E98: Big tech starts making cuts, Fed incompetency, global debt, Russia/Ukraine & more

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hey everybody Welcome to episode 98 of the all in podcast with us again the Sultan of science the queen of quinoa looks like he brought a trucker hat what what are you getting jealous of the Montclair hat or are you just not bathing anymore I haven't had a haircut in like six weeks I'm getting my hair

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cut this afternoon it's not gonna make a difference I think what Friedberg is trying to tell us is that he is the Zodiac Killer it's long been known all right there he is the unibar uh all right uh and Montclair sax is here with his 400 Montclair hat and of course the dictator himself I asked Ron I asked Ron to cut my hair so

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that the white patch is more prominent I think he did a good job do you add the white patch with coloring or is it uh no it's natural it's just there it's just there make it look so odd if you were doing it on purpose it's super random I like the way it looks I like the way it looks Jay Leno had a look like that I'm

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about to go by the way you know this in the fall it truffle season I like to grow it so that it's more wavy white for white truffle season got it I needed to have a reset cut so then we could grow it wavy for the fall for truffle season listen sir moth the only thing less relevant to

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us than your cashmere sweaters is your haircut [Music] [Music] I believe all right second now it's the hiring freeze and a reorg at meta he also said meta will reduce head count for the first time in its history medicine count in 2023 will be smaller than it was this year he called it the end of an era of rapid growth this on

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top of uh Apple reporting and apple got walloped in the market for the first time in forever uh Apple pullback iPhone production for the 14 after slower that anticipated demand as I mentioned on previous episodes they've kind of done a gentleman's layoff similar to I think meta in that Apple

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said you have to be back in the office three days a week a bunch of people quit so uh you don't have to pay them I guess huge packages when they quit that way Google CEO Sundar pichai also called out employees in July as you guys all read and he wrote there are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not

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where it needs to be for the head count we have Google of course 174 000 employees so I guess the question I have for you is are these the last Towers to fall chamoth in this uh pullback that we've seen these are companies that don't need to do the layoffs they have tons of cash so they're obviously doing that to maintain

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earnings uh one would and to maybe send a signal to employees that they need to work harder what's your read on these this past week's shoes to drop well it definitely is the end of an era I think it is sort of like the the end of this phase of big Tech where you had this you know unfettered growth where these

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business models were largely unassailable and they you know we're really just fighting to grow into their valuation and just generate more Revenue to justify where they um where they traded at and now it's this next phase where they have to operate more like a cash cow business and so you know it's an

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acknowledgment that the growth is tapering it's an acknowledgment that they're going to trade on a pretty tight band in terms of multiple which means that they have to manage expenses much more tightly which means that they can't have a really broad-based surface area in which to operate an

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experiment you have to keep the experiments small you have to manage your expenses you can't have employees basically you know run over the place management has to have a firm hand in in dictating strategy and what people work on so I think all of that signals that I actually Jason I don't think this is the

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end I actually think it's the beginning because these companies Apple Facebook Google maybe a little bit Microsoft are the most sensitive to valuation because they are the most widely held right these are the these are the you know the equivalent of U.S treasuries in the equity markets the safest most

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predictable Safe Haven in times of stress if you want to own big chunky cash flow generating businesses that you know are relatively unassailable you couldn't pick four better businesses than those and so the fact that they see enough in the Horizon to say that we need to batten down the hatches should be a warning to everybody else

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uh Freeburg is it as simple as this that the they're moving from Top Line growth to bottom line and they're going to need to look at the expenses what's your read on this for Silicon Valley well I just want to zoom out for a second because I remember I started working in Silicon Valley in 2001

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you guys are a little older than me I think but like we were right at the kind of year one of the.com implosion and all the Fallout that happened from all the funding that happened from 97 to 99 and 2000. and so from 01 to O3 it was super like deflationary everyone was cutting costs and all the money that had been raised

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was kind of being pissed away or companies were liquidating and you know so on and then starting in 2004 which is actually when I joined Google but there was also this big movement starting 0304 of like what people called Web 2 then kind of new business models and new businesses started to emerge that seemed

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to have real traction and real legs and it was a different story and a much more rational story than what you saw leading up to kind of 2000 2001. and it was around that time when Google started offering these crazy benefits right it was like there's a gym and free food and all these amazing workplace and

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suddenly everyone had to do that to keep up right Facebook obviously mimicked it all the other big companies mimicked it and then it became Mainstay and they also raised compensation in the valley significantly because Google had really cracked a nut on how to extract value from the internet and it really changed

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everything in Silicon Valley and changed everything in Tech because suddenly every tech company whether you were Enterprise software or Hardware or an internet eCommerce site to be competitive and hire great talent you have to have the same sort of environment High wages great salaries really share the value

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with your employees you know gyms and free food and all this sort of stuff so it's the first time I think in a generation since like 2003 2004 that we're seeing things start to turn the other way where instead of adding more benefits you know making things more attractive giving more value to

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employees we're really seeing the recession hit these kind of leading indicators of how things are going to be in the valley and as a result I think we should expect to see a similar impact on compensation on benefits on value share and on kind of proclivity to hire an opportunity to kind of jump jobs and you

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know opportunities that we've all kind of taken for granted over the past 18 years and this is going to be a real shock to a lot of people that work in Tech and a lot of people that have gotten used to the idea that every company offers great benefits there's always another job to jump to that'll

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pay you more and that that as that engine of growth that was really driven by these big companies by Google Facebook Apple starts to slow no one needs to compete with them anymore as much and the compensation bands get tighter and the option value gets Tighter and the free stuff gets tighter so it's the end of an era and I think

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it's a new world for tech and and Silicon Valley sex what are your thoughts here in terms of startups in relation to Big Tech maybe having these austerity measures kick in and a refocusing on profitability the big takeaway here is just that nobody is safe and it's not just starts to have to you know tighten their belts it's these

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big companies too and I think we're headed for a broad-based recession that's what it seems like you saw druckenmiller's comments this week predicting a hard Landing in 2023 no one's talking about soft Landing anymore in fact I think we're all wondering who's flying the plane so I think we're

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headed for a pretty big recession and I just take it in a slightly different direction I'm down here in La had dinner the other night with a friend who's a showrunner in Hollywood and so a showrunner basically is like the head writer and they basically put together the writing team and the you know the

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content for a show and then they sell them to networks he said that like no one is buying anything anymore here that last year you had there was tremendous you know activity and you saw like the The Game of Thrones guys you know uh DND they got like a 300 million dollar deal from Netflix and Shonda Rhimes yes they

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did yeah they got like these they were massive multi-hundred Million Dollar Deals being made last year and that was just for like future writing deals like Netflix wasn't even buying libraries when they did those deals they were locking down talent for the next day yeah exactly so all of that has stopped

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and the reason is that Netflix's stock has been hammered right and only so they not have the capital to do those kinds of crazy deals anymore but they know that Wall Street is watching them and so fundamentally they're questioning whether a business model even works if they have to spend that much money on

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content so then all of Netflix's competitors basically have stopped so this whole like frothy environment that you had for in Hollywood last year that's just over the faucet's been turned off and it's not even turned off to a trickle it's just stopped so you think that this like massive asset

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bubble that we had last year was just in crypto and growth stocks it's not I think it actually trickled down into the real economy because Netflix is one of those gross stocks the money then flowed into writers in Hollywood and then lots of other places this is one small example right that that this asset

