All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E67: Revisiting Rogan, Canadian truckers' protest, fusion breakthrough, $MSFT's savvy move & more

Starting point is 00:00:00 We had a nice dinner, Tremoth hosted a little, and we played a little bit of the cards, and there's this new kid there. Oh, big shout out to S***, co-founder of S***, is there? Bricka. Mike S***, how do you wind up here at the game? Is sitting here, you know,

Starting point is 00:00:14 well, having a beautiful dinner with us. And he's like, well, and then Tremoth goes, and he points to, how am I, how am I going to be a billionaire when how am I going to be a billionaire when how you find a billionaire what happens he's tied to the hip he has like a billionaire It's a billionaire regular how me with this like one of those truffle dogs in like you know Alba in Italy, you know you send them out into the woods he forges around

Starting point is 00:00:39 He finds a truffle just digs it out And that's it. It's like. Then he follows, like a dog. He follows the building around. Tail wagging, tail wagging, waiting for his owner to show up and picked his little billionaire off the ground. Here's another one. Look, Daddy see. I found another billionaire.

Starting point is 00:00:58 Helmuth is the most insecure person, but he's such a beautiful human being. It's a great human. It's like the tale of two people. He's he really is a walking case of schizophrenia and narcissism. Just I mean that's the mom saying that We open source into the fans and they just go easy. I'll be West. I'll be Queen of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of

Starting point is 00:01:33 the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of King of the King of the King of the King of King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King ofroy of veganism. Do you like my thin casmere

Starting point is 00:01:46 Jolay that I'm wearing? Jolay? Jolay. Do you mean polo? No, Jolay. Jolay. Okay, many feet. Also with us the vice-roy of veganism, the Regent of the right wing. David Sacks. The vice Roy of vegans. Wow. The vice Roy of vegans. It came to me in the shower today. I was like, you know, like he needs a new one. I switched my background, guys.

Starting point is 00:02:17 Do you like it? I just flipped the camera to look the other way just to mix it up a little bit. Now we can see your chef picking the vegetables in your garden. Well, yeah, well, before you used to see him pick the herbs, the herbs are on this side. But now you see how you can see your chef picking the vegetables in your garden. Well, yeah, well before you used to see him pick the herbs. The herbs are on this side, but now you can see him picking the veggies. Oh, there's the sous chef. Okay, there's the prep chef. And there's that chef.

Starting point is 00:02:35 Okay, yes, everybody showed up today. Okay, great. You know, you seem to enjoy the food, Jason, every time you go. Don't go ahead. But you are always eating when you're at miles. You're always eating. Who's the first RSVP after a film? He's not as eating, he's sending his notes to the kitchen.

Starting point is 00:02:50 Could you just do this a little differently? I do give notes. I do, I do. You see positive ones. It's like three out of four, a positive notes. You know when I flew with Chamat a few weeks ago, the chef made gluten-free Nutella crepes with homemade Nutella. I mean, it was like the most extraordinary breakfast experience.

Starting point is 00:03:07 That Nutella has no sugar. It's incredible. It's basically all protein, fat, and it's sweetened with monk flour sugar. So delicious. That didn't tell. They also kill some albino seals. I've not brought a chef on the plane with me, but I think in fairness, you're playing not that big. Yeah, I mean you've got a small I don't know if a sesna 142 can fit a chef I'm feeling plain-shamed

Starting point is 00:03:38 I just got to business select on Southwest. I'm feeling pretty good about myself right now. All right everybody, let's get started. A lot of topics people want to talk about. Do you want to start with Rogan? Or the Canadian truckers? I think Rogan probably leads into the truckers, no. It might in fact lead into the truckers. Okay, so we covered Rogan in Spotify in episode 66, a whole bunch, since that time, a video surfaced on Saturday with Joe Rogan repeatedly saying the end word and it's pretty rough to watch and he did a meocopa an apology and overall now Spotify has taken down 70 episodes of his podcast. You know, that's out of over a thousand.

Starting point is 00:04:27 I thought it was like 113. That's what I saw on Twitter. There's 113, maybe 70 had the N word, but 113. Oh, okay, that's your correct. I stand corrected. 110 have been taken down. I was texting with socks. It's like almost 6% of all of his episodes, it took down.

Starting point is 00:04:44 Yeah, something like that. Yeah, but not all of them were because of that lane. No, that's what I'm saying, but 6% were taken down. 6% taken down. In his apology, he said, obviously, he was wrong to use that word for the decade or so, but he pointed out that he did not use it towards a person as a slur, but was talking about it more in studying or discussing BN word. Use versus mention, is that right? Is that the distinction? Yeah, use versus quoting. Yeah, so he said it was taken out of context, apologized. He also made a joke that he immediately said, oh my god, that's pretty racist. They shouldn't have told that joke, where he compared

Starting point is 00:05:24 going to see Planet of the Apes in an all black theater and Philly saying he was in Africa. On Sunday, Daniel, he sent a memo to Spotify employees claiming he is not the publisher of the Joe Rogan show. Something I completely dispute. We'll talk about that in a moment. Thoughts on the latest Ruhaha and do we think that Spotify will be able to handle this,

Starting point is 00:05:52 what seems to have died down over the last couple of days, and Rogan is now joking about it in his comedy, you know, engagements at the small comedy clubs. What do you think, Sax? Is Joe Rogan going to weather the storm and Spotify gonna stick with him? Well, okay, so as of the last episode of the All in Pod, they were trying to cancel Rogan for misinformation. And for the reasons we discussed that basically failed because so many of the times,

Starting point is 00:06:17 something starts with misinformation and eventually becomes the truth. Rogan seemed like a guy who actually just wants to present both sides, present a balanced viewpoint. In any event, that whole attempt to cancel and base some misinformation was fizzling out, and then lo and behold, this 22-second clip comes out, and they escalate the charges to racism. If you kind of look at, you know, who's behind this clip, it's pretty clear that it was a democratic super PAC, put this together and sort of astroturfed it

Starting point is 00:06:47 as a viral video. This is part of an organized attempt to cancel Rogan. Now, as to the merits of the sort of racism accusation against him, I mean, look, let me say that I don't think anybody, especially a public figure, should be using this kind of language, you know, in this day and age, even if you're just sort of quoting something or mentioning it, you know, he should have known better. However, there are also similar clips that are now circulating

Starting point is 00:07:21 of Joe Biden doing the same thing using this type of like incredibly incendiary language in like a brazen almost offhanded way. You've got clips of how. I'm not a second. Wait, you're saying brazen and he said it exactly the same way as Joe. I'm saying we can a cavalier way. He's been late. Let me come back. So you have, you have Biden doing it. You've got Howard Stern doing it. So what is the difference? I mean, the reality here is that we used to in our culture have a distinction between the use of this type of language as an apathy, which was never okay.

Starting point is 00:08:00 Or using it, you were referencing it. You might have been quoting it. You might have been quoting a rap song. You might have been quoting it. You might have been quoting a rap song. You might have been quoting Dave Chappelle Routi and you might be reading from a book. You might have been telling a story in which somebody else has said it and you're merely trying to relay what happened.

Starting point is 00:08:17 The rules today are, that's not an excuse. You can't say it, but the truth is that 10 years ago, 20 years ago, the rules were a little different. That's why Biden said it. That's why Howard Stern has these episodes. And I think it's why Rogan had said it. And I think it's a little bit disingenuous for people to now try and apply the new rules to this old language. And they're doing it very selectively because they're not trying to cancel these other people who've said these things under the old rules. they're doing it very selectively because they're not trying to cancel these other people who said these things under the old rules They're trying to cancel Rogan

Starting point is 00:08:48 So I think what you're seeing here is selective cancellation outrage selective application of these new language rules for the purpose of getting Rogan canceled Why for the same reasons we were talking about two weeks ago or last week, which is he's an outsider, he's an independent voice, he bucks the establishment, he doesn't present the orthodox view on COVID, and that's frankly why they want to cancel him. Friedberg. I'm just looking at the Howard Stern quote. So in 1993, Howard Stern dressed in blackface and used the N word in a skit he did, mimicking Ted

Starting point is 00:09:27 Danson talking about whoopie Goldberg, something, and he said, I'll be the first to admit, I won't go back and watch those old shows. It's like, who is that guy? But that was my stick. It's what I did and I own it. I don't think I got embraced by Nazi groups and hate groups. They seem to think I was against them, too. So I think, you know, Sax is probably right.

