Scarlett Johansson vs OpenAI, Nvidia's trillion-dollar problem, a vibecession, plastic in our balls

1. 0:00 – 2:46

   Bestie intros: Recapping "General AI Hospital"

   1. JCJason Calacanis0:00

      Now, I just wanna be clear here. W- I'm trying to do a docket and, uh, we have to put the kibosh on this insanity of the soap opera that is becoming OpenAI, Sax. Because every week, it's three, four, five stories. Have you seen what's happened this week?

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:17

      Yeah, of course.

   3. JCJason Calacanis0:18

      We gotta catch the audience up here. Let's catch the audience up on what's happened here. (instrumental music plays) This week on General AI Hospital ...

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:27

      (laughs)

   5. JCJason Calacanis0:27

      ... is Sam Altman's job security in jeopardy?

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:30

      (laughs)

   7. JCJason Calacanis0:31

      Whose data was stolen this time?

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:33

      (laughs)

   9. JCJason Calacanis0:34

      What did Ilya see?

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:36

       (laughs)

   11. JCJason Calacanis0:36

       Why isn't he talking about it? And with our special guest-

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:40

       (laughs)

   13. JCJason Calacanis0:40

       ... will our special guest get her revenge? General AI Hospital.

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:45

       (laughs)

   15. JCJason Calacanis0:45

       Brought to you by the drama queens at OpenAI.

   16. DSDavid Sacks0:48

       Wow.

   17. JCJason Calacanis0:50

       Did that land? (laughs)

   18. DSDavid Sacks0:50

       (laughs)

   19. DFDavid Friedberg0:51

       Who made that? That was great. Did you make that?

   20. JCJason Calacanis0:54

       Yeah, that was me.

   21. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:54

       10 outta 10.

   22. DFDavid Friedberg0:55

       That was great.

   23. JCJason Calacanis0:55

       That was, that was my idea, but Nick's and Lon's execution. So shout out to-

   24. DFDavid Friedberg0:59

       Nice work, team.

   25. JCJason Calacanis0:59

       ... Lauren Harris and Nick Kalikanis.

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:00

       You f- finally landed the-

   27. JCJason Calacanis1:01

       Hey.

   28. DFDavid Friedberg1:02

       Yeah.

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:02

       ... the plane.

   30. JCJason Calacanis1:02

       Broken clock's right twice a day.
2. 2:46 – 14:37

   Scarlett Johansson vs. OpenAI

   1. JCJason Calacanis2:46

      here. And let's go over this ScarJo saga. Uh, to recap, (laughs) if you're living under a rock, this week it came out that OpenAI, specifically Sam, had contacted Scarlett Johansson multiple times about lending her voice for one of OpenAI's chatbots. Obviously, you know, she famously was the voice of Samantha in the awesome film, Her, and according to ScarJo, Altman told her she could, "Bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI." And that her voice "Would be comforting to people." Although she declined the offer, OpenAI released a chatbot named Sky, which had a similar voice to ScarJo's. According to ScarJo, her friends and family thought the voice was her, she released a statement, yada yada. On May 13th, the day OpenAI launched ChatGPT-4o, Omni, which we talked about last week, Altman tweeted "Her," a reference to the film obviously. Now ScarJo is threatening legal action against OpenAI. Altman put out a statement apologizing and saying the voice was never intended to resemble hers. His quote, "We're sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn't communicate better." OpenAI showed documents to the Washington Post that confirmed the voice was provided by a different actress who is anonymous. Post reporters also spoke to the unnamed actress' agent, who confirmed the story. I guess, Sax, you sent us a comparison clip. Maybe we start there and see what we think?

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya4:15

      Yeah. Do, do you guys think they sound the same?

   3. GUGuest4:17

      I can understand and generate human-like text pretty well. It really depends on what you're looking for in an assistant, what specific tasks.

   4. When I was like, "Oh, sexuality." Like, it was like open my eyes to, like, some other thing. Samantha.

   5. DSDavid Sacks4:36

      Lay- Where'd you get that name from?

   6. GUGuest4:38

      I gave it to myself, actually.

   7. JCJason Calacanis4:40

      What do you think?

