E163: Market rips, Media RIFs, Texas defies Biden, Fintech reckoning, ARkStorm 2.0 & more

26:10And it's not the truth. It's the official narrative. So, you know, how many political reporters do we need just being stenographers for the White House kind of party line? And if you're not going to actually dig deeper to expose how the official narrative they're telling you is not the truth, if you're simply going to print whatever they tell you to print, then why do we need so many of you? So I think that there's a glut of publications is all putting out the same official narrative. I think the third thing is there is a go -woke, go -broged dynamic going on. I mean, you talk about like the LA Times.

26:43The reason why they're losing so much money is that family that bought it. They put their woke daughter in charge of it. This is basically like a woke Nepo baby on steroids, basically an Alexander Soros type who's made the LA Times the most radical woke publication, you know, within the range of the mainstream media. Remember, though, the ones who put out that ridiculous story on Larry Elder called the new face of white supremacy or something. Yeah. Yeah. In the case of sports illustrated, they basically pulled a bud light and they lost a lost subscribers when they put a trans person on the cover.

27:17I mean, look, they had a... That's from a citizen's shoe. I mean, look, they had a formula of that work there. What their audience wants is Christy Brinkely on the cover, not Dillemolvaney, okay? I'm not meant to offend anyone by saying that, it's just the truth. And then I think the last thing is, Jason, what you're saying about the experts, I do think that the gel man, amnesia effect may be wearing off. I'll remember what Michael Crichton said about the Jailman Amnesia effect where you read one part of the paper where you actually know something about the subject matter and you realize it's all just lies or lazy reporting.

27:51But then you turn the page to some other part of the paper you don't know as much about and you just assume it's true. I think because experts are able to go to Iraq for every section of the paper now people are realizing that the whole thing is bogus. And I think Jailman Amnesia is starting to wear off and people are realizing that they just go around these official channels and get their news direct. So it's not because these publications are telling us the truth in a boring way that they're losing readership. I think they're losing readership because they're just not telling us the truth at all.

28:20And I think a boring version of the truth would sell better than what they're doing right now. This is why I think subscriptions are starting to work. People are doing subscription, podcast, subscription, newsletters. You know, it's a little bit of back to the future, but you and lower your overhead, have one person doing real journalism. And you could actually thread the needle. You could get 1 ,000 people to give you 100 bucks. You can get 2 ,000, 3 ,000 people to give you 100 bucks or 200 bucks. And that's enough to cover a couple of solid legit journalists doing legit journalism. I have a question.

28:50You think there's a business opportunity to actually build like an AP news, which is just basically like there's no byline. And they just write the truth. and they make it super cost effective for anybody else to just license the truth so that they know it. But why do you need an arbitrator? Well, somebody got to be boots on the ground to go check the boots on the ground. To just tell the truth. Doesn't the distributed model work for that? That people just post. You don't know. I mean, listen, we all the time have this when we're building the docket like, Kane Koa, you know, random Twitter account or Tyler Dirt and, you know, zero hedge.

29:28Like, who are these people? What are their motivation? You don't even know their names. that doesn't mean they don't get stuff right, but you may want to have somebody actually go check that this person exists in the real world. So to your answer your question, you would need people to subscribe to that service. An economist, AP News and Reuters are the closest to what you describe. The economist doesn't use people's bylines. They have people work on the story together and the economist is the brand. AP and Reuters obviously do typically have the journalist names on it. But so you're describing Newswires.

29:58They're not great businesses. I think APN Reuters are just as bad as everything else. I think what I'm saying is like, you know, maybe Twitter should have like a new service, which is just like, here's the truth. I'll argue that PageRank, which is Google's algorithm for determining which sites to rank higher or lower, and the protocol for Bitcoin and other systems that operate on the internet have all kind of followed the same model where there's some system for scoring or for voting, the quality of the site. In PageRanks case, it's how many links come in. In Bitcoin, there's a voting system that determines whether or not the transaction should be approved.

30:38And I think in Twitter, the number of followers seems to be a proxy for the quality of the account. There's some version of that Chimoff that I think just naturally evolves on the internet versus saying, let's take the arbiter of the data and let that state be static versus let it be dynamic and let the system of consumers dynamically vote on what is the arbiter of the data, which seems to be working with Wikipedia, seems to be working with PageRank, and other systems fairly well. Well, unless you look at your own Wikipedia page and you realize it's completely biased, and yeah, is the function of the people who are trying to say something.

31:11What happened to your, which is something bad on your Wikipedia page? I went to the early Wikipedia conferences in the first couple of years of Wikipedia, and the bios of living people, BLPs, were the biggest problem they had, because you had people like let's say you know you had a company fail or something somebody was an investor in it you know they're motivated to write something on your Wikipedia page you fired somebody whatever and so the people who have the wherewithal to edit your Wikipedia page if you're a human alive today sometimes is your detractors and that's just yeah but over time if you're doing that and you get downvoted you no longer have authority on Wikipedia that's part of how that system works.

31:50I think that actually has a way. It doesn't work very well. It's been totally weaponized. It's weaponized by people with money. I think it's been weaponized by interest groups, mainly left -wing interest groups, activists who are well -funded and it's their full -time job to basically disseminate their propaganda on sites like that. Ideally, that becomes a temporal phenomenon that they're, because if you picked an arbitrary and you said, this is my source of news, my source of data, my source of truth, over time that source becomes hacked, it becomes biased in some way. And so I think having a system that's dynamic where those who are doing the editing, those who can be voted up and down and ultimately the system can be voted on by the consumers of the system.

32:31So anyway, I just think that's naturally how the internet's going to evolve anyway. I think it's crazy to rely on one source, especially with a computer, although I do use with a computer for some things. But I guess what I do is I try to triangulate to the truth based on having a number of sources. I mean, isn't that what it's going to do? Yeah, that is the best technique. And that's why X, you know, formerly Twitter is the best way to get news. It's the main way I get my information is because I can triangulate towards the truth by looking at my feet and I'm following a couple hundred people who I take seriously and you can kind of figure it out.

33:02Well, yeah, because if you saw a business insider story over here and then you hear Bill Ackman give his side of the story. Now you've got the principle in the story going direct. And I think that's where going direct and experts have created that triangulation. You could listen to this podcast. You go to direct to Wikipedia and check our facts. You could look at people criticizing us or creating derivative podcasts of this one, of which there are many. And like, you can kind of get all these different vectors and angles to kind of find the truth. But your answer, Tramoff, rich people, you can't get rich doing what you're describing and running a company.

33:37So smart people are looking for opportunities to maximize their compensation. And that's, it's kind of like teachers. It's we don't pay teachers enough. You can't pay journalists enough because the system is broken Therefore, you're just getting lower and lower quality people in the profession who The smartest people leave and become venture capitalists Marketing communications people developers whatever or they do solo stuff So I think the solo journalism the independent voices is gonna want to be in the solution because nobody's gonna want to try to hire a thousand Journalists for a hundred k each and then if they get really smart What do they do they get hired by somebody like you right?

