I can't wait to talk about lob grow meat I have been trying to get people to please let's not get canceled but the four of us are functional again we like each other we enjoy we look forward to doing the show again everything styled in is your lab-grown meat does it use hormones my lab-grown meat was a little
let me ask you this about your lab ground meat do you have sage no no no no no you know I was told that my lab grow meat was a little I've injected some flavors of tobacco black cherry some notes some notes persimmons [Music] [Music] so let's go to big Tech earnings Google stock is up five percent after beating
on the top line and bottom line estimates some high level takeaways Google announced a 70 billion dollar stock buyback plan and that their Cloud unit was profitable for the first time in its history as we mentioned last week Sundar officially announced that deep mind was merging
with brain this is kind of controversial because it's uh really hard According to some sources or Sundar to get all his lieutenants to work together and row in the right direction Google's Q on search Revenue up year over year two percent down five percent quarter of a quarter just kind of to be expected because
of seasonality and because we're in a down market right now obviously with the recession YouTube down 2.5 year over year down 16 quarter of a quarter other bets which is like nest and some other products down 35 year over year net income 15 billion dollars any thoughts freeberg on what is a mixed quarter by Google and I
guess the water macro environment what was so striking about the earnings call is not necessarily what was presented but what was not presented which was a stronger voice and a strategic plan going forward for dealing with two major issues that the company one is the operating cost model and the
second is the AI strategy and the response to this Evolution and AI I've heard from a lot of folks that the AI strategy in particular it's almost like Google already has this in the bag but they just haven't kind of let it out of the bag it's like they've got a Tasmanian devil and they're
they're ready to go with it and there's from from my read an incredible amount of confidence that there's something that's going to happen and a set of things that are going to happen that are going to be very profound and Powerful I even heard some anecdotal stories about hey you know we don't have this feature in this
product but chat GPT does and then people basically showed up to this meeting and there was all this debate about well we can't let it out because we're not sure you know the classic kind of like we're scared of doing doing wrong versus leaning forward and taking risks don't be evil you're referencing
no it was just more about regulatory concern and getting things wrong and making a mistake and so there's this total fear of like again you know Regulatory and fear so someone kind of slammed the table and said let's just put it out the next day they put it out so there's definitely a cultural change
happening internally is what I've heard anecdotally but what was really missing which is what Wall Street needed to hear what investors and shareholders needed to hear is what's the strategy there how are you going to compete how are you going to resolve what's going to go forward and secondly what are you going
to do about the cost structure of the company because everyone else you know in contrast to meta being up 11 12 after hours with their cost cutting model and demonstrating that they're going to start pulling cash out of this business Google's top you know kind of top story was Hey We're stopped serving at peanut
M M's in the cafeteria or something ridiculous and you know that doesn't really address the real structural question so I think the stock buyback the 70 billion stock buyback is an authorization to repurchase it's not a plan to repurchase so it's unclear if when or how that Capital does actually get deployed in
the market to buy back stock and so there is also this big kind of shareholder sentiment of being let down that there isn't an improvement in either cash coming out of the business or in cash being used in a smart way with the business and it was the The Silence in the earnings call that I think really
stunned a lot of people which is why you didn't see a lot of stock movement despite the actual business numbers being better than expected and so there's a lot that Google I think still has to catch up to with respect to their peers both on a product and strategy point of view but also on a cost cutting and a communication of
that cost cutting point of view to the market and to the street otherwise shareholders are going to start to lose faith if they're not already and are going to start to put their Capital with other folks who they feel are better leading and leaning into this new Evolution of Technology like
Microsoft and Apple and meta which is really where those big Capital allocators end up picking stuff to go one final thing I'll say it's extraordinarily important to note that I think Google has such an incredible AI advantage over Microsoft and you know Microsoft is almost solely
dependent on openai this small startup company and all of Bing chat is powered by it and Microsoft hasn't built out the the infrastructure the team the rigor the depth the models that Google has and Google made a few strategic blunders you know they shouldn't have been as open with the Transformer work that they did and
shared that publicly it certainly enabled openai and others to compete but Google certainly has an incredible set of tools and capabilities that is leap years ahead of Microsoft they're in a position to really compete they just have to have the will and the leadership to do it slam the table say here's we're
going to stop wasting money and we're going to start leading and driving this this industry forward and this this could be a quick turnaround story for the stock and for this company and and I I hope it'll happen chamath what are your thoughts on Google's leadership specifically is Sundar the right person to run the
company going forward does he have the founder authority to get the ship and to get the lieutenants all kind of rowing in the same direction or does it need to be a leadership change which is the big discussion of Topic in Silicon Valley right now I think he's very capable that's an amorphous organization of so
many different competing interests the thing that doesn't add up about the Google earnings release but then also what Freebird just mentioned is there was this article that kind of tried to paint sundara as sort of a caretaker CEO right where Larry was the actual Shadow CEO well if that's true
you know Larry has more incentive than anybody else to kind of Force change and there was all these kind of like gripes and complaints that were articulated and I don't put much stock in all of this stuff I think that he is the right person for the job and I think what they have to do is just do the
simple basic things like it doesn't take a CEO change for a board of directors to have the emotional wherewithal to authorize a 15 or 20 reduction in force for a company that is so profitable that clearly is not yet humming on all cylinders and so you don't need to go through all of this drastic change to do these simple obvious things
my takeaway across all of these four big companies is we are in a really unique moment to observe something that may sound controversial or hurt people's feelings that like these companies but I think we're now well past Peak big Tech their valuations may still go up because they generate such an enormous amount of
cash flow but these are exactly those kinds of businesses now they are X growth large cash flow businesses Blue Chip you might say while they were always Blue Chip but the way that they grow is not through Innovation if you look at Google Facebook Microsoft and Apple and ask yourself when was the last hugely
disruptive thing that they've created you're hard-pressed to find something that was even done in the 2010s yeah actually that's a good thought I mean the iPhone for Apple iPhone was 2007. yep Microsoft was in the 1990s Google was in 1998 with course search maybe there was maps and Gmail in two in the
2000s Chrome Android they bought some of that Facebook it was the core service that we built in the 2000s and then they acquired brilliantly right so I'm not saying that they didn't acquire well yeah my point is that core organic Innovation hasn't been there for a long time so this is a moment to just be
reflective of the fact that these are some incredible companies with ginormous cash flows but now you've had this foundational platform shift which exposes the fact that they really aren't good at innovating and at times when they've tried to organically innovate they've massively misallocated capital
either TLS would be the example either through a bloated balance sheet so someone claim that Google overspends or through just pure misallocation by starting projects that just are not large but consume large amounts of cash that would be the Facebook VR example but in all of this I think when you cut staff and expenses
as a way to meet and beat and Top Line growth is in the low single digits it's an important moment to recognize that these companies have now transitioned to being cash cows and if you look at sort of how financial markets value cash cows they're very valuable but it's not where you look for growth
and so in a world where rates eventually get cut and we start to come out of a recession it tends to be that other people get rewarded so that's an idea that's getting to your point here they're not allowed to acquire things Microsoft's acquisition thing dead dead so they're not going to be allowed to buy stuff so
