E59: Twitter's content warning algo, equity audits, politicians trading stocks, Fed's next move

let's talk about the sweaters okay let david let's start with you because i love it i love it david i love that i decided to up my sweater game for chamoth this is tom ford love it tom ford tom ford the buttons are made out of endangered rhino horn we just lost a third of the audience so my sweater is a very light italian cashmere made by a company called doriani doryani cashmere uh this is this right here this right here is a little uh young calf leather very soft very soft and the buttons uh like david's uh are made from sharkton and for those of you at home who would

like to spend 150 and stay warm may i recommend the marine layer you can find it on union street jacket i mean how you can also find that jacket on turk street how tilted is sweater karen listening to this sweater karen if you're listening i mean you must never reveal sweaty karen got back to me and she was like oh my god he's so tilted i think i know who she is sweater karen can kiss my brown ass oh so i jade comes home last night i kid you not she's like i i don't like you in the t-shirts i got you some sweaters and i was you know we're going to the mountains for the for the holiday and i was like did you watch the podcast

about the sweater she's like no i don't listen to your podcast i was like okay fair enough um and i'm like i'm looking at these things through all these boxes and she's got this bunch of sweaters i started like what did you spend on this she said three thousand dollars i was like i'm not comfortable spending three thousand dollars on a sweater that's half a second eight of them i think that's the box the sweater came in was three thousand so i got my three quarters and i'm feeling good i'm feeling really good i feel pretty sexy and i'll be honest [Music] [Music] hey everybody hey everybody welcome to the holland podcast yes breaking into the top 50 podcasts week

after week because of you the amazing audience telling your friends it's been two weeks so it's week and week all right we that's what i said week after week a week a week a week and a week the top 40 podcast episodes in the world thanks to the fans with me of course the dictator himself in a uh amazing sweater light light cashmere the consultant of science i found out from his mom she much prefers the sultan of science to queen of quinoa so that's what we're going with going forward david freeburg who had a great party uh up in um and i really enjoyed going and sacks who

didn't go to beeps party or to friedberg's party he stayed home and played chess on his iphone the rain man himself david sachs welcome to the pod everybody okay you want me two new york stores my one true bestie jason calacanis it's true no that's not true i i really wanted to come but that's breastfeeding and so i couldn't come the helipad was shut down jamal couldn't land you were getting breastfed oh no it was um this great show called afterlife from ricky gervais there's literally a scene in it where a woman they work for a local newspaper that's going out of business and they're going

to do local stories and the big story in town is a woman is making pudding uh incredibly delicious pudding and it's from her breast milk and they go and cover the story anyway i'll just leave it at that it's pretty amazing story do you want to know my two new york stories or not yeah let's hear it what would you say you had a helicopter story what's that helicopter story helicopter is also new york story so uh i uh went to deep dale to play golf with uh a certain well-known individual and uh we chopper we chop her back a finance individual uh media well-known political individual

okay so this is not a rock and roller you do not want to step foot in a helicopter with a rocket no though but so here so here's my story which is why i i totally freaked out about helicopters and i can't this was eight years ago we played deep dill which is just you know outside new york get in this the chopper lands in the middle of thing i was like okay that's fine you know and we're going and i'm already feeling kind of skittish i don't like helicopters get to the east side heliport and eastside heliport is basically right by the east river and so the helicopter descends and one of the skis doesn't actually

land on the [ __ ] oops thing and so it does a little tilty poops and then the guy comes back up and then he lands you i honestly like i i have never been more scared in my life all right that's it and i was like never again any besties it's a bestie band for life we're making a pack here nobody in [ __ ] friends it's crazy so that's why i'm on new york city last new york story was i was there two days ago or for the last couple days we're staying in the middle of the in the middle of this omicron breakout uh by the way had a beautiful dinner uh after the game draymond kevin durant me bunch of friends did you go to the game

no we went to the private room at carbone it was so brutal though i have to tell you i feel so disgusting with myself i had a work dinner and i have sushi at the work dinner and then you know dratex after the game he's like hey look we're all having dinner carbon i said okay i'll head through i went to the hotel i called nat and i said i'm brushing my teeth and she said but you're going out and i said yes but if i brush my teeth i'm not going to eat a second center dinner and i thought you know and then but i made a key mistake but i didn't floss so i was unflossed

but i brushed my teeth okay i show up and [ __ ] i lose it and yes wine and dessert and bread vodka it was really brutal and by 3am i stumbled home and i felt so bad because i had to wake up at like you know 8 o'clock in the morning no my first meeting was at 7 45. well congratulations to stuff hi by the way incredible no shooter of all time he's a virtuoso yeah anyways that was my that was my new york story i gained here's my here's mine i gained one kilo 2.2 pounds i gained in two days uh here's my car bone story hardest thing to hardest reservation to get in

new york saks is like jake i'll need to help me a favor what's the best place in new york to do a closing dinner i'm like i got you i got my guy get my guy on the horn my guy's like okay i got you car bone friday [ __ ] night eight o'clock hardest ticket to new york you know what saks does goes dark friday afternoon 1pm he's like yeah we're not gonna make it i'm like oh my god my friend is like j cal your guy burned the carbon res that was the bird ipo i was going to take the founder out to dinner that night at carbone and then it turned into like the big group dinner

with like 30 people so it moved over to by the way the the the private room which is like you know not in the restaurant but it's like a little bit on the side it only fits like 15 20 people so it's not like you can and that's that's then it's really tight how what can i ask your question what was steph's uh how did steph feel no steph wasn't there draymond kevin me benny fowler morale but just a bunch of us you say kevin kevin durant yeah kevin durant still ah friendly with uh he's honestly he's he's such a great guy i love kevin durant he really is really really really aggressive

super super sensitive cool he's friends again with uh always always he was always i mean i think that when they had their blow up it was more like their brothers and it was just a little bit like when you started talking like joe pesci did did kevin durant ever start talking with joe pesci hey it's time baseball all right uh it was an eventful week on twitter we're only one week into the new twitter ceos reign jack is gone and already david sacks has been flagged it's a guy it can't be a coincidence that you were talking about them flagging accounts at the end of free

speech and then pull it up on the screen everybody investors should be spending their time finding good investments not endlessly debating interest rates inflation and tax policy but that's the uncertainty washington has created it's a great tweet i like that tweet actually and then the flag the conversation from sax has been flagged some conversations can get heavy don't forget the human behind the screen do you think that this is that's machine learned or do you think that that's an editor that goes in there and actually manually flags machine learned right

there i think that's a great question but what is but what is in there that actually triggers we're debating washington interest rates tax policy washington i'm not sure i'm not sure that you could build or maybe it's the ratio i don't i don't know how you would build a function that would weight this in a way where this could get flagged of all the things you could say with those words this is so benign well i think it's the kind of it seems to me this thing's trying to ward off bullying attacks on sex which i don't think saks needs to be too worried about all right because they're telling this to people who would reply you're saying

it's there to protect me it's to protect you it's one of those things where they're like trying to get people to not insult you in the comments they're talking about them do you get a lot of insults and comments on your tweets oh undoubtedly but so it could just be a point this this tweets comments section was pretty benign oh right it may not be about the tweet it might be about the replies no it might be that this wasn't that hot this wasn't that hot i think your mother might be onto something you know michelle chandler got the same label around the same day for a tweet that seemed totally innocuous too

so what i wonder about is you know is this labeled to protect us or is it a way is it sort of a passive aggressive way for snowflakes at twitter to like label people they don't like and sort of suggest they're vaguely disreputable i don't think it's that i don't think it's right it's a left wing it's a it's the it's the libs going after the the sacks you're powering any liberals getting obviously like left-wing people wait a second there seems to be a blanket attempt at trying to kind of mute the tone a little bit across the the debating that happens and the comments that come across in the replies and i think they're just trying to like get everyone to tone it