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya4:40

      I think it sounds pretty darn similar.

   9. JCJason Calacanis4:43

      Dead-on.

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya4:44

       I mean, I don't know if it's dead-on. It's, honestly, it sounds like a digitally altered version of her voice.

   11. JCJason Calacanis4:50

       Right.

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya4:50

       That's what it sounds like to me.

   13. JCJason Calacanis4:51

       Sounds like they didn't get it perfect, right.

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya4:53

       Well, no, it sound, it sounds like-

   15. JCJason Calacanis4:53

       Like they got it to what? 90%?

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya4:55

       ... it sounds like it was her voice but then-

   17. JCJason Calacanis5:00

       Okay.

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya5:00

       ... they changed it. So either that or they hired a voice actor who sounds like her, and that's what the company has said is that they hired a voice actor. But they won't tell us who the voice actor is, they said because of privacy concerns. Which doesn't quite make sense to me, because when you hire an actor, they want the credit, you know?

   19. DFDavid Friedberg5:19

       Yeah.

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya5:20

       So-

   21. JCJason Calacanis5:21

       Get more work.

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya5:21

       ... they, the company could just clear this whole thing up by saying exactly who the voice actor is, and why wouldn't the voice actor want that, you know, want that thing?

   23. DFDavid Friedberg5:30

       Because she doesn't exist, dude.

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya5:32

       (laughs)

   25. JCJason Calacanis5:32

       Oh. Uh-oh. Back to the ... Bro, Q the general OpenAI bum, bum, bum. Wait, they made this actress up? (laughs)

   26. DFDavid Friedberg5:42

       I mean, she doesn't exist. Of course it's a-

   27. JCJason Calacanis5:44

       (laughs)

   28. DFDavid Friedberg5:44

       ... a digitally altered version of ScarJo, and they got caught. Okay? Cookie jar.

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya5:50

       This is why Sam's call to Scarlett's agents, or her, two days before they launch is such a damning piece of evidence, because it sounds like he's trying to shut the barn door on something they've already done, right? They've got this demo ready.They're gonna launch it in two days. They're realizing maybe they don't have the rights to use her voice-

   30. DFDavid Friedberg6:10

       Mm-hmm.
3. 14:37 – 25:35

   OpenAI's novel off-boarding agreements, ex-employee equity problem, and safety team resignations

   1. JCJason Calacanis14:37

      week. Former employees sign an agreement that they're forbidden forever from criticizing the company or even acknowledging that the NDA exists. If a departing employee declines to sign the document or if they violate it, they can lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company. In practice, uh, this means ex-employees have to choose between giving up millions of dollars they've already earned or agreeing not to criticize the company in perpetuity.

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya15:03

      Well, I can see why-

   3. JCJason Calacanis15:04

      This is a lot of details here. No, no, Jamal-

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya15:06

      Or, or Jamal-

   5. JCJason Calacanis15:06

      ... yeah, we'll go to you. Yeah.

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya15:06

      Well, you can see why they wrote that in there. That makes sense if you think, hold on a second, if an employee can leave with, you know, a random copy of, like, some old weights as a starting point to rebuild a model, that could be very valuable or there's all kinds of-

   7. JCJason Calacanis15:21

      Well, that's IP. Yeah.

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya15:22

      Yeah, but well, there's all kinds of, like, kind of quasi-confidential information or knowledge or knowhow that you leave a place like that with. So I could see why there was a justification to be very heavy-handed about it. But again, the question isn't whether you're allowed to be heavy-handed. You are. The question is why backtrack and then obfuscate and lie after you get caught? That's- Well, right. What did, well, what do they say?

   9. JCJason Calacanis15:49

      ... that's the crime.

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya15:49

       They claim it's an accident once they get caught-

   11. JCJason Calacanis15:52

       Yeah.

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya15:52

       ... with their hand in the cookie jar, which like you said, Jamal, is just a heavy-handed agreement. It's in the company's interest to do this.

   13. JCJason Calacanis15:58

       Yeah.

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya15:58

       They just say it was an accident, just like the Scarlett thing is an accident or a coincidence. It's just getting hard to believe.

