E89: GDP growth negative in Q2, $SHOP layoffs, Alzheimer's fraud, Ginkgo acquires Zymergen & more

all right his monthly burn rate would make even bezos wince he's living the life of a sri lankan prince he drinks nothing but the absolute highest top shelf he's lifting italy's gdp by himself the dictator's back mouth polly hopper i'm back to the program thank you jake when uh you mentioned that burn rate i thought you could be talking about me sometimes these intros you're not sure which which way something is correct it's a misdirection it's a comedy a mystery it is inconceivable that my burn is higher than david's axe i have i own one house how is it possible and maybe one or two next week you're such an ass he's analyzing macroeconomic charts and grids while at the same time ignoring his kids he's the

sultan of sass it's no surprise the only thing heavier than his pockets the bags under his eyes the rain man is back david sacks it's not bad oh here we go here we go the admiral of anxiety he's rife with strife he plays on his ps5 and he also plays one in real life meow the commander of the cat boys david freeman i mean i'm totally cool with that opening because you're gonna look like an it's all good i mean more of an i mean if you didn't ignore it every time freebrook spoke you would have heard that the guy from anaporna pictures reached out to him gave him a link to download a free

game about cats which he downloaded and he's been playing it's now the most popular video game in the world you introduced the cat game it's on you by the way what shirt are you wearing it looks like a carpet yeah you really do look like one of the characters from goodfellas like one of the older guys in the kansas city yeah i have my cigars right off the screen here and i got my nice coffee i got from dunkin donuts you remind me one of the guys in kansas city from casino absolutely sit around the table in that restaurant it's like should we whack him why take a chance boom listen you give him you got my style icons joe pence is my style icon you look really bad thank you thank you [Music]

let your winners ride [Music] rain man [Music] [Music] gdp fell by 0.9 in q2 marking two straight quarters of negative growth in q1 we all know gdp fell one point six percent here's the real gdp chart current dollar gdp increased seven point eight percent in annual rate or 465 billion in q2 to a level of 24.85 trillion home construction down 14 obstetrically because of the interest rates increasing inventories which helped boost gdp in 201 dragged down growth in q2 so supply chains easing taking away two percentage points uh chamath what's your take do these year-over-year comparisons work we were talking in the chat a little bit about the spike in 2021 versus the dip in 2020. what's your take on this i mean i think you just summarized it people are really fixated on these numbers without understanding uh basic

statistics so just taking a step back if you go to the bureau of economic analysis which is an official website of the government of the united states that posts gdp the title makes it pretty self-obvious what we're dealing with here which it says nick you can put it up there real gdp the percent change from the preceding quarter so things can still go up positively but still be negative if it doesn't go up by the same or more than the quarter before it the thing that we really have going on is that over the last eight quarters we've had all kinds of very turbulent data that's made the trend line unpredictable and the most obvious way to see this is actually in one specific sub sector which we'll get to in a second which is around us e-commerce adoption

you see this one huge spike coming out of nowhere and then eventually everything has settled back to trend the same way i think what we're waiting to figure out is how many quarters does it take for us to get back to on-trend growth in the economy we had a massive shortfall in q2 of 2020. we had a massive surplus in q3 of 2020. we've had a country that's been getting back to finding equilibrium over the last five quarters so we don't really know what the steady state growth should be this is why i specifically had such an issue with the tone the white house took which was trying to explain away this that this isn't a recession

by trying to create doubt in the definition instead i think it would have been much better off just repeating what i just said and explaining basic statistics and actually showing that the country is headed in the right direction largely speaking from a really crazy one-time externality that nobody could have predicted that it's going to take some number of quarters and so really what you should look at and jason you've pointed to this is employment and wages and try to be a little bit more circumspect in overreacting to any one quarter of data by the way the fed exactly just said the same thing yesterday when they raised 75 basis

points they said we are not going to give guidance anymore because things are too turbulent we're going to remain vigilant on inflation but mostly we're going to be very near term data dependent so i would boil all of this in saying let's not overreact to a quarter's print here or there and specifically the label i think the white house made a mistake in trying to basically think you know we all didn't understand what our technical recession was i think instead we should just focus on what we have to do to get back to solid-state equilibrium yeah and just to put a pin in the definitions we all know the common definition two successive quarters of uh negative gdp

however people have said it's a a temporary economic decline during which trade and industry activity are reduced so there's a sort of debate in splitting hairs going on sax which was kind of stupid the big news this morning is that we no longer know what a recession is this is such a vast and complicated question you might as well be asking what is the meaning of life now i remember in the days of republican presidents we had a very simple definition of recession which was two quarters of negative gdp growth but now that we have a democrat in the white house we just can't know these things why even ask such difficult questions right i mean that's basically the media coverage today and it's absurd i mean and you saw for the last week the administration and spokespeople have been trying to muddy the waters on the definition of recession and it was

laughable as they were doing it but now you see the media coverage today and you realize like they've bought into this nonsense and they're carrying so much water for the administration look the headlines should be the biden recession has begun that's it if you had three minutes and 45 seconds for your biden over under with sacks you took the under you won you're in a recession he's the president and if we had a republican in the white house it would be republican president recession has begun yeah so the media here is carrying so much water to try and avoid the obvious headline i just explained it instead of reporting the obvious headline they're now saying that we're approaching recession or we might be in recession we have all these difficult technical issues look listen

we're in a recession it started it might be a shallower session we don't know yet yeah um it's it's uh it's a recession in which the unemployment rate as of today is low although the labor participation rate's also low so listen we're at the beginning of a recession it might turn out we might have a bounce in q3 this might be more of a double dip i suspect that's what it'll be but we know the cause of this the cause of this recession is inflation if you look at the economy's growth on in nominal terms it grew at seven point something percent but because inflation was at nine percent you have to subtract them in real terms the economy is shrinking and who is

to blame for reset uh for inflation well j pal at the fed because he reacted way too slowly but also the buying administration for all the spending they did how much sooner do you think they could have reacted two quarters no like nine months earlier so three quarters we got that we got that first surprise inflation print last summer it was may i believe that 5.1 percent we started to talk about 10-year break-evens uh tips in may of last year yeah so they could have gone quarter to quarter nine months and they continued not only did they not raise rates um or or signal any desire to raise rates for six months they continue to quantitative easing for nine months which just makes no sense but

they should have taken their foot off the the accelerator right not nine months they only start they only stopped in june of this past year so we've only been quantitatively tightening for two months i thought they stopped the bond buying program in march maybe that's right yeah yeah but they saw quantitative easing in march but you're right that tightening is just something they're getting started with but the point is they should have stopped easing right like why would you need to keep intervening in in the in the markets to buy more and to basically push out more money is the reason for this that powell and yellen just haven't lived through highly inflationary times i just read that

they're older than i am they haven't been in office and doing fed policy like i just read volcker's book if you haven't read it it's pretty great his biography i mean what he had to do in 81 82 was super severe uh but we just haven't lived through this in her life so i guess people are just not used to having to tap the brakes no no look what happened is that the administration reacted in a political way to the inflation print they invented this well the word transitory existed but they applied it you heard this word used relentlessly for about six months so the administration went into denial mode yeah and then by the end of the year it

became clear that it was persistent and i think the issue with powell is that he is basically responding to headline risk right so he didn't respond to you know the inflation problem last summer he waits until the end the headlines tell him he has to react and so now the the thing that he's worried about is his recession obviously he knew no he's worried about inflation mostly right he wants he's worried about inflation but if you look at yesterday's right but if you look at his comments yesterday it was more dovish comments they did a 75-point rate hike but the comments were more dovish and i think it's because he knows that today we have this second consecutive quarter of negative gdp growth so now he's trying to balance

recession risk against inflation risk but the point is that the fed's been very slow to react and the administration basically just tries to relabel and rebrand problems instead of confronting them head-on hmoth when we look at this chart you pulled up four and we see this massive spike q3 q4 q1 q2 a little bit in q3 and then q4 i mean this massive uh one two three four five six just extraordinary quarters or five out of six in terms of gdp that's all stimulus in your mind right this is the money drop so that was lockdown it's in q2 2020 jason they lock the economy down yeah so people are spending online and we'll get to the chama chamat story about spotify but it's not all of it but the the point is it's some combination of blockchain and access money right access excess money

