E140: LK-99, Sclerotic establishments, Fitch downgrades US debt, Trump indicted... again

24:01I mean, it really is, in my mind, the first time I've really seen this happen in a very long time, maybe the internet was a, was a kind of great moment. Yeah, everybody being connected, everybody being able to share information for all of the world information. For all of the world information on Twitter and Billy Billy and YouTube and like all sharing this stuff and saying, my gosh, we could have this breakthrough together as a, as a civil, as a species, not like a country, not an individual, not a who messed up, who did something wrong, who's to blame, who's on the other side, it's like, dude, if we all do, if this happens, we're all gonna be like chilling on the beach.

24:35It's gonna be amazing. This is awesome. So we're gonna have a rash of VCs running into this next and start funding the stuff. Material science. Yeah, I mean, my attitude is kinda like, wake me up when you know it's real. Because, freeberg, it's nice that if this is real, then it's great that there's all this positive energy around it, but that's like a big caveat. Until we know that there's something real here, I think it's premature for everybody to say that this is like some wonderful thing. Now, if we find out that the science is real and then this is to debate over commercialization of it, then yeah, I agree.

25:15That would be like a really positive moment. I just love the fact that when something positive in the world happens or when something negative happens, we have this amazing platform for everybody, socialmediax .com, formerly Twitter, where everybody can get together around this campfire and just start discussing it and speculating. Now, some people don't like speculation. Obviously, if there's a school shooting or a tragedy, a building burns down, the fog of war, as we've seen in the constant Ukraine coverage, you know, you can have, it's very easy to make mistakes when you're catching this stuff in real time.

25:46but I love the real -time nature of the world and the pace we're moving at. It's kind of delightful to me. I don't have a problem with the speculation and there is a fun element to it. But when you start talking about investing in it, like I said, wake me up when you know it's real. There's a really funny meme that VC Braggs posted. Oh, VC Braggs, shout out VC Braggs. This is good. This is a famous meme of a kid drowning. That's so good. Wow, the mom is playing with another kid and not paying attention to the drowning kid. Sort of like the guy who's holding hands with his girlfriend, but looking over his shoulder and whistling at the other woman and superconductors is the happy little kid.

26:28VCs is the mom and gender of AI is drowning. But then they show in the underwater. Yeah, somebody who's tied to a chair with chains of skeleton. The last type cycle. The last type cycle. Creator, economy, crypto, M3. Yeah, it's pretty funny. It's pretty, it's pretty exact. I told you about this when we were in Italy last week, but when I was 13 years old, Jake Alchemyk funded me now. I did a science fair project on superconductors. Actually, I was doing it. I was 13. And I bought this superconductor from the back of popular science magazine, you know, this old E3 Mbarium Copper Oxide. That was the one that won the Nobel Prize.

27:01You could buy it for nothing. And I got a liquid nitrogen at UCLA and I did a demo at the science fair and I did a poster board and I had hypercard on a Macintosh LC. And I showed everyone, This is the future. We're about to have room temperature superconductors. It's about to happen and we're gonna have flying cars and we're gonna have limitless energy and limitless battery storage for energy by the way, which is one of the big applications. And it's just on the break and this was when I was 13 years old 1993. You know here we are 30 years old, 30 years later. And everyone feels like this moment might be upon us, but it has been this thing that's always been elusive.

27:38That everyone's always thought it's around the corner. Well, it sounds like cold fusion, you know, we've always been 10 years away from some breakthrough in cold fusion. Self -driving cars, artificial general intelligence, yeah. Well, I think there's a difference between this physical world, material sciences type innovation and then software innovation. And one of Peter Tiel's critiques is that we've had tremendous innovation and software, but in every other aspect of the economy, there's been little snow innovation. Plains, for example, are getting slower, not faster. would you believe that position from from him?

28:11I don't buy that position. Well, I mean, with the exception of like what Elon has been doing with the genomic, genomic revolution. He misses life sciences entirely in that point. I don't know. I mean, genomics is largely sufferbast this point. If you look at the revolution driven by gene editing, oncology, the breakthroughs, I mean, look, it's all slowing down. I do agree with him. If you look at the number of approved drugs every year and the cost per drug, cost per drugs going the wrong direction and the number of drugs per year is going in the wrong direction. So there is an argument to be made there, but there are arguably some quantum leaps in the types of medicine that we're applying.

28:50We didn't have biologics, you know, 40 years ago. We didn't have gene therapy 10 years ago. These are new modalities for therapies that didn't exist. As we've engineered the molecular world to do amazing things in the biochemical application space. So I think there's elements of this that I disagree with, but I think the general trend lines, as he points out, is totally true. But with planes, I think we made a conscious, he always sites the plane issue, hey, we don't have the conquery, we're going backwards in terms of speed. I think that was a deliberate cost -cutting measure because people aren't willing to pay to go faster and burn more fuel.

29:24So they're not the innovation. Yeah, but Jay Cohen, the innovation, the price gets cheaper. That's right. That's right. Same with electricity. Same with energy. Electricity's getting more expensive, not cheaper. If you look at the massive, if we wouldn't have the massive gains in artificial intelligence and machine learning, if it hadn't been for the revolution in GPU storage and data centers and microprocessors and the actual stuff. Yeah, but that's kind of the point is that we were promised flying cars instead of we got 280 characters. Not that Twitter slash X is bad, but that's just where all the innovation has been as an IT.

29:57That I agree with. So they figured out they keep figuring out to put more circuits on a transistor, whatever, and keep Moore's law going or. I could show you. I could make a different argument by showing you human lifespan and agricultural yields. I mean, agricultural yield continue to climb because of our ability to engineer in a smarter and better way every generation there. There's a lot of counter -arguments to that point. I would say what's valid about it is we, go ahead, Chema. I was gonna say the reason we don't see these kinds of innovations is because the ruling class has clogged up and schlorotically dominated all the places where you'd have this massive forms of innovation like regular regular regular paper.

30:38No no no no that's like I'm talking about that's like a that's like a boogie man so get the boogie man out because regular drug captures there forever. Like why was this paper published on Artson because every other form of publishing mechanism is schlorotic it's establishment, it's hierarchical, it's about people basically dominating their own little forms of peyola, right? And so nature, jamma, all of this stuff works this way. And so what happens? You don't get fundamental innovations that happen to labs. You have things that feed research proposals that feed people who need to basically establish their supremacy.

31:15You saw the Stanford professor get booted out because of stuff that, you know, he... The president of Stanford. The president said, so why is all this happening? Well, Peter is right. The reason why this stuff is happening is that instead of places where true fundamental innovation can happen, if you look at the Nobel Prize winners and you do distribution by age, what do you find? People went Nobel's in their 60s for work that they did in their 20s and 30s, right? And so you have a system now that rewards people staying in their positions. I wrote this in one of my annual letters. If you look at the average age of like leading people in schools, they're not going to like 70 years old, if you look inside a Congress.