   15. JCJason Calacanis16:04

       Just own it and say, "You know what, guys? This is a really valuable company. There's a ton of very valuable trade secret knowhow, IP, confidential information, and we're gonna be extremely..."

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya16:13

       Litigious.

   17. JCJason Calacanis16:13

       "... on the offense and protect it because our-" Aggressive. "... and it's correlated to the importance of the company and the ecosystem." You could've said that and people could've been upset, but they would've understood. Here's what Sam Altman said. "There was a provision about potential equity cancellation in our previous exit docs. Although we never clawed anything back, it should never have been something we had in any documents or communication. This is on me and one of the few times I've genuinely em- been embarrassed running OpenAI. I did not know this was happening and I should have. If any former employee who signed one of these old agreements is worried about it, they can contact me and we'll fix that too. Very sorry about this." So he's very, very so- sorry. It's starting to be like BP Oil, this company. Like, they're just so sorry about everything. (laughs)

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya16:59

       Here's the question is, these are form documents at the end of the day.

   19. JCJason Calacanis17:04

       Yeah.

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya17:04

       And form documents don't write themselves. Lawyers write them. And-

   21. JCJason Calacanis17:08

       Right.

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya17:08

       ... when you get a novel change in one of these documents, somebody thought that through and thought it'd be a good idea and put it in there.

   23. JCJason Calacanis17:14

       Right.

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya17:15

       And like Jamal said, there is a way to potentially defend that. It's not like these provisions don't exist. It's just a novel application to try and claw back someone's already vested equity from a company-

   25. JCJason Calacanis17:25

       Well, that is not-

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya17:26

       ... on behalf of these things.

   27. JCJason Calacanis17:27

       Yeah, that is not exactly standard. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya17:31

       No, that's completely non-standard. I'm just saying that-

   29. JCJason Calacanis17:32

       Yeah.

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya17:32

       ... these provisions exist in other contexts and their application as a, as a clawback of vested employee equity is something that I don't think any of us have heard before. So-
4. 25:35 – 40:05

   Nvidia crushes earnings again, but it faces a trillion-dollar problem

   1. JCJason Calacanis25:35

      Uh, stop me if you've heard this before. NVIDIA, NVIDIA just smashed all expectations while reporting record profits and revenue. The AI train continues. On Wednesday, NVIDIA reported earnings for the fiscal Q1. Revenue was 26 billion, up 18% quarter-over-quarter, 260% year-over-year. Basically, they quadrupled, year-over-year, on billions of revenue. This chart is bonkers. We've never seen anything like this in the history of Silicon Valley or corporate America. This is if somebody, like, literally was mining coal and then found a diamond, a gold mine underneath it.

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya26:10

      (laughs)

   3. JCJason Calacanis26:10

      It's bonkers what's happened here. When you look at the revenue there, the, you know, sort of slow growth or moderate growth revenue that they experienced, that was all because NVIDIA was primarily providing GPUs for people playing video games or mining crypto. And then what you see with this unbelievable six-quarter run, uh, and, and five, six-quarter run is companies like Microsoft, Google, Tesla, OpenAI, et cetera, buying just billions and billions of dollars' worth of hardware. I'll end on this, and Chamath can get your take on it. Here's 2019 top companies by market cap in the world. Obviously, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Berkshire, Facebook, Alibaba, Tencent. And then you get some of the, you know, incumbents and legacy companies, J&J, Exxon, and JP Morgan, Visa. Way down on the list in 2019, number 84, was NVIDIA. Today, NVIDIA is the third-largest company by market cap behind Microsoft and Apple, and ahead of Google, AKA Alphabet, and Saudi Aramco. Chamath, what's your take on this? Will it continue? And how do you conceptualize this level of growth on such a big number?

