E72: Impact of sanctions, deglobalization, food shortage risks, macroeconomic outlook and more

i now have a chief of staff he's pretty great he's worked for me for a while and he's he's doing a great job but it's actually really helped i will say that and then i uh started a family office wow congrats what does that mean you have a place in your home that you call an office yeah you don't like to break by your refrigerator there's an office is that the family office yes the family goes in there to talk about all this stuff where does jade put the stickies that say we're out of granola bars [Music] [Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of the all-in podcast episode 72 part du

with us today again the prince of panic attacks the sultan of science david friedberg ah yes and also the zephyr of zoloft and also as you're hearing cackling the duke of degeneracy uh the dictator himself holly hoppity and of course everybody's uh favorite the rain man himself the drunk history channel uncle david sachs i mean david i i follow you on twitter you're tweeting 50 times a day oh i was thinking the same thing when do you work what has happened to you you you won't meet with startups anymore i i bring you startups she said you know what i'm no longer you're like stuck in your room tweeting

i just i don't do first meetings that is the end of your career huge mistake no it preserves it preserves my energy there's nothing more draining than endlessly spending your day in first meetings no why don't you just have a short first meeting like a 15-minute first meeting well that's what you know we have a team for is there they don't because we know exactly what we're looking for sas investing is very metrics driven and so the first meeting yeah exactly so it's like the first meeting we just find out do they meet our basic threshold for love it for growth yeah exactly fantastic yeah so we run the numbers and i i will

meet with them if they look good i love this i would like all vcs to take the same approach and i will let everybody know my dm's are open jason at cal academy i will take the first meeting saks i need to call you after this one of our businesses which is not in sas has started to sell sas software and we've already booked 40 million dollars of [ __ ] acv by complete accident from zero wow you stepped in it uh and i need some advice okay yeah let's talk all right everybody uh it's been a bit uh of a crazy couple of weeks here and i we have to start with the war in ukraine and and do a bit of an update it's been over 20 days the

death toll continues to climb we don't know exact numbers here it's very hard to get information we're not experts we don't have boots on the ground uh but according to uh the new york times seven thousand russian troops have been killed and zolensky said on march 12 1300 ukrainian troops have been killed i think we've got three or four angles we need to talk about here one i want to talk about food supply with freedberg since you ran climate.com and have a lot of expertise in that and of course ukraine and russia are the breadbasket of the world trabot i want to talk about markets of

course but let's go to our history channel uncle first uh sacks you have been going down the rabbit hole looking at the history of this let me just ask you just a pointed question is russia losing the war and if they are losing the war if that is a pos is that even a possibility that they're losing the war are they losing the war and then what is the exit ramp here and what does it mean on a go forward basis right i think great question so here's where i think we stand three weeks into the war is that putin clearly miscalculated he thought this would be a cakewalk obviously has turned out not to be the ukrainians have

put up very fierce resistance the russians have taken very serious casualties and losses um and so the war is very much you know up in the air the the outcome is very much in doubt so i think you know putin was overconfident uh made a political economic and you know obviously humanitarian mistake but i think three weeks in here is where i would characterize things is it feels to me like the west might be making a similar mistake of sort of excessive overconfidence and triumphalism meaning that we think the rest of this war is going to be a cakewalk and the reason i say that let me just give you some examples and then tell you why it may

not be a cakewalk so you've got francis fukuyama had a piece this week basically he's back with the end of history he predicts that you know imminent russian defeat and that there's gonna be a new birth of freedom uh for the west it's going to be like the bush doctrine and 20 years of failed policy in the middle east never happened you got david from you know all but predicting mission uh accomplished just like the iraq war he said the springtime's gonna be bad for anyone who bet on putin his words which in his view is anyone who isn't a basically a neocon who favors regime change you had a piece

get a lot of circulation over the last week in the u.s china perception monitor by um by i think a former chinese observer named hugh way and he basically predicted that china would be under so much pressure by what the the russians have done you know in terms of humanitarian uh losses that they would come out basically denouncing russia and support the west and then of course i think the final example of what you might call western triumphalism right now is that absolutely no one in washington seems to be pushing for a ceasefire they're all you know they're all paying lip service at least to snow flows fl no-fly zone

idea biden and the squad seem to be the last holdouts uh for the idea of not imposing no fly zone so i would say right now the west seems to be very confident about the way this war is going and not inclined to make any compromises or concessions i just want to flag quickly why that you know why there might be some clouds on this silver lining so you had a washington post article first of all warning it was very interesting that ukrainian military progress may not be as great as there's quote stratcom the strategic communications you know aka propaganda so in other words the ukrainians are very effective at fighting the information war but the

the russians are still making progress on the ground you also had this um washington post story about neo-nazis flocking from all over europe to ukraine to fight for the cause again that story got it's it's very troubling and it got no likes or retweets because it just doesn't fit the great narrative here you've got the slow motion humanitarian is that true like this yeah but let's come back to let me lay out all the issues that we can come back to you've got the slow motion humanitarian disaster of you know a billion people across the world potentially starving if the spring planting doesn't happen which

we should let freeburg speak to more you've got the fact that russia can still escalate this war i mean they could still rubble cities uh by elorus could enter the war and you know god forbid they could even use wmd and then we you have this idea this dream of toppling putin probably look it could happen but probably a fantasy you had 200 000 protesters pro-war protesters turn out in moscow today nationalism is still strong in russia yes there's anti-war protesters there but the russian people at the moment seem to be still behind putin and then i think you had today um the foreign minister of china came out with a statement really throwing cold

water on the idea that they support the west they basically denounced the west for nato expansion so this whole idea of of the chinese bowing to western media pressure which they in other contexts called the baizou influence i think that's a fantasy that is not going to happen so look i think that you know you know we all support the ukrainian cause uh we all support their desire for freedom to their freedom from domination from this um this russian war of aggression but what i wonder about is whether this would be the opportune time to for washington to try and push for a ceasefire instead of a no-fly zone and we should talk more about what that might look like

can i give you a psychological assessment of i think what's happening right now yes great just as somebody who as as you know you guys and i were just joking but six days just being mostly off the grid with my notifications off i was really like honestly like you you kind of like go through this dopamine fast and what it actually helps you do is pick out better signal and you know with all respect sex i think like a lot of what you said is not really a as meaningful signal as the following which is the most important thing that happened was both sides basically said the surface area of a

deal was very much in sight and that they were down to three or four points and i think that that didn't get reported nearly as much as it probably should have and what i thought was psychologically interesting was that as soon as that was said the next few days was when the rhetoric got ratcheted up extremely aggressively on both sides and the way that i interpret that typically is having done deals that's typically when you're closest to a deal and you're trying to get the last few t's in c's and in that same construct as applied to ukraine and russia i suspect what's