because because of loose financial conditions distort what true supply and demand should be got it right and excess money can come from the government but in this case excess government money went from the government into the hands of individuals who then participated in the public markets and they distorted what it what it all looked like and so there was a lot of purchasing activity that was propped up by what seemed like an endless supply of free money right so yeah good and so now that that money is getting taken out we don't yet know what the real equilibrium economic growth rate should be because you have to

remember we have not seen an era without federally introduced spending without federally introduced forms of quantitative easing since the great financial crisis so we have been propping up our economy for 14 years straight now so we have distorted the prices of bonds and fixed income we've distorted the prices of equities we've we've created an asset bubble in crypto out of nowhere and now we have to do the hard work of figuring out what the real supply demand is in the economy and we took six quarters here there's six quarters of just massive gdp spike there from the preceding quarters and we have two down quarters is it going to take six quarters to wash us out or longer i guess no longer because

what david said is now making the problem even worse so because powell was catering to whatever pressure he's been getting and he must be getting some severe pressure from the white house those were really dovish comments but what is the problem when he is dovish well the practical reality is a couple of things number one is typically the yields of long-dated bonds go down okay that essentially tells everybody else to reprice assets what does that practically do it makes the cost of borrowing roughly cheaper okay it makes the price of equities particularly ones that are far out on the risk spectrum so specifically let's focus on nasdaq and crypto right tech stocks biotech stocks and and crypto stocks go up much more aggressively so what has powell effectively done he has synthetically created a form of easing again right like his job at the

federal reserve if you think about the money supply as a pipe it's to shrink the pipe to close off demand to get things in equilibrium so even though he's doing this by the language that he's doing he's effectively allowing market participants to basically guess that the worst is over and now we're going to start to expand the pipe again and so they go to the end state so what he effectively did in one speech is basically put a pin at the end of this year and is telling the markets i'm mostly going to be done and if anything i'm probably going to be cutting in the back half of 23 go on your merry way and there is no c the problem jason is yeah it's now pushing the problem out another eight quarters like we need to stop this nonsense he

needs to be definitive and he needs to fundamentally break the back of inflation so that you find out what the true demand is in the economy yeah and it we did .75 yesterday the markets rallied on his sort of uh the assumption that he would do a couple of more of these rate hikes and then he'd be done at the second half of the year and then hey maybe we can get back to growth uh or some normalcy uh in re related to all of this uh and by the way there's an interesting story uh saks would be interested in did you read paul volcker's biography at sacs no i've not read it yeah it's i'm not familiar with this record but yeah

like at one point baker and ray took reagan and volcker into a room off of the white house so it wasn't recorded and just said volcker to volcker the president does not want you to raise rates going into the 84 election full stop and volcker's like well i wasn't planning on raising them so there's a lot of politics in this even though people claim they've already done enough i mean volcker raised rates all the way up to like 20 he broke the back of inflation it created a very severe recession in i think 1981-82 but by 1983 the economy was rocketing back yeah with lower interest rates and and they basically solved the inflation problem hopefully we're not in that situation where powell has to jack up rates so much to break the back of

inflation because it means that we'd be in an even more serious recession so i hope we're not in a volcker type situation just think about that spread sacks 20 versus like three or four percent we're trying to get to we've never in the history of america ever had cpi print above four and a half or five percent without inflation being brought down by having fed funds not also be greater than four and a half or five percent so at some point inflation will turn over and we'll print six and seven percent but that's still not below four and a half or five and right now our target fed funds rate

is between 2.25 and 2.5 percent so we could still be only 50 percent of the way there if inflation remains at four to four to five percent and this is what i think market participants don't want to hear they don't want to hear that there has to be a meaningful form of tightening and politicians don't want to hear that the white house for sure doesn't want me here the problem is that if powell caters to too much of that feedback he's not going to do what he's supposed to do and why he's put in that job his job is to get it to two percent and keep price stability uh and full employment do you think there is um a balance here i mean the reality is we do not want pal

tightening more than he should or more than is necessary to solve inflation because it will cause a serious recession so i think we're we're caught between two pretty bad options here and it's because i think that what happened last year contributed to this i mean look if you go back to that chart that you just showed what happened in q2 of 2020 we had a very healthy economy going into 2020 in 2019 right and then in q2 of 2020 we had covid but we made the situation even worse with lockdowns and which basically shut down the whole economy brought it back at least in most states in q3 and then the feds started printing and congress started printing 10 trillion dollars well still by last year the economy was back we had something like 5.7 percent annualized growth this year it's

negative why why is that i mean this may be the lingering effect of all that stimulus but i think that it is but i do think that the administration made it worse by sending checks into an overheated economy they also created energy scarcity and they just kept you know spending more money so i'm not saying the white house isn't without fault david but i do think that if all of these geniuses could have actually just taken a simple econ and stats 101 class and explained how year-over-year measurements work to the american people i think they're smart enough to understand it we didn't have to go down this convoluted route we could have just explained we put a lot of excess money in the economy we don't yet know what the full effect of that is we need to

let that wash through in the meantime you're going to see some crazy numbers from time to time and we just have to be patient and the other crazy things you're going to have looking at second and third order effects is all these downstream effects people are making business decisions going into these economies shopify just laid off 10 of its workforce about a thousand people on tuesday their stock is down 10 past five days overall 70 year-to-date um and if you look at this chart and and toby uh took blame for this he basically said listen we thought that this was going to be a uh you know fast forward into the future that people would adopt

e-commerce in a major way and that would stick here's u.s e-commerce adoption growth rate massive spike when people were forced to buy all their goods online and now it is regressing to the mean i mean mean reversion is a if you look at shopify stock if you look at peloton stock if you look at a firm stock if you look at arc you know a lot of these things were trending in a great direction they had this short-term crazy behavior in the middle of all of this free money and now they've mean reverted and you know we're in the midst of finding out what the real price is i got to give toby a huge um you know round of applause because he is such a great ceo and i'll tell you why last year in the middle of all of this wokism he wrote this incredible memo which was you know we're not um a family we're a team which i thought was exceptionally well

written and really got the point across this time around he just owned it he's like you know i made a huge bet that all of this behavior changed was going to be discontinuous and permanent and it turned out i was wrong i'm sorry for that and here's how we're gonna have to course correct in both cases he kind of just put it all out there and he owned it and i think that that's all you can do when you make a bet and it's wrong and here's what he said uh it's now clear that bet didn't pay off ultimately placing this bet was my call to make and i got this wrong now we have to adjust as a consequence we have to say goodbye to some of you today and i'm pretty sorry for that i mean

everybody made that mistake right so you know it is it's just you're right just own it everyone was thinking the same thing we all were talking about how covet was this accelerationist virus and it was going to accelerate all these trends and well that's the acceleration rude awakening is going to be for all these people who made all these bets assuming that it's permanent and specifically i mean you know especially around real estate and work from home and all of the stuff benefits and it's all going to change now and the reason i say that is the combination of reversion to the mean will impact a company's bottom line and those boards

of directors and ceos will say okay we're just going to have to reset expectations and that's going to touch the employees i don't know if you saw this leaked transcript but you know zuck was asked the question from this one that was unbelievable he was asking about his like emotional support days or something i think in the in the middle of like zuck having like a really serious you know heart to heart with the company about how we're gonna have to buckle down and you know get this company back individual performance one dude one dude you know schmenke from the back raises and goes what about the covet extra vacation days of those days zuckerberg almost like he literally his head almost exploded he's like did you not just listen to what i said i

just said if people are not performing at a high level maybe they shouldn't be here and you're asking me about more days just fire that person to say like you obviously you don't get it you didn't listen anything i said you're not right for this team at this time goodbye he said a version of that he's like there's a lot basically it may not be the right thing freeburg when we look at these uh trends okay uh commerce seems like people are going back to shopping but i want to ask you about two specific ones healthcare it does seem like telemedicine was one of those things that got accelerated during covent do you think that's going to revert to the mean or do you think that you know doing doctor's visits over you

