2025 Predictions with bestie Gavin Baker

(0:00) The Besties welcome Gavin Baker and recap ski week! (5:38) Biggest Political Winner (9:26) Biggest Political Loser (17:34) Biggest Business Winner (32:43) Biggest Business Loser (46:54) Biggest Business Deal (57:04) Most Contrarian Belief (1:12:59) Best Performing Asset (1:22:56) Worst Performing Asset (1:30:19) Most Anticipated Trend (1:38:59) Most Anticipated Media (1:43:03) Super Predictions (1:46:50) Bonus: Drones, UFOs, and more Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow Gavin Baker: https://x.com/GavinSBaker Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://shop.unitree.com/products/unitree-go2 https://shop.unitree.com/products/unitree-g1 https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/state-of-crypto-report-2024 https://x.com/chamath/status/1873144394100187263 https://polymarket.com/event/will-openai-become-a-for-profit-business-before-april-2025

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  Welcome back to the All In Podcast, everybody. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. I'll put in a bunch of plugs for the projects I'm working on throughout the show to annoy my co-hosts and continue the grift, but it is 2025 and we are doing our Bestie Awards. It's going to be amazing today. We've got so much to do. Today with us again, for the second time, a truly amazing bestie, Gavin Baker from Atreides Capital. Am I correct? Is it Atreides Capital?

• 0:25Gavin Baker?

  Atreides Management.

• 0:28Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Atreides Management. Okay, and Just call it House Atreides. Oh, no, let's not get him in trouble. I pay.

• 0:37Jason Calacanis?

  Gavin, welcome back to the program. Let us know, just briefly, what does Atreides do?

• 0:41Gavin Baker?

  Thanks for having me here, Jason, Chamath, and Dave. Atreides, we're a crossover firm. We invest publicly and privately in consumer intec, and we go from Series A to mega cap.

• 0:55Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Okay, so you are a capital allocator. You place bets on technology on the most important new companies in the world. We'll get into that. And this is our prediction show. We did our Bestie Awards.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  How big is your firm, Gavin?

• 1:09Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you just met the guy, Friedberg. You don't just ask him how big his firm is.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  The audience wants to know, is this guy a player? Like, what's the deal?

• 1:15Jason Calacanis?

  Tell us.

• 1:16Gavin Baker?

  Roughly $4 billion.

• 1:18Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, all right. So that's about a half an inch bigger than Chamath. He's really worried now.

• 1:25Jason Calacanis?

  Not that he's a size queen or anything.

• 1:43Jason Calacanis?

  We're going to do a really great prediction show today, and we're going to do some super predictions this year. Each bestie gets to make a super prediction or two during the show, and we're going to take those super predictions, Chamath, and we're going to put them on Polymarket. Yes, that's right. If you don't know Polymarket, it's a prediction market where people can place a wager, a bet, an investment in one or the other side, and they're paying us. Is my image good? It feels like it's blurry. It's a little blurry. That's the avalanche coming. And so I guess, is that the MAGA avalanche? What is this avalanche? Is that people streaming across the border? What's the metaphor here? Chamath? Is that the huge orgasm that you're about to lay down in 2025 rocking the

• 2:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, my friend, no, no. This is a shout out to my friend Ruben Oslund, who's the director of a bunch of really amazing movies, including the one behind me, Force Measure.

• 2:38Jason Calacanis?

  There you go. All right. We did an amazing partnership with Polymarket. Friedberg, you want to detail the partnership in some way? I think you helped work on it.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Well, we obviously have talked to Shane at Polymarket for some time, and we set up a deal with them where we could put our own markets up on the, on the site. So we're going to talk about a couple of our predictions this year, and then Polymarket will post them up on, on their site and people can, can trade them, obviously X U S. And we're really excited about it because it'll allow us to kind of track how we're doing and give us the opportunity on an ongoing basis to create markets. So there'll be an all in section on Polymarket where you can kind of go in and see the all in market. It's gonna be really cool.

• 3:16Jason Calacanis?

  Awesome. Fantastic. And so we just got, we're all wrapping up our ski trip here. Nick, I understand there was some footage, some found footage from the besties skiing. Is that true? Oh, here we go. Look at this. Here I come down the mountain. Gavin, I want you to rate everybody skiing. Here I come.

• 3:36Gavin Baker?

  Looking great.

• 3:37Jason Calacanis?

  There comes Chamath, looking good. And then here comes somebody, I think the technical term Joe Lonsdale does for that third person is a beep beep. Okay, here we go. And look at this technique coming down. Look at Chamath. Chamath, you really advanced this last season. Look at him cutting those S turns, Gavin. What do you think?

• 3:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Listen to me. I, I made a very strategic decision to stop snowboarding so I could learn to ski with my kids. It is so hard to learn how to do something in your 40s. No? I mean, if you've never done it. But I do appreciate what you and your brother did for me last season. I learned a couple of things. So it's been my third.

• 4:15Jason Calacanis?

  You're out there with the Black Bomber.

• 4:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My third season was great.

• 4:19Jason Calacanis?

  I am absolutely amazed at the progress you're making. Friedberg, I'm amazed you made it onto the mountain. You, you were out there a number of days. You're getting it done.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  I needed new boots and I tore my MCL last season. So I'm in it got really tweaked when I went out there, but I'm good. It was great. I had a lot of fun. I mean, I think I skied four days. Yeah.

• 4:37Jason Calacanis?

  You skied four days. Okay. I finished my 16th day yesterday, but I took today off just to get prepared. Yeah, I got 16. I do the executive program Gavin. I go out for an hour and a half to three hours, zip, zip, zip, 10 runs and I'm done.

• 4:48Gavin Baker?

  I only ski in the morning.

• 4:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's the way to do it.

• 4:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Same, same, same, same. And end at 12:15, have lunch, relax, get a little work done.

• 4:57Gavin Baker?

  Need a healthy, healthy mix of apres ski and ski.

• 5:00Jason Calacanis?

  Gavin, how would you compare yourself to what you just witnessed in that video? Your skiing ability, where would you rank yourself? Clearly it's me, Chamath, Friedberg in that ranking. Where would you live in the ranking?

• 5:11Gavin Baker?

  I, well, I would say I'd make two observations. First, like I'm in the bottom percentile in terms of natural athleticism, but I do have many, many thousands of hours skiing.

• 5:21Jason Calacanis?

  Great.

• 5:23Gavin Baker?

  And I would just leave, I would just leave it at that. Yes.

• 5:26Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay. Well, then we'll be going out with you next year, new bestie.

• 5:31Jason Calacanis?

  All right. We got to get to it. We're going to start off with politics, gentlemen. We got to keep this moving because there's so many predictions. We're going to do our 2025 prediction for biggest political winner. Now, last year, well, yeah, I think we got it kind of wrong. Friedberg, you said independent third party in the US. And we did see some of that with, you know, the breakout of Robert Kennedy, maybe. Chamath, you said independent centrists. We didn't get there with that one. And I said dark horse presidential candidates. Maybe I get a quarter point credit there with.

• 6:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wait, hold on. What do you mean? We didn't get there. Independent centrists won the election for MAGA.

• 6:07Jason Calacanis?

  Independent centrists won the election? Really? That's what you believe?

• 6:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. I didn't think that it was independents, but okay.

• 6:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think independent centrists swung the election for Biden in 2020. And then I think they swung the election for Trump in 2024.

• 6:22Jason Calacanis?

  Huh. Is that statistically correct, you think, Friedberg? Do you buy that independent centrists did the election or?

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Gavin, what do you think?

• 6:29Gavin Baker?

  I think it's right. Like, I think a lot of, there are a lot of people, not just centrists, but a lot of people who had been lifelong Democratic voters who voted for Trump.

• 6:40Gavin Baker?

  So I do think Trump won the centrists. I mean, Trump, Trump won everything. Essentially.

• 6:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, okay. Chamath, who's your prediction for the biggest political winner of 2025?

• 6:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My biggest political winner for 2025 are fiscal conservatives.

• 6:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that we are going to test a very important concept in 2025. And I hope it works, which is that of austerity. And the reason why austerity has to work is that the only thing left after austerity is to cut entitlements. And I think that in doing this, we are going to figure out how much waste, fraud and abuse exists in the United States federal government. I think that that's going to spill over to a lot of state elections. And I think that the fiscal conservatives that have been clamoring for a more restrained approach to spending will have their day in 2025.

• 7:40Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, fiscal conservatives from Schmitt-Friedberg. What's your prediction for the biggest political winner of 2025?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  I also took a class-based approach. I chose young candidates. So Trump's cabinet picks have an average age of 40 to 45 years old compared to the Biden cabinet, where the average age is a little over 59, almost 60 years old. And I do think that this marks the beginning of a new trend in the kind of age range of political candidates shifting younger. So I think that this is something we should expect as candidates start to emerge for the midterms by the end of 2025. We'll start to see younger, new names start to pop up that deliver resonant messages and aren't part of kind of the old guard of, you know, the aging political class. So I think that's a trend that's kind of underway now.

• 8:30Jason Calacanis?

  Excellent, young candidates. So we've got fiscal conservatives, young candidates. Gavin, what do you got for the 2025 prediction for biggest political winner?

• 8:37Gavin Baker?

  I would say Trump and centrism.

• 8:39Jason Calacanis?

  For my choice for 2025's biggest political winner, I went with something similar to you, Friedberg. I said Gen X and the elder millennials. If you look at the notable Gen X appointments, you got Elon with Doge, you got Sacks, obviously, Marco Rubio. My God, it just goes down. And then if you look at the elder millennials, J.D. Vance, Vivek, Tulsi, just a lot of young people. And this is going to be absolutely fantastic, I think, because... They're going to start thinking not just about themselves as the boomers are doing with social security, taxes, real estate, all the different issues that they tend to pick for themselves. They're going to start thinking about maybe their own kids and themselves. So yeah, it's obviously a sea change is underway. So there you have it, folks, for our predictions for

• 9:24Jason Calacanis?

  political winner. Let's go with political loser here. Prediction for political loser. We'll start off with you Gavin. We'll do this a little round robin here. We'll snake it around. Gavin, what do you think? Who'll be the biggest political loser of 2025?

• 9:37Gavin Baker?

  I think Putin. I think Putin is going to lose bigly. So if you are Xi Jinping, you know, Xi Jinping, Russia is a client state of China at this point. And if you're Xi Jinping, what is happening is now a disaster for you because Europe is starting to rearm and which is which will only accelerate this year. That will allow America to take resources out of Europe and put them in Japan and South Korea and all over the Pacific. And that makes it a lot harder for you to do what you most want to do, which is reunify China and Taiwan or invade Taiwan.

• 10:19Gavin Baker?

  Let's call it what it is. And I just think Xi is going to begin decoupling from Putin. If you're Trump, you want to show that you're independent, that you're not enthralled to Putin in any way. So I think Trump is going to be a lot tougher on Putin than people think. And I think he's going to get a very, very, a deal that's very, very bad for Russia and Ukraine. And, you know, you've lost half a million people. And for what?

• 10:51Jason Calacanis?

  For what? Exactly. And it's a thousand, over a thousand days into this, nobody from the West, you know, in NATO or America, no, no soldiers have lost their lives from our side. We've just given them weapons. And so it's a humiliating defeat so far for Putin. I agree with you. Friedberg, your prediction for the biggest political loser? Of 2025, free Burks prediction.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  I'm going to predict the pro-war neocons who are going to go head to head with the JD Vance and Elons and others of the world. And I think that they're going to lose. And I think that there's going to be this kind of big crack in the establishment of this neocon movement that's been very pro-conflict around the world. And we've heard it in the speeches and in the commentary from JD and others. And I think this is going to be the year it's all going to kind of come to a head. I think they're going to end up on the losing side.

• 11:42Gavin Baker?

  Can I, Gavin, can I take the other side just, just a little bit?

• 11:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's why you're here.

• 11:47Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, yeah, I think it's right in reality. But I think, you know, Trump said something very interesting about John Bolton. He said, the guy was absolutely crazy, but it was awesome having him in the room when you were negotiating deals.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:00Gavin Baker?

  Because people looked at this guy looking angry, red in the face, so excited to hit the nuclear button, so excited to go to war, and you ended up with much better deals.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:09Gavin Baker?

  So I think you're going to see probably a lot more bellicosity from the Trump administration than anyone expects. And that's just to get a good deal for, you know, between Russia and Ukraine. And then it's to get China to kind of decouple from Russia. So I think the, in reality, I think you're right, David, but I think there will be a lot of rhetoric that is at odds with what you're saying before you end up being wrecked.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  We already see it with Canada, with NATO, with Taiwan. There's a lot, you know, we're gonna do this or this. The tariffs, obviously, there's just a lot of very aggressive posturing leading up to the negotiations that are hopefully going to get the US good deals. We'll see.

