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All In Podcast Episode 125 Recap and Notes April 20 2023

 April 20 2022



  • Antonio Gracias and Gavin Baker (Altreides) Bestie Guesties - JCal taping from Starbase - in a tiny home
  • SpaceX launch
    • AG is board member

    • New engine/ship

    • This vehicle will take us to Mars

    • Falcon 9, etc were most successful vehicles

    • This is a new one - needs to be stable

    • $2M is the (variable) cost to get a 100 tons to orbit

    • This is a step function change

    • Falcon 9 mass to useful orbit is 17 metric tons - variable cost is ~$15M

    • 100 metric tons for new engine is conservative

    • This is about 50x change in cost - so Starlink, etc becomes much cheaper

    • Interior space of this is size of ISS - its huge!!!



    • There will be no more trans-atlantic trans-pacific flights - transportation logistics - fundamental change

    • Experience of visiting Starbase is special - human beings can accomplish something like this is amazing

    • Engineers living in gulfstreams in the middle of the desert - miles away from any major city - no potable water, no electricity, etc

    • Mainstream media coverage is ghoulish or glee - on Twitter it was covered as if it was a failure

      • They don’t care - and its a way to dunk on someone they don’t like
    • This is an amazing accomplishment by an American company and here is how American media covered it:



    • Chamath is going to have a babushka of planes - he will make lot of money from SpaceX shares

    • Starlink will get cheaper, faster, better, smaller

    • Starship can carry 600+ satellites

    • Previous - Falcon9 can only take 20-30 or so

    • SEC approves SpaceX satellites deployment

    • The crowds are getting bigger or bigger - near San Padre island - people are lined up in the area with cameras - Americans in RVs, cars with cameras - want to watch the amazing progress

    • You can overestimate what you can do in a year, you underestimate what you can do in ten

  • Fox settlement with Dominion
    • Paid $787M
    • If media makes a mistake - they should correct it and correction should be at same level as the mistake
    • Fox has $4B in cash - they lost ~20% of it - so a shareholder can question their decisions - also Smartmatic lawsuit coming
    • This stuff doesn’t make economic sense - why lie, get sued and lose a lot of money?
    • Finland fines match income - so people should get proportional fines maybe?
    • Alex Jones got a judgement from multiple courts of > $1B
    • Media should do more fact checking, less anonymous sources, and clarify fact vs opinion
    • Rebuilding trust is on the media
  • AI
    • Reddit wants to get paid for AI training data

    • Such an important world for how the world and Silicon Valley work - things you spitball about - they come to pass a few weeks later

    • AutoGPT renders ChatGPT+ Plugins almost useless

    • Google merged Brain and DeepMind - something that people thought would never happen

    • Some AI company let go a third of their company within 6 weeks of training an agent that has replaced those people

    • 10 times the value will be created in this economy now than during internet

    • Its harder than it has ever been to predict a technology cycle

    • There’s a chance > 70-80% Series C+ companies have lower valuation than amount raised in preference stack

      • Just extrapolating from what happened in public companies that have also dropped in valuations - and they’re the best
    • So a rush of talent and therefore capital will go to AI bubble - employees will quit and start new stuff - investors will also prefer to go to early stage

    • Height of previous bubble took $30-40M into Series A for silly NFT style projects - now its just 100K+ or low million dollars for just a few people and cloud resources

    • Maybe its better to just do 500 or so of these 2-3 person companies

    • Chamath tried this a while back with Capital as a Service

      • Administrative burden of managing so many companies was crazy
      • VC is a software light, person heavy artisanal business becomes difficult
    • Lot of funding going into

      • AI infra: like vector databases, etc
      • AI copilots - coders, doctors, etc
      • SaaS products
    • JCal looking for office space in San Mateo

    • Midjourney - 12 people team and bootstrapped

    • Writers Guild strike might come - not the time to give studios excuse to not need you

    • Zuckerberg laying off more and hiring freeze

    • Series C funding dropped



    • No growth stage funding

    • Tiger Global’s $12.7B fund has lost like 20% or so

    • Private Equity has more realistic/pessimistic outlook vs optimistic outlook for VCs when they invest

    • Chamath not sure about investments right now

    • Greater Fool Theory - no one wants to be the last guy in

    • Stack OverFlow also will charge AI giants for training data

  • Coinbase could move away from the US?
    • Crypto is dead in America
    • Gensler is blaming the banking crisis on Crypto
    • Not a coincidence there are concerns on de-dollarization while crypto ban is happening
    • The company that did all the right things (Coinbase) was furthest from regulation while most fraudulent was closest (FTX)
  • DeSantis vs Trump
    • Polls moving in Trump’s favor
    • Republicans registered their displeasure with Alvin Bragg by going with Trump - maybe that was the strategy?
    • This might be similar to Obama vs Hilary in 2007 - she was ahead at this stage, but then he beat her - out fund-raised her, out-hustled her, built narrative to turn the page - it took time but he did it
    • DeSantis vs Disney - the bill is a parental rights bill
      • Doesn’t seem to be hurting DeSantis
      • Polling - for Disney - NPS was in the 50s, now its in the single digits
      • Pew study recently - Democrats and Republicans are on completely different sides of issue (trans rights)
      • This issue has become a lightning rod
        • This is a proxy for quality of education for children in the country
        • Getting rid of advanced maths, test taking, etc
        • Schools are overrun by unions, ideology, etc

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