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bubble wasn't purely just something that's going to be localized to crypto it affects real people in the real economy and we are just beginning to see the unwind of that yeah what's absolutely correct I think is people were more risk taking they had free Capital they wanted to place more

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bets and sure why wouldn't you bet on the Game of Thrones writers for the next decade but looking at this is going to be fantastic for startups I mean the startups I've worked with over the last five years have been they always come to me oh I got a developer but this person's got three offers from you know

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Facebook Google and they're like how do I land this person they got 300 000 a year offering a million dollars in rsus and basically Founders had to say no I can't get that person and so they had to get creative and they would hire people Ukraine Uruguay everywhere in between to try to find developer talent and they

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had to get creative now all of those people are not going to have four job offers they're going to have no job offer so they may have gotten laid off uh and those crazy unrealistic out of school deals are going to be gone and this means massive consolidation of talent you look at the startups uh Community right now

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tons of companies are just going out of business they're packing it in those people are going to go work at the other startups that are stronger so whoever makes it out of this as a startup this is how the cycle restarts is Talent then consolidates on the winners it would be like taking the NBA and getting rid of

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the bottom you know 10 teams and just telling the best players there move up to the other teams and uh everybody else you're out of the league so I I think this is incredible setup for 2023 for startups to consolidate Talent so I'm I'm actually excited yes it's another data point that again I said it last

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week I'll go out on a limb and predict my equivalent November fall predictions last fall it was at the markets were going to Coop the bed my prediction now is that I think the markets are bottoming and consolidating yep 100 and this is the time I think to start nibbling and start getting ready

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to really rip the money in and I think there's enough signals every day that kind of like tell me at least that on the margin it's time because I think the markets do a reasonably good job of digesting news and then pricing the forward reality right like today's price is really everything we already know and so the

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real guess is what's about to happen in the future and from my perspective I'm actually pretty starting to get a little constructive here I think that um when when companies like Facebook really do this and you know like if you think about it one way the financial markets have always had this thing that we have

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called the fed put what does that mean a put is essentially the right to sell something and what Market participants have always known for the last decade is that if things got very hairy if there was uncertainty in the market the Federal Reserve would and they have consistently stepped in to create a buyer of Last

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Resort and so it always eliminated that last part of true you know Supply demand balance because they would just come and say don't worry in many ways in Tech what the big tech companies were were that you know you could never really find what the true market clearing price for an engineer was or what the true

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amount of expenses you should spend on office space or you know free services because you always always had these companies which was an escalating arms race you know if one company had a massage the next company had gyms in massage and physical therapists and the other company would have buses to take you to

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the gyms in massage and therapists in the next company would have protein shakes that were freshly made you know and it just kept escalating and escalating because the costs didn't matter and they wanted if nothing else to get that marginal engineer or product manager or business person to work at

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their company which eliminated the risk that they would actually start something to disrupt them blocker strategy is very real you should on the blocker strategies is very real so when you take this big Tech put out of the market you will get true price Discovery and you will find out what the real price

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should be for this kind of an engineer that kind of a product manager you'll find out what are the real expenses you need to bear in order to build a real lasting business and you'll be able to sort through all of that stuff out so I think it's a really good moment and again it's yet another indication to me

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that I think broadly speaking the markets are now starting to stabilize all the irrational Behavior is starting to exit the system the party is in the last few hours volumes going down the alcohol has been taken away people are hanging around with a little bit lights are coming on they're like I've

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been here a little too long and I think that that's a very healthy process for an economy and I think that that's what's happening right now so I'm constructive I'm a little bullish I'll go I'll go out on a limb I think you know we could be three to five percent from the lows but we're more near the

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lows than the highs it certainly feels like the double bottoming out process was the The Bouncing along the bottom and yeah who knows how hard the landing uh is but I think it's a great setup for startups and people who want to start companies I don't know if you saw a girl who did a great interview

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that trended on the Twitter and you're just saying this is the best time to start a company and I have to agree with him like you're going to have talent available and like who are you competing against for buying ads like there's so many marketing opportunities available the first thing to go in a down market

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like this is advertising and marketing so and by the way we will we will also relive what we have empirically known to be true and it's been it's been pretty well proven the Investments that one makes in this period will probably be the best for many many years to come because they'll have the most asymmetric upside and that

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was true in 2008 and 9 and 10. it was true in you know 2002 three and four you I mean you're talking incredible companies just in those two periods think about this atlassian Tesla Uber Google Airbnb Uber Instagram WhatsApp incredible businesses that have created tremendous value and so there

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are businesses that have been invested in for the first time in 2022 and will be invested in for the first time in 2023 and 24 which will be the leading winners of this next phase and this next leg up and so the real opportunity is to find out who those companies are and get behind them I think 100 as I always tell

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people fortunes are made in the down Market they're collected in the up Market Freeburg what are your thoughts here in terms of the startup Community or company Builder uh and talent because that that seems to be the piece that uh could be a silver lining on all of this uh Maelstrom that we're going through I

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mean technology always marches forward so there's always you know there's always progress to be to be had and to be made that's one universal truth about it's weird that we call it an industry because a lot of technology companies in Silicon Valley today don't sell technology to other companies

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which is how Silicon Valley started nowadays Silicon Valley is Reinventing other industries by being technology LED and that is certainly still true because there are so many I hate using the term but undisrupted Industries to pursue efficiency gains across and Technology built in Silicon Valley can

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can drive that now when I say Silicon Valley I don't mean the physical location anymore and that's the confounding Factor here which is that there does seem to be this distribution opportunity that's also emerged at the same time where people are doing remote work and work from home and distributed Workforce

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models that seem to be highly effective you guys talked about atlassian I don't think they ever had an office right I mean don't most of the people work from home there and I think that the success that's been seen in software companies that have operated that model also changes the calculus because not

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only are are wages lower and therefore the cost of operating is lower not needing a fancy expensive office in San Francisco is needed but you can also access far more Talent than you ever could before you don't just need people to live in the Bay Area or New York or LA or wherever you're operating from

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so from a software perspective this is an amazing time I'll tell you there's a flip side to this like in life sciences real estate is more expensive than it's ever been right now in the Bay Area to get lab space there's a total dearth of space so there's certain segments that I think uh lab space like a specific a specific

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designation I mean there's a revolution and genomics that's totally transforming all of biology and human health and what I'm saying is like do you need a certain type of location that's sanctioned for that yeah yeah lab space is a certain kind of build out and it's not you know and so there's a certain amount of

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square footage and it's being built out a lot around the bay area but um the thing about life sciences companies is you do have to operate physically because you're doing some you're building something physical and so that is an industry that continues to remain very well funded and very competitive and I think

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you know there's still tremendous value and by the way there's a lot of public companies to invest in not on the primary basis but that are tools companies that are benefiting greatly from the continued demand and and growth in spending in that category sex let's talk about competition you know a lot of

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talk you know of these large companies pursuing many different verticals we talked about anti-competitive stuff Lena Khan the bundling in the suite of products at Microsoft other firms now you have uh all these being cut death to the Roomba death of the room by the way did you see the letter to the FTC about I guess she

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sent a letter about the Roomba I mean Senator Karen is just too much man I mean there's a lot of other stuff going on but you can let the Roomba slide that's not important oh you know all the things that are going on right now in 2022 it's the Roomba that gets on the that gets that's above the line at this

