Hey, everybody, Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. It is the end

of 2022. And once again, we’re doing our bestie awards. Yes, at

the end of the year, we do our bestie awards. This is where we

give awards to the biggest winners, losers, and many other

categories that you love with me again, of course, the Sultan of

science, deep in his Kurosawa vibes. How are you doing

Sultan? It was great to see you guys for dinner last night,

Sachs, we missed you. That was a lot of fun. We all got together

twice this week for dinner while we were on vacation. And during

our dinner, we took a vote and Sachs you are now the director

of the all in summit. Congratulations. Congratulations.

Yes, the grift is on my first act is to veto it. Okay, sorry

to the fans. Also with us, of course, is the dictator himself

Chamath Palihapitiya deep in his turtleneck phase and his vibes

tell us about your winter vibes, bestie.

I mean, I can’t believe that we all took over Lake Tahoe for a

week together. It’s cool. It’s been a lot of fun. I gotta say,

Sachs, you’ll be surprised Jay cow has the life hack of life

hacks here. He’s figured out how to basically get everything

pre wired. All the restaurants all the reservations. It’s been

great. I’ve loved it. We’ve had a wonderful time. It’s an

eight person table for every night. And he does it what

months in advance. So every two weeks out, I get a table of

eight for five, six nights in a row. And then I invite my

besties out. And oddly, it turned out there was only one

person from Jake outside just himself. Yes. For the rest of us

to show. We had a wonderful time. I picked up the check for

the nachos and Chamath brought $6,000 worth of wine. I brought

my own also to the restaurant yesterday so we could open the

line properly. It was wonderful. We’ve had a

wonderful time. And of course with us looks like he had to

work over the Christmas break. Sachs How are you doing,

brother? You working today? I’m good. I’m just hanging out

somewhere. Well, come on. You could be honest. You’re at the

Twitter HQ. I recognize that incredible architecture and

design. They spent so much money on that office space.

Beautiful. That’s definitely beautiful office got their own

bespoke coffee shop here called the perch. We’re the people that

work there.

Too soon. People are working too hard to be hanging out in the

coffee shop.

Let your winners ride. Rain Man David.

Okay, so let’s get started with our bestie awards. This is a

very controversial. We start with a political award. And last

year, you know, this is our just so we’re clear, this is not the

prediction show. That next week will be the prediction show.

This week is our winners. Cue the music. Yes. Cue the music.

Right there. Okay, here we go. 2022 predictions. This is what

we predicted for the bestie award for biggest political

winner. I said Ron DeSantis, and so did David Sachs, we predicted

in 20 after me, you said it after me. And the way you

introduced it, you said, What did Tucker Carlson’s writers

come up with? I said DeSantis. And then you said DeSantis. Are

you starting already? Literally, I’m trying to give you your

flowers.

Okay, take it easy. You’re gonna get your flowers. So Ron DeSantis

obviously a big winner. So those were those were great

predictions. Freeberg with a wildcard there. He predicted

Putin would be a winner in 2022. That one fell a little flat. Did

it not our friend Freeberg? Not a winner.

No, I think he you know, I mean, my projection was really built

on what I thought would be a big kind of influence that he

would gain this year. You know, whether he’s viewed negatively

or positively, he’s certainly at the center of the stage right

now. Now, Chamath, your 22 prediction, this is your

prediction last year for this year, was that the biggest

political winner would be Xi Jinping. Okay. Now we go to our

actual biggest winner. This is where we tell you who we thought

was the biggest winner of 2022. Let’s start with you, Sax. Who

is your biggest winner for 2022? Political biggest winner?

This was the prediction that I nailed as you mentioned it. So

the red wave fizzled everywhere else, but it crashed over

Florida hard. So DeSantis is my pick. He won reelection by about

20 points. And his coattails carried four new GOP house

seats, which happens to be the exact size of the GOP majority.

Several polls have now shown him beating Donald Trump by

significant margins for the 2024 GOP nomination. He is

shattering fundraising records, Florida is now the fastest

growing state. So he is my pick for the biggest winner,

political winner of 2022. Great. Who is your biggest political

winner?

Chama? I mean, it’s obvious. It’s a huge impact. You know,

there is no single person in the world that is now as powerful as

this one man, he has complete authoritarian control over 1.2

odd billion people and 20% of the world’s GDP and a large

amount of the world’s debt, including a lot of us dollar

debt. And so you know, it’s pretty, there’s there’s it’s

hard to find anybody that won nearly as much as he did.

Okay, now to you, Friedberg, who is your biggest political

winner of 2022?

I mean, I think you’re the Santas and G. Jinping calls were

really like, good. I think the biggest surprising winner for me

is like, you know, unexpected. And that would be Zelensky from

the Ukraine. I don’t think going into this year, people paid as

much attention to him. He was certainly not a song hero. But

coming through this conflict, and I think leading the

storyline, about our common enemy of the West, and common

enemy of democracy being Vladimir Putin, really kind of

made him a superstar and a hero on a global stage. And I think

that’s evidenced by the fact that he’s in the White House.

And he gave an address to the US Congress yesterday. So I would

make him kind of the biggest winner of the year.

It’s hard to go against a Santa. So, you know, he clearly has,

as sacks correctly pointed out, gone into the lead, we’ll see if

he can be Trump in the primaries. I have my doubts,

but he does seem to be pulling in some of those moderates,

right? I don’t

understand why you guys say he’s a political winner. What did he

win? He hasn’t won the nomination yet. He got reelected

to a state that he had before 2022. So what did he win

exactly?

Well, I think a couple of things. One is when he won

election to the governorship four years ago, it was by less

than 1%. It was a tiny margin of victory. This was margin of

almost 20%. He had coattails. And he is now the front runner

for the GOP nomination in 24. I think you can argue you can make

the case that maybe he’s peaking too soon.

Well, I’m glad you brought that up. Because if you look at the

data, you know, I think in the last seven or eight nomination

cycles, the person that’s been leading the popularity contest

going into the Iowa caucuses has not won the nomination. He’s

peaking too soon almost.

That’s a possibility. Because when you’re the front runner,

everyone takes shots at you. On the other hand, if he stays this

dominant, he will drive out other contenders out of the

primary, and he may be able to solidify it. And if it can just

be DeSantis versus Trump in the primary, he has a much better

shot than if it’s Trump versus a bunch of other challengers. And

I think that if he continues to pull this well within the

Republican Party, I think Trump might not run again, because

Trump definitely does not want to risk being a loser in the

Republican primary. So yeah, there’s always front runner

risk. But it’s hard to say that coming out of this year, that he

wasn’t a huge political winner. Okay, if we’re going to

challenge other people’s picks, I would maybe challenge

Zelensky. There’s no question that he’s been a global media

hero. But two thirds of Kiev is currently without power. 80% of

Kiev doesn’t have water, 30% of the Ukrainian power stations

have been destroyed, nearly half of the country’s without power.

There’s something like 8 million displaced Ukrainians in the

country. And over 100,000 Ukrainians have been killed in

this war. So yes, he’s been a very strong, charismatic war

leader for them. But

Friedberg your response, I’m not advocating for his performance

as a leader, I’m advocating for his accumulation of political

goodwill. And that’s it.

Okay, and he is winning the war. So is that winning? Well, in

war, they say there, nobody wins. But it’s certainly better

than having your country taken over by Putin. So some would

argue that’s winning. Let’s go to biggest losers, biggest

losers. In 2022. We predicted again, this is our predictions

from last year. And then we’ll go on to our actuals for this

year. Last year, we predicted Chamath said the progressive

left, Sachs said Nancy Pelosi, Friedberg, you said us influence

globally interesting. And I said the extremes both Biden and

Trump. Let’s go with our predictions. I’m sorry with our

actuals for this year. Chamath, why don’t you go first this

time? Who is your biggest political loser for 2022?

I mean, I don’t think it’s as written about as much but the

progressive left did see as much failure as the MAGA right. So

they were a huge loser. I mean, to the extent that anybody

thought that leftist, you know, quasi socialist policies and

politics was a winning strategy. I think that was pretty soundly

refuted, even in places that were pretty staunchly Democrat,

it was really difficult for the progressive left to do much of

anything but lose. So I think that was a really powerful and

important repudiation. And I think it’s marginalized as them

to a bunch of, you know, kooks almost. And I think that that’s

really healthy for politics going forward.

So your prediction and your actual are going to be the same

the left,

I think they were the biggest political loser in the United

States, at least.

Okay, yeah, Elizabeth Warren, we don’t hear people talking about

Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders much this year.

Yeah. And I think that the biggest political loser outside

of the United States was probably the European Union.

Okay, you want to expand on that a little bit. If you just think

about the corner that they painted themselves into how much

they had to basically literally go 180 degrees away from what

their policies were, you know, there was a huge raft of whether

it was green ESG kind of woke liberal politics that manifested

itself in all kinds of national security decisions and energy

decisions that in this last year, they literally had to undo

in order to stay alive. And that makes that whole political

construct, I think, very fragile. So they were they were a

pretty big political loser outside of the United States.

Okay, Saks can be hard here to guess this one. But Saks, who is

your biggest political loser in 2022? I have no idea who you’re

going to pick.

By the way, I got Pelosi right last year that she did lose the

gavel. So you’ve got to say that the war in Ukraine was the

biggest event of the year. And obviously, you can spread the

blame around to a lot of people starting with Putin, because

he’s the one who ordered the invasion. But I would say this

is a slightly different take on the category, which is biggest

political blunder occurred on January 27 of this year, when

Blinken said that NATO’s door is open and must remain open. And

that is our commitment. He basically shut the door. He kept

NATO’s door open, but shut the door on any means of a

diplomatic off ramp to end this conflict by promising Russia,

the Ukraine would not become part of NATO. That was the

single biggest diplomatic blunder of this year, or maybe

the last couple of decades, because there’s a good chance we

could have avoided this disastrous war, if we had just

been willing to close NATO’s door.

Wonderful, great, crisp answer. Thank you for that nice and

tight. Friedberg, who’s your biggest political loser for

2022?

It was a tie for me between Jerome Powell, and Liz truss

Liz truss just has to get recognition here for only being

in office for 45 days as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

I mean, I think that is cannot be overlooked. The some of the

policy and folks that she put in, in office, caused, you know,

massive chaos, it was just a clear dysfunction over a very

short period of time. Jerome Powell, I think this was a big

surprise this year, to see how the Fed Chair became so

politicized, and his role became so politicized, both kind of the

left and the right, finding reasons to question his

leadership, and his decision making the failure to raise

rates soon enough, led to massive inflation is what you’ll

hear from one contingent of politicians and the public at

large. And then the rate at which he’s raising rates now to

catch up to the to calm inflation is causing people to

complain on the other side. So there is really no one that

seems to be happy with Jerome Powell. And I think that that

was a shooting star that seems to have completely lost its

luster.

Okay, so the Fed, yes, good pull there. Okay, mine is pretty

clear. And objectively, it is, of course, the GOP, the red wave

failed, it turned into a trickle. Trump is back. And I

believe there’s a good chance he will win the primary Roe v.

Wade, a complete unmitigated disaster for Republicans, they

caught the car and plus marriage equality and having to deal with

that women and the LGBT community vote and they have

long memories, the GOP, the biggest political losers for me.

Okay, I’m sure sex has no rebuttal there. So we will move

on to the next category, which is,

by the way, if you say it that way, then you know, the biggest

political loser in 2022 were women look like fundamental

human rights were stripped away from 50% of the population. So

that’s not cool.

And they could have left it alone.

And they could have left it alone.

Well, if if what you mean is that the issue was sent to the

states and each state then gets to decide, then you’re right.

But but if you look at the battles have happened at the

states, even red states like Kentucky and Kansas have

rejected the subsequent political push to outlaw

abortion. So it has not turned out to be just by the fact that

all of these red states basically re confirmed and

enshrined a woman’s right to choose may actually go more to

show that the Supreme Court is totally out of touch, and that

they didn’t need to touch Roe v. Wade. And the fact that they

did opened up, you know, a huge can of worms in 50 states that

now go and need to go and adjudicate this thing, where it

looked like actually that decision, even back in the day,

even though the way that it was done, you know, there was a lot

of room for improvement, clearly, everybody agrees with

that, but was actually after, you know, 50 plus years

reasonable law. And so now that you took that law away, now

folks, even in the red states are like, No, it was fine. Which

means that this whole thing was a huge political gambit more

than it was actual societal intention.

Okay, so we are going to move on now I just I’ll add my final two

cents to that. As I said, I do think women and the LGBT

community have very long memories and the people who are

in the moderate are not going to forget how they were treated by

the GOP in this specific issue. So biggest political surprise,

we didn’t do predictions last year. But I’ll just run down

what everybody said was their political surprise. I said, the

fact that Kamala Harris was sidelined was pretty surprising

to me. And that’s continued. Chamath, you said Joe Manchin

was your biggest political surprise. Glenn Youngkin

winning sacks that was your biggest surprise. And Friedberg

the January six crowd, making it into the Capitol during the

insurrection was your biggest political surprise. So here we

go. Our 2022 biggest political surprise. Saks, let’s start with

you. You have a lot to say about politics. Go.

Well, the biggest political surprise to me was no red wave.

So I admit, I got this prediction wrong. You know, I

got all my previous ones, right, Jake House, I’m gonna admit, I

got this one wrong. You know, I believe that the electorate would

focus on the fundamentals three quarters of the country thought

we’re on the wrong track. Three quarters think we’re in a

recession. Nevertheless, the Republicans did not do nearly as

well as predicted. They only gained nine seats in the House

actually lost a seat in the Senate. And I think that that

something to do with candidate quality. And of course, the

whole election denial narrative, basically was a disaster for

them. I hope that the Republicans move on and stop

talking about the past. What voters want to hear about is the

future.

Friedberg, did you have a biggest political surprise for

2022? Friedberg?

Yeah, it’s also the failure of the red wave. I mean, that was

my, my pick. I think the consensus going into the

election was with, you know, rising inflation and the disdain

that everyone had for the way politicians kind of managed us

through COVID and then managed us through the economic

recovery. It’s, it was inevitable to see a flip and it

didn’t happen. I think obviously, we talked about why

that is, but that was a big surprise for everyone.