know facetime and text and all these consultations going to stick with us and then what about work from home because that does not seem to be uh shifting all that much free the work the work from home is not shifting well i mean it's people are still staying home uh and you know uh amazon just put a hold on six buildings where they said you can finish the outsides but let's not do the insides because we don't even know what we're gonna do with these buildings and what hybrid's gonna look like and zuckerberg hasn't been able to get people to come back to the office and apple seems to be getting people two or three days a week so it seems like it's still been a struggle and downtown san francisco is empty so we're getting mixed we're getting mixed results back now i

would say is the best way to to describe it so work from home and telemedicine what do you think free berg i mean certainly the knowledge economy seems to prefer work from home i mean you're working on a computer and you don't need to interact with people and you got kids or family you're inclined to stay home so that seems to be a sticking point um you know younger people probably have their own motivations but there was a good stat on telehealth i'm just trying to find it and i think telehealth surged during covid and 36 of patients used a telehealth service in 2021 420 increase over 2019 and so despite some reversion post covid post lockdowns there's a significant sticking point that

and i think 60 of telehealth patients are women so there's particularly female services that are being rendered through telehealth at an increasing rate than pre-covert and so there's a lot of stuff i mean look we've all had to go sit in the doctor's office for two hours to get some prescription or get a doctor to give us some advice on something they don't need to physically check us out for so you know it certainly seems to be a acceleration in that department offices what's the amazon like was working on 15 warehouses they shut down as well right i mean if you guys remember at the start of kovid when you place something on amazon it was like a two-week delay because they didn't have enough capacity to fulfill the order volume you know you looked at toby's chart it's nearly a doubling in e-commerce

volume in a week when that happens amazon's you know plus or minus five percent supply chain has to revert to servicing twice as many customers it's just not going to happen so they over built tried to get ahead of the curve remember they hired like you know 100 000 workers and you know they they had to make a pipeline for quarters ahead to build warehouses now they're realizing the demand is not going to be there and they're cutting back on 15 warehouses around the country and not going to build them they were buying up so many warehouses i had a couple of companies that were looking for warehouses in los angeles northern california and amazon just bought an option on every single warehouse they

could find and now they're putting them back on the market so they they definitely um went too heavy and then everybody started betting on peloton and teledoc and if you look at teledoc i mean it's off 90 from the peak i would show the um i would show the peloton chart as well but that would just be gratuitous some of the stuff to note like at the end of the day whatever product is better for the consumer they're going to pick you know what's the better way to buy shirts you know what's the better way to get well define better yeah i mean for the consumer it's like you want to try them on or do you know your size right you're buying a brand that you know and a size you know you're gonna buy it online at this point i mean

the one thing kova did is it basically created a trial by fire my parents never used doordash before kovid so then they were forced to use doordash during cove but now they know what it's like and so you know there are now people that never trialled a lot of these services that have trialed them and are now making decisions based on that experience but that's a beautiful example so just use your parents why do you think let's assume they did why do you think they mean reverted to now using doordash only in the same percentage as they would have otherwise i think the quality of the food the time to wait the experience of going out to dinner there's a lot of motivating

factors that are different by different demos and so whatever the consumer wants they're gonna pick if i wanna go have a dining experience in person with my friends i'm gonna go do that instead of sitting at home ordering doordash and having everyone come sit on the couch and eat dinner together so i think that there's this um you know this call it mean reversion but we have seen call it a broader exposure and we're really going to see the true market dynamics play out i don't think everyone wants to buy shoes online i don't think everyone wants to buy every piece of clothing online i think people want to go to the store and try stuff on i think it's that and i think that there's a lot of ancillary social benefits that come with

a lot of these activities that you lose if you just optimize for efficiency so to your point like yeah you can get a burrito but even going to chipotle with your friend is more fun totally get out of the house get out of the house shooting the you know yep um it's just it's and the serendipity yeah you may run into somebody nothing beats that i will tell you by the way i i do believe that there is a counter narrative to the idea of work from home and e-commerce moving together i think as people work from home they want to go be in person for other activities more yeah so the more you're working from home the more you want to go to dinner with people or lunch to people yeah the more you want to go shop in person because you're stuck in the house all day and you want to go do other stuff and so if you're working in the office you're going to do more e-commerce and if you're working at home you're probably going to do less e-commerce so there's probably some

net-net balance we saw both of them rise together during covid but now there's more of an equilibrium being reached well i mean if you don't by the way i think change your behavior may stay home for three days straight and obviously remember and just remember 60 of the us population lives in urban areas where this is kind of an effective kind of conversation we're having i think outside of that it's a very different world and so for forty percent of americans this is not like the conversation that you know in in deeply suburban and rural areas do you guys know what shadow or ghost quitting is you know what ghost quitting is go to science

i saw it on tick tock you stopped you stopped working i saw it on tick tock but you're still getting paid it's when you decide to quit mentally but don't actually quit and so you basically get out get off the corporate rat race by doing the bare minimum to not get fired at a company oh like saks during the science segment and so i uh you know i i think that there's all of these like invented things that people do that they think they can get away with which they generally can in a moment of prosperity where in a moment of actually like buckling down when earnings matter and profits matter and investor pressure matters all of this stuff i think is going to mean revert so this is sort of my my opinion on all of

this which is i think that most of these behaviors will eventually take over but it's still many years away and right now we have to go through the process of just getting back to where we were meant to be in the first place i think one area with significant disequilibrium right now i mean to your point is is productivity i think it's very hard uh to assess um and qualify productivity uh for knowledge workers in this environment and this is for employed base right remember we talked about last time like a large percentage of the u.s workforce has moved to more of an independent contractor sole service provider kind of model for how they're interacting and working in the world but i'm talking about knowledge workers in an employed environment and it is becoming difficult for managers and for companies to assess you know the quality and the level of work

being produced relative to its potential it's not the same as it used to be when you'd be able to have in-person monitoring and interaction and so you know i saw a stat the other day where it was like most companies are asking workers to come home most of the workers are to come to the office most of the workers are saying no and then most of the bosses don't know what to say in response and they're still sitting on the sidelines like okay okay don't come to work uh i'll get fired yeah and so there is this signa and by the way this may yield a competitive advantage for businesses in the marketplace that figure out how to assess productivity and how to assess performance in their organization right now in this rapidly shifted totally different workforce than what we had a few years ago because it's so easy to take four hours off in the afternoon go

to lunch hang out have beers come back get back online get back on slack do stuff and so there's this real challenge um i think for organizations and a real disequilibrium of productivity and output right now i've had to do it you guys looked at the tick tocks of these people that are like in the life of like a google engineer or day in life they work for thirty years and then they're like four hours at the gym they don't work they don't work they're literally smoking weed and playing video games and everyone knows cats managers know what's talking about managers know it senior vps know it the ceos know it it's this is my point people just don't know how to manage it

it's a real i figured it out it's a real disequilibrium in the workforce because the way you managed it before is everyone would choke to work or they wouldn't someone's not in the office they're not working they get fired now what do you do period you know and no one wants to be monitored no one wants to manage keystrokes through a freaking remote computer and figure out how much you're typing actually uh it's interesting you mentioned what do you do jkl to your employees no no no no no there there are people doing that call centers actually do that so call central they have monitoring software customer service and call centers totally sales people you can totally track productivity i'm talking about creators producers right like yeah i actually have come up with some strategies for

this so we have a lot of writers uh doing newsletters and stuff like that and so we did was we created a block in the afternoon we've been testing where three writers will get together in a pod and they work on a newsletter together so instead of three writers writing three different newsletters you have three writers collaborate on three different newsletters they do one for two hours one for two hours one for 90 minutes one for 99. and then a total of three people read the newsletters uh well it's doing four or five million dollars i'm advertising it's hundreds of thousands of people a day but okay but anyway the point is um i didn't mention the name of the company there's no plug in here but by the way you're going into

