E70: EMERGENCY POD! Russia invades Ukraine: Reactions, Putin's ambition, Biden's response and more

00:00:00.000 | All right, everybody, welcome to another episode of the all in

00:00:22.360 | podcast episode number 70. We made it to 70 episodes, which is

00:00:27.240 | just shocking to me. And we're recording a little bit earlier,

00:00:30.840 | because one of our besties had to change their schedule,

00:00:34.740 | Chamath. And it's a crazy day to be doing this last night, Putin

00:00:42.360 | decided to invade the Ukraine. Late Wednesday night, early into

00:00:47.440 | Thursday morning, Putin started a special military operation in

00:00:53.580 | quotes to demilitarize the Ukraine.

00:00:57.080 | And we've been watching this build up for weeks.

00:00:59.660 | You're missing it. He said to demilitarize and de-nazify.

00:01:03.320 | And de-nazify. Yes, of course. Because the Ukraine was filled

00:01:07.040 | with so many Nazis. His trolling continues. I guess just starting

00:01:11.300 | it off. Sax, you're a big Putin fan, along with Tronch and you're

00:01:17.960 | the right wing. So tell us how glorious is this invasion for

00:01:22.700 | the Republican Party?

00:01:23.660 | It's interesting what

00:01:26.920 | it's well, that's funny. But it's also it's also kind of sad

00:01:31.060 | because what you're doing right there is exactly what the whole

00:01:34.520 | Twittersphere is doing, which is anybody who wants to actually

00:01:38.540 | deescalate and defuse this war before it escalates and

00:01:41.320 | metastasizes and something much worse gets denounced as a Putin

00:01:44.440 | apologist. I have no dealings in either. You know, Russia or

00:01:51.340 | Ukraine, for that matter, Ukrainian cash is not lining my

00:01:54.100 | pockets, like many of our politicians, their families and

00:01:56.760 | their families, and I don't care who they are. I don't care. I'm

00:02:00.000 | not interested in that. So I'm not interested in that. I'm not

00:02:02.320 | interested in that. I'm not interested in the United States of

00:02:03.960 | America. I'm not interested in the United States of America.

00:02:06.400 | I'm not interested in the United States of America. I'm not

00:02:07.980 | interested in the United States of America. I'm not interested in

00:02:09.140 | the United States of America. I'm not interested in the United States of

00:02:10.500 | America. I'm not interested in the United States of America. I'm not interested in the United States of

00:02:11.440 | America. I'm not interested in the United States of America. I'm not interested in the United States of

00:02:12.520 | America. I'm not interested in the United States of America. I'm not interested in the United States of

00:02:12.920 | America. I'm not interested in the United States of America. I'm not interested in the United States of

00:02:13.300 | America. I'm not interested in the United States of America. I'm not interested in the United States of

00:02:13.340 | America. I'm not interested in the United States of America. I'm not interested in the United States of

00:02:13.420 | America. I'm not interested in the United States of America. I'm not interested in the United States of

00:02:13.500 | America. I'm not interested in the United States of America. I'm not interested in the United States of

00:02:13.540 | America. I'm not interested in the United States of America. I'm not interested in the United States of

00:02:13.620 | . I'm not interested in the United States of

00:02:13.620 | intervene militarily in Ukraine. We should all understand that he made it very clear.

00:02:18.420 | The troops that were being sent over there were to defend our NATO allies. Ukraine is not one.

00:02:23.540 | We do not have a treaty obligation to defend them. What is happening right now is tragic.

00:02:27.460 | Putin is the aggressor. It's a humanitarian disaster. I do feel bad for the people of Ukraine.

00:02:33.780 | Our thoughts and prayers are with them. However, we are not going to intervene militarily in that

00:02:38.740 | conflict, nor should we, because we cannot risk starting World War III. It is not a vital American

00:02:45.060 | interest. Who rules the Donbass in a way that it is a vital American interest to avoid a war

00:02:50.180 | with Russia? And the tragedy here, the second tragedy, is that we did not do everything we could

00:02:55.540 | to diplomatically try and solve this problem. And what do I mean by that? On this pod three

00:03:00.340 | weeks ago, I said that Ukraine was never going to be part of NATO. Why? Because Biden just said it.

00:03:05.620 | We can't defend them militarily against Russia. We are never going to admit them.

00:03:08.580 | Why didn't we give up that card? We don't know for sure what would have happened, but

00:03:14.500 | if we had been willing to basically affirm that we believe in Ukraine's sovereignty,

00:03:19.860 | but they are not going to be part of NATO, that might have diffused this conflict.

00:03:22.900 | I think we had consensus on that. We said like, hey, what if... I think actually I suggested,

00:03:26.180 | what if we set a five-year moratorium on them joining or something like that?

00:03:29.940 | Absolutely.

00:03:30.260 | We put that out there.

00:03:31.060 | Can I just ask Sax one question on this?

00:03:32.740 | Okay. Yeah.

00:03:33.700 | Sax, do you not think that the US,

00:03:36.100 | regardless of the obligation,

00:03:38.580 | the obligations under NATO, faces a little bit of an issue on a global stage where we told this

00:03:49.140 | leader back down, don't do this, and then we don't respond militarily, that that action

00:03:54.900 | effectively reduces America's influence and credibility when it comes to these sorts of

00:03:59.940 | defensive statements in this kind of global theater. And our primacy is being challenged

00:04:05.780 | because we laid down the law.

00:04:07.540 | We said,

00:04:08.100 | "You cannot do this. You cannot do this. You cannot do this. You cannot do this. You cannot do this.

00:04:09.780 | There's going to be repercussions."

00:04:11.140 | And then it happens, and there are economic sanctions. And maybe we'll talk in a second

00:04:16.660 | about some other potential repercussions. But by not doing something militarily,

00:04:19.860 | we weaken ourselves and we weaken our position. And it gives permission to others to take action

00:04:26.660 | that may be counter ultimately to kind of the US interests abroad.

00:04:30.660 | Okay. So, in response, I have to quote what Barack Obama said. And we've mentioned this on a previous

00:04:36.820 | pod. He said, "The fact is that Ukraine," which is, and this is back in the Atlantic interview he

00:04:41.540 | gave, "The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to

00:04:44.500 | military domination by Russia no matter what we do." This is an example where we have to be very

00:04:49.140 | clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. The fact of the

00:04:53.460 | matter is none of us on this pod want to send our sons and daughters to go fight and risk their

00:04:59.620 | lives and die to determine who rules the Donbass or even Ukraine. We sympathize with them. We may impose,

00:05:06.340 | we may impose sanctions on their behalf. We may arm them militarily, but we are not willing to

00:05:10.260 | fight. And so, therefore, us trying to lay down this law to Putin was a bluff and he called our

00:05:15.540 | bluff. And the smart thing we can do right now is not to escalate. Look, we've already gone to the

00:05:21.140 | river. He's, you know, we basically tried to barrel and bluff him at every street. We got to

00:05:26.180 | the river. He has now invaded. We're now in a showdown. What do you want to do now? You want

00:05:30.740 | to escalate this even more? The only way that we could make this worse is to precipitate a

00:05:35.860 | world war. Now, if our absolute priority, our absolute priority right now should be to make

00:05:40.980 | sure that this war doesn't spread. My prediction is as of right now, it would be very unpopular to

00:05:46.420 | go to war or for the US to enter the war in a on the battlefield. I do think and I don't know if

00:05:53.460 | we're going to hear more about this today, but I do think that the cyber war is beginning today.

00:05:58.100 | The United States has talked at length about having, you know, tremendous cyber capabilities

00:06:05.380 | and my understanding is as of this morning, a number of state websites were down in Russia and

00:06:10.020 | a number of, you know, Russian cyber interests were under attack. And so we may see the US kind

00:06:16.900 | of confront Russia on another battle stage, not on the, you know, on the field on the physical field.

00:06:22.660 | But if over the next couple of weeks, this continues or days, and I was just looking at CNN

00:06:28.340 | this morning and BBC and there were these images that started to come out of like, you know,

00:06:32.500 | Ukrainian, you know,

00:06:35.460 | airplanes that had been downed. And if you start to see images of children,

00:06:39.540 | you know, helpless children, buildings being bombed, bodies strewn on the street, does that

00:06:46.020 | not change kind of the American opinion on whether or not we should do something here?

00:06:50.660 | And will that not kind of lead us potentially into a war that you know, today, I think we all,

00:06:56.180 | you know, or many people would say strategically doesn't make sense economically doesn't make sense.

00:06:59.860 | You know, we're only going to lead to kind of escalation. But don't you think that American

00:07:03.620 | opinion typically doesn't make sense? I think that's a good question. I think that's a good

00:07:04.020 | question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question.

00:07:04.980 | I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question.

00:07:05.540 | When imagery arises when you know, the sort of brutality of war,

00:07:09.140 | well, I mean, that's images out of some wars, and we have in the past, yeah.