34:11from our company's when they get to the ceiling of what they can do at business insider or vice or wherever. They're going to go try to look for a $200 ,000 a year, John. I think this is important for the following reason. I think that society, if society doesn't have a good way of getting to the truth, it just ends up really decaying in very bad directions. and there's all kinds of truths that are out there that we ignore because people can actually just totally change it where I would rather be in a place that there's the truth than there's the opinion on the truth and then there's fiction and I'm fine with all of it existing it just needs to be better arbitrarily because I think there's a lot of people who don't know any better who should know better and who will just make an assumption and then that's a very limiting, limiting decision for them.

35:10The whole process is going super messy, but that's actually a good thing to happen. The reason it's getting messy is because people are challenging the sources of the news. So you don't just believe a politician about what's happening at the border. You don't just believe a publication about what's happening at the border. You see citizen journalists going to the border, whether it's Elon or RFK went to the border. people are going there and saying, well, I'm going to go check it out for myself and see what's happening there actually. I'm not just going to trust a publication. I'm not just going to trust a politician.

35:38I'm going to go myself. That messiness is now led to a more vibrant system, but it's messy. I think it probably also led in part to Texas suing the federal government. Yeah, which we'll get to in a moment. For sure. If you think about that, we were trying to parse the numbers here. Remember, we had the number and we were trying to parse the number of encounters. So we never were able to get a number. We still don't have a number. How many people the numbers are finished by sentence? We don't have a number knowing how many people have gotten past the border. We know how many people got intercepted.

36:13We don't have the number of the people who didn't get intercepted by definition. We don't have that. We only have the ones that are encounters. That's why they call it encounter set. You've been running interference on this point for like a year on this pod, like saying that we don't know the numbers and Fox News is providing you know bias footage and it's not really a crisis at the border and I said I said I wanted to know the numbers but the only numbers we can get was encounters not how many people actually get it? 6 million encounters and they finally updated those numbers. The numbers are increasing like hockey stick.

36:48Show the chart of it. It looks like a hockey stick. Every year there's more. It wasn't that was the point when I showed it last year every week every month every year is a lot when we looked at it last year it was flat I'll pull up the episode but it wasn't at the time it was flat it was it was only in the last year that it's not like a rocket since COVID well we'll pull it up we'll pull it up so if you look at this chart this explains this perfectly so let I'll explain this chart where's that from this is from the CBS the word of control so this is the exact chart that we pulled up last time and as you see yellow 2022 was essentially flat and then the dark blue 2023 2021 spike see this this chart is not correct.

37:33And then if you look the one thing that does look like a massive spike is 2024. So there was and I said at the time, it's showing from June to December of 50 % spike. Yes, that's what I'm saying. But if you look when we looked at this last year in 2023, three, it was right there. June, when we started talking about last year at the time, it started to spike, but the other years, it was flat. It was my point. It was flat. And then it just started the nut. And that's why I think even trusting the numbers is my point. Like, I mean, I don't know if numbers weren't changing that time. Like from October of 21, there was a hundred thousand encounters at the border to this last code.

38:10It's by the way. 300 ,000. Look at the yellow line. It's like triple. It's like triple since in the last two years. That's crazy. That's a long way. Here's another chart from the Wall Street Journal. This goes back a long way. This is from, I believe, October. So it's already four months old. But zoom in on 2020, like I said, it was at a low there, you know, under $20 million. Well, yeah, and then, but even if you go back, it looks to me like since about 2010, we've been holding it to under half a million. and since 2020, basically since Biden took over, it shot up like a rocket. And what I've been reading in recent articles again, is since October, every month, every week, every day is a new high.

38:52It's not a stable number because obviously, there are millions, hundreds of millions of people all over the world who would like to come to the United States if they could. Yeah. So as the word gets out, that we have an open border, they're gonna come. And that's what's been happening. It's gone viral, is what's basically happened. And also what went viral was there are YouTube videos now of how to claim asylum. So everybody's kind of hacked it. It's completely, I guess we could go, which way do you want to go? Do you want to go right to the border now since this has come up? It's Texas going to succeed from the union stuff.

39:27All right, what's going to happen? Do you want to just go, you want me to tee it up? You want to just touch on it? I think we should explain it. Let's just talk about it. Last year, as everybody knows, Texas started installing razor tape, raise a wire along the Rio Grande near evil pass. Federal border agents, the feds removed it and October, Texas sued the federal government to stop them from removing a December. A federal appeals court temporarily banned the Border Patrol agents from removing the razor tape. Then the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene. Then last week, Biden's office told scotus that a couple of migrants tragically died, a woman and two kids near that same area.

40:02Yeah, we got a ruling on Monday, Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett actually voted against party lines and supported the feds. The justices didn't explain their decisions, but this basically upheld the prior ruling. They gave the federal government sole responsibility for border security. Governor Abbott has responded and he is saying that he's going to challenge the Supreme Court ruling and that Texas is under invasion and it's going to defend itself. That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal status in the country. He said, so, sacks, what are your thoughts here? Is this, I guess there's two things I'll ask you about, is the ruling a good ruling?

40:41And is it in terms of law and constitution, but is it a bad implementation given the circumstance of the board? Well, I think Governor Abbott here is probably going to lose in a court of law, but he's The public by a huge majority wants this border in force. They want to have border security. They can see the photos and the videos and the numbers and the charts of record breaking illegal immigrants streaming into the border. And again, it's not stopping, it's growing. So I think that Governor Abbott is on his way to being a national hero for standing up to this. And it's outrageous that the border agents are actually removing the border security that Texas is at it.

41:30We're supposed to have a border wall. You know, I'd rather have a wall than barbed wire, but if we can't have a wall, then you take the barbed wire and they're actually cutting it down. And this is following in a pattern of the Biden administration. Remember, when Biden first came in, there were pieces of Trump's wall that hadn't been finished. And they basically stopped construction and they sold off these large pieces of wall that were just laying on the ground as scrap metal for two cents on the dollar. And remember that Robert F. Kennedy flagged this when he went to the border at the beginning of his campaign and said that it was petty and outrageous that Biden had done that.

42:06Then Biden changes the whole remain in Mexico policy and he starts granting asylum to what are basically economic migrants who are streaming into the country. And what the asylum rules say is that the immigration officials are required to detain asylum applicants who are not what's called, quote, clearly admissible. So if you're not clearly admissible, you're supposed to be detained. You're not supposed to be let into the country. And the Biden administration has basically paroled millions and millions of these economic migrants who are not clearly eligible for asylum into the country. They just hand them a ticket and say show up in court in three years.