Chamath, what was your biggest political surprise of 2022?

Chamath Palihapitiya?

The absolute toothlessness of MAGA and Donald Trump. I mean,

he was just a scarlet letter. If you were anywhere near this guy,

you were going to lose. And that’s surprising, considering

how traditional Republicans were pandering to him, up until

frankly, just a few months ago. So I think that we exposed the

emperor of as having no clothes, and that he marginalizes and

sidelines candidates into a fringe following that cannot go

mainstream. That was a it was really surprising to see how

stark that was this year.

Fantastic. I’m going to build on your Chamath. I had two here.

Number two was Roe v. Wade, but we’ve beaten that. I think it

would just get us disgusted as much as we possibly could. My

number one, building on your Chamath is that despite what’s

happened with Trump, the documents that the his cases in

the United States in New York, and about taxes, despite all of

this, the January 6 insurrection, despite all this,

Trump is still viable. I can’t believe he’s still viable in

that he is going to be out there in the primaries, and he’s going

to have to debate DeSantis. And I don’t know that DeSantis can

beat him in a debate. I think he might win. So this is completely

scary for both me and sacks. I think it’s terrifying sacks his

nightmare and mine.

Well, I think he’s mainly viable in the minds of the maggot

deadenders and the mainstream media who want to keep him

alive. And the Biden administration wants to keep him

alive, and they’ll do anything to keep him alive and in the

news. And you love keeping him in the news. So it’s a yes, it’s

a codependent relationship between the mainstream media,

which you sometimes front for, and Trump.

Oh, be careful telling me what I need to end this codependency

J. Cal.

Well, I wish the Republican Party would finally take

ownership of this disaster that is Trump and tell him that he

has no business, but you guys keep him in the game. And the

fact that he’s viable, again, your personal nightmare and

mine. Okay, biggest business winner, everybody excited to get

off politics right now and get to our kill zone, which is

business. So last year, we had predictions in this category. I

had said Disney, that’s an up and down prediction. I’ll get

into that in a moment. Tremont, you said small and medium sized

businesses, the old SMBs. SAC said rise of the rest, the fly

over states. And Freeberg, you said stripe. Tremont, let’s

start with you SMBs. What did you get? Right? What did you get

wrong here?

I mean, I whiffed, it just completely missed the global

macro shift that we embarked on in full force. Starting in q1 of

this year, it was, it is the most important business story of

the year. It’s just like we have an absolute complete regime

change. And by the way, that regime change is so complete,

and so, you know, thorough, that it even touched Japan just a few

weeks ago, or sorry, just a few days ago, where Japan who find,

you know, finally yielded on this idea of, you’re gonna,

we’re gonna have negative interest rates and yield curve

control, even they finally broken it and raised rates. So it

is an absolute worldwide sea change in how we need to think

about risk. And I think that’s worth talking about a little bit

later in the show. But that was the single biggest business

story of the

year. I’ll add to what Tremont said, I missed this too, even

though on another prediction, when you asked what the biggest

business loser would be, I think I said that it would be

asset classes that have been pumped up by the feds money

printing, because you start to feel now. So I got that part

right. But what I didn’t connect it to, were all the asset

classes actually got pummeled. So I kind of conceptually

understood that rates were rising, but I totally

underestimated the magnitude of the shift, the way that gross

stocks would get hammered the way that crypto would get

destroyed, the fact that like Tiger basically got blown out

of the industry. I mean, I had the right general intuition, but

I didn’t translate it into the specific asset types and the

magnitude of the shift. And also the like what you must set a

real regime change now, and how markets are viewing stock

performance.

It’s really incredible. Freeberg, let’s get in on this.

This is somewhere where you can contribute deeply. What do you

think about your take last year, and you still believe in stripe?

Yeah, I mean, look, it’s a it’s a business that obviously

benefited greatly from the pandemic and the adoption of,

you know, the payment processing infrastructure that they’ve

built across their across various kind of e commerce

platforms. It’s I’ve been I’m not an investor, so I don’t have

any numbers. But there are public reports that have

highlighted that the revenue increased 66%. This year,

they’ve indicated that they’re probably going to experience

significant revenue slowdown with the recession ahead. But it

still seems like a super high quality business. And you know,

valuation wise, who knows what things are going to be worth

when they ultimately come to market. There’s certainly no

one going to going public right now. So at some point, we’ll see

you know, whether valuations play out, but it seems like it

continues to be a very strong, one of the strongest private

businesses that’s being built in Silicon Valley.

We will get to 2022. biggest business winners in one second.

I will just say for Disney have man what a swing, Bob chapik in

and then out and now Bob Iger back. So I feel like I got this

one wrong and right. At the same time, I still believe in the

company deeply. I think they’re gonna have a big win. Let’s get

to our actual biggest winner of 2022. Sachs, why don’t you lead

us off with your biggest winner of 2022 for business?

I said Lockheed Martin along with other defense stocks,

Lockheed Martin, which makes javelins and high Mars is up 40%

in the past year when most of the market’s been way down.

Northrop Grumman is also up almost 40%. And even some of the

lesser performers like Raytheon and General Dynamics are up

about almost 20% in a terrible market environment. The fact of

the matter is war is terrible, but it appears to be good

business. We’ve sent so many weapons to Ukraine, that there’s

recent press reports that are the US stockpiles of missiles,

javelins and stingers are now depleted. So these companies are

going to keep doing well for the next year, at least. Now there’s

a new appropriation sailing through something like 44

billion of new funding for the war. It’s now over $100 billion.

McConnell says this is a republicans number one priority.

This is now a bipartisan concern. And if you think the

war is expensive, just wait for reconstruction that’s estimated

to cost at roughly a trillion dollars to build Ukraine back

sex. Can I ask a question about that? Are these when we fund

these wars? I’ve heard different versions of this can’t get a

clear answer. When we provide weapons and systems like this,

are they not on account and we asked for money back at some

point? Do you know the answer to that question?

You think we’re gonna get money back? Are you kidding me? It

seems to be sometimes that we do. So that’s why I was asking. I

think it’s something there hasn’t been clarity on

look, I think the the war has been phenomenal business for the

military industrial complex. That’s what we’re seeing here.

Not so great for the rest of the economy.

Freeberg, what do you got? Yeah, I mean, I think you guys will

remember last November, I predicted energy and defense to

be the best performing stocks for this year. sax is right. I

think defense is up 40%. So I kind of went with the bigger oil

and gas companies are up, you know, across the board about 47%

in terms of equity value in the public markets a year to date,

compared to the S&P being down about 20%. So over the short

term, I would argue oil and gas companies, but I think that over

the long term, there were a couple of big breakthrough

moments that I would give kind of, you know, the winner in

business that will benefit over the long term to open AI and to

fusion startups. And we’ll talk more about why for those two,

obviously later when we get to the biggest winner in tech and

science. But yeah, short term oil and gas, they benefited from

the supply constraints and the conflict in the Ukraine. And

then longer term, I think opening I infusion startups

well, and by the way, I mean, just just to give freebird some

credit here, you actually predicted the war, or you

predicted a war? I don’t know if you predicted this war, but you

predicted

Yeah, I predicted the war and Putin kind of rising to the

center stage and the dog

that was a huge prediction, because I don’t think most

people even most analysts, well, they were surprised even when

the invasion happened. I think people were still very surprised

both that Putin would order it. But also, if you say the

situation, I think you got to be surprised that we didn’t

negotiate harder to try and prevent it.

I traded it too. I bought I bought an energy ETF. So it

worked out for me. Okay, Chamath, your biggest business

winner of 2022.

Nick can throw it up. But it’s basically any single person that

understands the following formula. So if you this is the

good, this is the this is the capital asset pricing model. So

what is this? This is like before you make any investment,

what it actually tells you is here’s the rate of return that

you need to generate above the risk free rate, in order for you

to justify making that investment. And if you really

understood the capital asset pricing model going into 2022,

it would have been difficult for you to not make money. Because

all of a sudden, as the 10 year flexed up, and as you know, the

volatility, particularly of things like tech stocks, went

crazy, you could have figured out where you to park your

money. And all these people that have built businesses

around this capital asset pricing model. So you have

companies, obviously, so you know, you have sectors of the

economy, like defense or energy stocks, consumer goods and

staples, they all had moments where they all did well. But if

you take it one step above the organizations that actually ran

big macro books, or really understood how to algorithmically

implement this capital asset pricing model just ran rough

shot over the markets. And, you know, said in a different way,

it’s sort of my background, which is, you know, if you

understood the capital asset pricing model, you would have

been a massive bear. And the bear got fed this year to a

degree that none of us could have anticipated.

Okay, so am I correct saying the capital asset pricing model is

the biggest winner?

Or no people that understood it.

People that understood it. Got it. Okay. And for my biggest

winner, I went with chat GPT slash open AI and their partner

Microsoft. Why did I pick that as the biggest winner? Well, on

my other podcast this week in startups, we played a game chat

GPT versus the first result of Google’s. And Molly and I could

not tell the difference. And in fact, we picked chat GPT is

answers. Often above Google’s Google, one of the greatest

businesses and franchises ever created, has no answer at

currently for chat GPT. Because Google’s business model is to

get you to click on an ad between links. If you give the

actual answer, then the person doesn’t stops clicking. If they

stop clicking, Google stops making money, there is no

business model in search, if the person gets their answer,

because they’re done. This is an existential threat like we have

not seen. And our friend Sam Altman has a line chat GPT

slash open AI with Microsoft. Microsoft, I think is going to

release a and there’s a prediction as well, a search

engine with open AI that has a significant impact on Google’s

franchise. We didn’t think this would ever happen. And it’s

here. Okay, the biggest losers in business. We made predictions

last year. I said in 2020, I predicted in 2021, the biggest

loser in 2022 would be crypto. By the way, Friedberg, you

agreed with me. And we nailed it. You agreed with me? Well,

yes, that’s correct. We were in agreement. How about that? We

were in. We were in agreement. Independent. You said, and

Chamath visa slash MasterCard, we’ll get into that. And sacks,

you said asset classes benefiting from government

pumps. Very interesting. The Fed stopping QE. Interesting.

Anybody have comments on their predictions or each other’s

predictions from last year?

On a percentage basis? David absolutely nailed it. sacks

absolutely nailed it. On a dollar basis, the biggest

business loser of this year was big tech. And I think that you

saw three things happen, which I think are important for the

future. The first was it was the most crowded trade, both by

professional money managers as well as retail. And that fever

finally broke in the last half of in the second half of this

year. And now going into, into these last few weeks, you’re

seeing a lot of panicked selling to cover losses and other

things. So I think that number one, that happened. Number two,

regulators basically said we’re going to go after these guys

every single which way we can. And then number three, I think

it started to change the innovation cycle where people

now actually believe that they can’t outspend because folks

won’t tolerate it. And the things that they’re spending

their money on seem kind of foolish. And so I think the, you

know, big tech is probably not discussed enough, but it was a

huge loser for this year, in terms of what happened to them.

2022 is actual biggest business loser. Chamath says big tech,

Freeberg, who is your biggest business loser for 2022?

I mean, this one’s just a simple FTX. I mean, that was such a

incredible revelation of the scale of the scam and the fraud

and the craziness that went on. And I think what was interesting

about FTX is it had implications, not just for

crypto, and not just for kind of offshore regulatory and not just

for fraud, but also for the investors, we had a whole debate

about whether the press and journalists failed to kind of,

you know, appropriately investigate this guy rather than

give him accolades, because he said the right things, which he

said he did over I am. And investors fail to do relevant

amounts of due diligence or form a board and have proper

governance over him, because they wanted to be part of the hot

new thing and everyone had capital to deploy. And I think

what was interesting about the FTX failure is it didn’t just it

wasn’t just a failure due to fraud, but it revealed so many

parts of kind of, you know, I call it, you know, systemic

laziness and systemic kind of blind eye and systemic bias that

allowed and enabled this to happen. It was really a

revealing kind of failure. And that’s why I kind of gave it the

the award, Mr. David Sachs, who is your biggest business loser

of 2022?

Well, you kind of mentioned this, I picked Bob J. Peck is

the former Disney CEO, he was eigers handpicked successor three

years ago, then the pandemic hit, which shut down the theme

parks. But then I think the big mistake was allowing himself to

be Mao Mao by woke employees into picking a fight with

DeSantis over the so called don’t say gay bill. That caused

DeSantis to retaliate by threatening the special

privileges that Disney enjoys in the state. And then he had

eiger undermining him behind the scenes, this was revealed, I

think, as a Wall Street Journal story, that he was grousing to

insiders that JPEG was not soliciting his advice. And he

was undermining confidence in with the board. And recently,

JPEG was forced out and I was put back in charge.

Fantastic choice for the biggest loser.

How brutal does eiger look in that Wall Street Journal piece?

I mean, would anybody work for him?

Yes, he is incredible. He looks terrible. I agree. I read that

piece twice, actually. The CFO calling him up, she was the one

who stabbed him, you know, in knife JPEG. It’s a great wall.

So I don’t think that I don’t think that that happens without

the support of the person waiting in the wings.

Hey, listen, there’s a couple of jobs, you never quit. You never

quit a hit TV show. You never quit a hit band like Roger

Wattard is with Pink Floyd.

Why didn’t they just extend this

for the Disney job? It’s the best job as a job in the world.

But Jason, why go through this? Why go through the theatrics of

like grooming somebody putting them in your job and then

undermining them? Like I all I’m saying is if you’re I think he

made a mistake. I think he made a mistake. He quit and he wanted

and also if like if you’re a good up and coming exec. I mean,

what do you do if like all of a sudden, like, you know, you have

the opportunity to get groomed for that job. It just seems

really risky.

Yeah, I mean, I think Bob Iger realized when he in that piece,

they say he went on his yacht, his wife didn’t come with him.

The Wall Street Journal piece is incredible. And he’s got bored.

And he’s 70 something years old. He’s like an early 70s. Why

would you give up the greatest job in the world? So he went

back and he took it back.