happening is they both put out the trial balloon it was well received on both sides the surface area is now down to a few points i'm not saying that those are justifiable in the end but i think that if both of these two folk parties want to come to a ceasefire which i think it does we're probably much much closer than anybody thinks and right now all of this rhetoric is meant to basically try to get the other side to budge a little bit more and so i suspect and you know i could be completely wrong um is that we're much closer to a ceasefire than anybody thinks and i suspect that you could see something in

the next two to three weeks and i think that that's really hopeful because you want this thing to come to an end the thing i'm trying to parse here uh and i don't know if anybody here can even answer this is how did how did we either underestimate or over estimate depending on the time russia's ability to invade another country i think i think the thing is we we have we can't even estimate correctly so for example there was something that said there was a hundred out of a hundred russia has 170 battalions apparently i don't know if that's true or not right of which 100 were sent in we don't know if that's

true or not of which you crane apparently destroyed 50 of which we don't know if that's true or not so we're left to guess and unfortunately what that does is that people psychologically then fit as david is used in the past your priors what are your biases right what narrative fallacy do you want to believe and then you're going to fit so the pro-russian factions will say that's entirely not true the pro-ukrainian factions will say actually it's even greater than that huge sustained military losses the truth is somewhere in the middle that will only get accounted for after a ceasefire is in place so i think we

almost need to again we can get caught in this fog of war and and talk about this stuff in ways which we don't accurately know or we can level up and say the thing that we both know is there was on the record statements by the foreign minister of russia and the president of ukraine that a cease-fire and the surface area of that ceasefire is within sight and unless something is materially changed and then in the last three days which it hasn't it means we are really really close to this being done so i agree with a lot of what jamal said i don't think it contracts anything i said before i agree that there was a big piece of news this

week that caused markets to rally for three days which is the announcement of a proposed 15-point peace deal and the we do know sort of the key features of that deal it means that the three big features are you uh ukrainian neutrality so they don't become members of nato you had zilinski saying that nader membership was off the table ukraine can't host foreign troop spaces or weaponry there'd be limits on ukraine's military but they would get security guarantees from the allies uh so it wouldn't be a complete demilitarization and then the the other pieces of it were ukraine recognizing russia's control of

crimea recognizing that's not coming back and then some sort of independence recognized for the disputed territories in the dawn bass so i think you're right chamath that everybody now knows the broad contours of what a peace deal would look like and the markets are starting to price in them getting to that peace deal but i'm worried that if you look at it from the point of view of what people in washington say that there's no pressure here coming from washington for zielinski are who's basically our client he's an american client to make a deal you know if you compare this to say the

1973 yom kippur war where the us was on the side of israel but still acted as a peacemaker and got a ceasefire done you know kissinger got that deal done even though we were on the israeli side you don't really hear anyone in washington saying let's get a deal done so i hope you're right but it's because you're not we're not talking about the elephant in the room which is that in the yom kippur war the unitary resolve and the military dominance of america was undisputed and so as a result its ability to be the mediator was also undisputed we've already talked about this when biden called the uae in saudi they wouldn't even pick up the phone the people that

are negotiating this priest peace treaty right now are naftali bennett and emmanuel macron so we're not at the table so i think a lot of what we're hearing as well is just a lot of the rejection and the psychological you know kind of anger that we have to not being even part of the process maybe the world doesn't want us to have such an outsider the point is it's we've moved past that whether you wanted us to be involved in it or not we're not involved and we are not the principal mediators in this and we i hope to god that israel and france and whoever else is at the table gets this done yeah i agree with that but here's my

concern is i think everyone knows the broad contours of the deal but if you're russia or you're ukraine you're getting daily reports of what's happening on the battlefield and if you think you're winning you have an incentive to stall the peace process to cement greater gains and get more leverage for those remaining details and negotiating points and so if zolinski thinks that the ukrainians are making progress on the battlefield he's going to wait and so neither one of them i think left to their own devices can be fully trusted to make it deal i think you need the us applying some pressure or acting in a pot in a constructive way towards the process and

i think it's a huge problem that the us is not viewed as a peacemaker uh we're basically viewed as so partisan and on the side of ukraine that no one wants us involved david we've talked on this pod about us not being the global police officer of the world and that other people need to stand up so maybe the lesson here is you know maybe strategically jason it's not like we were called on and we didn't stand up we weren't called on well okay that's we assume that i mean we don't have perfect information either but let's let's get to friedrich here i think the other wrinkle in all of this and i think it's quite positive is

sanctions uh are seeming to have a profound impact here and people are looking at them as potentially maybe cyber warfare and just you know actual tactical warfare on battlefields is less important than economic warfare and russia has been essentially cancelled from the global economy from visa to mcdonald's uh to exports and these sanctions are not just uh government sanctions these are people opting into them whether it's corporations uh and other entities saying we're just not going to do commerce with russia unfortunately and this is something you have great expertise on and so we're lucky to have

you here to talk about it people may or may not know this i'm happy to be here this is the bread basket of the world they export more wheat than anybody and they also export fertilizer soybeans and some other inputs uh which we've talked about previously that uh provide meat uh for the world uh so what can you tell us about the downstream effects of there not being potentially uh or half as much crops coming out next year and what would happen in places that are the beneficiaries or dependent on wheat and fertilizer from russia so there's a number of um first order and then second order

effects that are not just about sanctions but also about export controls by russia that are creating swings in food markets like we've never seen and will almost certainly lead to widespread famine by the end of this year at this point so the first important point to note is about 15 of the world's calories come from wheat about a third of that wheat comes from russia ukraine russia has banned export of wheat and um the the wheat spring planting season is like now this week and there's not a lot of planting going on you know a lot of commodity folks are in the field trying to figure out who's

actually going to go to field and plant but um no one's making you know the concerted effort that they normally would under normal circumstances so not only is the current wheat supply in russia ukraine blocked up and cannot make its way to countries like africa or countries in africa and elsewhere but the future planting season um is now significantly at risk and again that's 15 of global calories and i just to take a step back the whole planet earth operates on a 90-day food supply so once we stop making food humans run out of food in 90 days so another way to think about that is our food supply excess our capacity

in excess is about 25 of our global production so if our global production goes down by 12 we've lost half of our global food supply and that's not just linearly across all nations what happens is the most vulnerable nations lose their food supply first and the richer nations buy that food supply to secure their population calories and so you very quickly see a bifurcation happen when you have a shortage in a food supply like this of just a few points where suddenly famine is a real risk and we already have about 800 million people on earth that are subsisting on below 1200 calories a day so this very quickly tips the bucket