42:47We know that's never going to happen. It's gotten to the point where the mayors of blue cities like New York and Chicago have tapped out and said we can't handle this We've run out of space we run out of hotel rooms We've run out of budget to accommodate all of these migrants and these are sanctuary cities and yet the By administration has persisted in this policy and now They're actually removing border security. They're actually cutting the wire It's unbelievable and when Texas has tried to reinstitute it They've actually gone to the Supreme Court. I mean, to do that, Biden has to send his list or general to the Supreme Court to take on the state of Texas.

43:26So look, at the end of the day, Governor Abbott may lose this case, but I think he's going to win over the American people. And I can't understand why Biden in an election year is pushing this losing argument. I mean, I think this is his worst issue. Maybe inflation is slightly worse, but there's not a worse issue for Biden and the Democrats than border security and to actively be fighting Texas on this. When Texas is merely trying to reinstate a border, it seems to me like a crazy political strategy and it just shows you how finatically wedded the Biden administration is to this policy. Yeah, and the country is not, if you look at the CBS news poll, this is just from September to now should be tougher, 55 % to 63%.

44:14Just one second here, which is just, it's important to note that I don't think Biden's

44:23contesting Texas has anything to do with their desire to actually keep the border open. I think what they were saying, again, we can debate whether it's right or wrong, but what they were saying is the federal government needs to do access to all of these places. And we need to get, we need to cut through this concertina wire to get access. And we can't now because it's wires there in the Texas National Guard and all of these folks are there. And so just give us the do authority that we have to do what we need to do. That was what they were saying in the lawsuit. Now that sounds like total nonsense to me.

44:56The byproduct, David, is what you're saying, which is it does then facilitate more illegal migrants to be able to cross in the intervening time because I think that then what the government federal government isn't saying is here's our plan to secure the border. They're just saying we need access in order to render critical aid if one of these folks gets sick or drowns or what have you and that's why these three people died so cut, you know, remove this wire so that we can do what we need to do. That's what they're saying. Yeah, so on the migrants who drown point, what Governor Abbott says is, look, if you actually had security along all of these points where you put in the wire.

45:34It forces the migrants to go to the 20 -something checkpoints where you actually have an organized process, which is where you want them to go. They wouldn't be trying to swim across the Rio Grande and enter through all these different areas if you could funnel them through border security to the checkpoints. The federal government does control those checkpoints, and I'm sure that if Republicans could control it, Republicans like Abbott, they would be detaining asylum seekers that that weren't clearly admissible, but they don't control those checkpoints. So the federal government can still implement the policy at once.

46:07I actually think that fear of people will be drowning in the Rio Grande if they were actually to, again, push everyone to these checkpoints. So I don't really buy that argument and it looks to me like the Biden administration has now frost over from failing to do its duty because again, it is a federal responsibility to enforce the border. and the president has a constitutional duty to enforce the laws of the land. So he's moved now from failing to do his duty to act as sabotage. I mean, this is actual sabotage where what little border security that we have in these parts of Texas, they're taking down.

46:45They're cutting the wire. I think to most Americans, they can't fathom that this is Biden's policy. What is the reason that this, If Biden wants there to be free flowing immigration, which he says he doesn't, but if he did, why would he want that? What's the reason? There's some arguments I've heard from economists that the fundamental value the US can gain from the flow of immigrants across the border at an accelerated rate is to lower the cost of labor. And so you get low cost labor to participate in the labor market. we have skyrocketing costs for basic goods and services, many of which are tied ultimately to the cost of labor in the US due to the tight labor market.

47:31And so if you can open up more manual labor roles in the US or fill those manual labor roles with a lower cost of labor, you can bring inflation down, you can bring the cost of goods and services down. So there's an economic argument for doing that. And it also grows the economy because fundamentally when you have more productivity through more participation of the labor force, you see the GDP grow, and you also increase the consumption of goods and services in the US by the immigrants that are coming across the border. So there's an economic argument. That's a theory. That's a theory that folks don't want to say out loud.

48:02They don't want to be very public about it, but there is kind of an underlying kind of economic story that behind closed doors, folks are making about why you want to see this happen particularly now. So, Chimoff, what do you think of that theory as proposed? I'm not saying that you're endorsing that freeberg, but I have also heard people say that that's the reason. And why would Democrats be in favor of that over say Republicans wouldn't both of them want to see the economy grow and have more labor available in record low unemployment? You know, whether you agree with or not. So, or is it just become a political weapon now?

48:37Yeah, what do you think? I think that theory is stupid. If that theory were to be valid, let's let's try to steal men why that theory could be Even though it was probably thought up by a knitwear.

48:50You would want to know, first of all, all of the different types of labor shortages that exist. And then you'd want to know all of the different types of labor inputs that these people can provide. And then you'd need to know all of that labor demand by geography, and then you could sort of like do a reasonable job of allocating that supply and demand. So if that was really the case, it's even more reason to have an organized border. Why? Because as David said, you get them through very specific points that allow you to actually enumerate these details about these people and then actually send them to the places where they are actually needed so that then they can become a productive part of the economy, where they can lower labor costs, etc.

49:44What that explanation does is actually put a nice lie in front of what is the actual truth. I think that there are a lot of people who feel fundamentally guilty because a lot of the quality of their life, they didn't earn necessarily. And so they have this self -loathing that they feel like they can appease by allowing all of this other stuff to happen. And one of them in this weird way is immigration. But if you actually ask an immigrant, somebody like me, I kind of feel that it is very unfair for those of us who actually stood in line, who waited years, and in some cases I know decades, highly skilled individuals to try to actually fill this labor gap that you talked about, who are prevented or who are slowed down from actually doing what you say that they're usually all about.

50:41So I just think that this is just frankly like a lot of folks that live in a very, very comfortable way who feel fundamentally guilty. And so they're like, let me share my large S and riches with other people. And maybe that comes from a good place. But the manifestation of that is bankrupting all of our major cities and it's creating an enormous security vulnerability for this country. Yeah, I mean, you could describe it to having an open heart and wanting more people to come into the country, but it's crazy because you have to have at least some control over this. So I can't forget to control.

51:20What about just documentation and awareness? Of course. Yes. I mean, terrorists could be flowing across the water right now. But Jason, what about something even as simple as like communicable diseases? I mean, yeah, I'm getting members, the cartels, gang members and criminals also. Like we should, we've talked about this before point -based systems and merit -based immigration. Yeah, we can have a skills -based system, but that wouldn't get in as many people as quickly as just having an open border. And look, I think there was an economic rationale for this a a while ago. Yeah, we talked about that.

51:55Republicans were in favor of it. 20 years ago. Yeah, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, like 30 years ago, wanted to support a constitutional memo to have an open border. I mean, they just saw the world purely in economic terms and having free trade, free movement of capital, and free movement of labor was all part of that conception. I think it was naive in a lot of ways. And I think now, if you're still supporting it, I don't think it's for economic reasons. I think it's mostly for political reasons. and look, there's this clip from Tucker that would just went viral today explaining it.