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point believable oh my points actually is sleepwalking oh my God what is going on no there's a there's a famous history of world war one called The Sleepwalkers because that's basically what it felt like is they just slept walked their way to World War One basically what should have been a minor Regional War the third

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Balkans war that nobody should have cared about nobody should have cared about this Franz Ferdinand guy except for you know the austrians and yeah exactly but the whole world basically got themselves invested in this thing and it feel and this is what we're worried about we're worried about the

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Roomba when the administration is sleepwalking its way into the next World War well I do not want Amazon okay to control my vacuum cleaner I'm just gonna put that on the record okay because you know where the dirt is they know which rooms are dirty what happens if they get a hold of the Roomba I'll tell you what

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happened happens the next thing is they're going to go after Dyson okay and then once they do that they're going to put chips in these things and all of a sudden they're going to know exactly what Jason said what are you eating where your dust bunnies are yeah all of this stuff it's This Must Be Stopped

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Lena Khan now no but to the point of competition you you you're seeing cuts to you know all the uh non-core projects at these big companies this is going to be great for startups right like the idea that Facebook could focus on you know a fourth fifth sixth thing is going to go away yeah well look you're right

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that great companies are built during downturns uh PayPal was built largely during the downturn the starter pack created Yammer was built largely during a downturn so listen there's going to be opportunities Innovation doesn't stop just because we're in a recession or depression but I gotta tell you I unlike

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tremath I'm having a hard time finding a silver lining right now uh part of it is the comments that druckenmiller just made which and he's been right about this stuff we've been talking about his predictions for over for a year on this podcast and he famously shorted the pound uh for George Soros that was one

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of his first things started but yeah since then um he's one of the most successful macro traders in the world and and you know universally respected and I think deservedly so remember he said that that this was in mid-2021 he said that the Fed was engaged in a radical uh monetary policy because even though

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we were starting to get inflation it was around five percent then that they were so engaged in this Bond buying program they're still bought like 160 billion of bonds and he is the first one waving the alarm bell saying what are they doing and now his predictions have come true I

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mean we're in a inflationary spiral and his prediction now is his Central Outlook is that the Dow Jones will be in the same place where it is today in 10 years and he made the point that yes Equity markets do go up in the long term but how long term are you talking about from night from roughly 1966 to 1982 the stock

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market was sideways Japan had a lost decade as well like this is not unprecedented after an asset bubble right and then from the Great Depression it took until 1955 for the stock market to recover so in the long run the stock market will go up but it could be you know we could have um a flat decade this is his prediction

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right but he's very smart guy and and then on top of that that's not to say that you can't be one of the ones who make money during that period because lots of people do but we're in for I think a very tough economic period because of just this radical uh expansionary fiscal monetary policy

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we've had basically the fed and the administration printed the last two administrations but especially this one printed 10 trillion dollars over the last couple of years most of that was under Trump but continue no it's not 100 I'll pull it up in a second but anyway keep going we had Biden basically kept digging this hole

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we had the two trillion dollars of American Rescue plan which we didn't need we just had uh another two trillion of the infrastructure Bill the inflation reduction act 500 billion for student debt yeah exactly so Jason what are you talking about and this was all after the emergency was over but I think I think

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that you guys are debating the wrong thing I think that what drucken Miller I think by the way just to be clear both drucken Miller and I can be right which is he's commenting on the real world economy going into a recession what I'm saying is that the stock market tends to be 9 to 12 months

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ahead of where we are Nick throw up that chart please that I asked you guys to share just to give you guys a sense of what I mean by this by the way while you're doing that jamas Jason look I will agree with you that a lot of this is 7.8 trillions more than Biden but fine a lot of the stimulus happened under Trump

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you're right because that's when basically covet happened remember in the in that Q2 of 2020 quarter the economy shrank at a 30 percent annualized rate everyone thought we're going to a great depression and that's why they passed all the stimulus by huge bipartisan margins director Miller's best point is

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that this is all post-vaccine right yeah yeah so look and I think we can definitely go back and second guess what happened during the Trump Administration there's an old saying that many of the worst ideas are bipartisan but and so you know the spending that happened in 2020 was clearly bipartisan and maybe it

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went way too far but in the last two years like drug said it was post-vaccine post-emergency and they kept spending and it's not just Administration it was the bond buying program of the FED where the economy was already fully back and they bought another 160 billion of bonds yeah I think I think the thing is that

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you know I think Stan is a proven Republican so maybe he is speaking a little bit of his book as well I think it's fair to say that both Trump and Biden did not help but overwhelmingly I think where the where the problem stands is a central bank that was the same through both of those administrations

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and I think we should probably focus on them because you're right what they did was excessive and what they essentially said is that if there is volatility Beyond a certain amount and people cry Uncle we will not allow the markets to sort themselves out in an orderly way we will step in and that's what you know

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again what we just talked about the Central Bank put in this case the FED interventions yeah and these interventions really uh pervert a market because you don't know what's going on and that has huge ramifications in the real economy so Nick if you just throw up this chart the the thing that is

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really important here and what this chart shows is essentially all of the hiking cycles that we've gone through since 1983 so 83 87 89 94 9904-15 in the current one and here's what I just want to call out for you guys what's incredible is that other than the one in 83 so this is sort of like you know

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that last big one what we've seen is that the stock market has a tendency to immediately go to the conclusion very early on in a rate hiking cycle and now why is that important for normal folks listening to this thing well the reason why that's important is right now we're in month seven of a cycle we

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obviously don't know how long it's going to be but the odds are improving every day that we're near the end versus the beginning and why that's important is again if you're thinking about when to you know buy equities for example this is a really instructive guide because what it tells you is the closer we get to the

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end or more importantly the closer we psychologically know that the end is coming we start buying and that and that's just a broad-based statement that has been true so you know what you see right now I think is really interesting which is that despite all the bad information oh my gosh the nordstream pipeline blew

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up could it have been sabotaged was it the CIA was it the Russians oh my gosh big Tech is slowing spending and firing people China's in a coup I don't know if you saw that rumor yeah how about something more benign you know the the US you know us yuan is really trading in a crazy way the U.S euro is trading in a

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crazy way the U.S pound is going crazy despite all of that every time we trade down the market consolidates very quickly and we sort of like so I think we're forming a bottom I do think that Stan is right we are going to see a hard Landing recession something will break in 2023. I hope it doesn't I hope it doesn't

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affect a lot of normal people but it's likely but at the same time to find hard Landing us so I'll tell you in a second but at the same time I think what's happening is in the equity and financial markets we are consolidating a bottom because we're seeing through to that end state and this is where cheap Equity gets

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bought so why is there a reason to sell now I think a lot of the people that are selling the smart money sellers that I talk to are essentially right now selling to book in capital losses to offset other capital gains from this year a term that's called tax loss harvesting and so if you have gains

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through this year which some of us do this is the great moment to just sell the losers to book the loss to net it out so that you can minimize your taxes for next year that's probably I think where we are at and I think that's why they're still Consolidated by so what is the hard Landing Jason if I had to predict I

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think what David said is absolutely right you're going to see unemployment get to an awkward and uncomfortable number five six percent I think could be something that we see and I think you're going to see a lot more companies pull way back on their spend because demand is going to really modulate uh

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you know I'll give you a crazy example you know what happens to all the people in the United States that are on armed mortgages right adjustable rate mortgages when those things reset they're going to reset two 300 basis points higher their monthly payments are going are going to go nuclear it's