   4. DFDavid Friedberg27:30

      I mean, I think it's a really, really incredibly fun moment if you're involved in anything AI-related, just because it shows the level of investment that NVIDIA's customers are making into making this new reality available for everybody, right? So, when you're spending effectively $100 billion a year on the CapEx of chips and then a couple 100 billion more on all the related infrastructure, and then another couple 100 billion more on power, you're talking about half a trillion to three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year being spent to bring AI forward to the masses. So, I think that's the really positive take. The other exciting thing is if you're on the other side of the NVIDIA trade, which is you're working on something that does what they do cheaper, faster, or better, it's also really exciting because at some point, the laws of capitalism kick in, right? We've talked about this. When you are over-earning so massively, the rational thing to do for other actors in the arena is to come and attack that margin-

   5. JCJason Calacanis28:38

      Mm-hmm.

   6. DFDavid Friedberg28:38

      ... and give it to people for slightly cheaper, slightly faster, slightly better, so you can take share.

   7. JCJason Calacanis28:44

      Yes.

   8. DFDavid Friedberg28:44

      So, I think what you're seeing and what you'll see even more now is this incentive for Silicon Valley, who has been really reticent to put money into chips, really reticent to put money into hardware. They're gonna get pulled into investing in this space because there's no choice. You, you, you have a company that went from 100 billion of market cap to two and a half trillion in four years. It's just-

   9. JCJason Calacanis29:07

      That's incredible.

   10. DFDavid Friedberg29:07

       ... way too much value that, that is there to then be leaked back. You know, the interesting thing to remember, during the PC revolution, which is really mostly the '90s, right? It ended in the late '90s, I would say like '98, '99, right before the dot-com bubble took over. Intel's peak market cap was, I think it got to about $200 billion. And then their average growth rate from 1998 to today was negative 1.4% a year, right? So, it went from about 200 billion to about 130-odd billion. And why? It's not that Intel was a worse company, but it's that everything else caught up and the economic value went to things that sat above them in the stack. Then it went to Cisco for a while, right? Then after Cisco, it went to the browser companies for a little bit. Then it went to the app companies, then it went to the device companies, then it went to the mobile companies. So, you see this natural tendency for value to push up the stack over time.

   11. JCJason Calacanis30:06

       So, let me ask you, then-

   12. DFDavid Friedberg30:08

       And in AI-

   13. JCJason Calacanis30:08

       Yeah.

   14. DFDavid Friedberg30:08

       ... we've done step one, which is now you've given all this value to, in- to NVIDIA-

   15. JCJason Calacanis30:11

       Yeah.

   16. DFDavid Friedberg30:11

       ... and now we're gonna see it being reallocated.

   17. JCJason Calacanis30:14

       So, Chamath, who's in the arena trying stuff, some of these things working, obviously, and some not working?

   18. DFDavid Friedberg30:19

       Well, e- everybody, right? So-

   19. JCJason Calacanis30:19

       So-

   20. DFDavid Friedberg30:19

       Yeah.So right now, what you do is you speculatively bet on anything that kind of, like, quote-unquote "rhymes with Nvidia." So AMD is ripping. The companies that make... HPM is ripping. So all of that stuff, the folks that make optical cables, this Japanese company that I found that makes, like, the high bandwidth optical cables, ripping. So every- anything related to that ecosystem right now is at all-time highs. But at the same time, what you find now is, like, every other day when you wake up and read the, the trades in tech land, you find that there's a company that's gotten seeded with five to 50 million bucks to create a new chip, right? You're also starting to see folks that are working a little bit above the stack and build better compilers, right? Things that will allow you to actually build once, run in many different compute environments. So all of this stuff is starting to happen. At some point, the spread trade will be that Nvidia loses share, even though revenues keep compounding-

   21. JCJason Calacanis31:23

       Mm-hmm.

   22. DFDavid Friedberg31:23

       ... to these upstarts.

   23. JCJason Calacanis31:25

       Yeah. Death by 1,000 startups. All right, Sachs-

   24. DFDavid Friedberg31:27

       Yes.

   25. JCJason Calacanis31:27

       ... I guess, one of the questions, uh, people are asking right now is, have we ever seen a company at this scale and the impact it's having, not just in technology, which Chamath just pointed out beautifully, but also it's having (hands clap) a huge impact on Wall Street, on the stock market, on finance?

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya31:44

       Well, the, the company that everyone compares Nvidia to, or asks the question about whether a historical comparison should be made, is Cisco.