52:27I mean, if you want to play it. No, but the numbers you need to understand. Yale University released a study last week by three researchers, all the liberal I believe, who concluded that the actual number of illegal aliens in this country is not 11 million. It's north of 22 million. 22 million. Fact one. Fact two. The Democratic Party is now as a matter of policy calling for the legalization of all all illegals in this country, citizenship voting rights, 22 million new voters. Fact 3, the overwhelming majority of first -time immigrant voters vote Democrat, Fact 4. The largest margin in American presidential history was 17 million votes, 1980 election.

53:03Thanks, Robert. 1984 election between Mondale and Reagan. And Reagan, yeah. 17 million. You would add to our voter rolls 22 million, at least, permanent electoral majority in perpetuity. That's what this is about. It's not about making a country better serving our labor needs, helping the population. It's about putting Democrats in power. Okay. How do you react to that? How do I react to it? Yeah. Can you ask the question like why would the Democrats want to do this? That's a theory. That's a theory. Basically, you're taking votes is what he's saying. We just had a conversation here that just, I think it was on the predictions episode that we all felt that more immigrants, people of color, were going into the Republican party.

53:45So there's only that. I don't think all 22 become magically Liberals we talked about or Democrats here. So I don't know if that part of the Argym is hard to I think what I think what Tucker is saying effectively is that if if 22 million people are converted to US citizens by a given political group They will be rewarded by the vast majority of those people with at least one cycle vote in their favor You believe it Chema you believe that that's why Biden's hasn't opened borders to give votes No I think that actually my opinion is what I just stated, which is I think that highly overeducated liberal elites have a certain amount of self -loathing about their lifestyle that they believe is not earned.

54:27And so they have this weird thing of like, they need to feel better. Well, instead of just like looking at the truth, which is, yeah, they didn't earn it. And a lot of it was given to them by the rich parents and just move on and do something good with their life. They want to just destroy it. So, actually believe it. You believe Chuck Rosarangam in there that this is a democratic vote getting conspiracy? Well, I don't think it's a conspiracy. I mean, your strategy. Democrats have actually said on a number of occasions that this type of immigration is good for the country because a diversity and b, these people will eventually vote democratic or, you know, when they get citizenship or they'll have kids and because of birthright citizenship, they are more likely to be Democrats.

55:12Democrats will say this and say it's a good thing, but then when someone like Tucker says it, they'll basically say it's great replacement theory, it's a conspiracy, it's racist. No, he's saying the same thing that you're saying. He's just saying it's a bad thing and you're saying it's a good thing. I never said it's a good thing. No, it's a good event. No, I'm not about other people. Oh, okay. So I didn't even get my opinion yet. What are you using, Jason? Well, I wanted to hear sacks. So sacks do agree with him that this is is a strategic move by Biden to get more votes? I think it's like a lot of things.

55:41It's an issue where the party that's championing it can claim that it's kind of like doing well and doing good. They think that they're doing good, but it's also highly motivated by their own desire to benefit themselves. So do a function, yeah. Yeah, I'm the rest of the country. We should have an orderly process here and it should be merit -based. I've said that a thousand times on this podcast that we should be a point -based system and we should re -recruiting people. We should have some compassionate slots and then everything else should be a wait list. And we should pick a number of how many people we could absorb based on the labor markets and do it very softly.

56:18Maybe we need a half million teachers. No, you've just got your solution many times. Yes, we're asking for your opinion on what Tucker just said. I would go with sexist position that it's probably convenient that you, yeah, it might go 60, 40, 70, 30 for votes. It's I don't think it's 100 % of them are going to vote there. I think this could blow up in Democrats' face as if it is their strategy because a lot of people who are coming here immigrants don't want to be part of the Democratic ending. The liberal, woke Democratic Party. They want to be part of the Republican hard working party. I want to go two for two.

56:51Last week, I mean, Friedrich pulled up stats that showed that a bunch of people got really angry and quit the pod when I said that and reason basically put in the money to generate AUM and we were joking in our group chat that was all the VCs that stopped listening. I would like to go to they all hit the stop button at once. Yeah, because it was again the truth, the uncomfortable based truth. So, I want to ask you guys, I just a reaction to my comment that there is an amount of self -loathing amongst liberal elites that causes them to embrace some of these ideas that are not rooted an actual logic, but our rooted, I think, in their own insecurity.

57:32Can I just get your reaction to that? You guys think that's true? I think that among this elite, this call it wokalit, who defines their politics in terms of social justice, which basically means you divide the world into oppressor and oppress groups and you try to figure out with every issue who the oppressed group is and you take their side. that's basically how politics works for this group. So in their view of the world, all these poor migrants who are streaming across the border, they're the oppressed group. And so we should help them, we should let them in. And you saw Gavin Newsom in California just extended healthcare to illegal immigrants.

58:11So all these government services basically being provided, and they think that's a good thing, that's official policy. So I do think that there is this ideological view that we should be doing as much as we can to provide help and benefits to these people. I think that at a certain point, it gets to a place where the system breaks. And again, you have mayors of New York, Chicago, other blue cities saying, it's breaking. We can't afford this. There has to be some common sense around what we can afford. You know, can we afford the social services, the hospitals, the schools, the infrastructure? Do we have enough housing for all these people?

58:48and I think we've just like become completely unmoored from common sense. Now, I think that's the ideological people in the party, but I don't know if that's Biden and the Biden administration. I do think that for the administration, they think more about some of these other calculations. But even so, I don't really understand their motivations and their actions because recruiting more Democratic voters is more of a long -term proposition. It's something that they can achieve over the next couple of decades. But Biden could lose the election this year over this issue. I mean, this is his work issue.

59:22Yeah, that's the crazy part. This is where Sean Rissin. Spotlight on this. I mean, he's actually sending his solicitor general to this who court to get permission to cut the wire at the border, right? And, you know, again, he's shining a spotlight on an issue where the vast majority of the country and even I think half of the Democrats don't agree with this policy. So I just don't. I don't get 100 % right on sex. This is like for a Republican, this is a portion is to Republicans as the borders of Democrats. You have to solve this problem. Look at this chart to be so disconnected from the populace.

1:00:00Only 7 % of people reported it, and this is a recent poll. This is from this year that it's not much of a problem in the situation of the border. 45 % and 30 % very serious or a crisis. That's 75 % think it's a crisis or very serious and then 18 % think it's some of the serious. That is the majority overwhelming majority of Americans and you just have to change your policy here. This is too many people flinting across the border period full stop. Just like for Republicans like they shouldn't have overturned Roe v Wade and we should shut down the border on the Democratic side. But I come from a blue collar fam.