• 12:48Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, you have a prediction for your 2025 biggest political loser prediction? It's hard to do.

• 12:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The biggest political loser of 2025 is going to be progressivism. So November of last year, right after the election, I flew to London and went up to Oxford and I spoke at the Oxford Union. And my speech was a full-throated defense of MAGA. But it was mostly an explanation of MAGA. And it was sort of the

• 13:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Antidote to progressive instincts that had been riddling the Western G8 countries and was starting to basically come ungun. And when you look at what's about to happen in 2025, in Canada, Justin Trudeau is going to lose massively to Pierre Poliev. In Germany, AFD looks like they will win. In France, if there's a deadlock and it goes into an election, more than likely Marine Le Pen is going to win. And then in the UK, where you see this unfolding child rape scandal where allegedly upwards of hundreds of thousands of young girls over the course of 20-plus years were being raped by

• 14:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  organizations of Pakistani Muslim men who were then not prosecuted for fears of stoking Islamophobia, as it turns out, by the current Prime Minister Keir Starmer. And if all of that comes to pass in the UK, I think you're going to see the Labour government fall and I think you're going to see Nigel Farage win. So what do all of these countries look like by the end of 25? It's very much a repudiation of this class-based identity politics. And I think that has enormous ripple effects all throughout the world. And so I think the biggest political loser for 2025, I think, stands to be progressivism, quote unquote, what we labeled progressivism.

• 14:48Jason Calacanis?

  I took something very similar. I said the racist vocal minority of each one of these parties. And there's a little bit of this on either side. You have DEI on one side and then you just have outright racism on the other side. And it's probably 5% of MAGA and 5% of the left. And just to recap last year's political predictions, for 2024, our predictions for political loser was, I said Netanyahu, Friedberg, you said Ukraine, and Chamath, you said the Koch family, the GOP donors.

• 15:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Nailed that one. I nailed that one.

• 15:19Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, any thoughts on last year's?

• 15:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who lost on the Republican side more than the Koch family, do you think? I mean, explain for the audience who maybe aren't as deep into it. Well, I think essentially 2024 was the end of the Republican Party as we knew it. And I think what stands in its place is what I would call the MAGA reflection of a coalition of people that will be housed under the label of Republicanism, which is to say that these folks aren't necessarily Republicans. These folks are believers of the MAGA philosophy. They're just using the Republican vessel in order to run their candidates and get elected. And in that overturning of the status quo,

• 16:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  what you had was this one family who was at the center for the last few decades of political machinery that essentially decided candidates, that it decided agenda, that it decided policy. And that was the Koch family, and they spent an enormous amount of money to get that, which they stood up, frankly, literally the day after Citizens United happened in the Supreme Court. And I think that in that lens, those billions of dollars of investment have essentially gone to zero because I don't think it means much of anything anymore. And if you look at the new class of donors who will decide

• 16:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  quote unquote, Republican policy, it's going to be the the Miriam Adelsons of the world, the Elon Musks of the world. And that's very different than how I think the Kochs used to decide things. Do you think there's too much money in politics now, Gavin?

• 16:57Gavin Baker?

  I think there's too much money in politics now.

• 17:05Gavin Baker?

  It's, it's a good question.

• 17:09Gavin Baker?

  You know, I might feel very, very differently if I didn't agree so profoundly with, with the largest donor in this political cycle.

• 17:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 17:18Gavin Baker?

  I would say the reality is, is like the money, as long as the money raised on each side is roughly equivalent, I don't think it really matters. That would, that would be my take. You just want some equivalence. That's all.

• 17:34Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Let's do our 2025 predictions for biggest business winner. Friedberg, why don't you start us off? Biggest business winner for 2025. What's your prediction?

• 17:43Speaker 02

  So I feel like we're at a really interesting inflection point that is going to make 2025 the year of autonomous hardware or robotics. If 2024 was the year of kind of compute build out and the rollout of AI systems in software, I think 2025 will be the year of the robot. You know, there's a company, we just placed an order today, actually, out of China called Unitree. Gavin, have you looked at this company?

• 18:14Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, it's pretty wild, actually.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  It's an incredible business, incredible product. So their GO2 robot is $1,600, has an API. Here it is. You can run a payload on it. It's got LiDAR on it. It's got kind of intelligence guidance systems on it. This is the robot system that was used on some of those videos we looked at earlier this year where there were machine guns mounted to the back and it was basically a new kind of field soldier. It's an autonomous field soldier. But really, you can use it in scientific applications. We're looking at using them in our, on our, on our test farms where it can wander the farm and take images and report data back to us. And at such a low cost at like less than $3,000, you can do some incredible things with it. So this business just raised a couple hundred million dollars

• 18:58Speaker 02

  last month from mostly Chinese investors to Chinese company. And I think that there's going to be, you know, other similar type businesses, you know, kind of takes a long time for things to work. And then all of a sudden they happen faster than you could have ever imagined. I think this is going to be the year where we're all going to look at humanoid robots and autonomous systems and be like, oh my God, I can't believe this is here. So this could be the year.

• 19:21Jason Calacanis?

  Such a great, strong choice for the biggest winner. And I think the quote you're looking for is how did you go bankrupt slowly and then all at once? That's how these technology changes. I mean, I would love to have one of these for the ranch to just run around and do the perimeter security.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Sorry, Nick, pull up the, you guys got to watch this if you haven't seen it. Nick, find the video of the G O two with the wheels on it, managing terrain.

• 19:40Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yes.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  And everyone thought this was a BS video that it was like CGI wasn't real. It was AI generated, but like this thing is just incredible. Here it is. This is a real video of this thing.

• 19:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And it could learn from an L L M too, right? Like a large language model could teach it how to do something. Yeah.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Gavin, is this real?

• 20:01Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, absolutely real. Yeah.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:03Gavin Baker?

  I want to get the G one, which is their humanoid robot.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. So pull up the humanoid. It's really cool.

• 20:09Gavin Baker?

  Yeah.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  It's a little more expensive.

• 20:10Gavin Baker?

  Yeah.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:12Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, $16,000 is the cost of a used Prius. Let's be honest, that's in spitting distance of being affordable for the middle class.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Look at this thing. 16 grand. And this thing, you can, you know, you can basically command it to do things for you in your house. Hey, or in your factory, or in your workplace.

• 20:30Jason Calacanis?

  Come on, I knew you would do it. Oh, come on. I was gonna say, maybe we could get a poker dealer. Maybe Beau, you know, I wonder if this thing could deal cards or open wine.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Do you guys remember that robot that was on stage for our all in holiday spectacular?

• 20:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, 1X.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  So my, my brother made an observation. He said, as soon as that robot came out, it's like everyone just wanted to abuse it. He's like, humans have this very interesting nature where like the robot emerges and all that humans want to do is like hurt the robot. It's like a very strange revelation of human behavior. Yeah, like it just, it's like, oh, here's something I could dominate. Here's something I can tell it what to do and control it.

• 21:07Jason Calacanis?

  We're so threatened by it. We want to make sure that we're the top of the species here. And it doesn't feel like it's going to be for much longer. I mean, these things will kick our ass pretty soon.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Anyway, these things are amazing. I think this is going to be the year of the robots. That's my prediction.

• 21:19Jason Calacanis?

  Year of the robots is your prediction. I love it. Gavin, what do you got?

• 21:22Gavin Baker?

  Profoundly agree. I think you're the robots, inclusive of F S D.

• 21:28Gavin Baker?

  You know, I think F S D works today and it's gonna, it's, it's, it's gonna cross into mainstream adoption where I already notice, particularly if I'm taking an Uber late at night, I really, really prefer to have a Tesla. Just sometimes you get an Uber driver who's, who's tired.

• 21:48Gavin Baker?

  And I just feel a lot safer if they have the FSD running. And then obviously, using it for yourself is amazing. But I think it's going to continue compounding at an accelerating rate. I think the, in a lot of ways, what I'd say broadly is, I think for a while, it's going to be big businesses are winners. Big businesses that use AI thoughtfully. And the reason is, is that with what is happening, what, what O3 showed us, OpenAI's new model, a combination of reasoning and test time compute. Like, I think you're, if you're a big business and you can pay a million dollars

• 22:28Gavin Baker?

  to let an AI think for six weeks about the most important question for your business, that's going to be a profound advantage relative to small businesses that can't afford that. And by the way, we are the other, like, inference compute is going to be the, the kind of derivative winner of that. We're going to run out of GPUs, accelerators, compute in 2025, the same way we did in 23.

• 22:55Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so you're also long Nvidia and chipmakers, Grok, et cetera, because we're finding new uses for all that compute.

• 23:04Gavin Baker?

  Absolutely.

• 23:05Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, very good. Chamath, do you have a prediction for your biggest business winner of 2025, sir?

• 23:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the biggest business winner of 2025 are going to be dollar-denominated stablecoins.

• 23:20Jason Calacanis?

  Ooh.

• 23:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll make two points. In 2024, two critical things happened. The first is that stablecoins essentially became uncoupled from crypto volatility. And it started to be used for wholesale useful functions in running businesses. And there's an image here that starts to show that. So independent of crypto volatility, what you saw were stablecoin usage just rising up and to the right. That's an incredibly important decoupling that happened in 2024. The second, and this data is still just trickling in, but it's an incredible stat.

• 24:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Stablecoin usage at the end of the second quarter of 2024 was about 1.1 billion transactions that summed to 8.5 trillion dollars of transaction volume. If you compare that to Visa over the same period, it was more than double Visa's transaction volume. So I think what we have now is something that has fundamentally crossed a point of no return, similar to how last year I thought that the big trend was going to be Bitcoin in 2024. I would say that the big trend in 25 is stablecoin usage.

• 24:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think we're going to finally attack the duopoly of Visa and Mastercard. I think you're going to see an innumerable number of use cases that sit and use stablecoin rails. I think when Donald Trump becomes president, I think you're going to see him go after incredibly high credit card transactions and costs. You're already seeing cracks in consumer credit anyways because of these high APRs. All of this stuff is going to come to a head in 2025, I think, and I think stablecoins could quadruple or quintuple by the end of 25. I think it's just going to be an enormous market.

• 25:32Jason Calacanis?

  Great choice. Should they be regulated, Chamath? We saw at some of these congressional hearings, Tether was kind of dragged for being the primary transfer and monetary tool for terrorism, for getting around sanctions and for human trafficking. Should it be regulated and how?

• 25:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think I'm qualified to say how it should, but I think the point is that there are these immutable logs that sit. In between and on either side of all of these transactions. And so I think the knowledge is there and there are a whole bunch of third party services that add that intelligence layer. I think the, the thing to really question is if you just took 300 basis points of drag.

• 26:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 26:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Out of the global economy.

• 26:22Jason Calacanis?

  Massive gains.

• 26:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How valuable would that be? And I think it would be valuable just in the United States alone to the tune of a trillion dollars. So the idea that you wouldn't do it at this point is somewhat quizzical to me. So I just think that the economic justification for this now is just so profound.

• 26:41Jason Calacanis?

  Gavin, let me ask you a hard question there as well. Should the United States government give up the, let's face it, you know, they, they have a bit of a stranglehold, they've got a bit of a monopoly on US dollars. These things are a competitor. And we were sitting here on this program for the last couple of years, talking about the BRICS and them starting their own currency. Aren't these in some ways similar to that? And they would take people off the USD standard. How do you look at that? Because that is the criticism that some people in power have put forward.

• 27:12Gavin Baker?

  I do, I do think that they might be very good for the world, but I do think they would be very bad for America if they replaced, if some constellation of stable coins became the new reserve currency. It is such a, an advantage to be able to borrow in your own currency and to give that up lightly. That just, that means you control, you, you, you control the real size of your debt at all times. Oh, wow, we have a big, big debt. I mean, this is a little bit like what we just did. Let's just have, let's just let inflation run hot and oh, wow, that debt's a lot smaller than it was.

• 27:52Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm.

• 27:53Gavin Baker?

  Effectively. So I think it would be a big mistake.

• 27:57Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, you have any thoughts on it? We, we've been talking about currency here, a whole bunch over the last couple of years. Any thoughts on stable coins and, and just the monopoly we have on it?

• 28:07Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't know enough about stable coins.

• 28:10Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that'll be one of our big topics for the year and we should definitely invite Jeremy LaR from USD On or USDC, USDC.

• 28:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jeremy LaR, I mentioned, by the way, that I had this small little product that

• 28:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I exposed to the world, which is just our research and we sit it on top of Substack. Again, the tools aren't very good and we use Stripe. And Jeremy reached out to me and he's like, I'll just rebuild all of your payment rails on using US dollar stable coins. And it's a no brainer because I'm spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in transaction costs that now I can just save and use to hire somebody else or just pay the team more.