Starting point is 00:09:44 I mean Howard Stern's a very different character today. You know, I think the question of if Howard Stern acted that way today would cancel culture kind of mob him, the answer is probably yes. But I think it's because you know, Rogan is out here probably picking a bone with everyone. You know, he's kind of, a bone with everyone. There's no alignment. There's no tribal behavior with Rogan. He's been pretty public about being very liberal. He's been very public about being conservative in some ways. I don't think he kind of aligns himself strongly with anyone. So he is a threat to everyone. He's got a huge following. He speaks openly in honestly in a way that is threatening, certainly his behavior was inexcusable and has been inexcusable, but there are others. So it's an important question, which is why him, why now? It's also interesting with that Ted Danson. He was dating Wippie Goldberg at the time,

Starting point is 00:10:41 I believe. And Ted Danson, there was a roast of Whippy Goldberg at the Friars Club and Ted Danson dressed in blackface, I think, which Whippy Goldberg was in on. Ted Danson dressed in. Didn't Howard dress? And then Howard did a send up of that. Anyway, the point is the more the standard has changed significantly less the Chimouth Chimam. My book of the year, last year was this book wanting by this author, Luke Burgess. He wrote something on Substack. I'll send you guys a link. You can put it in here. But he said, he said the following, he said, as we regress to a superstitious quasi-pagan world of witch burning.

Starting point is 00:11:25 Civil discourse will be replaced with superstition and scapegoating. And he was talking about Rogan. I think that the thing that I was the most proud of in this whole thing was Daniel Eck. I mean, disclosure, he's a friend of mine. So maybe this is biased. However, I think that Spotify had business principles. And this was similar to what Brian Armstrong did at Coinbase. I think they stuck to those principles.

Starting point is 00:11:56 They made a well-reasoned decision that they explained to their employees and shareholders. And then they did the most important thing that SACS has always been saying around free speech, which was which is more speech. And so what Spotify said when they explained the decision to not de-platform Joe Rogan was that they would take the exact equivalent economic value of what they were paying them him $100 million and invested in underrepresented historically underrepresented, historically underrepresented groups to tell their stories, to make their music, etc.

Starting point is 00:12:31 And so effectively doubling the universe of that kind of content. And so I think if people are really willing to listen, I think what we should take away from this is, here's a really clear right example of the solution to free speech, which is just to get more of it on your platform to have the right disclosures and disclaimers. And then for people to go along with their lives so that they can then choose. And I think that that was the one positive outcome that I saw from this entire episode. The rest of it was another attempt at being morally absolutist and scapegoating.

Starting point is 00:13:21 And then that was before obviously the N-word thing. And then the N-word thing just brought to light that we live in a very different age where the rules have changed. And I think the open question is, you know, if you're going to judge people for past behaviors on current rules, are we allowed to do it selectively or does it apply to everybody? And I think that, you know, this is why I think we saw people like David Simon, you know, came out and David Simon was very, you know, basically, excoriated Joe Rogan, but then David Simon wrote the wire, you know, and if you watch the wire, which is an incredible piece of television that people point to all the time is one of probably the greatest shows on television,

Starting point is 00:14:05 an incredible piece of television that people point to all the time is one of probably the greatest shows on television. You know, every probably, you know, 13th to 14th word was the end word. Yeah, I have like two observations here. And then I'll get to you, Saxony, if you want to chime in on. I always like to think about intent. And then I like to look at the apology and think is this like sincere or not and when you look at the intent It does anybody actually think Joe Rogan is a racist and I think it's pretty clear He's not from all of the behavior collectively in his life and then you look at the apology I thought I felt it was incredibly sincere

Starting point is 00:14:39 And there were many learning moments in it and he's's a comedian, which is kind of this other space where we ask comedians to make us laugh and make us feel uncomfortable. And now we're also asking them to live by a standard that changes every year and words come on and off. The allowable list. Would anybody here, does anybody here actually think, or anybody listening to me think Joe Rogan's actually racist?

Starting point is 00:15:03 I think the answer is, I don't think anybody thinks that. And then number two, I felt the apology was incredibly thoughtful and well done, Sacks, what are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I agree with those things. Nobody was accusing Joe Rogan of racism until the cancellation mob started throwing stones. And the misinformation stones didn't work work so then they escalated to racism I think the generalized thing is just take take the context out of Rogan for a second I think that the the formula if I can point to this of

Starting point is 00:15:36 cancel culture is now I think pretty well understood which is If you don't like somebody You need to throw some ism label on them until that ism label sticks. And eventually you will find it ism label. But the thing that this cancel culture doesn't appreciate is everybody has some ism that can be attached to them. Now some isms are worse than others, obviously. But we're all infallible, right? I go back to, like, if you want to quote the Bible, right? There's a, there's a beautiful passage into the Bible, the book of John. And the whole thing, and you guys have

Starting point is 00:16:15 heard this quote many times before, but let me just give you the setup. So in the law of the land back then, adultery was illegal, but only for the woman. Right? And so there's a very famous example of a woman who is accused of adultery. And she was about to be stone to death, which was essentially the punishment. And Jesus basically draws a line and says, he who is without sin should cast that first stone. And nobody does. It deescalates that conflict in everybody it leaves. Right? And there's a very famous essay that Renee Gerard wrote. That basically compared that to it to a different example in a more paganist context where people

Starting point is 00:16:57 did stone people. The idea of all of this is that there's some amount of sin that everybody carries. And I think that at some point, cancel culture will realize that you have to deescalate and you have to see through some of this noise, you have to have some point of moral resolution to really move on. Because this sort of like fatalistic judgment doesn't work anymore So whoever people wanted to cancel Rogan

Starting point is 00:17:29 They must be very frustrated today because for all intents and purposes he got off the hook They may try again in the future with some other ism He may just as well get off the hook in the future, right? So what is the real solution? The real solution is to figure out how to deescalate and after you have a conversation about the things that he's doing that really upset you. And that is still not what's happening. And a path perhaps to resolution. Let's get freeberg in and then you sex.

Starting point is 00:17:53 Freeberg. I'll say two things. One, I think I want to set next to Tony Blair for dinner. You know, he was the prime minister of the UK and he told me it was a really funny conversation because he was talking about his youth and he's like, if there were iPhones when I was young, I would not have ever been elected to public office.

Starting point is 00:18:10 He was in a rock band. I don't know if you guys know his history, but he was pretty freewheeling kind of guy. His point was really broader than that. It was that all of us have something that people can look to us for and use against us in some way. But I think what's really important with this Joe Rogan thing, and I think the bigger picture for me, dissenting voices and critical voices and outspoken voices are extremely important in the discourse that makes society progress. It is not a good society when people that have dissenting voices or offensive voices are shut down. Society has a better opportunity to chart a new course and to identify new paths. Sometimes when the dissenting voice is wrong and sometimes when it is right, but in both

Starting point is 00:18:54 cases it is important to have that dissenting voice because it allows us to have the dialogue that allows us collectively to figure out what is wrong and what is right. And so this notion of cancel culture and the way that people like Joe Rogan are and have been attacked for things that they have said in the past or do say today, I think it is really contrary to the opportunity that the United States presents with this, you know, a founding principle of freedom of speech. Sax. Yeah, so I agree with that. I want to build a much more said with the René Gerard analysis of this. I mean, what we're seeing here is the modern day equivalent of a

Starting point is 00:19:32 primitive, you know, archaic stoning ritual. This is a modern day virtual stoning in which we're not killing somebody, but we're trying to kill their digital avatar. I mean, we're basically trying to remove and destroy their online presence. I mean, that was really the goal here. And in the mechanics of this thing, it only works to the extent that people are unaware of the mechanism of the scapegoating. As soon as they become aware that this person's being targeted selectively as a scapegoat is stops working. And that was the situation we were in last week where you had, you know, Neil Young through

Starting point is 00:20:11 the, he cast the first stone, despite being guilty of misinformation many times himself. He's got like a weird history of saying weird things about GMOs and gay people and some of the stuff got dredged back up. And I think that was fair because led he who is without misinformation cast his first stone. And then he got some of his friends, you know, these aging, you know, rockers, like Joni Mitchell and Crosby Stills and Ash

Starting point is 00:20:37 to throw the next stones. And then the media got in on this. And CNN and MSNBC, they were throwing stones. And it was all motivated by the fact that Rogan simply does not refuse. He refuses to pair at their orthodoxy because, you know, we can see people like Howard Stern who I like Stern, okay. But today, how are certain to become a full-fledged COVID hysteric? I mean, he is fully on board with the COVID restrictions and mandates in this area.

Starting point is 00:21:05 That's why he gets diplomatic immunity to this. So this whole, the whole scapegoating ritual around Rogen was about to fail last week. And that's why they escalated it is because they saw, first of all, Rogen was getting away and then second, our ability to run these sorts of witch hunts. If people start to reject that, we lose all of our power. And so that's why this thing escalated into the most sensitive area that we have in our society,

Starting point is 00:21:33 this language around race, this very hurtful, these hurtful epithets. And these people are playing games with that type of language. And it's very destructive. And, but I think people are seeing through it, you know? I really agree with this. I think like the, the scapegoating has a way to resolve things is losing its effectiveness increasingly.

Starting point is 00:22:00 It did work online for some amount of time early on and David, you're exactly right. It's when the mechanism of action was poorly understood. But now that everybody sees it and people try to do it all the time, it just stops working. And it's not nearly as effective anymore. It's a burnt out tactic. You know, we see this in the start-up. It's like this marketing channel's been overbur- and everybody knows. Okay, okay, I'm being marketing too. And to give it some context for those people who are wondering, you heard Renasier on, like, three or four times here, it's a philosopher, and he taught at Stanford. He had a big impact on Peter Tiel.