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already happened I've literally had a family member call me about this and they were like what do I do so in the UK in the UK 40 percent of all mortgage dollars are interest only arms that will reset in January to around four percent forty percent can you imagine how upside down the UK economy is going to be when

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people have to spend three and four times more together and then people have to go to work so people who have not been participating are going to have those bills come in and they're going to have to go to work they're going to have to go to work yeah so free bird what do you what do you think uh hard Landing

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here and then what do you think 2023 looks like in that regard uh looking pretty bleak do you buy that we're bottoming out now as chamatha's sort of hypothesizing I mean I'll tell you I was running some back of the envelope math you know how much debt there is in the world take a guess 200 couple hundred trillion

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200 trillion about 300 trillion yeah that's um debt owed by governments businesses and households and if in response to the inflation which is response to fiscal stimulus which is a response to the entire economy of the world shutting down for a couple of months we end up raising rates from zero

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to five percent that's uh 15 trillion dollars of annual Debt Service which is like 18 of global GDP like that The Debt Service alone but what does that mean that means that for every dollar transacted no it means nothing tax it no it means what does it mean like so so what so I'm saying that there's a massive

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squeeze hap that's gonna happen right and so what ends up happening ultimately is because you could run this across local governments I think it means demand destruction I mean if you're in debt households yeah thick no no I'll tell you I'll tell you about what it means but it means nothing and I'll tell you

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why these people keep because you can print more money you print more money I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but like it is not as if we have a law a constitutional law or it's not as if governments have collectively decided that you cannot have debt to GDP uh above a certain number that doesn't

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happen guys we passed 100 under Obama and we've just kept printing money so whether we like it or not and I'm not saying I'm a fan of this or it's right we are kicking the can down the road and what we're doing is we're extending the maturities you know you'll eventually have 100 Year government bonds okay just

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like you have like now you know multi-decade long corporate bonds we missed a chance for that we missed it because brilliant Yellen actually said no to that when when rates were like near zero and we had the opportunity to refinance the U.S government debt using long-term rates basically long-term bonds and actually was Trump who you

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know crazy Trump who suggested let's basically shift the debt to 100 Year bonds and she said no you have a dollar right so the the problem is that we have all the short-term debt and look at what just happened in the UK when Liz trust tried to prop up the uh Bond rates by basically intervening she was basically

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an inflationary policy to fight an inflation the markets puked all over that and that's when their the pound hit you know exactly there's only so you have to have a buyer of the debt right I think the list trusting is really actually a microcosm of how unfortunately Western governments are

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working but I think there's a silver lining like she basically came in a day after she got elected and said okay guess what guys at the same time I'm going to massively cut taxes and I'm going to give you fiscal stimulus I'm going to cap your energy bills and I'm going to have these huge transfer payments from the government into the

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hands of uh of uh British citizens I'm not going to comment on whether that's right or right right or wrong but the financial markets to your point David absolutely hated it and within a few days you basically saw the pound get crushed but then what did you see you saw the bank of England decide that

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Financial stability was more important than financial viability meaning the things that she wanted to do were not viable so you could have let the financial Market sort this out which would have forced the prime minister to basically abandon the policy but instead the Boe said now we're on the unlimited

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buyer of UK guilts which is the name of the UK Bond and everything snap back we're back to where we were before her speech and before the chancellor of the exchequer speech and so it's as if nothing happened and that's what's so insane to me which is that even though the bank of England by the way in the

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next week or two are going to raise rates 140 basis points 140 basis points almost double what the FED is that is they're doing both at the same time they're both raising rates and they're acting as a backstop for bad policy and this is what's wrong right now in the world we do not have a real

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check and balance so my point to Friedberg is just that I'm like emotionally on your side but the problem is with these folks keep getting bailed out David they're just going to keep doing this stuff and there's no end in sight well and the the consumer doesn't get bailed out so that if you look at it on a micro basis

35:52

instead of a macro basis you're correct these governments will just bail people out even if they make bad decisions as we're seeing but then the person whose uh variable interest mortgage just kicked in has 500 less a month in savings so they're now not going to buy an iPhone 14. they're not gonna upgrade

36:08

their car every six years they're gonna do it every eight years so the demand destruction that's happening is going to be quite severe and that's going to reduce money then monetary velocity and then we mark my words the Federal Reserve will intervene this is why I think we're in a bottoming process I

36:25

think the the bleeding edge of the Smart Financial actors are actually on Sax's side and friedberg's side but then they're taking that next intellectual leap and saying okay well what happens when Apple basically says hey guys I'm gonna have to fire 15 of my employees I think what happens is the fed intervenes and I'm just using apple as

36:45

an example but there there is a threshold of demand destruction Jason I think you're right where we have the fed put come back on the table and the markets just go Bonkers so they instead of doing 75 basis points two or three times they're just gonna be like yeah I'll do 50. we'll throw it down no no no

36:58

no no no no no they're gonna they're gonna get to four and a half very quickly and then this Something's Gonna Break like all these guys are saying I think they're right and then the fed put comes back on the table and we'll have this we'll have the UK you know the UK thing happened in what six days

37:15

bars will play out over six or nine months but it's going to play out the exact same way and freeburg's right you know we should have capped debt at you know 100 of GDP or less and sax is right we should have issued 100 Year bonds at zero rates when we had the chance we didn't do either of those things

37:31

that's so incompetent sex I mean there was no need to have rates this low for that long and it maybe they could just keep them at some average number instead of going down to zero or that's spiking back up and just steering you know spitting the steering wheel uh you know so violently why don't we have some basic uh concept

37:49

of maybe not having zero rates and keeping them at two percent or something reasonable so you have some dry powder well if you go back and and listen to what the FED said and Drug makes this point they were all worried that they got there was an inflation print a few years ago where I was at 1.7 percent and

38:04

they all started panicking about not being at two percent so for a point three percent move that they try to engineer they opened the floodgates okay and that's basically what happened and that's why he's so critical of it the other thing is the federal remember the FED said we're going to be data driven

38:19

but then the data came in last summer we got that surprise 5.1 print and they dismissed it as transitory so they said they're going to be data driven but they weren't they they were dismissive now on what basis did they conclude transitory like what was the proof for that there was no proof that was a

38:39

political consideration the administration and Yellen is a big part of that immediately reacted to basically downplay the news I mean they PR did I mean they didn't want to admit that there was a problem they went from transitory to this is permanent to next six months but during and now we're at

38:56

hard Landing like right these people are not competent are they just not competent no I think they're really I think they are competent but I think that they're a little bit fighting with one hand type behind their back I think if you had to take the other side sacks you know the problem is they have a very

39:10

specific strain of data that they focus on and that data has all these weird anomalies to it like you know they should look at rent data but the way that the rent data works is that you know you bleed it in one-sixth a month over six months just as an odd example or like use card data only comes in a

39:30

certain way so I think they're driving in the review mirror I think there is something to that I think it's simpler than this which is listen I think all politicians do this which is when they get bad news they want to spin it and they're going to delay acknowledging the bad news as long as possible so what

39:44

happened last summer when this inflation started they all dismissed it it was all a talking point I mean every single one of them and here's the crazy thing is Jay Powell he's the only Trump official who got reappointed by Biden by a huge majority how do you think that happened and when did it happen it happened at