then you're right what is the growth here they're not able to innovate I think these companies are X growth which is why they use their cash flows to do what borrow money cheaply to buy back stock to manipulate their Equity right you can manipulate and overcome dilution you can manipulate earnings per share you can manipulate
the number of shares outstanding and so just by the nature of that whole game a bunch of passive investors will end up buying more which helps the active investors who own that stock so it's a game so if we're not in the world financial engineering would be the I mean the most charitable way to say it
we're in the financial engineering phase which is fine and by the way you can make a lot of money Facebook's up 90 percent so there's a lot of there's a lot of meaning just this just this year oh yes so there's a lot of room for financial engineering but it's not where you need to look to figure out where
these big improvements and uses of this next Generation platform technology are going to come from most likely saxon's is a fair assessment in your mind looking at you know the the major tech companies the fangs yeah I mean their growth is down to single digits so I think Microsoft had seven percent
year-over-year Revenue growth Google was at three percent I think Facebook was for sales Rose three yeah three percent from a year earlier but at least that was an improvement because it's actually gone down for three straight quarters so yeah but you're down to you know single digit year-over-year growth
rates nevertheless most these companies beat expectations so Microsoft shares wrote nine percent meta jump 12 might be up more now and I guess Google got a little bit of a bounce and they all gave a pretty upbeat forecast the only one that wasn't upbeat was Google where the CFO Ruth poorat said that the
Outlook remains uncertain but all the other ones seem to indicate that things are going to get better so I think what's interesting about that is just the mismatch that we have between how well these companies did in this quarter versus how uncertain the rest of the economy is looking right now
and maybe the fed's behavior yeah so maybe this is the flip side which moth is saying is they're not growing very fast but they are profitable machines generating a lot of earnings and they seem to be pretty immune from what's happening in the economy right now or at least that's what they're saying now
you're right in a parallel track there was an interesting interview that Powell did so uh Jerome Powell gave an interview it was actually kind of like one of these hoax calls where a couple of people pretending to be zelinski engagement and interview oh my God that was crazy you want to explain that reference oh my God
they've done this a number of times where they've gotten you know major leaders I think they did this to macron some other people or they pretend to be zelinski and they do an interview it's like Ali G yeah but they played it straight I don't care that he was fooled into giving the interview it's like who
cares but some of the things he said were really interesting I mean number one Powell said that the economic outlook for the year was looking pretty uncertain and he said the most likely scenarios were either sub one percent growth so staying out of recession but just barely or he said
going into recession so he thought that was roughly about equally likely he admitted that we had the worst inflation of 40 years and that's why interest rates weren't necessary and he said that it was necessary to slow the economy in order to combat inflation and he then even went further and said that it was
necessary to cool off the labor market and even to cool off wages specifically because that's how you combat inflation that's the only thing we know how to do in a situation like this so I think this is certainly a political mistake for Powell to say that his objective here is to hurt the wages the American people
and to basically cause a recession but that is his view apparently and I think that we are headed for it seems like a recession I'm a little surprised that the earnings reports of these tech companies are so good because or at least their forecasts are so good well they can cut spending and we talked
about this last year when we were trying to reject what would happen I remember saying well I think jamath and I were talking about this and I said well they're saying hey earnings are going to go down and there's a PE and I said what if they just stop spending or they make a lot of cuts well here we are people
are just saying you know what we're going to cut our way to and do stock BuyBacks and that's another way of financial engineering to Route Around the FED right and to and to make the stock go up worked incredible for Facebook I mean my Lord they were at 91 to share and now they're over 200. right but just to bring it back to the
economy so look I think we agree that these tech companies seem to be pretty immune they've got a large cushion in terms of their ability to continue generating earnings because of all the bloat that actually gives them like a margin of error where they can just keep cutting to prop up earnings I'm a little surprised that
they think their revenue forecasts are going to be so positive because again they were guiding upwards generally so they seem to think they're not going to be impacted by the recession and maybe they won't be again I think what was interesting from pal is the way that he seemed to think that the only thing we know how to
do this is basically what he said the only thing we know how to do in this situation with inflation is to kill the economy is to slow the economy and specifically to kill jobs and wages and that was pretty remarkable to me because there are other things we could do such as okay well one thing is that you don't have to
print so much money cut spending austerity so yes our fiscal policy remains completely out of whack we're running two trillion dollar annual deficits right now pass covid so he could have said listen we could get off this Reckless fiscal policy and be more restrained but he didn't want to
go there the other thing he could have done was address the supply side one of the ways that you can reduce inflation it's not just to kill demand you could actually affect Supply chains so like cost of energy for example energy is a huge input into the economy and one of the things that happened at
the beginning of this Administration is they made it much harder to drill for oil and gas and I think Biden sort of reversed course on that at the State of the Union remember he had that line where he said we can't get off oil and gas for 10 years and the audience started laughing but at any
event the point is just that it's too little too late they could have done more on energy to keep costs low and then there's a whole bunch of other critical inputs into the economy besides labor and what you could do is I think you could go category by category and say how do we get the price of these key
inputs into our economy down how do we resolve supply chain bottlenecks how do we make it you know easier to get access to whatever the key commodity is and I think there's things they could do if they're just willing to work at it maybe this isn't the fed's job this is more the administration but what you could do
is say listen we're going to make it easier for people to produce and create Supply and if you have a higher supply of goods and services then you will start to bring inflation down because inflation is just the amount of money in the system divided by the amount of goods and services and when
the amount of goods and services hasn't gone up but the money supply has gone up tremendously you're gonna have inflation and that's why I think it's a little bit misplaced to be killing demand the way they're killing it is because fundamentally the problem here is they flooded the economy with money both
through government stimulus and through quantitative easing and then also they made it harder on the supply side to produce certainly with energy so it seems to me that the approach they're taking for us to get out of this it's like taking a meat cleaver to the economy or a sledgehammer really and it's the
most violent possible way that they could solve the problem they previously created of too much inflation any other thing obviously is jobs we're still sitting here with close to 10 million job openings and the thing I'm hearing from the streets is that unemployment hacking is become a high art and so labor force
participation remains low it's nowhere near the historic highs we have been very permissive during covet for good reasons to give people very extended benefits people have now learned is my understanding and this is a something that's happening on a regional level state by state level people are learning how to hack
unemployment and not going to work and people are just not taking the jobs that are open which are service industry jobs Americans don't want to work them we don't want to let people into the country we've got record low people coming into the country it seems to me that would be a much more
productive way to do this right yes I think it's an excellent point because exactly what you're doing there is addressing the supply side which is you're unlocking the supply of a keep input into the economy which is all this unused labor it's all these people aren't working you're right the labor
force participation rate is still much lower than it could be so if you get more people into the economy then that helps alleviate the cost of Labor it helps fill these jobs but it doesn't kill the economy so it would be a much more positive way to address this so I just think it showed a lack of creativity for him to
