E5: WHO's incompetence, kicking off Cold War II, China's grand plan, 100X'ing American efficiency

hey everybody welcome to the all-in podcast this is our fifth episode as you know we regularly publish this podcast well every two to four weeks something like that and just to give you a little idea of how well this is going the podcasts peaked at number 10 in zag podcast even though we never publish it and we're only 400 so tell your friends about the podcast so we could be number one and just dunk on traditional media which is full of people who have us as the guests chasing number ten on what Apple Apple technology podcasts we literally raced I mean it went from like we debuted in the 20s then the teens and then boom we hit number 10 and I was talking to somebody in

media who has us on as guest and I was like listen I formed a super team and we're now getting more traffic I'm sorry who are you talking to just like a mirror where you were just looking yourself I mean you are so [ __ ] arrogant after that shitty video what video are you buried - what oh my god you want me to say it tell the listeners you are a me just somebody an a how somebody made a cut of the billion times Jason mentioned he was an early investor in uber all right take it easy Virgin Galactic slash slack investor I don't I don't say anything I know the companies on the Chiron the lower third every time you're on CNBC everybody my problems I have too many unicorns to

mention just one right they just go with one dimension they just go with PayPal and knows Peter T Oh David David I have a question why is there a picture of two pregnant men behind you for men to be impregnated this is a recent picture of Jason I on the golf course and I'm not sure who's more out of shape you look like you're about the class in fairness it's a hundred degrees it's a hundred and six degrees at 80% humidity and I kid you not this is the this was the second and third time I play golf this was the third time and I'm gonna just ask D frame David Freiburg is here of course he's our science friend buddy and shabbath property is here how many holes I want

one of you to set the over-under on how many holes we completed each day the maximum number of holes we are eluded for okay Chamorro a lot of four and you're taking me over it was Sachs five five and there is a there's a there's a red door every five holes so that may have had something to do with it I took nine because I figured Jason was on his rights to the hot dogs well that's where the red doors were the hot dogs are you know you know why I said I said these two these two dorks with ADHD can barely make it an hour doing anything and so if you think an average Brown takes four hours and basically you know you get through four holes in about an hour and then you want to give up we got to the fifth hole I am addicted to golf now I don't know if you guys know this you can

gamble on golf okay so I I the biggest match I ever played was as was a five hundred thousand million dollar NASA I don't know what at NASA is I lost I lost one and a half that's LS 750 K what what is it Matz that I bet NASA NASA is basically a gambling bet on a per hole basis not it we we had we had just a ton of fun and it was great because this was the first time I've ever it's the single best aspect of golf in my opinion if you gamble it makes that game one of the most incredible games because people with mental fortitude who cannot play it all can show up and literally make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars yeah we were playing for hundreds of

dollars per hole so let's just leave it at that I thought we play hundred dollars holes so it was it was just for fun but man I I don't know about you guys do we have some we know if we know somebody who's got a membership in one of these places I'd love to go back out again but it was great fun and Shadow Creek come to Shadow Creek in Vegas we can play it's probably the best gambling golf course in the world okay I'm in so let's get to business for those of you who are tuning in for the first time Chimel Paulo Hypatia is my co here co-host here on the podcast we've been friends since we both did a very brief tour at AOL he then went to work for Mayfield which is a venture firm you might not have heard of he stayed there for about 27 weeks before going to work for Mark Zuckerberg

he secured the bag then started his own venture firm it grew way too big and he kind of got bored having to manage 100 people so now he's running his home office venture firm and doing two deals a year the one you've certainly heard of is Virgin Galactic where he's taking people to space and he did ass back for that IPO B and IPOC are lined up from what I understand will correct me if I am wrong and he'll be packing two more companies once a year I guess we'll be the pace is that correct Chema among other things but yeah yeah and then David Sachs has now become and David Freiberg have become regulars we've decided we're gonna stick with this foursome as it goes because we're

getting a really nice passing of the ball around topics and David Sachs went to Stanford with folks you know like Keith roboy Peter teal during an era where they were a bunch of huge nerds who created a way to transfer money on Palm Pilots called PayPal it didn't work until they decided to move it to email I'm not sure who's idea who gets credit for moving it to email sacks sacks who decided like hey Adam silence is his way of saying me cuz it was it was an abject failure when you tried to send money between Palm Pilots Peter Thiel's original idea but then somebody woke up and said well why don't we just do this over email but he hasn't said let me tell you the names

at PayPal he has not said yet musk teal Hoffman left chin silenced radio silence so far David sacks Jeremy Stoppelman Chad Hurley from YouTube cherry Stockman for Yelp anyway he was part of that cohort then he made a movie called thank you for smoking which was Jason Reitman first film jason reitman then went on to great success that film actually made money sachs was so absolutely depressed by how long it took to make one film and how painful it was he then decided to go create a billion dollar company and under three years called Yammer which Chamath made a ton of money on any cackles about regularly and then david freiburg is with us he is just the smartest kid

at the table but somehow figures out how to lose tons of money to us in poker he created clara calm and sold it to monsanto he created Metro Mile and he created Itza which felt horribly but that just goes to show you nobody even remembers what Itza is but they do remember his giant multi-billion dollar companies and he now is running his own startup studio which is making incredible ly interesting companies can I talk about the one thats related to beverages or not not yet okay anyway there's a company related to beverages that is so game-changing I said no literally you can't say it he showed it to us under friend EA I just said can I talk about the beverage company yes

or no I'm trying to give the guy goddamn plug here but anyway he says he can can't do a plug I'm not doing a plug but I'm teasing it and I think he's literally sitting on what could wind up being the greatest snow successful company of the entire group it's not period okay let's jump in I want to talk let's turn out the David you sold climate to Monsanto for a billion dollars back in the day when it was shocking to people that amount of money it still is but you know you were one of the first sort of quote-unquote unicorns and then you you know we're right in the front seat in Monsanto probably could have been CEO if you wanted I want you to talk to me about what is going on with Bayer Monsanto roundup and I want to use that as a jumping off point to talk

about the World Health Organization so roundup is a molecule known as glyphosate and it's been used as a herbicide for decades and for decades it was very well studied the US EPA and the FDA and you FDA and global health organizations have studied it carefully because of its incredible use it is it biodegrades the core molecule glyphosate biodegrades you know in a couple of days and it is a very effective herbicide so when farmers grow stuff they don't want weeds growing in the field and roundup was a pretty effective way at getting rid of weeds so you could get more crop per acre or more yield per acre a long time people thought that roundup like many of the

traditional persistent chemical herbicides was carcinogenic and people were concerned about that and as a result there was a lot of studying done in fact before I sold my company to Monsanto I spent a lot of time researching roundup and glide to say to make sure that it was safe that I wasn't selling my company to what everyone was saying was the devil at the time and from a scientific basis I felt pretty comfortable about the the data the studies the research that had been done when I was at Monsanto there was a bit of a political event that took place at the World Health Organization the World Health Organization runs a group called IARC the it's a Cancer Research Institute that's part of the w-h-o and there was a gentleman who was politically

trying to get himself on that council to make the case that glyphosate was carcinogenic and years later a Reuters reporter identified how he was able to get this council to disregard a number of scientific findings and studies including the US EPA and other very wide broad ranging studies by international organizations and showing that roundup or glyphosate was non carcinogenic but the political process by which he was able to get on the council get that data excluded from a study and then get IARC to declare roundup or glyphosate a possible carcinogen or probable carcinogen then triggered a bunch of tort lawyers in the United States to start suing Monsanto and

now Bayer because Bader bought Monsanto a number of years ago for causing cancer and the data is absent but the way the US court system works is if you have some probable definition and you can get a jury to say yes and the probable cause was there's a probable carcinogen label applied to it by IARC and this Reuters reporter years ago did a great job highlighting how whole thing was kind of politically motivated and and the data and the science from a broad range of scientists including the triple-a s a lot of scientific membership organizations very definitively and clearly show that glyphosate is non carcinogenic but you know it was super troubling and frustrating now look