in a significant way in a number of countries that's going to be really awful and that's just on the wheat supply and wheat planting problem the bigger problem is the energy price problem and the phosphorus and potassium problem all fertilizer is made up of nitrogen phosphorus or potassium those are the three major types of fertilizer that farmers around the world have to use every year in order to grow that crop without fertilizer plants don't grow nitrogen is made from natural gas 98 of the world's ammonia is made from natural gas natural gas prices as you guys know have doubled and the futures market looks

like in some places natural gas prices going up like 4x as a result the price of ammonia fertilizer nitrogen-based fertilizer has gone from 200 a ton to a thousand dollars a ton so it's five times as expensive to buy basic ammonia fertilizer today than it was a few weeks ago or a few months ago and so this is now leading a lot of farmers around and then the other big problem is phosphorus so phosphorus you know by some estimates i mean you know there's a little variation around here but about 10 of the world's phosphate comes out of russia and um about you know call it

um 25 of the world's potassium comes out of russia but potash both of those markets are blocked up they they are they are sanctioned and they have banned exports russia has through the rest of 2022. so around the world the cost to make nitrogen fertilizer has skyrocketed because of natural gas prices because of the russia problem and russia is not exporting potassium and phosphorus and as a result the price of nitrogen has gone from 200 to a thousand the price of potassium has gone from 200 to 700 and the price of phosphorus has gone from 250 to 700. so now it's so expensive to grow a crop that a lot of farmers around

the world are pulling acres out of production and they're actually going to grow less this year than they would have otherwise because it is so expensive and they cannot access fertilizer locally to plant crops so not only do we have the wheat problem we now also have the fertilizer problem and the acres coming out of production problem and so food supplies are going to go down even further and this is going to become even more catastrophic and so there's a scrambling going on right now you know food prices around the world as a result everyone starts buying up all the commodities they buy up all the corn they buy the soybeans

they buy up the wheat and the price for corn has nearly doubled whereas you know from where it was in july of 2020 uh the price of soybeans the price of wheat are all skyrocketing and in a lot of countries they cannot afford to um acquire and individuals cannot afford to uh to buy food with the skyrocketing commodity prices can ask you a question uh i think it's estimated that the u.s food supply if you could x out the waste would actually feed most of the developing world because i think 30 to 40 of all of our food is wasted can you do something with that yeah that that is actually true um a lot of that happens at the

point of consumption so it's in people's homes so it's a reverse supply chain problem um where you know we throw away a lot of like stale bread and cereal that goes bad or whatever there's some in the fresh vegetables market but generally the core calorie producing commodities are rice wheat potatoes and corn those commodities don't go bad in the supply chain they end up getting tossed out at the end of the supply chain which is at the point of consumption at home so you know i'm not sure there's a real solution there right now the the bigger issue is like how do you get bulk commodities to the places that are going

to need them over the next 12 months so look right now we're reducing food supplies stocks around the world there are strategic reserves that are getting opened up and being released as that starts to get the plenish um diminished and as the production kind of numbers start to come out it looks like less acres are in production you know and god willing we have a good weather year everywhere this year because you know a bad weather year in some markets could completely decimate the remaining supply that's coming out this year regardless it is going to be a humanitarian disaster within a year and we will see hundreds

of millions of people go starving and there will be potentially i think you said hundreds of millions of people hundreds of millions of people never happened in the history of 100 million people already live on below 1200 calories a year right now so you're predicting that 100 over 100 million people will die because of this i don't know about death salmon like famine is this like you know short of calories you know within within a market it's not like hey there's no food like you know there will be strategic reserves released there will be stuff but it won't be enough we just don't have enough in the way supply chains are set up there just isn't enough and so so

once again we found another supply chain weakness uh like we did in covet over and over again and so the free surprise will be released but then hoarding is starting so david you take it after this but the one question i had was maybe talk to me about this concept of hoarding because there seems to be a cascading effect and you you kind of well yeah it's not just a little bit as with any market guys as you know when there's scarcity people come in and buy at a faster pace you know everyone and so this is a market dynamic it's not like people are physically hoarding

loaves of bread but commodity traders countries strategic reserves they start buying up what they can get to prepare for the famine that's coming then prices go even higher and then it kicks other people out of the market that couldn't afford to buy it and the whole thing gets really ugly really and there's no off ramp here there's no way to solve this well what freeberg yeah the thing i want to ask you is if we had a peace deal right now a ceasefire would we avoid this outcome i mean like how long how long do we have to avoid we need russia to reopen fertilizer export markets now we need natural gas prices to come down now and we need them to plant the spring

wheat those are three things that need to happen to solve this problem if those three things don't happen we're going into spring right now so around the world in the northern hemisphere farmers are making plans they're planting they're deciding how much fertilizer to use and so as this market starts to kind of work itself out over the next few months a lot of the commodity traders and the the ag departments they publish these planting reports and they talk about how many acres of what were planted and then everyone forecast how much the supply will be and we're going to start to see these uglier numbers come out over the

next few weeks and months meanwhile we're seeing supplies dwindle and russia is holding all this stuff so you know they're holding hostage uh phosphorus potassium and the natural gas pricing is just what it is remember there are ammonia plants everywhere the ammonia plants and i and all ammonia plants use natural gas to create you know to create this nitrogen-based ammonia let me make a statement and i'd love your reaction we're finding out all of these externalities that was made with underlying poor scientific ra reasoning that has caused these issues to be exacerbated so we know for example that our over-reliance on russian hydrocarbons

could have been mitigated with nuclear but we fell for shoddy science and we fell for uh a bunch of uninformed people who ran this banner of like environmental protection right so they screwed us okay and those people now have meaningfully less credibility let me give you another cohort freebergen you tell me all the people that pushed back on gmo and said gmo was unacceptable it could never happen it has to be x y and z way and there are ways where we could have been working on plants that had different mechanisms of action in order to actually absorb and retain nutrients from the soil in different ways that would have made us

less reliant in exactly the way in which fertilizer works true or false yeah gmo technology as a former monsanto executive so you can call me a monsanto chill here but yeah gmo technology has been hindered globally by a challenge to adopt it and there are techniques and technologies that have not been aggressively developed because of the concern on approvals just to get a single gmo trait approved in the united states today and get it to market can take seven to 13 years and um even then you have to still go get china to approve it because they're the biggest importer and you have to you

