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[Music] and they've just gone crazy with them all right everybody welcome to another
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episode of the all in podcast episode number 70 we made it to 70 episodes which is just shocking to me and we're
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recording a little bit earlier uh because one of our besties uh had to change their schedule chamath
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and um it's a crazy day to be doing this last night putin decided to invade the ukraine
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late wednesday night early into thursday morning putin started a special military operation in
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quotes to demilitarize the ukraine and we've been watching this build up for weeks
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you're missing it he said to demilitarize and deny supply and de nazify yes of course um because the
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ukraine was filled with so many nazis uh his trolling continues i guess just starting it off um
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sax you're a big putin fan uh along with trunk and uh you're the right wing so tell us how glorious is uh this invasion
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for the republican party well it's it's it's interesting what it's well that's funny but it's also
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it's also kind of sad because what you're doing right there is exactly what the whole twittersphere is doing which
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is anybody who wants to actually de-escalate and defuse this war before it escalates and
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metastasizes in something much worse it gets denounced as a putin apologist i have no dealings in either
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you know russia or ukraine for that matter ukrainian cash is not lining my pockets like many of our politicians
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their families in washington i have no interest except preserving the safety of the united states of
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america and the point is that i think biden the one clear elusive point that he made in his last speech i know he's
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giving one today is that the united states of america would not intervene militarily in ukraine we
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should all understand that he made it very clear the troops that were being sent over there were to defend our nato
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allies ukraine is not one we do not have a treaty obligation to defend them what
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is happening right now is tragic putin is the aggressor it's a humanitarian disaster i do
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feel bad for the people of ukraine our thoughts and prayers are with them however we are not going to intervene
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militarily in that conflict nor should we because we cannot risk starting world war iii it is not a vital american
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interest who rules the donbass in a way that it is a vital american interest to avoid a war with russia and the tragedy
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here the second tragedy is that we did not do everything we could to diplomatically try and solve this
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problem and what do i mean by that on this pod three weeks ago i said that ukraine was never gonna be part of nato
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why because biden has said it we can't defend them militarily against russia we were never
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gonna admit them why didn't we give up that card that i'm we don't know for sure what would have happened but if we
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had been willing to basically affirm that we believe in ukraine's sovereignty but they are not
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part of nato that might have diffused this conflict i think we had consensus on that we said like hey what if i think
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actually i suggested what if we set a five-year you know moratorium on them joining or something absolutely put that
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out there can i just have sex one question on this okay yeah sex do you not think that the
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us you know regardless of the obligations under uh um nato faces a little bit of an issue on a
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global stage where you know we we told this leader back down don't do this and then we don't respond militarily
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that that action effectively reduces america's influence and credibility when it comes to these sorts of defensive
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statements in this kind of global theater and our primacy is being challenged because we
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laid down the law we said this is not allowed you cannot do this there's going to be repercussions
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and then it happens and there are economic sanctions and you know maybe we'll talk in a second about some other
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potential repercussions but by not doing something militarily we weaken ourselves and we weaken our
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position and it gives permission to others to take action that maybe counter ultimately to kind of the us interests
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abroad okay so in response i have to we'll quote what barack obama said um and we've mentioned
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this on a previous party he said the fact is that ukraine which is and this is back in the the atlantic interview he
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gave the fact is that ukraine which is a non-nato country is going to be vulnerable to military domination by
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russia no matter what we do this is an example where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and
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what we are willing to go to war for the fact of the matter is none of us on this
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pod want to send our sons and daughters to go fight and risk their lives and die
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to determine who rules the donbass or even ukraine we sympathize with them we may impose sanctions on their behalf we
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may arm them militarily but we are not willing to fight and so therefore us trying to lay down this law to putin
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was a bluff and he called our bluff and the smart thing we can do right now is not to escalate look we've already gone
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to the river he's you know we basically tried to barrel and bluff him at every street we got to
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the river he has now invaded we're now in a showdown what do you want to do now you want to escalate this even more the
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only way that we could make this worse is to precipitate a world war now if our absolute priority our absolute priority
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right now should be to make sure that this war doesn't spread my prediction is as of right now it
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would be very unpopular to go to war uh or for the u.s to enter the war uh in a um on the battlefield i i do think
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and i don't know if we're gonna hear more about this today but i do think that the cyber war is beginning today uh
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the united states has talked at length about having uh you know a tremendous cyber
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capabilities and my understanding is as of this morning a number of state websites were down in russia and a
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number of um uh you know russian cyber interests were under attack and so we may see the u.s
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kind of confront russia on another battle stage not on the uh you know on the field on the physical
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field but if over the next couple of weeks this continues their days and i was just
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looking at cnn this morning and bbc and there were these images that started to come out of like you know ukrainian um
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airplanes that that had been downed and if you start to see images of children um you know helpless children buildings
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being bombed bodies strewn on the street does that not change kind of the american opinion on whether or not we
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should do something here and will that not kind of lead us potentially into a war that you know
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today i think we all you know or many people would say strategically doesn't make sense economically doesn't make
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sense you know we're only going to lead to kind of escalation but don't you think
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that american opinion typically changes when imagery arises when you know the sort of brutality of war well i mean
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that's why out of some wars and we have in the past yeah but even today it's like the first
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day and there's like these really gruesome awful photos coming out and i i could see people getting sympathetic to
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that and starting to kind of you know bang the the wardrobe saying this is ridiculous
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we can't let this tyrant do this it's awful well it's already it's already happening you know but this is why we