   27. JCJason Calacanis31:55

       Right.

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya31:55

       So there's an article in Motley Fool saying, "Is Nvidia doomed to be the next Cisco?" There was one in Morningstar called "Nvidia 2023 vs. Cisco 1999: Will History Repeat Itself?" The reason they're asking these questions is that if you go back to the dot-com boom in 1999, you pull up the stock performance chart, you can see that Cisco had this incredible run. And if you overlay the stock price of Nvidia, it seems to be following that same trajectory. And what happened with Cisco is, that when the dot-com crash came in 2000, Cisco stock lost a huge part of its value. Obviously, Cisco's still around today and it's a valuable company, but it just hasn't ever regained the type of market cap it had. The reason this happened is because Cisco got commoditized. So to Chamath's point, the success and market cap of that company attracted a whole bunch of new entrants and they copied Cisco's products until they were total commodities. So the question is, will that happen to Nvidia?

   29. JCJason Calacanis32:53

       Yeah.

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya32:53

       And I think the difference here is that, at the end of the day, networking equipment, which Cisco produced, was pretty easy to-
5. 40:05 – 1:02:36

   Understanding why economic sentiment is so negative among US citizens, while the broader data is positive

   1. JCJason Calacanis40:05

      More than half of Americans think we're in a recession. I think we're in a vibe session right now because we're not in a recession, but people are feeling really bad. A Harris poll conducted by The Guardian shows that 50 cens- 56% of Americans wrongly believe the US is in a recession. Not surprisingly, they blame Biden. The poll highlighted a bunch of misconceptions. 55% believe the US economy is shrinking; it's obviously not. 56% think the US is experiencing recession; it's obviously not. 49% of people believe the S&P's 500 stock market index is down for the year. It's up 12% this year. It was up 24% in 2023. And 49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high when it's in fact at a 50-year low. And Americans are really concerned about the cost of living and inflation. Fair enough. 70% said the biggest economic concern was the cost of living. 68% said that inflation was the biggest economic concern. Important quote here, a majority of respondents agreed it's difficult to be happy about positive economic news when I feel financially squeezed each month and that the economy was worse than the media made it out to be. According to the poll, 70% of Republicans and 40% of Democrats think Biden is making the economy worse. Chamath, you have some thoughts on this.

   2. DFDavid Friedberg41:25

      I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that a lot of the big numbers that we use to gauge how we should feel about things-

   3. JCJason Calacanis41:36

      Mm-hmm.

   4. DFDavid Friedberg41:37

      ... in today's day and age are pretty brittle-

   5. JCJason Calacanis41:40

      Okay. Explain brittle here, yeah.

   6. DFDavid Friedberg41:41

      ... and fragile and may- may actually just be totally wrong. So what's an example? So for example, like if you look at something like non-farm payrolls, right? So the first Friday of every month you get this report that comes out from the- the Department of Labor and it shows what- where unemployment is. But how do they calculate that? Do you think that they have a real-time sense of exactly every person in that month that entered the workforce or exited the workforce? No. They do a survey and then they extrapolate. And if you do that survey incorrectly, and Jason you've commented on this before, for example, if you don't capture adequately the number of people that are on the sidelines and never join the workforce or the number of people that are part of the gig economy so they are kind of working, you get an inaccurate sense of where the real economy is.I think that GDP is somewhat similar because if you just break down what GDP is. So, Nick, there's a very simple pie chart I sent you. What is GDP? It's the sum of four things. Most of it is what people spend.

   7. JCJason Calacanis42:43

      Okay.

   8. DFDavid Friedberg42:44

      Then the next big chunk is what companies and governments spend, and then the last is what we export to other countries. So let's just pause for one second and think about, what do you think happens when rates are zero versus when rates are at 6%?

   9. JCJason Calacanis43:00

      People spend a lot more.

   10. DFDavid Friedberg43:02

       Well, people are tend- are- tend to save when interest rates are high, just like in the natural thing, like, "Why would I buy a pair of these Nike shoes? I'll just put it in the bank and get 6%." But when the bank pays you zero, you're like, "Ugh, let me buy these Air Force 1s and move on." Right? It turns out it's the same for companies. Companies find it easier to invest when rates are at zero because it's cheaper. It's much more expensive because they're borrowing money at 6% versus at 0%.

