#2206 - Chamath Palihapitiya

53:37Today, it costs about four cents a kilowatt hour Just don't forget the units, just remember the four cents concept 20 years ago it costs like six or seven cents If you go and get solar panels on your roof Basically cost nothing, in fact you can probably make money, so it costs you like negative one cent Because you can sell the energy in many parts of America, back to the grid But if you look inside the energy market, the cost has been compounding And you would say, well, how does this make sense? If the generation cost keeps falling Why is my end user cost keep going up? This is like, this doesn't make any sense And when you look inside We have a regulatory burden in America That says to the utilities of which they're like less than 2 ,000 in America We're giving you a monopoly effectively In this area of Austin, you can provide all the energy Now, Texas is different, but I'm just using it as an example But in return, I'm going to allow you to increase prices But I'm going to demand that you improve the infrastructure Every few years, you've got to upgrade the grid, you've got to put money into this, money into that Over the next 10 years, we've got to put a trillion dollars America collectively into improving the current grid Which I think will not be enough Because it is aging And most importantly, it's insecure Meaning folks can penetrate that, folks can hack it, folks can do all kinds of stuff And then it fails in critical moments I think that in Austin, you had a whole bunch of really crazy outages in the last couple of years People died like this is in 2024, that's totally unacceptable So, I think as people decide that they want resilience You're going to see 110 million power plants Which is every homeowner in the United States Everybody's going to generate their own energy Everybody's going to store their energy in a power wall This stuff is going to become, I mean, absolutely dirt cheap And it'll just be the way that energy is generated So you have this, but this is not the whole solution Because you still need the big guys to show up When you look inside of like the big guys So like now you're talking about these 2000 utilities that need to spend trillions of dollars They can do a lot of stuff right now to make enough energy to make things work But when you look at nuclear, I would just say that there are two different kinds of nuclear There's the old and the new, the old stuff I agree with you It's just money and you can get a turn back on It's a specific isotope of uranium, you can deal with it Everybody knows in that world how to manage that safely But then what you have are like these next generation things And this is where I get a little stuck And I'm not smart enough to know all of it But I'm close enough to be slightly ticked off by it There's a materials and a technical problem with these things And what I mean back to materials Some of these next -gen reactors need a material That will take you like 50 years in America and the world to like harvest an ounce The only place where you can really get it is the moon in sufficient quantity I mean that's how it's going to work You're going to go to the moon to harvest the moon You're going to harness this material, then you know, schlep it all the way back To someplace in Illinois to make that I find that hard to believe What is the material?

57:38I can find it, it's in an email that one of my folks sent me But it's a certain form of reactor that uses a very rare material To create the plasmonic energy that can generate all of this stuff And it's just very hard to find on earth So I kind of scratch my head What's the benefit of this particular type of reactor? Enormous energy So like, you know, a solar cell gets this much energy You know, a nuclear reactor does this and like this other thing does that And it's super clean So my point is like these next -gen reactors I think have some pretty profound technical problems that haven't been figured out I applaud the people that are going after it But I think it's important to not oversell that because it's super hard And there's still some profound technical challenges that haven't been solved yet You know, we just got past what's called like, you know, positive net energy Meaning, you know, let's just like You put, I'm making up a number You know, a hundred units of energy in And at least you try to get out like a hundred point zero one And we're kind of there So that's where we are on these next -gen reactors The old generation of reactors, I'm a total believer in And we should be building these things as fast as possible So that we have an infinite amount of energy By the way, if you have infinite energy, you know, the most important thing I think that happens is you have a massive peace dividend There's like the odds of the United States going to war When we have infinite energy, approach is zero But isn't the problem with introducing this to other countries?

59:26And I believe it was India where they introduced nuclear power plants Then they realized very quickly they could figure out how to make nuclear weapons from that Yes, when the uranium degrades, it can be used in weapons grade uranium And the real problem would be if that is not a small handful of countries that have nuclear weapons But the entire world, they could get very sketchy I think you're touching what I think objectively to me Is the single biggest threat facing all of us today

1:00:10I escaped a civil war So I've had a lived experience of how destructive war could be The collateral damage of war is terrible Where were you? In Sri Lanka And you know, I was part of the ethnic majority, singhalese Buddhist But you know, we were fighting Hindu Tamil minority And it was a 20 year civil war It flipped the whole country upside down from an incredible place with 99 % literacy to just a struggling developing third world country And so we moved to Canada, we stay in Canada You know, my parents do whatever they could, they really, and they got run over by that war They went from a solidly middle class life to my father, you know, had a ton of, you know, just alcoholism And didn't really work and my mother went from being a nurse to being a housekeeper And it was dysfunctional It really crippled, I think, their dreams for themselves And so you know, they breed that into their kids, fine But that can't be the solution where hundreds of millions or billions of people have to deal with that risk And I am objectively afraid that we have lost the script a little bit I think that folks don't really understand how destructive war can be But also that there are not enough people objectively afraid of this And that's what sends my spidey senses up and says, hold on a second When everybody is telling you that this is off the table and not possible Shouldn't you just look at like the world around and ask, are we sure that that's true?

1:02:03And I come and I think to myself, wow, we are at, you know, the biggest risk of my lifetime And I think the only thing that is probably near this is maybe at some point in the Cold War I don't know because I was so young Definitely, you know, Bay of Pigs But it required JFK to draw a hard line in this end And say, absolutely not So will we be that fortunate this time around? Are we going to find a way to eliminate that existential risk? This is why my current sort of like vein of political philosophy is mostly that Which is like, you know, the Democrats and the Republicans, there's just so much fighting Over so many small stakes issues in the sense that some of these issues matter more or less in different points But there is one issue above all which where if you get it wrong nothing matters And that is nuclear war And you have two and a half nuclear powers now that are out and about extending and projecting their power into the world Russia, China, and Iran That wasn't what it was like ten years ago That wasn't what it was like twenty -five years ago It wasn't even what it was like four years ago And I just don't think enough people take us that back and say, hold on a second, if this thing escalates All this stuff that you and I just talked about won't matter Whether, you know, our kids are on Adderall or not or the iPad or two Don't give them so much Fortnite or, you know, material science or, you know, optimism It's all off the table because we will be destroying ourselves And I just think that that's tragic We have an enormous responsibility right now for the village elders of the world to tell people guys We are sleepwalking into something that you can't walk back from One of the strangest things about us is the kind of wisdom that's necessary to sort of see the future and prognosticate and see where this could go Especially based on the history of human beings and how many times things have Like you were talking about Sri Lanka, but there's many examples over the world of civilizations that were thriving That were pounded into dust and because every day is similar for us We have this inability to look forward and to make that leap and see the potential for disaster that all these things have And this is what freaks me out about when people talk openly about, you know, we have to win with Russia versus Ukraine What are you talking about?

1:04:59What is winning? Yeah, what does that mean? Like this sounds insane and then applauding the long range attacks into Russia now Like an escalation Oh, you know, they're attacking Russia now, they'll show them like, are you in a movie? Like are you do you think that this always ends up with the good guys winning? Because that's not the case in human history at all and not only that there is no good guys people start launching nukes Everybody's a bad guy and everybody's fucked And that's on the table It's on when you see long range of Israel bombing campaigns in the Lebanon and you see what's going on with Ukraine and Russia Like who knows who knows how this escalates who knows what the retaliatory response is who knows what the response to the response is Well, I think I think like let me add to this by saying we know what the response will be not it will not be measured It will not become it will not be hey, let's get on the phone and talk about it Right Like the thing is there was a long period of time where you know, America was the leading moral actor in the world Right and I think that we spoke from a place of wisdom but also like earned respect But we forget that at the end of the cold war, it's not that we vanquished the USSR as much as they imploded from within Right, it was just an economic calamity they just couldn't afford to keep up with us And the reason was we had these two edges right we had a technological edge and we had an economic edge And when you put those two things together it created a lot of abundance now we can talk about how some of it is not equal which I also agree with but it allowed America to be sort of effectively for a long period of time the top dog The honest reality is that's not where we are today we are one of two or three And the problem with that is that you can't look back in history and try to live your life like what it was like in the good old days You know, we're not the high school football star anymore So we need to live in a more modest way, in a more reliable and consistent way with neighbors that have also for themselves done well And just realize that they have their own incentives And when you tell them to do something they're not always going to listen So if we don't understand that and find a way to deescalate these things What you said is going to happen Something is going to be one step too far A reaction, a reaction, a reaction And then eventually somebody will overreact And that is all just so totally avoidable And it just frustrates me that we objectively don't understand that We sweep it under the carpet and we talk about all the other things And I understand that some of those things, all of those things, let's say, matter But at some point in time, nothing matters Because if you don't get this right, nothing matters And I think we have to find a way of finding people that draw a bright red line and say This is the line I will never cross, under any circumstance And I think America needs to do that first Because it's what gives everybody else the ability to exit stage left and be okay with it The other problem that America clearly has is that there's an enormous portion of what controls the government Whether you want to call it the military industrial complex or military contractors There's so much money to be made in pushing that line Pushing it to the brink of destruction but not passed Maintaining a constant state of war but not an apocalypse And that as long as there's financial incentives to keep escalating And you're still getting money and they're still signing off on hundreds of billions of dollars To funnel this and it's all going through these military contractors and bringing over weapons and gear And the windfall is huge, the amount of money is huge And they do not want to shut that off for the sake of humanity Especially if someone can rationalize You get this diffusion and responsibility where there's a whole bunch of people together and they're all talking about it Everyone's kind of on the same page and you have shareholders that you have to represent Like the whole thing is bananas So I think you just said the key thing, this may be super naive But I think part of the most salvageable feature of the military industrial complex Is that these are for -profit largely public companies that have shareholders And I think that if you nudge them to making things that are equally economically valuable Or more, ideally more, they probably would do that What would be an example of that other than weapons manufacturing?

