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dude sax i love that look look at that shirt look at that man is it too noisy for a podcast you look very relatable
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you're like you're like a an american man like just like at home doing stuff is he trying to go full tucker on us it
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is a really really horrendous shirt that you're that is a i mean i that was the same shirt tucker was wearing last week oh my god sax is
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going to be so appealing to middle america right now he's like absolutely look he's going for the every man he doesn't have a blazer on he's trying
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to get the purple pills are you going to go chop wood with tucker yeah i may not be a man
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of the people but i do try to be a man for the people [Music]
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[Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode
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of the all-in podcast it's obviously been an intense week and there is a
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topic there's really only one topic to talk about this week and that's the russian invasion of the
00:01:04
ukraine with me to break all this down i'm going to take it from a couple of different angles
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the rain man david sacks with his power flannel on today he's going to go chop some wood after this trying to appeal to
00:01:16
the everyman power flannel it's a power flannel it's a power flannel i think that was gifted by
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tucker and the sultan of science hot off the you know how do you know it's uh flannel instead of uh cashmere
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how do you know it didn't come from one of tomas little um if you sent that shirt to chamathi burn
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it that would go right in his pizza i'm gonna burn it but i would wipe my butt with it
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geez here we go folks uh and hot off the launch of the hannah beveridge printer replicator the sultan
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of science himself david freeburg and back from a little holiday
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the dictator himself jamal palihapita with a a jedi robe tell us about the jedi
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robe that you elected for this week darth palpita well this is darth palpatine hapatia
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well i i mean this is look this is yes it is cashmere we're running out of time i have to wear through the rest of my
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few garments my new garments before it's springtime and then i have to go to the you know the linen and the
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cotton got it so you're enjoying the final days of cashmere well i do i did
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find some baby cashmere light thin you know you can wear them probably
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until april maybe even may so we have that going for us all right well
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there you go and is there a specific date that you uh shift over from to the linens and
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to to be honest with you i have a i have a team i consult with the team's working on that right they're working on that they're working on a
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recommendation all right so we can still laugh uh it's kind of hard to talk about other topics when a war has broken out
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uh i don't know if i have to go too deep into recapping what's happening
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because it is a static situation but there's been massive uh fallout from
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the war both economically lives lost and it's escalated pretty dramatically we had a pretty crazy moment last night
00:03:15
we're taping this on friday march 4th last night a nuclear facility the largest one in
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europe uh was involved in a firefight it seems to have been secured and the russians have taken control of it but
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there were people bombing it where to begin here i think maybe saks we can start us off
00:03:33
with a little bit of your assessment of the situation as it stands in week two
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yeah i mean when we broke up last week this war was just breaking out and we were still talking about ways that we
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might defuse it obviously that was too late and i think everybody probably putin
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first and foremost thought this would be a cakewalk and it has turned out not to be the resistance by the ukrainians has been fierce
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and it's been sort of uh galvanized by their leader zielinski you know at the very beginning
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of the hostilities he made the decision to stay and fight he had that video that came out with his
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cabinet standing behind him that galvanized all the people of ukraine stand behind them and then the
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west now wants to stand behind the whole country of ukraine so it's really been
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you know amazing leadership by zilinski and um you know it's too bad in a way we didn't have that kind of
00:04:25
leadership among our allies and say afghanistan you know we had this guy ghani who got in the first helicopter out of there
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when when the trouble started um so uh you know his leadership has been
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strong and admirable and it's basically galvanized the west and i think that putin i think must have underestimated
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the level of resistance he would face and also the unity of the west in terms
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of sanctioning him uh and providing support for the ukrainians
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all that being said i think we're now at a very dangerous sort of crossroads because the situation is is very
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volatile uh and you've got so much variance in the outcomes that can occur now um i think you're seeing people
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prognosticate everything from you know uh kiev gets turned to rubble
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in the next week and the russians basically power through and win two this turns into a long-term insurgency
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to you know there's gonna be some sort of uprising in moscow and and you know regime change there
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and i think because the variance is so high because all the sort you know because the two sides are playing for all the marbles
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so to speak and you've even got i think intemperate and insane remarks by
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lindsey graham basically calling for uh you know calling for putin's ouster you
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know which i think is going to give i mean yeah it's going to give the kremlin i
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think a propaganda tool but for for rallying people internally but
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the the the point is just where it seems like we're playing for all the marbles right now and um i think that's a very
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dangerous place to be and i'm seeing you know insane rhetoric and commentary by people trying
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to push us into war and so just the other day you know one of the one of the things i tweeted about is one of the craziest things you hear is we're
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already in war three well and you know kasparov said this i mean he's kind of a
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known to be a little bit of a hothead but you also had fiona hill who's supposed to be a russia expert from the state department who frequently is the
00:06:24
go-to source for cnn and other publications also saying we're already in world war three well no we're not i
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mean if we were in war three you'd see the mushroom clouds assuming you were still alive and not vaporized so it is
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incredibly reckless for people to be saying things like this and there is just you know this drumbeat of war
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that is being pushed by cable news and by the twitter sphere and just today uh
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thankfully this morning nato announced that it would not be uh imposing a no-fly zone
00:06:53
over ukraine that was why is that important explain well because because there's all these people who are saying
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well we shouldn't send boots on the ground to ukraine we don't need to get militarily involved but let's let's do a
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no-fly zone to basically help the ukrainians how do you enforce that what a no-fly zone means is that you're going
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to shoot down russian planes yes that's what it means you are going to war it may not be boots on the ground it's boots in the sky
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so had we done that had we given in to the emotional appeals and i think we all feel the tug on our
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heartstrings but had we given into that we would be potentially in a shooting war with russia
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and that would be the most serious we're already in i think the most serious foreign policy situation in
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my lifetime and you know i'm almost half a century old so you know it's um
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it's very dangerous and um you know i've been saying for the last month on this podcast i've been actually advocating
00:07:48
for the cause of not getting militarily involved and a month ago it seemed like an argument i didn't need to make
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but now it really does because uh both sides are are sort of and this is there's almost a unanimity in washington
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that we need to continue escalating the situation sex my concern is
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less about the washington um intent to put boots on the ground or boots in the
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sky and i'm much more concerned about nato allies there's 30 member nations
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in nato and um if any one of them does something stupid if there's any action
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by any even rogue element within the military or um
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some statement even by some politician at some nato member um you know you could see
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a reaction potentially from putin and then article five kicks in which is this collective
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defense article in nato and then the united states has an obligation to enter the conflict uh and and that's the one
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scenario you didn't mention which is the scenario i am most concerned about most frightened by
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is we don't know when the when or if a franz ferdinand moment could occur here
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that someone does something stupid some polish tank rolls across the border and shoots down
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some shoots at some russian you know tank and then the russian tank crosses over and then all of a sudden
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we've got to go to the rescue and we've got to go defend that that nato member and then all of a sudden this whole
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thing sparks into a wildfire it felt like last night could have been that when you look at the fog of war you know
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it was basically this nuclear reactor if it explodes if it
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has uh you know an episode would do just tremendous damage to the whole continent i mean if
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you're living in a nato country or in moscow if that thing had gone up which i know is