know get all these other market participants to approve it and there are multiple agencies to get to approve it europe is finally the eu is finally coming back to the gmo problem and saying you know what precision gene editing can actually be beneficial to growing better more stuff now would it have solved this particular crisis can i just say what's so ridiculous about this the fact that we have a modern agrarian economy is because we actually did figure out a way to do gmo except we use the punnett square and we use successive iterations but the minute that you try to scientifically scale it in a lab all of a sudden that same process

is not uh does not make any sense to me that's it's just intellectually so inconsistent yeah the thing that really scares people about gmo look i mean i've spent a lot of time on gmos and and the reason people are upset i have a broader philosophical do you believe in that do you believe in that in consisting that intellectual inconsistencies like how do you think somebody from you know pre-bc to today i think that agriculture iterated on our roots no i think agriculture itself is technology think about it humans humans used to go out and just eat whatever was lying around what nature gave us then we started

making rose in the ground and putting seeds in the ground and putting water on the ground we engineered the earth to make sure we started to breathe and then we used plant breeding and traditional plant breeding through enormous normal energy save the world modifying things it is and then what we did with gmos which is the distinction just to be really clear about the definitional distinction between gmo and traditional plant breeding gmo is when you take dna from another organism and you put it in the plant's dna to get that plant to do something very specific and jason you came with me to monsanto i mean you're sure cautious we should be cautious about any

time we're doing stuff like that right but and then there's generally like a very visceral reaction when i make that statement and people are like wait you're taking the dna from bacteria and putting it in plants and how do i know that's going to work and so there's these layers of concern which you know are deeply psychological layers but we can you know scientifically resolve this over time but look at the end of the day humans today you guys remember last year how much i was talking about that stark synthesis paper and how important it was we don't need to grow plants to make the

stuff we need to consume if every city around the world had a starch synthesizer and it took co2 from the atmosphere and water from the ocean and had this technique developed out it could synthesize its own calories in a physical device without needing to rely on the ammonia supply chain and the phosphate supply chain and all of the systems that we rely on that are super outdated that are all a scaled up industrialized version of old-school agrarian techniques humans today i think have the ability to synthesize and print food and over the next couple of decades particularly catalyzed by what's going on in russia ukraine today we're going

to see these technologies accelerate it's obviously where i spend a lot of my time but i'm super excited about it yeah i think we suffer from a very insidious kind of plague in the world which is the plague of over-educated dumb people and it's it's almost as if you know because of their degree in the school you give them inordinate power to make value judgments that really put the world in a very difficult position and so when you have something like a war in ukraine it just lays everything bare you find all these things like you know another another version of this example how did an entire continent and

specifically i mean europe abdicate their entire energy security to the group of it to a group of environmentalists and to you know to a 16 year old girl without even thinking about what the right answer was for themselves from first principles that's really crazy that that happened and you need a war you know where tens of thousands of people have to die to realize that that was a really bad set of decisions that have been compounding for decades here's another example where food security is yet another one where you know we weren't able to think cleanly from first principles and so depending on who had more money or who was able to create

more psychological guilt or fear was able to get an outcome that fundamentally puts the world at a hundred million person plus famine so somehow we need to rethink how our institutions work because we are giving folks who haven't proved that they can handle power the ability to influence outcomes for the wrong sets of reasons what's even worse tomorrow these people you talk about who are smart dumb people they're so privileged that they're living in some bubble making decisions for people who have food insecurity or energy and security and it's only when kovid showed hey oh semiconductors i can't get my car that i want because it

doesn't have the chip in it or i can't get drugs or i can't get ppe then all of a sudden they see the value in redundancy and supply chain but when they were living high on the hog and had nothing to worry about in 20 different flavors of captain crunch that you know they can't even think about people in africa jacob i think it's really important to speak to the capitalist incentive and how you get there so okay we've globalized supply chains because as a business it doesn't make sense for me to do every step of the thing that i want to do because you can get better utilization out of capex if a system is running all the time to make stuff so if one step of the system

doesn't need the other system running 24 7 it's going to outsource that and that's kind of think about like semiconductors think about food manufacturing right doesn't make sense for a farmer today to make his own ammonia so there's a pneumonia plant that centrally makes that stuff 24 7 distributes it out to a bunch of farmers that brings the cost down per unit of production and so these systems have existed because we've had less capital with a higher roi on capital invested at every point in the system by you know distributing and having a kind of you know centralized supply chain system like this now what we're looking at today is what

happens when one part of that system fails and now i think the big trend for the next decade or two everyone's going to have like an institutional memory of this and you're going to see companies that are going to start to vertically integrate supply chains they're going to vertically integrate their their manufacturing we're going to see a lot of businesses make what traditionally would have been really quote unquote bad capex decisions and bad investment decisions and they're going to say you know what we need to have redundancy because we cannot face the cataclysmic kind of circumstance that we faced in the past i also think those are by the way the easy decisions i also think that

there are some more complicated ones of morality that we may have also misappropriated i'll give you one example so if you think about energy independence of america i think there's there's not going to be there's not going to be many who think that it's not critically important well then you go and say we have a short-term bridge with hydrocarbons and the long-term solution is renewables but underneath renewables is the idea that you have to store these things right you have to store the energy you make whether it's from wind or solar even if it's from nuclear okay and all of that results in us needing

batteries while batteries need lithium there's enormous lithium deposits in the united states that today can never get accessed because we've decided that the you know the upper land grouse of the state is more important than america's energy independence right so when push comes to shove a small rat like creature is prioritized more importantly than america's energy independence the downstream implications of that are now obvious rising costs inflation unemployment potential recession war death famine is the upper land growth that fundamentally more important than all of these systemic risks to humankind

and the thing is for a long time we would never even think about the trade-offs to actually think about why that decision should be made that way and now we actually have the ability to remake these decisions so it's going to be really interesting to see whether we upend all of these existing frameworks you know and there's enormous environmental lobbies that have been created that have raised hundreds of millions billions of dollars to fight these battles systematically wherever they come up and in some ways now what people will say well you've really prevented progress and you've actually done more

damage that's going to be a really interesting point good intent save the environment and then downstream impacts let's go to sax about the sanctions we saw a level of sanctions we didn't expect they were ferocious they were unilateral they they're you know undeniably having an impact do you think putin would be at the table do you think these sanctions are having a dramatic impact and do you think that there will be a tool that we should use in the future or do you think maybe we need to be more thoughtful about them in other words cancer culture comes up as a an analogy

here people are saying oh it's like cancer culture for a country i think it's pretty great that a country that is murdering their neighbors doesn't get to participate but obviously you could have some serious concerns if fertilizer and supply chain issues as we just discussed are going to cause famine so what's the balance here yeah i think i think it's a great another great example of um you know we're not thinking through the second and third order consequences of what we're doing we're just reacting and so to to freeberg's point um so you know first of all we have to