31:53So there's this all of this stuff that just kind of sporadically prevents young naive people from basically going out and really pushing the boundaries in specifically this case of science, of fundamental science. And so for every innovation, I think the question to ask is what other innovations are we missing? And if innovations are on a fundamentally well -established pathway that defends a bunch of work of senior people before it, it'll get supported. And I would say that genetics is a perfect example of that. But if you look at the number of rare diseases that have still that are still like unsolved or the lack of understanding of immunodeasease, it's just crazy.

32:32Like I just think that that's really what's happening. I think Peter's more right than he's wrong. The other issue here, SACS, is, and I'd like to get your feedback on this, is if you look at how venture capital works, you got a 10 -year window, you want to get returns for your LPs, you'll look at how this fundamental research, we just said, this started in 1999, that's why it's called dash 99. This thing took 25 years to get to this point. Is part of this issue that you have this big opportunity zone between, say, Ventures window 10 years and then academia, which you put at like four decades there, trim off 20, you know, year olds getting their rewards in their 60s.

33:10How much of this has to do with we don't have a platform in between venture and academia? Yeah, that's not the problem. I mean, so it's true that VC funding, typically you want to go to the commercialization of an idea and that the underlying platform shift already exists. And usually that comes from some sort of breakthrough that happened in academia. I mean, that's basically what happened with the internet. So yeah, you do not want VC funding, typically going to basic R &D, you know, fundamental science R &D. It's this really expensive takes too long and too unknown. So you want that stuff kind of done more at the academic level.

33:49The question I have is how much of what's happening in academia is basically either a relevant or fraudulent. So Jamal Thibarov, the Stanford president, I think the story there is he had five papers about Alzheimer's research and related topics like that where they found out that the papers are basically bogus and quasi -frogilin. So how much of the work that's being done in academia? How many of these papers are basically bogus? Well, the thing with peer review is like it's presented like it's a great, incredible solution to the world's problems, but I think what it has inherently wrong with it.

34:27So the positive part of it is theoretically you have error correction, right? But here, what you don't find is that that error correction actually even happened. And so it It takes like some young 20 year old kid at Stanford, who's a journalist, whose family were journalists, to basically figure that out. So instead, what were those, what were those papers doing? They were supporting a rising up and coming person because they thought that, you know, he would support them at some point. This is like the whole corrupt Fauci system at the end of the age. Friedberg, they're pro -Chemath and Sax are presenting academia as corrupt.

34:59Do you agree with that? I don't know if corrupt is the right term because I think that implies malintent. I think that the incentives are wrong. So in order to get funded, you have to show results. No one gets a grant to disprove someone else's work. No one gets a grant to do confirmatory work on someone else's work. You get a grant, yeah, I mean, that's the argument that some folks make. You get a grant to do breakthrough research and have breakthroughs. And if you have breakthroughs, you get more money. That's the way the system is set up. But this is why this guy, this is why, well, let me just think.

35:33I think it's corrupt. I think so. So it's corrupt. They're going to find a breakthroughs? Come on. Okay. Whatever you wanted to find it as, the guy at Stanford, if you read some of the testimony from people in his labs, they said that he encouraged people to have big findings. And if you get big findings, you get to progress in the organization, you get more funding, et cetera. So the incentive structure that he set up for people was not necessarily to go in and disprove stuff or try something and show that it didn't work. If you try something and show that it didn't work and publish a paper on that, it's going to be very hard for you to turn around and get a trophy or get some money or Get a somebody did that there was like a bunch of ear in the data that they went back and were like, hey, this is this was incorrect And he's like, oh, yeah, it was sloppy.

36:16I just didn't do a good job of reviewing So yeah, so what happened was if you read some of the testimony the people that worked in his labs the students and the graduate students and so on They said that he basically encouraged people to get good results And in that process and in that way, there was some fuzziness in the data or some tweaking of the data that he didn't double check for sure, but he was encouraging this sort of system of performance. And the system of performance says, you've got to show results, you can't show non -results. And if you show non -results, there's no money. And there you have.

36:47The reason they're doing that is marketing. They want to market and get more attention so they get more donations. Yeah, exactly. the problem with pure research is that you have to get funding to do your research. Where do you get your funding from? You get your funding from federal agencies, from nonprofits, from your donors. And so in order to get that money, you have to say, here's what I'm going to do. Here's not what... You don't say, I'm going to go not prove something. You say, I'm going to go prove something. No, no, no. You're hiding the cheese. Can you stop hiding the cheese? That's not what these people are saying.

37:18These people aren't saying, I'm not going to not prove this. You're like, But most of these people are working on very thin incremental extensions of work that's already been done because it allows them a more defined path to get tenure ship to be a well -respected professor to work through the hierarchy of a university. That's what's happening today. And the reason why that stuff gets funded is that those are the same people that are in charge of the funding infrastructure at NIH and all these other places. is what we don't have is something that says, go and write the most ambitious proposals and I'm gonna go fund it.

37:52Yeah, I think both things are true. I'm sorry, oh, just, there's no market mechanism. I'll just say both things are true because what you're saying, Chimac is a point of failure. If you say I'm gonna go try something crazy, like do a search for room temperature superconductor using lead crystals, you're not gonna get funding for that. It's too out there. I mean, you guys today are talking about how low probability stuff isn't that interesting. I'm not going to fund it until it's real. And so when things are real, you have some molecule that has some effect on cancer cells, then you get funding to make that molecule go to the next phase or go to the next stage.

38:25That is more fundable than the outlandish crazy thing where the probability of it going to zero is 99%. You could throw Elizabeth Holmes into that, right? I mean, she came up with this absurd idea that you could do 200 tests on one drop of blood. And they would even see a research. That was just a statement about engineering that wasn't ready. and whether they're talking about another company, it just got funded to do the same thing that Theranos promises is gonna do. Do you see this? But I know. I did not see that. Yeah, I mean, some pretty good VCs invested in it, actually. And they especially said, we know this is the same ideas Theranos, but for that very reason, we think it's very unlikely to be flawed because it's being held to such a high standard of scrutiny.

39:01I want you guys to think about this. I want you guys to think about this as VCs. An entrepreneur comes to you. And the entrepreneur, as she says, I've done this thing. I did this thing. I did this thing, I did this thing, I did this thing. Five different things, none of them work. I wanna have money to do this next thing. You're less likely to fund that person than the entrepreneur that shows up and says, the first thing I did work, the second thing I did work, the third startup I did worked, they weren't home runs, but they should have the opposite. And I had good results. That's basically what happens in, the scientific research is you've got to get something that's fundable and often that means not doing something that's likely to go to zero.

39:37And that's where the incrementalism comes in, Is that orientation, I think? I hate to give my playbook, but one of the great successes I've had is finding people who got their assets kicked on the last two companies, talking to them about why they got their assets kicked, and then how they're going to avoid getting their assets handed to them with this third company. Then if you look at Travis with Uber, he did scour, got sued for a quarter trillion dollars. He did Red Soush. He got like a 30 million dollar exit, and then he did Uber, right? His first two companies were very hard. Steve Jarvetson and future ventures.

