Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

I'm Dan Pramak. On today's show, big tech backlash gets official and why political campaigns aren't ready for deep fakes.

But first, the next recession. So there are basically two Americas right now in terms of economic prognostication.

There's Trump's America, where the White House regularly blasts out sunny optimism with a dose

have told you so to critics who expected the economy to begin tanking right after the inauguration.

And then there's economists America, with consensus showing slowed growth in Q2 as the tax cut

sugar high wears off and is further hampered by trade wars with China and now Mexico.

The reality, of course, is no one is able to consistently time bull markets or bear markets, either in terms of macroeconomic well-being or stocks or bonds.

But we do all know that the only people consistently wrong are those who, in moments of exuberance, proclaim that economic cycles are dead, something we last heard a lot about during the dot-com boom, which soon became the dot-com bust.

So for investors, the question isn't so much when things will turn bad, particularly since it often requires some outside shock to the system,

but rather what to do about it when it comes. And that's where my guest today comes in. He is Jason

Thomas, director of research at private equity firm, the Carlisle Group, who argues in a new paper

that while money has been the defining finite resource of years past, it won't still be true

going forward. Instead, he says

investors will need to suss out more intangible qualities of executives and managers,

human capital versus financial capital, a sort of bet on the future of brain power at a time

when there is broad concern and even you could say broad consensus that machines will be making more and more of our decisions for us.

In 15 seconds, we'll dig in with Jason Thomas. But first, this.

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And now, back to the pro rata podcast.

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