down a bit i mean before you tweet it it'd be really interesting to know whether this was algorithmic or was editorial because i think if it's editorial it does actually i don't think it's as extreme as what david just said but it skews more in the realm of like people with an axe to grind can flag one thing over another or not right but if it's algorithmic i think that that algorithm probably just needs a lot of tweaking because it's not well anyway this doesn't it say that there's a person behind the tweet it's like trying to get people to not say it's charming the morning is charming it's trying to get you to be nice to

each other it's ridiculous like your mom inserting herself and being like now remember it's it's there to suggest that there might be something wrong with the content that's being posted well you know in other words in other words the content is so triggering that you know it needs warning labels do you guys think that paternalism has a role on social networks to try and multiply the the kind of discourse being too acrimonious like i think we need some some of the transparency that jack dorsey repeatedly promised at all the congressional hearings remember when he got hauled up

there he promised that they would give more transparency about the way that their algorithms worked where is that and it hasn't been delivered up they promised it now jack dorsey skipped out of town and there's a new guy in charge well we need to know how these algorithms work because they are pressing their thumb on the scale you know of debate in the marketplace of ideas by suggesting that some ideas are sketchier than others they should just put here this was algorithmically done based on they should explain it under there should be a little question mark you hope for the question mark based on the words in the thread it feels like things are getting heated

here we did this with an algorithm or users reported this as a heated thread so we put this here or a human decided no we just decided yeah but you want it to be an open marketplace of ideas but the fact is it's twitter's marketplace of ideas yeah and facebook's is facebook's marketplace of ideas and at the end of the day i don't think you're going to get away from any of these centralized social networks having anything but some degree of moderation to play a role in a related thing they didn't just target sacks also chamata you didn't see this but uh they flagged one of your tweets uh just this afternoon pull it up as you can see here

it's a slightly different one it says layers are for players this conversation will drift to five thousand dollar sweaters so a big warning for tremont just and for the people replying be careful this well that that that must be then that must have been human uh you know that's human energy for sure and uh this one came in or prof g another one came in for prof g so and in this case i think they're actually trying to think about uh the public good this guy is full of [ __ ] you thought jc benny would beat amazon how many how many hours of masterclass

adobe photoshop did you take to to get this little joke i didn't make these my meme team did i'm convinced that there's two ways to raise your next fund in silicon valley one have one of the top 50 podcasts in the world or two have a strong meme game and i'm going for both sax now has a warning on his and this is how they put it on your profile page exactly this is crazy warning this person has interesting things to say if you if you're too interesting you get labeled now it's really crazy no i saw jake i saw jacob having too much fun with this and i'm like i gotta get in on this act

you're like i need a meme team yeah if anybody out there i don't care if you're i need a comedian i'm i'm willing to pay on a pay per meme a pay-per-viral whatever it takes okay uh in a related story democrats want racial equity audits at tech companies according to the washington free beacon uh which sacks correct me if i'm wrong that's some sort of wacky right-wing uh publication uh never heard of it okay washington freebie again if instituted orders would have veto power over every product or initiative that's not an exaggeration is what the story says one proposal from house democrats would

find companies 20 000 a day for not completing biennial independent racial equity audits a left-wing non-profit called color of change is pushing for these audits last week their president called for independent auditors to vet new products from tech companies before they were released in front of congress 2018 color of change successfully pushed facebook into completing an audit they called for more restrictions on trump's posts clear change itself pushed for trump to be permanently banned from the platform just so you know this is exactly the the rough version of what happened to microsoft in their doj settlement their anti-trust

settlement was effectively an oversight where lawyers at the doj were the product managers and had not effectively veto right but you had to approve product features before you could push them for 10 years you know this is essentially what caused bombers rain just be so you know inaudib to do something and you'd have to go to these random folks who didn't really have the context to make a a decision one way or the other on future so i mean the idea that they would do this is a pretty it's pretty crazy i need a point of clarification here i've heard the term uh racial audits or racial equity audits my understanding of those were to

understand the composure of the company uh in terms of you know the diversity in the company but this is something different this is in the product to make sure the product isn't racist can products be racist what's an example of a product being racist i don't understand what they would find let me unpack this for you okay what they are basically saying is that these big companies and for example they've called on google to conduct one of these audits they want all these big companies to conduct these audits these so-called auditors are actually political consultants who are members of

the democratic party who are friends of the senators who are pushing for this they're political activists it's a gift and it's partly a griff but it's more than that because you know when you conduct an audit let's just take this word audit for a second okay you bring in a big five accounting firm and they will check your numbers according to generally accepted accounting principles gap and make sure that the numbers are what you purported them to be that is the purpose of an audit and if the auditor ever says that you've done anything wrong like you have to fix it there's no choice or you can appeal to some other auditor

and have them redo the work okay according to these generally accepted principles with an equity audit what exactly are the principles that are being enforced or checked here there is no generally accepted list of equity principles that must be enforced these companies basically you have to do whatever this political activist tells you to do i mean it's essentially like bringing in a party commissar to now take over the company or at least be inside the company telling the executives and officer of the company what to do it's something that frankly the ccp would do it does feel a little like uh yeah stasi-like didn't we have all of the companies

uh on their own from twitter to google to facebook release their own diversity stats years ago i think this is not more than diversity it's about equity it's about equity so let's explain the difference in what that means this is somehow how the companies run like the day-to-day life of the employees there not just the composure and the breakdown of the employees look equity equity means anything that progressives say it means we've seen on this program before how equity has dumped the shark there's now uh there's a provision in the infrastructure bill for tree equity so i mean really any disparity that occurs that progressives

don't like can now be called a violation of equity and this gives them the authorization to come in there and start giving orders it's very weird that i don't understand how the product then review gets stopped meant to throttle you from a leasing product as a punitive let me give you an example so recently you know i wrote a piece called the the no buy list where i basically you had companies like paypal and some of these other financial firms were starting to deny service to customers to users based on their political affiliations and not just like people who are in you know well-known hate groups that like everybody sort of you know issues

and wants to stay away from but these are people with relatively down the middle conservative you know conservative groups and they were being denied service by you know fintech firms so now i'm not saying that this is what this means but if this equity auditors tells you well look i don't think it's equitable to allow these conservative groups to you know be a user of your product well what's the company going to do they're going to have to listen to that and and that that is a plausible scenario given that it's already occurred we've all we've we've said this so many times on the pod but i just want

to say it again for because i guess a lot of folks are new and listening whenever you hear equity used by a politician it usually means there's a power grab involved yeah because if you really want things to be fair you want things to be um equal meritocracy you want equality but whenever you start throwing the word equity around and say we want racial equity it's a bunch of you know a small number of people who you know basically have and live by what i you know what's often called luxury beliefs who want to judge other people who want to be morally absolutist and then who want to basically like uh you know exercise a power grab and we have to push back on that stuff because

it's just a slippery slippery slope well this also seems like overbearing red tape for companies i mean if the company has no problems no complaints against it you know releases their diversity numbers like what is the point of going in and auditing them let's use let's use an example that builds on what david said let's take square okay one of the one of the most incredible things that square did was in a hackathon essentially build a cash app yeah and one of the most incredible things that happened in the cash app was that it really started to blow up in urban communities okay and it starts to normalize banking

opening up bank accounts having more savings understanding you know an on-ramp into crypto you know cash app has probably done more to get black and brown people into crypto and to save money and to understand their cash than almost anybody else as as a customer almost explicit strategy and so is somebody supposed to go in there and just you know arbitrarily judge whether there's too many white people that work at square or not enough black people and so xyz thing has to change or such and such a feature doesn't actually speak to folks so you can't do it it's insanity it's like also to se to your point sax is what are the what do these people know

like what is their qualification and what what's the goal right and and to build on jamaa's point if these senators so i think cory booker was the one who proposed this if these senators want those specific policies implemented in the fortune 500 let them pass a bill to do it and let all of our elected representatives vote on that bill and then we can see if it'll really if it's popular enough to pass and whether it passes constitutional muster they won't do that because these bills if they were directly concretized for international would be very unpopular so instead what they do is tell you well we're not going

