E160: 2024 Predictions! Markets, tech, politics, and more

(0:00) Bestie intros! Pasty Preppers (4:17) 2024's Biggest Political Winner (13:37) 2024's Biggest Political Loser (19:41) 2024's Biggest Business Winner (32:08) 2024's Biggest Business Loser (37:31) 2024's Biggest Business Deal (41:15) 2024's Most Contrarian Belief (51:18) 2024's Best-Performing Asset (56:46) 2024's Worst-Performing Asset (1:06:14) 2024's Most Anticipated Trend (1:12:28) 2024's Most Anticipated Media (1:22:28) Emotional condition heading into 2024 Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://twitter.com/Jason https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://lmc.icds.ee/lennart-meri-lecture-by-fiona-hill https://news.gallup.com/poll/512135/support-third-political-party.aspx https://apnews.com/article/robert-kennedy-president-election-utah-ballot-863513ec2bf75d1efc9b202cb8ddcc4a https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-considers-accepting-yuan-instead-of-dollars-for-chinese-oil-sales-11647351541 https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/08/10/us-saudi-arabia-sell-oil-dollars-chinese-yuan https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/putin-talk-oil-uae-saudi-meet-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salman-2023-12-06 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=853724306532726 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/07/californias-budget-deficit-balloons-to-68b-00130624 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/28/in-grips-of-war-ukraine-faces-gloomy-demographic-future https://razumkov.org.ua/en/articles/pension-system-can-ukrainian-pensions-be-saved https://www.jordannews.jo/Section-20/Middle-East/Israel-won-t-be-able-to-eliminate-Hamas-US-spokesperson-33415 https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2023/08/30/us-natural-gas-production-sets-new-record-high https://www.anduril.com/roadrunner https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/19/missile-drone-pentagon-houthi-attacks-iran-00132480 https://twitter.com/CeciliaZin/status/1740109465918328844 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/business/china-car-exports.html https://img.caixin.com//2023-04-14/168147450347265.jpg https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/21/china/china-russia-relations-record-trade-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-by-category-line-chart.htm https://thehill.com/opinion/4383282-turkey-is-a-us-ally-but-should-not-be-a-trusted-one https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/06/turkey-nato-membership-alliance-russia-erdogan-sweden-syria https://apnews.com/article/nato-sweden-turkey-erdogan-stoltenberg-639d70add38ec481253729b0e451f4ea https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/27/biden-endgame-ukraine-00133211 https://www.google.com/finance/quote/URA:NYSEARCA https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/28/the-west-may-now-have-no-option-but-to-attack-iran https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9218128 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13016388 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11198330 https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Paypal-Entrepreneurs-Shaped-Silicon/dp/1501197266

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  I found out about a Free Bird purchase that is just, you were there, Chamath, you heard what he bought.

• 0:06David Sacks?

  What did I buy? Pickles? The quinoa? What was it?

• 0:09Jason Calacanis?

  No, no. Sax, you missed this because you're, you are a sunbird now and the rest of us are snowbirds over the holidays, but the three of us have been hanging out, skiing, having dinner for a couple of weeks. And we had a little wives dinner and one of the wives was complaining about-

• 0:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, the suits, the radiation suits.

• 0:27David Sacks?

  Oh my god.

• 0:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So Free Birders, do you have pictures of the radiation suits?

• 0:32Jason Calacanis?

  I don't have pictures of the radiation. I've been trying to find them, but-

• 0:35David Sacks?

  Radiation suits? I thought you were gonna talk about like Brioni suits or something.

• 0:40Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 0:40David Sacks?

  Radiation suits?

• 0:41Jason Calacanis?

  You know how you went into full-scale panic mode and you, during COVID, and you had your whole outfit, your hazmat suit? Friedberg, just because he's panicked about nuclear proliferation, has bought suits for his entire family, thousands of dollars of radiation suits, and-

• 1:04David Friedberg?

  Nuclear fallout.

• 1:05Jason Calacanis?

  And he bought one for his dog.

• 1:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Dogs.

• 1:08Jason Calacanis?

  Dogs. Dogs. Sorry, dogs.

• 1:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  For Monty and Daisy.

• 1:12David Friedberg?

  I should send you guys the photo of the dog.

• 1:14David Sacks?

  Bunker? I mean-

• 1:15Jason Calacanis?

  I've got it all taken care of.

• 1:16David Sacks?

  You need a bunker first, right?

• 1:18Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's underway as well.

• 1:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How do you get to your bunker, Free Bird, with, with the pilots that you'll be asking to leave their families?

• 1:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or will you be protecting them with the guns that were stolen from your house?

• 1:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  At least you'll have the thousands of pickles you've made.

• 1:36Jason Calacanis?

  I didn't know Friedberg was a prepper. Did you know this, Sax? Because Sax has a little prepper in him.

• 1:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sax, Friedberg was howling because he was so mad. He made like thousands and thousands of pickles and nobody would eat them, including himself.

• 1:49Jason Calacanis?

  Because they were so terrible. You literally bought a radiation pod for your dogs.

• 1:54David Friedberg?

  Yeah, so that's their air filter on the right, so that they don't breathe in and you clear fallout, collapse.

• 2:00David Sacks?

  I kinda like the, the prepping.

• 2:02David Friedberg?

  Thank you, sir. Yeah, it's good. You guys don't understand. There's a reason evolution happens in moments of what we call punctuated equilibrium. There's a massive event and certain, you know, things survive and then that becomes the proliferant species going forward. This is the moment. Be ready.

• 2:18Jason Calacanis?

  So you're saying paranoid, rich, white guys are gonna survive the nuclear holocaust, is what you're saying? Paranoid, rich, white tech guys are gonna make it to the other side. Got it.

• 2:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How exciting.

• 2:29Jason Calacanis?

  How exciting. What a great future. What a future, Chamath. Chamath and I are like, we'd rather die.

• 2:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That touches my erogenous zones, just the idea that when Sacks and Friedberg are the only two reproducing males left, delicious.

• 2:42Jason Calacanis?

  Can you imagine the gene pool? It's like, literally, this is like some dystopian science fiction. This is like a Black Mirror episode.

• 2:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You'll have the pastiest preppers in the world.

• 2:52Jason Calacanis?

  Pasty preppers to inherit the earth.

• 3:13Jason Calacanis?

  Welcome back to the program, everybody. It is the new year, but it's the same squad. Your four besties are here. Chamath Polihopatia, he is now not just the dictator, he is chairman dictator, calling in from the slopes with his beautiful Burt sweater. That's a great sweater. It's a major turtleneck going on there. And we have David Friedberg, also, uh, looks like he's on the slopes and he is wearing his Ohalo, his Ohalo, not Mahalo, Ohalo hat. He is branding here on the All In Podcast, sneaking in a little branding for his new startup that he is the CEO of. David Sacks is with us, of course, and he cleaned up. He cleaned up a little bit here. The hair was getting out of control. We had a lot of commentary on the hair. Apparently you cleaned up shop.

• 3:58David Sacks?

  I pivoted from the Jefferson to the Gecko.

• 4:01Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So everybody loves when we do our predictions. And so we're going to start off 2024, big year for us. We have a lot going on here at All In, and we're going to just do some predictions here. So let's get started. We're going to kick it off with Sacks doing his prediction for the biggest political winner in 2024. Sacks, who do you have? What's your prediction for who's going to be the biggest winner in 2024? We're bracing.

• 4:26David Sacks?

  Yeah, well, you're gonna love this, J. Cal, but my prediction for biggest political winner in 2024 is Vladimir Putin.

• 4:34David Sacks?

  Twenty twenty three, last year, was the year that Putin turned it all around. He stabilized his economy after the West's attempt to sanction him to his knees, tried to collapse his economy. We issued basically an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. He has gained the upper hand militarily in Ukraine. I think that twenty twenty four will be a year of him consolidating gains in Ukraine, potentially making new gains. I think that the stalemate narrative that our media has propagated about Ukraine will be exposed as a lie. I think the Russians are in fact winning that war.

• 5:14David Sacks?

  And what you're seeing is that his successful stance against the West in Ukraine has only made him more influential throughout the Global South and in the BRICS countries. Countries that oppose American dominance and dollar hegemony see him as the man with the plan, as a bit of a conquering hero. And I think as Project Ukraine falls apart in twenty twenty four, it's only going to reinforce that sense that he's the big winner.

• 5:44David Friedberg?

  Sax, did you see that Argentina said they're not going to join BRICS? And that some have said that was a bit of a blowback on the BRICS effort to end dollar hegemony? And do you think it's really impactful or is it just a one-off?

• 5:59David Sacks?

  I think it's a one-off. I mean, Milei won in a big surprise there because the country's economy has been such a basket case and he is very pro-American, pro-Israel, pro-West. And so he has distanced Argentina from BRICS, but I think that's a little bit of a one-off. The larger issue is that the whole Global South now is really resisting the collective West in a number of different ways. And so our influence and dominance is slowly declining across the world. And there's many examples of that, so we can get into it throughout the show.

• 6:38Jason Calacanis?

  Just to be clear with the audience, you're not rooting for Putin here. You're just predicting he's the biggest winner.

• 6:43David Sacks?

  I'm not rooting for it to happen. I've got other answers here that I think are negatives as well. I wish we had made a peace deal and avoided this whole Ukraine war. I think that was a gigantic mistake by the West.

• 6:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you've been clear about that, yeah.

• 6:58David Sacks?

  We have put Putin in this position. To be the victor because we plunged into a war without thinking it through. And the truth is, we can't give Ukraine enough aid to have them actually win this war. So we've contributed massively to Putin being this victor. And, you know, it was Fiona Hill, who is a Russia hawk in the foreign policy establishment, who pointed out in a speech, I think, over the past year that the global South is using this Ukraine war as a proxy to rebel against the West. So in the same way that we're using Ukraine as a proxy against Russia, she said the global South was using Russia as a proxy against the West

• 7:42David Sacks?

  as a way to basically dethrone American hegemony all over the world. And that's a very negative trend.

• 7:49Jason Calacanis?

  So if you had Ukraine and Putin in under seven minutes for this episode, you bet the under, you win. Free Bird, who's your prediction for the biggest political winner in politics for 2024?

• 8:00David Friedberg?

  I'm going to go with independent third party in the US. We saw the stats last week. I think we reviewed them with a poll that showed that 60% plus of people are claiming interest in a third party or an independent effort outside of the traditional Dem Republican split. And if you look at in 1992, Ross Perot got 18 to 19% of the general election vote. RFK Jr. is obviously running on an independent ticket this year. We'll see if he can even get on the ballot in a bunch of states. But I think that whether it's him or the interest in developing a third party in the US, that there may be a big winner this year that challenges the traditional two-party split in this country.

• 8:45Jason Calacanis?

  All right, and Chamath, what do you got for your biggest political winner in 2024?

• 8:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Independent centrists. I think this election starts the breakdown of the two-party system.

