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E103: Tech layoffs surge, big tech freezes hiring, optimizing for profits, election preview & more

November 05, 2022 / 01:28:51

This episode discusses the recent developments at Twitter under Elon Musk, the implications of layoffs in tech companies, and the evolving landscape of journalism. Key topics include the advertiser boycott on Twitter, the rise of misinformation, and the challenges faced by tech companies amid economic changes.

Jason Calacanis and his co-hosts address the advertiser boycott on Twitter, clarifying that it stems from a coordinated attack involving bots posting racist content. They emphasize that this was quickly managed and does not reflect a change in Twitter's content moderation policies.

The conversation shifts to the impact of layoffs in tech, with companies like Stripe and Twitter making significant cuts. The hosts discuss the necessity for companies to adapt to changing economic conditions, focusing on profitability over growth.

They also critique the media's handling of stories, particularly a recent incident involving two pranksters posing as fired Twitter employees, highlighting the importance of fact-checking in journalism.

The episode concludes with a discussion on the upcoming midterm elections, analyzing polling data and potential outcomes, as well as the broader implications of political shifts in the U.S.

TLDR

The episode covers Twitter's advertiser boycott, tech layoffs, media accountability, and midterm election predictions.

Episode

1:28:51
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what the f what are you wearing Jason what oh Uber had a big week so this is the Uber Montclair crossover hat oh look
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at that all right and I also bought a Montclair shirt you bought that or I sent it to you oh what oh you got the
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watch in the mug oh you don't know about the Apple Montclair watch or the commemorative mug
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or the new tech you don't know about the new neckties that are coming from Montclair it's actually nettec oh my God
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oh so good I'd just say somebody got their be quiet I'm not saying that I got a hundred thousand dollar sponsorship
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but we don't have a rule in the agreement about logo placement do we listen Jay Cal if anyone was willing to
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sponsor you every square inch your clothing will be covered in ads like a race car driver it is look you'd be like
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wearing a jumpsuit every day you know Montclair sponsorships are great this is five five dollars plus 17 of shipping
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from France on its Etsy I'm ready to go [Music] Rain Man David said we open source it to the fans and
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they've just gone crazy [Music] how was everyone's week what'd you guys do this week ah just busy working
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um trying to be helpful where I can and that'll be the extent of my comments today how is Market Street this time of
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year look there's all sorts of wild report I've gotten all sorts of inbound from people asking me if I'm like
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leaving craft Ventures to do something at Twitter no it's not true we're just Jason and I are just pitching in and
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helping out while Elon establishes his permanent team at that company elon's the CEO he's running it he's the decider
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he's making the decisions and that some of us are just kind of helping out in any way we can and that's really the
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extent of it it's a you know very much part-time thing we're just helping a friend but it's been like
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blown up in by the media into something much more than it actually is it is a hundred percent accurate I am still
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doing my day job podcasting investing in 100 companies a year just helping out on
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the margins uh that's it the end I do want to try talking about one issue that's already public because it's
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already been tweeted so Elon had a tweet this morning about how there's now like
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an Advertiser boycott going on and This falls on the heels of a bunch of reports that came out over the last
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couple of days that supposedly there's been a big influx of like racist tweets and Jason I actually saw what was really
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going on which was it's all not true I mean what happened is that within hours of Elon taking over the company on
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Friday there was a 4chan attack where basically people from this message board created Bots to post hundreds of
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thousands of spam messages that contained racist words and epithets and within hours this has been detected and
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Yol who runs the the trust and safety implementation he met with me and Jason and Elon directed him to
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shut it down and he UL actually posted a tweet story about it that's the only reason I feel comfortable talking about
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it is because you already posted a tweet storm but maybe people don't haven't seen it or they haven't
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connected all the Dots here but what's really I think unfair about this is that as you've as you've seen it's not like
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your feed was all of a sudden filled with racist things these were spam accounts or bot accounts that were
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posting to zero followers they generally have zero followers or if they do have followers it's other bot accounts right
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so they're posting racist tweets Into The Ether so to speak it's not degrading anyone's experience it was shut down
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promptly but then what happens is these activist groups they're monitoring the fire hose right and so they publish a
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report saying that racist tweets have gone up 500 since Elon took over Twitter the truth is Elon hasn't even had a
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chance to change anything about the content moderation policies he's posted that like guys I haven't even I haven't
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changed anything about content moderation whatever the rules are they're the same rules that existed
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prior to him taking over and this is just an organized operation by people who want to create that report so then
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these activist groups basically publish this report they feed it to news outlets
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and then somebody then takes those those reports and then feeds them to advertisers and you get a boycott but I
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think the point here is that Elon didn't do this this is being manufactured by people who are not operating in good
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faith they are trying to manufacture an incident that they can then use to hurt the company yeah and it was thwarted
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immediately and fixed have you guys seen episode 333 of the Lex Friedman podcast
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he um he interviews Andre carpathy who is really I mean one of the great minds of our of our time particularly around
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Ai and ML and the question that Lex asked which Andre expounded on which I think is really
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interesting is what is the next generation of bots look like and I think where the problem gets very hard
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for all platforms so this is not a Twitter Twitter specific discussion is that you can now generate such real life
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like human images that are unique and you can also generate high quality text to things like gpt3 that's also you know
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that can offense essentially push the boundaries of you know a low-level Turing test
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I think the real problem over time for Bots for spam for coordinated attacks on any
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platform is that when you use these tools you're going to have to become very sophisticated in how you try to
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detect them and then to block them it's a really interesting discussion between you know two pretty meaningfully smart
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people carpathy was the head of uh autopilot at Tesla right autopilot Vision yeah so he's really smart yeah I
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have no doubt that Elon is going to do a much better job stopping bots on Twitter
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once he has a chance to do it because he's got this amazing team of AI engineers and and he's just going
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to be more focused on it you know what I like the most about what I heard this week is the idea that
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you can do either micro payments or subscription to third-party content providers because I think so much of my
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news feed is delivered to me through the Twitter app and then I click on an article and then it's like a paywall or
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it's some sort of difficulty in kind of accessing the content having some integration there or some ability to
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kind of make a micro purchase to read an article it's going to be I think a super
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feature the other thing that I would love Twitter to experiment with is if you have a micropayments model to
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Publishers it would be great if you could publish content without a byline allow The Economist and see what that
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does to information quality right you know if you if you if you do not get any credit to your individual name for
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writing stuff but instead it goes to the Masthead publication whatever it is the
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times the post I think it could have a really important Behavior change in how journalists cover the news it's worth
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experimenting with at least and if you're paying them enough money I think that you could probably demand that
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Facebook could probably demand that today you know strip the byline away and just it just says New York Times just
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like today it just says The Economist yeah it is a um The Economist is a very polarizing gig in journalism for that
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reason uh there are going to be actually a lot of journalists who would prefer to
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have their byline taken off one of the problems with journalism today is even if you're doing reporting in good faith
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tramoth and you put your byline on there harassment you know threats Etc can become very acute if you're just
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covering certain topics and so I actually think a lot of you know writers and journalists would opt into this they
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might prefer it I think they should because I think the two ends of the spectrum are better than this you know
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Gross Middle that we have the end of the spec one end of the spectrum is you have
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the New York Times The Washington Post and the economists with no byline and no attribution to reporters the other end
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is if you want to build a brand that's based on your name go start a sub stack yeah and I think that there's a very
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good balance there and the New York Times could Syndicate that as well but if you separate the two all of a sudden
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the news becomes more likely to be truthful news versus you know well disguised opinion the the
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other issue is you know for readers if you do choose to do a no byline publication you're really going to need
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time to build trust and for people to understand what you're doing because they will think you're taking the byline
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off in order to pursue a certain agenda right so that is the the that is the suspicion that can build up The
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Economist has been able to do this over decades with trusted reporting yeah and sub stack proves that you can have no
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reputation whatsoever and if you're publishing great content you can build a great business from scratch so yeah
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you don't need to pay your dues quote unquote by getting a byline at the New York Times to be a clever writer
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you can start that business today and get paid so I think the New York Times should just focus on being the New York
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Times and sub Stacks should focus on individual people and I think if you could clean up the middle that would be
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much better for all of us anyways I'm excited for you guys to help out and pitch in I hope you guys do some good
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with it I'd love to come back and use Twitter more often can we talk about the reporting that happened
