E154: Presidential Candidate Dean Phillips in conversation with the Besties + Xi's SF visit & more

24:58They just want to pretend like he didn't exist and they basically drove him out of the party So now he's running as an independent. Do you think you're gonna be able to get on the ballot as a Democrat on in these primaries? Absolutely and we're making those choices right now David because First of all, it's obscene. I want to let you all know that in a country that prides itself on being a democracy, a democratic republic, I can't even tell you how many states literally create high barriers to entry to satisfy the two parties to ensure that their coronated candidate has an advantage over anybody else.

25:31I'm talking about... The most egregious ones. Give us an example of what you have to do. Oh, the most egregious are oftentimes the deepest blue. New Yorkism is close to impossible. When I say impossible. How so explain it to us, like what you have to do. So the reason I started in New Hampshire is it has 103 year old tradition of being the first in the nation primary. They take this really seriously. They're the most engaged Americans in the country. They have a process. We walk through the snow, we answer their questions. And you also, all you need is a $1 ,000 check. You gotta be 35 years old.

26:03You got to be born in the United States of America and you too can become a candidate for president of the United States. That's what I did. They have the most beautiful ritual in the state house in Concord, New Hampshire, that is worth going to one time just to see the majesty of filing for president of the United States. So there are 21 of us on the Democratic side of the ballot because that's how it should be. Take a state like Virginia. Wait, wait, hold on. There's 21 people running for the Democratic. But that's incredible. I have no idea. Yeah, Chimac 21, Marianne Williamson and I are the best known of those 21 because the president of the United States chose not to.

26:43So that's how you have it. You ask about other states though, New York, Virginia, $450 to $500 ,000 to pay consulting firms, to pay people $25, $26 per signature to just sit outside and just say, hey, can we you're sitting in sure to get this guy in a ballot. No, it's not grassroots. It's not old school caucusing democracy. It is paid a play. And we would need it. We would need a, we're going to have to raise. Probably six, maybe, I'm sorry, maybe less than that, maybe five million dollars. We have a staff of three people right now and legal counsel just to get my name on a primary ballot. It's absurd.

27:25Mary and Williamson, you know, she's not going to be able to. RFK as an independent, by the way, I think he should be. I'm not someone who I'm concerned about some of his positions, but I think he should be able to get on the ballot. It's, you guys, it's absurd, it's obnoxious, and what I've discovered in the last three weeks is going to be my mission after being president to fix because it is going to destroy the country from the inside. And that is why we have the kind of candidates we have year after year after year in America and say they're, then that's why we have Trumpism. I like the fact that...

27:57you know, most people become politicians as a career of hard to against this for a while. And so they have everything to lose if they stand up against the party and they stand up against the political establishment within which they're meant to operate. And therefore, just a few people get to make all the decisions and control all the levers and everyone else is just a marry and at. And they stay there forever, Dave. And they stay there forever. And there's no term limits, which is what we need. That's why we need them. The fact that you're self -made and you don't have anything to lose you can leave Congress and you'll be fine You you're a citizen that can go back to work and do what you do and you're doing this as a service You're doing this because of your interest in the country It sounds like other not to say that other folks don't But they're largely going to be driven and unfortunately Adversely affected by the fact that they have to fall within the way that the game has played in order to operate and will not stand up and say the things that need to be said in in order for us to make progress and get out of these situations.

28:54But those are the perverse incentives. I commend you for doing it. I'm glad it's possible. I think Jason, we should probably talk about the top. We have two topics that I think are all passionate here. The first is foreign policy. The second is the budget and our out of control spending. Let's start with SACs. You said you wanted hard questions. Welcome to the pod. SACs, pod policies. Let's bring it. Before we hear about you, well, this is said hard questions. Let's go. Please meet David SACs. Hey David. Dean, you said a minute ago that one of the reasons why the world's on fire is because of the Biden administration's handling of foreign policies kind of led us to this point.

29:30I think there was a really good example of this, but we could go. There was a new report out by a former UN Assistant Secretary General, named Michael Bonder Schulumberg, who worked at the UN for 34 years. He did a detailed study and reconstruction of what happened in March of 2022. So the month after the war and what he concluded is there was a bonafide Deal on the table between Russia and Ukraine where Putin was willing to pull back and leave and leave the territorial integrity of Ukraine intact if Ukraine would agree not to become part of NATO and this is something that's been discussed There's been many reports of this over the last several months Ukrainian prof.

30:13Had a story about that But now there's yet another confirmation that such a deal was available and yet Boris Johnson and Joe Biden said no We want a pressure Putin not work out a piece deal with him and So thanks to Western intervention that deal never happened now we're 20 months later and Ukrainian counter -offensive has failed. It's been a fiasco the casualties have been Absolutely massive So horrifying. You saw there was this article on Time Magazine, this new profile of Zelensky, where his own AIDS and avisors say that he's delusional. You can't accept that they're losing the war. They furthermore say that even if the US provides more weapons, more aid, they don't have enough men, they're enough soldiers to use them.

30:57Things are going that badly. I think there's now a fear that Ukraine could collapse in the next year, even if we provide more aid. So I guess, I know that early on in the war, you supported Biden's policy. see, I'm wondering, have events on the ground now change your view at all? How do you feel about it today? Do you think it was a mistake not to try and work out a peace deal in those early months of the war? And if you were president, what would you try and do differently now to try and end this thing? Well, first of all, I think we have to back up to 2014 to talk about this, David. You know, first of all, I've seen that reporting.

31:32I do not have confirmation of the validity of that. And if I did, I could talk about it more directly, but if that's the truth, I would first ask to that include Crimea. And secondly, it is not a United States decision about whether or not Ukraine should agree to a peace deal. It is Ukraine's decision, plain and simple. But I do want to turn back the clock a little bit, because I think this all kind of plays together. But it didn't include Crimea. But Zalinsky was willing to go for that deal. And it was the last two intervening and said, no, we want you to pressure Putin and fight. David, like I said, I never speak to him, unless I can verify that myself.

32:09And I've not seen that intelligence in the skiff. I've not seen that presented to me. And by the way, there are some times where I don't know, most times, none of us know it, everything. If that is the case, I would absolutely answer this question differently. But based on what I do know, I want to turn back the clock to 2014. This is where foreign policy matters. President Obama was a great order. I think an inspirational leader. He came to the US presidency with only organizing state legislative and a couple or a few years of a Senate experience as a very young man. And Joe Biden was his vice president.

32:45And when Vladimir Putin took Crimea, easily, that set the tone for what's going on right now. And we have not done a very good job of prevention. That's true in healthcare. That is true in poverty. that is true in our foreign policy, which is by the way maybe what happens when you spend 83 billion a year on diplomacy and 850 billion a year on bombs and missiles not to mention go back to Eisenhower and the military industrial complex David and you well know this it does it controls a lot of our policy because those who are making great profit Find ways to influence those who open the piggy banks I think the Crimea moment in 2014, the writing was on the wall, that was Putin's test.

33:32If I take an inch, maybe they'll give me a mile. And what happened during the Biden presidency, of course, he took the mile. I think it has implications now, though, David and all of you. If we do not do our best to support Ukraine and defending, I think it doesn't just send a message to Putin, a post -Pooten Russia, which is going to be a failed nation with a brain drain and something we should talk about, but also sends a message to Iran, North Korea, and even China, and I want to talk about that too, because I think we have a much brighter future with them than most people portray as it relates to Taiwan.

34:04And that's the sad truth is we get ourselves into these situations that then layer up the consequences by withdrawing. And Afghanistan was another example of that. So to answer your question, had there been a peace deal at that point that simply would than the deal would have been, will give you your territory back in return for not entering NATO. Who in the right mind would say that was a bad deal? Who in the right mind? Especially for Johnson. Well, by the way, that's really good when you get people like, well, I'm going to make this case as you guys know for comprehensive new generation of leaders all around the world in our country and in others that are sick of this nonsense, sick of the bloodshed, sick of enriching enterprise at the expense of human beings.

34:46It happens here. It happens in Ukraine and Russia and it's happening in the Middle East. Plain and simple. Sax anything else on foreign policy you want to go to? Hacking off now would be I think a shameful, horrible mistake. One thing I would argue right now, David, is those who are most likely going to be subject to Putin's terror, the countries in Europe should be carrying a much bigger, bigger part of this load. We have 750 bases and installations around the world in 80 countries where the most dominant presence in world history of any government. And we spend more on our military than the next, I think 11 nations combined for God's sake.

35:27And if anyone thinks that a kinetic risk to the United States is the most likely harm that will be done us, not cyber or not social or not biological, I think you're out of your mind. And those are the risks that I think are most threatening, that I think this president does not quite understand. And we have to recomprise and recommit to diplomacy and defending ourselves against the most important literal risks, including nuclear weapons that can be carried in a backpack and detonated in New York or Tel Aviv or anywhere in the world. And if we don't start changing how we do things, we're not going to be ready and we are just sitting still in dysfunction.