a zoom yeah no no you put people in a zoom or a huddle on slack which is like an audio only and then they have to deliver work to each other it's kind of how developers work or sales teams work with leads and then in things like programming like peer processing like peer program exactly and then with and it also makes people less lonely and it builds social fabrics so there are techniques that are emerging the other one i've looked at is i tell anybody if you're doing any type of knowledge work you need to create a notion or a coda page depending on what you use and update us on that and then send it to the group chat you know to the general channel hey i was working on the strategy for this so when people say

they're working on strategy i have them documented and i say share us share with us the google doc and i use the amazon six page you know uh philosophy of a right first culture and now people have to write it down so i've been teaching people how to write use grammarly or hemingway app to be better writers and then what you can do is as a manager you can just look at your notion or your coda and see the change log and when i see people in a change log and i see they've made no commits i'm like what is this person doing they said they did all the strategy stuff where is it where is the strategy stuff write it down so if you switch to a right first culture and then train people how to write and become more confident writers all that knowledge gets captured on your knowledge base and you can actually see people getting done it's not perfect but

i think it's actually intellectually better than being in office if you know how to do it because in an office people are also performative they're doing like meetings they're pretending they're working they they're they're actually reading the news or you know or whatever so sax what are you doing to uh monitor your employees covertly and keep them uh productive we don't need to monitor our employees that way because we're a small team of yeah and they're highly motivated you know but look it it it is an issue i don't i think where work from home is beneficial is on the hiring side right it's so much easier to hire for a job

when your potential pool is anyone in the world you're not just geographically limited to the city in which your office is so that was the temptation for all these companies to go remote as it made hiring so much easier but there's no question that it makes management much harder and scaling the company much harder and building culture much harder and so there's some real trade-offs there i don't think companies have totally wrapped their heads around it but look in addition to productivity there's one other aspect of this economy that i think is really broken so the the chamber of commerce says that 3.25 million fewer americans are working today than they were in february of 2020. so basically if you go back to the

month before covid we had over three million more americans in jobs than we do today and yet the unemployment rate is still in the three percent range and the reason is because that if somebody drops out of the labor force and isn't looking for work they don't get counted on the unemployment rate so we do have a if you define unemployment as a large number of people who aren't working we have a huge unemployment problem but the problem is they're not they're not counted because they're supposedly not not looking for work so i don't think this economy is that healthy and and i think that there's a lot of distortions that have been created by governments the suspect is what you're saying right like labor participation is there all this data the data is suspect the labels

are suspect i mean like we talked about all of a sudden we can't know what a recession is and let's just bring up one other thing that just happened today so mansion cut a deal with schumer to bring back to bring back a slimmed down version of bbb thankfully it's not 4 trillion like biden wanted 750 trillion okay but what are they calling billy billion right okay so you know thankfully it's it's a slim down bill but what are they calling this they're all of a sudden calling it the inflation reduction act wait what of 2022. what was like are you kidding this isn't possible are they trolling us with the names of these bills the bills are never what's

in the bill why don't they just call it the green energy bill and the screw private equity bill i mean that's basically what it is yeah well inflation reduction sells to everyone right but jason the media the media is not holding the administration accountable if we had if we had an honest media they the the headline today would be you know recession basically sacks we you can only get it on this pod or other podcast yeah what did president manchin get for this deal he agreed to it what did president mansion get well he he secured some bag right did you see what i said during the group shop

why did he agree he's like i got a pipeline there's gonna be huge uh handouts and pork for the state of west virginia there's no question about it i mean if you look at this bill okay the i mean we just we should just look at what's in it and yeah more and more is going to come out over the next few weeks right it's only one day so we're going to learn a lot more about what's in this but the largest republicans feel like can you explain the dynamic as well after you get through this of why the republicans felt like now that he double-crossed them because the democrats felt double-crossed by manch president manchin and now the republicans are feeling double-crossed by president manchin well i i don't know that you can

use the word double cross because he's not a republican and he had no obligation but look the the but there's no question that manchin went back on what he said just a few weeks ago he was saying that build back better was unacceptable because it would contribute to the inflation problem in fact he's been doing that since last summer he's been saying that we have a growing inflation problem we can't contribute to it with a lot more government spending now he's agreed to a 750 750 billion of of which something like 450 is new spending so yeah it's it's uh it's a smaller package than we had before but if your concern was inflation a few weeks ago you can't justify this you certainly can't call it an inflation reduction act i mean that's just patently dishonest

how do they come up with it being inflation reduction is it because their the health care stuff is theoretically going to help consumers have more money to spend because i think it's a 10 it's a tenuous argument but if you want to if you want to make the argument there's some cap on what seniors pay for prescription drugs and then there are subsidies for people are in the market for an electric vehicle however those are small adjustments those are small rebates to a small segment of the population i don't think you can argue in good faith that this bill will reduce cpi i just you know that's just not a plausible argument and the vast majority

of the bill like you said are subsidies for clean energy which are basically handouts to special interests in the donor class in the democratic party just itemize some of these things so the largest single outlay 60 billion is for quote environmental justice initiatives to address the unequal effects of pollution on low-income communities and communities of color this includes 3 billion to invest in community-led projects in disadvantaged communities and another 3 billion to support neighborhood equity safety and affordable transportation access another 30 billion shovels of states in the form of grant and loan programs for states electric utilities to advance the

green energy transition 30 billion for additional production tax credits to accelerate domestic manufacturing of solar panels wind turbines batteries and critical minerals processing that's basically going to companies right 20 billion in loans to build new clean vehicle manufacturing facilities across the u.s and 2 billion to revamp existing auto plants to make clean vehicles 20 billion for the agricultural sector to quote curb emissions 3 billion to reduce air pollution at ports 10 billion investment tax credit to manufacturing facilities for things like electric vehicles wind turbines and solar panels it seems redundant to the 30 billion

dollar outlay i just mentioned but it's another giveaway to democratic donors and wouldn't that be good chamoth wouldn't that spending be good for energy independence in addition to climate because we've been talking about being energy independent if we have more evs more batteries more solar that's a good thing right we want to be energy independent so this seems like we get two wins we're possibly three one we we get economic activity two we reduce our dependence on foreign oil and three we stop burning a hole in the ozone and increasing the temperature of the planet it seems like three good things we have to i think we have to see the force in the trees here and there's a there's one good part of this build and then there's the kind of more ugly reality that it avoids the ugly reality is

unfortunately or fortunately or maybe without taking emotion of it we are dependent on fossil fuels for a very long time it is a necessary bridge fuel and so we need to if we're talking about energy independence it can't happen without us frankly drilling more and subsidizing the capital incentives of private companies to go and do this exploration work which they have stopped jason and the reason they've stopped is that they don't trust that these oil prices will stay this high and so they don't want to make these outlays and investments for the next five to ten years because they're worried that it's going to be a rug pull which did happen to them in the back half of uh last decade and the early parts of this decade so they're like once bit and twice shy they're not they're not going to touch this you're saying oil companies that

would do some exploration it would cost them whatever amount two dollars to get the gasoline out to get the gasoline out of the earth and then process it but they're afraid it's going to be negative they're not going to be able to sell that gasoline i think they're a ferry that you know the united states government may impinge on their ability to actually process it that it may there may be tariffs and costs and taxes that they don't they'll be upside down forecast they'll be upside down so they just don't want to be and right now and you saw this i don't know if you guys saw it but like shell and exxon and these guys are printing enormous record profits so their incentives to change the status

quo right now is zero they want less supply because then they can raise prices they have the perfect situation right now which is it's an incredibly energy-intensive world we live in and we don't have nearly enough energy to do the work that needs to get done and and by the way and you saw this this week already where you know putin cut north stream by another 50 it was already running at 40 capacity he he cut it down to 20 percent it's only getting worse so i don't know i mean i think this bill could be good i haven't looked at the specifics to give you a very well the specifics aren't even fine i did see the ev credits uh freedberg and i thought that these were particularly well constructed