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a very um uh would be a rare occurrence and they were shutting it down et cetera so but there was that last night it felt like
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there could be a tipping point nuclear material is like a whole nother level it's like um
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it has nothing to do with war at that point it has to do with uh extinction
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you know a nuclear reactor is almost like a temple on earth to god it's like
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this holiest of holies no one can should or ever could consider that to be a point in conflict ever it's nothing
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should be touched let the wars of humans continue on the rest of the earth surface but nuclear weapons nuclear
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reactors that's unleashing the fury of the gods on olympus and when they come down they scorch the earth and nuclear
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material you know is an extinction kind of or is you know kind of a cataclysmic
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event for this planet and so you know that that goes well beyond this idea of like is it nato or
00:10:40
did someone shoot at someone let's all go fight it becomes like almost existential to the to the condition of humans well so
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what does that say about putin then i mean putin targeted that facility no hold on a second hold on i think that's
00:10:51
fake news at this point you see the tweet by michael shellenberger so hold on a second you said this is false
00:10:57
nice tweet i did see last night's tweet okay so i don't necessarily think this is fog of war i think this might be disinformation so here's what happened
00:11:04
is it and it wasn't just misreporting zielinski tweeted out a video where he basically
00:11:10
was saying this plant has been attacked it's on fire it's going to be chernobyl times 10 for all of europe and then the
00:11:16
foreign minister of ukraine came out with another statement just like that simultaneously so this was coordinated
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and then i saw on all the cable news networks all of them there's no difference between fox and
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cnn msnbc same reporting they were all in a panic about this and then you know and that now then we find out very
00:11:34
quickly the truth which was confirmed by the white house which is no radiation no explosion
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um the fire was sort of tangential it wasn't core to the plant so i think we have to be very careful
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now to guard ourselves against disinformation that is designed frankly to escalate the situation and pull us to
00:11:55
draw us into a war simultaneous with this there was a new york times op-ed by zielinski and and
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one of his aides who was standing next to him sort of transcribing and the headline was something like i'm fighting to the last breath look that that is
00:12:08
heroic i mean i think we can all recognize zilunsky's bravery and courage in in in doing that
00:12:14
however the point of that article was to tug on our heartstrings to get us to involved in the war and what he said in
00:12:21
that that article was you don't need to send boots on the ground but impose the no-fly zone which we just talked about
00:12:27
is a declaration of war yeah but no what i was talking about with the nuclear power plant is not that it wasn't being
00:12:32
hyped up by the media certainly like this was becoming like their ratings bonanza and they were definitely hyping
00:12:38
it up and maybe zolinsky was giving a warning hey this could escalate but the russians did target that they were
00:12:45
bombing around it they were firefighting sort of freeberg's point like this is i think crazy behavior by russian troops
00:12:51
by putin to actually you know try to seize a nuclear power plant it seems
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pretty crazy chamath you've been silent thus far let's get your moth involved here there's a 17th century phrase that
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says adversity makes for strange bedfellows
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and i think what happens when you are in the middle of enormous adversity
00:13:13
um you know you need to do whatever it takes to win right that's i think why silence is so
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patriotic and viewed so heroically around the world now um he's trying to defend his country and
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his people um i want to take the counter of david what you said i actually think
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we are at war but it's the most
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positive form of it in the sense that we are learning
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a different kind of warfare now if you think about how we used to fight
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up until basically the persian gulf war it was armaments and tanks
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and then that evolved in the middle east because we had to fight insurgents and you know
00:14:01
urban terrorism in many ways right i think this is a way in which we are
00:14:06
learning that there's a different kind of warfare as well which is fundamentally economic and so you know it may not take the same
00:14:14
shape as drones and missiles and fire and guns and bullets
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but i think you would be foolish to make the mistake that we are now not at economic war with russia
00:14:28
and at the end of the day the outcome is the same which is either they survive
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or they don't survive and everything we've done points to that we are willing to fight
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um and we are willing to put a lot of economic collateral um
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and chips on the field in order to win this battle so i think in that respect we are kind of at a war did we are we on it is this
00:14:53
a nuclear level economic uh decoupling everybody has a historical framework
00:14:58
where they want to go back to how the natural path of escalation works and i think this is a very different
00:15:04
form of escalation that we need to consider and i think that this is the kind of warfare that may actually
00:15:11
um you know be the the way in which wars are fought in the future you seize assets you shut off access to
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supply routes you make it impossible for anything to work so you know i'll give you a simple example
00:15:25
form of warfare is what's happening right now in the sense that you know for example the russian skies are completely
00:15:30
clear not just because that you know no uh external
00:15:36
airlines will necessarily fly there but because boeing and rolls-royce and ge and airbus basically pulled all of their
00:15:43
support all of their parts right um we've gone to war with respect to their petroleum and lng supplies how not
00:15:50
necessarily because we won't still stop payments which we are still enabling but because the actual refiners won't take
00:15:56
the oil on the lng because they then would be subject to sanctions the people who would ship that
00:16:01
are no longer taking those uh payments or those those barrels of oil into the marketplace because they can't get
00:16:07
insured by international banks so in all of these various ways we are actually at
00:16:14
war and i think you know maybe this is the way war should be fought in the future
00:16:19
because it'll save thousands of lives in in the more classic way of describing how lives are sacrificed for
00:16:26
i want to make a counterpoint my concern to mock is that we've rushed into a reactive response
00:16:33
with respect to sanctions and seizing assets in a way that maybe not be calculated
00:16:38
over the long run meaning like are we setting ourselves up for another iraq
00:16:44
afghanistan situation where we rush into a war and we don't have an exit strategy and
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the issue is that a lot of the assets that we've effectively wiped the value down to zero
00:16:56
have a repercussive effect on global businesses and the global economy as a
00:17:01
as an example you know this company that we were texting about called luke oil they were worth 60 billion dollars a few
00:17:08
days ago we effectively wiped them out to zero and um 65 to 70 percent of the shares in
00:17:15
that company were held and owned by public uh um retirement funds pension funds
00:17:21
mutual funds that are used for retirees in europe and the united states and um and so you know a significant
00:17:28
amount this is a complete red herring i i've told you this in the private chat i think this is a complete complete red
00:17:33
herring and the reason it's a red herring is that the global total market cap of all of these businesses
00:17:41
is meaningfully different than the amount of total capex that these guys represent and inasmuch as you are gonna
00:17:46
take the equity values of certain of these companies to zero it's in the grand scheme of things not that much
00:17:52
equity value we can absorb it we're not talking trillions of dollars forget about the equity value just think
00:17:58
about the economic repercussions where there is leveraged uh positions and swaps and derivatives in place
00:18:04
counterparty swaps in place with a lot of these companies that are now going to default and we're not going to know that till the end of this month when
00:18:10
everything has to settle and no one's going to be able to make their payments a small price to pay freedberg if well
00:18:17
hold on one sec this applies both to russian companies that are suppliers and buyers of assets um products and
00:18:25
services from international businesses and all of a sudden that line item just zeros out i don't believe the economic
00:18:31
value of all of that oil exceeds the market cap of luke oil
00:18:36
i don't believe it and i don't believe further that the economic value that's held by
00:18:42
uh non-russian actors is meaningfully more than a few tens of billions of dollars we're going to find
00:18:49
out pretty quick for sanctions by the way russia and the ukraine combined account for roughly 25 of global wheat
00:18:55
exports let me let me say differently that wheat goes to egypt and from egypt it goes throughout africa and there's a
00:19:02
lot of nations and a lot of people that depend on that food supply and that food supply is now cut off okay i understand
00:19:08
but now we were talking about something different you want to talk about wheat we can talk about wheat generally i'm talking about zeroing all
00:19:14
this stuff out and cutting them off completely hold on a second one of the things you have to realize freeburg is that the purpose of sanctions is to
00:19:20
create massive pain that stops a madman dictator 100 from
00:19:26
invading other countries and causing a world war so while it is tragic that's
00:19:31
some pension hold on let me finish while it is tragic that people will suffer and
00:19:36
people maybe can't get their netflix or can't get their facebook or some wheat will get disrupted all of this is the
00:19:43
the is the better choice than going to war with putin and it's meant to create pain and
00:19:49
suffering it does not create pain and suffering then russia will not change i understand the point of sanctions jkl i
00:19:55
totally get it i totally understand the intent and i totally understand the point my point is have we really done
00:20:01
the calculus because when you make this much of an impact this fast when you rush into what we might call an economic
00:20:07
war with such significant abrasion in such a significantly short period of
00:20:12
time i don't know do we really have a sense of where the calculus is because i don't know where the wheat imports are
00:20:18
going to come from for egypt now and i don't know where the millions of people that depend on that wheat supply are now
00:20:23
going to get fed from and i don't think we have an answer if we had a strategy that said here's the solution here's the
00:20:29
solution from an energy perspective from a food perspective from a capital perspective to fill all these holes otherwise we may all end up sharing that
00:20:36
cost over the long run and it's going to be a big cost to bear i think you're wrong and the reason why i think you're wrong
00:20:42
is we've already seen how this has played out before so in the last two years we learned what governments are
00:20:48
willing to do when you have supply shots in demand shocks and what they do is they turn on the money printer and they
00:20:55
create enormous amounts of stimulus okay and what we have now is a point where
00:21:01
if these shocks are really really really meaningful globally
00:21:06
i think you're going to see the federal reserve and the ecb and the bank of canada and the bank of japan step in in
00:21:14
a very coordinated way to provide liquidity to these markets
00:21:19
and i think what that has the byproduct of doing is blunting the economic consequences to everybody but
00:21:27