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should not conduct foreign policy by twitter we should not twitterize the situation yeah this is when this is when
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cooler heads need to prevail the fact of the matter is when soviet tanks they rolled into hungary in 1956 or czech
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slovakia in 1968 to cross the frog spring or poland in 1981 across solidarity we did nothing because
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avoiding war with the soviet union was more important even though we sympathize with those people and in
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2008 we've been in this situation before 2008 georgia the republic of georgia putin
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invaded on behalf of these breakaway russian sort of dissident uh provinces south of
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city and abkhazia why did that happen well if you remember back in 2008 there was a lot of talk about georgia joining
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nato and you had you know the warhawk senator john mccain go over there and declare we're all georgians now and so
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what happened all of a sudden these breakaway provinces the russified provinces of south africa and abkhazia
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started rebelling that gave putin the excuse to roll in there and the tanks a year later he left but there was no more
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talk of georgia joining nato so and again we george w bush was present at the time
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we did nothing militarily we just sent humanitarian assistance that was it so we've been in this situation before we
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should not i keep hearing in the media on cable news and on twitter this is historically unprecedented we must act
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no we've been in this situation before in 2008 and all those previous times we were in
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the situation in 2014 when putin invaded let me ask you a question zach um we we had this concept of hey maybe if
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we said hey we won't admit them into nato and uh do you think that if we had actually made that concession or said
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we're not going to let them into nato for a decade or whatever do you think that would have changed putin's behavior
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yes or no well it's honestly it's hard to know i mean i can't i can't prove a counter factual however i think it was
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tragic not to try okay i do think i think i think it should be the goal of diplomats sure to try and again as i
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said on a previous pod it was the sleeves off our vest ukraine is not going to be a member of nato so to give
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that up would have was basically giving them nothing it was almost meaningless to us and instead of
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making that concession what happened lincoln came out with this statement nato's door is open and will remain open
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it was perhaps the most provocative thing he could have said in that situation and
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they they would have been voted in that would have happened wouldn't have happened anyway let me ask you this
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question you've been complaining about the media and democrats uh banging the drum of war and you're saying they're
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more hawkish on the other side of the table you have uh trump came out and said that putin's
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move on the ukraine is genius and the guy is very savvy and then you have pompeo saying i have enormous respect
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for him and that he's a very talented statesman has lots of gifts and he knows how to use power we should
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respect that so your party uh your crew is praising putin do you think the praising of putin is wise in this kind
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of situation no look here's what's going on first of all the the warhawks and the
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people beating the drums of war is happening on both sides of the aisle and on both both both sets of cable news i
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was watching fox last night and they were all but you know cheerleading for war basically saying we have to go on
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it i watched it too yeah it's crazy we're saying we have to go on offense that what is biden doing saying that
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we're not going to intervene militarily i'm like watching these people who are acting you know it reminded me of um dr
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strangelove where you have slim pickens the cowboy riding the atomic bomb on the
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way down they were excited and i'm watching the cable news and all these people are acting this way and i'm like
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what in the world is going on you know it's it's all this is a big part of what i
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tried to point out our prediction show at the end of last year you know the the if a country is happy if the economy is
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growing if there isn't significant risk of inflation no one wants to go to war when those are not the case there's a
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tendency to say we gotta do something and if you don't you're anxious and if you don't have anything to do and some
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conflict arises that's a good place to kind of apply your energy and your pressure let me bring the dictator
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himself into this chamatha you've been silent thus far uh any thoughts on what we're seeing here i was letting the
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proletariat speak okay are you the bourgeoisie or what that sweater is very bourgeois i have to
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say i mean i mean sweater karen right now he is drafting she's multiple emails she's melting she's melting i think
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they're going to be a gofundme to revoke that sweater from you what is the story
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with that sweater that's what that's what trudeau trudeau trudeau will reinvoke in a state of emergency to stop
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that yes they go fund me i mean this feels like we're processing this chamath so quickly
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that the ukraine just asked on twitter today for everybody to tell at russia how they
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feel about what they're doing and the ukraine this is happening in real time is tweeting memes
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now about putin uh this seems almost surreal and is getting very strange in terms of
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how we're interpreting it i mean is there an off-ramp here are we just gonna have to deal with putin doing this every
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number of years and this is just going to be you know a year or two of you know conflict i don't know but
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here's what's important to um two points one is the economic sanctions have begun and the economic
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damage to russia i've been starting to be infected right i think germany basically suspended the certification of
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north stream that has a huge economic impact to russia right i think the ruble against the dollar was off nine or ten
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percent this morning um when i woke up here in europe so it slows down even more
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so um now the interesting thing about that was that i've read an article in the wall street journal maybe nick you
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can dig this up but this is a few years ago uh preceding this russia had built massive amounts of us dollar reserves in
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fact they had been depleted over like the last little crisis that they went through and then they had rebuilt all
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these dollar reserves so in some ways it may have been the case that these guys had this plan all along and they put
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some you know they built up their bank accounts just in case because they knew that this would happen the other thing
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is there's a quote from hr mcmaster he said that deterrence is a simple equation it's it's the product of will
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and capability right will times capabilities and so you know if you're going to be
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a deterrent on the world stage militarily not only do you have to have an incredible military capability you
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also have to have the will to go to wars but and i think in america you know what
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feedback said is i think if you pulled a lot of people um you know people are pretty exhausted after all of these
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different conflicts and so i'm not sure that the will is there to go to europe and so the best off ramp is to try to
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find some amount of uh economic pressure points and then to negotiate some sort of you know
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release valve from all of that economic pressure in return for some normalization babe i think that's
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really the best chance you know i have to be honest with you when i was thinking about the odds of this just