realize this was more than just sanctions this was a complete severing of economic ties i mean basically every western country pulled up stakes out of they russia mean they did it on their own too i mean they did it because for the reasons you said because they wanted to make a statement that what putin did was wrong so every russian who was working for one of these companies basically got fired and all the stores closed and and so on so i think i think it is the repercussions of it are going to be severe however these things the economics of it take time to play out and so do i think it creates pressure on putin to make a deal yes

but you know if the if this is going to be determined on the battlefield one way or another in the next month do i think it has time to operate in that time frame probably not and i think what's likely to happen here is that in the same way that the real repercussions of this war are going to be felt in grain production in six months you know there is an economic tsunami headed for our own economy as a result of the blowback from basically severing you know 144 million russians from the global economy um there's also going to be geopolitical uh blowback i mean

you know i think it's very likely that the way this is going to play out geopolitically is that russia will become a chinese client and you know all of those natural resources that china produces the the gas you know all the the mineral wealth that those resources are going to flow on a conveyor belt on a belt and road conveyor belt from moscow to beijing and they're going to fuel the chinese economy yeah yes and no because the reality is the the the thing we have to remember is china is still a fundamentally export-driven economy of which 35

percent just alone goes to the united states when you add in europe and other oecd countries it's almost 60 so i think the idea that all of a sudden you russia will be able to back door all of these things through china into the rest of the world i think is not really realistic and this is actually why i think the rhetoric is so high because those two countries specifically are put in a very difficult situation like what do you think the china calculus on taiwan is looking what's happening to russia hasn't completely exported because it's completely off the table completely off the table they would never consider

invading taiwan knowing that it would put apple in a position or other companies that are entwined in the chinese economy i think they would have to again i've said this before everybody has was always you know sort of like land-basing economic sanctions you know even on this pod people it's never going to work it doesn't do anything and it turns out it's just not true to be clear i think sanctions are an appropriate way to create economic pressure so that we can get a ceasefire and a peace deal made okay so i do believe in the same way that i believe we should arm the ukrainians so they can defend themselves while i'm against the

no-fly zone the the issue is just are we actually using the leverage that we're creating to drive this process to a success i'm trying the ceasefire process to a successful resolution because if we just make this the new normal which is you know a basically an insurrection in ukraine that drags on forever and uh the china and russia cut off from the global economy and becomes a client of china i think there's a parade of horribles that flow from that and freeburg just outlined one of them which is hundreds of millions of people across the world potentially starving so my point about sanctions is not that

we shouldn't have done them but there are going to be big repercussions for our economy if we don't resolve the situation in ukraine let's do best case worst case with these new this new economic order here in economic sanction ability that the west has now demonstrated um you know quite effectively for me the best case scenario here is if you want to participate in the global economy and globalism globally globalization 2.0 means you're going to have to be hit some base uh behavior level of being a good actor in the world if you want to participate in the wider economy therefore as chamath just pointed out i

think quite correctly taiwan's off the table i mean china does already is having massive economic downturn and headwinds the the idea that they would face what russia is facing right now in terms of sanctions globally would be cataclysmic for them so do we think what's that what's the best case in your mind friedberg the worst case of this new economic sanctions that we've just outlined best case worst case much of this is driven by um russian decision making not just our decision making and so you know there's a lot of question marks around what they're gonna they've said

definitively we are banning all fertilizer exports through 2022 okay so like does changing a sanctioned model at this point get enough resolve for them to kind of come back to the table do we need to kind of weave that into some discussion peace discussion that they're having with ukraine i think there's going to need to be this multilateral like global either support or partnership model that's going to have to kind of emerge for this to all get resolved positively i don't think that it's just about russia and ukraine agreeing to a bunch of terms we're all going to be affected by what's going on and what russia has chosen to do back to us and we all think

we're in the power and we've blocked them and destroyed the ruble and you know knocked them back to the stone age yada yada but like we're hurting ourselves far more than we realize and we have to go get something back from russia in order to resolve this so nuanced i'm not sure i totally agree with that i actually think that you know necessity what is it necessity is the mother of invention um i think that this has the ability just circling back to what we said before for us to rewrite all of these other decisions that were frankly not necessarily rooted in either first principles or long strategic thought in a way that can actually

improve the state of play for everybody not just including us for the next 50 or 100 years so i'm not completely convinced that it's as catastrophically bad as you think well what about this uh friedberg if if we were thinking about food stability you mentioned your slurry and you know being able to make these calories without actually planting any food if we it's not going anywhere if you call it a slurry but yeah okay let's call it a protein bar you know like ultimately jason we can actually create pasta bread rice i mean that's where this all goes perfect by the way just so you guys know i want to frame

this up it's super important 60 of the world's calories come from carbohydrates which are basically two molecules amylose and amylopectin okay that's what makes up starch so if we can synthesize amylose and amylopectin we can make it how long would it take how long would it take what would it cost to build your pasta making machine and rice making machine you know uh to have more decades-long scale-up problems right this is not like this is like hey we got a solar it's similar to nuclear or solar exactly yeah yeah okay but there are solutions to this i look i mean this is why i keep coming back to saying like we're evolving the global

economy and planet earth away from this model of centralized industrial manufacturing into a production system that looks more distributed more decentralized with better technology and that that's really a big trend for this century for for our global economy and that's why right now i think the near-term trend is in de-globalization people making less capital-efficient decisions that create redundancy in supply chains and there's a lot of ways as investors to play that by the way sax were your thoughts on maybe the the high order bit for the west being a race to resiliency or a race to redundancy in energy in semiconductors this race to resiliency in food supply yeah i mean

look trade creates economic wealth but it also creates dependency and we're realizing the downsides of having that dependency if we're dependent and or europe is dependent on russian gas or you know you saw during covid we've become dependent on chinese pharmaceuticals all the pharma companies have moved their manufacturing over there and then you know that got when china was rattling the saber uh because we were blaming them for covet this is back in in 2020 they all of a sudden started implying we might not get access to pharmaceuticals so look we are going to have to rethink all those trade relationships you can't have trade without trust because

again if you if you you are empowering the producer to cut you off when you make yourself dependent on that yeah so so look i think we're going to rethink all of that but can i go back to your best case worst case question yes i was trying to get somebody in there on this i think that's a good question and you know i hear here let me lay out the best case and then the worst so the best case look the best case is this sort of the fukiyama argument the sort of the from argument is this western triumphalism which is luck sanctions are going to drive the russians into submission they're going to topple putin the people are going to rise up they're going to lose this war