1:10:22What would be equally economically viable? So part of when you look at the primes, the five big kind of like folks that get all of the economic activity from the Department of Defense What they act is as an organizing principle for a bunch of subs underneath effectively They're like a general contractor and then they have a bunch of subcontractors There's a bunch of stuff that's happening in these things that you can reorient if you had an economy that could support it So for example, when you build a drone, what you also are building a subcomponent, a critical and very valued subcomponent, all the navigation, all the communications, all of it has to be encrypted, you can't hack it, you can't do any of that stuff There is a broad set of commercial applications for that that are equal to and greater than just the profit margin of selling the drone But they don't really explore those markets If, for example, we are multi -planetary, I'll just go back to that example

1:11:34I will bet you those same organizations will make two or three times as much money by being able to redirect that same technology into those systems that you just described Hey, I need an entire communications infrastructure that goes from earth to the moon to Mars, we need to be able to triangulate, we need internet access across all these endpoints, we need to be real time from the get -go There's just an enormous amount of economic value to do that So again, we have these very siloed parts of the economy that are limited by what we know And what we know is part of what you just said, which is we built these things and then some people convince others to use the things that we built And I think instead of saying like there's like some crazy nefarious plot to always go to war, instead if we say if you make the thing and you could sell it to a different market and make more money Would these people do it or are they hell bent on war?

1:12:33I think it's more that they would just do it As long as there's not still a business for war So then it reduces war to a very different kind of business, I think it's smaller, I think it's more kind of drone oriented I'm not saying that war will not go away, there's no utopia where war goes away But it's a crazy thing to say Unfortunately, I think that we're always going to be fighting for some resource So the last 30 or 40 years, all these forever wars, we were fighting over energy effectively This is my one bright spot that I think about with AI as well Everyone's terrified of the open border situation and criminals coming across the border Wouldn't the solution be not have a place like a desperate third world country where people are trying to escape on foot with their families If we were living next door to another United States and you could just travel freely back and forth between the two of them because it really didn't matter Both of them are equally safe, both of them have equal economic prosperity, both of them are equally democratically governed No problem, go over there, go over here, I mean it kind of used to be like that with Canada With Canada, it used to go over there with a driver's license It used to be able to go back and forth between the United States, I think the first time I went to Canada, I did not have a passport, I had a driver's license And it was kind of the same sort of deal as it just accepted, oh that place is cool, we're next to each other If the whole world was like that, it would be incredible It would be incredible, and I think AI makes that possible I think so too I think it makes that possible, and we're going to have to deal with a few very uncomfortable factors, one of them being the illegal drug trade And another one being the consequences of prohibition And forcing people into prohibition of drugs Of drugs, yes, which is, I'm not comfortable with that, but I feel like the only way to disempower illegal drug manufacturing is to have legal drug manufacturing That's regulated, the only way to stop fentanyl overdoses is to have cocaine become legal But the problem with that is you can need a bunch of people that are addicted to cocaine Can I ask you a question?

1:14:56I don't do drugs, so I don't understand But what's the step before it? Like what causes you to want to do fentanyl? They don't do fentanyl on purpose Most started because of a prescription No, most fentanyl overdoses is fentanyl that's cut into other drugs Particularly party drugs like molly and ecstasy, cocaine, even heroin Things on those lines where people think that they're getting a pure thing But they're getting it from the cartel and you know It's laced with this Yes, it's cheap and it's very small amounts of fentanyl do incredible damage Like the amount of fentanyl that can kill you is like the head of a nail It's very small, if you're seeing any relationship to a panel I've seen a picture of it So the problem is if you have a drug and you've cut it with a bunch of other things Because you want to sell as much of it as possible You add a bunch of things into it and it'd increase the potency they add fentanyl And because that it's all done illegally, it's unregulated So a lot of people die and the numbers in the United States I think there are upwards of 100 ,000 people Is there something to do to motivate folks to not do the party drugs?

1:16:08Well, I think you're going to have to have a massive education campaign And people are going to have to understand it the same way they understand cigarettes Like cigarettes smoking in young people is down quite a bit from the 80s And I think that's because of people understanding the consequences of it But you're always going to have people that want to smoke cigarettes And my belief is that they should be able to smoke cigarettes I don't think you should do Adderall all day But if you get a prescription, you can do it But at least in my mind, you're getting Adderall from a pharmacy And that pharmacy is going to give you actual Adderall And not some fentanyl lace thing that's going to kill you And you have no idea You think you're taking the same thing you've always taken and then one day you're dead And that's the case with a lot of people today Especially with party drugs I don't think you should do heroin I don't think you should do cocaine I don't think you should fuck your life up And I know too many people will fuck their life up But I also don't think that I should be able to tell you what you can do Especially when there's all these drugs that are readily available Particularly alcohol, which is one of the most destructive drugs To your health, to relationships and families, to societies How many alcoholics, how many drunk driving accidents, how many drunk people murdered other people There's just horrible consequences of alcohol But I completely support alcohol being legal But we have learned how to consume alcohol as a culture What about what happened in Oregon?

1:17:35You know, like Oregon where they legalize it And now they are legalized They were already off the rails Okay, this is not like legalizing drugs in a ver... It's not like legalizing drugs in San Francisco in the year 2000 It's a completely different scenario So you have these people that are really... They're accustomed to tents And subsidizing drug addicts And they're accustomed to this very bizarre breakdown of civil society Where you're seeing open -air drug markets And everyone's fine with it And it's somehow or another kind and compassionate to allow this to take place everywhere And that's what you have in Portland Portland is probably one of the most liberal cities that we have The one of the most leftist cities that we have So for Oregon to do it that way, I think it's like an awesome libertarian notion We shouldn't make any of these things a crime These are personal choices And you can make good personal choices or bad ones We'll have everything with it But the problem is the fabric of society The encouragement of discipline and of hard work and of accomplishment It had been eroded to the point where accomplishment meant that there was something wrong with you Like if you were a person that was eat the rich, tax the rich If you were a person that had accomplished something great It wasn't because of some extraordinary effort you put in Even if it was It was you did something to fuck over other people And that's the only way you get rich in this world And it's bizarre It's bizarre It's permeated Portland So when you introduce free heroin to that You're going to get more problems And you're subsidizing people for living on the streets I mean, I watched this interview where they were talking These people in the Pacific Northwest where they moved there specifically so they could be homeless Because they knew that they get money And there's no incentive to get out of those tents There's no incentive, there's free food and free drugs And they give you money And they're like, okay Right, so that didn't fail because of the actual drug policy But more of the other social policy I think...

1:19:49Have you ever heard of Dr. Carl Hart? No He's a professor at... Is he at Columbia? I believe he's at Columbia Carl Hart was a straight chemist Like a guy studying chemistry and studying these substances in Columbia And he was a clinical researcher And along the way he started realizing that our understanding of these drugs And the pros and cons of them had been flavored by Propaganda heavily Particularly the sweeping act of 1970 that made almost everything illegal Which was really to target civil rights groups and anti -war people And so this was during the Nixon administration They made a bunch of things that were psychedelics M .K.

1:20:38Ultra? M .K. Ultra was actually before that It was when they were experimenting with people Particularly with LSD So when they started doing this They made everything illegal And now the only way you can get any of these things is through illegal sources So you're getting them through the cartels So if we don't have the ability to legalize things And the problem with legalization There's a lot... There's no good answer here So to keep things illegal You're gonna have fentanyl overdoses I know people have lost their children I know people have lost their brothers and sisters to this It's a horrible thing that happens You're also gonna get heroin overdoses if it's legal So Jesus Christ And you're gonna get more people that try it because it's legal But it's just like prohibition during the 1920s or the 1930s rather When they had that What they did was they enabled the mob And they enabled organized crime And that was the rise of Al Capone And that was the rise of the moonshiners And you essentially...

1:21:45You always had a demand And the people that were willing to supply that demand were criminals And they were criminals in this country We're empowering criminals that are essentially running Mexico Which is bizarre I know during the latest election How many assassinations were there? Was it 37 or 35? During their latest elections In Mexico In Mexico There was at least 35 assassinations Wow Are there European countries that do this well? Portugal Portugal is decriminalized everything And they saw a massive decrease in HIV A massive decrease in drug addiction And all sorts of other things I don't know what the long term study is on that 37 37 37 assassinated candidates I mean, you have to play ball with the cartel over there You know, just like you had to play ball with the mob in the 1930s You have to play ball They have the guns and they're really mean And they'll do whatever the fuck they want to The 2021 midterms When 36 candidates were killed Oh my gosh Geez Geez Yeah, it's wild down there That is a direct result of having trillions of dollars Being made by selling illegal drugs And made most of them to sell to America I'm sure they sell them to other places as well All fentanyl or is it all?