7 500 bucks off of a new car but you have to uh be in the 150k salary or less on your taxes so rich people can't get these and it can only be for an eighty thousand dollar new car a fifty thousand dollar or twenty five thousand dollar used and so they did seem to be started pretty well and i do know that those incentives did work in the early days of tesla because when you went to the website you would look at the price and you know this would be 10 off of a new car and they did drive sales and it it was uh pretty significant what are your thoughts on the ev tax credit is that something that's a wise thing and then what do you think overall about spending a couple of hundred billion dollars on uh reducing emissions and becoming more energy independent at the same time seems like a laudable strategy to you nope seems like a total

waste of money okay unpack it please the eevee tax credit is just giving away money to ev car manufacturers there's already enough demand the prices are low enough there's enough consumer interest there's enough consumer intent i don't think you need to put this money out there distorts a market that's already functioning well and this goes back to my point about the role of you know government and how we create you know create incentives or spend money uh this is not a place we need to be spending money because there isn't an absolute need there's no data that indicates that this will accelerate a transition to a carbon-free

economy or that it's even needed uh it really is a point of view that people hold and they believe that evs are good they're good for climate change we should accelerate it therefore we should spend money on it without any accountability or proof that these tax credits will actually motivate a market to move faster or quicker than it is already moving and so it is just spending taxpayer dollars that could theoretically not be spent or be spent in a more effective way to improve the lives of people broadly um in this country so yeah i don't i don't fully agree that i haven't seen any data that tells me this makes sense anecdotally

7 500 off of 75 thousand dollar ev is attractive i think the ev's are 75 000 gm and others have great low price tvs and there's a ton of market demand and they can't keep up with production and you know giving people 7 500 off a car that manufacturers are still struggling to keep up with making because there's so much demand already you don't need to do it it is so much cheaper to drive an electric vehicle now um by plugging this thing in and spending money on gas that people already want to buy these things they pay for themselves super fast every consumer wants to save money on transportation and you will save money by buying an electric vehicle so you will already buy an electric vehicle you don't need government money to get you to buy an electric vehicle for free bricks point there was a lot of um

analysis that's been done on consumer adoption patterns and typically for a new good or service the tipping point is around five percent mass-market adoption from when it goes from early adopters to the mass market and evs just crossed five percent so to his point the historical data would tell you that we're now past the critical point where it's no longer questionable and now it's just going to happen so it's not early adopters we're getting to the the map now it's mass market i mean i'll tell you like the best the best thing about ev adoption or for me for having an eevee is never having to go to the gas station amazing

amazing yeah i mean just just that one thing it's like i'll just give you guys currently it's about um 34.6 kilowatt hours per 100 miles okay i'll just get let's just do some math together let's say a kilowatt hour in the us costs about 10 cents okay so that's about 3.50 to drive a hundred miles in an electric car that's a lot cheaper than paying fifteen dollars for gas to drive the same distance in a gas car you don't need the tax credit to get people to buy these things these cars are financiable there's a very liquid very active lending market you you get paid back on these cars within a federal team if you're better or would you direct if you were going to direct some stimulus to i would not say anything right now we don't we just talked about how we don't need to stimulate the economy i would not do

anything i'm not talking about the economy i'm talking about to you you believe global warming's happening fredberg yes look you want my point of view on climate change and industry i i think i think humans i think humans are on a driven naturally market driven path to resolving um carbon output in our industrial systems and i don't think that government intervention with tax credits and specific consumer products is actually going to accelerate or resolve um you know these changes that are needed we need to not change consumer behavior consumers always want to have cheaper faster better what we need and you know at the end of the day what we need to do is change the way that we're producing and making

things because that's ultimately what's going to drive this transition and guess what consumers are demanding things that are you know more efficient that are more effective and efficiency ultimately resolves to less carbon ultimately resolves to less land less energy and industry has always resolved to greater efficiency natural market forces improve the efficiency of every industrial system so stimulus not necessary mankind has ever created and i think it doesn't it is a matter of um time and a matter of natural evolution that we will resolve all of the factors that are driving climate change from animal agriculture to transportation systems to energy systems these are all going to get completely will we do it in time technical tools we absolutely will and

at the end of the day we can pull carbon out of the atmosphere and resolve it into products we have tools to do that as well so i am an eternal optimist but in this particular case i think that this century much of what we're throwing our hands about and you remember at the beginning of the 20th century we thought we were going to run out of food then suddenly we invented the haber bosch process and created fertilizer out of air it was an incredible incredible invention that saved mankind we have had time and time again in the history of humanity these thoughts that we're in an exorcistic crisis we thought we would have peak oil and we've had these and we've had these points of view that we're in an existential crisis and humanity's about to end and every single

time we figured out a way out of it and we didn't figure out a way out of it because the government came along and said here's a tax credit and we've gotten sick and we've gotten drunk on government spending and we think that it is the solution to every problem we have as a species you know the biggest solution to our problems is our ingenuity and then they let the markets figured out consumers are smart businesses are smart they will figure out ways to resolve these solutions they don't need to have these handouts and i think that that's um that's a really important point that we've kind of missed and i'll say we were talking earlier about the economy this stimulus we've been giving ourselves caffeine since 2008 when the fed started to build up this balance sheet and we got used to

the idea remember before this it was like oh my god multi-million dollar bills and then it became multi-billion dollar bills then we had an 800 billion dollar bailout in 2008 and suddenly it was the multiple of 100 billion and the multiple of a trillion and this expectation now we've kind of reset the clock and everything now is in what multiple 100 billion or what multiple of trillion we're going to spend on stuff and no one's even batting an eye at the size of these um the the the bills anymore freeburg what is a bigger existential threat to the united states is it climate or is it overspending by our government i think it's over um i i think the biggest threat is uh is productivity um i think that as as a society we've gotten to the point that we are so well off

that um we have so many things that we don't realize we didn't have 50 years ago and you know read pinkner's book or enlightenment now and just go through those 200 charts he puts in there it will blow your mind and if you actually sit down and think about it and have a broader perspective on where we sit in this country today versus where we were 100 years 50 years even 30 years ago you will say oh my god we live in an absolute luxurious state in this country golden again golden era and it is a condition that unfortunately reaps um you know a decline in productivity because at that point we're entitled to some degree some people are entitled there are many people in this country that are still very hungry there are many people in this country that still want to progress and frankly i think a

lot of the um the lacks behavior from government entities actually holds us back from accelerating our productivity out things because it gives people many incentives and many reasons and industry many incentives and many reasons to not solve problems and i think that we solve problems and we're left to our own shabbat there was an article i posted nick you can put it in about the congo and that they've decided to auction a bunch of land to oil companies and um i think before they tried to heed sort of you know the west's directives and they said okay well let's build a land bank and we'll put a bunch of money in and so then the you know people in the in the congo will have money for things and you won't have to sell off the oil

rights and only tens of millions of dollars showed up and then the congolese were like they threw up their hand i'll just read the quote because i think it's interesting congo's sole goal for the auction said the government official is to earn enough revenue to help the struggling nation finance programs to reduce poverty and generate badly needed economic growth that is our priority he said our priority is not to save the planet that's quite a stark statement when you read it but but the reality is in one generation what will happen is they will feed the world's desire for fossil fuels that will generate a lot of revenue hopefully it doesn't get pilfered and so

it gets invested in health care and education and within a generation this country could be in a completely different situation [Music] allowing the productivity of that entire population of that country to do what they think is right so i'm generally of the belief that that that freeberg's right on this do you think though we should subsidize evs to increase the percentage and then also for solar just give me those two chamath solar and evs do you think they should be subsidized or not in the united states it depends on how and at what point of the market cycle the government's job is to create economic incentives that tip the balance of power towards investment

so if you are sitting here 15 years ago the price of solar panels was sky high it was incomprehensible that we could make solar equivalent to any other form of energy the only way that we were able to close the gap was through government subsidies but what that did was allow a bunch of companies to build businesses to make revenues and then also to make profits that then the public markets valued those public markets then put pressure on those companies to take those profits to become more efficient to make the panels cheaper and 15 years later we're now at parity so that was a really great example of the government stepping in to smooth out an imbalance in the investment incentive of the private markets that is where they are exceptional so in