00:07:13.300 | But even today, it's like the first day and there's like these really gruesome, awful

00:07:16.740 | photos coming out. And I could see people getting sympathetic to that and starting to kind of,

00:07:21.060 | you know, bang the, the war drum saying this is ridiculous. We can't let this tyrant do this. It's

00:07:26.260 | awful. It's already happening, you know, but this is why we should not conduct foreign policy by

00:07:32.340 | Twitter. We should not Twitterize something that's not in the world. We should not do that. We should

00:07:32.980 | not Twitterize the situation. This is when cooler heads need to prevail. The fact the matter is when

00:07:40.820 | Soviet tanks, they rolled into Hungary in 1956, or Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the Prague Spring,

00:07:47.220 | or Poland in 1981 to crush Solidarity. We did nothing because avoiding war with the Soviet

00:07:53.140 | Union was more important, even though we sympathize with those people. And in 2008,

00:07:58.660 | we've been in this situation before. 2008, Georgia,

00:08:02.340 | the Republic of Georgia, Putin invaded on behalf of these breakaway Russian sort of dissident

00:08:09.780 | provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Why did that happen? Well, if you remember back in 2008,

00:08:15.300 | there was a lot of talk about Georgia joining NATO. And you had, you know, the Warhawk Senator

00:08:20.500 | John McCain go over there and declare we're all Georgians now. And so what happened all of a sudden

00:08:25.860 | these breakaway provinces, the Russified provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia started rebelling. That

00:08:31.460 | gave Putin the excuse to go back to Russia. And so, you know, the war is over. And so, you know,

00:08:31.700 | Putin gave Putin the excuse to roll in there and the tanks. A year later, he left, but there was no

00:08:36.580 | more talk of Georgia joining NATO. So, and again, George W. Bush was president at the time. We did

00:08:42.740 | nothing militarily. We just sent humanitarian assistance. That was it. So, we've been in

00:08:47.220 | this situation before. We should not—I keep hearing in the media, on cable news and on

00:08:52.260 | Twitter, "This is historically unprecedented. We must act." No, we've been in this situation

00:08:56.500 | before in 2008 and all those previous times. We were in this situation in 2014. We were in the

00:09:00.100 | situation in 2014 when Putin invaded Crimea. Let me ask you a question, Zach. We had this

00:09:05.940 | concept of, hey, maybe if we said, hey, we won't admit them into NATO. And do you think that if we

00:09:13.300 | had actually made that concession or said we're not going to let them into NATO for a decade or

00:09:17.700 | whatever, do you think that would have changed Putin's behavior? I also know.

00:09:20.100 | Well, it's honestly, it's hard to know. I mean, I can't prove it counterfactual. However,

00:09:24.820 | I think it was tragic not to try. I do think—I think it should be the goal of diplomats,

00:09:30.020 | Sure.

00:09:30.660 | to try. And again, as I said on a previous pod, it was the sleeves off our vest. Ukraine is not

00:09:35.620 | going to be a member of NATO. So, to give that up would have—was basically giving them nothing. It

00:09:41.380 | was almost meaningless to us. And instead of making that concession, what happened? Blinken

00:09:47.140 | came out with this statement, "NATO's door is open and will remain open." It was perhaps the

00:09:52.820 | most provocative thing he could have said in that situation.

00:09:55.540 | And they would have had to been voted in. That would have happened—wouldn't

00:09:58.100 | have happened anyway. Let me ask you this question.

00:09:59.940 | You've been complaining about the media and Democrats

00:10:02.900 | banging the drum of war, and you're saying they're more hawkish. On the other side of the table,

00:10:09.380 | you have Trump came out and said that Putin's move on the Ukraine is genius,

00:10:14.020 | and the guy is very savvy. And then you had Pompeo saying, "I have enormous respect for him,

00:10:17.700 | and that he's a very talented statesman, has lots of gifts, and he knows how to use power.

00:10:23.700 | We should respect that." So, your party, your crew is praising Putin. Do you think

00:10:29.620 | the praising of Putin is wise in this kind of situation?

00:10:32.420 | No, look, here's what's going on. First of all, the war hawks and the people beating the drums

00:10:37.060 | of war is happening on both sides of the aisle and on both sets of cable news. I was watching

00:10:43.060 | Fox last night, and they were all but, you know, cheerleading for war, basically saying,

00:10:47.460 | "We have to go on offense." They were excited. I watched it too. Yeah, it was crazy.

00:10:50.100 | They were saying, "We have to go on offense. What is Biden doing saying that we're not going

00:10:53.940 | to intervene militarily?" I'm like, watching these people who are acting, you know, it reminded me of,

00:10:59.300 | um, Dr. Strangelove, where you have Slim Pickens, the cowboy, riding the atomic bomb on the way

00:11:04.900 | down. They were excited. And I'm watching the cable news, and all these people are acting

00:11:09.060 | this way, and I'm like, what in the world is going on? You know, it's ratings. It's all...

00:11:13.620 | This is a big part of what I tried to point out at our prediction show at the end of last year,

00:11:19.060 | you know, that if a country is happy, if the economy is growing,

00:11:23.220 | if there isn't significant risk of inflation, no one wants to go to war. When those are not the case,

00:11:29.380 | there's a tendency to say, "We got to do something." And if you don't, you're anxious.

00:11:33.620 | And if you don't have anything to do, and some conflict arises, that's a good place to kind of

00:11:38.900 | apply your energy and your pressure. Let me bring the dictator himself into this.

00:11:42.500 | Chamath, you've been silent thus far. Any thoughts on what we're seeing here?

00:11:47.780 | I was letting the proletariat speak.

00:11:49.700 | Okay. All right. So...

00:11:52.500 | Are you the bourgeoisie or what?

00:11:55.380 | Yeah.

00:11:56.100 | That sweater is very bourgeois, I have

00:11:58.660 | to say.

00:11:59.060 | I mean, oof. I mean, Sweater Karen right now is drafting multiple emails.

00:12:05.300 | She's melting. She's melting. She's melting.

00:12:07.380 | I think there's going to be a GoFundMe to revoke that sweater from you. What is the story with that

00:12:11.700 | sweater?

00:12:12.020 | No, that's what Trudeau... Trudeau will revoke in a state of emergency to stop that.

00:12:16.740 | Yes. He'll seize the GoFundMe. I mean,

00:12:20.340 | this feels like we're processing this, Chamath, so quickly that the Ukraine just asked on Twitter

00:12:27.700 | today...

00:12:28.340 | Yeah.

00:12:28.660 | ...for everybody to tell at Russia how they feel about what they're doing. And the Ukraine,

00:12:33.780 | this is happening in real time, is tweeting memes now about Putin. This seems almost surreal and is

00:12:43.940 | getting very strange in terms of how we're interpreting it. I mean, is there an off-ramp

00:12:48.740 | here or are we just going to have to deal with Putin doing this every number of years and this

00:12:53.460 | is just going to be, you know, a year or two of, you know, conflict?

00:12:57.780 | I don't know. But here's what's important to... Two points. One is the economic sanctions

00:13:03.780 | have begun and the economic damage to Russia has been starting to be infected, right? I think

00:13:07.940 | Germany basically suspended the certification of Nord Stream 2. That has a huge economic impact

00:13:12.260 | to Russia, right? I think the ruble against the dollar was off 9 or 10% this morning

00:13:16.660 | when I woke up here in Europe. So it's down even more. So now the interesting thing about that was

00:13:24.020 | that I read an article in the Wall Street Journal, maybe Nick, you can pick this up,

00:13:26.660 | and this was a few years ago. Preceding this, Russia had built massive amounts of US dollar

00:13:31.780 | reserves. In fact, they had been depleted over like the last little crisis that they went through,

00:13:35.940 | and then they had rebuilt all these dollar reserves. So in some ways, it may have been

00:13:39.060 | the case that these guys had this plan all along and they put some, you know, they built up their

00:13:43.460 | bank accounts just in case because they knew that this would happen. The other thing is there's a

00:13:46.900 | quote from H.R. McMaster. He said that deterrence is a simple equation. It's the product of will and capability.

00:13:53.460 | Right? Will times capability. And so, you know, if you're going to be a deterrent on the world stage

00:14:00.260 | militarily, not only do you have to have an incredible military capability, you also have to

00:14:04.580 | have the will to go to war, is what he said. And I think in America, you know, what Friedberg said is,

00:14:09.540 | I think if you polled a lot of people, you know, people are pretty exhausted after all of these

00:14:14.980 | different conflicts. And so I'm not sure that the will is there to go to war. And so the best

00:14:19.700 | off-ramp is to try to find some amount of

00:14:22.900 | economic pressure points and then to negotiate some sort of, you know, release valve from all of

00:14:28.820 | that economic pressure in return for some normalization to behave. I think that's really the

00:14:33.780 | best chance. You know, I have to be honest with you, when I was thinking about the odds of this,

00:14:37.700 | just from a financial perspective and, you know, whether I should be doing something different or

00:14:41.620 | putting something on, I thought that there was zero chance that this would happen. Literally, I put it

00:14:46.420 | as close to zero as possible because I thought in 2022, it just didn't seem like this could be possible. And here we are,

00:14:52.340 | and it seems like it is. I hope everybody in Ukraine is safe. But I think that Biden's going

00:15:00.260 | to announce some pretty crippling sanctions. And I think the West is going to be very punitive

00:15:03.940 | financially. And that's probably the off-ramp. But it depends on how long that stuff will last,

00:15:08.980 | because again, like I said, I think Russia's foreign currency reserves are pretty strong

00:15:13.700 | going into this conflict.

00:15:15.780 | Let me then pass the ball to you, Sax. There's going to be a lot of people who are going to die,

00:15:21.780 | both Russians and Ukrainians, sadly, if this thing keeps escalating. There's 190,000 Russian troops on

00:15:28.580 | the border, or making their way into the Ukraine. Is there an off-ramp here in your mind in any way?

00:15:35.540 | Do you think the sanctions will work? And God, the poor citizens of Russia, I mean, are they going to

00:15:42.500 | crack at some point? And is this going to blow back onto Putin? Because what did they seem to get out of this, I guess, is a question.

00:15:51.220 | Do the Russian people support this? And will they support it on an extended basis?

00:15:56.340 | Well, okay, so there's a few questions there. Okay, so the fact of the matter is, so I think

00:16:03.380 | you're right that Putin has bought himself a headache here, right? I mean, the eastern parts

00:16:08.820 | of Ukraine that are, you know, ethnically Russian, the areas of the Donbas, they will, those people

00:16:15.220 | will support him. But the western part of Ukraine that wants to be free, that's not ethnically Russian,

00:16:21.300 | that is going to be a headache for him to manage. I don't think he wants this problem long term.

00:16:26.020 | It's probably going to be more like the situation we had in Georgia in 2008. He goes in for a year,

00:16:32.100 | he institutes perhaps some sort of puppet government or some government that's more favorable

00:16:37.460 | to him, and then he gets out, probably. This is if there's no escalation. I think it's very important,

00:16:43.780 | I keep making this point, the most important thing Biden can do is to make sure that this does not escalate militarily, and this is not escalating.