this doesn't bother me personally anymore I have no interest whatsoever but it turns out that these lawsuits are now gonna cost Monsanto and now Bayer which bought Monsanto somewhere between ten and fifteen billion dollars to settle this and this is all a function of some political hacking that took place at the w-h-o so for a long time I've had a bit of a concern about how the WHL operates and the process by which they do scientific assessment and validation and a lot of this has obviously become much more apparent with the coronavirus crisis and their response with respect to masks and treatment and so on so that's a little bit of the background I think you're referring to tomorrow and so you get your math if you want to know I mean like it to me I I think that this is

such an interesting thing I I wanted to use it as this on-ramp to the w-h-o largely because it's like V inaptitude keeps compounding in that organization I just read that we still don't have a definitive posture on masks from the w-h-o and that they are finally ceding ground to the idea that the corona virus could partially be spread in air I mean this is so bizarre because it's the middle of July there are three million cases and half a million people who have died and we are still there and so you know when I saw that Trump pulled out of the w-h-o you know in this weird way the way he did it was kind of cartoonish and stupid and you know kind of an insolent child

but the reason he did it was actually pretty reasonable because this organization is not a scientific or health body it's an academic body and you know you can see this in universities where all of a sudden things tilt away from facts and it tilts towards you know all kinds of very very very small points of sort of like political capital that people fight over and so these politicized organizations are incredible and to the point at which we saw you know this past week the report that well over 250 of their own scientists who they rely on said hey it's very

clear that this is an airborne phenomenon aerosol tiny micro particles of aerosol when people talk when they sing when they cough when they sneeze all this obvious stuff floats in the air and if you ever closed air conditioned you know location like say a church in the south or a hotel or a casino it's not a good idea to be in there and it's especially not a bad idea bad idea to take your mask off so now the w-h-o is over - and Trump as you said in his just horrific ly comical way can explain as we're very clearly explaining that this is a political organization that is funded by a duopoly of superpowers that have many issues which we're going to get into today and we it's

they're able to say who the duopoly is sex when you look at this being our token conservative here and you see the Trump win how frustrating is it for you that trumps delivery and it's persona when he is right and a person can't be wrong all the time I'm proof positive of that you you have to deal with the fact that he doesn't is such a stupid inane way that you don't actually get credit for the win well you know Trump is often the the bull in the china shop and you know kind of disrupts the status quo by throwing a grenade into it but frequently there there are

good reasons why this house quote needs to be disrupted and the the New York Times laid out the case in a news story on who the the one that reported the scientists complaining that you were talking about it was just a straight news story but it almost came across as an expose because whose incompetence was laid out so starkly the fact that they were slow on mass and opposed them and I think kind of lied about them and then and to be downplaying the airborne nature of the virus in favor of maintaining this narrative that it's spread through touching surfaces or fomites which

I think people are realizing now is much much less likely and so yeah you do kind of have to wonder whose side is is who on and the the New York Times article kind of suggests why they do this which is when they issue a declaration they have to think about the ramifications in all of their member countries and so what ends up happening is they sort of start with the policy implication or political result that they are thinking about and they kind of reverse-engineer the science and you know the article talks about how you know if who were to come out and and sort of be very clear

about airborne transmission that could affect spending or you know political budgets and all these different countries and so they've been reluctant to do that so yeah it's a it's a it's a organization that's sort of political first and then reverse engineers the science to fit that and you know what this reminds me of it's like when you have giant investors on the board of a company the management team comes out and now they've got to present like a pivot or an acquisition or whatever it is and they're thinking well okay we've got this funding source these people own 26 percent of who this person owns 22 percent we've now got to present it to them and what are the ramp down stream ramifications luckily there's an alignment in a single company the alignment is we won't want the company's share price to go up but here in the world it is not equally aligned what is in China's best interest what's in the --use best interest and what's in America's best

interest might be radically different and they are literally funding them correct your mouth well there's a they are there there's a there's this thing called sailor's law right which many of us kind of have seen play out which is that academic the the saying is something like academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small and in this interesting way the w-h-o has lost the script because they fight over politics who gets to say what who's being positioned and they lose sight of the real down street in my opinion the downstream implications of the things that they have because if they actually just thought from first principles and tried to be a truly independent body that said we are going to take the capital we're given from the countries that are supporting us and actually do the best and actually publish like what is the best thing to

do for example in the case of coronavirus and be definitive and iterate we'd be in a much better place but a lot of what is allowed the posture around coronavirus to transition from a health issue to a political issue in many ways has been because organizations like the w-h-o and the cdc are political bodies and their academic bodies and so the incentives of the players within these organizations are not to necessarily you know project the right public health positioning they are at some level to think about their own career trajectory and the political machinations

that happen within the organization that are blind to normal citizens like us that just consume the output and then so when you see something like an inability to give a definitive ruling on things like masks or you know other things you just kind of scratch your head and wonder is it that they're dumb and the answer is no it's not that they're dumb they're just motivated by very different things than public health all the time which might be including keeping their jobs and the fact that we had David friedenberg on this podcast and then Sachs you know chiming in after it surely after just definitively saying first principles why wouldn't you wear wet wear a mask what is the

possible downside and Friedberg saying hey I'm getting some testing equipment we should just be doing mass testing Freebird when you look at this and how when we started the podcast I think in March or April we were very clear as people not in the with the exception of herself not in the health care space in any way why can't they what would be a better structure for the WHO and or is there a better structure than just a bunch of you know randos like us on a podcast very easily seeing through first principles that a 79 cent mask is a no-brainer that getting testing math testing and recording it every day and doing sampling what is the better solution here for governance or for dealing with these type of you know really large problems and

ones that kind of have a clock that's the other thing about this problem is this this problem came with a countdown clock you had to make a really fast decision in order to protect yourself and we made a really drawn-out decision now we're paying the price I mean I think under the circumstances you outline you know you need leadership right so you need probably a country or some entity to step forward and lead with respect to being proactive and aggressive with action because any multinational oversight body or political body is gonna be kind of you know molasses tout it's gonna be stalled out with the the processes and the competing interest as you guys have highlighted so the libertarian argument would be let the free market drive outcomes and you know some

folks will succeed and some folks will fail if we want all of humanity to succeed then you know the likely scenario is what we've seen with with world wars and such which is you need leadership you need one organization or one entity or one national body to step forward and say this is what we're doing and we're gonna lead and the world was absent leadership over the last six months historically the US has filled that void but that certainly wasn't the case this year and so you know it seems to me like you're not gonna find a political governing system multinational governing system that's gonna be successful in solving these kind of existential global problems overnight you really need someone to step forward and the u.s. is kind of leaving a bit of a gap this might be a good segue because the question next is who's gonna fill that gap going forward yeah so let's make that segue when you look at the the duopoly that currently is I would say on par now I don't

think we can say we're the superpower anymore and that China is an up-and-coming superpower it's pretty clear they are an equal superpower I don't know if anybody here disagrees with that right now but if we have an edge it's a very minor one at this point how do we look at health problems with an authoritarian country where individuals do not vote and there is a god king who has recently said I will be the god king for the rest of my life for sure how do we manage this relationship with China Friedberg then we can pass it over so from a healthcare perspective let's start there for sure and then whatever other major issue you would like to then segue into climate change comes

to mind trade comes to mind Human Rights comes to mind I would imagine the biggest the argument that your geopolitical commentators would make who are probably more experienced than experts in this than any of us would probably relate to you know the degree of influence you know the question of who has the most influence globally maybe kind of the way that you define who has the most power globally and so you know in the current circumstance you can look at trade balance between China and other nations you can look at trade balance between the US and other nations and you can look at the balance sheet the assets and and the debt owed and you're right I mean a lot of people are making the case that that we're kind of reaching a point of parody through some metric or some set of equations here and at this point there's there's going to be a

