E152: Real estate chaos, WeWork bankruptcy, Biden regulates AI, Ukraine's “Cronkite Moment” & more

• All-In is being turned from a podcast into a broader media-and-events business, with 240 CEO applicants already in the pool. The hosts want more live events, a five-to-10-city tour and possibly consumer products or community offerings, while saying the podcast itself will remain free and ad-free.

• Chamath Palihapitiya is productizing his personal research process into a partly paid “Learn With Me” operation. He said two research assistants and an expert network already support monthly deep dives, with subscriber Q&As and full decks intended to finance more researchers and eventually increase publishing frequency.

• David Sacks’s central Ukraine point was that skepticism he had voiced externally was now appearing inside Zelensky’s own circle. TIME reported that a close aide saw Zelensky’s belief in victory as bordering on delusion and that some front-line commanders were refusing orders to advance. (TIME)

• A San Francisco office sale showed how commercial-real-estate losses can move from owners to banks: roughly $53 million of debt against a building marketed near $38–39 million. At that price the owner gets nothing and Bank of America would take the remaining loss, while comparable buildings traded around $200–$300 per square foot.

• Cheap office buildings do not automatically create tenants: Chamath said even free San Francisco space would not make him move a distributed workforce back. He estimated returning would add 15–20% to operating costs, while the hosts cited roughly 30% city office vacancy, making demand—not merely valuation—the unresolved problem.

• The hosts saw WeWork’s expected bankruptcy as a chance for a buyer to inherit expensive build-outs while using Chapter 11 to shed or renegotiate bad leases. They cited 777 locations, about $25 billion of future lease obligations, roughly $3.5 billion in annualized revenue and $8 billion of free-cash-flow burn since late 2019.

• The sharpest AI-regulation disagreement was over regulating model scale and development before harm occurs, rather than regulating specific illegal outcomes. Biden’s 2023 order did require reporting around powerful dual-use foundation models and directed multiple agencies to develop standards; Chamath, despite favoring targeted sandbox testing, called the broader approach incoherent and overgeneralized. ([Federal Register Public Inspection][2])

• Chamath said friends who had been major Democratic and university donors had paused donations totaling “billions of dollars,” describing movement from the left toward the center. He linked it to frustration with policy and institutions, intensified by reactions to the Israel-Hamas war; the figure was his private-network estimate, not independently substantiated in the episode.

[2]: https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-24283.pdf?1698765442=&utm_source=chatgpt.com "9

(k) The term \"dual-use foundation model\" means"