Didn’t Disney have a mandatory retirement age?

But this is my point is he was so he was so prolific, he could

have extended it. Why not just extend it and be done with it?

Yeah.

Did you guys read the book he wrote? That ride of a lifetime?

What is it? Yeah. And I think that what was interesting about

that book was the entire thing was built around a series of

deals that he did. It was like I did this acquisition, then I did

this acquisition, then I did this acquisition. And

everything for him was building this this this empire by doing

deals. And someone whose storyline and narrative that

they tell of themselves, that’s built as a series of deals is a

deal junkie. And you’re not going to be a deal junkie, where

where that’s your excitement. That’s the thrill. That’s the

adventure that you get out of life. And then you go and sit on

a yacht, you’re not doing any deal sitting on a yacht. And

you’re going to want to get back to that. And I think it’s less

about kind of management and product. And it was much more

about being in the midst of doing deals. And that’s probably

why I came back.

If this was part of Iger’s diabolical strategy to get back,

let me just say, like, one of the ways he did it, I mean,

Chapek had the right instincts, which is when this whole

Florida debate happened over don’t say gay, highly

contentious, no comment. No comment, his instinct was just

to stay out of it. But then Iger made some statements about how

companies have to live up to their values and that kind of

stuff. And then the employee started, you know, again, you

know, Mau Mau him to get involved. And he took the bait.

And he got involved. And what he didn’t expect is that DeSantis

wasn’t going to just roll over. DeSantis hit him back really

hard. And it cost them economically. And then

and in the first interview that Iger gave when asked about this

question, he was like, no comment.

Yeah, he’s like, we’re not gonna get involved in politics

anymore. We’re not gonna get involved in politics anymore. It

was hilarious. That wasn’t

nuts, JPEG to basically get involved in politics. And then

JPEG basically became cannon fodder for DeSantis. Exactly.

And then I was like, Oh, we’re out of this now. I mean, how

diabolical is that?

It’s so diabolical, so dirty. The other two were cheap. It

said, we’re going to take away your PNLs to each of the

leaders that is like just neutering them that he basically

said, everybody’s under the CFO, everybody’s going to be on one

PNL. That infuriated all the creatives. And then he went to

war with Scarlett Johansson over a $10 million settlement for her

black widow. He couldn’t handle talent. He couldn’t handle the

politics. And he wanted to control everybody’s PNL just

unforced error after unforced error. Congratulations to my guy

Bob Iger, I own the stock.

Do you think he was diabolical at all?

Oh, in the best possible way. In the best possible way, which

means that Disney stock is going to go up. Yes, I’m buying more

Disney stock this year.

Is all the woke progressive politics that he projects? Is

that all just a game to mask what a viper’s nest their

executive suite really is?

Are you telling me that Disney is a political corporation after

Eisner and Bob Iger and all of his Michael Ovitz? I mean, it’s

the history of Disney. It’s the greatest job in the world. It is

Game of Thrones to get that job. And Bob Iger got it back. He’s

my guy. I’m sticking with them. Okay, they have the best IP in

the business. I don’t care how he gets that job back. He’s

awesome.

I gotta say the IP at Warner Media is a real strong

contender. I mean, that white Lotus we were talking about

this yesterday, how good white Lotus season two was. Let’s

open up the discussion. It is incredible how HBO produces

extraordinary hit after extraordinary hit. The quality

and the consistency of that quality coming out of HBO is

like nothing else. You’ll go I mean, look, Avatar two, I did

not like Avatar one, I thought it was junk. Avatar two is

getting panned for being junk as well. Not everything that comes

out of Disney is a hit. They certainly have the best

franchises. But man, Warner Media has a lot to contend with

and you know, they could end up being a real challenger to

Disney in the years ahead.

Saks Did you watch the white Lotus season two? Yes or no?

So I haven’t gotten me. No problem. It is absolutely

fantastic. We have to do a little fan service here. What

did you love Chamath about white Lotus season two? Give the fans

a little service here.

Wait, it’s on season two. I didn’t even see season one. I

don’t even know what you guys are talking about.

Okay, it’s the hottest show in television.

Well, I’ll tell you what’s incredible is there’s a

diversity of characters and they weave the super like, you know,

interesting story together. But each of the characters are so

distinct. And the characters are played so well. I mean, we were

talking about, you know, we were kind of at dinner last

night talking about who our favorite character was on the

show. And everyone has a different answer. And everyone

has a different reason. And then there are characters that you

hate. But the fact that you hate them, and the fact that you

despise them draws you in you’re drawn into these characters. I

think that the the way that they kind of portrayed and the way

that the characters were acted by the by the actors, and then

the way that they all kind of weave together to tell this

extraordinary story. It was really, it was really compelling.

And it was like, just super impressive. Directing, acting,

writing everything.

There are a handful of scenes in season one, and season two,

which I would say are unbelievably psychologically

violent. And there’s just no other way to describe like, how

they just expose and by the way, they do it with simple shots,

very simple dialogue, it’s almost nonchalant in the way

that they present these truth bombs. And you have to sit there

and process it. And you’re just like, Oh my god, it’s just, it’s

wave after wave. It’s an incredible, incredibly well

written show.

The character development is extraordinary.

Amazing.

Production and set design, by the way. Also, I mean, when you

when you don’t you want it, you want to cool it. You want to go

to those locations.

Do you guys remember in season one, Saks will remember this

because Saks watched it season one, the family is sitting at

the table where they’re watching the Hawaiian dance. And

Paula, the guest of the family gets up and leave, she can’t

take it anymore. And then the next day, they’re in a

discussion about it. And the father says something about, I

think, hierarchy or imperialism or something. And it goes around

the table, and she just deadpan. She says, Well, maybe it’s just

time for others to eat. Talking about, you know, like fixing

these wrongs. And I had to listen to it two or three times.

I’m like, Oh, my God, that is that is a line that just sticks

in your brain. There’s a few of those in that show that I think

Eric said, and I was saying, like, they really draw you in.

The set design, the production design is so compelling. You

want to be there, you want to be in that experience with those

characters.

Yeah, you’re totally drawn to the pineapple suite. I mean, and

then in this season, that whole hotel, I looked up the hotel, by

the way, online, they hadn’t, you know, their their own set

design, people come in and redo the hotel, but it is an actual

hotel. It’s a real, they just made it so magical. Yeah, it was

such an incredible,

Oh, free book, we should make that the host of the All in

Summit 2023. I’m working on my Jennifer Coolidge.

Tell your director, David Sachs, what you’d like to do for you.

Yeah,

my biggest loser was crypto. And I think there’ll be a

subsequent domino to fall, which is now that Gary G, head of the

SEC has FT x and the FTT tokens as the grift, he’s going to go

down the list of other tokens. And he is going to start doing

more prosecutions of grifts in crypto biggest loser for me.

All right, biggest business surprise. Let’s see if we can

get sacks back engaged in the conversation now that we’re not

talking about art and life. sacks. Last year, your biggest

business surprise,

sacks just produced a movie about Dolly. I know he is. I’m

joking with him. He’s a true artist. And he sold it to Mark

Cuban. Congratulations on the sale. David, I guess me and

Cuban are besties now. Fantastic. In 2021. Our

selections for business biggest business surprises. I was very

surprised by Dow’s Chamath by Moderna. sacks by tech moving to

Miami and Friedberg. You were surprised by NF T’s. What were

we surprised by in 2022? Friedberg, we’ll start with you

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, I think took everyone by

surprise. It kind of went I mean, this is such an obvious

one, but it went from a whimsical fantasy and idea to

suddenly, you know, cold hearted reality with, you know, a huge

kind of negotiating saga that took place and court battles and

all the drama that ensued. And here’s what I think was most

surprising about it. It wasn’t just the acquisition and the and

the fact that the acquisition closed, but it was the the

incredible veracity of the head cutting, cost cutting the

demands that people return to work return to the office. And

then what was most surprising that followed that is the impact

that that seems to have had on the rest of Silicon Valley,

where now nearly every VC I speak with every CEO, every

board is looking to Elon’s behavior for right or for wrong

for you know, moral, moral or not. And saying that’s a model

for how you can challenge your team to achieve the impossible

in an impossibly difficult environment, which is what we

find ourselves in. And so I think it was a series of

surprising events. He bought Twitter, he made these

incredible changes, and then everyone seems to be looking to

that as a model. And it’s really resonated, it’s created a

rippling effect. I’m not saying it’s good. I’m not saying it’s

bad. I’m not saying it’s moral right or wrong. But the whole

thing was really an incredible, surprising, unexpected saga this

year. So I give the Elon acquisition of Twitter kind of

the award.

Chamath, do you have a biggest surprise?

I would say it’s Jerome Powell and the Fed and their staunch

hawkishness on inflation. I think everybody wants all of

this to be over. And I think we’re definitely in the last few

innings of it. But I think what was surprising was how

consistent and how hawkish and how bearish Jerome Powell was

every chance he got. He didn’t capitulate or waiver from the

key message, which he was saying from the beginning, which

is, we have the tools to fix a broken economy. But we don’t

have the tools to fix runaway inflation. And so we will raise

rates higher than anyone expects and keep them there longer than

anybody wants. Because on the back end of it, we can fix a few

broken bones. But if left unchecked, this could really do

a lot of damage. And I think that that was an enormous

surprise that all the political pressure in the world, all of

the financial capital markets pressure in the world, did

nothing to change his position. Sachs, what was your biggest

business surprise of 2022? David Sachs biggest?

Well, it was it was a pretty big surprise that Adobe bought

Figma for 20 billion. That price tag in this environment, pretty

big surprise. But I got to say, I think Freeberg nailed it. Got

to say that the business saga of the year was Elon buying Twitter.

First, liberal media was up in arms that he might do it, then

they insisted that he must complete the deal. In any event,

he he did ultimately buy the company. Now he’s affecting his

changes. I agree. That’s the big business story of this year.

Certainly was a big surprise for me that I got deposition for

six hours.

Is it a surprise that you’re sitting in Twitter’s headquarters

today right now?

Yeah, it is a surprise. But just by the way, the rumors and

speculation are getting out of hand. I am not a candidate for

CEO of Twitter. So I want to put the kibosh on that because it’s

starting to get out of hand.

J Cal, the job is yours, my friend. Congratulations. All

right, I guess. Let me know when I start. Okay, you’ve worked

hard.

J Cal the last man standing last man standing outwit outlast.

Now that Saks has said he is not taking the job a bunch of libs

have just stopped taking Xanax. The libs biggest fear was Saks

was gonna get that job. We just canceled a bunch of Xanax

prescriptions. Congratulations to the libs. Saks is not going

to be your overlord on Twitter. For me. It’s obvious. The

Twitter acquisition is the biggest surprise by far and away.

Freeberg I couldn’t summarize it better. I will say in six

weeks, what we have seen there is nothing short of

extraordinary. Have there been bumps in the road? Has it been a

little chaotic at times perhaps, but the features that are coming

fast and furious are going to be the story going forward. You’ve

seen Twitter for business. Saks had his fingerprints, all that

you may fingerprints all over that. You may have seen hashtags

for stock tickers. I was briefly involved in that. There are

going to be so many features coming. And this is what Elon

zone of excellence is product. He is an engineer. He’s a

product genius. The proof is in the pudding, whether it’s

rocket ships or the cars, we’re going to see a parade of

features. I predict in another six to 18 weeks, we will see

people talking about all the great features in Twitter, not

any of the transitional issues and people will be shocked my

runner up metastock collapsing. That was my runner up for the

biggest business shock is that they just absolutely collapsed.

I was just gonna add to what you’re saying about new features

launching while we’ve been sitting here on this pod and I’ve

been checking my Twitter feed. There’s a new feature where

there’s a view count on all of your tweets and all of everybody

else’s tweets as well. So you can see how many views a tweet

is generating. So this tweet that I posted yesterday has 1.5

million views. It’s like incredible. So it really shows

the incredible reach of Twitter. And anybody who’s thinking about

going to like some knockoff like Macedon or something is gonna

have to contend with the fact that it doesn’t have nearly the

distribution. So I think this really shows the power of

Twitter. And then Dave Rubin noticed my I tweeted this just a

second ago. And Dave Rubin noted that the New York Times doesn’t

have anywhere near the views for its tweets, because they bought

all their followers, which is interesting. I didn’t know that.

But I just went over to the New York Times profile and my tweets

are routinely getting 10 to 20 times more reach more views than

theirs. So this is a super interesting indicator of who

actually people are paying attention to on Twitter. It’s

fascinating.

This is fascinating. I’m looking at my own I just did how do you

give a $30 billion fraud bail, referring to SPF. And that was

just less than an hour ago. No, it’s 30 minutes. Yeah, an hour

ago. And I have 50,000 views already, which is 10% of my

follower count. So this is an extraordinary you see right next

to likes retweets, quote tweets, the feature train is

coming. And this will change the dialogue all these haters who

are like Twitter is going to go down who are rooting against

Elon. Let me tell you something, if a guy can land two rockets at

a time, and he can literally restart the electric car

movement, and he becomes the number one car in any category,

he releases a car and how on earth would you bet against him

to build software, you have to be idiotic.

This is way too much. I mean, you guys like we should sorry,

he’s doing the awards. I get it. It’s like an ad. Yeah, you’re

selling a partner for a company that you guys are working at.

Like, I mean, come on, I’m not working. Well, you guys are

advisors, right? I mean, Nick, can you let me show another

feature? So I think it’s cool. Nick. Let’s go. Yeah, keep on

featuring. Let’s go pull up my profile real quick. Welcome to

this week in Twitter. Oh, my god. Twitter now has affiliate

badges. You can see I’ve got a little craft ventures badge next

to my name. So if you, you should be able to click on it

actually, to get to the craft ventures profile. Yeah. So

you’re gonna be able to affiliate users with business

accounts. And it creates kind of secondary badges after the blue

check. I think even the corporate journalists are going

to love this because if you’re a New York Times writer, you’ll

have a little NYT badge next to your name, Wall Street Journal,

whatever, you’ll have that little badge. So more and more

people are going to get blue checks, and then people are

going to have secondary or even tertiary badges that are

basically specific to their affiliations. Okay, so I think

let’s make sure we get let’s get an all in bad. We are going to

have all in badges really soon. Awesome. Okay, let’s go for

free work free works. That was our biggest business surprises.

