E35: Biogen's controversial Alzheimer's drug approval, the billionaire space race, real estate, Bitcoin & more
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Hey, everybody here, everybody, welcome to another episode of the all in pod cash. It's saturday morning. It's ridiculously early, but we're taping the show because one of the best these happens to have left the continent with us from, uh, an underscore SE location to a math. Polly hopeth a, are you in a White seller or n catos?

I am in, I am in. Look at IT. Wait for IT.

Wait for IT. Ww, did we able to see that? Or no?

No cathedral somewhere.

You mean the ceiling of your room?

credible. So you pay for the four walls and now you can afford the roof.

I'll a little, i'll a little. Let's see if you can just see outside and get a sense of the view or you can't.

Oh, just up best lifestyle.

happy. The house is already built .

and he's still paying. The architect ah is like.

I do you favorite this came out grape. But yes, you ripped down these four rooms and then just start over. Well, we lost best to see as he walked around his castle in some european country.

Welcome to life's ons of the rich famous.

What time is IT there for you? It's in the afternoon. In the evening was in london week and maco the weather.

If you want to see climate change, spend some time in europe. Because literally day over day, london, on the first day I landed was call IT twenty four degrees salsa. So whatever that is, A Y seventy eight, maybe beautiful.

Literally the next day IT was sixty two and raining, and I just kept bouncing back. And fourth, IT is the weirdest thing. And if you're in europe right now, you you just see some of the crazy as weather patterns, literally day over day, massive hundred showers, then it's completely Normal. I mean, no wonder everybody here takes climate change so serious. Ly, you actually feel IT everyday .

and with us as well. David sax is here, the rain man himself tearing up the twitter we've offer two weeks, so there's a lot to cover. And of course, the queen of kinda, chairman of the production board, David freeburg, right off the bat.

I think we ve got to go science to get the freeburg ratio up from the gate. Biogen has an alzheimer drug that on monday the fda approved. It's the first new treatment for alzheimer in almost two decades and biogen drug is not a cure for alzheimer and freeburg will get into that IT does not reverse the diseases progression but IT does mitigate IT gets you getting worse. Very strange moment in time. H the F D A S advisory panel, three members of IT have quit because they didn't want to approve the drug, because I had such a modest efficacy.

Three quit. But unanimous ous vote against approval.

right? So unanimous ous vote against them, three quit. And this is, I think, out of ten or eleven individuals.

So this is truly significant. The drug is going to fifty five thousand dollars. IT still requires brain scans and all this kind of stuff. But I top for people suffering. Uh and so the fda approved IT um freedoms g tell us on a science space is what we're seeing here IT is what's happening in journalism and social media now happening in science or is this some other you know search a truth uh or some other issue?

The biogen drug that was approved this week is called ade. Can map. Remember any drug that ends with mab M A B means model, color, anti body. So it's an anti body. Uh, and antibodies, you know, we talked about in the past our proteins that can be made by our immune system and proteins that bind to a specific target that then tells your immune system to clear that target out of your body, so that's what monoclonal anti bodies do.

And we have been using biological drugs monopole anti body drugs for decades now uh to target specific cells or specific proteins in our body um that we can then remove from our body and that can reverse or change you know a human health in very significant way. So this is a um you know a classic drugs that is very efficient for having specific outcomes across many disease states. And so years ago, researchers at the university of eric, we're looking at people with alzheimer that we're having slowly progressive dementia, and they looked at anti bodies that they could find in their brain, and they found this anti I body that they saw was binding to Emily ID black and emo.

oy. Plack is one of the theories, zed mechanisms, by which alzheimer progresses, that is, Emily played up in your brain, know you start to have this function and information, and the Emily plat, kind of maybe the driver of alzheimer's, but that is not proven. So they then you ultimately gave a to a company called new a mune who licensed at the bio biogen, started testing IT and they took this anti body um that they discovered and they turned into a uh you know an anti body you can now get injected into your body, goes into your brain IT the ideas that bites the Emily black and remove IT from your brain.

And so theoretically, this should slow down or stop alzheimer. But IT turns out that as they rams test across thousands of patients, IT didn't have as much of an effect. And in fact, the data across many, many patients showed that I didn't really offer a cibo baseline, meaning people that didn't get the drug verse s people that didn't get the drug that IT wasn't really that different in terms of cognitive scores and tests and all the other stuff.

So they abandoned IT a few years ago. They kind of got this. They stopped the trial.

They had this kind of negative outcome. And, you know, biogen got beat up for IT. And then all of a sudden they refiled about nine months later with the F, D.

A saying, well, look, when we look at the patients with the highest dosage of the drug, because they gave you to three different toes, the people, they got the most anti bodies. This particular group of people had a twenty three percent decline in the progression of the alzheimer's, which is kind of one way of slicing the data. And and as a result, went back to the F.

D. A. And people were like, well, you know, some of the tests don't really show that. Still, there was some cognitive test results that didn't show that that was the case. And they fought back against and still some people were pushing back against IT.

And we're not sure no one knows for sure how we all kind of came together at the end, but the F. D. A. Ultimately approved this drug. And here's what's chAllenging about this.

You basically will go in, you'll get an injection of this, this anti body, just like you do with many other anti body based therapies. IT costs roughly five dollars to make antibody therapy, just to be clear. So when you make five box, roughly is the cost, and they're charging fifty six million dollars for this treatment.

So that's a problem. One in the pharmaceutical al kind of debate is should we be charging the you know the quality of life premium? And then yeah and then the part of the kind of second issue is like that this thing have been approved when IT wasn't really that effective and you could slice the data slightly. And now all payers, you know mean all people who are injured or the government or whoever IT is as responsible for insurance payments is ultimately bearing the cost of everyone with alzheimer. There's fifty million people in the united states of alzheimer.

They're going to raise their home and say, oh god, anything that gives me any chance or any hope I want na get but if IT cost fifty six thousand dollars, is that really the responsibility of the insurance company and all the players to give everyone a hope? Even if the drug may not work at the downside in the side effects is negligible, there is no risk to taking the drug. So it's all about the cost of the upside.

And that is the big philosophical debate right now is like, first of all, we approved drug like this. Should we allow farma companies to charge whatever they want, even when the efficacy is very low and the cost is very low to make this stuff? And how do we ultimately decide what? So this is plastic .

risk reward trh. How do you look at this on a financial basis?

Yeah let me let me let me give you sort of like A A market investing kind of view on this. Um look, i've been taking biotech pretty seriously over the last eighteen months. Just trying to learn because I think basically freeburg in inception me with a this idea that you have to know IT.

Um so here's what's interesting in the set up for what i've learned and putting a little bit of my knowledge together, which is dangerous, but the set up for alzheimer's is really scary. If you're black, you're twenty percent more likely to get IT. If you look at the distribution of all patients, sixty percent and upwards of you know sixty four, sixty five percent um are women. So if you think about the distribution of this disease, it's it's the disease of minorities and it's the disease of women. Now that's problematic international itself, because if you want to have any form of equality, IT seems like this is something that we have to tackle.

The second interesting thing as a, as a set up to this is every single alzheimer's drug that ever gone through the fda has been rejected and has failed and what's interesting in the the the more social science around this is this is also where two of the more infamous insider trading events ever happened was around failed alzheimer's s drug um the first which is less known but inside baseball is what happened that S A C which was a huge change fund but the second that's very well known is Martha Stuart and why he went to jail was around a the speculation and the insider trading of the face three results of an alzheimer drug which ultimately n out to feel IT was almost the sher's money on wall street which is every time some small of these drugs came to market, you just bet against IT and IT would turn out that these stocks would collapse so there the social and market set up I am super torn, but I think there are some positive points to make on the thing. So but let me give you the negative case, the negative cases. What is the F, D.

A. Doing approving a drug where there is no clear evidence that at least the clinical benefits and he could give family's sense of false hope. What are you doing in terms of process if you have a unanimous vote against approval? So why do you even bother having an F, D, A advisory committee of outside experts if they are just going to do what you want? And you could set a precedent where companies can get drugs approved on limited evidence.

Now here's the positive point, which is they may be taking a long term view. And what they could be really doing is creating a market that ultimately incentivises other folks to come in, where then ultimately those people are the ones that find the solution, right? Because this bio ent drug, biogen, came out and basically said, we think this is a hundred billion dollar market.

So now all of a sudden you must believe capitalism is going to take hold. And a lot Young started up, so say, well, shit, I should be going after this market as well. And so by going after that, after biogen, then maybe you actually do get the solution.

And just a kind of a little bit of trivia IT turns out to the acting F. D. A commissioner in twenty sixteen, this woman, and what cock he was, the one that approved a different form of drug in the exact same set up, that one at the nine percent, which is basically for the shane muscular destroy y he had a negative panel vote.

SHE basically said, no, we're going with this. The scientific community reacted similarly back then, but SHE basically took the view that you you're doing no harm, exactly what you said, free book, because the safety says it's fine. You're doing no harm to the patients by approving the drug.

And maybe IT might turn out to work in the end. And in that specific case, for dushan moscow tsr hy, what we see four years later that now there are a lot more companies focused on finding a solution and they're pouring a tone of money into R N D. And maybe one of those things will break through. So I think he could just be running the same playbook here in alzheimer's, which is important enough, uh, that somebody needs to do something.