36:08Okay, I'm gonna change it. Let's talk about China for one second. I'll give it to you in two arcs. Arc number one, the comments that President G made yesterday, which were very if you just heard them or read them, were very specific. We have zero desire to seek Chinese hegemony. We have zero desire to find a cold or hot war, which was, but then there is what wasn't said, which is part of what you said, which is well, okay, maybe there's no kinetic war, but the cyber risk is still there. And actually, the psychological war risk is there. So two questions. One is, how do you react to what President G said last night?

36:53And then the second is, how do you react to what's happening with this TikTok of some of Bin Laden, Sia, thing that just seems to be, frankly, just getting out of control here? I agree. Well, let me say I was so pleased to see President Xi's remarks. I think President Biden responded by saying we should trust but verify. I think that's appropriate. I was troubled though when a question was shouted out to President Biden on his way out about whether he considered President Xi a dictator and he said, yes, he's a dictator. And I think that may have undermined this entire rapprochement, which I think is terribly important.

37:30You know, words matter. The playbook matters and the negligence or ignorance of another culture as it digests our words, our actions, our intentions is very consequential. And unfortunately we see this pattern with the president of doing what he did today in using that term. Whether or not it's really true or not, there are ways as we all know to simply not comment because that is going to undermine I think a very important otherwise, very promising outcome. And to your question, I'm concerned that we have made China, perhaps into the very enemy that is sensibly now our military and test real complex, wants to defend us from, which happens time and time and time again through our history.

38:20And it concerns me deeply. We should be partnering with China. Our disagreements are real. I think they should be litigated and bridged with diplomacy and not destruction. And imagine what can be accomplished in this 21st century world if two nations like ours recognize the potential of spending less on destruction and more on human beings. It astounds me. Do you think TikTok itself is a threat to the United States? So, if you're a president, ban it or force them to divest and remove the servers in China and the algorithm from China, et cetera. I'll make this really simple. He's making it actually being used for science.

38:59I'll make this really simple. If we want to change our constitution and change what we consider speech, change how the federal government or any domestic government affects people's rights to what they watch, what they read, what they eat, how they pray, how they think, where they go, with whom they congregate, you know what, that's up to Americans. But I think to target one app is a huge mistake. And my I have a very simple solution hold every single platform to the same standard transparency via their algorithm have an independent commission perhaps that is discharged and responsible with assessing and holding those platforms to account.

39:40And if any of them violate the terms that we pass into law, then they should be banned. But to target one, I think it's not sensible. We do have foreign ownership rules for media outlets. Let's see. So there's many more users and is much more powerful with the algorithm. So then how would you respond to that sort of counter -argument? I'm just going to say this. If we want to change our constitution, this is what the Supreme Court, I'm afraid, is going to say if we start doing this, then change the constitution. That's what they said by the way about a women's reproductive rights. In the absence of Congress doing anything, in the absence of that, we're going to assess it the way it reads right now.

40:17I don't think that's necessarily really possible without a significant Supreme Court challenge. My belief is yes. Is it a threat? Yes, it's a threat. By the way, every social media platform is a threat when used by malign actors. You know, nearly 80 % of the... To advocate for reciprocity. If we allow TikTok, they allow Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. I think that's the kind of thinking Jason I like. In fact, reciprocity as it relates to IP, enforcement of IP, of theft, of trade. You just hit the nail on the head. reciprocity. You know, let's let's be reciprocal in the nature of a relationship.

40:52If you're going to ban our apps and our platforms, our products, or our brands, well why this is to me an opportunity for the next generation to say this is nonsensical. You know, if you're going to succeed, by the way, China you all know has significant, they have a bubble there facing that will make ours in 2008 look like a gumball by comparison. And that is coming down the pipe. I think that has a lot to do with this kind of step towards rapprochement. But yes, reciprocity. And to know that Facebook is not allowed. Yeah, perfect example. But in the United States, that doesn't change my contention that we should set the same standard for every platform, every media entity, whatever it might be, hold them accountable and if they don't qualify or perform, then they're banned.

41:38Give us your just maybe societal then commentary on the number of people on TikTok right right now. Advocating for, I don't even know what you want to call it. I guess reading and sympathizing with some of the lines. Justification. Well, first of all, I'm sure you guys do too. I look at TikTok. I consume as much media as many platforms as possible. So I understand why some of the nonsensical perspectives are being shared with me by so many people right now. So I get it. But back to the fundamental mental question. What do we do? This has been, by the way, an age old issue since our very founding.

42:15It used to be anonymous pamphlets that would spread misinformation or condemnation and fire people up. Now it's just instantly available. It doesn't matter if you have a printer, you can push a button. And yes, am I concerned, of course, I am. The fact that when I'm spending time on college campuses right now and listening to otherwise really well -educated, privileged kids, same things that are so nonsensible, so ignorant, and And so shocking, I know where it's coming from. So I understand the problem just like all of you. I think this question is, what do you do about it? And all I'm saying is we should have the same standard for every platform because the same issue is on every platform.

42:52That is my only thing. What do you think about, you're about to say this, but what do you think about what Nikki Haley suggested? You know, I was shocked that people, maybe just frame for the listeners who don't know what she says. So Nikki Haley, and I asked Mark Zuckerberg this one. So to all tell you Nikki Haley proposed that every platform every social media platform have verified accounts No more anonymous accounts And she got ripped Got ripped You know, I understand this is this is it's a reasonable argument to have But I got to tell you I'm a surprise that that's something that seemed somewhat reasonable to people who are paying attention would have such a Such a response that she actually retracted it.

43:32I'm not proposing it I'm just saying that I think we should be throwing ideas on the table and I know from experience just like you guys when you hide behind a fake name you can be not just a jerk to someone you can be downright dangerous. When your name's attached to it you behave in a very different manner not to mention what you're face to face. So I don't think that was as absurd as people considered it. I asked Mark Zuckerberg after a financial services hearing a couple years ago. Why doesn't Facebook just verify accounts make this so much easier to hold people accountable and have higher standards of accountability.

44:05And he said it would be a competitive disadvantage. Well, of course it actually only had to do it. Yeah, and this has been tested. Korea had their version of this in order to sign up in Korea for their social networks or ISPs. You had to use your social security number. Sure, and that makes sense. And now the other thing guys is you know that, you know, if you write a letter to the editor of most major newspapers, you have to attach your name to it. It has to be verified. It's this I just think it's a conversation that we should be having and by the way, you know, it might be time to read Future Shock again by Alvin Toffler who predicted so much of this mess in which we find ourselves the incapacity of human beings to adapt to such rapid technological change, which by the way, you know, you all in this, you just the handful of you on this podcast have more expertise than the entire United States Senate and Congress is combined as it relates to the issues we're talking about.

45:02On tech, there is no capacity, no competency. So on whom do we rely? The very lobbyists being paid by the very enterprises that so easily can set the standards. Right. There aren't people of better capacity. And only 11 members of Congress have an engineering degree. Only 11. By the way, I was, I was on Kevin McCarthy invited me to join his AI cabinet, which just it was a few four Democrats, about four Republicans. We had our first meeting and started making plans right before he was deposed. And now I don't know anything. If anything's going on in that respect. Where do you stand on the spectrum of decorum online on one end and free speech on the other?

45:42Where the absolutist would say absolutely not verified accounts as a non -starter because it just fundamentally undermines the First Amendment and this other thing which is more organized decorum. Jamal, I think that's the issue of our day. Maybe the most important when it's true, both online. It's also true in our Congress right now. Where's that intersection between debate, discord, and comprehensive division? I don't have the good answer for it right now. Is the truth? And I'm afraid that if you interpret our Constitution, free speech has to be met with more free speech. But I'll tell you, but that also will conflict and increasingly is with the right to pursue do happiness.

46:24I mean, that's just true. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's the most complicated issue in our era. When I like to see our kids safer and our mental health and emotional health improve and the division reduced and misinformation and disinformation rectified, of course, because I do think. Would you put a minimum age on use of social networks? You have kids. Would you make it 15, 16 years old? I think it would be healthier. Look, we have minimum age for alcohol.

46:52That's, fight in the war for God's sakes. It's ridiculous. You know, we have three. cannabis is still banned at the federal, the hypocrisy of the federal government is also what I'm running against right now. So Jason, I think that is a good idea. You know this. And I've had daughters that grew up in the social media era. It is one of the most destructive. It is far, it is as destructive as I think drug consumption to adolescent health as anything else. So to answer a question, I think that's a perfectly legal, be perfectly reasonable. And you You can't just entrust parents to do it because Johnny's parents will allow them to have the phone and the apps.

47:26And Jill's won't. And there has to be, I think there has to be. We do that for a lot of other things and I think we should talk about what age any of this is reasonable, but absolutely I think that's not unreasonable. I want kids to be safe just like you guys. That sounds like driving a car is a good match there. 15, 16, 17 years old. We should also allow kids to learn how to drink before they learn how to drive. We're the only country that does it like this. Drive for five years until you legally can drink. So when you have your first drink, you don't even know what it's going to do to you. Yeah, it's absurd.