1:23:08Oh, it's all kinds of things No, I don't think there's a lot of money in that The real money is in like meth, meth, cocaine They have a problem with illegal marijuana that's grown in the United States on national forest land Because what happened is, especially in California My friend John Norris, he wrote a book called The Hidden War And he was a fishing game officer And you know, basically wanted to be the guy that like checks your fishing license Like great job, you're out in the outdoors And what is one day? One day? It isn't beginning of a movie It isn't beginning of a movie I'm sure they're probably doing a movie on it But in one day they find this creek that is dried up And they think that perhaps Oh, they diverted the water Someone's diverted the water They thought it was a farmer that had done something inappropriate or whatever So they follow the creek up And they find this illegal grow -up that's run by the cartel And then they become a tactical unit And they have Belgian malemois and bulletproof vests and machine guns The whole thing is crazy And they get in shootouts with the cartel in national forest land Oh my god Because it's a misdemeanor to grow pot illegally in a state where pot is legal So California has legal marijuana You can go to any store, anywhere Use credit cards, it's open free market If you follow the rules, you can open up a store But if you don't follow the rules, you can sell it illegally It's just a misdemeanor I wanted to learn about marijuana, the market But you can't process the money, I think In some states I know in Colorado it was a real problem And in Colorado they had to do everything in cash That's like breaking bad bricks of cash Well, they were using mercenaries They're essentially using military contractors To run the money back and forth to the bank Because you had to bring the bank money in bulk So you'd have a million dollars in an armored car And a bunch of guys like tailing the car in front of the car And they're driving into the bank And everyone knows there's a million dollars in that car So you have to really be fortified And so it was very sketchy for a lot of people I don't know what the current condition in Colorado is now I don't know if they still have to do it that way A couple of companies I just remember The reason I know this is like A guy came and pitched me on some business And he was like the software for all that And you know, I think the company went public And I just realized it just went sideways Because like nobody wanted to touch it Because they didn't want to build rails for that economy Yeah Which didn't make much sense seeing as To me at least just because if the laws say it's legal Then it should all be treated equally But then the problem I think I remember them telling me was That federally it's still great Yeah, it's great And they're trying to diminish that The latest steps during the body administration is to change it to a schedule three And that's up for proposal That would help But really it should be just like alcohol It should be something that you have to be 21 years old to buy You should have to have an ID And we should educate people how to use it responsibly And we should also pay attention to Whoever the fuck is growing it And make sure you're not going wacky You know like there's people that are botanists that are out of their mind podheads That are just 24 -7 hitting bongs And they're making stuff that will put you on Mars Like without Elon Musk I remember the problem that somebody raised I read this in an article was You need to make it more than what like more legal than it is today So that you can get folks to put like some version of a nutritional label on the thing And show intensity right because the intensity is not regulated Well they do regulated in California If you go to good places in California Let's say this is 39 % THC which is very high This is 37 But then there's also the problem with one thing that marijuana seems to do to some people That alcohol doesn't necessarily Some people have a propensity for alcoholism And it seems to be genetic But there's a thing that happens with marijuana Where people who have a tendency towards schizophrenia Marijuana can push them over the edge And Al experience in wrote a great book about this called Tell Your Kids And I've personally witnessed people who've lost their marbles And I think it's people that have this propensity Because one of the things that I think is beneficial about marijuana in particular And this is one of the things that freaks people out is the paranoia Right?

1:27:46Well paranoia is I feel like what it is is a hyper awareness And I think it pushes down all these boundaries that you've set up All these walls and all these blinders So that you see the world for what it really is And a lot of people it freaks out But what I think it does is it ultimately makes you more compassionate And kinder and nicer And you realize like In the moment or afterwards I think it's a tool for recognizing things that you are conveniently ignoring And you know my friend Eddie told me about this once he was saying If you're having a bad time and you smoke marijuana You're gonna have a worse time Because you're already freaking out You're already freaking out about something You know if you're going through a horrible breakup And you get high But if you're having a great time with your friends You'll probably just laugh and be silly Right?

1:28:39Because you're not freaking out about something You probably you're in a good place mentally Which we should all strive to be in a good place I have this weird psychosomatic guard that developed My father was an alcoholic And I didn't drink at all In my teens and my twenties And mostly in my thirties And then in my mid thirties I started drinking wine And I love wine and I think I can handle it I really enjoy it I love it I do too But I cannot drink hard alcohol The minute that it touches my lips I get severe hiccups I mean like debilitatingly bad hiccups Really? Any kind of alcohol Do you think it's psychosomatic?

1:29:21I think it's completely psychosomatic Because it makes no logical sense If the tequila touches my lip I just start hiccoping like crazy And it's like this weird protective thing That I think my brain is developed Because my dad used to drink some stuff That would make you blind Right It was like 150 % proof The guy would just chuck it I mean he was I think there is There are whiskey connoisseurs And there are There is like scotch Like old scotch does have a fantastic taste It's got an interesting sort of an acquired taste But there's real wine connoisseurs Wine is a different animal The flavor of wine is spectacular It's the most delicious of all alcohols without being sweet I completely agree with you Yeah, it's a different thing Like the people that say they're tequila connoisseurs like Shut up It all tastes like shit Some of it just tastes less like shit The great tequila tastes less shitty It's alcohol Yeah And it's like then there's some flavor around the alcohol Yeah, I drink a glass of wine with a steak And it's like Oh, it's wine, it's fucking great I totally agree with you And he puts you in a Like a calm It relaxes me You don't want to go drive fucking wild And crazy and get in a fight when you're drinking wine Exactly And the amazing thing about wine is You can go on these journeys Where like when I first started to buy wine I did what every knucklehead does Which is like oh, if it's expensive it must be good Right And you start down that road And it's just so dumb Because the amount of money that I spent On stuff that was marginal But it had a good label and it had a good pedigree And then when you discover and you learn Like I remember like my wife's Italian So we spent a lot of time in Italy in the summer With our kids And when we were there You find these incredible Italian white chardonnays Okay In the summer I'm just going to be honest with you There is nothing better to drink it in the world It's better than water If you were like cold It's cold, it's refreshing It's got a great bouquet But these bottles are 40, 50, 60, 80 Maybe maximum 100 euros Max And then you'll spend a thousand dollars on some Stupid white burgundy from France And it tastes like half of it You know the other great example of this is like Chateau Petrus And you know I don't want to get in trouble With the Chateau Petrus guys But I'll just be honest Those bottles cost you know Two, three, four, five, six thousand You see some in restaurants, 19 ,000 I've never bought one I've tasted it once Because in Vegas I had a host And once he gave me a thing He says, Chimath, you can use this for You know Like your dinner And I'm like, what is our cap?

1:32:06You know, and he's like This time no cap And first I was like, God, I must have lost a lot of money I was like When they say no cap I was like, so that was a thousand dollars one So then I said Fuck it, I'm just going to try this So I went to Caesars And it was like four or five thousand dollars I mean I would never buy this in a norm But I got it because it was free Joe is okay All this build up in my mind This is oh my god This is going to be ethereal It's going to be embrosia It was not embrosia Yeah Whereas you can find these other ones That are made by you know Folks that just put their entire lives into it You taste the whole story I just think it's incredible It's a weird status thing The expensive wine It's just like Cuban cigars It's really dumb Yeah, it's a weird thing The real skill is being able to know price value And when you know it, it's so satisfying Because it's like, oh this is just delicious And then when your friends enjoy it They're like, oh my god, this is delicious And I'm like, yeah, that's 80 bucks Yeah How?

1:33:13And I'm like, well, it's very hard to find So then the skill is like It's funny, I'll tell you This is how bad wine has gotten for me Meaning like, I love the story, I love the people I want to support the industry So I went to the register for an alcohol license In the ABC in California Really Because I was tired and frustrated Of trying to buy retail Because you have to go through folks That have their own point of view And I was like, well, if we just become You know, we isn't like me And a friend of mine And so we set up a thing We set up a little else Yeah, when I filed the paperwork And it's called like, you know C .J.

1:33:58Wine LLC You know, my friend, me and Joshua And we're able to negotiate directly with the wineries And we're able to get it from wholesalers in Europe Or in South Africa Or in Australia And it just allows us to buy a bottle, try it If we really like it Thursday nights at my house is always poker We serve it to our friends They like it, then we can buy a couple cases I can share with my friends, and you know, you get it at wholesale It's a great little hack Is there a limitation Like there's a certain specific amount that you have to buy? No, I look like a retail store It could be like Amazon You know And so retail store could just buy a few bottles They could buy a case, they could buy a few bottles That's a little bit harder So you have to have a more personal relationship But then the really good stuff you can buy a few cases And then pass them on to your friends I don't know It's I think wine is incredible And it is incredible But when I hear people that are going to open up their own wine label I'm like, oh good lord How much do you know about wine?

1:35:01Like, oh, I'm going to start a wine business Like what? I went to a couple of these wineries And I just asked them just out of liking They just explained to me how you got there And all I could think of was, man, this is way too complicated But these folks, it's like animal husbandry They're breeding this fine with this fine But then they're going to take, you know, cleave off this little bit So it's like breeding, it's a breeding program Over 10 and 20 and 30 years And it's like, this is really complicated Oh yeah, they do weird stuff Like they'll splice avocado trees with What is that nut? Pistachios So they'll take avocado trees And they splice them with pistachios To make the tree more sturdy You're going to take two different species of tree And if you cut them sideways And splice them together, they'll grow A friend of mine started a company that's making like potatoes And he makes like these ginormous potatoes like this It's an incredible thing Because like you, the yield is through the roof And like, you know, his, I think vision is I'll be able to feed the world in a cheaper and more abundant way But it's all this engineering He hacked the chromosome of the potato Oh my God That's incredible And like it generates a huge potato And it generates a seed I didn't know this, but potatoes don't have seeds In order to plant more potatoes You chop up the potato into like quarters or eights And you stick the potato into the soil Oh, he's playing God And so he's like No, this is dumb I'm going to make a huge potato And I'm going to have the potato have the seed Then I'll just take the seed and I'll plant it at the ground So when you usually do it, do you have to have that potato And they have to soak it So the sprout comes out of it And then plant it, is that what they do?