• 8:55David Friedberg?

  Same, same. Look at that.

• 8:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  RFK this week actually just got added to the Utah ballot. I think that This could be the most meaningful, long-lasting change that we see in American politics is

• 9:04Jason Calacanis?

  This is amazing.

• 9:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  From the RFK candidacy.

• 9:07David Friedberg?

  I mean, how many people do you guys know that were Republicans that don't want to be Republicans anymore? Or were Democrats and don't want to be Democrats anymore? It's really like

• 9:14Jason Calacanis?

  Most.

• 9:14David Friedberg?

  So many people.

• 9:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I know more of the latter. I know more of the latter, actually, than I do.

• 9:19David Friedberg?

  Right, yeah, that's true, too.

• 9:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's what I was.

• 9:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think Republicans are still firmly established. I think people are embarrassed to be a Democrat right now.

• 9:26Jason Calacanis?

  Interestingly, I also picked the dark horse presidential candidate who will beat treasonous and corrupt, AKA Trump and Biden. I think we're going to actually see some dark horse candidate maybe beat these two in the rematch that nobody wanted. Wow, that's crazy. Three of the four of us picked the same thing.

• 9:43David Friedberg?

  No coordination beforehand.

• 9:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, and this is done blind, folks. And Nick has my notes here, so he can voucher me here. And just to go back and look at 2023, what we predicted. Sax, you said Asian-American college applicants were going to be your biggest winner in politics. That actually turned out to be pretty prescient, right?

• 10:02David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, I was betting on court cases overruling affirmative action. And that's exactly what happened, is that Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in college admissions, saying that it unlawfully discriminated against Asian-Americans. So, yeah, that worked out exactly right.

• 10:18Jason Calacanis?

  So that's a great prediction. I think, Chamath, you had perhaps the best prediction of even the entire show last year. Your spread trade, Long Nicky and Short DeSantis, that paid off in spades. Well done there. Friedberg, you had MBS and Saudi have the most important year in their modern era. That's actually pretty prescient as well. They seem to be.

• 10:38David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I mean, if you look at, let me just post this. This was this journal article that came out in March. If you guys remember this, when Saudi was considering accepting yuan instead of dollars for sales of oil to China. And then in August, the US ramped up pressure on Saudi Arabia to sell oil in dollars, not yuan. Let me just pull this up for you guys, which was obviously the follow-on story where the US tried to counter the actions, which is continuing, obviously, today, where there's a back and forth. And Saudi, as I mentioned last week, I think is in this really interesting central pivot position between all of these competing. Major nuclear powers and fighting for influence and this is a big story and it will continue to be this year.

• 11:20Jason Calacanis?

  And modernizing society.

• 11:23David Sacks?

  That photo of the fist bump, I mean, what a mistake that was where Biden just gratuitously insulted MBS. Compare that to the photo of Putin visiting the Middle East and meeting, shaking hands with MBS, which happened just a few weeks ago. And compare the welcome that Putin got in Saudi Arabia and I think UAE to the welcome that Biden got. It's just two completely different levels. It was a very warm embrace on both sides. I think it was UAE, they literally had a parade for him where they had the colors of the Russian flag up everywhere. So, you know, we've tried to portray Putin as this global pariah, we've tried to turn

• 12:05David Sacks?

  him into this global pariah, but it's not working because of the way that he is defeating the collective West in Ukraine. I think that it's given him enormous cachet and influence in the global South and much of the developing world, which would like to stand up to American dominance or at least is tired of American dominance.

• 12:28David Friedberg?

  And if you double click on that article, the second one I sent on Washington trying to negotiate with the Saudis, you know, quote behind the scenes, but obviously this all comes out. They're asking assurances that Riyadh will use dollars, not yuan to price oil sales, assurances that Saudi won't allow China to build military bases in the kingdom and limitations on Saudi Arabia using technology developed by China. And in exchange, the US will protect Saudi, will provide military protection and will help them develop a nuclear program, which is an incredible demand. So obviously this is an unresolved point, but this becomes a pivot moment for Saudi Arabia. They may become a nuclear power, use this as leverage as the US continues to try and keep dollar hegemony alive.

• 13:14Jason Calacanis?

  And my prediction last year was that Trump would get indicted, win the nomination, and then agree not to run in order to get a pardon or something in that vein. And it looks like I'm going to get two of those three correct. We'll see on the pardon. He has been indicted, obviously, and he is looks like a lock to win the nomination. But we'll see. I don't. It seems like Nikki Haley's doing OK. We'll see. Biggest political loser of 2024 is what we're going to do next. Shama, last year you picked DeSantis. I picked DeSantis. That was a pretty easy one. Sax, you picked California, also a pretty easy one. We know that California's gotten demolished.

• 13:51David Sacks?

  Because specifically, California went from having a $76 billion surplus in 2022 to a $68 billion deficit now.

• 13:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's bonkers. Yeah.

• 14:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think any of those were as obvious as they were in January of last year. I think DeSantis was leading. He was collecting a lot of big checks. And California hadn't imploded. And I and everybody knew that they were on be under pressure, but nobody expected to be, I think, this swift.

• 14:13Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm.

• 14:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So.

• 14:14Jason Calacanis?

  All right.

• 14:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think those were obvious. I think those were actually pretty decent picks.

• 14:17Jason Calacanis?

  OK, that's a good argument. And then Friedberg, you picked debt issues for emerging nations debt markets start to unravel. IMF steps in. I'm not sure if I have enough information to check in on that one yet. Any thoughts, Friedberg, before we go on to our predictions for biggest loser in 2024?

• 14:31David Friedberg?

  I don't think we had any big unwindings like I had expected. But these problems are bubbling and persist. You know, obviously, Argentina took a big step with the election there. That one was one of the countries that was most at risk of having a big event last year. But.

• 14:47Jason Calacanis?

  Shama, who's your prediction for biggest political loser in 2024?

• 14:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The cokes. I think on a dollar basis, they are the largest spender in Republican politics. They have been, and they have been the most consistent negative indicator of value. And so if you just want to fade a trade, I think you can pretty easily just find where the those old school Republicans are putting their money and just kind of short it. And right now, as much as I was sort of long the Haley spread trade in 2023, I would probably now short that trade in 24.

• 15:23Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm, OK, switching it up.

• 15:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Mostly because of the cokes.

• 15:27Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, what do you have?

• 15:28David Friedberg?

  Well, Sax will like this one, but I think Ukraine might be.

• 15:33David Friedberg?

  The biggest loser this year as attention shifts to the brewing conflict in the Middle East during an election year like the US is facing, continuing this funding of this Ukraine-Russia conflict with US dollars is becoming a more unpopular issue for people to support. And so I think because of all these competing interests and the political pressure, the US will probably not have the resources to commit to Ukraine. I think Ukraine's shot at being in NATO is going to fade away. And unfortunately, it seems like the country may be left behind by the end of this year. Sax, what do you got?

• 16:11David Sacks?

  Well, I totally agree with that. And I would just add demographic decline or even collapse. They've lost something like half a million soldiers in terms of casualties. They also, something like 10 million people have fled the country. I read recently that there's only about 20 million people left in the country and half of them are pensioners. So it's not even clear that the working population of the country is going to be able to support the pensioners. And of course, the war isn't close to being over yet, so there's going to be even more destruction that happens. So I agree with that pick. I upleveled my answer a little bit here to have the collective West as the biggest political loser. And Ukraine is a big part of that.

• 16:53David Sacks?

  Obviously, this huge bet that the collective West made in terms of pressuring and challenging Putin in Ukraine has completely crapped out. But I would also go much further than that. You look at what's happening in Israel and Gaza right now, and I don't think that Israel's invasion of Gaza is going well at all. And again, just stepping back, these answers don't reflect my desire for what I want to have happen. It just reflects my honest assessment of who the losers are going to be. And I just think that Israel's invasion is not going well. It does not look like they're going to be able to militarily achieve their objective of destroying Hamas.

• 17:36David Sacks?

  Admiral Kirby, who's the Pentagon spokesperson, even said that the other day, which was a pretty amazing admission. At the same time, Israel is creating a huge humanitarian crisis in Gaza, something like over 20,000. Palestinians have already been killed, over 50,000 wounded, something like 1.8 million of them have been displaced, and it doesn't look like it's going to let up anytime soon. As a result of this, Israel is facing, I think, a huge amount of condemnation internationally. It is becoming a bit of a global pariah. So that is not going well for America and the West. And then you're going to have a whole bunch of elections this year, both

• 18:19David Sacks?

  in the US and in Europe. I think that there's going to be tremendous disruption. Things are really not going well in Europe right now. Large parts of Europe are in recession as a result of losing cheap Russian gas. This is particularly true of Germany. And I think there's going to be some big shakeups in the European Parliament, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was similar shakeups in the US election as well.

• 18:47Jason Calacanis?

  All right. And I picked for my biggest political loser, I was going to go with the American voter, but I'm hoping that the American voters make better choices and maybe we see some alternative candidates, as we said in the last one. And I went with Netanyahu here. I think, and again, this is just my assessment, this isn't what I want to occur in the world, obviously, but every major Israeli poll is just suggesting that they want him out and they put the odds, Vox puts the odds of his ouster at 75%. And obviously, Gaza is not going well, and it feels like there is a massive shift in terms of what was early support and obvious support for the terror attacks that occurred on 10/7. And any reasonable person would be supportive of that, too. Hey, maybe what's happening

• 19:30Jason Calacanis?

  in Gaza is not helping the situation and needs to be resolved, and maybe a different approach has to occur. And so I think Netanyahu is going to be the biggest loser in 2024. All right, let's go on to the biggest business winner of 2024. Back to business. Last year, last year, in 2023, I predicted laid off tech workers, starting startup companies would be the big winner. Chamath, you predicted Relativity Space, 3D Printing, Rocket Company. And Sax, you picked America's Natural Gas Industry, Friedberg, OpenAI. Wow, a lot of good choices there. I think OpenAI was a huge winner in 2023. Yeah, Friedberg? Even with the chaos? I would say so.

• 20:11David Sacks?

  That was a good pick.

• 20:12Jason Calacanis?

  Massive revenue. The highest market cap gain of the year, probably. Yeah, thirty to ninety billion. Yeah. American natural gas industry, that really actually cooked in twenty twenty-three, yeah, Saks?

• 20:24David Sacks?

  Yeah, it has a new record, so.

• 20:25Jason Calacanis?

  Good prediction.

• 20:26David Sacks?

  That was a good pick.

• 20:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, good pick. All right, so let's go right to twenty twenty-four predictions. Friedberg, you haven't let us off yet, so you're gonna lead up, be the leadoff batter here. What do you got?

• 20:36David Friedberg?