• 28:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, well, if you're paying 10% to Substack and the 3%, yeah.

• 28:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If it's obvious for me, it's obvious for everybody else.

• 29:02Jason Calacanis?

  All right, my biggest business winner prediction for 2025 is Tesla and Google. I think this is going to be the year of AI and robotics, obviously. But I am just absolutely amazed at the comeback that Google has made with AI. And I'm absolutely in awe of what Elon did with Colossus. If those of you don't know, Jensen Huang, Michael Dell, they all obviously participated in building out XAI. And they were shocked. They couldn't believe that they stood up 100,000 GPUs in under 45 days. Was it Gavin? Something in that neighborhood? It was a tremendous effort and uh

• 29:39Speaker 02

  But that's not Tesla, right? Is that Tesla?

• 29:41Jason Calacanis?

  Well, Elon, Tesla, XAI and Google, that cohort who are investing heavily in AI. Those two specifically, those two, three names, I think are going to be the biggest winners next year. They're going to come out with some things that people didn't anticipate. I don't, I don't think people are anticipating what Google is going to come out with. Because Gemini, Deep Research, I keep telling people this and I'm using the app, is so impressive. Drop what you're doing right now, pause the podcast, download Gemini and just start playing with Deep Research on your desktop, pay the 20 bucks for it. It is mind blowing. It blows anything else in the market out of the water, period, full stop. It is a step function higher.

• 30:22Jason Calacanis?

  All right, I'll just leave it at that.

• 30:23Gavin Baker?

  Jason, shouldn't you just go with the vibe of the podcast? Should you explain what it is?

• 30:28Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah, sorry. Okay, so what it does is Good call, good call. If you wanted to create a model, let's say, and I did this, where I said, hey, make me a model based upon what it would take to replace all the cars and trips in the United States with full self-driving cars. What would that cost to do? And if you ask that to ChatGPT or Brock or, you know, Claude, it's going to give you a decent answer. What deep research does is it goes and it figures out what the subcomponents of each of those questions would be. And then it fires off multiple threads and then it searches the web in real time, which Google is extremely good at. And then it summarizes it, gives citations, and it produces a report that looks like something that Gartner Group,

• 31:09Jason Calacanis?

  McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group would have spent, I don't know, 30 days on Gavin and a million dollars, a half million dollars. It's fucking bonkers how good this is, but the amount of compute it takes is extraordinary. That's why ChatGPT released something similar that's 200 bucks a month, the O1 Pro, I think they call it. And then this one is like 20 bucks from Gemini. Anyway, given what Google has access to, YouTube, your G Drive, your Google Docs, et cetera, your Gmail, it's going to do things that you wouldn't anticipate, like if you were asking this question, it might look in your Gmail for possibilities to answer those questions or YouTube videos of channels you subscribe to.

• 31:50Jason Calacanis?

  So this is going to, I think, knock people's socks off and solve problems that people didn't know they had. Is that a pretty good explanation, Gavin?

• 31:57Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 31:58Jason Calacanis?

  For last year, our predictions for business winner, Chamath said bootstrapped or end or profitable startups. I think that's a really great pick and that came to pass. We're seeing some of those go public and raise money at higher evaluations or not go out of business. Friedberg, you said commodities businesses. I'm not sure how that did. Did you know, did you check it on that?

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Pretty, pretty flat. Yeah, we didn't have a lot of the inflationary pressures that I think were underlying that thesis, so.

• 32:23Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  It ended up being, I'd say, a loser relative to other indices you could have bought this year.

• 32:29Jason Calacanis?

  I said training data owners like Reddit, New York Times, Google, et cetera. Reddit stock up 224% in 2024 and they launched their own Reddit answers.

• 32:37Gavin Baker?

  That was a good call.

• 32:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think I got that one. New York Times stock is up as well and they fired off that lawsuit with OpenAI. All right, now we're going to move on to the 2025 biggest business loser predictions. In 2024, Chamath said Pro sports teams because they hit peak valuations. It's looking like a pretty good prediction. Friedberg, you said vertical SaaS companies because of AI disruption. That's another one that seems like a great prediction. I said smartphone manufacturers. Apple stock was up 30% in 2024, but I think we've all seen that these smartphones aren't advancing. And people are taking their times. The sales of those are down, services are up.

• 33:12Gavin Baker?

  I would take the other side on pro sports teams. It feels like that market is about to be institutionalized. And funds are going to start buying pro sports teams.

• 33:22Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 33:23Gavin Baker?

  That ultimately and ultimately, capital markets have way more resources than kind of the wealthy individuals who've done it for now to date. So I just think it's the amount of money that can go after pro sports teams is about to, you know, 10x, 100x.

• 33:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you're totally right. The reason I said that last year was it was pretty clear to me at the time. And the NBA was the canary in the coal mine that there was a viewership problem in professional sports. And specifically in the NBA, the game has devolved into essentially rebounds and dunks or three pointers. And the issue with that is that it becomes just meaningfully less interesting to watch. At the same time, because of the fact that the TV deals are really what determines the discounted value of these sports franchises. The TV deal was so enormous that it creates no reliable rivalries anymore.

• 34:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because people will hopscotch teams almost every year because the compensation that they can get is just so obscene, quite honestly. And I think what happens is sports will have a decent run until the next TV deals get done. And I think if you, for example, take pharma ads outside of TV, so like that pool shrinks. If you have less viewership and so you can sell the remaining ads less effectively because there's just fewer of them and then there's fewer buyers and it shrinks yet again. Then the dollar pool that the television networks and the streamers are going to be willing to pay for sports will go down. And the group that will be the most price sensitive are exactly

• 35:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  who you said Gavin, meaning the non-trophy buyer. So like, you know, when I bought into the Warriors, I bought it purely as a trophy asset and I was price insensitive. But I agree with you that now that you have the PE firms on the cap tables of these sports franchises, those folks are all DCFs, those folks are all Excel models. I don't think that they're buying things for emotion. I don't think they've grown up thinking I want to own this thing, not using institutional LP dollars. So I just think that's why, that's why I said that in 24. So I just wanted to

• 35:34Jason Calacanis?

  On behalf of Phil Hummuth and I, we appreciate you made that vanity investment for the number of times we got to sit in your courtside seats.

• 35:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, because I never went to the games.

• 35:43Jason Calacanis?

  With NBA players.

• 35:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I never went to the games. I should have gone to more games.

• 35:46Jason Calacanis?

  I went to your games and almost got thrown out of your seats. I got a red card one time.

• 35:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's true.

• 35:51Jason Calacanis?

  Is it true?

• 35:51Speaker 02

  You did?

• 35:53Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you don't know that story?

• 35:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I got a, I got a call. I got a call. I think it was from the Warriors or it's from the NBA, something to the effect of, this guy that was sitting in your seats was almost kicked out. And I said, excuse me, because I knew that it was Jason.

• 36:05Jason Calacanis?

  It was the Knicks game in fairness.

• 36:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And, and he was like jawboning our own players.

• 36:10Jason Calacanis?

  I was getting into it with Bogut and with David Lee, because I told,

• 36:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It was unbelievable.

• 36:15Jason Calacanis?

  I told Steve Kerr, listen, you're up 30 on my Knicks. Sit these guys down. This is bush league. What if Steph Curry gets hurt out there? Like, and, you know, Bogut told me to shut up and Andre Iguodala.

• 36:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bogut told him to basically go pounce and, and

• 36:28Jason Calacanis?

  He basically did. It was the funniest thing ever Gavin. This is what happens when you get

• 36:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bogut's one of our friends and he's one of our good friends. So that's why. It's so funny.

• 36:35Jason Calacanis?

  But they can't, they come over Friedberg and they tap you on the shoulder. I'm with my wife. She's mortified. And the guy hands you a card. And the card says, you've been warned one time and one time only about abusive, you know, behavior. If we have to warn you one more time, you will be escorted out. So I look at the guy and I say, but, and he goes, read the card. I read the card, I say.

• 37:01Jason Calacanis?

  He goes, gives me thumbs up. That was it. I never. That was it. You're not supposed to. Then, three years later, I'm sitting in the same seats. I'm interacting with Draymond during the finals games and then everybody's hokey dokey with it. When you say interacting, what do you mean when you say interacting? Wait, hold on. Gavin wanted to make a point about what I just.

• 37:17Gavin Baker?

  No, I just want to just, just come back to Chamath because for sure these private equity guys, there's DCFs. The NBA has been terribly managed. I think LeBron said they have a big problem.

• 37:28Gavin Baker?

  You know, and I'd separate the NBA is the worst managed NFL is probably the best managed. But the one kind of counterpoint I would say on the TV rights is Google bought Sunday Ticket and are extremely happy with it. Amazon and Netflix also bought, you know, both bought NFL games and are really happy with them. And so I just think those three companies, it doesn't really matter to them if pharma ads go away. In 18 months, you're going to be able to dynamically create an ad for each individual person and show it to them. And if you're a high value user with, you know, that Google knows that you're about to book a vacation. You know, they'll dynamically generate, you know, whatever, you know, hotel destinations you want and show click here.

• 38:12Gavin Baker?

  So I just think sports, as long as they command the eyeballs that they do. And I, for sure, if the NBA doesn't fix it, the value of those franchises will start to decline. But, um, just the fact that all of the biggest tech companies are so happy with the sports kind of rights that they bought. They're going to buy them all. Every sport will go to one of those companies.

• 38:37Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe, maybe you're closer to this, but why wouldn't Apple, Amazon, or Google just back up the truck to the NBA? And say, we'll take the whole thing and then anybody who's got an iPhone gets the NBA for free. And then everybody else has to pay and they figure it out in the back and they lose a, you know, five billion. They make two billion. Who cares? It's a rounding error for Apple.

• 38:57Gavin Baker?

  I agree. And they, you know, I mean, they all, all except for Apple, really. And Apple, they have, I think, an MLS deal, but they all kind of stuck their toe in the water. And I think they feel like, wow, the water's warm. Let's dive in.

• 39:10Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay.

• 39:11Gavin Baker?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Jason Calacanis?

  And the new deal is an 11 year deal for the NBA. So these things don't come up that often. But we'll see over time. Maybe somebody will buy one of these media companies and inherit them. Okay, biggest business loser for 2025. What's your prediction Gavin Baker?

• 39:27Gavin Baker?

  Government service providers. You do not, you do not want to have the United States government at any level is over 35% of your revenue.

• 39:36Jason Calacanis?

  Good choice. Yes, obviously in the age of Doge, they might not be spending wildly and they might actually look at the bill. They might check the bill.

• 39:44Gavin Baker?

  Crazy thought, crazy thought.

• 39:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, crazy thought to actually check the bill. You never know. Chamath, who do you predict will be the biggest business loser of 2025?

• 39:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, this is a little bit precarious, but

• 40:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't know what the percentage drawdown from here will be. But I think when we look back, the absolute dollar drawdown of the mag seven will be in the trillions of dollars. And the reason is not necessarily because of the underlying fundamentals of these companies. But I am a little bit worried and I tweeted this a few days ago about just the general concentration of the top seven, eight, nine, 10 companies in the indices.

• 40:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's approaching 40%.

• 40:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think that when you look at these historic concentrations, they've generally foreshadowed a big drawdown. And unfortunately, I don't see how you can sort of, you know, inoculate yourself from that risk. So independent of the quality of these companies, because I think these companies are exceptional businesses. I do think you've just had too much concentration and I think it is a setup. To retrade and give back and in that it could even be 10%. But 10% in the MAG8 will be a couple trillion bucks.

• 41:15Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 41:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so on a

• 41:16Jason Calacanis?

  1 or 2% would be a lot. Yeah, an absolute dollars a lot. Okay, Friedberg, who do you predict? You predict MAG7, government service providers for you Gavin. Friedberg, who do you predict will be the biggest business loser of 2025?

• 41:26Speaker 02

  I'm sort of on the same vein as Gavin. I went with the kind of old defense and aerospace providers, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon.

• 41:35Jason Calacanis?

  Defense 1.0.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  Driven by kind of China dominance, driven by US defense budgets that I think are going to need to shift towards a more kind of tech oriented and ROI driven rationalization and pricing and spend. So the Palantirs and Androld's, obviously the world will benefit. And I also just think like there's a lot of failure at scale with these businesses. They've gotten too clunky and too bureaucratic, as we've seen with Boeing from their space program failure in 2024 to the challenges with their airplane business. But I think that this government contracting business across the board is going to be deeply challenged this year with all the new blood.

• 42:11Jason Calacanis?

  So the cost plus are going to suffer is what you're saying and the Androld's will thrive.

• 42:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Would you guys add, just a question, would you guys add the traditional consulting companies then to the mix as well? Like if

• 42:23Speaker 02

  That's a good, that's a good point, too.

• 42:25Jason Calacanis?