47:54Frabour. I know we're going to talk about spending in a second, but just before we get away from foreign policy, I think it's important that we ask, what would be your goals with respect to conflict in the Middle East? What's the strategy you'd enjoy to achieve those goals and who are the people that eat around yourself with? Well, tell you, my strategy is quite simple. It's peace around the world and it's prosperity at home, plain and simple. And I can put the legs of that stool together for you as quickly as I possibly can, but let's talk about the Middle East. You know, I'm 54 years old. President Biden has been in the U .S.

48:28Senate or in the White House for 50 years. None of us on this podcast have lived through anything but bloodshed, reciprocal misery between Palestinians and Israelis. This cycle has continued for decades. I've had enough. I cannot stand the sight of babies being pulled from the the wounds of mothers by Hamas and Israel. Any more than I can watch babies being destroyed by bombs and missiles in Gaza and it's got to stop. I am about to issue a statement to that end that says essentially Hamas must release all of its hostages period of which there are nine Americans guys. 9 Americans are being held in Gaza by a terrorist organization.

49:12And as President, I would be making that might not my daily desire or request, my daily demand, all hands on deck, these hostages must be released immediately. Would you send in special forces to collect them? I would. Absolutely. It is incumbent on the President of the United States to extract Americans being held against their will by any foreign entity. I don't know. I got to ask him. But good luck at seeing him because he doesn't do any press conferences. The goal for peace is reasonable, but these, like maybe some specifics around your strategy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so first, at the moment, the hostages are safely released, there should be a ceasefire period.

49:49And at that very moment, there should be a multinational peacekeeping force sent into Gaza to maintain security immediately. When I say multinational, the very nations that are connected to Gaza, Arab nations have to be part of it. not the United States, not Israel, of course, but a significant force there to keep the peace immediately. Concurrently, a multinational coalition designed to eliminate Hamas by every nation in the world that wants them eliminated, which frankly is most. And then we have got to invest again, nations of the world investing in a democratic civil society, infrastructure, education, facilities, and security, so that a new generation of Palestinian leaders can create a circumstance whereby another nation can be created, period.

50:34And it's not going to happen with Israel and Palestinians trying to do this. It has got to be imposed. It has got to be a coalition of the willing. And then only then, when we see the conditions for, hopefully, elections for Palestinians for the first time since 2006, 17 years. And concurrently, it is time for Israelis to call an election to replace Benjamin Netanyahu because he is absolutely part of Israel's security problem. I've looked him in the eye. I told him before this happened earlier this year, I've been with him twice. Looked him in the eye, I said, what you are doing is affecting the relationship with the United States and Israel and will absolutely affect security moving forward.

51:15I had no idea what would be coming in October 7th. But the settlement policy, the right -wing government, the distraction that the judicial reform initiative has created in that country is made the conditions ripe and by the way having been in re -odd recently too, you know, it was really getting close. The Saudis and the Israelis normalizing and that was exactly why I believe whether it was implicit or explicit, Iran inspired Hamas to do this then and by the way, in the United States, mark my words. There are our adversaries are watching the dysfunction and distraction right now with the same open eyes and we have borders that are awfully easily to get in and that's the truth and I'm a Democrat saying that I would do this entirely differently.

52:00Can you actually talk about the border? Tell us what should we do there? Once again, I've got a lot of colleagues who make their decisions by reading an article, seeing a tweet or seeing a TikTok. I go, you know, I've been to Israel and the Middle East twice just in the last number of months. I've been to the Southern border twice. I've seen with my own eyes. It is the most despicable, embarrassing, failure of American policy I have ever seen. I have seen women walking across the Rio Grande with babies in their arms who have spent six or $7 ,000 dollars their whole life savings paid to gangs and coyotes to bring them across the border.

52:38I've seen the extraordinary beauty and grace with which Border Patrol agents have looked after these people. I've seen babies who were abandoned that were on 24 -hour care reporter patrol agents who took as good a care of these little kids as they would their own. I saw people in cages. I saw the most archaic out of date inefficient, ineffective ports of entry. I saw lines of trailer trucks, probably two, three miles long, idling in the hot weather, waiting to get across. I saw a mile long of human beings waiting to come into the country to do their shopping or their job or their education, and it was horrifying.

53:17And if we think, by the way, we need much better border security, barriers, technologies, and facilities. And by the way, we also needed at the Northern border. I'm a border state in Minnesota. People walk across farm fields in Manitoba and in Minnesota. We don't know who they are. Some of them get caught. That's true. But I'll tell you guys, if we think that we can solve the problem at the border, that's the issue right there. This administration and past ones just don't get it. We should be adjudicating asylum cases in countries of origin. Why make these poor people take their life savings that they have no money?

53:50They're set off in the streets here. They're supposed to come back to a court two years from now. Let them keep their money. Let's build dormitories next to our consulates or our embassies in the northern triangle countries, wherever migrants are coming. Create some safety security there. Invest in local economies so that there can be some opportunity. And adjudicate their cases there if they qualify. Why? Let's bring them to America with six or seven thousand dollars in their pocket so they can start a nice new life and pursue the American dream. And if they don't, they will be kept in their countries of origin.

54:22And of course, we have to work with Mexico as well. But this is not rocket science. It's simple problem solving. And the fact that we continue to do this stupid policy to this day, you guys is in fact. On the other side of this, talk about recruiting many countries, Canada, New Zealand, a lot other Nordic, except a point -based system, and they actively recruit talent. You're an entrepreneur. You've been CEO of multiple companies. It is an absolute, arduous pain to get talented people here right now. Recruitment of talent in the United States is bundled with the Southern border. How would you decouple that?

54:52Would you be in favor of a point -based system and recruitment of talent to get more talented immigrants in our country, which by the way, three of the four besties here, we're not born in the United States. which is an and by the way my four mothers and four fathers came here for the same reasons. Same reasons that every one of those moms and dads is coming across the Rio Grande. So I to answer your question directly Jason, I think I think we can do both. I think we should have a merit -based system to attract the best and brightest and most talented. I'm sure all of you had came from enterprises that would afford benefits perhaps education to people you would expect them to actually stay at your enterprise for a number of years to kind of as pay back.

55:27We are right now the United States is training some of the best and brightest in the world. not creating opportunities to stay. And of course, Canada's the beneficiary, the Nordic countries, European countries, you guys know this. This notion that we can't do two things at once, that we can't welcome the most disadvantaged who simply want to pursue an American dream and start at the very bottom and match that with some of the best and brightest who can actually start at the very top. Oh my goodness. Why does everything have to be binary, you guys? Black and white, good or bad? Yes or no? It's nonsense.

55:58Before we run out of time. Oh, darn, let's get too short. Yeah, no for you. I'm getting a little over time. I got more days that time guys. Okay, great. We really want to talk. I got time. Yeah. Freeberg and I are, I think, freeberg, you know, moved me to his position on this. Number one issue for this election freeberg, correct me if I'm wrong for you, is still our out of control spending freeberg. Maybe you could tee this up. Yeah, I mean, I've said this in the past. I think the US is facing a fiscal emergency in the sense that arithmetic starts to play out that the cost of debt spirals, we can't accomplish any of the other stuff we're talking about unless we can figure this out.

56:34We have $33 trillion of debt today. The treasury estimates it's going to grow to $47 trillion by 2033, just 10 years old. Hey, one and a half trillion in deficit this year, trillion in debt interest expense alone this year and a third of our debt is coming up to be refinanced soon. It's going to get refinanced at 4 .5 % interest rate instead of 2 .5 % and sitting at today. Okay, so the interest will swell, the deficit will swell, the debt will swell, and we're already taxing 18 % of GDP as federal revenue, which a lot of economists have shown. You can only get to 20 % at which point economy starts to shrink.

57:10There's, yeah, I think pretty good research on this. Some would argue differently, but I think that's kind of a natural limit. So the only kind of response is what's wrong with spending? Like, why do we have the spending problem? I guess the question for you is what is causing structurally the spending problem? A lot of people have said that this is the late -stage empire, the failure of democracy, because everyone votes themselves, all the money eventually. Or is it a politically oriented problem where folks don't want to address the biggest line items? They don't want to hold programs to account.

57:43And what is the answer here? So to answer your question directly, you asked what the cause is. its incompetency and perverse incentives. Period. There used to be a political reward for conservatives who were focused on fiscal responsibility because they would win elections over tax and spenders. But that party is long gone. There's no reward. That's why Trump added $7 trillion to the deficit and that's why Biden will probably add about that much as well. So by the way, I think I'm one of the only Democrats who has been named by the committee for a responsible federal budget, one of their fiscal heroes as a Democrat.

58:22And also I'm a Hamilton Jefferson Award winner by the U .S. Chamber of Commerce. And I'm also a pro -worker. I have this notion that you can't be, by the way, pro -business and pro -worker that they're somehow mutually exclusive. That's BS. They're mutually mandatory. But back to your question, thirty through trillion in debt, by the way, our economy can accommodate more. That's the sad truth. The issue is our debt service. and nobody's talking about the fact that it is going to go from the mid -400 billion a year to to your point date with the higher interest rates, probably approaching a trillion, maybe 800 and 40.