Starting point is 00:22:36 I don't know if Sacks actually took any courses with him. And there's a book, Me, Peter, David. I mean, like, if you take courses with him, it's okay. I never heard of you getting courses, but Peter told me about his ideas in college I wrote some of his books. Yeah, his books are incredible. I mean, he is one of the most powerful thinkers of the shem, I mean, he's he passed away. It reminds me of Joseph Campbell, the power of meth like they were really thinking about the the sort of basic basic tenets of like human the human condition and how people behave

Starting point is 00:23:05 it's really worth double clicking on. I think also interesting in terms of forgiveness and blackface Justin Trudeau has appeared no less than three times in his youth in blackface and it's not a joke it's literally true. Justin Trudeau like like the reason why the the race ism label was planted on Rogan is because he's heterodox. The reason why that race ism label has not yet really been planted on Justin Trudeau is because he's orthodox. He's quite he's quite part of the ingrained establishment. He comes from royalty. In Canada growing up, pure Trudeau, you know, we were we were liberals growing up We were members of the liberal party. We'd made donations to the liberal party You know in our lore

Starting point is 00:23:51 There is no greater symbol than pure Trudeau his father and so when you're the son of somebody like that you get an enormous amount of Credit in your bank account that you're born with and he was able to burn through so much of it by doing things that anybody else in any other situation may have been judged much more harshly for. And he wasn't. And he becomes prime minister. And then he's able to get reelected. But, you know, his day of reckoning is coming because he is revealing himself to be a part of this establishment with these views that are actually really uncomfortable and you know quite grotesque because of how judgmental they are of everybody else. And that's a great segue. And then just finally, Sacks, correct me if I'm wrong here, Joe Rogan has voted Democrat his whole life. He holds largely Democratic beliefs. He's for universal healthcare, he's pro-trans, he's pro-gay.

Starting point is 00:24:48 He's a work of Bernie Sanders. And he was a voting for Bernie Sanders. He's a really stupid person for the Democrats, for Democratic politicians like Biden to alienate because he's a hero, to young people, he's a hero to the working class, and his youth are fundamentally, might say, more progressive. Yeah, they're 100% progressive. Yes. So it's stupid for them to do this, but it's also stupid for them to be alienating

Starting point is 00:25:12 these truckers, because Democrats were supposed to be the party of the working class. So let's pivot to that issue. Can I just say one last thing? I just want to reiterate this, because I just want to really give you a chance to say it again. You have always said, and it's so true, the solution to free speech and to protect it is more speech.

Starting point is 00:25:29 I just want to say to Daniel, I can't the team that Spotify, you guys must have been in a really difficult spot. But the decision to take that $100 million to increase the funnel for other voices and historically underrepresented voices is so good. And I hope you guys get to the other side of it, but I thought it was a really, really, really good decision. Yeah, I mean, so on the Ecken and the Spotify decision, let me say I want to think to that.

Starting point is 00:25:54 So I applaud them for not canceling Rogan. They must have been under enormous pressure to do so, including from their own employees. The only thing I didn't like in X statement was when he talked about the user safety and how they need to do a better job of user safety. That's a concept that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I mean, Rogan is not sneaking into people's living rooms and turning his show on and pressing play. If people don't like it, I'm talking about users. If users don't like the content, they don't have to listen. You don't have to click play. He's not really turning the chat.

Starting point is 00:26:27 He's not really turning the chat. That's a great idea. That's a lot into this idea of psychological safety that being confronted with any view you don't like is a threat to your safety. That is actually a threat to free speech. It is giving the most hysterical people in our culture. The ones who are most prone to being offended, a veto over any idea that ends speech they don't like. Yeah, if you're uncomfortable, you're unsafe, you could remove yourself from that situation.

Starting point is 00:26:51 If it's a piece of media, you don't need to read every book, you don't need to see every Quentin Tarantino film, you don't need to listen to Joe Rogan or whatever else that you find offensive to you personally. I just don't think we should be feeding that idea that that's like a lot of safety as legitimate idea. We talked about this before with like, people at work, if they say they feel unsafe, that's instantly like an HR, like, oh my God,

Starting point is 00:27:11 you feel unsafe. Yeah, right, alert. HR is running over because it's available requirement. If someone's creating a safety issue in the workplace, they have a legal requirement to remove that problem. That's why this language got started is it triggers the machine of HR. Of HR or to remove people who are doing nothing wrong I told you I'm going to be like sax hey listen your work product is not good enough you like I feel unsafe right okay let's go to the truckers because I think we're being this to

Starting point is 00:27:37 I just want to have one final comment on Spotify I Think debt and appreciate what Daniel did with $100 million. That's great. And I think it's great that he's supporting free speech and he's holding his ground there. I know that's not easy. However, I think he's intellectually dishonest saying they're not the publisher of Gerogun. I have a three-part test to see if you're a publisher. Do you pay for the content?

Starting point is 00:28:00 Do you promote it? Do you produce it? If you do two or more of those, you're a de facto publisher in my mind. They pay a lot of money for Gerrug and they promote the heck out of him. And while they don't produce it in advance by picking the guests, they do have a production like veto on what content they put out there. And so if Netflix has to own the people they pay, even if they don't produce it and they promote, then Spotify does need to have the same standard. And Disney and Netflix, all our producers of content, nobody would argue that.

Starting point is 00:28:31 And I believe Spotify is the producer Daniels not being honest. Final thought on this. Let me just defend Spotify for a second. You guys have been through this. I've been through this many times at several of my companies, but when you are in the middle of a firestorm, it's very rare that you can put out these, you of my companies, but when you are in the middle of a firestorm, it's very rare that you can put out these, you know, press releases where the pride of authorship is one person. And in many ways, you have to write these PR releases with all of these

Starting point is 00:29:01 guardrails that think about all of these future issues that may prop up over time And so I understand that you guys had some issues with some of the words I would just say again look at the action and the action is he didn't de-platform someone and then he doubled down on free speech And he actually pointed a hundred million dollar firehose at people who can now tell their own stories On a platform that is the most important audio platform in the world. So I would say, you know, that's kind of like same thing when I said, you know, I didn't particularly like sometimes, you know, Brian's essay, I could have written it better. But at the end of the day, what I saw through it and I admitted this later,

Starting point is 00:29:39 the substance of what Brian Armstrong did was incredibly profound. One of the most important things that actually happened in the last few years in Silicon Valley culture. And I would just say that I think that Daniel did something really powerful here. And I think that both Spotify and Coinbase deserve and the employees and the leaders that deserve a round of applause. I think it was a very, very hard decision. And I think they stuck to their guns irrespective of what you believe they stuck to their guns. Canadian truckers are protesting as many of you know, vaccine mandates, just breaking

Starting point is 00:30:09 today Ontario's premiere has declared a state of emergency for the entire province and Ottawa police have braced for thousands of protesters to descend for the third consecutive weekend USA today also reported the convoy could disrupt the Super Bowl by insane reunion, etc. The protest has been self-titled the Freedom Convoy and has been underway since January 29th. It appears it has spanned several thousand vehicles across the country and the truckers are blocking key roadways and bridges, including the ambassador bridge. They're seeking an end to Canada's vaccine mandates. And it feels like this is now morphing into something a little bit wider than just vaccine mandates. Maybe it's becoming a occupied Wall Street type of protest open to many people with many different things that they have grievances

Starting point is 00:31:07 about. A reporter from Barry Wises, Common Sense Newsletter, Slash Media Operation wrote what the truckers want. Jason, you just nailed it. I do think that this is actually occupied Wall Street. 2.0, yeah. Look, it turned out just to get roots and facts. So it's not just truckers. This is a broad-based coalition of people across every single race and gender and age group in Canada that's participating in this thing. In fact, the Bari Weiss article,

Starting point is 00:31:39 she profiled men, women of all ages, seeks, you know, whites, I mean, everybody blacks. So there's a coalition of people. Second, is this really isn't about vaccination rates because it turns out truckers are 90% vaccinated. They're vaccinated at a higher percentage than the actual broad-based population of Canada, which is about 78%. I think the point of this, and again, I care about this so much as a Canadian, but I just want to read a quote from Justin Trudeau because I think it encapsulates what this is really about. The quote is, the small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa, who are

Starting point is 00:32:17 holding unacceptable views that they are expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians. And I think it's that phrase, unacceptable views that really points to what the real issue here is, which is that there are a lot of people who now say it's been two years, enough with mask mandates, enough with all of this, you know, almost police state that's developed, all of the emergency use power that politicians have taken, let's reclaim our democracy and let's have, you know, freedom again. And under the political viewpoint of the ruling liberal party, which by the way is now going into revolt as well, a bunch of liberal MPs have just completely flipped because of this statement. It summarizes what Trudeau is saying, which is what you believe is unacceptable to me. And so now I will quash you. I will ask you. Or the Canada has one viewpoint. Freeberg.

