E126: Big Tech blow-out, Powell’s recession warning, lab-grown meat, RFK Jr shakes up race & more

I think it's just a very complicated, long drawn out process. And I just wonder if the people that are in these businesses, if they actually love food or not.

So I want to just get back to the unit economics. The cost per kilogram or the cost per gram of the protein, we are still many orders of magnitude away on cellular meat. So the problems you're laying out are really down-the-road problems of optimization. Right now, we've got more fundamental problems on how do you actually get this stuff to be cost competitive.

They're like... It's like eating something mushy that's 60% of an average hamburger. It's not worth paying double for, certainly, for somebody who's a hamburger eater.

One final thing I'll say, it's extraordinarily important to note that I think Google has such an incredible AI advantage over Microsoft.

So I just don't see a world where, on the one hand, physical labor will continue to be more expensive, they'll demand more and more money to do the job that they're asked to do, and the knowledge work will become increasingly more deflationary because so much of it will be automated by AI that those folks will charge less and less.

I think a different way to put it would be every knowledge worker can get 30% more work done.

I don't think it's 10% less Chamath or that, you know, I think it's like 90%, 10 cents on the dollar to do knowledge work.

So the Luddite argument of, oh, this is going to destroy jobs and destroy the economy and drop costs by 90 percent, lawyers are going to get cheaper, etc. etc. I think that doesn't even matter. It's the tip of the iceberg.

Their valuations may still go up because they generate such an enormous amount of cash flow. But these are exactly those kinds of businesses now. They are ex-growth, large cash flow businesses.

Yes, maybe this is the flip side of what Chamath is saying is they're not growing very fast, but they are profitable machines generating a lot of earnings.

in contrast to Metta being up 11, 12 percent after hours with their cost cutting model and demonstrating that they're going to start pulling cash out of this business.

Like it doesn't take a CEO change for a board of directors to have the emotional wherewithal to authorize a 15 or 20% reduction in force for a company that is so profitable, that clearly is not yet humming on all cylinders.

People are just saying, you know what? We're going to cut our way to and do stock buybacks. And that's another way of financial engineering to route around the Fed, right?

They've got a large cushion in terms of their ability to continue generating earnings because of all the bloat that actually gives them like a margin of error where they can just keep cutting to prop up earnings.

It's going up for sale. And they believe, according to the Wall Street Journal, that bids will come in at $60 million, an 80% decline. And we talked about this commercial real estate would have this moment. A lot of the banks, the smaller regional banks, own this debt.

So you're going to be sitting on that property for five years, ten years before the market comes back the way that you needed to.

So we're going to nearshore or onshore all kinds of things that used to be done by the Chinese. They'll sit in Mexico or they'll sit in Central America.

So the way that Beyond and Impossible and others have tried to make it taste good for people is they've added a lot of, you know, saturated fats, which is a way to drive the mouth feel and make it taste good.

It looks like Russia is certainly not losing the way they used to be. They've captured 90% of Bakhmut, which has been the most violent, bloody battle of the war. And Biden at this point has no strategy to bring that to an end. In fact, he's rejected multiple attempts at a peace deal. And so now it looks like it's the Chinese who are in the driver's seat, potentially putting together some sort of diplomatic settlement.

But Google certainly has an incredible set of tools and capabilities that is leap years ahead of Microsoft. They're in a position to really compete. They just have to have the will and the leadership to do it.

By the way, we said that the first organizations to use this, like the Canary and the Coal Mine would be the consulting organizations. And today when Harvey got announced, one of the things that right on the heels of that, PricewaterhouseCoopers announced like a billion dollar investment into AI.

Now, I don't know if he was right about those vaccines, but I do know that he's right in the case of COVID. They had an incentive to push this dubious mRNA shot on us so that we get boosted a zillion times.

But when you show that chart, Jason, what it means is it's just really hard to find people. And so the only way you're going to get people off their butt to go into work, to sit in a chair, to do a job that you need them to do is to pay them more. And in finding that, wages will have to go up.

I'm sticking by it. I think we're still going to have a recession.

Hundreds of millions of dollars, and in several cases, billions of dollars have gone into these systems, and it's very likely that these companies may need several more years and several billion dollars. We are going to get there. The technology is progressing. The rate of progress is a little slower, and it's a little more challenged, I think, than the first round of investors had hoped.

And we've talked a lot about the statistic that I've shared a bunch publicly on how 70 percent of publicly traded companies that have gone public since 2020 are trading below their total cash invested since founding, which should translate to an estimate that call it somewhere in the order of 70 percent of private companies are probably worth less than their preference stack.

Or should I even bother, so should I bother building, you know, a verticalized app? And it turns out, like, I think you should do the verticalized app.