You're saying the economic incentive could drive further innovation in the space that ultimately could benefit patients more truly than the current drug.

I think so. And I think like, you know what, look, a lot of like I think drugs that that are potential solutions in many ways. I think what the fda is doing are two things which I think you're really positive.

The first is that they're accelerating their approval timelines, right? So you can have breakthrough approval and innovations and so you can get to market much, much faster. The best examples is what we seen in these vaccines.

But the second thing is if you have a wells structured safety study that says that these things are not harmful to humans, yeah, David, it's basically saying sell 了 fifty six thousand dollar drug。 There's a ten thousand dollar copy. Now we should talk about that because that shows how broken medicare plan b as a part b sorry um but yet they're creating a hundred billion dollar market added nothing .

yeah but should that be the case to or should I be regulated? Because ultimately, if the regulators are approving the drug and enabling the commercial opportunity, shouldn't the regulators also say, you know what, you could have this commercial opportunity, but you can only charge x because we're not going to have the taxpayer .

pay the y hi freeburg. Let me a really basic question here. Why is there no you know, document put out by the fda saying, here's how we came to this decision in plain english? Or is there cause I look for that, couldn't find IT? In other words, in the same way there was a vote, they could say he, listen, we understand the vote. We're overruling IT for this reason. And why isn't there an interview step?

The ft, not the ft is not your doctor, right? So I think the way things are set up as your doctor is meant to be informed about the panel's review of drugs and and there are labels that doctors needs to be able to read and understand. And then the doctor's job is to make a decision on treatment for their patients and make a recommendation to their patients.

So ultimately, the fda is not a consumer organization. The labels that get approved, what the pharmacy dual companies have to say about their drug, all of that stuff is overseen by the regulators of B, F, D, A. And then that is then used by the doctors to make treatment decisions. And they couldn't .

kick this back and say, listen, Jason, but couldn't kick IT back and say we wanted to do one more trial or some breached up.

Hey, you can do ten thousand people over the next. They continue as IT goes in the market. They always do that and they always asked for more data, and they do this continuous review. The fda is a really strong body and a really strong regulatory body, and we should all feel kind of pretty well you safe and secure. But but the issue was really having the economic question on the other end, which is they could have problem a hundred drugs tomorrow. And then what happens to the economics of health care if everyone's allowed to charge any Price they want for any care, if IT has even the slightest st range of effects acy, we're not going to be able to afford anything.

you know. So just so this is where, like you know, regulatory bodies run run into each other because the effort of alzheimer, alzheimer is a drug of the gold right. Health care expenses are covered by medicare.

And in medicare, there's a section called medicare part b, which effectively is away for these drugs to go to market. Just so you guys know, under a medicare part b plan, a physician gets a six percent kickback of the Price of the drug. Your doctor gets six percent of that fifty seven thousand dollars.

That's a terrible incentive.

is an incredibly bad incentive. And so three thousand dollars every time you put somebody on this, it's quite a stiff IT is. And so no medicare party has been this mechanism that people have wanted to do for a long time. Now if you're sitting in the fda, you can change that because .

that's covered by cm s.

So I think it's like this weird intergovernmental agency warfare portion poll and trying to move the incentives this all goes back to. If congress can act, then all these folks have all of these other random tools. They just have to throw this baghi against the wall. And this is the kind of stuff that happens because congress should actually be fixing this in a more substantive, holistic c way. And until they do IT.

this is what's going happen. This is no different than what we saw during the pandemic where we had health regulators coming in, local health regulator public help officials saying, shut down because their incentive is to save lives. Their incentive is not to baLance the trade, ffs, between saving lives and protecting the people versus the economic damage in the fall out and the cost of IT.

And there are two different agencies. And ultimately, the sympathy of these decisions isn't being managed by a leader anywhere or by a leading organization anywhere. And that's where things in flat and get ugly and get nasty over sax as a free.

as a free market monster. What do you think, sax, how would you approach releasing these drugs as A I know, but you're for less regulation when you see this regulatory mass of speakee and you know costs and and Price gouging. You know, if we take the more cynical look at IT because fifteen million people times fifty five thousand dollars. I'm no genius at math. I, but I, my S A T is, tell me enough that that's gonna this drugs you to make ten billion year, twenty billion years, something in that range if they just get a fraction of those people.

So I mean, I I, I agree with free back moths that we shouldn't give doctors an incentive to choose one treatment or another, right? I mean that this seems totally work, but going to the sort of larger issue of fda approval, um I would make IT a little bit easier to to get drugs approved. I mean, look, I think that double blind test is the gold standard.

If the drug clearly doesn't work, you don't approve IT. But this is a case where the evidence is a little bit inconclusive. And in a situation like that, where it's a drug that might help people who are facing a deadly disease and know alzheimer is one of the worst, it's nearly event the prognosis is terminal, but IT also is deteriorated and it's devastating for patients and their families.

These people have nothing to lose. And so I would let the drug through, I think, and then watch out our performance over the next couple of years. They could always revoke the approval in two years, you know, in other words, almost considered the usage of the drug over the next couple years as a stage for trial. You know, the one group who is not complaining about this, our patients that mean all zimbz patients want the ability to test this. And generally speaking, I think we should give people who are facing again, a terminal prognosis the ability to try these drugs.

Yeah and freeda caciques i'm wrong. The reason or maybe trim's, you're Better for this, but just looking at the economics of this, taking care of somebody with alzheimer's. And if you in the starts to hit people at sixty five and people start living to seventy eight, eighty five years old, they need to have care.

A person with alzheimer. The issue is not their ongoing uh, maintenance in terms of their brain, it's their data day life. They cannot be left alone.

So they have to be either institutionalize or have home care. And then you're talking about one hundred thousand year and and I think Better care and some other people pay for that. So five k if the person can take care .

of themselves, that's how pricing is done. That's exactly is how they do IT. So pricing is typically done based on the long term cost benefit of the uh of the drug, of the the the to to the pain system.

So you know you'll take a look at like k here's how much we're gonna benefit people or benefit the paying system. Therefore, we can charge x dollars for getting this drug. That's why today you can go get a um a car t therapy or something, you know some sort therapy that that that is going to be highly application. I'll charge a million dollars or genetic um there's a few that are getting approved now uh for genetic diseases and that you know a million dollar one time fee because you get you get the treatment once a costs you technically nothing the cods zero to make this stuff. You get that treatment, they charge you a million dollars because the long term care of the progression of that disease is so high that they can economy rationalize that um and .

so is that ethical or moral on the pricing?

Clarify one thing. So we're talking about IT at fifty six six thousand hours, that is true, but it's basically forty eight hundred dollars per shot. You get a shot once per month and that cost forty eight hundred dollars.

And see pie twelve and you get fifty six thousand number now is forty eight hundred dollars to get this monthly shot, an outrageous amount of money for what could be a breakthrough alzheimer treatment? I don't initiative think so. I mean, that is the sticker Price is not what the patient.

Is gna pay, right? The patients gna pay, the ten thousand doors cope, but divide that by twelve, you're gna pay about eight and fifty dollars per month for what could be a breakthrough treatment. I mean, to me, the real issue is whether that works.

And since since there are some positive indications but it's inc. Inconclusive, I would say to goes to the runner here, meaning you can try IT and less. We visited in two years and see if that works.

But but IT wasn't a tie as far as scientists were concerned. So what is the disconnect there to moh?

Because I think what they were looking for, no, but they were looking for a cause of link. And the problem is, at some point along the way, over the last few years, we started with the hypotheses that Emily ID plack was caught of alzheimer's, and then we moved to a place where there was some correlation, and then we moved to a place where we said, actually may not do much of anything, but I actually agree with sex.

I think the fda did something really novel here, which is that they applied an extremely aggressive free market approach to a market that has been completely bereft of solutions. And so if you can create a hundred billion dollar market overnight, I think IT stands to reason that a lot of people will look at the increase in biogen market cap and the profits of biogen can make over the next ten or fifteen years and say, I will attack that and do that cheaper, faster, Better. IT happens in every other market.

I think the point here is that IT probably shouldn't have been the fd s role to create competition. But for whatever reason, whether it's how the capital markets in biotechnology are structured or the way that, you know medicare part be kind of works and creates these odd and incentives, we are where we are. And so I tend to think that it's probably Better that this drug was approved.

I also agree with tax that in general, I think as long as you have a reasonably defensible safety study, we should probably be in the business of getting more drugs approved faster. And the reason is that IT allows smart, clever, hardworking people to connect the dots and ways that right now we don't know anything about, like, just like a random factory to prove this point. Like when you look inside, for example, of who wins the nobel prize, right, particularly in the fields of biology and chemistry at etra, you have people that are in their sixties and seventies that win awards for research done in their twenty years and thirties.

So clearly, people, at some point when they are somewhat less stated you and somewhat more naive, maybe have the ability to really transform the world for all of us. And if you can marry that to economic incentives, so folks that understand the markets can also be along for that ride. That in my mind, I think, is generally Better than an any state of babysitters.