00:16:50.100 | militarily and that we do not get militarily involved? I think sanctions will happen. I mean,

00:16:54.380 | that's pretty clear. Probably, we have to move forward with that. But at the same time,

00:16:58.640 | will sanctions work in terms of being a strong deterrent? No, I don't think so.

00:17:03.500 | There was a very good article by Neil Ferguson and Ken Griffin, actually in the Wall Street

00:17:08.180 | Journal talking about what we should do. They made the point that sanctions don't usually work.

00:17:12.620 | However, what we should really be striving for is energy independence.

00:17:17.220 | 100%.

00:17:18.660 | So, yes. But the crazy thing is America, despite having these huge natural gas reserves,

00:17:23.940 | 7% of our natural gas is coming from Russia right now. So, why? Because we stopped fracking,

00:17:29.780 | we stopped the, you know, Biden canceled the Keystone Pipeline. And then in Europe,

00:17:34.100 | the situation is even worse, which is they're completely dependent on Russian natural gas.

00:17:38.760 | Germans are and the UK, not France.

00:17:42.060 | The op-ed made the point that we could be investing in liquefying natural gas and exporting it to

00:17:47.640 | Europe to create more energy.

00:17:48.680 | And so, you know, we're going to have to do a lot of work to get that back.

00:17:50.920 | And so, you know, we're going to have to do a lot of work to get that back.

00:17:52.120 | And so, you know, we're going to have to do a lot of work to get that back.

00:17:52.900 | The problem with energy independence is it takes too long.

00:17:55.180 | And we went through a massive capital underinvestment cycle over the last six or seven years.

00:17:59.700 | And so, you know, in order to start this up, you need to have started actually putting money into the ground six or seven years.

00:18:06.020 | And the problem today is if we put money into the ground now, that's not going to yield any sort of return on investment capital for another six or seven years.

00:18:12.820 | And so when you look at these mad gas companies, every single one to a name has basically said we are not going to be able to do this.

00:18:17.960 | Right.

00:18:18.020 | And we are not going to put any incremental capital into U.S. domestic gas or shale or even offshore.

00:18:23.780 | The real solution is to actually go fully alternative and to go to renewable energy.

00:18:28.000 | Because you can today, right, deploy solar vastly more aggressively in the United States.

00:18:34.740 | Look, at the end of the day, the thing that is completely abundant and has the best implications all around is solar.

00:18:40.500 | And it's gotten cheaper than coal.

00:18:42.120 | And you have to ask yourself, like, why are we only 3% penetrated in the United States?

00:18:47.880 | Right.

00:18:48.880 | We can manufacture these panels.

00:18:50.380 | We can deploy them broadly.

00:18:51.720 | Right now, you know, we're in this situation where California is actually revisiting the ITC credit or the net metering laws, sorry, rather, which would have huge implications for the California solar market.

00:19:02.820 | It could actually destroy that whole market.

00:19:04.480 | And so, you know, we have to get really organized, David, to your point.

00:19:07.320 | But there is a path to energy independence.

00:19:08.860 | I think it's alternative energy.

00:19:10.020 | It's wind and solar because we can do it today and you can do it really quickly and you can basically leapfrog the entire capital investment cycle that you do.

00:19:15.900 | Right.

00:19:16.400 | Right.

00:19:16.920 | Right.

00:19:17.220 | Right.

00:19:17.520 | Right.

00:19:17.740 | Right.

00:19:17.880 | to do for net gas, we've already missed the train.

00:19:19.880 | Well, and also you could have Germany could start turning back on nuclear power plants,

00:19:23.720 | if they could get their citizens to pick nuclear over war. And it seems like a pretty easy choice.

00:19:29.720 | It takes too long.

00:19:30.920 | They're 20 years. They've been doing it for 20 years. They've been turning them off for 20 years.

00:19:39.160 | I know they could. That means they don't have to rebuild them tomorrow. If

00:19:42.280 | they could just turn the back on.

00:19:43.880 | Jason. No, but that's not how it works. It's not a light switch.

00:19:48.440 | I know, but it's not the same as building a new one in the US. That's the point.

00:19:52.360 | They could put them back on.

00:19:53.480 | It's still years to turn these things back.

00:19:55.640 | But the threat of doing it, but you got to think Chamath, the threat of doing it

00:19:59.720 | would terrorize the Saudis and the Russians. If all of a sudden the EU said we are going to go

00:20:06.600 | massive solar, massive nuclear, and we're going to be energy independent.

00:20:10.120 | I'm not sure any country.

00:20:11.880 | I think that would have a dramatic effect.

00:20:13.800 | I'm not sure any country.

00:20:13.880 | I think that would have a dramatic effect.

00:20:14.520 | I'm not sure any country is going to really have a massive reaction to any other country

00:20:19.960 | talking about a multi-year investment cycle. I do think Jason, to your point,

00:20:23.800 | solar is not a multi-year investment cycle. It can literally happen in bucks.

00:20:27.160 | Yes. And it's cheaper now.

00:20:28.200 | That is much more disruptive. So for example, you could, if you took $3 trillion of build

00:20:32.440 | back better and instead said, you know what, we're just going to actually put solar everywhere.

00:20:35.480 | Everywhere.

00:20:36.360 | That would be, you take $3 trillion of solar and you put it literally everywhere in the

00:20:40.600 | United States. I think everybody would support it. You would have domestic

00:20:43.800 | job creation like nobody's business. You would take so much carbon out of the air and you would

00:20:48.920 | have enormous energy defendants. Well, it would give you a degree of freedom so that the next

00:20:53.560 | time you're pushed to war, you can actually evaluate it under a very different risk calculus

00:20:59.000 | than if you actually need the energy from the country after the war.

00:21:01.880 | Yeah, that's the point. And just for a fact check here, nuclear power in Germany accounted

00:21:06.600 | for 13.3% of German electrical supply in 2021. France, by the way, 70, 80%. And that was generated

00:21:13.480 | by six power plant of which three were switched off. At the end of 2021. They literally just

00:21:18.680 | turn these off, Chamath. And the other three, I know, but the decision was not made yesterday,

00:21:24.600 | Jason, what point is this is these are 20 year decision.

00:21:27.640 | Now it was Fukushima that pushed them actually in the sentiment of, and they also had 70% of their

00:21:33.480 | electricity on a couple of weeks come from renewable. So the Germans suddenly thought that

00:21:37.960 | they didn't live in a shady area and they could get by with just solar, which is a big mistake.

00:21:43.400 | This turning these off Germany, if they didn't turn these off, they would have a different

00:21:46.840 | approach here too. You can be sure of that. So look, I'm a fan of solar, but I'll just

00:21:50.520 | make the point that natural gas burns from a climate standpoint, it burns much cleaner than oil

00:21:55.560 | and oil burns much clearer than coal. So natural gas is a way better than a lot of the alternatives.

00:22:01.320 | And the main problem with it is that when you frack, you can get the release of, well, that, but

00:22:07.800 | that's in the ground. But in terms of the release of methane, which is a greenhouse gas, that's

00:22:12.440 | actually worse than CO2. Yeah.

00:22:13.320 | And so you can actually get, you know, methane release, but in the US we have techniques for

00:22:19.400 | recapture of it. Whereas I don't think Russia cares about that. So we'd be a lot better off.

00:22:24.120 | I think solar is part of the answer, but I don't think we should be turning our backs on the

00:22:29.000 | enormous reserves of natural gas that we have here in this country. Friedberg, what are your

00:22:33.480 | thoughts? You're hearing three of us talk about energy. Give us your science boy, superpowers

00:22:39.320 | here. And what, what do you think is the clearest shot on goal here for energy and

00:22:43.240 | independence as an option to war? I'll just point out that the notion that there are countries

00:22:48.520 | that are jockeying or positioning to stop the train towards renewable alternatives for energy

00:22:56.920 | production this century, the number of countries in that bucket are close to zero. You know, Saudi

00:23:03.800 | Arabia took Saudi Aramco public specifically so that they under kind of MBS's strategic direction

00:23:12.200 | diversify away.

00:23:13.160 | From, you know, the fossil fuel dependency of their economy and diversifying to other assets.

00:23:18.120 | So they are going to sell down their equity interest in Saudi Aramco over time and invest

00:23:22.520 | in things, you know, they probably made their first bet and regret it with soft bank, but

00:23:26.440 | they'll probably make other bets to try and invest in kind of next gen industries. And so, you know,

00:23:33.160 | if you look at the money that's going from even Exxon and, you know, there's a guy locally here

00:23:38.760 | in San Francisco who ran a very significant board,

00:23:43.080 | proxy fight to get on the board of Exxon and he won. And he's jockeying for continued and

00:23:48.840 | increased investment from an R&D perspective in renewables and alternatives. And we're seeing

00:23:54.040 | this across the board. There's going to be in the next couple of years, if not already,

00:23:58.120 | many of these fossil fuel dependent businesses and countries have or are making a massive shift

00:24:05.000 | towards alternative renewable sources of energy. So I don't think that there's any enemy here.

00:24:09.240 | There's no evil like all the folks that have been dependent on in the past are aware of the fact that

00:24:13.000 | this is not where the future is. We do have to transition. So the reason I bought energy stocks

00:24:18.120 | in December, and the reason I made this point was threefold. One is because we have, as a result of

00:24:23.640 | this general consensus view, under invested in energy infrastructure, and the demands that are

00:24:29.960 | going to come out of the ex COVID economic growth cycle cannot be met with the current energy

00:24:36.440 | infrastructure. And you're going to see energy prices continue to climb coupled with the fact

00:24:39.720 | that when war or conflict arises, typically, you see

00:24:42.920 | stockpiling, and you see trade routes being shut down, and you see energy prices climb.

00:24:48.360 | And so, you know, I think generally, we're in a little bit of a transitionary state,

00:24:52.760 | everyone knows where the puck needs to be. Everyone's headed there. But for now,

00:24:58.360 | I think everyone's trying to navigate how do we get through the next couple of years,

00:25:01.640 | and in this particular year, you know, get through the season of uncertainty.