to do this directly we're going to put pressure on these big companies to hire one of our political friends again this like commissar-like person and empower them to tell these companies what to do so it's it's really kind of insidious what they're doing and they're kind of covering it all up with these nice sounding names i mean who could be against a racial equity audit right because yes if you're if you're against it you must be a racist and you must not believe in auditing companies right right word game you have to you just it's a word game it's it's using words that are really loaded and mean a lot to a lot of us

right if i hear racism and race you're triggering it's not triggering but my ears perk up and i have i have a lot of inbuilt opinions on it that have been governed by 45 years as living as a as a brown man and so okay it stands to reason that i'm going to pay attention but on the surface if you say racial equity audit it also doesn't seem actually all that bad it seems like reasonably benign and that seems like an okay thing to do it's just that most of us then stop at that point and move on right but if you actually look at the rules again i would just say whenever political frameworks use the word we need to create more equity

the outcomes are horrible for example look in healthcare you know if we have used this idea of healthcare equity health equity and we've misused it to such a degree and all we see is that now the system is so perverted it also doesn't work for the majority of people that have actually had the health care system work for it right like at the top of the pecking order has always been white men have always gotten the best care and we've always measured our health care progress in america based on the longevity of men white men you know 78 79 80 years old and then it started to degrade and people were curious what was happening and underneath it all was just a bunch of

power grabs under the realm of equity we passed all these crazy laws we basically didn't do anything to really create more accountability and a cost based system and here we are so at some point when the citizenry hears that word you're gonna have to put your thinking cap on and actually take the opposite view which is hold on this is a really nice sounding word it may not be what i think it is and i got to pay attention because more than if i didn't hear the word at all anything you have uh on race freidberg representing uh south africans fundamentally i i don't

think this is about race j call i think this is about power power it feels like a power grip also it feels like a little grip it feels like a little bit of a grift i know i had heard on the back channel that a lot of the people who are criticizing some big tech companies who were getting you know i'm not going to say who or under what modern sweaters sweater karen is that okay but there was a group of people who are like attacking big sur why don't karen if she has an opinion on sweater she must have an opinion on racial equity come on okay enough leave spread of caring the issue is um they would complain and create

these you know basically you know twitter mobs and then they'd say oh yeah and hire us for twenty thousand dollars we'll come in and fix the problem for you so they were creating the twitter to then come in and solve the problem that's so good and i was like oh wow that is that's so brutal that's so dirty no i mean these hr consultants who've written these books like on the was it uh d'angelo or whatever on white fragility and you know how how to be an anti-racist i mean they're all making a fortune in corporate fees you know charging 20 30 000 per per gig i mean it is absolutely a racket i'm not a fan of equality of outcome i'm

more a fan of equality of opportunity and i think um absolutely many many of these sorts of folks i try and identify methods to drive a quality of outcome and it inhibits the competitive forces that cause the best person the best idea the best business the best market model to win and you know i think it's easy to conflate the two when you don't really think through it but it is certainly appropriate and reasonable to make sure that folks aren't discriminated against when they apply for a job i don't think it's appropriate to then apply considerations of race and other factors when people are equally in the same job

on who gets to have the chance at the bonus it is the best performer that should have the chance at the bonus and the same should be true in marketplaces and the same should be true with business um and i think that what we're really seeing is this fundamental effort to try and generate equality and outcomes um in lots of different manifestations and we're seeing it more frequently and more severely than we've seen it historically but it's not uh i don't think it's the right model and it's only going to lead to demise of marketplace dynamics and the things that cause forces for success and progress

to wimp you know we we mentioned this a couple times i'll just say it again but we are about to have probably the most significant movement and questioning of equity versus equality um because i think in the next month maybe in the next two months we're going to sort of see a pretty strict opinion on affirmative action and if you talk to legal scholars the overwhelming consensus is this is gone um and you know we're gonna have to figure out how to rebuild you know what was a really important system that tried to give folks at least you know getting to the starting line in

the same way but it's not gonna it's not really gonna exist in this in the same way shape or form speaking of karen's uh elizabeth warren uh was bashing elon over taxes and elon um has a twitter handle um with some followers and he responded uh elizabeth warren says let's change the rigged tax code so the person of the year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else unfortunately for uh elizabeth warren uh elon musk is pretty good at twitter he replied and if you opened your eyes for two seconds you would realize i pay more taxes than any american in history this

year you pay which is i guess true he paid more in taxes now than any american in history as a side note elizabeth warren has a 12 million net worth and i saw that she paid no taxes on her equity holdings because she didn't sell anything which is how the tax code works and uh elon then responded uh don't spend it all at once oh wait you already did and then you know after the warm-up replies you uh really you know uh got in the zone and uh like steph curry just started draining half court shots he rationed her everything she heard her with 50 000 rupees yeah you remind me of when i was a kid and my

friends angry mom would just randomly yell at everyone for no reason please don't call the manager on me senator karen elon also responded to bernie sanders uh tweet today about climate change bernie sanders said when future generations asked us what did we do to stop the climate crisis how would we answer and uh elon set and so great tweets uh but to the bigger picture did these people even know what's going on in the world no they woke up they woke up on the wrong side of the tilt bed yeah because uh in in like a 24-hour period he was the time

person of the year the ft person of the year and they just went into super mega tilt mode and the buildback batter act got shelved and um well i mean you know i think we we talked about this last week but that bill is dead now i mean they pushed it to march to basically avoid a down vote nothing's going to happen david you're right we said last week wouldn't it be hilarious if elon said kill it and then it got killed well i don't i don't think that that's why the bill is dying i think the real reason is that we now see a fed posture which is actually pretty reasonable which actually says oh wait there's way too

much money in the system as it is yeah you know the fed two days ago basically said we're going to see up to three rate hikes next year probably 50 basis points each so you know it's basically acknowledging that these these last you know several years we have printed way too much money and they're trying to fix the problem that they created so that's i think the real reason and then the cbo comes out and basically says the congressional budget office and says this thing is a white albatross that's going to cost way more than you guys think it will and so it puts biden in this very awkward situation which is you know on the one hand he supports

powell um and you know he supports institutions or has historically like the cbo but he effectively then has to push back on both of them all in one false to try to ram this bill down people's throats and the support is i think it's crumbling and so you know to save face they basically said well we'll put a pin on this and we'll revisit it in march but you guys know what's going to happen in the next three months there's going to be some other crisis most folks will forget and it may just allow them to move on without having to actually deal with the potential of this

thing getting defeated which would just be i think cataclysmically bad for exact for democrats you were on cnbc today i thought you said something really important where you said hey listen maybe if we just calm things down for a year we can you know get through i'm not sure what the exact quote was but maybe you could unpack that sentiment you had on cnbc today because i thought that was pretty important yeah well i mean i agree with what jamal said this um i mean this this bbb bill was particularly anachronistic once the 6.8 percent you know inflation print came out in other words we're in a

hyperinflationary environment and here comes this bill that the cbo says if you know over 10 years would cost five trillion dollars that's the last thing we need is more money printing when you know we've got this inflationary fire out of control so i think that is why the the bill is being shelved probably not to return um i think that the larger problem that we have in the markets is that this there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty being created right now by washington we've had tremendous uncertainty over spending over taxes over interest rates and the conversations that i'm having with friends who are investors in really

every asset class real estate vc crypto the conversations are all the same what's interest rates going to do what's the macro picture going to be i've never seen investors who should be focused on hey do i miss this company or buy this building or whatever those aren't the conversations it's all everyone's a macro economist now and so we're also distracted by this and so now the fed a couple of days ago finally gave us clarity i mean what they basically said is they're gonna accelerate the taper they'll end quantitative easing at the end of q1 and then we're basically gonna get explain what that means to people who don't know