I agree with that point. I I think I think .

the frame this year in a question for you of those scientists on that board who voted against this, if their parent what or spouse got forbid we're suffering from alzheimer's, how many of them would take the driver at a protest?

My point is it's a point of gonna, which is everyone wants that lottery ticket. There's no downside, only upside because you're not paying for the lottery ticket. And so um the way the system works in terms of paying right now as a patient and as a doctor, I have no incentive to manage costs down, right? All I have is opportunity in front of me. And so as we add more opportunity, as we give everyone the ability to have a lottery ticket that potentially could cure their disease or you make them kind of live forever, have a healthier state of being, uh, you know, we are gonna this proliferation of approvals that end up costing all of us so much that the inflation that we've already experience in terms of paying costs for health care continues to climb.

So the chAllenge is like, you know, if we are going to continue to Operate the socialized model of medicine, or even partially socialized, where the government's paying some amount of of the uh of the premium or employers are paying part of the premium, where the individual that's getting the treatment doesn't bear the cost, you're gna end up seeing everything in fate because you're creating this incentive. Now companies are going to rush and you're going to trying get ten things approved. Everyone's going to be taking in alzheimer drag in a couple of years because there is going to be so many available on the market and none of them may actually be curing alzheimer's.

Maybe ten percent of people get cared, ninety percent don't. But the cost is going to be millions of dollars you know per person for these treatments and everyone pays that. I'm not saying that necessarily a bad thing.

You know we need to have a proliferation of innovation. Certainly, the chAllenges in the intern period, the inflation we've already experience in healthcare, which is just extraordinary, will continue to climb. Um if you know we don't regulate uh the actual market for pricing on these things. Um and on the other side, we pay all the bills or there's some socializing pull to pay all the bills. You can have IT both ways.

I'll give me the other side of the argument as well, which um is the reason why this could be so valuable. Again, if you look back to what gene lock .

would did um was a moss muscular .

is in the shane muscular destroy, you know, for gender. Woodcock, every part of my gender. Wood cock.

Um but if you, if you know anybody whose child has to shame, muscular destroy. Y my gosh, what an incredibly dibbling ital disease. You would not want anybody in the world to habit.

And again, by approving that drug, what he did, I think, is something pretty incredible because now there are of the the number of companies that have again come after that market opportunity because he helps define a market. Four of them are already public. Just to give you a sense of IT, you know and so the odds at least numeric or greater today than they were four years ago. And that was a potentially non effective drug that that Frankly though had a had a legitimate .

safety study to your guest trips and freebies. Ten out of ten of those people on the fda board would have a spouse or love and take because there's no downside. If you look at biogenic market capture to wrap up here, they had a twenty billion dollars market cap in the five days since you know this announce been happened.

So in terms of incentives, you ve got to think every other drug company is saying, hey, i've got something that kind of, sort of works, and it's really expensive. Can I get a free ticket now? Can I do this? Compassion.

hopefully, is just the former thing .

kind of of works. Moving on to our uh, next topic. Daou has decided that he will be the first billion airin space. Uh, three people are gonna going to space in quotes on an eleven minute flight on july twenty eighth twenty twenty one. A jeff eos in a promotional video on his instagram a springless on his best friend, his best to his brother mark, who agreed to go with him. And there's bidding of three million dollars, I guess.

to to four point eight oh my god.

four point eight now on blue origin sight and uh just doing back at the envelope math, which I which I did um uh last week when I heard this announced with six hundred people or so have gone to space, some of them have gone multiple times. Lu origins done twenty some other flights, two of which went south and probably would have exit, resulted in death. So I think five to ten percent of large flights would have killed, uh, they.

So we have been on them, but obviously have made progress since then. Two of the hundred and twenty plus flights that space acts have done, but none in the last six years um have had an accident uh and obviously uh virgin collect add tragic accident as well so is this a wise idea? And where would we put the percentage risk of ruin slash fatality?

I 就是 I 就是， i just wanted to statistics for a second.

Jason.

Yes, just because there were blue origin accidents in the past doesn't necessarily mean that IT has any bearing in predicting the future likelihood of their being an accident because the data from the past is from different machines and different places, different processes. So I I don't think you know to your tweet and the controversy with your tweet and know your point now, I don't think you can necessarily look at the past. This is much more of a kind of deterministic conversation about like, hey, look here, the things we have done systems and here's why we have a high confidence in this thing of working.

which is obviously why people don't call on the first fifty rockets or first twenty rockets whatever happens to be. But statistically, it's it's not zero. So I guess the question is, is this a wise move? Where would you actually put the .

odds that but I IT could very well be zero now yeah.

you don't know. We don't know how well their systems have been developed. Know I don't know anything about this, but i'm pretty sure that a piles is go. He's a pretty smart y he's not going in anything that's gonna some high even omino likelihood of death, right?

Like any knows probabilities. And he's been there in the last fifteen test flights and he's seen the data and he's probably seen string of nominal flights. And at some point you just feel like, you know, okay, this is, this is really died in here. My prediction is, bao.

this is going to come back and he's going to announce he's going to be the sea of blue gin. I think this is he's going away on bo. I I think this is what he wants to do with the rest of his life.

I think it's been pretty clear that this is such a passion for him. And like you know, he he's got the world's greatest money machine ever. It's a fly wheel. It'll run as a monopoly for decades. He can do whatever he wants to do now. So when he takes a look at this, what's greater after of color earth then leaving earth and move in on so to me this seems to be so intellectual interesting to him and um and so kind of existentially interesting. My guess is he goes in full time on bu orge now that he's kind of transition to the chairman role and he's kind .

of been pretty about hundred percent, hundred percent.

David, more conservative and typically very scared of anything.

Well, okay, business created for dog footing his own product. But um to be I would take a contrarian view overall. You know I think sometimes people get so Richard and so powerful that there is nobody around them to tell them when they have a bad idea.

And quite Frankly, I think this is a brain fart that the people around him are telling him smells like perfume. And they should be telling him, dude, what are you thinking? You know, if jaco said to me he was going up on a rocket, I be like, do you got at least three good years here? Bezzle don't .

screw up the podcast. Yeah, we need the.

we need you down here. What thinking bezzle s has got like one hundred and seventy billion after the divorce. He's a solar Young guy and he's gonna risk IT to go up in space for like three minutes.

I mean, now yeah, this is they have the crash has dumped up there successfully fifteen times. But this is the first man flight, the first flight with humans on IT. He's determined to be on IT.

If I were his advisor, I would say put a go pro on the head of the crash test dummy and experienced in virtual reality. No, thanks. exactly. What are you thinking?

Yeah I mean, if this was a stunt that you know um Richard branson he did early in his career, remember he did the ballooning things and he was trying to become a billion and trying to get excitement around his brand. But I I think this is totally unnecessary and IT is not the risk of a year is not zero. IT might be close to zero, but it's definitely not there.

I mean, well now right is trying to beat bezos into space. So he's announced he's going to go up to and you know so these guys are both um being dead to me.

How do you go up this space? Is that a virgin galactic way?

You course the company, but I know that was A.

Public you're .

saying sorry that you say was a public no.

I said IT virgin collected is a public company of which i'm chairman of said board of directors. I'm not saying anything about anything.

Branson is is trying to beat bezos into space by going up before him. There is now a space race going on. And you have to wonder. And then meanwhile, elon, I wonder how much of this is because of bezos is pride, because elon tweet that bezos couldn't get IT up, because his rocket, bezos s rocket.

is only .

actually space, no subbed, low earth orbit.

you know, gets in a half way up. I think he's somewhere in the fifty to seventy range, I think. How much, if you a little lue blue origin, if you got a little blow origin.

pulling my to one hundred percent, how great is the space race? By the way, this is so freaking cool, right? I mean, like the government, I mean, the government creates all these great contract incentive.

This, this is a good role for government, right? They come and they create all these contract incentive space. Acs, and making all this money from the U. S. government. And then they take that money and they invest in creating the space race, this industry that, you know, could absolutely transform humanity for the centuries to come. Uh IT IT really speaks to kind of like how semicon on doctors and computing came out of the space race of the mid twenty century and we could see this not kind of like next industrial age arrived for the space industrial age, uh, because of these incentives that have been created by the government. That seems to me like there's a good role here, the government's played.

And this is super cool in contrast to the government doing the space shadow program, which if you look at the fatalities, there are about thirty fatalities and going to space, fourteen of which were on the two shuttles, one that tragically blew up on the way up and one that to create on the way down in our childhoods in the eighties, I believe um for .

most I was also incredibly expensive. Look, this is privatization for the win, right? It's set of having the government doing all the R, N, D.

And the government is good at some things, but R N D is not one of them. So you you let the private sector do the R N D and the masses contracting with these private sector companies. The government .

is a phenomenal baLances. How do you feel about the government funding this work? Right, because they are not doing the but it's the taxpayer's money that's going to space sets and others for contract services that ultimately fuels this innovation engine. Do you feel like this is a good role for government spending?