  That's a great one. Yeah, we think what we talked about with

• 42:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Like the Y Pro's, the Tata's, the HCL, the Accentures.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Cognizance.

• 42:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Cognizance, the E and Y's, all these folks that are in real trouble if that, if that also happens.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 42:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the efficiency that they'll gain will also be felt by their customers and their customers might not hire them.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  When you got a bunch of software entrepreneurs that are now advising and informing the federal government on how to run their, their operations, I'm pretty sure that some of these service providers are going to get washed out. So it's a good idea.

• 42:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The thing to keep in mind is like cost plus is a fancier way of saying time and materials and time and materials is a fancy way of saying human labor arbitrage. And I think that all of that stuff will get extremely scrutinized in 2025. Because if you are buying, you know, $800 wastebaskets and, you know, $9,000 umbrella hangars because of time and materials and all of this other Crazy stuff that's in the system and all of that gets washed out, then a lot of these folks and their business models will get put under severe stress.

• 43:30Jason Calacanis?

  The alignments, you know, you show me an incentive, I'll show you the outcome. The alignment of cost plus is to just keep being inefficient and waste. And these defense contractors are taking 60, 70, 80% off the price of each piece of munitions or vehicle.

• 43:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 43:50Gavin Baker?

  Cost plus is terrible. No, just cost plus is terrible.

• 43:52Jason Calacanis?

  That's right. For my biggest business loser prediction, I had to go through a lot of the people I've criticized, I didn't start a fight with over the past year. Commercial real estate came to mind because these leases are going to keep coming up. And I think like they kicked the can down the road a little bit. So I started there. Then I looked at micro strategies and that made no sense to me that they were trading at two, three, four times the book value of their Bitcoin. And I think that's not sustainable. I looked at Truth Social, which is like doing four or $5 million in revenue and is valued at $7 billion. That makes absolute no logical sense. But I think the one that is the most overpriced of all of this, and I think is going to see their peak valuation is OpenAI.

• 44:38Jason Calacanis?

  I think the headwinds for OpenAI are being absolutely

• 44:43Jason Calacanis?

  underappreciated. Like I said before, my previous one, my previous prediction, Google is kicking ass. XAI is just getting started and building out so much big iron. Microsoft was basically on another podcast, almost like laughing at OpenAI for selling them the source code and that they didn't even need OpenAI anymore because they had it all. They don't need them and they own all the big iron. I think OpenAI's valuation made no sense. I don't think they're going to be able to keep charging the prices they're charging. And I think AWS, Apple, Google, XAI, this cohort are going to

• 45:22Jason Calacanis?

  Really take that $157 billion valuation and make it the peak valuation of the company. And I do, I do think that there is a non-zero chance they could lose their process in these court cases of transferring $157 billion in value from a nonprofit into a for-profit. I think that whole thing could blow up.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  Is that your super prediction is OpenAI will not be able to convert from nonprofit to for-profit in 2025?

• 45:50Jason Calacanis?

  I think that that's a small piece of it, but that's a really interesting super prediction. Insert polymarket graphic here.

• 45:58Jason Calacanis?

  Super prediction. Will OpenAI convert? Is that's a good one?

• 46:02Speaker 02

  25. Yeah. By the way, you know, they're projecting, I think, in the, the, the leaked financials 12 billion in revenue next year at J Cal. So unlike a lot of the other things you were talking about, this is a real business with real revenue, real scale, real growth, real technology. It's, it's a little bit distinct from kind of being a meme stock or being a.

• 46:20Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. That's why I'm picking it because I think it's easy to pick a meme stock. It's harder to pick a real company. But I do think that that revenue, which, you know, a lot of it is consumer and a lot of it is developers. The developers I know all want to do open source. They don't want to have to be beholden to OpenAI and Sam Altman. They would much rather, and they're already setting their queries across multiple different stacks and trying different ones. I don't think there's any loyalty to OpenAI or Gemini or any of these services. I think they'll just go with eventually open source in many cases. So anyway, that's my thought on OpenAI. 2025, biggest business deal? What do you got, Chamath? What's your biggest business deal for 2025 prediction, Chamath? What do you got? You said Starlink to go public last year. That hasn't happened yet.

• 47:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  On that one?

• 47:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 47:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Totally with on that one. I think that this is the year that we will see the collapse of the traditional auto OEMs. And I think that the. The deal that happened at the end of 2024 with Honda, Nissan, I think, is a bit of a signal to what the industry has to do, which is to go through a massive wave of consolidation. I think that Tesla is just in an incredible position with the quality of their vehicles and the quality of their software and the quality of their autonomy with FSD.

• 47:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I suspect that after a couple of more meaningful product releases, it's just going to trigger the realization by the public capital markets that these auto OEMs are uninvestable. And I think the result of that will be a wave of auto mega mergers.

• 48:06Jason Calacanis?

  And for people who don't know, Honda and Nissan signed an agreement to merge, and Mitsubishi is involved because they're part of, I think, Nissan's alliance. This would obviously get rid of all of the redundancy.

• 48:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I think this is going to touch, like, the European OEMs are in real trouble. You know, what does Volkswagen do? It's not clear. What does Stellantis do? It's not clear. These are all businesses that are effectively melting icebergs. And so, you know, typically melting iceberg businesses, when they get put under pressure from smart investors like Gavin and his ilk, they're forced to merge.

• 48:44Jason Calacanis?

  Are you short these Gavin? Gavin, you got a spread trade? Are you short these names?

• 48:48Gavin Baker?

  I would rather not talk about specific positions. I would just say I agree 100% with Chamath.

• 48:54Jason Calacanis?

  All right, there you go.

• 48:56Gavin Baker?

  They're going to lose their Chinese business because they don't make competitive products anymore. If there's not massive protectionism, and we're seeing signs of that, they'll be caught between Tesla and the Chinese OEMs. And I think the only way that this doesn't happen, Chamath's, the only risk to Chamath's prediction is just government intervention because they're such big employers and, you know, often seen as national champions. But absent really significant government support, they're all in deep trouble.

• 49:28Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, well done. Friedberg, last year, you said there'd be some blockbuster deals for rights holders, licensing data for AI training, and Reddit did in fact sign two of those. So a great prediction from you for last year on biggest business deal. What do you got this year? See if you can go two for two.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Was it just Reddit? I should probably look it up.

• 49:50Jason Calacanis?

  What do you got?

• 49:50Speaker 02

  I'll just follow on my year of the robot theme. I do think that there's going to be massive funding deals similar to what we saw this past year for compute build out. I think we're going to see massive funding deals for hardware based manufacturing build out in the United States. And I think that those deals may take the form of kind of traditional equity from private markets, or they may have some component that includes government support to to kind of motivate and drive and accelerate onshore manufacturing. We're not going to go in the U.S. to making stuff that is like last century. I think we're going to need to move manufacturing to the next decade, next century of of production.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  And I think that's going to mean making some of these autonomous and robotic type systems that are going to become really critical for us, particularly with China doing this massive ramp up and build out for both drones and robots and autonomous vehicles. So I think we're going to need to kind of onshore a lot of this. And so that'll be a big amount of capital that's going to move in. So you'll see a bunch of these big blockbuster deals for hardware build out in the U.S.

• 50:55Jason Calacanis?

  Gavin, what do you think should be the biggest business deal in 2025?

• 50:59Gavin Baker?

  I think the biggest business deal is that there are going to be deals. I think there's going to be a tidal wave of M and A after four years of not being able to get anything done. I think there's an enormous amount of pent up demand. So kind of point number one. Point number two, something will happen with Intel and that will be big and hopefully it's good for America. And then I do think you will see a lot of these frontier AI labs that are independent be acquired. You know, I thought your points were well taken, Jason, about, you know, everything that, uh, you know, Google is bringing to bear and X, XAI owns their own compute. I mean, you guys can choose whichever one of these three you like, but the ultimate

• 51:41Gavin Baker?

  AI winner will be the one with the lowest cost of infrastructure cost, the lowest cost of compute. And definitionally, you can't be the low cost provider if you're renting your compute from someone else.

• 51:53Jason Calacanis?

  Because of markups.

• 51:54Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, because there's a markup. If you're buying your compute from Azure or AWS or Google, you are at a disadvantage relative to their internal services over time.

• 52:05Jason Calacanis?

  So the full stack wins. Great prediction for me.

• 52:11Jason Calacanis?

  Last year, my prediction was that ByteDance would go public, or TikTok would get divested, or some version of this. We are but 18 days away from figuring out if the Supreme Court will do just that. My prediction for this year, I was looking at all the media companies, gentlemen. There were so many possibilities there. Warner Brothers, we talked about Apple and Disney, you know, a couple of years ago. But I think the age of autonomy is here. And I think there is going to be some partnerships that will happen between Amazon, DoorDash, Uber, Tesla, Waymo, and that cohort. And I would not be surprised to see Tesla could buy Uber right now for but 10% of its market cap, and Waymo could spin out and partner with Uber.

• 52:56Jason Calacanis?

  Amazon could buy DoorDash fairly easily. And with the wrath of Khan being over, the wrath of Lena Khan being over, Gavin, it is possible that mega deals like these could go through. And if a couple of mega deals go through like this, whoever, you know, teams up here could win autonomy, delivery, food delivery, and e-commerce. This is a ginormous space. And I think, listen, I don't, I haven't spoken to, obviously, my friend about it. But Tesla buying DoorDash and Uber, or Amazon buying DoorDash and Uber, could be the greatest service ever created if you wanted to build a super app.

• 53:34Gavin Baker?

  The only thing I would add, and I think dovetails with what you said, and Friedberg's kind of year of the robot, is autonomous drones. There's a company called ZipLine, which my firm is an investor in.

• 53:46Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic company.

• 53:47Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, but autonomous drones, they really are the best way to deliver almost anything to suburban America. And then I think, over time, it will be sorted out so that they could deliver in cities as well.

• 54:02Gavin Baker?

  So I just think that that might be a little bit of a wild card for some of these delivery services.

• 54:07Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and Amazon in, I believe it's Texas, is actually doing these now. They've got 60,000 SKUs is my understanding already being delivered and they just drop it in your backyard and it's there in 45 minutes.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  Well, we talked about this like two weeks ago. You know, Metron in China has got this and they have food delivery happening with these drones. By the way, just kind of dovetailing off of this, I think the other big deal potential in 2025, just to be very specific, is a deal with Waymo. You know, Waymo launched NSF in August 2023 in kind of an open market way. Uber and Lyft were 66 and 34% market share at the time. And in 15 months, in November of 2024, Waymo is now a 22% market share of rides in SF, which is the same as Lyft and Uber is now down to 55. So Waymo ate into both Uber and Lyft's market share by on the order of 12 points in just 15 months. And now they're launching in LA, in Austin, all over the country.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  They're already in Phoenix. So I think you could see a massive, and by the way, you know, they also just moved the hardware platform over to a new device that's supposedly going to bring the capex significantly down for new launches. So you'll see much improved ROIC metrics, which means that there's a much kind of more efficient way to use capital to scale. So the system works. It is scaling. They're opening up in new markets. You could see something happen with Waymo this year that could either be something like a massive financing and IPO or a merger or acquisition with one of the big ridesharing companies. I don't know if that makes as much strategic sense as I've thought about it a little bit, but I do think you could see a big deal with Waymo. This company is, if you guys have not been in a Waymo, I think we all talked about this, but it's an incredible experience and everyone I know of every age group that has been for

• 55:49Speaker 02

  a ride in Waymo comes out of it saying that is the future. This is going to absolutely dominate how I'm going to get around.

• 55:55Jason Calacanis?

  Clearly it's the future. Most people say it's slow right now and monotonous and they don't like it, but you know, because it does take weird routes, but that'll be fixed over time, obviously.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 56:04Jason Calacanis?

  And just in case anybody thinks I'm talking my book here, I have exposure to all these, almost all these companies in a significant way because I believe in the entire space. 1.5% of rides in the US and globally it's less than 1% are done by ridesharing. The TAM is going to go to 20% in a very short period of time and it's going to be across the board. There's going to be a lot of winners here. And to my favorite Uber, obviously, they have deals with eight people and it's a global market. BYD produces cars for half the price of any other car manufacturer and they have full self-driving and it's pretty darn good from what I understand. So this is going to be a global competition and that means if you want to win that global competition, something

• 56:46Jason Calacanis?

  like Uber and DoorDash, Waymo, Amazon, BYD, you're going to see some interesting partnerships happen very quickly, I believe, because there's so much at stake. All right. Any final thoughts on biggest business deals? I think I maybe have a good one here. Consolidation in the transportation space. Okay. Moving on to 2025, most contrarian belief. Last year, enterprise value of OpenAI goes down from Chamath. It roughly doubled, but I just picked it as my prediction. So I think we're simpatico on what we think long-term. Friedberg, you said increased probability of a nuclear weapon being used for the first time since World War II. Thank the Lord that that didn't happen. Again, this is contrarian beliefs. People are going out there.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  I didn't predict it was gonna happen. I just said the probability went up. It's a tough, it's a tough thing to call.