jockeying for leadership globally in terms of influence and so that will have ramifications with respect to things that are global in nature like global pandemics and I think this is a really kind of key for a moment a flashpoint moment for us because we are facing that sort you know we did face that circumstance this year and obviously we took the raw end of the deal we've we failed most I mean we all concur on that we thought we did worst China is just like an extremely good example of focusing on strategy while the rest of us focused on tactics you know the last 20 years have been punctuated by the United States spending literally trillions of dollars on endless wars and

unnecessary military infrastructure and all kinds of wasted pork barrel spending and programs that just have resulted in zero ROI for the United States and it's taxpayers and citizens and instead what it China do they basically went around the world and they used the equivalent amount of dollars and they said every war that the United States fights is a war that we can essentially be silent on let them do that dirty work and what we will do instead is we will go and basically buy and own large swaths of Southeast Asia large swaths of Africa which is you know the emerging labor pools that will drive GDP forward for us and what they've essentially created is

not necessarily a voting bloc but a productivity bloc and that's what's so you know interesting and also really important to understand which is that China is fighting not an ideological war they're fighting an economic war and it is one where they are buying you know member states to join them with their capital and so we've kind of like not seen it and it's unfortunately happened right under our nose so now what we need to do is we need to sort of wake up to this reality and have a very aggressive point of view around what you know matter so by the way this is also why and I'll hand the mic to David after this but this is also why I think like we have completely

wasted so much time focusing on you know all these other countries that just don't matter anymore and you know I don't say that emotionally I just say it practically like every single minute we spend on Russia is just the wasted time this is a you know country that just won't fundamentally matter in the world over the next 15 to 20 years large swathes of Europe you know they're ideologically aligned but they just don't matter the United States has to develop a really specific strategic viewpoint on the fact that it is US versus China whether we like it or not and it starts in things

like public policy but it stretches to everything including capitalism technology intellectual property healthcare and this war will not be fought on the ground with guns it'll be fought with computers and it'll be fought with money yeah no need to realize owns and joint ventures sacks what are your thoughts here on this coming Cold War you know we beat the Russians in the cold last Cold War and to jamaat's point the only thing they have really going for them is they're incredibly sinister KGB style information warfare and the decreasing value of their oil and irrelevance

which is why they have to do things like mess with us on social media I mean that literally I feel like it's like the last couple of dying techniques they've got in their playbook from you know the 80s as the KGB and they got a KGB agent running the country when we look at China how do you frame our relationship with them and what would be the best practice for the next ten years midterm well I think I think what you've seen just really in the last couple of weeks is a critical mass of scholarship and punditry declaring that we are in a new cold war with China and I think you know of all the momentous news events that have happened this year from kovat to you the riots and protests I think that the most newsworthy and historically important event will be the beginning of this and

the recognition that we are now in cold war too so takedown court tick-tock is part of it I mean it's paradoxical about a dance app is literally at the tip of the spear I mean I think any tick-tock is sort of at the fringes I think the the Cold War to to David's point started when the United States basically embargoed Huawei from getting access to 5g technology and I know that sounds like a very sort of like thin thread that most people don't understand and we can unpack it in a second but in my opinion that sort of you know at the beginning of this year was when I started to pay attention and try to understand this issue more because it seemed like wow that's a that's

a shot across the bow and declaring China as the clear you know sort of a clear and present danger for American sovereignty and the NBA tik-tok being cultural ramifications of that and which are differences he talks irrelevant who cares well it's it's is it in tax well what tick-tock and all we have in common is that the the sort of proxy battles of Cold War - will be fought between these sort of client corporations whereas you know Cold War one you have these you know sort of these proxy these sort of client states fighting these proxy wars cold war - you have more of these like client corporations fighting these proxy wars so you know it's that's the sense in which I

think they're they're related the what tick tock shows is a company that's desperately trying to maneuver so they don't become one of the first economic casualties of cold war - they appointed a American as CEO they've pulled out of Hong Kong so they're not subject to to those regulations and they're desperately maneuvering so they don't get banned in the United States they want to preserve their market access but I think there's a very good chance that they will get shut down in the u.s. they've been shut down in India and today's July the 10th and right before we went on the breaking news was at Amazon basically asked all their employees delete to delete tik-tok because

of a security threat so it's happening I think that tick-tock unless they basically have bike dance cell under 20 or 30% of the company and get it into the hands of Americans it will get banned and I think that there will be a massive destruction in enterprise value book can I tell you why tick-tock doesn't matter and or doesn't matter as much I think David you're right that it's sort of like collateral damage it it almost is like you know it'll exist but whatever the Huawei thing in my opinion is so important because it shines a light on two things the first is that you know what happened essentially as the United States told tsmc you know you cannot basically

give Huawei access to the 5g chipsets and the 5g technology that they would use to essentially kind of like you know implement their spyware and then sell it into Western nations effectively and so then what what it does is it puts China in the posture of having to figure out how do they get access to this stuff and you know the most obvious answer is to invade Taiwan and take over tsmc and you know why would they do that well obviously that has huge geopolitical ramifications but they could only do that again going back to the first comment is because they've already bought so many nation states into their productivity bloc that it's still on a balance a worthwhile trade and it allows them to solve their version of Taiwanese sovereignty completely and definitively

and basically say look we've we've now solved Hongkong you know Macau is already solved and now we're gonna solve Taiwan and put the whole thing to bed and now we have access to this critical technology that we need so that's why I think sort of like what happens with Huawei sort of what happens with TSM see what happens on 5g is so important because if you're going to force China you know to basically have to buy Western technology in order to get access to a critical piece of you know Internet infrastructure they're gonna be put to a very very difficult test about what they have to do and then they will have to be much more transparent on the global stage

about what their ambitions really are and how far they're willing to go and I think that's you know that's a lot more important than you know a bunch of kids dancing to short videos well and and just just to add to that point you know so I think your mouth is right that these these sort of chips the 5g chips these other chips are that they're the new oil you know in terms of their geopolitical significance you know obviously all of our technology or our iPhones are advanced event weaponry it's all based on these these chips and and 70% of them are fabricated in Taiwan and and I

think you know what one of the huge blind spots of American trade policy over the last thirty years is is kind of not to notice that that this key technology that's really the substrate for all of our technology for our economy has now been many it's now been moved and it's manufactured you know in Taiwan whose sovereignty China does not recognize and it's constantly you know threatening with the risk of being of being annexed so you know we have a tremendous vulnerability there and you know at the same you know II finally after about 40 or 50 years of declaring that

we'd be energy-independent we've achieved that but now we have this new dependency on these chips that and Pharma and manufacturer I mean and we and we it seems like now manufacturing we're starting to realize hey Elon was right we need to be able to build our own factories and guess what American spirit American ingenuity American focus American capitalism we can do it we have the wherewithal to do it there's no reason we cannot make these chips here sorry I don't buy it that we're we're gonna be this dependent forever we just need to have the will and the leadership to say we're going to do this whether it costs us an extra 50 cents per chip and well the fact the fabrication of these chips is incredibly complicated I mean they're they're basically

so let's buy the companies they're microscopic yeah and it takes years and like several years to set up the you know the facility to do this kind of fun why don't we buy those companies now why don't we just take it just Ramat spoink which was very clear which is hey this is an economic this is a ledger this is you know a cheque writing exercise to win this war why don't we take out our checkbook and buy fifty percent of these companies now and put them on the Nasdaq if they're not already there it requires real leadership at the end of the day it needs to be led by the United States government the reality is that you know lithography has gotten so advanced I mean

like look I have you know companies that are you know taping out chips at like seven nanometer and I don't I don't have supply or diversity I don't know I can't basically choose you know nine folks to bid it out against of which you know five are domestically in the United States there are two right and so you know you kind of just deal with the complexity or the lack of diversity that we have and Jason your point is exactly right which is the first and most important decision here is one that's philosophical which is again saying that era of efficiency at the sake of all else is over and we are now moving to an era of resilience which inherently is more inefficient but in that