And we just canceled your account freeberg. It’s locked

out. We just took away. No one goes to it. Anyway, it’s all

good. Don’t worry about it. Okay, best science breakthrough

here’s an easy one for us to do. 2022 biggest science

breakthrough. What have you got? Sultan of science we core of

course, I have to start with your 22 biggest science

breakthrough freeberg.

Yeah, I’m gonna give it obviously to the the

demonstration of net energy gain from the National Ignition

Facility in plasma fusion that we talked about last week. I

wouldn’t call it a breakthrough. By the way, I think we use that

as a misnomer last week, but I’m still gonna put it in this

category. It’s more of a milestone along a very long

path, a very arduous path of very difficult work that’s been

taking decades. So it’s a great milestone. But I think what was

so important and impactful and powerful about it is that it’s

really catalyzed to change a sea change in the investing in the

outlook that this is becoming more reality. As I mentioned

last week, we’ve seen an increase of nearly 40% in the

number of fusion startups, and the amount of capital that’s

flowing in is now reaching 10 billion a year. So this is

becoming you know, a real investable or an area that’s

getting real investment. Some people might not think it’s very

investable. But that’s why I think it’s been an important

year for fusion. And I think, you know, it’s something I

highlighted last year, I was excited about

and I to pick fusion. Also, just point of clarity last week,

some people Chamath before you go to your prediction, we’re

saying, hey, you’re talking your book on solar when you were in

your disagreement with Friedberg. That’s obvious.

You’ve been very upfront that you’re investing in solar, you

placed your bet.

Yeah, 100%.

Yeah. So just to

everybody knows he made that bet. He’s talked about it

incessantly.

Plus, those idiots that were saying that are stupid. But

yes, let me, let me further clarify what I said last week

and why it’s important. If Nick, can you bring up the capital

asset pricing model again, the most important thing for me is

to make sure that we don’t misallocate human capital into

endeavors that I think are best left for research institutions

funded by the government. And I think when you look at a capital

asset pricing model and try to build one out for fusion, as an

example, the expected rate of return that you need to get from

this is just astronomically high, because of the beta of

that investment risk, and the market risk premium you have to

generate. And so, you know, from my perspective, I think that

there are probably four or five labs in the world that are

capable of actually getting us to a positive energy equation. I

think Friedberg, I really thank you for actually saying that it

wasn’t a breakthrough and more of a milestone. I think the real

breakthrough is when we have positive, not just joules, but

we actually convert that into electrical energy, right. And we

actually talk about power and watts. And I think that most

people listening probably don’t even understand the difference

between joules and watts or don’t even care. And they want

to jump around here or there. So the point is that there’s an

enormous path we need to take in physics. And I think it’s

best done in governments. And I don’t want to see a bunch of

billions of dollars get wasted to get to to get marginal cost

of energy to zero right now, I think there is a point in time

where private startups can take the last 20 or 30%. But I think

about this, like the internet, which is you need a DARPA to

build v one. And then it could be handed over to private

industry. And I think fusion, when we look back, will look

very similar. And all the folks that try to build, you know,

versions of the internet that were private, I think found

themselves lagging, because there’s just a level of

investment that’s required, that’s best served in

government. So anyways, that’s, let’s clarify that for all the

folks who got their panties in a bunch of dudes. But in any

event, my science breakthrough of the year is that there was a

13 year old girl, this was, you know, because of all of this

fusion stuff, actually, we didn’t even get to cover it

because it happened in the same week. And I think this is

infinitely more impressive and is an actual breakthrough, which

is a 13 year old girl in the United Kingdom, who had a

heretofore, uncurable form of leukemia, T cell acute

lymphoblastic leukemia. So typically, you start in

chemotherapy. If chemotherapy doesn’t work, you move to bone

marrow transplants. And it was uncurable. And a lab in the UK,

basically using CRISPR edited these transplant T cells to go

in and wipe out her cancer. And now her cancer is literally

undetectable. Now, if you bring up that capital asset pricing

model, again, Nick, what I’ll tell you is, the rate of return

on a human life, in my opinion, is infinite. And so here is an

unbelievable breakthrough that got very little attention

because everybody was wrapped around the axle of fusion. It

happened in the same week. So maybe it’s understandable, I

didn’t understand it. But I think this is the single most

important thing that happened in science, not just this year, but

frankly, in the last decade, because if you can actually now

do base editing, and eradicate, at least in this case, a blood

based cancer, and eventually we’ll be able to bring that and

use that towards solid state tumor cancers. It’s a huge

breakthrough in just human longevity and human quality of

life. And that happened just a few weeks ago.

Okay. And of course, for David Sacks, his biggest science

breakthrough is I don’t care. So moving on. Go ahead, tell us.

Yeah, no, this category reminds me of when Biden had that

moment where he’s like, America can be defined in a single word.

And he’s like, that’s kind of how I feel about this category.

America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. I was

gonna foot him. Excuse me.

Amazing how you figured out a way to be derogatory about Biden

in the science section. A new low even for you, sacks. Oh,

it’s a good one. Thanks. I like it. All right, biggest flash in

the pan. 2021. This is what we said were the biggest flash in

the pan. I said the woke socialist leadership of cities

i.e. Chesa Boudin. freeberg said the Constitution down. sack

said the word transitory very well played. And Shemot said the

metaverse also very well played. Everybody that

very good. Everybody get your flowers. Enjoy all of those seem

like pretty good selections. But this year is what everybody

wants to hear about. freeberg. Tell us now who is your 2022

biggest flash in the pan, the undisputable who we got biggest

flash in the pan of 2022 was the all in summit. Oh, man, it

went. That will always be a strong and significant memory.

It was such a hot thing for a minute. And then it died. So to

the all in summit, I went out my glass, I pour one out. I toast

to you to Miami. And unless David Sachs carries it from

here. It was a flash in the pan. It was a flash in the pan.

sacks, who’s your flash? Which democrat is a flash in the pan

for you?

This is where I had Liz truss. As you guys mentioned, she only

survived 44 days as PM. I mean, that’s only for scaramoochies.

She was basically fired by the bond markets after she combined

a Thatcher s tax cut with massive energy subsidies to

counter the price spikes caused by the war in Ukraine that she

was fanatically committed to. This was deemed untenable by the

UK Central Bank, it crashed the pound. And I think there is a

serious point here, which is that as much as Thatcher and

Reagan were the two towering heroic figures of the 1980s, I

think zombie Thatcherism is not going to be electorally viable

in the UK, just like zombie Reaganism is not going to be

viable in the United States. I think that the conservative

movement has to stop living in the past, we have to develop

fresh ideas to meet the economic and foreign policy challenges

of today.

Chamath, do you have a flash in the pan?

I actually think fusion literally was a flash in the pan.

It was it lasted 10 to the negative 10 seconds. So that

more less of a flash you can’t have without being a flash in

the pan.

Ah, they haven’t. Hey,

Saks, look who’s here.

Oh, look.

Oh, is it the proprietor?

The proprietor, the owner

for our customer support at your service.

Saks, you spent the last 15 minutes selling your new

features on the podcast. Pretty exciting.

Well, the like the views are like incredible. Yeah. I mean,

and I saw Dave Rubin already made an observation that if you

look at New York Times, their views are maybe one 10th like my

views, just me as a lone tweeter. And he said that their

followers are inflated by just basically buying a bunch of

follower accounts.

Yeah, the views thing is huge. That’s why I pushed the views,

which is like actually a lot harder feature to implement than

you’d think because the sheer number of transactions per

second like it’s, I think it sort of requires system wide on

the order of three, 3 million transactions a second to

actually calculate the view to, you know, calculate and display

the view count. If I put Twitter, Twitter global, so it’s

like 3 million per second. It’s a lot.

For those of you listening, Elon Musk has had joined the

pod. Elon, how’s, how’s the first six weeks been generally

speaking of owning Twitter?

Well, it’s been quite a roller coaster, which obviously you’ve

witnessed and been on the roller coaster as well.

Yes, the dramamine. I’ve taken the dramamine. It’s it’s quite

up. Yeah, I mean, it’s exciting. But I think it sort of has its

highs and lows to say the least. But overall, it seems to be

going in a good direction. And, you know, we’ve got a lot of

the expenses reasonably under control. So the company’s not

like on the in the fast lane of bankruptcy anymore. And we’re

releasing features faster than Twitter’s history, at the same

time as having contained the costs and reduce the cost

structure by a factor of three, maybe, maybe four. So you know,

the verified is obviously that that’s the one that’s going to

the verified is obviously that that’s, that’s, that’s huge.

It’s revenue stream as well as a means of identifying of like,

knowing that it’s a real person and not a barter or trial

situation. The having the affiliation organization

affiliation, which I suspect you talked about that was a idea of

David’s that was great to have organization affiliation. So you

can know that somebody is an actual professor at Stanford or

that this particular handle is actually Disney, not someone

simply putting I work at Disney in my in their bio. So I think

that’s gonna be really helpful. It just really just having

detailed and nuanced verification. So of all the

various things that you say you are, are these things validated

by other people and organizations?

Can you tell us how you do product iteration, Ilan? Because

one of the things that I think some people got jolted by over

the last couple of weeks is like a bunch of things got taken away

or changed or rules changed, or policies changed, and there was

very quick action. And then people had all this negative

feedback about the quick action without communication. But your

extraordinary talent is to iterate product to success. Can

you just maybe share with people how you do product iteration in

this context, to help them understand how some of these

decisions get made, and why moving quickly is so important.

And just, you know, how you’re doing this?

I’m a big believer in like, you want to look at the net output.

So it’s sort of like, you know, what’s the batting average? If

you’re like baseball? The point is, is not that you like, you

know, hit the ball, but it’s like, well, how many home runs

you get? And how like, what’s your actual

your slugging percentage?

Yeah, slugging percentage? Yeah, yeah. It’s like, you’ve got to

swing for the fences, you’re gonna, you’re gonna, you know,

strike out a bit more, but we’re gonna swing for the fences here

at Twitter. And we’re gonna do it quickly. So and I think,

generally, like my error rate, and sort of being the chief

twit will be less over time. But, you know, in the beginning,

we’ll make obviously sort of a lot more mistakes. And, you

know, because it’s, I’m new to the I’m like, hey, I just got

here, man. So, I mean, if you look at like, the actual amount

of improvement that’s happened at Twitter in terms of like,

like, having costs that are not insane, and getting an actually

shipping product that on balance is good. I think that is that.

That’s great. Like, I think we’re actually executing well

and getting things done. I think we’ll have fewer, fewer gaps in

the future.

How did you get to your intuition on what the efficient

frontier of employees needed to be to make the product better?

Well,

yeah.

Well, I was a part of this, we’re basically asked the

question, who here is critical? And who here is exceptional?

Yes, I mean, so, I mean, really, the what the criteria is trying

to apply, and obviously, you’re gonna be perfect. If you’re

moving fast, and there’s a lot of, you know, people you’re

talking about here is that anyone who is exceptional at

what they do, where the role is critical, they have a positive

effect on others. And they are trusted, meaning they put the

company’s interests before their own should stay pretty

straightforward. Yeah. And also, and it also is up for working,

you know, working hard, like, that would not that would have

not just this, this, this, that’s not was not Twitter’s

prior culture.

Yeah. Were you surprised that that the intersection of circle

and the people that left was basically 25%? Were you

surprised it was that deep? Or did you think your intuition was

like, it’s probably somewhere in here?

Well, I think you could just stand back and say, without

knowing how many employees Twitter has at all, and say, how

many people are really needed to run Twitter? Like, let’s say

you don’t know what the playhead count number is at all. How many

people are needed to keep the site operational? Like, let’s

say, excluding product, product evolution, you basically have to

keep the service going. And you have to have customer sort of a

support function to take down material that is in violation of

the law. How many people? What’s the minimum number of people?

That’s in the hundreds, probably.

It’s not exactly it’s not it’s not like a giant number.

Yeah. Twitter still has like 2000 people, right?

Yeah, we still have 2000 people. It’s not nothing. And actually,

if there’s, there’s actually on the order of like, almost 5000

contractors. Like, almost, yeah, almost all of the what’s called

trust and safety work, which is like, the support functions for

the site are done by contractors.

You’re doing a lot more to take down hate speech than the

company previously was doing.

Yeah, absolutely. The hate speech impressions are down by a

third, and we’ll get even lower.

Maybe you could speak a little bit to the what we discovered, I

think, in those early weeks, which was the incentive. The

incentive previously was to create as many accounts as

possible. And there were a lot of quick fixes to lowering all

these, you know, what people might call bought accounts. In

some cases, it was people opening many millions of

accounts. But we discovered this very early. How easy was it for

you with the tech team to maybe lower the bot count and all the

fake accounts? Maybe you could speak a little bit to that

because people have seemed to think that, gosh, it’s a really

hard thing to get rid of bots. And it turns out it isn’t.

We still have a fair number of bots in the system. But the, I

think that the incentive structure, the way Twitter set

up previously was this relentless focus on what they

called MDAL, which is monetizable daily active users,

although I’d say the monetizable part is dubious. But at least

things that appeared to be monetized or could be passed off

as monetizable daily active users. So this, I created an

incentive, an incentive to turn a blind eye to a fake accounts.

So if the incentive structure is like, you know, maximize the

appearance of monetizable daily active users, then you’re just

it’s a strong incentive to pretend that a bot is real. And

that’s what happened. So we’re taking a lot of steps to reduce

the bots and troll situation. So many. And I think you’re

seeing that in the usage, like, it’s not it’s not like

relatively rare to have your replies filled with crypto

scams.

I’m not seeing any anymore. Freeberg, you had a question?

Yeah, I mean, just on your earlier question, you know,

Elon, when you first started making changes at Twitter after

you bought the business, a lot of people kind of took notice

at how extraordinarily swift and significant those changes were.

