All the crap you never needed

August 25 2023 Friedberg NASA chat Astro Woody Berkeley PhD, MIT prof, now astronaut, leading Artemis mission, All in Fan! Uranus jokes Besties want to make their own Tequila People said they’d pay ~100 Index towards quality instead of price Example 21seeds Diageo bought it The Rock can play the volume game so his tequila’s price is a little less Chamath recommends Villa D’Este at Lake Como Candidate for AIS 2025 Nvidia smashes earnings Incredible performance Closing in on Amazon and Google in valuation $1.4T Board is approving a $25B share buy back Very large Tesla making their own supercomputer (Dojo) Everyone is spending all they can on compute Similar to fiber expenditure during dotcom era? There was a telecom collapse in 2002 Nvidia is the dominant shovel provider Computational biology could leverage this 2015 Chart - product of gold rush was state of California OpenAI released fine tuning for their models (GPT...

August 18 2023 Sacks partying and alcohol stories Snow White Disney movie controversy Disparaging the OG Disney movie Rich Men North of Richmond Channeling people’s voice People are justifiably angry about the failure of the elite and the coverup by the media A lot like Solzhenitsyn line about brazen lying Bottom 80% earnings have been flat for 60 years Too much red tape preventing lower income people from becoming entrepreneurs and earners The truth is that we don’t want the government to bring down the dashed black line or the blue line - this is natural - it proves economic supremacy of US GDP - so the answer is simply that this is a hard issue and we want the government to stay out of our way Problems are in addiction to wars, military industrial complex draining the country of resources and elite corruption (example covid) Whenever government steps in to help people, it actually creates bad incentives Think about how hard is it to move up It wo...

August 11 2023 Friedberg haircut stories Chamath out (probably first time!) Bill Gurley doing some angel investing and working on a book Happy to do his dream job of investing, etc Advice Study history of your space Networking like crazy Learned from Danny Meyer’s story Restaurauteur, Shake Shack founder Read Setting the Table Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern Friedberg Read Walter Isaacson bio of Jobs Immediately helped him (use/learn from his management style) His book on Elon coming out soon JCal and Sacks were interviewed for it He was there for the transition to Twitter Rocket launches, everything in between Sacks writing a book on how to create, start, run software companies Sacks read Good to Great and was a little confused by the message Chamath dials in Alexander Hamilton, Phil Knight (Shoe dog?), The Man in the Arena Akira Kurosawa Born standing up On Writing - Stephen King bio Great to listen to before writing a book He wrote the ...

August 4 2023 LK-99 ~70% of energy we produce is lost to heat and friction Semiconductors, roads could all be re-invented LK99 = Lee and Kim 1999 - when they saw this material the first time Limitless battery storage for clean energy Kinda like cold fusion Innovation in software vs rest of the fields Peter Thiel - we were promised flying cars but we were given 140 characters He is more right than wrong All other fields are dominated by the establishment Stanford president out for alleged mistakes/errors/falsification in alzheimer’s papers Proof that sclerotic leadership is stopping innovation Similar to what happened with Covid and Fauci and Lancet letter Fitch downgrade of US debt rating Deficits will get bigger Larry Summers coming to AIS 2023 Trump indictment 3rd criminal case Seems no different than Sandy Berger, General Patraeus, Hilary Clinton, etc Not clear he actually violated any laws Using novel legal theories Maybe then go after the ...

July 27 2023 Chamath and Nathalie’s wedding Diverse guests Portofino area Obesity and weight loss Chamath Jason weight bet Ozempic, Wigovy?, Munjaro? Unclear what the benefits are of normalizing weight gain Too many VCs Spend your 20s working before you become a VC Main value prop of an investor to a founder is to offer advice Sacks’ team requires people joining their firm to have operating experience, ideally founder experience The top 1% of VCs wouldn’t have beaten the top 5 stocks in the last 15 years Top 5 stocks went from $1T to $10T, over the next period it could go over $25T You have to put in 60-70 hours a week for a decade+ Writers vs Hollywood Ripe for disruption by AI % of workers with union membership is dropping - down 10% in 2022 Demands like banning AI for writing software makes no sense All creative industries are power law businesses Because humans are fundamentally creative, so a lot of people will do it for free Your bar is not the wo...

July 21 2023 Sacks and Chamath are neighbors in Italy Vivek Ramaswamy! Started as biotech investor at a hedge fund Did law school Then started a company Roivant did well - $10B company now, returned $1B to shareholders Starting 2020 he started getting a more public profile Books - Woke Inc and Capitalist Punishment and Nation of Victims Sees a void in young people Lack of family and religion So sees people gravitating towards causes of race, gender, sexuality, climate What is the alternative? National identity Unapologetically nationalist American exceptionalism - that is his platform Fiscal responsibility and spending Most of national history we have grown 3-4% but now its 1.5% Can’t really cut spending without establishing trust first Drill, frack, burn coal Nuclear energy - double down on this by interestingly shutting down Nuclear Energy Commission Paying people to stay at home is an obstacle for growing GDP Will only promise stuff he can get done as Presid...

July 14 2023 Besties argue about previous weekend’s pod Inflation cools Larry Summers speaking at AIS2023! Structural longer term trends - some believe like Summers that rates will be higher for longer than people think When to pivot from safer assets into equities? Maybe in the next 12-18 months - will have to figure it out Chamath thinks the market has hit the bottom now and its time for markets to go up Market is pricing in a soft landing People are getting in their last hurrah Nice chart explaining how to think about this Disney wait times have gone down now Interest rates on car loans have gone up in the last year Used car pricing in the last month has declined 4.2% Ripple gets big win in SEC case Huge vindication for them XRP is ripping 25-35% Huge egg in the face for SEC Whole crypto market is ripping now Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple is happy US court system is not kowtowing to administration and doing their job Microsoft Activis...

July 9 2023 No JCal - BG in No producer Besties hacking the pod together Meta launches Threads 30 million app downloads overnight Almost like a Twitter clone According to rumors they built this in 6-9 months with 20 people Meta pace of innovation is really high right now Facebook is heavy on videos and pictures, but light on text - so this could be a way to get that Facebook invented photo tagging and newsfeed So they need something new again - Threads is a copy, has nothing new yet TikTok did well because it was fundamentally new Standalone it isn’t great but unless it integrates into Instagram 30million signups is 3% conversion rate from 1B users in instagram Chat AI interest in decline ChatGPT usage is falling - apparently also Bard Are people bored or did students stop using it because they’re on holiday? These are early days - things will change rapidly Fed meeting minutes Might raise rates later in the year 450K new jobs created - ADP jobs report 1 ye...

June 30 2023 Friedberg moderating Wagner group rebellion in Russia Maybe it was genuine - if true that his department was being merged into military and would have lost revenue Was a mutiny and could have become a coup - 8000 people, about a quarter of Wagner and sent 3000 men to Moscow Was looking to see who might support him On the way to Moscow - nobody supported him - generals, governors, Duma folk, etc So he took a deal brokered by Lukashenko - exiled in Belarus in return for being allowed to live How do we know replacing Putin is a good outcome - it could actually be much worse for the West The war is existential for Putin - so if the Ukraine counter offensive is successful, then Putin will escalate the war Sun Tzu - the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting Scotus strikes down affirmative action Data shows admissions were harder for Asian Americans Lots of potential downstream effects - might hit sports quotas, legacy quotas Need to focus ea...