00:25:05.080 | You know, how fast is the economy growing? How much have we actually

00:25:09.160 | under invested in infrastructure? And how much renewables do we have coming online? Now,

00:25:12.840 | I think the right answer, if I were to be president of the world, I would immediately deregulate

00:25:19.000 | nuclear and make nuclear fission reactors, a mainstay of energy production here in the US.

00:25:27.240 | And I think that there are a number of techniques we can undertake for a safer

00:25:31.080 | building without all the regulatory cycles and process needed to get these things stood up.

00:25:39.960 | You know, China, as I've mentioned in the past,

00:25:42.760 | is over the next 30 years committed to building check this number out, I think we talked about

00:25:47.320 | this 140 nuclear power stations. Their estimated cost, I believe is on the $3 billion per station

00:25:53.720 | range, they are going to increase their total energy production capacity with these nuclear

00:26:02.360 | power stations on the order of 15 to 20%. So they will take coal offline as they bring those online,

00:26:09.000 | or they will kind of start to have a cleaner mix of energy.

00:26:12.680 | So, you know, if we as the United States, intend to be an economic challenge to China,

00:26:22.040 | this century, if we intend to compete effectively with them, we are going to have a really hard time

00:26:27.880 | with energy prices being what they are here. In this country, China is already 30 to 40% cheaper

00:26:33.000 | than us on an industrial scale basis with their current energy infrastructure. And when their

00:26:36.840 | nuclear comes online over the next decade, their prices are going to drop even further nuclear

00:26:41.320 | should be in the forefront.

00:26:42.600 | So, you know, we're going to have to think about this in a different way.

00:26:44.760 | So, you know, we're going to have to think about this in a different way.

00:26:45.240 | So, you know, we're going to have to think about this in a different way.

00:26:45.320 | China is in the kind of, you know, seven to $0.08 per kilowatt hour range,

00:26:49.800 | the US for industrial, I think is in kind of a $0.09, $0.10 range, $0.08 to $0.10,

00:26:55.160 | depending on where you look. So, you know, they're already cheaper, they're going to get even cheaper.

00:26:59.480 | And so not just from like, what's the right transition from a security point of view,

00:27:03.640 | but energy is going to be so critical in this next century,

00:27:06.920 | for us to maintain our footing as a competitor to China, particularly as think about this for a

00:27:12.520 | second, if automation is the future of manufacturing, then electricity and energy

00:27:18.120 | ends up being the biggest cost driver for those systems. And if our if everything is on parity,

00:27:22.920 | everyone's got the same automation systems, whoever's got the cheaper energy wins.

00:27:26.200 | And to dovetail you and Chamath's both positions, a friend of ours said, Hey, you know,

00:27:31.880 | nobody wants to live near nuclear power plants. And they've already got the grid going there,

00:27:37.560 | because it has to be there, surround the nuclear power plant with a solar farm, because

00:27:42.440 | it's the most efficient way. So actually pairing these two things,

00:27:46.120 | perhaps even with some batteries solves the entire problem.

00:27:49.560 | And what do we think SACS is the eventuality here, in terms of the relationship between Russia and

00:27:59.880 | China now that we've wrapped up the energy and then, you know,

00:28:02.920 | all of us, I think don't want to go to war here. So I guess there's two questions here

00:28:08.040 | of escalation. And I'll let you pick which one you want to go for escalation with Taiwan,

00:28:12.360 | or does if Putin is not held, we don't hold the line here. You know, Putin picks another country

00:28:19.880 | to or another region to go after in 2023 2024. At what point do you say we got to hold the line?

00:28:26.040 | Well, I mean, I think the line is we have existing NATO treaty obligations to protect

00:28:31.880 | the members of NATO under Article Five, we have to come to their defense. Ukraine is not one Georgia

00:28:36.520 | is not one. So to me, that's the line or is our existing treaty obligations. And this is why we

00:28:41.720 | should not

00:28:42.280 | want to add some of these countries to NATO is because it involves us in their

00:28:47.400 | disputes and drags us into war. You know, on Twitter, all I hear is that this is 1938 all

00:28:52.920 | over again, and we cannot appease a dictator. And that is one lesson of history. It's an

00:28:58.520 | important lesson. However, there are other lessons of history. And it seems to me that

00:29:02.280 | the situation we're in could be more like 1914, which is World War One, what happened in World

00:29:06.920 | War One. Basically, conflicts between minor powers drag major

00:29:12.200 | powers into wars. And basically, Germany gave Austria the so called blank check war guarantee.

00:29:19.800 | And then that led to a war with Russia. And then that dragged the, you know, Britain and France in

00:29:25.160 | and eventually the United States. So, you know, it was a case where nobody, none of these powers

00:29:31.160 | wanted to be in a war with each other. And yet, somehow inertia, and threats and escalations,

00:29:37.560 | and miscalculations and folly, all sort of tumbled their way into it.

00:29:42.120 | And that, I think, may be the historical precedent here that we want to avoid. I think we need to be

00:29:46.680 | very careful not to let, you know, every conflict all over the world drag us into these, these types

00:29:53.560 | of wars and disputes.

00:29:56.120 | Sachs, do you think American primacy is coming to an end?

00:29:59.240 | I hope not. But if our goal is to preserve American primacy, which I think it should be,

00:30:04.040 | then we need to be smart about how we use our strength. And we don't want to fritter it away.

00:30:09.640 | And what I've been doing for the last 20 years, frittering away

00:30:12.040 | our strength in wars we didn't need to be in. In the Middle East, we spent how many trillions on

00:30:18.200 | nation building there that turned out to be a total folly and waste of money.

00:30:22.280 | Look at this, we have a $30 trillion national debt. If we want this century to be an American

00:30:29.000 | century like the last one, we need to preserve our strength and use it wisely and not involve

00:30:35.160 | ourselves in every conflict. And, you know, so look, we need to protect our NATO allies.

00:30:40.120 | I agree with that. But we don't need to be creating

00:30:41.960 | disputes and involving ourselves in wars that we have no obligation to get involved in.

00:30:48.520 | We need energy independence and we need to deliver our balance sheet for American finances.

00:30:53.000 | Absolutely.

00:30:53.400 | And it's possible, but it's going to require a lot of focus and sacrifice.

00:30:57.800 | I really think the thing that I just made up is actually really quite genius, which is

00:31:01.560 | redirect that $3 trillion Build Back Better bill to just pure solar everywhere in the United States.

00:31:07.000 | It would be so disruptive. I mean, it would just be so disruptive.

00:31:11.000 | Free electricity.

00:31:11.880 | Free electricity for everybody. It becomes a dividend. It's like it's UBI in a way.

00:31:15.960 | Everybody gets no electrical bill.

00:31:17.800 | I don't think it would allow people to have free electricity forever. But I do think it would

00:31:21.320 | subsidize basically the deployment of energy infrastructure to every single household in

00:31:26.840 | America in a way that would just completely shake up, frankly, the political world order.

00:31:33.080 | Because, you know, what you guys said is so true.

00:31:35.720 | A lot of this stuff rests on, you know, the politics around natural resources, right? So,

00:31:41.240 | you know,

00:31:41.800 | today it's oil. Tomorrow it's going to be some rare earth. You know, in 10 years, it could be

00:31:46.920 | copper and lithium. And we want to find ourselves with the ability to be clear-eyed and focused in

00:31:54.040 | our response to these issues. But if we need critical resources that can only come from one

00:31:59.640 | other place or two other places, and we don't have the engineering ingenuity to have figured out how

00:32:05.080 | to, you know, de-lever our reliance, then we're going to get dragged into not just this conflict,

00:32:09.320 | but a whole bunch of other conflicts going forward.

00:32:11.320 | I'd say, you know, you're going to have to be very, very careful about that. You're going to

00:32:11.720 | say yes, and we could be energy independent for free right now if we were just to repeal some of

00:32:17.720 | these executive orders. I mean, we were energy independent like a year or two ago until we banned

00:32:23.880 | fracking.

00:32:24.760 | Why do the fracking when solar is available? It seems to me like we want to actually preserve

00:32:30.760 | the environment, stop global warming. So, if solar is available and nuclear is available,

00:32:35.160 | why would you advocate for fracking and ripping up the earth and, you know, polluting it?

00:32:39.400 | I'm a fan of solar. It's really just about cost

00:32:41.640 | and time to deployment. Got it. Okay, so you see it as a bridge. Hey,

00:32:44.760 | maybe we do it for five years, ten years. Long term, I think solar is the answer,

00:32:49.000 | but I think that's a long-term strategy. The other thing that is confounding is,

00:32:52.600 | like, Americans, and this is another thing I was just watching the media, and I did exactly what

00:32:56.920 | you did, David, is I put on Fox, I was like, let me get their interpretation of this, because the

00:33:00.600 | Trump folks are praising Putin, and then these guys are wanting to go to war. So, it feels like

00:33:04.920 | there's some inner conflict or civil war going on in the Republican side of things, but even on the

00:33:09.640 | There is. Yeah, and then on the left,

00:33:11.560 | you have this craziness. They were, I mean, Wolf Blitzer, and everybody was so excited about this

00:33:17.640 | war. They were like, stay tuned, and oh my God, we're going to be 24-hour coverage. They were,

00:33:22.040 | like, orgasmic in their coverage of this. Remember CNN got their big start with the

00:33:28.360 | Gulf War. That was it. Wolf Blitzer. Absolutely. That was their chance to shine.

00:33:30.680 | I remember being a kid watching that. And that is the language,

00:33:33.240 | Freebreakers, since you're being there, that was the language they were using. So,

00:33:36.120 | Don Lem was saying, and we have the full resources to give you blow-by-blow coverage of

00:33:41.480 | everything happening. Stick with CNN. This is where we do our best work. And it was literally

00:33:46.280 | like war porn, and it was really uncomfortable to watch, combined with, Saxon, this is what I wanted,

00:33:51.400 | well, maybe Freebreak, I'll throw this one to you. They kept talking about how Americans were going

00:33:57.240 | to suffer at the pump. And I just thought, this is so crazy and disturbing. There's 190,000 young

00:34:03.960 | Russian men who are going to die, countless Ukrainian civilians who are going to die,

00:34:09.880 | potentially, and this thing could escalate. And I just thought, this is so crazy and disturbing.

