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

No, what I'm saying is the NIH budget per year for Alzheimer's and dementia is 1.9 billion. 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.

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.

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.

I mean, mean reversion is a bitch. If you look at Shopify stock, if you look at Peloton stock, if you look at Affirm 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.

I mean, everybody made that mistake, right? So, you know, it's just you're right, Chamath. Just own it. Everyone was thinking the same thing. We're talking about how COVID was this acceleration of this virus, and it was going to accelerate all these trends.

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.

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.

And EVs just cross 5%. 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.

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 and the Democratic Party.

So they overbuilt, tried to get ahead of the curve. Remember, they hired like a hundred thousand workers. And, you know, 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 definitely went too heavy.

Zymergen being acquired for $300 million comes off of them having raised a total of $1.5 billion of capital from many investors, including SoftBank and then their IPO since they were founded in 2013

But the industrialization, the amount of capital these guys raised and what they promised they would deliver on when turned out not to quite beat 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.

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 root 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 this 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.

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 will print six and seven percent, but that's still not below four and a half or five.

And yet, the unemployment rate is still in the 3% 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, 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 counted because they're supposedly not looking for work. So I don't think this economy is that healthy.

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.

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.

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 will be. But we know the cause of this. The cause of this recession is inflation.

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 by the way, and you saw this this week already, where, you know, Putin cut Nord Stream by another 50%. It was already running at 40% capacity. He cut it down to 20%.