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with the two guys that trolled the journalists and pretended to be fired employees because I actually thought
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that was such an interesting moment this week that all the journalists immediately parroted it because it fed
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their narrative Johnson checking done there was no reporting done and then several of them including I think
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Deirdre Bosa from CNBC came out and publicly apologized for that report and if folks uh listening aren't familiar
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with what happened these two guys came out they pretended to be fired Twitter employees on Monday walked out with a
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box up and they were like hey we just got fired it's terrible life is awful no it's even worse husband and wife you
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know the guy's name was one guy's name is Rahul ligma and the other guy's name was like Mike Johnson so the whole thing
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was ligma Johnson so I now here's what's so funny about due diligence hold on I read this story without giving away that
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punch line to my kids all of my kids immediately started howling they're like Dad if you say
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these two names are ligma Johnson and I was like oh my God and so you know when when like you know pre-teens can figure
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this out but the journalism industry could not that is kind of a very telling sign Friedberg made the key observation
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which is they didn't figure it out because they didn't want to because it fit their narrative so they don't they
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don't fact check things that fit their narrative this was my point about journalism I it just it was so poignant
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to me this week when this happened particularly as it relates to Twitter and the importance of call it open
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journalism or citizen journalism and the Integrity of kind of you know of the voices that we all kind of trust as our
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our kind of journalistic authorities that these guys came out and they were pawned right outside Twitter's offices
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into telling a story that fit their Sensational narrative and it was really a kind of poignant moment for me well do
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you remember that story I think it was originally a rolling stone and then Rachel maddowell Amplified it where it
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was in Oklahoma City where supposedly all these Mega Republicans were eating horse Pace because Trump told them to
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and they were and this is basically I thought it was like a coveted therapy and then they were going to the
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emergency rooms of all the hospitals and then they were turning away heart attack
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victims because there are so many of these these people going to the emergency room anyway it all turned out
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to be like a made-up story like a hoax but the media reported it because the story was too good right it just it fit
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too many of their preconceptions there's also one there's another Vector sex which is live coverage is
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um you know you really have to to be careful because when doing live people will call in and say oh they're at the
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scene of an accident and then they will do a baba buoy or whatever you know kind
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of Charades and so without fact checking and without saying hey we haven't confirmed this yet but these two
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employees are claiming this people want to get real-time coverage it's fine to do real-time coverage I think everybody
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in the audience has to understand so much credit what about the editor there was a picture and it said ligma Johnson
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why are you covering for these people I'm not covering I'm just trying to explain it no you're gonna even let me
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unpack the whole point let me unpack the whole point there's also you interrupted
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me well here's the thing there is a different standard for live news coverage and then there we've ripped out
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fact checking from a lot of these Publications and basic fact checking and a little bit of time I'm explaining why
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they make this mistake I'm not protecting them you want to know the reason they make it that's part of it
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but they've also ripped out fact checking and then they are in such a race to get the clicks on social media
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no no here's what's going on if the story fits their priors they run with it immediately and they don't do any fact
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checking because they don't want to know that it's not true that's what's going on there is an element let's check a
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story if it's a narrative they don't like because they're gonna they're gonna try and make sure it's not true yeah
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that's true of both sides and they'll use proxies this thing there's only one mainstream media this is the mainstream
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media who's the alternative Fox is uh the the number one network the alternative to the number one network is
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do you think journalists do this tell me the writer tell me the writer on sub stack wow there's a lot of different
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ones there so I who got fooled what sub stock writer got fooled by ligma Johnson
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fooled by ligma Johnson I don't think so I'm not defending don't make me just defend ligma I'm not defending we are
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both sidesing it I'm not both sizing it I'm telling you what is happening in journalism today they have ripped out
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fact checking and they are in a race to beat each other because the first person
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to get the story up gets a clicks that's the dysfunctional thing they try to create a story when there was no story
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there they agree with that as well they went and camped out outside of an office
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mid-market Street yes and they said hey there's this Sensational thing happening
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and there was no Sensational thing happening correct and so the little drop that fell into their laps the little
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thing that fell into their laps became the story because that's the story they wanted to see created there was no story
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beforehand that then that there were all these people being fired walking out with boxes and then they said let's go
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send live TV producers down there they sent the live TV producers down there and then the same things
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they did the same thing in New York at Bears to read the cover when they had other major layoffs at Bear Stearns and
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stuff like that during the financial crisis of course they sent people to do live coverage there not defending it I'm
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just explaining to you what's going on in the background as well with live TV and and the gutting of newsrooms and
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having no fact checking a lot of these stories go out but what about 20 years ago my 11 year olds and 10 year olds
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better copy editors than these adults at these that's crazy incredible Publications my kids started howling
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they were like Dad do you understand what you just said there's a league budget yeah I mean awesome I mean come
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on this is like prepubescent humor that these people fell for it it's ridiculous
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it's embarrassing it's certainly embarrassing yeah it is embarrassing and this connects with the 4chan board it's
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the same problem this is a grievance industrial complex right they're manufacturing grievances it's funny in
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the case of ligma Johnson it's not funny in the case of the 4chan board but these
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are people who are inventing stories because yeah to manipulate media because they
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know it's so easy to manipulate the media right anyways big shout out to Rahul ligma that was a great stunt well
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played sir it happens to be a huge fan of the all-in podcast apparently sir come on as the bestie guesty anytime he
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wants oh no well no definitely not please all right we should talk about layoffs and Tack lift 13 riff 700
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employees let go yesterday stripe 14 riff a thousand employees open door chime Dapper Labs all hundreds of
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employees Open Door the most significant they're 550 18 percent Dapper 22 percent uh and Twitter we'll
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see what the Riff winds up being but that's occurring as we're taping here so and then Jason Apple did a pause Amazon
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did a pause right and Google and Facebook yeah maybe trying maybe signaling a pause but haven't they've been hiring
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like in absolutely uh at a crazy crazy pace and we'll pull up the chart here actually it's instructive to look at
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Facebook and Google because they have not slowed down by any stretch of the imagination
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just by the raw numbers uh this all started to Peak in June and now it's starting up again so there's a website
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uh layoffs.fyi that's been tracking all these layoffs you can see the number of layoffs these are kind of major layoffs
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and the number of employees impacted been pretty consistent in the third quarter it started to die down in
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September from the Peak in May and June and now right yeah it feels like this is the
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double dip we were talking about I think this is the beginning this is not even unpack it well I think that we had if
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you take a very balanced view of what happened this week you have to start I think with the
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Federal Reserve and really what they said is rates will probably be higher than all of you think
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and they'll be higher for longer than all of you want and again without debating whether you
00:17:22
know that's going to come to pass or not the thing that you can do is you can build a little sensitivity model to
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understand the mathematical implication of it and basically what it means is that the dollar that's right in front of
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you is now meaningfully more important than the dollar that's far far away from you
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so let's just assume that you know the FED funds rate goes to five and a half percent or so
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even five let's let's go to the optimists and say it's only going to go to five tech companies have to achieve 500 basis
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points above that minimum so we all have to generate 10 to 11 percent returns for us to be on a
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risk-adjusted basis better than a Government Bond the problem with that is all of a sudden
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you know if you're trying to generate cash even three or four years from now it's not worth that much you need to
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generate dollars today and so you know they are really re-prioritizing the value of short-term profits and that's
00:18:21
going to affect how companies get money the cost of capital so how much dilution
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you have to take so I think this is what companies are now bearing down for they're realizing oh man I need to get
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my cost structure way in line it is way better now just to put think about this contrast it's way better to grow at 20
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and be profitable than it is to grow at 100 and burn money because it's not clear where that second
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company is going to get the incremental dollars they need for growth and that's just a mathematical realization when
00:18:53
rates are five percent risk-free rates are five percent so I think this is this is that moment where you see that pivot
00:18:58
from pivot growth to profit yeah yep we've been talking about it for six months but this is this is this is how
00:19:06
it is Manifest in Silicon Valley companies is of scale is through layoffs and cost reductions and cost savings
00:19:14
so the investments in future growth are reduced and the timeline to drive greater profits
00:19:22
is improved I think what if what Elon is going to do at Twitter or what is reported so this is nothing