Is the kind of the question the question for government as a policy matters whether we want to go to space. And then the question is how do we get there? I definitely believe that if we believe it's important tava space station to get to space to a kind of advance the frontiers of, you know, human kind, yes, then it's it's a worthy program to fund. And then the questions why how do you get there? And I think you know funding space x and these or it's not funding its contracts with space x to deliver the product is a much Better idea that having the government trying to .

develop IT itself yeah because those are milestone based with some level of competition even if people might complain about the bidding process acetate, the contract is for a duration of time. And for deliverables, if the deliverables are not bad or the contract expires, then we start the whole process over again. And this, correct me if i'm wrong, is a must due for us because we cannot let the communist and authoritarians own space. We have no choice being the democratic west of owning space and getting there before them and dominating space.

Nobody can own space, but I think the united states is a the baLances.

Nobody can own space. I mean, are you kidding me? What if somebody gets up there who decides to put nuclear missile up there and decides anybody else puts satellite up there? We're going to just note them and laser them.

You're not gonna own IT.

You don't even need a kw. Quite Frankly. You could drop a thang ston rod from space, okay, just like a giant steel rod. And by the time IT hits the ground, it's going so fast that IT basically can blow up or assassinate anybody.

How are the two you taught? The two v become?

No, this is real.

Like the two you are like that. Like B R thr n the golden girls.

Going to be Arthur here.

Lathering on not seen the south china sea.

Have you not seen the chinese putting rockets over taiwan and military exercises? These people are .

Jason playing. Is Jason? I I understand nobody. I all i'm saying is there's no owning IT, okay?

It's too vast. It's effectively infinite. You can't own IT, okay? You can have certain areas.

You can .

dominate you.

he dominate course.

You can dominate space, I would think up there and they don't play by the rules. I mean, did you guys not see what happened with he there in europe?

Eo, 这次 evolved parts of space that you can dominate。 Maybe the one planet is uranium, that there is nothing.

You guys are so naive about the intentions of russia and china. This is for they have hundred year plans to dominate humanity, and they are willing to put millions of people into concentration gibs. They have no problem going to space and deciding we're going to own the satellites, and we're gonna call other satellite.

And I can believe you are so anti trump. And can I just say .

one thing? I think, I think back to what we before, the U. S.

Is an incredible baLanced and uh, what freeport access is so true, which is like coming out of the Apollo program, we really created so much technological innovation. IT propelled the us. forward. We unfortunately gave a lot of IT up. But hopefully this time around, we can do IT again.

And by the way, just last week, I guess I was I guess I was last week um or a month ago, you know where we got that chips act in play, which is a quarter trillion dollars you know for semiconductors and other things. Um so we're slowly getting there, but this is where the U S. Can do a lot of good, which is just to act as a funding source and then let private markets kind of take over the rest.

By the way, we've talked about this on the past couple of podcast, but there is, I think, ninety billion dollars the earmark in this new bill for enabling american manufacturing progress. And so IT will be through a similar sort of funding mechanism. IT looks like as what we're seeing here, IT could be A A fantastic boon for innovation.

And say, what other category should this after sex? Should we do this for nuclear? Should we do for education, for housing .

before we move on? I mean, look, jack, I want to comes to your defense on this point because I think it's it's because I think this is wrong to say that there aren't like vast an important military applications of space. Um the fact the matter is you look at the history of warfare is critical to have the high ground. Whoever has the high ground ultimately ins the war. This is why first thing we do, h the Green, the .

greeks said.

the high three guy, see me with the snow.

see me with the sphere, and shelter a me.

They may finish the point. The first thing we do in in a war, a conflict is established. Ed, total air superiority is the reason why infinity doesn't take massive losses.

We want to establish artillery that that sort protect. I instance looked the future artillery is going to be from space IT is the ultimate high ground. Uh, IT, I agree with jet. L, it's naive to think that the other side, that the other powers are not pursuing military applications, we have to have the ability to defend ourselves against space, space attacks, and to have those abilities ourselves, those capabilities. And so that is part of what's factory .

in here with the space I I get. I know what you guys want. A giant laser.

China laser has space.

I don't think he has be a laser I think can be low test. Do you .

mean just have you just little ally shot fun at other satellites?

IT would rip through them, right? I mean.

the grams to a from space and hits the grounded like mock thirty five people .

have has invaded our podcast and taken the body of David.

no. But in all seriousness, this um program that we're seeing great success with, inspiring the greatest in entrepreneurs of our time to go after big prizes like this. Could we not do this with nuclear energy, housing and education? Or are is that can add of the question out .

by the things you out? Are the things that are now most regulated and is the regulatory burden which ultimately stifles innovation? Was in this case, we're enabling innovation without putting a lot of regulatory burden on space at this stage, right? And so as soon as I tar, which is one of these bodies start to step in and maybe we start to limit things that can be done in space and so wanted so forth, you may see things kind of get damage like nuclear energy got damage because the fear of the downside ends up um you know kind of counterbalancing the opportunity of the upside.

And it's something we've seen time and time again with every innovation cycle in every industry. Um and you know you're right right now, we're in this opportunistic moment in the space race. But as soon as kind of the regulatory burden becomes heavy, you you're going to see the same thing that happen with housing, the same thing that happen with nuclear energy and all the other kind of innovation cycles that that kind of got stifled, not just in the U. S.

For globally. yeah. So we don't think for nuclear will see this happening time soon. Man, that would be an incredible nobody.

Nobody wants nuclear if there is a huge ebbie problem. Nuclear, right? Which is who really wants a nuclear power plane in their backyard. I mean, not onna happen. I don't think it's realistic, is one of these ideas that you know sounds great in theory, but then in practice no one's willing to raise your hand.

say I want that was really easy solution for that. You just make anybody who has to live within x zone of a nuclear power plant have a tax credit of a million dollars a year.

They don't want IT. Look, I think the future of alternative energy is solar. Um it's it's an inexorable supply. The causes solid. The cost solution .

anal keeps going down experientially.

The cost curve is going down exponentially. And look, ultimately all life on this planet is solar powered, right? Because fossil fuels come from the remains of dead dinosaurs who were eight plants.

And plants are solar powered. So ultimately the sun is the ultimate source of energy, not wind, not nuclear, not win. Solar capacity is still .

like a hundred billion years based on our consumption rate. But uh there is limited uh research relative to the we've been at record low .

case loads um and deaths are so low now from uh coin nineteen in the low hundreds that is probably hard to know freedman g you tell me if i'm wrong or right if people are of those three or four hundred people dying a day, that's with covering from covin acta.

But anybody I think it's intellectually correct to say that anybody who, over the age of twelve, a months of acting together and anybody who's in a highly sk group, certainly now has had over six months to get a vaccine. So basically done. And now the question becomes what happens to society or we're going to go back to work uh apple employees uh rote a letter um about apples uh demand um using air quotes here h that people come back to work three days a week.

Um amazon just adjust to their return to ward policy, a backing off their claim of uh in march that are gonna return to an office center uh culture. They announced that employees can do two days remote three days in the office. That seems to be the three for two.

Um google has a similar policy. Um they're expecting people to return to the after three days, week and september, twitter said. You can work from on forever because jack uh is an introvert and doesn't want to come back to work. I guess, uh, facebook employees either need approval to can you work from home full time or they will need to be back in the office fifty percent the time. But zuck berg personally said that he is embracing remote where cars. The quote, I found that working remotely has given me more space for long term thinking and help me spend more time with my family, which has made me happier and more productive at work, which I guess is either devastating for real estate or this is a great negotiation that's going on. You had some choice quotes about apple employees doing three um um letters lash uh partially three weeks .

yes yeah so look I don't have a problem with the work from home policy. My my problem is with the fact that apple employees um keep doing what they do, which is Sunny petitions and of course that it's all the snowflake language around. We're not being listened to.

We're not being heard you know and then they wanted dictate to management, uh, the way that the company should work. And so there's y've circular petitions to get other employees fired. They circulated petitions to make tim cook take a stance against israel.

Now they are circulating petition on work from home. And of course, that is what apple employees do. And apple management um is doing what IT seems to do, which is cave.

See these petitions every time. And so there are an infinite loop where the employees have realized they can run the company by forming these these sort of boycotts and petition mobs. And its working now my objections not to work from home.

Most of my portfolio companies are now working from home or fully distributed. They're hiring employees everywhere. It's been very liberating for them to get a higher talent anywhere in the world.

And so I think the work from home question, the reason why these big companies are strugling with, I think, quite Frankly, is this because this is about their ability to supervise their employees. I think that work from home makes the best employees Better, but IT allows the worst employees to hide. And I think what this really comes down to is a fear on the part of apple and google and facebook. They've got thousand, thousand employees who aren't really working and are going to be able to completely hide. And and I think that's what this policy comes down.

Tell of management or just the nature of work is the .

nature of these gigantic companies where theyve got so many employees that they're trying to figure how to supervise them all and make sure they're actually doing work. There's this funny tweet that's going around. I don't know it's sure or not, but I got retweet about somebody saying that I i've gotten six jobs during the pandemic.

They're all work from home. And I went to get fired from them for, you know, people realized I am not doing anything. And so I think this work from home controversy ultimately is about the ability these large companies to supervise a workforce that they don't know what they're doing, if anything.