  I'm going with commodities businesses, which I know isn't speaking a specific business, but there's a lot of ways to play it. And I think there's a big commodities boom that's coming back in twenty twenty-four. There's been a lot of underinvestment relative to demand over the past, call it eighteen to twenty-four months. Coming out of COVID and with rising interest rates, a lot of folks have been selling down inventory. And there now needs to be a build back up on inventory and supply. There's also a bunch of cash coming into the commodities markets that was sitting in treasuries as yields go down and that cash is coming back. So building the base back up, rebuilding stockpiles and supplies coming out of the past eighteen months. Obviously, economic activity is strong and robust.

• 21:20David Friedberg?

  So commodities businesses are gonna see a killer twenty twenty-four.

• 21:24Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, what do you got?

• 21:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the biggest business winner in twenty twenty-four is going to be the bootstrapped startup and/or the profitable startup, but the best will probably be the bootstrapped profitable startup. And I think the reason is that we are underestimating how cheap it's going to be to copy an existing business in twenty twenty-four. And so if you assume that these models are gonna get ten and a hundred times better, and you assume the cost of compute is gonna get ten and a hundred times cheaper, and you assume the cost of energy is gonna get ten times cheaper.

• 22:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're no longer measuring in decades when a company will be subject to disruption. I think you're measuring it in frankly, months. And so I think you're going to be able to create these companies for very cheap and essentially have them attack an existing business which has upside on economics because they have just a lot of people and a lot of processes that these GPTs can replicate for essentially free. So if you're profitable, you have the chance to survive. And I think if you are unprofitable, I think that you're going to be under a lot of pressure.

• 22:43Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's a great pick. That's exactly what I'm seeing on the field in the early stage. Sax, who's your prediction for a biggest business winner of 2024? Who do you predict is going to be the biggest business winner?

• 22:53David Sacks?

  I'm predicting Androl for its Roadrunner product, which it announced last year. And this is a drone interceptor. So it basically intercepts drones. It's built for ground-based air defense. And the reason I say this is because if you saw recently what was happening in the Red Sea with the Houthis, the U.S. was having to use $2 million air defense missiles to shoot down $2,000 drones. And that is not sustainable. So right now, we have a huge problem with asymmetric warfare where our adversaries are using very cheap missiles, very cheap drones, swarms of them.

• 23:36David Sacks?

  And they force us to exhaust our air defenses, which are just way too expensive on a unit basis.

• 23:43Jason Calacanis?

  And these cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, do you think?

• 23:45David Sacks?

  Yeah, I think that's right. I think the Roadrunner system costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it can be, it's reusable. So it's not like you just send one up to take out one drone.

• 23:53Jason Calacanis?

  Reusable if it doesn't blow up. If it does blow up, I don't think you can reuse it.

• 23:56David Sacks?

  It basically takes off, it loiter's. This is basically a AI system where it's self-driving, I guess you will. It has operators, but, and then it returns back to its base station after it's used. It's not like a kamikaze type drone. It's actually a drone killer.

• 24:13Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, really? I think it is. I think it do dual purpose. It can either intercept and blow something up, or it can return back to base. But we'll have to check in on that. Hey, and shout out to our friend Palmer. Lucky come back on the program. We miss you. Shout out to our boy. Are you an investor, Sax, in Andro?

• 24:27David Sacks?

  No, I'm not. I'm not an investor, but I think I would be.

• 24:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 24:31David Sacks?

  You know, so.

• 24:32Jason Calacanis?

  They've raised a ton of money. Palmer, great job. Yeah, no, Palmer, we'll all buy. Actually, I'm building a position right now. I've been buying secondary in Andro. And for me, I was gonna go with startups again.

• 24:44David Friedberg?

  Are you really buying secondary shares in Andro?

• 24:46Jason Calacanis?

  I've been building a large position in Andro, yes. I'm trying to get to a 2% ownership position so I can join the board. So I've been using. So shout out to my guy Palmer Lucky. I am gonna go with for my biggest winner in 2024, training data owners like the New York Times, Reddit, X, Twitter, YouTube, etc. I think what we learned in 2023 was that the language models are starting to hit parity very quickly and that the real value is gonna be in, and it may even become commodities and open source may win the day. So then I think the winner is folks who have the training data. And I'm actually proposing a new business model for these language models. I think now that we've seen this New York Times and OpenAI lawsuit,

• 25:32Jason Calacanis?

  I think there's a really great outcome here, which is a market-based solution where if you have a ChatGPT account, you can log in and federate with your New York Times subscription or, you know, any other subscription. And then it gives you the tier of ChatGPT 4 with the New York Times. And so that could be a win-win for everybody, or they could obviously pay a licensing fee. And so I think this is gonna be an amazing turnaround for the entire content industry if the language models respect copyright owners and come up with a sustainable system where every year copyright holders can get some money in exchange for using their training data, whether it's on images or content. So I am very bullish on.

• 26:13David Friedberg?

  Maybe you should accumulate a 2% position in OpenAI through secondary purchases and get them to do that on the board.

• 26:19Jason Calacanis?

  Only 2 billion, yeah. No, I think, I mean, we didn't bring this up because this broke over the holiday break, but I think Sam Altman's doing a great job of telling people he wants to do the right thing. And we discussed previously the licensing deal they did with Business Insider and the parent company of it.

• 26:35David Friedberg?

  Axel Springer, what do you think the deal with New York Times will look like?

• 26:38Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's gonna be a nine-figure settlement for previous stuff and then an ongoing licensing fee in order to have the New York Times in their training data. And then you'll be able to. Say, hey, what does the New York Times think of this? Right? You could actually do queries about the New York Times in it. And I think the New York Times will come up with a license that everybody can use their data if they pay this yearly fee. If you stop paying the yearly fee, then you can't train on it. And we're in uncharted territory. You're saying there's going to be a New York Times model and a non-New York Times model? Well, I think you could do two different things. One, you could do, New York Times could make their own model, right? But they could fork their model or just with the user interface, say, if you want to query New York Times information and have that as part of your results, you have to have

• 27:23Jason Calacanis?

  a New York Times account, right? So if you say, I want the best coffee machines or what's the best coffee equipment? It says, oh, if you had Wirecutter and a subscription to New York Times, we would include the Wirecutter results. And this idea that technologists can't do citations has been proven absolutely incorrect. There are language models out there that are using citations all the time. OpenAI, I think, will wind up losing the case if it goes to them. And I think they're going to pay a big licensing fee. To your question, Chamath.

• 27:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My prediction, then, is that if this happens, this is not my pick, but I'm just going to tell you. I suspect that what happens is you'll get these yearly licensing fees and then one year, the New York Times just falls off a cliff. And when it comes time to renegotiate, then OpenAI says, no. And they won't have a choice.

• 28:10Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, it's a possibility, but if you think about the Disney characters, you know, let's, I don't know if you saw Nintendo and Disney characters, you know, making stuff on Dolly or other things. If you make derivative works on that and you want to have that feature as part of your image creator, you just have to have a licensing fee. And so I think that there's a win-win here to be had. And I am really interested to see the market-based solution because I don't think this is a Napster situation where like OpenAI gets shut down because OpenAI is too savvy. I bet you the four.

• 28:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The big difference between Napster and this is there, the content universe was limited and small. Here it's infinite and unlimited. And so how do you pay anything to anybody without? I just think it's like without direct attribution of revenue, which is basically impossible, you're kind of making a value judgment, which I don't think makes any sense. I think, I think doing a revenue licensing deal is impossible when you get into the weeds. When these business people sit down and actually start to try to figure out the bid ask, I don't know as a rational, coherent business person, what you would model in order to present a number.

• 29:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so one suggestion would be what percentage of the model's creation was using the New York Times data? And I think people say one to 2% of the original ChatGPT was built off a trading data was New York Times. And then if they weighted that heavily, Chumoff, like, let's say they said, New York Times is an authoritatively five times more important than these other sources. That could be upwards of 5 to 10% of the authority of that model.

• 29:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, but I understand.

• 29:37Jason Calacanis?

  And so, yes, it's not easy, but you could.

• 29:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What's the COGS? Yeah, but what's the COGS for the, like, are you telling me that, like, an AI model?

• 29:43Jason Calacanis?

  The music industry has this.

• 29:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but what is it? It's gonna be like a 30, 40% cost of goods?

• 29:47Jason Calacanis?

  You could say that ChatGPT, or let's say, Apple, I predict Apple will do this, right? They'll do a language model where they say 50% of the revenue that we generate from queries or subscriptions to this

• 29:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  50%?

• 29:59Jason Calacanis?

  goes to the people we built it off of, or the licensees. Sure, why not? Why not? The music industry already does that.

• 30:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That would guarantee the death of the startup ecosystem, and it would guarantee the lock-in of big tech.

• 30:12Jason Calacanis?

  No, I don't think so. You could build models that don't have the data, and you could build models with it. So it'll be a choice by the person who builds the model. And synthetic data might make it so you don't need the New York Times, Chumoff. It's early days for synthetic data.

• 30:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I don't have an opinion. I'm just reacting to this idea that 50% of COGS, then all of a sudden, these aren't software companies. You know, these software companies will have a gross margin of like 30%.

• 30:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Well, what does Spotify pay for music? You know, so the same argument's made for Spotify, you know, or Netflix when they were licensing content.

• 30:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's the difference. It's limited in scope, meaning there's only ever one hit song from Rihanna that matters, or Jay-Z, or whomever. Pick Taylor Swift. And so, it's a very scoped content universe. And so you can ascribe value much easier, because then the user goes and actually listens to that song over another. This is about something that's happening under the waterline, where you don't know how the iceberg is built.

• 31:01Jason Calacanis?

  It's both. There are things under the model that do it, and then there's also quoting stuff. And that's really where the New York Times got their, caught them with their hand in the cookie jar, is that when it was regurgitating information and giving the results, it was quoting deeply New York Times proprietary content. And so, that's where there's like, you're right about the training data, but you might be wrong about the output.

• 31:22David Friedberg?

  Yeah, but that could be fixed, right? They could train models, and they could exclude storing any proprietary data. You can create a filter that says the model can't store any of this data. But it can still be trained on it.

• 31:33Jason Calacanis?

  Or can't use it, right? So if you say, what's the best coffee machine? It can't use the New York Times wire cut of data. And I bet you that Sam Altman has already built a model without it. I guarantee you they've already built a, for an emergent, press hearing case of emergency. Here's the 4.5 model in case they got an injunction, which would be highly unlikely, but if they did get an injunction, they just say, okay, here's 4.5. It doesn't use the New York Times training data. So this is all uncharted territory, as we all know. I think we got everybody's business predictions, okay? Andro commodities, training data, and bootstrap profitable startups. What a great cohort there. Let's go on to biggest business losers in 2024. 2023, Chamath said Google search as measured by profitability engagement.

• 32:17Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks said the consumer. Freeberg said capital intensive series B Cs and D growth companies. That's pretty, pretty good winner there. And I said white collar workers without hard skills, also known as surplus elites. Any feedback on those boys?

• 32:35David Friedberg?

  As your winner, I'll give you my prediction for 24.