00:19:29
to do with anything anyone told me just what I've read in the reporting it's accurate that he's going to cut so
00:19:34
deep he's going to cut 30 40 50 potentially of the employee base it really sets a new standard for how
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profitable a tech company can get and again I'll give credit to a Twitter poster named post Market who I didn't
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give credit to a few weeks ago when I read this tweet which I think was a good one which was
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that elon's really going to show everyone just how profitable these tech companies can be just how lean they can
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be run and you know when you're doing a 10 riff or a 13 riff you may or may not even be
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getting to profitability with that riff when you cut 30 40 50 deep and you can actually turn a real profit on a
00:20:14
business an Enterprise scale business like a Twitter or like many other enterprise software companies that are
00:20:19
out there right now it really kind of sets a new standard that a lot of folks might then end up
00:20:23
saying you know what maybe we should go deeper and there could be the case that private Equity firms take a look at this
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and there's a lot of these distressed mid cap and small cap software companies out there that private Equity firms now
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realize wow you don't actually need 50 of the workforce in order to keep the product running and to drive to
00:20:42
profitability and you could see a bit of a flurry of buyout activity as more folks come in and maybe try and
00:20:49
mimic the Elon Playbook so you know that's one kind of prediction I think may arise if Elon is successful in
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making Twitter a much more profitable Enterprise it could set a new model that catalyzes a lot of other M A activity a
00:21:03
lot of other buyout activity of these distressed small and mid-cap companies uh by uh by other actors can I build on
00:21:09
what you're saying Nick could you please just throw up that tweet that I sent just for
00:21:14
all of these guys to look at because I think it's incredible so to your point this is an incredible uh slide just an
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incredible slide and essentially what it shows for those folks that are not watching this on YouTube is it
00:21:25
essentially shows the private software universe and then the public software Universe at different levels of
00:21:32
valuation so as an example right now there are 15 companies private companies that are valued greater than 10 billion
00:21:40
dollars and there are 40 public ones that are valued greater than 10 billion there are
00:21:45
50 companies between you know more than 5 billion but only 60 that are public that are valued more than five
00:21:53
and here's what's crazy there are 400 companies who have an average valuation of 3
00:22:00
billion and then there are already 70 companies in the public markets where they have a
00:22:06
billion dollars of next 12 months of Revenue and it just goes to show you to your point freeberg
00:22:13
if these folks have to generate an 11 hurdle rate their cost of capital is 11 percent
00:22:21
the companies on the left will have to go through a lot of very difficult cost cutting potentially head count
00:22:27
reductions you know repricing of the product all kinds of things yeah no not none of them have oh of
00:22:37
these many of these are the left tracker you're on the Left Right 400 there there's almost 500 companies here that
00:22:43
have to do an enormous amount of work so that they have a chance to be on the right hand side of this chart the point
00:22:49
is that you didn't have to do this when rates were zero there was just an abundance of free money and risk seeking
00:22:55
and duration that is now out of the market I think there's also a story that of the 200
00:23:01
companies that are software public software companies that you see on the right some number of them will need to go
00:23:07
private in order to do the restructuring that the market is demanding that they do in order to get rightly valued and to
00:23:13
your point it will happen at meaningfully lower valuations than where they probably went public or their last
00:23:18
drive around which will you guys as you guys enormous instructions yeah if you guys look at these 200 companies on the
00:23:24
right how many of them do you think go private over the next 18 months to get restructured Allah what Elon is showing
00:23:31
everyone is possible on Twitter 18 is 18 months is hard to predict but to your point Freeburg I think if you look at
00:23:37
the number of them that are unprofitable at least half of them will have difficulty and about so I think about
00:23:44
two-thirds of these companies really have no line of sight to profitability in the next two to three years and again
00:23:50
if you if you layer in this cost of capital argument all of those companies David will have
00:23:56
to raise money at very egregious terms in order to keep themselves going as a public business in which case their
00:24:05
alternative is to go private in a PE transaction so it's probably at least half these businesses I mean it's a lot
00:24:12
there's 100 PE deals to be done yeah 100 wow Stacks what do you think because you know these businesses and
00:24:19
the models I mean some of them it's hard to get profitable if you're a scaling SAS business right like you have to get
00:24:24
to a certain scale before it's possible well I don't I don't that's like a very specific question of like how many of
00:24:30
them are gonna get acquired by pe firms versus going public or going private after being public that's that's like a
00:24:37
very specific question I think the larger point is just that it feels to me like the economy is headed off a cliff
00:24:42
right now I mean I can tell you within our larger portfolio of companies like I can see the trajectory so after
00:24:50
q1 board meetings I would say about two-thirds of portfolio companies were hitting their numbers and one-third were
00:24:57
missing and it still appeared to be like problems related to those specific companies not a macro Trend I would say
00:25:04
after Q2 board meetings two-thirds were missing and one-third were hitting their
00:25:08
numbers and it you could start to feel okay maybe there's like a macro Trend here and I would say after
00:25:13
Q3 board meetings like now the entire portfolio is is reforcasting uh maybe there's like a handful of
00:25:20
companies here or there that aren't if you're one of those congratulations but like even the best companies our
00:25:26
portfolio now are seeing major headwinds and this is just I think an economy-wide
00:25:30
slowdown do you think there's restructuring possible I mean can these companies yeah because let me just ask
00:25:36
in the public markets do you think those public companies can get restructured as
00:25:40
public companies in order to yeah it just yes it will yes of course it is extremely expensive well it's expensive
00:25:46
I don't even think it's will I think it's just expensive yeah I mean coinbase as an example like
00:25:51
look take coinbase versus carvana right these are both businesses that issued convertible debt sort of right before
00:26:00
things got very very hard and if you look at where their convertible debt trades it's trading basically at an
00:26:06
implied yield of about 12 or 13 both companies now one is probably you know a legitimate bankruptcy risk which is
00:26:14
carvana that's what the market would think whereas the other one you know I think it has a very fortified balance
00:26:19
sheet and could weather the storm coinbase but unfortunately in a moment where you know rates are again the
00:26:26
risk-free rate goes to five five and a half our cost of capital to do business goes to 10 or 11. these guys have to pay
00:26:33
12 or 13 my gosh it's really really deluded to be in business right now so it just goes to show you that you can
00:26:41
stay public but if you want to get incremental money to cover your burn the only way you can do it without really
00:26:48
you know blowing up your cap table and doing a massive recap will be through convertible debt but it
00:26:55
has a huge overhang and you risk turning the keys over to the debt holders of the
00:27:00
company so the alternative for that business is to go into the hands of private equity
00:27:06
and get out of the spotlight of these public markets but public private Equity is very smart and the thing that's
00:27:14
happened to them is they can't raise debt right so what do you think they do they
00:27:18
just have to pay 50 less than what they would be willing to pay before because they have to write you know 100 Equity
00:27:24
check so right there is no free lunch anymore I think is the big is the big point to to point out anywhere in the
00:27:31
market right now I think one of the things I'm most concerned about or would be is I was talking with a friend who
00:27:37
works at a private you know unicorn software company any we talked about the numbers of the business and I was like
00:27:44
oh that company's probably worth X and I gave him a number and then I asked him how much money they've raised and
00:27:49
they've raised more than x so I was like dude your options are worthless like you
00:27:54
know this is a real problem I think that's probably going to become very systemic
00:27:58
for scaled unicorn software companies what happens to these businesses sacks in the market
00:28:04
you know as they kind of need another round but the value of the company is now less than the total cash that
00:28:09
they've raised that all is sitting as preferred stock listen it's it's survival of the
00:28:14
quickest those who are most willing to adapt the most quickly are going to survive and the ones that are stubborn
00:28:20
and refuse to accept the new regime the market regime are gonna die we showed that chart remember that chart from
00:28:26
Sequoia months ago on this podcast remember that where it basically showed what happens if you're a company that
00:28:34
doesn't cut burn until the very end then you're still going to run out of money and die but if you make the cut right
00:28:39
away quickly you you have enough Runway to weather the storm and I think that what we've seen is you know at my firm
00:28:47
craft yeah this is exactly it yeah we showed This months ago we've been begging our Founders to embrace this we
00:28:52
did a portfolio a review with our entire set of founders of our portfolio companies we did one in February when we
00:29:00
felt the markets were changing and we did another one in May and we showed the slide and this is the most important
00:29:06
thing for Founders to internalize is you have to make the changes quickly you know one way for them to think about it
00:29:12
is let's say say you're a unicorn company okay and you raised at the peak let's say second half of 2021 you raise
00:29:18
100 million dollars at a billion dollar valuation and let's say you've got 50 million left in the bank right so you've
00:29:23
burned 50 million a lot of these Founders are thinking that 50 million they've got left is only 5 dilution but
00:29:29
that's what it was historically if you were to raise a new round today you might only be valued at 250. so that 50
00:29:36
million you have left is actually 20 dilution and that's if you could even raise which might be very very hard the
00:29:43
most important thing Founders can do is forget about the historical terms on which you raise that money forget about
00:29:49
how much money you were burning in the past just think about how much money you have in the bank today impute evaluation
00:29:56
to it so you really internalize how much dilution that money represents and then
00:30:01
create a new plan moving forward to preserve that cash as long as possible can I say something else quickly on top
00:30:06
of this that's I think that's really good advice the thing that again people should do is
00:30:12
you should just build a little spreadsheet for yourself to understand what the alternative financing options
00:30:19
are for people who are in the business of investing so David to your point the current three-month t-bill rate is four
00:30:26
percent you know you can buy munis now between four and five percent that are that are
00:30:31
Triple Tax advantaged right you can buy uh high quality corporate bonds that are
00:30:36
six seven eight percent and so it's stocks that have a dividend yield of five percent of growth growing
00:30:43
Market leading growing and so all of them dividend yield exactly and so all of a sudden like turning around and
00:30:49
giving it to a company where there is no end in sight in terms of it doesn't get
00:30:53
you to profitability is a really really hard thing to do I was talking to an entrepreneur David
00:30:59
soloff just yesterday and he said it really well he's like listen you know I'm not a macro
00:31:06
Economist I'm not trying to forecast but he's like what I understood yesterday this is David
00:31:11
talking about the FED as an entrepreneur the angle of attack has changed the FED
00:31:16
has said this is not going to be some triangle Sawtooth it's not going to go up sharply and then come back down
00:31:23
sharply which is what we would all want if we wanted things to get back to normal sooner
00:31:30
the angle of attack is now a little bit slower which means it's going to take longer to get where we need to be
00:31:36
and then we're going to stay there for a lot longer than we want and when you roll those two things together a lot of
00:31:42
companies may run out of money and so if you can't get to default alive you have to look at your cost structure
00:31:48
and figure out how to right size this thing because the cost of capital is just going to be
00:31:54
really really expensive and this was the fed's goal right they wanted to take away this free Capital they want to slow
00:31:59
the economy down and it seems like they're making progress they did the 75 basis point
00:32:04
hike this week but we're adding jobs to the economy we have more job openings and we had 2.6 percent
00:32:11
GDP growth so I guess my question to the to everybody here is what is the Fed gonna have to do or can
00:32:18
they stop this consumer and this growth it's very strange right Powell Powell said he'd rather over correct
00:32:27
and break things because he has a toolbox to fix the broken bones but he doesn't have a toolbox to fix if they
00:32:34
under correct and they have rampant inflation I mean not more explicit you can't get
00:32:40
Jason so he's going to take rates until demand is destroyed and enough demand is
00:32:45
destroyed such that inflation is tamed but that has huge implications to all of us because we all have to do our job
00:32:52
trying to build a company trying to raise money trying to invest money it's just getting much much much harder
00:32:59
than I even thought so like you know for me I'm like wow I thought that we could
00:33:04
get through the worst of this by mid-23 but now you have to plan for the worst which means okay now I'm thinking that
00:33:10