1:36:49I don't know, but I mean Because I've seen that before I don't, I've always wondered like how are they doing that I don't know, but he's like going after potatoes And then he wants to go after fruit Like I'm a, I love fruit But fruit is like tilts me because like every time I go to a store Sometimes like you'll get like their seasons were like you know Like white nectarines and white peaches Maybe like one of the most incredible fruits I've ever created But if you get it in a bad season, it's just like unedible Yeah, they're dull They're dull, they're terrible Mangos are the same, I love mangoes And when you see like these mangoes in the summertime Like I don't know where Europe gets their mangoes But this is probably one of the best features of Europe Like they have these mangoes that are just like this Well, they're organic too Oh, they're just, they're just incredible Well, they still have real tomatoes Like you have to search for real tomatoes here Like if you want an heirloom tomato That's an actual tomato The tomatoes that we have are just these freaks You know, I, have you ever worn Glucos monitor?

1:37:50No, haven't I, I wore one for 90 days And my wife when she was younger Well, she runs a pharma company So she has a Proclivity for science obviously And she's, she thinks about a lot of this stuff scientifically But she also broke her back when she was 11 So she's very sensitive to inflammation So she's hacked a lot of food So that she can minimize inflammation I wore this thing And I was Totally blown away The things that I thought were healthy for me My body was like This is radioactive Like what stuff? So like the way that I ate rice or quinoa I would have like a small amount of rice Or I would have brown rice Or I would have black rice Or I would have quinoa because I was like Oh, it's more protein It didn't really matter It had the same My body reacted with this massive sugar spike The minute I cooked it off Put it in the fridge Waited 24 hours And ate it the next day No glycemic load whatsoever Same with potatoes Potatoes I found that positive I made it more al dente than what I was used to No glycemic load And like the problem that's frustrating More al dente meaning less cooked Less cooked Has a totally different reaction in my body Than if I make it soft and smooshy So I've trained my body To have like really Al dente pasta And I see that The glycemic load is much lower Just the point is like The food supply In the United States I think it's the most precarious it's ever been It's brutally hard To figure this out I mean is everybody supposed to get a glucose monitor And then figure out what little things You know trigger insulin spikes Well that's not possible And then even if you do find out How do you get it in a cheap affordable way And I mean no wonder like everybody's You know Really struggling with this Have you ever wanted glucose monitor when you were in Italy No I wore it here I'd like to know Because there's a difference that The way my body is I can tell you how my body feels If I take a picture like I mean I try to work out And I take pretty detailed like What's my BMI What's my muscle mass What's my fat percentage And I always Take those readings Right before I go And when I look afterwards And I don't do anything when I'm there You know I swim in the In the sea when I can like when I'm on vacation Or whatever I walk a lot But nothing else No weights, no nothing

1:40:35My muscle mass stays the same My fat percentage Goes down I look healthier And I feel Really great And all I do is I just eat What's in front of me I don't think about quantities whatever But when I'm back in the United States So I get to be there Call it six weeks a year Right But when I'm back in the United States I have to go back on lockdown Because like a lot of people You know I had this thing Like if you look at a picture of me In Sri Lanka Look like old Dave Chappelle I was like that I was like this I was just a total stick figure Within one year of being In North America In this case in Canada When you look at the school pictures I was fat Couldn't explain it It's just a difference in the food system And my parents are making the same things Because they wanted to have that comfort Of what they were used to So I don't know if it was the food supply or not But you know It has to be And everybody says the same thing And then my whole family is struggled with it You know So I think that there's something And then when I go now To Italy as a different reference example It's like It's the best shape of my life And I do less Even when you eat things like pizza Over there you don't feel like you ate a brick If I have eaten pizza here and I love it But when I'm over I'm like What did you do?

1:42:08Like you ate a brick But over there it's just food It tastes great The pasta doesn't bother you Nothing bothers you It's just whatever they're doing And there's many things One of them they're not using enriched flour And another thing is they have heirloom flour So it hasn't been maximized For the most amount of gluten I'm curious to see what Bobby does If Trump wins in this world Make America healthy again I don't exactly know what his plans are Yeah What's possible How much can you really affect with regulation How much can you really bring to light And what are we gonna learn about our food system?

1:42:44I mean even Canada One of the things about the hearings That they just had Was they were comparing lucky charms That they sell in the United States That are very brightly colored Versus lucky charms that they sell in Canada Completely different looking product Because Canada is illegal to use those dyes That we use ubiquitously And those dyes are terrible for you We know they're terrible for you And Canada knows they're terrible for you Which is why they're illegal up there The food tastes the same It's still sucks It's still bad for you It's still covered in sugar But at least it doesn't have that poison It just makes it blue or red And it is impossible Like to teach my kids healthy eating habits As a result of this The food in the United States It's just It's everywhere And it's beating into you That this is a cheap way of getting caloric and take And it is full of just All these stuff you can't pronounce It's garbage And it's so It's so common And then if you're in a what they would call food desert If you're in a place that only has fast food Like my god Your odds of being metabolically healthy If you're poor and you're living in a place It's a food desert It's impossible It's fucked It's too hard And it's also very expensive Which is even crazier It's so expensive to eat well And to eat like clean And make sure that you don't have any additives And garbage in your food Do you remember In like the 90s and 2000s Where what we were told was that was bad Yeah And like you would see sugar free And I would just buy it Oh yeah, sugar free Oh like sugar free I'm doing the healthy thing here This is great Margarine Margarine or then I would see fat free And I'd be like oh I'll do that And it turned out all this stuff was just Well it's not even It's such a small amount of people that affected that That's what's so terrifying There's a small amount of people Who bribed These scientists to falsify data So that they could blame All these coronary heart Arty diseases Heart diseases on saturated fat When it was really sugar That was causing all these problems And we had a very dysfunctional Understanding of health For the longest time the food pyramid Was all fucked up The bottom of the food pyramid was all bread and carbs It's terrible So nuts And just made a bunch of like really sloppy humans And you could see it in the beaches The photos from the 1960s versus Looking at people in the 2000s Have you had Casey and Cali means on?

1:45:15They're coming on They have an incredible story Should I say it or we can do it? Sure, yeah They have this incredible story that they tell about What happened And what they say is In the 80s When you had these mergers One of the mega mergers that happened was Tobacco company with food company There was two of them And a lot of the scientists Started to focus some of their energy On taking that skill I'll just put that in quotes Of making something very addictive And transposing it to food Right, it's like okay if I'm at RJR And I'm used to making cigarettes How do I think about structurally building up Something that Wants you to eat more but now Instead of smoking instead of a cigarette It's a Twinkie or whatever And a lot of the food science That we have in America Is built on the back of a bunch of these Mega mergers where you had these scientists Go and build super Quarant -quot -addictive food You know, and that was a failure of the I mean obviously it was a failure of the Capital markets but it was a failure of public health Well, it's a failure Of our regulatory process It's a failure of our Exposing the public to this And making sure that Whatever this is is labeled the same way cigarettes are Because if you want to buy cigarettes You can buy them today But it's going to have a big warning That tells you this can kill you And arguably sugar is probably As difficult to kick As nicotine is And there's a lot of other problems I smoked when I was younger I found it much easier to stop smoking Than it was for me to cut out sugar Wow Cutting out sugar is basically impossible It's very hard You encounter it everywhere I have a friend who has diabetes And he got type 2 diabetes And he's thin, my friend Duncan And one of the things he found out Is when he stopped eating, it was all just eating too much sugar When he stopped eating sugar He's like, oh my god, I have so much energy Like this is what I'm supposed to feel like He had thought that it was just life Like he's in his 40s now He's starting to get a nap Yeah, I need a nap And he didn't realize he was poisoning himself Yeah And that's what most people are doing Most people out there that are drinking regular soda And they're eating candy And you're eating burgers with sugar in the bun And bullshit and bread And french fries cooked in seed oils You're just poisoning yourself You should fact check this Because I make it the number wrong But there was something that came out Very recently about the percentage of the US food stamp system That goes to soda Yeah And it was like 10 % of the total budget Or something nutty like that It's like some ginormous amount of money Is just basically giving folk sugar water Yeah And you wonder why now the solution Is just to give everybody on the back end of it It was epic It's also like, let's be real That's not food Okay It's something you put in your mouth But you can't buy cigarettes with food stamps You can't buy cigarettes with food stamps Why should you be able to buy something That's really bad for you I mean, what would change If we said food stamps We're going to actually increase the amount that you get But we're going to regulate what you can buy And you have to buy all the things from the outside of the store I don't even think you have to regulate it Like Think of what has happened Because of companies like Uber Eats and DoorDash as an example What have they done And I'll tell you why I think this is important Those guys have gone out And cloud kitchens, there's three companies They have bought up Every single kind of warehouse In every part of every city and suburb In America And what they put in there Are these things that they call ghost kitchens So that when you launch the app And a lot of the times when you Get a drink from Starbucks It's not coming from the actual Starbucks down the street It's coming from a ghost kitchen Why because they centralize all the orders And it creates an economy of scale Why am I telling you this I think that there is a way for food stamps To sit on top of that infrastructure And just deliver food But the problem is people Especially people that don't know Or care want that sugar water Well You know, like the choices are I understand Yeah, you're going to have people that choose that big mac Because it is delicious Yeah, and I think that they are delicious And once a year I have a big mac But I think if you're going to tie it to something Like a government subsidy At least the government should have a conversation with themselves That says well, we can ship them all of this healthy food And you know, change a bunch of boundary conditions And these folks is lives Like I've seen it, I know what it's like To be overweight, it sucks Your self -confidence is negative one The way I dressed, the way I felt It just took an enormous amount of work To overcome it And you're still left with it Then there's the physical pains Then there's the internal issues that you create for yourself This is not a win And so I get it that the hamburger tastes good But this is where the government I think has a responsibility to say Look, we're going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year So let's spend it in a smart way We're not going to give you pop and soda anymore And we're going to start introducing Some fruit, some vegetables, some fiber Like why can't you do that That's like a very reasonable thing to do Especially if on the same hand The other hand of the government is going to go and negotiate Insulin prices And met foreman prices And GLP ones That is the issue See what Bobby Kennedy was talking about With these GLP ones He was comparing the amount of money Spent on GLP ones And what you could give Every obese American That you could give them Free healthy food and a gym membership For 10 % I think I think what Bobby said is the cost of GLP ones Current course in speed would be $3 trillion A year Isn't that amazing Just something that controls your appetite And for 300 billion You can give everybody food By the way, you can use this ghost kitchen infrastructure To give the food in a prepped way Right, so you can even make life super simple for them The idea that you would spend three We don't have three trillion to spend But we have a responsibility to make sure That people don't kill themselves with food But now there's an industry That's making three trillion dollars By giving people these GLP ones And the problem is Just like every other industry Once it starts making money, it does not want to stop And you're...