40:01

the end of May last summer so just when this inflation print came out and yell into the administration were saying it was transitory that's when Powell was up for renomination and he swept through the only Trump appointment to basically be renominated without even a question by Biden why because he got on board the

40:19

talking points he wasn't gonna basically Buck them at that time so he waited six months he bought into the talking points that was a hundred percent political 100 I told you I read Paul it's a very compelling argument I read them there it's really compelling it's really it's sad but compelling sax you should read

40:37

the Paul volcker uh book keeping at it he basically says Reagan came to him off site where they knew they wouldn't be recorded and told them do not raise rights uh so this idea that the FED is independent like history now has shown us it is not like the the there is massive uh political pressure on them I

40:55

I think especially at the time driving in the review mirror clearly the data they have is not great and then all this data is nuanced you know jobs and this massive amount of jobs we've had in this country is because of you we have a new immigration policy we don't let people into this country we kick out phds that

41:10

we trained and then housing we have eye buyers buying this so to your point jamoff I think a lot of the data has changed and they're they've got a bad data set they have a bad dashboard and they're driving with bad information they don't know their Direction they don't know their speed perfectly if you

41:24

want more Fidelity on the data you're right if you went to a board of directors meeting for your company and said how's the business doing and the CEO says well you know well we're going to have data from six months ago and it's like okay I got that but what about like last week uh you would fire that CEO to

41:41

your point Jason um and these things are knowable today like there are businesses for example that are selling billions of dollars worth of like iot sensors here and there energy sensors here everything is connected to the internet everything is automated everything is running in code

41:59

um you would think that the government would say there's a national level directive here to get this into some kind of a system that we can use because these decisions are becoming more and more important I think that would be a wonderful idea and a project and what had huge value a Manhattan project for understanding

42:16

the economy on a very granular level we you invested in a startup at one point I remember I heard the pitch where they had people around the world taking pictures of food prices Africa India the United States anywhere and then putting them into a database normalizing them so you could know the price of tomatoes or

42:32

potatoes on a global basis you know and normalizing all that data they don't seem to have this data there they're talking about August data and it's you know we're now in October it's a really odd situation I think you know our friend Brad grosser made this point which was that look in this last fomc meeting the

42:51

FED raised their forecast for what the neutral interest rate would be from three and a half to four point six percent so in two months they raised their forecast by over 100 basis points what is that based on like is there a model I assume there is a model I assume there's data so why don't they just open

43:07

source that why don't they let the markets like see the model they're using so we have a little more predictability of course they always have the discretion to bucket or not follow it or whatever or change it but like you know wouldn't that be a better approach is to like let us see the data and the models

43:24

in real time as it's happening and then the community like like an open source project could actually like Fork the model and actually create like better ones well to your point to your point like there's the the FED is actually known as the gold standard of transparency so the IMF has kind of like

43:40

a a view in how all these central banks act last week they actually explore created and this is good this hurts me to say Canada because of their lack of transparency apparently Canada doesn't even put out minutes and so they're like hey Canada you uh you guys like yeah and you know well Canadians are I mean the Canadian

44:01

government at least like total moral virtue signalers but they don't value transparency apparently but to your point David there is a lot of opacity in these things that really determine how the real world works and the impacts the individual people are going to go and get ratcheted way up and nobody

44:19

really knows what to expect even though the data is there sitting in plain sight I think two things can be true I think the Fed the process of setting Central Bank rates by the Federal Reserve should be reset I also think that it could be true that the FED is not responsible fully for a lot of the conditions we're

44:47

now facing we did have a bunch of policy decisions that the whole world got swept up in and seemed to accept as appropriate at the time when we shut the global economy down and there was some weird assumption or belief that fiscal policy would allow us to soft land or recover out of that and

45:08

at the end of the day all that fiscal policy did and I remember I was speaking with a smart person at the time and he said all the fed's going to do is they're just going to inflate everything and it's going to take a while and everything will inflate and that way everyone will feel good for a while but

45:24

you can't just stop the spigot of capital moving Goods moving and services moving for months on end and assume that the repercussions will not actually be felt extremely harshly and at some point things are going to come home to roost and that is what's happening there was no winning solution for the fed or for

45:41

any Central Banker in light of the policy decisions that were made to shut the global economy down when covid began not to argue whether or not that was appropriate but that was simply a statement of fact I said it before and I don't understand if you were to take a first principle's point of view on this today and say hey

45:59

let's create a central bank and how should it operate you would take all the data from into it from PayPal from visa from MasterCard from the internet you would take all of that data you would let the algorithms or the AI or the software figure out what is most predictive of certain inflationary

46:16

recessionary totally and growth indicators totally and you would basically say look X percent growth X percent inflation solve for what the the central bank's interest rate should be and it should vary at a hundredths of a percent or a basis point every day and every day the rate is reset and the

46:36

software resets it and to have you know some degree of human logic or oversight seems appropriate but to have a decision made in quarter percent increments once every couple of weeks uh seems seems kind of Arcane so I think both things are true the FED isn't necessarily fully responsible we all want to point fingers

46:54

you know we can point fingers at at the the Mania that swept over the entire world when we started our podcast and everyone was like what the hell is going on why are we locking down the world and this is nuts and it felt nuts and the response may or may not have been appropriate but at the end of the day

47:11

there was a cost and the cost is going to be born for very likely a decade or more if we are able to get through it all a lost decade is a possibility handset central banks can be Rewritten so yeah well I think there's actually two original sins of the economic crisis we're in one is lockdowns you're right

47:26

like that was a fiasco it didn't do anything to stop kovid it was an economic disaster and then we overreacted to lockdowns by them printing all of this money both fiscally and through expansionist monetary policy so freberg's right about that I but I think the other original sin here is the

47:44

the QE and the zerp right the zero interest rate policy that began in 2008 2009 we broke the glasses emergency totally yeah and then it just became standard like it was on autopilot why did we keep printing why did the government keep buying it was a long tail event that became the mean problem is that every time government is

48:05

a bad idea I mean it's just yeah Milton Friedman once said there's nothing quite so permanent as a temporary government program how many times have we seen this every time the government's supposed to do something on a one-off emergency basis like zurp it ends up becoming institutionalized we still have kids in

48:19

schools in California wearing masks I mean that it's the same crazy thing that people cannot get off these programs the the thing about zurp which if you look back what really happened if you think about like how people live their lives every day what what if what has happened in

48:34

our view of government and politicians it's really eroded since 2007-2008 right there's huge amounts of rancor nobody gets along everything tends to happen on partisan lines and the reason I think that that was allowed to happen or that accelerated is actually because of zurp because if you think about it if you had

48:53

failed policy right and the economy was completely broken politicians would actually have to get together and try to solve the problem themselves and the last time they really did that was actually in the great financial crisis if you look at tarp and if you look at how all of these smart

49:10

people actually had to get together in a bipartisan way to figure out how do we bail out America and prevent a banking crisis that was the last real effort that touched a lot of people but then David as you said on the heels of that we broke the glass and we've been fighting ever since and the peak of that

49:28

fighting was basically Donald Trump getting elected and so I think like what it shows is that if you have these irrational Central bankers that will or that are willing to constantly bail people out you will never get a high functioning government because policy is irrelevant good policy doesn't matter I think our policy

49:47

doesn't matter if any of it goes wrong the central Banker will come in and bail us out well and the the second and third order impact of these is can become quite acute and just for people who heard the word zurp like three times zero interest rate policy basically keeping interest rates very low very