say that the only thing we can do in this situation is not just to raise rates you did say that but but to go further and cool off the job market increase unemployment and cool off wages I mean that's gonna be a very unpopular thing to say I think because what you're basically saying is you're going to hurt
the wages of the American people who wants that here's the chart for job openings we thought this would collapse it went down certainly as we you know I don't want to obsess over macro stuff but it's still way up there and so the fact that we can't get people to take these jobs I don't know chamoth what do
you think about the employment and participation situation and how that might unlock things I also wanted to know from YouTube off this concept of the FED is reacting to data just so slowly and then you have these companies that maybe are more Nimble and they have better data than the FED I think that
that's a truism and I don't think anything about that is going to change I mean I think we talked about how these folks calculate non-farm payrolls or how they calculate CPI it's incredibly outdated right it's people with clipboards walking around talking to people and checking boxes and filling out forms
can that change probably it could will it change it probably won't and so they're going to focus on the most simple but most powerful measure that they have which is controlling the money supply kind of what sax talked about so they're going to manipulate the money supply to either put more
liquidity in the system in which case markets go up and asset prices go up but then inflation goes up or constrained liquidity which then causes markets to go down asset prices to go down and inflation eventually to go down the thing that we're facing today when you look at this labor market chart is a
couple of things that I think we've talked about before and I just want to reiterate them which is you have to remember that we are in this new world order which is the ex-china World Order and in that there is no more unitary economy that can do things cheaper faster and better globally around the world
right so we're going to near shore or onshore all kinds of things that used to be done by the Chinese they'll sit in Mexico or they'll sit in Central America maybe in some cases they'll sit in Canada and all of that will feed into the United States the problem with all of that is that that will keep costs higher because
it'll be naturally more inefficient it will naturally take more money and that will naturally cause the prices of those things to be higher which means that terminal inflation I think is just roughly higher as a result I think that more power if you will goes to labor so in this constant tension that we have in an economy
between labor and capital the people that own the factories or the businesses and the people that run them and work inside of them we've been in this position where the pendulum has swung so far towards capitals the owners the shareholders that all this financial engineering has tremendous upside right
that's why companies engage in it but when you show that chart Jason what it means is it's just really hard to find people and so the only way you're going to get people off their butt to go into work to sit in a chair to do a job that you need them to do is to pay them more and in finding that wages will have
to go up the counterbalance of that is what AI will do which I think I have to say that is the key yeah which is massively deflationary so that is going to be the tension that we're in now for a really long time as we explore this I don't know if you guys saw today but Sequoia led a 20 million dollar round in this
thing called harvey.ai the legal uh yeah which is like a legal super wizard for law firms yeah we knew that was coming and my partners and I were debating it and what we thought of was well how much do you pay out of the 800 or thousand dollars an hour that you charge to harvey.i maybe you're willing to pay
five percent or ten percent but then the reality is that one of the most powerful things it does is it's able to go into Westlaw find all these cases and say yeah this is germane to the thing that you're working on right now that's a very useful thing but the N plus First Law Firm will also
use that tool and instead of charging 800 an hour they'll say well we'll charge 600 bucks an hour and we're still willing to give you five or ten percent so I just don't see a world where on the one hand physical labor will continue to be more expensive they'll demand more and more money to do the job that they're asked to do
and then knowledge work will become increasingly more deflationary because so much of it will be automated by AI that those folks will charge less and less and there's going to be attention there and I don't exactly know what's going to happen I did a couple of experiments uh this week I've been
rolling up my sleeves and playing with these tools it's pretty amazing and I've been trying to use them for actual tasks in our companies what have you learned what did you do and what have you learned so I got on the openai plugins Greg thank you I sent him my email and he got me on to that and
you can connect it to zapier so I have two projects I'm working on currently one of them I was since I'm raised so raising launch Run 4 and I'm actually going out to people not just taking inbound I was like hey can I get the names of all the major LPS and start doing some research there put in a table
stuff that sax did when he does blog posts but then I started connecting it with finding people's Twitter handles finding their LinkedIn profiles and then the next piece I'm working on is automatically following them dming them on Twitter let's say or following them on and doing an in message saying hey we
haven't met here's the deal memo for my next fund would love to you know get together this is sent from Jason's AI script I was gonna like actually tell them but here's my real email if after you read the summary of the next fund you want to meet and then I was I'm going to pair that and then this is a
piece I'm going to probably need a developer to do with our internal LP database to not email people who are already duplicates and then up inside with newsletters I have it building a database of every newsletter we've ever sent the writing style and that I'm having it go find in real time news stories that we should be including
in the newsletters which I think will make the writers right now a third more productive but these are things that would cost 40 50 bucks an hour 30 bucks an hour for you know college-educated Americans and Canadians and I have already figured out and I'm not a developer anymore I had to script
them and I'm actually thinking about learning to code again just so I can do this myself and so on Saturday I'm going to do a little coding with a friend of mine and get back up to speed on that I think about 30 percent of what knowledge workers do right now is possible so I put every single person at
both companies on chatgpt4 and the San uh the playground about 30 percent of what knowledge workers at both firms can do currently is doable if you can figure out and this stuff is not perfectly scripted yet so I've been doing some stuff in travel as well playing with the kayak interface Expedia interface Etc
to look at travel planning and it's pretty good as well so it's it it's this is the real deal folks I I think by the end of this year 30 of knowledge work could be done by this and then additionally on Monday I went back to work in person and I went to I hosted our accelerator in person and
then I hosted founder University in person in the city the city was absolutely dead but we had a hundred people fly in from around the world for our founding University and a lot of them were working on AI projects and what's very interesting is like there's this big debate going on Friedberg between
is this going to be built into chat gpt4 or Bard or you know Poe or whatever it is or should I even bother so should I bother building you know a verticalized app and it turns out like I think you should do the verticalized app and you're going to be able to put together multiple of these AIS that have different Specialties
um so I'm super stoked about it but I do think if you're not using this if you hear my voice right now and you're a white collar worker a knowledge worker and you're not using this this year and getting up to speed on it I think you'll be out of a job within the next two jeez wow I just don't think you'll
compete it would be like trying to compete without knowing how to use Microsoft Office 20 years ago right like could you work and not know email remember when we came into the workforce 30 years ago and some people knew office and email and web research and then other people didn't those other people retired they
were phased out if you didn't know how to use a computer and type and use an Excel spreadsheet or do a PowerPoint you were done I think there's two possible ways you can interpret what you're saying so in terms of the economic impact so one is that you could say well AI is going to do 30 of the knowledge
work therefore 30 of the knowledge workers are going to be put out of work I think that a different way to put it would be every knowledge worker can get 30 more work done correct so if that's the case then they're more productive and we're just talking about the problem of how do you increase real wages in the economy
without having inflation well the way to do that is for every worker to be more productive so if every worker is 30 more productive in theory their wages should be able to go up by up to 30 percent that's how you get wage growth now maybe there will be some companies that don't need all those employees because now