1:52:16By the way, I think that they should be allowed to make money But what I'm saying is in a free market Every actor Is allowed to act rationally And actually what you want is everybody To have their own incentives And to act naturally That's when you get the best outcome Because if you're acting with some shadow agenda You're not going to necessarily do the right thing So my point is in this example The government's job In this narrow example Is to get The best healthcare outcome Because if they're doing any form of long -term planning It's pretty obvious Like we are hurtling to a brick wall On this healthcare issue With respect to people's health You don't have a solution The only solution Cannot be to medicate And then triple and quadruple The budget deficit That we already don't have a path to pay down Right Well the only other thing that I could think Is if there was some sort of a way That would be effective At establishing discipline Other than just promoting it Like I could conceive of Especially when you're dealing with something like Neuralink or some sort of a new way Of programming the mind Where it just changes Whatever the Behavior pattern is That accepts These foods as choices Like lobotomize Your appetite That would be a very Distopian place If you want the subsidy You need to get this break in time Would not be a good place That would be bad That's worst case scenario Best case scenario is You just have Like a national scale Promotion of health and wellness And abandonment of this Body positivity nonsense And fat doctors And people are telling you that every Weight is a healthy weight And all food is food and to think otherwise Is discriminatory Which you're hearing from people And by the way that stuff is funded And that's what people need to know That nonsense is actually funded They pay people to be influencers And they're getting paid By these food companies To say these nonsense things That are scientifically factually incorrect They're not true It is not healthy In any way shape or form to be obese And when they tell you that It's healthy, you can be metabolically healthy And still have fat It's okay, it's not okay It's not okay, that's just not true And is that fat shaming?

1:54:51You can call whatever the fuck you want But it doesn't change what it does to the human body And it doesn't make someone better If you don't make them feel bad About being robustly unhealthy It's an enormous disservice to folks If We don't expose An alternative path Okay, we're spending this much money We spend so much money in all kinds of random stuff Like just a simple example That we saw this past week 50 billion dollars Spent between Rural broadband And chargers We have no rural broadband And we have three chargers This is the data That's 50 billion Okay, that's not the 300 billion Explain that what you mean by that So There was a So in Congress When they come together to pass these bills Sometimes what happens is there's a lot of horse trading, right?

1:55:50And you get what's called the Christmas tree bill Which is like everybody gets to Hang something off the Christmas tree Right And the crazy part of the United States Is these little bubbles now We are 10 billion here, 50 billion there, whatever So We We passed A few years ago Something that was meant to Get rural broadband Into thousands of people's homes And initially it was given To space eggs and starling specifically And then i think it was pulled back And they said you know what there's a Better quote -unquote better way to do it And There's other folks that decided That the better option Would just be to Like lay fiber Now i'm just going to This is not a judgment i'm just going to show you Something The thing is like if you are like In Kansas from here Okay, between here in Kansas Is like a big distance, right?

1:56:51It's like this When you're in orbit it's just here Right It's just infinitely shorter distance So just at a practical level Solving that problem technically Is way better through satellites Fine They Make i think what was the right decision They unmake it And so they say we're going to go and figure Out a way to lay fiber whatever They've laid zero fiber So there's these thousands of people That were promised broadband That you can get for basically A thousand or a hundred bucks a month or less now And instead they're spending Upwards of thousands and thousands Per home and haven't delivered any Isn't it like $42 billion dollars That's 42 And then the other example was a seven billion dollar program To install EV charges Seven billion And they've managed to install three So all i'm saying is If you add the two together that 50 billion That's one sixth of what bobby kennedy Was talking about in terms of Giving people organic food So maybe we can't give everybody organic food But you can get tens of millions of people Right start with the 40 million people That's on snap you can get maybe Ten million of those people Get them organic food right away So there's all of this waste All we got to do is just like Focus a little bit Take some of these dollars that are just like Falling into the seat cushions It seems like and just reallocate It somewhat intelligently into the things that really matter It seems worse than falling into the seat cushions If it's 42 billion people None of them have received internet access That's 42 billion dollars Nobody's got it I should say i used the Starlink mini this past week in Utah And the mountains It's amazing It's the size of this book It's crazy It literally fits in a small laptop case My friend couldn't believe that was it I was like this is it I got a very used plug it in I got a very early one And I used to carry it around in a Blondry basket It was incredible And then when you see what they've done In a couple of years From this thing that was a little bit bulky It is so beautiful and simple And you know you've seen it You just plug it in And it auto starts to rotate Fingers out where it is The app comes up It shows you this Speed and then You're just going and I've used it in all kinds of situations Like where I'm traveling I bring it with me It's never failed And then I think Man this is like It's a hundred bucks It's less than a hundred bucks And then in a year or two You'll be able to run your cell phone over this thing Yeah This is crazy Yeah in the year or two It'll probably be straight to your cell phone And you won't need that dish anymore But right now the dish is a small iPad And you just sit it down In a field And we plugged a cord to it And you don't even have to have a cord It is a battery that comes with it So how much do you think it really takes To give every American Just a starlink dish Pretty fucking cheap It's very cheap Well it wouldn't be 42 billion I can guarantee you that And by the way the cost of that Would basically fall through the floor If you put it in order for 50 million of these units You know SpaceX would make them for like eight bucks And it's fast internet too Which is even crazier Yeah There's all of this stuff That We should do We just need a few folks I don't know that can either course correct Or just can shine a light on it I mean it's like this thing Where I'm like so optimistic Married to enormous fear And like you know just like a little I kind of go back and forth between this Well let me paint the ultimate dystopian solution The ultimate dystopia Part of our problem is We have corruption We have what you were talking about With deals sort of like You know the border wall Deal had money in it for Ukraine Like there's all these weird deals Though there's bills that don't make any sense Like how did you add all this If it wisest 2000 pages How many people assigned it actually read it AI government AI government solves all those problems AI government is not corrupt AI government just works literally for the people And instead of having all these state representatives And all these bullshit artists That pretend to be working on their truck And they don't know what the fuck they're doing They're just doing it for an ad You don't have any of that anymore Now everything's governed with AI The problem is who's controlling the AI And is there some sort of An ultimate regulatory body That makes sure that the AI is biased or tainted I think there's a step before that Which is a lot more palatable I think the thing with I thought about your version And the problem that you state Is the key problem which is how is this model trained Right Who got their hands on that core stuff The weights and the values of that Who decides And at some point there's going to be Or not there going There is already today in AI models A level of human override It's just a natural facet of how these things are There's a way to reinforce the learning Based on what you say and what I say It's a key part of how An AI model becomes smart It starts off as primordial And then Joe and Jamath and all these other people are Clicking and saying yes that's a good answer Bad answer Ask this question all this stuff Who are those people And it could be gameed as well I think it's skill We haven't figured out We haven't seen it yet but it will be When the incentives are that high And we've seen distortions Like the Gemini AI That was they were asked to Make Nazi soldiers They made these multi -racial Nazi soldiers And that kind of stuff Where it's just like who are the founding fathers It's oh there's a black guy And like here's a Chinese lady Like okay we get it You're not racist But this is you're being crazy You're distorting the past Exactly when you talk specifically history I mean one of them was like a Native American woman was a Nazi soldier And it's like this is so nuts So that is a problem In that AI is not clean Right?