what they've been purchasing and why yeah i mean quantitative easing is kind of a weird term what it means is the fed has been going into the bond market and buying bonds um i think basically mortgage-backed securities and treasuries and they've been buying i think about 90 billion a month they're going to cut that back to 60 billion a month and that'll continue just to explain it a little bit more when you do that what you're doing is you're giving somebody that owns those bonds money okay so the fed prints money the government prints a hundred dollars takes that hundred dollars steps into the market and takes something from you

in this case it's a bond and gives you that freshly printed hundred dollars what are you going to do well you're probably going to go and spend that you're going to buy other things and that's the cycle of inflation that quantitative easing basically creates and so when you call when you talk about tapering what that means is slowing down the money printing machine and slowing down you stepping in the market and buying assets with money that you've created out of thin air and it's up to other people to buy those assets if other people see value in them you you then are forced to find the real market clearing price yeah those those bonds

are now on the fed's balance sheet and so there's a very interesting chart showing assets that are owned by the fed and it went up by something like three trillion during covid so that is the sort of monetary stimulus that's been pumped into the market over the last couple of years separately we've had something like six or seven trillion of dispending by the government so you know tremendously so that three trillion is not thrown away so we're clear we're going to get interest on that and people some number will default some of them will get paid back it's a way of stimulating the economy but we now know after this uh stemi checks and all the stimulus we did during the

pandemic we don't need to put more fire or oxygen or kerosene on what we got going in this economy correct david yeah i mean we we should show that chart about how much the fed's balance sheet has grown over the last couple of years but you know the the argument i think would be the reason why they do they buy these assets is if they're buying bonds it basically means that it keeps the yield down right because if they weren't the ones buying them someone else would have to buy these bonds to keep the government funded and they might demand a higher interest rate a higher yield on the bonds so this by having the fed come in and

increase the demand for the government's debt it means that the government can sell its debt more cheaply so when they stop doing that um i think you can expect that you know interest rates are going to need to rise in order to make our debt attractive to you know to bond buyers the other thing the other thing by the way that the fed did when they did that was it wasn't just government bonds that they were buying they decided completely arbitrarily at one point to start buying certain corporate debt so they own like four debt gm debt commercial that's called yeah no no no

well not i mean commercial papers sort of more very fast turn short term duration but like how do you make a decision to start buying corporate bonds it's like buying corporate equities do you buy google versus facebook do you have who's the capital allocator making that decision so more importantly who's who's setting the price who's setting the price so you know these guys have been off the reservation for a long time i think it's fair to say that they were forced into action without a playbook in the middle of a once in a you know lifetime once a century pandemic fair enough and i think they actually did a pretty reasonable job but we just kept the tap

on for so long yeah and now we're like dealing with this stuff trying to figure out how do we actually compensate so the idea that we would add knowing all of this so it's one thing i think if biden passed the bill five months ago six months ago because we didn't know any of this stuff but to do it now knowing that i think that it's really hard and i bet you that it's not just mansion on the democrats that are having a little bit of heartburn and second thoughts it's probably more because i suspect that they could have forced his hand really if it was just up to him but i suspect there are other democrats who are now teetering on the fence thinking i don't

want my legacy to be tied to this when we're printing six seven eight percent inflation for me to basically keep the money printing machine on because it's it's insane this is like the sopranos episode where he gave him like he fronted the guy like 45 boxes of ziti and like you wake up and this guy can't pay the bill in the poker game like where can we even afford to pay this back at some point yeah look i think when when march comes around and this bill is supposedly going to be brought back off the table we're going to be into the election season in 2022 and i don't know that democrats are going to want to defend this

i think there is a view on the democratic side that if they deliver enough goodies to their base then that will help them win elections but i think what helps you win elections more than delivering goodies to your special interests is for the economy to be healthy yeah and if they are sort of pressurizing this inflation situation that is i think ultimately that could backfire i think that's going to be worse for the economy frankly i think manchester is doing biden a favor because if the economy does grow by four percent next year as the fed is predicting it is and if inflation comes down because you stop printing money the way

they're doing then you know i think the democrats will do better in the election if the economy is good i mean one of the reasons why they did so poorly you know in the off-year election uh a month ago is that there's tremendous economic anxiety out there people are seeing the inflation at the gas tank when they go to buy food and um you know if that continues i think they're going to do very poorly next year i wanted to like bring up this chart from fred on total assets on the fed balance sheet i think it is really interesting to look at this thing because so the fed had about a trillion

of assets until 2008 okay then we had the financial crisis and they doubled it that's when the quantitative easing began i went to 2 trillion but then from roughly 2009 to about 2020 before covid somehow the balance sheet grew from 2 trillion to 4 trillion so and it had gone to four and a half and they were starting to shed assets so they were starting to get off drugs but it was still from two to four trillion between this like 2009 and 2020 period when supposedly we weren't in a crisis so you know they've continued this quantitative easing then covet hits and the amount grows from four to seven

trillion just in 2020 and since then it's gone from seven to a little under nine trillion uh just in the last you know well they they they've been three trees i mean these are 20-year-olds they got to sell them well either they're going to have to sell the assets or they kind of do well well well it's not like that they basically are the are the fed is the one who bought the government debt so they're buying to call it a 10-year treasury so yeah i guess they could just wait till the the bond gets paid off but um but i guess they could do that but but now that fed has an incentive not to let

the assets get toxic right so if you know the assets would get toxic if you know if interest rates go up too high that drives bond prices down and now all the assets on their books are worth a lot less yeah this is this is like the point where we have to just call it and say okay you know what let's move on meaning in the sense that like we have to go to these root causes because the money is more money is not going to fix what we're dealing with so i just put something in the group chat and i just want to get your guys's reaction to it because when i saw

it it blew my mind there was a study okay that was just published a few days ago and it said the following thing children born during the pandemic have experienced a catastrophic drop in cognitive development of 22 iq points 22 yeah and when you look at it the people that were the most affected were male children and children of lower socioeconomic families but everybody was affected yet you see the amount of money that we're spending already so adding more money to something is not going to make it better if what we're spending today is basically just getting flushed on the

toilet and these are the kinds of things that really matter how do you allow an entire generation of kids to to see to suffer by the way what does that show that means that teachers actually are unbelievably important so number one they should get paid a lot more okay let's just put it down there should be more of them and smaller class sizes exactly but if you if you have you know these completely screwed up incentives between you know the organizations the unions that represent these teachers and then the parents who have completely different incentives and they basically fight to never be in classroom and to not really teach this

is the measurable outcome yeah the iq of our children i mean we have crucial ability their executive function their scores are going down how do they recover from that be a lot of tutoring it's gonna be a large summer school yeah i mean zoom's not gonna do it i don't think more fortnite in roblox fixes this problem no definitely not and and i feel terrible because like you know as a parent that's that was my solution right i was struggling with the zooms like every other parent and then in the evenings i was just so burnt and just feeling so beside myself in the middle of the pandemic whereas i had a no ipad rule for my kids

that i broke down yep you know everybody did i mean it's like everybody you're home with your kids all day long it's not how it's supposed to work and but so the point is like this is where the government should step in and actually say okay here let me take leadership on this topic right and talk to the unions fix whatever needs to be fixed amp up the the money into charter schools do whatever you need to do but please fix the problem but randomly spending money to try to buy votes i think people see through that it just doesn't work and related to that omnicron is spreading like crazy uh

new york city hasn't i'm rick omnicron omicron there is no n omicron omicron omicron yes i'll i'll learn how to pronounce it when it's gone omicron is spreading like crazy in new york city and in the uk amongst other places the nba and the nfl are seeing surges i've had a ton of people i know test positive this week you guys had that family friends crazy it's insane how many people are i know so many people in new york city related yeah and a lot of people that don't have um any symptoms so here's the chart of cases uh case of spiking but hospitalizations and deaths are flat or going down um in places where these outbreaks are occurring the uk uh charts