Oh my god, what a brilliant idea. The big answer problem, the pandemic with respect to work from home is how do you on board new people, in my opinion, like if you have an establish company with establish people where everybody knows each other, IT seems like a all positive to be able to work from home because there's trust, there's to correa, there's social norms, there's all these things that established together.

But what happens when all of us that you introduce one, two, three, four, five, five hundred new people into the mix, hide you on board these folks? How do you get. And I think that's not a solve problem until you do that.

I'm not sure that work for Normal as effective as I can be because I think you'll just get a lot of people that that uh, languish a little bit as they switch jobs. Now maybe what that means is there will switch jobs less because they'll say, actually this is net Better. My crappy job got a little bit Better.

So there's no reason to move the on your point of a commercial real al jacka, I actually think IT just brings the utilization down, but i'm not sure destroys IT because I think people need the physical plant. Now maybe over time, they'll get much smarter um about getting smaller spaces and having flex spaces. So like things like we work do Better um because then you use that for overflow spacer. That's how you how you actually have a primary outfit. Um but yeah, that's my thoughts freeburg.

Any thoughts?

I think it's gonna hard to what i'm hearing. I don't know you guys have a lot of ceos, but I just hear it's kind of a little bit tough right now to find the baLance of the rules around when to be in work because people have meetings um in the off you'll have a meeting. Eighty percent of the people will show up to the meeting, twenty percent will be remote and then it's a huge headache for everyone to be like, okay, we're all in the room.

We're all having a conversation that we ve got to asme the people that aren't here and this person decided not to show up today and it's kind of become a little bit of A A weird photo part or what's the everyone else is meeting and that just becoming a little bit of conflict across the organization right now. Um there's it's going to be sticky for a while. I'm not sure there's going to be a great um solution and it's gonna ary by company also. It's very different, as you guys know. When you know what, I was single in my uteri .

twenties .

working at google.

Here comes no IT was like IT was cool like .

IT was a IT was great to go to campus every day now that I married with kids, you know like being being around your kids more often you got obligations at home. It's very different, right? Your priorities change. And so when you have a diversity in the workforce of people with different home lives and so on.

what if you're married but you don't know and you have kids but you can't remember their names? David overdo.

I mean, but at that moment in time, correctly by more on freedoms, g, you know, google was taking people out of stanford, harvard and mt. Whatever, and they were basically giving them another four years in college.

With this, like college campus, you got experience. IT was to make coffee and you walk over the counter and there's a brief that he makes you whatever you want, you get all these amazing snacks and you go, you go down the .

slide here meeting, I mean, say, was a great experience. Do you mean that IT was like fun, and for the employees, like IT was like a fun life experience? Or do you mean actually good work experience.

fun life experience? Yeah, yeah. I was.

I was like, useless. IT was useless from like a skills or like resume, like from building your career. IT was useless, right? Well, though the work itself was useful.

at least for me, at least at that error. Google, when he was a private company. I love that work. IT was an incredible experience for me. I made a lot of friends and and built incredible career experience working at google when I was a private company.

Um but what about now? I mean, google has a reputation that their thousands of employees not doing anything that was satis by by the employees on sitting on the roof of the shows. Look in valley who yeah exactly .

that is up the yeah.

So look, I mean, it's said sitting on the roof there going be sitting on their catch at home. This I guess this is an improvement, but I think that's really what IT comes down to. What facebook said in its statement was kind of interesting. There is a apart in there where they kind of implied that work from home would be like a perk, you know, and that high performers would get in and then low performers would have to come into the office more. And that probably is the right approach because in order to let people work from home, if you have to trust them to be much more self motivated to get their work done, and quite Frankly, the employees who won to hide, you got got to make this feel coming to the office.

You second jail, where the good inmates .

get total yeah solution, you get yard.

get via contact.

If you are running a five hundred to a thousand employee test company based in silicon valley with offices around the country, whatever, what would you do right now? What would you, your work from home policy be today?

Well, most of my companies that are in that position are going fully remote, fully distributed and IT is and they're give me some chAllenges, to be sure, but I just it's inevitable now some of them I do think there is a strong cultural advantage. We talked about this before. The months has made this point around having everyone in the same office, or at least having hubs.

So I am a fan of developing hubs. You might have like an engineering hope somewhere that and then you've got some remote engineers. You might have like a customer service.

Ub um I do think that like call centres, for example, you're much Better off having everybody work from the same cohl center because that that is like a total protium ity job where it's about like how many units of work and you do with in a ceramic of time. It's way easier to measure and manage that work when it's all happening in one place. And and those call centers tend to be in locations at orn as expensive as as the area at metro mile.

We've a big a customer service and claim center in temporised a and um we have gone fully a remote h since the pandemic and productivity per unit uh per per employees gone up a since going to street because IT turns out that you i'm not i'm not gonna pink too deeply on this. But you know the the through put h increases when people are kind of maybe not being distracted in the office or something.

So you can actually track IT and and that's a very measurable job, right? So the through put and everything can be measured. Um so I I would kind of make a counterpoint there that maybe we're seeing something different.

Yeah I mean, look to you yet you maybe right about that. I mean, that all comes down to you of the U F systems that can manage the the sort of and if you do, I mean and you can really measure the output and you can ensure the employees are delivering results.

That is a win win. I I created a super lights version of this um where since lack is so dominant, I just tell people you you need to have a start and end to the day so you couldn't get on with your personal life just at the start of the day.

Do an S O D um in slack and the general channel you to say two or three points what you're working on today and then at the end of the day reply to that same one with your E O D, just what you've got done today and then inform your employees and then you don't need to be managed. So if you can do that for five minutes at the start of the day and just five minutes and the day and then on friday before you leave for the enclose up the week, give me an E O W of what you got done this week. And then on saturdays, like today, when we're taping this, I go through, have a cup of coffee, read all the E O W, and I get feedback.

And IT has made IT so clear who's a contributor in the company and who's not. And when I I instituted this prepare, delic and I had two people quick as they were like, I don't want to do IT. And IT turned out that those people were .

the lowest performers. I think you should call IT the tps report.

I you could frame IT as such like micro managing. And I said that you can either frame this as micromanaging or you're setting an intention of what you're going to do in your workout and then you record what you did. You work out since I started using the tunnel system and the using hydro.

I'm not advertising them here, but they both have measurements and I I did sixty five hundred pounds on the tony and i'm like, I want to break that record this weekend. I want to do seven thousand pounds. I want to do five exercises, and I want from doing three exercises, three reps to five exercises, four raps. If you want to measure.

if I, if I do slash apple slices into slack, do I get apple slices?

Will we will bring you? You could also pick milk or chocolate milk or shrub ry milk. What did what did you .

guys think of the press release that sales force set up, which said something to the effective, like they're becoming an entirely slack centric company. They were going to rebuild, I guess, the entire architecture of S F D C around our sales force.

around we predict show slack is going to be they get name sales for slack.

But I don't really understand what that meant. Other actually line of the tape and modern, if you guys understand what IT means.

I I think I understand what bending off is getting at which I saw an interview that he did recently um where you talk about their results, which I guess for their best ever was like a fabulous quarter for them. Um what he talked about, many of his very good at connecting his products to larger societal trends. And the big trend that he's kind of hooking onto is this distributed work trend.

And the way he described this is basically this is the future companies are trying to figure out out, but they need to settle because I guess this this is a trend that could sort of bucked them off the horse. And he's trying to say that slack is going to be the thing that anchors your company. Now for this new error of remote distributed at work, I think, is kind of brilliant marketing. brilliant?

absolutely.

Mean, be there. He's absolutely brilliant. He has built such an incredible organization. I mean, the scale of sales force over the last twenty years. My gosh, he is, he is a star, star of stars.

I mean, in H, I set you guys in the slack. The or I said you guys in the chat this uh socket IDE dcom which is a cool real stateside for uh severity isca that's been around for two decades I think um infiltrates they calculate how much open office space by how many salesforce showers are empty in uh and it's sixteen million of square of vacant off space now spread across uh, ago.

This seems to me at the same time we're having a crazy housing crisis and enough you're monitoring this. But IT turns out that banks and hedge funds and now red fan and we know, uh, open door and all these companies are buying homes. Homes are getting bit up at the same time. Mortgage, uh mortgagees are in all time low and people are moving around and we're not constructing. So I think we had a six year seventy percent decline in new housing, uh, being released into the market and now we've got A A full blown housing crisis in the country.

I'm going to go back uh other than limb and put up my uh ten year break even. I think this whole inflation thing is a headwaiter. And I think that um the right now, we're in this weird position where the home builders are not necessarily sure whether they are going to rip in the capital necessary to build a bunch of homes. The reason they would slow down as if they think that inflation is coming, rates go up, mortgage rates go up and then demand falls off. But if IT turns out to be a head fake, the builders will then actually build what's necessary and they have the capital capacity to do IT.

But I don't think that they've had the the economic justification and the courage to do IT and and in fairness to them, it's because the ten year break even has gone straight up since the depths of the pandemic, which is essentially again, just we know get everybody up to speed is how the market thinks about the future forward inflation rate anyways over the last three or four months or three or four weeks or since we talked about IT, it's kind of steadily started to fall off. And I think there is a fAiling sentiment that, you know, we're going to see some short term Spikes we saw this past week in C. P, I, energy went bananas, right? The cost of energy, the cost of certain things.