• 57:33Jason Calacanis?

  Well, this is most contrarian belief. I think it's fine. Doctor Doom strikes again. It's all good. I picked Apple would become the player in AI and they did launch Apple Intelligence, but it sucks. I mean, it sucks. It's terrible. I just bought the Google Pixel Fold 9 and the Gemini works perfectly. It does everything that Siri is supposed to do. If you say, please play this song, if you say, please download this app, if you say, add this to my calendar, it does it and it does it in one fifth or tenth the amount of time that Apple takes and Apple gets it wrong every time. It's a piece of garbage. It's a disgrace. Disgracia at Apple.

• 58:18Gavin Baker?

  Apple Intelligence is even worse than Copilot, which is saying something.

• 58:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jason, would you like to announce? You bought the domain?

• 58:27Jason Calacanis?

  Disgraziad.com. I own it. I'm not selling it. Right now, it redirects to Jake Paul.

• 58:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Gavin, Gavin, do you have any idea what word he's even saying when he says that?

• 58:38Jason Calacanis?

  Disgraziad. Disgraziad. It's disgraziad is what people used to say in Brooklyn for somebody who is disgraceful. It is an Italian-American slang.

• 58:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How do you spell it?

• 58:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You don't even know? You own the domain? You don't even know?

• 58:57Jason Calacanis?

  D I S G R A Z I A D. Disgraziad. Yes. And if you type in disgraziad, it goes to Jake Paul. I bought it when I was watching the Tyson fight. It was so disgraceful. I was saying to my brother Josh, the black bomber, this is, and he just said disgraziad. And I just said, I wonder if that's available as a domain. I'm redirecting disgraziad right now, Tim Cook, to Apple Intelligence, the website.

• 59:24Gavin Baker?

  Do you guys think Tyson threw that fight? That it was part of the deal?

• 59:28Jason Calacanis?

  Thousand percent.

• 59:29Gavin Baker?

  I so agree. I would love, I think somebody said Saudi Arabia was offering to host a remake, or whatever, a redo, a rematch, a rematch of the fight, where the winner would make 50 million and then we'll see what's what.

• 59:43Jason Calacanis?

  And the loser gets zero. Yes.

• 59:44Gavin Baker?

  And the loser gets zero.

• 59:45Jason Calacanis?

  This is a good use of the kingdom's money. The people want to know, we will all fly out there and do an all-in episode from that fight.

• 59:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did you guys see this? Did you see this thing where, is it, is it Logan Paul is fighting Conor McGregor in India? And Conor McGregor is going to get $250 million?

• 1:00:03Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 1:00:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah. It's like a whole tourist thing, PR stunt. I, I think it's boxing and it's meant to sort of like bring a bunch of tourists into India to show them the country. But it's a quarter of a billion dollars to Conor McGregor.

• 1:00:17Jason Calacanis?

  How do we get in on this grift? Friedberg versus Baker, Polly Hapatia versus Calacanis. Oh my gosh. We need to get in our own celebrity boxing. Who would we do?

• 1:00:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Come on, keep going.

• 1:00:28Jason Calacanis?

  I gotta drive home. Let's go. It's too much fun this episode. Chamath, what's your most contrarian belief prediction for 2025? We're going out on a limb here. This is going out on a limb, folks. Don't judge us. The spicier the take, the better here. This is where you can go freestyle.

• 1:00:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that you're going to see a banking crisis in one of the major mainline banks.

• 1:00:50Jason Calacanis?

  A banking crisis? Wow. There is a small chance it happens, but that's a contrarian belief. Okay. Why, Chamath? Why? Black swan?

• 1:01:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I think if I had to kind of build the case for this, it would be along the following lines. If you added up the total indebtedness of Pax America, which is US government debt

• 1:01:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  plus corporates, plus mortgage debt,

• 1:01:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  and you actually sensitize it to rates that are around, call it 5%, what you quickly realize is on a dollar basis that because the amount of debt that we have has just massively exploded, that 5% rates today on 70-odd trillion dollars is actually equivalent to 10% rates 25 or 30 years ago because we only had a fraction of that debt on a dollar basis. And so the pain that you feel at 5 or 6% can very quickly ripple through the economy

• 1:02:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  the way that it did when rates 25 or 30 years ago were 10%. And so I think that when people look at rates, they forget the actual total dollar impact. Because when somebody or collectively, when we have to come up with 3 or 4 trillion dollars, how do you do that? And so I think that there is a non-trivial risk. I think it's small. This is why it's contrarian. But I think it's a risk where if you have a mark-to-market problem...

• 1:02:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you have a credit default problem amongst the corporates or amongst enough individual consumers, what I think that happens more than anything else is that it triggers a reserve issue. And I think that the reserve issue in one of these mainline banks, I have two that I think are more obvious than others, but I don't want to name them.

• 1:03:01Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, fair enough. I love this contrarian take. This is great.

• 1:03:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that there's a, there's a small but reasonable chance that that happens.

• 1:03:09Jason Calacanis?

  I love it. It's a great, great contrarian take. Small chance, but big impact. Gavin, what do you got?

• 1:03:14Gavin Baker?

  Well, first, we should use Gemini deep research to just ask it to look at the total, you know, Pax Americana debt outstanding, apply the current market interest rate to it, and then look at that, you know, interest expense relative to GDP and generate that chart over time. That would be a cool chart. That would be interesting. I don't, I don't, I don't disagree with Chamath. You know, any, anything is possible. And, you know, there, there could for sure be, be a problem at a big bank. I don't know that I would say it's likely, but you, anything is possible. My most contrarian belief. So I think that

• 1:03:57Gavin Baker?

  America over the next, at some point over the next four years, will print at least one year of greater than 5% GDP growth, real GDP growth. I think productivity is going to go vertical because of AI and deregulation. And I think there could be a world where this is the late 90s. And it doesn't sound like a big difference, you know, 5% or 6% versus 2% or 3%, but it is a massive difference. You know, at 5% or 6%, you know, the economy is doubling.

• 1:04:30Gavin Baker?

  You'll call it every 12 years roughly, first 24 years at 3%. I mean, it's just, it's a massive difference in terms of kind of the wealth of the country and individual Americans. As far as a specific prediction for 25, uh, cause I don't know when, when that will happen. I think you will see the frontier labs stop releasing their leading edge models to prevent knowledge distillation and their IP effectively being stolen. You know, deep seek from China, it was really impressive, but I think such GPT four.

• 1:05:01Gavin Baker?

  Yeah. So I just think you will, you'll see the labs keep their best models in house, distill them and put small, small models out over time.

• 1:05:12Jason Calacanis?

  Freiburg, you have a contrarian belief, and I did put into Gemini advanced 1.5 pro with deep research, the question, which banks have the great biggest chance of being insolvent or having a financial collapse or crisis? So it's doing its research right now. It'll be done in about 10 minutes, I think, which gives you an idea of how much research it does. It's nuts. Freiburg, what do you got?

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  I think that the, the party line is that socialism was defeated in this election cycle and that there was a resounding kind of vote from the American populace against socialism. And I actually think my, my contrarian belief is that we'll see a rise, a dramatic rise in socialist movements in 2025 in the United States. And I think that we are going to see, as Gavin pointed out, an acceleration of progress. We're going to see an unleashing of economic growth because of deregulation and AI. But I do think that some markets, we've also talked about the, the downfall of US auto manufacturing and some other industries, there's going to be a real significant shift in 2025.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  Some industries and some companies are going to be huge winners and some companies are going to be huge losers. There's going to be some parts of the economy that are going to be big winners and some parts of the economy that are going to be big losers. When you have this sort of a change this fast, there are often large contingents of people that are left behind. And when that happens, I do think that the socialist policies and the socialist movements gain steam. When Peron came to power in Argentina in the mid 1940s, that country was experiencing 8% GDP growth to Gavin's point about accelerating growth. Growth does not mean that it benefits everyone equally. And I think that some folks will see people go from being billionaires to 100 billionaires to the world's first trillionaire. And it will also start to fuel this rise.

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  So I think that we will see an increase in the breadth and depth of socialist movements in the United States. By the way, particularly with Doge cutting government funding to programs that benefit individuals, employment being cut in the federal government and through federal contractors. There's just a lot of rapid change that's about to kind of really upset a lot of people.

• 1:07:20Gavin Baker?

  I totally agree. I think AI, you know, people are fond of saying that we're in a world of AGI or ASI, money will be meaningless. But for a short period of time, money will matter more than it's ever mattered before. Because the amount of money you can spend on AI, on test time compute, is going to give you a massive advantage, whether you're a company or an individual. So I just think AI is going to really amplify inequality for some period of time.

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Gavin Baker?

  I hope I'm wrong. Like, I hope, you know, AI leads to, you know, all sorts of, you know, opportunities being created for low income people.

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  There's a lot of, there's just going to be a lot of employment and income disruption in 2025. And it's going to fuel socialist movements. And I think that this is going to be a more difficult year. Everyone thinks it's kind of rosy red because we're all working in the tech industry in Silicon Valley. But the reality on the ground for most Americans could be a lot harsher than any of us anticipate. And that could make for a very difficult political environment and social environment.

• 1:08:23Jason Calacanis?

  This is a great contrarian prediction, Friedberg. I would build on it, that I don't think this is just going to hit blue collar. I'm seeing in the venture industry and in entrepreneurs, all over the place, people who are super qualified, who had six-figure salaries, even to mid-six-figure salaries, not be able to find work or not find work at previous compensation levels. Why? Because people are doing more with less. It's much better to invest and do deep research and AI and automate stuff or deprecate stuff or delegate stuff to other regions than to hire Americans in some cases. And that philosophy that's happening isn't just going to hit truck drivers, it's going to hit developers potentially, designers, writers, marketers, project managers.

• 1:09:08Gavin Baker?

  What is the contrarian part of what you guys are saying? What's the contrarian part? Socialism. Socialism is going to rise.

• 1:09:15Gavin Baker?

  I think it's pretty interesting.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  Because I think.

• 1:09:17Jason Calacanis?

  You don't think it's contrarian? You think it's obvious?

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  I think the party line has been that socialism was getting knocked back this year with the selection cycle and it was a mandate against socialism and some of the socialist policies that were being put forth. And I think that the contrarian view is that we're actually got this really wrong and socialism is going to be on a big rise.

• 1:09:37Gavin Baker?

  But just to build on what you said earlier, like woke-ism and progressivism will decouple from socialism. I think woke-ism and progressivism, you know, will be on a declining trend, but socialism in terms of the government.

• 1:09:52Jason Calacanis?

  Like policies you guys are saying.

• 1:09:54Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:55Jason Calacanis?

  Why don't we have universal, why don't we have universal healthcare? Why don't we have pre-K? Or, you know, in every state and, you know, these kind of things. I think Americans are right to ask those questions. Now, other behaviors are obviously abhorrent, but you do have the right to ask why we can't figure this out and why our government has failed us in something as basic as, you know, providing after-school programs or universal healthcare or universal childcare. These things are easy to do. And when you see everybody getting rich and the polarization of wealth, I can understand people saying, why don't we have these basic things when other countries have them? It's a reasonable thought.

• 1:10:31Speaker 02

  You're making the assumptive statement that these things are easy to do, which was what was said about education. It's like, let's give everyone access to college education with the, uh, the federal student loan programs. And what happened was when we introduced those programs, those schools started to charge more and the tuition went up every year and eventually the cost of education inflated away from the benefit you were getting from it. And this has happened universally in healthcare. It has happened in housing. It has happened in education. It has happened in every market where the United States.

• 1:11:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I can tell you why I think it's easy.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  Where the government has stepped in to provide capital to support that market is that the market basically no longer operates in a free way.

• 1:11:08Jason Calacanis?

  I appreciate the challenge to it, and I'll explain to you why I believe it's easy. If you just put this down to the states and you make it more competitive, I think you solve the problem. If you introduce a school vouchers and you create competition. If you take universal healthcare and maybe you run some experiments where different states get that money from the federal government and let them run 50 different experiments. I think we could actually solve some of these problems, but you're correct. Anything that the federal government does, it eventually becomes corrupt and inefficient. My most contrarian belief was OpenAI loses its lead, loses its nonprofit to for-profit transition and becomes the number four player in AI. The total collapse of OpenAI is my most contrarian prediction for 2025.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  That's a good one. The total collapse of OpenAI.

• 1:11:53Jason Calacanis?

  Doubling and tripling down. Hey, man, I'm trying to make this spicy. It's a spicy category. Let's do it. Yeah, I got it. I got it.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  Jeff Bezos could still be, Jeff Bezos could still run for president, Jake Helf.