the person who is sanctioned do you think that's inflationary as well no and the other thing in fact it's the
00:21:32
opposite i look david and i have been the ones that said the risk is to a recession we are now teetering towards a
00:21:38
recession nick you should throw this thing that i sent to you guys before if you look back over the last 30 or 40
00:21:44
or 50 years and you look at every single period of when there has been a recession
00:21:50
what's interesting to note is that it's not always been the case that the price of energy has risen by 50 percent in a
00:21:56
recession but it is always the case that when energy prices spike by 50 we enter a
00:22:01
recession we will contract as an economy the government will have to become more
00:22:08
accommodating that is the price of this economic war that we have started
00:22:13
and i think it's a just price because what's happening is not supportable so tamath you are sure that we're or you
00:22:20
you feel strongly that we're not entering into a condition of significant stagflation where we're
00:22:26
not able to restimulate the economy and we inflate everything with all this money printing i don't even know what
00:22:31
stagflation is to be completely honest with you i don't think i've ever seen it i know how it's classically described i
00:22:37
think it's like pseudo-intellectual kind of gobbledygook speak what i can tell you is i think that prices are
00:22:45
too high in certain core commodities and goods i think what's going to happen is we are going to find a way to subsidize those
00:22:53
prices coming down and i think the simplest way to do it is for the government to step in and become a
00:22:58
buffer and it will drive massive deficits it'll drive increasing amounts of debt
00:23:03
but i think that is a simple way for us to make sure we put and ratchet the pressure and just to speak on this other
00:23:09
point we have only just begun meaning just today as we started the pod
00:23:14
uh biden came out with an incremental new set of sanctions on russian crude so we're not at the
00:23:20
even in the beginning we're at the beginning of the beginning i'm just worried this is a new kind of nuclear war i mean it's just well it's right now
00:23:27
if this is if this is the new nuclear war then it's a blessing because we're not going to have millions of people die sacks is are the sanctions just right
00:23:34
too strong too little i think like versus going to war i think what
00:23:39
free we're saying is that we're on an escalatory path here that starts with sanctions then leads to more and more sanctions
00:23:45
that includes arming the ukrainians and i don't know that's not that's a big that's a big leap and i
00:23:52
think i think already the germans gave the gave the ukrainians javelin missiles last week yeah i mean
00:23:59
i know absolutely right and there's there's a lot more coming so you know what i would say is back to something said which is we're
00:24:06
already at war i you know call me a call me non-binary call me a non-binary thinker but
00:24:13
i don't i don't like dividing our options in that simply into war and peace i think there's like a spectrum
00:24:18
here and there and and you could call that spectrum an escalatory path so there's sanctions there's arming them and and so
00:24:25
on down the line and i don't like characterizing what we're in or what we're doing is war
00:24:31
because once you're in war then it justifies anything and for the other side too so you're such a pacifist
00:24:38
sacks it's awesome keep going look we have to remember wait no let me just clarify what i'm saying yeah let me just wait i didn't say we're at war i said
00:24:44
we're at a form of a war it's an economic war it's just a difference i hope it stays economic then you know i
00:24:50
don't i don't like using that metaphor but let's not debate semantics but to jason's point am i pacifist what i would
00:24:55
say is you know during the cold war we have to remember that this philosophy of containment that we
00:25:00
had the goal was to prevent the spread of communism while conceding that the countries that were
00:25:07
already communist that were behind the iron curtain we would not challenge we would not seek to roll that back why
00:25:13
because we did not want hot war with the soviet union and everything was calibrated to make sure that we did not
00:25:19
blunder ourselves into nuclear wars mutually assured destruction and yet it almost happened anyway most notably with
00:25:26
the cuban missile crisis but rules of the game evolved right and so we did things like arm the mujahideen
00:25:33
you know rebels in afghanistan with stinger missiles so that would be sort of the equivalent of the javelins but we sure as hell didn't put the american
00:25:40
flag or a nato flag on the boxes and on the trucks delivering those weapons we
00:25:45
delivered them through pakistan through intermediaries there are rules of the game that we all understood
00:25:51
now i hope we are following some of the rules but it feels to me like we are and
00:25:56
i think one good thing is that both biden and certainly putin remember the cold war they were very involved in the
00:26:02
cold war they're old enough to remember it and hopefully we remember those rules the most encouraging thing i've heard bin say this entire time was when he
00:26:09
reiterated at the state of the union that we would not get militarily involved it's very important that he keeps saying
00:26:15
that because you know the russians are looking at these statements so
00:26:20
we just have to remember that again we're on this escalatory path and and one of the things that's going on here
00:26:26
is is is a purity spiral so there's a social media version of this and there's like a partisan version of this so the
00:26:32
social media version of this is that the way that you show that you're on the the side of the good of ukraine is you
00:26:39
advocate for the no-fly zone you advocate for the escalation but if you advocate for slowing down or
00:26:46
de-escalating or just taking a breath you're called a putin bootlicker you're called neville chamberlain i've already
00:26:51
gotten about a thousand reply tweets coming at me saying that so the purity spiral on twitter that we've seen in so
00:26:58
many other contexts now pushes everybody into the into world war three similarly
00:27:04
there's a partisan dynamic where no matter what biden says or does no
00:27:10
matter what new sanctions he imposes the republicans will always announce him for weakness
00:27:15
and the media and fox news will always announce him for weakness it's a one-way ratchet
00:27:20
how much more do you want him to do is the question and i think freeburg asks you know a great question which is what
00:27:26
is the end game here what are we trying to accomplish and what i'm worried about is that the dynamic this this um frenzy
00:27:33
that you know what what biology is called the chimp frenzy of social media right with cable news and now social
00:27:40
media and partisan rhetoric it all pushes us towards continual escalation
00:27:45
and war three and who are going to be the grown-ups who say listen this is foolish stand down take a
00:27:51
breath by the way we might want to keep some of these cards in reserve we don't have to play every single thing right to
00:27:57
your point um i saw lady g trending i guess this is his nickname
00:28:02
but lindsey graham literally explicitly said somebody in russia needs to assassinate putin i mean
00:28:09
this is a crazy escalation and then on the other side inside the you have people saying
00:28:15
you know putin's a genius and so we are going to continue to ratchet up these economic sanctions guys we are this is
00:28:21
the beginning of the beginning of the economic sanctions we're not even in the middle of them what do you think he's going to do
00:28:26
like what is the exit ramp for putin if we keep doing this and he's in a corner i have no idea but i think that it's
00:28:32
clear it's pretty it's pretty plain as day if you're going to be unemotional and just look at this from our from the american
00:28:40
and european perspective which is the only end game now uh is regime change
00:28:46
right and one step before regime change is a complete sort of detent and somehow
00:28:52
you know um [Music] surrender by putin in the sense that he pulls back from ukraine not if seventy
00:28:58
percent of his people support him which is what a poll pulling figure showed this morning right and and you're
00:29:04
careful with those polls i mean people in russia are not exactly gonna say i'm anti-putin in a survey well j cal i mean
00:29:11
look you can say that to to kind of defend what you believe about i know i'm not saying it to defend whatever i'm saying like i'm saying
00:29:17
just just suspend it and assume for a moment that maybe that is the position of those people maybe they do believe in
00:29:24
pride of nation like the united states would believe in pride of nation if we were attacked if everyone took economic
00:29:30
sanctions against our country would we not stand up and defend our president and our nation and say that our country
00:29:37
is the prime country and our way of living and our life and we should be left alone you know this is um this is
00:29:44
not an issue for the world to get involved in okay let's play this out and so how do you end up assume that is the case how do you end up having a regime
00:29:51
change where you don't have a country that's actually in revolt but you have a country yeah but let's play this out like look people are
00:29:58
rallying for what this guy is doing if that is the case right let's move our conversation to exit ramps from where we
00:30:03
are there's there's two options right there's two options option one is ukraine successfully defends itself
00:30:09
right and option two is russia quote-unquote wins okay let's just go down that branch for one second
00:30:15
or they settle there's a third one jamaa they come to a peace treaty which is what's happened previously
00:30:21
oh there's a third and then there's like i guess what you're saying jason is like everybody just kind of stops where they're they are in place
00:30:27
yes they do a peace treaty they give them the east of the ukraine of ukraine got it well let's let's play
00:30:33
so then what happens to all of these economic sanctions are they undone
00:30:39
that would be part of the negotiation right yeah maybe undone based on conditions the question is are their reparations paid
00:30:46
one way or the other and how do those get funded well those should be imf get involved and say hey we're going to fund
00:30:51
your 300 billion dollar war damage bill to the ukraine and you know there's a big confiscate the 650 billion dollars
00:30:59
sitting in foreign bank accounts that's owned by the central bank of russia again like how do you go back and lead a
00:31:04
nation and how does a nation accept that how do they accept that um their sovereignty has now been challenged when
00:31:11
a few months ago so they were the aggressor right they don't already look at what happened to japan by the way you
00:31:16
know i mean you know it's it's a very similar kind of um psychological shock that that
00:31:21
may not be as easy to swallow with modern russians don't all roads then lead to this is going to
00:31:27
take a really long time to figure out a long it's either going to take a long time or it's going to catch on fire i
00:31:32
thought georgia took like 11 days so i mean i there's a sun tzu quote uh which i don't want to butcher but uh it was
00:31:39
build your opponent a golden bridge to recruit retreat across there needs to be a golden bridge here that's what we talked about
00:31:45
we we did talk about it two episodes ago where we said well we're not what if we're people running the country i'm talking about like where's biden and
00:31:51
where's the rest of the state department and saying here's an exit path for putin and clearly stated over and over again
00:31:57
and give him something to win right like i think we gave a suggestion david correct but i'm wrong if you suggested or i did two weeks ago when we started
00:32:04
talking about this which was hey why don't we just say hey we're not going to allow the to allow ukraine to
00:32:10
join nato for a decade if you leave now you know we're so past that we're so
00:32:15
passionate are we that has nothing to do with i think what's going on now you had countries you had countries like that
00:32:21
came off the sidelines and have done things they've they haven't done 30 40 50 years and in some cases ever i mean
00:32:28
their industry just got gutted this week house so like we should understand that there's there's a there's a hundred
00:32:33
million people worried about there's a hundred million people worried about food if we had done it preemptively i think i think it made a huge
00:32:39
difference like look at germany as an example germany under 40 years of policy you know they had consistently
00:32:44
been under investing relative to their gdp in the military and they made an explicit commitment to basically just
00:32:50
ramp that up back above two percent you know they've also made commitments around their energy independence you
00:32:56
know switzerland is freezing bank accounts something that they've really never done and they've always stayed neutral sweden sending uh
00:33:03
uh military support so there's a lot of countries in europe in continental europe that have found a voice well it's
00:33:10
terrifying right chamoth i mean to live with this threat just east of you this would be like us living with
00:33:15
this threat in you know central america or something this is like two steps away and i think that's what people forget is the