1:00:32I can tell you there are two Democratic parties right now. There's the working class Democratic Party that totally doesn't understand what Biden is doing with the border because they want to see wages increase. They want to see low unemployment. They want to see their wages increase and not have to deal with illegal immigrants, you know, fighting for jobs. That's a real thing. Wages have gone up in this country because of low unemployment. That's great for the bottom half of the country. And they live in New York and New Yorkers want to see services for their families, not for families that are streaming across the border.

1:01:10It's that simple. And so what you're saying, Chimath about like woke liberals, that's not the majority of people in New York. That's like a really elite class. Right, but they control the Democratic Party. That's the thing is. They control it for now. They control it for now. But I think they're losing control. I mean, this is why Biden did that huge debt forgiveness program. That's true. court found unconstitutional is because professional elites, college graduates, specifically Ivy League graduates, are the people who run the Democratic Party, as well as the media and all these other professional institutions.

1:01:40They're the center of gravity and the power within the party. And the blue collar, the lunchpale type Democrats, the Union Rankin File, not the leadership. They are starting to move to the Republican Party, the working class, in bigger numbers. and I think that's Trump's appeal. Is he actually knows how to appeal to those people? Absolutely. Knowing a lot of both, my experience is there's a lot less self -loathing amongst Republicans right now than there is among Democrats. A hundred percent of my middle -class family does not want an open border. They may move to the Republicans one day, Jason.

1:02:11Oh, no, they are. They're literal people in New York proving my pro -Klin in the boroughs who are looking at it saying, like, I don't understand this world -crazy ideology. I don't want any part of it. And they might vote Republican. Shabbat is right. It is self -hating. It's self -destructive. It's the same thing that we have with these DAs, you know, who are letting all the controls out of prison, you know, the decarceration movement. No, that's one law and order. Jason, you keep saying nobody wants that, but I think the people that are making these decisions live in high rises that are 50 stories up where there's door men in security or they're living behind a gate with private security.

1:02:50and so they can make these decisions because they don't feel the impact. But yeah, this is why what's happening in these elite cities is so important. Because for the first time, the broad infrastructure of a city is getting crippled in a way where these folks have to live with the implication of their decision and actually understand for themselves, why did I endorse something that is so fundamentally destructive to me and the people around me? And this is the first time. And so in many ways, what the Southern States have been doing by sending migrants to all of these major cities is actually allow the leadership of the liberal elite in these cities to confront.

1:03:31Why have I been proposing these programs and these solutions in this way? They've never had to feel the exact same thing that's happening to the Republican Party as well. They're a leadership, Nikki Hell, etc. the Neocon war -mongering Republican party is now losing to Trump as well. Everybody's going populist now. You need only look at the statistics. The majority of people want the border closed. That is across both parties. The majority of people don't want to be involved in foreign wars. That's across both parties. And that's why Trump and RFK are just crushing it in the polls. And that's why they're both having such a great showdowns because they're appealing to the majority of Americans and the majority of Americans don't want to be involved in foreign world.

1:04:13So it's not a Republican position. The Republican position is the opposite. They're Neocons. They want to go to war. Let's go to Fintech. On the topic of Fintech and more journalism, a bunch of news has been leaked recently. We can get into that aspect of the story as well. Confidential financial data from Brexon and Tropic were leaked this week.

1:04:39If you don't very hot startup. They raised a billion five between 2017 and 22. And they were last valued at $12 billion. Earlier this week, it was reported that Brex was burning $17 million a month, $200 million a year on net revenues of 280. These are select leaks. We don't have like the full P &L here. So we can't tell you exactly what's reality or what parts of this are true. But later that same day, after the leak Brex announced, it was cutting 20 % of its step, 300 jobs, which it said would help it extend its runway by two years in Thropic, one of the breakout AI companies that's building a proprietary large language model called Claude.

1:05:16It's really dope actually as well into the cool product. They've raised over $7 billion out of $19 billion valuation recently and their gross margin was leaked this week to anonymous sources said it was between 50 and 55%. Obviously we talked here about SaaS software being a 70 to 80 % margin business. So freeberg, you want to maybe, I don't know which way you want to go with this stuff being leaked by the press or the finance side. I wanted to ask you guys your opinion. Do you think it's almost like the gossip version of business when you get private companies financials and report on it with like an angle of being effectively disparaging towards the business.

1:05:58Look how much they're burning. Look how bad the business is. It hurts employees, it hurts shareholders, any one of us who have been investors in or involved in or on the board of a company, where the press then writes an article where they got a hand on confidential financial information about the business, always hurts the business. It's almost like taking photographers outside of celebrity's homes and taking photos of them through their windows. I don't understand the true newsworthiness, and I just like to take a step back because we always kind of dive into these conversations and treat it as totally appropriate when private the confidential information about businesses is leaked and discussed like this.

1:06:33And we kind of have accepted it as the standard. But, you know, do we really identify the newsworthiness in this or is this really just like the gossip fodder for hurting businesses and it's the kind of sensationalism that we've kind of come you gotten used to in the news in general? Who does the reporting benefit? What the journalists would say is it gives the public the ability to understand business and trends at a deeper level and that's good in a free society. That's what they would say. But you could argue like what's the point of this? Isn't it a sensational story? It's like, oh, look how much money this company's burning.

1:07:05Oh, wow, that's why we should all talk about it. Like they would say maybe it's, it's like, look at the mega yacht that the billionaires on, you know, or like, look at the, yeah, look at the celebrity at the beach, you know, like, look at how they're dressed. The journalists who reported this would say it's no different than us talking about the Zerparra or overspending and it's just part of the reporting on that trend. Yeah, that's a general framing of like, like, like, like, I don't know. I just think like going in a getting confidential financial info. It hurts the employees, it hurts the shareholders, it hurts the board, it hurts the company, and the customers of the company that ended up questioning the business.

1:07:37From a journalistic perspective, there's nothing about this that to me seems to benefit the public at large by revealing all of this salacious information. It's a private business that's not required to disclose their financials, and all of their shareholders privately on the stock, and someone took some private company data and leaked it. I can tell you in, you know, when we ran and gadget 90 % of the leaks, 95 % of the leaks were calls from within the building. So this is... This is just gruncle employees. Well, I think in this case, it's actually an investor who doesn't want to see them burning 17 million a month and wants the runway to go further and they leak this because that's who would have access to it.

1:08:12The accountants and lawyers would have access to it, but that would be the end of their careers and their firms if they did leak it. So somebody who has a financial interest in this, typically an earlier stage investor or an investor who's frustrated with the management that they won't cut the burn, leak this in order to create pressure. So in other words, the press is just a tool being used by the insiders. And that's how this went down. 95 % of the time. I think it's more likely to be a low -level employee. I think that's typically where this comes from. A board member has a future -y duty to basically keep a proprietary data secret.