   11. JCJason Calacanis43:27

       Or more. Corporate gets charged-

   12. DFDavid Friedberg43:28

       Or more.

   13. JCJason Calacanis43:28

       ... a higher fee, right? Yeah.

   14. DFDavid Friedberg43:30

       Then when you have high interest rates, you have a currency that appreciates. It makes exports less attractive to other people, which means then you become a net importer. Okay, so what is the last thing that's left? The last thing that's left is government spending, and you have to ask the question, "What should governments do when rates are high?" There is a chart I published in my annual letter, if you just go to that for a second.

   15. JCJason Calacanis43:56

       And just going back to this chart right before it, just so-

   16. DFDavid Friedberg43:58

       Yeah.

   17. JCJason Calacanis43:58

       ... the people who are listening, if you put the pie chart part in there, important for people to know, consumer is about 70% of the economy. And if you put investment and government together, that's just over, maybe, 34%-

   18. DFDavid Friedberg44:10

       35%.

   19. JCJason Calacanis44:10

       ... 35%, something like that.

   20. DFDavid Friedberg44:11

       Yeah, exactly.

   21. JCJason Calacanis44:11

       35%. So, it is a consumer-driven economy, but hey, you know, corporate and government spending is a major piece as well.

   22. DFDavid Friedberg44:19

       And then- and j- I just wanted just to highlight that when interest rates are very high, all of a sudden governments are faced with this very difficult problem, which is, "Oh, man. I have to spend a ton of money on interest," just like if you had a bunch of credit cards and all of a sudden the interest rates went up. So, the choice is twofold. Do governments spend less? But unfortunately, it turns out that our governments in America, they just keep spending more and more. So, even if net interest income is small, even if net interest income is high, they're just like, "Forget it, the taps are on." So, what does this all mean? I think what it really means is that we do a very poor job of measuring all these dynamics together. And so I actually trust the survey data of these individuals more than I trust the GDP report in the sense that I think it more accurately captures this dynamic. Rates are at 6%. People are saving more. If they're not getting paid more, things are costing more. The government is giving you free money, so you kinda feel like everything is moving, so that the GDP measurement, the way that it's classically done shows that, "Wow, we grew at 3 or 4%." But the average individual American isn't feeling that. They're actually-

   23. JCJason Calacanis45:30

       Yeah, they're not part of that

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya45:30

       Mm-hmm.

   25. DFDavid Friedberg45:30

       ... feeling that they have less money. So, I would actually go with them and actually say if we don't revisit this thing from first principles, we're gonna get this dynamic where we think one thing is happening, but the actual exact opposite is happening. In this case, I do think we're in- we're in a quasi-synthetic recession.

   26. JCJason Calacanis45:50

       Sax, what's your take on the vibe session?

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya45:54

       Well, look, I- I tend to agree with Chamath on this. I think this is a classic story of who do you believe? Do you believe the experts or do you believe in the intuitions of the American people? And the experts have some statistics on their side, but, you know, the old saying goes, "There's lies, damn lies, and statistics." And then the American people have their actual lived experience on their side. They know what they're feeling, and I tend to trust in that. Now, obviously, we're in an election year, and the press knows that, so they're trying to do this big clean-up effort for Biden. But why is it that people are feeling this way? Number one is inflation. And if you look at this chart, you can see that if you look at household net worth since the start of the Biden presidency and compare it to the change in household net worth at a similar point in Trump's presidency, in nominal terms, it appears to be the same. But then if you adjust for inflation, in other words, you look at the real household net worth, you can see that household net worth during the Biden term has been flat. Actually, it's down. It's-

   28. JCJason Calacanis46:57

       Because of inflation, right?

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya46:58

       Because of inflation. And-

   30. JCJason Calacanis46:59

       Where did the inflation come from?
6. 1:02:36 – 1:14:57

   New study shows plastics in testicles

   1. DFDavid Friedberg1:02:36

      balloon.