• 1:12:03Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe he's great. I don't know. Everybody who, all his friends left the company. Maybe he's great. Maybe he's a stand-up guy. I mean, everybody quit, but maybe he's, maybe he's a good guy.

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  Are you familiar with Jake Helf's prediction that Jeff Bezos is going to run for president? It was, that was my favorite.

• 1:12:17Jason Calacanis?

  I was predicting I wanted him to. I wanted him to. And he bought Washington Post and he quit the Amazon job. And he bought a house in Washington DC and he went down to Mar-a-Lago. Don't be surprised if Bezos, after he gets through his midlife crisis and going to Coachella and partying and having a great time, which he deserves. If he comes back and says, you know what? I want to serve my country. I still stand by that.

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  Sell the Washington Post? Or do you think he's going to hold on to it?

• 1:12:43Jason Calacanis?

  Well, let's stick with that one because that's one of my predictions.

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  Jeff Bezos will sell the Washington Post in 2025. That's a good poly market.

• 1:12:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, sell it to Kara Swisher. Sell it to Kara Swisher. They'll run it right into the ground. They'll double down. Uh, okay. Best performing asset. Everybody loves this one. Best performing asset. Hey, we can, you can put a price on this. Best performing asset last year, Chamath did a spread trade. He was long public tech stocks, short private, late-stage tech stock index. Nasdaq top 100 tech stock ETF was up 10% in 2024. Friedberg. You went with your uranium ETF, not Uranus, uranium ETF. And you're a, you are a. Was down 1% in 2024.

• 1:13:27Speaker 02

  I know. You know what? I looked at the components of that ETF last week when we were preparing for this. It has absolute junk in it. Like, it was not the right, the right way to kind of trade uranium. But anyway, that was my, my outcome for the year.

• 1:13:45Jason Calacanis?

  I went with the on-demand economy with Uber, Airbnb and DoorDash. Uber was up 30%, but now it's only up 3% with the robo-taxi headwind. Airbnb is basically flat and DoorDash up big 74%. Shout out to Stanley Tang. Great job to the team over there. So Chamath, get your flowers there. Let's do our best performing asset. Let's let our guest go first. Gavin, what will be the best performing asset of 2025?

• 1:14:09Gavin Baker?

  I think the companies that make high bandwidth memory. Going back to, we're going to, we're going to run out of compute.

• 1:14:17Gavin Baker?

  It's, it's, um, it's actually a pretty shocking stat. High bandwidth memory is a bigger part of Nvidia's COGS on GPUs than Taiwan Semi is. And today, there's two companies that can make it. Hynix and Micron. We'll see if Samsung gets their act together. But HBM memory, it's in Nvidia GPUs, AMD GPUs, Amazon traniums.

• 1:14:42Gavin Baker?

  And particularly in a world of test time, compute and inference being so important. High bandwidth memory is arguably

• 1:14:53Gavin Baker?

  more important than it ever was. And it's been, um, it's been sold out for the last two years. So high bandwidth memory would be my pick.

• 1:15:01Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:15:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Good pick.

• 1:15:03Jason Calacanis?

  Great pick, in fact. What do you got, Chamath?

• 1:15:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So let me preface this by saying that this is a pick that

• 1:15:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  92 times out of 100 goes to absolute zero.

• 1:15:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:15:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And six out of the remaining eight times you make 10x your money. And then the final two times you make anywhere between 100 to 1,000 extra money. Okay, sounds like Bitcoin. Okay, so this is a loser trade. Okay. But I would be long CDS. So what am I buying? I am buying insurance. I'm buying insurance using credit default swaps. I'm buying what's called protection, that there is no default event in 2025. Again, I'm not going to tell you which companies or what maturities.

• 1:16:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But just the general idea for me is I would like a little bit of an insurance policy in 2025. So that the men and the women that we have voted in have the chance to do their work in peace. I think that there is a small chance of some volatility next year. I hope it doesn't happen. I hope that this trade, like I said, 92 times out of 100 loses money. I hope it loses money. But if it hits, it will be the best performing asset of 2025. It will be the equivalent of Ackman buying CDS right at the, right at the beginning of the COVID crisis. How does one buy those? You have to have an ISDA. You talk to the big investment banks and they'll price it out for you.

• 1:16:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But again, and I just want to be clear, this is not something I think will happen. It's not something I want to happen. But I do think that if you look back in terms of just the tonnage of dollars you can make and the massive risk asymmetry that it presents to you. When you look at the concentration of the S and P, when you look at just the total gross amount of debt that we have, when you look at rates spiking, all of these things say having a little insurance may not be a bad thing. So I hope I'm completely wrong. Gavin, you're nodding. You want to add something?

• 1:17:23Gavin Baker?

  No, I was just, I was just thinking, I mean, if you're, if, you know, Chamath's prediction of a bank failure is true, you absolutely want to own CDS. Yeah, I mean, you'll, you forget 100x, you'll, 1,000x, 10,000x.

• 1:17:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What are you offering, Bert?

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  So I went with Chinese tech stocks, Chinese tech ETFs.

• 1:17:47Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 1:17:47Speaker 02

  I think that the market, everyone's kind of dumped Chinese tech stocks over the last couple of years. Everyone's taken this isolationary stance on positioning portfolios and saying, hey, we can't do business with China. It's over. But I do think that the Trump administration, particularly with their recent request on TikTok being, the ban on TikTok being kind of halted, they're trying to line up what I would call kind of like the great deal with China. So I don't know anything about what they're actually trying to do. But I think that Trump and leadership in the US government want to kind of open up the Chinese market to American companies in order to give Chinese companies access to the American market. And I think that they're going to get a deal done, given the position with

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  China. I think that they're very likely to kind of get a deal done. That's one driver. I think there's three drivers. The second driver is that obviously the cost of build out of electricity production in China is unfathomable. They recently approved $137 billion hydroelectric dam facility, which is going to add another, I think, couple hundred gigawatts of electricity production in that country, not to mention all the nuclear build out we've talked about in the past. So the cost per kilowatt hour is already lower, the amount of electricity available is going up. And then I think that the Chinese Communist Party have this incredible ability to throttle up and down free markets and entrepreneurship. And this is a moment where you could kind of see them making the throttle go the way towards enabling more innovation, more free market activity, and it's going

• 1:19:14Speaker 02

  to be one of the motivators for them to do a deal. So when you put all of this together, I do think that there's a lot of Chinese tech companies that have been beat up under the assumption that this is going to be a very difficult conflict with the US in the years ahead. And I think that that may not be the case going into 25. And I think that their, these stocks are pretty cheap. I was just looking at Alibaba, and it trades at a pretty decent multiple. It seems like these stocks could be poised for a pretty good run in 25 if the macro works out.

• 1:19:41Jason Calacanis?

  This feels like a contrarian take. I mean, Trump, I don't think is going to find a way to balance the relationship with China very well. And I don't think you can rattle up entrepreneurship after you cut everybody's knees out the last time. Plus, I don't trust any accounting statement coming out of China because they could fudge whatever they want. But wow, what a great potential, you know, buy low, sell high scenario.

• 1:20:05Speaker 02

  The good thing is you'll know if I'm right or you'll know if I'm right or wrong in a year. You can.

• 1:20:09Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. Well, no, exactly. That's right. Pull the ETF. Absolutely. Gavin, what do you think of this hot take here from Mr. Friedberg?

• 1:20:16Gavin Baker?

  Really cheap. I've had a, I would call it a no China guideline ever since the long top financial fraud more than 15 years ago. Or it's just amazing. It was, you know, a lot of great investors owned it and, you know, they, they talked a great game and they had a Western auditor. But then it turned out that the fraud was happening at the local post office where they're opening up the documents that the local auditors had signed off on, changing them and then sending different documents, you know, whatever, FedExing them. Yeah. So I just think it's, it's a hard

• 1:20:56Gavin Baker?

  place if you're, I think if you're not Chinese to make money. But I tend to agree with a lot of what David said. I think Trump and Xi both want to deal. I think there's a deal to be done that leaves Putin out in the cold, as I referenced. And if that happens, Katie, bar the door. I mean, there are really, really high quality companies, you know, that are, some of them are mid-single digit multiples.

• 1:21:21Jason Calacanis?

  And they're, and it's a big market. So if you did get it right and you do.

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  And by the way, the Chinese, the Chinese companies serve a global market. It's not just the US. They serve, you know, Africa, South America, I mean, the whole Southern Hemisphere.

• 1:21:34Jason Calacanis?

  Well, yeah, if you look at BYD, that gets all over Europe. It's, yeah, it's.

• 1:21:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, look, I mean, I mean, the Chinese companies and they have the best unit economics. They have the best cost of production. I mean, everything is advantaged, particularly if you believe it's the year of the robot, there's going to be a kind of a massive demand around the world for automation.

• 1:21:58Speaker 02

  And for rebuilding manufacturing capacity all over the world. And I think that China could service those markets more efficiently than any other kind of country of origin. So it's a pretty, pretty powerful set of macro drivers as well.

• 1:22:10Jason Calacanis?

  I think the Mag 7 is going to be the best performing asset. I'm taking the other side. Chamath, I think in an earlier prediction, said maybe not so much. I think that what they've learned in the last couple of years is that there is an incredible earnings expansion you can do by not hiring people and outsourcing jobs to other parts of the world and automating. And the gains we'll see from AI, which they're producing for other companies and for consumers, they're applying first internally. So the internal application of AI will allow these companies to have earnings growth that people will not be able to comprehend over the next couple of years. So I'm going with Mag 7. We got a lot of different takes here going different directions. What a great episode so far.

• 1:22:56Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Worst performing asset. Last year Chamath said late-stage tech stock index, mostly SaaS. Friedberg, you put in a brilliant spread trade, short vertical SaaS, long AI cloud providers. SaaS has had a little bit of a rebound, but Google up 36% for AI cloud, Microsoft 14%, Amazon 46%, all in 2024. I said LLM startups like OpenAI, Anthropic, too many players, open sourcing will kill. Pricing, obviously the one valuation we can track is OpenAI and it doubled, but I do think all long-term have that one work. Worst performing asset of 2025, Gavin?

• 1:23:35Gavin Baker?

  Enterprise application software. This is basically just about, like 2025 is going to be, I think, the year of agents, particularly in the second half. Agents just being AI models that can take action on your behalf, that can do anything online that a human can do online. And if the labs and the big cloud providers dominate agents, which seems likely, going back to, you know, the low-cost producer is going to win, enterprise application software, I think is going to be in a lot of pain. And, you know, some of these companies are talking a big, big game about agents, but at the end of the day, they don't have their own models, they don't own their own compute.

• 1:24:19Gavin Baker?

  And I just don't see them being ultimate winners in the world of agents. You know, I could easily, I could be wrong because they do, you know, they, they, they have some customer data, maybe a little bit of a data moat and they do, you know, have strong customer relationships. But you know, most companies have relationships with AWS, Google or Microsoft as well. So I think enterprise application software will be in pain.

• 1:24:43Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. And Chamath, what do you got?

• 1:24:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think Gavin just absolutely nailed it. I'm going to double down on what he said. I think that there's a term that, that we will start to use more. I started to use it internally at 8090 over this last year in 2024, which is the software industrial complex. These are these large,

• 1:25:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  bloated in many cases, enterprise software companies that effectively have convinced incredible numbers of organizations to spend a tremendous amount of money, essentially wrapping a bunch of heuristics and business rules around a crud database. And along with that, what they have perfected really is a go to market and sales motion. The golf trips, the steak dinners, you know, we mentioned this before, what Alex Karp railed against.

• 1:25:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  None of those things equate to product value. And increasingly in the world of agentic software and AI, I think that you can rebuild a lot of these workflows in very efficient ways. And I think the go to market is going to be driven by CEOs and CFOs who start to exert a little bit more pressure on their CIOs to manage spend. And in that world, I just think that these next generation AI businesses are built frankly, an order of magnitude cheaper than the companies that they compete against. And so even if it's just feature for feature, the same, I think the software industrial complex, these old mainline, traditional enterprise software companies.

• 1:26:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you're going to start to see fissures in those businesses in 2025. So I, I agree with Gavin, different words, but same result.

• 1:26:34Jason Calacanis?

  And you put your time and money where your mouth is on this one. 11 months ago, you founded 80, 90 to get 80%.

• 1:26:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And the traction in, in less than a year, to me is shocking. And I don't think it speaks necessarily. I think we're decent. We're very good. We have great engineers. But my 30 person engineering team, I think, does the work of 300 people. By next year, it'll be doing the work of 3,000 people. Maybe we'll only grow by 10 or 20%. So, and the reason is we use these tools. We're productive to an order of magnitude that I didn't think was possible. And as a result, we're just able to price it differently. So even if it's the exact same product, its cost structure is just meaningfully lower. And so this is what I mean where the ROI calculators get blown up. All of the traditional go to market motions

• 1:27:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  get blown up because in an RFP or in any other sales environment, what you do is somebody says it's a hundred dollars and you show up and you say 10.