2:03:10It is It's got the greasy fingerprints Of modern civilization on it And all of our bizarre ideologies But there's a step before it that I think Can create a much better government So it's possible today for example To understand Have you ever done a renovation on your house? Yes Okay so you make plans You go and you know your architect Probably pays an expediter To stand in line in city hall There is a person that goes and reviews that plan They give you a bunch of handwritten markups Based on their understanding of the building code You can't use this let pipe you need to use aluminum This windows too small All this stuff You come back, you revise You go do this two or three times on average To do renovation And then they issue your permits Now An AI can actually just ingest all the rules Know exactly what's allowed And what's not allowed And they can take your picture And instantly tell you Joe fix these 19 things You fix those things You go to the city You can show that it maps to all the rules So you can streamline government You can also point out where they're making decisions That don't map to what the rules say That I think is going to be a really important first step Because it allows us to see Where maybe this administrative state has grown on wieldy Where you got to knock some of this stuff back And clean up some of the craft Because there's rules on top of rules And one conflicts with the other I bet you there are things on the books today That are like that 100 % We have no way of knowing But I do think an AI can tell you these things And say just pick which one It's a or its b And I think that that starts to cut back a lot of the The difficulty in just making progress Right You know one of the things that I thought was extraordinary That Elon was getting pushed back on Was his idea of making the government more efficient And that auditing the various programs And finding out how to make them more efficient And a lot of people really freaked out about that And their main freak out The main argument from intelligent people that I saw Was what are you going to do You're going to fire all these people That are in charge of government I don't think that's the answer For an effective government Is to let the same people do the same thing Because otherwise you have to fire them That sounds insane And to say that the government As as efficient as is humanly possible Or even close to it No one believes that No rational person believes that Everyone believes in bureaucracy Everyone believes there's a lot of nonsense going on Everyone believes that Look at the difference between What Elon has been able to accomplish With SpaceX Versus what NASA has been doing recently Look at the difference between What they're able to accomplish with starlink Versus this $42 billion Program that yielded zero results Look at the difference between All these different things that are done In the private sector When there's competitive marketplace strategies Like you have to figure out a way To get better and more efficient And you can't afford To have a bunch of people in your company That are doing nothing And that are creating red tape And creating things harder to progress That's bad for the business That's the argument For letting private companies Take over things By the way, I think that what Just to build on what you're saying People jump to this conclusion That like government shouldn't exist It's not some Anarchic thing where like Government's actually very important They create incentives And then those of us in private industry Go out and try to meet those incentives Or take advantage of them That's very normal And a well -functioning government Creates very good incentives An incredible example of this Is in the 1950s Do you know what the GDP Of Singapore was?

2:07:16No It was the same as the GDP of Jamaica And you fast forward 70 years And you understand what good governance looks like We actually were talking about Singapore Yesterday how extraordinarily efficient Their recycling program is It's unbelievable I mean it's really amazing What they do They really recycle They recycle how we think we're recycling They really do They really separate the plastic They break it up They use it to make power They use it to make road materials They make building materials out of it They reuse everything They were thrust into a spit of lead With no natural resources They had to become incredibly well -educated And industrious And so, you know, Lee Kuan Yu Was able to create the right incentives For government to do a good job They pay their civil servants incredibly well But then also for private industry To show up and do the rest And it works incredibly You can do that in the United States The thing that we would benefit a lot from is If we could just point out All the ways in which like There's either too many laws or laws are conflicting You can at least have a conversation about Batting those back And the second is If you look inside of Private equity There is one thing that they do Which I think the government would hugely benefit from And it's called zero -based budgeting And this is an incredibly powerful but boring idea What private equity does when they buy a company Some of them, the best ones They'll look at next year's budget And if they say What should the budget be?

2:09:01Well guess what's going to happen Joe and your company Everybody runs and says I need X for this, Y for that, Z for this And you have this budget that's just ginormous Instead, what some of the best private equity folks do is say We're starting with zero Next year's budget is zero We're spending nothing now Let's build it back up meticulously block by block So somebody comes in What is it exactly that you want to do? I want to build an interface That allows They start saying something No What do you want to do? I want to upgrade the factory So that we can make a more high Done urine, how much you need?

2:09:43One by one by one And if you go and you do that inside the government What you probably would find Is that same group of people Would probably enjoy their job a lot more They'd actually be, their hands would be on the controls In a much more directed way We'd spend a lot less Because a lot of this stuff probably just goes by the wayside And we don't even know You know And people would just be more able to go and work You could do what you wanted to do I could do what I wanted to do Elon could do what he wants to do There was a thing I tweeted it out today He Cannot get The FAA To give him A flight permit for Starship 5 And 6 So they're waiting on dry docs Right?

2:10:34They're slow rolling the approval Right? It takes it, it takes him Less time to build these starships now Than it does to get government approval That's what he said Meanwhile, the FCC, which is a sister organization to the FAA Fast -tracked the sale of 220 radio stations In part to some folks that were foreign entities Right before an election That touched like 160 million Americans When you look at that You would say how can some folks Cut through all the red tape and get an answer quickly How can other folks Be waiting around For something that just seems so obvious And so exceptional for America And there's no good answer I don't know what the answer is I don't think any of us know No, and then there's just folks that are stuck in space Meanwhile, there's these two people stuck in space And Jamie said they were supposed to be there for how long?

2:11:39Eight hours? They were supposed to be there for eight hours It was supposed to be quick And they've been there for months They're going to be there till February That's so insane They're going to be there till February How terrifying must that be I mean, for maybe you and me Eight days They were supposed to be there for eight days I think I would freak out 100 % I think they would do, how do you not Well, I read this article where They interviewed them, now this could be the party line I don't know, but they're like, this is great It's my natural place Oh, God, Lord I can't believe that's really I had a friend of mine, who knows That's what they say to themselves, keep from going crazy Well, yeah, a friend of mine went to space The founder of Cirque de Soleil, Guy Laliberté And he brought a super high Who goes about, like, it's already over But it's still going on No, it's still going on February 24th Yeah, February 25th, yeah We're stuck in space That's great, this is AI It could Wow, yeah, it could be way more It could be way, way more That's weird, that AI That's another flaw with AI, right?

2:12:53Read it like that What are what the incentive is for AI at a lot of you about that How does AI not know? It's not 2025 yet No, we're stuck in space Until February 25th That's just a straight -up error That's a weird error though It is a weird error But these poor people So my friend that was up there Said It was incredible, he has this funny story Where he was a smoker Still is a smoker But this was like 20 years ago So he was going up on like a Soyuz rocket And he shows up I guess in Siberia is where they do the launches And he was really stressed out Because he had to stop smoking He's not drinking all the stuff He shows up in the cosmonauts They're smoking at the time They're like, oh, it's totally five door They smoke in space No, no, no, I'm saying on the ground while they were trading Oh boy So they go up, he does eight days, he comes back down He took these incredible high -res pictures of like all the parts of the earth He said it was the most incredible thing But you know, when you get back, he's like, I was ready to get back Did you see this latest report, there's like real controversy About some finding that the James Webb telescope has discovered And there's some talk of some large object Moving towards us, that's course correcting This is the weird part about it And there's all these meetings And so all the kooky UAP people are all over it Saying disclosure is evident There's a mothership headed towards us So it gets fun, I don't know what they mean By course correcting, what does that mean And how do they know it wasn't impacted With something else that diverted it It could have been that, it could have just been the gravitational field It could have been the orbital path But they're not telling anybody There's something going on Do you think they would tell people like Imagine if there was a giant chunk of steel Of iron rather that's headed towards us That's a great question, I think the question is What would we do if we knew Do we have the capability of moving that thing Would the FCC wait five months to give Elon the I think you'd probably spend send as many But see, I mean it's all a physics problem at that point It's also a problem of breaking it up If it breaks up then you have smaller pieces that are hitting everywhere By the way, isn't this like the Perfect reason why being multi -planetary just makes a lot of sense Sure Like in any, like for example, would you get on an airplane If they said hey Joe, this is the best airplane in the world It's the most incredible, it's the most luxurious It has the best weather, you can surf, you can But there's only one navigation system And if it goes out You can never do that Would you ever get on that airplane?

