicals in a box
01:22:19
of oatly i mean just drink water guys i can also tell you the chemical name for every chemical that's in milk which is
01:22:26
all chemical like all everything around us is chemicals so i understand i understand natural
01:22:30
chemicals but you understand synthetically made man-made chemicals that are explicit that have to be put on
01:22:36
an ingredient list because of its danger in high quantities should be treated slightly differently in my opinion all
01:22:41
right yeah i mean olis just gave us three subpoenas we're all [ __ ] we're being deposed by holy now
01:22:47
all right everybody we'll see you next time on the all-in-pot love you boys [Music]
01:23:04
and they've just gone crazy with it [Music] besties [Music] we should all just get a room and just
01:23:27
have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to
01:23:32
release somehow we need to get back [Music] i'm going on [Music]