00:34:11.400 | And I just thought, this is so crazy and disturbing. And I just thought, this is so crazy and disturbing.

00:34:11.480 | And I just thought, this is so crazy and disturbing. And I just thought, this is so crazy and disturbing.

00:34:11.560 | As Sax said, you can't play games with war. The dominoes can fall in all directions. You have no

00:34:17.400 | idea when you light off these grenades. And we're talking about our pain at the pump? Very weird.

00:34:23.880 | Very weird times. Freebreak, any thoughts? America's weird. It's weird.

00:34:29.720 | If Freebreak doesn't want to respond to that, I want to talk about the media coverage. I'll add

00:34:34.440 | to that. You flip over to MSNBC, John Bolton is on MSNBC. And one of the weirdest things happening in

00:34:41.160 | our politics now is that all the neocons who used to be members of the Republican Party, who worked

00:34:45.560 | for George W. Bush and got us into the Iraq War, have now all become Democrats. And they're all

00:34:51.000 | over, they're supposedly the conscience of the country over on CNN and MSNBC and beating the

00:34:57.400 | drums of war. It's absolutely unbelievable. And one of the tactics they use that I think we should

00:35:03.800 | talk about is, and this goes all the way back to the Vietnam War, is that anybody who merely tries

00:35:10.200 | to, let's say, understand the war, they're going to be the ones who are going to be the ones who

00:35:11.080 | understand the other side or wants to deescalate or get out of a conflict. They try to portray as

00:35:17.160 | unpatriotic. I mean, again, this goes all the way back to the Vietnam War where the Vietnam

00:35:20.920 | protesters were portrayed as un-American and unpatriotic. Well, it turns out they were right.

00:35:25.240 | That was a mistake for us to get embroiled in Vietnam. And similarly, the Iraq War, it turns

00:35:30.680 | out that was a gigantic mistake. But in 2003, David Frum, who's like one of the leaders of this

00:35:34.840 | group, wrote an article called "Unpatriotic Conservatives," in which he attacked and sort of

00:35:41.000 | called out the conservatives like Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak who were against the Iraq War.

00:35:46.120 | And he called them unpatriotic and implied that they were un-American

00:35:49.720 | and somehow in the pocket of Saddam Hussein because they were against us, our involvement

00:35:55.080 | in the Iraq War. Well, they turned out to be right. And yet they were demonized and

00:35:59.720 | called unpatriotic. And where are we today? Those same people I'm seeing David Frum

00:36:04.040 | on Twitter now impugn the patriotism of people who merely want us not to escalate this

00:36:10.920 | not to get involved, and maybe to try and understand our enemy. Because I mean,

00:36:15.960 | this is one of the problems with Twitterizing our foreign policy is, look, we can see Putin

00:36:20.040 | as an aggressor, we can see him as a thug or an authoritarian or as a dictator. But nonetheless,

00:36:25.240 | we should still try and understand our enemy and anybody who tries to promote a greater degree of

00:36:30.600 | understanding or diplomacy gets attacked by these people as being Putin apologists.

00:36:35.240 | Chamath, you said you didn't see this coming. You thought this

00:36:37.880 | was a very small probability. I think we all felt it was a pretty small probability.

00:36:40.840 | That Russia would actually go through with this. You thought it was actually something

00:36:45.240 | actually I do free bird you did think it was going to happen as a certainty.

00:36:47.960 | Yeah, well, you there was a certainty that America would get involved because of the

00:36:51.560 | wagged the dog scenario, or that Putin would do it because

00:36:55.160 | Putin's okay. Yeah, this is not like a surprise that Putin did this. I mean,

00:36:59.720 | this has been a long time coming.

00:37:00.920 | Yeah, I mean, it just felt like I thought that he would saber rattle and we come to

00:37:05.960 | some resolution here. But what does he want? It seems like nobody and this

00:37:10.760 | is what everybody keeps saying. I think that's a really by the way,

00:37:13.160 | I think that's a really complicated question. I feel like there's decades of and layers of like,

00:37:18.440 | to the story, it's like, you know, war and peace. And then you read like one half of the final

00:37:23.480 | chapter. And you're like, Oh, yeah, okay. Like, there's a lot to the story that's going to be

00:37:27.240 | really hard for us to unpack. So you know, I'm not sure there's a very simple like, what does Putin

00:37:32.600 | want as much as there is a significant narrative that backs the history, you know, post Soviet

00:37:39.160 | history with, you know, the Soviet Union. So, you know, I think, you know, there's a lot of, you

00:37:40.680 | know, there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of, you know, there's

00:37:40.920 | a lot of, you know, there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of

00:37:40.920 | Ukraine and the relationships. I mean, you guys may remember that there was a president,

00:37:44.520 | a presidential candidate or president that was poisoned by Putin at some point. I mean,

00:37:49.320 | there's been like a long history to this that I don't think is something that we can

00:37:52.120 | say.

00:37:53.320 | Unification is what most people would put that under is this concept?

00:37:57.400 | There's economic, there are social, you know, there are individuals cultural

00:38:01.640 | motives. I mean, there's a lot driving this, there's a lot of influence within that country

00:38:07.080 | that I don't think we really fully grasp within the country of Russia. I mean,

00:38:10.600 | there's a lot of things that we don't fully grasp related to some of the cultural relationships with

00:38:16.200 | some of the population in the in the Ukraine. And so you know, it's a very difficult question

00:38:21.240 | to simply answer.

00:38:21.800 | Can I take a shot at it?

00:38:23.560 | Yeah, sure.

00:38:24.600 | Okay, what is Putin wants? So I want to there's an article by Peter Baynard, who was an editor

00:38:29.640 | of the New Republic. He's not, you know, some far right conservative or whatever. He published this

00:38:35.240 | quotes from a memo that was written by Bill Burns, back in 2008. So Bill Burns is the current

00:38:40.520 | director of Central Intelligence, the head of the CIA. He is also a Russian expert. He speaks Russian

00:38:45.320 | fluently. He is the he and he spent many years over there in our government. And he works for

00:38:52.040 | Biden. He's Biden's head of the CIA. So he is the highest ranking Russian expert in our government.

00:38:56.920 | In 2008, he wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice, who was then the Secretary of State.

00:39:02.120 | And what he said is this is about Ukrainian entry into NATO. He said,

00:39:05.720 | Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite,

00:39:10.440 | not just Putin. He says, in more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian

00:39:15.320 | players, from knuckle draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin, to Putin's sharpest liberal

00:39:19.960 | critics, I've yet to find anyone who views Ukraine and NATO as anything other than a direct challenge

00:39:26.680 | to Russian interests. So Burns pointed out to the then Secretary of State that this was a huge red

00:39:34.840 | line. And since then, since 2008, Putin has been very consistent that Ukrainian

00:39:40.360 | entry into NATO has been a red line. And even in the speech that he gave last week, he talked about

00:39:45.960 | this. And he said that, I'm quoting Putin from his speech, he says, "If Ukraine was to join NATO,

00:39:54.280 | it would serve as a direct threat to the security of Russia." So, you know,

00:39:58.520 | in response to Putin's speech, and on Twitter, I keep hearing that Putin is this madman, we can't

00:40:03.640 | understand what he wants, that the only possible explanation for his behavior is either senility,

00:40:10.280 | he's gone crazy, he's gone mad. And, you know, I'm looking at this, and I'm like, okay,

00:40:15.320 | maybe those things are true. But you can't say that he hasn't been clear about what his red lines

00:40:20.760 | are. He's been saying this for 20 years, that Ukraine joining the NATO alliance is an absolute

00:40:26.440 | red line. And, you know, I mentioned before on this pod, that imagine if the Cold War is still

00:40:31.160 | going on, and the Warsaw Pact still existed. And, you know, Justin Trudeau was going to lead

00:40:37.080 | Canada into the Warsaw Pact, we would absolutely be up and

00:40:40.200 | arms about that. We would not let that happen. It is that kind of issue for Putin. And we just

00:40:46.280 | act like this guy is insane, that has no point of view. I'm not, we don't have to believe he's right.

00:40:52.600 | But to basically say that he has no interest in Russian security, that we need to give any weight

00:41:01.080 | to, that we just need to dismiss all of his concerns out of hand. It just, you know, this

00:41:06.440 | is not the history of the situation. Yeah. Did you read, anybody read

00:41:10.120 | Madeleine Albright's New York Times piece? It was pretty interesting, because she was in the

00:41:15.640 | position when they first met him. And he's been talking about the Ukraine and reunification for

00:41:21.400 | 20 years. And it's probably a good lesson for the entire planet that dictators are going to,

00:41:28.040 | you know, they have a certain, to your point, Chamath, of like, having will and capabilities.

00:41:32.760 | A lot of people have capabilities, a lot of people don't have will to start wars

00:41:36.760 | anymore on this planet. And, and he clearly is in that group. I think

00:41:40.040 | as hard as it is,

00:41:41.160 | but Jason, we don't know, here's the thing, by not taking NATO off the table as an issue.

00:41:46.520 | We don't know whether his true aim here is the restoration of the Russian Empire, or merely to

00:41:53.480 | avoid, you know, this border country being part of a military alliance that he views as a threat.

00:41:59.160 | So I don't know what the answer is,

00:42:00.600 | or part or door number three, he wants more attention, he wants to be more globally relevant.

00:42:05.080 | Right. But we made the mistake of not taking this issue off the table. And so,

00:42:10.120 | if we had taken the issue off the table, then we could get to the real heart of the issue,

00:42:13.320 | maybe it would have diffused the situation.

00:42:14.920 | Or if the EU and NATO had done it, right? It's not just us in this, like, the people in Europe

00:42:19.320 | have a big say here. As we're discussing this on a, on a Thursday, February 24,

00:42:24.040 | Biden has announced a coalition of partners, EU, Australia, others are doing pretty significant

00:42:32.520 | sanctions, it seems, limiting Russia's ability to do business in dollars, euros and yen imposing

00:42:37.800 | major sanctions on the Russian bank.

