Transcript for:
Regulatory Capture in Key Industries

regulatory capture like is one of the biggest issues and in related uh news by the way another insane statistic just sorry they're up i saw this today i forgot someone we know tweeted this the who wants to guess the ratio of administrators to doctors in the u.s healthcare system 300 to one yeah i saw it 301 yeah 900 to one today oh my god and that is up from five to one in 1970. by the way can i just build on what you said 900 to 1. your initial tweet said 300 to one and it ended in 2010 right before obamacare passed so from 300 to 900 was all obamacare yeah regulatory capital zach's shaking his head which by the way uh nothing against obamacare because i think like coming as a canadian i actually believe in subsidized healthcare and i think the the principle of obamacare was great but there was one fatal flaw which is it basically said okay you know what you're capped at the following margin and the minute that people said wait a minute i can only have a 20 gross margin what do you do you just jack up prices to basically jack up revenue because if you can only take 20 you're gonna take 20 of a bigger number than a smaller number and so it completely burned the incentives for any healthcare company in the united states to do anything other than just basically walk prices up and it's funny because if you look at the stock prices of these companies you you would have made more money being along united healthcare than you would have been owning facebook google any of these other tech companies in the last decade crazy stat uh speaking of regulatory capture tesla uh got left out of this new tax credit or proposed tax credit insane four electric cars i don't know if you saw that but tesla wasn't invited a couple of months ago to biden's ev summit elon responded like i wonder why i wasn't invited it turns out it's because they're not a union shop their employees make much more money than union employees make uh and but now as a punishment but hold on as a punishment the twelve thousand dollar credit that they're giving to or they're proposing to give to all ev manufacturers is only if you have union employees it's 4 500 less to tesla so literally two massive regulatory captures and corruption go or maybe sacks no i mean i don't have much more to add to that i mean you hit the nail on the head i mean this is to serve the unions it's not to serve clean energy or the ev industry i mean a little bit for uv but it's mostly for the unions the um [Music] on the one hand what we do is we say that climate change is this existential issue but then when the rubber meets the road if you look inside the infrastructure plan today we unveiled basically how we're going to do all the tax credits and again it's just an enormous amount of just sloppy um regulatory capture we're doubling and tripling credits in certain places where disallowing credits in other places when you follow the dollars what happens is you can map it to companies those companies tend to be mostly public large balance sheets large lobbying efforts and it's not necessarily the most important companies that matter so if you know if i said to you what are the most important companies in climate change you'd probably say well maybe it's direct air capture maybe it's nuclear maybe it's some other thing that basically helps you go to a different place and where does all the tax credits and tax dollars go sun run sun power these are companies that basically you know have this oligopolistic hole stranglehold on essentially installing solar panels and battery walls in homes across the united states and it's not to say that that job isn't important but to basically explicitly block other people out because all the chatter today on um you know or some of the chatter today was around just if this bill passes as written you're gonna see these stocks rip and so obviously the positive reinforcement loop of wall street and hedge funds getting behind these companies their market cap goes up the amount they allocate to lobbyists go up and then all this [ __ ] just continues to cycle through the system freeberg how far are we away from small nuclear reactors and fusion just from a science perspective and then on a regulatory basis i don't know enough i mean yeah look i mean from what i've seen there there are great technologies that you know we should be able to kind of realize my understanding and speaking to investors some in this room and i know chemists looked at this area a lot is um you know there's the the regulatory burden that's made it so difficult to launch nuclear um technically it seems like there's great breakthroughs there was an announcement from a group this past week cfs yeah on a new um superconducting magnet system that they spent years designing this is a bill gates backed company anyone here an investor no uh john huh and uh basically it enables like the tokamak plasma fusion based systems uh to be kind of reliably produced now and so they've had a proof of demonstration of this uh of the superconducting magnet system that effectively allows you to control a plasma which is like 10 million degrees celsius in a little donut that spins around and that plasma allows you to kind of pull energy out that can be used for you know effectively you put a bunch of material in this thing runs and more energy comes out than you put in it's magic um and so you know this has been a theoretical kind of concept for decades uh getting the superconducting magnet system to control the plasma in a very small space uh using a very small kind of system was proven and now they think that they're you know call it four or five years away you know by the way everything in nuclear is always four or five years away so four or five years away with a grain of salt from kind of having a demonstrable kind of uh system so there's technologies that are clearly like on the brink or proceeding nicely but as we know um a lot of a lot of these sorts of technologies similarly are kind of regulatory burdened we're about a hundred degrees away i think from a from a operational functional room temperature semiconductor and superconductor sorry and you know i've told a team that i'm working with on this project i don't want to go into energy generation or unless we can do it in a small form manufacturing thing that can be adopted broadly but if you try to go and you know basically build some distributed energy resource out over here that powers cavallo point it's impossible because you run into these people who don't really understand the science won't take the time and you know we've taken so many steps backwards from nuclear that it's probably just going to take decades and it's going to take some cataclysmic climate change event where the only way out is this super abundant energy source where you're willing to basically say ah [ __ ] it we're [ __ ] otherwise by the way if you if you were to go to mars today you wouldn't be pulling a bunch of [ __ ] you know oil out of the ground and burning it and you know rotating uh you should i mean and you wouldn't necessarily i mean you'd be using you know solar at the beginning but you wouldn't necessarily rely on solar the you know the cost of material to transport from here to mars to yield the best energy potential would likely be some sort of nuclear power source right um as it is in a lot of military questions elon was saved by obama i mean just kind of like having we were there even meaning like you know it was in that moment he was able to get that deal with daimler he was able to get these you know tax credits the the auto bailout you know all of that stuff but then it seems like we're in the middle of a democrat administration and they may go out of their way to basically try to [ __ ] this guy i just think it's like become a special interest free-for-all there was an article today that the national deficit year to date is 2.7 trillion and i think that we're on an october first fiscal year so there's one more month so it'll be about 3 trillion last year was over 3 trillion because of covid there haven't gotten to the infrastructure bill yet that's gonna be another 1.2 trillion on top of that the democrats are saying they want another three and a half well not all democrats but thank god for joe manchin but another three and a half trillion and you know most people can't even really say what's in that three and a half trillion dollar bill i mean it's we're at 28 trillion something like that of national debt i mean and it's all just like special interest plunder well i mean if you look at the results the results aren't there correct yeah and then on top of that um well you know i i understand i mean with respect to obamacare okay that's a major item on let's call the democrat wish list was to give everyone health care and we didn't even get there okay but you can sort of understand that but most people i think even on the left can't really say what the big ticket item is that's going to be delivered for this three and a half trillion that is proposing to be spent so um i mean it's just it's just become this like you know special free for