Yeah. And there’s a lot of technology companies that have

CEOs and investors and boards. And we all talked to a lot of

them. And they’re all now having a conversation like, look at

what Elon did a Twitter, how can we do something as aggressive as

swift as deep? Do you think much about kind of the model you’re

playing for other businesses and other business leaders,

particularly in Silicon Valley and how you’re operating

Twitter? Do you ever kind of talk about that? Because I know

you, you mostly talk about your business, and you talk about the

businesses you’re running. But you’re having a big influence, I

think, and how other people kind of act and behave that are other

business leaders and run other technology companies.

I mean, to be frank, I’m not I’m not really, you know, thinking

about that much, because I’m just thinking about like, how do

we just, you know, just get Twitter to be in a financially

healthy place, and, and, and fix the engine of engineering so we

can have a rapid evolution of new products. So and, you know,

I mean, I guess I’m in sort of, in some ways, unfortunate

position where I don’t have to answer. It’s not public. And we

don’t have a board, really. So I mean, so I can just go, you

know, and I can take actions that are drastic. And obviously,

if I make a bunch of mistakes, then the Twitter won’t succeed.

And that’ll be pretty embarrassing and sad. But as

long as like I said, as long as the batting averages is good,

that that the wins out, you know, significantly outweigh the

mistakes, then, you know, it’ll be a great future. And I think

I’m very optimistic about where things are headed.

I think a lot of people want to talk about your understand,

Elon, your position on freedom of speech and your principles.

I’m curious, you’ve been pretty upfront about it. How do you

think about it post acquisition? You know, what

speech should be allowed in the platform, Kanye came back, he

just went insane. His account got revoked. What have you

learned, I guess, now that you own it, because you must be

getting a lot of inbound from people asking you, hey, how are

decisions going to be made, etc. You’ve been clear,

transparency is super important in this. But what are your

thoughts on free speech and speech on a platform like this?

Well, I mean, the general principle, I think, is that we

should hew close to the law in any given country. So the law is

very, quite a lot by by country. And so I think we

should be doing free speech that’s close, close to the law.

And that’s, that’s, that’s the general principle. The, I think

there are other things where it’s like, okay, we like, for

example, like, if you’re an advertiser, you don’t want to

you don’t you don’t want your ad, like, let’s say it’s a

family movie, next to some, you know, NSFW content, even if that

content is text, you know, it’s like, they’ll be like, that’s

probably that’s we don’t, you know, so so that’s, that’s, you

know, part of what you know, like, like, so there’s, there’s

more of an allowance for what you might what some I call hate

speech on the system, but it’s just it’s not going to be

promoted. It’s not like it’s, we’re not going to be

recommending hate speech. It’s a risk of stating the obvious. And

we’re not going to monetize hate speech. So or negative speech,

like that’s not what advertisers want us to, you know, any any, I

think it’s going to be a rare product that wants to be next

seriously negative stuff.

I was gonna say you referred to it as hey, freedom of speech,

but not reach, because this is a very nuanced discussion. Like,

should this stuff be able to hit the trends, you know, and that

kind of stuff?

Like, it’s only possible that some things that will be

regarded as hate speech will hit will hit will hit trends. But I

think it’s gonna be relatively unusual, especially as we are

doing a better job of controlling the bots and trolls

situation. And I do want to emphasize, like, there’s

difference between bots and trolls, like bots, like fully

automated accounts, but like a troll phone would be where

you’ve got like, you know, 100 people in a warehouse somewhere

each with 100 phones. And so they’re actually humans, and

they’re going to pass a capture test or, you know, and they can,

you know, reply, reply, and they’re because they’re actually

good humans, but it’s actually 10,000 accounts that are just

that are obviously not operating as as as real people. So that

that’s, you know, stuff like that can cause things to trend

negatively. That’s why I’m like a big proponent of having just a

low cost verification capability. And, yeah, so, like,

this is definitely a work in progress. So there’s, like, so

there’s going to be, and I did, like, one of the first things I

said, after the acquisition closed was like, we’re going to

make a bunch of mistakes, but then we’ll try to recover from

them quickly. And that’s, that’s what we’ve done. And I

think we’ve generally succeeded in recovering up from them

quickly. And it’s been going pretty well.

Was the Paul Graham and journalists suspensions

mistakes? Have you talked about this publicly about how that all

kind of got resolved at the end?

Yeah, I mean, the Paul Graham suspension was definitely a

mistake. And I actually called Paul Graham to apologize

personally for that.

Yeah, great.

Yeah. So, you know, on the journalist front, the I think

the journalist essential suspensions were not not a

mistake, in that, for some reason, a bunch of journalists

thought they were better than regular than everyone else. And

that if they engage in doxing and, you know, other and break

the rules in various ways, that that they’re not subject to

suspension, even though your average your average citizen is

and I think that’s just messed up. The same rules should apply

to people who call themselves journalists as to, you know,

anyone else on the system. They shouldn’t be sort of above the

rules. For some reason, they thought they should be that’s

that’s that doesn’t make sense. I don’t think that’s right.

Yeah. And the rules being transparent and upfront. I

think that’s what everybody’s looking forward to maybe some

just complete clarity and transparency. And you’ve said

from the beginning, when somebody gets suspended, or the

shadow banning of this sort of would tips into this really

weird stuff that we discovered during or you discovered where

the journalists discovered during the Twitter files, it’s

it’s kind of a bummer that people are being sanctioned or

shadow banned. And they don’t know it. If we’re going to have

a system, the rules should be clear to everybody.

Yeah, absolutely. So the saying I’ve committed to and we’ll,

we’ll, I think, probably be able to roll that out in January.

Just by the way, there is like a bit of a, you know, we are not

going to be rolling out a ton of new features over, you know,

Christmas and New Year’s and stuff. So there’s like a, you

know, the next sort of feature set will probably roll out

mid to late January. And hopefully in that we can include

information about why an account is suspended, or has what is

called within Tesla to Twitter visibility filtering, aka shadow

banning. So and some of these things like, are like this,

there’s a lot of things that just happen accidentally, where

there’s, you know, the rules in the system that are meant to

detect whether someone’s a sort of bot or troll or like

brigading, whether like, you know, and then an account is

sort of innocently caught up in that. So, like, there was some

accounts just suspended yesterday, because, but

temporarily suspended, like they got like 12 hour suspensions,

because someone in customers is someone in trust and safety

thought that they had posted a nude photo of Hunter Biden or

something. But they hadn’t they hadn’t actually done that. I

don’t know, it was just basically a mistake. There were

some accounts that were there were got a 12 hour suspension

yesterday for it in error. And they weren’t sure why it why it

happened. It was just essentially a mistake in the

with Twitter customer support that was corrected.

Ilan, let me, let me ask you just a slightly broader

question. One of the things we just talked about was the regime

change that’s happened where, you know, we all have to act

differently now that the risk free rate is probably going to

get to 5%. And I’m just curious, across all your businesses. So

Twitter, yes, but really, more importantly, Tesla, SpaceX, are

their decisions that you will make differently or not at all

or will make that you wouldn’t have made otherwise, in this new

regime? And how often do you think about that kind of stuff?

Well, I think it’s more like, like, it does seem like we’re

headed into a recession here. In 2023, the magnitude that

recession is debatable, but I think it’s at least a light to

moderate recession, potentially, it’s on the order of 2009. So

that’s, so I think it’s, it’s, it’s wise to kind of like,

prepare for the worst, hope for the best prepare for the worst.

Don’t get too adventurous, like, like, watch out for margin

debt. Like, I would really advise people to not have margin

debt in a volatile stock market. And, you know, from a cash

standpoint, keep keep powder dry. You can get some pretty

extreme things happening in a down market. Like Brett Johnson,

who was a CFO, who is a CFO, CFO of SpaceX was at Broadcom in

2000. And he said that, and that’s a good company making

good products. And he said the, the from, from peak to trough, I

think in less than 12 months, Broadcom went down 97%. So like,

even if you had a small margin loan there, you got you got

crushed. And subsequently recovered, and I think, you

know, to much higher levels, but you know, if there’s like mass

panic in the stock market, then you got to be really be careful

about margin debt. So but I mean, this is just as we know,

there’s the economy is cyclic. So you and it’s somewhat overdue

for a recession. And my best guess is that, you know, we

have sort of stormy times for a year to a year and a half, and

then things start to dawn breaks roughly in q2 24. If I were to

get it, that’s like my best guess. recessions don’t like

booms don’t last forever, forever, but neither do

recessions. And it’s a 14 year boom. So a six quarter

recession seems like that may that might actually bounce out

the last time it was what four or five quarters. So it’s not

easy. Hey, the Twitter files. How much longer are these going

to go on? It seems like every week, another drop. And these

are pretty controversial. How much longer are the Twitter

files going to go on? In your mind? Yeah. And maybe why is

this important to you to make sure that people understand the

stuff? Yeah,

I think it’s important to like, if we’re going to be trusted in

the future to kind of clear the decks for stuff that’s happened

in the past. So I mean, to be totally frank, almost every

conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to

be true. So is there a conspiracy theory about Twitter

that didn’t turn out to be true? So far, they’ve all turned out

to be true. And if not, more true than people thought.

Is there a part of the files that really shocked you more

than the rest of them? Like of the things that have been

disclosed? Of all of these things? Is there something that

really sticks out with you as like, holy shit, I had no idea

this was happening? Or is the whole thing just a big dumpster

they were just looking at one huge thing. Um, you know, like

psyops versus the hunter Biden thing versus the Yeah, the

number of FBI people involved. That was pretty intense. Yeah,

the FBI psyops stuff, to me was probably the one that was the

most insidious, like, the rest of it, I could think of, like,

you know, a bunch of overzealous libs got used. Yeah, got it. You

know what I mean? Sure, sure. But to have like a secure skiff

that essentially sends things that, you know, government

agents want the populace to basically think seems like kind

of like a really bad dystopian novel. And then it turns out it

existed. And then it also the thing is, it couldn’t have just

existed at Twitter. So what do we do about all the other places

where this shit’s happened? YouTube, Facebook? Yeah, it did.

None of it seemed that surprising to me. I mean, I

don’t know, maybe I just believed all the conspiracy

theories. But I’ve also been inside some of these companies

and seen how they operate. So honestly, none of it was a

surprise to me. Was it a big shock to you, Elon?

Wait, you, Friberg, you were, I think you can claim that you

weren’t surprised that these companies were shadow banning,

although they denied it. But did you really suspect that the FBI

was playing a role in flagging content for these companies to

take down? Like that blew me away.

Content that’s got nothing to do with like, terrorism.

Yeah, they’re not investigating crimes. There’s no crime. Right?

Yeah, they literally flagged satire. Maybe they didn’t get

the joke. I don’t know.

They don’t seem to be a humor driven group. But they don’t

seem to have the best senses of humor. But aren’t they supposed

to get warrants? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work in a

democracy? They want information.

Yeah, they’re all that’s the thing that’s troubling to me.

Put yourself on either side of the extremes.

We have Michael Schellenberger here who broke the FBI story in

the Twitter file. So let’s look at him and to see. Because I

think maybe the audience isn’t caught up on like what was

discovered. So

you’re now I know I have to follow Elon Musk. That doesn’t

seem fair. Hey, guys.

Hey, guys.

Hey, Michael, how are you? I’m good. Just a quick question for

Michael.

Michael, first of all, first of all, who makes that sweater?

I’ll send you mine, man. Do you want it? Are you making fun of

it?

I’m asking.

You’re the master of sweaters. High praise from you, brother.

High praise.

I’m asking. I’m asking. I’m asking.

Just briefly, Michael, isn’t the FBI supposed to get warrants to

Yes, take actions with folks. And then I guess is that at the

crux of this? Are they doing this at other companies? You

think? Are they just like embedded in YouTube? Should we

expect they’re embedded at meta, and that they don’t get warrants

and they’re kind of tipping the scales? And is that a good thing

for society or a bad thing for society? It’s a bit of a basic

question.

Yeah. Well, I think there’s a there’s multiple issues relating

to FBI that I think have to be unpacked a bit. But the first

one is that yeah, FBI was constantly pushing the

boundaries of what is legally and ethically acceptable in

terms of requesting information. Now, I think what you saw over

the last three weeks was a shift. And I think our own

understanding that we did see more pushback from Twitter

executives against FBI, and some alarm bells being rung in

terms of the requests that were being made from the intelligence

community. But these guys were really persistent, they kept

asking for more, they kept getting more and more

cooperation. It’s very troubling. It does look like

Congress is going to look into this, the two heads of the

committees that are tasked with this or have said that they’re

going to look into it next year. I think the other thing that we

saw that I think is is more troubling was this persistent

effort to basically communicate to Twitter executives, but also

to news media, national security correspondents, that there was

this heavy foreign infiltration going on this, this Russian

disinformation. And it appeared to me looking at all the

evidence both that we saw from within Twitter and from outside

of it, that this was pretty organized effort to convince

key executives at Twitter and Facebook, but also these key

reporters, that they should expect a hack and leak

operation sometime right before the elections having to do with

Hunter Biden. I find that very suspicious.

Can I make an observation? I think that maybe what we’re

finding out is that the mainstream media tried to go

back to its 1980 Cold War playbook and turn Russia into a

boogeyman. But as we’re seeing in the Ukraine war, you know,

you know, they’re not nearly the formidable foe that we thought

they were. And so it could probably be the case that in

2016, they were as inept technically as as they are

militarily right now. And so we may have just built up this

monster that is kind of more like, you know, a much smaller

thing to be worried about. And we all ran with it because we

had no evidence. But the Ukraine, Russia war is evidence

that you know, this highly sophisticated war machine and

propaganda machine is not that good at their job.