40:09He took his venture fund and he told the LPs, it's a 15 year term, not 10. So he specifically is trying to do a little bit of a longer window. I think that is actually a possible solution here. I think smart independent thinkers find ways to make money. I've been looking at this superconductor space for the last two years. And so it's not like people are shy and have money and aren't willing to write the checks. I just don't think that's what it is. is the body of work that's coming out of academic institutions today for the amount of money that's put in is modest. And I think that's the best way to describe it.

40:42It's the fairest way. And the reason is modest is not because of the intellectual capacity of the people. It's because of the incentives and the hierarchy and the establishment, elitist politics that infuses how these organizations are on. And I think the only way to break that apart is to basically disrupt who is in charge to these institutions. Nick, just throw up this chart. These are people that for decades and decades and decades are in a grind and who are now in control. And so what is the incentive of these folks to explain the change? Yeah, what is this? This is a chart that I put together, which is just the generational distribution of academic leadership across all the leading research institutions in America.

41:28Okay. Well, isn't Fauci a primate sample of this? This is the birth here? No, listen, you had the most important person, hold on a second, the most important person probably in the federal distribution of grants. And the medical field was Fauci, right? He literally was running the NIH since the 1980s. He's been there for 40 something years. And the mass was peeled away during COVID and we saw how much power he wielded. Really, I think in a corrupt way. Jason used the word corrupt. You had that letter to the Lancet that he got a whole bunch of scientists to sign that claimed that COVID was not made in a lab.

42:05That was a conspiracy theory that the only place it could have come from was the sort of the zoonotic leap naturally occurring from animals. We know that he used his power over grants to basically pressure those people into signing the letter or they thought it would be in their interest to do so. Even though Faltchie had already been updated by a bunch of scientists that it likely had come from a lab, they could just look under a microscope and see if you're in Cleveland sites, which are the telltale sign. So they knew that this thing likely came from a lab. There was no basis for calling it a conspiracy theory, certainly.

42:42And yet the whole thing got behind that. But Zach, did you see that Slack messages where they were trying to manipulate the New York Times science writer. I mean, they basically let the question have to ask is why we're all these scientists want to go along with this and inside the lift the lantern? Because these guys have been grinding for 40 or 50 years in a hierarchy. And so to all of a sudden put a pin in it and just say, you know what, I'm going to dispense with all of it. And now I'm going to basically like be completely open -minded. How likely was that the odds of that were very low. Look, look at the number of people who have basically grown up in one segment of that are sclerodically in charge of every single leading research university in the United States.

43:22That is why we don't have flying cars. This is why. Because after 40 years of working in a specific hierarchy being rewarded in a very specific way with a very specific set of incentives, when some young, brash, 22 -year -old naive person writes an extremely ambitious research proposal, you're like, no, you will not be a part of my lab to do that. But you can do this incremental thing that that further reinforces my leadership in society. That is what this charge shows. Yeah, it's also perverse inside of government. We didn't talk about it. I don't think last week, but Mitch McConnell, I don't know how to say it, but I guess he froze while he was speaking and, you know, we got to have an upper eight.

44:00Oh, and the Diane finestein thing. Remember when she started. Oh, the Diane finestein. The speech. And their staff are whispering, saying, just say, I, you know, when she starts going on this, like, filibuster. No, Jason, we have a slurotic political system run by oxygen to generians because the boomers are not relinquishing political power. Fucking retarded. They're also not relinquishing bureaucratic power. Can we just pull up this lance and letter for a second? They say, here's a duamin on this. The rapid open and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumors and misinformation around his origins.

44:34We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theory suggesting that COVID -19 does not have a natural origin. How could they would say that at that point in time? All the evidence suggested it was made in a lab. Now, certainly, I think you could take the other side of that, but to condemn the lably theory as a conspiracy theory, that was corrupt. I'm not sure that that's corrupt. You know what's corrupt is not retracting that in apologizing. That's where the real corrections. We have not gotten our But the Lancet letter was organized. It was organized. This is just like the 51 spies who lied claiming that the 100 -biden laptop was disinformation.

45:10This is the establishment willing to use its credentials and respectability and expertise to sign a letter they know is false, to perpetrate a fraud on the American people in order to protect the people in charge. That's a motivation here because Fauci had funded to gain a function research in the move on left. I think the same rod that is in some of these leading research institutions and leading academic institutions and politics, they all share the same commonality, which is we are sclerotic. We are in desperate need of a generational shift to power. And right now, there is no incentive because at the same time, the people that are 70 and 80 are thinking to themselves, well, I'm probably going to live to 100.

45:56What should I do for the next 20 years? being in power is pretty good. Right, so we're in this weird clash. I was thinking a lot about the fiscal spending problem in the US, and we should talk about the Fitch rating downgrade that happened this week. I've got some data I'd like to share. One thing I was thinking about was how tied the age of Congress is to our fiscal spending problem. If you think about someone who's young, they're going to want to invest for their future and think about the future. If you're someone who's old, you live for the day and you don't think about the future. And I worry so much that the aging of the establishment that makes the decisions about how money is spent creates a cycle of a particular area.

46:41Yeah, the positioning that's all about giving away all the money today instead of making the right decision to make sure that we have a prosperous tomorrow. And that's why I think so many of these things kind of slip through. If you put a 20 -year -old in charge that was well informed in charge of some of the fiscal policy, environmental policy, energy policy, decisions, defense policy, it would be a very different set of decision -making than someone who's in their 80s. Inherited stacks. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, we should talk about the Fitch downgrade because I think it's a really important story this week.

47:17Fitch the rating agency downgraded the US's long -term debt by one notch from AAA to AA plus. Only nine countries have AAA ratings from the top three rating agencies. That's a big global, Fitch and Moody's. Those are Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Singapore, and Australia. What you can take from that is you've got to have a good balance sheet and you have to have high functioning governments.

47:47The the Nordics. That's why you see Denmark, Melon, Sweden, Norway there. Query to NPR, the negative reaction hasn't been as strong as 2011. That was the first time the US was downgraded from AAA to AA plus by the S &P. That also had to do with the debt ceiling. The market's kind of shrugged off. Largest shrugged off the Fitch downgrade. Main reasons for the downgrade is obviously higher interest rates, aging population, the debt to GDP of the ratio, which we've talked about here, but government kept coming up over and over again and how dysfunctional our government is. The debt ceiling is one of the key manifestations of that, your thoughts on this.

48:27For the first half of the show, Freeberg, you're an optimist, but are you now going to switch to the clientist? I wouldn't say the clientist. Are you going to switch to the clientist mode now or are you still an optimist mode? I mean, in J. Cal's view, unless you're a cheerleader for every stupid government policy. It's just silly, Jake Alistair. I know. It's a, Jake Alistair. I want to be honest, I don't think so. I think he like, and I concur. I think you can highlight that there are concerns with US fiscal policy that are putting us into decline in our spending spiral with the US currency reserves, which there are now diversification efforts underway.