1:08:45I really don't see most investors wanting to take the chance of it coming back on them. by again violating their Delaware obligations, their free -shoot duties. Furthermore, I think even passive investors who are on the board generally don't want to hurt their investments. I think it's generally disgruntled employees who do this. I'd say lower level disgruntled employees. And the reason they do it is that either they feel like the management of the company is asking them to do something unethical or is non -responsive to their concerns. So I think it is the motivations you're talking about, Jake, Al, but my view on it is that lower level employees have less to lose.

1:09:28What about the news, what are the needs of this? Like, what do you think the journalists, like objectives are besides sensationalist headlines on, like, what's the newsworthiness to the public on reporting these stories? Well, I mean, you talk about how damaging these stories are and they hurt the companies. So why would the reporters do it? And the reporters are like, right, They're not there to help companies. They are there to hurt companies and self clicks by doing it. So now, is it newsworthy? What I would say is it's annoying when the media gets a hold of proprietary information and puts it out, but it's hard to argue that it's not newsworthy.

1:10:03I wish the media would do it in a non -clickbait way. Like if they're gonna put out some numbers, don't cherry pick one or two of our swimmers. But you survive a company. So by that vein, shouldn't a journalist go out and try and get the private financials of every private company in Silicon Valley. They would if they could. And just publish it on our website. Okay, but if they did, yeah, that's for that explicitly, that would be illegal. So they can take inbound, but they can't go out and try to steal it themselves, obviously. Right. So why wouldn't someone just set up a week of leaks for private financial information?

1:10:33If you look at every journalist now, they have a PGP key or whatever. They have a phone number. They say anonymous hit me on these anonymous services. And that's how this is done. and having been on the other side of it. It's back in the Engaget days, people used Yahoo, I think they use Prototype. I don't know, I just read it now. I think kind of negatively when I see these stories, and I'm always like, what's the point here? Why are we reporting and hurting companies based on reporting and actuals? That is the point to hurt them. Well, but the media has a different incentive than you do. Just to get a subscriber, if you put this behind a paywall and you have all the salacious details and you have one story like this every week, then the fifth time somebody comes to the paywall, they're like, you know what?

1:11:11Yeah, this is great insider information. I'm getting smarter because of it. I'll pay the 25 bucks a month. If people in our industry didn't want to see this happen, they shouldn't subscribe to the publications that do this. Freeber, did you read the article? Yeah, it just got some numbers. I mean, I got it. So you did read it. Yeah. Yeah, so they accomplished their goal. Well, I read it because you guys sent it to me, but I hate all these articles that I see on the internet that you subscribe to the publications that do this. No, no, no, I don't subscribe to any of that. No, I don't want to read about every startup is a challenge.

1:11:41Every startup is a disaster. until it's suddenly not. Like that's reality. And it's really awful for years to have seen like tech reporter after tech reporter who's supposed to be kind of covering the news, the innovation, the progress in the industry, target and focus on the inevitable failure that every business is dealing with on a frequent basis and make that the headline story, which just ultimately hurts the business, hurts the employees, hurts the ecosystem, hurts progress, doesn't really benefit anyone except their viewership. I thought you wanted to talk about the quality of these businesses.

1:12:12Let's talk about the authority of businesses. I think it's hard to have a conversation about the quality of this business based on a couple of these data points because I think they could be cherry picked. I think one of the problems of these articles is you don't get the PNL. You just get like one or two numbers. I can't tell you based on, I mean, look, 17 million a burn is not good. That's almost always a red flag. But I don't know if that was one month or like the steady state. I need to see the PNL. I can tell you five minutes if it's a good business or not by looking at the PNL. Yeah, in the Brax case if we for those of us that know the The founders They're really sharp guys and Reake is a really really sharp guy So you guys in that company anyone I am not no, but I'm friends with Enrique and I think he's wonderful If they are cutting the burn by 20 % who knows we don't like Sacha saying we don't know the denominator here.

1:13:00We don't know the total spend We don't know how net revenue is defined It's just a part of you on fintech go ahead is Fintech a great business or not? I mean, is it a tech -based business? Do you believe in the category? So I started Metro Mile, which was an online auto insurance business with a telematics device that plugged in the cars back in 2010. And the term Fintech wasn't used at that time. And in the years that followed, Fintech became a term where it was like technology, companies or software companies reinventing financial services in different ways. And, you know, so we're now 14 years past that.

1:13:34And a lot of, quote, FinTech businesses are looking like Fin businesses without the tech, meaning their margins and their LTV to CAC or their return on invested capital. It looks the same or in some cases worse than the traditional financial services businesses that they're meant to disrupt. And so this spans insurance to lending, to banking because the technology advantage was meant to accrue either a better margin or a better return profile or a better call it LTV to CAC, meaning you can acquire customers for less or you can get more money from those customers by retaining them longer and get more money over time.

1:14:15I always used to sit at the board meetings at Metro Mile and I would scream, guys, if we don't demonstrate margin advantage, the business will eventually trade like the market trades, which is one times revenue. And if we trade it one times revenue, we're already overvalued and we've earned so much money, it was always a challenging conversation about pulling up the margin, pulling out the LTV to CAC numbers. The truth is, over the years, a lot of Fintech companies fell into the same crap that D to C businesses did, which is to grow. They started acquiring customers through Facebook and Google, and Facebook and Google became all the page views on the internet, and ultimately got competed away, and the price went up, and the conversion rates went down.

1:14:54And so the CAC went through the roof. There was a lending company I was involved in early on as a main shareholder and we were spending $4 to acquire a customer making $12 a month in gross profit. Fast forward 24 months and it was costing north of $30 to $60 to acquire a customer and gross profit per month declined to $2 to $4. So this margin advantage went away as the business scaled and the CAC went up. So the LTV to CAC ratio started to look worse than traditional lenders. So what are the FinTech companies doing response when this happens, which many of them faced? If they had some inherent margin advantage or some inherent growth advantage that over time got competed away, well, they start giving product away for free.

1:15:36In FinTech, it's really easy to grow by giving away a dollar for 90 cents. So you could drop the price of auto insurance and suddenly everyone buys your auto insurance and your revenue growth goes through the roof. But your margin profile is terrible. You'll lose money over time because you'll have higher loss ratios and same in lending. In lending, you can offer people a lower rate. Revenue goes through the roof. Everyone signs up for loans from you. And over time, you end up having defaults that eat away your gross profit and you end up losing money on that product. So many of these thin tech companies, it takes a couple of years for those economics to play out, are now starting to run into that headwind, which is they couldn't just grow through some unique margin or CAC advantage.