50:04

dangerous to do because you get like this like look at the number of unemployed people per job opening and if you just look at this like ratio this is the number of jobs per unemployed person it gets way out of whack and then if you look at this other chart just in terms of the total number of job openings you know we

50:22

started we talked about this earlier in the Pod hitting 11 million to burn that office crazy then what happens if you have too many jobs you don't let immigration you you don't have a functioning immigration policy well then you get this great um you know people quitting their jobs quiet quitting and then

50:41

the Boomers saw their net worth go up so high because of their retirement accounts because of the stock market boom and because of the housing boom you had all these rich parents now who are bailing out their kids who refused to go to work and labor participation goes from 70 down to 62 these are the

50:58

unintended consequences of zurp that you know now how do you get a generation to go back to work if their parents have you know a two million dollar home and 3 million in stocks or a million dollar homes yeah and that's what they're doing now they're like we're going to break this

51:13

we're gonna we're gonna get Google and apple who have unlimited cash to do a riff those companies don't need to do a riff they're doing it because they have no choice now because they want to break the economy so hard Boomers have 71 trillion in assets over March I mean the wealth transfer that's going to occur between

51:31

these two generations is crazy why would any U.S except for Millennial with a boomer parent even go to work if they've got a million U.S Boomers have 71 trillion dollars in assets is that what you said no yeah that's the number I have here so an entire turn of global GDP in savings that's about one-seventh

51:48

of the world's total assets it's just a lot of Locked Up well and this monetary policy was done by Boomer 70 trillion controlled by 76.4 million people yeah so if you want to really talk about the you know the rich in a global context the Richer very specifically U.S Boomers yeah that's one-seventh of the world one

52:12

seventh of the world's assets is controlled by 76 million people how much of it is their homes I mean they were they were at Woodstock they you know they lived the best life in the best times they enjoyed the most of the peace dividend in the 80s and the 90s and the 2000s they are the ones that control everything

52:33

it's pretty crazy it's I think it's less like Jeff Bezos and Gates and musk it's Boomers that if you want to go and really zoom out and get it right it is Boomers it's one percent of the global population that controls one seventh of the global wealth and they're all in the united U.S Boomers hiding in plain sight

52:56

U.S Boomers there you are well once these housing prices decline and the stock market declines that number is going to shift and that really is what's fundamentally happening with the fiscal policy and the effects that's happening today it's happening today which is a redistribution of that value because

53:11

we're basically deflating all those assets now we're deflecting the average Boomer is and we're going to deflate real estate assets I mean if you just do the math on that back of the envelope these boomers are worth a billion a million dollars each like think about that like every Boomer is worth 900k a

53:28

million something in that range 1.2 million I mean it's bonkers that's the average that's how much wealth they have Bonkers you you two are a boomer Jacob no we're Gen X we're Gen X can we get the worst we had the we had like we got really shafted it's like you know we grew up with flannel Alanis Morissette Alanis Morissette no

53:52

hold on hold on Smashing Pumpkins 93 was probably the best year Smashing Pumpkins ever did it for me Billy corgan's voice was always like ah yeah really annoying Rage Against the Machine can we do a quick shout out for um Julio sad to hear that he passed we're here for you yeah I mean it was

54:13

really sad the guy was uh how old was he 50. were you a big fan of Coolio's I love cool in the 90s his Coolio story from the Pod when he said Gangster's Paradise I feel you yeah and then when I saw him at Sax's birthday last year I was like dude I love Coolio I mean I cannot tell you

54:32

what a big fan I am what was the line you said to him you said I feel you I said I appreciate you I appreciate you I appreciate you we fly down for the birthday they you know they shuttle you on the cars from the plane to the to the house we get to the house and you know we're all waiting of course sax is late two

54:50

and a half hours to his own party we're all hanging out starving but then we go into the party and then they have like uh Coolio shows up so we're like sitting down to dinner for course two all of a sudden pop comes out of the the woodwork Coolio I lose my I run up on the uh so dance before I grew up Coolio like

55:10

it's like high school jams man I mean that's like in the car cruising and at this point I'm like seven tequila watermelon Tequilas in so I'm playing oh my God on the Dance Floor you know jamming up to Coolio I think Kaleo thought I was sex you know because he's like yeah he's like oh two South African Jews you guys

55:30

all look the same Coolio comes up starts high-fiving me and hugging me and I'm like What's Up Coolio my God this is like a dream come true he's like hugging me his face is right next to my face I didn't know what to say and I like I'm I'm I've had a little bit of tequila and I and I whisper in Coolio's ear I'm like

55:47

oh no I appreciate I appreciate you I appreciate you wow oh my God I think I saw Freeburg throw his panties on stage 201 yeah know what to say I mean what do you say clearly clearly you don't know what to say yeah my team my my team and TPB they had a they had a cameo made for me of that Coolio sent in it was super

56:20

heartfelt and awesome sax posted it on the internet I think yeah retweeted it yeah retweeted it and it was uh I don't know man it was uh he was he was actually a super nice guy great guy and uh it was super sad yo Dave it's your friendly neighborhood Coolio bro I'm out here on the golf course thinking

56:40

about you I appreciate you man so I want to wish you a very very very happy birthday man you feel me I want you to drink it I want you to smoke good I want you to eat good I want you to have some fun bro go big do it right yo Dave happy birthday man from Coolio Shaka Zulu man well all the stories are

57:05

coming out now and not your experience was not unique he touched everybody he met literally these college kids were like genuine very kind like yeah he was a real super friendly and like you know and and like wanted to ask about you I mean it's like a very like I could have been a politician if you didn't become a music a music Superstar

57:26

he looked incredible he looked like he was 25. I mean he literally went to these college kids met him he went back to their like you know uh frat house he cooked them dinner and then he got a guitar out with them and he sang gangster paradise with them and he like orchestrated it with the crowd singing

57:46

whatever he was then there was a video of him in Dublin on the bar singing can I just say something to I I've given the message uh before yeah before but like you know take care of your health yeah take care like there there are these incredible drugs I just want to call out Health as wealth

58:07

if Lipitor for example or Crestor or these statins are not working for you there's this next Generation kind of drug called the pcsk9 inhibitor which essentially is uh effectively a gene therapy that's modeled after this very specific group of folks in the nordics I believe who actually have effectively

58:26

immunity against heart disease and so it's taken 20 years to refine this drug but this drug is a wonder drug and you know there are versions of it now that are injectable you know once every six months or whatever so go and ask your doctor if you're not if statins don't work for you look at the pcsk9 inhibitor

58:42

and then separately after you're 45 or so you should again a CT angiogram because these things are really important or you know a heart flow where they actually inject a die they characterize all your veins they give you a calcium score may not prevent this but at least if it's if it's something cardiac related

59:03

you can get to the bottom of it and it's a knowable thing nowadays yeah rest in power to um our friend and uh yeah take care of yourselves your health and uh speaking of Health shout out to Gwyneth Paltrow uh G pal uh who in her group newsletter pointed out that she loves the all in pod and has to be

59:26

honest she's obsessed with the personalities a little bit anybody want to handicap that listen let's be honest uh what doctors say not you if that's what you're trying to say I've met her actually doctors say she's a delightful if you want if you want to live in health after a meal the best