58:54No, it's already over a trillion. Is it a trillion one today? It's going to be a trillion five. Well, yeah, I don't, I would argue that maybe we could have a little argument about if it's there quite yet, but not in the either way. Let's call it a trillion. Let's call it a trillion. Call it a trillion. That means literally, that means literally we are spending way more for the past than we are investing in the future. that means we have literally no dollars left for any discretionary spending. Every bit of it is now consumed by social security, Medicare, and our military. And we're, and on top of that, we've got people sleeping in on the streets in every single town in city in America.

59:31We have kids going to school hungry. We have one of the most, to me, failing public school systems in the entire developed world. We have a healthcare system that is not healthcare. It's sick care. A fee for service model that should be capitated and our outcomes are mid -packed. And we have a $2 trillion deficit. And by the way, no childcare, no pre -K education. I can go on down the list. It's nonsensical. And we're spending $2 trillion more. So to answer your question, you guys know the answer here. We're a country with, I think, $150 million, $150 million, $1 trillion in total United States household wealth.

1:00:09Where do you cut? Let's start by getting into those specifics. Do you cut entitlements? Do you cut military? Where do you cut and how do you cut? So here's what I would do, starting with Social Security. Social Security, you guys, is the most successful anti -poverty program in world history. And I believe it would be not just a dereliction of duty, it would be counter to every American principle if senior citizens struggled. By the way, we don't have a culture in America because it takes care of the elders, like in most Asian cultures and other wonderful cultures in the world. So absent that, we have to afford resources.

1:00:48So two things. As you all know, Social Security, the Trust Fund will face probably reductions in 25, at about 25 % cut levels by 2033 based on the current path. Two easy things we can do. $160 ,000 a year is the cap right now, I think roughly. We should make that $250. That means it's a very regressive tax. if you're making 160, you're paying a whole lot more of your income than someone making $250 ,000, $300 ,000. You're not to mention, $3 million or $30 million. So we should raise the capital to 50, make sure that fund at least is solvent through probably 20, 40, 6, 20, 40, 7. And then I would do something different for the first time in American history.

1:01:28For all the millions of Americans who've done well, don't need their Social Security, that wish to become philanthropists, I would create a pool, not that goes back to the uh... treasury a pool that would be automatically redistributed to the lowest five or ten percent of all social security recipients in the entire country and let's it might be a five hundred dollar boost it might be a thousand dollar boost a year for the for the most challenged uh... elderly americans but when forty percent of americans can't afford a four hundred dollar car repair emergency expense you know that's not for this group but no dear point to your point i think it was the Fed or was Treasury that published a study, I was shocked by the actual number of American millionaires that exist.

1:02:12And it's counter to the narrative because you would, if you just read the headlines, you think America is an economic despair and it's not true. And the wealth creation is actually quite pervasive, which is a great feature of American capitalism. So to your point, there probably are a lot of people who would be willing to pay it forward to folks that didn't have it if you gave them the choice. It's just not possible today. So why shouldn't we be a government that creates, so just, Jamat, if I could just say, one of my perspectives and intentions is to not, by the way, we don't have to spend money to expose young people who never get out of their neighborhoods in many cities in this country, expose them to possibility.

1:02:52Get them into factories, into ad agencies, into high tech centers, show them rockets, and music makers and artists. is we don't need to spend a whole lot more money to simply completely change the path of young Americans lives, not to mention old Americans lives. And that's just a perfect example of a simple solution that costs zero and lets Americans actually be Americans. Okay, so now go to Medicare, but I think I know what you're gonna say because you mentioned it, capitation, but maybe talk very quickly on that and then military. What do you, Captain? So quickly on healthcare look guys, I represent United Health Group in my district.

1:03:33Tens of thousands of Minnesotans, many of them who live in my district, earn very handsome salaries from United. They've done some great work in many ways, but I have to tell you, since I've joined Congress in my third term now, you would be in tears if you had to sit with the people that I have sat with over so many occasions who thought they had coverage, whose son got sick or who's mother broke a leg or something. And they literally have gone bankrupt or take on tens of thousands of dollars in medical debt and they get surprised bills. And then they read in the paper that their health insurer reported annual net income of over $20 billion.

1:04:13And I don't know how you guys feel, but I gotta tell you, I'm a capitalist, I'm also compassionate, and I can no longer reconcile that. I really can't. There's a reason we're the only nation in the world that does it this way. I think it's time, by the way, from Roosevelt to Truman to Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon proposed universal health coverage and it was Ted Kennedy that undermined it, if you can imagine that. If we don't, if conservatives and progressives don't come to the table and talk about how we can deliver a national health insurance program that is portable, let's gig economy participants do their thing that people don't have to make choices about where to work just because of the healthcare.

1:04:51I don't know why we wouldn't talk about that. And by the I'm not talking about the provision of care. It's really important because Fox News and some Republicans have tried to say this is a socialized solution Uh -uh. Just the coverage because the money is in the system already between 3, 4, 5, 6, x, pharma costs between 2x health per capita health costs 10 ,000 per person compared to any country in the world at 5 The answer is I think right there in front of us the money's in the system would not require tax increase I think we could actually save substantial money. I'm working on a proposition right now know, I would argue that the model is part of the problem.

1:05:26Fear service is antithetical to what we need. We need a capitated model that gives an incentive to the providers, to people out of the hospital, at least try. At least try. So that's the answer on that. And by the way, you know, right now Medicare, as you probably know, I think 23 % of the mayor of the country, no, between Medicare and the VA, which are single payer systems, times, 25 % of Americans right now are covered by a single payer system. And by the way, it works better than the other system. Medicare recipients are pretty pleased. This would also be a huge benefit as a capitalist running companies.

1:06:02I mean, how much of your time was spent running your companies dealing with healthcare and the dysfunction of employees staying at companies because they couldn't? Awful. Get healthcare in another company. What about military team? What would you do that? Okay. Now, military. And this is where, to answer your question very directly once again, nobody can tell you that they can even begin to address our fiscal challenges without looking at that ridiculous number approaching a trillion dollars a year. And by the way, the Pentagon has not passed an audit. They would, in my administration, there would be a top -down assessment of every single program, every single base and facility, every explanation of why we are in those 80 nations, and whether or not we should be employing 21st century strategies to keep our country safe.

1:06:51And I think one of the simplest solutions you guys is we should be entrusting countries more approximate to the problems to manage them. It doesn't mean we're not in good ally anymore. It just doesn't mean that we are in a position any longer to be the policeman for the entire world when we can barely take damn care of our country itself. It's just so damn simple and I'm frustrated by it because as someone who lost his father in a completely obnoxious and unnecessary war, a guy that I have on my phone right now, digital audio tapes that he used to send back tapes to my mom, where he says, I've come to the conclusion and he loved America.

1:07:28America. He did not like that war, but he loved America. He said, I believe the only reason we're still here is because so many people are making so much money. He saw it and the same thing is happening to this day. You guys, that trillion dollars, that's going somewhere, it's going in people's pockets. And I believe we can cut that and I'm not going to make a proposition, but I believe after a comprehensive assessment that we can save hundreds of billions of dollars that can either be saved on the bottom line or better yet, actually invested in human beings instead of the destruction of them, period.

1:08:01Would you zero based budget there? Absolutely. Why, Jamal, I've had to go back to Washington twice to vote on CRs, continuing resolutions. It is, the dysfunction is absurd. There may be five people that can read a P &L or a balance sheet in the whole damn Congress. our budgeting system is completely broken. And yes, as president, I would demand a zero -based budgeting procedure. And, like I said, a comprehensive independent assessment of every program. And if it is not generating a return, or if it could be outsourced to a private sector that can deliver it for a better value, that's how we should proceed.

1:08:42And by the way, it may not be easy. It may take time to get done, but why we don't try is absurd and to answer your final question if we don't And once foreign investors no longer consider the United States of America the safest place to deploy capital It's too late and I will not certainly under my watch will not let us get there But we've got a recraft and and lastly can I say one more thing quick on that you month? Please if the only way that I think we can address the biggest issue in the country which is the growing disparity between those who have wealth and income and those that do not.

1:09:19We're not a nation that will redistribute. I think we've been not just unsuccessful. We actually created some of the problems we now find ourselves in. The way to do it is to raise the foundation. The same way it was raised for me by a good, a stroke of good luck. You know, I was adopted by a dad who gave me everything and who knows where I would have been if that didn't happen. I want to education, have childcare, make sure you have a house, a place to live. If we give everybody the same thing, then we can be a country that believes in self -determination and... Talk about education then briefly.

1:09:54So if the spectrum is the teacher's union on one end of the spectrum, and Vivek Ramaswami, who would dismantle the Department of Education at the federal level and just push all the responsibility to the states with the voucher program, he talked about it here once. Where are you and what's your philosophy on the state of the education? I would say I'm in the middle because I think there's some worthiness to both of those perspectives. What would I do? I would fundamentally reinvent American public education with the best and the brightest, with students, with teachers, with families, with the nonprofit sector and the business sector because right now business needs to participate in 21st century education to advise the teachers and the administrators and the curricula designers, what skills they need.