they're able to get you know whatever a third more done but there will be other companies who can hire them they can go off and do other jobs for other companies especially when you've got this backlog of like you said eight or ten million new you know jobs that are unfilled those jobs are all service though you know they're not you're
actually you're gonna have this big group of knowledge workers there's just nothing for them to do oh no I just don't I agree with you but I think there's going to be a group of knowledge workers who do not Embrace this and do not make the transition because it is it's going to require an upskilling like
I think you're actually going to need to know how to do some basic programming and coding to really take advantage of the at least like scripting levels up I don't know it's pretty easy to use I agree with you there have been writing blog posts but the date the example I gave of like taking the lp database
sorting it you know it's not quite sure it will be this is like a chatbot but it is like I think it takes like level two programming skills no it doesn't no you don't have to know how to program you just have to know how to prompt it in natural language it's the opposite of need to learn how to code
the thing about the thing that makes coding hard is that you have to learn the specific commands it's like its own language you have to learn a new language with this you don't in fact one of the cool things about some of these uh open AI apis is that you just tell it what you want it to do there's not even
like a scripting language a lot of it's in natural language and that makes it incredibly easy to use even for Developers so I don't think this is a hard technology to use I agree with you there may be people are resistant to it because there's always people who are resistant to change and new technology
and you're right if they don't adapt they're going to be dinosaurs but I don't think this is a hard technology to to rock how to use and get benefit from you might be right I mean I right now it's so new that the glue between systems is just not there yet and maybe you'll be able to talk to chat gpt4 and
it'll connect your database on notion it will take a type form and a survey monkey and put it all together and figure that all out for you in the game right now is still connecting all these things and that and that's what I'm talking about and like it that's kind of not there yet but in the auto GPT stuff
you need a developer right now but anyway I'm deep in it and I am more excited right now this feels to me like 2005 to 2012 period when you just saw Ajax and the web and speed just all coming together so quickly and the rapid iteration and is just unbelievable I I every day I find a new use for it I have
made my default web page opening like when I open a new page on my PC it just opens chatgpt4 now just so I'm forcing myself to use it for every possible task and the people who work for me some of them are doing it's most of them are not and I'm just trying to drag everybody along and then you have at the same time
that this um a remote work thing happening where salaries I'm finding are starting to normalize not across cities but across countries so you know hiring somebody in Canada Estonia Sao Paulo and then you add this AI to it the cost to do things is this is like I don't know I think everything's going to
cost about 10 all this knowledge work is going to be 10 as expensive to do I don't think it's 10 less chamoth or the you know I think it's like 90 percent 10 cents on the dollar I agree I agree and I it's not this is not a five-year 10-year prediction this is like five quarter ten by the way we
said that the first organizations to use this like the canary in the coal mine would be the Consulting organizations and today when Harvey got announced one of the things that that right on the heels of that pricewaterhousecoopers announced like a billion dollar investment into AI which makes sense
because as a Consulting organization full of lawyers and accountants and I.T folks those are the services jobs that you get tremendous Leverage if you were to use these tools free to bring any thoughts I don't know I mean I think we kind of beat this horse to death right we've talked about it for a couple of months and I think we just
keep repeating ourselves are you doing anything when you're first hand are you playing with it yourself yeah look tell us about that by the way one thing I will say we all talk about cost reduction and then oh you know knowledge work is dead and we're gonna save money and all this stuff
what what that is always the first reaction to any new point of Leverage realized from some novel technology the second is suddenly people start doing things that use that leverage to do things that they couldn't have done before so it's not just about dropping costs it's about enabling new things that does a hundred
times more or unimaginable things prior and I think the next phase of this AI shock wave that that kind of hit us and hit the world and you know kind of hit Enterprises is going to be the evolution of integrating those tools in a very unique way with other tools to drive very novel things forward to create new things new
projects new progress that was unfathomable before so it's not just about cost savings it's going to be about new stuff I shared a link on Twitter yesterday there's some guy I want to quote him correctly his name is McKay Wrigley so shout out to McKay on his Twitter page it says that he didn't know how to code
in 2019 he learned how to code for the first time he taught himself and he put together an object recognition tool with chat GPT I saw this video it's crazy with his webcam and basically he holds up like a Diet Coke and he's like you know tell me how many calories what is this and how
many calories are in it and it's like oh there's no calories in it it's a Diet Coke and he does this three different times with three different objects and he hacked this thing together in a couple of hours that is a product that was like theoretically unfeasible or you know kind of very very difficult to kind
of see how you would put that piece together quickly and easily with one person in a room in a few hours a year ago and here you see a demo of of this person who didn't know how to code not too long ago putting it together and creating this product that would have been such a profound startup imagine if
you went to VCS 18 months ago and were like look I've got this thing and I hold stuff up in front of it it tells me all about it and it talks to me and I literally use my voice to talk to it and he basically strung together a text-to-speech chat GPT an object recognition tool all of this stuff completely open source and a a plug-in
that does web browsing and the whole thing is basically like your own interactive visual robot it's it's an incredible product demo and I thought it was so amazing and profound I'm sure it's a prototype and it's kind of janky but it was done in a few hours on almost a no code basis it's incredible so what's
going to come from that is a whole set of new products and ideas and things that we are certainly not thinking about today but in six months is going to become almost Mainstay and many new categories of products many new Industries many new businesses are going to emerge that we're not even thinking
about so the Luddite argument of oh this is going to destroy jobs and destroy the economy and drop costs by 90 lawyers are going to get cheaper et cetera et cetera I think that doesn't even matter it's the tip of the iceberg what's more exciting is all the new evolutionary stuff that's going to hit the market
that's really going to transform the things that we can do and that we didn't realize we could do there's gonna be incredible analogy for this because what you're really talking about is more people being able to use tools and be creators and what happened in the 80 is the 90s when the NBA started playing
exhibition games around the world was more people around the world started playing basketball and then you started seeing people like Luca or before him Yao Ming Mutombo you start to have people from around the world who had never been exposed to basketball just incredible porzingis incredible talents
emerged because you just had more people playing with the basketball I think you're going to have more people playing with code and Building Products so you're going to have incredible amounts of creativity from people who maybe you didn't expect because they didn't go to school for coding or have that opportunity hey um
I mentioned I was in fidai and I was at fenwick's office and then Wilson cincini's offices to law firms being the law firms in the financial district in the Embarcadero it was an absolute ghost town and when I say ghost town I mean like serious ghost town like weird like this is uh still like being
in some dystopian science fiction they were the last man on Earth and then we saw in the group chat today 350 California Street was worth 300 million dollars four years old it's a 20 two-story glass and Stone Tower it's a picture of it it's going up for sale and they believe according to the Wall Street Journal
that bids will come in at 60 million dollars and 80 percent Decline and we talked about this commercial real estate uh would have this moment a lot of the banks uh the smaller Regional Banks own this debt Saks what do you think is going to happen here who is the person who would buy an office tower
in downtown even at an 80 discount knowing that you have to pay all those carrying costs and there's so much fake in office space and it's only increasing right what's your who buys this it's called land banking okay explain so in other words okay what I mean is you're right there's 30 vacancy