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from a financial perspective and you know whether i should be doing something different or putting something on i
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thought that there was zero chance that this would happen literally i put it as close to zero as possible because i
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thought in 2022 it just didn't seem like this could be possible and here we are and it seems like it is um
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i hope everybody in ukraine is safe but i think that biden's going to announce some pretty crippling
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sanctuaries and i think the west is going to be very punitive financially um and that's probably awkward but it
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depends on it depends how long about the suffer last because again like i said i
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think russia's foreign currency reserves are pretty strong going into this council let me let me
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then uh pass the ball to you sax there's there's going to be a lot of people who are going to die both
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russians and ukrainians sadly if this thing keeps escalating uh there's a hundred ninety thousand russian troops
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on the border or making their way into the ukraine is there an off-ramp here in your mind in any way do you think the
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sanctions will work and and god these the the poor citizens of russia i mean are they going to crack at some point
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and is this going to blow back onto uh putin because what did they seem to get out of this i
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guess is a question do the russian people support this and will they support it on an extended basis
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well okay so there's a few questions there yeah okay so the the fact of the matter is so so i think you're right
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that putin has bought himself a headache here right i mean the the the eastern parts of ukraine that are you know
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ethnically russian the areas of the dawn bass they will those people will support
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him but the western part of ukraine that wants to be free that's not ethnically russian
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that is going to be a headache for him to manage i don't think he wants this problem long term
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it's probably going to be more like the situation we had in georgia in 2008 he goes in for a year
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he institutes perhaps some sort of puppet government or some government that's more favorable to him
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and then he gets out properly this is if there's no escalation i think it's very
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important i keep making this point the most important thing biden can do is to make sure that this does not
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escalate militarily and that we do not get militarily involved i think sanctions will happen i mean that's
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pretty clear probably we have to move forward with that but but at the same time
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it will sanctions work in terms of being a strong deterrent no i don't think so there was a very good article by neil
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ferguson and ken griffin actually in the wall street journal talking about what we should do they made the point that
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sanctions don't usually work however what we should really be striving for is energy independence so 100 so yes but
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the crazy thing is america despite having these huge uh natural gas reserves seven percent of our natural
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gas is coming from russia right now so why because we stopped fracking we stopped the you know biden cancel the
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keystone pipeline and then in europe the situation is even worse which is they're completely dependent on
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on russian natural gas germans are and the uk not france the op-ed made the point that
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we could be investing in liquefying natural gas and exporting it to europe to create more energy independence and
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that would remove their dependency on putin that energy independence here problem with energy independence is it
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takes too long and we went through a massive capital under investment cycle over the last six or seven years and so
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you know in order to start this up you need to have started actually putting money in the ground six or seven years
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and the problem today is if we put money into the ground now that's not going to
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yield any sort of return on investor capital for another six or seven years and so when you look at these mad gas
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companies every single one to a name has basically said we are not going to put every any incremental capital into u.s
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domestic net gas or shale or even offshore the real solution is to actually go fully alternative and to go
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to renewable energy because you can today right uh deploy solar vastly more aggressively in
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the united states look at the end of the day the thing that is completely abundant and has the best implications
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all around is solar and it's gotten cheaper than coal and and and and ask yourself like why why are we only
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three percent penetrated in the united states right we can manufacture these panels we can deploy them broadly right
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now you know we're in this situation where california is actually revisiting the itc credit or the the net metering
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laws sorry rather which would have huge implications for the california solar market it could
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actually destroy that whole market and so you know we have to get really organized david to your point but there
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is a path to energy independence i think it's alternative energy it's wind and solar
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um because we can do it today and you can do it really quickly and you can basically leapfrog the entire capital
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investment cycle that you need to do for netcast we've already missed the training well and also you could have
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germany can start turning back on nuclear power plants if they could get their citizens to pick nuclear over war
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and that seems like a pretty easy choice it takes too long they've recently returned there's one
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year no they've been doing it for 20 years they've been turning them off for 20 years i know they could they that means
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they don't have to rebuild them they could just turn them back on you that which is it's not switch jason
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no but that's not how it works it's not a light switch but it's not the same as building a new
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one in the us that's the point they could help them back it's still year it's still years between these things
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but you got to think chamath the threat of doing it would terrorize the saudis and the russians if all of a
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sudden the eu said we are going to go massive solar massive nuclear and we're going to be energy independent just a
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threat dramatic effect i'm not sure any country is going to is going to really uh all have a massive
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reaction to any other country talking about a multi-year investment cycle i do think jason to your point solar is not a
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multi-year investment cycle it can literally happen in months yes and so that is much more disruptive so for
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example you could if you took three trillion dollars of buildback better and instead said you know what we're just
00:20:34
going to actually put solar everywhere everywhere that would be you take three trillion dollars of solar and you put it
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literally everywhere in the united states i think everybody would support it you would have domestic job creation
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like nobody's business you would take so much carbon out of the air and you don't
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need to go to war enormous energy dependence well it would give you a degree of freedom so that the next time
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you're pushed to war you can actually evaluate it under very different um you know risk calculus than if you actually
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need the energy from the country to the point yeah that's the point and just for
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um a fact check here nuclear power in germany accounted for 13.3 percent of german electrical supply in 2021 uh
00:21:10
france by the way 70 80 um and that was generated by six power plant of which three were switched off
00:21:16
at the end of 2021 they literally just turned these off and the other three i know but the
00:21:22
decision was not made yesterday jason my point is this is these are 20-year decisions no it was fukushima that