are even starker there's a lot of anecdotal evidence everybody on tick tock and instagram and twitter young people in new york who went to cena con are saying they all got it but if you look at this what is santa con santa con is the worst holiday of the year it's a time when a bunch of young people dress as santa claus and get drunk and you have [Applause] that's what goes on everyone wears their little santa outfit and they go bar crawling so it's not sexy santa well actually i have a story about that i was san francisco you were sexy santa no i literally took my daughters out for

pizza uh tony's uh in uh north beach and you know i've got my three daughters and there's all these people walking around like look dad it's santa claus like a lot of them and so there's a thousand santa claus descend on north beach and i turn around and i kid you not there are two old guys i'm talking 70 years old and they're wearing a baseball a santa hat santa boots and nothing in between literally [ __ ] naked in on the street so yeah bro you're you're so you're so demented okay you're like this like like unkey perv like every time i get those text messages i don't know what to think

did you guys click on the twitter link when jason was like guys search for the folsom street fair on twitter no i can't i can't unsee what i saw i was like why is this awesome street trending i was like i thought there was a terrorist attack bro that was so brutal you you should you can't send that [ __ ] around like it's so brutal i don't click off i was like don't click on false i was like oh this is a twitter link what is it about web 3.0 not exactly uh the folsom street fair i'm gonna go ahead and say don't search for that um if you have kids around it's a little bit intense but anyway the santa calm was on saturday december 11th and so

here we are five days late you know four or five days later and the stuff uh hitting if that's true it almost perfectly mirrors the original outbreak after saint patty's day in march 2020. and if you look on social media all the city md lines uh where people get tested are around the block and 30 nba players have entered the covid protocol in the last two weeks about seven percent of the league and uh we had a big question mark of would this be less more contagious it obviously is check less deadly it apparently some studies show as much as 40 times more infectious than delta um highly contagious extreme very much airborne it's going everywhere

like i said last time if it does end up having low severity and low um hospitalization rate and low death rate for vaccinated or vaccinated plus boosted populations this could end up being a massive immunizing event meaning like a lot of people will develop new antibodies and resistance and you know that could be a net good thing but it's certainly the case that this is not a one strain one shot and done pandemic this is an endemic kind of circumstance we're going to be in this for a while and um you know the circumstances are one that may kind of require you know an

adaptation in terms of how we live and operate and especially as it relates to things that are so important like keeping businesses open in schools um you know i think we're going to use recent memory to guide future decision making or at least politicians and you know kind of lawmakers will and they'll say hey this is what we did last time this happened and we just saw this in california where they're like last time like we told everyone going to lock down or wear masks indoors again and we're seeing that behavior again certainly it may have an impact in terms of the spread but this is highly contagious and it's going to spread

everywhere and i think there's just some adaptation that maybe is going to be needed here over the long run there's no end there's no end inside there's no end in sight but uh it is less deadly and so could be mass immunizing and that has led people to think of this herd immunity potentially if there's not another variant um sacs if the nba and the nfl are learning to live with kovid and obviously when we were in miami there's no covet in austin there's no covid is everybody now just go because it seems like the politicians now whether it's in europe we're seeing the protests uh and i think we'll see them here in the united states if this keeps up

australia obviously having protests as well the public has decided i think we're willing to have a thousand people die a day or a certain number of people die today to get back to normal so what what do you think the end game here is going into 22. i'll make a prediction for 2022. okay i will predict that even the blue areas of the country are going to have fatigue with all these coveted restrictions and so even the blue state governors who are addicted to their state of emergencies and their restrictions and lockdowns and closures and mass mandates even they are going to have to give them up in 2022 because the country is sick and tired of this peter

pham had a really good tweet uh just the other day maybe you guys can dig it up where he had a friend visit him from texas and they've been living normally there since like july of 2020 roughly kids in school occasionally someone gets sick but they've been living normally okay it's a manageable problem and he couldn't believe peter's friend could not believe how they're living in l.a where still everyone's living in fear they've we now have a new one month indoor mass mandate thanks to you know governor newsom who still is ruling the state under a state of

emergency what good is that going to do so i think you know but but but i think that some of these blue areas people are so petrified still of the virus and i think it's just because of they're the ones who have been ingesting all this fear porn coming from the media and but but i think it's gonna break i think the the finally this hysteria and panic will break it'll crest over the blue parts of the country in 2022 they're already back to normal in the red parts and especially omicron you can't stop this okay i think that's the the salient point here nothing spreading you're all going to get it look the little the little stupid vax card

that you have to show everywhere to get like popcorn at a movie theater like you know in san francisco it doesn't do anything because vaccinated people can spread it too so that doesn't do anything and the mass main date doesn't do anything um you know and so none of this stuff does anything except getting a vaccine reduces the severity of the illness and losing weight and we can't have that conversations those consequences are mainly on the person who decides to do it what we have to say is we just have to tell everybody you know listen lose weight get in shape eat healthy get vaccinated get back to life that's it

that's the best you can do i'm i believe everybody's going to get it we're starting to see like a real divergence in american life where and i think omicron's if we have lockdowns under omicron and really the big issue is school closures if we go back to school closures and blue states and have more of the learning loss that jamal was talking about and i bet we do whereas in red states they're still out there learning normally and they're dealing with it just like they deal with the outbreak of a flu season or cold season but they you know they're just managing it we're gonna there's gonna be we're gonna be living in two different americas

but i but i don't believe this is sustainable i think eventually these governors who are holding on to their power and their restrictions are gonna lose in 2022 the ones who haven't given it up are gonna are gonna basically uh fall to a red wave in november 22. i think noosa might be the only one left school's closed i see everybody's cancelling their christmas parties jp morgan canceled that we're close we're close every christmas party's been getting cancelled um and i wonder if schools i mean teachers unions i think they got to be having a meeting right now they don't even the teachers don't even acknowledge

that learning loss exists i mean decided to homeschool for the year of the pandemic and i kept my homeschool teacher for you know a couple of hours a day and uh my kids have done wonderfully and it's great to have the ability to afford to be able to do that but not everybody can have an after-school tutor let me upload this for a second okay so i'm spilling the beans on one of my predictions i'll make at the predictions episode we do but first we had covet okay then we had the overreaction to covid both politically and economically economically we pumped 10 trillion plus of spending and monetary and qe and all this sort of

stuff politically we had these restrictions school closures lockdowns mandates okay i think we're about to enter a new phase which is the correction to the overreaction and i think we're already in the correction so the market's been correcting growth stock's been correcting for the last five or six weeks i now think that there was a bit of a political correction with young kid winning in virginia remember that state swung 10 points relative to a year ago and i think you'll see a further correction both political and economic in 2022 so we may not be completely passed kova but i think we are going to be past this

sort of overreaction to covet what do you guys think about succession oh no i haven't seen it don't say anything jeremy strong jeremy strong let's talk about the journey jeremy strong okay jeremy strong is a weirdo uh according to a new yorker profile and there's been a huge response to it uh this profile handle kendall roy on success chandler roy who is woke and dumb and ineffective as an executive and obviously the show is modeled after rupert murdoch and fox and the kids there who are not dopey actually in the article it hinted that most of secession's co-workers dislike him due to his intensity and nothing acted and method acting rituals

he won't rehearse with anybody he's in character all the time like daniel day lewis he won't get makeup whenever everybody else does because he doesn't want to reduce the energy and the buildup uh the article notes there is a fine line that strong walks between being a legendary method actor and just a complete uh the awesome networker wait can i tell you why this story was interesting to me and why isn't this you guys yeah okay so here's a guy who in many ways is a virtuoso and the reason you mean he's a he's a really good actor because i despise kendall roy

on that show uh and i was wondering like is this guy just a terrible actor or is he such a good actor that i hate them yes i hate him and that's why i was attracted to this article and in it or after it so basically what happens is he's a virtuoso just i'll come back to in a second these people at the new yorker who i guess are just jealous or want to write click bait try to destroy this guy but what they didn't factor is that when they published this article all these other actors would come to his defense and do it really publicly yes anne hathaway jessica

