AVOID NGOS

“Do you know the single factor that has brought the most people out of poverty throughout civilization? Actually industrialization. And so when you think about the projects you're going to do, you need the big ones that move the needle for people. I mean, it's the story of America in a lot of ways. Look at the railroads going west and everything, Towns develop alongside railroads.”

“Piclorum is a pesticide that was developed by the Dow Chemical Company in 1963. This is the chemical formula for that pesticide. It's related to auxin, which are these hormones that plants make. And in the nineteen sixties, there was this big rush to try and make synthetic plant hormones that you would then apply to a plant. It would cause the plant to overgrow, and the plant would quickly die. And piclorum became a very widely used herbicide in our environment. The problem with piclorum, one of the things that's been known about it is it's very persistent. It doesn't biodegrade very well.”

“I think in some ways, we were slightly victims of our own success. You know, you go to this period of time after we win the Cold War, and everyone's into Fukuyama's end of history. And if you build it, it'll just people will automatically convert to our system. We let China into the WTO. We lost all discipline.”

“I'd be remiss if I didn't start with the Western Hemisphere. What's going on in Latin America and across The Americas is certainly something that's never existed in our lifetimes, and I think you have to go back over a hundred years to see this type of opportunity there. You have a lot of pro American governments. You have elections moving in a direction of folks who are pro business, pro growth, anti crime, real allies to The United States.”

“With an NGO, nonprofit, what have you, they raise money. They don't sell things. They fundraise from donors in order to engage in an activity. But what happens over time is the actual activities may stop mattering, and all that really matters is they're able to keep fundraising. Right? Because they're just trying to figure out a justification to keep going back to donors to get more and more money out of them. That's what perpetuates the organization.”

“I've been in debt. I mean, I've had a 420,000,000 credit line. And I had a moment where it was reflexively kind of collapsing inward because the assets that I was using to secure it shrank in value in a moment of market disruption. I was scrambling. And then at the same time, there was a risk. It was the worst moment of my professional working life. I had like a couple $100,000,000 sitting at Credit Suisse and they were about to implode. And so on a weekend, I was trying to figure out whether my money was still there. I had always had this rule, don't have debt, and then I violated it to try to run the number up. I almost got run over. I almost lost everything.”

“Where is SpaceX today? Let's call it a trillion. Where could it be, just for the purpose of this argument, let's say 2,000,000,000,000. So when the deal gets done on a stock for stock basis, it's going to be if, again, if it's 60,000,000,000 in tomorrow dollars, effectively, Elon's gotten a 50% discount. And what has he bought? He can issue $60,000,000,000 of stock at a $2,000,000,000,000 valuation and get a model and a service that I think is extremely compelling in coding, which is where we know all of the immediate and short term revenue gains are.”

“What people don't realize about the Marshall Plan, part of it is this myth has been taken on about pure altruism and it was incredibly altruistic, but 70% of the funds that The US sent over to Europe in the Marshall Plan were used to purchase US goods and services. It was a stimulus for us and it hardwired markets for US workers, businesses, and capital, and we had a first call on strategic and critical materials.”

“What he intuitively recognized faster than almost anyone I spoke to was hey, if other insurers people talk about Lloyd's a lot, but, you know, other insurers are canceling war risk insurance because the straits closed, then implicitly that means everybody's insurance programs across the world on stuff like this rests on the back of The US Military. And what he says is, why are they getting paid for it and not us? Especially when it's our guys at risk and everything we're doing there.”

“Look at the amount of money that Steve Jobs returned to shareholders in his tenure at Apple. It's easy to count. It was zero. He loved to keep that money on the balance sheet and he probably, or maybe I'm guessing, would've directed that at some huge shot on goal. In the Tim Cook era, it was very different. He shrank the share count by almost 50%. I think it's like 44%.”

“Private equity is the last stop because when they come in and they'd layer in billions and billions of dollars of not just equity but also debt, and that has to then be completely predictable and paid back, their only lever is to raise price. They can never cut price to take share. They don't they can't underwrite that to pay back their debt holders. And so Saks, part of the big problem here and why nobody wants to touch these companies is that they are overpriced.”

“So sulfuric acid exports have been banned, from China. That's 25% of the market. That starts May 1. Sulfuric acid is used often for the processing of rare earths. It's incredibly important for fertilizer and a whole host of agricultural products.”

“So I went on part of my honeymoon with my wife to Rwanda and remember driving, when we did a gorilla trek and, you know, an amazing country, especially what they went through, with their genocide and civil war and how the country has been rebuilt. But you know, the driver on the way to the Guerrilla Tracts Plaza, guys are Americans, we love Americans. This road, everything here was built by the Chinese. We hate the Chinese. And I go, but they built you the road, why would they? And I go, yeah, they built our road. They won't pay and they won't use Rwandan workers. They don't eat at the same restaurants or anything like that.”

“My head of investments has gone overseas to places and has gotten thank yous for being treated like a partner, to have expectations set rather than an incredibly paternalistic view that frankly does not create partners but dependency. When people actually have skin in the game, are invested in and are working hard for something, and it's why we have them we have our partner countries co invest with us.”

“I've always hated when founders take on Worse. Venture debt. And I know, Jake, how you agree with me. Part of it is that founders forget that they have to pay it back. They treat it like venture capital, and they forget about that. And then they get surprised. But the other thing I've never liked about it is it makes you more fragile. It basically subjects you to a bunch of business covenants, and it makes it harder for you to do an abrupt shift in your business because now you've got a bank looking over your shoulder.”

“You're right that the SPLC allegedly did fund $270,000 to help plan Charlottesville. In addition to that, they secretly funneled more than $3,000,000 to a bunch of violent racist extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, Aryan Nation, United Clans of America, and it goes on from there. So this group that was supposed to be fighting racism, in fact, was fomenting racism by paying these groups to basically organize protests that SPLC could then point to and say that America has a huge racism problem, donate to us. And that's basically what happened after Charlottesville. They increased the amount of money that they were able to fundraise by $81,000,000.”