59:42

thing to eat is a little dark chocolate hmm do you get your dark chocolate from goop do you have goop dark chocolate Jason I was trying to make a story where I am the dark chocolate where I'm saying that I am her favorite personality you so you're handicapping that you're her favorite she said she's

59:58

obsessed with the personalities plural I'm gonna I'm gonna where did she rank her besties I need to know I'm gonna rank as rebirth oh really you think she's a free person that makes that's on yeah okay then me then you okay I'll take it the fact that Gwyneth Paltrow even understands like who we are is a win in my book so I'll

1:00:19

I'll be number four on her list but uh G pal if you could rank the besties in your next newsletter that would be appreciated and we'll we'll take rank your besties all right if sakshi wants some red meat you'll I I saw you wrote a piece you want your red meat should we throw it to you yeah yeah all right I think we we

1:00:40

need a Ukraine update because I mean we're talking about all the reasons that there could be a silver lining or the Market's bottomed out I don't think you can know for sure that the markets are going to bottom out unless you know that there's going to be successful resolution of this Ukraine war at least

1:00:56

a non-escalation of it and all the things that have happened in the last couple weeks have been on the road towards escalation exactly so in the last like just few days you've had zelinski saying that they want to be admitted to Nato you've got Putin basically annexing or saying he's going to Annex the Don bass and somebody we

1:01:14

don't know who but according to radic Sikorsky who's the Polish foreign minister he think the U.S somebody blew up the Nord pipeline so what is the common denominator did they say was blown up was it one or two was this so it was the one that was actually like working what is the common denominator

1:01:33

of all these things they're all eliminating key elements of what a peace deal would look like so everyone understands that a peace deal would require uh zielinski to give up on NATO it would require Putin to make some compromises likely in the Don bass and it would require the sanctions to be

1:01:52

lifted and the energy flows to be turned back on well so now those things basically have been removed from the table or at least potentially that's what's happening so I don't see how you're going to get a peace deal now and so if you remove all the off ramps what's left escalation wow so it seems to me this thing's just

1:02:11

going to keep escalating I thought you wrote a good piece in the American conservative should America go all in on Ukraine if you haven't read it it is 80 of rehash of what we've talked about here for the last year but there's 20 new in it I think and I thought what was interesting uh in terms of new stuff you

1:02:28

put in the piece and it's a good summary of you know poker strategy versus what's going on here is that we've already proven you know if you did want to prove that Russia is not a threat with the exception of their nuclear we now have proven that they're really not going to be able to do a domino and go into all

1:02:45

these different countries with the exception of obviously the threat of nuclear power so I thought that was well that was really a point yeah yeah what I was really responding to in that piece is the assertion by the media that Putin is bluffing how do they know that you know how do they know that like you

1:03:01

know I think all of us understand poker pretty well and none of us ever would have the confidence to assert that we know exactly what cards our opponent holds in any given hand and how exactly they'll play them what do we do what do smart players do we put our opponent on a range a range of possible hands of

1:03:22

possibilities and then we evaluate what did their previous actions tell us what story are they telling through their previous actions well what story has Putin been telling this is not a guy who Bluffs in my opinion or at least that is not the story there's a chance he he would pop off a tactical nuke it's a

1:03:40

non-zero chance if that if his life is on the line he is incentivized to use every weapon at his disposal to try and prevent his violence his life isn't on the line here he can he can back out oh yeah but where's this thing headed if there's no compromise I I think they you know I I I'm gonna stick with my

1:03:57

original prediction that we wanted to you ankle Putin we wanted to prove he didn't have you know as much strength as he did and we wanted to exhaust his resources so we could finally basically get him out of office at some point so I do think regime change via exhausting him and I think it seems to

1:04:14

have worked we have exhausted you're agreeing with me I agree that we have exhausted his I mean he's proven he can't fight a ground war right I mean that that's a pretty oh he's escalating now he's escalating you think he's just gonna roll over he's not going to roll over I think he but I think what we've proven haven't we is

1:04:32

that he can't fight a ground war effectively he doesn't have the Army he doesn't have the weapons uh compared to the west and he's been exhausted you know and I think his he's spent now the only thing he has left is what you're talking about is the new corruption literally no no well no there's there's

1:04:48

more intermediate options first of all he's just called for the the mobilization of 300 000 more troops so that's going for step one people are coming into the country yeah exactly look there's gonna be very high yeah they're gonna be very high costs on the Russian side I would not assume that

1:05:05

means that there's something in it for us even with this um you know the the conscription he's doing this draft he's doing forced draft I mean he is kind of redundant but um this conscription or draft whatever you want to call it has proven that he doesn't even actually have the standing inside his own country people are

1:05:23

leaving they're breaking they're looking up how to break their arms like it's it's pretty dark I think you're making a lot of assumptions there just like the media who are saying that he is definitely bluffing what I'm saying is we cannot know that he's definitely bluffing no the United States of America

1:05:35

is blessed with being the most safe and secure country in the world and really in human history and the history is full of humans constantly being at war with each other so that is a really valuable thing that we have why are we so secure we're surrounded by gigantic oceans we have these gigantic moats in addition

1:05:55

thanks to the wisdom of the Monroe Doctrine for 200 years we have prevented any great powers from getting a foothold in the western hemis Fleet we are completely dominant here and no one could ever stage an invasion of the United States we only have one one vulnerability just one icbms that's

1:06:11

really it so what are we doing we are basically engaging in a proxy war with the person in the world who has the most icbms and we are basically putting ourselves on an escalatory path with him this would be like if Achilles had gone in front of the walls of Troy and basically taken off his armor and stuck

1:06:30

his foot in the air and drawn a little Bullseye around his his heel that's what we're doing the other side in the world why would we do that why would we do that if they are the last real um threat and they are the Achilles heel if we can uh they're not the last threat they're not the last threat we're never

1:06:46

going to be out of threats okay well we got two major ones with icbms but anyway it looks like we're in the end game now what do you think happens here we're not in the end game we're on a path towards escalation because all the off-ramps have been removed that's my point and instead of saying instead of trying to

1:07:01

find a diplomatic solution first of all we keep removing off-ramps and then we we blithely disregard the threat to ourselves by saying he must be bluffing this is incredibly stupid questions hold on a second the better question to ask is what's in it for us what's in it for the United States of America what is the

1:07:20

vital interest that compels us to risk our security there isn't one this Don bass region hold on this donbass region is the Franz Ferdinand of this situation it is not historically important to us we have invested in it all of this importance and we are potentially turning a regional War into a World War

1:07:40

we are sleepwalking towards this unless somebody finds an off-ramp we are escalating our way into a much larger conflict that is my point and I don't see how anyone I don't see anyone should re-enter the markets with this geopolitical risk hanging over our heads yeah this is kind of like what I

1:07:56

said a few weeks ago and JP Morgan put out a analyst report today saying that they were shifting from being you know call it roughly positive sort of like chamoth's Point earlier about being a little bit constructive in the markets right now and coming in and finding opportunities to buy to

1:08:14

realizing that the sum of the portfolio of tail risks right now you know outweighs the upside that may arise from finding these low priced opportunities in the market and that seems to be the prevailing Market sentiment right now is that there are too many of these moments that while each one of them is low probability the

1:08:36

impact is of such high severity that the aggregate value expected value or expected loss of all of them is actually quite significant and that is heavily Weighing on the market and so huge amount of point I think and to the question earlier about market conditions one Catalyst for upside in the market