1:10:42They're not even part of the conversation, you guys. I don't know about you all. I don't know about you all. Well, why do you think that there are certain places, progressive, liberal, bastions, if you will, that have been the first to dismantle things like Stan and AP classes? Why is that happening? I wish I had a good answer. It's appalling, but I do have a good solution. I'm sure like you guys, you all know this. The single most important determinant of a child's success educationally is the quality of their educator. Every single study says the same thing. The United States of America right now, we pay about 81 % of the per capita GDP to teachers for compensation.

1:11:22The best performing systems in the world and there is a correlation, pay 120, 130, sometimes 140, 140 % of their per capita GDP. they make teaching one of the most admired elevated professions in their nation. They identify great teachers when they're still young and I think we should be a nation that does the same thing. We're not attracting the best and brightest any longer. When Teach for America teachers outperform teachers who have tenure have been at it for 10, 20, 30 years. Does that not say the quality matters? It's not the school how it looks. But anyway I would reinvent and the other thing is this you and I'm sure like you guys I remember a couple teachers that made a huge difference in my life and they're about 50 I could barely remember it all.

1:12:02They should all be those two. And then furthermore, if you think sitting in front of a blackboard is the way to teach kids in this day and age, no, you got to get out of the school, you got to look at Scandinavian countries and Asian countries and how experiential learning, learning from the best most extraordinary educators in the world through screens on occasion but to experience. You know, AI is going to fundamentally change employment as we know it. We have nobody in Washington that gets it. We need an administration in 2024 that does and begins to Simply rectify all these problems anticipating the change that's coming this administration is not going to do it and Education should be redesigned can based on the change we know is coming and I don't have all the answers But I know a lot of people have in California and around the country and around the world who could help us to regulate AI?

1:12:54Where is it? No. No, I think it should be there. Jason, I would say right now it should be very limited. And this is where back to the conversation about anonymous accounts. We do have to set, I think, some standards and penalties for nefarious use of AI. If we don't do that early and set the tone, I think it will get out of control. So to me, that's all we should do right now. And let it grow, let it expand, let large enterprises and small come up with extraordinary ways to save money, by the way. AI is going to save extraordinary sums of money for the federal government and healthcare for businesses.

1:13:31We can anticipate how employment will change and what jobs will be jobs of the future. But if we don't think about that now, we're going to do what Congress always does. Get caught off guard, have to come in on a midnight, ill prepared with a thousand page bill that nobody understands because it was written by a lobbyist that had skin in the game and does not that sort of America. And that maybe wraps up this whole conversation. Yeah, I'm just not sure folks really understand in Congress what they're doing. No, it's front. No. But the difference between foundational models and the utilization of those models in an endpoint are very different regimes to think about regulation.

1:14:13Yeah. And they're not even, that framework isn't even understood. Not at all. We're not even talking about regulating outcomes or actions. We're talking about regulating the infrastructure that could cause various outcomes. Regulate. I'm very, I'm very much against where this is all evolved to. And I think like some folks kind of want to say, hey, this is a regulatory capture moment. But I want to see someone in Congress stand up and demonstrate an understanding first before they can even have the right to articulate, you know, a framework for regulation. Well, Dave, I can tell you, there's one man.

1:14:48I want to shout out this guy. Don Byer is a former US ambassador, Democrat from Virginia. He must be 70. He went back to college. I think Johns Hopkins and just received or is pursuing his degree in artificial intelligence. That's the kind of representative. Isn't that cool? You would never know his name because he's not on Fox Remus and BC screaming at night. But those are the kinds of people that should be celebrated. A lot of my Republican colleagues got thrown out of Congress because they had the audacity to support the Constitution when Trump was impeached the second time. Those people I celebrate, I got to run, but can I tell one quick story to wrap my whole story up in a place, what I want to try to do?

1:15:28At the end of the day, none of this occurs. None of the successes, none of the policy ideas, none of the ideation occurs if we don't repair. That means restoring friendships, our families, our communities, and our country. So I do a series back home in Minnesota called Common Ground. I get six Democrats and six Republicans invited to a table. We break bread. We introduce ourselves to a little bit of our life stories. We talk about healthcare policy and we talk about immigration policy, which is where everything I shared tonight comes from both Democrats and Republicans. And it's a two hour session facilitated by an extraordinary group called Brave Rangles.

1:16:05I encourage you to look them up. They are remarkable doing this work all around the country. And at the end of these sessions, we go around the table and each person at the table shares a little bit about what they got out of this experience. And I had an episode not long ago that sums up my whole mission. A young woman Emily looks across the table at Dave and says, Dave, when you drove up in your F -150 with the Trump sticker on it, I almost got back in my car, left the parking lot, and drove away. I could not bear to go in the building, let alone sit at the table with you. And she said, but I got to say, I so loved sitting here.

1:16:40And you're a good guy and I learned something. Goes around the table, comes to Dave and he looks at Emily and says, Emily, when you drove up in your Prius, I wanted to run it over. And he says, but hey, I got to tell you, Emily, I've never met a progressive as cool as you and I really am glad I came to this today. And at that moment, Emily and Dave stood up in front of our table and they embraced. And to see a bleeding heart liberal and a dyed in the wool trumper, do that probably was the most important moment in my entire career and service. If that is the only moment of its kind in my career and service, it would have made it worthwhile.

1:17:22And that is exactly what I'm going to inspire as president of the United States. Get Emily and Dave to hug it out. But all they have to do is be invited for a little dinner, given some space in place to recognize their common cause and their common ground. And that's how we're going to do this. I don't see a candidate right now in the ballot that has that intention, has that capacity, or has that capability. So I just want to thank you guys and. Last thing, and just yes or no. Can everybody expect that you will be on the ballot in every state? I can't say I'm going to be in the ballot in every state, you're off because I don't think it's possible between time and money.

1:17:57I'm going to have to make some choices. And that's just the sickening truth. I want to salute Bernie Sanders. He actually made it possible for a candidate like me and probably future candidates who are subject to this nauseating system to actually still compete and get to the convention and maybe win because he depowered people like me, members of Congress that used to have outsized votes disproportionately. So versus voters and I celebrate him because he was right I used to think he was a sore loser Bernie Sanders was absolutely right about a rigged system That is keeping people out of the process keeping candidates out of the process and keeping debate out of the process So I'm gonna be in the most I'm gonna be on most ballots I've got to raise money and frankly I hate to be shameless But the truth is if we want to get on ballots I need support and it's easy Dean 24 calm You know, by the way, I'm at 15 % in New Hampshire after just two weeks.

1:18:55We thought it would take six if we were lucky. Wow. So people can throw 15 bucks our way to get on ballots at Dean 24 .com. And by the way, Joe Biden, 27 % 73 % of New Hampshire Democratic voters do not want the sitting present the United States as their nominee and mark my words. We're gonna bring change. Thank you guys. All right. Thanks so much. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you very much. Keep the faith guys. I mean, love to see you again. See you later. Yeah. Great. Thank you. 90 minutes with Dean Phillips. Everybody go to dean 24 .com if you want to learn more. All right, Besties. I think that was another epic discussion with the presidential candidate.

1:19:36What's your thoughts? Jamal, you set up this interview. Where does he stand in your are likely votes for President in 2024. Where would your rank him now? Andriang texted me like last week and said, would you guys do this? And I was really interested because mostly, I didn't know where he was coming from to be totally honest. But I think his national visibility is probably gonna increase a lot. My reaction is that he is who he says he is, which is like kind of down the middle. He doesn't take either extreme, any kind of takes a moderate point of view and says there's a balance of this and that that can work.

1:20:18And that's actually good that he owns that as opposed to it being sort of a consequence or a byproduct of not getting what he wants. He kind of like that is where he starts. So I like that about him a lot. I thought he was really candid about what doesn't work. I really appreciate that honesty. He's saying some of the right things around capping Medicare, zero -based budgeting, the military. I think all of those things are right. I didn't like, to be honest, the free speech part. I thought that that was, I don't think you can have some kind of registry of verified accounts or something. I just think that's a non -starter for America.

1:20:55It's a super slippery slope. But in general, that was really impressed. And his war stories as a businessman were pretty cool. Pretty awesome. Sachs, what's your candid thoughts on, obviously he's not part of your political party, but what do you think his chances are versus Biden? And how would you assess his performance here today? I was pleasantly surprised that he made the case for himself not just based on Biden's age in the fact that he's 54. But he also, I think, took a number of interesting policy stances that were a little different than where Biden is. He did it on foreign policy, did it on domestic policy.

1:21:36So I think he took a number of positions that were refreshing. And a big one, I think, relates to his personal story, where he talks about how he lost his father and Vietnam. And that that war was kept going much longer than it should have been, because basically the greed of the military industrial complex And he didn't fully connect the dots all the way to our present situation in Ukraine, but at least I think he would be skeptical of the influence of the MIC in our politics. What he said with respect to Ukraine is, well, he said that it would be shameful to abandon them now, but he also said that if it's true, he wasn't willing to concede it because he just didn't know factually, but if it's true that we could have avoided the war by taking NATO expansion off the table, then it would only be common sense to do that.