00:42:39.400 | And Russia's largest state-owned enterprises will no longer be able to raise money from

00:42:43.400 | coalition of governments. Biden assumes this will degrade their military advancement.

00:42:49.000 | And I have a funny Russian story to tell. So when I was when I was still running,

00:42:54.600 | when I was managing, not just my money, but other people's money, and I was raising

00:42:59.080 | some money, and I was trying to get some money from the Russian government,

00:43:02.120 | and I was trying to get some money from the Russian government, and I was trying to get some

00:43:04.120 | money from the Russian government, and I was trying to get some money from the Russian government,

00:43:06.040 | and I was trying to get some money from the Russian government, and I was trying to get some money from

00:43:09.320 | and funds. Eventually, you know, you, you get LP commitments from all kinds of people interested

00:43:17.540 | in investing with you if you're generating great returns, right? Meaning, you know,

00:43:21.100 | rich family offices all around the world want to give you capital. And there's a very strict

00:43:25.220 | process in America where when you get capital in, you have to make sure that those folks basically

00:43:31.640 | pass, you know, an anti money laundering check and a know your customer kind of check.

00:43:37.040 | And one of these checks is actually a gray list and a black list that Treasury and the DOJ kind

00:43:44.260 | of manage. And every now and then they'll put people on and off the list. And there's a very

00:43:49.660 | famous person in Russia, who I will not say when I was raising money for my last fund, this is

00:43:55.980 | probably in 2014 or 15. He was on the he was not on the list. And, you know, very well known person.

00:44:02.680 | And I thought, wow, this is a great opportunity to get somebody who seems to be doing a lot of

00:44:07.020 | really interesting, good work. And not less than two or three weeks after we had signed our LP

00:44:11.900 | agreement, I think it was DOJ or Treasury, put them on this list. And we get a we get a, you know,

00:44:16.900 | an email basically saying, a tear up the LPA, and you can't take the capital. And we had to undo the

00:44:23.520 | entire limited partner agreement. Crazy. Yeah. What percentage of the fund would that person

00:44:30.340 | have been both? I don't remember. But he was a he's a significant person investing significant

00:44:37.000 | money in the stock market. So I guess it's about 1% or something. So I'm guess. Yeah. Hey, Jason, I

00:44:42.680 | just want to going back on a point I made about energy and energy independence. Sure. Earlier,

00:44:47.100 | because I actually pulled up the numbers. So you know, the average cost per kilowatt hour in the in

00:44:55.720 | China right now is about nine cents. For for energy production, it is estimated that nuclear power

00:45:06.980 | plants will be around $0.05 per kilowatt hour if operated at scale, with perfect efficiency, just

00:45:12.260 | to give everyone a sense of where not just security risk and kind of, you know, the green

00:45:17.360 | opportunity lies, but also where economic advantage lies in investing in nuclear infrastructure. And

00:45:23.120 | so as China builds out 140 nuclear plants here over the next two to three decades, they're going to

00:45:27.920 | see their energy costs decline from about nine cents for industrial use, potentially, you know,

00:45:33.320 | into the sub five cent per kilowatt hour range, which makes them tremendously competitive.

00:45:36.960 | On a manufacturing point of view. It's a lot of Bitcoin servers. There's a lot of hash.

00:45:40.500 | I think it's never going to happen. I'm not I love

00:45:45.020 | nuclear. I think America America's America's ability to scale nuclear I think is a very

00:45:51.540 | difficult proposition. And I think our real solution is solar, solar, it's practical,

00:45:55.740 | they can be done today. And it can be done right now.

00:45:58.100 | And just to look at the EU versus the US in terms of gas mileage, which is just stunning the EU,

00:46:05.820 | which has mandated. America doesn't have the resolve. It's like it's like, we have to we have

00:46:12.600 | to cross so many bridges. And you know, we have to really confront a bunch of issues that we that

00:46:18.780 | have been riddled with so much inaccuracy. You know, for example, of the environmental impact,

00:46:23.820 | the understanding of how nuclear energy works. You know, the NIMBY is in Jason that you referred

00:46:28.680 | to about not being able to build these things all around the country. And so reducing the form

00:46:33.000 | factor, in my opinion, is a technical challenge that I think we can overcome. And I think we can

00:46:35.800 | overcome. But it still leaves the policy and the societal level challenges that I think are very

00:46:41.380 | difficult to overcome. Because you're talking about rewriting history in many ways and, and

00:46:45.940 | convincing, you know, hundreds of millions of people that things that they had thought were

00:46:49.600 | true are no longer true. And I think that's much, much harder than we give it credit for.

00:46:53.440 | And cars is a perfect example. Americans now we're averaging 24 miles to the gallon, the EU is

00:46:58.420 | mandated 57 miles per gallon in 2021. They're getting it done in the EU. They're twice as

00:47:04.840 | effective. I tweeted,

00:47:05.780 | listen, Americans, we need to buy better gas mileage cars and move to EVs. And I was faced

00:47:11.540 | with a backlash. I mean, it was insane. That's not entirely true, because California did pass

00:47:16.740 | their own legislation. Yeah. And there was this issue because the car companies pushed back and

00:47:20.740 | said, you know, it's too expensive for us to build two different SKUs, one for California and one for

00:47:24.980 | the rest of America. They're already building ones for the EU, just to give you one counterpoint to

00:47:29.940 | your statement about energy independence arising potentially from solar to generate a gigawatt of

00:47:35.760 | electricity. And so I think that's a very, very important issue. And I think that's a very important

00:47:38.800 | issue. And I think that's a very important issue. And I think that's a very important issue. And I

00:47:42.320 | think that's a very important issue. And I think that's a very important issue. And I think that's

00:47:43.280 | a very important issue. And I think that's a very important issue. And I think that's a very important

00:47:43.920 | issue. And I think that's a very important issue. And I think that's a very important issue. And I

00:47:45.040 | think a very simple solar installation in everybody's home with a simple battery is more

00:47:49.520 | than enough to basically give people the power they need. And then these big CNI installations

00:47:54.080 | that's happening on top of all these big buildings will cover the rest. And I think that you'll still

00:47:58.560 | have some amount of mad gas peakers usage. And maybe you can have some amount of solar or hydro

00:48:03.840 | or wind. But people are experimenting and figuring out the battery storage capability to supplement

00:48:10.240 | this. I think what we don't have is that 3% residue solar, we don't have a credible alternative, but

00:48:15.760 | 80% resin solar with battery systems in everybody's home, which is a tractable solution that costs

00:48:23.280 | 1000s of dollars per phone, which the government could subsidize would be a great use of capital,

00:48:28.560 | I think would be transformational for energy, it would completely rewrite the energy calculus.

00:48:32.560 | So again, to do that, we need to be able to do that. And I think that's a very important issue.

00:48:33.820 | Yeah, and to do that today would cost because when you do something on a residential roof,

00:48:38.160 | it costs a lot more than doing it on an industrial scale. So when you build out a 7500 acre solar

00:48:42.320 | facility, you get economies of scale, you get single tubes, everything can run off one wire,

00:48:46.800 | when you build it on a roof, you need contractors to come in, you got to wire the home, you got to

00:48:50.520 | put batteries in. So the actual amortized cost over the lifetime of that solar installation

00:48:55.400 | works out to something on the order of 15 cents a kilowatt hour. Whereas if you do it on an

00:48:59.240 | industrial scale, it works out to about three cents a kilowatt hour. So you know, your point makes sense.

00:49:03.800 | But it makes things more expensive. So then the question is, who's going to fund the delta?

00:49:08.420 | And is someone actually going to pay for that delta? Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna I'm sure

00:49:12.420 | I'm sure over the next few years, we're going to spend trillions and trillions of dollars on nothing.

00:49:15.940 | Those trillions and trillions of dollars could probably whatever your gap is, I don't know

00:49:20.460 | whether your math is right or wrong. But whatever the gap is that gets us to China as an example,

00:49:24.820 | in terms of the cost per kilowatt hour, the government could substance

00:49:28.820 | and there is a quantifiable number. And if we had if we decided whether it was worth it or not,

00:49:33.780 | we could decide. But all I'm saying is, it's something that we need to put on the table,

00:49:37.960 | because every time a new president comes into town and gets elected, they generally get this

00:49:44.360 | one big shot on goal. You know, the last few presidents have tried to either, you know,

00:49:48.400 | cut taxes, or basically give these massive economic stimulus packages. And the net dollar

00:49:55.000 | effect of these things is now measured in the trillions of dollars. And I suspect that the net,

00:49:59.280 | you know, cost of subsidizing enough solar energy that you get a broadly deployed is also in the

00:50:03.760 | trillions of dollars. And we should just decide whether that is in a better use of the moment.

00:50:06.700 | All right, just to do some quick math here. To boost your trauma point, he almost nailed it

00:50:12.460 | exactly. There are 85 million standalone homes in the US Chabot. I'm just going to assume none of

00:50:18.740 | them, for the sake of this argument have solar on them, but 3% do I think average cost of putting

00:50:25.140 | solar on homes 20 to 35,000. I picked the number 30,000. Yes, yes. Hold on a second. But but in

00:50:32.900 | Australia, it costs $20,000.

00:50:33.740 | Okay, they have a cheaper system or something?

00:50:36.140 | No, it's because of all the nonsense that exists.

00:50:38.300 | I see. So but just to give the raw cost here, if it was $30,000 to put on

00:50:44.300 | you can do it for $5,000 at home, because Australia, which is one sixth the size of America

00:50:51.340 | is able to do it with no subsidies direct to the consumer for $5,000 in installation. So that price

00:50:57.180 | is possible. I'm going to pick the $30,000 crazy price in America by $2.5 trillion to

00:51:03.720 | put solar on every home the end. Like we're, you were $30 trillion in debt, 10% of our debt would

00:51:11.400 | make us energy independent forever. The plan gets better when you do math.

00:51:15.320 | Sorry, and think of the think of the amount of savings you do to the environment. Think of the

00:51:20.600 | lack I don't know if you saw this, but there was a UN report about the criticality and importance of

00:51:24.920 | emerging wildfire threats to our ecosystem and our ecology. I don't you know, for all of us that

00:51:30.280 | lived in California, do you guys remember how the sky was orange and red?