49:06And I'll talk about this in one second. And that doesn't mean that the US isn't the most exceptional place to do engineering and entrepreneurism and have freedom of speech and thought and so on. But there are elements of the US that put things at risk. So let me just point out these two charts. If you guys pull the first one up, this is a pretty striking chart. And I think I showed this before. This is federal government interest payments that are being made. We're now up to a trillion dollars. The chart, as you can see, a year has spiked. And by the way, that number is spiking further. and we'll talk about this in one second, as a result of rising interest rates and increased fiscal spending.

49:40So this is now becoming a pretty sizable part of our budget. And as of now, paying the interest on our debt is a larger capital outlay for the federal government than defense spending. The second chart shows what happened in the last week, which is that 30 year treasuries have been sold off. And as that's happened, treasuried yields have climbed. So there's been about a 10 % decline in pricing and a concurrent nearly 10 % increase. and Bill Akman basically said today that he's shorting 30 year treasuries. He thinks we're going to go to 5 .5 % long term rates. Currently, the 30 year treasuries sitting at 4 .3.

50:13And remember, I told you guys this after this thing I went to a few weeks ago that there were two prominent economists who shared that they think we're going to be facing long term rates in the 5 to 7 % range, very long term rates for a very long period of time, that it is a new fiscal regime. game. And then if you pull up the last link I sent Nick, this is a report made by the Treasury borrowing advisory committee of the Treasury Department. And I just want to read a couple of quotes from this report. This just came out today and it was published that it was sent over to the Secretary of the Treasury yesterday.

50:46And it said since the advisory committee convened in May, two year treasury yields are about a hundred basis points higher while ten year treasuries have increased by about 40 basis points. The The bank holdings of non -mortgage -backed government securities, mainly treasuries, have actually declined by 146 billion so far this year. That means banks are selling off their treasuries. The committee goes on to say at the same time, Treasury investors have noted the Treasury supply will need to increase to address the rise in public deficits as tax revenues have come in weaker and government spending has increased.

51:19Issues and needs will be additionally impacted by the timing of a recession, so on. Then they said, based on the marketable borrowing estimates published on July 31st, Treasury, this is crazy. Treasury currently expects privately held net borrowing of $1 .007 trillion in this quarter with an assumed end of September cash balance of $6 .50 and then they said we expect another $852 billion of borrowing next quarter. That means treasury is going to try an issue and sell $2 trillion worth of treasury bonds in the next two quarters. That's $2 trillion of new borrowing by the federal government to pay our bills.

52:00At the start of the year, they were estimating $1 .6 trillion for the year, which was an insane number. Now we're talking about $2 trillion and just two quarters. So rates are climbing. As a result, we need to borrow more. And this is a perfect manifestation of the debt spiral problem that we've talked about multiple times. Our fiscal spending outlay and the rising interest rates come by to create an insurmountable debt spiral that is now manifesting in the fact that we need to sell $2 trillion of treasuries. And here's the crazy statistic that they said in reviewing recent demand for US treasuries in auctions.

52:35The committee noted that an increasing percentage of supplies being absorbed by investment funds while foreign participation has remained range bound. That means as we're trying to sell more treasuries, governments, foreign governments are buying fewer of them, which means that the US currency as a reserve is no longer the place that everyone wants to plow their money as much as it used to be, it is in decline. Now, the other thing I want to share, which I think is absolutely critical, is how do we address this gap? Well, the one way is these entitlement programs, and so several Republican presidential candidates, Nicky Haley, Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence have all publicly stated on the campaign trail that they're promoting programs to cut social security benefits for people that are 30 and 40 years old.

53:18And here's the response to that. So they've gone out and they've started saying that. A poll was done. And on that poll, 82 % of voters oppose the push to cut social security for Americans under 50, 82%. So where is this going to take us? This is what is so scary to me, J .K. I'm not an American declineist. I believe in the American system. It benefited me and my family. But I do worry that we find ourselves in a whirlpool that it's very hard to get out of because the populace says we don't want to make the cuts that are necessary in order for us to save ourselves. That's what's so scary to me.

53:56And I've said it before, I think it's worth saying again. That's it. I'm done. It's not a problem with populism. I mean, the elites are saying it too. There's no appetite in the DNC to cut over forms of security you kidding? It's very unpopular. How do you get how do you get elected? I don't know why those Republicans How do you get elected saying I hadn't seen that article. I would advise all those campaigns not to touch that rail They're gonna electrocute themselves. I think Trump has the right political instincts on this point Which is you cannot touch the security as a single party effort It has to be bipartisan and there is no bipartisan will to do anything So I think you're you're right about the larger point Chimath, your thoughts on Friedberg's manifesto that 80 % of the public does not want to cut spending.

54:38They're in favor of Social Security for people under 50 years old and we have a trillion dollars in debt payments and we're in a debt spiral because we're borrowing trillion. In 180 days, we're borrowing an extra two trillion. That's the real point. That's the real point. And the end of the fiscal end of days. At the start of the year, the expectation was there we're only going to borrow 1 .6 trillion for the year. Now we're borrowing two trillion and just these two quarters. Let me just state what I think about the Dongray. It's irrelevant. The S &P did it 13 years ago, which is a marginal credit rating agency.

55:12They're at a minimum 13 years away, at a maximum, they're just anxiety -like other people are receiving the sky's true. So that's my first point. Ooh. The second point and the more important one is that I, I, none of you who are always freaking out about this understand this conversation about relativism. All of these conversations are relatively and deal with them in absolutes. On a relative basis, Japan's debt to GDP is 270 percent in growing. On a relative basis, our debt to GDP is half of that. We are the most important economic force in the world. It is going to continue to be the most economic force in world and all I see actually on every single monetary basis is every other country struggling more than we are.

55:59So my question to all of the chicken littles is what do you do if you're a central government where you have to have foreign reserves? Do you all of a sudden double down on the euro? Do you double down in the yuan which is basically a proxy for doubling down in the US dollar? What are you supposed to do? And I never get a good answer because on a relative basis the US will still continue to do well. I think that debt to GDP is a red hearing for a lot of people and I think that the way that people run their personal lives which should take income to debt into consideration. I don't think applies as much to governments and I think these things are going to march forward as a group.

56:43There's not going to be a single G8 country that all of a sudden moves away and starts printing surpluses. It happened almost as an accident and an aberration during the Clinton administration, it'll never happen again. And I think that we shouldn't worry so much because I just don't see an alternative. So give me, instead of telling me how bad this is because you think about your own life and how it would be bad if you had debt to GDP of a, I get it. As a country, give me the alternative country. But just start with that. Can you answer that question? What is the alternative country? Yeah, where would you put your, your wealth, if not the dollar?