• 32:37Jason Calacanis?

  Please, yes. Go ahead.

• 32:39David Friedberg?

  Vertical SaaS companies, I think, are going to get smacked this year. And I mentioned this, I don't, I can't, I think we talked about this off, off the show. But, or if we talked about it on the show, I apologize. But like, I think these tools to write code, no code tools, co-piloting tools, and the ability for engineers to get 20, 50, 100x more productive to build custom applications for their enterprise are so incredibly powerful. I mentioned this to you guys. I know of a couple vertical SaaS businesses that some of my companies use the software and they're getting off the software because they've built homegrown solutions in a very low cost, very low touch way.

• 33:22David Friedberg?

  And I'm seeing that so frequently now. I think this is a real threat to vertical SaaS businesses that can charge thousands of dollars per seat per year that are getting disrupted by the ability for companies now to very cheaply and quickly build homegrown solutions using a lot of the generative tools that are out there.

• 33:38Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks, your prediction?

• 33:39David Sacks?

  My prediction for biggest business loser in 24 is, is actually the German economy. There's two big problems there. First is that the loss of cheap Russian gas has really cut the legs out from under the German industrial model. Their entire economy is based on industrial output and cheap Russian gas was sort of at the foundation of that. As you guys know, someone blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. I think that has really hurt the German economy. And then second, the German car industry has been massively impacted by a sudden glut of cheap cars coming from China. So if you look at the Chinese automotive industry, it's really exploded in the last few years.

• 34:24David Sacks?

  And auto exports is one of, you know, is one of the biggest products that Germany manufactures. And with German costs going up and Chinese costs coming down, that's just not a very good place for them to be. So I think double whammy for Germany.

• 34:39Jason Calacanis?

  Chumap, do you have the biggest business loser in 2024?

• 34:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I am going to say that 24 is the peak in terms of valuations of professional sports.

• 34:53Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm.

• 34:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh. And I will give you four examples in 2023 that I think were in some very concerning or pro sports franchise values as of today. The first was you had an upstart competitor to a league that came out of nowhere, used money to overcome the ability to attract stars. I'm talking about the live tour versus the PGA and then essentially forced the PGA into merger talks with them. The second was you had a country use their balance sheet to basically try to jumpstart their own professional sports business. In this case, it was soccer.

• 35:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The country was Saudi Arabia and the players were Ronaldo and Messi. They got one, but not the other. The third was the explosion of NIL inside the NCAA. You have people in college now making more in some cases than the same player in a professional sports context. So they're making millions of dollars to be in college. And then the fourth, which may not seem like it's related, but there was an article in the Wall Street Journal, I think recently, about a meaningful uptick in churn amongst all the streamers, Netflix, Hulu, all of these companies, Amazon, who are the only folks with, in a position to actually have the balance sheet to keep paying a premium

• 36:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  for professional sports rights. So I think when you put that all together, you can start to see that there's been a tipping point in enterprise values. The acceleration we've seen over the last decade has slowed down. So I would say that 2024 is going to be the year of peak pro sports values.

• 36:41Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, starts to come down. And I went with smartphones. Smartphone manufacturers are facing a major slowdown. Consumers obviously love their phones and use them constantly, but people are skipping a generation of phones. And if you look at Apple's revenue, they're having a very hard time getting people to upgrade. And so I think that's going to flatten out. They will keep trying to squeeze money out of it. I don't know what you guys spent on your iPhone 15, if you got it, but I, I always buy the top of the line. And I think it was 14 or $1,500 this time. And when I got the accountants, they said, oh, is this a new laptop? I said, no, it's a new phone. But I think this is going to slow down and people will during austerity, they're going to skip two or three versions of it. I know I skipped for the first time. I skipped the 14 this time around. So I'm going with smartphone

• 37:26Jason Calacanis?

  manufacturers and Apple would be obviously the tip of that spear. Let's keep moving. Our next prediction, biggest business deal of 2024. Biggest business deal of 2024. I went with, uh, last year, my prediction was Amazon getting into healthcare. Maybe they buy Peloton or Roman Hymns. And they have been getting into healthcare a bunch more. And my, my wild card was a CCP divesting of TikTok. That didn't happen. Chamath, you went Starlink goes public in a spin out from SpaceX at 75 billion. That didn't happen, but Starlink is doing fantastic. Sacks, you said a deal between Putin and Xi. And then Friedberg, you said Petro for one trade, the Saudi-China trade. Any thoughts on the predictions there? Doesn't look like anybody nailed it.

• 38:11David Sacks?

  Well, no, actually Putin and Xi did make a deal. Their ties have never been stronger and the trade between those two countries keeps increasing as a result of the fact that we pushed Russia into China's arms. So that absolutely happened.

• 38:22Jason Calacanis?

  And what's your prediction this year, Sacks? Biggest business deal. Sacks, what do you got?

• 38:26David Sacks?

  My biggest business deal is whatever the Fed decides to do to replace or extend BTFP, the Bank Term Funding Program. Remember that the BTFP, which is what the Fed used to bail out the regional banking system last year and was it like March or April? It was only supposed to last for one year. It's supposed to be a temporary program. But I do not think that the balance sheets of regional banks are healthy enough to survive without this continued liquidity from this program. So I think the Fed's gonna have to do something to either replace the program, extend the program. They're gonna have to do something. And I think that regional banks are still in pretty bad shape with, you know, impaired

• 39:10David Sacks?

  commercial debt portfolios. And they need this liquidity as long as the yield curve remains inverted. So I think the Fed is gonna try and somehow figure out a program to keep these guys

• 39:26David Sacks?

  liquid until they can de-invert the yield curve. And I think the Fed's trying to massage all of this into place without there being a recession.

• 39:36Jason Calacanis?

  Seems like they'll be able to do it. Chamath, what do you got?

• 39:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm gonna go with the same thing. I think I was just off by your Starlink will go public.

• 39:43Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm. Fascinating. I like it. And I had a similar theme. My wildcard, my wildcard last year that the CCP would divest of TikTok. I'm gonna say this year that I think TikTok goes public and they'll be under pressure from different political factions to get the CCP off the board. So I'm gonna go with ByteDance taking Going public or TikTok spinning out and going public, some, some version of that. Friedberg, what do you got for this year? We got some continuation bets here from Jake Allen.

• 40:14David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I would keep going with my Petro you on trade bet. I don't think that the U.S. is going to let Saudi become a nuclear power, but so maybe leave that one outstanding. But I think rights holder is getting licensing deals for generative AI or there's going to be a couple of blockbuster deals this year.

• 40:30Jason Calacanis?

  Great.

• 40:31David Friedberg?

  Where you'll see like Disney license out a chunk of their library so people can generate on-demand video games or content or, I don't know, you guys remember this company in the early 2000s called Zazzle? Do you remember that company?

• 40:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, what was that?

• 40:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Printed stuff on mugs.

• 40:47David Friedberg?

  Yeah, and they had a big deal with Disney where the idea was you could put any character in any way you want on any piece of like t-shirt or mug or whatever.

• 40:57Jason Calacanis?

  Merch.

• 40:57David Friedberg?

  Yeah. And it was like merch and it was a big deal. I think we see that again with generative AI this year where you can take, for example, a character from a movie and generate them in an image. So anyone that has an interest in content rights will start to license it out and get a lot of value from it.

• 41:13Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely.

• 41:13David Friedberg?

  Could see a couple of big deals like that this year.

• 41:15Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Most contrarian belief of 2024. I went American exceptionalism source. I think I, I like that prediction from last year I had. Chamath, you said inflation doesn't fall off a cliff as fast as people want. Saks says the bromance between Biden and Zelensky comes to an end. Friedberg, you said 2023 marks the beginning of the end of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency.

• 41:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I nailed that one.

• 41:41Jason Calacanis?

  It, it didn't fall off a cliff?

• 41:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It didn't.

• 41:44Jason Calacanis?

  What was inflation in the first quarter of 2023?

• 41:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just kidding, it fell off a cliff.

• 41:48Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I'm like, yeah, I'm like, wait a second.

• 41:52David Friedberg?

  It's like, what the [bleep] are you talking about?

• 41:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, sorry, you're confusing me. I'm like, really? Wait a second. I think you get the Jim Cramer or the Professor Galloway moment for that prediction. Yeah. I think, yeah, I might've missed that one by a bit. All right. What do you got, Chamath, for this year? What do you got? Most contrarian belief of 2024?

• 42:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the enterprise value of OpenAI goes down.

• 42:12Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm. Oh, okay.

• 42:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think it has anything to do with OpenAI. I think it has everything to do with the rest of the industry. I think, and I think there's a couple of factors at play, similar to what I just said earlier, but if you actually try to use these tools, which now I have been.

• 42:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In my sort of day job as CEO, I've been trying to build models. Sunny's been helping me. My takeaway are two things. Number one is the latency right now amongst all these AI tools makes building production quality code absolutely impossible. So you can't have APIs where you take 30, 40, 50 seconds in between a request to get data back. It's that's ridiculous. These need to be

• 42:55Jason Calacanis?

  Nonstarter.

• 42:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  50, 30, 40, 70 milliseconds. Second is the actual cost of a million tokens on any of these platforms is economically untenable if you're trying to build something. So whether it's Amazon, whether it's Together AI, whether it's OpenAI, it's extremely, extremely expensive. So I think that capitalism would tell you that if these two things are true, you should expect people to arbitrage that opening. And so if you see cloud services come out that allow you to basically get millisecond latency, batch size one on the one

• 43:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  hand, and second, where you have pricing for a million tokens at sort of 10, 20 cents.

• 43:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Those folks, and they'll need to build their own custom hardware to do it, but those folks will multiply the capability of this market by a thousand X. And I think when that happens, the open source models really proliferate. Proprietary models and closed models go under pressure and the existing economics of how you make money today will get reallocated to those different players. And I think in that, it's going to be very hard for existing folks. I would say the same is probably true for Nvidia. The folks that have won up until today to maintain a multiple of market cap in this next year, if that happens. And so my prediction is that will happen. And as a result, the enterprise values of those companies, and I think OpenAI will be the most obvious, will go down.

• 44:31Jason Calacanis?

  People buying secondary at 90 billion right now will be underwater next year.

• 44:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Although it's, again, they have to believe. That the revenue composition today is sustainable. And if you look under the hood, half the revenue is consumers paying subscriptions. The other half the revenue are enterprises paying for essentially some version of AWS.

• 44:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 44:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But the problem is that version of AWS is economically non-functional. It's unsustainable. It's way too expensive and it's way too slow. And by the way, that's just not an OpenAI problem. It's an entire industry problem. And so if this industry is really going to be real, it needs to be literally dirt cheap and as close to zero as possible. The minute that that happens, that revenue goes away.

• 45:16Jason Calacanis?

  So then they're just left with the subscription rate.

• 45:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And by the way, the people that provide that will be the ones that have the hardware to enable that thousand X-ing of the cost.