Starting point is 00:33:15 Did any of you guys listen to the New York Times daily podcast that our friend sent out the link to this morning? Yes. You know, to me, these are the same story. It was actually an interview with a reporter who highlighted some work that she had done and identified that Phil Murphy, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, had done some polling and some focus group discussions with some of his constituents. And the overriding tone was one of emotion, one of feeling left out of the life that they believe they should have been living over the past two years. And ultimately, I think the tone speaks very clearly to what the truckers are saying, which is everyone feels more than ever, incredible overreach into their personal lives by the government,

Starting point is 00:34:02 and by different governments, whether it's local or federal here in the US or by this Canadian government or go to Australia or the UK and the sentiment seems to be similar everywhere. I don't think that any time since World War II, have we seen the government create such restrictions and such mandates in democratic republics like the United States, that we just saw over the past two years.

Starting point is 00:34:25 And I think the fact that it's continuing when folks are now seeing on the ground every day, the mildness of Omicron or the challenges that their kids are facing in school and you kind of put these things together and you say to yourself, why is my government restricting my life and causing the challenge that I'm being forced to face for what? And I think that's a tone that everyone feels everywhere in the West today.

Starting point is 00:34:51 I think in the East, it's a little bit different, right? Because of the mindset there, but I think here it's right. Collectiveism. Collectiveism. And I think here we pride individual liberty and freedom as kind of the foundation of these democracies to have the government tell us what we have to wear, shots we have to put in our arms, where we can go and when, how we can behave in ways that were never legislated, in ways

Starting point is 00:35:15 that were never kind of debated and discussed publicly. Just feels overreaching at this point, I think everyone's hit their breaking point. And this is another one of these examples, this trucking thing, it's another one of these examples of people manifesting their breaking point. And this is another one of these examples, this trucking thing, it's another one of these examples of people manifesting their breaking point. And SACs to the point we've been discussing over and over again, things have changed radically since the beginning of the pandemic. You believed in mask mandates early

Starting point is 00:35:34 because hey, no downside, we talked about that. And we didn't want hospitals to be overrun, which is reasonable, right? You wanted to have oxygen, we were all, you know, trying to make plans for, hey, how bad is this going to be? But we're sitting here two years later and it's pretty clear, Omicron, which I had. Thank you, Sax. Is there nothing for you as we sit here?

Starting point is 00:35:53 Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Maybe a superhero, thank you. All I've ever gotten is sick when I've been around you. Yeah, I went to Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. Sax, yes. This is a party, and all I got was an $8,000 gift bag and Omicron. The gift bag is pretty great at sexist party. No, I think getting Omicron helped you because it enabled you to see that this for you was largely a nothing burger and so you could come out of your house and start acting normal.

Starting point is 00:36:15 I think there's a lot of people all over the country who are like, you're saying that, you haven't left your house for two years. Do you remember the photos of Sacks at the beginning of COVID when he was wearing a triple mask and the crowd was in the... You were scared too, Dathy, we got to put that ton of... Mexican, you got to put that ton of... ...build a sport. Yeah. He colonized it.

Starting point is 00:36:30 Well, look, I supported mass mandates at the beginning of the pandemic when Fauci was telling us, Mashton, work. Let's not forget that. You know, I was supporting when the health officials told us they didn't work. Why? Because it was the only thing we had. We didn't have that scene. No, David, David, come on. He was doing us a favor by lying to us by his own admission. He said, I lied to you so that we could preserve these masks for frontline workers. Well, thank you. Thank you. Anthony. If you want of many, one of many Nobel lies that he's been telling. Here

Starting point is 00:36:58 we go. He's in he's a Nobel liar. He's in my my my my may of 2020. I would like to say my biggest political Luther pick from 2020. Go on, take it easy on your picks. I know you want to do your victory lap. It's only February. Give us a leg June for the check in. Okay, Colonel Karts continue. Mass were the main alternative to lockdown.

Starting point is 00:37:16 That's the way I saw it in the summer of 2020. And I was saying, and these crazy lockdowns just do mass. And then once we had the vaccine and all COVID restrictions, that was a year ago. And now we still have these restrictions a year later. And that is what the truckers were abelling against. Just like you said, these are ordinary people who are sick and tired of having to show their papers and have to deal with these mandates.

Starting point is 00:37:40 And for that, they've been like absolutely demonized. I mean, Trudeau comes out and says that they're basically white supremacists and racist and homophobic, every epithet he can throw at them. Sorry to your point, he used every, he did use every ism. He really did try to cancel them at first. And this is what's really painted him in a corner. He went on national TV and he said these people are racists and misogynists. That's, that's specifically what he said.

Starting point is 00:38:03 And it actually turned out that the overwhelming majority of them were not. They were just normal ordinary law-biting Canadians who were just fed up with the overreach. And then what happened was the polling said, you should bring these convoy leaders in, sit them down and talk to them. And then the political calculus, though, was impossible for him because he had already called them racists and misogynists, so then how could he bring them in? Right, exactly. Yeah, how do you negotiate with Nazis, basically? So then what he did was he ran out of Ottawa.

Starting point is 00:38:32 So instead of staying in Ottawa, now he's under, in a secure location for his safety. Oh my God. Oh, he feels unsafe. So trigger one. In fairness, when you bring 8,000 people together and you get a wide enough group of people, there was swatts tickers and white confederate flags that were flown. So it might

Starting point is 00:38:51 have been two of 8,000, but that did happen within any protest movement, which I just said. Yes. Within any protest movement, there's always going to be a handful of people who go too far in our two extreme, but they did not represent the vast, vast majority of the people who turn out, which are ordinary citizens. And Trudeau seized on a handful of isolated examples to try and demonize these guys. And I think it's blowing up in his face. The fact of the matter is, the truckers did not start this fight. It's the zealotry of our elites, of our professional class that started this fight.

Starting point is 00:39:24 They will not give up on these mandates. That's the fundamental problem. And while they go to the Super Bowl with no mascot. I think what you're seeing here with this trucker thing, I think it's gonna have huge ripple effects because it's showing the schism in the Democratic Party between the professional elites and the working class. Here you have the working class.

Starting point is 00:39:42 Remember, these were the essential workers. These were the people bringing us our food. Most of them have already had COVID over the last couple of years. They couldn't sit behind a computer and do their job in their pajamas on Zoom all day, okay? So these guys know the reality of COVID, just like you learned the reality, Jason, when you actually got it.

Starting point is 00:40:00 And yet we've got this neurotic class of professionals within the Democratic Party, who are these COVID dead-enders don't want to give this stuff up. And that's the fundamental divide. And I think Biden's going to have to choose which side of you on. Are you on the side of the working class or the professional class? Trudeau has chosen his side. He is the a feet elite face of these COVID dead-enders. And Biden's going to have to choose who he supports. And those are dwindling, you have governors now who are democratic governors in many states

Starting point is 00:40:30 who are saying, listen, Omicron is obviously different and look at the charts, look at the data. We have to talk about this New York Times story on how New Jersey and several other of these blue states dropped the mass mandate, so it was absolutely extraordinary. I mean, it was absolutely extraordinary. I mean, it's not extraordinary. The risk assessment is different, David. What was extraordinary about it is that... I mean, I think it's kind of obvious more than extraordinary.

Starting point is 00:40:53 If Omicron is less deadly, it's an upper respiratory. Doesn't kill people who are vaccinated, and most people are vaccinated. Pretty obviously it's time to pivot and open everything up. It's time to get obvious decision. Biden really missed his moment here. So I think, you know, like Freeberg said, it was Phil Murphy. He's a Democratic governor in New Jersey.

Starting point is 00:41:08 He was supposed to have an easy reelect when by 20 to 30 points, he narrowly squeaks by by two to three points, okay? So then he conducts the focus groups to find out what do we miss? Why were we so off on this thing? And they find out that people in second tie to these mandates, he goes to the White House, shows these findings and says, guys, we have to get off this losing position

Starting point is 00:41:29 on COVID and the White House to send his hands and does absolutely nothing. So Murphy is like, we can't wait anymore. So he unilaterally goes without White House support. This is all in the New York Times article. This is not like some right-wing publication saying this. So he unilaterally says, we're getting rid of the mass mandate, okay? And then five other states do the same thing because they realize we can't wait anymore. And Biden is just nowhere to be found.

Starting point is 00:41:53 And Pesaki is saying, well, we're deferring to the CDC. They're deferring to, you know, Rachel Lollinsky at the CDC and Randy Whitegarner, the teachers unions and these health officials like Barbara Furrier and LA County, all of whom are saying we cannot lift these mandates yet. They don't want, so they are completely on the wrong side of this. And then Biden really steps in it by saying to Trudeau and Canada, listen, you guys gotta clear this bridge,

Starting point is 00:42:18 do whatever you need to do to clear this bridge. Basically implying that the civil disobedience needs to be met by force. And then you've got Harvard professors and CNN analysts saying slash their tires, take away their trucking licenses, starve them out. You know, so this has been the response. And the response to that is now there's a trucker convoy getting started in the US and

Starting point is 00:42:39 they're going to march on Washington. They're going to drive to Washington. Great. And between now and then Biden better forget what side he's going to be on. Because if he doesn't handle this right, I think it's going to be the end of his presidency. Peaceful civil disobedience is fine as long as they're not blocking ambulances, getting people to and from hospitals.

