E66: $FB's big drop, Rogan/Spotify mess, Xi/Putin meetup & supply chain issues with Ryan Petersen

At PayPal’s IPO party, David Sacks says he was the only player in Peter Thiel’s 10-board simultaneous chess match to beat him. Sacks had wagered about $20, and the hosts recalled Thiel sweeping the pieces off the board afterward—an unusually personal glimpse of early PayPal culture.

Flexport’s Ryan Petersen said factory-ready goods were taking 115 days to reach U.S. warehouses, up from about 50 before the pandemic. More worrying, container volumes were roughly flat year over year while delays kept worsening, meaning the system itself was losing throughput rather than merely absorbing higher demand.

The shipping shock favored incumbents: China-to-West Coast container rates had risen from a normal ~$2,000 to about $20,000. Large companies could pay premiums, charter ships or integrate logistics, while small e-commerce firms faced much larger working-capital requirements and weaker bargaining power.

Petersen traced part of the port gridlock to mundane local rules: Southern California truck yards could stack containers only two high, tying up scarce chassis. After he tweeted about it, Long Beach raised its limit to five the same day; Los Angeles did not, leaving much of the bottleneck intact.

Petersen said officials kept counting ships waiting near Los Angeles even after new rules pushed waiting vessels about 150 miles offshore, then cited the lower visible count as progress. He argued the meaningful KPI was total factory-to-warehouse transit time, which remained severely elevated.

Meta’s earnings exposed a structural weakness: Apple’s tracking changes were expected to cost it about $10 billion in 2022 while Reality Labs was losing roughly $10 billion annually. The deeper problem was platform dependence: unlike Google, Facebook had no operating system insulating its business from Apple’s rules.

Chamath Palihapitiya disclosed that Facebook once explored a phone initiative but “didn’t get to the starting line” after an ask he made was rejected. He would not elaborate, but the admission matters because Facebook later spent comparable sums on VR while remaining exposed to Apple’s platform control.

On geopolitics, Sacks argued for de-escalation around Ukraine while treating Taiwan differently because of its strategic semiconductor role. He proposed deferring NATO membership for Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia while expanding domestic chip capacity so U.S. decisions would be less constrained by dependence on foreign supply.