00:33:22
geography here of you know france germany uh paul and ukraine i think this nato commitment doesn't necessarily get
00:33:28
it done at this point yeah i agree with that i mean i didn't have to be part of anything what's the actual
00:33:34
ramp in my opinion is that you ratchet these economic sanctions up so severely
00:33:39
that then you know look the thing is hopefully in the aperture of war memories are
00:33:46
short in the sense that you know if you ratchet these things up very aggressively
00:33:52
now all of a sudden something from even two weeks ago seems like a much much better place to be right and so that could be an off-ramp
00:33:59
which is like you basically find a way to take a lot of pressure off these economic sanctions in return for it to
00:34:06
taunt i mean i don't know but i'm making this up i have no idea i mean it feels like
00:34:11
there's no exit here because putin has a lot of pride and nuclear weapons is this
00:34:16
an a no exit situation saks i think there's always an exit we have to be willing to to contemplate what that is i
00:34:22
think to your question let's go back for a second up to your question would it make a difference if
00:34:28
we had taken nato expansion off the table say last year i think this year was probably already too late but i
00:34:33
think the answer is yes regardless of whether you believe that nato expansion is a real
00:34:40
issue for the russians or whether you think that's a pretext because you know people are in one of those two camps
00:34:45
putin has been saying since 2008 in 2008 there was a nato summit in bucharest in which they basically declared they
00:34:52
proposed that ukraine and georgia could eventually be eligible for membership that basically started this whole thing
00:34:58
the russians at the time said this is an absolute non-starter for us it's a red line
00:35:03
no way will we allow this to happen and in fact later that year they rolled the tanks into georgia to put a stop to that
00:35:09
idea in georgia in ukraine the conversation was deferred they had this basically pro-russian
00:35:15
democratically elected prime minister president yukanovic
00:35:22
who was deposed in a coup in 2014 a coup that was supported by our state department and probably the
00:35:29
cia okay in reaction to that putin sees crimea not a year later not
00:35:36
months later days later the reason why he was able to seize it so quickly is the russians actually have
00:35:42
a naval base there at sevastopol okay it's it's at least the area is leased from ukraine but they
00:35:49
have a naval base there it allows them to control the black sea so the the russian thinking on this
00:35:57
if you believe it goes that listen we're about to have a pro-western
00:36:02
ruler come into ukraine installed by what an american-backed
00:36:07
coup and now we're going to lose our main naval base in the black sea and it could be
00:36:12
replaced with a nato base there's no way that's happening so they moved to seize crimea and then after that
00:36:20
they started backing russian separatists in the donbass and the civil war began okay so that
00:36:26
basically is what's been leading up to this and then last year they started getting very exercise about the
00:36:31
possibility of this nato proposal which again goes all the way back 2008 becoming
00:36:37
formally recognized and ukraine joining nato and for again this is from the
00:36:42
russian perspective okay and we could talk about whether there's a pretext in a second but from the russian perspective they said that listen and
00:36:50
putin gave a speech like this if ukraine joins nato because of article 5 the next time we have a border dispute which is
00:36:56
all the time right we could end up getting drawn into a war
00:37:02
three with you guys and so there is no way we're going to allow ukraine to be part of nato and
00:37:09
so they propose they basically by december had given an ultimatum to the state department
00:37:14
now what was the response to that lincoln came out at the critical moment and said nato's door is open and will
00:37:20
remain open basically said you guys can you know
00:37:25
take a hike um now obviously that was an extremely provocative thing and the russians
00:37:31
invaded ukraine days later now i think it's pretty obvious that if you take the russians at their word that they believe
00:37:37
forget about whether you think it's true or not but if you believe take them at the word that the same word they've been saying since
00:37:42
2008 that this is a red line for them and they have a serious vital national interest there then you should have diplomatically
00:37:49
tried to resolve this issue but even if you believe it was a pretext and putin is making up this whole red
00:37:55
line thing and his real goal is the expansion of mother russia and all that reunification or reunification let's say
00:38:01
that's his real goal it still would have been a good idea for blinken to basically
00:38:07
declare that we were going to take nato expansion off the table which is simply an affirmation the status quo it's not
00:38:12
appeasement you're not giving anything up you're reaffirming the status quo why would they blocking something from
00:38:18
happening in the future right why why would that have been a good idea because the polling on this
00:38:23
showed that the russian people by two to one were in favor of basically taking this kind of
00:38:30
military action against ukraine to prevent nato expansion but they were not in favor of doing it purely for
00:38:35
reunification so you would have if this was a pretext by putin for his expansions dreams
00:38:43
you could have taken away that card and it would have changed his calculus would have prevented the war we
00:38:48
can't say but in his calculus he's got to think well wait a second maybe the people won't be behind here's the good
00:38:54
news too if you had given him that chip and said we're not going to let them in tornado and then he does invade now
00:39:00
you've proven that this person is in reunification mode and he's deranged and
00:39:05
he's a warmonger and that this could go to other places and finland and poland and other people have no real reason yes
00:39:12
you would have so it would have been a much better chess move right so there was a failure
00:39:17
to listen and um and this is what concerns me so i want to you know uh george herbert walker bush who i think
00:39:24
was a great foreign policy president only wasn't so good on domestic only got re-elected didn't get reelected
00:39:30
but everyone recognized him as a great foreign policy president and um he has a quote about this style
00:39:37
of foreign diplomacy that we that his son practiced dick cheney and rumsfeld
00:39:42
and the same people now in the binding administration it's all the sort of neocon foreign policy he said though he
00:39:49
he called this iron ass foreign diplomacy he called cheney and iron ass
00:39:54
and he called sold arrogant and um you know what he basically said is that
00:40:00
these guys he's talking about cheney and rumsfeld they don't listen they just want to kick ass and take names they
00:40:06
never want to listen to the other guy's point of view and um you know he thought
00:40:11
this was tragic he thought it ruined bush 43's presidency and i gotta wonder i mean are we
00:40:17
practicing the same style of iron ass diplomacy here you know um well now it's too late we're
00:40:23
already at war i mean i think if we had practiced i i i think if herbert walker bush and james baker had
00:40:30
been president last year and and james baker was secretary of state do you think we'd be in this mess i don't think so i think james baker would have
00:40:36
figured out a way to defuse it who is the political who's the political scientist that you shared that uh link
00:40:42
from in the group chat uh from the university of chicago who have yeah this guy john mearsheimer
00:40:47
who's sort of king i watched the video from him it's quite convincing that we should have an approach that was hey we
00:40:54
we don't need to incite ukraine to break off we could let them make
00:41:01
their own decisions and that we're kind of taunting the russians that i don't think you know he makes a pretty convincing argument there and i don't
00:41:07
think you need to be a putin apologist you can keep in your head this person's a dictator this is a communist country
00:41:13
he's a murdering sociopath and at the same time we should not
00:41:19
provoke him and let the ukraine make their own decisions but not encourage them to come
00:41:24
into nato and we should have taken nato off the table it's pretty clear that that would have been a better
00:41:29
uh decision here but we we still can't think of an exit ramp here which and i don't hear
00:41:35
what's talking about putin has never said i want x well no i think you know there there
00:41:41
have been times where he well i mean look i think his demands have been a non-starter with us i think at this point he wants crimea
00:41:48
he wants the don bass to be independent maybe uh under the suzerainty of russia some
00:41:54
protectorate basically uh and he's talked about this uh denosification demilitarization of
00:42:00
ukraine i mean so now i think the demands are escalated because they're at war and he's lost too much he needs to
00:42:06
get more right i mean part of the the problem is you're saying he's stuck he needs to no
00:42:12
i think once you've you know once you've invested 100 you've got to make 150 back whereas before he had invested 10 he
00:42:18
would have been happy taking 50 out you know and i think at this point he's put too much in to walk out with the same sort of deal
00:42:24
you know he was like what are the chances he's overplayed his hand like the economic cost at this point to him
00:42:30
the loss of jobs the loss of customers the loss of the value of his currency i mean you add all this stuff up
00:42:37
uh so much has been taken away it's very hard to see him coming feeling like he can come out of this thing ahead and so
00:42:44
he's only going to keep plowing forward does he face the risk of ruin chamoth i mean is this like at this point
00:42:52
here in 2020 russian gdp was 1.483 trillion dollars
00:42:58
now what percentage of that do you think is actually exports versus a domestic economy let's say half let's be
00:43:06
just take a guess right so you're talking about 750 billion dollars of exports
00:43:12
so let's just say that you know between the boj bank of canada ecb and
00:43:19
the federal reserve we all just collectively printed five trillion dollars
00:43:25
you can absorb many many years of russia's export loss now it does have some
00:43:31
gnarly implications you know you probably have to work more closely for example with iran you
00:43:37
have to get an iran nuclear deal done why so that we can get access to their oil
00:43:42
right so it blunts the loss of the of the russian reserves as an example
00:43:48
you know we'd have to do um some clever things on sustainability and farming my point is though that i think the
00:43:54
economic calculus of this decision is not as grandiose as it once may have
00:44:00
seemed post a covet scenario where we were printing you know hundreds of billions of dollars a month i think there's a
00:44:06
the only good news i can take from this acts is you know the the free world has now learned about what a dependency
00:44:14
like we've literally woken up from the delusion that we can intertwine hold on let me just finish this once a minute i
00:44:19
want to get your feedback on it we have woken up from a delusion that we can intertwine our economies with
00:44:26
rich nuclear-powered dictators in communist countries both china and russia and now
00:44:32
i think the great decoupling and the great independence is upon us with us moving semiconductors back on shore
00:44:38
going nuclear maybe fracking seems i think even any environmentalist will take fracking in
00:44:45
europe fracking in the united states over a dependency over a dictator so is that a silver lining here yeah i mean look i
00:44:52
think it's so obvious now to everybody that we need to be energy independent that it was insane for us to throw away
00:44:58
that energy independence we've restricted it i think that if there was a bill introduced i think
00:45:04
it's being talked about to uh repeal all the restrictions on fracking it would pass the senate 75
00:45:11
25 meaning all the republicans would vote for it half the democrats would vote for it so i think everybody's on
00:45:16
board now and there was some remarkable uh you see the tweets from michael shellenberger about it it has come out
00:45:21
that you know who is backing all these anti-fracking environmental movement
00:45:28
in russia in europe exactly and they fell for exactly the germans fell for it and turned off
00:45:34
nuclear and now all of a sudden they're dependent on russia and he has the pretext to now invade right these
00:45:41
environmental groups in in europe have been useful idiots for putin and the kremlin
00:45:46
yeah that's that's what's so sad i think i saw a tweet it was something uh to the effect that
00:45:52
25 years ago or 30 years ago europe actually produced more liquefied natural gas for europe than russia did and the
00:45:59
whole thing flipped because all these environmentalists forced the outsourcing they outsourced their guilt but it
00:46:05
turned out that all a lot of those organizations may have been funded by russia to basically affect that
00:46:11
change i wanted to say something jason before you know there's a common
00:46:17