we are going to strike a great blow against autocracy and liberal democracy is going to win okay i understand that argument okay now what's the the worst case scenario worst case scenario is freeberg's right we end up with hundreds of millions of people starving the war drags on because the russians aren't gonna give up so the sanctions you know while be while hurting the russians don't end the war and in fact drive them into the arms of the chinese you know the russia has been called a big gas station with nukes that gas station will now fill up the chinese economy henceforth worsening the balance of power in cold war ii and then there's a big you know tsunami

or boomerang headed for the u.s economy we we have a recession later this year as gas prices go to seven dollars and ten dollars a gallon and so it ends up hurting us and so i don't i i certainly see the case for sanctions um but um but i wonder if people are really thinking through the downside scenarios and what i what i do think is that if that that the removal of sanctions should be certainly something we're affirmatively putting on the table in these ceasefire negotiations and and that sounds obvious but i saw a tweet from ian bremmer who's sort of part of the foreign policy establishment think tank guy who has been pretty good

on like smart he's smart and he's been good on no-fly zone he's been saying the same things i've been saying like guys this is tantamount to a declaration of war we're not going there uh also basically saying that listen no matter what the russians do we are not gonna get into war three here he's been cool-headed about that but he also tweeted that listen as long as putin's in control of russia we can't ever do business with them again sanctions are sticking around basically forever and i just wonder if that is an overreaction if if we're gonna make that policy i'd rather see us as america be willing to put economic relations back on the table

as you know in this peace process as opposed to saying that the russians are cut off forever because otherwise they're just going to become a chinese client state i don't see how that benefits us long term well again i did but again david what do you think they do with china china what are they going to do take 60 percent of their goods and still export them to us even though it just contains russian materials that are now considered contraband so they can't absorb it economically is my point there's not enough demand outside these oecd countries to absorb all of that well here's what i think it's just mathematically not possible i think so look i think you make a point

but i think if you're going to look at this from like a 50 000 foot level i think there's like two grand narratives about what is happening in the world one narrative sort of the neocon sort of liberal hegemony narrative is that we're in a great battle between democracy and autocracy the other narrative is that we're in cold war ii is that it's more of a great power rivalry between the us and china i tend to think that the latter is where we're really at in the world and the reason why i say that is you look at there's a lot of autocracies who frankly we support because we want them on our side for example you know turkey is run by an autocrat um

you know erdogan is becoming more autocratic in egypt we had sort of democracy there for a brief moment when mubarak got overthrown guess what they elected the um the muslim brotherhood and we didn't like that too much and now we got general al-sisi in charge we like that a lot better you know we are still allies with the the saudis and they're they're a more autocratic government so i tend to think that you know the better way to describe what's happening in the world is a balance of power rivalry between the us and china which is only going to pick up momentum in the current in the coming decades and we have to think about who's

on our side of the ledger and who's on their side of the ledger and you know i think at this point it's we've pretty much driven russia completely onto the chinese side of the ledger and um i think it's gonna have like very bad consequences for us all right let's segue from here into uh the economy inflation and markets in a previous episode chamath you talked about the the psychological cycle of you know ignoring good news then accepting it being outraged by it and then maybe not taking the good news in the bad news column obviously inflation continues uh last six months of cpi

numbers year over year obviously uh september 5.4 i'll fast forward to november 6.8 january 7.5 february 7.9 excluding food and energy core inflation still rose 6.4 that being said um we have 11.x million jobs uh available for americans five or six million people unemployed who are looking for work obviously there will be some uh mismatch in terms of geography and skills there uh and then corporate earnings great but a recession possibly looming where are you on this uh and obviously the market's bottomed out so where are you at with the economy hope fear and otherwise um well i think that we're in the midst of

what i would call a melt up so you know probably the next month month and a half there really isn't much quote-unquote bad news that hasn't been priced in the the thing that i've learned over the last few years is that markets don't actually care what the news is they they can process good news and bad news equally well what they despise is the uncertainty of what the news could be and so this week was really important because we had two um huge buckets of uncertainty taken out of the market so the one we've already talked about which is when when

the market saw that there was a surface area of a deal between ukraine and russia that was really constructive because neither side would have signaled something if both parties were very far apart so that that meant to the markets were a few weeks out from something getting done and then the second thing was jerome powell and the federal reserve they finally had their meeting they raised rates 25 basis points but even more importantly they gave you a very prescriptive forecast of what the next year will look like at a minimum and possibly even two years and once you could have that

you were able to then go and redo all of your expectations and what people realized was okay you know inflation may actually start to get tamed in the back half of the year the economy is still quite strong uh and we could actually support two two and a half percent interest rates and still actually grow really well and so what you've seen in the last three or four days is a reaction to the loss of uncertainty and so there really isn't you know uh the only thing defying the ointment could be if the war all of a sudden escalates not that it gets dragged on because at that point that's also i think been priced in

but if something very meaningfully different and some and and russia in this case ratchets up the intensity by going you know nuclear something else although i think that's a very long tail chemical weapon seems a possibility or carpet bombing i think these are all very very low probability events um but in the absence of these things you basically have really constructive dynamics right now for at least the next month and a half maybe even two months how much of this has to do with retail investors who were yolo huddlers speculators stemi chats super active for two years and then maybe getting super spooked right now

and maybe needing the money to deploy in their lives look the the thing to remember and and and i hate to be this blunt but it's true retail is not a very good signal of anything in fact um if you actually look at retail flows typically you will make money by doing the exact opposite of what retail does and i posted this in the group chat to you guys you know every single day of since the beginning of this year retail was a net buyer in all of those days the market got punched in the face finally at the beginning of march retail capitulated right and i posted that same day and i said guys this is the moment to buy

and it lo and behold what happened the markets rallied meaningfully from that point and the reason is because they were going into the end of q1 you have a huge tax bill due in april 15th people were starting to just finally give up they were buying every single day and they finally gave up but that capitulation was the moment that you buy so if anything retail is is is the you know you know i've said before you fade your faith list you know retail flows are something you typically will make money by fading by doing the exact opposite of whatever retail is doing um and you just need to have access to

that information if you have access to it you can kind of um you know profit from it so where are we going from here probably up david you've been pessimistic uh we're seeing a lot of changes in the private market funding rounds taking longer a lot of funds getting closed uh you know venture funds that is but seems like a lot more diligence is being done the time mean time to closing a deal has definitely extended massively what's your batting strategy now as a venture capitalist i think that there's going to be a trickle-down effect of what's happened in the market to privates and the valuations are going to go back to their pre-coveted levels i