00:21:28
pushed them actually in the sentiment of and they also had 70 percent of their electricity on a couple of weeks come
00:21:35
from renewables so the germans suddenly thought that they didn't live in a shady
00:21:39
area and they could get by with just solar which was a big mistake uh this turning these off germany if they didn't
00:21:45
turn these off they would have a different approach here too you could be sure of that so like i'm a fan of solar
00:21:50
but i'll just make the point that natural gas burns from a climate standpoint it burns much cleaner than
00:21:55
oil and oil burns much cleaner than coal so natural gas is a way better than a lot of the alternatives and the main
00:22:02
problem with it is that when you frack you can get the release of water well that but
00:22:07
that's in the ground but in terms of the release of methane which is a greenhouse
00:22:11
gas that's actually worse than co2 and so you can actually get you know methane release but in the us
00:22:18
we have techniques for recapture of it whereas i don't think russia cares about that so
00:22:23
we'd be a lot better off i think solar is part of the answer but i don't think we should be turning our backs on the
00:22:29
enormous reserves of natural gas that we have here in this country friedberg what are your thoughts you're
00:22:33
hearing three of us talk about energy um give us your science boy uh super powers here and what what do you
00:22:40
think is the clearest shot on goal here for energy independence as an option to war i'll just point out that the notion
00:22:47
that there are countries that are jockeying or positioning to stop the train towards
00:22:54
renewable alternatives for energy production this century uh the number of countries in that
00:23:00
bucket are close to zero you know saudi arabia took saudi aramco public specifically so that
00:23:08
they under kind of mbs's strategic direction diversify away from uh you know the fossil fuel dependency
00:23:16
of their economy and diversifying to other assets so they are going to sell down their equity interest in saudi
00:23:20
aramco over time and invest in things you know they probably made their first bet and regret it with softbank but
00:23:26
they'll probably make other bets to try and invest in kind of next-gen uh industries
00:23:31
and so you know if you look at the money that's going from even exxon and you know there's a guy locally here
00:23:38
in san francisco who ran a very significant uh board proxy fight to get on the board of exxon and he won
00:23:47
and he's jockeying for continued and increased investment from an r d perspective in renewables and
00:23:52
alternatives and we're seeing this across the board there's going to be in the next couple
00:23:57
years if not already many of these fossil fuel dependent businesses and countries have or are
00:24:04
making a massive shift towards alternative renewable sources of energy so i don't think that there's any enemy
00:24:09
here there's no evil like all the folks that have been dependent on in the past are aware of the fact that this is not
00:24:13
where the future is we do have to transition so the reason i bought energy stocks in december and the reason i made
00:24:19
this point was threefold one is because we have as a result of this general consensus view underinvested in energy
00:24:26
infrastructure and the demands that are going to come out of the ex covet economic growth cycle cannot be met with
00:24:35
the current energy infrastructure and you're going to see energy prices continue to climb coupled with the fact
00:24:39
that when war or conflict arises typically you see stockpiling and you see trade routes being shut down
00:24:46
and you see energy prices climb and so i you know i think generally we're in a little bit of a transitionary
00:24:52
state everyone knows where the puck needs to be everyone's headed there but for now i think everyone's trying to
00:24:59
navigate how do we get through the next couple of years and in this particular year you know get through the season of
00:25:04
uncertainty you know how fast is the economy growing how much have we actually under invested
00:25:09
in infrastructure and how much renewables do we have coming online now i think the right answer if i were to be
00:25:14
president of the world i would immediately deregulate uh nuclear um and make nuclear fission reactors
00:25:24
a mainstay of energy production here in the u.s and i think that there are a number of techniques we could undertake
00:25:30
for a safer building without all the regulatory cycles and process needed to get these
00:25:39
things stood up you know china as i've mentioned in the past is over the next 30 years committed to
00:25:45
building check this number out i think we talked about this 140 nuclear power stations
00:25:50
their estimated cost i believe is on the 3 billion per station range they are going to increase their total
00:25:59
energy production capacity with these nuclear power stations um on the order of 15 to 20 percent so they will take
00:26:07
coal offline as they bring those online or they will kind of start to have a cleaner mix of energy rather than
00:26:13
building a next-gen infrastructure so um you know if we as the united states intend to be an economic challenge to
00:26:21
china this century if we intend to compete effectively with them we are going to have a really hard time
00:26:27
with energy prices being what they are here in this country china is already 30 to 40 cheaper than us on an industrial
00:26:34
scale basis with their current energy infrastructure and when their nuclear comes online over the next decade their
00:26:39
prices are going to drop even further nuclear should be in the four to five cent per kilowatt hour range today
00:26:45
china's in the kind of you know uh seven to eight cent per kilowatt hour range the us for industrial i think is in kind
00:26:52
of a 9 10 range 8 to 10 cent depending on where you look so you know they're already cheaper they're gonna get even
00:26:59
cheaper and so not just from like what's the right transition from a security point of view but energy is going to be
00:27:04
so critical in this next century for us to maintain our footing as a competitor to china particularly as think about
00:27:12
this for a second if automation is the future of manufacturing then electricity and energy ends up being the biggest
00:27:19
cost driver for those systems and if our if everything is on parity and everyone's got the same automation
00:27:24
systems whoever's got the cheaper energy wins and to dovetail you and champs both positions a friend of ours said hey
00:27:31
you know nobody wants to live near nuclear power plants and they've already got the grid going there
00:27:37
because it has to be there surround the nuclear power plant with a solar farm because it's the most efficient way so
00:27:44
actually pairing these two things perhaps even with some batteries solves the entire problem
00:27:51
and what do we think sax is the eventuality here in terms of the relationship between russia and
00:27:59
china now that we've wrapped up the energy and then you know or all of us i think don't want
00:28:04
to go to war here um so i guess there's two questions here of escalation and i'll i'll let you pick which one you
00:28:10
want to go for escalation with taiwan or does uh if putin is not held if we don't hold
00:28:16
the line here you know putin picks another country to uh or another region to go after in 2023
00:28:23
2024 at what point do you say we got to hold the line well i mean i think the line is we have
00:28:29
existing nato treaty obligations to protect the members of nato under article five we have to come to their
00:28:34
defense ukraine is not one georgia is not one so to me that's the line or is our existing treaty obligations and this
00:28:41
is why we should not want to add some of these countries to nato is because it involves us in their
00:28:47
disputes and drags us into war you know on twitter all i hear is that this is 1938 all over again and we cannot
00:28:54
appease a dictator and that is one lesson of history it's an important lesson however there are other lessons
00:29:00
of history and it seems to me that the situation we're in could be more like 1914 which is world war one what
00:29:06
happened in world war one basically conflicts between minor powers dragged major powers into wars and
00:29:14
basically germany gave uh austria the so-called blank check war guarantee and then that led to a war
00:29:21
with russia and then that dragged the uh you know britain and france and eventually the united states so
00:29:27
you know it was a case where nobody none of these powers wanted to be in a war with each other and yet somehow
00:29:34
inertia and threats and escalations and miscalculations and folly all sort of tumbled their way into it and that i
00:29:43
think may be the historical precedent here that we want to avoid i think we need to be
00:29:47
very careful not to let you know every conflict all over the world drag us into these these types of
00:29:54
wars and disputes sex do you think um american primacy is coming to an end i hope not but if if our goal is to
00:30:01
preserve american primacy which i think it should be then we need to be smart about how we
00:30:06
use our strength and we don't want to fritter it away and what have been doing for the last 20 years frittering away
00:30:12
our strength in wars we didn't need to be in in the middle east we spent how many trillions
00:30:17
on nation building there that turned out to be a total folly and waste of money uh look at this and we have a 30
00:30:24
trillion dollar national debt if we want this century to be an american century like the last one we need to preserve
00:30:31
our strength and use it wisely and not involve ourselves in every conflict and um you know so look we need to protect
00:30:39
our nato allies i agree with that but we don't need to be creating disputes and involving ourselves in wars that we
00:30:47
have no obligation to get involved in we need energy independence and then we need to deliver our balance sheet in
00:30:51
order for american prime minister and it's possible but it's going to require a lot of focus and sacrifice i
00:30:57
really think this thing that i just made up that is actually really quite genius
00:31:00
which is redirect that three trillion dollar build that better build to just pure solar everywhere in the united
00:31:06
states it would be so disruptive i mean it would just be so disruptive for everybody
00:31:13
it becomes a dividend it's like it's ubi in a way everybody gets no electrical bill i i
00:31:18
don't think it would allow people to have free electricity forever but i do think it would subsidize
00:31:22
basically the deployment of energy infrastructure to every single household in america in a way that would just
