November 3 2023
- No JCal - Friedberg moderating!
- AllIn CEO
- 240 applicants so far
- Might sell goods - tequila, etc
- Might do a tour of 5-10 cities, etc
- Shaan Puri applied with video on X
- He will get a call!
- Chamath started his newsletter and subscription service for research
- Sacks also producing more content since Pod started
- Ukraine War “Cronkite” moment
- Cronkite basically went to Vietnam and came back said the war is not winnable - and that helped turn public sentiment against the war in 1968 - which still took 5 years to end
- Now recent developments in Ukraine - Zelenskyy’s own inner circle is saying the war is lost (see Sacks articles and posts about the Time magazine article)
- Simon Shuster is the guy who profiled Zelenskyy for Time magazine of the year
- He has given favorable coverage to Zelenskyy in the past - so this is now a legit source
- War will still take a long time to end
- Now its up to the US govt folks to stop the war
- Apparently people in Ukraine are stealing all the money that’s being donated
- Markets are up because fiscal year buying of stocks for mutual funds starts in November 1 - they were selling till Oct 31 to do tax loss harvesting, etc - now they cant hold cash they have to buy stocks
- War maybe ending is also a good sign
- Lots of stocks doing well - Doordash, OpenDoor, etc
- If you believe rate decrease is likelier than rate increase
- Commercial Real Estate
- $3T of CRE loans
- Owners are trying to restructure their debt from the banks - so trying to sell property on auction for much less than the loan amount
- Buildings selling for ~$200/sqft - 10-20% of their replacement cost
- 08-09 is when SF started to take off - bubble - young folks, ZIRP environment
- Sacks owns buildings in Jackson Square
- One of the last few decent neighborhoods in SF
- Chamath doesn’t want his team to move to an office in SF
- No other major market has 30% vacancy rates
- City needs to clean its act up
- They have to choose to fire half the govt employees or become a partner to business
- Bill Gross (PIMCO fame) is already buying bank stocks
- Pointed to how Jamie Dimon sold $100M of stocks
- Biden act to convert office buildings to residential buildings
- Positive message to blue cities to fix their issues
- SF will be a case study on return on invested capital on left wing ideology
- If it fails it will never be tried again for a very long time
- SF Budget shortfall will increase from ~$500M soon to like $1.7B in a few years
- Wework Bankruptcy
- Drowning in lease obligations
- Burned $8B in FCF since Q4 of 2019 - capital destruction machine!
- Smart PE player will come in and use bankruptcy to fix the lease obligations
- Get rid of some obligations
- Re-negotiate with landlords
- Softbank put in $16.9B investment into WeWork
- Old saying in real estate: “3rd owner makes all the money”
- Biden’s executive order on AI
- Requires companies to turn over their algorithms, systems and models to ensure it provides safety, DEI, etc
- This order’s language is going to look like medieval literature in 3 years given the fast pace of change in the field
- India, China, Singapore will run far ahead
- Outlandish infringements on first amendment rights with saying we need to watermark stuff produced with AI
- AI is being convicted of pre-crime
- Steven Sinofsky blog is nice - he references all the fear mongering when PCs started - no one took that seriously - IBM would have been happy to work with the government
- They don’t want foreigners to use IaaS
- Apparently Joe Biden got more worried about AI after watching the Mission Impossible movie
- This pulls up the ladder against open source software
- Its activating every agency of the government to create more bureaucracy - authorize them to examine private companies’ systems and methods
- You are in non-compliance just by existing
- Everyone will hire lawyers and lobbyists
- US vs India vs China
- Time to bet on India
- They are going to create a software commission
- That’s the end game - they will force us to ask for it ourselves
- This will kill the 2 guys in a garage dream
- Silicon Valley’s right shift
- Events in Israel exposing Democrats as anti-semitic and crazy far left leaning
- Chamath is a case study himself
- Liberal causes are too extreme
- Causes
- Reckless fiscal policy from Govt
- SF and crime
- Covid policies, ruined kids and work culture
- Long con of regulatory capture with AI, etc
- Free speech and open inquiry
- Visionaries like Elon being targetted
- Growing awareness that wokeness has gone way off the rails
- Wokeness seen as breaking up the world into oppressed and oppressor
- Way too many people on the woke left basically cheering for Hamas from day one
- Interesting from Kamala Harris to launch a campaign on islamophobia when jews are also being attacked and are their big donors
- Governments just grow
- In a democracy over time there is a group of folks who get elected and so a philosophy that endures in the system that we need to overcome a power that exists
- So you push the government as big as possible to attack systems of power for a minority of the people
- Therefore end-game is socialism
- Instead goal should be to figure out how to maximize benefit to people of this country through private enterprise
- Government should stop negative outcomes but should not just grow employing people
- Government in US has highest employee spend in human history - there is no accountability standard for anything in the government
- AI is just software, data and statistics
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