thing that you hear right now which is oh economic sanctions don't work and i just wanted to talk about that for one second which is i think i think there's
00:46:25
a lot of people there's a lot of chatter that historically economic sanctions aren't enough which is why you can't
00:46:30
draw a very clear bright line between that and military intervention as well and i thought and i as i thought
00:46:36
about it this is why i think you can actually fight an economic battle and an economic conflict without it pulling you
00:46:43
into a military one and the reason is actually because of what's happened in the last 40 or 50
00:46:48
years you know you have like the the most critical infrastructure in the world i think is
00:46:53
the financial infrastructure whether we like it or not right because you know energy infrastructure tends to be more localized other forms of infrastructure
00:47:00
are localized but the one real asset that is absolutely global and universal
00:47:07
is the financial payments infrastructure and you know what has really happened is that you can really [ __ ]
00:47:14
a country or an entity when you blacklist them from these organizations and these networks and so
00:47:21
this is why i actually think people underestimate the severity of um [Music]
00:47:27
of economic sanctions if done correctly and i think before you've never really other than you know
00:47:33
venezuela and a couple of other you know north korea north korea cuba venezuela cuba you've never really explored the
00:47:39
totality and the impact of this kind of sanctions on a large global actor which
00:47:44
this is almost greater than sanctions you're being you're not allowed to participate it's not even like you're
00:47:50
saying you can't export this you can't import this it's you're now not allowed you have no seat at the table i think
00:47:56
the crude oil example and the airline industry example are two incredible examples of the ripple
00:48:02
effects of these sanctions right so again just to reiterate like if you're a european-based refiner
00:48:09
in order for you to go and buy that oil you may have you know a working capital
00:48:14
line from a german bank well that would violate the terms of that bank now and so you can't go and
00:48:19
get that right if you actually have that oil on hand and you refine it into gasoline and you want to put it into the open market
00:48:25
and you call flexport as an example and say help me get this stuff to xyz location or mersk or somebody else they
00:48:33
won't do it i mean you look at the tech sanctions that have started it sounds minor but you have netflix is pulled out of the
00:48:39
country apple is not selling products in the country google is starting to restrict services in the company
00:48:44
and this is going to have a massive impact on their ability to just participate in society they just turned off
00:48:50
proactively this morning if you saw that it was right as we were getting on air facebook's been bad instagram is still on twitter still on but the russians now
00:48:57
are are turning off information into the country while every other country every other
00:49:02
company is turning off their services there i think the global economy or not even the global economy i think
00:49:09
japan europe canada america
00:49:14
can collectively support five six seven trillion dollars of
00:49:21
subsidies to blunt the economic impact of these sanctions that's effectively shutting russian
00:49:27
exports off for eight nine ten years
00:49:32
think about the the so you know this this is that is the damage any
00:49:37
thoughts here as we kind of come to no way out here and just well i think
00:49:44
economy so so i i think that if we're going to figure out a way out we need to
00:49:50
assess what our objectives you know what our objectives are and we talked earlier on on on the show about
00:49:57
this idea of regime change and that there wouldn't be an answer without regime change i disagree with that
00:50:03
um i you know just those two words regime change to make everybody cringe
00:50:08
because regime change was the justification for the iraq war for afghanistan for libya
00:50:15
for syria and every single one of those things been a disaster when has the united states of america successfully
00:50:21
achieved regime change in the last 20 years without creating enormous blowback
00:50:27
there's an assumption that somehow if putin gets toppled by an internal coup that we end up with gorbachev 2.0 well
00:50:33
maybe we do maybe we end up with a hardliner who's even worse i don't you know i don't know
00:50:39
so what should the goal be uh obviously regime change would be wonderful if the russian people chose that but what is
00:50:44
this ceasefire right yeah i agree ceasefire um so
00:50:49
i think putin miscalculated the resolve of zelensky and the west you know
00:50:55
zolensky was like this tv actor became president he was very before this he was like 25 popularity now he's at 90
00:51:01
something percent i think putin underestimated his resolve would you say
00:51:06
information more i mean that that's pretty staggering i mean it's pretty clear that putin thought he could win
00:51:12
this information warren this is the first night i don't even see the first meme yeah i agree it isn't me more i think
00:51:18
we're being heavily propagandized but the west is winning the propaganda war but
00:51:24
it's not just the west yeah but i mean look at where you're sitting right ukraine is engaged in that effort too right i mean you had you had
00:51:30
the whole snake island thing where basically the um you know that wind up being confirmed as
00:51:36
fake news that was fake okay you had snake island where the 13 ukrainian soldiers said we're going to
00:51:41
bring us death rather than surrender it turns out they actually surrendered you had the old woman walking up to the
00:51:46
russian soldiers with time to get the hell out of it yeah exactly that was a fake um what else i mean i think this
00:51:52
everything's fake this chernobyl 2.0 was fake oh the um well that was the fighter pilot the fighter pilot was the the
00:51:59
ghost of kiev yeah exactly that turned out to be a fake so look we are being heavily propagandized now i don't blame
00:52:06
zielinski or the ukrainians for trying to propagandize us because they're a small country fighting for their lives
00:52:11
and if they can pull us into the war it would help them it might also cause
00:52:17
world war three or just win hearts and minds and you know flip russian sentiments there's something else that's really interesting i just went to uh
00:52:24
the world bank site just to check um whether the gdp number that i just gave
00:52:30
you was right and it is right but what's even more interesting is that russian gdp has actually decayed 35 in the last
00:52:36
decade it what it peaked in 2013 at 2.292 trillion dollars
00:52:45
and so and all the way down to now 1.483 so i think the point is with you know all of these other things that they've
00:52:51
been having to deal with because of their foreign adventurism um you've seen a contraction of their economy already
00:52:56
freeburg did we over did the west and everybody overestimate uh russia's
00:53:02
capabilities here i mean is that a possibility because they seem like they're getting beaten pretty uh or they're they're being fought back at a
00:53:09
way people didn't think they would be able to first of all i have no freaking clue second of all i don't know like what people think that they thought they
00:53:15
knew or do or don't know but i think importantly we don't really know what's going on over there
00:53:22
you know we are hearing stories every day that we feel is conclusive and factual and on
00:53:28
the ground reporting and then a few hours later we find out may or may not actually be true
00:53:34
you know this is the fog of war and i wouldn't take anything that i'm reading on twitter or seeing on cnn or
00:53:41
hearing some commentator from the united states making some comment about nor would i feel the same about any commentator in the ukraine or russia or
00:53:48
anywhere else for that matter facts are going to be facts i'm not sure facts are necessarily going to get to us
00:53:53
and so i don't know what's going on the ground with russia there's a convoy supposedly that we know we can see from
00:53:59
satellite imagery that's moving towards kiev it's stopped we don't know why it stopped there's claims by one group of
00:54:05
people that says they're out of food and they're defecting there's claims by another group of people that say they're waiting to encircle the city and then
00:54:11
command pressure and use this as leverage effectively to try and get a good negotiated deal to exit we don't
00:54:17
know and so you know for us to be like you know four guys commentating at starbucks i think is a bit of a mistake
00:54:23
because there's very few facts that we can't actually say is objectively true at this point
00:54:28
now um what we do know is russia has a lot of nukes and so
00:54:34
regardless of what's going on the ground with tactical stuff you know any sort of assumption that leads to our belief that
00:54:41
an alternative intervention or or some other force can ultimately win against russia
00:54:46
uh is is completely false because russia has thousands of nuclear warheads and um
00:54:52
you know if russia wanted to exert its military authority over anyone in the
00:54:58
world they can and um and so i wouldn't kind of take any of this stuff um that russia is going to lose a war uh
00:55:05
you know a a war on the ground in the ukraine i mean at the end of the day they've got the ultimate trump card well
00:55:10
and also they haven't brought out the heavy the heavy argument they have earth i mean yes
00:55:17
rubble okay bunker buster bombs they've got stuff that yeah what is the strategy here to just listen they can pull a
00:55:23
grozny they can pull a fallujah i mean look you know we they we can a dresden let's not pretend like we
00:55:30
haven't done it too they can bomb these cities into rubble from the sky and they're not they're because it would
00:55:36
be too bad you know their back would be too bad from the west we don't know we don't know but there's
00:55:42
certainly there's certainly a strategy these guys aren't a bunch of idiots scrambling around trying to figure out what to do they've got the second most
00:55:48
powerful military on planet earth that can literally destroy every human on planet earth they are they are pretty
00:55:54
smart and they are going to figure something out to get themselves some sort of an advantage ultimately what that is we don't know you know we're
00:56:00
sitting here trying to figure out how to play chess when we've never played it before i mean sax that might be
00:56:05
something worth discussing there is a contingent that say listen putin isn't
00:56:10
thinking about this strictly logically yeah i understand that point of view uh
00:56:16
you hear it a lot on on the press what do you think here's why well here's what i think is i think putin
00:56:22
underestimated uh zielinski's resolve ukrainian resolve and i'd say the west resolve i think it would be a mistake
00:56:28
however for us to underestimate his resolve yeah and uh that's what i'm
00:56:33
afraid of next is that he doesn't want to give up um and listen to go back to
00:56:39
you know the mirsheimer point so there's a school of realism and what mirzheimer says and he predicted a lot of this so
00:56:45
you have that's amazing yeah he gave a great talk in 2015 and i watched it um right before we got on air right one of
00:56:50
the ways yeah one of the ways i i assess who i want to listen to and learn more from is
00:56:56
when i see someone making far sighted predictions that come true i'm like okay one yeah yeah exactly you're like okay
00:57:02
this guy has a mental model that seems to predict the world right i mean like carl popper said famously that the
00:57:08
difference between science religion is that science makes predictions that are falsifiable if you make predictions one
00:57:13
prediction after another that ends up becoming true maybe you have a way of thinking about the world that is predictive so this guy i would just say
00:57:21
i can't summarize all this thinking here but i would just say i mean i went down kind of a rabbit hole on youtube just
00:57:26
watching his stuff obviously not all of it is right okay but and but you know the media has been
00:57:32
demonizing this guy because for the few things he's gotten wrong about the situation instead of all the things he's gotten
00:57:37
right and you know if you were to do the washington establishment by the same standard they've gotten far more wrong
00:57:43
than he has especially over you know since the iraq war over the last 20 years but anyway the point he makes is
00:57:49
simply this or one of the points is listen this situation in ukraine is to the
00:57:55
russians what the cuban missile crisis was to us meaning it is not a pretext
00:58:00
for putin to go in and expand his empire what is really going on here is they have defined this
00:58:06
as a red line they see as a vital national security interest and so we should be thinking about them
00:58:13
and their resolve the way that we thought about the cuban missile crisis so in other words the russians are
00:58:19
acting like the americans did in the cuban missile crisis remember
00:58:24
fidel castro thought he had the sovereignty he thought he had the the right to go make a treaty and a deal
00:58:30
with whoever he wanted and he went to the freely went to the to the soviet union to try and make a deal and the
00:58:36
americans said no way and you know not in our backyard and we imposed a
00:58:41
blockade and we were flying the bombers and kennedy had advisors and generals who were