1:22:23I think that when the histories of this are written, it's going to be abundantly clear that we could have done precisely that. So his difference of opinion with me isn't in the logic. It's just in what, in what facts he knows to be true. So I actually thought that his position there was reasonable. You know, if it came down to a choice between Dean Phillips as the Democratic nominee and someone like Nikki Haley as Republican nominee, I'd vote for Dean Phillips all day long. You know, one other thing I like about him is he is a business owner and he presents as a Bill Clinton Democrat. I mean, I think that it's not an accident.

1:23:04He's got a picture of Bill Clinton on the wall behind him. You know, he presents as a - That was exactly my takeaway too. I thought, wow. This is a moderate Democrat who's a little bit of a throwback to the Democratic Party of the 1990s. If RFK, Jr., is trying to bring back the Democratic Party of say the 1960s, the party of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, his father, I think that Dean Phillips is more trying to bring back the Democratic Party than 1990s. Both of them, I think, are ultimately very out of step with where the Democratic Party is today, but they're out of step with it in ways that I like.

1:23:37So he is a candidate who I could support against a Republican who if we ended up getting a sort of stale new con type Republican candidate, I would take a Dean Phillips all day long. Really? Wow. Great. Freeberg your thoughts. I mean, I think if Joe Biden runs, he obviously doesn't stand a chance just based on the structural issues that he described. If Joe Biden doesn't run and drops out, I think there are probably a lot of other Democratic candidates who are going to have deeper pockets and more support from the party and more celebrity or what have you to get themselves elected. With respect to his candidacy and whether it's a realistic kind of campaign, I would probably argue no.

1:24:22But what I really like is the fact that he is making the case, I think in a stronger way then even RFK Jr. was on how these incumbents and how the incumbency in the party system prevents new candidates from actually participating in a true democratic process. And it feels to me a lot like what goes on in that sense is the equivalent of like regulatory capture, but in politics, it allows these party leaders and influencers, which is a very small group of people to decide who gets to go on a ballot in the state to decide who gets to be the nominee, who decides who gets to run for president. The best thing that he's doing is exposing a system that Bernie Sanders calls rigged, and that clearly, I think, is very inequitable and doesn't create a true kind of democratic process.

1:25:10So it's really great to see him doing this work and telling this story, and I'm glad we gave him the forum to do that for just that reason. And if you were to have a choice of him or you'd pick him. Yeah. If you had a choice of him or Vivek on the other side, would you pick? No comment. No comment. Okay. Taking off my moderator hat for a minute, loved his business story, so I grew with you, Chema. Really excited to see somebody under the age of 80. Run for president, and I thought there were really two powerful moments there when he said he would send special forces in, and then he was pretty aggressive in his assessment of Netanyahu's leadership.

1:25:47And overall, He did engage with every single issue and had interesting policy issues. No, Shema. It seemed pretty pretty engaging there. So overall great job everybody. I think Four for four on the presidential candidates and just as a programming note We have sent the first podcast in kits the first microphones to four presidential candidates for those of you counting at home What do you think will happen post this Shema? They got a big bump RFK got a big bomb. What do you think is gonna happen post that? I think that Dean Phillips is going to pull really well. The more that people get to see him, and I think New Hampshire is set up well for grassroots politics like this, it will go over very well.

1:26:26The question I think Freeberg points is the key one, which is the party infrastructure has tremendous antibodies. And if they decide to shut you out, which they did very strongly and Focally for RFK you don't have much of a choice except for one as an independent so His candidacy is precarious not because of the viability of him as a candidate actually because I think it's quite high or his Likeability, which is quite high or his electability as SAC said which against the right person is very hot This has all to do with the antibodies of the infrastructure Sure. It's just a quick. Just a quick.

1:27:07Programming, no, Jake, how are you drinking a chocolate milk? I am freaking a core power 26. Oh, I thought it was 26 grams of protein. I'm still on my. Try more protein. But I did have a super gut bar earlier today. Oh, no, it's quite nice. I thought that was a chocolate milk. This one's got 26 grams. It's a 42 gram protein. Yeah, I don't want to give a free add to core power. But sacks, in addition to the antibodies that kicked RFK out of the Democratic Party, the press also blocked him, CNN, et cetera, wouldn't let him on. The right would let him on all day long. Does this same antibody kind of system exist on the right at all, or is the right more open to multiple candidates, just generally speaking?

1:27:46No, I mean, you look at Republican debates and they are vigorous debates. There is real disagreement on the right. There are real debates on the right and there is a real working out of contested issues. The Democratic Party, by and large, is a machine. It works in lockstep. That's why what Dean Phillips is doing is so sacrilegious. I mean he is pretty much ending his career as someone who can just move up through the ranks that are the Democratic Party. Maybe this will turn out in a way where it gives him like a leapfrog, but I don't think so. I mean, I think he's basically signaling to the higher ups in the Democratic Party that he's no longer a candidate for or advancement through the regular course.

1:28:29Got it. And one analogy is that the Democratic Party is like the Empire, and the Republicans are like the rebel alliance. You know, the Republican Party is a bunch of misfits. It's a bunch of discontents. He walks. He walks and solos. And solos or whatever. But the Democratic Party marches and walks that. Is that why the Democratic Party wins more is because they're in lockstep? Yeah. They're much better fundraisers. They are more disciplined. They have their act together right now. I don't think this is always the case, but I think it's true right now. Yeah. Okay. Well, we had a couple of other issues we wanted to get to.

1:29:06So I think we can wrap there. Great job, everybody. That was spectacular, great job getting the candidate, Chema. Thank you for that. All right. We have to touch on what happened this week with the US and China relations. Everybody knows you, Jean -Pain, was here in the Bay area to meet with Biden. and yelling, welcome, she at the plane. Maybe she's selling some treasuries, I don't know. And things. That's what the best said. Yeah, she, I mean, like we're like some sort of piss -poor company that's selling us junk bonds. I mean, the second that she gets off the plane, she's hawking our shitty bonds.

1:29:38Well, listen, everybody's rushing as that. Now, you know, fundraising's hard. Did you guys hear the commentary that the treasury auction had a really tough, tough moment last week. They had a big auction on, what was it, 10 and 30 year bonds? the 30 year bond did was not really there. And so they got to get buyers in the market. They got to go get the money. She's coming to raise money apparently too. She's here. Everybody's having a hard time raising right now. Pretty crazy. But Chimoff, you and I tweeted about this clip where Xi Jinping said that he's basically for peace and that we have to work together.

1:30:10Let me just start there with you, Chimoff. So we can get through this quickly. Do you take him out his word? There were cynical people saying like, hey, He's just desperate needs more trade needs more business. How do you interpret? She's peace pipe here, you know, and His dinner with a bunch of executives last night. I Think he's pragmatic. He's somebody that wants to not just Rule over China, but he wants to do it for the rest of his life and he wants to do a good job and I've said this many times China's issues are endemic and pervasive and they're demographic and And so he has huge structural issues that he has to fix in the Chinese economy.

1:30:52And so I think all of this is just about him focusing on his priorities, which makes sense, which is really about domestic policy. There's an enormous real estate issue that has to get sorted out. There is a GDP issue that has to get sorted out. There's a youth unemployment issue that has to get sorted out. And then there's an aging and a birth rate and replacement issue that has to get sorted out. But all of these things are enormous efforts. And so I think he's pragmatic enough to not also then add foreign misadventures to that plate. And I think what you heard was him being very clear about just exactly that.

1:31:31Saxford was your interpretation. There's so many jumping off points here. You got farm policy. You got TikTok. Fentanyl. I mean, there's a long list of issues. but does it feel like we're turning the corner on relations? Hey, they need us. We need them. What was your interpretation of all this? Well, I think what's going on here is that the administration has its hands full with two wars. They've still got this war in Europe over Ukraine, which is going very badly. And now we have a new war in the Middle East that caught them completely by surprise. Recall that literally a week or two before October 7th, you had Jake Sullivan saying that the Middle East has never been more peaceful.

1:32:06So they absolutely did not anticipate what was coming and now we have half of our carrier groups in the Middle East position there in cases, blows up into a wider regional war. So I think the simple fact of matter is, is that the Biden administration, this is more than they can handle. Or let's put this way, they're trying to put the China compete on hold. They're trying to put it on ice while they figure out a way to rescue this losing effort for Ukraine and to prevent the situation in the Middle East from spiraling out of control is just too much for them. They don't have the bandwidth to deal with a war or conflict breaking out in the Asia -Pacific.

1:32:43So I think that's the Biden administration's motivation here as they're seeking to ease tensions because they're just too bandwidth constrained to deal with it. By the same token, I think Jamal is right that she realizes that he's got his hands full with domestic economic problems. he doesn't need a ratcheting up of tensions with United States right now. And I would also add that on foreign policy, I think what you're seeing in his remarks is a return to the far away from this kind of wolf warrior diplomacy that they had going on a few years ago where they were kind of saying these very bellicose things and they're kind of flexing their muscles in the Asia Pacific region.