Starting point is 00:42:55 That's fine, especially the vaccinated on the right. Joe Biden. Is this great and Joe, the guy who said he would take us back to normalcy, the representative of the working class is that, who the president of the United States is, or is he in the Trudeau camp, the Fauci and the Walinsky and the Barbara Ferrer.

Starting point is 00:43:14 And usually, I think you're asking a rhetorical question. I think that the polling data makes the answer pretty clear, which is that the Democratic Party is lurching towards establishment insiders and working normal ordinary people have in larger and larger numbers started gravitating towards to the Republican Party. Minorities in far larger numbers than we ever expected have started lurching towards a Republican party. And so the answer is sort of in the polling data and what the actual facts on the ground have been.

Starting point is 00:43:53 You know, I mean, we forget because we were also ready to cast away our Trump derangement syndrome, but he did get, I think, what was it, nine million more people to vote for him in this possible election? Yeah, the working class, whether there is the white working class or the non-white working class are moving in huge numbers. Huge numbers.

Starting point is 00:44:13 I think the margin of non-white working class who moved to the Republican's last election was 18 points. They got 18 points more share than eight years ago. So the working class, regardless of their race, is moving towards the Republicans while the Democrats are becoming this more a feat elite professional class party, this woke elite party. And I think Biden is caught in the middle of this. And I think he's running out of time to try and reestablish that he's going to have a centrist presidency that is not completely

Starting point is 00:44:46 Caltown and defer to the left of his party to this sort of woke elite thinking. You see Democratic political scientists like Roy T. Shara writing about this like every week saying this is your last chance, this is your moment to save your presidency. I don't know if he's listening. Okay, freed Park, we made some great progress in science this week in nuclear fusion. Do you want to teat this up for us? I'm happy too. So let me just give a little background for maybe a minute on fusion. So, you know, the way energy is made in the sun and in all stars is through this process of nuclear fusion, where hydrogen, nuclei, the protons inside of hydrogen atoms shoot

Starting point is 00:45:26 around at such a high energy and they're so dense because of the amount of hydrogen that all causes gravity to pull them all together, they get really dense. They start slamming into each other when they slam into each other, they fuse into helium and ultimately the heavier elements and release energy in the process. That is what fusion is. We talk about nuclear energy on Earth, all nuclear energy that we've generated on Earth as a species to date has been through vision where we take much heavier elements like plutonium

Starting point is 00:45:51 and uranium and break apart by squeezing them together and they release energy. But this creates radioactive material, it's dangerous, it's very, very expensive and so on. So there's always been a question since roughly the 1950s, on whether or not we could recreate the conditions of the Sun or stars on planet Earth By creating a plasma by creating the same sort of plasma that exists inside of stars very hot

Starting point is 00:46:13 very fast very dense Hydrogen that can slam into itself and slam into atoms and fuse into helium and release energy. Does that same plasma exist on Uranus? Uh-huh. Yeah. God, you're going to give him a wedgie. Let science boy finish. Oh, my God. Oh, sorry.

Starting point is 00:46:32 Back to you. Never gets old. Was it 69 megajoules or 420 megajoules? Yeah. So plasma fusion has always been this kind of holy grail of energy because if you can actually generate plasma fusion, the amount of energy it takes to create the plasma is less than the energy that comes out of the plasma. So it's effectively infinite, free, cheap plasma.

Starting point is 00:46:53 And so the system that people have been building for the last 25, 30 years is these, these donut-shaped systems called Tokamax. They're like a circle, like a donut, and they spin the plasma around inside. And so it takes a lot of energy and magnets, and so on to try and make this work. You know, it's a company we talked about a few months ago called Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which uses a new superconducting material to control that plasma and instead of using expensive magnets, it may just raise $1.8 billion. And you know, more recently, the joint European Taurus, which is managed by the atomic energy

Starting point is 00:47:28 authority in the United Kingdom, just this week demonstrated energy output from their Tocomact plasma fusion system, where they generated, you know, 59 megawatts of energy in five seconds, which is a record. The prior record was set in 1997 by that same agency. They generated 16 megawatts of power output. So it was a great breakthrough. And to make this all possible has required technical breakthroughs in electronics, technical breakthroughs and sensors and computing and hardware and material science and superconductors. And so all of this is starting to coalesce

Starting point is 00:48:05 that plasma fusion might actually become a reality. And the ITARE system, which is the biggest construction project in Europe, 35 nations have contributed a total of roughly 50 to 60 billion dollars to make this system. It's going to go online around 2027. They've been building it for 20 years. It's going to be a 500 megawatt demonstration system. And if it works, then it opens up the door that in the future we may actually be able to turn plasma fusion into an energy source for all of humanity.

Starting point is 00:48:32 It basically would use water. Plasma fusion is made from taking hydrogen, which you would get from water, spinning it around, heating it up, getting it to be really, really dense, and ultimately driving power out of it. The implications are extraordinary, right? So over the next few decades, it is appearing more likely that we will have plasma fusion systems working on Earth. And as that happens, energy becomes free and it becomes unlimited.

Starting point is 00:48:55 And with unlimited free energy, we can terraform Earth, right? We can take ocean water, desalate, turn it into fresh water. We can pump that into deserts, turn them into rain forests. You know, the total annual production of energy on Earth today is about 170 terawatt hours. That amount of energy could be generated from just a 10 foot by 10 foot by 10 foot cube of water. That's the amount of energy, the amount of material that would be turned into photons that would drive all of the electricity we need on Earth. So it's an incredible technology and an incredible breakthrough. We're starting to see this stuff happen.

Starting point is 00:49:27 One area that I wanted to kind of just highlight, which no one talks about, but which I think is extraordinarily important, about 100 years from now, let's say, as these plasma fusion systems work, it's certainly going to be true that we'll have abundant free energy during the back half of this century. And that'll change everything. We'll decarbonize the atmosphere, we'll terraform the planet, we can make whatever we want, we can build things, etc. But the same system of plasma fusion theoretically could be used to fuse heavier elements than just helium. So fast forward 100 or 200 years, if we can actually make plasma fusion systems work, we could also, and to make helium to make energy, we could also use them to make heavier elements,

Starting point is 00:50:10 like the rare earth metals that we talk about being so important here on earth to make batteries. Or phosphorus, which we're going to run out of on planet earth in about 100 years, which is a critical component of agriculture and feeding ourselves. So over the next, call it, 100 years, plasma fusion systems, I think, back half of this century come online, provide us with abundant free energy. And then in the 22nd century,

Starting point is 00:50:33 I think this idea of nucleosynthesis, the idea that we can actually make the rare earth or the heavier elements that are limited natural resources here on earth, where we could turn water into gold or water into lithium or water into molybdenum or into virillium or whatever starts to become a reality. And so this to me, like I feel like we're on the eve of plasma fusion being a reality based on some of the results we're seeing and it's one after the other, it's going to come online, commonwealth fusion had their materials breakthrough and on and on and on. So this seems to be building up. And so the 20 and 30 hit a tipping point.

Starting point is 00:51:06 That's right. I think the 20, 30s and the 2040s are where this becomes real. And all these problems and concerns we have about climate change and carbon in the atmosphere, all of this stuff can be reversed with infinite energy. And so I'm optimistic and I'm excited about a lot of what we're seeing. Let me ask you one question.

Starting point is 00:51:23 Obviously when people start hearing about nuclear reactors and vision and then they start learning about fusion, they immediately have the Chernobyls of the world and Fukushima's come to mind and nuclear bombs. In this case, when this reaction occurs, my understanding, I've interviewed a couple people working on these reactors, is that the reaction just fizzles out, it just stops.

Starting point is 00:51:44 And then, it's not radioactive. So these are not radioactive materials that naturally decay into radioactive ions or particles that can damage the body or damage. These are literally just hydrogen atoms that are spun around so hot and smashed into each other. So if the machine breaks, everything just turns off. That's it. And the output, even when it's working, my understanding is some natural, like, just air and water. So there's no output. There's no. There's nothing radioactive. There's no environmental. There's nothing to do with. So let me fast forward 200 years. So now assume these systems work. As you guys know, all technology over time gets better, faster, cheaper, smaller. So in 200 years, we could find that we have plasma fusion reactions in every pocket, in

Starting point is 00:52:31 every computer, in every phone. Imagine a world where we no longer need battery, where we no longer need transmission lines, and where a system can literally pull hydrogen out of the air, generate electricity on the fly. And it sounds crazy, but people thought, people would have never thought that the batteries that we put inside of phones would have existed when the first flow cell battery cell was made, you know, whatever, you know, during the early days

Starting point is 00:52:52 of chemistry, electrical chemistry. So, you know, the idea that we've been able to shrink batteries as we have, the idea that we've been able to make generators like we have today, these were concepts that would have been so foreign. So I do think that in 200 years, if plasma fusion systems work, there's nothing about the laws of physics that says they're limited in scale to only being large. They theoretically could

Starting point is 00:53:11 be reduced down. There's no limit to the size they can drop down to. And so there could be a world 200 years from now where plasma fusion reactors exist in every component that needs electricity. And so ultimately, you could see putting these systems on spaceships and using them to convert elements from one form to another. And we could live for, you know, a hundred thousand years on a spaceship and just recycle the elements on that spaceship to produce all our food and our air and everything. And yeah, for sure, we could get to Uranus with that. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:53:43 And back. The summary. And back. You could circle as anus. that. Absolutely. And back. The summary. And back. You could. You could circle his anus. So that was my diet tri-bon plaza diffusion. I'm super excited about some of the progress. All right. So right now, Saks is wondering how we went our binks.