Right? Yeah, I mean, I think that what’s there’s a lot of

interest that we’re being served by hyping the so called Russian

misinformation threat. I mean, one of them was just to simply

explain away the Trump phenomenon, as a consequence of

foreign interference. Certainly the people that ran Hillary

Clinton’s campaign had an interest in doing that. But then

you saw it become a sort of way, I think, to condition people for

the release of the Biden laptop. And again, we can’t I

can’t prove that. But it is striking that the Yole Roth,

this means Twitter executive, who I think was the object of

this misinformation campaign, testified under oath that he was

being bombarded with these messages all throughout 2020,

that they should expect some sort of a hack and leak

operation. So when the New York Post finally did report on that

computer, in 2014, it was briefly censored by Twitter. But

I think more importantly, it was discredited in the minds of many

voters, including myself, I really didn’t think that that

laptop was what they said it was. And it turned out that it

was. So I do think it’s there’s a real troubling pattern of

behavior by both the FBI agents, but also by the former FBI

executives, including the Deputy Chief of Staff and the Chief

Counsel from FBI that that were at Twitter as executives at the

time. And in fairness, Michael, this has been brought up many

times. But I just would like your take on it, because you’re

a lifelong Democrat, correct? Until until last year. Great. So

it would, you know, just lest anybody think that you are like

some MAGA supporter here. My sweater. This was all on the

backdrop of Trump, asking for the Russians, you know, during

that debate to hack Hillary for him interfering with Zelensky

and trying to get him to give dirt on Biden. And the fact that

Hunter Biden was obviously dirty. So to expect a hack,

there was massive precedent for it. So that set the stage for

this, correct?

For sure. And there’s definitely that going on. And maybe that’s

all there was to it. It is just striking, of course, because I

didn’t even mentioned in my this was, by the way, this is

Twitter thread, part seven that I did on this issue. I didn’t

even get into the fact that, you know, within a few days, the

many of former senior heads of intelligence organizations and

others came out and said that it was the result of a Russian

disinformation campaign. So yeah, sure. I mean, I guess we

could find some other explanation for it, whether it

was innocent or coordinated, but it is it is striking. Also, I

think the other thing that we found was the contrast between

the the threat inflation and what what Twitter was finding

themselves. I mean, there was, you know, you’ll repeatedly

you’ll Roth would respond to FBI that, yeah, we looked into

these accounts that you mentioned, and they were all

very low follower accounts with very little activity. So they

just weren’t finding very much foreign influence on the Twitter

platform. And so I just think it was grossly inflated, either

for kind of good reasons or bad reasons, I would say, yeah.

Yeah. And it’s, there’s no perfect way to police this

stuff, obviously. And okay, well, listen, we appreciate

your reporting. Thanks for doing it. And if you haven’t

read Michael’s book, San Francisco, you did some great

reporting there as well. And continued success in your

investigative journalism. Thank you, Michael. Thanks, guys.

Appreciate it. All right, cool. Sorry. Awesome. Sorry.

He’s still here.

Hey, you did an interview on that. I think I saw it on

YouTube or something where you interviewed someone who was

homeless in San Francisco, and they were addicted to drugs. And

they kind of said some narrative about how they were in this

condition, because San Francisco basically pays them to be

homeless and pays them to do drugs on the street. Did that

ever get published? And did that come out? Because it was such a

compelling couple of minutes that you got on tape there. It

really, for me sent home a message of how far kind of

progressive policies can take a society. And it’s such a beacon

for where things might go as other people start to think

about adopting similar policies around the world, which is why I

thought it was such important reporting, whatever happened

with that. And where can folks see that? Because it was such a

moving interview for me.

Yeah, if you just Google Michael Schellenberger, YouTube

homeless, you’ll be able to find all my videos. There’s a lot of

them that we did with people on the street. All of them, of

course, people asking and wanting to do them. But yeah, I

mean, what we I also wrote about that in my book, which is

basically a San Francisco pays cash welfare payment of somewhere

between six to $700. Plus, you can get $200 in food stamps. And

a lot of people sadly use that to maintain their addiction. And

this gentleman, James with the tattoos on his face was very

honest about how he was playing the system. In fact, he was

himself, we found this increasingly kind of horrified by

the incentives that San Francisco was creating for

people to live on the streets and, and live on the streets in

their in their addiction. So yeah, you can find that on

so many people say incentives drive behavior. And

unfortunately, these policies all came from a good place from

a kind heart. And the idea that we could help people in need.

And unfortunately, the way that the incentives get structured,

they can actually cause more harm than good. It’s such an

important lesson. I just wanted to say that because I think

you’re reporting on this really hit that home. So so thanks for

doing that. I think it’s really important because we have we

have to do the right thing for people. But we also have to be

careful that the policies are done in the right way. So I

think it’s so well said, Friedberg, because when you’re

Michael, and I just think you’re very courageous for doing it,

because it’s very easy for somebody to say, Oh, well, you

are being callous. The truth is incentives matter. And we saw

we’ve seen this over and over again, if you pay for something,

you get more of it. And really, San Francisco is bearing the

burden. I think this is what your book and, you know, in a

lot of the videos you’ve made, at least the message I got was,

San Francisco has the lowest price of drugs, the lowest

enforcement, and the most incentives, therefore, they

suffer, because every person who is, you know, addicted comes

here, because they speak to each other. And 90% of the people who

are in San Francisco are here, because we have created an

incentive structure. Is that directionally correct? As we

wrap here? Yeah, 100% correct, including just the non

enforcement of laws against sleeping on the sidewalk doing

drugs in public, not requiring ultimately, three times more

people die, living outside as an unsheltered homeless person

rather than live than being in a shelter. And for me, that’s

all you need to know to know that you usually cannot allow

our brothers and sisters to sleep on the street, no matter

how desperate they sound about wanting to avoid going inside,

it’s three times deadlier to be on the street than inside.

So the compassionate thing is to force people into housing. Yes.

People to say, but you know, because you’re, we have this

perception that people have freedom, and they should have

the right to do this. But a person who’s taking fentanyl, in

your research, is not thinking correctly. And if it was any

family member of ours, we would not want them to make that

decision for themselves. We’d want somebody else to make that

decision for them. Correct.

Abs, I would want that from if I was on the street, so desperate

that I was, you know, smoking fentanyl and breaking multiple

laws every day. Of course, I would want to be hospitalized.

You know, and usually, you know, people overcome their addiction.

That’s the good news. We always leave out of it. But it is

possible people do overcome their addiction all the time.

But they often need some some intervention from family and

friends. And if that’s too late for that, then you need the

intervention from the from the city.

All right, Michael, thank you, Michael. Appreciate it. So as we

get back to the all in news network, we’ve now gone 24 hours

a day, the all in news network has launched. We’ll just have a

road we should sit at various offices throughout Silicon

Valley, letting executives and CEOs

imagine we did like a 12 hour marathon show for charity, where

just people showed up. And we did a what do they call those on

TV? What is the charity?

Telephone by Jekyll Jekyll a plane?

Yeah, no, no, just a ticket. Telephone. Jekyll has to still

fly commercial. We’ll do a telethon. Hey, Saks, thank you

for setting up those amazing drop ins. Well done. Thanks,

Saks. Thanks, Saks.

I think that was good. Your jacket. That’s a great jacket.

Is that custom? That is an Eastside. I’ll Stuart Eastside.

This is the Christmas or holiday jacket.

Who is it by Eastside?

It’s Valentino.

All right. Well, that’s that’s that’s nice. Also. Okay.

But okay, let’s keep going here. We got to go to lightning round.

All right, let’s move biggest flash in the pan. We were was

our last. I went with crypto. Pretty easy to say that. I’m not

going to give myself a big high five. But what do you guys think

of the Elon conversation real quick? Well, he’s very talkative

and he’s anything interesting or surprising for you. I mean, he

said the biggest, you know, thing that people want to make

sure to avoid is margin debt. That was I mean, he’s working

hard. And he’s just such a product of focused guy. He just

gets his he’s like, so deeply into it. It’s like, yeah, just

ultimately, product wins, right? Friedberg. I mean, if anything’s

on my god, of course, that’s it. That’s it. Yeah. So I mean, and

then, you know, products are made by teams. So what I think

is distinctly different here, I’m just giving my personal

opinion. I don’t know what Microsoft Teams. No, no, no.

Teams make products. And so what I just want to say here is, you

know, like, Microsoft Teams suck. No, that I’m not. No,

don’t trigger the bundle. But I just want to say, you know,

like, this is a takeover. As opposed to building a company

from scratch, he’s had to assemble a team, and then work

at this incredible product pace. And I think those two things are

starting to click week. Yeah, it’s gonna look very different

than week the first six weeks. So yeah, the products are already

looking awesome. And it was nice to him to give me that shout

out on the you know, the affiliate badges, but I’ll just

give a shout out. I didn’t hear it. What was it? Oh, well, he

gave me he gave me some credit for the affiliate badges. But I

wanted to give credit to the PMs who approached me about that

troll. I went again. Okay, is there? Let me give me give

credit to the actual PMs, Evan Jones and Patrick Trauger, who

they approached me about this idea they had. And then I

helped, you know, give it some momentum.

Here’s the truth. When Dave and I spent the first couple weeks

there. Now that it’s a little more public, he wants to be on

the program. What we found over and over again, was that there

were great features that were ready to be released, that were

being held back by management. And there were brilliant people

with all the ideas that you think should have been released.

And they just weren’t allowed to release a lot of these products.

Why? Who knows. But now that he’s in charge, I think you’ll

see the product cycle is going to go much quicker.

The most important thing I saw, which is such an important

lesson for anyone running a business in Silicon Valley is

that the pace of decision making matters far more than the

accuracy of decision making. It’s always been like one of my

three big mottos.

Say more about that for entrepreneurs.

Yeah, for me, like my number one, like my three things are

always like grit, bias to action, and then narrative, but

like bias to action, the rate at which you can make decisions is

a far greater predictor of success than the accuracy of the

decisions you do make. And so you have to be willing to

embrace failure, you have to be willing to make decisions that

could result in something not being done correctly, or making

a mistake, and even getting embarrassed on the internet, you

know, by making mistakes and having to call people like Paul

Graham and apologize for them. And that was a big moment. But

as a business scales, as professional managers are

brought in, their incentive is to not make mistakes, their

incentive is to do things that are predictably going to work,

and are predictably not going to fail. And therefore, they avoid

taking the risks, and they reduce the rate of action, the

rate of decision making. And that’s why so many businesses

ultimately don’t scale past some sort of inflection point, or

when founders that are willing to push that envelope step out,

everything starts to fall apart. And it’s so critically

important, I think, to look at that as being, I think, Elon’s

defining trait and characteristics that this,

regardless of the scale of the organization and the enterprise,

he’s still willing to act with that level of bias to action

that you typically see in a small startup. Okay. And put his

reputation on the at risk. Yeah.

Just so that I sat in a meeting yesterday, he said that, if

we’re not rolling back 10% of the time, we haven’t pushed hard

enough. Right? Wonderful. There you go. I mean, it’s like, if

you’re never rolling anything back, because you never make a

mistake, maybe you’re just not right, moving fast enough. You

don’t have an ambitious enough, you’re not fast enough of a

bias towards action, you’re too afraid of making a mistake.

By the way, here’s what’s so interesting about the views

feature is that a bunch of websites, I think it started

because Instagram did a bunch of apps, deprecated, you know,

likes, because they felt that it was too. It was part of this

negative cycle. And so they took all this stuff away. And

basically, views is going sort of back in that direction and

giving more granularity in terms of outside in social engagement

on a post, which is, I think, interesting to see it’s

happening in a moment where all these other sites, and apps are

actually going in the opposite direction.

Well, it’s like a standard feature on YouTube. And it’s

very powerful for YouTube’s network effects, because it

shows you how many views you get. So it discourages people

from using other sites, because you know, you get the most

distribution on YouTube. So it’s weird that other social

networks don’t want to follow suit. I mean, in one hour,

they had it, but they deprecated. That’s what’s so

interesting.

But I guess, you know, my point is, we’ve only had this feature

for an hour. And I didn’t realize how much distribution my

tweets were getting. And it definitely undermines my

incentive to want to go use some other platform when I see the

distribution I’m getting on Twitter.

Well, if you’re getting 10 times more distribution in the New

York Times, you know, what’s going to happen is people stopped

listening and reading.

Well, I mean, it’s sort of like this podcast itself. Like, I

mean, we people ask us to go

and my point is, we have to rely on social proof, and anecdotes

about the actual scale and the breadth and the reach because

it’s impossible for us to get one holistic view that shows

across all of these different modalities, whether it’s

Spotify, or Apple podcasts, or YouTube, how many people listen

or watch and you know, we add it all up. And you know, we think

it’s in this, you know, sort of three to 5 million range of

people. But if you just had a numerical canonical number that

was irrefutable, you just run over everybody.

This turns it into a meritocracy is gonna be terrifying to some

blue check marks when they see that the people who they report

on get 10 times as many views as they do, of course, is why when

when journalists look at Sean Hannity, go to Sean Hannity’s

profile, and for the number of followers he has, how

pathetically engaged his audiences, it’s all bots, it’s

all trolls, it’s all nobody’s

looked at Mitt Romney just put out a video, whatever. In the

first like half hour, he had 100,000 views, like, every

politician who starts seeing this is going to go wait a

second, I mean, the world is getting more views here than I

am on MSNBC, or Fox, the world is I need to do this rational

place if Mitt Romney actually has more influence than Sean

Hannity.

Let’s hope Okay, let’s move on. We got to get through this

quickly. It’s our longest episode ever. Here we go. We are

going to do next up. It’s very, this is a very important

category. Best CEO of 2022. In 2021. I went with Frank

Slootman and Elon Musk. Chamath went with Satya Nadella. Saks

went with Brian Armstrong and Freeberg went with Jack Dorsey.

Now we go on to 2022. Saks who everybody wants to know Saks is

best CEO of 2022. Go ahead, Saks.