inefficiency we will rebuild American prosperity because it rebuilds American industry and it rebuilds American jobs there's another example that I want to build on David's point which is let's all believe and a test that we all care about climate change for a second and we all want the world to be electrified okay well electricity and electrification requires two very very basic inputs okay one is a battery and the second is an electric motor right make sense so far yep well inside an electric motor there is one critical thing that you need to make it work which is a permanent magnet the permanent magnet spins around and that's how an electric motor works okay why

is that important as it turns out that permanent magnets need special characteristics that are only provided by a handful of very very specific rare earth materials that we need to mine out of the ground and refine those materials actually exist in many places including the United States yeah we stopped mining for them but right now China controls 80% of the supply of rare earths they can choose how they price it they can differentially price to their own companies which means that the battery and engine manufacturers inside of China can now lead on electrification which means China can actually lead on climate change before the United States can unless we have leadership that

says at a governmental level on down we are gonna make this a priority we're gonna fund it we're gonna make sure that their onshore mines we're gonna make sure that those mines are clean we're gonna build a supply chain domestically and we're gonna subsidize this is what governments do best it's not Act it's just incentivize on things like climate so I don't know Freiburg has spent a lot of time on climate change so he has a PS probably a lot of ideas on this but whenever you look at any of these things health climate food it all comes down to the United States versus China Strada versus tactics Freebird look I'm not sure I'm not sure I think that the Chinese action is as deterministic as we think it is or as we kind of frame it where it's China's got this grand plan they're gonna beat the US and they're gonna control things and make decisions that that hurt

us I think a lot of this is China if you think about it less of that black and white there's a continuum and the continuum is one of influence and one of creating an environment whereby these things can happen so China for example made capital readily available for the agriculture industry to be able to buy buy assets and so the companies inside of China which aren't controlled the Chinese government isn't telling them what to do the Chinese government has set a policy that enables them to increase their prosperity and as a result increase the prosperity of the Chinese people you know when I was at Monsanto we were we'd bid for the largest AG chemicals

company in the world based out of Switzerland it's called Syngenta and we bid like forty four billion dollars to buy this company and the largest chemical company in China called CEM China bid 47 billion dollars and acquired the business and they now own the largest add chemicals company in the world China also bought Smithfield and they bought they put a bunch of people in Canada hey free bird how much of that money do you think came from the CCP and and what involvement you think the CCP had in putting their thumb on the scale of making sure that transaction went that direction look I mean ultimately wherever the the capital comes from it's no less equivalent than what you would see in the United States where Treasuries fund the central bank which funds banks which fund lending to corporations which ultimately make but do you think the leadership said hey we're

winning this at all costs so here's what happened in 2007 there was a CCP internal doctrine that was published and it's now reasonably well known and there was a speech that was given that started this aggressive action in agriculture and as a result Chinese citizens started moving to Canada and buying farmland in Canada they started moving Australia buying farmland in China they started building these facilities in Argentina and Brazil and Africa and the Chinese government set out you know a strategic objective and provided the capital and enabled industry and people to go after pursuing these interests but the CCP didn't say here's the roadmap it's not like here's the specific plan for what we need to do they had a general high-level kind of point of view that I think drove all that action and all that behavior and so you know it's I would say it's it's not as

perhaps coercive as we might think it is in terms of the CCP wanting to target and attack us they're trying to increase their influence around the world they're kind of increased their own security and increase their own prosperity and at some point there's only so many resources globally there's only so much land so much magnets that you know they and they're winning in the markets and you know we're kind of crossing that threshold now where they're actually like a competitor you know the only difference between this is and it couldn't be my point is I just don't want to frame it as like I just think it's a it's a misstatement to frame it as China has this grand plan to come after the US and they're evil and that's what they're doing I mean you know this is where I think they're completely wrong David respectfully yeah in that I believe this is an

ideological war and if you you can't diminish what's happening in Hollywood tik-tok and the NBA and other sports where China is explicitly saying if you put a villain in our in a movie if you talk about Tibet in a movie we are going to not play that movie and we're going to start funding your movies and so they are absolutely using the vector of culture and chamalla I think you're also wrong here where you're saying tick-tocks not important tick tock is something that a generation of kids absolutely are in love with and those kids are like hey boomers stay out of our platform and so and in the ideological issue here Freebird which I think that you're under playing is they want

to win and they want to spread their ideology which is the ideology of authoritarianism they are not going to win Africa and then suddenly say you know what would be great for Africa if we made the entire continent democracies that's not in their best interest how's it different than Trump tweeting well Freiberg I think that it's it's inconceivable to me that the Chinese when they do this grandiose planning and they do that you know the political theater of having the thousands of people in the Chinese you know assembly hall once a year that you know in GG bing talks that they haven't developed a multi-faceted multi-layered plan that they're executing in part

I think this is why is using ping essentially wants to be this ruler for life inside of China because he I think they have a 20 or 30 year plan and I do think it is to disrupt the United States and I don't think that they believe though which is the smart thing that there's one silver bullet I just think that they're gonna take a thousand shots on goal whether it's you know monopolizing the rare earths or you know figuring out how to basically put spying software in the hands of millions of Americans that's where I think tick tock is actually really important it's essentially a vehicle to spy and backdoor into Americans or whether it's you know introducing a digital yuan so that we can try to disrupt the you know the the use of the US dollar as a reserve currency of the world they probably have a list of a thousand tactics and they're gonna go and execute them and I don't begrudge them that I just think it's it's it's well-organized machine I just think we

now need to counterpunch sacks yeah I mean so China is on a mission of national greatness I think the immediate goal is to is to assert its hegemony over Asia and to kick the u.s. out of that region but I think ultimately now they see in their sights potentially being the number one country in the entire world because of the because of the chaos that kovat has wrought over here I think and in fairness David the incompetence of Trump thus far I mean like you know it's it's not fair to think that the Chinese Politburo versus Trump and his cabinet are an equal match forget

their political persuasion yeah I mean they clearly seem emboldened and you know just in the last few weeks and months we've seen the ending of the two systems and Hong Kong which was a 50 year commitment they made and I think the 1984 so they abrogated on that well it's a commitment that yeah you having to do that three or four months before our Trump is looking like he's not gonna be in office so talking about shots on goal this may be their only shot to do this and well there's the whole want yeah but just do they go after Taiwan in the next hundred have a window I think we have to be extremely clear that Taiwan is a red line for us and that we're committed to

the security of Taiwan because if we show any hesitation or weakness there they will they will seize on that and would try to do that would Trump put his foot down because he did nothing when it came to supporting I think we need to attract away from any given President of the United States because they they change every four or eight years and I think we need to have a bigger discussion which is like I said over the next 40 to 50 years are we comfortable with do all duopoly power structure in the world which is the United States and China because that's effectively what we are today or are we the shining city on a hill once again and if so what are we willing to do to make sure that that's the case and I think that's independent of your political persuasion in your party right well the good news here is that both Trump and Biden are basically racing to sort of

position themselves as the more hawkish candidate on China which is to say that this recognition of Cold War 2 is now I think bipartisan which if you want to sustain a policy in this country over say 40 years like we did in containing the Soviet Union you have to have bipartisan support for that and so it does seem like finally as a country I think we are kind of getting our act together on China I mean obviously there will be disagreements within that larger context but it seems like now people are waking up to the threat that that china represents to you know

to America being that I'm one country in the world and I think yeah by the way I agree with I agree with Sachs I mean I think that's exactly what's happening and and what will happen here and and it'll certainly it'll be a big hill to climb I'll just highlight and I'll ask the question of chima you know per his point earlier let me ask you guys how many factories do you think exist in China take a guess 11 million to point eight million now how many do you think exist in the United States 150,000 close back to Norfolk 2000 and has about 83 million factory workers and we have about