Starting point is 00:53:53 Just tell us where to place the bat. There's no where yet. This is. I mean, honestly, I don't place bets on things that take 100,000 years. It's only a hundred years, Saks. Oh, a hundred years, sorry. A hundred thousand years.

Starting point is 00:54:03 I imagine things that might materialize in four years, sorry. Hundred weeks, you need to upgrade. Zach's plans. Bill's are due next month. Not an action call, Zach's so. I got bills to pay. I got bills. He's got bills.

Starting point is 00:54:15 He's got bills. He's got a big part of the, you know, just speaking markets for a second, I mentioned to you guys at the end of last year that I made a bet on energy stocks. And the reason I made a bet on energy stocks is because some of the breakthroughs that we're seeing in decarbonization and renewable energy has driven a reduction in capital improvements across energy infrastructure. Because people are so optimistic about what's over the horizon, and they're so pessimistic about carbon intensive energy systems that we actually have under-invested over the past

Starting point is 00:54:43 few years in energy infrastructure that it's turning out today is critically needed. So while this is a great long-term kind of optimistic world scenario and it's going to decarbonize energy production and energy systems, in the near term, we're actually struggling a bit to meet our energy demands and there's a lot of leverage that energy producers have over those that are the consumers as we are seeing currently with the Russia, Ukraine, Europe, crisis, and so on. And so part of the reason for the climate energy stocks over the last couple of weeks has been largely driven by the fact that we're realizing that this underinvestment in CAPEX has created

Starting point is 00:55:15 a decline in productivity of these assets relative to the demand. And so suddenly everyone's like, oh my gosh, these things are going to be able to charge more commodity prices are going up. And so on. So it's very hard to think about playing an investment cycle around this stuff because in the near term, there's still significant demand and we only have carbon intensive systems to produce energy. Well, as I got you asked you to trim off, does this mean on an investment thesis, you

Starting point is 00:55:38 might see a massive spike in carbon-based fuel systems and these other wealth funds and then a dramatic drop off. No. Okay. What do you predict will happen? Nobody will support anybody investing in pulling more oil out of the ground. They'll support trying to get more from what we have. But I don't know if you guys saw, but there's no support for this. Whether you're an investor and you go activists on some of these oil companies, whether you're, I think Biden had a big setback because he had cleared a whole, like millions of acres of offshore land for some kind

Starting point is 00:56:20 of energy extraction that was then just reversed by the courts. No, but nobody has support for this stuff. But what you're saying is exactly right, and it's exactly the reason oil prices are climbing. I just sent you guys a link to what's going on today. But they're climbing for the wrong reason. So look, let's just be realistic here. We have a cartel. It's called OPEC, and what they do is they decide output.

Starting point is 00:56:44 And we have some checks and balances to OPEC, namely Russia and a few other actors, who will try to then regulate supply and demand so that there's mutually assured destruction. The net result of all of that right now is that we do have some constraint supply for the amount that we need to get back to the level of production we had pre-pandemic. So we are going to have some sustained energy prices, but you saw something really important this past week. Everybody was waiting for this big CPI print, right, the consumer price index print. Everybody thought it was going to be a bad number.

Starting point is 00:57:17 It was a pretty bad number, but the markets were pretty responsive to it. And then it's been pretty responsive the rest of the week, despite a whole bunch of stuff. I don't know if you guys saw it, but yesterday there was this crazy article where one of the Fed governors was like, we should raise by 100 basis points by July. And we should do eight raises. And the markets were like, what are you talking about? And why is that? Because now people have started to look, you know, I've mentioned this before,

Starting point is 00:57:45 when you go into a rate cycle, we're kind of past worrying about how many we kind of look to the end and decide what we want to believe about the future. And one of the most interesting things is the rate of change of this inflation was actually lower month over month. And so if you think about it that way, we had a bad CPI print, but it's actually not going up as much, and in fact it's starting to trail off, and a lot of economists now forecast,

Starting point is 00:58:15 basically this inflation peaking, or already having peaked over the last few weeks. Consumer sentiment is not so good. A lot of us are now shifting our consumption away from goods to more services. We're stopping the hoarding of the toilet papers of the world, if you will. And so I'm not a big buyer of this trade, to be honest with you, Freeberg. I think that it works in the short term. I don't think it's an investment. I think at some point you're going to have to make a decision about what your view on energy is.

Starting point is 00:58:43 I agree. I don't think this is a long term trade. Not an investment. That's right. I do think that the macro sentiment sent the market in one direction. It created a buying opportunity, which I was pretty clear about. I do think that some of this global tension stuff we're seeing is only going to drive it up for a while. I do think, however, that this big tech spread trade is moving from a trade

Starting point is 00:59:07 to an investment actually. And that I didn't expect. And the reason is I talked to a bunch of folks on Wall Street over this past week. And they told me two things. And one of them is a segue because I think we should talk about Microsoft, which is another brilliant move in the lexicon of business.

Starting point is 00:59:23 But what they said was Facebook has become a funding short we should talk about Microsoft, which is another brilliant move in the Lexicon of business. What they said was Facebook has become a funding short for other investments. Now, what does that mean? Everybody was crowded into big tech. We talked about this before, right? Those five stocks were broadly owned. They were effectively the index. But after that, after that earnings report, a lot of investors, including retail investors, had to decide where to reallocate their capital and had to decide where to invest, where the money

Starting point is 00:59:54 was going to come from to invest in these other names that were really beaten up. And what folks on Wall Street have been telling me is that, you know, Facebook has become what's called a funding short, meaning there is no bid to buy that from institutional owners. They'd rather on the march and sell it to generate the cash to then take and invest in other things. And what you saw over this past week is the bottoming out of a lot of these growth stocks that were beaten up, right? They rallied pretty significantly every day, three, four, five, six percent rallies.

Starting point is 01:00:24 And other names in big tech have rallied really well, including Microsoft. And so I think that there is the potential, a small potential that that's going from a trade to an investment, actually, a sustainable trend that you can bank on for several years. Investment hold the stock for five, ten years. The trade, that spread trade, you can hold for a long period of time. But for the winners, the winners in in that just so people get refreshed. Google's a Microsoft Google Microsoft Google and then you feel Amazon Facebook obviously and Netflix are the losers in that trade.

Starting point is 01:00:55 Still feel that way? I think that Microsoft and Google are far and away the winners. Far and away the winners and look you saw you saw you saw this Microsoft thing today or sorry this past week so smart you know. Yeah so give catch people up on Microsoft has made another savvy move to get approval for their 75 billion dollar activation blizzard acquisition they promise their video game app so it operate with open market principles. CEO of the year satia nadell and Others trapped watching in the Dell Nadella right this in the end travels watching this week to meet with regulators regarding the acquisition So they I guess are proactively going to Washington as opposed to other people who maybe are not Quote for Microsoft president Brad Smith. We are more focused on adopting

Starting point is 01:01:41 adapting to regulation than fighting against it That's some really interesting conflict. There's a famous story about this explorer named Hernándal Cortez where we've all heard this analogy or this little phrase before, where when they were exploring coming from Europe and they hit the Caribbean islands and then looking for America, etc. The famous phrase is burn the boats. Yeah, right. Can't go back.