any market they should be able to do this but i think what freebrook is saying is when then they do do it successfully and a market starts to germinate on its own where supply and demand happens naturally between the private markets the worst thing a government can do is step in because it completely perturbs what true supply or true demand is and that is what causes all of this crazy stuff that we deal with jkl fast forward assume that there's a 7 500 tax credit for evs that artificially makes ev's cheaper and then a better technology than evs comes along let's assume it's some nuclear fusion cold fusion mr fusion car like from back to the future and that car inevitably has to fight against the cheaper car because the

cheaper car is subsidized by the government we see this in a lot of markets that already exist in food in energy in infrastructure where government subsidies that are embedded in the operating model of that industry and that industry becomes kind of reliant and dependent on it totally distorts the ability for the market to naturally transition to a more productive more efficient state and that more productive more efficient state ultimately is cheaper better for consumers and better for the planet and we're we hold ourselves back when we insert government dollars into well-functioning markets i do think the government has an important role as i

mentioned last time in pure science in seeding new markets and seeding these opportunities in identifying paths that are quantum leap efficiency improvements in production systems in industrial systems in ways of living once those have been identified those breakthroughs have been kind of catalyzed boom let the market take off because it's going to take off but we shouldn't be in this so you believe evs and solar are there already absolutely they're cheaper and so let me point let me just give you one one point of reference let's use chimoff's congolese example let's assume that there's someone that lives in the congo and i said to this person who's probably subsisting on less than three thousand dollars a year of income and

they're probably living you know day to day on finding food and you said to this person in the united states they have these cars they're called electric cars and they're cheaper than gas cars and they're um you you make more money or you save money by buying one of these cars and they're cheaper now and we're giving people 7 500 to buy one this person who's making three grand a year would say what it is a state of luxury that allows us to do this and frankly i think it's it's a state of uh excess abundance and that's what i'm most worried about sax what are your thoughts on the government giving these type of subsidies to accelerate solar and evs the whole bill seems anachronistic you know first of all it's raising taxes by 739 billion at a time when we're entering a recession i don't know any economist who thinks that tax increases

help the economy we just talked about how the economy is in a really tenuous position so this is not the right medicine right now then you've got the fact that the vast majority of the spending this bill goes to these you know energy subsidies which are to see they're not going to help the average person there's very little money in this bill that helps the average working class person these are basically handouts there's basically pork barrel spending for democratic party donors and special interests and like freeberg i think just articulated very well they're not necessary right now the what's driving demand for electric vehicles and solar panels and

so on is first of all the products just keep getting better and better and second they keep moving down the cost curve as technology and innovation gets better these products get cheaper that's what's fundamentally driving the demand we don't need the government now again we need to accelerate it in an anachronistic way to shovel out all this money at a time we can't afford it you know look i'm glad that 300 billion of the bill is supposedly going to deficit reduction i hope those numbers actually materialize but we're still 30 trillion in debt and now that interest rates have gone from basically zero to around three percent the imputed debt service on our debts basically gone has increased by almost a trillion dollars that is a lot of money

so just like somebody who had a variable mortgage the united states is on a variable mortgage with our debt and so when interest rates go up we're going to have to pay exactly so if interest rates stay at this call at 3 level which is roughly where the 10-year t-bill's been you know bouncing around at that is a lot of debt service a trillion dollars a year of debt service so i think we're probably entering an era an overall era of austerity that lasts more than just this year or even this presidency and i think we'll look back at all this wasteful spending this last 10 20 trillion of spending as money we didn't need to spend they're gonna be paying

for for a long time so to be shoveling out another 300 billion plus of these programs and again once again going to corporations and special interests not to the average you know person who needs it it's just so irresponsible i have a question for fredberg one of the one of your exceptions there was investments in science you want to talk about your opinion on the quality of the grant process at the nih and whether we are doing the real work necessary to get the right things funded yeah i mean i think it's a good transition to what happened this week which was that there was a major potential fraud uncovered in alzheimer's research which has led to over a billion and a half dollars of funding and grants being given out to follow on alzheimer's research

programs in the years that follow this initial paper so you know in 2006 there was a paper published in the journal nature um about amyloid beta proteins that impaired memory and brains which then became kind of the leading theory for the cause and the driver of alzheimer's disease and much of the research and funding that followed from there which is now up to nine several billion dollars uh in in total funding in private and public uh institutions last year alone the nih funded 287 million dollars in research into amyloid beta and it turns out that the initial paper was shown to be fraudulent and so you know just recently the journal science published in detail an analysis of the photos of the western blot measurements the protein recognition images that the scientists used in this initial paper were forged and that many papers of his were then forged years later

and this paper is one of the most cited papers in alzheimer's research and much of the work that's been done on alzheimer's came out of this and if you guys remember last year we talked about that biogen drug that biogen drug is meant to stop amyloid beta plaque and you know the projection is that alzheimer's drug and and remember there was a panel of scientists that looked at the data for that drug that biogen got approval for from the fda and they all said this does not show conclusively in any way that it improves alzheimer's and the fda still approved the drug because so much of the nih funding went into the research for amyloid beta and so the assumption has always been this is the cause of alzheimer's this is the way to resolve it and everyone gets

so strongly held in that core belief and there's so much money behind it that we can't turn away and say maybe we're wrong and this is the problem when science meets money once you go from funding something and then suddenly a whole bunch more money pours into it everyone's gonna look bad and everything's gonna fall apart and everyone fears that the system fails if you realize that something you didn't said was so totally wrong we can even argue this is what happened recently with kovid the masks the vaccines all of the statements that were made that you have to keep doubling down every system has bad actors you know people

plagiarize fraud whatever is this like a systematic thing and doesn't science protect against this because people then do double-blind studies and try to replicate studies do things because like jason blair eventually got caught right at the new york times it was only a matter of time before somebody said like his description of my back porch was not accurate i never talked to this journal let's say that you're a smart up-and-coming scientist your job is to is to publish research that gets attention and that you can then go raise grants from the nih and others from on so you want to get some good papers out you want to get attention and then you want to forward the research that's already being done it is to no one's incentive to go out and try and retest something that someone's already published on even though that's what you're supposed to do

in science there's no motivation there's no dollars to do this it's um it's a disincentive to your career it's a disincentive to your ability as a scientist to source funding and to source grants to go back and retest assumptions that are already strongly held beliefs in the industry i'll give you another strong example that just came out um two weeks ago you know um you guys heard of ssri antidepressant drugs right 37 million americans are on these drugs the market is is projected to be at about 25 billion in the next few years that's how much um americans uh are spending on these on these antidepressant drugs half a sex but yes go on right um so there was a paper published in nature a few weeks ago and the nature journal pulled all the research and all the data from 17 other

studies that was across several hundred thousand patients and their conclusion was that there is effectively no proof that these ssri drugs have an effect on depression have a positive effect on depression that um you know serotonin and the idea that you know serotonin uptake should kind of have a driving effect on depression and this has been the assumption that's been held now for you know for many years i mean you know i think the original paper on this was published uh probably north of 20 years ago but the industry is so big right the drug companies are making 20 25 billion a year on this drug on these drugs and scientists are incentivized to further that research that supports that

research and so they can go out and get nih grants because it's already an accepted proven belief that this is is there a solution to this like for every dollar that's spent on primary you know a dollar needs to be sent on double-blind testing it and making sure that it's accurate should there be because we have this issue in journalism right everybody is a content creator re-blogger an opinion journalist but there's very few now investigative journalists left the actual problem his peer review systems entirely in my opinion like the the problem with this study is that this was done by an up-and-coming researcher in 2006 at the university of minnesota