12 so you know ch amok if we do end up in Cold War 2 where you know we escalate the tension and escalate the divide how do we end up you know having avoiding $2,000 $3,000 iPhones how do we get all the televisions we want for 500 bucks how do we do that given that you know to catch up with this production capacity will end up costing many tens of trillions of dollars of invested capital that China has invested over decades well this is such a brilliant this is a somewhat fabulous question and I think I don't have the answer but here's the way that I think about the solution you know the the thing that we had before was in my way in many ways like this kind of like

perverted sense of globalism and I think that we we you know we thought that globalism equals utopia and that's not true it's actually more like a chessboard which means you have you know two different sets of colored pieces competing against each other and each piece on the board in many ways as a country so you know we can look at that as a Geographic skew and say like we need to really consolidate you know North Central and South America has a block as a productivity block and so David that's where we need to have more trade within those areas so that we can actually

build up production capacity in places that can absorb and produce low-cost labor or low-cost items to compete with to china bloc that may be a solution I mean that is an incredible point Chamath which is why with the rhetoric with Mexico which would love relationship with us is so so dumb we're talking about factories they would love for us to put more factories on there and whatever country is good for this work our way down the peninsula yeah go to go down the peninsula go go to Honduras go to El Salvador go to Guatemala where your weii paralyzed they won't work yeah are screaming for work which is why they're trying to enter the United States the best ways to not build a wall take all that money and fuel it into production and manufacturing and warehouse

in those places in which they're leaving in the first place and if we thought like China we would go ahead do it Freiburg sorry no you can't successfully sustain a cold war with China without global partnership and I think you know this notion of nationalism and isolationism in the United States will not work in a world where we are also trying to compete globally with China and are raising the stakes in a global cold war you can't have it both ways so you know either the the current administration policy needs to change I'd love to hear Sachs's point of view on this or you know or we need to have a change in administration and actually you know re-engage on it on a global basis with partner States well okay so I think that the the point about about well I

think what what some people on the right would say is that being able to buy cheap goods at Target is not worth the hollowing out of the American industrial base that happened over the past thirty years and that was a catastrophic mistake and you know this is what got trump reelected was shattering that that blue wall in those Rust Belt states so I think we can kind of look back on that and wonder whether that trade-off was really worth it but moving forward I think the balance is gonna be to realize that trade does create wealth you know all wealth in fact comes from trade whether at the level of individuals or nations if it weren't for trade all of us would be subsistence farmers or something like that but we also have to realize that trade creates interdependence because

I stopped making certain things in order to buy them from you and so in order to engage in trade we have to trust each other I have to trust that that you one day won't decide that your ability to manufacture antibiotics is strategic and you might deprive me of them in order to facilitate some geopolitical interest and so I think what we're waking up to with you know production of you know pharmaceuticals or n95 masks you know PPE and now chips is that we've had this real blind spot with respect to trade we've basically offshore so many of the elements are necessary for our national survival and I think those elements have to be brought back so that America is safe

and independent but with respect to you know so many other things I think it's fine for us to get them through trade whether you know it could be a peril or toys or so many other goods that you know we do want cheap goods I want to do an only strategic I want to do a mental exercise we all for our living try to come up with 100 X 1000 X solutions whether we're creating the companies or betting on the companies when everybody to just think for a second of the United States as a startup company and a 10x 100x idea for how we can not only maintain our position but maybe become the shining hill where we actually lead the world towards democracy towards human rights I'm going to start with the one that I just happened to it hit me while you all were talking which is

why I love doing this podcast because I get such inspiration listening to you guys you know pass the ball around we haven't added a state to the United States in a pretty damn long time what if we said to Puerto Rico what if we said to the Dominican Republic what have we said to indoors I mean and I don't want to make this into a exercise in colonialism but if we said you know what Puerto Rico how do you feel about being the 51st state because we're already 80% of the way there and what if we said the United States is going to and this is just a crazy hundred x idea we're going to start taking countries that maybe love democracy that would love to be part of the United States and and having a bridge towards becoming part of this block whether it's how Puerto Rico

is Jason the United States can barely function as it is that's why I'm giving you the freedom to say this is a hundred x exercise as a start-up because if we put out crazy ideas like this maybe we can pull people towards thinking like the chessboard of how to play 3d chess or how to win the chessboard not just move the pawns back and forth well I think the first thing America has to do is is decide whether it wants to whether it still thinks that national greatness is important and whether it wants to compete to to be the leading power in the world because right now it seems like we're hopelessly divided and our guns are literally drawn on each other and you know you've got this all out assault going on on capitalism you have sort of canceled culture and

America just seems hopelessly divided and I don't know if Americans still think it's important to be the number one power in the world so what are the thought experiment on how to make Americans realize this is important or if anybody else wants to jump in here with a 10x idea of America good well I I have an overlaying theory that I it this is sort of kind of me spitballing so bear with me but let's do it you know there's a there's this concept called the Overton Window right which is sort of like the the minimum ly viable acceptable surface area of dialogue at which case it starts to sort of you know get extreme I might I would theorize I would tell you that the Overton Window is the smallest that's ever been and there's basically nothing that you can talk about that is relatively benign without it being politicized and and there's no gradation anymore it's a very

binary thing you're either in the Overton Window which for example would be like you know vegetables matter or looking both ways across the street matters and outside the Overton Window honestly is black lives matter as an example you know and it gets politicized on both sides masks you know if a balaclava when you're skiing because your face is cold is inside the Overton Window that same balaclava when you go to the drug store so that you can actually you know either prevent disease one way or the other is outside the Overton Window you know making sure that police you know are there to protect you in a time of need is now outside the Overton Window because

it's framed in in the lens of police brutality so the Overton Window has shrunk so we we have very little surface area where we can actually all agree without getting into a fight Heidi like each other I totally agree with that I mean we have this we have this sort of epidemic of cancel culture going on and I guess Jason you recently experienced this oh my lord I mean for the love of God what happened Jason tell us what happened listen I I look at Twitter as a place to have vibrant discussions and you know ten years ago it was kind of where the Overton Window was most open you could have a discussion about anything and we had a discussion about you know my feeling that as

a former journalist and we're doing random acts of journalism here that I just thought the New York Times was just way too biased and that they picked aside in order for their business to survive and I actually believe that I believe they picked the side of Trump I'm sorry the side of anti Trump in order to get subscriptions because their advertising business has been demolished by the duopoly of Facebook and Google this led to the circling of the wagons of the journalists which I was part of but listen it's pretty easy to hate me I understand that I'm a loudmouth and so now I'm getting piled on by the journal and and you were an early investor in who absolutely forget that let's forget I think that a third or fourth I they tell me the third or fourth anything so there's a journalist at said publication I'm not going to say her name because I don't want any harassment of anybody nobody does who said people are stupid for going back to work and they're idiots and I

said you know this is a very convenient thing for a journalist who works behind a keyboard who makes $100,000 a year to say because those people are literally not going to be able to feed their kids if they don't go back to work and this led to her saying I was harassing and stalking her then I was in Clubhouse the new social network where you talk and the same journalist was in the audience and I said to the people who were talking just be aware there is a journalist in the audience because even though this is a private beta this could wind up being in the New York Times which it did not that discussion but another one that was covertly taped and I don't know it was covertly taped by journalists or not but it did wind up in the press anyway this whole thing turns into a giant fight and table house sounds like some dark S&M sex club in Berlin Hey no no that's here's

what I think is most entertaining house H la us house club house yeah let me what I think it's most entertaining about this is that the the New York Times journalist was in this vicious battle with Balaji who's a Silicon Valley founder and personality and they were arguing and then Jason somehow comes running over and starts involving himself in this feud and it's like and it's like Balaji gets fouled but Jason takes the flop you know and all of a sudden then all of a sudden Jason's talking about you know how he's getting Doc's ball geez the guy who is like called out in the New York Times but somehow Jason Jason takes the flop but anyway so here's what's happened