Starting point is 01:02:10 We have to find our way. Make it work. The way that that's been extended in business is sort of what we would call scorch the earth. And there's a competitive move that a lot of businesses, if they're smart enough, can execute, which is to effectively take a key market and take an economic view of that market where you say that we're going to take all the economic value away from it. And I think this is the first step towards a really interesting play that Microsoft could pull,

Starting point is 01:02:39 which is essentially to scorch the Earth of AppStores, which is Google's and Apple's really big money printer, to make a completely open, permissible platform with very little to no take rate. And in a market as big as video games, I think what it does is it creates pressure on all these other mega platforms to essentially copy them. And I think Friedberg mentioned this before. Google has actually been the best in doing this by finding these key markets where I think it was SACs, Chrome and other things and giving them away for free. Google is in a position to make the app store effectively free, and then that puts Apple

Starting point is 01:03:14 on a little bit of a desert island. So Jason, back to why I think you can keep Apple in that basket of shorts. The competitive pressures are mounting by the moves of Microsoft that I think are easier for Google to copy and very difficult for companies like Apple to copy because it creates an incredible disincentive. Yeah. And also as part of this open app store concept, they would let you use any payment system. So if you're on an iPhone and you wanted to use Apple Pay with a Google app purchase,

Starting point is 01:03:40 you could do that. And if you're on Microsoft, you could use PayPal as an example. Sax, what do you think about inflation? Okay, there was a really interesting chart on inflation that actually zero-edged tweeted. And I threw it up in the notes here, where they said real hourly earnings are negative 1.7%. It's the 10th month in a row

Starting point is 01:03:59 where US incomes aren't keeping it with inflation. So the problem here is that, people's incomes have increased with inflation, but not as much as the inflation rate. So the net effect of it is that people are feeling worse off. When they go to the grocery store to buy groceries or whatever they need, they don't feel as rich. That's the fundamental problem here. And I think there's a lot of people out there who think that there's a free lunch that if we printed two trillion worth of Stimichex, this is the whole, that two trillion dollar bill last year that they shoveled through. I think the idea was we're going to print as much money as we can before the election and it's going to help us in

Starting point is 01:04:38 the midterms. Actually, as it turns out, it boosts inflation so much that people are feeling worse off even though their wages went up slightly, because on a net basis their earnings are down. So I just think it's a good reminder that you can't just like print wealth, you can't print your way to prosperity. No free lunches? There's no free lunches. Yeah. Or we're going to create addiction to universal income or universal subsidy. That's the alternative

Starting point is 01:05:06 is people are going to basically try and vote to make some programs that were initially meant to be temporary, more permanent in order to keep up the lifestyle that they've been come accustomed to. Just a build on Sax's point, the University of Michigan consumer sentiment was released. I think it was today this morning, and it shows exactly what he's saying, which is that consumers' propensity and confidence in the economy has been falling off a cliff. You know, the month over month change was almost, it was down 8.2%. The year over year change is down almost 20%. Current economic conditions was down 20%, and then index of consumer expectations

Starting point is 01:05:43 down 19%. So to, to S sax's point, people are scared. Yeah, well, we've been we've been talking on the show for the last, I'd say a couple of months about balancing the risk of recession versus the risk of inflation. Inflation, I think has gotten slightly worse at the print when from the last point was like 7.1 percent now, 7.5 percent. So to Jamal's point earlier, it's getting worse, but the rate of how fast is getting worse is slowing. Could be peaking.

Starting point is 01:06:09 But the risk or a session, I think, is increasing because what's keeping this economy going is the consumer. And if the consumer sentiment now all of a sudden is tanking, and people feel poor because of inflation, I just, you know, now the risks are starting to become. Now, a sentiment goes down. This is where governors play a critical role because if they don't open up these economies, we can't actually have a consumer-led consumption rebound of the economy because there aren't any services to buy because you can't actually be around anybody.

Starting point is 01:06:37 So if the economy remains effectively closed, then people are done buying, you know, tubs of margarine and toilet paper because, you know, Armageddon isn't coming as we were worried it would. What are we supposed to be doing? So this is how these things interplay. So we have to get these, again, going back to where we started, we have to get this economy open and we have to just get back to some sense of normalcy and the consumer will lead us out.

Starting point is 01:07:01 But I think sacks you're right. On the margin, I think the risk is towards a recession because people don't see this Thomas Soel who's a well-known Stanford. He's a, I think he's a senior fellow at Hoover. You know, he has this comment, which is effectively, taxes are bad for the rich and the poor, but inflation is bad just for the poor. And the reason he says that is because, you know, if you're wealthy, you can transition to assets that are sort of inflation, adjusted or inflation protected, right? You can consume assets or you can purchase assets to protect yourself. But inflation is an exceptionally regressive means of the government taking compensation

Starting point is 01:07:37 away from you, current compensation, and it disproportionately affects working class ordinary people. And so if you have real wages that are negative, inflation that's high, that's confiscatory, right? You are meaningfully less well off than you were before. And, you know, wealthy folks have a way to hedge, but normal ordinary working class people do not. And on the margin, then, if they then do not go out and spend, the problem will be some sort of recessionary effect. I also think if we open up, more people might, since they're so lonely and getting weird staying at home,

Starting point is 01:08:08 I think they might actually want to go do jobs to socialize and do things. I'm seeing people want to get out and do, you know, trips with their teams and they're sick of staying home. Salesforce just bought a retreat center. I don't know if you saw this out of the city, the Bay Area and because Benningoff's got a concern, I guess, that all these employees he hired over two

Starting point is 01:08:28 years who've never met another Salesforce employee are getting weird and lonely. And I think history is going to be really judgmental of Biden. If he is the last person to basically give the green light and all of these democratic governors basically revolt and open up underneath, you know, either silence or the complete opposite point of view. This is a really bad setup. Well, national journal, which again is not some right-wing publication. They're just sort of an analyst of what's happening in Washington said that an article, Biden is blowing his COVID moment. He was elected to lead us back to normalcy.

Starting point is 01:09:06 All he had to do was say, guys, it's time for the restrictions to come off and take credit for the fact that the old country was ready to move on. And he's kind of missed it. But this trucker convoy has come into Washington and gives him one more chance, I think, to get on the right side of this

Starting point is 01:09:24 because there's really two ways he can react. One is to treat them as domestic terrorists, racist, white supremacists, insurrectionaries, or he can embrace them and say, all he has to do is say, listen, we love you, we respect you, we hear you, we agree with you as time for these mandates to end. And you know what? Thank you, Rachel Lansky and Anthony Fauci for your service. We understand you're just trying to keep the country safe, but thank you very much. We're ready to move on. We're getting rid of all these restrictions. His popularity would like bounce five points, ten points, if he did that. Yeah, I'm betting he's going to. I mean, he's always

Starting point is 01:10:04 represented the working man and woman of this country. That's been his thing from the beginning. I bet you he does embrace them. And if you look at Omicron, remember the scareiness of December, hey, this thing is spreading 30, 40, 50 times faster. I wonder if it's gonna have the same death rate.

Starting point is 01:10:17 And we didn't know. And now we know. And it's February, two months later we know that the curve in South Africa, same as the curve in New York in California, up and down and then The only people who die seemingly are Immunicompromised or unvaccinated or both so feels like the perfect time

Starting point is 01:10:33 We really let us back to normal see I mean we really need to give credit to all the people who fought To it's the moms who went to these school board meetings were denounced as domestic terrorists There are the ones who put pressure to repeal these mass mandates on their kids, which by the way aren't even fully off. In New York and California, adults don't have to wear a mask anymore, but the kids do. It's the scientists, it's the scientists

Starting point is 01:10:53 of the Great Barrington Declaration who were demonized and called fringe and coaxing conspiracy theorists. There were the ones who provided the real data against lockdowns, not the NIH. It's these truckers who are basically opposing mandates. These are the people who are dragging us back to normalcy and it's the politicians who are reacting to that

Starting point is 01:11:11 when the polls change. And I think what the people want now is some real leadership, it's a politician who gets up there and leads us back to normalcy. Why can't Biden do that? There's a great article in the Times and they profiled a couple of people and one of them was a mom in New York who's running for Congress against an entrenched and entrenched Democrat.

Starting point is 01:11:30 And she's, I mean, she's just a good parted mom who was like, this is enough, enough enough. I need to get back to normalcy. My kids need to get back in school. We still have mass mandates here in California. Kids are so wearing a mass in school, yeah. It's becoming tribal warfare amongst the Democrats in California because even when the governor basically said, okay, mass mandates can go on X state, the county supervisors

Starting point is 01:11:57 have not decided. So for example, in Santa Clara County, you know, they've not said yes. In LA County, there's a health, an unelected bureaucratic health director named Barbara Ferrer. She calls the shots on COVID. After Newsom basically said that the mass can come off, she says, no, they can't not until April. Who is this person giving us orders? She told us to the border supervisors down there. And we're all just supposed to listen. Now, the reason why she has this authority is because Newsom is granted to her under Newsom state of emergency. So what he

Starting point is 01:12:30 should do is end that. What is the emergency? The superl's happening this weekend in the state and everyone's going to be their maskless. I mean, I was at the Warriors game last night and you had people wearing the most flimsy of masks that does nothing to protect people taking them off while they're eating and drinking. And then people walking around with signs, the security guards had signs that said, please put your mask on. And they were walking up to people like, you're not, and putting this little round sign in people's faces and not talking to them just, you know, and they would stand there until you put your mask back on.

Starting point is 01:13:00 And like, you're literally eating a hot dog and then you put the hot dog down and then they come up and put the sign in your face and you put your mask out and take another body of your hot dog. I mean, it's getting unnecessarily confrontational and just weird. And nowhere else are you seeing it. And then you go to a restaurant and the employees are wearing masks and nobody else is. I hope you can find it so weird. There was this clip on Twitter when the mask mandate was lifted in Nevada. And it was a clip of kids in like grade two or three. And they went crazy. Okay.

Starting point is 01:13:33 And the reason they were so excited was like they got to be normal again. And the explanation I had never heard this more beautifully said, these children can finally see their friends as emotions on their face. Oh my God. Can you imagine if you were four, five, six, seven years old and you cannot understand the emotions of other kids because you're covered up in a mask?