1:16:12They acquired traffic. And when they couldn't acquire traffic with a good LTV to CAC ratio, they had to start doing this, give it stuff away. And then the margins get eaten up over time or the business gets unprofitable, and they can't get out of that cycle. So I think we're in this kind of like realizing the truth, which is that a lot of fintech businesses are just fint businesses. There are a few that are doing great, but many of them, for many years, I think mass graded as having some unique tech advantage until those numbers started to play out, which demonstrated that in fact they did not.

1:16:40Yeah, and you can understand the customer acquisition cost. That's what Cat stands for for those of you who don't know very easily, because I was an investor in Robinhood and one of the genius things they did was a give to get program. It's called in the referral space. If I get you to sign up with my referral code, they would give me a share of a company and they would give you a share of a company. So you get a free share, but you have to then sign up and put your bank account in and all that kind of stuff. They'll pay a referral program, a couple of hundred bucks, e -trades, et cetera of the world to get a funded customer.

1:17:12Robinhood was able to do it for giving away two fractions of a share and you weren't getting like a $300, you know, Tesla share, you were getting whatever. One percent of that, you get $3 worth of Tesla shares or whatever. And they did it with a little device, like a mystery box. So it was quite addictive. And in the mystery box, they would have dollar shares, two dollar shares, whatever they would, and they would net that out to be well below, tens of dollars instead of hundreds of dollars. And I maxed out the prong because I tweeted it and got 250 people. Now they're doing one where if you move your money into the account, they give you 1%.

1:17:43So if you remove a million dollars of shares in, they'll give you like $10 ,000 to build up their assets under management. So you need to have something that is cheaper than what's in the market, like TV is very expensive too. I'll say two things, which are built on what I've said before. And maybe I'll try to make the point clearer. Do you guys know what the average gross margin is of the S &P 500 and how it's changed over time? My guess is gross margin. Yeah. My guess is 28%. wrong, but it's a good guess. It's about 43 % over the last kind of 25 years, except in two years. And those two years were on the tail end of the Web 1 .0 bubble bursting.

1:18:26So the average is about 43 % in 2002. It went to 30 % in 2003. It went down to 23%. So a half right of the steady state average. That's one comment. But the second comment is when you actually look at the S &P 500, right? So it has all of these different sectors. But this is the 500 best companies in the world, right? Everything else is much worse than this. And you look at who has the highest probability and the highest correlation over long periods of time of generating high gross margins. It's actually the companies in the markets with the lowest gross margins. So if you put these two things together, what is it saying?

1:19:11It's saying that high gross margin companies are rewarded for growth, but they generally speaking have a very poor track record of two things. One is generating profitability, and two is actually doing it in a consistent manner. And so I think this is just the way of saying what I said last week, but I'm just going to keep harping on this because I think this is a huge trend over the next decade is technology free -brew to your point is no longer a definable sector. I know that we want to point to a company and say it's the tech company but I think it's much You'll be much safer if you say this is a tech -enabled version of X And X is all of these other historical sectors of the economy that have existed energy consumer staples consumer discretionary materials IT industrials real estate utilities whatever it is It's actually that company And those companies have a prevailing gross margin, a prevailing gross profitability, a prevailing ability to convert gross margin to gross profit.

1:20:16And that has not changed that much. And so all of these companies that are massive outliers to these trends are going to go through a process of getting refactored. And maybe your example of fintech being more fintech is a very early sign of what may be happening to the rest of all of these companies that we point to and say, that is a tech company. Actually, that may just be a real estate company that's tech -enabled. Yeah. It used to be the case that tech companies sold technology to traditional companies. And now, traditional companies are getting rebuilt, quote, as technology companies, but maybe don't have as big of an advantage as the incumbents who can easily adopt technology themselves.

1:20:58So it becomes ubiquitous that technology is, you know, the way the market evolves. But could you imagine if we have a mean reversion to the average gross margin profile? Oh, by the way, the other thing was a gentleman made a very, I think, misguided comment when we posted the plot last week about how gross margins can never change and this is crazy. And I just wanted to explain that for a second. Let's just say you have a software company that has 80 % gross margins. But you have an accounting rule now all of a sudden that changes the capitalization of R &D I think Saks you said it last week, but I'll reiterate it If all of a sudden these companies go totally pair weight pair shape Because of these kinds of accounting rules where you can't capitalize these investments over five years But now you can only you pay for them up front But you can deduct them over 15 or 20 years, which is what is happening right now So, companies will lobby the standards bodies to change the definition of gross margins, so that those gross margins look very different, because they'll want to deduct them immediately.

1:22:02And now you'll see gross margins decay by a thousand and two thousand basis points. All of this is to say that this may not be new and different. It just may be a rhyming version of the past. And we know what that past look like and the new the numbers are kind of unavoidable. Sacks any thoughts on this Fintech Reckoning bubble or Some other perspective you might have. I think you're right. It is a reckoning and the reason for that is because Fintech is one of the hottest spaces during the bubble I have the saying that the hotter they are the harder they fall and So when a space gets really frothy and speculative obviously the reckoning is gonna be that much bigger in terms of your question about revenue multiples and how to think about that.

1:22:50I agree that it's a big mistake to think of Fintech revenue as having the same quality as say SaaS revenue. I mean, the gross margin profiles of Fintech businesses typically are very different. A good software business, 70%, 80 % gross margin. Fintech businesses typically have transaction costs on every transaction that are pretty high. So like Friberg mentioned, if you're making loans, you're going to have a loss rate on that portfolio. If you're doing insurance, you're going to have claims payouts. If you're doing payments, you're going to have transaction fees that you pay to save fees in MasterCard.

1:23:30And certainly we saw this at PayPal, where the margin on any particular payment was pretty low. And I do think that investors who were putting 100 times plus multiples on Fintech revenue, definitely we're not taking the the margin profile into account. You know another mistake that I think investors make is they'll think in terms this is certainly true with payments companies. I mean I can I saw this all the time after PayPal is that people will confuse gross payment volume and revenue with a payments company. What you have to understand is you know take up a payments business that's doing maybe a billion dollars in payment revenue.

1:24:12That sounds like a lot, right? But if they charge 2 .5 percent transaction fees on that, that's only 25 million revenue. Okay. Now, let's say that of that 2 .5 percent, 1 .5 percent on average goes to Visa Mastercard, and another 50 basis points is fraud losses, and another quarter point is customer support costs on transactions where there's a problem. Okay. Now, your real margin, your real gross profit on that transaction is 25 basis points 10%. So really of your 25 million of revenue, you only have 2 .5 million of true net revenue. And then you have to use all of that revenue to pay off all the overhead of the company, all the R &D, all the sales and marketing, all the G &A, the overhead.

1:24:57Kind of bars. Yeah, exactly. So you very quickly shrink from a company that's doing a billion dollars in payment volume to one that really is only doing 2 .5 million of net revenue. So, I mean, unless you're a company like, I don't know, like only fans is able to charge 10 % transaction fees, but they're rare. You know, and they tend to be kind of in these, you know, subprime or kind of sketchy spaces. So people just don't really understand that the scale that you need to make a payments company work. I mean, it needs to be not just like a billion is not enough. You need to be doing tens or hundreds of billions of volume to make these businesses exciting at all.