I'm only telling the story I'm not trying to get victim points give a [ __ ] about that it's July 4th I think I put the kids down for the nap we you know stakes are going on the grills [ __ ] great day and then I'm on the peloton trying to be just a little less fat so I can be less fat than Saks so that the photo that we're Sachs is using I just come out 5 percent less fat than Saks and I look and I had posted a picture of the tree line outside my house two of the beautiful blueSky on July 4th and I said listen everybody take a break from Twitter go spend time with your family which is what I was about to do a 37-year a private equity douche from Boston does a reverse image

search on the tree line finds a bigger picture of the trees finds a picture of my pool based on that bigger picture in Google reverse image search and all these other tools and then DOCSIS me which basically means releasing your address he releases my address in my thread where ok because so i DM him and he's using his real name and he's got a LinkedIn profile and I said do you realize how dangerous this is he goes well you're stalking said journalists I said I am not stalking the journalist was she said you're stalking her so if you apologized to her and you take down the mean stuff you said about horror I'll take down your home address and I said a [ __ ] this is illegal number one and number two you gonna lose your Twitter account and then I said number three we're

connected your boss because you have a you're using your public name your boss is connected to 14 people of which like half are very close friends of mine and I'm calling your boss and I have all these screenshots of you doc see me what do you think is gonna happen on Monday and I just gave him my phone number in this weakness sick to your face okay let me just finish the story I tell the guy here's my phone number he calls me I said hey I know that you're a kid I know that you did something rash but this is actually you know a kind of a dangerous thing because you know there's serious mental illness in whatever point 1 percent of the population there's millions of people in now involved in this discussion it could be a security concern for me I'm not gonna post your address please don't post mine delete the tweet he was I refused to delete a tree until you whatever

and I said okay well I'm gonna call your boss on Monday we know these people in common she's going to fire you and you're gonna lose your job now I know you're only 23 or 24 and this doesn't matter to you and he goes uh I said how old are you said 37 I said you're 37 year olds are you married you said yeah I'm married I got a six-year-old they said now you want me to make you lose your job because you're so mad at me over nothing I said I don't want to call your boss on Monday and and tell them what you did because it will certainly result in you being fired and he goes oh I said you might want to go talk to your spouse about what you did and maybe get her perspective she writes me an apology letter we deleted it's all water under the bridge but I've been trying to tell people you have to be very careful when this gets too personal because there are your

dog whistling two crazy people who then might do something crazy anyway end of story I backed off the whole discussion because I just don't want to I want to finish my second book and I want to do podcast with guys like you and have a great time with my life and not be involved with a bunch of idiots and if so I want to go back to this Overton Window concept for a second so again just my idea so you take the word matters the word matters is in the Overton Window nobody can argue that the word matters is offensive if you if you prepend that word with vegetables it stays in the over too window if you put looking both ways before you cross the street now cash we're still there

going over to window if you say black lives as a term just without the word matters that's probably in the Overton Window sure you put black lives matters it's out the Overton Window and both sides politicized I think the left politicizes with this cancel culture and basically like an extreme form of political correctness and then the right politicizes by you know in in their way a vein of hypersensitivity and then a doubling down on this notion of an attacking of individual freedoms and free speech and in all of that both of these two groups miss the fact that they're both sort of the

same and they they're they're wronged in the same way but they're both not listening in the same way right so if I have to put something in the Overton Window that would address the us-china Cold War thing here's what I would say we all need energy we all need food and we all need technology right we need to sort of warm our houses we need to feed our bellies and we need to be able to be productive in some way so that we can make money and I think that everybody in the United States can agree that on these three dimensions there are some really simple things that we could do that

basically double down on us sovereignty and allow us to basically be more on the offensive so I'll give you a couple of ideas on the energy side is we need to continue to support energy independence and that will require subsidies and the reason why that's important in my opinion is that then what happens is it hastens and accelerates Russia and the Middle East not becoming relevant anymore because they are forced to monetize their oil sooner the Middle East probably disintegrates into 30 countries you know the Middle East was just a kind of a random exercise of you know basically

Americans and Europeans after the war divvying up a bunch of things it has no sensitivity to culture or language or anything so that probably you know - in a very different direction and Russia itself and Russia becomes less important because they just have to monetize otherwise they will lose their only source of revenue so that's one thing on energy that I think we could do that I think is relatively politically acceptable and inside the Overton Window second is on food which is that we have to double down on creating a completely independent food supply inside the United States and there are ways again where if we don't need to be building tanks and having 90 trillion

dollar programs for aircraft carriers anymore we could pour that money into US farms you know and give people like Friedberg a lot more money to go and actually make sure the united states has food security that in any situation and scenario we can feed the three hundred and thirty-odd million people inside of our borders and then the for the the third thing is on technology which is there are a critical bunch of inputs whether it's 5g chips rare earth materials or minerals things like cobalt and lithium which we need for batteries for climate change that we can go and basically co-opt because those things are concentrated in countries like Chile in places like in places like

Africa where we can actually do a better job of instilling government governance and security so that's my Jason back to your thing these aren't sexy ideas but they would work and I think they would work by both Republicans and Democrats and it's non-controversial I'll even put punch up the food part there's no reason why you know the same way we made water and public schools you know kind of a given in the United States nobody really has to worry about going getting water nobody has to worry about getting a basic education learning to read let's say it's not perfect obviously why not make healthy produce and some amount of healthy food so affordable in the United States that it's essentially free right and then you think about food security like how are we still

discussing food security with the amount of money and prosperity we have in this country make it free we've we've almost made energy free we have energy independence I'll say a Manhattan Project to make energy and food as free or de minimus as water would be just an amazing thing for us to rally around because then people can work on the next thing in their life their careers their family their pursuits Freiburg what do you think of the Overton Window and would you add something to it that we can all agree on that we could work on together and maybe unify the country as opposed to pulling guns on each other in the parking lots because of the color of our skin I'm reminded of a great moment in history when Will Smith and his friends blew up the UFO that came to attack Earth nothing brings us together like a common enemy so it could be that the unification is gonna be

you know in part driven by this cold war - and creating a common enemy in China it's gonna work for both the right on the left and create a lot of opportunity of jama' highlights and manufacturing and food production as there's a lot of tools available to us I think we could all sit here and speculate and I could pitch and plug all the companies I'm involved in I think are gonna play a role but I do think it's it's that moment where you know we are gonna coalesce around a common enemy and well I would be good if you actually shared one or two of those projects you're working on if you can actually we think well I mean I think here what you're working I've shared this before but I do think biomanufacturing which is that the technology whereby we engineer the DNA of microbes and those microbes then make molecules for us in a big fermentation tank in the same way

that we make beer or wine biomanufacturing can be used to make flavors and fragrances and now we're making materials like silks and plastics plastic equivalents and and more interestingly proteins for human consumption to replace animal proteins and the cost of production and the cost of energy associated with making these materials these molecules these proteins through bio manufacturing is literally several orders of magnitude less than the traditional technique which is just insane if you think about it in first principles basis of growing [ __ ] corn feeding it to a cow letting the cow grow up feeding it hundreds of gallons of water killing it chopping it up transporting it to a restaurant I mean the amount of energy that goes into making a pound of ground beef is

insane and the the greenhouse gas emissions and so on so I do believe that there is a big wave of bio manufacturing as an industry that is coming on the US this century and it will hopefully by the end of the century be the primary way that we're kind of producing a lot of the molecules that we consume and that we use for clothing and materials so then that does what to factories because you know you did explain earlier they a number of factories if we can bio produce that's right only our steaks not only our corn so I mean we could bio manufacture steel plastics cars not so much steel but alternatives to leather alternatives to cloth alternatives to so close to