man rates could be higher for much longer which means you know we could be in this market until early 25 and you
00:33:17
may say hey that's way too conservative yeah but you have to plan for conservatism in this point so how do I
00:33:24
invest money right now honestly I'm like hmm I should just put more into T bills
00:33:29
isn't that crazy if a company's like hmoth can have another 10 15 20 million bucks I'm like wow I mean I don't think
00:33:35
that that gets you anywhere and oh by the way that 10 or 20 million dollars I can generate four percent
00:33:40
what a what a tough trade-off right for well for somebody who has access to private markets which should be high
00:33:46
growth companies to take the guaranteed four over the 50x 25x10x whatever we're trying to bet on here yeah that's not
00:33:54
it's not just the guaranteed four but if you want to take Tech risk then you could go buy the corporate bonds of some
00:34:00
high quality companies for the 10 or 11 so you take moderate risk so you're also
00:34:03
competing with that not to zero risk can you explain that for the listeners what
00:34:06
that corporate debt is and why it you know pays more sure there are there are you know high quality public companies
00:34:12
tech companies that have bonds and that's corporate debt and they obviously have to pay a higher rate than what the
00:34:18
treasury pays because the treasury is is risk-free and corporations could default
00:34:23
so there is some risk to it it's not zero risk but you know it's like if you're willing to take Tech risk then
00:34:29
why wouldn't you buy a bond at 10 meaning the equity always has to beat that threshold return but but hey can we
00:34:36
just go back to the jobs report for a second I mean the U.S government could default but it's considered the least
00:34:41
likely to default of all issuers of debt in the world and that's right yeah that's why people call it the
00:34:49
risk-free rate because it is the least risky the U.S can always repay its debt because the debt is denominated in
00:34:55
dollars and the treasury can always at the end of the day print more money that would just be monetizing the debt other
00:35:00
countries that owe money in dollars and obviously don't control the U.S mint they can't do that so they could
00:35:06
actually default but since we're the world's Reserve currency we're never going to default however the dollars
00:35:12
that you get paid back by the US government might be worth a lot less in the future because of inflation and
00:35:17
that's the real risk you have to think about but there's no default risk right whereas with corporate debt there is but
00:35:23
let's just go back to this the Jaws picture for a second Jason you asked about this so there is news this morning
00:35:30
that we added 261 000 jobs in October and obviously given that there's an election in a few days then you know the
00:35:36
administration is eager to point to this but if you dig a little deeper in the report I just posted the link there you
00:35:42
see in the Raw numbers that there's actually 328 000 fewer employed Americans and the number of unemployed
00:35:50
Americans actually increased 36 000. so and the labor force participation rate declined for the Third
00:35:56
consecutive month to 62.2 percent so like I don't really understand like how all these numbers add up but the point
00:36:03
is like the data is very mixed our new and and this very definitely negativity in there
00:36:09
and this feels to me like the last gasp of the bull market where there's like this residual job creation but you look
00:36:18
at like just what's happened in the last week where it's stripe cutting I mean Stripes probably the single highest
00:36:24
quality I think it's probably the most valuable private company okay but but like software pure software
00:36:31
company they had a 14 cut you're starting to see now the riffs really start to pile up so I think we're at the
00:36:38
beginning now of a long cycle of the unemployment rate going up I mean it just feels like the economy is slowing
00:36:45
so fast the markets are you know they've been puking now for six months it just feels like this is the beginning of a
00:36:53
like really serious recession yet we had GDP growth yet we had job uh openings we
00:36:59
had two quarters we had two quarters of net negative GDP growth this is when we had the debate about what our recession
00:37:04
is it was true that if you looked at growth in nominal terms that appear to be strong and then it was net negative
00:37:11
once you subtracted the inflation rate you know we said several months ago my prediction was a double-dipper session
00:37:16
where you had this shallow technical recession then it bounced back in Q3 but now I think we're headed into the second
00:37:23
part of it which is the real recession a recession characterized by joblessness and you're starting to see economists
00:37:28
say we're going to go from three point something percent unemployment rate to say five or six percent unemployment
00:37:33
next year so I think we're just beginning to see the the job Cuts start to add up
00:37:39
this is I think this is what Powell met which is you know he'll take it as far as it takes and then he can fix it on
00:37:46
the back end by reintroducing you know quantitative easing and reintroducing lower interest rates to
00:37:52
stimulate demand but there's what are the odds he gets this right it seems to me that the FED
00:37:59
has a habit of reacting too slowly they were too slow to react to inflation my guess is that they'll be too slow to
00:38:06
react to the recession so we'll end up with a period of rates being higher than they should too long and then they will
00:38:13
correct they'll drop rates but that could be two years from now and meanwhile we could be in a pretty deep
00:38:17
recession two charts for you to look at the GDP uh by quarter and then after that the labor participation rate so
00:38:26
there's your GDP q1 Q2 being negative Q3 bouncing back we'll see what happens in
00:38:30
Q4 here's your fed Force participation rate for labor as we discussed the thing with the labor participation rate that
00:38:37
we're still not sort of like truly factoring in is like you know we had a million Americans die because of covid
00:38:42
and you know starting in that Trump presidency we lost like seven or eight million immigrants
00:38:48
so those eight million people have a huge effect on this number yeah right and it's not properly really factored in
00:38:54
because if if you see that at the start of the Trump presidency it's just it's it just fell off a cliff basically
00:39:00
and you also have people who retired early that was a big Trend and this all peaked in 2000 labor participation
00:39:06
hitting that like 67 68 I think it's the peak and just slowly going down as Boomers
00:39:13
retire early because they made so much on their 401ks and homes and then you're right your mouth we've
00:39:19
had negative we've really cut immigration in the last whatever five six years I think there's an element in
00:39:24
here that's missing on how much people individually are finding other ways to earn income that doesn't qualify and
00:39:31
show up in the labor force numbers people have set up Etsy stores Shopify stores
00:39:38
have tripled since covid people are making more money on YouTube on Instagram on Tick Tock than ever
00:39:45
before there's a whole new class of work that revolves around the individual creating their own business creating
00:39:53
their own income stream that's simply taken off and have taken off it was it was kind of
00:39:58
a trend pre-covered but it really took off during covid and there's an element of this that's really more about the
00:40:04
transition of how people work and how they earn that isn't reflected in these numbers I
00:40:08
don't think that the idea that everyone should go be an employee at a company is
00:40:12
necessarily the right way to think about Labor going forward the amount of money
00:40:16
that individuals are earning is probably the better way to frame this up going forward and as really thinking about the
00:40:22
earning power and the economic health of this country this is something important you're
00:40:26
bringing up here gig workers are about nine percent of the uh Workforce and uh Uber and Dara had um
00:40:33
they they grew over 70 this year but I think the big number that I watched for was drivers are making 36 dollars an
00:40:40
hour in the United States working for Uber so you're exactly right people are finding other options whether it's
00:40:45
doordash or Uber and that doesn't qualify in labor force right because they're no contract independent
00:40:51
contractors are counted yeah they are counted I that's based on my preliminary research if somebody wants to fact check
00:40:56
us that'd be great but my understanding is independent contractors which is what
00:41:00
gig workers are classified under are counted in labor participation I don't know how they're counted so uh we'll
00:41:06
we'll look that up and figure that out there was a story in BBC that the bank of England has now warned that the UK is
00:41:14
facing its longest recession since uh Records began some of this is getting to be fear porn yeah but look here's what I
00:41:23
think is scary about going into a recession is number one you don't really know how long it's going to take to get
00:41:27
out we know the average recession lasts about 18 months but the truth is once it
00:41:31
starts you just don't know and the second thing is you don't really know who's been stress tested people claim
00:41:36
that they can weather the storm but the truth is that there's no there's no way to simulate truly simulate a stress test
00:41:43
they claim they can but the only way is to really subject you know an institution to that pressure and that
00:41:49
stress and then you see if they come out the other side so that's the issue is you're just going into this it's there's
00:41:55
there's all there's a lot of unknown unknowns and and this is why I would just urge
00:42:00
Founders to be cautious is because if the recession ends up being shallower and shorter than people expect great
00:42:07
you'll be surprised to the upside but if the recession ends up being deeper and and longer than expected you don't want
00:42:13
to go out of business you want to be protected against that so again you know we've been saying this since February
00:42:18
and may but again I just reiterate I think it really makes sense for Founders to be conservative prioritize your
00:42:26
survival above all else you know this recession probably will last about two years you want to make sure you survive
00:42:32
it and to shama's point if you survive it with lower growth that's fine you can keep growing on the other end of this
00:42:37
thing but if you go out of business because you grew too fast then you're not going to get the chance to fix that
00:42:42
problem when the recession is over I just don't see anybody rewarding hyper growth that is burning a ton of cash
00:42:50
where you have to be back in Market every year because it's it's just very hard to feel
00:42:56
comfortable that the conditions on the field aren't going to be drastically different a year from now right it's not
00:43:02
like we know that it's going to be better or worse and I think that that uncertainty is actually really bad for
00:43:09
companies so to your point it's just like a lot of folks have tried to shy away David from actually revisiting their
00:43:16
valuations they've done these complicated converts and they've tried to basically you know
00:43:23
it's I think it's sort of like managing their ego or the board's ego and I think
00:43:28
like the next shooter drop has to be these Founders and these boards just saying okay let's just take the hard
00:43:34
medicine what's the real you know market clearing price and valuation let's get a
00:43:38
third party to price it and let's get new fresh equity and then move forward because if you don't do that and you
00:43:44
wait until everybody's trying to do it then it's going to be a really tough scenario so better to your point you
00:43:50
know this is why I like stripe it's so smart better to cut now again it's always hard to let people go
00:43:56
but it's better to do that now than 18 months from now because you just have no idea how much more expensive or hard
00:44:04
it's going to be then and who's going to even be in the business of lending money or investing
00:44:09
money in 18 months and you know that that sounds pretty crazy but it's it's like I think that
00:44:13
that's that's the moment that we're in to your point uh Friedberg I did a little research here and um
00:44:19
according to the FED of St Louis if you accounted uh casual workers informal workers
00:44:28
over doing over 20 hours a week of informal work AKA gig work you would increase labor participation between a
00:44:35
half point and a point if you counted all of them maybe even uh slightly more than two percentage points higher so
00:44:41
probably about a point uh seems like a realistic way to look at Labor participation and of the eight points or
00:44:48
maybe now the six or seven points the ten percent it would then account for 10 to 20 of
00:44:53
the 10 drop in labor participation it's just alarming statistics because if most
00:44:59
people have most of their personal net worth tied up in their home asset and their home values are
00:45:06
declining are going to decline and we're seeing this dramatic spike in Consumer Credit in the U.S it paints a
00:45:14
really ugly picture for the next two years wow guys I'm just looking at I'm just looking at the markets today git
00:45:19
Labs down 15 snowflakes down 13 Mondays down 14 percent uh at least down 30 percent in one day a Yelp is down 17
00:45:30
percent is down 16 percent so it's just a horrible oh my gosh the cloud computing index wcld has hit a new
00:45:40
low for the year it's down to 23 bucks I think the previous low was 25 is down almost eight percent today and this is
00:45:47
on a day in which the NASDAQ is down less than one percent so the point is they're rotating out of growth stocks
00:45:53
yeah it's just brutal and so listen if you're a startup founder you got to realize these are like some of the
00:45:58
highest quality public so Leo's down 40 today twilio is down 37 in a day today whoa but guys this is this is just math
00:46:09
you know it's not a judgment on any of these companies it's just pure math this is why I think you have to be utterly
00:46:15
unemotional in this moment and if you're if you're a CEO running a company particularly a SAS business
00:46:23
you have to really figure out how to how to right size your cost basis and make this money last profitable
00:46:30
industrial companies are Bill Gurley had a tweet a tweet about this a few months
00:46:34
ago about how the biggest mistake people make in riffs is they just do like a tepid riff like a 10 ish riff and they
00:46:41
have to come back and they do it again and they do it again this is what I think the the Elon action this week
00:46:46
really sets a standard he shows the entirety of Silicon Valley that you can cut deep and you can turn a profit and
00:46:52
you can do it fast and it could set a new standard for how folks are managing this Jack Welch used to in his
00:46:58
management principles recommend dropping the bottom 10 of people every year and so you know the 10 13 Cuts don't really