• 45:25Jason Calacanis?

  Which is Azure, AWS.

• 45:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no, no. I think these are startups that are building proprietary hardware.

• 45:31Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay. Wow, so there's another prediction. Free Bird, what do you got? 2024 prediction, most contrarian belief.

• 45:36David Friedberg?

  Okay, so I don't think we're past the conflict escalation stage. I think things are only going to continue to mount. So a lot of the theater that we see on a global stage is more fundamentally driven by these big cycles that we're in. So I think a big one and a kind of tactical one. I think the big one that's contrarian is that there's an increased probability of a nuclear weapon being used for the first time in conflict. And I think that that's conditioned on the fact that there are declining military supplies, there's declining appetite and capacity to support

• 46:17David Friedberg?

  traditional conflict, meat grinder type conflicts that we're seeing sprout up everywhere right now. And not everywhere, but in a lot of places. And you could see a moment where, as I mentioned in the past, someone gets backed into a corner and a tactical low-yield nuclear weapon gets used. And I think that when you do that, it opens up the gates to hell. So it's a little scary. That's why, you know, we, all joking aside.

• 46:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's why you bought the radiation suits.

• 46:41David Friedberg?

  And by the way, I don't think this is a high probability. And I'm not joking. I don't think it's a high probability. I think it's like, you know, call it 1% to 2% chance something like this happens. But it's 10x where it was five years ago.

• 46:52Jason Calacanis?

  And the outcome of this is terrifying.

• 46:56David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's such a significant event that it's definitely one to kind of be thoughtful about. And then the other one that I kind of said was tactical is I think there's a risk that Turkey gets challenged to leave NATO.

• 47:07David Friedberg?

  That a lot of what's going on right now where Turkey is siding with Hamas, this has obviously been talked about and rumored about for a long time. There's no real mechanism, by the way, for kicking a member out of NATO. But I'll share with you guys, there's a lot of political commentary that Turkey cannot be a trusted ally. And obviously that now, you know, Turkey is siding with folks who are actual threats to the West. The US incentive is you don't want to see Turkey with the biggest, one of the biggest armies in Europe, run into Russia's arms. You're going to try to keep them in NATO, but there is a real risk that you start to see the first fracturing of NATO happen with Turkey being asked to leave or some negotiation on something that happens this year. So that's one that I keep an eye on that is certainly not top of anyone's mind,

• 47:50David Friedberg?

  but it certainly begins to beg the question of the importance of NATO.

• 47:56Jason Calacanis?

  What do you got, Sacks? Your most contrarian belief?

• 47:59David Sacks?

  Well, can I first just make a comment on last year's pick?

• 48:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 48:03David Sacks?

  If it's okay. So, you know, last year I felt like I was going out on a limb predicting a rift in the bromance between Biden and Zelensky because that relationship seems so tight. And with about four days left in the year, there was this article that came out in Politico that says the Biden administration is quietly shifting its strategy in Ukraine. The article basically says that the administration wants to go on the defensive. And I think pretty clearly it wants a ceasefire and a frozen conflict. It wants to get this conflict sort of out of the way, swept under the rug before the election season really cranks into high gear. And the problem they have is that Zelensky does not want to negotiate a ceasefire with Russia that would involve Ukraine losing territory.

• 48:47David Sacks?

  So there is now a rift between, maybe not Biden himself, but let's say Biden operatives, the Biden administration and what Zelensky wants. And I think this will be a theme in 2024 is how do you rein in Zelensky after you've been telling the public for the last two years that our job is to support whatever Zelensky wants?

• 49:09Jason Calacanis?

  And your prediction for this year?

• 49:10David Sacks?

  So my prediction for this year is that the soft landing gets very bumpy. I think that over the last two months of the year, I think markets got super optimistic. They started pricing in big Fed rate cuts, you know, let's call it one and a half percent. So we had this huge stock market rally in November, December. And I think there's generally a very strong belief that the Fed will be able to pull off the soft landing. I'm not necessarily saying that there's going to be a recession. I just, you know, I feel like I predicted 10 of the last two recessions. So I keep basically predicting recession when there's not one. But I do think that there's just been too much too soon of this euphoria.

• 49:51David Sacks?

  And I just think that this year is going to be a lot bumpier than that, both politically and economically. So I think there's just a little bit too much euphoria and over optimism right now.

• 50:02Jason Calacanis?

  I tempted to go again with American exceptionalism. I think I nailed that last year. America just had an amazing year in 2023 while Xi Jinping made unforced errors and getting rid of capitalism in his country and nobody's starting companies there and stock market falling apart, real estate falling apart. And now he's coming back to America, as we saw when he had a summit with Biden, asking people, please come back and invest again. Huge unforced error. And I think Russia with the huge unforced error, losing hundreds of thousands of their citizens, their young people to a senseless war for no reason, and losing customers in the West like Germany, as you pointed out. Saks, I think American exceptionalism will continue to soar. But I don't want to take the same prediction.

• 50:44Jason Calacanis?

  So I also consider two other options. Apple, making huge gains in generative AI and then streaming services, rightsizing and becoming highly profitable and having a rebound between those two. I think I'm going to go with Apple as my contrarian belief. I think Apple's going to become a player in AI the end of the year. Maybe they reboot Siri, but they're going to figure something out. And I think they're not going to remain on the sidelines when it comes to AI. So I'm going to go with Apple making huge gains in generative AI or AI in general. Maybe a new Siri coming soon. Best performing asset of 2024. In 2023, I went with seed stage investing. I think I'll be proven right in five years. But that's kind of hard to prove in the short term. Chamath, you said cash and the front end

• 51:29Jason Calacanis?

  of the yield curve. Saks, you went with short term T-bills as well. And Friedberg, you went with semiconductor, capital equipment, oil, gas services, pharma, infrastructure. Anybody have thoughts on their predictions from last year?

• 51:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Cash was pretty good at 5%.

• 51:43David Sacks?

  No kidding, right?

• 51:44Jason Calacanis?

  As good as it gets.

• 51:45David Sacks?

  Yeah. There's just not a lot of motivation to enter the markets when you're earning five, five and a half percent risk free.

• 51:51Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so let's do our 2024.

• 51:53David Friedberg?

  Cap equipment up 60%.

• 51:55Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing.

• 51:56David Friedberg?

  It's a good year, good year.

• 51:57Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, well, what do you got? What's your prediction for best performing asset of this coming year?

• 52:01David Friedberg?

  Oh, I took the uranium ETF, U R A. Easy money. Whether it plays out in the next 12 months or over time, I'm not sure. It's just an inevitability. A lot of folks have this bet on this trade on it's. It's kind of an inevitability that we have to see. It's a, it's an index on businesses that benefit from mining and producing nuclear power, mining uranium, producing nuclear power. China is building up 415 nuclear power stations, as we talked about. There's a lot of E S G driven demand and a lot of conflict driven demand, a big shift underway. A lot of deregulatory effort underway globally to try and get nuclear back on track, nuclear power back on track. So these companies are going to benefit from this big macro cycle. So it's a.

• 52:45Jason Calacanis?

  And this is an existing ETF where you're saying you roll one.

• 52:49David Friedberg?

  No, it's an ETF called uranium, but it's uranium. Tracking ETF, U R A is the ticker.

• 52:54Jason Calacanis?

  I like that a lot and sentiment certainly has changed.

• 52:57David Friedberg?

  I do a lot of esoteric general statements. This one, I thought I'd go a little specific.

• 53:01Jason Calacanis?

  I like it. I mean, it's, it's a great prediction and sentiment has certainly changed here in the U S.

• 53:07David Friedberg?

  By the way, that trade has been on, right? So since, I'll just tell you guys. It bottomed out in March of this year at 19 bucks. It's up 50% since then. And in the last five years, you know, it's up 2X. But plenty of room to run if you look at the underlying assets that B T F tracks.

• 53:25Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, what do you got? Best performing asset of 2024. What's your prediction?

• 53:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have to do it with the worst performing asset of 2024 because it's a bit of a spread trade. So.

• 53:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm going to take the public software index, tech stock index, and my short is going to be the private tech software companies, the late-stage, mostly SaaS companies. And I think we've all talked about the reasons why, but I think that the terminal valuations are getting reset in the public markets. I don't think the growth rates are there in the private companies. And so you're going to have a reset on valuation. In many cases, that reset may just be that they stay at the same valuation three years later, even after doubling revenue or more. The problem is you will have taken another 30% dilution between now and then because of all the stock-based comp that these private companies give out.

• 54:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So long the public tech cycle, short the private late-stage tech cycle, expecting a valuation contraction in the latter.

• 54:28Jason Calacanis?

  What do you got, Sacks? What do you think is going to be the best performing asset of 2024?

• 54:31David Sacks?

  Well, I'm really not sure about this, so I would urge nobody to actually trade on this.

• 54:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, this is not investment advice. To be clear, none of this is investment advice.

• 54:42David Sacks?

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not trading on this, on these predictions, so you shouldn't either. My guess here, just a guess, is energy, is energy stocks, energy prices could be among the top performers of 2024, just because there's so much risk of conflict breaking out now and escalating. So I agree with Friedberg that there are huge risks of escalation in the Middle East. The Ukraine war is still going on. I think not enough attention is being paid to what's happening between Venezuela and Guyana. Venezuela is basically attempting to annex Guyana's offshore oil reserves, which are huge. This is basically just pure theft.

• 55:23David Sacks?

  Ethiopia also has tense relationships with a few of its neighbors, and I could easily see there being a war that breaks out between Ethiopia and Egypt, or Ethiopia and...

• 55:37David Sacks?

  Eritrea, and then that could spill over and create further disruption in the Red Sea. We also still have this unresolved issue of the Houthis. And of course, you have neocons braying for war with Iran as they always do. John Bolton just published another piece saying that we had to go to war with Iran. So there's just so many ways that the conflict could escalate and create, I think, a spike in the price of oil.

• 56:01Jason Calacanis?

  All right, you know, I'd love to, in my heart of hearts, I believe the best performing asset will still be seed stage startups. But I'm going to go with consumer comfort services. I think as austerity measures and this, whether we have a soft landing or a recession, it's clear the consumers have spent all their money. So they're going to go for small luxuries like DoorDash, Airbnb, Uber, small things to have great experiences. And I'm talking my book in two out of those three, which I own shares in. But I think consumers are going to keep treating themselves to getting some DoorDash or, you know, getting an Airbnb and going to Japan or whatever it happens to be.

• 56:42Jason Calacanis?

  So consumer comfort services is my pick for the best performing asset of 2024. Worst performing asset, let's go right on to worst performing asset. We're cooking with oil. Worst performing asset, I went with energy, Chamath and tech, energy, junk debt. Saks went with Officaires in San Francisco and Fribourg went with consumer credit. Wow, I think we nailed it in almost all those cases here. What do we got for 2024? Saks, you got a 2024 prediction of worst performing asset? Again, this is not investing advice.