57:19Well, let me paint a scenario that's not as dire as a collapse of the US dollars world's reserve currency. Okay. So on this Fitch rate, that's not what I think happens, right? I think this is just purchasing power goes down. That's it. But go ahead, Sucks. Relative to who? He's really to anyone. But what does that mean relative to anyone? Let me paint like a non catastrophic scenario or non -apocalyptic scenario, which is what you saw in this Fitch ratings downgrade, is that the bond market did move at the margins. There was a sell off in the tenure, and as a result, the tenure bond yield moved up to 4 .2%.

57:55So it wasn't a case of everybody shedding all of their US treasuries. It's just that there were market actors at the margins who adjusted their portfolios. Okay, now, Freeberg is saying that the treasuries can have to do another $2 trillion bond offering, and we have trillion dollar plus deficits as far as I can see. And we've got entitlement liabilities on the horizon, and then a political unwillingness to do anything about it. So the deficit's only going to get bigger and bigger. Now, what does that do? It's supply and demand. When the US Treasury needs to keep issuing more and more bonds, at some point the demand for those things gets incrementally saturated, and they have to offer a higher yield.

58:36So what happens? Well, the bond rates go up, And so the 10 year goes up like Freeberg was saying from 4 .2 to somewhere in the 5 to 7 percent range And that doesn't mean that US dollar is not the world's reserve currency It just means that it gets incrementally harder and more expensive to keep financing our debt now What is the result of that? Well if I as an investor could theoretically get 7 % From the US Treasury as the risk -free rate why would I want to take equity risk and put it in the stock market which historically is yielded somewhere in the five to seven percent range. So if I can get my five to seven percent from a risk for US government bond, of course I'm going to do that.

59:16So the discount rate on equities will go up. That means that the stock market relatively on a relative basis will go down. Risk capital will go down. There will be less capital. There will be less capital. There will be less risk capital available for things like venture capital and private equity. There's risk taking of all kinds. And so the economy will just grow slower. It's not like there'll be a collapse. It'll just be this huge albatross around the neck of the private sector. And this is called crowding out. We know that. You know, maybe I give a counter here. I think if you look at the amount of sovereign wealth funds and the investment coming from around the world into US venture capital, that will keep the venture machine cranking here in America.

59:56But three charts to just look at here. Nick, pull up the first one, the 30 year Fed. So to counter this argument, and really the aberration has been 2010 to 2020 when we had low single digit mortgages, 3%, 4%. The majority of our lifetime, it was between five and 10. And if it sticks up in the five to 10 basis, that's what we experience for most of our life. And then the second chart, this is the lowest unemployment we've had in our lifetimes. If you look at the unemployment rate in the United States, 3 .6 is unbelievable. And then combine with it, something we've talked about here for two years that we can't understand is when do all these jobs burn off?

1:00:33We peaked during the post -COVID era at about 11 million job openings. And then we're still over nine. So for, there's two or three job openings for every American who wants to work. And we've shut down the borders largely, even though we have some illegal immigration coming in. It is basically shut down the United States to immigration. It's about a third of what it was before Trump and Biden decided to shut things down. I don't think we're looking at the same video that I'm seeing. Yeah, if you're looking at videos, those are very distracting. I would encourage you to look at the numbers of the actual migration into the country.

1:01:05It's a third of what it was. Do you see what's happening in New York City? They got lines around the blocks. They caught up in clips on from the border. I would just look at the raw numbers, sacks, and the raw numbers. I know the raw numbers. Yeah, because we count them. And we can't, we can't be. Well, they got to estimate them because they're illegal, but they got seven million in the last two and a half years. numbers and the actual statistics than anecdotal videos because both sides will manipulate the hack out of them for their own purposes. But the fact is America is just crushing it in terms of employment.

1:01:34And that's why we didn't have this crash landing. And I think the soft landing is because of employment. And I'll just stand there. And if we can keep ourselves employed and everybody from the Middle East to Japan to high net worth individuals in Europe are pouring their money into the US venture ecosystem. I think the setup here is we got a control spending as you've said correctly freeberg We get a little bit of control on spending hopefully and then we are gonna have to slowly burn off some of this You know debt we can't hear a little kind of debt payments Timat this is from Congressional research service off of Fed data So foreign holdings of US treasuries have declined from 40 % to 30 % of total treasuries 70 % of treasuries today are held by domestic investors.

1:02:21This is the data that was being described in the Treasury Advisory Committee, the borrowing advisory committee letter that I just said is that they're seeing less demand from foreign buyers of treasuries. Now, I can argue, we can argue theoretically about what else they're going to buy and what else they're doing with their money. I don't know. But the data is showing a decline in purchasing intention by foreign buyers of US treasuries. And we're having to pick up the slack through investment funds held by the US, mostly pension, and mostly retirement funds, I would guess, that are buying these treasures.

1:02:52That is not what this chart shows. The chart shows the effect of quantitative easing. That's what this chart shows. Because when you're buying treasuries from the market and retiring them, of course, the percentage of foreign and domestic holdings of publicly held debt is gonna go down. So this last period, explain this ex of QE, explain it. Sorry, I don't understand what you're saying. This is a measurement of the amount of people that own treasuries, is that right? Domestic versus foreign. Yeah, so who owns so as of December 22 there was I'm gonna assume because this chart is fucking worthless if this if it doesn't assume that the domestic holding the gray bar that adds up to a hundred Doesn't include the fed which it must and that is because the fed has been buying treasuries From the market.

1:03:37Okay, so just let me just give you the numbers for a second and then we can take out I'm just looking at the chart the chart is a great bar. That's his domestic holding I'm going to give you there's an orange bar that's as foreign holding you've had 10 years of the fed buying Treasuries. I'm going to give you the numbers. There are 24 trillion dollars of treasuries publicly held treasuries outstanding 7 .4 trillion held in foreign hands the foreign holding of publicly held debt between December of 18 and December 22 increased from 6 .3 trillion to 7 .4 trillion. While other investors increased from 16 trillion to probably 23 trillion.

1:04:18So you know it's we're having to pick up the slack investment funds private investors are having to pick up the slack because of foreign demand for treasuries lagging at this point. That's the point of it. I don't know what I don't know what to tell you. I think what this chart tells me is that the balance sheet of domestic holdings grows because the Fed has been buying treasuries and in a role of QT I suspect that This bar chart will change in the next 10 years. If you look at the histogram 10 years from now, if you assume the Qt sticks around. So I don't know. You can interpret whatever you want to feed your anxiety.

1:04:48It doesn't change that there's a relative problem at hand, which is you cannot sell one thing without buying another. That's just the way it works in financial markets for the central risks. The federal reserve during that same time period increase their treasury holdings. Here's the exact numbers. From 3 .7 trillion to 9 .7 trillion. So they bought 6 trillion of that debt. I think the fact that we're going to go from quantitative easing to quantitative tightening over the next decades another overhang because not the whole outside because not only does the US government need to sell another two trillion Of bonds every year to finance its deficit which basically the addition to the debt you've got the Fed now shedding what like eight trillion They're not shins.