1:25:41And I think there's something probably pretty analogous with some of these other areas like loans of various kinds or insurance. Because of the losses, the margins are just way smaller than people think, and therefore, you just need huge volumes to make them interesting. So I think that's part of what's going on here. Yeah, and people conflate the numbers, especially in the early stage of startups, people were referring to Airbnb and Uber and DoorDash's revenue as the gross market, you know, transactions. And like, yeah, Airbnb is taking what like a 15 % rate and that's all margin. Yeah. But you know, people would take the whole, you know, five days day and attribute that to like, oh, this is the revenue of Airbnb.

1:26:24It's just intellectually dishonest. All right, Friedberg. I have been seeing a bunch of tweets about this ARC storm hitting California. Yeah, is this gonna be amazing snow? Is this going to be floods and disasters? Is this the day after what's reality here? Yeah, there's this like rumor that is not corroborated by science that this arc storm event is gonna hit us in the next week or two in California, which is this massive storm. Nick, if you pull up that tweet that I sent you last night. So this is the 200 mile cross -Pacific jet screen. Oh, yeah, I saw that. With a very hot and moist Pacific, so a lot of energy, the ocean temperatures are hotter than they've ever been on record.

1:27:10So this causes the air to move more quickly. It causes more moisture to go into the air and then it gets moved and pushed all the way to the Western United States. And so some people have said, wait, this is going to lead to an art storm event. So what's an art storm event? In 1861 to 1862 in California, there was an atmospheric river event for 43 days. So water poured down for 43 days straight, completely flooded the Central Valley, Sacramento, Los Angeles. All of these regions were underwater for six months. At the time, causing $100 million in damage, and the USGS, the United States Geological Survey, did an analysis on what they projected what happened if such an event were to happen again this day and age.

1:27:55These sorts of events are predicted historically to happen every 150 to 200 years, but based on the warm temperature in the oceans, we see it's now predicted that these will happen every, call it 25 to 50 years or much sooner. And these high temperatures are driving a higher increased frequency and severity of these sorts of events. So the most recent model called ARCH Storm 2 .0, which was an analysis done by the USGS showed that if this sort of an event were to occur again, would drive over a trillion dollars in damages in California. So based on the image that you just saw which showed this massive 200 mile an hour hot, wet, jet screen plowing towards the Western US, a lot of people on Twitter started speculating, it's art storm 2 .0, it's coming our way, and a lot of meteorologists have looked at the ensemble, which is the simulation model forecasts and said, you know what, it's not gonna be art storm 2 .0, it's gonna be wet over the next couple of weeks, it could be very wet, but this isn't the big mega flood event that everyone's been worried about.

1:28:52So rest assured, it's not imminent. I know a lot of people are talking about it saying it is imminent, but I do think it's worth being aware of and cognizant of this art storm 2 .0 type scenario. And you know, it's the kind of thing that folks are waiting for and now, you know, predicting it every other week as his about that happened when these sorts of things happen. Last year they referred to the storms we had in California as atmospheric river. And the arc, the AR in, in arc storm is for atmospheric river, I see. So last year we had flooding, we had damage to our house, I think like $50 ,000 in damage.

1:29:23No, it was not. Yeah, the snow and Tahoe, the floods in the Bay Area. It was crazy. It was bonkers. And how many days was that? It was only like 10 days. So basically, it's going to be like wet, warm, moist. But it's really not going to be like dripping. And like, I got it. It's not going to be drenched. It's going to be drenched. It's going to be wet. but not drenched. It's going to be wet for 25 days. There you go. There you go. Anyway, it's worth being cognizant. We talked about the hurricane event in the Pacific couple of weeks ago. These sorts of events more frequent, more scary, more significant.

1:30:06Hotter oceans are driving these events. But this doesn't seem to be the megafluet event. But it could happen. Some point got to be cognizant. That's the reality. There are people are buying like sandbags and stuff like that and putting things around their homes these days to to prevent this kind of stuff So yeah, and then hopefully it hits I got to leak in my office here right now. I got a tarp on my roof You got a tarp on your roof. This is at your house or this is your office my house my office at my house Your home is like water was pouring in through the roof Do you have wood you have wood shingles or do you have other?

1:30:39I've got composite shingles, but apparently underneath it that's some holes. They got to redo the roof Anyway, I have to take I have to take the wood shingles off because we can't get the insurance people to yeah She proves no longer because of fires in California and you can replace up to 30 % of them is what I was told And so you can do like patchwork trim off But if you want to at a certain point they won't let you do it and you just have to replace the whole damn thing This happened to me in Brentwood and those wood shakes that you have the sun dries them and they become like tender basically.

1:31:10So you actually don't want to have those shake roofs anymore. Super. I think that I think they're treated to be fire retardant. But they look so beautiful. Now we have to replace them with composite shingles or like, you know, yeah, we're about to start. But we don't we can't even get five days straight of good weather for the folks to come in. So that's what's so crazy about this thing is we can be sitting for six months from now and have 25 days in moisture. Yeah. I mean, 40 days, I'm going to tell that 40 days straight of wet moisture, wet and moist. Yeah, but not dripping, not drenched. No, 40 days.

1:31:45That's it. Consistently 40 days and moisture. Consistently 40 days of just, yes. Wet and warm. Moisture. And it doesn't, if you were up in Tahoe, would be flurries and, yeah, soft powder, which is what I'm hoping for. All right, everybody. for the day. What is he laughing? Give it together, please. For the dictator, Chromoth Polyhapatia. And is there, when we look at these atmospheric things that occurred, is any way does this have any kind of gravitational pull? Multiplansions. Does this freeberg? Any planetary effects that might pull the oceans out, like the gravity of the moon? I'm turning off my microphone.

1:32:29Moral. You're in this. You're in it. And nothing. None of those. We're classes. All right, everybody. Goodbye. Goodbye. For the Southern of Science, David. We've heard the dictator. Chairman dictator, Shema Foyhapatia. And David Sacks. I love you, man. Yeah. I love you, Bessie. See you next season. Bye -bye. Bye -bye. What like your winners ride? Bring man David Sacks. I'm going to win. And it said we open source it to the fans. and they've just gone crazy with it. Lumbi West, I'd be sweet up, you can walk. I'm going all in! What? What? What? What? What? What? What? Besties are gone. Go through it.

1:33:12That's my dog thinking I wish you're driving. Sit back. Oh man, I'm going to have to do that. 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 out. What your VIP? What your VIP? VIP. What? We need to get merch. I'm doing all this.

1:33:42I'm doing all this.