• 57:12David Sacks?

  Yeah, so I'm not going to trade on this, so just take it with a grain of salt. But I would bet against the magnificent seven, just because I believe that what goes up must come down and the hotter they are, the harder they fall. I'm not saying that the magnificent seven are actually going to go down. I'm just saying that the S and P 493 are going to catch up a little bit. So I would book this as a spread trade where I would bet on the S and P 493 over the magnificent seven, because again, I just think that there's got to be some catching up here. And the huge gains made by the magnificent seven were really based on story, you know, based on AI.

• 57:54David Sacks?

  And I don't see why those gains should be limited to the magnificent seven if AI is going to play such a big role in the economy.

• 58:04Jason Calacanis?

  Chama, I too, what you predicted earlier about OpenAI losing some value, my worst performing asset in 2024 is LLM startups. I believe they've been massively overvalued and I believe open source is making an incredible run at them. And I think they're going to hit parity. And there's too many players. This is like having 15 search engines or 20 Amazons. There's just too many players and there's too much parity. The prices make no sense. And I think they're all going to come down by, you know, 50, 60, 70, 80% in terms of their valuations. That won't get marked in their books, but that will be the reality of where their stocks will trade on the private markets. Freeberg, what's your worst performing asset?

• 58:43David Friedberg?

  Just based on what I shared earlier, I would go short vertical SaaS, vertical software companies and long cloud providers that have AI tools and platforms that will allow enterprises to build custom applications in a low cost, low code way. And so you could obviously pick the companies that would go in that bucket, go long those cloud bucket and go short the vertical bucket.

• 59:09David Sacks?

  Is there like a per seat price threshold that you think would kind of demarcate the companies that you think are at risk? In other words, like I invest in plenty of SaaS companies that sell seats at 5, 10 bucks per seat per month. I'm just like very skeptical.

• 59:26David Friedberg?

  They're not going anywhere.

• 59:28David Sacks?

  That it's worth an enterprise's while to recreate that software?

• 59:31David Friedberg?

  No. And so I'll give you an example that there's a vertical software provider. We're paying five grand per seat per year right now. And we look at that and we're like, okay, it's basically a data management tool for our particular vertical. Let's just go recreate that and did it very quickly, very low cost and we're going to replace it up.

• 59:55David Friedberg?

  Cut that out. I don't want to say that, but yeah.

• 59:58Jason Calacanis?

  Is it?

• 59:59David Friedberg?

  So it's like, you know, very specific, very expensive. But I mean, Sack, you could probably see the same thing happen in sales CRM type tools that are obviously also very expensive and

• 1:00:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How much is a day note receipt? How much do you pay?

• 1:00:12David Friedberg?

  Five grand. Five grand a year.

• 1:00:14David Sacks?

  Five grand per year. So that's basically

• 1:00:16David Friedberg?

  And every employee's on it.

• 1:00:17David Sacks?

  Over $400 a seat per month.

• 1:00:19David Friedberg?

  We have like 100 employees. So we're paying like 500 grand. And so one of our software engineers is like, this spins up a replacement for it. We're going to roll it out in Q1.

• 1:00:29David Sacks?

  Okay. So is there, is there like a per seat per month price that you think starts to where it doesn't work? Is it 50 bucks? What is the number?

• 1:00:37David Friedberg?

  I, I, I mean, I do the math, but yeah, it shouldn't be in the range that it's at for sure. But a lot of these guys where they had a monopoly and it wasn't worth the company's time to try and invest in software at the price point that they were charging, they found a market. Now the market has to compress. So I'm not saying that the companies go away, but I do think pricing compression is going to hurt these businesses a lot.

• 1:00:55Jason Calacanis?

  If you pay, could pay 50,000 for the same software instead of 500, you would not have spun it up yourself. So there is a reasonable number between those two.

• 1:01:02David Friedberg?

  Correct.

• 1:01:03Jason Calacanis?

  And that reasonable number might be 250 or something.

• 1:01:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But here's the thing that we need to also factor in, which is that Friedberg's companies, that engineer could also then just release that product for everybody else to use at 10 cents. And everybody else will then use it because it'll be good enough and that, and that 80% solution will take over the, will take over the market.

• 1:01:25David Friedberg?

  Yeah, that's my point. There's going to be pricing compression.

• 1:01:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is the thing, like, I think that people underestimate how deflationary this whole thing is. It's like,

• 1:01:30David Friedberg?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's like two out of three orders of magnitude more deflationary than people have any inkling of.

• 1:01:36David Friedberg?

  Yep.

• 1:01:37Jason Calacanis?

  Interestingly, I had David Handmar Hansen on This Week in Startups and they're releasing something called once.com where they're going to charge for software one time like we used to do. And their first product is a Slack killer. And so the idea of paying per seat for Slack, what they're planning to do is just charge you, you know, 85. No, you find a hosting company. So

• 1:01:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You host it.

• 1:01:59David Friedberg?

  Okay, so it's like old school. It's old school.

• 1:02:01David Sacks?

  It's old school on-prem software.

• 1:02:03David Friedberg?

  On-prem and then you pay you pay an upgrade fee when you upgrade the software, basically.

• 1:02:07Jason Calacanis?

  I think they're gonna probably do.

• 1:02:08David Sacks?

  Paying them like a maintenance percentage. That's the way.

• 1:02:10David Friedberg?

  Yeah, just so you got to know, in old school enterprise software, right, the pricing model was the revenue model was always built that when you did a sale, you would make on average 20% of the revenue per year in update fees. And so that and then everything switched to SaaS, which would just continue.

• 1:02:25David Sacks?

  Support, support, maintenance, all that kind of stuff. So it's never, they say it's one time. It's one time for the software, but if you want to stay up to date and get support and patches and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:02:37David Friedberg?

  Yeah, and the old school enterprise software model was always like figure 20% of the install cost.

• 1:02:42David Sacks?

  Right. And by the way, this is one of the reasons why Oracle made so much money is they did a roll up of all these old school on-prem software companies that weren't growing, but the maintenance fees were just rolling in forever.

• 1:02:55David Friedberg?

  Yep.

• 1:02:55David Sacks?

  And they rolled all that stuff up.

• 1:02:57Jason Calacanis?

  And then probably raised the fees. I mean, for me, you know, when you have a 20 person company, 50 person company, the Slack fees don't seem like a big deal. But when you get to, you know, when you're spending 500,000 or a million dollars a year on something like Slack, you know, then maybe you would consider other options. And I know people at large organizations that have done that because there's an open source competitor to it. So that does exist in the world. Okay.

• 1:03:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But what Freeburg is bringing up is like, why would you support 500,000 to million dollar a year OpEx for software? I mean, can you really put a model together that shows that that's somehow accretive to you, especially if you're a money losing startup? It just doesn't make any logical sense. I understand that it happens.

• 1:03:39David Friedberg?

  And the fact that that software SaaS companies have been able to make 80 to 90% margins and grow on that. It has created the best business model in history. But I think what may become apparent now is that the SaaS business model is really a temporary phenomenon that existed between ubiquity of the internet and the development of AI and low cost, low code tools for developing software.

• 1:04:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, the dirt, it was an arbitrage of the dearth of engineers. It was the gross margin that was correlated to the lack of engineers.

• 1:04:07David Friedberg?

  Now that the work that software engineers could have done has been automated into software itself, you are going to see a lot of that arbitrage.

• 1:04:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Say differently, Freeburg. You could say like the number of engineers has now. Multiplied by a million fold.

• 1:04:21David Friedberg?

  That's right. And now everyone has them available.

• 1:04:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So then the gross margins were not going to be 90%. The gross margins may be 30%.

• 1:04:28David Friedberg?

  Right. And so, so everything gets competed away and pricing goes down, pricing gets compressed. And that's why this is a big macro trend for me. Like I'm, and I'm just seeing it across every company. Everyone's rethinking whether or not to pay these fees for all different types of software tools.

• 1:04:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By the way, the, the part of that, which is economically true is if you look at every other category in the economy and you look at the gross margin profile of businesses that are not pure play tech. We have grown up and we've monetized this belief that tech companies not only can start at 80 to 90%, but stay there indefinitely.

• 1:05:01David Friedberg?

  Stay there. Yeah. They should be at 40%.

• 1:05:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Not even. Every other market can start off in the 50, 60, 70% when they're nascent, but capitalism competes away those margins down to 30 to 40%.

• 1:05:12David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:05:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And a best in class business generates 20 to 25% EBITDA margins on a sustained basis.

• 1:05:18David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So if you believe that the average best run company is a 35% gross margin business with 20 to 25% free cash flow margins. Tech stocks have a long way to go down.

• 1:05:29David Friedberg?

  Exactly. Exactly. Software, software companies. Yeah.

• 1:05:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Software companies.

• 1:05:34Jason Calacanis?

  But if it's priced below the cost of you rebuilding it, then you're not, you're just, it's a buyer.

• 1:05:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no. But Jason, the point is, the point is like when somebody does that, so Friedberg's company did that work. He doesn't even need to need, want to make a profit from that software to just say, anybody else can use this. I have an auto GPT that will basically configure myself to you if you want to use it. And now that N plus first company who's starting up with two or three people can now raise an order of magnitude less money and will write a GPT that connects to his and now has this. So this is my point where like it just, it's, it's, it's just a race to the bottom.

• 1:06:14David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:14Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Last year, for our most anticipated trend, Chamath and I both picked austerity. Feels like that came to fruition.

• 1:06:22David Sacks?

  You're kidding, right?

• 1:06:25David Friedberg?

  We did not see any austerity.

• 1:06:26David Sacks?

  We added like two trillion to the debt.

• 1:06:29Jason Calacanis?

  I was talking about.

• 1:06:30David Sacks?

  Thirty-four trillion.

• 1:06:31Jason Calacanis?

  I was talking about consumers and companies and individuals.

• 1:06:34David Sacks?

  Consumers didn't, didn't cut either. I mean, they kept spending and in fact, credit card debt is now at the highest level it's ever been. So where's the austerity?

• 1:06:44Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's happening right now where people are maxed out. You're already starting to see it happen with travel and some of those areas, but yeah, we could be off by six months on this one. Uh, Sack, you said Trump's influence in the GOP wanes.

• 1:06:57David Sacks?

  That was definitely wrong.

• 1:06:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. That was wishful thinking. Friedberg, cell gene therapy.

• 1:07:02David Sacks?

  Wishful for you.

• 1:07:03Jason Calacanis?

  Wishful for you too.

• 1:07:05David Sacks?

  No, that's true. I mean, I.

• 1:07:06Jason Calacanis?

  Over and over again. You don't want him as your candidate.

• 1:07:08David Sacks?

  Well, I can explain that. I mean, at the end of 2022, we had that election that was supposed to be a red wave and it turned into a red puddle. Remember that?

• 1:07:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it was a loser.

• 1:07:17David Sacks?