in San Francisco right now maybe going up even more in the next few years as Lisa's role and people take less space you may have a countervailing effect in terms of new companies moving back because of AI or expanding so it's possible you start to see some growth in the office market in San Francisco but
the bottom line is 30 plus vacancy is going to take years and years of growth in order to absorb so you're right this building they can slash it to rent but they still probably can't fill it I mean there's just no there's just no demand so you're going to be sitting on that property for five years ten years before
the market comes back the way that you need it to but there's no value right oh it's going to trade way below its replacement cost right if you were to build that building today it would cost you many times what they're going to pay for it the problem is you can't finance that purchase with debt because if
Billy's not going to generate enough Revenue so that's what I mean by land banking it's going to have to be an equity investor who's willing to think long term and say I'm going to buy this at a super distressed price and I'm just going to sit there and hold it and wait carry it like you said bury the carrying
costs until the market comes back but Jay Cal I want to say something I think it's a great analogy because public growth stocks have declined 70 plus percent right since the uh the market started to decline and we've talked a lot about the statistic that I've shared a bunch publicly on how 70 percent of publicly
traded companies that have gone public since 2020 are trading below their total cash invested since since founding which should translate to an estimate that call it somewhere on the order of 70 of private companies are probably worth less than their preference stack and so they're not worthless companies
they just have a capital structure that is upside down those companies are making products for customers those products those customers are paying money for those products there's value there there's real value there the value's just been reset and so it's interesting it's not just the asset
class of growth stocks and the asset class of private companies or private Tech it's also you know in commercial real estate we we try and treat each of these as if they were in isolation but the problem is many of these assets were funded with some degree of Leverage preferred stock is leveraged and
you know it is a form of death because it has a preference over the shareholders there the common shareholders the equity holders and the same is true with this commercial real estate market that there was a certain amount of debt so the availability of low-cost Capital um securitized against some asset in the
form of debt or in the form of preferred stock in a private company has the same effect which it allowed the valuations to balloon on the equity and now that the market has re-rationalized the prices down 70 plus percent across all three of these connected but you know somewhat disparate asset classes you're
kind of having this big reset moment and funny enough the other statistic is the cell phone traffic down 70 in downtown SF right so it's funny all four of these numbers are pretty much on track yeah there's this chart that's crazy it's literally like you have some cities that have more cell phone traffic than
they did last year or a couple years ago and this is downtown by the way yeah and Sam I mean The Wider Bay Area is is I don't say booming but it's vibrant yeah I said on last week's show I was looking for a place to host the accelerator in San Mateo area I got dozens of people contacting me hundreds of locations and
offers at 25 of what their carrying cost is or like not the carrying costs the the rent was and people offering the major companies offering me free space just because they would like to have Founders hanging around and there was one project that I really liked the person was like I'll give it to you for
whatever just because I want to get more people to downtown San Mateo uh so that that does sort of prove the point that there is a what I and I saw this in New York City during the the 90s when things were so cheap people just got creative with space it inspired people to say I'm going to create an art gallery I'm going
to create a performance space and I don't know when that happens in San Francisco with these spaces but feels like it's going to be a while I don't know what you when do you think there would be demand for this SpaceX if you had to pick a year over and give us an over under I mean
five years plus I mean just to give you some numbers I think a healthy vacancy rate and a office Market is five to ten percent a high vacancy rate in a city was considered like 15 like you wouldn't want to be an office investor in a market that have 15 vacancy five to ten percent was sort of the normal range if
you were under five percent it was a super hot market and then 10 to 15 was sort of a not great Market from an investor standpoint so they're at 30 plus and like I said it could get worse before it gets better because it's Lisa's role people are going to shed more space that that they might not
already be subleasing so the real number might be like 40 percent I think it's like yeah it doesn't seem like a decade it's a decade assuming that San Francisco gets his house in order and companies come back speaking of that new companies are created and they don't completely wreck it it's not
clear to me that like things will go in the right direction I mean speaking of that do we want to bring up this horrific uh bear spray attack now you want to cue that up sax I mean we're like in full-on Gotham City now now we have vigilantes there was a story of a fire commissioner named uh don carmignani who was beaten
with a metal pipe by a gang of homeless addicts who were encamped in front of his mother's house and apparently they were harassing her and they were doing drugs smoking drugs or whatever right in front of not not pot it was like professional whatever fentanyl or meth or crack something like a hard drug and
um so what we know is he went down there had words with them Boop you know and they bashed them upside the head with a pipe and uh now it turns out that he was accused by the defendant's lawyer the one who assaulted him so we don't really know what's true here of using bear spray on them first so the da dropped charges the lawyer for
the defendant in that case is saying that he apparently was the perpetrator of these bear spray attacks on on homeless people going back a number of years I guess there's a like you said pretty gnarly video of of yeah but obviously the D.A thought something was kind of hinky because they dropped
charges against the the guy who assaulted him we shouldn't the person who sprays the bear spray and the person who beat somebody with a pipe shouldn't both people yeah yeah yeah of course listen there's video of somebody bear spraying homeless people and that's clearly wrong however that
was from a couple years ago the one that was released is from 2021 we have video from the night that carbignani was assaulted that they were chasing him down they're chasing him down yes with the metal pipe and even even if they were acting in self-defense you can't go chasing the guy dude that's not self-defense more
damage on exactly that's Vengeance that's not self-defense yes so they took it out of that zone of self-defense and they were chasing after him and if you saw what he looked like after the attack but they were using deadly force he could have been killed and you know if Donna gotten killed by the metal pipe I
don't think it'd be a defense that he bear sprayed them first it would have been an excessive use of force so yeah but in any event I mean where the D.A ended up on this it was just a drop charges from that night but you know that they're going to drop those charges I think that that's going
to be untenable you know they already dropped the charges they have to I mean justice has to be blind correct I mean you're you're you're a trained lawyer here we have to apply the law equally to the sadistic insane person who wait a second they arrested the guy who hosed the person down didn't they arrest them as well I
remember seeing a perp walk we talked about that on the future anyway it's Gotham City folks this has gone to Pure yeah this proves anything I mean again what they're trying to say now is that because of of the actions that Don took that San Francisco is safe and there's nothing to worry about and these addicts
people who are encamped on the sidewalks doing drugs doing hard drugs there's nothing to worry about because somehow they were provoked by karmagnani and I just think I agree with you that this is part of an overall pattern of chaos and lawlessness in the city it is like Gotham City so
you know it doesn't make me feel a lot better about what's happening on the streets it's nuts Shabbat you wanted to add something I want Freebird too oh Riff on lab meat uh yes well there was actually a story about this I guess there's two types of lab there's two types of mock Meats I've Had The Impossible Burger
yeah I've never craved an impossible Burger there's so many great Burgers you can get out there Shake Shack Five Guys in and out why would I go to get this impossible Burger unless I was doing it like vegan stuff but then there was also supposed to be 3D printed meets and this stuff seems to be taking forever where
is this at because there was a story in the Wall Street Journal about how poorly this is apparently going so there's three categories of these alternative proteins to traditional animal protein the first is these call it alternative proteins where you use things like soy protein or pea protein Beyond Burger is a good