and aaron sorkin wrote a letter exactly that jessica chastain published to twitter because aaron aaron sorkin doesn't have access to social media by design and in all of it they said this is the most incredible person we've seen aaron sorkin says this guy is as good as dustin hoffman which is like this is as good as it gets so why was it interesting to me it's you have these people who are grinding and trying to perfect their craft be a virtuoso you talked about steph curry grinding try to perfect his craft just a little steph curry story as a tangent he he brought in this team where they basically started to map out all of the

uh circumferences of the ring of the of the net and he practiced this summer literally trying to get it perfectly in to create this very specific kind of swish and he just kept shooting and shooting and shooting and shooting not you know all the time but every day for some number of shots trying to get the ball perfectly into the basket that is a level of perfectionism and if that's being a virtuoso that none of us can really appreciate but you see the output and we all love it he's already the goat and he's trying to outdo himself here's a different guy in a completely different theater in this case acting

trying to also be really legendary and putting himself through all kinds of stuff and still not lose himself in it okay so much so that all of these other people will really appreciate how amazing he is and to me what i don't like is that then these critics who don't do anything who've never accomplished anything at all in their lives judgments feel so triggered that they have to judge him it's one thing to not have that skill i'll never be as good of an actor as jeremy strong i'll never be as good of a basketball player as death but i don't hate these people for that

i'm so happy that people like this exist but there's a strain of people that exist and then you also have a and then who also have a platform yeah i was about to connect the dots for you is like look at yeah look at how the politicians feel the same way about private markets politicians social decide to try to destroy people yeah so instead what these people do is they take a shortcut they're the critics they're not in the arena okay the folks in the arena are booking wins and losses constantly but you have this you have this strain of impotent critic that doesn't actually know how to do for

themselves and they somehow have a platform and then what they end up doing is cutting corners and then some subset of those start to cheat cue david well yeah it's a story that the congress back in 2012 passed a bill called the stock act to prohibit members of congress from trading on their insider knowledge based on you know based on legislative actions they're about to take and it's been widely flouted by dozens of you know representatives and senators and the problem is there's no punishment it's something like a 200 fine or something like that that gets waived in most of these cases so it's

completely hypocritical because these are the these politicians like senator karen they're constantly demonizing and attacking other people to make themselves look better and then here they are they've got dirty hands um and they asked pelosi they said to pelosi well don't you think that members of congress should be prohibited from trading stocks right because their actions have such a huge consequence on them and pelosi said no it's a it's a free market it's a free market we should be free to to do that it's like huh you know i don't remember that being a defense every time you've wanted to regulate some you know industry that uh

doesn't the president have to divest when they take the presidential office it's not a thing yeah so they're blind so why why would senators congress totally people be any different it's absurd that elected officials should be able to engage in insider trading it makes no sense the fed uh actually had this issue as well two um two folks on the federal reserve board resigned and then powell issued uh a whole bunch of i think new laws tried or regulations inside the fed to try to fix it and the same issue occurs with federal judges and there are federal judges that are

consistently trading in the equities of the companies that are in front of them and so how can you how can you adjudicate a case there was one judge that had 130 plus conflicts trading conflicts 130 plus and he is the one that's there where at t or facebook or google has an issue i mean how can you actually assume that these folks are being impartial if that's the case and there are no consequences for this and yet you know if you're again going back to where we started somebody in the arena trying to do something you just got to think to yourself like

you have critics that are bashing you you have folks that are basically flouting the law because they can and then you put these two together and it's like this is so it's kind of depressing to be honest with you you you start to lose a little bit of faith i mean this these politicians are grifters that's it and full stop i mean they're just grifting and i mean except for apparently except for bernie sanders and elizabeth warren they should just buy the companies they hate why aren't they buying amazon and tesla they would be total proponents of jeff bezos and elon musk if they did yeah in

fairness to warren i've seen her tweet that she supports the banning of the insider trading by congress representatives but i don't exactly see her fighting for it uh you know as hard as she's denouncing people like elon so um look i mean it's it's characteristic of elected officials that they um what is it they see the the splinter you know in somebody you know in somebody else's eye but not the the log in their own or something like that isn't that the expression but you know who's taking advantage of this issue is blake masters who's running for senate in arizona just tweeted about that this would be the first thing he would fix if he gets

elected which is to ban insider trading by elected officials and i i think it's remarkable that you know politicians as shrewd as nancy pelosi are deceiting this issue to republicans i mean i don't know why republicans wouldn't make this a major plank of their platform for 2022. nancy pelosi is i think the third or fourth richest person in congress her husband is a very sophisticated private equity investor there are these meme stocks that follow nancy pelosi's stock trading account or pretend to that were you know recently by the way banned by twitter right yeah that was yeah protecting her protecting

her effectively so you know she has an incentive to not her seat of power is not necessarily the salary that she earns by being house leader but it's by translating that in a bunch of different ways and one way apparently it turns out is being an active equity investor in the market it's unbelievable that's allowed i don't know how this isn't just like an a plus fantastic issue for republicans they should make it an absolute plank of their platform here we go florida republican brian mast was late in disclosure disclosing purchase of up to a hundred thousand in stock at an aerospace company which had just testified before a

committee he sets kentucky republican rand paul was 16 months late disclosing that he bought his wife bought stock in a pharma company that manufactures an anti-viral coven 19 treatment right nevada democrat susie lee failed to probably dispose more than 200 trades yeah just as much as 3 million i mean this is yeah just to be clear the violations have been on both sides of the aisle i'm not at all trying to say that republicans are better on this than democrats this is good bipartisan cooperation yeah yeah exactly i mean it's ridiculous this is the political class in washington engaging in bad behavior but but but the difference is this which is

that pelosi the only leader of a party i've heard defend this is pelosi and i think this is a fantastic issue for outsider candidates really on both sides to run on well this is also something that biden can take because biden has never tried to do this stuff you know oh my god biden's got so many shady dealings and comments selling paintings to china there's a lot of rich spiders out there apparently he's got a rich brother he's got our you know paid a lot of money maybe that's true but joe biden has been really down in the middle come on be fair hunter is brilliant i mean he's selling paintings yeah but why are they buying hunter buying paints for 500 000

well i mean he's a great artist i mean a lot of people buy i don't know if you saw melania's coming out with nfts today so she's okay everybody's securing the bag now i mean if and by the way the presidential grift is always the best just as a case in point trump's spec is worth over 2 billion and buzzfeed which makes 360 million a year and i think has 102 million million cash issues he's not in office that's misstated jason trump's back his shares that he's going to be receiving are worth close to 20 billion 20 billion but he's not in office anymore so i'm not sure the shares he's

going to receive oh yeah what you're counting is the market cap of the cash and trust the value of the shares that are already republican right the trump the value of the trump entity is going to be closer to 20 billion oh is that right wow that's even yeah crazier with no revenue there's more media right yeah well the sec apparently the doj sent a bunch of inquiries on this asking uh for background on the transaction because there's no business there's no contracts there's no employees it's just the whole but by the way ideas just to make sure that everybody understands this is this is a bipartisan thing as well the the ultimate

bag secures the obamas got i think 50 million plus each for their book deals and they got supposedly high eight figures like 50 60 70 80 million dollars from now sorry hold on a second hold on a second when you said when you call them bag secures i was really triggered there for a second so am i supposed to take that offensively that you're saying michelle obama and barack obama secured the bag secured the bag is a term for getting the money the we're not against everybody not being able to make money uh the issue is trading on your office in a way that uh where you are trading on your insider

information that your office is giving sure but i mean here or if you're selling influence if you sell a book hold on a second if you sell a book when you're out of office is that really a problem is that on the bus i wanted to point out that netflix won what was netflix's existential crisis for the eight years obama was in office anybody remember nobody remembers net neutral cares could they get would they have to pay verizon what was uh the obama's position on net neutrality they were for net neutrality netflix stock went up 40 50 x under obama it could all be a coincidence i'm just saying what the [ __ ] so you're

