E94: NFT volume plummets, California's overreach, FBI meddling, climate change & national security

Number two, businesses are going to automate. So new businesses will emerge that actually do the fast food work or do the car building work or do the dock loading and unloading work that are automated and they'll have an inherent advantage in the economy and they'll win.

Well, the reason is because if you raise the minimum wage too much, then these employers have a huge incentive to replace that labor with automation. And so the unintended consequence that Chamath is talking about is that these big chain restaurants are going to rely even more heavily on automation now.

And so to think that they're not going to just invest heavily now at the corporate level, the next franchisee of McDonald's will still pay a million dollars for franchise fee but will give will be given a bevy of robots that they rent for McDonald's and they'll have to hire half or third less.

We are within, I think, five, 10 years of a lot of these jobs. We're talking tens of millions of manual labor jobs being gone. And we're going to look at this moment in time where we try to squeeze an extra 10 or 20 percent out of these employers. And then you're going to see these employers say, you know what? 24-hour-a-day robot. Yeah, it's a little bit upfront cost. I'll put it on the lease and they're just going to move to these robots. It's really very close to being game over for manual labor.

the way that he described it to me, which is so true the minute he said it, I was like, my gosh, it's like Moore's law never ended, it just shifted to GPUs. Because the inherent lack of parallelization that CPUs have, you solve the GPUs. And so that's why the surface area of compute of innovation has actually shifted, Jason, to what you're saying, which is all of these new kinds of machine-learned models, because you can just now brute force and create such a tonnage of compute capabilities and resources to solve these problems that weren't possible before.

You look at the data sets that are available to train. So you have the GPUs still escalating massively the amount of computer power can do. You have cloud computing at the same time, and then you have these data sets.

No, it's true. If you're willing to use natural gas and fracking, America is one of the richest energy countries in the world.

I think the only way we'll be able to deal with him is if he doesn't have the oil market he has. He just has too much power from that oil. And over time, that's the solution. We have to be energy independent.

This is a state in which you have a disappearing middle class. The middle class has been moving out of the state by the hundreds of thousands. In fact, last year, we had for the first time net migration out of the state.

No, the great thing is we have a running A-B test, which will show whether this state central planning can work or not. And again, if we refuse to want to listen to the examples of Russia or all of these other countries that have tried this, then so be it. We will know in the next three to five years that these policies actually don't work and actually that it actually accelerates the exact hellscape that they think they're trying to avoid.

The floor price of a board ape has now dropped by 53%. If you remember, OpenSea raised $300 million at a $13.3 billion valuation December 2021 in a round led by Kotu and Paradigm. To put that in perspective, that was nine whole months ago. My how the world has changed. Friedberg, what's your take on NFTs and this whole boondoggle?

And I think the NFTs are really just one more kind of example where this beautiful narrative has formed, the digitization of art. But it is no different than any other form of assets that we tell ourselves a story around.

So these things are more similar than they are different. Coachella and Burning Man, the same. NFTs and part of the art market, the same. Everybody that runs to you with why it's so different, I would just have a grain of salt and say, you don't need to be different.

The great thing about the IRA and what Chuck Schumer did is actually will be written in 10 or 15 years from now, because when we get to energy independence, when every home is resilient, the national security calculus in America changes wholeheartedly overnight.

You just saw, actually, Elon just gave a talk and made news this past week from Norway where he said that we still need oil and gas. He's the leading innovator in basically moving to solar and renewables. And he said, listen, unfortunately, we got to rely on oil and gas because it's too important for civilization.

If you actually believe this is a cataclysmic issue, you need to basically be okay with hydrocarbons because it is the only credible bridge fuel we have to keep the world working properly. Because otherwise what David said is right, we are going to economically destroy parts of the world by trying to race towards this net zero goal. By the way, guys, I just want to take the, you know, rip the bandaid off. Net zero by 2050, 26, it is not possible. There is zero credible plans that the world has to do it.

And we saw obviously Germany is, you know, thinking the three remaining of their six that they were going to turn off, they're putting back on. And I think we're going to see new ground broken. And Japan came out just in the last week and said, they're going to build more nuclear power and nuclear power plants.

And one of the byproducts of the production of fertilizer is CO2, which gets added to the production of beer to make it fizzy. Well, guess what? The Germans are not only about to run out of gas, they're about to run out of beer. You think they're going to keep supporting the Ukraine War when they find out that there's no beer for Oktoberfest?

Which is now going to cripple many economies of that entire continent unnecessarily.

We're in the eighth month of this story, which is fill in the blank asset class crashed.

And I will also say that in the last year, with the liquidity that we saw the last two years, it leached into the stock market where there's supposed to be more rational behavior that ultimately the cash flows of an asset you're buying should generate more for you than the money you're spending to buy that asset.

And then obviously European farmers are having issues. And combine that with the geopolitical issues of the Ukraine crisis and the natural gas pricing being so high, one third of ammonia plants have been shut down in Europe. And they think that ammonia and fertilizer production may drop by as much as one half in Europe because of the crisis.

So in the province of Shishuan in China, they actually lost power because so much of the power is driven by hydroelectric plants. So streams and water flow has slowed down and stopped. As a result, there's less power. As a result, the factories are being shut down. As a result, key components for manufacturing in the computing industry and kind of mechanical goods are not being produced at the rate that they were being produced before that has a ripple effect in the supply chain, similar to what we saw in COVID.