00:31:28
completely shake up uh frankly the political world order because you know what you guys said is
00:31:34
so true a lot of this stuff rests on you know the politics around natural resources right so you know today it's
00:31:42
oil um tomorrow it's going to be some rare earth you know in 10 years it could be copper and lithium and we want to
00:31:49
find ourselves with the ability to be clear tied and focused in our response to these
00:31:54
issues but if we need critical resources that can only come from one other place or two other
00:32:01
places and we don't have the engineering ingenuity to have figured out how to you
00:32:05
know de-lever our reliance then we're going to get dragged into not just this conflict but a whole bunch of other
00:32:10
conflicts going forward i'd say yes and we could be energy independent for free right now if we were just to repeal some
00:32:17
of these executive orders i mean we were energy independent like a year or two ago until
00:32:23
we banned fracking why why do the fracking when solar is available it seems to me like we want to actually
00:32:30
preserve the environment stop global warming so if solar is available and nuclear is available why would you
00:32:35
advocate for fracking and ripping up the earth and you know polluting it i'm a fan of solar it's really just about
00:32:41
costs and time to deployment got it okay so you see it as a bridge hey maybe we do it for five years ten years long term
00:32:47
i think solar is the answer but i think that's a long-term strategy the other thing that is confounding is like
00:32:52
americans and this is another thing i was just watching the media and i did exactly what you did david as i put on
00:32:57
fox i was like let me get their interpretation of this because the trump folks are praising putin and then these
00:33:03
guys are wanting to go to war so it feels like there's some inner conflict or civil war going on in
00:33:08
the republican side of things but even on the there is yeah and then on the left you have this
00:33:12
craziness uh they were i mean wolf blitzer and everybody was so excited about this war
00:33:17
they were like stay tuned and oh my god we're gonna be 24 hour coverage they were
00:33:22
like orgasmic in in their coverage remember cnn got their got their big um yeah before with the gulf war that was
00:33:29
it well it was that was your chance to shine i remember being a kid watching that that is the language free break
00:33:33
essentially that was the language they were using so don lemon was saying and we have the full resources to give
00:33:40
you blow-by-blow coverage of everything happening stick with cnn this is where we do our best work and it was literally
00:33:46
like war porn and it was really uncomfortable to watch combined with sax and this is what i wanted well maybe
00:33:51
free break i'll throw this one to you they kept talking about how americans were going to suffer
00:33:58
at the pump and i just thought this is so crazy and disturbing there's 190 000 young russian
00:34:04
men who are going to die countless ukrainian seville civilians who are going to die
00:34:09
potentially and this thing could escalate asak said you know you you can't play games with war he could the
00:34:14
dominoes can fall in all directions you have no idea when you light off these grenades and and we're talking about our
00:34:21
pain at the pump very weird very weird times freeburg any thoughts america's weird
00:34:29
it's weird well i want to if if freebird doesn't want to respond to that i want to talk about the media coverage i'll
00:34:34
add to that i mean yeah you flip over to msnbc john bolton is on msnbc and one of
00:34:39
the weirdest things happening in our politics now is that all the neocons who used to be members of the republican
00:34:44
party who worked for george w bush and got us into the iraq war have now all become democrats and they're all over
00:34:51
there they're supposedly the the conscience of the country over on cnn and msnbc and beating the drums of war
00:34:58
it's absolutely unbelievable and one of the the um one of the tactics they use that i think we should talk about
00:35:05
is and this goes all the way back to the vietnam war is that anybody who merely tries to let's say understand the other
00:35:12
side or wants to de-escalate or get out of a conflict they try to portray as unpatriotic i mean this again this goes
00:35:18
all the way back to the vietnam war where the vietnam protesters were portrayed as un-american and unpatriotic
00:35:23
well it turns out they were right that was a mistake for us to get embroiled in vietnam and similarly the iraq war it
00:35:30
turns out that was a gigantic mistake but in 2003 david frum who's like one of the leaders of this group wrote an
00:35:35
article called unpatriotic conservatives in which he attacked and sort of mao mao
00:35:41
the there were you know conservatives like pat buchanan and robert novak who were against the iraq war and he called
00:35:47
them unpatriotic and imply that they were unamerican because and somehow in the pocket of saddam hussein because
00:35:53
they were against us our involvement in the iraq war will they turn right they turned out to be right and yet they were
00:35:58
demonized and called unpatriotic and where are we today those same people i'm seeing david from on twitter now impune
00:36:06
the patriotism of people who merely want us not to escalate this not to get involved and maybe to try and understand
00:36:13
our enemy because i mean this is one of the problems with twitterizing our foreign policy is look we can see putin
00:36:20
as an aggressor we can see him as a thug or an authoritarian or as a dictator but
00:36:24
nonetheless we should still try and understand our enemy and anybody who tries to promote a greater degree of
00:36:30
understanding or diplomacy gets attacked by these people as being putin apologists
00:36:35
tremothy you said you didn't see this coming you thought this is a very small probability i think we all felt it was a
00:36:39
pretty small probability that russia would actually go through this you thought it was actually something
00:36:45
actually i do freebird you did think it was going to happen there's a certainty yeah wait you there was a certainty that
00:36:50
america would get involved because of the wag the dog scenario or that putin would do it because both putin's okay
00:36:57
yeah but this is not like a surprise that putin did this i mean this has been a long time coming yeah i mean it just
00:37:02
felt like i i i thought that he would save a rattle and we come to some resolution here but what does he want it
00:37:09
seems like nobody and and this is what everybody keeps saying i think that's really by the way i think that's a
00:37:13
really complicated question i i feel like there's decades of and layers of like um
00:37:19
to the story it's like you know war and peace and then you read like one half of
00:37:23
the final chapter and you're like oh yeah okay like there's a lot to the story that's going
00:37:27
to be really hard for us to unpack um so you know i'm not sure there's a very simple like what does putin want as
00:37:32
much as there is a significant narrative that that backs the history you know post-soviet
00:37:39
history with ukraine and the relationships i mean you guys may remember that there was a president
00:37:45
a presidential candidate or president that was poisoned by putin at some point i mean there's been like a long history
00:37:50
to this that i don't think is something that we can reunification is what most people would put that under is
00:37:56
this there's economic there are social you know there are individuals cultural um motives i mean there's a lot driving
00:38:04
this there's a lot of influence within that country that i don't think we really fully grasp within the country of
00:38:09
russia i mean that we don't fully grasp related to some of the uh cultural relationships with some of the
00:38:15
population in the ukraine and so you know it's a very difficult question to simply answer
00:38:21
can i take a shot at it yeah sure okay what does putin want so i want to there's an article by peter uh bainard
00:38:27
who was an editor of the new republic he's not you know some far-right conservative or whatever
00:38:32
he published this uh quotes from a memo that was written by bill burns back in 2008 so bill burns is the current dci
00:38:40
he's the director of central intelligence the head of the cia he is also a russian expert he speaks russian
00:38:45
fluently he is the he and he spent uh many years over there in our government and he works for biden
00:38:52
he's biden's head of the cia so he is the highest ranking russian expert in our government in 2008 he wrote a memo
00:38:59
to condoleezza rice who was then the secretary of state and what he said is this is about ukrainian entry to nato he
00:39:05
said ukrainian entry into nato is the brightest of all red lines for the russian elite not just putin he says in
00:39:12
more than two and a half years of conversations with key russian players from knuckle draggers and the dark
00:39:17
recesses of the kremlin to putin's sharpest liberal critics i have yet to find anyone who views ukraine and nato
00:39:23
as anything other than a direct challenge to russian interests so burns pointed out to the then secretary of
00:39:32
state that this was a huge red line and since then since 2008 putin has been very consistent that ukrainian entry
00:39:40
into nato has been a red line and even in the speech that he gave last week he talked about
00:39:46
uh he talked about this and he said that i'm quoting putin from his speech he says if ukraine was to join nato it
00:39:54
would serve as a direct threat to the security of russia so you know in response to putin's speech and on
00:40:00
twitter i keep hearing that putin is this madman we can't understand what he wants that the only possible
00:40:07
explanation for his behavior is either senility he's gone crazy he's gone mad and you know i'm looking at this and i'm
00:40:14
like okay maybe those things are true but you can't say that he hasn't been clear about what his red lines are he's
00:40:21
been saying this for 20 years that ukraine joining the nato alliance is an absolute red line and you know i
00:40:27
mentioned before on this pod that imagine if the cold war was still going on and the warsaw pact still existed
00:40:34
and you know justin trudeau was going to lead canada into the warsaw pact we would absolutely be up in arms about
00:40:40
that we would not let that happen it is that kind of issue for putin and we just act like this guy is insane and
00:40:48
has no point of view i'm not we don't have to believe he's right but to basically say
00:40:54
that his he has no interest uh in russian security that we need to give any weight to that we just need to
00:41:02