Every founder took my advice to get leaner, slow down their

burn, create runway, you know, weather the storm down, you

know, generic answer, not a person. Yeah, exactly. I mean,

look, I think, actually, a lot of the names names. Well, here’s

the problem is that, you know, yeah, can I finish Jacob? The

names that you mentioned from last year will be the top

candidates for this year. I mean, I think Satya Nadella had

a good year. Obviously, what Elon’s doing, we just talked

about it’s amazing. Brian Armstrong, I think the stock

hasn’t done great, but he’s been a strong CEO, but I don’t want

to repeat the same names. I think that, you know, every CEO

who responded to the regime change by cutting costs,

getting leaner, extending runway, I think deserves to be

on this list. And unfortunately, a lot of them are just

resisting, and they’re just not yet taking the medicine, or

they’ve been taking the medicine in little drips and drabs

instead of just like swallowing it whole and getting a move on.

Yeah, just drink the whole two tablespoons of medicine. Don’t

sip it, you got to just take it.

It’s not getting better. I mean, the stock market today should be

a wake up call. I mean, this is one of the worst days in the

market the whole year. So things are getting worse before they’re

getting better.

Chamath, who is your best CEO of the year?

Well, the numerical answer is Vicky Holub, who’s the CEO of

Occidental Petroleum stocks up like 140%. This year, it’s

technically the best performing stock of the year. $63 billion

company. But that’s just a numerical answer who I, I

actually want to double down on David’s answer, Saksa’s answer,

because I agree with that. I have been guiding our portfolio

company CEOs to be at cash flow break even now or extend runway

to q1 2025. And they’re 25. Yes, because I mean, I think, well,

Elon and I are kind of roughly in the same place we have been

for a while, which is like, you know, mid 24 is when the

recession ends, and you need to give yourself two to three

quarters of buffer so that you can go and raise around which

takes a quarter to two quarters. And once you start to get kind

of get escape velocity out of a recession, having money through

end of q1 2025, I think is a is a minimum requirement. And, you

know, of the companies that I think were the most precariously

positioned, there was five of them that got their acts

together and really did it. But these are all CEOs of companies

that, you know, I mean, if you said them, you would know some

of them. But I do agree with David, I think the CEO that bit

the bullet, so maybe publicly, what I would say is, you know,

the CEO of Karna deserves a huge, you know, medal for having

the courage to do it before anybody else did the CEO of

checkout.com just took a huge write down. These CEOs are

making sure their companies survive. Friedberg best CEO

2022. My vote for best CEO is Warren Buffett. And I think it

is just simple arithmetic. He has for years and now for

decades proven himself to be just not just an exceptional

investor, stock picker, whatever the kind of typical quip is

about what he does for a living. But I think what’s so

extraordinary about Buffett is that regardless of the market

conditions, he can kind of remain steadfast in his intent

and in his mission. And he doesn’t kind of waiver. And, you

know, he doesn’t take an active role in ranting and complaining

about markets and politics. And I think that that’s what makes

him such an extraordinary leader, he stays within his zone

of competence, he doesn’t do things that he doesn’t know

about. He doesn’t let the macro drive him and cause him to be

kind of, you know, affected by it. And he says, this is what I

know how to do, this is what I can do. And that is all that he

does do. And he does it so exceptionally well. And to

Chamath’s point, he is the largest shareholder of

Occidental Petroleum, along with many other incredible

businesses. And I think he’s proven in a market like we just

had this year, why he is kind of the most extraordinary CEO, or

one of the most extraordinary CEOs, but one of the best kind

of capital allocators of all time,

I’m going to go in a similar fashion, as Chamath and sacks

and go with the money losing CEOs who have dedicated

themselves to free cash flow, and to getting to profitability

from the last cycle, Airbnb, and Uber were the money losers. And

now Airbnb is my number one, they become a money printer,

they are now making bank, and they’re still growing very

quickly. And then Uber, I put in my second, they need to do

another riff, they need to cut some expenses, but they too are

hitting the free cash flow and the network effects. So I’m

giving it to Chesky, and then Dara, one and two. Okay, let’s

keep moving best investor. For me, I’m going with the

investors, like a general category, who are demanding

governance and doing diligence again, or who never stopped, let

me say it that way. There’s a generation of investors who

raised their funds in the last five years and didn’t do

diligence didn’t demand board seats, didn’t demand boards.

Those idiots are now paying the price, and they created a lot of

this mess of entitlement and a lack of governance. I want to

give a shout out to the Bill Gurley’s of the world, who

fought for governance and fought for diligence in the face of

being told, okay, boomer, you don’t get it. Who do you have

best investors? Chamath Palihapitiya.

I will pick the what are called the pod shops. So these are

folks that have strategies where they have hundreds of investing

pods underneath an umbrella. And they have this very

sophisticated risk infrastructure. So this is what

Ken Griffin owns in Citadel. This is what Izzy Englander owns

in Millennium. Brevin Howard is another one. D.E. Shaw is

another one. So they have all kinds of strategies, but that

are essentially run by computers that allocate risk, you know,

scale you up, scale you back, turn you on, turn you off, fire

you overnight. And those strategies as a whole ran over

the market this year. They were the best performers. They are

giving back billions of dollars, they’ve generated double digit

positive returns. They’re raising their fees, in some

cases, some of these folks are moving their annual fee up to

4% a year, their carry up to 40% a year. Incredibly,

incredibly well run performant businesses. They were by and

away the best investors this year.

Okay, we’re gonna go lightning round from here. Saks, do you

have a best investor?

Yeah, I said, Stan Druckenmiller. He, as you

recall, last year, he predicted that inflation would be lasting.

This was the spring of 2021. When transitory was the word of

the day. This year, he predicted the bear market rally we had in

July and August. And I remember back at the CO2 summit in May,

they’re around that time, he was interviewed. And he basically

was saying that as soon as there was a bear market rally over the

summer, that he would then put a short position on I don’t know

if he actually did that. But he said he was going to do that.

And then it turns out that the summer rally that we had was a

dead cat bounce. So he was right about that. And now he is

predicting a hard landing in 2023, with a deeper recession

than many expect. So sadly, I suspect he may be right yet

again.

Friedberg best investor for you.

2022. I had Druckenmiller, I indicated that he’s been doing

interviews pretty much every quarter for the last two years.

And he’s been pounding the table telling everyone what’s going to

happen. And it all happened. And even told people the trades in

mid 2021. He said he was short long dated treasuries, and he

was long commodities. And if you had put those two trades on at

that time and held them to today, you would have made a

fortune. And so I think he’s extraordinary in his ability to

kind of see macro in a way that others don’t, but also to take

extremely brave action with his portfolio. He’s he’s renowned for

how big the bets are that he makes, and how quickly he can

change his mind when he’s wrong, and make another big bet to and

still get himself out of the hole. He’s incredible. So I

definitely give it to Stanley Druckenmiller this year.

2021. We did our best turnarounds. I picked Disney

Chamath Ford, Friedberg, we were

should we skip this category? What do you guys do? What about

the worst investor of 2022? Can we do that?

Good, Chamath. You want to freestyle? Tell us your worst

investor of 2022.

I mean, I’ll put myself in the category along with anybody else

who was long tech based if Nick if you can just bring please back

up this capital asset pricing model. Any of us that didn’t

understand this got run over this year. And just to put some

very specific numbers here. There was a decent little tweet

thread that Elon was a part of where he they actually

calculated what the expected rate of return of Tesla was and

it turned out to be almost 14% a year. And so you know, when

you start to compound 14% over three, four or five years, these

numbers get very big very quickly. And the reason why is

that it has a huge beta. And we’re in a world now where the

risk free rate is quite high. So all of us benefited from this

equation, essentially being upside down for the last 15

years. And all of us who were over allocated into things that

benefited from those dynamics, frankly got run over this year.

So we were as a class, the worst investors of 2022.

Okay, here we go. Let’s do our best turnaround. I am going to

go with me for me, it’s meta. They were losing money, hand

over fist, they refuse to do a rift. And then finally, bestie

Brad Gerstner said, Let’s get fit. He did a memo. And finally,

finally, Zuckerberg made some cuts, reportedly rumors he’s

making a 15 10 or 15% cut I heard in the back channels right

now based on performance. So he’s not calling it a riff or a

layoff. They’re just gonna cut the bottom 10 or 15% again. So I

think Zuck’s gonna turn it around. Anybody have a best

turnaround?

So you’re saying Zuck mission accomplished?

You don’t turn around this year. I’m going with meta.

So your answer is meta was turned around by Zuck this year?

Yes, they’ve got down to $85. And now they’re up at what, what

110 115? Yes, he turned it around at the end of the year.

It was like a Hail Mary at the end of the year. He’s turned it

around. I think he’s going to continue to Yes, that is my

position.

Listen, I bought the stock at 94.

Go with that, Jacob.

Okay, so if we’re talking about very partial turnarounds here, I

would say, I would say that

you can measure the turnaround as of October 24 to now.

Yes, exactly. So San Francisco still overall a mess. But there

were a few positive events that happened over the past year. And

since we’re looking back, we should call these out. So first

of all, back, this is towards the beginning of the year, we

recalled three members of the school board, most particularly

Allison Collins, remember her, this was done by something like

a 7030 margin and 8020 on on Collins. This was the school

board that had dragged its feet on school reopenings, they

destroyed the merit based Lowell High School, they wasted hours

of meetings on a silly plan to remove the names of names like

Abraham Lincoln from the from the schools. In any event, they

were removed. Then Jake, how you refer to this, we got chase a

Boudin recalled by a 6040 margin as San Francisco da. This was

the da who whose agenda was decarceration. He tried to

release as many repeat offenders as possible. The voters in

San Francisco had enough. And then most recently, the far less

supervisor Gordon Marr just got rejected by his own community

this November. And the new tough da Brooke Jenkins got reelected

in her own right after being appointed by London breed. So

there’s still a long way to go in San Francisco. But there are

definitely some green shoes start that the electorate here

has had enough and is looking for the let’s say called the

centrist Democrats as opposed to the radicals.

Okay, we’re in the lightning round here. We’re in our three

of the all in podcast, marathon, this telethon.

Shemoth, you got a best turnaround for 2022. Hard, hard,

hard one to give. So any green shoots for 2022? As Saks would

say,

no, I mean, everything, everything is just called a

disaster.

Great. Freeberg, anything that you

there may be no turnaround award until 2025.

Fine. Okay. Yeah. We’re gonna split on this freeberg. You got

your, your incisive fucking viewpoint. And I’ll pick Zack

and meta that made so much sense.

At 94. It’s at 117. It’s one of my best j trades.

Didn’t you also say Disney was your pick of the year or

something? I’m buying more. I’m buying more Disney. I’m buying

more. This is

I’m telling you Disney Warner, which you talked about before.

Yeah. And Facebook are three of my bit and, you know, are three

of my big ones. Let’s say worst human being here.

Well, I think, look, given that this is supposed to be the year

2022. I mean, you got to say that. Yes. Sbf was the winner of

this hands down.

Okay. Congratulations to Sbf. You are consensus worst human

being for this year. I mean, not ever, but only for this year.

Right? Yeah, we all hate you equally. Okay, who’s who’s

number two? Why do you hate him? Why do I hate him? Because all

those people lost their money. And you know, there’s some it’s

causing chaos. I feel terrible for all these people who lost

money. That’s why I hate him.

Oh, it’s disgusting. Did you see anybody have a second?

The two guys copped to please Caroline Ellison and Gary like

pancakes flip and but it turns out that they actually did

engineer a backdoor into FTX and has been doing this for years.

Oh my god. Oh my god. That’s game over. You’re getting 10

years. He’s getting life game over.

Well, they’re talking about an interesting defense strategy

that we were discussing in the chat. Oh, yeah. I think this is

actually a fascinating defense strategy. I think this is their

only shot. One of our besties had this theory that he was

prescribed to prescription drugs. One was Adderall. What

was the other one called? This was

he said, the patch.

It’s it’s a drug I wasn’t familiar with. I guess it’s a

patch. But when you combine these two things, apparently it

basically shuts down or kills the part of your brain that

deals with

inhibition inhibition. It’s cocaine. Yeah. What if his

defense strategy was? Yeah, like only an insane person would do

this. And I was acting insane because I was prescribed these

drugs that had these drug conflicts. And it like killed

part of my brain. I mean, and you think about every criminal

on Wall Street said cocaine is my defense. But this you could

say he was maybe he was legally prescribed if you could show the

prescription. By the way, I’m not saying yes, should get him

off. I’m just, we’re basically workshopping. What is the only

shot of his defense would be right?

Well, and think about it, sex. He acted manic after FTX

collapsed. So that mania of doing 20 Twitter spaces would be

there’s something so insane about what he did, right? That

you that all it’s almost like a like a prescribed insanity

defense. Like I was prescribed a drug combination that made me

insane. Anybody have a most loathsome company has we wrapped

the only way that you could come up with that it’s like you’d

have to have two parents that were like law professors or

something. Right? Most most loathsome company. His defense,

you know, my parents boohoo. No, no, no, no, he’ll claim

insanity. J. Cal, he’ll say, of course, yeah. And they’ll have a

fun. I mean, do we think that his parents aren’t going to help

his defense?

You know, at this point, this, this kid’s got to go away for

life. That’s it. Well, I think it’s got to be life. I think

it’s got to be 30 plus years. I mean, it’s just going to be

billions of dollars. What kind of justice system do we have?

When people go away for 2030? How many years per billion?

Would you sentence?

A decade per billion, at least? Yeah, I mean, just you got 100

years. Sax, you got to don’t you think the justice system needs

to look at other people who are in jail for selling cocaine for

selling marijuana for for robbing a convenience store?

They’ll put somebody away for robbing a convenience store for

a decade or two. Where do they get to put him in jail for just

because somebody came in with a gun and robbed a convenience

store, they get 20 years, this kid’s gonna get off.

Screw that. Look, I think what do you guys think the over under

is here? You think it’s like set it at I’ll set it at 35 years.

I think I’ll take the over. I’ll take 30. I think this is made

off. I said a good line, then

which I think this is I think this is made off. No, I agree

over on 30. Yeah, I think I think I said 35. I think it’s

gonna be 100 multiple hundreds of years. I agree. And you’ll be

gone for life. Yeah, I think it’s gonna be life. But I said a

good line. Okay, most slow some company is FDX. Anybody want to

go for a second?