under a researcher who is well known and so there was zero incentive as friberg said to really push back when well-credentialed scientists tried to find this amyloid beta star 56 they couldn't find it and you know lo and behold those articles don't get published because they don't get accepted why because it unravels the entire game that folks will play so you know if you're a well-educated phd with postdoc in the right places supporting other people it's just a loop that goes on forever the article goes on to talk about how that person who wrote that initial article eventually got this very prestigious multi-year grant from the nih by a person who was his reviewer who worked on the 2006 paper with him i mean these are some pretty blatant conflicts of interest but the reason they don't get uncovered is like who is who's going to

step in and all of a sudden become the let me strike an analogy here you know there's a seedling of fraud here obviously some guy took some freaking photos and photoshopped him and doctored him or whatever but we then tell ourselves stories and those stories get us access to money which allows us to pursue more science which is meant to forward the market and then eventually the market gets forwarded so much and you spend a billion and a half dollars and it turns out the whole thing doesn't work just like stock markets it starts out as a voting machine in the beginning and it's a weighing machine over time the same is true in science you will have a voting machine in the beginning where everyone has some belief some theory some hypothesis and they all want to believe it and they forward it and they fund it

they fund it but ultimately if it's not true and it doesn't actually resolve in real world change the market will collapse the stock will collapse and that's what just happened with amyloid beta and alzheimer's to a large degree there's a billion and a half dollar market cap you can think about it or billion and a half dollars of funding that's gone into this no that's probably the idea that's pretty well no there was a billion half of nih funding over time this is just the nih money no what i'm saying is the nih budget per year for alzheimer's and dementia is 1.9 billion yeah yeah and half of it if you look at the tags if you just search the tags half the money has gone into alzheimer's disease amyloid beta so the point is you could orient the terms you used and the way in which

you wrote your grants to disproportionately affect the likelihood of getting money separately there's a whole body of researchers that have felt for a very long time that specific forms of infection viruses um lyme disease could actually be a precursor to alzheimer's and it has been poorly researched because the funding dollars weren't there so the there's a lot of other theory mitochondrial dysfunction yeah yeah so freeberg when we look at this a bad actor committing fraud can send the entire uh deployment of capital in science on a multi-billion trajectory of the human race come on like it's not just about like we didn't get the dollars in it's if you don't take the path the drug

doesn't get discovered that's a really big deal and now and now the drug is in the market biogen gets approval and people start taking it and we're seeing the data it doesn't work and no one wants to use it so the market has collapsed and you kind of go back to the origin it's like the market collapses ultimately the weighing machine happens because the science doesn't work it's not there and there was no incentive no one got paid along the way imagine if there was a bounty program to go and disprove papers i mean imagine if there was a system that's what i was talking about what is the safeguard and we do have that in public markets it's called shorting no there is short stocks it's called pub here the problem is if you go to pup here and all of a sudden put your

name out there as someone calling it out your professional career inside a research institution is finished right if your job there are no heroes no if your job is to disprove other people's stuff you don't you don't forward your career right i mean there's a it's a role those people should be heroes those are like bug bounty programs they have to look at it like bug bounty programs in tech or shorting stocks and the problem is that this community is extremely small highly specialized and their impacts are enormous on all of society but you can't replace them with somebody else very easily because it takes an enormous amount of expertise like if you read that science article the amount of

work science took six months of due diligence before they even had the courage to put this thing out there they had all kinds of different teams trying to prove what this guy had found before they were willing to put ink to this thing yeah when things are starting to feel like they're altering moving to market or getting to market the more money starts to flow in another good example of this is zymergen and genko okay so in the past week zymergen was acquired for 300 million it was announced that they're going to be acquired by ginkgo buyer works both of whom are public companies ginkgo went public at i think a 20 billion dollar market cap as a spec

a few months ago zymergen went public at you know four billion or whatever they went public at zymogen being acquired for 300 million dollars comes off of them having raised a total of one and a half billion dollars of capital from many investors including softbank and in their ipo since they were founded in 2013. both of these businesses do exactly the same thing or similar things which is pursue the industrialization of synthetic biology synthetic biology has been talked about you know or pursued for 20 years in an industrial setting the kind of gen 1 of synthetic bio companies was amorous gevo keor solazyme these companies were all engineering cells you change the genome or the dna of the cells you get those cells to make a product you want them to make you put

them in what's called a bioreactor and they make the product you can make bioplastics you can make animal proteins you can make fuel and so these um and you put sugar water in the tank so you're programming the organism to make stuff for you and there's a lot of technical challenges right how do you change the genome how do you get it to be more productive what are the environmental conditions of the bioreactor how do you scale this thing up and so on and so many of them had early stage proof points and then extrapolated out that this is going to work at scale so all the gen 1 companies largely failed gevo key or solazyme they were all trying to compete with the price of oil and they lost and so they could never actually the science worked

in the lab but getting it to a big scale there was a million things that went that suddenly were kind of proven or disproven along the way and they all kind of pivoted and became cosmetics companies and kind of did high-end food and other stuff and then genko and zymogen were kind of gen 2 they were like we're going to reduce the cost improve the time scale of these synthetic biology programs and they started using industrial robots and arms zymogen made a bunch of kind of strategic errors where they were like we're going to make the product and design the organisms so it took a lot more money a lot more time and as they kind of stepped up and tried to scale up turns out a lot of the things that they

believed to be true weren't quite true but the ceo did a great job selling the story josh hoffman he went out for years and he told everyone you know we're going to kind of create this this factory and we're going to make everything in the world using biology it's going to transform uh the world and we've talked about this is it a true story yeah and so look there's so much of the fundamentals are true but the industrialization the amount of capital these guys raised and what they promised they would deliver on when turned out not to quite beep the economics not to quite get there and the market decisions they made about what products to go after how quickly to scale up building their own facilities there was just a lot of strategic errors and i think the

storytelling got ahead of where the business was you know we saw this a lot in other businesses in the past years we've talked about crypto and other markets but these were really key examples because the science is so compelling and the narrative is so compelling and if it's right and if it works it changes the world and i think the same was true of amyloid beta and alzheimer's everyone wanted it to be true ssris everyone wants there to be a cure for depression that you take a pill and you solve depression everyone wants to you know have a drug that you take and it ends alzheimer's everyone wants to print all the world's products in a factory using cells but there's a lot more to it and as you kind of get through the nuanced

10 to 20 year cycle of science moves to technology moves to industry those stages are wrought with errors and issues and ultimately may not actually yield what we expected it to yield and those stories start to fall apart and that's what happened with zymogen they're getting potential well we look back on this fredberg in 20 years and say hey yeah these things were total train wrecks they flipped the car but it was a step in the right direction and yeah that was a hundred percent capital but you know something will be built on top of it just like mainframes or mini computers to smartphones the first system of calling synthetic biology a recombinant dna where we took dna from one organism and we put it in a in a in a microbe to

make stuff for us was genentech in 1978. prior to 1978 the way we got insulin is we actually processed pig parts so it would take like you know hundreds of kilograms of pig parts to make just a few grams of insulin and um genentech took the dna for human insulin and they put it in a bacterial cell and they made human insulin in a bioreactor and that really kind of ushered in this this era of you know industrial synthetic biology that all of these companies kind of followed suit to do in different markets but remember biologics the entire pharma industry and biologic drugs it's all made this way we take the um the dna to code for certain antibodies or proteins we put it in microbes and those microbes make those products for us that

biologics drug industry is a 350 billion dollar annual revenue industry today and so it works it's just a matter of when and what the right products are industrial enzymes 25 billion annual revenue today so there are markets that are working it is working but this whole like we're going to change the world overnight isn't really you know true and so these stories catch up to us and i think we've seen this where i call it science meets money you know money usually wins um and the science isn't quite there yet and so we've seen this kind of the genentech story is amazing i mean tom perkins from kleiner perkins fame

like willed that company into being and they yeah it's pretty amazing how in the old days eventually i don't know if they basically built these companies like you're doing today freeburg in like a production board model he he basically incubated genentech and then surprised the world with like hey we have synthetic insulin here um it was like true yeah look i mean the potential for silicon valley there isn't a single material or food or a fuel or product that we ultimately won't be able to make using synthetic biology it's just a matter of how do we get from here to there and the storytelling kind of gets you a bunch of money and then you get ahead of your skis and then boom you fall down same happened in alzheimer's same happen with ssris and i think we'll see this happen a lot but like when science gets exciting a lot of money gets behind it and sometimes it can kind of you know