00:58:48
willing to go to nuclear war to win that standoff in that confrontation
00:58:53
and ultimately the way that they solve the problem is jfk sent bobby kennedy to
00:58:59
go secretly cut a deal with the russians to pull the jupiter missiles the warheads out of turkey so there's a quid
00:59:05
pro quo they kept it secret for six months kennedy got to declare a victory but the the russians the soviets got
00:59:11
something out of it too they were able to defuse the situation so
00:59:17
if there's any way to make a deal like that i think it would be a good idea yeah i mean the reason don't you think the reason he's don't you think the
00:59:23
reason facts that he is misunderstood is because we are propagating democracy
00:59:29
and when we do something well it has the shine of hey we want people to be free we want individual
00:59:35
freedom we want individual human rights we want individual expression these things are the height of human existence and when
00:59:42
communist countries do it well they're trying to spread communism and authoritarianism and reduce humans
00:59:48
uh individualism and freedoms and and that is a valid argument but he says in
00:59:54
his talks like listen you can put that aside and just say you know missiles in your backyard not good
00:59:59
yeah exactly so this is the the fundamental dichotomy and sort of the in foreign policy thinking or international
01:00:05
relations between idealism and realism idealism says it's all about values and so we're going around the world we're
01:00:12
promoting democracy we're supporting allies who we think will spread democracy there's good guys and bad guys
01:00:17
we're on the sides of the good guys and that's who we support and we change the regimes that are the bad guys but the realists just think of this as great
01:00:24
power rivalry and we have to understand the way that great powers have always reacted and behaved and great powers
01:00:31
whether it's russia or the soviet union or us will behave viciously and ruthlessly towards anything they
01:00:37
perceive as a threat to their national security their vital now security interests what are your thoughts on
01:00:43
this being the moment we we make the next big transition we were in a bipolar world order we've been in unipolar for
01:00:50
the majority of our lifetimes where we only experienced the united states and now is this the moment we move to
01:00:55
multipolar sacs where we're gonna or have we moved there already
01:01:00
it's uh it's it's it's a transition that's happening mainly because of china so we're and i you know it seems like
01:01:06
what we're doing is pushing russia irrevocably into into g's arms because he's a huge mistake he's part of that
01:01:13
well i'm i'm surprised to hear you say that jacob well i said it two weeks ago i mean i said this sounds crazy but if
01:01:20
we could get putin to be you know in talks with us then he's not in talks with xi jinping and
01:01:25
when you saw him with you know taking pictures with xi jinping that should have been a red alarm bell to everybody
01:01:30
that our foreign policy is not working because if he's talking to xi jinping supposedly and who knows if this is true
01:01:36
again fog of war to freeburg's point you know maybe xi jinping told him can you wait till
01:01:42
after the olympics to do this invasion if they're coordinating at that level that's really problematic for the us we
01:01:48
need him on our side we need to get pakistan on our side india south korea we need to build an alliance
01:01:55
to deal with the eventuality of china going into the south china sea and taking over taiwan so chamath what are
01:02:01
your thoughts on does this give xi jinping a window or not and is there any path to getting
01:02:07
russia back in uh talks with the west maybe he can help get them uh
01:02:13
restarted in a way that could normalize relations is this uh well
01:02:19
the real question is like if you're g do you look at this and say uh it emboldens me
01:02:26
or i have to be even more strategic and crafty what do you think i say the latter yeah yeah
01:02:33
it's the latter right if russia had rolled right he'd be this is one good this is one good thing i'll sort of contradict what i said a little bit
01:02:39
before look i i i don't i'm not passionately attached to either the realist or the idealist school of
01:02:46
thinking i think they're interesting we need to consider both perspectives what i would say is that the resilience the
01:02:51
ferocity of the ukrainians the resistance defending themselves giving putin a punch in the nose we can all
01:02:58
support that because we know that she is watching and if he sees wow
01:03:03
the russians really got a tough time with ukrainians what you know am i going to be facing a similar situation with
01:03:10
taiwan and what's interesting is that the way the ukrainians they basically were
01:03:16
willing to arm every man woman and i don't know child but every man and woman there they were handing out the ak-47s
01:03:23
basically they israelized right you wonder how israel has survived in a neighborhood where everyone wants to
01:03:28
kill them every single adult serves in the army and they get guns it's like you know
01:03:34
they're in the second amendment over there yeah exactly so yeah so i think that the ukrainians have shown a
01:03:40
model that's really based on the israel model which is listen if taiwan really wants to be independent every adult
01:03:46
there needs to learn how to fight and they need to have weapons and that's gonna be the best guarantee
01:03:52
we can be their ally but that's gonna be the best guarantor is creating a credible deterrent to she moving on them
01:03:58
i mean do we transition to another story here i mean this is this is one of the problems when we're
01:04:04
living in these kind of times is that if you talk about anything other than when the decision trees can i saw a tweet
01:04:09
when all the decision trees can go to zero meaning that like there's a one percent chance of or 0.1 or 0.01 chance
01:04:16
of of war 3 the nuclear war then yeah it's hard to talk about anything else hard to think about anything else so
01:04:21
yeah um i watched ozarks this week
01:04:27
amazing ozark is that good oh great jason bateman amazing great perfect is so
01:04:33
freaking good on it breaking bad 2. that series twice and i've fallen asleep in episode one both
01:04:40
times no no no you you got to keep going it rolls it's it's it's basically breaking bad 2.0
01:04:45
yeah phenomenal yeah i started season two of euphoria oh my lord don't ever let your kids watch it oh my
01:04:52
god it's either that or it's like the best deterrent so like you make them sit and watch it and
01:04:57
they'll not only will they never not do drugs but like they'll they just won't do anything they'll just like stay in
01:05:02
the house it's scarring it's basically requiem for a dream meets like disney plus afternoons like these are disney
01:05:09
stars living in requiem for a dream i need to decompress after i watch it if
01:05:14
you have kids it's terrorizing it's terrifying it's terrifying it's absolutely terrible it's scarring
01:05:21
it's very artistic too i have to say i give them a lot can we talk about markets i mean you know i i feel like there's
01:05:26
let's go to markets important discussion because the markets are so volatile during these
01:05:32
kind of volatile information times times with you know information that's changing day to day intraday
01:05:39
you know where do you guys think about kind of spending your time right now are you kind of just putting your head in
01:05:45
the sand and saying we'll pull it out afterwards i mean how do you i mean guys
01:05:50
what's funny is like sax is curled up in a ball you know in times of in times of uncertainty you
01:05:57
actually want to be deploying so you know uh i announced what was it last week i think it was a
01:06:04
solar deal the solar deal you know i put 228 million dollars into this thing and then i did another deal i put 45 million
01:06:10
bucks into this thing you guys know about which we haven't announced yet yep so um but other than that i've been
01:06:16
literally uh white-knuckled uh i don't like to open the stock app there's no
01:06:21
point take some dramamine before you open your morgan stanley stock up the stock and
01:06:27
what's so funny is like my bloomberg terminal which is right beside me here at my desk i have not logged into it
01:06:32
okay put it in a drawer unplug it yeah there's just no point like at the end of every week i get a report right kind of
01:06:38
like our p l and i just look at the top line like connor always sends me the top line is like you know and and the last
01:06:44
like eight weeks in a row we've lost one percent we've lost two percent we've lost three percent the time that this
01:06:50
wishes he lost one percent i celebrated i got so drunk that night i
01:06:56
was like this is where it really does help right sacks to think in
01:07:02
decades like if you think in decades and you're a venture investor you can kind of just put the stuff out of your mind
01:07:07
which is what i'm doing and the great thing is i'm seeing amazing companies great founders deals are taking longer
01:07:13
to close people are starting to do diligence again and people are discussing what the right valuation for this early stage startup is
01:07:20
which is good that's healthy i think we're getting like i don't know what you're seeing in the in the early to mid stage market privately but i'm seeing
01:07:27
really healthy discussions and late stage madness is gone it's over
01:07:32
yeah i mean i think 100 times ar is over but we no one really knows where it's landing so i've seen some deals get done
01:07:38
at 60 to 80 times but um no one really knows where it should be you know i sent you guys his tweet from
01:07:44
morgan housel who is a great guy and he has this fabulous tweet he says
01:07:50
this he he it says this the shock cycle and it's this beautiful cycle assume
01:07:56
good news is permanent oblivious to bad news then you ignore the bad news then you deny the bad news then you panic at
01:08:03
the bad news but then you accept the bad news and then you ignore the good news you
01:08:08
deny the good news you accept the good news and then you assume the good news is permanent that starts the cycle if i
01:08:14
if i could just put it out there i don't know today if you guys saw non-farm payrolls but we had a huge print in um
01:08:20
unemployment like really great print meaning like a lot of employers were able to find people
01:08:26
to take jobs it was a big number but the interesting thing about it was we didn't see
01:08:32
wage inflation tick up with it and if i had to look at that and if you
01:08:38
actually look at a bunch of the earnings reports that have come out in the last three or four weeks
01:08:43
i actually think we're in the part of the cycle here where we're starting to ignore the good news
01:08:49
and we're so negative and we're so emotionally wrapped up in everything
01:08:54
that people forget that actually the world tends to um keep moving forward
01:09:00
right we are not in world war iii by any measure are we not we are not anywhere
01:09:06
near that okay and so i just think it's important for people to take a step back and take a
01:09:12
really deep breath but i think that there's a lot of good news out there there's a ton of good news and for people who don't know the term we're
01:09:18
ignoring some people don't know the term print when we say there's a print that is just a colloquialism in the
01:09:23
financial markets that something was formatted for printing previously and you got good news so an official report is sometimes called we got a price i
01:09:30
agree with i think what's going on is there is some underlying good news right but there's this overhead of a small
01:09:35
chance of something catastrophic happening so how do you price that in right it's it's it's uh
01:09:42
it's like a one outer right yeah yeah exactly but it's this guy's quads were set over set yeah it's a one hour to one
01:09:48
hour to the apocalypse basically if this tiny probability thing happens the game is over so you know
01:09:55
so it doesn't matter it doesn't right like it doesn't matter if it's the cost of your house does it matter if there's a nuclear war that's right this is this
01:10:01
is the thing that people underestimate is like that's not a that's not a risk that one should be hedging in any way
01:10:08
financially right at that point the only thing that matters is the health and safety of your
01:10:13
family and your friends but really your immediate family like can you take care of them and make sure they're safe and
01:10:19
so you know if you're if you're an investor in the financial markets or you're building a company managing for that externality in my
01:10:25
opinion i'm not sure makes a ton of sense because i don't think you can manage to that externality you have no impact on it
01:10:32
it's something it's a controversial scenario yeah so i think you have to manage to the 99.999
01:10:37
of normalized outcomes and i think right now there are some what's called green
01:10:42
shoots meaning like some positive news in the world and some positive data by the way the other thing that we saw
01:10:49
today was or this week was jerome powell and you know the jerome powell testimony was also in the middle of massive
01:10:56
amounts of bad news some actually pretty decent good news which was he said he's going to raise by
01:11:03
25 basis points in march everybody knew that right so we took the 50 basis pointer off the table but then he was
01:11:09