example they have a pea protein based burger and so that category was kind of hot for a minute where everyone was like oh it's an eco-conscious decision people will make the shift and you know beyond Mead had this massive IPO and the stock went crazy and I someone said it was the biggest return
ever for Kleiner Perkins but it really was just taking plant protein processing it and trying to make it sort of mimic the texture and flavor and taste of animal protein and it's more expensive so I've generally been fairly negative on whether that really moves the needle right the the needle for me is can you
replace animal proteins traditionally and stop using all this land and putting all this carbon into the atmosphere and all this water and all these resources that we use to make all these animal proteins which I think is both kind of ethically incorrect but also extraordinarily environmentally costly
sorry can I ask a question qualifying question do you think it's also important for it to not just replace natural products despite all of those externalities you talked about with artificial products with chemicals and sugar so first of all everything is a chemical so that the you know I think the the categorization of you know all
chemicals are bad and silly because everything is made of chemicals I think it's a question of are there bad things that are being put in there that's not good for your health to make it flavorful or whatever and that that may or may not be the case it's really product dependent I don't think it's a good generalization
but do you so you think when I eat a salad I'm just eating chemicals it is chemicals yeah got it but coffee ones right healthy chemicals there's good in there or bad yeah for sure and then bad chemicals are in like sugary cereal yeah like refined sugar is bad for sure right that's a bad chemical and
no I'm just I just want to understand how you just viewed as a spectrum of chemicals some good some bad yeah there's things that are good for you there's good fats there's bad fats there's there's you know and even in the category of sugar some people say all sugars are bad some people say some
sugars are better than were others as measured by the glycemic index all you know there's a lot of ways to kind of look at this stuff is beyond meat and these P ones uh they're all processed highly processed they got a lot of salt they got a lot of fat right they're they're not good for you so the way that
Beyond and impossible and others have tried to make it taste good for people is they've added a lot of you know saturated fats which is a way to drive the mouth feel and make it taste good but then a lot of doctors at the American Heart Association came out and said that those fats are really bad for
your heart and you should meet them and also there's been a general kind of consumer sentiment shift so a couple years ago these were the hottest products it was like all the food ingredient companies were shifting to plant-based proteins and they were building plant-based protein business categories and it was this big hot thing
and then they came out and they're like wait a second this isn't going as we thought what happens is people try them out and they're like yeah that's a cool thing I want to do good for the planet but would I rather pay five bucks for a do good for the Planet Burger that kind of doesn't taste that good or would I
rather pay three bucks for a burger that tastes really good and what happens is B B I choose option b yeah and so do most people right and so almost all people and that's the point of view I've always shared I said it's just it's not going to win the hearts and minds of the world
unless it's cheaper and it tastes better and healthier and it's identical yeah and doesn't damage your health doesn't make you worse exactly so the more challenging technical solution is the other two categories the second category is can you synthesize animal proteins using recombinant DNA so this is where
you take the DNA that codes for the protein whether it's the milk protein or the egg protein or the cheese protein and you put it in a bacterial cell or a yeast cell that are used to ferment that we use to make wine that we use to make beer and they eat sugar and then they spit out a product and in the case of
wine and beer they eat sugar from grapes or for from malt or whatever and they spit out alcohol ethanol and Genentech was the first company to really Pioneer recombinant DNA at a mass scale they basically use recombinant DNA to make insulin so they took the DNA from humans that that codes for insulin the gene for
insulin they put in E coli bacteria and then they put the E coli bacteria in a big tank and the E coli start to duplicate and they make all this insulin and that's how we make all the world's insulin today it's using that biomanufacturing process and it's how we make all of biologic drugs all antibody
drugs are made this way it's a 300 billion year Market just in biologic drugs so when crispr kind of came about in 2012 suddenly the toolkit to go in and do a much better job and a much cheaper job of editing the genomes of those little microbes to make them more efficient at making these proteins
became standard and everyone said let's go use this new category of what's being called synthetic biology or synbio to make all these animal proteins that we use animals to get today so can I just ask a question is the idea that if you use recombinant DNA in this process it would taste better and be healthier in
all this chemically identical so it's the exact same protein as you can get and just I understand it'd be the exact same under a microscope or whatever but would it taste the same tastes exact same totally exact same so that's the whole point do we know that or was that that was the guess no we know that it's
the same protein shamat so whether you get the protein from the cow or you get the protein from the yeast cell so what's the issue it's too expensive to do this process because so the key metric in that second category is productivity grams per liter per day how well can you get that little
microorganism to make that protein the more protein it makes per day the cheaper the price per protein and we're still a far ways off from getting this to be price competitive so that's a a challenged category right now there's a lot of I'm invested in a couple of companies in this space where we're
trying to make it faster and cheaper to do that strain engineering to edit the genome up front and make them make those little cells more productive to bring the price per gram down and hopefully make it compete ultimately with the traditional market for eggs cheese milk Etc but what is the constraint is it an
energy constraint or is it an actual biological incapability no so the great thing is our first principles basis the biophysics indicates that this should make proteins cheaper and that is good for the planet it's good for human health it's good for everything we should be able to make eggs cheese milk
all this stuff exactly the same as what you get from an animal without the animal because the biophysics of a single cell making it is better than the biophysics of a whole animal think about a chicken it grows feathers it bucks it walks around it has energy it makes heat so the chicken as a system is not that
energy efficient but a little cell that just eats sugar and it's programmed to do one thing and one thing only eat sugar make protein each sugar make protein and spit as much of it out you Theory officially can make it way more efficient exactly now we're making great progress but we're not there yet we're
not a commodity price point why I'm trying to ask why where's the failure Point there's two failure points sorry I should I should say there's three the first is strain engineering which is you want to shuffle all the other genes in the organism to stop doing things like growing a bigger cell wall or you know
taking your time to duplicate you want to change the Genome of the cell to get it to do stuff faster the second stage is process engineering when you put that cell in a tank you're changing the sugar the methanol the CO2 the oxygen the pH everything about that tank and the condition of the tank has to be adjusted
so there's about 60 variables and those 60 variables all need to be tuned and tweaked before you optimize the performance of production the third category is the hardest which is scale Manufacturing there's about a hundred million liters of biomanufacturing capacity on Earth today 95 million liters it's owned and
operated by companies that use and when I say buy a manufacturing capacity I'm talking about big stainless steel tanks you pour water you pour sugar you pour your cells in they make hobbies and they make your stuff of that 100 million liters 95 million is owned and operated by companies 5 million is available for
rent of that 5 million liters 4 million is rented for its entire lifespan by some company usually a biologic Drug Company because very little of this is being done in food today so there's only a million liters left to rent and there's 200 syn bio startups trying to make animal proteins and they've all
competed for this this capacity so the capacity cost has gone up by about fourfold but it sounds like the the latter two you can overcome with capital but the first one is really bounded by science it's more engineering because we're back is kind of What's called the tighter curve which is grams per liter
and the more experiment you do the higher that number goes and so if you can increase your experimental rate and the few the few grams that it does produce today when when a normal person tastes it they're like Yep this tastes the same as a a wagyu rib eye no so remember I'm talking about proteins