  Yeah, it was a big loser for the GOP and a lot of the candidates, I'd say in particular, the candidates who had been endorsed and supported by Trump ended up losing, not doing very well. So, and then by contrast, it seemed like the one part of the country where the Republicans had done incredibly well was in Florida, where obviously DeSantis won by like 20 points and added seats to their majority in the legislature. So it seemed like going into the year that DeSantis was kind of the heir apparent and Trump's influence would wane. But like you said, that may have been wishful thinking. It's clearly not what's happened. But a big part of the reason why

• 1:07:56David Sacks?

  Trump's influence is greater than ever is because of all this lawfare, all these indictments against him and this prosecution and persecution of him by Biden and his minions. It's really, I think, galvanized the base to support Trump.

• 1:08:10Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, well, you last year, you said cell gene therapy becoming more mainstream. How did that one pan out? Your prediction, most anticipated trend?

• 1:08:19David Friedberg?

  Better about mainstream, but I mean, we're seeing, we've seen more approvals this year. It's been good. I mean, steady, steady pace of progress.

• 1:08:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I saw the sickle cell product come out.

• 1:08:28David Friedberg?

  Sickle cell came to market. Yep. There's a few more that got approved. So. In cell therapy, so it's great. And we're seeing good progress there. And I remember there's like over a thousand in clinicals. So there's this tidal wave coming to market soon of cell and gene therapies. They're going to have a profound effect on a lot of disease conditions. So really exciting.

• 1:08:46Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, you want to continue and tell us what your most anticipated trend of this year is?

• 1:08:49David Friedberg?

  So this year, I'm really excited based on the progress we've seen in 2023 of predictive models, AI-driven discovery of novel molecules, materials, and methods of production in biopharma, in chemical engineering, lots of new materials and new drugs that are actually coming out of software, not coming out of brute force, wet lab discovery processing. And then we're also seeing these really amazing generative systems on production processes in chemistry that are going to unlock all of these new products and drop costs. Going back to the deflationary point, not only does this introduce new products into the world that are going

• 1:09:31David Friedberg?

  to benefit humanity, but it reduces the cost of making them and reduces the footprint of making them. So there's a lot of great benefit coming from these predictive modeling tools that's starting to percolate its way into these industries. So I'm excited about seeing what comes to market this year. I'm sure we're going to have the science corner at some point this year that says, look at this amazing new thing that was discovered in software and it works. And it's going to be really cool.

• 1:09:53Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. What do you got, Chamath, for your most anticipated trend of 2024? What are you most anticipating, Chamath?

• 1:09:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think this is the most important year for Bitcoin that has ever existed. We are probably days away from a series of ETFs being approved. And so this is the moment for Bitcoin to, to use that old term, cross the chasm and really see mainstream adoption, where our parents and our grandparents understand what it is, can buy it, and then do buy it. And I think that If all of this comes to pass, Bitcoin will be a part of the traditional financial lexicon by the end of 2024. So that is my most anticipated trend of the year.

• 1:10:42Jason Calacanis?

  What do you got, Sacks, for your most anticipated trend of the year, Sacks?

• 1:10:46David Sacks?

  What you're saying is a pretty good one. I think there's a version of that same thing in AI. I mean, it's hard to know exactly what all the advancements are going to be in AI, but, you know, when we look back on it in five or 10 years, it's going to be pretty clear that the exponential pace of advancement in AI continued. And so I can't say exactly what those breakthroughs are going to be this year, but there certainly are going to be some. And I think we'll see those innovations continue to percolate down to more and more of the average sort of mainstream consumer.

• 1:11:19Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks, once again, you and I are simpatico. I picked my most anticipated trend of 2024 as efficiency in the form of AI advances and outsourcing. Basically, a lot of Americans don't want to work, or they want to work from home, or they want high salaries. We have record low unemployment, thanks to Biden. I'm joking. But all of this is forcing people to build robots, AI, and software to route around, you know, and make things more efficient. And I think the number one trend I'm seeing from startups, and they tend to adopt this stuff early, is outsourcing to all other geographies around the world for work, because

• 1:12:00Jason Calacanis?

  it's so easy. Once you have a work from home philosophy or paradigm at your company, well, adding somebody from Portugal, Manila, Argentina, Canada, is the same as adding somebody from outside of New York City, or Silicon Valley, or LA. But you can do so at a third of the price for somebody maybe who really wants the work. And so I think efficiency is my most anticipated trend, but in the form of AI and outsourcing. Okay. Now, media. Everybody loves when we do our most anticipated media.

• 1:12:34Jason Calacanis?

  For 2024, for last year, I had Oppenheimer. Wow, that was great. Chamath, you had Dune Part Two. That was delayed. Sax, you also had Oppenheimer. What did you think of Oppenheimer, Sax? Did it deliver for you? Have you seen it?

• 1:12:49David Sacks?

  I thought it was good, not great. It was very long. It kind of went on and on.

• 1:12:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54David Sacks?

  It's not a movie I need to see a second time. Let's put it that way.

• 1:12:56Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. And Friedberg, you said generative AI-based media. For this year, I'm, I have to confess, I have inside information. So my prediction is going to be the winner. It turns out our favorite DJ is dropping a new album in 2024, and I got a release track. So my most anticipated media, I'll just play the unreleased track here.

• 1:13:22David Sacks?

  What is this? According to NASA, there's a new look at Uranus.

• 1:13:27David Sacks?

  Uranus. Uranus.

• 1:13:32Jason Calacanis?

  Talk about my anus.

• 1:13:34David Sacks?

  Uranus. Uranus. Is this Young Spielberg?

• 1:13:38Jason Calacanis?

  This is Young Spielberg. Coming at you, the summer jam of the year.

• 1:13:46Speaker 04

  How is your colonos?

• 1:13:47Jason Calacanis?

  It's a banger. Well, there it is. Talk about my anus. Coming at you.

• 1:13:53David Sacks?

  That was a banger. He obviously likes the deep bass of my voice.

• 1:13:57Jason Calacanis?

  He does like the deep bass of your voice in his anus, yes. So that's a banger. That's going to be, I think, the, that's going to carry, it's going to be the summer anthem. The new album from Young Spielberg dropping, that's the lead title track, Uranus, coming at you. I also am looking forward to Gladiator Two is coming out, Ridley Scott. Lucius, the nephew of Commodus, is a grown man. It's going to be awesome, I hope. And Netflix's Three Body Problem, if you haven't read the books, they're great. And that's being done by the Game of Thrones guys. And that's going to be awesome.

• 1:14:30David Sacks?

  D and D.

• 1:14:32Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, Three Body Problem Gladiator.

• 1:14:33David Sacks?

  Once the books ran out, they were kinda.

• 1:14:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37David Sacks?

  They were kinda on their own there and the show kinda declined.

• 1:14:40Jason Calacanis?

  It was a terrible last season. In this case, the Three Body Problem is a complete series and it's it's mind blowing in terms of its epicness. Sax, what's your most anticipated media of 2024? Is there a Putin biography coming out? Is it Alex Jones's biography 10 part series on Netflix?

• 1:14:58David Sacks?

  None of that.

• 1:14:58Jason Calacanis?

  What are you looking forward to?

• 1:15:00David Sacks?

  Well, I I agree with you about Gladiator 2. We actually have similar taste in in movies. I'm also looking forward to House of the Dragon, season two.

• 1:15:06Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:15:07David Sacks?

  But one project I will give a little plug to is Jimmy Sony's book, The Founders, which is the story of PayPal and the entrepreneurs who shaped Silicon Valley.

• 1:15:17Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:15:18David Sacks?

  That came out in 2022. The reason I'm mentioning it is because I optioned this book along with Jack Selby, who's another PayPal mafia alum who has a film company. And so we've optioned this and we have just made a deal with Drake's company called Dream Crew to turn this into some sort of television series. Could be done as a docu.

• 1:15:39Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, did you say Drake, the musician Drake?

• 1:15:41David Sacks?

  Yeah. He actually has a very successful production company called Dream Crew. They're the producers of Euphoria, which is this huge hit.

• 1:15:48Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:15:48David Sacks?

  On HBO.

• 1:15:49Jason Calacanis?

  Terrifying.

• 1:15:50David Sacks?

  So they've decided to, it is kind of a terrifying show.

• 1:15:53Jason Calacanis?

  If you have kids, it's terrifying.

• 1:15:54David Sacks?

  It is terrifying. Incredible show, terrifying. It's an incredible show, but terrifying. And yeah, it is scary. In any event, it's a big hit. So they produce a lot of not just music, but television content. They're very interested in the story. And so we're partnering with them to create a TV show. So hopefully that comes together this year.

• 1:16:13Jason Calacanis?

  Are you in production this year on it or is it?

• 1:16:14David Sacks?

  No, it's going to go into development this year and then hopefully. You get any EP credits, Sax? Yeah. Oh, of course.

• 1:16:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How much does it cost for the rest of us to get EP credits?

• 1:16:23Jason Calacanis?

  Fifty, fifty grand. Yeah.

• 1:16:26David Sacks?

  Is it a fifty grander or is it?

• 1:16:28Jason Calacanis?

  A little.

• 1:16:29David Sacks?

  This is, this is, uh, this is gonna be an expensive one.

• 1:16:32Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, really? Well, who's your dream? Is it HBO as a dream or Netflix?

• 1:16:36David Sacks?

  Yeah, who funds production? Ultimately, a studio would make this.

• 1:16:39Jason Calacanis?

  Right. You would want HBO or Netflix, I take it? Those are the top two in terms of making high-quality stuff?

• 1:16:44David Sacks?

  They'd be really good, yeah. It doesn't have to be those two, but they'd be good. It could be Amazon Prime. I mean, there's a lot of these.

• 1:16:49Jason Calacanis?

  And who are you hoping plays a young Sax? Who would play a young Sax?

• 1:16:54David Friedberg?

  Good question.

• 1:16:55David Sacks?

  That's a good question.

• 1:16:56Jason Calacanis?

  Who would play a young David Sax?

• 1:16:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What's the name of the guy that's dating Zendaya? What's his name? Tom Holland? How about that? Tom Holland?

• 1:17:04David Sacks?

  Oh, Peter Parker.

• 1:17:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Peter Parker, yeah.

• 1:17:07Jason Calacanis?

  How about Millie Bobby Brown for you?

• 1:17:08David Friedberg?

  Only one guy can play a young Sax, that it would be Ryan Gosling.

• 1:17:12David Sacks?

  Well, you guys are really shooting the moon with this.

• 1:17:15Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm. Tom Holland's interesting.

• 1:17:17David Friedberg?

  Jake Els is busy on the internet right now. He's gonna give you a-

• 1:17:19Jason Calacanis?

  No, I'm looking. I'm looking on the internet for a young actor to play you Sax. Well, we'll let the audience come back to that.

• 1:17:24David Friedberg?

  Yeah, let the audience decide who plays a young Sax.

• 1:17:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Chav, are you looking forward to anything in media in 2024? Did you have anything for us to look out for?

