June 23 2023
- Intro
- Sacks and BG were at a Coatue Conference
- Feds quietly drop 5 charges against SBF
- Brad Gerstner back again!
- Insert conspiracy theories about no Sacks last week and no Friedberg this week
- Coatue lunchboxes looked so bad
- SBF was the hot ticket at the previous year
- Magnificent 7 from Cramer (7 stocks make up most of the gains in the market)
- Meta, Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple
- Chamath in Milan - gets a hair fluffer during his haircut
- Sacks played testimonial from fan of the pod at Coatue
- Sacks and BG were at a Coatue Conference
- Zuck vs Elon cage match
- Zuck has been training a lot
- This is so dumb
- Ukraine/Russia updates
- Ukraine counter offensive not meeting expectations so far
- High casualties
- 16 months in - fatigue setting in, not dominating news cycle in America also
- Americans don’t want to be in forever wars
- Apparent rejection of ceasefire by the West
- Naftali Bennett claims there was a potential peace agreement
- Putin flashing some apparent document about the agreement - and no one has refuted it
- Apparently Boris Johnson was flown in to blow up the deal
- Ukraine publication (pro) writing in May 2022 also claims Boris Johnson said Ukraine should reject Russian peace deal
- Fiona Hill (also a Russia hawk apparently) claimed Russian peace deal was available
- At the time - 2+ months into war - there was a peace deal available and the agreement was not made and now a year+ later its a disaster
- Such a terrible situation
- Apparently ~3-4M people have died in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan since Sep 11 2001 issue - we spent 8T (World War spending was 4T inflation adjusted)
- Lloyd Austin - secretary of defense has said they want to weaken Russia
- Has actually weakened US in some ways - out of 150mm artillery shells - ripped off by Military Industrial Complex
- Russia is using 20000 shells a day, Ukraine is using 3000-6000
- Matt Yglesias wrote a year ago about how this war is a good deal for the West because its trading NATO weapons + Ukraine lives for Russian weapons+lives
- Russia-China-Iran working together - Iran giving drones to Russia, Russia giving jets to Iran - this would be a huge power - to challenge the US - they have more manufacturing capacity + war capacity
- Blinken trip to China
- Blinken is in China while Biden is calling Xi a dictator - huge gaffe
- Biden said this at a fundraiser where Besties were invited - but apparently they didn’t go
- Chinese index was up heading into the meetings
- Blinken wasn’t scheduled to meet Xi - on Day 1 there was a meeting with the foreign minister, went well apparently and so he met with Xi
- Market reaction post meeting was negative
- This was a stabilizing moment
- US-China relations have been at the lowest point they ever have been (according to Chinese readout)
- US wanted to discuss Ukraine but China didn’t because they said Russia-China relations is none of the US business
- Soviet bloc vs Western bloc - was never more than 1/3rd of US economy
- China already has a listening outpost in Cuba - and now might be training troops - this could be a violation of Monroe doctrine
- That foreign troops can’t be in Western hemisphere
- Business leaders don’t want decoupling - better if political and business leaders were more in sync
- ByteDance just bought billions of NVidia chips for example
- Have created a dangerous revolving door between largest industrial units and highest positions of power
- Taiwanese citizen should look at the writing on the wall and see that US is ready to not be dependent on TSMC - might get chips from Europe and Mexico
- Think about why Buffett got out of TSMC
- People speak with their dollars/feet
- Think about why Buffett got out of TSMC
- Blinken reaffirmed current US policy
- Blinken is in China while Biden is calling Xi a dictator - huge gaffe
- RFK Jr
- Hit piece/stray hit by Matt Yglesias against AllInPod
- The guy who wants to let Ukrainians die is calling RFKJr anti-human
- This is a typical disciplinary tactic by people who want to prevent different positions
- Insidious how even talking to RFK Jr is not allowed
- Besties have hosted Ro Khanna, Joe Manchin, DeSantis also
- Michael Shellenberger’s reporting on how patient zero for Covid came from Wuhan lab - a lab funded by the US
- Fauci knew that at the beginning of the pandemic that his funding might have caused the problems with the lab
- 46% of tv news advertising comes from pharma
- These companies were given a pass - if you criticize them the media will come after you
- Hit piece/stray hit by Matt Yglesias against AllInPod
- Startup secondary market shares are heating up
- Huge discounts on shares
- 1400 unicorns at the end of 2022 - almost all of them will have to do a down round - and many of them will be down 50+%
- In 2020 we had 145 IPOs, in the last 2 years we have had 4
- Sell your businesses or get profitable - there is no middle ground
- Ford receives $9.2B loan from Federal department of energy to build EV battery factories
- 3 other companies got loans in the past - Tesla is the only one that paid it back (with interest)
- Energy sector is going crazy how to exploit subsidies introduced by misnamed Inflation Reduction Act
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