1:05:30They're not they're not they're just not letting them roll off They're letting them roll off and they're not re -issuing them but you actually said the right thing earlier, which is that the risk premium has been shrunk so massively between equities and bonds. These two Trilina bonds that these guys will issue that between the strip will trade from 5 % all the way down to, there'll be a line out the door. I guarantee you. And the reason why is exactly what you said before, David, which is like why not own 5 % paper from the US government? Versus having to like all of a sudden speculate on the S &B 500 or something else.

1:06:03It's a no -brainer and I totally agree with you. But this last two trillion, that'll be the easiest two trillion to sell. There will be a line out the door. Guarantee. Well, there's a line out the door at some price. So my point is that the yield will have to go up to attract those incremental buyers. And as the supply of T -bills becomes a glut, obviously they're going to have to make the yield more attractive in order to keep attracting that marginal buyer. It's just that simple. So yeah, at some price, they'll be able to find a buyer. But that yield will have to get higher and higher over time.

1:06:38And then that crowds eye -proven investment. Because why in the world would you invest in a risky stock when you get 7 % risk for it? What's your alternative? Because again, what do you think the spread to JGB is going to be if that's true? If US Treasury's, okay, if 30 or Treasury's are all over the 7 .5 and a half of Bill Ackman's right, which you can very well be. The other part of what he's not saying is what did JGB look like? What do European bonds look like? You know what they're going to be? they're going to be trading at 300 to 500 basis points above that. It is cataclysmic for the entire world economy.

1:07:08And so we all move in unison. When we suffer, we will suffer less in other countries. And when we win, we will generally win more than other countries. That has typically been true. I suspect it will typically be true. And I don't see anything changing that. Well, hold on, let's assume that you're right. And what happens is that though, let's call it the Western world, and all these governments are basically mired in debts with a few exceptions. I guess Australia is good, Switzerland's good, but the rest have massive debt to GDP as well. So their bonds have to move up with ours, and so their risk premium has to go up as well.

1:07:39So you're right, in lockstep with the US. But now why wouldn't global growth just slow down across this whole Western dollar complex? Coupled with inflation. Coupled with inflation. Right. Which is inevitable. That's basically what's happened in Japan, right? is that they have like a 200 % debt to GDP and they've been very active in your curve control. And so they've controlled the interest rates, but the price of that's been total, I can also say that. I have a big issue, which is the population. They have demographic problems as well, but. That's the main issue there. Is it young people there?

1:08:11There's just not a lot of young people there. I mean, their housing is crazy. If you just look at it, and I think the United States has a lot of innovation. So we will innovate our way out of it, is my belief, which is kind of what we always do. So exciting guys, we can have this conversation with Larry Summers himself at the all in the summer. September. Do we have Ray dolly? We have Ray dolly. Yeah. Are they gonna be on a panel together? Are we really interesting to discuss this topic with the two of them? Maybe overlapped. Well, look at the schedule. Everyone, unfortunately, all our speakers are in tight schedules on when they're in and out, which is why I need Jake out to respond to my, I am to him about finalizing some of our other speakers.

1:08:48But, hey, Jimmy taxed me because I probably he's in like London or he has to be in London. Yeah, you got to figure out how to get him back. Yeah. Yeah. He said he'd fly up, but we got to figure out how to do that. But yeah, we can have this conversation in LA September 10 through 12th. Well, it's sold out. So way to frustrate everybody, I'm getting like all kinds of like LPs and giant folks are like, can I buy a VIP ticket? And I'm like, listen, it's sold out. You had two months to do that. So in other news, the GOPs lead candidate for the 2024 race. Donald Trump has been indicted. for trying to overturn the 2020 election and stop the peaceful transfer of power.

1:09:27The indictment has four counts and is the third criminal case for those of you playing along at home. Four counts include conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding obstruction of an attempt to obstruct an official proceeding conspiracy against rights. Trump campaign, not shockingly called it fake news. The indictment feels like it's got them dead to rights. And this is on top of the oath keepers, founders, Stuart Rhodes getting 18 years, and a bunch of other cases. In addition to that, the DOGA prosecutors also accused Trump of ordering employees to delete security videos.

1:10:08In the classified documents case, the cover -up, of course, being worse than the crime. Looks like they got them dead to rights on that one as well. all of this against the backdrop of DeSantis spending tens of millions of dollars and falling in his percentage. Sacks explain to the audience why this is Hunter Biden's fault and that's a deep -sweat conspiracy. I kid. What are your thoughts on this? When you say they have them debt to rights, like what do you mean by that? What's your basis for saying that? Exactly. What do you... That's a right on what charge? Yeah, so in this indictment, the 45 pages, if you read it, you will see that they put up fake electrodes and they knew that it wasn't going to work and they did it anyway after losing 60 cases.

1:10:57So that's the belief of why this is such a serious case. And then also the cover -up obstructing justice and it looks like some of these maintenance workers are potentially flipping and markminos. They claim has flipped as well. But he listened to everybody. The lock man's case is sort of separate. I mean, I think we should have stick to this. The big news here is - Well, what do you think of the fact that he tried this allegation that he tried to delete the videos? Do you think it's real? Or do you think it's made up on the story? I don't know. That's a detail about a piece of evidence in that case.

1:11:28I do think the documents case is on a sounder legal footing than the January 6th case. More dangerous to him. You're saying? More dangerous, too. It doesn't involve as many novel legal theories. Now, is it really dangerous? I think the American people think that at the end of the day, that documents case is sort of a paperwork case. And there are many other people who violated the classified requirements rules like Sandy Burger or like David Petraeus, like Hillary Clinton, never prosecuted. So I think if they have him dead to rights on any of the cases, is the documents case. But I also think that in the mind of the American people, that in the minds of the American people It feels like DC inside baseball now.

1:12:09I think on this January 6 case About the documents case. What do you personally think? I think if you're gonna prosecute Trump for that You need to prosecute all these other people who violated classified documents rules What do you think about him Sandy Berger who worked for Clinton? It was a national security advisor stuffed his pants. Yeah with classified documents from one of those clean rooms and Got away with the slap on the wrist. What do you think? Now? I don't over turn the election Well, look, do you think he tried to overturn the election? I mean, just a basic fact. Let me state right away that I think that what Trump did in the wake of the 2020 election was indefensible.

1:12:46I said so at the time. I said that. Did I give a credit? I did say it. What I said is that once the Supreme Court, once the courts in general throughout his case and once the Supreme Court denied Sir Shiori, it was time for him to stop. And he kept going. Yeah, it was time for him to stop. And he did it. And so I think that his actions were indefensible. However, when you're talking about criminal prosecutions, they can't just be an expression of condemnation. You actually have to prove that somebody engaged your criminal behavior. And the issue here with this January 6 case is that it relies on novel legal theories.