• 1:17:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jimmy Donaldson, Mr. Beast, added 100 million subscribers on YouTube in 2023. More than two times the next largest channel. And if you watch his content, Mr. Beast's channel, it's incredible. And that has become event-based viewing now for hundreds of millions of people. So I am really excited to see what production value gets cranked out in 2024 from these guys. But my, that's my most anticipated media is Mr. Beast.

• 1:18:06Jason Calacanis?

  And Free Bird?

• 1:18:08Jason Calacanis?

  You got anything you're looking forward to in the media space in 2024?

• 1:18:12David Friedberg?

  I mean, I put AI-generated news, which I think has become like an interesting. Have you guys seen these? Where there's like a broadcaster that just tells you the news and they're like naked? I haven't seen that, no.

• 1:18:24Jason Calacanis?

  That was the name in the early days of theater, right? Wasn't there like naked news or something? No, that was like a meme from the-

• 1:18:31David Friedberg?

  News. That was like naked news where like these people would be like in, in-

• 1:18:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The process of undressing as they, as they like read the news. It was so stupid.

• 1:18:40David Friedberg?

  Oh, really?

• 1:18:40Jason Calacanis?

  It was really dumb, but I, it, it did capture people's imagination. Naked news. You could basically watch newscasters naked, read the news.

• 1:18:48David Friedberg?

  I do think you're going to see a lot of this real time generative video that's going to take as its input, uh, news feeds and develop some understanding and then present it back to you in whatever visual format you want. And so you'll have your own personal newscaster presenting you the stuff that's interesting and be like, no, no, tell me less about the Middle East. Tell me more about Wall Street. Tell me more about tech. And you can basically interact with it and curate your own personal news feed, whether that's through video or through text or through audio, you can have it presented to you any way you want. So I'm really excited for the day that that happens. So I don't have to doom scroll through Twitter all the time to get news and I can have, you know, a personally curated newscaster.

• 1:19:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  To your point, one of the things that, one of the tasks that I had this year was to kind of like take a model and learn how to fine tune it. And Sunny and I, we took, uh, stable diffusion and there's a mod to it called juggernaut XL, which basically produces no, the most beautiful people you've ever seen. Like under any boundary condition, it doesn't matter what prompt you give.

• 1:19:48Jason Calacanis?

  Handsome.

• 1:19:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The people that it generates are the most stunningly symmetrically beautiful people. And all it's going to take to your point is to just put this stuff together next year and you'll have these people that capture your attention and can keep your attention and they'll tell you the news or whatever.

• 1:20:05David Friedberg?

  And you could just say skip. You can say, tell me more. You can say, go back. You could say, hey, I want to hear more, like double click on that story and interact with it. It's going to be incredible. I do think it's, it's going to happen in 2024 where a series of products will come out that start to look like this and it'll get.

• 1:20:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In terms of objective news, if that, as they're telling the news, you can have another agent that's basically scoring it and telling you how biased it is.

• 1:20:29David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By the way, I'll tell you a crazy story. Yesterday, after Jason, Jason took Nat and I out yesterday, we had an epic day. It was incredible.

• 1:20:37Jason Calacanis?

  It was fun. Good times.

• 1:20:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was totally gassed skiing. And so I took a nap and I fell asleep for like 40 minutes and I woke up and I turned on the TV and I watched CNN. For 20 minutes. Have you guys watched CNN? I can't watch more than a minute. It is so bad. It is for stupid.

• 1:20:54Jason Calacanis?

  All network news. Yeah.

• 1:20:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, it's really bad, Jason. Like how biased it is and just how inaccurate it is. If you were to watch it for an hour a day, you would have this totally lopsided view of what's going on in the world that is completely not accurate. But here's my, here's my point. There's nobody fact checking CNN, just like there's nobody really fact checking Fox News. But my thought is these models and these AI tools should be the thing that presents objective news. And then actually just tells the truth.

• 1:21:21David Friedberg?

  I disagree. I think what will happen is people will bias this, the, the delivery to what they want to hear. And you'll end up having something that's going to become more of an echo chamber for you. I want to hear more about how X, Y, or Z is so great. I want to hear less about the stuff that I don't agree with. And you're going to curate your news to exactly what's happened with social media. So I don't know if that's necessarily how this will evolve, because people don't like to hear what they don't believe or what they don't already know.

• 1:21:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You mean they don't want to hear the truth? Yeah.

• 1:21:46Jason Calacanis?

  They want to hear the truth that speaks to them, their version of the truth.

• 1:21:49David Friedberg?

  They want to be emotionally titillated, you know?

• 1:21:51Jason Calacanis?

  It's about time I let you guys know that we ran an experiment right now, Chamath and Friedberg. I did this with Saks's permission, but Saks's participation here today was actually his AI. This is an AI version of Saks that we programmed. AI Saks, can you reveal yourself and what training data went into this version of AI Saks? Can you, can you give us something about your training data? AI Saks, what training data was used?

• 1:22:17David Sacks?

  If this is a bit you want to do, you're going to have to give me more of a heads up.

• 1:22:22Jason Calacanis?

  That would be hilarious though, if we actually trained like a Saks model and we had him come on and we tried to fool the audience.

• 1:22:28David Friedberg?

  Can we just do a quick roundtable? If you guys were to summarize your, in one word or two words, your emotional condition for 2024, what would it be? Like, how are you feeling going into 2024? Sacks?

• 1:22:40David Sacks?

  Oh, I feel fine, but if I were to describe 24 in one word, I would say the year's going to be turbulent.

• 1:22:46David Friedberg?

  Turbulent?

• 1:22:47David Sacks?

  But I feel, I feel level. That's not me, but I feel like the world's going to be very turbulent.

• 1:22:51David Friedberg?

  Um. Jekel?

• 1:22:53Jason Calacanis?

  Kind of exhilarated, enthusiastic about 2024. It feels like a lot of the cleanup work, you know, that we had to do in 20. Twenty three, twenty twenty two, like I feel like a lot of that's we've worked through it and I'm finding a lot of optimistic. So I guess I would be, you know, enthusiastic and optimistic about twenty twenty four. I'm really excited to go to work and create. I want to create some new things in twenty twenty four. I feel very creative, creative.

• 1:23:22David Friedberg?

  Yeah, yeah, creative.

• 1:23:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would say cautious and pensive. I think that just a lot of stuff is changing underfoot and I'm personally not excited to make a bunch of decisions because I worry that those decisions will have to be remade or unmade even nine or 10 months later. So I I'm just kind of like very

• 1:23:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  pensive. I'm like, wow, a lot of stuff can change, will change, even just like, you know, and then Free Bird knows this, but like, you know, there's like some deals underfoot that like I think for the industry as a lot like as a whole are just really meaningful things. And so to do stuff right now, Free Bird, makes me very anxious. So

• 1:24:09David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:24:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm really cautious and pensive.

• 1:24:13David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:24:14Jason Calacanis?

  Where are you at, Free Bird?

• 1:24:16David Friedberg?

  I'm excited. I'm enjoying my new job as CEO at O-Hollow. There's so much cool stuff happening. I'm personally excited about it. So this is the most excited I've felt in many years in terms of my my work. And then I would and I'm really excited to share what we've done next year, which I'll or earlier this year, which I'll do. I'll do it on the show first, obviously. And then looking outside of the world, I'm just a little cautious. I'm a little nervous. I think there's a like, there's still a lot of tinderboxes out there. So I mean, you guys know, like, we joke about it, but I do think there's these like little mousetraps that can get set off and then they set off all the other mousetraps. So there's a couple couple of those things out there that I'm a little nervous about.

• 1:24:52Jason Calacanis?

  But in the course of history, aren't there always conflicts in the world? And like, do you try to like, put them on a spectrum of like, there's always going to be conflict? There's always going to be?

• 1:25:00David Friedberg?

  There's never been this much debt in the world. And that's what makes me so nervous. Like, yeah, no, and I think they're related. So actual conflict relates to the debt load.

• 1:25:10David Friedberg?

  And that's why I'm so nervous because we've never been, you can't keep your societal fabric together if you have a lot of debt and you can't grow your economy. Those are two, that's a simple fact. And so that leads naturally to finding points of conflict with other nations and other places because, you know, you look for conflict elsewhere.

• 1:25:29Jason Calacanis?

  There's a, there's a good chance that will, the Republicans will force some momentary temporary budget cuts in this next

• 1:25:37David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Jason Calacanis?

  Couple of weeks shutdown.

• 1:25:39David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:40Jason Calacanis?

  Seventeen.

• 1:25:41David Friedberg?

  Two weeks away. Yeah.

• 1:25:42David Sacks?

  Yeah. It's pretty interesting. Under the terms of the debt ceiling increase that they agreed to last year, they're supposed to all agree on a new budget. And if they don't, then there's a 1% cut across the board on discretionary spending that goes into effect.

• 1:25:56David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:25:57David Sacks?

  If I were the Republicans, why agree to a deal? You're never gonna do better than a 1% cut in discretionary spending. If you care about austerity or just having any kind of reason in our spending, just take the 1% cut.

• 1:26:10David Friedberg?

  Yep.

• 1:26:11David Sacks?

  Just don't agree to anything.

• 1:26:12David Friedberg?

  Agreed. That's the most likely path, right? At this point?

• 1:26:14David Sacks?

  I hope so. And, you know, 1% cut, cut is a rounding error, but the Washington elites are gonna shriek like crazy over that. I mean, they're gonna

• 1:26:22David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:23David Sacks?

  squeal over this miniscule cut like we were slashing their budgets.

• 1:26:27David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:26:28David Sacks?

  But that's all the more reason to do it, I think.

• 1:26:30David Friedberg?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:26:31Jason Calacanis?

  They're cutting their fingernail and they're crying. It's like just

• 1:26:33David Sacks?

  Totally. They're gonna act like we cut off their arm when they got like a fingernail clip.

• 1:26:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's nothing.

• 1:26:40David Friedberg?

  All right, I gotta run.

• 1:26:41Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. What an amazing 2023 we had. Here's to a great 2024. You got your prediction show and we'll be back with more news and a, and a classic all in episode next week. Have a great new year and we wish you all the best in 2024.

• 1:26:55David Sacks?

  Love you, boys.

• 1:26:56Jason Calacanis?

  Back at you.

• 1:26:57David Sacks?

  Bye bye.

• 1:26:58Speaker 04

  We'll let your winners ride.

• 1:27:01Jason Calacanis?

  Rain Man David's out.

• 1:27:04Speaker 04

  And it said, we open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with them. Love you, West Coast. Queen of Kinoa. I'm going on it.

• 1:27:15Speaker 04

  What your winners want?

• 1:27:19Speaker 04

  Besties are gone. That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

• 1:27:26Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 1:27:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just pissed. It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

• 1:27:37Speaker 04

  What your be? What your be? What your feet? Be? What? We need to get merch. Besties are back.