1:33:26That really backfired on them because it raised the hackles of all those other Asian countries and it was making it too easy for the United States to form a containment alliance against China. So he's moving away from that type of wolf warrior rhetoric that got them nowhere and he's moved back to the rhetoric of a Dunk Shopping who said that China's policy should be to buy its time and hide its light under a bushel. In other words, just get stronger and stronger. Don't let people get wise to how strong you are and then when the time is right, you will flex your muscles, but just keep getting stronger.

1:34:02And I think he's returned to that policy. And you saw this with a Belt and Road conference that in Beijing just a few weeks ago, where you saw countries like Vietnam participating. And I think that China, their strategy is now to try to use some honey to catch some fly as opposed to using this kind of bella coast rhetoric. And say buraddling. And if we look at this chart, I think this chart speaks volumes, Friedberg. in foreign investment into China has absolutely fallen off a cliff. In the decoupling, the saber -addling, you know, and other countries looking to have resiliency and not be dependent on China has obviously blown up in his lap.

1:34:44What are your thoughts on foreign trade and our business relationship with China and their relationship with the West and the rest of the world? This used to be a thing to do to make money. and then it became a question mark of whether you can make money a couple of years ago. And now, as of this year, I would argue, you were a pariah if you were trying to invest in China or do any business in China. It's almost like you can't do business with the enemy. That's the tone shift that I think accelerated in the last 24 months. And as that tone shift happened in the business community and the investment community, It obviously escalated the tenor of what is the broader relationship look like that I think catalyzed, hey, we got a simmer things down because we can't really afford a deal with that escalating escalation right now.

1:35:40But I don't know, I mentioned this to you guys. I was at a conference this past summer. The summer of 22, it was like, hey, maybe, you know, when are things going to get bad with China? to this summer, it's like if you were doing business in China, you're trying to pick up pennies in front of a freight train. Like you're gonna get run over. And it happened in one year. That was my observation. It was like this pretty cheap. And I could tell from the tone of what everyone is saying on stage, it was like universal. There wasn't anyone that disagreed. And similarly, as you guys know, we've heard this from both political parties in the US.

1:36:13It suddenly became the new new thing for Democrats and Republicans to denounce China, denounce investing in China, denounce doing business with China. But too much too fast, I would argue, has led to an observation of the consequences to deeply coupled economic partner to the United States. China is the largest buyer of US agricultural exports, $200 billion a year of farm products that we make that shipped out to China. China is a major supplier to our electronics industry. We don't need to recount all the relationships, but trying to decouple too quickly, trying to call China the enemy too fast, I think has led to a realization that that's not really attendable.

1:36:54So I would argue that maybe this week has been a moment. I don't know if it really changes the long -term trajectory, but it seems like it's certainly a very important and critical pause in the escalation. One thing I wanted to comment, I think one of the biggest winners this week, I'd love your point of view on this guy, is it's like Gavin Newsom. I mean, he was all over this week, like he was at the playing greeting G. He cleaned up San Francisco. I mean, he got it out from the president. He was, yeah, he was at the dinner. I mean, do you guys think like Gavin is, you know, going to be there when Joe says, I'll see you later.

1:37:28I'm not going to run again. And the near and I spoke. Yeah, what's happening here? It's all just a big coincidence. He actually went on stage and San Francisco made all those comments about the city should be cleaned up and we haven't been doing it. We could have the whole time. It's very honest about it. Well, it's not quite what he said. Yeah, but I look, I mean, I don't know, what do you guys want to do? Is he owning it right? Yeah. It's actually quasi. Oh, I don't think he did own it. He gave these really weird remarks about how there are some people who are saying that we're only cleaning up San Francisco because there's these fancy people here.

1:37:59That was such a weird term as well. And it's true because it's true. And it's true, but yeah, it was like he was headed in one direction and then realized he was make a mistake but couldn't quite. Yeah, let's pull it up. Let's pull it up. It's good. They're just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming in a town. That's true because it's true. What he's basically doing there is admitting that he as the governor has the power to snap his fingers and wave his magic wand and clean up the streets of San Francisco. And that is completely different than what he's been telling us for years.

1:38:33For years, he's been maintaining that the problem of homelessness in California is owned by local officials or by judges or by somehow by the system itself and it's too complex and it's beyond his power to simply do something about it. But he just admitted that in fact he does have the power to do something about it. In fact, he is the boss of a one -party state and all he had to do was snap his fingers and make this almost problem go away. And he's willing to do that for Xi Jinping. He's willing to do that for dream force. He's willing to do that for the Super Bowl, but he is not willing to do that for the ordinary citizens of San Francisco.

1:39:11And I think that ultimately is going to be a huge vulnerability. What he should have said here is it's true that we cleaned up the city to represent ourselves well for these foreign leaders who are coming in, but the truth of it is that we should be doing this every day. And here's my agenda for fixing it. 0 .123 and if we could get everyone on board with this agenda, we could fix this problem. But that's not what he said. What he basically communicated was that I can solve this problem anytime, but I don't give a shit about you, ordinary citizens. We only do this for the fancy people. Trimoff, any reaction to that?

1:39:48He's auditioning. I mean, I think that much is clear. Again, I would just say it's, you can't just go to China and meet with Xi Jinping. So that has to be endorsed. It's negotiated. It's enabled. You go there with talking points. You go there in discussion with state and treasury and the rest of the federal bureaucracy behind you. So that was a clear addition of some kind. And I think it was obvious that they wanted the apex summit to be the backdrop of a Biden G meeting. And so you're doubling down on California. So I think it's I think it's kind of like a dry run here is what I would say. I mean, I'm not sure that it's I don't know what for it definitely.

1:40:36I'm a presidential and I think you're right that when he went to China a few weeks ago to invite you to the summit that was clearly sanctioned by I got to be by Blinken by Sullivan. You can't do that on your own. Of course, of course. But again, the reason why they sanctioned that is because they really want to ease tensions with China right now, given how full their hands are with the Middle East right now. And with you. No, no, no, I'm not debating that. I think that that makes all the sense in the world. I think that you could have sent any number of, well, not any number, but one of three cabinet secretaries and it would have been just as appropriate.

1:41:10I think sending the governor, I think was a little bit of a, It was a test. Can he perform? And I think he did a good job there. He helped himself. I mean, he heard himself with the, it's true because it's true, but he helped himself in terms of the optics of the kind of. Can I say it though? I think he did look presidential in China. And I actually, that was the first time where I thought Gavin was really being a normal person because he actually told the truth. He said, yeah, this state is a, at its best, no, but this state at its best is a center of innovation in the future. and at its worst, it's where every bad progressive idea goes to die.

1:41:47The way he said that? No, no, no, I'm saying that. I'm saying San Francisco embodies both of those two things. On one day, it's full of people on Crystal Math and fentanyl. On the second day, it's the OpenAI Dev Day. Yeah. What's your surprise? Within a block of each other. So I think he just admitted. But if he said something like that, that would make him so much more real. Well, maybe he's trying to find his voice. I think his tone has shifted a bit. I don't know. That's what I'm saying. It felt like in seeing some of the talks he gave this week and his positioning and where he was sitting, it was, he looks like very legit.

1:42:22I definitely, I definitely will say that the Gavin Newsom of three years ago was a little bit smarmy and more of like a political insider. The Gavin Newsom of like the last week and particularly even just that comment to me, David was actually being honest. And I think that that's a more viable path if they decide to give him the candidacy, which I think is a really good observation because he could just come out and say, listen, we tried a bunch of things. We had good intent. It didn't work. And now we're reversing them. But Biden did say that he would possibly be running for his job. I want to thank Governor Newsom.

1:43:05I want to thank him. He's been one hell of a governor man. Matter of fact, he could be anything he wants. He could have the job I'm looking for That was I don't know if you guys heard that quote from Biden Biden said that last night. Wow. So I guess conspiracy Let's put our tinfoil tinfoil hack corner time Sacks your favorite percentage chance Biden runs He or drops out whichever way you want to do it anybody have Some tealy I still think there's about a 70 % chance that Biden runs Okay, so they're representing. He's not gonna voluntarily retire. He the party apparatus, whoever's behind the scenes, pulling the strings, the wizard of Oz is gonna have to go, the party elder, you have to go to him.

1:43:50At a certain point and say sorry, this is just not gonna work and we're not there yet. Okay, Shamat, what do you think? I'm curious. I think David's the leaders and the powers that be will not make that call right now. I don't think it's time yet. Freiburg, you gotta take. I don't know. I think it's speculation. I really don't know. Okay. Hey, Trimoff, one question here just on markets. Hundreds of billions of dollars not being invested in China on that chart for our investments. Where does that money go? And he thought, so where that's going? He's just sitting in a couch. I think it's being invested in other geographies.