00:47:05
pass muster as a public market investor kind of looks at the the management across these different companies to turn
00:47:11
a profit they're going to say the folks that are making the deepest cuts the fastest are the ones that are going to
00:47:15
get valued it's unfortunate and it's a difficult circumstance for everyone in Silicon Valley to deal with from the
00:47:21
employees to the investors to the public and private shareholders it's really brutal one quick question for you guys
00:47:26
really it's really just this kind of Market motivation that's underway right now here's the chart uh and my question
00:47:31
for you is when do Google and Facebook stop this I mean if you look at the number of employees being added it is
00:47:39
truly extraordinary here's the chart and this includes the latest quarter so they
00:47:43
are not turning off hiring yet what do you think hold on didn't they announce a hiring freeze
00:47:52
they announced that they were at Google they announced that they were going to hold people accountable to better
00:47:57
performance and they were going to go do more with less and then they added more
00:48:00
people Facebook said that they would do a hiring three percent today yeah Facebook said it would do a hiring
00:48:06
freeze well whatever jobs last quarter yeah well you're right they just announced
00:48:12
the hiring freeze you look at Apple Apple just announced in non-r D functions a hiring freeze this is Apple
00:48:18
like the most valuable most profitable company in the world so if Apple basically is putting the brakes on
00:48:25
non-engineering hiring that tells you something about how fast the economy is slowing down I think that was a huge
00:48:31
signal yeah the point Freebird makes is so correct which is if you're doing a riff obviously there's a reason why but
00:48:38
I think we we're seeing too many riffs where the details of the Riff and the magnitude of the Riff don't match up
00:48:44
with what the objective of the Riff is the objective of the Riff for a lot of these companies should be to get them
00:48:51
cash flow positive or at least to put them on a Runway or a trajectory where they can get cash flow positive with
00:48:58
their existing cash on the balance sheet right they won't need to raise money again and we're seeing a lot of
00:49:04
companies where they don't achieve that and they have to come back again and again and hit it again and that creates
00:49:10
more turmoil for the company and it's more unfair for the employees by the way sex to that point I'll just say
00:49:17
how deep these come these companies are cutting and how you management is expressing shareholders how they're
00:49:22
going to turn a profit becomes a signal for those shareholders on whether or not
00:49:26
they want to stay in that stock and the companies that are doing it fast and are
00:49:30
doing it deep the investors and the shareholders say you do actually have a path that makes sense here I'm going to
00:49:35
stay in the stock cash today versus cash in the future sure off let me ask you a
00:49:38
question in terms of strategy for one of these companies let's say the Facebook Corporation or
00:49:44
perhaps even Google or apple even if they were to cut their expenses which might take obviously a
00:49:51
riff and then because their stock prices are so depressed right now maybe even a
00:49:55
mid cap one like a twilio or an Uber or an Airbnb if they were cut costs and then start buying back their shares
00:50:02
which some companies have been doing what would that do in terms of the Market's appreciation of those stocks or
00:50:07
management teams I think it's hard to tell I think that the if you have not lost investor trust
00:50:15
I think it would be really well rewarded if you have become unreliable and undisciplined
00:50:25
even those cuts I think would be met with some amount of excitement but but probably not a broad base support so
00:50:33
you know it then it just goes to narrative meaning if Google did it I think that people really trust Sundar
00:50:40
and Ruth and I think the stock would go Bonkers they would they would probably move very
00:50:46
quickly into the echelon of apple and apple is sort of a first among equals like they're just
00:50:53
they're just in a different class unto themselves Facebook I think is a little bit harder
00:50:58
because I think folks have gotten burned and you know they would have to make some really really deep Cuts but then
00:51:04
you know where do you do it you can't capitulate on this meta strategy but then the other part is where you
00:51:09
make all the money and so you have this huge morale issue that you have to manage so it's just a
00:51:15
really hard game to play just one more thought on on um on the rift stuff I think one thought
00:51:22
experiment for Founders is to think about what was your plan at the end of 2019 why do I say that because 2020 and
00:51:29
2021 were two of the most distorted years ever in the history of financial markets and the economy because we had
00:51:36
covet and then we had the reaction to covid right and so you saw there was this um you know zooms market cap hit
00:51:42
100 billion all the e-commerce companies were doing extremely well you you know you had all this money printing you know
00:51:48
you had zero interest rates and so on you had SAS companies hitting all-time Highs at the end of 2021 so we lived
00:51:55
through this incredibly distorted time so as a thought experiment go look at what your plan for 2020 was supposed to
00:52:02
be when you created it at the end of 2019 because that was the last time that you were thinking without any
00:52:08
distortions you know that were then created and I think if you were to go back and look at your 2020 plan again
00:52:15
created it at the end of 2019 you'd probably see that you could get by with half the head count you have now because
00:52:22
probably you doubled your head count during the last two years during these heady heady times and yet I think
00:52:27
Founders start thinking oh I can't go back to operating you know I can't operate at half the level of head count
00:52:32
but you were you were operating with half the level of head count by death definition at some earlier point I also
00:52:39
think sometimes I think what Founders say is what will people think if I cut 50 meaning all of a sudden the perceived
00:52:46
success of my business would be different and I think that this is where you have to realized no like there's a
00:52:51
lot of ego tied up in these things which slows people down from doing the thing that they need to do
00:52:57
yes it's a really it's a really it's hard to do I mean look at Airbnb as an example I mean they did this ginormous
00:53:04
riff during covid because they had no choice I mean they're they're Revenue went
00:53:09
essentially to zero and now the business is incredibly strong it's throwing off massive amounts of free cash flow and
00:53:15
the stock market seems to really love what Airbnb has done uh and a similar story over at Uber in terms of having
00:53:21
done significant riffs and probably could is still down almost 75 off its high right so when you say the stock market
00:53:30
love it so they're they're up today three percent so meaning they're not down 30 in one day but they have gone
00:53:37
down with the rest of the market they have gone down with the rest of the market
00:53:40
but it feels like the business I'm talking about the business fundamentals when you're throwing off almost a
00:53:44
billion dollars yeah now you're going to start people are going to perceive that
00:53:48
business maybe as uh of this cohort the flight to safety right or same thing with Uber throwing or free cash flow now
00:53:54
I think a lot of these names are gonna I don't know Airbnb right now but they do
00:53:58
on Uber I think the people throwing off the free cash flow are going to look pretty attractive
00:54:02
and be able to buy their stock back maybe all right let's talk about the midterms
00:54:08
a lot of big uh Senate races and obviously Governors uh Pennsylvania Georgia Arizona Wisconsin Ohio all
00:54:16
really important races sex what do you think well it looks to me like there's going
00:54:22
to be a republican wave there was an interesting article actually on CNN where they it's called five scary
00:54:27
numbers for Democrats and what they point to is that Biden right now has a 42 percent approval rating 61 percent of
00:54:38
the American people say he hasn't focused on the key problems so this is called the out of touch index 51 say the
00:54:44
economy is number one issue compared to only 15 for abortion and then 78 say we're on the wrong track I don't think
00:54:49
I've seen a right track wrong track index that was so negative and 75 percent of the country says we're in a
00:54:56
recession so you know when you look at polling numbers like that it must translate I think into a republican wave
00:55:04
and you have now Real Clear Politics currently has the GOP gaining four Senate seats so winning in the Arizona
00:55:10
Nevada Georgia and New Hampshire that's a big change from just a couple weeks ago and winning 31 House Seats so
00:55:17
this is this is kind of what it's looking like right now but look the the margin is still within the
00:55:23
within the margin of error on the polling so Nate silver has pointed out that within one standard deviation you
00:55:30
could either have a republican wave or you could have basically the Republicans fizzle out so it's going to be very
00:55:37
close but ultimately I think this breaks Republican yeah the to me the way that I've I'm looking at it right now is that
00:55:45
it seems like most scenarios the Republicans will have the majority in the house
00:55:51
and the real question is what happens in the Senate it's really really kind of a
00:55:55
coin flip and that's going to be really interesting to see so you know things where I thought would break Republican
00:56:02
in the Senate like Pennsylvania are now back to almost a you know a statistical Dead Heat
00:56:08
so it's a really interesting moment actually it's uh but most scenarios David I think you'd agree is that the
00:56:15
Republicans win the house and then there's a non there's a plurality of scenarios where they also win the Senate
00:56:21
the house will almost certainly go Republican but I think the Senate now the the official percentages are 55
00:56:26
percent likely to tip Republican but I I just think that in a wave year like this
00:56:31
where the wrong track sentiment is so high I think all these races that are a dead heat they're more likely to break
00:56:38
in One Direction as opposed to like a random distribution which is why I think you could just as easily end up with and
00:56:45
you know instead of it being a 5149 Senate it could be 55 45 because all these things could break the same way so
00:56:53
right now so I I would slightly disagree in Pennsylvania I think Oz has improved
00:56:58
as a candidate fetterman did that debate and since he suffered that stroke he kind of came across as somebody how do
00:57:04
we feel about that I I I had very very hard to watch that happen and yeah I mean the guy the guy has suffered a
00:57:11
stroke and is sad but he you know he doesn't present as someone who can be a senator right now I think what does the
00:57:17
science say about that like a re as a society is this a good idea to have somebody post-stroke be in office I'm
00:57:23
not picking any political side here I'm just talking about the the medical issue
00:57:26
Alice is actually doing the right thing right now which is he's not actually focusing on that issue because it's so
00:57:31
obvious he doesn't want to be seen as beating up on fetterman and instead he's a human he's focusing on the issues and
00:57:38
actually fetterman's issues are very unpopular in a state like Pennsylvania so I actually think for both reasons Oz
00:57:45
is going to win that I think fetterman's manifestly unqualified but also I think
00:57:49
his positions are fairly unpopular so I think Pennsylvania will will almost certainly tip so let me pull up the
00:57:55
chart here just so people can see Ohio is going Republican and then Arizona I think is really the interesting one
00:58:00
where Blake Masters is now tied after being behind Mark Kelly throughout this campaign he is now tied in New
00:58:09
is popular your guy is really unpopular and now he's tied interpretation it's the Peter too he was
00:58:18
he was doing really poorly I think because I think listen I think that I think that
00:58:23
Arizona is probably gonna be the closest race in the country I think it's gonna be a nail biter but I think Blake's
00:58:28
gonna pull that out sex what do you think are the biggest policy shifts that take place in this
00:58:34
country Host this predicted Red Wave is there anything that changes so just you know talk to folks about what's on the
00:58:42
docket from a legislative point of view going into the next congress with all these new candidates the reality is we
00:58:49
have a separation of powers in this country and you're gonna have to divide a government the Republicans will will
00:58:54
control Congress the Democrats will control the presidency and so as a result you're going to be largely in a
00:59:00
gridlock situation but gridlock may be a lot better than what we've had over the
00:59:04
last couple of years so you know you've had basically this orgy of spending and money Printing and I think that's going
00:59:10
to stop obviously the other thing that's going to happen is Republicans may not be able to pass
00:59:15
much legislation but they're going to do investigations and there's a lot of questions that need to be answered I
00:59:19
think about still about covid you know these lockdown policies that we had that started at the top at NIH why did they
00:59:26
happen we need to start having accountability for some of these horrible decisions that were made during
00:59:30
covid and there's been no willingness in Washington to hold anyone accountable at
00:59:34
a minimum they need to have some Congressional investigations and find out why we pursued such bad policies
00:59:40
over the last couple of years by the way did you see did you see what happened this week where the CDC
00:59:46
you know after this entire opioid epidemic and all of these lawsuits the CDC came out and actually said Hey
00:59:52
listen we need to really make sure that we're getting access putting opioids in the hands of
00:59:58
Americans who are really suffering with pain management and whatnot and I didn't
01:00:03
read the article to really understand the details but I just thought it was an incredible headline where it's like it's
01:00:08
just it's so counter to The Narrative of what we've been told is happening which
01:00:11
is like you know over prescription and misprescription if we learned anything during Covetous to question every
01:00:17
organization everybody and to really collect your own information while you know looking at these organizations we
01:00:25
trusted over time I know I look at the world differently now that you couldn't say covid was possibly a lab leak
01:00:31
without having your podcast taken down or being banned on YouTube and now propublica has done an investigation and
01:00:38
they're saying along with Vanity Fair and they're going to win a Pulitzer for this I bet