No, I’ll add one. I’m gonna this year, I’m gonna give my last

year, I gave it to Tyson foods, one of the largest slaughter of

animals on earth. This year, I’m going to give it to a company

called innovative i n o t IV. This is the company that was

busted by the feds for their animal abuse in their dog

breeding facility, where 4000 beagles were rescued, one of

which I adopted. And this is a publicly traded company stocks

down 90 some odd percent, which I’m thrilled to see terrible

business, awful, awful, kind of, you know, inhumane behavior. And

so I want to kind of give them a special shout out this year.

Hmm, look at you. And you’re getting the virtue signaling

points of rescuing the dog to increase your Q factor amongst

besties. Well done.

Max Q factor. Max Q factor. Max Q factor. Yeah. Anybody else have

a lonesome? Yes. I’d like to pick this company zebra. Which

destroyed the environment for a bunch of endangered species that

I would otherwise have used for various for pelts for my

sweaters and such.

Yes. And I would like to go with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

which was torturing puppies, 18 of which I rescued and I am now

have them in the J Cal puppy rescue. I am the most sensitive

and caring person. Also, I would like to add SeaWorld. I am in

the process of raising money to build bigger pools to eventually

release all the orcas in captivity. That is my new focus

for next year. Okay. Moving on. Oh, God, do we want to do best

meme? Do we want to do best new tech?

I’ll do best new tech. I don’t have a best name.

I’m going with fusion for best new tech. I’m going with

I’m going to go with chat GPT. I think what was so impressive

about chat GPT and and the experience that everyone’s had

using it is that it really for the first time I think

elucidated where these kind of machine learning tools can take

us and what the kind of new product experience can be what

generative AI can yield things beyond I think the scope of what

a lot of people were imagining before. So it was really so

revealing. And as you guys know, there’s an absolute

friggin tidal wave of people trying to start companies that

are leveraging tools and generative AI to kind of

reinvent everything from what workplace tools, enterprise

software, all the way through to media games and entertainment.

So that’s why I think chat GPT was the most impressive new

technology new tech tomorrow 2020. And then sacks lightning

round, please best new tech

alpha fold three, which basically has almost near

perfect accuracy and protein folding sacks best new tech.

I can’t improve on the chat GPT. So yeah, let’s keep rolling.

Best trend best trend in business and in the world. Mine

is startups getting back and investors getting back to

reality and the what I call the age of austerity, the age of

focus after the age of excess. That’s the best trend in our

world, the age of austerity, which are best trend for 2022

marginal cost of energy generation and storage is now in

the low single digit pennies per kilowatt hour, which basically

means that not only will energy be free and abundant, but it

will, I think over the next decade or two, create a massive

peace dividend, it will rewrite our foreign policy, it will

rewrite national security. That is the reason why people should

care about energy transition, not necessarily climate change,

although that’s important. It’s a distant second to keeping men

and women out of war, and keeping our borders safe.

Well said anybody else have a best trend?

I’ll pick it up. Last year, I said the creator economy, which

I think referred to all these kind of creators creating new

products and businesses beyond their content. This year, I

think that the trend that was again enabled and demonstrated

through chat GPT is the narrator economy. I think this is going

to be a really important trend going forward. We’ll talk about

it in the prediction episode. But I think the idea that people

are and they’re starting to experience this and using chat

GPT and Dolly and other kind of generative AI tools is how much

you can kind of narrate the product you want to see created

and have it created for you on the fly. And I think that that’s

a really kind of powerful mind shift for people and frame shift

for people. And I think it really starts to change a lot of

the way that people behave, entertain themselves, businesses

operate, and so on. So I’d call it the narrator economy. And I

think it’s really kind of starting to emerge.

Okay, do you have a trend? Sax?

Yeah, I would say best friend is the growing realization that the

corporate media is failing does not tell the truth. It has an

agenda, more and more people are opting out of it and going with

independent media, I think, you know, what Elon mentioned, where

we’re going to start holding these corporate journalists, the

same standard on Twitter, as regular citizens, they’re

outraged by that. But that’s a huge step in the right

direction. The fact of the matter is, is that the press or

the media is the prism through which reality is refracted. And

if it’s not giving us an accurate representation of the

world, we can’t begin to solve our problems, because we don’t

have accurate information. And I think more and more people are

waking up from the matrix and realizing that we’re living in

this media controlled simulation. And again, I don’t

think we’re going to make progress until the this power

that the media seems to have over our reality gets gets

broken.

Let’s go for worst trend. My worst trend is the Fed trying to

play catch up the Fed trying to play catch up. Sorry, buddy. The

Fed trying to play catch up is the worst trend for me

oversteering into the crash. What do you got Chamath for the

worst trend of 20?

Worst trend was the continued profligate spending by the

federal government. We have record deficits, record debt. And

this year, we’re ending the year by adding another $1.65 trillion

of spending that nobody can seemingly account for. It is

truly the Christmas tree of Christmas trees in terms of

bills. So we just have not gotten religion yet around being

measured and how we spend money. Good one.

Worst trend sex.

Last year, my worst trend was authoritarianism growing all

over the world. And I think that’s pretty decent prediction.

This year’s worst trend is the government colluding with big

tech to engage in censorship. This is how they’re going to do

the authoritarianism. We talked about it with Schellenberger and

Elon, this whole series revelations, notice the Twitter

files, we can see this collusion, this cozy relationship

between the censors at Twitter and big tech and the bureaucrats

at the FBI and DHS and Pentagon. This is a really disturbing

dystopian relationship, as we talked about earlier. And you

know, I feel like we spend all this time talking about the

authoritarianism in Russia, and China, we seem to be obsessed

with combating that and going to war with that. But we don’t

spend enough time talking about this growing authoritarianism at

home. The media doesn’t seem to want to report on the Twitter

files at all. Let’s focus on stopping authoritarianism here.

Well said Friedberg, what’s your worst trend trend for 2022 is

what I would call interest rate mania. And I think that this is

the mania that we’ve been caught up in on this show that other

people on our thread, people in the business community and the

investing community, where everyone’s obsession with did

the Fed act soon enough or late enough, and that interest rates

ultimately drive success or failure with building businesses

and making good investments. All right. The truth is, when

interest rates go the wrong way, good investments, you know,

can kind of strengthen their way can can can make their way

through those environments, bad investments cannot, good

businesses can make their way through and bad investments

cannot. And so I think our mania around the fact that interest

rates and the Fed ultimately drove bad outcomes in businesses

and investments is a flawed kind of assertion. And we all want to

kind of get back to the drunken days, where, you know, a low

interest rate environment enables us all to be successful

and wealthy. And I think that that’s kind of changed. So I

think it’s time for us to get away from the interest rate

mania and focus more on solid investing and solid business

building. Okay, here we go lightning round. We got two to

go favorite media of 2022. For me, it was Top Gun, House of

the Dragon, White Lotus two, but I’m going to pick my favorite

here, something you may not have heard of the film tar, I highly

recommend it. But I did like those other three tremendously.

What do you got sacks for your favorite media of 2022

House of the Dragon, I guess I enjoyed quite a bit. Like you

did. I’ll give a shout out to my movie Dolly land, which will

be coming out next summer. If we’re going to include podcast

episodes, I would give a shout out to the unheard episode where

Freddie Sayers interviews john Mearsheimer, the professor of

international relations. He explains the origins of the

Ukraine war and has some really pessimistic predictions about

what might happen next. I suggest everyone watch it if

they want to understand this conflict and where it may be

going next year.

Chamath, you have any favorite media for 2022? You want to

share? I thought Yellowstone kicked ass. Absolutely

incredible. There’s, I think it’s on Hulu. But there’s a show

with Steve Carell, a little short series called the patient,

which is about a serial killer that kidnaps his psychologist,

and locks him in his basement to try to help him prevent him

killing more people. I thought it was really, really well done.

Never have I ever, the latest season, another just brilliant

offering from Mindy Kaling. She’s unbelievable. Those are

those are probably the top ones. What do you got? Freeberg? Any

media? Yeah, I read a book this year that I really liked. It’s

called the vital question by a guy named Nick Lane. Someone

recommended it to me. It’s he’s a biochemist and he kind of

talks a little bit about the origin of life on earth. It

really ties into this idea that there are certain call it

certain, call it principles of physics and statistics that make

life predictive and predictable. But I think the way that he kind

of walks through how a lot of things emerge in life. And how

life ultimately kind of developed on this planet are

really well shown. So yeah, I give I give his book a shout

out. It was it was a really good read. So that book, the vital

question is incredible. The other one that he wrote, which

is called life ascending. Those two books you must read if you

don’t want to be a Luddite, in my opinion. All right. I will

also also for those people who don’t understand the difference

between power and energy, you will learn what that is very

good. I have two book recommendations putting the

rabbit in the hat is Brian Cox, you may know him from secession.

He has a great book and he reads the audio book very

enjoyable. I’m halfway through Quentin Tarantino’s cinema

speculation and enjoying it very much. So you will enjoy it

tremendously. Okay. And now we do the Rudy Giuliani Award for

self immolation. This is for the person who poured lighter

fluid and gasoline over themselves and lit themselves on

fire for no apparent reason. I go with Kevin O’Leary, who

secured a $15 million bag from FT x and then decided to try to

defend it. 18 ways to Sunday burning whatever reputation he

had. Who do you have in your Rudy Giuliani Award? This will

be controversial for you guys. I’m going to go with Elon Musk.

I don’t think that he’ll put himself in the position that he

did with bad intentions or without paying attention. I

think he’s taken on a role in buying and running Twitter. That

is, you know, principled. And, you know, in his mind, and many

other people’s minds, a really important role that someone

needs to play. Unfortunately, I think his reputation has gotten

really hurt. Because of, you know, that role, he’s not making

a lot of friends. And he’s not he’s causing a lot of

reputational damage. He obviously had a lot of good and

important things he was working on prior to taking on the

additional burden of Twitter. And while many people appreciate

his doing it, I think that it’s causing him a lot of

reputational damage. And so yeah, I don’t mean to kind of be

offensive in saying that, but I think he’s he’s gotten the

biggest certainly been a hard thing to do. It’s certainly been

a hard thing to do. But you’re saying self immolation free

broke because he took it on himself. He could have just took

it on himself. Yeah, I’m not saying it’s just like,

interpretation. Yeah, it’s not it’s not like the Rudy Giuliani

idiocy. I think he’s taken on the burden of doing this. And I

think it’s causing him a lot of reputation.

Okay, it’s an interpretation of the award. What do you got?

Well, I mean, if if I were to interpret the award, I think the

way it was originally intended, I think I got to give it to

Herschel Walker this year, unfortunately, and I wish

Republicans would stop winning this award. At least, Herschel

never gave any speeches next to a dildo shop. But nonetheless,

I am so sorry that I’m so delighted sacks that you’ve been

so self aware about the follies of the dying maga. The last

throws of the maga nation. I want to find some Democrats to

give this to I want to give it to that brain dead senator from

Pennsylvania. What’s his name? Fetterman Fetterman. Thank you.

I wanted to give it to Fetterman, but he won. So I

don’t know what I’m supposed to do. You know, it’s like no,

listen, when when a Republican self immolates like Rudy or

Herschel or something like that, they get laughed out of town.

And when the democrat does it like a Fetterman, they just get

elected. So I don’t know what to say. All right, you got any

final words here? Good. I mean, and this episode is gonna be the

longest episode ever. Who think it’s poor, poor producer, Nick,

whoever signed the papers for the whole search and seizure at

Mar-a-Lago looks kind of like an idiot. So that that was not

politically astute. Okay, I think you would say the FBI

then. Okay. poorly handled. That’s actually a great. That’s

a great one. Actually, if we’re going to get serious for a

second, the combination of revelations, if we’re going to

look over this whole year. Remember, Jason, when I I

basically spoke up at the time they raided Mar-a-Lago and said

that it was heavy handed and unnecessary. And now you guys

for years, Donald Trump is an idiot savant minus the savant.

Why all of you guys just project all of this like insane,

genius, evil level stuff. He’s not capable of that. This is a

simpleton who likes attention. He stole a bunch of souvenirs

that he didn’t read when I was in my position hasn’t read now

kept in a box downstairs just to say he had them. That’s

exactly right. I was the one who championed the souvenir. I know

he’s a souvenir guy. You said he was selling secrets to the

Saudis. No, I did not say that. I said it was souvenirs. No,

just did it. You said

hold on, you were turning Jared Kushner and elaborate

conspiracy theory. I’m saying I know it’s not a conspiracy

theory when you do it. And and guys, and this is the same

person that basically, in the in the beginning of his

presidential campaign in 2016, in front of Hillary Clinton

said, absolutely, I bend the laws that you created the tax

laws to my favor, because I’m not stupid, when she called him

a tax dodger. And it turns out after all these years, he was

telling the truth. He basically, once again, the show

ends with Trump. He’s been a great 2022. No, no, but

honestly, like, like, did we learn anything except that these

tax laws are egregiously stupid. And the only people that are

consistently guaranteed to make money in these tax laws are real

estate investors. If you put these two things together, a

real estate investor, who happened to be very poor at his

job, which Trump turned out to be packed billions of dollars

of NOLs that he was able to use to wash his taxes for years and

years. And by the way, and he was clearly proud of it. He was

just goading the Democrats in not releasing them. They went

through all this rigmarole. And what did we find out he had huge

NOLs. He had huge deductions, and he paid no taxes. Is that

shocking to any of us? It’s like it’s like Chappelle said, he

came out of the house, told everyone everything you think is

going on inside that house is going on and went back and he

walked back inside the house. Yeah.

It’s pretty great. Chappelle got it. All right, listen, for

David Sachs, the rain man, for the Queen of Quinoa, Sultan of

Science, David Friedberg, and the dictator himself, Chamath

Palihapitiya, it has been an honor and a privilege to do this

podcast with you gentlemen. This is the longest show in the

history of the pod. Enjoy everybody. R.I.P. Producer

Nick’s next 48 hours and we’ll see everybody next year.

Love you guys. Happy Holidays.

Love you bestest.

Besties are gone.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge

orgy because they’re all just useless. It’s like this like

sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

I’m going all in.