E173: Google buying HubSpot? FTX depositors not made whole, AI job fears, Ukraine joining NATO

I'd like to summarize my thoughts in three charts. And I call this, This Time It's Not Different. ... as productivity goes up, which is what AI should give us, just as we've seen in the past, compensation also goes up, which means new job classes will be created.

Or does the cost of making an architectural drawing drop by 90%? And it enables us to do more detailed, higher resolution architectural drawings across more places, more frequently, and the industry actually booms. ... we will see these tools creating more leverage for knowledge work instead of just simply replacing knowledge work and that humans will start to shift to a higher order of work

Now, look, in the short to medium term, AI leads to productivity gains. In the long term, it may lead to job losses. But as you guys pointed out, hopefully by then we'll have lots of other jobs created by the productivity boom that we're going to get.

If you look at the non-big tech M&A deals, they're going to get slowed down for different reasons. So, for example, like the big US deal merger with Nippon Steel that was announced, Biden has one set of issues. But I suspect, you know, if Donald Trump were to get elected, his issues will be more about further hollowing out middle America. And so that deal will probably get stopped for different reasons.

I mean, I think it's a bit of an odd acquisition. And the reason is that it's become pretty clear for all of big tech that any acquisition that they do is going to be highly scrutinized. ... And I would not characterize HubSpot as strategically valuable for Google. I think it's an important ecosystem player and it's probably better off as an independent company.

So this is a very natural fit into Google's advertising business and taking all of the leads from advertising and better converting them and giving your sales team the tools they need to convert those leads into customers. So it makes great strategic sense.

I don't think this acquisition makes any sense. I'm kind of in Chamath's camp. This would be a very odd acquisition. I'm not even sure the story is true. There's been no confirmation of an actual bid made.

I think you're both missing a key piece to this. I think this is about the data. ... They don't want a SaaS business. They want the data. They want to retarget folks.

This really has the risk of tipping over into policy, I would say, in a Biden second term, where Biden agrees to do what our European allies are already calling for, which is send in NATO troops to Ukraine to save Ukraine from what Politico calls an imminent collapse. I think this is a very dangerous situation. I mean, we're really talking about here is World War III.

Well, look, it's going to be very hard for any big tech company to do a $50 billion acquisition of anything, just given that Linecom and the FTC are opposed to bigness in and of itself.

I think the Democrats and the Republicans are really well aligned here. They don't like deals. And I don't think you're going to see a big sea change. They hate big tech for different reasons, but they equally want to slow them down.

So if you want to have a serious chance of World War III in the next four years, then I would say go ahead and vote for Biden in November. I mean, this is just very clear to me. I'm personally not willing to accept that risk.

But this is why I'm asking you, obviously they're not going to do this because things are going perfectly in that space. And so if you're losing share, you're not going to be losing it to Bing. You're losing it to some form of AI, which is why, again, it's a bit of a head scratcher.

what he's basically saying is it's still more artificial than intelligent. And everybody needs to take a deep breath and understand that there's just going to be a lot more work before you get to this omnipresent agent that just replaces and destroys everything and thinks on its own.

What's going to allow us to pay off this enormous national debt that seems to be so large that it's unrepayable? We need the productivity gains that AI is going to unlock. Without them, we're definitely toast.

he points out that the era of prosperity that over the last 500 years, we've seen six major empires go through is followed by a debt bubble, which drives a wealth gap, which ultimately leads to economic challenges, which means printing more money, which is the cycle we are going through right now with a, as you guys know, $2 to $3 trillion annual deficit and explosion in federal debt levels. And that ultimately leads inevitably to external conflict, to war.

Jason, I don't think it's a five year time frame. I think it's longer than that. That's just my guess. ... I think in the near term, it's all about industrial applications or maybe even military applications.

I think it'll be less than that. I think it's going to be in the next two or three years, you'll have a domestic help robot that you can probably pay a thousand bucks a month for.

I think every human is going to have one of these. I think every household in America, every middle class household in America, will have one of these thousand dollar a month robots in seven years. I'll give it seven.

I don't think it necessarily follows this general purpose model. I think that there are likely going to be more narrow application ranges, and they're not going to necessarily be humanoid in form factor. ... the success of Gecko indicates that there's far more money to be made in industrial applications than there is in consumer applications today.