01:00:41
that this conspiracy theory from two years ago is probably actually the leading theory and that the the Wuhan
01:00:49
lab Lab was showing if you didn't see it reporting an incident in late November of last year uh before covet broke 2019.
01:00:58
it's really it's really incredible there was an article in the Atlantic that came out over the past week called
01:01:03
let's declare a pandemic amnesty no yeah investigation right so basically at everything yes all the experts who told
01:01:13
us Jason that we weren't allowed to have an opinion because we weren't expert enough that if we raise any questions
01:01:18
about the origin of the virus that it might have come from a lab that that basically needs to be censored the
01:01:23
people who said we had to do lockdowns and implemented all these authoritarian tactics now they're saying that they
01:01:29
need an amnesty that what that really means no one's looking no one's looking to criminally prosecute them what we're
01:01:34
looking to do is have some accountability around the public policy what they want is they want to pull the
01:01:39
expert card to say that they're the only ones who get to have an opinion and make
01:01:42
a decision but then when it all goes horribly awry they basically want to be completely insulated and unaccountable
01:01:48
no account in their decisions no way no way we're not going to give you full investigations we're in alignment on
01:01:54
this side by the way can I just yes hold on I just want to say sex we're in alignment on this for a rare moment of
01:01:59
Peace on this podcast the same thing after 9 11 shouldn't all Americans understand what happened after 9 11 and
01:02:05
what the failures were in our intelligence just so we can get better I I'm not picking a political horse here
01:02:10
but it's kind of crazy that you could people said to our podcast and other people who were questioning it forget
01:02:17
about what political party you're in just want to understand how the world Works what are the chances that this
01:02:23
breaks out in the one or two places where they're studying the coronavirus that you have a lab leak it was so
01:02:28
obvious to everybody the other reason why you need to have accountability for this is that there are still a long tail
01:02:33
especially around the damage that we did to our kids educationally yes and now and now the over prescription of
01:02:40
stimulants and so if you don't depression sensors you can't go after these problems like there was a there
01:02:46
was like stimulant prescription is now the single biggest epidemic in children it is now
01:02:53
twice as prescribed as contraceptives and Asthma drugs and why chamoth why are we doing this to get them to score
01:03:01
higher on a test to be more attentive in school well it's it's actually this negative feedback loop where these
01:03:06
children were miseducated during covet it had huge psychological and academic damage to them
01:03:18
our test scores have fallen off of a cliff relative to how we used to do relative to other countries
01:03:24
I think the teachers unions have found a way to try to explain it to basically Shield themselves from any
01:03:31
sort of critique and so the loot and then part of that Loop is then to look at a bunch of kids
01:03:37
that are underperforming in school and instead of saying well maybe these lockdowns and masking and all of these
01:03:43
things that we implemented actually had a huge impact they say uh you know you're misbehaving so let's put you on a
01:03:49
stimulant yeah it's crazy we're in that Loop right now just so you guys know the
01:03:53
data is outrageous twice as many prescriptions for stimulants as the sum of contraceptives and Asthma drugs for
01:04:02
All American Kids yeah it's not that suddenly everybody's got ADHD so we failed them we failed our children and
01:04:10
and we're going to use stimulants to have them ketchup weeks but we should be doing Summer Schools after school
01:04:14
programs we failed them because of our response to covet that is why we need answers to
01:04:20
all that stuff because you need to link these things together to have some real accountability absolutely here is the uh
01:04:26
just so we have the people see the numbers here's the 538 poll of uh how Joe Biden's popularity has switched this
01:04:32
is uh 654 days into his presidency started out really strong 54 and now a little rebound since the
01:04:41
summer obviously that uh dip started uh with the economy it's the economy stupid
01:04:46
and if we go down a little bit on the same page and you zoom in on the left there you can see compared to Donald
01:04:51
Trump uh he started out much more popular than Donald Trump day by day and now he's
01:04:56
just as unpopular as Donald Trump was at this point in his presidency well look I
01:05:00
mean look the setup is really interesting for 2024 because it's probably going to be the case that we're
01:05:04
in the middle of a recession going into that election cycle maybe we'll be sort of like getting ourselves out of it but
01:05:11
there'll be a lot of economic damage high unemployment and you know typically folks in power will have to sort of be
01:05:18
held accountable for that it's a really interesting setup that both Gavin Newsom
01:05:22
and Ron DeSantis have to figure out now and navigate if they're going to get the
01:05:27
nomination on each side and breaking news today sax would love to get your thoughts on this axio says uh and we'll
01:05:34
go to science Corner next that Trump's going to announce on November 14th that he is running for president look I I
01:05:41
kind of have the Joe Rogan philosophy on this which is why I give it oxygen let's
01:05:45
just wait and see there's certainly no needs to talk about it before it happens you know we're not even past this
01:05:50
election yet but but hey I want to go back to the the Biden popularity because I think part of the issue here is what
01:05:57
are the arguments that Biden is making to the country about why people should vote Democratic and he gave another
01:06:04
speech on Wednesday night where he basically claimed that if you vote for a different party that that is a threat to
01:06:12
democracy in other words the perpetuation of single party rule is what you must do if you care about
01:06:17
democracy that is a sales pitch that's not going to appeal to anybody outside of the viewers of MSNBC it's just not
01:06:24
he's not talking about the issues that really matter to the country you know what the country wants to know is that
01:06:29
he's focused on the economy he's focused on inflation he's focused on crime he's
01:06:33
focused on the schools and fixing this learning loss that Jamal was just talking about he's not doing those
01:06:39
things instead he's basically saying that the Democrats should be kept in power forever because there was a riot
01:06:45
at the Capitol on January 6 and look that was a stain on the country okay it was terrible that that happened
01:06:50
disgusting that is not a reason hold on a second that is not a reason to keep Democrats in power forever and actually
01:06:56
there's a um a liberal guy a liberal Democrat named Josh Barrow who wrote a pretty
01:07:00
good blog about this and what he said is the message is that there's only one party contesting this election that is
01:07:08
committed to democracy the Democrats and therefore only one real Choice available
01:07:11
if voters reject Democrats agenda or their record on issues including inflation crime and immigration they
01:07:17
have no recourse to The Ballot Box they simply must vote for Democrats anyway and that argument is just not flying and
01:07:23
actually he's a a Democrat who is pointing this out but I don't think that Democrats are getting the message on
01:07:30
this but I think they will after this election and they're gonna have to find a new sales pitch to The Country well
01:07:35
you know and he does have a good sales pitch doesn't each a month with these major bipartisan uh wins he had the
01:07:41
infrastructure deal got done the technology bill and the chips you got gas prices going down yeah GDP growth
01:07:47
you got job growth the problem is that those things happened frankly too early in his presidency and things are getting
01:07:54
materially worse so I just sent you a link can you just throw this up here for a second you know Jason you mentioned
01:07:59
this cheaper gas thing yeah but the reality is um if you look at this we have now depleted our strategic goal
01:08:06
Reserve by almost 50 percent yep so we are running out of oil that we can introduce into the
01:08:12
market at effectively zero cost to bring the price down and because we've lost our relationships with folks like Saudi
01:08:19
Arabia there's no way to influence them in order to produce more in fact they're
01:08:24
going to cut Supply so that they can control the prices that they have which that they can sell into the market and
01:08:32
so now what are we left with well the only three places where you can have incremental supply of energy which the
01:08:38
country still needs is from Russia Iran and Venezuela and so you know all of these things
01:08:45
Jason I think come back and really put Biden in a tough place because as as Sac says he does have to
01:08:51
answer to all of these things because these are his decisions look I still believe in the Democrats
01:08:56
you know I I'm hoping I gave a million bucks uh to the Senate pact trying to sort of tip the Senate I really think
01:09:03
it's important that we have a split government because I've kind of I gave up on the house I think it's clear that
01:09:08
the Republicans are going to win but the Senate is still is still up for grabs and the reason is because I think that
01:09:14
we need to sort of have stasis so that nothing bad happens between now and 2024 because I think the economic conditions
01:09:22
on the ground are going to be bad in and of themselves and then just the one last thing I'll
01:09:29
say is the instructive thing that I think we should look at is what happened in Germany
01:09:34
because what happened in Germany is really interesting when the economy turns and inflation is out of control
01:09:39
and energy is out of control what they basically did was they sidelined the European Central Bank they stepped
01:09:48
in with their own balance sheet and said you know what we're going to nationalize
01:09:51
assets and I know that this sounds crazy to say but if it can happen in a place like Germany I know most people would
01:09:57
say it'll never happen in America but I'm not so sure and I think that you want to make sure that there's a split
01:10:04
government so that these things are never possible and so hopefully there's some you know Common Ground in a
01:10:11
Democratic Senate and a republican house and we just kind of get through 24 and see where the chips land and I still
01:10:17
think it's going to be uh DeSantis versus uh Newsome Freeburg any final thoughts here on politics my first um
01:10:24
observation is that I think it's funny that chamoth and sax are funding opposite uh sides of the uh
01:10:30
yeah why don't you just guys just give the money to me and Friedberg to get a plan each other's money up yeah I could
01:10:37
think of other ways for you guys to use that money but David and I may have canceled each other out you're right I
01:10:41
mean yeah so far Peter Thiel made the better trade he's it looks like the teal wave in the Senate so look I would say
01:10:46
my very broad statement is democracies evolve in a cyclical nature over time right you often see swings
01:10:55
from one political party to the other and um it's just the nature that once someone's been in office they form the
01:11:02
new establishment and then folks in the next election cycle want to vote against
01:11:06
that establishment because there are things that they want that they aren't being given today and therefore the
01:11:11
Democracy forces a change from what is the current establishment back to the other side and generally political
01:11:17
parties seem to kind of adopt whatever the other side is and that's how the cyclical evolution of democracy seems to
01:11:23
play out the recent Trend that has been more alarming which I think we can kind of take pause to notice is the rise of
01:11:30
populism where populism is this really kind of vehement Die Hard opposition to elitism and the establishments that
01:11:37
everyone feels kept down by and everyone feels taken advantage of by and um the the rise of trump the rise of
01:11:44
bolsonaro the rise of Boris Johnson and I would argue even the rise of AOC Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren all
01:11:52
similarly speak to the the crying voice of the the Democratic populations that they want to see these
01:12:03
establishments taken apart they don't feel like they're Fair they don't feel like they're just they don't feel like
01:12:09
the institutions that oversee us and are meant to service us are servicing us um and so there was this big rise the
01:12:16
problem is like a normal pendulum would swing back and forth between one side and the other with the rise of populism
01:12:21
you get such a strong push of that pendulum it can knock through a wall and I think we saw that on January 6th and I
01:12:27
think it gave a lot of people pause we saw the the motion of brexit knocking through a wall and we saw these kind of
01:12:35
very radical outcomes and then the cost of those outcomes blow up in our face and as a result I
01:12:43
think we're seeing a bit of a receding of the tides right now away from populism during this current electoral
01:12:49
cycle where folks are saying you know what maybe we just need to have some sort of an establishment so I can feel
01:12:54
safe and secure less than the volatile volatility that I've experienced of late look I think you look at the economic
01:13:00
mess we're in okay populist did not cause that okay populists did not cause 10 trillion dollars of money printing it
01:13:06
was Modern monetary Theory and the experts the FED who did that it wasn't populous who created the great financial
01:13:12
crisis of 2008 that caused the zurp and we're still living with all the downstream effects of that it was the
01:13:18
experts on Wall Street who said they could manage all these derivatives and the collateralized mortgage obligations
01:13:24
and all that stuff that they lost control over I would argue hold on it was not populous who caused the
01:13:36
horrible handling of that pandemic even though they were blamed for remember we were told it was a pandemic of the
01:13:41
unvaccinated then it turns out the vaccine doesn't stop it it was not populous who caused the reaction to the
01:13:46
pandemic it was the experts the CDC and falching people like that who shut down our economy who caused the learning loss
01:13:54
it was those experts so Freeburg listen you may not like this populist waiver that we have in the country and I get
01:13:59
that but it's in reaction to something real which is the failure of this expert class and if you want to stop having
01:14:07
this populist wave rise up we need to start having experts in position of power who actually know what they're
01:14:13
doing well one way to say that sorry Jake out hang on a second I don't have any opposition to the populist wave I'm
01:14:19
making the observation that the uh the effects of some of the populist movements have started to become too