dismiss all of his concerns out of hand it just you know this is not the history
00:41:07
of the situation yeah did you read anybody read madeleine albright's um new york times piece it
00:41:12
was pretty interesting because she was uh in the position when they first met him and he's been talking about the
00:41:19
ukraine and reunification for 20 years and uh it's probably a good lesson for the entire
00:41:25
planet uh that dictators are gonna you know they they have a certain to your point your mouth of like having will and
00:41:32
capabilities a lot of people have capabilities a lot of people don't have will to start wars
00:41:36
anymore on this planet and and he clearly is in that group i think as hard as it is but jason we don't know here's
00:41:42
the thing by not taking nato off the table as an issue we don't know whether his true aim here is the restoration of
00:41:50
the russian empire or merely to avoid you know this border country being part of a military alliance that
00:41:57
he views as a threat so i don't know what the answer is part or door number three he wants more attention he wants
00:42:03
to be more globally relevant right but we made the mistake of not taking this issue off the table and so
00:42:10
if we had taken the issue off the table then we could get to the real heart of the issue maybe it would have defused
00:42:14
the situation or the eu and nato had done it right it's not just us in this like the people in europe have a big say
00:42:19
here as we're discussing this on on a thursday february 24th uh biden has announced a coalition of
00:42:26
partners eu australia others are doing uh pretty uh significant sanctions it seems
00:42:34
limiting uh russia's ability to do business in dollars euros and yen imposing major sanctions on the russian
00:42:39
banks trying to the ruble blocking four major russian banks freezing all of their assets in america adding sanctions
00:42:45
to russian elites i guess that's the oligarch class and russia's largest state-owned
00:42:51
enterprises will no longer be able to raise money from a coalition of governments biden assumes
00:42:57
this will degrade their military advancement and i have a funny russian story to tell so um right when i was
00:43:04
when i was still running when i was managing uh not just my money but other people's money and i was raising funds
00:43:10
uh eventually you know you uh you get uh lp commitments um from all kinds of people interested
00:43:17
in investing with you if you're generating great returns right meaning you know rich family offices all around
00:43:22
the world want to give you capital and there's a very strict process in america where when you get capital in
00:43:28
um you have to make sure that those folks basically pass uh uh you know an anti-money laundering check
00:43:34
and a know your customer kind of check kyc checks and one of these checks is actually a a gray list in a black list
00:43:42
that treasury and the doj kind of manage um and every now and then they'll put people on and off the list and there's a
00:43:49
very famous person in russia who i will not say when i was raising money for my last fund this was probably
00:43:56
in 2014 or 15. he was on the um he was not on the list you know very well-known person and i thought wow this is a great
00:44:04
opportunity to get somebody who seems to be doing a lot of really interesting good work and not less than two or three
00:44:10
weeks after we had signed our lp agreement uh i think it was doj or treasury put him on this list and we get
00:44:15
a we get a you know an email basically saying hey tear up the lpa and uh you can't take the capital and we had to
00:44:22
undo the entire uh limited partner agreement um crazy yeah what percentage of the fund
00:44:29
would that person have been ballpark i i don't remember but he was he's a significant person investing in a
00:44:35
significant 5 10 or something so i would guess yeah hey jason i just want to going back on a point i made about
00:44:41
energy and energy independence sure um earlier because i actually pulled up the numbers so you know the average cost
00:44:48
per kilowatt hour uh in the uh in china right now it's about nine cents uh for um for energy production it is
00:44:59
estimated uh that um nuclear power production should drop to about four cents but
00:45:05
could be as low as one cent per kilowatt hour if operated at scale with perfect efficiency just to give everyone a sense
00:45:11
of where um not just security risk and kind of you know the green opportunity lies but
00:45:17
also where economic advantage lies uh in investing in nuclear infrastructure and
00:45:21
so as china builds out 140 nuclear plants here over the next two to three decades they're going to see their
00:45:26
energy costs decline from about nine cents for industrial use potentially you know into the sub five
00:45:32
cent per kilowatt hour range which makes them tremendously competitive uh on a manufacturing point of view it's a lot
00:45:38
of bitcoin servers there's a lot of hash i think it's never going to happen um i'm not i love that
00:45:46
nuclear i think america america's america's ability to scale nuclear i think is a very difficult proposition
00:45:52
and i think our real solution is civil it's solar it's practical it can be done today and it can be done right now and
00:45:58
just to look at the eu versus the us in terms of gas mileage uh which is just stunning the eu
00:46:07
has mandated america doesn't have the resolve it's like it's like we have to we have to cross so many
00:46:13
bridges and you know we have to really confront a bunch of issues that we um that have been riddled with so much
00:46:20
inaccuracy you know for example like the environmental impact the understanding of how nuclear energy works you know the
00:46:26
nimby is in jason that you refer to about not being able to build these things all around the country and so
00:46:31
reducing the form factor in my opinion is a technical challenge that i think we can overcome but it still leaves the
00:46:37
policy and the societal level challenges that i think are very difficult to overcome because you're talking about
00:46:43
rewriting history in many ways and and convincing you know hundreds of millions of people that things that they had
00:46:48
thought were true were no longer true and i think that's much much harder than we give it credit for and cars is a
00:46:54
perfect example americans now were averaging 24 miles to the gallon the eu is mandated uh 57 miles per gallon in
00:47:01
2021 they're getting it done in the eu they're twice as effective i tweeted hey listen americans we we need to
00:47:08
buy better gas mileage cars and move to evs and i was faced with quite a backlash i mean it was insane
00:47:14
that's not entirely true because california did pass their own legislation yes and then there was this
00:47:18
issue because the car companies pushed back and said you know it's too expensive for us to build two different
00:47:22
excuse one for california and one for the rest of america they're already building ones for the eu
00:47:28
just to give you one counterpoint to your statement about energy independence arising potentially from solar to
00:47:33
generate a gigawatt of capacity an industrial scale solar farm would take about 7 500 acres
00:47:40
you know so that's about 30. i don't think that's how it's i don't think that's how it's done i i think a very
00:47:45
simple solar installation in everybody's home with a simple battery is more than
00:47:49
enough to basically give people the power they need and then these big cni installations that's happening on top of
00:47:55
all these big buildings will cover the rest and i think that you'll still have some amount of nat gas
00:47:59
peakers usage um and maybe you can have some amount of solar or hydro or wind but people are experimenting and
00:48:07
figuring out the battery storage capability to supplement this i think what we don't
00:48:11
have is that at three percent residue solar we don't have a credible alternative but at you know eighty
00:48:16
percent resi solar um with battery systems in everybody's home which is a tractable solution that cost
00:48:23
thousands of dollars per home which the government could subsidize would be a great use of capital i think would be
00:48:29
transformational for energy it would completely rewrite the energy calculus so so again to do that today would cost
00:48:36
because when you do something on a residential roof it costs a lot more than doing it on an industrial scale so
00:48:40
when you build out a 7 500 acre solar facility you get economies of scale you get single tubes everything can run off
00:48:46
one wire when you build it on a roof you need contractors to come in you got to wire the home you got to put batteries
00:48:51
in so the actual amortized cost over the lifetime of that solar installation works out to something on the order of
00:48:56
15 cents a kilowatt hour whereas if you do it on an industrial scale it works out to about 3 cents a kilowatt hour so
00:49:02
you know your point makes sense but it it it makes things more expensive so then the question is who's going to fund
00:49:07
the delta and is someone actually going to pay for that delta yeah we're gonna we're gonna i'm sure
00:49:12
i'm sure over the next few years we're gonna spend trillions and trillions of dollars on nothing
00:49:16
those trillions and trillions of dollars could probably whatever your gap is i don't know whether your math is right or
00:49:21
wrong but whatever the gap is that gets us to china as an example in terms of the cost per kilowatt hour
00:49:27
the government could substance and there is a quantifiable number and if we had if we decided whether it was worth it or
00:49:33
not we could decide but all i'm saying is it's something that we need to put on the table because every time a new
00:49:39
president comes into town and gets elected they generally get this one big shot on
00:49:45
goal you know the last few presidents have tried to either you know cut taxes or basically give these massive
00:49:51
um economic stimulus packages and the net dollar effect of these things is now measured in the trillions
00:49:56
of dollars and i suspect that the net you know cost of subsidizing enough solar energy that you could have broadly
00:50:02
deployed is also in the trillions of dollars and we should just decide whether that is in the better use of our
00:50:06
model all right just to do some quick math here um to uh booster tremolo's point he almost nailed it exactly
00:50:13
there are 85 million standalone homes in the u.s java i'm just going to assume none of them
00:50:19
for the sake of this argument have solar on them but three percent do i think um
00:50:24
average cost of putting solar on homes 20 to 35 000. i picked the number 30 000. yes yes hold on a second but but in
00:50:32
australia it costs 5000. okay they have a cheaper system or something no it's because of all the nonsense that exists