1:44:22We talked about it last week with Jared Kushner. But if you look at just the the ton of cash and cash equivalents, I think it just speaks to how everybody's just a little bit on the sidelines waiting to go, waiting for the green light, which you saw CPI this week, by the way. I mean, we talked about it last week, which is that it looked like CPI's turning over. And now the consensus forecast is you're going to see CPI with a low 2 % handle by February or March of this year. So you're going to see 2 .2 % CPI or something. Watch out. Watch out as in, hey, markets could come roaring back. Maybe not syrup environment, but, hmm, could get interesting.

1:45:00All right, listen, we don't want to leave without doing a science corner. Everybody loves science corner. I know DeepMind has been working on, you know, many projects Reberg and DeepMind, of course, is Google's AI arm. They did go. They did protein folding and, of course, they're doing bard, but they announced something this week about predicting weather. Tell us about this paper that was really a free bird. Yeah, so I think this was pretty exciting. You guys know I used to work in whether when I ran climate core We did a lot of work with weather forecasting and weather modeling. So deep mind Published a paper in the journal science this week introducing graph cast Which is actually a publicly available Model that does weather forecasting using machine -learn models.

1:45:46It's a 37 million parameter model just to give you a sense how small that is that model compared to ChatGPT, which is like a 1 .5 trillion parameters in the ChatGPT model. This is only 37 million parameters in this model. And the performance that they got out of Graphcast, which they published in the journals, they've made the model available. You can check it out. You can read the paper on how they built the model. They're very open about that. When the model actually forecasts whether over a 10 -day period, better than traditional weather forecasting. So let me just talk about how weather forecasting is normally done and what they did differently and why this is such a big breakthrough So weather forecasting is usually done by kind of chopping up the atmosphere into little cubes little blocks and You know the weather is a fluid.

1:46:33It's like a liquid. You know, it's it's air and moisture being moved around with energy And so normal weather forecasting systems are what are called numerical models you run physics, you run the formulas for physics on each of those little cells of the atmosphere and figure out how they affect the cell next to them and the cell next to them, and you run that cycle forward, and you run all these calculations, and then you figure out how those cells are going to be different in hours and then in days going forward. And these numerical models basically because they're compute intensive, they're running actual calculations from physics to model all this stuff, they require a lot of compute power.

1:47:13There are hundreds of variables that are measured and that are output from forecasting models, and they generally run on these very expensive compute clusters. There are two major weather forecasting systems. One is run by ECMWF, which is the European Weather Center, and the other one is run by NOAA, called GFS here in the US. And ECMWF runs on a million cores across 7 ,700 compute cluster notes. They spend about $200 million on this compute cluster. And the GFS model runs on a 29 peda flop system. So 29 quadrillion floating operations per second, it costs $270 million. And when they run the forecast model using this traditional way of doing things, they're running all these physics calculations on these little small blocks of the atmosphere and for turbine it fast forward, try and capture as much data out of the model runs as they can.

1:48:07And every six hours, they run the model, and there's a new output every six hours. And it costs a billion dollars for NOAA to run forecasts every year and disseminate that information. And then all the weather companies you know from Weather Channel and ACU, whether they are all buying or getting free access to these forecasts that come from these big compute clusters. And that's how all weather forecasting is done. They're actually done primarily by these big, centralized government super compute clusters, and then they're made available for everyone to consume. And the more data and the more compute you get, the better the forecasts, the higher the resolution, meaning the more local space you can forecast on, the smaller the time scales, meaning you can go from one day forecast to one hour forecast, break it down, and the further out you can be accurate, whether it's five days and then ten days and so on.

1:48:53So more compute has been the name of the game for many, many years in whether forecasting the more compute you get, the better the forecasts. So this breakthrough that DeepMind has had is they basically took all the past weather forecasts and they built a model that figured out how to take the current weather and the weather from six hours ago, just the data, so the data feeds from today's current weather in weather six hours ago, and trained a model that predicted weather for the next 10 days. The same output as you would get from these big expensive numerical models. And they did this using what's called a graph neural network.

1:49:27That's the architecture for the model. A graph neural network is far more complicated than, say, predicting an image, which is two dimensional. It's pixels next to each other, or predicting a text stream, which is one dimensional. It's what's the next word in a sentence. So these are a graph neural network. It's a fairly complicated model. And so they describe all the techniques they used and everything they built in the paper. They were really open about it all. And then they were able to train this model using past forecasting data going back to the 70s. And then they ran the model. If you pull up these charts, so the first chart that we're going to pull up here basically shows the model's performance graph cast against the big ECM, ECMWS model.

1:50:09And what you'll see is that the model across all time scales going out to 10 days is better. And there's a bunch of ways to measure this, primarily what's called root mean square error, which measures the skill of the forecast. So here you can see the black line is the numerical model run by ECMWF, which is the big weather forecast model that most people in the world rely on every day, and the bottom is the machine learn model. And by the way, the entire graphcast model runs in one minute. So you basically input current weather data, and you input weather data from six hours ago, and in a minute you get all the forecasts.

1:50:47Whereas currently - run on what? Like a smartphone or a laptop? It's not that small, but yeah, I mean, you could run it on a small compute and you could get the results in a minute. And so basically, everyone can now be a weather forecaster. What used to be is this is the gap between the black and the blue line significant? Is that an important? It is significant in two ways. One is, first of all, it's better, which is amazing because researchers have spent billions of dollars in decades trying to make their numerical models better. So the fact that a machine -learn model is just simply better, it's really profound.

1:51:21And the second point is that this machine learned model is only 37 million parameters and can be output in a minute. So you could be running this thing continuously. And you could be this, does this work for whether all around the world or just in the specific exactly all around the world? And the second thing that they measured, if you pull up the second graph was, well, okay, great, you can measure, you can do basic weather forecasting. But are you good at picking up extreme events? the things that are really outside of the normal distribution curve, the things that we should worry about, like cyclones or extreme heat or atmospheric rivers.

1:51:53And the answer again is absolutely yes, that this model trained on this data is better at forecasting extreme weather events. How on that bottom left one is it saying that H -RS doesn't actually predict cyclone tracking and that graphcast gives you like two, three, four days lead time? That's just an error difference. Yeah, it's just a measure of delta. So what's the down -tube effectiveness? People will be able to get out of an area that could have extreme weather or insurance. You did climate .com, right? So you've been in this business for a long time. Yeah, so I think one of the most interesting things is how this is going to change how weather forecasting is done.

1:52:30Again, billions of dollars, there's a big system in Japan, a big system in Europe, and a big system in the US that forecasts the weather. There's some of the biggest compute clusters in the world. And now you can run it in your home. you can run this model in your home. Because all the weather data that is the input to the model is available all the time on the internet for free. So we can just type that data and anyone could run it. You can get faster results, more frequent updates, certainly a much lower cost. And I think this is just the beginning of obviously a long road of optimization and iteration that we'll go from here.

1:53:02Where it'll be really amazing to see what else can be done with this model. It totally upends a lot of different business models as well. What's really important also to note, So this is an incredible proof point of these graph neural nets. Graph neural nets can be applied in other areas like chemistry, biology, material science, anywhere where you're simulating physics or physical properties or three dimensional space over time, showing that you can train off data and be better than physical models that just needs physics to make a prediction. And you can just have the machine figure out how to do it on its own.

1:53:35It comes up with this prediction that's better than running physics in a computer cluster. It's really incredible and I think it'll also it's a great way to highlight the opportunity for machine learning models being applied to things like Chemistry and biology for discovery purposes and other is over time. I thought it was a great paper another Really incredible proof point by deep mind. I mean are they gonna just throw away those clusters running Other weather models now that I'm telling you like that's redundant and by the way talk about accountability So if I'm running the Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA in the US, I'm like, what are we doing spending a billion dollars a year on this now?

1:54:10We can just run this thing on a MacBook. So a perfect example of how AI is going to save billions of dollars. This is like an incredible point for the government getting more efficient to circle back around to Deans Point earlier in the episode. Okay, this has been an amazing episode for the dictator himself from Appalachia. I want a more accurate forecast of the temperature on Uranus. Oh, he was coming in at any moment. Oh man, it depends. Did you have a cold and dark cold and dark or maybe you had the hot sauce. Anybody knows? All right. Listen, and for the Sultan of science, the day after tomorrow, beautiful, I was great fun movie.

1:54:44David Friedberg and the rain man, David Sacks. I'm amongst amongst the world's greatest moderators. Great job. The last two weeks, Friedberg. And this is your favorite podcast. The all in podcast. We'll see you all next time. Bye bye. Bye bye. Oh, also also also happy Thanksgiving everybody happy Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving. No episode next week You never know somebody goes rowd happy happy Thanksgiving to everybody Not to be that

1:55:30I'm crazy with it. Love you, West. I'm sweet. I'm sweet. I'm going on a leash. What? What?

1:55:40Besties are gone. That's my dog. Take it away. I wish you're driveway. Sit next. Wait, I know. Oh, man. My ham is a bit asher. We need to be at police station. We should all just get a room and just have one big hug. Because they're all just like this like sexual tension. They just need to release that. I'm going to be a man. What? You're the big, what? You're the big, what? You're the big, what? You're the big, what? You're the big, what? We need to get merch. I'm going to leave.

1:56:13I'm going to leave.