But then we're going to get back to Normal. And when we get back to Normal, inflation will be OK. And I think, Jason, that's probably a solution because that gets you know if that if that booky man is actually not real and um we put IT away, then um uh the builders will lead back in size and and theyll Green light a lot of projects and I think you will see housing supply kick back up really aggressively that big first.

Yeah two two points there. I think one IT. So I hope to math is right about the long term inflation prognosis. It's been it's it's very important for investment in growth companies, grow stocks and high tech companies that the inflation the long term state remains low. So I hope you're right.

I think that ultimately what's happening is there's a battle going on between the sort of fiscal monetary policy coming out of washington, which is highly inflationary, and the technological deflation. So the last twenty five years, because we have had this explosion of productivity around technology, is driven down the Prices of pretty much everything. That's not where the Prices aren't set by the government.

So health care, a university, things like that, the Price i've gone up because the governments paying for everything else, the Prices come down massively. So we were kind of in this battle between sort of government inflation and technological deflation. I don't know which one's onna win.

Um I do think that the sort of the the policies were seeing creating a lot of government debt and h the fed continuing on this never ning Q E R are pretty scary. But in an event, I hope you're right about where this ends up. I think on the the other point was was so we we're on what about the housing? Yeah the housing.

So this is a really interesting sort of popular narrative that's evolving where you've got I mean, it's I think both the left and the right can agree that is a pretty scary thing that you now have major hedge funds buying up huge stocks of housing in the U. S. Driving up Prices.

So first time home buyers can't buy a home. I A very a spirit is a nightmare, is a nightmare. Rend, and I think you're seeing a reaction to IT on the left that california now proposed some new policy where they want to say to california to pay for fifty percent of first time home buyers houses, which this seems insane to me.

But now and then on on the right, tucker just did a segment coming down attacking black rock of these big hedge funds for basically for driving up the Prices. So I think you're going to see a union's mity on the populist left and right in reaction to these hedge funds pot. The thing that no one's really talking about, that they need to be talking about is the nimbi M. I mean, Jason, you mentioned that the reason why we don't have enough housing is because it's too hard to build and chemotherapy that the builders could get the capital for IT, but IT is too hard to get these projects approved. That is the thing we've to uh, that is the change we've got .

to make to build on that. I think what's happening now becomes the catalyst to break the emblem.

If all these blackrock are buying up all the homes, if Young people and Young families can buy at home, despite mortgage rates being ridiculously low, and despite them having the money to do IT and the desire to do IT, then that's going to create a massive society of people, I believe, and then that's going to either drive people to other states like texas is benefitting because they are pro development. It's going to catalist the massive movement of people out of new york, out of california. You, whatever states are, are giving too much red tape.

It's going to drive people to those states because that's where the housing people is going to be built or those states are going to crack under the pressure and say, you know what you we're gonna you build in sacramento. H and you know, you guys know um um I have A A housing company in my portfolio and they are they are getting absolutely deluge with people begging them to do affordable housing in different locations. The biggest problem they are having is sorting through all the projects and what are we are going to do uh but the great news is technology exists now to build modular homes in factories like tesla dus cars and ship them to site and take six months to a year out of the construction process so that IT just becomes a matter of regulations and which they decides that they are gonna let people buy a home for the first time.

And if carefully, IT doesn't let people buy home for first time, who's going to pay taxes here? Where's the growth going to come from? This is going to be this is a store moment.

I think just just, you know, the other the other really terrible thing about home owner ship is that IT is where the proper trance of wealth creation for average americans comes from. And so when you lock people out of home ownership, you're essentially ripping away sixty to seventy percent of how they're ever going to make real wealth.

And so yet again, you exacerbate, Jason, to your point, the inequality that we have where a few folks make all the money, 你 and then everybody else， they're kind of shut up from the equity market. They're ut up from private investing and then they're ut up from owning a home. And no wonder people are pissed because it's like you throw your hands in the end litter.

creating a revolution. You pulled up linders at once. You can invest.

You can tell me how. I tell me how I can just earn some money so that I can pay for my is to go to college, take a vacation and have a nice leg when I will tell me how to do with them. Yeah, that is government. Good answer you. We're pulling up the latter .

of phone ownership. We've pulled up the latter with a credit tivo. You can invest in private companies.

We've made higher education far too expensive. We pulled up that latter. I mean, what's left for the average citizen to to grow their wealth?

This is the crazy thing. We put up the latter. And then in response, government creates a program to subsidize people and bail them out at the end. I mean, IT doesn't make any sense. I mean, max ela had maxell had a really funny tweet about the california program, which was as amazing the length to which people will go to avoid building new housing. Your new supply is like we subsidize homebuyers for this artificial Price increase we have cause by limiting supply.

This is by limiting people's student loans.

Just allow supply and demand.

Yeah, just make more college and make them cheaper.

What do guys think about this whole process of head wealth inequality? This public league of tax, somebody inside the irs or IT was had, we don't know.

Yeah, this is clear.

Got to hold basically three thousand, uh, the the tax records, many going back many years of three thousand of the wealth est americans and republica has slowly started to digest and issue um news reports about them and IT shows that you know in some years guide bases um paid no tax. What's ever were able to take huge sections you know at one point I SHE bases in the year where we made you know, kind of like billion dollars, was able to essentially didn't, uh, claim he made nothing and then made so little or made negative dollars that he got a four thousand dollar tax credit that's typically reserved for people, you know, people, people who he .

was a your kids. It's it's not meant for billionaire sentiment, but you know they this was a lot. I think the big story here is the league more than, uh, capital gains.

How capital gains works? We all know how capital gains were. Republic has gotten agenda, obviously this is a left leaning, uh investigative journalism uh funded by the left uh and donations and they do a great job with investigations.

But in this case, they're just telling everybody what we already know, which is if you have giant holdings, you can get alone against them, whether it's you own a home and you can get a mortgage against IT or actually line or if you own a bunch of stock, you can get a margin one. I mean, it's not really news. I think this is like starting the pot.

And the big news is who who released this data. Then you know there are some countries, I believe sweden is one of them, where tax records are they have to be published. And so I think the way the united states is going is we're going to force people to publish to our tax records and we're going to force some sort of minimum for people with buildings A K A wealth tax and nothing agree with either of those, but I think that this is the way it's going. And somebody posted to I favor thousand more irs agents are coming on.

I have our publishing tax. I think that that's a really good idea as I think it's a really smart thing to do. I think like you would see a lot less shady .

behavior if you have to publish your stuff when you publish your tax return, holding your .

test return mirror like one teer one teer rolling down my two.

You should just be a picture of you with a wheel barrel of cash just .

you dumping IT into a family one thing I says, I think these stories have higher lighted just an incredible um a ability to the narrative and create a different kind of a dialogue around taxation because as we all know, the principle of taxation in the united states is that your tax on income and income is a recognized game.

Meaning when you sell an asset for cash or for some other asset, do a job or you do a job and then you get pay, you get that cash that you can now go use to go buy something or to, uh, to do whatever you want to do with that is the transaction moment that you get taxed on. And everyone saying, well, this guys a billions air. He has these billions of dollars.

He paid no taxes. He didn't necessarily make billions of dollars of income that year. His stock value may have got up billions of dollars. But if we all tax each other when our stocks values went up each year, and we didn't get a rebate when our stockings went down, people would feel pretty upset.

The average american, the average person would probably feel pretty upset if they got tax every time their stock portfolio went up and then they didn't get to have a rebate when they're stocks portfolio went down. So the principle of taxation is such that when you sell those shares and you ultimately generate income, that's when you get taxed. But the narrative is very quickly shifting where people are like all the guys, a billionaire stated, you know, he didn't pay the taxes. They don't say anything about how much income he actually made in. A lot of these guys don't need .

income because have a dollar salary.

They effectively have a credit card. One way to think about IT is wealthy people have a credit card, you might point IT out, because they can buy everything on loan. They can buy everything they want on credit. Because down the road, everyone knows .

you guys to have a billion of dollars when your consumption taxes on those.

So if they do take the building and you buy house. So if you take a loan and then you use that loan to actually invest, the united states tax law says that all that in pay is deductable as well. And so the arbitrage that you find yourself in is.

if you happy person.

yeah, I think you have these assets you go to a bank will fill lendin against because they won. You know what is the bank shop? A bank shop is the generate interest rate. So they want these big .

fish ous customers, right?

And so and then and then part of the tax code is that it's tax educable. And so it's one of these things that I think structurally gets people very confused about what's right wrong. But IT happens and IT happens.

Is there any common sense solution sex?

Well, to say to keep in mind that when somebody lives on a credit card, like one day that credit card comes you and it's not a problem for best SOS because amazon's talks, this keeps going up and up and up. But you will occasionally hear about some rich person going broke.

And the reason is always that they took on too much debt and then their stocks Price went down and all the sudden they owe more than the value, the clatter, al, and then they're done. And you do, yes, exactly. So you do take a big rest.

