All the crap you never needed

 July 18 2025

July 12 2025 Chamath fun at Lake Como - at Friedberg’s expense Travis Kalanick and Keith Rabois join the show Pony.ai People are interested in an alternative to Waymo, Tesla etc in autonomous driving - and they are reaching out to TK (presumably others also) for breaking into this space Cloud Kitchens Bowl builder machine Infra for better food (real estate, software, robotics) Uber was “everyone’s private driver” and now he wants to do “everyone’s private chef”, etc The machine can do 300 bowls an hour Internet food court AIS 2025 - Sep 7-8-9 Grok4 launch Scores well in benchmarks The Bitter Lesson - best to use a general approach that scales with computation Any problem should be an endless search or learning task Investable opportunity could be who has a leg up on scientific breakthroughs? What is an AI model that can incorporate the scientific method? Then you could have 1000s of PhDs at your disposal once you have enough GPUs Can these models help us creat...

July 4 2025 AIS 2025 AllIn Tequila orders Big Beautiful Bill Vance had to cast tiebreak vote AI regulation Federal vs State? Clean Energy Subsidies Marginal cost of energy has to go to zero - any way you can produce energy - its a winning trade in the US over the next decade CA has only 5 days of energy deficit per year (PGnE data) Mostly ~50% utilized Elon vs Trump wrt BBB Seems both sides have a valid point of view about the deficit Both too powerful to be able to get along too long Ray Dalio has been calling this situation for a long time - our debt death spiral is probably already here Goals vs Reality 3% inflation → 2.4% 3% GDP growth → 1.4% 3% deficit to GDP → 6% Question is if tax cuts and AI increase GDP growth - how will tariffs help - not sure how any of this works out Balaji has already called that the US is bankrupt This is the issue of our time US dollar down > 10% in 2025 Dollar has devalued 50% or so in the last 35-40 years So t...

June 28 2025 White House funny video All In Tequila release Iran/Israel conflict US helped Israel hit some Iranian facilities Trump is apparently unhappy with Iran and Israel What’s the narrative now - is Trump pro-war or not? You could argue this is establishing US again as “the” superpower Military supremacy Stock market is at ATH (projecting economic supremacy) Unpredictable situation - folks predicted WW3 and it didn’t happen John Mearsheimer called this exact situation at AIS2024 Oil prices Worry that price might rise a lot Nuclear weapons are complicated - giving up your weapons hasn’t been good necessarily - Libya (Gaddafi assassinated), Ukraine (now in war with Russia) Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani going to win NYC Mayor-ship Free buses $30 minimum wage Defund the police, replace them with social workers in high crime areas Grocery stores Friedberg predicted this last year This seems like a canary in the coalmine - this socialism wave will spre...

June 21 2025 Thomas Laffont joins the show Friedberg has 4th baby LA is behind national average of recovery in food and beverage industry (going out to eat, etc) Filmings in LA are down 50% from the peak Other places are giving better movie deals 30% more expensive to shoot in LA/CA Levered to 1 industry that has secular decline AI is helping SF OpenEvidence is a company helping doctors Example of AI accelerating a health care provider Zuckerberg AI offers Scale AI almost acquisition Alexandr Wang joining Meta Crazy $100M offers to OpenAI engineers and other researchers Trying to hire Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross Meta has $70B in cash Scale acquisition seems like the Onava deal from a while ago Similar to HTML5 vs native app discussion at Facebook HTML5 decision one but was wrong - and Zuck admitted it Facebook generically trains on Nvidia and open sources- whereas everyone else is optimizing their models to the hardware (Google with Gemini + TPU...

June 14 2025