1:13:20There's actually a really good article in the New York Times of all places explaining this. Do you think there was a possibility that he, If he could have, he would have turned over the election if Penn said going along with it. No, you're getting into a bunch of hypotheticals here. The question is whether these charges will actually stand up to scrutiny. Let me read you what David Lee and Art from the New York Times reported, because I actually think when you have the New York Times saying that the case is weak, I think it's really indicative. So, what the New York Times says, or Lee and Art says, is shocking as it was, Trump's behavior on January 6th did not violate any laws in obvious ways.

1:13:59He never directly told those that January 6th rally to attack Congress during his speech that day. He even said he knew that protesters would behave peacefully and patriotically. It was part of a long sitting Trump pattern in which, as my colleague Maggie Haverman puts it, quote, he is often both all over the place and yet somewhat careful not to cross certain lines and quote. As for Trump's broader effort to overturn the election result, no federal law specifically bar's politicians were attempting to do so. Without such a law, Smith has relied on a novel approach. She has charged Trump with committing criminal fraud, violating conspiracy laws that were not written to prevent the overturning of election result.

1:14:36And then he says that you keep part of these laws, they revolve around a person's intent. And tend is core to the notion of fraud, only if someone is knowingly trying to deceive others can he be committing a fraud. And he says that's why the case seems like they're evolved around Trump's state of mind. So the problem with this is they have to only prove that what Trump did in the wake of the election was indefensible and outrageous and all the things that you believe. They have to prove that Trump knew that he lost the election and knowingly perpetrated the fraud. And I don't think you'll be able to ever prove that beyond a reasonable doubt.

1:15:06But even though, yes, there are statements that they point to. Yeah, they got all those statements and then Bill Barr, Mark Meadows, everybody's flipped on him, Pence has flipped on him, they're all flipped on him. They're same as others people. Yes, but Trump also had this whack pack of lawyers. So you had Giuliani and you had Sydney and Johnny Eastman and Michael and Del the pillow guy. They were all in the White House telling Trump that Listen you won the election you've been robbed and there are valuable leal grounds for you to contest this and Trump for years Has been maintaining the stolen election narrative even when his advisors have told him this is not good for you The guy has stolen election on the brain.

1:15:44Okay every interview, he's brought this up even when it's manifestously harmful to himself and the Republican Party. So this idea that you can prove that he doesn't really believe the election was stolen. The one thing I believe about Trump is that he really does believe the election was stolen. And I think you will never be able to prove, be on a reasonable doubt, that he is knowingly lying about that. And as a result of this, you can never prove this case. Now, it also relies on this novel theory. They are turning the civil rights line to a pretzel to try and figure out a way to indict Trump or prosecute him under this novel legal theory of committing fraud against the American people.

1:16:25Okay, this ain't novel legal theory that's never been tried before. And by the way, if you're going to create that as a precedent, I hope we're going to go after those the signers of the Lancelotter we talked about because they committed a fraud against American people. I hope that we will prosecute the 51 spies who lied because they perpetrated a fraud against American people I hope also and I hope we will go after the authors of that steel dossier Because they perpetrated a fraud of the American people there's a lot of people in Washington who've perpetrated a fraud in the American people I hope we're gonna go after all of them, but my point is this is not the job of a prosecutor to be creative with the law ever I mean they are supposed to apply the law strictly as written they're supposed to bring cases that are open and shut and And what Jack Smith is doing here is going for this bank shot where he wants to charge Trump with incitement, but he knows he can't win that case.

1:17:17So he's going for this back door or civil rights law to sidestep the first amendment problem. And it might be this is an abuse of prosecutorial power. And once you let prosecutors get creative like this, you're on a slippery slope to show me the man. I'll show you the column as installance Russia. So listen, I believe that again, Trump's actions were illegitimate and outrageous, but again, the purpose of criminal law is not to express disapproval. You have to prove these cases in an open and shut way without novel the Gil Thierry's. I just want to say I need to give, I need to give Sats a 10 out of 10 for this last piece.

1:17:50That was absolutely, absolutely. Jason, here's the question I asked you. Do you believe that Trump was guilty of inciting an insurrection? Absolutely. Yeah. When he told those people to go down. Why hasn't Jack Smith indicted Trump? They've indicted Trump on all these different charges with over 500 years of jail time And they have not indicted him for a site. They could always add to the charges And so I suspect when they start flipping people they will but you know, it's kind of No, no, no, no, no, no, hold on hold on This is the question. Here's the thing. You know what? 30 % of people in the Republican Party about 30 % of this country have Trump Stockholm syndrome, they cannot let go of Trump.

1:18:32And so there's no reason to debate it with the GOP. They have TSS and it's you're going to defend him to the dying day. You're going to do what about isms the Republican Party will never accept the fact that this person's a criminal. He's corrupt and he's a horrible human being and he he is not fit to serve and you're going to serve him up as your candidate. It's disgraceful. The GOP is a disaster for actually supporting him. and the guy has no morality and he would have overturned the government if he had the chance. And he will do it again. Can I respond to this? So let me have a couple of different points here.

1:19:04Okay, yeah, so many points as you want. I don't know. And they got that. They're all absolutely fixated on January 6th. And it's the people who've been trying to whip this up and make it into a crime and event all these novel legal charges and haven't stopped talking about it for the last two and a half years. I'm so sick of talking about this whole January 6th thing. I don't want this to be our politics. Okay. the people who've made it our politics include the mainstream media. It's all the people on CNN and MSNBC won't stop talking about it. And part of the reason why I think Trump's likely will be the nominee is because they are creating a backlash in the GOP where people basically think that he's being unfairly prosecuted and persecuted.

1:19:43Now to my question, why aren't they charging him with incitement? That is the crime that the media says he has committed for the last two and a half years. So why aren't they charging him? Because the DOJ looked at that at the beginning of 2021 Merrick Arland's DOJ looked at that and they did a report and found that they could not win that case and When that came out the media and even biting himself so that Merrick Arland was basically being a whim and should be tougher And so that's when they appointed Jack Smith to be the special counsel to go find some other way of prosecuting him And so that's why they've invented this novel legal theory now I think the reason why we should care about this, that has nothing to do with wanting to defend Trump or make him the nominee, is that I don't think our political system should be weaponized this way, because when they can start inventing novel legal theories to get somebody, that's what they've done here, Jason.

1:20:36It's showing me the man, I'll show you the bride. No, no. Trump tried to overthrow and reverse the election, and he tried to do that by putting up a fake slate and he tried to convince Pence to go along with it. Pence is an honorable person who wouldn't go along with it. And everybody in his cabinet said, this is a bridge too far. His supporters from bar to Pence, tomatoes, all told him, please stop what you're doing is illegal. You cannot overturn the government, the election results. But are you saying this and are you saying this is an expression of condemnation against Trump? Or are you saying that that Jack Smith actually has?