   2. JCJason Calacanis1:02:36

      If we're gonna talk about our balls-

   3. DFDavid Friedberg1:02:39

      (laughs)

   4. JCJason Calacanis1:02:39

      ... we need to go to somebody who's an expert on our testicles. Freeberg, let's go right to science corner.

   5. GUGuest1:02:47

      Our balls have been on your face. (laughs)

   6. JCJason Calacanis1:02:47

      Let's talk about our balls with the sultan of science. There's been a study on phthalates, our balls, and plastic in our balls. Freeberg, tee this up.

   7. GUGuest1:02:58

      Yeah. The Consumer Reports put out a really interesting, or what has become pretty widely covered now, story a couple weeks ago where they measured phthalates in common foods. And Nick, if you wanna just pull up the image, that's been repeated in a lot of media, a lot of press. People were going nuts over this. Phthalates are these chemical compounds that are used in plastics, or used with plastics to soften them. So when you make plastics, you can kind of, you know, make them softer and, and form them into all sorts of different shapes and use them for different applications, like plastic bags or wraps or cubes or all sorts of things. And, uh, phthalates are these kind of smaller molecules that, that kind of go along with the polymers that, that are the basis of the plastics. And they measured phthalates, which are known to be toxic in terms of if you get enough of them, they can be carcinogenic and cause cancer, and they showed that every product they tested had phthalates in it. Wendy's chicken nuggets had, you know, 33,000 nanograms per serving.

   8. DFDavid Friedberg1:03:58

      Oh my gosh.

   9. GUGuest1:03:58

      If you scroll up to the top-

   10. DFDavid Friedberg1:03:59

       Look at the... Wait, look at the Chipotle chicken burrito. Oh my God.

   11. GUGuest1:04:02

       Right. And just to be clear, guys, this is not just about packaging. Packaging plays a role, but the whole food supply chain, the way we wrap food, all of our water, all of our dust, all of the air we breathe, we have measured phthalates in everything. So these phthalates end up in the animals that are used to make milk and the animals that people eat. They end up in the water that goes into the vegetables that we grow in the ground. They end up being used to make the little plastic jars that we feed our kids out of, the little yogurt pouches that our kids drink out of. Everything, all... Just to move food around in plastic packaging-

   12. DFDavid Friedberg1:04:36

       But sorry, Freeberg, Freeberg, why would the chicken nuggets from Wendy's though be so-

   13. GUGuest1:04:41

       Mm-hmm.

   14. DFDavid Friedberg1:04:41

       Is it because they are eating?

   15. GUGuest1:04:43

       They are eating things that have plastics in them.

   16. DFDavid Friedberg1:04:45

       Plastics in them.

   17. GUGuest1:04:46

       But, but we also don't know. And so what goes on-

   18. DFDavid Friedberg1:04:48

       So we're eating the chicken, so we're eating the plastic.

   19. GUGuest1:04:50

       We're eating the plastic, and it's also the fact that the way that they process the chicken and the material that they use and the packaging that they use and how they move-

   20. DFDavid Friedberg1:04:56

       Wow.

   21. GUGuest1:04:56

       ... this stuff from one place to another, you got bags that are holding chicken breasts that then get put in the thing.

   22. JCJason Calacanis1:05:01

       (laughs)

   23. GUGuest1:05:02

       Ev- And then the oil has, has, you know... The oil is transported in plastic. We don't know.

   24. DFDavid Friedberg1:05:06

       So it's plastics all the way down.

   25. GUGuest1:05:08

       It's plastics-

   26. DFDavid Friedberg1:05:08

       Guys, look at this.

   27. GUGuest1:05:09

       ... all the way down.

   28. DFDavid Friedberg1:05:09

       I mean, like, the- these are the things, like, look at Annie's. I... First of all, I really dislike Annie's labeling and patch- packaging. I think it's very ugly. So I've never bought it for that reason. But I know that there's a lot of private equity moms that buy Annie's because it's supposed to be better for you.

   29. GUGuest1:05:25

       (laughs) Here, go. Keep going, Tucker. This is a really, it's a really good point.

   30. DFDavid Friedberg1:05:28

       Private equity moms.

Episode duration: 1:30:05