Starting point is 01:13:59 And you've only had an experience in school. Come on guys, two years in school. My kids, your old has never attended a day of school without a mask. It knows. That's about the night, right? Like, there's kids out there who I never had. I can't complain.

Starting point is 01:14:09 And you know, I was at, I was at, like, the, I was at horses with one of my kids last weekend and there were a bunch of kids out there writing. It's sunny, it's outside, they're on a horse. They're all wearing masks. In a voluntary optional situation, I'm just like, how brainwash, this generation that we're raising, I mean, they're gonna be so neurotic,

Starting point is 01:14:26 but they're also like brainwashed. I mean, it's crazy. We see it in the Bay Area, like I'll have a party with the kids or a group of kids come over and there's two or three parents who show up at the house, we only do outdoor parties, obviously. Two or three of the 10 kids will have masks on,

Starting point is 01:14:44 their parents will have masks on, The parents will have masks on. And like the most intense N95 like sealed masks. And I'm like, you want to take your mask off for a picture. And one of the kids refused to take her mask off for a picture outside at a birthday party. I was like, okay. Listen, I mean, when I supported the mask mandate, the very beginning of the pandemic,

Starting point is 01:15:01 you know, it was always as an interim measure. If I had known that people would want to continue this thing forever, there's no way I was supported. But it also probably was effective in the early days with the first time. I don't know what the psychological impact children is when they don't understand other people's emotions and you do it over a long period of time. No, we don't. I think that's a fair statement. We don't show the impact. Sure. I mean, it's probably not zero. And so at some point, we need to look at the risks, calculate some expected value, and

Starting point is 01:15:31 the people we need to prioritize are those that are the youngest, okay? And I've said this before, and it's like the teachers unions need to understand that calculus. Parents already understand that calculus. I don't think the state legislators, governors, and the federal bureaucracy yet understands this calculus, but it's time to return to normal and it's time to return. Sorry, and on this point, I would like to bring up something, the ACLU thing, just because I

Starting point is 01:15:59 think I would love to get your take on, you know, talking about civil liberties and freedoms, there are things that are happening here under our noses every day, under democratic and Republican presidents that, to me, when I saw this on the ACLU Twitter feed yesterday was shocking, Jason, do you want to, um, T that up? All right. In other news, the CIA has been secretly conducting surveillance programs to capture Americans' private information on Thursday. Democratic centers widen and Heinrich sent a letter to director of the CIA and the director

Starting point is 01:16:34 of National Intelligence, the little call for greater transparency in the CIA, into the CIA's data collection of private U.S. citizens. Basically, the CIA used executive order 12333, which was signed by Reagan in 1981 together data on US citizens. The letter notes the program was, quote, entirely outside the statutory framework, that Congress and the public believe govern the collection and without any judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes from a phiza. That's the foreign intelligence surveillance act, election, quote, what these documents demonstrate is that many of the same concerns that Americans have about their privacy and civil liberties also apply to how the CI collects and handles information under executive

Starting point is 01:17:16 order and outside a fizala in particular, these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that had generated bipartisan concern in the FISA countries. Where is the mainstream media while they breathlessly run around chasing cancellation stories? Where are they to report and to hold accountable this stuff and where are politicians in actually doing their job? But I you know, I don't think there's ever been this kind of overreach that's just constantly been going on with zero accountability or transparency into it. You know, the FBI is responsible for domestic

Starting point is 01:17:55 laws, right? And the FBI has a very clear path in which they need to get warrants in order to be able to surveil US citizens. And then the fact that we give an agency whose responsibility is actually foreign. Yes, to be honest, IAO is supposed to work only on international, not domestic. And then to basically spy on its citizens with zero accountability or reporting, it seems to be a pretty important issue that should at least be discussed,

Starting point is 01:18:18 especially in a world now where executive power just keeps ramping up and ramping up. What's going on? And there's zero transparency or accountability. If I didn't randomly see this on an ACLU tweet, would we even be talking about this? Probably not. And the other thing that's crazy about it is I think the way they get away with this, Jamoth. And this has been something that the Patriot Act had a similar technique is they the CIA and some other organizations will track international people of interest,

Starting point is 01:18:47 you know, money, wonders, etc. and then stay in order to track them. Well, anybody they contact in America is fair game, or if they're, you know, and so you can get the metadata from the phone calls and the emails. And I think that's how a lot of this gets justified. This what this letter seems to say is we just, there's a broad scale surveillance program against US citizens that is indeterminate in scope and scale. Right. So we don't know. That seems very different than that.

Starting point is 01:19:12 And then in parallel to this, there was also that announcement that the Department of Homeland Security is creating this major apparatus, this infrastructure to go after domestic terrorists. Well, look, if they mean people who actually like set off bombs or commit real crimes, fine. But, Timothy asked where the media is. The media is defining routine political dissent

Starting point is 01:19:33 as domestic terrorism now. I mean, you hear this type of threat inflation. We've heard these truckers even described as insurrectionists. So, you know, how are these programs going to be used? Is really the question. You create this massive infrastructure under these executive branch. We've seen that in Washington, this trend towards criminalizing political disagreements where Democrats or Republicans have

Starting point is 01:19:55 been putting their partisans in jail for years. But are they now going to apply this to political disagreements in the country? Can they use these powers to go after truckers who are engaging in civil disobedience? Can they use these surveillance powers to go after somebody who just tweets things on social media that they don't like? I mean, these are the open questions. It's very scary. Well, and it's also hard to determine

Starting point is 01:20:17 because you might have some people on the right who are protesting something in a very valid way. And then you get some whack jobs like the oathkeepers who are bringing in tons of weapons outside the DC area in January 6th. So there's a valid concern here with all those weapons, the Oathkeepers brought, and their plans to accord need to take over after they first got in there. But then you have the other dipshits where there are probably just there to have fun and banged drums and support trump, right? Do you think these truckers are engaged in an insurrection? Well, I mean, we don't know, and I don't think so.

Starting point is 01:20:47 No, I mean, if they bring a bunch of guns, then yes, we should have concerns. But I don't think they are. The slippery slope is when you have an executive order that is not governed by the standard guard rails that we use to have checks and balances between these kinds of government agencies and the people and the elected officials that we elect. Here's how it basically gets in a really tricky place. You have, I'm just

Starting point is 01:21:10 going to use Justin Trudeau's quote, okay, but replace that person with any politician in power. Hey, there's a small fringe minority of people who are on their way here. They hold unacceptable views. Well, you know what that person is going to do? That person is going to want to do everything in their power to basically understand, break apart, and tear up that fringe minority group. Now, isn't that scary? Right. When you have this overheated political rhetoric that describes your political opponents, your dissenters.

Starting point is 01:21:41 And enemies of the state? Yeah, as enemies, as white supremacists, as Nazis, there's insurrectionaries, as domestic terrorists. Why wouldn't then the law enforcement arms of our government then treat them that way? I mean, does the Department of Homeland Security or the CIA or the FBI, do they understand that the politicians are just engaging in rhetoric, in threat inflation? Or will they take that those invocations literally to what we have to investigate and stop these?

Starting point is 01:22:10 I think they've done a department of justice done a pretty good job of that. I just want, I just brought this up because I think it's really important for somebody in the mainstream media of which many listen to this podcast. Sure. You have a responsibility to actually double click into this issue and figure out what's going on, please. Yeah. For on behalf of all of us. By the way, like, if you guys, I mean Wall Street Journal, New York Times, BBC, everyone covered it today, but the story today is that lawmakers made this claim

Starting point is 01:22:37 with no details and no evidence. So I'm sure the investigations are underway. I mean, the journalists are clearly leaning in to identify, you know, the evidence behind the story and I'm sure more will come out over the coming days and weeks. And in fairness, like you said, as the Justice Department doing this even handedly, they were very specific with the January 6th interactions acts where they went after oath keepers because they had a coordinated, they're a militia. They literally refer to themselves as a militia.

Starting point is 01:23:02 And those people are getting treated very different than the people who broke glass or sat on pants, polices, deaths. Those people are getting three months suspended sentences, six months sentences and the oath keepers who are a militia? They call themselves a militia. They're dangerous and they're treating them very differently and they're the only ones who are being charged with the more serious 10 to 20 year sentences. So I would say they are doing a great job. All right, everybody. This has been an amazing journey from truckers to Joe Rogan all the way to Uranus and back for the rainman David Sacks

Starting point is 01:23:45 the Sultan of science dude. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no your outro Jason and they live for the people love it love you boys we'll see you all next time I love you besties we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Lumbi West, I speak. We up in a wild. I'm going on a leash. What, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what Oh man, my eyes are immediately escalated We should all just get a room and just have one big hug or two because they're all just It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release our power

Starting point is 01:24:33 What your heartbeat? What your heartbeat? Your heartbeat What's the good news? We need to get merch these aren't it? I'm going all in! I'm doing all it I'm doing all it

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E67: Revisiting Rogan, Canadian truckers' protest, fusion breakthrough, $MSFT's savvy move & more

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.