00:50:38
in the united states yeah so but just to give the raw cost here if it was thirty
00:50:43
thousand dollars to put on you know you can do it you can do it for five thousand dollars for home because
00:50:48
australia which is one-sixth the size of america is able to do it with no subsidies direct to the consumer
00:50:54
for five thousand dollars in installation so that price is possible i'm going to pick the 30 000 crazy price
00:51:00
in america 2.5 trillion dollars to put solar on every home the end like we're you know we're 30 yeah
00:51:08
trillion dollars in debt 10 of our debt would make us energy independent forever
00:51:12
the the plan gets better when you do math sorry and think of you think of the amount of savings you do to the
00:51:19
environment think of the lack i don't know if you saw this but there was a u.n report about the criticality and
00:51:24
importance of emerging wildfire threats to our ecosystem and our ecology i don't
00:51:29
you know for all of us that lived in california do you guys remember how the sky was orange and red two years ago
00:51:35
crazy pictures from los angeles so if you if you have a have less of a reliance on these aging utilities and
00:51:41
these utilities infrastructure there'll be less forest fires the air will be cleaner um people will be more resilient
00:51:48
think of the times that for example in texas where there was a massive freeze right where people were shut out of they
00:51:53
couldn't have power because the actual traditional utilities were shut down if it's only two and a half trillion
00:51:59
dollars i think we should have done this yesterday i can't believe the number is
00:52:02
that low actually considering the things that when we put two and a half trillion dollar price
00:52:06
tags on things then the cost of upgrading i'm just pulling some numbers here off of the internet
00:52:11
but um replacing uh our electrical grid would be five trillion so if you think about the replacement cost of the
00:52:18
electric grid which we're going to have to do at some point and the upgrade cost
00:52:21
of 500 billion a year or the maintenance of 500 billion a year this actually starts to seem very
00:52:27
reasonable and achievable if we had the will which means we need to have some politicians who actually aren't in the
00:52:33
pocket of bills the number of jobs that biden would create if he actually ran with this
00:52:37
then and because you do need a lot of local installation capability and other jobs
00:52:43
you would create hundreds of thousands maybe even millions of jobs in the united states they would be really well
00:52:48
paying um and you would be pushing us towards a completely energy independent clean
00:52:53
energy you know uh zero carbon futures that'd be transformation yeah i wonder how many hours of work it is to install
00:53:01
you could actually do that math as well and figure out how many jobs you create and then how much tax those people
00:53:08
pay and then how much they spend of that money to put back into the economy you're probably getting a 30 40
00:53:14
rebate on that 2.5 trillion dollar so it becomes even better because of the high
00:53:17
paying jobs all right the markets are tanking uh obviously over the last couple of months
00:53:25
dow is down 11 percent year to date and of course a lot of the growth socks we've talked about this over and over
00:53:32
again from zoom to netflix facebook spotify coinbase twilio all down over fifty percent uh today the market went
00:53:39
down five six percent on the news and then rebounded is this all priced in and is this the bottom of the market kathy
00:53:48
wood is supposedly um buying and i don't know if it's net buying or she's just reallocating but uh are we
00:53:56
now in the bargain hunting period of the market and and we've bottomed out the smart folks that i talk to who i
00:54:04
really you know uh look up to and respect think that the bottom in the smp is around 3 800
00:54:12
and that what we still need to do is it's one last flush and that last flush will really
00:54:18
touch the big cap um companies but that growth is largely um done sort of getting taken to the
00:54:27
woodshed so in general i think that so generally buyers are broke now um sellers of value
00:54:34
and waiting for this one last you know 400 point move down the s p and i think people think it's roughly the bottom now
00:54:40
if there's a world war obviously who knows all that's wrong but um yeah so sax what's more shocking that we're
00:54:46
almost at the bottom or there's people in the markets that chamoth really which is well speaking
00:54:53
speaking of people that we respect so i think uh brad gerson has a really interesting take on this which is that
00:54:58
sorry i i should also be clear that i'm recruiting this one person who i really respect he knows who he is so they're
00:55:03
poachable got it so uh brad gerson has published a couple of charts showing basically multiples in the internet
00:55:12
index and among sas companies over the last whatever dozen years or so and what you can see is that over the last two
00:55:18
years during covid there was a huge spike in multiples for internet companies and for sas companies and that
00:55:24
over the last really since november last three four months has now come down and
00:55:30
as of i would say last week it was right at about the historical trend and now it's starting to go under the historical
00:55:37
trends so from a bargain hunting standpoint you'd have to say that this is the first time that we've been below
00:55:44
the the average um for a few years now that's not to say it can't go down even more because in
00:55:51
the same way that you can be above trend you can also be below trend and if this
00:55:55
war escalates and metastasizes it will go down more but if this conflict can stay localized um
00:56:03
and the economy doesn't go into a recession because of everything that's happened then yes this might be bargain
00:56:08
hunting here's the chart for everybody to take a look at from january 20 to january 22 the two
00:56:14
years of the pandemic and i think this is times forward-looking sales if i'm if i'm
00:56:19
reading it correct i don't have the full chart here i just have a screenshot of it a portion of it yeah i think it's
00:56:24
enterprise yeah it's enterprise value divided by like forward-looking revenue which is
00:56:30
you've got to say it's like a r yeah it's sort of like ar it's like recording revenue um and so yeah we had this 15x
00:56:37
we went up to 40 50x private market deals going at 100 200x those days are over big time
00:56:45
uh and uh it's we've talked about that ad nauseam one of the interesting things that i'm seeing is i think people are
00:56:50
looking at businesses that have been corrected and uh saying hey what is the true value
00:56:56
of this and the i think the best example is peloton new cfo the cfo netflix i gotta go all right i gotta go
00:57:03
jacob i love you guys love you tomorrow and stay safe and enjoy your vacation cheers now so i just without chabot here
00:57:10
just wanna talk a little bit have you guys watched what happened with peloton and the cfo coming in and just really
00:57:15
revitalizing that business very quickly by the way jason i'll say one thing i think um
00:57:20
two weeks ago uh if you pulled the market they would probably have or if you looked at the
00:57:26
the trading prices of bonds you probably would have assumed a 95 chance of a half point rate hike in
00:57:34
march and as of today my guess is that the probability of that is below 5 and you're probably assuming you know um
00:57:46
a quarter point rate hike or maybe even a deferral at this point and i think that's one of
00:57:51
the things that's keeping the market up instead of tanking so much uh people are
00:57:56
predicting that it's been such bad news that they'll push it out yeah they're assuming that under the conditions of
00:58:02
great uncertainty like this the fed cannot act as aggressively as they were planning to act interesting and as a
00:58:07
result that that rate hike um would be pushed out and it would continue to kind of keep prices uh somewhat inflated and
00:58:14
continue to support the market with cheaper uh capital and liquidity so you know a lot of uh capital around the
00:58:20
world is going to get locked up as armed conflict kind of comes to bear and when that happens you know markets
00:58:26
will tighten up and prices will be affected and so the fed in in traditional in typical times would want
00:58:32
to have an incentive or would have a motivation to uh you know inject liquidity into the
00:58:36
markets um and so this is not a great time to do a half point rate hike and so it's almost
00:58:42
certain at this point that they're not going to do a half point rate hike it feels to me like huge setup right now
00:58:46
people have capitulated the market's gotten demolished i just think there's some these companies are still great
00:58:52
like they're still great some great businesses out there and some great companies to invest in some great stocks
00:58:57
to buy all the way from technology through to industrials uh through to um you know even some of the energy
00:59:03
companies that are going to benefit greatly from this commodity cycle were were kind of in the middle of
00:59:08
um and so there's going to be you know um i think an opportunity to move away from
00:59:14
uh speculative um behavior into real kind of cherry picking productive cash generating um businesses in the
00:59:22
next um uh you know or or even growth businesses that are actual um you know value craters uh so versus
00:59:30
being like 10-year speculative kind of bet so this is a great time to kind of be looking for businesses you really
00:59:35
like to own uh to identify them to make investments and to hold those investments for a very
00:59:40
long period of time uh you know you're not going to find a lot of market conditions like this i
00:59:44
mean if we all went back to march of 2020 and you remember the s p was like 2300. yeah i was going to buy disney i
00:59:51
never got around to it yeah so like if at that point you pick businesses that you knew were going to be durable
00:59:56
businesses and that you loved and you thought were going to have legs to them you bought everything from alphabet to
01:00:00
disney to lockheed martin you know you could have done um tremendously well so now's a great time
01:00:06
to kind of be looking for businesses that you really like and to buy a stake in them yeah forget forget about trying
01:00:11
to time the bottom that's a fool's errand right no no if you want to buy stuff you want to hold for 10 years
01:00:16
things are relatively cheap relative to a time horizon like saks pointed out and
01:00:21
um and gerda gerstner pointed out so things are relatively cheap find businesses you like to own and buy them