very clear that they were going to be data driven and in the language of the federal reserve what that essentially
01:11:15
means is like we're going to be patient and wait and see and if you couple it with what i said before which is the
01:11:21
economic cost of these economic sanctions towards russia can be calculated
01:11:27
and i think that we have proven a willingness to print capital and money and so if you put those two things
01:11:33
together i think there could be a real possibility that powell becomes very accommodative
01:11:39
and you know he and biden and the entire administration come together with europe and everybody else and say get the money
01:11:44
printer back going because we are we're going to stand the line on these economic sanctions
01:11:50
and we're going to you know sort of soft land the economy here because we think there's recessionary risks afoot let me
01:11:56
just provide a little bit of a counterpoint which is where i'm most concerned
01:12:03
we don't know what the repercussions are fully in a dynamical system of global capital
01:12:11
of pulling out this much capital and devaluing assets at this scale so quickly
01:12:16
the shock to the system i don't think has yet been realized and i think we'll know at the end of this month when books
01:12:22
close what things actually do to businesses to swap agreements to trades
01:12:28
you know trade balances that are outstanding and you could talk about economic stimulus as being the way to
01:12:33
solve that but we don't yet know what's broken and they're like let me just give you guys another example today corn i
01:12:39
think is trading at 760 a bushel that hasn't happened guys i can't tell you in how long this was a commodity that was
01:12:46
trading at 350 a few months ago and so we're now talking about that the trickle-down effect of that price
01:12:53
into the beef the trickle-down effect as we're already seeing in california where the or san francisco and the average price per gallon of gas at over five
01:12:59
dollars the trickle-down effect on um on purchasing behavior on businesses
01:13:05
defaulting because uh suddenly their their counterparties dry up we don't know and we won't know and it's not
01:13:11
actually we know some of those we know some of them but we don't know what we don't know and the thing i'm concerned about is this is a imagine when i say
01:13:18
dynamical system from a physics perspective it's like take 100 slinkies and tie them together into a giant graph
01:13:24
of slinkys and you start punching one of the slinkies like this if you punch one or two of the slinkys hard enough you
01:13:29
don't know how the repercussions will cause a slinky all the way over there to suddenly shoot up or shoot down but
01:13:35
you're also denying your ability to change a difference linkey that's the whole point of a dynamic you could put energy back into it but we
01:13:41
don't know what's broken and there could be something that's irreparable through these we've gone through these things before and i think you're not learning
01:13:47
from history or you're at least not willing to admit it but no i i think we're seeing hold on a second we've seen it in tarp okay we did not know the
01:13:54
total extent of what happened in the gfc and we had to invent a financial framework to soft land the global
01:14:00
economy we figured it out when we went through ltcm and john merriweather blew up explain what dennis
01:14:05
there was a huge hedge fund in the late 90s that basically had a massively
01:14:11
levered exposure to the financial markets to the tune of like tens or tens or hundreds of billions of dollars go
01:14:17
read the book when genius failed if you want to read the story it's a it does a good job summarizing it but it's a great story yeah go ahead and again we had to
01:14:23
step in uh with a governmental framework and a broad infrastructure of actors across the world to soft land the
01:14:30
financial economy in a way not knowing what the actual uh what what part was broken so i i just
01:14:37
fundamentally disagree with this idea that we're running blind yeah look we're talking about i'm talking about capital and energy and food and some combination
01:14:45
of those things are going to cause some serious deleterious effects on okay well i think and on markets and look i i get
01:14:50
it jamaat i know that there's solutions for repair and i know that we're going to act swiftly and aggressively and
01:14:56
every time by the way i just want to point out in each of those scenarios you've talked about we've acted more swiftly and more aggressively than we
01:15:02
did in the scenario prior and it's getting to the point that you know what is the value how much debt how much
01:15:08
deficit are we really willing to take on everyone obviously has these kind of you know
01:15:13
intrinsic existential questions about how much we really can act long term without the dollar collapsing but
01:15:19
certainly in the context of a global economy collapsing the dollar will always be the safe haven but there are
01:15:24
other things that play here like you know the cost of gas for the average american you know the the the amount of
01:15:31
wheat and the amount of food that people in africa are going to have what you're saying here freeberg is that some of these things we have been
01:15:37
through and if you look at gas as one example i think you're bringing up the important ones here food and energy gas we actually know what
01:15:44
happens when gas prices go up we saw that not long ago people bought more hybrids and the miles per gallon per car
01:15:51
uh you know when you raise prices consumption goes down and people get created adjustments i'm talking about the short-term acute effects the thing
01:15:58
that america has the ability to do is they have the ability to change the financial incentives for actors
01:16:05
all around the world in a split second and behavior can change and and so i actually think freeberg the nuance thing
01:16:11
that you're saying which i completely agree with but maybe we should say more explicitly is it probably is a
01:16:17
reasonable way to manage risk in america europe canada japan
01:16:22
but what's going to be very very difficult is the impact that this has on emerging markets in southeast asia asia
01:16:28
africa could be really really deleterious for some amount of time and sad and it's a human it's going to cause
01:16:34
a humanitarian problem it's really friggin sad and it's you know whatever progress has been made could be unwound
01:16:40
i think you're right by the way i think i think that that is actually really the risk that i think um holding
01:16:46
the line on these sanctions really does it pushes the risk towards em countries and then i think we're gonna have to
01:16:52
figure out what our moral resolve is to go and fix those that's my point earlier which is we're gonna bear the cost ultimately the united states is gonna
01:16:59
have to step up in a really outsized way to solve this problem and while we might not be sending troops on the ground
01:17:04
we're going to end up paying several i don't know that it's going to be just the united states free burger the united states seems to be working in coordination with whatever it is in this
01:17:10
situation unilaterally anymore that's a good news we're going to have an economic cost right there's gonna be something
01:17:16
there's there's there's no amount of money that you can actually put on human
01:17:21
life and so if we can avoid a military war
01:17:27
i just think that there's just there's there's no red line on cost there and so if we end up running massive
01:17:33
deficits and now we're at you know 150 250 300 percent of gdp
01:17:40
uh i think that you know morally that's that is the right thing to do sax is is is the world becoming more idealistic
01:17:46
and realistic let me bring saxon here sex is the world becoming more anti-fragile slash
01:17:52
resilient pick one of the two i guess to these kind of upending events because of covid because
01:17:59
of china pulling out of financial markets we just went through this freeberg was like hey this is unprecedented actually i think we have a
01:18:04
little bit of precedent here we have the complete shutdown of the economy from covet in recent memory and we have china
01:18:10
deciding that all these companies are no longer public we've seen they did their own economic sanctions they sanctioned
01:18:16
themselves and pulled out of markets so what do you think sex i mean i think the current crisis is a reminder that it's
01:18:21
not uh too anti-fragile i think we are in a transition we've the cold war ended
01:18:26
about 30 years ago and since then we've been engaging in this sort of unipolar
01:18:32
foreign policy where america calls all the shots now the world is becoming more
01:18:37
multi-polar i'm not sure it's all the way there yet and you have countries like russia
01:18:43
and china reasserting themselves and that's making the world a more dangerous place well you also have the eu working
01:18:49
together in unison and they seem to be maybe they're going to become a bigger actor here because of this right we're
01:18:55
seeing them take that that was sort of a positive surprise as long as they don't pull uh franz ferdinand like
01:19:01
freeberg said and inadvertently blunder us into the into a war okay folks this is this week in dystopian outcomes let's
01:19:08
talk about something good come on another good news is some good news here let's talk about the big carte breakthrough this week there is good
01:19:15
news guys good news is that we just the good news is that we're managing um crises after crisis china crisis do you
01:19:22
want to tell people about this revolutionary breakthrough i mean look there's just there was another car t therapy uh approved two of them approved
01:19:29
in the last week for um myeloma car t just i think we've talked about it in the past
01:19:34
you know every human body has um t cells they're a core part of your immune system
01:19:40
t cells are programmed so they have a sensor you know that that tells them where to go and what to destroy and so
01:19:47
as t-cells learn what to destroy you know they can be really effective at
01:19:52
clearing bad things out of your body clearing pathogens and invasive things out of your body
01:19:57
and so a few years ago uh you know humans gained the ability to engineer t cells by adding the genetic
01:20:04
code to a t cell effectively engineering it to go after a very specific thing and
01:20:10
so the big revolution in carte therapies has been in oncology and cancer so uh you know
01:20:17
programmed t cells to destroy specific cancer cells in the body that you know you would historically
01:20:23
have had to use really difficult systemically challenging drugs like chemotherapies and so on to wipe out
01:20:29
lots of cells and in many cases it doesn't eradicate all the cancer and car t turns out it can be extremely
01:20:35
effective at finding very specific cancer cells in your body and in many cases causing complete remission and
01:20:41
cancer and so you know there was one car that was approved that showed i believe it was an 88 or 90 complete remission in
01:20:49
multiple myeloma which is a form of blood cancer so they they take your t cells out of your body uh you just get a
01:20:55
little blood draw basically uh they go in a lab they're zapped with electricity which causes them to open up slightly
01:21:02
and an engineered a little crisper edit happens and those those cells are now edited the dna in those cells is edited
01:21:09
and now those cells know to go after the cancer target you put them back in your body after they grow up for a few days
01:21:15
and they filter them and test them make sure they're safe and after they go back in your body the t cells go to work and they clear
01:21:21
all the cancer cells out of your body it's an incredible technology incredible salvage therapies are unbelievable is
01:21:27
the name of the company involved in this a2 bio is that the no 82 did something else no so that breakthrough was even
01:21:32
even more important i think in the long term what he's talking about is jansen and legend
01:21:37
uh are the two companies that basically got approval from the fda now the thing with carte is like you know cartier has
01:21:43
been incredibly um believed in blood-based cancers
01:21:49
right but that's an entire category that excludes solid tumor cancers
01:21:54
what you're talking about jason this week as well what happened was a2 bio basically figured out how to modify
01:22:01
these t cells in a way where you can actually attack and target a very specific solid tumor so there's a lot
01:22:08
more work for those guys but if you play that out now you have this incredible
01:22:13
ability for your own body to be trained to fight and kill cancer whether it's in your blood or whether
01:22:18
it's the solid tumors ah now the the pride the pr the price of these therapies today they're charging call it 400 to 450 000
01:22:27
per treatment and by the way the treatment it's a one-time shot i mean it's like what yeah they pull the blood
01:22:33
out of your body they and then the the expensive challenging part is how do you take the cells isolate them engineer
01:22:40
them test them screen and make sure they're safe the way that is done today is very expensive and time consuming
01:22:46
because the volume is low and there haven't been as many kind of engineering breakdowns how long does it take you
01:22:51
know it takes a month it can take a week to four weeks so before you get one person 10 people is it the equipment
01:22:56
that's expensive like i actually um i invited champ to come with me we went and visited one of these labs a few