When you live on margin, you are taking a big rise. Most people don't do that. Most people who have games will eventually cash out. They'll do that by selling their company or the solar piece, their stock of a stocks selling plan and then .

they pay tax exactly. And so I feel like it's really unfair how I look. I don't want to say it's unfair because people get really riled ed up when rich people aren't paying taxes. But it's interesting to me how the narrative has been kind of very quickly reframed without the facility of the income that was generated by these individuals. And they're just saying, look, this person has all this wealthy in penny taxes without actually recognizing that this person may have had an income generating event earlier in their life, which they did pay taxes on or they will have an income generating event later in their life which they will pay taxes on. Um and so the truth a little bit more nuance than I think you know the very quick kind of sound by the press stories kind of indicate and it's it's just it's been really interesting to watch how many people get so riled, ed up and frappe about this moment and I I get that we all know everyone kind of dislike wealthy people um you know I certainly did and I had no money and I felt like .

I was getting you certain ly when we started this pocket .

to be but I think freebies a great point which is that with bezos take for example and looked by the way maybe he should be paying more tax in other ways but with to his amazon stock he built this machine called amazon is this machine that makes all of our lives Better um for the most part in terms of the delivery of goods and services. You know you press a bud and someone shows up the next day so he builds this incredible machine.

He owns a piece of IT. He's merely holding on to his ownership in that machine. But the way that the public market is valuing that machine keeps going up and up and up at a freepost point.

He hasn't recognize more income. He doesn't have more cash in his bank account. Um and so should he be paying to something?

If you change the holder, if you change the rule, trouth crack me from wrong here. And you said you have to pay on the game. Then somebody who bought a house in one thousand nine hundred eighty, and I appreciated a hundred x in california by the time they were seventy, and they bought red in the authorities, they wouldn't get caught up in this wealth tax or paying for IT as they go.

The appreciation. This mechanism exists. No, just useing. This mechanism exists at all parts of the tax code. So yes, a billionaire can basically go to J. P.

Morgan or goldman tax or Morgan stanly, you know get a margin loan on their stocking of their life. But individual folks who are not billionaire can do that via a hee lock on their home. And a lot of people do that as well.

They take home equity lines of credit and they use that to ford finance things as well. The difference is that because the quantum are so much bigger, you have disability for rich people to accelerate their wealth creation in a way that Normal folks notes. So i'll give you another example.

So one example that I just broke about is you basically take alone instead of selling things, right, you use that to make investments, all of that interests tax adoptable. Number one. Number two is, even if you don't need to do that, you can just take alone on a small percentage of your capital, reinvest that again, pay the interest and now you're running implicitly ly a little bit of leverage.

And just to give you a sense of IT, there is a really great study by um A Q R I think is a name of the hetch one. And um they reverse engineered uh buffer s returns and what they saw was at buffer ran about twenty to thirty percent levered his entire career and the way he did that was synthetically by the float of echo. The point i'm trying to make is even the best investors in the world proves that a small amount of margin and leverage is the key between being average and being the best in the world.

And if that if he needed that, lets be honest, we all need that. And again, we all can't have that. It's only available to a few.

And so i'm not saying that the rules are wrong, but the rules do stifle the ability to basically move up and move down that curve. It's clear how often people move down. People get stopped out.

They get margined out. Happens all the time. It's very hard to see examples of people moving up. It's because it's harder, harder to get that first little bit of capital that then you can go and run with.

Yeah and see, I think the great the great reconciliation is what we need to work on society. And if you look at what the great reconciliation would be, can I get in great education? Can I get great health care? And can I have a nice home? And if you just said we're going to have, uh, health care for everybody in the next states, very easy to pay.

And if you just said we're going to allow the building of single family homes, two or three uh bedroom homes and you cannot stop them and any state that tries to stop them is not going to get whatever amount of federal funding. And then finally, we said all trade schools are free. Those are three very simple of thing.

That's a great idea, by the way. What a fabulous idea. I D R.

schools, schools and school choice, everybody. Because that is the number one thing to create equality .

of opportunity with the incredible ways .

and safe communities. Because the number one thing kids need is a great education and a safe household. And you cannot have that when done there.

And health care, you can have that when done. Violence is exploding across the country. Our communities are no longer safe. We have to fix that problem.

Listen, at seventy five minutes. Do we want to talk about toxic bitcoin insanity and miami?

And where do help is going on over there? What are these guys doing?

alright. So very simple. There was a bitcoin conference in miami. If you go to that conference, you have to agree to not mention ocracoke currencies.

There is a we all have heard of bitcoin maximum zone or being a bitcoin maximum st. This means you believe that bitcoin is the one true crypto currency. All other crypto to currencies do not exist. This conference has qualified that to the point at which people are jumping on stage like maniacs ripping off their closed to reveal dog coin shirts.

And then people are saying, bitcoin maximum ism now has evolved into bitcoin toxicity, which is a subset of the bitcoin movement, or bitcoin in toxic says, in order for bitcoin to become the one true currency and the reserve currency, we must attack anybody who attacks IT, in other words, called like behavior, either except mohamad, jesus, moses, whoever hindy hindu god, zus for the rags you have to accept our god, or else we're gonna attack you. So if you can actually see this in practice, I twist, if a if bitcoin was replaced by technology, what would that look like? And you get massively ratios on twitter, which means more comments than likes.

Take the other you yes.

ahead. So bitcoin toxic is now a thing. And it's actually, I believe, making the movement um toxic to people and people will not gonna to participate.

So it's actually collapsing the project. People do not want to be involved in toxic and people think that there are many ways to win in cypher. So the crypto community, because of the recent loss of fifty, I think now is in a debt spiral of toxicity. Go sex.

Well, I think this is a fake moral panic on your part. Look, if if toxicity means that you think that all these cyp to currencies are scam. And Jason, you are guilty of toxic .

too because you think you those worth.

nobody has been on twitter more saying that all these scripter currencies are a scamp. The only disagreement that you and the bitch maximums have is with respective bitcoin. But you both agree, both sides agree that you and the .

maximum believe that all these other .

gypt of currencies, no real .

by basically .

by constancy denouncing every .

crypto I ico s and stamps. I believe technology it's a real technology ah, but anyway it's it's just gross.

And I think I think in general, if I had to summarize what I see, I I see like there's a vain of Young men basically who are super, super frustrated and so and well, I don't know themselves, are not. But like, you know, I think that they they basically, I think like ran the race the way they were told. They checked all the boxes.

They went to the schools, they got the jobs, they did the thing they is that, and it's kind of not working. And so whenever they find a thing that's new, I think they find acceptance in the community. And then, man, did they get really rigid ID about IT. And they, in some ways, to stop thinking for themselves. And that's a shame, called out me.

I quote something. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't. And we're soly learning that fact. And we're very.

very pissed off, of course.

of that's a great quote. It's so true. It's true that basically summarizes twitter.

that summarizes twitter stage m. Stage m made one hundred times words. You can see. Everyday people suddenly becoming rich and famous.

or at least the perception using fillers to look Better.

And then everyone feels like there being left out or everyone feels like they want something that bit don't have, and then you're left in this constant state of want and desire and this constant state of unhappiness. So uh, this isn't new, by the way, you know these are buddhist principles that dca is sort of unhappiness. This is really um a about desire. And if you can like a we create .

more than comparing yourself to others.

Yeah, I think there's A A A different answer to to the fight club nyalong m um then just sort of giving up all desire, I understand, sort of buddh approach. I actually wrote in one thousand nine hundred and ninety nine, when I joined paypal, I wrote an article called silicon valley's five clubs, in which I basically said that startups where the answer to this sort of you've got, remember, fight up, came out ninety and ninety nine.

And so you had this sort of nyalong m associated with this empty materialism. People wanted all these materialistic things, but I didn't really make them happy. But I think that are creating something great.

And being part of creating something great is the answer to this. And it's about it's about separation. It's about purpose, having .

meaning.

mastery. And we are robbing people of having that experience when we do stuff like universe, basic income or or tell them they don't need to work. You know, we should be urging them to have these great experiences.

And this is why I kind of react to the is like apple snowflakes who don't want to come into their billion dollar spaceship campus. It's like they're just punching a time clock. You know they are not really getting any meaning out of their work and that's the thing I sort of react to that. So um be you'd rather .

than find another place where they can actually find purpose and mastery, rather than be at apple.

be made right, contribute to the iphone have .

been created by a remote team. And lets be clear.

the iphone would never have happened had IT up in for Steve jobs. Okay, period story. You need to have the founder. Yeah you need to the founder, you just needed to have him. I mean, he could have been .

anybody but he him with a remote team made iphone.

No, that's so. I mean, I think I think I will probably be a different company of Steve was so here who know.

which is why I think they want people to come back. And I think what's happening here, I mean, hate to be supersonic as I think a lot of people left the bay area did tell apple because you're supposed to tell them if you relocate and they're just trying to extend their tenure at apple because there is the way to come in three days a week if you're living, you know, in ta aho or further out. I mean, what are you supposed to do, get a hotel for two nights a week and then drag back to toho or phoenix? I mean, these people have left.

If Steve are sill around, those apple employees be racing back to the office because they would be so excited about what they're working on to be working on new products. And if they did and if they didn't have that passion, Steve would to, we do them out in two seconds at the end.

You can snowflake the .

way you mention snowflake, although you said apple, snow lake.