saying it's like you're saying that this guy is lobbying payment to obama i think it's like are you serious i think it's like i mean listen the clintons were doing speaking gifts for goldman sachs at half a million dollars this is kind of my cue to go to dinner now okay so here's the mri you know the main way that winston churchill supported himself was writing books i think it's okay for politicians to write books and if because ultimately the public buys them and that's how they make money what about when the book is 50 million in the

normal price for b10 that's the problem well i mean if i i guess you might have a point if the advance was so in excess of the expected sales that it raises a question of what the real motive is for the payment but i don't but is that is that what happened nobody gets paid a 50 million dollar event nobody gets an eight-figure dollar who's never made a documentary before no i mean if this book sold five million copies it still wouldn't be worth it uh let's move on to mrna so we keep our freed uh free burn factor i'm like so i'm so ready to go to dinner rick thompson gave me a wonderful bottle of wine by the way i'm going to go drink

it tonight i'm so super tilted that you're you you you like it's like i mean what did i criticize the obamas yeah i can't deal with you there's a no-fly zone for you i'm super tilted i mean this is worse than sweater karen what what about the clintons can i can i uh go after their 500k speaking gigs from goldman sachs yeah that's okay yeah okay fine just don't trust the obamas but i mean jason are you are you doing exactly what senator karen did to elon which is by virtue of the fact that they're making money that you are now computing evil motors to it no it's just a disproportionate to what they should get by your assessment their assessment's

the same about elon i pay a lot of money for michelle obama to do much of any i think she's a bigger deal for somebody who's never made a film on for netflix i don't think that makes sense you you said the same thing about rivian i don't know man you're projecting a little bit i i totally agree this is on the second floor i jump out the window right now yeah let winners be winners i think we should differentiate between insider trading sure bad and should not be allowed influence peddling badge should not be allowed and somebody out of office making money they're influenced oh no no not monetizing their influence

and if they did that that's the problem getting paid for services is not getting paid to sell tickets or books that's if that's what it is that's fine it's disproportionate to the reality let's put it in yeah no no no jason say you like the obamas or i don't know i would vote obama for a third term okay didn't you get paid a fifty thousand dollar speaking fee recently to speak at a yes conference he did overpaid overpaid overpaid who are you trying to influence who are they paying you to influence jacal i mean honestly jacob jason jason jason you're like like 30 less than a high-end escort okay no offense

oh yeah that's 600 bucks there's uh what's 30 more than 50 you're saying it's like 80 grand right i don't know 60 70 grand i didn't realize that um all right talk to us about the mrna news for cancer freeber that came out this past week so i think the article that you guys sent around was one related to an oncology treatment that uses mrna tech but i think it's what i wanted to kind of what i thought would be interesting to talk about for a second is just zooming out on mrna technology as a whole um which you know has been theorized for you know the the potential of it's been

talked about for 50 years um if we talk about real quick what what rna is remember your dna your genetic code uh you know defines um the uh the printing of proteins in your cells and so every three letters of dna is as an amino acid a bunch of amino acids in it in a row form a protein and that protein has some function in your body the way that the dna gets translated into protein is through these mrna snippets so a little snippet of rna is a copy of dna which floats over from the dna strand and it floats into what's called the ribosome and the ribosomes the protein printer in the cell and there's lots of

ribosomes and there's lots of rna floating around all the time and it's being copied over so some chemical triggers the expression of that gene of that sequence of dna into rna that then turns into protein and so a chemical induces the protein then the protein does something interesting and the protein has a function in your body and some of those proteins in human body can you know do bad things and some of them can do good things and so the idea has always been that we can actually use proteins as a way to modulate our health and modulate disease for example creating a protein that can attach to cancer cells and signal immune cells to

come and kill those cancer cells as an example and some people have genetic problems where their dna prints the wrong protein and then that protein is malformed or causes some harm to your health and so the idea for rna technology has always been that instead of having dna be the source of truth for the proteins that get expressed in your body can we stick rna directly into cells and use that rna to trigger the production of proteins that can do specific things in your body and remember the biggest segment of the pharma market or a huge segment of the farmer market is what's called biologic drugs which are largely

antibodies which are a type of protein that have some specific function but very many of these proteins are hard to get into the body and get them into the right place and get them to do the things we want to do so it would be a lot easier if we could get rna into the right cells to get those cells to make the right protein to do that thing that we want them to do so everything from cancer treatment to genetic diseases and there's rna interference and there's rna or what are called oligonucleotides that can be used to block specific bad proteins from being produced in your cells or is kind of another kind of course of treatment so making proteins that we

think are therapeutic and blocking the production of bad proteins are kind of the mainstay of this idea behind rna technology and moderna was started to pursue this effort out of flagship pioneering which is an incubation shop in in boston um and they really kind of struggled for years to find the right footing of what's the right business model and the right product and the and the fda kind of struggled with improving this stuff and then boom covet hit and when covet hit it was like holy crap let's accelerate this rna technology use it for vaccines which had been in development for years and the protein that's being produced is the same

protein you find on the the sars cov2 virus which triggers an immune response and builds up your immunity to that virus and now the floodgates are open and this is incredible because the frontiers in rna over the next decade could change the course of how we treat disease and change the course of um of outcomes for many diseases from genetic diseases all the way through to cancers and so we're starting to see those floodgates open i think there's now a few a handful of these uh you know uh rna interference um products that have been approved by the fda and we're now starting to see many more of these cancer and immunotherapy drugs start to get approved

as rna therapies but it really i think was lit by um uh by the breakthrough with covid and everyone kind of seeing the benefit of this and the lack of side effects and we've now got i think a validation in the market and acceptance for consumers and this technology could transform the industry in the same way that genentech transformed the pharma industry with biologic drugs in the um 80s and 90s so it's super exciting and you know we can do updates regularly on our show if you guys want to talk about more of the cool stuff that's coming out but man this is going to

transform how medicine is delivered and the potential of things that we can kind of treat let me ask you a question would the if we looked at the total number of deaths from covid and then the potential debt you know debts avoided or early debts or more life days added however you want to do it from mrna and the impact on cancer over the next say 30 or 40 years in other words the impact it would have on the people living today who lived through covid do you think net net uh will see that the prevention of cancers through this new technology could actually make you know uh

basically the silver lining to what happened during covenant it's a good question um let me give you the counterpoint in the late 90s there was a a gene editing clinical trial that took place and they tried to uh and a patient and they and they delivered the gene editing technology via virus and so the virus goes in it spreads around and it has this this molecule that would edit the gene and and it was for genetic disease and a patient that they gave it to a young guy got this uh this virus and he actually died from it and they shut down all clinical trials for years and it was like boom that's the end

so um there are a lot of scientists a lot of doctors have argued for years that that particular case caused so many lives to be lost because we lost years of progress in being able to run clinical trials during that time and get drugs to market that could treat people and you're right maybe the opposite has happened here that while these clinical trials may have taken years and years and years to get through in a normal setting perhaps the pandemic was the accelerant we needed to get more of these to market faster and millions of people whose lives would have been lost or would be lost otherwise to cancer and other genetic diseases and so on over the

years to come will be safe because these therapies will get to market faster and so yeah it's it's it's a it's a great point and maybe i don't know what the calculus is between the lives lost and the pandemic versus the lives gained via these treatments coming to market faster but it's certainly a good way to think about it the the way to look at it we look at the days of life lost right and if we actually could actually predict how long somebody's gonna live and that you know extension of life i think we could come out of this ahead uh finally on our docket london breed calls for better policing in san francisco after this insane surge in crime here's the video

it is time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city it is time for it to come to an end and it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement more aggressive with the changes in our policies and less tolerant of all the [ __ ] that has destroyed our city we are going to turn this around this is a city that has a population of less than 1 million people an over 12 billion dollar budget the residents of the city have been extremely generous in providing us with the resources we need to make a