mean ar multiples pre-covered we're like 20 not 100. so we're seeing a massive repricing of deals and that's going to continue and i don't think it's just going to be this like transient effect everything's going to bounce back in a few weeks on the public markets the defining characteristic of these markets is volatility i mean the vix which is the measure of volatility is at one of its all-time highs and so it's true that over the past week we saw a nice sort of melt-up or a rally because there was speculation about this peace deal the financial times had that article on the 15-point plan chamath is right that if that peace deal

gets signed i think the market rallies strongly because you know it went up considerably just on hopes that it might be signed but on the other hand if this peace process falls apart i think the market will give back all those gains and then some i think we are nowhere near out of the woods on all the risky scenarios that could develop from this war i think that if there is no peace deal i think you can almost expect russia to escalate in the war they have said this is an existential issue for them i think that would mean at a minimum you know heavy bombing of ukrainian

cities and then that will step up the pressure even more on biden and washington to get militarily involved this situation could still spend out of control so you know i think in the absence of peace deal and then finally we have all the risks of recession we we definitely are seeing a slowdown in the economy right now and i think if this war continues and we don't get the spring planning and things keep you know deteriorating i think we're headed for a very serious um recession in this country i think we'll go from slow down to recession so if i were advising biden of course no one's listening to me but if i were advising

biden i would be telling biden listen mr president we are going to have a horrible midterms in november and you know we are going to have a really hard time in 2024 if this war continues and you know we head down into a recession or any of the other catastrophes that could happen we need to push for a peace deal right now and the u.s should be playing a constructive role and we should be applying pressure wherever we can to make a deal because the broad contours of this deal to jamaa's point have been set i don't think any of the details now that we know look it's about crimea it's about dawn bass about neutrality

none of the details that we're still fighting over are more important than getting a piece right now and if i were in the white house i'd be singly pushing for that yeah it's uh it's complicated there the the counter to that obviously is this could be you know the beginning of the end for putin and you know even if that's a 10 chance or 20 chance the possibility that in our lifetime you know russia could have a leadership change could be tremendous obviously it's a coin toss which way it goes uh but change could be i think so look that's certainly in the cards and um and look if somehow magically putin got toppled and replaced with a

democrat that would be a wonderful thing um however before it's rare but it happens yeah well tell me when does it happen uh east germany right on the wall yeah i mean that was a reunification here's the basic problem we understand the russians in the russian system you've got all these oligarchs are basically like bosses or mob bosses and then putin's like the boss of bosses right so what are the odds if you take out the boss of bosses that he's replaced with someone who's a democrat versus the next biggest baddest boss um i think you know look that that's certainly a possibility but my concern

is that when you play for maximalist upside like that you're also taking maximalist downside and a lot of people have made this point that look if putin's life is on the line he's going to be more willing to do anything and i think that the better approach and you've heard people mention this idea of the golden bridge from sun tzu which is give your enemy a golden bridge to retrieve i mentioned it so that he's not fighting for his life that was a really clever um framework jacob i think yeah i think i mean if you guys went and created a tally and i'm not trying to be debbie down here

but you know since the advent of the cia the number of times that we have tried to incite regime change and then the number of times it's been successful what is that percentage i mean we don't know because we don't know how many times we've tried well we know we know of many attempts yeah i mean we've chased a lot of two outers which every time we try it we either get the same or worse so for example syria we tried to get rid of assad he's still there and now it's worse uh afghanistan we tried it the taliban are back in power well no but hold on we finished to take it to the calculation is what if it

does change hold on iraq we got rid of saddam and now we've handed that country to uh iran on a silver platter the ayatollahs control it gaddafi in libya we got rid of him because he was so horrible and now that country is in chaos you've got to try open air markets we tried in um in ukraine we tried in ukraine in 2014. so our track record is not super good yeah no i mean i i think regime change is like chasing someone out or something you know if we're a company at some point we would have been pipped for our ability to do regime change i don't i don't think it's a great strategy i'm not necessarily advocating for it but

i'm not saying that i'm saying whether or not it's a good strategy i think that we are particularly not good at it yeah we need a performance improvement plan on that front well we should just i think we should just stop trying that we shouldn't be going for a regime change we should be this is a good question you and i had this thing where i said you and i are in sync that we both want to contain dictators and maybe isolation and you're like i'm not into isolation so i think a definition of like what is the strategy for containment going forward post a peace deal with russia and isolationism you know i guess is a bit of a trigger word and it's loaded

but well yeah i'm not an isolationist next person i would describe my strategy as selective engagement meaning that we still engage internationally on behalf of vital american interests in our core interests but we don't stick our fingers in the pie of the internal affairs of all these countries all over the world to try and foment regime change so for example like what's an example of a vital american interest i would say standing up to to china in the sense that we do not want them dominating asia and becoming a pure competitor to the united states that can then challenge us all over the world so some more pragmatists on it and that would be more productive we can be isolationist with

north korea because there's literally nothing they can do for us and and look i would not be throwing countries like turkey and egypt and saudi arabia out of our coalition in cold war ii because we don't like the the nature of their governments and i'm not saying i support autocracy i don't know but the reality is dialogue is reasonable because if you don't then the other side will the foreign policy playbook is going to get fundamentally rewritten after this russia ukraine war in large part because of the effectiveness of government sanctions plus corporate social responsibility whatever

you want to call that csr public sentiment or whatever you want to call it yes i agree but the combination of these two things has proved to be incredibly effective at setting the stage for some sort of compromise or regime change the spectrum of outcomes is there but the point is that's an incredibly unique set of circumstances where before we never would have thought an economy that large or a country that important on the world stage would ever have compromised in the absence of military intervention and i think that that's important to think about as we think about what our forward going china

policy looks like i think really like the the importance of like the oecd right the importance of all these organized nations that consume from china uh becoming more organized now probably makes more sense i said this before in a tweet but the importance of the us dollar has become completely primary which has been an incredible benefit you know benefit of what has happened because of this war you know very small silver linings in the grand scheme of all this humanitarian crisis but those are going to be really important things that the united states can seize on so you know we may in some ways have

have had some diminished power in order to facilitate peace in this truck in this conflict but the downstream capital that we could accumulate by organizing these countries more effectively i think could be really important and then separately we have to have a moral conversation in the united states about all these things like environmental laws like our approach to agriculture that may have been underrated absolutely yes with faulty logic a little more pragmatism would go a long way yes it would i'm a little more pessimistic about our foreign policy establishment and part of

the reason i say this is because i'm very disappointed in the republicans the republicans used to be the party a vital national interest meaning america did not get involved all over the world unless we had a vital national interest you just never hear them making that case anymore it's all the way back to sort of bush doctrine and you know as an example they're all pushing for the no-fly zone they're all pushing for the delivery of the migs despite they want war just say the words they're weird i mean those right wingers are crazy why are they so not war i've been very critical i mean i've been the war on this i don't