clothes food so imagine instead of a traditional factory think about a factory historically being purpose-built so you build all these components to make one thing cement all this money making a giant machine that you put stuff in on one end and the same thing comes out over and over the other end and that's classic industrial revolution 1.0 and you know 20 century industrial revolution output in this century we are gonna build these giant printers they're not going to be single form machines that make one thing over and over they're gonna be systems that are giant fermentation tanks and in those fermentation tanks it's like you program them with software and the software in this case is genetic software you edit the genome of these organisms they take stuff on the input

and they make on the output a bunch of different stuff a replicator like in Star Trek and if there was seasonality and people needed something over the summer for July 4th versus what they need in Christmas or in the winter and ski season the same factory makes that thing where 10 20 30 40 50 years from this having an impact on the economy yes and we're seeing it now I mean look the number of artificial animal protein companies and the funding that they're getting its I think highlighting investor interest and appetite in backing the capex needed to get this to become a reality right now perfect day just raised 300 million dollars this week impossible foods rates forty million dollars from the Qatar Investment Authority you know obviously beyond meat is where they're I mean these companies are using these techniques of genetic engineering to make

microbes that make the proteins and the flavorings liquid 50 we put five hundred million into the PPP if we put 500 I'm sorry 500 billion and put 500 billion into this how much would it accelerate it pretty substantially and I think it goes from food to Pharma to materials and that's probably you know where you would see the be impact but again one system can make different materials can make different so we could be independent of other countries for food to Chalmers point and also Pharma which we are way to depend in correct on China yeah we're definitely a net exporter by the way you know our largest export partner is China so most of our soybeans in the

United States that we produce and soybeans are grown on 160 million acres on the US and it rotates half-and-half each year with corn but about two-thirds of our soybeans historically get exported to China so we are already food secured from a net resource perspective it's just the rest of the infrastructure in terms of turning that stuff in the meat and other stuff is where we're you know we probably have to build up a little bit in transmittance sacks let's swing the ball over to you when you hear the Overton Window idea is when you hear about this bio chemistry slurry tank revolution that Freebirds working on how does that change or evolve your view of our relationship with China and the political mess we're in right now in 2020 yeah well I think Cold War 2 does provide a lens to rethink and reevaluate a lot of these domestic political fights and so for

example are the big technology companies you know Google Facebook and so on are they these you know even when ah police that need to be broken up or are they the crown jewels of the American economy that needs to be protected from Chinese espionage you know is the free enterprise system this you know horribly you know oppressive racist thing or is it actually the engine of prosperity that's built this country you know is freedom of speech an outdated principle or is it something we we want to you know that that should be canceled or is it something we want to fight for and I think that you know when you start thinking about these issues you know in the you know through the lens

of Cold War 2 it provides an opportunity to kind of re-evaluate them and think about what's really and and hopefully it can provide a little bit of a Unova unifying force in America not because we want China to be an enemy but just because we want to maintain a sense of national greatness and I you know it's not something I just want to give up on I have a question for Friedberg are our schools gonna be back in the fall because I cannot deal with my kids being at home yeah I think it's gonna be a mixed bag it seems like I mean if you follow this this is a political decision right it's not a scientific decision and so there are different politics around nationally that are affecting this and there are some schools that seem like they've got processes and methods of

being comfortable some of them were just throwing everything out the window and say I don't give a [ __ ] if the kids got to go back to school and some of them who are being very conservative and saying you know we're not ready for that we can't take the risk so you'll definitely see a mixed bag I don't know where you're living Jamaa I don't know what's gonna happen per se but it's definitely a local apology Friedberg is it safe to send our kids back to a 10-person pod in a school in California I mean that's like asking if it's safe to cross a train track you know you can look left you can look right but yeah you're crying you know a busy train intersection during during rush hour right you know it's hard to say what level of safe is safe we know that kids are less

susceptible to any sort of health risk themselves from the virus and it looks like there's a lot of studies showing that they're likely less the virus is less transmissible through kids especially kids under the age of 14 and so it seems like there's there's some theories that say that look it's these h2 receptors whereby the virus enters the cells really start to present when you turn 10 years old at a greater rate and you know it scales up to 14 and above 14 you're kind of an adult from an h2 receptor point of view and then there's the severity of the infection as we all know is really more of a significant issue for much elderly people so when you take those factors into account the virus is likely less transmissible amongst children therefore a bunch of kids get

together they're not going to transmit it to each other and and it's likely going to be less severe even if there is an infection for kids the risk is just about are the teachers comfortable and what happens when they go home and there have been a number of letters that you guys have probably seen op-eds and whatnot written in papers by teachers saying I'm nervous to go back to school I don't want to teach this fall I don't want to take the risk for my health I take care of my mom or my dad or what have you and so there's a lot of competing interests let's go let's go around the horn of who's sending their kids back to school I'll start I posted on Calacanis comm yesterday that we've decided as a family that we're starting a micro school we put out a call for a teacher and you know just looking at teacher salaries they don't get paid particularly well in our society as we all know they're underpaid so we think we can come over the top and provide a you know a better financial arrangement for a teacher and then have one to five students and we're going to

just create a micro school that's hard that's our current plan our kids did go to camp this summer in a small ten person or less pod and we felt that was safe everybody was tested and it was outdoors but for me being indoors at a school with 300 pods of 10 and I think the best teachers are not going to show up and are my kids don't learn over Xoom I don't know about your kids but it's not working so we're starting a or we're gonna roll our own school and hopefully find one or two families who want to chop up the cost with us or we'll we'll just pick up the tab and invite one or two families if they don't have the means to do it but what we're gonna we're going to go solo for 20 21 free burger mouths what do you thinking right now because we're only seven eight weeks out from this right we're less than two months I really think like look not everybody Jason is going to

be in a position to hire teachers in fact most everybody won't be agree I think it's I want to send my children back to school I refuse to create some alternative reality for them I think it's really important that they are with their friends I think that we're not really thinking strongly enough about the social implications for you know children let's just say like you know you take an 8 year old or an you're old or a ten-year-old and you deprive them of their friends for a year I mean that's an enormous part of their life where they like a prison sentence they've been socially isolated you know I just think it's a really bad outcome so I think that obviously from a public

health perspective we want to keep our teachers safe I just think that it's so important that we realize that you know we are going to impact an entire generation of kids I think that if you're 18 or 19 and have had you know 18 or 19 years of normal teenage them you know and and and growing up that it's okay if you miss a year or you have to you know do your first year of college remotely like it sucks but you can deal but I really worry about these kids in in primary school and middle school it's really unfair yeah I mean with our plan was to try to get to four or five students small bubble and then you know have outdoor the problem is than the Northeast I just got to school it's you're inside with a heating system of the clothes ventilation scheme that was built in 1920 and I think it avoids the real key thing which is like I don't think you go to school to learn as much as you go to school to socialize socialize I mean you learn as a by-product because

everybody socializes not everybody learns right agreed and so there it's it's an enormous ly important formative experience for a child to be around 15 or 20 of their other kids and to be in the playground to deal with all the adversity that comes with normal life of a kid that's the biggest thing that I think we're depriving them of and I understand that you know there's an important reason to hold these kids back but I just want to appreciate that behaviorally and psychologically this is not gonna be for free hmm Freebird sacks what would you know I I guess I agree with both mouth and free bargain on this that the there are huge benefits to going back and the risk

to kids are low in terms of getting it and also they're less viral if they do but Israel sort of a strong recent counter example where they recently open schools and now all of a sudden they've got a spike so you know we're gonna send our kids back but I expect it to be a little bit of a [ __ ] show I think that the schools will reopen and they'll do all this plan a there'll be all these like pods and half days and smaller groups and that kind of thing and then somebody's gonna they'll be like one case either a kid or you know one family and then all of a sudden they're gonna shut down again I guess I you know they're spending all this time planning but I wonder if they're really gonna have contingency plans for what happens when there's a case or yeah I think they'll just shut down it's just it it's too scary for a child to die or a teacher to die and