get ahead of its skis and fall down but and exactly our sex how excited are you for this revolution to instead of with us in one of our companies in synthetic biology he may not remember but he's got some money here oh i won't name the company but he's got some money oh yeah how's that doing did you fall asleep in the board meeting no i'm not we're not on the board we're we're passive we didn't is that the one we brought to you freeburg yeah well three people brought me but i've known them since they were small but yeah no there was a deal that came in that looked interesting but it was a little bit out of our area so we went to freeburg but it is an interesting

business because these guys provide a tooling service to other sin bio companies and so it's a recurring response yeah yeah it's picks and shovels exactly yeah yeah it was very sass-like in that regard of nerds yeah okay so we're talking about an area where you know i'm not going to be able to contribute a lot to the discussion of ssris i'm not going to pretend to know i'm just a consumer i'm not i am uh these ssris helps you in any way with your depression about biden no okay the story that i think kind of fits with everything we're talking about this week um uh there was more there were more stories this week about this cynical ploy by the democratic party to fund the candidates no hold on we talked we talked a little bit about this last week

but they spent you should be up really opposed to this j kell i uh yeah listen as an independent i think it's gross i am an independent you're an independent only votes for democrats so not true not true i'm going to vote for liz cheney for president i think liz cheney or bezos those are my favorites have you ever voted for a republican candidate for any office ever i yeah i have you have really yeah yeah people i i'm a moderate and i don't feel like when i voted for um 1904 he was a democrat it's been a long life but i did i did vote i remember for a republican and when i lived in new york david sachs has a look on his face that says finish your stupid banter so i can go on my monologue okay go go hold on

henry bell caster in three two go no i don't i don't really have a monologue on it but i just think that this is this is a pretty amazing story that you've got democrats spending almost 50 million dollars this primary season boosting mega candidates yes um at the expense of moderate gop candidates perfect so let's get the crazies in there yeah i mean they're easier to beat right and that's the theory if you get a theory but in a year crazy in a year in which you get a red wave it's really dangerous and it totally undermines what the democrats are saying in their january 6th at least it's completely cynical i agree yeah you

can't you can't on the one side cynical is backing trump you can't on the one hand say that we're facing an unprecedented existential crisis for our democracy and on the other hand be giving money to the very same people you're saying are the threat to democracy it makes no sense it just shows that both sides are completely cynical backing anything that is talking about no no no no you're what you're saying you're trying to both you're trying to both sides it you're trying to engage both sides no but the difference here is that there is this is i'd say partisan political gamesmanship but the point is you can't on the one hand be engaging in ordinary partisan gamesmanship while you're saying that democracy faces an unprecedented threat that's the

disconnect no no i get it you're trying to get too cute what do you think about liz cheney i'm curious would you think for her if she was a nominee she's a warmonger just like her father she's like she's basically darth vader 2.0 so that's my biggest problem with her is no i would not i would not vote for her there's not there's not a war she doesn't want to get us involved in and there's not a country she wouldn't try and impose democracy at the end of a barrel okay so that's why i don't like her but to your point democrats say they want to work with more republicans like liz cheney but if you look at who they're

donating money to they're donating money to support the maga election denier against every single republican who voted for impeachment okay so you look at like the specific races um it's completely cynical and it's just about winning just like there were just to give you one one example uh democrats they gave they launched 450 000 of ads to take out a grand rapids congressman peter uh major who also voted for trump's impeachment they did this with a dem with a republican in california david uh valadel and just on and on so you've got on the one hand you've got democrats saying that this is an unprecedented threat to democracy they want to work with more reasonable republicans who aren't denying the election while at the same time trying to basically fund the campaigns of the maga candidate yeah the reason they're doing

it obviously is if you fund one of these maniacs then they're easy to repeat so they're trying to serve up somebody who's an easy candidate to be getting this strategy but it's an i think it's a very dangerous strategy because it's effective it was my question no i don't think so because this year i think this november is likely to be a wave election and when you get a wave election the specific candidate matters less and party matters more so you could get some of these crazies swept into office so i think it's a cynical and counterproductive strategy and you say that republicans do it too i can't remember any example i think trump itself is like supporting trump is that i can't i can't remember it i can't remember a single time ever

where republicans have basically funded have funded the soros i just think this is very stupid and dangerous but let me ask you listen it's of a peace okay it's of a piece with the administration claiming we're not in recession trying to redefine recession now that we're in one it's of a piece with joe manchin all of a sudden calling the slim down bbb the deficit reduction act after saying that it would increase the the deficit and the media is not holding these guys accountable that's why they're doing it politicians hold on a second politicians are going to be as dishonest as the media allows them to be and the media is not holding it brian conan o'brien kept the white house honest he tweets out the white house now says it's only a recession if you see a

salamander wearing a top hat about the comments the comments are the best one guys like but let me ask you a serious question seriously going beyond just the specifics of the political issue i think we really have a problem with the media class i mean the media is carrying water for these democrats because they agree with the ideological agenda we do not have an honest media who's willing to hold the party in power accountable given what you've said about being disgusted by like the um you know uh denying uh you know this voter fraud conspiracy stuff by trump or whatever if trump wins the nomination which i think he will

how are you going to be able to when we're on the show a year from now and trump has the nomination or you know 18 months from now whenever it is that it he locks it up and he will lock it up if he runs i don't think so so if he does though i don't think so you'll conceivably be able to back trump for a second term would you be able to come on this program and say i back trump as a republican because you don't want to vote for a democrat what would you do just not vote because you don't like trump you said you would not support him listen politics is always a choice of the lesser of two evils there are a lot so you would vote for trump so i hope i'm not in that situation listen i i what would you do listen the the election that america does not want in 24 is biden versus

trump i think the race that they want i think the choice they want to make is actually desantis versus newsom that's the choice i'd like to make so look i'm on the desantis train that's what i'm supporting for 24. you know if it ends up being something different we can talk bezos desantis what would you do would you vote for a samples really baby what about you chamoth would you go bezos or desantis who would you vote for bezos or desantis i i bezos are descent this wow that's a tough one probably desantis okay freeburg bezos i'm good i'm going to sit this question out let's keep going okay all right everybody there you have it everybody it's a it's a dumb question j-cal because bezos is not running i mean

and honestly the the fact that people were even discussing that is he supported no but his thought the thought experience the reason why i would go desantis is at least he knows how to play the game of politics bezos would just in a matter of a week be like why did i do this i had the best life in the world exactly there's just no way it's the stupidest living my best life listen jacob bezos had two tweets criticizing the administration on inflation and you're like he's running for president he's running no no no there's two there's other reasons come on zombies he bought the washington post he bought the biggest house in dc uh and he gave that 10 billion dollar

climate page i think those are all little cards that you could check boxes and if he writes a biography bezos probably has houses all over the world doesn't mean he's running for president of those countries come on uh i'm just saying you're just scared you're scared of the bezos presidency you know that he would roll over desantis he would roll desantis even if bezos were dumb enough to run for president i think he's too smart to do that the democratic party would never nominate him that's not why he would have that's like some purity don't get me wrong i'd love to see a candidate like bloomberg or bezos nominated by the democratic party because they clearly understand economics right would it be a master stroke by the democratic party to embrace a model i would like to i would

love to see canada but look at look what happened in bloomberg bloomberg spent 100 million dollars and he lasted to the first question of the first debate yeah they knocked him out the first course of the first debate and then you know uh elizabeth warren knocked him out by just basically calling him a billionaire and he's there stunned he had no answer terrible yeah he did terrible terrible but i mean it would be a master stroke if they went with a moderate you know it all right everybody for david sachs chamoth and friedberg i'm j cal we'll see you next time on episode love you i'll catch you bye-bye love you sexy poo let your winners ride rain man

david it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it [Music] we need to get back [Music] i'm going on [Music]