understand well anxiety i think i think there's two possibilities i think is it free what is it anxiety yeah and this is why i predicted war at the end of last year but you know i think that trying to be a great prediction right look i've been i've been very disappointed in the republicans and i think i think here's what i think is going on i think if any of those republicans like say uh mitt romney or something and look i think lindsey graham is just a crazy sort of warmonger but but you take someone like mitt romney who's basically saying all these um sort of more uh bellicose and escalatory things if he was actually in

biden's shoes i bet he'd be making the same decisions as biden because he would not want to risk war three but it's such a cheap easy partisan political attack to say that biden is being weak and he's not doing everything at all i think history will look back and think two things about about this whole thing with it with the american lens the first thing was for whatever set of reasons we lost it and we diminished some stature in the world as a perceived arbitrator and mediator in these kinds of conflicts but separately i do think biden has done a very good job in seeing the forest from the trees he held the line on military intervention and he has really ratcheted

up the ability for others to impose economic sanctions beside and behind the united states and i think that will turn out to be a master stroke i give him credit and i think that that he deserves to be acknowledged for that i'm going to agree with you because i i think the uh biden has done an amazing job of just saying outright we're not going to war we are not starting to i mean and sacks you've lauded them i think that shows some intellectual honesty on your part and to your point there's a reason why we lost our credibility these misadventures of saxophonism in the middle east have been disastrous we made huge mistakes and we

need to take a different approach i'll give a trump a compliment he didn't start any wars and if you look at every president who came before him in our lifetime every time they start two or three conflicts and he was like we're going to have a no war policy and now he got by and say we're not going to go to war either this could be a tipping point and our focus i think the ultimate checkmate should be biden coming out and the eu coming on saying we are going to start a race to resiliency and here's how it's going to look jason it's an incredible point that you just made i just want to reiterate it since reagan i can i can

explicitly point out incremental conflicts that the president of the united states has approved and greenlit to get us into since reagan so we've been we've been in seven wars we've been in seven wars since the end of the cold war it's amazing the american people trump was the only one that did not start a new war right before biden you want to know why because he was a populist and the people of the united states of america don't want these crazy wars they are sick of all these wars it is the foreign policy establishment that is pushing for all of

these wars and listen why and obama the same way obama let's just go back obama beat hillary clinton for the democratic nomination because he was against the iraq war and she was for it yeah obama had the right instincts on ukraine he did not want to escalate the situation remember in 2014 when they took crimea he said america does not have a vital national interest that justifies us going to war he was right the president that tried to incite regime change it's it's right you know why you want to know why because because the state department lifers you know who institut who incited that are under secretary of state for russian affairs was victoria newland

who was a foreign policy advisor for dick cheney and these people bull weevil their way into the foreign policy establishment they're in the think tanks they're in the state department what did you just use bull evil they they like it's like they are the permanent hold on a second they are the permanent establishment of washington the president's come and go they stay forever yeah she was there she was caught on a phone call basically picking the new leader of ukraine after a coup in 2014. she is she the one that had that famous quote that said uh putin

[ __ ] putin was that he said no he said he said yeah she said yas is our guide basically picking yatsenyuk to be the new leader and she said [ __ ] the eu when the eu wanted to take a more temperate approach okay okay look at william f buckley here you going saks i think the mistake biden made listen i think biden has good instincts on this i think he had good instincts last year in june when he called for basically an emergency summit with putin to dial down the tensions and i think that summit was successful so what happened okay the intercept just had a great article talking about how tensions ratcheted

down after that june summit but they picked back up in october november what happened between june and october i'll tell you what on september 1st zielinski met with biden in the white house and the state department issued a joint statement basically reaffirming that ukraine would be part of nato they would reaffirm military ties economic ties and then on november 10th they published a giant charter agreement between the united states and ukraine that was signed by blinken now look did i know about this yes but this is the state department agenda and it was on the heels of this charter agreement that the russians basically said they had reached

the boiling point they basically delivered the ultimatum to the us in december and precipitated the crisis that preceded this war so my point is just listen we have a state department with its own agenda it loves regime change it loves having clients all over the world and inserting its fingers in the pie and unless biden hold on if unless biden stands up to his own state department we will not get a ceasefire and we will not get a peace deal and that will be disastrous for his presidency what i will say is um i think biden has done a very good job and uh i i know tony really well and i think tony's trying to do the best job

he can i think he's done a pretty good job all things considered as well that's awesome final thoughts here on uh you know a very difficult time period we're living through the global order is being restructured it's predictable i think again if you read ray dalio's book which i recommended heavily last year um it's surprising how much of that simple um rubric uh is playing out uh today exactly as that rubric kind of estimated it would um and you know the look i mean by the way one way to think about the china russia us dynamic you know you got a one two and three player game theory number

one wants two and three to be at it because then they'll you know end up diminishing value number two wants one and three to be at it number three wants one and two to be at it and so we're seeing that um that multi-party game theory play out right now um and you know again based on that rubric you could probably predict where this is all gonna end up brilliant point listen if you were to look at this from the chinese standpoint they must be loving what's going on loving it old saying i think napoleon said it never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake why is china

so quiet right now well yeah because they love their dreams their dream is the us and russia attacking each other yeah we have to implement energy independence writ large and we have to make sure that it is very clear we have influence amongst all these oecd countries because if china takes one foot over the line we have to have the ability to do to them what we've done to russia economically it's the only way in which we can ratchet down all this tension and find peace yes the new war is the war on our dependency on dictators we must must must have a race to resiliency we're going to talk about this and more at the

all-in summit no more may 15 16 and 17 all in summit miami uh 500 of the 700 tickets are gone if you want to apply for a scholarship you can apply tell us how much you love the show at the website just do a google search for all in summit really excited to announce keith reboy will be joining us uh one of sax's besties a very iconoclastic person we're going for iconoclasts next up brian peterson friend of the pod from flexport talking about all these supply chain issues the number of speakers we're going to have is going to be extraordinary brad gerstner friend of the pod is going to come talking about markets education joe

lonsdale is uh halfway in again another iconoclastic controversial person and then we'll keep announcing more every week uh apply for a scholarship if you like and uh we'll see you all there for love you guys sultan of science the rain man and the dictator i'm jake al love you besties bye bye bye best love you sacks love your socks love you free bird back at you those are good feelings for you to have let your winners ride rain man david sacks and it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it [Music] we should all just get a room and just

have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music] your feet we need to get back [Music]