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 spread throughout the country
- US economic issue is causing this
- Student debt has gone up from $500B to $1.7T in the last 20 years
- These kids graduate with debt and continue to stay in cities (NYC, LA, Chicago, SF, Seattle, Portland, etc)
- Increase in cost of college fees has outpaced wage growth for entry level jobs by 10x over the last decades
- All because of increasing US govt role
- And now when you want a fix - you go to the govt again
- We need to make student debt dischargeable through bankruptcy - else this won’t be fixed
- Kids have no longer any skin in the game
- There is no under-writing in student loan program
- Govt caused problem will increase government size
- Democrats are embracing the socialist agenda to win the youth vote
- Chuck Schumer and Bill Clinton both congratulated Mamdani
- Trump replaced neo-conservatism with populist nationalism
- Now Dems are replacing neo-liberalism with populist socialism
- One view is that these things win in blue cities (london, chicago, etc) - but don’t scale to the national level
- Zohran is succeeding because he is putting NY first ahead of the other places - similar to Trump’s approach in this way
- Age reversal
- More cutting edge science now coming out of China
- Age reversal in monkeys - skin, muscle etc they were able to reverse the aging
- Yamanaka factors again
- AIS 2023 Nicole Paulk talk was along the same lines
- Robinhood Gold Card
- Market at ATH
- Maybe companies aren’t actually doing that well (SP493 struggling compared to Mag 7) - there might just be an inflationary aspect to this
- Markets could keep going up in Chamath’s opinion - he thinks Powell should cut rates (else will be viewed as acting politically)
- Inflation is down to about 2.4% - so we should also cut rates
- That would help refinance debt
- So it seems Powell was slow to raise rates at the beginning of the cycle - now he seems slow to cut at the end of the cycle
- GDP for Q1 2025 was apparently -0.5%
- AI copyright rulings - Anthropic and Meta
- Anthropic won its case with authors
- Judge made distinction between input and output
- Anthropic should have bought each book - not clear what exactly happened - piracy part of case is ongoing
- Meta also won a case
- Anthropic won its case with authors
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