01:00:26
cheap they could get cheaper but they're kind of at the bottom you know the whole i
01:00:31
think the whole time frame around like speculative stuff is kind of wiped out like i think that that that that era is
01:00:36
gone now what are you saying well it's it's that plus i think one of the things that happened is that people
01:00:41
are realizing now that the burst of activity especially like in e-commerce type companies that happened during the
01:00:48
pandemic that was not ongoing sustainable growth it was one-time growth in fact in many cases it
01:00:55
was sort of worse than one time growth which is it was pull forward growth meaning that growth in the future will
01:01:00
be lower because you pulled forward all of that revenue well i think peloton might be a good example i mean yes
01:01:05
everyone bought them during the pandemic but then after the pandemic everyone who
01:01:10
needs one has got one already so it could also be cars right like people were desperate to buy cars and now
01:01:14
there's not available right so what what happened is not only have multiples gone down but these
01:01:19
companies were being comped based on growth rates that were unsustainable and so now they're all revising their
01:01:24
forecasts down so it's the double whammy and brad's made this point but what's interesting right now is the markets are
01:01:30
actually rallying and um i think it might be because of this latest biden news at this press
01:01:36
conference so the important point here is that biden did not sanction putin directly there was talk about
01:01:43
sanctioning him personally or and he also did not remove russia from the swift uh system which like sort
01:01:50
of the key banking system and i don't know if this is because biden doesn't want to do it or because
01:01:55
europe won't support the move pretty clear europe doesn't want to do it so no one is willing to suffer too much
01:02:01
economic loss here to defend ukraine never mind sending troops so it seems to me that the signal here is
01:02:09
that um both militarily and in terms of economic interest europe does not want further escalation
01:02:16
and that may be why the market is rallying also the fed may hold off on interest rate increases
01:02:23
while this is all going on so you know sometimes markets can act in funny ways well they're forward-looking
01:02:30
people are putting money at stake so they have skin in the game so it's you know the the people can talk
01:02:37
all they want about um what's going to happen with the markets but unless they're placing bets
01:02:43
that's kind of cheap talk and here people are actually placing bets on socks they think will do well in the
01:02:48
future skin of the game people look their economic interests are skin of the game having people's sons and daughters
01:02:56
go off to fight and die in some foreign war that is real skin in the game what is not skin to the game is people
01:03:03
tweeting you know their moral outrage and condemnation and whipping things up and you know
01:03:08
we should not be listening to them calling everyone who disagrees with them traitors because that's happening too
01:03:14
you know this is a time for cooler heads to prevail all right you and i are going to
01:03:18
actually agree on this uh and we're both going to agree that trump and pompeo should not be
01:03:23
fawning over putin uh yeah but you've never commented on that people want to hear
01:03:30
well i mean you can't support them fawning over putin like that you do you i can't imagine you look i i heard i
01:03:36
heard what what trump said when he was saying i didn't hear the pompeo quote so i
01:03:41
can't speak to that it's just saying is a genius look listen you know sometimes trump is being
01:03:47
sarcastic when he says things like oh what a beauty you know um he means the opposite and i think the point trump was
01:03:53
making wasn't really about putin being so great the point i heard trump making was that if he were president this
01:03:59
wouldn't be happening now you can disagree with that it may be true or untrue but that was the real point he
01:04:04
was making i think that you're letting you know the political partisans try to whip this thing up and it's part again
01:04:12
it's part of this meme of anybody who doesn't support what i want must be a traitor it must be in
01:04:18
the pocket of true putin we have to use this meme warfare to get people free berg
01:04:25
to shame these politicians into backing like the solar plan and doing something meaningful like this like and
01:04:33
backing nuclear how do we get the politicians to reflect energy independence as a priority it feels like
01:04:40
it's not a priority for them well i mean the one one of the good things about american democracy
01:04:46
is that politicians are generally pretty responsive to what their constituents want and believe
01:04:53
so they use polling data and that polling data drives you know if they want to get reelected they better do
01:04:59
what the polls are telling them people want them to do and so ultimately if you can kind of
01:05:05
influence people broadly in the united states uh and that can that can go both ways by the way
01:05:11
we have special interests too and you have people with weird ideas right like yeah but generally like if something is
01:05:15
deeply unpopular a politician risks not getting reelected they're not gonna kind
01:05:20
of run to do that and if something is very popular even though it may not be the right thing by some objective
01:05:25
framework uh you know they would still run to do that so you know i do think that there's
01:05:31
you know some degree of uh of work to be done around you know framing for people
01:05:36
broadly you know via the work maybe that we do on our podcast but i think more importantly
01:05:42
on a repeated way and in a way that's kind of inspiring and inclusive will drive people to kind of want to see
01:05:50
these changes happen and ultimately politicians should respond can i make one other point to you to your thing
01:05:55
about um you know who who today would be considered you know in the words of gempasaki parroting russian talking
01:06:01
points barack obama if obama today were out there saying exactly what he told the
01:06:08
the atlantic magazine back in i think it was 2012 or 14 if he was saying that today he'd be accused of being in
01:06:17
putin's pocket and being a putin apologist and a traitor and all this kind of stuff
01:06:21
because he said that in that interview he said listen putin was always very businesslike he
01:06:26
was punctual he showed up he wanted to negotiate and deal basically he sounded like a guy who look we may disagree with
01:06:33
him about everything but he wasn't a madman he was someone you could a rational actor
01:06:38
he was a coldly ruthless but rational actor and that's basically what obama said he's someone you could talk turkey
01:06:46
with and if you say that today that hey maybe we could negotiate our way out of this with putin
01:06:53
you're accused of being you know uh a puppet of his yeah the concept of starting a war uh in this
01:07:00
day and age is just it's crazy like it is crazy that he's starting this war and putting all these people at risk and we
01:07:07
don't even know what the goal is you guys he's not even asked for anything like what is he exactly asking for so he
01:07:14
may not be he may have been rational then or maybe obama was trying to steer him towards rationality and praising him
01:07:20
publicly to get that more rational putin to show up this feels like irrational that we don't know what his goal is like
01:07:26
the fact that the world can't say if we gave him x he would do y is i think his strategy putin's always
01:07:33
like to be this like unpredictable madman right no i mean we just said that he's a
01:07:38
coldly ruthless rational actor that's sort of the opposite of a madman i mean his red lines have been clear he's been
01:07:44
stating them for for years um that the problem is that again we're conducting i'm referring him to murdering opponents
01:07:50
of his and oh there's no question that he's ruthless he's an authoritarian call him a dictator if you want i've tweeted
01:07:57
in support of alexey navalny yeah so i get it but that doesn't mean he's a madman
01:08:02
he has desires and interests and it's the job of diplomats to figure out how to conduct diplomacy and negotiation
01:08:11
with people you disagree with and one of the problems we have today is again we've twitterized everything so
01:08:17
you know we basically figure out the first step is who are the people who should be canceled you know who's
01:08:21
wearing the white hat who's wearing the black hat let's all rise up and virtue signal and moral denunciation and you
01:08:28
know stick our fingers in our ears and not listen to the other side and um and listen that that
01:08:34
is a way to find yourself in greater conflicts not avoid them yeah all right so just wrapping up here
01:08:41
let's uh let's wrap with sax's favorite part of the show sax's favorite moment where he's super
01:08:47
engaged in learning he's got his thinking cap on he's taking notes and that is the science corner no not
01:08:57
what about vendetta corner i thought you're gonna say vendetta corner yeah i don't want to hear that recorder this is
01:09:02
the other quarter is actually my favorite part of the show it is now people love indeed a corner in the
01:09:07
twitter community spaces who you horse twitter loves it because twitter is all about vendettas but i have no vendettas
01:09:14
this week what are you doing with your time yeah i'm trying to advocate that this is
01:09:20
time for cooler heads prevail and so um oh for sake start a fight with somebody aren't you fighting with paul
01:09:25
graham there's nobody here you're you and jake are you guys taking the week off for ski
01:09:31
week i don't think we're fighting over anything it's not i can't not that i can think of all right
01:09:36
for the dictator trump paulie hapatia sultan of science david friedberg and the rain man himself
01:09:45
david sacks i'm jay cal and we'll see you all at the all in summit in may 15 16 17. you can go to the website
01:09:53
summit.all in podcast.com where you just type all in summit the all-in summit into google and find it may 15th to 17th
01:10:00
in miami florida we're doing it at the new world symphony and we have a page there where you can vote on speakers
01:10:06
it's gonna be three days of fun we have a scholarship there if you can't afford the regular ticket and uh you can
01:10:12
apply for a scholarship if you're a super fan and we'll look forward to seeing you there and go vote for some
01:10:17
speakers bye bye love you [Music] source it to the besties and they've just gone crazy
01:10:34
[Music] it's like this like sexual tension that they just [Music] we need to get
01:11:06
back [Music] i'm going on [Music]