1:08:52

while there is fiscal strain and economic strain and growth strain there is also this geopolitical strain in the market if one or more of these things starts to resolve I think that weight starts to come off the markets and you can see look I can see the market taking off like a rocket if Ukraine gets

1:09:07

resolved and I do think you're right it's all fat tail risk that's about to get resolved I think that can potentially be the political motivation here which is that enough people like chamoth and you start making the calls to your representatives pointing out how strained the market is because of this

1:09:24

tension in the region right now that maybe there is some path to resolution that becomes more active rather than passive because of that this may be a little controversial so we can talk about it but I um think that the markets would have reacted much much more negatively to a nuclear incident three months ago

1:09:45

then now and may not even react as much as we may think it would three months from now but what do you mean by nuclear incident you may not goes off or just a threat you're saying if Putin blows up a new the markets may not react that much I think that the markets are basically um ring fencing Russia Ukraine risk in

1:10:09

terms of currency and stability but that's sort of now gone away we've ring fenced the energy risk because it looks like energy reserves in Europe are actually going to be pretty meaningful they're going to spend whatever it takes so all of the second and third order effects it would be a

1:10:28

humanitarian crisis which would be horrendous okay but the markets don't whether we like it or not react to humanitarian crises they react to the second and third order economic impacts of those things and if you actually try to think about what the second and third order economic impacts are you're seeing many of those things get

1:10:48

solved and so what it would be it would be a highly isolating effect it would be a humanitarian atrocity he would be completely cornered from a from a worldwide perspective um the the the monetary and fiscal implications of that um may not be as meaningfully disruptive today as they would have been three

1:11:10

months ago that's what I'm saying well it's one thing I should clarify I like friedberg's analysis of the fat tail risk because I'm not saying it's likely that this conflict goes nuclear but I don't need there to be a high likelihood in order for me to be very concerned about it because of how disastrous an outcome that would be so

1:11:29

if you're doing an expected value analysis it's really hard to analyze the expected value or negative value of a of a low probability disastrous event right that's the classic fat tail risk I do think that if the markets think they have priced in the effect of this war then I think that's an argument for a

1:11:50

lot of downside to this Market because it seems to me that we're on a one-way ratchet here all the off ramps for us a piece or a diplomatic solution have been systematically taken away and all that's left are potential escalations so no I hear you but how do those translate those escalations

1:12:08

to outside of those two countries and into economic terms for the rest of the world oh my gosh well I mean if the war spreads here I'll give you a couple of scenarios I mean well here's one I think we're just assuming that China is going to stay out of it imagine if you're China and you're watching what's happening and you're

1:12:24

worried that actually Russia could lose this war so badly that it emboldens Hawks in America who want to Target China next you know who are basically on This Global struggle against autocracy you're going to look at that and go wait a second is it really in our interests for Putin and Russia to be completely

1:12:44

toppled by This Global struggle against autocracy it seems to me they could enter the Russian side not militarily but in terms of support so they would have an incentive again not to lose an ally and then by the same token I think the Russians could lash out I don't think they're going to go nuclear right

1:13:02

away but I think they could pull a grozny I mean don't you think that is well when you know in the Chechen War when Russia was losing they just rubbled Grazie I mean they basically level it to the ground so I mean Putin hasn't done anything like that yet but if he's facing defeat isn't that something that

1:13:22

would be on the escalatory ladder is to basically start leveling Ukrainian cities destroyed infrastructure and then what is the response to the West yeah I know I know because the West may say you know what that's unacceptable to us I agree no no I I look I'm not debating how bad all of these things are I'm just

1:13:38

asking the question what are the second and third order economic impacts because the market doesn't reflect human atrocities we may want it to but it just doesn't do a good job of that it does do a reasonable job of reflecting a discounted set of events in the future related to economic events

1:13:55

and impacts and all I'm saying is that you know the most obvious impacts of this war have been to currencies to Commodities and to energy and the world has had six or seven months to reroute what they've needed to roughly solve a large percentage of those problems it doesn't take the fact that this is a bad war and it should end

1:14:18

I'm not saying any of it right right no I look you make you make a good point which is that look the Market discounts cash flow so how do the cash flows get impacted you maybe write that valuation multiples have gotten close to correction but I think the thing that we don't really know is what earnings and

1:14:34

profits and revenues are going to look like next year and part of that is about the hard Landing right like how inflated are all these companies revenues and earnings because of what are you I hear you but this is why that chart is so important every other time except in 1983 in modern history so the modern

1:14:51

history that we have all lived says that the stock market Bottoms in the first third of a process and so if you think that this process ends in 24 that's a roughly 24 month process 21-month process we're in month seven we're in the power rally of what would map to the last six or seven

1:15:12

patterns of behavior yeah I mean I I guess you may end up being right about this prediction I guess what I'm saying is that I personally would not want to enter the market until some of these fat tail risks are taken off the table oh yeah well talking about nibbling in the market for a second I'm not saying

1:15:27

they're likely I'm just saying that yeah I understand obviously none of us want this to happen I'm just asking a very specific question which is and making an observation which is I wonder how the markets would react and I I I don't see it being down a thousand points and that may be wrong but by the way it could

1:15:45

certainly be shocking to to see that yeah the diversity of views that you guys all share I think really represents the market what view do you have you too you have a view dude I I'm like what the wow what is your hand no but what is your view here's your view that we're okay we're about to just go through the

1:16:07

toilet like what is your view from an equity Market's point of view oh just in general yeah like Equity markets your temperature how do you feel like how do you feel yeah I'm worried about money not moving what does it mean money not moving I'm really anxious about invested dollars everyone seems

1:16:25

I think I mentioned a while ago that dollars were kind of locked up in March and then I went to this conference and people were like yeah we're loosening up and making a plan again in July because the market was kind of turning back up and now Equity markets are turning down Bond markets have turned down interest

1:16:39

rates have spiked and there's a bunch of these currency problems so I'm very nervous about the flow of capital which I remember happening in 08 and I remember happening when we were all joking over text when covet happened and we're like hey the market can only go down 10 a day for so many days in a row and everyone

1:16:58

was kind of like you know Jamal was talking about wearing jeans instead of he's like I could just wear the same pair of jeans for the rest of my life or something that's true demand destruction yeah yeah he's like I don't need fancy clothes I can just wear the same clothes I have let's go into a storage locker to

1:17:16

pull those clothes out right on sale rent the rent tomorrow the CEO of Laura Piana did send me a note after that podcast he's like is everything okay [Applause] indicator of economic health is the rate of rotation of chamat's closet because that is he's like you know what I can take this season off I'll just wear last

1:17:42

Summer's season I would guess that the rate of rotation of chemov's closet is probably predictive of IPO Market you know what I was I was there last one rotating it I'm rotating it so maybe that's a good sign the economy is about to read it again I'm ready to take some companies public

1:17:58

no no I'm buying I'm buying stocks because I was at chamat last week and it was supposed to be black truffles and then he jumped the fence all of a sudden white truffles over my shoulder I was like chef chef chef all right Lesson Four The Dictator uh the prince of panic attacks the Sultan of science the queen of quinoa

1:18:20

himself so see the Kevin Hart show if you're in San Francisco or San Francisco he's hilarious and uh for Montclair Ambassador David sacks the dictator himself it's moderate and we'll see you on episode 99. love you guys love you guys we'll let your winners [Music] somehow [Music] we need to get Mercies [Music]