• 1:27:34Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:27:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And at 10, it's still hugely profitable for you.

• 1:27:37Gavin Baker?

  And, and just to add, just one last thing is just, you know, fundamentally, these enterprise application software companies, the software industrial complex, and I agree with everything Chamath said. You know, they're, they're fundamentally based on making white collar human employees more efficient. And what the AI companies are going to do is just say, hey, we're just going to replace that worker. And it's just a fundamentally different mentality.

• 1:28:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a paradigm shift. Yeah.

• 1:28:02Gavin Baker?

  And it goes to like, there may, maybe a lot of pain that accompanies this. And you know, David's points around the, you know, potential rise of, of socialism.

• 1:28:11Jason Calacanis?

  What do you got for worst performing asset, Mr. Freeburn?

• 1:28:15Speaker 02

  I'm probably just going to triple underline vertical SaaS again, perceived pricing model being challenged. Pricing being compressed as companies explore in-house tools built with AI that replaces these kind of traditional business practices.

• 1:28:29Jason Calacanis?

  Have we ever had

• 1:28:31Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, geez, this is

• 1:28:32Jason Calacanis?

  It was an obvious, it was an, yeah, it was an obvious one on my list, but I want to make a different one. I want to make a different one. How about OpenAI? Do you have anything OpenAI? No, no, no, OpenAI is great company.

• 1:28:42Speaker 02

  Tell me why OpenAI is gonna die.

• 1:28:44Jason Calacanis?

  People left, but you know, I don't know where they are. Where do all the, where are they all the other OpenAI employees? Are they on vacation? They're skiing too, right?

• 1:28:51Gavin Baker?

  They've all started competitors.

• 1:28:53Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, right. That's what happened. Correct. Yeah. They all left to compete and have revenge startups. Wow, that's an interesting trend. Okay. So consumers make five big decisions in their life, as we all know, college, spouse, kids.

• 1:29:04Speaker 02

  12 billion revenue. I mean.

• 1:29:06Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that's, that's a projection.

• 1:29:07Gavin Baker?

  But also six billion, six. Six billion in losses too, David, against that 12 billion in revenue. Yeah.

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  Six billion this year or six billion next year?

• 1:29:16Gavin Baker?

  I think the six is for next year, but I, I don't know.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  I guess it makes sense why they're trying to charge 200 bucks a month now. Up from 20.

• 1:29:24Jason Calacanis?

  They got some headwinds. Okay. Listen, consumers make five big decisions in their life. We know college, spouse, kids are the obvious ones. And then cars and homes. And the consumer is up against it with record debt. So since you can't trade college spouse kids really. I think legacy car companies and real estate are going to face continued headwinds and be terrible assets. Because, listen, we've overbuilt in some cases. There's tons of cars on lots. And people can't afford homes with these mortgages. So I think these are going to be the two worst performing asset are people in the legacy OEMs, as Chamath pointed out in a previous prediction. And then I just think real estate is the same. If you look at a place like Texas, two years in a row, housing values have gone down, rent has gone down two years in a row.

• 1:30:09Jason Calacanis?

  Same thing's happening in other states where they allowed you to build and people are leaving states where they don't allow you to build. So that's my worst performing asset trade. Enterprise was my other choice, but I'll go with something slightly different. Most anticipated trend for 2025. Last year, Chamath, congratulations. You said last year that Bitcoin would hit 100K for the first time. Nailed it. Half court shot. Well done. I think at the time you made that prediction, it was probably trading at It felt like a layup. Felt like a layup to you. Up 112%. Friedberg, you said predictive models and AI-driven discovery in pharma and bioengineering. How did that do, that prediction?

• 1:30:43Speaker 02

  Well, there was a lot of funding and Demis won the Nobel Prize. And a Nobel Prize. Yeah, so it worked out.

• 1:30:49Jason Calacanis?

  I picked efficiency in the form of AI advancements in labor and outsourcing. And I've seen that a bunch with our investment in Athena. Go to athena wow.com. Okay, got my plug in there. Let's go for most anticipated 2025 trend. What do you got, Chamath?

• 1:31:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that there are a handful of, not to overuse an overused term, but canaries in the coal mine for the end of the deep state. And I would like to point to one, which is this obscure thing called the supplemental loss ratio. And essentially what it is, is a mechanism that the banks can use to include or not include treasuries and how they calculate reserves, et cetera, et cetera. Now, why is this an interesting thing? It's not interesting for many people. It's very arcane.

• 1:31:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But if we are unable to manage the debt situation in 2025, I think what you're going to see is maneuvering at the edges of these arcane regulations that effectively kick the can down the road. And there is a chance that that could happen to help the banks. Because, you know, we believe that, we meaning collectively America, that maybe Doge won't be as effective as it needs to be, that there's still going to need to be, you know, 10, 20 trillion dollars of debt issuance to refinance to 10 that's maturing this year and to plug holes in the coming years.

• 1:32:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My point in all of this is we don't need to understand the details, except that if we don't move the goalposts here, it is a great sign that.

• 1:32:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The folks that are running the show are the ones that we all elected.

• 1:32:45Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:32:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So that is my most anticipated trend. Small arcane regulatory changes that allow us to kick the can down the road stop in its tracks. This is an example.

• 1:32:56Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, Friedberg, you got a most anticipated trend for 2025?

• 1:32:58Speaker 02

  My most anticipated trend is around the announcement of build out of nuclear power in the United States in 2025 as a function of deregulation and some new technologies. I do think that this new government is going to be much more accommodating and it's going to, as I've said in the past, I think it's a necessity just because of the, the, the rate at which we have to do power build outs to meet kind of competitive demand against China. The United States is going to need to add more power, electricity production capacity than we can scale up with any other renewable source. So I do believe that nuclear is an inevitability. I think that the deregulation will happen in 25 and I do know a lot of very smart people

• 1:33:43Speaker 02

  who are actually starting nuclear power companies and have left very good jobs to go and do this in anticipation of this happening in 25. So I'm very bullish.

• 1:33:54Jason Calacanis?

  That's a leading indicator for sure. When smart people do something with their time, that's a great indicator. Gavin, what do you got?

• 1:34:00Gavin Baker?

  I think AI, Nick, I sent you a chart. I don't know if you can flash it up, but I think AI is going to make more progress per quarter in 2025 than it did per year in 23 and 24. And the reason is just with, with 01 and 03, this is Arc AGI, it's designed, you know, we keep, we keep changing the goalposts for the Turing test and AGI. And I'm sure we're going to change it again as we're going to blow through this. And I just think what has happened is we were scaling around, around one, on one axis, which was pre-training. And then we started scaling around inference time compute.

• 1:34:43Gavin Baker?

  And it's very clear that we have now added a third axis of scaling performance and that is reasoning. And what this is, is these models, the internet is composed of answers, people giving answers. And what the models really benefit from. Is kind of the internal monologue of somebody getting to that answer. And this is, you know, in AI terms, they call it a reasoning trace. And it's one reason, you know, 18 months ago, everybody was like, oh, wow. The more code you train a model on, the better it does. And all sorts of things that have seemingly nothing to do with code. But all code, you see kind of the reasoning, the internal monologue, the thought process, the step by step.

• 1:35:27Gavin Baker?

  And so what's happening is you're using models to generate synthetic data that contains these reasoning traces. So you ask a model, you know, solve this problem. It has to be a problem that is functionally verifiable, that has an answer or we know the answer. And we say, show your work. And we have it do that many, many different ways and times. And then you pick the best ones and you kind of feed those back into the model. You apply some reinforcement learning to it. And so now you're scaling along three axes that are multiplicative with each other. And I just, I, you know, a guy on the Google team said, tweeted maybe five days ago, it's going to be a straight shot to ASI, artificial superintelligence.

• 1:36:11Gavin Baker?

  And I think that might be right. Ilya gave a talk at NERIPs, Ilya Sutskever, one of kind of the original pioneers of this field. And he said something that I thought was scary. And he said, these models that reason are inherently unpredictable. So the best reasoning models in the world today are the ones that play games, the kind of AlphaGo, AlphaZero style models. And they are constantly making unpredictable moves that no human grandmaster ever could have come up with. And now these models are going to be making similarly unpredictable leaps in all sorts of domains.

• 1:36:49Gavin Baker?

  Which, you know, hopefully will be awesome, but you know, might not be.

• 1:36:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Well, they're going to go around corners that people might not have considered that are not intuitive. And then just to circle back and do a little callback here, remember I asked which banks would have the biggest chance of being insolvent or having financial collapse or crisis? Tons of misspellings in there as I typed it while we were talking. And you can see what deep my, uh, deep research did here. It went and said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to research a bunch of websites and find a list of banks in the US, find top banks by US by asset. For each one of these banks, find their latest financial savings. For each of these banks, find their capital. Adequacy ratios for each of these banks finding their loan loss, you get the idea. And then it went and it analyzed and then it created a report. This took about 10 minutes.

• 1:37:33Jason Calacanis?

  And when you look, it created this final report here where it gave a list, Chamath, of JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, yada, yada. It did an analysis of each one. And at the end, you can see all the different websites it pulled. It was well over 100 websites that it pulled- That's incredible. Live data from 162 websites. And you have to pay for this, but it's only $20 a month. And its conclusion. This analysis has provided a snapshot of the financial health of some of the largest US banks. While all banks face inherent risks, Citigroup and Wells Fargo appear to be the highest risk of insolvency or financial collapse compared to JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup's recent net loss, lower CET1 ratio and high exposure.

• 1:38:17Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, you start looking at this now, I don't know how much of this is correct. I'm no expert on this. But it does seem like it's a pretty good start of where it's getting to. And if you haven't used 1.5 Pro with deep research, just go to Gemini.google.com. I'm not being paid to say this. I just think it's the best product in the market. And it's pretty darn impressive. Okay. My most anticipated trend for 2025 was alluded to in an earlier prediction, I think, by Gavin himself. Mine is that exits in DPI, Shoredown will have this incredible distribution as the wrath of Lina Khan ends and M&A and IPOs will surge. That is my prediction, my most anticipated trend. Okay, let's go to most anticipated media.

• 1:39:02Jason Calacanis?

  I had two that I was working back and forth from. James Gunn's DC Universe with Superman coming out this year, I think is going to be amazing. And/or season two could be amazing. I predict they're going to do a Clone Wars live action series. If you don't know the Clone Wars, watch it with your kids. It's amazing animated series that takes place during the prequels. But I went with a little- Of a weird choice here. I think my most anticipated media is seeing what happens with legacy media outlets owned by billionaires and or people who no longer want to pick a side. Washington Post, CNN and LA Times specifically are steering towards the middle and trying to get back to classic journalism. The editors are revolting. Karen Swisher is

• 1:39:44Jason Calacanis?

  upset and they're adding some right wing voices. It is going to be popcorn time for everybody. So enjoy whatever you want to enjoy. Star Wars. I got a little Star Wars for you with Andrew season two. I got a little Superman or you can watch the chaos in the editorial newsrooms at Washington Post and LA Times. What do you got for most anticipated media, Chama?

• 1:40:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It is the enormity of the files that are going to get declassified and released by the Trump administration. I think it's going to be unbelievably interesting, salacious, useful, good, earnest, all of the above. So the JFK files, the Epstein files, Diddy files.

• 1:40:33Jason Calacanis?

  The moon landing.

• 1:40:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who knows what they find across all of these other fringe quote unquote conspiracy theories that may turn out to actually to have some shred of truth. But all of that, let's call it content, for lack of a better word, that gets released in 2025 by the Trump administration, I think will be incredibly interesting.

• 1:40:50Jason Calacanis?

  What do you got, Dave?

• 1:40:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Media.

• 1:40:52Jason Calacanis?

  Any anticipated media for you? What do you got?

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  I'm into AI video games. The cost of production comes way down when you use AI and you can have dynamic storylines. You can have new gameplay concepts, things that don't exist today. I think that the creative talent plus the technical talent that you typically find at development houses can be kind of unleashed with tools that have come to come to market recently. We've seen a lot of the generative video stuff. But there's also ways structurally that video games can kind of be rebuilt where the video game engine can run kind of locally, can be generating parameters that can then use an existing rendering engine. So you can have entirely new storylines and entirely new kind of plot sequences. So I do think that there's going to be a rewrite of of video games and the video game industry with the variety of AI kind of capabilities

• 1:41:37Speaker 02

  that are hitting market now. And it's going to be incredible. It's going to be incredible entertainment. People are gonna, people that don't play video games are going to find stuff that they're going to love.

