Feb 21 2025
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JCal and Chamath on Megyn Kelly
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John and Patrick Collison join the show
- Chamath has known them for 17-18 years and never invested
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Stripe
- They process > $1T/year - so 1% of global GDP ($100T/year) [* finished vs unfinished sales/products needs to be considered also in this claim]
- They bought Bridge last year
- UPI in India, etc are really good internationally - not happening in US, EU, etc
- Stablecoins are the first really big payments use case - their moment is now
- Stablecoins help with international remuneration, etc
- Example: Scale AI type use case - if they have to pay contractors in the Philippines - stablecoins are useful
- How representative of real economy is the Stripe data?
- One value add of Stripe is a reputation network across the internet
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Jamie Dimon rant leaked
- Remote work - declining TFP in the US - women joining the work force, etc
- Example of post covid era trend of leaders leading from the front - focus on org success and less familial sentiment
- Bloated bureaucracies in corporate structures - committees, etc
- Different strokes for different folks
- Median productivity in the US is 20% up in the last 10 years - inflation adjusted
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DOGE
- Turns towards Defense spending
- Maybe US is acknowledging a multi polar world instead of unipolar
- Might be a recognition of changing face of defense tech - drones vs carriers, etc
- Defense procurement is supposed to be wasteful
- Might want to read Boyd by Robert Coram
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Milei Memecoin problem
- 74000 traders apparently lost $300M
- Milei has been sued
- Opposition is trying impeachment
- Coffeezilla expose
- Dave Portnoy apparently bet on this
- This is another form of entertainment, trading cards, etc
- Similar to US states selling lottery tickets
- He seems to have hurt the people who put him in office
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Arc institute
- Non profit biotech research
- Spends $100M/year
- Trying to rival NIH grants - which tend to be very restrictive in kinds of research that is funded
- Released largest open source AI model ever - for biology
- Evo2
- Ohalo partnering with U Florida - to protect strawberry crops
- You can also help with trees dying like Irish Ash trees, CA chestnut, etc
- Bark beetles hurting Tahoe 😟
- TR4 problem in banana
- All the bananas around the world come from 1 species - Cavendish
- Amazing how far these foundational models have come - and are still going
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Grok3
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xAI is showing there are valuable gains from pre training
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Maybe this is a bull NVidia case
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Incredible work done by Grok3
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Innovation needs a constraint
- Capital, talent or time
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Like Japanese kuretsus or Korean conglomerates
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Tangent - Read Henry Kaiser - Builder in the American West - by Mark Foster - read this book
- He basically built the city of Richmond CA - 100K people in a year or so
- Built so many different kinds of businesses
- The faster a job gets done, the lower the costs will be
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Grok3 benchmarks look good
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NASA asteroid update
- Impact probability 1.5% of hitting earth in 2032
- 80ft-320ft in diameter
- 20Megaton bomb at the high end
- Maybe 1000 miles of effect
- 10-15% of the earth
- 1908 asteroid hit the earth near Russia - like 1000 hiroshimas in size
- Tunguska
- Flattened 80 million trees
- Countermeasure will be hard
- Probability dropped even more now - 1/3%
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Stripe going public or not
- Vanguard, Fidelity, Bloomberg, JaneStreet etc are all private finance companies
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Allin will be at SXSW
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Friedberg going on Celebrity Jeopardy
- Wed 9pm
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