2:15:46No So, you know, I think we owe it to ourselves To have some redundancy Yeah, but ultimately I always wonder You know, like the universe sort of has these Patterns that force innovation And constantly move towards further and further complexity And if you were going to have intelligent life that existed on a planet What better incentive to get this intelligent life to spread To other parts of the planet than to make that planet volatile? Make super volcanoes, earthquakes, solar flares All sorts of different possibilities, asteroid impacts All sorts of different possibilities that motivate this thing to spread But to say like this is fragile Yeah And it's not forever so create some redundancy I mean I was raised Buddhist, I'm not that religious in that way But I'm kind of weirdly spiritual in this other way which is I do think the universe is basically It's littered with answers You just got to go and find out what the right questions are So to your point like Are all these natural phenomena on earth You know, the question is Okay, if that's the answer Well, the question is like Do we want to be a single planet species Or do we want to be Do we want to have some built in redundancy And you know, maybe a hundred years from now that builds on top of what happens in the next five Will have discovered all kinds of different planets That's an amazing thing Unquestionably Unquestionably And we also know that there's planets in our immediate vicinity That used to be able to harbor life like Mars We know that Mars was covered in water And Mars had a sustainable atmosphere So we know that this is not just a dream That this is possible that What we're experiencing here on earth is temporary And if we get hit by something But what we know earth was hit by a planet in its formation There was earth one and earth two The formation of the moon, the primary theories That we were hit by another planet And that's why we have such a large moon That's a quarter the size of earth It's like keeping our atmosphere stable And keeping our It's a wild shooting gallery out there And it really is And especially our Our particular solar system has a massive asteroid There's like 900 ,000 Near earth objects But isn't that so like inspiring Like this idea of like Discovering all these other questions That we don't know yet to even ask Right That is a life well lived Yes That's the most promising aspect To a hyper intelligent AI in my opinion That it will be able to solve problems That are inescapable to us And also offer us like real hard data About how big of a problem this is And when this needs to be solved by And then come up with actionable solutions Yeah And that seems to be something that Might escape us as biological entities With limited minds Especially when we're not working together And you could get AI to have The accumulated power, Mindpower of everyone You know 10X The mental model is If an alien showed up today Would humans by and large Drop all of their Internal issues And cooperate together Perhaps Perhaps I would hope that the answer would be yes It would have to be something that showed Such overwhelming Superiority that it shut down All of our military systems And did so openly To the point where we're like We're really helpless against this thing Well, so I think that one way to think about AI is that it is A supernatural system In some ways So If we can just find a way to cooperate And harness this And see the bigger picture I think we'll all be better off Like again Killing each other It's just so Barbarically unnecessary It doesn't solve Anything All it does is just makes more anger It creates more hatred Because the What's left over is not positive And I think that we Need to be reminded of that Somehow without actually Living the experience Yes, my hope is that One of the things that comes Out of AI and the advancement Of society through this Is the allocation of resources Much more evenly And that we use AI As i was saying before, the best way To keep people from entering into this country Is to make all the other places As good as this country That's then you solve all the problems for everybody And you don't have this one place Where you can go to get a job Or you go over there and you get murdered Well, so I think that You know, why are a lot of people Coming to America A lot of the reasons Some are clearly political persecution But a lot of the other reasons are economic to your point And so if you can create Economic Abundance Generally in the world That's i think what people want Most people want as you said before A good job They want to come in and feel like they can point to something And say i made that And if i'm proud of that They want to hopefully get married Have some kids Have fun with them Teach them what they were all about And you know, then our swan song And we all kind of get reborn or not Is it interesting that the idea of people Not getting together in groups And killing people they don't know That's utopia That is some sort of Ridiculous Pine the sky vision Of the possibility of the future of humanity Where That's Common in small groups Like even in cities I mean there's individual murders And there's crimes in cities But cities aren't attacking other cities And killing everybody So there's something bizarre about nations And there's something bizarre About the uneven Application of resources And possibilities And you know Your Your economic hopes Your dreams, your aspirations Being achievable Pretty much everywhere If we did that I think that might be the way That we solve most violence Or the most horrific Nonsensical violence So and you have this data point I said this before but The most important thing that has happened Is that in the last four or five years Is we have severely curtailed The likelihood of war In the nominal sense I think Trump was able to Basically draw a hard red line In the sand on that stuff And the underlying reason Was because we had enough economic abundance Where the incentives to go to war fell We had just a complete Rebirth of domestic hydrocarbons In America, whether you agree with it or not My point is it is quite Clearly correlated in the data As we were able to produce More stuff so economic abundance We had less need to go and fight with external parties So I do think you're right Like this reduces It down to we need to find ways Of allocating this abundance More broadly Two more countries Meanwhile That one crazy thing That you can't unwind And go back from you can just never go there And you just have to make sure Nobody believes that that is justified Because in a nuclear event I think that that's not what happens Clearly I saw this brilliant discussion that you had Where you were explaining That Trump is the wrong messenger But many of the things that he did Actually were very positive Right And I think that is a Very difficult thing to describe It's a very difficult thing to express to people Because any We're so polarized And particularly with a character like Trump That's so polarizing It's very difficult to attribute anything to him That is positive Especially if you're progressive Or if you're on the left Or if you've been a lifelong Democrat Or if you're involved in tech I mean it's this bizarre Denial of basic reality The reality of what What can you see based on What was put in place What actions were taken What were the net benefits When I've always been a liberal And I think I should define what liberalism used to mean It used to mean Absolutely no war And it used to mean free speech And it used to mean You know supportive A government that was supportive of private industry Try your best, go out there We'll look out for you Come back to us if things go haywire That's an incredible View of the world And I think what happened was when I was given a choice I would vote Democrat Or I would support Democrats Because I thought that's what they stood for And I didn't really understand Trump And so what happened was I got too caught up in the messenger And I didn't focus enough on the message And I didn't even realize that I didn't realize it in 2016 But I don't think many people did And then in 2020 I got lost in it But probably by 21 or 22 I started to see all this data And I said, hold on I am not being a responsible adult The way that I define responsibility I am not looking at this data From first principles And I need to do it And when I did What I saw Was a bunch of decisions That turned out to be pretty smart The problem is that Because he's the vessel He turns off so many people With his delivery And I think this is A moment where The stakes are so high You have to try to figure out what the message is Versus what the messenger is saying Or look to somebody else That can tell you the message In a way that maybe Will allow you to actually listen to it That could be JD Vance It could be Elon Musk It could be RFK There's all kind of Tulsi Gabbard There's all kinds of surrogates now Because I think that They have realized that There's a lot of value in these messages We need to have multiple Messenger's So that folks don't get tilted And go upside down So that the minute one person walks in the room And I had to challenge myself To go through that process And at the end of it i'm like wow He's the only mainline candidate here That will not go to war And just on that point It's like Very unique times creates Strange bedfellows It's sort of like one thing that kind of like Always like pops out of me Like why are they working together?

2:27:41Why are they cooperating? I always think like what's going on here And when I saw him and Bobby Align You know Bobby is a very Balanced view of Donald Trump Here's the good, here's the bad Even now Even with everything that's on the line For Bobby and Bobby's agenda He's quite honest about Donald Trump's Positive's and negatives But they both get along And one of the things And probably the most important thing Where they Were sounding the drum from day one Is on under no Circumstance where the United States Go to war I just think we should observe that People should have an opinion on that He's so polarizing That he There's been two attempted assassinations on him And no one cares He's like Neil in the Matrix He's like dodging these plots For now, you know Yeah, but listen no one can dodge forever But the thing is it's like no one seems to care That the rhetoric is ramped up so hard And has been so distorted The other thing that people need to I think think about is The domestic policy agenda Of both the Democrats and the Republicans Are within error bars And what I mean by that is When push comes the shove They both Whether it's Kamala Harris or Donald Trump They have to work through a very Sclerotic Congress Which means that very little Will ultimately get done If you just look at the track record Of all these past presidents You typically get One piece of landmark legislation Past in your first two years And then it all just gets unwound It's happened From Clinton onwards You know, Bush had one bite at the apple Obama had one bite at the apple Trump had one bite at the apple Biden had one bite at the apple So The American political system Has a really incredible way Of like insulating itself So If people would just take a step back And look at that A lot of the policy agendas That both of them espouse Are going to be very hard to get done They'll be one thing You know, maybe they both do something On, you know, domestic taxation Maybe they both do something On the border But the likelihood, based on the past Is that they'll get one of these things done And then not much will be done This is why I think folks Then need to think about Okay, what are the Super presidential powers then Where they can act alone One area where they can act alone Is they can issue executive orders And That can direct The behavior of governmental agencies Okay, so people should decide what they think about that Do you want a muscular American bureaucracy Do you want to more slim down one Do you want one that has You know, bigger ambitions More teeth Do you want one that is zero -based budgeted They're pretty stark on those things And then foreign policy I think, you know One camp is much more in The view that, you know We are the world's policeman And there's a responsibility that comes with that And one says We got a lot of problems at home We're not getting pulled into something abroad And I think people need to decide about that But other than those two threshold issues My honest opinion is that There's You know, we're We're in error bars between the two of them One will cut taxes by this much One will increase taxes by that much But there is Real decisions that have been made During the Biden administration about the border That are affecting people Or lack thereof I think it's a decision I don't think it's a lack thereof Especially the flying people in And the utilization of an app To fly people in That seems insane Like the whole thing seems insane And I don't know what the motivation is I've talked to people that know a lot about the construction business And they believe the motivation is cheap labor I think that's part of it And that a lot of the problem is In many industries The lack of cheap labor And people that are willing to do jobs It's one of the things that I've heard You know, there's a lot of criticism About all the Haitians that have moved to Springfield Ohio But one of the positive things that I've heard from people that live there Is that these people are hard workers And they're willing to do jobs That the other people Weren't willing to take on So you have pros and cons But you have this incentivized effort To move people into this country illegally Which will undoubtedly Bring in people that you don't want here Gang members, cartel members Terrorists That's real And we've documented that And there's people that have been arrested That we're trying to come in that we're terrorists And there's people that have gotten through for sure I think that if I give both of them the benefit of the doubt I think both of them will have to act on the border I think that Donald Trump Has had a clearer view of this issue For much far longer I think that Kamala has had to shift her position To make herself more palatable to centrists But I do think that Both of them will probably have to act Because I don't think what's happening today is sustainable I don't think it is either But the fear and Elon's talked about this The real fear is that they're bringing these people in To give them a clear path To citizenship Which will allow them to vote And then you've essentially bought their vote So if the Democrats bring them in And incentivize them To become Democrats and vote And give them money Which they clearly are doing They give them EBD cards And they're giving them housing And they're giving things that they're not giving To veterans and poor people in this country That seems to be an incentive To get these people to want to be here And also to appreciate the people that gave them that opportunity Which is you would essentially In swing states Which is Ohio, what's one of them If you can get a lot of people in there And you've given them a better life Because of your policies Those people, if you give them the opportunity to vote Especially if they're like limited Low in information voters They're going to vote for the party That got them to America I mean, I Yeah, I have I don't know whether it's a Conspiracy per se Meaning But I do agree with the outcome Meaning I remember very vividly We My parents Took out the whole family Three of us, myself and my two sisters Two Niagara Falls And then we crossed the border to Buffalo And we applied for refugee status in America as well We didn't get it, we were rejected And when we went back We got a tribunal hearing In Ottawa, where I grew up And I remember that it was in front of this Magistrate judge The person comes in with the robes and the hair And everything and you sit there And they have the wigs up there All of it, yeah The wigs And then they sit there And they hear your case out And my father had to defend our whole family Here's, you know, what our life was like Here's what we did And I remember just crying From the minute it started That's all I did at the whole time I seared in my mind Because like, you know, your life is right there It's like a crucible moment for your whole family If they're like I don't buy it Off you go We go back and I don't know what would have happened Fortunately, obviously, it worked out And then, you know, you go through the process I became a Canadian citizen Then I moved to the United States, get on a visa Then I become an American citizen I have an enormous Loyalty to this country And so when I think about like Americans not getting what they deserve before other folks It really does touch me in a play Like, I get very agitated about that idea It's not that those folks Shouldn't be taken care of in some way, shape, or form Because I was one of those people That needed a little bit of a safety net, right?