• 1:41:46Jason Calacanis?

  Gavin, most anticipated media 2025?

• 1:41:49Gavin Baker?

  Unquestioned, 1923, season two. I'm normally a science fiction kind of fantasy, or you know, spy

• 1:41:59Gavin Baker?

  kind of guy when it comes to TV, but 1883 and 1923 were the first TV shows that kind of hit me the way Game of Thrones did, and I'm crazy excited for that to come out.

• 1:42:08Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic. Are you watching Landman? I'm enjoying Landman.

• 1:42:12Gavin Baker?

  I haven't watched it yet. I'm excited to try it.

• 1:42:14Jason Calacanis?

  It's quite fun, quite fun.

• 1:42:16Gavin Baker?

  Turns out this guy, Taylor Sheridan, he's, I mean, it's incredible. He's in the zone.

• 1:42:22Jason Calacanis?

  I highly recommend Day of the Jackal. I know Chamath also loved Day of the Jackal.

• 1:42:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, that was really good. That was really good.

• 1:42:28Jason Calacanis?

  That was a good, that was a good J C S suggestion for streaming.

• 1:42:31Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, I'm excited. Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:42:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What was your predictions for, for this last year?

• 1:42:38Jason Calacanis?

  Last year Chamath predicted Mr. Beast, Friedberg, AI-generated news. I predicted Gladiator 2 and the Three-Body Problem. Gladiator 2 was mid, but okay, Three-Body Problem, I didn't finish, so I guess mid.

• 1:42:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jimmy's show on Amazon Prime, the Mr. Beast thing, was the top unscripted drama in 140 of 180 countries.

• 1:43:01Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, incredible. All right, we're going to do our prediction markets here. I'm going to put up a prediction market, which is based upon immigration and the promise that Trump made to have 15 million people be deported from the country. I think in the first year, I'm going to set the over/under at 5% of that stated number, which is 750,000. So after one year in office, will Trump have deported 750,000, less or more? That's my first prediction.

• 1:43:34Speaker 02

  How are you going to measure that? You have to, there has to be a, like a, a source of truth on these things, right?

• 1:43:38Jason Calacanis?

  We'll do it based on the White House's reporting of deportations.

• 1:43:41Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, it's reasonable.

• 1:43:43Jason Calacanis?

  And we'll check with the Polly Market team if there's a way to do that prediction market, obviously. But I think that was the biggest issue of the election, so I'm putting it up there with just 5% in the first year.

• 1:43:52Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, it is interesting. Obama deported, I think, more than 2 million people. It's like people have forgotten, but he was actually really, really tough on the border.

• 1:44:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Chamath, do you have a prediction market you want to put up?

• 1:44:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The MAGA representation on the S and P 500 shrinks

• 1:44:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  below.

• 1:44:11Jason Calacanis?

  Thirty percent.

• 1:44:12Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a good one. That's a good one.

• 1:44:14Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm. So dispersion would happen to the other stocks.

• 1:44:17Speaker 02

  That's a good one.

• 1:44:18Jason Calacanis?

  Less concentration. That's a good one. So we'll finalize these. You'll be able to go to polymarket.

• 1:44:23Speaker 02

  I wanted to kind of play with was Microsoft, AWS and Google Cloud revenue growth. Who's going to win in growth in 2025? I don't know how closely you guys track, but um, I get a sense that Google is kind of accelerating ahead. Gavin, I don't know how much you've spent on these three.

• 1:44:39Gavin Baker?

  I mean, Google is, I, I wouldn't say they're a lot smaller, which makes it easier for them to grow faster.

• 1:44:47Gavin Baker?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:50Speaker 02

  Should we talk about? Yeah, I mean, I, I guess, um, who has the largest gain dollar, dollar gain in revenue in cloud revenue in 2025? Is it Google, Amazon or Microsoft?

• 1:45:05Gavin Baker?

  Well, it probably won't be Google because if they had the largest dollar gain, it would mean they were growing at an, at insane rates. But I think Azure versus AWS will be interesting.

• 1:45:15Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I know the other one I want to do, which was the national debt. The national debt has grown about two trillion per year in each of the previous two presidential administrations, right? So over the last eight years, we've gone up over 16 trillion, two trillion per year average. So I'm going to set it at, and Trump said he would not increase the national debt. I'll just set it at the national debt increases one trillion in the next year, over under. Is that a good prediction, market? Or is it should be two trillion?

• 1:45:48Speaker 02

  Um, I think what you should, I, yeah. So what I would do is I would set the federal debt for December, the US Treasury market report on federal debt in 2025. And I would set it at 30, 37 trillion. And so you basically, the US Treasury, um, market report, 20, December 2025, above or below 37 trillion. It's going to be above. I mean, let's just call it 38 trillion then.

• 1:46:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you want to basically, in order to make this, when you set a line, Dave, it's got to be one where people take either side of it. It can't be everybody takes the over.

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  We'll do the US Treasury market report, December 2025, federal debt above 38 trillion or below 38 trillion.

• 1:46:28Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. Which would be how much added in the year?

• 1:46:31Speaker 02

  About one and a half. Yeah.

• 1:46:33Jason Calacanis?

  I love that. I love that. That's a perfect one. We'll see if he can make any, he can control the spending or if it'll just be the same.

• 1:46:39Speaker 02

  Gavin, what's your sense on federal debt next year?

• 1:46:41Gavin Baker?

  I think like most things, it'll take like immigration will take time to get going.

• 1:46:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:46Gavin Baker?

  It just, it's going to take a little bit of time, but I think they will make progress. By the way, at some point, if I'm here on the all in again, I want to talk about UFOs and the drones.

• 1:46:58Speaker 02

  Let's talk about it now.

• 1:46:58Jason Calacanis?

  Do it right now. Are you going full conspiracy theorist? Are you, are you trying to get your seat here by being a little more Alex Jones? Do you believe those drones were aliens? What's going on?

• 1:47:09Gavin Baker?

  So I don't know. And I think it's very clear. If you look at all the, um, you know, statements from the New Jersey mayors and governors, you know, who've met with the police, the FBI, the defense department, that they don't know. Now, you know, Trump said someone in the government knows what they are. He also said he was not going to go to Benminster anytime soon, his resort there. I just think over the last, I'd say eight years, every 18 months, there's a big story in the New York Times, the Washington Posts, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, very credible media sources with dozens of interviews with fighter pilots and commercial pilots, talking about seeing things with advanced sensors that made

• 1:47:52Gavin Baker?

  no sense to them. And then there's kind of a taboo that went away.

• 1:47:58Gavin Baker?

  There was an article in the New Yorker where they quoted from a bunch of people who were at, you know, kind of the, the skunk works laboratories in the 1950s and said they absolutely saw extraterrestrial materials that have been recovered from a crash. That's one reason the US made such big leaps in material science. And, um, you know, there was the Uwamana thing where essentially a lot of, you know, astronomers said, hey, this is, this is clearly a UFO of some sort, including the head of astronomy at Harvard. And then just the conspiracy

• 1:48:36Gavin Baker?

  theory I would have is if, if, if, if, if these are actually UFOs and not, you know, government drones, either from the United States or China, you know, it seems like the most likely explanation in New Jersey is that some sort of a drill.

• 1:48:56Gavin Baker?

  And obviously, once this hysteria gets going, people, you know, misidentify commercial airplanes as drones. And like, why would UFOs have blinking green and red lights? But it is just interesting that there was, you know, a big concentration of these reports as we're scaling into nuclear technology, 1945 to 1960. And then now that AI is getting going, which is the next kind of technological phase shift for humanity, there's another big

• 1:49:28Jason Calacanis?

  I love this. This is great. You can come back, come back next week. You, you won. Congratulations. We have our winner for all, and I don't think Gavin is now the fourth best. I love this kind of conspiracy. But I mean, come on, I, we, how do we make a polymarket out of this free bird?

• 1:49:44Gavin Baker?

  I don't know that we can polymarket on it.

• 1:49:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Gavin, Gavin, are there, are there documents that you think Trump will release about the past in, in terms of UFOs? There must be just an entire spectrum of stuff that that could be subject to FOIA if we went after it, no?

• 1:50:00Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it depends how deeply it's classified. And, you know, I'm sure if the government doesn't want to give it up, they won't give it up. But, you know, there's all the, you know, there's all this.

• 1:50:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But look, let's be honest, you think that there are docs, like there, there's documentation that the US government has, that there are UFOs, that there have been, we just can't explain it.

• 1:50:23Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, and, you know, they, they call it UAPs now to make it, you know, not flying saucers. But it just feels like something funny.

• 1:50:31Jason Calacanis?

  What percentage chance do you put on? We have actual knowledge on a percentage basis, what percentage chance you put on the government, US government is sitting on knowledge of extraterrestrial life?

• 1:50:41Gavin Baker?

  Twenty percent, at least twenty percent.

• 1:50:43Jason Calacanis?

  Twenty percent from Schumacher, what do you say Gavin?

• 1:50:44Gavin Baker?

  I would say twenty five. I would take the over on the twenty.

• 1:50:47Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great. So you think there's a, a non, a significant small chance that this is the case, Friedberg, Sultan of Science, what chance do you think there is this government sitting on some extraterrestrial life or proof of it?

• 1:51:02Speaker 02

  So longer conversation. I don't have time for this, but I gotta be honest. I don't, I don't generally align with the idea that like our very narrow range of like understanding of technology and biology kind of is what visits us or would visit us. I think that there's an extension of information gathering that doesn't require moving physical biological life forms from one part of the galaxy to another. So I think that the whole premise of like UFOs moving bodies around is rooted in the current state of technology of humanity, which is the basis of Arthur Clarke's treatment of 2001: A Space Odyssey, not, which was done before the screenplay, which

• 1:51:47Speaker 02

  was done before the book. And the treatment, which you can buy, I think highlights this the best, which is eventually every civilization reaches a sufficiently advanced level of technology that you no longer need to physically move the bodies of the biological organisms around, that you simply are gathering information and affecting information. Because once you have the ability to convert any molecule into any other molecule and you have access to sufficient energy, which you will eventually evolve to be able to do, you can basically turn your local part of the universe into anything you want it to turn into. And then you're simply gathering information from all over the rest of the universe. So I would argue that there doesn't really make a lot of basic sense in why alien bodies would want to move around the galaxy.

• 1:52:29Jason Calacanis?

  I'm just saying it right now. If Trump releases information on extraterrestrial life, I'm voting for him to have a third term. I'm putting it out there. I'm going full MAGA. He gets a third term for me with change in the constitution. This has been another amazing episode of the All In Podcast.

• 1:52:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wait, one last question for Gavin.

• 1:52:45Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, one last for Gavin, okay.

• 1:52:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you think extraterrestrial life built the pyramids?

• 1:52:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is that the most plausible explanation to the accuracy?

• 1:52:57Gavin Baker?

  I don't know. It is. It is so strange the way there are, you know, in so many, I would say, cultures all over the world, pre, you know, we are closer in time to Cleopatra than she was to the time of the Great Pyramids. Like, that was a long time ago. But it's just weird that in so many cultures all over the world, there are these depictions of what looked like astronauts.

• 1:53:24Gavin Baker?

  And then there's all these Renaissance era paintings that clearly show what we would call UFOs in the skies over cities.

• 1:53:35Gavin Baker?

  So I don't know. I just think it's

• 1:53:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm with you.

• 1:53:37Jason Calacanis?

  I love Conspiracy Gavin. This has been the best

• 1:53:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is not a conspiracy period. No, Jason, if you're a questioning person, these things create these weird, unen, you know, open loops that it's like

• 1:53:50Jason Calacanis?

  I think we're in a simulation, so I'm fully vested in this.

• 1:53:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Anyways, Friedberg's driving home.

• 1:53:56Jason Calacanis?

  I think the pyramids, the best, most credible thing I saw on the pyramids was that they used water and they raised water in channels. So they put them on wood slats or something and then they would raise like in like the Panama Canal. They would do canals and float them up and then place them and then release the water, which, you know, sounds great to me. This has been another amazing episode of the All In Podcast and thank you to everybody.

• 1:54:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's have an amazing 2025 to everybody.

• 1:54:24Jason Calacanis?

  Let's kick ass, yeah.

• 1:54:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's all kick ass.

• 1:54:26Gavin Baker?

  Let's kick ass. 2025. Let's get it. Take care.

• 1:54:29Jason Calacanis?

  All right. We'll see you all next time. Bye bye.

• 1:54:55Speaker 04

  Besties are back! That is my dog taking a hit in your driveway.

• 1:55:02Speaker 04

  Oh, man!

• 1:55:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 1:55:13Speaker 04

  What? You're the bee! What? You're the bee! What? You're a bee. Bee! What? We need to get merch! Besties are back!