November 10 2023
- Sacks clapping back on Twitter
- Jared Kushner on the pod - no JCal again
- Senior Advisor to Trump presidency 2017-2021
- Worked with Mexico and Middle East during the presidency
- Then started Affinity Partners
- Raised $3.1B
- Use investing and government experience for company building, growth, etc
- Raised in riches
- Entrepreneur dad
- NJ upbringing
- Dad had legal troubles
- Dad was a big democrat donor
- Gave Corey Booker his first campaign donation
- Knew Chuck Schumer and Hilary Clinton early
- Was registered democrat then started changing since Obama
- Was struck by Trump’s appeal to people and realized there’s more to the world
- Had Upper East Side view earlier and then expanded
- Media at the time was deriding his rallies as crazy whereas on the ground it was different and more mainstream
- Trump was a strong candidate on his own
- Did Lex episode because his wife has a good friendship with him
- Podcast format is where people want to give their information from - easier to have a nuanced discussion
- Israel Hamas conflict
- Israel was surprised by the attack
- Now pursuing methodical approach
- People who are protesting on either side need to realize Hamas is the root cause of problems for both sides
- International rhetoric
- People are talking their book - talking to their populations
- Israel is getting the message out that they are actually helping Gazan civilians more than Hamas
- Historical context of Arab support/relationship with Palestine
- 1948 war
- 1967
- 6 day war
- Yasser Arafat took over after this point
- Trouble in Jordan and expelled
- 1982 Israel Lebanon conflict
- 1987-1988 is when notion of Palestinian state came up
- coincides with rise of Hamas
- 1991
- Saddam Hussein and Iraq invaded Kuwait
- Oslo accords
- Arafat’s backup plan
- In the past Saudi Arabia, etc were against stability
- New middle east emerging
- Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar
- Now Iran seems to be against stability
- Current situation is last gasp instability attempt to stop wider middle east from coming up and growing prosperity
- 2017 Trump went to Saudi Arabia and set up a deal
- Counter terrorism finance center to cut off funding for extremist elements
- Incentivised more moderate leaders
- Need to create a climate where new generation is incentivized to join the economy instead of joining extremist groups
- People are annoyed at how well Trump administration did
- Interesting to see radicalization in the West
- 26/11 attacks in Mumbai and India’s response was quite different - dismantled terror network on the side over time
- Jordan leader advocates for a 2 state solution - no stability without a Palestinian state
- Any solution has to ensure security of Israel
- Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005-06
- Problem for Palestine is leadership
- Palestinian people are very educated - paid for by American tax payer dollars and international donations
- This is the most well funded refugee group in history
- Palestinian leadership would travel in luxury whereas Netanyahu travelled in simple airlines apparently
- Iran oil revenue high during Obama years, dropped during Trump years, back high during Biden years
- Greater Israel has 50-50 jews and arabs
- GOP Debates
- Mainstream media didn’t cover Vivek at all
- X showed how well he did and dominated the debate
- Highlighted the difference between Neocon establishment wing vs grassroots wing
- Ronna McDaniel role highlighted
- Republicans keep losing because of abortion issue
- Discussion about how pro-lifers are going to wipe out the republican party (Ann Coulter)
- Lot of infighting in the republican party
- Trump has proven to be the best politician in the republican party
- He was right on immigration - see how NY is in a bad state right now
- He was more flexible than others
- Macro update
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M2 money supply is starting to shrink
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Decent place with inflation
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Lots of money in money market funds - $6T and growing
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Doordash, Datadog, Adyen, etc are all up
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Seems like economy will have a soft landing
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Beneficial for sitting president
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Good for equities
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Real estate
- Jared’s family is in multi-family space
- Commercial real estate is going to get worse - it will drop below land value almost
- SF could be Detroit of this era
- Real estate is correlated with interest rates
- NY has 95% of workers back in the office, SF only has ~45%
- Jersey City has better law and order than NY
- SF has high attrition for cops and has massive shortage of cops
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Russia-Ukraine
- When US had Covid troubles, Russia was the second country to send supplies to US
- War could have been completely avoidable
- This is affecting Middle East crisis also
- Countries don’t have friends, they have interests, so you might have overlapping interests
- Don’t condemn tomorrow to be like yesterday - Jared Kushner
- He endorses Sacks’ position on Ukraine
- All the men fighting could instead be home building things
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AI
- Shopify has apparently written ~1M LOC with CoPilot
- AI driven productivity can help grow GDP
- It has never happened in history that productivity gains don’t help the economy
- X released Grok
- Kai-fu Lee company from China has released an open source model thats apparently better than/competitive with Llama 2
- Big OpenAI dev day updates
- Now they are a platform business
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