01:23:01
weeks ago but i i won't get into it um but it is it's unnecessarily inefficient in the
01:23:08
sense that you can charge so much because when you spend half a million dollars to treat a cancer patient you
01:23:13
just save yourself millions of dollars in long-term care for that cancer patient so the price is determined by
01:23:19
the alternative cause they're priced it's like how do you uh save money over the long run for the payer you know the
01:23:24
insurance company and so if the if the insurance company knows over the long run they're gonna pay three million dollars in care for this cancer they're
01:23:30
just staying in 2.5 they're totally willing to spend half a million dollars to you know to to end the cancer is that
01:23:36
the right financial calculus for this thing so if you look at the actual cost of doing this there is a university in
01:23:41
the bay area that is doing um car key therapies and their cost is about 40 grand they built their own lab to do
01:23:47
this that by the way is also extremely inefficient we i think that over the long run we can get the cost of cell
01:23:52
therapies below 5000 bucks and when you can do that by the way car t can be used not just to go after cancer but you can
01:23:59
get it to go after autoimmunity so people with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis there are known b cells in
01:24:05
your body that are making antibodies that are causing the inflammation in your body destroying your own body and so down the road we could use car t to
01:24:12
destroy lupus to destroy antibodies uh b cells that are producing antibodies that are
01:24:18
um you know fundamentally causing autoimmune conditions including what we talked about a few weeks ago
01:24:25
multiple sclerosis given that we now have a strong belief that if you can get rid of the ebv the uh ft bar virus uh from your
01:24:32
body uh you can wipe that out so so car t can in the long run be harnessed not just for cancer but autoimmunity and
01:24:39
potentially other pathogens in the body in a really targeted way and this this is kind of the beginning of what will
01:24:44
likely be a multi-decade kind of new therapeutic modality that's that's you know accelerating i had a question for
01:24:50
you on the on the pricing model here of hey the way we price this is how much are we
01:24:55
saving the insurer is that too much price optimization is there a better model here
01:25:01
i have no idea okay i would like to talk about something else uh related to this jason
01:25:07
there's this massive patent battle going on for crispr yeah uh and i think it's worth jcal if you
01:25:15
can give just a two second primer because i think we should talk about patents just for a second and you know there are there's the
01:25:20
extreme version which is what elon has done and then there's the other extreme version which is these two folks fighting over so obviously elon has gone
01:25:28
with putting the patents out making his patents open source and putting them out there and using them as a deterrent like nuclear weapons have been but the u.s
01:25:35
patent trademark office published a ruling on monday in favor of mit and harvard over berkeley the ruling cancels
01:25:41
certain patent applications made by the university of california its partners regarding a crispr system known as crispr cas casino
01:25:48
has nine the ruling states that they failed to provide persuasive evidence that they got the gene editing technology to work before the broad
01:25:55
group did the central question and dispute is which group got to the crispr cast nine two basically the whole thing
01:26:00
here jason is like there was a group led by these two incredible uh scientists who they won
01:26:06
uh the nobel prize jennifer dudna and emmanuel charpentier
01:26:12
there berkeley and uh and she uh emanuel i think is she's at a university in
01:26:18
germany i think but then there was a different team
01:26:23
trying to develop a system for crispr cas9 from mit uh harvard at the broad
01:26:30
and they all filed patents on top of each other and this whole thing was a thing and you know
01:26:35
the the big implication of all this is what are companies supposed to do right because if you are a company that wants
01:26:41
to build a crispr cas9 gene editing thing look there's a lot of situations where
01:26:46
uh a single point edit or a broad edit can have a meaningful change in your health so these are businesses that
01:26:52
should exist you didn't know what to do because if you licensed the ip from the wrong person you get sued right
01:26:57
and many companies now are like trying to license both sets of patents and i just think to me it frustrated me when i
01:27:03
read this article and you know this is the conversation i had with you guys in the group chat is i
01:27:08
think we need to think of and imagine a new way for patents to work because it it shouldn't be the case that you know
01:27:15
folks are competing for what is really effectively credit and then what stops
01:27:21
behind them are all the commercial companies and investors and all of them and just the normal individual
01:27:26
day-to-day people who want solutions to solvable problems but the reason it doesn't get to the starting line is
01:27:32
because of patent credit and having to deal with patent trolls and i just think that that's a terrible situation for us to be especially if
01:27:39
it's something that could change the course of humanity almost feels like an arbitrator has to come in here and force
01:27:45
a settlement what do you think freeberg is the right thing to do obviously we have a tradition of people getting to
01:27:50
you know monetize uh dare i say their innovations for some period of time with a patent i have multiple businesses i'm
01:27:57
involved in where we uh leverage crispr and uh
01:28:02
i will tell you that the um you know the group at harvard so so the history is the group of
01:28:08
harvard and the group at berkeley argue each argue that they discovered crispr cast 9 around the same time each
01:28:14
or each argument that they have a right to crispr technology based on their discoveries that were made around the same time
01:28:20
and so for years each of them have been starting companies and licensing crispr technologies to
01:28:27
different companies and all of those companies now including several that are public uh it turns out that if this uh this
01:28:34
ruling you know is to be believed they actually have a license to a technology that they
01:28:39
may not actually have a license to so um there is a company that emerged a few
01:28:44
years ago and actually made an open sourced version of this uh this system and so i have
01:28:49
uh at least one company in gene editing implanted plant gene editing where we leverage this open source version of
01:28:55
this system and many more companies many more businesses are embracing that open
01:29:01
source alternative i don't think that we see this turning out to be any different than what we saw
01:29:06
with the proliferation of linux in computer software where uh you know microsoft or whomever
01:29:13
was trying to you know make everyone pay a licensing fee to use their operating system and guess what markets discovered
01:29:19
they discovered that hey if someone is able to make something free and open source and everyone will embrace it and
01:29:24
here we are where most of the internet is run on open source software so
01:29:29
you know i i i don't know what the right thing to do with respect to patents are because you know the truth is
01:29:35
a lot of very difficult very expensive technology r d dollars go into developing a
01:29:40
technology that is theoretically someone could look at it make a copy of it and so i do think that there are rights
01:29:46
to defend with respect to patents i think that there is if there is something that is a critical resource
01:29:53
that an entire industry really needs to access an open source solution will emerge you know the markets take care of
01:29:58
it and i think we've already seen that with crispr so um you know it's hard to say at the end of
01:30:04
the day you want to license some you know patent a molecule and be the only person that can make that molecule make
01:30:09
money from it go ahead but if everyone's going to need that molecule to run their business and to change the world
01:30:14
someone's going to make a cheaper alternative or a free alternative that's just the way markets work so saks would like to recite a poem for peace at the
01:30:21
end of the podcast he's gone totally soft the pacifist david sacks no i'd like to i'd like to address what you
01:30:27
said when you called me a pacifist um because i think oh my god here we go after hours this is all in after dark
01:30:33
here we go he's an existential pacifist go ahead sax read your power when i become a pastor well i'm not really pat
01:30:38
look i still believe in the idea of peace through strength like reagan said okay but i remember when we what is the
01:30:44
only clean win that we've had in a war since world war ii america has it was the win
01:30:50
straight shot the first iraq war when we drove saddam out of
01:30:56
out of kuwait that was george herbert walker bush our last conventional war well it was also the last war that we
01:31:02
actually won every other war that we've done has been turned into a fiasco winning was pretty easy to define get
01:31:07
out of kuwait the other ones we were trying to do revolutions but remember everybody wanted him to go all the way and march into baghdad and change the
01:31:14
regime replace saddam and he said no and he had the wisdom to stop and everybody
01:31:19
called him a wimp but he still had the determination and the the wisdom to stop and then what
01:31:25
happened his son comes in ten years later and they finish the job yeah they get they take out saddam and
01:31:31
they destabilize the entire middle east that's what the iron ass has got us so
01:31:37
what has turned me against these regime change wars it's look when i was in college i thought
01:31:42
herbert walker bush was a wimp you know and and george w bush was doing the right thing going into iraq 20 years ago
01:31:48
but we've seen the results and anybody today who doesn't modify their point of view on these regime change wars
01:31:55
is a fool i mean they're not paying attention and so for lindsey graham and you know these other guys out there to
01:32:02
be a lot of republicans to be talking about regime change that's something we should be seriously promoting they've totally
01:32:08
lost the script and they should be denounced as reckless dangerous fools
01:32:13
and look i've seen it on both sides of the aisle but what we need to do now listen if it ends up being the case that
01:32:19
the russian people want to make a change that's that's their call yes obviously i'm not
01:32:24
opposing something that they might want to do but for the idea that that should be our
01:32:30
goal that's our end game that's our objective that is a recipe for disaster
01:32:35
yeah we'll just wind up getting in a perpetual war then when we leave it will revert and that's what we saw it reverts
01:32:40
back to communist or authoritarianism the people have to really want it revolutions are hard fought and bloody
01:32:47
and if you think you can just go in there with a couple of drones and get everybody to decide oh we embrace
01:32:53
democracy from this point forward because you've drowned the hell out of the country is farcical and it's proven to be wrong
01:32:59
100 agreement with you no ceasefire is going to be possible i mean it's going to be hard enough as it is to get
01:33:04
anything remotely like a deal but it's not going to be possible if you're you've defined regime change yeah as
01:33:10
your objective it's way to dig putin in like that's literally what he wants to you know
01:33:15
that that you're giving him all the pretext he needs to keep this thing going if it's self preservation all right
01:33:22
everybody there's your overtime sex is uh sax's writers were freaking out in the writers room and i had to get his
01:33:27
last point in because before i pinned him as a pacifist there are no writers for this stuff jacob because look
01:33:32
everybody on cable news is singing from the same hymnal and following the same script they're all being the drums of
01:33:38
war there's only one cheek right now which is we're not doing enough and we're being weak and
01:33:44
biden needs to do more not being weak i agree having patience is nothing we are doing a lot we're doing a lot and we
01:33:51
should be careful de-escalation is the opposite of weak these economic sanctions are real we have to work
01:33:57
through and i think we have to make sure that the economy is supported while we do it on that note uh let's pray for
01:34:04
peace and we'll see you all uh next week on the podcast the all in summit is may
01:34:10
15 to the 17th 16th and 17th are the two days of the conference poker on the 15th tournament for charity
01:34:17
events every night of the week and you can apply for a scholarship at the website summit dot all in
01:34:23
podcast.com or just type in the all in summit into google it'll be the first link and 400 of 600 tickets have been
01:34:30
allocated either sold or for scholarships we're going to do the best we can to have as great of an audience
01:34:37
there as possible and for the dictator chamoth paulie hoppatia the rain man
01:34:42
david sachs and the sultan sultan of science hot off the launch of canna congratulations turning literally water
01:34:49
into wine david friedberg i'm jake out and we'll see you next time
01:34:55
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