But the founder of snowflake said in a cnbc episode, essentially, we care about diversity, but we care, first and foremost, about being a high performing organization and that services our customers, uh, and our shareholders. And so while diversity is important, we're gonna ill a role with the best person we can find. And so now the grand debate that has started is, and I think it's related to what happened, a coin base and shop ify with you know no more political speech network is meritocracy and a can merok racy live alongside equity and equality and diversification um or diversity so diversity, meritocracy in the same organization which win no my morals route .

this um pretty fabulous I say I think he was in the financial times a couple of years ago. He got in a little bit of heat for doing IT. But essentially what he said was, you know, while we are all talking about the things that we think are important, there's an entire code y of engineer in china that are coding twenty four seven. I think he actually said, like nine, nine, six.

exactly nine m to nine P M, six days a week, and they use the same t bag three times. And he used up to illustrate, he know he used that to illustrate their commitment to accent and what he used to see in silicon valley, where people on the weekends the parking lots were for keep going to make.

But I I just bring this up because it's like we've lost the ability to have both things be true, meaning it's it's maybe like at the end of the day, Frank slotman is a representative and a spokesperson for the values of a company that's a hundred billion dollar company that came out of nowhere and build t something fabulous for people in a matter of a few years. I doubt that he speaks for himself only.

No, he specifically said in this comment from this, be speaking for other people who are too scared to talk about IT.

Okay, but i'm saying but i'm saying he also, but I don't care about other companies. He speaks for snowflake. So to the extent he says that has a CEO snowflake, why can't we respect that an entire company has decided to do something, for example? You know, the other opposite ended this. Remember this Bakery, I think he was in colorado that, like, refused to make a cake. Yeah, refused to make a cake for lesbian couple IT went all the way to the supreme court and they said that um that this guy had the right to deny them making the cake to me IT IT makes my blood boil but at least I live in a country where he has the right to have that opinion and it's in within a legal boundary of reasonable ess I guess now I learned from that and I say, okay, that's a legal bound of reasonable this um and until that laws overturned, that's what IT is this is so much lesson than that and we can know. Let this guy actually just go about this day without issuing an apology.

anyone? AmErica were .

engineers that are working nine, nine, six in china eating our lunch every day.

yeah. I mean, in amErica today, I think you have to you have to give another example. You you have to capital ate and agree to the diversity. Uh this and let me .

let me give another example. There is a massive um play right now going on in the uranium m market. IT was brought to my attention.

I was like, let me just go look at this. I don't know anything about this, but I just was curious about what's going on. And effectively, other days, there is a fun that was trying to basically corner uranium and drive the Price of.

And the entire thing about uranium, which was interesting, is, okay, what is IT used for is used for nuclear reactors. Well, then you spend a little time understanding nuclear actors. And I was shocked to learn how clean, how safe, yes, how reliable, how beautiful. I had all these stupid cob webs in my head.

Based on a random couple of press releases, three ha is sa so when I cleared all of that bias away, and I learned about IT, and I like, why aren't nuclear reactors everywhere? Because IT is the fastest way for us to get the carbon usual. And then I find out the same people who want carbon neutral.

I E. Greenpeace is the one of the largest and advocates against nuclear. And I thought, how do we not, again, be in a position to actually hold two thoughts that are slightly divergent? At the same time, we want nuclear energy, because IT actually supports something that's even more important to the sustainable ecosystem, that Green pieces they were to protect in the first place.

And you can't have IT. And to me, I find, so I find all of this stuff again at nosier, in this list of, while we all naval, gain on this bullshit. China, nine, nine progress. China is nine, nine, six.

We have to for a progress. And by the way, slotman en, he put out a release comments I made during a media view last week may have let some to infer that I believe that diversion he married or mutually exclusive when he comes to recruitment, hiring and promotion. I do not believe this, and I want to personal pologize ed to anyone who may have been hurt, offended by my comments. So I added said in a statement posted monday, i've accept forward personal responsibility full of lack of clarity in my comments.

I think slotman apology actually only butchers the original point he was making, which is that CEO are afraid to say what they really think. Yes, he came out. He had the bravery, encouraged to say what he really thought 啊， 1 then got piled on on twitter， and now he's apologizing foreign, walking IT back. It's really kind of a shame at cha mos point. How can we have honest conversations when people are just afraid to say what they think?

Whether I agree with Frank sloping or not is not the point. The point is that if his entire company and his employees and his executive team have made a specific decision that they view merit as you, incredibly important, and then they they layer diversity in as a result, who might the Cherry pick those words? And all of a sudden, I have a wording issue with that because I don't even understand the hiring criteria as not as if he published his stuff. So it's not of not like anybody on the outside had any thread of ability .

to know the detail, right? I agree. And here's my prom with all the people who attacked Frank on twitter is, you know, have any of those people said one word about school choice or charter schools? The need to release the stranglehold that the education unions have on our kids, the running these schools for the benefit of the unions, not for the benefit the kids they're are boxing advances, math and how many the people attacking Frank have said one word about that, because if we want to achieve if we want to achieve a quality opportunity in our society, we have to fix the schools. And so it's so easy to attack Frank, but they're unwilling to say one word about school choice because the unions are a political outline is inconvenient for them to do.

So what about again, going and actually understanding the clinical ss and safety of nuclear and you know, being able to tell books on the environmental left that actually this is the path to sustainable energy and uh a Better ecology and biodiversity in the shortest path possible. They just want to shut down the conversation.

They don't want there to be any real conversation. But we're shutting down.

to be really honest with you. Words and we're shutting down rather superficial conversations and nobody ends up addressing the root cause issues of anything. That's the shame. I just think that we are screaming at each other about things that none of us really understand without taking the time to understand each other. Meanwhile, I is I, now you .

agree to the we have to win space.

Meanwhile, china is nine, nine, six.

Put one point.

put one point, two billion people that are born in a collective system against against holistically defined goals over multiple cate period of time. They're the only, by the way, the but going back to where we started just the end, maybe the podcast biotech is the last bastion where amErica is completely dominant.

right? For for to not really.

There are incredible advances that it's it's been american biotechnological ingenuity through and through. And the question there is going to be, how do we make sure we wrap our arms around this category and continue to do great things? Because in the absence of IT, and if we get again, if we lose this script, some other country is going to nine, nine, six that market from us as well. Yeah.

I think you know what you're pointing out is we're in this generational competition of um sort of cold war type conflict with with china. I think our foreign policy is starting to real line around that. You're seeing both democrat republicans really get on the same age now about the the threat that china represents. But our domestic policy is not realize around that if we really want to win this cold war against china, we have to be competitive and we keep doing things to our schools, our kids and other parts of our system in our economy that are anti competitive.

We need more freeburg, you know. And if you get rid of like advanced programs, we have no freeburg. We need to clone freedoms. G freeburg.

What's the chances we could just clone you and have like two thousand more freeburg to solve this biotech problem? Would you be open to that? Can we can we start the clone .

wars you think you would get along with your clone? Or would you want to destroy your clone?

destroyed? That's memetic.

So now I want ten clones of myself. You kidding me. Can you imagine around him.

you jr. Wrote about this very elegantly, many, many decades ago. This goes in one place which is, but you know, IT is IT goes into IT goes into capital merger.

I want to army. I would you like to just sit down, employ chest with your close all day.

not chest, but he d like to do something else.

No, wow. No, that's not the image. I want to, no, have a person with yourself. No, nothing sexual.

I don't. No, no, stop.

That's all of .

what you're saying. Well, actually like this, all these different things I want to do in my life that you know, different careers, whatever. And I could said one sex out to be once. I could be an architect, one could be a director.

and one a one. Do you guys want to have your mind alone for a second? yes. okay.

So there's a concept, uh, uh uh uh capability called induced pyrr potem stem cells where you can basically take any cell in your body and apply a bunch of chemicals to IT and effectively get that cell to convert into a stem cell. What's IT converts into us. And so the copy of the cell becomes a stem cell.

And this was this guy's yum. And archives tor. They want to know Price for this. Now you could take that stem cell and turn IT into an over cell, turn IT into A A A effectively uh um uh an X L fex.

And then you could induce that fears to start dividing based on a discovery that was made recently, which been done in mammals yet, but effectively get IT to start dividing without being fertilized and grow up. And IT would effectively grow a clone. So this has been done in plants and have not been done in animals. So in theory, in the next decade or two, we could take any, any hair cell from our own body converted into a seven cell. This is totally fight. By the way, it's not proven that is a there's a budget discoveries that have been made, research that has been done, that points of this projector that you can then take that stem cell from you take and cell from your body, turn into a stem sell, turn into a excell induced to start growing and turn IT into effectively.

I just want to say, as you've been same but I ve been shaking my head Jason has no reaction sex is grinning from we can know exactly inside me .

up i'm going to be like saddam who's saying with my cloth ones of myself.

you try.

Just think .

of my last guys I love your best these for the queen of kinda rain man himself and the dictator i'm jake out and this has been a double episode of the all .

in podcast will see you all next time .

n byebye your winners.

We open sources to the fans and they .

just got crazy with.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge org because like sexual attention and. 想到。

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we get more.