people at the overreaction to it will be to shut everything down right and then we're gonna be back to our kids when we sent our kids to camp for the three weeks they went man it was just they were different kids right and such a mots point they did their little social animals they need to roll around like little baby tigers and and play and if they don't have that it dramatically affects behavior and we saw it in only three months I mean 12 these kids are gonna go mental yeah I think that basically where the country is at is that we're an undeclared Sweden you know we've basically that the virus has become endemic it's everywhere you know we've basically given up on

trying to contain or stop it and and so now we're just on this path to hurt immunity and you know it's basically what Sweden did except we haven't declared that's what our plan is and so it's haphazard and but it's it seems like kind of were by default it is headed for herd immunity Freiburg as we wrap up here and I got one final question I want to do after this and then we'll wrap Freiburg what's your thoughts kids in schools I know you have kids I'm not sure the ages if they're like would be going back to it I think they're a little bit on the younger side so if you did have eight nine ten twelve year olds sending them back to school starting your own what are your thoughts yeah I mean I'd I would probably be a little ridiculous and send them and test them every other day at home and you know you can get this back to Dickinson test system now for 250 bucks

it's a handheld device and these test strips cost 20 say the name of it again the vector Dickenson it's a vector with a V B BB ways that alright are they available yeah you can buy them through medical retailers and yeah the handheld device that they use in hospitals and stuff today it's 2 or 50 bucks and there's a little test kit that you buy it'll probably cost 20 to 30 bucks it'll be available next month per test or 15 to 20 bucks and it takes five minutes to get a result and so you literally could do it in the school yard before they go into the building yeah it's that you could test you I would test my kids every day if I had a my kids or my one kids in preschool the

other ones do but you add I do a little pinprick on their finger in no no if you can just do a little swap in the nose so okay yeah deep no swab or you know halfway there's data that shows now that you can actually do a throat swab and you know get a pretty good reading on it so you know whatever the protocol is it probably me pretty non-invasive and you can get a result now that's expensive for most people you know that's not expensive for a school not expensive for a school that's right and so I think that company will do well with that testing system they've launched because it actually tests not for the RNA but for the protein is this a public company yeah and the stocks done well and and and this test does really well because a test for the protein not the RNA so it's actually a much you know much easier test scientifically to do you're not trying to pick

up specific nucleotides or nucleic acids you're trying to pick up a protein and so it's yeah it's pretty effective all right yeah if the election was held today we always like to talk about this a bit they wanted SLOS when we talked about it we talked about Oprah last time that was our sleeper candidate I'm changing but I'm changing our yummy Duckworth Tammy Duckworth is now my sleeper vice presidential I'm with I'm with the Tomas on that absolutely 100 now who's gonna win if the election was held today Sachs I'll let you go first since it's the most heartbreaking for you Biden Biden strategy is working his strategy is basically to say nothing to be you know tied in

his basement and and but it's working because even though he's a cipher I think people he's basically a protest vote against Trump and Trump you know is you know seen as very divisive and inflammatory and I think the American people at this point just want to push a button and make it stop and right now Biden seems like the make it stop button yeah okay and should Biden I'll add to the question to be a bit too will end on this to this double question who wins today and should buy it in debate Trump or is it better for him to just opt out of the debates and not risk it buy-ins would you advise well I think buying strategy right now I was working I don't know why he would change it I mean so he should not there's three debates on the books he agreed to

should he do the three debates yes or no if you were advising him so I think he probably will not be able to to duck that these debates forever I think I mean it seems unlikely that you know if you are advising him would you tell him to do it or not I would I think I would tell him is strategy is working which is to say nothing and don't go to the debates if you can get away with it I'm not sure he'll be able to get away with it so I think eventually people eventually the American public will turn its attention to the election but part of part of the reason why his strategy is working is because Trump is running such a bad campaign in fact it feels like Trump

hasn't even really started to campaign there's no logic to it for sure yeah well it's you know normally what the incumbent does especially when they've got a lot of money is they use this summer to define the opponent they start running a lot of ads seeking to define their opponent and and you know where are those ads where is that attempt to define Biden I mean I think it I think it's hard because you know cuz it's it's hard to define Biden as as a radical who represents these woke mobs Biden doesn't even know how to say the word woke correctly I think he's called him woke

so that's absolutely right by my four-year-old who needed her diaper change right all right but but the fact that Biden is so clueless and seems like so out of touch actually helps them because I mean the way the way for Trump to win the election okay let's let's put it that way is to make the alternative to trump the destruction of Mount Rushmore right I mean if if Trump can somehow convince the American public that the election of Joe Biden means the ripping down of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and and Mount Rushmore and the destruction of capitalism that is the way for him to win that's the you know but he has to actually listen well yes he

has to actually be able to tag Biden with that why didn't we tortilla why did Peter teal drop Trump he's you've got a 30-year relationship with Peter teal you talked to him on the regular why did teal drop him I don't know that he has I think you have to get him on the show to talk all right there you go good deflection best DC who wins and should he do those three debates Biden yeah yeah I think you can't get away from them I wouldn't make it a big issue because the debates are gonna be kind of this random crappy kind of experience you know I I don't even know whether they'll be in the same place I think they should try to make sure that they're not in the same place so that it's done almost over zoomed like you can you can [ __ ] the effort the the usefulness of these debates in many ways there really isn't much that can happen in the debates the reality is that people

aren't voting for Biden they are voting against Donald Trump any chance Trump wins and they are voting against the sheer incompetence of him and his family and you know it's going to be very difficult for him to overturn it there is one thin path for him to win which is to absolutely shower America with money close to the election day so if there is a Multi multi trillion dollar stimulus bill that passes and it literally puts money into the hands of working Americans especially in the swing states it could work now the one thing I'll tell you is if you looked at the exit in Georgia

it's scary because there were 230,000 I think more Democrats out of the exit polls in the Georgia primary than there were Republican now just hold the phone here for a second because under no calculus on electoral college did we ever have to think that there is probabilistically any chance that a Democrat wins Georgia and I think what this speaks to is a changing demographic longitudinally and this is not a racial thing meaning this is an age thing where these young people are very different politically and so if you think that there is an even remote chance that Donald Trump

loses Georgia don't even worry about Minnesota and Pennsylvania and Florida because he would have already lost those in order to lose George also this pandemic and work from home is gonna result in people if it is a sustained work for me we have scarred the American economy guys and we don't reduce our extent of the injury because you know you know the extent of the injury when you get you know step out of the chair that first moment the cast gets taken off and you put a little pressure on the leg to see how bad it is and we don't know how bad it is except we know that it's pretty bad

so you know I think that all roads kind of look like Biden I think the very narrow path that Donald Trump has is you know a Multi multi trillion dollar stimulus built directly into the hands of Americans Freiberg is he gonna win yes or no should he do the debates yes or no if the vote were to happen today he would win Joe Biden would win I think he's actually more likely to win based on news that just hit the wire which we haven't talked about today which is it looks like Facebook is gonna ban all political ads this year what yeah I do that obviously the Facebook invite for survival right now that ad camp amazing how a bunch of advertisers taking a one-month pause all

of a sudden brings Zuckerberg to the table amazing how my my well-timed short thesis tweet plays Oh yum yum so I think that works that obviously works to Biden's favor all right that's the case and then - my point on the debate if I were Biden what I would do right now is I would go on Twitter and I would say release your tax returns and I'll debate you and I would repeat that tweet twice a day and love it the Thurber gets the dunk 360 Danza dungeon that's a card Eldersburg for free burger wins the debate this show is sponsored by nobody however I'm gonna ask my bestie see if somebody were to make a $25,000 donation to charity would you allow me to read an ad for 30

seconds during the pot at some point no but I'll match it to wherever you want to go no [ __ ] ads ever I love and I love you guys I miss you love you bestie see I love you love you free love you sacks was great playing golf let's get let's go off let's [ __ ] golf man I'm losing my mind we'll see you a little let's do a little small little NASA boys a little time you buy on the all in podcast tell your friends to tune in if they want to listen to something intelligent bye-bye