2:36:15We needed welfare We needed the, you know, the places to go in To get the free clothes and all that stuff But You have to sort of take care Of all of the people That are putting in the effort and the time To be here And follow the rules and stood in line Like when I came to the United States Man, I came on a TN visa Every year You had to get it renewed, you had to show up And if the person that was looking at you Said, Jamoth, out You're gone, Joe Then I had to transfer to an H1B visa My company had to show That there wasn't an American That could do this job And then we were able to show that So I've lived this experience of an immigrant following the rules And just methodically and patiently waiting and hoping And the anxiety that comes with that Because it comes with tremendous anxiety If you ask people that were on H1Bs in America There was a website I don't even know if it exists anymore But we would check What You know, because when you apply for a green card You get an application date And Man, I would sweat that website Every other week Hey, did they update that?

2:37:34And it would be like four years In the past and I'm like I'm never going to get my green card My visa is going to expire, I'm going to have to move back to Canada But I still play by the rules So I just think it's important to recognize that there are a lot of folks that play by the rules That are immigrants to this country There are a lot of people that were born here that have been playing by the rules And I think we owe it to them To do the right thing for them as well And then try to do the right thing for some folks that are coming across the border Because they probably are some of them Legitimately are escaping some really bad stuff Quite a lot of them Quite a lot of them And I'm sure most of those people are people that just want a better opportunity And that's a great thing And that's a great thing But you have to take care of all the people here Especially the veterans And especially these people that have been struggling in these inner cities That have dealt with the red lining And all the Jim Crow laws that have set them back for decades and decades And they've never been corrected There's never been any effort to take these places that have been economically fucked Since the beginning of the 20th century and correct it And instead you're dumping all this money into people that have illegally come here That to me is where it starts looking like a conspiracy I think that as long as people can explain what they're doing for these other folks that you just mentioned I think for a lot of people For 50 % of the population that leans red on this topic You could at least explain to them Right The problem is that there is no explanation There is $150 ,000 home credit that Gavin Newsom was about to give I think he vetoed it But that bill somehow gets to his desk And is there a bill that says We should have better food for the food deserts?

2:39:29Did that bill get passed? So there's clearly a way for state legislatures to do what's right on behalf of the folks in their state So if we just had a little bit more balance And then if we were able to shine a light on those things A lot of the people that live here that contribute would feel better About where things were going and wouldn't feel like the whole thing is just rigged Well that's one of the things that people are so excited about with this Trump union with Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy Is that you're having these movements that seem to be almost impossible to achieve outside of an outsider Like the make America healthy again concept Like what are you talking about?

2:40:17You're going to go up against these companies that have been donating to these political parties forever And have allowed them to have these regulations that are allowing them to have these dyes And food that's illegal in our neighboring Canada Like what? This is no one's done that before Right? So that's very exciting Okay, so But again, messenger message Message, messenger message Just take a step back though And if you were just the average Joe citizen I think an important thing to just notice is Why are all these totally different people Acting as a team I just think it's an interesting thought question for I don't have an answer And I'm not going to plant an answer But just ask yourself like Why are all of these people cooperating?

2:41:12And I think The 2024 election Is a lot about the Traditional approach to governance And a very radical reimagining of government And I think that's what effectively will get decided The traditional approach says We're going to create robust policies We're going to work sort of top down You know, this muscular form policy Muscular domestic policy The government's going to play a large part of the economy And we're going to try to write some wrongs The radical reimagining says We're going to go back to a more Founding notion of this country We're going to have A very light governmental infrastructure We are going to cut back a bunch of the rules And we're going to Take a little bit of a step back on form policy So that we don't end up in a situation We can't pull back from In that lens it's very different In the lens of actual policy I honestly think that it's pretty much 6 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 But in that first lens They're really markedly different choices And you know, we'll see But the lens that you're describing The thing that distorts everyone's vision Is Donald Trump as a human being That's the thing And it's also the media's depiction of him Which has been grossly distorted And I think that, you know I met him and spent time with him I've also had lunch with Kamala She was very kind, very nice person Donald Trump, very funny Very kind Very polite Like he talks to you And I just was like wow This is like totally And exactly what you said I was like I was expecting something totally different And I think though that the part At the core, part of what Where the media goes crazy I think I'm guessing Is that there's a part of him as well That's like an entertainer I mean he's better than He's as good as any comedian Yeah He's on point, he's got, like he's got rhythm He knows how to land So there's a thing that he's doing when he's on stage Which for the audience I think Is no different than going to a show Or a revival or something You're seeing a star Right But then if you're looking at him As Donald Trump the person I think the media Really gets out of, they get tilted Well not only that They've distorted who he is Whatever flaws Donald Trump has Are nothing comparison to the media's depictions of him And everybody's got flaws His I think are His exist And are well described But I do think that they I think there's like a couple of good examples You know one example that Fathered me Was the Charlottesville press conference When I first heard the media depiction of it I was really upset because of what I thought he said Turned out he didn't say it In fact not only did he not say it He said the exact opposite And then I was really Frustrated and a little bit angry Because I thought he was never lying to me The filter was lying to me Right And I'm not paying For those people to lie to me I'm paying for them To actually give me the transcript Of it so that I can decide for myself I think that's part of a responsibility Of being a coach and adult And the only repercussions of them Lying is a lack of trust that people have for them now And so then they make their own bed You know they dig their own grave a little bit Because it's though I think the trust in the mainstream media Is the lowest it's ever been I think way more people trust you You know way more people trust us To tell a version of what we think is happening Because You're You're not going to lie And you're like interested in just showing the clips And then just debating What did he mean?

2:45:34What did he say? Why did he say this? Why did he say that? By the way, the same goes for Kamala Because now, you know The domestic political machinery Is going to try to characterize her as well Cherry -pick comments, she says So my point is I think we have to suspend this But it's not balanced Like particularly look at the debate Where they fact check Trump Multiple times But they didn't fact check her By the way, did you I read this, is this a Is this true or not? But the co -host was her sorority sister Yes That is true I mean Not just that, but there's the affidavit By the person from ABC That said she was aware of the questions And that she was told that there were certain things Going to be off topic Or off limits Like her record as a DA And also some other person That she's attached to that's involved in something shady And then on top of it There was things that she said That were absolutely untrue One of them, one of the grossest ones Was she saying that we don't have any Troops deployed in combat zones Have you ever seen that one where the troops In the combat zone Are going, what the fuck are we doing here And then Dan Crenshaw See if you can find Dan Crenshaw's post On Instagram He's innate out with one on Yeah, yeah, I mean that's a guy who understands the consequences of war Right?

2:46:58Clearly paid the price personally for serving But on his Instagram he laid out How many troops are in active combat zones It's tens of thousands In multiple combat zones Of American citizens I mean look I was trying to be charitable when I said that Like I think that there's Like I'm going to assume That both people Are smart They believe what they believe They're both trying to do what they think is right They both want to win Okay, let's take that off the table for a second The filters that then try to give them that message Will try to pervert that truth For their own best interests And I think what they have decided The mainstream media is their best interests are better served Through one i .e.

2:47:44Kamala And less well served through another i .e. Donald Trump Yes So if there's ever been a moment Where it's time for all of us to show up And be a you know A grown -up Try to get the source material Try to think about things from first principles I'm telling you it is the most Consequential election of our lifetime And the simplest reason why Is that the president decides to hit the button on the nuclear football So just imagine For one second Irrespective of what your politics is Who do you want To hold that thing What do you want them to do? Under even the most Excruciating pressure in the world And I think what we want to find Is someone at least in that very narrow moment Will be a JFK like decision I will block everybody else out It is entirely about my desire and wish For how I want America to be known And I'm going to protect my children And my grandchildren You cannot touch the button You can't get close to the button I think we're a lot closer than people think I think we are too Thank you very much for me in here man That was really fun I really enjoyed it Thanks I know you're very busy So I really appreciate your time It was an honor for me as well Thank you