01:14:25
volatile for people to feel like they should continue forward with that electoral path that was my observation
01:14:30
okay I'm not kind of criticizing the populist movement I'm just saying that events like January 6th and the
01:14:36
conditions in the UK for example are making people say wait a second maybe I need to take pause on the extreme the
01:14:42
bond market basically fired list trust I mean she's not a populist and you know in Bolson bolsonaro in Brazil he
01:14:49
actually just lost and there was this big narrative that somehow he was gonna not relinquish power and he just
01:14:55
announced that he will relinquish power right so you know some of the stuff that
01:14:59
is about how populists pose this great danger I think is threat inflation and that the threat is magnified by Elites
01:15:06
who want to stay in power and the truth of the matter is we need accountability for the people in power and when they
01:15:12
set the wrong policies and decisions they need to be replaced no more no more unaccountability yeah I
01:15:19
just just to my personal belief 100 agree that's all of these institutions accountability maybe competence and also
01:15:28
transparency and accountability like I think that's what the public wants I mean competencies
01:15:35
there's no way to perfectly react to the pandemic but in your mistakes owning them and explaining them would it be
01:15:43
much better than trying to obscurify it and asking for amnesty chamoth you're not um if you want to hear an incredibly
01:15:49
interesting interview because it's very thought-provoking of a modern Progressive uh but with a very
01:15:57
different mindset or sorry you know maybe you don't want to call him a progressive but is the president of El
01:16:04
Salvador naive bouquelli and he did this incredible interview with Tucker Carlson
01:16:08
on Fox News I encourage everybody to watch it on both sides of the political Spectrum
01:16:13
that man is impressive did we just get an admission that your mouth watches Tucker I watch I watched
01:16:19
that interview you watch the talker oh my Lord Jason's head's explode you know because I I try not to be against the
01:16:25
moment ignoramus it's an Entertainer I like to watch things on both sides but that interview is incredible He is
01:16:31
unbelievable impressive and it's a it double clicks into you know the skepticism that smart people like him
01:16:38
the outsider class has with The Insider expert class in a nutshell if you want to see it I would encourage you to watch
01:16:45
this interview because it's it's incredible incredible really really Jason The Peasants with pitchforks are
01:16:51
rising up against this Elite Class who put themselves up they've set themselves up as Lords they want exclusive control
01:16:58
over their blue checks and we're about to overturn this establishment because it is corrupt and it is incompetent
01:17:08
be great if the people who worked for us were confident back on Megan Kelly owned
01:17:12
and we're transparent you know I think that's why people are opting out of this is they don't feel
01:17:18
that there's a level of competence in these institutions nor ownership and transparency and it really is
01:17:24
frustrating whether it's education or it's health or you know any of these topics we've
01:17:31
talked about here on the show let's go to science corner and we can rap what do you got free bark for us to mock
01:17:36
I think we were going to cover the Facebook meta announcement that their AI research team had generated the physical
01:17:45
structure of 617 million proteins from these metagenomic data sets and so remember Alpha fold made this big
01:17:53
announcement that they had highly um accurate predictions of protein structure the three-dimensional shape of
01:17:59
proteins and remember proteins are kind of the Machines of biology that do everything from catalysis to enzymes
01:18:05
where they break stuff down and they're like you know they have all this structure that allows them to do
01:18:10
specific physical things and proteins are coded in DNA every three letters of DNA codes for an amino acid a string of
01:18:16
amino acids makes a protein and so you know we have about a million species where we've sequenced the entire Genome
01:18:25
of those species only about 3 000 Animals by the way including humans half a million from bacterial species
01:18:31
and then a bunch of viruses and other stuff but but call it about a million species that we've sequenced and so
01:18:38
you know earlier this year Google's Alpha fold project published the 3D structure of 200 million proteins
01:18:45
that they had derived from the whole genome databases that existed where we've gone through and figured out
01:18:50
what's the full DNA sequence of all these different species now when you look at the DNA in the
01:18:56
environment around us you were just to take the DNA out it turns out that we have seen very little of that DNA the
01:19:04
vast majority of DNA that you would find in a teaspoon of soil for example we've
01:19:10
never classified it's not part of a species that we've actually built the whole genome around we may not even know
01:19:15
what species that DNA is from and so when you take a teaspoon of soil you'll get about 100 billion microorganisms in
01:19:22
that soil from about a million unique species but you don't see those species because the way DNA sequencing or
01:19:28
shotgun sequencing works is DNA is chopped up into little 250 base pair of Lights little 250 strands and those 250
01:19:36
letters are read at a time and then statistically bioinformatics puts together all of that little DNA segments
01:19:43
and tries to create long strands of DNA to figure out what the genes are or what
01:19:47
the whole genome is and so shotgun sequencing gives us kind of a snapshot of the DNA but until we've done the hard
01:19:54
work of figuring out the whole whole genome we don't know what species that DNA comes from so when you take a sample
01:20:00
of soil or you take a sample of human poop and you sequence it or even a teaspoon of ocean water and you just
01:20:06
sequence the DNA in it you get all of these little segments of DNA that we've never seen before and you can string
01:20:12
them together statistically because you get lots and lots of copies of them and you can figure out the overlap and then
01:20:17
you can create these genes and a gene is a segment of DNA that codes for a protein and those genes make up the
01:20:23
metagenome or the combination of all the genes that we find in a in a piece of of
01:20:28
the environment and that meta genome comes from millions of species that we've never seen before so what Alpha
01:20:35
what they did at meta is they took all of those genes that we pull out of the soil or we'd pull out of the ocean and
01:20:40
they picked a bunch of random samples and they then predicted the physical structure of the proteins from just
01:20:47
those genes without knowing what organism they came from and this gives us a whole new universe of proteins that
01:20:54
we've never classified before or never seen before now I will just kind of speak a little bit critically about it
01:21:01
number one they didn't do what Alpha fall did what Alpha full did is they took 3D structures from typically x-ray
01:21:07
crystallography then they took the the DNA code and they built machine learned models to figure out the 3D structure
01:21:13
from the DNA code what these guys did at meta is they took the 3D structures and
01:21:19
the code and they basically did a fill in the blank they found all the metagenome data out of these samples and
01:21:25
a lot of it was missing and they filled in the missing blanks using kind of common protein structure that existed
01:21:32
out there in the wild that we already knew from the alpha full data and so they kind of did a fill in the blank and
01:21:37
as a result it allowed them to very quickly build these 3D models versus doing the hard and rigorous work that
01:21:42
Alpha fold had to do so they claimed that it was 60 times faster but it's actually an entirely different technique
01:21:47
and the second thing is that they represent that only about a third of it is high quality meaning only about a
01:21:52
third of the proteins that they've created structure for are really useful or or that could be kind of Applied uh
01:21:58
in terms of this is the real representation now why is this interesting and important proteins can
01:22:03
form the basis of new medicines so you know we can find proteins in the soil a genomes in the soil and proteins in the
01:22:10
soil that can kill certain fungal pathogens that can kill bacteria and those can be turned into fungicides they
01:22:16
can be turned into antibiotics we can find proteins that bind to specific things we can find proteins that fix
01:22:22
nitrogen from the atmosphere and those proteins can be turned into new types of fertilizer so you know searching through
01:22:28
this universe of proteins that exists in the metagenome will allow us to find new
01:22:33
molecules to do new and interesting things with in the applied engineering world
01:22:38
and I will say like this is what would the output of these be is what everybody's going to be thinking
01:22:42
antibiotics fertilizers I mean the idea of the metagenome is rather than start with the species and then take the genes
01:22:49
out of it just go get the genes the genes are already there they're in this they're in the ocean they're in the soil
01:22:53
and there's millions of genes hundreds of millions billions of genes that we've never seen before therefore there's
01:22:58
billions of proteins now we could randomly create proteins but the number of proteins that could exist is more
01:23:04
than the number of atoms in the universe because remember there's 20 amino acids
01:23:07
so 20 to the 200th power or 20 to the 300th power or 20 to the thousandth power meaning how many different
01:23:13
combinations of amino acids can you make that's more than there are atoms in the
01:23:16
universe so the best place to start is what evolution has already given us all the proteins that exist in the
01:23:22
environment so let's go find those proteins in the environment and then let's figure out what do we think they
01:23:27
can be used for can they be used in industrial applications in medicine can they be doing them in Material Science
01:23:33
you're saying Material Science and so you know a lot of drug Discovery mines proteins it tries to find proteins and
01:23:40
figure out what can these proteins be used for and now we have all these new data sets of proteins that are being
01:23:46
generated from these metagenomes and so it's amazing I mean you know look at the
01:23:50
world around you look everywhere up and down on the walls on the ground below you there are billions of species of
01:23:57
organisms that we've never classified before that are making billions of unique proteins that we've never
01:24:01
classified before and any one of them could unlock an amazing commercial opportunity
01:24:07
for industry so and for medicine and for human health that's what's really exciting about this ability to kind of
01:24:13
mine the metagenome silly question for you or maybe not silly uh we have gotten the precursors to DNA for meteorites if
01:24:22
I understand correctly what do they call them nucleobases nucleic acids yeah yeah
01:24:30
um thymine Etc like things that exist in DNA that are precursors we've never had DNA
01:24:37
from space obviously but we could at some point start to find DNA out there in space and this could have an even
01:24:43
crazier impact on what we built here is that the next card to turn over after we every human gene home what's here no
01:24:50
I wouldn't say so I like I think look if there's DNA that's coming to us for meteorites call it a couple hundred
01:24:55
genes you could pick up a piece of uh soil and find over a billion genes in that teaspoon of soil right so uh we
01:25:03
have far more to mine here on Earth and the low cost of DNA sequencing and shotgun sequencing coupled with
01:25:08
bioinformatics where we take all that so just to give you guys when you take a teaspoon of soil and you get the DNA out
01:25:14
and you read the DNA out of it sequence the DNA that's potentially tens of gigabytes of data and then you could do
01:25:21
that millions of times over and then you statistically can find genes and then statistically estimate what they
01:25:26
physically look like what those proteins look like and then you can start to build models around which ones do we
01:25:31
want to try and use for drug applications which ones do we want so there's so much work to do
01:25:36
it just in terms of what we have here on Earth and the tools are getting so cheap
01:25:40
and so available there are Labs that are all over the world starting to kind of spring up to do this work it's super
01:25:45
exciting adults it's kind of it you know just to put two ideas together I've said before like the
01:25:52
two big investable themes that I'm orienting my organization around is this one is that the marginal cost of energy
01:25:59
goes to zero and the second is that the marginal cost of compute goes to zero and the second one is really about
01:26:04
shifting compute to more parallelism on gpus and Asics and fpgas but that's why all of this stuff is possible the fact
01:26:12
that you know meta can do this and Google can do alpha fold is largely because the cost of all of this stuff is
01:26:20
you know trivial for these kinds of companies so it's really exciting it's going to move science
01:26:25
in my opinion out of this in Vivo in vitro experimentation model into silica and so those who can actually build
01:26:33
learning machines will solve some of the most important biological problems so I
01:26:37
I'm a real believer in this stuff I think it's super exciting when do you think this stuff actually hits Friedberg
01:26:43
our life that's always when people talk about these discoveries yeah a lot of people don't realize it but so many um
01:26:49
molecules that that are used in agriculture like fungicides to to kill fungus in the fields those are derived
01:26:56
from this sort of work a lot of antibiotics a lot of medicines are already derived from mining genomes
01:27:02
finding new proteins and seeing what those proteins can do because these proteins didn't evolve in the
01:27:07
environment randomly they evolved to do something and in many cases we can take that thing that they do and then harness
01:27:13
it into a product and that's what's so exciting and this this affects everything Material Science
01:27:19
you know agriculture human health it's uh it's a food it's really profound awesome all right everybody there you
01:27:27
have it that's another all in podcast in the camera by the way so many so many of
01:27:32
Freeburg stands were afraid Jay Cal that you and I were gonna make some joke and
01:27:35
we didn't no we didn't and so for all these fans I just I hope you guys can exhale
01:27:40
take a deep breath man have some you know eggless mail and uh enjoy your weekend
01:27:46
uh enjoy your week bye bye everybody see you next time love you besties love you
01:27:49
guys we'll let your winners ride Rain Man David's side we open source it to the fans and
01:28:01
they've just gone crazy with it [Music] besties [Music] is [Music] [Music]