right now I'm not talking about cellular meat I want to talk about cellular meat last which is the hardest category which is what you're talking about I'm talking about taking that protein and then using it to make a product like a like a cheese or you know using it as an egg replacer that kind of stuff it's the
same protein as what you would get from eggs or milk or what have you this all just sounds so hard well it's a big problem and it's a lot of money so is that a problem eggs alone or 200 billion dollars a year I mean the methane released from cows is one of the largest contributors to global warming it's a
it's a real problem also we're going to need to solve this Jamaica there's a lot of resources we're going to colonize Uranus we're going to need to get food there I just asked the question like if you if you go after the high emission categories first do you give yourself room to leave these things because
you're doing so much already just a question animal agriculture emissions are one of the largest and unfortunately one of the biggest drivers because it's people's GDP per capita increments the first thing they spend money on is probably no I get it I'm saying something different which is if
we just invented better heat pumps you'd have industrial Heating and Cooling which represents like almost a third of all greenhouse gas emissions you get that off and you give yourself a lot of time and space and room and maybe you let the cows Roam and Belch and burp because the tape the meat just tastes
better and you don't have to spend a bunch of time and effort I don't think it's an ore I think it's an antimoff I think we should be doing all these things and I think that I I'm a big believer as you guys know in markets so I'm not a believer in transition for the sake of you know Carbon saving because
people aren't going to pay a premium as we've seen with the kind of alternative Meat Market fifteen dollars people want some cheaper hamburgers that's one cheaper cheaper cheaper so if you can make proteins cheaper it's also a great Roi you can make money doing this and the market will buy it because it's
cheaper protein sorry I just want to I just want to hit on this because we keep sidetracked a little bit the third category is the one that the article was about which is cellular meat so cellular meat is where you're trying to make your wagyu or your shrimp or your fish you're trying to make cells not just proteins
but entire cells and those cells stick together and they look and cook and feel and taste like cellular meat like like muscle like what you eat when you eat fish or beef or whatever and the problem there is you're trying to take a cell and cells normally grow on you know bones and on tissue and so
there's scaffolding and all these systems that hold all the cells together and so to get cells to grow in a tank and stick together and replicate without other cells signaling them turns out to be really expensive there was an executive at Merck I spoke to a few months ago and he said we're going to
sell fetal bovine serum which is basically like this liquid that they get from the fetuses of cows and this is how cellular meat started they took a cell from a cow and they put it in a tank with fetal bovine serum and the cell started to replicate and duplicate and then they could take those cells and try
and turn them into a beef into a burger and sell it or try it that was the million dollar burger if you remember that a couple years ago and Fetal bovine serum Market has gone through the roof because so many companies are trying to make cellular meat and the Merc exact was like we're going to sell a billion
dollars of fetal bovine serum and then we're going to sell zero because No One's Gonna Be able to make money doing this it's just impossible you're not gonna sell 500 Burgers so the technical challenge there is do you have to edit the cells to get them to duplicate you have to get them to grow in suspension
meaning in a tank instead of growing on Bones and growing next to each other and Scaffolding and then you have to change the feedstock so that you're creating all these other proteins and signaling factors and hormones that you pour into the tank that trigger those cells to grow is there any chance that after all
this it's it actually just tastes slightly different or better it may yeah it may but likely not I mean let's be honest these are you're taking a cow cell or a salmon cell now the reason I say this is that I don't know if you I mean you don't eat meat so maybe you don't know this but depending on where
the water that they drink the actual grass that they eat the meat does taste different and that's part of the whether the cow is massage I mean look at the acorn fed cows the beef that we used to have at poker before austerity measures life was so good in 2021 well that's that no we can't get it anymore yeah I know we're
on a budget I get it no not us we can't get it anymore because they sell it through one channel um but yeah like it's so good yeah the variation you're talking about is obviously at an Echelon and a class of eating chamoth it's probably not Mainstay like you know the thirty thousand dollar a year McDonald's burger
and chicken nugget eater is probably happy to take no I disagree with you chicken nugget that tastes I disagree with you because if you go into Whole Foods and you actually buy like a USDA top sirloin there's a certain taste that it has that things that are not USDA don't have so even even at like the most
basic layer of the food pyramid you can differentiate on taste based on the same this is why I'm saying I think it's just a very complicated long drawn-out process and I just wonder if the people that are in these businesses if they actually love food or not I understand why they love the science I
get it and why they would love to save the planet I get that too but unless some of these people are are also food lovers they're gonna miss I think the thing where it all dies anyways I just want to restate again for the final time these are these are identical cells and identical proteins
to what you're getting from the animal so they are not like what we talked about in that first category where you're trying to get other stuff to sort of taste like meat you're literally trying to create the meat and create the protein using these systems I'm just trying to tell you that salmon two pieces of salmon can taste totally
different depending on where it swam right I and I guess what I could say is the same protein yeah you could probably adjust the conditions in the tank if needed to change the the characteristic this is my point like you don't even know where to start how is it the [ __ ] kelp in the Atlantic Ocean like
what are you changing look I don't know what kelp effects on the salmon I don't know if salmon but this is my point Nobody Does the Atlantic Ocean this is why we pay so much for the acorn fed beef I get it but most beef is not uh kelp from the Atlantic Ocean fed salmon it's animals grown in very large
feedlots fed corn and water that's it let me just say that again 90 95 of animal protein consumed is cows pigs and chickens grown in feedlots fed corn and soybeans and water and that's it right but if you if you go to different countries and taste the meat that's fed in that exact same way it tastes
different so for example if you go to Argentina I appreciate what you're saying but the point I'm trying to imagine you can recreate whatever the system is that you're talking about so I want to just get back to the unit economics the cost per kilogram or the cost per gram of the protein we are
still many orders of magnitude away on cellular meat so the problems you're laying out are really down the road problems of optimization right now we've got more fundamental problems on how do you actually get this stuff to be cost competitive now fortunately the tools of crispr and since crispr cast 9 came out
10 years ago there are now hundreds of variants that are open source IP free royalty free and used very broadly and generally and DNA sequencing costs continue to decline those are the two basic tools that are being used by biochemists and Engineers to do rapid evolutionary iteration needed to produce
the recombinant production of proteins to produce the new cells to produce the feedstock for those tanks and there's a cost curve that we're trying to get over it's not happening overnight hundreds of millions of dollars and in several cases billions of dollars have gone into these systems and it's very likely that these
companies may need several more years and several billion dollars we are going to get there the technology is progressing the rate of progress is a little slower and it's a little more challenged I think than the first round of investors had hoped but I do think that scientifically in first principles
it is absolutely feasible it's a function of engineering our way there to giving to moth and everyone else that eats burgers and chicken nuggets everything that they want hopefully at a lower price if you put it on the curve of uh self-driving cars you know we have Crews doing some automated taxis in like
a very constrained area in San Francisco but we don't have it everywhere where do you put this on the curve it's a great question so so what's happened by the way as we've gotten down the cost curve we are unlocking new markets so new products are being produced existing proteins that are come from animals
there's a good example of a product called pepsin it's uh it's extracted from pigs today it's very expensive similar to how we used to make insulin and we're replacing the sourcing of that product we replaced insulin which we used to get from pigsplains we now make it recombinantly we're now replacing pepsin we're replacing the the rennet