00:51:33.700 | Oh, two years ago, or those crazy pictures from Los Angeles. So if you if you have a have less of

00:51:39.320 | a reliance on these aging utilities, and these utilities infrastructure, there'll be less forest

00:51:43.880 | fires, the air will be cleaner, people will be more resilient. Think of the times that for example,

00:51:49.680 | in Texas, where there was a massive freeze, right where people were shut out of they couldn't have

00:51:54.280 | power because the actual traditional utilities were shut down. If it's only two and a half trillion

00:51:59.200 | dollars, I think we should have done this yesterday. I can't believe the number is that low.

00:52:03.680 | Considering the things that when we put two and a half trillion dollar price tags on things and spend

00:52:07.380 | the cost of upgrading, I'm just pulling some numbers here off of the internet, but replacing

00:52:13.500 | our electrical grid would be 5 trillion. So if you think about the replacement cost of electric

00:52:19.100 | grid, which we're going to have to do at some point, or in the upgrade cost of 500 billion a

00:52:22.580 | year, or the maintenance of 500 billion a year, this actually starts to seem very reasonable and

00:52:28.300 | achievable if we had the will, which means we need to have some politicians who actually aren't in the

00:52:33.660 | pocket of a number of jobs that Biden would create if he actually ran with this. Then because you do

00:52:39.540 | need a lot of local installation capability and other jobs, you would create hundreds of 1000s,

00:52:45.700 | maybe even millions of jobs in the United States, they would be really well paying. And you would be

00:52:51.480 | pushing us towards a completely energy independent clean energy, you know, zero carbon future that

00:52:57.560 | be transformation.

00:52:58.420 | Yeah, I wonder how many hours of work it is to install, you could actually do that math as well and figure

00:53:03.640 | out how many jobs you create, and then how much tax those people pay and then how much they spend of

00:53:10.580 | that money to put back into the economy, you're probably getting a 30 40% rebate on that $2.5

00:53:15.180 | trillion. So it becomes even better because of the high paying jobs. All right, the markets are

00:53:20.360 | tanking. Obviously, over the last couple of months, Dow is down 11% year to date. And of

00:53:29.520 | course, a lot of the growth stocks, we've talked about this over and over again, from zoom to net

00:53:33.620 | clicks, Facebook, Spotify, Coinbase, Twilio, all down over 50%. Today, the market went down five, 6% on

00:53:41.160 | the news and then rebounded. Is this all priced in? And is this the bottom of the market? Cathie Wood

00:53:49.160 | is supposedly buying and I don't know if it's net buying or she's just reallocating. But are we now in

00:53:57.120 | the bargain hunting period of the market and we've bottomed out

00:54:02.240 | this smart?

00:54:03.600 | I think that the bottom of the S&P is around 3800. And that what we still need to do is it's one last

00:54:11.600 | flush. And that last flush will really touch the big cap companies, but that growth is largely

00:54:19.260 | done sort of getting taken to the woodshed. So in general, I think that so generally buyers of

00:54:26.340 | growth now, sellers of growth, they're not going to be buying and selling. They're going to be

00:54:33.580 | of value and waiting for this one last you know 400 point move down the s p and i think people

00:54:38.940 | think it's roughly the bottom now if there's a world war obviously who knows all that's rough but

00:54:43.660 | um so sax what's more shocking that we're almost at the bottom or there's people in the markets

00:54:49.100 | that shamath really respects which is well speaking of people that we respect so i think

00:54:55.660 | uh brad gerson has a really interesting take on this which is that sorry i should also be

00:54:59.740 | clear that i'm recruiting this one person who i really respect you know so they're poachable got it

00:55:04.140 | so uh brad gerson has published a couple of charts showing basically multiples in the internet index

00:55:12.380 | and among sas companies over the last whatever dozen years or so and what you can see is that

00:55:17.740 | over the last two years during covid there was a huge spike in multiples for internet companies and

00:55:23.180 | for sas companies and that over the last really since november the last three four months has now

00:55:29.100 | come down

00:55:29.660 | and as of i would say last week it was right at about the historical trend and now it's starting

00:55:35.500 | to go under the historical trends so from a bargain hunting standpoint you'd have to say that

00:55:41.740 | this is the first time that we've been below the the average um for a few years now that's not to

00:55:48.620 | say it can't go down even more because in the same way that you can be above trend you can

00:55:52.940 | also be below trend and if this war escalates and metastasizes it will go down more but

00:55:59.660 | if this conflict can stay localized um and the economy doesn't go into a recession because of

00:56:05.180 | everything that's happened then yes this might be bargain hunting here's the chart for everybody to

00:56:10.060 | take a look at um from january 20 to january 22 the two years of the pandemic and i think this is

00:56:17.500 | times forward-looking sales if i'm if i'm reading it correct i don't have the full chart here i just

00:56:21.420 | have a screenshot of it a portion of it yeah i think it's enterprise value yeah it's enterprise

00:56:26.300 | value divided by like forward-looking revenue which is you kind of say it's like ar yeah it's

00:56:32.460 | sort of like arr it's like revenue um and so yeah we we had this 15x we went up to 40 50x

00:56:39.340 | private market deals going at 100 200 x um those days are over a big time

00:56:44.940 | and uh it's we've talked about that ad nauseam one of the interesting things that i'm seeing

00:56:49.820 | is i think people are looking at businesses that have been corrected and uh saying hey what is the

00:56:55.660 | true value of this and the i think the best example is peloton new cfo the cfo of netflix

00:57:01.980 | all right i gotta go jacob yeah i love you guys i love you and stay safe and enjoy your vacation

00:57:07.740 | cheers now so i just without chamath here i just want to talk a little bit have you guys watched

00:57:11.980 | what happened with peloton and the cfo coming in and just really revitalizing that business very

00:57:16.940 | quickly by the way jason i'll say one thing i think um two weeks ago uh if you pulled the market

00:57:24.380 | there would probably have or if you pulled the market you would probably have or if you pulled

00:57:25.020 | the market you would probably have or if you looked at the the trading prices of bonds you

00:57:29.180 | probably would have assumed a 95 chance of a half point rate hike in march and um as of today my

00:57:38.620 | guess is that the probability of that is below five percent and you're probably assuming you know

00:57:45.420 | a quarter point rate hike or maybe even a deferral

00:57:49.580 | at this point and i think that's one of the things that's keeping the market up instead of tanking so

00:57:54.540 | much and i think that's one of the things that's keeping the market up instead of tanking so much

00:57:54.780 | uh people are predicting that it's been such bad news that they'll push it out yeah they're

00:58:00.060 | assuming that under the conditions of great uncertainty like this the fed cannot act as

00:58:04.460 | aggressively as they were planning to act interesting as a result that that rate hike

00:58:08.540 | um would be pushed out and it would continue to kind of keep prices uh somewhat inflated

00:58:13.900 | and continue to support the market with cheaper capital and liquidity so you know a lot of uh

00:58:19.420 | capital around the world is going to get locked up as armed conflict kind of comes to bear

00:58:24.300 | and when that happens you know markets will tighten up and prices will be affected

00:58:28.620 | and so the fed in in traditional in typical times would want to have an incentive or would have a

00:58:33.660 | motivation to uh you know inject liquidity into the markets um and so this is not a great time to

00:58:39.980 | do a half point rate hike and so it's almost certain at this point that they're not going to

00:58:43.420 | do a half point rate hike feels to me like huge setup right now people have capitulated the markets

00:58:48.460 | gotten demolished i just think these companies are still great like zoom is still a great it's a great

00:58:53.820 | great business to invest in and it's a great business to invest in and it's a great business

00:58:54.620 | out there and some great companies to invest in some great stocks to buy all the way from

00:58:58.860 | technology through to industrials uh through to um you know even some of the energy companies that

00:59:04.060 | are going to benefit greatly from this commodity cycle we're we're kind of in the middle of um and

00:59:08.940 | so there's going to be you know um i think an opportunity to move away from uh speculative

00:59:15.420 | um behavior into real kind of cherry picking productive cash generating um businesses in the

00:59:22.940 | next um

00:59:24.140 | uh you know or or even growth businesses that are actual um you know value creators uh so versus

00:59:30.620 | being like 10-year speculative kind of bet so this is a great time to kind of be looking for

00:59:34.780 | businesses you really like to own uh to identify them to make investments and to hold those

00:59:39.420 | investments for a very long period of time uh you know you're not going to find a lot of market

00:59:43.340 | conditions like this i mean if we all went back to march of 2020 and you remember the s p was

00:59:48.220 | 2300 yeah i was going to buy disney i never got around to it yeah so like

00:59:52.860 | if at that point you pick businesses that you knew were going to be durable businesses and that you

00:59:57.180 | loved and you thought were going to have legs to them you bought everything from alphabet to disney

01:00:00.700 | uh to lockheed martin uh you know you could have done um tremendously well so now's a great time to

01:00:06.860 | kind of be looking for businesses that you really like and to buy a stake in them yeah forget about

01:00:11.820 | trying to time the bottom that's a fool's errand right no no if you want to buy stuff you want to

01:00:15.980 | hold for 10 years things are relatively cheap relative to a time horizon that sax pointed out

01:00:22.380 | gertzner pointed out so things are relatively cheap find businesses you like to own and buy

01:00:26.460 | them cheap they could get cheaper but they're kind of at the bottom end of the whole i think

01:00:31.180 | the whole time frame around like speculative stuff is kind of wiped out like i think that that that

01:00:35.500 | that era is gone now what are you saying well it's it's that plus i think one of the things

01:00:39.980 | that happened is that people are realizing now that the burst of activity especially like in

01:00:45.980 | e-commerce type companies that happened during the pandemic that was not ongoing sustainable

01:00:51.900 | growth it was one-time growth in fact in many cases it was sort of worse than one-time growth

01:00:57.500 | which is it was pull forward growth meaning that growth in the future will be lower because you

01:01:01.420 | pulled forward all of that revenue well i think peloton might be a good example i mean yes everyone