Episode Highlights

  • Elon Musk's Content Moderation Challenges
    Discussion on how Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter has led to misinformation about racist tweets.
    “This is being manufactured by people who are not operating in good faith.”
    @ 04m 25s
    November 05, 2022
  • The Importance of Fact-Checking
    A conversation on the decline of fact-checking in journalism and its implications.
    “They don't fact check things that fit their narrative.”
    @ 10m 32s
    November 05, 2022
  • The Shift to Profitability
    Companies are pivoting from growth to profitability, emphasizing cost-cutting measures.
    “It's better to grow at 20% and be profitable than at 100% and burn money.”
    @ 18m 41s
    November 05, 2022
  • Elon's Impact on Tech Profitability
    Elon Musk's strategies at Twitter could redefine tech profitability standards.
    “Elon is really going to show everyone just how profitable these tech companies can be.”
    @ 19m 54s
    November 05, 2022
  • The Job Market's Mixed Signals
    Despite job additions, the labor force participation rate is declining, indicating deeper issues.
    “The data is very mixed; this feels like the last gasp of the bull market.”
    @ 36m 06s
    November 05, 2022
  • The Rise of Gig Work
    The pandemic has accelerated the growth of gig work, changing how people earn income.
    “There's a whole new class of work that revolves around the individual.”
    @ 39m 45s
    November 05, 2022
  • Market Downturn
    Major tech stocks are experiencing significant declines, indicating a brutal market environment.
    “It's just pure math.”
    @ 46m 15s
    November 05, 2022
  • Republican Wave Predictions
    Polling suggests a potential Republican wave in the upcoming elections, with significant gains expected.
    “It must translate into a Republican wave.”
    @ 55m 00s
    November 05, 2022
  • Biden's Popularity Decline
    Biden's approval ratings have plummeted, mirroring Trump's unpopularity at a similar point.
    “It's the economy, stupid.”
    @ 01h 04m 46s
    November 05, 2022
  • The Rise of Populism
    Discussion on the cyclical nature of democracy and the rise of populism in politics.
    “The rise of populism is a vehement opposition to elitism.”
    @ 01h 11m 32s
    November 05, 2022
  • The Rise of Populism
    A discussion on the current electoral cycle and the receding tide of populism.
    “Maybe we just need to have some sort of an establishment so I can feel safe.”
    @ 01h 12m 49s
    November 05, 2022
  • The Metagenome Revolution
    Exploring the potential of metagenomics to unlock new proteins and medicines.
    “Searching through this universe of proteins will allow us to find new molecules.”
    @ 01h 22m 33s
    November 05, 2022

Episode Quotes

  • It's not like your feed was filled with racist things; these were spam accounts.
    E103: Tech layoffs surge, big tech freezes hiring, optimizing for profits, election preview & more
  • It's survival of the quickest; adapt or die.
    E103: Tech layoffs surge, big tech freezes hiring, optimizing for profits, election preview & more
  • This is the beginning of a serious recession.
    E103: Tech layoffs surge, big tech freezes hiring, optimizing for profits, election preview & more
  • It's going to be very close, but ultimately I think this breaks Republican.
    E103: Tech layoffs surge, big tech freezes hiring, optimizing for profits, election preview & more
  • We failed our children and we're going to use stimulants to have them catch up.
    E103: Tech layoffs surge, big tech freezes hiring, optimizing for profits, election preview & more
  • We could find proteins that can kill certain fungal pathogens.
    E103: Tech layoffs surge, big tech freezes hiring, optimizing for profits, election preview & more

Key Moments

  • Journalism Integrity10:25
  • Economic Realities17:31
  • Tech Layoffs Begin19:08
  • Serious Recession36:51
  • Biden's Approval Drop1:04:56
  • Populism Debate1:12:46
  • Expert Accountability1:15:08
  • Metagenome Discovery1:20:28

Tension Over Time

Words per Minute Over Time

Vibes Breakdown