difference and now the priorities we need to make must be to protect them must be to turn things around in their neighborhoods when you are in a room full of people i would say probably anywhere between 90 and 95 percent of folks could raise their hand and say that either their car has been broken into broken into or they've been a victim in some capacity or another that is not okay that is not acceptable sacks i thought crime was down and that everything was great and that we were going to defund the police what is happening here what's the big turnaround well it's it's exactly what i was saying that first of all i

loved it i love what she said it's exactly what i've been saying for the last year and it's really great to hear her say the same types of things i started this this campaign back in january after new year's eve you had those two women uh get killed by a repeat offender who was released by chase abu dean and then as i dug into it i saw that he was doing this all the time as part of his agenda of decarceration so and you know a year later like we've talked about throughout this this whole time and the city is totally degenerated into some sort of dystopian gotham-like city uh this did feel like the beginning of a batman movie i mean

it was a strong statement i thought it was great this is just the beginning of what needs to be done i predict that london breed is going to eventually butt heads with chase abu dean there is no way that he will support this agenda fixing the city she wants to increase the police presence so like you said she is going to refund the police not defund the police chase abu deen is i mean the only people he's passionate about prosecuting are police officers yeah so we have a huge problem that the police department is actually we have too few of them we're understaffed we take that job it's not just because the budget it's also because they're demoralized and they've got you know

they've got this prosecutor by the way there was a case just recently where um a repeat offender bashed a vodka ball over the head of a cop and chase just announced that he's getting sent to mental health diversion instead of being prosecuted i want to what post this yeah a cop and not go to jail in the city of san francisco yes this is why the cops are demoralized so in order for london brie to fix the problem she is going and i think she's on the right track here he's got to go so here's my prediction on february 15th they are having the recall election for the education board

and i predict that that board at least two of the three are going to be recalled the parents and tired are sick and tired of it they are going to be out i think that's going to embolden london breed to then support the recall of chase abu dean in the june election and and i think because he gets to pick his replacement yes exactly so that's what she's doing she basically flipped she was quiet up until this point uh and progressive left are slowly eating themselves yeah i mean i think this is self-preservation right chamoth i mean if she didn't make a change here she's going to be out of office too she'll get recalled it's not

self-preservation they're realizing that these policies don't work moral absolutism didn't work on the left or the right these guys have tried in a small scale to do what a certain fraction of the democratic party has been trying to do at a national level it doesn't work overspending under policing under educating it doesn't do anything there i think there is going to be a schism i think it started after the young victory in virginia and i think it's going to accelerate throughout for the next year and especially after the red wave in november 2022 there's going to be a schism between liberal pragmatists and these extreme radical progressives i

think um london breed represents she's obviously very liberal but i think she's pragmatic i think she wants to find solutions that work whereas chase boudin is a radical idiologue who will never change no matter how much evidence is presented to him those policies don't work i think um there's a simple formula the person who gets you into the mess is likely not the right person to get you out of the mess and um well said you know she she talks about san francisco having a 12 billion a year budget can you guys imagine if she was the ceo of a tech company that had 12 billion dollars a year in opex and she ran the business into the ground

would the board say go ahead turn it around absolutely not the board would step in and in this case the board is the citizens of san francisco and they would say let's find the right person to turn this thing around and while she stood up and said the right things and maybe it would echo and i think you know even if it echoes within david sax's heart i'm sure it's echoing in a lot of parts of more liberal san franciscans um but i think that the apathy being asleep at the wheel and allowing the um disorganization across the departments within that city is ultimately her responsibility and i don't think that any amount of you

know verbiage or action she might take at this point justifies the damage she has caused while being the leader of that city and i think that you'll and by the way i think you'll see to sax's point earlier i think you'll see the same response across the nation where folks feel like the leaders that got them into the mess that they're in locally in cities and elsewhere around this country are going to vote those folks out of office because they want to change and it's the same reason we saw folks vote trump into office and the same reason we saw folks

vote trump out of office the more you want to see a change the more you're going to make a change with your political right freedberg is so so right there is a phenomenal twitter account his name is rob henderson and he's like a phd student right now i think he's in europe on scholarship you know is this this this this guy has has an incredible background which you can talk about later but rob henderson has this thing which i love which is that you know a lot of this stuff is born out of what he calls luxury beliefs right like defunding the police is a luxury belief if you're like this rich middle-class cloistered person that can sit behind a

gate have armed security yada yada because you're not living in the ghetto where the byproducts of the byproduct of defunding the police are born out or decarceration are borne out or you know if you send your kid to a private school you can completely be for all these crazy radical ideas like defunding you know advanced placement defunding the gifted program because if your kid's smart you'll just pay for a tutor and you can do whatever you want those luxury beliefs exist more in the progressive left in such a small cohort of people than in any other political class that we have in america and when they get a hold of power

they've now had the right to show whether those luxury beliefs can actually work the data says it doesn't okay with competence i mean how about that like just keep people safe and make the education luxury beliefs belong in sociology sociology textbooks in anthropological articles they they're they're better off and like we're beatnik smoke pot and talk about it over a glass of wine let me clean up something just so look i have no special desire to defend london breed i'm sure there are many yeah i knew that i don't know i'm sure there are many better people wearing a london breed brand sweater is that yeah

look i i'm sure there are better mayors but um just i i think i think we have to sort of temper what you said based on the realities of politics in san francisco which are which are this we actually have a weak mayor the mayor can't do anything yeah we're supervisors without the boat the board of supervisors right and the soups are controlled right now by a bunch of crazies basically allies dean preston and matty hillary who are who are allies of chase abu dean okay so london breed i think wants to do some good things i think that she is more pragmatic than these idiologs i think that she could have been more

aggressive and more outspoken about standing up to them however earlier okay but i think she is now doing the right thing in terms of the speech she just gave basically calling for refunding the police and we're sick of the [ __ ] and we're going to take action those are the right things to be saying right now she did the right thing in terms of supporting the recall of this school board and what i'm saying is let's give her a chance to see if she does come out of his favor of the recall of chase abu dean because i think that's where it's headed and if she gets on board with that and she shows she's pragmatic she may actually survive what are you saying

if she gets out it's happening all around the country right we saw bill de blasio who was the first real progressive leftist elected to a major city he completely ran new york city into the ground now eric adams is going to go clean it up right we had glenn younkin who basically ran a centrist campaign take over virginia it's over it's over let's call it it's over centrism pragmatism enough of these extreme polar opposites okay right let let antifa and the proud boys go and make love to each other in some deserted island it's over it's done like proud boys and um what's the other group oath keepers or something they this uh

woman who's gay said she's like oh you know it was rachel maddow she's like i think these are like gay activist groups aren't they like proud boys it sounds like a gay activist group i think we're seeing the the correction of the overreaction the pandemic cause what neil ferguson calls pandemic politics that we that the pandemic bred a strain of radical politics that we saw all over the country and i think on both sides and i think the country is going to come out of that did you see these idiots go to cheesecake factory and do a sit-in without their masks on and that that's their form of protest

it's like we're going to go into the cheesecake factory it was a cheesecake factory protest and now it's going national with people who are anti-mass anti-vaxx they're don't want to have to show their cards or wear a mask when they walk through their seats so they're literally doing sit-ins at cheesecake factory and i was like i would protest going to a cheesecake factory i'm not going to protest any cheesecake factories well some people aren't on a diet like you jkl and they enjoy cheesecake ah well where are you at what's the number zach just give us the number what's your weight around 170. i'm 174. so i'm right i'm coming right up behind you you hear

the steps you hear the sex sexy i'm going to tell you bro i love your sweater i'm going to drive to the city come to the mausoleum and make love to you with that sweater on oh my god all right everybody we'll see you next week on the lovely boys and podcasts love you besties love you sucks back at you let your winners ride rain man david sack and it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music] besties [Music] we need to get mercy's [Music]