that's used to make cheese so as we move down the cost curve these Hive what are called high value proteins are the first to fall those markets collapse because we now make them recombinantly they were sorry they collapse in price because they're now cheaper using recombinant systems instead of taking
them from animals and eventually we'll get to that cost curve where they're ubiquitous for all proteins or for all types of cells in the meantime they're pretty sizable markets to go after these are multi-billion dollar markets that are getting knocked down we don't talk about it every day it doesn't show up in
the news but it's really profound and interesting to see that this technology is working it's overturning multi-billion dollar markets it's making progress and you know hopefully it'll it'll get to the point that you know everything from the chicken nugget to the kelp fed salmon can have you guys
tried a Beyond Burger or an impossible Burger I've had it I've tried them a long time ago but I've not tried them recently they're like it's like eating something mushy that's 60 percent of average hamburger it's not worth paying double for certainly for somebody who's a hamburger eater so while we were talking by the way
Amazon's results came out they crushed it earnings per share of 31 cents versus 11. and uh stock is about 10 10 off hours and it was up four percent today for The Insider Traders exactly how do you feel about your recession prediction I'm sticking by it I think we're still going to have a recession but it is an
interesting Paradox here so I think there's only a couple possibilities either Tech is sort of immune or they forecast down so much they were so conservative in their forecast thinking we're going to be in a recession that it was easy to beat or look I could be wrong about the recession but Powell is saying it
and pal is saying if it's not a recession it's gonna be less than one percent growth it's gonna be a thousand year to recession so it's not credible so I'm not revising my forecast well I I think pal is credible when he's giving us bad news because their incentive is always to fluff it up and
make it sound better than it is so when he's telling you things look bad maybe they're looking really bad I don't know man but look it's A Tale of Two Cities right now I mean the big tech companies seem to be doing really well so it's it's definitely a paradox yeah all right everybody well the whole
RFK thing okay that's a good topic yeah great topic go ahead I think we should tell people like what he's about where are all ears I think he gave a terrific announcement speech okay and just give you some background for the younger viewers who may not know so Robert F Kennedy his father ran for
the Democratic nomination in 1968 after his brother John F Kennedy had been president as assassinated as we know in the early 1960s what happened is at this time before the 1968 election Lyndon B Johnson was the incumbent Democratic president and everyone thought that he'd be the party's nominee and he was going
to get reelected and he was brought down by an extremely unpopular War the Vietnam War and it was RFK Jr's father who was a great critic of the Vietnam War and he ran for the Democratic nomination and I think that he very likely would have gotten it on the night that he won the California primary he
was assassinated by Sirhan Sir Henry yeah if you go back and look at the things that he was saying in that campaign he really was saying a lot of beautiful things that are in his son's add that I think would be worth playing here but I I think you have maybe the setup for a similar situation here you've got an incumbent Democratic
president who is sort of not that popular he's sort of old and out of it and incoherent he's presiding over a war that is rapidly becoming a debacle you don't hear so much about the spring counter offensive anymore these new Pentagon papers that were leaks show that the Ukrainian casualties are at
least five times greater than have been publicly admitting it looks like Russia is certainly not losing the war the way they used to be they've captured 90 of Bak mud which has been the most violent bloody Battle of the war and Biden at this point has no strategy to bring that to an end in fact he's rejected multiple
attempts at a peace deal and so now it looks like it's the Chinese who are in the driver's seat potentially putting together some sort of diplomatic settlement so I think listen if the economy ends up going into recession and this war ends up becoming the Fiasco that's increasingly looking like you
could have a setup like 1968 where people are wondering why the hell is this guy our nominee and let me tell you RFK Juniors already pulling at 19 which I think is pretty good considering he just came out of the gate and people don't even know the substance of his campaign yet Marion Williamson's at nine
percent so if she dropped out you'd be at 28 for the alternative and I think he could go up from here and I think if you if you watch the speech he gave I thought there was a lot of really beautiful sentiments in there it's very good he said that Biden has made Ukraine a pawn and a geopolitical battle that
has put the flower of Ukraine's youth into an avatar of death in order to exhaust Russia he channeled America's anti-war Traditions he quoted John Quincy Adams that America should not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy he quoted Martin Luther King Jr there's a direct link between poverty and
violence and oppression at home and War abroad he talked about the role of the CIA during his uncle's Administration where he said that John F Kennedy eventually realized that the purpose the CIA had become to create a steady pipeline of Wars to feed the military-industrial complex and he
talks about how JFK came to distrust the CIA and realized that it was lying to him and the biggest Applause of his speech was when he quoted JFK approvingly saying that he wanted to take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and Scattered to the winds and this very same week that he gave the speech we found out that five
former CIA directors have participated in a giant hoax on the American people by claiming that this Hunter Biden's story was Russian disinformation they knew it was not they knew it was not the information on the hard drive was real it showed that Hunter Biden received multi-million dollar payments from
foreign governments including China and Ukraine okay and regardless of what you think of that story it should not have been suppressed by social media and it certainly should not have been suppressed in a psyop by 51 former intelligence officials including five former directors of the CIA and if
that's the way they're going to behave if they're going to meddle in American politics that way I think we do need to start over we do need to ask what's going on with the security state they're not supposed to be meddling in American politics that way so I think if this is the way they're going to act I say shatter away scatter
that thing into a thousand pieces hey it's Catholic I'll vote for him and he's called out the insanity of covid lockdowns and man that's the thing that he's I guess that's the big controversy is he's anti he's an anti-vaxxer I guess that's the one thing they're trying to position him as and he
does conspiracy theories so so listen if you go back and look at his record he was an environmental activist for most of his people here he did the worship Project New York where they basically bought the land along the Hudson I remember I was at some events for it they wanted to clean the Hudson up and
they just bought the land and didn't people donated the land and they bought it they raised money and uh the Hudson today has like you know it's it's flourishing amazingly and he's directly responsible for that he was a big critic of the way that corporate greed could lead certain big companies to engage in environmental
pollution and at certain point he realized that big Pharma had a similar incentive now I don't know if he was right about those vaccines but I do know that he's right in the case of covid they had an incentive to push this dubious RNA shot on us so they would get boosted a zillion times and he's right about
that he was right about the fact that this should never have been mandated we should not have the lockdowns and you know what in his nomination speech or his declaration the word vaccine was only mentioned once so this is not what his campaign is about I look forward to having him on yeah and to be honest I mean look at all
the other things that were deemed to be conspiracy theories that ended up being true oh yeah Monster not that you go either way or it could be embarrassing let me ask you this ax if it was him versus Trump who do you vote for well I'm gonna I'm gonna Reserve okay versus Trump sex I'm not going to take a
position on the General yet but but in in the Democratic primary I'm definitely endorsing RFK Jr in the narcotic primary all right everybody uh to all the amazing people who got together for the episode unbelievable over 40 or 50 of them Ray great job shout out to Ray shout out to Ray I dialed into a bunch of them in I
think oh that's great Europe and I don't know all over the place no one got robbed or mugged or bearish but hopefully I don't know if they did any in San Francisco there's no bear spray incense so that's good all right four of the Sultan of science the dictator himself and the mouth feel
and Rain Man I am the world's greatest moderator we'll see you next time everybody love you boys let your winners ride Rain Man Davidson we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music] it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music] where did you get Mercies [Music]