1:21:15I think it'll be proven that he broke a lot of the proof and in the documents case that he also tried to cover it up But that's just my opinion. I believe that he's a criminal I believe he will be held accountable I think he should be held accountable for trying to overthrow the election. He tried to overturn the election That is the most treasonous thing you can do you can come up with all of your Defense of it charge him with incitement They're not done that they've invented this novel. He is a very smart guy when it comes to avoiding accountability. And I think that it's his, the clock is running out for him.

1:21:46You know what, Jake, how do you not think that it's a little surprising that all of these charges are hitting years after this event took place in the months leading up to the Republican primary? No, I think it's, that's the weirdest thing to me is like, why would it take so many years to prosecute someone? All those guys that went into capital, the capital building, they all got charged with crimes years ago, you know, two years ago. Why is he just falling on Trump today? It's like they because Trump and Jerry I mean the case. Yeah, and they take time to build is because I will say it does feel like it is interrupting a political process that if there were criminal charges to be filed, I would have liked to have seen them filed two years ago.

1:22:28So this could all get adjudicated ahead of a political cycle. Now that it's in the middle of a political cycle, it makes me as a US citizen and nervous about the fact that there are agencies interfering in the political cycle. You're so right. He could have given the documents back when they asked for them and he could have said, don't delete the tapes. We're talking about both. I'm talking about both. Yeah, and it takes. It does. It takes a subject to the case that is. No, I'm talking about both cases. I'm talking about both cases concurrently. We're talking about the case. In that case, I will say the documents back.

1:22:54The document is more solid but less important. Okay. I should read an art says this in the New York Times. But you asked me a question. I think it takes time to build a case properly and it took them a long time to make a to get to the 400 people who attacked the Capitol and brought tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition to the Capitol and put it in three hotels, which is why the Oathkeepers got 18 years. 400 people have gotten sentenced in that for good reason. They beat cops, they beat, they broke down their way into the Capitol and they brought dozens of AR -15s and they bought tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition and placed them in hotels around the Capitol.

1:23:32these are dangerous domestic tariffs. They would have shot a lot of that. That's not what he's been in. Dited for. No, I'm talking about who they they already got those oath keepers on 18 years. I just want to read this one sentence from from Leonardo just to wrap this up because this is the New York Times. This is the New York Times. He says you can think of the new charges being both more important and less solid than Trump's previous federal indictment. Yeah, I'm listening. Everybody's going to have different opinions on this. I get that. I just So he has his day in court and I think he's guilty and I think it will be proven that he's guilty and that it's time to start Moving this towards a pardon and figuring out how to get him out of political life and give him a pardon for all these crimes He's committed and let him off the hook But get him out and so that your party can feel the good candidate.

1:24:20That's what I hope happens I think one of the really tragic side effects of these prosecutions where they're inventing novel legal theories clearly to get this man for what he did even though it was outrageous but I don't think criminal in the way you wanted to be Jason. But the really tragic thing about this. I would rather he didn't do this criminal activity. Yeah, I get it. I get it. I already denounced it. I'm not defending his actions. I'm defending the integrity of our legal system. Really the tragic thing about this, the tragic thing about this is that I want the 2024 election to be about issues.

1:24:52It's not. It's gonna be a referendum on what happened in 2020. And there is no way to convince either side of the American people that they're wrong about that. The MSNBC, CNN crowd are gonna believe that Trump is guilty of a crime no matter where this case comes out. And by the way, I think Trump's actually gonna win this case. Maybe not in the DC jury pool, but I think he'll win it on appeal. Because I just... Is it a Supreme Court? I think if you have to say it's from where he's gonna win it. because there's a novel legal theory. By the way, Jack Smith took a case against the Virginia governor to the stream court, got overturned on appeal in 9 -0 because of an outrageous legal theory there.

1:25:28So that same thing could happen here, I think it probably will. But those people who believe in this will never be convinced, and by the same token, Trump supporters, the other half of the country will never be convinced that this was not a political persecution. It's tedious. So this will tear the country apart. And to Freeberg's point, it's two and a half years later, we could have just moved on. There's plenty of other things. They already have the documents case. So this is a political prosecution by Biden's own... Do you have any way to get out of this? What's your solution to get out of this?

1:26:00We should have just moved on. Oh, not charge them. Listen, the proper forum to deal with this was the impeachment hearing. The second impeachment was expressly on the correct charge, was whether Trump incited insurrection. They already have this trial. The proper form was that impeachment trial. He made it through and it's up to voters to take this trick out. He said the proper one was to go criminal. So it was interesting. Yeah. He said that impeachment was the wrong way to do it. They should just do the criminals. So here we are doing the criminal thing. The country should move forward. And instead we're going to join the party on it.

1:26:34And this is what 2024 is now going to be about. What do you think, for your Burke? What do you think is a good path forward? I kind of align with the fact that this is a little bit too late. It's in the middle of an election cycle and the damage that it will cause in terms of how our country views the intersection between the justice system and the electoral process can be more damaging than the benefit we would gain from bringing an individual to justice for breaking the law in this case. Unfortunately, the timing is just off and I think it's really scary. All right, Jason, you have to ask what is actually going to strengthen our democracy and what is the wisdom of bringing these charges.

1:27:12I think this case shows a lack of wisdom. I don't think it's going to strengthen our democracy. I think it's going to undermine it. It's going to make this country more polarized and hyperpartisan. And it's not going to help us move past this era of our politics. And I believe that. We've got a question towards me. I think Trump is responsible for part of that polarization. But I think Biden now is playing into it from the other side. I don't think we've had a president seek to indict his leading political opponent who's likely to be a selfish involved in this. This is the Justice Department. He's not driving it.

1:27:43Wait a second. That is not true. Okay. Yeah. He's not involved in it. No, there's an article in which Biden said that when Merrick Garland refused the incitement charges that he thought that it was weakened that Biden thought that Trump deserved he prosecuted. And that was a public article is in the New York Times and I'll provide the note. Okay. Sure. What's your question for me? You have a question? You said you wanted to ask me a question. No, no, I didn't say a question. I just think you can respond. But my point is I now think that Biden has crossed a line year. And just remember, this is not an independent prosecutor.

1:28:17Jack Smith works for Merrick Garland, who works for Joe Biden. This is a banana or a public type stuff. This is one president's DOJ seeking to prosecute his main political opponent. Who put Merrick Garland in? Biden appointed him. Yeah. Yeah, so this has been the all -in podcast Tremac had to bounce for a brick congratulations on okay 99 hope it happens Sacks are about congratulations to you to congratulations to you to sex if It's proven to be real we will all Benefit so it's great. Yeah, right and we'll see you all good for all of time on Let your winners ride Bring man David Satin And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

1:29:08I'm the west. I'm the queen of Kenwai. I'm going on a beach. What? What? What? What? What? What? I'm flying. I'm flying. Besties are gone. Go through the teeth. That is my dog taking a wish to drive away. Sit next. Get it off. Oh man. My ham is the ash. We meet the ash. We should all just get a room and just have one big hug or two. Because they're all like this, like this sexual tension, but we just need to release them out.