01:01:05.900 | bought them during the pandemic but then after the pandemic everyone who needs one has got one already

01:01:11.500 | so it could also be cars right like people are desperate to buy cars and now there's not available

01:01:15.340 | right so what happened is not only have multiples gone down but these companies were being based on

01:01:21.420 | rates that were unsustainable and so now they're all revising their forecasts down so it's a double

01:01:26.380 | whammy and brad's made this point but what's interesting right now is the markets are actually

01:01:31.020 | rallying and i think it might be because of this latest biden news at this press conference so the

01:01:38.220 | important point here is that biden did not sanction putin directly there's talk about sanctioning him

01:01:44.540 | personally or and he also did not remove russia from the swift system which is like the key banking

01:01:50.940 | system and i don't know if this is because biden doesn't want to do it or because europe won't

01:01:55.660 | support the move pretty clear europe doesn't want to do it so no one is willing to suffer

01:02:00.940 | too much economic loss here to defend ukraine never mind sending troops so it seems to me

01:02:07.740 | that the signal here is that um both militarily and in terms of economic interest europe

01:02:14.780 | does not want further escalation and that may be why the market is rallying also the fed

01:02:20.460 | may hold off on interest rate increases while this is all going on so you know sometimes markets can

01:02:26.940 | act in funny ways well they're forward-looking people are putting money at stake so they have

01:02:33.100 | skin in the game so it's you know they people can talk all they want about um what's going

01:02:40.460 | to happen with the markets but unless they're placing bets that's kind of cheap talk and here

01:02:44.780 | people are actually placing bets on stocks they think will do well in the future skin

01:02:49.980 | of the game people look their economic interests are skin of the game having people's sons and

01:02:55.420 | daughters go off to fight and die in some foreign war that is real skin of the game what is not skin

01:03:02.060 | to the game is people tweeting you know their moral outrage and condemnation and whipping things

01:03:06.940 | up and you know we should not be listening to that and calling everyone who disagrees them traitors

01:03:12.380 | because that's happening too you know this is a time for cooler heads to prevail

01:03:16.300 | all right you and i are going to actually agree on this

01:03:20.300 | and we're both going to agree that trump and pompeo should not be fawning over putin uh yeah but jason

01:03:26.700 | you never commented on that let's get people want to hear us get into it well i mean you can't

01:03:31.340 | support them fawning over putin like that do you i can't imagine you look i i heard i heard what what

01:03:38.140 | trump said when he was saying i didn't hear the pompeo quote so i can't speak to that

01:03:42.140 | saying he's a genius look listen you know sometimes trump is being sarcastic when he says

01:03:49.020 | things like oh what a beauty you know um he means the opposite and i think the point trump was making

01:03:54.140 | wasn't really about putin being so great the point i heard trump making was that if he were president

01:03:59.100 | this wouldn't be happening now you can disagree with that it may be true or untrue but that was

01:04:03.980 | a real point he was making i think that you're letting you know the political partisans try to

01:04:10.140 | whip this thing up and as part again as part of this meme of anybody who doesn't support what i

01:04:16.540 | want must be a traitor it must be in the politics of the world and i think that's what trump is doing

01:04:18.820 | in the pocket of truth of putin we have to use this meme warfare to get people freeberg

01:04:24.140 | to shame these politicians into backing like the solar plan and doing something meaningful like

01:04:32.860 | this like and backing nuclear how do we get the politicians to reflect energy independence as a

01:04:39.100 | priority it feels like it's not a priority for them well i mean the one of the good things about

01:04:44.460 | american democracy is that politicians are

01:04:48.620 | generally pretty responsive to what their constituents want and believe so they use

01:04:54.180 | polling data and that polling data drives you know if they want to get reelected they better do what

01:05:00.580 | the polls are telling them people want them to do and so ultimately if you can kind of influence

01:05:05.700 | people broadly in the united states uh and that can that can go both ways by the way

01:05:10.500 | we have special interests too and you have people with weird ideas right like yeah but

01:05:14.740 | generally like if something is deeply unpopular a politician risks not being able to get rid of an abortion

01:05:18.420 | or if something is deeply unpopular and if something is deeply unpopular and the risks not getting reelected they're not going to kind of run to do that and if something is very popular even though it may not be the right thing by some objective framework uh you know they would still run to do that so you know i do think that there's

01:05:30.140 | you know some degree of uh of work to be done around you know framing

01:05:35.420 | for people broadly you know via the work maybe that we do on our podcast but

01:05:40.620 | i think more importantly on a repeated way and in a way that's kind of inspiring um uh and inclusive

01:05:48.220 | uh will drive people to kind of want to see these changes happen and ultimately politicians should

01:05:52.540 | respond can i make one other point to to your thing about um you know who who today would be

01:05:57.580 | considered you know in the words of jen pisaki parroting russian talking points barack obama if

01:06:03.820 | obama today were out there saying exactly what he told the the atlantic magazine back in i think it

01:06:10.460 | was 2012 or 14 if he was saying that today he'd be accused of being in putin's pocket

01:06:18.020 | and being a putin apologist and a traitor and all this kind of stuff because he said that in that

01:06:24.060 | interview he said listen putin was always very businesslike he was punctual he showed up he

01:06:28.620 | wanted to negotiate and deal basically he sounded like a guy who look we may disagree with him about

01:06:34.300 | everything but he wasn't a madman he was someone you could a rational actor he was a coldly ruthless

01:06:41.020 | but rational actor and that's basically what obama said he's someone you could talk turkey with and if

01:06:46.860 | you say that today

01:06:47.820 | that hey maybe we could negotiate our way out of this with putin you're accused of being you know

01:06:54.820 | uh a puppet of his yeah well the concept of starting a war uh in this day and age is just

01:07:01.860 | it's crazy like it is crazy that he's starting this war and putting all these people at risk

01:07:07.300 | and we don't even know what the goal is you guys he's not even asked for anything like what is he

01:07:12.340 | exactly asking for so he may not be he may have been rational then or maybe obama was

01:07:17.620 | trying to steer him towards rationality and praising him publicly to get that more rational

01:07:22.620 | putin to show up this feels like irrational that we don't know what his goal is like the fact that

01:07:27.180 | the world can't say if we gave him x he would do y is i think his strategy putin's always like to be

01:07:34.380 | this like unpredictable madman right no i mean we just said that he's a coldly ruthless rational

01:07:39.980 | actor that's sort of the opposite of a madman i mean his red lines have been clear he's been

01:07:44.220 | stating them for for years um the problem is that again we're conducting i'm referring him to

01:07:49.500 | murdering opponents of his and oh there's no question that he's ruthless he's an authoritarian

01:07:54.780 | call him a dictator if you want i've tweeted in support of alexei navalny yeah so i get it but

01:08:00.860 | that doesn't mean he's a madman he has desires and interests and it's the job of diplomats to figure

01:08:07.660 | out how to conduct diplomacy and negotiation with people you disagree with and one of the problems

01:08:13.580 | we have today is again we've twitterized everything so you know we basically figure out the first step

01:08:19.340 | is who are the people who should be cancelled you know who's wearing the white hat who's wearing the

01:08:23.340 | black hat let's all rise up in virtue signal and moral denunciation and you know stick our fingers

01:08:28.780 | in our ears and not listen to the other side and um and listen that that is a way to find yourself

01:08:36.460 | in greater conflicts and you know i think that's a really important point and i think that's a really

01:08:37.460 | important point in the world of politics not avoid them yeah all right so just wrapping up here let's uh

01:08:41.660 | let's wrap with sax's favorite part of the show sax's favorite moment where he's super engaged

01:08:47.820 | and learning he's got his thinking cap on he's taking notes and that is the science corner no not

01:08:56.060 | what about vendeda i thought you're going to say vendetta corner yeah what about it is there

01:09:01.500 | anything on your vendetta quarter this is actually my favorite part of the show it is now people love

01:09:06.620 | vendetta quarter it's not just a thing it's a big deal it's a big deal yeah it's a big deal

01:09:07.260 | yeah they already did community spaces who you of course twitter loves it because twitter is all

01:09:11.780 | about vendettas but i have no vendettas this week vendetta free weeks the vendetta what are you doing

01:09:17.140 | with your time yeah i'm trying to advocate that this is time for cooler heads prevail and so um

01:09:23.380 | oh for sake start a fight with somebody aren't you fighting with paul graham

01:09:26.340 | there's nobody you're you're you're taking the week off for ski week i don't think we're fighting

01:09:32.980 | over anything it's not i can't not that i can think of all right four five six seven eight nine

01:09:37.060 | four the dictator chamath palihapitiya sultan of science david friedberg and the rain man himself

01:09:44.460 | david sachs i'm jay cal and we'll see you all at the all-in summit in may 15 16 17. you can go to

01:09:52.620 | the website summit.all in podcast.co where you just type all in some the all-in summit into

01:09:58.220 | google and find it may 15th to 17th in miami florida we're doing it at the new world symphony

01:10:03.980 | and we have a page there where you can vote on speakers it's gonna be three days a week

01:10:06.860 | three days of fun we uh have a scholarship there if you can't afford the regular ticket

01:10:11.300 | and uh you can apply for a scholarship if you're a super fan and we'll look forward to seeing you

01:10:16.740 | there and go vote for some speakers bye bye i love you besties we'll let your winners ride

01:10:22.020 | brain man david sacks

01:10:24.900 | and instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it love you

01:10:32.300 | sq queen of kinwa

01:10:36.660 | besties are gone

01:10:42.020 | that's my uh dog taking a drive away

01:10:45.660 | oh man

01:10:49.340 | we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless

01:10:54.980 | it's like this like sexual tension but they just need to release somehow

01:10:58.100 | wet your feet

01:11:00.860 | your feet

01:11:02.900 | we need to get merch

01:11:05.660 | besties are gone

01:11:06.460 | we're doing all this

01:11:07.700 | i'm doing all this

01:11:15.900 | Bye.

01:11:16.060 | you

E70: EMERGENCY POD! Russia invades Ukraine: Reactions, Putin's ambition, Biden's response and more

Chapters